Dear Francis Berger,
Today you took exception to Bishop Robert Brown's appeal for Catholic's to return to Mass. I can see that you are very angry and some of that is indeed righteous anger. Our shepherds have let us down. They closed down the churches to all but a few for several months and thus relinquished the "last" of their authority to the System.
They were already in the process of abdicating to the System before the Covids hit through allowing the System to dictate what is taught in Catholic schools, allowing non-Catholic procedures in what were once Catholic hospitals and giving only token resistance to System sanctioned sins such as abortion and same sex "marriage".
Added to this we have the sexual abuse scandals within the Church. This helped to whittle away the Church's moral authority in the world. It stopped the Church from insisting upon that moral authority. She had to remove the plank from her own eye.
We have also been suffering under 2 Popes. One is virtually silent and the other makes ambiguous statements hoping to mollify the System.
Most of these things were already happening prior to the Covid and it made me think that because the prophecies of the End Times predicted the cessation of the Mass then the End Times were a long way off since who would persecute such an innocuous institution. It rolls over for every command of the System. Little did I realise that it was the rolling over that would cause the Mass to stop.
So there you are, many reasons for righteous anger. If only we were Jesus and could stay on anger's righteous side. For mixed up in the righteousness is also spite. You say, to leave the Church and follow to a new unprecedented form of Christianity for this is where salvation lies. I say that salvation still lies within the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church unlike the American constitution does not need virtuous citizens to be effective, she was designed by God for sinners, which is lucky for us. Jesus said that she would last until the end of time and the gates of Hell would not prevail against her. (Matt 16:18.) and it is Jesus who gives her her authority. It is also within the Church that we find the sacraments, including the Eucharist and these are for our benefit; a gift from God. We do not need to follow the Bishops who push the vaccine or agree with the Pope's view on climate change. We do need to follow the Magisterium, the truths that the Church has held since the beginning. This includes that the Mass and the Eucharist are essential. The Church was wrong when she prevented us from going and receiving. She is right when she asks us to come back. As Fr Clovis said back in 2017, "It is self-evident that the Catholic Church and the anti-Church currently co-exist in the same sacramental, liturgical and juridical space." It is our job to discern the way the truth and the life and to stay in the Catholic Church and stay out of the anti-Church.
:
Thanks for this thoughtful response to my post. Our only real point of disagreement is the role of the Church in salvation. You believe the church is essential to salvation. I, on the other hand, do not.
ReplyDeleteContrary to what you allege, this belief does not emanate from spite, but from the conviction that God would not arrange things in such a way as to make staying in the Church essential to salvation. And I say this as someone who still attends Mass regularly and whose son serves as an altar boy every Sunday.
We appear to agree on the importance of personal discernment within the RCC, but very few Catholics I know seem to understand the deeper implications of what this individual discernment within the RCC means and where it leads. A recent comment by Bruce Charlton provides some clarifying insight on the matter:
"Catholics such as yourself claim to be obedient to 'the church' yet everything you do shows that you personally are discerning, picking-and-choosing, within the RC church - even to the level of disobeying the Pope and obeying only a small, selected-by-you minority of Bishops and priests within the church.
This seems to be In Fact a very different way of behaving than a Catholic of 400, 200, 100 years ago. Indeed, I think it is impossible to be a Catholic in the old sense - probably because the RCC (top to bottom, everywhere) is so incoherent and changeable that traditional simple obedience is unattainable.
My point is that you (and all serious Roman Catholics in 2021) apparently Just Are discerning (picking-and-choosing), on personal grounds, all the time, within the RCC; and that this practice invalidates your 'timeless' arguments concerning the nature of the RCC and its place in the scheme of salvation."
I apologise for accusing you of spite. I misinterpreted your tone.
DeleteI do agree that this is a time where the need for discernment is necessary. A time to weigh what our prelates say against the truth, and if what they say falls short it should be discarded. The truth is still to be found within the RCC, just not everybody wants to proclaim it.
Ann,
ReplyDeleteI can see where Frank is coming from, although like you, I believe in the validity and necessity of the Sacraments.
Catholics of a bygone era used to have confidence that the Church was One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. But since the 20th century (Vatican II is too recent a scapegoat) she seems to have buckled under the endless intrigues and subversions as well as the external social pressures from the collapse of Catholic Social Order. The accomodations to modernism in the 60's could at best be seen as a naive effort for the Church to reclaim her moral authority in the postwar era; at worst (and more accurately, by my reckoning) it was an attempt to force the Church to bend the knee to liberalism.
Since then, the message of the Church, to the eyes of the world, has seemingly inverted. Sin no longer matters, the Mass is a meal and not a sacrifice and most insidiously matters of sexual morality have been jettisoned. With encyclicals like Amoris Laetitia, it is as if morals can be created or reversed by pure Papal diktat and morality in general does not describe categories of reality. We see this in the promotion of pro-LGBT pastors and persecution of conservative and traditionalist voices in the dioceses.
Yet despite the endless campaigns of System Catholicism to call black white and up down, there still remain people who see reality for what it is and refuse to participate in or ratify the Lie. They find the truth and discern for themselves. This is due to what Frank calls intuition or primary knowledge. This is also alluded to in Romans 1:20, the scriptural basis for natural law.
I think that where Frank is coming from is that if the majority of church buildings and pastors have ratified The Lie, those places and men are unnecessary, even detrimental, to obtaining salvation. I disagree (though correct me if I'm wrong Frank). Even if those places have wicked or cowardly priests Christ is reposed in the Tabernacle and for that they still merit our respect.
But the tiny proportion of traditionalist churches that fight for the faith and the Sacraments pose a problem because while they maintain the old understanding of the faith they in practice teach rebellion to the Church hierarchy that is System-aligned. In a sense, the whole Church has become protestant--the greater Novus Ordo in morals and the Traditionalists in obedience.
The way I make it through this is by remembering that the Church Triumphant is always with us even if it appears that the Church Militant has abandoned its mission.
I do agree with Frank very often, particularly his condemnation of the Church's reaction to the "pandemic", however although the Catechism is very vague about what "there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church" means in practice, there can be no doubt that leaving her is fraught with danger. My own attitude is that no matter how terrible the Systemic Church gets I'm staying Catholic.
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