At the basis of this is the loss of Catholic Faith in the Magisterium and the Deposit of Faith symbolized by the Mass at its foundation.
Former PI belongs on the other side of the spectrum from those with common sense. He thinks that the changes in the Church symbolized by the changes in the Mass does not account for this loss. He supports his delusional thinking by showing the following new Pew Survey results:
The Pew Research Center actually asked people why they left, and their data indicates that it wasn't "the changes":
Just gradually drifted away 71% (Isn't this a loss of the Deposit of Catholic Faith and identity????)
Stopped believing the teachings 66% (Isn't this a loss of the Deposit of Faith and Identity?????)
Spiritual needs not met 56% (Isn't this a loss in the belief of what the Catholic Mass is and means???)
Unhappy with teaching on:
abortion/homosexuality 56% (Isn't this a loss of Catholic morality and identity????)
birth control 48% (Isn't this a loss of Catholic morality and identity rooted in the Mass????)
treatment of women 39% (Isn't this a loss of Catholic dogma concerning Holy Orders & Mass????)
divorce/remarriage 33% (Isn't this a loss of Catholic morality and identity????)
Dissatisfied with atmosphere at worship 26% (Isn't this a loss in the belief of what the Mass is????)
Clergy sexual abuse scandal 27% (Isn't this a lack of spiritual maturity which the OF does not foster???)
Opposed to celibacy for clergy 24% (Isn't this a loss in what the Catholic Mass does and offers to the sinner which the OF Mass doesn't seem to counter???)
Religion drifted too far from traditional practices such as Latin mass 8% (Isn't this a sign that the OF Mass as celebrated doesn't make as obvious the Sacrifice and Real Presence of Christ and the Fear and Awe one has in God's presence?????)
If the other 92% who left did not cite "drifting from tradition" as a cause for their departure, why keep claiming that's the reason they left? (FORMER PI: read what you just said!!!!The 92% who left not only drifted from the Tradition of the Church, her Mass, her Magisterium, her Deposit of Faith, her sacramental life, her morality, her faith and good works, they have chosen to do so in most cases because of Catholicism LITE reflect and symbolized by the manner in which the OF Mass is celebrated and the preaching that comes from it. WAKE UP and SMELL THE COFFEE!!!!)
Read the whole thing HERE!
30 comments:
Good Father - I suggest you go to the Pew Center page I cited and actually READ the questions that Pew asked. Then, if you try, you can understand the percentages I posted.
At present you are reading your biases into the data. For a person who claims to be trained in sociology, this is not your best showing.
Fr. McD., check again. You REALLY DO have it almost 100% bassackwards....
Father, this is a growing blog. By constantly using "insider" acronyms like "PI" or "former PI", a number of new readers will have no idea what or who you are talking about. I've read this blog for a couple of years and I thought initially that you were talking about a Private Investigator. It took me a few minutes to recall you were speaking about Pater Igno…well, whatever you call him.
Now, let me get this straight! On the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, God renews for us poor miserable sinners the only saving event for our salvation, the Sacrifice of his Son but now in an unbloody way. Almighty God, the Supreme Being gives Himself completely, His Body, Blood, Doul and Divinity! If Catholics truly believed this they would fill our Churches daily. Prior to the changes in the Mass more than 90% of Catholics attended Mass. Today with almost 50 years of the Ordinary Form of the Mass celebrated as it is, we have up to 88% of Catholics who don't bother to attend! Why? Because they don't believe what the Mass actually is! And not believing that they don't believe much else!
You have it backasswards. Or you are as delusional or in denial as former PI!
Of course you are correct! I forget that people actually read this blog apart from a few friends and enemies. I will try to avoid using terms which many may not understand!
No one is disputing a loss of faith after Vatican Two. What the Pew research indicates - don't you love that it is "Pew" research about church going? - is that the reasons people give for leaving have little to do with the changes in the mass.
I think I can hazard a guess that Fr. K could be described as more 'contemporary' while Fr. M is traditional.
By contemporary I mean "generally liberal politically and theologically" but with an important asterisk that Fr. K is by no means a heretic. He's one sharp, sharp, cookie. (if cookies have degrees in theology and are very well read).
I'm by no means a Latin Mass aficionado, I'm cosmopolitan in tastes and appreciate well read and well spoken people but especially priests so I tend to "like" Fr. K more than my politics and theology would otherwise lead people to suspect. He strikes me as a guy you could really enjoy having a beer with.
But if there are blind spots (haven't we all?) it's in presuming that the decline post Vatican II was inevitable or that it would have been worse without the LCWR/Commonweal, liberal/modernist drive and passive aggressive posture vs. Pope John Paul II's magisterium throughout the 1980s and 90s.
I just don't buy it. I've lived long enough and in enough places around the US to have seen dioceses that are thriving vs. those in terminal decline. I am old enough to know many of the players involved in the "American Catholic Church" and how their boasts notwithstanding, their orders and congregations failed to attract the youth, failed to retain 'faithful' and how this forced them to keep moving the goal posts as to what is 'effective' pastoral practice.
I'm not convinced that Fr. McDonald's approach (Latin Mass et al) is the ONLY alternative course of action. I think there were many other factors involved besides the mere rite and ritual. I think it involved the passive aggressive nature of the modernists among us, among the theologians and nuns, among bishops and older priests and among laity who went from external rules' compliance to hog wild apostasy, proving that they never internalized the Gospel.
So the solution is not more of the same (status quo is overwhelmingly "liberal") nor is it merely or 'simply' a 'return' to pre-1963 theology and liturgical praxis and pastoral praxis.
I have some ideas and experience on what does work but that's for another post.
I am not disputing the fact that people who leave are so ignorant for the reasons for their loss of faith. Most people don't know why they get cancer and don't get a proper diagnosis until it is too late! The fact is the OF Mass did not produce a strong vibrant Catholic faith! This lack of faith led to them becoming nones if they had only know. And experienced the awe and wonder of the EF Mass and culture that surrounded it!
You're on to something there father: "…the EF Mass and culture that surrounded it!"
The Mass was the heart of the culture, but what I miss more than anything, what I grieve the loss of more than anything is not as much the loss of the EF Mass, as the culture that accompanied it. It was vibrant, it was love-filled, it was beautiful and it was uncompromisingly Catholic and it fed our identity and gave us the fortitude to cling to that identity in a foul culture that is exponentially more foul today than when the OF was introduced (imposed).
There are pockets of America and even dioceses where remnants of that culture still survive. When I visit them, I am sick with envy.
We can talk "renewal" until we turn blue, but renewal isn't some new thing. It isn't found by endlessly creating new programs and slick marketing. The greatest renewal I've seen comes from people who appreciate or have re-discovered the old thing. To try to tell this to those who haven't seen it is pointless. They just don't get it.
God has not abandoned His Church, but he has left many of us the challenge of surviving in a time of great darkness. Reach for the light and your shepherds will scold your for your preconciliar (counterrevolutionary) orientation.
Dark, dark times.
Pew is generally pretty good with methodology, but in this case they are asking about the effects of Vatican II fifty years after it happened. I think people may have left of natural causes as much as a doctrinal issue. In fact, the majority of people who left, say, over Church teaching on contraception may have never known the Church before Vatican II. So this poll has possibly established correlation, but not causality.
I was around for the Liturgical Wars instigated by the "glories of Vatican II" and I can tell you, the way the alleged reform was handled was ham-handed and insensitive. I had two uncles who went to Mass on a weekly basis and once the changes got out of hand, they simply stopped going. If the bishops had been in private industry and produced a disaster like the "reformed" Mass, they would have lost their jobs, tres vite. Thank God we are slowly beginning to recover a sense of the sacred and it appears younger priests, unaffected by the Liturgical Wars, are leading the way while the double-knit dinosaurs are resisting as we wheel them into nursing homes.
The false spirit of VII destroyed the underpinnings of our pre Vatican II Catholic culture with the removal of the external beauty of that culture which nourished and sustained Catholic Faith. The trappings of the Mass, the trappings of the priesthood and religeous life, the trappings of popular devotions and fasting and abstinence which United Catholics in sacrifice, sometimes understood humorously are completely lacking in the post VII stripping of the Mass especially the elements that produced wonde, awe, the foretaste of heaven and the desire for heaven, as well as everyday Catholic life. But today's younger Catholics 55 and younger know nothing of this in their post Vatican II experience of the Chirch. They are gutted by a gutted Church and look elsewhere and in all the wrong places for relief! SAVE THE LITURGY AND SAVE THE CHURCH!!!
Liberals reject biblically based arguments and traditional morals because their faith tells them that theology can not be stated as true or false (black or white) but 50 shades of grey. They may make some exceptions but I have never heard a liberal posit anything without leaving an escape hatch in their arguments.
In my experience, they will put their ideological principles above theological dogmas every time. The mental reservations they accumulate over time will eventually lead to a lukewarm kind of faith. (Jesus spoke about them rather pointedly.) Eventually, in more cases than not, the liberal concludes there is just no there there and many drop out and walk away. Those who leave are rarely the problem. The ones who stay, especially the priests and permanent deacons, continue spreading their poison among their parish community.
Father MacDonald you are spot on in your analysis.
anon-1
TJM
If the NO were an automobile it would be called an Edsel.
anon-1
Anonymous,
The whole point of "pater ignotus" is that he is unknown.
He is not unknown, he just took a vow to be inscrutable.
Anonymous, I was thinking about the Edsel when I wrote this.
for shame anonymous.
We can disagree with people without going ad hominem in such a crude fashion. I have argued with PI on occasion most vociferously on pastoral practice and on politics. But I know my place and it's not to call pastors egregious insulting names.
Call him wrong headed or delusional - that's something that can be remedied. but to call someone a bastard... that's a low and unmanly blow.
We all vent our spleen, Lord knows I've my faults. But if we want a better civilization we need to be more civilized ourselves.
I think that last comment was out of bounds for this blog.
I suspect a lot of people don't believe. Not really.
Watch those that bother to attend Holy Mass. Look at them before Mass. Are they acting as if Christ is present? Look at them after Mass. Are they acting as if Christ is still present?
What happens when they go home? Do they respond to Pew Research polls in the way as shown in this posting?
What propaganda Pope Francis and USCCB is up against:
Today, I came across this "opinion" of a supposed "cradle Catholic". True or not, who knows:
The Title: "When my abortion is forgiven by the Catholic church, I will be free"
http://mashable.com/2015/09/03/catholic-abortion-forgiveness/
The story is full of desires for love and forgiveness, for the sacraments, and has quotes from Pope Francis but she gives herself away with the very first paragraph:
"Seven years ago, I had an abortion. As a 20-year-old senior in college, I did not hesitate to end my pregnancy — it was the right decision for several deeply intimate reasons."
Pope Francis requested contrite hearts. She still thinks an abortion was the "right decision". The young lady seems willing to elaborate on her feelings and everything else but a sincere apology for having done something terribly wrong.
Forgiveness comes with sincere remorse and recognition of having done something evil. She is her own impediment to forgiveness, a brick wall of her making. She wants absolution without guilt. She wants forgiveness for having made the "right decision". She's twiddling her thumbs waiting for the Catholic Church to "get with" the 21st Century. What the Catholic Church conveys is Christ's Truth and it is that Truth that will set her free. She still believes the Lies.
They don't "get it".
Hey, folks, he's the one who gave himself the name...for someone who thinks he is so smart it seems rather ironic...and funny.
"Prompter hoc, ergo prompter hoc." The simpler, more logical conclusion from these stats is that the world changed and the Church did not. Those stats tell us that the NO has little or nothing to do with people leaving the church.
While I celebrate the EF Mass regularly and pray that it will continue to grow and be accepted by bishops, priests and laity, I do not want to give the impression that I would want it to be imposed on the entire Church as the Ordinary Form was in 1970. That would be unjust and simply wrong.
What I would like to see is the Ordinary Form Missal, as we have it today in content, to have the option of the Order of the Extraordinary Form of the Mass with its rubrics. I think this is very much a possibility and as an option that I think many younger priests would embrace and congregations not feel put upon by an all Latin Mass.
What I would like the most and promote actively is that both forms of the Mass have the same spirituality, reverence and piety for the Sacred. That means recovering in the Ordinary Form what was lost from the EF Mass in terms of awe, wonder, piety and reverence.
It means ad orientem (to remove the priest's facial expressions and personal piety or lack thereof from the Mass) and kneeling for Holy Communion and receiving on the tongue. These two things alone, without any other changes to the OF Mass will go a long way in a recovery of the sense of the sacred and awe and wonder in God's presence.
Thank you Jusad and rcg for dealing with that "Anonymous" comment last night. I couldn't imagine how Father allowed that through, and wasn't sure I should return here. I took the chance and am very grateful it was removed.
Jdj, "...wasn't sure I should return here..." Are you really that fragile?
Yep, the "near occasion of sin" is very real. We don't condone sin or we risk becoming part of the problem (like laughing at a filthy joke when one knows he shouldn't). The mistake I made was not becoming part of the solution and I thanked Jusad and rcg for doing so--interesting that you didn't attack them.
The blog administrator reviews each comment before posting.
"I review each comment prior to posting and may take time to do so."
It is, therefore, obvious that he chooses to post even those comments that are vulgar, vitriolic, and disrespectful.
That tells us as much about the blog administrator as it does about the authors of such comments.
“Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi”.......Here is an article that makes sense....http://www.onepeterfive.com/losing-the-sacrifice-of-the-mass/#comment-10014
Some of you are far too thin-skinned. Something is only a near occasion of sin if you allow it to be...if your intentions are not right to begin with. Many Priests, pastors, and devout Christians have walked among the most sinful actions and environments imaginable without having their integrity compromised. Many use alleged fragility as an excuse not to deal with something or in an effort to shame someone else into silence.
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