THE 1970’S REDUX: A BISHOP EMERITUS CRITIQUE OF THE CHURCH GOING BACKWARDS TO THE 1970’S UNDER THE CURRENT PONTIFICATE…

 Contrary to FRMJK’s rantings about my seminary education, unlike his, mine was a thoroughly academic progressive program rooted in 1970’s theological thinking, especially anti-clericalism, liberation theology and progressive liturgical styles to include all sorts of inculturation. 

One of things St. Mary’s in Baltimore did best in the later 1970’s was to teach us what the Church taught prior to Vatican II and how Vatican II undid all of that and the logic behind it. 

The purpose of knowing pre-Vatican II theology was to show how Vatican II was so much more superior. 

And another 1970’s hermeneutic that Pope Francis has gone back to the 1970’s to retrieve is the psychological denigration of those who preferred the pre-Vatican II liturgies and Church. He uses psychological marginalization of them to manipulate them to accept his vision and ideology/theology of the Council. This mean-spirited and uncharitable approach to young Catholics today who prefer the older liturgies does not work just as it didn’t work in the 1970’s. All it does is anger and alienate Catholics and for what purpose? 

This kind of thing, from an authoritarian point of view, is truly what clericalism is in the Church and I think linked to other actual pathologies in the Church associated with abuse of all kinds and not just sexual but certainly inclusive of it. 

Also the good bishop emeritus corrects FRMJK’s claim that no one worships ecclesiology. In fact manic progressives do and this is a priceless paragraph in the good bishop’s very fine academic article I post below:

Liturgy is at the heart of ecclesial life. One can adhere with enthusiastic conviction to the idea expressed by Benedict XVI: the Church stands in its reality on the foundation which is the Sacred Liturgy—or it falls with it. A progressive mania manipulates the liturgy, and turns it into a means to another end, which is no longer the worship of adoration and expiation, but (for example) to meet, gather, and feel good together. The displacement of the source of grace gives way to a purely horizontal, human perspective.

Thus, with this in mind, this article reposted by Rorate Caeli and now by me, gives quite a good overview of what the Church in 2022 under the present pope and those who surround him are doing and it is all based in the 1970’s theology that they embraced in an uncritical manner:

“Progressive Manias”: Powerful article by Archbishop Aguer

What is progressivism? I am referring to ecclesiastical progressivism, which, like secular progressivism, looks to the future as if the world and the Church were on the move, always evolving towards the best.

We could consider evolutionism as a sort of eponym of religious progressivism. This constitutes a system of “advanced” ideas and attitudes, which proudly detaches itself from any adherence to Tradition. The so-called modernism of the early twentieth century was described and condemned by St. Pius X in the Encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis and the Decree Lamentabili sane exitu. It brought together a Kantian (rationalist) philosophy, which repudiated Aristotelian-Thomistic thought; the “positive” studies of Sacred Scripture of a Protestant-liberal origin; and the desire to equate Christian culture with that which reigned in a Europe shaped by the revolutions of the 19th century, which had their roots in the French Revolution of 1789 and its Enlightenment. Modernists suffered from a kind of discomfort, as if they were alien or had been left out of what the Modern Age was proposing. Moreover, confusion reigned in modernism between the doctrine, its contents, and the modes of expression. In this regard, post-conciliar progressivism surpasses it by far.

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