WHAT WORKS BEST? COTTON CANDY CATHOLICISM OR JAW BREAKER CATHOLICISM?
When I was in my uber liberal seminary in the late 1970’s in Baltimore, one of our Scripture Scholars, who I thought was one of the best teachers of Scriptures, pointed out that the corruption of religion in the Old and New Testament was when religion became primarily comfort religion, feel good religion with no rigid demands.
Old Time Catholicism, Pre-Vatican Catholicism was far from comfort religion. It was not about sitting in a circle, holding hands and singing Kumbaya. It was not about importing Protestant spiritualities, such as Pentecostalism, and the ethos of their devotional lives into the Catholic Church.
Pre-Vatican II Catholicism was strict, ascetic, rigid and regimented. Ask anyone who knew how the Church was back then, what our Catholic schools were like and what religious orders were like.
Ask anyone who remembers, what pre-Vatican II family life was like and that we were taught to give good example, suck it up, be disciplined, go to Mass each Sunday and Confession regularly, get married in the Church, have your children reared as Catholics and follow the laws of the Church!
THIS WAS JAW BREAKER CATHOLICISM.
Cotton Candy Catholicism seems to have developed after Vatican II. Discipline was relaxed. Ascetical practices almost disappeared, religious orders become shadows of their former self and prayer and liturgy was turned into the closed circle of Kumbaya and bleeding hearts, and not those of the Sacred Heart of Jesus or the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
The fires of hell are not preached. The four last things never mentioned. The need for repentance, penance and a reformed life seldom encouraged.
The way of individualism with its rot is welcomed into the Church. All are welcomed with no requirement to actually believe what the Church believes, teaches and proclaimsto be revealed by God.
Everything is in flux and open to being changed. Melt in your mouth Catholicism with nothing to crunch upon.
THIS IS COTTON CANDY CATHOLICISM AND RESPONSIBLE FOR THE MALIASE IN THE CHURCH WE NOW EXPERIENCE.
18 comments:
The "Church of Nice" has shed millions. I still believe if John XXIII had not died at the inception of the Council, things would have turned out very differently. He certainly would NOT have gone in the direction Paul VI and Bugnini and company did when it came to the Sacred Liturgy. People forget he issued Veterum Sapientia and seemed very much at home with High Liturgy
I get the sense that many people want to be challenged by their faith -- they want to do something that is difficult. In our (Orthodox) community, which was probably around 100 people just a few years ago, we presently have around 60 catechumens. A half dozen folks were baptized on Palm Sunday and another 18 were baptized on Pentecost.
Our converts are mostly people coming from evangelical Protestant backgrounds. Many of the catechumens are young men, but we also see families with small children. The catechumenate period typically lasts more than a year, sometimes multiple years, which is not easy in itself. And every Sunday liturgy lasts at last two hours with no pews or chairs --- not an easy thing with small children, I can assure you. Many folks come to a lot of services during the week, especially Saturday evening Vespers.
I think people want to be in a community where these things are taken seriously unlike so much else going on in modern American society.
Father McDonald,
Another fake Catholic, Colbert, outs himself:
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2025/06/16/stephen-colbert-says-cynthia-erivo-playing-female-jesus-in-jesus-christ-superstar-is-long-overdue/
Thank God he’s promoting that and not the TLM!
Father McDonald,
LOL! Good one!
Larry Chapp noted that as early as 1958 A.D., Father Joseph Ratzinger had made it clear that so-called "Jawbreaker" Catholicism and long proved disastrous to the Church:
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2021/02/04/the-constantinian-heathenism-of-the-church-joseph-ratzinger-and-the-crisis-of-our-time/
-- The Constantinian heathenism of the Church: Ratzinger and the crisis of our time
by Larry Chapp
"The appearance of the church in the modern era shows that in a completely new way it has become a church of heathens, and increasingly so: no longer, as it once was, a church made up of heathens who have become Christians, but a church of heathens, who still call themselves Christian, but have really become heathens.
"Heathenism is entrenched today in the church itself. This heathenism is actually in the church and a church in whose heart heathenism lives."
With these incendiary words in an article shocking for its candor during a time when such things were just not said, a young Joseph Ratzinger burst onto the theological scene in Germany.
All was not well with the Church, despite outward appearances, and Ratzinger was convinced that the Church was in a deep crisis of faith requiring an equally deep theological response.
What is instructive in the quote isn’t just the blunt claim that the Church had been infected by “heathenism”, but also that these words were written in 1958, which gives the lie to the currently popular view among some conservatives that the reforms of Vatican II are responsible for the malaise in the Church.
All Vatican II did was to lift the lid off of the ecclesiastical libido and to thereby allow for the first time a full public expression of the unbelief, brewing for centuries, of the laity and the clerics alike.
Only this can explain why the putative “Catholic” culture of the pre-conciliar Church collapsed almost overnight.
The vapid lunacy of the post-conciliar Church was the product of the hollow and merely forensic “faith” of the pre-conciliar Church.
Ratzinger was not alone in ringing the alarm...The signs of rot were there if you only had the eyes to see it.
These prophets were largely ignored by Church leaders and were viewed with deep suspicion as crypto-modernists...Church leaders were mainly focused on maintaining the façade/illusion of “fortress Catholicism” viewed as a rock-solid bulwark of unchanging “orthodoxy” standing firm against the evils of the modern world.
Ratzinger, and like-minded thinkers, knew that the “fortress” was in fact a house of cards, as later events would confirm."
Pax.
Mark Thomas
Larry Chapp had referenced Father Joseph Ratzinger's 1958 A.D. horrific, bleak, lecture/assessment in regard to the Church. Homelitic & Pastoral Review had published the text of said lecture.
-- The New Pagans and the Church A 1958 Lecture by Joseph Ratzinger
https://www.hprweb.com/2017/01/the-new-pagans-and-the-church/
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Then-Cardinal Ratzinger's Good Friday 2005 A.D., "how much filth there is in the Church"...the Church had fallen into utter collapse...comment echoed his 1958 A.D. horrific assessment of the Church.
That the Church...the priesthood...Roman Liturgy...everything for centuries had been in a state of utter corruption and collapse had long existed as a theme that Joseph Ratzinger had broadcast.
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It is also interesting that Joseph Ratzinger's 1958 A.D. lecture in question featured his insistence that the Church would collapse into that of a small flock. He had declared via his lecture:
"And so, either sooner or later, with or contrary to the will of the Church, according to the inner structural change, she will become externally a little flock."
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The supposed wonderful, pre-Vatican II "Jawbreaker" Catholicism was a facade — a monumental flop...a disaster — should we accept Joseph Ratzinger's bleak assessment of the Church.
Pax.
Mark Thomas
MT Suit,
Just like Father McDonald has stated here many times he once bought the Spirit of Vatican II Koolaid on the Liturgy as
did Pope Benedict. Unlike you, Father McDonald and Pope Benedict’s views on the Liturgy matured over time. You conveniently overlook an older and wiser Pope Benedict’s view that the Novus Bogus is a banal, made up on the spot Liturgy. Have you no decency, have you no shame peddling your lies?
MT,
Speaking of monumental flops and disasters, let's talk about the last decade or so in the Church, let alone the last half-century. Surely the cotton candy has turned things around after the "disaster" of the jawbreaker.
Oh...
Nick
It is fair to note that not everybody had bought into Father Joseph Ratzinger's dreadful assessment, beginning during the late 1950s, of the Church.
There are "traditionalists," here, as well as elsewhere, who rejected our future Pope Benedict XVI's bleak assessment in question...who rejected his call for radical reforms related to the Mass, etc.
There are non-traditionalists who also recalled a Church prior to Vatican II that they had viewed as vibrant and wonderful.
The bottom line is, however, that Father Joseph Ratzinger, as well as his fellow progressives, had carried the day during, as well as beyond, Vatican II.
The radical reform of the Church, as they had insisted upon, had long ago been realized.
Pax.
Mark Thomas
MT, you remain trapped in the 1960’s critique of all things preVatican II. We need to critique the past 60 years, not before that. Pope Benedict grew into that and had a lot to say about it after 1968. Get with the modern times like Pope Benedict did!
Fr. AJM,
Some people are stuck in the past... we just call them progressives when they're stuck in the 1960s and '70s!
Nick
Some people are stuck in the past...we just call some of them "traditionalists" when they pretend that the Council, as well as the liturgical reform, had not taken place...when they claim that "modernist" Pope Leo XIV, as well as each Vatican II Era Pope, is "not my Pope."
Yep, some people remain stuck...have not moved beyond Wednesday, October 10, 1962 A.D.
Pax.
Mark Thomas
Thanks for admitting it. That’s a major step to overcoming it in your life.
Thanks for admitting it. That’s a major step to overcoming it in your life.
Father, I am not trapped remotely in the 1960s. I noted simply that Father Joseph Ratzinger had made it clear that pre-Vatican II "Jawbreaker" Catholicism had long been mired in shambles.
He insisted that the pre-Vatican II Church had required monumental, radical reforms. He, along with his fellow progressives, helped to accomplish that at Vatican II.
To the end of his earthly life, Joseph Ratzinger was unshakable in regard to his decades-long claim that Vatican II had been "both meaningful and necessary."
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Speaking of having been stuck in the past: There have been folks here, and elsewhere, who insisted that in regard to Vatican II, holy Joseph Ratzinger had remained stuck in the past.
That is, said folks had insisted that Joseph Ratzinger had been too stubborn to have acknowledged that his "baby," Vatican II had, according to said folks, been a monumental, destructive flop.
Anyway, he believed that pre-Vatican II, "jawbreaker" Catholicism had been in dire need of elimination from the Church. He accomplished that as a key player at the Council — again, a Council that he insisted had proved "meaningful and necessary."
Pax.
Mark Thomas
In which MT continues to play Pollyanna.
As for the rest, just refer back to my previous comment.
Nick
Father McDonald,
Here is a remarkable vocations story. Please note these young women were not attracted to the pantsuit orders!
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/amp/news/264887/widow-mother-of-4-nuns-and-a-priest-takes-perpetual-vows
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