Agree wholeheartedly with Daniel. This won't change anything. It's a step in the right direction, but you've still got to contend with the fact that 90% of the NO parishioners are happy with the NO and are either wholly ignorant of or actively oppose the reintroduction of the TLM.
Please cite a source for that or is that another statistic you chose to make up on the spot?
Gallup polls over the years, my friend.
I'm going to say this right now as one of the things I cherish most in life are my friends and even though some nutty traditionalists and sedes see that as a liability and slander me over it, I feel I live by Christ's example and would willingly lay down my life for any one of my friends if I had to.So...
DO NOT use that word with me if you do not mean it.
I don't have to cite statistics for that which is common knowledge, at least to the old-timers on FE. It's well known that there have been scandalous gallup polls about how 70% of Catholics don't believe in the Real Presence. We all know how, well, not very traditional the typical Novus Ordo parish is. *cough*altar girls*cough.* The baby boomer set is very opposed to the TLM, from my experience, The very old ones who are still alive/still go to Mass might welcome it, if they haven't reconciled themselves to the NO and accepted the theological stuff that goes along to justify all that happens at their local parish that was "wrong and sinful" 40-some years ago. Therefore, though every parish usually has a few good, orthodox Catholics who are trying to obey what they know of church teaching, the majority of them are either young (and therefore likely ignorant, never even having heard of the TLM, certainly never having been to one) the English mass is all they know, or older ones who are on the "liturgical dance planning committee."
This is all opinion, Eric...nothing more. People's level of Faith varies from person to person and parish to parish. As an aside, the pre-boomer generation have been the ones I've seen most hostile to the Traditional Mass on an individual basis. I see more reception of the TLM among my generation and the younger generations like yourself.
I don't see them asking father for a 6:30 am TLM, do you?
I plan on asking the Friars for the Daily 5 AM Mass to be a Latin Mass, I think I can swing more than half the people to go along with me.
Furthermore, most of the priests are the same way.
Again, cite a reliable source or stop posting the drivel you've been brainwashed with.
Easy now, mate, I haven't been brainwashed, and I never said you or anyone else had been, let's try to have a nice, orderly discussion, can we?
Mike, ChantCD was making a point and it is a valid one. He did not say that you were brainwashed, he merely pointed out the high occurence of such cases. I don't blame him for pointing this out, because it's likely correct.
Ummmm ok, you didn't directly say it, just said it was "likely correct". But that's neither here nor there.
Back to my point...
How does this sound?:
I do not believe what you present as facts are always correct, in another thread you sourced a book that was incorrect (music thread). However, I do not think you are a liar, from my limited interaction with you, I'd call you honorable and truthful, wise yet naive...if that makes sense. To read what you type would have a complete stranger think that 99% of the Church is wrong and you're right, that we should throw up our hands and say "We're all doomed" and sequester ourselves in a bunker and withdraw from the world waiting for God to take us all.
Most of the priests are compromised, because they're saying the Novus Ordo Missae, "for all," etc., and have no problem with the new ideas and orientation which seems to be in vogue these days. The fact that a church called "the Rock Church" can exist in St. Louis, under "conservative" Archbishop Burke, where they have rock/hip-hop and liturgical dance every Sunday, and the clergy of the entire state have not risen up and said "get this filth out of the Catholic Church" shows that most of the clergy do not have strong traditional views. Again, altar girls. I shouldn't have to demonstrate to everybody that your typical Novus Ordo priest is *not* a bastion of orthodoxy. There are some (many) good and holy ones out there, but they are sadly not the norm, rather, they are exceptions, and trying to find them can be like trying to find needles in haystacks. The fact that when somebody says "tell me where I can find a reverent Mass," I can't hand them a diocesan directory and say "choose whichever one you like" ought to tell everybody that there's something rotten in Denmark, or, in this case, that there's a crisis in the Church.
I agree with you in part on most of this, however...I still say it's the Masses with abuses that are the minority. I've lived in 5 different States on both coasts and attend Mass at many more when I travel for work or trade shows. I've seen great Masses and I've been to Masses that made me walk out of the Church. I've also been to Masses where I should have done the same, but stayed and offered it up. An abused woman with abused children should walk from an abusive husband, not offer that up till it results in death. I think more of us need to "Man-up" and offer it up when we're in a Mass we don't like, but make it a point to contact pastor and bishop and let our feelings known. That is how you affect change!
The whole point of my post in this thread is just an attempt to help people.
You are a Moderator on this Forum, over the next few months you will see alot of new members. Many from the NO. Many who were lied to and told TLM was illegal, etc. Many who long for something better than the shell of a Mass they've been attending for 40 years.
Yes and a handfull of trolls will creep in.
I guess if your attitude is "to hell with them", nothing will change, let's be miserable. All I'm saying is give it a chance and maybe by positive reinforcement you can turn those "Gallup Numbers" around.
A Papal document can say all kinds of things...it means nothing if we do not take action. Vox has a chapter or 2 about "take back the net"...I'm asking all good Catholic Men and Women to take back the Church in a positive fashion.
Griping on message boards might motivate 1 person to do one thing, getting active in your parish and restoring the parish as the center of a Catholic Community should be the goal of any Catholic who's serious about combatting modernism and defeating the problems wrought by abuses within the NO.
These people have had a chance to play like they're protestants for 40 years. They get to decorate like prots, live like prots, and, for the most part, worship like semi-high-church prots. Now, there are a few factors (the fact that Pope Benedict is nicely old fashioned and doesn't care for bongo drums and pop tunes like his predecessor) which are starting to exercise a feather-light pressure to coax Catholics back into Catholicism from their little "holiday." Most of them aren't going to like it. Not one bit. Absolute truth isn't a very popular thing at this time in the world, and not 1/10th of the worldlings who call themselves "Catholics" now would keep that title if they knew all about the dogma of EENS and the other dogmas of the faith which sound so "hard" to our sensitive natures and weak bodies. Turning Catholics into protestants from the pulpit is easy... it was done during the reformation, and again in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s.
More rubbish
Please don't write it off as rubbish, tell me what you disagree with, exactly.
Calling your fellow Catholics Protestants for one by using a similie (an exaggerated comparison using "like" or "as" in case you did not know). You don't like being called a "sede" or "schismatic" or any other label that's not true, how do you think your fellow Catholics feel when they pop in here to learn more about the Latin Mass and see you calling them protestants or worldlings or not real Catholics.
Is that what they are teaching at Saint Mary's these days?
Do you think that average joe Novus Ordo parishioner who prides himself on being nice and "open-minded" would react positively if he really thought about the church teaching about salvation outside Her?
That is not really the point of this thread. You are a moderator so don't think I'm telling you to keep on topic or anything. Are you now saying NO parishoners are simple-minded or too nice?
Most moderns (non-Catholics) react with horror if you try to say that you have the truth and someone else doesn't, or that someone else will spend eternity in hellfire for not being part of your church.
And most prots think we're going to go to hell and the Pope is the Whore of Babylon. I don't give a $--- what they think. You might react with horror if you ever come face to face with one of these losers...I laugh in their faces.
I highly doubt that if 70% of Catholics reject belief in the Real Presence, they're going to truly adhere to the idea that there is no salvation outside the Church.
Again, outside scope...I doubt the validity of that poll to begin with.
If they know about it, they put their own spin on it like the prots, and define "church" as "all those who believe in Christ" or "all those who are nice people and not jerks" or whatever.
You must know some extremely simplistic people.
EENS is MUCH more controversial than the relatively "tame" theological belief about the Holy Eucharist really being the body and blood of Our Lord, rather than just a symbolic and "spiritual" memorial of Him.
And again, it has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
Turning prots into Catholics from the pulpit isn't nearly so easily accomplished, which is why mass conversions back to Catholicism are so rare, even with all the high-church sentiment in the Church of England during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Well that's like me saying converts aren't real Catholics.
Not really, I don't see how you're example and mine are related.
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They're both extreme simplifications (metaphors...at least I'm hoping yours is because there's probably alot of Catholics that don't like being called Prots). You are saying that our Church has become "Protestant" and it's not easy to convert them back. I kind of know where you're going, but I reject the argument.
I say protestant converts aren't real Catholics because I'm oversimplifying the following: I'm a cradle Catholic baptized at 2 days old. Those of us raised in the church have a different outlook on things than those who just wandered in. Not that God has a better spot for us in Heaven or you'll always be second fiddle, just different...the experience.
If you want to dispute my point, can you please show me where masses of people have abandoned protestantism after they've fallen into it and come back to the faith? (Especially gradually, bit by bit.) The Devil isn't going to like it when his catches of the last 40 years are slowly re-Catholicized and become "trads" again. He's a fan of liturgical dance, to say the least.
Your basic answer is to forget about them, they're done...we have no hope...and the next step whether you like it or not is schism. Maybe not now...but eventually that's where this line of thinking will take you.
I don't really care about protestants, to be honest. I care about my fellow Catholics. If I'm a Marine going house to house in Bagdad and a big bomb takes out a bunch of us along with some army or airforce types, I'm going to protect my people first...my Marines. Then. I'll worry about the others. My fellow Catholics are not protestants anymore than my fellow trads are schismatics.
I don't care what the devil likes or know if he likes liturgical dance. And if for some reason I end up in the basement instead of with the Man Upstairs...he'll end up kicking me out too!
Look, you and I both know that the Catholics in the Novus Ordo churches aren't protestants explicitly, but they're protestants in their actions and mentality.
That one Mass you went to must have been a doozy.
I'm not buying this argument anmd if you start saying NewChurch and NewRome like that crazy fake priest with the ill-fitting vestments and unkempt hair in San Francisco with the Website...I'm going to do an intervention.
Most of them don't know the faith, and thanks to all the modernists of the last 40 years in the hierarchy, there's lots of "private judgment," which is the hallmark of protestantism.
Most of them aren't scholars, alot have been lead in error. Are we going to sit here and throw rocks at them or try to correct them?
They don't go to the iron-hard and unchangeable dogmas of the faith for the truth, they say "Father said A, my coworker says B, I read the bible and I get C, and so I'll go with answer D, which is a blend of A, B, and C."
Again, I don't see how you can say that every single Catholic who goes to the NO or a majority of them thinks this way. You're arguments are all broad over-generalizations.
Satan loves that. Satan loves Catholics who beat their fellow Catholics over the head with rules and broad generalizations.
Why?
He wants you to run them off...make them feel marginalized...outcast...then 6 months later have them show up with copies of the Watchtower at your door.
I'm frequently told I'm caustic and abrasive and accused of the same, I don't believe I've ever caused someone to leave the church or doubt their Faith, though...I hope you can say the same.
As I said above, there are some orthodox Catholics out in that mess, but they're not the majority, to put it nicely. If they were the majority, then the wreckovators and modernist nutters could never have gotten away with what they did.
Well, the majority of people in the US don't want to pay income tax, yet they do it because they are told. The bishop tells the pastors: "You will do this", the pastors tell the priests, the priests tell the laity.
You're presuming simplistic notions not grounded in reality.
The fact is, the majority of the people will do what they are told by what they perceive as an authority figure. Especially a priest. It takes alot of courage to resist and do something else or speak up.
Your "If clause" does not hold up, as a student of human nature and organizational behavior I'm going to call you on that one.
People in the '60s were often orthodox after a fashion, but their faith was more of a habit than a real, living, faith. When the revolution came they either followed it like lemmings or got confused and quit going to Mass, period.
And now they have a chance to come back and get it right and you're blowing it off.
The road to restoration will therefore not be an easy one, to say the very least, the pope's personal opinions on the traditional Mass not withstanding.
Yeah, he's only the Pope.
He's the Pope, but if you might recall, the American bishops have a penchant for ignoring him whenever they don't like what he's saying. I refer you, for one example of many, to the case of Cardinal Roger Mahoney, and the GIRM.
Mahony is a red herring. In my opinion Bishops like him are the real Sedes. I've said this till I'm blue in the face. Let me ask you this, if the likes of Mahony and the liberals are excommunicated for refusing to comply, will you say those excommunications are invalid?
Remember: he's announced what we all have known all along, that every priest has the right to say the Mass of All Time. He's said one thing, and this is a good thing, somewhat surprising given how badly things have been going, but is hardly cause for rejoicing and anticipatory canonization of the man as a bastion of orthodoxy. You'll tell me that I shouldn't be so hard on him, given his environment, our times, etc., and that he's doing as well as any man possibly could, given the roman (modernist) intellectual climate, to preserve the faith. I disagree, however.
Naturally, you would. You have no idea how the Church works.
Come on man... you know perfectly well that this isn't about whether we like each other's "attitude" or "outlook," it's about truth. We're never going to get there if we reward each others comments with sarcastic comments which don't even happen to be true. I am fully cogniscient of the great pressure which the modernists are able to bring to bear on the occupant of Peter's chair. It's a terrific trial, and there's a very very good reason why St. Pius X, in tears, asked the conclave to please elect someone else for the supreme pontificate. That said, this pressure explains, but does not justify, popes who for whatever reason or other, do not uphold the constant teachings of the Church in word or example. That is what makes the papacy such a cross.... remaining steadfast in spite of all that opposition.
I was speaking more of the bureacracy. When I was a Marine, I could easily get a squad (12 men) or platoon (36 men) to follow orders. In the corporate world when I publish something that 300 people must start implementing, it takes months. For 1,000 people it can take a year. The higher up it goes...the longer it takes.
The Vatican runs on God's time, not man's. We're talking 1 billion Catholics: Roman and other rites crossing cultural, racial, geographical, and lines of language.
My point was and is...this is good for all of us. It's good for traditionalists like myself who wants to see more of my fellow Catholics see the Mass as it was intended, as it should be. It's good for the people from the NO and again, there is nothing like taking an NO Catholic to the TLM...changes them. I can speak to six instances when I took an NO Catholic to a Latin Mass and 12 where I reccomended it through Email, etc. All of those people were changed by it...some go to TLM exclusively, a few would if it was an option. I'm glad I was the catalyst to make it happen.
This is also good for folks like yourself, Eric. Maybe this is the first of many steps and other possible errors will be addressed. I'm sure you read Bishop Fellay's letter, I did and cannot find the link presently or else I would quote it directly. I see the Hand of God in all this and reconcilliation between Rome and the SSPX is not too far off.
However, I also see the point of view of some folks as having quite a lot to lose in this. Namely the Independents, SSPV, elements of the SSPX, etc. Some of these types profit off "conflict" within the Church.
Orthodoxy and absolute truth are easy to profess and uphold. Athanasius did it well in the 300s, and Archbishop Lefebvre did it in our own time. It's not impossible for Pope Benedict to do it either, if he wants to. He needs our prayers. God's grace will go MUCH farther to resolve this crisis than our laud of the pope for the bone he's thrown to us.
Maybe you should go to Rome and straighten him out. I'm sure when he was 19 or 20 he thought he had all the answers, too.
A) Age canard. My age has nothing to do with this discussion.
It most certainly does. You are basing your argument on your observations and your mindset. This is either what you've learned through books, school, life, research, etc. Your age is a handicap in that regard. I'm almost twice your age, so I've seen and experienced more. The Pope is more than twice my age...you think he has an edge on me with regard to age, experience, and education? I'll admit it. I really don't expect you to admit it. I thought I had all the answers at 16 and didn't realize I didn't till I was 26 or so.
Part and parcel of being young...that and you should try to enjoy life as you'll some day realize it's all temporary.
What matters is my knowledge and my maturity, which affects my ability to present that knowledge.
And you do have both. However there's a few things you miss once in awhile.
I cannot speak for myself, because personally I think I have many, many faults. However, I know that there have been not a few individuals who assumed that I was 60-70 years old, based on my posts and the way the information contained therein was presented.
I figured you for mid-30's when I first signed on here.
Therefore, I'm afraid that the idea that my convictions will change "when I've acquired a few more years" is sadly mistaken. My views do not in the least essential manner differ from almost any priest of the SSPX, and most of them are a good sight older than 20
Well, there's this thing called life...it has a way of doing the unexpected to you. I think it's admirable that you want to be like a priest and think like a priest. If that is the case, though, that should be your next step.
If you go the other route, you'll have to contend with what the rest of us do.
B) Going to Rome would do no good, I don't believe.
Wow, I was right...some of you people really cannot recognize sarcasm in writing.
Damn Pepsi Generation.
The truth is out there for all to see, and if any man has access to that truth, it is our Holy Father, Benedict XVI, who occupies an apartment in Vatican City, which boasts probably the most extensive library in the world related to Catholicism. We must simply pray, and God's will be done, whether the crisis is to last 40 years, or 400. (Arianism, remember, lingered for centuries before it finally disappared completely.)
So why do you think this is a bad thing or don't think it will do any good, then?
