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GScheid
Mary's Servant
USA
406 Posts |
 Posted - May 04 2008 : 6:34:06 PM
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Saturday, May. 03, 2008
Is Liberal Catholicism Dead?
By David Van Biema
He may not have been thinking about it at the time, but Pope Benedict, in the course of his recent U.S. visit may have dealt a knockout blow to the liberal American Catholicism that has challenged Rome since the early 1960s. He did so by speaking frankly and forcefully of his "deep shame" during his meeting with victims of the Church's sex-abuse scandal. By demonstrating that he "gets" this most visceral of issues, the pontiff may have successfully mollified a good many alienated believers — and in the process, neutralized the last great rallying point for what was once a feisty and optimistic style of progressivism.
The liberal rebellion in American Catholicism has dogged Benedict and his predecessors since the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65. "Vatican II," which overhauled much of Catholic teaching and ritual, had a revolutionary impact on the Church as a whole. It enabled people to hear the Mass in their own languages; embraced the principle of religious freedom; rejected anti-semitism; and permitted Catholic scholars to grapple with modernity.
But Vatican II meant even more to a generation of devout but restless young people in the U.S. rather than a course correction, Terrence Tilley, now head of the Fordham University's theology department, wrote recently, his generation perceived "an interruption of history, a divine typhoon that left only the keel and structure of the church unchanged." They discerned in the Council a call to greater church democracy, and an assertion of individual conscience that could stand up to the authority of even the Pope. So, they battled the Vatican#65533;s birth-control ban, its rejection of female priests and insistence on celibacy, and its authoritarianism.
Rome pushed back, and the ensuing struggle defined a movement, whose icons included peace activist Fr. Daniel Berrigan, feminist Sister Joan Chittister, and sociologist/author Fr. Andrew Greeley. Its perspectives were covered in The National Catholic Reporter, Commonweal and America. Martin Sheen held down Hollywood, and the movement even boasted its own cheesy singing act: the St. Louis Jesuits. The reformers' premier membership organization was Call to Action, but their influence was felt at the highest reaches of the American Church, as sympathetic American bishops passed left-leaning statements on nuclear weapons and economic justice. Remarks Tilley, "For a couple of generations, progressivism was an [important] way to be Catholic."
Then he adds, "But I think the end of an era is here."
To some extent, liberal Catholicism has been a victim of its own success. Its positions on sex and gender issues have become commonplace in the American Church, diminishing the distinctiveness of the progressives. More importantly, they failed to transform the main body of the Church: John Paul II, a charismatic conservative, enjoyed the third-longest papacy in church history, and refused to budge on the left's demands; instead, he eventually swept away liberal bishops. The heads at Call to Action grayed, and by the late 1990s, Vatican II progressivism began to look like a self-limited Boomer moment.
Then, the movement received a monstrous reprieve. The priest sex abuse scandal implicated not only the predators, but the superiors who shielded them. John Paul remained mostly silent. A new reform group, Voice of the Faithful, arose; the old anger returned, crystallizing around the battle-cry "They just don't get it."
Benedict's visit, however, changed the dynamic. And that's a problem for progressives. Says Fr. Thomas Reese, a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Woodstock Theological Center whom Benedict famously removed from his previous job as editor of America, "Reform movements need an enemy to organize against. As most bishops have gotten their acts together on sex abuse, they have looked less like the enemy and more like part of the solution. Enthusiasm for reform declined. With the Pope's forthright response, it will decline even more."
Not everyone agrees. Says Voice of the Faithful spokesman John Moynihan, "That's funny; I just came from a meeting of COR (Catholic Organizations for Reform), and there were a lot of people very buoyed up. We can now say to people, 'We have made a difference, and if you stick with us we are going to make a further difference'." Adds Peter Steinfels, a former editor of Commonweal, now a director of Fordham's Religion and Culture Center, "I think there is continuity in terms of the issues and the questions about whether Church structures can be altered." He notes that a social justice group, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, formed just three years ago.
But the familiar progressives-versus-Vatican paradigm seems almost certain to be undone by a looming demographic tsunami. Almost everyone agrees that the "millennial generation," born in 1980 or later, while sharing liberal views on many issues, has no desire to mount the barricades. Notes Reese, "Younger Catholics don't argue with the bishops; they simply do what they want or shop for another church." And Hispanic Catholics, who may be the U.S. majority by 2020, don't see this as their battle. "I'm sure they#65533;re happy that the celebration of the Eucharist is in the vernacular," says Tilley, "but they don't have significant issues connected to Vatican II."
And so, unless Benedict contradicts in Rome what he said in New York, the Church may have reached a tipping point. This is not to say that the (over-hyped) young Catholic Right will swing into lay dominance. Nor will liberal single-issue groups simply evaporate. But if they cohere again, it will be around different defining issues. "It's a new ball game," admits Steinfels. As Tilley wrote recently in Commonweal regarding his fellow theologians, "A new generation has neither the baggage nor the ballast of mine. Theirs is the future. Let's hope they remember the Council as the most important event in twentieth-century Catholicism."
Let's see.
“Everyone needs thirty minutes of personal prayer time each day, unless they are too busy to pray—in which case, they need an hour!”
Saint Francis de Sales
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GScheid
Mary's Servant
USA
406 Posts |
Posted - May 04 2008 : 6:35:13 PM
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| C'mon Antonio, New Spring is arising! The New Pentecost! |
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Antonio A
Maryhead
825 Posts |
Posted - May 04 2008 : 7:00:40 PM
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Hi. GScheid,
"C'mon Antonio, New Spring is arising! The New Pentecost!"
Come to Los Angeles and tell me where the "New Spring" is, because I don't see it. We have 298 parishes and 7 Tridentine Masses, 70% of the liturgies, Novus Ordo, are a disaster. Poor "Catholic" kids can't afford to enter a Catholic high school because their parents simply can't afford tuition, and we educate many rich kids whose parents could care less about the faith, and we call this state of affairs "social justice." I sometimes thank the Lord many kids can't come to our schools because they are under the delusion our schools are "Catholic" but the fact is very different from that fantasy. Catechesis is still in the hands of old farts who are still openly dissenting from church teaching, and then we wonder why kids who go through the RCIA are confirmed without knowing the most basic principles of the faith. California is a loosy goosy state and so is the Church in this Left Coast!, but hey, who is bitter?
Antonio A. Obregón |
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Antonio A
Maryhead
825 Posts |
Posted - May 04 2008 : 7:01:49 PM
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Gscheid,
"Is Liberal Catholicism Dead?"
I hope so and the sooner that CANCER dies, the better off the Church of Christ will be!
Antonio A. Obregón  |
Edited by - Antonio A on May 04 2008 7:02:22 PM |
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JohnF
Mary's Servant
USA
428 Posts |
Posted - May 04 2008 : 11:33:35 PM
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then we wonder why kids who go through the RCIA are confirmed without knowing the most basic principles of the faith
I'm in my 50s. In Los Angeles when I attended RCIA, we held hands in a circle, standing in the dark, gazing at a candle in the center of the circle, and "allowed the spirit to flow" from one person to the next for 20 minutes.
It was pure occultism.
They taught nothing about the Blessed Mother, except to warn us against Marian superstition.
It was a horrible experience.
Antonio, everything you say is true. |
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GScheid
Mary's Servant
USA
406 Posts |
Posted - May 05 2008 : 09:31:10 AM
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http://wdtprs.com/blog/
Excellent Pastor’s Page: Fr. Welzbacher strikes again!
CATEGORY: SESSIUNCULUM — Fr. John Zuhlsdorf @ 2:25 pm
Pretty often the "pastor’s page" of parish a parish bulletin offers pretty thin gruel indeed.
At times, however, they can be a truly useful tool. Take for example what went on via the bulletin in Greenville!
Then there is the weekly offering from Fr. George Welzbacher.
Here we have this week’s comments with my emphases:
Pastor’s Page
By Fr. George Welzbacher
May 4, 2008
Thoughts on Pope Benedict’s "Journey of Hope"
Many years ago, if memory holds true, there was a television game show in which contestants were asked to identify which of the two or more candidates claiming, each of them, to be a certain particular person was "the real McCoy". At the end of the contest, after each candidate had made his pitch, the program’s impresario announced in stentorian terms: "Now will the real ["Mr. Smith", or whoever] stand up?" I was reminded of this during Pope Benedict’s recent visit to the United States. While watching his appearances and listening to his words, and comparing what he was saying with what the exponents of a revisionist, "progressive" Catholicism have been saying for lo! these many years, I kept hearing a voice in the background saying "Now will the real Catholic Church stand up!", as Pope Benedict’s face, humbly and serenely smiling, filled the screen.
Pope Benedict’s basic message, a message of "the real Catholic Church," is a message of hope, a hope based on Christ’s promise that ‘The truth will make you free" (John 8:32), the truth, that is to say, taught by Christ and transmitted by His Church under the everlasting guidance of the Holy Spirit, an eternal and unchanging truth that reflects the unchanging nature of God and the unchanging nature of man. [authentic "liberation theology"] This is the truth that "progressive" Catholics have sought to "revise," particularly as it governs sexual behavior. When Humanae Vitae (the encyclical letter Pope Paul the Sixth signed on July 25, 1968 ) reasserted the age-old teaching of the Catholic Church that the use of the sexual power is restricted to the union of husband and wife in the life-long commitment of marriage and that the procreative potential of the sexual power can never be actively obstructed, a gang of rebel priests publicly rejected this papal teaching, led by such intellectual mediocrities (though widely applauded demagogues) as Father Charles Curran, a professor of moral theology at Catholic University whose shabby thinking , a perfect match for his sloppy prose, is on display forever in his book entitled Absolutes in Moral Theology? Joining Father Curran Father Richard McBrien, whose two-volume work entitled Catholicism was quite properly censured by America’s Catholic bishops for its multitude of errors. The errors referenced by America’s bishops for correction have survived, uncorrected, in the work’s subsequent editions.
Such priests as could claim for their false teaching the prestige of an academic chair were soon seconded by a bold chorus of parish and religious order priests, who moved perhaps by a desire to be compassionate, though in this case such compassion would be a compassion falsely defined, swiftly set up a counter-magisterium to their own liking – one is reminded of Aaron’s revolt against Moses – according to which the practice of contraception was enthusiastically praised as the "responsible" choice. Once this initial repudiation of a single teaching of Christ’s Church had gained widespread acceptance, abetted by legions of priests who with a spectacular lack of courage in defending the truth began to counsel their parishioners privately to judge the matter for themselves, rather than to rely on the voice of the Holy Spirit speaking within Christ’s Church, very predictably the rest of the precepts governing sexual morality were successively allowed to fall one-by-one into oblivion. Soon what used to be called (and is still rightly considered to be) "living in sin", that is to say cohabitation without life-long commitment, came to be regarded by many as an acceptable practice. And once the separation of the sexual power from its procreative purpose was taken for granted, approval of sterilization and homosexual lifestyles soon inevitably followed. Finally – again in the name of compassion – approval of abortion began, timidly at first and then with gathering speed, to find support among Catholics, Catholics, that is to say, who are disposed still to identify themselves as Catholic but for whom the voice of St. Peter’s successors, charged with obeying Christ’s mandate to "establish the brethren", has come to count for very little. The coup de grace for a united Catholic front against abortion came with the assurances given to Catholic politicians by Jesuit Father Robert Drinan, for ten years, though without the required ecclesiastical permission, a representative in Congress from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, who taught that one may cast a vote to promote abortion with a clear conscience, as long as one is "personally opposed" to abortion; one cannot you see, impose his own religious scruples on the public domain. In the interests of accepting so sophistical an excuse for mass murder a blind eye has to be turned to the basic truth that a directly intended attack on innocent human life violates the natural law, the law that governs all of mankind, whatever one’s religious convictions, the law that is "written on the hearts of men" (Romans 2:15), the law that expresses itself in the spontaneous judgment that certain acts are so disordered as to be always and everywhere evil. Therefore to act in response to that spontaneous, moral judgment is not to impose the peculiar precepts of a particular religion or a culture; particular culture; it is to bow to the dictates of a universal law rooted in the very nature of man. Whether one is Roman Catholic or Buddhist or a card-carrying atheist, the directly willed murder of the innocent is something human beings instinctively recoil from, since it fundamentally violates the dignity of man and, by depriving him of life, deprives him of all other rights.
In his First Letter to Timothy St. Paul refers to a certain Hymenacus and Alexander, two Christians about whom we otherwise know nothing, who "by rejecting conscience … have made shipwreck of their faith." (1 Timothy 1:19). In that same first chapter of 1 Timothy St. Paul gives examples of the kinds of sinners whose sins will cause them to suffer shipwreck in the faith: "manslayers, immoral persons, sodomites, kidnappers, liars, perjurers, and whatsoever else is contrary to sound doctrine." (1 Timothy 1:10). In effect St. Paul is telling us that if we fail to shape our behavior in accord with our faith, we will very soon shape our faith to accord with our behavior. That formula fits the so-called "progressive" Catholic quite well. As St. John tells us in his Second Letter: "Anyone who goes ahead and does not abide in the doctrine of Christ does not have God; he who abides in the doctrine has both the Father and the Son" (2 John :9). There is a kind of "progress" that means turning our backs on God.
Pope Benedict has come to our shores to rescue those who have suffered shipwreck in the faith, or at least to rescue those who are willing to accept the terms that will permit such rescue. Such terms of rescue call fundamentally for a return to the "sound doctrines of which St. Paul speaks, the doctrine protected and proclaimed in Christ’s Church ("the pillar and bulwark of the truth"-1 Timothy 3:15) by the Holy Spirit against the devil’s ceaseless attempts to subvert that doctrine. As Pope Benedict announced, "A people of hope is a people willing to make a change," a people willing to make whatever changes in their lives may be needed to bring them into harmony with Christ’s truth. Whatever may have been the previous course of their lives, if they are willing now, under the grace of God, to change course and and to take Christ’s teachings as the only true compass, they can find their way home to safe haven through "all of life’s tempestuous seas." That is his message to us.
Pope Benedict invites each one of us to examine his conscience and to make whatever changes in our lives need to be made. Let us pray that we will do so, and let us pray for those in whose confused and sin-darkened minds the voice of Peter, speaking through Benedict, has perhaps stirred some awareness that through an obedient return to sound doctrine a new way of life can open up, a new way of life that offers hope.
That, my friends, is how it is done.
WDTPRS solemn high kudos to the great Fr. W!
“Everyone needs thirty minutes of personal prayer time each day, unless they are too busy to pray—in which case, they need an hour!”
Saint Francis de Sales |
Edited by - GScheid on May 05 2008 09:31:59 AM |
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GScheid
Mary's Servant
USA
406 Posts |
Posted - May 05 2008 : 09:39:57 AM
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quote:
Originally posted by GScheid
The New Pentecost!
["New Pentecost... New Pentecost...."]
The Vatican might've already marked Ascension, but the Pope took the pastoral tack this morning and meditated on it at the noontime Regina Caeli... which today brought him down into the Square as it took on the feel of an "open-air cenacle":
He then urged all to mission in society:
"In a missionary Church, placed before an educational emergency like the one found in Italy today, you who love and serve it should be tireless announcers and prepared, generous educators; in a Church called to trials of faithfulness that are sometimes very demanding, and tempted to adaptation, you must be courageous and prophetic witnesses of the radical nature of the Gospel; in a Church that faces the relativistic, hedonistic, and consumerist mentality on a daily basis, you must be able to make more room for rationality under the banner of a faith that is the friend of intelligence, both in the area of popular mass culture, and in that of more elaborate and reflective research; in a Church that calls [you] to the heroism of sanctity, respond without fear, always trusting in the mercy of God".
http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com/
“Everyone needs thirty minutes of personal prayer time each day, unless they are too busy to pray—in which case, they need an hour!”
Saint Francis de Sales |
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Antonio A
Maryhead
825 Posts |
Posted - May 06 2008 : 10:51:29 PM
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Hi JohnF,
"I'm in my 50s. In Los Angeles when I attended RCIA, we held hands in a circle, standing in the dark, gazing at a candle in the center of the circle, and "allowed the spirit to flow" from one person to the next for 20 minutes."
Well the same spirit continues to "flow" here in Los Angeles but I don't believe it is the Holy Spirit doing the flowing!
It was pure occultism.
And absolute non-sense!
They taught nothing about the Blessed Mother, except to warn us against Marian superstition.
All the while they were probably ignoring Mary with all their hearts, the hypocrites!
It was a horrible experience.
I know, and 2 years ago I stopped going to my parish because I could not handle the non-sense anymore. Now I go to Mass an hour away where the liturgy is serious business and on the 4th Sunday of the month, I go to the Extraordinary form of the Latin Rite.
Antonio, everything you say is true.
Thank you. If you experience what I have been going through since 1985 when this man was elevated to be Archbishop of Los Angeles, then you understand why my words go beyond whining and cynicism. Hey, but who says I'm bitter!
Antonio A. Obregón |
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