Did Communists Insert Sinners Into Seminaries?

This sermon is the clearest, most powerful explanation you will ever hear of evil in the world, of the corruption of the Church, and indeed, of the demonic forces which currently hold the Church captive at the highest level.

Ross Douthat: A Crisis of Conservative Catholicism

Ross Douthat delivers the 2015 Erasmus Lecture 

Let’s begin with a story. It’s one I’ve heard many times; it’s one I’ve told more than a few times myself. It’s a story about the Catholic Church in the second half of the twentieth century, and it goes something like this.

Once, fifty years ago, there was an ecumenical council of the Church. Its goal was to reorient Catholicism away from its nineteenth-century fortress mentality, to open a new dialogue with the modern world, to look more deeply into the Catholic past in order to prepare for the Catholic future, and to usher in an era of evangelization and renewal.

This was not intended to be a revolutionary council, and nothing in its deliberations, documents, and reforms was meant to rewrite doctrine or Protestantize the faith. But the council’s sessions coincided with an era of social upheaval and cultural revolution in the West, and the hoped-for renewal was hijacked, in many cases, by those for whom renewal meant an accommodation to the spirit of the 1960s, and the transformation of the Church along liberal Protestant lines.

Soon, two parties developed: One followed the actual documents of the council and urged the Church to maintain continuity with Catholic teaching and tradition, and the other was loyal to a “spirit of the council” that just happened to coincide with the cultural fashions that came in its wake.

The second party had its way in many Catholic institutions—seminaries and religious orders, Catholic universities and diocesan bureaucracies—for many years. The results were at best disappointing, at worst disastrous: collapsing Mass attendance, vanishing vocations, a swift erosion of Catholic identity everywhere you looked.

But fortunately for the Church, a pope was elected who belonged to the first party, who rejected the hermeneutic of rupture, who carried the true intentions of the council forward while proclaiming the ancient truths of Catholicism anew. And while a liberalized, accommodationist Catholicism failed to reproduce itself and began to (literally) die out, the Catholic witness of this pope and his successor inspired exactly the kind of renewal the council fathers had hoped for: a generation of bishops, priests, and laity prepared to witness to the fullness of Catholicism, the splendor of its truth.

And by the turn of the millennium, it was clear to anyone with eyes to see that this generation owned the Catholic future, that the liberal alternative had been tried and failed, and that the Church of the twenty-first century would embody a successful synthesis—conservative but modern, rooted in tradition but not traditionalist—of conciliar and pre-conciliar Catholicism, the Church of two thousand years of history and the Church of Vatican II.

The story I’ve just sketched is the master narrative of conservative Catholicism in the West. It’s the story that was waiting for me when I became a Catholic in the late 1990s, late in John Paul II’s pontificate but while he was still hale and firmly in command. It’s a story that seemed confirmed by developments outside the Church and outside the ­United States—the collapse of Mainline Protestantism and the emergence of a kind of “Catholic moment” in American politics and culture; the growth of Catholicism in Africa and the faith’s clear fade in northern Europe, the home territory of the hermeneutic of rupture; and more. And when Joseph ­Ratzinger succeeded John Paul as Benedict XVI, “spirit of Vatican II” Catholicism seemed all but defeated, the triumph of conservative Catholicism seemed all but ratified, and the story I’ve just told, all but confirmed as true.

But now it’s a story in crisis.

Read more at First Things >>

William Oddie: John Paul II Set the Barque Back on Course

Pope John Paul’s major achievement for the Church was to recover Pope John’s original purpose: to “guard” and to teach more efficaciously “the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine”

Those closest to Pope John Paul II regarded him as a truly great man (CNS)

From The Catholic Herald (UK)

Why is Pope John Paul to be canonised this Sunday, not alone but together with Pope John? There is a very good answer to this question: but it is not the one generally being touted by the liberal press, Catholic or secular. Here, for instance, is the often sensible John L Allen, writing in the National Catholic Reporter: “With the canonisations,” he writes, “Francis is speaking not just to the outside world but to rival camps within the Catholic fold who see John XXIII and John Paul II as their heroes – meaning liberals and conservatives, respectively. The message seems to be, ‘You both belong here’.”

The Holy Father Has Just Fervently Declared His Support for Benedict XVI’s Vision of the Church, and Has Issued a Clear Rejection of the So-Called ‘Spirit of Vatican II’

As attendance at Mass and the confessional ‘soars’, his pastoral strategy is looking clearer; who knows? The ‘Francis effect’ may even prove durable

An important letter, from Pope Francis to Archbishop Agostino Marchetto, has just been published. It includes the following: “With these lines I wish to be close to you and join myself to the act of presentation of the book ‘Primato pontificio ed episcopato. Dal primo millennio al Concilio ecumenico Vaticano II’ ['Pontifical primacy and epicopate: from the first millennium to the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council.' The book is a collection of essays, some by Archbishop Marchetto, in his honour]. I beg you to consider myself spiritually present [there]…

“You have made [your love for the Church] manifest in many ways… above all it is manifest in all your purity in the studies made on the Second Vatican Council. I once told you, dear Abp. Marchetto, and I wish to repeat it today, that I consider you to be the best interpreter [ermeneuta] of the Second Vatican Council.”

Read more at The Catholic Herald >>

Catholics Today Could See the Birth of a New Model of Church

The shedding of institutional structures and the diminishing number of priests could, in fact, be liberating 

By Fr. Alexander Lucie-Smith

The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council could not have foreseen how the Church would change (Photo: CNS)

It is 50 years since the Vatican Council began, and everyone, it seems, has had something to say on the anniversary; what strikes me, rather belatedly, reading the documents again, just how the world has changed since 1962, in a way that the Council Fathers could not possibly have foreseen.

Let me count the ways.

Springtime in Pottersville

“Even so at this present time also,there is a remnant saved according to the election of grace. “

Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans (11:5)

Church of St. Jude, Jersey City, New Jersey

From The Remnant

By Christopher Gawley

I recently found myself standing before an old Catholic church and school building in the middle of New York. The abandoned structures were fairly typical of scores of churches and schools financed by immigrant dimes and nickels in the northeastern United States during the latter half of the Nineteenth Century.

If I’d looked around a little more I probably would have been able to figure out which nearby building had once housed the convent in which the teaching nuns had lived. The impressive stone facade of the church, along with the red-brick school building, was obviously built to withstand the test of time. The immigrant Catholics who’d raised these towering steeples were certainly not rich. But they understood they were housing the Real Presence of our Lord, and thus sacrificed a great deal to make it happen.

Sadly, many of these Catholic complexes, built in urban neighborhoods, have long since been turned into apartments or community centers or simply shuttered. Those that remain open could be much needed oases of light in a desert of urban blight, but, alas, are locked most of the time, their campuses hauntingly silent.

I closed my eyes and imagined the energy and activity that once defined these places a hundred years ago: the children of immigrant Irish or Italians, dressed neatly in school uniforms, Baltimore Catechisms in hand, in the tow of young nuns in full habit or chasing after good-natured priests in cassocks. I can hear the children’s laughter and the bells ringing, and smell the incense lingering over the holy sacrifices offered daily. I can see and hear and feel the lives of my forefathers that once bustled in this now-dead place. These men actually made things in America. They used their hands and toiled for long hours, six days a week. Their wives made due with little, despite considerable hardship and suffering.

Fifty Years On: Time to Revisit and Reform the Second Vatican Catastrophe

Perhaps never in world history have so many denied a catastrophe so terrible and painfully obvious -- that the so called "reforms" of the Second Vatican Council wreaked havoc, division and destruction on the Church at the very time in history when assurance, unity and evangelism have been most needed. As has been true throughout its history, it was not the faith that needed reforming, but personal behavior, and that personal, interior renewal, within all her members, is an enduring need. To our view, Gerald Warner states the obvious. More importantly, it also appears to be the view of this great Pope.

From The Telegraph
By Gerald Warner

Benedict XVI grows in stature as his reign progresses. To the momentous achievement of the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, freeing the Tridentine Mass, he has now added the sagacious and just lifting of the excommunications imposed on the four bishops of the Society of St Pius X.

Although there was widespread scepticism about the validity of those censures, their lifting removes a roadblock to the restoration of the Church after the damage wrought by the Second Vatican Catastrophe. Not everyone is happy about the pardoning of the bishops. The staff of The Tablet are rumoured to be on suicide watch, while the malign spirit of those who, without any conscious irony, denominate themselves "liberals" was well illustrated by Gianni Gennari, an Italian journalist.

Gennari is a laicized priest, now married. Fighting back tears, he responded to news of the lifting of the excommunications: "It is a tragedy, the complete debacle of the Church!... I am disappointed, stunned, scandalised... In this case there is no place for the mercy of Christ"... Of course not. The Modernists have always excluded from any kind of mercy those faithful Catholics who adhere unreservedly to the Deposit of Faith. Anything that reduces the likes of Gennari to tears has to be good news.

Over the past few days, some blinkeredly optimistic souls have been trying - without much real hope - to persuade Catholics to "celebrate" the 50^th anniversary of the announcement of the Second Vatican Council. This was the great "renewal", when the Holy Ghost inspired the Church to aggiornamento, or modernisation. What form has that Renewal taken?

In England and Wales in 1964, at the end of the Council, there were 137,673 Catholic baptisms; in 2003 the figure was 56,180. In 1964 there were 45,592 Catholic marriages, in 2003 there were 11,013. Mass attendance has fallen by 40 per cent. In "Holy" Ireland, only 48 per cent of so-called Catholics go to Mass. In France, there were 35,000 priests in 1980; today there are fewer than 19,000. Renewal?

In the United States, in 1965, there were 1,575 priestly ordinations; in 2002 there were 450 - a 350 per cent decline. In 1965 there were 49,000 seminarians, in 2002 just 4,700. Today 15 per cent of US parishes are without priests. Only 25 per cent of America's nominal Catholics attend Mass. Worse still is the erosion of faith among those who ludicrously describe themselves as Catholics. Among US Catholics aged 18-44 (the children of Vatican II) as many as 70 per cent say they believe the Eucharist is merely a "symbolic reminder" of Christ.

To describe this unprecedented collapse of the Church as "renewal" is insane; to attribute it to the operation of the Holy Ghost is blasphemous. The Catholic Church is in the same position as an alcoholic: until it admits to the problem, no cure is possible. The problem is Vatican II.

Pope Benedict himself has expressed reservations about at least one Council document. The only remotely celebratory response to the Council's 50^th anniversary would be to appoint a commission of orthodox theologians to scrutinise all of Vatican II's documents and correct their errors. It is time to revisit and reform this council that has brought forth such poisonous fruits.