Saturday, January 23, 2021

Biden is the Catholic President the modern Catholic Church deserves

Yep.  As the most prominent Catholic in the world aside from the Pope, his first days have been spent undoing most anything Trump did, including broadening the ability to abort pregnancies by the tens of millions in order to sustain our sex culture with a giant 'Catholics can do this and it's awesome' stamp.  

No, Catholics upset about this haven't been paying attention to our own Church.  This isn't Medieval or Renaissance problems with power hungry bishops and popes with concubines.  It's not where the basics are assumed by the masses, even if we have to watch out for the corrupt summoners.  

This is a point where a sizeable number of Church leaders, and a majority of Catholics in many parts of the world, simply no longer believe what the Church has taught for 2000 years. They don't believe in Christianity anymore.  Poll after poll finds that they don't believe the Eucharist is more than bread and wine.  They don't think the Trinity is anything but a Christian opinion about God (hence the easy ability to say things like 'Muslims worship the same God, no questions').  They don't believe in actual miracles, the Virgin Birth, or even the Resurrection. This doesn't count their complete support for the moral and social sins promoted by the secular world. 

In these things, when they speak of them at all, they sound more like agonistic and atheist skeptics than traditional Christians. Many just come out and say they don't believe it at all.  A friend of mine gave me a book on the Bible.  He wanted me to use it to do a lecture series at his parish.  Priest though he was, and rather conservative at that, I was stunned when I read through the text.  It was as 'critical scholarship' as any atheist ever proposed, rejecting almost everything except the Resurrection and the Virgin Birth.  The whole Old Testament was reduced to Peter Pan and Harry Potter.  He even accepted the rather recent development in skeptical scholarship that most of the New Testament was written centuries after the fact, the Church merely lied about their dates to buttress the idea of apostolic authorship.  And from what I could tell, the author himself wasn't some flaming leftist liberal type!

That's the Church today.  Everything it does - like most Mainline Protestants and a growing number of mainstream evangelicals - screams WE DON'T REALLY BELIEVE IT EITHER!  And the world is watching and the young are hearing loud and clear.  Oh they may appreciate the constant acquiescing to the modern nihilism and narcissism satiated only by meaningless sex and jaded hedonism.  But they also see that Christians running about with all those prayers on their lips don't believe it any more than they believe there was some big war in a galaxy far, far away.  

After all, if the distinction of the modern Church is how freely it will change its teachings to keep up with the latest Jonses, people begin to assume any other teachings not yet changed are nonetheless up for grabs.  And that might even include rethinking the very existence of a God.  Hence the gushing numbers of people abandoning the faith and and leaving it once and for all. 

13 comments:

  1. Dominus flevit!!!
    Which leads us to weep as well (at least it should!)

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    1. Yep. I think our capability of denial is what keeps us from weeping more than we do.

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  2. This reminds me of an abuse I have actually witnessed, in which a priest said, instead of "Look not on our sins but on the Faith of Your Church," "Look not on our sins but on our faith." I would not want to draw the attention of the Almighty to what is really our faithlessness.

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    1. I've seen similar things with the 'let's not sweat the little stuff, just let's be excellent to one another' approach.

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  3. As Abraham negotiated with God to save Lot and his family and those other inhabitants that were faithful, I wonder who will negotiate with God for those of left in this world who are faithful as Lot et al. before punishment falls upon the earth?

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    1. I don't think punishment WILL fall upon the earth -- if by that phrase you have in mind something overtly supernatural, like the Cecil B. DeMille version of the Exodus. It's more likely to be similar to the sack of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and again by Titus, or the English Civil War, or the French Revolution, or the Bolshevik Revolution. God usually works through intermediaries, and His punishments can usually be seen as the natural consequences of our sins. Gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit.

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    2. That's exactly what I'm thinking but in the order of Communism.

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    3. I've been thinking the same thing. What is coming is sort of what we deserve and it's going to thin the herds as things get rough.

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    4. Don't kid yourself. Stalin didn't mandate "gay marriage", and Brezhnev did not appoint "transgenders" to his staff. IF WE PERSIST in the direction we are now headed, we will not end up like the Soviet Union. We will end up as something worse. The good news is that such a system will not be able to survive long. "And whosoever shall fall on this stone, shall be broken: but on whomsoever it shall fall, it shall grind him to powder." Properly speaking, of course, the Stone is Christ, but the saying works for the Natural Law, too.

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  4. Even the worldly world senses a coming cataclysm. Note the many apocalyptic movies and books.

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    1. I think we've lived under the shadow of an apocalypse delivered by the one thing we thought would deliver us from all those old religious apocalypse beliefs (that is STEM), we no longer know where to go without thinking apocalypse.

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    2. I guess we had a good glimpse of the apocalypse in 1945. Most people today have never lived without the shadow of a mushroom cloud hanging over us.

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    3. Bear in mind that what the bomb did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, four legions did to Jerusalem in A.D. 70. The difference was the speed, not the totality of destruction.

      Regardless, most Americans no longer think about a nuclear apocalypse. Well, maybe in Hawaii they do, as a result of that false scare. We have been assured that America is the only superpower in the world and is invulnerable to external attack. In case you haven't noticed it, the American people will believe just about anything if it is fed to them by the media and the schools for long enough.

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