A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Mind blowing June 7, 2011

An article at Catholic World Report looks at the rhetoric emanating from the ‘progressive’ side of the Catholic blogosphere (yes, both sites), and the results are simply stupefying.  I complain and am surely sufficiently prideful to probably place  my eternal soul in jeopardy (I pray not), but wow:

One NCR contributor, Jamie Manson, calls the denial of ordination to women “profound spiritual violence” and charges that the Church teaches that “women’s bodies defile the Eucharist,” and an NCR editor, Rick Heffern, charges that “pathology underlies the Vatican’s insistence that an all-male priesthood is necessary.”

A participant in the liberal liturgical blog Pray Tell referred to the more conservative New Liturgical Movement blog as “the bowel movement.” (Pray Tell’s moderator, the Benedictine Anthony Ruff, later fastidiously moderated this to “BM.”) Another Pray Tell blogger compared the bishops to Communist propagandists and said, “These guys have no compunction about telling outright lies,” while Ruff charged that “much deception and mischief” mark attempts at liturgical reform.

After John Paul II was shot, an Irish Jesuit, Cyril Barrett, was heard to “bellow” in a London restaurant, “The only thing wrong with that bloody Turk was that he couldn’t shoot straight,” a complaint that, when Barrett died, was fondly recalled as evidence of his “detestation of intellectual narrowness.”

In such an environment, the NCR, with no sense of irony, laments that a liberal bishop “suffered personal attacks and angry denunciations,” while another endured a “smear campaign by enemies inside and outside the Church.”

Conservative Catholics are frequently denounced as Pharisees. But in reality pharisaism underlies the attitudes of many of those who cry “Pharisee.” (An organization called Voice of the Faithful for a time actually promoted a “Pharisee Watch,” inviting people to nominate other Catholics as “modern-day Pharisees.”)

A retired teacher warns against the phrase “and with your spirit,” because it will “encourage ordinary Catholics to think that their religion is basically about saving souls” and “will once again lead the ordinary Catholic astray.” The writer does not consider himself a naïve “ordinary Catholic.” In his enlightenment he understands vastly more than such “ordinary Catholics” as, for example, Ignatius Loyola and Teresa of Avila, who naïvely thought their religion was about saving souls.

Another NCR reader recounts, “Recently I asked a friend why she is a Christian. Her immediate answer, without reflection, was ‘So I can go to heaven.’” The author thereupon gazed into the heart of his “friend,” discerned that she was “unthinking and in thrall to fear,” and proudly announced that, by contrast, “I am a member of Pax Christi.”

Sister Celine Goessl condemns the hierarchy as whitened sepulchers, in contrast to which “the people of God see the real truth as we [nuns] live our lives in fidelity to the Jesus of the Gospels.”

The Council spoke of “reading the signs of the times,” a task that is surely among the most difficult and treacherous imaginable, but only liberals are thought capable of doing this. The NCR says of a group called FutureChurch that “they see very far down the road” and “have the patience and good will to drag us along with them.”

The NCR sums up the recent history of the Church thus: “It has been an open secret that powerful forces in the Church’s leadership have strongly opposed the reforms set in motion by the Second Vatican Council and have worked quietly but assiduously during the past 40 years to roll back what has been accomplished. The regression is usually couched in Orwellian churchspeak, which lavishes praise on the Council even as its intentions are reversed.”

The fallacy of this account lies in the sleight-of-hand movement from the little phrase “set in motion” to the Council’s “intentions.” No one could even attempt to show that the collapse of religious life, the sexual revolution, and the “ordination” of women are what the Council intended. It explicitly condemned contraception, abortion, and divorce, and forbade anyone to make unauthorized changes in the liturgy. Yet liberals continually lament that “John XXIII is turning over in his grave,” as though his purpose in summoning the Council was to validate contraception, abortion, divorce, homosexuality, and women priests.

The feminist nun Theresa Kane states flatly that women’s ordination was “the vision of the council,” and the nun-theologian Sandra Schneiders claims that Vatican II called nuns to follow a  road that leads to “globalized postmodernity,” a term that was not even in use at the time of the Council and seems capable of meaning just about anything.

The liberal movement is disproportionately made up of elderly people who look back nostalgically to the 1960s, so that when one NCR reader spoke of the “old church,” she meant the period from about 1960 to the election of John Paul II in 1978, and another asked incredulously, “Since when has someone proclaimed the teachings of the church to be infallible?”

There is much, much more at the link.  Some may say, well, the writer cherry picked the worst examples, but as I think any faithful Catholic who has perused the comments at the Distorter or a number of other ‘progressive’ sites could tell you, these are not extreme examples.  One could retort that ‘conservative Catholics say equally ridiculous things,’ and I would agree to an extent, but I in the comments I read, and I read quite a few, such comments tend to be the exception, and not the rule. 

Is it ‘divisive’ to point this out?  Whence comes the division – those trying to adhere to the Faith and see it adhered to by others for the good of their immortal souls, or those who have a vision of the Church in the Anglican model, following the well trod path of liberal mainstream protestantism to irrelevance and death?

I pray constantly that I do God’s Will.  Sometimes I do not.  When I don’t, I confess those offenses against God, and some of those offenses come from what I write.  I have a great deal of intellectual and other baggage to discard……I know that some of my thinking is not well aligned with the Mind of the Church.  In those cases, I strive to change my beliefs.  Do these characters quoted above do the same?  I don’t know.  I pray they do.