A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

The false gods in today’s Church November 1, 2013

Via Fr. Peter Carota, a very thought-provoking post on the idols in today’s Church. I add some emphasis and comments:

Throughout the Old Testament in the Bible, the constant sin, that God punished the Israelites for all the time, was worshiping and sacrificing to false gods.  This theme dominates the whole Old Testament.  [And that was somewhat the point of the sermon I posted on Tuesday.  That we as a Church are being chastised for how unfaithful we have collectively been.[

Since we are still the same human race and under the same propensity to sin (because of Adam and Eve’s sin and concupiscence), we need to see if we are falling into idolatry today as did God’s chosen race did before.

It all started with Descartes when he taught that to prove the existence of God, one needs to begin with the undeniable experience of one’s self.  Then you go from there to prove the rest from your subjective reality.  This put man in the center of the universe rather than God.  [And Cartesian philosophy was derived from protestant private interpretation/judgment]

The French Revolution soon followed and the humanist replace God with man.  The “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” proclaimed liberty, equality, the inviolability of property and the right to resist oppression.  Man became the judge over what is good and bad and left God out of the equation.  During the French Revolution, Robespierre placed a prostitute on the altar of the Cathedral of Notre Dame and called her the goddess of reason or liberty.

Since Vatican II, it seems that Catholics have tended to fall into the idolatry of self worship, where man puts all the emphasis on himself rather than God.  Before you get all excited, read and judge for yourself.  I do not think this was necessarily planned out that way, but you can see this tendency in how Catholics view the Sacred liturgy, the Bible, morals and themselves.  [Oh, I think to men like Congar, de Lubac, Rahner, and others, it was certainly planned out that way.  They were trying to execute a revolution in the Church.  There was pushback. Documents were released at an ecumenical council. Did they succeed?]

With the new mass said by the priest facing the people (even though it was not written that way), [that is to say, none of the documents of Vatican II stipulate Mass facing the people. But Bugnini’s Concilium, charged with implementing Sacrosanctum Concilium, and with Pope Paul VI’s direct support, produced regulations that gradually morphed over time into first permitting, then directing, Mass facing the people.]  the people have become more so the center of the mass, and God secondary.  With the Tridentine Mass where the priest and people face God, God is always adored and there is no danger of focusing on the people.  [I’m not sure there is NO danger, but it is miniscule in comparison]

Every Catholic has his own subjective taste as to what liturgy should be like or what kind of liturgy they like.  This is evident in every parish where there is a youth mass, quiet mass, organ mass, guitar mass, charismatic mass and Spanish mass.  Everyone goes to the mass they like.  And if they do not like a mass, they go somewhere where they find their kind of mass.  It is all self centered.  Does anyone ask God what kind of mass He wants?  [Now that, is a great question.  Is the Mass foremost for us, or for God?]

When I was young and traveled with my parents all over the world, Holy Mass was the same everywhere no matter what country or time of the day and always in the same language (Latin).  Masses were full of large families with children on Sunday all over the world.  Today with our self-adulation masses where everyone goes to the mass they like, we are losing more and more Catholics every day.  [And Catholics have even fewer children than the general population. The data strongly suggest Catholics are more worldly and more secularized than the general population, a far cry from even a few decades ago, when Catholics were still faithful and demonstrably different from the culture around them.]

I was very involved in Life Teen Masses before discovering that the Holy Mass was the Sacrifice of Jesus on Calvary.  I would hear the confessions of these youth and be amazed at how much sin dominated their lives.  I did not see conversions.  Yes, some converted, but most enjoyed the show and stayed the same afterward……..

…..It is not only in the area of liturgy where we can worship ourselves as gods.  As a priest all these years, I have experienced that most Catholics have their own personal belief in what is right and wrong.  When we decide what is right or wrong on our own, we have replace God and become gods.  So when every you decide you do not agree with the Bible or the Church’s teachings over the last 2000 years, you have made yourself god.

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That last bit is a good definition for what modernism did to the Church – the religion of man worshiping God became that of man worshiping himself as “god.”

Fr. Carota’s analysis certainly matches much of what I’ve read over the last year or two.  He seems to have hit the nail on the head.

It’s also an interesting rebuttal of other claims of “idolatry” we’ve heard of late from certain quarters.