Voris Obliterates AmChurch, and Challenges those Blase’ Souls that Sustain It

Amchurch, Novus Ordo land, the Great Facade………..whatever one wants to call it, Michael Voris obliterates it in the video below (h/t to reader Dismas).

Sort of……..frankly, he doesn’t go far enough.  For Bernadin and McCarrick, Dearden and Hallinan, Hunthausen and Mahony, didn’t fall out of the sky and land in their cathedras.  They were chosen and assigned, by popes dating back to Pius XII in some cases.  These are the popes Monsignor Joseph Clifford Fenton, regarded by several traditonal priests as the greatest theologian this country has ever produced, described as the popes between Saint Pius X and Paul VI as “weak and liberal……..who have flooded the hierarchy with unworthy and stupid men.”  That is to say, Voris identifies two key sources of the crisis in the Church, so far as the United States is concerned, but as always fails to follow the line to its inevitable conclusion.  Fenton was not sede vacantist in the slightest, and the quoted words were private comments pulled from his personal diary after his death, but nevertheless he was openly critical of the papalotry of his time and would be even more so today.  This is where Church Militant continually fails.

It’s a very rough line to draw.  If I had their reach and audience, I, too, would be very careful in how far I went in describing the crisis in the Church and its source, but it rings a little hollow to absolutely excoriate the hierarchy in the United States and say not a word about those in Rome who have selected, empowered, and backed up that hierarchy in all its error and destruction not only in the United States but around the world.

And, of course, today we see the apotheosis – or at least it’s apotheosis thus far, his successor may be far worse, God forbid – of this trend in the dictator pope Francis.

Nevertheless, these reminders of the corruption at the heart of the Novus Ordo establishment are healthy and helpful.  I would love to know how Voris’ video is received by any souls long used to the Novus Ordo church, who believe it to be the normative mode of Catholicism – indeed, for millions, it is the only form they have ever known.  But I am skeptical that many converts will be made by this video.  Perhaps there will be some, and God bless them if they see the light and Michael Voris for all his hard work. But I have found that very few souls happily ensconced in low-demand, happy-clappy, kindergarten-class Novus Ordo land very open to serious critiques of what they know.  Some of the very hardest to reach are the older souls who remember the pre-Vatican II Church, and dutifully followed their mother down this wide path to destruction so many years ago.  Souls who were devout enough to remain faithful even as the Church turned against her very core, her very nature, have a very, very hard time admitting, in the twilight of their life, that any reseverations they had decades ago were well placed, and that the experiment in aggiornamento has been a complete and total failure.  Of course, some of these folks went along quite wilingly, in the spirit of that tragic decade, thinking they really were good and great enough to “sing a new church into being,” to summon a “new pentecost,” one even greater than the first.

Nevertheless, watching this caused me to reflect on that occasional good news that comes out of the Novus Ordo environment, of priests offering Mass in Latin or more Confession, or good assignments made.  I like to think these are positive developments, but if they keep people from making the leap to the TLM and a real traditional Catholic community where the Faith is preached and, to the degree it can be in this sewer of a culture, lived, then they may actually be counterproductive.  It’s possible my own experience, where all these things – more Confession (which I sorely needed and need), more authentic forms of the Liturgy, increasingly solid catechesis from priests as we moved from the “large suburban parish” to the very conservative oddball Novus Ordo parish on the outskirts of the Diocese – pushed me and mine inexorably towards a traditional Latin Mass community.  But that may not be everyone’s experience.  At the same time, I do not feel comfortable criticizing those who are trying, by their own lights, to improve the situation in their parish, and seeing occasional positive moves in that direction.

Another thing Church Militant misses, today – they didn’t used to, at one time they were very much going in the direction of publicly excoriating the ambiguous, deliberately murky, and even blatantly erroneous aspects of Vatican II – is just that.  They don’t get to the root errors that caused Vatican II to happen.  Not at the level of, like Archbishop Lefebvre, accusing the Council.  I’ve been trying to screw up the courage to do a long podcast review of two books, John Courtney Murray, Time/Life, and the American Proposition by David Wemhoff, with a strong whiff of E. Michael Jones about it, and Desire and Deception by Charles Coulombe.  I’ll have to do it as a podcast, otherwise it’d be a 5000 word post I’d never get out.  Both books dwell on possibly the key aspect of the Faith, the practical rejection of which led inevitably to the crisis in the Church today – Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus – but one I think is a rather poor and even often misleading effort, and the other is much more spot on.  It’s a subject I’d really like to do proper justice to, so I pray I can finally get around to making a recording and posting it.