Monday, June 22, 2020

Why the Bishops Are Letting the Mobs Destroy Statues


In his latest video, about the destruction of statues of Bl. Junipero Serra in California at the hands of howling mobs of satanic tools, Taylor Marshall asks a good question: where are the bishops while all this is going on? Why aren’t they out there denouncing this destruction?  Why don’t they do something substantive about it?

What we are seeing now is the chickens of aggiornamento coming home to roost.  The point of aggiornamento was never to open the modern world up to the influence of the Church, but to open the Church up to the influence of the modern world.  And the defining characteristic of modernity is the rejection of God, and therefore the rejection also of man as a creature made in His image and likeness, possessing a high dignity that is worthy of respect.  What could possibly go wrong?

The modernist experiment has created churchmen who are not champions of Jesus Christ and His Church, but little men who occupy themselves with vain and worldly pursuits like global warming, women’s ordination and the accumulation of vast wealth, and leave the flocks to be picked over by the wolves.  Since modernism teaches us to place the city of man ahead of the City of God, it has left us, not only with men who have made themselves irrelevant, but also with men who are entirely in the tank for the Church’s secularist persecutors.  

When the Church is full of enemies and weaklings from within, she is defenseless against attacks from without.  We saw this graphically illustrated during the coronapanic, when Catholics all over the world were deprived of Mass and the Sacraments during the holiest time of the year, while secular pursuits were allowed to continue.  We are seeing it graphically illustrated now, when the enemies of Christian civilization are trying to overthrow governments here and abroad by force of violence.  We are seeing that the iconoclasm aimed at monuments to civic figures was never going to stop there, but ultimately has as its goal the destruction of the Catholic Church.  And we are seeing that decades of modernism within the Church has left the gates of the sheepfold wide open to the wolves.  

Of course we have bishops doing nothing about the wanton, demonically-driven destruction of monuments to saints!  Why should this come as a surprise, when, for decades, bishops have themselves been in the forefront of destruction of the Church and her treasures?  Who is it that has been bulldozing altars, tearing down statues and Communion rails, whitewashing frescoes and filling dumpsters with beautiful vestments and vessels and altar missals?  Who is it that has been building churches that look like warehouses and factories, instead of monuments to the supernatural?  Who is it that has supervised the wrecking of the liturgy, replacing Latin with street vernacular and chant with campfire ditties and Broadway show tunes, and turning the priest around to face the people as if he is doing a nightclub act?  Who is it that has failed to safeguard the flocks against bad teaching, until substantial numbers of Catholics contracept, divorce and remarry, shack up, accept same-sex “marriage” and disbelieve in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist?  Who is it that has been trying to filter traditional Catholic men out of seminaries?  None of this has been the work of Antifa or Black Lives Matter.  This has been the work of men within the Church.

After all this, should we really wonder why, when hordes of hooting barbarians pull down statues of one of the founding fathers of Catholicism in the United States, the local bishops are taking no action?  Why would they take action?

In modernism, we thought we were getting this shiny new ideology that would allow us to make our peace with the world and yet remain Catholic.  We thought that we were all grown up now and mature enough to have things our own way, and that having our own way was the path to true happiness.  We thought we could make our enemies love us by divesting ourselves of our spiritual weaponry and disregarding the “outdated” warnings of our forebears and presenting ourselves unarmed and vulnerable.  Now we are being allowed to learn, in the school of hard knocks, that “updating” the Church really only means making it easier and more convenient for our enemies to take us out.  We are having to learn from experience that the prince of this world is still a liar, and that his minions that hated the Founder of our Faith before us, still hate Him, and us.  We are having to learn that it is not the Church that needs to fall into line with the world, but the world that needs to fall in line with the Church.  And we are having to learn that the modernist ideology has neither help nor consolation to give us in times of crisis.

That, I humbly submit, is the answer to Taylor Marshall’s question.  And I humbly submit also that we need to begin to deserve to have God send us true shepherds.  Step one is to do as our Lady asked at Fatima over a hundred years ago, and start praying the Rosary every single day.  As Taylor Marshall is fond of saying, and he’s absolutely right: if you’re not praying the Rosary every day, you’re not on the team.

13 comments:

  1. It reminds me of my first return to the church. It was right after Vat II, which I didn't know about. The Mass, at the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona, was NO to the hilt and I sat there absolutely stunned. I also knew absolutely that there was something "bad wrong." I left and it took another 10 years (or more) before I returned again, but this time it was to SSPX. I also remember the entire congregation looking very confused also.

    It was a terrible thing they did. It also served to make my mother a liar. She taught us that one of the reasons for the Mass to be in Latin was because we could anywhere in the world and the Mass would be the same. Except she wasn't lying - they were.

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  2. You, my dear are a warrior. Shoot from the hip! I tend to be suspicious of every new priest that gets sent to our parish, wondering if he will defend the faith or undermine it. I so wish we had the FSSP close by. Alas, they are across the closed border and 2 hours away.

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  3. Adrienne, the deterioration has been very fast and very obvious. I think of an incident with my grandfather a few years ago, shortly before he died. After my grandmother died, and he married his second wife in the late ‘70s, he left the Catholic Church to join the Mormons. During one of my last visits to him, probably 2013 or 2014, I took him to Mass with me. Afterward he said he was glad to see that “you Catholics” have given up believing that the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Christ. I asked him what made him think that? Because, he said, lay people are allowed to drink from the chalice and handle the Host with their hands. In just those few decades, the Church had changed so much that my grandfather noticed it after his absence, and the changes sent him a very bad message.

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    1. Receiving Holy Communion in the hand and drinking the Previous Blood from the chalice are not moral evils. Think about what you are saying! He was a Mormon; you should love him and pray for his salvation but the opinion of a Mormon regarding the real presence or the state of the Church means less than nothing.

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    2. Did you read my whole comment? My grandfather had apostasized from the Catholic Church. The changes to the liturgy during his absence were enough to convince him that Catholics no longer believed what they professed to believe. The recent Pew study would seem to confirm that he was right.

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  4. Shirley, except for the second Sunday of the month, when a local parish has the TLM, I have taken refuge in the SSPX. I am weary of what Mother Angelica called “electric church”: every time you go, you get a shock. Since Catholics are allowed to fulfill their Sunday obligation at the SSPX, and there are no other options for a weekly TLM, I could not think of a good reason to stay away anymore.

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    1. The closest SSPX is Calgary - 5 hours away- or Vancouver, 8 hours away. Post Falls has the FSSP, they used to be in Coeur D'Alene but moved recently.

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    2. Yes, I would attend FSSP, but Post Falls is about 400 miles from me! Also, they had to shut down when the bishop suspended public Mass. The SSPX continued to offer public Mass until the governor’s stay-at-home order.

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  5. Thanks for your article. I can certainly see (and agree) with the fact that 'aggiornamento' mindsets can very easily lead to an excessive search for approval from the world -and with it a tendency to compromise with it as much as possible (Heck I even see it happen in my own life whenever I try to do just that).
    I must however add that, as Gregory of Nyssa states, the distinction between vice and virtue is just in the middle point between doing too little and doing too much. Nothing is harder than keeping the balance between extremes -and nothing is easier than going all the way to one side and ignoring any virtue or truth that may be in the opposite one. What I mean is that there is also a great (and grave) necessity for presenting the gospel to the world in a language that it can understand, which is able to connect with the kind of speech used and which is able to stir the people's hearts by showing how the Gospel is the answer to their longings (cfr. Paul VI's Ecclesiam Suam). This is what St. Paul himself did in the Greek Areopagus, as well as countless Fathers such as Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen -and ultimately Jerome (his letter to Magnus is a brilliant example) did when it came to bringing the Gospel to the secular world at large, deeply in need of conversion.

    As much as I agree with you that many of our current Bishops may have conformed too much to the world, I must also equally add that the rejection of any and everything in the Church after 1965 as outright 'modernism' seems at times to fall into the age-old temptation of a lethargy to engage with the effort to distinguish between what is good in it, and what is bad and definitely needs to change.
    May the wisdom of St. Thomas allow the Church to walk along this path.

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  6. Hector, there is a difference between preaching the Gospel in a way people will understand, and advocating the idea that the Church needs to change with the times in order to make the Gospel “relevant.” It is the times that need to change in order to conform to the Church, and therefore to Christ, not the other way around. Right now, the times stink. Materialism and atheism are the order of the day. These have nothing to offer to the Church or to mankind except misery.

    And the Gospel is always relevant: it came that way from its Author and has no need for us to give it any pizzazz.

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  7. I don't follow Dr Marshall but noticed this post. You read Mons Barron's response? [https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/article/why-what-are-the-bishops-doing-about-it-is-the-wrong-question/27757/] It is as if we are using two different but related languages: we talk pass each other, sadly. If he and they (the other bishops) are going to be satisfied with issuing memoranda in bureaucratese when there are crises I won't be defending the doors of the episcopal palaces when the vandals get there.

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  8. I guess all of us Byzantine Catholics are not on the "team." The rosary is not prayed by most of us. Everyone knows we don't love or venerate the Theotokos. I love sweeping, damning statements made by "uber" Catholics who know the mind of God and can read human hearts.

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