← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Buster
Thread ID: 7925 | Posts: 14 | Started: 2003-07-06
2003-07-06 22:15 | User Profile
[url=http://www.catholictradition.org/cfn-apr03.htm#PAPAL%20KISS]http://www.catholictradition.org/cfn-apr03...tm#PAPAL%20KISS[/url]
The Papal Kiss On The Great Facade by Joe Sobran
One of the most amazing symbolic acts in the history of the modern Catholic Church occurred on May 14, 1999, when Pope John Paul II, when receiving a delegation from Iraq, publicly kissed the Koran. It is hard to imagine how "ecumenical dialogue" can go further. This is not your father's Catholic Church.
The papal kiss seemed to me far less likely to bring Muslims into the Church than to drive Catholics out. Surely the Vicar of Christ was aware that the Koran has taught untold millions to deny Christ's Divinity and condemns believers in the Trinity to Hell. Personal charity to Muslims is one thing; honoring their holy book is another. For the Pope himself to do so, in this public manner, was not only without precedent, it was stunningly contrary to all Catholic precedent. As he himself also knew. No Pope before the Second Vatican Council could conceivably have done such a thing.
Since the Council, the Catholic Church has certainly entered a new and extremely troubled phase in its long history. Doctrines, liturgy, discipline, architecture, vocabulary, and demeanor have all changed profoundly. Mass attendance has plunged. So have vocations to the priesthood. Priests, nuns, and theologians [of those who remain within the Church at all, that is] openly defy the Vatican-----often appealing to the spirit of the Council itself. The laity routinely ignore Church teaching on contraception, one of the few things that haven't changed. [There is a widespread feeling that if so many other things can be discarded or disregarded, so can this.] Many Catholics no longer believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Shocking sexual scandals, implicating bishops [and forcing one Cardinal to resign his Archbishopric], now appall even Catholics inured to horrors. The Church has apologized to the world for everything short of damaging the ozone layer. And the Pope himself has publicly kissed the Koran.
All these things, in their various ways, are results of Vatican II. The debate rages over whether [and to what extent] they are direct results, or indirect and unintended consequences. Dissidents who appeal to the spirit of the Council often flout its letter. Some argue that the bad results are mere abuses of the Council's reforms. The trouble is that the ordinary Catholic-----encountering, say, altar girls or bizarre new liturgies-----can't always tell which results are reforms and which are abuses. In today's Church, anything can happen.
Is the Council to blame for the current turmoil in Catholicism? Yes, say two "traditionalist" Catholics, Christopher A. Ferrara and Thomas E. Woods Jr., in their book The Great Facade [just published by the Remnant Press in Wyoming, Minnesota]. They condemn "the regime of novelty" in the Church. They don't deny the authority of the Pope and the Church; on the contrary, they insist on the authority of the Pope and the validity of the Council. They are neither sedevacantists [who hold that St. Peter's chair is empty, that there has been no true Pope since 1958] nor schismatics; they agree that the Council left intact the central Catholic teachings, despite the strenuous efforts of liberals. But they nevertheless contend that the Council was an "unmitigated disaster".
One can argue that the Council changed only mere nonessentials. This in fact is the view of most orthodox Catholics. But Ferrara and Woods reply that there is nothing "mere" about such "nonessentials" as the old Latin [Tridentine] Mass. Replacing it with an entirely new liturgy has proved deeply unsettling; so have most of the conciliar reforms. The Council's adoption of such Sixties neologisms [or buzzwords] as "ecumenism" and "dialogue"-----never adequately defined, say the authors-----has caused general confusion as to the status of the Faith itself. Is this the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, or not?
It certainly doesn't act like it. When the Pope holds interfaith dialogue at the Vatican with Protestant and even female "bishops" [who, in traditional Catholic understanding, are mere laymen, lacking Sacramental Ordination], treating them as his peers, never mind what the formal doctrine says. The Church's new body language can only create doubt in the minds of believers. Nor have all the ecumenical powwows since the Council produced results in the way of reuniting the Churches; today they are further apart-----and further from Catholicism-----than ever.
Some Catholics are embarrassed when the Pope kisses the Koran, but the gesture springs from the ecumenical enthusiasm of the Council. It will hardly do to argue that the Pope doesn't understand the Council's true message. He is, after all, the Pope, and he participated in the Council himself. Who is better qualified to understand it than he?
Yes, an argument can be made that the "essentials" of the Faith haven't changed; but it's an increasingly strained argument. The authors call this position "neo-Catholic," impugning neither the orthodoxy nor the piety of those who hold it. The position, unfortunately, requires that the Pope be defended at every turn, that even his casual and personal utterances be treated as authoritative [if not virtually infallible] declarations, that every racking change in the Church, so long as it is properly authorized, be regarded as part of Catholic tradition.
If liturgical forms are so inessential, the authors ask, why not dispense with them altogether? The priest could simply consecrate the bread and wine, pass them out, and send everyone home. Obviously the Church has always attached great gravity to the rites, through which most Catholics have their most intimate contact with God on this earth. It is vital that the rites feel holy, and it is very hard for any novelty to seem holy.
Yet the Council's defenders, including the Pope himself, have had to keep repeating that it did not represent "a rupture with the past". As the authors say, "It is remarkable that a Pope would even have to make such protestations about an ecumenical council." Never before has a council's continuity with Catholic Tradition been in question. Avery Cardinal Dulles has even tried to show that the Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom is compatible with Pius IX'sSyllabus of Errors.
The neo-Catholic is, or tries to be, by his lights, an obedient son of the Church, and he wants to believe that the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit at every step. But according to Catholic teaching itself, God protects the Church from error, not necessarily from imprudence or outright folly. The authors contend that Vatican II committed no substantive errors, but much folly. And it urgently needs to be corrected.
With many citations, the authors show that many earlier Popes have condemned many of the very things the post-conciliar Church has adopted. In particular, those Popes condemned liturgical innovations and ecumenical "dialogue" with heretics and unbelievers. They were suspicious of innovation in general. "Far, far from our priests be the love of novelty!" said Pope St. Pius X. But a liturgy formed by centuries of gradual change was abruptly traded in for a new model, and further local innovations have proved impossible to stop. As the authors remark, any Pope before 1960 would be utterly horrified by the Mass as celebrated today.
Of all the changes, the one that disturbs me most-----it still shocks and horrifies me-----is the change in the mode of distributing Communion. The old altar rail at which we knelt in awe and humility has been torn out. Instead, the communicants stand, taking the Body of Christ in their hands almost as if it were a snack. To me this will always seem sacrilegious.
And real sacrilege is common. At an outdoor papal Mass in Des Moines, one witness recalls that Hosts were passed through the crowd in cardboard boxes: "A group of Hell's Angels helped themselves to Holy Communion. I saw them washing down the Body of Christ with cans of beer." And this was a papal Mass. But discipline is not altogether defunct: the post-Conciliar Church has cracked down hard on the traditionalists who want to restore the Tridentine Mass, while even the most extreme liberals haven't suffered excommunication. Many bishops are openly hostile to the old Latin Mass.
John Paul II has hailed the recent reorientation of the Church as "an utterly new way, quite unknown previously, thanks to the Second Vatican Council". But is it really desirable for the Church to embrace the "utterly new"? These words have never been a recommendation to Catholics before. Even such important doctrines as the Immaculate Conception, papal infallibility, and the Assumption, were in the air for centuries before they were made binding dogmas.
As John Henry Newman wrote, one sign of a genuine development, as opposed to a corruption, is that it emerges gradually and naturally from all that has gone before. It can't be entirely unexpected, or "utterly new". The difference between a development and a corruption is roughly the difference between growing a beard and growing a tumor.
But Vatican II took everyone by surprise. Liberals, heretics, and outright enemies of the Church were delighted, even though they had hoped for even more radical change. In Why I Am a Catholic [published by Houghton Mifflin], Garry Wills writes scathingly of the Church throughout history; he urges the abolition of the priesthood and denies transubstantiation in the Mass; but he has only praise for Vatican II-----and its results.
Liberal enthusiasm for the Council, even more than the [too few!] conservative qualms, should have been a warning. Looking back, it seems obvious-----to me, at least-----that the Council was conceived and conducted in the heady optimism of the early Sixties. This mood affected, or infected, even the Church's hierarchy. The reforms came without the caveats and restraints that, as we see now only too well, should have accompanied them if they were to be adopted at all. Does anyone still believe in the ecumenical movement that was one of the Council's great hopes? Like the Great Society, it now seems an old dream from which we have sadly awakened, amid much ruin. The Pope and other Catholic spokesmen still struggle to explain that the work of the Council was good, despite the wreckage of "reform". If all that wreckage was due to "abuses," then at least very strong precautions should have been taken against abuse. The Council should have warned us most sternly that misapplications of its reforms might produce such evil that it would have been better if the Council had never been convened at all: massive defections from the Church, weakened faith, immorality, sacrilege, confusion, and, above all, the damnation of countless souls.
And as soon as these results began to appear, the Church should have moved, with all its might and energy, to counteract them immediately-----even if that meant reversing the Council's reforms. Yet there were no such precautions, warnings, or counteractions. Apart from a few papal encyclicals, the Church's hierarchy have acted oblivious to the confusion within the Church and to the sexual revolution in the entire Western world. This isn't merely a Catholic concern. With the decline of the Catholic Church, the West as a whole has lost its moral center of gravity. There is no longer a huge, adamantine conservative institution to exert the restraining influence the Church once did. Before the Council, nobody in American public life dared to advocate abortion, and even in private life people were ashamed of fornication and contraception. Since the Council, madly centrifugal forces have prevailed everywhere. No wonder many people feel that Satan is at the wheel.
Even the verbal style of official Church pronouncements has changed. The pre-Conciliar Church spoke in the language of Aquinas, definite and defining; the post-Conciliar Church speaks in a Hegelian idiom of flux, in which nothing is yet complete, no tradition is fixed, and nobody is quite a pagan or heretic. Not only are the Council's own statements often ambiguous; they have created confusion about the status of the Church's older teachings, with which they sit uneasily. Many Catholics have the impression that those old teachings have been superseded-----or that they may be discarded in the future. Nothing could be more unsettling to Catholics' faith than this uncertainty about the permanence of all Church teaching.
The Council's own teachings, insofar as they are new, are rather ambiguous, and Catholics no doubt may safely ignore most of them. But conservative Catholics are loath to do so, while liberals enthusiastically embrace the Council, even as they reject or minimize earlier teachings. Never has such confusion reigned in the Catholic Church.
A few years ago, in San Francisco, I was struck by an arresting yet fittingly symbolic contrast. I passed the new Catholic cathedral, an ugly monstrosity of modern architecture, with no hint of piety or holiness about it. Down the street was a small Unitarian church-----a humble stone building in the quaint Protestant style, but at least it looked like a place where someone might pray. The Unitarian joint was trying to pass for a church, while the Catholic joint was trying not to. How perfect. John Paul II, now sadly aging and frail, will be remembered as one of the towering figures of the 20th Century. His is a powerful, magnetic, inspiring personality. His life has spanned Nazi and Communist tyranny in his native Poland, the Second Vatican Council, upheaval in the Church, and of course a unique-----one might almost say utterly new-----papacy. His elevation to the Chair of Peter in 1978 brought to conservative Catholics the kind of rapturous hope the Council brought to liberals. They hoped and expected that he would end the post-Conciliar abuses, excesses, and scandals in the Church and restore the magnificent dignity and order of traditional Catholicism.
But it hasn't happened. During his long and exciting papacy, the state of the Church has only gotten worse. Since 1965, when the Council ended, faithful Catholics have become inured to horrors: With each new scandal their reaction is "Oh no-----what next?" For Catholics this has practically become a way of life. As I write these words, Cardinal Law has been forced to resign as Archbishop of Boston because of the still-unfolding homosexual and pedophile scandals. Does John Paul himself bear any responsibility for his derelict and corrupt bishops? The question has become unavoidable.
The Pope's defenders speak as if it were unthinkable to blame the Pope at all, even after a reign of nearly a quarter of a century. His authorized biographer, George Weigel, predicts that he will be remembered as John Paul the Great. This is an understandable tribute to a man whose combined courage and charm inspire respect, affection, and even adulation around the world. But is the title really deserved?
With all due respect to the Holy Father, I think not. I can only see his papacy as a great tragedy. Like many tragic figures, the Pope has meant well. But his reigning passion has been to salvage the work of the disastrous Council in which he played an important role. He has tried, by the sheer force of his personal charisma, to reconcile the ancient Faith with the Council's novelties-----especially liturgical "reform" and "ecumenical dialogue," both of which have proved worse than fruitless. The new liturgy has weakened, not strengthened, the faith of ordinary Catholics; efforts at reconciliation with unbelievers have produced only momentary goodwill, followed by outrage and new demands for capitulation.
Particularly incongruous have been the Pope's apologies for the Church's historic conduct toward Protestants, Jews, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and even Muslims. Can even a Pope "repent" for other people's putative sins? Doesn't such "repentance" amount to an accusation against his predecessors, who can't defend themselves from the grave? Is this not presumptuous and unseemly? And, most important, doesn't it clearly have the effect of convincing the Church's enemies and detractors that they have been right all along-----even if they give this Pope "credit" for admitting it? What other effect could it have? Has John Paul really thought he was converting souls by this approach? It has certainly never been the approach of any previous Pope; perhaps for good and obvious reason. Yet this Pope clings stubbornly to the ecumenical optimism of the Sixties.
This ecumenism has gone to bizarre and appalling lengths with respect to the Chinese puppet Church, the openly schismatic Catholic Patriotic Association, founded under Mao Zedong in 1957 and vigorously condemned by Pius XII, who called its illicit consecration of bishops "criminal and sacrilegious". This pseudo-Catholic body expressly disavows loyalty to Rome and supports the State's policy of forcing women to undergo abortions. Meanwhile, Catholics loyal to Rome have been fiercely persecuted and forced underground.
And Rome's response? Since the Council it has courted the State "Church," seeking "rapprochement"! It professes vague concern for the persecuted Catholics, while treating the Communist puppets as true Catholics too. This ecumenical spirit has not been reciprocated. When the Pope canonized 120 Chinese Martyrs in the year 2000; the Patriotic "bishops" angrily denounced him.
Loyal Catholics who want to believe that the Pope can do no wrong should observe that this Pope has told the world that his predecessors have done many great wrongs. And if that is true of previous Popes, it may also be true of this one. In spite of his own piety and good intentions, shared, perhaps, with those previous Popes, he may be inflicting grave objective harm, both on the Church and on the world she is ordered to convert. Nothing in Catholic doctrine forbids Catholics to make such a judgment, though they should of course do so only with hesitation, respect, and charity. In principle, we can all sin and err-----even priests, bishops, and Popes. And we have recently had plenty of reminders that this is more than an abstract possibility.
But what about the Second Vatican Council? Should it simply be discarded? Ferrara and Woods argue that it should. They point to another disastrous council-----the Second Council of Constantinople in 553. Called to reconcile Monophysites to the Church, it produced such muddled compromises that it merely aggravated the divisions that already existed. It promulgated no positive doctrine, and therefore no error, but it was quickly recognized as a blunder, and its decisions were allowed to lapse. The same could be done with Vatican II. Or might have been done; the question is whether the changes the Council wrought are so embedded by now that they are practically beyond reversal. The job might take more than a Pope; it might require a new council, for openers, followed by a long period of genuine reform and return to pre-Conciliar ways.
The authors also offer a hopeful sign which may serve as a model for the recovery of the Church. A traditionalist order of priests, the Society of St. John Vianney in Campos, Brazil, now works and thrives independently of the local bishop. It even has its own bishop. Though the order was formed without papal authorization, it has received the Pope's permission to carry on. Minor differences with Rome have been quietly reconciled. 1
The Pope's defenders, God bless them, remind me somewhat of those political conservatives who deplore the condition of the U.S. Government, while loyally exempting Ronald Reagan from any blame. Surely this is as unreasonable in the one case as in the other, though understandable in both. Reagan, unlike John Paul II, came to power without a burning hope of bettering the world; but he too had great personal and symbolic appeal to people who did remember, and hoped to restore, a better world. And in both cases their most ardent followers were left disappointed. But Reagan's failure lacked the grandeur of tragedy. In that respect, he too, differs from John Paul II.
Editor's Footnote: 1. It is still too early to ascertain whether this "reconciliation" will be beneficial or detrimental. There are many reasons to be wary. For example, Vatican theologian, Father George Cottier stated that he looks forward to the day when Society of Saint John Vianney members will "concelebrate" in the New Rite. (JV)
2003-07-07 01:07 | User Profile
But according to Catholic teaching itself, God protects the Church from error, not necessarily from imprudence or outright folly. The authors contend that Vatican II committed no substantive errors, but much folly.
I rate Joe Sobran very highly but this is arrant semantic nonsense. "No errors but much folly" isn't very much different from the secular curtseying around taboo words that politicians and journalists indulge in on a regular basis.
**Mass attendance has plunged. So have vocations to the priesthood. Priests, nuns, and theologians [of those who remain within the Church at all, that is] openly defy the Vatican-----often appealing to the spirit of the Council itself. The laity routinely ignore Church teaching on contraception, one of the few things that haven't changed. [There is a widespread feeling that if so many other things can be discarded or disregarded, so can this.] Many Catholics no longer believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Shocking sexual scandals, implicating bishops [and forcing one Cardinal to resign his Archbishopric], now appall even Catholics inured to horrors. The Church has apologized to the world for everything short of damaging the ozone layer. And the Pope himself has publicly kissed the Koran. **
But no errors! Never an error! After all, we're infallible.
Please. This is all okeydoke to me, but if I were a believer then what each of these 'follies' would represent is the Church failing its flock, setting terrible precedents and - worst of all - abandoning its only real purpose, the winning and saving of souls for Christ. The only thing that could further damage the Church is the overweening arrogance of insisting that no error has occured, "merely" follies. But if a Catholic cannot find belief in his or her Church....where is he supposed to seek it? In a mosque?
2003-07-07 02:27 | User Profile
The Church's problems go back just a bit further than Vatican II, although Sobran is very much on target when he emphasizes that VII changes in lituregy were wrongheaded. So bring the Latin back, but also consider that the centralization of power in the Vatican that has occured since the 16th Century has reach a high point, and needs to be turned back. Bishops need to be free to set their own liturgical practises.
Finally, I doubt very much that the Church will attract new adherents by re-emphasizing the 'evils' of aritifical birth control. (Although this tactic might breed quite a number of new Catholics in the 3rd world.) If anything, the Roman Catholic church ought to get rid of this particular 'conservative' tradition: it is so much deadwood & horrible luddite nonsense.
But that will be a while--in the mean, yes, more Latin please.
2003-07-07 05:42 | User Profile
Originally posted by il ragno@Jul 7 2003, 01:07 * ** > But according to Catholic teaching itself, God protects the Church from error, not necessarily from imprudence or outright folly. The authors contend that Vatican II committed no substantive errors, but much folly.*
I rate Joe Sobran very highly but this is arrant semantic nonsense. "No errors but much folly" isn't very much different from the secular curtseying around taboo words that politicians and journalists indulge in on a regular basis.
**Mass attendance has plunged. So have vocations to the priesthood. Priests, nuns, and theologians [of those who remain within the Church at all, that is] openly defy the Vatican-----often appealing to the spirit of the Council itself. The laity routinely ignore Church teaching on contraception, one of the few things that haven't changed. [There is a widespread feeling that if so many other things can be discarded or disregarded, so can this.] Many Catholics no longer believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Shocking sexual scandals, implicating bishops [and forcing one Cardinal to resign his Archbishopric], now appall even Catholics inured to horrors. The Church has apologized to the world for everything short of damaging the ozone layer. And the Pope himself has publicly kissed the Koran. **
But no errors! Never an error! After all, we're infallible.
Please. This is all okeydoke to me, but if I were a believer then what each of these 'follies' would represent is the Church failing its flock, setting terrible precedents and - worst of all - abandoning its only real purpose, the winning and saving of souls for Christ. The only thing that could further damage the Church is the overweening arrogance of insisting that no error has occured, "merely" follies. But if a Catholic cannot find belief in his or her Church....where is he supposed to seek it? In a mosque? **
I share your concerns.
Walter
2003-07-07 06:04 | User Profile
Amazingly, Christians in the Soviet Union retained more of their traditions than their counterparts in the "free world". The shortest path to Christianity regaining their spirituality and converts is returning to the old ways of intolerance, anti-semitism and nationalism. People join organizations that stand for something, and that have coherent teaching.
Denouncing judeo-"Christians" would be a good first step, and affirming that there is no way to salvation but through Jesus Christ and that Jews are going to hell would be a good second one. :gun: :gun: :gun:
2003-07-07 12:33 | User Profile
The next Jewish pope
Intellect and intimacy ... Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger. Photo: Simon Schluter
His mother was burned in the ovens of Auschwitz, yet he converted to Catholicism, rose to the zenith of power in the church, and could become its next leader. Jean-Marie Lustiger spoke with Paul Sheehan.
He started life as Aaron Lustiger. Now he is Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, prince of the Catholic Church, confidant of Pope John Paul II. As the Pope grows more and more frail, Cardinal Lustiger, the Archbishop of Paris, grows more crucial to the leadership of the church.
"When he says Mass at Notre Dame [Cathedral] the place is always crammed and when he walks through the crowd it is a sight to behold," says Professor Colin Nettelbeck, head of the school of languages at Melbourne University, who studied at the Sorbonne while Lustiger was a chaplain there.
As one of the world's most influential and charismatic intellectuals, he is giving lectures in Sydney and Melbourne this week. But if you want to see him speak and don't have a ticket, forget it. Both events sold out long ago.
The cardinal is not exactly intimidated by intellectual fashion. Having seen, first hand, the rise and crash of nazism, communism and Marxism, and now the rise of globalism and consumerism, he takes a long-term view: he does not think the church needs to enter into a popularity contest.
"I'm sorry Jesus Christ did not have a good public relations office because maybe he wouldn't have had the bad problem of being crucified," he told the Herald during an interview this weekend.
Of the current fixations with feminism and sexuality he says, "These are problems of society, not the church ... When you look at the issues around feminism, it's not going so good. When you look at the issues of sexuality, it's not going so good."
In the classic tradition of French intellectuals, he worries that "citizens are being turned into units of an all-pervasive consumption". He sees society drifting toward "new forms of conformism, of unfreedom".
"I think Dr Goebbels would be happy with some of the advertisers of today. He would think, 'If I'd had this agency I might still be in power'."
He sees the huge and failed social experiment of Marxism being replaced by something that is similar - the rise of powerful wealthy elites that control an increasingly unequal and unreflective society.
"This will be the weakness of democracy. Democracy needs citizens not consumers. When people are merely consumers of politics, they are more easily manipulated. And in our time conformism is stronger than in the past."
The paradox is obvious: the mantra of modern civilisation is personal freedom and expression but Lustiger sees the exact opposite actually taking place. "I'm afraid what we called the new civilisation, the shift to the new culture of image and immediacy, it's an illusion. Popular culture is lower today than it was at the beginning of the 20th century."
"From the 17th century, we have had the progressive ambition that everybody could be a partner in the culture of the elite. Now, I'm afraid about the culture of the people ... Children are educated now not to reflect but to be impulsive. They respond to images, sensations. They don't have a sense of history ... In all the rich countries, violence amongst teenagers is growing. It's terrible. You see it in the statistics; you hear it from educators. Why? Because there are not as many parents. Work. Divorce. Single parents. No fathers."
His Australian lectures will pose this question: is the human species behaving like locusts, clustering in giant cities that cover Earth in concrete and suck in enormous amounts of energy from the countryside? He talks of the impact of the "massive phenomenon of urbanisation" which has seen the percentage of world population living in cities grow from 30 per cent to almost 50 per cent in just 50 years. He believes most large cities "unleash murderous impulses".
Although serving as Archbishop of Paris and leader of the college of cardinals, he has the gift of intimacy. And it is in his role as a servant of the poor and the outsider that he will speak in Melbourne today and at NSW Parliament House on Wednesday night. The lectures will raise funds for Caritas Australia, the overseas aid and development agency of the Catholic Church which is currently dominated by a major commitment to East Timor.
Born in Paris in 1926, the son of Polish Jewish migrants, Aaron Lustiger celebrated his 13th birthday as war broke out. His father placed him in the care of a Catholic family and although he never sought to sever his Jewish roots (he remains a great supporter of Israel), in 1940, aged 14, he converted to Catholicism. Sixty years later, he remains one of the church's staunchest defenders.
He has become a living bridge over the river of bad blood, mischief and mistrust that has divided the relationship between Catholicism and Judaism for 2,000 years. Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and chronicler of the Holocaust, has written that when he thinks about the career of Jean-Marie Lustiger he thinks about the history of transgressions against Jews:
"I think of the tensions and conflicts that over centuries have marked the relations between our two religions: the hateful writings of the church fathers, the massacres during the Crusades, the Inquisition, the pogroms, the public humiliations. I think of the silences of [Pope] Pius XII; his intercessions with Third Reich authorities were restricted to converted Jews. Only those mattered to him."
Of Lustiger himself, Wiesel wrote in his memoir And The Sea Is Never Full: "His evident sincerity makes him seem vulnerable and profoundly disarming ... But he insists that having been born a Jew, he will die a Jew. I try to explain to him why this stand seems untenable to us; I cite laws and customs."
In the end Wiesel pronounces himself a friend of Lustiger, yet, so driven by his career-long documentation of anti-Semitism, Wiesel seems oblivious to the racism of his own argument. Anyone can convert to Judaism, but can a convert ever become a chief rabbi? Whereas anyone can become a Catholic and even an archbishop because it is a religion, not a tribe.
The young Aaron Lustiger, who witnessed first-hand the monstrosity of nazism, whose mother was burned in the ovens of Auschwitz, has given a very different personal perspective of Christian intervention during World War II:
"The Righteous remain hidden ... I do remember the ones who provided me with forged documents. I do remember those who helped me get across the demarcation line. I do remember those who warned me that I might be arrested soon. I do remember those who put me up without asking any questions. I do remember those whom I trusted and who never betrayed me."
What leaps out from Jean-Marie/Aaron Lustiger is not how Catholic or Jewish he is but how French. With a craggy Gallic jawline, he is a classic French intellectual, comfortable with abstraction, unafraid of profundity, given to elegant soliloquising.
His first pastoral role threw him unwittingly into the path of history, when he was sent to the University of Paris, the Sorbonne, as chaplain of the university parish in 1954. The next decade spent there , later as director of the Richelieu Centre, was the decade which saw the climax of the Algerian war of independence, the French defeat in Vietnam, the influx of American culture and the currents which would rise to a flood in the mass street demonstrations of Paris in 1968.
"You can't underestimate the importance of those 10 years he spent at the Sorbonne," says Professor Nettelbeck. While living in Paris he also saw how the then Father Lustiger rejuvenated the moribund parish of Sainte-Jeanne de Chantal in the 16th arrondissement, one of the wealthier and more complacent sections of Paris. "He would have all the priests come to Mass on Sunday and go out and greet everyone." From there he became Bishop of Orleans.
Could this man be the first Jewish pope in almost two millennia? He certainly sits in the first rank of the crimson aristocracy.
While he shuns the trappings of ranks, he has been received like royalty since he arrived on Thursday, grey with jet lag, and bereft of luggage (thanks to a major Australian airline which shall remain nameless). His schedule includes visits with current and former governors-general, premiers, religious leaders and business titans. Dick Pratt, the billionaire member of the Jewish community, put on a big bash for him in Melbourne.
Although the cardinal does not care for fashion, he is happy to change. The Catholic Church has never expended much energy on environmentalism, but Lustiger has converted to this, too.
"The Bible talks about man's power to subdue nature. But now we know we can destroy it. The problem seems very new. I remember the first time I heard about the ecology movement, which began in California in 1965, when I received some papers from Berkeley. I thought then that the Americans were a little crazy. But it turned out they were right."
[url=http://www.888webtoday.com/lustiger.html] Found Here[/url]
2003-07-07 15:40 | User Profile
Not a lot of time, so I will try to keep it breif.
Vatican II was not itself a mistake so much as the PR that followed it was a mistake. The Left hijacked the message of Vatican II and made it its own in many western countries. Part of the problem was that too many clerics in the church made the neo-scholastic constructs of traditional Catholicism the meat of the churches teaching instead of the Gospel. This was not something pronounced ExCathedra from Rome, but it grew like barnacles on a hull over time and had the weight of church doctrine in the minds of many people.
But there is nothing central to the Churches teaching about eating meat on Friday or not touching the Eucharist with your hand. Why is the tounge any more holy than the right hand? It is a symbol of respect that had grown over the years, but Vatican II clarified that it is not central to the Churches message. Good, the church needs to focus on its core message and less on periphreal matters that do not accomplish anything positive but get in the way.
While I usually agree with Mr Sobran on various issues, I think he has the Vatican II issue backward. Vatican II has spurred the growth of the church in the Third World as it freed the message of the Church from its Western trappings, and the growth of the church has been huge ever since.
As to your point , MadRussian, about standing for something, yes, Christianity must always stand for something, and that something should not be subordinated to the needs of the state or the nation. The churches message is God's Truth and we as a community, nation or state must embrace that Truth and grow from it by learning where we depart from God's Truth. If we instead retreat into resentment, hatred and searching for someone else to blame for our failures, then we will not grow, we will not learn and we will ever fail and deservedly so.
We can stand for something as a people too. And this something is likely something that other peoples would like to share, so why not share with them? We can hunt each other down in the forrest or help each other to clear it and plant crops. I think the latter is what built civilization. How about you?
2003-07-07 18:43 | User Profile
rglencheck,
you do realize that standing for something will be characterized as hatred, resentment and anti-semitism by the usual suspects, don't you? In fact, that's what the Jews have to say about the traditional Church and gentile society. It's all semantics games by culture-benders and you have to be ready to face the slurs and brush them off. If you know you are right, and you know it's good for your people, never pay attention to the screeching hateful zhids.
Yes, describing the traditional Church as intolerant and anti-semitic is tongue-in-cheek, but shouldn't whites be innoculated by now against the verbal war and not display knee-jerk reactions to the kosher krowd's denounciations?
2003-07-08 05:08 | User Profile
The Jews I have met do have a low regard for people that take strong moral positions that are contrary to their own, but then who doesn't? Homosexuality has long been tolerated among the Jews, so in industries with a heavy Jewish presence, homosexuals have long been tolerated. But this attitude is changing among regular middle class Jews, from what I can tell. The more religious Jews do tend to see homosexuals as more intrusive, rude and vulgar as well as immoral. If a Jew is not Reform, then it is likely that they consider homosexual behavior to be immoral as well, but not justifying violence, which I agree with. In short, the determining factor as to whether one accepts homosexuality as 'OK' and morally neutral is not if they are Jewish, but again if they are liberals. It is more ideological than ethnic.
As to the inoculation you speak of, whites are more inured to the wild charges of racism, sexism, etc, but have been so conditioned all their lives to be disgusted with overt expressions of such that they are repelled by overt displays of hatred, as they should be. But they cannot, the vast majority I know, open their minds to anyone who hates otehr groups. And there is a big difference between loving your own kind and respecting others, versus hating the others while loving your own. Is it not a bad idea to set fire to your neighbors house? Both your house and his may end up burning. If losing your own house in order to burn his makes sense to you, then you are losing your perspective on things.
The world is getting more dangerous each day. For Americans of all ethnicities and races, if they are proud Americans and willing to work with me, then I will work with them to protect our nation. This is common sense. Meantime, we roll up our sleeves, mind our manners, and fight for our rights in the current tribal system of national politics.
2003-07-08 12:21 | User Profile
*Originally posted by wintermute@Jul 8 2003, 05:45 * ** So, if a hypothetical "we" is going to stroll forth into an arena that is tribal, does this mean that there are parts of this nation that are not "us"? And if we are "fighting" for our rights, does this not mean "we" are in some sort of contest with . . . other tribes?
**
Very well put, Wintermute.
One of the key insights I gained from my (not terribly deep) reading of evolutionary psychology is that man evolved in tribes *in competition with other tribes. *
This means that OUR NATURES DICTATE that we define ourselves as much in terms of our kin as we do in terms of our enemies.
Both "friends" and "enemies" are essential to our sense of self - to our very identity.
That's why even if the PeeCee crew ever did suceed (shudder) into turning the human race into a dishwater miscegenated mass, then presently new groups would form and tribal competition and indeed warfare would start all over again. Evolution cannot be stopped, for it is a mighty tide and our highest thoughts are puny in comparison. Perhaps Evolution can be directed someday by our science, but it can never be ended in the sense that tribal conflict will stop. Indeed, Evolution will be guiding the innermost thoughts and motivations of the very scientists who would challenge her. World peace will always be beyond our grasp, and all attempts to control our own natures will only sharpen their existing razor edges. The best that we can hope for is to work within the "devine economy" of the "nations", as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, while understading that we will always have conflict, inequality, and the poor.
We may not particularly like that truth about ourselves, but truth it is and our personal feelings about it be damned. I don't know why that one was so hard for me to get, but it finally clicked for me after I read Sir Arther Kieth's "Evolution and Ethics." We're stuck with our evolved brains, rglencheek. In Christian terms, our natures are fallen, and this is the devil's world. We believe in something beyond the Natural Law in terms of our salvation. Our souls may belong to Jesus, but our asses belong to Nature, and we'd better get that one through our thick skulls or we'll go the way of the dinosaurs.
So, Wintermute is right on the money with this. We need to accept that the nature of the conflict is ethnic. We're at war with other tribes, who wisely hide their hostility behind lofty universalisms. The devil's greatest success is in convincing us that he doesn't exist, and so it is with our tribal enemies. They've convinced the great majority of Americans that there is no Jewish threat to them, to their children, to their genetic and cultural integrity. It's a lie, and we bought it.
We're all equal, except when it comes to white kids competing with blacks and browns for university admissions that white taxpayers purchased. We're all equal, except for white males who are the oppressors of the world. We all have the right to an ethnic identity, except for white Christians who need to realize that there is no such thing as a white and Christian identity.
Get it?
It all seemed pretty obvious once I got over the doublethink blinders years of television and "education" fitted me with.
That said, I would add that my brother Wintermute is of course wimping out here. He criticizes Christianity (making some dead-on points in the process), but then he studiously avoids discussing the practical pros and cons of his (presumably Pagan) alternative. He is a critic only - I've heard from him no constructive suggestions as to which ideology could serve as a unifying mythos for our movement better than Christianity.
We need something more than pointing out what's wrong with the other guy's plan, however legitimate that might be. We need positive alternatives, for the time is indeed running short.
Regards,
Walter
2003-07-08 15:42 | User Profile
No amount of sticking heads in the sand by whites will change the nature of other tribes who haven't gone insane yet. One can get blue in your face chanting dogmas, and all one will be doing in the process is committing a slow suicide, while the "enemies" will keep on going, not believing a bit in the egalitarian bullshite.
2003-07-09 03:01 | User Profile
"There has been a long prophetic tradition that the Antichrist would one day sit on the throne of St. Peter. Who can say? I think Mr. Lustinger has an interesting career ahead of him, one that bears careful scrutiny."
.....Have you considered that, in one sense, this prophetic utterance is already fulfilled? The antiChrist, (read: "jews"), already stands in the temple where he, (they), ought not; the Holy land is not so Holy today, but profaned... they first taught that Scripture was contradictory, and possibly wrong, then they replaced Our Father with mere, worthless men by way of their unGodly humanist "doctrine"; was but a hop, skip, and a jump to then capture the nation... so thorough today, that most have their heads turned completely to mush; of course, this was also prophesied, as the method by which the scorpion kills his victim...
2003-07-09 09:21 | User Profile
Thank you for your very thoughtful reply, which deserves more treatment than I can afford at present. I will respond in greater detail in future, the Good Lord willing.
The crux of our disagreement is, I think, this:
Paganism is not my alternative because I regard the idea of WN as having to be religiously unified as unworkable.
If I understand you correctly, you seem to be saying that the WN movement need not have a unifying religion or ideology to succeed. I believe that this is a fundamental error, because man must have a religion just as he must eat, breathe, and eliminate. He's designed for it. It's an embedded part of our "wetware" programming bequethed to us 3 million years of evolution. Any attempt to avoid the issue, on both the individual and group levels, is doomed to failure. We simply have no choice in the matter.
Man's religious instinct arose for the very same Darwinian reasons our other instincts arose. The individual man of faith is generally stronger than the man without faith, since he is not tormented by doubts, is inspired by the promise of great rewards in the World To Come, and thus enjoys a survival advantage over the man of weak faith. The suicide bombers of Hamas are, morally speaking, invincible, the Incredible Hulks of the moral universe. Since the tribe is the evolutionary unit of selection, any group made up of such men and women will have a distinct survival advantage over groups that don't. Israel rightly fears them, for they will never be defeated short of protecting their rights or killing them all off.
Indeed, I think it not much of a stretch to say that the crises we face as a people is one of self-doubt. We lost our faith in the One Church 500 years ago, and then over time we've lost faith in all the ersatz replacements that have arisen to take its place (for something will take it's place as I've said, Evolution dictates that it cannot be otherwise). We've ended by losing our very selves. Our enemies see this as our weakness, and they play on it, but I digress.
Thus, and this is the main point, if our movement is to succeed, it must have a shared vision backed by the religious madness that tells men that dying for the cause will win them eternal rewards. Our enemies have that, and that is the main reason that, IMHO, we've been getting our asses kicked since WWII at least.
NeoNietzsche and I agree, it would seem, on this point that a unifying religion is inescapable, and thus I totally support his harping on the question of who is to be the WN's god of war (although I'd obviously express the thought in different terms). Our brother Neo saw through to the bottom here; this is the only question that really counts, and hence our grudge match (which has been carried on with a reasonble degree of mutual respect, I might add).
You apparently believe that this is not the main question, and that our movement can succeed without a unifying religious vision, and for the reasons set forth above I respectfully disagree.
Those internal problems in Western Christianity are its literal and fanatically philoSemitic core. The churches of the East prove that this is not a necessary feature of Christian practice, therefore I recommend Christian WNs look into their local Orthodox denominations. **
I therefore recommend that all Protestant and Catholic members of this board, and in "the movement" generally, consider converting to one of the Orthodox churches. The primary spiritual distinction between the two branches of Christendom, East and West, in our time, is that the churches of the East have resisted Judah, while the Protestants and Holy See serve them.
I agree that Orthodoxy has been far more faithful to the Gospel of late than has the RCC as worldly institution, and has indeed as you say resisted the Pharisees far better than we, and I completely support all WN's to explore our Orthodox heritage in depth, as our own dear JPII instructs us. It may well be that the answer lies in moving back toward that very Traditional part of our heritage, so that the "Church can once again breathe with both lungs" as JPII put it. There is no disagreement here.
**Christ's mission in life was to break down tribal boundaries -- the fences which Nature had set up with such infinite ingenuity and patience. He sought to make mankind one tribe... [His followers] cannot succeed until they have smashed the machinery of evolution--the machinery which has made mankind what it is now.
--- Arthur Keith, Evolution and Ethics**
I disagree with Keith on this point. Yggdrasil had a good thing on this in one of his more recent musings. Just because I agree with Keith on his dissection of the human tribal instinct doesn't mean that I agree with him on all points. I think that Yggdrasil is correct that Keith was relying on his faulty understanding of traditional Christianity that he imbibed from the popular culture.
Indeed, the very Orthodoxy that you mention with its insistence on the rights of "nations" and national churches is in the teeth of your own analysis. The RCC also, at least in theory, is fully in line with the idea that nations are part of God's plan of salvation and that we in a sense are saved as Germans, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Irishmen and so forth. Our division into "nations" is of "cosmic" importance says the Catechism (Articles 56-58), and thus in theory I see not only no contradiction between man's tribal instinct and the Christian Faith, but rather see in Kieth's analysis a very strong Natural Law argument in support of Tradition and Magisterial teaching on the vital importance of mankind's division into distinct groups defined by the indicia of blood, culture and territorial sovereignty. The fact that God created us with a tribal instinct indicates His intention that we should live in Tribes, worship as Tribes, and come to Him as Tribes.
I will try to write more later.
And you are my brother, Wintermute. Like it or not, you're stuck with me! :sm:
Warmest regards,
Walter
2003-07-09 18:07 | User Profile
Originally posted by Walter Yannis@Jul 9 2003, 09:21 * > Paganism is not my alternative because I regard the idea of WN as having to be religiously unified as unworkable. If I understand you correctly, you seem to be saying that the WN movement need not have a unifying religion or ideology to succeed. I believe that this is a fundamental error, because man must have a religion just as he must eat, breathe, and eliminate. He's designed for it. It's an embedded part of our "wetware" programming bequethed to us 3 million years of evolution.*
This is a non-sequitur. It may be that a unified religion is necessary, but it isn't demonstrated by the fact that humans are wired for religion.
The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosophers as equally false; and by the magistrates as equally useful. - Edward Gibbon (He later qoes on to say that religions hostile to Rome were forbidden.)
Originally posted by Walter Yannis@Jul 9 2003, 09:21 * Since the tribe is the evolutionary unit of selection, any group made up of such men and women [muslims] will have a distinct survival advantage over groups that don't. Israel rightly fears them, for they will never be defeated short of protecting their rights or killing them all off.*
Surely the evolutionary unit of selection is the gene, not the tribe or even the individual. Genes that predispose against ethnocentrism and particularism might be maladaptive when tribal groups (of common descent) are competing with eachother, but that doesn't make a tribe the evolutionary unit of selection. If that was true, individuals would never trade the interests of their tribe for the benefit of their own status as individuals.
Having a unifying religion that serves your interests is all very well, but you've got to make one first. How is this to be done?