Today marks 25 years since Joseph Card. Ratzinger gave a famous address in Santiago, Chile to the Chilean bishops.
Context: In the months immediately preceding this address, Archbp, Marcel Lefebvre of the SSPX had signed an agreement with the Holy See, represented by Card. Ratzinger. Lefebvre abjured his agreement the next day. Then on 30 June 1988 Lefebvre consecrated four bishops without the permission of the Holy See, thus incurring a latae sententiae excommunication. That communication would eventually be lifted in 2009 by Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger. Here is an English translation of the text of Card. Ratzinger’s address to the Chilean bishops on 13 July 1988.
Then I rant for awhile about the Second Vatican Council as a “superdogma” and about the Biological Solution (a phrase which liberals find appalling – because they have guilty consciences) and about why aging-hippies (in the USA at least) are the way they are.
I find Ratzinger’s description of the post-Conciliar “desacralization” an excellent description of what happened in the Church and why.
For the music I found a bit of Chilean charango and then an adaptation of … well…you’ll find out.
Hint: Here comes trouble!
(Which I am sure I will be in as soon as I post this PODCAzT!)
There is a lot about the SSPX in the text, but I want to steer you to Ratzinger’s deeper points. Let’s avoid the fever swamp.
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UPDATE:
Some are reporting trouble with the embedded player. It now works for me.
You can get the PODCAzT through iTunes and you can download it using the links.
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Father the audio stops at the 2:14 mark.
Father,
When I play the audio, it suddenly cuts out at 17:00, instead of continuing to 32:+ . Is this my fault or is the entire file not yet loaded?
13th July is also the 96th anniversary of the vision of hell given to Lucia, Jacinto and Francisco by Our Lady at Fatima:
…As the Lady spoke the last words, she opened her lovely hands as before, and poured down from them the revealing and penetrating radiance that had warmed the hearts of the children on the previous occasions. But this time it seemed to pass into the earth, disclosing beneath – and these are Lucia’s words, written in 1941, – “a sea of fire; and plunged in this fire the demons and the souls, as if they were red-hot coals, transparent and black or bronze-coloured, with human forms, which floated about in the conflagration, borne by the flames which issued from it with clouds of smoke, falling on all sides as sparks fall in great conflagrations, – without weight or equilibrium, among shrieks and groans of sorrow and despair which horrify and cause to shudder with fear.
“The devils were distinguished by horrible and loathsome forms of animals frightful and unknown, but transparent like black coals that have turned red-hot”. (Our Lady of Fatima, by William Thomas Walsh, 1948).
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.
My power went out while listening to this, and it still worked on my macbook, got to listen to it twice while waiting for the power to come back on.
What a gem! Thank you very much for this speech.
I had trouble using the player embedded in this post. But I was able to listen to it on iTunes okay.
The download file 13_07_13.mp3 (848 kb) appears to contain only 1 min 48 sec of audio.
Only 1:48 with RealPlayer, but seem to be getting it all with QuickTime.
In trouble for what, same thing as when you read the encyclical for the edification of many?
I’ll look into the player problem.
It works for me.
I can also download the whole thing.
Now it is locking up for me at 1:50 using the player in the post. GRRRR
I don’t understand why this priest doesn’t have his own program on Catholic radio.
I don’t know Father. I have expressed the point on previous occasions that I think it would take a definitive statement from another ecumenical council in answer to specific questions concerning the Liturgy to solve the problems created in the aftermath of the last council. Short of this I don’t know what is to be done with the casual and haphazard attitude towards the Liturgy one finds throughout the Church. The days of open abuse and ‘clown Masses’ are now long gone, save perhaps for a few wannabe Jedi knights in Germany, but there are deeper problems that will not be solved until the Church stands together as one in the person of all the bishops in the world pronouncing in unison what the Liturgy is to be and what it is not to be. The Liturgy should not be what each individual priest or committee of laity want it to be. The fates of the Church and the world are intertwined and the Church from around the world gathered together again and speaking as one again would begin the process of putting and end to the progressive march of each individual member of mankind retreating into his own little fishbowl that I have seen advance relentlessly in my lifetime. Mankind has a common enemy who seeks ever to divide us and has done a remarkably good job of that in recent times. We must speak as one again and we can only do that when we speak with the Word that God has given us.
I wonder what the state of the Liturgy would be had Ratzinger been elected Pope a decade earlier? I doubt the TLM would’ve returned, but I suspect Mass would feature at least a few prayers said in Latin while the altars may well have featured a more traditional arrangement (six candles). Just a hunch.
Thank you for the reminder about Our Lady of Fatima and the vision of Hell.
Today is also our 22nd wedding anniversary.
But the audio file still didn’t work properly.
[As I type, it is Sunday morning and it works for me on Safari.]
I find your podcasts very rewarding and easy on the ear, Father. A few years my community at the time had a sharing on our ‘vocation story’ – why we joined the Caps. For the older men it was as if it were automatic. They went to our seraphicum (secondary school) and in their final year some joined and some didn’t. One man admitted it was a way of avoiding a life on a farm. For myself (joined at 24 in 1988) it was a choice, supported by family and friends, to give religious life a go and I stayed. For our youngest friar (nine years my junior) it had cost him friends. There’s a tale in that. You are right to say that the ‘biological solution’ affects both sides. The old die off but another generation replaces them. Some (many?) of the younger generation are not laden with the hangups of the past but there are many that are entirely ignorant of even the basics of the faith and even hostile to the idea of God and religion.
It is as you regularly point out a matter of brick by brick change. Steady effort to live the Catholic life in all its fulness even by a tiny minority will be a leaven for bigger change later. Rome was not built in a day, we cannot expect to restore her in a day either.
Father it cuts out at 2:10 for me. It sure sounds like “Lefebvrist Sabatoogie” as Bugs Bunny would say!
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It works well for me, now, as the mp3 file, I think. (I’m a Luddite, so it may merely work for dumb luck for all I can tell.)
If anyone just wants the text of the address, there’s a translation here. There’s a sarcastic realization I see probably pop up once a week on the Internet to the effect that ‘Rome rolls out the ecumenical rug for animists and Protestants, but not for the SSPX!’—-Ratzinger stated this immediately after the consecrations: “The criteria with which we judge the past in the Vatican II decree on ecumenism must be used — as is logical — to judge the present [situation with the post-June 1988 SSPX] as well.”
Man, I miss that pope….
I have nothing to add except that I love that picture of Pope Benedict.. love it.