Catholics ARISE! Form base communities of resistance! Bring about permanent revolution!

Over at NLM there is a highly amusing, and in an odd way comforting, note to help us put the new Motu Proprio on translation (inter alia) into perspective.

Greg DiPippo posted an excerpt from Shawn Tribe’s very first NLM post about what Stratford Caldicott wrote about something Fr. Mark Drew offered:

“Don’t fear anarchy … Anarchy is what we have already. The law of the Church has been so widely disregarded that it is now in disrepute: if respect for law is to return there must be an end to the pretense that everything is under control.”

Years ago, I asked an American bishop what he thought about the state of the Church. “TERRIBLE!”, he rumbled. “What”, I asked, “should we do about it?” “The first thing we have to do is stop blowing happy gas at everyone!”… or words to that effect.

Was it Jeremy Bentham who said that anarchy and tyranny are never far apart?

I’m against tyranny.  Aren’t you?

So, everyone,

Down with anarchy!

Form your base communities of resistance!  

It’s time for our permanent revolution of lawfulness and order!

¡Hagan lío!

keep-calm-and-start-a-counterrevolution

Biretta tip to Catholic in the Ozarks for the image:  o{]:¬)

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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12 Comments

  1. Ave Crux says:

    LOVE. THIS. POST.

    Finally!! Yes, let’s stop blowing happy gas in people’s faces and wake up to reality!!

    When a car without brakes starts rolling down an incline (metaphysical equivalent of Vatican II), it doesn’t stop of itself. In fact, it continues to pick up speed and momentum until it’s wildly out of control.

    That’s what’s been happening for the last 50 years while everyone kept denying the reality of it.

    The present outcome of Anarchy is the inevitable, inexorable consequence of the process that crystallized 50 years ago at Vatican II.

    Traditionalists (Archbishop Lefebvre being one of those who most notably alerted to the first tremors) have been saying it for five decades and were always marginalized and ridiculed.

    Now the full blown reality of liturgical, spiritual, and moral wreckage within the Church is staring us square in the face and can no longer be rationalized or minimized or explained away as nothing to fear and a figment of our paranoia and imaginations.

  2. AHCatholic says:

    “anarchy and tyranny are never far apart.”

    Pope Benedict XVI’s paradoxical “Dictatorship of Relativism” comes to mind, and has been on my mind a lot over the last couple years regarding the current state of affairs in Rome.

  3. Mike says:

    Happy Gas is the smoke of Satan.

    Fr. Z's Gold Star Award

  4. Ave Crux says:

    P.S. to my comment above: What it all means is that if the naysayers had simply been given credence 50 years ago instead of blowing happy gas all the time, a more effective resistance could have been launched that much sooner.

    “The just man falleth little by little” is a principle that must be applied to the Church as well….constant vigilance for those destructive influences whose small beginnings are real harbingers of disaster.

    The same is true of religious orders that fall into laxity little by little.

    This world is a constant warfare and unless we are vigilant and repudiate those things which tend towards dissollution of even one jot or tittle of the law, one iota of what has been passed down to us that is sacred in Tradition, we risk a growing blindness and insensibility to our own demise.

  5. PTK_70 says:

    The tide is changing. In 20 years, barring some cataclysmic event, the Church in the U.S. will look a good ways different than it does today. For one thing, there will be fewer people of European extraction in the pews. Those that remain will have gravitated towards a celebration of Mass which is more reverent, Other-directed, grounded in the Tradition. A smaller Church, in other words, but more focused.

    Forming pockets or oases of excellence (ecclesial, communal, liturgical, spiritual, ministerial), is no doubt the way to go. More ad orientem, more plainchant, less bourgeois posturing. Reverence sells, ostentation doesn’t. Nor do vapid, formless, trivialized ceremonies masquerading as liturgy. It’s a matter of time. The tide is changing. People are voting with their feet.

  6. ejcmartin says:

    Our counterrevolution has begun, priests and laity are rising up against our diocesan “strategic plan” which calls for the use of “liturgical ministers” (female leaders providing communion and “gospel reflection”.)
    PS Want the slogan on a mug!

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  8. bibi1003 says:

    Happy gas is the reason young adults leave the Church. That and bongo drums.

  9. hwriggles4 says:

    When youth and young adults experience “happy gas”, they begin to question “What makes the Catholic Church different from the non denominational church that my friends attend?” I know – I went through this during high school and later in my early to mid twenties. If the young don’t understand the difference, and cannot get the nuts and bolts, they leave to follow their friends.

    Building on to this, this is one pet peeve I have with “The new evangelization.” While I understand being welcoming, friendly, etc., our Church must not forget the “nuts and bolts “. Homilies, bible study, CCD, RCIA must teach with a Church (our old pastor emphasized this) and while yesterday’s readings emphasized a community aspect, our Parochial Vicar (a Pastoral Provision priest) gave an excellent homily a few weeks ago that the Catholic Church is not a club.

  10. hwriggles4 says:

    Running errands Saturday, I happened to catch Register Radio and came across a worthwhile discussion on Stewardship and Education: Partnering with Parents. The National Catholic Register has an article on this by Katie Warner.

    Fr. Thomas Duffner was interviewed, since his school in the Twin Cities is participating. It sounds like a way to evangelize from within, since parents are learning the faith along with their children. Programs like this provide hope for the future of the Church, and it’s great to see a good priest addressing curriculum, finances, and 30% Sunday Mass attendance by Catholic students (i.e. parents who don’t attend Mass). Fr. Duffner has his heart in the right place, and we need more priests who put their foot down as he has done. Keep up the good work.

  11. Dienekes says:

    Having been around in the mid to late 60s when everything “old” in the Church went into the dumpster, and being preoccupied with surviving my twenties, I can look back on the whole catastrophe–and weep. From what I can tell, we suffered the equivalent of a theological coup; the framework remained but almost everything changed in reality. It’s still something of a mystery to me who the vanguards of the revolution were and exactly how they pulled it off. But pull it off they did; it’s now a remnant Church. The question is not so much why the Church is so moribund as to why anyone stays. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I guess it’s because I believe it really is the True Church under all of the laid-on dung, and I’m too stubborn to back off at this late date.

    It’s a sad state of affairs when plodding on “through the fog” decade after decade is the best option.

  12. jltuttle says:

    I went to war with a Colonel “Buck” James who would always tell his future operations (FUOPS) planning cell, “Remember, there is opportunity in chaos!” He deployed with a tomahawk strapped to the back of his Kevlar. He was a Ranger and I think he even had his SF tab.

    Old. School. Killer.

    We should use this opportunity to the best of our advantage.

Comments are closed.