St. John Paul, Pope and Prayer Warrior, with one of the most powerful weapons of spiritual warfare.
ME! ME! ME!
I! I! I!
MINE! MINE! MINE!
We are living in an age when many people think they can do whatever the hell they want and there should be no consequences for them.
DO whatever they want? HAH! If only. They think they can BE anything they want, despite the obvious.
The only think that can’t be allowed is for someone else to disagree with them or point to the obvious.
Okay… whew. That felt good.
What set this off?
Peter Kwasniewski offered something at LifeSite which touches on the above.
He points out several seriously corrosive efforts underway, chief among them the systematic attack on the magisterium of Pope St. John Paul II.
He points to the absurdity of the divided situation where the divorced and remarried in Poland may not be admitted to Communion, but step over the border into Germany and they can be. Ridiculous, right? It is a symptom.
He writes:
The unfolding of events has brought a welcome clarity: Belial hath no concord with Christ, the faithful with the unbeliever (cf. 2 Cor 6:15). Can anyone deny that there is a de facto schism in the Church?
Loading ...
This is an attack on the truth of Christ, not simply John Paul II’s writings. The Church didn’t start with him. And “Prayer Warrior” is a bit much for the man who did the Assisi meetings and asked St. John the Baptist to protect Islam, huh?
While schism isn’t a good thing, it is hardly new either. However, the good news is that I have come to the conclusion that the traditionalists are going to win the internal battles because they will be the only ones left. The rest of the Church is already rotting away and is going to become irrelevant, perhaps more quickly than anyone had imagined. With Hartford going from 218 to 128 parishes last June and Pittsburgh planning to shrink from 188 to 48 parishes, just to give two examples, and many dioceses already having hemorrhaged parishioners and parishes, the handwriting is on the wall for the liberal wing of the Church. The only question now is whether the traditionalists will be numerous enough to fight the battles ahead in the larger world. Unfortunately, the biological solution takes its toll on traditionalists too. The bad news is that we don’t have enough traditionalists to fight off the Muslims and secular liberals. That makes Msgr. Pope’s blog post at the National Catholic Register yesterday more critical. We have to attract more people to traditional liturgy and morality and get them out into the world to re-convert it and re-establish Christianity. Traditionalism may start by being a refuge from the vulgar world, but eventually it has to become more than that. A great insight that I heard not too long ago is that gates are not an offensive weapon. When we hear Jesus tell us that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church,” most people imagine the gates of hell being thrown at the righteous in an offensive attack. Stuff and nonsense. The Church is going to be pounding at the gates of hell with all its offensive weapons and those gates will be shattered to bits and the demons will not be safe there after a massive retreat. For that to happen, though, the traditionalists need to start going on the offensive. Traditional liturgy is one offensive weapon, but there is so much more and we all need to get out there and start acting with the confidence of Jesus– if he is for us, who can be against us?
http://www.ncregister.com/blog/msgr-pope/a-video-that-models-joyfully-inviting-others-to-the-traditional-latin-mass
Andrew Saucci :
… I have come to the conclusion that the traditionalists are going to win the internal battles because they will be the only ones left.
That’s still a factionalist notion, whereas it is the orthodoxy in the Church that will resist this phenomenon of people falling away, not this or that faction within her.
I have a great deal of sympathy with Catholic traditionalists — my aunt was a very active one, just for starters. And traditionalists have come under an extensive degree of unjust attacks against them, and one can only react against such injustices by seeking to support and defend those who are being made to suffer from them.
The Tradition though is not traditionalism, which is a political trend of some Catholics rather than being the same as the Nature of the Church as such — even though, in these troubled times, traditionalists are helping the Faithful in the Church stand fast in orthodoxy against widespread and ongoing attempts to destroy or even just undermine or vitiate that very same orthodoxy.
When the Church is in balance and in good health, the traditionalist and “progressive” trends are united in orthodoxy, and do not so much contradict as complement each other (as they did at Trent), on the one hand by resisting various sectarian or erroneous innovations, on the other hand by keeping the Church from becoming too rigid, or exclusive, or self-absorbed. But that’s when the Church is in balance, but she hasn’t been since about the 1920s or 30s.
She will regain her balance (though the signs of this are perhaps more visible in the Old World than in the New), and while traditionalists are a very important part of this work (because they are, in the main, doing their traditional work of “resisting various sectarian or erroneous innovations” as I put it), the smaller, more orthodox and Faithful Church that Pope Benedict XVI once predicted will not be composed of Traditionalists alone.
“Can anyone deny that there is a de facto schism in the Church?” Can Pope Francis? Does Pope Francis?
Alexander Verbum wrote:
“This is an attack on the truth of Christ, not simply John Paul II’s writings. The Church didn’t start with him. And “Prayer Warrior” is a bit much for the man who did the Assisi meetings and asked St. John the Baptist to protect Islam, huh?”
Agreed. While Pope John Paul II had a very admirable devotion to Our Lady, it is hard to forget seeing the ghastly images of the Assisi meetings (especially his being “blessed” by pagans), his praise for Islam and, like other the post Vatican II popes, his pursuit of ecumenism that did not include a conversion of infidels to the Catholic faith.
The heretics / modernists / apostates that are attacking the traditions of the Church are only allowed to do so because they have been given the ammunition supplied by the ‘spirit’ of the 2nd Vatican Council. The fact the New Mass promulgated by Pope Paul VI was so radically different from the Mass of All Ages meant for all intents and purposes, any and everything could be changed in the Church. Now we are seeing the consequences of the Pope John XXIII banishment of anathemas. If everything is on the table, then the very words of Christ and the 2000 year old teaching of His Church can be changed as well, the thinking goes.
This brood of vipers is less concerned about the magisterium of Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI or any other pontiff, than they are on launching an assault against God and His Holy Word.
Do not get me wrong. Do not misunderstand or misconstrue me. I am a faithful son of the Church and I want what is best for Holy Mother Church. I do not wish for schism.
However, with the understanding that there is already a schism in place, is it wrong for me to pray that it be brought to completion? Is it wrong to pray that those who are actual heretics be denied positions of power and influence, and even membership, in the Church? Is it wrong to pray that this be brought into the open and the general public be made to understand that this is not some political “conversatives vs. liberals” or “alt-right vs. Pope Francis” squabble, but has real and dramatic import to the contents of the Deposit of Faith?
In 1969, Father Joseph Ratzinger mused on a smaller, more faithful Church. Is it a sin for me to wish that this comes true? Yes, I desire that the Church become large and encompass the whole world, but I don’t pray for that size to come at the expense of orthodoxy. The Church is growing in Africa while not compromising her tenets. She can do the same anywhere in the world if her members had the resolve to work for it.
No, I do not pray for schism. I pray that the existing internal schism be recognized, brought to light, and healed. And if the only way to heal it is by separation of the heretic apostates, then God’s will be done.
Those anti-Vatican II reactionaries who continue to take superficial pot shots at Saint John Paul II would do well to educate themselves on just what part of the magisterium of his Catholic Church is so offensive to them. The Saint on this day gets his massive legacy dismantled by the Red left — and his memory sullied by the holier-than-the-Pope right. Surely that should put some fear of God in your soul for attacking the memory of the dead. We shan’t be gathering at St. Peter’s for your funeral Mass anytime soon.