Blame it on the ignorant laity?

I recently had a conversation with a priest who was asserting that Vatican II was a very necessary council and was very timely. I asked him why, and he said that the 1950's was no golden era for the Church in America; if things had been so good then and Catholics were so intelligent, why did everything go wrong in the 1960's? He was essentially saying the abuses and mass confusion that crept in after Vatican II happened because the American people were not well enough catechised in the 1950's to understand how to truly implement the documents of Vatican II (this is the same line the bishop's take with papal statements: you all are too stupid to understand these for yourselves; you need us to interpret them for you). If only the American laity had been intelligent enough to comprehend the grand vision of John XXIII, then everything would have went down a lot smoothly.

It was an interesting supposition. So, who is to blame for the gross abuses after Vatican II? (By the way, we are discussing here only the abuses, not the problems of the VII rites and documents themselves) Well, let's break it down Aristotelian style: (1) The Efficient Cause of the abuses were the confusing guidelines introduced by the bishops and the periti in the wake of the Council (2) The Formal Cause was the modernist doctrines that were infesting the theology of the Church in the first half of the twentieth century (3) The Final Cause was clearly the democratization of the Church and the rupture with Church Tradition.

The last question we have is "What was the material cause?" Who is to blame for actually allowing the abuses to take place? Since the Church is made up of people, we would have to say that the Material Cause is the people of the Church who actually instituted and performed the abuses; but which people? This priest in the discussion asserted that it was the laity who were so poorly catechized that they were unable to attain to the lofty vision proposed by Vatican II. Thus, the abuses are the fault of the stupid laity who misunderstood the Council. Is this a proper understanding of how the abuses crept in?

My answer is that the Material Cause is the priests and bishops who got on board with the "spirit of Vatican II" after the Council. If there was a problem with the laity in the 1950's, it was not that they were too poorly catechized but that they were catechized too well, especially in matters of obedience. For centuries, the Catholic faithful were taught the virtue of obedience to ecclesiastical superiors. It was drummed into their head (ever since the Reformation especially) that Father knows best and that obedience is due to the bishop in all things. Thus, when the time of the reforms came, the faithful (never dreaming that their pastors might be making a grave prudential error) followed their pastors into the land of abuse without so much as a thought. They were led by misguided shepherds and they, because of their obedience and docility (virtues, mind you!) to Church authority went wherever Father Get-With-It said they needed to be going. Thus, they reluctantly but obediently sat by while their altars were destroyed and while the music of Palestrina was replaced with the insipid guitar Masses of Marty Haugen.

It is always a virtue to obey an ecclesiastical superior in a prudential manner, even if their judgment may be wrong (so long as it does not lead you to commit sin, of course). The laity cannot be blamed for obeying their pastors; that is what the laity are supposed to do. But it is always a sin for a pastor or shepherd to deliberately lead his people astray. Furthermore, it is an even graver sin when the pastor exploits the faithful's sense of obedience to authority in order to compel their being led astray. The pastors gave the children a scoprion instead of a fish; this is the opposite of what a good pastor is supposed to do. They have the greater sin that whatever culpability an "ignorant laity" bear.

Therefore, the fault of the implementation of abuses certainly rests not with the laity who docily went along with what Father said, but with Father who got up there and told them that these reforms were going to "bring the Church into the 20th century", that they had to get on board with "the spirit of the Council", that fixed high altars were "medieval", that religious ought to discard their habits in order to "be more accessible." It is these who are the Material Cause of the abuses. If the American laity did have a problem, it was that they were too obedient.

Constitution of the Catholic Church?

Perhaps no attempt at democratization of the Church has been so blatant as the promulgation of a proposed "Constitution of the Catholic Church." This would be laughable if it was not serious; it was first proposed by Prof. Leonard Swidler (swindler?) of Temple University, Philadelphia, in 1998 and has gone through some revision since then. It is supported by the Association for Rights of Catholics in the Church (ARCC) and the International Movement We Are Church (IMWAC), both well known dissenting organizations that promote such foolishness as election of bishops by councils of lay people and term limits on the papacy.

"The intention of this Constitution" according to Prof. Swindler, "is to empower the Christian community." Okay, I don't like it already. What does he mean by that? Well, it means that "maximum decision-making authority is placed with the local christian community, as their responsibility, to develop their pastoral role without external interference or restrictions. The members of the community really are in control." I assume the phrase "without external influence" means without having to be accountable to the bishops or the pope. (By the way, why does the Church need to be "empowered"? Wasn't it empowered enough when Christ established it, promised it would never err, promised the gates of Hell would never destroy it, then gave it the gift of the Spirit and the sacraments for all time? Wasn't that enough empowering? I guess not; Prof. Swindler would have the people take the place of the Spirit. Anybody remotely familiar with Catholic theology knows that the Spirit is Who leads the Church. Prof. Swindler and ARCC would have us turn in our divine inheritance for a modernist bowl of pottage. But I digress.)

Section II of this proposed Constitution lists several rights that they assert every Catholic should have. Let's have a look at them (my commentary in red):

All Catholics have the basic human rights e.g., (a) freedom of action (ie, to sin without being told they are sinning) (b) freedom of conscience (to practice contraception) (c) freedom of opinion and expression (ie, the right to freely dissent from Church dogma) (d) the right to receive and impart information (ie, the right to have pro-Choice speakers disseminate propaganda at Church sponsored events), (e) freedom of association (the right to form dissenting organizations like Call to Action and Faith in Public Life), (f) the right to due process of law (ie, the right to freely disregard canon law), (g) the right of participation in self-governance (ie, the laity should elect their bishops), (h) the right to the accountability of chosen leaders (ie, the laity can impeach their bishops and even the pope if they don't toe the modernist Party Line), (i) the right to the safeguarding of one's reputation and privacy (ie, the Church should not be allowed to publicly excommunicate anybody), (j) the right to marry (ie, the right to gay marriage and to re-marriage), (k) the right to education and the corresponding duty to exercise them responsibly (the right for lay people to be in charge of education, versus the few pockets where priests and religious still handle it).

There is so much more where that came from: they propose a National Council that elects a pope who serves a term of ten years, and propose that each parish draw up its own individual constitution to be governed by, and that they "not to wait for action from above or below, but immediately start in motion a process bringing together all the ements of his parish to draw up a "parish constitution" by which the parish will be governed." I suppose this means to do it without permission. Even the preamble is insipidly trite: "We the people of the Catholic Church hold that because all men and women are created in God's image..." What a rip off from the Declaration of Independence! At least in the Declaration, those words "we the people" actually mean something substantial; here, in the context of the Catholic Church, it is the negation of meaning, the contradiction of what the Church has always taught about itself and its identity.

You can find the entire document here if you are looking for a good laugh. By the way, it might be nice to email ARCC and tell them what you think of this foolish attempt to rebuild the Tower of Babel. You can reach tham at mailto:facshaferi@mercur.usao.eduor ihs@ionet.net.

However, perhaps having a list of rights of Catholics delineated is not such a bad idea altogether. In fact, I have a few rights I wouldn't mind seeing codified. Here is a list of some of them:

1. The right to receive Communion on the tongue shall not be infringed


2. The right to receive Communion on the knees shall not be denied.


3. The right to receive Communion from a priest only shall be firmly established.


4. The faithful shall not be deprived of the Church's traditional holy music (chant).


5. Nor shall they be denied the liturgy in the Church's universal language.


6. The right of Catholics to not hear heresy preached from the pulpit.


7. Every Catholic must have a Traditional Latin Mass available for Sundays and Holy Days within 30 miles of his domicile.


8. The right of every Catholic to not be subject against their will to the music of Haugen and Hass, which is cruel and unusual punishment.

I could go on with many more, but I think these suffice. Keep an eye out for these groups like ARCC and IMWAC. They masquerade as Catholic organizations, but they are truly hotbeds of heresy.

Click here for "Why the phrase "We Are Church" should never be used, even in an orthodox sense."

Invitatory Fitting for Today's Church

Israel wandered in the wilderness for 40 years because of their "stubborness." Is the post-Vatican II Church in a similar siutation?

In praying the liturgy of the hours this morning, I was struck by the appropriateness of the Invitatory Psalm (Psalm 95) to the contemporary Church since the 1960's. Listen to this:

Today, listen to the voice of the Lord

Do not grow stubborn, as your fathers did in the wilderness,
When at Meriba and Massah
They challenged Me and provoked Me,
Although they had seen all of My works.

Forty years I endured that generation.
I said, "They are a people whose hearts go astray
And they do not know My ways."
So I swore in My anger,
"They shall not enter into My rest."

Is this not an appropriate description of the post-Vatican II Church? God here warns us not to be stubborn "as your fathers did." Now, stubborness, in the Bible, always implies one who is determined to go their own way, despite what God has commanded. Classic biblical examples of stubborness are Pharoah "hardening" his heart against Moses and Saul hardening his heart against David and God. Could it not be said that the Modernists in the Church have "hardened their heart" against God and grown stubborn in preferring their own novel theological speculations and liturgical creativity to the Traditions of the Faith?

God describes these stubborn persons as "challenging" Him and "provoking" Him, although they had seen all His works. What was one of these provocations the congregation of Israel committed against the Lord? One of them was the rebellion of Korah (Num. 16:1-40), in which Korah asserted that the "whole congregation was holy" and had a right to participate in the priestly office. Korah and his followers were consumed by divine fire. Is this not the same provocation against God that happens everytime the laity is clericalized or the special role of the priest is downplayed?

The final verse is especially applicable: "Forty years I endured that generation. I said, 'They are a people whose hearts go astray and they do not know My ways.'" Forty years! A biblical generation. And how long have we been in this quagmire? About 40 years! In fact, if you start from 1969 (when the Novus Ordo was promulgated), then 40 years will be up in November 0f 2009. Perhaps by then, with the passing of this "wicked and adulterous generation", will we be out of our present mess? Reason says no, but Christian hope (which is hope against hope) must stand firm.

The one thing we can be happy about is that this decrepit generation, these children of the 60's, our "fathers," will not be with us forever. We know how the generation that came with Moses out of Egypt ended up. As St. Paul says, "Was it not those who sinned, whose corpses fell in the wilderness?" (2 Cor. 6:1-2) A generation can be as stubborn or as wicked as they like; but we know this from God Himself, that "they shall not enter into My rest." Let's get rid once and for all of this heresy of Modernism, this "synthesis of all heresies" so we can finally "enter into His rest."

Democratization of the Church

It is not hard to point out many of the changes in the past forty years that have contributed to the current state of doctrinal apathy and moral confusion in the Church. One could cite the liturgical reforms forced on the Church in the name of the spirit of Vatican II (which find no justification in the documents of Vatican II), or one could point to the abandonment of traditional ecclesiology that emphasized the subsistence of truth within the Catholic faith for a newer, more ecumenical ecclesiology which waters down the distinctive nature of the Church and adopts an "I'm okay, you're okay" attitude towards Protestantism. One could point to the tragic decline in biblical scholarship in the past century, characterized by the general acceptance by scholars of anti-supernatural bias, as well as the heretical Documentary Hypothesis and the "Q" Theory (also called the "Two Source" Theory). In this vein, I could point to the ambiguitites created by such documents as Sacrosanctum Concilium and Dei Verbum (chapter 11 in particular). Couple all of these factors with the strange phenomenon of the Popes since John XXIII renouncing much of their authority and adopting a more "pastoral" in place of an authoritative position, and we have a recipe for the present chaos in the Church.

I am not the first one by far to point this out, and volumes have been written on these issues. However, I think they are but instrumental causes of the Church's present state. I notice that they all presuppose another, more foundational tenet which is not discussed or debated so much as it is taken for granted: this is the tend towards democratization in the Church. To be sure, the Church is not a democracy, nor has it ever proclaimed itself to be; but these days it acts more and more like one. Popes no longer wear the triple tiara; rather, they delegate their authority to commissions and congregations; bishops make no move without the advice of committees of lay advisors, and even parish priests work hand in hand with "worship teams" and other useless bodies of individuals who contribute very little to the common good but do foster much confusion and disillusionment.

One reason why the Middle Ages is considered by many to be a Golden Age of the Church is that the Church and State both followed the same model in their structure. Everybody knows that God's kingdom is not a democracy; Christ is the King of Kings and rules absolutely. It is a divine monarchy. In the temporal sphere, the Church functioned as a monarchy as well, with the Pope ruling as the physical head of the Church Militant and the bishops acting as the princes or prelates of the ecclesiastical kingdom. Likewise, civil society was ordered on the monarchic model, with the king reigning in the name of God and exercising the authority vested in his person by divine order.

Following the social changes of the past two centuries, we now have a different situation: Christ, of course, who is unchanging, is still the same and is still King and His kingdom is still a divine monarchy. But civil society has cast off monarchy in favor of democracy and liberal government. Now, the Church is in the middle. As part of Christ's kingdom, she must conform to His order; but more often than not she finds herself instead influenced by the existing socio-political framework. Thus, democracy is seen by the Church as something inherently meritorious, an attitude that is novel to the Church's tradition. The Church had frequently been pressured to submit to a popular will of the people before (as the 17th century French bishops clamored for their so-called "Gallican liberties" and the 19th century liberal Biblical scholars asserted that the papacy had to assent to their heretical views on the Sacred Scriptures, whose views were condemned in Lamenatbili Sane in 1907); the difference is that in ages past, the Popes vigorously asserted their unique prerogatives against those who insisted on the Popes bending to the will of the people. Now, the popes and bishops cave in or go soft when they are confronted with a "majority opinion" (by the way, check out Numbers 16:1-50 and I Samuel 8:1-22 to see what God thinks of majority opinion).

It is clear that to fix anything in the Church it will take authority. And no authority can be exercized until the Popes and Bishops rise up and take the authority that is rightfully theirs and reject this devastating trend of "democratization."