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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Apr 12, 2012 15:19:36 GMT
I read this piece and all the comments. My favourite was This particular kind of Traditionalists would have condemned St. John the Baptist for his dress probably even asking him to wear a suit and tie for the Holy Baptism of Our Lord, they would have stoned Saint Mary Magdalene, would have burned Joan of Arc at the stake for wearing armour and cutting her hair, and would have accused Blessed Hildegard Von Bingen as a sorceress or new ager for healing with herbs, for her musical compositions, and for writing books as well condemning her for the man buried in Rupertsburg whom the clergy of Mainz wanted to remove from sacred ground because he had died after excommunication from the Church. Something Blessed Hidegard oppossed by "replying that it was a sin and that the man had been reconciled to the church at the time of his death" The remark I'll make is that many commenters managed to both miss Fr Gaud's point and prove it at the same time. Fr Gaud affirmed modesty - he condemned the obsession with modesty. Good Lord, if we are fortunate to experience the resurrection of the body to glory, modesty won't be an issue as everybody, including Our Blessed Lord and Our Blessed Lady will be as naked as the Heavenly Father saw it fit to create us. To echo and reinforce the comment above, St Joan of Arc and St Mary of Egypt would be numbered among the greatest of sinners - one for wearing men's clothes (in the end, for her own protection) and the other for wearing none at all. If historical precedent is important - I notice that the tradition of segregating men and women in church, which prevaded in Ireland until very recently (I experienced it in rural Ireland not very long ago) is absent. It seems that they are taken up with matters relevant to them. Fr Gaud also raises the matter of politics - more than just off-the-wall conspiracy theories - at TLM (and this is applicable to diocesan EF Masses, the Institute and FSSP etc too). This got less credit, though it deserved as much, so the dress code is a particularly sensitive issue there. However, some comments go beyond this - bringing in topics that Fr Gaud never mentioned - homeschooling, for example. Right here we are talking about something in broader traditionalism, something I think Alaisdir may have mentioned earlier citing an American trad - Ghetto vs leaven traditionalism. Fr Gaud, with New Catholic and many others, are leaven trads whereas his critics are happy in the ghetto, behind walls. This is much broader than the SSPX vs Ecclesia Dei divide - to me, Fr Gaud, and other SSPX priests like him, are onside, but any diocesan/FSSP/ICR priest on the other side is best avoided. If traditional liturgy and spirituality is not evangelical, then the only purpose is to reassert pharisaism. This is definitely not what Archbishop LeFebvre was about, but Dickie Williamson (not uniquely) is of this school.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Apr 12, 2012 19:10:54 GMT
Listened to this. I don't know how true the problems about impurity are, but I have seen most of the other things he is talking about. It is an elaboration of Fr Gaud's points from another point of view - and the point about isolationism is a lot stronger here. I can't disagree.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 12, 2012 21:33:33 GMT
I suspect there is probably some substance in Fr Ripperger's reference to impurity; I suspect he is drawing on what he hears in Confession (i.e. noting a general trend, which would not be something covered by the seal). The tendency for people who are preoccupied with modesty to become preoccupied with what they are trying to repress (and the tendency of people who are beset by certain types of temptations to resort to ever more desperate measures to try and restrain themselves) are hyped by the liberals to dismiss all concern with purity and modesty, but they are real phenomeena nonetheless.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 12, 2012 21:40:44 GMT
As regards ghetto v. leaven traditionalism, I think it is necessary to strike a balance. Trads will tend and indeed need to flock together to some extent for mutual support and because we share concerns/practices/preoccupations which we don't share with non-trads, and the concern that by absorbing the cultural products of the modern secular world we will be drawn little by little into condoning and eventually accepting its dubious and harmful assumptions along with the rest of the "package" has genuine substance. My big worry is not about trads flocking together but about the attempt to shut out the outside world completely and, even worse, to exalt yourself and your associates as a little army of the pure who need have no care for the wicked world and its wicked inhabitants - like Jonah looking forward to the destruction of the Ninevites and dismayed when God spared them. What we need is discernment. Perhaps a better contrast would be between the shining city set on a hill and the light hidden under a bucket.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 12, 2012 21:43:34 GMT
And the point about certain trads denouncing Bl. Hildegard of Bingen as a New Ager is quite correct - when reports began to circulate that the Pope intends to declare her a Doctor of the Church (I don't know if this has been confirmed yet) some of the commenters on RORATE CAELI promptly complained either that she was a New Ager or that her use by New Agers made her a dangerous guide. St Francis of Assisi has had some very dubious admirers, but that doesn't make him any less a saint.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Apr 13, 2012 10:42:33 GMT
Once again, there a several points I want to address here, so I'll try.
I note what Hibernicus says about weddings being treated casually when matrimony was taken more seriously. A point has come across to me in the elaborate and expensive weddings I've witnessed - if the Church'es precepts on sexuality were universally observed and the summit of the wedding day was the consumation of the marriage by the couple in private, it would not be the case that the rule at weddings would be to keep the bride and groom up all night and deprive them of the privacy, time and energy needed to accomplish this. When you think of it - this indicates disrespect both for the individuals and the sacramental union. Weddings ought to be about the couple rather than the guests.
Given that I am on this sensitive topic, I can see what Hibernicus' means in relation to Fr Ripperger's observations. I think of this when Fr Ripperger (actually Rev Dr Ripperger - he has a PhD in philosophy and I think he taught philosophy in the FSSP seminary in Nebraska) mentions gnosticism. The thing about gnosticism is that it cuts two ways and this comes out in sexuality. Now none of us need a lot of savy to see the world's obsession with sex as being excessive and I will not dwell on that point (not that I wish to avoid it; just that I think it is unnecessary to go beyond stating this on this board. We all know there are big problems and we are as well not to know how bad it can get). We are aware of the trend among Catholics - traditionalist, conservative and charismatic- and Evangelical Protestants to react against that. I don't question their motivation, only some of their methods and their drift into rigourism. It is often lost sight of that sexuality is good and a gift from God. So is the beauty of the human body (which is a lot more generously dispensed than people realise - but this is a perennial problem as fashions have changed considerably over the years). Anyway, there is a tendency among trad Catholics to suppress sexuality - in themselves and their children. If this is done too extremely, it will do the damage that Fr Ripperger warns about. Children learn from their parents and they will be affected by their idiosyncracies. I should observe that my experience of trad Catholics in both France and the US suggest a disproportionate number come from broken families and divorced parents (some times remarried and often hostile to their children's choice in Catholicism). There is a lot of reaction formation going on here. I referred to experiences my friend had with rigorist students in the FSSP, and he said a lot of them gave from this kind of background.
I remember another FSSP student, now ordained, quote an older priest he knew in Boston who constantly said that traditional Catholics weren't scandalised; they were titillated. Fr Ripperger hints at this. I should point out that this is general rather than specifically sexual problem. However, in the latter regard, I will mention Michael Rose's 'Good Bye, Good Men!'. This is a good book, but the author makes a couple of mistakes. One is to take the word of ex-clerics at face value. The second is the emphasis on sexual matters in the book. The book doesn't tackle one of the greatest problems through western Catholic seminaries which are constant subtle undermining or denigrating of the faith. Of course, perhaps the biggest problem with the book is preaching to the choir - most of the readership didn't read GBGM to be informed, they did so to re-inforce their prejudices.
I don't want to spent too much time on modesty as it gets way too much attention and it is used to exclude or to circle the wagons. But does anybody know the dictionary definition of modesty? For example, is one's 'Sunday best' modest, assuming that ostentatious and modest are not synonyms? However, what most trads mean by modesty means concealing sexuality, but there is also a blanket ban on women wearing trousers for other reasons though some women I know opt for trousers because they are more modest than most available skirts or dress which go for higher hemlines or deep slits. I have to say when I heard the enumerating of what was modest and what wasn't in the Fr Gaud discussion drove home to me how obsessive these people are. However, it is worth noting lay Catholics are not called to poverty, chastity and obedience as religious are and it is quite legitimate for lay Catholics to dress to look attractive within the bounds of common sense, decorum and a reverence for the Blessed Sacrament without recourse to a dress code and that other activities do not require people to dress as they do in Church. Anyway, modesty gives way to charity in the hierarchy of virtues and one of the points in this discussion is that many trads have lost sight of that.
The point about gnosticism is well taken. Many of trads, fanatics of conspiracy theories, are unwitting gnostics who pride themselves on their hidden knowledge. This is something we need to guard well with as it leads to all sorts of crazy directions. Survivalism, for example - go into the widerness with the 4 Gs - God, guns, gold and groceries. How it avoids personal responsibility - it's all the Jews and the Free Masons. And as Fr Ripperger says - the attitude to authority. This list constantly remarks on the SSPX attitude to bishops, but it is a general trad thing. I recall the tea room in St Paul's, Arran Quay around 20 years ago, which was filled with stories of clergy and religious which were far from edifying and not always accurate.
On the other hand some trads immerse themselves in the spiritual life to no effect. To come back to the Fr Gaud discussion - the fascination and fantasy with the Middle Ages is another unhealthy thing. These posters have a very rosy-eyed vision of western Christendom between 1050 and 1300 prompted by works such as 'The 13th - the Greatest of Centuries', well as St Thomas Aquinas was composing the Summa Theologica, the Catholic gentlemen of Venice and Genoa were selling the Children Crusaders into slavery to the Moslems, retaining the prettier girls for Italian brothels. The history of this country from the Norman invasion to the middle of the thirteenth century was a particularly sorry one and I don't think we were unique, thinking of the series of wars in northern and eastern Europe. But as I remarked in other contexts, the fantasists identify with the knights and not the peasants, though more of any of our ancestry was serf.
The attitude to St Hildegard of Bingen, a heroine in Germany, is a case in point.
Frs Gaud and Ripperger have given us a lot to think about. We should do just that.
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Post by shane on Apr 13, 2012 17:54:37 GMT
One thing that strikes me is how sociologically similar traditionalist Catholics groups are to far-left Marxist parties.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Apr 13, 2012 18:54:51 GMT
One thing that strikes me is how sociologically similar traditionalist Catholics groups are to far-left Marxist parties. Absolutely correct, Shane.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 13, 2012 20:40:12 GMT
Part of this is because they are both groups which believe themselves to possess the truth. You might add Calvinist churches to the list - they tend to fragment in very similar ways. There is another more personal factor, which is that such small groups tend to be subject to intense personal rivalries and the splits often have as much to do with these as with doctrinal differences (though doctrinal differences often get mixed up with personal rivalries). I have just been seeing Carl Theodor Dreyer's film ORDET (based on a play written by a Lutheran pastor - who incidentally was killed by the Nazis). Two of the characters are elderly men who hold competing religious views, one (a tailor) is an extreme rigorist and the other (a farmer) holds somewhat broader views. When the farmer's son falls in love with the tailor's daughter, the farmer is utterly opposed to the match until he discovers the tailor is also opposed to it, whereupon he starts to advocate it. Sedevacantist groups seem particularly subject to this - apparently everyone wants to be Pope. Marxist-Leninist groups by their nature resemble religious cults because of the Leninist insistence on rigid obedience to a single dominant leader - I have a book called POLITICAL CULTS written by some social democrats who discuss such groups as the late Gerry Healy's Workers' Revolutionary Party as resembling religious cults. (Healy took the parallel to the extent of coercing female party members to have sex with him on the grounds that he was the human embodiment of the revolutionary process, so that by submitting to him they were forwarding the revolutionary process.)
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 13, 2012 21:33:38 GMT
BTW I read the March 2012 CHRISTIAN ORDER today and there is a readers' response feature (a lot of it, alas, dominated by people praising the recent features about the Jews, recounting their own painful experiences with Jews, and claiming that the latter validate the former. In response Rod Pead promises us another chunk of E. Micheal Jones' THE REVOLUTIONARY JEW, this time on how mediaeval persecutions of Jews were a justified response to the Jews' own crimes. Woe.) One of the readers' letters is responding to a characteristically sweeping article by James Larsen denouncing Pope John Paul's theory of the body in general and Christopher West's version of it in particular, in which he said or appeared to say that the marital act could not be an expression of grace because bodily passions distract from pure contemplation of God. The writer, a married traditionalist living in the United States, first of all disputes this on the grounds that married couples so engaged are fulfilling a sacrament. She then states that she knows of traditionalist couples in which the husbands appear to aspire to live as much like contemplative monks as possible, maintaining only the most minimal interaction with their wives and treating any approach by the wife (even physical proximity or attempts to make conversation) as occasions of sin; she states that such wives are left with the really devastating impression that their husbands regard them as occasions of sin and their children merely as products of shameful weakness, and that such isolation is more devastating to a woman (who throws herself into her tasks in life and commits to them emotionally more than men, who tend to be more detached and self-sufficient). Mr Larson is taken aback, as well he might be by such horrendous behaviour, and although he reiterates his view that the marital act is incompatible with the highest form of grace he states that such husbands are wronging their wives and that the married state has its own graces. He incidentally states that he knew a FSSP priest who told him that in the beginning the FSSP caused itself a good deal of trouble by accepting SSPX defectors straight off without realising some of them had serious limitations. Larson asked what were these limitations, expecting to hear something about doctrinal matters or Papal authority. The FSSP priest replied "Their Jansenist attitudes towards sex and marriage". This confirms some of the things Alasdair has said elsewhere on the board on this subject, and the husbands' attitudes as described seems to me not far short of the Gnostic view that the body is evil per se. I must say (and I am a single man) that the description of these unfortunate women's position made my blood run cold.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Apr 16, 2012 7:25:18 GMT
Well, Mr Larson's 'holier than Ratzinger' series has been running for a very long time and I am not surprised he is dumbstruck by the lady's observations.
This letter seems to me to give concrete examples of what Fr Ripperger was talking about and, as Hibernicus remarks, confirms some of the observations made by my friend in the FSSP seminary - I think that the problem moves outsides the SSPX. I seem to recall thread on the CTN Greg chat list (is that still going) which suggest the same thing. The marriages described in the letter seem to me to be possible cases for annulment - the husbands are not, nor never had any intention of, fulfilling their duties as husbands and fathers. Moreover, they seem consumed with a selfishness that would preclude them being contemplative monks. This is no good advertisement.
I opine that this is a reaction against the sexual revolution, but that doesn't excuse it. And if these men base their behaviour on the preaching of a trad priest - SSPX or FSSP - we are in trouble. This tendency toward heresy needs to be obliterated. Fast.
The trad movement should be aware of any plank in their eyes if they are to give effective witness to spots in anyone else's eyes.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 16, 2012 21:23:24 GMT
I may not have given an adequate account of the letter. The writer specifically said that these men are actually quite good fathers and take considerable time and effort with their children - it's only the wives who get snubbed and treated as occasions of sin. I might have done better to summarise the letter's account as saying they see "THE BIRTH OF their children only as the result of shameful weakness" rather than the children themselves. I think it may be a bit more than just a reaction against the sexual revolution: (1) SSPX-inclined commentators regularly argue that the Vatican II statement that the unitive and procreative functions of marriage are of equal value unintentionally opened the door to contraception, and the proper Catholic position is that marriage is solely for procreation. These husbands may see themselves as acting this out, but their attitude is still quite outrageous; it amounts to treating their wives solely as baby machines. I don't suppose these gentlemen would appreciate being treated as stud bulls and nothing more. I once read a book by a nineteenth-century Catholic convert who had spent some time in a High Anglican convent, who said that the superior seemed to have got her idea of convent discipline from the most lurid hostile Protestant caricatures to convent life and to have adopted this as her ideal. I think these husbands have adopted exactly the attitude towards their wives which the pro-contraceptionists and pro-aborts present as underlying the whole Catholic position on these matters. (2) Another possibility is that their attitude to their wives is a form of family limitation - given that the SSPX and other trad groups frown on natural family planning, a maximum family size can only be maintained by total abstention. (This was a fairly widespread phenomenon before the Pill and is often cited by present-day secularists as embodying the horrors of Catholicism.) If that is the explanation, however, their behaviour is still outrageous as they do not think their wives are entitled to consultation on the matter. (The "marriage debt" theology is supposed to apply equally to both spouses.) (3) Trad groups often maintain that the idea that the married and clerical states are of equal value is a harmful modern innovation, and that the clerical/religious state is the highest state and should be promoted as such. This may underlie the husbands' attitude towards their wives, as a reminder that they themselves have failed to make the grade. We should also admit that there were significant bodies of pre-Vatican II thought that held exactly these attitudes - indeed some of the Fathers of the Church, such as St Jerome, exalted celibacy to an extent that would be seen as horrendous nowadays. (St Augustine tends to be seen as a rigorist in this area but he was actually toning down the denigration of marriage found in Jerome.) The husbands and, I fear, the SSPX and similar trad groups, have produced a hideous caricature of the pre-Vatican II position, but the point of a caricature is that it draws on elements which are actually there.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 16, 2012 21:24:13 GMT
I will start a new thread on trad attitudes to women in the main forum
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Apr 17, 2012 8:24:31 GMT
I will react in the new thread.
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Post by hibernicus on May 29, 2012 20:20:54 GMT
The British LAtin MAss Society chairman notes on his blog the hypocrisy involved in THE TABLET denouncing celebration of the EF Mass on the grounds that the differences in the liturgical calendars of the two forms militate against the unity of the Church. He points out (amongst other things) that some saints' feasts are celebrated in particular countries/dioceses/churches run by religious orders and not in others, and there is no contradiction between this and wider unity. www.lmschairman.org/2012/05/tablet-on-liturgical-pluralism.htmlEXTRACT The oddest thing about this whole debate is that liberal Catholics are in favour of liturgical variety. The Tablet has (at least by implication) defended priests who make up their own prayers [I.E WHO EXTEMPORISE WHEN CELEBRATING MASS, for example; they are dismissive of attempts to rein in what the Holy Father has called 'arbitrary deformations of the liturgy'. They seem to be in favour of variety when it is illicit, and against variety when it is licit. The licit is illicit, the licit illicit... As Milton's Satan said, 'Evil be though my good!' Or maybe just 'Non serviam!' I will not serve. END
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