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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Oct 3, 2014 8:27:20 GMT
Hibernicus is referring to the Diamond brothers in Holy Family Monastery in New York. They have a following and a lot of their stuff was in circulation here around the time of the Eucharistic Congress, so they have contacts in Ireland. I wonder if they have any connexion (besides the name) with the Servants of the Holy Family in Colorado Springs. I don't know if these are seddie, but they are out on a limb. John Vennari of Catholic Family News has some connexion with these (the Servants, not the monastery). In other words there is a whole independent/sedevacantist subculture which thrives in the United States in particular, but we should remember the most notorious seddies are based in Palma de Troya in Spain and they enjoyed some support around here too for a time.
For futility, look up Pope Michael of Kansas on youtube. It would be funny if the young man didn't seriously believe himself to be Pope. In the circumstances, it is very sad.
There is another quirky movement out there called Sirivacantism, which believes Cardinal Siri of Genoa was legitimately elected as Pius XIII in 1958, but was persuaded by Freemasons (or whatever) to reject this election. The problem here is that as Benedict XVI recognises Francis I as pope (some still regard BXVI as the legitimate pope), Cardinal Siri recognised John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I and John Paul II as popes, so the thesis collapses. I am waiting to hear other stuff - I think I can remember something about Malachi Martin being a cardinal in pectore in this dispensation (it's already alleged he was a bishop and that he ordained Rama Coomaraswamy to the priesthood - and this is from this trend). Again, as nutty as much of the stuff the former Rev Professor Martin came out with, he always recognised John Paul II and his predecessors as pope in speaking and writing. But some people just believe what they want.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 5, 2014 20:21:10 GMT
Actually Martin did sometimes flirt with sedevacantism - his novel VATICAN (early 80s) demonises Paul VI to the extent of suggesting that he fell into formal heresy and forfeited the papacy. This contrasts very sharply with HOSTAGE TO THE DEVIL (published when Paul was alive), where one of the supposed exorcisms takes place during Paul VI's visit to New York and his saintly proximity assists in the deliverance. But I don't think Martin had a coherent ideological position at all - he just loved to manipulate people.
Sedevacantism is so strong in the US partly because of the major American secession from the SSPX; nine priests left, taking a lot of SSPX's American property with them (they had registered it in their own names) and several set up on their own account as independent sedevacantists. Cuneo's book THE SMOKE OF SATAN has quite a lot of stuff on sedevacantists (and also on false visionaries - the two overlap. Bayside is the classic example - I remember someone giving out Bayside leaflets during the Eucharistic Congress in 2012 even though the supposed seer Veronica Leuken has been dead for years and there is no coherent organisation.)
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Oct 6, 2014 7:49:56 GMT
I think Malachi Martin was willing to be all things to all nuts who were willing to pay and he made a good living out of it.
Bayside continues to be a major scourge and there are devotees who attend St Kevin's in Dublin and some of the EF Masses in north Leinster. I noticed sometimes copies of Alive! are delivered with Bayside material in them. I think the industrial North East of the US has false apparitions, sedevacantism and Feeneyism cross-fertilising and because of immigration and returned emigrants, a certain amount of the mix has crossed the Atlantic, hence they show up here too.
If there is any consolation, it is peripheral and the Palmarian movement has been seriously deflated in the past couple of decades.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 17, 2015 21:34:12 GMT
Have been reading the latest issue of CHRISTIAN ORDER in the Central Catholic Library - I think the cover date is March and they have fallen behind a bit because of an office move. The theme of this issue is Masonic infiltration of the Church, which I am not denying exists (though I have my suspicions about some of the sources they are invoking) but what struck me about it is that they operate a system of guilt by association. Thus, because Masonry draws on occult traditions which are influenced by neoplatonism (including such deeply sinister ideas as the view that good and evil are two sides of the same being and will eventually be reconciled), any theology influenced by neoplatonism (in matters like the idea that we come from God and return to God, the concept of divine filiation etc) is treated as being Masonic; similarly, because the Masons believe in a single universal religion of which all existing religions are aspects, any form of ecumenism or inter-religious dialogue is treated as Masonic. This feeds into a wider insistence that the only legitimate theology is Thomist-Aristotelean (because the Early Fathers are heavily interested by neoplatonism, so anyone influenced by them can be accused of being masonic). I suspect that this mindset has been round for awhile; I thought the Franco-era claim that Opus Dei were Masons simply derived from their secrecy, but I suspect that it also reflected suspicion of Escriva's emphasis on divine filiation and claims that he was abolishing the distinction between the sacred and secular, etc. The trouble is that there IS some substance in these people's concerns, but because they don't distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate uses of certain concepts you wind up with such atrocities as CHRISTIAN ORDER's pronouncements on "The Heresies of Joseph Ratzinger", their claims that the Orthodox Churches are not really Christian and that any theologian who thinks Augustine more important than Aquinas is ipso facto heterodox, etc. As CS Lewis puts in in SCREWTAPE DISCLOSES A TOAST, if the devil can't blind people to one danger he blinds them to everything but that danger, so that they are seen as hysterical cranks even on the occasions when they are correct.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jun 18, 2015 8:44:45 GMT
Platonism goes in all sorts of directions. So does Zoroastrianism, which somehow features in Masonic symbolism, but also has left influences on Judaism, Christianity and Islam, either directly or via Manichaeanism or Gnosticism. If we held some spiritualities beloved by traditionalists up to the light, we would find some pretty interesting results. Many of the Fathers of the Church, Augustine included were influenced by Plato. Aristotle was influenced by Plato for heaven's sake. If the main influences on St Thomas Aquinas were Aristotle, St Augustine and Avicenna (a Persian Moslem, regarded as a heretic by orthodox Islam), we could probably write a conspiracy theory about Aquinas.
The scattergun approach is no good. Yes, there is no doubt Freemasonary tried to influence the Church, that it has an influence in general. But before you start joining the dots, you have to do a lot of homework. And unfortunately, a lot of traditionalists want ready made solutions, which is why Christian Order and The Remnant stay in the market.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 3, 2015 22:05:40 GMT
HEre are two links which may be relevant to the subject of this thread. The first discusses how Victorian art and culture has gone from being utterly despised in the first half of the twentieth century (BTW this is one reason for the prevalence of wreckovation of nineteenth-century churches in Anglophone countries in the post-Vatican II era; the Church came late to the reaction against Victoriana and then went overboard on it just as the tide was about to turn) to enthusiastic rehabilitation and rediscovery, to a point where it is simply accepted as part of the mainstream of art history without producing either hatred or euphoria. I would suggest that this is the course which traditionalism is likely to follow DV. We won't have total rejection of ressourcement and all things postconciliar (such as CHRISTIAN ORDER has taken to demanding) nor will we have utter loathing and detestation such as we have now; traditionalism will simply be accepted as a legitimate movement/emphasis within the Church. Bear in mind that this link may not be available indefinitely, since the magazine which publishes it, while having some articles free online, operates a subscribers-only archive: www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-new--Horror-Victorianorum--8281HEre we see Edward Feser arguing that the ressourcement movement was misguided (this is implicit in his exaltation of Aristoteleanism over Platonism) and pre-conciliar manual scholasticism was fundamentally sound. IF this position is ever to be generally accepted, it will come about as a result of reasoned argument such as this, not from CHRISTIAN ORDER-style hysterical demonisation: edwardfeser.blogspot.ie/2015/12/in-defence-of-scholasticism.html#more
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 18, 2017 18:25:01 GMT
This is the sort of thing which irritates me about some traditionalist writers. I am open to persuasion on his central claim that celibacy is a superior state of life to marriage, but what is striking is how the author caricatures anyone who disagrees with him as a sex maniac (theology of the body) or political stooge (American political conservative) - "I am a True Traditionalist - I thank thee, Lord, that I am not as these conservatives". This is all the more irritating when it comes from someone who is married but looks to his childrn to put his views into practice when he has not done so himself. Think I'm unfair to this author? Read the link below and decide for yourself. www.catholicherald.co.uk/issues/january-20th-2017/my-dream-for-my-kids-celibacy/
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 4, 2017 12:09:55 GMT
Have been reading Fr Louis Bouyer's famous 1968 polemic THE DECOMPOSITION OF CATHOLICISM. I found a copy in the Central Catholic Library, which really is a neglected treasurehouse. Some points in no particular order: (1) Bouyer argues that French-style traditionalism and modernism share a common origin in the writings of the French early C19 theologian Lammenais (who was first a throne and altar legitimist, then called for the Church to identify with liberalism and "the people", and left the Church after being censured by Gregory XVI). According to Bouyer, what Lammenais' two stages have in common is fear of intellectual scepticism and the belief that this can only be avoided by removing faith entirely from the domain of intellect and making it something unchanging and unchangeable which is only known through arbitrary declarations from a divinely given authority. (Bouyer's argument is all the more convincing since he notes that Lammenais had some genuine and profound insights but lacked the intellectual equipment to develop them.) What makes this very striking is that Lammenais is often compared to Newman, and Bouyer's critique of Lamennais as driven to authoritarianism by fear of scepticism is often levelled against NEwman - but Bouyer was a great NEwman scholar (he was a convert froM Protestantism) and what he is saying is that what Lammenais lacked was precisely Newman's theory of the development of doctrine.
(2) Bouyer notes that these two forms of Lamennaisianism are locked in a deadly cycle in recent Church history - when the integrist version is dominant it leads to intellectual stultification which lasts only so long as the authority is noT questioned (I have been looking recently at some of the 1960s attacks on Archbishop McQuaid and what struck me is the way in which his insistence that his decisions however minor and arbitrary should be treated as the voice of God enabled his critics, when he defended genuine fundamentals of the faith, to present those fundamentals as equally arbitrary and reflecting only his arbitrary will) ; the liberal reaction in turn rapidly develops its own tyranny (Bouyer notes that after the Council certain liberals very rapidly showed themselves completely tyrannical on the grounds that since their rule is the rule of freedom whatever they do is freedom and anyone who disagrees is an enemy of freedom and not to be tolerated - he remarks that Teilhard's exaltation of unity could be applied to a perfectly organised concentration camp) which leads anyone who takes faith seriously and wants to commit their lives to God to side with the integrists as these appear to be the only alternative to manifest heresy and chaos, and so on... Bouyer visited the SSPX seminary without revealing his identity and noted that the seminarians seemed perfectly decent and straightforward, rather than the lunatics and fascists portrayed by liberals trying to explain why the nascent SSPX was so successful in attracting vocations when they were falling off elsewhere.
(3) A few points of detail - Bouyer notes examples of 50s French integristes treating a strong interest in St Augustine as proof positive of heresy. As I noted elsewhere on this thread, CHRISTIAN ORDER recently came up with this bright idea, seemingly quite independently, when attacking Pope Benedict. - Bouyer also notes a liberal commentator declaring that the Spanish church had obviously not yet experienced post-conciliar renewal because it had not yet experienced a decline in priestly and religious vocations. Again, this view that the falling-off in vocations is actually a good thing is something we have often seen expressed by self-proclaimed liberals. - One of the examples of liberals showing themselves as credulous and uncritical as they accused integristes of being is of the enthusiastic reception given to a book called THE PILGRIM by Michael Serafian, a pseudonym supposedly concelaing a big-name Vatican insider, and full of evident fantasy and slanders against Paul VI in particular. Certain liberals clung to the book even when it was revealed as the work of "a young unfrocked Irish Iesuit, who had been in Rome only long enough to gather the most inane gossip" - in other words, Malachi Martin, who was then engaged in swindling liberals in exactly the same way that he later swindled traditionalists.
Bouyer gives invaluable insights into the causes of our current troubles. If you can find a copy, read it and weep.
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Post by assisi on Mar 4, 2017 19:05:43 GMT
Have been reading Fr Louis Bouyer's famous 1968 polemic THE DECOMPOSITION OF CATHOLICISM. I found a copy in the Central Catholic Library, which really is a neglected treasurehouse. Some points in no particular order: (1) Bouyer argues that French-style traditionalism and modernism share a common origin in the writings of the French early C19 theologian Lammenais (who was first a throne and altar legitimist, then called for the Church to identify with liberalism and "the people", and left the Church after being censured by Gregory XVI). According to Bouyer, what Lammenais' two stages have in common is fear of intellectual scepticism and the belief that this can only be avoided by removing faith entirely from the domain of intellect and making it something unchanging and unchangeable which is only known through arbitrary declarations from a divinely given authority. (Bouyer's argument is all the more convincing since he notes that Lammenais had some genuine and profound insights but lacked the intellectual equipment to develop them.) What makes this very striking is that Lammenais is often compared to Newman, and Bouyer's critique of Lamennais as driven to authoritarianism by fear of scepticism is often levelled against NEwman - but Bouyer was a great NEwman scholar (he was a convert froM Protestantism) and what he is saying is that what Lammenais lacked was precisely Newman's theory of the development of doctrine. (2) Bouyer notes that these two forms of Lamennaisianism are locked in a deadly cycle in recent Church history - when the integrist version is dominant it leads to intellectual stultification which lasts only so long as the authority is noT questioned (I have been looking recently at some of the 1960s attacks on Archbishop McQuaid and what struck me is the way in which his insistence that his decisions however minor and arbitrary should be treated as the voice of God enabled his critics, when he defended genuine fundamentals of the faith, to present those fundamentals as equally arbitrary and reflecting only his arbitrary will) ; the liberal reaction in turn rapidly develops its own tyranny (Bouyer notes that after the Council certain liberals very rapidly showed themselves completely tyrannical on the grounds that since their rule is the rule of freedom whatever they do is freedom and anyone who disagrees is an enemy of freedom and not to be tolerated - he remarks that Teilhard's exaltation of unity could be applied to a perfectly organised concentration camp) which leads anyone who takes faith seriously and wants to commit their lives to God to side with the integrists as these appear to be the only alternative to manifest heresy and chaos, and so on... Bouyer visited the SSPX seminary without revealing his identity and noted that the seminarians seemed perfectly decent and straightforward, rather than the lunatics and fascists portrayed by liberals trying to explain why the nascent SSPX was so successful in attracting vocations when they were falling off elsewhere. (3) A few points of detail - Bouyer notes examples of 50s French integristes treating a strong interest in St Augustine as proof positive of heresy. As I noted elsewhere on this thread, CHRISTIAN ORDER recently came up with this bright idea, seemingly quite independently, when attacking Pope Benedict. - Bouyer also notes a liberal commentator declaring that the Spanish church had obviously not yet experienced post-conciliar renewal because it had not yet experienced a decline in priestly and religious vocations. Again, this view that the falling-off in vocations is actually a good thing is something we have often seen expressed by self-proclaimed liberals. - One of the examples of liberals showing themselves as credulous and uncritical as they accused integristes of being is of the enthusiastic reception given to a book called THE PILGRIM by Michael Serafian, a pseudonym supposedly concelaing a big-name Vatican insider, and full of evident fantasy and slanders against Paul VI in particular. Certain liberals clung to the book even when it was revealed as the work of "a young unfrocked Irish Iesuit, who had been in Rome only long enough to gather the most inane gossip" - in other words, Malachi Martin, who was then engaged in swindling liberals in exactly the same way that he later swindled traditionalists. Bouyer gives invaluable insights into the causes of our current troubles. If you can find a copy, read it and weep. Did Bouyer himself suggest a way forward? A middle path between liberal and traditional or an accommodation of all shades of Catholicism? Or did he just believe that these trends would always be a tension within the church?
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Post by maolsheachlann on Mar 4, 2017 19:55:24 GMT
"According to Bouyer, what Lammenais' two stages have in common is fear of intellectual scepticism and the belief that this can only be avoided by removing faith entirely from the domain of intellect and making it something unchanging and unchangeable which is only known through arbitrary declarations from a divinely given authority."
To be fair, isn't that what faith is to some extent? I see an assymetry in the positions Bouyer is describing. Modernist Catholicism has no dogmas, whereas traditionalism does. I agree it's better to have a reflective and enquiring and intellectually active faith, but it's not obligatory. I'm quite sceptical of the theory that Irish Catholicism declined because it had become unthinking, rote, authoritarian, etc. I like C.S. Lewis's observation that no soul ever perished through believing that God the Father has a white beard.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 11, 2017 20:25:35 GMT
I think you have a point there, Maolseachlainn. Bouyer seems to me unduly contemptuous of Franciscan and late-mediaeval Western spirituality and popular piety geneRally; he dislikes devotion to the Child Iesus as sentimental, for example, whereas it seems to me a very important witness to the reality of the INcarnation. In general, he tends to dislike emphasis on the Incarnation as downplaying thE centrality of the Cross. Some of his remarks seem to be directed at Opus Dei (though they might also be directed at leftist forms of worker Catholicism); he criticises the idea of a spirituality of human work as PElagian, argues that monasticism, asceticism and the Cross are indeed the central and defining form of Christian spirituality and specificAlly denies thaT St Francis de Sales provides a viable alternative spirituality, as distinct from popularising classical spirituality. I can actually see how someoNe holding the views expressed by Bouyer could be suspected of crypto-Protestantism, though in his caSe this was uniust (he is focussing very strongly on the Patristic period and suspicious of later developments - in some respects he is echoing OrTHodox positions). Bouyer is often very perceptive, but I also think that he shared some of the more problematic aTtitudes of 50s liturgists whose outcomes he later criticised, and which helped to create the liturgical mess we now find ourselves in.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 11, 2017 20:31:55 GMT
I don't think you havE it quite right, Maolseachlainn. Bouyer is advancing the classical Thomist position that knowledge does not create faith but can clear the way for it and explicate it once it has been attained. Lamennais, according to Bouyer, maintains that faith must be provided by an external authority - at first the Pope, then the People - and must be accepted without question. This view, which the early Lamennais like de Maistre would have called Traditionalism, is a form of fideism and as such was condemned by Vatican I. I agree with you that Bouyer is a bit too suspicious of popular piety - see my last post - though in fairness there is also a problem with the view that emotive forms of traditional Italian piety ought to be transplanted everywhere and accepted without question (cf the dispute between NEwman and Fr Faber on this point.)
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Post by maolsheachlann on Mar 11, 2017 20:57:18 GMT
Well, when you put it like that, I see what you mean. But I think fideism must be a rather rare phenomenon. Surely it's a positive assertion that religious faith rests entirely on obedience and the intellect doesn't come into it at all. Simply being foggy about why you believe what you believe, or never having really examined it, doesn't seem like fideism to me. I don't know what the majority of Christians in Christian history would have said if you asked them for the evidences of their faith, or their belief in God. But presumably even the weakest argument would acquit them of the charge of fideism.
Perhaps I simply have a trust that God wouldn't make orthodoxy difficult for simple people; that heresy isn't something you can stumble into without thinking.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 17, 2017 15:19:15 GMT
Fideism isn't all that rare - and we have to rely on faith to do anything at all; we can't spend our whole lives questioning, or we'd never get anything done. The problem is when faith is divorced from understanding as a matter of principle - as Father Brown says to Flambeau in the first Father Brown story "You denied reason. It's bad theology". (Note BTW how often atheist polemicists equate faith with fideism.) Heresy is indeed something into which you can stumble without thinking - that's material heresy and it's not blameworthy. It's formal heresy - when you know something is heresy and adhere to it anyway - that's the problem. (For example, I was watching a documentary about Pentecostals recently and at one point they declare that we are spirits who happen to live in bodies. That's heresy - a form of gnosticism - but they didn't know any better - and although they showed a good deal of hysterical emotionalism, they also showed remarkable faith and desire to help mankind. "When did we ever see Thee hungry and feed Thee, or naked and clothe Thee etc" comes to mind.)
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 20, 2017 21:26:24 GMT
Zmirak is in some respects a nasty piece of work - he seems to believe amongst other things that Muslims should not be treated as human beings, and that unmarried mothers ought to be stigmatised as heinous sinners because they are likely to have tax money spent on them - but this piece about the weaknesses of the trad subculture raises some pertinent questions about three vulnerabilities it possesses: (1) Fascists - people who are attracted by the idea of persecution in which they would be the persecutors. The 70s admiration of some trads for Latin American "Catholic" dictatorships (cf Michael Davies' defence of Archbishop Lefebvre's praise for the Argentine iunta) is a case in point, as is the overlap between some forms of trad-ism and Third Positionist neo-nazism, which uses Catholic terminology to conceal its underlying paganism. (2) Frauds - the tendency to assume that any fellow-trad must by definition be good and trustworthy leaves trads vulnerable to exploitation by fraudsters, abusers, and psychopathic self-aggrandisers posing as leaders. Malachi Martin is an example of such fraudsters. (3) Fantasists - the assumption that because you have The Truth you don't need to learn anything, need not do anything properly and the world will provide/God owes you a living. Very painful. stream.org/three-tough-questions-to-ask-yourself-before-signing-on-to-the-benedict-option/
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