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Post by maolsheachlann on May 13, 2013 14:33:58 GMT
Are you aware of this site: www.traditioninaction.orgIt is upsetting because, while it is well-written and well-researched, it takes swipes at Blessed JPII (a "buffoon"), Dorothy Day (a "socialist"), Mother Teresa (of shaky orthodoxy, apparently), and Benedict XVI. Do people like this exist in real life? I only encounter them on the internet.
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Post by maolsheachlann on May 13, 2013 16:28:40 GMT
I've heard that some obsessive-compulsive people wash their hands so often and so energetically that they end up tearing the skin and exposing themselves all the more to the germs they dread. This is what these "heresies everywhere" uber-traditionalists remind me of. They are so fixated upon heresy that they end up drifting into heresy themselves. (I am making no accusation about this particular group as I have not investigated their works deep enough to accuse them of heresy-- but they definitely don't seem orthodox to me.)
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Post by hibernicus on May 13, 2013 20:05:02 GMT
Tradition in Action are a splinter group from the Brazilian-founded Tradition, Family Property (who have come up on this site - they fancy themselves as the equivalent of a mediaeval military order). Their principal leaders are Attila Sinke Guimaraes and Marian Horvat. Both Horvat and Guimaraes signed (with the member of the MAtt family who owns the REMNANT and some other fringe traditionalists) a statement some years ago attacking Pope Benedict as a liberal. They called it WE DEFY YOU TO THE FACE - i.e. they are citing St PAul's criticism of St Peter as a precedent for their views (to which the obvious answer is they are not St PAul). Their central mindset is a version of Joseph de Maistre's declaration that the French Revolution was literally Satan incarnate and advocacy of a neo-mediaeval theocratic monarchy as divinely ordained. (They have already taken to denouncing Pope Francis for downplaying the monarchical elements of the Papal Office.) What chiefly seems to distinguish TIA is a prurient and smutty love for gossip about Popes and Catholics with whom they disagree, in which they put the very worst possible interpretation on every word or action of John XXIII, John PAul II etc. One of their sidelines BTW is defence of free-market capitalism against distributism. (I am not saying BTW that their criticisms are all wrong - they nicely skewer people who present Eric Gill as an ideal layman and traditionalist, for example) but they are a bit incongruous from neo-mediaevalists. Here is one of their odder pieces, criticising Belloc on the grounds that he was a Liberal Party activist and MP as a young man, when anyone familiar with Belloc's life knows that he fell out with the Liberal PArty and devoted most of his later life to denouncing them. Note incidentally their photo of an older Belloc with "George Russell Shaw" (i.e Bernard Shaw) which I strongly suspect was taken when the two men publicly debated each other - a bit like saying that because Reagan was photographed with Mondale at the 1984 US presidential debates they must have been on the same side!: www.traditioninaction.org/bkreviews/A_045_Liberalism.htm Some of their criticisms of Belloc on the French Revolution are actually quite good in pointing out how he defends the terror, plays down the anti-Catholic elements of the revolutionary regime, and sneers at the Vendeans (see linked articles) though again this is a bit odd for defenders of the pre-1789 French monarchy, becasue Belloc defended the French Revolution for the same reason he defended Louis XIV and Philip the Fair - a fantasy of unconstrained power let loose to impose one's own will. The central problems with TIA are (a) they are slanderers who will use any weapon against those they think insufficiently Catholic (b) they identify their own nostrums with true Catholicism so anyone who disagrees with them on anything is automatically branded a heretic. Life is too short to detail all their errors and faults, but I would say they can be summed up in one word - Pharisaism.
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Post by maolsheachlann on May 13, 2013 21:51:42 GMT
I actually first came across them while reading about Eric Gill, and was struck by how well-researched and written their articles on that subject were.
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Post by hibernicus on May 14, 2013 19:38:05 GMT
Yes, the Gill piece is one of their better efforts - I think one of them lives close to the US university which has Gill's papers. The Fiona McCarthy biography of Gill is really chilling, and what makes it even more horrific is that McCarthy adopts a deliberately "non-judgmental" attitude towards Gill's crimes of incest, adultery, bestiality etc. (Her book was published in 1989 - I suspect she would be a bit warier after the abuse scandals.) BTW it is also made clear in passing that when Gill denounced birth control he did so with deliberate equivocation - his real objection was not (as the unwary might think) to the deliberate exclusion of procreation but to such exclusion taking place at the discretion of the woman, rather than the man alone. In that case the distributist trads had given TIA a sitting duck with their assumption that anything pre-Vatican II must be positive. But TIA can be quite grossly selective and inaccurate in their quotations and reckless in their accusations. Here is an example, in which they claim that John XXIII's statement that he had a sudden inspiration to call Vatican II was a deliberate lie because there is evidence that he was already considering summoning a Council, and then go on to dismiss the whole of his JOURNAL OF A SOUL as fraudulent because if it contains one falsehood nothing in it can be trusted. What never seems to occur to them even as a possibility is that John's talk of a sudden inspiration does not mean that he never considered the matter previously, but that he reached a sudden DECISION. There is a name for people who make such accusations without sufficient proof (especially against a Pope, and when they are calling into question a solemn decision to beatify him) - slanderers, and slander was a sin well before Vatican II. EXTRACT An outright lie: A sudden inspiration to convoke a council Finally, there is ample proof and documentation that the decision to convoke the Council was no sudden inspiration of the Holy Ghost as John XXIII has purported in his autobiography, Diary of a Soul. Fr. Giacomo Martina, S. J., a known scholar in Church History, is one of many who have contradicted this commonly held view. In an interview for 30 Giorni, he said: “The Pope affirmed in his Diary of a Soul that the decision [NOTE HE SAYS THE DECISION, NOT THE IDEA] to convent the Council came from a sudden inspiration on January 20, 1959, during a conversation with the Secretary of State, Cardinal Tardini. But it is historically confirmed, as we have already mentioned, that John XXIII had already been thinking of doing this since November of 1958”(11). Cardinal Giuseppe Siri also stated definitively that the idea of convening a Council arose during the pontificate of Pius XII: [WHICH JOHN XXIII DID NOT DENY - THOUGH I HAVE SEEN TRADS WHO DID IN ORDER TO PRESENT JOHN'S DECISION AS A MENTAL ABERRATION] “The idea came up at that time, but Pius XII never talked to me about it, even though we were very close. I was told that he had said that ‘at least twenty years would be needed to prepare a Council. That’s why I will not call it. My successor will.’ And he was right, because the Council was convened by John XXIII. The one who suggested it to him, or at least reminded him about it, was Cardinal Ruffini on December 16, 1958, two months after his election. The Pope was enthusiastic and agreed …. But the idea of holding a Council was already circulating. Pius XII had set up a small commission to study the proposal quietly. It was an idea that was maturing” (12). I could continue, quoting yet other documents that all lead to the same questions: Why would the Pontiff in his Diary pretend that the calling of the Council was a sudden inspiration, when it is a documented fact that it was already an idea long in planning stages? Who and what was this accommodating “interim” Pontiff trying to accommodate? And why? [NOTE THIS PERSON DOES NOT HAVE THE COURAGE TO MAKE THEIR ACCUSATIONS STRAIGHT OUT, BUT RELIES ON INNUENDO AND LEADING QUESTIONS] This dissimulation also raises a doubt. If there is an erroneous dishonesty in one part of his Diary, this clearly indicates that there could be others... The beatification process carried out by Holy Mother Church - like all mothers, always so good, yet always so vigilant - has never relied solely on the words of the candidate alone as proof of holiness. [NEITHER DID SHE IN THIS CASE; NUMEROUS WITNESSES WERE EXAMINED ABOUT POPE JOHN'S ACTIONS] She always wisely and carefully examines the facts and clarifies any doubts [IT IS BEING INSINUATED THAT THIS WAS NOT DONE IN THIS CASE]. It seems to me the case of Angelo Roncalli bears some truly serious study and explanations to the faithful . Otherwise we could have the “canonization” of the new Modernism - Progressivism [AND WHAT YOU WANT IS THE CANONISATION OF YOUR OWN BRAND OF INTEGRISM]. END The link is for reference only; I do not think it is a good idea to spend much time dabbling in the murky waters of TIA. www.traditioninaction.org/HotTopics/a006ht.htm
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 14, 2013 19:25:19 GMT
An American Catholic blogger picks up on the disturbing trend among some trad/conservative Catholics (and US palaeocons, the two of course not being synonymous) to adulate Vladimir Putin www.ncregister.com/blog/simcha-fisher/the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-still-my-enemy/The individuals who want to move to Russia to live in a true Christian state remind me of those who moved from Ireland to Franco Spain in the early 70s because they thought the latter a sturdier bastion of Catholicism.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Aug 19, 2013 9:44:16 GMT
You know some trads go by "Any port in a storm". I'm sure they have batted for worse than Putin over the years.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 21, 2013 20:50:13 GMT
Indeed - seeing things through a Cold war and anti-communist prism led many trads (including myself as a teenager to some extent) to overlook or even welcome some really horrendous regimes so long as they could be seen as pro-Catholic and anti-communist. Michael Davies' apologia for Mgr LEfebvre's defence of the 1970s Chilean and Argentine dictatorships is really cringeworthy, and I think Pope Francis' somewhat sceptical attitude to traditionalism was influenced by its association with the dirty war. TFP and TIA have links to the upholders of the 1960s-1980s Brazilian dictatorship.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 21, 2013 20:54:47 GMT
Here are a couple of links by people who are sympathetic to trad concerns but complain that negativity is taken too far, so that any hint of optimism is treated as betrayal. (Bear in mind that they are writing from the US context where there are quite a few green shoots, however small, whereas in Ireland we are still heading into winter) blog.adw.org/2013/08/the-church-is-a-bride-not-a-widow-a-word-of-reminder-and-encouragement-to-the-faint-hearted-and-negative-ones/redcardigan.blogspot.ie/2013/08/for-goodness-sake.htmlEXTRACT Like Msgr. Pope, I would never assume that all those who love and attend the Traditional Latin Mass (a.k.a. the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite) are sour, bitter people who see no good from Vatican II and think that all bishops today are bad men who just want to oppress them. I know a few joyful Trads. I'm sure there are plenty. But I have also encountered, both online and in real life, Trads like the ones Msgr. Pope is describing above. And, being me, I'm starting to develop a theory about it all. We human beings have a strong yearning to believe that at some time in the past, people were much more virtuous and holy, much more focused and directed, much more responsible and organized, much better at being good and holy priests and nuns and husbands and wives and fathers and mothers and children than we are now. I think that what we can truly say is that there were ages during which the very notion of virtue wasn't so much under attack--that is, that there were ages during which men and women greatly praised, say, monogamy and saw no real conflict between their appreciation of its virtues and their personal sins involving affairs, or ages during which a priest might have a shining reputation for sanctity at the same time that he was quietly pilfering out of the collection box for his own gain, and that despite the conflict between the public praise of virtue and everyone's private evils, there was at least some social cohesion possible around the idea that it was a good thing to be good or at least to strive for goodness. And that made life at least theoretically better for the vast majority of people who didn't have affairs or pilfer out of collection boxes or otherwise commit big sins unrepentantly all the time, because the illusion of the public's goodness, coupled with the presence of the confessional as a quiet reminder that sin wasn't eradicated just because it wasn't displayed, made it seem like everyone was more or less on the same page about the desirability of virtue and holiness. Which, when you think about it, made the job of parents, teachers, religious superiors, and so on that much easier: plenty of time for Junior to learn that adults could be horrible sinners and hypocrites after he'd first learned to admire and appreciate goodness. Our own age is demonstrably unlike this. Society no longer believes in virtue or goodness, not in any cohesive way. Sure, people might say, for instance, that it's wrong to lie, or cheat, or steal, but then they'll parse the definition of those words down to their smallest particles until they mean less than nothing, and it all becomes about to whom you lie or your motivations (the noble lie), with whom you cheat and whether the person you're cheating on is okay with it (the mongamish relationship), or from whom you steal and whether or not you steal boldly (the corporate raider or the stock market coup). If hypocrisy was once the tribute that vice paid to virtue, today vice pays no tribute at all to virtue but insists that it is virtue, after all, and that virtue is vice, being intolerant and all that. So some people look at earlier ages, realize this strange distortion in the notion of goodness, and wonder: what happened? The real answer (the Fall happened) isn't all that satisfying, because if the present age's degeneracy is, like all of man's degeneracy, the result of the Fall, then there's no guarantee that we ourselves or those we love won't end up suffering either because of the vicious or by becoming vicious themselves. It is much easier to find and blame a certain Thing for the loss of the sense of goodness. That Thing has been, at times, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, Electricity, the War, the Second War, Communism, Atheism, and Feminism, just to name a few. Within the Church in our recent past, that Thing has been Vatican II, primarily--that Thing on which we can blame all the other Things, all the bad Things that have happened since that time, both inside the Church and out in wider society. You see, once you have identified that Thing that leads to badness, all you need, for goodness' sake, is to set yourself at opposition to that Thing. You might become a self-sustaining farmer who shuns electricity and machines, or you might marry the sort of man who sincerely believes that women are an inferior creation and tells you so at every opportunity, or you might become the most spendthrift of capitalists. Or you might blame the Novus Ordo (a.k.a. the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite) for everything (or at least for everything that isn't the direct fault of the Democratic Party). Once you've done that, why, all you need to safeguard your goodness (aside from Mass, confession, frequent daily prayer, almsgiving and other good works, of course, but that goes without saying) is to avoid that bad Thing that has caused, in your carefully studied opinion, all of the trouble. And so knowing where others stand regarding that bad Thing becomes a kind of shorthand. Just like Glinda's question to Dorothy, "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?" the questions about which form of the Mass in the Roman Rite a Catholic attends can become a shorthand to assess a person's overall goodness or badness. If someone says, "Oh, I only attend the Latin Mass!" he or she can safely be regarded as a good person, but if someone says, "I go to the Latin Mass when I can, but there's a nice Novus Ordo near my house..." then further questioning is needed. If that person then fails to show unqualified support for the right sort of politicians or the proper level of disdain for certain types of entertainment, etc., then one's hands may safely be washed of that person (and not a moment too soon!). END OF EXTRACT
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 21, 2013 21:25:39 GMT
And here is an ominous thought about one of the dangers to which trad or conservative nostalgia may open us, if we are not careful. I came across this quote when I was citing it on another topic. The writer is an Italian familiar with neofascism, who is warning that some popular comic-book series actually have a fascist sensibility: fpb.livejournal.com/237337.htmlEXTRACT It becomes clear that Miller resents all the slow work of compromise, negotiation, backtracking, law enforcement, discussion, opposition and sheer bloody-mindedness that is a fundamental part of democracy. He has no patience with civilized measures. Behind the work of convinction that any elected politician must carry out to take the masses with him, there is only the smile of the Beast. The institutions are corrupt to the core, a field for the Devil to play with (yet another typical Fascist aspect is the sick fascination with magic, especially with magic as power - irrational power).This is Miller's mood and mind since the last few issues of DAREDEVIL. I can tell you that I left ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN feeling soiled, as though I had been in touch with dirt. Miller's world has no grace, no simplicity, no softness, no love, and no courage: only obsession and cruelty. And in this sick world, only the explosion on to the scene of a positive new element, militaristic, vindictive, violent, cleansing, healthily brutal, can clean the Augean stables. When the Bolsheviks, after a single day of pretending to respect the elected constituent assembly of Russia, threw it out, the officer performing this despicable duty used a sentence that went down in history: "The Guard is weary". In the same way, Mussolini, in the speech which broke the last democratic resistance in Parliament, said: "I could have turned this grey, dumb, deaf hall into a bivouac for volunteers". There you have it: the weariness, the irritation, the burden of greyness, compromise, inglorious management of events, visible deal-making perceived as corruption; this is the Fascist's attitude to normal democratic life. And bear in mind that there is a fascination in it. We Italians learn Mussolini's threatening sentence in school, as an object-lesson in Fascist bullying and violence, but the significant percentage of votes the Fascist party MSI had throughout the First Republic - from 3% to 5% at every general election - prove that, on some minds, they had exactly the opposite result. A part of society, however small, is always drawn to violent short cuts. Miller’s two famous Batman mini-series state this even more clearly than even ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN. In BATMAN FIRST YEAR, the Batman charges the whole civic leadership of Gotham, en bloc, not so much of having robbed the city, as of having "fed on its spirit". The metaphysical tone is important, because the true Fascist is never so much angry about specific acts of corruption as about the general sense that his and his people's lives have been devalued, emptied of meaning. It shall never be repeated enough: Fascism is the attempt to recover a lost sense of meaning through the use of systematic brutality. Fascist brutality, whether real or only threatened, means a recovery of meaning and sense in a life that is felt to be have been made senseless by the vampiric group usually referred to by the dreadful word "they". The flaunted uniforms, the songs, the parades and festivals, all represent a protest against this loss of meaning.END OF EXTRACT Certainly a great deal of value in the Church's heritage has been lost, some of it needlessly lost. Certainly many in the hierarchy and the church machinery have made mistakes or worse, with terrible consequences for souls. But to assume that everything has been lost because of "them" and nothing that exists now is any good, that "they" are all-evil and all-powerful and that only a hero or a prophet can save us by making a clean slate, opens us to the sort of dark impulses that were exploited by a Clemente Dominguez or Malachi Martin - or which consumed those once pious young men, Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Aug 26, 2013 11:14:35 GMT
That last quote is scary. The heart of fascism is a sort of Manichaeanism/Gnosticism which sees the institutions we have as corporeal and evil and their own ideology is deepest spirituality. Many forms of traditionalism are not that far removed.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 7, 2013 22:42:40 GMT
Mark Shea has a post on why a certain type of online trad makes him angry. I cite it for discussion and do not necessarily endorse all his views: www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2013/09/ive-been-an-angry-jerk-of-late.htmlEXTRACT I’ve been on a pretty short fuse this week and I’ve been out of line–very out of line. Two hours of sleep in the last 48 haven’t helped. Nor did coming back from vacation to find my mailbox full of pitchfork-waving reactionaries denouncing people I like and respect as gutless cowards and money-grubbing whores, all on the word of a reckless and profoundly self-serving demagogue and hypocrite. Also unhelpful was the parade of reactionary lunacy from Pharisees announcing the End of Days because Pope Francis bowed courteously to a woman. This, piled on top of years and years of friends having their lives and livelihoods threatened by Reactionaries because they left an SSPX chapel pig-headed malice and foot-dragging from SSPXers when Benedict went multiple extra miles to accomodate their narcissism nutty Jew-hatred and Holocaust denialism endless conspiracy theorizing long-running Reactionary discussions of whether Vladimir Putin is a living saint and whether Francis is a monstrous force for evil long-running discussions by Reactionary Control Freak men over the burning issue of how to command innocent women in pants to not be foul temptresses long-running Reactionary discussions of the horror of Francis not wearing a mozzetta long-running Reactionary discussions of the horror of Francis washing the feet of Muslim girl long-running Reactionary discussions of the horror of Francis expressing gratitude for World Youth Day long-running Reactionary discussions of the sin of liking “Amazing Grace” countless examples of Reactionary people who tie up heavy burdens of condemnation for the backs of innocent people who receive communion in the hand countless examples of Reactionary people who tie up heavy burdens of condemnation for the backs of innocent people who practice NFP in obedience to the Church countless examples of Reactionary people who tie up heavy burdens of condemnation for the backs of innocent people who celebrate faithfully what is, after all, the *ordinary* form of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass countless examples of Reactionary people who tie up heavy burdens of condemnation for the backs of innocent and chaste gay people who try their level best to be faithful to the Church’s teaching on sexual morality and who are *still* vilified as fifth columnists and perverts because they happen to use the word gay or say their disordered appetite is not something they can make go away countless examples of Reactionary people who tie up heavy burdens of condemnation for the backs of innocent people for such sins as watching EWTN, or saying the Luminous Mysteries, or reading the Register, or supporting Catholic Answers long running discussions by Reactionaries on whether there might not, after all, be some real merit to scientifically enlightened racism and the preservation of The White Race from the hordes of foreigners Reactionaries speculating on whether murdering Hillary Clinton would be an act of just war Reactionaries sitting through Mass with giant headphones on in order to express their contempt for the OF Reactionaries physically threatening the OF untermenschen in my parish years and years and years of being diagnosed as an enemy of Church by Reactionaries, gossiped about by Reactionaries, lied about by Reactionaries, and kicked in the virtual groin by Reactionaries, despite good faith attempts to be accomodating years and years and years of watching many other good, kind, loving and faithful people I like way more than I like Reactionaries being diagnosed as enemies of Church by Reactionaries, gossiped about by Reactionaries, lied about by Reactionaries, and kicked in the virtual groin by Reactionaries, despite good faith attempts to be accomodating and all coupled, as ever, with Reactionaries blubbering and wailing their victimized wail of self-pity when the whole world fails to accept their arrogant condemnations or recognize their arrogant superiority. I won’t mince words: I can’t stand those kind of people and it is precisely those kind of people who are the common face of online Traditionalism. Multiplied hundreds and hundreds of times over the years, the nauseating effect of their sin (and that’s what it is) piles up. And coupled with their endless pontifications on who needs to be kicked out of the Church (basically everybody who is not them) it added up to this in the past week: In short, I chose not only to hate Reactionaries but to regard them with cold and resolute indifference (which is more serious since, as JPII observed, the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference). The thing about coming to hate somebody is that you usually have plenty of really good reasons to do so. Lots of hatred is not irrational at all. It is highly rational: you can’t stand that guy or those people because they are a constant source of malice, pain, frustration, pig-headed sin and strained excuses for it all. So when people say things like, “Don’t give in to senseless hate!” you immediately think, “There’s nothing senseless about it. I can give you 20 excellent reasons right now why it makes perfect sense to hate those jerks.” So you’re thinking, “Some apology, Mark. All you’ve done is say why you can’t stand Reactionaries.” Yes. That’s a feature, not a bug. I don’t know how to work through anger at repellent and unjust behavior without naming it for what it is. I don’t know how to forgive sin by pretending it doesn’t exist. Whereto serves mercy but to confront the visage of offense? And online Reactionary Traddery has piled up a mountain of offenses, not the least being its titanically prideful assumption that every time some Reactionary stabs some innocent in the ribs with a pious shiv he is “speaking truth to power” and the outrage he generates is entirely due to the guilty conscience of wretched sinners recoiling from the light of TRVTH. No. It’s not. Very often–in fact, usually–it is normal people reacting to the disgusting pride of Pharisees tying up heavy burdens and not lifting a finger to help, or straining at gnats and swallowing camels, or compassing land and sea to make a single convert and making him twice the son of hell that they are. Online Reactionary Catholics are the single most toxic subculture I have ever encountered in the Church. Reactionary Catholicism spends its wasted time on legalistic trivia. It gets off on evil power trips by cruelly inflicting guilt on scrupulous people who are already staggering under heavy psychological burdens. Reactionaries pose as courageous defenders of the Faith while huddling in bunkers and attacking people who have made genuine sacrifices and suffered huge losses for Christ. One can only stand to listen to the threadbare “You have to understand how much they’ve suffered” excuse for so long and the sellby date on that one expired years ago. So, no: I don’t much feel like I owe those people an apology for saying that their wretched and evil behavior offends and angers me. Injustice is pretty much what anger is designed for, according to Thomas. I owe God the duty of forgiveness to those people and I do apologize to him for letting my anger and cold contempt for them get the better of me. But I don’t owe nasty Reactionaries an apology for being angry at the way they act. They owe their victims apologies, most recently the decent people they smeared as gutless money-grubbing whores. And I have not heard one syllable of an apology from them for that or much of anything else, though I have heard plenty of self pity from them because normal people take offense at their behavior–which just adds to my anger at them... END OF EXTRACT
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 17, 2013 18:37:02 GMT
An American trad discusses some of the problems often found in trad online discussions: www.ccwatershed.org/blog/2013/sep/11/if-shoe-fits/EXTRACT One of the biggest problems I’ve noticed with online Trads is that of tone. This is a pretty broad statement to make on a medium like the internet, which has all the subtlety of a chainsaw. What I particularly mean in the case of traditionalists is the tone of superiority. Many comments and posts I read are laced with disdain for the Great Unwashed that are part of the larger Church. Simply put, we don’t need that superiority. If the truth is really on our side, rhetorical bombs just aren’t necessary. Furthermore, that kind of tone acts more to drive people away than to win them over. I know that it’s easier to write another person off because they prefer guitars to polyphony, but condescension certainly doesn’t help the guitar lover, and it will also bleed over into anyone else who reads that discussion later. Remember this the next time you want to call Guitar Guy a heretic. Speaking of which… Don’t assume the worst in others. I do this one all the time. If a liturgist or a politician is out of line with the norm, I’ll assume, even inwardly, that he truly desires the destruction of the Church. How much more likely is it that that person is taking a different approach, in a different spiritual state in life, or simply uncatechized? As I wrote in one of my first entries, many times a person, even an opinionated one, just doesn’t know. We do a lot more for the cause of tradition by speaking the truth firmly but gently and leaving the person with a good taste, so they remember The Kind (Even if Wrong) Trad instead of just That Jerk. A variation of this approach is… The desire to see others kicked out of the Church. Some will defend this approach by saying that Benedict XVI predicted a smaller, more faithful Church. Please understand that this was not a desired scenario, but a facing of reality in the postmodern world. If Benedict wanted to rid the Church of the riff-raff, he could have. He didn’t, because that’s not what the Church is for. It’s for all of us, especially the ones who screw up on a consistent basis. I’m not saying that we should change the proclamation of the truth, just that seeking to purge the Church of dissidents is not going to happen, nor is it a Christian solution. Worse yet, I see Trads (only online, never in person, thank the Lord) hoping others end up in hell, either explicitly or implicitly. There is an accurate label for such people: sociopaths. Overall, what the Trad community needs is a sane public face. No one wants to join a group of angry, bitter reactionaries (just ask most LCWR communities). They want to be a part of something that fulfills them and makes them happy. Also remember that Tradition is a means to an end: the salvation of the whole world through Jesus Christ. If your approach to forwarding the traditional practices of the Church and her liturgy gets in the way of that mission, then you’re doing something wrong. END Again, I would say this is a question of emphasis. There are people with whom it is as useless to debate as it would be to plough the Rocks of Bawn. There are people who argue in bad faith and are never prepared to clarify what they mean, or to accept that anyone could have a rational (even if mistaken) reason for disagreeing with them. There are people who are so far removed from historic Catholicism that they really should get up and leave. The problem is that we should not assume that everyone we disagree with falls into those categories.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 6, 2013 0:28:28 GMT
This quote from the Scots Catholic blogger Lazarus I think points to one of the major distinctions between traditionalism and some forms of both liberal and conservative Catholicism. The important point is the Beckett quote: cumlazaro.blogspot.ie/2012/06/happy-bloomsday.htmlEXTRACT I'd forgotten it was Bloomsday on Saturday until the trickle of mentioned celebrations in the media penetrated. It brought back memories of being a teenager and reflections on the buried roots in Joyce of my conversion to Catholicism. He didn't leave me with any immediate desire to be a Catholic, but he undoubtedly did give me a sense of intellectual and religious possibilities. As Samuel Beckett (yes, I had a teenage obsession with him too) said: My brother and mother got no value from their religion when they died [ie the Anglican Protestantism of the Church of Ireland]. At the moment of crisis it had no more depth than an old school-tie. Irish Catholicism is not attractive, but it is deeper. (Cronin: Samuel Beckett The Last Modernist, p21). Joyce (and Ireland) began to give me that sense of depth in Catholicism. That's not enough, but it was a start. END To be fair to Anglicans, and to Protestants generally, I think Beckett's observation would not apply to many forms of fiercely-committed Evangelical or High Church Anglicanism. What he is thinking of is a form of middle-class civic religion which is about good behaviour and respectability and many things that are valuable in themselves but which tends to avoid discussing formal and final causes and so breaks down when faced with experiences which can only be comprehended by those means. One possible view might be the one that would be taken by an Evangelical or by a Catholic revivalist, Ignatian or Liguorian - such people are just external conformists and need a real conversion and a developed interior spirituality. Another view is that what underlies the problem is the belief that religion is something we ourselves create and choose, rather than existing independently of us and making inexorable demands on us. One feature of liberal Christianity (which I notice is also shared b, for example George Weigel's version of conservative Catholicism) is the view that religion is something which is chosen and that conscious choice is central to it, and that the choice in some sense always remains open. (Of course there is a sense in which that is true.) The opposing view which might characterise traditionalism properly so called is that religion is not chosen but lived, that once the choice has been made it must be lived and built upon in ways that soon preclude a reversal of the choice - and that this is how life operates, and that to advise people to put off the choice in the name of exploring your options is often to make an irreversible choice without doing so. The choice is a preliminary, but it can never be central and trying to keep it open will keep you from doing anything at all. (Now that I think of it I remember CS Lewis writing something very like this, but I can't remember somewhere.) For the liberal, the trad insistence on a concrete way of life embodied in ritual and repetition is a form of self-mutilation and idolatry; for the trad, the liberal view on perpetual freedom of choice and always keeping one's eyes open is utterly thin and airless and in itself suggests loss of belief. This is very confused and cryptic but I believe there is an important distinction hiding in here somewhere. Anyone else have thoughts on it?
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Post by maolsheachlann on Dec 6, 2013 15:30:15 GMT
I admit I don't understand but I am intrigued. In what sense would George Weigel's attitude be mistaken? How is there an opposition between chosen faith and lived faith?
I think I have some idea what you are describing but I'm not sure. I have only been practicing my faith for a few years but I already feel that it is no longer a choice. Or that I have to understand a doctrine to affirm it. Or that a particular belief has to be a reality to me at every moment of the day for me to believe it. And I think I understand the deep, deep peace from knowing that our faith is not something we have to keep in the air at every moment, like a juggler's balls.
But I would think that lots of liberals do appreciate ritual-- they just have an "it's there if you want it" attitude to it. I also think many liberals believe that the truth of Catholicism, or any organized religion, is a kind of symbolic and poetic truth-- that there are supernatural truths but anything we could know is only an approximation to it. And that rituals and doctrine can only be "true" in the sense that works of art are "true".
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