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Post by tisherself on Jun 27, 2008 23:13:28 GMT
Askel said If ye ask me that when B16 got the top job it was like the whole church tumbled out of bed with a hangover and began to drink clear, clean water. Heh heh... well put, m'lad. And when the Motu came out last Fall it was a strong cup of fresh coffee! Ahh that goes down good. They haven't gone away you know:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh_nqtp3VrU
This is a 'Call to Action' Puppet Mass on Youtube.Ayy yi yi, noooo me gusta, nooo me gusta....eeeek, that's scary. I think the Spirit itself should be "decommissioned" ie put up agin a wall and shot....retirement is too good for it. How many souls did this spirit loose to the Church??? Right, my family is Greek Orthodox b/c Novus Ordo clown mass was all we had access to when time came to get serious about our faith back in the late 1980's as the kiddos were coming along.
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Post by tisherself on Jun 27, 2008 23:29:27 GMT
By the way, if you want religous themed musical entertainment, just head for AfricanAmerican gospel music. They aren't pretending to be Catholic either. Ride on King Jesus! When I sang in the Lincoln Community Gospel Choir years ago, I loved this number. www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKcA2A3N5Wg&feature=relatedRide On, King Jesus Traditional Song/Negro Spiritual Ride on King Jesus No man can-a-hinder me Ride on King Jesus Ride on No man can-a-hinder me No man can-a-hinder me In that great getting up morning Fair thee well, fair thee well In that great getting up morning Fair thee well, fair thee well Ride on King Jesus...
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Post by tisherself on Jun 27, 2008 23:52:45 GMT
OK, just two more, hopefully people enjoy this. Jessye Norman singing Deep River. Amazing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx4VfgHV2AI&feature=relatedand Give Me Jesus. Sigh. www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiQBrGzp2Yc&feature=relatedIn the morning, when I rise In the morning, when I rise In the morning, when I rise Give me Jesus. Give me Jesus, Give me Jesus. You can have all this world, Just give me Jesus. When I am alone, When I am alone, When I am alone, Give me Jesus. Give me Jesus. Give me Jesus, Give me Jesus. You can have all this world, Just give me Jesus. When I come to die, When I come to die, When I come to die, Give me Jesus. Give me Jesus. Give me Jesus, Give me Jesus. You can have all this world, give me Jesus. Give me Jesus. Give me Jesus, Give me Jesus. You can have all this world, You can have all this world, You can have all this world, ....give me Jesus.
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Post by Noelfitz on Jun 30, 2008 11:42:01 GMT
I have been reading this discussion with interest.
Is the Spirit of Vat II reday for retirement?
Are some people here saying Vat II was all a big mistake?
Prior to it Catholics in Ireland knew the faith and practised it.
I made this point at a lecture some time ago and it was pointed out to me that the decline in the Church would have occurred anyway.
I wonder.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jul 1, 2008 9:36:05 GMT
That's the problem with viewing this totally from an Irish or Catholic perspective. To look at the decline from the liturgical point of view alone, Dr James Lothian (Professor of Finance in Fordham University) analysed decline in Catholic Mass attendance in several Western European countries and the US and Canada and cross-referenced it with Protestant Church attendance and Orthodox Church attendance. There were only two exceptions to the big dip which happened across the Catholic world in 1969 - the radical Netherlands were it was evident several years previously and conservative Ireland, where it only kicked in a decade later. The decline in Protestant church attendance was much smaller (though Prof Lothian says there would be a distinction between the sharp decline in the mainline Protestant churches and the increase among the evangelicals) where the Orthodox and Eastern Catholic statistics in the same regions show an increase. This presentation was carried in the Brandsma Review a while back.
This concentrates on the liturgy and that is a narrow, but telling focus on religious practice across the denominations in the West.
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Jul 1, 2008 21:42:06 GMT
I am not suggesting that Vatican II should, or could, be rejected; and most members here would not say so either. We would accept that the Council and its conclusions are valid. But I think that most of us would say (though I may be challenged about this) that there has been a movement that might be called the "Spirit of Vatican II" that has twisted and perverted the teachings of the Council into an interpretation that is essentially Lutheran or, more recently, Unitarian.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jul 2, 2008 11:17:07 GMT
Michael is right. Vatican II is the 21st Ecumenical Council and is part of the ordinary magisterium of the Church.
The ephemeral 'Spirit of Vatican II' that we are talking about here is a different kettle of fish. I would say one that is very much on the liberal end of the scale even by Unitarian standards.
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Post by Noelfitz on Aug 23, 2008 11:05:50 GMT
First of all we should try to find out what Vatican II really means. It has unfairly been use as an excuse to introduce unfortunate changes.
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Post by royalosiodhachain on Aug 23, 2008 14:50:23 GMT
I think the Spirit itself should be "decommissioned" ie put up against a wall and shot....retirement is too good for it. How many souls did this spirit loose to the Church??? Monkey man, Christ said: "The way is narrow and the path difficult for those who follow Him and few are they who find it" You say the Church lost souls because of Vatican 11, I say the Church lost no one that was faithful, the Church let go many who were actually defecting from the Church and still are. Pope Benedict XVI said in a visit to America: "I would rather see a smaller number of faithful Catholic than a greater number of non-believers". Vatican 11 established the goals of ecumenism which is definitely not dying at all, rather escalating through out the world into a better definition of what is Catholic and what it means to be Catholic from the heart. The goats are being separated from the sheep as Christ prophesied. Let the protestant catholics go and let the protestants go off to their void and vapor. Let the faithful Catholics remain to follow Christ. Vatican 11 is just beginning to warm up and will intensify until it becomes a ball of fire. As God said to the prophets, "Do you not think that I can raise up from the stones those who would obey me"? And as Christ said to the Apostles, "Even though my followers would not proclaim me King, so the rocks and stones themselves would start to sing, "Hosanna in the Highest"". And again as God said to the prophet, "Say to the bones that lie dead, arise and I will put new flesh upon the bones". You Monkey man do not realize the power of God and Christ His Son, that they can raise from the dead to new life. As God said, "I will break their hearts of stone and replace it with a new heart that is faithful". God through Christ will reveal at the end all that is whispered in the dark rooms, and the children of the righteous will shine like the stars in heaven. The Eternal Salvation of all those "lost souls" you refer to is entirely in the hands of Christ through the Catholic Church in the person of the Pope whom himself is dedicated to the Holy Family of Father, Son, Holy Spirit, the Blessed Virgin Mary, all the angels and saints. As it has already been prophesied, "She will crush his head, and he will lie in wait for her heel". She being the Blessed Mary, mother of God. Through the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary the Church will remain and attain triumphantly the conversion of souls.
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Post by monkeyman on Oct 23, 2008 23:11:07 GMT
I think the Spirit itself should be "decommissioned" ie put up against a wall and shot....retirement is too good for it. How many souls did this spirit loose to the Church??? Monkey man, Christ said: "The way is narrow and the path difficult for those who follow Him and few are they who find it" You say the Church lost souls because of Vatican 11, I say the Church lost no one that was faithful, the Church let go many who were actually defecting from the Church and still are. Pope Benedict XVI said in a visit to America: "I would rather see a smaller number of faithful Catholic than a greater number of non-believers". Vatican 11 established the goals of ecumenism which is definitely not dying at all, rather escalating through out the world into a better definition of what is Catholic and what it means to be Catholic from the heart. The goats are being separated from the sheep as Christ prophesied. Let the protestant catholics go and let the protestants go off to their void and vapor. Let the faithful Catholics remain to follow Christ. Vatican 11 is just beginning to warm up and will intensify until it becomes a ball of fire. As God said to the prophets, "Do you not think that I can raise up from the stones those who would obey me"? And as Christ said to the Apostles, "Even though my followers would not proclaim me King, so the rocks and stones themselves would start to sing, "Hosanna in the Highest"". And again as God said to the prophet, "Say to the bones that lie dead, arise and I will put new flesh upon the bones". You Monkey man do not realize the power of God and Christ His Son, that they can raise from the dead to new life. As God said, "I will break their hearts of stone and replace it with a new heart that is faithful". God through Christ will reveal at the end all that is whispered in the dark rooms, and the children of the righteous will shine like the stars in heaven. The Eternal Salvation of all those "lost souls" you refer to is entirely in the hands of Christ through the Catholic Church in the person of the Pope whom himself is dedicated to the Holy Family of Father, Son, Holy Spirit, the Blessed Virgin Mary, all the angels and saints. As it has already been prophesied, "She will crush his head, and he will lie in wait for her heel". She being the Blessed Mary, mother of God. Through the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary the Church will remain and attain triumphantly the conversion of souls. oooo only noticed this now...2 months later. Well all I can say is your post is a little silly sounding because you havent understood my post (the spirit of Vatican 2 is alien to Christs Church) and have wasted your time preaching to the already converted.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 24, 2008 22:40:54 GMT
The illegitimate use of "Spirit of Vatican II" is best understood if we refer to two interpretations. The first, which I would call "orthodox" and others would call "conservative" is the "hemeneutic of continuity". This holds that the Council should be interpreted with reference to previous doctrine and practice. The second is "the hermeneutic of rupture" which exists in various forms, some milder versions being compatible with orthodoxy. The most radical version would hold that the essence of Vatican II lies in breaking with previous forms of Catholicism - a sort of ecclesiastical Maoist belief in cultural revolution. (Comparisons between the Cultural Revolution in China and the wreckovation of church buildings - a recent FURROW has a wreckovator proclaiming that to accomodate the Spirit of the Age's understanding of liturgy as communal meal, ALL churches MUST be wreckovated regardless of trouble and expense so that the altar, sorry table is placed in the centre - might be worth pursuing.) In this context the "Spirit of vatican II" is the entity to which one appeals when confronted with uncomfortably conservative passages in the Council documents. A fine example of the "hermeneutic of rupture" is the line now being pushed by Fr. Jerome Murphy O'Connor and taken up enthusiastically by the IRISH CATHOLIC, that Jesus did not found a separate priestly order and that in the first century Mass was simply said by heads of households. This is usually accompanied by ridicule of the traditional Orthodox, Catholic and even Anglican view that the triple order of bishop, priest and deacon is divinely instituted, and completely passing over what is to be said in its favour (not least that it is already there in the second-century Apostolic Fathers, some of whom claim direct apostolic authority for it. Prior to Vatican II proponents of such views would have been invited to betake themselves to the Baptists or similar denominations more congenial to this view; now they are allowed to poison the pool of Catholic discourse. The IRISH CATHOLIC has gone completely overboard on this IMHO; they are so exercised against clericalism (i.e. the view that priests' spiritual role should place their temporal actions beyond criticism) that they seem to be denying the hierarchical nature of the Church altogether. This is a pity, because some good stuff can still be found in the IRISH CATHOLIC despite the interminable drivel of Aidan Matthews and the like.
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Oct 25, 2008 17:28:33 GMT
Thati s worrying about the Irish Catholic. I have to admit I don't buy it (I prefer the Herald) but I had assumed it was reasonably orthodox. Is anyone contesting these views?
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 8, 2008 18:02:47 GMT
Part of the problem with the assumption that the "spirit of Vatican II" will burn itself out in Ireland is that in this country the "Spirit etc" devotees have near-total control of the Church bureaucracy and educational media, while the critique of them has been desultory - there is no narrative history of developments in Ireland since Vatican II which advances a "conservative" interpretation and the field is being allowed to go by default. Works like John Cooney's biography of Archbishop McQuaid and Louise Fuller's IRISH CATHOLICIISM SINCE 1945 - THE UNDOING OF A CULTURE treat as unchallenged and unchallengeable such assumptions as (a) the pre-Vatican II church was all about control and power and had no valid spirituality at all (b) The falling-off in Catholic adherence was entirely due to the "reactionary" hierarchy and Papacy blocking the proper implementation of Vatican II (liberal interpretation); if only they had done everything Hans Kung said the Irish Catholic Church would still be thriving - of course they don't address the question of how far the result would have been describable as Catholic or even Christian (c) "Conservatives" are only motivated by power-lust and conformism while "liberals" are inspired by grace and the Holy Spirit. [To be fair, "conservative" analyses which assume that liberals are only motivated by conformity to the world and a desire for self-indulgence are not entirely satisfactory either.]
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 9, 2008 18:47:48 GMT
I have been trying to finish a review of Louise Fuller's IRISH CATHOLICISM SINCE 1945- THE UNDOING OF A CULTURE for the BRANDSMA. As I have got bogged down for various reasons I thought I'd put forward my main points here for discussion: Fuller's book has many merits; she starts with a very interesting description of Catholic devotional life in the 1940s and 1950s and there is a lot of statistical material about changing practices. Because she wrote before the worst of the scandals about child abuse and church-run institutions broke, she does not address these horrors - but this also means that she does not treat them as the sole source of decline as many more recent commentators do. Her central problems may be summed up as follows: It is not just that she is writing from a liberal perspective, but that she has absorbed that perspective so completely that she does not realise other views are possible and is incapable of understanding people who do not share her views. Thus, for example, her central source is the FURROW, which is like writing British political history for the period covered by her survey entirely from the GUARDIAN (or the DAILY TELEGRAPH) without ever wondering how things looked like "from the other side" or trying to investigate what they thought they were doing. She presents Ireland's retention of the faith before Vatican II entirely in political and sociological terms, and she treats it in isolation without comparing it to similar regions where Catholic observance remained high. This has the effect of (a) making pre-Vatican II Ireland appear freakish (it is noticeable that when she describes such matters as public devotions in the 1950s it is assumed that these are self-evidently eccentric and that our present more secularised public sphere represents normality) (b) downplaying the role - virtually denying the existence - of organised evangelisation and individual religious commitment in the centuries before Vatican II. It is insinuated - indeed sometimes declared in so many words - that Irish Catholicism before Vatican II consisted entirely of legalism and external observance. (There are two forms of legalism - one is a hypocritical attempt to keep the outward forms of an obligation while evading its substance, the other is an honest attempt to provide guidelines for living out the obligation while taking account of particular conditions and human frailties. Admittedly the second can easily shade into the first, but she writes as if only the first exists. ) Since Irish Catholicism before the Vatican II changes is assumed to have had no spiritual substance whatsoever, the implementation of the changes is assumed to be good in themselves and not to require any assessment of how far it succeeded or failed in meeting its professed goals. If 90% of the population had ceased to practice as soon as the changes were implemented, Fuller's methodology would still regard this as a gain of 10%. The fall-off in commitment which followed the changes is explained by failure to put them into practice fully (i.e. as fully as the FURROW group would like). This explanation is self-sealing, since so long as there is any opposition or criticism whatsoever this can be blamed for the failures, and merely by suggesting that the reforms might not be perfect the critic will be blamed for everything that goes wrong. Although Fuller criticises old-style clerical authoritarianism, her methodology turns out to be equally authoritarian; since she does not acknowledge the legitimacy, or even the existence, of other viewpoints, she never bothers to spell out her own, and when "explaining" why, for example, it was "necessary" to abandon old-style catechetics for the modern style of "facilitation" of whose fuzziness and limitations readers of the BRANDSMA are so well aware, she can only invoke "modern research" without explaining of what this research consists. From her references to feminism and similar movements, this research appears to be based on re-imagining the nature of the Church. From being united under the leadership of the Hierarchy in carrying out our Lord's command to bring His Word and Sacraments to a world starving for the Good News, the Church's central struggle is an internal power-battle between a power-hungry Hierarchy and the oppressed pew-sitting masses who are to rise up in self-empowerment. In fact - though Fuller has failed to examine her own assumptions so deeply that she does not realise this - this involves the empowerment not of the masses, who are left to wander away like lost sheep, or driven away if they show themselves attached to traditional practices, but of a caste of FURROW-reading bureaucrats who have declared themselves to be the representatives of the pew-sitting masses so often that they have come to believe it themselves, and whose chief accomplishment is the dissipation of the legacies handed down by the faith of earlier generations whom they despise. Fuller's references to what a fully-reformed Catholicism would look like imply that very little of what we know as Catholicism would be left - we are told that we ought not to attempt to convert people from other religions and that other faith-traditions are equally valid, for all the world as if Our Lord had never given the Great Commission. Attempts to support and reinforce with law the moral teaching of the Church are treated simply as power-grabs, and the 1979 contraception legislation, passed despite the Church's opposition, is presented by implication as the herald of a brighter dawn. Once again let me reiterate that I am not accusing Ms. Fuller of conscious bad faith - she has absorbed her assumptions so deeply that she does not know realise they can be questioned at all. Her work shows much evidence of hard work, but it is deeply one-sided - and it is this version of the past which is being instilled in future generations. Some attempt must be made to gather the opinions and experiences of more "conservative" Catholics and to assess the merits and demerits of the post-Vatican II changes; we need an Irish version of Monsignor George Kelly's narrative of THE BATTLE FOR THE AMERICAN CHURCH - but who is to provide it?
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Dec 18, 2008 12:25:53 GMT
This is a highly interesting analysis of Fuller's work, Hibernicus. I know that Catholic conservative groups often disintegrate into talking to themselves and don't see other points of view (not something that can happen on this forum due to some of our friends here who believe different things to what we do), but liberal Catholics behave in the same way. Do I detect a coincidence between what you write about Fuller here and what you write about Rev Denis Fahey else where? I recall he was another victim of the tendency - believing he had no views of his own but just reiterated church teaching. I know it's not the same thing, but I see similarities.
Ireland in isolation...do I recall Mgr Cremin comparing Irish Catholicism before the Council to Dutch Catholicism? Are there similar models? One could be forgiven for thinking that the council initiated a totally new faith, a restored Christianity...I think groups like the SSPX would agree (rare convergence in liberal and traditionalist thinking) but the last four or five popes would have problems with this.
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