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Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 28, 2024 12:59:44 GMT
I must admit that I increasingly see nothing good in Traditionalism AS A MOVEMENT. After all, we are all traditionalists. Catholicism is steeped in tradition and I don't really know of even the most out-there lefty Jesuit demanding a total return to Year Zero. I rather resent the term "Traditionalist" being taken over by the movement, just as I resent "humanism" being co-opted by secular liberals. I consider myself both a traditionalist and a humanist.
I love and respect many Traditionalists but I can't really see what good thing they are getting from the movement that they wouldn't get just from being members of the Church. And I do think the movement tends to have a bad effect on people.
One could still attend the Latin Mass and even support the Latin Mass without being a part of this sub-culture, Traditionalism, which like all sub-cultures seeks to distinguish itself from the larger culture-- fine if that larger culture is modern society, but not so much given it's the universal Church. Because the differentiation goes way beyond a specific charism and spirituality.
Fr. Vincent Twomey says in "The Dynamics of the Liturgy" that the existence of a separate Traditionalist liturgical calendar seems to him the most questionable aspect of Traditionalism, the biggest source of disunity. He says this in the context of a rather balanced critique. I agree.
This is how it seems to me. I may be completely wrong. Traditionalists may inherit the Church in fifty years as they expand and less rigorous parts of Catholicism fall away. It won't be the first time in history a radical minority has prevailed over a more moderate majority. If that does happen I think some synthesis is going to emerge, though.
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Post by Devotus Immaculatae on Sept 29, 2024 11:43:05 GMT
The term Catholicism has been so frequently misused and abused, that people now rely on very unsatisfactory qualifiers like 'liberal,' 'conservative,' or 'traditionalist' to define which outlook on Catholicism one is dealing with. These same labels have naturally fallen victim to the very same issue. I also agree with your point on Humanism. While language evolves, it doesn't always do so in a helpful or precise way. 'Humanism' has been co-opted by 'Secular Humanism,' and 'Secularism' has been coopted to become anti-theism and hostility towards all religions, but particularly Christianity. Similarly, the term 'racist' is now often used to label anyone who dares to raise any question about unchecked, undocumented, mass migration and the huge societal and cultural changes it brings to a nation. There are many more examples of the ongoing co-option of language in our society today. The term Irish and Ireland are also becoming effectively meaningless geographical materialistic terms.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Oct 3, 2024 10:57:27 GMT
I have just looked at the video and I will come to that in a minute (or two).
I think there are several colliding issues here. At best, it generates eccentricity. At worst it leads to an überkatholikismus which is not Catholic at all.
First of all, that there is a remarkable consensus among ultra-traditionalists and ultra-progressives that the Second Vatican Council was a rupture. What they disagree on is which side of this was bad.
Secondly, the term 'traditionalism' means different things to different people. I am not sure that attachment to the older liturgical books alone is a good one. Eastern Catholics would have a better claim on the title that Latin Catholics as there is unbroken tradition. Many of those who are in on the traditional movement are making up tradition as they go along and the exhibit "A" is the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest who are combining a baroque Franco-Italian liturgical style with a model of religious life which comes totally out of Father Gilles Wach's head and the insistence on the title "canon", for which there is no basis outside cathedral chapters, which the priests of the institute are not members of. However, I find the fact that Wach is still superior general since 1990 when the other Ecclesia Dei communities have changed their's, sometimes more than once, extremely questionable. Most religious orders and secular institutes limit the terms of their superiors general to two terms, rarely more than twelve years. I know the Jesuits and Redemptorists allow superiors general for life, but neither are necessarily a model you would want to follow. All that said, I don't think there are issues of rigourism around the Institute
I suppose I find that some self-declared traditionalists are not totally on board with tradition. I know the Friday abstinence has come up and though not binding under the pain of sin, canon law identifies Friday as a day of penance. Of course the Irish hierarchy drove a coach and four through the requirement with their letter on the topic in 1983 and it's a dead letter because it's not talked about. You are not obliged to abstain from meat on Friday (though you would be in England and Wales), but if you don't, it's up to you to know what you are doing instead. I have found traditionalists who don't even think about this. As an exercise, go to lunch with one of these on a Friday, order fish, and look at the embarrassment on their face. On the other hand, I have seen some traditionalists keep the fast from midnight which Pius XII modified. The thing about this is very few of the EF Masses available in Ireland are early morning - during the older regime, communion wasn't given out at later morning Masses, let alone in the afternoon or evening.
Aside from the liturgy and asceticism, there is snapshot traditionalism, which I would say is the Catholic equivalent of the protestant/evangelical bible bingo. If our foundation is based on the fact that all ages are equidistant from the Incarnation we have to accept the whole tradition of the church, from the Apostolic age to the twenty-first century. At this point, we part company with the extreme progressives. But the trads probably elevate Thomistic philosophy/theology and Ignatian spirituality to a primacy they never held (and I am not denying the value of either; I am only saying that there are and always were alternatives). There is zero sympathy for the eastern churches and their traditions, although they are more connected with first millennium Christianity than Catholicism has. Pope Benedict did a lot to focus on that and I suppose it's ironic that Francis I owes more to the Scholastic period and Counter Reformation in his approach, especially as these are the sources that traditionalists drink from. I think that most traditionalists are looking at tradition through a 19th century lens (ultramontanism/reaction against the French Revolution) which in turn looks at the scholastic age through a counter-reformation lens. The point is that this limits and compromises the view of tradition.
Within this narrow view, there other stuff going on. One is the exaggerated emphasis on the apparitions of Fatima, which how ever useful they are, they are private revelation (the same applies to any recognised Marian apparition). Many traditionalist groups in North America and Northern Europe impose a dress code on women (not on men to the same degree) which is based on an understanding of the message of Fatima and probably in reaction to the general culture (I do think we need to recover the sense of the church as a sacred place, as the house of God from the point of view of behaviour and dress, but the tradionalist code moves beyond that and does it unevenly. I don't think that women wearing dowdy long skirts and improvised head covering necessarily gives glory to God either).
In relation to the video - I would avoid the term 'fundamentalism' as to me this means excessive focus on a text, the way evangelicals focus on the Bible or Moslems on the Qu'ran or Marxists on Das Kapital (if they have read Marx at all). Catholicism is much broader, so Integrism is a better word, though I recall it being tossed as an insult be a couple of ex-trads in the late 1990s, some of whom had been hard core. However, I do agree that the broader traditional movement have laid burdens on the faithful. Condemnation of NFP is one and when I saw Julian Kwasniewski defending dancing in a Crisis article recently, I thought this must be very bad. In regard to head covering - this was not universal across the world before the Council. On the other hand, a lot of areas maintained the separation of men and women in church which has not gained traction among the trad movement. This idea of women being forbidden to work outside the home or adult children being beholden to their parents is something that needs to be seriously clarified and contextualised. But there is a rigourist movement within both the traditionalist and neo-traditionalist worlds which needs to be addressed. And the presenter of the video addresses this.
To answer Maolsheachlann's question on how much good the traditional movement did, well, it has been a lot stronger in producing vocations and in promoting tradional marriage than the alternatives. Unlike the progressive movement, it is growing. Trouble is that some many clergy and bishops don't want to touch it with a barge pole. This is part of the reason that the eclectic leadership is emerging.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 5, 2024 22:18:13 GMT
One parallel for the position of trads which occurs to me is that of Don Ciccio the sacristan in Lampedusa's novel THE LEOPARD which as you may be aware describes the adjustment of a declining Sicilian noble family to the Risorgimento and the deposition of the Bourbon rulers of the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily by the supporters of Italian unity under the Piedmontese House of Savoy. The Prince who is the head of the House votes YES in the (rigged) referendum on unification. Soon afterwards when he is out hunting with Don Ciccio the sacristan reveals that he tried to vote NO but the authorities would not allow him to do so, expresses his comtinuing loyalty to the Bourbons and his bewilderment at the Prince's action. (The link gives a clip from the film, with Burt Lancaster as the Prince - unfortunately I could not find a subtitled version.) www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qh0Z_Bt6NM In the novel both the Prince's response and the narrator's commentary make it clear that Don Ciccio is a stupid man and a snob, that his idealisation of the bourbons is a fantasy and that his position is futile (because most of the population know they will be equally oppressed whoever is in power, and therefore vote as their superiors order them). It is also made clear that the refusal to allow Don Ciccio and those like him to record their sincere and heartfelt views is a sign of the moral corruption of the supporters of the Risorgimento, because they are violating their own professed ideals. Any comparison to the way certain liberals complained under Pius XII, John Paul II and Benedict XVI that they were not given every procedural safeguard in expressing their views, and under Paul VI and Francis declared that they had a direct line to the holy Spirit and need not bother with trivialities like procedure when imposing their views on trads and conservatives, is bleedin' obvious.
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Post by assisi on Oct 8, 2024 20:12:40 GMT
Keeping the 3 transcendentals in mind, traditional Mass has the 'beauty' of song and ritual to elevate the soul to another level. They say the devil (and liberalism ) don't create anything beautiful, they just corrupt creation. Traditionalism as a movement may wander, but it's love of the beauty of the faith is hard to deny.
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Post by Devotus Immaculatae on Oct 9, 2024 12:00:42 GMT
Sadly, many of these so-called ultra "traditionalists" are actually damaging the very traditions we hold dear in the Church, and are assisting with accelerating the Church's drift toward increasing "liberalism". When I look at the current College of Cardinals, I see no signs of change on the horizon. In fact, things seem poised for even deeper divisions and confusion ahead. I fear that, in time, the pontificates of Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict may seem like golden eras by comparison to what's coming. I hope I’m wrong.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 15, 2024 23:28:32 GMT
I would have thought that it is perfectly reasonable for individuals to fast from midnight before receiving Communion (with due allowance for prudence) if they wish to do so as a private act of devotion. Pius XII and Paul VI altered the obligation but didn't prohibit the older form - or variants therefrom; I believe the fast from midnight under the old discipline excluded even water, which I suspect is pretty rare these days even among trads. What would be outrageous would be to treat the older discipline as being a matter of obligation binding on everyone.
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