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Post by hibernicus on Sept 6, 2012 22:55:44 GMT
Maybe Bishop Williamson should join up with this Greek Orthodox Archbishop, who has landed in hot water for making some "creative" additions to the anathemas in the Rite of The Triumph of Orthodoxy. Their list of dislikes seems remarkably similar (not to say comprehensive). How nice it would me to see Mad_Rad-Tradism breathing with both lungs, east and west. www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2012/03/anathemas-of-metropolitan-seraphim-of.htmlEXTRACT ... Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus seems to have a completely different view. He believes that the Synodikon remains "open" and therefore can add "anathemas", as he did during this year's celebratory Sunday of Orthodoxy. He did not read all the anathemas of the Synodikon, but he voiced loudly his own "anathemas" to give, according to him, his own "witness of Orthodoxy" today. Let's see who he anathematized: - The truly non-existent and fallen arch-heretic Pope and Patriarch of Old Rome Benedict XVI and those in communion with him, anathema, anathema, anathema. - Martin Luther, John Calvin, Henry Zwingli, Henry the VIII the impious king, and those with them, and all the heretical offshoots of the Reformation, anathema, anathema, anathema. - Those who deny and rebuke the Panagia, the consubstantial, indivisible and Life-giving Trinity, the Rabbi's of Judaism, the Islamists, the anonymous tracts of the Watchtower Society, the Jehovah's Witnesses, anathema, anathema, anathema. - Those who deny the Holy 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th Ecumenical Councils, the Monophysites, Monothelites, and Monoenergists, anathema, anathema, anathema. - Those who preach and teach the pan-heresy of Inter-Christian and Inter-Religious Syncretistic Ecumenism, anathema, anathema, anathema. From the above "anathemas" of the Metropolitan of Piraeus the following conclusions are obvious: The Church for centuries has not added anathemas for Papists or Protestants. The "anathemas" for the Jewish Rabbis and the Islamists are probably totally irrelevant, since they are not for other religions but for Christians who fell into heresy. Shouldn't Piraeus have anathemitized all other religions and not only the monotheistic ones, to be consistent with his ideology of the anathemas. The anathemas of the Monophysites are redundant, as the leaders of the Monophysites are included in the Synodikon. However all the additions of Seraphim give the impression of an "editor", not to mention a forger of the Synodikon of the Sunday of Orthodoxy. In particular, regarding the anathema of Pope Benedict 16th and the contemporary "pan-heresy of ecumenism", it is worth noticing that: 1. The Church of Greece, which the Metropolitan of Piraeus is under, consciously follows the Pan-Orthodox line (after relevant Pan-Orthodox decisions) and participates in dialogue with Roman Catholics. The anathema of the Pope by a prelate of the Greek Church creates a major issue between the two churches, whether they come from either a Roman Catholic or not. Has the Metropolitan of Piraeus really expressed the anathema of the Pope to the hierarchy of the Church of Greece? Should he not separate in every way his position from the "pan-heresy" of Dialogue?... END OF EXTRACT
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Sept 7, 2012 9:47:07 GMT
This is an unusual type of ecumenism.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 7, 2012 18:54:02 GMT
John Zmirak once wrote a version of THE GRAND INQUISITOR story in which the Inquisitor figure was a cardinal who wanted to destroy the Church out of false charity - he believed that if nobody had access to the Faith they would all be saved through invincible ignorance, and no-one would go to Hell. I think John Zmirak is much too enthusiastic about people going to Hell (especially, in his opinion, Hispanic immigrants and inner-city welfare recipients whom he sees as stealing his taxes) but I get his point. The Dimond brothers and certain other Feeneyites and mad-rad-trads seem to have the opposite attitude to Zmirak's imagined Cardinal. They give the impression that their ideal career would be as follows (a) Get elected Pope (b) Declare the most rigorous version of no salvation outside the Church to be infallible doctrine (c) excommunicate everyone except themselves for not living up to their standards (d) die without revoking any of said excommunications. Metropolitan Seraphim seems to be a Greek example of this mindset; at least he is rigorously logical (like Chesterton's lunatics) whereas Williamson seems to me to be driven by a terrible sort of malevolent whimsy, as if he was making it up as he goes along on the basis of whatever comes into his head. (Pat Buckley, oddly enough, gives me the same impression).
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Sept 18, 2012 11:48:50 GMT
The danger with enthusiasm for other people going to hell is the liklihood that one will join them oneself.
Did someone post the classical definition of Feeneyism sine fine (alternatively, without end or without Feeney, as the mindset came into vogue when Fr Feeney was reconciled but some of his followers believed he was hoodwinked into going along by the then Fr Avery Dulles, whom Fr Feeney received into the Church while he was still kosher. Not that he'd thank me for using that term.)
Anyway, the definition runs thus: We believe in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, subject to the Roman Pontiff, outside which there is no salvation and membership of which is mortally sinful.
That is equal opportunities damnation - we're all on the road to hell in that construct.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 19, 2012 20:54:26 GMT
What lies underneath it all, I must say, is egotism - the non serviam principle -which is guaranteed to get you on the road to Hell. As Milton's Satan put it:
Me miserable! which way shall I fly Infinite wrath and infinite despair? Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell; And in the lowest deep a lower deep, Still threat’ning to devour me, opens wide, To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 9, 2012 20:53:33 GMT
Here is an interesting piece on the distinction between tradition and nostalgia. It argues that nostalgia is about pining for an idealised past as a form of escapism ("If only I had lived in the Patristic era/Middle Ages/Ancien Regime France/the nineteenth century/ the 1950s" etc) whereas tradition is about drawing creatively on the past to address the deficiencies of the present (Thomist Revival, Ressourcement, etc). I think this is bang to rights - there is a type of traditionalism which it seems to me is not just about idealising a lost past, but idealising it precisely because it is lost and expressing hostility to any contemporary adaptations of tradition as being by definition a betrayal. Necrophilia is as much a heresy as neophilia. As Bl. Frederick Ozanam put it, a certain type of Catholic conservatism is always like the apostles in the boat during the storm, utterly convinced they are about to sink and doubting Jesus's ability to save them. From somebody who drew on the legacy of St Vincent de PAul and on the Catholic charitable institutions of the Middle ages to create one of the greatest Catholic bodies devoted to the corporal works of mercy, that's worth bearing in mind. www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2012/10/05/nostalgia-is-a-sin/EXTRACT But a love for tradition is not nostalgia. I’ve been teaching Flannery O’Connor in an online course, The Catholic Imagination, and in her gruesome story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” the characters of the grandmother, Red Sammy, and the Misfit indulge in nostalgia, the belief that the past was better than the present. For instance, the grandmother says, “In my time…children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then.” Red Sammy says, “A good man is hard to find…Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more.” The Misfit remembers fondly his father’s words and deeds. This nostalgia is not healthy; it keeps the characters constrained in their inauthentic ways, as they believe the present is a time when virtue and transformation is simply too difficult. As one who treasures the past, and who does believe that many things were better in the 50s — I mean the 1250s — and who values tradition in religion and culture, I was struck while thinking about this. Those of us who value tradition are often accused of nostalgia, of seeking greener pastures in the irrecoverable past. Nostalgia is a sin, a form of sloth, and engaging in it enervates discipleship and devotion. But tradition is different; tradition is not the dead faith of the living but rather the living faith of the dead, as Pelikan said. To live within and out of tradition is not to daydream about days gone by most of us never experienced anyway, but rather to ride the crest of the wave of God’s redemptive story as we live out our own stories within its broader plot. We have no other time than the present in which to live; all of us were called for such a time as this, this time, here, now, Today, as long as it is called Today, wherever and whenever we are. But we do not stand alone; we stand locked in arms not only with our sisters and brothers today in time and space but also in spirit with those gone before — St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Hildegard — indeed, the entire company of all the angels and saints, the Church Triumphant and the Church Militant. Where is this encounter to be found? Where meet heaven and earth, past and present, I and Thou? In the liturgy, in the Mass, borne forth by tradition and bearing tradition forth, in which together we encounter Christ our God in the Eucharist, the sacrament of all unity, the source and summit of Christian life. Here, the Church teaches, is the highest form of prayer, upon which daily prayer, devotion, and discipleship draw, and thus here, the crest of tradition, is whence we draw wisdom and courage for meeting the challenges of our present age. Nostalgia is a sin. Tradition is not nostalgia. END
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 18, 2013 22:32:04 GMT
Here's an example of what traditionalism isn't - or at least should not be. Mark Shea has found a self-described "TradCath" who nonetheless is a follower of "Pro-Western Christianity" - i.e the idea that Christianity should be redefined as a tribal religion for whites - declaring that "if some African witchdoctor is elected Pope, I'm leaving the Church". That won't be necessary, Buster - you've already left it. Apply to Bishop Williamson - he's more in your style. I have noticed similar sentiments, more cautiously expressed but unmistakable, among commenters on some US palaeocon blogs. When the future Herbert Cardinal Vaughan visited the Southern US states in the late C19 to found a missionary order of priests to work among American blacks, he was shocked by the racist hostility towards blacks he found among white Catholics. After an argument he told a Mother Superior, "May you have a high place in heaven, with a Negro on either side of you". Ten years later he met her again and she begged him to "take off that blessing, it has preyed on my mind so". In other words, she would rather not have a high place in heaven if blacks were there with her. It seems her spiritual descendants are still with us. Of course I am not saying African Catholics are all angels - but there is a difference between pointing out faults and being a racist, just as there is a difference between pointing out the flaws of Irish Catholicism and being anti-Irish www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2013/02/tradcatholic-writes.html
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Feb 20, 2013 8:45:58 GMT
The pro-western bit gets me. A lot of trads have a fascination with feudal Europe. Our experience in Ireland of the Norman period should at least make us skeptical of the vision of this ideal age (our Golden Age, riddled with its own problems I must add, was the pre-feudal period).
But the thing that got me were the commentators who missed Mark Shea's point. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of truth in his caricature of trads. And until trads overcome that, the traditional movement will never be really evangelical as it must be.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 21, 2013 17:36:07 GMT
There is a strain in the European (and to some extent American) far-right which uses Catholic mediaeval symbolism but which is really a form of neo-paganism. "Pro-Western Christianity" is really an example of this. It seems to be particularly common in France. There is a novel called THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS by Jean Raspail which is very often cited in far-right circles which is an example of this mindset. (I have not read the thing myself, but I have seen enough summaries and eulogies of it to have a fairly clear idea of the plot.) Basically, it supposes that a vast horde of Third World famine victims [from Bangladesh; the book was written in the early 1970s) decide to emigrate en masse to Europe. The European governments are paralysed by the realisation that the only way to stop these people would be to massacre them; the immigrants land and are welcomed by numerous liberal do-gooders (including church leaders) who are promptly trampled to death by the starving hordes. A small group of militants, who declare themselves defenders of western civilisation and use the language and insignia of crusaders, adopt the only possible means of defeating the invasion - that is, absolutely indiscriminate attacks on the immigrants with the aim of exterminating them. The goverments (and such do-gooders as have not yet been trampled to death) denounce this as fascism and use their armed forces to assist the migrants in destroying the neo-crusaders at a second Battle of Tours. With their defeat, western civilisation is destroyed. Two points about the neo-crusaders; they include an Indian from the French colony of Pondicherry who recognises the superiority of Western civilisation and is willing to die in its defence though he recognises its hopelessness - in other words, we're talking about a French style of cultural chauvinism (if you speak French and are willing to adopt French culture, then you are French) rather than biological racism. Secondly, although the neo-crusaders use the language and symbols of Christianity it is made clear that some or all of them, including their leader, do not really believe in Christianity. It is directly suggested that the Christian belief that everyone is equal as a child of God (with its secular offshoot of belief in universal human rights) and in a supernatural order transcending the material is responsible for the overthrow of Western civilisation, because if it is really internalised it makes you incapable of defending yourself against those who are determined to destroy you because you are different from them - according to this view, if Charles Martel and his men had really been Christians rather than warrior pagans with a slight Christian veneer, they would have laid down their arms before the Muslim invaders. Those who are familiar with the history of so-called "German Christianity" and its more explicitly neo-pagan offshoots (religious and political) will recognise where this sort of stuff comes from. Those who followed the recent rise to prominence of Mr Anders Behring Breivik (whose use of crusader symbolism is straight out of this mindset) will see what it leads to.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Feb 25, 2013 15:06:52 GMT
A lot of traditionalists live in a neo-mediaeval fantasy world and if they check, they have more in common with those European religions supplanted by Christianity.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 26, 2013 23:26:32 GMT
There is a very strong French tradition of right-wing occultism cloaking itself in the language and symbols of Catholicism, with the idea that there is a secret gnostic message revealed only to a chosen few. HEre is a brief account of an early practitioner en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A2r_P%C3%A9ladan Pierre Plantard, the fraudster who invented the fantasies which were picked up by the authors of THE HOLY BLOOD AND THE HOLY GRAIL and THE DA VINCI COD, drew on that tradition (how far he himself believed in his claim that the Merovingians were descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalen and he himself was a descendant of the Merovingians, is difficult to determine - it often is with this sort of fantasist). The DA VINCI COD is a hilarious example of a populist appeal (the idea that there is a Big Scary Secret which the official elites have concealed but of which you can possess yourself by paying the necessary tribute to Dan Brown and then congratulating yourself on your own cleverness) which is based on a fundamentally elitist and aristocratic set of assumptions. (The theory that Shakespeare's plays must have been written by an aristocrat rather than the son of a Stratford tradesman appeals to a similar mindset, and contains the hidden implication that to adopt this view automatically qualifies you as a natural aristocrat.) The monarchist guff that Charles Coulombe was pouring out to a trad audience some years ago (mostly now deleted from the Web, but you can find it in his book EVERYMAN TODAY CALL ROME) also drew on that French tradition of pseudo-Catholic occultism.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Feb 28, 2013 9:11:50 GMT
I think there is a general problem of traditional Catholics burying their heads in the sands of mediaevalism, monarchism and feudalism. At best it is romantic nonsense; at worst it is the path to neo-paganism and gnosticism. It is a very superficial appreciation of all these things and it is related to the stuff we have been talking about - apocalypiticism, conspiracy theory fanaticism, dodgy private revelations and following of peculiar writers and periodical. Coulombe is downright weird - and being awared a papal knighthood didn't help. Moves to get Michael Davies a papal knighthood (which I must say did not pursue the right channels) failed, but someone like Coulumbe got it. I digress. With regard to traditionalists - they ought to (even claim to) know enough about the faith to know what is expected of them without going into irrelevant intellectual (often pseudo-intellectual) quagmires they have so much affection for. These take away from their practice of the faith and at times, even lead them into heresies.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 28, 2013 22:46:23 GMT
To be fair, there is a sense in which trad monarchism is responding to a real phenomenon - the demise of Christendom since the French Revolution (which was unprecedented in that it did not define itself in terms of some form of Christianity) - and the alternative Catholic social project of an "appeal to the people" has not been very successful lately. The ongoing drive to secularise the state and expel religion from he public sphere which we are witnessing makes the old legitimist/integrist view that any compromise with liberalism leads straight to persecution seem a lot more plausible than it did 50-60 years ago. The trouble is that the Constantinian alternative (I note BTW that some trads are actually looking to Putin as a Constantine figure if only he and Russia could be converted) is a fantasy. It's not going to happen and if it did it would have its own extremely severe problems. I'm afraid it's back to the catacombs and that is what we need to prepare for, rather than campaigning for the restoration of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the like.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Mar 1, 2013 8:58:34 GMT
The catacombes may well come, but it strikes me that the better way to prepare for them is through public corporal works of mercy. If Catholics live the way they profess to believe, it will dull the blade raised against us.
BTW - I am principally preaching to myself here.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Mar 1, 2013 14:38:28 GMT
Much monarchism is romantic nonsense, but it must be clear it is a lost cause. Our position is definitely more difficult, but we should analyse what we can do.
There are many people out there whom secularising society is failing - the corporal works of mercy is probably the place to begin.
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