*
Anyone who hopes that resurgent Western Catholicism might be the force that defeats policial correctness/ liberalism should take a look at this wonderful blog:
http://badvestments.blogspot.com/
The content is very funny - at first; but then induces despair.
*
For a shred of hope you might then take a look at:
http://www.sspx.co.uk/
which has an inspiring banner on Google Search that reads:
"Dedicated to providing training for the Catholic priesthood without any trace of modernist doctrine, morals or worship."
"...without any trace..." - I love that bit!
*
(Sadly, there is an awful lot of Bad Vestments Catholocism: while the SSPX brand is very small and continually persecuted... although certainly things have improved consderably under Pope Benedict XVI.)
*
11 comments:
the writer of bad vestments, Christopher Johnson, is a protestant minded Anglican. Most of the liturgical crimes committed showcased on that blog are by Episcopal/Anglican priests/bishops. Your larger point is still correct, that there is no hope for a Western renewal from protestants/ modernist Catholics.
I was using 'catholic' in its general sense...
Interesting--childishness as a substitute for transcendence. People going to church for the sake of the children. Mommies becoming priests. It all hangs together, but who knew that the bold new thinking would all come to this?
On the broader point, though, corruption, idiocy, and political correctness can be found everywhere. That's the problem. When things are bad, the issue is where the right principles can be found. The claim is that the structure of the Western Church can preserve them through the worst times. It's not a matter of relative bulk.
JK - yes indeed. And we are told that The Church will survive, also that it will have become very small.
My worry is that churches of the Bad Vestments type may actually be part of the problem not the solution - may actually be harming people considerably.
Some of the topical intercessionary prayers, for example, seem actively mischevious.
"Terminal Moraine" :)
Love it.
You're getting scarily poetical, Bruce.
I used to live on the terminal moraine at Cromer, Norfolk.
Fortunately, it pre-dated PC, at least at that time.
I cannot tell a lie: I stole and adapted the terminal moraine comparison from the mythologist Joseph Campbell...
Agreed that bad churches are a big problem--lilies that fester and all that. Hell is paved with the skulls of bishops.
Terminal moraines on the other hand are good. I live on one here in Brooklyn.
What I (and Jos Campbell) mean by the terminal moraine metaphor derives from its being a jumble of rocks carried from here, there and elsewhere, and dumped in a disorganized (from the geological perspective) heap.
Terminal Moraine is good, no matter what the intent is, in it's use as a metaphor.
It's what you end up with, where it is, and how it is, at the end of an era.
The End.
As in New Beginnings, and making use of the debris of what went before.
I gotta stop this eternal optimism stuff. It has not generally served me well.
This is part of the assault on categorical reasoning: just because one is in a church, or a right-wing group, doesn't mean that what is right is being done.
Language is a bad conveyor of anything other than static categories; we need a self-replenishing culture that produces, in each generation, people of the powerful intuition to tell the difference between a false surface and depth.
So it seems to me. Good to see Jim Kalb hanging out here. It's like a "society reconstructors" celebrity club around here.
Asinine perversions of the liturgy (such as depicted at badvestments) are most unlikely to be permitted within the Eastern Orthodox Church, I think.
Post a Comment