Dancing with Mr. D

In my Smoke of Satan I take up a discussion of how the ever-present schema of “liberal” (progressive, left) vs. conservative (traditional, right) which followed upon the close of Vatican II is wholly inadequate for explaining the present-day crisis of faith within the Church of Jesus Christ, though it is most unfortunate that usage of these terms persist among many Catholics and in the media today. Of late I have stumbled upon yet another label currently in vogue in the blogosphere, namely “neo-Catholics.” An attempt to discredit these Catholics has been made by two prominent traditionalists, Christipher Ferrara and Thomas Woods. One who has suffered the injustice of being labeled such by “Traditionalists”, Mark Shea, summarizes the views of this brand of Catholic, as follows [my take in brackets]:

The Second Vatican Council was a positively good thing. ….The pastoral strategy given by Gaudium et Spes is authoritative and, more importantly, correct. The problems in the Church following the council are not the fault of the conciliar documents themselves, but can be blamed on misinterpretation, misimplementation, or ignorance of them. [agreed]
The Bugninine liturgical reform was a positively good thing. [I highly doubt this] The problems following the promulgation of the new Mass are not the fault of the content, form or circumstances of origin of the new Mass itself, but can be blamed on liturgical abuse at the diocesan and parochial level. [True enough, but not the whole story] When celebrated reverently, there is "nothing illegitimate or doctrinally inexact" about the reformed liturgy. [True]
The ecclesiastical tradition of the Church has no permanent objective content. All "little T" traditions can and should be modified according to perceived pastoral or evangelical expediency. [can, but not necessarily “should”]
The pope can and should positivistically innovate in matters of liturgy and devotion. [not the teaching of the Church]
Ecumenism is a positively good thing and a "solemn and binding duty" on all believers. [Ecumenism properly understood]
Modern philosophical (e.g. phenomenology), artistic, and cultural (e.g. World Youth Day) forms can and should be used as vehicles for the Gospel, and there is nothing intrinsically and qualitatively superior about the forms used by the Church in the past (e.g. Thomism, Gothic architecture).
The 1992 Catechism is a "sure guide" to the faith, and can be considered a final authority on any matter it addresses. [True]
Disagreement with the above statements puts a Catholic in danger of "private judgment", "being more Catholic than the pope" or "Protestant mentality". [False]

Division within Christ’s Church is a clear attack by the evil one. Satan’s strategy here is the time-honored one of divide et impera - divide and conquer. Remember, too, Jesus' words to the Pharisees: “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand.” What are we to make of this branding of those who do not fit ones' personal interpretation of what is Catholic? Though I take it up at length in my book, the abbreviated version is, quite simply, membership in the Mystical Body of Christ presupposes personal conversion....

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Are We in a War?

Power Line POSTED ON NOVEMBER 22, 2020 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN DEMOCRATS , LIBERALS , SOCIALISM FIGHTING WORDS, BY DAVID HOROWITZ Our friend David Horowitz wrote this essay, which he titled “Fighting Words.” It is a call for freedom-loving Americans to fight back against the totalitarian Left. By now it should be obvious – even to conservatives – that we are in a war. It is a conflict that began nearly fifty years ago when the street revolutionaries of the Sixties joined the Democrat Party. Their immediate goal was to help the Communist enemy win the war in Vietnam, but they stayed to expand their influence in the Democrat Party and create the radical force that confronts us today. The war that today’s Democrats are engaged in reflects the values and methods of those radicals. It is a war against us – against individual freedom, against America’s constitutional order, and against the capitalist engine of our prosperity. Democrat radi...

A Book for all Seasons

Decades as a Christian leader — most notably at the U.N. as president of the Center for Family & Human Rights — have earned writer Austin Ruse, once a Washington liberal with little faith, his share of defeats and triumphs. Perhaps most valuably, he has intuited keen tactical insights from his confrontations with the dark side of human nature. You come away from this groundbreaking book with the sense that Ruse knows the enemy better than the enemy knows himself. In Under Seige, Ruse carefully examines how the anti-Christian forces gained power over every elite institution in America. He exposes their most deviant plans for the future. He then issues his authoritative call to arms, brilliantly arguing that there is no finer time to be a faithful Catholic. God Himself called each of us to live in this time and place, to contribute to the renewal society and the Church, and to vanquish the enemies of civilization. Ruse argues that each of us is called specifically to th...

Dancing With Mr. D: Grooming the Little Children

A former pro-transgender activist said she regretted her previous work in pro-transgender activism, adding she felt she was "indoctrinated" on gender ideology in an interview with Fox News Digital. "I started to realize that what I had been doing at my job at the LGBT Center, it was grooming," Kay Yang, a former employee of a location in New York, said. Grooming in this context means "to get into readiness for a specific objective." Kay works as a 'deprogrammer' to help parents and children who have been 'indoctrinated' by the 'cult-like' transgender agenda. Yang herself previously went by they/them and worked as a 'trans educator' in schools for years. Listen to her testimony.

On the Spirit of the Liturgy

Defending the papacy of Benedict XVI vs . the New York Times (!), Randall B. Smith has written : Like his predecessor before him, Benedict effectively carried on the authentic reforms of the Second Vatican Council, as opposed to the false “reforms” that so often led the Church astray in the post-conciliar period. A cardinal archbishop told an audience recently that the liturgy was so abused in the early seventies when he was in seminary that the faithful seminarians would say about the ersatz masses being done by their elders: “Everything in them changes but the bread and wine.” Benedict, by contrast, did a great deal to help realize the original intentions of the liturgical reformers. Given that the lex orandi (the law of praying) is intimately intertwined with the lex credendi (the law of believing)—which is another way of saying that what we pray is what we believe—reforming the liturgy has always been an absolutely essential way of helping...

Out of the Mouths of babes and Sucklings...

...Thou has effected praise! Click here should your faith have gone behind a cloud of late.

This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News

DANCING WITH MR. D: This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News : 'via Blog this'

Libido Redux Explained

When I read for the first time Pope Paul VI's 1972 “Smoke of Satan” homily, I was intrigued by his reference to the human sex drive as one way Satan can seek the ruin of souls. The sexual decadence of popular culture—in music, television, and videos—is only the most obvious manifestation. But let us consider from the standpoint of Catholic moral teaching the evils of fornication, adultery, cohabitation, divorce, bearing children outside wedlock and homosexual sex. Controlling these sins, living chastely, is a basic Catholic moral value. But I blog on these because, even as the social and economic results from these practices becomes ever more obvious and serious, priests and laity seem determined to ignore talking of them. No parish today seems willing to admonish or rebuke someone because of sexual misconduct, this in spite of the reality that it is precisely these sins that are wreaking havoc throughout society. Just what are social consequences of uncontrolled libido? For...

The 21st Century Must Come Into the Church

Continued from September 14.... T hrough the Church’s teachings, God has also revealed his truth on how humanity can live happily. What is so little understood by Catholics and Christians is that doctrinal revelations that come through the Church come out of God’s very Self. They are not tied to culturally constructed norms! Read Vatican II’s Dei Verbum : “by divine revelation God wished to manifest and communicate both himself and the eternal decrees of his will concerning the salvation of humankind.” Our Lord’s Church derives its basic vision not from mere human speculation, which would be tentative and uncertain, but from God’s own testimony—from a historically given divine revelation. Thus Catholics believe that just as God himself is immutable, so, too, are His teachings as revealed through the Church because they come from him. As I discuss in my book, although the Church does not change its central teachings, we do see the theological principle of “devel...

VATICAN III?

New York Times best-selling author and Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Regina Brett has issued a call for Vatican III . She says the Church needs true renewal. I agree that She does need true renewal, the best explanation of which is set down in Vatican II's call to personal holiness, yet to be acknowledged by a majority of Catholics in the U.S. at present (hence the Year of Faith!). Brett writes: " Instead of renewing our faith by returning to the fundamentals of church teachings, why not open our minds to a new church? It's been 50 years since Vatican II renewed the church and helped it face the modern world. The world has only gotten more modern. The Catholic Church hasn't." Just how will this produce true renewal? The New Evangelization is about true renewal, and the first step toward personal holiness. She also recites the familiar " God speaks, not only through popes, bishops and priests, but through ordinary p...

The Body of Christ and the City of Men

The “Statement of Principles” issued by select Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives on June 18, disapproving of Bishops in the United States for allegedly “politicizing the Eucharist” is an example of deceitful equivocation. Essentially, the Statement maintains that the Bishops should not “politicize” the Eucharist. On this the insight of Flannery O’Connor proves enlightening: Those whose lives are not ordered by, around, and toward the Eucharist, therefore, are those whose lives are defined by some love other than love of the Christ who is present there. Rather, their lives are ordered by the earthly city, manifest in this case, by, variously, partisan political identity or individual, radially sovereign conscience. This applies across the American political spectrum, to those who deny human dignity of the unborn, the immigrant, and the person on death row. In Catholic teaching the Eucharist creates St. Augustine’s City of God, the definit...

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