Fr Longenecker has just observed something which I first came to experience over 30 years ago:
As I travel around the country visiting parishes and speaking at conferences I am constantly amazed at the reality of two separate Catholic churches existing together with practically no conversation between them.
On the one hand we have what might be called the American Liberal Catholic Elite. They occupy most of the academic institutions. They have their own East Coast publishing houses, and universities with prestigious reputations. They write papers and award one another with honorary degrees and talk a lot about helping immigrants. In fact they don’t really talk about much of anything other than that and, of course, being kind to homosexual people and people who are divorced and remarried and so forth.
They do their theological writing and research and further their academic careers. They also pretty much dominate the hierarchy–most of whom are men from the same elitist background–or men who have clawed their way into it. They network together, ease the way for one another and put together an accepted, smooth public face of Catholicism in America. They are the establishment. They run things pretty much like a corporation or government bureaucracy, hiring public relations professionals, lawyers, fund raising companies, insurance firms and human resources professionals. It is fairly efficient, smooth and dull.
The liberal elite push their politically correct, essentially humanistic and rationalistic agenda using the usual mass media channels where they have friends and allies. Their religion is the acceptable moralistic, therapeutic Deism. Their audience are people much like themselves, Catholics of a certain generation who have presided over a disastrous departure from the faith. Their convents are empty. Their monasteries about to close, their seminaries shrinking and their families small. For this they usually blame shifting demographics and other cultural factors beyond their control. They see their mission now as managing the decline and continuing to adapt the faith to the surrounding culture in an attempt to keep the show on the road.
My experience of this "American Liberal Catholic Elite" Church, in which I was trained as a catechist, led me, once I returned to Fr.'s "second Church", which affirms the dynamism of the Second Vatican Council in a way the proponents of the “Spirit of Vatican II” detest, to quote one of the "elite's" spokespersons in The Smoke of Satan:
Hans Kung
protégé Leonard Swidler’s in his introduction to The Church in Anguish: Has
the Vatican Betrayed Vatican II? has written of Pope St.John Paul II's papacy:
….the anguish engendered in the Catholic church during
the past decade through what appears to many Catholics, and
non-Catholics, as an attempt by the present leadership in the Vatican to
reverse the momentous gains in maturity that were made at the Second Vatican
Council (1961-65)....Vatican II was clearly a peak experience. Today we seem to
be going through “the valley of the shadow...”
Here is a sample of the "politically correct, essentially humanistic and rationalistic agenda" worked in Fr. Kung, Swidler's mentor:
If you cannot see that divinity includes male and female characteristics and at the same time transcends them, you have bad consequences. Rome and Cardinal O'Connor base the exclusion of women priests on the idea that God is the Father and Jesus is His Son, there were only male disciples, etc. They are defending a patriarchal Church with a patriarchal God. We must fight the patriarchal misunderstanding of God.
To those who, along with Fr. Longenecker, have also experienced the first of his "two Catholic Churches," we are reminded that, at the close of
Vatican II, Pope Paul VI remarked that Christianity, the religion of
God-Incarnate, had encountered the religion of man-made God. He was of the
opinion that much of the Council was given over to demonstrating the
compatibility of Enlightenment belief with Catholicism, which spawned the elite's subsequent thinking and publishing. Several
years hence, on June 29, 1972, the Holy Father delivered
another assessment of the state of the Church since the close of
Vatican II. As Cardinal Silvio Oddi recalled it (in an article first published
on March 17, 1990, in Il Sabato magazine in Rome) the Holy Father told a
congregation:
We have the impression that through some cracks in the
wall the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God: it is doubt,
uncertainty, questioning, dissatisfaction, confrontation. And how did this come
about? We will confide to you the thought that may be, we ourselves admit in
free discussion, that may be unfounded, and that is that there has been a
power, an adversary power. Let us call him by his name: the devil. We thought
that after the Council a day of sunshine would have dawned for the history of
the Church. What dawned instead was a day of clouds and storms, of darkness, of
searching and uncertainties.
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