Here's Another Puzzle For Traditionalists
Pelosi was given the honor of meeting with the Pope on Saturday.
Pelosi was also invited to do a reading during Mass at St Patrick’s Catholic American Parish in Rome. But there was some form of a “security incident” according to Paulist Fr. Steven Petroff, rector of St. Patrick’s, who was saying the Mass. The Rome correspondent for The Epoch Times described it as Pelosi being “heckled.”
We know little else about the incident, except that according to Fr Petroff, there was some type of disruption that caused her security detail to take her out of the mass before she could do the second reading, which would be Hebrews 4: 12-13:12 For the word of God is living and effectual, and more piercing than any two edged sword; and reaching unto the division of the soul and the spirit, of the joints also and the marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
13 Neither is there any creature invisible in his sight: but all things are naked and open to his eyes, to whom our speech is.
If I were she, I might take the circumstances as a caution of some sort, but I doubt if she even gave the passage any thought or study before she was going to read it. It may as well have been in Latin.Which brings me to yet another puzzle: Pelosi, born in 1940, would have been confirmed in the early 1950s, well before any innovations in the Church. She would have been 30 by the time the novus ordo was promulgated, in other words a cradle Catholic fully formed by adulthood, all of that time hearing the mass in Latin under the old calendar and lectionary. According to traditionalists, this is just the thing that will restore the Church, right?
So how come Pelosi is at odds with the very wing of the Church that's most sympathetic to traditionalists? I suspect her own Abp Cordileone would have problems with her serving as a lector within his archdiocese (I don't know if she ever does -- if anyone knows, I'll be interested to hear). And I think this goes to the question of how the Church has changed since Vatican II.
All visibly attended mass, but I very much doubt if any ever went to confession, or if they did, it never had much effect. None seems ever to have had a problem with the public scandal he created, but they were all happy to campaign on the Catholic brand.
It's plain that the US bishops are less and less comfortable with that sort of arrangement, and Abp Cordileone has been increasingly vocal in his warnings to Pelosi that Catholic politicians shouldn't campaign on the brand if they don't support Catholic teaching.
This is a post-Conciliar development and a good one. It's reflected in a YouTube presentation by Bp Barron prior to the Catholic Paul Ryan's retirement as Speaker suggesting that Republican views like Ryan's were incresingly acceptable to Catholics and, by extension, the Catholic hierarchy. Ryan, born in 1970, was also formed entirely under novus ordo.
One clear intent of the Vatican II constitutions that produced novus ordo was to increae lay involvement in the mass and, by implication, the overall life of the Church. It's significant that somehow a vetus ordo machine politician like Speaker Pelosi should find herself in difficulties trying to participate in a novus ordo mass, in Rome, so soon after meeting with the pope.
But the changes go beyond that. There was nothing new in the clergy abuse scandal. Cardinal McCarrick, born in 1930, was convicted of abuse committed in the 1990s but was almost certainly part of a pattern over a much longer period, and which wasn't unique in the pre-Conciliar, Latin mass hierarchy. It was only in a post-Conciliar environment that laity could play a major role in addressing this problem.
I don't see how a return to the bad old days helps anything.
1 Comments:
The rot before the Council existed well before the Council. Sexual deviance ala Ted McCarrick in particular is a cyclical issue of lax discipline as the Liber Gomorrhianus and Horrendum illud scelus demonstrate that requires a firm push from the papacy through the hierarchy to correct lapses in chastity. The simple fact is that from the early 1900s, the stress on the ontological change overrode all other considerations and the disciplines for involuntary laicization as urged by St. Peter Damian and by Fr. Gerald Fitzgerald, who warned Paul VI in 1963 about the situation and even bought an island all the deviants could be shipped to for penance away from any temptation.
The old days were not perfect. They produced many monsters, as well as saints. JFK was in retrospect a quite despicable man with many afflictions and hardly an exemplar of Catholicism. We can only beg God's mercy for him and pray he repented in his heart and made an honest act of contrition on that morning in Dallas. Similarly so with Pelosi. In better days both would refused the Sacraments for the good of their souls up to and including Last Rites and Christian burial in urging them to repentance.
On the other hand, every single saint in the western calendar was formed by the traditional Mass and liturgy. The most recently canonized popes like John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II were formed and nurtured by it. The entire world from Germanic tribesman, Frankish serfs, Africans and Japanese et al were evangelized by a Latin and formal liturgy. The Cristeros and English Martyrs only knew a traditional Latin liturgy and did not meet their ends for tropes like vernacular or versus populum.
You don't understand traditionalist perspective. Abp. Cordileone does say many good things. He has celebrated the traditional rite as a bishop and has provided traditional confirmations and even ordinations for the FSSP. He is relatively friendly to traditionalists but is no traditionalist himself and he was reared it and primarily celebrates the novus ordo. He's what trads call a "conservative" who isn't really conserving much. He makes a public statement now and then that sounds good but has he done anything to curb the open promotion of sodomy by clerics in his diocese or imposed ecclesiastical discipline on either lay or clerical public dissenters from the post conciliar Church on abortion or gay marriage? Of course not. Similar so for Benedict XVI.
What traditionalists want is what Catholics have always wanted through the ages: the exaltation of our Holy Mother the Church, the propagation of the faith, the extirpation of heresy, the conversion of sinners, concord between Christian princes, and the welfare of Christian people. These were the traditional intentions of the popes, which we maintain, regardless of whether the modern popes still do or not. Beyond these, we only want to worship as our grandfathers and a thousand years of saints.
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