Question..... Is there something wrong with being a traditionalist? Or a conservative? I was just wondering because it seems to be the groups that are being more heavily attacked. We are rigid and archaic and not wanting to live in the modern world and see "reason". Honestly, I thought being a traditionalist or conservative was just another group of thoughts that we were allowed to ascribe to based on experiences and study. If our rights are given by God, then what makes my conservative beliefs any less valid? I don't expect my pope to chide me for a God given right of liberty and the right to a human opinion, which is granted whole heartedly to the opposite side of the fence. I attend a NO Mass. The NO is valid. The TLM I attend, I love it. I don't attend as often as I like because it is an hour away and I have local obligations. But still, I have a preference for the traditional thoughts. Is that wrong? I am not rigid. I am not angry and I don't hate people that have a more liberal thinking. So why is it that I, as a traditional conservative am chided for holding an opinion? Of course I know the answer but I always find it amusing that people with opposite beliefs are darn sure they are absolutely correct. And theirs is the straight course. I, as a conservative, couldn't possibly offer any insight. In the end, God wins so none of this matters anyway. I will do my duty and worship God, stay in a state of Grace, go to confession when I am not, vote, raise my children and otherwise try to be a good human for the planet. The fact that I believe in traditional thinking will not doom the Earth.
It seems that under Pope Francis the only grave sins of the day are related to those who oppose climate change as the elites believe, being anti LGBTQ, being opposed to fornication, globalism, sovereignty of country and democracy and holy communion for all, and who am I to judge. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord who is the same yesterday, today and always.
I dislike instinctively the Labels, 'Conservative', 'Traditional', 'Liberal' et al for Catholics. The word ..'Catholic' itself means Universal. We belong to one Church not several parts of one Church. The Robe of Christ is not rent. Christ is not married to several Brides but one. Of course in these very difficult times we are draw to use short cuts in description, but still. 1 Corinthians 1:10-17 A Church Divided Over Leaders 10 I appeal to you, brothers and sisters,a]">[a] in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought. 11 My brothers and sisters, some from Chloe’s household have informed me that there are quarrels among you. 12 What I mean is this: One of you says, “I follow Paul”; another, “I follow Apollos”; another, “I follow Cephasb]">[b]”; still another, “I follow Christ.” 13 Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in the name of Paul? 14 I thank God that I did not baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius, 15 so no one can say that you were baptized in my name. 16 (Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I don’t remember if I baptized anyone else.) 17 For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with wisdom and eloquence, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.
I agree Padraig. I am Catholic which should be the first words out of my mouth . But there is a range of thought allowed within Catholic teaching and we should all be able to discourse within that. Unfortunately, we are so removed from God in general society, and sometimes now even the Church, that holding up Catholic teaching is seen as rigid. It's not, it's Catholic teaching. Some of it from the beginning. America has polluted the table with turning everything into a "them and us". We are so political. My husband was listening to a podcast the other day and it ran into dinner time, which is usually a time for no technology. My daughter got so upset because she said she didn't want to hear politics yet again. She had been bombarded with it at school and friend conversations. Poor thing. My husband apologized but it was a good picture of what we are dealing with. We are saturated and the general trend is to pick a side. I don't like picking a side for the sole purpose of arguing. I just don't want to be considered some kind of evil person because I don't happen to believe in climate change or married priests or abortion or......and the list goes on. I do actually remember a time when we could be neighbors and hold diametrically opposed thoughts and it was OK. It is getting harder to do that. Common civility seems to be a rare thing now. And if you don't believe in the narrative of the day then there is something wrong with "you". No there isn't. I have a differing opinion. Mother Teresa said something once that has me thinking often on it: Abortion “is really a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself,” “If we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?” If it is okay to kill a baby in the womb, then it is okay to do anything. You cannot say something is wrong, if child-murder is right. This is bottom-of-the-barrel morality. Taking God out of society, of which abortion is definitely a part of that, has left us with no respect for life. Culture of death as JPII said. We don't respect life. We don't respect each other and so it is easy to say "they" are different or separate. The devil is a smart cookie and we are dumb. No wonder satan has hated God for God loves us so much He died for us, us lowly stupid wretched people. It just has bothered me for awhile that the pope, Vicar of Christ, says such unloving things to a part of the Church. He has an opinion and has decided that his opinion is correct and anyone not on board is rigid and unloving. But I guess, in the end, the pope is human and fallen just as the rest of us. I lift him up in prayer daily.
I agree that Catholic means 'universal'. I also don't believe there are several brides. I consider that those who subvert and even invert the Revealed Truth of the Holy Roman and Apostolic Catholic Church founded by Christ Jesus are simply not brides; they are not Catholics, they are apostates. There are some who deviantly plot in a legalistic and clerical manner to technically avoid seeming to cross the line, but who are they fooling? Will this work on that Dreadful Day? Poor Tanker is torturing herself for being traditional, which will bring her many Graces. But being traditional relates to the root of the word, the Latin word tradere, which means 'to hand over, to give for safekeeping'. To remain in the tradition is to remain in the Truth that has been handed over and kept safe for generation upon generation right back to the time when Our Lord instructed us, as revealed by the Gospels, and further in his teaching to the Apostles that was handed over orally and written down by the Fathers. That's all we need. The Catholics of the first centuries were just as Catholic as any since, indeed a lot more than the pagans and atheists that now pretend to be the most Catholic people that have ever existed and who claim to be at least the equal of Christ Himself. Let that latter absurdity (that's being overly charitable, it's sacrilege, blasphemy and apostasy and all from Lucifer) sink in and let's remember we are safe with Our Lord, His Mother, the Apostles and the Fathers, no matter what they do.
Padraig, that graph is very instructive. I think it displays a distinction. I think there is a difference in the various tragic breaks between ourselves and the various Orthodox and Eastern Churches and that between ourselves and the Protestants. By their fruits shall you know them. To my limited awareness, the various schismatic churches of the East, such as the Greeks, the Russians, the Copts, the Assyrians and the Ethiopians have been very successful in preserving the Faith, even against the terrifying oppression of the Mohammedans. They broke with us certainly, but seemingly with sincere and conscientious arguments. The Protestants, on the other hand, were a rebel rabble with an eye to the main chance, who to my mind exploited religion for mere material and economic gain. By their fruits shall you know them. The fruits have been established state religion, secularism, 'Enlightenment', Deism, Freemasonry, agnosticism, atheism and ultimately the now emergent progressivist luciferianism. The only Protestants that remain Christian, as far as I can see are the ones that protested against establishment Protestantism from within, notably the Evangelicals and the Pentecostalists.
Maybe the best post I have ever read here. Should be one of those 'stickies'. This describes perfectly what it is to try to live now as a faithful Catholic.
I think of the word , 'Conserve', as to keep. Or the word , 'Traditional', as to maintain Traditions. The Role of the Pope, any Pope is to Conserve the Traditional Teaching of the Church. Rather like the Role of a Shepherd whose Role to to mind the sheep rather than say run off to become, say an IT specialist. Thus the Church herself of her very nature is Conservative or Traditional of her own innate nature. The same thing should be true of the Papacy itself. The danger I think rises when we use the word as a label. Then it tends to the Schismatic to the political, to the Partisan. However they are such convenient descriptive shortcuts they are hard not to use in real life.
I suspect that graph was made by a Protestant as a self justification (look how thick the Protestant green line is)
Aye, and note the false distinction between Anglicanism and Protestantism per se. As we in Ireland know, who bore the brunt of it, Anglicanism was absolutely Protestant and the most vicious, ruthless, bigoted Protestant sect of all. No other branch of Protestantism was so coldbloodedly singleminded in its murderous persecution of Catholicism.
I think you could think of the Church as a vehicle. A horse carriage maybe. Meant to be slow and kind of bumbling along. (well it is 2,000 years old) But now if you take the Church and try to turn it into something which it , by its very nature it is not , say a team of racing horses it will tear itself apart. (this was a bad effect of Vatican 2 people tried to introduce too many racing horses too quickly) This is what is causing so many waves at the moment . Too many racing horses, many of them very bad racing horses. So if Pope Francis and others asked me for advice it would be no more changes, no more of these huge conversations. Give the poor old horse a rest. Go and pray somewhere and be quiet for a few years.Say a few prayers Give it all a rest.
Our Lord favoured the donkey. An ass and cart might be more apt a description. Stubborn and reliable, if wholly devoid of flash!
"The death of God in a society also means the end of freedom, because what dies is the purpose that provides orientation... Western society is... a society in which the measure of humanity is increasingly lost." —Emeritus Pope Benedict at the beginning of 2019, writing just before his 92nd birthday, in an essay entitled "The Church and the Scandal of Sexual Abuse." He says he wrote the text hoping to help orient the discussions of the February 21-24, 2019 "clerical abuse summit" in Rome, a gathering summoned by Pope Francis of all of the presidents of the world's bishops' conferences. Benedict said he wrote "to discuss the current crisis of the faith and of the Church, a crisis experienced throughout the world after shocking revelations of clerical abuse perpetrated against minors" (link to the full text). Benedict's text was not presented to the February meeting, and the bishops attending were therefore not able to know Benedict's thoughts on these matters. Benedict's text was made public by Benedict himself via publication in a small German Catholic journal in April "The crisis... urges us to regard the Church as something almost unacceptable, which we must now take into our own hands and redesign. But a self-made Church cannot constitute hope.... The idea of a better Church, created by ourselves, is in fact a proposal of the devil." —Ibid. "The office divinely committed to Us of feeding the Lord's flock has especially this duty assigned to it by Christ, namely, to guard with the greatest vigilance the deposit of the faith delivered to the saints, rejecting the profane novelties of words and oppositions of knowledge falsely so called. There has never been a time when this watchfulness of the supreme pastor was not necessary to the Catholic body; for, owing to the efforts of the enemy of the human race, there have never been lacking 'men speaking perverse things' (Acts xx. 30), 'vain talkers and seducers' (Tit. i. 10), 'erring and driving into error' (2 Tim. iii. 13). Still, it must be confessed that the number of the enemies of the cross of Christ has in these last days increased exceedingly, who are striving, by arts entirely new and full of subtlety, to destroy the vital energy of the Church, and, if they can, to overthrow utterly Christ's kingdom itself. Wherefore, We may no longer be silent, lest We should seem to fail in Our most sacred duty, and lest the kindness that, in the hope of wiser counsels, We have hitherto shown them, should be attributed to forgetfulness of Our office." —Pope St. Pius X, in his great encyclical condemning the errors of Modernism, Pascendi Dominici Gregis ("Of Feeding the Lord's Flock"), published on September 8, 1907 (112 years ago yesterday). These are the first lines of the document. A few days ago, on the feast day of Pope Pius X, Pope Francis unexpectedly came into St. Peter's Basilica and sat in the back row as a Mass was being celebrated at the tomb of St. Pius X Monday, September 9, 2019 — Feast of St. Peter Claver, S.J. (1580-1654) St. Peter Claver was born at Verdu, Catalonia, Spain, in 1580, of impoverished parents descended from ancient families. He studied at the Jesuit college of Barcelona, entered the Jesuit novitiate at Tarragona in 1602, and took his final vows on August 8th, 1604. While studying, the young religious was influenced by St. Alphonsus Rodriguez to go to the Indies and save "millions of perishing souls." In 1610, he landed at Cartagena (modern Colombia), the principle slave market of the New World, where a thousand slaves were landed every month. After his ordination in 1616, he dedicated himself by special vow to the service of the slaves — a work that was to last for 33 years. He labored unceasingly for the salvation of the African slaves and the abolition of the slave trade, and the love he lavished on them was something that transcended the natural order. Boarding the slave ships as they entered the harbor, he would hurry to the revolting inferno of the hold, and offer whatever poor refreshments he could afford; he would care for the sick and dying, and instruct the slaves before administering the Sacraments. Through his efforts, 300,000 souls entered the Church. Furthermore, he did not lose sight of his converts when they left the ships, but followed them to the plantations to which they were sent, encouraged them to live as Christians, and prevailed on their masters to treat them humanely. He died in 1654.
"For the Modernists, both as authors and propagandists, there is to be nothing stable, nothing immutable in the Church." —St. Pius X, Ibid. Paragraph 28 "With his new political and theological approach, Pope Francis is doing something truly revolutionary — he is reshaping the fundamental identity of Catholicism in the 21st century. From the beginning of its institutional history in the 4th century A.D., the Catholic Church has defined itself as the 'one true Church,' to the exclusion of all other paths to salvation... But the pope’s open-minded acceptance of the legitimacy of other roads to God represents more than grudging acceptance of an increasingly diverse and secular reality. It heralds a fundamental shift in the church’s aspirations. As he uses his bully pulpit to promote mutual understanding and acceptance, Francis is trading the aspirations to universality that have guided the church since its institutional beginnings for a looser agenda based on the 'care of creation.'” —Adam Littlestone-Luria, a PhD Candidate in ancient history at the University of California, Berkeley, September 24, 2017, in the Washington Post "After all, the document Amoris laetitia arose from a new paradigm that Pope Francis is pursuing with wisdom, prudence and even patience. Probably, the difficulties that have arisen and still exist in the Church, beyond some aspects of the [document's] content, are due precisely to this change in attitude that the Pope asks of us. A paradigm shift, inherent in the very text itself, which is asked of us: this new spirit, this new approach!" —Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Secretary of State of the Holy See, January 11, 2018, in an interview with Vatican News (link) "The Lord Jesus, before ascending into heaven, commanded his disciples to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world and to baptize all nations." —Opening words of the Declaration Dominus Iesus ("The Lord Jesus"), published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on August 6, 2000, the Feast of the Transfiguration signed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) and then-Archbishop (later Cardinal) Tarcisio Bertone (link to the full text of Dominus Iesus) "With the coming of the Savior Jesus Christ, God has willed that the Church founded by him be the instrument for the salvation of all humanity (cf. Acts 17:30-31). This truth of faith does not lessen the sincere respect which the Church has for the religions of the world, but at the same time, it rules out, in a radical way, that mentality of indifferentism 'characterized by a religious relativism which leads to the belief that ‘one religion is as good as another.'” —Ibid., Paragraph 22 "Do you, sons of St. Ignatius, soldiers of the Society of Jesus, want even today and tomorrow and always to be what you were from your beginnings right up to today, for the service of the Catholic Church and of this Apostolic See? There would be no reason for asking this question had not certain reports and rumors come to our attention about your Society, just as about other religious families as well, which — and We cannot remain silent on this — have caused us amazement and in some cases, sorrow. "What strange and evil suggestions have caused a doubt to arise in certain parts of your widespread Society whether it should continue to be the Society conceived and founded by that holy man, and built on very wise and very firm norms? The tradition of several centuries ripened by most careful experience and confirmed by authoritative approvals has shaped the Society for the glory of God, the defense of the Church and the admiration of men. In the minds of some of your members, has the opinion really prevailed to the effect that all human things, which are generated in time and inexorably used up in time, are subject to an absolute law of history as though in Catholicism there were no charism of permanent truth and of invincible stability? This rock of the Apostolic See is the symbol and foundation of this charism."—Pope Paul VI (1963-1978), Address to the Members of the Jesuit General Congregation, November 16, 1966. Paul VI was concerned that some of the changes in the life and discipline of the Jesuit order proposed after the Second Vatican Council might be harmful to the order's mission to defend and promote the Church and the faith "ad majoram Dei gloriam" ("to the greater glory of God")
'The crisis... urges us to regard the Church as something almost unacceptable, which we must now take into our own hands and redesign. But a self-made Church cannot constitute hope.... The idea of a better Church, created by ourselves, is in fact a proposal of the devil."'
What strange and evil suggestions have caused a doubt to arise in certain parts of your widespread Society whether it should continue to be the Society conceived and founded by that holy man, and built on very wise and very firm norms? The tradition of several centuries ripened by most careful experience and confirmed by authoritative approvals has shaped the Society for the glory of God, the defense of the Church and the admiration of men. In the minds of some of your members, has the opinion really prevailed to the effect that all human things, which are generated in time and inexorably used up in time, are subject to an absolute law of history as though in Catholicism there were no charism of permanent truth and of invincible stability? This rock of the Apostolic See is the symbol and foundation of this charism."—Pope Paul VI (1963-1978), Address to the Members of the Jesuit General Congregation, November 16, 1966. Paul VI was concerned that some of the changes in the life and discipline of the Jesuit order proposed after the Second Vatican Council might be harmful to the order's mission to defend and promote the Church and the faith "ad majoram Dei gloriam" ("to the greater glory of God")
