Well, I just spent an hour writing an addendum to Marc’s
fine piece on the SSPX. The gist of it was that Vatican II was an attempt to
respond to the new conditions of the twentieth century, and that those
conditions have changed so drastically just in the past 50 years as to render
many of the pastoral statements of VII outdated. The changes include massive
rises in divorce and abortion rates, the Pill, the coming out of the LGBT
movement, the vastly increased importance of developing nations, consumerism
far in excess of that of the 1960’s, cloning, computing, communications, and
the Internet, all of which have actual or potentially profound theological
consequences. I wrote about how the hierarchy, in implicitly portraying VII as
a dogmatic rather than a pastoral council, has adopted a position that is
implicitly indefensible given these vast and ongoing changes, and that simply
defining it as a pastoral council would make the problem go away entirely, at
the expense of a hysterical outcry from vast swaths of laity, priests, and
bishops who have either been unwittingly infected by or willingly embraced the
heresy of modernism. The only alternative is for the hierarchy to formally
embrace modernism, which will result in schism, scandalization and confusion of
the laity and the world, the endangering of souls, and ultimately a much
smaller Church on the order of the first century Church: little-known,
unheeded, ridiculed, and violently persecuted.
Alas, through a hiccup I lost the entire post. Due entirely
to age and poor reflexes, I clicked not one, but two wrong buttons in a row.
What are the odds? I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. (This from a
person who stored multiple copies of important files in locations farther away
from each other than the diameter of a megaton-range airburst back in the days
before the Cloud.)
2 comments:
I wish I could've read the whole thing. This is a good post. The key to settling this whole thing with VII is to understand and proclaim that it was a pastoral council. However, many high-ranking churchmen see VII as their life's work. We will likely have to wait until everyone at the Council is dead to properly view it as it is: An interesting historical curiousity thats pastoral message was outdated before the ink was dry on the page.
Take consolation in knowing that the Holy Spirit is at work in your life. You say that your original post could have been taken out of context- the Holy Spirit spared you from that!
If only the V2 documents had been done on computer...(sigh)
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