Identifying the Issues

There is no real dispute that there is an immense crisis in the Catholic Church today. This crisis has been described accurately as another Passion besetting the Mystical Body of Christ. There is, I suppose, some dispute as to the nature and extent of today's crisis and whether it is different in magnitude or type from previous crises. 

I propose that today's crisis is the most serious crisis ever to have happened in the history of the Church and that this is due to the nature of the crisis itself. 

In former times, various heresies besieged the Catholic Church, sometimes gathering to their errors vast multitudes of unwitting laity and complicit bishops and priests. We are all familiar with the dark times of the Arian heresy, and we live with the aftermath of the Protestant Revolt everyday. Still, today's crisis is nothing more than an outright Modernist upheaval attacking the Church's members at every level of the hierarchy and capturing uncatechized laity in its skewed thinking without their even being aware that they have been infected. 

In a certain sense, this crisis has been presented as merely one affecting liturgical practice resulting in bizarre pseudo-Protestant rituals performed in the hollowed-out shells of formerly Catholic buildings. Assuredly, this is a hallmark of the crisis, but in a way, the focus on the liturgical revolution as the problem instead of a symptom of many larger problems has served to minimize the actual extent of the crisis wrought by the near wholesale acceptance of the Modernist heresy as the de facto intellectual framework operative in the Church for the past 50 years. 

It is the erroneous thought process of Modernism that has so successfully subjected doctrine to practice in a complete inversion of the Church's perennial methodology. Remember that Modernism itself is a way of thinking that immanates from the individual, who creates his own reality and truth, while sometimes retaining the same vocabulary as former generations. One cannot believe a Modernist because words have no objective meaning to him. And words aren't the only thing lacking objectivity as the Modernist conception of God Himself is a construction of the individual's making. Hence, Modernist liturgical practice focuses on the individual and his "experience" and feelings. So, you can see the necessity for Modernists to invert the traditional roles of doctrine and practice--to them, there is no doctrine in the way Catholics would understand the word. There is only practice, from which the individual produces whatever conceptions he might create. 

This is a concrete problem that was presumed to be codified by the recent "pastoral council" of unhappy memory. And it continues to be problematic as members of the hierarchy hope to subject Our Lord's clear teaching on marriage to modern sensibilities by, once again, elevating practice above doctrine. 

What is one to do when one recognizes, with the assistance of grace and the God-given intellect, that Modernist heretics have won the temporal victory in our times? The crisis is, after all, a crisis of Faith for everyone involved. The heretics (yes, even in the hierarchy) have lost the faith and departed from it in ways that affect us by promoting anger and dismay, among other reactions. Many priests are indoctrinated in erroneous thinking in the seminary. And those priests have arisen from the ranks of a laity that has largely lost the faith or who see our Holy Catholic Church as merely another option among many that are presented to our completely pluralistic society as equal and equivalent. Finally, the crisis of faith makes those who wish to remain faithful to the Faith of our Fathers question their standing--it calls them schismatic, traditionalist, Pelagian, Jansenist, nostalgic, and backward.

With this global view of the crisis, we can justifiably ask what are our options? What should we do? What can we do?