The enthroned god of this age is Self, his second person is Pleasure, and his third person is Égalité

Recently, I had occasion to discuss the Church situation at One Peter Five. Below is one of my Comments.

Mr X, thanks for responding. Much appreciated. You write: My "admirable sentiment" isn't equivalent to anything like "I'm ok, you're ok".

How is it not? I’m honestly interested in how you’d explain that. The enthroned god of this age is Self, his "second person" is Pleasure, and his "holy ghost" is Égalité. You continue: My concern here is to clarify that the Novus Ordo is _the ordinary rite of mass_ in the Roman Catholic church, and that it should be treated as such.

Technically, legally, and obviously by imperial papal prescript via Summorum Pontificum, that’s true. Pope Benedict 16 specifically said so. But the article is about how the old Mass (specially the High versions thereof, of which there are three) is superior.

The unspoken conclusion is the bone of contention among the Commentators – that the N.O. Mass should be scrapped and the old one restored. Some go all the way with that, most (I would be one) say let those who want it have it but for Heaven's sake, dump the Cranmer Table and turn the priest around correctly. To be sure, I would not want it called or designated the "ordinary" form, of course; and indeed, the very phrase "ordinary form" is an insult to what the Divine Liturgy is. Anyway, all this in turn conjures the query: Well, how'd we get something defective in the first place? Not trying to be “cute” or “argumentative” but I believe there are 23 different rites in the Universal, or Catholic Church. “Roman Catholic” usually refers to the Latin Western Church, but it is no longer “Latin”. As a matter of dogmatic faith, the Universal Church consists of the bishop of Rome and all the bishops in Communion with him, whatever their liturgy. However, the current pope, Jorge Bergoglio, is acting highly irregularly and many – and I mean MANY – people are losing their faith. Perhaps it is true he's not really pope, because of the manner in which Benedict abdicated. But in the meantime, however that is eventually decided, we have an absolute, stone-cold, first-class crisis.

However, that in turn is yet merely the modern-day example of what’s been going on since Vatican II and especially the post-Conciliar “Spirit of Vatican II”.

It’s a HUGE scandal. About one-half of all Catholics simply walked away from the Faith between 1963 and 1983. (A poll down in ’63 show 2/3s, 3/4s of all U.S. Catholics attended at Mass on a Sunday morning (no Sat “vigil” masses then); a

poll done in ’83 showed exactly the reverse. So, where did they go?) You quote St. Paul to me: 10 "Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters,[d] by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose." NRSV. Admirable, once again. But who's been paying attention to that since Luther? A. B., the Catholic Church has been in de facto schism since so many theologians, clergy, and laity dissented from Humanae Vitae way back in 1968.

There's even a C: St. Paul did not mean that the Corinthian Christians had to submit to error or to be "in agreement" about error -- and the whole point of all this, of 1P5 and the Trad critique of the Vat 2 Church, is that the Vat 2 Church is in error, as we see from these doleful fruits, as noted above. See the problem?

As for the Protestants, I grew up among them, and my own father was a Methodist. I didn't have any Catholic friends till I was in my later 20s, and certainly had no Vatican II schooling in the 60s and 70s. I had to "argue Bible" since (I'd guess it was) 5th grade. There is no, none, zilch question as to the Protestant understanding of the Eucharist. It runs on a huge arc from old-fashioned Lutherans saying God is there because he's everywhere (consubstantiation) and the Calvinist God is there in a form, maybe, but it's spiritual.

In no way, no wise, no shape or form has ANY Protestant Church taught the Catholic/Orthodox Real Presence: that the Consecrated Bread and Wine are the REAL Body and Blood of Our Lord, as Body and as Blood, even though it looks, tastes as though it were still bread. The formal teaching is that NO BREAD or Wine remains, at all. NO Protestants have any teaching like that. So strict were they against it that they insisted miracles per se had come to an end in New Testament times.

So starved were average, everyday Protestant laity for miracles as reported Biblically that that is where the Pentecostal movement cam from in the latter 19th century and why the mainline Protestant Churches, and the Fundamentalist ones (as the Baptists) go out of their way to distance themselves from Pentecostals.

So I've plenty of experience in ecumenical discussion; I've always been polite, respectful, as I was of my father and so on and so forth down to today -- but that doesn't mean I have to accommodate error any more than the Corinthians did.

An Préachán