Saddest column I've read on the Church, along with other Corvinian observations...

Amici,

Saddest column I've read on the Church, and that's saying a lot.... The estimable Anthony Esolen has a column that every Catholic ought to read. It's title is The Loss of the Heart of a Human Community.

I could describe it, but it is too depressing. Yet this vignette at Rorate Caeli gives a sense of it: 

In a few years, a heritage of many centuries was thrown down; thousand-year-old habits were forgotten, cursed, castigated, and condemned. Mrs. Michu [*the average homemaker], who had not read the Acts of the Council and had no intention of devoting ten seconds to it, observed with astonishment, in her parish:

• The abolition of the choir, that was all well and good but…
• The elimination of Latin; well, she didn’t understand anything of it, but the objective was for God to understand.
• The appearance of a table in front of the altar—it was her neighbor who had provided it!
• The celebration of the Mass facing the people, which made the celebrant turn his back to the tabernacle, which seemed incongruous to Mrs. Michu, but not to the celebrant.
• The distribution of Communion in the hand; Mrs. Michu had seen children put the host in their pocket.
• The upheaval of the calendar and the suppression of the patron saint of the parish. She learned that even St. Philomena, the favorite saint of the Curé d’Ars, had disappeared in the turmoil.
• The destruction of confessionals.
• The prohibition of kneeling.
• The suppression of Corpus Christi processions.
• The abandonment of the recitation of the Rosary.

And so on and so forth… Mrs. Michu did as another neighbor did; she decided not to go to church again, except for weddings and funerals. Her religion had been changed.

This vignette gets the idea across, alright.

The Church is in absolute freefall. From the putridly wretched Canadian bishop Esolen references in his essay, to the Evil Ogre "pope" Bergoglio's appointment of human dregs, such as now a pro-abortion atheist, to the Pontifical Academy on Life, the Church is just a quivering husk of anything it once was. Bergoglio even appointed a gay friendly (code for gay?) bishop to lead culture and education in the Curia.  

They need a good beating. Put in the stocks and cudgeled in an effort to save their souls by getting through to them. "Spare the rod and spoil the child." (Proverbs 13:24; 23:13-14) But no one will put them into stocks; until, that is, Satan gets around to it himself.

I suspect there's a revolution coming, though. Old Cardinal Mueller set off a earthquake with his interview with Raymond Arroyo the other day. Of course, the mainstream Catholic press ignored it. Mueller talked about Bergoglio and his obscene "Synod" being actually a hostile takeover of the Church. It is.

And now Bishop Athanasius Schneider has instituted a Crusader Cross. Dom Alcuin Reid has broken his monastery away from the local bishop. All are examples of the road to take, and suggest where that road will lead.

Something is up, that's for sure. The vast majority of bishops will play ostrich, and take what comes up the derriere. Most remaining Catholics – I mean the huge number of those outside of Trad circles or those few, very orthodox Charismatic groups – just won't "get it". They're clueless now. Most will remain that way. But it will happen. You can sense the sea change. The black-mantled ships are sailing upriver from Pelargir. How it will blossom and play out, I know not. But I pray I live long enough to see it.

N.B. Vatican II wrecked my Catholic life and nearly threw me back on "The Old Ones", but not quite (obviously). However, it is fascinating to read the original documents planned for Vatican II, which you can access via this enthralling article at Ann Barnhardt's. 

Some examples you can access:

Draft of a Dogmatic Constitution on the Sources of Revelation,

Draft of a Dogmatic Constitution [on] Defending Intact the Deposit of Faith,

Draft of a Dogmatic Constitution on the Church,

Draft of a Dogmatic Constitution on the Christian Moral Order,

Draft of a Dogmatic Constitution on Chastity, Marriage, the Family, and Virginity,

Draft of a Dogmatic Constitution on the Blessed Virgin Mary Mother of God and Mother of Men

But Roncalli didn't defend these; he folded like mushy spaghetti. And he made Montini a cardinal.

    An Préachán

Psalm 146 of the Douay-Rheims: verse 9:

Who giveth to beasts their food: and to the young ravens that call upon Him.

"George III was but a boy stealing a peach from your lunch..."

"...by comparison with our plumed and puffed liberty-thieves and governors."

So writes Anthony Esolen in an article here at American Greatness. Good article, and a lot of quotes from ol' Herman Melville. But of course the doom for the U.S. was written on the wall at the beginning. "Liberty" was a false god, a sort of pied piper leading its adherents along the famous "primrose path" until boom, disaster befell them. Esolen writes eloquently (when does he not?) :

"We need not confine ourselves to the legal. There is also the customary. Free men honor the good and wise, the benefactors of their nation. Slaves toady to the famous. Free men make their own entertainment. Servile men are content to consume it ready-made. Free men seek out the dangerous space, as Melville sought out the sea. Servile men demand the safe space, where they may suck their thumbs. Free men fight in the open. Servile men sneak about, bear tales, attack the weak like a pack of jackals, and couch their enmity in soft and seductive slogans. Free men raise their own children. Servile men submit their children to be raised by others. Free men take their pedigrees from almighty God. Servile men seek out means of establishing a factitious superiority over their peers or their betters: a diploma, a bank account, a big house, a title, a special status as favored victim."

Reads like a description Cicero could have written. So we are replaying the drama the Romans lived through. What recreated Rome in the East, in Byzantium, and in the West, ultimately as the High Middle Ages, was Christianity, and not imputed-grace Protestantism but rather the Theosis-Faith of the True Church, that God became Man not merely to save us from our sins, but to elevate us as new creations in Christ (as St. Paul wrote so often and in so many ways, as did St. John). For a fascinating discussion on Theosis, the forgotten teaching of the Church, see this podcast at (rather absurdly named) "Pints with Aquinas". The theologian being interviewed is Fr. James Brent, O.P.

But America, the United States, never had that, a secure foundation on the profound teachings of Historical Christianity. Instead, the country was founded by Puritan fanatics in New England and Capitalists in Virginia, and then given a national government by the godless (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton) via a Constitutional Convention they themselves created in Philadelphia (after a failed attempt a year before – 1786 – in Annapolis). The new U. S. Constitution intentinoally left God totally out of the picture and if God is out of the picture, no "rights" of any sort can be guaranteed, and even the nature of man and the point and bounds of his life are all "up for grabs". Which, need I point out, are precisely what plague the poor country today, what with its Gay marriage imposed from above, and Tranny rights, and absolutely shocking political malfeasance.

"Liberty" is the false god, "freedom" the true one – if one understands by "freedom" the freedom to be what God intended you to be. As I have written many times, and as have others before me, we're like gasoline engines, we humans; i.e. we're like engines meant to run on gasoline, and gasoline only. Not kerosene, not diesel, not propane, not natural gas or whiskey or aviation fuel. "Liberty," that pied piper, would have one believe one can run on anything one wants. The more choices the more "liberty". Simple enough, except that it doesn't work. And when you of course, necessarily break down, when you "crash and burn", well, too bad. 

With most everyone in the U.S. now wanting to run on everything from unicorn urine to sea water, it's no wonder the country exhibits the morals that even the pagan Cicero would lament. 

An P