Some are likely to draw those conclusions, but not those who can see that a Petrine primacy is part of the deposit of faith, and that the Church herself has infallibility and indefectibility. How this will all get worked out is the mess we are currently dealing with.
The Truthfulness of the Pre-1955 Good Friday Prayer for the Jews https://t.co/lpWRMLHFWM pic.twitter.com/ANlfY6XYBY
— NLM (@NLMblog) December 7, 2020
Dr. Peter Kwasniewski has provided us with a helpful tool: a “word-cloud” for the new General Directory of Catechetics. Our blessed Lord’s name not even mentioned. This should serve to demonstrate what is really going on in Rome these days. pic.twitter.com/JIBCNl2pCC
— John Stone (@Johnthemadmonk) September 5, 2020
Soul of the Apostolate 2020: For every 1 convert, 6.5 leave the Church. The world is in chaos. What is the solution? Catholic Apostolic leaders unite to emphatically declare: the “one thing necessary”... the spiritual life.
It is true that a concession for some use of the vernacular was sought by some missionaries (although we may note that a large number of bishops at Vatican II spoke up against vernacularization), and there is no particular reason to think that this concession is necessarily a bad idea. However, there is much in the Catholic liturgy that remains constant from day to day; that content should certainly remain in Latin (for further argumentation, see, e.g., here, here, and here).
Even if parishes were often set up along ethnic lines, there was still, beyond this, a strong sense of belonging to the one Catholic Church, the great equalizer and leveler.
The American churches gave up on assimilation and requiring immigrants learn English. They also gave into multiculturalism, and allowed for different worship "styles."
The imposition of the vernacular and the lack of ritual and rubrical discipline has separated us into little enclaves. You end up with Masses for white upper-middle-class golfers, Mass with African-American Gospel music, Mass for Hispanics, Mass for Vietnamese, etc. etc. How can the Church “unite the different races” if she can’t even unite us in a single recognizably Catholic worship?
Churchmen after the Council foolishly abandoned this remarkable power of a single Creed, acknowledged and taught as such; a single observance with real asceticism; and, above all, a common body of Latin liturgy to draw together people of different races, ethnicities, languages, classes, backgrounds, and vocations. We may truly say that the practice of the traditional liturgy has been, and is capable of becoming once again, the Catholic Church’s “secret weapon” for unity among the faithful of the far-flung and demographically highly diverse Latin rite.Latin as the unifying language of a political or ecclesial empire. No thanks. That Latin ecclesial and political myth persists, though. "A common body of liturgy in hieratic English to draw together people of different races, ethnicities, languages, classes, backgrounds, and vocations..." That is a solution as much as what Kwasniewski is advocating. But the bureaucrats who run the Latin churches surrendered.
The Church teaches that baptism is necessary for salvation; whatever else God may do in His freedom, He has revealed to us only one path by which we are saved: plunging into the death of Christ and rising with Him. The Church teaches that confession is the only way to be certain of the absolution of mortal sins, and in this sense, it is necessary for those in mortal sin. Extreme unction, as it was once aptly named, prepares the soul for the great passage from death to eternal life, lest it be a passage from death to second death. It fulfills the petition in the Byzantine Divine Liturgy: “For a Christian, painless, blameless, peaceful end of our lives, and for a good account before the dread judgment seat of Christ, let us beseech the Lord.”
There seems no end of dioceses where the faithful are being cut off even from necessary sacraments like baptism and confession—and for what atheistic persecution? Where are the Red Shirts breathing down our necks?
Bishops who believe in the Christian faith will seek every creative solution to be with their people and to ensure that the clergy, who in a way represent them, can remain where they are most needed. By contrast, for an indifferentist or a universalist who thinks, Abu Dhabi-like, that many different paths lead to God, or that perhaps no path at all is needed as a merciful God will scoop us all up in the end, baptism would not be necessary. To one who no longer believes in the reality of mortal sin—sin that kills the divine life in the soul—confession would no longer be necessary. It helps, of course, that laymen can baptize their own children in a difficult situation and that one can make a firm resolution to go to confession as soon as it is available again. But will the laity who feel abandoned today by their pastors feel confident in them tomorrow after the crisis has passed? The abuse crisis and the coronavirus response are, in many ways, like a one-two punch.
Can. 879 The sacrament of confirmation strengthens the baptized and obliges them more firmly to be witnesses of Christ by word and deed and to spread and defend the faith. It imprints a character, enriches by the gift of the Holy Spirit the baptized continuing on the path of Christian initiation, and binds them more perfectly to the Church.
