Fifty Happy Years

Fr PJM said...

Only as long as the women can physically carry them or drag them to Mass, does it include the children. And only a small minority of women at that.

24 April, 2019

JARay said...

I well remember the late Cardinal Heenan when he was Bishop Heenan and I believe that the clergy regarded him as being rather ruthless. He was noted for simply moving priests from their comfortable positions and shifting them to other parishes in order to give them a bit of a shake up. Of course he moved to Liverpool and there he set about shaking up the all too cosy matter of a new Cathedral. The result of that shake up resulted in "Paddy's Wigwam" which I have heard described as the ugliest cathedral in Europe. Outside of clerical circles he was generally well regarded and respected. But not everything which he did has worn well with the passage of time.

24 April, 2019

Amateur Brain Surgeon said...

Dear Father. One has to give the revolutionary triumphalists their due.

They successfully overturned the existing order and replaced it with their indifferentist anthropocentric ecumenical order and they will never willing surrender what they won.because Ecumenism is the Universal Solvent of Tradition and broken shards of it yet remain.

As for anniversaries and days that will live in ecclesiastical infamy, how about December 7, 1962?

December 7, 1962

Pope John XXIII’s creation of a special commission to study the disputed proposal on the sources of Revelation was “a turning point in the Second Vatican Council,” Father John B. Sheerin, C.S.P., said here.

Father Sheerin, of New York, editor of the Catholic World and a member of the U.S. bishops’ press panel, also told newsmen at the panel’s final meeting (Dec. 7) that the Pope’s act in setting up a special committee to coordinate revisional work during the council’s long recess “means that a counter-reformation theology won’t be able to exert influence on the schemata.”(Pope John ordered [Nov. 21] that a special commission made up of members of the Theology Commission and of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity be set up to revise the proposal on Revelation. This proposal, submitted to the council by the Theology Commission, headed by Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, was criticized in the council as too rigid and formal.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

What was it about these revolutionaries that made then think that they were uniquely qualified and, thus, the chosen ones to overturn the existing order?

Well, according to Pope Paul VI, the ecclesiastical enginers who assembled the V2 rocket where the holiset and best Catholics ever.

No, seriously...Here is Pope Paul Vl:

++++++++Begin quotes+++++++

Following is the council press office translation of the Latin address delivered Dec. 4 by Pope Paul VI at the closing meeting of the second session of the ecumenical council.

 We have now reached the end of the second session of this great ecumenical council….

Let us rejoice, my brothers, for when was the Church ever so aware of herself, so in love with Christ, so blessed, so united, so willing to imitate Him, so ready to fulfill His mission?

+++++++++ end quotes++++

The actions of !962-1965 BCE (BEST CAThOLICS EVDER) were a wonder to behold

That bad old church, with its rigid Dogma, Doctrine, Mass and Sacraments, is no more. It is now a laid back loose-goosey thing and one can not identify a single prelate worthy of being called a successor to the great Roman, Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani who (along with Ruffini) , it ought be noted, was prescient enough to call for an ecumenical council as early as 1948, because he was aware of the many Doctrinal errors then in vogue and gaining strength.

There was a reason the revolutionaries struck first at the Holy Office and the great Ottaviani....

24 April, 2019

DrAndroSF said...

I am over 70 and was an altar boy who knew the Old Mass by heart. It was not perfect. It was often rushed, perfunctory and mechanical, even robotic. While Father Faber’s saccharine hymnody was embarrassing even then, you could still be introduced to transcendant beauty when a parish choir sang Mozart’s “Ave Verum” at a packed High Mass in August, with incense and sweat accompanying. You knew something important was happening.

BUT, at the moment of the Consecration, all that ceased to matter. Here was the True Body & Blood of Christ, worshipped on their knees by the members of His One True Church. This was the glue that held everything together.

With Vatican II, that center of gravity was abandoned, with glee and with enthusiasm, (including by me back then) and the Church, now “the People of God” (what a vapid phrase), went running after “the modern world.” Instead of confronting, it started flirting and pleading. And its “cultured despisers” promptly exchanged their attitude of respectful distance for contemptuous jeering. And now, inside a single lifetime, the churches are empty in the old Christian lands of the north, as they are being invaded by millions of savages from the Third World, including Mohammed’s slave army. With Lord Bergoglio of the UN cheering them on. Kissed feet for them, scolding for us.

What my years tell me is that human beings are attracted to confidence, unapologetic confidence. No matter what they tell you about “sensitivity” and “caring”. Like women, what they say is a screen, to see if you have the, well, the stuffing, to stand up to them.

The Roman Church gave all that away for a mess of bloviage, like the whole self-dismantling Western culture of which it is only a symptomatic part. Unless it does a full 180 degree reversal and recovers itself as, unapologetically, the One True Religion, it will fade into deserved dust before the Muslims and the savages, not a martyred saint, but an incomprehensibly tragic suicide.

24 April, 2019

Scribe said...

Dear Father, May I clarify the words spoken by Cardinal Heenan concerning the New Mass 'producing' only women and children'? What he actually said was this: "If we were to offer them the kind of ceremony we saw yesterday in the Sistine Chapel we would soon be left with a congregation of women and children." (Michael Davies: Pope Paul's New Mass). The implication is that the New Mass was only suitable for children, and of course women,whom many people in those days regarded as a kind of child. The Cardinal's reaction will recall for ex-Anglicans the popular reaction to Cranmer's English "Mass" as being nothing more than "a Christmas game." Cardinal Heenan was at one time Archbishop of Liverpool (my native city), and I can vouch for the fact that he was a very Good Egg indeed.

24 April, 2019

Highland Cathedral said...

While females vastly outnumber males when it comes to the incessant comings and goings of lay people to and from the sanctuary (if you can call it that – altar space might be more appropriate) at a Sunday Mass in my local parish church there are quite a lot of men in the congregation. The children’s choir is almost entirely female, the adult choir is almost entirely female and the cantors are almost entirely female. The majority of altar servers are probably female. The groups most noticeably missing are teenagers and people in their twenties of both sexes.

24 April, 2019

Highland Cathedral said...

While females vastly outnumber males when it comes to the incessant comings and goings of lay people to and from the sanctuary (if you can call it that – altar space might be more appropriate) at a Sunday Mass in my local parish church there are quite a lot of men in the congregation. The children’s choir is almost entirely female, the adult choir is almost entirely female and the cantors are almost entirely female. The majority of altar servers are probably female. The groups most noticeably missing are teenagers and people in their twenties of both sexes.

24 April, 2019

 ...

Alan said...

Some time ago, Fr Ray Blake discussed Cardinal Heenan's remark on his blog. Fr Ray asserts that, in context, the meaning is rather different. The Cardinal had attended a Mass with sung responsorial psalm, etc. as a demonstration of the new rite. His concern was with the length of the rite and its discouraging effect on men accustomed, as were most English RCs at that time, to attending low Mass.

25 April, 2019

John Vasc said...

Father, if I recall accurately, the remark was made after a solemn demo of the 'new Mass' which had been exhaustively full-length, with extensive extra readings and probably a daunting laundry-list of prayers for every single area of famine, civil war, dictatorship or poverty in every village of the globe; there was now to be no distinction between High and Low Mass, and the good Cardinal was thinking of Catholic working-class men who had traditionally popped in for 30 minutes to 'hear Mass' during their daily lunch-hour or after work: a largely mute, 'short and sweet' Low Mass, in which they might either follow the liturgy or pray silently; they weren't expected to constantly bob up and down in strenuous Swedish exercises, or to be forced to listen to (and themselves partly supply) reams of chatter in pseudo-English.

So Heenan was just objecting to the actual length - which was in fact then subsequently curtailed. Possibly he was also appalled by the new rite's sententious tediousness, and wanted to drop a helpful hint about that too? Alas, if so, he did not persist, and let the great waves of modernism crash over the E&W Church with no further quibble.

25 April, 2019

orate fratman said...

Well, I am aware of Cardinal Heenan's comment and, whether it referred to the length, or to the sappy, seemingly denial of the divinity of Christ atmosphere, I am old enough that I attended the Mass before, during, and after the council. There were far more men present at the Traditional Latin pre-conciliar Mass than there are at the Novus Ordo Mass.

26 April, 2019

Terry said...

I note, “DrAndroSF”, that you have used the word savages twice in your comment of 24 April (“millions of savages from the Third World” and “the Muslims and the savages”). Could I ask you to clarify to whom you are referring when you use this word, and why you chose to describe them as savages? You might also wish to confirm that your striking use of this word is compatible with Summi Pontificatus, which states that we should “contemplate the human race in the unity of its origin in God”, and talks of “the law of human solidarity and charity, dictated and imposed both by our common origin and by the equality in rational nature of all men, whatever nation they belong to.”

Of course many people might be taken aback by the unchallenged use, in a comment on a blog written by a Catholic priest, of the word ‘savages’ to refer to our human brothers and sisters. But I assure you that I was not taken aback.

Terry Loane

26 April, 2019

DrAndroSF said...

Father Hunwicke, despite my sometimes trenchant comments, I am not lacking in courtesy and therefore do not intend to try using your blog as a platform for a conflict between commenters. Terry Loane and I clearly come from quite incompatible standpoints. I am neither an egalitarian nor a humanitarian, regarding both these now-ascendant Enlightenment ideologies as central to the Vatican II “mess of bloviage” I spoke of, so any back-and-forth would be a waste of energy and a misuse of your cyberspace.

26 April, 2019