“The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, ch. iv, “Nature”
“[T]he decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form…. [Language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. … [Yet,] the process is reversible. … A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. … [Restoring language] is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness.“
— George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)
On the way home from a First Saturday Mass yesterday, I realized how we consistent (viz. we “traditionalist”) Christian Catholics must “flip the script” in one little but crucial way. I read the above quotation from Emerson last week (in Charles Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences), and I realized that the same dictum holds for our Faith and for us Catholic men.
As an illustration of this trend toward “bad usage,” please read Paul VI’s closing address to “The Council”. Like “The Council”, that address is, by Paul’s own admission, dripping with populist, quasi-Modernist, catch-phrasey, neo-Protestantoid optimism and vagueness:
[The Second Vatican Council] devoted its attention not so much to divine truths, but rather, and principally, to the Church…. This secular religious society, which is the Church, has endeavored to carry out an act of reflection about herself, to know herself better, to define herself better [Nothing self-referential here!]…. deeply committed to the study of the modern world. Never before [Ahem!] … has the Church felt the need [Eh?] to know, to draw near to, … to penetrate…, almost to run after [the modern world], in its rapid and continuous change. … The religion of the God who became man has met the religion … of man who makes himself God. … Was there a clash, a battle, a condemnation? There could have been, but there was none. The old Samaritan has been the model of the spirituality of [‘]the council[‘].
Sound familiar? “Heal the wounds! Heal the wounds!!”
Well, let me pause to note what the authentic, traditional understanding of the parable of the Good Samaritan actually entails. According to Haydock’s commentary (as echoed in large part by Lapide’s commentary and elaborated upon in the Catena Aurea),
This is the allegorical meaning of the parable: The man that fell among robbers, represents Adam and his posterity; Jerusalem, the state of peace and innocence, which man leaves by going down to Jericho, which means the moon, the state of trouble and sin: the robbers represent the devil, who stripped him of his supernatural gifts, and wounded him in his natural faculties: the priest and Levite represent the old law: the Samaritan, Christ; and the beast, his humanity. The inn means the Church; wine, the blood of Christ; oil, his mercy; whilst the host signifies S. Peter and his successors, the bishops and priests of the Church [and his money represents the Church’s treasury of merits — EBB]. [Cf.] Origen, S. Jerom, S. Ambrose, S. Austin, and others.
I suspect that some–perhaps most?–of you had never heard or considered the parable in that sense. Is that understanding the spirituality which undergirded the Second Vatican Council? Really? Or might the council instead have been based on a spirituality more content to meet Modern Man as an equal, in the ditch of a supposedly neutral public square, and, rather than seeking to “proselytize” Modern Man into the Church, content to tend to his wounds in the sterile ditch of Enlightenment rhetoric and compromise? The point I am trying to make is that, according to the parable of the Good Samaritan itself, a genuine and complete adherence to the “spirit” (that word!) of the parable of the Samaritan would have led the council to an unflinching equation of true “healing” with complete sacramental membership in the Church. Instead, Paul VI reminds us how V2 sought a collaboration with the world, rather than its conversion.
Deep breath!
A feeling of boundless sympathy has permeated the whole of [the Second Vatican Council]. The … council has been absorbed by the discovery of human needs [What?]…. [Hence, we ask the world] to recognize our own new type of humanism…. [T]his council, which exposed itself to human judgment [sic!], insisted very much more upon [the] pleasant side of man…. Its attitude was very much and deliberately optimistic. A wave of affection and admiration flowed from the council over the modern world of humanity. … [M]essages of trust issued from [‘]the council[‘] to the present-day world. The modern world’s values were not only respected but honored, its efforts approved, its aspirations purified and blessed.
There are some orthodox gems in the V2 documents, to be sure, but, by and large, as the above excerpts show, the language is–once again, by Paul’s own admission–so self-absorbed that it painfully obvious how it led to the amorphous Sponge Church of our day. Exactly whatever happened at Vatican II, we can, in the immortal words of Alice Thomas Ellis, in The Sin Eater, say that at the very least, “It is as though…one’s revered, dignified and darling old mother had slapped on a mini-skirt and fishnet tights and started ogling strangers. A kind of menopausal madness, a sudden yearning to be attractive to all. It is tragic and hilarious and awfully embarrassing. And of course, those who knew her before feel a great sense of betrayal and can’t bring themselves to go and see her any more.”
In any case, here is my epiphany:
Instead of saying, “I assist at the [Traditional] Latin Mass”, let us say, with the pride that can only from a consistent embrace of our patrimony, “I assist at the Mass, but I sometimes assist at the New Mass when the need arises.”
Or something to that effect.
If it wants to be known as a New Order, let the Novus Ordo be known as the New Mass. We Consistent Christian Catholics must drop all revisionist qualifiers about THE MASS and treat the Novus Ordo as it wants to be treated: as the New Mass. This in no way suggests that the New Mass is illicit or invalid, nor does it seek to insinuate any inferiority of the New Mass. It is simply an attempt, heeding Orwell’s advice cited above, to reverse the revisionist corruption of language in the modern Church, whereby a liturgy that’s younger than most of the priests offering it is spoken of as the default expression of Catholic worship, while the oldest form of Christian liturgy is looked down upon as some kind of deviant, decadent innovation.
After all, your typical New Mass is not even what V2 had in mind. I very recently acquired a used copy of the 1966 St. Joseph’s Continuous Sunday Missal, and its every page displays a liturgical something that is far more “traditional” and rich than the typical New Mass on any given day (which, of course, isn’t even said in Latin, despite, once again, V2’s wishes).
If you’ve read this far, then I know I’m preaching to the choir on all this, so I’ll wrap it up.
From this day forth, let this (or something like it) be your new conversational plumb line with other Catholics:
“So you assist at the New Mass in _____ parish. Lovely.”
“Where do you assist at the Mass? Have you ever assisted at the Mass?”
“I normally assist at the Mass in ____, though of course I have nothing against the New Mass.”
And so on.
Let me know how it goes.
I’m off to the Mass.
FideCogitActio : "Omnis per gratiam" fidescogitactio @ gmail . com 
Striking. I also assist at the Mass whenever possible and when not possible I assist at the new Mass.
FAR superior to Real Mass and Lil’ Licit Liturgy.
Kudos
There is a fellow on Twitter by the handle @RadTrad who always refers to either the Traditional Latin Mass or the Modern Vernacular Mass. I think I might like your approach better.
That is a good point about the Good Samaritan Parable. I have noticed in homilies after Vatican II that the originally understood sense is almost never brought up. Maybe it is because they think it makes them less intellectual. Instead, there seems to be a tendency to interpret the passages from scratch. It is like the priest wakes up on Sunday (or Saturday), reads the Bible passage, and then comes up with an interpretation based on his personal meditation without using any of the prior wisdom of saints and Church fathers. Since the modern seminarian seems to have relatively less of an exposure to the writings of saints and Church fathers and more so toward the modern philosophies, psychology and protestant like concepts, the homilies written like that tend to get awfully weird.
I hope to attend “The Mass” often one day and see it come back to every Church! 🙂
Tony. You would not believe the number of Priests who think that Scott Hahn is THE Doctor of the Church.
The reason we Catholic children can not have nice things,like the Mass, is because Dad is forever breaking Tradition.
Yes, and the same think that’s happened with the Good Samaritan has happened to the Holy Thursday foot washing: it’s now solely about “humble service.” It’s horizontal, moralistic. We do not see that what Christ was actually doing was giving a sign of how His death would cleanse us from our sin, which is our true enemy and the true obstacle to all that is good and holy. We keep taking God out of the center and, like the Good Samaritan distortion, do not allow Him to be God and do His work.
Just got it in the mail last week–w00t!
https://www.librarything.com/work/11162093/book/109649584
Branch. Yes; and, we Christian Catholics are, routinely told that WE are the Pearl of Great Price whereas, JESUS is.
I know that, more than any other, we love man- but, come on…
OK, ABS is gonna repost (tomorrow) his response to those claims that can be found to exist in the Scofield Bible Commentary; that is, it aint Catholic, but what priest can be expected to know that given the thinly-disguiseed pro-tess-tent gruel he is served in seminary
Yep, ABS. I’ve been skeptical of “it’s all about the human person” since I first heard it. It’s true, from a certain angle, but today the virtue of religion is all but dead in the Church, so we do not know how to rightly focus on the “human person”.
My problem with exhortations for Catholics to imitate the Good Samaritan is that I own no horse nor car nor ambulance. Nor enough money to pay for someone else’s hospitalization. So I always resort to the context of the parable – It was told by Lord Jesus as an answer to a lawyer’s challenge to define, “Who is my neighbor?”
Also, seen in the context of arrangements of episodes in Luke, the Good Samaritan parable (love of neighbor) is followed closely by the story of Mary and Martha, wherein the Lord called Mary’s contemplative attention to Him (love of God) as “the better part” and “it will not be taken away from her.”
This might sound very naive, but I was just wondering. In the time since Vatican II, has there ever been a public mass petition launched at the Vatican/Pope asking for clarification of what Vatican II really teaches? I am asking because it seems like a legitimate request to make and in keeping with the teachings of the Catholic faith. No one will be condemning Vatican II or even making an offer of a possible interpretation. It is merely a request (or perhaps even a demand) that the faithful be given clear instructions as to what this council means in an authoritative manner.
Has it been tried? In this day and age, I am sure publicity can be gained and surely it can be a powerful message for those high up in the Church who seem very sensitive to public perception? So if it has not already been tried yet………
You know, thinking about it a bit more, lesser causes have had success from using the social media and mass petitions as leverage. So can this more important thing not be done? After all, the reason why it seems easy for the hierarchy to dismiss this request seems to be because the concerned Catholics are scattered and therefore easy to deal with at the local level due to the small numbers in any one parish. But if they were given an outlet and ability to voice their concerns through one place and get the media to to over it, can’t they be heard? And by making the request as “Please clarify what this council actually taught and did not teach!!” we avoid the possible clashes due to sub divisions inside trads. Even Sedevecantists, SSPX can get on board with such a petition. Maybe even the likes of Jimmy Akin will be on board on the other end of the spectrum 🙂
I don’t think it is a sin to organize and push for such a thing, no?
Oh and maybe we can even get the “Catholics for remarriage”, “Pro-Choice Catholics” and all the dissident groups to support the petition too. After all, certain interpretations of VII, if clarified as true by the Church, can be to their potential advantage to further their causes. So at the end of the day, it seems like we can unite under the request asking that Vatican II be clearly clarified as to what it is teaching, what pastoral means and what is the relationship between being pastoral and the doctrine in clear objective terms. It seems like one can gain a lot of steam and encapsulate all Catholics to support this issue by framing the issue positively for the diverse groups involved. From the traditionalist perspective, we know the only outcome, if the Church chooses to clarify, will be the truth because of Christ’s promise to the Church. We will of course have to hope that the clarifying job is better than the Council documents themselves 😀
Or maybe all of this is just me crazy thinking haha.
http://vultus.stblogs.org/index.php/2012/08/the-good-samaritan/
Tony:
You asked about a public appeal to the Magisterium for official clarifications of V2. As a matter of fact, I know of two such petitions.
The first is by Msgr. Brunero Gherardini – http://centreleonardboyle.com/Supplica.html
The second is from Bp. Athanasius Schneider – http://www.ewtn.com/library/bishops/schneider-proposte.htm
USC has more info on Schneider’s proposal, and their own: http://unamsanctamcatholicam.blogspot.com/2013/07/athanasius-schneider-clarification-of.html
I am certain that in the past few decades there have been others, especially from lay apostolates like The Remnant or some such. In a sense, that is all the SSPX is asking for, too. The problem is that such pleas are then tainted by association with the SSPX. But the need is real, and such a redress would likely salvage the moderate core of the SSPX as the radical fringe hardens.
Yea but those seem isolated though. What I mean is that it seems to have always been either SSPX asking or a certain individual that has a standing in the Catholic world (but not necessarily in the secular) making a request but no real follow through. There is no real pressure applied. So it is easy to deal with. There is no lasting memory of those appeals because it is soon forgotten as long as it is ignored when it is made.
What I was thinking about is something on the lines of leveraging social media. So not just the SSPX or an individual figure but getting a large amount of Catholics (liberals, trads) to just unite and ask a question that really deserves answers. Hey, even get a whole bunch of people to just to and stand in St. Peter’s square in silent prayer asking for clarification if that is what draws attention. I always thought something like that should have happened on this issue way back in the 70’s. Those FEMA members seem to be allowed to do their thing around the St. Peter’s square. Where are the legitimate causes?
So I am thinking more along those lines of an effort that at a certain point is so large and visible that it gets covered by the BBC or CNN as a growing “protest”, “request”, “demand” or whatever to the Church hierarchy regarding “Please tell us what does Vatican II teach definitively and clearly”. Today, the trad camp is just not visible and simply having one trad group or the other make a request is easily dealt with by ignoring it. Same goes for individuals no matter how high up they maybe (unless that individual is the Pope).
HAHAHAHAHA
Oh. You’re serious? You mean a traditionalist groundswell.
I’m not nearly as optimistic as you are.
Nobody cares about Tradition anymore, inside and outside the Church.
I guess it is worth trying to connect the various trad groups, but, of course, they already ARE united by their immersion in the Catholic patrimony. I think the only abiding, and thus the only truly conservative, way back to sanity, is through little apostolates, like the TLM Society and the American TFP, working as leaven.
The Church is like Dante right now: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.”
Things probably have to get worse before they will get better.
I’m struggling to understand what we should do in this time of insanity. I’ve seen Steve Skojec suggest a kind of monastic turning our back on the world in the interest of preserving the Faith. What are we to do even when so many of seemingly good will and otherwise good sense do not get it?
You are probably right. The mass push might be hard to create. I was thinking of kind of duping the Liberals too to jump on board by saying “hey look at the bright side, if the debate on VII is settled in favor of some rupture interpretation, even the trads will join you in getting what you want” haha.
But I guess the more practical solution is to go about at the local level. It is just difficult though when there are no priests or Bishops at the local levels to rally around. It is hard to have discussions with anyone who opposes tradition to convince them of it because Vatican II inevitably comes up. Since there is no definitive interpretation of it, the matter simply becomes ‘my opinion vs. your opinion’.
That is why I felt that to break that dead lock, maybe both liberal and trads need to unite and ask the Church for a definitive declaration of what this council actually teaches. It won’t end the crisis but finally there will be a foundation on which to stand and hold firm and ask any faithful Catholic to do the same. The rest will be clear as dissident Catholics rather than as “merciful Catholics” or “Catholics guided by the Holy Spirit to modernize the Church” like descriptions.
P.S. I had not read about Bishops Schneider’s proposal before and I am finding it very interesting reading through it. I have always heard him speak of it on Youtube videos but never seen it. So thank you for sharing those links 🙂
Branch,
I think the monastic solution is probably a dead end solution. The reason being that when they have a majority, the only way to sway it is by having a visible minority that opposes the ideas of the majority. So I feel that if the trads were to all go monastic and get together in some deserted Island, the majority will just grow more and more in it’s errors and nothing will really change.
So I think there is a need to be visible and stand out.
That is also why I was thinking of leveraging some social media and the likes to make this issue visible. Now as Codg said, I think the trads can’t be made visible that easily. The trads are a relative minority and there is nothing they can do by themselves to draw much positive and lasting attention. Then there is the split among the trads that exist between SSPX vs. FSSP or sedevecantist vs. [FSSP/SSPX] etc.
But I think if we construct the cause in a general enough manner (something like “Please clarify definitively as to what does Vatican II actually teach?”), we can get the trads to unite and even the liberals to unite by baiting them. In a way, they might see it as baiting the trads because they think the definitive solution will in their favor anyway.
Like right now, there is no foundation for trads to appeal on other than “the Church said X was bad for 2000 years, how can you now do X?”. Then they get the reply that this is Vatican II. So I think at the end of the day, to oppose the crisis requires a foundation stemming from Vatican II itself so that there is nothing more a liberal can appeal to.
The way I see it, the book of Romans in Scripture could have been as something problematic or better off not being there when the Protestants began their “protest”. But when the Church settled the interpretation and surrounding issues definitively, it became clear how to interpret it for the subsequent generations and the Protestants were clear as the heretics. So today, I think it is the same with Vatican II. We need that definitive interpretation to even begin working towards ending the crisis. Without that key ingredient, the crisis will always exist.
One of the teeth-gnashing problems with petitioning the Magisterium (Msgr Brunero Gherardhini points this out) to clarify the texts of V2 is that the Magisterium tells the petitioner to read the texts of V2 which are the source of the confusion not the answer to the confusion.
The reality is that you are on your own and you are tasked with finding like-minded men for support as we are not meant to be alone.
Hell, you can even form a Trad Study Group and get excellent counsel from a Priest like Father Calvin Goodwin (former Jebbie, now FSSP) and be granted a session with your local Bishop (Bishop Joseph Gerry, Diocese of Portland – entire state of Maine) who will patiently hear your list of concerns and promise to meet with your group on a regular basis and then refuse to ever even speak with you again and so you are left to buy a van so you can pool all the kids together and drive them back and forth to New Hampster every damn day so they can get to a decent parochial school for education and then you can have, Charles Wilson, of Christifidelis, show-up at your study group to advise you on the proper way to petition the Holy See for redress of your concerns and as you send your letter off you look at one another and laugh knowing that it will bring no response at all.
ABS doesn’t want to appear to be too cynical for, truly, that was a blast to go through all of that..
You, Are. Own. Your. Own.
Look, they don’t fear God so they sure as hell ain’t gonna fear you.
You, Are.Own. Your. Own.
My Flummification is now complete. I have lost the ability to spell.
One of the things a love of history does is to offer analogies, even if they might not always fit well.
My thought is that Vatican II was the Church’s “Battle of the Bulge,” a surprise attack that should not have been surprising, but caused a great deal of chaos.
The German (Rahner, et al?) counteroffensive caught the Allies flatfooted, with the worst of it hitting a very green American infantry division (the 106th) which hadn’t seen much combat and was asked to do far too much. It disintegrated under the onslaught, two thirds of it captured or destroyed, and it was left to little bands cut off from the leadership (such as it was) and even from each other, to try to fight their way back to safety. Led by sergeants or low-ranking officers, they were on their own. Adding to the confusion was the fact the Germans had snuck English-speaking infiltrators (modernists?) through American lines to cause even more chaos, and you had a disaster on your hands. In places, the survivors gathered together with some rushed and inadequate reinforcements to places such as St. Vith and managed to slow, if not halt, the relentless advance. But there was no help from above, because storms had grounded the fearsome Allied warplanes, who before had owned the skies and pummeled Axis units during the day. They had to manage the most difficult of military tactics, a fighting withdrawal, and did so, eventually making it to safety.
Finally, after a long and grinding battle, and the occasional bit of leadership brilliance (Patton turning his Army on a dime and sending it hurtling northward), the Allies won. There wasn’t much left of the 106th at the end of it, but they did their jobs and kept fighting throughout.
So, Sergeants, here we are. We’re outnumbered, out-gunned, in danger of being surrounded, we can’t contact the brass, and they’re too busy inspecting their own colons anyway. Looks like we’re going to be doing a lot of marching and fighting for the foreseeable future.
Dale:
Gold. You need to post that. Do in an ironic, hypothetical way (“Wouldn’t it be weird if…” etc.), if need be, but get this out there. 🙂
Dale,
Haha love that historical analogy.
But I think there is a bit of a problem where the analogy breaks down. We already know that the world never comes around. We know that it is the duty of the Church to make the world come around. But if the Church is not doing her duty and is not clarifying confusion, then there is no fight for us against the world. The fight is to first get the Church to do her duty properly, right?
I mean at the end of the day, who are you really fighting at the moment? The trad meaning of “fight” has just been “I am going to do my thing in this nice trad parish I found”. Ok? How does that actually help resolve anything? Is that even a fight? It is more like just waiting for the Church to come around.
ABS,
I am not sure I am saying it properly. I am not talking about writing a letter or every trad writing a letter. None of that gets any publicity or visibility toward the concern. It might as well be a secret letter that got ignored.
I am also not talking about asking for a specific issue be resolved with respect to the liturgy or one small piece of the puzzle.
I am talking about making it know world wide that there is a big problem with interpreting Vatican II. I am taking about creating a state where I can talk to any average Catholic who just watches the news and they know about Vatican II having some problem. I am not talking about a “problem” in the sense that “oh it broke with tradition!!!”. I am talking about a problem that is common to both liberals and trads i.e. “What is the definitive interpretation of Vatican II?”
Contrary to gut feeling, I am not sure this general question is merely a trad concern. Even Liberals have much to gain if that definitive interpretation is in their favor.
But I am getting side tracked. What I am saying is not about writing letters or collecting signatures. I am talking about making it a global issue. I want to see on the BBC or CNN headlines like
“Catholics are in silent prayer protest today in St. Peter’s square requesting a clear definitive pronouncement on what Vatican II teaches”
“A growing number of Catholics have taken to twitter demanding a clarification of VII”
“Catholics around the world are asking that the truth be told about Vatican II”
“Professor XYZ explains the reason behind the request made by Catholics”
etc.
In my life time, I never saw those headlines. Everyone is busy writing private letters which at the end of the day can just be thrown in the garbage. It is fine and worth a shot but we know after 50+ years it surely doesn’t work. Has there been a public letter to the Pope on a national news paper? I don’t recall hearing about it. I am thinking that sort of stuff that is really hard to just brush aside.
Tony:
The problem is that conservatives and liberals BOTH think that they ALREADY have the correct take or side of V2. Only trads feel compelled to call B.S. this paradox, but we are a small minority. As they say in AA, the first step is admitting you have a problem. As things stand, the majority of Catholics refuse to admit that there IS a problem. So we have a problem.
Codg,
I just wish we could bait even the Liberals in you know. Maybe by saying something like “look, if the Church settles it in favor of your liberal interpretation, then we will support your causes” or “leave your causes and plans alone”. But that might not work because they already feel confident that Pope Francis has almost definitively settled it in their favor anyway lol.
But yea, I don’t know. Maybe we need to wait and pray for God to bless us with the more certainly effective solution of a good Pope that can see there is a problem that is tearing the Church apart. If someone like Bishop Athanasius Schneider eventually becomes Pope one day, then all this confusion will certainly end. Only thing is, that sort of thing seems very far away.
So maybe the only thing we can do is just preserve our own faith and those of our families and just wait.
So maybe the only thing we can do is just preserve our own faith and those of our families and just wait.
That is why many of us have retreated into the Cave of Covadonga (FSSP, ICK, etc) and we will not let our own selves be drawn out to fight a losing battle with cries of – yer cards * – as Prudence is the moderating virtue.
Collectively, we Catholics deserve what we have been receiving but we are also led, individually, by The Holy Ghost into contact with other like-minded faithful for mutual support/education etc. The Pelayos, El Cids, Alfonsos, Ferdinands, and the beautiful blonde, Isabella (There can only be one like her) , may be being formed in those caves this very moment.
I hate to be a killjoy re Mr. Jokin’s sane and thoughtful proposal of fomenting a large-scale movement of concerned Catholics to respectfully request clarification of Vatican II, but in the eyes of the Council’s modernist proponents, wasn’t its lack of clarity pretty much the whole point? The overall atmosphere of unctuous fuzziness which resulted has provided perfect cover for wholesale upending of Church praxis, with no need to lay a finger on doctrine. Besides, let’s face it, past individual requests for clarification may have been a bit disingenuous – sort of like asking the Emperor to provide an itemized list of his New Clothes.
If the annual massive March for Life on DC can be rendered invisible by media blackout, it would be child’s play to keep this movement out of the public eye as well. It’s maddening to have to say it, but I don’t see that there’s anything overt that can be done by traditionalists to improve matters in the Church, apart from doggedly and unrelentingly applying the old reliable prescription: “But this kind is not cast out but by prayer and fasting.”
“But this kind is not cast out but by prayer and fasting.”
Exactly.
I say, “I usually go to the holy Mass but today I am forced to go to the new Mass.”