Justifying everything except crass evil and contradicting himself in the process, Fauxther Longenecker treats liturgical and disciplinary chaos as a norm, even a "strength," of the Church. He laughably asserts that Charismatic Catholics are a legitimate "sub group" of the Church alongside Traditionalists, and claims to love them as well. Does he not realize that Charismatics and Traditionalists, quite apart from the question of who is right and who is wrong, cannot possibly belong to the same Church by their own internal criteria? Longenecker seems to have some distorted variant of the Pauline "Many Members" disquisition in mind (cf. I Corinthians XII-XIV) when making his ridiculous love-speech, but he has left out the very head of the argument, the most important premise,
viz. "For in one spirit were we all baptized into one body..." His is no longer a treatment of different spiritual gifts but of different bodies. I'm surprised he didn't entitle his article "St. Paul the [Big] Tentmaker."
One has to wonder what exactly, in Fr. Longenecker's mind, is the real Church to which all these sub groups belong. Where are the boundaries which he still insists are present, despite their allowing for a uselessly capacious degree of latitude? His first criterion, that we need to love Christ with all our heart, is true but insufficiently illuminating in this regard and reduces to mere sentimentality in his mouth; and his second criterion, that we must be obedient to the magisterium, simply begs the question. Yet he offers us a clue as to his real beliefs in his seventh paragraph: it is, of course, above all necessary to be "joyful" and "radiantly authentic." That's the way to grow the Church, don't you know? Oh, and besides, all you Traditional exclusivists out there, the Second Vatican Council
has happened, so get over it!
You will notice this confused and oscillatory tone amongst all the defenders of the conciliar religion's hermeneutic of continuity (the most vocal of whom tend to be former protestant ministers): first, an almost opiated paean to inclusivity, followed quickly by a measure of sanctimonious piping concerning the alleged dangers of a too-zealous attachment to Tradition. There really isn't anything else they could say; their manner of speaking and thinking is dictated to them by the exigencies of their position. How else to make it appear as though the Conciliar Church and the Catholic Church were the same body? How else to advance the hermeneutic of continuity without abandoning the reforms? Here also we see Longenecker's modernism at work in the way in which he organizes and disposes of his data, for it is clear from his discussion of "sub groups" that he mentally arranges the several "charisms" he identifies into a sort of
cladistic diagram in an effort to demonstrate their derivation from a common source through their display of homologous structures. Can ecuмenism be far behind? Would that those archaeologists of knowledge, our contemporary doyens of Lit-Crit who are so often dismissed as the enemies of truth and reason, but condescend to sift through the docuмents of the Conciliar Church! From what unlikely quarter might salvation come if they were to apply their deconstructive methodologies to
Summorum Pontificuм! For even secularists today are better at perceiving the disconnect between Tradition and conciliarism than many Catholics.
Finally, let us take note once and for all of just what Traditional Catholicism signifies in the minds of the conciliar religionists and their priests. It is nothing but a charism, one of the "many ways[!] given by the Lord to follow Christ," the principal purpose of which is to offer a reminder of Catholic traditions of liturgy, architecture, and art, as if we were the curators of a Catholic museum. In other words we are simply "Extraordinary Form" - that execrable little phrase mooted by Benedict XVI in an effort to explain away the illogicalities inherent in his VII sect - the extraordinary form of the
Novus Ordo, the traditional practice but the conciliar attitude, the latter of which alone is stipulated as unalterable truth.
And why not? Does it hinder the conciliar religion at all to allow Tradition to coexist with it in this neutered form? Of course not. The modern mind adheres to a form of religion but denies the power thereof. If the priest is no longer a
sacerdos ordained to offer sacrifices to God, to be as it were a mediator between the people and their God, but only a member of a bardic class of pious storytellers, what does it hurt to add one more story to the chronicle, a memory of a dream that once was our Church? It does not hurt them; it hurts us, who wept as we remembered Sion.
Topic: A Novus Ordo Priest: "Why I Love Trad Catholics" (Read 1218 times)