Month: October 2007

Interview with Cardinal George

John Allen has an interesting interview with Cardinal George which, for some idiotic reason,the NCR folks decided to put online in pdf form.

FIRST, HERE’S A BACKGROUNDER ON THE INTERVIEW.

AND HERE’S THE INTERVIEW ITSELF.

In the interview, Cardinal George has a number of things to say that have a bearing on the thesis that a broader cultural shift among Catholics is significantly responsible for declining Mass attendance and other religious practice, yet he also faults the leadership of the Church for contributing to the problem out of a sense of sociological naivete.

Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge talk about the distinction between “high tension” and
“low tension” religion, arguing that over time low tension groups tend to dissolve into
secularism.

That’s right. In the 60s, it was very important to show you could be American and Catholic.
Whole magazines were devoted to that. There was a collective sigh of relief at the Second
Vatican Council, with human freedom being so much in the forefront of the conciliar concerns,
that the tension wasn’t there anymore. I think some of the moves of the church in that period
now seem sociologically naïve, in their long-term consequences.


What do you have in mind?

Catholicism as a distinctive way of life was defined by eating habits and fasting, and by days
especially set aside that weren’t part of the general secular calendar. They were reminders that
the church is our mediator in our relationship to God, and can enter into the horarium [calendar]
that we keep, into the foods that we eat, into all the aspects of daily life, into sexual life. Once
you say that all those things can be done individually, as you choose to do penance, for example,
you reduce the collective presence of the church in somebody’s consciousness. At that point, the
church as mediator becomes more an idea for many people. Even if they accept it, it’s not a
practice. So then when the church turns around and says ‘You have to do this,’ then resistance is
there to say, ‘How can you tell me that? I’m deciding on my life for myself, and you even told
me I could!’

Cardinal George also comments on the situation with the new translation of the liturgy being prepared and notes that, while the new translations are better and the right thing is being done in preparing them, it’s still going to be a significant adjustment for people:


Bishop Donald Trautman and others worry that when that Sunday comes and you have to
explain to people that from now on they will be saying “and with your Spirit” rather than “and
also with you,” there will be a negative reaction. Do you share those concerns?

Hopefully, there will be a lot of good catechesis, which is already being prepared in all the
English-speaking countries. That [a negative reaction] will happen if it’s not well prepared. It
will be a lot harder, as we all know, to go from English to English than from Latin to English.
The Latin was foreign anyway, and this was our language. Now we’ve got something that is our
language, and we’ve got something new that is also our language with a slightly different cast.
That’s going to be hard. Beyond that, we’ve memorized. I can say the canons by heart. We can
enter into them and pray them. Even if they’re not great translations, they’re not bad, and in
many ways they’re quite beautiful. I’ve made them my own. It’s good when you say “We
believe,” and people go down the line through the Creed. We’re changing four lines in that thing.
It’s going to be difficult. People will go back again to reading it, whereas for 20 years now we’ve
just been able to remember it. That’s not going to easy, and nobody’s looking forward to it.


Is it worth it?

Oh yes. I think the translations are superior. There’s a lot of the richness of the Roman rite, and
therefore our faith, because our liturgy reflects our faith, that we will have present in our hearts
again. But it will take 20 years, maybe, before we have it memorized. I mean, I’ll probably go to
my death fighting not to say, “and also with you,” because it’s so second nature by now. People
know immediately what to do. That’s great, that’s a sign of unity. So we’re introducing a
discordant note in our unity, for a good purpose. I think the reason is very adequate, but it’s
going to be work.

GET THE STORY. (PDF WARNING)

The Nattering Nabobs of Know-Nothingism

TheviewcurrentI have never seen an episode of ABC TV’s The View.

Until Rosie O’Donnell got in trouble on it, I hadn’t even heard of the program, though it’s apparently been on for more than ten years.

From reading about the show and seeing clips of it, I have, however, come to hold a very low opinion of it.

What I have seen and read about the show leads me to the conclusion that it is shallow and bubble-headed and frequently shameful, embarrassing, and even disgusting. In other words, it swings between the two extremes of insipid, inconsequential fluff, often with prurient undertones, to completely idiotic attempts to take on serious subjects by a group of commentators who don’t have the first clue what they’re talking about.

Since the commentators are also all women, the show is clearly aimed at a female audience, and if I were a woman, I’d be insulted that ABC thinks this is the kind of junk that I’d be interested in.

The show also seems to deliberately stir up controversy in order to attract ratings by hiring sick puppies like Rosie O’Donnell and Whoopi Goldberg (note that it’s Barbara Walters in the clip who first introduces a disgusting suggestion, which Goldberg then amplifies and makes even worse; there’s plenty of sick puppyism to go around on this show).

So it comes as no surprise that, if this pack of intellectual mendicants (not in the good sense, in which Dominicans are intellectual mendicants) were to choose to take on the subject of Archbishop Raymond Burke’s statement that he would deny Rudy Giuliani Holy Communion that they’d make more errors than you could shake a stick at.

And they did.

Reading the following transcript of part of yesterday’s show (which sure sounds authentic, though I haven’t been able to verify that yet, so caveat emptor,though I have partial confirmation from another source) is like playing one of those "How many things can you find wrong in this picture?" games.

Man, is it painful!

ABC–and its owner, the Disney corporation–should be ashamed of itself that it’s putting out this kind of offensive and brainless twaddle.

Since the hosts of The View obviously don’t have a clue, ABC should get one and cancel the show.

Transcript below the fold (CHT to the reader who e-mailed).

Continue reading “The Nattering Nabobs of Know-Nothingism”

Declining church attendance

SDG here (not Jimmy) with some musings on the trend of falling church attendance, especially among Catholics..

In a combox discussion below about post-Vatican II liturgical changes, a reader suggested that post-Vatican II liturgical changes were responsible for a massive decline in Catholic church attendance. Of course church attendance has fallen everywhere, not just among Catholics — but another reader argued that Catholics have fallen away at much greater rates than their non-Catholic neighbors, implying that the fault must lie with changes in the Church:

The Church was in ascendancy until all of these shenanigans started up around Vatican II. Now? Decline in many fronts…

So what is the cause? Protestant church attendance went down by about 5-10% in the last 40 years, Catholics are down by over 60%.

Now, I’m not a sociologist. I suspect the second reader’s statistical factoid is misleading, for reasons that I may or may not touch on in a follow-up post or in the combox. Granted the statistic, though, or at least the general point behind it, I can think of a few possible factors that could contribute to such a disparity, though I don’t pretend to know what "the cause" is.

What I can say is this: Granted that the decline in church attendance has hit the Catholic Church harder than Protestant churches, it doesn’t follow that the basis for this disparity must be rooted solely in harmful changes within the Catholic Church. On the contrary, I think it is very likely that two very important factors involve ways in which the Catholic Church has not changed while the culture — including Protestant culture — has drifted further into error.

Let’s review a little history. Other than Vatican II and the 1969 missal, what other cultural changes have taken place from the 1960s onward?

Here are a few: The sexual revolution. The Pill. No-fault divorce. The Playboy Philosophy. The Me Generation. The evolution of serial monogamy. The DINK culture. The rise of what is only half facetiously called the "starter marriage."

Now, what are the most widely criticized and resisted teachings of the Catholic Church today? Here are two:

1. Divorce and remarriage.

2. Contraception.

To these two we could also add an obvious third, abortion, although there the Protestant culture is more divided, with strong areas of ongoing resistance to abortion within the Evangelical community. On the subjects of divorce and remarriage and contraception, on the other hand, the Catholic Church stands essentially alone against the culture.

Say what you like about the liberality of American marriage tribunals. The fact remains that in the Catholic Church it is still a whole heck of a lot harder to get divorced and remarried and keep on receiving communion as a Catholic in good standing than it is in any other church or ecclesial community. On this subject, what has changed over the last four decades is not the Church’s essential teaching, but the culture at large.

In an age in which skyrocketing divorce rates and multiple marriages are increasingly the norm, the Church’s ongoing fidelity to her essential teaching seems increasingly onerous and unrealistic. No other church or ecclesial community imposes the array of time-consuming, bureaucratic and potentially costly obstacles upon divorced members seeking to enter or having already entered into new unions. The Church does this out of fidelity to Jesus Christ, who declared that he who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, but the world grows ever deafer to this declaration.

As for contraception, if anything it is probably an even bigger issue. As prevalent as divorce and remarriage have become, contraception is ubiquitous, literally taken for granted. The question in our contraceptive culture is not whether to contracept, but only which type(s) of contraception to use. (The mere fact that one particular type of oral pharmaceutical has an undisputed and unambiguous claim to the definite term "The Pill" itself speaks volumes.)

Although surveys suggest that many Catholics are willing to keep coming to Mass in spite of dissenting from the Church’s teaching in both theory and practice, it remains a major impediment to fully appropriating and embracing one’s Catholic identity. It is a wedge driving untold Catholics to qualify their acceptance of the Church’s teaching and pastoral authority, making it easier to dissent and distance themselves on other issues and finally to abandon the Church altogether.

On a fundamental level, whatever mistakes and questionable decisions may have been made within the Church in the 1960s and beyond, on these two issues it is what the Church has done right that has pushed away some who might not have been pushed away in Protestant churches.

This isn’t to say that mistakes and questionable decisions haven’t made both issues a bigger stumbling-block when they need to be. For instance, I know a couple seeking full membership in the Church who have been trying to get an anullment hearing in another country for several years. Not just the Church’s teaching, but the imperfections of the Church’s leadership obstruct their way.

Nor am I claiming that liturgical changes in the 1960s and beyond — both authorized and otherwise — haven’t been factors at all.

I’m simply noting that the factors are complex, the social changes over the last few decades are complex, the issues are complex. We can’t simply conclude that if more people are falling away from the Church, the only possible explanation is limited to what the Church is doing wrong. At least in some cases, it may be what the Church is doing right.

Many disciples stopped following Jesus after his "hard sayings" in John 6, saying, "Who can accept this?" The same dynamic is at work today.

Vatican’s Top Liturgical Liberal Steps Down

It’s been predicted for some time that B16 would remove Marini from his office as the papal master of ceremonies.

And now he has.

His replacement is . . . Marini!

That is, Archbishop Piero Marini is being replaced by Fr. Guido Marini.

Same last name. Two different guys.

In case you haven’t been aware of who Piero Marini is or what the papal master of ceremonies is, basically he (Piero Marini) is the guy who, as master of ceremonies, plans the pope’s celebration of the liturgy.

Want to know why there were Aztec dancers gyrating all over the place at the canonization of Juan Diego?

Piero Marini.

Want to know why John Paul II’s vestments for the Third Millennium celebration looked like a costume from Star Trek Voyager?

Piero Marini.

Want to know why liturgical law was disregarded regularly at John Paul II’s major celebrations of the liturgy?

Piero Marini.

I don’t know why JP2 kept him around, particularly as he started tightening up on liturgical abuses through the latter part of his reign.

I mean, if you’re trying to tighten up the celebration of the liturgy for Catholics all over the world, not using one’s authority as pope to authorize deviations from the norms at your own liturgies would seem to be a good first step.

Otherwise, it’s easy for liturgical dissidents the world over to say, "Well, the pope had this (e.g., dancing) at his own Mass, so it’s obviously okay for us to have it, too."

But for whatever reason, Pope John Paul decided to retain the services of Piero Marini.

Once B16 was elected, it was widely expected that he would replace Marini, though not immediately lest it look like a slap.

Some have thought that the case of Benedict’s tie-dyed vestments in Austria (more on those later) might have precipitated the replacement.

So who’s the new Marini?

EXCERPT:

The new Marini, according to Italian observers, does not bring a sharply defined ideological profile into his new position. Though he served as the master of ceremonies in the Genoa archdiocese for both Cardinals Dionigi Tettamanzi and Tarcisio Bertone (today the Vatican’s Secretary of State), Guido Marini, 46, has an academic background in canon law and spirituality rather than liturgy.

GET THE STORY.