Tradition and Truth

Bringing it back

From Thomas Pascoe, writing for the Telegraph:

Hallelujah! Rejoice! The progressive instinct which has brought the Christian churches to their knees in the West over the last century has at last been stymied. Not, of course, stymied by the priesthood, but by a laity which has had enough of seeing Christian dogma play second fiddle to the demented social engineering foisted on the church by a secular world which holds it in contempt. ... 

One of the reasons we have lost sight of this is that all the Western churches have accepted a general need to liberalise in response a society which has paired the loss of political liberty with expansive sexual liberties. The notion that without stigma we often act against our own interests is not new, it dates back to Aristotle's discussion of the akratic. But our loss of shame as a society, and the social breakdown which has ensued, has derived from an absentee church which has resiled its duties in favour of chasing the zeitgeist. 

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, of Pope Leo XIII appearing to fall into a trance shortly after he finished celebrating Mass in Rome in 1884. When asked later what had happened, he reported hearing two voices, one gruff and coarse, one kind and gentle, transact a conversation in which the frightening voice was given between 75 and 100 years to bring about the collapse of the Church. 

What ensued was a steady erosion of doctrine. Practices established from time immemorial were dispensed with because they were no longer seen as relevant. The efficacy and the beauty of the Catholic rites has been diminished by this process, as much as is the case in the Anglican communion.

So true. Please CC to the American bishops, and every pastor at every Catholic parish.