"How can I, except some man should guide me"?

One of the most profound realisations I made in my journey out of Protestantism was the need of an authoritative teacher. It is sad that even the holy scriptures tell us this, yet my pastors denied this, asserting the "scripture interprets scripture" and our own private judgement under the guiding of the Holy Ghost is sufficient. I stand, like the Ethiopian eunuch, in constant need of assistance. Thank God the Church has ordained men to preach and teach the holy scriptures, to make plain what they say. I suggest the following link as one great tool in understanding the rich treasury of the Bible: http://www.scripturecatholic.com/ 

Happy studying!

Fr. Z features a podcast with special guest Pope Paul VI.

http://wdtprs.com/blog/2009/11/podcazt-93-40-years-ago-paul-vi-on-the-eve-of-the-novus-ordo/

Reflecting on my exchange with Fr. Robert Hart re: Anglican Difficulties, and on his assertions that the changes in England's liturgy beginning in 1549 were only to reform what had become encumbered with Mediaeval heresies and bring to light the primitive Patristic Faith. I think that if you compare the suppression of the old Latin Rites (there were several) with the Prayer Book in 1549, and even more so 1552, with the suppression of the Tridentine Rites with the Novus Ordo Missae in 1969, the excuses offered by Fr. Hart, and the excuses offered by Paul VI run along much the same lines. "This will make the theology of the Mass much clearer, it will help the common people participate in the Liturgy more fully, it will enable those who don't know Latin to become involved, it will do any number of glorious things..."

Quite honestly, the quotes I dug up from contemporary observers in the late 1590's/early 1600's (you can scroll down through the Anglican Difficulties comments) point out that, in fact, attendance at Holy Communion had been falling instead of rising, and that it was normal practice to frequent Holy Communion two to three times a year at most, and often only once at Easter. And this state of affairs is documented as existing, not counting the Interregnum, for some 300 years! Newman, writing after his conversion and reflecting back could state matter factly of the country parish where "the Sacrament was administered at the three great feasts" - period. This was in the first quarter of the 19th Century, and so we see an almost total stagnation of spiritual life on the part of the common people for some 300 years.

And Fr. Hart can boldly claim that this reformed religion of purity and truth, with its fresh and untainted rites in the vernacular, was God's gift to the world as the answer to the English Church's problems?  in 300 years it failed to even raise the people a tiny bit closer to any sort of eucharistic devotion or piety. The people were ignorant in 1590, and they were just as ignorant in 1825. Can anyone fail to see the utter hypocrisy of the reformers?

I really feel that every "reform", whether the Protestant in the 16th C or the reform of the Catholic Church at Vatican II, has been nothing more than egotistical elites imposing their new-found notions on people who don't care at all for religious change. One of the contemporary observers I quoted on Anglican Difficulties I will quote again here: "Pemble claimed that people had to be `compelled by law' to come to communion, `or else the Lords Table is likely to stand unfurnished of guests'." The reformation in England would have been a manifest non-starter had not it had the weight and brute force of governmental authority to impose it on the population. So the romantics looking back from a comfortable vantage point, entirely free from the draconian laws which this State Religion imposed, are free to give whatever interpretive spin on the matter they wish.

A tree is known by its fruits. 300 years of absolute barrenness and stagnation is nothing to brag about. The present morass which is Anglicanism, be it Low or High, Canterbury or Continuing, is just more desolation and make-believe. Ever changing, ever seeking, never achieving, never finding... wandering in the desert. But what do they care about the big picture of the whole Church? Not much, as long as I have my tidy little parish, my stipend, my nice parsonage, a wife, a degree or two after my name, a reputation in the neighbourhood, and the right of ecclesiastical snobbery which a Roman collar automatically confers. Hell no. Anglicanism may be a failed, dysfunctional and fruitless system, but hey, it works for me!

We can look at any of the original Protestant "Isms" that resulted from the schisms of the 16th C today and see much the same sort of sick, deflated, and washed out shell. Almost without exception they have embraced Homosexuality, female clergy, they condone abortion, euthanasia, contraception, they deny the authority of the Holy Scriptures, and are dying off like flies in January. The legacies of every "reform" are what? Ruined and crumbling churches, derelict and collapsing abbeys, empty churches sold off for flats and boutiques or galleries, millions of people who give up the practice of their religion altogether rather than go along with the reforms, future generations to whom the "pre-reform" era is forever lost, priceless documents allowed to disappear as they fall into disuse. The legacy is sad.  How anyone can think that violent reformation is a positive thing is beyond me.

The reform we are to embrace is the inner conversion that comes through a dedicated imitating of Jesus Christ. It is this inner conforming, this moulding and shaping over a lifetime of penance and sacrifice and suffering that will truly make the Mystical Body healthy, vibrant, and flourishing.  This pottering about with papers and drawing up newfangled liturgies is nonsense that intellectuals indulge in when they have nothing better to engage their time and energy. We are saved by grace, not newfangleness. Newfangleness failed in England, it failed Rome after Vatican II, it will always fail. The Body is not a machine to which we can simply bolt on new accessories or turbo chargers; it is described in Holy Scripture as a body, as one body, that slowly grows and develops just as a body should, organically and steadily. There can be no tearing away, no tearing apart, no rupture, no inserting foreign elements; to do so would violate the very nature of the body. The reformers in England sought to tear away, and cast off their past, in search of elusive golden Patristic age... CANNOT BE DONE. Rome sought to do the same in the 60's and 70's...CANNOT BE DONE. You cannot do that and expect the body to grow. It will go into shock, it will be in pain, it will begin to hemorrhage, it will enter convulsions, become weak, and DIE.

"And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man." St. Luke 2:52. Now the reformer would no doubt make the argument that incremental growth and development in doctrine is false. Thus the analogy of the earthly life and  human body of our Lord and  His Visible Body on earth which is the Church is worth discussing in order to correct him.  Jesus, no one would seriously say, failed to possess the fullness of His Divinity at any point after the Incarnation; He was always fully God as well as fully man. So how can the Gospel teach us that He "increased in wisdom" in the natural sense that all boys do? I think Jesus teaches us here a lesson, and sets forth the pattern which was to characterise His Body in the ages to come after His Ascension. Wisdom is not simple knowledge; a man may know a great amount about a given topic, yet remain clueless as to how to apply this same knowledge. The problem is not that his knowledge is incomplete, it is that as yet he lacks the ability to apply this knowledge in a practical and positive way. Nor is wisdom simple human prudence, tact, or cunning; examples of which Church history is littered. The Catholic would never accept that any new or novel dogma has been added to the Deposit of Faith since the death of the last Apostle, this has been restated over and over. So what do we mean by the development of doctrine? Take the Parable of the Mustard Seed as one example: a small seed becomes over time a great and mighty tree. The Faith was entirely present in the teaching of the Apostles, some already committed to paper, some held as authoritative oral teaching and later codified and written down to answer heretics and reafffirm the true doctrine against those who would wrest it according to their liking. The process of a growing child is an excellent analogy to use in the growth of the Church through the centuries. What started out as a tiny embryo in the person of Our Lord, soon multiplied into the small band of faithful in the Upper Room, and from thence emerged to spread and grow through all Judea and finally throughout the entire Meditteranean and into Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Far East, eventually crossing the oceans and into the Americas. Through all this varied growth amongst differing cultures, languages, climates and people of both primitive and refined manners, the Church had to struggle to meet these challenges, to present the Message it had been given in a suitable way, and to carry out the Work of Baptism, Preaching, and teaching of souls. It is for this reason that Jesus did not drop a pre-packaged Church from the sky at Pentecost, but rather gave us the Holy Ghost to help and strengthen us for this enormous task. The reformer, in pointing out the mistakes the Church has made (and there are some all along), takes the simplistic approac of rejecting ALL the Church has done - throwing the baby out with the wash water - and starts anew and fashions a church according to his own fancy as he sees it in the Bible...of course cutting out those bits of the Bible that do not suit his fancy. The use of logic and reason, as applied to the truths of scripture, to glean new truth and insight and to illuminate and expand what is but kernel size into a full ear of doctrine, is the prerogative and duty of the Church in order to fulfill its mandate. This is not "making up" new doctrines, but simply through diligent and sanctified study bringing out of the treasury things ever old yet ever new, and presenting them afresh for the instruction and nourishment of the peoples to whom she is sent that their souls may be saved.

"I am worried by the Blessed Virgin’s messages to Lucy of Fatima. This persistence of Mary about the dangers which menace the Church is a divine warning against the suicide of altering the Faith, in Her liturgy ... A day will come when the civilized world will deny its God, when the Church will doubt as Peter doubted. She will be tempted to believe that man has become God ... In our churches, Christians will search in vain for the red lamp where God awaits them, like Mary Magdalene weeping before the empty tomb, they will ask, ‘Where have they taken Him?’" Pope Pius XII recalling the Message of Fatima.