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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34500 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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In some non-US news German Catholic has decided to vote against official Catholic doctrine, by supporting the blessing of same-gender relationships. Unlike MLK who advocated a stricter reading of the Bible, present schismatics seem to argue in favour of a "living constitution Bible".

If they hope to bring back believers by adopting left-alligned attitudes, they are probably mistaken. This is because if one looks towards the US, a country with sufficient religous pluralism to make comparisons between various sects of Christianity, one can observe that future only holds failure for such a plan.

More progressive Christian groups, apparently called "mainline" in American discourse, are declining significantly faster then conservative ("evangelical") ones.

I assume that such statistics are known to Catholic leadership, be it in Vatican or Bonn, so it stands to reason it probably isn't maximization of mass attendance that is the motivation. Sincere belief in correctness of their cause is.

If Vaticans persecution of rightist deviations, and German acceptance of leftist ones, hastens the decline of belief in G-d, it would be in-line the usual stance of the Church that Truth (as it interprets it: gay couples deserve to be blessed, bishops need permission to Mass in Latin) is important than popularity.

Better there be A Couple, but Committed, than Common, but Cafeteria.

As a catechumen, I’ve seen plenty of people talking about this in online Catholic spaces, but this has yet to come up in real life.

Maybe this is just the fervor of a convert speaking, but it seems to me we have a lot of work to do educating the laity (and apparently the German bishops) on doctrines of the faith. Last night YouTube recommended a video to me from Bishop Barron where he shared a poll that 70% of Catholics do not believe in the real presence of the Eucharist.

This is perhaps the greatest distinction between the Catholic Church and nearly all of Protestantism.

Is it? Theological ignorance is a massive problem in American Protestant churches as well - remember that Ligonier poll? That found 73% of evangelicals affirming the statement "Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God", which is as classically heretical as you can get. 43% of evangelicals affirmed "Jesus was a great teacher but he was not God". 57% of evangelicals agreed with "Everyone sins a little,, but most people are good by nature". 65% of evangelicals affirmed that "Everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God". These are all obvious heresies.

There are even some obvious contradictions: 97% agree that "There is one true God in three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit", and then 60% agree that "The Holy Spirit is a force but is not a personal being". Not only is that false, they just said that the Spirit is a person!

Likewise I am sure that a majority of Catholics deny the Real Presence, or think that the Immaculate Conception is about Jesus, or some other basic misunderstanding of doctrine.

Catechesis is a massive problem in Christian churches in the West right now.

On the Ligonier poll, it is striking that there is a very high degree of conformity on culture war issues (e.g. 92% agree that abortion is a sin), but extreme levels of confusing on even basic questions of doctrine. It suggests to me that churches have become very good at lining people up into political tribes, but are failing at their more basic, essential duty of teaching the gospel.

Historically, this is nothing exceptional. How many medieval illiterate village peasants (or barely literate town laborers) would answer this questionnaire correctly?

It depends on the era of 'medieval', and way more than you think. Medieval community life was heavily influenced by the sacred calendar -- feast days and fast days, holy processions and festivals, based on events from the life of Christ and lives of the saints. Likewise, while illiteracy was common, medieval churches were decorated with stained glass, icons, statues, and other artistic representations of key elements of the faith. Finally, while catechesis (religious education) was a recurring issue within the medieval church, the Carolingian Renaissance (at the tail end of the Early Medieval period) and the rise of mendicant orders (Franciscans and Dominicans during the High Medieval age) represent serious efforts by the church to improve religious education of priests as a means of improving the religious instruction of the laity.

At the very apex of Age of Faith, at the time when Saint Thomas wrote his Summa, how common peasant devotion and worship looked like?

It looked like this.

Yes. Veneration of dead dog as a saint. Absolute and unspeakable horror for anyone who ever skimmed Theology 101, SOP for average Christian peasant of the day.

This is what actual based trad popular religion of our ancestors looked like, and it had nothing in common with dreams of online trad bros.

The church was not amused.

The custom was regarded as harmful and superstitious by the church, which made efforts to eradicate it.

How successful it was?

the last known visit by someone to Saint Guinefort Wood to effect a cure for a sick child occurring around the 1940s.

Yea, only full fledged modernity of radio, cinema, TV, urbanization and medicine that actually works, managed to uproot age old superstitions.

If it it 'standard operating procedure' for 'average Christian peasants', can you show me another example of a dog saint? Or do I need to point you to the many many irrationalities of our modern secular world before you'll agree that the plural of anecdote is not data, and that you can't generalize from a single example that was notorious even in its own day?

This dog anecdote was just an illustration of peasant relationship to the divine and supernatural, untouched by any theological thought.

Yes, it is an anecdote, because we do not have any research or opinion polls from medieval villages.

We don't, but we have second best, classic anthropologic survey work of extremely trad Italian village (with very unPC name), as close we could in 20th century get to the medieval world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Basis_of_a_Backward_Society

The Moral Basis of a Backward Society is a book by Edward C. Banfield, an American political scientist who visited Montegrano, Italy (Montegrano is the fictitious name used by Banfield to protect the original town of Chiaromonte, in the Southern Italian region of Basilicata) in 1955. He observed a self-interested, family-centric society, which sacrificed the public good for the sake of nepotism and the immediate family. As an American, Banfield was witnessing what was to become infamous as the Southern Italian Mafias and a self-centered clan-system promoting the well-being of their inner group at the expense of the other ones. Banfield postulated that the backwardness of such a society could be explained "largely but not entirely" by "the inability of the villagers to act together for their common good or, indeed, for any end transcending the immediate, material interest of the nuclear family."

So, after 1500 years of Christianity, how pious and devoted were the Montegranesi?

The Montegranesi get little religious instruction. A peasant grandmother tells her grandchildren the stories of miracles and sacred things which she heard from her grandmother. At six a child learns his catechism, a meagre list of questions and answers which is likely to be forgotten soon after the priest has given a simple test.

In school an hour a week is devoted to religion. In later life the individual, if he goes to church--and many do not--hears simple sermons: the priest says, for example, that to be a good Catholic one must love God, obey the laws of the church, and do right. On saints days speakers sometimes come from Naples and Potenza to tell about the saint whose holiday it is.

This is the extent of the ordinary person's religious training.

Those few who could read the Bible are not discouraged from doing so but they are not encouraged either. A few peasant women have prayer books or the gospels, but most homes contain no religious literature.

Every peasant has his children baptized but (according to a Montegrano priest) most of them--especially the men--do not take seriously the idea of life after death. They believe there may be some kind of an after-world but that, whatever its nature, it will be the same for all. The hope of heaven and the fear of hell do not move them.

For the typical peasant, God (or Christ, the terms are used interchangeably) is not a spirit of loving kindness or even of firm justice. He is a demanding and capricious overlord. He may not notice one at all. If He does, He may distribute bounty or catastrophe according to whim.

Many think of God as a hostile, aggressive force which must be propitiated. A young woman, very angry with her father for getting drunk and making it necessary for her to leave a festa to take him home, sobbed, "What do I have to do to satisfy Christ ? He never does any nice things for me, and He always does these bad things to me. I don't know what to do to satisfy Him."

Some Montegranesi pray more to the saints than to God. Candles are rarely left before the main altar; most people think it more economical to leave them before the statue of a saint or madonna.

These judgments are made on practical grounds: no one has heard of any noteworthy miracles performed recently by God; this or that saint, on the other hand, has shown himself to be able and willing to afford protection (it is always protection that is asked) in a special class of matters. Some peasants even believe that certain saints are more powerful than God.

Five Madonnas are honored in Montegrano, and for some people the connection between them and the mother of Christ is extremely vague. (When a Montegrano boy who had studied for the priesthood attempted to explain to an old woman that there is only one Madonna, she laughed at him. "You studied with the priests for eight years", she said, "and you haven't learned the differences between the Madonnas!"

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