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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34439 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Could you give me a little background on this? I am completely unaware of the conflicts within the catholic church atm.

I had started writing an explainer but then got distracted by events in meat-space. Long story short John-Paul II and the respect he commanded had been what was keeping a lot of long simmering disagreements between the different factions in check. The sex abuse scandals have since become something of an albatross around the progressive wing's neck (this is what comes of tolerating homosexuality and all that). The expectation amongst conservatives was that Benedict XVI would "clean house" but that is not what appears to have happened and now we have pope Francis attempting to appeal to a sense of unity that simply isn't present. See @hydroacetylene's post below.

I think Benedict did try, and I personally found him very much to my inclinations and tastes (even things like the change of the processional staff to something more old-fashioned).

But he suffered from (1) succeeding the rockstar charisma of John Paul II where he was quiet and scholarly and didn't have the personal oomph to ride over the progressives and (2) having been painted as the Rottweiler, Palpatine, all the rest of the negative press that got going pretty much since he was elected. Trying to go back to more disciplined forms of liturgy doesn't work when a chunk of the faithful have been born and grown up under the new forms so have no memory of the old; those who do have the memory of how it used to be are either too old to make a difference, or are liberals who hated the old style anyway.

The Vatican II reforms were never meant to be taken as far as they went, but a lot of liberals at the time seized on them as "Gotta get rid of all this, the Council says so" and literally chopped up churches (there's a church in my town that was built in a conventional Victorian Gothic Revival style, nothing spectacular, really off the shelf, but it was destroyed by being hacked about over the years. The altar is now what I can only describe as a bundle of sticks. The laity sure didn't want the altar rails taken down and the rest of it, it was all down to the clergy). The ideals of going back to simpler, Gospel-oriented worship were great, but the effect was that schools now left teaching up to the parents, the parents thought schools would continue teaching the basics, kids never got the basics and Christian Doctrine classes (as they were in my time) now became all about what you could call social justice discussions.

There's a reason for the joke about "When God saw the Church was no longer suffering persecutions, He sent liturgists".

So Benedict was standing in a razed-flat wasteland trying to get the people who had only known that to come back to the way it used to be, and the press was too busy laughing about his red shoes to try and understand what he was doing.

God rest the man. He at least stood at the tiller and tried to steer the ship.

If you want to get into the doctrine, the Dimond Brothers (VaticanCatholic.com) have some good explainers from the ultra-traditionalist perspective. They’re more than a bit controversial (they go so far as to deny the legitimacy of the post Vatican II popes), but they explain everything well and quote the relevant sources.

The Catholic Church has been riven by internal conflict over how liberal to go since Vatican II. The reactionaries(we should go more conservative than we are now) are generally referred to as traditionalists, the hardliner conservatives as orthodox, and the hardliner liberals as progressives, with conservative and moderate and liberal being fuzzier terms for people that don’t belong in those camps, more directional than indicating firm allegiance.

JPII and in particular Benedict XVI managed to keep a lid on this conflict, although there were a few notable blowups under JPII and in a lot of cases they kept a lid on it by ignoring the divisions as long as the fighting was behind closed doors. Pope Francis, alas, is not anywhere near as good of a manager. He’s probably not a progressive, but his poor management has left him with very few other allies and little choice but to implement or at least tolerate unpopular and or unwise parts of their agenda. Now you’ve got the powerful conservative former head of the doctrinal department kept from open opposition by expecting the pope to die and be replaced by Benedict XVI’s(quite orthodox) top diplomat within the next year, local bishops openly siding with traditionalist groups they had not previously been on speaking terms with to signal opposition to the pope, the German bishops conference announcing a plan to approve gay marriage against Vatican disapproval, a looming confrontation over the next Vatican doctrine chief(this is traditionally the de facto number 2 spot) in which that same former head appears to have already vetoed a progressive appointee by making threats with the backing of a double digit number of cardinals, and the American bishops literally making heresy accusations against each other to the media(which is unprecedented). All of this is against a backdrop in which more revelations of sex abuse mishandling, this time mostly with perpetrators in the pope’s inner circle, coming out.

I think Francis does at the core have a solid or at least traditional understanding. There's a couple of things going on: he's a South American Jesuit, he does have the instinct for the pastoral role as the primary one, and he tends to say things off the cuff that the media then take up and amplify as their message (the one about "who am I to judge?" was not about "the gay is okay" and if you read the full context, it's in a specific case that was presented to him in a press interview aboard the Vatican jet, but that's not how it was reported in the papers).

I don't have much personal liking for Francis as his style is completely at odds with my own tendencies, and he does have a liberal streak. But "liberal" is not the same as "progressive" and I think he does believe in things like the divinity of Christ, the Real Presence, etc. He has a taste for the kind of lay devotions that the Spirit of Vatican II crowd looked down their noses at and swept away when in power.

I wish he'd clobber a few of the ones straying off the reservation, but he does believe the job of the Shepherd is to go after the sheep, not drive them further off.

Agree that Francis doesn’t seem personally very progressive(hence why I draw the distinction between liberal and progressive), but he’s definitely increasingly reliant on progressives to do anything and his weakness as a manager is not helped by his tendency to come down like a ton of bricks to his right.

his tendency to come down like a ton of bricks to his right.

Yeah, that's the Jesuit in him (I was going to say "South American Jesuit" but it's pretty much all the Jebbies everywhere, save for a few reactionary holdouts here and there).

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