Chris Ferrara breaks the mould of the Catholic Trad. He's one of the leading voices in the Traditionalist movement in the US. And you will never meet a more cheerful, fun-loving and personable chap. Never an unkind word to or about anyone and always ready for a laugh or a song or a beer or a gelato.
Here he helps to clear up some misunderstandings.
One often hears the phrase, "I'm just a Catholic" from people who are at once trying to place themselves above the Church's interior War and to deny that there is anything they need to learn about their Faith.
It is annoying.
Where there are differences, one must make distinctions. And in the Church there are differences (and how!) and therefore we make the distinctions as best we can. (Taxonomy is the least exact of all the biological studies).
It is not pious or noble to try to ignore these differences or to sneer at the people who are attempting in good faith to clear away the dishonest effort made by many churchmen over the last 50 years to paper over and ignore these differences, to the harm of millions.
Chris Ferrara explains that we use these distinguishing terms because there are differences, one might say "divisions" in the Church that, for the good of souls, must be identified.
"Because of these novelties that have infiltrated the life of the Church, we've developed a kind of neoconservative Catholicism... And that is unprecedented in the Church. Before Vatican II we were all 'traditionalists'. We all went to the traditional Latin Mass; we all believed there was one true Church; we all prayed fifteen decades of the Rosary. We all pretty much practiced and believed the same way as our fathers and their fathers did for century after century after century.
"But now as I stand here, it becomes necessary for me to say I'm a Traditionalist. Why? Because there has arisen in the Church a kind of division of the Church into strains of Roman Catholicism.
"Now we have the charismatics. We have the conservative Novus Ordos. We have the very conservative Novus Ordos, the liberal Novus Ordos, the moderate Novus Ordos, the Traditionalists, the very extreme Traditionalists, the sede vacante Traditionalists... and so on.
"Whereas before Vatican II, we had heretics and Catholics."
He's the one who finally put my mind to rest about the Church. In a conversation at Gardone, he said, "Whatever goes on in Rome, stay Catholic. They can't take the faith from you unless you're willing to relinquish it."
"You can't take the sky from me."
~
21 comments:
If we were just a denomination and Christ hadn't founded One, Holy and Apostolic Church, you'd have to conclude that these distinctions were enough to constitute different religions.
The neo-Catholics, in many ways, are so flexible that they are best described by behavior rather than belief.
After Mass this weekend, a fellow parishioner started to talk about the old Abbott & Costello routine "Who's on First?" Initially, I tuned him out because I always found that skit so irksome.
He then said: Bud is the neo-Catholic and Lou is the Trad who wants to pull out his hair and say "That's not how we use those words!"
It makes all the more sense when you consider that Costello was a pre-Vatican II Catholic and Abbott was an Episcopalian Lodge member of Jewish decent.....
" We all went to the traditional Latin Mass"
see, right here you lose people, because that's false. Eastern Catholics are Catholics. - Karen
Yes, but most people don't know about the Eastern Catholics. I never met one until I was 30+. Unless you belong to certain ethic groups going Eastern is not an option. They aren't too welcoming but I don't blame them. They see the mess the Western Church is in and fear that refugees will acidentally bring the same garbage with them.
I go to an Eastern Catholic church and would disagree with the above statement. Our parish is filled with people of different nationalities and many of Anglo background. And we are very welcoming. Every single visitor is invited after the liturgy to partake of lunch with us. Neither I nor my husband belong to the 'ethnic group' represented by our parish BUT it is an option for us. And a very good one.
I have also been to a number of Ukrainian Catholic churches, even though I am not Ukrainian, and felt welcomed by both the parishioners and the clergy. Ditto for the middle eastern churches we have visited.
Language is sometimes seen as a barrier but this is slowly breaking down with many services being celebrated in English, or a mix of English and Arabic/Syriac/Slavonic/Ukrainian.
Lydia
There's also the plain *not true* part. - Karen
Actually, in Boston, we have 4, maybe 5 TLMs on Sundays, that's in *all* of the Boston area. I drive by at least 3 or 4 Novus Ordo churches during my 10 mile drive to get to the TLM. If, for some reason, the Archdiocese of Boston decides to start dismantling the TLM Masses, I may try to find the Eastern Catholic Mass in the Boston area. I think there's *one*, 20 miles or so away from me...
Karen,
It's inaccurate to say that "most" Catholics are Latin rite. It's closer to say "nearly all". And one way or another, until the Council all Catholics believed the same things. Which is Chris's point here.
Also, you might want to check out a Maronite parish some day: they also gutted their liturgy.
I didn't make any of the following statements:
1. Before VII, we all went to the traditional Latin mass.
2. Most Catholics are Latin rite.
3. Nearly all Catholics are Latin rite.
Arguing about whether 2 is less true than 3 is stupid. I guess we could get into it if we felt like doing something stupid but there are so many stupid things that are so much more fun. Also note that nobody but you made either statement. However statement 1 is just false. And no, "everyone had the same liturgy" doesn't mean "everyone believed the same things." Those are DIFFERENT STATEMENTS. (It also isn't true. Until Humanae Vitae spelled out that this was NOT ALLOWED, it was pretty easy to get a confessor to tell a married woman to go ahead and use birth control, for example.) - Karen
Quite honestly, I frequently have no idea what you are talking about. Sorry.
Don't be silly, you know perfectly well what I'm saying. And what you're saying is "I'm taking my ball and going home." It's a minor point, but what the man said *is false.* - Karen
which bit? That Catholics all believed the same doctrines before the Council? That's the thing he's saying.
And yes, you do frequently flummox me.
Well that's also not true, it's just way more inflammatory to say it than to say that Eastern Catholics are Catholics.
People are making up a glossy pretty movie version of a pre-Vatican II Catholicism that was uniform and full of good doctrine and teaching and it just ain't so. If everything had been peachy in the first place then things wouldn't have fallen so fast. This is the problem with looking immediately before the Asteroid in general though. There wasn't an Asteroid. It was more like a subduction event and maybe people should have realized that living on a faultline wasn't a good idea. - Karen
"People are making up a glossy pretty movie version of a pre-Vatican II Catholicism that was uniform and full of good doctrine and teaching and it just ain't so."
I agree. I'm trying to find the answers to 2 questions; what did we lose and when did we lose it? I guess the first is more important but it would be interesting to find the answer to the second one.
I stopped reading any "Catholic" book written after 1960. I'm thinking I should push that back another 60 years...
You know, I was raised by and around people who were educated in the pre-VII American Catholic lower middle class world, where there was nothing but Catholic books, NOTHING, and man why would anyone think that was desirable. I remember coming across some of them in my own childhood and sometimes they had a certain appeal - I remember particularly a children's biography of St Madeleine Sophie that contained more reverence for the Eucharist than I was getting in my Catholic school - but people have totally memoryholed how segregated and intellectually degenerate pre-VII American Catholicism was. You can't keep people artificially immature in an attempt to preserve their faith, either by social controls like in the US or by force like in Spain. - Karen
The idea that if everything were so great before Vatican II then things wouldn't have collapsed so fast seems to discount human nature and free will, I think.
One doesn't have to look much farther than the Apostles themselves to see how people, even those guided directly by Christ, tend to react to Asteroid-level events. The Apostles ended up having the advantage of Pentecost; the postconciliar churchgoers didn't, "New Springtime" notwithstanding.
I'm not the sort of Trad who thinks everything was glowing roses before The Council (TM), and generally only employ the term "asteroid" semi-facetiously since the disaster that has befallen us certainly did not come out of a clear blue sky, but was the result of deliberate occult machinations by bad men from the turn of the 20th century.
One of the indications of that was the sudden collapse of the womens' religious orders. By the time the Council came along, they were as strong as a soap bubble, and the least touch caused them to go poof. I spoke to the prioress of a very sound Benedictine monastery about it once. She had been in a Carmelite community and said that they had been forbidden to read St. Teresa Major or Minor, for fear that they would not understand it. She said that people came in with a third-grader's understanding of the Faith and were "formed" strictly in externals. They didn't have the Faith to begin with, so she said their outright apostasy later was unsurprising.
I was educated in a school run by one of the more intellectually rigorous women's orders, and there were no young nuns by my day. Now the schools are trying to wiggle out of any vestigial connection to the Church whatsoever. - Karen
Oh Lord, with a perfect hatred do I hate them that hate thee, I account them mine enemies.
I don't hate them, I miss them. :( - Karen
"before Vatican II, we had heretics and Catholics"
Which one was Pascal?
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