Let's play a game! - The "Shrinking Ice Floe" game

I hope everyone feels better today. No silly panicked runnings-off to the Orthodox or the SSP-2.5?

Good. The sun continues not to set on the Catholic world, and the Faith is still the Faith.

In fact, I predict that in, oooo let's say a year's time, nothing from the highest office in the Church, no implicit denials of doctrine, no fuzzy New Age blatherings, no ambiguously worded incomprehensible pseudo-theological nonsense will any longer come as a surprise or shock to anyone.

What we are experiencing now is merely the shock of hearing plainly spoken what has been implicit and said in coded language by the hierarchy for decades. We thought we could ignore it or wish it into the cornfield when it was "just" a local bishop, or "just" a parish priest or "just" a high-ranking Vatican prelate. We had the luxury of having the pope to point to and say, "Well, he's not saying that, so things are fine."

But how long has it been since anyone has been shocked by incomprehensible New Age Modernist gibberish coming from a cardinal or bishop? How long has it been since we learned to just ignore it, or at least allow it not to burden us personally?

If you are a Catholic, you know what the Faith is. If you don't, trust me, its written down somewhere, using very *very* precise and comprehensible language, leaving NO room for ambiguity or "misinterpretation". Look it up.

Do the work, people. The time of just sitting back and letting the pope do the driving is over.

In fact, we can have some fun.

Let's play a game! I like to call it the "Shrinking Ice Floe Game". We can sit back and watch to see which of our NeoCatholic friends will be the first to abandon their compromises and face up to reality. It'll be fun also to watch the increasingly desperate attempts of the professional neocatholic apologists to keep the whole business afloat. And I think I agree with Kat; this ought to be a drinking game.

Whenever the next interview, off-the-cuff remarks or homily chips away a few more feet of ice, we can yell, "Extra ecclesiam nulla salus" or "Viva il papa!" and chug a beer.

On the day, (which is certainly coming) when the first encyclical or other formal teaching document tries to deny a dogma or doctrine of the Faith, we can all meet back at Scholar's Lounge on the Via Del Plebiscito and get plastered together. Won't that be fun?

It's not a mean game. Polar bears can swim, did you know that? And Catholics don't depend on the pope for the Faith. There's nothing to fear; you don't have to stay on the ice floe.

I have to say, though, that all this has really made me feel much better. Unburdened. I can't tell you how sick I was getting of Cassandra Syndrome. Now that the Successor of Peter has decided to take over the task of demonstrating that the Traditionalist critique of the post-Conciliar Church was right all along, I can relax, and get on with what we should all be doing: being Catholic. Which means? ... Come on people, you know this one...

Embrace the Cross. Sure there's going to be suffering. Sure it's going to suck. Things are going to get higgeldy-piggeldy. But this is nothing new. We've known about this for a long time, whether we have been in stubborn denial or not. The Index of Leading Catholic Indicators and a bunch of other books told us all decades ago where this was going, and anyone with Catholic eyes to see knew precisely how and by whom it was being pushed.

Why should we be surprised or upset now when it actually gets there?

So, calm down. Nothing important has changed, because nothing important can change.

I've got more to come, of course, but I'm afraid I'm not going to be the one to waste my time demonstrating with documentation exactly which quotes were heretical or nonsensical. There's more than ample of that stuff around about. Plus, it's booooring, and I'm not going to do your homework for you.

Back in my day, when I started down this path, you had to actually leave the house to look things up...in books... in a "library".

So don't complain.



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