ZOMBIE CATHOLICS BUT LEGIONS OF YOUNG PRIESTS

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He acts like a clown  - which just proves he's not the pope

 

 

Catholics who continue to prop up the conciliar synodal Francis church, who turn up on Sunday and put money in the plate to get Father's assurance of their eternal reward, are zombie Catholics. The Novus Ordo has obliterated their knowledge of the Faith; all they retain is the notion that there has to be a pope and what he says goes.

Not that they know what Francis says, and it's far better they don't. In New Zealand all they have to go by is the papolatrous Cathnews and papolatrous diocesan rags, so they just read the parish newsletter. During the homily. Because Father says nothing about the Gospel and anyway they've heard his nothing before. It's all quite soothing and it's nice to catch up with the other zombies. At the Sign of Peace maybe, or when they're handed the Most Precious Body and Blood of their Lord Jesus Christ. With a mini-elevation and a special smile.

The thing is, the zombies' days are numbered. The dinosaurs who roamed the pastures of the Second Vatican Council are mostly dead and the priests and prelates infected by the virus they call "The Spirit of Vatican II" are so - well, passé. No wonder the young mostly want to forget the Faith they were born into. But the rest are reclaiming the Church from their elders and worsers. Young priests and people's loyalty is now to the Social Kingship of Christ, in the Traditional Latin Mass.

Or one who claims to be Pope and who openly destroys the Church

Writing for Crisis magazine, Father John Perricone expounds on the death of the dinosaurs:   

Recreational Catholicism? Let me explain.

It is an attribution identifying the current stage of collapse in the Roman Church. Its coinage is meant to convey the tangled knot of the therapeutic, political, theatrical, and ego-massaging trend besetting the Church, all of which produces a kind a zombie Catholic, who is daily fed on what Huxley called in Brave New World the “feelies”: engineered pleasures that maintain their victims in a state of floating euphoria.

It's been described on this blog before now as a weekly dose of anaesthetic.

 

Its principal vehicle is the liturgy, where Sunday “celebrations” are carefully planned by Liturgy Committees for maximum effusions of non-threatening messages of “welcoming.” While normal men gag on its oozing sentimentality, certain kinds of Catholics crave it. Sunday after Sunday. It is like a narcotic, you see.

 

Music is meticulously chosen to leave participants in swoons of gratified self-absorption. Toxic language, such as defined doctrine or the moral law, is proscribed. In fact, not a few bishops insist that the communion line (deliberate lower case for accuracy) be absolutely non-discriminatory. One and all come forward, the shepherds intone, because the sacrament is not a place of judgment but a place of warm fellowship.

 

The place of judgment is of course, the confessional, eschewed by the vast majority as unnecessary, since there's no such place as hell.

 

All of this is topped by celebrant priests who see their roles as talk show hosts. Each is vested shabbily enough (a requirement) to telegraph a casualness consistent with sipping margaritas. Added to this are churches resembling airport lounges. Of course, the Recreational bureaucracy is always intent upon improvement. So now churches are equipped with jumbo screens guaranteeing the mood of a sports bar.

 

 

Other vehicles exist to proffer Recreational Catholicism. The entire educational apparatus of the Catholic Church, for instance. What was once an unprecedented tool for the inculcation of Catholic truth and devotion has become a factory of counter-Catholicism.

 

Every facet—from grammar schools, high schools, universities, and colleges, to seminaries and houses of formation—have become appendages of a sprawling Recreational Catholicism. Even the once named “convert classes” (now labeled RCIA) are immersions in an inverted Catholicism with familiarity of the Nicene Creed as foreign as Sanskrit.

At the highest levels of church governance, defense of the Faith is now replaced by another tentacle of Recreational Catholicism—the Synodal Listening sessions. These are sandbox (sandpit, for Kiwis)  exercises where participants babble about redesigning a Catholic Faith more suited to a modern, woke sensibility.

Breezy conversation stands in place of granite doctrine, producing a Catholic Church stretched into forms barely resembling historic Christianity. Various dicasteries of the Holy See concoct a no-fault Catholicism where the repeal of the moral law proceeds apace by a thousand cuts, and traditional Catholic dogma suffers the blows of intentional ambiguity.

 

This Recreational Catholicism is merely the next iteration of historic Modernism. The 1907 heresy was a more subtle version of Renan’s 1893 Vie de Jesus, a shocking reinterpretation of the New Testament, blanched of any trace of the supernatural. Or, in the charged words of his disciple C.A. Sainte-Beuve, “we have forced Jesus to hand in His resignation from the Godhead.”

This was nothing less than a take-no-prisoners assault on doctrinal Catholicism. By the closing years of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Modernists appeared. Fathers Loisy, Tyrrell, et al. insisted upon a more “spiritual” Catholicism, where the object of Faith was not the crude intrusions of Divine Revelation and its doctrines, but a gentler “spiritual faith.” Doctrinal Catholicism was to be surrendered to a religion of personal élan.  

 

A dark pope is no pope and Fr Heimerl's readers know it 

 

 

G.K. Chesterton remarked; “Beware those who clamor for the spirit of Christianity, for what they really want is the ghost of Christianity.”

 

Modernism is Christianity’s “ghost.”

 

Recreational Catholicism is Catholicism’s “ghost.”

 

Just as the same Chesterton spoke of the five resurrections of the Church, in his memorable The Everlasting Man, we are on the cusp of a sixth. Or, to borrow from the First Letter of the first-century Pope Clement, the Church is like the phoenix rising from the ashes. Look carefully, and you will see it.

 

And it’s happening today. Before our very eyes.

 

With the headwinds of crisis still whipping against our faces, many might miss it. Moreover, its beginnings are small, like all great things. But it possesses remarkable strength. It is showing itself on every continent—but, surprisingly, strongest in America.  

 

Gerald Vann, Fathers Basil Maturin and Edward Leen. To say nothing of Lewis, Chesterton, Pieper, Daniel-Rops, Gilson, and Maritain. Add to these Msgr. Robert Benson, Fr. C.C. Martindale, and Hilaire Belloc.

 

Other Catholics are founding publishing houses (such as Sophia Institute Press, Ignatius Press, Os Justi Press, Emmaus Press, Cluny Press, and Angelico Press, to name a few), online magazines (like Crisis, LifeSiteNews and OnePeterFive), creating routine podcasts and daily radio shows (like The Catholic Current with the imitable Fr. Robert McTeigue)—all of whom can be likened to the pre-Soviet era Radio Free Europe.

 

 

Remember this. But he's not the pope

With skill and ingenuity, they are broadcasting the message of Doctrinal Catholicism over the heads of the cadaverous ecclesial bureaucracy that sits like a massive beached whale on the Mystical Body of Christ. These dynamic New Catholics have become the lean and diminutive David, slinging the tiny polished stones of the Victorious Christ against the massive and dollar-bloated Goliath of the conventional leadership.  

This high-powered group of young Catholics is impassioned with an electrifying love of the Old Faith, and they are aborning a renaissance before our very eyes. Coming from their numbers are priests. Scores and scores of them.

 

Many are entering the Traditional orders of the Fraternity of St. Peter or Institute of Christ the King. Both seminaries are at their maximum capacity, training young men in the fashion of the seminaries from the Council of Trent to 1965.  

 

Catholics owe it to themselves to visit these impressive battlegrounds of sanctity and learning. Their superiors appreciate that they are sending newly anointed priests as sheep in the midst of wolves. To that end, their training has the feel of Parris Island, with order and discipline sitting upon the crown of their ascetical/theological/philosophical formation like jewels set in a golden diadem. After eight years of this blessed rigor, they are launched, in the words of Henri Daniel-Rops, to bring to the world and the Church “a revolution of the Cross.”  

 

Even some dioceses have begun to imitate the seminary classical program, and they are reaping astonishing results. Discretion prohibits naming them due to the present climate in which the Church finds herself. But Catholics can rest their heads more securely upon their pillows at night knowing that legions of young men are being summoned by the Holy Spirit to lead this New Renaissance.

 

It should not surprise us that these newly ordained priests are becoming pastors in record time. A proper supernatural attitude can see how the vocation dearth acts as a blessing. It permits priests who normally would wait decades to be pastors to take on that role in seeming minutes. 

 

Unafraid of the spiritual, doctrinal, and liturgical ruins that face them, they meet the challenge with creative, careful, and heroic swiftness, sometimes verging on the dramatic. A very young pastor in southern New Jersey recently read that a local church was shuttering its doors.

 

He wasted no time in hiring engineers to devise a plan to transport all of its marble sanctuary altars and altar rails and reset them in his church. After several months of meticulous moving and repositioning, a church conceived in the seventies to appear like a dentist’s waiting room underwent a miraculous transformation in marble. In fact, the extraordinary pastor named his renaissance “Faith moves Marble.”

 

But he is not finished. He is now in the planning stages of constructing a medieval tower to adjoin his church. This new phalanx of wondrous priests does not act in half measures. They recognize that the faithful have hungered without bread long enough.

 

Amid this astonishing good news, there is still more. The Traditional Mass grows in leaps and bounds, all the more striking given the circumstance of its three-year suppression. Again, only a supernatural attitude will do.

 

Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano sees clearly that Francis is just 'Bergoglio'

In many ways, this explosive growth depended upon scores of young Catholics exploring the internet toinvestigate what they were told was a malignancy growing in the womb of the Church. Investigate they did. What they found did not fit the cautions of malignancy about which they were cautioned.

 

And they rushed to the Traditional Mass. In fact, very soon in the Washington, D.C., area a group of young Catholics will march for the preservation of the Traditional Mass.

 

All this to the consternation of these young people’s betters. To quote Graham Greene in Brighton Rock: “I cannot understand, nor can you, the appalling strangeness of God’s Mercy.”

Sorrow and wrath over the wreckage of the past sixty years will not do.

A New Springtime is about, albeit so very small; but a Springtime, nonetheless.  

 

Fr. John A. Perricone

Fr. John A. Perricone, Ph.D., is an adjunct professor of philosophy at Iona University in New Rochelle, New York. His articles have appeared in St. John’s Law Review, The Latin Mass, New Oxford Review and The Journal of Catholic Legal Studies. He can be reached at www.fatherperricone.com. 

Further reading: https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2024/09/christ-is-no-longer-to-be-spoken.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawFgjeJleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHcISFqRcefi1h9tG6mHq2onB5wR53CAi2nw8ZtfDnwrOdjqWlhs8cFuxxQ_aem_7VmqOTdvEXaQALWxtcKPug

‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’ The Rhetorical Question That’s Losing Axiomatic Power (complicitclergy.com) - from Dr Gavin Ashenden, convert to Catholicism, former chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II.

"My Lord and my God"