Okay, blog policy time, guys.
I am becoming a little tired of the short hand “RC” or “RCC”, and even of the long hand “Roman Catholic/Roman Catholic Church”.
That is a name for the Church which was dreamed up by English Protestants. Even German Protestants have the good grace to refer to us as “Katholische”.
It is generally polite to call another person by the name they wish to be called (please do NOT call me “Dave”). You might have objections to my name, but do me the courtesy of calling me by it.
Same goes for the Church to which I belong. I belong to a Church called “The Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne”. I do not belong to an entity called “The Roman Catholic Church” or any version there of. I DO belong to a body which calls itself “The Catholic Church”. You might have a problem with that. You might want to protest (as in “protest-ant”?) that your “church” is a part of the “catholic church”. Good for you. Go ahead and call your “church” that then. Call your church “God’s Own and Only True and Apostolic Church of Christ and No Other” if you like, and I will refer to your “church” by that name.
So. Please – on this blog – no more of this “RCC” stuff, okay? The Church to which I belong calls itself “The Catholic Church”- as in PE’s oft stated “The Catholic Church the Catholic Church the Catholic Church”. Go and write it out a hundred times if it will help.
End of rant. Time for bed.
Doesn’t matter, conservative dissent and liberal dissent are both dissent, and if the conservatives win, it is no victory for Catholicism from which either and both sides dissent.
Er, newsflash, that apply to just about every religious body on the planet today. Everyone is struggling with it.
As usual it just reinforces to me how foreign whatever the church under discussion is here to the Catholic Church. But you have clearly stated that you no longer accept Catholicism in either its pre or postconciliar form, so logically it shouldn’t make a bit of difference what any Catholic here believes.
Even if everyone here came to the conclusion that yes, the only valid form of Catholicism that now exists is found in the SSPX and similar organizations, you are positing that they would be faithful to “authentic” Catholicism but don’t join them either because their Catholicism is false too.
Makes my head hurt. I think I’ll stick with the magisterium.
Christine
Christine
This must be some sort of record. Well over 100 comments on ‘What’s in a name?’. Anyone for coffee?
Tony, I suspect certain parties like to come here cause we’re all such a fun bunch (ducking to avoid the cyberbricks).
Christine
It isn’t fun at all. It’s amazing how quickly the Roman hallucinogens take effect, rendering a person incapable of any thought that doesn’t end up being about The Catholic Church The Catholic Church The Catholic Church.
Every religious body on the planet is not at issue; the Catholic Church is the one under discussion here, and with regard to that particular religious body, what it presently promotes as its faith is what was previously among the milder forms of dissent from it, with a new liturgy to match, and its claims that nothing REALLY changed are just plain wrong. And to the extent that it promotes error, that should be countered.
This is all independent of what I personally believe. Since you bring it up, here is the story on that. It is not rocket science at all to understand, and only makes one’s head hurt if one is trying desperately to maintain the fiction that nothing changed. I believed what the Catholic Church taught me prior to the council. Then the Catholic Church began teaching something else, not, as with any non-Catholic Christian teaching, without its points of congruence with what the Catholic Church taught me before, but not the same thing in toto. So I did not believe it — as in even if I or an angel should deliver to you another Gospel let him be anathema. Which creates another problem: it’s bad enough that what one believes went away to something else, but how could that happen if what one believes was true since that included a promise from Christ that it would not go away? There are only two possible answers: it did not in fact go away, of which I tried for years to convince myself, and which if anything produces a hurting head the constant “that’s not what the church REALLY teaches” is better than a hammer, or, it went away because it was false too. I tried like hell to make Option One work, but it just doesn’t, and I would have to deny everything I saw and heard to say it does for the sake of being able to hum along The Catholic Church The Catholic Church The Catholic Chuch, therefore it’s Option Two, what I was taught was false to begin with, which for me was even harder to bear than the galling apostacy of the postconciliar church but as part of what I was taught there was no place else to go, so the conclusion is Christianity itself is false since the true Christianity failed.
It was more than twenty years before I saw, thanks to Concordia and the 1520 treatises of Martin Luther, that the Catholic Church had gone into captivity to Babylon, so zu sagen, long before Vatican II, which turns out to be just the final slipping of the stern under the waves but not the shipwreck itself, but the catholic church was alive and doing quite well.
A good cup of coffee would be great. What’s your preferences, Tony?
Yes, I believe you have recounted your history with the Catholic Church here before.
Which is why I can’t take your arguments at face value. You were taught what you were taught and I don’t deny the validity of that. But, as you say, after becoming Lutheran you came to the conclusion that Catholicism in all its forms was false so for you to be telling anyone here that the Catholic Church in her present form is false as well seems oxymoronic.
My journey is just the opposite. While not denying for a minute that reforms were necessary one man, Luther, threw out the baby with the bathwater and I find the catholicism of the Lutheran churches quite truncated.
So let’s just all continue along in the paths we have chosen.
Christine
Oxymoron. A Greek based word not actually in Greek but coming from placing the words for sharp and dull to-gether.
So here again is something else I have said before, and say again because in typical Catholic fashion it is made into something it is not: what I believe is beside the point here.
I do not believe Marxism, but I know what Marx wrote and taught, and if someone calls something Marxist which plainly isn’t I can point that out though I do not believe what Marx taught.
Likewise Catholicism. The continuing efforts of the postconciliar RCC to pass off as Catholicism what is in fact dissent from it are what they are with no reference to me at all. Efforts to make it about me are classic ad hominem arguments, which does not at all carry the popular connotations of slander, but is rather to disqualify a position without examination or discussion of the position because of a factor about the one presenting the position apart from the position itself which supposedly makes any such examination or discussion worthless.
what I believe is beside the point here.
No, I don’t think it is.
If you believed that preconciliar Catholicism were true you’d still be there. So here you are, telling us that the preconciliar Catholicism that you no longer believe in is the true Catholicism.
One cannot come to these discussions in a vaccum.
Christine
False. (Now how about that; “false” hits my mind first in German to comment to non-Germans, and in English to comment to a German.)
Once again, the a priori that the Catholic Church is always right overrides anything and everything else.
What did I say? (An impossible question in a Catholic context where every This becomes actually That.) Preconciliar Catholicism does not exist to “be there”. Groups that follow preconciliar Catholicism against Rome may uphold preconciliar Catholicism, but preconciliar Catholicism does not admit of groups that follow the Catholic faith against a Rome that does not.
That is why, for example, while the SSPX does indeed uphold the Catholic faith precisely and exactly as I was taught and believed it from the RCC, it is untenable that this faith be taught not from Rome but from a group it proscribes. That is why much as I admire them, I do not and have never had any affiliation with them. What they uphold is the Catholic faith quite clearly, but if it were true it would be the Catholic Church upholding it instead of their new faith. What it is, is not the same question of whether it is true or not, or whether I believe it is true or not.
“That is why, for example, while the SSPX does indeed uphold the Catholic faith precisely and exactly as I was taught and believed it from the RCC, it is untenable that this faith be taught not from Rome but from a group it proscribes.”
That’s my problem with the SSPX, too.
But then PE, why didn’t you join the Eastern Orthodox Church?
A very logical question, in fact, I thought about doing just that for some time because, from where I stood at the time, it had valid sacraments, all seven of them, and a liturgy that wasn’t some crazy quilt of this and that made by “scholars” at a council. So why didn’t I do it?
Because, contrary to the “ecumenical” nonsense you may hear, they do not hold the same faith as the Roman Catholic Church, most notably in the lack of the petrine gift to the church. Close, but no cigar. Secondarily, rather than impose one version on all people, the Eastern Church developed ethnic/national churches but not in the ethnicity or nation to which I belong or came from, ie I am not Greek, Russian etd.
In fact there were many who took refuge from the horrors of Vatican II in Orthodoxy, and the most concise summary of Vatican II I ever heard came from a Greek Orthodox friend — “very sad”. Lately something some call “Western Orthodoxy”, instanced by what is known here as the Antiochan Church, of which we have two parishes in Omaha, has gained many converts from the RCC and Episcopal and Lutheran churches largely. However, while some of the historically Orthodox have reservations about just how Orthodox this body is, even if it is, and even if their “Gregorian” rite is a Mass as the novus ordo can never be, it is still Orthodox, not Catholic, and one can not believe Catholicism and be Orthodox. Again, close, but no cigar.
I keep reminding myself that my Lutheran mother and Catholic father shared the bonds of Holy Baptism with each other and with me, and we are inseparably bound, thanks be to God.
I am glad to be Catholic, but will always respect both traditions.
Christine
I respect the Catholic tradition too — that is why I will have nothing to do with the postconciliar RCC as it does not but merely parodies it.
Sorry, PE, as long as you keep coming here to rant it’s hard to be convinced that you’ve made a total break with it all.
It would make sense to read your statements on a Lutheran blog — but not here. You don’t get to define for us what is and isn’t Catholic.
Christine
Take another tab of the Roman acid, it seems to be taking hold nicely — since there can be no objection to The Catholic Church, the great god, any objections must be rooted in the objector since they cannot possibly have any merit.
I’m actually amazed that David hasn’t hauled out one of his Monty Python exercises in psycho-analysis and announced his diagnosis that I REALLY want to be Catholic.
The only reason to speak of these things on a Lutheran blog is to point out the damage we are doing to ourselves by modifying our worship according to Vatican II For Lutherans.
Most certainly I don’t get to define for you or anyone including myself what is and isn’t Catholic. The Catholic Church does, and I believed at one time what it so defined. Then it defined something else as Catholic, which I rejected because it rejected what the Catholic Church taught me and embraced what the Catholic Church taught me was not Catholic.
In so doing it lost any credibility whatever. The irony is, this blog, by what Catholics here say is Catholic and what the Catholic Church REALLY teaches, simply adds to the 40 some years on confirmation that whatever it is you call Catholic or the Catholic Church calls Catholic these days, by what the Catholic Church called Catholic it isn’t.
And this is my message here. You’ve been told blue is red by people who are colour-blind and know neither.
You asked for it, PE:
“Why do you keep on going on about the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church, Stan? Whoops, sorry, Terry?”
“Because I want to be one.”
“Then it defined something else as Catholic”
The Second Vatican Council defined nothing. The only ‘Catholic reason not to be Catholic’, as you might put it, would be a contradiction between two irreformable Magisterial teachings. But no such contradiction has occured (nor will it occur).
And as for your ‘Lutheran reasons not to be Catholic’, I ask what somebody at this blog’s old address once asked: Prove sola scriptura from Scripture.
The only reason to speak of these things on a Lutheran blog is to point out the damage we are doing to ourselves by modifying our worship according to Vatican II For Lutherans.
Sorry, pal, it’s a done deal. They’re not taking revising the Lutheran Service Book to fit your specifications, not to mention that some Missouri Synod congregations still use — and like — the Lutheran Book of Worship. I’m afraid your prophetic mission isn’t going to be very fruitful on that score.
Christine
I’ld have no problem with that, and nothing would please my lazy hand more than this, … but there’s a problem: there’re also Greek-Catholics. :-| (And, as I heard of late, even Oriental-Catholics).