A conservative blog for peace: June 2014

A tale of two Western Christian heresies, old-school Marxism and the Cathedral (apostate Protestantism).

The new sins of "nonjudgmental" millennials. Millennials are like the Moral Majority, except genderqueer. What I think of millennials as leaders.
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church has awarded Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov with an order for "glory and honor." I was set to make excuses for this: he's not really Communist; he's just nostalgic for Russia as a greater power. Zyuganov -- who in 2010 called for the re-Stalinization of Russia and has called the Soviet Union "the most humane state in human history." So much for that. Patriotism and the church as the Church Local are good, but when you put your country above the universal church, you get this.

Sunday, June 29, 2014

SS. Peter & Paul

Mass: Nunc scio vere. Outranking the Sunday (commemorated with second collect and postcommunion). Slight byzantinization: at Mater, Fr. Pasley put icons of SS. Peter and Paul on the gradine with red-glass votive candles in front of them; that's nice. (Like how I feel about latinization in the Byzantine Rite: moderate. Don't introduce it but don't suppress it; I like it when it's pre-Vatican II and doesn't take over. It also reminds me of the full traditional papal Mass, with the Greek deacon in Orthodox vestments chanting the gospel in Greek.)

"Peter has spoken through the mouth of Leo"; today, Hunwicke has spoken through Pasley. Father did his brother priest, a Tridentine English papalist Anglo-Catholic priest turned Tridentine Catholic priest, I think in the ordinariate, the honor of making most of his sermon today readings from Fr. H's blog. The point: as Jeff Culbreath said to me right after coming into the church, "we are papal minimalists." It's about church infallibility, which the Pope's office, not the man, has a share in. Ultramontanism is only an opinion, not our doctrine. The modern media promote the caricature believed by both well-meaning conservative Catholics and liberals that "the Pope is the church." The Novus Ordo conservatives felt they had no other identity than with "Our Saint in Rome"; the liberals don't believe in church infallibility so they think the Pope can change anything. Of course a lot of this explaining from us is in reaction to a possible attempt, by our churchmen, such as Pope Francis and Cardinal Kasper, to change the church's teaching about divorce and remarriage, for example. Short answer: they can't.

This minimalism, from both Cardinal Newman and "liberal" German seminary professors in the early '60s, is what converted Anglo-Catholic Episcopal priest turned Catholic priest Fr. John Jay Hughes and is exactly what I believe in.

The truth is simpatico with Eastern Christianity, which the Orthodox don't admit. The real reason for the schism is we're not in their rite, nation or empire and they can't or won't conceive of the church outside those terms.

That said, I can say something nice personally about Pope Francis. Like two statesmen I admire with very different cultural connotations, Richard Nixon and Jerry Brown, he tries to govern non-ideologically (nobody owns him): his heart is in the right place (very loving and people-centered in a Mediterranean/Latin way), and he tries to do what he thinks is right. He seems to dislike us trads and to threaten to cave to the world on homosexualism (but even here he doesn't go along with the world and call gay marriages matrimony; he just considers the plausibility of state marriages for them) and divorce/remarriage, but he does his job, firing liberal priest dissenters, like most Catholics worldwide he has no time for women's ordination, and he's made the pro-life point that in the West, substituting pets for children is wrongheaded.

Sedevacantism is possible but it has never happened.