Catholic integralism is the true seamless garment.
The Church in the West has, over the past century, doubled-down on the bourgeois modernity he [Berdyaev] speaks of and has turned itself into a Bed and Breakfast for traveling Laodiceans.When religion is reduced to social convention and routine.
Professor Chapp's a bit snide to the liturgically high-church, though he says he goes to the Anglican Use ordinariate and in fact likes the traditional Latin Mass, so under Benedict XVI's peace that Jorge Bergoglio took away, we could at least coexist. I in turn have no problem respecting people acting in good faith including making the most of the religion they've received, such as at a college Catholic chaplaincy in the late 1970s. All that said, this blog post/essay is one of the best things I've read. The founder of a Catholic Worker farm, he writes like Catholic Action of yore, getting to the cause of a problem to try to heal it and NOT settling for the comfortable status quo when real renewal is needed. This is what Carol Robinson of Integrity magazine would sound like today.
So long for now, from me, just another fervently moderate, semi-traditionalist, rather perennialist (like the King, Charles III), relatively conservative high churchman.
Glad to see you back and posting regularly again. I've missed your perspective. Once upon a time, I got pretty far down the road in discernment about the US ordinariate. Long story short, they and the diocesan folks they worked with made it abundantly clear that the Church I thought I was reading myself into -- the Church that Newman read himself into -- no longer existed. They also taught the view of Lumen Gentium you've described here: that good faith Protestants are covered.
ReplyDeleteWith those two data points in mind, I thought through all the reasons I was considering swimming over, and none of them were great. I think the Lord lead me far enough down that road to realize I didn't need to go down it and to turn back with no further reservations. I prefer my headaches in the ACC to the ones in the RCC and Orthodoxy.