Catholic Church, in Today's News 09.17.09

Catholic Church. The Vatican has announced that talks between the Vatican and the Society of Saint Pius X will occur at the end of October.

Now the SSPX will pay the price for their failure to defend Bishop Williamson when the media, the church leaders, and Jewish spokesmen were calling for his head because he questioned the official version of the holocaust. In fact, the SSPX silenced Bishop Williamson as their response to the controversy.

This failure sent a message to the Vatican that the SSPX at best wavers on the question of the holocaust and relations to Judaism. The SSPX in effect opened a door wide open, and the Vatican is now walking through it with great confidence.

Cardinal Schonborn is quoted, "The SSPX will be told very clearly what is not negotiable for the Holy See. This includes such fundamental conclusions of the Second Vatican Council as its positions on Judaism, other non-Christian religions, other Christian churches and on religious freedom as a basic human right."

In other words, the Vatican will insist that the SSPX repudiate any critical outlook on Judaism and the holocaust. Because the Vatican saw a weakness in the SSPX on the Judaism question, they are now going to put it to the SSPX to stand or die on this very question. And they fully expect to prevail.

If the SSPX had been principled and stood by Bishop Williamson and his right to his views, the Vatican would have realized that it would be tough to confront the SSPX on Judaism. Instead the SSPX has handed the initiative to the Vatican. And the SSPX has made the discussion of this issue all that much more difficult.

Every epoch has its key issue. In our talmud-influenced world the key question is the holocaust and holocaustianity.  If one goes wrong on this question they will not arrive at an accurate understanding of anything in the battle for the souls of the world's population.

The truth is that very, very few people understand this key question. It is a pity and damaging to the future of the Church that the SSPX does not understand. They in fact dismiss the notion of holocaustianity. And by doing so they have given up the fight for the future of the Church before the fight even really begins.

Crisis

A friend sent in the following table.  I don't know its source and therefore its accuracy, but the statistics seem reasonable.

Number of Seminarians in the United States:

Congregations, 1965, 2000,  %  Decline

Jesuits 3,559, 389, 89%

Franciscans 2,551, 60, 97%

Christian Brothers 912, 7, 99%

Benedictines 1,541, 109, 93%

Redemptorists  1,128, 24, 98%

Dominicans 343, 38, 89%

Maryknoll 919, 15, 98%

Oblates of Mary Immaculate 914, 13, 99%

Vincentians 700, 18, 97%

OFM Conventual 511,  49, 90%

Passionists 574, 5, 99%

Holy Cross Fathers 434, 132, 70%

Augustinians 483, 14, 97%

Capuchins 440, 39, 91%

Precious Blood Fathers 521, 27, 95%

La Salette Fathers 552, 1, 99%

Carmelites 545, 46, 92%

Holy Ghost Fathers 159, 9, 94%

In any organization in the world such declines in the key component of the organization would be the cause for heads to roll and for the most fundamental assessment of what the organization was doing.  Any organization except the Catholic Church that is.  The Catholic Church, faced with this disaster, just rolls bureaucratically along, seldom mentioning the problem, conducting business as usual.

Well, business as usual will result in the near-destruction of the Church, at least in the United States and Europe, and most likely within a decade.  I am very familiar with a monastery in my area.  They are now down to 12, and the average age is well past 60.  It is easy to see that within 10 years or so the monastery will be unable to continue.  And it is easy to generalize from this particular to the Church institutions as a whole.

Anyone of minimum intelligence and foresight can see where the crisis in the seminaries is leading.  So why is there such a lack in concern and corrective action among the Church hierarchy?

The inability of the Church to do anything meaningful about this crisis, leads one to look for a reason for such paralysis.  Many commentators point to accommodation to modernism initiated at Vatican II.  And certainly that factor is key.  But, the issue in recent years has become a lot more concrete that just generalized modern-ism. From the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI at least, the evolving central direction of the Church has been toward pleasing Judaism.  This stance disarms the Church completely and sets the stage for all the things the Rabbis would want from the Church  -- namely to become more "tolerant", to evolve toward a Catholicism that more reveres the Holocaust than the 2000-year-old teachings of the Church, and to become a Church that is in reality based on the Noahide principles promoted by the Rabbis.

A revival of the seminaries will probably take an act of God to completely shake up the existing bureaucratic inertia and fundamental disorientation.  Oh, that it would come soon.  In the meantime, one must fight to recreate the Church.  What we need is a modern-day Joan of Arc who can hear the word of God and act uncompromisingly on it against the Church's enemies to reorient the Church.  A Joan of Arc who can rally the forces who stand on the timeless teachings of Christ and the Church.

Michael Matt and his traditionalist current believe that the revival in the Latin Mass will lead to a revival of the Church, including the seminaries.  This belief is naive, to say the least.  Benedict himself knows that a re-institution of the Latin Mass will not stand in the way of his "reform of the reform", and his steady development of philo-Judaism in the Church, a trend to which Matt is evidently completely blind.