This phrase in particular, “fetish of liturgical practice,” is the only thing in the thread that really upsets me. Usually it’s used by non-traditional Catholics to shut down criticism by more traditional Catholics of the new Mass.
They use that exact wording too? That’s interesting either way.
I actually come to the term from my somewhat recent experience debating with anti-Catholic Protestants. It occurred to me that many actually make a fetish out of the Bible–although before today I believe I’ve always used the term idol. This is brought into a larger question about what is idolatry, really? If idols are only figments of own imagination then what does it mean to worship them instead of God? And what does it mean in this light to worship God? Is the person who rejects the sacraments really in a relationship with Jesus?
All of us have false beliefs. One thing that surprised me when I converted to Catholicism (from a secular scientism) is what faith actually is. There is no easy way to describe it because while it is like a sense, it is not a sense, since the senses make contact with the natural world and faith does not. Nevertheless what we know through our “sense” of faith we know in exactly the same way that we know what we’ve seen through sight and heard through our hearing. When St. Paul says we walk by faith and not by sight he doesn’t mean we privilege our mere beliefs over the evidences of our senses, but rather that we have a sense that gives us a perspective on the totality of reality.
Nonetheless even with our physical senses our experiences don’t necessarily mean we have correct beliefs. How many people a day pull out into oncoming traffic because although they looked and therefore must have seen it they didn’t actually register that that another car already occupied the lane? In other words the believed the lane was open. Although if they looked again perhaps they would then see the other car. Likewise,faith doesn’t guarantee that we hold correct beliefs, although repeated experience of supranatural reality through the sacraments does have the tendency to align our beliefs with reality over time. When you combine this with guidance given by saints and the magisterium of the Church our sense of faith can become a true compass.
Even still no one on this side of death has beliefs that perfectly line up with reality, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we are all idolaters either. For one thing Christianity isn’t even really about one’s beliefs so much as it the encounter of a person through faith and the sacraments. It is an experiential form of knowing, and what we know is the living God.
This experience however seems to happen a lot less frequency than one might expect in the Church–certainly less than I expected–and in all those other cases instead of relationship with the very source of Being, itself, one has the gods of their own invention.
Also I hesitate to use the word traditional when speaking of Catholicism as the word is being used in two different ways and a fallacy of equivocation often results.Traditionalism is a form of modernism and has noting to do with respecting the Church’s traditions–although it is confusing because there is often significant overlap by happenstance. They are simply on the other side of the modernist coin from progressivism. They both are predicated upon Utopian schemes. One is straightforward projection into the future while the other is attempt regain an imagined past 'golden age" paradoxically in the future.
I guess my point is that the only way of escaping idolatry is through faith. that is through an actual experiential relationship with Christ, and it is no surprise then that fetishes are so prevalent. It is easier to have a “relationship” with an idol then an person because the former doesn’t require one to pick up their own cross, which is the promise we make when accepting communion.
This goes back to everything illustrated in the above back and forth. The perennial choice for mankind is between self-indulgence and self-sacrifice. Christianity is really simple when you get down to it. It is about love, but not love as the world understands it as mere sentiment predicated upon self-indulgent desires (which can take the form of liturgy) but an act of will that is predicated upon self-sacrifice. Speaking for myself I realize how fervently I resist the later as if goes against every instinct of my body. It is easy to deceive ourselves into deciding upon the former in terms that make us believe we are choosing the later.
