Dear Marcsababa, et. al.
I read through over half of the posts here. I will give you some background that I have myself experienced, and I will give you what I can that might help with the attitudes others express toward Vatican II.
I attended Our Lady of the Assumption in Ventura for three yrs. before I was confirmed, and received my first Holy Communion at age eleven, 1981. Then my family left the church. Both my grandmother and my mother at the time followed a guru in India, Maharaj Charan Singh Ji of the Radha Soami Sat Mat, or Science of the Soul, organization.
In 2001 or so, my mother went back to the Catholic Church, and I followed. She went to mass only for the reason that she wanted to enjoy what she considered to be part of her own Western culture; odd as it may sound–given the Eastern origin of Catholicism, and hence Semitic.
Eventually this led to absolution both for myself, and for her. My mother and I somewhat vainly sought instruction in the Catechism. The only group we found that taught the Catechism without–what I will call: “New Age Speak”, was a group of elderly people that expressed their sadness toward the condition of modern American society, which I summarize in the following statement: the spread of errors rooted in Marxism, in Masonry, and in the Communism of the Soviets during the time of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which of course we know Fatima was the site of such predictions, and instructions that publicly were to be followed by the whole of Catholicism–we see the failure of these popes as we witness government in the US that has become the owner of many natural resources, timber, streams, etc., and abortions worldwide at one tenth of one billion, and counting. The Soviets spread their errors, and we submit. I learned the Catechism from these elderly people; one of whom lived under Communism.
One Easter a yr. or two ago, my mother left for an SSPX chapel. She gave me a reason, a good one that I failed to grasp, because she can be a little too intellectually subtle in her motives, for my liking. I followed, because I thought that this is very serious. I called a theologian, an advisor to the two bishops of our diocese, and I received a phone call from an employee of Catholic Answers. I was confused by documents that concerned others who had attended SSPX chapels.
This past wk. I considered returning to the SSPX chapel for the reason that I went to confession and was recommended a bk. by a Ph. D. with elements in it that I find contradict the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC). This has led me to pay closer attention to Ecclesia Dei, and to the Code of Canon Law. SSPX is schismatic. Attendance there is schismatic. The priests and the bishops of SSPX are no more valid in what they do as priests than Protestants, than Lutherans. The bishops of today were never “legally” ordained, because the authority to ordain bishops had been taken away from Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.
You ask: How should a person, yourself specifically, respond to traditionalists, and their arguements against Vatican II.
Many of us find ourselves in need of support to adequately worship in reverence: we say, God is for us, an unbloody sacrifice at mass, and some of us promise even to lay down our own lives for this truth, while it may be we are willing to in fact lay down our lives for this truth; how can it be that we allow ourselves to be outnumbered, and to allow our being outnumbered a cause for us to run away from mass that we might escape the blessings of being persecuted, for His sake, and we should also model patience for doing well, and thus stand as evidence for others to follow in the midst of persecution.
I feel torn apart between what some regard to be traditional, and what others say is Vatican II, because I am a victim, of the horrors, of the terrors spread by the Soviets–I am the father of an aboretus. This might have been prevented by anyone of some seven popes that could have led the Church in compliance with what Our Mother instructed us to do. I wanted to be a father. She and her parents wanted a college education. The stress of the experiences, of my faults as an eighteen yr. old brought about many wrongs in my life. Some of you may not know, but Roe v. Wade, et. al. 1973 found abortions acceptable on the basis of the practice of abortions performed throughout the 1960’s in the former Soviet Union.
Briefly, how you should respond to Traditionalists and their attitudes: the Eucharist is worthy enough of a promise not only to believe in the Real Presence, but also to give ones life to this end and therefore, whatever abuses occur to the Eucharist during the mass; they should be fought against in the parish where they occur, and I plan to heed my own words on the matter.
Most sincerely,
Kristopher
I must remember that!