Interesting article about centricism with which I differ

[foolishmortal]

tfp.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=152

The author thinks that centricists, despite being more comfortable with the left-wing than the right, which gets the negative attention of the media and because of some wilder types, that don’t represent all on the right, who make themselves heard, actually are not centrists, but leftists who don’t want to admit it. I think people just have short memories and can be too lazy to read more than what the daily news tells them. I think they also fall for false peace the world tries to give us. That doesn’t mean they are leftists, but maybe the negligibly ignorant who are in danger of accidentally serving the left-wing with the motive to do good for others–kind of like Zangief’s character in “Streetfighter: the Movie”, except that movie has a right-wing dictator (Hitler was seen as a right-winger, but was a socialist who was worshipping Norse “deities”).

What sayest you?

 

[strngrnrth]

I could easily be called a centrist. In fact I have been called one more than once. I’m not left or right. I’m a registered Libertarian but don’t toe that line either. I take issues one at a time and think them over. I think one person’s right to swing an arm ends where another person’s nose begins but I also think many times people aren’t totally honest with themselves or others about where someone’s nose begins. I believe the government has no business doing anything but protecting people from invasions or other takeovers, protecting the people from first-strike force and/or fraud, providing a necessary rock-bottom physical infrastructure, remaining fully publicly accountable and providing relief to victims of major disasters and devastating crimes and to the very disabled or otehrwise helpless if they have no appropriate source of private support; in other words, it’s not the taxpayer’s responsibility to provide playgrounds (though as long as we have them I believe in using them, since we’ve paid already), distribute condoms, stop mentally competent adult strangers from ruining their futures with drugs, intervene in every country in the world, or even force its version of education down every throat.
OTOH, a society that doesn’t care for the devastated can hardly be called a society at all. People who have lost everything to theft, domestic violence, hurricanes, fires, injury, disease or childhood abandonment must receive what they need to be reasonably safe and capable of living reasonably healthy, until they are on their feet. The helpless are the responsibility of us all. This includes the unborn. We must protect those who really need protection. In contrast, the merely oversensitive, such as the university student who “feels marginalized” by another student’s presentation on a common religion in an elective class, or people who can work but merely can’t earn enough for a middle-class standard until they finish their retraining classes, or the person who weighs too much to work because he eats many times more than is good for him and who knows how to lose weight but “feels anxious” when he does, do not have a claim on my tax money. Nor do those who would make undeclared war on half the world to ensure that my country remains powerful.

 

[foolishmortal]

I did not mean to say that conservatives are the good guys here. We can be too heady and be out of touch with the poor (as are most elite liberals in office, I’m sure) and think they’re just being lazy. Some may take too much advantage of welfare, but squalor can dampen the spirit, despite the man’s responsibility, if physically and mentally “there” enough, to be the main provider in 90 something percent of families, where it’s possible.

I think there is a schism between right-wing and left-wing. I think St. Francis was orthodox in his beliefs and also understanding of the poor’s problems. I think he would have treasured beautifully-adorned houses of God built to praise Him with a society’s first fruits of the best they could provide as the finest ointment spilled on Christ’s feet in the Bible, yet preferring to stay in simpler surroundings as he may feel too swept away and not want to leave. Who’s to say Brother Juniper, who cut the rings off the altar cloth for the poor didn’t respect why it was made, but was driven out of pity for the poor to give away the rings?

Liberation theology is really, I think, what I was addressing. Some went to far in pity for the poor and oppressed to the point of breaking ranks with the Magisterium (the mistake, out of charity for souls, that people like Archbishop Lefebvre made). Apparently, one of those liberation theology priests is now head of the UN General Assembly. I hope I have not gone too far in A.b. Lefebvre’s or Fr. Gruner’s direction when criticizing the errors of the post-Vatican 2 clergy in not cleaning up the mess faster and/or more efficiently over 40 years, but it is the Church Christ created and our leaders are the leaders, by correct means of handing down the office of bishop and Pope. We are to be obedient to them unless they any should propose something wrong that is obvious to all the loyal faithful–like a dogma no-no, such as condoning birth control. God can’t talk to His faithful if we are following our own lights. Well, there is the prophesied Great Awakening, so I can’t say He can’t, but He can’t as He tends to relate to us in ordinary circumstances.

I think many Catholics have become their own lights unto themselves, deciding what they’ll believe or not and claim ignorance about Vatican 2 as the excuse. That is culpable with that attitude. This has become a very self-centered society and very little has been done at Mass to shake us out of our selves. Faith in the priest has been replaced by faith in big science or some other tool that has become a religion of its own and whose doctrines are considered reasonable because it can be measured and studied and replicated in a lab, for an example of big science. People want to see results, despite the fact that big science changes and our Faith does not and we have all these saints to show that our Faith teaches the right Faith in good times and in bad. They miss that science cannot prove evolution or panevolution, but they can prove no trickery has been played on weeping statues that are pronounced worthy of believing in the sign. This “reason” is the false centricism of which the author comments to which I respond in partial agreement. We have lost faith and rationalize it as “reason”.

Of course, as I said, schismatic traditionalists see these small signs right, but miss the forest for the trees. They believe themselves on the right path for understanding those things, but not who’s still in charge or that “Old Catholics” probably think them wrong for sticking with the likes of Pope Pius X, the hammer of the heretics, of all popes!.

I went this way and the way of the previous paragraph. It’s not centered and neither is some that is overtly orthodox, but heterodox in inspiration, such as the stripping of the altars, getting wishy-washy with time-honored admonitions that seemed too dreary, tossing out sacramentals, and maybe even a similar sounding prayer style or excusing all this as being merely tradition with a small “t” and thus, non-essential to the faith (maybe so, but not to mass psychology, who cannot give as much direct attention to God as a monk, hermit, and/or friar).

In other words, this was really about liberation theology but aren’t most Catholics on the edge of going that way? Many don’t believe in all the teachings of the Church but their stoic act in their head has them thinking themselves “centrist”.

 

[strngrnrth]

That’s a lot of thought you put into it. I don’t know as much about Church history. We studied liberation theology a little in college in some class. That was as much religion as we learned there. We also got a short lecture on the reformation in a lit class once at least. I’m still learning the story of Christianity. Liberation theology is a major part of the reason for some right-wing anti-Catholicism, from what I’ve seen, but then it softens the general anti-Catholic, anti-all-Christians, anti-any-monotheistic-faith attitude some people on the far left have. I think the Christian left is a natural for one of the next big social movements to grow, because it is the camp that would likely be there for lots of the victims of the natural disasters, industrial disasters and economic disasters that have been going on. I hope its theology is mostly good. What I see losing relevance in the hard times that may be ahead are the two kinds of the Christian right extreme: the kind that says if you follow this celebrity or that one you will get rich and have whatever you need and church will be like a night at the Improv, and then the kind that says everyone must dress as if it were WWI or thereabouts, women must go back into the kitchen and so forth, regardless of people’s needs.
If we can meet poeple’s needs while sticking to solid theology we can bring God’s love to a lot of people.

 

[foolishmortal]

I admit I am more on the melancholic and I lean towards the obedient version of the magisterium. I am idealistic and scrupulous. I’m not a bull in a china shop so I can feel overwhelmed and irritated by what some mischief some want me to get into. In these days and ages, even the more choleric types feel they can’t fix the errors. In some ways, things are getting more on track, yet many of the faithful still get Happy Meals instead of the Lord’s Supper as long as the confused baby boomers are still experimenting and not respecting the form of the Mass I assumed like more than the Latin Mass. An older cousin of mine said he didn’t really like the Grateful Dead’s live shows because they kept playing till they “got it right”. Unlike rock, though, the Mass had a form even aat the birth of the N.O… What came first, I wonder: disrespect for the Mass or for the Faith’s divine protection? Maybe the atheistic left is less hateful and the Fundamentalist Protestant churches are more hateful of it is because liberation theology cannot be respected. Without adherence to the Magisterium, they are as much a plain, ol’ secular charity group with a Catholic name just as the schismatic traditionalists might be whitened sepulchers in a museum without obedience.

Still, the liberation theology groups still hold the Catholic name and represent the Church (as the SSPX is not really the Catholics in the news) and the Church has been as wishy-washy on important psycho-spiritual traditions even though they are not formally defined (the newest Catechism, while divinely-protected, I understand is less specific than the previous protected ones). The liberation theologists also can hide on the inside and play semantics with formal tradition so that, in many peoples’ minds, it might as well be that the Church’s dogmas could be able to bend with the zeitgeist. Protestants don’t believe in our dogmas so, in their minds, our dogmas have been bent. The sad thing is, many Catholics are practically Protestants.

It is likely that the wilder ones my be more choleric, but the liberation theologists are likely more often sanguine–possibly some phlegmatic thrown in there as well if it’s about getting everyone together to have a united nations so there will be no more war and other pax Romanus that apparently, though being Catholic, they don’t trust the Church to bring the world, despite what Jesus said about himself in the Bible and the authority given the Church via the Apostles and what they continued by their authority. Satan does, however, respect the Church and what he did in the mid-60s, to get around our dogmas, was brilliant. He got the people to be confused, or use that as an excuse, and break God’s laws, but to feel eternally safe by helping people (thus breaking Charity off from Faith and forgetting that, outside the Faith, no charity does one any good and that we should not fear those or that which takes lives, but which takes souls). If it is just to help people, if they are defying God, they may mean well, but they are doing Him no favor if they are spreading heresy or dissent from the Church.

 

[foolishmortal]

In the Bennett’s book, sanguines are attracted to melancholics and vice-versa unless communication breaks off; the same for cholerics and phlegmatics. Faith and Charity must be brought together again by those more on the right and those on the far left. Traditionalists, at least the obedient ones, do have charities. Maybe the left needs to give up some of its independence in the name of charity and hold hands with them as it does the non-Catholic faith traditions and religions. The obedient Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest has an apostolate in Nigeria. You always have prayers also, which are powerful with God. Still, it seems we could have more apostolates.

I wish the above priestly fraternity and the FSSP had as many apostolates as the SSPX. Fortunately, the SSPX and similar schismatics get little exposure in the media; unfortunately, the Pope’s going to the Church’s future enemy, the UN (once it gets enough of the world under its thumb and enough people find the Church a nuissance because it does not bend with more radical moves) is ecumenical poison with future St. Pauls like the ultra-conservative Protestants. St. Paul respected the young Church, even if just because it was gaining members amongst Jews and Gentiles and seemingly being radical itself, and that’s why he saw them a threat.

Maybe, if we start acting like a major religion (which psychologically-correctly employs medals, statues finest metal and metal used to honor their “gods” and “goddesses”), we’ll be taken seriously by other religions and thus, slapped despite our good done for the world, as we are meant to be, I think too many of us want to be liked or we want peace that is not by Christ (like economic deals between the US and China and S. Korea, N. Korea and spiritual ones between our Church and the Chinese Patriotic church, which, though not condoned by the Church leadership, is also not apparently stopped by them either). I can be wishy-washy, I admit, in defending my Faith as I’ve become more mild-mannered or more defeated-feeling (I’m definitely not a John the Babtist in public and thus, may have some phlegmatic in me unless its personal), but I am not the leadership and I do not buy made in China lightly. This Pope seems to be taking care of a lot of business far too left undone, though he still wastes time traveling, when he could be straightening out rogue clerics in charge of many of the flock, in my opinion.

In total, the dissenting far-right and far-left might need to be brought together and have a talk toward not dialogue but to get a butt whoopin’ verbally so to get their acts straight so they will learn to bring Faith and Charity together to inform each other so that we will have a correct balance. The far-left, however, needs to be removed from office and Catholic schools and have Magisterially-obedient younger priests in charge of flocks even if it means closing some trashy upscale suburban parishes. I think our clergy have been too slow and congenial, which has led to too much confusion and lost souls. The schismatic right at least don’t have charge of churches and schools belonging to the Church .