Thanks everyone.
“Chain reaction” was an ambiguous choice of words by me. I mostly meant the “compounding” of sin upon the clergy himself, but it could have extended to others. Let’s say that he sinned, didn’t confess it, took communion, etc. Wow! We were told that taking communion without confessing was a no-no.
Yes, it would be a compounding of sin on the priest’s part. But it would not “extend to others,” except in conceivable cases where, for instance, you encouraged the priest to say Mass without confessing his sins or something like that. That’s really just a particular application of ordinary Church teaching, however. I wouldn’t deliberately choose a sinful, pedophile barber if there was one next door that I knew was holy and pious, but if I just walk into a barbershop to get my hair cut, (1) it’s definitely a haircut, (2) I have not been contaminated with any sinfulness, and (3) the pedophile barber should have his license revoked and be sent to jail. That’s not to trivialize the Sacrament,
Actually, the rift between the church and me began when they changed the church rules in the 60’s based on the Second Vatican Council. There I was, a little kid, and I’m saying to myself, “How can the rules change? They’re supposed to be permanent.” Funny enough, had they stayed the course and kept the rules such as “No meat on Friday,” etc, I probably would have survived being Catholic into adulthood.
That’s really unfortunate – and obviously ironic in a bad way. Hopefully your presence on this board and your openness to asking questions means good things.
You’re probably already aware that there’s a difference between the Church’s teachings on matters of faith and morals on the one hand, and its practices and disciplines on the other hand. This Church asks for different things in the lives of the faithful (1) in the catacombs of Rome in 150 AD, (2) in France during the Plague in the 1300s, (3) in the Brazilian jungle in 1910, and (4) in a first-world country in 2010.
It may also surprise you to learn – it surprises most people – that the Church didn’t quite “do away with the no-meat-on-Friday penance”. They retained the call for a penitential Friday practice, but no longer specified that in must be in the form of abstaining from meat. This makes some sense in a modern world in which meat is more likely to be a staple of the diet, versus even 100 years ago when it was much more of a luxury.
The Protestants have been trying for four centuries to find any possible way to claim that Rome’s dogmatic teaching on an issue of faith or morals. They’ve come up with some instances of changes in wording or emphasis, a bunch of changes in non-dogmatic matters, a few things that aren’t changes at all but look like them if you squint your eyes really hard, a whole slew of confusions caused by selectively quoting or mistranslating old documents, and not much else.
Christ was divine, but walked the earth as a man. In a similar way, the Church, which is called the Body of Christ, is divinely instituted, but exists in the world. Some people think that because the Church is in the world, it must constantly change in all respects to keep pace with the world. Others think that because it is divinely instituted, nothing about it can ever change. Both of those are complete errors, though.
As to the changes that took place in the 1960s and 1970s, in my view at least, what happened is that things had been largely frozen in place for 400 years, so when the door was opened to change there was a lot that had to come out at once. Even more so (to shift metaphors), like a rubber band that’s been stretched taut, when you let go it will not just fall loose but will bounce too far the other way. So, four centuries after Trent, there were definitely changes that needed to be made to the Mass. Probably what we should have wound up with was something that looked maybe 60% like the old Mass and 40% like the new Mass, at least as practiced in most of your average parishes. So now, a few decades on, were seeing a shift back in the other direction: increased use of Gregorian chant and Latin, more young people starting to receive Communion on the tongue and young women wearing veils to Mass, even a return to older styles of vestments for the priests.
All that is perfectly natural. Or, rather, it’s natural for things like the
manner of worship to change as the centuries go past; and if you hold up that process for a while, it’s natural to have a period of tumult and correction as you straighten it out. We just happen to be living through that. However, none of the fundamentals of the faith has changed. There are disagreements about how to
express those fundamentals through the liturgy of the Mass, how to
foster them through education and penitential practices, and so on. And there are people who are just outright dissenters, like priests who call from the pulpit for the ordination of women. But those things have always been the case. Each generation thinks they’re experiencing them for the first time, and perhaps we’re experiencing them more than has happened in a couple of centuries, maybe since the French Revolution. But the Church will still be here in 10 years, 100 years, 10,000 years, unless Christ returns first. That’s one of the promises he made to us when he gave us the gift of the Church.
