R
roadsend
Guest
I would hope that Helenio’s viewpoints are not typical of the NCW folks.
- Status
Y
YoungTradCath
Guest
Helenio was posting in the comments section of Rorate Caeli, one of the most trad blogs out there, so maybe he was being sarcastic. I hope so.I would hope that Helenio’s viewpoints are not typical of the NCW folks.
B
BertBlyleven
Guest
Be sure you aren’t judging the movement based on numbers. Evengelicals are great about numbers. If I am evangelizing tons of youth, awesome. But woe unto me if I am evangelizing them to something that stands in contradiction to the Church and its eternal teachings.I have witnessed this as well.
I have also witnessed at many gatherings, hoards and hoards of youth coming forward when it was asked for all who were considering a vocation to come forward. Hoards. Hoards.
I have never seen such a thing in my own parish. In fact, we can’t even get the youth to come to a youth group meeting once a month.
After witnessing that, I think that’s why I get a little irritated when I see the gossip machine spewed around about this group. If y’all want to reject them, fine. But let’s reject them based on FACT.
B
Bookcat
Guest
P
PA650
Guest
We’re an inclusive church, but not as crazy as those Episcopalians.Oh my goodness.
T
TrueLight
Guest
I agree with you. I am all for evangelization. But evangelization to what?
M
masondoggy
Guest
Well all I can say is that based on MY experience and the time I spent with members & leaders, is that they are very serious about adhering to Church teaching…at least the people I was with.
That’s not to say there aren’t some involved in the movement with other motives. But that would be true with ANY group in the Church.
D
Dirt
Guest
After my first post, i wasted about an hour of my life researching the neocatechuminal way on the internet. Found some very frightening stuff. If what i have read concerning the theology of Arguello and Hernandez are correct, this sect is a cult in every meaning of the word. No real presence, no true sacrifice, The Church was in stasis from Constantine to V-II, hand written liturgy, hand written catechism and wait for it, he and the ex-Nun are leaders for life!
C’mon folks, this is Jehova Witness stuff filled with calvanism and a touch of Masonic mind control. And according to former members, very few of the followers know the truth, since to get through all of the training(indoctrination) can take upwards of twenty years. Just like Masons, the locals are doing good works, unaware of the actual designs and demonics of the leadership. I am really worried about our Church. These same tactics are used by evangelicals in the South. There is a growing mega-church in my neck of the woods. All modern, loud music, come as you are no pressure. Smooth pastors(6 satellite campuses) and the same “Jesus Loves You as you are” "If you are not feeling Loved in your Church, try us"message. What they do not advertise, nor will you find it on any of their handouts or their website is that they are a Southern Baptist seed Church. Same slight of hand! Same get you in and quietly start the process of indoctrination!
Can anyone look at this phenomena or any of the occurances of the past fifty years and say that Pope St. Pius X or Pope Leo XIII or Pope Pius XII would have sat back and permitted this stuff to happen? What happened to “Lamentabili Sane”, “Quanta Cura”, Vatican Council I ? What happened to Anathema Sit???
C’mon folks, this is Jehova Witness stuff filled with calvanism and a touch of Masonic mind control. And according to former members, very few of the followers know the truth, since to get through all of the training(indoctrination) can take upwards of twenty years. Just like Masons, the locals are doing good works, unaware of the actual designs and demonics of the leadership. I am really worried about our Church. These same tactics are used by evangelicals in the South. There is a growing mega-church in my neck of the woods. All modern, loud music, come as you are no pressure. Smooth pastors(6 satellite campuses) and the same “Jesus Loves You as you are” "If you are not feeling Loved in your Church, try us"message. What they do not advertise, nor will you find it on any of their handouts or their website is that they are a Southern Baptist seed Church. Same slight of hand! Same get you in and quietly start the process of indoctrination!
Can anyone look at this phenomena or any of the occurances of the past fifty years and say that Pope St. Pius X or Pope Leo XIII or Pope Pius XII would have sat back and permitted this stuff to happen? What happened to “Lamentabili Sane”, “Quanta Cura”, Vatican Council I ? What happened to Anathema Sit???
B
Bl_Pope_Pius_IX
Guest
They are rolling in their holy sepulchres. I often wish that I was born in a time before this one, a time when whose Vicars of Christ reigned. I love H.H. Benedict XVI, but I was very surprised to hear of the approval of the NCW and the praise that His Holiness extolled to them. We will have plenty to pray about and for.
Saint Michael, defend us in this battle.
~ Pius :knight1:
Y
YoungTradCath
Guest
I feel the same way. I often wish I was born somewhere around 1850 or so.
C
Chris_McAvoy
Guest
Because apparently the power of books is rather limited, Someone ought to make a detailed unbiased documentary of this group over a period of at least a year or several years. Other than prayer, If the concern is real and serious the only thing to prove that it has a problem is to document in with hidden camera.
I think that the real task christians have is to educate themselves on their faith.
If people were more educated many of these problems would be elimated more speedily. A true unity of faith would be possible. It was an ignorance as to what power bishops and Pope’s have and what they don’t have that allowed much of current practice to exist. There was an authority given to them to do almost whatever they wanted, assuming it would automatically be holy correct. Though the Pope can not err in important matters faith and morals, otherwise he like all bishops is fallible.
videos along the lines of this are very helpful:
youtube.com/watch?v=OeXfbdr1jlM
youtube.com/watch?v=CLRLrm2leUE
M
masondoggy
Guest
And do you really think if ANY of that were true, that they would have gotten full approval from the Church? I think not.
I happen to trust our current Pope.
P
Pee
Guest
Before any group, movement, or organization is started in any parish, it has to be approved by the parish priest or administrator. Your parish priest is the person who can give you the best answer.
F
Filii_Dei
Guest
Be careful about what you’re saying there. His Holiness only approved their prayers and mission. People synthesize their own prayers to God everyday, so unless they contain doctrinal errors, they are no big issue.
I think what is more significant is that the Holy Father did not approve their liturgical practices. We mustn’t forget that the purpose of the NCW’s trip to Rome was to obtain approval for their “liturgy”, not their prayers. Prayers don’t require approval. Changes to liturgy, however, do.
In any case, I see the Neo-Catechumenal Way dying out rather quickly without their “liturgy”. That was the most defining characteristic of their practices, and without it, they become no different from any new-age Catholic movement.
This article might help shed a bit more light: catholicnewsagency.com/news/vatican-approval-for-neo-catechumenal-way-only-applies-to-non-liturgical-catechesis/
Y
YoungTradCath
Guest
Whew, so their “rite” wasn’t approved. Very stressful moment now over.Be careful about what you’re saying there. His Holiness only approved their prayers and mission. People synthesize their own prayers to God everyday, so unless they contain doctrinal errors, they are no big issue.
I think what is more significant is that the Holy Father did not approve their liturgical practices. We mustn’t forget that the purpose of the NCW’s trip to Rome was to obtain approval for their “liturgy”, not their prayers. Prayers don’t require approval. Changes to liturgy, however, do.
In any case, I see the Neo-Catechumenal Way dying out rather quickly without their “liturgy”. That was the most defining characteristic of their practices, and without it, they become no different from any new-age Catholic movement.
This article might help shed a bit more light: catholicnewsagency.com/news/vatican-approval-for-neo-catechumenal-way-only-applies-to-non-liturgical-catechesis/
P
PhilOSophia
Guest
It looks like these people are making The Protestant Mistake:
‘All those accretions of since the Last Supper are barnacles to be swept away. If we can get back to what (we think) happened at the Last Supper, we’ll have the perfect Mass’.
Subtext: We don’t want hierarchy and we want to be more to the front, instead of mere witnesses at a mystic rite of sacrifice. We want the mass at our level. We have/want a special relationship with God/The Holy Spirit and the rubrics and Latin get in the way.
Hopefully more and more people will realise that the old rite has Extraordinary value in directing the mind to God and propitiating him. It’s a basic error in engineering to meddle with what works and re-invent the wheel.
‘All those accretions of since the Last Supper are barnacles to be swept away. If we can get back to what (we think) happened at the Last Supper, we’ll have the perfect Mass’.
Subtext: We don’t want hierarchy and we want to be more to the front, instead of mere witnesses at a mystic rite of sacrifice. We want the mass at our level. We have/want a special relationship with God/The Holy Spirit and the rubrics and Latin get in the way.
Hopefully more and more people will realise that the old rite has Extraordinary value in directing the mind to God and propitiating him. It’s a basic error in engineering to meddle with what works and re-invent the wheel.
B
Bl_Pope_Pius_IX
Guest
Thank you for clarifying.Be careful about what you’re saying there. His Holiness only approved their prayers and mission. People synthesize their own prayers to God everyday, so unless they contain doctrinal errors, they are no big issue.
I think what is more significant is that the Holy Father did not approve their liturgical practices. We mustn’t forget that the purpose of the NCW’s trip to Rome was to obtain approval for their “liturgy”, not their prayers. Prayers don’t require approval. Changes to liturgy, however, do.
In any case, I see the Neo-Catechumenal Way dying out rather quickly without their “liturgy”. That was the most defining characteristic of their practices, and without it, they become no different from any new-age Catholic movement.
This article might help shed a bit more light: catholicnewsagency.com/news/vatican-approval-for-neo-catechumenal-way-only-applies-to-non-liturgical-catechesis/
F
Filii_Dei
Guest
You are most welcome.
Let us pray that this movement learned a strong lesson from their private audience and doesn’t mutate any further.
A
archangel04
Guest
Don’t forget video!
T
the_phoenix
Guest
My own small personal experiences with the Neocatechumenal Way:
When the Italian missionaries first came to my American parish [NOTE: Not my current parish!], I went to one of their catechism nights just out of curiosity. The advertising flyer sounded rather pie-in-the-sky, promising you a happy feel-good cure-all type of thing if you were feeling blue about the troubles in your life. The very first night, I realized the Neocatechumenal Way was not for me, for two reasons.
A) They placed a lot of emphasis on being there for adult Catholics unfamiliar with their faith, and that just doesn’t describe me, since my family background is such that I’ve voraciously done intense Catholic spiritual reading even as a child.
B) They suggested that we keep repeating “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me” like it was a mantra. For example, in the car all the way to work. Now I can see praying the Rosary while driving to work, but repeating a single phrase for maybe hundreds of times personally just didn’t feel right when it came to my prayer life.
There have also been two occasions where I’ve gone to the Perpetual Adoration Chapel to make a quiet visit to the Blessed Sacrament, only to find anything but the peace and quiet I’d been looking for because the Neocatechumenal Way were occupying the chapel, the tabernacle door was closed, and the closest you could come to contemplation was to offer up the noisy environment as sacrificial prayer.
The first occasion, they were offering one of their private Masses to ring in the New Year. The Mass must have started about 11:00 p.m., because when I arrived shortly before midnight was right before Communion. I was invited to join the group by sitting in their circle, and found it most embarrassing when I was offered Communion in the hand while sitting down, because I had to publicly refuse Communion, in front of everyone, at close quarters, as we were all practically sitting on top of each other. (Since I hadn’t known I’d be attending Mass, I hadn’t made an hour-long fast before Communion.)
The second occasion was a Wednesday evening, stopping by the chapel for quiet prayer after an evening class at the university had ended. This was their Liturgy of the Word where they had a theme that they all spoke on after various Bible readings and songs to the sound of rattles and guitars. Now I enjoy hearing passages read from both the Old and the New Testament. What made me wonder was how they could shut up the Blessed Sacrament behind tabernacle doors so that they could focus on describing their intimate feelings about how great (pious) they and their lives had become since joining their group. One man in particular did this, on the verge of tears. The others in the group seemed to enjoy emphasizing that they had put in time preparing a talk for the theme.
If they had read Bible passages aloud and then wanted to sing and pray aloud such prayers as the Rosary or the Divine Mercy Chaplet, it would have been an experience where we were all together as a community focusing on Christ, in which case, I would have been happy enough to have the chapel silence broken. But for people to pat themselves and the members of their clique on the back only a few feet away from the Real Presence of Our Lord in the Holy Eucharist … well, yes they had permission to be there, but couldn’t they have chosen a different location?
Meanwhile, I wasn’t the only one who had come in for a simple visit to the Blessed Sacrament and gotten something different than what I’d bargained for … a man came in a bit after me. He seemingly needed to be coaxed into coming in, sitting down, and listening to the Liturgy of the Word … possibly he’d been about to leave, discouraged that here he’d come to be in the welcoming presence of Jesus and now felt as though he might be intruding on some group’s private service. When I was taken notice of at that point and invited to sit up front with everyone, I bowed out with the very real reason of it being 9:30 p.m. and not having had dinner yet, because people kept getting up and talking, and there didn’t seem to be a very good time to leave without seeming impolite by walking out on one speaker or another giving an intimate from-the-heart witness that they had worked so hard on for their theme.
~~ the phoenix
When the Italian missionaries first came to my American parish [NOTE: Not my current parish!], I went to one of their catechism nights just out of curiosity. The advertising flyer sounded rather pie-in-the-sky, promising you a happy feel-good cure-all type of thing if you were feeling blue about the troubles in your life. The very first night, I realized the Neocatechumenal Way was not for me, for two reasons.
A) They placed a lot of emphasis on being there for adult Catholics unfamiliar with their faith, and that just doesn’t describe me, since my family background is such that I’ve voraciously done intense Catholic spiritual reading even as a child.
B) They suggested that we keep repeating “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me” like it was a mantra. For example, in the car all the way to work. Now I can see praying the Rosary while driving to work, but repeating a single phrase for maybe hundreds of times personally just didn’t feel right when it came to my prayer life.
There have also been two occasions where I’ve gone to the Perpetual Adoration Chapel to make a quiet visit to the Blessed Sacrament, only to find anything but the peace and quiet I’d been looking for because the Neocatechumenal Way were occupying the chapel, the tabernacle door was closed, and the closest you could come to contemplation was to offer up the noisy environment as sacrificial prayer.
The first occasion, they were offering one of their private Masses to ring in the New Year. The Mass must have started about 11:00 p.m., because when I arrived shortly before midnight was right before Communion. I was invited to join the group by sitting in their circle, and found it most embarrassing when I was offered Communion in the hand while sitting down, because I had to publicly refuse Communion, in front of everyone, at close quarters, as we were all practically sitting on top of each other. (Since I hadn’t known I’d be attending Mass, I hadn’t made an hour-long fast before Communion.)
The second occasion was a Wednesday evening, stopping by the chapel for quiet prayer after an evening class at the university had ended. This was their Liturgy of the Word where they had a theme that they all spoke on after various Bible readings and songs to the sound of rattles and guitars. Now I enjoy hearing passages read from both the Old and the New Testament. What made me wonder was how they could shut up the Blessed Sacrament behind tabernacle doors so that they could focus on describing their intimate feelings about how great (pious) they and their lives had become since joining their group. One man in particular did this, on the verge of tears. The others in the group seemed to enjoy emphasizing that they had put in time preparing a talk for the theme.
If they had read Bible passages aloud and then wanted to sing and pray aloud such prayers as the Rosary or the Divine Mercy Chaplet, it would have been an experience where we were all together as a community focusing on Christ, in which case, I would have been happy enough to have the chapel silence broken. But for people to pat themselves and the members of their clique on the back only a few feet away from the Real Presence of Our Lord in the Holy Eucharist … well, yes they had permission to be there, but couldn’t they have chosen a different location?
Meanwhile, I wasn’t the only one who had come in for a simple visit to the Blessed Sacrament and gotten something different than what I’d bargained for … a man came in a bit after me. He seemingly needed to be coaxed into coming in, sitting down, and listening to the Liturgy of the Word … possibly he’d been about to leave, discouraged that here he’d come to be in the welcoming presence of Jesus and now felt as though he might be intruding on some group’s private service. When I was taken notice of at that point and invited to sit up front with everyone, I bowed out with the very real reason of it being 9:30 p.m. and not having had dinner yet, because people kept getting up and talking, and there didn’t seem to be a very good time to leave without seeming impolite by walking out on one speaker or another giving an intimate from-the-heart witness that they had worked so hard on for their theme.
~~ the phoenix
- Status