The treachery of the dwarves: Fr. Dwight Longnecker

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gracepoole said:
Most Catholics have no clue that such a divide exists save for his blog post ramblings about it. Perhaps the divide would lessen with fewer people bemoaning it.
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I will say this for Father, in the part of the world we are in (I live not too terribly far from his parish) the divide is very evident.
 
Instead of accusing them to be stuck and wrapped in fear one can instead pray for them and stop.calling them names. Rad Trad is name calling. Calling them dwarves is a name calling too. Let us be honest - has anyone trully been like the kids in Narnia? Because you cannot compare someone with a character and be outside the story unless you are God. And who knows how God will judge this situation?
Catholic Rad Trads who are contemplative and thus constructive have been spiritually helpful for me even if they describe all EO as schismatics and maybe we are. They never called me names or judged me.
They desire clarifications and in this Jesus on their say “let nay mean nay and yes mean yes”. The diplomatic subtle church of today, east and west, many times mixing yes and no and they teach that is okay as long as it is peace-making.
 
gracepoole said:
Most Catholics have no clue that such a divide exists save for his blog post ramblings about it. Perhaps the divide would lessen with fewer people bemoaning it.
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The websites on the far right (and left) are dedicated to expanding this divide.

There are 3 groups: the complacent, the proactive, and the alarmists. I try to encourage those in the complacent and alarmist groups to join the proactive. The more people drift into the alarmist movement, the less active they are in working for improvement and success in actual parishes, dioceses and imperfect Catholic ministries. The alarmist movement makes people spectators when we’re short of workers.
 
Again, most Catholics have no idea what it would mean to be “complacent,” “proactive,” or “alarmist.” They attend Mass on Sunday, maybe participate in some kind of parish ministry, hear the occasional rumblings from the Vatican, and that’s it. I am part of a very large parish and I would bet quite a lot that most there have no clue where they can attend the EF in town, nor do they have any interest in championing it or disparaging it. Probably they’ve never heard of Summorum Pontificorum.
 
It’s obvious that complacency leads to passivity. It’s not as obvious, but also true, that alarmism leads to passivity. The alarmists distrust every ministry developed in our imperfect parishes and dioceses. They repeat the secular media mantra, that Catholic authority is bad. Their attention is on the faults of Vatican and bishops, never on working in their local prolife ministry, nor anything else local.

The websites fuel this fixation on what the Pope and bishops are doing (wrong), and neglect (distrust) of things the individual COULD do locally. They breed spectators, armchair commenters, not workers.
 
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The real issue is described here by Chesterton. I think what he says of a creed, can also be said of a rite of worship. Unfortunately, since Vatican II there has been de facto uncertainty and division as to the contents of the faith and morality as well as liturgical chaos. The result is as described below.
A fixed creed is absolutely indispensable to freedom. For while men are
and should be various, there must be some communication between them if
they are to get any pleasure out of their variety. And an intellectual
formula is the only thing that can create a communication that does not
depend on mere blood, class, or capricious sympathy. If we all start with
the agreement that the sun and moon exist, we can talk about our different
visions of them. The strong-eyed man can boast that he sees the sun as a
perfect circle. The shortsighted man may say (or if he is an
impressionist, boast) that he sees the moon as a silver blur. The
colour-blind man may rejoice in the fairy-trick which enables him to live
under a green sun and a blue moon. But if once it be held that there is
nothing but a silver blur in one man’s eye or a bright circle (like a
monocle) in the other man’s, then neither is free, for each is shut up in
the cell of a separate universe.

But, indeed, an even worse fate, practically considered, follows from the
denim of the original intellectual formula. Not only does the individual
become narrow, but he spreads narrowness across the world like a cloud; he
causes narrowness to increase and multiply like a weed. For what happens
is this: that all the shortsighted people come together and build a city
called Myopia, where they take short-sightedness for granted and paint
short-sighted pictures and pursue very short-sighted policies. Meanwhile
all the men who can stare at the sun get together on Salisbury Plain and
do nothing but stare at the sun; and all the men who see a blue moon band
themselves together and assert the blue moon, not once in a blue moon, but
incessantly. So that instead of a small and varied group, you have
enormous monotonous groups. Instead of the liberty of dogma, you have the
tyranny of taste.
…
And it is supremely so in the case of religion. As long as you have a
creed, which every one in a certain group believes or is supposed to
believe, then that group will consist of the old recurring figures of
religious history, who can be appealed to by the creed and judged by it;
the saint, the hypocrite, the brawler, the weak brother. These people do
each other good; or they all join together to do the hypocrite good, with
heavy and repeated blows. But once break the bond of doctrine which alone
holds these people together and each will gravitate to his own kind
outside the group. The hypocrites will all get together and call each
other saints; the saints will get lost in a desert and call themselves
weak brethren; the weak brethren will get weaker and weaker in a general
atmosphere of imbecility; and the brawler will go off looking for somebody
else with whom to brawl.
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http://www.online-literature.com/chesterton/2586/
 
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Thanks for sharing! That was a brilliant article. 👍

When I first saw the title, I thought of the treachery of Tolkien’s dwarves at the end of The Hobbit when they refused to share the treasure…I really enjoyed his interpretation of the dwarves in The Last Battle.
 
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Rob2 said:
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JanSobieskiIII:
The Treachery of the Dwarves | Fr. Dwight Longenecker
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One key point he makes is the harm done when one’s religion gets mixed up with party politics .

That is always a remedy for disaster .
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Agree 100%. Our Church is solid, eternal and unchanging. Political party platforms are fluid, mercurial and unreliable, as can be seen with the disgraceful abandonment of their principles by many Republicans under the current President.
 
I beg your pardon, but 1P5 is NOT “hard right”. Their articles are excellent and they have moderators just like other websites.
 
Is the Divine Liturgy Eastern Catholic or Orthodox? You could definitely attend the Divine Liturgy at any Byzantine, Ukrainian, Melkite or other Eastern Catholic Church which is in full communion with the Holy See to fulfill your Sunday obligation if you can’t go to the TLM.
 
Shame you have such little faith in Christ’s promise about the church.
 
Margaret_Ann said:
I beg your pardon, but 1P5 is NOT “hard right”. Their articles are excellent and they have moderators just like other websites.
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Ok, I regret using a term as Hard Right.
If you find reading 1p5 benefits your actions, provides useful information you can apply, that is fine.
My own belief is that this and similar websites do not provide info that the reader can implement, locally. By obsession with atrocities of Pope and bishops they are unable to notice other things going on. I suspect many readers think the Vatican is a greater evil than Time Warner or Disney.

By keeping people alarmed about the world Level, which readers can’t act on, they make despaired readers less willing or able to act on the local level, which they might potentially influence.

They create spectators.
 
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QDo you really think that when Christ promised indefectability to his church that it meant every pope was valid and every pope was right…?

There have been official antipopes before .
During the Great Western Schism the college of cardinals elected two popes.
One of them was an anti pope.

If it happened before therefore it can happen again.
 
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I realize there are many conservative Catholics who are dismayed by the leadership of the Church at this time. They dislike Pope Francis. They dislike his advisors even more. They can’t stand Fr James Martin SJ, revile the German bishops, are disgusted by the McCarrick affair and the gay mafia, resist the liberal prelates and extend their animus not only to all the liberals but also to just about everybody else who does not join in their constant stream of sour invective.
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I have to say, I’m a fan of Fr. Dwight, but I don’t see why a lot of these things are problems.
  • I can dislike Pope Francis’ methods without rejecting him as our Pope.
  • I can dislike his advisers take without claiming that they are unfit to hold their positions. (As it stands, I know pretty much nothing about his advisers >_>)
  • I don’t care for Fr. Martin. I believe he wants to do good, but I don’t actually think he is accomplishing anything positive. He is too preeminently focused on building bridges, without seeming to place any focus on helping homosexuals embrace Church teaching on the nature of human sexuality and the immorality of homosexual acts. I follow him and Vorhis on Facebook, and I find their stances about equally misguided.
  • There is real reason to have problems with many German Bishops. From their push for communion for divorced and remarried Catholics, and now their push to allow Protestants to take communion… There are serious theological errors at play here which they seem unwilling to even consider…
  • We should be disgusted by McCarrick’s actions, considering that his abuses have been proven. We shouldn’t believe him to be beyond salvation, or unworthy of our prayers, but he committed some serious sins that had some real negative consequences for his victims…
I can believe all of these things while still knowing that Christ founded the Church, and God won’t let it be destroyed. Having problems with particular popes or bishops isn’t going to drive me to schism. What’ll drive people to schism is if they forget Christ’s promise and His sovereignty.
 
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1P5 has some of the best inspirational Catholic articles like this:

onepeterfive.com

Eating Fire and Spirit: The Most Wondrous of All God’s Gifts

Imagine eating the sun—and imagine you could do it without perishing. What would happen? You would receive into your body the source of light and warmth. You would have within you all the light and…
onepeterfive.com onepeterfive.com

This is my all-time favorite 1P5 article.

Seriously, I’d say that for every article that 1P5 posts which deals with the crisis in the Church, there’s at least one article which uplifts and inspires you.

And they are NOT sedevacantist - that’s part of their comment policy.
 
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