Traditional Catholicism defined? What it is not.?

[Berry19]

A year ago it was asked: Why does traditional Catholicism oppose Vatican II? It appears few know how to find serious answers. Moderators properly replied and yet the inquiries persist. This is so because the web is filled millions of sites for Modernistic Catholicism and only four or five sites to show what is True Catholicism. Even a casual inquirer would never locate a doctrinal answer. What to do?

The cautious inquirer should do this: Compare your impressions of today’s Modernism with a catechism dated before the council of Vatican II (1962-1965), such as the online Baltimore Catechism, levels 1 thru 4. There are four levels, beginners to catechists. Or use the doctrinal level Catechism of Trent to compare encyclical content.

I add this. Modern Catholicism is a “mixture” of some original doctrine and some heretical doctrine. When this happens a “newchurch” is invented. It is not Catholic. The difficulty is knowing which doctrines are “new” and which are historically accurate. Which is which? You cannot have both. Modern Catholicism is condemned by Pops St. Pius X. One also can add, Modern Catholicism is condemned over and over by all the Church Doctrine prior to Pope Pius XII (1958). This is so because it takes the meaning out of a doctrine and puts a new meaning in. That is called heresy.

 

[brotherhrolf]

The hard part about your question is what is or was defined by the Second Council and what is “believed” to have been part of the Second Council. Much has been done in the “spirit of Vatican II” that is not what the Council actually said.

As someone who remembers both Pius XII and the Vatican Council way too much was done in the “spirit of Vatican II”

 

[Jacafamala]

A year ago it was asked: Why does traditional Catholicism oppose Vatican II? It appears few know how to find serious answers. Moderators properly replied and yet the inquiries persist. This is so because the web is filled millions of sites for Modernistic Catholicism and only four or five sites to show what is True Catholicism. Even a casual inquirer would never locate a doctrinal answer. What to do?

I think it’s a matter of reconciling Vatican II in light of Tradition. The shaky parts (i.e. ecumenism and religious liberty) need to be better defined. I believe that this can be done if VII was really just a pastoral council.

The cautious inquirer should do this: Compare your impressions of today’s Modernism with a catechism dated before the council of Vatican II (1962-1965), such as the online Baltimore Catechism, levels 1 thru 4. There are four levels, beginners to catechists. Or use the doctrinal level Catechism of Trent to compare encyclical content.

Yeah, there’s a huge difference.

I add this. Modern Catholicism is a “mixture” of some original doctrine and some heretical doctrine. When this happens a “newchurch” is invented. It is not Catholic. The difficulty is knowing which doctrines are “new” and which are historically accurate. Which is which? You cannot have both. Modern Catholicism is condemned by Pops St. Pius X. One also can add, Modern Catholicism is condemned over and over by all the Church Doctrine prior to Pope Pius XII (1958). This is so because it takes the meaning out of a doctrine and puts a new meaning in. That is called heresy.

Tradition isn’t a return to the past. Traditional Catholicism has meaning and significance in every age. It always has. I think that’s where modern Catholicism went off the rails; the Church failed to trust in the defined doctrines as being truth for the modern world. In some ways, VII tried to bend the Church dogmas so they’d be more appealing to contemporary society.

And of course the changes have hurt us as a Church. Especially ecumenism which I think has created a sort of relativistic attitude in the Church. It’s created the attitude that ‘their church is as good as the Catholic Church’-- as though it’s all just a matter of preference. This has proved to be a very dangerous and false presumption for so much of the flock.

But realistically with regard to the changes, they won’t all be scrapped overnight. We need to be patient and pray that the Holy Spirit will provide our bishops with the grace necessary to fix what needs to be fixed.

The Spirit of Vatican II; the parts that really weren’t in the documents that Bro Rolf referred to are perhaps the easier things to fix.

 

[Claire_from_DE]

Since we haven’t yet seen a definition of Traditional Catholicism, I don’t think you can even say that Traditional Catholics oppose Vatican II. Many don’t oppose it but realize things were implemented that were not required or even implied.

Can a traditional Catholic love both the OF and the EF masses and even feel blessed by attending a Catholic charismatic conference or a nearby Spanish mass?

Can someone who isn’t a Traditional Catholic be a True Catholic? Is EWTN one of those Modernistic Catholicism sites?

Since the Holy Spirit was promised to the church that had Peter as ‘keeper of the keys’ I figure my best strategy is to stick close to the pope who sits in Peter’s chair and to trust the Holy Spirit to sort things out in His own time. That’s traditional.

Maybe we need guidebooks a la Jeff Foxworthy: You Know You’re a Traditional Catholic If… and You Know You’re NOT a Traditional Catholic If…

I’ll begin.
You know you’re a traditional Catholic If you have a mantilla in every liturgical color and a blue one for the Marian feasts.

You know you’re NOT a traditional Catholic if several of your favorite hymns are sung to the tune of Bridge Over Troubled Water.

You know you’re a traditional Catholic if you have to fight the urge to genuflect before going down the row to your seat at the movies.

You know you’re NOT a traditional Catholic if the Kyrie is Greek to you.

 

[brotherhrolf]

I’m with Claire. I’m not sure what a traditional Catholic is. My recollection of the period just after Vatican II is one of “anything goes”. Week after week of liturgical change…an abandonment of traditional hymns, the introduction of guitars…

I was a junior in high school when it all started. The brothers who taught me abandoned wearing their cassocks in favor of white shirt, black tie, and black slacks - over the course of the summer of 1967. I don’t think y’all have any idea of what it felt like to go from Parce Domine to Sons of God over the summer. And, yes, we did.

I can tell you this. For every one of my high school classmates who “ran with the ball” after Vatican II, there was an equal and opposite number of us who were perfectly content with HMC. I am one of the latter.

My conscience was formed before Vatican II. I believe that there are still large numbers of us who were kids before 1967, educated in Catholic schools, and who have never stopped being how we were raised. I don’t follow “traditional Catholicism”. It is how I was raised.

 

[thistle]

A year ago it was asked: Why does traditional Catholicism oppose Vatican II? It appears few know how to find serious answers. Moderators properly replied and yet the inquiries persist. This is so because the web is filled millions of sites for Modernistic Catholicism and only four or five sites to show what is True Catholicism. Even a casual inquirer would never locate a doctrinal answer. What to do?

The cautious inquirer should do this: Compare your impressions of today’s Modernism with a catechism dated before the council of Vatican II (1962-1965), such as the online Baltimore Catechism, levels 1 thru 4. There are four levels, beginners to catechists. Or use the doctrinal level Catechism of Trent to compare encyclical content.

I add this. Modern Catholicism is a “mixture” of some original doctrine and some heretical doctrine. When this happens a “newchurch” is invented. It is not Catholic. The difficulty is knowing which doctrines are “new” and which are historically accurate. Which is which? You cannot have both. Modern Catholicism is condemned by Pops St. Pius X. One also can add, Modern Catholicism is condemned over and over by all the Church Doctrine prior to Pope Pius XII (1958). This is so because it takes the meaning out of a doctrine and puts a new meaning in. That is called heresy.

Many words but no substance.
As you are stating as fact that the Church teaches some heretical doctrines please enlighten us. What heretical doctrines does the Church teach?

 

[Lainey63]

Catholicism itself is very rich in tradition, both oral & written. So if one is a Catholic in good standing with the Catholic church, following her laws & precepts then it would be an accurate assessment to say that person is a “traditional catholic” which is a somewhat redundant description. I think.:hey_bud:

 

[puzzleannie]

Traditional Catholicism is above all obedient and submissive to the authority of the popes and the bishops. Anyone or any group who dissents from the magesterial teaching of the Church is a dissenter, the opposite of traditional. Anyone who urges and teaches others to dissent is worse, and if the person so doing is one who claims to speak for the Church and misleads others, that is the gravest of sins, one which Christ condemned in the harshest terms. Furthermore one is a “traditional Catholic” should have no need of any preface to the word Catholic.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Traditional Catholicism is above all obedient and submissive to the authority of the popes and the bishops. Anyone or any group who dissents from the magesterial teaching of the Church is a dissenter, the opposite of traditional. Anyone who urges and teaches others to dissent is worse, and if the person so doing is one who claims to speak for the Church and misleads others, that is the gravest of sins, one which Christ condemned in the harshest terms. Furthermore one is a “traditional Catholic” should have no need of any preface to the word Catholic.

I agree, and this seems to me an adequate working definition of “Traditional Catholicism”.

I might add, though, that “Traditional Catholicism” in the U.S. (and, one assumes, elsewhere) depended a lot in the past on the expression one’s culture gave it. My antecedents were essentially Irish and (northern) Italian. Their respective approaches to Catholicism were significantly different. One could almost accuse the Italians of being “post VII” in some respects, even before VII. It wasn’t a matter of what they believed, but more a matter of how they approached things. The Irish saw protestantism as a deadly threat to all they stood for, and saw Masonry around every corner (sometimes rightly). The Italians seemed to think of all that as a mildly amusing aberration, and not a whole lot more. The Italians seemed to have a more socially oriented approach to things, notwithstanding that they still believed every single thing the Irish believed. The Irish seemed always to be at war with this world, while the Italians seemed to be more at home in it. The latter were certainly a lot easier to be around if one did something wrong. I can’t say that’s typical of the two ethnic groups, but I have never experienced anything that changed my mind about the generalizations.

I am one of those who (perhaps not being as scholarly as some) has never seen anything all that “new” in VII. What seems to have happened, though, is that it opened the door to new “cultural adaptations”. In this country, those adaptations often went awry; perhaps in part because “American culture” was really not a unified thing. It was a conglomerate of inherited cultures, with an admixture of very vague, non-organic attempts to create a peculiarly American culture. But there are chasms of division within American (even Catholic American) society, and some of them ended up being reflected in the “cultural adaptations” some attempted to include in Catholicism in the U.S.; often to very ill effect.

Thus, for example, we see attempts to “return” to an “early Church” model, reflected in catacomb-like architecture and an extremely social, yet oddly insular, sort of religious practice. But to me, that’s entirely ersatz; an attempt to “return” to something about which they really know nothing. Some have tried to follow commercial/evangelical sorts of models, and not with great success. Some have an almost “country Fundamentalist” kind of flavor to them. Having been raised in that social context, I find it fairly congenial and organic. Lifelong city dwellers, though, might absolutely hate it. Black urban parishes tend to be like black protestant churches in many ways. That seems to be fairly organic, and while it’s not my thing, I don’t have a problem with it. Vietnamese parishes are a world all their own, as are Mexican parishes.

But again, a good part of the problem that I think is there, is that this country really doesn’t have a prevailing “culture” for the nation as a whole, despite all attempts to create or imagine one. And yet, VII, or at least the “spirit of VII” (I don’t like that expression either) seems to encourage cultural adaptations. And so, it has tended to sort of flop around rudderless in the U.S. Because of that, “innovation” almost seems encouraged and, of course, as with all innovation, much of it goes awry.

 

[puzzleannie]

Hijacking the term “traditional Catholic” to justify one’s own dissent from Church teaching, including the Vatican II documents, demeans the vocation of faithful Catholics, just as hijacking the term “marriage” to justify same-sex unions demeans all valid faithful marriages.

 

[brotherhrolf]

Traditional Catholicism is above all obedient and submissive to the authority of the popes and the bishops…

Amen. And so we were.

I grew up in a Sicilian, Irish, French and African-American parish. New Orleans and south Louisiana was/is a great cultural gumbo to this day. I was never so surprised as when I was stationed in Chicago in the early 70s where there were such clear distinctions between ethnic neighborhoods. Didn’t exist in New Orleans. So the ethnic approach to traditional Catholicism doesn’t work for me.

What I saw…

I saw the brothers who taught me cease wearing their cassocks over the course of the summer of 1967. I sang in the choir for the senior’s graduation in 1968 - traditional Catholic hymns. Our graduation in 1969 had three of my classmates on guitar. We sang “Sons of God”; “Bridge over Troubled Waters”; “Sounds of Silence”; “And They’ll Know We are Christians”,

I saw my parents and neighbors (the WWII generation) reduced to attending the then new Saturday afternoon vigil Mass so that they didn’t have to endure the a’strummin’ and a’grinnin’ folks. I drive (and have driven) 25 miles one way since 1983 to attend a reverent cathedral parish. I have prayed for 40 years that the pendulum would swing the other way.

That’s what we did 40+ years ago. We prayed. Our Holy Father has answered our prayers- except in my diocese. But that’s OK.

I don’t want to call myself a “traditional Catholic”. I am Catholic. The fact that I can attend either an EF or OF Mass with equal ease…Eat your hearts out. There are a heckuva lot of us who are able to do this.

 

[Cider]

Why does traditional Catholicism oppose Vatican II?

I’d suggest these:

Iota Unum: A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the Twentieth Century by John P. Parsons and Romano Amerio

Goodbye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption Into the Catholic Church by Michael S. Rose

The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture by Philip F. Lawler

Open Letter to Confused Catholics by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre

 

[Claire_from_DE]

I’m with Claire. I’m not sure what a traditional Catholic is. My recollection of the period just after Vatican II is one of “anything goes”. Week after week of liturgical change…an abandonment of traditional hymns, the introduction of guitars…

I was a junior in high school when it all started. The brothers who taught me abandoned wearing their cassocks in favor of white shirt, black tie, and black slacks - over the course of the summer of 1967. I don’t think y’all have any idea of what it felt like to go from Parce Domine to Sons of God over the summer. And, yes, we did.

I can tell you this. For every one of my high school classmates who “ran with the ball” after Vatican II, there was an equal and opposite number of us who were perfectly content with HMC. I am one of the latter.

My conscience was formed before Vatican II. I believe that there are still large numbers of us who were kids before 1967, educated in Catholic schools, and who have never stopped being how we were raised. I don’t follow “traditional Catholicism”. It is how I was raised.

This was exactly my experience except I was four years older than you. I would have been OK continuing as we had been but didn’t have much problem accepting the changes. The mass was still the mass even if it looked a little different. God hadn’t abandoned us. If we were well educated in the faith, what they now call ‘formed’ in it, we managed to weather the storms. I think the older people had it harder. My father had stressed that the mass was the same everywhere, now it didn’t seem to be. I don’t think he even knew about the eastern Catholic churches and rites. And those much younger than us suffered from the terrible “God loves me” crisis in catechesis. They learned that but not much more.

I knew the church. She had good bones. I could still see them under the new fashions because I had known her before she was clothed in the unbecoming American styles of the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s by some with more enthusiasm than sense.

I agree with puzzleannie who wrote:
Traditional Catholicism is above all obedient and submissive to the authority of the popes and the bishops. Anyone or any group who dissents from the magesterial teaching of the Church is a dissenter, the opposite of traditional. Anyone who urges and teaches others to dissent is worse, and if the person so doing is one who claims to speak for the Church and misleads others, that is the gravest of sins, one which Christ condemned in the harshest terms. Furthermore one is a “traditional Catholic” should have no need of any preface to the word Catholic.

 

[Irish_Polock]

A year ago it was asked: Why does traditional Catholicism oppose Vatican II? It appears few know how to find serious answers. Moderators properly replied and yet the inquiries persist. This is so because the web is filled millions of sites for Modernistic Catholicism and only four or five sites to show what is True Catholicism. Even a casual inquirer would never locate a doctrinal answer. What to do?

The cautious inquirer should do this: Compare your impressions of today’s Modernism with a catechism dated before the council of Vatican II (1962-1965), such as the online Baltimore Catechism, levels 1 thru 4. There are four levels, beginners to catechists. Or use the doctrinal level Catechism of Trent to compare encyclical content.

I add this. Modern Catholicism is a “mixture” of some original doctrine and some heretical doctrine. When this happens a “newchurch” is invented. It is not Catholic. The difficulty is knowing which doctrines are “new” and which are historically accurate. Which is which? You cannot have both. Modern Catholicism is condemned by Pops St. Pius X. One also can add, Modern Catholicism is condemned over and over by all the Church Doctrine prior to Pope Pius XII (1958). This is so because it takes the meaning out of a doctrine and puts a new meaning in. That is called heresy.

I don’t think most Traditional Catholics view VII as being heretical. As others have posted on this thread, some parishes took the spirit of VII a wee bit too far. My parents went through the change in the church, I wasn’t even born yet. So I haven’t had much to compare it to. In fact, my family and I have only recently started to attend the TLM here in Austin, I have found that we get more out of the TLM then we did at the parish we attended (St. Thomas More) before. Not because I find the N.O. mass heretical, but because I find the TLM has more of what I need including confession before mass, Rosary before mass and a honest devotion to Christ (and today on the feast of Christ the King, Benediction after Mass). The things I couldn’t find at my local parish, I have found in the Traditional Mass…I honestly believe I am a better Catholic attending a parish that offers the TLM. IMO

… Now, if only they had a earlier TLM with child care (3:30 is my kids nap time and the time of our TLM ) everything would be perfect. I can only hope the TLM becomes more of the norm in the future.

 

[Jacafamala]

Hijacking the term “traditional Catholic” to justify one’s own dissent from Church teaching, including the Vatican II documents, demeans the vocation of faithful Catholics, just as hijacking the term “marriage” to justify same-sex unions demeans all valid faithful marriages.

This is precisely what traditional Catholic don’t do: they don’t dissent from Church teaching. Traditional Catholics strive to maintain continuity in Church teaching.

 

[brotherhrolf]

This was exactly my experience except I was four years older than you. I would have been OK continuing as we had been but didn’t have much problem accepting the changes. The mass was still the mass even if it looked a little different. God hadn’t abandoned us. If we were well educated in the faith, what they now call ‘formed’ in it, we managed to weather the storms. I think the older people had it harder. My father had stressed that the mass was the same everywhere, now it didn’t seem to be. I don’t think he even knew about the eastern Catholic churches and rites. And those much younger than us suffered from the terrible “God loves me” crisis in catechesis. They learned that but not much more.

I knew the church. She had good bones. I could still see them under the new fashions because I had known her before she was clothed in the unbecoming American styles of the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s by some with more enthusiasm than sense.

I agree with puzzleannie who wrote:
Traditional Catholicism is above all obedient and submissive to the authority of the popes and the bishops. Anyone or any group who dissents from the magesterial teaching of the Church is a dissenter, the opposite of traditional. Anyone who urges and teaches others to dissent is worse, and if the person so doing is one who claims to speak for the Church and misleads others, that is the gravest of sins, one which Christ condemned in the harshest terms. Furthermore one is a “traditional Catholic” should have no need of any preface to the word Catholic.

Yep. My parents’ generation (WWII) suffered greatly. We prayed that what was our heritage would be restored, but we obeyed. That was the example set by our parents’ gneration.

 

[Joe17]

Catholicism is holding onto the truthes of the Catholic faith as they were handed down through the ages without there being any change to the meaning of these teachings. It means, of course, accepting the Trinity, what Our Lord left us with, and understanding that we must die in the state of grace to obtain the Beatific Vision. It puts upon us the responsibilty of obeying our superiors and being in union with the Pope when one is alive, as well as accepting of our fellow Catholics.

When teachings come and are different from what you know to have been always taught, then watch out. For instance, what do you understand about Holy Communion being given to non-Catholics? Is this wrong? Are non-Catholic religions a means of salvation? These can both be answered with one of two words-yes or no. Of course, one can develop their answer for thoroughness sake, but there is a final answer.

Joe

 

[miltonhork]

Traditionalist Catholics are Roman Catholics who believe that there should be a restoration of many or all of the liturgical forms, public and private devotions and presentations of Catholic teachings which prevailed in the Catholic Church before the Second Vatican Council.