What a totally insincere thing to say after a lengthy, unfounded diatribe full of false accusations and characterizations.
“The manly men disappeared, and the seminaries became hotbeds of homosexuality, leading to the priest abuse scandals.”
That statement libels many good and holy men, and saying so is not a false accusation. To say that blaming these scandals on today’s priests is a libel against those priests, since the vast majority of them are innocent, is not a false characterization. To say that such libel
at the very least seems betray a lack of reverence for the priesthood itself is also not a false statement. To say that it does a disservice to seminarians to encourage them to look down upon their predecessors
en masse is no false characterization. I am sorry you hate so much to hear that.
The priest abuse scandals
did not come from the NO, nor from Vatican II. To say otherwise is the false accusation. Nor is it a false accusation to say that instances of pedophilia were, in the past, either disbelieved or swept under the rug, nor is it a false accusation to say that most of the accusations, in Oregon at least, are very old, 30 years old and older. This is a matter of public record.
Do you ask me to hear so many priests so wrongly painted with the same brush and not respond in no uncertain terms that it is unacceptable? I hope not! Do you want me to let people who are bad-mouthing the NO go on thinking that it brings no one to wonder what is going through the minds of people who prefer the TLM? Again, I hope not! Do you want the TLM widely desired, so as to become widely available, or not?
I am sorry that you found insincerity in my willingness to believe that all is not as it very much seems, that you don’t want to think I hoped I was reading these posts all wrong. I do sincerely hope that I what I seem to hear is wrong. It becomes harder and harder to hold on to that hope.
Originally Posted by EasterJoy:
“We need to admit that if the Church had been so perfect as so many romantics want to believe, Vatican II would not have been convened. I suppose you can criticize the effort to meet the problem, but let’s not pretend that no problem existed.”
This quote is founded on erroneous thinking. If you have read anything at all on the history of the church in the century leading up to Vatican II, you would know that the progressive and modernist thinking that overtook churchmen all the way up to the church hierarchy, that the infiltration of the modernists into the church, began years before Vatican II. It can in fact, be traced back to the French Revolution. The popes( before the modernist popes) had tried to battle back and quell the tide of modernist thinking long before the turn of the last century. I suggest you acquire a better understanding of it all before making wild accusations and statements.
Uh huh. OK. There were no problems in the Church before Vatican II. No pedophiles. No abuses. No rhetoric that led to religious wars and pogroms. No little Protestant girls shoved in the mud by the Catholic kids, no Catholic girls terrorized by the Protestant kids. No Popes who led personal lives that led to scandal. The word “nepotism”, referring to clerics who gave special favor to so-called “nephews”…no problem there. As long as the Church held on to Latin, as long as the faithful thought every cleric to be a totally celibate “manly man” and refused to hear a word otherwise, there were no problems within the Church. No, until the Holy Spirit saw fit to let modernists become cardinals and Popes, or fell asleep at the wheel, or whatever the problem was that made God let Vatican II happen, there were no problems. Furthermore, it was a mistake to go back to letting the laity ever touch the Eucharist, St. Peter shouldn’t have done it, the early Church Fathers shouldn’t have done it, the world was a better place with altar rails and mantillas, and losing all that stuff is what is wrong with the Church and therefore what is wrong with the world, period, end of conversation, and that is that.
There, another “diatribe.” I give up…not on the TLM, but on this conversation. It is only pushing us farther apart, and nobody needs that. Please forgive me, please know I still want to believe the best of you, but I need to bow out. I’m only straining *your *charity. I don’t think there’s a chance I’ll change your mind.