By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
For many years now the Catholic middle-of-the-road attempt to avoid extremes was a recommended and safe conservatism, a refuge for those who favored tradition.
On one side, the extreme to be avoided was the Protestant heresy. Respect for the Catholic past was necessary. We were part of a Church that was 2,000 years old, after all, because founded by the Lord Himself. We didn’t want to make the mistake of rejecting certain essentials as Protestants do, of course.
There were, we knew, ever-spawning new Christian-like sects; splitting apart and reforming again and again, amoeba-like; new cells combining to imitate the old ones but at the same time, by doing so, mitigating against unity in their multiplicity.
The Church is one. It’s in the Credo. We stick together come what may because we’re Catholic. Without unity we cease to be Catholic, so we stay on board the barque no matter the storms.
But there was always at the same time the low hum of Modernism, the disharmonic white noise against which our lives of faith played out. It lured us, by threatening with the penalties for disunity, into a slow denial of Tradition.
This was a gradual extinction of faith, like the proverbial frog in increasingly hot water which kills without warning, the death-blow boiling point inexorably arriving at last. No longer were we aware of the rich and beautiful traditions just beyond our grasp, these having been sloughed off as superfluous burdens by our predecessors. They who had learned it denied us the Latin, chant, and teachings, among other elements of patrimony, which they deemed no longer necessary.
Read the rest: https://thewandererpress.com/catholic/news/our-catholic-faith/triumph-of-modernism-ecclesial-suicide/
No comments:
Post a Comment