Fortress Church?
Gloria.TV – News Briefs 28/02/2012 06:25:30
"The fort is betrayed even of them that should have defended it" - St. (Bishop) John FisherFortress Church?
Enabled by Neo-Catholics and Other Useful Idiots, the Modern State Will Have Its Way
Ten years ago, in The Great Façade, my co-author and I explored the curious inconsistency of neo-Catholic commentators who defend the disastrous liturgical and pastoral novelties of the past forty years as if they were dogmatic pronouncements, while blithely disparaging the solemn teaching of great Popes perceived to be at odds with the “updating” of the Church at Vatican II.
Typical of these people is Alan Schreck, a professor of theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville.
In discussing the Syllabus of Errors of Blessed Pius IX, a truly prophetic condemnation of the false principles of modern liberty and Church-State relations that plague us today, Schreck wrote: “Unfortunately, the Syllabus condemned most of the new ideas of the day and gave the impression that the Catholic Church was against everything in the modern world…. The Catholic Church looked like it was becoming a fortress Church, standing in opposition to the modern world and rejecting all new ideas.” (Schreck, Compact History of the Catholic Church, p. 95).
That the Church before the Council was a “fortress” walled off from the goods of the “modern world,” its timid adherents hiding behind the ramparts of inflexible formulae and soulless discipline, is the master shibboleth of neo-Catholic thinking.
The essence of the neo-Catholic mind is its smug certitude that the great conciliar “opening to the world” was a long overdue tonic for the fortress Church, and that traditionalists are the sorry Catholic equivalent of the Amish, blindly clinging to their outmoded ways in a Church that has gone out to meet the world and other religions in the new spirit of dialogue and ecumenism.
The Remnant Online
