In Case You Missed It..

Because I sure did!  What did I miss?  (Drum roll and trumpets, please!)

The 2012 Leadership Conference of Women Religious Assembly in St. Louis MO, from Aug 7-10

Actually it ends tomorrow (Deo gratias!), but their true colors certainly did fly.

From Father Z's blog we read that the keynote speaker of the event was Barbara Marx Hubbard.  What does she consider her life's mission?  Well, that's straight from her Facebook page: "to be a voice for the Collective Emergence of humanity as a Co-creative Universal Species".  I can just imagine that her address induced, uh, "deep meditation" among the attendees.  The National Catholic Reporter noted that "Teilhard would find in Barbara a kindred spirit".  The NCR might well be correct; many of Teilhard's writings were condemned by the Church!  At the very least, she certainly shows a knack for inventing interesting-sounding words like "regenopause".

By the way - for all their snivveling about what they claim is the Vatican's refusal to "dialog", why did they not allow the CDF laison, Bishop Sartain, to attend their meeting?  Such snubbing hardly seems conducive to "dialog".

There was a protest of the LCWR meeting.  By whom?  Right-wing religious zealots?  Nope!  SNAP!  There have been cases of abuse perpetrated by women religious.  So why, oh why, was there complete silence of this protest?  Had this been a clergy meeting, SNAP would have been featured front and center of all the coverage.  Could it be because the progressive media doesn't want to air "in-fighting"?  So much for truth in media.

Contributing Factors to the Church's Problems

In order to address the problems currently facing the Church, it behooves us all to try to examine just how these problems came to be.  Quite a few people point to the Vatican II Council in the mid 1960s as the start of the Church's problems.  Many sedevacantists seem to be of that opinion.  Some deeper thought into the matter makes plain the illogic behind that somewhat simplistic theory.  While the misapplications of the proceeds of the Council may have made the problems apparent, by no means did the problems originate from the council.

Common sense only makes that clear.  The same crowd that blames Vatican II claims that a number of mefarious bishops undermined the Church via that council.  Well think about it for a minute.  I tend to concur that some bishops were clearly off the wall.  But when did those individuals become bishops?  Clearly they weren't ordained the day before the Council started.  Many of them were occupying high positions in the church long before the start of the Council.

Quite a few of the pre-conciliar but modern popes saw problems on the horizon.  Pope Leo XIII, to address the problems, wrote prayers for the protection of the Church and directed that they be said after every Low Mass; the very familiar Prayer to St Michael is one of those prayers.  Pope St Pius X wrote Pascendi Dominici Gregis and Lamentabili Sane to address specifically the growing threat posed by modernists.

Clearly modernism was a threat and it had made footholds within the Church.  How?  I came across a book put out by TAN Publishing.  It's called Christ Denied and was written by Rev Paul A Wickens.  The author delves into what he believes were the origins of the problems with clerical formation in Europe during the early 1900s.  He focused on three priests who embraced modernism and who were influential teachers.  The first was George Tyrrell, a British Jesuit.  He had profound influence over the second, Teilhard de Chardin.  I've attempted  to read one of the works of the latter - talk about a convoluted mess.  But that's how he got away with spreading error.  He influenced many, including American seminarians sent to Europe to "study" - and lose their faith.  A German pupil of Chardin's was Karl Rahner.  I do recommend that you read it.  Go to the website of TAN Books and search the title and author.  I don't believe Father Wickens supplied the entire picture, but I suspect he supplied a crucial part.