Stuck In The Sixties

 http://youtu.be/xiIorPa_cNI

From Rorate Caeli 

Even here there is need for a new evangelization, which is why I propose you intensely live the Year of Faith, which will begin in October, 50 years from the opening of the Second Vatican Council. The Council documents contain an enormous wealth for the formation of new generations of Christians, for the formation of our conscience. So read them, read the Catechism of the Catholic Church and rediscover the beauty of being Christians, of being Church to enjoy the great “we” that Jesus has formed around him, to evangelize the world: the “we” of the Church, never closed, but always open and projected towards the proclamation of the Gospel.

Benedict XVI 

Homily (Frascati, Italy) 

July 15, 2012

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Of course the Sixties gave us many beautiful things: the Ferrari 250 GTO, Simon & Garfunkel’s stupendous melodies, Ronald Reagan’s “A time for Choosing” , Sergio Leone’s Westerns and –  if we look really hard –  a couple of other events, like for example yours truly’s appearance on this vale of tears…

but sadly, the Holy Father’s statement is much worse than this innocuous admission: it is the complete blindness to reality, and the utter denial of a devastation probably without precedents in the entire Church history; a devastation which is denied in its scale and causes, and whose first root is now indicated to us as the panacea able to help to restore what it has devastated in the first place. It beggars belief that after 50 years of such wreckage those who have caused it should still insist in offering it to us as something beautiful or useful in itself.

It reminds me of those people saying that the best cure for hangover is to drink more alcohol.

I stand with 2000 years of pre-drunkenness Catholicism, and thank you very much. There’s nothing V II can, qua V II, teach me that would make me a better Catholic. What is right in the Vatican II document was right also before V II, so I don’t need to take my teaching from there. What is misleading in V II can be better understood by sticking to pre-V II teaching, so I don’t need V II again. What is wrong in the V II documents  is, well, wrong and I reject it as not being in line with 2000 years of Catholicism. But truly, it beggars belief that we must still discuss these truisms after 50 years of massacre of everything Catholic: from the liturgy to the churches, from the devotions to the sacraments, from the understanding of the Eucharist to the role of the priest.

When after fifty years of directly or indirectly V II-caused devastation I read about the magnificent virtues of Vatican II I am strangely reminded of Austin Powers.

Without the extenuating circumstance of having been frozen.

Mundabor

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