Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi

Our life, our sweetness and our hope.

It is interesting to observe how in matters of religion everything is interconnected.

Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi, our wise forefathers used to say. We, who are far less wise, think everything must be fine because we “have the heart in the right place”, and as a result unavoidably make a pig’s breakfast of things.

Much has been written already about the liturgy, so I will skip the point today. Let us, however, take the expression lex orandi literally, as referred to the way we pray. Once upon a time, prayers were learnt by rote; as a result, basic tenets of the faith were hammered into the head of even the more theologically challenged.

As an example, let us take the “Hail, Holy Queen”, a prayer almosr disappeared in the wake of Vatican II and now revived together with the practice of the Rosary. When reciting the “Hail, Holy Queen” everyone was reminded – inter alia – that Mary is his hope; that he is a) a banished b) child of Eve; that he lives in a valley of tears rather than, say, in the Great Oprah New-Age Amusement Park; that Mary is our advocate, whose merciful help we sorely need; that we are exiled on this earth, and at the end of this exile we need Her to show us to Jesus, born of her through the miracle of the Incarnation, in order for us to know that, at last, we made it.

All this may seem banal, but it isn’t. I suspect most of the concepts expressed above either sound strange or are fully unknown to most of today’s “casual” Catholics, who have been encouraged to make their own prayers and as a result have ended up making  their own theology, their lex credendi unfailingly mirroring the superficiality and chaos of their lex orandi.

Nor does this stop at the mere problem of bad instruction, because the new lex credendi will unavoidably create a correspondent lex vivendi. If I am not a banished  child of Eve, do I really need to go to Mass? If I am not in need of any mercy, why do I need to go to confession? If I and mine are already worthy of the promises of Christ, what need is there to baptise my children? Hey, their heart will most surely be “in the right place”: after all, they are my children, and I am – as all my friends, some of whom obligatorily “gay”, will attest – sooo nice!

At this point, Christianity has all but disappeared from one’s and one’s family members’ conscience and way of life, and it has been replaced by a vague, but emotionally satisfying feeling of a generic  perceived “goodness” without any logic. Perversion is now either ignored or “celebrated”, adultery is a way of life deserving of our “support”, contraception is accepted as obviously “right” and the Church – when one is even conscious of what the Church’s position on the matter is – clearly “wrong”; then the fact the Church can’t be wrong in doctrinal matters was not contained in any of the self-made prayers on which the theology of the typical Post-V II (un)faithful is based.

So, what do we have? No mass attendance (80% or more of the Catholics in the West); divorce like there’s no tomorrow (in Germany, same percentage of divorced spouses in Catholic Cologne as in neighbouring, Protestant Dusseldorf); aiding and abetting of sexual perversion (again in Germany, approved by the “Christian” party, led by the clearly atheist, (cough…) culona inchiavabile, Angela Merkel), contraception as a kind of social duty across the religious spectrum, & Co., & Co. …

It all starts with the attack against the lex orandi, both as liturgy and as individual prayer life.

Satan knows this very well.

The V II clergy are well aware of this too.

Which is why they have massacred them.

Mundabor