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Pope Francis calls for "permanent catechumenate" for married couples
- Thread starter Volnutt
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Deacon Lance
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He is calling for ongoing Catechism classes for married adults. It is long overdue.Volnutt said:
Volnutt
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Maybe it takes being married, but I guess I don't see what would need to happen in a formal class situation that can't be knocked out in a single evening or a few of them, as opposed to rehashing it regularly.Deacon Lance said:
Now, having periodic conversations with one's priest about it is another thing entirely.
Alpha60
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Isn’t that what the Homily is supposed to be for? If by the way Francis intends to deny communion to canonically married couples who do not attend these classes, given his willingness to communicate the civilly divorced and remarried, that would be an act greatly beyond the pale, in my opinion.Deacon Lance said:
The Orthodox Church allows divorce and remarriage. Why does the RCC Pope so concern you now? Is his desire to recommune the divorced something contrary to what the Orthodox would do?
Deacon Lance
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No. The Homily should be about the days Readings. How do you go from Pope Francis wanting classes to offered to those who don’t attend will be refused Communion?Alpha60 said:
Deacon Lance
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Learning is lifetime. Parents are to be the primary religious educators of children and most are woefully prepared.Volnutt said:
Well , its kind of uncomfortable when he is in the bedroom with his candle overlooking whats going on.biro said:
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+100Deacon Lance said:
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Perhaps maybe he'll consider bringing back the Baltimore Catechism so young, infant Catholics, will grow into mature Catholics and will have a better chance of avoiding many of the pitfalls that many fall into long before considering marriage. This article makes me wonder if Francis is admitting the post-Vatican II Catechism of the Catholic Church is not sufficiently providing that along the road of life for Catholics?Volnutt said:
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It was the generation of clergy and laity raised on the Baltimore (or similar) Catechism, Latin Mass, seminary instruction conducted entirely in Latin, etc., etc. that gave us the current situation.noahzarc1 said:
Sharbel
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It's probably more of the typical hyperbolic and shallow off the cuff thinking of PP FI. He is, however, on the spot about the symptoms and the need to address them, though probably in a completely different way. For, as Card. Kevin Farrell, whose credibility has been recently questioned by some Catholics due to his ties to Card. McCarrick, “priests are not the best people to train others for marriage”, “they have no credibility.” Though I knew many Catholic priests who were quite good at addressing marital crises, I knew very few who had any practical clue about married life.
No, I think that PP FI is referring specifically to a sort of continuation of the preparation for marriage that engaged couples are mandated to attend. I agree that adult formation is long overdue, something that a previous Catholic parish where I was a councilor provided, also in most Orthodox parishes.Deacon Lance said:
Such as VII, Novus Ordo, etc. I tired until I turned blue pointing this Tridentine idolatry to superstitious traditionalist Catholics.Mor Ephrem said:
Alpha60
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Having had time to reflect on the idea of Pope Francis, I think you are entirely correct in supporting this, actually, and I hope it would be something available in the Eastern Rite.Deacon Lance said:
My fear was these classes could take away from attendance of the mass and the Divine Office, and add yet another para-liturgical distraction, where the RCC is already saddled with Novenas, 40 Hours Devotions and other things which, combined with the superabundance of masses at various times on Saturdays and Sundays, have resulted in the Divine Office being under-utilized at the parish level.
My point is that the homily in the liturgy and additionally, homilies attached to Divine Office services, which I am a huge fan of (St. John Chrysostom preached during the 9th hour) will, for the pious married couple who attends every Sunday, and in the RCC, such couples are by no means unknown, touch upon the key issues of married life in the course of the lectionary; also, if these classes are to be scheduled on weekdays, the weekday lectionary has scriptural lessons which in some cases address marriage even more specifically, and rather than having dedicated classes, married couples could be encouraged to attend specific services where the lectionary addresses marriage and thus the homily extends to support it in a general way.
That being said, I positively support pastoral counseling for married couples, which in the Byzantine Rite, which is blessed with married priests, could include small groups of faithful couples meeting with the priest and presbytera, and I suppose in the Latin Rite the Permanent Diaconate could provide a similiar function with similiar efficacy. And it sounds like the catechesis envisaged by Pope Francis could facilitate this kind of counseling.
But I think if they are going to do these classes, the quality of them would be improved if at least some aspects of the Divine Office were featured. I am not calling for the spouses and clergy to form a choir and sing all of Matins in Latin; I am thinking of something simple, like the Little Hours. Sexting, not to mention Tercing, Noone-ing, and for those Catholics not hamstrung by the dreadful lesser clauses of Sancrosanctum Concilium, Priming, should surely be for married couples as much as it is for OCNetters.
Alpha60
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What Tridentine idolatry? In my experience, the churches that have regularly scheduled Diocesan Tridentine masses are usually full; I used to frequently visit St. Mary Magdalene in Camarillo, where Latin masses are held in the old church, which has been demoted to an auxilliary chapel in favor of an ugly building next to a strip mall, and would doubtless have been sold despite its commanding position on a hill overlooking the downtown, were it not for the fact the Camarillo family is buried in the crypt. They compete for time in this chapel with a Novus Ordo said for the benefit of the Filipino community, and an excess of vernacular liturgies generally prevents them from having any service on Good Friday (and their Paschal liturgy is usually at 2 PM rather than the usual 10 AM). The priests who serve there are gracious and respectful, and at the same time the other clergy in the Northwest Los Angeles-Santa Barbara area, elsewhere in Ventura County, with the exception of the clergy at a traditional Catholic college located in the nearby mountains, generally do not hold the diocesan Latin mass community in Camarillo in anything like a state of high esteem. However, the church is invariably packed, and what is more, it is packed with families with young children; the demographics of it feel much like some of the family-dominated Coptic parishes, whereas the other RC churches in the area have a demographic pattern that is sadly familiar to someone from a mainline Protestant background.Sharbel said:
The steady growth in the number of parishes offering traditional Latin liturgies of the Tridentine, Dominican and other rites and the popularity and vitality of these communities in my opinion would suggest against “idolatry;” I think we could argue the Novus Ordo has more potential for idolatry in that it seems to shift the liturgical focus from God to the church community. I also don’t understand how this relates to the question of catechism and counseling to prepare for and ensure the maintenance of Holy Matrimony, something which I hope would also be accessible to the traditional Latin mass communities in the dioceses, and in TLM groups like the Institute of Christ the Priest and Sovereign King, the FSSP, and mamy of the Oratoriansn and members of certain monasteries and Dominican provinces.
My view is that Eastern Catholicism is closest to the traditional Latin mass communities in terms of the piety of the faithful, the family orientation, and the profound beauty and majesty of the liturgy itself (with, as we have discussed before, the lamentable exception of some Maronite parishes (apparently not the one in close proximity to Deacon Lance).
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I mean the naive notion that had the liturgy not been... reformed, Sunday mass attendance wouldn't have collapsed and the public piety would have become stronger. The current corolary is that should the Vetus Ordo become the normative rite, everything good and holy would be instantly restored.Alpha60 said:
If I understood Mor correctly, people fail to realize that all the Western Council Fathers of VII had known no other liturgy other than the Tridentine and were raised in its catechism. The notion that there's something in a liturgical rite that can, independently of the disposition of the heart of the faithful, effect piety and virtue is pious superstition, indeed idolatry.
As for the several Latin mass communities, in my close experience, they failed to produce fruit. In my diocese, there's been only one and it has not outgrown its time slot in the cathedral for almost a couple of decades. In places nearby, where the FSSP has established a parish, it was the same local Latin mass community that filled its pews, a zero sum game. What I learn from other friends is the same anecdotal evidence that points to a steady state in the numbers.
As inspirational and commendable as their commitment has been, their community suffers from the same ailments as the rest of Christianity, Eastern and Western: an aging congregation whose children fail to embrace the same commitment as them, yet remains more or less the same size because of a number of transient members passing through, whose permanence varies widely. What PP JPII and BXVI intended when they rightly allowed and encouraged the Vetus Ordo has arguably not been achieved. Namely, the deepening of the love and reverence of the liturgy in the whole Catholic Church.
Having said this, having experienced the reality of the Traditional Latin Mass experiment in the places where I've lived, I am saddened by its underwhelming fruits. I did believe that it was going to enliven the Church of Rome and bear much fruit. Alas, it was easy to think so when all the popes one had known were either JPII or BXVI.
Though I was never a regular member of those communities, I could always relate to their yearnings. However, they are bound to go unmet in the Roman Church. Rather, everything they love and yearn for is found in the Orthodox Church. I pray that they drop the scales of their eyes and come to believe in and embrace Orthodoxy.
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"Current situation" i.e. Post-Vatican II or the sex scandals, etc? I would say both gave it to us, true. I was thinking of it from purely a catechism perspective of knowing the faith. My family members catechized under the Baltimore Catechism were far more adept in the Catholic faith than I would say I was (or many of my contemporaries.)Mor Ephrem said:
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Correct. In the end, I think this was the only conclusion I could come to. I also found that many of the radical trad-caths today were born and raised well after Vatican II. They very much have a superstition about what they think Catholic life was under the Tridentine form of the Church.Sharbel said:
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It is good to hear this, but this had not been my experience in the Washington DC area. I attended for a while a very large Novus Ordo parish that offered the Latin Mass at 12:30 pm. The 9:00 and most especially the 10:30 nous ordo mass was beyond packed, with my estimation it had to have between 750 to perhaps 1000 attendees. The Latin Mass that followed at 12:30 perhaps drew 50, 75-100. However, given the size of the church, it seemed as though no one was there. Perhaps the numbers have grown since I've been there and given the current crisis, but the Latin Mass certainly seemed like the lost step-child of the Church and that it is not the dominant liturgy of Rome any longer, it seemed as though most people were not even remotely interested to attend to see it. My guess was that most who attended may not even have belonged to that parish, but it was the closest one in the area offering the Latin Mass. In fact if memory served me, I think the Latin Mass I attended was a low mass, because the priest was not assisted at the mass by a deacon or sub-deacon. However, the Latin Mass of the Western Rite I attend is a high mass, as there is always a deacon, sub-deacon and most of the mass being sung. Of all the Latin Masses I attended (i.e. Catholic and independent Catholic Chapels) the Western Rite of the the Antiochan is the most beautiful I've seen.Alpha60 said:
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Maybe he was rather metaphorical, stressing the need of continuous pastoral care.Rohzek said:
Alpha60
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Mor is accurate on this point in that the Vatican II fathers were raised on the “Vetus Ordo,” and is correct in stating that, by itself, being trained in a liturgy is not enough to protect that liturgy from degradation; the Melkite Archeparch of Caracas was trained in the Byzantine Rite but this has not prevented him from utterly ruining it in his parish with marimbas and other liturgical horrors; for that matter, the Ecumenical Patriarch who ruined the calendar was very well versed in celebration according to the old calendar and presumably clever enough to realize his actions would cause the intermittent oblivion of the Apostle’s Fast, and that even the Gregorian Calendar would have been better than the intractable Typikon compatibilities caused by the Revised Julian Calendar (which also extend to the permanent loss of the Kyriopascha for those Orthodox churches who mistakenly embraced it).Sharbel said:
Speaking of the Typikon, Violakis was doubtless well versed in the Sabaite-Studite typikon, which he proceeded to altar in a manner characterized by Metropolitan Kallistos, with glorious British understatement, as “extensive and often ill-advised changes” the results of which were “awkward[]” resulting in the “whole structure [becoming] unhappily obscured.” https://orthodoxwiki.org/typikon
And in the church to which Mor and I are devoted, the idiots who insist on ruining the liturgy with synthesizers (exploiting a 1920s rubric which I am convinced has the affect of authorizing only pipe organs, and which at this point, after failing to see any case where it has had a positive effect, I have very reluctantly joined the side calling for its abolition and a return to a capella worship) are not deaf; I have heard online some spectacular massacres of some of our hymns which are so terrible as to form a Syriac Orthodox analogue to the Paper Mache Puppet Mass.
So clearly, Mor is correct in saying that being raised in a liturgy does not guarantee one will not try to ruin it. Nor, as far as I am aware, are any Traditionalists disagreeing with him. However, it would be worth considering that a spirit of liturgical experimentation was in the air at Vatican II and in the 1960s; the first “modern” liturgy with celebration versus populum was developed by the Church of South India on its creation, as a loose hybrid of the Anglican BCP with bits and pieces of the Divine Liturgy of St. James, and there are ancient Greek rubrics for that liturgy which were in the early 20th century being interpreted, and still are interpreted by many, as requiring a versus populum celebration on a separate altar outside the iconostasis (and in the great cathedrals of England, the beautiful high altars in the apse have been left untouched, but simple communion tables have been put in front of the Chancel Screen, a sort of English iconostasis dividing the choir stalls and the altar from the nave, for use with “Common Worship,” the Anglican equivalent to the Novus Ordo).
During the 1950s, the Liturgical Movement was still active, but having failed in its original objectives in the 1900s-1920s, had become increasingly dominated by liberal theology, and whereas at the turn of the century it consisted of supporters of the Gregorian Chant Pope Pius X sought to impose, and in other denominations by Anglo Catholics, Scoto-Catholics and High Church Lutherans, by the mid 20th century it was increasingly dominated by secularists who felt that the liturgy, as the work of the people, had to “keep up with the times” to stay relevant in tne Post War era. These elements largely controlled the agenda for the liturgical program before, during and after Vatican II, as reflected by the liturgical changes imposed under Pius XII, which, were it not for Vatican II and the even more dramatic change that was to follow, would, by themselves, be aptly characterized as “sweeping.”
Certainly, if someone dared to mess with the Eastern Orthodox Triodion, or the Holy Week services of the Oriental Churches, to the same degree Pius XII dared to revise the Paschal Triduum of the Roman Rite, it would cause a schism. So Vatican II occurred in a climate where people who had been raised in the liturgical patrimony of the Roman church felt uniquely empowered, by a confluence of historical, political and sociodynamic factors, to change it, and were furthermore utterly convinced by the theological modernism they had embraced of the importance of imposing such changes. The climate was similiar to that of the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th century, which also had disastrous results.
The position you express seems to me to be dangerously close to Donatism; St. Augustine held that the sacraments were effective ex opere operanto. The Orthodox Church has to my knowledge never disagreed with St. Augustine on the subject of sacramental grace provided it occurs within the Church, which of course leaves huge question marks over the Roman church in general given they initiated a schism with the Orthodox of their own volition.
However if one assumes, for the sake of argument, that the Roman church had ecclesiological validity, it would be correct to say that those who receive the sacraments would not benefit if they approached the sacraments lacking a proper disposition; conversely, if they approached the sacraments with a proper disposition, even if the priest was a complete hypocrite who served the sacraments according to the rubrics but on the inside was morally bankrupt or had no faith, the faithful who sought to partake of the sacraments piously would receive the grace they convey, although some additional blessings which one could argue attach to the sacraments when the priest is virtuous, for example, an edifying homily or useful guidance during confession, might be lacking.
To use a more clear-cut case, Orthodox Christians, at least those who were not members of ROCOR, could have partaken with no ill effects of the Eucharist from the hand of Archpriest Sergei Bulgakov, a man who was even towards the end of his life regarded as a heretic by ROCOR, and whose theology, along with that of St. Pavel Florensky, had been officially pronounced erroneous by the Moscow Patriarchate, but who remained a priest in good standing in the Russian Orthodox emigre community in Paris under the EP.
I also cannot accuse the TLM community of idolatry if they express reservations about whether the form of the Novus Ordo still leads to sacramental validity, since similiar objections have been made to the traumatic revision of the Russian liturgy under Patriarch Nikon, and the traumatic imposition of the New Calendar, and I am not prepared to write off New Calendarists or Russian Old Believers as idolaters. Personally I don’t agree with any of the three groups in question, but I cannot dismiss their concerns as entirely unfounded, far less can I accuse them of violating the Second Commadnment and engaging in idolatry contrary to the 7th Ecumenical Council (particularly given the large scale removal of iconography which followed the implementation of the Novus Ordo Missae, and also some iconographic irregularities in the Russian Orthodox Church during the period when it was effectively controlled by the Imperial Procurator).
I believe your assesment of the Traditional Latin Mass communities is entirely wrong. They are growing in number, and in size, and having visited these communities, I have found in them something remarkably similiar to the Orthodox experience. My only concern is that some of the trad-Catholic types, particularly the SSPX, are also Latinizers, and I see the SSPX remaining a destructive influence (whereas the Latin mass as provided for under the proper channels seems to be a revitalizing force; also if one compares the number of new vocations in traditionalist religious orders with nee vocations in general, its evident that several of the great Novus Ordo monasteries are facing extinction, and Catholic nuns outside of the traditionalist movement are going to become a rarity in the years ahead.
Sharbel
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My assessment is not wrong, for I don't pretend to comment on the Tridentine communities in general, but just in my diocese and surroundings.Alpha60 said:
I agree that mostly the traditional orders are experiencing growth, but most are not in the Lefevrian vein, but in the JPII one. IOW, they stick to the Novus Ordo, even if sprinkling it with Latin, as it's proper to the Western rites. However, many of these orders are new orders or new groups in ancient orders, mostly still in the first generation of religious members, thus without having been tested by time and adversity yet. Yet, unlike the traditionalist groups around me, I see these orders growing, especially the ones I am most familiar with, having visited them often and spoken at length with their members. These groups, methinks, seem to have a fruitful future, especially because of their lay members, unlike the often stodgy and grumpy traditionalists, in my experience. Perhaps because the former are motivated by love for the Catholic Church and the latter, seemingly, by resentment.
Iconodule
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“I don’t know why you Orthodox are always going ‘Pope Pope Pope!’ The Pope is really nowhere in our ordinary life. Anyway, ttyl, the wife and I are off to our papally mandated marital catechism night class.”
Alveus Lacuna
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As if anyone would actually obey the directive... :Lepanto said:
Alpha60
Taxiarches
Iconodule said:
Ha! Most amusing. I would offer you a high five except it might seem indecorus. ;D