Knuckling Down: Vortex

Did you catch that great Vortex episode from Tuesday (Nov. 27), “Time to Knuckle Down”? If not, here it is. Below, I’ve commented on excerpts from the script; you can read the entire script here.

Michael Voris starts out the Vortex by pointing out that there are two sides to every story; and the story is “The Church is in a crisis at nearly every level.”

Some people would like us to believe that “things are bad here and there, but generally things are improving”, and Voris acknowledges that there is some validity to that assessment… “here and there. But only here and there.”

He goes on to say:

The other side of the story, which we here at ChurchMilitant.TV focus on, is this:  The Church is STILL mired in a crisis because of the lack of response on the part of so many Catholics to acknowledge the depth and degree of the crisis. This lack of response is owing to two major areas: ignorance and cowardice.

…

Let’s talk briefly first about ignorance. Many, many Catholics today simply have no idea of how far the Church has fallen from her previous self-understanding. Fifty years ago, many more Catholics knew who they were and what it meant to be Catholic. Were they perfect? Of course not? Were they always right? Nope.

But they had an identity, an awareness that they were and were commanded to be different from the world. This is absolutely not true today.

In America alone, tens of millions of Catholics are walking around every day in a state of objective evil – having dismissed the importance of attending Mass this past Sunday…or any Sunday for that matter.

And then Voris points out that even among Catholics who do still attend Mass

…most are blissfully ignorant or unaware of this. They have relatives and friends who are nominally Catholic who haven’t set foot in Church in years…who they would never think of saying something to like, “You know, when you deliberately miss Mass you are placing yourself in jeopardy of eternal damnation.”

Imagine the hullaballoo that would result if that was said.

Ain’t that the truth!?! We don’t say that to our friends and relatives, do we? Not often, anyway…because it’s so judgmental. Is it my business whether a friend or relative goes to Mass? Uh…why, yes, it is.

When we stopped attending Mass locally, we were never contacted by the pastor concerning our absence. I mean, you’re talking about the family that sat in the third row from the front on the right-hand side every single Sunday and Holy Day...without fail (unless we were out of town, which was not often).  We saw people we knew at the grocery store; no one ever said a word about not seeing us at Mass any more – except for one man. We were buying a washing machine from him at his store, and he did say, quietly and with a sincere smile, “I haven’t seen you at Mass in a long time.” I really appreciated that. We assured him that we were still regularly attending Mass – just at a different parish.

The thing is, as Michael Voris says, most Catholics don’t think in those terms “because it has been drummed out of them for decades now”; who has ever heard a priest preach on the importance of attending Mass every week?

It's not really a good strategy...

Michael Voris continues:

Then there is the issue of cowardice: the refusal to confront the evil and the wrong that you DO SEE and ARE aware of. As we hear in the Apocalypse, heading the list of the damned will be the cowards – those who knew and did either nothing or painfully little.

And what needs to be done that too many leaders are simply unwilling to do? A total and complete reversal of the sickness that has seized Holy Mother Church.  

That illness, Voris asserts, has as its symptoms the news items we see about Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden misrepresenting Catholic teaching, or Obama being invited to speak at Notre Dame, etc.

Those incidents are merely symptoms of the underlying far worse illness. [They] are like the tumors that become visible when a body is riddled with disease and infection. If it looks like that from time to time on the outside, what must the case be on the inside?

The “inside” of the Church is the parish, and this is where – in thousands of parishes, week after week – hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Catholics are continually subjected to the slow administration of spiritual poison.

And it all happens very quietly, almost unnoticed…

Voris gives two examples of the “occasional notice” in the bulletin, or the story in the diocesan newspaper that quietly undermines the faith. He provides links to two such examples, here (scroll down to page 2 to see a priest extolling and promoting a homosexualist TV series) and here (where two nuns suggest, basically, that while we “need” priests, the laity is doing just fine without them). Voris maintains that

[T]his type of thing is business as usual in thousands of parishes every Sunday, week in and week out. The faithful are constantly subjected to these distortions and diversions from sanctity and it is simply allowed to go on unchecked. It’s not so much the words – although they can’t be dismissed – but the underlying spirit of rebellion that is slightly masked over by the appeal to niceness and injection of a little humor here and there just to make the poison a little more honey flavored.

I touched on that same point in this post a few months ago. It’s not the big, glaring, outrageous liturgical abuses and flaunting of Church teaching that do the most damage; many can see the error there. It’s the quiet, incremental commissions and omissions that work the evil. As Voris says,

So each week, in thousands of parishes, thousands of moments are missed by refusing to talk about hell, sin, damnation, evil, contraception, homosexual sins, adultery, custody of the eyes, co-habitation, pre-marital sex and so on.

But SOMETHING needs to be said that at least SOUNDS religious, so we hear about social justice or the need to forgive – which by the way is almost NEVER accompanied by the express call that GOD HIMSELF NEEDS to forgive us in the sacrament of confession.

We’re told to be nice, and pray for high sounding platitudes in the intercessions…like world peace and an end to injustice. And high-sounding platitudes is exactly where Satan likes the discussion being kept. That clears the way for brain-dead Catholics to have junk poured into their minds…

Voris makes the point again about the widespread liturgical abuses that are accepted as “normal” in parishes all across the US (and even the world, I suppose). He begins his conclusion of this Vortex with this thought:

This is the real story, and it’s what those who understand it must make their life work of reversing – first through their own personal holiness, and secondly through their instruction to those who don’t know.

Now, both of those are very difficult! That “personal holiness” thing…yeah, well, we have to keep trying! And the second part is difficult, too, because some of those who don’t know simply don’t want to know. There are a few people who won’t speak to me any longer because of my efforts to tell them something they don’t want to know.

It’s time to knuckle down and stop lamenting how a majority of Catholics voted for Obama again, or how the pro-life vote failed again, or how another country legalized abortion, or how another TV show is promoting sodomy and adultery.

We know why.

The Church needs to re-discover Herself and that will only happen by God raising up saints…and that means you.

So…where does that leave us? Where do we go from here?

That question keeps coming up. I guess the answer is that we have to educate ourselves and our children, since our shepherds are not doing it. And how do we do that? Find the right books to read; listen to people who have demonstrated, one way or another, that they know the faith. (For myself, I have always leaned toward listening to the one who presents facts, rather than his own opinion, and who backs up his statements with references to Church documents, etc.)

The right books: well, there are lots of them. Since we’re in the “Year of Faith”, and the suggestion has already been made, you can start with the Catechism of the Catholic Church – the current edition; and you can compare it with older books like My Catholic Faith, or This Is The Faith, which tend to describe the tenets of the faith in stronger language we’re used to hearing these days.  That can be quite refreshing in itself! And it wouldn’t hurt to re-read the Vatican II documents with an eye to truly seeing what they say, instead of listening to misinterpretations of them.

Don’t forget, too, to get a premium subscription to ChurchMilitant.TV, where you can listen to hundreds of hours of instruction and discussion about the faith.  Or check out the CMTV “store”, where you can purchase DVDs of the shows available on CMTV.

And then there’s evangelization – of Catholics, first, perhaps!? I ran across a good book: Why Protestantism Can’t Be True by Devin Rose. It’s conversational as well as logical, and covers all the basic Protestant arguments against the faith. Read it yourself, and you will be fortified against some of those things your fallen-away Catholic friends and relatives are saying and believing. Looking for Christmas gifts for Protestantized and fallen-away Catholic friends and relatives? This is perfect!

Another thought is the series of apologetics booklets from San Juan Catholic Seminars, which includes booklets on responding to Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, New-Agers, and atheists, as well as instruction on defending Marian doctrine and the Real Presence, as well as how to answer “tough moral questions” concerning abortion, contraception, and euthanasia. The booklets are short and concise.

Those are my thoughts. Feel free to add your own in the comments.