Instaurare In Christo
Today is the feast day of Pius X, a 20th-Century pope-saint that the church establishment would just as soon forget. There is a little chapel to him in the Shrine. He was pope when it was begun in 1913. His most famous encyclical was "Pascendi Dominici Gregis" ( "feeding" the Lord's Flock), against what is now called Modernity.
I just finished "Goodbye, Good Men" by Michael Rose, well worth the read, in which the author argues that the priest shortage is artificially caused by homosexuals and liberals in certain seminaries trying to change the priesthood into a gayboys club or otherwise foist their agendas upon the church. I can certainly attest to the fact that such efforts, if less melodramatic than in the book, are under way in the U.S. Catholic establishment beyond seminaries.
One of Rose's informants made a reference to Pius' "Pascendi" saying that almost everything it warned of was taught at the deviant seminary he attended. I downloaded "Pascendi" and even just skimming through it, I can see what the stoolpigeon meant. In fact, the ideas condemned by Pius are today the staple-thought of establishment.
One term that keeps recurring is "immanence." Knowledge of God comes from within Man, rather than from Revelation, Natural Theology, typical of post-Reformation thought. "...Faith...consists in a sentiment that originates from a need of the divine." All the time in the evangelization racket I hear this: Everybody has this built-in longing for God, a "God-shaped hole" that they try to fill with lesser things, but they can only be satisfied if they fill it with God. To which I say, "So they got a hole! Hole shmole! So what, if they don't fill it with God?" Contemporary theological hamburger served up as filet mignon. I've just read another book, a hot-seller, called "The Holy Longing." It has the applause of Rembert Weakland and Gary Wills. I may tell you about it if you're nice to me.
Copyright © 2003 by Neal J. Conway. All rights reserved.