Catholic catechesis is lousy because it’s based on the widely adopted liberal educational “model”

Other denominations, I’ve observed, do a better job of offering meaningful adult faith formation, and it’s well attended.

Yes, there is Sunday school for children, but that’s not considered the central formational focus of the community.

There are logistical differences beyond the confessional ones here, of course.

Episcopalians and Lutherans and Presbyterians rarely offer 6 back-to-back services on a Sunday morning, and don’t have the same need for childhood sacramental preparation as Catholics do.

Many Protestant churches schedule formation opportunities for all ages on Wednesday evenings.

That’s part of the reason the adult formation classes and workshops we do offer are so poorly attended—adult catechesis is just not a part of our regular expectation and structure. And adding it to an already overscheduled parish calendar doesn’t seem to be much of a solution.

So here’s my totally immodest proposal, audaciously presented on the virtual eve of the grand ComicCon of Catholic religious education, L.A.’s RECongress: Snap out of it.

Let’s just stop catechizing children.

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“Zombie” Catholicism: Pope Francis breathes new life into Cardinal Bernardin’s legacy.

While there is no indication that Francis knows the writings of Bernardin, who died in 1996, many say the pope’s remarks repeatedly evoke Bernardin’s signature teachings on the “consistent ethic of life” – the view that church doctrine champions the poor and vulnerable from womb to tomb – and on finding “common ground” to heal divisions in the church.

Ironically, the re-emergence of Bernardin — a man who was admired by a young Chicago organizer named Barack Obama — is exposing the very rifts he sought to bridge, especially among conservatives who thought his broad view of Catholicism was buried with him in Mount Carmel Cemetery, outside Chicago.

Link

Editor’s note: Pope Francis’ ill considered rhetoric has already alienated a good part – the most consistently faithful part – of the Catholic Church.

No “seamless garment” is going to be able to patch that up.

At least the late Cardinal Bernadin (who was my archbishop, as well as a working associate of Barack Obama/Barry Sotero) managed to conduct his nefarious business without insulting huge numbers of Catholics and that’s probably why he was such a remarkably effective operator.

Thank God he died before they could elect him pope!

Classical Liberal Education: The cure for the dumbed-down culture of death?

Classical education, the institute explained, is meant to help students learn how to think, giving them “the tools of lifelong learning,” rather than merely teaching them “subjects.” The foundation of classical education is a set of three methods of learning subjects, called the trivium, which consists of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

“By uniting faith and reason across the curriculum, this approach aims to form students in wisdom and virtue,” the institute added. Classical Catholic education is also meant to “form an educational community that is fully Catholic,” rather than being merely “secular schools with a Catholic name and a religion class.”

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Editor’s note: This is the authentic, original and beneficial type of Liberal Arts that forms the basis for all the best features of western civilization. Not the Marxist, Socialist, virtually useless aberration currently provided by many/most of today’s institutions of higher learning.

Political Catholic Question of the Day: How is that we find Catholics coming down on both sides of virtually every major political issue?

Question of the day: How is that we find Catholics coming down on both sides of virtually every major political issue?

Answer: About 50% of Catholics are liberal democrats. The other 50% of Catholics actually believe in God.

Catholic catechesis is lousy because it’s based on the widely adopted liberal educational “model”

Other denominations, I’ve observed, do a better job of offering meaningful adult faith formation, and it’s well attended. Yes, there is Sunday school for children, but that’s not considered the central formational focus of the community. There are logistical differences beyond the confessional ones here, of course. Episcopalians and Lutherans and Presbyterians rarely offer 6 back-to-back services on a Sunday morning, and don’t have the same need for childhood sacramental preparation as Catholics do. Many Protestant churches schedule formation opportunities for all ages on Wednesday evenings.

That’s part of the reason the adult formation classes and workshops we do offer are so poorly attended—adult catechesis just not a part of our regular expectation and structure. And adding it to an already overscheduled parish calendar doesn’t seem to be much of a solution.

So here’s my totally immodest proposal, audaciously presented on the virtual eve of the grand ComicCon of Catholic religious education, L.A.’s RECongress: Snap out of it. Let’s just stop catechizing children.

Read more

Ecumenism gone wild: Former Catholic explains “How Catholic Bishops Led Me to Islam.”

It’s like they put that phony “signing guy” from Nelson Mandela’s funeral
in charge of writing official Catholic Church documents.
A huge scandal, all around!

I was born to devout Catholic parents and attended a Catholic school taught by devout priests and nuns.

We learned thoroughly our religious knowledge by means of the question and answer method called “catechism”. It consisted of 499 questions to which we memorized the 499 well-thought-out answers, word for word.

Our catechism dealt with all aspects of faith, morality and prayer. We attended Mass every Sunday and on seven other special yearly holidays.

Every day at home we prayed the Rosary, a meditation on the 15 most important events in the life of Jesus and his mother, Mary. We dearly loved our parents, our teachers, and our religion. We had a happy childhood.

When I was a teenager, there was a meeting of all the Catholic bishops of the world, about 2500 of them, in Rome. After the meeting, they published a book which said, among other things…

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Editor’s note: This is just one of the many reasons that Muslims all around the world scoff at Catholic “New Evangelization” efforts. The referenced document “Nostre Aetate” was released on October 28, 1965 by Pope Pail VI. Like most Vatican II documents, it is poorly written, and it makes certain gratuitous, erroneous and even dangerous assumptions about a number of ethnic and religious groups.

In the case of Muslims, the writers of  Nostre Aetate assume that the pagan moon god of the Muslims is the one, true God that Christians worship, when the preponderance of the evidence clearly shows the opposite to be true.

The scariest part of all this is the fact that Pope Paul VI apparently intended Nostre Aetate to be an infallible statement of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. If that’s true, the only thing any sensible person can ask is “which Catholic Church might that be – the old one or the new one – since the real Catholic Church would never – ever – publish poor quality documents of this nature?”

This is precisely the kind of nonsense you get when the liberals take over. It’s like they put that phony “signing guy” from Nelson Mandela’s funeral in charge of writing official Catholic Church documents.

A huge scandal, all around!

Being authentically Catholic can be complicated

The Catholic vision of life permeates everything. Thus, it shapes the way I view sexuality – as a great gift from God but also with certain boundaries and limits – but also the way I view how we should build our towns and cities and care for the environment, raise our animals, cultivate our food. The Catholic principle of subsidiarity – mentioned earlier – causes me to be distrustful of big government – where it isn’t warranted – but also of big corporations.

None of this fits into our neat political categories. And it leads to quite a bit of misunderstanding from those on the outside.

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On a number of economic issues, Pope Francis is said to be “to the left of Nancy Pelosi.”

But as an economic mission statement, Evangelii Gaudium places the pope — as Vatican watcher Rev. Thomas Reese predicted in March — “to the left of Nancy Pelosi.” In his decidedly populist document, Pope Francis specifically criticizes the economic “trickle-down theories” that were the beating heart of Ronald Reagan’s anti-tax, anti-regulation revolution.

The part of the document that is grabbing most of the attention starts with Section 53, in the chapter on “the crisis of communal commitment.” With his caveat that “it is not the task of the Pope to offer a detailed and complete analysis of contemporary reality,” Francis begins his economic critique like this:

Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? [Evangelii Gaudium]

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Editor’s note: The Pope can be as liberal as he wants to, with his own money! The problem with liberals in the United States (and elsewhere) is they like to be liberal with other people’s money!

The grievous abuse begins when liberals (typically Democrats) gain control of public funding – especially Federal funding – because only the Federal Government has the power to print money – or to borrow – big time – from other countries, who also print their own money.

As for Republicans – they’re just slightly less abusive with other people’s money than are Democrats.

The Spirit of Corruption and Greed is no respecter of race, creed, or party affiliation!

There hasn’t been a disastrous roll out like Obamacare, since the end of the Second Vatican Council.

A pair of  colossal “train wrecks”!

by Doug Lawrence

Both were liberal political fantasies which aimed to replace perfectly good, workable systems, unequaled in both efficacy and objective truth, with untested, unworkable, pie-in-the-sky, progressive ideologies and practices, no matter the cost or consequences!

“Zombie” Catholicism: Pope Francis breathes new life into Cardinal Bernardin’s legacy.

While there is no indication that Francis knows the writings of Bernardin, who died in 1996, many say the pope’s remarks repeatedly evoke Bernardin’s signature teachings on the “consistent ethic of life” – the view that church doctrine champions the poor and vulnerable from womb to tomb – and on finding “common ground” to heal divisions in the church.

Ironically, the re-emergence of Bernardin — a man who was admired by a young Chicago organizer named Barack Obama — is exposing the very rifts he sought to bridge, especially among conservatives who thought his broad view of Catholicism was buried with him in Mount Carmel Cemetery outside Chicago.

Link

Editor’s note: You never get a second chance to make a good first impression and only six months in, Pope Francis’ ill considered rhetoric has already alienated a good part – the most consistently faithful part – of the Catholic Church. No “seamless garment” is going to be able to patch that up, and the scheduled 2014 canonization of Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II is likely to only make things worse.

At least the late Cardinal Bernadin (who was my archbishop, as well as a working associate of Barack Obama/Barry Sotero) managed to conduct his nefarious business without insulting huge numbers of Catholics and that’s probably why he was such a remarkably effective operator. Thank God he died before they could elect him pope!

Pope Francis by comparison, has so far acted more like the humble, likable, but almost totally inept former American President Jimmy Carter – the guy who got Egyptian President Anwar Sadat killed – and by his timely gutting of the CIA and abandonment of the Iranian Shah –  lit the fuse of the powder keg which promptly exploded into today’s Middle East.

All the more reason to pray fervently for Pope Francis!

We can thank Pope Francis for highlighting some of the liberal, modernistic stuff hidden in the current Catechism of the Catholic Church.

What the Abortion President and the Modernist Pope
have in common

by Doug Lawrence

Pope Francis’ unabashed, unapologetic and unashamed public promotion of worldly, liberal and modernist religious concepts is working a lot like Barack Obama’s similarly unrestrained efforts at promoting abortion without limits.

It’s making people with authentically formed consciences think and respond – utilizing all the  truths of the faith, within the proper context of sacred and apostolic tradition – as opposed to the hermaunetic of chaos, corruption and disruption that has been the “norm” in the Catholic Church, over the last fifty years.

In the case of Barack Obama and abortion, we’re seeing more anti-abortion laws being passed, coupled  with long overdue enforcement, regulation and prosecution of abortion facilities and abortionists.

In the case of Pope Francis – which is not yet as far along – I predict that we will eventually see all the liberal and modernist errors and scandals in the church exposed – and we will then be called to participate in a genuine spiritual revolution that will demand (and get) a prompt return to the doctrinal sanity, traditional reliability and genuine Christ-centered holiness for which the Catholic Church (except for the last half century) has always been known.

An article at Catholic Vote by writer Tom Hoopes put me on to this idea.

I’m sure Mr. Hoopes means well and intends to fully support and defend Pope Francis in his continuing outbursts of catechetical curiosities, but for those of us who know and understand the catechism – including its many weaknesses, omissions and political calculations – Hoopes article accomplishes just the opposite.

Here’s an example: 

Love, not Legalism

“If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God. Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists­—they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.”

Rejecting ideology, even religious ideology, is another central teaching of Francis. And it’s a critically important teaching for our time, which turns everything into ideology. It is also a teaching of the Catechism.

1972 The New Law is called a law of love because it makes us act out of the love infused by the Holy Spirit, rather than from fear; a law of grace, because it confers the strength of grace to act, by means of faith and the sacraments; a law of freedom, because it sets us free from the ritual and juridical observances of the Old Law, inclines us to act spontaneously by the prompting of charity and, finally, lets us pass from the condition of a servant who “does not know what his master is doing” to that of a friend of Christ – “For all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” – or even to the status of son and heir.

******

This totally ignores the fact that it is impossible to create true disciples without a certain amount of discipline – just as it would be virtually impossible to live a good, holy, Christian life absent regular prayer and study – along with full, faithful and active participation in all of the applicable work, worship,  sacraments and devotions of the Catholic Church. 

The liberals and the modernists attempt to quickly discredit and then discard all that is tried and true in the Catholic Church, in favor of untested novelties that appeal primarily to the inflated human egos of persons who typically possess a distorted sense of charity, equality, diversity and prudence.

They also seem to totally forget that sin is the reason for most of the world’s evil – and that traditional Catholic teachings, practices, disciplines and philosophy remain the best antidote to sin that the world has ever known.

If that’s ideological, legalist and/or restorationist, then so be it!

The Catholic bishops have already experimented with the modernistic approach to corruption in the priesthood and it has cost the church much of its moral authority, along with at least $2.6 billion dollars that could otherwise have been used to feed, clothe and house the poor. This constitutes a colossal breach of essential Christian charity as well as an almost total failure of prudential judgment by ordained persons operating at the very highest levels of the Catholic Church!

Remember … with the close of the 2nd Vatican Council
“CHANGE” had come to the Catholic Church …
and it came to the Catholic Church FIRST!

It was only after the Church of the Ages
was totally disrupted and taken out of the way
that global terrorism, big government, radical feminism, abortion,
homosexuality, the destruction of the family
and many other types of evils and immorality
were allowed to proceed, virtually unchecked!

Should Pope Francis and his supporters succeed in their efforts to further “modernize” the Catholic Church, there’s no telling what new evils might be in store for the church – and for the world.

Famous actor Jack Nicholson – a pro-life Catholic?

(CNSNews.com) —  Hollywood legend Jack Nicholson, 76, who is retiring from movies it was reported today, is, unlike many liberals in Tinseltown, a staunch pro-lifer who said in a 1984 interview about abortion, “I’m positively against it. I don’t have the right to any other view.”

He added that it was the moral character of his mother and grandmother that ensured he himself had not been aborted.

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You might be a liberal Catholic Bishop if …

…your name is Robert Lynch and your Diocese is St. Petersburg, Florida.

Text and photo

Editor’s note: The late Cardinal Bernardin would be proud of this man – who seems to equate one person being legally and licitly executed in Florida with the wanton and willful destruction of millions of innocent babies in the womb, killed by legal but illicit abortion.

A troop of mini-Bergoglios

…it is not unthinkable for the CDF’s Archbishop Muller to go on the attack against traditional Catholics (particularly the SSPX), and if he does, I think Pope Francis will not stop him. I also believe Francis will appoint bishops who are indifferent or hostile to the Old Mass…

Link

The “Original Sin” of Vatican II: Replacing the traditional dogmatic language of the church with vague, new ‘pastoral’ Vatican II “doublespeak”.

”From the two opposed languages, dogmatic and pastoral, Radaelli sees the emergence and separation ‘almost of two Churches’.”

In the first, that of the most consistent traditionalists, Radaelli includes the SSPX, whom he describes as fully “Catholic by doctrine and by rite” and “obedient to dogma,” even if they are allegedly disobedient to the pope.  It is this ‘Church” [the Traditionalists] that, precisely because of its fidelity to dogma, “rejects Vatican II as an assembly in total rupture with Tradition.”

Radaelli assigns to this second “church” all the others, meaning most of the bishops, priests and faithful including Benedict XVI. This second group has renounced dogmatic language and “is in everything the daughter of Vatican II, proclaiming it – even from the highest throne, but without ever setting out proof of this – in total continuity with the preconciliar Church, albeit within the setting of a certain reform.”

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The answers to three key Catholic questions speak volumes

Once again let me stress that I developed this set of questions in the mid-1980s as a journalistic tool. The goal, when asking these questions, is to listen carefully to the answers.

It is especially interesting, of course, to note when people remain silence or try to find a way to maneuver around the questions without answering.

Different types of believers, of course, have different answers. The goal is to listen carefully and then respond with follow-up questions that yield nuggets of on-the-record doctrinal, as opposed to political, information. The goal is to transcend mere labels.

Here are those questions, once again:

(1) Are the biblical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus accurate? Did this event really happen?

(2) Is salvation found through Jesus Christ, alone? Was Jesus being literal when he said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6)?

(3) Is sex outside of the Sacrament of Marriage a sin?

Link to story

Seen on the web: The conservative vs. liberal concept of Catholic reform

BuckeyePhysicist • 5 days ago

Conservative idea of Catholic reform: Proclaim the Gospel, maintain doctrinal orthodoxy, support marriage and family, reform the Curia, fix the bank, root out corruption in management.

Liberal idea of Catholic reform: Redefine sins as virtues.

Link to original article

A man finds himself at the mid-century mark of his life, wishing he’d had children.

Life Regrets Of A Childless Liberal At 50

By Anonymous Attorney on March 4, 2013 at 11:49am

A relative on my wife’s side was on the phone with his mother recently, reflecting on his impending 50th birthday. He wondered if he’d leave a legacy of any kind. His career has been spent on the Internet—he made a nice bundle during the tech boom, but as with all things Internet, it flits off into cyberspace.

He and his wife have lived in an apartment—albeit an impressive one—all their adult lives. When they’re gone, it’ll be turned over to another tenant.

But most paining to him was the regret that he and wife did not have children.

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Submitted by Mark H.

What do conservatives really think about Cardinal Mahoney?

Text and video (Don’t miss the reader comments)

Editor’s note: If you watch the video, note the illicit and just plain wrong post-consecration decanting of the precious blood.

CM says:

February 27, 2013 at 11:20 am

Hi! I have lived in the LA Archdiocese all my life. Yes Mahoney is a “liberal”. Where should I start? He wrote and promulgated “Gather Faithfully Together”. A document that outlined his vision of the Mass and it’s meaning, the “appropriate” gestures, and the words to describe all the participants. It’s the first time I ever saw the word “presider”, which was, apparently supposed to apply to the priest celebrant. But most of us saw that he was trying to leave open the possibility of non-priests leading worship. It is THE document that got dear Mother Angelica of EWTN in so much hot water with Mahoney. She was right to criticize it.
Mahoney was an advocate of liturgical dancing.
He gave very short shrift to pro-life work, and no attention at all to NFP. Priests were discouraged to even talk about it, be ause he thought it would drive the faithful away.
He made sure the diocesan seminary was staffed with people of the same ilk. They made a point of discouraging young men who had a more traditional view of serving the Church. He opened the seminary up to women who wanted to study theology, etc.
He was known to be very harsh with priests who tried to disagree with his policies.
The books he wanted used for CCD were so watered down they were all but useless for learning the basics of the Faith.
He raised the age for Confirmation to 15 or 16, too long after puberty, and made it a two year program that is grindingly difficult for families to have to endure, not to mention tedious. The families I know went through it said a lot of the time was just filler, and they had to also, somehow, fit in a hundred “service hours” for the Church in already tight schedules.
He was a fan of moving tabernacles away from the center of the church so that the focus could be on Jesus “active” presence at the Mass. The tabernacle was a distraction.
He wanted as many parishes as possible to be renovated, at great expense, to fit his model of the Mass.
The Religious Education Conference became a showcase for all the “progressive” religious and lay theologians, teachers, etc. who could then come and poison our diocese with watered down teachings on Faith and morals.
He was soft on Dignity, the gay rights Catholic group. He allowed them a lot of freedom in the diocese, allowing them to have their own Masses in our parishes. He also encouraged a group that encourages families with same sex attracted children to meet and find acceptance of their children’s lifestyle.
And last, but not least, he built his own massive, horribly ugly cathedral down in LA. He couldn’t find the money to renovate to earthquake codes the historic St. Vibiana’s Cathderal, but the cost of this warehouse looking thing was a great waste of money. He actually had a campaign during the Mass years ago, inviting everyone to buy a paver that would go on the floor around the altar. And, no, your name was not going to be on it, but you could go out into the foyer, and look up in a computer exactly where your paver was to be located. Oh, and I almost forgot, a former well known head of Disney, who donated a ton of money to building the “cathedral”, a non catholic, and gay sympathiser ,etc., will be buried under the altar someday. Perfect.
We cannot wait for him to stop talking and writing. We have been praying for him for years. *Sigh*

Classical Liberal Education: The cure for the dumbed-down culture of death?

Classical education, the institute explained, is meant to help students learn how to think, giving them “the tools of lifelong learning,” rather than merely teaching them “subjects.” The foundation of classical education is a set of three methods of learning subjects, called the trivium, which consists of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

“By uniting faith and reason across the curriculum, this approach aims to form students in wisdom and virtue,” the institute added. Classical Catholic education is also meant to “form an educational community that is fully Catholic,” rather than being merely “secular schools with a Catholic name and a religion class.”

Read more

Editor’s note: This is the authentic, original and beneficial type of Liberal Arts that forms the basis for all the best features of western civilization. Not the Marxist, Socialist, virtually useless aberration currently provided by many/most of today’s institutions of higher learning.