Catholicism: Novus Ordo, Traditionalists, Sedevacantists, & Modernism
Ian McDonald asks for my take on these three different 'branches' of Catholicism: at the core of it, an ugly, Modernist beast.
Subscribe to me on Vidme: https://vid.me/Davis_MJ_Aurini
My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/
My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini
Download in MP3 Format: http://www.youtubeconvert.cc/
Request a video here: http://www.staresattheworld.com/aurinis-insight/
Live Consultations here: http://www.staresattheworld.com/life-coaching/
Support my work on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/DMJAurini
Credits:
I Feel You by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
He wanted me to talk about the difference between the traditionalist Catholics, the SSPX, the Novus Ordo Catholics, and the Side Vacantists.
Now, the simple answer to all of this starts out with Vatican II in 1963.
Vatican II was a council that met to discuss changes in the church to address changing times, changing technology, changing culture.
And the big changes, at least the big changes that we're concerned about here, largely deal with the liturgy and tradition.
One of the most substantial changes was the openness to the vulgar tongues.
So where once the Catholic Church was very much focused on Latin, on the history, on the very specific and detailed grammar of that language, this new Vatican II, this new liturgy, opened up a lot of it, if not, well, nowadays all of it, to local tongues, local languages, creating a bit of a Babylonian effect to the service.
Another major change was the openness to modern styles of music.
So it wasn't just the Gregorian style, the ancient style of music that had been with the church for centuries.
Suddenly we could introduce all sorts of new sounds, new instruments, new rhythms.
We could rewrite the hymns to better fit modern music.
There was also less of a focus upon the fact that it's the one true church, that it is the universal, the Catholic Church.
And an openness to equality, to universalism, to all these other things.
And so you wind up with three groups coming out of this.
There is the Novus Ordo, which literally the new order.
This is the majority of Catholics out there.
They have gone along with it, completely embraced it, never questioned it.
Okay, most people don't read their Bibles.
Most people don't study their theology.
Most people certainly don't study church politics.
Then you've got the traditionalists.
The traditionalists, the SSPX is one example.
They looked at all of this and said, geez, there is so much being abandoned here.
We are, we might be throwing a baby out with the bathwater.
And so the traditionalists kept to the old ways.
They kept to the who was it?
Pope Paul VI, his Mass of 1570, his liturgy.
They kept the liturgy that was 500 years old.
400 if you're really doing the math specifically.
And then finally, you get the Sede Vacantists.
The seat of Peter is empty.
These are the ones that would argue that this change, that Vatican II represented such a radical change in the church that you couldn't possibly call any of these people Pope anymore.
Nobody since, was it Pius?
No, no, it was.
Yes, yeah, Pius XII in 1958.
That nobody since him could properly be described as a Pope.
And so the seat has been sitting empty for all this time.
They're still Catholics.
They just don't believe that we've had a real Pope because no real Pope could push all of this nonsense.
So that's the three positions in a nutshell.
But I want to dig into this a little bit more.
I want to look at these popes that we've had since, since 1958, since Pius XII.
And are these actually anti-popes?
Are they actually heretics?
I don't think the solution is that simple.
Generally speaking, I'm not a fan of the conspiratorial view of history.
Now, certainly conspiracies do happen.
By the time God crapped out the third caveman, a conspiracy was launched against one of them.
But it's often a very uninformative view of history.
It's a very black and white view of history that fails to acknowledge, fails to have comprehension for the subtleties that are going on at the time, for the cultural shifts that are going on at the time.
Simply labeling somebody as a villain is often an oversimplification.
There are exceptions, of course.
There are absolute villains in history.
Look at the late Roman emperors, for example.
You can find dozens of them.
But to simply think in such a black and white manner doesn't really get us anywhere.
It doesn't really explain to us what is happening.
Because even if you do have somebody that's a complete monster in an office of power, it doesn't explain how they got there so easily and why their successors were just as bad.
I prefer to look at the structuralist view of history, the looking at people as people, people who often have the best intentions at heart, even if they go extremely awry.
So we will start with the Pope who started it all, John XXIII.
He seceded Pius and served from 1958 to 1963.
He's the author of the Second Vatican Council, and he was passionate about equality.
And of course, equality, if you've been following my channel for a while, you should be familiar with my opinion that equality is an absolute, absolute contradiction of reality.
There is no equality in reality.
As my friend the Bekloff likes to say, we're all equal in church because outside of it, we're all unequal.
Nobody's the same height, the same intelligence, the same skill set, the same attractiveness.
You name it.
Inequality is the nature of life.
And this equality, these human rights, okay, because he was also a passionate supporter of human rights.
Now, if you go back to the early days of the American experiment and you want to talk about negative liberties, about John Locke, about all of this, this equality before the law.
Now, this, maybe it's a little bit naive, but it's not the sort of thing I take major issue with.
But let's be frank, equality, human rights.
They have not meant this for over a century.
Human rights these days mean right to free health care, right to a free education, right to workers' compensation, right to insurance covering you even when you didn't pay for it, right to freedom of consequence.
And so when you see the Pope supporting words like this, even if he is coming at them with the best of intention, these are very, very slippery words.
And they have long stopped meaning what all of us seem to think they mean.
Okay, long ago they stopped meaning any of that, any of what they teach in school.
There's the laws and the books, and then there's the policies and procedures that you don't get to find out about until you're trapped in the maws of the beast.
And same thing with all these rights and freedoms.
You know, in theory, on paper, they look really good.
In practice, freedom of speech means that you have the freedom to shut up.
So we have John XXIII, also known as the Good Pope, passionate about equality and human rights.
During World War II, he was assigned as Nuncio to liberated France.
And this informed quite a bit of his views on things.
He was active in helping the Jews fleeing the Holocaust, active in that Underground Railroad.
And he would later on, he would go on to do a generalized confession on behalf of all Catholics, a confession for our sins against the Jews.
Now, let's make no bones about it.
Catholics, many times, over the centuries, have done inexcusable things to Jewish people.
There have been many pogroms, there have even been these enormities which happened during Crusades, which is the last time you would think an enormity would be happening.
And yet there you go.
But it's not as simple as saying that Catholics or Christians or white people or, for that matter, Indians and North Africans and you name it, have some sort of psychotic, irrational hatred for the Jews.
There's always a bit of give and take.
The Jews were very often bad guests of the host civilization.
They were the first culture to specify usury as a sin.
And yet they would frequently, while they wouldn't give usurious loans to one another, they would give usurious loans to the Goyam.
They would frequently be bad hosts.
And while this does not excuse the pogroms, this does not excuse locking Jews in a synagogue and setting it on fire, it certainly does explain it.
And while confession, yes, you should confess, you should apologize to your siblings for what you have done wrong to them.
It doesn't mean they didn't likewise do anything wrong to you that they should likewise apologize to you for.
And if they're not repentant, well, you have to include that in your future relationship with them.
And there was no similar acknowledgement on the side of organized Judaism to say that, yes, Christians have been bad to us, but Christians have been very good to us at other times, and Jews have been very bad to Christians at times.
That was never acknowledged.
So right here, we have this one-sided guilt complex coming out of this.
So following John XXIII, we have Paul VI from 1963 to 1978.
This is the Pope who completed Vatican II.
And in addition to all of that, he made a number of modern reforms to the Church.
He reduced the regal splendor of the office in a variety of ways.
And this goes along with Vatican II, which eliminated many of the old styles of dress.
Some of the more powerful accoutrements that priests or nuns or monks would wear were put by the wayside for more modern-looking styles.
He began the dialogue with the modern world, as he called it.
He disbanded the Palantine Guard and the Noble Guard, which, granted, were rather recent inventions from the 19th century, keeping only the Swiss Guard as the defender of the papal offices.
In 1971, he introduced the Papal Office for Economic Development and Catastrophic Assistance.
There's also some scandals alleging that there were homosexuals being promoted in the Vatican through blackmail against him.
Now, despite all of this, he maintained very stringently and very, very much offensively to many modern people that the Eucharist was not merely symbolic, despite the language of Vatican II, the new liturgy, avoiding specifying that it's not merely symbolic, that it is the blood and body of Christ.
He maintained that it was, very stringently.
He stood up for traditional morality, reaffirmed the discipline of priestly celibacy, maintained the church's opposition towards homosexuality, and he managed to heal the great schism with the Eastern Orthodox and also opened up communication with many of the Protestant churches.
So once again, I see a lot of good in this guy.
I see a lot of adherence to the history of Catholicism, to the traditions, to the principles, to the theology.
You know, this isn't some sort of radical reformer per se.
This is a guy navigating troubled waters.
And then the last pope I want to look at.
Pope John Paul I, the 33-day pope, second shortest pope we ever had.
The big thing he did before John Paul II came in was he was the last to use the gestatorial chair.
That was a the popes used to visit the public while being carried in a sedan.
If you think the old monarchies, it was exactly like that.
It was a royal appearing sedan, the gestatorial chair.
He eliminated the use of the royal we.
So the pope no longer spoke in we, he used I.
And finally, he had a papal inauguration, not a coronation.
So when we examine these popes, when we examine these men and what they did in service to the church, the common trend isn't necessarily subversion, it's modernism.
Imagine for a moment the splendor and majesty of a cathedral next to the enormity and ugliness of an office building.
The cathedrals that we built back in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, these were amazing feats of engineering.
We were doing the impossible.
And if you look at the actual details of a cathedral, this building is built to such amazing specifications.
Every single bit is done properly.
They're amazing, amazing structures.
And yet a cathedral has no reason to be more than four, five stories high.
Certainly not 30.
And so you draw up the cathedral in comparison to the office tower.
And the office tower, it's built expediently, it's built cheaply.
It's not there to glorify God.
It's not even there to glorify man.
It's to put men into little cages, to put them onto little spinning treadmills like a hamster, to keep them running to make the economy move.
Absolutely no respect for the inherent dignity or worth of a human being.
And yet it speaks so much louder than that enduring beauty of the cathedral.
This modernist beast has been eating us alive, just absolutely consuming us for centuries now.
And these popes, and this is despite what the Se De Vacantists say.
So the city of Vacantus would point at these popes and say, look at all this modernism they introduced to the church.
You know, they're clearly bad popes.
Well, and here's the thing, who was it?
Pius XI, 1931.
He was the first one to introduce the term social justice into Catholic documents.
He didn't invent the term.
I mean, the term's been off and on, it's been used since the 1700s, but it's largely a term embraced by Reform Judaism.
He didn't invent it, but he used it.
And if you didn't know what social justice was, if you weren't so familiar with what we've been dealing with in modern years, it certainly sounds like a very nice term.
It sounds like an attractive idea, despite the subversive elements encapsulated in it.
So we have this modernist beast that's just eating us alive.
To the point where even the church is trying to adapt itself to modernism.
It's trying to rid itself of all of the splendor, all of this majesty, all of this beauty, all of this existential magic,
To replace it with efficiency, rationality, it's like European people are tired.
It's like we're all living under the shadow of Hitler.
That confession of our sins against the Jews and our sins against Africa and our sins against India and China and Japan and everywhere else in the world.
We're all weighed down by this history.
These sins are never forgiven.
Modernism does not grant grace.
And the church and its attempts to remain relevant to this modernist nightmare has been slowly divesting itself of the most important element for combating modernism.
It's been abandoning the supernatural.
It's been abandoning the pomp and circumstance.
It's been abandoning the traditions and the rituals and the ancient languages.
We don't have a history anymore.
who just has a list of unforgivable sins and in the modernist ethos one thing i've been noticing about modernism is it's not even hedonism
Hedonism would at least suggest some sort of achievement.
Hedonism would suggest that you emulate Morrison.
And sure, you're dead by 27, but you've accomplished a lot.
You've done every drug in the world and slept with every woman that came into your view.
You know, that takes a little bit of effort.
Modernism suggests the absolute opposite.
Modernism suggests the lowest common denominator.
It suggests the human resource.
It suggests not the pimp, but the porn addict.
Modern society doesn't create beta males.
Modern society creates gamma males.
Gammas are the natural creature for this biosphere.
And the church ought to be a refuge from all of this.
The church needs to be the absolute, the choirs of the angels.
And yet, you walk into a Novis Ordo church, and what are you going to find there?
You're going to find a bunch of women reading scripture.
You're going to find that the hymns, this Gregorian music, which it goes all over the map.
It's sometimes light and effervescent and joyful.
Other times it is absolutely heartbreaking.
Other times it's grim and profound.
It's all been replaced.
It's all been replaced with adult contemporary.
You might as well be listening to Amanda Marshall.
Vatican II allowed for new architecture in churches.
New gross modern architecture, which is well, it's just an ugly imitation.
It's an ugly sarcastic imitation of what's actually going on inside the church.
I wrote an article about this a while back.
I'll link to it below.
So the Novus Ordo, it's still the church, but it's the church in an ugly, ugly outfit with a saccharine, obsequious grin on its face.
The city vacantists are angry.
And believe me, I understand why they're angry.
But you got to get in to get out.
And simply abandoning it all is not a solution.
It's not even an explanatory historical theory.
Saying that we've had bad popes since 1958, or 1933, or 1850, saying any of this is not a solution.
It's just a refusal to participate.
So that's not enough.
I don't see that as enough.
And the traditionalist Catholics, the ones that still go to Latin masses, the ones that appreciate the long-held traditions that even adhere to them when they're not required to, which I would include myself in that number, are nonetheless.
Again, they are not a solution to this problem because we haven't even identified the problem.
Most people have no idea what to call the problem.
The traditionalist Catholics, to a large extent, are the equivalent of observing that society was far more civilized back in 1950.
So let's all dress and act like it's still 1950.
Let's listen to 1950s music exclusively.
Let's drive 1950s cars.
So on and so forth.
And so while the traditionalist circles have a lot going for them, they've got the richness of tradition.
They've got the Latin Mass.
They've got all of that good stuff.
You'll still find the same problems.
Traditionalist Catholic circles are very infested with second wave feminism.
Okay, they don't have the third wave blue hair feminism, but they still have the second wave, women can do no wrong, men are eternally evil ad nauseum.
If the Sede Vacantists have run off and they're going to start their own church with blackjack and hookers and, in fact, forget the church, then the traditionalists are burying their head in the sand because we're dealing with a very...
very big problem here.
This problem of modernism, of Leviathan.
And it's not just a spiritual, it's not just a theological issue.
It's a philosophical, economic, sociological.
This is a major, major beast that we're going up against.
And the more time goes on, the more laws are passed preventing you from even naming this beast for what it is.
And the more logical it becomes to serve this beast rather than to genuinely pursue virtue in your personal self and in your dealings with others.
Anarcho-tyranny is just the trickle-down of this beast to the legal process.
and that the church is embracing it points to just how widespread, omnipresent this beast is.
We need to fight it individually, but we also need to fight it collectively.
And folks, I guess that's what I try and do.
I try and create the grammar, the logic, and maybe even some of the rhetoric to target this filthy machine god that we've built for ourselves.
So I would certainly recommend that you find yourself a good traditionalist church.
Go find the Tridentine Mass.
Go find a church that does Latin or has some Gregorian music or something.
Find what you can.
I mean, if Novus Ordo is all you got, then Novis Ordo is all you got.
You know, bite your tongue.
Try not to listen to the music too closely and take the sacraments.
They're still the sacraments.
But this monster, this beast, well, we need to be fighting this thing on multiple levels.
