RKIA on materialsim and the decline in religious observance

I had the privilege of teaching dead languages to comatose seminarians for many years at the seminary of Bathsheba Bible College. There I had the even greater privilege of working with Fr. Stanley, a renowned old professor. Once at lunch in the faculty dining room he sighed and said, “The collapse of western civilization is going to be very inconvenient.”  
 
He sure had that right. Anyone who is paying attention has a feeling of imminent collapse all around us. The Diocese of Frostbite Falls sure seems to be on a toboggan slide to insignificance. So how did it all happen?  (Keep in mind that I am an inveterate curmudgeon descended from a long line of pessimists, and am quite possibly absolutely wrong or at least over simplifying things.) I suppose things have been unravelling since the Thirty-Years War, the French Revolution and the invention of processed cheese spread, but I want to talk about the part of the Great Unravelling that I remember. I noticed it with the coming of artificial birth control. I grew up in a small town of big houses where the Catholics came to breed. A family of seven kids was pretty standard back then. Then, in July of 1961, in the heart of beautiful downtown Skokie, Illinois, the Searle Company began the manufacture and sale of the oral contraceptive, or as the Singing Nun called it in her ballad, “…the little golden pill.”  
 
I was born just four short years after the end of the Second World War. The 1950’s were all about consumerism. Like Scarlet O’Hara in the movie, “Gone with the Wind” the entire country shook its fist at heaven and said with one voice, “As God is my witness, I will never go hungry again!!”  1929 to 1949 were pretty hungry years in the USA and the world in general, first the Great Depression then the World War (Part 2) with its rationing of food and luxury goods. This was followed by the Korean War, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. At the same time, we had the post-war housing shortage and the BABY BOOM. There were a lot of soldiers who had spent years overseas thinking about the girls they’d left back home. When the soldiers were repatriated they could do a lot more than dream. The post-war baby boom peaked around 1948 and stayed pretty high for around the next 10 years and then the birth rate in America started to plummet and continued to plummet until recently when it seems to have levelled off, well at least to be dropping more slowly, if not quite a plummet. All those new houses in the suburbs, all those babies, all those returning soldiers who wanted to give their families the luxuries they swore they would never do without if they could just get back home. 

The 1950’s and sixties were a glorious era of consumerism. I believe the Age of Materialism started in the Wars; First, Second, Korean, Cold, and Vietnam. The Cold War with its McCarthy Era Anti-Communist witch hunts and the Vietnam War with its hippie backlash created a kind of fashionable Marxism which Hollywood is still infected, along with most institutions of higher learning. (And you’re hearing this from and old hippie who actually studied the Communist Manifesto and carried around the little book of the “Sayings of Chairman Mao”. I would actually get a bit weepy when watching documentaries about union organizing.) 

Don’t forget that Marxism is a materialist religion. It denies the existence of supernatural reality. Reality is what you can get your hands on. Forget “pie in the sky when you die,” as warns an anthem of the Industrial Workers of the World written by Joe Hill, an early union organizer.

Long-haired preachers come out every night, tell you what's wrong and what's right.  But when asked how 'bout something to eat, They will answer in voices so sweet,

Chorus
You will eat, bye and bye, In that glorious land above the sky
Work and pray, live on hay You'll get pie in the sky when you die

And the Starvation Army, they play And they sing and they clap and they pray
Till they get all your coin on the drum Then they tell you when you're on the bum

Holy Rollers and Jumpers come out And they holler, they jump and they shout
Give your money to Jesus, they say He will cure all diseases today

Pope Leo XIII had a vision in which the Lord told him that the 20th century would be the Devil’s own century. It most certainly was, not just for its carnage and war. Worse than war was the murder of the human soul by the worship of pleasure and possessions that became the hallmark of the century. Left, Right and everything in the middle has come to believe in “Reality” so-called. The supernatural is just a myth. The Marxist materialist is not much different than the prosperity gospel Christian. If I don’t have it NOW, what good is it?

The highest goods are pleasure and possessions, power and position. The monasteries, convents and seminaries that created western civilization are empty because what good is self-denial?  Why deny yourself pleasure and property in this world? “Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die!” (c.f.1Cor 15:32) Or as the mega church Protestants would have it, “Eat drink and be merry, because you were saved at a revival and don’t have to worry about your eternal salvation,” or as the progressive Catholic would have it, “Eat drink and be merry, and go to a lot of meetings because if there’s life after death and God and all that stuff, God would be just too nice to ever send anyone to hell.” If it ain’t here it ain’t real. Didn’t the Bible say, “Grab for all the gusto you can get!”

Now enter the little golden pill. If the greatest good one can confer on oneself and on one’s loved one is stuff, it is unwise to have too many children because who can afford all that stuff for 10 children. We now have the pill so we only need to love 1.5 children per family by giving them stuff.  Of course we want them to have the Sacraments and a little bit of religion in case there really is a God and heaven and hell, and besides, sacraments like Baptism, Confirmation, First Communion and Marriage, are wonderful rites of passage and you have a swell party and get lots of stuff.

A little religion and a lot of stuff. Heckuvadeal, no? We really like stuff and the pill made it possible to have more stuff and thus every marriage bed has become an altar for the worship of the god of stuff. What altar is complete without sacrifice? What sacrifice is offered on our beds, the altars of the god of matter, that god who confers so much wonderful stuff?  The sacrifice is children just like in the days of the god Moloch. The purpose of the pill is to prevent ovulation and thus to prevent pregnancy. It also has a secondary effect. If one of those sneaky ova get fertilized and becomes a human being despite the pill, that little, new human being will not be able to latch onto the womb of its mother and then must die, sacrificed to the god of matter just surely as a baby thrown onto the fires that burned in the belly of the Canaanite god Moloch.

The carnage wrought in the post-pill, post-abortion holocaust far exceeds the butcher’s bill of the 20th century. Just since 1980, there have been about ONE BILLION 500 MILLION abortions, far more than the entire death toll of all the wars of human history. Add to this the number of unknown abortions caused by the pill, and the god of matter must be pleased indeed. I just don’t have time or energy to talk about the objectification of women and the disrepute into which both motherhood and fatherhood have fallen because of the recreational sexuality made possible by the pill and abortion.

It is interesting to think that all this sexual chaos that is drowning us in the 21st century is, at least in part, Searle’s gift to the world.  Remember that the little golden pill was first manufactured and distributed right here in Skokie at 4901 Searle Parkway.

“History. Read it and weep.”  From the books of the Prophet Bokonon

Next week: the tirade isn’t over.

Isn't it great that Pope Francis is letting us vote on truth?

Dear Rev. Know-it-all, 

I think it’s so exciting that Pope Francis has asked us all to vote on what we think of gay marriage and remarriage and artificial birth control and living together before marriage and all that sort of thing. Personally, if you want to know what I think, the Church needs “to wake up and smell the coffee” on cohabitation. It is commonplace and there are some reasons for it which cannot be summarily dismissed, such as economic realities. On the matter of artificial contraception my responses might be characterized by the saying, “that train left the station long ago”. Catholics have made up their minds and the sensus fidelium suggests the rejection of Church teaching on this subject. What do you think?

Yours sincerely,

Mary Kay Lastima

Dear Ms. Lastima,

I think you are nuts. First of all, I doubt that the Roman Pontiff, Pope Francis, the Bishop of Rome has suddenly become a Congregationalist who wants us to vote on the truth. Second of all, you seem to have no understanding, or perhaps a convenient modern American understanding of the “Sensus Fidelium”. 

The Sensus Fidelium (sense of the faithful) is the understanding held by the whole body of the faithful. It is “the supernatural appreciation of faith on the part of the whole people, when, from the bishops to the last of the faithful, they manifest a universal consent in matters of faith and morals.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 92) Lumen Gentium, a document of the Second Vatican Council says: “By this appreciation of the faith, aroused and sustained by the Spirit of truth, the People of God, guided by the sacred teaching authority... receives... the faith, once for all delivered to the saints... the People unfailingly adheres to this faith, penetrates it more deeply with right judgment, and applies it more fully in daily life.”

It is important to note that the Sensus Fidelium is not a vote, not a two thirds majority, and it is led by the teaching authority of the Church. By that it is meant, I assume, the bishops of the Universal Church especially the Pope, the Bishop of Rome and Vicar of Christ. It is not the faithful leading the bishops. The call of the bishops is to lead the faithful.

The Sensus Fidelium is an expression of the whole Church, spread out through space and time. It does not just belong to the modern American/European Church which is careening toward extinction. It belongs to the whole Church, including Africans, Asian, (especially Vietnamese, Korean, Filipinos), and Mexicans and other Latin’s, these are people who still seem to love their children more than they love their poodles and their large flat screen TVs. The Sensus Fidelium includes the faithful of two thousand years, not just the faithful born since the sixties. The Sensus Fidelium is the authentic sense of what we have held and believed universally and consistently since the beginning. It is not the church catching up with the latest trends or coming to terms with day time talk TV show on which over-the-hill actresses grace us with their personal infallibility and superior acumen.

For instance, we have always believed that abortion is wrong. The Bible doesn't even mention abortion as far as I can tell. I don’t recall any pope having to make infallible pronouncements about abortion, but from the Fathers of the Church until now, we have always known that abortion is just wrong. That is the Sensus Fidelium.

I am a bit bemused by your belief that the Church needs “…to wake up and smell the coffee” regarding cohabitation before marriage for economic reasons. In my limited pastoral experience a lot of couples who are (in the common phrase) “shacking up”, tell themselves and their grandparents that they are going to make it legal — eventually. They usually go through two or three cohabitations before they marry, (and then divorce). Which of the cohabitations are we to condone as a legitimate source of grace? The first, the second or the third?  If by “economic reasons” you mean the expense of the big white wedding at 40,000 smackers, you have as little regard for the permanence and sanctity of marriage as most marriage planners and divorce lawyers. For them multiple marriage is a boon. They get to fleece the same people over and over. I suggest you go to your computer and look up “Cohabitor’s vows” on YouTube. And now the big one: ARTIFICIAL BIRTH CONTROL. In essence you are equating the Sensus Fidelium with the saying, “If everybody is doing it, it must be right.” I can imagine Germans said that to themselves in the stadium at Nuremberg as everyone raised their arms in a salute to Hitler. After all, everybody was doing it.

Traditionalist, restorationist, curmudgeonly, reactionary old uber-Catholic geezers like myself, often disparage Venerable Pope Paul VI. I do not. I think he was among the great hero’s of Christian history. None of us really know what overwhelming pressure he was under to cave in regarding two unchangeable points of Catholic Truth. By these I mean the sacrificial nature of the Mass and the unbreakable bond between the unitive and procreative elements of marriage. In English, these are the truths that the Catholic Mass is a true sacrifice, the re-presentation of Calvary, and that marriage is not just about a relationship, but that it is a relationship between a man and a woman that is open to the creation of new human life. No abortion and no artificial birth control. That poor little scholarly nebbish who occupied the throne of St. Peter from 1963 to 1978, the poor little sad sack who brought the Vatican Council to its close in 1965 is, in my opinion, one of the great popes of history. He was bullied by theologians, politicians, the press and by progressive liturgists and yet that frail, bookish fellow managed to cling to the essentials in the midst of a demonic hurricane. The Venerable Paul once said that “the smoke of Satan has entered the church.” One hears the quote but never the context. Here is a fuller version of his words. 

Referring to the situation of the Church today, the Holy Father (the Venerable Paul speaking of himself in the third person) affirms that he has a sense that “from some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.”  There is doubt, incertitude, problematic, disquiet, dissatisfaction, confrontation. There is no longer trust of the Church; they trust the first profane prophet who speaks in some journal or some social movement, and they run after him and ask him if he has the formula of true life.  And we are not alert to the fact that we are already the owners and masters of the formula of true life. Doubt has entered our consciences, and it entered by windows that should have been open to the light. Science exists to give us truths that do not separate from God, but make us seek him all the more and celebrate him. But they end up teaching us: “I don’t know, we don’t know, we cannot know.” The school becomes the gymnasium of confusion and sometimes of absurd contradictions. Progress is celebrated, only so that it can then be demolished with revolutions that are more radical and more strange, so as to negate everything that has been achieved, and to come away as primitives after having so exalted the advances of the modern world.

We certainly are seeing some strange things promoted by the prophets of journalism and social; change. It’s okay to kill the child in the womb. It’s okay to live a life that is just about the two of us and denies life and love to others, and we should all be supportive of the distasteful and brutally primitive tastes of certain sexual minorities, which are as good as and as respectable as the natural intimacy between a man and woman that creates that most beautiful of creatures, the human infant. These are strange inversions indeed and certainly seem to fall under the rubric of “revolutions that are more radical and more strange.”

Next Week: Sex, the Devil and the Second Vatican Council 

(I bet you’ll read that one!)

Letter to Lee Turjiste -- part 4

Letter to Lee Turjiste, continued. 

Baptisms and Funerals! Here I am really torn. On the one hand, if you say “No” to someone who wants to have a child baptized, they will probably be angry enough to never darken the door of your church again. If you say “Yes” to someone who rarely comes to church and is in no sense a member of the parish, or even a practicing Catholic, they will probably never darken the door of your church again either. That is until it’s time for the kid’s first communion. You will see them again for weddings, confirmations and other photo events.

If you say “No”, it’s goodbye. So most priests want to be pastoral and say “Okay, but you’ve got to start coming to church.” “Okay, Father we will.” And they do come: three times — 7, 13 and about 25 years after the baptism. Here is a typical phone call:

(Bridezilla) “Hello, Are you the priest?” 

(Pastor) “Yes I am.”

(B) “I want to rent your church for my wedding.”

(P) “Are you a parishioner? “  

(B) “...... (long pause)...yes I am.”

(P) “What’s your name?”

(B) “I’m Diadora Shickelgruber. Certainly you remember me, Father.” 

(P) “I can’t say that I do.”

(B) “Well I probably go to the service you don’t celebrate.” 

(P)”I say most of the Masses and am always in the vestibule after Mass. Why do you want to be married here at St. Dymphna’s? 

(B) “I went to school there and got all my sacraments there. When I was little I always dreamed of walking down that aisle on my wedding day.” 

(P) “Are you currently attending another church?”

(B) “Oh yes, Father. When we’re not at your church we go to a church closer to our house.”

(P) What is the name of the church?”

(B) “I can’t remember it right now.”

(P) “Because you live twenty miles away, don’t attend regularly, and are not registered here, I am going to need a letter of permission from the pastor of the church you normally attend.”

(B) “....long silence....How do I get that?”

(P) Introduce yourself to your pastor after Mass and he will tell you how to make an appointment.”

(B) “Oh.” Click. Phone goes dead.

They are either going to have a wedding in the park with the local shaman, or they are going to pester the nearest Catholic priest who has also never met them for a letter of permission until weakened by hunger and fatigue he gives it to them. If not they will write a long letter to the bishop pointing out that their grandfather gave a lot of money to the parish and the priest treated them terribly. Some diocesan functionary will call and Father will give in.

The bride invariably shows up dressed like a frigate in full sail at which point I am tempted to wax eloquent on the beauties of virginity symbolized by the reams of white lace and taffeta in which she is festooned, but that would just evoke another letter to the bishop about how un-pastoral I am and so I preach a few platitudes that will sound inoffensive on the video. And so the cycle starts all over again.

We will see them again a few years later when they want a baptism or something like it; or someone they love, or at least fell guilty about, needs burial. We, the clergy, refer to this sort of religion as “hatch, match and dispatch.”  However, this is becoming much less common. Very few, except homosexuals, wedding co-coordinators and divorce lawyers think that it’s important to get married anymore; and most Catholics think birth control is just fine. This abandonment of the sacramental life eases up the pressure for baptisms, weddings and, oddly enough, even for funerals.

Ever since, at the urging of Margaret Sanger (Foundress of Planned Parenthood), Drs. Pincus and Rock invented the birth control pill in the early 1950's, things have been changing. Puerto Rico was selected as a trial site in 1955. I suppose Puerto Rico was chosen because the US government was already trying to reduce the number of Puerto Ricans in the world with a string of birth control clinics on the island. Perhaps Ms. Sanger, former friend of and collaborator with Adolph Hitler, figured there were more Puerto Ricans than anyone wanted or needed. Perhaps she figured if it worked on Catholic Puerto Ricans, it would work on Catholic Mexicans, of whom Ms. Sanger also thought there were way too many, even back then.

Guess what? Puerto Ricans went for it despite their Catholicism and now most Puerto Ricans aren’t Catholic. They are an aging population that has lost much of its beautiful art and culture. Ms. Sanger couldn’t give a fig for their wonderful food, delightful music, beautiful painting and wood carving. They were the wrong color and the wrong religion as far as she was concerned, so let’s test the pill on them. Those who renounced their faith in order to have a more relaxed reproductive morality and a higher standard of living soon also renounced their culture, and eventually renounced their progeny.

Having devastated the Puerto Rican family, Planned Parenthood went on to devastate the families of the USA proper. Catholic faith had not stood in the way of modern narcissism in Puerto Rico and it would not stand in the way of the reduction of the European American population of the United States, even though the birth control pill had been designed by Sanger to get rid of all those brown and black people cluttering up our lily white shores.

How, you may ask does this take the pressure off for funerals in Catholic churches? We just had an example here at St. Dymphna’s in Frostbite Falls. An elderly woman died who had been active here as long as her health held out. After that, the family put her in a very nice home. The woman had only one daughter. The daughter didn’t seem very interested in having a large family and so there were only two resultant grandchildren. Like their mother, they had little use for grandma. I don’t think she got a lot of visits.

When I heard that she had died, I was curious that no one had requested a funeral. It turns out that she had died a while ago and no one had told us.  The daughter said that they thought it foolish to go to the bother and expense of a funeral. They cremated grandma and went their merry ways. They all had lives to live.  So it is, that there are fewer and fewer funerals because there are fewer and fewer left to grieve and even fewer to pray for the dead.

Our small families have relieved us of the economic and financial burden of former times. The one or two children we thought optimal were given everything except faith. Why should the little narcissists mourn the dead? We gave them everything but never mentioned that they in turn should be generous. The death of a grandparent is cause for rejoicing. The few descendants are freed from the guilt of never visiting Grandma and now they get all her money. Having not wasted her money on a brood of demanding little rug rats, Grandma had amassed a tidy sum, which her one or two heirs, or their lawyers will divide. Why waste any of it on a funeral that no one wants? No one but Grandma, that is.

Remember that scene in Dickens’ Christmas Carol? Having used his finances very prudently, old Scrooge is un-mourned by anyone. The ghost of Christmas future shows him his own overgrown grave. That poor dear woman I mentioned above does not even have an overgrown grave. I imagine her ashes were scattered, or maybe they are somewhere in the basement to be thrown out with the rest of her stuff.

When there are still enough people who remember religion in some form, they schedule a funeral in a church where the deceased may have more or less gone. They want the choir, the eulogy, the sermon, the wake, the grave side, the whole nine yards and a video of the proceedings... The most crazy-making thing that I get asked at funerals is about scheduling. I have actually had people request a funeral months in advance. When I looked confused and asked isn’t that a long time to wait?  They responded, “Oh no Father, she’s not dead yet, but she will be by then. We have to get everybody on the same page as to the best date of the funeral. We have to check our calendars and we won’t take her off life support until we have a tentative date picked.” I thought I was dealing with a family of vampires.

It is now very common to put grandma on ice, or if it’s going to be a really long time before the calendars open up, Grandma will be burned and there will be a “Memorial Service” whatever that may be. The modern mourners haven’t a clue what Mass is about especially if they are born in the USA. They want the whole enchilada and they darn well better get it. After all, they are paying for it! And these are people who know the value of a dollar! They certainly haven’t wasted any of it on having large families.

Of fifty Americans at many funerals, perhaps two of them will be under the age of 30. Do you really think those two remnants of once Catholic large families will bother to have funeral masses for the childless multitude around them? When I offer a funeral Mass, my grief is very real. I don’t however grieve for the departed whom I have probably never met; I grieve for a way of life, a culture and a community of faith that has died.

The Church is growing: Africa, China, the Philippines, South America, Korea and so many emerging cultures are on fire with faith. There has never been a time when so many Muslims converted to Christianity. The faith is made glorious by those made martyrs by their Muslim neighbors.

The faith is not dying, the culture is. We have chosen ourselves over the God who made us and loves us. We are now 60 years, give or take, after the invention of the little golden pill, (as the singing nun called it). We have been born into the birth-controlled, baby boomer consumerist revolution and are reaping the reward of our own narcissism: extinction.

Next week: So what do we do?