THE ROMAN CATHOLIC REVOLUTION INITIATED BY THEOLOGIANS AND BISHOPS,
AND SUPPORTED BY THE WORST POPE EVER
The previous posting consisted of (1) my own composition [no plagiarism!!!]; (2) excerpts from a webpage cited correctly (not the entire webpage, significant parts of the full page were not reproduced); and (3) another proper citation to another article (not quoted at all). Each of the three was properly separated and labeled. U.S. law protects people's rights to excerpt, quote from, comment upon, agree with, and strongly criticize copyrighted materials. There was no infringement of anyone's rules.
Below, Ross Douthat admits clearly what has long been obvious: (1) the radical changes in Roman Catholicism were initiated by theologians and bishops; (2) the German bishops today want to push the revolution in a more radical direction; and (3) Pope Francis agrees, at least in part, with the German Catholic revolutionaries.
ADMISSIONS FROM ROSS DOUTHAT,
Full article at https://nyti.ms/2FWOzSP
.... .... It was the [Roman Catholic] leadership that embraced a different approach, in which Catholic Christianity would seek to enter more fully into modern culture, adopting its styles and habits — modernist and even brutalist church architecture, casual dress, guitar music, a general suburban and Protestant affect, etc. — in order to effectively transform it from within. It was the leadership that decided that much of what Proust depicted as Catholicism’s cultural glory — the old Mass above all, but also a host of customs and costumes and rituals — needed to be retired in order to reach people in a more disenchanted age. ... ... Catholicism’s attempt to do the same with modern culture since the 1960s has largely seemed to fail. The secular culture welcomed the church’s Protestantization and demystification and even secularization, praised the bishops and theologians who pursued it, and then simply pocketed the concessions and ignored the religious ideas those concessions were supposed to advance. ........ .... on many other fronts, the Francis era has been a springtime for accommodation and inculturation, and especially for the secularizing and Protestantizing German Catholicism that helped forge the original revolution of the 1960s, and whose leaders believe that only further modernization can refill their empty churches. Under German influence, but with the pope’s implicit blessing, Catholic rules on divorce and now perhaps intercommunion may be joining the Latin Mass and meatless Fridays on the altar of sacrifices to the culture of the modern world. .... For this, as for his doctrine-shaking innovations, Francis has won admiring press. But as with the last wave of Catholic revolution, there is little evidence that the modernizing project makes moderns into Catholics. (The latest Gallup data, for instance, shows American Mass attendance declining faster in the Francis era.).... ....