Liberal Catholics

[kenrockthefirst]

[quote name='dUSt' post='1412026' date='Oct 31 2007, 01:11 PM']"Your" is possesive.

You're = you are.

As is, your sentence is incomplete. Here's a few that would work better:

"[b]I think your incredibly ignorant and narrow minded [/b]dog barks too much."

"[b]I think your incredibly ignorant and narrow minded [/b]wife needs to stop calling me."

See? Better.[/quote]
Dust, this is a message board, hardly the place to call people out on their spelling and grammar. Hence the "edit" button. Unless YOU ARE going to add spelling and grammar features...?

[Winchester]

[quote name='kenrockthefirst' post='1412054' date='Oct 31 2007, 02:43 PM']Dust, this is a message board, hardly the place to call people out on their spelling and grammar. Hence the "edit" button. Unless YOU ARE going to add spelling and grammar features...?[/quote]
dUSt, let me field this.

Since spelling and grammar are part of a good message, a message board is a great place to "call people out" on their grammar. Especally if the person is question is claiming in a grammatically hideous sentence that certain people are "ignorant." In this case, not only is a nice grammatical lesson imparted, but one's attention is called to a delicious irony.

The edit button was not utilized. It is irrelevant.

People have been checking spelling and grammar for years without a program to do it for them. And there is a spellcheck feature on Phatmass. Grammar is more difficult for a computer to find and correct, and properly used poor grammar is always acceptable. The your and you're conflict is a pox upon our language. It must be assaulted with vigor.

[mortify]

Maybe part of the reason why liberalism is so popular among Catholics is because of the strict rigidity and dryness that existed prior to Vatican ii.

[Socrates]

A "liberal Catholic" is an oxymoron.

[quote name='Aloysius' post='1411834' date='Oct 30 2007, 11:14 PM']A massive sociological shift in Western culture. Basically, the media spread the idea most effectively.. the purpose, sociologically, was to give more power to the market. If you can vilify all the old values, you give people free licence to fulfil their appetites as much as they want.

It's really not that difficult: they convinced people to throw off their upbringing by appealing to their appetites. We've been exporting that all over the world with our media systems, we've even begun to strongly undermine traditional islamic culture in the middle east, which is why their extremists hate us so much.[/quote]
While the media would become an influence, I think it's rather silly and inaccurate to blame the problem of liberal Catholicism mainly on the media and "the market." Frankly, the idea that Catholic heterodoxy isa the result of a plot to "give more power to the market" reeks of a certain shallow quasi-Marxist ideology which blames "Capitalism" for all the world's ills.

The truth is a lot more complex (though ultimately we can blame it all on the devil, I suppose). First was the underground growth of certain condemned modernist ideas (stolen from liberal protestantism in the 19th century) among the clergy, which were brought into the open after Vatican II, on the false pretext that the council had done away with old Catholic teaching and radically changed the Church.
Also was the influence of the whole sexual revolution and the hippie counterculture on the Church in the '60s and '70s. (Though I wouldn't blame this initually on a capitalist marketing scheme - though marketers would later use this to their advantage. Many of the 60s-70s-era liberal Catholics and hippies were vehemently anti-capitalist, and even blatantly Marxist.)

I'd say part of the original problem was that by the '50s, American Catholics had come out of their "Catholic ghetto" and were getting much cozy with the outside culture (as opposed to earlier areas when Catholics were strongly persecuted), so they didn't have the strength to resist when secular culture changed for the worse.
The blatant heretical teaching of many dissident clergy post-Vatican II helped further confuse the faithful.

[Socrates]

[quote name='LouisvilleFan' post='1412036' date='Oct 31 2007, 01:24 PM']Seems to me, raising a kid in Catholic schools is the best way to ensure they [i]don't[/i] become Catholic. How many people who are passionate about the faith were raised Catholic? I'll bet more than half of Phatmass folks were not... guess that means I better create a poll. [/quote]
I think a [i]bad[/i] "Catholic" education is the best way to ensure that kids loose the faith. Students at liberal "Catholic" universities tend to lose the faith at a higher rate than those at purely secular universities.

I attended a solidly (orthodox) Catholic college, of which most of the grads remain faithful Catholics.

If all I had known of the Catholic faith was the wishy-washy kumbaya feel-good fluff I got in junior-high CCD (back before the program was cleaned up at my parish), it's dubious that I'd still be a practicing Catholic.

[Aloysius]

marxist paradigms can be accurate. as Chesterton says, the critic is usually right about what is wrong, but rarely right about what is right.

everything you said is quite accurate too... but why was the average joe catholic so susceptible to selling out? because there was a systemized attempt to detach people from the old values so that they would have unfettered licence to fulfill their appetites, their appetites were appealed to; sexual appetites included. the free-love hippies played right into the hands of the market, because by getting people to follow their appetites without the old value systems, they made people more vulnerable to become manipulated by the market.

[Socrates]

[quote name='Aloysius' post='1412263' date='Oct 31 2007, 10:15 PM']marxist paradigms can be accurate. as Chesterton says, the critic is usually right about what is wrong, but rarely right about what is right.

everything you said is quite accurate too... but why was the average joe catholic so susceptible to selling out? because there was a systemized attempt to detach people from the old values so that they would have unfettered licence to fulfill their appetites, their appetites were appealed to; sexual appetites included. the free-love hippies played right into the hands of the market, because by getting people to follow their appetites without the old value systems, they made people more vulnerable to become manipulated by the market.[/quote]
Marxist paradigms are are mostly pure b.s.
I disagree with this paradigm because it sees morality as basically being decided by economic forces, which is opposite to the truth. "The market" is morally neutral. It is human beings that make moral choices and can use the market for good or ill. True, if people reject traditional morality, the market can meet the demand by openly producing immoral materials, just as if people are virtuous, there would not be a demand for the immoral, and there would be demand for, say, Bibles and books on holiness instead.

While I think you have a point in that marketeers and merchants exploit immoral impulses, I do not think they can be primarily held responsible for engineering the sexual revolution nor Catholic dissent in the first place.
Remember, we are discussing the children of the '50s here. 1950s-60s t.v. was not the cesspool of sexual immorality we know today. Programming largely upheld what would become known as "traditional values." You're talking about shows like "I Love Lucy," "Andy Griffith," "Leave it to Beaver," "Gunsmoke," etc.
I don't think the media of that era can really be blamed for destroying Catholic faith and morality.
(True, there was some suggestive stuff in movies, etc., but nothing that can really be blamed for singlehandedly causing a sea change in morals among the Catholic faithful.)
The media would change after the sexual rev hit critical mass, and many children of the revolution took over the media. After this, of course, the media would play a large part in perpetuating the moral decline (ala MTV, etc.)

So basically, I don't think there is much basis for idea of the liberalization of Catholic morals being a plot by Evil Capitalists (sitting together in smoke-filled room chomping big stogies, no doubt) for the purpose of maximizing profits.
The market exploited our moral decline, rather than having engineered it.

And "Average Joe Catholic" is susceptible to "selling out" because he is lukewarm, slothful, and poorly catechized and confused by the heretical claims of his priest who insists the Catholic Church has radically changed her teachings after Vatican II.

[NewReformation]

And now, a word from a Baptist on this issue:

I attended a Private Baptist High School. There are probably a couple different reasons why people become liberals after that kind of education.

1)As stated earlier, the theological/Biblical education is a joke.
2)Possibly, the person is not a believer to begin with.
3)They don't understand what they've been taught, or come to the wrong conclusion.

[infinitelord1]

[quote name='catholicinsd' post='1411775' date='Oct 30 2007, 10:32 PM']I've been thinking the vast majority of the liberal democratics Catholics were educated in parochial schools in the era prior the the Second Vatican Council. Yet they have broken with Holy Mother Church on nearly every issue. Why do you think this is?[/quote]

I went to catholic schools from kindergarten to the 12th grade. I never went to a public school. Trust me...politics has nothing to do with religion.

[Justin86]

[quote name='Aloysius' post='1411834' date='Oct 31 2007, 02:14 PM']A massive sociological shift in Western culture. Basically, the media spread the idea most effectively.. the purpose, sociologically, was to give more power to the market. If you can vilify all the old values, you give people free licence to fulfil their appetites as much as they want.

It's really not that difficult: they convinced people to throw off their upbringing by appealing to their appetites. We've been exporting that all over the world with our media systems, we've even begun to strongly undermine traditional islamic culture in the middle east, which is why their extremists hate us so much.[/quote]
Yes, it's all Bush's fault. Only one man can lead us out of our crisis of faith in the Catholic Church. Ron Paul 08!

If anyone [i]really[/i] wants to know why the faith among us Catholics in the West started declining before Vatican II it would be because the modernists went underground after Pius X condemnation (yes, the modernist heresy dates back [i]prior[/i] to Vatican II), and spread doubt by raising questions about the great supernatural events in salvation history. Questions raised on the Holy Eucharist, the Resurrection, and the Virgin Birth are a few examples of this. This further lead to liturgical abuse, most namely the Tridentine Liturgy being said as if it were some sort of NASCAR event to see who could say it the fastest. Eventually, this combined effort made Sunday Mass merely a formality instead of a devotion for most Catholics and in more modern times is what inspired people to do away with the formality all together.

Modernism--the real problem of our times--did not just pop out of nowhere in 1960's American and European universities. It is the logical conclusion of the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolt that took Satan centuries of work before he could get mainstream society to accept. Therefore no, it is not an political-economic problem, and thus can not be solved by simply adopting a political-economic solution. Our crisis will only be solved by holy priests actively engaging families, and well-populated Catholic families raising their sons and daughters in the Church.

[NewReformation]

Technically, post-modernism is what's in vogue now.

[Justin86]

Not according to how the Catholic Church defines "modernism".

[Aloysius]

Justin, everything you said is true as well. How do you peg me as a "blame everything on Bush" guy? I totally supported him in the last two elections, you know.

That does not detract from the fact that the market has been systematically attacking the traditional values in order to make us more susceptible to our appetites. It's not a big conspiracy or anything, just a sociological fact: our society values our market above everything else (market:modern society::religion:medieval society) and a tremendous amount of what has happened in recent times has been to shift our society into one that is more beneficial to the market. What's beneficial to the market? Unrestricted free appetite which is not bound by any value system.

[Aloysius]

The point was made about the sexual revolution not starting in the 60's. I agree. It started with the Bohemian Revolution in the Graduate Schools of the 1930's, by the 60's, all the professors in undergraduate schools had come up through the Bohemian Revolution and were more than happy to spread that into the undergraduate schools, thereby widely dispersing to the general population.

Here in the St. Vincent Anthropology Department, we like to call Margaret Mead the "grandmother of the sexual revolution"

Anyway, like I said, the way it was able to spread through much of society was because the media mass marketed the ideas, and they did so by the driving force of the market. Believe it or not, the amount of sexual license going on in the 60's with "free-love" hippies was not nearly as much, statistically, as is going on now; nor was it nearly as wide-spread. The only way that stuff was able to infiltrate these families that had raised their kids in strict Catholic Schools was for the media to spread it around, was for the market to make it all available in order to exploit people more easily; people were tempted primarily at the level of their appetites. There wasn't a whole generation of people who were primarily indoctrinated with Catholic principals and then intellectually convinced that modernist principals were the way to go; they were tempted away by the unrestricted appetites that the society was pushing on them.

Marxist principals are total bunk when they reduce everything to just economics; but they are not inaccurate at analyzing certain economic sociological trends. Like Chesterton and I said, the critic is most often right about what is wrong, but rarely right about what is right. Marx was not a fool in analyzing economic trends in capitalism, he was a fool in proposing a system which reduced everything to them and proposing his own even more fool-hearted system. Why did I choose to focus on the economic side of things in this thread? I don't know, I didn't even think it would cause too much of a ruckus... just throwing out a major factor in the mechanism through which a whole generation of Catholic children were undermined... and what that really does come down to is the temptation of appetites, all the rationalizations for that generation came after the fact, they didn't abandon their Catholic upbringing on idealogical principals, they adopted the idealogical principals which supported the lifestyle that they had already given into.

[Justin86]

[quote name='Aloysius' post='1413172' date='Nov 3 2007, 12:10 AM']Justin, everything you said is true as well. How do you peg me as a "blame everything on Bush" guy? I totally supported him in the last two elections, you know.[/quote]
Since it sounds like you see our faith crisis as the result of media brainwashing, I'd assume the solution would be the result of whatever economic system you're advocating. People like this usually blame Bush for everything.

[quote]That does not detract from the fact that the market has been systematically attacking the traditional values in order to make us more susceptible to our appetites. It's not a big conspiracy or anything, just a sociological fact: our society values our market above everything else (market:modern society::religion:medieval society) and a tremendous amount of what has happened in recent times has been to shift our society into one that is more beneficial to the market. What's beneficial to the market? Unrestricted free appetite which is not bound by any value system.[/quote]
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Can big business impose an unrestricted free appetite on a society, or does society first adopt the desire for it?

In my opinion it is the latter. It's not good business to try to impose a particular idea on people, have them get all offended, and then boycott your product. Business ultimately exists to make money, and nothing more. Whatever society wants, they will sell. These days people what sex and violence. So business gives them sex and violence. What you are describing is nothing more than a symptom of modernism. None of this changes the moral neutrality of the markets, which is my point.

Also, in terms of what the saints valued, finding the best economic system was very low on the list. While we are as Catholics called to live in this world we are still called to be separate from it as well, and ultimately economics is a silly, irrelevant affair that has no eternal consequence. It just wasn't that important to them. To me, this would seem to indicate that they saw the markets as mostly harmless to a society. If they really could cause such damage wouldn't God send His saints to be more aggressive in warning us of it?