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The Rise of Fundamentalist Catholicism


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On 11/18/2019 at 1:25 PM, Hane said:

@Cleopatra7, I was recently surprised to learn from a priest that the awarding of the title “Monsignor” and the wearing of the beretta are on the wane.

When I read "beretta" my mind went right to "handgun."

On 11/21/2019 at 10:11 PM, Palimpsest said:

But is she called Jillian?

 HE probably calls her that as a term of endearment.  Meanwhile, her parents will need to get the girl a bodyguard soon.

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9 hours ago, Granwych said:

When I read "beretta" my mind went right to "handgun."

On 11/21/2019 at 10:11 PM, Palimpsest said:

I think of the 1970s TV show starring Robert Blake.

 

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On 11/25/2019 at 6:27 PM, Hane said:

At my old parish, the priest wanted one of the parish council guys to become a deacon (which involves study and ordination). He agreed to do it only if girls were allowed to become altar servers.

As far as I know, women and girls are allowed to participate in the mass as servers, lector’s, cantors and any role other than as priests or deacons everywhere in the USA except the Diocese of Lincoln (Nebraska).  That gradually changed over time in the 70s and 80s with just the one outlier. 

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3 hours ago, louisa05 said:

As far as I know, women and girls are allowed to participate in the mass as servers, lectors, cantors and any role other than as priests or deacons everywhere in the USA except the Diocese of Lincoln (Nebraska).  That gradually changed over time in the 70s and 80s with just the one outlier. 

True, but there are the occasional pastors who get crotchety about it. The deacon in question was quite vocal, and this was back when girls as altar servers were a very new thing.

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On 11/20/2019 at 5:33 PM, Katzchen24 said:

I remember reading these threads ages ago! What a surprise that he's:

a) still not married,

b) referred positively to Taylor Marshall (same person from the article linked by @NachosFlandersStyle above), and

c) confessed in a massively passive aggressive creepy way to a crush on a nice catholic girl.

Ugh. Sometimes I think that these ultra-trad wing nuts set their sights so high so it guarantees they never find a partner. I'm not going to accuse him of being closeted. It may be that he's just not really into being partnered but his faith has pushed him into a "you must get married and breed multiple little bigots" corner. The unrealistic expectations in a partner are a way of making sure he never gets one. That's me on the idle speculation bus anyway!

I wonder if the nice Catholic girl could be a Santorum? The kids aren't famous, but the dad sure is.

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1 hour ago, JMarie said:

I wonder if the nice Catholic girl could be a Santorum? The kids aren't famous, but the dad sure is.

You might want to rethink that statement.

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19 hours ago, samurai_sarah said:

You might want to rethink that statement.

I didn't say famous in a good way....

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On 11/27/2019 at 12:20 PM, louisa05 said:

As far as I know, women and girls are allowed to participate in the mass as servers, lector’s, cantors and any role other than as priests or deacons everywhere in the USA except the Diocese of Lincoln (Nebraska).  That gradually changed over time in the 70s and 80s with just the one outlier. 

I got curious because I grew up in the penultimate diocese to allow altar girls (in 2006). It looks like as of 2011, 60% of the diocese's churches still didn't allow female altar servers. I now wonder how common this is in other dioceses even if there isn't an official diocesan rule against it. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/protests-of-va-parishs-move-away-from-altar-girls-reflects-wider-catholic-debate/2011/11/17/gIQAnbRLcN_story.html

Also--learn from my mistakes and don't read the comments. ?

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I was baptized as a Catholic before entering a fundamentalist church in my early teens. I returned to the Catholic Church two years ago.nnex

The parish I attend is in a liberal area of New England so we don't have many conservative Catholics. But we have a few families with 7-10 kids who believe in NFP only.

What has really struck me since trying to reconnect with my faith is the number of mainstream Catholic forums that seem to be focused on contraception, abortion and homosexuality. They're not much different than the fundie forums we snark about here.

Ive found a sense of connection with some of the online Jesuit groups which tend to be more liberal and focused on social justice issue including women's. rights and same-sex equality.

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17 hours ago, nausicaa said:

I got curious because I grew up in the penultimate diocese to allow altar girls (in 2006). It looks like as of 2011, 60% of the diocese's churches still didn't allow female altar servers. I now wonder how common this is in other dioceses even if there isn't an official diocesan rule against it. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/protests-of-va-parishs-move-away-from-altar-girls-reflects-wider-catholic-debate/2011/11/17/gIQAnbRLcN_story.html

Also--learn from my mistakes and don't read the comments. ?

In the early 90s, when I attended RCIA, my parish didn’t have altar girls, while the church in the neighboring town did(it was considered more liberal). They did eventually allow them, and the parishes merged several years ago(both schools—as well as the regional Catholic high school—have since closed).

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19 hours ago, nausicaa said:

You were not kidding about the comments! What boulder did THOSE people climb out from under?

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On 11/27/2019 at 4:12 AM, Granwych said:

When I read "beretta" my mind went right to "handgun."

Lol. You aren't wrong. In English it should be "biretta", in Italian it's "berretta", without the double r it's the gun maker.

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10 minutes ago, laPapessaGiovanna said:

Lol. You aren't wrong. In English it should be "biretta", in Italian it's "berretta", without the double r it's the gun maker.

Oh yes, that's right.  A relative gives me a catalog he gets every so often with Catholic items in it; the vestments, wafers, everything.  I would really like some of the incense they use in church but I didn't see it in that book.  They had censers, though.

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On 11/14/2019 at 4:45 PM, libgirl2 said:

I listen to Catholic radio every so often and I remember one of the daily shows that is on, hosted by a priest, discussing the Catholic view of the OT stories being fables and not actual fact. 

Yeah, that’s what I was always taught in catholic high school and university. I think the official phrase is “divine inspiration”. The Bible should be considered divinely inspired but was written by humans and is not a literal history of *anything*. This included the NT and gospels which we learned were probably written even a 100+ years after jesus’ death, and borrowed heavily from each other (at least the “Synoptics”). And evolution was never taught to be in conflict with the Bible, since of course the creation story is not literal.  I am always surprised to hear about Catholics who take the Bible literally. 

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On 11/29/2019 at 9:25 AM, SecularMusic said:

What has really struck me since trying to reconnect with my faith is the number of mainstream Catholic forums that seem to be focused on contraception, abortion and homosexuality. They're not much different than the fundie forums we snark about here.

I got lost in a Catholic rabbit hole a while back (I think after reading about Trad Catholic Jillian lover) and the obsession and misinformation about contraception was mind boggling.  If you make a drinking game out of every "Birth control masks the problem, NaPro technology treats the hormone imbalance!" comment your liver would never recover from reading comments.  I know the Catholic restrictions on contraception too well, but the leap from the Catholic Church restrictions to the contraceptive pill being some great evil even when used as medical treatment for a medical problem kills me (especially when they lap up the odd use of progesterone and even HCG in NaPro technology, while claiming progestegen causes all sorts of harm as contraception.  Ooooookay).  Their own concept of double effect seems to be lost on many of them.

Edited by Destiny
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On 11/21/2019 at 6:24 PM, Cleopatra7 said:

The Latin Mass parish that I attended was 100 percent approved by the archdiocese and the Vatican and it was still a magnet for all kinds of trad crazy. There was a large SSPX faction within the parish, which was weird because there was/is a SSPX chapel in another part of the city. They tended to homeschool and didn’t want to associate with people outside that clique and they caused so much drama that I left, which I realize now was a good thing. Anybody who is interested in the Latin Mass for aesthetic or nostalgic reasons isn’t going to fit into the Latin Mass subculture if they don’t agree with the political reactionarism, homeschool only, Theology of the Skirt, birth control makes the Blessed Virgin cry stuff. 

So I know people who participate in a full Latin Mass every week - I believe the church does the Latin mass then a regular one immediately after. I'm in NYC so this is not a hotbed of Catholic fundie-ism, and the people I know who participate are not Catholic but are there because they get paid, so they don't really know the culture of the church. I was under the impression that the people who attend do it for nostalgia or for the music (it's either a chant mass or done with Renaissance choral masses). I'm now picturing my very liberal friends surrounded by a bunch super fundies and not even knowing it! Do you think most places that do Latin Masses fit with your description? Or are there ones out there who do it for aesthetics?

For the record I've never heard from any of the participants that they've encountered anything particularly crazy there.

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1 hour ago, Eponine said:

For the record I've never heard from any of the participants that they've encountered anything particularly crazy there.

I would bet that there are more than a few crazies in attendance. Anecdotally, I've never met anyone who does Latin mass and isn't also into the right-wing stuff. As for it being in NYC, I can't find any hard data on the distribution of trad Catholics but I personally wouldn't be surprised to find them in any northern city. Those areas have a lot of Catholics generally, and these churches tend to draw in educated professionals looking for something different from the mainstream traditions they were raised with.

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2 hours ago, Eponine said:

So I know people who participate in a full Latin Mass every week - I believe the church does the Latin mass then a regular one immediately after. I'm in NYC so this is not a hotbed of Catholic fundie-ism, and the people I know who participate are not Catholic but are there because they get paid, so they don't really know the culture of the church. I was under the impression that the people who attend do it for nostalgia or for the music (it's either a chant mass or done with Renaissance choral masses). I'm now picturing my very liberal friends surrounded by a bunch super fundies and not even knowing it! Do you think most places that do Latin Masses fit with your description? Or are there ones out there who do it for aesthetics?

For the record I've never heard from any of the participants that they've encountered anything particularly crazy there.

There’s a huge difference between people who like the Latin Mass for nostalgic or aesthetic reasons and those who think it’s the ONLY acceptable form of Catholic liturgy, as many traditionalists do. It’s not unusual to find trads who refuse to going to mass in the vernacular for any reason, as is the case with christendom’s most stalky bachelor. There are some who will go to any group that offers a Latin mass, even if they’re sedevacantist.

A couple of years ago, there was an uproar in the trad world when a priest who offers both kinds of masses asserted that the demand for the Latin Mass wasn’t growing:

http://m.ncregister.com/blog/msgr-pope/an-urgent-warning-about-the-future-of-the-traditional-latin-mass

There’s something rather Norma Desmondish about the trad subculture, because they think they’re the vanguards of Catholicism, when almost no one outside that world knows who they are or cares about their concerns. Yes, they have a high birth rate but so do the Amish, and no one would suggest the Amish are going to be taking anything over. 

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10 minutes ago, Cleopatra7 said:

 christendom’s most stalky bachelor

I move to make this his official FJ moniker. 

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2 hours ago, Eponine said:

For the record I've never heard from any of the participants that they've encountered anything particularly crazy there.

The church I went to was full of fundy. The sermon consisted of mansplaining how the world was supposed to work and who has to obey whom. God was top of the patriarchal pyramid, followed by the church. The church had to be the proper godly church, not the evil pre-Vatican II one. The state followed the church, but not this evil secular government which could be ignored because it was evil and secular. The rest of the pecking order was men, then women, then children.

I know that the priest is supposed to act as the intercession between god and man, but I don't understand the point of a service where the priest is facing away from the congregation. He was muttering in Latin which I'm certain no-one understood. I totally get why the Catholic Church modernised their services because I just don't know how you can attend a mass like that as anything other than performing a rote action.

The beliefs of these people are even scarier than the Evangelicals in some ways. Not only do they believe God is on their side, but they also have 1700 years of history behind them telling them they can do whatever they want and they will never be held accountable for it.

 

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I remember being a kid when “audience participation” came to the Catholic Mass. It happened in stages: First, IIRC, the priest started facing the congregation. Then he started teaching us the Latin (and Greek, in the case of the Kyrie) responses and what they meant. I found this interesting and fun. Then gradually more and more of the Mass was in English. It was in the good old days of the ecumenical movement. 

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18 minutes ago, Katzchen24 said:

I know that the priest is supposed to act as the intercession between god and man, but I don't understand the point of a service where the priest is facing away from the congregation. He was muttering in Latin which I'm certain no-one understood. I totally get why the Catholic Church modernised their services because I just don't know how you can attend a mass like that as anything other than performing a rote action.

The beliefs of these people are even scarier than the Evangelicals in some ways. Not only do they believe God is on their side, but they also have 1700 years of history behind them telling them they can do whatever they want and they will never be held accountable for it.

 

The reason trads will give about the priest facing ad orientem (a fancy way of saying with his back to the congregation) is that it’s facing the rising sun or towards Jerusalem if you’re in the West, but it seems more likely that it was just a local custom of Rome that became universal in the Middle Ages. in the Latin Mass. In any case, the Latin Mass isn’t really designed for the laity to hear or participate in its proceedings; it’s really more for the priest, and the people are just “there.” The vast majority of masses are said without a congregation. It’s supposed to be a bloodless sacrifice to God performed by a priest, and the deemphasizing of that in the post Vatican II mass is one of the many things trads don’t like about it. The priest isn’t speaking to the congregation in the Latin Mass (except a couple of times when he turns around), he’s directly addressing God.

In fact, until the production of hand missals for the laity in the early 20th century and the work of the Liturgical Movement, the Mass was not the central activity for most Catholic laypeople. Rather, the devotions associated with their particular town or parish were. In a way, trads and liberals are two sides of the same coin for thinking for laypeople should understand the mass, whether in a missal or in the vernacular, and making it the center of their spiritual life.

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The Catholic School's in Scotland are not much different from the non denominational school's, follow the same curriculum just with a bit more RE thrown in. It depends on where I am living when I have children on whether I send them to a Catholic school or not, you generally get the choice of Catholic School and a non denominational school that you are in the catchment area for, if the Catholic school has a better reputation I will choose it, my cousin and his ex are not Catholic and chose to send their children to the Catholic School because the other school they had the choice off has a bad reputation and out of all the school's in my hometown is the lowest in the league tables, they could almost see the other school from their house and still decided against it. 

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2 hours ago, Hane said:

. Then he started teaching us the Latin (and Greek, in the case of the Kyrie) responses and what they meant. 

Now I have this song in my head .   

 

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