How Many "Catholics" Are Really Catholic?

A new survey says that a majority of "cultural Catholics" do not believe the religious and moral teachings of the Church.  Read the whole thing here.

Vanishing Nuns

Due to the "culture crisis," i.e. the fact that modern Western Society is pagan and hostile to Christianity, several orders of nuns in Cambridge, England are facing possible extinction. Read the full story here.

The Dying of Christianity

British art musuem goers no longer understand enough about Christianity to understand medieval art. The Victoria and Albert Museum has been engaged in re-vamping their displays assuming that the viewers know nothing about the Christian religion or Catholicism. Full story here.

Another Great Post By Father Dwight

Here's another great post from Father Dwight Longenecker about what's really wrong with the Church and what should be done about it. And the short answer is HOLINESS. And getting HOLY ain't easy.

I Alone Have Escaped To Tell You

I just finished reading the memoirs of the late Professor Ralph McInerny (1929-2010). From the mid-1950s to his retirement in the 21st century, Professor McInerny taught philosophy at Notre Dame. He also found time to write an incredible number of novels. This book, published in 2006 by the University of Notre Dame Press, is called I ALONE HAVE ESCAPED TO TELL YOU: MY LIFE AND PASTIMES.

The Bad Catholic found this to be a very enjoyable read, as well as a profound one. Professor McInerny surveyed the highlights of his life, which include the death of his first born child at age three to the writing of the highly popular Father Dowling mysteries.

Professor McInerny also spoke at great length about the Church and Catholic education and the poor state that both have fallen into. He talks about his early years in the junior and senior seminaries and his higher education after he left the seminary. Even going to graduate school in the late 40's and early 50's, McInerny felt that there was much that was wrong with "modern philosophy." McInerny says "To doubt everything is impossible. . . . No wonder philosophy over the last century has seemed to real from one form of self-assertive subjectivity to another, with its last state being skepticism that there is anything beyond our construals to know anyway. Truth along with objectivity goes out the window."

Professor McInerny felt that the Zeitgeist of the 20th century was very destructive and that the smoke of Satan had definitely entered the Church through "the Spirit of Vatican II." In his chapter on his various extended stays in Europe, McInerny says this: "Of course Europe has changed since our first visit, and not for the better. It is not simply that lovely national currencies have given way to the euro. There is something post-Christian about the continent, England seems neo-pagan to me, and even holy Ireland is taking on the worst traits of modernity. Cardinal Schonborn has said that our cathedrals have become museums and our museums have become churches. That does not begin to capture the change that has occurred."

Professor McInerny attacks the idea that in order to be a first class university, that a school must be totally secular and abandon its religious affiliations in the classroom. "I have portrayed the conflict as one between believer and nonbeliever . . . In Catholic departments of philosophy, one now has tenured colleagues whose training disposes them to take seriously positions which, however implicitly, are in conflict with the faith. And of course, students in our colleges and universities are likely to be taught by professors, whose views, if true, would undermine the student's faith. That is why those of us who have spent long careers in traditional Catholic institutions are involved in a long twilight struggle within the walls. Positions dubiously compatible with the faith are maintained and taught all around us. A young colleague of mine announced in a departmental meeting that, since he regarded Catholicism as false, he had a moral obligation to disabuse his students of their faith. That is where we have come." This is underscored by the recent commencement address controversy at Notre Dame. Professor McInerny loved Notre Dame passionately and was deeply saddened by the forces of secularism and evil at Our Lady's University.

In discussing the decline of the Church, Professor McInerny says that the post-conciliar problem was primarily Catholic intellectuals and left-leaning bishops who fostered changes on the Church which were not intended by the Council. The hot button issue was sexual ethics. According to McInerny, this one issue is the primary fire bringing Pope Paul's "smoke of Satan" into the windows of the Church. Professor McInerny opines that the open rebellion against the teachings of the Church in this one area has opened the door and led to the collapse of moral theology.

This quote is worth reproducing in full:

". . . many of the priests who are currently costing the Church millions upon millions of dollars in court-ordered payments were already priests before the collapse of moral theology. Their training surely would have enabled them to see that adulterous and homosexual activities were morally wrong. How can one explain this? I will provide an anecdote.

Priests of that age, though not only they, were regularly sent to programs allegedly designed to familiarize them with the brave new post-conciliar world. There was such a program at Notre Dame. A St. Paul priest I had known years before, who had been engaged in dedicated and effective pastoral work, came to Notre Dame to be renewed. We had lunch one day in the University Club. After pleasant reminiscing, it became clear that he wanted to talk about what he was undergoing. He leaned across the table and said to me in a whisper, "They told us to forget everything we had been taught in the seminary." Perhaps the one speaking to those priests was indulging in hyperbole, a little rhetorical excess to gain attention. Perhaps. The effect on my old friend was obvious. He was not, I can say, a fast-ball pitcher in the seminary, but he was a good priest. He had walked in the vocation to which he had been called. Now he was being told to forget everything that had defined his life. How could he not feel vertigo? He finished the course and went home and a few years later left the priesthood, under a cloud of accusations of sexual irregularity."

It is no doubt that Ralph McInerny was a remarkable man and led a very rewarding life as a husband, father, teacher, and author. The chapter in the book on writing fiction and detailing how McInerny broke into the publishing business and came to write mystery novels is worth the price of the book by itself.

Professor McInerny does not close his memoirs on a sour note. "Have I become a Cassandra, in despair of the Church and the modern world? Not at all. With William Faulkner in his Nobel Prize address, I am confident that man will prevail, and as for the Church, the gates of hell will not prevail against her. But one would have to be a mindless Pollyanna not to admit that we live in strange and antinomian times."

I ALONE HAVE ESCAPED TO TELL YOU is highly recommended. I have previously reviewed Professor McInerny's book SOME CATHOLIC WRITERS and his novel THE PRIEST.

The Real Problem in the Church

Once again, Father Dwight Longenecker has hit the nail on the head. Here is Father Dwight's article about the real problem plaguing the Church. Be sure and read the underlying editorial in the British Daily Telegraph by Gerald Warner which Father Dwight references. It is awesome as well.

A Few Thoughts on "Jihad Jane"

It strikes me that as our country becomes less Christian, the more we are going to have of people whose families used to be Christian looking for something solid to anchor themselves to.

Our hedonistic secular culture is, ultimately, spiritually bankrupt. People are looking for something greater than themselves to dedicate their lives to. Of course, we who know Christ know the truth and the power of the words, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life, no man comes to Father except through me." Christ is the way. However, the former witnesses of Christ, including some parts of the Holy Catholic Church, have been taken over by the "smoke of Satan" which has brought with it all the evils of the secular culture.

As author Thomas C. Reeves wrote in his 1996 book The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Protestantism: "And so the mainline churches wane - disheartened, aging, increasingly irrelevant, all too often satisfied to serve as a sort of sanctimonious echo of National Public Radio or the left wing of the Democratic Party. For a variety of reasons, many liberal Protestants, especially church leaders, have endorsed a view of reality and a way of life that have helped produce a society that is breaking up. And they have become part of the problem."

The same thing can be said of liberal Catholicism.

We must face facts. As Southern Baptist Convention President R. Albert Mohler has said of liberal protestantism, "As the boundaries between liberal Protestantism and the secular culture vanish, there is little reason for anyone to join one of these churches." Read that quote again and replace the words "liberal Protestantism" with "liberal Catholicism." Same result.

As Christianity becomes more irrelevant and both religious and secular culture become more decadent, more and more people will be foundering for direction in their lives. Unfortunately, I can see how fundamentalist Islam can be attractive. It has a simple theology that even a child can grasp: "There is One God, Allah is His Name, and Mohamed is His Prophet." It has clearly defined rules. And it has enough religious truth in it to be dangerous.

All the great heresies have taken real religious truth and distorted it to one degree or another. Hillare Belloc was right when he wrote that Islam is really a Christian heresy. Jesus is declared to be a great prophet but not God incarnate. Our Lady is declared to be a pure vessel who gave birth to the prophet Jesus while a virgin. For someone lost in the dark pit of our evil culture, and who does not have the Christian gospel preached to them in a way to make them want to take up their cross and follow the Master who leads to the only way to heaven that there is, Islam may seem very attractive. We must never forget that John Walker Lynd, the American arrested fighting for the Taliban, was raised in a family which was nominally Catholic, but was a broken home where his parents had divorced and the father had abandoned the mother for his gay lover. As our culture deteriorates further, brothers and sisters, I fear that we can expect more "boys and girls next door" to become jihadists.

Is This a Catholic Church?

Why is the baby Jesus surrounded by minarets and quotes from the Koran? Can this really be a Catholic Church? This display was apparently in the foyer of the church of a Franciscan community in Switzerland.