Simon Magus, "the first gnostic".
Dante deposited him head first, in a pit, in the eighth circle of Hell.
Fr Tim Finigan has a post concerning the Year of Faith and reading what the texts of Vatican II actually say. Things that some people have managed to intimate that the documents didn't say, such as:
"The Pope is infallible, that we should give religious assent of mind and will to his teaching even when he is not infallible, that Latin should be retained as the language of the Church, that “both sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of loyalty and reverence”, that Catholics “may not undertake methods of birth control which are found blameworthy by the teaching authority of the Church in its unfolding of the divine law."
Fr Tim thinks it possible that these "true believers" - those who really understood the hidden meaning of the Council hidden from the rest of us - may now be a little afraid of people actually reading the texts for themselves and and getting quite a shock when they discover that they don't call for many of the things done in name or "spirit" of Vatican II. (Show me the text where it tells us to get rid of altar rails - it doesn't exist).
It struck me that such a mode of operation of those claiming to have special knowledge that can't be immediately seen from the texts in the public domain are very much like the early Gnostic heretics, condemned as far back as the New Testament (St Paul’s letters to the Corinthians have much to say regarding false teachers (2 Co 11:4), “spiritualists” (1 Co 2:14-15; 15:44-46] and their gnosis or knowledge.) Those who are enlightened by the "spirit of the Council" (spiritualists?) who have moved it on from what it actually said and the rest of us are just not enlightened enough to know that. The Catholic Encyclopedia describes Gosticism as:
Gnostics were "people who Knew", and their knowledge at once constituted them a superior class of beings, whose present and future status was essentially different from that of those who, for whatever reason, did not know.
2 comments:
Last weeks copy of the Catholic Times contained a letter from Mgr Loftus. He made the point that a reading of the documents of V2 in isolation from the post conciliar documents would not give a true picture of the intent of the Council Fathers. His position appears to be that only by studying what came afterwards can the lay person gain a true understanding of this Council. He gave the example of "the almost exclusive use of the vernacular in the liturgy" as not being found in Sacrosanctum Concillium but in what followed. Given the fact that there are hundreds of post conciliar documents as opposed to the sixteen Council documents one could be forgiven for thinking that this is an attempt by a well known advocate of even more disastrous changes to stop the laity finding out just what Pope John and the Council Fathers intended. One could also be forgiven for thinking that an appropriate signature tune for the good Mgr would be the old Roy Orbinson hit "Running Scared"
"the documents didn't say, such as:"
I've made a list of items in the Novus Ordo which are not mentioned or in any way referred to in Sacrosanctum Concilium.
I got to 14 in the Mass itself and 2 items closely related - then I got fed up!
I'm sure a few more will occur.
Oh, I've just remembered another from yesterday, the priest leaving the sanctuary (and the Sacred Species unattended), and charging around being nice to everyone.
Roll, on the Reform of the Reform!
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