What is this mythical time period that "evangelical Catholics" want to take us back to? In the case of the Counter Reformation, what is with the utter loathing of this period? From baroque, to fiddlebacks, to triumphalism. There is some utter disdain for the Counter Reformation. Do we have to all don tunics to mass and hold the consecration over a limestone rock?
It is the make believe return to a "small group oriented" church. One free of hierarchy and Dogma and anything that smacks of institutional Church. It is a ghost that is used to fool the masses into thinking this is how it was supposed to be all along before all those pesky Saints and theologians throughhout our Church history Gave us the rich Tradition and History that is the Catholic Church. As H.H. Pope Benedict puts it:
"“Let me go one step further. From today’s crisis, a Church will emerge tomorrow that will have lost a great deal. She will be small and, to a large extent, will have to start from the beginning. She will no longer be able to fill many of the buildings created in her period of great splendor. Because of the smaller number of her followers, she will lose many of her privileges in society. Contrary to what has happened until now, she will present herself much more as a community of volunteers ....
"As a small community, she will demand much more from the initiative of each of her members and she will certainly also acknowledge new forms of ministry and will raise up to the priesthood proven Christians who have other jobs. In many smaller communities, respectively in social groups with some affinity, the normal care of souls will take place in this way ....
"There will be an interiorized Church, which neither takes advantage of its political mandate nor flirts with the left or the right. This will be achieved with effort because the process of crystallization and clarification will demand great exertion. It will make her poor and a Church of the little people .... All this will require time. The process will be slow and painful ....
“From this interiorized and simplified Church, a great force will pour out. The men of an [artificially] planned world will feel unspeakably isolated. When God will seem to have totally disappeared for them, they will experience a complete and horrible poverty. And then they will discover the small community of those who believe as something entirely new ....
"Her [the Church’s] real crisis has hardly started. We still have to go through some great storms .... Certainly she will never again be the dominant force in society to the degree that she was until recently.”" Fr. J. Ratzinger 1969.
It is a strange new ideology wrapped up in a sham of an idea that less is more. That somehow all that the Church has achieved, All Her Saints and great theologians were somehow wrong all along and now, just in the last 100 or so years, have they gotten it right. Sort of the same arguement that many protestant leaders use to denounce the Catholic Church as a whole. I find it all very unsettling and scary. Yet it continues unabated. Save for a small few who still retain and hold on to Tradition and the true teachings of the Church. The believers of this false theology are doing there utmost to see this thing to it's fruition. And are doing a damn good job of it too.
