Important thread with some interesting replies, but I think the most important reply so far might be this one by obscurus:
What an interesting topic!
I was just transcribing a personal letter by Carol Jackson where she touches on the question of rigorism in association with The Grail Movement. In the mid to late 40s, she wrote a letter describing the effects of this rigorism which relied more on human efforts than the grace of God. She made a curious statement that usually this type of rigorism ended up in mediocrity. I'll try to finish transcribing it and post it here.
The Grail is, I think, "Integrist", they have set up a perfect, little Christian community, but isolated -- especially psychologically.... The two errors in the apostolate are to accommodate yourself too much to the world (at the expense of Christianity), or to be Christian in your culture, mores etc. (not holy necessarily), at the price of separating yourself. Anne, having tasted one error, may be surging into the opposite one by reaction.
....There is another thing, that so far it seems as though all the splendor of the Grail ends in mediocrity. This is as it would be expected from a movement which depends too much on humans rather than grace.
This links with another important point made by bigbadtrad:
In conclusion I had this same conversation with my wife but in a different way. She asked how we make our kids into saints if things are so corrupt and the lives of the fathers seem so abstract. I mentioned the analogy of Bishop Sheen’s “modern hairshirts” where he showed in times past we imposed penances on ourselves in a Catholic ethos to help conform to God’s law against internal dangers. In today’s time our neighbor is our hairshirt as it’s an attack from without that constantly bombards us with attacks stronger than impurity but against our faith.
That maybe our way back to the ancients is not in linear form, but in the spirit of joy, happiness, spending more time as a family, playing games that are wholesome, restore chaperones over dating, and to make life the most fun it can be so they see the love of God through the family. Maybe the discipline imposed on us is to be as joyful as we can in a fallen world and not to let melancholy and despair take over us.
I’ve seen Catholicism practiced in 12 countries from Eastern, Novus Ordo, and Traditional perspectives. The only thing I’ve seen as a thread that binds them when I see the children prospering and growing in the faith is love, patience, compassion, modesty, family activities (which I can't stress enough) sobriety, and vigilance against the world into their homes. Maybe it will be through our joy and by extension the analogy of the compassion and mercy of God that gives them the will to fight in a decimated world and to conclude in the words of St. Paul our salvation is founded upon hope. May we be that for others and that might be the greatest interior mortification which exceeds all other penances.
What we strive for as Christians is sanctity. We have to be holy, as our heavenly Father is holy. The danger of any "movement" is that we become too focused and satisfied with its externals rather than its interior spirit, e.g. being satisfied with mere attendance of the Old Mass without regard for practicing the faith and holiness which the Old Mass teaches. Another danger is that we become slothful and proud in being a mere member of the movement, thinking that in recognising the defects in the wider Church it suffices to make one holy or even acceptable to God. Another danger is that the movement becomes a mere faction more preoccupied with polemics against its enemies or detractors rather than with following its own principles.
Satan's primary method for poisoning Catholic Traditionalism is precisely to make it into a mere human faction within the Church fighting for its own rights and privileges, rather than its members being docile to the inspiration of the Holy Ghost for the restoration of the Church as a whole and willing to suffer persecutions and setbacks for the general salvation of souls. What Carol Jackson in obscurus' quotation and what bigbadtrad are counselling is precisely that we should be preoccupied first & foremost with submission to the Holy Ghost and living our lives as Christians, rather than as campaigners for a sect. If we live our life as Christians, relying on the grace of God and not on our own vain human efforts & campaigns, we will have that joy that bigbagtrad describes which will rescue us from the main sins which plague traditionalists - bitterness and scandal. Because traditionalists are so universally and so unjustly persecuted by members of the hierarchy, it is easy for us to develop something of a persecution syndrome where on the one hand we see ourselves as veritable martyrs by the mere fact of beings traditionalists, and on the other hand we become so bitterly offended by the betrayal of our pastors that we see anyone who is not explicitly for us as being against us (e.g. guiltless "Novus Ordoites"), and sin against charity. This is another of Satan's tactics. It would be beneficial to remind ourselves that there are "Novus Ordo Catholics" who are living more traditionally Catholic lives than many so-called traditionalists, whose traditionalism is vain.
That is what we must avoid: vain and superficial traditionalism. We are not an art movement concerned with the preservation of a beautiful ritual or baroque craft. We are here to keep the faith whole and entire, and to practice it.
Revival of traditional Catholic doctrine and practice in faith & morals - orthodoxy AND orthopraxis - should be the supreme end of Catholic Traditionalism. The Old Mass is our rallying banner and our most effective means for accomplishing this end, but Satan has worked to attract false brethren to that same banner and to make us proud and satisfied with the banner itself over and above what it signifies and what it points to: an integral & holy Catholic life. The primary reason that this is being frustrated is the upper hierarchy's betrayal of the faith, with the consequent lack of Catholic leadership. The shepherd is struck, the flock is scattered. When our superiors do not maintain their charity for us, it becomes ten times harder for us to maintain charity among ourselves. Traditionalists priests are affected by this problem perhaps more than the laity, because they are hampered more by modernist prelates than even we are; so it's easy for them to lose charity and for that to spill over into their parishes too. However, despite this failure of charity in the Church as a whole with its consequences for Catholic Traditionalism in particular, it does not make living a Catholic life impossible even if it makes it more difficult. We simply have to rely more and more on the Holy Spirit's guidance and in maintaining charity the best we can among ourselves, with our neighbours, and with our enemies (especially those in the Church).
What Greg points to as the failure of "Jansenist" trads to keep themselves or their children practicing the faith is due, I suspect, to them focusing more on the exterior trappings of traditionalism rather than the spirit of Catholicism in the first place, which is essentially one of rejoicing in God and the redemption He has worked for us in Christ. This is why the early posts in the thread decrying the triumph of the Jesuits and virtually lamenting the defeat of the actual Jansenists is a very grievous error: the Jansenists portrayed themselves as reviving the rigour of ancient Catholicism, but in reality their dark and sinister spirit was a Satanic inversion of the true spirit of the faith. The old saying about the Jansenists is that they were "pure as angels, and proud as devils." This is the devil's intention for Catholic Traditionalism as well: he would be very glad to see us pure as angels, if it also meant we were proud as devils (incidentally I heard Fr. Ripperger say in an online recording that trads generally struggle with purity, and that God allows it to punish their pride). Jesuits may have gone too far with moral laxism, I don't know; but they certainly didn't go too far in opposing the diabolical movement of Jansenism - and in tirelessly promoting its antidote given to the Church by God, devotion to the Sacred Heart - which over 150 years after it had been condemned by the Church, still had such an overall influence that a saint like St. Thérèse of Lisieux was being obstructed against receiving Holy Communion by her post-Jansenist influenced confessor. Those of you who feel sympathy with Jansenism ought to reflect that they often used to brag about not receiving Holy Communion for years due to their self-professed unworthiness and depravity - it was a demented sect.
Pon de Replay points to an abandonment of Catholic morals in the Church, even before Vatican II. His assertion that Early Christianity is dead and not alive in the Catholic Church because of moral laxity is due to gross exaggeration. First of all, decadence in the Church does not imply that the Church has apostatised. There were men of a similar spirit to Pon de Replay's in the Middle Ages who left the Church because they were scandalised by the decadent lives of many of her prelates at the time. St. Paul talks about degenerate behaviour for example in the Church of Corinth; while Pon de Replay extolls the moral rigour of the Church Fathers, he neglects to mention (from what I've read) that the same Church Fathers were decrying the widespread moral laxity among the Christians of their times, i.e. these Fathers were extraordinary examples of Christian virtue in their times, so one can hardly take their preaching as evidence that the Church was unequivocally more clean morally in their times than the Church has been in modern times. I'm not an historian of any sort but what I've heard doesn't seem to imply that the Church Fathers presided over a pristine Church; and for that matter, the apostles themselves in the New Testament complain of the errors and deviations in the Church already present. Now, one can undoubtedly say that there has been a collapse of Catholic morals in modern times, and especially after the modernisation project of Vatican II: but what could one expect when the Church has been so viciously persecuted, openly and surreptitiously, high and low, from within and from without, in modern times? We are talking about a persecution that has not been matched since the days of the pagan Roman emperors. And yet, despite all that, we still have our St. Thérèse of Lisieux, St. Maximilien Kolbe, and St. Padre Pio. So for Pon de Replay to imply that the Church has apostatised and Christianity no longer exists is frankly insulting. The Church still teaches Catholic morals and we still have saints practicing them. That we have so many traitors in the hierarchy and such a confused and fractured laity as a result has not prevented this, as the Church has the protection of the Holy Spirit. I had an interesting conversation with Pon de Replay a while back on this forum, where he talked about his loss of faith. He admitted early in this thread that he had tried to practice it rigorously but then gave up. I don't know the man and I can only speculate (and I hope not unjustly), but perhaps his trying to practice the faith in an over-rigorous fashion is what lead to his loss of faith. Whether he was holding himself or others to too a high a standard and ending up despairing as a result - I don't know. But the dangers of a too strict moral rigourism must be very strongly warned against, as with moral laxism.
Many have commented on the fact that we are swamped by a modern culture awash with indecency and occasion of sin. We're not in Jerusalem anymore. I think Catholics in the modern world ought to be comparing themselves to the Jews in Babylonian exile: "Upon the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept: when we remembered Sion" / "How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people! how is the mistress of the Gentiles become as a widow: the princes of provinces made tributary! Weeping she hath wept in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: there is none to comfort her among all them that were dear to her: all her friends have despised her, and are become her enemies." The problem is that the core idea of the pastoral council Vatican II is to pretend not that we are in Neo-Babylon but that we are in the early stages of New Jerusalem; to pretend that the modern world somehow wasn't established in direct opposition to God and the Church, to divine and natural law. Anyhow, seeing as we truly are surrounded by so much filth we have to avoid two errors: 1. rolling in the filth ourselves, 2. expecting each of us to live the austere lives of monks, even those not called to a monastic life. "I am come that they may have life, and may have it more abundantly." We cannot adopt the sinful mores of our pagan contemporaries, but that does not mean that we must abandon any and all recreation or comfort; instead, we should try to live as we would if we were living in a more fully Christian society like in the Middle Ages, and adopt recreation and comfort that wholesome and consonant with the faith.
