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.
I apologize, John Lamb, for insulting the faith. That was not my intention. Just to clarify on two points: first, it is not my contention that Christianity no longer exists. Clearly it does. At this point, however, I am simply in no position to say in which denomination it wholly subsists. Taking the Early Church, I would say that the Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have
more or less its doctrine, and that the Russian Old Believers and Mennonites have
more or less its practice. (I am stressing the "more or less" with italics because I have been misconstrued here as implying that the Old Believers are the true Christians. That is not my claim. I am only speaking generally). In terms of the Church apostatizing, all I am saying is that
if maintaining those early disciplines was necessary for the Church not to defect, then my conclusion would be that the Church has defected. Obviously, traditional Catholics do not believe that those practices were necessary for the faith to continue or for the Church to be indefectable. (As Greg points out, though, "indefectable" can be conveniently redefined at every failure).
Secondly, I would only want to repeat what I've said elsewhere on certain threads: I did not lapse from my so-called "Jansenist rigorist" practices because I found them too difficult or got burnt out on them. Almost the opposite, in fact: I think I actually had a greater mental clarity and focus during those days. I almost wish I could get that back. Sometimes when I listen to the kinds of music I was permitting myself back then (like Bach's cello suites or John Dowland's
Lachrimae), I get somewhat nostalgic for it (and by "it," I can only suggest something along the lines of "contemplation"). I can still listen to the music, of course, but I can't recover the benefits that came from the disciplines. What eventually drove me out of it, though, was the cognitive dissonance that came from the nagging suspicion that I was creating my own personal religion. I didn't have the confidence in myself to believe that I was on the right track and that the majority of traditional Catholics were on the wrong one (presumably leading to a ... "fiery end"). And this goes back to the problem of epistemology: I was on a
sola scriptura path of sorts, where my
scriptura consisted mostly of the Early Church Fathers and Meister Eckhart and Thomas à Kempis, spiced with some Stoics and Neoplatonists. I was ignoring the fact that the Catholic Church no longer demanded the rigors of the Early Church. Eventually I came to realize that I had become my own pope in my own little spiritual cocoon, and that's not the Catholic Church, which is a community of believers.
So for me, the problem with "Jansenism" (or whatever anyone wants to call it) isn't that it's difficult. It
is difficult, of course, but once you clear the highest hurdles it has a beneficial and calming effect. The only thing that perturbs the calm is if you have an intellectual tendency to consider whether you really belong to a living religion or whether you've recreated one out of the past. That's why I've said: the Jesuits won and the Jansenists lost. That battle is over and the Jeromes are the Japanese holdouts. Look, if the Catholic religion was the religion of a former user on this forum named AustrianOrthodoxCatholic, I would be a Catholic. The sad truth, however, is that that person was simply an unparalleled genius in creating the best possible Christian patchwork from the best variety of sources from the past. It's like reanimating a corpse. Even if it's beautiful, it's still the undead; it's still a zombie. I'm just trying to face the facts here. Last week I discovered a millennial band called The Blue Angel Lounge that sounds better the higher you turn the volume, which I never would have discovered if I was still a so-called "Jansenist." Meanwhile Greg is waiting on an apocalyptic phantasmagoria of fireballs raining down from the sky on Catholic bishops and homosexuals (or maybe that's a redundancy). Someone else is probably waiting for Pope Francis to grant Adriana Lima an annulment. I don't know. It's all pretty wild. To each their own.
