Cardinal Pell and Cardinal Burke Endorse Radical Traditionalists

Cardinals George Pell and Raymond Burke

Cardinal George Pell and Cardinal Raymond Burke are among two of the most well known and influential cardinals in the Catholic Church.  Cardinal Pell, former archbishop of Sydney, Australia, is currently the Prefect of the newly created Secretariat for the Economy.  Cardinal Raymond Burke is a canon lawyer and former archbishop of LaCrosse Wisconsin and St. Louis, Missouri and former head of the Apostolic Signatura, the highest Court in the Catholic Church.  He is currently patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

Cardinal Pell and Cardinal Burke joined forces last year with three other cardinals when they wrote a book defending against Cardinal Walter Kasper's call for communion to the divorced and remarried.  

It seems Cardinal Pell and Cardinal Burke have once again joined forces. Both have written letters in support of the 23rd Annual Summer Symposium of the Roman Forum. Below are the letters:

The "Dr. Rao" to whom Cardinal Pell's letter is directed is Dr. John Rao, an associate professor of history at St. John's College in Queens, New York. He is also head of The Roman Forum founded in 1968 by Professor Dietrich von Hildebrand, and whose headquarters is now at Dr. Rao's office in Greenwich Village. I have personally met Dr. Rao and attended several of his lectures. He is no slouch. He earned a D.Phil. in Modern European History from Oxford University, and has done extensive writing and speaking.

Dr. Rao is a prime example of why it is so easy to get sucked into the message of radical traditionalism.  Dr. Rao is no kook.  He is a highly educated and highly intelligent individual.  He speaks to the real issues of our time.  And he seems to give real answers to the problems.  

Except that he doesn't.

Dr. John Rao
Credit:  catholicidentityconference.com

Catholics Leaving The Church and The Need for Vatican II: Part 2

Credit:  salesianity.blogspot.com

In the first part of this post [HERE], I wrote about the crisis in the Catholic Church here in the West in which so many have left the Church in the last 50 years.   No one can point to any one reason for this crisis.  Western society in general has become spiritually and morally depraved, and it is inevitable that the Church has been infected to one degree or another.  But as I pointed out in my post, we need to look at the pre-conciliar Church and how and what was taught to the laity.  I showed that on the local level, the pre-concilar Church taught about  the evil of sin, but not enough about the love and mercy of God.

As a result, many of us were taught an unhealthy fear of a God who must be appeased before he struck us down for stepping out of line in even the slightest way. We never came to really know the great loving and merciful God who created us and poured His Life out on the Cross to save us from death. I was one of those who left in that time, and as I wrote, I left because the Church had become a burden to me. I had come to see God as a bogeyman out to get me. At age 14 I rejected a life of fear as I had come to know it and, like millions of others, that meant rejecting the Catholic Church

It is vital that the Church teach about sin and the consequences thereof, both physical and spiritual. But to discuss sin WITHOUT discussing the love and mercy of God is actually dangerous. This can lead to fundamentalist thinking in which obedience to rules and law is an end in itself, and the love of God and of neighbor is forgotten.

It was from this kind of thinking that much abuse originated in the Catholic Church. In the pre-concilar Church era  it was common to hear about abusive nuns and priests who would slap a child for the slightest, often unintentional infraction. This would at times escalate, and then we had the following as described in an article from TIME Magazine [HERE], regarding the abuse in Irish Catholic schools in the 1950's:

James Quinn and his classmates called it the blackjack — five layers and 18 in. (46 cm) of leather, studded with coins and other metal objects. The priests at the school Quinn attended in rural Ireland in the 1950s each carried a blackjack and used it, along with bamboo rods and other objects, to dole out almost daily beatings to hundreds of children. "Whatever class you went to, you got a beating from whoever was in charge," says Quinn, now 70. "But knowing what other people went through, I know I was one of the lucky ones."