The Problem We Face

I was just reading Ben and thinking about Steve's hopes and aspirations and those of my fellow Restorationists. There are a lot of discontented souls out there. You don't have to read the Catholic trad bloggers to see it. A glance at the daily papers will suffice. No one seems to know what is going on, least of all the people who purport to be in charge. Many simply assume that this state of mental dissolution and befuddled philosophical palaver is normal.

One hears often, "Oh, when has it ever been different?" Thus speaks a modern and lately educated person. As has been said many times, the revolutionaries knew that they could not win without destroying the past; the victims had to never suspect that they had been tampered with. In Ingsoc, Orwell showed us that it is not the generation of the revolution, but their children, who are the completely indoctrinated ones. They have known nothing else. History is not taught and young people are cut off from their elders and cannot ask what life was like in the Before Time.

I think I have said that the problem we face in this age as Catholics is that we must all make it up for ourselves from day to day. It is why we have the different "movements" in the Church. We have 'liberal' apostates, feminist theology, Trads and trads, neo-catholics, Americanists, Marian apparition and end times people, yodeling "charismatics" and all manner of crackpottery and no one has the faintest idea how to simply live quietly as a Catholic. The Church has, for whatever reason, abandoned its role and can no longer give a coherent structure to sustain our daily religious lives.

Ben says, "A religious posture which requires to be shored up with ideological constructions and historical contingencies in order to preserve the appearance of solidity cannot be sustainted indefinitely."

...a Benedictine father asserted it in relation to the good effect of the Old Rite on the celebration of the New. This is fine as it relates to externals – but what about the texts, and that ominous shift in the lex orandi that it doesn’t require a Dr Lauren Pristas to detect? Asserted oontinuity is meaningless here. It springs from the same desperation that leads conservatives to insist, whenever an official statement includes something obviously at odds with reality, "Oh well, of course he has to say that..."

Catholics are, by definition, not supposed to have to make it up. Truth is outside ourselves, outside our preferences, our philosophical or ideological constructions. We are, therefore, forced to do something that goes essentially against the general thrust of following that external truth.

Now, I'm all for such projects as Steve's and I am, obviously, much more on with the "hermeneutic of reconstruction" or restoration than that of "continuity," all respect due to Fr. Tim. But such a reconstruction strikes me, in the larger sense of our societies, as flatly impossible. We can do whatever we can individually, and for our families to live in as true a way as possible, but the re-ordering of society? It requires a set of assumptions that have been burned out of the great majority of people.

The problem of how to live, as integrated Catholics, as wholly truthful and truth-seeking people, is something that remains unsolved. I don't know many SSPX laymen, but I have talked with a few of their priests and the honest ones will tell you that their solution is also a lousy one. There are no good solutions. The normal Catholic life, the day to day life lived by our ancestors for 1965 years, is destroyed and cannot be brought back, at least for the indefinite future. We are, therefore, refugees for life. We have to learn to live in exile.