Liberal Catholics

[Aloysius]

marxist paradigms can be accurate. as Chesterton says, the critic is usually right about what is wrong, but rarely right about what is right.

everything you said is quite accurate too... but why was the average joe catholic so susceptible to selling out? because there was a systemized attempt to detach people from the old values so that they would have unfettered licence to fulfill their appetites, their appetites were appealed to; sexual appetites included. the free-love hippies played right into the hands of the market, because by getting people to follow their appetites without the old value systems, they made people more vulnerable to become manipulated by the market.

[Socrates]

[quote name='Aloysius' post='1412263' date='Oct 31 2007, 10:15 PM']marxist paradigms can be accurate. as Chesterton says, the critic is usually right about what is wrong, but rarely right about what is right.

everything you said is quite accurate too... but why was the average joe catholic so susceptible to selling out? because there was a systemized attempt to detach people from the old values so that they would have unfettered licence to fulfill their appetites, their appetites were appealed to; sexual appetites included. the free-love hippies played right into the hands of the market, because by getting people to follow their appetites without the old value systems, they made people more vulnerable to become manipulated by the market.[/quote]
Marxist paradigms are are mostly pure b.s.
I disagree with this paradigm because it sees morality as basically being decided by economic forces, which is opposite to the truth. "The market" is morally neutral. It is human beings that make moral choices and can use the market for good or ill. True, if people reject traditional morality, the market can meet the demand by openly producing immoral materials, just as if people are virtuous, there would not be a demand for the immoral, and there would be demand for, say, Bibles and books on holiness instead.

While I think you have a point in that marketeers and merchants exploit immoral impulses, I do not think they can be primarily held responsible for engineering the sexual revolution nor Catholic dissent in the first place.
Remember, we are discussing the children of the '50s here. 1950s-60s t.v. was not the cesspool of sexual immorality we know today. Programming largely upheld what would become known as "traditional values." You're talking about shows like "I Love Lucy," "Andy Griffith," "Leave it to Beaver," "Gunsmoke," etc.
I don't think the media of that era can really be blamed for destroying Catholic faith and morality.
(True, there was some suggestive stuff in movies, etc., but nothing that can really be blamed for singlehandedly causing a sea change in morals among the Catholic faithful.)
The media would change after the sexual rev hit critical mass, and many children of the revolution took over the media. After this, of course, the media would play a large part in perpetuating the moral decline (ala MTV, etc.)

So basically, I don't think there is much basis for idea of the liberalization of Catholic morals being a plot by Evil Capitalists (sitting together in smoke-filled room chomping big stogies, no doubt) for the purpose of maximizing profits.
The market exploited our moral decline, rather than having engineered it.

And "Average Joe Catholic" is susceptible to "selling out" because he is lukewarm, slothful, and poorly catechized and confused by the heretical claims of his priest who insists the Catholic Church has radically changed her teachings after Vatican II.

[NewReformation]

And now, a word from a Baptist on this issue:

I attended a Private Baptist High School. There are probably a couple different reasons why people become liberals after that kind of education.

1)As stated earlier, the theological/Biblical education is a joke.
2)Possibly, the person is not a believer to begin with.
3)They don't understand what they've been taught, or come to the wrong conclusion.

[infinitelord1]

[quote name='catholicinsd' post='1411775' date='Oct 30 2007, 10:32 PM']I've been thinking the vast majority of the liberal democratics Catholics were educated in parochial schools in the era prior the the Second Vatican Council. Yet they have broken with Holy Mother Church on nearly every issue. Why do you think this is?[/quote]

I went to catholic schools from kindergarten to the 12th grade. I never went to a public school. Trust me...politics has nothing to do with religion.

[Justin86]

[quote name='Aloysius' post='1411834' date='Oct 31 2007, 02:14 PM']A massive sociological shift in Western culture. Basically, the media spread the idea most effectively.. the purpose, sociologically, was to give more power to the market. If you can vilify all the old values, you give people free licence to fulfil their appetites as much as they want.

It's really not that difficult: they convinced people to throw off their upbringing by appealing to their appetites. We've been exporting that all over the world with our media systems, we've even begun to strongly undermine traditional islamic culture in the middle east, which is why their extremists hate us so much.[/quote]
Yes, it's all Bush's fault. Only one man can lead us out of our crisis of faith in the Catholic Church. Ron Paul 08!

If anyone [i]really[/i] wants to know why the faith among us Catholics in the West started declining before Vatican II it would be because the modernists went underground after Pius X condemnation (yes, the modernist heresy dates back [i]prior[/i] to Vatican II), and spread doubt by raising questions about the great supernatural events in salvation history. Questions raised on the Holy Eucharist, the Resurrection, and the Virgin Birth are a few examples of this. This further lead to liturgical abuse, most namely the Tridentine Liturgy being said as if it were some sort of NASCAR event to see who could say it the fastest. Eventually, this combined effort made Sunday Mass merely a formality instead of a devotion for most Catholics and in more modern times is what inspired people to do away with the formality all together.

Modernism--the real problem of our times--did not just pop out of nowhere in 1960's American and European universities. It is the logical conclusion of the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolt that took Satan centuries of work before he could get mainstream society to accept. Therefore no, it is not an political-economic problem, and thus can not be solved by simply adopting a political-economic solution. Our crisis will only be solved by holy priests actively engaging families, and well-populated Catholic families raising their sons and daughters in the Church.

[NewReformation]

Technically, post-modernism is what's in vogue now.

[Justin86]

Not according to how the Catholic Church defines "modernism".

[Aloysius]

Justin, everything you said is true as well. How do you peg me as a "blame everything on Bush" guy? I totally supported him in the last two elections, you know.

That does not detract from the fact that the market has been systematically attacking the traditional values in order to make us more susceptible to our appetites. It's not a big conspiracy or anything, just a sociological fact: our society values our market above everything else (market:modern society::religion:medieval society) and a tremendous amount of what has happened in recent times has been to shift our society into one that is more beneficial to the market. What's beneficial to the market? Unrestricted free appetite which is not bound by any value system.

[Aloysius]

The point was made about the sexual revolution not starting in the 60's. I agree. It started with the Bohemian Revolution in the Graduate Schools of the 1930's, by the 60's, all the professors in undergraduate schools had come up through the Bohemian Revolution and were more than happy to spread that into the undergraduate schools, thereby widely dispersing to the general population.

Here in the St. Vincent Anthropology Department, we like to call Margaret Mead the "grandmother of the sexual revolution"

Anyway, like I said, the way it was able to spread through much of society was because the media mass marketed the ideas, and they did so by the driving force of the market. Believe it or not, the amount of sexual license going on in the 60's with "free-love" hippies was not nearly as much, statistically, as is going on now; nor was it nearly as wide-spread. The only way that stuff was able to infiltrate these families that had raised their kids in strict Catholic Schools was for the media to spread it around, was for the market to make it all available in order to exploit people more easily; people were tempted primarily at the level of their appetites. There wasn't a whole generation of people who were primarily indoctrinated with Catholic principals and then intellectually convinced that modernist principals were the way to go; they were tempted away by the unrestricted appetites that the society was pushing on them.

Marxist principals are total bunk when they reduce everything to just economics; but they are not inaccurate at analyzing certain economic sociological trends. Like Chesterton and I said, the critic is most often right about what is wrong, but rarely right about what is right. Marx was not a fool in analyzing economic trends in capitalism, he was a fool in proposing a system which reduced everything to them and proposing his own even more fool-hearted system. Why did I choose to focus on the economic side of things in this thread? I don't know, I didn't even think it would cause too much of a ruckus... just throwing out a major factor in the mechanism through which a whole generation of Catholic children were undermined... and what that really does come down to is the temptation of appetites, all the rationalizations for that generation came after the fact, they didn't abandon their Catholic upbringing on idealogical principals, they adopted the idealogical principals which supported the lifestyle that they had already given into.

[Justin86]

[quote name='Aloysius' post='1413172' date='Nov 3 2007, 12:10 AM']Justin, everything you said is true as well. How do you peg me as a "blame everything on Bush" guy? I totally supported him in the last two elections, you know.[/quote]
Since it sounds like you see our faith crisis as the result of media brainwashing, I'd assume the solution would be the result of whatever economic system you're advocating. People like this usually blame Bush for everything.

[quote]That does not detract from the fact that the market has been systematically attacking the traditional values in order to make us more susceptible to our appetites. It's not a big conspiracy or anything, just a sociological fact: our society values our market above everything else (market:modern society::religion:medieval society) and a tremendous amount of what has happened in recent times has been to shift our society into one that is more beneficial to the market. What's beneficial to the market? Unrestricted free appetite which is not bound by any value system.[/quote]
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Can big business impose an unrestricted free appetite on a society, or does society first adopt the desire for it?

In my opinion it is the latter. It's not good business to try to impose a particular idea on people, have them get all offended, and then boycott your product. Business ultimately exists to make money, and nothing more. Whatever society wants, they will sell. These days people what sex and violence. So business gives them sex and violence. What you are describing is nothing more than a symptom of modernism. None of this changes the moral neutrality of the markets, which is my point.

Also, in terms of what the saints valued, finding the best economic system was very low on the list. While we are as Catholics called to live in this world we are still called to be separate from it as well, and ultimately economics is a silly, irrelevant affair that has no eternal consequence. It just wasn't that important to them. To me, this would seem to indicate that they saw the markets as mostly harmless to a society. If they really could cause such damage wouldn't God send His saints to be more aggressive in warning us of it?

[Justin86]

[quote name='Aloysius' post='1413185' date='Nov 3 2007, 01:04 AM']The point was made about the sexual revolution not starting in the 60's. I agree. It started with the Bohemian Revolution in the Graduate Schools of the 1930's, by the 60's, all the professors in undergraduate schools had come up through the Bohemian Revolution and were more than happy to spread that into the undergraduate schools, thereby widely dispersing to the general population.

Here in the St. Vincent Anthropology Department, we like to call Margaret Mead the "grandmother of the sexual revolution"

Anyway, like I said, the way it was able to spread through much of society was because the media mass marketed the ideas, and they did so by the driving force of the market. Believe it or not, the amount of sexual license going on in the 60's with "free-love" hippies was not nearly as much, statistically, as is going on now; nor was it nearly as wide-spread. The only way that stuff was able to infiltrate these families that had raised their kids in strict Catholic Schools was for the media to spread it around, was for the market to make it all available in order to exploit people more easily; people were tempted primarily at the level of their appetites. There wasn't a whole generation of people who were primarily indoctrinated with Catholic principals and then intellectually convinced that modernist principals were the way to go; they were tempted away by the unrestricted appetites that the society was pushing on them.

Marxist principals are total bunk when they reduce everything to just economics; but they are not inaccurate at analyzing certain economic sociological trends. Like Chesterton and I said, the critic is most often right about what is wrong, but rarely right about what is right. Marx was not a fool in analyzing economic trends in capitalism, he was a fool in proposing a system which reduced everything to them and proposing his own even more fool-hearted system. Why did I choose to focus on the economic side of things in this thread? I don't know, I didn't even think it would cause too much of a ruckus... just throwing out a major factor in the mechanism through which a whole generation of Catholic children were undermined... and what that really does come down to is the temptation of appetites, all the rationalizations for that generation came after the fact, they didn't abandon their Catholic upbringing on idealogical principals, they adopted the idealogical principals which supported the lifestyle that they had already given into.[/quote]
The only reason business did that was because they were convinced it would be popular, and would sell. Unfortunately they were correct.

[kenrockthefirst]

[quote name='Winchester' post='1412069' date='Oct 31 2007, 03:02 PM']dUSt, let me field this.

Since spelling and grammar are part of a good message, a message board is a great place to "call people out" on their grammar. Especally if the person is question is claiming in a grammatically hideous sentence that certain people are "ignorant." In this case, not only is a nice grammatical lesson imparted, but one's attention is called to a delicious irony.

The edit button was not utilized. It is irrelevant.

People have been checking spelling and grammar for years without a program to do it for them. And there is a spellcheck feature on Phatmass. Grammar is more difficult for a computer to find and correct, and properly used poor grammar is always acceptable. The your and you're conflict is a pox upon our language. It must be assaulted with vigor.[/quote]
Obviously, the correct use of a given language helps one to communicate, which is ostensibly the point, [i]inter alia[/i], of message boards.

HOWEVER, given the informal nature of message boards, it's easy to make a simple mistake, i.e. "your" vs. "you're." These aren't "peer-reviewed" posts. In this case, there was no confusion as to the meaning of the sentence in question, and calling S][N out on it was mean-spirited and contributed nothing to the discussion, IMHO.

[Aloysius]

perhaps you did not notice: I said the whole society went in that direction, it was a sociological shift by which the market took the place of paramount importance in our society. the mass-media-market spread it, undermining the traditional values by appealing to the appetites. what came first? doesn't matter, they basically came about simultaneously, it's the way cultures change and evolve and devolve. but you can see it more clearly when our culture begins to clash with various traditional cultures throughout the world; it's just that we first did it to ourselves.

the market did indeed spread the unrestricted part of the appetite; of course the appetite already existed, it was the market that exploited the appetite; the market attempted to undermine traditional values in order to do so. that's a tremendous force for why people threw off the old value system; and you'd be pretty hard pressed to convince me that the large majority of people actually made intellectual decisions about the old value system; it was generally made in order to justify joining in on the big party society at large was having.

oh, and don't try to typologize me, you'll find I won't fit any of your preconceived paradigms

Leo XIII was very concerned with a proper economic system, as have most popes of recent memory (some of which were saints). I personally subscribe to economic Thomism, which I see as a purer type of "capitalism" which allows more people to be "capitalists/entrepreneurs", but Chesterton and Belloc coined the term "distributivism" which is modernly called "distributism" and is highly misunderstood. but it won't solve these problems; nor will Ron Paul. What is needed is a re-culturation of the traditional value system, but that traditional value system with invariably hurt the materialist market-driven culture

oh, and FYI, the entire bulk of the Social Doctrine of the Church are amassed against the idea that markets are "morally neutral"

I'd recommend the recent Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church:
[url="http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/justpeace/documents/rc_pc_justpeace_doc_20060526_compendio-dott-soc_en.html"]http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontific...ott-soc_en.html[/url]

Or the classic Encyclical of Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum:
[url="http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum_en.html"]http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii...novarum_en.html[/url]

[Sanvean]

[quote name='NewReformation' post='1413162' date='Nov 2 2007, 10:31 AM']Technically, post-modernism is what's in vogue now.[/quote]

Post-modernism? Pfft. That's [i]sooo[/i] passé: these days all the academic hipsters are into [i]post-post modernism.[/i]

[Socrates]

[quote name='Aloysius' post='1413185' date='Nov 2 2007, 10:04 AM']The point was made about the sexual revolution not starting in the 60's. I agree. It started with the Bohemian Revolution in the Graduate Schools of the 1930's, by the 60's, all the professors in undergraduate schools had come up through the Bohemian Revolution and were more than happy to spread that into the undergraduate schools, thereby widely dispersing to the general population.

Here in the St. Vincent Anthropology Department, we like to call Margaret Mead the "grandmother of the sexual revolution"

Anyway, like I said, the way it was able to spread through much of society was because the media mass marketed the ideas, and they did so by the driving force of the market. Believe it or not, the amount of sexual license going on in the 60's with "free-love" hippies was not nearly as much, statistically, as is going on now; nor was it nearly as wide-spread. The only way that stuff was able to infiltrate these families that had raised their kids in strict Catholic Schools was for the media to spread it around, was for the market to make it all available in order to exploit people more easily; people were tempted primarily at the level of their appetites. There wasn't a whole generation of people who were primarily indoctrinated with Catholic principals and then intellectually convinced that modernist principals were the way to go; they were tempted away by the unrestricted appetites that the society was pushing on them.

Marxist principals are total bunk when they reduce everything to just economics; but they are not inaccurate at analyzing certain economic sociological trends. Like Chesterton and I said, the critic is most often right about what is wrong, but rarely right about what is right. Marx was not a fool in analyzing economic trends in capitalism, he was a fool in proposing a system which reduced everything to them and proposing his own even more fool-hearted system. Why did I choose to focus on the economic side of things in this thread? I don't know, I didn't even think it would cause too much of a ruckus... just throwing out a major factor in the mechanism through which a whole generation of Catholic children were undermined... and what that really does come down to is the temptation of appetites, all the rationalizations for that generation came after the fact, they didn't abandon their Catholic upbringing on idealogical principals, they adopted the idealogical principals which supported the lifestyle that they had already given into.[/quote]
The problem was (whether this was what you intended or not), your post in question appeared to be claiming that the problem of "liberal Catholicism" was caused by a plot by business men to increase profits. I find that idea absurd and unfounded.
I said I agreed that the media would later help spread the decline in morals (few would deny that), however that would not explain the origin of the problem, especially as the original question in the thread concerned the generation of people now in their 60s and 70s (Kerry, Kennedy, etc.).

[Aloysius]

I re-read my post, and really, I have no idea what you're talking about. it was a sociological shift... you're the only one here talking about conspiracies.

the questtion was why did an entire generation of Catholics who were raised in the strict Catholic environment betray their upbringing? the answer is that the market manipulated their appetites and they altered their beleif system in order to justify unrestricted appetites. the average Joe Raised Strictly Catholic that ended up as a Joe Liberal Catholic was not a member of the modernists who went underground after the Syllabus of Errors; he was tempted into the culture which was changing because our culture valued the market above all else; tempted by his appetites, and only then did he change his ideological system in order to justify that.

there are many forces in history that were the origin of the problem; but their success came because of the market and the media.

[Winchester]

[quote name='kenrockthefirst' post='1413233' date='Nov 2 2007, 12:18 PM']Obviously, the correct use of a given language helps one to communicate, which is ostensibly the point, [i]inter alia[/i], of message boards.

HOWEVER, given the informal nature of message boards, it's easy to make a simple mistake, i.e. "your" vs. "you're." These aren't "peer-reviewed" posts. In this case, there was no confusion as to the meaning of the sentence in question, and calling S][N out on it was mean-spirited and contributed nothing to the discussion, IMHO.[/quote]
It is always easy to make such mistakes. It is no easier to make them simply because you're typing for a post as opposed to an article. The differnce, as always, is care.

You're and is more than a simple typo. It's a hideous grammatical tumor, and must be extracted. And judging from sin's typical fare, it's not a mere transposition. DusT was helping out, and my evaluation of his "spirit" is every bit as valid as yours.

[kenrockthefirst]

[quote name='Winchester' post='1414812' date='Nov 5 2007, 10:00 AM']It is always easy to make such mistakes. It is no easier to make them simply because you're typing for a post as opposed to an article. The differnce, as always, is care.

You're and is more than a simple typo. It's a hideous grammatical tumor, and must be extracted. And judging from sin's typical fare, it's not a mere transposition. DusT was helping out, and my evaluation of his "spirit" is every bit as valid as yours.[/quote]
But look, in this post you made two errors: you misspelled "difference" as "differnce," and you started your second paragraph, "You're and is..." when presumably you meant to say, "You're and your is..." Of course, in that case it should have been, "You're and your [i]are[/i]..."

Again, message boards are an extremely informal means of communication, and errors of this nature are easy to make and should be expected.

As to dUSt's intent, we'll have to agree to differ.

[Winchester]

[quote name='kenrockthefirst' post='1414826' date='Nov 5 2007, 10:10 AM']But look, in this post you made two errors: you misspelled "difference" as "differnce," and you started your second paragraph, "You're and is..." when presumably you meant to say, "You're and your is..." Of course, in that case it should have been, "You're and your [i]are[/i]..."

Again, message boards are an extremely informal means of communication, and errors of this nature are easy to make and should be expected.

As to dUSt's intent, we'll have to agree to differ.[/quote]I was careless, and so I made careless errors. I typed and posted without properly editing. It's not easier to do that in this medium, it's just it's common to not police oneself.

The sentence would have been "is" because it was to have read: "You're and your transposition is not..." and so on. But I did not edit, I wrote and posted. However, the constant misuse of words involving commas indicates that sin has no idea how to use them properly. And when someone is going to criticize another, one should be ready to be picked at. It's simply part of the game. Taking up for such a humorless person as sin only reinforces his notion that he is above reproach.

I know dUsT personally, and he is an extremely sober person and takes the language very seriously. One might say he lacks humor in this area. He is an avid reader of William Safire's weeken column "On Language." I assure you his intent was purely educational. A frontal lobe injury suffered during a BMX racing accident has left him quite unable to render taunting in the printed form. In person, he is very playful, but with written things, he is notably grim. To watch him write is to study the depths of human sobriety.

[cmotherofpirl]

NO