It would seem so, if some of the higher prelates have anything to do with it. More than a few of them, at the beginning of Lent, urged us to imitate our “Muslim brothers” as they undergo their Ramadan fasts.
Us imitate them? The Catholic Church had been exercising the rigorous disciplines of Lent for 500 years before Muhammad arose from the sands of Arabia. Have these good prelates forgotten the fasts of the apostles? Or the emergence of Christian men and women braving the wildernesses of Arabia and Egypt to give birth to the great eremitical and coenobitic Orders? Have St. Anthony, the Desert Fathers, or St. Simeon Stylites slipped their minds? Monasticism as it is known emerged from those centuries with the great stress upon taming the beast in man so that he becomes even more than angel.
Perhaps their lapse in memory is due to their predecessors’ devaluation of the whole apparatus of atonement for sin, reparation for past offenses, and the singular value of mortification and fast? Pope Montini, after all, was driven by the need to soften the signature self-abnegations of the Church’s millennial tradition as empty exercises of a benighted past. Thus, the obligatory Friday abstinence, the three-hour fast before the reception of Holy Communion, and many other worthy disciplines that had been emblematic of a robust Catholic existence were cast aside.
Whether Pope Paul VI intended it or not, the “approved” theological cognoscenti of the time were allowed to spin all kinds of romanticized tales to buttress this fatal mistake. One of them touted a Promethean trope, “man come of age.” Recognize that these ranks of “enlightened” thinkers were willing avatars of the decadent ’60s, drinking deeply at the poisoned springs of that antinomian age. Ringing in their callow ears was that ubiquitous refrain, the “age of Aquarius,” so beloved by that deluded generation. For those blessed not to live through those chimerical times, it was that zodiac figure, Aquarius, who embodied a trancelike abandonment to a fanciful life of wanton self-absorption and unchecked sybaritic pursuit.
All too willing, theologians readily surrendered to this siren call, more sophomoric than theological. They traveled hither and yon preaching the message of a liberated self, pursuing the spirit of satiety. All past codes, traditions, and ordered disciplines of the Church’s tradition were mocked, then proscribed as shackling the movements of the “spirit.” Convents emptied, seminaries were drained (or transformed), and priests abandoned their sacred vocation pleading obedience to a higher call of fidelity to self.
Most bishops of that time surrendered; others, who recognized The Lie, surrendered, mistakenly concluding that resistance was futile, rather like a flea struggling to halt a hurricane. And the sacred walls of Mother Church suffered fatal cracks.
Then there was the conceit “man come of age.” This emerged from the decomposing carcass of modern philosophy. The Modern Man of the ’60s had long outgrown the strictures and moral code that were the narcotic of past ages. A New Illumination had arrived, and the Catholic bien pensant treated it like catnip.
Montini had opened the door, and it was now the obligation of these New Catholic Thinkers to remove the hinges. They screeched that the Church before 1965 (hmmm, what infallible marker could that be?), treated its members like children, with imperatives like obedience to moral law, ancient penances, and even time-honored forms of piety.
Abandoning them all was the law of the day. Beneath that mushroom cloud was Old Lent. With the firm hand of their newly won position, they displayed an unrelenting exercise of embarrasing masochism.
Pondering the wounds of the Savior? Nothing more than an unhealthy fixation.
