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Name:
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MartiniMan
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Subject:
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Slight Detour
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Date:
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5/15/2012 10:04:04 AM
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Its kind of complex but here's my executive summary. First of all we have to remember that Vatican II occurred at a time of great upheaval and change in our society. We went from the dominance of the greatest generation to the self absorption of the baby boomers. The purpose of Vatican II was to evaluate the norms of the Catholic Church in light of the tremendous amount of change in the world, including the penetration of secular humanism in all aspects of society. In short, the Church was asking the question, "Is the way we do things in the Catholic Church preventing us from sharing the good news of Christ to the world?". In particular, it focused on the proper role of the consecrated (priests, nuns, brothers, etc.) and the laity and to provide a means for greater participation by the latter (i.e., make them understand we are all called to holiness and to be saints, not just the religious). Nowhere and at no time in Vatican II did the Church change any of the basic faith and moral teachings that have been in place for 2,000 years.
Unfortunately, far too many marginal and dissenting Catholics misused Vatican II to try to make the Church what they wanted it to be rather than what Christ made it to be. So we had an infusion of homosexuals to the priesthood, the seminaries were infused with dissenting Catholics, the consecrated (Nuns and Brothers) became confused and embraced all sorts of harmful practices, Catholic schools began to deemphasize the cathecism so Catholics were poorly formed, Catholic universities became even less Catholic, etc. In essence the Church in the U.S. went through a generation of bad ideas and a general misinterpretation of what was intended by Vatican II.
Then along comes Pope John Paul the Great, who was heavily involved in Vatican II, and who tried to right some of the wrongs caused by the dissent, upheaval, misinterpretation (either out of ignorance or malevolence) and downright evil intentions. He spent most of his pontificate trying to make us understand the true nature of human sexuality which was by far the biggest challenge being faced by Catholics, especially ones trying to be faithful to orthodoxy. Only in the last decade has the Church tried to rid the seminary system of all the errors, especially the homosexuality which has caused so much harm to impacted young people as well as the Church itself.
Despite all that, we still have far too many Catholics that are cultural (i.e., my parents and grandparents were Catholic, I was baptized Catholic, etc.) but either don't have the proper formation or simply dissent from many of the teachings because some are hard. For those people, ignoring an issue of great concern to society like the redefinition of marriage is not that big a deal. The reason they think that way is they have no real concept of why God ordained us in a complementary way, why marriage is a sacrament where two people don't make promises to each other but are in fact each making promises to God, why openness to life is not just about procreation and so on. They simply don't understand and therefore easily fall into error. And God gave us free will to make these kind of choices.
Sorry for the tome, but books have been written on this topic and I have barely scratched the surface.
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