'Denying the known truth' leads to absurdity, spiritual and mental blindness
When Novus Ordo apologists sink to new levels of desperation, should traditional Catholics argue against them, or leave them to the absurdity?
Novus Ordo Watch has just released an edition of its shorter podcasts, “Tradcast Express,” on the following matter:
[Two apologists] claim, in all seriousness, that the Great Apostasy predicted in Scripture as a sign of the end times that will prepare the world to receive the Antichrist, is not the loss of Faith engendered in countless souls by the beliefs and practices of the Vatican II Church, but rather, is the traditionalist repudiation of the Vatican II religion!
This claim is ably dismantled in the podcast, and we’d encourage readers to go and listen.
NOW rightly points out that traditionalists (both sedevacantists, and those sedeplenists who firmly reject the Vatican II revolution - see here for more on that) are a tiny minority in comparison to the great masse of those who have accepted the Novus Ordo system and the Conciliar-Synodal Church.
But in addition, we could point out a third, gigantic group in this equation: those who actually left the Church following Vatican II. Our friend John Lane pointed out several years ago that the Conciliar Church is huge because the Catholic Church was even more huge before the Council.
Amidst this group, we could call to mind all the priests, religious and seminarians who abandoned their vocations and faith immediately following the Council – as well as the horrible attrition ever since.
We could also call to mind all those good Catholics who, like their fictional representative Edmund Rougham in Judith’s Marriage, were scandalised by the radical changes to their previously unchangeable religion, concluded that none of it really mattered, and lost the faith. (NB: commissions earned on this link.)
Rougham was given the grace to come back. Most did not.
(We could also call to mind all those who would have been swept along into the Church with the general wave of converts – if the revolution were not to have happened).
However, let’s now consider another approach to claims like the one under discussion.
Let’s consider the limitations of arguments and reason in the face of such absurdity – and the alternatives that lie before us.
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