The Anglicans' "spiritual Alzheimer's"

Someone please correct me if I'm misreading this, but it sure seems like a Catholic Cardinal just came perilously close to acknowledging that Anglicanism has apostolic validity.

Can he do that? Could Rome?

Rod, would you mind defining 'Modernity'?

And by the way, kudos to Cardinal Ivan Dias for giving such a speech. That took courage. He is a credit to the curia and Pope Benedict.

I suggest (as did GKC) that the whole point is to forget Tradition--invalidating the experience of our predecessors.

Sorry, but I see the big problem here being that a papist "Cardinal" is addressing a gathering of Christ's church. We threw Romans out with James II and the Glorious Revolution. Who the hell was given leave to invite them back? Gilbert Burnet is rolling over in his grave.

Cardinal Dias is a better homiletician than diagnostician.

His purpose though, as Prefect for the Evangelisation of Peoples (formerly known as Propaganda Fide), is to lay the ground work for a return to Rome of traditional Anglicans scandalised by the morbidity which wracks their communion. His address closes with a verse of Newman's "Lead Kindly Light."

But the dementia debilitating the Anglican church is not Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's is of unknown cause. The Anglican dementia is that of the tertiary pox and its ulcerous lesions are the liberal hierarchy. The cause is clear - embrace of the death of Satanic vice rather than the life of traditional Christian virtue. Traditionalists should abandon the corpse before the sepsis spiritually putrefies them as well.

Though the Cardinal misdiagnosed the disease, he offers the only efficacious cure.

Menominee, David J. White, heh - I assume you are both joking a bit, but seriously, would anyone (preferably Rod if he'd deign to reply) please care to tell me what Rod means by Modernity?

I assume it has some sort of technical meaning and isn't what I think of as Modernity, which is stuff like electricity, running water, Constitutional Rights, etc.

Geez people, it's a freaking analogy. It's not going to work at every level. Some of y'all are trying to read way too much into it.

I suggest (as did GKC) that the whole point is to forget Tradition--invalidating the experience of our predecessors.

No, that's not quite it. If you ever been to Japan, or Germany, or Russia, or such places- where the inhumanity of the recent Past is undeniable- the rationale is far more evident. The actions of preceding "traditional"/conservative generations and their mores (as such) and the consequences thereof are too painful and suffocating of life to accept and carry on in those societies.

So, in those societies much of a generation or two choose mostly to separate from tradition to gain a distance from it and break the undue deference and authority given to it. Then, when it is almost powerless, they review and greatly revise it. After all, customs and culture exist to enable the life worth living. Those elements of them that cannot and do not and poison life must be removed.

Surely you agree that "validating the experience of our predecessors" who engaged in human sacrifice, or mass murder, or killed the mentally ill is not what people should do today. So every generation must, if it would be moral, review and efface the inhumanity within its tradition and reject its repetition. In our times and place that is to end crude behaviors and crude thinking of the kinds we call racism, anti-Semitism, religionism, tribalism, and the like.

Jillian,

Modern (as opposed to contemporary) Germany, Japan, and Russia were hardly "traditional" or only "traditional" in their self-conceptions.

Hitler's regime in Germany, Tojo's regime in Japan, and Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union were each of them far more modernist than traditionalist in orientation -- even their visions of tradition were modernist ones.

The case of Japan comes closest to your characterization, but even then not so close.

Germany and Russia especially were laboratories in which every bad (as opposed to good) idea of "modernity" was put into practice with absolutely horrible results.

While the British issued copies of *Palgrave's Golden Treasury of Verse* to their soldiers during World War I, the Germans issued copies of *Thus Spake Zarathustra* by Nietzsche, which ought to tell one something about the modern German self-conception vis-a-vis modernity (and Christianity).

Lenin, Stalin, et al were just successors to a longer line of Russian autocrats, it is true. But the nature of their own autocracy was quite a bit different from those that came before. I'd be interested in what the Orthodox reading this thread might have to say about how well their own tradition fared in the Soviet Union -- not to mention what Jews might have to say.

The paradox here is that modernity itself is a part of tradition by now -- and as such it ought be viewed just as critically as any other part of the past.

When the Germans, the Japanese, the Russians, reject their recent past, they are *rejecting* as much as embracing modernity.

I'm kind of with Jillian 6:41 pm. People use 'tradition' and 'wisdom of the past' as if they were formulas. No folks, you need to t-h-i-n-k about the current society and I would say, how best to implement the real meaning of Christianity instead of unthinkingly following something written in 1600 by people who had very different understandings (and lots of misunderstandings) of the world and the people around them.

HR (Henricus Rex?),

there will be Catholics in this world who will refuse to kiss the red slippers of the whore of Babylon.

Wasn't she one of Saddam's molls?

Oh - you meant that fellow with the popish Pradas! Je m'excuse. Ma faute, ma faute, ma très grande faute!

Christ's Holy Catholic Church will survive in England and all of the world.

Well said. And let us pray to its founder St. Augustine that its day of restoration may come soon.

- Orlandus Caballarius