Mr. Mitsui Hits Another Home Run

At the risk of alienating some of my readers, I cannot help but direct your attention to the most recent posts on the Lion and the Cardinal blog. Here are two gems from them:

From the first post:

Theirs was a patently dishonest invocation of a pre-Constantinian Church. Selectively reading what little history was available, they projected their own desires back in time, reestablishing only those practices coincident with them. Most offensively, they adopted external similarities in practice with the early Christians for motivations that the early Christians would have found utterly blasphemous. Thus the simplicity of the catacomb church - the result of professing an impoverished and brutally persecuted religion that needed to avoid detection - was adopted as an expression of the indolence and stinginess of affluent modern society. Insofar as the modernists and iconoclasts imitated the early Christians at all, they adopted their products, and rejected their principles.

-i.e. (for me at least) Having table instead of an altar and facing the people instead of facing east (Christus - Sol Invictus) is the result of Calvinist liturgical thought infecting the Church and has nothing to do with what they did in the early Church. It's inexcusable. Period. Just go to any other apostolic church and you will find that out very quickly.

From the second post:

This is also different from what is proposed by many contemporary apologists. To read the discourse in Catholic websites and periodicals, the hermeneutic of continuity means pretending that ruptures did not occur, even though they are plainly observable. This is not defending the faith; all it does is make the Church look ridiculous, like something that requires a willful obliviousness and doublethink to believe. The solution advanced by these apologists is essentially that all Catholics think like dialectical philosophers. But a continuity attained by employing an intellectual approach contrary to apostolic principles is no continuity at all; it is just another rupture.

A true recovery of the greatness of Roman Catholicism cannot rely on apologies that hide the ruptures under triumphalist bluster, or under a new ultramontanism that reduces the Catholic religion to a mere expression of magisterial power. For the recovery to succeed, Catholics must be allowed to believe in its necessity.

No comment necessary.

Go ahead. Fire at will.