THE VATICAN ll WAKE

'POP' CATHOLICISM

So-called 'Pop' culture has proceeded for more than half a century to disenfranchise aspiration, eliminate what it regarded as 'elitism' or excellence, and reduce all hope and striving to a lowest common denominator under the guise of a virtue: equivalence and equality in all things: (rather than a virtue, more a disease disguised as a 'cure'), and fired with the invidious and socially political cause of excessive liberalism.
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I am minded of the comment of Socrates that at first glance, such an order, of any collective, or society, where there is great diversity, and everyone does as he thinks and pleases, is alluring and appealing. Certainly it satisfies the desires of the immature and self-serving mind to self-ingratiate, self-satisfy, and reduce all that it cannot understand, or anticipate, to a level of banality, requiring no labour of close scrutiny.

This spirit of self-serving without serious or truly considered thought has permeated every aspect of life during this downward twist of human self-direction and management, as injected by the one-eyed behavioural science pioneers of such psychology as that of the Utilitarians, and others like Skinner and Gilbert Ryle: a science designed to manipulate human individuals into a state of mindless auto-monism, triggering rewards only when conforming, by pressing the required buttons, like the prototype rats in a laboratory box. One is constantly reminded of this manipulation whenever confronted by official forms to complete, allowing no personal comment or remark or full explanation, demanding only a ticking of the right boxes to ensure one's inclusivity, and otherwise ignored.

This materialistic approach to the experience of living strengthens exponentially by its constant and repeated application, (it is that clever), taking its provenance from an over-reliance on scientific explanation as being so reliably comprehensive as to explain everything, beginning with the foundations of scientific principle as inherent to physics, from Newton.

The problem with this is that science does not explain everything, as in the case of  universals, such as beauty, truth, or justice: things of some mystery that affect all of us in everyday life. Is not justice served when 'pardon' is sought for the innocent who have been long since executed, or our intuitive knowing that it is categorically wrong for us to 'torture children for fun'. We cannot live or achieve flourishing lives with 'physics' alone, or according to standards of correctness only as it may expect of us, but require for this abstractions, such as those above, grounded in the principle of metaphysics.

When the innocent Pope John 23rd took the helm in directing the Catholic Church toward the self-inflicting blow of Vatican ll, he was hopelessly unaware of all the above, and indirectly, (no doubt unwillingly), offered his support to the materialist cause of pop culture and popularism in general. 'Holiness' in any reverential self-effacing way of spirit, was to be dismantled and discarded. As long as the priest was 'partying' with his people, what should it matter he has his back to God and the altar: an altar to which centuries of artists had laboured to focus. The host, taken in the hand, seemed no longer to be worthy of any special note. Everything reduced to the mundane and now similar experience of attending a 'chip shop', something 'run of the mill', and not the least bit 'extraordinary' in any way. No wonder mass attendance is at an all-time low, with  recruits for Holy Orders in any numbers decimated, Convents demolished, for lack of inhabitants, and the Christian Brothers order, for the education of boys, dis-endowed as of relevance or value, and crushed out of existence.

Added to that is the question of the Lord's promised guidance of the Church, when John 23rd can be seen as so indistinguishable from a clearly holy and astute devoted Pope like John Paul, to be made a saint alongside him! Surely this is sufficient to rob 'papal infallibility' of any vestige of credibility, (only adopted anyway in the first Vatican Council of 1870).. The sole escape remaining open lies in the old Celtic Christian monastic spirit of reverence, by private prayer and works, overtaken and 'hoodwinked' as any formally approved way of approaching God, in the cause of absorption by ecclesiasticism at the Synod of Whitby in 664. Hope cannot be extinguished, but political cause, even if within the church, is episodic.