Unlike France, the United States has a strong current of Puritan/Fundamentalist in its national blood. That may be the reason that the Catholic Church in the US is in (slightly) better shape than the one in France.
One stat tells all you need to know: only 1.7% of French Catholics attend Mass "regularly." And "regularly" doesn't mean weekly; it means monthly OR 'more often.'
One point seven percent.
...Cuchet, in fact, lays most of the blame at the feet of the French
clergy. They failed, he says, in their duty to preach about sin, to
preach properly on the work of a well-formed conscience, and to preach
about the importance of confession and penance. Thus, the usefulness of
confession became less obvious, as did the connection between confession
and Holy Communion. In a word, Communion was trivialized and confession
nearly non-existent.
Cuchet also claims that the French clergy stopped preaching about the
Four Last Things — death, judgment, Heaven, and Hell — “as if they had
stopped believing in it themselves.” French priests, he says, in effect
“paved the way to Heaven.” They gave the distinct impression that the
path was no longer narrow and steep, but was now a wide, well-travelled
thoroughfare. In a sense, wonders Cuchet, doesn’t that essentially mean
the end of salvation? If one does not believe in sin, why the need for
salvation? If there’s no need for salvation, why bother with Jesus
Christ? If we needn’t bother with Jesus the Savior, why go to Mass? Why
belong to the Church? Why identify as Christian? The rhetorical answer
to those questions leads back to the astounding statistic that only 1.7
percent of French Catholics attend Mass even once a month.
...
Yah, well, maybe that new funeral Mass celebrating the Resurrection should be tossed out and the black vestments and Dies Irae should be brought back. And memorized.
Meantime, thank that Calvinist neighbor you have. His ancestors here prolly kept you Catholic (in their own way, of course.)
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It may have been initiated by Vat II but 1968 and the criticism and outright rejection of Humanae Vitae sealed the fate of faithful observance. The ‘primacy of conscience’ became the norm. Never mind that the qualifier ‘rightly-formed conscience’ was seldom mentioned.
Bishops instructed their priests not to preach on HV. And if everything came down to you deciding for yourself what was right and wrong, well then there was no need for confession.
And if we’re all going to Heaven (“Mass of the Resurrection”) then there must be no Hell – despite Our Lord’s warnings – so eat, drink and never mind praying for the Holy Souls in Purgatory as it must no longer exist either!
There will be a price to pay – for all of us.
Pp. Francis' nouvelle theologie includes some blatherdrather about 'learning from experience of the Faithful' which is code for primacy of conscience. Not by co-incidence, that was one of the positions adopted by the Jesuits in about 1965 or so.
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