Thursday, December 17, 2015

The Destruction of the Church in the United States Long Prepared at Benedictine Monastery

Saint John's Abbey, Heresy in Stone
Edit: the Remnant is a newspaper produced fortnightly which has, "For nearly fifty years we have been fighting in defence of the traditions of the Catholic Church and the proclamation of the Kingship of Christ. In print or online, The Remnant calls a spade a spade no matter who is using it to bury God."  Despite being so long in the trenches, they only seem to have first come across nearby St. John's Abbey as the source of trouble just this year. They seemed horrified by the recent national news item which recounted one of the many sexual predators of Collegeville who claimed to have had 200 sexual partners, but still managed to wax nostalgic about the Matt family visits with one of the founders of the so-called "Liturgical Renewal," Father Virgil Michel, and asked incredibly, "what happened?"

Alas, the Remnant doesn't see the connection between the hideous architecture of the campus, the evil of her monks,  Michel, Vatican II and the aftermath.  It's not a controversial statement to say that Father Virgil Michel was one of the forerunners of Vatican II.

We could go so far as to say that he even laid out the praxis in so far as he put his erroneous liturgical notions ad experimentum, using the local laity of Sterns County and the environs as guinea pigs.

Eponymous Flower doesn't normally link to Diocesan newspapers, particularly ones of poor quality like the Catholic Spirit, but the following article really does accurately describe many of the actors which prepared the Archdiocese and indeed, the United States, for Vatican II.   Some of the actors in the article are more guilty than others, some have misgivings, others ascribe to Vatican II things it did not call for or address, but they were all in one way or another, advocates, whether they lived to see the results or not, of a disastrous situation for the Church and the world.
[Catholic Spirit] If Catholics in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis were well prepared to implement directives of the Second Vatican Council in the areas of liturgy, social justice and lay involvement, there are reasons: the Benedictines of St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Msgr. John A. Ryan and a German immigrant lay woman named Therese Mueller.
“To understand the Church in the Twin Cities, you’ve go to look at the abbey in Collegeville,” said Father Charles Lachowitzer, the archdiocese’s moderator of the curia. He and others credited Benedictine Father Virgil Michel (1890–1938) as founder of the Liturgical Movement in the United States and fellow Benedictine Father Godfrey Diekmann for picking up the banner of the movement upon Father Michel’s death.
By founding of “Orate Fratres” magazine in 1926, sponsoring the first national Liturgical Day in 1929, and experimenting with an innovative Mass in which the assembly responded to the presider using English instead of Latin, the Benedictines were the forerunners of today’s postcounciliar Mass, “stirring the pot before it was to be served,” said Mary Kaye Medinger, a religious educator.
“Because there were plenty of Benedictine priests serving in the archdiocese, that Benedictine legacy was well-planted,” added Father Michael O’Connell, a  longtime priest of the archdiocese.
Father Diekmann’s contribution included leadership in the drafting and implementation of the “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy” as a peritus during the Second Vatican Council, and he was the founder and member of the International Committee on English in the Liturgy and the Consilium for Implementing the Liturgical Reforms of Vatican II, as well as a consultor to the American Bishops Committee on the Liturgy. He died in 2002.
Bishop Pates Endorses Aberrosexual Activist James Pennington
on May 14 2007

Early adopters
Father Lachowitzer noted that “Vatican II incorporates changes that were already happening.” The council ended 50 year ago this month.
Father O’Connell, retired pastor of the Minneapolis parishes Ascension and the Basilica of St. Mary, and a former moderator of the curia, recalled an example that illustrated the point.
“In 1949, the pastor at St. Thomas the Apostle in south Minneapolis, Bishop James Byrne, held a children’s Mass in the basement of the church,” Father O’Connell said. “The altar was placed in the center of what was typically the parish hall. I think because of that there was greater participation in the responses the people said — because there was an accent on ‘we’re together,’ not what one individual did to pray.”
And the principle that Father Michel taught — that worship and justice are married — played into Msgr. Ryan’s work in the social justice area.
Msgr. Ryan (1869–1945) taught at the St. Paul Seminary and later at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He preached that the Church had a proper role to play in public affairs. As a close advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he is credited with advocating for New Deal policies that advanced the common good: the living wage, the 40-hour work week, public housing, social security, unemployment insurance and women’s rights in the work place.
Father O’Connell, who was ordained in 1967, pointed out that the pillars of Catholic social teaching were in the encyclicals “Rerum Novarum” and “Quadragesimo Anno” which were written well before Vatican II. [He is one of the most active exponents for gender ideology in the Archdiocese.]
“They were precursors of the documents of the U.S. Bishops on war and peace and the economy when Archbishop John Roach was the president of the U.S. Catholic Conference” from 1980-1983, Father O’Connell said, and the implementation of the social justice activism after the council began more easily because priests in the archdiocese were steeped in justice teachings.
“In 1959-60 at Nazareth Hall [then the archdiocesan minor seminary on what is now the campus of University of Northwestern in St. Paul] [Like several other Catholic properties and institutions in the Archdiocese it was sold to Protestants for a song], I had fabulous social justice teaching, mainly from Monsignor [James] Cecka,” he said. “Father Edward Flavahan taught English literature, and those social justice values were bubbling up through literature.”
He named teachers Herb Slusser [the father of Father Michael Slusser], Father William Bullock [later a bishop] and Father Thomas Conroy. “They all understood the inseparable bond between worship and justice, and that we had to care for the marginalized and the poor,” he said.
Official commission
Vatican II set the stage for a social justice mandate, and among the first initiatives that evolved locally from the council in that area was the Urban Affairs Commission of the archdiocese in 1968, led by then-Father Ed Flahavan, which took on issues of racism, labor strife, low-income housing.

Archbishop Niederauer

Locally, laymen John Carr and Ron Krietemeyer rose up to become social justice leaders on the national level, following in the footsteps of priest leaders like Father Edward Greszkowiak and Msgr. Francis Gilligan. Carr went on to  direct the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development for more than 20 years.
Faith formation minister Mark Croteau said that Vatican II had “a strong evangelical tone,” expressed plainly as, “’You lay people have got to do the work to bring Christ to the market.’ What Vatican II was calling us to be — to use the word of John Paul II — solidarity with the other human beings on the planet. We are Christ’s voice. We are Christ’s hands.”
Croteau said the Church had that teaching before Vatican II with the words spoken by the priest at the end of the pre-counciliar liturgy — “Ita Missa Est” — in Croteau’s words: “What are you still doing here? Get out there!”
Church of the home
Mary Kay Medinger, founding director of Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality on the campus of St. Catherine University in St. Paul, told of a married couple who also primed the pump for the lay involvement that blossomed with Vatican II.
German immigrants Therese and Franz Mueller taught at St. Catherine and St. Thomas respectively, she philosophy and he economics. [Her daughter picked up where she left off.]



Therese wrote for the Liturgical Movement’s magazine, “Orate Fratres” and published a book aimed at helping parents inculturate [sic] their children with knowledge of Scripture and the traditions of the faith, “Our Children’s Year of Grace.”

Dominican Nun
First published first in 1943, in the midst of World War II, it was reprinted in four more editions and updated by the couple’s daughter, Gertrude, after Vatican II.
“Therese taught that Scripture didn’t belong only Sunday in the church but also in the home and in the fields,” Medinger said.
Medinger described the local Church that is the archdiocese as “complex and diverse,” “a faithful, well-educated laity,” “great liturgical diversity,” “with a passion for social justice this archdiocese has been known for.”
The fact that Therese Mueller taught at St. Catherine with the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet is not a coincidence. [She might not approve of what eventually happened, but the language she uses is very familiar. Yet in her own mind and in that of her contemporaries, she was a liturgical pioneer.  Never a good thing.]
“The CSJs have grown up within that local Church,” Medinger said, so liturgical reform, social justice and lay involvement were “woven into that fiber.” [Today, it is very difficult to discern anything Catholic about Saint Catherine's.  It's as though a bomb had destroyed all of the Catholics and evidence of Catholicism there, including the accouterments of the chapel, as if all of those telltale signs of the Catholic Faith had been swept away.]
That some in the archdiocese were not only ready for the changes that Vatican II might bring about but were chomping at the bit is illustrated by this anecdote Father Lachowitzer told about one of his predecessors as pastor of Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Maplewood:
“In 1964, Msgr. Raymond Rutkowski was on the phone to St. John’s to find out the latest church designs that were being proposed at the council. That’s why there is no Communion rail in the church at Presentation — they didn’t have to take it out because they never built one.”
And the sense of hope that surrounded the council is illustrated by the fact that it saved at least one vocation.
“Vatican II kept me in the seminary,” Father O’Connell said. “In 1963 I was a senior in college. It was a year for very, very strident discernment. I wasn’t sure I was going to stay. There were aspects of the Church I grew up in that were rigid, clerical, unbending, primitive. I wasn’t going to stick around to be part of that. [One more reason to bemoan it.]
“We weren’t allowed to read newspapers because there might be women’s underwear ads in them, but someone got a hold of the New York Times with the stories that Xavier Rynne was writing from the Vatican, and we read some of the probable and possible changes. That’s what fired me up. That’s what kept me in.”

Photo Liturgical Dance, Adriana Dominicans.

27 comments:

Anonymous said...

I believe that right before Vatican II and it's liturgical disaster which St. John's prepared the way for so well, there were nearly 300 monks at Saint John's, and it was perhaps one of the largest....if nost largest...Benedictine monastery of monks in the world at that time. Today, there are THANK GOD!! barely 110 very elderly monks left in Collegeville, with an average age pushing 80. A good 75% of them are retired.
Another once great monastery, Thomas Merton's Trappist Gethsemani Abbey also became a place of radical dissent and liturgical depravity. Merton himself was a radical in the early post-Vatican II days. He died, electrocuted in an accident in Thailand, while participating in a Benedictine and Buddhist dialog session, which had the full support of Pope Paul VI's Vatican. Only God knows the radical agenda he would have pushed had be lived.
But like Saint John's, Gethsemani sowed the seeds of it's own destruction after Vatican II, as did the entire Trappist Order with departure from liturgical and disciplinary traditions of the Trappist Order. Gethsemani now has less than 30 monks in residence (before Vatican II in the 1950's they had 275 !!) Two Trappist monasteries for men have closed in the last two years...Holy Trinity Abbey in Utah, and the Abbey in Ava (I don't know what State).
It always makes me angry, and later I laugh, when I head these liberal vocations coordinators and talking heads at CARA in Genrgetown and other places who say that the huge surge of vocations the USA experienced ffom 1920-1958 was a a glitch, an abnormal occurrence. They claim the desert of vocations the Church has now...especially in Europe and the USA is normal. LOL!!!
The fact is that in those years, we had Popes who were either Saints (Pius XII), or Popes who were saintly (all the rest).Not the filth we have now....or the very questionable Popes before him (and I don't mean Benedict XVIexceptions of JP II and Benedict XVI, who was exceptional considering the Church he found himself in !!) John Paul II gets a passing grade too, Benedict XVI, A-....John Paul II, C+ !!!!

Damian Malliapalli

Liam Ronan said...

Why take a swipe at The Remnant? Your point is well-taken without suggesting an orthodox and astute Catholic paper is lacking for not intuiting your own perception of the matter:

" Alas, the Remnant doesn't see the connection between the hideous architecture of the campus, the evil of her monks, Michel, Vatican II and the aftermath."

Ain't we got problems enough as it is? Peace!

Anonymous said...

“Vatican II kept me in the seminary,” Father O’Connell said. “In 1963 I was a senior in college. It was a year for very, very strident discernment. I wasn’t sure I was going to stay. There were aspects of the Church I grew up in that were rigid, clerical, unbending, primitive. I wasn’t going to stick around to be part of that. We weren’t allowed to read newspapers because there might be women’s underwear ads in them,"

But the filthy faggot had no problem sticking around to interview child victims of priest rape for his faggot 'master' Roach--no problem covering it up so it could happen again and again and again:

"document dated Jan. 17, 1989, and labeled “strictly confidential” chronicles Wajda’s alleged grooming and abuse of one boy starting in 1982. The Rev. Michael O’Connell interviewed Wajda’s victim in the fall of 1988 and addressed a letter about his findings to former Archbishop John Roach and sent copies to the Rev. Kevin McDonough and St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson, then an auxiliary bishop in the Twin Cities.

“I found [the boy] to be a very credible and normal young man,” O’Connell wrote. During a second interview with O’Connell in 1989, the boy “dissolved into tears and anger” and divulged more details that he had been too ashamed to reveal before.

According to O’Connell’s letter: The boy said Wajda began grooming him in 1982 by inviting him to play racquetball. Wajda started giving the boy $40 to $50 a week, creating a “naive dependency on the boy’s part.”

Here's another one:
he Rev. Michael O'Connell, who served at the chancery, met with a woman who claimed to have been raped by LaVan when she was a teenager. The woman, whose name was redacted from the documents, told Carlson that the rape left her with physical injuries that later required her to have a hysterectomy.

O'Connell was alarmed.

"Archbishop, it would seem to me, judging what we have been finding out over the past 1.5 years about personality and behavioral disorders similar to Father LaVan's, that we are dealing with a potentially very dangerous situation," O'Connell wrote in a memo to Roach on May 24, 1988.

By September 1988, the archdiocese was aware of two allegations of child sexual abuse by LaVan, according to a memo by O'Connell.

One woman said the abuse took place when she was 16, and that LaVan took her to a rectory basement and raped her. "I have no doubt that she will take every action on her behalf to ensure that Father LaVan does not perpetrate this sort of behavior against anyone else," O'Connell wrote.

Another woman said LaVan abused her as a child at St. Michael Catholic Church in St. Paul.

The Rev. Kevin McDonough, who served as chancellor at the time, interviewed LaVan. McDonough claimed under oath this year that he couldn't recall whether he knew about the allegations of child sexual abuse.
http://www.mprnews.org/story/2014/08/11/documents-lavan

http://www.andersonadvocates.com/documents/James%20Murphy%20Timeline.pdf

http://www.mprnews.org/story/2014/09/05/richard-jeub-documents

a May 5, 1988, letter to a Minneapolis counselor to whom Thurner was being referred, then-vicar general Michael O'Connell said that the archdiocese became aware in 1982 of a Minnetonka Police Department investigation involving the teen boy.

"Father Thurner was called in by Archbishop (John) Roach and asked whether or not this was true, and he indicated to Archbishop Roach that it was true," the letter said. "He also pointed out the fact that the boy's parents suspected that there may have been some inappropriate sexual contact, but that they did not in fact know that, and as far as we know, still do not know that."
http://www.twincities.com/localnews/ci_24410025/ex-west-st-paul-priest-archdiocese-named-abuse
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/catholic-church/betrayed-by-silence/ch2/

Tancred said...

What, the Remnant's not above criticism, is it?

Considering its alleged mission, I'd say that it's been ignoring or missing one of the biggest problems in the Church right in its own back yard for at least 50 years.

When I read the article linked to, my immediate thought was, "you just figured this out?"

Anonymous said...

Fr. Paul Marx suffered greatly at their hands and because he was a N.O. Priest he was ignored by the Trad establishment. This notorius den was exposed by Fr. Marx 40 years ago perhaps even sooner if the Remnant bothered to listen to him or to your many exposes on it. Well done Tancred.

Anonymous said...

“with a passion for social justice this archdiocese has been known for.”

I don't know how those who prevent justice from being done to those who stole the peace of children and families by raping them can have any peace!

This constant rant re: justice, peace and mercy for cold blooded thieves, baby murderers, and sick and elderly murderers who then sell the body parts is so shocking -- they are just vicious criminals and I am talking about Pope Francis and anyone who follows him (Nazis or Obama followers could be less culpable).

Anonymous said...

Justice is a variant of the truth. Perhaps The Remnant has not been vocal about St. John's Abbey, but has it occurred to anyone that that may be because they have almost single-handedly been defending the Faith and the Mass for decades with firmness and clarity? Why must those on the side of tradition be always attacking each other. The secret to the almost total triumph of the Left, with all its depravity and malice, is their understanding of solidarity. We, the followers of the Truth, on the other hand, know zero about it. Yes, The Remnant is certainly not above criticism, but justice demands that we look at all the good it does, and has done for decades, before criticizing. It is very bad for the morale of those struggling to survive in the present desperate social and ecclesiastical climate. Quirkiness and hyper-individualism have been our undoing---and we have no one to blame but ourselves. RC

Liam Ronan said...

I stand by the first sentence of my reply, and I am not so untrained as to presuppose that any faithful Catholic, much less any faithful Catholic publication, can cover the length and breadth of the battlefields in this spiritual WW III.

Camels and motes and which atrocity to spotlight are sideshows. Peace.

Tancred said...

I guess a place which houses one of the largest concentrations of sexual predators in the world merits some attention, just as a public service if nothing else, especially if that place is the originating point of many of the errors and a uses of theology in the last 80-90 years.

If I didn't know better, is think they were obfuscating those facts.

Anonymous said...

I have been a long-term subscriber to The Remnant and can verify that they have indeed had articles about the nest of heretics and deviants at St. John's Abbey over the years. I do not know how many, but there have been articles denouncing that nest of vipers. Melinda

Tancred said...

I'm not criticizing his or the Remnant's faithfulness as a Catholic, but his judgement.

The editors of Catholic Spirit might be Catholic, I have my doubts, but it is a deplorable publication and probably shouldn't even be produced.

Tancred said...

I love and knew Father Marx. Like his mentor, Virgil Michel he was a great man with many talents, but his loyalty to Vatican II and the Litirgical Reform were unfortunate, and his efforts for the unborn more than made up for it inmho.

Tancred said...

I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

Liam Ronan said...

I understand, Tancred.

In fairness though isn't it somewhat inconsistent to downplay the likely impact of the papal petition presently being circulated publicly by The Remnant as reported in one of your previous articles and then subsequently to infer that if The Remnant had been more attentive to the St. John's Abbey mess that attention by The Remnant, unlike its papal petition, would have had a consequential impact?

In any event I wont let a day pass without reading your Blog or The Remnant's. Great stuff and always meat and wine for the hungry Catholic laymen. Cheers.

Anonymous said...

The Remnant appears to be defending itself and patting itself on the back in the comments here (just like Rorate always). I was glad to see The Remnant article on St. John's Abbey, but per usual it contained the hat tip to itself and its ancestors, but NO GUILT (just like NO GUILT here) that all they seem to care about is architecture and that THEY were there, but these men running the church are TRUE popes and these monks' biggest crime was not listening to Mr. Matt etc. where is the scandal at the CRIMES committed? What responsibility does Matt bear if he was there talking about the liturgy while these crimes were being committed and covered up? What responsibility do so-called traditionalists and "pro-lifers" that continue to play along w/these wicked, evil thieves and destroyers bear for their continued crimes? Would these "single-handed defenders" of the true faith still be playing along w/Herod and Caiaphas--even as John the Baptist, Jesus Christ, Stephen, James, Peter, Paul etc. etc. were martyred?

Where are the Remnant articles on Bishop McKenna or Fr. Gommar DePauw?
http://www.traditio.com/comment/com1512.htm

The Remnant (and most prolifers and traditionalists) has never stopped playing patsy w/the perverts. "If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed: For he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds." 2 John 10-11]

Anonymous said...

I think all the Christians should stop criticizing each other and get along because of all the attacks against Jesus so I think protestants should have inter-communion.

I think all the Germans should stick together during this war so that defeating Stalin and the Americans is the most important thing (not the murder of Jews).

I think all "good" people should come together at this time to fight world hunger and poverty instead of worrying about if Buddha or Mohammed or Jesus Christ is the true representative of God.

Why doesn't The Remnant make those arguments? Who is funding The Remnant anyway?

Lynda said...

What wicked heretical talk from Fr O'Connell, and how proud is he of his opposition to God and His Holy Laws. Lord, have mercy.

Tancred said...

I didn't say the Remnant was useless, but I do believe their noticeable lack of coverage of St. John's Abbey is at least suspect, whether of a generally incorrigible level of incompetence or something less savory, I do not know.

I think a significant part of its problem is that it's a lay apostolate, and such things have always seemed contrived to prevent a priestly from really ruling the Church.

Tancred said...

Huh? Even the Remnant's editors would see that as flagrant indifferentism.

You can't be serious.

Anonymous said...

The two "Anonymouses" above (Dec. 18, 12:53 and 12:57) are great examples of the unhinged mind so typical of both irenicists and sede-vacantists (although in this case I suspect the author is the same and trying to promote some kind of Bergoglian confusion---a return of "Gabriel" peut etre?). One thing is sure:there is urgent need for a solidly Catholic psychiatrist at once---whether the author is the same person or two clinical cases of delusional madness. A good writing instructor should provide a secondary but important service for this (or these) tormented soul(s). Leif the Navigator

Anonymous said...

On non-Remnant/SSPX forums (on their forums only yes-yes comments are posted) anyone who mildly criticizes/ disagrees is "quirky and hyper-individualistic"; anyone who criticizes them more strongly needs a psychiatrist and a (good) writing instructor [and if a priest booted out like Wmson +x00]. But where are the answers to the criticisms? Where are the articles The Remnant ran on St. Johns Abbey? Might as well debate w/that faithful Catholic (in his own circles of course) Joe Biden.

Anonymous said...

I,for once,agree with Tancred on this one,100%!

Anonymous said...

You mean the pro-life crowd that support "popes" who allow pro-abortion pro-gay marriage politicians to attend and receive "communion" at their "papal installation mass"?

Anonymous said...

St. John's Abbey is in my diocese - it's actually on the campus of the other major university here (College of St. Benedict/St. John's University).

This diocese is a HOTBED of liturgical disaster, so it doesn't surprise me that Vatican II and sexual iniquity were in place for so long...

Tony V said...

I'm curious if any of this has anything to do with the Pray Tell blog? Maybe not.

Tancred said...

Anthony Ruff is a priest and dissident at Collegeville. He was profoundly unhappy with the Bemedictine Reforms of the Bugninine Mass for various reasons, and has appeared at at least one CTA conference.

Anonymous said...

Speaking of which,Tancred should post a brief biography on Bishop McKenna since he passed away last week.He was a traditional catholic many years before the SSPX.