This blog has always been positive.
But the truth is, Italy has lost the Faith. The anomaly (deviation from the common rule) is the Italian family (dad, mom and kids) that darkens the door of a church, let alone on a Sunday.
It would take a long book to annotate the many and sometimes complicated reasons for this. Some blame the advent of TV. Others the sixties (1968). Some the Risorgimento (1870) or the Renaissance or Fascism or Communism or even Vatican Council II.
But, only since our own modern era (the early eighties some kid once told me), has Italy been officially not Catholic (non-Catholic) because until then, in the Statuto Albertino, Italy defined herself as a Catholic nation:
"Art. 1. - La Religione Cattolica, Apostolica e Romana รจ la sola Religione dello Stato. Gli altri culti ora esistenti sono tolleraticonformemente alle leggi." (The Catholic religion, Apostolic and Roman is the sole religion of the State...).
To read the Lo Statuto Albertino see here:http://www.quirinale.it/costituzione/Preunitarie-testi.htm
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8 comments:
It is undeniable that Italy is not the Catholic Church. After all, Italy is the country in the Western Europe which had the strongest Communist Party. And the remanents of it are very strong. Knowing this fact about the strenght of the Communist Party in Italy one can understand what happened in the Church since the II Vatican Council.
Like the Rome of today completely lost it´s sacred character beginning with the triumph of masonic Risorgimento so also the entire country lost the faith in the past 150 years. What we see today at religious rituals in Rome or elsewere in Italy are the tiny vestiges of the former rich and dominating catholic culture. The empty churches of Rome dead monuments of the catholic past. But things are even worse in Spain, Belgium, Portugal which soon will be dominated by the insane religion of Islam. Omnipresent Abortion, Pornography, feminism do the rest. Look at the demographic trends of former catholic southern europe. A pure catastrophy.
"or even Vatican Council II."
I had to laugh when I read this part. You sound os incredulous that anyone could blame Vatican II!!
It's not Communism, or secularism, or anything that happened to Italy in the 1870's!!!
Hundreds of dead Orders of nuns (most of which have discarded the holy habit just like the USA), empty seminaries, empty monasteries, declining religious practice, declining Mass attendance, secularism (which would not be as strong if the Faith was strong...which it isn't thanks entirely to Vatican II).
I clould go on and on, but I won't.
I just thought that it was humerous that you would write.." or EVEN Vatican II".
You don't have to look any further for anwswers.
The distortions, abuses, etc.....and perhaps the "reforms" themselves have caused the massive turn away from the Faith in Italy, and France, and Germany, Ireland, England, Spain, Portugal, USA, Latin America, Australia, etc. etc.
"or even Vatican Council II"?
Do we have to look any further than that? LOL !!!
A colleague told me a wonderful anecdote of an English lady visiting Rome for the first time in the 1950s.
The lady took a taxi and noticed the rosaries and holy pictures adorning the dashboard. Quite naturally she asked the driver if he was a Catholic. 'Yes, madam' he replied. Then, to make conversation, she asked him where he went to Mass. Indignantly he responded 'Madam, I may be a Catholic but I am not a fanatic!'.
It is plainly obvious to me that the church in Italy along with the church all over the world suffered prodigious destruction due to the implementation of the Novus Ordo mass...surly that was the plan.
You have been consistently positive in your touching, energetic exhortations to put the breaks on the runaway train, to regain so much that has been lost and forgotten. I am sure that as you guide pilgrims it must be discouraging to realize that devotion and piety is rare in Rome except for those visiting or, obviously, the religious stationed there. To me it is even more depressing to realize that the Italians have so much to aid them: the relics of the Saints, beautiful churches on every corner, an over abundance of clergy and religious. Just think about all those who do not have it so easy.
The popes since John XXIII thought that the answer to Italy's problem was the II Vatican Council. They were wrong, it only intensified the problem.
I think things are more complex. Vatican II had to happen. It is the consequence of a long development which had begun long before Blessed Pope John XXIII was elected. By giving up the harsh line of their wise precedessors against secular culture Benedict XV, Pius XI, Pius XII inadvertently set up the first fundaments of Vatican II-ideology. Thinking that some compromise with the secular state would allow to regain some lost influence over the people they made the first mistakes: Lateran Pacts, support for the "democrazia cristiana" (her leading involvement in politics for nearly 50 years was just in those years when this country underwent it´s hypersecularization)
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