The Catholic Church has acquired a public image as a haven for sex abusers, and unfortunately, there is little hope that bishops are doing to change that image.
At this point in the American Church's history, the bishops have traded their moral authority for fat diocesan bank accounts and op-eds on Fox News. Most of the Church's shepherds have spent the last 50 years not feeding the sheep, but instead, feeding the sheep to the wolves.
In many cases, like with ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick and other sexual predator bishops, the bishops themselves were the wolves.
The resurgence of the Traditional Latin Mass is a sign of hope for a laity weary of the effeminate Catholicism that's become the norm. Some people were horrified at decades of liturgical abuse, heretical preaching and openly homosexual behavior in seminaries.
But as people who associate with the Society of St. Pius X have been learning, the mere fact that an organization has the TLM with all its pomp, bells and incense doesn't make it immune from the same problems plaguing the so-called Novus Ordo Church.
What must be remembered is that problems in the Church didn't start with Vatican II. They began years before when the clergy conducted their religious exercises with an external formality but no heart within.
The same men who learned theology and Thomistic philosophy in Latin were quick to cast off a 1,500-year-old liturgy for "a fabrication, a banal product of the moment," according to Cdl. Joseph Ratzinger.
The very bishops who engineered the Second Vatican Council and, more importantly, its checkered implementation, had some of the most thorough religious formation in the first half of the 20th century.
What's needed is a genuine conversion of hearts to Christ's gospel — not to a modernized, watered-down gospel.
The Traditional Latin Mass can definitely help predispose souls to fruitfully receive the infinite graces offered with the Blessed Sacrament. But as with everything, it still comes down to an act of the will as God never forces man to love Him.
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