back in the 1970s, an agnostic Catholic wrote a book that was made into a TV movie about the Catholic Church turning into a social work organization, and about a monastery that said the mass in Latin and because many went there to hear mass, the Pope shut it down. link
since the book/tv was written by an agnostic, no one in film really believes in God, prayer, or the holiness of the mass, so the film is a bit cynical, as if the author lives in a flat universe without the ability to recognize the nuances of belief.
You can still find a fuzzy copy of the TV movie on youtube:
so today, Pope Francis has issued a decree shutting down the Latin mass in parish churches. Life imitating art.
....
actually the Latin mass was allowed in response to so many going to schismatic Catholic chapels that said the older mass. That group was in danger of becoming a rule oriented cult, so previous Popes decided to let people go to the older mass in their own parishes, and many did.
but now the Pope is shutting them down.
this is similar to the Jesuit war against the Jansenists a couple of centuries ago: The Jansenists were a response to the corruption in the church and incorporated the strict moral code of Calvin and other reformers into Catholicism.
The danger was that Catholicism would degenerate into a cult where following rules was more important than your relationship to God or caring for your neighbors.
Why do folks go to the Latin mass? It's sort of a reaction to the collapse of holiness in the mass, (not to mention the rejection of the bishops who allowed abuse to go on under their watch).
Many Catholics felt a mass had become about us instead of about worshipping God and meeting him personally in the sacrament.
myself, I merely found it boring.
but anyway: not much to do with me, since here in the rural Philippines I am not yet allowed inside the church due to covid, and alas many of the young and middle class are going to Protestant churches that actually preach Jesus in a pentecostal way.
------------------
sort of a related story:
StrategyPage has a long essay on China's aggression againts their neighbors, including the Philippines, India, and China, and expansion in Asia. Read the whole thing.
But halfway down the discussion they discuss religious persecution in China, because China knows how religious movements can be a way to oppose a government.
Most westerners know about the persecution of the UIghar Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists, and most Christians know about the persecution of these churches. But SP has details on the FalunGong, a taoist movement, which is being persecuted with little outcry by the west. And they mention the use of the imprisoned Falungong members as a source of organ donation: which by the way is part of a plot of one of Dean Koontz books.
no mention of the underground Catholic Church there however, mainly because Pope Francis had the Vatican sign an agreement allowing the Communist party of China to essentially run the church while ordering the underground Catholic church to cooperate.
Cardinal Zen predicts the result will be the collapse of Catholicism in that country,
“A schismatic Church put up by the communists, whom we suppose will be rejected by the Chinese people, will die out soon,” Cardinal Zen told Religion Unplugged. “There is no foundation in the culture, in a tradition. Their leaders have no credibility, respectability… They will have no market.”
These new regulations seem to completely sever Roman influence from management of the Chinese Catholic Church — a move that would intrinsically make the CCP’s regulated church schismatic and no longer part of the Catholic communion....
ah but deep in the article, the PC version takes over: it says all of this is about the Pope's favorite stalking horse, the synodality movement, meaning every area of the church can make up it's own rules.
Indeed, that part of the essay compares the takeover of the Catholic church in China by the atheistic communist government as merely an example of synodality, and compares it to the takeover of the German catholic church by their (atheistic) bishops who want to introduce the latest intellectual fads into the world wide church under the guise of "synodality".
again, none of this is new: the CCP takeover of the church has similarities to Henry VIII takeover of the British church, but also has roots in the investiture conflict (1076) which was about if kings or the Pope could appoint bishops and direct the church.
As for the German bishop's attempt to change the Catholic church into a church of what's happening now, well, one is sort of reminded of all those bishops of late antiquity against Athanasius .
