Editor: We've always thought that Father Stravinskas was too liberal. If you'll look at the poll taken at Our Sunday Visitor, you'll see that the support for homeschooling seems enormous, over seventy one percent of those responding at this point. Here's a report:
[Deliberations of the Senechal] In an apparent override of Natural law, common sense, and the Magisterium of the Church, Our Sunday Visitor has published an interview with the formerly respectable and orthodox Priest, Fr. Peter Stravinskas. After this article however, I will never again apply the glorious label of orthodoxy to this cleric.
In this interview, which includes unsupportable claims, unidentified references to "The Church Fathers", and flat-out falsehoods, Fr. Stravinskas attempts to portray parents who choose to homeschool their children as "psychologically unhealthy", "anti-clerical", and, to top it all off "a church within a church".
I very much wonder where Father has gotten this information, has he actually taken the time to get to know any of these "elitist" homeschooling families, or is he just towing the line of the (FAILED) Catholic educational system? Having spent large amounts of time among both homeschooled students, and products of Catholic education, I must insist on the exact opposite of Father's surmise. In the company of homeschooled students, I have almost invariably found a honest quest for truth, the capacity for articulate discussion, and indeed, keen insights.
Read further, here.
Father Stravinskas is one of those many, many priests and authors out there who are becoming, sad to say, irrelevant. There was a time when these people may have done some good in the face of the more bizarre examples of liberalism in the Church but they built their houses on sand, the sand of the post-Conciliar age. And that sand could never withstand the onslaughts of the evil one. As the Church crumbles visibly from the rot that entered into it, folks like Father Stravinskas hang on, thinking they are the Pope's good soldiers, never realizing they are merely sycophants.
ReplyDeleteSimple, serious Catholicism (which some must label "traditionalism") will triumph in the end, as it always has and always will, and the McBrien-type modernist moles and the Stravinskas-type conservative modernists will be swept away. These "neo-Catholics" will eventually learn that trying to defend the Church against the more extreme form of modernism (their form of modernism being somewhat less extreme) using the Vatican 2 mindset is like trying to put out a fire using gasoline.
When I get the tons of mailings every week from these orthodox/modernist publishers, booksellers and magazines all showing huge photos of the Pope on their cover letters and advertising within the lunatic (and boring) writings of the deLubacs and the Urs von Balthazars, they go right into the circular file...because they are irrelevant.
To fight the foul criminals who are now trying to destroy Catholicism, both from within and without, you have to use Catholicism undiluted. And that is something that will forever escape the neo-Orthodox Catholics like Messrs Stravinskas, Kreeft, et al.
Moreover, Father Stravinskas doesn't fight the right battles. Going after homeschooling in his position as a publisher of alternative Catholic books is suicide inmho, but there you go.
ReplyDeletePerhaps also, the estblishmentarian types are getting a sense that they are losing their grip on Catholic laity who justifiably no longer trust their children to be educated in their modernist teacher's associations, choked with filthy government lucre extorted from the American taxpayer.
Father Stravinskas defended courageously the American Catholic schools against secularism. And he has now to fill them with pupils, because if everybody in a parish chooses homeschooling, then the parish school closes!
ReplyDeleteWow! I met this guy. I spoke to him about Catholic schools, Catholic teachings, and about secularism.
ReplyDeleteFor someone to make this statement about him:
"We've always thought that Father Stravinskas was too liberal."
Tells me all I need to know about the credibility of this blogger.
No one possessing the faculty of "reason" could ever make the serious claim that this priest was "too liberal."
Such a claim, when made, must come from a mind devoid of reason and intellect.
Sorry -- but home schooled, Catholic schooled or public schooled -- these lines of writing get a resounding "F" for "Falsehood."
Father Stravinskas says there is salvation outside of the Catholic Church, he supports, unequivocally, the poor regime of Catholic education and his strident and, frankly, mendacious attacks on homeschoolers who are opting out of the gruel of Catholic education are yet another indication that the man's orthodoxy are severely challenged.
ReplyDeleteThis isn't anything new for Fr. Stravinskas: he took a similar position in an article which appeared in Pastoral and Homiletic Review several years ago. In fact, in that article, he went so far as make the ridiculous claim that parents who homeschooled violated canon law. There he opined that the responsibility of parents to provide a Catholic education (preferably by recourse, where possible, to Catholic schools), could only be satisfied by use of the parochial schools. If he has not made that claim this time, then I would regard it as an improvement, however slight.
ReplyDeleteIt would be one thing to for the Reverend Father to claim that organized Catholic schools are the preferred option, where truly good and orthodox ones are available. I think that, both from an idealist perspective and a pragmatic one, this would be difficult to dispute - and I say this a one who was homeschooled. However, it is quite another thing to presume that good Catholic schools are available in many areas, let alone to insist that parents must entrust their children to the schools, no matter how bad they are. For the vast majority of Catholic parents, homeschooling is the best option they have available for providing a proper Catholic upbringing.
Fr. Stravinskas in no friend of true orthodoxy, only of maintaining the status quo. The clergy has been reduced by worldly men within its own ranks to little more than a bureaucracy. True anti-clericalism is not to be found among those who aim at restoration, but instead with those like Fr. Stravinskas who act like nothing is wrong.
Like the vast majority of priests and bishops -- regardless of whether they're "liberal," "conservative," "progressive," "traditionalist" or anything else -- Stravinskas doesn't give a damn about the laity. He doesn't give a damn about truth. He doesn't give a damn about the Triune God. He cares only about the ecclesiastical institution. That is his one and only God, as it was and is with Law, Mahony, Weakland, Wuerl, Finn, etc.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who was raised as a Catholic and worshipped as a Catholic for the vast majority of my life, I now see "Holy Mother Church" for what it truly is: a religious mafia run by, of and for the bishops and their chancery sycophants (or should that be psychophants?).
This faithless church has stored much judgement up for itself. When God pours out His justified wrath on it, the flow will be more horrific than the clericalists and their pansy apologists could ever imagine.
People like you would have crucified Christ, and would have been as miserable under a Cure de Ars as you are under the mealy specimens that now proliferate.
DeleteWhy does the American laity deserve any better than what they've gotten?
When God shows His wrath, you surely don't think He's going to spare the pathetic, cynical American laity, do you?
Tancred, the people who would have crucified Christ are the ones wearing the miters, chausables and stoles and who accept such salutations as "Your Eminence" and "Your Excellency." Christ threatens their power base just as He did the Pharisees'.
ReplyDeleteYour description of the "pathetic, cynical American laity" shows that you're a clericalist of the first order. If the laity is pathetic and cynical, then who helped make them that way? Bishops and priests who have become far more interested in intellectual fashion, wealth and power than in God's truth. Bishops who are hypocrisy incarnate. Sure, secularism and materialism have wreaked their havoc. But when any church claiming to represent the "fullness of the Gospel" and to be indispensible in the transmission of divine grace is led by people who view themselves as medievalist monarchs who are distant from the people they claim to serve and who can effectively reject their own stated principles with impugnity, then how do you expect people to behave?
Cynicism helped destroy the Soviet Union because people knew how corrupt, isolated, hypocritical and selfish the leaders were and how hollow their claims were. Any centralized, bureaucratic system that discourages accountability will produce such people.
Besides, Moscow was quite willing to destroy the Catholic Church from within. Read anything about Bella Dodd or anything written by Malachi Martin. They know the truth far more than you ever will.