A young Catholic man came to my speech last night, and e-mailed the following comment:

I was struck by your descriptions of Orthodox asceticism and practices. The Church’s shedding of Her ancient liturgy, ascetic and disciplinary practices, and the destroying Her sacred buildings and art leading up to, during, and after Vatican II is one of the greatest losses to Catholicism and to the West in recent history. By doing so, the Latin Church has effectively induced Her own amnesia, which is reflected, I believe, in the recent experience you described traveling in western Europe. It was the buildings, liturgy, discipline and practices that formed the Church’s memory for the previous 1,930-odd years. Remove the sensory connection with the past, and it will not be long before the memories fade. Furthermore by doing so, She has disarmed Herself of much of the armor or weaponry Her members had always used to build up personal and communal strength to be counter-cultural. Catholics no longer act like Catholics, because much of that content has been dispensed of: eucharistic fasting, Friday abstinence, Lenten fasting and abstinence, Ember days, eucharistic processions, saint’s processions, etc. Replace all of these things with a vacuum of daily practices and devotions, and a minimalist liturgy that, while certainly valid, is anthropologically centered, and barely adequate at expressing the truths of the faith, and it is no coincidence that the Latin Church has been in free-fall since the Council, and utterly inept at preventing the secularization and mass exodus of its members. Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. May the East not succumb to such blunders!

And now, to mark the 98th anniversary of the final apparition at Fatima, here is your Synod woo-woo of the day. Excerpt from a 2008 interview with the Cardinal of Bologna, about an exchange he had with Sister Lucia, the last surviving Fatima visionary:

Q. There is a prophecy by Sister Lucia dos Santos, of Fatima, which concerns “the final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan”. The battlefield is the family. Life and the family. We know that you were given charge by John Paul II to plan and establish the Pontifical Institute for the Studies on Marriage and the Family.

Yes, I was. At the start of this work entrusted to me by the Servant of God John Paul II, I wrote to Sister Lucia of Fatima through her Bishop as I couldn’t do so directly. Unexplainably however, since I didn’t expect an answer, seeing that I had only asked for prayers, I received a very long letter with her signature – now in the Institute’s archives. In it we find written: the final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family. Don’t be afraid, she added, because anyone who operates for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be contended and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue. And then she concluded: however, Our Lady has already crushed its head.

(And hey, as long as we are lamenting what a church’s leaders do to cripple the spiritual integrity of the Body of Christ, check out Sergei Chapnin’s lament for the Russian Orthodox “Church of Empire.” Woe.)