Macht den Mund, bitte!

Dialogue.

If I hear one more Bishop, Cardinal or other Catholic talk about the value of dialogue to the Roman Catholic Church, I'm going to need a Confessional.

Let me go out on a limb by adapting a quote from Salvador Dali and say, "Dialogue, c'est la merde." -- at least when following the tack we have so far.

The Church's four-decade long pursuit of dialogue has done nothing but dilute our base.

Now, had the enlightened minds of the recent ecumenical Council taken the Socratic approach to dialogue rather than the Hegelian, we might have gotten somewhere. But alas, they wanted aggiornamento.

And they got it.

A fair question to ask is what we, the Roman Catholic faithful, have received from our partners (our concelebrators?) in this dialogue? Among the fruits for Holy Mother Church have been:

• A new missal, which has caused division -- and more than a simple rubric-based division -- among the faithful. The irregular implementation and abuse of the new liturgy has led to ecclesiological differences within an allegedly "catholic" -- that is, universal -- community. "Unity through diversity" now seems to be the Liturgical Ministries' motto. It's akin to the legendary dormitory graffiti comparing "fighting for peace" to "f**king for virginity". Thirty years later, liturgical reform has become a farce.


• Seminaries that are half empty, at best, in many locations...oh, sorry, I meant to say "half full"...along with female vocations in most western, industrialized nations that are approaching levels of non-existence. Further, most of the female religious are nearly indistinguishable from the devoted women of the laity. Except for the butch haircuts.


• Fabricated music in our "worship spaces" (we used to call them chapels, basilicas, cathedrals, etc.) that is barely worthy of Saturday morning children's programming. The rate at which music is being produced and published by some of the masterminds of liturgical development (sic) is astonishing. Fortunately for these people -- and unfortunately for us -- they have what the software industry calls an installed base. Unfortunately Rome doesn't go after these people like the U. S. Department of Justice went after Microsoft... It reminds me of a bad episode of American Idol, really.


• There are other fruits that could be discussed, but I will leave that to my friends at the Roman Catholic Faithful website.

So, rather than working charitably and sincerely to draw our separated brothers and sisters in Christ back to Rome, or to adopt meaningful reforms to unite ourselves with the Eastern Churches, we have simply created, courtesy of Hegel's dialectic, a new half-Catholic, half-Protestant "faith community" dressed in a Roman toga.

This chimera has done nothing to dispel the misconceptions held by Protestants and Evangelicals about Roman primacy, the Blessed Virgin Mother, saints, the Sacraments, or our general Catholic Weltanschauung. Additionally, it has further distanced us from those to whom we ought to have made any ecumenical overtures, if any needed to be made at all.