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hare-krishna-shonbornThe target audience of this post is the Priests and Bishops who will happen to read this blog. I am going to try to keep this post as short as possible, but will put up a separate page to provide a more comprehensive set of information regarding this subject matter. This post in turn, will be a continuation of the recent post titled Revenge Of The Saturno: Death Of The “spirit of VII” Is At Hand.

So that is the introduction.

In the video above, I am presenting a ~ 15:00 minute video with Dr. Jordan Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto. I have discovered him (his work) recently thanks to a long time reader of this blog, who goes by the nom de guerre: Cold Stream. ( CS: Have I credited you enough?) But I digress… At about the 13:00 minute mark, the following interchange transpires: (emphasis and added emphasis)

NB: When reading/listening superimpose “FrancisChurch” for “university” and try to “discern” if there is any noticeable difference.

Jordan Peterson: The students are protected from failing. There’s incredible pressure, for example…  Another thing that’s happening on the campuses is that the “accessibility” people are raging completely out of control too, so they’re enticing students continuously on campus to claim disabilities that… to claim impairment in their performance associated  with disabilities at an ever expanding rate instead of just using OBJECTIVE CRITERIA by which to judge people. The problem is, see the problem with that is that, authority should be a… should mimic the real world so to speak. So if you’re a parent , you should interact with your children in approximately the same manner that the harsh social world and nature is going to interact with them. So what you do is you discipline your children when they are doing things that are going to hurt them if they do them in the real world. And you should be doing that with students too. So the standards should be there as an analogue of the standards that are going to confront them in their marriages, in their friendships, in their business relationships and all that. And all of those genuine institutions and situations have unbelievably harsh standards. They just flatten you if you make a mistake. And protecting students from that at the university is… it’s a kind of Oedipal coddling (i.e. psychological complex that is known colloquially as a “mama’s boy”). Really and what I do see happening in our society is the rise of the oedipal mother, from a Freudian perspective. And an oedipal mother is the mother that just won’t distance herself enough from her children and whats to protect them from everything. And what she end up doing is hollowing out their SOUL and transforming them into permanent infants. It is not a good thing.

Host: Well it’s a form of child abuse in many ways. And that’s the irony of the situation is that you have the students best interest in mind, whereas the administration just has the students tuitions in mind. And one of them is abusing children and the other is trying to rescue them.

JP: Well, I can tell you that I’ve been teaching this Maps of Meaning course for … it’s almost 30 years. I taught it at Harvard for 6 years and I’ve taught it at the University of Toronto since. And I would say that I’ve got a lot of student comments over the decades. And this has been an unbelievably popular course. And I would say that 90% of the students who’ve taken my Maps of Meaning course, say that it changed their life. And I mean that dead seriously. I’ve taken people and toughened them up and teaching them how to speak properly and how to write properly and how to be… to be.. ahh.. what I’m trying to inoculate them against ideological possession. And it works too.  So I have students writing me all the time, my past students too, and people on the net now, because now a million and a half people now have watched my educational videos who’ve told me that the material that I am presenting them is straightening out their psyches and improving their sanity and making them decent honest, tough people.  And that’s bloody well what a university should do and it’s failing. In fact now, I really believe that universities do more harm than good.

 Which leads to the following question: What is the “material” that Dr. Peterson is presenting that is “straightening out their psyches and improving their sanity and making them decent honest, tough people”?

Well, as best as I can tell, given that Dr. Peterson is among others a clinical psychologist, it must have something to do with psychology. Yet Dr. Peterson refers to a “SOUL”, used in line with the OBJECTIVE MEANING of that word AND its COMMON USAGE, it can be deduced that Dr. Peterson (a clinical psychologist) has ventured into terra incognita. For a psychologist that is.

Before I go on, I need to state that I am not a theologian, not even a possessor of an STD, yet after listening to over 5 hours of various videos that Dr. Peterson has put up on the internet, it would appear to me that the terra incognita that Dr. Peterson has ventured into, for a clinical psychologist that is, is actually terra firma for a theologian. Using our LEX ARMATICUS framework, the area of human endeavor that Dr. Peterson has entered is what in the ECCLESIASTICAL sphere we would call SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY (a discipline of theology that formulates an orderly, rational, and coherent account of the doctrines of the Christian faith). Actually, we can drill down even deeper and claim that the sub-set of SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY that Dr. Peterson is dealing with, although a stripped down version of it, is what is known as THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, i.e. the study of the nature of humanity. (NB: I am using Wikipedia terms to make referencing easier – see here)

So the obvious connection between that which Dr. Peterson studies and that which a Catholic priest would study are more or less the same thing. I.e. Dr. Peterson in fact has a less “full” body of knowledge (tools) than a priest would, as can be seen in the above reference to the human SOUL.

But what interest us in that which Dr. Peterson said is the following: he has provided material (transmitted knowledge) to students over 3 decades that an overwhelming majority of those who took his class (~ 90%) claimed was useful, and some even going on to say that it straightening out their psyches and improving their sanity and making them decent honest, tough people”.

So hold that thought for now.

From the ECCLESIASTICAL sub-set of human activity, we were provided information coming from sources inside the Sacred Vatican Walls. If you recall dear reader, in yesterday’s post (see here) I republished a Andrea Gagliarducci post from his blog MondayVatican. The subject matter of that post, if I understood it correctly, was to SIGNAL to the Universal Church what the prelates (mid and upper level mgt.) are thinking about the manner in which the Catholic Church should go forward after the pontificate of the present bishop of Rome.

From the post itself, I have identified several DATA POINTS which I felt contained SIGNIFICANT information about the THINKING of the present day upper management about how to map out a STRATEGY going FORWARD. The DATA POINTS, from my point of view (and those suggested by the Pierce/Ockham Pragmatic Methodology) which were significant, are as follows:

Primary CRITERIA

  1. Key CRITERIA for selecting the next bishop of Rome will center around VOCATIONS (SEMINARIES),
  2. All sides (and he speaks with all sides) agree on this main CRITERIA,
  3. The foundation for ADMITTANCE and  VOCATION formation will be “curriculum studiorum” along with the Benedict XVI ADMISSION INSTRUCTIONS.

Secondary CRITERIA

  1. One crucial CRITERIA going forward for promotion of priests to episcopacy will be: number of SEMINARIANS,
  2. The QUANTITY of SEMINARIANS in the future will be OBJECTIVELY MEASURED for gauging the effectiveness (or lack there of) of “pastoral care”,
  3. Generation of REVENUE to support these new priests will also be taken into account w/r/t episcopal promotion.

Don’t believe me?

Go back to the SOURCE post HERE and see if you can connect the DATA POINTS above. But I digress…

Given that the above is an accurate analysis of the information in the SOURCE post, what I want to do in this post, is to take the above post-Francis PROCESS forward.

Let’s assume that the new future leadership of the Bride of Christ is successful in creating the intended new VOCATIONS, (see here) and it should, what Holy See then will have to do is find the FAITHFUL SOULS that these new priests will be looking to save.

This above situation means that the Catholic Church will have to get back into the PROSELYTIZATION business. Now here I have some bad news and some good news.

On the one hand, the bad news is that over the last 50 years, the level of CATECHESIS in the Catholic Church has been ABYSMAL.

The good news is that since the CATHOLIC CHURCH, has “DE-CATECHETIZED” the FAITHFUL, It can now more easily “RE-CATECHETIZE” those same FAITHFUL, but this time RECATECHETIZE PROPERLY.

Which brings us to point of: HOW does the Church go about getting those lost SOULS back into the pews?

And naturally, this is where we return to Dr. Peterson’s PROVEN TRACK RECORD (methodology), i.e. a methodology that has been widely and wildly successful for over 3 decades.

THEREFORE: your humble blogger’s suggestion can best be stated as:

REINTRODUCE THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY into the formation of vocations and into the homiletics of the clergy.

And here, I have a PROPOSITION. 

My PROPOSITION in turn is not new. Actually, it is the same STRATEGY that was used by the 4th Century Christians when PROSELYTIZING the pagans. And isn’t that what we are dealing with today? Funny that! But I digress… Getting back to the STRATEGY, here is how it is explained in the New Advent Encyclopedia: (see here)

Christian thinkers, from the beginning, were confronted with the question: How are we to reconcile reason with revelation, science with faith, philosophy with theology? The first apologists possessed no philosophy of their own. They had to deal with a pagan world proud of its literature and its philosophy, ready at any moment to flaunt its inheritance of wisdom in the face of ignorant Christians. The apologists met the situation by a theory that was as audacious as it must have been disconcerting to the pagans. They advanced the explanation that all the wisdom of Plato and the other Greeks was due to the inspiration of the Logos; that it was God’s truth, and, therefore, could not be in contradiction with the supernatural revelation contained in the Gospels. It was a hypothesis calculated not only to silence a pagan opponent, but also to work constructively. We find it in St. Basil, in Origen, and even in St. Augustine. The belief that the two orders of truth, the natural and the supernatural, must harmonize, is the inspiration of intellectual activity in the Patristic era. But that era did little to define the limits of the two realms of truth. St. Augustine believes that faith aids reason (credo ut intelligam) and that reason aids faith (intelligo ut credam); he is, however, inclined to emphasize the first principle and not the second. He does not develop a definite methodology in dealing with them. The Scholastics, almost from the first, attempted to do so.

Without going into too much further detail, by the 13th Century, with the advent of what is today known as Thomism, the “second principle” i.e. intelligo ut credam element was put in place. For a more detailed explanation please go to this link HERE.

But for us, we move on…

Concluding, what is interesting to OBSERVE, and not just with Dr. Peterson but with other rational commentators, individuals like Stefan Molyneux for example (see here and here), is that they are in essence continuing the tradition of Thomists and neo-Thomists. They are picking up where the Thomists were stopped at the Second Vatican Council. (see here)

What is also of note is that these individuals have been empirically (OBJECTIVELY) successful in that part of their activity that relied ONLY on a stripped down version of THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY. 

Which brings be to the essence of the information that I am trying to convey in this post. On a page that I titled Why Thomism?, I explain why the O. N. L. Y. manner in which the Catholic Church can go forward, provided that it wants to go forward, is a return to SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY, i.e. classical THOMISM.

The first reason is that today’s apologists must meet the crisis of the “DE-CATECHETIZED” FAITHFUL by a STRATEGY that is as audacious as it will be disconcerting to today’s neo-pagan FrancisChurch.

The second reason is that this STRATEGY, i.e. SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY, OBJECTIVELY speaking: WORKS. 

In other words, the Catholic Church, as an INSTITUTION needs to break out of its animistic, pseudo-mystical, TRANSRATIONAL, neo- Modernist, FrancisChurch intellectual GHETTO!

Or to put it another way, we need to start thinking and acting like Catholics and not a HARE KRISHA sect!

We also need to get ready, because if my analysis of the Gagliarducci post is correct, we have the RESTORATION just around the corner.

And we don’t want to miss that train!