“Neo-Catholic” (Silly Radical Catholic Reactionary Term)

“Neo-Catholic” (Silly Radical Catholic Reactionary Term) February 10, 2016
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(4-21-05; revised, with new terminology incorporated, on 8-12-13)
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What magisterial Church document provides radical Catholic reactionaries with their definition of “Neo-Catholic”? What is the etymology of this term? Who first used it? Just curious . . .
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I am content to simply call “traditionalists” and also reactionaries and myself “Catholic.” If I must make distinctions due to liberal or far-right rot in the Church, then I use the qualifier “orthodox” as well, to indicate that I accept all the teachings of the Catholic Church.

If one accepts notions that go contrary to orthodox Catholicism, and uses the term, I must object, because “tradition” is a good Catholic word which must not be trifled with (and those who reject some of it ought not to be allowed to co-opt the term to themselves as if they actually exemplify a particular devotion to “tradition” as they themselves define it).

Even if a reactionary is orthodox, but insists on using the term, then it must be because it is being used to distinguish the reactionary from the likes of me, who has supposedly somehow become simultaneously “liberal” and “orthodox” (by the application of the silly term “neo-Catholic”).

So it is still attempting to create division in the Church and separate Catholic believers into a superior-subordinate relationship, with the reactionaries being the ones who “get it” and the “neo-Catholics” being dupes and fellow travelers of their liberal overlords in the lower hierarchies of the Church. Either way, it stinks to high heaven.

“Neo-Catholic” means a new kind of Catholic. But this is an oxymoron, according to the nature of Catholicism. There can be no “new Catholic.” One is simply an orthodox Catholic, according to the tradition of the ages, or not. Catholic (in its deepest sense) means “orthodox”, so to say that one is a “new Catholic” is to say that one espouses a “new kind of orthodoxy,” which, of course, is a self-contradiction.

There is no such thing as a “new orthodoxy.” That would be, rather, a novelty or heterodoxy or heresy. So the label basically reduces (but this is actually consistently applying logic) to calling someone heterodox or a heretic.

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Yet reactionaries want to call us “orthodox” and “neo-Catholic” at the same time? Some reactionary Catholics would say that it means (almost synonymously) “liberal Catholic” or perhaps the ecclesiological equivalent of the old Lenin term, “useful idiots.”

But how can I be a liberal and orthodox at the same time? The whole thing is a big game and exercise in futile, circular logic. The term is simply meant to belittle and dismiss non-reactionaries Catholics, precisely as Omar Gutiérrez maintained. It doesn’t matter where it came from. The goal is to ridicule and defame orthodox Catholics who try to get beyond the separation of Catholics into categories and the divisiveness that this tends to produce.

“Neo-Catholic” contains an explicit insult and implication of heterodoxy, any way that you look at it.

If “Neo-Catholic” doesn’t come from the magisterium, why should I accept it? On what authority? It’s an insult, meant to belittle and put in a box those who don’t buy the reactionary line.
                   

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