Los Schismaticos

Many thanks to The Western Confucian for this.

Far from Hispanics’ being the great hope of American Catholicism, Latin America has never been a very Catholic place, with slight if any Mass-going majorities, huge numbers of the unbaptised, rampant syncretism and surviving paganism, and a very heavy dependence on (historically European, these days usually North American) missionary priests. No wonder that the strongest opponents of the present levels of immigration, of any amnesty, and of the erosion of English in American life, are themselves traditional Catholics. For example, The Western Confucian.

Whether apart from Rome or in internal dissent from Rome, High Church movements have always become progressively less orthodox theologically, and thus (among much else) progressively less radical politically. Meanwhile, ultra-Augustinianism produced the Remonstrandt Brotherhood, the Socinian ‘New Licht’ within the Free Church of Scotland, the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland, and Unitarianism among English Presbyterians and New England Congregationalists. Look at the once-Gallican, once-Jansenist Old Catholics, of which this new Hispanic-American body is an offshoot.

I must say that I rather enjoyed the comment suggesting that there might soon be a Pope from Latin America, and even that Europeans might then break away! It put me in mind of the apparently serious suggestions on a newsgroup to which I subscribed that John Paul II might be succeeded by an American. And that, remember, was in the Bush years. Bless...