OP did not explained why they think it is the same either. They just fired something.
The original comment may be short but it's also thought-provoking. The reply, on the other hand, is not (per the FAQ) "a good critical comment [that] teaches us something".
I meant Catholic as in Catholic Church - the huge hierarchical organization lead by Pope. The mass is the ritual part, the bread, wine and the ceremony. Then there is the preaching which is separate thing. You can have mass only, the preaching only or the combination of the two. Catholicism is really big on rituals and tradition, they have meaning by themselves.
The Midnight Mass for example does not have much preaching. That is not the point of going there. The point is to celebrate.
Sorry, can you help me understand what you mean here?
I attended a Catholic mass from 1-18 (and occasionally since then), and there was definitely a bunch of moral reflection from the readings, gospels and the sermons.
So I'm struggling to understand how this would differ across other Christian denominations, so I'd really appreciate a better awareness of what you mean here.
Yes, they tend to be combined on Sundays, because that is practical and many believers want both on Sunday anyway. But that does not make them the same thing.
Have you ever gone to a mass on random Thursday? There is often no sermon during daily, non-Sunday mass. Yes, there are readings, but the central part of the mass is the Eucharist, which the Catechism (¶1324) calls the "source and summit of the Christian life".
Again, super confused. Like yeah the Eucharist is clearly the most important part for many Catholics, but the notion that the readings don't contain moral teachings is very strange to me.
Am I missing something in your point?
The Truth about What Really Happened to the Catholic Church after Vatican II Audio Program, Part 1, Part 2 [2 hrs. each part] https://www.mostholyfamilymonastery.com/audio/06_08_22MHFMra... https://www.mostholyfamilymonastery.com/audio/06_09_02MHFMra...
https://vaticancatholic.com/what-really-happened-after-vatic...
TLDR: they are a fringe group of sedevacantists who think all other sedevacantists and catholics are heretics and promote lots of insane infowars-tier conspiracy theories, run by two brothers living in an isolated compound in upstate New York. SPLC lists them as a hate group for being holocaust deniers.
So, the background context: in the 1960s the Roman Catholic Church held a big reform council (Vatican II) where, among other things, they decided to switch from the old Latin Mass to the modern one which celebrates mass in the vernacular, which is what nearly all of the world's 1.4 billion Catholic attend today.
A small fringe, called "sedevacantists", hated Vatican II so much they declared it was heresy, and that every pope since then is fake and there hasn't been a real pope since the 1950s. Hence the name: sede (chair) vacante (empty). Wordlwide, sedevacantists probably number around 30,000 (maybe as many as 200,000) and include all sorts of groups with various wacky beliefs.
Another small fringe is "Feeneyism", the belief that only baptized Catholics can go to heaven, with no exceptions for e.g. good people who never heard of the Church or who died before they could be officially baptized. The Catholic Church rejected this view in 1949 and the founder was excommunicated for disobedience. There are a few thousand of them left, mostly in rural New England. Some of them are still in communion with the mainstream Church, which quietly tolerates them.
This brings us to Most Holy Family Monastery (MHFM), currently run by brothers Michael and Peter Dimond in New York (which the above poster linked extensively). Neither of them is ordained, and no bishop recognizes them. The MHFM was founded by a guy named Joseph Natale in the 60s. He was a benedictine drop-out who broke away from the Catholic Church. Natale started an unofficial traditional latin catholic monastery in New Jersey which preached that Vatican II was a secret plot by the freemasons and the communists to destroy the Church, and predicted the world would end in 1999.
Weirdly, despite believing that Vatican II was a Communist Freemason conspiracy, the MHFM weren't sedevacantists under Natale; Natale just believed the pope was real, just a puppet controlled by the conspiracy. when Natale died in 1995, Michael Dimond took over with his brother Peter. They moved the operation to a rural hamlet in western New York and promptly declared that actually, the Pope wasn't just a puppet, he was a fake pope. Under them, MHFM became sedevacantist (which by their own logic makes their founder a heretic). But they also decided to become Feeneyites! So, being sedevacantists puts them outside the Catholic Church. Being Feeneyites means they consider every other sedevacantist group heretical, and vice versa. And being Sedevacantist makes them heretical to other Feeneyites, who mostly still accept the pope.
Some of their actual beliefs, as far as I can tell:
- Most everybody is going to hell except for them and and maybe some of their youtube followers
- Stage magicians use real magic, not illusions, which they get from demons
- UFOs are real and actually they're demons
- The covid vaccine was a cover-up
- John Paul II was the antichrist
- Holocaust denial. (if I had a nickel for every time I look up a sedevacantist group and find out they are holocaust deniers...)
The Southern Poverty Law Center lists them as a hate group due to that last point.
Thanks for the links btw, I have no idea if your comment was a joke or not but I had never heard of them before and I had a fun time going down this rabbit hole
This is the wildest part to me, JP2 was a super, super conservative pope potentially put in to avoid the potential ructions associated with some of the more liberal beliefs of JP1.
Like, I'd have expected a group like this to be much more upset by Francis rather than John Paul.
That said: while he was conservative in many ways, Pope John Paul II was well-known for his ecumenicism, especially mending relations with Jews and Muslims, which might ruffle the feathers of the sort of sedevacantist whose problem with post-Vatican-2 Catholicism is that they got rid of the antisemitism.
https://vaticancatholic.com/heresies-of-john-paul-ii/
https://endtimes.video/what-francis-really-believes-4th-edit...
My brother in Christ, I recommend against calling people anti-popes based on theological difference.
God basically doesn't care about this, and it's just an example of humans being humans and nitpicking around pointless abstractions.
I suppose that if one accepts that only the Catholic church is the path to salvation, and that the pope is supreme within the church, then one might get very upset.
Don't get me wrong, the Tridentine mass is a phenomenal spectacle, but mass in the vernacular has it's own benefits which I think that you're under-rating.
Ultimately, many paths, one mountain.
Pope Eugene IV, Council of Florence, “Cantate Domino,” 1441, ex cathedra: “The Holy Roman Church firmly believes, professes and preaches that all those who are outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans but also Jews or heretics and schismatics, cannot share in eternal life and will go into the everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels, unless they are joined to the Church before the end of their lives; that the unity of this ecclesiastical body is of such importance that only those who abide in it do the Church’s sacraments contribute to salvation and do fasts, almsgiving and other works of piety and practices of the Christian militia productive of eternal rewards; and that nobody can be saved, no matter how much he has given away in alms and even if he has shed blood in the name of Christ, unless he has persevered in the bosom and unity of the Catholic Church.
You have imbibed heresy and must course-correct.