Customer Reviews

Confusion in the Pews: How We Can Make Our Church Catholic Again - One Parish at a Time

5 star:		(3)
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This book is important reading for Catholics who take the practice of their Faith seriously. Time and again, during recent years, we have seen purportedly "Catholic" authorities, speaking through the media, contradicting beliefs universally taught pre-Vatican II.
Has the Church changed so radically? Is what was once wrong, wrong no longer? Does it matter if the formal liturgy of the Mass is changed by the Celebrant? Why?
Cecilia Martin documents many abuses, justified by their proponents as "reform," currently assailing the Church. She shows how enemies hijacked the genuine reforms of Vatican II and selectively misinterpreted them to promote an agenda aimed at its destruction. Far fetched? Read the book! It is well written and referenced. Reach your own conclusions. If they are the same as Cecilia's, follow her advice on how to counteract this attack from within.

The "reforms" which many believe to have been initiated by Vatican II are not actually reforms but rebellions, and some of the rebellions mentioned in this book are incredible (a woman dressed in an alb and stole "concelebrating" a Holy Mass and even hearing confessions!).

Priests, bishops, and even some cardinals have rejected the authority of Rome in favor of their own view of what true Catholic worship should be. The result has been a departure from the vertical worship of true liturgy to the horizontal worship of modernism, indifferentism, Americanism, and naturalism. Naturally this departure does not only manifest itself in liturgical abuses, but also in doctrinal abuses (contradicting the Church's stand on birth control, homosexuality, abortion; preaching heresy from the pulpit; inviting blatantly anti-Catholic speakers to speak at Catholic retreats and seminars).

The book gives the best possible advice for those who really want to understand why the quality of our liturgy has declined so terribly in the last few decades; read the Bible, the Catechism, the Vatican II conciliar documents, and the Code of Canon Law; confront (respectfully) the priests who are committing liturgical abuses (I say respectfully because some of them are heretics, while others may truly not know that something they are doing is actually an abuse); confront the bishop; and if necessary, write the Vatican.

I give this book five stars. I was considering only four, since the English usage is so bad. This book is an example of why a good proofreader is necessary and a spell checker is not enough ("form" instead of "from"; "principal" instead of "principle"; etc.).

Cecilia Martin has succinctly presented the background of the present problems in the Catholic Church and who is responsible. All of us need this book to tell us how to defend our church from its enemies within and how to find and use the resources of the Church to be intelligent, well-informed Catholics and apologists. Thanks!