I had the great honor of having Dr. Fimister for a graduate history course on the history of the Catholic Church to 1500 at the Augustine Institute, 2021. I can say with all honesty, he is the most brilliant history professor I have ever encountered, has a great sense of humor, and is a very dedicated, traditional Catholic gentleman. Every lecture was as you heard here and I never noticed any notes beyond one or two sheets. 16 weeks, 3+ hours of lecture each week. Beyond amazing. Thank you, Dr. Fimister.
I'm 72 years old.....and I'm finally learning something worthwhile. I have a BS in American History which is... Absolutely LOVED this lecture!!! I'm 2 years into being Roman Catholic...some persecution from my protestant friends. But I am their very first Catholic friend. Big responsibility.
Absolutely magnificent series. I am going back around for a second listen, it's wonderful. Dr Fimister has recently become one of my favourite people on RU-vid, a mighty learned gentleman with a great sense of humour, a fierce talent for storytelling, and an absolutely phenomenal memory. Hearing our history as Catholics, delivered so beautifully, is a true gift. Many thanks, Sensus Fidelium!
This was a great presentation of all the Councils and especially this last one Dr. Fimister. Thank you for all the work. My personal opinion is that while we should definitely know what the Second Vatican Council really said, its good points and its bad points, that Council isn't really the issue anymore. It isn't the '70s or '80s or '90s anymore: the people who were involved in the Council either have all gone to their eternal reward now or are very very old. The people who are doing bad things in the Church now don't even try to use Vatican II as a justification anymore like they did in times past. It is becoming a part of history. What we have to do is clean up the mess little by little, prayer by prayer, person by person, priest by priest, parish by parish, bishop by bishop, i.e. fight using spiritual guerilla warfare tactics until Our Lord sends one of those historical waves along that sweeps away all the garbage.
Saint Pius X did NOT 'rewrite' the Breviary. He changed the distribution of the Psalms, which was the main change (the Roman Office by the beginning of the twentieth century had become a mess) but beyond that the Office was still the same. The text of the Psalter was still the Gallican Psalter, Saint Jerome's translation done in the fourth century, and the Offices of many of the major Feasts were still the same as they had been for a thousand years. Other Popes had wanted to change things before Vatican I: Benedict XIV for one in the middle of the 18th century but his commission didn't produce any workable results, and Urban VIII actually did rewrite many of the hymns of the Breviary according to pagan Latin meters during the seventeenth century and mandated them on the entire Church. They are still in use today in the Extraordinary Form except that as part of his reform Pius X made it possible to use the pre-Urban hymns if one wished. To compare what Saint Pius X did to was done to the Divine Office after the Second Vatican Council is a very big mistake and a grave injustice to a good thing.
How is Pius X's change a good thing (from your last sentence)? There was a problem with the calendar which had become overloaded with the constant Doubles of Confessors of not extraordinary importance for the Universal Church, for example; but instead of fixing that by implementing some reform of the calendar (for example, making some post-Tridentine additions of lower rank or only to be celebrated in some places), Pius X made a completely new Psalter schema and strictly forbade the use of the very venerable old one.
@@paulissimus I am speaking of the Office as it stood at the beginning of the twentieth century not in the immediate aftermath of Trent. You are true that the Feasts had multiplied greatly but part of that problem was the reason they had multiplied. Maybe we who have never been under obligation to pray the pre-1911 Office can complain about priests being weak, but eighteen psalms on a Sunday at Matins when that is your busiest day saying Mass is a lot. And the Psalms (save 118) weren't broken up like they are in the Pius X distribution of the Psalter and some of them are quite long. And this was the reason those Feasts were raised in rank to eclipse the Sunday: because they had only nine psalms and lessened the burden somewhat on the clergy. And then on the ferial days there are twelve psalms at Matins and then at the minor hours psalm 118 was incessantly repeated throughout the week whereas in the post 1911 each of those hours has its own set of psalms thus increasing the variety and decreasing the repetitiveness of the Office. So many priests complained to Leo XIII that he established shorter votive Offices that priests could say at need to meet their obligation and that destroyed the universality of the prayer. It was a good change, maybe not perfect, but one has to understand that the Roman Office at the beginning of the twentieth century as it was actually said was neither ancient nor venerable; it was chaotic and confused. Besides the text of the Psalms are the same: the Gallican Psalter that had been sung in the West since the first millennium. Most of the responds and the readings at Matins are the same. The Offices of the ancient Feasts are still almost all the same.
Thank you, Dr. Fimister. I thought it very generous of you to call George Tyrrell British. Unfortunately, I must acknowledge his birth in Dublin and as such Irish.
What a marvelous encyclopedi recall you have. I'm keen but a bit thick. So please prepare your long for discourze with sone handy change of year info ( 17 18 19 th century)with a quiet warning.
He said Pius X. But the reform of the Breviary that Saint Pius X was a very good thing in most regards. As much as I admire Dr. Fimister I think that he is wrong in thinking this was a particularly new use of papal power that only could have taken place after Vatican I. Benedict XIV had wanted to do it in the middle of the 18th century and established a commission for that purpose but it never came off. And Saint Pius V after the Council of Trent mandated that the Roman Breviary be used in every place couldn't claim a two hundred year pedigree for their own Office. I think that this was mainly to correct the abuse of the impieties of the so called "Renaissance" but still it eliminated a lot of regional practices that had contributed to the strength of the Church by keeping power from being too centralized. Also Urban VIII in the seventeenth century rewrote most of the hymns of the Breviary and mandated them on the entire Church. So what Saint Pius X did in 1911 was not exactly a new concept and people had in fact been calling for it for quite some time.
Dr Fimister studiously omits why Ratzinger didn't actually DO anything about correcting the heretical interpretations of the Council documents. Words are cheap. At any point he could easily have required every bishop to sign a statement of faith and excommunicated those who refused. Instead he resigned. The problem goes far deeper.
The leader was agnostic, sure, but the movement was overwhelmingly catholic and it crippled catholic political efforts in France, and it constituted a de facto siding with the third republic over what would have been a significantly better regime.
I could be completely misreading the situation. But given that he also told the cristeros to stand down, I think it's clear that Pius XI was kind of naive.
@@terilien6124 I have only heard a very little about Action Francaise and Dr. Fimister's explanation is the most detailed I have ever gotten. The Third Republic was a disaster by the end and I don't know if anything could have saved it but maybe who knows?
No, we must be honest about Dignitatis Humanæ. "Religious communities also have the right not to be hindered in their public teaching and witness to their faith, whether by the spoken or by the written word." (DH 4) Which religious communities are being referred to? "If, in view of peculiar circumstances obtaining among peoples, special civil recognition is given to one religious community in the constitutional order of society, it is at the same time imperative that the right of all citizens and religious communities to religious freedom should be recognized and made effective in practice." (DH 6). If all citizens and religious communities have a RIGHT not to be hindered in public teaching, then the church of satan has the right to proselytize. This document isn't just about the power of the state, although it does in fact deprive the state of it's legitimate rights and duties toward God. No, even if the document is double-tongued, it is about exalting the supposed rights of man above those of God.
2:22:00, The social kingship of Christ was, for example, brought to Plimoth Colony with the Puritan Pilgrims, and has never been a problem for American Christians. I think Protestants (my background but am Catholic now), having no overseeing authority and being decentralized were allowed too much freedom of thought, like children without parents. However they would have embraced and did embrace Christ as authority. The problem was the freedom and the encroachment of atheistic communist influence especially on the Baby Boomers. Social engineering was a tool of Satan and hard at work against Christian America.
