Guest Submission: Doubling Down On Failure

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By Edmond Schwab, Jr

It is very prescient that both Michael Matt at the remnant newspaper and Dr. Taylor Marshall often make the analogy of New Coke, but at least that was an example of a failure that was reversed.

But of course in the case of Pope Francis with Traditiones Custodes, he is so invested in the failure that it’s not enough to double down on failure for himself, he must Force the failure upon everyone else.

I’ve mentioned the Practical results of the second Vatican Council and the Novus Ordo before myself to people in the hierarchy as well as lay Catholics and sadly my concerns all too often utterly dismissed. Never understood why those that are firmly ensconced in the novus ordo don’t seem to care and just wish to double down on failure. Are they so invested in the change that they will ride it all the way to the bottom?

I don’t wish to go into a long tangent, but there are many examples of a similar double down on failure that have in the end led to things that we once thought were ubiquitous absolutely disappearing. Just look at the private business sector of the United States, companies that continue to double down on what they did that worked for so long but as tech and trends evolved, far too many of them fell out of favor and even just outright went under. I was born in 79 and throughout the 80s and early 90s remember small mom-and-pop video stores, and certainly most of those ultimately went under in the face of companies like Blockbuster that were able to deeply undercut mom and pop stores on price. But thanks to internet streaming and things like Netflix, those sort of companies are now a distant memory, the last meaningful hold out being a small chain called Family Video, but even if it has one tenth of the locations they had a few short years ago, and Blockbuster is all but gone with only one location in Northwestern Oregon. The funny thing is early on Netflix offered to sell to Blockbuster. But bottom line when you’re in the private sector if you do not adapt as needed or worse yet double down on failure you eventually go out of business. 
Obviously a religion that is supported by the weekly contributions of hundreds of millions of faithful as well as periodic endowments of more well-heeled adherents is less susceptible to those sort of Market forces but even so the continual double down on failure should be certainly not beyond fair and reasonable scrutiny.

Now I am certainly not a theologian let alone a plolemcist, I am not even a journalist, I am just a private individual who happens to be deeply devoted to his faith and trying to make sure all my loved ones get to heaven as well as myself. But I have had some success in the private sector over the years, and one thing I have learned is that when you double down on failure eventually things will hit a Tipping Point of No Return. Is that a fact I can only point out things based on what I observe and what I learned. However one thing is abundantly clear and that is the Catholic Church  in the post conciliar era is dangerously in decline. And while the church will not be defeated in her Divine element, it is becoming potentially clear to any observable individual that her human element appears on the verge of collapse. Now certainly this is not withstanding the fact that there is certainly a faithful Remnant on which I myself count myself in that number. But when you see siblings completely abandon the faith because they don’t see it as remotely relevant to their lives anymore, when your family for Generations has been devoutly Catholic, well that should tell you something. At the minimum it tells me we’ve got a chief Shepherd that is a WOLF in Shepherd’s clothing that cares less about bringing the face to all corners of the Earth baptizing in the name of the father Son and the Holy Spirit, and cares more about issues of temporal human concern such as the fraud of climate change or wealth inequality.  Especially when he goes after the one place where there is still life in the church, the traditionalist movement and the traditional Latin Mass.

The current situation makes the “Catholicism: Wow” campaign in a certain Kevin Smith movie look benign by comparison. I’ll have a couple pints with Buddy Christ before I get within ten feet of that pachamama crap unless it’s throwing Pachamama, with a couple cinder blocks tied to it, back in the Tiber where it belongs!!!

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