The Trouble with Angels - 1966 Farewell to Vatican I

 Pope Francis, the Jesuit, honored an abortion advocate.

Tonight we watched a movie, The Trouble with Angels, 1966, with Haley Mills and Rosalind Russel. Haley was 20 and did not look like a Catholic schoolgirl, but the movie a light fantasy with some laughs. It also signaled the last of those traditional, private Catholic high schools. Vatican II began in 1962, so the film was a farewell to the Catholicism of the past.

Vatican II emptied the seminaries which trained priests, closed most of the Catholic high schools, and shut down many new facilities built just before Vatican II. A Catholic bishop told me how remarkable it was that so many orders expanded and built in time to shrivel from Vatican II - start loaning their excess capacity to Lutherans and other mainline groups.

The Notre Dame Moreau seminary for Holy Cross Fathers was down to 80 students for a three year course of study. One priest told the mixed class that people from all over used to come to the campus on Sunday and watch the armies of priests, brothers, and nuns march along the lake. The complete name of the university is Our Lady of the Lake, Notre Dame du Lac.

The "reforms" were anything but that, since the Documents of Vatican II preserved everything from before. Instead, rationalism took over so the Roman Catholics could be as Unitarian-Universalist as the mainline Protestant denominations. 

Vatican II as reform was as honest, sincere, and Spirit-anointed as a DMin at Fuller Seminary.

The Catholic leaders, apostates even from Catholicism, were able to rebrand their dogma - forget the Documents - and invite an era of total Left-wing activism

The Protestants coveted the smells, bells, and pink copes of Catholicism, and already beat them at German rationalistic doctrine.

So we should not be shocked that the Protestant collapse came at roughly the same time as the Church of Rome's meltdown. 

 Would he keep you from attending Luther Seminary - ALC, now ELCA?
This is the Luther Seminary Chapel.

Matt the Fatt Is Liquidating the Missouri Synod - Already on the List, Concordia College in Portland, Oregon

 "Next we'll sell Concordia College in Portland."

I was looking for information about seminaries and found the ALPB Online discussion (2017) about the ELCA seminaries losing 80% of total student enrollment in relatively few years. ELCA seminary names have continued, but they are all a shadow of what they were 20 years ago.

The LCMS is following the same pattern in colleges and seminaries. Missouri sold the China property for a bundle, closed the Selma college, and shuttered Portland's LCMS college. They sold their NYC Concordia  College to Iona College, run by the Christian Brothers, a Roman Catholic order.

Harrison - "I cannot but reflect with thanksgiving, even today, on the myriad blessings God has produced through this school. We thank God, too, for the heroic effort of the CCNY Board of Regents, CCNY President Rev. Dr. John Nunes, the LCMS Atlantic District and District President Rev. Derek Lecakes, and the faculty and staff of CCNY to find a way forward."

The LMCS extension fund has bought the Portland college for a mere $3 million. The college owed the synod $36 million. The college got involved with HotChalk, a company partially owned by Noodle. The Portland college was using HotChalk/Noodle, apparently in a scheme where the online component recruited students who would keep the LCMS college solvent. 

I would hate to be the chief accountant at HotChalk/Noodle trying to explain the numbers to giggling reporters. Or - a student with a diploma printed by HotChalk with a footnote - "A Subsidiary of Noodle."

"Doctor" Harrison's sales pitch has probably gone from "I will resuscitate this synod" to "I inherited this mess." Potential replacements for Harrison are probably already at the point of wondering how much more will sold at a sheriff's auction and argued in various courtrooms. 

 "Honey, I shrunk the synod!"