What the Mighty Ones, the Great and the Good, deem to be their Priorities are often temptations of the Enemy. Come to think of it, this may also be true of the Lowly among us! I had better remember that.
Hilaire Belloc was particularly amused by the following couple of sentences in Kai Lung:
'"Your insight is clear and unbiased," said the gracious Sovereign. "But however entrancing it is to wander unchecked through a garden of bright images, are we not enticing your mind from a another subject of almost equal importance?"'.
Indeed. We can all get hung up on our treasured fancies and fantasies.
This entrancement happened in a very big way with regard to Jorge Brergoglio. His favourite chip ... on his favourite shoulder ... has been, from the very beginning of his pontificate, his fellow clergy, 'butterflies', 'neo-pelagians' ... followed closely by the devout laity ... the sort of misguided people who might offer him Rosary Bouquets.
Personally, I thought the most offensive thing in Amoris Laetitia was the footnote telling confessors to remember that the Confessional is not a torture chamber. That's what this ... man ... thinks of his brother clergy! I read that when I had just returned from supplying duty at a very busy church; I was literally aching after sitting for more than two hours bent up with my ear to the grille doing my best to help; so very often telling people not to beat themselves up too much about matters where they were, in my view, judging themselves too harshly.
And the ... poor silly man ... thinks of me and my brother priests as unsympathetic and stupid sadists.
Surely, there were and are (to recycle the the rococo irony of Kai Lung) other "subjects of almost equal importance" worthy to engage the attention of a Roman Pontiff.
We have just experienced what one writer characterised as the first time in two millennia that Easter Was Cancelled; when episcopates in collusion with governments and led by the Vicar of Someone quite simply forbade Christians even to pray before the Blessed Sacrament. I will return to this monstrosity later, because it seems to me to raise enormous and disturbing matters of first principle.
To adapt some words of a famous spiritual writer of the last century:
"Even the best and most energetic of popes will one day have rest from his labours, and the lance of his successor often delivers the Church from the menace of some quite different windmill.".
This pontificate has been a pontificate of deceptive Windmills and distracting Gardens. Hidalgo Bergoglio has expended far too much of his energy in charging at the former. He has wandered unchecked in too many of the latter, where the bright images have blinded him to his true duties.
To be continued.
Dear Father. When ABS read "Laying the Foundation" by the solidly orthodox Roman Catholic Priest, Fr. Jospeh Clifford Fenton, ABS smiled and spoke a loud "Yes" in agreement with his observation:
ReplyDeleteWhile men live upon this earth there is no more precious and sacred privilege than that of standing forth and speaking for Christ
But that is exactly what Pope Francis refuses to do and he makes that plain with his screeching rejection of Vicar of Christ
And yet you won't publish my comment questioning whether this whole, hysterical, embarrassing affair isn't confected nonsense. Which, scientifically, it really is.
ReplyDeleteThe Church and the churches (and their incumbent priests - modern or traddy, it would seem) will have no one but themselves to blame when no one comes back. For years we've been admonished to stick by arcane disciplines else we forfeit our right to the Sacraments. But now we find ourselves actually excommunicated because of a mild virus that enables (some) of the morbid elderly to shake off their mortal coil. I don't think the Church realises quite what it has done here. In my view, and in the view of many orthodox Catholics I know, She's lost any legitimacy. Francis is only a symptom of the problem. He may have requested the closures but the priests were only too willing to comply, evidently placing their health worries above our right to the Sacraments. In so doing, the Church at universal and local level has declared that the Mass and the other sacraments are in the gift of the Church, rather than our *right* as confirmed Catholic Christians. And they thus continue to say the Mass - on our behalf - in the splendid isolation of the churches our labours and generosity built, telling us that our spiritual communion is enough. This clearly demonstrates the critical problem, that clergy actually thing they constitute the Church. They don't. And if it's enough now that we sit at home and flick through a missal, it always was and always will be.
Read this: https://www.jpost.com/opinion/it-is-time-to-end-this-misguided-social-experiment-get-back-to-work-622856