It's all fun and games until someone loses their soul

The presider at the "closing liturgy" of this year's West Coast Call to Action Conference looked familiar to me...

I couldn't place him...

Until I realized he was the bishop of my hometown for 37 years, where very little of the Catholic Faith survives.

In 1972, when my mother applied to the nearest Victoria Catholic parish to be received, she was taught by the priest and sisters (of St. Anne), who had been taught by this man, that there was no one really true thing to know about God, that all that was necessary was to feel good about oneself. But that the most important thing to remember is that the Catholic Church that mercifully was supposed to be dying out after the Great and Glorious Second Vatican Council, was a wicked and evil thing. It's teaching and tradition was something she ought to avoid at all costs...

you know the drill.

My mother died last summer after a lifetime of rejecting and hating the Faith because of the work of this man. She embraced the entire mythology of liberal catholicism, feminism, paganism: the whole self-contradiction. She addicted herself to a fantasy world and never let go and the people under this man's leadership encouraged her to dive deeper into the poisoned well and never come up.

She died confused and frightened, never having known any peace or any answer to any of her anguished questions about what her life had been for.