Why the Church in England is falling apart

This is from a post by Fr. Ray Blake of Brighton's St. Mary Magdalen parish. It is just a snippet from a

"letter from a Bishop to one of his priests, which basically said, "I cannot be bothered to read what you have written or to listen to what you have to say or to investigate what you are accused of but whatever it was it was wrong and hate filled."

Fr. Blake doesn't tell us the subject of the accusation, but comments simply, "It actually wasn't, it was a gentle argument trying to explain the faith".

He comments,

"I rather welcome the recent judgment that the relationship of priests to their bishops is like that of employer to employee, simply because it might bring some justice into a situation which is often quiet unjust and sometimes, as an American friend suggested, more akin to master and helot.

Those with power in the Church are often a law unto themselves, especially when they turn their back on the Church's Canon Law and basic Christian principles."

But it's not merely that these are bad men and bad bishops, heedless of the law of the Church and the tenets of the Faith. It's that they are intellectual runts. Some of them have a kind of animal cunning when it comes to protecting their interests, but other than this, well...

Think about it. It's not just that this man wasn't interested in investigating an allegation of "hate" against one of his own priests. It is the complete inability to grasp the internal logical contradiction he is making in his ridiculous rant. He "cannot be bothered" to investigate an accusation, yet "whatever it was" was "hate filled". And how, exactly, Your Excellency, have you made this assessment when you "cannot be bothered" to examine the actual material in question?

This is the current level of intellectual ability in the leadership of the Catholic Church in England.

In the lead-up to Advent, I think I will revive my "Abolish Christmas Now!" campaign. I am beginning to think that only if Christians in England are absolutely forbidden, on pain of harsh judicial penalties, from mentioning their religion in any public sphere that there is the slightest hope of saving the Faith in that country. These men need to be persecuted harshly for the belief they no longer hold and defend.



~

And with thy spirit

It's coming up...

Let's practice. All together now,

one, two, three...

More Christmas pics

A pre-Mass lounge-about, guarding the post-Mass spread from the ravenous hordes.


Urbi et Orbi the next morning. (Well, OK, it was noon, but when you've been up till three the night before, 11 am feels like a pretty early start.) Pretty good zoom on that camera huh?


Me sleepy. It was 18 degrees on Christmas day. Even the Romans, who bundle up when it dips below +20, were carrying their coats over their arms.

...and to all a good night

I'll be back after Christmas...

if the world's still here.

Buon Natale

Christmas Angel at St. Peter's Nativity scene.

Remembering the Real in the Capital of the World
Christmas Reflection by Hilary White

ROME, December 24, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com ) - I'm in Rome. And it's Christmas already. These facts have only in the last few days really sunk in. I've hardly noticed the last two months passing and have had no time to think about anything but work and the difficulties and expenses of moving from England.

I know, you who are reading probably already know this, having read the headlines of the LifeSite stories I've written in the last two months, but it still seems very odd to me to find myself in Rome, The Capital of the World.

Many mornings I wake in surprise and ask the cat, "What are we doing here?" She seems as unconcerned with the question as does the Urbs itself.


Christmas fair in the Piazza Navona


The correct way to eat your Christmas cotton candy


Today, I spent the day in a magnificent 17th century room, watched by the portraits of Baroque popes, cardinals and saints, helping to repair the hand made lace on an antique linen altar cloth to be used tonight at the Midnight Mass in the only Roman parish dedicated to the ancient "Tridentine" liturgy of the Church.

My little gang of friends, the parish "irregulars", laity who help organise and prepare the Masses, bustled about the altar putting out its gold candlesticks and reliquaries. Steps away is a little church where the body of St. Vincent Palloti lies, like an ecclesiastical Snow White, in a glass and gold coffin, miraculously incorrupt after 150 years. Miracles, and wonders are the commonplaces of daily life. I've fallen into a strange and glorious dream.


This is a city of contrasts, where the ancient and the medieval, the pagan and the Christian, the Renaissance and the Baroque, the modern and the secular, are not separated. Time here seems not to operate in a line, but as a crowd in a piazza during a festival: all times and eras milling boisterously together at once. Romans, some looking in profile like the marble statues in the Capitoline Museum come to life, still leave candles and flowers at the statue of Julius Caesar on the anniversary of his assassination.


Madam, may I hack you a gobbet?

Here all things, even the paradoxes of modern life, live together in a tangled skein of the here and now. Rome and Christmas, the eternal and perennial; me and work, the immediate and transient.

This is Rome, a city and a state and a culture and, if not the cradle of western civilisation, its true home and place of its youth. But this city, when Christianity was just reaching out through the world, was already ancient, and the centre of the western world.

People have called Rome the capital of the world, and there is still a sense, fifteen centuries and more after what historians call the 'fall of the Roman Empire', in which this is its true name. I walk every day through its windey, twisty medieval streets, with the walls of the Baroque Palazzos held up by ancient Imperial Roman columns; the little portrait shrines to the Blessed Virgin, "Madonellae", on the corner of every building, statues of saints and angels, Roman generals, and nationalist politicians, the gypsy beggars, the graffiti, the peddlers of silk shawls, the blaring ambulance sirens, and the Carabinieri, the military police, keeping watch over the whole, carrying automatic weapons out of fear of terrorist attacks. Rome is the whole world, the ancient and the modern.

Rome has been called the most beautiful city in Italy and standing on the Ponte Sisto, looking down the length of the Tiber towards the ancient Mausoleum of the Emperor Hadrian, topped with its statue of St. Michael the Archangel, it is easy to believe that Rome is the most beautiful city in the world. It is the place where the cultural treasures of our civilisation are found in their original context. Where the great religious paintings of Carravaggio are not in museums behind bullet-proof glass, but over the altars for which they were commissioned.

And it is still true that all roads lead here. Earlier this month, the great Australian cardinal and hero of the antipodean pro-life movement, George Cardinal Pell of Sydney, celebrated Mass in our parish, giving a homily in Italian, laced (so I'm told) with his charming Aussie accent.

Rome is like a mountain peak from which all the world is spread out before one's eyes and for a journalist, there is no more exciting place to be. I've observed that once in Rome, there is not much need for a travel budget since it is inevitable that anyone one might want to interview will eventually come here.

Madonna and Child at St. Peter's

Tomorrow is the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord and the day to remember that we are not here forever, that even Rome itself will one day be gone and that only truth will have mattered. The only thing worth knowing will have been the incarnate Truth, the one Who came to us on a still night in an insignificant and unfashionable backwater province far from the centre of the Empire. The place where the Emperor would send you if you were unpopular at the Imperial court.

The other day, I took a walk through the centre of that Empire: the Roman forum, where the laws and governance of the whole world originated when Christ was born to the sound of Angels' trumpets. In that forlorn and almost forgotten place, the Senate building from late Imperial times, a few columns and an arch were almost the only things standing. And even these have only recently been dug from under the city streets where they had lain forgotten for centuries.

It is said even here that the Feast of the Nativity is being forgotten in the midst of a secularised and commercialised - and above all forgetful - modern culture. And many have denounced this, complaining that the Christ Child and His mother, Joseph and the shepherds, the angels and the Magi are slowly being edged out in favour of Santa Claus and some of the most glittering shopping districts in the world.

But Rome is a place that never forgets and knows the difference between the transient and inconsequential absurdities of modernity and the Real. The wise adage "this too will pass" means more here than anywhere else because what matters, what is real and lasting, stays here, while all that is false passes down the Tiber and is forgotten.

Tonight the church will be full of worshippers and tomorrow the Holy Father, the man who is not only successor of the Apostles of Christ, but the inheritor and guardian of the entire ancient pagan and medieval Christian western world, will address the crowds in St. Peter's square, and I will have answered my own question. This is what I'm doing here.

Copyright © LifeSiteNews.com.

That's better

Now I'm definitely feeling more Christmassy

Yep. It's that time of year again.

The No-God Zone

So, having just spent three days in Rome where Catholicism, even in decline, comes seeping out of the walls and radiating up off the cobbles, it is something of a shock to come back to the God-Free Zone.

British public life cannot be a "God-free zone", the head of the Catholic church in England and Wales warned last night.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor said he was unhappy about attempts to "eliminate the Christian voice" from the public forum. He urged Catholics to prevent the country from becoming a "world devoid of religious faith" through a deeper engagement with God by praying, studying and performing charitable acts.

Speaking in a lecture at Westminster Cathedral, he said there was "considerable spiritual homelessness", and even if people wanted to believe they felt faith was not an option.

"Many people have a sense of being in a sort of exile from faith-guided experience. This is the effect of the privatisation of religion today: religion comes to be treated as a personal need. You cannot banish religion to the church premises. There are social currents that want to isolate religion from other forms of knowledge and experience in order to marginalise it."

But I'm not sure which is worse, the totally anti-religious nation that the hardcore secularists of the Labour party would have, or the hazily heretical, lukewarm bathwater Church we would have if Cardinal Cormac were to have his way.

Come to think of it, I'm fairly sure I do know which is worse. It tells us which is worse in the Big Book:

I know thy works, that thou art neither cold, nor hot. I would thou wert cold, or hot. But because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold, not hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth. Because thou sayest: I am rich, and made wealthy, and have need of nothing: and knowest not, that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.

So, Cardinal Cormac "Bubbles" Murphy O'Connor has helped us again with more of the same rubbish that has resulted in millions abandoning the Faith around the world.

"If Christians really believed in the mystery of God, we would realise that proper talk about God is always difficult, always tentative."

Tell Thomas Aquinas that "talk about God is always tentative".

A few months ago, my aunt was telling me about the daughter of a friend of hers who was recently confirmed in the Catholic Church. They went to visit at Easter and the girl, who is fifteen and has been in a Catholic school throughout her education, was saying, "Well, that's just rubbish isn't it? How does anyone know for sure if Jesus rose from the dead. If you can't prove it, why should anyone believe it?"

My response is simply, "Quite so."

But her mother, apparently, was completely at a loss. She had never heard of apologetics and had gone through her whole Catholic life hearing from Cardinal Bubbles and his friends that "talk about God is always tentative" and there is nothing in Catholicism that you can prove. No evidence.

I knew a young, very enthusiastic and quite stupid fellow once who was very keen on the charismatic movement. He had a friend who was an unbeliever but was quite intelligent and wanted to know if there was a God. This young idiot just kept repeating, with the usual charismatic glaze in the eye, that, "No man, you've just gotta believe. You just gotta beleeeeeeve."

The young friend was stunned to meet with the idea that there is a strong and very venerable intellectual tradition in the Church giving quite satisfying proofs for the existence of God.

I'm actually with Dr. Dawkins on this one.

He told an interviewer: "There's absolutely no reason to take seriously someone who says, 'I believe it because I believe it.' God either exists or he doesn't. It's a matter of the truth."

Yep.

But I guess once you have made a fortune and a global reputation on being an atheist, one doesn't want to look at the assertion too closely, just in case there is any evidence available.

Don't get me wrong

Christmas, or the Feast of the Nativity, is something I would go to the stake to defend.

...

(getting the point yet?)

Abolish Christmas Now!

While Christianity still survives in this country.

I had a few raised eyebrows just before the Holy Days when I posted a couple of notes calling for the complete abolition of Christmas. I didn't mean abolish Christmas shopping, Christmas decorations in shops, Christmas specials on television, all of which have done so much to make me loathe and dread the coming of the season.

I meant actually abolish any public mention or recognition of the feast once known as the Nativity of Our Lord. It must be made an offense, preferably a criminal offense, to hang a light, to put a decorated tree in your home, to send a card with a robin or a creche on it or sing a carol. The government, with the strongest measures at its disposal, must put an immediate end to the ringing of bells, the staging of pantomimes, the decorating of churches, Nativity plays, or anything related to the Christian celebration.

It is absolutely imperative, a matter of life and death, that Christmas be outlawed. I don't know if Western Civilization will survive another Merrie Yule Tide season if things are allowed to continue.

I meant it, and was not kidding nor fooling about. (Well, I might have been fooling about a wee bit, but not much, even as much as usual.)

But I'm surprised that those who wondered were wondering whether I meant it or why I had said it.

Why isn't the answer obvious?

Abolish Christmas

Please! Before it's too late!

(Where's that National Secular Society when you need them?)

The Nativity as an asylum seekers' tale

Reindeer Ralph - the new Nativity : The traditional nativity play is on the wane, suggests a survey.

Grinch Chronicles

Remind me to tell y'all later why I think Christmas ought to be banned.

No, I mean really really banned. I don't just mean the glittery tinsely Christmas stuff, but the actual religious holiday.

Banned outright. No more carols. No more Christmas TV specials. No services in churches.

And definitely no bell-ringing.

Especially in Britain.