Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O Lord of hosts, my King, and my God.
Introducing my little Evil Project for the duration of the Synod.
Later today (I hope) The Remnant will be producing a longish article I wrote explaining in detail (and at length... sorry in advance) why I abruptly gave up news reporting in May this year, literally walking away. In truth, I had gone down to Rome for the March for Life, and the little quiet voice that had been whispering to me for about five years to move on, grew to a roar. I could no longer ignore my misgivings about the value of it. I'm not even really sure what came over me. I had gone to lunch with some friends, and then a couple of us went to the pub for a mojito. Then we went back to my friend's place where I was staying, and watched a movie.
The next morning, when I woke up, feeling surprisingly refreshed, I simply knew that the time was up. I packed my things, took leave of my friends and got on the train and went home.
I spent most of the summer doing not much more than thinking about it and going for walks. I did a few things for the Remnant, and found a new voice started developing, and a new conviction. We all knew full well that the thing that started today, the Synod, would be a watershed moment in the history of the Catholic Church. We all saw it coming, though even now no one really has any idea of exactly what to expect. For me, however, the one thing remained clear: this was too important to treat as "news".
But as we drew closer and closer to the day, I found the old urge to report and reveal coming back furiously.
Yesterday, talking to some blogger friends, it was suggested that we set up a war room, a place where traditionally-minded Catholic bloggers, writers and commentators can write and comment about the Synod as it is happening.
And, as things on the internet are generally about three minutes between conception of the idea and realization of the object,
I have recruited some familiar voices who have agreed to help with their examination and analysis of the situation, with a no-holds-barred rule. Names will be revealed shortly (though in some cases, identities will remain obscured.)
I sent around the following note to some of the louder-mouthed among my colleagues:
We'll run original blog posts as opinion pieces, we'll steal other people's stuff from other sites like the pirates we are, and we'll run original interviews with people on the ground in Rome that no one else will get because we'll have at least a couple of people on board who will be in situ. I will be inviting people to blog against the highjacking of the Synod ... We will give voices to people who would otherwise never be heard.
So, beware, beware, oh those of delicate sensibilities, there will possibly be some salty language as well as some unabashed truth-telling, some openly "divisive" posts, some people (I hope) saying things there that aren't being said anywhere else.
You thought the Mad Rad Trads were the bad kids before? Well the gloves are off today, boys and girls.
I am also opening the commboxes. Get in there, people. Tell us what you really think.
May no member of Christ’s Body and the American people feel excluded from the Pope’s embrace. Wherever the name of Jesus is spoken, may the Pope’s voice also be heard to affirm that: “He is the Savior”! From your great coastal cities to the plains of the Midwest, from the deep South to the far reaches of the West, wherever your people gather in the Eucharistic assembly, may the Pope be not simply a name but a felt presence, sustaining the fervent plea of the Bride: “Come, Lord!”
It could just be that this man and his supporters are doing what modern people do with words. Modern people don't think about what words mean. They follow the doctrine of Mao who said that we, the "West" who were at that time his opponents, were still labouring with the mental handicap that words mean things. No, no! Words, he said, are not a way of conveying meaning. They are little sticks of dynamite that you implant in people's brains to incite them to this or that desired action. To such people words are goads for driving a donkey. As a good Peronist populist demagogue, the evidence certainly would support the theory that Bergoglio has this attitude towards the things he says.
But aside from the few of us humans left who do remember what words are, there are two other classifications of rational beings who also know it. Whatever a Maoist, a Peronist or Jorge Bergoglio thinks their words are for, there are still powers who know what reality is. Whatever Bergoglio meant by this, the true meaning was not lost in Heaven or in Hell.
I realise we have more or less established that this man does not know what a logical contradiction is. That he feels nothing is amiss in saying one thing one day and its opposite the next. Or in saying one thing one day and doing its opposite the next.
But seriously...
“Those who covered this up are guilty. Even some bishops who covered this up,” he said. “It is a terrible thing.”
Is it just that he doesn't know that the world is writing down and comparing every single thing he says and does? Do he and his friends really think we aren't out here keeping track?
Or are they simply so drunk on power that they just do not care?
"Danneels advised the young man not to “make a lot of noise” about the abuse he endured from his uncle bishop because Vangheluwe was scheduled to retire in a year anyway. “It would be better that you wait..."
“The backdrop of this whole visit is not what's happening in American politics or a presidential campaign. The backdrop is a world steeped in violence and bloodshed and rancor and hatred, and here we have coming to your city, to our diocese, a real prince of peace. If there's any princely title that should be associated with Francis, it's a prince of peace, it's a bringer of peace,” Rosica said.
“When peacemakers come, they upset those who are not at peace. So, if people are going to be upset in any side of the spectrum here, let them look inside themselves and see what those issues are first, because in the presence of Francis, as you know and as I know, you're in the presence of extraordinary goodness, of kindness, of intelligence and of humanity. So, humanity is coming to teach us how to be more human,” he added.
Whom do you bring to the faithful?
To whom do you belong?
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
“You shall have no other gods before me.
“You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
Because nothing says "mercy" and "joy" like a seven-story high neon picture of a communist mass-murderer.
Yes folks, it's the Pope Francis in Cuba show! Brought to you by the Obama administration and Pope no-one-was-ever-merciful-in-the-Catholic-Church-until-I-came-along Francis.
Apparently, some of his biggest fans have been waiting for a long time to meet him.
Around 70% of Cuba's 11 million people practice syncretism, the blending of traditional Christianity with African religions that arrived on the island with the slaves imported during colonial times.
Only about 10% describe themselves as Catholic, once the dominant faith.
The Santeria tradition has survived both the hostility of the Catholic clergy and the state atheism the communist government decreed for more than three decades after the Cuban Revolution.
Today, many followers say they plan to turn out to greet the pope during his four-day visit.
"As pope, Francis has brought the honey that was missing in our lives," said Juan Manuel Perez Andino, a "babalawo," or Santeria priest.
He said he has seen a subtle shift in the Church under the Argentine pontiff, even if the Vatican and the Cuban clergy still officially frown upon Santeria.
"Now the Church lets us go there with the 'iyawo' (new initiate) to perform the ceremonies we need to," he said.
I just can't imagine why they don't get vocations... can you?
~
I'm working on a thing about how failing in my vocation led to becoming a Trad. There's bits about gardening in it for some reason I can't yet quite figure out.
Did I ever tell y'all about the time I almost wrote a book about women's religious life?
A friend on Facebook wrote about a woman who is "bitter" at the disasters in the Church, and the evils it has created:
"A 61-year-old woman I've been corresponding with... has seen the faith of almost everyone in her life decimated by the post-conciliar Church. Her mother lost her faith after the changes (and I presume, is now deceased). She describes her own children as "godless". She is 'bitter and angry'.
"This is what the Church did. This is what men like Kasper and Maradiaga and Marx and the rest of them have done to His little ones. These are the stories that don't get told, because the people leave and are rarely heard from again. God forgive us for what -- and whom -- we have abandoned."
But, acknowledging the unimaginable losses the collapse of the Church has caused, there is something good to remember here. In the past people had the Faith handed to them, and it cost them little or nothing to accept and keep it. They were often given little instruction past that which is given to children. People followed the Faith because it was what their parents did, or because all their neighbourhood was Catholic or their friends or businesses were. I know nuns who said that the exodus from the convents really happened because they had been given no intellectual formation in the Faith either in their homes or schools or the novitiate. It was mainly about how to walk and hold your hands so you looked like a holy nun. She had been a Carmelite, and she said they were told they were not allowed to read Teresa, for fear it would give them airs.
The Asteroid wiped all that away, and the people who had received the Faith so easily dropped it just as easily. What you get for nothing is not valued, even if it is pearls.
And now the Faith is still there and can still be found, but it is no longer easy. The result of the post-Conciliar catastrophe has been as our friend above said, but it has also created a race of Catholic guerilla fighters of which we are the second and third generation, and who are now going to be called upon to carry the fight forward. The ferocity with which they have acquired and kept the Faith is going to be required by everyone.
There is no more cheap grace to be had for tuppence in all the shops. Now if you want to know what is true, you have to go looking for it, develop your mind and knowledge and exercise your intellect and will, which faculties had become nearly atrophied in the immediate pre-conciliar period. Now just getting to know what you need to know to be a merely practising Catholic requires almost heroic effort of will and powers of investigation, as well as taking the trouble to learn to tell the truth from the sweet lies nearly all the parishes and priests are peddling. Heroism has, essentially, become our baseline.
And then you have to exercise those muscles of will to hold on to it as the World turns on you like a horde of screaming savages. In a situation like this one, the people who know and hold to the Faith are the Charles Atlas of the Catholic world. And it is going to be true very soon that they are going to require all that strength to stand up to what is coming at us. Anger can be the fuel for much of the fire in the blood required to get this far, but indulging in bitterness is really just a means of avoiding the fight. "Bitterness" is really just a fancy word for sulking, and right now, if you are indulging it, you're sulking while everyone else is fighting a war. It's a variety of self-indulgence that we have no spare resources for.
It might not sound like I'm being sympathetic, but a great many of us have been forced to claw our way out of the Novusordoist fever swamps, and for a lot of us it has cost pretty dearly. I know someone who started asking awkward questions in her small working class town in eastern Canada, and eventually got to the point where she wanted to study at a small orthodox Catholic college. Her parents and family, all the friends she had grown up with, almost entirely disowned her when she came to the unavoidable conclusions.
She loves her family and her home town, but knows that there is no longer any place for her there and that she will probably have to spend the rest of her life living far away so she can receive the real sacraments. It was a horrible but ultimately heroic choice, and she made the right one, but it will never stop being hard.
One of the terrors of Traditionalism is that we learn at some point that the Faith makes a totally uncompromising demand. It is this choice that the happy-clappy Kasperian Church wants to hide and banish. But we are coming to a time in which heroism is going to be only the first rung, the bare minimum requirement to save our souls. Ours is a fearsome Faith, and the kind of choices my friend made are going to be forced on more and more of us. We can't expect everyone to make the right one.
We must get used to asking the question: "Which Faith are you willing to die for?" The religion of the Tango-Mass?
Or this one?
Our friend Ann Barnhardt offers a piece of advice that I think would be a good cure for a person's indulgence in bitterness:
"Our Lord Himself who has told many mystic saints and doctors of the Church the same thing: THINK AND PRAY ABOUT MY PASSION AND DEATH. Why? Because thinking about Our Lord’s torture, agony and excruciating death forces us to confront Him as a Person, True God AND True Man. Legal systems don’t sob until their capillaries burst. Philosophies don’t suffer the agony of unrequited love. Imaginary friends don’t lay down their lives. Bureaucracies don’t fight asphyxiation by pushing themselves up on their impaled feet.
Only a PERSON can do these things. Only a DIVINE PERSON did. And remember, He would go through His ENTIRE PASSION just for you alone, and He would go through it REPEATEDLY for you alone, in fact as many times as you assist at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and even more. That is how much He PERSONALLY loves you, PERSONALLY.
And yes, I lost my mother to the Novusordoist revolution and the Sexual Revolution that Novusordoism is now embracing. She entered the Church in 1972 in Remi de Roo's Victoria, BC. They taught her that God wanted her to embrace the entire delusion, including the new sexual paradigm. In the end, it destroyed her life, and finally as she pursued what these evil people taught her, she contracted HPV and died of cervical cancer, estranged from me and everyone else in her family, addicted to and entirely engulfed in the post-60s Fantasy, refusing to the last minute to involve herself in reality.
One of the delusions of "bitterness" is that you alone have the right to complain. It whispers to you that your personal suffering is worse than everyone else's and that it absolves you of responsibility. But the War has left very few without scars.
Bitterness is a Fantasy. A life dedicated to the Real has no room for it.
When contacted by concerned Catholics, Franciscans assured callers that they had "the full support of the archdiocese." The Archdiocese of Boston however, issued no public statement on this scandal. The closest thing to an official response was an e-mail sent by the Archdiocesan Cabinet Secretary for Parish Life and Leadership, the Very Rev. Kevin M. Sepe, who told one outraged Catholic:
'St. Anthony Shrine, although within the Archdiocese of Boston, is a parish of the Franciscan Order and so I encourage you to contact them directly with your questions and concerns. The Archdiocese has no knowledge of the intent of this initiative and is not associated with it. Thank you for your correspondence...'
And...
Contrary to Islam, Christianity showed the oldest age profile among the leading religious groups in 2011. And while the main reason for Christians being economically inactive was retirement, for Muslims economic inactivity was mainly because they were students, or because they were looking after the home or family.
Some argue that unlike Islam, which gives security to people, Christianity isn’t helping young Brits to survive on the violent streets of England.
People are dying for the Faith, dying for Christ, right now.
Is this that Faith? Would you give your life for this?
~
Been in Malta for most of the week, and attended 3 Masses in Maltese. All greyheads, all receiving Communion standing, and on the hand... a general atmosphere of gloom pervading... very, very depressing.
