Church of Babel

These nuns live not very far from here and have a business manufacturing and selling herbal remedies that are very popular. "Produtti monastici" is a Thing in Italy, and the Orte nuns sell their products all over the country, including in the shop at our monastery.

I am thinking of going there to make a little weekend retreat soon, and was pleased to find this video to know what sort of liturgy to expect.

But it's a rather depressing video, in many ways. First, there seem to be almost no Italians in the group, that appears to be made up almost entirely of Asian straniere. There is nothing wrong with the solemnity with which they recite the Creed, but... but...

I don't know the liturgy in Italian. Frankly, because no parish in Canada ever uses the Nicene Creed at Mass, I don't really know it in English either. I only know it in Latin. And this is kind of the whole point.

The abandonment of the universal language of the Church has splintered the entire Church into national enclaves. No one belongs any more to the universal Church. We belong to the British Church or the German Church or the Italian Church, and very little crossover is possible.

Now that we have the German bishops and others clamouring for the local national conferences to decide matters of doctrine according to local fashion, the final manifestation of this appears to be ready to launch, and the notion of a Universal Church united by belief will finally be dead. Divide, confuse, scatter, then pick us off one by one.



~

A New Papacy for a New Church

It's funny about the popular obsession with the red shoes, huh? Two years ago there was a kind of weird miniature frenzy over the fact that Bergoglio doesn't wear them (and of course, the implicit sneer at Benedict who did.)

So much noise was made about the shoes in the press that we had Bergoglio himself getting in on the rather nasty joke during the recent triumphal progress. Like every school bully that ever existed, he does seem to make a point of picking on the weaker kids, in this case, the last remnants of believers in the Church. In what is now the normal papal style, he landed a sucker punch and then while the victim was gasping and wondering what was going on, turned around to his gang of followers and snarled out a joke about it.

Mocking and bullying devout little old ladies. What a mensch.

But why did the red shoes even get a mention at all? Why did anyone even notice they were missing in Bergoglio's chosen manner of dress?

Because they are symbolic. Because somewhere deep in the festering swamps of modern man's soul, there is still a tiny glimmer of recognition that symbols are a real thing, there is still communication going on. It's just that now, the New Catholic Man hates and violently rejects what the shoes symbolise. They were one of the last fragments of the deeply symbolic papal grandeur that Benedict XVI was able to revive, and even that so enraged the enemies of Christ that they were the subject of electronic reams of scorn-heaping articles.

But of course, none of the journalists sneering at Benedict or sniggering at Bergoglio's nasty jokes has bothered to stop and look it up, and find out why popes used to wear the things they did. A while ago someone wrote somewhere that this kind of portrait of a pope, where it looks like he's wearing so much stuff that it's holding him up, was like that on purpose. That "holding him up" was precisely the desired effect. This was because the papacy was not supposed to be about the pope. It was supposed to be about Christ and His holy Church.

Remember those photos everyone mocks of President Obama dressed in a polo shirt and cycling shorts and a bike helmet? Those are understood as symbolic garments, and the American political cartoonists have got the message: Obama is a liberal Beta male, not someone to be taken seriously. They are often placed next to pictures of Vladimir Putin bench pressing Russian bears. Political cartoonists are perhaps the last people on earth who still fully grasp the purpose of the physical symbols of politics.


Just try to imagine what the People's Pope would look like dressed up like Pope St. Pius X, Hammer of the  Modernists...

...

Yeah. Me too.

Today I came across possibly the best description of the purpose of all that papal pomp and circumstance that New Catholic Man hates so much. Read it, and you will learn why New Catholic Man is no one I want to meet.

One of the things the following clarifies, once again, is that Bergoglio is not anything surprising. We have the pope we've been asking for, for decades. He's a pope in the populist model that John Paul II was so beloved for, only without all those tiresome big words everyone had to look up all the time, and most importantly, without all that tedious religious stuff.

...

[I have retained all the ridiculous American spellings, to prove that it wasn't me...]

It's a very Catholic instinct, a reflex, really, to adore the pope as our sweet Christ on earth, as the sacrosanct keeper of the keys, as the vice regent of the King of the Universe. The problem is this papal affection has been running on the wrong kind of fuel for decades.

When the papacy decided to "loosen up," lower itself, scrape off the barnacles, lose the triple tiara, dye the Church´s proverbial hair and spring for hair implants, the focus, paradoxically, went from the august office to the active, and even hyperactive, man in that office. If you observe the photo of Pope Pius XII in procession, there are multiple layers of order and decorum and rank which act like a kevlar vest for the instinctive popular clamor...

Precisely because Pacelli was ensconced in such an intricate web of sacred semiotics and, shall we say, mystical bureaucracy, the savor and brightness of his unique person was blunted, dimmed, diffused, so that the popular devotion flowed towards what he was animating, rather than towards his charisma, jawline, hand signals, idiosyncratic gestures, etc. A man elected to be pope did not just die to himself by devoting all his labors to the care of the Church, but his personality was radically smothered by the byzantine demands of his clothing, routine, manner of speech, associations, residence, and so on. That was how a sacrosanct office ran on the fuel of sacrosanct populism.

As things stand now, though, the papacy has become so democratized, so "personalized", that the ancient instinct to adore the pope can only find purchase on the unique surface of the particular man with the papal ring. Without the traditional semiotic buffer, the pope-man cannot but become one Great Leader among others (e.g. "the Catholic Reagan," "the Catholic Obama", etc.). This is why Francis's famous "humility" rings so hollow.

Precisely by rejecting the conventional residence, clothing, shoes, forms of expression, associations, liturgical disciplines, etc., he becomes a tractor beam of attention. It may be unwitting but he´s inadvertently become the biggest egotist in the world, sort of like the man who becomes the loudest in the room by repeatedly assuring everyone that he´s not going to say anything else. He is Pope Kanye West and he is here to stay.

As for the selfies, that's just symptomatic of our dumbass age. I suspect Dante would have penciled in a perverse punishment for the vanity that smart phones generally sustain. Perhaps an arm wrapped around one's own throat in an eternal sneering strangulation.

But I digress...

~

Well... I am definitely feeling something present...

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.



~

“Those who covered this up are guilty. Even some bishops who covered this up,” he said. “It is a terrible thing.”

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..."

~

Whom do you worship?

Whom do you worship?


Whom do you welcome?


Why are you there?

“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.

~

I am not an antipope!

Dude, it's not about the shoes...

Hey y'all,

remember that time when Pope Pius XII used to constantly say such insane and incomprehensible and kinda heretical-sounding things all the time - off the cuff-like so no one could really call him on it - and the rumours went around all the time that he wasn't really the pope and he ditched all the traditional symbols of his office like living in the Apostolic Palace and refused to wear the pope-stuff and then he appointed a public pederast to run his household and refused to bless people because they might get offended by Christianity and then his hand-picked subordinates started publicly demanding that the Church either change or ignore the words of Christ in the Gospels because nobody liked Him any more and then Pius just sat there saying nothing and didn't correct them or fire them or issue clarifications and then instead stood up on the loggia and got on TV and told everybody what great theologians they were and then he fired the guy who objected to it and then started chumming around with Hitler and Stalin and told the Jews and the people in the Gulags that that torture and starvation and extra-judicial arrests and getting beaten and murdered by the secret police were really good for them because Jesus said "Blessed are the poor" even though He really didn't and then when Pius misquoted Scripture all the time even in official documents and implicitly denied the Divinity of Christ by repeatedly denying the miracles in the Gospels and then when his cardinals and bishops started saying that if he kept on this way there would be a giant catastrophic schism in the Church and he just kept on doing it and never even responded...?

Oh, and remember that time when his predecessor Pius XI resigned in the middle of a giant clerical homosexual-abuse scandal but didn't give up the papal name or papal whites and went on calling himself Pius XI and lived in the Vatican and sometimes issued letters and stuff under his papal name and then it was revealed that a group of ultra-progressive cardinals at the Conclave had decided they needed Pacelli because they knew he would give them what they wanted and went around campaigning to get him the votes even though that would have invalidated the election?

Remember that?

Oh, and remember when the uproar and outrage caused by his behaviour resulted in him having to make a public statement that he wasn't really either an anti-pope or the Antichrist?

Yeah...

me neither.

“Maybe I have given an impression of being a little bit to the left,” the pope admitted. “But if they want me to recite the Creed, I can!”

Pope Francis said a cardinal “who is a friend” was telling him about an older Catholic lady, “a good woman, but a bit rigid,” who had questions about the description of the Antichrist in the Book of Revelation and if that was the same thing as an “anti-pope.”

“‘Why are you asking,’ the cardinal said. ‘Well, I am sure Pope Francis is the anti-pope.’

“‘Why do you say that?’

“‘Well, because he renounced the red shoes, which are so historic,'” the pope said the woman responded.

People have all sorts of reasons to think, “he’s communist or he’s not communist,” the pope said.

Actually, yeah. Yeah, I think I would like you to recite the Creed. Often. That would be a good thing for a pope to do now and then.

I think, in fact, that from now on if you just recited the Creed every time you saw a microphone in your face, that might be good.

But just give me a few minutes to step back a little. Like maybe into the next block.



~

Catholic no-fault divorce

And, just in time for the apocalypse, Pope Francis announced yesterday that he will be issuing a Motu Proprio (why not just sidestep all that annoying "collegiality" blather, eh? No?) changing the rules for  the annulment process. Can't keep the poor little darlings waiting, can we? And all that nonsense about investigating the facts of the case, waiting to find out whether there is any, you know, truth in the claims. That just creates suffering, don'tcha know.

As for those questioning the premise of good Edward Pentin's book suggesting that the Synod is a fix, and that the whole process has been controlled from the outset to achieve a pre-determined agenda...

have you spent more than six and a half minutes observing how politics works? But hey, whatever helps you sleep at night brah...


The other day the Washington Post published a thing saying there is a "conservative revolt" brewing in higher circles of the Church's leadership.

Good luck with that, lads.



~

The fix is in

Everything's fine. Nothing to see here. Move along...

 Gagliarducci reports:

Some well-informed people say that the 2015 Synod will be completely different from any other. First of all, a midterm report will not be released. 

Avoiding the release of a midterm report would mean eliminating any possibility of discussion. The plan is for the Synod to carry out discussions mostly in “small groups” (circuli minores) without a general discussion. In the end, the reports of the small groups would be put in the Pope’s hands, and the Pope would then give a final address. No final report or post-synodal apostolic exhortation is foreseen at the moment, at least according to recent rumors.

In this way the adapters hope to convince the Pope to employ vague language so they can eventually exploit his words.

A little while ago, a friend of mine said that she felt confident that the "good" bishops attending the Synod would win the day in October. After asking her what evidence she has seen to give her that idea, and receiving only vague assurances about the working of the Holy Ghost, I responded that it wouldn't matter whether they did or not, since they had no power. It seems they are to have even less than none now.

The same people are in charge, and they were very unhappy with the outcome their machinations produced last year. Accustomed to operating out of the limelight, I guess. They didn't expect the uproar or the vast public exposure - and censure - their tactics would generate. Well, looks like they've solved that problem. I wouldn't be surprised to see the press conferences cancelled as well. While these things can be controlled, it is just too easy to slip up when there is a big crowd of journalists in the room with you. All they would need would be one member of the staff of the Vatican Press Office to offer a guest pass to the wrong sort of fellow, and all manner of difficulties would be unleashed.

Last year, I urged the bishops who were concerned with the direction things were taking to hold a separate press conference, since the official ones were so tightly controlled. That advice was ignored. I believe there has been a battle going on since October 2014 inside the rib cage of every bishop who retains a shred of the Holy Catholic Faith, between their desire to be good company men and go along and play nice, and their holy desire to defend Christ's Church and His flock.

We will see which side wins; whether they are men or the men-without-chests I have always believed them.

Either way, they clearly have no power to alter the outcome of the Synod. Whether the men coming to Rome in a month discover their long-lost vertebrae, the Synod has obviously been fixed from at least the time of the February 2014 Consistory.



~

Eaglefeather Chaput is on the job!

Ok, so I've been kind of not really posting much about this stuff here, but this one is just too damn good not to share.

It looks like that ol' World Meeting of Families is turning out to be the most entertaining fiasco of the year (until... well... October). We've got a stellar line-up of fake Catholics, pro-abort politicians and sodomite activists for y'all, and the "pro-life conservative" archbishop of Philly is on the job!

Following concerns from Catholic lay organisations, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia, well known in the US and abroad for his strong conservative and pro-life stands on abortion and family issues, has issued a statement saying that he is shocked that the World Meeting of Families organisers could have so drastically misstepped...

... Oh wait... no...my bad. He's issued a statement telling the whistleblowers to shut up and mind their own damn business...


Woot! Bring me more popcorn!

Does anyone know if there are any plans to picket the Philadelphia thing? Now THAT would be hilarious! "Pro-life" Chaput, who everyone in the US thinks is the great hope of the Church, having a bunch of little old ladies show up with cute baby signs and Rosaries... And then get Eaglefeather Chaput to lead the "Catholics" at the meeting to a counter protest, shouting "Get your Rosaries off my ovaries" ... WHILE. THE. POPE'S. THERE.

Oh man! there just isn't enough popcorn in the whole world!

Church Militant and the Lepanto Institute ... two genuinely pro-life and Catholic lay organisations fighting for... well, for the Catholic Faith... have been asking some awkward questions you see...And your modern churchman, he don't like it much when someone points out that the emperor's naked...

This is the response from Christine Niles, spokesman for Church Militant...

Open letter to Archbishop Charles J. Chaput:

Your Excellency,
Instead of attacking the Lepanto Institute and Church Militant for doing nothing more than reporting the facts, you should be explaining why there are four members on the leadership team of the World Meeting of Families who support abortion and/or gay "marriage."

Please also explain why you then issued the demonstrably false statement that "No one on our leadership team supports abortion or Planned Parenthood." [Oh! Oh! I know! Pick me! Pick me!]

Please also address why Tom Wolf, pro-abort, pro-gay governor of Pennsylvania, was graced with the honor of being named Honorary Co-Chair of the World Meeting of Families — a man who just named a former Planned Parenthood executive to be his chief of staff, and who is the nation's first governor to be a former PP clinic escort, and whom Cecile Richards publicly supported in a video during his re-election campaign.

All of these facts were made known to you privately before they were published, in order to give you the chance to address the scandal and possibly make corrections. You chose to ignore everything, and our good friends at the Lepanto Institute have proof.

But ignoring the scandal and slandering the apostolates that are exposing it will not accomplish any purpose but to cause you to lose credibility — as has already happened with many Catholics who once believed you were a staunch defender of orthodoxy, but whose talk has turned out to be just that — talk.

Do not lecture us about "pro-life unity" or "charity" when you are more than willing to work with (and honor!) businessmen and leaders who support the slaughter of pre-born infants by the millions, and who push gay "marriage," all the while giving these businessmen and leaders publicity and good press so they can continue promoting their anti-Catholic, anti-family agenda.

This is the height of hypocrisy, and your attempt to smear faithful apostolates for doing no more than reporting the truth is pathetic. You once had my respect. No longer.

Looking forward to the scorching Vortex when Pope Francis embraces the pro-aborts...

...Oh wait...



~

Losing my religion

Today I went to Mass at the basilica of San Benedetto. The monks chanted the propers beautifully and Fr. Basil was in especially fine voice for the Gospel. All was lovely and there were few of the irritations that are usual during tourist season. There were a few non-townies but they seemed to understand at least the gist of what was going on.

I came in a little late (as usual) and sat next to a woman - about her mid-fifties - who was obviously a Roman. She appeared to be engrossed in prayer and gave all the responses in Latin without hesitation.

Immediately after the gospel, she turned to me and whispered, "Are these Benedictine monks?"

Me: ... < blink >... < blink > ...

Ah, you mean those guys up front in the long black robes, with the shaved heads and the big beards...? The ones doing flawless Gregorian Chant ... as if they do it every day? ... In the Basilica of San Benedetto ... that has statues and paintings of San Benedetto everywhere? In the church that was built over top of the birthplace of San Benedetto... like it says on all the signs around town...

Those guys?

Ah, yeah, those are Benedictine monks.

What the... ?

The other day, I met a lovely young nun who is forming a new community in the US, to pray for and support priests and teach the faith to younger people. She was making a little pilgrimage around some of Italy's holy sites and stopped in town for a day or so. We had a lovely chat and I showed her around some of the neat stuff we have. We went in to look at St. Lawrence parish, a tiny little 4th century church around the corner from the main piazza. It's still a church but the Sacrament has been removed and it is no longer used for Masses, and is falling slowly into decrepitude. That day it was full of a grand piano and a few rows of chairs, since it was being used as part of the Norcia music festival. The person in charge of this saw us come and and asked if either of us played. Sister said she did, and she was kindly invited to sit down. She played and sang quite a lovely song she had written about the graces of the priesthood, as was appropriate. She sang in English.

At the end of it, as we were being ushered to the door, the nice gentleman asked sister, "Are you Catholic?" This was a nun dressed in a full habit, floor length white tunic, blue cincture, white linen guimpe and very long blue veil. She didn't just look like a nun, she looked like every painting you've ever seen of Our Lady of Lourdes. She stammered, "Yes, yes, I'm Catholic. I'm a nun." Having had his question answered, our new friend nodded with satisfaction at having guessed correctly the meaning of her peculiar attire.

As we were proceeding back to the piazza, she turned to me with a look of complete incredulity.

I said, "Yes, the Italians remember that there used to be this thing called 'Catholicism,' but they can recall very little about the details."

We are coming to the point in Italy where it will shortly no longer be accurate to refer to them even as "cultural Catholics".


Apparently, this is true in Germany too:

Emergency Call: The following call to 110 (the German version of 911/999) was made in Aachen, Germany:

Police: "Police Hotline."

Caller: "Hello, my name is [...] I'd like to report a large group of people who are walking down the street with a bullhorn. One of them recited some biblical saying, and the people were repeating the same saying. It's pretty creepy."

Police: "Which saying?"

Caller: "Something biblical, like ... that they are leaving this world ... something about a shepherd and stuff."

Police: "How many people are there?"

Caller: "Unfortunately, I couldn't tell. My husband was watching them ... wait a second ..."

Caller's Husband (shouting in the background): "20 people!"

Caller: "He says 20 people."

Police: "They are just walking through the area?"

Caller: "At the moment they haven't done anything, but it seems strange. Just in case something were to happen."

Police: "What, exactly, were they saying?

Caller's Husband (background): "... 'holy Mary, Mother of God' ..."

Caller: "You know, that saying ... 'and the fruit of thy womb' ... that saying people are always repeating ... I'm not a church person."

Police: "That's probably a procession which is passing through the area."

Caller: "A what?"

Police: "A procession. It's nothing to be afraid of."

Caller: "That they are wandering around here saying these things?"

Police: "Yes, it's a solemn church parade. That's called a 'procession' around here."

Caller: "Oh, I see. I'm not familiar with that. I just thought, because they were saying these things..."

Police: "Right. It's a procession."

~

Archdiocese of Toronto wins

You know how I'm always saying that Novusordoism isn't Catholicism? How it's actually a completely different religion with some Catholic-looking stuff tacked on for legitimacy?

Well, the Archdiocese of Toronto gets the O's P Making-My-Point-For-Me prize of the month by coming right out and openly joining the new paganism.


Singing to "Gaia, calling us home," (at 27:33) the Earth Goddess, whom Pope Francis (if we can still call him that) referred to several times in his encyclical as "mother earth". (H/T to Mike Matt at Remnant TV)

Is Nature the focus of your deepest spiritual feelings? Are you looking for a spirituality or religion that focuses on Nature, on saving the Earth, on preserving its habitats and species?

World Pantheism is probably the most clearly earth-focussed of spiritual/religious organizations. Nature is the very heart of our spirituality, which is close to Deep Ecology, Gaia theory, Nature religion, or basic and direct Nature Worship. The simplest way to sum it up is in Michael Gorbachev's phrase "Nature is my god."

Yes, they mean that Mikhail Gorbachev: "I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos. Look at the sun. If there is no sun, then we cannot exist. So nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals."

Nature worship: you spell it "A.P.O.S.T.A.S.Y."

Want to know why I kind of gave up writing Catholic news? It's because I was finally forced to admit that "activism" - stomping about the world doing things, writing things, organising things, protesting things, saying things - isn't what we need to be doing right now. It's gone way beyond that. Way.

There are some kinds that can only be cast out by prayer and fasting, right Jessica?



~

You can't make it up

A church refreshed: A dispatch from an American Catholic future.

"Song leader Sophia Santiago stood to the right of the altar of St. Gertrude Church in Chicago and invited those in the crowded pews and in folding chairs to greet their neighbors. 'All are welcome,' she proclaimed.

"To the simple notes of a single piano, the parish choir and the congregation sang a sweet, lilting version of "Come to the Water" as liturgical dancers, altar servers, ministers of the word, parish chancellor Emma Okere and pastor Fr. Antonio Fitzgerald processed up the center aisle. The song filled the soaring interior of the 131-year-old structure. On a banner high behind the altar, in large, easily readable lettering, was a quotation from Pope Francis: 'Who am I to judge?'

"This was one of thousands of celebrations across the globe marking 50 years of rejuvenation and renewal dating from the election of Pope Francis in 2013, popularly called 'refreshment of the faith.'"

~
At first I thought it was a parody, and then I noticed that it was NCR, and had to laugh. These are the people forever locked in the bleak mid-winter of 1978. Patrick Reardon, apparently stung a little by the fact that the commbox instantly filled up with real Catholics laughing at him, instead of the usual NCR crowd of the greying-dreadlocked, said that he doesn't see what's wrong with it, the Chicago archdiocese, after all, is going broke and there's no one in the pews.

How it has managed, all through the last five decades, to fail to cross the minds of these people that it is precisely the kind of feminized marshmallow rubbish they have offered that has driven Catholics out of their Churches. Think about it for a second, Pat. What is the average age of the only people left in the world who still go to stuff like this?

Need some help working it out?


Good thing we got iPhones and Youtube, huh?

I've never been able to understand the inability of these ambered 70s "progressives" to see the evidence right in front of their faces. The polyester pant-suited anti-nuns who keep pouring more money into newer and shinier "formation programmes" for their orders, concocted by the very most up-to-date psychological experts, and who can't understand why no one comes. The Patrick Reardons who are incapable of seeing the plain fact that the parishes (the ones that are allowed to flourish without being stamped out by their so very loving and merciful bishops) that have retained even a modicum of traditional Catholicity are jammed with people, (young people, mostly married and often crawling with babies).

Dude, the reason the AD of Chi is broke, the reason there's no one in the pews, is because of this crap. The thing is, and obviously I'm not alone here, if you want me to get out of bed on a Sunday morning for this ridiculous chick-centered, nursery-school nanny-fest - and you've already abolished all the moral law - why shouldn't I go to the pub instead? I'll get a lot better music, there's beer and it'll be more fun, and I don't have to get out of bed before noon. And I don't have to be lectured on my failure to comply by a pinch-faced, beta-male feminist in a chasuble.

If all it's about is friendly warmth and "welcome" and togetherness, as Flannery O'Connor is rumoured to have said, "then to hell with it."



~

Srsly?

This




is the Faith




you'll die for?




~

Is this the Faith you'll die for? - Grooving with the Dominican Greyhead Sisters of Swing

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?



~

The Fantasy of bitterness

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.



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Welcome to Nuchurch

...and have a nice day.

After many years, on the rare (and always penitential) occasions when I am stuck going to the NO, while I'm watching the priest make faces at us, I'm always like, "Dude, why are you talking to me?"

It appears that reaction is not mine alone...

As far as the priest having his back to me goes… At first i found it a bit frustrating. I couldn’t see what he was doing for goodness sake! And then it began to dawn on me that I had become very accustomed to going to Mass to be ‘entertained’. Then it struck me that I automatically judge a priest on his ability to entertain me. How awful! I honestly believed the Mass to be a dialogue between the priest and the congregation. Where does this put God?!
...
As the priest elevated the consecrated host (with his back to me) I realised that the Mass is addressing God. In fact it would be more accurate to say that the liturgy is our response to God’s call. The Tridentine Mass made it suddenly clear to me where the Holy Trinity is during Mass. I do think it is extremely important for the congregation to see what is happening on the altar and to hear the Eucharistic prayers as is done in the Norvus Ordo style Mass, but with that simple turn I learned more about the Mass in 1 second than I have in 35 years. I wish the priest would come around the front of the altar with his back to us when he elevates the host in the Norvus Ordo Mass. Just that brief moment says so much.

I was once privileged to introduce a good friend to the Traditional Mass. We went to Trinita on a regular Sunday, in August, if I'm not mistaken, so there was no choir. Just Low Mass, with very few people in the pews. My friend didn't say anything about it and I didn't ask, just letting her mull it over.

The following weekend, we went to a little chapel near my flat for the local NO. It wasn't particularly egregiously novusordo-y. No guitars or hand holding or clapping. But potted plants all over, not one second of silence that was not covered by loud caterwauling of modern "hymns" and the priest doing the usual novusordoist stand-up routine; the kind of thing seen in nearly all parishes in the world.

Afterwards, we went for tea near the beach, and quite spontaneously my friend said, "It's SO DIFFerent! I had no idea! It's a completely different thing! It's as if the priest is trying to entertain us! I'd never noticed before, but it's like God isn't even there and we're all just talking to each other about Him!"

Pret'much, yeah.

And don't ever think there is no agenda at work with the new liturgy and all its noxious little add-ons. I'll never forget the lesson I learned attending Mass for the last time at Holy Rosary cathedral in Vancouver.

It was at Holy Rosary, centrally located in the downtown core, that I had first returned to the Faith in my 20s. At that time, through some odd quirk, the practice of receiving Communion kneeling and on the tongue at the marble altar rail had survived the main brunt of the blast of the Asteroid. Having only gone to Mass at the cathedral, I had never seen the strange (and frankly nearly blasphemous) practice that is nearly universal of everyone lining up and sticking out their grubby unconsecrated paws, like they're getting a bagel at Tim Hortons.

Kneeling and receiving on the tongue was simply normal to me, and I remember my shock and near-nausea when I finally saw what people did nearly everywhere else. And at the cathedral there were also no lay "extraordinary ministers". So, this weird little pocket of survival was probably one of the factors in finally pushing me to reject the whole Novusordoist paradigm, in the end (though that took another decade of reading and observation).

Well, in 2006 I'd returned to Vancouver to visit my mother after many years absence, and went to Holy Rosary for Mass and thought how nice it was going to be to go receive at the good old altar rail. But it was not to be. The wreckers had not failed to notice the anomaly, and had taken steps.

Instead of the old practice of everyone going to kneel at the rail, we had new "options" explained to us. We could get in the Timmy's line or we could, if we chose, go to the altar rail and kneel down. Only, of course, the Timmy's line was being manned by the priest and deacon, and if you were stubborn enough to go kneel, you had to receive from one of the lady-Eucharist distributors, all dolled up like priests in polyester bathrobe-albs.

Take yer pick.

Bastards never miss a trick, do they?



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Things popes say: Jesus "instructed them in order to convert them"

Beware of

"this distortion of the Gospel and to the sacred character of Our Lord Jesus Christ, God and man, prevailing within the Sillon and elsewhere. As soon as the social question is being approached, it is the fashion in some quarters to first put aside the divinity of Jesus Christ, and then to mention only His unlimited clemency, His compassion for all human miseries, and His pressing exhortations to the love of our neighbor and to the brotherhood of men.

True, Jesus has loved us with an immense, infinite love, and He came on earth to suffer and die so that, gathered around Him in justice and love, motivated by the same sentiments of mutual charity, all men might live in peace and happiness. But for the realization of this temporal and eternal happiness, He has laid down with supreme authority the condition that we must belong to His Flock,

- that we must accept His doctrine,

- that we must practice virtue, and

- that we must accept the teaching and guidance of Peter and his successors.

Further, whilst Jesus was kind to sinners and to those who went astray, He did not respect their false ideas, however sincere they might have appeared. He loved them all, but

He instructed them in order to convert them and save them.

Whilst He called to Himself in order to comfort them, those who toiled and suffered, it was not to preach to them the jealousy of a chimerical equality.

Whilst He lifted up the lowly, it was not to instill in them the sentiment of a dignity independent from, and rebellious against, the duty of obedience.

Whilst His heart overflowed with gentleness for the souls of good-will, He could also arm Himself with holy indignation against the profaners of the House of God, against the wretched men who scandalized the little ones, against the authorities who crush the people with the weight of heavy burdens without putting out a hand to lift them. He was as strong as he was gentle.

He reproved, threatened, chastised, knowing, and teaching us that fear is the beginning of wisdom, and that it is sometimes proper for a man to cut off an offending limb to save his body.

Finally, He did not announce for future society the reign of an ideal happiness from which suffering would be banished; but, by His lessons and by His example, He traced the path of the happiness which is possible on earth and of the perfect happiness in heaven: the royal way of the Cross.

These are teachings that it would be wrong to apply only to one's personal life in order to win eternal salvation; these are eminently social teachings, and they show in Our Lord Jesus Christ something quite different from an inconsistent and impotent humanitarianism.

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Rad Trad Quote-Quiz of the Week

Identify the writer: (No cheating)

But amid this variety of languages a primary place must surely be given to that language which had its origins in Latium, and later proved so admirable a means for the spreading of Christianity throughout the West.

And since in God's special Providence this language united so many nations together under the authority of the Roman Empire -- and that for so many centuries -- it also became the rightful language of the Apostolic See. Preserved for posterity, it proved to be a bond of unity for the Christian peoples of Europe.

Of its very nature Latin is most suitable for promoting every form of culture among peoples. It gives rise to no jealousies. It does not favor any one nation, but presents itself with equal impartiality to all and is equally acceptable to all.

Nor must we overlook the characteristic nobility of Latin for mal structure. Its "concise, varied and harmonious style, full of majesty and dignity" makes for singular clarity and impressiveness of expression.

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Is this the Faith you're ready to die for?

Boston Franciscan parish friars hand out "Who am I to judge" t-shirts and buttons at Boston "gay pride" festival.

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.

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Is this the Faith you're ready to die for?

Nearly all gone: conquering jihadists are evicting or killing Mosul’s last Christians



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