The true Advent mission of priests which the Association of Catholic Priests talks about today in our parish newsletter is surely to save souls by preaching the gospel to the poor, not to those they call the ‘oppressed’.
Who gave
them licence to change the Gospel? The Douay-Rheims, the New
Jerusalem and the NRSV all talk about
“the poor” – not the ‘oppressed’.
This is important. In the Church of Nice the physically poor - the hungry, the
homeless, the persecuted - are rightly championed but those who are poor in the spiritual
sense are forgotten.
Who are
the spiritually poor? The people who call themselves Catholic, who send their
children to a Catholic school, who throng the church for their prize-giving but who aren't there on the following Sunday: not a single altar server, even. It’s the same
story throughout New Zealand and the western world (with the exception of France, 'the first daughter of the Church', where churches are reportedly full again). The clergy lament the shortage of priests but fail to nourish their starving people.
No wonder they don't attend Mass; they don't know what they're missing, because they've never been told.
I heard a homily on the feast of St Juan Diego (last Saturday) in Wellington which I
thought was leading up to the need and the reason for Catholics to March
for Life later in the day. (And/or we could have heard the story of
St Juan and Our Lady’s message at Guadalupe, of the love, compassion and mercy
that she wants to show her needy - “poor”- people.)
Not a bit of
it. No mention. That afternoon, 600 people Marched for Life to Parliament,
and only one priest (at least, only one who looked like a priest) and he - tellingly - was SPPX.
No wonder
that later in the week the infamous Euthanasia Bill proceeded to a Select
Committee. How many people in the pews of the Church of Nice were warned by their priests of this
impending disaster? How many were encouraged to urge their MPs to vote against
it?
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