FR BRYAN BUENGER, LEAVING. OH NO!

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The feast of that most celebrated of parish priests, St John Mary Vianney, Cure of Ars (inimitable in the Church of Nice), seems a good day to compare the awful layout at Our Lady of Lourdes Palmerston North and the cathedral of the Holy Spirit (see my earlier post, below), with St Joseph's, Dannevirke. Comparisons they say, are odious - but this one's so favorable, it  just has to be charitable.


Fr Bryan Buenger of St Joseph's Church Dannevirke, Tararua Parish priest, came to New Zealand seeking ordination to the priesthood. The Church in the US, his own country, had turned him away as 'too old'. 

He doesn't look old to me. And St Joseph's Church in Dannevirke in Tararua, where I go to pray on the way home from meetings in Palmerston North, is a blessed relief after the aforementioned churches there. 

Entering St Joseph's, the tabernacle is right there, where it should be: centre-rear, beyond the altar, in a space that till very recently was obviously for private prayer, with a couple of upholstered pews placed so you could pray without being seen from the nave. (This week it was filled with pews, maybe for the school children at weekday Masses - but there wasn't enough space left in front of the tabernacle to celebrate Mass. Hmmm.)

The tabernacle is covered, as it should be, the church is immaculately appointed and maintained and so are the grounds. On one of my earlier visits, people had come in to the church to pray. Silently. By the time I left, 20 parishioners had gathered with Fr Bryan for an evening Mass, silently (and smilingly). I had to leave - I'd been to Mass at the cathedral, and I didn't want to be late for dinner. ('Im indoors is now the cook, and you don't upset the cook.)

But some months before that, I'd stayed on for Mass, and been very impressed by Fr Bryan's care and reverence in celebrating the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Unlike at least another two priests of the PN Diocese, he does not take a break from the sacred texts during the Mass to pass jocular remarks.

I'm reliably informed that the parishoners of St Brigid's, Pahiatua ,which is also in Tararua, are extremely happy with Fr Bryan, and are looking at St Joseph's as a model for re-ordering their church.

But last night I heard from another source that Fr Bryan is leaving. WHAT???

He's returning to the States, where now that he's been trained and ordained and proven in New Zealand, they're happy to have him. Fr Bryan's visitor's visa has run out, but in a letter  informing his Tararua parishioners, Fr Bryan reportedly adds that "there are other significant considerations that are involved in my decision."

Meanwhile, is his letter to the same parishioners Bishop Charles Drennan has (reportedly) said the diocese is happy to apply for an extension to his visa, but that Fr Bryan doesn't want it renewed. "The reasons for his departure are varied, wrote Bishop Drennan, even though one or two of them I would not share".

I'll say no more. But if this is distressing for me, as it is, how must the rest of Tararua Parish - St Joseph's, St Brigid's, St Columbkille's Woodville and Sacred Heart, Eketahuna - be feeling?

Does anyone else smell a theological rat?  

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My earlier item, posted Tuesday July 31, to which I'd intended to add a paragraph holding up St Joseph's Dannevirke as a model for church interiors but didn't get around to it - until today:

Café Brie, near the Catholic cathedral in Palmerston North, has French pretensions and is a hang-out for cathedral habitues.

Yesterday I was what you might call a 'would-be' cathedral habitue. I couldn't go to Mass there because, astonishingly, at the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit there is NO MASS ON MONDAYS ('Priests' Day Off' syndrome).

But don't get me started. I'm focused on the church of Our Lady of Lourdes in Palmerston North, where I went for a Liturgy of the Word with Holy Communion - although my remarks about OLOL  apply almost equally to the cathedral.

Following the service I had lunch (a good club sammie and green tea) with a friend at Café Brie, and told her how forcibly the disordered nature of OLOL's 're-ordering' had struck me that morning.

There we were, half a dozen or so mostly elderly, mostly women, up the front with a man in a bed on wheels at the back, addressing our prayers to an altar, a couple of candlesticks and a bowl of flowers. (There might have been a crucifix; I can't remember.)

Meanwhile, Jesus Christ our Saviour, really and truly Present in the Blessed Sacrament, to whom we were praying, was off-side, over to the left, relegated in His tabernacle to a sort of cubbyhole by the exit.

I said to my friend (who quite saw my point), that if the liturgical mindset that dictated the OLOL lay-out were applied to our animated conversation, we'd not be talking to each other naturally as you do, across the table, but forced to turn side-on to chat to the coffee machine at the counter instead.

I'm reliably informed that the parishioners of Our Lady of Lourdes were extremely upset when the tabernacle, the little palace if you like, or throne room, where the King of Kings resides among us, was removed from its position in the centre of the rear wall behind the altar, and sidelined as it is, right beside a busy thoroughfare through a door to the school playground.

The Instruction on the Worship of the Eucharistic Mystery states that any renovation of older church "should be done with prudence". I'm told the parishioners' protests were aired at a meeting, politely heard (you know how things are done, in the Church of Nice) and then ignored. The 're-ordering' went ahead. Why?

What did it achieve? A shift of focus from the Blessed Sacrament to the priest.

How can a parish priest justify such a move? How could the bishop - at the time, +Peter Cullinane, consent to it? What do priests and bishops pray regularly, in their Divine Office for Pastors?

Never be a dictator over any group that is put in your charge, but be an example that the whole flock can follow (1 Pet 5:3).

NOW IT'S THE BUNK IN THE BARRACKS (letter to Dom Post, July 26)

Once it was ‘the casting couch’ for ‘starlets’. Then it was the solicitor’s sofa. Now it’s the bunk in the barracks.

 

But the trouble with “training for how to say no to your superiors” (Inquiry into army recruit sex, July 26), is that school sex ‘education’ has given girls no reason to say no, except “I don’t feel like it”. Well, come on girls, don't be spoilsports!

 

But there is a reason to say no, quite apart from condoms failing and girls getting pregnant (because of course, no worries, they can get an abortion). 

 

Pope Paul VI’s famously ridiculed encyclical Humanae Vitae proscribed sex outside marriage, and contraceptives, as offending against God’s beautiful design of love for the human race. Humanae Vitae, 50 years old this week, is not only profound but prophetic: Paul VI predicted that men would lose respect for women and would come to consider them as mere instruments of selfish enjoyment.

 

But it was beyond the papal power of prophecy to imagine solicitors and army officers abusing their position of trust. 

Not to mention priests.

WHY 'CATHOLIC' SCHOOLS AREN'T CATHOLIC

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Once upon a time, in a certain Catholic 'convent' school here in NZ, it was fairly routine on a Monday morning for Sister to tell one of your classmates to stand up and explain why they weren't at Mass the day before.

How things have changed.  Now there are hardly any children at Mass, and even fewer front up for Holy Communion, even at 'School' Masses.

On Sunday we were told why. Don't ask me for detailed analysis or official jargon, but in his 'homily' for Good Shepherd Sunday, Father recounted the successive, regressive steps taken by our bishops in setting entry requirements for Catholic schools. He said 'retired' priests tell him the best thing about retirement is no longer having to negotiate what he called a minefield, deciding which child can get in and which can't.

I naively used to think that all children in Catholic schools were baptized. And at first, after integration with the state system in 1975, that was generally the case.

Then began the descent down a slippery slope. The only reason I can think of is, prospective parents baulked at the requirement of baptism, so their children were lost to state schools, leaving not enough little bums on seats in Catholic classrooms.

So then (I think the story goes) to admit a child it was enough if the parents were baptized - or more likely, just one parent. Time went on and the effects of our state-funded schools' 'teaching' of Catholic doctrine became apparent: there were no longer enough prospective baptized parents around.

Er, well, what about baptized grandparents? They'd been baptized before state-funding was introduced, when baptism was automatic in Catholic families, so it worked for a while, but inevitably that supply dried up too. So now it's sufficient to have someone - anyone - in the whanau put their hand up to 'sponsor' a prospective entrant and say yes, we might get them baptized, some day.

The result is, 'Catholic' schools aren't Catholic any more. It's a while now since Bill English as Prime Minister commented that "the staff are less Catholic and the kids are less Catholic. The staff are no more religiously inclined than in state school staffrooms. In the long run that can't work."

Have we reached the end of 'the long run'? Soon, if the doom and gloom preached by our bishops about vocations ('there aren't any!') is proved right, there won't be a priest left in the presbytery to instill as best he can the 'values' Catholic schools pride themselves on, and non-Catholic teachers will be reduced to asking the children to be nice to one another. There'll be no more weekday Masses for the children to learn how to genuflect before the tabernacle, and why they must.

Even as things stand now, teenage girls, maybe non-Catholic, at 'Catholic' secondary schools can be heard in the playground f...ing this and f...ing that. At home when teenage rebellion gets an airing, mothers are appalled at the language issuing from their sweet little daughters' mouths.

What should be exercising bishops and priests is not the trouble they experience in setting and negotiating the 'minefield' of  preference requirements. Instead they should be agonizing over the trouble ahead for children who've not been given the inestimable grace of baptism, "the cause and beginning of our eternal glory". (And the trouble ahead for themselves, when God calls them to account as shepherds of their flocks, ravaged by wolves.)

The bishops must exercise themselves in clearing that minefield. Faced with the glaringly obvious decline in society's standards, parents are now falling over themselves to get their children into Catholic schools, so having gradually lowered the requirements for entry, the bishops can surely gradually raise them again.

It's utterly wrong that by effectively denying children baptism, the Catholic Church in New Zealand has insidiously become trapped by secularism.

It seems the Church who is wedded to Jesus Christ is being wooed and won by that whore, the world.


"The cause and beginning of our eternal glory" - Divine Intimacy, Fr Gabriel of St Mary Magdalen, OCD.

TEACHING CHILDREN HOW TO CATCH SYPHILIS (letter printed in the Dom Post, July 24)

To comment please open your gmail account. The Dominion Post published the following letter, but heavily abridged . It's interesting to see just what the editor put his red pen through. I've underlined the offending sections. 

Butter wouldn’t melt in the mouth of Jackie Edmond, chief executive, Family Planning NZ (July 20), as she assures us that every year her organisation takes “13,500 pregnancy tests – that’s 13,500 opportunities to make sure that problems such as syphilis are diagnosed and treated”, dah de dah.

Those 13,500 pregnancy tests are 13,500 opportunities to kill unborn babies through Family Planning’s referrals for abortion – opportunities which in the overwhelming majority are, tragically, taken up, meaning one life ended and another damaged, sometimes beyond repair. Women have a right to be fully informed of the possible consequences of abortion, including suicide, which Family Planning publicity coyly omits to mention.

But the truly awful aspect of Family Planning NZ is its business of ‘educating’ young people, starting at school at age five, in ‘sexuality’, teaching innocent children the behaviours which can lead to syphilis.

In other words, Family Planning NZ grows its business by grooming its future customers.  

SELF-INDULGENCE OR MORAL SUPPORT? (letter to Dom Post, July 19)

When we read of a Prevention plan after deaths (July 18), a community wider than that of Flaxmere has to ask how the End of Life Choice Bill could possibly contribute towards the zero suicides goal sought by Flaxmere ward councillor Jacoby Poulain, and District Health Boards all over the country.

Five years ago in Flaxmere four teenage girls “tragically took their own lives” and now a suicide prevention plan for Hawke’s Bay, as required by all DHBs, represents “moral support” and “a stepping stone” for projects that work towards that goal.

The national community needs to reflect very seriously on the consequences of legislating assisted suicide for elderly people who’ve lived their lives by and large of their own choice, and want to end them by their own choice.

What “moral support” would such self-indulgence give to young people who find that life is too hard to live? 

TOO PAINFUL FOR THE BISHOP?

The following letter, which I emailed to NZ Catholic on July 2, comments on an article about the German bishops' eucharistic sharing plan, published in NZC's June 17 issue. It doesn't appear in the latest issue (July 15 -28), which has letters commenting on the issues of June 17 and July 1. So my letter was obviously not received too late for publication. 

Could the no-show of my letter (see below), relating as it does to the sacrilegious practice of intercommunion which occurs with 'permission from the bishop', have anything to do with the fact that NZ Catholic is owned by the Bishop of Auckland?

Your guess is as good as mine. But I'll just quote that courageous Bishop, Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan (look him up!):

"Thank God, the internet exists."

No Protestant observing New Zealand Mass-goers, how we generally behave like we’ve turned up for a concert, with little or no acknowledgment of the Real Presence, is likely to believe that in Communion - in the hand! - Catholics receive Jesus Christ. 

And if a Protestant wishes, he’ll receive Jesus too. Why not? After all, it looks like Communion’s just a symbol. And ‘it’s good for unity’. And Father has ‘permission from the bishop’. 

The bishop however, has ‘permission’ in Canon law to give that permission only in “grave necessity like danger of death”. And he’s doing that Protestant no favours, "for all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves" (1 Cor 11:29). 

To receive Communion, non-Catholics must believe in the Real Presence, be baptised, confirmed and in a state of grace. As Cardinal Arinze, the Vatican’s former liturgy chief, states, “Be received into the Church and you can receive Communion. Otherwise no.”

The Catechism tells us the Eucharist “never ceases to be an occasion of division”, a division ignored and glossed over by our bishops under pain of sacrilege. 

Unity will never be achieved by intercommunion, because intercommunion is disobedience to Scripture, Magisterium and Tradition. 

NZ’s bishops need look no further than intercommunion to know why they’re so short of priests.

THE STORY WE NEEDED TO HEAR (letter to Dom Post, July 12)

Stories we love but don’t need (July 11) are the ones we hear most. But the story about the boys in the cave was one we loved and they needed, and the world needed.

 

The boys who prayed in that cave needed the story told so that the world would pray too, and the world responded. Someone on radio commented that she "didn’t know who to pray to", but she prayed. 

The world needed the story too, so that the people praying everywhere for those boys and their mentor would see that prayers are heard and answered - in this case, unusually, in the way we wanted.

 

“Bonum diffusivum sui”: in this classic story of heroism we beheld goodness, and how it can diffuse itself to millions all around the earth, united for once in love.

DEFENDING THE INDEFENSIBLE (letter published in NZ Catholic, July 29)

This letter was abridged. The deleted sections are underlined below.

Your editorial “The Power of Beauty” (NZ Catholic, July 1), defends the indefensible.

New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is showing priceless sacred vestments, papal robes from the Sistine Chapel and treasures from the Vatican, including a tiara given to Pope Pius IX by Queen Isabella II of Spain, alongside papal and episcopal fashion, cinch-waisted, designed for women, even an S&M bondage mask decorated with rosary beads.

This blasphemous conflation of the sacred and profane was funded largely by gay icon Versace’s fashion empire. The curator is gay, and admitted the exhibition was meant as ‘a provocation’.

Well, I am provoked. Even more provoked by the gala opening, where Rihanna came wearing a mini and bishop’s mitre. Anne Hathaway’s cardinal outfit was backless, with cleavage. Lana del Ray’s dress parodied Our Lady of Sorrows. Jared Leto had a golden crown of thorns; Madonna wore crucifixes and little else.

The Catholic clergy and faith were caricatured;  American Catholics were not just provoked but scandalized. 600 turned up at a rally to protest.

But ‘special guest’ Cardinal Timothy Dolan was “honoured to be there”. He “couldn’t really see anything sacrilegious”. 

Maybe because the Met gala and exhibit are “unfruitful works of darkness”, in which Catholics as “children of the light” ... must “take no part, but instead expose them” (Eph 5:7,11). 

NZ BISHOPS DOING PROTESTANTS NO FAVOURS (letter to NZ Catholic, July 2)

No Protestant observing New Zealand Mass-goers, how we generally behave like we’ve turned up for a concert, with little or no acknowledgment of the Real Presence, is likely to believe that in Communion - in the hand! - Catholics receive Jesus Christ.

And if a Protestant wishes, he’ll receive Jesus too. Why not? After all, it looks like Communion’s just a symbol. And ‘it’s good for unity’. And Father has ‘permission from the bishop’.

The bishop however, has ‘permission’ in Canon law to give that permission only in “grave necessity like danger of death”. And he’s doing that Protestant no favours, "for all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves" (1 Cor 11:29). 

To receive Communion, non-Catholics must believe in the Real Presence, be baptised, confirmed and in a state of grace. As Cardinal Arinze, the Vatican’s former liturgy chief, states, “Be received into the Church and you can receive Communion. Otherwise no.”

The Catechism tells us the Eucharist “never ceases to be an occasion of division” - a division ignored and glossed over by our bishops under pain of sacrilege.

Unity will never be achieved by intercommunion, because intercommunion is disobedience to Scripture, Magisterium and Tradition.

NZ’s bishops need look no further than intercommunion to know why they’re so short of priests.