Today it looks like it's all over for the Catholic Church in China, bar the shouting.
Pope Francis has done a deal, to be signed by the end of the month. He gets to be recognized as the Pope and the Communist regime in Beijing gets to choose the bishops. And this at a time when the Communists are cracking down on religious freedom. Given their method of cracking down on women who conceive a second child (forced abortion), we can only imagine how they'll crack down on Catholics who worship a 'foreign' God.
Sounds like in future the patsy Catholic bishops in China will be good shepherds about as much as the bishops in New Zealand, in the Church of Nice.
Niceness like beauty is only skin deep: scratch the surface and what's exposed is Nasty.
NZ's bishops are led by +Patrick Dunn, who enthuses about Luther and his disastrous 'Reformation' - more properly called the Deformation - and about Fr James (Jimmy) Martin, the homosexualist Jesuit who at the blasphemous Met Gala tweeted the compliment paid him,"I love that you got dressed up like a sexy priest".
Last year in NZ Catholic +Dunn wrote a review of Fr Martin's Building A Bridge, Dah-De-Dah, calling it 'a beautiful book'. It's all about LGBTQs feelings of 'rejection' by the Church - which by the way should cease forthwith to use the word 'homosexual'. LGBTQs don't like it. It's like calling a black person a 'negro'.
+Dunn thinks 'devout Catholics' should get over their 'fear' that celebrating Masses with and for the LGBTQ community would be seen as giving tacit approval to everything they do, because after all, a Mass for business leaders doesn't mean the Church approves of everything they do. This is what now passes for apologetics in the Church. It's embarrassing.
Dear Bishop Dunn, when one calls oneself a businessman, one is not defining one's morals. The Catholic Church defines active homosexuality as 'intrinsically disordered'. It does not define business as 'intrinsically disordered'. Oops! That's not a nice term. +Dunn thinks it's 'needlessly cruel'.
What I want to ask is, is 'intrinsically disordered' more or less 'needlessly cruel' than 'immoral' or 'shameful', which are the adjectives St Paul applies to active homosexuality? And anyway, what, may I ask, can possibly be needfully cruel?
Kiwi Catholics are in general nice people. I suspect they see the perversion of predator priests and bishops, and its cover-up by bishops, cardinals and many Argentinians would also say, the Pope, as being far away, in 'Rome' - which is held up from time to time at Mass as an object of mild derision. "In New Zealand," says Father, "we do things differently".
So where were those photos taken that were shown on Tv One News in July last year of what looked to be a gay wedding? The happy couple were posed in front of what looked remarkably like the high altar in the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit in Palmerston North. Even more remarkably, Year of Mercy flags were hung on either side of the altar.
Maybe these guys just thought it would be a fun thing to walk in off the street for a pic, just to take the mickey out of the Church. But the photos were two of a series shown on Tv One News of a wedding. Was it really a same-sex wedding, or maybe just a blessing? Questions have been asked, but in the tradition of the Bergoglian era, not answered.
And just a couple of weeks ago, at a weekday Mass at the same cathedral, an openly gay couple were enthusiastically welcomed with hugs, and then given Holy Communion. Maybe they're celibate. But if so they, and the presider, should be more discreet.
One wonders how long will it be before we see photos of the parish priest posing in the sanctuary in front of the tabernacle - below the crucifix! - with a somewhat stunning but very sad collection of drag queens, as in the Canary Islands last month.
"We should be disgusted by the filth and corruption in the spotless Bride of Christ, the Holy Catholic Church. The Church has been made a cesspool, a sewer which is poisonous. Toxic."
That, from last Sunday's sermon at South St Paul's, Washington DC, is what we need to hear in New Zealand. Instead, Father told us last Sunday that "the Church is dying!".Not because it's poisoned itself, but because the Church that is our Mother is past it. Out of date. So our Mother the Church is dying. But apart from that, Father's reflections on the diocesan priests' gathering at the 4 star + hotel in Christchurch, where the food was so good and so plentiful, gave us to understand that business will be as usual.
+Carlo Maria Vigano, an archbishop who was once the third most powerful man in the Vatican, who managed all the papal nuncios throughout the world, who turned the Vatican budget around from loss to surplus and made enemies for exposing corruption, was demoted to the office of nuncio himself and like the prophets of the past was, in an attempt to silence him, sent into exile and is now in hiding, in fear literally for his life; but for the Church in New Zealand it's business as usual.
We need to pray, fast and do penance. Pope Francis asked for the first two, but not for the last. Penance after all, is a bit … well, Catholic, isn't it. .
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