IT'S 10 DAYS NOW: POPE FRANCIS, SAY SOMETHING

It's all right, people. The Body of Christ has been diagnosed with leprosy, yes, but the Church hierarchy have the remedy. 

They nipped down to the dairy for a box of sticking plasters. 

That's how the Response by Monsignor Gerard Burns, Vicar General Archdiocese of Wellington, to the Papal Letter to "the People of God" in this week's in NauMai* reads to me. And in line with our Church of Nice preaching over the past 50 or so years, both the Papal Letter and Mons Burns' response are so Protestant, they could have been written by Justin Welby.*

Except maybe for the suggestion of 'fasting'. Fasting? What's that? Even my parish church lectionary's version of that Gospel about the kind of demon which "is cast out only by prayer and fasting" (Mt 17,20) ends with 'prayer'. Full stop. And the 'Catholic' Edition of the NRSV, and The New Jerusalem Bible, incredibly, omit the verse altogether. If ever there were a demon that needed casting out by 'prayer and fasting' it's the one who's ravaged the Church for the past 50-70 years.

The Pope invites "the entire holy faithful" (compliments, compliments) People of God to a penitential exercise of prayer and fasting. But what we were invited to, in yesterday's homily, was a change of subject. It was all about sympathy for the victims (by some calculations, 50,000). A fat lot of good sympathy will do them. 

We were not asked to attend a weekday Mass, where in my church often Father has a congregation of one, or Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament which was initiated by a parishioner and is routinely attended twice a week by only one, or to pray the Rosary which is not prayed publicly in our parish now at all. There was no call to fasting - nothing to stop teenagers tittering in the pews - and such a call would have been anathema, even to their parents.

The Pope and the Mons both talk about sin. Again I ask, what's that? Good man that Monsignor Burns is, he's following the lead of his Pontiff, who never once calls the disease in the Church by its real name, which is active, out-there homosexuality and its perfidious concealment by highly-placed prelates. 

No, the Pope calls it 'sex abuse' and 'clericalism'. Mons Burns says he's 'proposing a conversion of the whole Church in the light of the truth shown to us'.

Truth known to us already, more like. The truth about the homosexual priestly culture in the Church has been obvious even to us lay people for some time and must have been known by the Pope for years. Way back when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires Bergoglio claimed there was no sexual abuse in his diocese, while in fact there were five priests at least who were officially known to him. He reportedly protected an Argentinian bishop caught in a homosexual encounter, with the official diocesan spin putting the blame on the victim.

And then there's Kim Davis, a marriage clerk in the US and a cause celebre with Christians for refusing to marry a gay couple. She went to prison for that. 

Vigano organized for a private audience for her with Pope Francis, which duly occurred - but later, after the news was leaked to an avalanche of protest, the Pontiff claimed 'that woman was sprung on me' and the pix for that day in the press were all about the Pope embracing a former student, an openly gay man, and his male partner. Pope Francis denied ever having had a private audience with the first American citizen ever condemned and gaoled in the US for conscientious objection. 



In NauMai Monsignor Burns asks for 'a fierce and searching moral inventory' for the clergy: the 'A A twelve-step method'. 

Ahem. This is the Catholic Church we're talking about. The Church which was endowed by Jesus Christ not with a twelve-step AA method, but with the Sacrament of Penance, through which and only through which, he forgives sin. 

Here we come close to the heart of the problem: the terrible rate of attrition in reception of the Sacraments over the past 50 years - funnily enough, since this abusive system strengthened its strangle-hold on the Church. Through the sacraments God puts at our disposal His immense riches - immeasurable possibilities of sanctity - and they're rejected. 

In New Zealand, how many queueing up to take the Body of Christ in their fingers like it was a piece of cake (although you'd usually take a piece of cake from a plate, not from someone else's fingers, how unhygienic!) are in a state of serious, unconfessed sin? How many non-Catholics are routinely given Holy Communion in retirement homes, where they say 'thank you' if they say anything at all? The Church in New Zealand has apostatized, big time. 

"We are all called to be holy" says Cardinal John Dew, speaking from Ireland and the debacle of the Papal Visitation. How? How do we become holy, except through reception of the sacraments, especially the Eucharist? Cardinal Dew goes to some lengths to tell us about the Examen. Does he advise us to ask, after laboriously proceeding through the Examen for 15 minutes daily, for sacramental forgiveness?

No. Because the Sacraments are Catholic. In the Church of Nice we mostly avoid reference to the treasures of Tradition and the Magisterium, because it implies the Catholic Church is somehow superior to all others. Which it is. As the infallible dogma of the Church declares, There is but one universal Church of the faithful, outside which no one at all is saved .

In my little country parish, apart from 'Reconciliation' for First Holy Communicants, I know of no one receiving the Sacrament of Penance since the last Rite II (so called because it's secondary to Rite I) when about a dozen parishioners turned up. About a year ago. At the cathedral in Palmerston North, the few people waiting after Mass for Confession look to be, with the exception of yours truly, exclusively of Indian ethnicity.  

You know what else happened about 50 years ago, when as the US Grand Jury reported on August 14, priests started "raping little boys and girls and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing: they hid it all"? Pope Paul VI published the encyclical Humanae Vitae - and most of these priests and men of God rejected it. 

They not only failed to preach its restatement of the teaching of the Catholic Church on sexuality, they failed to practise it. As prominent Catholic scholar and layman Dr Joseph Shaw of Oxford commented yesterday, that rejection of Church teaching destroyed the hierarchy's ability to respond to abuse. 

And even before that, something which will be dismissed by many (including 'im indoors) as a conspiracy theory: in the 1930s and '40s an American, Bella Dodd, converted to the Catholic Church by Bishop Fulton Sheen but formerly a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, was responsible for placing 1200 young men in seminaries as agents of the Party, to subvert and destroy the Church; the reason being that the Catholic Church was the only religion feared by Communism, and the Party planned not to destroy the Church as an institution, but to destroy the faith of her people. 

Yes, I'd find that a bit much too, if it weren't for the fact that Bella Dodd's testimony, given to Fordham University in 1953, has been verified by Alice von Hildebrand, the widow of Dietrich von Hildebrand, described by Pope Pius XII as "the 20th century Doctor of the Church".

It's ten days since Carlo Maria Vigano published his Book of Revelation, and 5000 women, all leaders in the Church, have now written to Pope Francis demanding he SAY SOMETHING. 

But he opts for his usual ambiguity and obfuscation, waiting while Vatican spin doctors try the old ad hominem tactic, increasing attacks on the credibility of the whistleblower, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, while the usual 'franciscan' chorus line of commentators are looking like possums caught in the headlights.

Meanwhile the New York Times have done what the Pope himself told them to do, on that plane out of Ireland. Its reporters have tried to contact all the prelates named by Vigano as knowing what the disgraced ex-Cardinal McCarrick was up to - inviting seminarians to his holiday house, always one more than its single beds allowed for, so that one supernumerary had to share the only double bed, with McCarrick. Only one of those cardinals and bishops would even answer the phone to the NY Times, and then only to say "Good evening, good evening," and hang up. 

The Vatican has gone into lockdown. Of all the world's reporters, I'd say the NY Times guys would be the hardest to evade. But the Lavender Mafia, as these princes and dukes of the Catholic Church are known in some circles, would have the experience and the know-how to do it.



*Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Anglican Church. 
**usually, Welcom, the official organ for the Wellington and Palmerston North Dioceses of New Zealand.