LIFTED OUT OF THE DITCH, DRAWN INTO HEAVEN

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Shoot the bastard!

This comment, on my last-post-but-one (The word Pope Francis' man forbade the bishops to utter to the press),came from a Protestant. An honest, down-to-earth, sincere, church-going Protestant. He was referring to Pope Francis. And he won't be the only man in his congregation with such sentiments.

I publish his remark only to illustrate the depths of disrepute into which the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, led by the Pontiff and hierarchy, has fallen; how the Bride of Christ has suffered from guilt by association with the homosexual clergy, the cover-ups and the laissez-faire, modernist mentality currently running the show.

As today's Gospel proclaims: Can the blind lead the blind? do they not both fall into the ditch? (Lk 6:39).

With Cardinal John Dew in Welcom bewailing "a Church with too few people, an unsustainable financial burden (and) a declining number of priests", the situation we're in today might well be described as a ditch - where we find ourselves alongside the traditional Latin Mass, tossed there by the architects of Vatican II.

We can climb out of this ditch only by means of prayer, without which St Augustine says no one will save their soul. 

Today's Gospel also tells us that a good tree does not bear rotten fruit, nor does a rotten tree bear good fruit. Cardinal Dew draws a picture of rotten fruit which begs the question, which tree do they come from? 

I don't expect him to answer, so I will. The trees are Vatican II, mostly naively but sometimes willfully, misinterpreted and manipulated by the modernist clergy. And the Novus Ordo, ditto. The new Mass, ambiguous and permissive, gets tweaked and embellished according to the ego - more or less - of the priest, and according also to his theology which under NZ's Bishops' Conference is very likely also more or less modernistically heretical.

It's time now for the laity to come to the help of the Church, our Mother, with the prayer of Mary the Mother of God - the Rosary, and the Mass.

Fed as a child and nurtured as a teenager by the Latin Mass, and now longing to return to it, I believe the suppression of the traditional Latin Mass was the chief tool used for demolishing the Church from within by the Communist importations attested to by Bella Dodd, aided and abetted by naïve, well-meaning clergy deluded by visons of a utopian, socialist World Church.  

  

The traditional Latin Mass, as Fr Chad Ripperger FSSP says, "leaves one with a sense of being drawn into heaven with the priest. This draws us into prayer and gives the sense of the transcendent and supernatural that are key in the spiritual life.  The Latin provides a sense of mystery. The beauty of the ritual … all these things lead to contemplation, the seeking after that which is above.

"We cannot be satisfied with a liturgy that is the work of our own hands. 

We need the work of God back … we need God."

Bob Gill says: 

Many have been led to believe that the situation of the 'declining number of priests' cited by Cardinal Dew in the Wellington Archdiocese is happening all over the world. Not so.

Father Bryan Buenger, until recently Parish Priest of Tararua in the Palmerston North Diocese, has returned to the US to the Phoenix Diocese which is currently celebrating its greatest year ever, with 40 or so priests-to-be in its seminary. 

Its bishop, Thomas Olmsted, is a champion of orthodoxy.

I say: What a wonderful, positive illustration of a good tree bearing good fruit! 

Bob adds: You tell it how it is, Julia, without being nasty. We need more of that proactive rhetoric!
Some countries are lucky; they have a Catholic forum to sound off on and they can ge questions on their faith and associated matters raised/answered either directly or indirectly. Not so in New Zealand because, as far as I know, your blog, Julia, is the only non-Church controlled avenue we have for voicing thoughts and opinions. 
Carry on the good work!

I say: thanks Bob. I'd love to know what other NZ blogs are doing this sort of stuff. Surely mine can't be the only one!