MEA CULPA, MEA CULPA ...

To comment, please open your gmail account, use  my email address, Facebook or Twitter. Scroll down for comments. Thank you.



Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa …

It's confession time. Yesterday at the pro-life vigil outside the Hastings hospital a friend of mine, one who's absolutely honest - the sort of friend you need these days, in the Catholic Church if nowhere else - told me I'd made a mistake.

She'd been informed by someone in the know that a blog post of mine concerning Fr Nathaniel Brazil, a set of vestments, and Our Lady of Lourdes parish in Havelock North, was incorrect. Fr Nathaniel's mother hadn't given him a set of rose vestments and OLOL had not refused his offer of same.

For one thing, Fr Nat's mother has been dead for years, she said.

So I apologise to Fr Nathaniel, who's now been sent to fresh pastures for the Lord in Whanganui, and who's had quite enough to put up with from people and fellow priests in the Church of Nice, without a Rad Trad giving him grief. Although knowing Fr Nathaniel, who once and sadly only very briefly, graced Holy Trinity Parish, I don't think he'd have bothered his pretty head about it too much. I apologise also unreservedly for any comments I made which might have upset any OLOL parishioners.

Because for another thing, Our Lady of Lourdes has much more serious concerns. I'm reliably informed that the priest celebrating Mass there last Sunday suddenly became ill and had to call on another priest, providentially present in the congregation, to take his place.

It seems the situation in Palmerston North Diocese in regard to the supply of priests is even more dire than when Fr Bryan Buenger departed Tararua Parish last month. 

But God save us please, from any ghastly 'lay-led' Sunday services. (I know they're ghastly because in the days before I grew up, as it were, I conducted them myself on weekdays sometimes.) We all have still have a choice, thank God, in churches and times for attending Holy Mass. Almost everyone has a car and if there's no Mass where you usually attend, you can offer those who don't a ride to Mass somewhere else. 

And that 'somewhere else' could be, in the PN Diocese, the Traditional Latin Mass, in a tiny church in Ashhurst (every Sunday), St Anthony's Whanganui (daily) and DUNSTAN'S FUNERAL PARLOUR for heaven's sake, in Napier (every third Sunday) - all of which of course are SSPX.

To those who are horrified at the suggestion, because 'The SSPX is in schism!" I would say that Bishop Athanasius Schneider, requested by the Holy See to visit SSPX's two seminaries, afterwards stated that "There are no weighty reasons to deny the clergy and faithful of the SSPX the official canonical recognition, meanwhile they shoud be accepted as they are.

"The issue of Vatican II should not be taken as the "conditio sine qua non" since it was an assembly with primarily pastoral aims … and possesses a temporary value, as … pastoral documents do. … There is on both sides (Holy See and the SSPX) an over-evaluation and over-estimation of … Vatican II."

Bishop Schneider goes on to recommend "... canonical recognition of the SSPX on behalf of the Holy See. Otherwise the often repeated pastoral and ecumenical openness in the Church of our days will manifestly lose its credibility and the history will one day reproach to the ecclesiastical authorities of our days that they have "laid on the brothers greater burden than required" (Acts 15:28), which is contrary to the pastoral method of the Apostles.

And anyway, according to an international expert in Apologetics who was then living in New Zealand, the Papal Nuncio at the time was unable to deny his assertion that the NZ Church has been in schism (separated from the Church of Rome), since the 1980s.

If enough of us attend the Traditional Latin Mass it might mean that Bishop Charles could upgrade it from a country church to its proper place, in the cathedral, and the Holy See could accept the SSPX as they should be: "as they are".



P S: Of course, none of the above is to distract you from my wrongdoing. Honest. But as the Gospel for the Divine Office this evening says, Confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, and then you will be healed (Jas 5:16). 

So here's praying for you, people!