HOW TO GET WARM IN A BLACK FROST

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Kiwi Catholics will not go where their priests and bishops won't lead them. 

That unpalatable fact has dawned on me like last Thursday's black frost which, after Wednesday night's passing of the Assisted Suicide Bill's Second Reading, seemed a fitting metaphor for the black frost which has settled across the entire nation.

Because for us foot soldiers the battle to preserve the right to life in New Zealand has, as Bob McCoskrie of Family First cogently puts it, only just begun. 

"The Bill has more than 100 amendments proposed to make it 'workable'," says Bob. 

'Workable' is just what it ain't and never can be. Even NZ's finest minds, assembled in the Beehive as they pretend to be, cannot make a silk purse out of this sow's ear.

We must challenge the Association of Assisted Assassinations to prove that its vision of painless death is not a mirage, that no one will die by mistake or malice aforethought, because nowhere in the world will they find the evidence to prove it.

The crying shame is that we infantrymen - who were praying for the defeat of this odious Bill and some well-deserved R&R - lack the officers we need to lead the next charge out of the trenches. Reference Cardinal John Dew, who supported the schoolkids' climate strike and speaks out for refugees, who says, "the effects of an abortion on mental health are a concern for the Catholic Church".

WOT??? Shouldn't the first concern be the murder of  500,000 defenceless babies in only 50 years? Hands up the people who've heard homilies preached against this euthanasia Bill, a Bill which only fifty years ago was unthinkable? 

In the '70s, when my mother got up on a chair at the United Women's Convention and told those newly-minted feminists that if they succeeded in legalising abortion the next thing would be euthanasia, they just laughed at her.But in those good old days (by comparison) sermons were preached up and down the country, by priests who knew evil when they saw it and exposed it to their people for what it was - and Catholics joined the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child in droves. 

SPUC was the NZ Catholic Church on a podium. (The acronym did not have the unfortunate rhyming opportunity that it has now. By comparison, Kiwis were innocent then, and clean-spoken.) 

Catholics may still be the mainstay of pro-life organisations but they're an aging, dwindling silent majority, a legacy of the faithful priests and bishops of the '70s and '80s. I'm the only RC on my local Voice for Life committee. 

It's Protestants like McCoskrie, Voice for Life's Jacqui de Ruiter and fierce little Hilary Kieft who are the 'out-there' voices for the vulnerable now.

And the reason is that Kiwi Catholics won't go where their clergy won't lead them. 

It goes back further than 50 years, to the invention of The Pill and then Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae, and what Church Militant calls the Contraception Deception. For every homily worldwide in favour of the encyclical there was another opposing it. In New Zealand, as far as I remember - and as a young mother just starting a family I have every reason to remember - the silence of the shepherds was deafening. And so their lambs strayed. Strayed so far, they fell into the Luciferian trap of believing that if the Church is wrong/silent on contraception and if The Pill fails, the Church should then keep her mouth shut on abortion. And NZ's Church of Nice does exactly that.

After years and years of hearing Proddy homilies (my daughter's friend Domhnall from the Irish Republic can't believe that her mother bandies that word about, where he comes from you'd get shot for it) most Catholics now are sadly uncatechised. They don't fear Hell, so they don't try to avoid it and they don't try to stop anyone else going there either; but Jesus himself has said "Narrow is the gate … that leads to life and few there are who find it."

Even in Jesus' day, Hell was evidently the default position. The tragic correlation is, if most of the sheep fall into the pit, what will be the fate of their shepherds? It's probably news to most Catholics that there are degrees of Hell, and Jesus Himself has said "Better for him that a millstone be tied around his neck, and that he be drowned in the depth of the sea" (Mt 18,6). The depth of Hell reserved for shepherds who put a stumbling block before one of these little ones is deep indeed. 

The Catholic Church is in dire straits, but they're straits which have been predicted over and over again, by Our Lady of Fatima and even more hearteningly, Our Lady of Good Success. We have Jesus Christ with us in the boat and can find refuge from the storms of crisis in the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, celebrated yesterday as a Solemnity and preached by Bishop Charles - who commented, "We don't hear much about the Sacred Heart these days".

It was at once a masterpiece of understatement and also the most loaded remark I've ever heard, from the good bishop. Its freight includes the idea that devotion to an exposed heart of flesh is somehow distasteful now, when - ironically - good taste is dead and buried. 

Did +Charles intend to go right to the heart (pun intended) of the matter? Because the Sacred Heart is the raison d'etre of all the mysteries of our faith, the symbol for a God who knows nothing but Love, the Love which immolated Him on the Cross for us, which opened His Heart by a lance to bring forth the Sacraments from which we receive the life of grace. 

Only love will open His Heart again for us personally, but it's a love no longer taught, the love which is charity and gives God the first place, gives Him a tabernacle in the centre of the church, a Mass celebrated ad orientem (facing God, not us), and celebrates the priesthood as representing Christ.

To relieve my feelings I intend, tomorrow morning after the Recessional, to belt out on the organ To Jesus Heart all Burning. No one will listen; few will recognize it. 

But at least it will drown out the laughter and chatter which, as the Fatima seer Lucia has told us, deeply offends His Blessed Mother; laughter and chatter which breaks out straight after the last hymn at a time when we still have the Sacred Heart of Jesus present in our own hearts, trying to tell us a few home truths.

Like, don't wait for a priest to tell you what to do. If only you'll listen, I will tell you Myself.

Linda Clarke says:

I really mourn what has happened with the Church. But He will act in His time, and it shall never be prevailed against - permanently... they are certainly trying to prevail against it. But what a wonderful array of strong Catholic men are doing their best ... Michael Voris of Church Militant using all his journalistic skills … and many others using their particular gifts … it is so good!

Yes, I see the climate is changing....v. slow, but it IS.   All over the world there are reports of people wanting the Latin Mass, people who see 'The Spirit of Vat. II' for what it is.   Do you find you have a sense of almost 'smelling', 'tasting' who is who in this situation?   The language, they use, for one, gives people away every time now, to me.    I was around it for years but didn't realise then... I became a bit liberal too because that's how I was being led and I trusted.