PN CATHEDRAL GIVES SUNDAY MASS THE GO-BY

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



The Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, seat of Bishop Charles Drennan in the Palmerston North Diocese, has given Sunday morning Mass the go-by. 

"It's because the priests at the cathedral are 'supplying' for the whole of the Tararua Parish". We can't drum up any sympathy: had their attitude to Father Bryan Buenger, the former Parish Priest, been positive and supportive, he'd not have left New Zealand; there'd be no need for cathedral priests to be tootling all over Tararua on Sundays. One is sorely tempted to say they brought it on themselves. 

It's hard to escape the conclusion that some clerics want to do themselves out of a job.

The cathedral parish has an obligation to advertise, by email, on the diocesan website and in the newsletter, the fact that on Sundays it offers only a Liturgy of the Word with Holy Communion. 

They have an even more serious obligation to explain Canon Law, which states that a Liturgy of the Word, when there is Mass available, does not fulfill the Sunday obligation. The Liturgy is an option in Palmerston North only for people who can't get themselves to St Mary's, Our Lady of Lourdes or St Columba's, Ashhurst. Otherwise, attending the Liturgy instead of Holy Mass is a mortal sin.

A correspondent has reported on Sunday's pathetic event at the cathedral:

"We had a Liturgy of the Word with Holy Communion (as Welcom seems to call it), instead of Mass, at the cathedral at 9:30 this morning. I found it a very hollow experience.

The 'gospel' was read by a woman.

The 'homily' was by a man.  Its hard to comment, I don't have the text or a recording. The gospel was Luke 12:49-53: "Do you think I came to bring peace on the earth? I tell you, no! I came to divide."

I felt the speaker was almost contradicting Christ's message, speaking more of ecumenism instead."

Snap! Wouldn't you know it, at my parish Sunday Mass also, the homily wound up wallowing in 'ecumenism'.

It opened with the usual doubts and self-questioning, intended I suspect to bring Father down to our level, just as he physically descends the step from the sanctuary to deliver the homily (so that he's one of us). 

Father couldn’t “understand” the Scripture readings. He couldn’t understand how the angels sang Peace to people of good will at the birth of Jesus, and then that Jesus during His ministry would say, “I have come not to bring peace but a sword” - and how, Father asked, could Jesus want families to be divided and argue among themselves about Jesus’ message???

Oh, the rush of blood to my head! Or rather, the unspoken words to my lips! 

The angels came offering peace not to everyone, but to people of good will. It was up to those people either to accept that peace or spurn it. 

And of course Jesus knew, when He began His ministry, that He would create division (with "a sword") in Jewish families, and throughout Israel: some would accept His word and try to share it with friends and relations, who would angrily reject the message and often the messenger with it. (Even just last century, Jewish intellectual and philosopher Edith Stein's conversion to Catholicism met with something like horror in her family, particularly her mother.)

When Jesus later proclaimed the doctrine of the Eucharist many of his followers deserted Him, and decried and denied Him to those who stayed faithful. Those deserters were forerunners to Martin Luther and all the Protestants, who still deny His Presence in the Eucharist. 

Now we have deserters of a different stripe: Modernist 'Catholics' who deny Church doctrine and dogma, or subvert it to their own ends and strategies, bringing schism into the Church and very often into their families.

“We used to emphasise the differences between religions, but now we know better," Father declared.

Oh, yes. Now, the Church of Nice has by and large stopped preaching the doctrine which Jesus preached - the hard bits like the Transubstantiation and the Judgment.

"Now we emphasise what we have in common,” said Father.

Oh, yes. Now the Church preaches only the nice bits, the bits that Protestants like too. Worse than that, doctrine and dogma is heretically contradicted, as in Sunday's homily in my church, when Father strayed from ecumenism into the separation of Church and State,"which is right", said Father, "and much better than what we had in the past”.

Leaving aside the "synthesis of heresies", Modernism, which Father invoked in that statement, ecumenism has to be Satan's most successful exercise in deception and deviation in our day. The Catholic Church has been totally hornswoggled by Satan, the Father of Lies.

Ta Whakatairanga i te Nohotahitanga o nga Whakapono I Aotearoa is the title of a booklet currently to be found in our church foyers. 

What that means is Promoting Interfaith Relations in Aotearoa New Zealand, Second Edition - and further, New Zealand Catholic Bishops (sic) Committee for Interfaith Relations. 

How much did this document cost to produce? How much did it cost to organize and stage the 'interfaith councils', 'forums', and 'groups' and their 'Sounds of the Sacred', 'Exploring Sacred Spaces' etc, which fill its stiff, expensive pages? How much time and money, which should have been expended on Christ's Great Commission to His Church, not of cosying up to heretics but their conversion, preaching the Gospel - the whole Gospel, including the doctrine of Transubstantiation - "to all creatures"?

The opening line of this piece of puffery is 'Growing religious diversity'.

WOT??? Jesus Christ came to bring a sword, not to 'grow religious diversity'. He did not want Pope Francis' "diversity of religions". The unity He prayed for his disciples was unity with Him in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

He came to teach us - as yesterday's saint, St John Eudes, Priest, states - to be "one with Jesus as the members are one with the head, so you must have with him one spirit, one soul, one life, one will, one intention, one heart. It is he himself who is to be spirit, heart, love, life, everything for you. In the life of a Christian all these marvels … are perfected above all by the holy Eucharist".

Philippa O'Neill says:

What can I say … this is awful.