RUDE AND DEFIANT: DOING A RUNNER TO AVOID AN 'ECUMENICAL SERVICE'

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This morning I did a runner from Mass. Not during, but after, to avoid the annual 'ecumenical' Advent Service with the Anglicans, hosted this year by the Catholics.

My walk-out wasn't just rude, it was positively defiant: at the end of Mass, Father had commanded the congregation, in no uncertain terms, to stay put. Numbers were down this morning. Father went so far as to say people hadn't turned up for Mass because they didn't want to attend the Combined Advent Service afterwards; but staying for the Advent Service was what Christ would judge us on, said Father, because staying for the Advent Service was "loving others".  

"It's only twenty past ten!" said Father, as if time were the crucial factor. So much was it not so, for me, that I hoped to drive an hour and a quarter to the Traditional Latin Mass at Ashhurst.

So what could possibly lead me to defy Father's orders and walk out? To begin with, the Gospel: 

“The Lord Jesus, before ascending into heaven, commanded his disciples to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world and to baptize all nations” - Opening words of the Declaration Dominus Iesus (“The Lord Jesus”), published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on August 6, 2000, the Feast of the Transfiguration signed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) and then-Archbishop (later Cardinal) Tarcisio Bertone (link to the full text of Dominus Iesus). 

There you have it: proclaim the Gospel, the whole of it, not just the books Luther left in, to the whole world, all nations, even the English; even the Anglicans. Even the Queen. 


And then there's the Council of Trent, called by the Church in the middle of the sixteenth century to condemn and refute the heresies of Protestantism, chiefly the heresy of Justification, proclaimed by Martin Luther and promoted by King Henry VIII in his new Anglican Church.

Canon IX. If any one shall say, that by faith alone the impious is justified; so as to mean that nothing else is required to co-operate in order unto obtaining the grace of justification, and that it is not in any respect necessary that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will; let him be anathema. (Council of Trent, Sixth Session [1547], Decree concerning Justification [trans. Theodore Alois Buckley]).

The decrees of the Council of Trent  (the First Vatican Council) still stand. They have been confirmed by the Second Vatican Council and the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992). In other words, although the Modernist heretics  now running riot in the Church of Nice would have us believe otherwise, the truth never changes and Protestants are still heretics and are still anathema. 

"What a horrid thing to say!" Actually, it's not. To be declared anathema is not - as Protestants and probably many Catholics, uncatechised are they are, often think - to be condemned by the Catholic Church to Hell. No, to be declared anathema is to be excommunicated, and only in the interests of giving the anathematized reason to think again, to repent and be converted and gain Heaven. Ecumenical services are yet another swindle, introduced post-Vatican II by certain malevolent elements, Communist and Freemason, in the Catholic Church. 

St Teresa of Avila says expressly: "The Lord asks only two things of us: love for His Majesty and love for our neighbour. It is for these two virtues that we must strive, and if we attain them perfectly, we are doing His will, and so shall be united with Him" (The Interior Castle). 

Note that she puts love for God first, and loving our neighbours means doing for them what God wills, which is whatever will help him attain eternal life - which God wills to be achieved by conversion to the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, founded by Jesus Christ on the Rock of Peter. 

Ecumenical services are a blatant waste of time, which would be far better spent in simply inviting our fellow Christians to attend a Catholic service, with generous hospitality to follow.  

"Oh but", you say, "Pope Francis says God wills a diversity of religions". Ahem. No, God does not. Pope Francis was good enough to retract this remark privately in correspondence with the valiant Archbishop Athanasius Schneider of Astana, Kazahkstan (now there's a real shepherd for you), but has yet to correct himself publicly. And so, says Archbishop Schneider, “there is being proclaimed a new Gospel, a Gospel that is not the one taught by the Incarnate Word of God, that was loyally preached by the Apostles and passed on to the Church.”

“There can be no doubt,” Schneider explains, “that Saint Paul would say today, concerning this controversial formulation in the Abu Dhabi statement: ‘But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema’ (Galatians 1:8–9).”

(See? Even St Paul says horrid things occasionally. If you're committed to Christ and His Gospel, you have no option but to say - or do - 'horrid' things occasionally.)

“With the coming of the Savior Jesus Christ, God has willed that the Church founded by him be the instrument for the salvation of all humanity (cf. Acts 17:30-31). This truth of faith does not lessen the sincere respect which the Church has for the religions of the world, but at the same time, it rules out, in a radical way, that mentality of indifferentism ‘characterized by a religious relativism which leads to the belief that ‘one religion is as good as another’” — 'Dominus Iesus', Paragraph 22.

With all the "sincere respect" in the world, we should acknowledge that for Catholics to celebrate 'ecumenical services' with Protestants is tacitly to admit that Protestantism is as good as Catholicism.  That's the "mentality of indifferentism characterized by religious relativism" regretted by Pope Benedict. 

In the spirit of religious diversity he claims to be willed by God, Pope Francis has made much of his recent trips to the United Arab Emirates and Morocco. “My pilgrimage followed in the footsteps of two Saints: Francis of Assisi and John Paul II”, he said again during his general audience on April 3^rd, 2019:.

“Eight hundred years ago Francis took the message of peace and fraternity to the Sultan al-Malik al Kamil”.

Ahem. For his namesake the saint, it was just a little bit more than 'a message of  peace and fraternity'. St Francis was virtually putting his head on a plate: the sultan of his day had decreed a highly valuable gold coin be paid for every Christian head delivered to him (suitably severed from its body, of course.).

To give us complacent Christians and Catholics an idea of what loyally preaching the Gospel entailed for St Francis and his friars: in order to maintain the right to possession of the holy places granted to the saint by the sultan, in the case of the Holy Sepulchre for six hundred years the friars inside it, unable to leave, each died after three months of breathing no air but only the smoke of candles.

St Francis did not risk his life to be nice. He risked his life to evangelise. So can you figure out what Pope Francis means when he says - as he reiterated to bishops in Japan just over a week ago - that in encountering those who do not know Christ we must witness to Christ but "not with convictions, not to convince [or persuade], [and] not to proselytize"?

Que? So his namesake St Francis risked his life to meet the sultan but he did that without convictions, not to convince the sultan of the truth of the Trinity, of the Gospel?

It was progressive Protestant churches who in the 20th century initiated the ecumenical movement, and by its latter half Freemasons had infiltrated the Catholic Church to such an extent that high-ranking Freemason priests and bishops were typified by the chief architect of the Novus Ordo Mass, Archbishop Annibale Bugnini.

"Masonry... looks forward to the time when ... there shall be but one altar and one worship; one common altar of Masonry on which the Veda, Shastra, Sade, Zend-Avesta, Koran and Holy Bible shall lie ... and at whose shrine the Hindoo, the Persian, the Assyrian, the Chaldean, the Egyptian, the Chinese, the Mohammedan, the Jew and the Christian may kneel..." ("The Kentucky Monitor." Fellowcraft Degree, p. 95). Freemasonry. Sounds positively ecumenical, doesn't it?

As for being judged on attendance at ecumenical services as a way of 'loving others', as I recall, Jesus Christ stated it was a matter of being judged on how we've fed the hungry, given drink to the thirsty (for priests, feeding and watering their people, spiritually moribund or dead as they are for lack of nourishment), clothing the naked, hosting the stranger (local Anglicans hardly qualify) visiting the sick and those in prison - praying for Cardinal Pell, perhaps? (Mt 25: 35-39). 

How wonderful if Father employed his draconian powers of rhetoric to persuade his people to frequent the confessional, because this morning they worked very well in enticing the congregation to stay for the Combined Advent Service. I know because after feeling like a pariah and with the moment for leaving for the Ashhurst TLM having passed, I suddenly realized that I could, without abandoning my adherence to the Gospel, the Council of Trent and all the rest of it, attend the morning tea which inevitably followed the Service. 

So back to the church I went. Although the great Church theologian Francisco Suarez once remarked that "heresy spreads like cancer, which is why heretics should be avoided as much as possible", I take that to mean in a liturgical context, not social. Far too late in life for me to avoid contagion over cups of tea or glasses of wine, anyway, because most of these Anglicans I count as good friends.

And of course, the only hint of disapproval came from a Catholic. “I’m glad you stayed,” she said, meaningfully.  I didn’t tell her I hadn’t. It would have taken too long to explain.