Saturday 30 May 2020

YES VIRGINIA, THERE IS STILL A RULING CLASS - OR HOW THE NEW ELITES AND THE MODERN MASSES DESERVE ONE ANOTHER IN A COVID WORLD

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In a guest post, Paul Collits (Sydney) applies a magnifying glass and a Down Under context to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's comment "We have forgotten God" and "That's why all this has happened". 



Yes Virginia, There is Still a Ruling Class - Or How the New Elites and the Modern Masses Deserve One Another in COVID World


Yes Virginia, There is Still a Ruling Class - Or How the New Elites and the Modern Masses Deserve One Another in COVID World




The ruling class is real, and it dominates our culture.  It is also embedded in the modern, intrusive, all-powerful state.  The current COVID scare provides a perfect case study of the sources and consequences of our democratic dilemma.  The people have seemingly handed over their sovereignty to the State, without noticing what this surrender means.

The ruling class is real, and it dominates our culture.  It is also embedded in the modern, intrusive, all-powerful state.  The current COVID scare provides a perfect case study of the sources and consequences of our democratic dilemma.  The people have seemingly handed over their sovereignty to the State, without noticing what this surrender means.

Of Ruling Classes, Old and New
Two old Aussie lefty academics, Bob (now Raewyn) Connell and Terry Irving, came up with a wonderful title for an academic article back in the 1970s.  The article was called “Yes Virginia, There is a Ruling Class”.  (This was a take-off of the much older, delightful story (from 1897) which inspired a New York Sun editorial, “Yes Virginia, There is a Santa Claus”, and much later, a children’s book, a 1970s TV show, and eventually a 1990s film.  The Virginia was Virginia O’Hanlon, who had written to the Sun because her father, a Dr Philip O’Hanlon, had advised her – “if it’s in the Sun, it must be true”).

Must the ruling class thesis be true as well?
Well, nearly half a century on from Connell and Irving, I can confidently report that there is, indeed, still a ruling class, deep into the twenty-first century.  Bob (now Raewyn) Connell and Terry Irving were right.  Yet a lot has changed since the 1970s, in politics, in culture and in thinking about politics and culture.  Today’s world, even before the bizarre new version of it we are now experiencing in “COVID times”, would be virtually unrecognisable to a citizen of 1974.

It is just a different ruling class now.  Or, perhaps, it could be argued that it is the same ruling class with new members, new values and new forms of control.  I favour the view that it is a new class entirely, and far worse than the old one.  And now, perhaps most surprisingly and ironically, the lefties are part of the ruling class.
Recognising that there was a ruling class, and that democratic forms of government were a sham,   were favoured tropes of the 1970s academic and industrial left.  Yet the idea of a ruling class in modern democracies is an older idea, and its genesis belongs more properly to some long forgotten but very important European thinkers.  These are the “elite” theorists of democracy Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels and Gaetano Mosca.

The Wikipedia version of elite theory is pretty reasonable as a definition:
The theory posits that a small minority, consisting of members of the economic elite and policy-planning networks, holds the most power—and that this power is independent of democratic elections.

Elite theory met the theory of the “new class” in the 1940s.  The latter explained how an entirely different elite had formed and was emerging as a new ruling class in Western countries.  The best and most recognised theorist of the emergence of this new class was an American marxist-turned-conservative, James Burnham, author of the highly influential work, The Managerial Revolution (1943).  (Burnham had written another book, equally perceptive and influential, called The New Machiavellians, and this, indeed was about the elite theorists’ work and its significance for democracy).

The old ruling class consisted, especially in the past world of Europe, of the landed aristocracy and more recently, of industrialists, media barons and their political representatives.  This was the world of “old money”, inherited wealth, elite public schools and very restricted democracy.  It was also a world of traditional values – of believed-in and practised religion, chivalry, hard work for delayed gratification, family, local community and limited government.  

In short, they were, ultimately, “bourgeois” values, as the American neo-classical economist Deirdre (formally Donald) McCloskey has argued.  (Yes, I know, there is an outsized representation of the trans community in this article).
Outside the ruling class, we were all reasonably poor, but the old (reasonably rich) ruling class pretty much left the rest of us alone.  The politicians of the old ruling class ruled in the interests of their class, certainly, but they allowed the rest of us to live our own lives as best we could.  They didn’t tell us what to do – or what to think.  They were not instinctively totalitarian.  To use the now fashionable term favoured by those concerned about cultural appropriation, they “stayed in their own lane”.

The new ruling class consists of inside-the-beltway politicians and bureaucrats, their armies of minders, media operatives in both the public and private sectors, deeply embedded lobbyists, academia, professionals, the arts, tech entrepreneurs and corporate managers.  

It is a “credentialled class”, the product of the utterly false idea that meritocracy is necessarily and always a good thing, and that we should be ruled by experts.  And the product of the modern, utilitarian university.  It is a super-networked class.  It is the woke, uber rich world of Davos and of Silicon Valley.  The American economic development scholar Richard Florida called this new ruling class “the creative class”.  Like the old ruling class, they own and control wealth and they own, or at least massively influence, politicians.

Moreover, the State that the new class co-manages is a very different, and a far more alarming beast, than that controlled by the old ruling class.  The latter was a minimal state, with limited government, limited reach into the private lives of its citizens, and which largely observed constitutional rules and principles of governance.  Whatever corruption there was, was limited since government just didn’t do that much.  They “stayed in their own lane”.  And the old ruling class “ruled” a working class that was itself largely committed to the protection of private spheres, to traditional values and to democracy.

The new class believes in very different things, and has new and very different values and pre-occupations.
The values of the new ruling class – left-liberal, woke, green, technocratic and globalist – little resemble either the values of the old ruling class or of the new ruled.  The new ruling class despises the values of the working class – the Brexit-voting, racist, Trump-loving deplorables and xenophobes – while also (still) economically exploiting this working class, whether the workers are the much hated older, white, male version or the much loved, poor migrants of colour who do the outsourced chores of the new rich, and live all the while in squalor.

One of the main differences between the old and new ruling classes is that the old rulers and the old ruled actually shared many values.  Traditional values.  They just had very different amounts of wealth and power.

Dumbed Down Culture and the Uber State
As the American political scientist, Johnathan O’Neill, has pointed out, post-war conservatives, at least those in the USA, focused their attention and concern on two modern trends – the recent emergence of the intrusive State, and popular moral and cultural decline.  O’Neill rightly singled out the conservative thinkers Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet and (again) James Burnham for particular mention.  As O’Neill notes:
… both Kirk and Nisbet saw the administrative state as a new social form sustained by a “new class” of intellectual-technocratic “managers,” a bureaucratic elite with a vested interest in statist expansion.

O’Neill, quoting the work of another conservative thinker, Paul Gottfried, might well have been anticipating our current alienated predicament when he observed:
Gottfried further deepened the managerial concept by arguing that the administrative state had moved into its therapeutic and coercive phase. In the age of relativism and multiculturalism, “[p]ublic administration will decide which group receives which benefit or is forced to suffer which liability, for the sake of general self-esteem and maximal healing.” 

Citizens become “patients” as managerial rule presents “itself as collectively administered assistance . . . concealing its operation in the language of caring.” 

Additionally, dissent from the new order was being pathologized. Opposition to progressive liberal politics was construed as a form of deviance in need of government-administered re-education, behavior modification, and possibly the indemnification of designated victim groups. “Liberal democratic pluralism has come to denote a process of sensitization. And the behavior modification required by this conditioning is something that demands the intervention of social experts.”
See under wokeness, and see under COVID rule.

Here the State becomes the protector of all, the provider of health and happiness, the champion of designated “victims”, but also the coercer of all.  

In the COVID era, the latter includes (in Australia) issuing internal passports, blocked internal borders, having the police check what we have in our car boots, police striding around supermarkets, the arrest of people sunbaking on the beach (and thereby accumulating vitamin D and probable COVID immunity), and the ushering of people munching on KFC away from food courts in otherwise non-socially-distanced shopping malls.

The victory of the new class and the decline of freedom has had two twin drivers.
On the one hand, the new Deep State with its extensive, counter-constitutional controls over the masses had been the vehicle for a new clamp down on freedom, on private living and on local communities.  

On the other, the embrace of a debased pop culture by the punters – see, for example, under tattoos, reality TV, the pornification of everything, talking in clichés, addiction to social media and other drugs, and the contemporary Aussie tabloid – has been both the cause and the effect of a sharp decline in traditional standards, principles, practices and virtues.  In Joseph Ratzinger’s phrase, there is now embedded in our culture a “dictatorship of relativism”, accepted knowingly by both the rulers and unknowingly by the ruled.  And the debasement of culture, our amoral myopia, has at the same time de-fanged our cultural capacity to think-with-spine and to resist the over-weening State.
This is Gogglebox culture.

People watching people on television who are watching people on television.  Reading tabloids which spend their time talking about people on television who watch people on television.  Or talking about the sex lives of the nobodies who infest reality television, or the uninteresting and mostly sordid off-field activities of overpaid footballers.  The victory of the celebrity, or as the Australian writer Shelley Gare termed it, “the triumph of the airheads”.  Mark Bauerlein’s acerbic conclusion was that our age’s young adults, the leaders of the very near future, are, in fact, “the dumbest generation”.  Not a nation of thinkers.

Dumbed down culture unused to thinking big meets a new ruling class weaponised by access to, and the control of, technology and by an intrusive and pervasive Deep State.  A turbo-charged State.

George Orwell would be either spinning in his grave or shaking his head in sheer disbelief.  The irony of these high level developments is that the State controls just about everything – especially now in lockdown world – and yet most of the critical changes in culture have occurred outside the formal activities of the State.  It is the new ruling class, and not the State itself, which invented political correctness and spawned relativism, which has taken over the universities, workplaces and media, which created and then infected the HR industry which in turn powers the woke corporation, and which has all but destroyed traditional values of family, faith and flag.  After all, someone had to engineer the long march through the institutions of the new ruling class.

The worst thing about a dumb culture – and an especially dumb culture is one that doesn’t know that it is dumb – is that it comes to be a supine culture, in thrall of Big Brother and willing to hand over freedoms and rights to the unelected, credentialled class, and lacking the capacity or the willingness to question.  

Core skills are gone now.  Sadly, ours is culture that has little self-awareness and no sense of history or context, and which believes that spending a lot of years in school equals education, that the ability to work gadgets and communicate in bubbles are signs of broad and deep knowledge.  

This is a non-learned and an unlearning culture, populated by the blithely ignorant who cower beneath a State which they naively believe will solve their problems and keep them safe, while simultaneously printing all the money the world needs while no one actually runs businesses or works.  A population ready to cop a COVID scare, without thought or any willingness to set our decision-makers the policy “smell test”.  Now that really is dumb.
And right at this moment in history is decidedly NOT the time to be dumb.

COVID Mania, an All Powerful State and a Dumb Culture
A recent and extremely perceptive article by Jack Kerwick in American Greatness, titled The Imperative to Think in the Covid Era, argued that ours is a culture that has largely lost the will to think as we all willingly observe in real time an absolute policy train wreck.  He drew upon the well- known philosopher Hannah Arendt’s observations of the architect of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, at the Nuremberg trials.  She concluded that Eichmann presented not as either evil or stupid, but rather as someone with a “curious but authentic inability to think”.
Kerwick notes:
Eichmann couldn’t think beyond “clichés,” “stock phrases,” and “conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct.” Because of this, his testimony was littered with “inconsistencies and flagrant contradictions,” illogic that didn’t in the least faze him.
In other words, Eichmann couldn’t think beyond the memes, bumper sticker slogans, and hashtags of his day.
It wasn’t that Eichmann was stupid. Nor was it that he lacked the ability to think critically or logically. Rather, he lacked the will to do so.

Kerwick relates Arendt’s observations of Eichmann to our current, post-reality predicament, and in particular, the masses’ apparent inability and unwillingness to think.

What else explains the utter contempt with which elected governments across the West have shown their people by giving themselves dictatorial powers that are, to use a much over-used 2020 word, “unprecedented”, at least outside times of war?  And the utter devotion of the masses to the unconstitutional, authoritarian State?

While there has been a strong correlation within the US system between the thirst for COVID lockdown and willingness to supress freedoms and Democrat run states, and between a willingness to end lockdowns and Republican run states, there is little evidence elsewhere in the world that the willingness to shutter economies and deprive people of their liberty is ideologically driven.  

After all, all governments, or almost all, are doing it.  Boris Johnson is a lock-downer, perhaps not by instinct but he certainly caved when pressured.  Macron needed almost no pressure, even persuasion.  The leftist Swedes have been erring on the side of freedom, not clampdown, on the side of voluntarism and not police stating.  Yes, the leftist Victorian Premier, that wolf in wolf’s clothing, has shown a particular aptitude for dictatorship.  As has Anna Stasi in Queensland.  And while there have been murmurings about freedom and the need to revive the economy in New South Wales, it couldn’t be argued that the sole Liberal-run Eastern State has been any less prone to be a freedom-killer than any of the other states.

No, governments of all persuasions have taken to their new, more intense exercise of extreme powers with alacrity and relish.  The things governments do best – hyper-regulation, spending other people’s money that has already run out, nanny stating, ordering people about, choking the airwaves with self-serving propaganda, rigging statistics, censoring or bullying the (few) opponents that have dared to raise their voices, and politicising the whole thing – have readily been on show during this manufactured crisis.

What of the dumb, supine electorate, for which the State has shown such contempt?
Instead of resistance by the freedom-deprived and the newly unemployed, there is only a herd mentality, a tendency blindly to obey orders and the chanting of what Kerwick terms “stock phrases”.

There is only the apparent adulation of Western governments, certainly as revealed in opinion polls from New York to New South Wales.  Blunders such as sending infected people into nursing homes – to their almost certain deaths – unexplained shifts in policy, the adoption of ludicrous academic modelling as gospel and as the basis for policy, letting infected people off cruise ships and into the community, locking down domestic populations while allowing porous international borders, shutting down “elective” surgery, have been rewarded with willing compliance, benign behaviour, the absence of protests, and general, bemused acceptance of patently ineffective, counter-intuitive and just plain, bloody stupid directives.  

Oh, and the reflexive attacks on COVID doubters, the dobbing in of neighbours, putting up signs saying “we are all in this together – get the app”, clapping over-appreciated and under-employed health workers, and the utter silence of the lambs, only underline the gullibility of the public and its complete credulousness in the face of State directives and messaging.

Outside the United States, there is little to suggest that there is even a flicker of protest at the industrial scale erosion of basic freedoms and rights and the destruction of jobs, businesses and whole economies, visited by Western Governments on their peoples.  All in the name of controlling a largely benign and minor virus of the kind that inflicts sickness an d death on us every single winter.

All of this suggests that the philosopher Ken Minogue was right to term this modern phenomenon “the servile mind”.  We-the-people seem simply to have outsourced our will to think to the State and to the new ruling class.

The lack of vigorous media and academic debates over the “crisis”, the refusal of the so-called thinking classes to call governments to account, certainly in Australia (and New Zealand!) and the contempt for their flocks shown by the churches in their failure to provide the one thing they are there for – the safeguarding of souls – and in so aiding and abetting the Deep State, have been especially abhorrent.

Conclusion
What do we make, then, of the COVID hysteria, indeed paralysis, and how can we situate it in the recent development of a deeply anti-democratic state run by a new and cloying ruling class?
The analysis here suggests three things – first, that there is nothing new in the existence of a ruling class; second, that there is (Virginia) a ruling class still, but it is a very different ruling class with far greater power than its earlier iterations, and very different values; third, that the dumbing down of culture and society’s associated moral decline has resulted in an utterly supine and unthinking population that is only too willing yielding of our rights to a supreme state and its ruling class.
We have lost the will and the capacity to think independently, critically, morally and originally about our world and its challenges.

How do the ruled fight back in the surreal times that we currently inhabit?  Where we have willingly handed over our freedoms and our livelihoods to inept yet all-powerful masters?  In short, we must overcome our learned inability and, more importantly, our learned unwillingness to think.

As Kerwick states:
But if we are interested in thinking clearly, of becoming educated, empowered; if we are interested in seeing to it that the powerful, the opportunistic, and the corrupt don’t manipulate us for their own purposes; if we are interested in self-governance; if we are interested in guarding ourselves against being perpetrators of evil—then we must marshal the will to think.

It is imperative that we learn how to think.
It is imperative that we refuse unabashedly to accept the declarations and decrees of experts uncritically.
It is imperative that we resist the tendency of most to just go along with the herd, to blindly obey orders.

Until we-the-people begin to understand our rights and how they have been suffocated, not just by COVID fascism but by far broader and equally crushing destroyers of freedom, we will remain, alas, simply “the ruled”.  We have been suffocated, on the one hand, by the enforcement of woke culture, political correctness, identity politics, the cultural hegemony of our masters, government and corporate surveillance and control and, on the other hand, by our own retreat to dumbed down priorities and the pursuit of seedy and ephemeral distractions.  

The cultural and moral decline referred to above, the abandonment of traditional virtue, isn’t merely offensive of itself.  Just as importantly, by weakening our self-knowledge and our moral spine, we surrender our will to think.  This plays into the hands of the ruling class.

As acute observers of the human predicament from Charles McKay in the 1800s right down to Douglas Murray today have realised, there is a madness to crowds, which only great courage in pursuit of a recovery of self-determination can turn around.  

Giving the middle finger to the elites, whether or not in a protest march against COVID totalitarianism or in snubbing the European Union by voting for Brexit, or indeed in donning a MAGA (Make Ardern Go Away) cap and walking down the street, all provide short and perhaps much needed dopamine hits for us deplorables.  

Much more thinking and purposeful activity is needed, however, if the currently cowed and the locked down are to respond more vigorously, effectively and lastingly to the dictatorship of the Deep State and the corporate elites who govern us.

Alas, until those of us who are not “insiders” of the ruling class, including those who are now hooked on our sadly debased culture and its down-market ways and who seem strangely ready to hand over our freedoms, provided the State provides for all our needs even as it subdues us all, one must reluctantly conclude that the new political and cultural elites and the spineless, docile, unthinking masses simply deserve one another.
Read 187 timesLast modified on Tuesday, 26 May 2020 09:11
Paul Collits


Paul Collits is a freelance writer and independent researcher who lives in Lismore New South Wales.  
He has worked in government, industry and the university sector, and has taught at tertiary level in three different disciplines - politics, geography and planning and business studies.  He spent over 25 years working in economic development and has published widely in Australian and international peer reviewed and other journals.  He has been a keynote speaker internationally on topics such as rural development, regional policy, entrepreneurship and innovation.  Much of his academic writing is available at https://independent.academia.edu/PaulCollits
His recent writings on ideology, conservatism, politics, religion, culture, education and police corruption have been published in such journals as Quadrant, News Weekly and The Spectator Australia.
He has BA Hons and MA degrees in political science from the Australian National University and a PhD in geography and planning from the University of New England.  He currently has an adjunct Associate Professor position at a New Zealand Polytechnic.

Thursday 28 May 2020

AN UNJUST LAW, BISHOPS, IS NO LAW AT ALL

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"With you we rejoice that we are able to take these first steps towards returning to some semblance of normality. The sacrifices we have made as a nation have averted what we have seen overseas." 

Yes, it reads exactly like the kind of blather we've got used to from our Glorious Leader as she whipped us on through the weeks she had us virtually under house arrest. But no, this is not a government announcement, it's what the New Zealand Bishops' wrote in their latest 'Pastoral Letter' on Tuesday.

So sickened by it am I, it's hard to find words to respond. But I must make the attempt. 

Its worst aspect is that I suspect most people who were in the habit of attending Sunday Mass before these bishops locked our churches will agree with the main thrust of this truly pathetic document.  

But to say "we rejoice" at the prospect of Mass on Pentecost Sunday is surely hyperbole. Or wishful thinking. Or both. How many of those to whom this letter is addressed have re-entered their parish church since Father emerged from the presbytery to unlock it? Very few, I suspect.

So most who will be "taking these first steps towards some semblance of normality" (I suppose that circumlocution means Sunday Mass) are not seeking the Eucharistic Christ - who makes Himself available 24/7 and was surely eager to see us just as soon as our shepherds let us back into our sheepfold. 

The weeks of imprisonment imposed by this Government have made it chillingly obvious that faith in the Real Presence has dwindled away to what Christ Himself predicted when He said, "But yet the Son of man, when he cometh, shall he find, think you, faith on earth?"(Lk 18:8). 

What are we seeking, then?  'Community'.  

That after all is what we've been pursuing subliminally for years in the Mass versus populum, facing Father with his impromptu embellishments to the banal liturgical texts, his instructions to the altar servers (if there are any) while turning his back on God in the tabernacle and approving the leapfrogging over pews to embrace everyone within coo-ee just when we're preparing to receive the Son of God in Holy Communion.

Not to mention the babble before the Sacrifice of the Son of God on Calvary to save us from Hell, and the uproar that erupts afterwards, when Christ is still really and truly Present within our souls.

We could just as well find 'community'  at St Mary's Anglican or St Andrew's Presbyterian but hey, we like the church and people we're know, that we're comfy with. True communion - with Christ - which is to be had only at St Joseph's, is in the Novus Ordo made so perfunctorily that the Body of Christ might as well be a a scoop of chips at McDonald's.

The horrible reality is, it was the Pope himself who was responsible for taking the first steps away from 'normality' (such is our bishops' casual take-it-for-granted attitude towards the inestimable gift of the Mass), when he closed St Peter's in Rome in Holy Week before the Italian government ordered it.

But just to underline the fact that the NZ Bishops' Conference are a law unto themselves, and in the van in the global advance towards a One World Church, church spokesman Fr John O'Connor stated at the time that "the key point is that we are guided by the Ministry of Health and not what other countries or other churches are doing." Oh yes, Dr Bloomfield, no Dr Bloomfield, three bags' full, Dr Bloomfield.

Thank God for 'Bishop' Brian Tamaki, who is no government boot-licker. Destiny Church announced it did not fear Coronavirus and would not close its churches.

Brian Tamaki speaking at the Destiny Church Man Up rally at Parliament.
Destiny Church leader 'Bishop' Brian Tamaki
"I'm not about to let a filthy virus scare us out of having church.To equate fear with common sense is nonsense," said Bishop Brian Tamaki.

"In a time when people are fearful, they need faith, hope, and the presence of God, so we will be keeping our churches open."
Oh the shame of it, that the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church would be shown up as craven and cowardly by a heretic. A brave heretic, but as a Protestant, still a heretic.
And what can one possibly make of the bishops' statement that "The sacrifices we have made as a nation have averted what we have seen overseas"? 

Honestly, are the bishops getting a kick-back from the Government? First, we don't have any idea yet of 'the sacrifices we have made as a nation'. Those sacrifices and the effect not of Covid, but of the Government's strong-arm reaction to Covid, will not become apparent, I'm afraid, for months or even years, almost certainly too late for New Zealand to avert another three years of socialism, suppression and subordination in what is even now dangerously close to a police state.
"In these days between the risen Lord’s Ascension into heaven and Pentecost," the bishops continue, "the apostles returned to the closed room."

Fortunate, blessed Apostles! The 'room' where Catholics would gather to pray - the church - was locked by these successors to those Apostles!

"There they joined in continuous prayer, together with several women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers (cf. Acts 1:12-14). It was from the closed room that the Church was brought to birth as the Holy Spirit came down upon the apostles and impelled them to go out and proclaim the Good News."

The Church was born not in that closed room, but from the Sacred Heart of Jesus pierced on the Cross by the lance of the centurion Longinus. Have the bishops forgotten that, or did they never know it, or is the Church teaching of the Sacraments flowing down into the world in the Blood and Water from His Sacred Side a bit unsanitary in these days of 'pandemic'? 

"This year Christians around the world entered a “closed room” due to the pandemic." 

No, we entered a 'closed room' because of this Government's imposition of totally unnecessary penalties and hardship in the interests of gaining control over a stupid, supine population. 

"For some of you this has enabled a graced time of prayer and reflection." 

For which we should all be grateful to our bishops, perhaps, for affording us such 'a graced time'. 

"For others it has been a time to refocus and put lives in order." 

If only it had been that for the bishops! They gave themselves weeks off work in which they could have refocused on their God-given vocation to teach, to forgive sin and to heal their flock. The lives they should have put in order first are their own, in the realisation that one day they will end at the Judgment Seat of Christ and answer to Him for deserting their flocks at the first sign of the Covid 'wolf' - which as time goes by looks more and more like a dog. A poodle, perhaps.

For some the “closed room” has led to family tensions or concerns about future employment." 

That's a nice way of putting it - which is these nice bishops' way of putting everything. How nicely will they be able to describe to the Lord, on that frightful Day when He comes again, how they cancelled the Mass and the Sacraments and locked our churches and hid themselves when their flocks were frightened by Covid the poodle?

Police figures comparing the week before the lockdown show a 22 percent increase in investigations.
Mirroring the police figures are those from Women's Refuge, showing a 20 percent increase in calls related to domestic violence.
Women's Refuge chief executive Dr Ang Jury said it had not yet seen the sorts of horror stories that were being reported overseas and the worst could be yet to come."https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/415553/domestic-violence-calls-to-police-increase-in-lockdown

"Concerns about future employment." say the bishops. More euphemism. 

Job losses due to Covid-19 may already be matching those seen in the Global Financial Crisis and economists warn we may be at the start of a "second wave" of redundancies, as the reality of the new economy dawns.
And with many of the current job losses affecting lower-paid workers, the next wave is expected to creep "higher up the food chain".
Since the start of Covid-19 restrictions around 43,000 people have signed up for the job seeker benefit, pointing to a sharp upturn in job losses.
The real number of people out of work may be higher because some people are not entitled to a benefit because their partner is in work.https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12335512
"For others still this has been a time when they have allowed their faith to drift." 

I beg your pardon? It is primarily you, bishops, who have allowed your people's faith to drift, by denying them the Sacrifice of the Mass and the Sacraments.

"Now the “closed room” of our churches is coming to an end." Only because the Government said it could. No thanks to you, bishops.

"We thank all those in our faith communities who have worked tirelessly to connect with parishioners offering spiritual support."

To whom, bishops, do you refer? Surely not parish priests. One turned a praying parishioner out of the church grounds, locked the gates and put a sign up warning any others off. Another aggrieved parishioner says, "I have not seen my parish priest since before the instruction was given to close my church on the morning of the Feast of the Annunciation, without a Mass being held or any kind of church service that day, many hours before the official lockdown at 11:59pm on 25 March 2020. Real support has been non-existent all along.

"I must look to the Latin Mass, it seems, to meet my spiritual needs" - Bob Gill, St Joseph's, Dannevirke.

My first sighting of our PP - in spite of praying on the public footpath right outside my church, St Joseph's Waipukurau, most days during lockdown - was at Mass last Thursday. Haven't seen him since. 

"Again, we have been delighted by the creative initiatives that have arisen and the way the risen Lord has used these to bestow his graces."

Do you mean live-streamed Masses, bishops? Which have served at least, thank God, to show up the NO in all its anthropocentrism, with the poor priest offering the Sacrifice of Calvary to a camera rather than to God. Oh all right, there might have been 10 highly-favoured parishioners present, probably feeling guilty because in their humility they all knew someone else who would have loved their place.

"We share your joy at being able to celebrate Eucharist together."

Speak for yourselves, bishops. After weeks of the Immemorial (Latin) Mass I was dreading the Novus Ordo and now I realise I have to play the organ. After all these weeks of not touching a keyboard because I don't have an instrument at home and the organ was locked up, my time in the church, limited to the last week as it has been, has been given to prayer rather than practice. I hope the Eucharist will bring joy to the parish. Certainly my playing will not. All I can say is, a congregation gets the organist it deserves.

"However, we still have to live under the restrictions that are there for the good of our vulnerable and elderly."

Oh, spare me. The restrictions are there, bishops, for the good of this Government!!! In a few short months we'll have the referendum on euthanasia, and probably us 'smiling zombies' will go for it, and then just watch the 'vulnerable' elderly that 'kind' Jacinda has been caring so much about, being offered (or given willy-nilly) a lethal jab. Jacinda wants euthanasia, and what Jacinda wants, Jacinda gets, because we'll hand it over.

"Each parish is going to have to determine how it will offer Masses while ensuring health guidelines are kept." 

So bishops, you've passed the buck. In effect PPs will determine it, because we all know what Father wants Father gets, too. And the PPs will toe the bishops' line or forfeit any chance of promotion to a bigger parish; that's the example given, after all, by you bishops who have toed the Pope's line for the same reason: ambition. 

You, bishops, are seem to want to reinvent the Catholic Church in New Zealand by turning a hierarchy into a democracy. You may get somewhere with this pope, but some time in the future the Holy Spirit will send a holy pope to put right all that has gone wrong since Vatican II. For instance, tomorrow we're supposed to celebrate the feast of 'Saint' Pope Paul VI. Groan. 

"This may mean some churches will not open immediately."

Oh bishops, the opening of churches is for you to decide. As 'Bishop' Brian Tamaki would say, MAN UP.  

"It may mean that there are more people wanting to attend Mass than can be accommodated." Wishful thinking, again, bishops.

"We ask you to be patient and understanding while your parish leadership determine what will happen in your parish."

How long does it take to 'determine' what to do about letting more than 100 into the church? Once 100 are in (at the ridiculous anti-social distancing ordered by this atheistic Government, of whom only a handful attend church) the rest stay outside. Just like they do at a funeral. Get it?

"With the Government, we ask those who are vulnerable to the virus, those who are afraid and anyone who is not well to stay at home." 

I think the message has already sunk in, bishops, that you are 'with the Government' and have might on your side. That is worldly thinking: the godly want only to be on the side of the might of the Almighty.

"All people continue to be dispensed from the obligation to attend Sunday Mass during this time."

What 'time', bishops? Until the Gummint finally lets us out of the Levels? And when will that be? Have you any idea? Do you care?

"As we emerge from our “closed room” we hope and pray that the Lord will pour out his Spirit upon us, guiding us to work for a better, more caring society."

We must hope and pray, bishops, that the Lord will pour out His Spirit upon us, guiding us to work for better, more caring bishops.

"We hope and pray that the Spirit will inspire our faith communities, our parishes, schools and chaplaincies, to re-vision themselves towards a revitalised spiritual life, a renewed effort towards welcome and evangelisation and to a deeper awareness of and response to the needs of the wider community."

Platitudes, platitudes, platitudes. We must continue to believe that God works miracles, yes, bishops. Nothing is impossible to God. But you surely know that we cannot 're-vision' ourselves; that is the task of the Holy Spirit and He does it only insomuch as we ask for, and cooperate with, His grace. 
"As we look towards Pentecost may we be inspired by the early Church that emerged from the “closed room” so long ago. Like those Spirit-filled disciples, may we too take the risen Christ to the world."

While limping along, weak and sick not from Covid (fat chance!) but deprivation of the Eucharist which, bishops, you have stated will continue for all the faithful who love their Eucharistic Lord too much to treat him like a potato chip; a deprivation which is beyond belief and which is not within your power to implement. 

It is truly a terrible thing for New Zealand Catholics to be at the mercy of a totalitarian government without even one bishop at their back who obeys the Code of Canon Law, which in Canon 387 for example states that the diocesan bishop, mindful that he is bound to give an example of holiness, charity, humility and simplicity of life, is to seek in every way to promote the holiness of Christ's faithful; that since the bishop is the principal dispenser of the mysteries of God he is to strive constantly that Christ's faithful entrusted to his care may grow in grace through the celebration of the sacraments.   

And passing the buck to parish priests won't wash, either: Canon 384 tells us that priests are under the authority of the bishop who is to ensure that priests fulfill the obligations proper to their state. And Canon 519 says the pastor of a parish is to exercise pastoral care on the community entrusted to his care; and canon 528.2 says the PP is to take care that the blessed Eucharist is the centre of the parish assembly of the faithful, and that they are nourished by the devout celebration of the sacraments, particularly frequent reception of the Eucharist and Penance.

The Church has always taught that lex iniusta non est lex - an unjust law is no law at all. When the Government passes unjust laws, you, bishops, should not obey. And when bishops issue unjust instructions to you, priests, to cancel Mass or refuse Communion on the tongue, you, priests, should not obey.  

According to canon 455 any decision by a Bishops' Conference to cancel Mass is invalid. 

A conference of bishops can only issue general decrees in cases where either (a) universal law has prescribed it, or 9b) a special mandate of the Apostolic See has established it.


As the saying goes, bishops: "A crisis does not build character; it merely reveals it." .https://canonlawmadeeasy.com/2020/03/20/bishops-authority-cancel-masses/

Damien de Veuster (Father Damien), Belgian cleric - Stock Image ...
St Damien De Veuster, the leper saint of Molokai

St Damien de Veuster, who toiled on the island of Molokai among the lepers, got nothing but grief  from his bishop - for the financial support he received from American Catholics who heard of his plight, being without building requirements or even another priest to hear his confession as he'd begged for - because such support from elsewhere made the bishop look bad. His religious superior, his vice-provincial, openly described as being "excessively devoted to the lepers".

Father De Veuster showed his superiors up as greatly inferior in charity, and they resented it. They tried to stop his heroic ministry but he persevered, sometimes ignoring instructions from on high. Obedience wasn't his long suit, but he loved his Lord unto death.

Good priests, take courage from St Damien, just as a good bishop could take courage from Pope St John Paul II, who celebrated Mass (without a permit!) every Christmas on a field in a new Communist city where churches were not permitted, in spite of knowing his colleague the Polish Cardinal Archbishop Stefan Wyszinski was in prison and he could suffer the same fate.

As the NZ Bishops omit to refer at all, in their 'Pastoral' Letter, to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mediatrix of all Graces, I will try to supply for their deficiency.

"O Lady, our Mediatrix and our advocate, reconcile us with your Son, recommend us to your Son, present us to your Son! Obtain for us that Jesus, who through you deigned to share our infirmity and our wretchedness, may grant us also through you a share in His glory and His beatitude" (St Bernard).

Wednesday 27 May 2020

CHRIST HAD BETTER NOT COME RIGHT NOW

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"No wonder Jesus asked, “when the Son of man comes, will he find any faith on earth?” (Luke 8:18)

"He'd better not come right now," says Sharon Crooks of Palmerston North, "because I can think of only a handful of priests in this country who are prepared to defend the Holy Eucharist with their life, and not be among those withholding the sacraments from the children of God. 

"The rest are busy defending the flock from a common cold, which is faithless (behaviour) at best and ridiculous at worst, because the Divine Physician came to heal and rebuke fevers and drive out evil spirits.

"It is absolutely unbelievable that our bishops and priests would so happily comply with every regulation JaSINda puts forward and yet blatantly disregard their own instructions in the NZ GIRM, Church documents and canon law, which make it plain that it's the salvation of our souls that must be forefront in their minds, not the salvation of our bodies. This means not withholding Communion on the tongue.

"Withholding the Divine Physician is counter-faithful or - a better word - ‘evil’! God help the bishops and priests on the Day of Judgement, because it is by their fruit they will be known, and right now they’d be akin to the fig tree with no fruit and we all know Jesus rebuked that tree and it withered and died! 

"When Jesus asks for an account of their works, what will they say? "We abandoned The Bride of Christ for Covid"? In sickness and in health...


Bob Gill of Dannevirke says:

"The Novus Ordo priests and bishops have literally hidden away from us, coming into view only through the virtual world of online Masses, some of which are lukewarm and casually presented.


"I have not seen my parish priest since before the instruction was given to close my church on the morning of the Feast of the Annunciation, without a Mass being held or any kind of church service that day, many hours before the official lockdown at 11:59pm on 25 March 2020. Real support has been non-existent all along.


"I must look to the Latin Mass, it seems, to meet my spiritual needs."

"Bishops who have “directly prohibited their faithful access to the sacraments” have behaved as “fake shepherds”: Bishop Athanasius Schneider, Auxiliary Bishop of Kazakhstan, is of exactly the same mind as Crooks and Gill on the complete and utter dereliction of duty by bishops throughout the world during the coronavirus crisis.

“The unbelievable fact is that in midst of this worldwide ban of the public Holy Mass, many bishops, even before the government banned public worship, issued decrees by which they not only forbade the public celebration of Holy Mass, but of any other sacrament as well,” +Schneider said in a talk given today at the virtual Rome Life Forum.
Schneider said that the almost worldwide ban on the public celebration of Holy Mass had made it seem as though “the ruthless historical persecutions of the Church were brought back” and that there had developed “[a]n atmosphere of the catacombs...with priests celebrating Holy Mass in secrecy with a group of the faithful.”
“In the time of the plague, which had an incomparably higher mortality rate as the current epidemic of Covid-19, St. Charles Borromeo increased the number of the public celebrations of Holy Mass,” +Schneider said. 
“Even though he closed the churches for a while, he at the same time ordered that there should be Masses celebrated in many public and open places, such as squares, crossroads, street corners.

"He obliged the priests to visit the sick and the dying to administer them the sacraments of Penance and of Extreme Unction. He ordered public processions to be held, in which people walked in due distance, to make reparation for the sins and invoke Divine Mercy.

"St. Charles Borromeo did not forget the care for the body of the infected people, but at the same time his primary concern was the spiritual help of the sacraments, with which the sick had to be strengthened.”
+Schneider also called on Pope Francis and bishops around the world to understand the public cessation of Holy Mass and sacramental Holy Communion during the Covid-19 epidemic as a “divine rebuke” for the liturgical crisis in the Church for the past fifty years.
He said the cessation of Holy Mass was “so unique and serious that one can discover behind all of this a deeper meaning.”
“This event has come almost fifty years after the introduction of Communion in the hand  and a radical reform of the rite of Mass with its protestantising elements  and its horizontal and instructional style of celebration (freestyle moments, celebration in a closed circle and towards the people). 

"The praxis of Communion in the hand over the past fifty years has led to an unintentional and intentional desecration of the Eucharistic Body of Christ on an unprecedented scale,” he said.
“The current cessation of public Holy Mass and Holy Communion could be understood by the Pope and bishops as a divine rebuke for the past fifty years of Eucharistic desecrations and trivializations and, at the same time, as a merciful appeal for an authentic Eucharistic conversion of the entire Church.” 
He called on Pope Francis to “issue concrete liturgical norms” in order to address irreverence to the Holy Eucharist, including making ad orientem celebration of the Eucharistic prayer compulsory and forbidding the reception of Communion in the hand.
“Once the current tribulation has ended, the Pope should issue concrete liturgical norms, in which he invites the entire Church to turn again towards the Lord in the manner of celebration, i.e. celebrant and faithful turned in the same direction during the Eucharistic prayer,” +Schneider said. 
“The Pope should also forbid the practice of Communion in the hand, for the Church cannot continue unpunished to treat the Holy of Holies in the little sacred Host in such a minimalistic and unsafe manner.”
+Schneider also suggested that Pope Francis together with cardinals and bishops should “carry out a public act of reparation in Rome for the sins against the Holy Eucharist, and for the sin of the acts of religious veneration to the Pachamama statues.”
+Schneider spoke of the importance of listening to the faithful laity, who he said have been “humiliated and despised in the midst of the Church by an arrogant and undoubtedly Pharisaic clericalism.” 
“These little lovers and defenders of the Eucharist will renew the life of the Church in our day and these words of Jesus are rightly and deservedly applied to them: “I bless you, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have kept these things hidden to the wise and intelligent and you have revealed them to the little ones” (Mt 11, 25). 


And while we're talking 'unbelievable', how about poor Dr Ashley Bloomfield, Director-General of 'Health' (who looks decidedly sick) and his statement reported today: 

"If New Zealand was in the same COVID-19 situation as the UK,  we would've seen between 3000 and 3500 deaths."

Can anyone take this Gummint propaganda seriously? Tragically, it seems the media do. 

'If', says Bloomfield. He might as well say " 'If' pigs could fly".

"The Director-General of Health made the comparison while describing how Aotearoa  had managed to 'head off' the disease having a significant impact here." (BTW,when did NZ become 'Aotearoa'? It's infinitely preferable to 'New Zealand' but the latter is what we are until it's democratically decided otherwise.)
"There are 21 recorded deaths from the virus so far compared with the UK's 36,914, but Dr Bloomfield says this could've been much higher."

Too true. My word, it could have been 'tens of thousands', as threatened by PM Ardern! Our nation is sick all right, but it ain't Covid it's sick with.
"Clearly this is a virus that's having a big impact globally…" 

NO. IT IS NOT THE 'VIRUS' BUT GOVERNMENTS' REACTION TO THE VIRUS WHICH IS HAVING A BIG IMPACT.

"If we were the UK" (and if pigs could fly), "we would've had between 3000 and 3500 deaths to date, yesterday we would've reported 250 new cases and we would still be in lockdown. That's proportionate by population."
Dr Bloomfield adds a vaccine or an effective treatment will help to not just control COVID-19, but help open up global borders."

The Government on Tuesday pledged $37 million to secure a vaccine for the virus "at the earliest possible time" and will ensure New Zealand is kept in the loop on international research efforts.
Health Minister Dr David Clark says the development of a vaccine is a "crucial tool in the control of COVID-19 worldwide" and that a "global effort is well underway" to develop and test vaccine candidates.
Oh, dream on. How long has the world been waiting for a vaccine for the common cold? $37m that NZ hasn't got, to spend looking for a vaccine which if ever found will, as even Bill Gates admits, come with thousands of side effects and could harm or kill hundreds of thousands of people.

And if your blood's not boiling yet, how about this: 
"The Ecumenical Charter declares that the Church is “one, holy, catholic and apostolic” and therefore the “inescapable ecumenical task consists in making visible this unity.” 

No, it's not some Vatican outfit making this pronouncement about a Catholic Church document, but the signing ceremony did take place in a Catholic Church - the San Paolo Maggiore Roman Catholic Church in Bologna, Italy. 
Pope Francis just named a pro-LGBT+ bishop as a cardinal
Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, pro-gay prelate
(would you buy a 2nd-hand car from this man?)
If I hadn't seen a pic today of Cardinal Matteo Zuppi (pictured above) actually signing this "historical Ecumenical Charter" alongside a Seventh-Day Adventist, on January 25 of this year, I would not have believed it.  

"Make no mistake,"gloated the Advent Messenger (obviously the Adventists were pinching themselves too), "the churches that signed this document promised to uphold the principles of the Ecumenical Charter which includes affirming an allegiance to each other" (sic). It was signed, they say, by Seventh-day Adventists, Roman Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Evangelicals and Methodists. 
http://adventmessenger.org/seventh-day-adventists-roman-catholics-and-evangelicals-sign-a-historic-ecumenical-charter-that-affirms-faith-in-one-holy-catholic-apostolic-church/?fbclid=IwAR3ByWcjT6RCSh0ZrZfvaprv8RBG6VnbVeR14Z8YqnEBmvdZHcJXoCqG_Jo

So Seventh-day Adventists, Roman Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Evangelicals and Methodists are now one, holy, catholic and apostolic” Church.

This is the sort of fruit borne by ''ecumenical' goings-on like The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which NZ Catholics are asked to indulge in as preparation for the Feast of Pentecost this Sunday. 

This year it commemorates the Feast of the Shipwreck of St Paul, marking and giving thanks for the arrival of Christian faith in Malta. "The theme for this year ... is “They showed us unusual kindness” (Acts 28.2), which refers to the reception given to Paul and companions" says Cardinal John Dew.

"There is much to reflect upon in this theme in the light of our experience of the last few weeks with COVID-19."

No, Cardinal Dew, the last few weeks have NOT been "with Covid-19." They have been with this evil Government's hijacking of a flu bug by locking us in, locking our Eucharistic Lord up and denying us the Mass and the Sacraments,

"We have been urged to “Be kind”, and "stay united" - yes, by a Prime Minister who voted for infanticide without pain relief, for leaving aborted babies to die with no duty of care for the nurses and doctors responsible for that baby's death.

Certainly the Catholic Church can take pride in staying united with the Government; united with the Government rather than with the faithful, with the world rather than with Christ.

"The pandemic has been the equivalent of a shipwreck for many people ..." - no, the Government's handling of Covid which IS NOT A PANDEMIC has been the equivalent of a shipwreck for many people, for many businesses and for the nation. 

" ...and unusual kindness” is needed as never before", says Cardinal Dew. 

Surely not kindness like the Prime Minister's? A mass murderer's 'kindness'?

The cardinal's business is actually to promote true kindness - the love of God which is found only in doing His will.  

"Behold I come: in the head of the book it is written of me: that I should do thy will, O God" (Heb 10:7).