THE PM AND BISHOPS V THE FAITHFUL

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"My kingdom is not of this world. ... The COVID-19 epidemic (has) laid bare an insidious disease that was eating away at the Church: she thought that she was ‘of this world'.”

Cardinal Robert Sarah may not always show discretion, but he does have a brand of courage and wisdom which should inspire NZ's bishops, but obviously does not.

This morning the NZ Herald finally admitted the truth of what MP Simeon Brown (give that man a gong) has been saying for days on Facebook (which at least some of our bishops must follow, now that they have so much free time, having exempted themselves from their God-given duty of saying Holy Mass and celebrating the Sacraments). 

As Brown reiterated today: "The PM has once again been proven wrong regarding religious services. We are privileged to live in a country where we operate under the rule of law, not the rule of a press conference."

Oh but, Mr Brown, after yesterday's poll the Prime Minister may rule by press conference to her heart's content: see above, Whitcoull's bookstand in the Palmerston North Plaza this morning. 

  So why haven't NZ's bishops followed the lead of 'Bishop' Brian Tamaki (shame!) and woken up to the legal advice given the police, that Mass can be celebrated in groups of ten with (anti)-social distancing, and declared they will do it? Like this Sunday, the Feast of the Ascension (which our bishops have already downgraded from Holy Day of Obligation? And why? Because they knew people would soon stop coming on "Ascension Thursday".)

The answer can only be that it's "too hard". The local (Holy Trinity Parish Central Hawke's Bay) version of that is, Father says it would be "confusing". Both answers bear witness to the truth of Cardinal Sarah's statement (above) made in his op-ed for Figaro Vox, the internet platform of French daily Le Figaro on Tuesday. 

'The Holy Trinity Parish' newsletter today features the Sallies in rebel mode:

"The Salvation Army is concerned that the Government’s Health Response Bill, designed to empower police to deal with breaches of Covid-19 alert level 2 rules, does not consider spiritual wellbeing alongside physical wellbeing.

The Army considers Sunday church services an ‘essential service’, as they offer spiritual health; a vital component of wellbeing.

The COVID-19 Public Health Response Bill makes no allowance for  or trust in religious gatherings, “which further indicates this Government’s low view of spirituality as a fundamental part of overall wellbeing,” Salvation Army Māori Ministry director Lt-Colonel Ian Hutson says.

Hutson says the Bill shows a lack of trust in iwi, hapū and community groups to work within the Covid-19 guidelines, despite the proven leadership of Māori in protecting the health and wellbeing of whānau during Levels Four and Three.
 https://cathnews.co.nz/2020/05/21/wellbeing-covid-19-wellbeing/

And why is a Catholic parish bulletin publishing the Sallies' opinion rather than Catholic Church's? Possibly because it's more cogent. More spiritual. Less worldly, in fact.

The hierarchy of the Catholic Church have mostly deserted their spouse, the Mystical Body of Christ, and embraced that old whore, the world. 

Bishops think like the world, speak like the world, act like the world. Ergo, they are of the world, not of Christ and His Church.

"This is the victory over the world - our faith. Who can overcome the world? Only the man who believes that Jesus is the Son of God" (1 Jn 5:4,5).

Bishops of New Zealand, show you believe that Jesus is the Son of God. Open the churches! Give us the Mass!

“We all understood the reasons (for Lockdown) and we knew that the Government was trying to keep us safe, and we were all trying to support the move to avoid the spread of this pretty deadly virus,” quoth Bishop Patrick Dunn.

Oh yes, dear Bishop, we understand the reasons for The Lockdown all right. They are not "to keep us safe". They are to keep us suppressed and controlled, to be managed and assisted towards the extinction of the Catholic Church, historically the chief opponent of socialism and Communism.

The Decree Against Communism was a 1949 Catholic Church document issued by the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, and approved by Pope Pius XII, which declared Catholics who professed Communist doctrine to be excommunicated as apostates from the Christian faith. Opposition to Socialism and Communism in Catholic social teaching had already been expressed in the teachings of popes since the encyclicals Nostis et nobiscum (1849), Quanta cura (1864), and Rerum novarum (1891).

The Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modem times with "communism" or "socialism." She has likewise refused to accept, in the practice of "capitalism," individualism and the absolute primacy of the law of the marketplace over human labor.²⁰⁶ Regulating the economy solely by centralized planning perverts the basis of social bonds; regulating it solely by the law of the marketplace fails social justice, for "there are many human needs which cannot be satisfied by the market."²⁰⁷ Reasonable regulation of the marketplace and economic initiatives, in keeping with a just hierarchy of values and a view to the common good, is to be commended.

Cardinal Sarah writes that the COVID-19 crisis has revealed both the world’s incapacity to come to terms with the scandal of death, and the Church’s failure to bring to it the only possible answer and consolation that it alone can provide: the promise of eternal life.

The COVID epidemic, the cardinal says, now gives the Church the chance to return to “essentials” and to show the world which has counted too much on the “security” of technology, and how only the Church can provide answers to its newfound doubts.

In the words of a faithful, furious Catholic priest in the US, Father James Altman: "Every deplorable and wretched bishop who has locked churches and denied access to Holy Mass, the Eucharist and the Sacraments will have the blood on their heads of every lost soul! They are the blind, leading the blind to destruction!"

I'm thinking of a farmer who yesterday struggled with $500 worth of maize burst out of a bale on a farm track, furiously shovelling it back onto the tractor  to feed to his starving sheep. And running over three sheep so desperate for maize they crowded under the tractor wheels. And having to feed his cattle on palm kernel. And that farmer having been deprived for eight weeks of his own divine food, the Eucharist, needed so much by his starving soul.

And all the while the bishops and priests whose task it is to feed this farmer are sitting pretty in their palaces and presbyteries, busy 'keeping us safe'. 

"Can.  843 §1. Sacred ministers cannot deny the sacraments to those who seek them at appropriate times, are properly disposed, and are not prohibited by law from receiving them.

§2. Pastors of souls and other members of the Christian faithful, according to their respective ecclesiastical function, have the duty to take care that those who seek the sacraments are prepared to receive them by proper evangelization and catechetical instruction, attentive to the norms issued by competent authority."

Speaking, or rather thundering from his pulpit, Fr Altman asks the bishops rhetorically, "Do you really think it is Jesus Christ's will that any bishop should lock the churches and deny the faithful's God-given right to the Mass? One bishop has said he would remove anyone from Mass who tried to receive Communion on the tongue. 

"Turn in your crozier, Bishop! You're not worthy of it! "

Father Altman put his finger on a cause for the pandemic hysteria of Covid-19 which Cardinal Sarah acknowledges - but Father adds perceptively that it is engendered largely by "the Godless left" (witness Ardern and her socialist comrades) in whom although they are atheists the fear still exists that "there might be something after death and they might be held accountable."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-PZamqwIvs

 (As the Catholic Encyclopaedia points out: "Nature had so provided that each man establishes for himself a code of moral concepts and principles which are applicable to the details of practical life, without the necessity of awaiting the conclusions of science." Even atheists have an instinctive knowledge, implanted in their hearts by God, of right and wrong, or of Crime and Punishment as Dostoevsky puts it.) 

Cardinal Sarah accused state secularism of being responsible for choosing to confine the elderly and to isolate them, leaving them with the risk of dying of “despair and loneliness.” 

Yes. Who in New Zealand doesn't know of at least one old person in danger of death, in a 'rest home' and denied family's company?(Like the eighty year-old in the hospital wing of a retirement village, and her husband who in Level Four and Level Three was not allowed to visit her - and no one allowed to swim, either, because the pool is in the hospital wing.) 

And a faithful Catholic's  "despair and loneliness" must be terribly exacerbated by a priest's denial of the last rites. 

“The answer could only be a response of faith: to accompany the elderly towards a probable death, in dignity and above all the hope of eternal life,” the cardinal  proclaimed. 

Despite the so-called protection of the elderly in nursing homes in France, in many of them healthcare personnel were not provided with masks and other protective equipment and large numbers of residents were infected in several regions. More than a third of all deaths officially attributed to COVID-19 in France (10,308 of 28,022 to date) were registered among residents of nursing homes for the elderly. In comparison, a heat wave in August 2003 in France directly caused an excess mortality of 14,800, mainly affecting individuals ages 75 and over.

To date, deaths attributed to the COVID-19 crisis have reached a world total of 323,286 individuals. Every year, 6.15 million people die of lower respiratory tract infections. But the focus on the coronavirus has led to seeing “COVID-19 deaths” as a particular tragedy.

"The epidemic," says Cardinal Sarah, "has hit Western societies at their most vulnerable point. They had been organized to deny death, to hide it, to ignore it. It came in through the front door! Who has not seen those giant mortuaries in Bergamo or Madrid? These are the images of a society that not long ago was promising an immortal, augmented man." 
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/cdl-sarah-corona-crisis-has-laid-bare-insidious-disease-of-church-thinking

Cardinal Robert Sarah

At the Rome Life Forum on Wednesday, Father Serafino Lanzetta warned of Marxist ideology's “triumph over the ruins of a collapsed communism" because of the delay in consecrating Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and then that it was not made “precisely” as Mary had asked.
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/marys-fatima-plea-to-save-souls-from-hell-urgent-and-for-today-priest?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com&utm_campaign=9eaa9a4c22-Catholic_5_21_20&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_12387f0e3e-9eaa9a4c22-405142193

Marxism has been “transformed” into a “worldwide petition for an equal society shaping a new man made in the likeness of man with his instincts and desires, with not even a gender-based difference,” he said.

“This is our world today,” and this ideology is even “embraced within the Church,” resulting in a crisis of faith and a “creeping apostasy.”

Marian consecration is an essential and efficacious remedy to this, Fr. Lanzetta said.

Consecration is “perfect” when one makes a sacrificial offering of oneself to God through the mediation of His Mother, he said.

“This is the way to respond to the call of the Fatima message: to offer everything to God in order to cooperate with Him for the salvation of mankind, as Our Lady did in a very unique manner.”

However, consecration is not the same as “entrustment.”

Entrustment describes an “easier” commitment, one which avoids sacrifice in favor of a “mere pastoral and existential approach to faith,” and which derives from a “minimalist, shallow consideration of Mary in our salvation,” he said.

“Our Consecration to Mary lets us live in full the mystery of Marian co-redemption as asked by Our Lady of Fatima,” Fr. Lanzetta said. 

“In this way we can truly respond to Our Lady’s request to offer sacrifices so that many souls might be saved from an easy fall, so to speak, into eternal perdition."