PETER, PETER, WHY ARE YOU PERSECUTING ME?

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His Excellency Bishop Emeritus Peter Cullinane

"Are you saying," asked Bishop Emeritus Peter Cullinane in an injured tone, "that I'm persecuting you?"

He was replying, at the end of his two-hour 'catechesis' yesterday for the Traditional Latin Mass parish of St Columba's, Ashhurst, to a parishioner who'd thanked him for the grace of persecution, and  quoted the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are the persecuted".  

The cancellation of the Traditional Latin Mass, not just in Ashhurst but throughout the Wellington Archdiocese - and in modernist dioceses like Wellington throughout the world - is certainly persecution. It's Jorge Mario Bergoglio's persecution of faithful Catholics, and Bishop Emeritus Peter Cullinane, personally, had just spent two hours attempting to explain why the Motu Proprio Traditionis Custodes of 'Pope Francis' must be enforced, and why these faithful Catholics must be deprived of their Mass, their parish and their priest.

Not only that, but most if not all of those same Catholics are resisting the Pfizer vaccine, primarily because it's tainted with aborted baby parts, and so, many are facing dismissal from their jobs. At this critical juncture, when their future in worldly terms looks very bleak, when asked about vax passports for Holy Mass Bishop Cullinane assumed an anxious expression and said, "That's a very difficult question". 

Really? So as shepherd of the flock - the shepherd of the flock in Palmerston North - +Cullinane doesn't know the answer? He doesn't know whether his sheep, many of whom are already going short of food on the table, should be fed with divine Food or left to starve? 

He's agonising about the sheep who don't feel 'safe', who are worried about catching a bug no more serious than influenza and who in any case have taken a jab urged on them by the hierarchy and which was produced with aborted baby body parts. If they've taken the vaccine, why aren't they feeling 'safe'? 

It would seem it's Bishop Cullinane who needs catechising more than the TLM faithful at St Columba's, Ashhurst;

• He maintained that it is "the risen Christ!" Who is present in the Eucharist. This was in response to one of the TLMers who'd asked - rhetorically, you'd think - "is the Mass not the unbloody re-enactment of the Sacrifice of Calvary?" He could hardly deny that, but he continued to assert that it's 'the Risen Christ' Who is present in the Mass.
  
  He holds Eucharistic miracles quoted by the TLMers which involve "bleeding Hosts" in disdain. But the Church teaches that the Eucharistic Species contains our Lord complete and entire, Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity - as was pointed out to +Cullinane by one of the hapless 'catechised'. That's Catholicism 101, surely. 
  
  CANON III. If any one denies that, in the venerable sacrament of the Eucharist, the whole Christ is contained under each species, and under every part of each species, when separated; let him be anathema.” If This is the whole Christ He may, and does bleed, as verified in so many Eucharistic miracles.
  
  
• Bishop Cullinane cannot, and will not, make any distinction between the four ways that Christ is present in the Mass: the readings, the faithful, the priest - and the Host. He refuses to acknowledge that in the Host Christ is Really Present in the Flesh, and so vitally different in kind from His spiritual presence in his other three manifestations in the Mass.
  
  
• Bishop Cullinane continues to defend the proposition that the readings in the Novus Ordo are vastly superior to those in the 1962 Missal. Because there are more numerically, he maintains they are superior in quality. To a comment to the effect that the N O readings exclude almost all scriptural references to sin (particularly homosexuality), judgment and hell, he had no response.
  
  
• Bishop Cullinane seems to deny any profanation of the Host or sacrilege involved in receiving Communion in the hand. He complained of complaints about fragments falling from the sacred Host. The bishop seems to believe that a) It has to be a sizable fragment, not just "a bit of dust", as he referred it It and that b) after 15 or so minutes It ceases to be a Host because once received by the communicant, after that length of time It ceases to be a separate Entity. 
  
  Once absorbed into the bloodstream, yes your Excellency, the Host ceases to be. But not if It drops onto the church carpet! It is not absorbed by the carpet! It remains the Body and Blood of our Lord, and is trodden on. That's one of the reasons why, your Excellency, Communion in the hand is often sacrilegious.

  Bishop Cullinane, like all of us, would do well to read the story of "Little Li - China's Precious Girl Martyr of the Eucharist", beloved by another bishop, the Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen.  https://www.myfirstholycommunion.com/portfolio-view/little-li/

  
  
  
  

  But one gets the impression that, unlike the Latin Mass faithful of St Columba's, Bishop Cullinane doesn't do such spiritual reading. (Unlike for example, Fr Francois Laisney SSPX, who reads lives of the saints or similar as his daily required spiritual reading while being driven to and from Napier by an SSPX religious brother for the monthly Mass there.) 

• Bishop Cullinane still defends the N O shibboleth that our Lord in the tabernacle should be excluded from the church proper and shut up in some hard-to-find corner, on the grounds that especially at weddings and funerals the faithful and the priest should not be restrained by the Real Presence from making innovations in their worship (as pictured below).
  
  Has it escaped Bishop Cullinane's attention that these 'Blessed Sacrament chapels' are almost always empty, the one at the cathedral itself in our experience occupied almost solely by Latin Massgoers?
  
  Can Bishop Cullinane defend the swap at Wellington's cathedral of the tabernacle for the cathedra of Cardinal Dew, whose chair now occupies the space where the tabernacle was formerly? No wonder that building is closed, on the face of it for earthquake strengthening but at a deeper level one may conclude, for spiritual reasons.
  
  

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  N O innovations ...

  
  
  

• His Excellency refused to admit any liability on the part of the Novus Ordo Church since Vatican II for bad fruits such as empty pews, falling Mass counts and the drastic drop in reception of the Sacraments and vocations to the priesthood. In Bishop Cullinane's mind it seems those are all symptoms of societal malaise since the '60s and not to be sheeted home to the Novus Ordo. 

Bishop Cullinane called upon something called 'the Apostolic Constitution' more than once as an affirmation of his catechesis. "You haven't read the Apostolic Constitution!" he remarked triumphantly, when a hapless catechised person ventured a comment with which the bishop disagreed. There have been many Apostolic Constitutions but the one to which his Excellency was referring is probably Pascite Gregem Dei - issued of course by 'Pope Francis'. In it we read:

"Bishops are thus called to govern “by counsel, exhortation and example, as well as by their authority and sacred power” (Lumen Gentium, 27), inasmuch as charity and mercy demand that a Father also make every effort to correct deviations. ... Bishops are responsible for ensuring that these rules be obeyed, for they reflect the faith that we all profess and from which their binding force is drawn; founded upon that faith, they manifest the maternal mercy of the Church, which is ever concerned for the salvation of souls (emphasis ours, and we make no further comment). 

 ...(T)hey must take account of changes in society and new needs of the People of God, for which reason it is at times necessary to modify and adapt them to changed circumstances. 

It would seem this sentence is the reason for +Cullinane's repeated mention of 'the Apostolic Constitution' (which is actually 'Pope Francis' ' promulgation of a revised text of Book VI of the Code of Canon Law (Penal Sanctions in the Church) ). 

We may take that sentence as licence not just to modify and adapt the rules but to change them, as has been demonstrated by the bewildering profusion of changes in the Church, not least changes to rules for standing, sitting and kneeling, since Vatican II. (+Cullinane was forced to admit that when many of the congregation stand, it does pose a problem for those unable to stand and for those who kneel in reverence for our Lord, who can't see the Host when elevated.)

Here we see the heresy of Modernism, which Pius X in his crucial encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (ironically, in view of +Cullinane's 'catechesis', "Feeding the Lord's Flock") called "the synthesis of all heresies".

Another one of the catechised faithful mentioned, in some vigorous detail, the shocking bawling-out she'd had from a priest at the cathedral, in front of the congregation, over her rightful expectation of receiving Communion on the tongue. 

"Which cathedral?" asked the bishop. (Well, er, your cathedral, maybe?)

 "You should complain!" said the bishop. 

"I have complained, Bishop Peter. Twice, in writing. I've got nowhere."

And ominously, at the conclusion of his 'catechesis' he confidently agreed with a concerned questioner that other expressions of the Immemorial Tridentine or Latin Mass, such as the FSSP (Priestly Society of St Peter) will also be cancelled. By Bergoglio, we suppose. 

Bishop Emeritus Peter Cullinane, says an insider, "has never had it so good". And it would seem that as he's offficially retired and so, as he said, not in a position to do anything about cathedral parishioners getting bawled out publicly for attempting to receive Communion on the tongue, he doesn't have much to do except perhaps, for 'catechesis' like yesterday's.

But he's still, in the prolonged absence of a bishop, the major influencer in Palmerston North - and perhaps also in Wellington. 

The insider added that even in Bishop Charles Drennan's brief day, Bishop Cullinane had an office right next door to that of the new occupier of the 'cathedra'. And that was not for long.

Bishop Emeritus Peter Cullinane still sounds like a Freemason. Apart from the tiny cross on the lapel of his business suit, he even dresses like a Freemason.

When asked by a participant in the catechesis about "the smoke of Satan" described by Pope Paul VI as having "entered the Church", His Excellency knew nothing.

"Where's the smoke gone?" he was asked.

"I don't know," he replied.

It was Saul of course, whom Christ struck off his horse and asked, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?" The woman who'd thanked Bishop Peter for the grace of persecution also added Christ's injunction, "Pray for them that persecute you'' (Mt 5:44). 

Saul became St Paul, the great Apostle to the Gentiles. We need to pray for Bishop Cullinane, and all New Zealand's bishops. 

Conversion of St Paul, Caravaggio