CATHOLIC CEC DISCOVERS ANGLICAN ALPHA

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CEC's Te Reo novena, with that oddly familiar image

"Catholic Discovery" is the new name for the Catholic Enquiry Centre's newsletter accompanying the CEC's annual appeal.

In 2023, what can Catholics discover, in New Zealand? An unlocked church for them to pray in? Not awfully likely. A parish priest, perhaps? Even less so. These days that most essential commodity is very hard to come by. 

One of their dwindling number spent time this morning enumerating the priests that once populated his country parish in Palmerston North Diocese, ticking their presbyteries off on his fingers for the benefit of his somewhat less than enthralled congregation of primary school children.

"What priests have we got now?" he asked rhetorically. "Just me!" As he - who is loved by the children - is decidedly elderly, one wonders what they think might about that, and about his tale of the vanishing priests. They might conceivably find it depressing and not an incitement to come to Mass on Sundays (which they don't). 

Father told them the meaning of the word tabernacle and how in days of old it was a tent for the Ark of the Covenant. If he'd explained what it's a tent for now, would the children (and teachers) all have strolled right past it on their way out? Would more than just six of them have wanted to receive the "Living Bread Who givest all Thy creatures breath" (St Thomas Aquinas)? How many of these children are baptised, even? In fact, how Catholic is their 'Catholic' school?

Not sharing our faith, but 'Sharing our World' 

Even adult parishioners enter the church with no sign of recognition of the God Who created them and Who awaits them there with longing, or of any realisation of the presence of "the angels, they are there" (Bishop Athanasius Schneider).

They've been told by Father that the fact that their number (sans children) diminishes almost weekly doesn't matter. "We pray on behalf of those who aren't here," he says. He implies then, that although the number praying doesn't matter, the prayer itself does. 

If prayer matters, then the more prayer, the more who pray, the better. Surely. But nothing - absolutely nothing - is done to encourage prayer. No homilies on prayer, no rosaries, no retreats, no parish missions, no processions (the very idea!!! So pre-Vat II!)

Yes, processions are pre-Vatican II. So are all the rest of those devotions. 

And so were all those priests and presbyteries pre-Vatican II! What does that tell us?

All those children who haven't made their First Holy Communion, their ignorance (and their parents') of Who it is, imprisoned by His love for us, in the tabernacle, the missing priests, the locked or closed churches and presbyteries, are the fruits of the Novus Ordo ('New Mass'). It's the Novus Ordo effect, and it's exactly what Satan had in mind when he devised this banal, boring ritual for the lowest common denominator and foisted it on the Body of Christ through the Judas priests who made it up with help from their Proddy friends.

Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, ‘The Clopton Portrait

Who can say that line in the Novus Ordo, "For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory" etc, without cringing? Where did that come from? Not from the Old Mass, not even from Scripture but from the murderous Queen Elizabeth I, who added that early, Eastern Church, doxology to the Lord's Prayer as reinforcement to her criminal purges and persecutions of what still remained in England of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. 

What a betrayal of Our Lord and King Jesus Christ, and who can be surprised at the outcome, the fruits, of that wicked Queen's addition to the Our Father in the Novus Ordo? 

A 'priests' hole' during the persecution of Elizabeth I

We can only be surprised that there are still - presumably - any Enquries made to the Catholic Enquiry Centre, and not surprised that the personal testimonies of conversion the CEC would produce in the past are missing from their latest appeal (Autumn 2023). 

Instead the reader is greeted with (sigh) 'Tena koutou' and told that a lay woman (with a striking resemblance to the embattled Labour Minister for Education, Jan Tinetti) has taken over from a priest (Fr Neil Vaney S M).

Half a page is devoted to (sigh) a 3-year programme for 'deepening faith' called (sigh) 'Nga Parirau - Wings'.

But another half page is given over to (gasp) Alpha! Ah, er, um - Alpha is Anglican! The Catholic Enquiry Centre is heavily promoting an Anglican initiative! 

By commission and omission, the ALPHA material proposes an ecclesiology and a sacramental theology, contrary in essence to the teaching of the Church.

Secondly, the underlying principle of the methodology used in the small group discussions held after each of the 15 ALPHA video sessions, acts against the principle of religious freedom upheld by the Church. The questions are formatted in such a way as to elicit responses from subjective criteria alone. This does not respect and protect the right of participants to freely answer and clarify points from the objective criteria of the Church's teaching when the need arises. Thus, in effect, it silences that teaching and encourages the ALPHA 'magisterium' to stand, develop and be absorbed.

https://www.ourladyswarriors.org/dissent/alpha1.htm

"What's it all about, Alfie?" 

It's about the Novus Ordo effect. It's about  destruction of the One True Church. It's about the coming of the kingdom of the Antichrist. 

And it's about making reparation by prayer and fasting for the worldwide sacrilege and indifference to Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.

"The adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is truly part of the direct universal worship of God which is paid to Him by the faithful. In the daily Sacrifice of the Mass, in the receiving of Holy Communion, and in the proper observant homage of His Sacramental Presence in Churches, this worship is bound by the Church on the consciences of her children.

And this worship and homage is of course not included under the idea of a special devotion. It is something which every one must have, which every one must do, else is he a rebel, a renegade, or a heretic. It belongs to Catholic dutifulness. 

It is a necessary part of the profession of Christian faith, and of the homage which the instructed reason of the creature owes to the majesty and presence of his Creator, wheresoever they are revealed to him" - Father Faber.