STATIONS OF THE CROSS TRAVESTY, SACRED HEART HASTINGS

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Sacred Heart' Hastings: 'Stations of the Forests' (2024 version)

One year ago the travesty pictured above, of the ancient Catholic Lenten devotion known as The Stations of the Cross, was displayed in the foyer of Sacred Heart Church, Hastings, New Zealand. Presumably it was devised by teaching staff at St Joseph's School, next door. 

This image was duly posted as a heads-up on the FB page of NZ's Catholic Bishops, but they must have been too busy to notice because there it is again now, at Sacred Heart, in Passion Week. Or maybe they did spot it - this year the display is called 'The Journey of Jesus is Written in All Creation'. A Proddy reader of this blog guessed that the new title would feature that Vat II buzz word, 'journey'. Francis and the sect currently in charge of the Vatican are obsessed with journeying - but in this unprecedented crisis of mass apostasy, where will their journey end?

This is a travesty because a) it's blasphemous; b) it's sacrilegious and c) it's idolatrous. Blasphemous because to substitute Christ in His Passion for a bunch of trees is a grave violation of charity toward God. Sacrilegious because it violates a sacred tradition. Idolatrous because instead of worshipping God the Creator it worships His creation. 

John XII (l), arguably the worst Pope in history. Yet not a heretic. Francis (r), a heretic. Understanding this distinction is paramount.

It's entirely unsurprising that in the Ape church stage-managed by the ideologue Jorge Bergoglio that a 'Catholic' school should indoctrinate children with blasphemy, sacrilege and idolatry via the Trojan horse of the faux 'climate change'. When bishops fail - as they have incrementally since Vatican II - to preach Catholic doctrine (and in New Zealand, surrender to the fake but brave 'Bishop' Brian Tamaki their sacred duty to preach the Gospel) hey are revealed as mere hirelings who don't bother to pasture their sheep. 

Since the Second Vatican Council, 60 years of doctrinal confusion and ambiguities have gradually eroded the faith of both priests and people, steadily turning up the temperature under the Novus Ordo pot until the 'Catholic frogs, stink like dogs' once derided by horrid little Proddy boys have reached boiling point, the vast majority without realising.

However, these hungry sheep (to mix metaphors), can hardly pretend 'invincible ignorance'. They have native intelligence, innate sense of right and wrong, access to the internet and an obligation to God to feed themselves and their families with the spiritual sustenance which will save their souls. But the detritus of sin accumulated by years of neglect of the sacrament of Penance aggravates loss of faith, compounded by apathy and laziness, and the only reason for our existence - to save our souls - is forgotten. Or for 'Catholic' teachers, perhaps, the subject of jokes in the staffroom. 

How do the bishops, and the staff of St Joseph's School Hastings, imagine "the mournful Mother" of the 13th-century hymn to the Virgin Mary, Stabat Mater, feels about 

"her tender Child

Bruis'd, derided, curs'd, defil'd

All with bloody scourges rent"

being swopped for a bunch of trees? 

Predictably, a la 'Pope Francis', in the Sacred Heart newsletter for the 'Fifth Sunday of Lent'  (not 'Passion Sunday' as it's traditionally honoured), Fr Marcus Francis PP takes 'mercy' as his theme. St. Thomas Aquinas writes that in every work of God, there is an element of both mercy and justice, signifying that the two are not opposed to each other. Rather, “God acts mercifully, not indeed by going against His justice, but by doing something more than justice” (ST, I, q. 21, a. 3). Post-Vatican II Novus Ordo- ites are wonderfully merciful to one another, but horribly unjust to their Creator and His divine Son Who went to the Cross to redeem us.

My purpose here is not to argue for a rejection of mercy, properly understood. But there has been a shift in the Church’s dialectic, leading many who reject a spirit of repentance and amendment of life as necessary prerequisites for mercy to believe that the only authentic mercy is unconditional acceptance of the sinner—along with his sins.

 

These same individuals believe that talk of unchanging moral truths, inherently evil actions, repentance, and conversion is therefore somehow unmerciful. We understand this to be a false conception as we beg for the mercy of God and reject sin in the sacrament of Baptism, in the Confessional, at the administration of the Last Rites, and in every liturgy of the Catholic Church.

 

Christ’s mercy is not a grace that comes cheap, nor does it imply the trivialization of evil. Christ carries the full weight of evil and all its destructive force in his body and in his soul. He burns and transforms evil in suffering, in the fire of his suffering love. The day of vindication and the year of favor converge in the Paschal Mystery, in the dead and Risen Christ.

 

This is the vengeance of God: He himself suffers for us, in the person of His Son. The more deeply stirred we are by the Lord’s mercy, the greater the solidarity we feel with his suffering—and we become willing to complete in our own flesh ‘what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ’ (Col 1: 24).https://onepeterfive.com/toward-a-catholic-understanding-of-mercy/

 

The 2025 Stations (bowdlerised version)

A PREPARATION FOR THE WAY OF THE CROSS (Fr. Dignam SJ.)

 

Do we all remember how holy and how easy a manner of honouring our dear Saviour’s Passion it is to follow the Way of the Cross?

 

How pleasing this is to our Lord we may judge from His own words to St Gertrude. “As they who handle flour cannot but be whitened by it, so no one, however imperfect his devotion may be, can occupy his mind with the Passion, without receiving some benefit. “ – “However grievous the load of a man’s sins, he may take comfort in the hope of pardon, if he offers to God the Father My Passion and Death.”

 

It is very easy to make the Stations. We need only think about our Lord’s sufferings as we visit each of the fourteen Stations in turn. We are not obliged to remain long at each one. No prayers are enjoined; we have only to think of our Lord’s sufferings; and when the images are before our eyes this is not difficult.

 

The Stations begin when our Lord is condemned to death. If we have in our minds what He has gone through before that moment, we shall make them more devoutly. –

 

Our Lord had washed His disciples feet; He had prayed and spoken words of love to them; He had given them His Blessed Body and Blood. In the Garden of Gethsemane, the three disciples had fallen asleep. “He was offered because He willed it”. Yet His soul shrank in fear and horror from the coming torments, all of which He clearly saw, from which there was no escape, and in which no one would stand by Him.

 

An agony of shame and sorrow for all the sins He had taken upon Himself then overwhelmed Him. Oh blessed Contrition of the Son of God, which gives such value to our poor acts of sorrow! This agony was followed by another, that of weariness and desolation at the ingratitude of so many who would reject and despise all He was about to suffer for their love.

 

“My Soul is sorrowful unto death”. At length an Angel is sent to Him. – O Divine Humility of the Son of God to accept comfort from His own creature. Next comes the betrayal – the kiss of Judas – Jesus is seized and bound, dragged before the Judges and is disowned by his disciple Peter. The terrible scourging follows and after it the crowning with thorns. Such was our Lord’s preparation for making the Way of the Cross.http://www.sspxthepriesthood.com/Stations%20of%20the%20Cross.pdf

 

Christ Carrying the Cross 
Titian

 "It were better for him, that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should scandalize one of these little ones" (Lk 17,2).