SACRED HEART NAPIER'S MASS IN ANGLICAN CHURCH

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"I am not too popular for choosing not to attend my daughter's Catholic school's End of Year Mass which is once again being held in an Anglican cathedral. Instead, I will offer my Mass for Sacred Heart in a Catholic church on the same day."

So says 'Unknown', in a comment on my post "RUDE AND DEFIANT: DOING A RUNNER TO ESCAPE AN 'ECUMENICAL SERVICE" (Dec 3). 

We can now reveal (sounds like One News), with 'Unknown's' permission, the name of this 'Catholic' school.

It was Sacred Heart College Napier which held its end-of-year Mass not in the city's main Catholic church, St Patrick's, but at the Anglican Cathedral of St John.

Is this not taking 'ecumenism' a teensy-weensy bit too far, even for the most liberal and modernist of Catholics in the Diocese of Palmerston North?

At the Filipino Novena Mass tonight in St Patrick's Waipawa, we heard the Gospel of Lk 1: 5-25. The missal said that's tomorrow's Mass, but anyway:

"(Zechariah) was chosen by lot to enter the sanctuary of the Lord to burn incense". In the temple of the Old Testament, just one priest was permitted to enter the sanctuary, "while the whole assembly of the people was praying outside." 

We may be struck by their reverence for the Ark of the Covenant: by comparison, how cavalier is our treatment now of the Son of God, in the Blessed Sacrament!

What justification is there for celebrating the Catholic Mass, in which Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is offered in an unbloody re-presentation of the Sacrifice of Calvary, and made present in His Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity by the priest in the act of transubstantiation - a dogma denied by the Anglican Communion - in an Anglican church, be it ever so large, impressive and CBD, as is St John's Cathedral in Napier? ("Poor Anglicans," some wit has observed, "all dressed up with nowhere to go.")

How can a Catholic priest consent to making Christ really and truly present on an altar built and used merely for a quotidian gathering of Protestants (i.e. heretics) in remembrance of the Last Supper, be the wording of the Anglican communion service ever so similar to the Catholic Novus Ordo (New Mass)? 

In an Anglican church there's no altar stone, no sacred relics, no tabernacle and no crucifix, only a tasteful, tactful cross which doesn't offend sensitive Anglican sensibilities. How can the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass - except in an emergency - be divorced from the altar stone and its sacred relics of the saints? And from the tabernacle above the altar? And from the crucifix above the tabernacle? 

"Easy-peasy," you say, "it happens all the time, at 'house Masses' and rest homes.

So once again we see the rotten fruits of 'the spirit of Vatican II' and of the banalities and trivialities of the Novus Ordo: the erosion of reverence, of a sense of the sacredness of things. 

It's tantamount to denying the dogma of the Blessed Eucharist. How can a Catholic bishop give permission (because surely he must have been asked) for Mass to be celebrated in an Anglican church? Surely he realized the potential for scandal of such a proceeding? 

And we can't even say, "oh, we haven't got a bishop to ask for permission", because Sacred Heart's end-of-year Mass was held in St John's in 2018, when we did have a bishop - of sorts: Bishop Charles Drennan, recently ret'd. So presumably it was +Charles who gave permission, and we can't ask him why because he's shot through. 

"Oh but," you say, "St John's is bigger. There wouldn't be enough room in St Patrick's for the prize-giving." That's beside the point. Holding a prize-giving in a Catholic church is quite simply wrong. 

I've attended such prize-givings and experienced the hubbub, the applause, the laughter, the 'songs' - all in the presence of our Lord who, Sr Lucia, one of the seers of Fatima, assures us, is "deeply offended" just by talking in church, let alone the racket of a prize-giving. The Blessed Sacrament could have been removed from the church for those events, but wasn't, and wouldn't be at St Patrick's, either, which is further evidence of a lack of belief in the Real Presence.

The prize-giving was held at St John's in the morning, and fair enough: no reason why not. But parents and families were required to turn up again at the Anglican cathedral in the evening to celebrate the End-of-Year Mass. 

If St Patrick's is big enough for Christmas Eve Masses, and big enough for Requiem Masses, I bet it's big enough for the Sacred Heart Mass. If it's not, then enlarge St Patrick's or better still, build a new church, a traditional church with the tabernacle in its rightful place - but instead of that, St Patrick's is setting its sights on a new 'community centre'.

Why, when Mass counts are dropping and churches emptying, do 'gathering spaces' and 'community centres' conversely get bigger? Pre-Vat II there were no gathering spaces, only church porches.

"Oh," you may say, "but gathering spaces are necessary to build 'community'. No, they're not. It's Holy Mass, reverently and frequently celebrated, with catechizing that feeds the faithful, which builds community. Pre-Vat II, when the Mass was celebrated in Latin, with sermons, not 'homilies', churches were full to busting.  

And St Patrick's already has a community centre, newer I think than the church. Napier's Parish Priest, Father Barry Scannell SM, arrived just last year from Wellington, trailing clouds of glory: he'd been awarded the NZ Order of Merit for leading the multi-million dollar earthquake-strengthening exercise at St Mary of the Angels. 

Maybe Father Scannell's finding Napier a bit humdrum. Maybe he wanted a challenge. Anyway, I'm told fancy architects have been hired for a new community centre on the site of the old presbytery which, significantly, is no longer needed. A parishioner who's seen the plans says "it's very ugly". 

Wouldn't a new, fit-for-purpose St Patrick's church be far more suited to Fr Scannell's revenue-gathering and morale-building skills than a mere 'community centre"? 'Fit for purpose' means a church with acoustics to showcase the Sacred Heart choir - which was the reason other than size adduced for the use of St John's.  

Slight by comparison to the gratuitous insult to the Eucharist, the "source, centre and summit" of our Catholic Faith, of celebrating their Mass in an Anglican church, but still to be considered, are the needs of Sacred Heart's students and staff. They don't even have a chapel any more, and now they're expected to hold their end-of-year Mass in a Protestant church.

In 1 Corinthians 8, St Paul tells us that even if a certain idol is "nothing", we shouldn't eat it if there's any danger of leading our brothers astray. "When you thus sin against members of your family,and wound their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ." (1 Cor 8:12). 

How could the celebrating priest - let alone the bishop - get around Scripture, which teaches that even lay people, let alone clergy, must avoid not only evil actions, but also the appearance of evil?

Let me refer you to a new book by the brave Bishop Athanasius Schneider, Christus Vincit: Christ’s Triumph Over the Darkness of the Age (Angelico Press).

https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2019/10/christus-vincit-bishop-schneiders.html

"I think that with the tremendous and almost unprecedented interior crisis in the Church we are witnessing today, the hour of the laity has arrived. They also feel responsible for the conservation and defense of the faith. The true intention and teaching of the Second Vatican Council on the laity is being realized now in our days ever more clearly, in many meritorious and courageous lay initiatives for the defense of the Catholic faith. 

"We have arrived at a grotesque situation, in which the sheep are beginning to unmask the infiltrating wolves in sheep’s clothing, i.e., the unbelieving, apostate, and debauched cardinals, bishops, and priests.”

Philippa O'Neill says:

Read your post on the end year Catholic college school Mass in Napier held at an Anglican cathedral. Sadly nothing surprises me anymore. Shameful.

My 'nice old codger' from Dannevirke has just rung, and it was not to wish me a Happy New Year.

No, he'd just read this post and he was 'absolutely furious'. Holding a Catholic school Mass in an Anglican cathedral is 'incredible'. He's going to ring Cardinal 'Call me John' Dew, to see what he has to say about it. 

I'll keep you posted ...

  

My nice old codger rang back today. He wasn't allowed to speak to Cardinal Dew. Some female gatekeeper told him that Cardinal Dew is - you guessed it - on holiday. So he rang Emeritus Bishop Peter Cullinane.

+Cullinane hadn't heard about Sacred Heart celebrating their School Mass at St John's Anglican Cathedral. Even though they've done it twice, that is, for two years running.

"Oh," said Bishop Cullinane. "Mass is celebrated in all sorts of strange places these days."

It seems my 'nice old codger' isn't so nice after all. Because what he dearly wanted to tell the Bishop  was, "I think there are more bishops in Hell than in Heaven".

Jeanette Hancock says:

That's my old school. I went there in the 90s, and yeah, St. Pats is too small for an end of year Mass. It was then, and it defintely will be now. Heck, it was too small for our opening and feast day Masses, which weren't as popular that our wider school community wanted to attend. Parents et cetera would complain that our opening Mass was too cramped.

People honestly need to get over themselves. If they want a bigger Church, then I suggest they have larger families and pay more to the local parishes so they can afford a building big enough that it can offer an end of year Mass for a school and it's community.

This is quite frankly a mountain out of a molehill, crafted by those who think they're more Catholic than the Pope.

I say:

I'm so tempted to reply, "Well I am more Catholic than the Pope", but I'll content myself with quoting Michael Matt of The Remnant: "The Pope wouldn't even make a good Moslem".

And it seems that even with their families the size they are now, St Patrick's can afford a building big enough for a 'Community Centre'.

Isn't this a case of the tail wagging the dog? A church big enough for all the community to worship God is the first priority, not a 'gathering space' for the community to worship community.

Helen Carver says:

In the words of Fr Max Palmer OCSO, "Pope Francis is the best Pope we have ever had and the group in the Vatican plotting to bring him down is a nest of vipers." Hear Hear! 

I say: 

He would say that. Fr Palmer is a liberal and a modernist, one of those described by Bishop Athanasius Schneider in his new book 'Christus Vincit' as the latter-day Scribes and Pharisees. 

Thanks for supplying his surname. I was wishing I knew it so I could pray for him by name.

Philippa O'Neill says:

By his own words he will bring himself down. 

While I try to teach my young adults the truths of the Catholic Church (the Pope) constantly moves the lines or totally confuses us. I respect the office of Pope and that he is my Pope but I can totally disagree with him and what he says.

I'm not a lemming.

Bob Gill says:

Regarding “In an Anglican church there's no altar stone….” I was shocked to discover recently that Catholic altars not made of stone (most it seems) do not contain an altar stone or relics of a saint these days. Apparently things changed after Vatican II.

As Father Buenger just recently explained to me: “From my research and discussion on this point in New Zealand, most altars are not fixed and therefore don't "qualify" as a permanent altar into which an altar stone is placed with a relic in it. Note that the altars in Dannevirke and in 'Palmy' at the cathedral are not fixed and therefore do not have a relic. The altar in my "new" parish is not fixed either, nor does it have a relic.”

I say:

According to both the GIRM and to Canon law, it is “proper” and “appropriate” for every church to have a fixed altar, and fixed altars “are to be dedicated” (while moveable altars can simply be blessed), and the tradition of placing relics in the altar to be dedicated “is to be retained”.

A member of our Parish Council confirms what I thought, that in the new, moveable altar at St Joseph's Waipukurau there are no relics. He states that there haven't been relics in altars "for many many years".

I'd say, about 50 years. Since Vat II. It figures. The saints have been tossed out of the altars just as by and large they've tossed out of the texts of the 'New Mass'. How the Church thought she would get along without the help of the saints, I don't know. 
But now,50 years on, we do see. And the Church is not a pretty sight.

YOU COULD HAVE WON THIS

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Sorry people, you're all too late to buy tickets in our Voice for Life Central Hawke's Bay Christmas raffle which offered this Christmas cake, baked by moi, as second prize. 

I took the pic yesterday on our dining table. I should have taken it before I got the cops to draw the raffle yesterday, not after. I didn't get around to it. But I could book tickets for next Christmas ...

The cake was only second prize; the first was a stunning Christmas hamper worth $135, and the third a $50 voucher from the oh-so-popular Waipawa Butchery. 

In two days, with the help of 'im indoors who came out for half an hour at lunchtime while I ate sammies and drank a Greek coffee, I took $1600 in $2 tickets. Deo gratias - and thanks to our dear, generous CHB citizenry.

Voice for Life will need all the funds it can get to fight the egregiously awful (I know that's tautologous but it seems 'appropriate') Abortion Legislation Bill. Not forgetting, of course, the referendum on the ditto ditto End of Life Choice Bill.  

FOR US BULLYING, CRITICAL SOCIAL MEDIA: LET'S PRAY

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Having prayed this morning with my parish community in the POF "that social media … not be used for bullying, criticizing others or spreading harmful and unkind words" I will confine myself here to mere reportage - of the kind not so often seen now in the print media - of the unvarnished facts.

This morning at St Joseph's, Waipukurau it fell, as is not unusual, to the same individual to 'do the Welcome' and to be a Minister to the Sick. His son proclaimed the Readings. His wife had been rostered as organist but had asked someone else to play, which might be construed as A Good Thing, as otherwise it could have looked like a takeover, a bit of a family production.

His wife had hoped to attend the Latin Mass at Ashhurst, to avoid being present while her husband performed his third ministry at this morning's Eucharistic Liturgy, which was to give the congregation the benefit of his Reflections on the Readings. It's fair to say the Reflections would have gone down well. They'd have gone down well at St Mary's and St Andrew's too. 

No, it wasn't a Liturgy of the Word. Father was presiding, and Mass was celebrated. Holy Trinity is practising, you see, for the Liturgies of the Word which will take place in January when Father goes on holiday and when, he assures us, there is no priest available to celebrate Holy Mass in the parish.

It was quite warm this morning. Father's collar was undone. When he referred in his opening remarks to 'Laudate Sunday', quoting (as he thought) the chap who'd given the Welcome, he was corrected by same chap, who called out from his pew, "I didn't say that, I said "Gaudete"." 

"Gaudete," said Father. "What does that mean?" I couldn't help myself. "Rejoice," I replied from my pew.

"Means the same thing," said Father. And in a way, it does. 

There were no children to help Father decorate the 'Jesse tree'. As the bread and wine were placed on the credence table at the beginning of the Eucharistic Prayer, a cockroach was discovered on the altar which caused the altar girls much merriment. 

After the final Blessing, Father read out statistics from the 1950s pertaining to St Vincent's, the erstwhile third church in the parish, which had suggested to me as Parish Council chairperson (yes, truly!), at the time our three Eucharistic communities amalgamated, the name of Holy Trinity. St Vincent's was closed some time ago, although not to my knowledge deconsecrated, and was transported to Orua Wharo, Takapau's stately home where now, expensively furnished with amazing modern light fittings and called 'Vincent's', it serves as a wedding and function venue.

Next year, said Father, we will 'celebrate' its125th anniversary. Presumably that function will take place in the rehabilitated 'Vincent's', but it would take wild horses to get me there.

Anyway, the statistics were riveting. I can't be sure of the figures - they sound incredible - but I think Father said that in the 1950s, the Sunday Mass attendance at that St Vincent's in Takapau,a/, that little church now revamped as a restaurant was in the 600s. Not only that, but in Ormondville 10 miles away, there were some 100s more and  15 minutes away in Onga Onga, whose church is now also defunct, a third not far away, 60+.

"Times have changed," said Father. He didn't say, "the Church has changed," or "the Mass has changed"; he said, "times have changed". 

I didn't join in singing the Recessional. It was a Christmas carol - Te Harinui, which I wouldn't want to sing even during Christmastide. As soon as Father and the altar girls reached the foyer, I knelt down and got out my rosary beads.

I actually cried a little - and I'm not a weeper. I stopped when a chap shoulder-tapped me and said, could he ask me a question? I smiled and began getting to my feet, trying to indicate I'd answer his question in the foyer. (I tell people I'm trying to get out of the habit of talking in church, because Our Lady told the Fatima seer, Lucy, that talking in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament deeply offends her Son, but it hasn't caught on.)

"Oh, I'm sorry," this nice chap said, as I held up my rosary, "am I interrupting you?" I can't remember what I said in reply; I think I tried with the assistance of the rosary beads to mime it, and the nice chap vanished.

I resumed my Rosary of thanksgiving. The usual post-Mass chatter and laughter (subdued, they're polite people, and they could see I was trying to pray) died down. Then Father struck up a conversation, mid-pew, with an events organizer and a parishioner with historical ties and family ties to Orua Wharo and St Vincent's, the church which in the '50s had 600 Massgoers.

I wasn't listening to the conversation, but apparently it was about history. Church history as well as local. I couldn't help overhearing Father say, very clearly, emphatically even: "For the first 300 years, the Mass was a meal. It was just an evening meal."

Now, St Justin Martyr,  a philosopher and Christian apologist who lived between 100 and 165, didn't see the Mass quite like that. This is how he described it:

"And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs [letters] of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president [the presiding priest or bishop] verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. 

"Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we before said, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen; and there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given, and to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons. 

"And they who are well to do, and willing, give what each thinks fit; and what is collected is deposited with the president, who succors the orphans and widows and those who, through sickness or any other cause, are in want, and those who are in bonds and the strangers sojourning among us, and in a word takes care of all who are in need. 

"But Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Savior on the same day rose from the dead. For He was crucified on the day before that of Saturn (Saturday); and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun, having appeared to His apostles and disciples, He taught them these things.

"And this food is called among us Εὐχαριστία [the Eucharist], of which no one is allowed to partake but the man who believes that the things which we teach are true, and who has been washed with the washing that is for the remission of sins, and unto regeneration, and who is so living as Christ has enjoined. 

"For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Savior, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh. 

"For the apostles, in the memoirs composed by them, which are called Gospels, have thus delivered unto us what was enjoined upon them; that Jesus took bread, and when He had given thanks, said, This do in remembrance of Me, [Luke 22:19] this is My body; and that, after the same manner, having taken the cup and given thanks, He said, This is My blood; and gave it to them alone -https://aleteia.org/2017/04/13/what-was-mass-like-for-the-early-christians/

Doesn't sound like an evening meal to me.

As to social media and its use or misuse, we could remember the words of Blessed Jerzy Popieluszko, a Polish priest who in 1984 was executed by the Communists:

"To serve God is to speak out about evil as a sickness which should be brought to light so it can be cured."

THE PRIDE OF THE MARCH FOR LIFE - AND THE SHAME OF IT

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 "We saw Father Laisney in the March on Tv - he looked so regal; I was so proud of him!"

From my personal perspective the March for Life was saved from disaster by the same Fr Laisney, SSPX. 

I've had the privilege of attending the TLM celebrated by Fr Laisney, and received the Sacrament of Penance from Fr Laisney, but don't ask me what's his first name: the SSPX don't go in for palsy-walsy Christian naming (as in 'call me John' Cardinal Dew or even 'Father Tom, Dick or Harry'). The SSPX like to keep things on a formal footing, which tends to head off any intimacies or accusations of sexual abuse at the pass.

Anyway, thinking I'd lost a $500 cheque from my Voice for Life branch which I was supposed to present to Family Life International at the March, I'd spent a couple of hours revisiting every retail premises I'd entered the day before, hoping to find it (and don't tell me it was crossed etc so no need to worry; I was panicked beyond reason - I could hear my mother saying, "Monkey girl!"), then another half hour negotiating with Westpac to cancel it.  

So the tail-enders of the March were at Midland Park before I caught up with them (sans cheque).

At Parliament in a force 8 gale I helped hold on to a large banner brought all the way from Christchurch, and not for the first time, by a valiant Protestant marcher. I was consoled by the fact that the other assistant banner-holder (it took four of us to restrain it) was an archetype of Catholic motherhood and moreover, a member of my branch of VFL. 

She and two or three of her brood were the only other Catholics I spotted until Fr Laisney gathered about fifty of us together, as prearranged by the redoubtable Dame Colleen Bayer, to pray the Rosary - on the eve, of course, of the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. It occurred to me that the Rosary could have been announced from the stage at Parliament but I'm told it was purposely not mentioned as it wasn't a March for Life event.

Kneeling there on the grass I was consoled also by the thought that my carelessness and panic re the lost cheque would have been used by God in His holy, adorable and Divine Will for His own good and perfect ends. 

"If only each soul knew or comprehended the immense good that the Cross contains, and how it renders the soul precious, like an inestimable Gem that acquires a value ever higher, insofar as the soul accepts the suffering that the Cross entails": so ran the text from a friend whom I'd asked to pray that the cheque would be found; a quote I'd say, at an educated guess, from the writings of the Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta, a 20th century Italian mystic known as the Little Daughter of the Divine Will.
https://divinewill.org/

Maybe my embarrassment over the lost cheque, combined with another serious concern visited on me on the trip down to Welly, might even have contributed mysteriously to the turn-out for the March - which I couldn't even guess at but TvOne News called "thousands". 

The Mass for Life at St Mary of the Angels the night before, concelebrated by Cardinal John Dew, Monsignor Trevor Murray of Taupo, Monsignor Gerard Burns and SMOA's Father Kevin Conroy SM was not, as I'd expected, primarily a Mass of Reparation for the 500,000 babies murdered by abortion since it was legalized 50 years ago. 

The word 'reparation' was never mentioned. Instead the congregation, we who had been allowed to live our lives, were invited to thank God and more or less congratulate ourselves and one another on that account.

Quite apart from any lack of emphasis on atonement, which as one of the four ends of the Mass would seem peculiarly suited to a Mass preceding a March protesting against abortion, in a nation which in an act of collective barbarism has sacrificed 500,000 lives given by God on the altar of convenience, career or concupiscence, there was the aspect of 'concelebration', of multiplying the number of priests at the altar as a means, it would seem, of turning the Mass into a special occasion. 

The Mass cannot be made more 'special' than it is; and the Ottaviani Intervention which sought to prevent the promulgation of the Novus Ordo advisedly calls concelebration a "mania, which will end by destroying Eucharistic piety in the priest, by overshadowing the central figure of Christ, sole Priest and Victim, in a collective presence of concelebrants."
https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-ottaviani-intervention-turns-50.html

Neither could I help thinking, as I knelt on the grass for the Rosary, near an old woman who sat to pray with great difficulty and regained her feet only with helping hands, that it was a shame the Rosary was led, in a force 8 gale, by a priest with a pronounced French accent.

But thank God, it was led by a priest, and my friend (a convert who's discovered the SSPX and the Latin Mass) who saw Fr Laisney on the News, was right. I'm told Cardinal Dew and several other 'mainstream' priests were among the marchers, and good for them, certainly they should have been marching, but how visible were they? 

In his black cassock and roman collar, tall and ascetic, it was Father Laisney SSPX who stood out like a beacon among the marchers, a sure target for the Tv cameras. As the second antiphon for Morning Prayer for the Common of Pastors (Mt 5:13) goes:

Your light must shine in the sight of men, so that seeing your good works, they may give the praise to your Father in heaven.


A coda: 

As soon as we arrived home this evening, 'im indoors said, "here's the cheque". Folded in a business envelope to fit in my handbag but left on the kitchen bench to be picked up on the way out, there it was, mistaken for a shopping list (which we write on old envelopes) and tucked in with the other lists. By moi. Silly as a two-bob watch.

Mea culpa.

A BLM FELLOW AND AN ANGRY OLD MAN IN A BOUT OF FISTICUFFS AFTER MASS

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" “Why are you wearing such an offensive t-shirt to Mass, you fool ?!!"” 

In this guest post, a correspondent I call my Angry Old Man (with apologies to John Osborne) describes the bout of fisticuffs he incited outside his parish church last Sunday, in an incident which illustrates how he earns his pseudonym and how our Catholic Faith, when truly believed and lived, evokes deep emotions.  

"Julia," the A O M continues, "I've mentioned in a recent email how I had to get my second youngest son to act as bodyguard for me in a previous parish while I handed out Parish Pumps (the A O M's satirical newsletter highlighting parish offences against canon law and the GIRM ), before Sunday Mass.



"Well, this morning after the 9:30am Mass here, I wished my son had been there.



"My wife and I were angered in the church just prior to Mass when we noticed a relatively new parishioner wearing a black t-shirt with bold white lettering back and front proclaiming BLACK LIVES MATTER. I’m assuming you know about the evil US mob that call themselves Black Lives Matter.



"Now, Cath (his wife, not her real name) and I are never happy with anyone using the Mass as a vehicle for political causes. Some political causes are virtuous. Black Lives Matter is definitely not.



"Anyway, I was almost dumbstruck when this fellow rose to do the Second Reading! But I called him out: “Why are you wearing such an offensive t-shirt to Mass, you fool?" He was momentarily put out, but carried on with the reading. When he came down from the sanctuary to his pew, I again called out: "Buffoon!”



"I received many scowls and wagging fingers from other congregants. And when this fellow got back to his pew, a couple conspicuously shook his hand in support.



"After Mass Cath and I went out quickly, to speak to our good parish priest. I asked him to remove this fellow from the reading roster, and he agreed that would be appropriate, and that he would do so. 

"Anyway, to cut a long story short, I asked this fellow why he'd worn the BLM t-shirt to Mass - and he and his wife attacked me with a frenzy of punches! I kid you not.



"He’s a big fellow, 6ft+, but mostly flab. His wife is approx 5’9”, but as round as she is high. They’re both powder puffs and, although a few punches hit my head, they didn’t do any damage. I’m quite proud that I resisted returning their blows – just not on to do so in such a situation – but I was sorely tempted. But, you wouldn’t believe it, I was hauled off by a couple of blokes who treated me as the villain !!



Of course, the blokes had no idea of what Black Lives Matter means. One told me he'd spent some time in South Africa, so understood the sentiment of the t-shirt! He was a little unbelieving when I told him BLM has nothing to do with South Africa.



"When I approached the fellow and began to question him about his t-shirt, his stance was belligerent and aggressive and a middle-aged woman bystander began to push me away.  I resisted her pushing, and it was then that the BLM fellow and his wife threw a frenzy of punches at me. Subsequently, the middle-aged intervener shouted that I had attacked her!



"She went on to commiserate with Cath about how bad it must be to be married to such an awful man. Cath put her in her place: “My husband," she said, "is a very good man!"



"I received no support from any parishioner. And what we’re dealing with here is the far left bias of the main stream media: most of the congregants have never heard of Black Lives Matter, and the rest have seen or heard only the far left gushing praise for this vile organisation.



"Rather than just let the matter lie, with this bloke thinking everybody supports his t-shirt and his violent assault, I’ve laid an assault complaint with the police.
I feel something of a wuss since I am not at all injured.  But there’s a principle, and as has been the case so many times in the recent past, we might have to rely upon the police rather than the clergy to deal with corruption and villainy.

"I’ve given Father this advice:  

• Instruct this fellow to repent and go to Confession for his serious public sin
• Instruct him to apologise to the parishioners at next Sunday’s Mass (I won’t be there - I'll be at the national March For Life)
• If he’s defiant, explain the situation to the congregation next Sunday, including the evil of Black Lives Matter. 

"If the villain makes an appropriate apology to the parishioners, I’ll withdraw my police complaint."

Now, in my little backwater parish I doubt anyone has heard of Black Lives Matter. Perhaps it's seen on the 'News' but I don't watch telly and because they've deteriorated so badly I hardly read the papers either, so I knew next to nothing about Black Lives Matter.

This exasperated my A O M, who reacted with the following links to enlighten me - and possibly you too, dear reader:

Black Lives Matter hypocrisy       Cheering violence



Dallas attack     The "pigs-in-a-blanket" crowd got what they wanted



Black Lives Matter threatens white reporter   I've got 800 black people behind me



Why-hasn't-black-lives-matter-been-classified-as-a-hate-group ?



Video   Black-Lives-Matter riots in London   Police attacked



So how did I react to this story - which threw into sharp relief the relatively humdrum nature, at exactly the same time last Sunday, of my escape from Mass through the flower-room, rather than run into the good Anglicans waiting outside our church for the Combined Advent Service?

Gosh, was my initial comment in reply to the A O M. But I could easily believe that he was treated as the villain of the piece. 

Because it reminds me irresistibly of the Hawera newspaper report, unearthed by my brother Karl, of our great-grandfather Charles Quin (Oirish to the bone), who on being accused by the PP from the pulpit at Sunday Mass of some malfeasance, stood up in his pew to defend himself and was hustled out of the church by burly parishioners - urged on from the pulpit by the PP - with enough violence to injure him. He took the parishioners to court and lost.



It's absolutely non-U to wear a political message to Mass, let alone when proclaiming the word. My reaction would have been to question him after Mass, not during, but then I’m not an A O M.



I asked for the name of his PP (save me googling it) so I could pray for him. 

Thank God, I said, that he has such a priest. Maybe that’s why his congregation is relatively politicised – a fracas such as he described is inconceivable here, where the congregation almost to a man is protestantized and nice to the degree that they appear to be sleepwalking their way to judgment and eternity. 

Good on him, I continued, for laying a complaint with the pleece. 

So far the good Lord has deprived me of the experience I’ve sought of presenting for Communion on my knees to Fr Joe Grayland, in the hope that he’d try to drag me to my feet, as he’s reportedly done to another woman and got away with it.

Like you, I think I'd go straight round to the police station and lay a complaint. 

RUDE AND DEFIANT: DOING A RUNNER TO AVOID AN 'ECUMENICAL SERVICE'

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This morning I did a runner from Mass. Not during, but after, to avoid the annual 'ecumenical' Advent Service with the Anglicans, hosted this year by the Catholics.

My walk-out wasn't just rude, it was positively defiant: at the end of Mass, Father had commanded the congregation, in no uncertain terms, to stay put. Numbers were down this morning. Father went so far as to say people hadn't turned up for Mass because they didn't want to attend the Combined Advent Service afterwards; but staying for the Advent Service was what Christ would judge us on, said Father, because staying for the Advent Service was "loving others".  

"It's only twenty past ten!" said Father, as if time were the crucial factor. So much was it not so, for me, that I hoped to drive an hour and a quarter to the Traditional Latin Mass at Ashhurst.

So what could possibly lead me to defy Father's orders and walk out? To begin with, the Gospel: 

“The Lord Jesus, before ascending into heaven, commanded his disciples to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world and to baptize all nations” - Opening words of the Declaration Dominus Iesus (“The Lord Jesus”), published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on August 6, 2000, the Feast of the Transfiguration signed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) and then-Archbishop (later Cardinal) Tarcisio Bertone (link to the full text of Dominus Iesus). 

There you have it: proclaim the Gospel, the whole of it, not just the books Luther left in, to the whole world, all nations, even the English; even the Anglicans. Even the Queen. 


And then there's the Council of Trent, called by the Church in the middle of the sixteenth century to condemn and refute the heresies of Protestantism, chiefly the heresy of Justification, proclaimed by Martin Luther and promoted by King Henry VIII in his new Anglican Church.

Canon IX. If any one shall say, that by faith alone the impious is justified; so as to mean that nothing else is required to co-operate in order unto obtaining the grace of justification, and that it is not in any respect necessary that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will; let him be anathema. (Council of Trent, Sixth Session [1547], Decree concerning Justification [trans. Theodore Alois Buckley]).

The decrees of the Council of Trent  (the First Vatican Council) still stand. They have been confirmed by the Second Vatican Council and the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992). In other words, although the Modernist heretics  now running riot in the Church of Nice would have us believe otherwise, the truth never changes and Protestants are still heretics and are still anathema. 

"What a horrid thing to say!" Actually, it's not. To be declared anathema is not - as Protestants and probably many Catholics, uncatechised are they are, often think - to be condemned by the Catholic Church to Hell. No, to be declared anathema is to be excommunicated, and only in the interests of giving the anathematized reason to think again, to repent and be converted and gain Heaven. Ecumenical services are yet another swindle, introduced post-Vatican II by certain malevolent elements, Communist and Freemason, in the Catholic Church. 

St Teresa of Avila says expressly: "The Lord asks only two things of us: love for His Majesty and love for our neighbour. It is for these two virtues that we must strive, and if we attain them perfectly, we are doing His will, and so shall be united with Him" (The Interior Castle). 

Note that she puts love for God first, and loving our neighbours means doing for them what God wills, which is whatever will help him attain eternal life - which God wills to be achieved by conversion to the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, founded by Jesus Christ on the Rock of Peter. 

Ecumenical services are a blatant waste of time, which would be far better spent in simply inviting our fellow Christians to attend a Catholic service, with generous hospitality to follow.  

"Oh but", you say, "Pope Francis says God wills a diversity of religions". Ahem. No, God does not. Pope Francis was good enough to retract this remark privately in correspondence with the valiant Archbishop Athanasius Schneider of Astana, Kazahkstan (now there's a real shepherd for you), but has yet to correct himself publicly. And so, says Archbishop Schneider, “there is being proclaimed a new Gospel, a Gospel that is not the one taught by the Incarnate Word of God, that was loyally preached by the Apostles and passed on to the Church.”

“There can be no doubt,” Schneider explains, “that Saint Paul would say today, concerning this controversial formulation in the Abu Dhabi statement: ‘But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema’ (Galatians 1:8–9).”

(See? Even St Paul says horrid things occasionally. If you're committed to Christ and His Gospel, you have no option but to say - or do - 'horrid' things occasionally.)

“With the coming of the Savior Jesus Christ, God has willed that the Church founded by him be the instrument for the salvation of all humanity (cf. Acts 17:30-31). This truth of faith does not lessen the sincere respect which the Church has for the religions of the world, but at the same time, it rules out, in a radical way, that mentality of indifferentism ‘characterized by a religious relativism which leads to the belief that ‘one religion is as good as another’” — 'Dominus Iesus', Paragraph 22.

With all the "sincere respect" in the world, we should acknowledge that for Catholics to celebrate 'ecumenical services' with Protestants is tacitly to admit that Protestantism is as good as Catholicism.  That's the "mentality of indifferentism characterized by religious relativism" regretted by Pope Benedict. 

In the spirit of religious diversity he claims to be willed by God, Pope Francis has made much of his recent trips to the United Arab Emirates and Morocco. “My pilgrimage followed in the footsteps of two Saints: Francis of Assisi and John Paul II”, he said again during his general audience on April 3^rd, 2019:.

“Eight hundred years ago Francis took the message of peace and fraternity to the Sultan al-Malik al Kamil”.

Ahem. For his namesake the saint, it was just a little bit more than 'a message of  peace and fraternity'. St Francis was virtually putting his head on a plate: the sultan of his day had decreed a highly valuable gold coin be paid for every Christian head delivered to him (suitably severed from its body, of course.).

To give us complacent Christians and Catholics an idea of what loyally preaching the Gospel entailed for St Francis and his friars: in order to maintain the right to possession of the holy places granted to the saint by the sultan, in the case of the Holy Sepulchre for six hundred years the friars inside it, unable to leave, each died after three months of breathing no air but only the smoke of candles.

St Francis did not risk his life to be nice. He risked his life to evangelise. So can you figure out what Pope Francis means when he says - as he reiterated to bishops in Japan just over a week ago - that in encountering those who do not know Christ we must witness to Christ but "not with convictions, not to convince [or persuade], [and] not to proselytize"?

Que? So his namesake St Francis risked his life to meet the sultan but he did that without convictions, not to convince the sultan of the truth of the Trinity, of the Gospel?

It was progressive Protestant churches who in the 20th century initiated the ecumenical movement, and by its latter half Freemasons had infiltrated the Catholic Church to such an extent that high-ranking Freemason priests and bishops were typified by the chief architect of the Novus Ordo Mass, Archbishop Annibale Bugnini.

"Masonry... looks forward to the time when ... there shall be but one altar and one worship; one common altar of Masonry on which the Veda, Shastra, Sade, Zend-Avesta, Koran and Holy Bible shall lie ... and at whose shrine the Hindoo, the Persian, the Assyrian, the Chaldean, the Egyptian, the Chinese, the Mohammedan, the Jew and the Christian may kneel..." ("The Kentucky Monitor." Fellowcraft Degree, p. 95). Freemasonry. Sounds positively ecumenical, doesn't it?

As for being judged on attendance at ecumenical services as a way of 'loving others', as I recall, Jesus Christ stated it was a matter of being judged on how we've fed the hungry, given drink to the thirsty (for priests, feeding and watering their people, spiritually moribund or dead as they are for lack of nourishment), clothing the naked, hosting the stranger (local Anglicans hardly qualify) visiting the sick and those in prison - praying for Cardinal Pell, perhaps? (Mt 25: 35-39). 

How wonderful if Father employed his draconian powers of rhetoric to persuade his people to frequent the confessional, because this morning they worked very well in enticing the congregation to stay for the Combined Advent Service. I know because after feeling like a pariah and with the moment for leaving for the Ashhurst TLM having passed, I suddenly realized that I could, without abandoning my adherence to the Gospel, the Council of Trent and all the rest of it, attend the morning tea which inevitably followed the Service. 

So back to the church I went. Although the great Church theologian Francisco Suarez once remarked that "heresy spreads like cancer, which is why heretics should be avoided as much as possible", I take that to mean in a liturgical context, not social. Far too late in life for me to avoid contagion over cups of tea or glasses of wine, anyway, because most of these Anglicans I count as good friends.

And of course, the only hint of disapproval came from a Catholic. “I’m glad you stayed,” she said, meaningfully.  I didn’t tell her I hadn’t. It would have taken too long to explain.