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"I know who I'm voting for."
By now I've learned that line is code for "I'm voting Labour". I heard it again on Sunday after Mass while standing on the footpath outside St Joseph's, handing out Family First's apparently seditious literature, which has been banned from the church foyer by my parish priest.
(Coincidentally,on Sunday 2 dozen parishioners were standing outside Blessed Sacrament Cathedral in Detroit, prayerfully protesting the Archbishop's suspension of Father Eduard Perrone, falsely accused of raping an altar boy.)
https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/rally-for-sidelined-priest
I asked the St Joseph's parishioner if she knew that Catholics can't vote Labour.
"I think she's doing a good job," she replied, and turned away.
I didn't ask, "A good job at what?" but I called, to her retreating back, "Even though she legislated to kill babies up to birth?"
She closed her car door without replying.
It's hardly surprising that she thinks the barbarian babykiller Ardern is 'doing a good job'. Her parish priest (and mine) had just enthused in his heretical homily, "The world's getting better and better!"
New Conservatives' deputy-leader, Elliot Ikilei, a Protestant, did a better job than that of preaching the Gospel in Dannevirke last week, when after looking carefully around the venue checking for any children (and I guess getting a thumbs-up from the Catholic parents of 13 children who'd brought teenage daughters along) he graphically mimed abortion by dismemberment.
In our 'hospitals' babies are now, thanks mainly to neo-Nazi Ardern, routinely pulled apart limb by limb, with no pain relief and no medical care for those who somehow manage to survive - and Father can preach that the world is getting better and better. And 'Catholics' say they'll be voting for Ardern. It comes from living in Novus Ordo land.
In fairness to Father, he did explain that the reason why the world's getting better and better is that the Irish (Father's forebears were Irish) are no longer deported to Australia for stealing food for their starving families. His reasoning, and his reiteration of former homilies to the effect that "we never stop sinning!", which is tantamount to denying the healing power of sanctifying and actual grace in the Sacrament of Reconciliation (which I think he meant to promote), was followed up with saccharine Laudato Si POF for 'Aotearoa New Zealand'.
In spite of its relevance, I struggled to play the offertory hymn, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross. So yes, I admit it, by the time I got out onto the footpath after Mass I was somewhat stirred.
Coming home, I came across a friend who's Indian, the owner of a liquor store, and he cheered me up. His reaction to my brief description of the Abortion Legislation Act was, in a word, "F..k!!!" He asked me to deliver some of my banned Family First and New Conservatives pamphlets to his store, to hand out to customers.
However, the parishioner who knows who she's going to vote for has complained to the parish secretary. The burden of the parishioner's song was that she was upset because when I called to her retreating back, "Ardern legislated to kill babies up till birth", I 'shouted'. (She's obviously never heard me shout. A kid at the local college where I was dragooned into relief teaching P E once asked me, "Were you in the army, Miss?")
Before the morning was out the parish secretary was posting on FB: "Taken from bishop's (sic) statement from 2011 - it still applies today: Catholic Bishops we do not (sic) endorse any particular political party, but ask all people of goodwill to inform and use their consciences in challenging and debating the options put forward by all political parties." A puzzled ex-parishioner then innocently pointed out, on FB, that "there have been 2 elections since 2011". She doesn't know the back story.
My rhetorical question on FB in response to the parish secretary's post was: "And whose God-given mandate is it, to inform Catholic conscience? Catholic Bishops! They have not informed the faithful; consequently uninformed Catholic voters think it's okay to vote for babykiller Ardern."
"It is sometimes claimed," said John Paul II in his 1987 address to the U S bishops, "that dissent from the Magisterium is ... compatible with being a 'good Catholic' and poses no obstacle to reception of the Sacraments. This is a grave error ...
To vote for a socialist Party or any MP who voted for the Abortion Legislation Act, or any candidate who would have voted for it, would be dissent from the Magisterium, "a grave error" necessitating the Sacrament of Reconciliation before receiving Holy Communion. It's gross dereliction of duty for New Zealand's bishops not to spell this out to the faithful, to people like the Massgoer who was upset to be informed of the effect of the Abortion Legislation Act.
She might have been more upset because I 'shouted', than by what I said. A GP commented to me today that "people don't care" about that legislation. He seemed somewhat depressed, as well he might be. Of course I don't wish to 'upset' people, but it's prelates and priests who don't wish to 'upset' people by preaching the Gospel on contraception and abortion (Pope Paul VI's Humanae Vitae, for example), plus their equally human desire to be liked, which has resulted in abysmal ignorance of the Magisterium in both clergy and laity, and the wholesale rejection of God's law which has led to the wholesale slaughter of the latterday innocents in Ardern's Abortion Legislation Act.
Dear shepherds, do you realise that many of your flock have no idea what was legislated in that Act? That many Catholics will go to the polling booth next month not knowing that this socialist Labour Coalition Government legislated to kill the unborn up to and even during birth without anaesthetics and leave the survivors to die without medical care?
It's not so much their fault, dear shepherds, as yours, for abandoning the Traditional Latin Mass - which feeds and teaches and forms Massgoers with every word - and hiding it away, like a leprous sore on the Body of Christ, in hole-and-corner venues like funeral parlours and private chapels. 50+ years of the Novus Ordo and Communion in the hand have inculcated disbelief in the Real Presence and divested us of the devotions which deepened our faith, leaving your flock, like yourselves, stranded in the here and now, ruled by human fears and desires instead of seeking "the things which are above" (Col 3:1).
And what's more - except for a very short course, seminarians do not receive training in Latin or the EF Latin Mass, in particular. Other lacunae requiring Rome's attention is the urgent need for specific training to be mandated for priests, seminarians, and all religious or lay 'ministers of the Eucharist' in the manner of giving Holy Communion on the tongue properly and graciously as Catholic Mass rubrics actually require - so that the Sacred Host is not virtually shoved into one's mouth as It was when I received at Sacred Heart Hastings recently, from the priest. That may be just nervousness as much as anything, for lack of practice ...
I'll write to the St Joseph's parishioner to say I'm sorry she was upset. However, I care even more for the feelings of Our Lord, who is upset and offended by sacrilegious Communions more than by any other sin. According to St John Vianney, patron of parish priests:
- Unworthy Communion outrages God more than all other mortal sins.
- Whoever communicates unworthily crucifies Jesus Christ in his heart.
- Unworthy Communion is in certain respects a greater crime than the deicide of the Jews.
- Unworthy Communion imitates and renews the crime of Judas.
https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/st.-john-vianney-on-unworthy-communions
The "dictatorship of relativism" denies that reason can know anything beyond "the empirically verifiable." Conscience therefore becomes not a judgment of reason on the morality of an act, but a decision of the will determining right and wrong, an expression of personal taste with no transcendent claim to immunity against oppression by the State." Since reason can know nothing beyond the empirical, affirmations of God and objective moral truth are "non-rational" and excluded from the public discourse"...
Such as on a public footpath on a Sunday morning after Mass.
The jurisprudence of relativism is legal positivism in which, as Hans Kelsen put it, even Auschwitz was valid law and could not be criticised as unjust because justice is "an irrational ideal".
In the real world, as St Thomas tells us, "If ... we consider one act in the moral order, it is impossible for it to be morally both good and evil."
"Moral truth is objective," said John Paul II ... "and a properly formed conscience can perceive it. ... Christians have a great help in the Church and her Magisterium ... the Church puts herself ... at the service of conscience, helping it to avoid being tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine proposed by human deceit ... and helping it ... to attain the truth with certainty ... if there is no ultimate truth to guide ... political activity, then ideas ... can easily be manipulated for power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into ... totalitarianism."
Exactly. Totalitarianism, as in Ardern's Government and its brutal laws which condemn not just babies, but also old people locked up in 'rest' homes, forbidden the company, hugs and kisses of their children and grandchildren or even of their masked 'carers', to a cruel death.
How does conscience deal with an unjust law? ... "The negative precepts" (of the Ten Commandments), said JP II, "oblige each and every individual, always and in every circumstance ... without exception ... it is always possible that man ... can be hindered from doing certain good actions; but he can never be hindered from not doing certain actions, especially if he is prepared to die rather than do evil."
Which brings us to the law imposed by NZ's Bishops in Ardern's lockdown, and reinforced now by Cardinal John Dew, which restricts Holy Communion to the commonly sacrilegious reception in the hand. (Not to mention the same prelate's inexcusable ban on Sunday Masses in the Archdiocese of Wellington aka the Land of Mordor.) We can never be hindered from not receiving Communion in the hand.
As Aquinas put it, if a human law "deflects from the law of nature", it is unjust and "is no longer a law but a perversion of law" ...
...excerpted from Why the Campaign for Humanae Vitae? The Latin Mass Vol 21, No 3.
We beseech Thee, O Lord Jesus Christ, let Thy Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose holy soul was pierced by a sword of sorrow at the hour of Thy Passion, implore Thy mercy for us both now and at the hour of our death -
Collect, Commemoration of the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
