by PAUL COLLITS – IN A country town parish in NSW’s Blue Mountains, one quietly observes the congregation.
There is only one Sunday Mass, so a quick census is straightforward. Apart from the obvious eighty or ninety per cent who have white hair or none, the other obvious and alarming observation is that one counts only one – yes one – school aged child in attendance.
- The gates of hell shall not prevail? We hope not.
- Australia is now what we used to call a “mission country”.
- Increasingly, our pastors are from what we used to call the Third World.
The parish church is right across the road from the parish primary school, where, on any given day, one sees hundreds of happy children frolicking around the playground. (I realise that many of the students in Catholic schools are not Catholics.)
Obvious question. Where are they all at 10am on Sunday morning? Not in church; that much is clear.
COMPLEX
Next obvious question, why are all but one of them not attending? A complex question, with many answers. Some hints may lie below.
The titular head of the Church on earth and the Vicar of Christ, the 266th title holder, is often in the papers, generally for the wrong reasons. One gets the impression that he likes being in the papers.
Well, it was St Paul who stood up to the first pope, “to his face”, over a matter of importance relating to divisions in the early Church.
A tradition that should be continued wherever necessary. As we know from the secular realm, citizens have a moral obligation to resist bad laws and regimes.
Three recent papal appearances in the media are noteworthy.
The first. “Pope bans Traditional Latin Mass at Melbourne’s St Patrick’s”, Tess Livingstone’s story in The Australian newspaper read.
She writes: “In a move that has shocked and upset hundreds of Catholics in Melbourne, the Vatican has banned the traditional Latin Mass from the city’s St Patrick’s Cathedral.
“The final traditional Mass will be offered on Wednesday, June 19, at 5.30pm. By essentially ordering traditional Catholics to get out of their own cathedral, the ban is stirring up tensions and divisions.
“Wednesday evening Mass, which has been a regular feature of cathedral worship for 13 years, drew a crowd of more than 150, mainly young people, including city workers not aligned with traditional parishes.”
One standout phrase is, obviously, “mainly young people”. One of the few places in the first world where the Mass and Catholic devotion are growing is in traditional communities. We can’t have that!
There is a feel of holiness in these places. In the words of Bernie Taupin:
Oh the furnace wind
Is a flickering of wings about your face
In a cloud of incense
Yea, it smells like Heaven in this place.
Indeed, it does.
A recent visit to north Queensland revealed just about every priest in the Townsville Diocese to be Indian.
Both parishes with which I have a connection are (mercifully) presided over by Filipinos. Australia is now what we used to call a “mission country”.
Increasingly, our pastors are from what we used to call the Third World. There are simply not enough vocations here now, probably because of all of those Catholic non-Mass attending families who no longer pray for vocations.
CHILDREN
And who no longer raise children for whom a priestly vocation might appear a real possibility.
Tess Livingstone continues: “The priest who said that Mass was Father Shawn Murphy, 34, who was ordained a year ago.
“The Cathedral is the mother church of the Archdiocese and like a mother should be welcoming to all her children,” Fr Murphy said.
“What is so tragic is that unlike previous oppressions of the Mass and the faithful, in England under the Tudors, during the French Revolution and in prison camps of the Soviet Union and China, this oppression is coming from within the Church,’’ he said.
Right from the top, to be precise, Father.
It is beyond ironic that the most divisive pope in church history thinks he has to ban the Old Rite because he thinks it is … divisive. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
Tess Livingstone also sees irony: “Francis overturned his predecessors’ initiatives three years ago, in a document ironically entitled Traditionis Custodes (Custodians of Tradition), which crushed centuries of tradition.
The second pope story this week? It comes from a Spectator interview with a French academic and writer, Frederic Martel.
He is the author of many books, the most provocative of which is called In the Closet of the Vatican.
Pope Francis this week apologised for decrying the “frociaggine” — or “faggotry” — in the Vatican and in Catholic seminaries for the second time in a matter of weeks.
FAGGOTRY
Ah, faggotry in Rome. He has apologised twice for saying that, the same man who has been out in front arguing for blessing “civil unions”, as per the declaration Fiducia Supplicans. (God help you if you have an uncivil union).
Go figure.
Martel argues, among other things, that the Pope is not anti-gay, so long as gaydom is kept “in the closet”. When it becomes an all-consuming culture, then he is concerned.
He explains: “While we can think that Popes Paul VI or Benedict XVI had homosexual tendencies and desires, though probably remaining chaste, nobody can think that Francis is gay.
“On the contrary, he’s a heterosexual who’s both rather gay-friendly and very reserved about the Vatican’s gay omnipresence.
“I don’t think Francis has a problem with gays per se, but he’s very reserved about gay activism. He likes discreet gays, let’s say “in the closet”. Not those who militate for or against the gay cause, while being gay.”
What does all this mean for the little, old, white-headed ladies in the pews? Mercifully, not much.
But the Vatican is what it is. Big power games are not unknown in the long history of the Barque of St Peter.
The weeds grow alongside the crop. This is not the first time that Rome required fundamental counter-revolution engineered by a saintly outsider. St Catherine of Siena’s mission in the age of the Avignon Popes comes to mind.
The third and final pope story. A hundred comedians were recently invited to the Vatican.
Yes, I know, an unkind observer might say, well that makes a total of one hundred and one comedians in the Vatican.
Without plunging into the list of invitees, one’s best guess is that most of them are unfunny progressives. Most comedians are.
No Dave Smith or Steven Crowder here. Johannes Leak? Billy Birmingham? Jerry Seinfeld?
SHILL
Instead, the headline act was Jimmy Fallon. COVID pro-vaxxer. Climate campaigner. Maximum shill, as Steven Crowder called him.
Whoopie Goldberg was (inevitably) there.
Theologian Whoopi recently had this to say: “Abortion isn’t included in the Ten Commandments, ‘It’s you, your doctor and God’.”
Clearly Whoopi can’t count to five. As in, thou shall not kill.
As Fr Glenn Tattersall of the Caulfield traditional community said, putting it extremely kindly, this pontificate hasn’t been known for its orthodoxy of belief. These are the Pope’s mates. Welcomed into the very heart of the Church. At the See of Peter.
The Pope, of course, like Jimmy Fallon, was one of the great global pro-vaxxers. They all just roll on. Unaccountable. In the clear.
I was reading recently about the sad death of the cult figure and star of Animal House, John Belushi. The woman who injected him with what turned out to be a fatal concoction of cocaine and heroin (aka “speedballs”), one Cathy Smith, did fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter.
A fatal jab, indeed, right there.
As death and injury from the lethal COVID jab ever mount, as does the peer reviewed evidence to its lethality, one can be forgiven for thinking that all those who cheered on the jab might consider themselves fortunate they too haven’t done time for the lethal injection.
They may as well have been holding the needles themselves. Accessories after the fact, at least.
I doubt any of this will have come up in conversation in Rome this past week, amidst all the merriment and laughter.
Meantime, out in the distant provinces, the Church continues to haemorrhage members and to endanger souls through the side-bar antics of its leaders.
SOLD OFF
Our country (and city) parish churches continue to empty. In Britain and elsewhere, they are increasingly sold off for restaurants and B&Bs.
They and we are becoming relics, artifacts, in a post-modern, secular, go-along-to-get-along world, in which belief in the transcendent and its still-glorious signs and wonders are consigned to the dustbin of liturgical and (so) ecclesial history. Lex orandi, lex credendi.
In sum, not a pretty look. Those who, back in the day, perceived (or knew of) the infiltration of Rome by communists and activists, of both the rainbow and non-rainbow variety, as ringing the Church’s death knell, now seem not a little prescient.
One such communist whistleblower turning (Vatican) State’s evidence was Bella Dodd.
The gates of hell shall not prevail? We hope not.
But what if those that are keenest to see the Church’s passing are housed comfortably within its bosom? And calling the shots?PC
