Crowd Pleasing

The Church in the UK was growing exponentially from the end of the war until 1965, measured by all indicators of Catholic health: baptisms were up year on year; Mass attendance, conversions, vocations and Catholic marriages likewise. This steady advance came to a grinding halt in 1965; a broad plateau then lasted until 1969, from whence it went into free fall, and this is where we have been ever since. When I became a Catholic sixty years ago there were three million people at Mass every Sunday in England and Wales, today there is around 600,000, of which a third are immigrants and two thirds of the remainder are heretics who could best be described as Roman Protestants.

Coincidentally, Vatican II closed it doors in 1965 and the Novus Ordo was imposed on the Church in 1969. Within a mere seven years of the latter novelty nearly half the priests in the world had resigned their ministry and three quarters of the laity had abandoned going to Mass. But all this is of course mere coincidence, it must be mere coincidence because neo-Catholics keep telling us it is so.

The tragedy is that the Church in this country did not whither on the vine, it was deliberately killed off by the corrupt modernist bureaucracy that has replaced our once great Catholic hierarchy. And with a man on the see of Peter who is clearly more interested in crowd pleasing than preaching the Catholic faith, our fortunes are unlikely to change any time soon. Among numerous mob-pleasing statements made by Pope Who-am- I-to-judge Francis, one of the most bizarre in my estimation was, "I believe in God, not in a Catholic God. There is no Catholic God...." Oh, really!

The Catholic Church is the one true Church founded by Christ when He walked the earth 2000 years ago. It is called "Catholic" - meaning for all men and for all time - to distinguish it from the innumerable sects founded by men, that have none of the sacerdotal powers of Christ's Church, that have proliferated, especially over the last five hundred years. Christ was God, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, and His Church, i.e. the Catholic Church, is, so the Scriptures teaches, His body. Does God then have a Catholic body and a non-Catholic head? The Scriptures also teaches us that Christ is wedded to His Church, He is the bridegroom and she is His bride. Is it now an article of faith that this is a mixed marriage?