THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UTTERLY BIZARRE

---The Good---

Sunday the 14th September was to prove a funny old day.

The highlight of the day was the celebration marking Daphne McLeod's forty year fight for the right of children to be taught their faith properly.  The special Mass and reception afterwards was a truly lovely and memorable occasion.  The best part for me came when Daphne entered the club room beside the Church, and everyone broke out into spontaneous prolonged applause.

Father spoke warmly and movingly about her work and Daphne was then presented with a rose (the name of the rose appropriately: Absolutely Fabulous) as a remembrance of the occasion.  She was also presented with a spiritual bouquet which she obviously appreciated enormously.

This was rounded off by a splendid feast provided by the parishioners.

Daphne spent her time happily chatting with well wishers including two Irish Flock readers who had flown in from Dublin especially for this occasion - may both these lovely ladies be blessed for their kindness and devotion.

---The Bad---

A shadow had been cast over the day earlier by the news that Mrs Palmira Silva, the sweet 82 year old lady, mother and grandmother, who had been beheaded in her north London garden by a mentally deranged convert to Islam, was the cousin of members of our congregation.

Politicians prate on endlessly about Islam being a religion of peace.  We should challenge them by asking them to name a single country on the planet that has embraced Islam other than at the point of a sword held to the throat of unarmed men, women and children.  One could also ask these politician to explain why, if Islam is a religion of peace, the Middle East is the least peaceful place on the face of the Planet, and has been so for as long as any can remember.

The barbarism of this deranged young man had me reflecting on what we mean by the word "barbarian".  It sums up those who gratuitously destroys what is beautiful, holy, living, growing, thriving and healthy, those who wantonly tear down in seconds what others have painstakingly built over decades.

---The Utterly Bizarre---

Which brings me neatly to the "bizarre", the tragedy unfolding at the nearby parish of Blackfen, which up until a week ago had been home to a beautiful, thriving, traditionalist community, full of young married couples with lots of children and young people.  It had also provided a warm welcome to home-schoolers, with over a hundred homeschooled children and their parents regularly meeting in the parish.  Half a dozen good and clearly hurting folk were "crying on my shoulder" this Sunday over the mindless destruction of this (their) spiritual home.

A new priest, one Fr Steven Fisher, took over a week ago and was clearly hell bent on the senseless demolition of what his predecessor had built.  Indeed, he gratuitously upset so many trads in the course of the first hour, it made the proverbial bull in a china shop look like Margot Fonteyn.  Space forbids me relating a string of grievances, sufficient to say that he kicked off by announcing at his first traditional Mass that Holy Communion could be receive in the hand!  A bizarre announcement even from the angle of man-management and simple human prudence.  All it could achieve would be to delight half a dozen contracepting elderly post-Conciliar Modernists (who would sooner be found dead than at a traditional Mass in any case) while needlessly upsetting a hundred or more trads.  Within days, the Modernist rag, the Pill (aka the tablet) was on sale at the back of the church - no surprise there then.

The mendacious excuse for this immature and loutish behaviour is "unity."  Oh what crimes O Lord are committed in the name of the sham unity of the post-Conciliar Church!  If there was any tension in the parish it certainly would not have come from the trad side.  Trads are the most generous when it comes to contributing to the parish coffers, invariably play an active part in all parish activities and have no interest whatsoever in interfering in the worship of their Novus Ordo brothers and sisters.  If there was ill-will, it was being stirred up by a handful of elderly contracepting post-Conciliar Modernists.  A priest's role in such circumstances is clearly to be a mediator, a bridge builder, not to use it as an excuse to indulge in an orgy of wanton destruction.

Two devout homeschooling mothers were informed that they should have their children in Catholic schools.  This humbug from a man who had personally told me a decade ago that the only reason that he was a priest was that his mother had had the wisdom not to send him to a Catholic school!  The tragedy is that the man carrying out this wilful vandalism was, I can personally vouch, once a good priest.  One can only weep and wonder when and why he decided to sell his soul to the Revolution and become part of the problem rather than part of the solution - was his conversion motivated by ideology or careerism, or was the original persona merely a sham? - only he can tell us. 

At this hour of decisive battle for the soul of the Church, we must of course expect the Devil to go after good priests, so we must redouble our prayer for our many good priests (and not forgetting a handful of good bishops).  The faithful remnant must also pray for themselves and one another, lest we too through pride fall into the same abyss.

It is difficult to understand what the powers-that-be hope to achieve by the sort of boorish carry on at Blackfen.  No trad that I know is going to quietly melt back into the post-Conciliar Modernist wallpaper merely because one priest is putting a special effort into being unkind and tactless towards him; most would rather seek out the SSPX than go down that particular cul-de-sac.

It is crucially important not to allow these setbacks to discourage us.  In any war there are bound to be setbacks and reversals.  Our post-Conciliar Modernists are currently running around trying to put out the little forest fires of tradition breaking out all over the Church.  They no sooner damp down one in front of them and two spring up behind them.  Pretty soon some of these fires will join up and become bigger fires, and then these bigger fires will join up and become infernos.  Our Lady has promised that ultimately her Immaculate Heart will triumph, so the question is not "if" but "when".  In the meantime, we must expect our post-Conciliar Modernists, as they become increasingly desperate, to become even more intolerant, insensitive and cruel than they already are - for such has proved the final days of all revolutions.

Just reflect that the average age of a Novus Ordo priest in France is seventy-five.  That means that the post-Conciliar Church in France and its bizarre regime of Modernist novelties is tottering on the brink a very steep precipice, and other countries cannot be far behind them.  And do amount of persecution of those who have retained or reverted to the orthodoxy and orthopraxis of their forefathers, saints and martyrs, even if emanating from the highest echelons of the Church, can avert the inevitable - or render the sterile fruitful, or the fruitful barren.

Come back Joseph Goebbels, all is forgiven ...

The news blackout is a powerful weapon that is being increasingly used by the masters of the secular asylum to keep the masses compliant. I recently, as a result of complete serendipity, found myself talking to a senior executive of the BBC. On condition of unanimity, she was completely open about the fact that news blackouts were blatantly used to massage the news.

For example, a few months ago ago, over a million anti-gay "marriage" protesters took over the centre of Paris. The authorities responded by tear-gassing women and children and old men. Ninety-nine percent of the populace would be excused for being completely unaware that it had taken place; our secular liberal masters had ordered a complete news blackout of what was probably the largest popular demonstration ever seen in the French capital.

Another news blackout is currently in place, the subject this time is one Kermit Gosnell. Who is Kermit Gosnell you may well ask. Kermit is an abortionist on trial in Philadelphia for murdering eight people; if found guilty, he will be officially a serial killer. Note for comparison, the death toll of the Boston bombers was three, and just reflect on how much news coverage they generated. Kermit's method of abortion was to cause the child to be born alive (often into the WC apparently) and then decapitate it. One child was so big, Kermit allegedly quipped, before beheading the little boy, "he could walk me to the bus stop". Kermit is on trial for the murder of seven babies, and for killing one woman following a botched abortion.

So why the news blackout? - simple, Kermit is an abortionist. In the secular liberal asylum, the sins of abortionists must be covered up, just as the sins of the predatory sodomites among the clergy were covered up by our post-Conciliar "shepherds".

However, the news blackout is a blunt weapon and sometimes needs to be used more selectively. There is no blanket news blackout, for example, covering the recent tragic death of an Asian lady in Ireland following the Irish medical profession's refusal to abort her baby. This story is being milked by the media notwithstanding the fact that there is not a scrap of evidence to suggest that the refusal had any relevance to her tragic death. The implication is that Ireland would be a safer place for women if it legalised abortion.

However, a more selective news blackout is in place around this story to conceal the fact that the maternal mortality rate in the UK (where abortion is not only legal but industrialised) is twice that of the Republic. Indeed, a pregnant woman, given the choice, would be well advised to have her baby in Ireland, given that she has double the chance of dying in childbirth in the UK. Further, Ireland's infant mortality rate, according to the latest 2010 figures, is nearly 20% lower than the UK's, so, not only she but also her child would have a better chance of survival.

Secular liberals, in their diabolical crusade to advance their culture of death, are clearly more than happy to climb over the corpses of dead women to get to the promised land.

Britain, the New Soviet (There appears to be quite a lot of us "nutcases")

By: Graham Moorhouse (Inspired and adapted from an article by Piers Paul Read in the Catholic Herald)

Back in May there was an exchange on Newsnight between Jeremy Paxman (a man whose liberal reflexes are so predictable he makes a Pavlov dog appear utterly fickle) and Nigel Farage.  This exchange underscored the media’s intolerance of anyone who dissents from the party line.

Farage was defending his party, UKIP, from the charge that it was filled with “nutcases”, a collective noun that in liberal speak includes everyone who has not embraced all the latest secular liberal dogmas; indeed, to fall short of endorsing them with passion without the tiniest mental reservation would be sufficient to earn one this label.

The particular “nutcase” he had in mind was Roger Helmer who twelve years ago had said that some people find homosexuality “viscerally repulsive”: a statement of the bleeding obvious that was about as controversial as a declaration that grass is green.

Listening to this exchange one could not help but recall how the Soviet Union used to use a diagnosis of insanity (and “nutcase” presupposes that one is insane) to confine those who were brave enough to dissent from the party line to an asylum.  And listening to Farage’s wretched grovelling apologies for Helmer’s comments reminded one of the miserable confessions rung from accused during Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s and in China during the Cultural Revolution.

Doctrinaire liberal zealots now command the heights of our culture and their ideology of intolerance is now default mode in government, the media and academia.  The British Film Institute, which is responsible for investing public money in the film industry, for just one example, has declared that applicants must be able to “tick the gay, female and ethnic” boxes.  Ed Vaizey, minister for culture has praised this initiative.  The CEO of the British Film Institute has stated that “this is just the beginning.”  Yet again one is reminded of the Soviet Union, where the livelihood of artists, writers and film makers was dependent on them fawningly towing the party line. 

The aim of government, the media and academia now is to demonize the recalcitrant and brainwash the malleable young.  “A Labour government,” Yvette Cooper announced recently, “will introduce compulsory sex and relationship education into schools”.  This, she added, would empower our daughters, “and we need our sons growing up as powerful feminists too”.  The aim of modern education, as in the Soviet Union, is not to educate, but to produce cloned zealots who will slavishly parrot the party's dogmas.

In higher education this philosophy is promoted in gender studies, a creed described by one Polish bishop as an ideology worse than Nazism and Communism combined.  This statement was picked up by the Economists and used to imply that Poland had more than its fair share of nutcases.  The article acknowledged that the bishop had some impressive philosophical and theological qualifications – clearly a scholarly nutcase, but nutcase none the less.

It is rapidly becoming a crime to hurt the feeling of anyone the cultural elite have declared a victim group – even if what one says is patently true, as witness the grovelling of Farage on Newsnight.

For those who are still not totally sold out to the brainwashing of the secular liberal Left, there are two must reads.  Neither of these books brings religion into the equation, they adhere strictly to the scientifically demonstrable social consequences of undermining the traditional family.

The first is The SexChange Society by Melanie Phillips.  Its subtitle is Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male.  She lays bare that the denigration of men as husbands and fathers (as found in Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch) is now the default setting of government and academia: “it appears to have become perfectly acceptable to do without an identifiable father from conception onwards.”  

The second book is Marriage Files by the sociologist Patricia Morgan.  Both Philips and Morgan clearly demonstrate the all important role of the traditional nuclear family in nurturing the young and identifies those forces currently seeking to destroy it.  Both clearly show the suffering of children divided from one of their natural parents, usually the father, and the consequential harm down to society in terms of delinquency, depression, academic underachievement, poor employment prospects and failed relationships.  Morgan proves convincingly from studies in countries that have brought into the same-sex “marriage" canard, that David Cameron’s claim that it will strengthen the institution is not only baloney but baloney on stilts.

                

From the traditional Catholic perspective one should also point out that by confusing the roles of men and women, the Devil has an agenda that goes far beyond the misery and disorder resulting from the breakup of homes.  A loving father is the image repeated used by Jesus to convey the nature of an otherwise unknowable Creator.  Children raised by single mothers and same sex couples will find it difficult to envisage God and therefore to have a meaningful relationship with Him in their adult lives.

Would it not be tragically ironic if Nigel Farage, having spent the best years of his life admirably fighting to free us from an unelected Brussels bureaucracy, should then by sycophantically paying homage at the shrine of political correctness, play no small part in enslaving us to the ideology of an unelected intolerant cultural elite - the very same political classes who constructed the EU behemoth in the first place?  This fawning to the Zeitgeist could also prove politically very expensive given that polls have shown that three out of ten people who voted for Cameron at the last election, say they will not be doing so at the next - precisely because of his heavy-handed promotion of gay “marriage”.

There appears to be quite a lot of us "nutcases".

Medieval Torture and the Spanish Inquisition are the stuff of an Englishman’s nightmares

Anti-Catholicism is in our blood

The problem with discussing Catholicism with many native English-speakers is that they come to the table loaded down with so much baggage.  They have been formed by 400 years of anti-Catholic propaganda.  Consequently, their negative view of the Catholic religion is in the national subconscious, it is in our blood.  If a man actually believes at the level of his sub-conscious that a rosebush is a man-eating tiger, then he will jump and break out in a sweat of fear when he passes a rosebush regardless of the fact that at the level of conscious thought he knows that this is absurd.

Catholic Inquisition

One can illustrate the point that we are making by invoking the Inquisition.  The very word will conjure up nightmare visions of some poor Protestant being racked for the good of his soul, while a sadistic hooded monk looks on gloating.  The fact is that the word “Inquisition” simply means “Inquiry”.  And there have been scores of inquisitions throughout the Church’s history.  When the popes ruled half of Italy, it was the name given to the Church’s legal system.  This was so benign in comparison with the secular legal systems of the time that in the areas where there was dual jurisdiction, accused would seek to be tried by the Inquisition as opposed to the secular courts.

The Spanish Inquisition (1478 to 1808) is the one people usually mean when they talk about the Inquisition.  This Inquisition had the misfortune to be operating at a time when the Spanish were our mortal enemies.  To understand the Spanish inquisition one should look at France in 1945.  At the end of the last war, members of the French resistance and those who, now the occupation was over, claimed to have been active members of the French resistance, were handing out summary justice without trial to people accused of having been quislings and collaborators.  Charles De Gaulle, the post-war President of the Provisional Government of France, cracked down hard on this lawlessness and ensured that if any Frenchman were to be punished for collaborating with the occupying power it should be after a fair trial and a proper legal process. 

The Spanish Queen, Isabelle, and her consort, Ferdinand, were in a not dissimilar situation.  They had just ended 700 years of occupation of their country by the Moors.  In the civil unrest following the war, the Spanish crown began the Inquisition hoping that religious unity would foster political unity.  By the standards of the time, the Inquisition was very enlightened.  One may also point out that while the Church was heavily implicated in the Spanish Inquisition, it was a secular not a Church inquiry. 

Most of the penalties handed down were spiritual, rather than physical.  Its severest sentences were reserved for people who bore false witness against others.  As for torture, in an age when the secular powers (including England) used torture routinely, the Inquisition was restricted by its rules to using it rarely and in very limited circumstances.  And as for persecuting Protestants, not one Protestant was ever arrested by the Inquisition, let alone tried - for one very simple reason, the Inquisition regarded non-Catholics as outside its jurisdiction. 

Its judicial procedures were far ahead of their time.  Such things as the need for witnesses, the rights of the accused to question and challenge their accusers and the right of appeal where all laid down.  Inquisitors did not have to be clerics, but they did have to be qualified lawyers.  As for the death penalty, it has been notoriously difficult to reach a consensus on the numbers involved, but the highest number supported by serious historians is in the order of 3000 to 5000 over the entire 330 years of its operation. 

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