With Joe Stanley and a bloke in a wig and floral frock reading the bidding prayers at Vincent Nichols’ scheduled Masses for militant gays at Warwick Street, most Catholics can but weep for the once great English province of the Roman Catholic Church.

If a hairy bloke in a wig and floral frock reading the bidding prayers at Mass, cheered on by a dissident cleric, strikes you as a fantasy from Hell, then you probably haven’t viewed the new video on YouTube of the special Masses at Warwick Street for militant homosexuals and a supporting cast of dissident clerics organised by Archbishop Vincent Never-Answer-a Straight-Question Nichols.  Click here to view video now. 

Any genuine Catholics would of course be sick to the stomach to see such sacrilege regularly taking place with the blessing of the English episcopacy.  Nevertheless, were it not for the sacrilege, it would be hilariously funny.  Indeed, Monty Python would be hard pressed to come up with anything quite so surreal - our Archbishop has clearly missed his vocation.

How’s this for surreal: we have a bidding prayer praising God for 97-varieties of wall-to-wall “life giving” sex, which is then followed by a bidding prayers for all their friends who have been killed by that same “life giving” sex.  One honestly couldn’t make it up.

Then there is Joe Stanley’s comical flogging-to-death of the word “integrity”.  However, their litany of “joyful and life giving” sexual disorders (“orientations” they would no doubt prefer to call them) which they claim “embraces the fullness of human diversity and excludes no one,” in reality excludes a whole raft of sexual “orientation” - sadomasochism and paedophilia, to name but two of scores? 

The latter omission is especially odd given that the poster boy of the gay rights movement, the Teflon-coated Peter Tatchell, has assured us that, “Several of my friends – gay and straight, male and female – had sex with adults from the ages of nine to 13.  None feel they were abused.  All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy …”  

So why such an exclusive litany that clearly doesn’t even begin to “embrace the fullness of human diversity and exclude no one”? - what’s happened to all that “integrity” you keep banging on about Joe? 

CATECHISING CHRIST’S LITTLE ONES

“This prostitution of Catholic education by our bishops to serve their private Modernist agendas and the awful scandal of clerical sexual abuse of minors are flip sides of the same coin, for both are rooted in the willingness to abuse clerical and episcopal power for one’s personal ends.”

By: Don McGovern

It is absolutely critical that the Catholic remnant in this country assumes a pro-active responsibility for catechising their children and there grandchildren if the faith is to survive.  If you are not prepared to equip yourself for this sacred task, then you can kiss goodbye to any chance of them growing up Catholic and a meaningful Catholic presence on British soil.

One of the fundamental errors that most Catholics make is to equate Modernism with liberal Catholicism.  This is an error equivalent to calling a Communist a liberal Conservative.   A Modernist is not a liberal Catholic, he is simply not a Catholic; he is in fact an anti-Catholic!  How else can we accurately describe someone who dissents from much, if not almost all, that constitutes one a Catholic?

A Modernist has much in common with the sixteenth century reformers, but where he differs markedly is in his methodology.  Whereas Luther nailed his dissent to the church door at Wittenberg and shouted his foul mouthed defiance from the rooftop; the Modernists prefers to conceal his dissent and work away to destroy the Church termite-like from within.  There will be no loud, coarse mouthed defiance from him; the last thing he wishes to do is draw attention to himself.  Like the wolf in the story of Little Red Riding Hood, all is disarming smiles, effusive politeness and inflated bonhomie; his handshake is always warm, if a little unpleasantly limp and moist. 

When it suits his purpose he will claim that he is recovering some long lost tradition from the early Church, when he wishes to kill-off some tradition retained from the early Church he will tell us that it is necessary to change for pastoral reasons to better address the needs of modern man.  Thus, he puts himself in a heads I win, tails you loose situation, all the while smiling you to death.

Just one example, Modernists are uncomfortable with the doctrine of transubstantiation.  His attack is multi-faceted: he will encourage us to stand and receive communion in the hand; he will find pseudo-reasons for encouraging every Tom, Dick and Harriett to distribute Holy Communion and invade the sanctuary, and the Tabernacle will be removed from its place of prominence on the high altar.  Most cunning of all, he invents numerous new “Real Presences”, on the premise that we will finish up with so many “Real Presences” that the real Real Presence won’t seem so special anymore.  Thus we have the “Real Presence” in the scripture readings, the “Real Presence” in the priest (particularly mendacious that one, because he doesn’t actually believe in priests), the “Real Presence” in the assembled people, etc. 

The scriptures record that even when Christ was on earth, many disciples deserted Jesus because they rejected the doctrine of the Real Presence (John 6, 60-72).  But whereas the Bible records that these disciples walked sadly away from Jesus, the Modernist prefer to stay and work to undermine the doctrine itself from within the Church.

Another example: the Church solemnly teaches that she does not have the power to ordain women.  The Modernist believes she does.  More accurately, he doesn’t believe that priest have sacerdotal powers (that smacks to much of magic to him - like Christ’s miracles, that are similarly rejected), he believe that anyone, including women, can be appointed by the community to preside.  So you find modernist like Bishop Malcolm Mahon taking two Anglican priestesses with him on his diocesan pilgrimage to Lourdes and encouraging the faithful to attend their invalid (and hence blasphemous) masses.  Thus he replaces our Catholic religion with his Modernist religion without uttering a single self-incriminating syllable.

The Modernist is always keen on ecumenism, but only if it involves mixed bathing with other Modernists.  Thus he will queue up to wine and dine the “Archbishop” of Canterbury, and not tire of publicly slapping himself on the back for being the fine, liberal, progressive fellow he perceives himself to be for having done so.  However, he will rent his garments at the mere suggestion that it might be nice to invite an SSPX priest round for coffee - he’d much prefer to sup with the local mullah or a liberal rabbi to that.  Even brother bishops who evidence signs of genuine Catholicism are rapidly bundled off to outer darkness: witness Bishop O'Donoghue, who discovered his Catholic backbone shortly before retiring and became an instant leper, never again to be spoken off in polite conversation.

Because Modernists are anti-Catholics, nowhere has there termite like destruction been more ghastly and evil than in our schools.  They have introduced religious text books that deliberately set out to destroy our glorious faith and enforce their agenda with a degree of ruthlessness that makes the German Nazis look positively incompetent.  These text books make no mention that the children have a soul to save, no mention of the foundational doctrine of Original Sin, or a host of other Catholic doctrines that are de fide.  A teacher can have his or her career ruined by merely seeking to teach one doctrine of the Catholic faith - and many have.  The story of the persecution of good Catholic teachers by the bishops’ Modernism enforcement tsars would fill many volumes.

This prostitution of Catholic education by our bishops to serve their private Modernist agendas and the awful scandal of clerical sexual abuse of minors are flip sides of the same coin, for both are rooted in the willingness to abuse clerical and episcopal power for one’s personal ends.

So what is a genuine Catholic to do in the presence situation?  First up, whatever you do, with a few glorious exceptions, do not entrust the faith of your child to a Catholic school.  Having been force fed Modernists garbage for ten years or more, well over ninety per cent of children who attend our schools lapse, and rightly so.  Indeed, that is not the end of this miserable storey, most of them do not merely lapse, they become actively hostile to the faith!  And don’t expect any empathy from your Modernist bishop; as far as he is concerned this is a success story, for there is nothing he wants more than that our children should share his own hostility to the faith of our forefathers.

Have you not noticed dear betrayed parents that none of our good young priests has ever been near a Catholic school, had he done so, both his faith and his vocation would have been destroyed long before he was anywhere near a seminary.  Bishop Morris, the outspoken Modernist who has recently been sacked by the Pope from an Australian see had not had a single vocation in his diocese for ten years, but that’s real success from the Modernist point of view.  They do not believe in a sacerdotal priesthood, so why on earth would anyone imagine that a dearth of vocations would worry them?

Having removed your child or grandchild from the present corrupt Catholic school system, you need to send him to a good state school and catechise him yourself, or better still home-school him, but we have to be realistic and accept that not all have the time, circumstances or the ability to homeschool well.

Two of our bishops have recently broken ranks and very publicly announced that they are going to phrase out the toxic Modernist programs of their brother bishops from their schools and use text books that are a little more Catholic.  One or two others have also done so, but with less fanfare.  These bishops will need the prayers and militant support of all genuine Catholics if they are to succeed, for they will face absolutely massive opposition, not just from other bishops but also from within their own education bureaucracies.

Regrettably, while they plan to replace the Modernist’s poison with something a little recognisably more Catholic, what they are planning to use is far from perfect.  It is undoubtedly better than Here I Am and Icons, but that is saying little; it would be near impossible to be worse. 

This could be the last chance Catholics will have for a generation to have their children and grandchildren taught the faith properly.  It is absolutely critical that we pray, fast and become militantly active in securing this by insisting on genuinely good Catholic syllabuses.

The best of those that Pro Ecclesia has evaluated is the American Faith and Life Series available from Ignatius Press.  One of the problems in teaching the faith these days is that we have two generations of teaches who are as clueless as their pupils, having themselves been through Catholic schools and been brainwashed by the Modernists.  Faith and Life could almost be described as an idiot’s guide to teaching the faith: it is so excellently and comprehensively structured that one could place it in the hands of an atheist or Muslin, and armed with it they would be able to teach the Catholic faith, and teach it very well indeed.

And Catholic parent or grandparent reading this who wants to catechise there children or grandchildren could not do better than purchase this series.  Ignatius Press can be found at: http://www.ignatius.com

WELCOMING ANGLICAN CONVERTS

One of the most surprising and welcome recent items of news is Pope Benedict’s generous provision for Anglican converts seeking to escape the Noddy-land of Anglicanism. This will mean that groups of ex-Anglicans will be able to worship together free from bullying by local bishops who dislike the newcomers' conservatism, and who prefer the un-biblical "dialoguing" with heretics than saving their souls by welcoming them home into the one true Church.

The Pope appears to have done this without consulting either the Anglican or Europe’s modernist establishments. That alone is a reason for cheering: at last a post-Conciliar pope who acts as if he actually believes he has the Power of the Keys, rather than like the rather timid chairman of a board of governors. It must be good because Hans Küng doesn’t like it, and the Tablet is wailing loudly that the Pope should have consulted. There is a complete lack of integrity here of course, the only reason they want him to consult is because (had he restricted his consultation to Tablet readers) they believe he would have come to a different decision. The real reason that they are now consuming record quantities of Prozac is that they are deeply depressed at the prospect of a large influx of orthodox convert clergy.

Nevertheless, understandable traditionalist elation apart, there are good reasons for some caution. The document has not yet been published but one would be very concerned if it weakened the Church's commitment to clerical celibacy beyond the prudent limited concessions already made to earlier convert Anglican clergy. A more serious concern: given the English Church’s manifest complete lack of integrity in the reception of individual "converts" since the Council (the reception of Tony Blair, a man whose convictions are manifestly about as Catholic as my gatepost’s, illustrates my point) what honesty can we expect when receiving large numbers on mass?

There is only one reason to become a Catholic: the conviction that the Catholic Church is the one true Church founded by Christ, outside of which there is no salvation. It is not even sufficient to merely agree with the Church, one must submit one's intellect to her reality, rather in the manner that one submits without quibble to the proposition that 2+2 equals four. However, I fear that many of these Anglicans will be coming into the Church with the mindset of a man who has decided to switch to shopping at Sainsbury's rather than Morrison’s because he prefers the fish counter

A JEW CHAMPIONS CHRISTIANS’ RIGHTS

Somewhere at the back of my mind I seem to remember that the Jews have an avenue in Jerusalem, or maybe Tel Aviv, in which the trees have been planted to commemorating the lives of “Righteous Gentile.” Each tree has a plaque bearing the heading “Righteous among the nations,” with a synopsis of the life of the individual celebrated. Aside, I also believe that one tree, shortly after WWII, was planted to commemorate the life of Pope Pius XII, in recognition of the 860,000 Jews he saved from Hitler’s gas chambers - more incidentally than all the governments of the world, and charities and noble individuals, such as Schindler (just over a 1000) added together! Well if Vatican City one day has a similar avenue celebrating the lives of non-Catholics who have made outstanding contributions to the Church, I should like to pay for a tree and a plaque for one Ezra Levant. Who is Ezra Levant many readers may well ask?

Ezra Levant is a Canadian Jew who, unlike our post-Conciliar bishops who tiptoe about in these situations like timid school girls, has taken on the Canadian government’s “Human Rights” Commission head on. Levant, in spite of being a Jew, had realized, what should be self-evident to any Catholic, that the bludgeoning international “Human Rights” industry, backed as it is by militant secularists, radical feminists, Muslim activists and the homosexual collective, is little more than a front for anti-Christian bigots in general and anti-Catholic bigots in particular. This is why the ADL, another “Human Rights” scam can turn up in busloads to express their outrage when some callow spotty teenage thug daubs a swastika on a synagogue, yet are nowhere to be seen when rent-a-mob from the homosexual collective trashes a church.

Ezra, clearly no mincing shrinking violet, set out deliberately, not to politely dialogue with the Canadian Human Rights Commission, à la post-Conciliar Church, but by a mixture of wits, courage and Jewish chutzpah, to blow a bloody great hole below their water line. And in this he has succeeded spectacularly! First he published on November 20, 2008 on his blog, ezralevant.com, the following:

“Come on people, wake up! It's time to stand together and take whatever steps are necessary to reverse the wickedness that our lethargy has authorized to spawn. Where homosexuality flourishes, all manner of wickedness abounds.

Don't allow yourself to be deceived any longer. These activists are not morally upright citizens, concerned about the best interests of our society. They are perverse, self-centered and morally depraved individuals who are spreading their psychological disease into every area of our lives. Homosexual rights activists and those that defend them, are just as immoral as the pedophiles, drug dealers and pimps that plague our communities.”

This resulted predictable in a gay activist, probable a cat’s-paw from the homosexual collective, lodging a complaint with the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission. However, on November 17, 2008, Mr Levant received a letter from Lucie Viellette, Secretary to the Commission, stating that the complaint filed against him had been dismissed on the grounds that he had published the article in question “with the goal of furthering a public debate on freedom of expression.”

You may well ask what is so significant about all this. Well, here comes the punch line: this was a perfect scientific experiment: you see, Mr Levant had republished, word for word, the very same "hate speech" that a Protestant Minister, one Stephen Boissoin, had published six years earlier. However, the Rev. Boissoin was found by both the Alberta Human Rights Commission and the Canadian Human Rights Commission to be guilty of hate speech. He was found guilty of violating Section 13 of the Human Rights, Citizenship and Multiculturalism Act. He received from the Alberta Human Rights Commission a hefty fine and a lifetime ban on preaching sermons that criticize homosexuality and a lifetime ban on private communications which are critical of homosexuality.

Mr Levant had merely re-published Boissoin’s words, attributing them to himself and then sat back and waited for the inevitable “human rights violation” complaint to be lodged against him. It was - but, unlike Rev. Biossoin, he was acquitted. Mr. Levant response: “I published the exact same words Rev. Boissoin used. I published the words in the exact same jurisdiction that Rev. Boissoin did – in Alberta. I published them in contravention of the exact same laws that Rev. Boissoin did – the Stalinist human rights acts. And a complaint was brought against me, just as it was against Rev. Boissoin. Only one thing was different. Rev. Boissoin is Christian. I'm Jewish.”

Not content to leave it there Ezra Levant re-published the infamous cartoons of Mohammed - provoking a predictable complaint from two Islamic fundamentalist. This time, the Commission, having been caught with their trousers down once, felt obliged to call Mr Levant to account. Click on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzVJTHIvqw8; you will enjoy an object lesson on how to deal with secular bullies. One almost feels sorry for the “human rights” lawyer as she visible wilts before Mr Levant’s verbal onslaught - almost, but not quite.

"FIRE IN THE DARKNESS THAT COVERS MODERN EUROPE”

PÈLERINAGE DE PENTECÔTE
(29-30^th May to 1-2^nd June 2009)
“The Pentecost pilgrimages are the most important annual events happening anywhere in the world today.”

With acknowledgement to the Remnant

It begins on the day before Pentecost when thousands of traditional Catholics from every corner of the world join their French brothers and sisters at dawn beneath the spires of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Three days later it ends in the city of Chartres, as some fifteen thousand dust-covered traditionalists complete the challenging march and kiss the stones of the ancient Cathedral of Notre Dame de Chartres. Much of what happens in between defies description.

Yes, Europe is in the process of banishing the old Faith from her shores! She’s busy legalizing every conceivable human depravity, butchering her babies, euthanizing her elderly, destroying the Christian family and the sacrament of matrimony. And, yet, in the midst of all this putrefaction, over the hill comes a jubilant band of thousands upon thousands of Catholic pilgrims from every corner of the globe, marching six abreast, in a column that takes an hour and a half to pass any given point, announcing to the whole world that the old Faith is still alive and in rude and hearty good health.

For three days, even secular France cannot ignore this strange and wonderful pilgrim parade, flanked by countless priests in muddied cassocks and purple stoles, the all but forgotten keepers of Europe’s altars. Throngs of scouts lovingly carry statues of Our Lady on their shoulders; banners of the saints are raised high for all to see; pilgrims sing forgotten hymns, renew broken vows, and celebrate Mass in the Rite of their forefathers, saints and martyrs. The Pilgrimage to Chartres is fire in the darkness that covers modern Europe.

The total cost is £250 (£125 for children under 12). This includes Coach travel to France, two night's hotel (B&B) accommodation (one in Paris and one in Chartres), 2-nights tented accommodation, Pilgrimage Registration, pilgrimage booklet, 3-course meal with a quarter bottle of wine on Monday evening, a quartet of charming, erudite guides who will take you places you never knew you wanted to go and return by Coach Tuesday. It is the bargain of the millennium!

Plus, at no additional cost, spiritual direction and confessions on the hoof, as many rosaries as you can manage, every hymn you ever thought of singing, three magnificent traditional High Masses in breathtaking settings (the memories of which you will take to the grave), All-night Exposition, hearty French breakfast every morning, medical facilities, wake-up calls, plenty of bread and water rations, hearty evening soup, as much wine as you can carry (if you're quick), blisters, chilblains, shin splints, bruises, aching muscles, in short, an unrivalled opportunity for penance! - everything, in fact, for the right-thinking Catholic to achieve salvation. What more could one possibly ask?

Seventy miles may seem daunting, but that said, a nine year old boy and a priest in his eighties completed the march with the British contingent one year. And free transport is provided by gloating Frenchmen for Brits who fall by the way side.

For free information pack, contact: CHARTRES 2008
27 First Avenue, AMERSHAM, HP7 9BL
Tel: 01494-729-223 or Email: Chartres@duc-in-altum.co.uk

GOD BLESS OUR POPE: The contested excommunications are finally lifted

with acknowledgment to Gerald Warner

Benedict XVI grows in stature by the minute. To the achievement of the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, he has now added the sensible and overdue lifting of the always contested excommunications imposed on the four bishops of the SSPX. Although there was always widespread skepticism about the validity of those censures, their lifting removes a major roadblock to the restoration of the Church.

In the children’s animated cartoon, the Ice Age, a wooly mammoth, one of the principle characters, believes that he is the last of his species. However, half way through the story he is dlighted to find a female wooly mammoth to which he immediately takes a shine. Unfortunately, the female wooly mammoth his suffering from the delusion that she is a sloth and spends her time hanging upside down from trees, with disastrous consequences! Happily, with the aid of friends, she is persuaded over time that she is a mammoth. The final eureka moment comes when she realizes that her shadow is similar to that of the male wooly mammoth and they both live happy ever after.

What I found fascinating was watching the reaction of my grandchildren. They were fidgeting with frustration with this animal’s delusion. When the mist cleared and she accepted her “God given” nature, the collective relief was palpable.

The Church is the Ark of Salvation, the Body of Christ, the one true faith, the one true Church, founded by the God who threw the stars into their orbits and knit you and me together in our mother’s wombs; indeed, she is the very reason for the existence of the universe.

Yet for the past forty years, the Bride of Christ has been behaving as if there was no such thing as truth and error, right and falsehood, she was merely another religious tradition or one church among many. This widespread delusion and apparent insanity of our mother caused many orthodox Catholics to squirm with frustration. The lifting of the excommunications suggest that our mother is recovering from these delusions and her eureka moment may not now be far away. Then we shall all be able to breathe an enormous sigh of collective relief.

Not everyone will be dancing in the street of course: the Staff of the Tablet will probably need counseling - poor dears. Anything that moves the malign spirit of those who, without any conscious irony denominate themselves "liberals" to misery has to be great news.

Recently, a handful of Catholics, more noted for their mad optimism than solid faith, have been striving to persuade us to throw a party to "celebrate" the 50th anniversary of the calling of the Second Vatican Council. What sort of Catholic, one wonders, wants to celebrate the fact that in England and Wales in 1964, at the end of the Council, there were 137,673 Catholic baptisms; in 2003 the figure was 56,180. In 1964 there were 45,592 Catholic marriages, in 2003 there were 11,013. Mass attendance has fallen by 40 per cent. In "Holy" Ireland, only 48 per cent of so-called Catholics go to Mass. In France, there were 35,000 priests in 1980; today there are fewer than 19,000.

In the United States, in 1965, there were 1,575 priestly ordinations; in 2002 there were 450 - a 350 per cent decline. In 1965 there were 49,000 seminarians, in 2002 just 4,700. Today 15 per cent of US parishes are without priests. Only 25 per cent of America's nominal Catholics attend Mass. Worse still is the erosion of faith among those who ludicrously describe themselves as Catholics. Among US Catholics aged 18-44 (the children of Vatican II) as many as 70 per cent say they believe the Eucharist is merely a "symbolic reminder" of Christ.

To call this unparalleled implosion of the Church a "renewal" is a sign that one is as close to being a raving lunatic as one can get short of eating one’s own shirt - and to attribute it to the Holy Ghost is blasphemous.

The Catholic Church is in the same position as an alcoholic: until she admits that she has a problem, no cure is possible. The lifting of the contested excommunications is a sign that the Church is returning to mental health. Hopefully once the SSPX is back fully in the fold, they will be able to help prod our mother towards that final eureka moment when she once again fully and openly acknowledges and confesses her own God given nature.

Further down the road, another exciting prospect is that, once the final agreement is worked out, it opens the door to the canonization of Archbishop Lefebvre; that sadly I will not live to see.

In the meantime we can all look forward to sitting back and enjoying some innocent fun reading all the revisionist history being written by those who have been calumniating the SSPX for 20 years. Funniest of all will be the mental gymnastics of the post-Conciliar popeologist. These are the folk who if the Pope was to declare the sky green, would be peddling round excitedly telling everyone what a delightful shade of green the sky actually is.

Dialogued is Dead RIP

Abridged and adapted from an article in the Remnant

A positive consequence of the ruckus over the Good Friday prayer is that “inter-faith dialogue” was exposed for the nonsense it always was. The instant Peter brought Christ the Saviour of all men back to the table, his “dialogue partners” began picking up their toys and didn’t want to play anymore.

For forty years they’ve been jabbering about this ill-defined "dialogue" and yet things have only gone from bad to worse. After all, fundamental religious differences aren't exactly rocket science: he says Christ was merely a rabbi; she says Christ was only a prophet; they say He is whatever they want Him to be; and we say He is the Son of God. How is a lot of inter-faith blathering going to cause any of these contradictory beliefs to suddenly gel - unless, of course, “divisive” dogma is knocked for six? And once that happens, how is a “better understanding” of anything ever going to be achieved? But such blatantly obvious contradictions don’t register with the enlightened dialoguers. They remind one of those lunatic sex “educators” in public schools calling for still more sex education after veritable epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases began spreading among their robustly sex-educated teenagers. “If it doesn’t work, don’t fix it!” seems to be their motto. It would appear that ecumeniacs and sex “educators” have much in common. Bottom line: Inter-faith dialogue hasn’t worked. Tensions between the religions are getting worse every day. Why? Because inter-faith dialogue doesn’t serve truth - it buries it!

Dialogue is premised on a certain unspoken willingness on the part of the Catholic Church to downplay her own doctrine, if not actually renege on her claim to be the one true Church. If there was ever any doubt of this before, there isn’t now. The Pope revised one prayer to be said once per annum by a minority of Catholics and what did his “dialogue partners” do? As the Bible puts it, they rent their garments. Why? - because the fundamental rule of dialogue was violated by nine words written by the pope: “acknowledge Jesus Christ as the Saviour of all mankind.” Anathema! He has blasphemed! Dialogue be damned!

Clearly, this sort of dialogue isn’t really about achieving a "better understanding” of anything; our “dialogue partners” understand perfectly well the theological differences. What they evidently want is for the Church to modify her teachings to say that Christ is Saviour but only for Catholics and those who believe in Him - not for all men! Evidently, this has been the ultimate goal of inter-faith dialogue from the start.

Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told Reuters Television she couldn’t imagine that this “German pope could impose such phrases upon his church.” Impose what phrases? That Christ is the Saviour of all men? Yes, who does he think he is - the POPE? No wonder Alan Brill of Seton Hall concluded that the Pope’s prayer marks “the end of the era of John Paul II, the era of reconciliation.”

The “party pooper” here is Christ, of course. If Benedict were to hold up Mickey Mouse as the Saviour of all men, the dialoguers would no doubt hail his intellectual courage and continue doing whatever it is that dialoguers do. Which raises an interesting question: What exactly do dialoguers do? What is their point and purpose? How often do they dialogue? Can one watch them dialogue on YouTube? What was going on behind dialogue doors all these years to leave poor Mrs. Knobloch convinced that Popes are no longer permitted to pray that all men might acknowledge Christ as saviour? Obviously, they weren’t talking about Him in there. One word about the Saviour and the dialoguers stormed off in a huff. “The inter-religious dialogue has suffered an enormous setback,” Mrs. Knobloch sobbed to Reuters, “because of this version [of the prayer] and I assume that one will find a way very soon to continue the dialogue, but at the moment I don’t see it happening.”

Does Mrs. Knobloch actually imagine anyone in the real world gives two hoots about dialogue. What has inter-faith dialogue done for you lately? As the world plunges into universal warfare (without precedent in human history!), terrorism and economic collapse, is there a single shred of evidence that inter-faith dialogue has been anything other than part of the problem? Cardinal Kasper has devoted his life to it, Mrs. Knobloch thinks it's a bomb, but what does it mean for folks with real jobs, mortgages and mouths to feed? I can’t imagine!

Has there ever been a clearer indication of the sheer pointlessness of “dialogue” than that the Catholic Church is now expected to set aside her foundational teachings on salvation even in her own prayers and in her own backyard, in order to sit across the table from Mrs. Knobloch and talk about — WHAT? What in thunder does this woman want to talk about?

“As long as the Catholic Church, that is to say Pope Benedict, does not return to the previous wording, I assume that there will not be any further dialogue in the form that we were able to have in the past.”

Yes, and what a shame, have a nice day!

In the meantime, the Muslim convert to the Catholic Faith who was baptized by Pope Benedict on Holy Saturday, made a comment that could formulate the caption beneath this whole tragic picture. Shortly after Magdi Allam, 55, had been baptized into Christianity – taking the name “Christian” as his baptismal name – he asserted that the “Catholic Church has been too prudent about conversions of Muslims, abstaining from proselytizing in majority Muslim countries and keeping quiet about the reality of converts in Christian countries”.

Welcome to the Titanic, Magdi! The Catholic Church since Vatican II has been “too prudent” about most things, especially teaching her own doctrines to her own children. Want proof? Ask a Catholic sixth grader what the hypostatic union is, or the beatific vision, or even the Fourth Glorious Mystery. Better yet, ask him to give you the Ten Commandments. If you’re lucky, he may hand you a DVD of a Charlton Heston film.

Our best bet is that the sheer folly of inter-faith dialogue will be fully recognized by the hierarchy before any more of the Catholic Church is swallowed up whole by the new order of the age. Pope Benedict speaks often and eloquently about reclaiming Catholic identity - what better way to do just that than to suspend this exercise in futility and get back to the business of preaching the Catholic Faith, whole and entire, to all the nations of the world.

We would, therefore, like to make common cause with our Jewish brothers who in recent weeks have suspended dialogue with the Catholic Church over the revised Good Friday prayer. This, it seems to us, is wise beyond words and we urge our Catholic leaders to support this Jewish initiative without further delay.