A superb take on the increasingly shambolic state of the Church under Pope Humble the 1st, the Merciful.

Catholics really have their backs to the wall at the moment.  Murdered and driven from our homes abroad by Muslims; persecuted at home by secularists and homofascists; our Church rotting from the inside by Modernists, radical feminist, predatory sodomites and other assorted dissenters, add to this we have Pope Humble the 1st, the Merciful, treating the Church like his personal fiefdom and all the barmy news coming out of Rome.


Listen to Michael Matt's (the editor of the Remnant) superb take on the increasingly shambolic state of the Church under Pope Humble the 1st, the Merciful.

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.

Putin's Black Eye

The modernists is a duplicitous sort who for the most part prefers life in the shadows. However, his vanity is such, that every so often he cannot resist the urge to break cover and do a little what-a-clever-fellow-am-I dance before slinking back into the shadows.

I not too certain why the above thoughts sprang to mind while reading a letter from one Fr Julian Shurgold (I believe, the parish priest of Holy Family, Sutton, Surrey) in the Catholic Herald (23/05/2014) concerning the Eurovision "song" contest:

" ... I'm certain Conchita got votes solely because she [SIC] was a bearded drag queen. Yet her victory was a well deserved black eye for Putin, certain members of the Russian Orthodox Church and other vile, bullying Russian homophobes. Apparently many leading Russians were seriously upset by Conchita. Well, it all goes to show that there may be justice in the world after all!"

It must come as an enormous consolation to the faithful to find that their clergy have the sort of scintillating minds that enables them to put together such brilliant and incisive letter at the drop of a hat. Nevertheless, whilst I'm no bag carrier for Putin, he doesn't actually strike me as the sort of man who would be throwing in the towel on account of a black eye ... or two for that matter.

However, correct me if I'm wrong, but all that Putin has done on the homosexual front is to outlaw homosexuals promoting their lifestyle (more accurately "death style") to minors. This is analogous to the British government criminalising the promotion of smoking to minors. And given that the average homosexual dies considerably younger than your average chain-smoker, it would seem neither an entirely irrational measure nor an entirely uncaring one.

Indeed, given the number of young people whose lives have been appallingly blighted by the sexual abuse of some Catholic clergy, and given the fact that over ninety percent of the victims of this abuse have been adolescent boys, it would seem a shame that the popes have not taken a leaf out of Putin's book and done more to clip the wings of the predatory sodomites among the clergy and prelates - ten's of thousands of young people would been spared unspeakable suffering had the popes had the Christian decency and courage to have done so.

Instead, the laity have had to sit back and watch popes like the late "Saint" JP2 the "Great" rewarding the likes of Cardinal Law, a depraved serial protector of rapacious sodomites among the clergy, with plum jobs - all wages paid of course from the widow's mite.

I suspect what really pisses father off is the fact that the Russian appear not to have brought the propaganda lie, which is churned out ad nauseum by the militant homofascist collective, and the godless media, to the effect that homosexuals are born that way . There is nothing quite so guaranteed to have a liberal, lefty, Modernist (its all the same) spitting blood than a refusal to be buy their propaganda - they seem to take it as very personal.