FROM THE CATHOLIC BISHOPS CONFERENCE, FEMINISM AND THE CATHOLIC PRESS - LIBERA NOS, DÓMINE

Someone by the name of Anita de Lacey wrote to the Catholic Herald last November bewailing the fact that the Nicene Creed states “For us men”, as it appeared to her, or so she avers, that women have been excluded!

Man-eating (sorry -
person-eating) shark

Someone once wrote that the oddest thing about Hitler was not that he was mad, yet millions followed him, but that he was obviously mad and yet still millions followed him.  Similarly, what strikes me about such letters, is not that they are crackpot (in a world of seven billion, we must expect that a few will write daft letters) but that they are so obviously crackpot, and yet the Catholic Press still publishes them!

Given the obvious cerebrally challenged status of most of our post-Conciliar English bishops, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that some of them have flirted with this nonsense.  Notably, David Konstant held up the publication of the Catechisms of the Catholic Church while he attempted to rewrite it in Fem-speak.  He would have had Our Lord saying “People do not live by bread alone,” - presumably because he believed that women reading “Man does not live by bread alone,” might labour under the delusion that women could - which suggest that the bishop didn’t have much respect for the intelligence of most women (to learn more, follow this link: HERE).  Unusually, on this occasion, mercifully Rome came to the rescue of England’s long suffering Catholic remnant.

I suggest that the day when Ms de Lacey is torn to shreds after she leaps into shark infested water because she didn’t realise that women were on the menu of man-eating sharks, will be soon enough to start worrying about this sort of patent drivel.

Contrary to what our political masters would have us believe, the current recession, kick started in the US, has nothing to do with capitalism or the free market, and everything to do with governments and government behemoth like Fannie May.

During a family get-together over Christmas, the conversation among the men inevitably got round to the current economic meltdown.  Sooner or later, and sadly just as inevitably, someone trotted out the cliché, "laissez-faire capitalism doesn't work".

My old heart sinks when ever I hear my own flesh and blood mindlessly trotting out these old chestnuts as if they were revealed dogma.  There is admittedly a superficial truth in this slogan; but it’d rather like announcing that marriage doesn't work and then pointing to Fred West's basement as proof of your contention - all that is being demonstrated is that in a fallen world, nothing is perfect.

In the culture of the North Atlantic alliance most have had their compasses confiscated and thus are like walking iPods, and the educational, political and media élite can write on them any tune they want.  Thus they engineer consent to their chosen ideologies and outlaw ideas that they do not currently favour.  They persuade millions that their masters’ ideas and beliefs are their own.  It is depressing to realise that your offspring, whom you carefully raised to be independent thinkers, have morphed into walking compendiums of received opinion.  The problem with “received opinion” - like its smug cousin “conventional wisdom” - is that it's not really opinion at all, but merely the safe adoption or whatever is fashionable and trendy.  There was more independent thought in Spain at the height of the Spanish Inquisition than there is today in Britain under the jackboots of our secular left thought police.

“Conventional wisdom” and “received opinion” would have us believe that the current economic meltdown had something to do with the failure of free markets and capitalism, or a lack of adequate regulation, bankers’ greed, etc.  Whilst the greed of bankers may be repugnant, it is as relevant to the current economic meltdown as my gate post is to the price of fish.

The simple truth is that our current mess has absolutely nothing to do with the market, and everything to do with political meddling in the market driven by left-wing interventionist ideologues.  It is important to note that this secular left mindset is now shared even by those who present themselves as conservatives: George Bush and David Cameron being obvious examples.

There are in fact five culprits who should be in the dock for the current economic mess: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which at one point were underwriting no less than seventy-five per cent of all US mortgages!), the Community Reinvestment Act and affirmative action in lending, the US government's artificial stimulus to speculation, the "pro-ownership" tax code and the Federal Reserve and its artificially cheap credit.  Not one of these guilty parties has the slightest thing to do with the free market: they all arise from government policies driven by the left’s interventionist creed, i.e. the belief that laissez-faire capitalism doesn't work.

Let's take a closer look at the first defendants; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, neither of which were constructions of the free market.  They are both government leviathan, capitalised and financed by eye watering sums of taxpayers’ money and that phony cash that the Fed routinely magics out of thin air.

They spent their ill-gotten gains buying up mortgages from banks and financial institutions.  This had a number of entirely predictable results: 1) banks now had virtually unlimited sums to invest in the housing market, sum that go vastly beyond what a free market would devote to that area of the economy; 2) banks are artificially shielded from the normal risk of a free market and thus take risk that they would not have done in a free market; 3) because so much money is slopping about in the housing market, house prices are artificially inflated and eventually shoot through the roof.

As a result of secular left government policies, we now have vast sums of money being loaned to the sort of people the sane would be reluctant to loan a fiver to, in order to encourage them to buy vastly overpriced real estate!  But Fannie and Freddie had not finished: they were then trying to cover their butts by parcelling up the doggy mortgages they had both created and purchased with taxpayers’ money and sold them on as equally doggy investments.  And when the bobble finally burst, as anyone who was not a complete economic dunce would have foreseen, the politicians whose meddling in the free market caused the mess in the first place are now running around telling us that the free market doesn’t work, and needs yet more regulation!

Only around five US senators had enough economic savoir-faire to foresee that this meddling would end in tears.  Of particular note is Senator Ron Paul (one of the front runners for the Republican nomination); five years before the bubble burst, Senator Ron Paul had denounced the whole scheme as nothing more than a giant taxpayer funded Ponzi scam.

Once the bubble burst, banks and financial institutions of course rapidly returned to a more prudent and cautious loan policy, a policy that had served the market well for decades, if not centuries.  What do our politicians do?  Call for the banks to return to the sort of reckless lending that had got us in the mess in the first place!  So the current crisis, having been caused by excessive and imprudent lending, is now going to be solved by still more politically driven and artificially stimulated imprudent lending - yea, and I’m writing this blog riding a camel.

Poulson, the onetime US Treasury Secretary, even bemoaned the fact that “millions of Americans” were facing rising credit rates and reduced access to credit, and thus, “making it more expensive for families to finance everyday purchases.”  What planet are these guys on?  What sort of healthy economy wants people to buy their weekly groceries on credit?

It’s as if a gang of political thugs employ two heavies, Freddie Max and Fannie May, to beat up granny Freda Marwick for money that they allege she owed them.  And when poor Freda dies at the hand of these two heavies, the gang of thugs, when put in the dock, claim that they never had any dealing with Freddie Max and Fannie May (“never heard of em guv”) and it’s all Freda Marwick’s fault for dying in the first place - “You should have all known you couldn’t leave old Freda Marwick to look after herself,” they proclaim.  And in the secular asylum that we are all currently forced to live, the jury actually buys the crap and acquits the bloody lot!

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

Child Abuse and the Catholic Church

(With acknowledgement to Peter Hitchins and Gerald Warner)

“One should never waste a good crisis”

One should never waste a good crisis; the child abuse scandal is the perfect opportunity to clean out the stables. Benedict XVI should take advantage of the wave of revulsion against our awful post-Conciliar episcopacy and fire the clowns who, while spewing out an endless torrent of modernist’s banalities and ecumaniacal episcobabble, have sat on their purple clad arses for the last forty years whilst Christ body haemorrhaged away. These are the same men who having wickedly denied any meaningful catechesis to the young and in consequence (having produced a generation wholly ignorant of the faith) have all but extinguished the Catholic faith from Europe.

The sex-abuse crisis is a God given opportunity to start to roll back the devastation of the last forty years, to cull the hirelings, stop the apologies, reinstate apologetics and begin replanting the vineyard. It is time for Catholics to roll up their sleeves, to square up to liberals and secularists, and to root out the traitors within our own ranks, and to proclaim again from the rooftops the timeless truths of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

Child Abuse and the Catholic Church

All decent people are horrified by the abuse of children, especially sexual abuse, and will instinctively feel deep compassion for the victims and their families. Further, to learn that a Catholic priest, who is supposed to model himself on Christ, has committed such a terrible crime is just too horrible for words.

It is nonetheless essential to put the issue into
perspective

In the USA an appalling 17 out of every 1000 Catholic priests have been found guilty of sexual abuse, which is a shocking 1 in 59. In the UK the figures are much lower: 4 in every 1000 priest have been accused (fewer still have been convicted) - that is one in 250 accused.

Appalling as these figure are, you are, statistically speaking, still safer leaving a child in the care of a Catholic priest than you are leaving a child in the care of a teacher, a youth leader, a doctor, a lawyer, a farmer or indeed a family member, for all these groups offend more frequently than do Catholic priests. Catholic priests are actually at the bottom of the ladder.

So why the media blitz on the Church? Simple: the current hounding of the Church by the secular media has absolutely nothing to do with concern for children and everything to do with a deep latent hatred of the Catholic Church. This totally bias propaganda is comparable to the sort of evil cant that Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, used to spew out against the Jews and their rabbis. Anti-Catholicism, unlike anti-Semitism, is a respectable (indeed, mandatory) prejudice among the secular left.

The second thing one needs to do is accurately identify and name the problem.

All the independent studies that have been carried out have demonstrated that over eight out of ten of the victims (in some independent studies it has been as high as nine out of ten) were not children strictly speaking, but adolescent males (i.e. teenage boys). That should tell anyone without a liberal bias to defend that the problem is not paedophilia but homosexuality.

Rome is not blameless, for one of the root causes of the problem is the plethora of effete liberal bishops she has foisted on the Church in the aftermath of Vatican II. These men, desperate to embrace the secular liberal agenda, opened their seminaries to homosexuals, and boy they flooded in! Entirely predictably, a significant number of these men have proven to be predatory sodomites. These problems were further exacerbated by the fact that a significant number of the bishops were themselves homosexuals and were thus willing and anxious to cover up the sins of their clergy. Had post-Conciliar bishops not started willfully ordaining homosexuals there never would have been a significant “child abuse scandal”, so-called, in the first place.

So why is this truth, which is no more than the bleeding obvious, never addressed by the media or the Church? Again the answer is simple: both the media and large sections of the western Church are currently in hock to the militant homosexual collective - sometimes unkindly referred to as the Lavender Mafia. One has only to listen to Archbishop Vincent Nicholls defending his bizarre decision to sanction regular Masses for militant homosexuals who flaunt, celebrate and seek to promote their disordered inclinations and impure and unnatural life styles, to realise the truth of that last sentence. How many Catholics forty years ago would have foreseen that one day they would listen to a successor of St Augustine pimping for perverts? Why are there no similar Masses for shop lifters, drug peddlers, pedophiles or sadomasochists, one may legitimately ask? I‘m sure they, and indeed many others who have the misfortune to suffer from disordered inclinations, would appreciate a Mass where they are “accepted” and encouraged to promote their favourite moral disorders.

Recently, Cardinal Bertone, one of the Pope’s right hand men, was courageous enough to point out that most independent experts agreed that the problem is homosexuality – his statement put one in immediate danger of being trampled underfoot by the frenzied stampede of English bishops frantic to distance themselves from his statement. Yet further evidence, if needed, that large sections of the western church are deeply compromised by their now routine obsequious stance before the militant homosexual collective.

Liberal fatwas and the bigotry of militant atheists

The secular mindset is characterised by irrationality, dysfunction and overinflated egos. It is a mindset further characterised by little humour and even less joy. The secularist have only one real enemy, the Catholic Church: that is why just before the Pope’s arrival a number of secular Ayatollahs wrote to the Guardian protesting the visit of Benedict XVI. On their “charge sheet” of course was the issue of child abuse. Among the list of the usual suspects was the Teflon-coated Peter Tatchell, a man who has built a career out of campaigning for legalised paedophilia since the 1990s!

As Michal Matt has pointed out, what we have here is a campaign by militant homosexuals to brand the Pope as homophobic for failing to deal sufficiently rigorously with the crimes of homosexual priests! As they say, if you can make sense of that humbug, “You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!”

On June 26^th 1997 the Guardian published an article by Mr Tatchell, defending a book called “Boy-Love”. This book Tatchell argued was not shocking but “courageous”. The book he applauded documented “societies where consenting inter-generational sex is considered normal”. He gave an example of a New Guinea tribe where “all young boys have sex with older warriors as part of their initiation into manhood” [One might be excused for wondering if they “all” do it, just how consensual it is] and allegedly grow up to be “happy, well-adjusted husbands and fathers”. Mr Tatchell further wrote: “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 … it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.” Further, in 2008 Mr Tatchell had an article published in an Irish paper in which he argued that the law should allow adults to have sexual access to fourteen year olds.

So there you have it, buggering little boys is fine provided it is done by some depraved tribe or one of Mr Tatchell’s friends but not by a Catholic priest! There can be no more stomach churning humbug than the wheeling out by the media of men of the likes of Peter Tatchell to attack the Pope for the Church’s failures to adequately address the issue of abusive clergy. Mr Tatchell’s way to protect children from abuse is by redefining it so that abusive priests who succeed in persuading children that they want sex aren't criminal but legal lovers!

The opposition to the papal visit came from an unholy rat pack of condom waver, abortion peddlers, anal-copulating pimps, feminism fanatics and value-free sex-ed ideologues (and they tell us Catholics are obsessed with sex!). This sordid collective of those whose centre of gravity appears to be permanently fixed six inches below their belt buckles have already advanced into our primary schools and ensure that pornography seeps like sewage from million of teenagers’ bedroom computers. They will clearly not be content until they rule the world and have dismantled every last moral barrier.

And therein lays the rub. The only institution big and powerful enough to stand in their way is the Catholic Church. The Church may be undermined by the sex abuse scandals and compromised by the weak leadership of men of the ilk of Archbishop Vincent Nicholls, men who prefer to genuflect before the Zeitgeist than before Catholic truth and peddle diversity and equality like a card-carrying Marxists, but the Church has a history of rising from the ashes and there will always be a large remnant of genuine Catholic who, bloodied but unyielding, will not back down in this culture war … and we may take heart from the fact that we will not stand alone, there will always be others willing to stand alongside us.

If the campaign against the papal visit was really about protecting children, the signatories would have ensured that the egregious Mr Tatchell wasn't allowed within a mile of it - they didn't, because it isn't. Nevertheless, we should be grateful to Mr Tatchell for, unlike most of his ilk, he is honest enough to point out where the sexual revolution is headed.

Has the Church done enough?

Of course not! Whilst I have not the slightest doubt of the sincerity of Benedict XVI’s horror at what he calls these “unspeakable crimes”, the fact is that it is action that Catholics seek, not words. It is a depressing fact that nowhere in the entire world has a single bishop been disciplined for covering up child abuse and protecting the criminals - not one! On the contrary, Cardinal Law, one of the most prolific protectors of clerical child abusers in history, was called to Rome by JPII and given a plumb job!

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, who moved around child sexual predators (Father Michael Hill among several others) during his time as bishop of Arundel and Brighton, kept popping up during the recent papal visit. Furthermore, he has also been given the job of helping sort out the Irish Churches sexual predator problem - one honestly couldn’t make that one up. Can one imagine anyone in the secular world retaining such a position of responsibility with such an awful track record?

To understand the uncertain leadership and mixed messages Rome continues to put out: one needs merely to again recall that something in the order of ninety per cent of the perpetrators of clerical sexual abuse are homosexuals and then reflect that one of the supporting cast in the papal visit, the current Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, encourages, justifies and promotes homosexuality via his Warwick Street Masses and cannot even bring himself to state that the Church will never bless the unions of sodomites!

Hypocrisy

Before Vatican ll Catholics were taught that the four marks of the Church were that she is one, holy, catholic and apostolic. The post-Conciliar Church can surely add a fifth mark: hypocrisy - and the predatory sodomites in the ministry and their episcopal patrons are not the only charlatans. The sex abuse scandal has given the post-Conciliar Roman Protestants who fill our pews - the fruits of forty years of the Novus Ordo - the perfect excuse for apostasy. Tens of thousands who had never been abused, or even stood close to someone who had been, have found the perfect excuse to lie in bed Sunday morning. One can only assume that, according to what passes for logic among this generation of frauds, the fact that some sexual degenerate, who should never have been allowed within a million light years of the priesthood, violated young people, proves that the Son of God did not become man, redeem us on Calvary and found the Catholic Church?

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

THE KENNEDY FUNERAL SCANDAL

With acknowledgement to Frs Brian Harrison, O.S. and Thomas Euteneuer, President of Human Life International.

It is no secret that there have always been priests, bishops and even popes, anxious to serve Caesar rather than God. Pope Stephen VI dug up the corpse of his predecessor and put it on trial in order to earn the favour of the Emperor; Blessed Fr Noel Pinot was sent to the guillotine by an apostate priest, and numerous priests sided with the murderous communists who sparked the Spanish civil war for some worldly benefit, such as the advancement of the Basque nationalist cause.

However, since the Council, many clerics have fallen head over heels in love with the world (which is just a more venerable word for the secular asylum). Nowhere was this more tragically illustrated than in the recent pantomime funeral for the late Senator Kennedy. The televised funeral Mass, celebrated in Boston's Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, was a scandal comparable to that given several months ago when America’s most prestigious “Catholic” university bestowed an honorary doctorate upon Barack Obama, the most pro-abortion and 'pro-gay' president in U.S. history. The message it sent out was, the Church is not serious about the defence of innocent human life or the sanctity of marriage; it’s more a disciplinary matter, like that old fish on Friday fixation.

The funeral had the usual farcical and embarrassing Novus Ordo canonisation: with Fr Mark Hession eulogising about what a wonderful Catholic Christian Ted was, assuring us that we could be "confident" that he is already with Jesus in glory! Well, I have news for Fr Hession, many are equally confident that Hell is full of what the world regards as “jolly good chaps”.

Senator Edward Kennedy, the secular, brash and privileged "Lion of the Senate" had everything that the world had to offer, including comprehensive political protection from his criminally buffoonish and cowardly causing of Mary Jo Kopechne's death. However, it and its subsequent cover-up were perhaps the least among the many sins he will have to account for before the Throne of Grace. Ted Kennedy went on to continue his murderous rampage throughout his political career with his constant advocacy of the legalized murder of abortion, and his defence of Roe-v-Wade by vetoing potential Supreme Court judges who might have rectified that terrible injustice. Ted Kennedy is a man with oceans of innocent blood on his hands.

Hitler is held in universal opprobrium for supporting policies that led to the death of millions of innocent human beings. Kennedy was held in universal approbation (by the left) for supporting policies that led to the death of millions of innocent human beings. How to explain? Well, I suspect the clue lies in that sacred cow of the left, “discrimination”. You see Hitler discriminated by concentrating the killing on one racial group, whereas Kennedy did not discriminate: his victims could be Jew or gentile, black or white, rich or poor, male or female. So this in the twisted logic of the secular asylum makes the killing okay, even praiseworthy, and earned for Kennedy the highest accolades of such organisations as Planned Parenthood and NARAL. In truth, he did of course discriminate: he picked his victims exclusively from the small, voiceless, unseen, and powerless; those who can neither fight back nor file a legal suite.

Boston Cardinal Séan O’Malley, stung by the worldwide outrage over this scandal, responded with the usual left wing blather about the senator’s work for the poor and not being judgemental. All humbug of course, because had Ted Kennedy espoused some cause anathema to the secular left, like holocaust denial, there is no way these worldly clerics would have staged this travesty of a Catholic funeral. No one of course may dare judge the state of the senator’s soul, that can and must be left to God, but his actions we most certainly can and should judge. Ted Kennedy and the clerics who staged this public scandal will not of course be the first to attempt to hide their betrayal of Christ behind a smokescreen of concern for the poor.

We must, as a matter of Catholic duty, earnestly pray for the salvation of heretical Catholics like Senator Edward Kennedy, but we do not have to praise him, let alone exalt him with the full honours of a public Catholic funeral. There was very little about Ted Kennedy's life that deserves admiration from a spiritual or moral point of view. Indeed, he was probably the worst example of a Catholic statesman that one could think of.