Seminary

It's a weepy!

The whole of Michael Davies's 'Timebombs in Vatican II', more relevant than ever, is available at this website.

Michael Davies's statistics are from 2002. That was 15 years ago! Things are much worse now. Here in the UK, more and more people are becoming more and more familiar with Bishops announcing that there will be 'difficult decisions' at a local level with parishes 'merging'. I am certian this is a nationwide phenomenon. The whole issue of parish mergers becomes the most wonderful form of Newspeak, with Bishops announcing 'mergers' which amount to a near shutdown of ordinary parish life  - with, you know, no resident priest - for existing parishes. This is predicted to become more and more common, never less. What many Catholics are seeing at a local level is a reorganisation and restructuring that almost imitates what is happening to British libraries. I'm told many British libraries are closing with a central one being manned mostly by volunteers. Most are being sold off to private firms who manage them, restructure them, gut them, sack their staff and then say, 'Good job done!'

Only the beginning of sorrows at Ground Zero.

Parishes don't 'close' they 'merge' and it is often glibly slipped in that we have to see as a diocese where 'the Holy Spirit is taking us'. There is never or rarely an assessment from Bishops as to whether it is the Holy Spirit, or rather a spirit of godlessness and faithlessness, the collapse of perhaps an entire culture that has led us to parish closures a.k.a 'mergers', the taking over of parishes by lay communities, the drastic decline in vocations, a dearth of religious and the increasing isolation and pain of those heroic priests who are still alive holding the fort as best they can.

The question that I and others would like to have answered is: Do bishops even want more vocations to the priesthood or are they now so comfortable with the management of decline that the management of decline is in fact the de facto policy of the Church in England, Wales, Germany and elsewhere in the West? Have they already decided that 'the Holy Spirit' is leading us to a priestless (or even Christless) Church?

'I'll just leave this 1962 Missale Romanum and maniple here for fifty years.'

The ideas that I hear from many bishops are about a 'creative' or 'innovative' response to the crisis of vocations (not that it is ever regarded or alluded to as a 'crisis' in public, after all, we don't want to upset the children!), but these responses rarely amount to a resolution to 'up the game' on making the priesthood look attractive to men who are devoted enough to Christ to consider it, nor to encourage such devotion among the clergy to the venerable Rite of the Church that might foster embryonic vocations.

One could be forgiven for wondering if a culture of acceptance about the loss of so many Catholics in two generations has bred not only a culture of pessimism about the future of the priesthood in the average diocese, but indeed a culture of death and sterility sweeping over the Church. It is never the Holy Spirit Who takes the Church to Hell in a handcart. It is always Bishops (of elsewhere, but not excluding Rome) who do that.

There are of course real reasons for optimism for the growth areas in the Church but they seem to lay within traditional orders and traditional communities. I have spoken to at least two people in the last week or two who promote the Traditional Latin Mass online and on social media but in fact do not even attend the Mass in the Extraordinary Form because it is not available within a 50 mile radius of their house. 

I think the late and great Michael Davies (RIP) may have prophecised the coming of Cardinal John Dew, having examined the Second Vatican Council and discovered the various loopholes therein that could be the seeds of the destruction of the universality - read Catholicity -  of the Church if bishops so willed it. But then even Cardinal Dew could not do what he has decided to do without the aid of an atmosphere of lawlessness encouraged by Francis, courtesy of Magnum Principium and other 'signs' destructive to the unity of the Church. It is with a sense of dread that one anticipates what stories we shall hear in the coming weeks and months of liturgical innovations being touted in other major Dioceses around the World.

A number of bloggers are using the word 'antipope' in relation to Pope Francis. I'm beginning to think that this is most unjust and deeply unfair.  

Let's be fair to the antipopes of history.

No antipope in Church history has sought to do what Francis is doing. 

Nor would any of the antipopes of history even dreamt of doing what Francis is doing.

Pray for bishops and pray for vocations to the Priesthood.

Pray for the Pope and pray for an end to the crisis in the Church.

Please note: Cats ears and whiskers have no been placed on the Princes of the Church in order to mock them as individuals (whoever they may be) but to add a humourous dimension and to make more visually effective a parody of the Andrew Lloyd Webber West End musical, 'Cats'.