HABEMUS PAPEM!

So we have another Holy Father, a new Pope and someone from outside Europe!  Like everyone else I'm also putting in my few words of commentary.  You can check out John Allen's account of the new pope written before he was elected here.  

No matter what he may yet say in clarification (and pace the Jesuits) all Franciscans, and Italians everywhere, will believe he chose Francis as a tribute to the founder of the Franciscan family and the patron saint of Italy.  As Franciscans we will have the peculiar experience (for the first time in our history) I referring to our 'Holy Father Francis' meaning the Pope and 'our Holy Father Francis' meaning St. Francis.

I hope that he does have both the holiness and 'fire in the belly', the strength of character to lead the Church along the path our Lord indicates for us.  I got the impression watching him on that balcony that not only was he overawed and stunned at this outcome but also a little lost.  Perhaps he will be another John Paul I?  He is 76 so he will not likely hold the office for twenty or  more years.  All we can do is pray, fast and be faithful.

CHRISTENDOM COLLEGE COMES TO IRELAND

Christendom College of the U.S. is to launch the Columcille Institute this year from July 20 to August 7.  It will be held in our friary in Ards, i.e. Ard Mhuire, Donegal.  'Ard' means 'high' or 'height' in Irish and 'Muire' is the Irish for 'Mary' as in the Mother of God.  Other Marys are 'Máire'.  I hope they get the weather!  Ards is beautiful if the weather is good but miserable if it isn't.  The Institute will offer courses on Catholic Apologetics, The Rise of Western Culture and Christian Ethos and Christian Imagination and Prominent Continental Irish Writers.

POPE BENEDICT XVI ABDICATES

Well the Holy Father has gone.  Not quite as bad as when Bl. John Paul II died but still sad.  It hit me when I saw footage of his last appearance at the window of Castel Gandolfo.  He said he would now be a pilgrim on his final journey to the Lord.  That hit me.  This is a man preparing to die, a man who has quietly come to hold such an important place in the hearts of all true Catholics.  

 There is  the sadness of losing such a dedicated pastor and teacher and the uncertainty of who will take his place (please God not Dolan!).   He also said that he was not coming down from the cross but would remain with the Crucified Christ in another way.  That's one in the eye for a certain Polish Archbishop.  Now we must pray not only for the Holy Father in his retirement but more importantly for the upcoming conclave that the cardinals will elect a holy, wise, orthodox and strong pope!

So thank you Holy Father for your faith and loyalty.   Thank you for your witness to Christ, for sharing your learning and exhorting us to believe, to trust and to follow Christ.  Thank you for the years you have given to the priesthood and the sacrifices that involved, for taking on the demands, the cross of the  Papal ministry.  Thank you, Holy Father.  We will miss you.

IS THERE A LAVENDER MAFIA IN THE CHURCH?

I am a sinner myself.  I too have fallen short of the glory of God and on all too many occasions I have failed to live as a Christian.  Daily I struggle to be a Christian yet alone a priest.  My job is not to sit in judgment on anyone but I also have to stand up for the truth revealed in Jesus Christ.  I have read the report or rather article from the Polish priest Fr. Dariusz Oko.  It makes for disturbing reading when taken in conjunction with the rumours about the cardinals' report to the Holy Father and what they allegedly discovered.  There are always rumours.  It's part of how Satan stirs up evil in the Church and the world.  Go along to this blog post and then go down and read the comments to see how distorted and bigoted human thought can become when it listens to rumour and innuendo and refuses to give facts a chance.  Yet there also rumours that are pieces of the truth, warning rumbles of approaching trouble or hidden disorder.  Knowing the true from the false is not always easy.

I support and teach the Church's teaching on homosexuality.  I have been challenged by students and by members of congregations for doing so.  It's a painful subject for some and an uncomfortable one for many.  Family members, especially parents, often want to support their child and maintain that relationship with them while people who have same-sex attraction often want approval and not just tolerance.  They will settle for Church silence.

That said, as a priest for the past fourteen years, while I have heard rumours and innuendo, I have not personally met any openly homosexual clergy.  Maybe I live in some world of my own.  Maybe I just don't move in circles that intersect with such men but while I have come across homosexuals I haven't met clerical ones.  Too often effeminacy is equated with homosexuality which is an unjust and very ignorant supposition.    There is a secretive, furtive side to homosexuality as there is to many deviant forms of sexual behaviour that is part of the attraction, part of the buzz, the frisson, that goes with breaking rules.  Such secretiveness, coupled with the desire to avoid repercussions means that at least in Ireland any homosexual clergy will keep a low profile.  That said a priest had a heart attack and died back in 1994 in a homosexual sauna and was, allegedly, anointed by another priest on the spot!  The owner claimed that there were about twenty priests who used the sauna regularly.  I wonder how he knew they were priests?

I have no doubt there are homosexual clergy and if they are not living their vows they should ask themselves why they are still priests.  The same goes for heterosexual clergy who fornicate or commit adultery.  If any of them are part of a clique (however loose) that promotes other clergy or laity based on their support for or ambivalence to homosexuality or opposition to Church teaching on human sexuality then they should have the decency to desist or abandon the ministry.

What is frustrating is that one does not know what is true and what is false.  There are rumours but little evidence.  There is evidence of cover-ups of abuse, failures to act swiftly and effectively, and deviation from the doctrine of the Church.  There are those who teach heresy or fail to affirm the Church's teaching even in third level colleges and nothing is done to them.  There are no repercussions.  Priests grant 'general absolutions', tell penitents they need only tell a single (mortal) sin, hold penitential services during Mass, alter the text of the Mass, and give public support to groups and persons that oppose Church teaching and nothing happens.  One must ask why?

Why does it take Vatican intervention before clergy are challenged on their teaching?  Why does it have to go to Rome before liturgical abuses and other irregularities are confronted?  Why did it take so long to deal with the abuse of children when, as the Murphy report affirmed, the bishops already had enough power in canon law to stop the abusers from getting access to children?  I am not convinced that it was always concern for the image of the Church.  People rarely really care for the image of an institution.  People really care about their own image and the image of the group with which they are associated.  Perhaps there was some other threat to their image that encouraged bishops and religious superiors to turn a blind eye?  I cannot prove this but I now suspect it of some.

It is discouraging to deal with these issues but, as Mr. Voris, puts it it is better dealt with than not.  Better to bring the poison out into the open, to drain the puss from the abscess and to apply some healing remedies.  We will always have to deal with those who see in the sacred ministry not a path to God or a means to serve His Kingdom but a career choice or a place to hide from their demons.  Perhaps very few of us are entirely pure in our motives; we are all sinners but that does not mean we should tolerate our own sins or the sins of others especially when they harm the Church.

This Lent can be a new beginning, a return to the sources, a return to authentic Catholicism.  This Lent can be a re-appropriation of obedience to the whole teaching of Christ and an abandonment of the à la carte Catholicism of the last forty years.  I believe we are seeing the stirrings of a deep reform movement within the Church, a continuation of a stream that preceded the Council but got side-tracked or went underground and is now re-emerging to carry the Church into greater fidelity to her Lord.  We must choose whom we serve.

GREEK CATHOLICS

Two videos from Catholic Focus on the Eastern or Greek Rite Catholics. Not many of them but they are part of the Church that must learn to breathe with both lungs again.

MICHAEL VORIS ON THE CULTURAL ROT

One of our friars commented recently about a certain priest that he thought him a prophet. I disagreed but I think Michael Voris is a prophet. He is definitely Catholic. I find it sad though that he finds he has to identify his country with the cultural rot spreading through the world. I do not think he is wrong just that the US being such a massive cultural influence, especially in the English speaking world, it's effect is more widespread. It is no surprise then that the 'barbarians' are appearing everywhere. Once people choose to deny the objective standard of Natural Law, indeed objective standards in anything, then the only path left is into barbarism. Down that path prejudice is masked as principle, reason is debased into rationalization and morality becomes the latest fashion in behaviour. Once the barbarians are in control the next step is tyranny and then chaos.

THE NEW BARBARIANS

I am currently working my way through Henri Daniel-Rops (actually Henri Petiot,1901-1965) a French historian and member of the Academie Francaise.  There are about nine volumes in the series and I'm on the third dealing with the Middle Ages.

What strikes me the most is that we may be in a period not unlike that of the fall of the Roman Empire.  The Empire did not all of a sudden collapse.  There was a slow decay as it became less able to deal with challenges.  Its economy stagnated and the Emperors increased taxes.  It became more and more bureaucratic and less and less efficient.  It depended more and more on barbarian peoples to keep its borders safe, barbarians who were mostly heretical Arian Christians.  When these barbarian peoples migrated into the Empire there were nor the troops, nor was the will nor was there the local support to oppose them.  The Empire in the West collapsed.  

 Our Western civilization is collapsing.  It has within it problems so fundamental as to bring the whole system down but our leaders and intelligentia seem incapable of grasping the issues.  It is as if there were a collective blind-spot as regards both the problem and the solution.  Our governments are bureaucratic and unwieldy.  People are enduring heavier taxes while the wealth is hogged by a few.    Most seriously our fertility rate is below the average replacement rate.  We have surrendered our intellectual world to largely barbarian people.  That last statement may come as a shock.  We have traditionally thought of barbarians as pagans and intellectuals, i.e. civilised people, as being as far from barbarian as possible.  In this modern none but a few odd balls can be serious pagans.  That worldview simply does not thrive in a world as permeated with Christianity as ours.  But barbarism is always with us.  By barbarian I do not mean a wood or stone-worshipping heathen.  These barbarians, not unlike those of Roman days, are quasi-Christian.  Back then they were heretics now they are apostates.  Back then they came in vast migrations but now they have grown up amongst us.   

By barbarism I mean a mind for whom there is no objective moral law and where, ultimately, might is right.  By barbarism I mean a mind that neither recognizes nor respects the Sacred.  Such a mind might dabble in a kind of secular pantheism by which I mean not that God and the material world are somehow one but that the only kind of sacredness is the material world.  A sacred material world takes precedence over the needs of individuals, communities and the human race.  This barbarism allows the killing of babies in the womb and eventually after they are born.  It allows the killing of the sick, the weak and the disabled.  It does not just allow them it celebrates them.  It holds them up as acts of compassion, heroism, good.  This barbarism exalts the freedom, the autonomy of the individual.  The ruthless individual, the solo hero, is the true star of all its stories, its gore-filled sagas and spectacles.  

The barbarians are in control.  The West has once again succumbed to them.  Back in the days of the Empire though the barbarian people came with families, clans, traditions and a culture.  They came from outside, admiring the Empire they occupied and wanting to share in its wealth and security even as they brought it down.  Crudely and inconsistently they at least believed in a law that implied some recognition of the Natural Law.  These new barbarians, having grown up in the West, despise the very foundations it was built on.  To them there is no Natural Law, no truth save that which science can attest to and that only because science, for the moment, has such great cultural standing.  Yet the science is always selectively cited.  'Reason' is their banner but it is really rationalisation.   To them Christianity in particular, and religion in general, has no future.  To them only their hedonistic, amoral, materialist ethos has any validity and any right to allegiance.  They are as drunk on their new found power and influence as the ancient barbarians, and the pagan Romans before them, once were.  

Evidence of this can be seen in the popularity of people such as Dawkins and Hitchens, in the opprobrium to which the Holy Father is subjected in many places and the indifference to matters of faith and religion even in once Catholic countries such as Ireland.   Not only are these barbarians within our society they are within the Church.  Wherever the Divine origin of the Church and her Sacraments, or the sacredness of her Tradition, are denied, wherever the authority of her bishops and above all the Holy Father is flouted, wherever, whether explicitly or implicitly, the Divinity of Christ is denied there are the barbarians.  The loss of the sense of the sacred is everywhere.  Today at a eulogy at the end of a funeral Mass I heard a young man refer to the sanctuary as a 'stage'.  If ever that was an argument for the restoration of the altar rails it was that comment.   The sanctuary has become a stage, a place for a play that reflects back to the people their own glory and relevance but with no room for the living God.  It is a stage hired out, borrowed for a few hours, were rituals happen and words are spoken at important occasions: the naming of babies, marriages of lovers, and the burial of the dead.  These are the tame barbarians, generally indifferent if not positive towards the Church.  The power though is increasingly in the hands of the untamed, the wild, the true barbarians.  They are the people who have abandoned reason in the name of reason.  They have made a tool of it to demolish the very foundations of the civilisation that shields them.  They do not think of themselves as barbarians.  They are civilised, cultured, cultivated and intellectual.  They can often speak  two or more languages, have degrees, post-doctorates even, and move in the 'best' circles.  Yet they are barbarians because only barbarians will kill the innocent or attempt to justify it.  Only barbarians deny the ultimate civilisation of love, of reason, of truth that is based on the Natural Law and ultimately on God.  

It is as the Mother of God warned at Fatima.  If people did not listen Russia would spread her errors throughout the world and she has.  It was not Communism or Marxist-Leninism or any of those ideologies.  They were but vehicles.  Atheistic materialism was the central error, the poison of the snake that is turning people to barbarism.