Sunday 2 February 2020

"A Public Catholicism"


Last Sunday, I heard something at Mass which I have been chewing on for most of the week.

The Gospel was that of the two miracles immediately following the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew's Gospel - the healing of the leper and the healing of the Roman centurion's servant. During his own sermon, Father expanded on how both the leper and the centurion made public acts of faith - with our Lord telling the leper to go and show himself to the priests, and Our Lord commending the centurion for his public profession of belief. Father then when on to say that even though there are many aspects of our spiritual life that we should keep private, "our faith is public, so we must make our Catholicism public for the sake of others." In other words, we must let people know we are Catholic, for our faith is not something we are to keep hidden.

Father's words were fortuitous. That very same day, I had been grappling with sentiments of shame and embarrassment for being outspoken about many things of a Catholic nature, from certain aspects of my spiritual life that I really should have kept private, to my opinions about a certain man sitting on the papal throne. I was also thinking about whether or not I should clam up altogether and withdraw my voice from the public sphere, for I was becoming frustrated with what I saw as the endless purity spiralling and posturing amongst many Catholics online.

Father's soft-spoken words calmed me, gave me something to ponder, and in time, has come to start renewing my resolve.

Readers of our sister blog Vox Cantoris may recall a foray I made on there in 2017, where I detailed my reversion to the Old Faith. It is much too long to detail now, but I remember how I slowly came to realize that the Old Faith was what I am meant to follow, and how I came to that conclusion with a determined resolve as a result of that ponderment.

The intervening years have admittedly shaken that resolve up quite a bit, but here I have remained, with a few new conclusions in my belt from that same process of ponderment. While my world has turned, the Cross has remained firm. Focusing on Him in spite of it all - be it via the crucifix or the words of those I trust - has been my saving grace when my emotions run high and my thoughts get jumbled. In spite of all that I have done against Him, He continues to call me toward Him and gently requests I do what I must not just for His sake, but also so that others know I follow Him.

He did not die so that I may be ashamed and embarrassed of looking out for His Bride, however that may be manifested.

Nay, He asked through His actions that I may be public in my belief in Him, while avoiding extremes on both end of the spectrum.

A public Catholicism, in other words.

13 comments:

Barona said...

It is difficult for us all to know when, how, and what to express at certain times. Sometimes what may good today may be unwise tomorrow. Perhaps off topic, but regarding human communication, the internet cannot be said to be truly humanly communicative. Part of communication is the emotive aspect, which is a conduit of information - by the giver and the receiver. Further, communication is also non-verbal, and that as such this entire aspect of communication is missing. The human necessity for a true dialogue between persons is missing on social media, as there cannot be real, live face to face contact (even video is the reconstruction of an image, but not the true image). Twitter perhaps is the most dangerous of all, as it is really a platform for sloganeering, advertising an idea (or far more popular, even amongst "Catholics" insulting, mocking, and judging other Catholics whom the accuser has never met).

All of this is, I think, another manifestation of the diabolical To divert people from true living. So Catgolic need to think very hard about the "public" image they put forward, whilst claiming to be "Catholics".

J Haggerty said...

*A Public Catholicism* reminds me of the Catholic Book Club to which my father belonged. This was in the 1950s. He kept these volumes in a bookcase with double glass doors, which I was free to open.

Many I still have.

Abbe Pierre and the Ragpickers of Paris. Morris West and the urchins of Naples. Books on Our Lady, Lourdes and Fatima. Saint Damien of the lepers. Hilaire Belloc, Chesterton, Theresa of Lisieux, Pope Pius XII. Paul Gallico's life of Saint Patrick. The Rule of Saint Benedict. Thomas Merton's *The Last of the Fathers* a short study of Bernard of Clairvaux. Dorothy Day, Meriol Trevor, Frank and Maisie Ward, Evelyn Waugh, H.V. Morton, Fr. D'Arcy, Ronald Knox.

One book on the Shroud of Turin held me spellbound - could this be the actual burial cloth of Our Lord with a miraculous negative imprint of His wounded face and crucified body? I have read a number of books on the Shroud, but none have affected me like this one, which I pored over at the age of nine.

As shocking as it is to admit, I am relieved to be outside the Catholic Church and worshipping in reformed churches. The problems that I see ahead of you are simply too immense and insoluble.

The systemic sexual abuse of children by clergy will shame and haunt the Church for the rest of the 21st Century. The active homosexuality within the priesthood is a malignant tumour.

Radical feminist nuns pushing for female ordination are in cahoots with the gay priests, a sick trade-off. The book *Goodbye Good Men* revealed the dire state of American seminaries. Who can fix any of this?

Read the blog of Bishop Pat Buckley - *Maynooth, Cesspool of Liberal Theology and Gay Sex Stomping Ground of Predator Kitty Drury.*

Another post is titled *Blackmail and Confession - the Life of a Gay Priest.* To quote:

*The RC priesthood is being homosexualised at a very fast rate. The figure of 75 per cent is no surprise to me. What is emerging is that there is an international cohort of actively gay cardinals, bishops and priests ... the way to get promoted in the RC Church is to do homosexual favours for your superiors.*

Even if there was a will to tackle this vice by Team Francis, and there isn't, the problem would not go away. Why? Because the whole of our Western secular world has been *homosexualised*, thanks to the cunning strategy of gay activists.

To give just one example. Billy Graham's son was due to preach for two days at the Usher Halls in Edinburgh, but the event has been cancelled because Graham is perceived to be *homophobic*. His chief opponent is a minister in the Church of Scotland.

Satan is inside the Vatican. He is inside the culture. An entire generation of liberal churchmen, politicians, academics, students and sundry do-gooders have been deceived by the Father of Lies. Cardinal Marx in Germany lost his supernatural faith years ago. So did Bergoglio.

By destroying the Christian family - even just the nominal Christian family - Satan has destroyed the heart of Christianity. Jesus Christ spoke solemnly of marriage between a man and a woman because the family is at the beating heart of Christ's mystical body.

All that remains will be a pseudo-Christian counterfeit, a love-in run by a hierarchy of old hippies who would be happier in a Wiccan coven. (Wiccans love their false Jesus too, it's Christ the King they despise and fear.)

No doubt Bishop Robert Barron will assure the faithful that they still belong to the Mystical Body. *It's just a NEW way of being Catholic, see.*
But one can detect a growing hollowness in the Bishop's YouTube homilies.

Today they are going after Pope Benedict and Cardinal Sarah.
Tomorrow they will find a way of discrediting and disarming all you traditional lay Catholics.

You will be told that you are stuck in the past. Like my father's Catholic Book Club.

J Haggerty said...

*Goodbye, Good Men* by Michael S Rose is available in paperback.

The book's subtitle is revealing - *How Liberals Brought Corruption into the Catholic Church*.

The writer uncovered a cult of homosexual abuse in both seminaries and seminary schools in the United States; and this often involved both faculty (i.e. teaching priests) and seminarians.

Young men of good character were often refused admission by the seminary in their diocese. They might then apply to a far diocese where the bishop was a man of real holiness, or they gave up their vocation, hence the book's title.

One teenage boy arrived at a seminary school only to find *an atmosphere of evil*. He felt afraid on his first night there.

Pornography was openly distributed. Younger boys were pressurised by older boys into having sex. Some of the faculty were paedophiles. The decent faculty members turned a blind eye to abuse.

Any seminarian with a devotion to Mary and the Rosary was ridiculed. Having a photo of the pope in your bedroom was seen as foolish. Reading papal encyclicals was regarded as a waste of time. In class the Bible was openly traduced by modernist exegesis.

An interview with Michael Rose is available online, at the Latin Mass Magazine.

His book reveals how feminist nuns made deals with openly gay clergy in the pursuit of goals. These priests wanted the normalisation of homosexuality in the Church (everything Cardinal Marx is now demanding) and the nuns wanted to see their campaign for female ordination advanced inside the Vatican.

And all this has come to pass in Bergoglio's *new way of being Catholic*, a project supported by the charlatans who make up most of the American hierarchy.

In my young days *liberal* churchmen were seen as the hope of the Church while the *conservatives* like Cardinal Ottaviani and Cardinal Siri were seen as *men of the past*.

How very wrong we were! The bitter tears being shed in the Church today are the price we are paying for our foolishness.

John Haggerty said...

Michael Rose in his interview with the Latin Mass Magazine speaks of the heterodox views being taught in American seminaries. And how this has rotted the faith of young priests.

*The essence of their careers,* he said of the teaching faculty, *is to change the structure, doctrines, and mission of the Catholic Church. They appear to be teaching at Catholic seminaries primarily to train seminarians NOT to be priests.* (My emphasis.)

What if we have a hierarchy in North America as well as Europe who are not really Catholic priests at all? Or not priests as the priesthood was understood in my father's generation? Yes, they have been ordained. But what does ordination really mean to them?

Is it possible that an anti-church has gradually replaced the Catholic Church?
That members of the hierarchy are not Christian in any Biblical sense?

This could be called the post-Benedict church, the Church of Aquarius.
It is New Age, gnostic, neo-pagan.

That is why the anti-church is able to normalise homosexuality.
They believe that the Classical world was right about homosexual acts, and that Saint Paul and the Fathers were wrong.

In an old episode of The Vortex, Michael Voris said the American hierarchy no longer believe in Christ's *narrow path to heaven*.
They think that *only a very tiny sliver of humanity is damned*.

The Apostles asked Our Lord *Will many be saved?* but modernists don't take the question seriously. This is true of liberal Protestant churches, and even some reformed Protestant churches are weak on personal conversion.

From all this stems the US hierarchy's *betrayal of the faith, their multiple violations of Canon Law, their effeminate preaching* in the words of Michael Voris.

See *Today's Vortex - Excommunicate Them, All of Them!*.
1 July 2015. Church Militant.

James Joseph said...

I have read your blog almost daily for basically forever.

The Gospel of the centurion and it's accompanying lectio in the Old Mass are my favorites.

There you have it.

John Haggerty said...

*Raising socialists; God allows negative popes?*

Father William Jenkins of the Society of Pius V in conversation with Thomas Naegele.
What Catholics Believe. 18 January 2020. YouTube.

*The fight is now for everything,* as G.K. Chesterton once said.

It is a fight for the truth of Orthodoxy over Heterodoxy when the Church has badly lost the way.

It is a spiritual battle for the souls and minds of children and teenagers. Because their bishops and teachers have succumbed to the siren voices of our age. Because Pope Francis has become just another child of his time, a fate which Chesterton warned us to avoid at all costs.

This is what it means to be a Public Catholic.
To preach the Word to those who are without Christ and without hope.

To be able to say with Saint Paul, *I am not ashamed of the Gospel.*

And not to care a rap what the politicians and the media and the Smart Set think about us.
As the Lord said, *Let the dead bury the dead.*

Irenaeus said...

I should note, I was not denigrating social media in any way. It has its place in our time. It is to be commended for sharing ideas and encouraging others. I note that while it is more immediate than other forms of impersonal communication, the purity spiralling and posturing is in no ways limited to that form, and nor can we say that sort of social behavior is limited to our time.

Make of that what you will.

John Haggerty said...

Recommended on YouTube:

*The Weight of the Cross.*
Father Mark Goring. 29 January 2020.

*Former Protestant Pastor tells 3 things that kept him from converting to Catholicism for so long.*
Keith Nestor.

*Why are you afraid of being Catholic?*
Keith Nester.

*Why so many evangelicals are STILL becoming Catholic.*
Blue Collar Catholic.

John Haggerty said...

In America *operational control of the Catholic Church has been seized by weak cowardly men, many of whom also happen to be homosexual.*

The Vortex - We Want Justice.
Church Militant. 4 February 2020. YouTube.

Once again a damning indictment of a bishop who need to be criminally investigated. Lies, financial corruption, dirty tricks, and arrogance.
And Walter Rossi, a priest who faces multiple accusations of homosexual predation.

Being a Public Catholic means supporting the investigative journalism of The Vortex. We owe this independent Catholic media group a big thanks.

The American laity are being taken for fools.

These cardinals and bishops have turned the Church into a sleazy soap opera. Untreated sewage smells sweeter than the sins of these false priests.

John Haggerty said...

If you will permit me one last (honest!) comment on this post, Irenaeus.

To be a Public Catholic today means receiving the sacraments of Confession and Holy Communion; attending the Latin Mass as often as possible; saying the Rosary; attending a weekly prayer meeting; evangelising to Catholics who have fallen away from the faith; reaching out to the unsaved.

But it also means calling out all those members of the hierarchy who have failed in their duty in denouncing politicians who support abortion. These politicians, unless they publicly repent and recant, should never be given a Catholic funeral.

It means calling out those members of the hierarchy and those priests who fail to follow the Catholic Catechism on marriage, divorce, contraception and homosexuality.

It means calling out the hierarchy for their financial rip-off, involving huge sums of money, all taken from trusting parishioners in churches everywhere.

It means exposing the paedo-sodomite network operating inside the Church, a network that has flooded the Church in filth. Cardinals and bishops who are silent on this greatest of evils need to be named and shamed on social media, on a weekly basis.

If the Jesuits do NOT discipline Fr. James Martin, then the Jesuits are complicit in this paedo-sodomite network. The order is a malignant tumour.

Being a Public Catholic means calling out the cardinals and bishops in Canada who haven't the backbone to stand out against Gender Ideology in schools, an ideology perverting the minds of a generation of children.

Being a Public Catholic means championing independent Catholic media, and holding the official Catholic media to account for hiding these evils which cry out to God for justice.

Revisit The Vortex, 'Evil' Church Militant.
15 February 2019. YouTube.

Toronto Catholic Witness needs to go even more militant.

If you fail to speak out, then these evils will drag many souls down to hell.
We will all have to stand before the Judgement Seat.

Irenaeus said...

Thank you, John.

Barona said...

John,

I understand your concern, and I too, for a time, was more "militant", but I saw that my spiritual life was failing, whilst my efforts (so to speak) were not of the Holy Spirit.

Catholics have to very carefully, and honestly discern why they are becoming "militant". Do they think they are going to "save" the Church, for example?

When many Catholics are ruled by emotion and no longer reason, when lack of charity, slander, detraction reign amongst so many Catholics, I think the answer is not so much "militancy", but prayer.

Another serious problem with becoming "militant' is that via the internet, without face to face contact, it is easy for Catholics to misread misinterpret and have their Faith endangered.

Regarding Voris, I have noticed a change in the direction of his "Church Militant" over the past couple of years (abstracting completely from his recent criticism of Pope Francis)to a more politicized view that is flirting more and more with secular neocons who can bring no good to the Church. Self-identifying with neoconism is definitely not Catholic. Indeed, it is a volte face from the days when Voris rejected (rightly) Americanism. Voris' political positioning seems to be far closer to those of the very dangerous heretical evangelical sects, than to those of Christ the King, as envisaged by Pius XI in Quas Primas. Now that is militancy!

Irenaeus said...

If I may interject, militancy is something that tends to be misunderstood. Militancy has a certain quality to it that doesn't mean just charging in with guns blazing and adopting a "tough-as-nails" approach. Some Christians are meant to have that trait for God's greater glory. Other Christians exhibit that militancy more quietly - gaining confidence and fortitude through prayer and the quieter doings of life - again, also for God's greater glory.

Personalities differ, and God's plan for each personality differs also. Prayer is essential, but how that feeds a soul, God has made it different for each one.