O tempora o mores

Some miscellaneous and disparate news items and observations:

• Rorate Caeli has a brilliant article about the Orwellian language at play in the Vatican's transparent attempt to subvert Catholic doctrine and manufacture a new Gospel based on secular sexual practices. Obfuscation and language perversion is indeed a favored tactic of these men but, in a sign that they are confident in their unassailable position, it appears as if they are also taking the gloves off now and eschewing subtlety. The Vatican's own instructions for next year's follow-up Synod on the Family overtly demands that attendees avoid reference to doctrine when coming up with a "solution" to the irregular relationships of homosexuals and bigamists. The fix is in and it is looking more and more as if this Pope is fully behind the revolution: he wants Communion for the divorced and remarried and he wants integration for practicing homosexuals. The consequence of such "pastoral" contradiction of dogmatic teaching would have the most dire consequence, namely, the final and authoritative suicide of the Catholic Church. 
• This wonderful interview with Cardinal Burke deals with the matter of the impending betrayal of Catholicism by our hierarchy, and other topics as well. 
• I noticed that a local church had an advertisement in its bulletin for a book called "Romans 8" by someone named Teacher Shekinat Ayodele Ikioda (I'm not sure if "Teacher" is a title or a given name).The book's amazon page doesn't have anything that would indicate that it is a Catholic book. On the contrary, the book blurb trumpets its "Christian" message. Have we sunk so low that we're now marketing Protestant books? How they must be laughing in their sleeves at our stupidity!
• The latest issue of Catholic New York included a pull-out color section which displayed, in yearbook fashion, all the seminarians and students at the Seminary in Yonkers. Not a single one was from Staten Island. 

Catholic Church Shopping, Part XV: The Heresy Hut

I'm going to dispense with all the usual attempts at anonymity for this location because of the sheer egregiousness of the violation I witnessed. People need to be warned. I attended the Sunday evening Mass on October 19th at the St. Thomas half of the St. Joseph-St. Thomas parish.

 

First, a bit about the church. The only thing I knew about it before I first attended was that it had been hilariously described as a "Tabernacle of opulence" in a letter to the editor by an envious Protestant minister some years ago. It is indeed opulent; ugly as sin but still grand and, no doubt, expensively constructed. The shape of the church resembles a Mongolian yurt, with a statue of a dove hanging from the apex. The walls are brick and the stained glass windows- having been made in the early 1990s and thus avoiding the worst cartoonish excesses of 1970s modern church art- nevertheless still don't quite approach the standard of traditional Catholic beauty.  Again, avoiding the worst excesses of hippie-era Church architecture, it also has several alcoves with statues and relics and kneelers for devotional purposes (not that they are ever used). The stations of the cross were built, in a creative but ultimately unappealing way, into the brick walls using other bricks. There is a tiny, hermetically-sealed room at the back of the church, presumably for families with young children, where you can see the Mass through a window and strain to listen to it through a sub-par sound system. In practice, there are few families with babies in this church, so this room fills up with rowdy tweens who want to text and talk in peace, without much liturgical distraction. Any attempts to verbalize the Mass responses or- God forbid- sing, are met with heads whipping around to glare at you. The confessional is located in this tiny room, thereby precluding any self-conscious person from ever going to confession for fear of being overheard by the other people sitting 2 feet away. The music here is strictly limited to the effeminate treacle of the St. Louis Jesuits. No one sings.
 

Standard church wear for local Catholics

The well-to-do people who attend this church are some of the worst dressed and worst behaved congregants I have ever seen. All of the usual misbehavior can be seen here, but to a higher degree than anywhere else in my experience: unbelievably slovenly and slatternly dress, constant talking and phone use, and a complete lack of respect for or acknowledgment of the presence of God. It's not as if there's any example coming from the parish leadership, since the tall, blonde pastor, when he is not the celebrant, habitually wanders around the church before and during the beginning of Mass glad-handing and chatting up the crowd. (Bizarrely enough, when he is not saying Mass, he announces that he will be hearing Confession during the other priest's sermon). Mass is always well attended but I suspect that this has something to do with a requirement for the children at the booming parish school; one does not get the impression of any piety whatsoever from this group of people. The rotation of three priests serving the two constituent churches are nice enough but their sermons set the standard for banality and insipidness.



"Cool" priest prototype

I had heard this priest before and although his sermons are usually bizarre, this one took the cake for not only being strange but outright heretical. He came down from the pulpit in the usual pandering style of "cool" priests and started talking, with his customary histrionics, about Father Leonard Feeney (as if there were nothing more relevant to talk about than a 65 year old controversy that 99.9% of Catholics have never heard of.) Father Feeney, of course, rigidly interpreted the age-old doctrine of No Salvation Outside the Church to mean that one had to be formally baptized with water in order to be saved, and was eventually excommunicated for disobeying a summons to appear in Rome to defend himself. This priest didn't stop at condemning Father Feeney for denying the validity of Baptism by Blood and Desire, but went even further by preaching universal salvation. I kid you not.

 

He mused that God couldn't possibly damn a person who had never heard the Gospel and He couldn't possibly damn a person who was turned off by the Faith because they only knew bad Catholics and He couldn't possibly damn a person who was comfortable in their own non-Catholic religion. In fact, God really can't damn anyone at all, he preached, because if they are non-Catholic it's because God wanted them to be non-Catholic, which is all part of His plan (thereby reducing to worthlessness all the missionaries and evangelists and martyrs through two millennia of Church history). This priest repeatedly said that "every person made in the image of God will know God". He also repeatedly and vehemently underscored that this has always been Church teaching. He admitted that, yes, Christ said that no one comes to the Father except through Him and, yes, the motto of No Salvation Outside the Church was ancient and true, but he harmonized  his contradictions by explaining that Christ's sacrifice basically made every human being a part of the Church and ensured their salvation automatically, whether or not they were consciously Christian because, after all, "every person made in the image of God will know God".
 

How many souls did that priest murder that evening, I wonder.

 

I think I did the right thing by trying to contact the pastor privately, but several emails to the parish about this outrageous blasphemy went unanswered.

No Marriage=No Church

The following must-read article by John Zmirak is spot on and exactly what I have been saying: if these modernist, wicked bishops in the hierarchy manage to declare that Catholics are able to divorce their spouses and marry again, then that effectively negates all of the Catholic Church's authority and claims about its divine nature. This issue is that important. And if the Catholic Church turns out to be a fallible, human institution, then what does that say about the Christ who promised that the gates of Hell would not prevail against it?

The Abomination of Desolation

The Synod on the Family taking place in Rome right now is proving to be one of the most disastrous and significant events in the history of the Church. Satan has surely enthroned his servants in high places if our shepherds are seriously considering allowing Communion for the divorced and remarried, second and third marriages, allowing contraception, and recognizing fornicating couples and active homosexuals as comprising some sort of legitimate alternative to true marriage that must be valued. Our Church leaders have not only embraced the spirit of the age but have fallen down and worshipped this idol of lust. They are in the process of constructing a new Gospel that discards or makes powerless the clear words of Jesus Christ Himself. May God intervene!

So when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains." Matthew 24:15-16

Death watch

So, the St. Francis Center for Spirituality is closing down and- just like the Mount Manresa affair- all anyone can talk about is the threat of overdevelopment on the site. As a native Staten Islander, I can well understand that, but there has been no Catholic response as such, as if it is just to be expected by our clergy that we are to suffer, in the natural course of things, one humiliating defeat after another and just eventually die out. Are any of our clergy wondering why it is that a seminary has no seminarians and what we can do about this non-stop decline?

Fun fact: only 40,000 Staten Islanders attend Mass every Sunday, according to spokesman Joseph Zwilling. Approximately 54% of Staten Islanders are counted as being Catholic (although the actual percentage of baptized is probably much, much higher). Even going by the lower number, that is only 8% of Staten Island Catholics who go to Mass on Sunday.

8%

And how many of those church-goers have the slightest clue about the Faith, considering polls show that the vast majority of even church-going Catholics dissent from or are ignorant of basic Church teaching on the Eucharist, sexual morality, the authority of the Pope and the Bible, the divinity of Christ, et al. The situation over the past 40 years, but especially today, should prompt any faithful priest to run frantically through the streets, trying to salvage whatever souls they can from this wreckage. However, all our priests and bishops seem focused on is gaining amnesty for illegal invaders, pandering to homosexuals, destroying the orthodox Catholics who point out the truth and turning the One True Faith into a hand-holding Episcopalian community center.  We are on a death watch here, and our spiritual fathers just don't do or say anything about it.

Shut up already!

Imagine if we had someone like this whose job it was to hush the sacrilegious yacking that goes on before every Mass? This soldier's action was entirely correct when confronted with such low-class disrespect. How much more respect do we owe the Creator of the Universe when we are in His presence for the purpose of worship?

A Korean Phoenix rises from German ashes.

This is really good and exciting news that escaped my notice last October: the formerly defunct parish of St. John the Baptist de la Salle in Stapleton  has been reborn as a Korean Catholic church. As far as I can tell from their website, they are up and running. Congratulations to them! As wonderful as this news is, it is so sad that the Church's only "strategy" seems to be to rely on immigrant priests and immigrant congregations to replace our own apostate flocks and reinforce our own miniscule vocations. That is the strategy of passive incompetents.

An interesting reflection on some St. John history here.

Also, this site says that St. John was being used by a Protestant congregation as recently as 2010. WHO was responsible for allowing that kind of sacrilege to occur??

Follow-up article here.

Censoring God's politically incorrect Word

Today's Gospel reading dealt with Jesus' meeting at the well with the Samaritan woman (John 4:5-42). It was a long reading, yes, and a "short form" was available in which several long parts were omitted, but one extremely short passage in the middle was_very_conspicuously excised, perhaps in conjunction with the push to end the indissolubility of marriage. It was the section where Jesus supernaturally perceived that the woman was living in some sort of adulterous pseudo-marriage and confronted her about it by saying, “You are right in saying, ‘I do not have a husband.’For you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband." (JN 4:16-18). As these kinds of relationships are so popular with modern American Catholics, our Cardinals, bishops and priests are so terrified to even bring up the topic that they have now officially edited the liturgy to avoid speaking Jesus' "offensive" words. Does the cowardice of our clergy know no bounds?

Some time ago I started a petition to abolish this sacrilegious "short form" option. As one of the (grand total of two) people who signed the petition said: "The short-form option is frequently used to skip passages that challenge us to piety and say the consequences of impiety." Please sign this petition if you are as sick of it as I am.

Marriage and its Enemies

We have entered into an age when, seemingly, Satan has been loosed upon the earth in order to test and sift the Faithful in preparation for the End. In a matter of a handful of years, society's values have been utterly transposed, and almost everything we had held good or sacred has been rejected and their opposite embraced. One of the most horrifying- and successful- tactics of the Enemy has been to attack marriage, the foundation of the family. True marriage, between a man and a woman who contract a permanent union before God in a church, has been undermined in a hundred different ways: the Sexual Revolution, Feminism, contraception, abortion, easy divorce, easy annulment, pornography, the internet, media mockery and now its dark counterpart, so-called "gay-marriage," are all weapons in the devil's arsenal to minimize, desacralize, disparage and destroy marriages and Marriage.

Even the secular world's sentimental and improperly-formed idea of marriage, as practiced casually and serially by non-believers, is falling by the wayside as young and old alike seem to be eschewing its hypocrisy in favor of mere fornication and cohabitation, with one person after another so long as the feeling lasts.

One could weather these attacks, by the Grace of God, if it didn't seem like our bishops were actively trying to undermine us as well.

To wit, they often issue the correct, formal written statements about these matters (which counts for little) but never, never do anything about them, e.g. the bishops_never_preach about marriage, or any of these hard issues that undermine marriage, but gleefully run an annulment factory of easy "Catholic divorce"; they provide little to no opposition to legalized homosexual pseudo-marriages and, in many cases, even abet them; yes, they have sued Obama over his contraception mandate, but, in a lot of cases (including in our New York Archdiocese) the Church already provides contraception in its health care plans and hospitals, thus fatally undermining our position; they never, never discipline the politicians who defy the Faith, such as "Catholic in good standing" Andrew Cuomo, who not only supports abortion and homosexual marriage, but is a divorced man shacking up with a concubine. Frankly, most of our bishops are either actively working for the other side or are just too cowardly to wear a miter.

Now, the Fifth Column in the hierarchy are taking off the gloves and, for the first time, openly lobbying to overturn not just Catholic praxis but Catholic doctrine. A well-organized campaign is being hatched in the Church to repeal God's law on the indissolubility of marriage.

Led by the German bishops, who are already defying the Church and denying our Faith by giving Communion to people who have divorced their spouses and remarried, they have chosen as their spokesman the modernist and dissident Cardinal Walter Kasper, whose own career and continuing preeminence is a mystery and a festering scandal. For months now, these forces have been leaking hints to the media that the upcoming Synod on the Family will change Church teaching on marriage and permit the reception of Communion by the divorced and remarried. In the recent opening discussions for this October Synod, Cardinal Kasper stated his case with Luciferian persuasiveness...

He begins by pointing out the hard cases of those divorced and remarried people who genuinely desire to be reconciled with the Church. Striking a pose as a loyal son of the Church, he affirms Jesus' clear teaching on the indissolubility of marriage while denying it in the next breath by subtly describing the Church's teaching as a "tradition" and calling for these adulterous relationships to somehow be made valid in the eyes of the Church. (Funny how this bleeding heart has no tears to shed for the millions of children who have had to endure broken homes over the past 5 decades). He exhibits his reasonableness by arguing that this would only take place in very limited and individual circumstances, and only after a period of penitence.

Bull.

He, and everyone, knows that this is intended to be the camel's nose under the tent. As if it were possible to only defy God's law in a limited way, it is patently obvious that the modernists in the hierarchy are using this issue to "officially" overturn and nullify the Sacrament of Marriage and thus the infallible consistency of the Catholic Church, which is the ultimate goal, of course. For who could trust a Church or believe in a Faith that would contradict its own most basic dogmas? The Catholic Church will have finally slit its own throat if this change is allowed to pass.

What makes it even more disturbing is that Pope Francis has tolerated these proposals and even appeared to approve of them. We will recall one of his first interviews, when he favorably referenced the Eastern Orthodox approval of second marriages. And the Pope's very questionable advisor, the constantly-smirking leftist Cardinal Maradiaga, has been extremely vocal in his support of this new morality.

Sensing the rising zeitgeist, the then-Archbishop (now Cardinal) Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and not theretofore known as any sort of staunch conservative, issued a preemptive blow to this dangerous conspiracy. Entitled, Testimony to the Power of Grace, it is the most powerful and, indeed, beautiful apologia for and encomia to Marriage that I have ever read. It is intellectually substantial but eminently comprehensible. I encourage everyone to read and re-read it, until its message is internalized: 1. Marriage cannot be dissolved, because Jesus said so, clearly and definitively, 2. the Church has solemnly and dogmatically reaffirmed that teaching throughout the ages, and 3. therefore, the Church couldn't teach anything different even if it wanted to.  God bless the Cardinal. To his credit, he is standing strong against his enemies' attacks, but their campaign continues.

I know this isn't a Staten Island issue (unless one considers the epidemic of divorced Catholics here) but this campaign to change doctrine is so exceedingly dangerous to our Faith that I feel we should be aware and be vocal. Read Jesus' words on marriage in the Bible; read Muller's essay; and reflect upon what a glorious gift God has given us in Marriage.

The Good Shepherd and his lost sheep

Fun Fact: The "Dr. Rev. Daniel Mercaldo," the pastor of the Gateway evangelical megachurch, publicly brags that 90% of his very large congregation are ex-Catholics. The image seen below is advertising one of his upcoming classes that are meant to solidify the apostasy of the people he has seduced away from Mother Church to his personal sect.

An excellent opportunity for undercover Catholic apologists, hint, hint...

And in response to this and similar kinds of spiritual aggression from the ravaging wolves of the sects, our local Church leaders do....what exactly? Well, they organize symbolic charity events with Moslems,  they expend all their spirit, intellect and energy figuring out how to close down parishes, they agitate for immigration amnesty, and they throw a big ecumenical hootenanny every year (coming up this week), where they will smile at and embrace people like the Rev. Dr. Daniel Mercaldo and others of his ilk, who are doing their best, day and night, to completely destroy Christ's Church.  Our local yoga instructors seem to show greater leadership and evangelistic fervor than our Catholic priests and bishops.

Granted, even our best priests must recoil in horror when they see the quality of the lay people they are given to shepherd, but that's the thing about leadership- we are shaped by our pastors, not the other way around. When our priests are lazy, ignorant, unfaithful, uninspiring and uninterested, that's the kind of congregation that will be produced. And when our priests and bishops not only don't care that 70% of American Catholics have left the Church, for either the sects or for secularism, but even treat these sectarians and heretics as allies and friends, then we have a situation where the Parable of the Good Shepherd has been inverted: The shepherd has lost 99 sheep, but instead of going out to rescue them, he sits on his rear end and declares to the one remaining sheep that all the world is beautiful and the fold has never seen better days.