Wednesday, January 22, 2014

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.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...


All grace and all good flow from the sacrifice of the Cross: when we get the liturgy of the Mass right again--whose center is the very same eternal sacrifice of Calvary made present on the altar--and worship our Lord aright, everything else will fall back into place. http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2014/01/father-manellis-pastoral-report-to_5.html


"...and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread"



Staten Pilgrim said...

I see that you know your Brideshead Revisited. Very good. : )

Anonymous said...

Thanks - Fr. Brown mysteries actually. I did watch the Brideshead series on tv (and remember it quoted); hopefully one day will read the book (I've heard it's much better).

bill bannon said...

anonymous....if liturgy were the whole solution, Pope Alexander VI would not have had 7 children nor would Pope Julius II have had two daughters. They said the Roman rite Latin. Liturgy is not a magical talisman. We had 29 Popes from. 1585 til 1878 2975 8368996cooperate proximately with the castrati culture until Pope Leo XIII put his foot down and stopped it. Those 29 all said the Latin Mass. Liturgy is not magic.

Staten Pilgrim said...

I agree. How many heresiarchs lived their entire lives hearing the Latin Mass? Luther, Calvin, Henry VIII, etc.? How many liberal Catholics- John XXIII, Paul VI, Annabile Bugnini, etc.- heard nothing but the Latin Mass and yet disposed of it like yesterday's garbage? It is not a magic talisman of holiness. Still, in our day, adherence to the Latin Mass almost always means orthodoxy, while opposition to the Latin Mass almost always means heterodoxy.

Anonymous said...

As the facilitator of the " Growing up Catholic" class at Church at the Gateway, I hereby invite you. Staten island Pilgrim (Catholic ) to come to the meeting tonight at 7:30pm. There is also one last session next Monday also. Come and see for yourself that we are not "Catholic bashers " and I use the New American Bible (Catholic Edition ) when conducting the meetings. Please come and hear the Gospel presented in clear easy to understand language before you pronounce Gateway "apostate". Please look for more information on my Facebook page. Thank you, nicgenn

Staten Pilgrim said...

Dear anonymous Gateway leader: 1. I wouldn't pronounce Gateway as a whole "apostate"; that wouldn't be linguistically accurate. However, those confused, individual Catholics whom you love-bombed into your congregation are most certainly apostates (look up the definition). Why take offense at the term? You don't believe that the Catholic Church is of God, you believe that many of the Catholic Church's dogmatic teachings are either perverted or invented and you believe that Catholics who reject their church and join yours are being faithful to God. So, in your view, being apostate to our "false" religion is a positive thing. There's no other reason for you to conduct this class except to persuade and indoctrinate Catholics away from their faith. You are anti-Catholic because you are pro-evangelical Protestantism; it's ok if you are a "Catholic basher"- just admit it.

It's a curious tactic of the sects to somehow disguise their anti-Catholicism in order to lure in ignorant Catholics. It's not exactly respectable, but it happens. I guess it must work. I recall back in college when I attended a lecture on world government and the New World Order at an evangelical church way up in the mountains. The lecture was preceded by a half hour of worship, singing and jumping around to Christian rock. It was incredibly strange and uncomfortable to me at the time, but I've seen a bit of the world since then, including Gateway church. Anyway, as I didn't own a car, one of the members had to pick me up and drop me off. On the ride back to my dorm he asked me to come attend the next church service, but I told him that I wouldn't be interested, as I was a Catholic. His response has stuck with me these many years, as it was so contrary to basic logic yet so slick and ostensibly reasonable: he said, "That's ok- we have many Catholics in our church." I'm still trying to wrap my mind around that sales pitch.

No- I thank you for your offer to hear the Gospel in "easy to understand language", but I can already read God's word in a comprehensible translation, along with the explanatory notes from God's infallible Church. How would a convinced and informed Catholic benefit from this class? I know what you believe and I don't believe it jives with either the Bible, reason or historical facts. Thanks anyway. I'm sure it must be a blast.