Bishop Philip Egan

You don't need God; You have me! Sunday 14th to Saturday 20th of January

There is a lot of ground to cover this week so I shall try to be brief on each topic.

We begin with some good news in the form of a series of articles by the always-unpredictable Fr. Allan J. McDonald. I refer to him as unpredictable because one never knows what he is going to write. One day he could be attacking the latest destructive Novus Ordo novelty and the next day he could be attacking not only an analogous novelty, but the very Novus Ordo mentality that brought the novelty into being in the first place.

This time he published 3 posts on Vatican II, the sum total of which was geared towards defending the Catholic Church pre-dating before Vatican II. He linked to a series on interviews from people who lived before Vatican II, and only one of 6 was negative, and that 6th one turned out to be a bitter feminist who was a toddler at the opening of the Second Vatican Council, so her opinion can be dismissed out of hand. What we have is a snapshot into the life of a Church which was caring, loved and vibrant; a Church which was the centre of the lives of many of her sons and daughters. It was a loving Church which inspired those under her care to aspire to be the best they could be.

In a follow-up post, he responded to a comment from the original piece, in which the notion that the pre-Vatican II Church could not have been that good given that it collapsed virtually overnight once NOChurch went into high gear was advanced. He finished off with citing a study which shows that only 24% of Catholic women in the U.S. go to Church nowadays. This number was naturally much higher before the Novus Ordo. In other words, in spite of - or perhaps, due to - the mass effeminisation programme undertaken by NOChurch authorities, even women find NOChurch unappealing.

On Rorate Caeli, Peter Kwasniewski outlined the Church's traditional wisdom in having post-Christmas and pre-Lented periods, to slow us down from the highs of Christmas before we enter the gloom of Lent. It was a piece well-worth reading.

We were also informed that at least 20% of non-religious people pray, often in times of trouble. I would have thought the figure was higher. So perhaps the old adage that there are no atheists in foxholes should be updated, but I would think that even 80% of the rest have some kind of notion of God, only they let their anger get in the way of their humility. You find it commonly expressed in the "God doesn't exist, because if he did then so-and-so would not have died" and so on.

In the U.K., we had Bishop Egan visiting a foreign diocece and to his dismay and horror most Catholic churches were locked. He did not appreciate that, and neither do I since I have also attempted to go to many churches which I found locked. That this diocese seemed to be in England precludes the possibility that he could have paid a visit during siesta hours. Churches being locked is yet another fruit of Vatican II, and a bitter one at that.

We then get to the bad news, and not entirely unpredictably, these are headed by our very own Bergoglio.

The world's favourite attention-whore was up to his old tricks again, although this time he outdid even himself. On another of his scandalous trips - this time to Chile and Peru to do nobody-knows-what-good, he 'wedded' a couple on the plane, after joking that it is witchcraft which gives him all his wrecking-ball energy. The couple both worked as air stewards, and the story they gave was that Bergoglio by chance inquired as to their marriage status, and finding out that they were not sacramentally married - only civilly -, volunteered to wed them on the plane. I must admit that I never bought the story for a second, because more or less everything Bergoglio does is a stunt. Furthermore, we are talking about a man who says that most couples who are married are not married and many couples who are not married are actually married. It is an unlikely candidate for an inquisition into whether the steward serving him is in a sacramental marriage.

It reminded me of a scene from an X-Men movie, in which the grandfather mutant tells Charles that he doesn't need Cerebro (the machine he uses to reach into far-away minds) in order to reach out to all the world, because he can do with his powers instead, saying "You don't need a machine to amplify your powers. You have me!". Bergoglio was simply stating "You don't need to call on God for marital blessings; You have me!". The mutant seems to have been correct, as he had the power; Bergoglio, not quite so, as he doesn't.

Now, at a wedding Mass, we call down God's blessings on the new couple and pray that they will have a fruitful marriage. Bergoglio obviously seem that a wave of his hand can replace the blessings that are brought down from Heaven upon a newly-wed validly and sacramentally married in the House of God.

It never seemed likely that Bergoglio would warmly speak to flight attendants anyway, as insider portrayals of Bergoglio paint him out as a rather unfriendly man. It seemed even less fanciful that a man who has launched a fully-fledged assaunt on the institution of marriage would care whether a couple was canonically and sacramentally married.

To nobody's surprise, therefore, the whole stunt turned out to have been pre-planned but that didn't stop Bergoglio continuing to lie about the whole event and sticking to the original story.  What id did, however, was show just how irreverent and narcissistic all involved were. No longer could...

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