It is quite often to hear people saying that the Church needed to change because it was not effective in evangelisation, or was losing members, or whatever other tripe the ill-informed or ill-intentioned will give us about the pre-Vatican II Church. They say this to rationalise or justify the rapture which took place at Vatican II, whose negative effects are growing by the day.
In this context, and given that we are approaching the 'canonisation' of Paul VI, it is timely to have a look at how the Church actually was, statistically, at the death of Pope Pius XII. Indeed, Rorate Caeli never gets tired of reminding us of how booming the Church was, and even though the figures are for the U.S., I am quite certain that the trend holds world-wide. In a piece titled "The Canonization of Vatican II: The case for Pacelli, revisited", they did just that.
Long story short, if the Church today was to have even 1/4 of the numbers that the Church was pulling in 1958, it would be seen as almost miraculous, given how bad things are today.
These are only the positive numbers. For a complete picture we would have to also find out the number of apostates every year, how many priests became laicised, how many monks and nuns left religious life and the number of divorces and annulments. With regards to annulments, I know for a fact that there were less than 1,000 in the whole world in the reign of Pope Pius XII, compared to more than 60,000 in the U.S. alone just some 10 years later and today probably. I suspect the other negative numbers from the reign of Pope Pius XII would put NOChurch to shame.
'Shame' and NOChurch are never far apart, and this week was no different. From Rome we had a high-ranking member of the Apostolic Signatura sentenced to 18 months probation for child pornography possession. This particular pervert was revealed as he groped a man at a market and was then run down by the young man, only for the police to intervene. Upon looking him up they noticed he had prior convictions for indecent exposure and this led to a search on his apartment wherein the perverted material was found.
In the U.S., we had one of Bergoglio's most popular sodomy-pushers, Cardinal Tobin - a Bergoglio appointment - tweeting out "goodnight baby" before promptly erasing the tweet. He claimed that it was to his sister, but I am not sure how many people believe that, as I certainly don't. The best we can hope for is that he was writing to his mistress, although it doesn't take much of an imagination to suspect that he was sending to someone with not quite so squishy parts...
In Germany, they have gone full-blown apostaste, with news that protestants will be allowed to receive Holy Communion, if they are married to Catholics. I'll not spend much time on this, but it is amusing to note that Catholics who do not pay the Church tax are barred from all sacraments, whereas protestants who share the same bed with Catholics are welcome, even though they do not believe any of the Chuch's imporntant doctrines. That's NOChurch logic if ever we had it. Gloria.tv wondered when Muslims will be up for some Sunday bread.
The Remnant wrote a piece on sacrilegious Communion by protestants and traced the rot all the way back to the documents of Vatican II, in 1965. It is very fashionable by many who dislike Bergoglio to pin all the blame on him, but the fact of the matter is that Bergoglio is only a very virulent strain of the Novus Ordo virus. The rot began a long time ago and there are very many people to blame, and no Novus Ordo pope gets off lightly, with the exception of Pope John Paul I whose reign was too short and not excluding even Pope Benedict XVI, however much good he did. These are the same popes, by the way, who are automatically canonised at death, with Bergoglio even blasphemously joking that Benedict and he are on the waiting list.
We are supposed to believe that the greatest crisis and apostasy in the Church's history has been overseen by a series of holy popes not seen since the early centuries, when many of them died to save the faith.
One of these supposed 'heroically holy' popes, Bergoglio the terrible, has this past week been implicated in a financial corruption scandal. It involved the transfer of money to a scandal-ridden hospital on Bergoglio's behest, to the tune of $25 million from an organisation which normally limits itself to donations of $100,000 and in exceptional cases to $200,000. The cardinals in the U.S. voted for the money to go to the hospital because Bergoglio urged them to do so. We would all like to know how much of that money has gone to its proper use and how much went off to pay off people for their silence.
In " Peronism and Corruption" , Fr. Ray Blake attempted to explain why Bergoglio surrounds himself with so many perverts. He puts it down to Peronism, in which people are promoted not due to competence or virtue, but out of loyalty to the head honcho. Hilary White picked up on this and pointed out that part of the reason why Bergoglio wants perverts around him is because they are easier to control since he has more dirt on them. That he is one of them did not get a mention, but perverts of a feather perve together.
The now rather famous Jordan Peterson revealed in an interview to former Catholic Answers host Patrick Coffin that he needs 3 more years before he can give his position on the "historical Jesus". I remember getting into a discussion regarding whether the man was a Christian or...
