The crisis of faith

Recently, the Catholic diocese of London, issued a diocesan report that registered a decline in all areas of Church activity. The 65-page report, which strongly reflects the parlous condition of the Church today, found that only 14% of the 450,000 Roman Catholics in the diocese attend weekend mass, down 3.5% in the last three years. The report also showed a drastic drop in the number of priests, parishes, marriages, funerals, baptisms, first communions and confirmations. The only upward trend was in regards to ecclesiastical bureaucracy. In numbers the apparatchiks multiplied while the worshipers dwindled.

London Bishop Ronald Fabbro reacted to the chilling report on the plight of our Church like most bishops do today - by promising "strategic changes" that would increase the number of bureaucrats that caused the dire situation in the first place. Rather than attempting to reform the mess our bishops made of Vatican II, Bishop Fabbro's stated solution was to invent yet further new and "different models of ministry and leadership".

The last thing the Church needs today are more bureaucrats. What the Church does need is to restore much of the Tradition it jettisoned after Vatican II. Though this is totally lost on our most all of our Modernist bishops there are some positive ways the church can overcome the crisis of faith and bring back souls from the precipice of moral relativism. They are as follows:

1) Remove the Norvus Ordo and bring back the Tridentine Mass to prominence. The Eucharist is the all encompassing source and summit of Christian life. This has been largely forgotten today because the people have lost their sense of the supernatural. A major reason for this is the gimmicks and novelties brought into the New Mass. These include the total elimination of Latin, the removal of the altar rail, the new practice of receiving Holy Communion in the hand while standing, the priest facing the people, and the banality of lay people drifting about the altar engaged in tasks that were previously restricted only to to priests. Despite the best efforts of holy priests and dedicated lay people, the New Mass remains a casual affair that has lost its sense of the sacred. The new changes coming into effect will do little to remedy this because they do not remove the options which are the main source of division and abuse. This was one of the primary reason Pope Pius V fixated the Tridentine Mass as the mass for all time.

We now have a "two-Mass concept" that not only pits traditionalists and non-traditionalists against one another but which also serves to confuse the faithful with their given terms "ordinary" (New Mass) and "extraordinary" (Latin Mass). These terms are rarely understood or used with any consistency in the church. For example, the same vast majority of bishops who accept the Novus Ordo as the "ordinary" form of the Mass, reject the Church teaching that restricts lay ministers of Holy Communion to act as "extraordinary" ministers. Because both masses are now considered equally valid (notwithstanding the terms "ordinary" and "extraordinary") and because it is equally valid for the laity and the priest to touch the Host, everyone does as they please - acting in accordance with their own preferences and not in accordance with the mind the Church. This deep-seated inconsistency within the church comes from the church Herself who prefers one thing yet allows another. The Novus Ordo has undoubtedly destroyed the Catholic faith by advancing a "cafeteria" mentality among Catholics with all its options. We need to bring back the Latin Mass and shelve the Novus Ordo, admitting that it was failed experiment.

2) We also need to get rid of our National Bishops' Conferences which operate, in practice, according to the heretical principles of "Gallicanism" always seeking for the bishops greater autonomy and the restriction of papal control. Their post-Vatican II innovations and teachings - often in defiance of Papal edicts and in contradiction to Magisterial teachings - have Protestantized the Church and helped the world usher in its sexual revolution. I refer in the first instance to their implementation of practices like Communion in the hand and the use of altar girls, and, in the second instance, to their acceptance of moral evils such as contraception which was affirmed by the Canadian Bishops in their infamous "Winnipeg Statement" of 1969. This is not to say that there are not still some good bishops who are willing to follow the pope and the church unfailingly. There are. But these good men are intimidated and forceful suppressed and silenced by the majority vote of the various Bishops'' Conferences. Not surprisingly we see but a rare sampling of bishops with the courage to defend the faith by speaking out against the moral evils of the day or by refusing, for example, to administer Holy Communion to the throngs of self-excommunicated Catholic politicians who legally and rigorously (often in a corrupt and illegal manner i.e New York Governor Andrew Cuomo) promote and advance these evils (abortion and homosexuality etc.) in society.

While it is the norm for the various Bishops Conferences' to censor orthodox bishops, we see no discipline at all issued for the vast and growing number of heretical Bishops clamoring for women priests, married priests, homosexuality, abortion etc. In fact, a formal schism in the church is brewing in Austria where hundreds and hundreds of priests are openly calling for an end to official church teaching on a number of matters.

The bishops' new attitude toward error (which is basically to ignore it) comes from their post-Vatican desire "to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity". Our bishops have now decided to resist error by showing the validity of church teaching, rather than by issuing condemnations. This setting up of the principle of mercy as opposed to severity ignores the fact that in the mind of the Church the condemnation of error is itself a work of mercy, since by pinning down error those laboring under it are corrected and others are preserved from falling into it. Moreover, our bishops reduce by half the amount of help they can offer, since they restrict the whole duty of the Church regarding the person in error to the mere presentation of the truth: this is alleged to be enough in itself to undo the error.

This fallacy is based on a peculiar view of the intellectual state of modern man. Our bishops make the paradoxical assertion that men today are so profoundly affected by false and harmful ideas in moral matters that at last it seems men of themselves, that is without refutations and condemnations, are disposed to condemn them; in particular those ways of behaving which despise God and His law. One can indeed maintain that a purely theoretical error will cure itself, since it arises from purely logical causes; but it is difficult to understand the proposition that a practical error about life's activities will cure itself, since that sort of error arises from judgments in which the non-necessary elements of thought are involved. This optimistic interpretation of events, asserting that at last error is about to recognize and correct itself, is difficult enough to accept in theory; but it is also bluntly refuted by facts.

After our bishops adopted this mentality at Vatican II, men did not change their minds regarding their errors, but became entrenched in them instead, and gave them the force of law. The public and universal acceptance of these errors became obvious with the adoption of divorce, homosexuality, homosexual-marriage, embryonic stem cell research and abortion. The behavior of Christian peoples was entirely altered thereby and their civil legislation, until recently modeled on canon law, was changed into something completely profane no longer having a shade of the sacred about it. On this point, our bishops' foresight indisputably failed.

Our bishops Conferences are essentially clandestine organizations composed of Bishops, Episcopal Vicars and Directors, Deanery Chairs, Diocesan leaders and a host of other bureaucratic lackies who operate with virtually no transparency. Their penchant for power-tripping and for secret dealings away from Rome and the purview of the faithful facilitated the homosexual-pedophile scandal which has drained the Church of so much money She has been forced to close down hundreds and hundreds of churches. Not to be outdone our Bishops continue to rob from the church collections, the poor box and from various other good-will donations to support shady and otherwise untrustworthy charities and organizations like Development and Peace which is undeniably in cahoots with various groups advancing the evils of homosexuality and abortion.

It is time to open up the windows of the church and get rid of the stale air of Collegiality which has become a repressive Big Brother of sorts in the Church. This will free up the good bishops to practice their vows and pursue, unimpeded, the path of the Pope and the Magisterium - whether this means following the pope's latest example of administering Holy Communion only to those who kneel and receive on the tongue or to follow his good example of speaking out vocally, consistently, and continuously against the moral evils of our day.

3) We need also to close down all our Catholic schools and re-open only as many as can bear -with pure conviction - the name "Catholic". They will have to be private schools so as to be free from any governmental influence in the realm of church teaching and discipline. The Church is now in the early stages of a life and death struggle for its survival with a secular state that is seeking to usurp religion in every sphere of life. This move will help deter our bishops from engaging in political compromises with the state on matters of Catholic faith and allow them to concentrate fully on upholding it.

It is essential that our schools retain their Catholic identity. It is not about numbers. Since Vatican II our bishops have succumbed to a false missionary spirit using gangs of strategy planners, consultants and brain-storming committees to try and revolutionize the world with every ludicrous theological, political and liturgical trick and gimmick imaginable. The one thing they forgot to use was the unchanging Catholic faith revolutionized by Christ which they stretched beyond all recognition to appease the masses - as if they (the innovators) were the ones, and not God, who were in charge of saving souls. Unbeknownst to most of our bishops, the good news of Christ has been around for 2,000 years - long before our Post Vatican II bishops started calling it "The Good News"

To both retain and maintain the Catholic identity of our schools we need to get rid of non-Catholic teachers and those Catholic teachers who are divorced, who are shacked up with other "partners" or who otherwise openly live in sin or flaunt the teachings of the Catholic Church. All teachers, at all levels, should further be required to pass a rigorous examination attesting to their superior knowledge and understanding of the faith. In addition, the school elite should be made to sign an oath of obedience to the Church's Magisterium subject to penal sanction. This will rid our schools of, among the other evils of the day, Gay-Straight Alliance Clubs and school taught sex education which is strongly condemned by the Catholic Church but which championed by almost all of our present day Modernist Bishops.

If we restore and entrench the Tridentine Mass throughout the world, eliminate the error of Gallicanism posing as Collegiality, and overhaul all our Catholic schools, - the 3 areas that have been most affected by the chastisement or "diabolical disorientation" prophesied at Fatima - the church will once more become the salt of the earth.

Paul Kokoski