Now, Here's an idea!

Well, we can sell our stolen property when our little fake church has run its course and see old churches become community centers... or, what if, perhaps, we were to give them back to the True Church we stole them from? Blimey!

Why does anyone bother with ecumenical dialog with these people any more?

And, speaking of matters Angletical, the second quarter of England v. France has been postponed until tomorrow. Sorry. Sleep happened earlier than expected last night (had to make up for staying up too late the previous nights). American Conservatory Theater happens tonight. Sorry.

Oh, By Gum! It's the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity!

Of course there are two ways of looking at this week: a right way and a wrong way. The wrong way is "Lord, let us all come to understand and accept each other's positions and blah blah blah."

The right way:

Lord, shed your Grace on all semi-Christians, heretics and schismatics, help them to put down their pride and come to the True Faith and to grow in communion with the Holy Father, the Bishop of Rome. And if they harden in their apostasy, heresy and schism, then shatter their sects, fragment them, and thus free them from the bonds of Satan, so that they may be better inclined to search for the Truth, whole and complete, which is found only in the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Amen.

The Anglitics and Cardinal Kasper

Now, I make no pretense of having warm and fuzzy thoughts towards the Anglican-Episcopal Church and her many offshoots. Of all the Protestants, they are the worst, in the roots of their schism, in their theft of Catholic buildings, in their persecutions of the True Church, and in their solemn mockery of the sacraments. I can personally think of no sillier way of wasting time than dialog with them beyond saying, "look, your little play church is falling apart left and right. Repent and join the Holy, Catholic Church in communion with the Bishop of Rome, or go to Hell, enduring a lot of silliness along the way. And, yes, they have women priestesses in Hell, in fact, all of them."

Bingo. Think of the time saved.

Instead we get this sober, polite back and forth, back and forth, and our guys have to sit and grin and not blurt out, "you gits! All of this hogwash is so that slob Hank 8 could get a divorce. We know it, you know it, and all of this theological gobbledegook you keep shovelling at us is nothing more than half-assed attempts to make yourself feel better about your decision." And the Anglitics go on to do sillier and sillier things: ordain women, Gene Robinson, elevate women to their episcopacy.

It is beyond time to stop bothering with dialog. Cabbages would be more receptive.

But, I am not in charge of these matters, Cardinal Kasper is. And Cardinal Kasper is a much more patient and polite sort of fellow than I am. Here he is talking to the Coven of Anglican Bishops or whatever they are called these days. I admire his charity and all that, but at what point is this crap going to be seen as prolonging the misery. The Church of England is going to vanish in the air, and, since it is clear that they will not come back to the fold as a whole communion (indeed, how could they with women priests?), we should simply hover around with lifeboats to pick up the survivors.

The good Cardinal should reflect a little bit when he says things like:

it is the church led by the Archbishop of Canterbury who, in the words of the Windsor Report, is ‘the pivotal instrument and focus of unity’ within the Anglican Communion; other provinces have understood being in communion with him as a ‘touchstone of what it was to be Anglican’

These people are not about unity. If so, these talks would not be necessary. In reading the whole speech, it is clear that the Cardinal is proceding as if there were some hope that Canterbury might repent and return to the fold. His optimism is certainly praiseworthy, yet it is an optimism I do not share.

The best hope for the Anglicans is for them to leave their church and become Catholic. Period. And in this, we must strongly support those who came out of the darkness of Canterbury, whether into the Anglican Recension or the normative Roman Rite.

Yes, as the Cardinal says, "Our friends’ problems are our problems too." So let's stick with helping our friends with their problems, and let the enemy wither and die, so we can begin the enormous task of tending to our enemy's victims.

They Were not Pilgrims!

This really gets me whenever I hear one of the Protestant Patriotic Hymns, especially when one is inserted into the Liturgy of the Catholic Church:

The Mayflower folks were not Pilgrims. They were dangerous, revolutionary heretics who were escaping duty, law and Truth, in order to establish a demented little utopia where they could be free to burn witches and hang priests (I have no objection to the burning of witches - as I have said before, I think the Pope should apologize to the world for dropping the ball on this and should thank our separated brethren for their work in stamping out witchcraft). Our nation and the world would have been better off if these rascals foundered on the rocks and drowned in the frigid Atlantic, or had been forced to land in New Spain where they would have been treated properly by the Holy Office.

The celebration of victory over the Protestant usurper in England should be completely distinct from the survival of these Puritan wretches. There is some beautiful writing on the Natural Law found in the Declaration of Independence. We should examine that and celebrate that.

There is nothing Catholic about the evil of Puritanism. We should no more call these people pilgrims than we would the damned souls being carried to their everlasting place of suffering.

Anglitics

I have to be brief, unfortunately. I am just wondering at all of the Catholic handwringing over the American Anglitics and their desire for self-destruction, especially the folks who seem to wear long faces and write in very SERIOUS tones. Of course I am not a contender for Mr. Ecumenical 2003, so perhaps it is just a perspective thing, BUT...

Is it really possible for a real Catholic to NOT want to watch the false church of Henry VIII fall into the sea and never be seen again? Obviously we do not want to wish this of the individuals in the Anglican Communion, but it would seem that every soul who leaves the Real Absence of Canterbury for the True Faith of Rome should be the cause of rejoicing. It is a Triumph (there! I've said it) of the Holy Spirit and Christ's Church for the institutional structure of this dangerous false church to crumble.

Now, I certainly recognize that we do not want to lose the individual Anglicans to the even worse philosophies of secular humanism, paganism, atheism or Mohammedanism, but to worry one iota over the viability of an idolatrous pseudo-church that fakes sacraments, an institution that has caused nothing but misery for the Irish people, an institution born out of adultry and murder, confirmed with massive bloodshed, willful schism and heresy, even to the point of breaking Apostolic succession, seems, well, to be valuing "tolerance" and "diversity" over Truth.

Sure, pray for the poor confused Anglicans, but pray that they will come home to Rome, not that they will stabilize the sham structure of Henry VIII!

St. Augustine, Pray for Us!
St. Thomas More, Pray for Us!
St. Edmund Campion, Pray for Us!