There is a parish and a Catholic school in my town that I cannot associate with. I cannot associate with the parish because it is a parish fully imbibed with the Novus Ordo/post-conciliar paradigm, and there is no way to ensure worthy worship will be offered to God or that worthy preaching and catechesis will be expressed for the good of the faithful.
The school is just as bad — I know because I worked for the board that oversees this school. In fact, when I was a rookie teacher working as a substitute, I distinctly remember sitting in the staff room during a lunch break in this very school when the Canadian Supreme Court legalized medical suicide. One of the teachers got an alert on her phone and told us the ruling, and she said, “I am okay with it,” and everyone nodded.
I say this because I am very confident that I could never allow my children to attend such a school because the staff members — and this woman’s comments reflect the general consensus of Catholic teachers in my area — are so far removed from Catholic orthodoxy that they can’t even feign a pro-life stance.
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In any event, I pass this school and parish almost every single day, and between my daily dog walks and frequent runs, I pass by it multiple times a day on some days. Because we cannot attend this parish we drive 30 minutes to attend Mass at an SSPX chapel, when it would take us five minutes to walk to the parish in our town. We home-school our children because we can’t send them to the school. During the month of November, however, we go to the cemetery run by the parish to pray for the holy souls in Purgatory.
My wife and I have often daydreamed about what it would be like to live in this town 70 years ago when the parish was still truly Catholic and the school also. When the bells rang for the Angelus and nuns taught and rightly disciplined children in the classroom. Our lives would be so much easier if we could just walk to Church and our children could walk to school, but alas, it is not so.
Of course, you understand that the reason this parish is in such a state of decay is because of the crisis in the Church, which is a crisis of Modernism. The parish as it stands will never fix itself, because the seminary for the diocese makes modernist priests and the bishop facilitates the spread of Modernism. There is nothing you or I can do about it because it is above our pay grade.
The only person, besides the bishop, who could turn this ship around, would be the Pope, and it is a tall order to expect the new Pope to fix my little parish in my little town because I am pretty sure he doesn’t even know it exists. So, what hope is there?
Well, there is of course the supernatural virtue of hope that we must defend and possess in our souls, but on the human level, it seems like an impossible task. That being said, there is, I think, a way that we could see some improvement.
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Hurricane Relief
The best way I can attempt to explain my thinking is by way of analogy, and the analogy I will use is that of the destruction wrought by a hurricane or any grave natural disaster for that matter.
After a disastrous hurricane, there is a typical pattern that plays out; almost immediately after we see looting, robbing, and unnecessary crime and the infliction of suffering by the most unscrupulous offenders who take advantage of a downtrodden environment. It is almost as if there is a call that goes out to all low lives after a disaster that says, “Go to the store and steal TVs and narcotics.”
At any rate, during that time of chaos, there is not really anything anyone can do, because things are truly out of control. However, after the rains stop and the floods begin to subside, the hard work of rebuilding and picking up the pieces begins.
People must mourn their losses and find a way to come together to recreate what took so long to build but was destroyed in an instant. For this to be done effectively, they must have a compassionate leader who will bring them together and help them to focus on the essentials. When there is chaos, the vacuum of authority will be filled either by a good leader or a bad leader or various bad leaders who divide the community even more.
An effective leader in this scenario is one who can somehow transcend politics and act in a very paternal way to his constituents. It isn’t that he doesn’t have his particular political persuasion, but, his focus is on bringing people together and therefore on the bare essentials that deserve attention during the crisis.
For example, if the mayor or governor needs a tonne of tradesmen to volunteer their time to help rebuild a vital bridge, he must approach the trade union and focus on getting the men on board, rather than lecturing the union boss on how his union has become a Marxist outfit. It is probably true that the union has become Marxist, as many if not most have, but it doesn’t help anyone in that moment to bring it up.
The leader also has to convince the residents of ghetto communities that police presence in their neighbourhood, although temporary, is actually a good thing given the circumstances, and this isn’t indicative of some underlying agenda that he has to criminalize the underclasses.
At any rate, this sort of leader has to do the impossible and get everyone to work together for the true common good, and he has to somehow keep the peace while doing it. If he fails, he risks watching his community fall back into disarray or losing control of it altogether.
The Hurricane in the Church
It is my contention that Vatican II and the reforms that followed were received like a hurricane, and I think the same patterns that follow natural disasters have been followed in the Church. Also, it is worth remembering that things often move slowly in the Church, so, the patterns we see playing out over months or weeks in civil society can take decades in the Church.
The New Mass and the New Springtime were received like a chastisement, and immediately the looters came out to ransack all they could. They looted parishes and seminaries of statues and seminarians. They looted heaven of countless souls and took advantage of nice old ladies and trustworthy people, just like looters do in all scenarios.
The leader at the time, Paul VI, was largely responsible for the hurricane, and he completely lost control. Under his reign it was the looters and vandals who took control; the inmates took over the asylum.
Then came Pope John-Paul II with his magnanimity and the promise of greatness only matched by his public speaking abilities. Well, he had all the charisma of a great leader, and the camera loved him, but he did little to right the ship. If anything, maybe he was naive about how divided the people had become after the hurricane. Sadly, he didn’t do much to bring down hostilities, and he seems to have exacerbated them with his stupid maneuvering against Catholic traditionalists.
If we think of John-Paul II’s actions in light of the hurricane analogy, they become even more absurd. Imagine a leader condemning the most patriotic group of people during a time of rebuilding because they wanted to preserve whatever structures and monuments had survived the disaster.
Nonetheless, JP II was a man committed to the New Springtime, even if God wasn’t.
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After him came Benedict XVI and hope sprang eternal for conservatives. Granted, there are many criticisms to be levelled at Benedict, and I do so in my recent book, but he was nothing if not conciliatory to Tradition in a way that his predecessor was not. Sadly, he did not possess the leadership skills to create a lasting peace, and the looters returned when Francis took hold of the Church.
Francis had the committed liberalism of Pope John-Paul II, but without the intellectual gravitas, and he demonstrated a seeming hatred for Tradition, much unlike his predecessor; it was a deadly combination. There is no need to go into all that here because we all just lived through it.
But now we have a new man, Leo XIV and he inherits not only the post-hurricane, which is to say post-conciliar Church, but a Church made even more messy because of the insanity of Francis. When Pope Francis said, “Make a mess,” in hindsight, we should have understood that this was his plan for the Church.
Can Leo save my local parish?
So, what will Pope Leo do? Ultimately, if I ever want to take my children to my local parish, then Pope Leo has to find a way to bring Catholics together in a way that can lead to a meaningful rebuild. I have absolutely no idea what that will look like, but he will have to find a way to convince the liberals to be Catholic and convince the traditionalists that the liberals can still become Catholic if we can give them a chance.
In addition, he is going to have to act completely differently than John-Paul II and instead of hitting trads with a stick for being trads, he will have to find a way to bring them in to do the work that needs to be done.
As I said, I have no idea how he will do it, but I suspect he will have to find a way to transcend ecclesial politicking and be a compassionate man with a good heart who can act like a true father if he hopes to accomplish anything at all.
And, to do this properly, he will have to somehow balance the demands of the different groups, without requiring them to compromise on principles, while at the same time having them work for the common goal of rebuilding. And, any unity he builds will have to be real unity based on the authentic Catholic Faith and not a vague promise of some amorphous togetherness or fraternity.
A miracle will be required for this to happen, so let us pray for such a miracle to take place.
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