Good Riddance

It was a pleasure to read that the Holy Father has finally started doing something about  bad bishops: Boo hoo, cries Bp William Morris of Toowoomba, the nasty old Pope and those conservatives have forced me to give away my diocese (see the front page of to-day's Australian).  We expect the Vatican to release a formal statement to-night, Australian time.  About time, too: ever since his notorious Advent pastoral letter five years ago, calling for women priests and the usual collection of liberal nostrums, he's been justly examined, and in due course found wanting.  While I have no direct evidence, I would assume, given my own experiences of such men, that he is the usual intolerant liberal, suppressing those who would want doctrinal and disciplinary and liturgical correctness – "Scratch a liberal, find a fascist".  Good riddance to the whinger he's proven himself to be!

I rather hope that the similarly-wretched priests backing him, who are apparently contemplating resigning en masse, take their own advice.  Given the lack of vocations for Toowoomba, one suspects they are the sort of priests having a contraceptive (even an abortifacient) mindset as regards vocations (in other words, they are self-hating priests) – I recall meeting a young bloke, Joseph, from that accursed diocese, who was pursuing a vocation, but after attempting to swim against the tide in Queensland, he gave up.  No doubt the aCatholics and their clerical wing, SWAG readers all, will be wailing; I just hope they get the message, and other bishops, too.  Will CathNews even attempt to be objective, as opposed to siding with Morris?

I have long been sick to death of priests, yes, and bishops too, who take the pay-cheque and tyrannize their congregations, all the while teaching and living, not the Catholic Faith, but alien beliefs.  Let them go the way of South Brisbane (why is Queensland the locus for all this, I wonder?), or join the Anglicans, and let those who actually believe and accept the doctrines of the Catholic Church have priests and bishops who also share them, rather than shitten shepherds, as Chaucer put it.

Significantly enough, Morris was ordained a priest in 1969, meaning that his formation occurred during the years when, drunk on change, the Church was in uproar, and the decisions of the Council were used to legitimate all manner of madness.  He demonstrates in his writing, both of that infamous pastoral and of his letter of resignation, what Pope St Pius X long ago diagnosed as the skilful Modernist manner of advancing misbelief by dissembling, always protesting that deliberately ambiguous words should be taken in whatever sense seems expedient, while by those words seeking to corrupt and pervert the Faith.  Such men are cowardly: if he really and honestly wants women priests et al., let him defy Rome openly, ordain them, and lead off his followers into what he would regard as the true Church.  Again, good riddance.

It's about time the mediocrity and heterodoxy in the Church in Australia gets rooted out.  Canon Law has been ignored too long: it's taken the secular courts to pursue those guilty of sexual abuse; now I hope Rome will start repairing the damage caused to the faithful by doctrinal and liturgical abuse.  Sad to say, in both cases the damage has resulted in an epidemic of Stockholm Syndrome, whereby the victims, brainwashed, side with their abusers, and reject those who would deliver them.