WHAT WE HAVE HOPED, IN VAIN, TO HEAR FROM A CATHOLIC BISHOP IN AUSTRALIA
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“I am a priest of the Catholic Church, the Church founded by Almighty God for the salvation of mankind. Its head is the God-man, Jesus Christ who, having died once for our sins, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven—not a dead but a living Christ, mors illi ultra non dominabitur. The soul of this Church is the Holy Spirit. The end for which this Church was established is the union of each individual soul with God the Father now, here on earth, and after death, forever in heaven.
“Blessed with the fulness of the priesthood of Jesus Christ, my sworn task is to work for the salvation of all men—not only those who have the faith given by God but those outside the Church—at the peril of my soul.
“It is irrational, a violation of reason, not to believe in God. It is irrational and also the worst of sins. Once that sin is committed consequences flow for the man, for the society, that embraces it : a rejection of the possibility that God exists ; rejection of the formal reality of nature as the means whereby God has made known His will to us ; rejection of the order He has embedded in nature, manifest in a refusal to accept the demands of reality and the embrace in its place of innumerable forms of ideology as in—
- the serial endeavours to explain reality by excluding final and formal causality—the mindless theses of evolutionism ;
- the confusion of absolute liberty with the liberty proper to man, moral liberty, and the exalting of absolute liberty beyond reason ;
- the embrace, as if they were rational and not irrational activities, of divorce, of contraception, of the fertilisation of human embryos in vitro, of abortion, of homosexuality, of the corruption of the innocent, and of euthanasia.
“Our life in the modern world is ruled by ideology and 'political correctness'. The moves to corrupt the right understanding of marriage and to legitimise homosexual behaviour—revolting to all right-thinking men—are but the final symptoms of the harm wrought by this stifling atheism.
“We are not the result of blind material forces with happy consequences but the effects of an all seeing Maker. All order demands an intelligent Orderer and nature is immersed in an immense and intricate order. We were created by God. We owe Him our essence and our existence, what we are and that we are. The very air we breathe is given by Him. He is entitled to our adoration and obedience to His will. We begin from Him and will return to Him whether we will it or not. God has made us for Himself, as St Augustine said, and our hearts are not at rest until they rest in Him.
“Through the mouth of St Paul, the God of heaven and earth said this for our salvation :
“The anger of God is revealed from heaven against all the impiety and depravity of men who keep truth imprisoned in their wickedness. For what can be known about God is perfectly plain since God himself has made it plain. Ever since God created the world his everlasting power and deity—however invisible—have been there for the mind to see in the things he has made. That is why such people are without excuse : they knew God yet refused to honour him as God or to thank him ; instead they made nonsense out of logic and their empty minds were darkened. The more they called themselves wise, the more stupid they grew, until they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for a worthless imitation, for representations of mortal man, of bird and beast and reptile. And so God left their lustful hearts to filthy practices whereby they dishonour their own bodies among themselves. They have exchanged God's truth for a lie, reverencing and worshipping the creature instead of the Creator (who is blessed for ever, Amen). In return God abandoned them to passions which brought them dishonour. Their women exchanged natural for unnatural intercourse ; and their men... giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with desire for each other ; men practising vileness with their fellow men—a fitting retribution for their unbelief.” Romans 1 : 18-27
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“There are two aspects to the legislation which our politicians contemplate. The first is the corruption of the right understanding of marriage. The second is the legitimisation of the sin of sodomy.
“Marriage is not, as the irrational contend, a matter of human will but of nature. Men and women do not marry from some power accorded them by society but a power given by God through their human nature. The seeds of the error that man is free to determine what is and what is not a marriage are contained in provisions of the Australian Constitution, section 51, placita (xx) and (xxi), and in the preconceptions underlying decisions on those provisions by the High Court of Australia. The powers of the state (the Commonwealth) do not extend to determining what is, and what is not, a marriage. Marriage is of God as Our Lord Jesus Christ made plain in his teachings (Matthew 19 : 6) repeating what had been revealed to the Jews (Genesis 1 : 28 ; 2 : 18 ; Tobias 8 : 5-7) and man may not sunder, or attempt to sunder, its bond without working immense harm to the individual, in the family, and in society generally.
“The mindset that allows divorce is an extension of the error committed by Henry Tudor (Henry VIII) 500 years ago enforced by his tyrannical will on the English populace, part of the manifold evils Protestantism introduced into men's minds. The current proposal to corrupt the right understanding of marriage marks the nadir of that movement.
“Any society that allows indulgence in sodomy and its cognate aberration among women is embracing the corruption of its very structure. The sin of the homosexual, like the sin of the murderer, cries to heaven for vengeance as appears in the narration of the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. [Genesis 19] To offer it legitimacy in the form of “marriage” is to embed its evil in the very heart of society.
“But the ultimate evil of the contemplated legislation is not this temporal disorder, great as it will be, but the support it will lend to the atheistic inclination, to the rejection of God and the order He has established for our good, manifest in the eternal loss of the souls of this country's men and women.”
29th October 2017—Feast of Christ the King (forma extraordinaria of the Roman rite)
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