LENT & THE SEXUALLY PERVERTED

 

“At first non-Catholics were puzzled by the atmosphere of prayer that pervaded the City (…overseas visitors assure us that it is a very pagan city); gradually they accepted the situation, and showed a genuine and reverent interest in what was going on…”

 

The Australian National Eucharistic Congress,

by Yvonne Matthew, Maureen Beesley and others[1]

 

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   In the week 12^th to 19^th April 1953 a Eucharistic Congress was held in Sydney by Cardinal Gilroy and the bishops of the Catholic Church.  It was marked by innumerable public demonstrations of the Catholic faith by clergy and faithful which included a tableau at the Showground representing a chalice and a sacred host formed by some nine thousand schoolgirls, forums at the Town Hall and at Sydney University, apologetics conducted by members of the Catholic Evidence Guild on street corners and in parks, preaching from the backs of lorries by Dominican, Passionist, Vincentian, Redemptorist and Jesuit priests, many of whom made themselves available to the curious during lunch hours, and the illumination of Catholic buildings and schools throughout city and suburbs.  The authors of the text cited in the anagraph above remarked how, while some came to jeer, as the week advanced they stood thoughtful and respectful.

 

The climax of the week was a 3 ½ hour procession through the streets of Sydney led by fourteen mounted police from St Patrick’s, Church Hill (site of the first Mass offered in Australia by the convict priest, Fr Dixon), to St Mary’s Cathedral, with a number of floats and diocesan priests in albs and chasubles accompanying cardinals and bishops.  Some three quarters of a million people are said to have viewed the event.  At its conclusion Benediction was celebrated and thousands of the faithful knelt at the elevation of the Monstrance.  Cardinal Gilroy recited an act of consecration of Australia to the Holy Spirit and, shortly after, a message was broadcast from the Vatican in which Pope Pius XII gave those attending his apostolic blessing.

 

The Australian Catholic heart was full of hope for the future, the life of the faithful marked by an intense vigour.  Few could have foreseen the abandonment of Catholic principle which was to come as many of clergy and faithful, moved by their attractions, began to dally with the pagan and the secular.  The rot was present, but hidden.  Pope Pius had identified it in a short but powerful encyclical, Humani generis, less than three years before the Congress the perils of the theological errors abroad and their philosophical roots.  He was only too conscious of the extent to which these errors had infected members even of his own Curia.  Four years after his death in October 1958, the errors were to surface in an aggressive fashion at a council called by his successor.

The numbers of those inclined to heterodoxy were not sufficient to carry the day as the world’s bishops gathered for the Second Vatican Council but, mistakenly, the new pope, John XXIII, allowed them scope with the result that a vocal minority of bishops and their theological advisers came to dominate the orthodox majority.  The negligence of a few coupled with the lethargy of many saw the Council’s bishops drift away from orthodoxy.

 

The result today is that God’s Church is divided throughout the world and heterodoxy flourishes, a defective liturgy aiding the entrenching of error among the faithful.  The singular sign of this division in Australia is the utter silence of our bishops on the daily breaches of natural and Catholic principle that occur in the public domain.  Immorality and abandonment of natural principle have not just increased, they have flourished, in this foetid atmosphere.  Contraception, abortion, the facility of in vitro fertilization of human embryos and active homosexuality no longer excite revulsion among the populace but access to them is regarded as a ‘right’!

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Seventy years on from that Eucharistic Congress, almost to the month, Sydney finds itself dominated by preparations for a festival promoted by the Catholic Church’s antithesis, the devil.  ‘WorldPride 2023’, a ‘celebration’ of the ideology of the sexually perverted, the lesbian, homosexual, ‘bisexual’ and ‘transgender’ community, is to run from February 17^th to March 5^th.  In its midst Christ’s faithful move to embrace the strictures of Quinquagesima and, with Ash Wednesday, another Lent.

 

There is an immense irony in the term hijacked by the homosexual community to mark the yearly ‘celebration’ of their perverted ideology—Mardi Gras.  The term is French for ‘Fat Tuesday’, Shrove Tuesday, the last day on which, traditionally, faithful Christians may satisfy their appetites for food freely before the duties of the penitential season compel them. 

 

There is much for us to consider as we embrace Lent in this Year of Our Lord Two thousand and Twenty Three.  Such are the evils generated by the defective philosophies of the Enlightenment, subjectivism and materialism, which ground the atheistic drive among the populace and the coupling of neutering of the only force capable of countering them, the bishops and clergy of the Catholic Church, that the very future of society is at stake.

 

God wishes men to work out their salvation humano modo—in a human fashion.  He could intervene at any time with His mighty power but He chooses to leave it to those He made in His own image and likeness to achieve the end.  He does not cease to provide the necessary means even in an age sunk in hatred of Him and blind to the gifts which daily He pours upon its people.  Let us make a special effort this Lent with fasting and penance to aid Almighty God in His work to achieve the salvation of mankind and to convert a perverted world.

 

Michael Baker

February 21^st, 2023—Shrove Tuesday