under the patronage of St Joseph and St Dominic

By the rivers of Babylon there we sat and wept, remembering Zion;
on the poplars that grew there we hung up our harps. . . Ps 136

OUR ALLEGEDLY CATHOLIC BISHOPS

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    More than one secular commentator has remarked the way Australian political life is drifting to the left, into the embrace of ideology, into unreason.  The Liberal Party, refuge until now of conservative thinkers, has demonstrated alignment with the zeitgeist, the atheistic spirit of the age - witness the recent expulsion by its Victorian branch of long standing supporter, Bernie Finn, for insisting on upholding the fifth commandment against those in favour of aborting the innocent unborn.

The catalyst for the almost inexorable movement of the Australia’s populace towards auto-destruction is that the one influence that could prevent it, that could persuade its members of the inanity of atheism, has failed.  What is it?  It is the Catholic Church, the Church established by God on earth for men’s welfare in this world and in the next.

But this claim needs to be understood.  It is not that the Church has departed from her principles but that those appointed to speak for her, the Church’s bishops, have chosen to betray their oaths of office.  They choose to remain silent in the public domain on the reasonableness of belief in God and the utter necessity of man’s conformity to the natural moral law if he is to flourish even at the temporal level.  In September 2021 some 75 priests, exasperated at their bishops’ inaction, sought to go public on the need to attend to God and His teachings.  The bishops suppressed them![1]

Each bishop is consecrated, each takes an oath, to stand up for God and for His reign on earth, to provide leadership, to be a shepherd to the Catholic flock and an example and a teacher even to those not of that flock.  Yet Australia’s bishops have failed to do so—to a man.  Moral principle is from God.  No man can achieve his end unless he conforms himself to its norms.  The bishops’ refusal to defend moral principle testifies to their refusal to stand up for its Author.  They behave like Modernists, followers of the heresy that denies the transcendence of religion and reduces the Church to the level of a merely secular institution devoted to man’s temporal welfare while paying lip service to his ‘religious feelings’.  (On this topic see Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, September 8^th, 1907)

Our bishops do not behave like shepherds but like sheep.  They herd together in conferences looking for support from their similarly compromised peers, not one of them prepared to speak in a manner that departs from the collective view of the ‘herd’; not one prepared to raise his head above the parapet.  They are terrified of taking on the secular media and confronting the atheistic zeitgeist.  Their negligence amounts to positive malice; and it is bringing the country to its knees.

Michael Baker

July 29^th 2022—St Martha