WHY CAN'T WE ATTEND MASS AND RECEIVE THE
SACRAMENTS?
Download this document as a
 PDF
In an acerbic commentary on the diktat
that has seen
the Church’s bishops world-wide conform their behaviour to the
demands of the
secular arm, the Roman Forum’s John Rao remarks:
“[T]he
believing population
has been deprived of its right to worship openly and to gain
access to the
sacraments not through the guns and whips of the oppressors, but
with the full
agreement of the successors of the Apostles... These sad and
lamentable prelates have made it
crystal clear to the entire globe that laundromats and abortion
mills are more
‘essential’ to the life of man than the grace of Christ... How
foolish must we consider the priests of the Black Death who
perished to give
last rites to the sick in comparison with the sensible bishops of
the present,
huddled in their pointless palaces, warning the clergy of the
physical dangers
of shepherding the sheep? Admittedly they are filled with a kind
of ‘holy terror’: the fear that, should they open the doors of the
generally
empty churches of the ‘renewal’—where social distancing is
actually simple to
maintain, even under normal circumstances—someone who enters might
claim to
have fallen ill and litigate. At that
point a true disaster would ensue. The
last pieces of property… might then be taken away from them.”[1]
Why is it that in Australia we can attend
the
supermarket, the petrol station, the laundromat and the
dry-cleaner while
maintaining ‘social-distancing’, but are not permitted to attend
Mass, receive
Communion and the Church’s sacraments on the same basis?
It is because the secular rulers in the
country do not recognize attendance by Catholics at the
ceremonies of their
religion is an essential service—AND OUR BISHOPS AGREE WITH
THEM! As we have
remarked on previous occasions one
must doubt whether the vast majority of the Church’s bishops
believe in God.
The newspapers here are full of a report
of a Royal Commission
of Enquiry that, at the time he was a junior priest of the
diocese of Ballarat,
George Cardinal Pell had been aware of the sexual-predatory
behaviour of two
priests and a religious there; full, too, of the fears of the
Catholic
hierarchy of suits for damages in consequence. This
has only served to confirm the
unlikelihood that any Australian bishop will emerge from the
Masonic cadre
constituted by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference to
buck the
directives issued by State governments and offer to the faithful
under his care
attendance at Mass and the sacraments.
There is not one Australian bishop who
would risk
arrest and imprisonment by publicly refusing to regard the
administration of
the sacraments as of less importance than the purchase of the
necessaries of
life; not one who is a leader in the train of the Apostles. In short, there is not one
of them who realises—not
just understands but realises—why
it
is that he wears red!
The point was made by one of the few
bishops who looks
like a leader in Christ’s Church, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò,
former Apostolic
Nuncio to the United States, in an interview published on the
American website,
The Remnant, on 29th
April
2020, in which he addressed the state of the Catholic Church in
Italy as a
result of the restrictions of the Italian government as a
consequence of the
depredations brought about by the Corona Virus.
An extract from the interview—the part that deals with
the calculated
subservience of the Italian Bishops Conference to the Italian
government—is set
out in the Appendix. Mutatis
mutandis
what the Archbishop has to say there applies to the
Australian
bishops, jointly and severally.
Archbishop Viganò has now been joined by a
number of
others in a joint letter published on May 8th.
The letter is, regrettably, weak in that it does
not assert the rights
of Catholics to
receive what is their entitlement but appeals to the general
goodwill that they
be accorded them, an ineffectual exercise.
Dear fellow Catholics, press your bishop
for an
explanation as to why he has not acted to protect your rights to
attend Mass
and receive the sacraments. Do
it now!
Michael Baker
May 10, 2020—Fourth
Sunday
after Easter
_______________________________________________________
Appendix
[Extract from interview with Archbishop
Carlo Maria
Viganò]
Q.
Many faithful and priests have felt abandoned and
unprotected by the
Episcopal Conference and the Bishops.
A. In order
to avoid any misunderstanding, we
need to point out that the Bishops’ Conference has no authority
over the
Bishops who each have full jurisdiction in their own diocese, in
union with the
Apostolic See. And this
is even more important
once we have understood that the CEI (Italian Episcopal
Conference) has been
all too compliant and indeed, has been under the thumb of the
Italian
government.
Bishops
should not wait for a body without any jurisdiction to tell them
what to do: it
is up to each of them to decide how to act, with prudence and
wisdom, in order
to guarantee the Sacraments and the celebration of Mass to the
faithful. And they can
do so without having to ask
either the Bishops’ Conference or the State, whose authority
ends at the
entrance to our churches, and there must stop.
It
is unheard of that the Italian Bishops’ Conference would
continue to tolerate
such abuse, which undermines the divine right of the Church,
violates a law of
the State and creates an extremely grave precedent. And
I believe that the statement issued [by
the Italian Bishops’ Conference] on Sunday evening [April 26] is
also proof
that the leadership of the Italian Episcopate agrees not only
with the means
but also the ends that this government is proposing.
The
supine silence of the CEI and of almost all local Ordinaries has
revealed a
situation of subordination to the State that is unprecedented,
and that has
rightly been perceived by faithful and priests as a kind of
abandonment. The
scandalous raids on churches by law
enforcement, even during the celebration of Mass, are emblematic
examples of
this abandonment. Such
sacrilegious
arrogance should have provoked an immediate and vehement protest
by the Vatican
Secretariat of State. Italy’s
Ambassador
to the Holy See should have been summoned and presented with a
harsh note of
protest against the government’s grave violation of the
Concordat, and the Holy
See should have reserved the right to recall the Apostolic
Nuncio to Italy if
the illegitimate measure had not been withdrawn.
Cardinal
Parolin, who has backed President Conte, is in a terribly
embarrassing spot and
a conflict of interest. It
seems clear
that, instead of protecting the sovereignty and freedom of the
Church in
fidelity to his lofty institutional role as Secretary of State,
Cardinal
Parolin has shamefully chosen to side with his lawyer friend. Not even the economic
interests of the
so-called Catholic volunteer service could justify taking this
option…
__________________________________________
|
