For the benefit of my overseas readers, I should point out hat the middle of July is the peak of what is called in parts of Britain the marching season. This means that Protestant groups celebrate vehemently the defeat of the forces of King James II in 1689 by William II, with the appearance of marching bands usually accompanied by flutes. Students of Paradise Lost will of course be aware that Satan led his minions out of Heaven ‘In perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood, Of flutes’ but they would be well advised to forget about that. Much more interesting is that this ultimate Protestant victory was also celebrated at the time by the Pope, who ordered a Te Deum for the purpose. This is a historical fact which it would be also unwise to mention, but less importantly , since each side ‘staunchly’- a key word in this area- refuses to believe it exists. The fact that such a march takes place in the almost entirely Catholic Irish county of Donegal is celebrated with even more enthusiasm by both sides, for different reasons,.
The Orange March is a colourful spectacle, reminding one of Chesterton’s bon mot that the adverts in Piccadilly Circus would be truly wonderful if one could not read. For ‘read’, substitute’ hear’ in this case. I have always had reservations about it since a Protestant with whom I was watching such a march observed, ’You see, this is our Christmas . ‘ It is interesting that Teilhard de Chardin at no point mentions this in his description of how we move to Omega Point.
Many of these marches take place in Glasgow and its environs ; apparently one took place at midnight on the day of a recent Pope’s death. It must be obvious to anyone that this is a social phenomenon with distinctly anti-Catholic connotations. Just last week, as such a march was moving past a Catholic church, when one of the many amateur theologians who follow such marches assaulted a priest who was standing at a church door which faces on to the road on which the march was taking place. I am told that a marching member of the Orange Order which organises these marches ‘broke ranks’ to approach the priest and shook his hand. The assault was carried out by what is known locally as ‘a follower’, and not a member of the Order.
I mention this because of the alacrity with which the Catholic Church locally has insisted on meetings with politicians to prevent such an event reoccurring. This has to be compared with the lack of alacrity with which the Catholic Church has approached the suggestion of Pope Francis that it is time the Church got down to looking at the shortage of people validly ordained to provide the Eucharist . The Scots novelist and journalist Neil Munro noted along ago the propensity of Glasgow people to celebrate a public holiday by ‘drugging themselves with drams’. It is well known that this process would appear to be an essential part of the ‘follower’ celebration of the Incarnation, nowadays, of course, with the addition of chemical substances of various kinds, or indeed of all kinds.
One of the good things about an Orange March is the fact that it can be heard coming for some time before its arrival , sometimes for several miles away if the participants , especially the man with the big drum is religious-minded enough. London Road where the assault took place is narrow at that point and the ‘followers’ are perforce funnelled on to a narrow pavement.
To sum up, was it really the time and place for a Catholic priest to come out and stand on the pavement ? Yes, I know about democratic rights , and the irony in the circumstances, but was it the time and place ?
Even more interestingly, the priest was referred to as a Fenian bastard and a paedophile. He is certainly not the latter. He is highly unlikely to be `a member of a rambunctious 19th century Irish political movement which once tried to invade the United States , and is yet another example of the mystery by which illegitimacy , although doubtless mistakenly applied here, is considered an insult. I am told that in Australia the word ‘bastard’ is, if anything, a term of mild endearment.
In a Catholic newspaper, the Fenian bastard comment was sympathised with, but the ‘paedophile’ comment was ignored. Ah yes.
If the paedophile scenario is ignored , it will just go away . People will forget it, and the secular priesthood can carry on, `shaking the thing away as a dog does fleas.
Unfortunately for some, the loss of two generations of Catholics and the consequent emptying churches , makes it clear that it has not and will not go away . The hungry sheep look up , and are not merely baffled by the lack of the Eucharist but also why It is still more or less exclusively in the hands of a defunct provider. Why?

Sometimes we are stopped in our tracks. Sometimes we just have to stand open-mouthed. Sometimes we wonder if we have wandered into an alternative universe. Such was the effect of the most recent edition of the Glasgow Archdiocese newspaper ‘Flourish’.
The headline in very large letters is a quotation from Archbishop Tartaglia :’ This is what I long for people to read and understand and act upon. To receive Holy Communion is everything…’
Now I don’t know if the Archbishop has read ‘To Feed The Flock’ .I do know he –well, at least had in his hand the statement we made to the Scottish bishops a few years ago- because he was the only one who had the courtesy to acknowledge receipt of it , if they all actually received it; I don’t know if he has kept up with many other websites who think like us and make the same point. I don’t know if he reads the small Catholic magazine ,Open House, in which we have made the same points: apparently only one Scottish bishop knows it.
So much happens in our world on a daily basis that one is spoiled for choice in speculating what future Catholics will make the subject of Ph.Ds. A certainty, however, is ‘What Happened to the Bishops? ‘
What happened to a lot of them was St Pope John Paul II. The hissing sound of the Big Bang which started the Universe was detected by Robert Wilson and his associate not very long ago in the Bell Laboratory in New Jersey, and can still be heard on websites. The effect of the Big Bang which was S PJPII can still presumably be heard in the brains of those who were his appointments as bishop.(This does not apply in full to Archbishop Tartaglia, who was selected by Pope Benedict before he sensibly decided he would rather step down than be associated much longer with SPJPII, in our opinion)
Many possible candidates for bishoprics presumably thought SPJPII was the cat’s pyjamas. Many others made sure SPJPII heard they thought he was the cat’s pyjamas. There were certainly plenty of them. The Curia certainly seems to have thought he was an example of this remarkable image. After 30 years or so, it became difficult to avoid thinking as he might have thought. To follow his thinking could be difficult. At one point, celibacy was all, where the priesthood was concerned. At another, one could permit Anglicans with wives and families to join the priesthood. He could be a confusing old chap to follow. His confusing relationship with another man’s wife –chaste though it was- was a particularly confusing scenario, so confusing that it was considered better to tiptoe around it.
What we were left with – and it was obviously genuinely felt – was that for many reasons it was better to try to do what he might have wished us to do , while ignoring the Gospel, of course. After all he was now a saint, however precipitately , according to at least one great Catholic thinker ,, his canonisation may have taken place.
Anyway, thanks to the paedophile scandals , their cover-up and perhaps a natural evolutionary process based on the much misunderstood idea of the survival of the fittest, the secular or Tridentine priesthood declined, deteriorated and became ultimately defunct, with 50000 parishes left without a priest .
Now, everybody knows this, especially in those parishes where Catholics are born, live and die without the Eucharist. It’s very simple. For a part of the Church’s existence- a mere thousand years or so- the provision of the Eucharist was largely in the hands of the secular priesthood, for the silly purpose of protecting Church bits and pieces of stone. Now that the secular priesthood has no credibility, another way has to be found of providing the Eucharist.
Pope Francis asked very early in his papacy that bishops consult him about extending the /function of providing the Eucharist to others, in particular married laymen in parishes.
The world’s bishops know this, but if any bishops have consulted him about this, it is news to us.
So what are the consequences?
Do Bishops think the Pope doesn’t know what he is talking about, even when he suggests a way in which Christ’s Eucharistic imperative at the last Supper may be implemented., even when the alternative is for it not to be implemented at all ?
Do Bishops not accept that married laymen , although validly ordained , are part of the Apostolic Succession ,and therefore deny the Apostolic Succession ?
Do Bishops not see that a change from the defunct secular priesthood to a different method of providing the Eucharist gives them a unique position in the transformation of the Church in a transformed world, under the guidance of the Paraclete ?
We must remember that individual Bishops have only one vote in a Bishops Conference or whatever it’s called. Elderly Bishops for physical, mental or even a distorted kind of intellectual reason or simply because of the natural human tendency to fear and suspect any kind of change, crippled even by the kind of mental cancer which we call nostalgia, are obviously a problem.
Admittedly we carry our treasure in frail vessels.
But why can’t we all get the Eucharist as Christ asked?

The late and very much missed Father Felix Beattie used to wonder what priests did in the afternoons. Now just half way through 2018 and still no attempt to take up the Pope’s suggestion that bishops discuss extending ordination , let us consider what bishops do. Archbishop Cushley of course will be brushing up on his actuary homework to prove we actually will have x priests in the year x ; another is very worried about Trident and nuclear disarmament , despite the latter’s success in preventing World War 3. But these things pass the time. But ignore the Scottish bishops- we think they ask nothing more- and look at bishops in general , why they don’t want us to receive the Eucharist, and see if we can detect some kind of rationale. Now don’t laugh !
Let’s take celibacy first. They must know why it started- I’ll get on to clerical education next week . In the early Middle Ages, some legitimately married priests were leaving church property to their children. The answer was to confine the provision of the Eucharist to unmarried men without any reference of any kind to Christ’s Eucharistic command at the Last Supper. Presumably our bishops still accept this, which does make it rather difficult to accept anything they say seriously.
This is not a humorous blog , but the next point about celibacy does come up occasionally . No, seriously. It is cultic purity, the idea that women are impure. Before the invention of a practical cold shower , this must have been handy enough as opposed to thinking about it. We apologise for any spelling mistakes at this point : we are trying to imagine the faces of a Scottish congregation on being told this , especially if they read the local press.
People speak of the Mafia , the Freemasons and possibly even the BBC in terms of institutional solidarity. Institutional solidarity with a conscious or subconscious sense of grievance at deprivation of something as human and natural as family life is even more satisfying to experience , and more difficult to combat . Other than just shaking one’s head and walking away , which most people in the Church have simply done. It is a direct refutation of the concept of the Good Shepherd . But if you can ignore Holy Thursday, well, the sky’s the limit.
Possibly literally so.
Some schools have a school song : a line from ours warned about ‘Vana mentis gloria’.If you have your own uniform, uncontrolled authority , even your own language in a way, plus the occasional person still referring to ‘Your lordship’, not to mention Canon Law-framed in 1917, incidentally- to back you up , well why listen to anyone else ? Even to the Gospels on Holy Thursday ? The expression ‘All power corrupts ; absolute power corrupts absolutely ‘was aimed directly at the Church.
The American scholar Marshall McLuhan was partially correct in his very early warnings about the power of the media. A prescient American writer asked ‘What if he’s right?’ as he mostly was.
Do any bishops in 2018 ever ask ‘What if we’re wrong ?’ This is an area never covered by definition in the many writings of St Pope John Paul II, to which they tend as a group to be addicted in every sense of the word.
When will they ever agree that they are , and find their way to extend valid ordination to parishioners ? Can’t they see that their authority is not affected but in fact increased by this, not to mention the transformation to the Church that this would permit ? Perhaps even allowing as a result the Flock to receive the Eucharist?
We celebrate this week the Feast of St Peter and St Paul . We hope that this week they would add a celebration of the life of St Peter’s mother in law, with all its implications.

Some aspects of the Irish abortion referendum were particularly interesting. One was the fares of Irish students in the UK being paid by some university groups to go back home and vote. Not so much of the ‘Saxon foe ‘ stuff nowadays! And who was paying and why? Actually why in particular, when you think about it.
An Irish daily newspaper- in an article quite opposed to abortion- makes the following point : ‘The vast majority-97% -of all abortions are in cases of crisis pregnancy, a deeply distressing circumstance in the main endured by women who are young , unwed or single’(we don’t see the distinction either). Where have these women been? It has been pointed out before that anybody sitting at the back of a bus full of schoolchildren and requiring an education in the mechanics of sex can easily receive a spectacularly wide one. In Victorian times or Edwardian times this could be obtained in brown paper covers from seedy shops near railway stations, but damn it, do young women not watch TV, where the narrative thread of any drama ever since the Bond films must have an interruption in the narrative thread for a coitus? Do they not watch perfume adverts? Or in 2018, even chewing gum adverts? Where have they been ?
The journalist Mary Kenny wrote the perceptive ‘Goodbye, Catholic Ireland’ which defined Holy Ireland rather effectively, juxtaposing Ireland’s astonishing missionary activity along with queries to Catholic magazines as to whether saying the rosary wearing gloves was still effective. This website’s favourite episode has been repeated too often . (You know the one- the toilet one ). A little Irish town I used to visit had a parish priest and two curates. Each had his own house, and the parish priest was known to some as ‘Old Belly o’Pups’, not a remark to be heard among the parishioners of the Cure D’Ars, one imagines. The wild boys of the parish playing cards at the back of the chapel during Mass have appeared in Irish fiction for nearly a hundred years. Further back, before the Famine, priests struggled unavailingly against faction fights and the fairy culture with its consequent high rate of infanticides, much worse than abortion , after all, since it involved picking up and murdering real live babies. The song ’Shall My Soul pass through Old Ireland, Lord ? ‘is in theological terms indicative of a stupefyingly low IQ. There is the pathological and all consuming Irish fear of what other people- from village idiots to the gombeen man, or anybody- might think of them, and its impact on high Mass attendance. There is obviously a great deal of stony ground beneath the green fields, and always has been.
But we must be fair, even to the Yes advocates. The Irish film star of the Thirties, Brian Aherne, a brilliant anecdotalist, was once interrupted in full flow at a meeting with friends in a Hollywood pub in the autumn of his career by someone activating the juke box. He remarked, passionately,’ Here I am, a poor old man, at the mercy of ever halfwit with ten cents to put into an illuminated coal scuttle’. A large percentage of those under fifty, thanks to social media , is also apparently at the mercy of every halfwit able to loft an opinion, however immature or weird into the Cloud. And worse still, to act on it.
To recap, the referendum was to remove the right to life of the unborn from the Irish constitution. The deflective construction of the Stealth bomber is highly effective, but beside that of the Irish episcopacy it is comparable to wet newspaper . Bishop Brendan Leahy of Limerick was first out of the traps, with a reference to the forthcoming visit of Pope Francis. An Irish bishop looking forward to a visit from Pope Francis ! Oh for a look at the agenda of a meeting between Pope Francis and the Irish episcopacy.
One of those Irish expressions , and there are several, which appear to have been constructed entirely and not at all surprisingly without reference to the concept of Christian charity, pungently remarks ‘ Hell slap it into them!’ It is not without distaste but with a nod to the fitness of things that we suggest this as a welcome to the meeting of the Irish episcopacy and Pope Francis.

The world’s most remote island is Bouvet Island, 54/26 South, 3/24 E in ths South Atlantic. Were it possible, our interest in Cardinal O’Brien would be a good bit farther away still , especially about how not nice people have been to him.
Fireworks are used seriously as a form of signal. The exhibition of virtue signalling pyrotechnics produced by the Catholic press made this New Year’s Day display on Sydney Harbour look like a partially defective cigarette lighter. A badly needed note of humour- come on, it must have been humorous- was produced by Archbishop Cushley, his successor, not normally a challenge to P.G.Wodehouse or J.K. Jerome, when he said that the Cardinal in life may have divided opinion. This was either pushing the language of euphemism well beyond any generally accepted level of acceptance. Or he was just having a laugh, something any successor of the Cardinal could probably do with, to be fair.
Unfortunately, however, it suggested that there might be a lay difference of opinion about him . If the Archbishop seriously thinks there is such a division, we wish he would provide a qualitative and quantitative assessment of it :the former would be particularly interesting.
All we’ll say is, that unlike many of the debauched and perverted old clerical buccaneers who will always be associated with him, /all of them ordained to provide the Eucharist, there was no record that we saw of his remembering us in his prayers.
When we think about it in considering the Catholic press at what must be its nadir, we do not remember ever reading the words ’giving scandal’. If you did, let us know where. Want a bet ?
Anyway, it is Easter , and we must remember those who are trapped, and trapped as effectively as innocent and dedicated and sincere people have ever been. We refer, of course, to the Tridentine clergy, who have been put into this position –hopefully we’re only talking really about the Church in Scotland- by a tiny minority. But what a crew ! Just last week, rape was added to the catalogue of paedophiles, alcoholics, fornicators and embezzlers with which the local press has thankfully made us so familiar.
Their leaders have been trapped in turn into embarrassingly pathetic acrobatics in their attempts to prove that nobody has really noticed, and that they have really been left far behind by the Flock, as it seeks the love and respect of Christ, but seeks it now without his Sacraments but without those ordained to provide them.
The song ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone?, which so plaintively and fitfully briefly reignited the career of Marlene Dietrich, had as its chorus the query ‘Oh, when will they ever learn?’
They are actually still here and during this Holy Week. They will still be conducting Holy Week services. They will still be conducting the services for Holy Thursday in particular. They will still have to reiterate Christ’s words at the Last Supper about the provision of the Eucharist for His Flock, while simultaneously trying not to remember them in their lives and their influence on the Church and why they have made it so difficult for the Flock to live by them.
Mere human prayer seems to us almost insignificant at Easter , as we move annually in commemoration towards an unimaginable future where we are reunited with Christ at what has been called Omega Point. But let us still remember those whose fears, prejudices or pride are keeping many of us from joining Him through the Eucharist.