Tag Archives: Cardinal O’Brien

It’s Time To Say Farewell- But Not To This Site

06 Sunday Jan 2019

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We’ve spent a lot of time on this site making references to the Last Supper. We saw it as the foundation of the Church, laugh at us if you like. We saw it as a command from the Man who was to die an appalling death a few hours later. This was to provide the Eucharist for the world.

Looking back from 2019, obviously some kind of organisation was necessary. History and geography and common sense demanded it should start in Rome to be effective. It did, although there were other places , almost all in the Middle East, where the Word took root, obviously around walking distance from the Upper Room. In 2019, there are 23 of them. We’ll come to them in a minute.

The biggest did things its way. This was called the Roman Rite. The others did things their way and are called the Eastern Rites. Fair enough, you will say.

If you can bear it, look back to 2018, the year of ‘Come to bed with Uncle Ted’ this being Cardinal McCarrick of the Roman Rite, or the Roman Catholic Church.

In Britain, we have to bear the burden of Cardinal O’Brien having been the man who in modern times brought the long, disgusting , hypocritical and terrifying history of seminary education out into the open at cardinal level.

Our Church was based on the Moving of the Stone . Say what you like about Cardinal O’Brien and his like- and we do, and we will- the Church in 2019 must be based on the Lifting of the Stone. It was a big stone- and we all know what a mass of wriggling ,disgusting lower levels of life live under stones. We hope here that we do not give offence to those who marked the Incarnation by holding wakes outside turkey farms.

50,000 parishes are without priests because the Church has rejected the basis of the Roman Catholic Church in 2019, that the Eucharist can only apparently be provided by celibate men who have survived the seminary experience.

But there are 23 parts of the Church which have avoided this sex-obsessed cul de sac. Let us think of them at this New Year tide, and how humiliated they must feel by being lumbered by association with the power-crazy, sex-obsessed leaders of the Roman Rite.

Your radar may say here ‘Ah ! Crank talk !’ . It’s not, you know. And you do know .

While this site has breath to continue during 2019, inhibited though it may be by small cigars, it hopes to continue examining what caused the demise of the Roman Rite, or the Roman Catholic Church as opposed to the Catholic Church in 2018. It will involve St Pope John Paul II, Emeritus Pope Benedict XIV, and many others. , not to mention the Curia.

Do please keep watching. Like many other such sites all over the world, we have a lot to say and at the moment nowhere else to say it.

Et Tu Bergoglio?(if accurately quoted)

07 Thursday Sep 2017

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Pope Francis is quoted a lot. Possibly therefore he is misquoted a lot. We’re prepared to give him all kinds of leeway. If he’s asked a long question and says ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ , did he necessarily have time to examine the question carefully? We know, we know, we’re on his side.
In March he was extensively quoted on the subject of ‘viri probati’, or ‘approved men’, a concept dreamt up by Emeritus Pope Benedict for keeping control of ordained laymen. Worse still, he was quoted as actually saying’older viri probati’.We have searched the internet diligently , and there are only some references to ‘older’ when this quote is mentioned. So who knows? But just in case, we propose with all due deference and respect, and certainly more than we would give to StJP2or EPBen to lay about us.
If you have and have always had a full-time job in the Vatican, and you are in your late seventies or eighties, we have to put it to you that you have never had anyone say to you ‘Do you know what the hell you’re talking about ?’ (Add being a Jesuit Provincial to Pope Francis’s case). Go quite far down the pecking order and add old Mgr X or old canon XXX (yes him!) in Glasgow. Has it ever happened ? Or have just always confused the clergyman with his function?
Anyway, another time for that, but we have to put the question, fearlessly as ever, to Pope Francis.
‘Probati’? Approved? Approved by whom? We prefer to speak only of the Church in Scotland, beginning with, of course, Cardinal O’Brien , and working our way down the list of pederasts, mistress-keepers and embezzlers who have disfigured its work in recent years. But we will not do so, even if only because this PC is on its last legs. They were all approved. We know nothing personally of , say, the Church in the USA other than what we see in Oscar –winning films, or in Australia /from what we read in best sellers like Thomas Keneally’s latest. We wish we had a German correspondent.
Effective and efficient approval, we will say, has not been a gift given those in the Church whose business, even after six years or so in a seminary, is assessing candidates for the priesthood. A parish is a community, sometimes far flung, sometimes in a city. To regard it simply as a collection of faces beyond the altar rails is a mistake.
The suggestion that a parish would select , among those whom it would choose as being worthy of being Ordained Celebrants , those who are unworthy is a slap in the face to any parish, a vibrant and infinitely complex network of family and social relationships , and frequently uncharitably so assessed. Would any parish choose for election a sexual adventurer, a pederast or an embezzler to represent it? And if some chancer should escape scrutiny, we must remember that 8.5% of the Apostles betrayed Christ Himself.
Approved forsooth, the latter word being one we have always wanted to use.
We are reluctant to believe that Pope Francis said’elderly’.This is where we have to ask even Pope Francis if he knows what he is talking about. It is also a criticism of celibacy, and its failure to provide a life lived among the young.
We find a succession of rhetorical questions incredibly irritating We will simply make a series of statements . If you disagree, you know where we are. We remind you that the average age of members of To Feed The Flock is 80 plus.
Teenagers think anybody over 21 is middle-aged. The expression ’coffin-dodgers’ is widespread, and applicable to anyone over 40. ‘Elderly’ is commonly considered a euphemism for Alzheimer’s. Those between 30 and 40, who have fought the good fight and are still church-going, don’t really know what life is like in 2017. A 70 year old is a dodderer, be he lay or clergyman. Older people have let the Church become what it is today,without challenging Cardinal O’Brien and his like. If an old man can relate to Christ and his teaching, therefore how can he relate to life as a Catholic adolescent? Those who remember Stephen Fry must ask-what would he have said?
All of these ideas help to keep the third lost generation from the Eucharist.
Elderly? Come, come, Pope Francis, if you actually said this.

Frank Carson- Still Sorely Missed

12 Sunday Feb 2017

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Archbishop Antonio Mennini, the Apostolic Nuncio to Great Britain, is returning to take up a post at the Vatican. Archbishop Mennini was ordained by Cardinal Poletti in 1974. His episcopal consecration was undertaken by Cardinal Ruini, and JeanLouis Tauran, ,SecretAry for Relations with State. He was born into a Roman family with strong links to the Roman See. His father was managing Director of the Vatican Bank; one of his brothers is a public prosecutor. He has served the Vatican in Uganda, Turkey, Bulgaria , Russia and Uzbekistan.
He was a St John Paul II appointee as Bishop. While we can, of course, be sure that neither his family connection nor his professional relationship with the Vatican will have affected his judgment in any way, in any given situation, he is certainly a Curia man /to the bone.
There will be idle speculation as to why his experiences in Uganda, Turkey, Bulgaria, Russia and Uzbekistan made him just the man for Great Britain, but this is irrelevant. After all, Bruno Heim picked Cardinal O’Brien as a bishop, after a lot of time in Egypt and Finland. Then Luigi Barbarito picked Bishop Roddy Wright, after a lot of experience in Senegal, Niger and Haiti. There was no speculation about the relevance of all this to choosing bishops for Scotland in the Catholic press , although to be fair, due to holidays we might have missed an edition or two of the ‘Scottish Catholic Observer’.
The omission of comment on what seems a bizarre method of choosing bishops for a country rather than leaving this to the country does suggest, possibly, a tolerance of Curia whim. We are reminded of ‘Cuckoo’, a game played by Czarist/Soviet army officers, when well-oiled in the mess. The lights were put out, and a revolver was fired into the darkness, to cries of ‘Cuckoo!’
On the other hand, this may all have been a prescient venture into the benefits of diversity, not all of which, it must be said, are as yet immediately apparent.
The concept of an ambitious prelate has been for those of us brought up on sermons about humility, a difficult one to grasp, not to mention the lack of transparency about financial matters and the secrecy about clerical sexual adventurism at all levels. It may not have been ambition which has prevented the bishops of Scotland at any point, as far as we know, to ask the Curia if it has even heard of Drumchapel and Drumnadrochit and their different pastoral needs, never mind why poor Archbishop Mennini was asked to transfer his experiences in Bulgaria and Uzbekistan to these very different areas. Who knows? We are sure he did his best.
Anyway, Archbishop Tartaglia has thanked him conventionally and no doubt genuinely. But one phrase he uses may well ring down through the ages. He thanks him for ‘his readiness to convey the specific reality of the Catholic Church to the Holy See’
If Archbishop Mennini does this, he will undoubtedly spoil the morning coffee that day for the Holy See, since we must assume they don’t know this already. Mustn’t we? We wish him more strength to his elbow. The results should be stimulating, and we certainly hope he managed to get a copy of Fr Despard’s silenced book on his Kindle before it was removed. Our only regret is his failure to answer our respectful letter to him in 2014 on the extension of ordination, despite our certificate of recorded delivery.

Scandalous

29 Sunday Mar 2015

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Cardinal O’Brien will certainly go down in history. One of only 24 cardinals who have offered their resignation since the fifteenth century- another was Cesar Borgia-, and seemingly the only one in the history of the Church to decline to vote in a consistory, he managed to alienate homosexuals and homophobes simultaneously. In passing, he may well have confirmed the deepest suspicions of other religions in Scotland about Romanism well into the foreseeable future . Scottish Catholics have to live with his activities, both personally and in the community , the latter being very important in a country where identification of another’s religion can be more important than the practice of one’s own. The “Tablet” magazine has this week confirmed some of the revelations that were suspected, and pretty damning they are.
There is no indication yet that the Scottish episcopate is willing to help. Why not a complete and open general description of the situation in the Church in Scotland over the last twenty years or so ? Given the difficulty of getting any of the bishops but one even to acknowledge receipt of a letter, perhaps this is far too much for us to expect. But The Emeriti, of course, if they had known about these things, must be asking themselves why they said nothing, although Archbishop Emeritus Conti did accuse the cardinal of blocking an enquiry into clerical sexual abuse. But they’re out of the firing line, forgotten but not gone.
The current bishops, more and more insulated from Catholics in Scotland , still hanging on to that most devastating of illusions that it Will Be All Right, have to watch, as we have seen in Edinburgh, congregations dwindling even more, with the number of alienated generations moving now from two to three. Why not face up to the fact that the Church in Scotland is a shambles ? A new and dynamic start, from scratch, may well still save the situation, as well as giving a lead to other tardy episcopates. Could we suggest Extending Ordination? The Bishops of Scotland- and most of those in England and Wales- will find in their files the very practical suggestions sent to them last year by To Feed The Flock.