Portsmouth Roman Catholic

Who is responsible for the Catholic Education of your children?   When I grew up it was assumed that the responsibility lay with the priest and the schools.   It seemed to work very well and the parents were satisfied, but then they never questioned what their role was.     They took their children to Mass on Sunday, they talked to their children about the saints in heaven, about the Sacred Heart of Jesus and what it meant, they had statues of Mary in their houses, and many said the Rosary.   But they never saw this as 'education', that belonged to the educated teachers and priests.   But their role as educators was vital.    Now that worked really well however when the Church really was a 'community',  In many parts of the UK children grew up in the same areas their parents had grown up,  their parents had gone to the same schools, their teachers were also living in he same areas and attended and led them in the Sunday Childrens Mass, explaining what was happening on t

I received some 'comments' recently.  One was the reconstruction of a post I had done on another blog.   In case it appears again I will give my 'Mea Culpa' since I did nothing wrong and when I do nothing wrong I carry on as usual.   It happened when I was standing for a Councillor at Winklebury in Basingstoke.    I was out canvassing when I received a call to ring the UKIP office.    It seems that The Guradian newspaper had given me a mention in their newspaper. As a Candidate for UKIP the media were going crazy about UKIP candidates in an effort to stop the rise of this party.   The advise was not to worry and carry on.    So I carried on.   At the same time a young student stood for Brighton Hill and he was favoured with a news item telling of a facebook blog where he had fallen out with his girlfriend and thought all women in Basingstoke were ugly.    The result of these intrusions I may say was that I got a higher vote than I should have, the no hope student won Br

I did not attend the Eucharist Congress in Liverpool so I only know what went on from reports I have heard.   Many topics seem to have been covered and on the Blessed Sacrament there seems to have been a positive outcome in so far as I have heard, one report of a catechist deciding to teach children Adoration is very welcome.    However since this Congress was centred around the Blessed Sacrament will we find priests and bishops going back to their dioceses to put the Blessed Sacrament back at the centre of our altars and at the centre of our Faith? Adoration is at the very heart of the Catholic Faith because we believe in the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ being present in the Sacred Species.   That is the authoritative teaching of the Catholic Church.   Now when we say we Adore Jesus by kneeling before Him in the Blessed Sacrament we are one of two things.    We are  Idolatosr because we are kneeling and adoring a piece of bread when Adoration belongs to God alon

It is a horrible moment when you look into another human being’s eyes and Satan looks back at you. It is a faith-destroying moment when those eyes belong to a man wearing a Roman collar. But just as Satan is real, and more often than not walks into our lives on two feet, the Holy Eucharist is real and comes to us from the hands of a priest. When those priestly hands belong to an apostle of Satan, it’s a crazy-making thing. But don’t let it make you crazy. The wheat and the tares, the good and the bad, the evil and the holy, will live side by side in this world until Christ comes again. Jesus told us this Himself. I will not leave the Church because Jesus is really and truly present, under the appearances of bread and wine, and I can touch him. I will not be a fool for corrupt men in collars. But I will stay. Because the Holy Eucharist is Jesus. And I will not leave Jesus.                                                                                                      

I was just a young man in my early twenties when a priest who had learned I could write shorthand asked me to write out a talk by Cardinal Heenan to the priests of his Westminster Diocese and send it to another priest.  The talk was on one of those tape to tape reels.   This was about 1966 and he was talking about his recent experience of the Vatican Council II.   Now I had had a good Catholic Education and believed in the unity of the Catholic Faith but for the first time I was shocked.      It was not because of the Latin Mass being replaced, because the bishops had never discussed the matter, but deceit and dishonesty were becoming common in the Church.   The Cardinal was unaware of this at the time.   What he did say that shocked me was that at the beginning of the Council a Document on the Virgin Mary was to he introduced but was bitterly opposed by certain European Bishops, mostly German.  They cried out "THIS WILL PUT THE ECUMENCAL MOVEMENT BACK 10 YEARS"   An unprepar

Having reported the wonderful things about my trip to meet Our Lady of Walsingham I must turn now with regret to the Anti-Christ who is present in the Basilica at Walsingham. My story begins in the late 1960's when the first attack on the Real Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament began.   It came from so called experts, whom priests had started using to go round the parishes starting to impose a New Faith and a New Church on the faithful.    The people loved their priests and were easily persuaded that what the experts were saying to them was  true.   These lay experts from Universities and Colleges told the people that the Church around the 12th century made too much of the Blessed Sacrament ad it was not meant to be adored.     I know that they taught this because I was alive and heard them.   Catholics were easily persuaded because of their trust in the clergy.    Nobody was allowed to point out that from earliest times Hermits had kept the Sacred Species in caves,  monk

This is the ruin of the entrance to Walsingham Abbey. We sere hoping to find it but all attention was on the church of the Annunciation and the Walsingham Shrine. There is a strange happening attached to our finding it. There was a road leading from the back of the Pilgrims Bureau which we were told would lead to a junction at the top and on turning left we could follow a road and then a track which led to the Catholic Shrine. They called it the Holy Mile. We got th ere OK. It was on our return when we were thinking of finding the ruins that something strange happened. As we walked along we expected to come across the road leading down to the Pilgrims Bureau again. It was a wide road for cars coming in both directions. Hardly a turning we could miss. The strange thing is that we did as even my son Andrew who was our leader will testify to. We eventually came to a turning which led down to the end of the village. We came across a little square where buses stop and there was the Red B

I am off to Walsingham tomorrow 10th September for one week.   I will as I wrote in my song "I will pay homage, I will sing your praise, and I will love you as in bygone days" Pray that I have a fruitful pilgrimage.

Amid the darkness in the world and the Church, there is one constant source of light It is hard to imagine a more pressing priority than renewing faith in the Holy Eucharist. Every generation since the Ascension has viewed its times with urgency. This is the unchanging perspective of those who realise these are “the last days” of human history between Christ’s first coming and His glorious return. No generation has been mistaken in recognising the shadows of the latter times, whether in the mysterious figure of the Antichrist or in the apostasy which will be the Church’s ultimate trial. I recall the words of Blessed John Henry Newman on what he described as “the infidelity to come”. He explained: I know that all times are perilous, and that in every time serious and anxious minds … are apt to consider no times so perilous as their own … still admitting this, I think that the trials which lie before us are such as would appal and make dizzy such courageous hearts as St Athanasi

This afternoon I will be visiting a friend.   He lives as a human in my local Church.    He is the Bread of Life  and lives in the Tabernacle not, as the Church teaches and has been observed from earliest times, just the Spirit of Christ in Bread, as he is in Scripture, but as God made Man, a living being. Why do I go?   When God became man he was someone that we could relate with.    He has human feelings so when I am sad I can speak to him as someone who has experienced my sadness. when I am joyful he can experience my joy, and when he loves it is not just the love of a Creator for a Creature, it is as someone who has also experienced human love and sits beside me rather than stand above me.     He has experienced human pain and misery so when I am weary and heavy burdened he is there for me.  He is truly my friend. So many young people need a God like this today, yet they are discouraged from having him as a  friend of their own.       He has often been removed from the alta

When the representatives in the Eucharist congress meet in Liverpool should they actually discuss the Blessed Sacrament?     A little history should vitalise this question.    In the early Church at the Breaking of Bread it was soon realised that the hard saying of Jesus about eating my Flesh and drinking my Blood had been fulfilled when he ordered at the Last Supper for his followers to do this in memory of Him     SO HOW DO WE PREPARE OURSELVES BEFORE COMMUNION TO BE WORTHY OF RECEIVING JESUS?    Perhaps you feel it does not matter.   Just turn up and take the Body of Christ  forget all the nonsense about confessing sins, and being worthy, it is Pre-Vatican II nonsense,  We are now liberated. Parts of the Sacred Species are not consumed and in the early Church hermits started keeping the consecrated Bread in their caves for adoration.    Later monks kept the sacred species on their person, but when monasteries were built they kept them in safe places.   Eventually as St John sa