Portsmouth Roman Catholic

I well remember the heady days at a Catholic Higher Education College.   The Spirit of Vatican II {which had nothing to do with Vatican II itself} was sweeping through the Church in England and Wales.   The  views of Tom, Dick, and Harriet were eagerly explored and delighted in while the documents of the Church, the source of true teaching were ignored.   The Catechism of the Catholic Church was sneared at before it had even been printed.   It was the age of the Prophet.   Suddenly everything was possible in the Church, we could now build a Church to suit ourselves and those who got in our way, the immature ones who still preferred to follow the Church were scorned as immature and effectively denied their Catholic beliefs and practices.   Many priests lost their way as groups of feminists and their supporters set themselves up to rule parishes and enforce their open mindedness.   In no time the Church was emptying.    I remember a semina...

While receiving the Blessed Sacrament this morning I knocked into a woman who had just received the Chalice.   Returning to our seats she apologised to me.   After Mass I thanked her for the apology but it was really my fault.  It was a morning when the First Holy Communicants were present and I asked if the little girl on her knee was one of them.   `O no, she replied  she is not ready.  I then asked how old the child was.  Nine  came the reply.    I refrained from entering politics and asking her who was filling her head with such nonsense,  but instead told her about Pope Pius X and how he had consulted the bishops of the world before an agreement was made in the Church that seven was the correct age and that this Pontiff had on talking to a five year old  and hearing merely that he believed Jesus was indeed in the Sacrament had allowed him to make his First Holy Communion.   That was the only requirement, not understan...

Well, it happened again.  Pope Francis returning from the Philippines gave an off cuff interview regarding the family.    It was a really good talk though and he defended large families and the generosity of parents who were not persuaded by the secular world and its views on birth control.  But he is getting old and like other older people his mind can wander and he can say things he never meant to say, and this has caused Cardinals at the Vatican to have to stand up and offer and explanation.   This time the phrase was Catholics need not breed like Rabbits.    It is sad that in a speech where he condemned contraception he should use a phrase which his enemies homed in on and the truth of all the rest of what he said was ignored.

It all came in the seventies and eighties.  Suddenly it was a shameful thing to have been a Catholic prior to Vatican II.    What with the Latin Mass we obviously could not understand, believing in Transubstantiation, carrying the guilt of sin that made us cringe before God, having beautiful Churches with beautiful altars and beautiful  images of the Sacred Heart, Mary the Mother of Jesus, the Saints, and even worse having Tabernacles on the Altar which contained the Sacred Species which after all was just bread, and allowing people to pray to this object and even putting it in a ciborium for worship, well what a backward people we were. and all those devotions and holy pictures, people saying the Rosary, well that was all just too much for the new Ecumenical mind.    Well Vatican II did start off with the German Karl Rahner complaining that if we gave a document on Mary this would put the ecumenical movement back ten years.   So the truth was out, tru...

One of the things that astonished me back in the eighties was the  attack on the Holy Family as a model for family life.   Because divorce is rife, because there are quarrels with children, because there are so many suffering spouses we cannot apparently have a model of what family life should be.     I found the whole things rather ignorant and insulting to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.   They were a real human family in which there was love and indeed disagreements.   The love of Joseph and Mary is something that a husband and wife for a start could contemplate.   We saw how Joseph accepted Mary and spent the rest of his life with her, providing for both her and Jesus.  No, it was not a sexual love but even this is worth thinking about in our society of today.  Husbands your wife is not just there to be used she is there for real love and real warmth and a real relationship.   Joseph sacrificed himself and what is a marriage without sacrifi...