A Happy and Contented Community.

 This is the Year of the Eucharist.    Now there are plenty of events and meetings planned throughout the next few months.   People will attend and everyone will settle down to a positive programme of uplifting talks and going home feeling good inside.   This is how these meetings have been for over fifty years.   What was actually happening was that we have all been lulled into a sleep, we all pretend everything is well, and all we have to do is wait for God to fix any problems.  So to a background of Catholic Schools succeeding in alienating over 90 per cent of schoolchildren from the Church, and by their early teens, we keep our voices quiet.   We do not want to be 'divisive'.     Then there are the sex programmes, where the 'old fashioned' teachings of Christ are ignored because we live in a more educated society.   Young people in Catholic Schools learn about contraception and are as keen as pupils in State Schools to indulge in this 'responsible sex', leading on to 'single parenthood' and emotional problems for so many children.   But we must not mention marriage, the teachings of Christ on Divorce and Re-Marriage for He was very unkind, the 'understanding' bishops give annulments and cause even more confusion in families as the father or mother go off to start another family, and we have children of two families deprived of their natural father or mother.   The children without the experience of the  natural love of a father and mother do badly.  They have been  denied the security they should have, a security that nature itself has ordained.   Now I am sure that someone reading this will be offended, perhaps because they have not given the matter much thought, or perhaps they have survived despite the hardships.  Nor in this narrative do I seek to offend single mothers, many of whom give everything they have to their children and are worthy of the highest praise, but I can only look at what is happening in the secular world.    There recently was a so called Independent Inquiry into Sex Abuse.    It started at Rotherham where Rape Gangs of a certain nationality were using and abusing children, many from Social Services Homes.     It decided to ignore the Rotherham problem and instead look into abuse by Religious groups.  It eagerly went through the religious groups and of course gave prominence to the Catholic Church and the Church of England.    It ignored that it should have been looking into Rape Gangs and that the Social Services were very much involved.      So the problem at Rotherham was ignored just as, probably the largest contributor to child rape, the Social Services was ignored.    On the Catholic Church the Nolan report of 2000 was ignored so that they could get back to the better figures of the 1970's.     It was probably the most biased report every published.    But why are these children in care?     Why are there so many children of single parents?   Why are so many children on drugs?   Why are suicides among young people rising?    And why are young black children knifing one another in London and poverty being put forward as the cause, when we know it is the absence of a father.

So let us go back to the beginning.   Jesus was so much in favour of Marriage that he warned against Divorce.    We do not enter marriage on a trial basis, through their teenage years young people are in preparation for marriage by keeping themselves chaste and free from adultery.     That is the teaching of Christ in the Gospel, and taught by the Early Church Fathers.    Why do we stand by and let this destruction of the young continue in our parishes and schools?        O forget it,  let us all love one another in a happy community, pretending we are doing the work of God.   lt is His fault, not ours.

Jesus and Mary, help us to get nearer to you both.