The Apocalypse - Letter by Letter: Author Makes Plea for Cleansing Bishops Directly to Pope
The Apocalypse - Letter by Letter
Blog to discuss the book "The Apocalypse - Letter by Letter: A Literary Analysis of the Book of Revelation" and current events that point to the events described therein.
Note: This plea reminds me of the cry from the martyrs under the altar in the Apocalypse. Patience is wearing thin for sure. But according to Apocalypse - Letter by Letter, Satan is in the Church, even the highest levels, and will not be cast out until the time of the "Great Sign." Until then, much suffering will continue.
MEMO TO THE POPE: PLEASE YOUR HOLINESS, ADDRESS CRISIS OF FAITH WITH THE BISHOPS
Holy Father, as everyone knows, you'll soon be among us! In April -- just a couple months away -- you will be visiting the U.S. Thank God for that! No doubt you'll handle this with your characteristic insight, prayerfulness, courage, and aplomb. We look forward to it. Thank you for being prayerful. Thank you for being faithful to the legacy of John Paul. Thank you so much for nudging our Church back to the right kind of music. Thank you for the call for protection of God's Creation. Thank you for not folding in to pressure when it came to the Good Friday prayer for Jews (in the Latin Rite). Thank you for both loving and communicating with but also standing up to Muslims. Thank you so much, Your Holiness, for gradually bringing back old Latin-style mysticism.
These are times of purification (and spiritual warfare) and of course your name is Benedict! You told us just the other day to confront evil. Our Church is going through a purification, and perhaps the beginning of recovering its lost treasures (or at least some of them). It is this, Your Holiness, that we would like to address.
May we be so bold, when it comes to your trip, as to offer a few recommendations? Please, Holy Father, speak even more on music during your trip. In some churches, it all but obscures the liturgy. There is that drumbeat. There is the sugar-sweet modernistic music -- as we try to pray. Surely there are no clashing cymbals in Heaven!
Meanwhile, homilies are often too intellectual, focused almost exclusively on the past. How about the present? How about the future? It is the dryness of religion that creates the desert. Please tell our good shepherds to speak about the miraculous! Please tell them to relate personally to us. There are miracles in our chapels. There are healings. These are largely ignored. Remember the miraculous Christian origin?
Holy Father, there is a real crisis of belief among our good bishops. You must speak to them as you never have -- with both love and urgency. There is a fear among U.S. clerics to believe in the supernatural because of what you so rightly have called the distortions of science. Please reorient our priests, our dioceses, away from scientism and back toward toward the deliverance of Jesus. Let them come into our midst in their miters and cast out spirits! Please speak on Adoration, Holy Father. Urge bishops on the importance. This alone will bring vocations and inspiration and exorcism.
There are many good, holy priests left. They live almost a white martyrdom. Often, they are cast away into the outlying parishes. But they are there. They are the backbone. They must be defended. Our Church will survive. No doubt -- even despite the crushing reality of church closings. But please tell our dear priests, Holy Father -- Our Lady's special sons -- to return to the mystical roots of the Faith. Please tell the nuns and priests and brothers and everyone else to stay clear of alternate beliefs. Holy Father, there is an epidemic here of the New Age. It has infiltrated dozens of Catholic retreat centers. Almost a majority. Many convents are less centers of prayer than ashrams. We're not sure you have been informed of the extent. Crystals, psychobabble, labyrinths. The same ones who allow all that disdain the devout and dismiss blessed salt as a superstition.
So it is, Holy Father, that naked we stand, as the enemy advances. Many clerics don't even seem to believe in the existence of the devil as he runs rampant around them (and especially in our seminaries). There is a planned "exorcism center" for Poland. How about North America? It is very serious. It must be approached as a mystical crisis, not one that can be addressed at an annual meeting. They must be pushed into a sense of battle. They must see your trip as the thunderous approach of reinforcements, of the larger battalion.
Perhaps it is time to ask the bishops and cardinals to put the tabernacle back in the center and the chairs that priests use off to the side. Perhaps this will start to humble us. Perhaps this will bring the right thing at the center. Please urge bishops who are closing churches to turn them into oratories (instead of selling them to realtors). Please address the Catholic colleges that not only ignore Catholicism but negate it. (They have a play called the Vagina Monologues at Notre Dame!)
Please, please, Holy Father: address the crisis of Catholic schools. Scold this nation for not allowing vouchers -- for not even allowing the deduction of tuition from taxes! Desperately, we need you to speak, as you have the ear of the nation, of Congress, about the incredible unfairness. Our Catholic schools can not be allowed to die. We hope we are not being pretentious but in many ways our society and our Church (at least in the West) are at a tipping point. Often, the only orthodox priests are foreign ones. As much as it hurts to say, Holy Father, many faithful have lost faith in their bishops. There are the majority who are so good and have fought the odds to be where they are -- despite the culture around them. Dear bishops indeed!
But in far too many instances -- Holy Father -- the spirit of bureaucracy has overcome the Holy Spirit. We have many good men who are not allowed into seminaries -- who are turned away because they are devout -- and priests who were never even taught how to bless a house (or Holy Water)!
Please tell your bishops to go out among the people. Please tell them to forget the annual Alfred E. Smith dinner. Please urge them to forgo the opulence. Please urge far more prayer (than administration). John Paul II prayed seven hours a day!
This we hate to discuss, but there is the abuse crisis. Holy Father, much has been purged (many abusers have been exposed), but there is still the niggling feeling that the general issue of homosexuality in the priesthood has not been fully confronted. There are churches in the U.S. that rent out to blasphemous transvestite groups but won't allow a talk on Fatima.
Holy Father, it may be a bit too critical and suspicious and ardent but it has gotten to the point where one Catholic writer in the beleaguered archdiocese of Boston has hinted (in a new book) that the slow response and at times cover-up in abuse cases was due to homosexual blackmail -- that certain bishops themselves have been compromised and thus neutralized. Is this true? Notes one reviewer: "The account offered is devastating and the blame is clearly laid at the door of the American bishops. 'The thesis of this book,' writes [author Phil] Lawler, 'is that the sex abuse scandal in American Catholicism was not only aggravated but actually caused by the willingness of church leaders to sacrifice the essential for the inessential; to build up the human institution even to the detriment of the Divine mandate.' Bishops again and again responded to the crisis as institutional managers, employing public relations stratagems to evade, deceive, and distract attention from their own responsibility.
"Lawler adds: 'Homosexual influence within the American clergy was not in itself the cause of the sex abuse crisis. The corruption wrought by that influence was a more important factor.' He very gingerly addresses a theory proposed by a number of commentators on the crisis, namely, that bishops engaged in cover-ups and other deceptions because they were threatened with homosexual blackmail. He cites a number of instances in which this appears to be the case and bishops were permitted to resign when their misdeeds could no longer be denied. 'The blackmail hypothesis,' he writes, 'provides a logical explanation for behavior that is otherwise inexplicable: the bishops’ willingness to risk the welfare of the faithful and their own reputations in order to protect abusive priests.'"
These are not our words. But you see our point; you see the bitterness. You see the suspicions. We need to purge any homosexuals who have positions of any sort of prominence. There was a real and serious infiltration.
Three years ago, during the first Holy Week of your papacy, you spoke of the "filth" in the priesthood. Perhaps, when you are in New York, that language needs to be repeated. We don't like to stray so far into such territory, but you can see the mindset of many dedicated Catholics. A priest or bishop will in some cases bless a Mardi Gras or even a "gay-pride" event and do so with pleasure at the same time that he turns down Adoration.
Why, for example, would a priest wear a vestment like that to the right? How are we to react? Please call on our bishops to evangelize. Please call on them to be holy. Please call on them to evoke the Holy Spirit. He will cleanse! He will resurrect! Perhaps the best way of urging evangelization is to do so yourself during your trip -- laying on hands, exercising charisms, letting our great Church leaders know the way to evoke the Holy Spirit.
It is the Holy Spirit Who will fill the pews again -- not intellectual language. We do not so much need terms like "Mulieris Dignitatem" or "humanum" as simply, "Praise God!" (or "Get thee hence, Satan!"). A Benedict you are! Like your namesake, you fight evil. And now, you will be stepping on the devil's turf. Do you not always step on the devil's turf?
And in your courage, do you not always confront evil and win?
