I realise this is two days late, but it's too awesome not to blog...

By Butters on B3ta

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Pope John Paul II, Ash Wednesday 1996...

Why does the Church place ashes on our foreheads today? Why does she remind us of death? Death which is the effect of sin! Why?

To prepare us for Christ's Passover. For the paschal mystery of the Redeemer of the world.

Paschal mystery means what we profess in the Creed: "On the third day he rose again"!

Yes. Today we need to hear the "you are dust and to dust you will return" of Ash Wednesday, so that the definitive truth of the Gospel, the truth about the Resurrection, will unfold before us: believe in the Gospel.

On the threshold of Lent, it is necessary that this perspective be opened before us, so that we may believe deeply in the Gospel with all the truth of our mortal existence.

We are called to take part in the Resurrection of Christ. For this appeal to resound within us with all its force at the beginning of the Lenten season, let us realize what death means... "You are dust" ... "Repent! ... Believe in the Gospel"!

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The Catholic Church is dying, perhaps the Catholic Church is already dead.

It may suprise you to hear me say that, but we have to face facts. Our congregations are ageing, our numbers are dwindling, our buildings are crumbling. Much of what is called "Catholic" is nothing but a hollow shell. At the "Catholic" school that my daughter will soon attend only one member of staff is a practising Catholic, probably by the time she gets there it will probably be none. Even many of our "Catholic" parishes are nothing more than jumped up community centres, clubs for nice people to meet and be nice while so called "Catholic" priests inform them of how wonderful they are to give a few quid to Cafod.

Had a cheery Easter then James?

The simple fact is that parishes, schools, priests and even bishops with the word "Catholic" on the label no longer do exactly what it says on the tin. It's a bit strong to call that a "lie", it's more of a cartoon deception. It's like Wiley Coyote when he's just run over the edge of a cliff but he hasn't quite looked down yet. Formerly Catholic institutions bumbling along under the old name, desperately trying not to look down, trying to pretend everything is okay.

Well it isn't.

Anybody who knows their history knows that when Henry VIII demanded that the bishops of England side with him against the Pope all but one of them agreed. Every single bishop in the country except one. How could every bishop in the country cave in so easily? The answer is simple, the bishops had caved in long before. They already resented the influence of Rome, they had already accepted the comfort and prestige that comes from befriending ruling powers, they were moderate and diplomatic, slow to act, careful not to offend. They had already ran off the edge of the cliff. All Henry VIII did was cause them to look down.

But James, that was then, that was history. History finished in the 1960's with the Second Vatican Council and the invention of sex. we live in the modern world where everything is wonderful and nothing ever happens.

Ha ha ha ha. Does anybody really believe that?

In her recent article in the Catholic Herald, Anna Arco writes about Fr Josef Friedl, an Austrian "Catholic" priest who has admitted to living with his girlfriend. "I am 65 now. Why should I lie?" he said, pointing out that his "Catholic" parishioners know all about it and don't mind. Another Austrian priest, Fr Peter Paul Kaspar, said that lots of "Catholic" priests in Austria have girlfriends and the Bishop knows all about it. The Bishop knows of priests with girlfriends but he does nothing.

In Australia Fr Peter Kennedy is founding his own 'community in excile'. For thirty years he has been in and out of the news for dubious Baptisms and other fun and games and his Bishop has done, guess what... nothing.

More locally... Ah yes. The Diocese of Middlesbrough, where all is perfect and nothing untoward ever happens. None of our confessionals are store cupboards, none of our absolutions are general, none of our "Catholic" schools allow government agencies who promote abortion services to come to the school and advertise. Oh no. None of that going on around here. The bishop would do something...

Heh. Did you think that not blogging for lent would mellow me out?

Our bishop is a nice guy, I like him, but does he realise he's captain of the Titanic? I'm not talking about the early stages either, when we've just struck the iceberg and a few people are saying the ship is going to sink but nobody believes them because all seems well. I'm talking about the later stages, when the propeller is in the air and hundreds of people are already in the water drowning.

So what happened? Why are we sinking?

Some blame the Second Vatican Council but I doubt the council is any more responsible for the decline of the Church than the Synod of Whitby. Others say the Church is being killed by being too conservative, that if the Church only loosened up a little she might survive. Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists haven't kill the Church, they have come like vultures to peck at the corpse and check the pockets for loose change. Maybe Science is killing the Church? Personally, I think the smart money is on Moral Relativism.

Whatever it is that is killing the Church, it's too late to do anything now.

So why are you still smiling?

Because there's some I ought to tell you... I'm not left handed either!

Okay, so I am left handed, but that's not the point. The point is that the Church has a trick up her sleeve, an ace card, a ruse, a flanking manoeuvre. We are an Easter people. Just when you think she is dead, she is alive. This is not the first time this has happened. As Chesterton notes in his great classic, The Everlasting Man, the faith has died many times before.

I have said that Asia and the ancient world had an air of being too old to die. Christendom has had the very opposite fate. Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.

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The Faith is always converting the age, not as an old religion but as a new religion. This truth is hidden from many by a convention that is too little noticed. Curiously enough, it is a convention of the sort which those who ignore it claim especially to detect and denounce. They are always telling us that priests and ceremonies are not religion and that religious organisation can be a hollow sham, but they hardly realise how true it is. It is so true that three or four times at least in the history of Christendom the whole soul seemed to have gone out of Christianity; and almost every man in his heart expected its end.

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This fact is only masked in medieval and other times by that very official religion which such critics pride themselves on seeing through. Christianity remained the official religion of a Renaissance prince or the official religion of an eighteenth-century bishop, just as an ancient mythology remained the official religion of Julius Caesar or the Arian creed long remained the official religion of Julian the Apostate. But there was a difference between the cases of Julius and of Julian; because the Church had begun its strange career. There was no reason why men like Julius should not worship gods like Jupiter for ever in public and laugh at them for ever in private. But when Julian treated Christianity as dead, he found it had come to life again.

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Arianism, as has been said, had every human appearance of being the natural way in which that particular superstition of Constantine might be expected to peter out. All the ordinary stages had been passed through; the creed had become a respectable thing, had become a ritual thing, had then been modified into a rational thing; and the rationalists were ready to dissipate the last remains of it, just as they do to-day. When Christianity rose again suddenly and threw them, it was almost as unexpected as Christ rising from the dead.

I am joyous this Easter because I am full of hope, because I know that the Church is dying and yet it will continue to live.

The "Catholic" priests who openly defy the Bishop and the Pope, the "Catholic" schools with their "Catholic" ethos and their dodgy careers advice services and their "Catholic" RE departments with dodgy textbooks. The Church there is dead. It has gone in to the tomb and the stone has been rolled over the entrance. These so called "Catholic" institutions are like the crumpled up wrapper of last years Easter egg. The chocolate is gone. Jesus is no longer shown nailed to a cross in the classroom, instead he is pinned to the mission statement like a dead insect. An artefact, a historical curiosity, a platitude in an ethos. What they call an "ethos" I call a shroud, a paper shroud in which Christ is wrapped for burial in a drawer or a filing cabinet.

Chesterton continues...

There are people who say they wish Christianity to remain as a spirit. They mean, very literally, that they wish it to remain as a ghost. But it is not going to remain as a ghost. What follows this process of apparent death is not the lingerings of the shade; it is the resurrection of the body. These people are quite prepared to shed pious and reverential tears over the Sepulchre of the Son of Man; what they are not prepared for is the Son of God walking once more upon the hills of morning.

The Titanic may be sinking, but the waters of death are the waters of Baptism and the Church will rise again.

The next few years are going to be very interesting indeed.

Every morning I awake and come downstairs to drink a mug of tea and eat some breakfast. Ella is still in bed at this time (she sleeps while she can before the baby wakes up) so I get a quiet half hour to read the paper. Sorry, it's 2009. I get a quiet half hour read the blogs.

Usually it's quite a mix. Some blogger's are up in arms about the latest silly thing to come out of some Bishop's mouth while others are posting YouTube clips of awful liturgies and others still are getting upset about the bias on the BBC and some small minority are finding something happy to talk about. In short, it's a cacophony of unrelated babbling - a lot like the background noise in a pub before you move closer and listen to individual conversations.

This morning was different. This morning there was an unusual uniformity to the Catholic blogs. The chaotic noise of a hundred people saying a hundred different things faded to silence and the blogs spoke with one voice:

Fr John Neuhaus is dead.

Dawn Eden, The Curt Jester, Fr Z, Steve Ray, John C Wright, Kathy Shaidle, James Akin, New Liturgical Movement, Amy Welborn and Many, Many more... Unprecedented.

Readers in the UK probably don't know who Fr John Neuhaus was, I wouldn't if it were not for the internet. He was a ghost writer for John Paul II and he founded a journal First Things that you probably haven't heard of either but you should.

Appropriately, an essay that Fr Neuhaus wrote on the subject of death has been doing the rounds. I'm going to join the chorus and post some of it here...

We are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already underway. The work of dying well is, in largest part, the work of living well. Most of us are at ease in discussing what makes for a good life, but we typically become tongue-tied and nervous when the discussion turns to a good death. As children of a culture radically, even religiously, devoted to youth and health, many find it incomprehensible, indeed offensive, that the word “good” should in any way be associated with death. Death, it is thought, is an unmitigated evil, the very antithesis of all that is good.

Death is to be warded off by exercise, by healthy habits, by medical advances. What cannot be halted can be delayed, and what cannot forever be delayed can be denied. But all our progress and all our protest notwithstanding, the mortality rate holds steady at 100 percent.

Death is the most everyday of everyday things. It is not simply that thousands of people die every day, that thousands will die this day, although that too is true. Death is the warp and woof of existence in the ordinary, the quotidian, the way things are. It is the horizon against which we get up in the morning and go to bed at night, and the next morning we awake to find the horizon has drawn closer. From the twelfth-century Enchiridion Leonis comes the nighttime prayer of children of all ages: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray thee Lord my soul to take.” Every going to sleep is a little death, a rehearsal for the real thing.

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Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord.
And let perpetual light shine upon him.
May he rest in peace.
Amen.

Ella says: Don't blog that it's ming!

Perhaps this is more to her liking...

What she definitely won't like is this.