It is a wonderful thing to be alive in the age of the internet. Twice this evening I have wanted to know something and twice I have known it within minutes.

I do not know what is more wonderful, to be alive in the age of the internet or to be alive in the age of lego. It is certainly a wonderful thing when the two collide.

Today, the internet has collided with lego has collided with English Catholic history. You don't get much better than that.

Yes, the dissolution of the monasteries in Lego!

What I particularly like about this is the little details, like the monks fighting the soldiers with brooms and shovels...

But even better than that is this...

Lego Ad Orientem!

Okay, okay. So they appear to be having lunch in the Church. You can't have everything.

More pictures can be found here.

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.

[...]

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.

[...]

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.

[...]

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.

As Mark Shea said when he was here. We live in England.

England is full of history, back in the day (before the reformation) we had monks. Loads and loads of monks. Here in the North of England was particularly monk heavy because after the Norman conquest William the Bastard basically had his guys trash everything and kill everybody so that in the Domesday Book all the villages are described as wasta est (wasted).

William (aka the Conqueror) gave his favourite lords great swathes of land in the north and those guys carried on living down south because the land up north was basically useless (with no peasants, cows or anything). The lords lead lives of debauchery and then pooped themselves about what would happen to them when after they died. They struck deals with various monks from France saying "If you can get me in to heaven I will give you huge tracts of wilderness to build monasteries on" and since monks love huge tracts of wilderness (it's quiet) they said "it's a deal". Over the years house prices rose and the monks grew very wealthy until Henry VIII said "Hey, that looks valuable, I'll have that..."

The land in Hull was pretty much all owned by two groups of monks. The Cistercians at Meaux and the Augustinian Canons at Haltemprice. Michelle thought it would be a cool idea to take the Youth Group to visit the latter for night prayer at the end of this, um, whatever Youth Groups have... terms? Anyway, we took a walk up there this evening to do a bit of reccy and risk assess it check it's all safe.

We took a look online before going and found a great site about the priory here, so we knew that there was nothing of the priory to actually see. What there is, is a farmhouse which is pretty damn old and has some parts that may be contemporary to the priory itself. Better than Skipsea Castle.

The recent updates are a bit of a concern, it's the usual tale. A listed building that's too historically significant let somebody do something useful with it (like do it up) and not historically significant enough to take care of properly (build a visitor centre etc). So it stands there, crumbling. I can see why English Heritage hesitate to allow somebody to turn it in to a house, I've seen some lovely historic buildings trashed by people turning them in to houses. On the other hand, if English Heritage can't afford to look after it, surely it's better to let somebody do it up and live in it and hope for the best. The current state of affairs is going to leave us with a field.

You can see a picture of the farmhouse in 1998 here. Here's my pictures today, ten years later...

As you can see, quite a lot of the building has been lost in only ten years. Fortunately, quite a bit remains (for now). I trespassed a little bit through a rather large gap in the fence (you could drive a car through it) to get this photo of the other side. From this side you can see the stonework (at the bottom) which may have been contemporary with (and maybe even part of) the abbey.

Older OS maps also show a "Lady Well" to the north. We decided to go and check it out but we couldn't find anything, the field was too overgrown to really look for it and you're not really supposed walk around people's fields.

I really hope something can be done to save what remains of this site for future generations. It's not Buckingham Palace, but the site has great significance for the history of our local area. What would be ideal is for a millionaire to come and buy it and convert it in to some kind of Catholic retreat centre with visitor centre and resident monks. They could mark out the location of the old abbey and people could worship there once more. That would be amazing. But I'd be well happy just to find the next time I walk up there that somebody has fixed the walls, put a roof on top and is living there and occasionally checking the more ancient stonework hasn't crumbled too much.

As we left, I hoped that when Leona is old enough to look at these things, there will be something left for her to look at...

Come on English Heritage. We're members and we even visited Thornton Abbey. Get this farm sorted out.