The other day I wryly wrote about what may take place in the wake of the now Post-Synodal Apostolic Letter Amoris laetitia (aka Familiaris divortio):
Benedict, in Summorum, emancipated both the older form of Mass and priests who say it!
With Amoris laetitia, Francis too has done something to emancipate priests from their bishops!
If by Summorum Pontificum the Pope laid down that priests can do something and their bishops have no say about it, then so too the Pope laid down something in Amoris laetitia and, again, bishops can’t do anything about it.
In the case of Summorum, priests can say the traditional Roman Rite’s Mass, etc., and bishops can’t stop them because the Pope said so.
In the case of Amoris, priests can now, it seems, tell people in the confessional that they can do whatever the hell they want, and bishops can’t stop them because the Pope said so.
What game changer. Now and in the future, sooooo many bishops try rein in their errant liberal priests as they hear confessions …. right? But, “NO!”, the priests will say, “Pope Francis says I can!”
As libs are reasoning now, Amoris is the huge game changer. Rules are out! Mercy is in! Who needs the laws of God and the perennial teaching of Holy Church? Priests can now affirm everyone’s conscience just as they are in the internal forum and no bishop can stop them!
Here are some things I have spotted as the division is rapidly growing.
First, there is a horrid piece in the LA Times about the Letter, filled with half-truths. Note:
So do remarried divorcees now get Communion or not?
Yes. And then again no. It is going to depend on your priest. [See what I mean?]Francis states in The Joy of Love that he is not tearing up any rules, or writing any new ones, but says a little wiggle room is in order if people deserve it, [?] and that will be down to the good judgment of priests.
“It is possible that in an objective situation of sin,” he writes, a person can be helped to live in God’s grace, and in certain cases, “this can include the help of the sacraments.” [This is from the Imfamous Footnote 351.]
Explaining who priests will give the nod to, [how condescending] Francis lists “unjustly abandoned” spouses, people remarrying for the sake of their children and anyone who is really sure their “previous and irreparably broken marriage had never been valid.” [THEY don’t get to be the judges of that!]
See what’s happening here? Doctrine and discipline effectively mean nothing and people can do whatever the hell they want. Bishops aren’t any longer able to make an impact on what their priests do.
Today I received this from a priest friend who works in a Tribunal:
I’ll bet he’s not the only one.
Again, I choose to read Amoris as a two-fold exhortation to even greater compassion than the great compassion which faithful priests have been and are showing to couples in scare-quotes situations (“irregular”), and to dissidents to conform their minds and pastoral practice to the teachings and laws of the Church as they still stand.
Friends, it is going to take immense resolve to stand strong in the face of the onslaught that is coming. Begin to think about your spiritual lives in a new way and plan to include mortifications and acts of reparation for the sacrileges that will increase. If you are confirmed, ponder deeply the effects of the sacrament. If you are not confirmed, think about asking to be confirmed.
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Would I be sinning by questioning Pope Francis’ orthodoxy at this point? I don’t see how anything in this document can seen as anything but a departure from the perennial teachings of the Church.
Several months ago I felt drawn to prayers of reparation. I sought them out, printed them into a booklet that I take to church and pray. (I also pray at home but feel especially drawn to praying in church.)
There are some very good ones at the Vultus Christi blog from Silverstream Priory. This link will take you to articles and prayers of reparation.
Perhaps other readers can suggest more sources for prayers. And I would be interested in learning more about efficacious mortifications.
This would seem to be an excellent justification, more now than ever, for all priests to do all in their power, to bring back the sense of the sacred and awe to the liturgy.
If they are teetering on the edge of a decision to begin offering Mass in the Extraordinary Form, this should push them over the edge. Even if they are firmly entrenched in the NO, this would be a great time to:
– Bring back the communion rail
– Celebrate ad orientum
– Encourage reception on the tongue (of course without coercion, but some instruction on how the abusive practice of reception in the hand was born in disobedience would be in order)
-Keep lay readers and extraordinary ministers out of the sanctuary, and minimize their use
– Make generous use of Latin and Gregorian Chant
These pious practices could do a lot to restore the sense of reverence for the Blessed Sacrament, and may make a difference for those struggling with “irregular” situations in their discernment of what they shouldn’t do.
[Indeed. No effort of renewal of any sector of the Church’s life will succeed without a true renewal of our liturgical worship. I think Pope Benedict’s Summorum Pontificum is the key to this, though it will play out over a long time. I’ve written about this elsewhere too many times to count.]
Thank you, Father. Blogs like yours help us continue to do just what you suggest.
There are so many consequences of this new thing…so many implications and so much fallout. The Beast has a new mask, and people like it.
Christ has risen!
We need to have faith in our Lord. He who destroyed death by death and liberated us from the wages of sin will not permit His Church to fall apart. Some may engage in “priest shopping,” but there will be a reaction to practices that further the Dictatorship of Relativism. The Evil One never tires from trying to confuse the faithful. That has been true from the day of Resurrection until now. However, Christ has already won the victory over death and sin. That is not going to change.
Fr. Z, you mention that “I choose to read Amoris has a two-fold exhortation to even greater compassion than the great compassion which faithful priests have been and are showing to couples in scare-quotes situations (“irregular”), and to dissidents to conform their minds and pastoral practice to the teachings and laws of the Church as they still stand.”
For the record, are you agreed that a compelling story can be told that the rhetorical and even logical implicature of AL is that the Pope has attempted to depart from longstanding doctrine on Communion for the remarried? A strict interpretation of the comment about dissidents above may suggest that you think this is not the case. [I think that the Pope wanted to put the full-monty Kasper Proposal into effect. He wanted to, but he understood through the Synod process and other sources that he couldn’t, can’t, do that officially, clearly, by his Apostolic authority. He hints at what he wants without going farther.]
I read the document in its entirety and so far have not seen any compelling arguments that the document does not suggest that the Pope fully intends to change longstanding doctrine. [I need a diagram of that sentence to understand what you meant.]
Of course, Cardinal Burke has fortunately pointed out that AL does not have magisterial authority. [Not everyone is convinced by His Eminence’s argument, btw.]
Certainly this exhortation merely represents the opinions of a Pope. But even so these are of course the opinions of … a Pope! They therefore carry a lot more weight in the public imagination than any statement by a cardinal or a bishop.
And so where are the latter? It doesn’t suffice to say that the document carries no binding weight. The Pope needs to be challenged explicitly by Cardinals and bishops in the form of a public statement by a group of them.
There is absolutely no question that a failure to criticize this papacy and object to its confusions will embolden some future Pope to continue playing these rhetorical games. Maybe even the next Pope. [It might inspire the Lords Cardinal to elect someone who is quite different from this Pope.]
What’s at stake? The serious erosion of the remaining counter-cultural bulwark in our culture. It won’t be too long before all this exaltation of the internal forum and conscience is going to be used to challenge Catholic moral theology *across the board*. [What are you going to do about that? Remember: Pickett’s Charge did not work. We need a strategy that accomplishes what we want.]
During the past three years, with each passing day, I have found myself reading less and less Catholic news, visiting fewer and fewer Catholic blogs, deleting more and more of my Catholic browser bookmarks, to the point where, now, WDTPRS is my sole remaining Catholic bookmark. It’s just been all too depressing. What a difference from the joy of the preceding decades.
As my former pastor told us young parents: contraception is a ‘matter of conscience’. Well, being a ‘resurrection people’ and all that, we did not need confession and so I had 19 years between confessions and my ‘conscience’ did not hurt a bit when I missed Mass or had a sterilization or anything. My ‘internal forum’ was fine with all that. When I worked in a retail pharmacy and dispensed birth control pills but came to see that perhaps I should not be doing that, I had 5 different priests tell me I could!!! And is one was wanting to continue in a, shall we say, less that holy situation well an accommodating priest could often be found. To think we are back to that garbage again. No favors to the faithful here! Had I died during those 19 years, heaven was not a certainty by any means. SALVATION is more important than worldly comfort! It is more important than the world’s favor and approval. Condoning people in sin…well, why would not also be sin?
Father, I think there’s a lot to be said for always trying to put the best face on things under normal circumstances and in the proper context.
However, in a time of war, and most especially when one knows the enemy has breached the walls, it is foolhardy not to be on high alert and raising the alarm at the first sign of incursion, exposing and engaging the enemy in its *every* move — however so covert their stratagems might be.
If one waits too long, it’s too late. And that’s what has happened here.
Cardinal Suenens (happily) described the Second Vatican Council as “the French Revolution in the Church”, and Paul VI lamented that the “smoke of satan has entered the sanctuary…”.
The Traditionalist movement with its apologists and writers recognized this from the outset, and foretold these developments for 5 decades. Everyone called them “alarmists” and went back to sleep, or simply kept happily smiling.
Archbishop Lefebvre — the meek, sainted prelate whom I had the privilege of meeting personally — fought this specter at the very Council itself, after seeing the Council schemas he had been commissioned along with others to prepare for over 2-3 years prior to the Council in order to guide it, thrown out by the Modernists in the first 2 days of the proceedings.
SSPX has recognized it from the very beginning and has been made to suffer and pay dearly for its fidelity to the path of Tradition, knowing full well where all the successive compromises would lead.
I think of our priests and our bishops as the Marines of the Catholic Church, the Special Forces. It is for them to raise the alarm, to push back the enemy incursions which have claimed more and more territory.
And yet, they have largely remained silent, or “put the best face” on things.
What would we think of a General who had done this, thus allowing his territories to become so overrun that now his troops are in survival mode, and have lost all hope of mounting an offensive? We’re going to be eaten alive now; that’s clear.
I have been a member of the Traditionalist movement for 40 years now. I have lived the history, and I am heartsick to be watching year after year as everything we foretold now entering the final stages of a terminal disease.
It should have been stopped….Our Lady at Fatima forewarned of these developments, and She did not come to tell us to give up — but to fight.
Would that all Catholics had been Traditionalists…it would never have come to this. Thanks be to God, we now have many more Traditionalist options open to us.
I pray that the ranks of these chapels and Institutes now swell so that a “remnant” of the True Faith can be saved; and I pray the Pope Francis will at last put an end to the unspeakable injustice of the suppression of SSPX, whose only crime was to hold fast what we have received….and ought to have passed on and used as a weapon to subdue the Church’s enemies.
Excerpt of an email from a friend which I found very profound in the midst of the AL controversy, discussed between friends:
Jesus said “many will come in order to deceive even the elect.” I see this happening. Do you guys?
This is misleading many who are not so well formed in their faith (myself included) which is probably 80% of Catholics (according to even Father Ricardo). My concern is that many will now believe that you can be in full Communion with the Church and live in adultery or any other relationship. Faithfulness in marriage and outside of marriage will be a concept of the past…impossible to live out the “ideal” today as Pope Francis suggests? I disagree. I am divorced and have chosen to remain true to Church teaching on chastity through the grace of God and Mary’s help. Is this gift of sacrifice that God has allowed me to experience for nothing? I believe grace is available to everyone who wants to live chaste lives. Jesus deserves our all over any creature or thing. He actually demands it in the Gospel. Can you see that or am I speculating too much?
An observation from Fr. George Rutler on Amoris Laetitia. Anything but wry.
http://www.crisismagazine.com/2016/the-curates-egg-a-reflection-on-amoris-laetitia
examples
“The literary quality of Amoris Laetitia does not challenge the claim that the Authorized Version, or King James’s Bible, is the only successful work of art composed by a committee.”
“The Word does have a way with words, and the charity of the Apostle gave him the tongue of an angel. In contrast, there are a lot of gongs clanging and cymbals clashing in the contradictions and redundancies of much of the exhortation’s diction.”
“A lack of clarity in the text might endorse the conceit already expounded in some media interviews, which says contrition is not a necessary element in petitioning for mercy. Any parish priest should wonder at the description of the confessional as a torture chamber.” . . . “Speaking only of my own parish, in my confessional is a picture of the Prodigal Son and not the Grand Inquisitor. . . . “Dramaturgic references like that to torture are straw horses, and a straw horse is the rhetorical device of a weak argument.”
“The decline of moral realism is like a shift from realism in art to impressionism and then invariably to expressionism. That expressionism, for instance, seemed to be the tone of a book by the Argentine theologian and consultant on the writing of Amoris Laetitia, Victor Manuel Fernandez: Heal Me with Your Mouth: The Art of Kissing. I imagine Henry VIII writing the foreword to that, without the approbation of Saint Thomas More.”
My son and I were talking about America’s change from a seemingly religious to a seemingly secular nation during my lifetime and it occurred to me that I actually live in a blessed time, a time of wonderful opportunity and clarity.
I am 46 and, when I was a child, everyone around me seemed to be actively Christian. No one proclaimed themselves atheists or agnostics that I know. Really, the only division was between denominations of Christians and that reality was extremely comfortable… and not particularly conducive to developing real belief.
It was easy to be Christian in 1985. Everyone else was too and, so, it was easy to go through the motions, never challenged, never needing to learn anything… It was assumed and, so, I assumed that everything was OK. Now, though, one is Christian by choice or not Christian at all. Who would choose to be a minority but those fully convinced that they possessed the truth?
It seems to me that we are missing that joy at being persecuted that comes through so fully in the Letters. We are presented with an opportunity to truly be a lamp in the dark, a city on the hill. That is something to embrace and express thanks at for we are assured that Jesus will stand for the one who is not ashamed of Him.
I thank you for your posts, Father, for they constantly improve my understanding of what should be and what is and I pray that every one of us who follow your writings find true joy in the present trials.
Amoris will create two classes of priests- the merciful, caring priests and the mean, miserly priests. It will also increase divisions in families as faithful Catholics will resist recognizing adulterous couplings ( I can’t bring myself to use the word “union”), people in adulterous relationships may not even feel the need to apply for annulments if they can short-circuit the process and find the merciful priest in the confessional, and abandoned spouses will feel abandoned by the Church too.
It won’t take long for word to get out as to who the merciful and mean priests are, or which confessionals are the “friendly” ones.
It’s frustrating to hear that the document has not changed doctrine, or that the document is not infallible, because it overlooks the casualties. Most of us have real-life family members and friends, people we love and care about, who may be deceived and eternally lost because of this exhortation. There are real casualties even if we know that the Church triumphs in the end and that “no doctrine was changed”.
For all the hubbub about this exhortation, the sad part is all the pandering to people who in the end will likely find an excuse to stop going to Mass altogether anyway. I also have come to the conclusion that this is yesterday’s battle. Today’s battle is getting people to go to Mass and get married in the first place. No marriage, no divorce. Fornication is today’s battle, not adultery. And tomorrow’s battle is shaping up to be raw survival when we get overrun by those who don’t believe in contraception.
In answer to Majuscule, I have been praying the Chaplet of the Holy Wounds as given to Sister Marie-Marthe Chambon by Our Lord in the late 19th century. She was a Visitation nun and the cause for her canonisation was opened in the 1930s and taken up again in 2012 by the Visitation Convent in Marclaz, near Thonon-les-Bains, France.
In the link below, there is a link on the right hand side for a flyer in English relating details of the Miraculous Crucifix (the one that shone rays of light on St Francis de Sales while he was preaching in 1606), a meditation on the Holy Wounds and the Chaplet of the Holy Wounds.
http://www.marie-marthe-chambon.fr/
O my Jesus, pardon and mercy, through the merits of Thy Holy Wounds!
The most extraordinary thing of all is that Amoris Laetitia makes Benedict’s vision of a “smaller, purer Church” much more, not less, likely. And I dare say that Francis was trying to avert precisely that vision with his exhortation.
Well, it seems that we are resorting to the “Feelings of the priest”… because, as you know, it’s all about FEEEEELINGS… (whoa, whoa, whoa, Feeelings…..)
@ torch621
” I don’t see how anything in this document can seen as anything but a departure from the perennial teachings of the Church.”
I do. Or rather, I don’t see anything in it that is actually a real departure from perennial teachings of the Church.
I do see how it can be read that way very easily by people wishing to think so, and I’m deeply concerned about that, but you have to throw away a large amount of the Church’s teaching and more or less ignore the clear words of Christ to read it that way. To do so is disingenuous.
How much the pope may have intended that I don’t know, and I shy away from thinking it was deliberate. I tend to think instead he interprets reduced culpability as a more normal aspect of sin than has historically been held. He doesn’t say the situation of divorce and remarriage isn’t sinful. He doesn’t say we don’t have to earnestly desire to live the lives God intends and repent when we fail. He doesn’t say we don’t really need confession. He mainly says we need to weigh the objective facts in our conscience, with guidance from our pastors, but he also writes about the need to form our conscience around what is right, and warns that sometimes we ignore even a well-formed conscience.
Interestingly, he talks on one hand about the ideal of the family and how hard it actually is to attain that. Yet for the case of families that have fallen apart and are anything but ideal, he talks about other ideals – an ideal conscience, and an ideal pastor – these are equally as challenging to attain as an ideal family, and even more challenging to describe, but those challenges and the problems that may arise if an “irregular conscience” or an “irregular pastor” are trusted uncritically don’t seem to get much discussion.
This document is being referred to as “Amores de Letizia” on some Spanish blogs – the Loves of Leticia, similar to the title of a culebrón, a Spanish language soap opera, because of its overblown, gushy tone and weird sexual subtext – all the product of Archbishop “Ovid” Fernández, one assumes. [Wow. How do you say “Holy cow!” in Argentinian Spanish?]
In any case, I think it’s really much worse than the issue of divorced and “remarried” Catholics, because this shift in the basis for determining the morality of an action and the grounds of doctrine extends to every single human action and also to the matter of the Sacraments. Francis regards himself as a prophet sent to reform 2000 years of misguided actions and erroneous thought; he thinks he’s a new Martin Luther, which is why he is suddenly referring (like all good Protestants) to the 1st century Christians, in other words, before the institutionalization of the Church.
I am sure the bishops and cardinals are scared out of their minds, and I know we lay people can just hunker down and hope that a few good priests will hang in there. But I still just pray that some Cardinal or person in authority in the Church will stand up and challenge Francis on the level of overall orthodoxy and not even on the particular issue of the “divorced and remarried,” because he was slippery enough on this to never make a firm statement. But some of the other more general things that he said are virtually textbook Modernism and undermine all Catholic moral teaching and the authority of the Church.
I realize that he didn’t write the document, [He signed it. It’s his, entirely.] and I also think that he himself may have some mental problems [We won’t go there. But we can say that he is a Jesuit.] – whenever he’s not scripted, such as in his airplane statements and off the cuff homilies, such as the bizarre one about Judas the other day, he sounds like a bitter, irrational old man whose statements are nearly incoherent but has suddenly found himself with a captive audience. And in that case too, the possible incapacity of a pope, the cardinals need to intervene.
A great weapon against Modernism is the traditional Roman Breviary. [Amen.] I would encourage everyone to obtain a copy and pray however many Hours of the Breviary they can muster, as a personal defense against evil and as an offering for the Church. It is available in Latin-English hardcopy (Baronius Press) and online at various websites (e.g., divinumofficium.com). As a part of the Traditional Liturgy, it connects one to the Traditional Mass even if one cannot assist at a TLM regularly. It is definitely a sacrifice of time to pray the whole Office every day, but we need more sacrifice in our lives!
Since everyone was looking to the Holy Father to clarify the situation regarding allowing cdrs to receive communion and he deliberately refused to do so as expressed in AL#3 (“Since ‘time is greater than space’, I would make it clear that not all discussions of doctrinal, moral or pastoral issues need to be settled by interventions of the magisterium. …) would that not be a refusal to ‘preserve the faith’, much as Honorius’ deliberate silence, at a critical time. This moment called for a reaffirmation of the Church’s teaching on marriage and on the Eucharist, as it has been handed down, understood in the same sense as it has always been understood.
Pope Francis goes on in the same paragraph to say: “Unity of teaching and practice is certainly necessary in the Church, but this does not preclude various ways of interpreting some aspects of that teaching or drawing certain consequences from it.” But it does preclude many current ways — parameters have to be set, and “interpretations” cannot contradict what has always been understood. Allowing what Pope Francis does does not foster unity of teaching and practice, nor unity of charity, but a so-called unity of toleration which is no real unity.
Maybe Pope Francis is a humble person (as Cardinal Burke recently explained, with respect to what was not said in Amoris Laetitia) who is trying to be a good pastor. After all, he has had a life that most of us would not want – having to be a mostly unappreciated pastor and bishop for many decades in one of the most violent and uncharitable and angry places of the world (sometimes people joke about Argentinian arrogance – sadly, it is no joke). Even the least charitable reflections in Amoris Laetitia – perhaps the ridiculous and unconvincing misquote of Gaudium et Spes that the editors somehow let through, the (at times) half-hearted support of Humanae Vitae where full support should have been shouted to the rooftops, and the various straw-man insults that probably should have been edited out – are not as bad as similar passages would have been if several other modernist cardinals – chosen by Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul, by the way – had written the document. God has promised us he answers our prayers and He will answer our prayers if we pray to Him – perhaps through the intercession of Saint John Paul the Good – that Pope Francis, in further documents, clarifies for the better those portions of Amoris Laetitia that appear, in their ambiguity, to carry uncharitable and unChristian implications. Anyway, if we do not pray for that, it won’t happen.
Your priest friend brings up an unfortunate reality, that a number of CDRs and others in similar unacceptable relationships who had previously respected the Church’s discipline and teaching by abstaining from Communion will no longer choose to do so, believing the discipline is now changed by a higher authority than the pastor, tribunal, or local bishop. [And souls will be lost, because I think that, deep down, they’ll still know that what they are doing is wrong. And those priests and bishops who aided them, helped to snuff out their rightly-inspired consciences, will be responsible before God for their dereliction.]
Post-AL, those who had previously respected the Church’s teaching may no longer acknowledge that they are doing anything in the wrong, let alone respect the prohibition. It is harder to bring someone to repentance who no longer has that sense of sin, and unworthy reception of Communion…it would be curious to know how many of those pushing the Kasperite position believe in such a thing as unworthy reception (except in the case of those kneeling or putting out the tongue).
Respect for the discipline is really the only way the prohibition has had any force as it is in the modern world – anyone hellbent on receiving before AL only had to look for a parish where there was either a pastor who would overlook their sin or a parish where their situation was not known (for example, I am within 30 minutes by car of several dozen parishes and would be known to few of the priests serving those parishes, and certainly almost none of the parishoners). The same option remains open now, the only difference being people will now think it’s okay to go somewhere else if their home pastor refuses them.
I think of profound Encyclicals such as Redemptor Hominis, Fides et Ratio, Dives In Misericordia, Deus Caritas Est and Spe Salvi
I think of the beautiful Apostolic Letter Novo Millenio Inuente which I have read and re-read on numerous occasions.
I also think of the beautiful Apostolic Letter of Pope Benedict called Porta Fidei.
Chapter 8 of Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation is sad to read. When I read it, it is filled with ambiguity and it reminds me of an Anglican approach. It leaves me speechless with sadness about how it fails to call us to heroism and sanctity. From a background in evangelical Christianity, I became attracted to Catholicism through the pontificates of John Paul and Benedict with their beauty and precision.
I do not think I would have felt called out of evangelical Christianity if Francis was Pope 18 years ago or so. I imagine that I would have had to contend myself with evangelical authors such as John Stott and Jim Packer rather than exploring Catholicism.
I fear who may come after Pope Francis.
The Catholic Church is simply reaping what the world has sown. On pondering the language of “Familiaris divortio” we find again what happens when a world has become completely unhinged from any form of objective morality. I actually agree with the LA Times piece. There are and will continue to be Priests that give Communion to subgroups of people living in grave sin, and we are kidding ourselves if we don’t believe this was happening before. Now, they feel even more boldly empowered, because they know that no one in Rome will stop them. “Wink Wink…Nudge Nudge” has seemingly taken the place of Cannon Law. Soon we will see Bishops that uphold the Cannon Law replaced by those who are “more tolerant and merciful”.
Take heart though friends. Holy Mother Church survived the Romans, the Barbarians, and the Muslim hoards. When society begins to reap the full harvest of their love for moral relativism, they will need somewhere to turn, and God and the faithful will be there for them.
With all of the issues that the average Catholic confronts, morally on a daily basis, one finds it confusing that this battle is the center of attention. This issue appears to be the priority of this pontificate.
Why?
[Because knocking down dominoes begins with a single tile.]
If Pope Paul VI hadn’t changed the way we pray, there would never have been an opening for Pope Francis and Cardinal Kasper to change the way we believe. For 2000 years the Church has given us so many great intellects, that have added reason to our faith. It seem such a trial to read and hear such mediocre, or even ignorant spoutings, from ill formed prelates.
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So priests need no longer have to pay any attention to their bishops, the successors of the Apostles, who now appear to be redundant. The Head of the Apostles and the successor of Peter continues to claim authority although he is all things to all men depending on what bit appeals.
All very confusing. More confusing than ever. What a mess.
One thing did strike me Father, the bit about Confession not being a torture chamber. That means the priest is not allowed to shout in rage at old Jones. Pity, I mustn’t forget my hearing aid next time while waiting otherwise it’ll be rather boring. Reminds me of our first Confessions at school, some time back. It was all considered a giggle, especially when young Jones was inside!