From a reader – “Idea: Spiritual battle/Catholic Church fullness of faith.” Wherein Fr. Z rants.

From a reader….

Idea: Spiritual battle/Catholic Church fullness of faith.

Sure the Rosary but at the same time Holy Bishops and priestly exorcists casting out the Devil from our land, the Church. My priest asked an expert and he said that we need the bishops to be around the country to do it.

This is exactly what is needed.   Exorcisms and acts of reparation.

How would this be for a program?

  • Bishops reestablishing Forty Hours Devotion in parishes on a regular scheduled as in days of yore.  Forty Hours was instituted for urgent public needs, such as plague or threat of invasion.
  • Bishops establishing a monthly day of fasting for the diocese and holding public devotions (e.g., continuous Rosary before the Blessed Sacrament) in their cathedral churches including 24 hour confessions on that day.
  • Bishops reciting Ch. 3 Title XI over their dioceses on a weekly basis, ideally in public.

On a smaller scale, pastors of parishes could do these things.

None of this would interfere with any of their other projects and campaigns.

The worldly and those oppressed by the Enemy of the soul will howl with rage and fight like hell.  But isn’t that precisely what the Church is here to battle?  For the sake of saving souls?

That’s the spiritual side.  On the material side, the fact is, dear reader, that a “demographic sink-hole” is opening up under the Church in these USA and elsewhere.   The Wuhan Devil – and I believe that once it got out of its Chinese lab somewhere along the way it was weaponized by propagation and then some bad actors cursed it – has accelerated the opening of the sink-hole.   Seasoned Catholics will pass away in God’s good time and, when they do, their unchurched or barely aware children and hardly catechized grandchildren are not going to provide material support for the Church.  Many will have lost interest in going to church on Sundays and feasts, since they were only sort of Catholic anyway – many of them – and they were attending “beige” parishes.

Tell me I’m wrong.

Convince me that, as soon as all the churches are opened and lockdowns and face-diapering are over, everyone and more will flood back into our churches with generous giving.

Go ahead.

One thing I do know.  I’m getting notes from priests who, in this interim, have started TLMs in their parishes.  They are now better attended – with young people – and they are producing more revenue than the Novus Ordo Masses.

If we want any hope of evangelizing, we have to embrace Tradition, but with a heart for spiritual and temporal works of mercy, and fire for preaching the Faith in a missionary way, not watered down, not secularizing.

Sound, clear, clarion trumpets must sound and our priests and bishops have to put on their gear and lead.

This is not rocket science.

Today, however, it is sometimes hard to distinguish what we are doing as a Church from just about any other NGO.

NGOs can’t perform exorcisms, for example.

We have to turn towards the Lord, in our hearts but also in our sacred liturgical worship.  We have to get down on our knees in reparation for sins and in adoration of the Trinity, and for Holy Communion.  Get the junk out of the confessionals, clean then up, and turn the lights on.

 

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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5 Comments

  1. Gregg the Obscure says:

    there are scattered small initiatives toward that end here in Denver. a new diocesan TLM recently started at the opposite end of the metro area from the FSSP parish (Assumption Parish FWIW). i’ve seen several parishes start 40 hours including one that really surprised me. the redoubtable exorcist Fr. Chad Ripperger is in residence in a small town not too terribly far away and it sounds as though he is working to train up more exorcists. i’ve gotten to know two new profs at the seminary and they are as solid as can be.

    the other day i was cleaning out my wallet and i found a scrap of paper on which i had written the available times for confession at nearby parishes in 2001 when i was received into the Church. nearly every one of them has expanded their confession times significantly over the past two decades.

    as a wise man said, brick by brick.

    that being said, when i changed parishes after downsizing last year, i skipped over my new geographic parish because even before the lockdown i didn’t think it likely to survive more than a couple of years. i went with the Cathedral because – aside from Madison, Wisconsin – even dioceses in freefall tend to retain their Cathedrals and the Cathedral is at the front lines of the works of mercy for instance feeding >100 people per day. a few years ago the rector (who is still there) was trying to start a scola. i am confident that, should i live so long, i can help make that a reality

  2. ChrisP says:

    Can’t tell you you’re wrong Fr Z…….

    because you are right. And down here in New Zealand we have the data to prove it.

    We have been blessed, or cursed, to not have COVID stop our internal society for long.
    And after an initial 4 wk “lockdown”, somebody had the idea of calculating Mass attendances.

    They are down 30-50%. The plate receipts have plummeted.

    Concomitantly, we have the most liberal abortion laws in the world now, gangs are shooting up each other in unprecedented numbers, their is a large housing crisis, our health system is so underfunded it’s struggling now in a normal setting and drug use is skyrocketing. Happiness is at an all time low.

    It’s possible that our small country is serving as an example of what happens when the faithful and most of the Church leaders either give up or pretend to be just another NGO. We are left by God to that most awful of fates……ourselves.

  3. luciavento says:

    Our Bishop plans to deal with the situation with more masks and less holy water. Priests are on their own and risk the ire of aforementioned Bishop if they attract too much attention and have too many people in the church.

  4. Jones says:

    Great post. Will archive.

  5. Pingback: FRIDAY EDITION – Big Pulpit

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