The powers High Atop The Thing fear people who desire the Traditional Roman Rite and hate the Vetus Ordo because they know that the demographic sink hole opening under the Church is gobbling the people they have neglected to catechize and sanctify while attendance at the Vetus Ordo is burgeoning with the young and dedicated. Their solution to the disaster they created is to crush what is clearly working and cling to the model that is dying, not because the later is right, but because it’s more confirmed to the world’s ways. As they are. And you know what that often means.
At Epoch Times there is a piece about the Opening Mass for the Second Assembly of the 5th Plenary Council of Australia (Sunday, 03 July 2022).
The writer is dead on target. My emphases.
If you have a theoretical interest in Christianity, you should watch a video of the Australian Catholic Church’s Plenary Mass on July 3.
The service doesn’t actually begin for about seven minutes of the video (it was poorly edited), and the first 10 minutes thereafter are devoted to the Aboriginal “smoking ceremony,” a reported religious practice dating back to the 70s. It is accompanied by the evocative music of the didgeridoo.
Much more importantly, and of enormous theological significance, what follows is an invocation of “male and female spirits” by a woman who is introduced as an elder of the indigenous community.
The invocation of spirits is and always has been strictly forbidden by the whole Christian church.
The clearest early manifestation of this prohibition is found in the Bible, in the First Book of Samuel, where King Saul secretly consults a witch at Endor, having previously forbidden his subjects to engage in any form of necromancy. This deceit on Saul’s part leads to his own downfall and suicide. Such a practice has always been regarded, in both Judaism and Christianity, as an insult to God. [And it can result in nasty outcomes like possession by demons.]
The inclusion of this ritual at the start of the Plenary Mass was completely inappropriate, without intellectual content or integrity. [“But… but… inculturation!” Maybe rather, “Cthulhuration”?]
It should never have taken place within a Christian Church. [Or anywhere else, for that matter.] The fact that it did, and that it did so as a sort of preface to the Eucharist, and in the presence of a high proportion of the bishops, almost beggars belief. You couldn’t make it up.
[NB] It’s a sorry fact, however, that in today’s Church, such an absurd folly is all too easily believable. The Australian church, like so many others in the West, has lost its way.
There are some good grounds for taking heart. As I write this, fewer than 5,000 people have watched the clip. It has therefore been viewed by a tiny proportion of the nation’s practising Catholics, an even tinier proportion of the nominal ones, and a vanishingly small number of their non-Catholic fellow citizens. [The loss of Catholic identity, because of bad priests and bishops, has resulted in a Church that is increasingly irrelevant in the public square. As her identity becomes murkier, the numbers of participants will drop and her relevance will diminish even more in a vicious cycle. Therefore, crush the sector of the Church is vibrant, faithful, practicing and growing. It all makes perfect sense.]
As an item of news, it ranks with small town fetes and minor folk festivals and well below even the most trivial localised sporting event in our sports-mad country.
So really, on the larger scale of things, the deliberations of the Plenary don’t carry much weight. The delegates’ oh-so-predictable apologies to all the usual victims (predictably right at the top of the agenda) will contribute nothing to the unity and harmony of the nation, but neither will they further weaken its social fabric. [But they DID weaken the social fabric. The weaken of the Church accelerated the social decline.]
[…]
There’s a bit more which you can see over there.
Proposed:
The last time in Rome, I recorded the names of everyone who contributed and I very often said Mass for them, as my benefactors, several times a week depending on “emergency” intentions for the sick or dying. 
