Omnia possum in eo, qui me comfortat
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by Deacon Nick Donnelly
Over the past two years our world as Catholics has been turned upside down, to the point that we are often called ‘dissenters’, ‘ideologues’ or ‘fundamentalists’ for upholding the Faith of the Church as contained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I’ve come to the conclusion that these labels are being increasingly used by those seeking to change Church teaching in order to intimidate, dismiss and exclude faithful Catholics from public discussions about the doctrines of the Church.
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by Deacon Nick Donnelly
On the whole I’m a hopeful person and I quickly regain my joy in life, after a good meal, spending time with my family, walking in the countryside or being with the Lord in prayer. But I must admit that I have a growing sense of anxiety when I consider the prospect of the Synod in October.
Review of the Year – the highs and the lows
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by Deacon Nick Donnelly
As the year draws to a close it seems to many that we are again living through revolutionary times in the Church. I suggest therefore that we would be wise to pay heed to the caution given to the politician and philosopher Edmund Burke by Major John Cartwright of the Royal Navy. Discussing how best to respond to another revolution – the American Revolutionary War – Cartwright drew on his maritime background when he wrote of the necessity for a ‘sure guide upon the tempestuous sea of politics’. Looking back over the past year the image of a ‘tempestuous sea’ best describes the greatest storm to hit the Church since the Second Vatican Council. Cardinal Raymond Burke expresses the experience of many faithful Catholics in 2014 when he said that ‘there is a strong feeling that the Church is as a ship without a rudder’ and ‘many feel a bit of seasickness, because it seems to them that the ship of the Church has lost its compass’.
THE ATTEMPT TO CRUSH CHRISTIAN TRADITION
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by Deacon Nick Donnelly
It seems to me that Cardinal Kasper and Cardinal Baldisseri, in the words of Waugh, are attempting ‘to try and crush out by force historic Christianity’ through a two pronged assault consisting of the dismissal of the apostolic Tradition of the Church and the distortion of the history of doctrine.
Cardinal Baldisseri, the General Secretary of the 2015 Synod, also appears to reject the apostolic understanding of Tradition when he says that ‘there would be no point holding a Synod if we were simply to repeat what had always been said’. What he fails to understand, or refuses to understand, is that attentively and carefully repeating what has been said before by the Church is at the heart of the Catholic understanding of Tradition.
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by Deacon Nick Donnelly
For most of this year I have been haunted by photographs of the murderous persecution of Christians in Syria and Iraq by Muslim terrorists. I cry with Pope Francis ‘how can human beings do such cruel and depraved acts?’ A toddler in his pyjamas hanging from a wall, a little girl beheaded with a child’s bracelet on her wrist, a young woman tied to a bed, violated and murdered by a crucifix shoved down her throat, room after room filled with the bodies of women shot in the head for being ‘prostitutes, just because they were not dressed in bruqas and habibs. Christian men crucified with their ‘crimes’ written on plaques hanging from their necks or nailed above their heads.
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by Deacon Nick Donnelly
In January 2014, Enda Kenny legalised the national tragedy of abortion in Ireland. This year he seems set on pitching the country headlong into the nonsense of gay marriage announcing the date of his gay marriage referendum in the run up to Christmas. Tánaiste Joan Burton’s enthusiastic endorsement of the referendum gave the misleading impression that it originates in will of the people. She said: “The fact that this referendum is now to take place is a mark of the progress that has taken place in this country in recent years and decades, and indicates the extent to which attitudes to lesbian and gay people have changed.”
But is this really anything to do with the will of the people of Ireland?
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The 8th December, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, marked the 150th anniversary of the Syllabus Errorum (“The Syllabus of Errors”) and Quanta Cura (“Condemning Current Errors”) by Blessed Pope Pius IX. The Church in his day was in grave danger of being hurt by enemies within and overwhelmed by enemies without. The holy Pio Nono saw therefore the need to teach strongly against the theological, philosophical, moral and other errors behind this danger. In December 1864 he did this not only with an encylical (Quanta Cura), but with an annex to that encylical listing these errors, all of which had been condemned previously in his other Magisterial statements.