PRIESTS LIKE THIS MIGHT GET CRUCIFIED FOR SPEAKING THE TRUTH SO BLUNTLY, OH, SO DID JESUS GET CRUCIFIED FOR HIS WORDS AND ACTIONS

We are in the season of Passiontide and we need to ponder why the words and actions of our Savior led to this:


From the blog of Fr. Brent Shelton
A Priest of the Diocese of Knoxville

Dear brethren of the Legion of Mary, today we celebrate Passion Sunday and the beginning of Passiontide, during which we focus our attention on the passion of the innocent Christ. If you have had the opportunity to read the Holy Father’s pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland, you will know that this is also a time for reflection upon the mystery of sin by clergy and religious against innocent children. This letter address deeper failures within our Church to implement the renewal of Vatican II, and serves to provide us context for today's consecration.

The suffering of these innocent children took place at the hands of those who sacramentally represent Christ the Good Shepherd, but who instead chose to become serpents in the garden of innocence. And their bishops, who have the authority of the apostles to govern and safeguard their flocks, instead chose to apply pop psychology and intrigue rather than the discipline and truth that was at their disposal, thereby enabling continuing violations of the innocent lambs.
That the nation that gave birth to the Legion of Mary could come to embrace sin and darkness with such determination, and in such contrast to her recent past, is the result of an adulterous affair between her and Satan, an affair entered into at the time of the Second Vatican Council and which diabolically subverted the holy efforts of the Council.

The Church in Ireland was not the Devil’s only companion during this time. In too many countries we have seen the subversion of the Council, whose call for renewal proposed a deeper embrace, not a Satanic reordering, of the Sacred Liturgy, doctrine, morality, evangelization, penance, devotional practices and discipline.
That lay Catholics in these countries so gullibly accepted instructions from their priests, issued with deceitful and unfounded reference to the holy Council, to banalize the Holy Mass, to lay aside their devotions, to forget their catechisms, and to consider the immoral moral, gives testimony to a radical misunderstanding on the part of the laity regarding the legitimate authority of the clergy. It is within the competence of the clergy to urge greater reverence, greater penance, greater morality, greater knowledge and greater mercy, not to impose plans to reduce any of these.

Who told you to stand and take Holy Communion into your hand and pick up the Savior with your fingers for your mouth? Who told you to look at the priest during the Sacrifice or while you make your confession? Who told you to eat meat on Fridays or to use contraception? Who told you to address priests by our first names? Who got rid of the Legion of Mary in many of our parishes (are there no longer people in need of mercy?)? Why haven’t the young been taught the truths of our faith or the traditions of our fathers? The children of this parish can’t even recite the Ten Commandments! Why don’t Catholics know their parts of the Roman Mass in Latin as the Council instructed, and why don’t families kneel down to pray when Mass is ended?
The clergy responsible for dismantling the faith and tradition of the Western Church are members of the generation whose perversion has poisoned the mission of the Holy Church. And restoration will not be easy. I have told seminarians that they will have the opportunity to accept a bloodless martyrdom once they are ordained. You see, if you tell Catholics today that their sins aren’t that bad, that their casual reverence at Mass is sufficient, that their piety at home will be just fine without rosaries and scapulars, fasting and study, if you tell jokes at Mass and praise the choir, inviting an army of laymen to enter the sanctuary to do the work of the priest, you will be thanked, praised and worshiped yourself. But if you insist on increased reverence, piety, morality and knowledge, if you promote the Legion of Mary over lay communion ministers and the parish council, you will be dismissed, mocked, attacked and will have a file of complaints at the chancery that grows by the day. Such is the state of our perversion today as Catholics. May God have mercy on us. There’ve been many revelations of evil within the Church in recent years. How many more must there be before we see the solution is not in adopting new policies and procedures, but in a return to piety and penance? The image the world has today of Our Lord’s Church is no longer one of pious grandmothers and penitential monks, but of pervert priests and unfaithful politicians.

What’s needed now, brethren, is a new generation devoted to truth and tradition, morality and mercy, a holy generation that will flush away the horrors, deceptions, impiety, irreverence and scandals of the "hippie" catastrophe that has marked the recent decades of the Latin Church, a generation that will discover anew the work of the Holy Ghost in the documents of Vatican II, leaving behind the so called “spirit of Vatican II”--the spirit of Satan, and help the Church discover for the first time the wisdom and promise of the holy Council, which is the wisdom and promise of 2000 years of faith, hope and charity.

I trust you can see the absurdity of the times in which we Catholics live, and the need for urgent reform. This is the reason I must begin to dispense with the “feel-good” messages I prefer to give at gatherings such as these. We Catholics, clergymen and laymen, have lusted after sin and deception, self-love and the cult of the community for almost five decades now. Well, enough! It’s time for hard-core Catholics, men and women like you, to say “be gone Satan, suggest not to me thine evil ways”, and like the many great reformers of the past, from Saint Benedict to Saint Francis, Saint Athanasius to Saint Charles Borromeo, to reorient Our Lord’s Holy Church back to Our Almighty God, back to his truths, his morals, his Mother, and his afflicted people, that one day you may each arise, “dripping with Catholicism”, into the Promised Life of Heaven.

We make our consecration today in circumstances very different from those first Legionaries in Dublin at the beginning of the last century. Consecration to her today is not the same as consecration to her was then. I urge you not to come forward unless you fully intend to offer yourself to her in the service of her Son without reservation. But if you are prepared to give yourself into her maternal arms, then come forward now for the consecration.