The Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Newark, New Jersey, USA. Image taken by Wasabi Bob in 2009, under the CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0 license, here.
The following excerpts were taken from an article written by the American journalist Hilary White for the Remnant Newspaper, a Catholic newspaper and online news portal by Michael Matt in 2018. I intend it to be food for thought about possible solutions for the Catholic Church going forward. The article was written in the context of homosexual priests and bishops, but can be equally applied to the current situation with Antipope “Francis” (Jorge Bergoglio).
We are seeing the final slide, the expected and inevitable result of the last 100 years. The Church was infiltrated, we know this, in the 19th century by some pretty dark forces, and they have finally come into the ascendancy and are showing themselves quite clearly for what they are.
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The bishop can, with the flick of a pen or a single phone call, render a priest homeless, penniless and jobless. And these, remember, are men, often well on in years, whose only education and employment training has likely been academic degrees in philosophy and theology, and whose only professional contacts are ecclesiastical. Moreover, because of the globalisation of the bishop-network, a man blackballed for his authentic Catholicity will be a pariah in every diocese in the world. And with the advent of Bergoglio in Rome, there are no more havens; as many of the former Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate have learned, the blackballing has gone global with this pontificate. He will remain a pariah even among the so-called “good” bishops who live in terror of the immense power of the cabal…
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I have been hearing from priests who are saying in effect, “We’re trapped in this situation and forced to remain silent because if we don’t we’ll not only be unable to function as priests, but we’ll be homeless and penniless. We’re unemployable in any other field.” And as much as we might be tempted to say, “Well suck it up, this is for the good of souls,” the reality is that these are not small considerations. Many priests are getting older – many of them with health issues – and a man who has already given 20 or 30 years of his life to the Church is faced with a practical impossibility if he finds himself blacklisted.
Of course there are some who don’t fit this mould; there are a lot of second careers in the priesthood and plenty of people go into seminary after some years in the normal workforce and can go back to it at need. […]
But I think honestly most priests are in this corner and they know it and so do their bishops. I think a young man goes forward in great faith, spends ten to fifteen years studying philosophy and theology – fields that have almost no application in the workforce outside academia or the Church – with the honest, and frankly fair, expectation of a lifetime of employment and a safety net at the end. As one of them said to me, “The old arrangement was, ‘Remain faithful, do the work, and we will look after you. We’ll house, feed and clothe you and look after your retirement.’ The new arrangement is a perversion of that: ‘Keep quiet and go along with it all and you’ll be fine, but step an inch out of line and we’ll destroy you.’”
The other day the American conservative writer, John Zmirak, wrote a sound suggestion on Twitter that I think it’s time we all started taking seriously. In response to the continued outrages of both “good” and bad bishops, Zmirak suggested establishing “an escrow fund in each scandal-plagued diocese, where laymen [can] deposit the funds they would have donated to [the] local church, until [a] new bishop [is] appointed.”
I responded: “And the money could be used to purchase properties to house faithful priests punished by their bishops for refusing the New Paradigm. We could even perhaps buy a few convents so contemplative nuns could continue to pray in peace, without harassment from the evil men in Rome.”
I am hearing lately from laymen who are starting to talk about setting up financial structures to ensure that the authentic Catholic life can be maintained through what is obviously soon to be a general collapse of the institution. This would mean independent non-profit foundations that could build or buy church buildings, convents and even schools and provide salaries for priests and other staff.
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The other suggestion I have is for young men interested in the priesthood to fortify themselves not only spiritually but in the material sphere.
There’s one big vulnerability we can guard against pretty easily. No one should be facing penury and permanent unemployment because he’s a faithful Catholic. We should never be letting any young man go into any diocesan seminary without being a property owner. He should own a house or stand to inherit one. Families have to come to see this as a duty to the child and to the Church.
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How many young men do we foresee being forced out of seminary for having the wrong “sexual orientation”? Every one of those guys needs to be able to snap his fingers in the face of the rector and walk straight into a decent job, based not on any recommendation from a corrupt bishop, but on his solid skills. Among the white collar classes there is a bias against blue collar work, but the trades are crying out for skilled men and a trade school diploma in fixing tractors is a lot cheaper and a lot faster to get than a university degree. That’s an economic asset that we can’t afford to turn up our well-educated noses at.