Catholics are waking up & walking away:

Yesterday's Vortex was particularly excellent I thought, one of those episodes which speak directly to so much that seems so obvious about being an active Catholic today. People are utterly dismayed with the lack of Catholic in the Catholic Church. This comment probably sums it all up:

Do you want to be Catholic with Max? If so, good luck with that. It's not an easy thing to do in the Catholic Church today. In fact, it can get you into quite a bit of trouble!

I have spent the last year or so trying to work in service to the Church, but despite a strikingly successful track record in business and management and a degree in Catholic theology (or perhaps BECAUSE of these things) I have found myself rejected at every stage (even being appointed to a senior position in Westminster Cathedral, only to be told Cardinal Nichols wanted the appointment withdrawn a day or so before I was to start). A number of clergy have forwarded and backed me for numerous positions within the Church, but they have never been the ones "pulling the strings" as it were.

This is not a new experience for me. I was sacked as a school governor at the end of my four year term as part of a openly political attempt to move the school in a more secular direction. This was because I exposed corruption and told the truth about the lack of integrity in the system and the lack of catholicity in the school when what was wanted was someone who did what they were told and didn't make a fuss. I documented it, reported it, provided evidence of it, but despite assurances that action would be taken, nothing happened. No one wants to rock the boat you see. In the Church, we are only ever reactive, never proactive it seems.

In my younger days, I found myself similarly stung and rejected by the human institution of the Church. You see, those who seek power and office in the modern Catholic Church only like a certain kind of Catholic, a Catholic who does what they are told, believes everything they say, who does not have a passion or an opinion or a desire to uphold the truth of the faith. If you don't fit the mould, you are simply rejected. It always seems that some are just too Catholic! Like Nick Donnelly, or a friend who was recently turned down after going forward for the diaconate because he was "too black and white".

The role for many of these clergy is about their importance and rarely about service or improving the lot of the faithful. They tend to be mediocre and have chosen the Church as a way out of the cut and thrust of secular life: an easier route to dominate and be in charge. Gaining power in the Church (clearly there are notable exceptions) is about oozing and never being clear or direct. Of course we see this in politics on a grander scale and it seems to prove the old epithet 'Power corrupts', but it is still so upsetting to encounter in the Church.

It is important to remember these jobs are not easy, but seriously guys, we can see who is sincere and who is a power hungry narcissist, it's not hard! A priest friend once told me it is very easy to be so busy as a priest that it may be the death of you, but it is equally easy to be very, very lazy.

Most plainly, it manifests like this: if you are a priest who believes the faith and cares about saving souls, you approach someone who disagrees with you and you try to help them if they are sincere about their faith. You guide them in their decisions, if they are wrong about an issue, you help them, in love to find the truth. My experience of many is that they loath any kind of honest confrontation and are unable to defend their modernism and heresy in the light of actual Catholic teaching.
I know many good, faithful priests and a few bishops, but the vast majority I have met are modernists in slow motion, incrementally changing what the Church teaches and capitulating the truth to modern secularism.

After forty-odd years of this I have found my feet and know good clergy and support them. I abandon the ones who lie and mislead the faithful. They do far more harm than good. Some are ticking time bombs in the Church I fear, while no one has the courage to actually do anything about them.

All this amounts to an episcopacy whose moral authority has been so eroded by lack of teaching and scandal that they are scared to speak on anything except safe, leftist platitudes, e.g.

Soft-left platitude from @CardinalNichols. Business as usual, in other words. https://t.co/H2CZLXoZ8s

— Damian Thompson (@holysmoke) November 9, 2017

and in a self-fulfilling sort of way, this results in a loss of trust:

The great problem with the Church today: a loss of trust in its leadership - people don't trust their bishops - bishops don't trust Christ. https://t.co/L1ENd7AXok

— raymond blake (@raylblake) November 10, 2017

All of this as well as my own experiences are summed up very well by Michael Voris in this Vortex. Voris puts it this way (with some underlining & comments from me):

"Tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of committed Catholics have simply grown to not trust the bishops when it comes to promotion of the authentic Catholic faith. In fact, those Catholics see many of the bishops more along the lines of being the actual problem, not just a hindrance. There is, simply stated, a mountain range of evidence pointing at the bishops collectively not caring about committed Catholics. It has not been for nothing that tens of thousands of committed Catholic parents will not let their children attend Catholic schools anymore for fear of losing the Faith. [And when a courageous bishop does stand up and do his job, a la Bishop O'Donoghue, former Bishop of Lancaster, his brother bishops throw him to the wolves] The same motive is behind thousands of Catholic families who Sunday after Sunday pile into vans and drive long distances to go to a reverent Mass, driving right past a number of other, more convenient parishes along the way. They simply don't trust the priests who are allowed by the bishop to continue in their ministry.

When you add to that climate the silence in the face of heresies, dissent, horrible catechesis, bowing to false ecumenism, which was on full display front and center during Revolt Day last week, and a host of other sins — the approval of all things gay and gay clergy, the anti-Catholic preaching that happens regularly at Catholic parishes, the promotion of a massively worldly agenda dressed up in spiritual rags — climate change, immigration, death penalty, community organizing, social justice warrior "collections," to name just a few. These are politically liberal, practically socialist positions that too many of the bishops like to baptize and pass off as somehow Catholic, and of course, the realization that many of these bishops were involved directly or indirectly with the gay clergy sex abuse scandal which has cost the Church in the U.S. nearly $4 billion.

What this all boils down to is this one simple bottom line — committed Catholics no longer trust the hierarchy. To the degree they preach already existing Church teaching — fine. But that seems to be the last thing they do. Prominent on the agendas are never topics like the evil of contraception or the plan to make sure that men who are same-sex attracted are not being accepted into seminaries, nor is there any national push for authentic Catholic catechism — a protestantized Alpha program is promoted as the new savior of Catholic education. Even when various states and secular outfits were calling out the errors in the Common Core curriculum, Catholic bishops clung to the Planned Parenthood backed program. [and here in England, Bishops push anti-catholic social-engineering programmes on our children, authored by anti-catholic, homosexualist lobby groups, and wonder why we are losing trust, and patience!]

They allow pro-gay, pro-abortion individuals who feel completely free to express their opinions without any fear of discipline to work in various Church establishment offices like Catholic Relief Services and cover for them when they are discovered. To a huge number of committed Catholics, this is treason on the part of many bishops and begins to raise questions about not just the actual question about trusting the bishops but seriously considering if they actually still believe everything the Church teaches.

Think about it — opening up your cathedral for illicit, invalid, ordinations and consecrations without the slightest consideration even being thought about how committed Catholics would perceive that. And the same is true when cathedrals are opened up for funerals of known dissenters or heretics. The Ted Kennedy triumphal send-off with Cdl. Sean O'Malley in attendance was an abomination. That man supported the murder of millions of little Americans for decades, and there sat a prince of the Church condoning his evil by his mere presence. The phenomenon that is happening as a result of all this is committed Catholics are simply separating themselves from the institutional rot.

They are finding other churches to go to Mass, either one of the Eastern rites or the FSSP or the Institute of Christ the King or the rarest of all beings — a faithful parish with a reverent Mass and a faithful priest. In short, they're voting with their feet. They are building their own school system for their children, [this is also happening here in the UK with the FSSP & ICKSP both building schools and Catholics from all over the country considering relocating and financially supporting the project] some of it home-schooling, some of it co-ops, some of them independent Catholic schools.

They no longer get their news and information about the Church from the official Church of Nice organs like the bulletin and diocesan newspaper but from non-propaganda sites. In short, they look around the ruinous state of the Church and determine that neither they nor their families are going to end up like other family members and friends and loved ones who have walked away from the Faith. And yet with this exodus from the Church of Nice, the leaders still continue to push their ridiculous social justice claptrap and double down on their embracing of dissent and crushing of Catholic identity. [This is it - more and more Catholics are waking up, and simply walking away from bishops who do not teach or hold the faith.]

All that the Church of Nice holds dear and has pushed down people's throats for decades will soon be faced with the stark reality that in short order there will be no one in their pews to shove stuff down. The Church of the 1970s, enjoying one last party before its final death, will have taken tens of millions of Catholics to the grave with it. What will be left is what has already begun to form even as some faithless bishops try to stamp it out."

Here's the video: