Ascension Thursday

No thanks, NJ bishops, with all due respect: I will NOT be celebrating Ascension Thursday on Sunday. To do so is an incoherence. For 75 years I have thought, practiced and taught the beautiful liturgical pattern: Easter season as 50 days, 40 of Resurrection appearances, 10 day wait for Pentecost. You want to change it to 43 and 7? No thanks!

This Thursday I will attend a Tridentine Latin mass for the Ascension. I will find a valid, licit way to continue this tradition: in another diocese, or an Eastern rite church, or something.

This is another capitulation of our hierarchy to the soft, bourgeois, indulgent, secularizing, workaholic-consumerist Spirit of the Age. In the compulsion to  accommodate, our bishops dilute, sweeten, and finally spoil our faith, making it a thin, anemic, insipid compromise.

This is not the worst decision of our apostolic shepherds in the age of  Francis. Actually it does not make the top ten of my most disheartening, saddening actions. Here is my list:

10. Closing of the Churches and suspension of the sacraments in a hysteria over the Virus and submission to the bio-techno-state.

9. Unbalanced, partisan advocacy by our "populist" Pope for the values of the Western elites (borders, global warming) along with a contempt for countervailing values of emergent populist movements including the pro-life alliance in the USA of Evangelicals-Catholics.

8. Relentless, obsessive harangue by the Vatican against clericalism, formalism and rigidity in a Church and a world desperately in need of continuity, rigor and form.

7. Continued tolerance for episcopal sexual predators, especially allowance of McCarrick's high public profile after his censure by Pope Benedict.

6.The weakness of our American bishops in confronting pro-abortion Catholic politicians exemplified in McCarrick's distortion of the famous Ratzinger letter on refusing communion to the obstinate. 

5. Suppression of the Latin mass.

4. Vatican encouragement of the LGBTQ agenda by elevation of James Martin S.J. and appointment of cardinals like Joseph Tobin and Blase Cupich.

3. Heavy-handed intrusion into the Catechism of an absolute ban on the death penalty without episcopal consultation and in defiance of a clear, ancient, natural law teaching that it is a prudential decision.

2. Renunciation of the teaching of John Paul II on sexuality shown in the destruction of the John Paul II Institute on the Family in Rome.

1. Abandoning the persecuted Chinese Church into the hands of the Communists. 

If you told me ten years ago about the imminent decline of the hierarchy into confusion and polarization I would have said you were hallucinating. If the pontificate of John Paul was the joyous mysteries, then that of Benedict was the luminous; and Francis the sorrowful; so we wait for the glorious.

What do I do as I find myself in a Church with leadership that is enfeebled and disoriented? Leave the Church? I could more easily live on the moon! Go to synodality listening sessions and agitate on behalf of my views? Not a chance!

Maintaining a correct filial obedience and loyalty, but a diminished trust and affection, I find it necessary to "detach with love" from this episcopacy and papacy. I will double down on the Catholic values they are disregarding. I will pray for Cardinal Zen and the persecuted Church in China; and against the Communist persecutors and the collaboration of Cardinal Parolin. I will deepen and intensify my pursuit of chastity and encourage others in the same. I will try to support the Latin mass community,  priests and those who sustain  a balanced  traditionalism. I will cling more passionately to what has been handed down and is now despised. I will avoid indignation and discouragement. I will take strength and joy, invoking the Holy Spirit, confident that the ruler of this world has been condemned and that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church!