Perspectives and Predictions

On The Laity

Who will the bishops command if not the faithful? The faithless? The pretenders?

When all is said and done, and cafeteria (c)atholics have left for religious social clubs that offer cheap grace, who will listen? The faithful will listen, and they will not tolerate heresy nor lacklustre witness to the Gospel.

Who are the faithful? Those Catholics who are mindful of Tradition, those who take seriously the Faith and who abide by the soul-saving teaching of Holy Mother Church.

To whom will the faithful look for guidance? Likeminded shepherds who offer the true, the good and the beautiful. Father Celebrity and Bishop Narcissist will preach to empty parishes. Traditional Catholics will find the FSSP and ICKSP, the Ordinariate, and the Eastern Churches in communion with Rome.

Beauty seeks beauty. An honest soul seeks

• beautiful liturgy;
• true teaching;
• a good life conformed to the will of God, modelled on Christ and the saints, and shaped daily by the Holy Ghost encountered in day to day circumstances illuminated by God through prayer.

The Holy Eucharist and the confessional are such a soul's refuge and comfort.

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On The Woke

• Who will the bullies bully when their chosen targets are gone?
• How can they bully anyone if, in return, their victims show them love and refuse to be dominated by ideologies, empty slogans and petty hypocrites?

Those who inflict suffering on others in the name of social justice reveal their own need for healing or a detention of their wounding behaviour. Their confessions or tirades are guilt-bombs they hurl at others. In addition to the attempt to deflect attention away from their bad acts, the tirades are attempts to terrorize others into submission. Rather than inviting others to discover ways to better love their fellow human beings, they stand in judgement of others and cannot tolerate any criticism of their tactics which most often involve violence, vile language and caricatures of the truth.

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On Worldly Clergy

A pope that makes the Office of Peter into a servant of a worldly agenda, or a bishop who does the same for his diocese, or a priest for his parish, should not be surprised when the Lord calls him home and, to his surprise but to no one else's, is confronted with a serious omission: the failure to promote the mission to save and protect souls. That great agenda - the salvation of souls - trumps all other agendas. If, however, a successor to the Apostles attempts to rob the Church of Her mission, he should not be surprised that he finds himself in the company of Judas Iscariot. Judas tried to co-opt the mission of Christ by selling his Master to the authorities to force Jesus to act as he, Judas, would have had him act. That is, as a political messiah. He sold our Lord into suffering and death and, unlike Peter who sought our Lord's forgiveness and was restored, Judas appropriated authority over life and death and ended his own life. Poor miserable Judas; poor miserable pope, bishop, priest.

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On Social Alignment

2022 will be a year of recovery, but the shock of the past year will not soon fade and will require people to exercise additional patience with their fellow citizens as they navigate the reconstruction of normal day-to-day behaviour. 

Many people have chosen early retirement rather than attempt to maintain a business or face wading in the quicksand of ever-changing social policies meant, so we are told, to shield citizens from harm. To some people's thinking, recovery justifies exploitation, an opportunity to recover lost material prizes at all cost. As freedoms widen, others will attempt to transfer their need for control on to circumstances because their practiced but fleeting comfort of familiarity - their neatly ordered home lives - have become solidified and predictable, as have their imaginations.

As people breathe again, the respirations will be deep and restful at times, and at other times shallow and tense. It's most likely, given human nature, that those without resilience assisted by faith and community will postpone their integration into society. Others, eager to reconnect, will make all the mistakes of an adolescent giddy with a new car. People of faith can offer their communities an equilibrium, action based on charity and hope, and the gentle strength that preserves the dignity of others.

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On Pandemic Celebrities

How soon will the arts recover from the pandemic? Will comedians launch into crass tirades or tentatively stalk laughs? What forum will pop icons give to the impact of the disease? Will theatre dramatize people's struggles, or will writers and producers surrender the pandemic to their media cousins that have reduced the multitude of deaths of elderly shut-ins to mere soundbites? Will health bureaucrats take up book deals and collect their state awards as citizens of the year? Will politicians pat themselves on the back for 'doing their best' while adding billions and trillions of dollars to their country's national debt, debt that effectively cripples an economy for generations? Will governments find ways of forgiving debt, ways to facilitate starting over and to release citizens from burdens that prevent them from having a home? Will the pandemic foster a resilience that curbs the sense of entitlement to excessive consumption that has been growing like a virus in western nations for decades? What new ideological offspring of relativism will develop in the wake of the recovery?