Let’s Make Knock Catholic Again!

Knock, Knock, who’s there? Promoters of abortion, divorce and pseudo-marriage!
What on Earth are Fr Richard Gibbons, the parish priest of the shrine of Our Lady at Knock, and his ordinary, Archbishop Michael Neary, up to? Why are these two complaisant clerics permitting promoters of abortion, divorce and “marriage” between “spouses” of the same sex to address the faithful assembled at – of all places – a sanctuary dedicated to the Blessed Mother?

Archbishop Michael Neary

Bizarrely, the Archbishop appears to have looked the other way and has allowed Fr Gibbons to invite John Bruton and Trevor Sargent to speak during the annual Knock Novena. Neither of these clerics has proven willing to answer hundreds of questions from outraged Catholics about why two opponents of the Church’s eternal moral teaching are to address them in one case – of all days – on the Eve of the Feast of the Assumption.

Fr Gibbons, has contented himself with replying to all enquiries with a bloodless, shop-worn, calculatedly unresponsive formula to the effect that “Your communication has been received and its contents have been noted”, which, being translated, signifies “I wish I hadn’t had your letter, whose contents I shall altogether ignore.”

Fr Richard Gibbons

Bruton, in 1995 argued for a referendum to purport to legalise divorce, even though official statistics from all over the world show that the surest way to destroy the prospects of those of our children fortunate enough not to have been killed is to rear them in broken homes.

Sargent, who once led the viscerally anti-Catholic “Green” party, has long argued for the enforced introduction of pseudo-marriage “to combat the discrimination that exists in the marriage laws against gays and lesbians”. Bah!

A scandal to the faithful.
Our own John Lacken has described Fr Gibbons’ invitation to these two as a “scandal” to the faithful. And that, literally, is what it is. For the word “scandal” is derived from the ancient Greek word skandalon, which means a stumbling-block.

To permit two long-standing opponents of the Church’s teaching on life and on the nature and indissolubility of matrimony to flaunt their views at a shrine dedicated to the Mother of the Lord of Life is indeed to present a stumbling-block to the faith of Catholics everywhere.

So what to do about Fr Gibbons’ disgraceful invitation and Archbishop Neary’s culpable failure to intervene. These two are sullenly determined not to pay the slightest attention to the mere laity. So…

Write to Rome. Not one, not two, but three Sacred Congregations of the Holy See, are relevant:

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – whose duty is to protect the faithful from precisely this sort of scandal;

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
Piazza del S. Uffizio,
11,
00193 Roma,
Italy

Prefect: Cardinal Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer, S.J.
Secretary: Archbishop Giacomo Morandi

The Congregation for the Clergy – which will deal very firmly with Fr Gibbons;
Congregation for Clergy
Palazzo delle Congregazioni,
Piazza Pio XII, 3,
00193 Roma,
Italy
Prefect: Cardinal Beniamino Stella
Secretary: Archbishop Joël Mercier

The Congregation for Bishops: which will – if past experience is any guide – deal with Archbishop Neary if, after hearing his side of the case as well as ours, it finds him guilty of gross negligence.
Congregation for Bishops
Palazzo della Congregazioni,
Piazza Pio XII, 10,
00193 Roma,
Italy
Prefect: Cardinal Marc Ouellet, P.S.S.
Secretary: Archbishop Ilson de Jesus Montanari

By all means copy Archbishop Neary (admin@tuamarchdiocese.org) and also Fr Gibbons (frgibbons@knockshrine.ie) so that they are given fair warning that formal complaints have been laid against them. Their offences against Catholic teaching are of the very gravest and their actions hinder the faithful on the road to salvation.

For the past week, I have been blissfully isolated from the endless assaults against the Church in Ireland and worldwide not only by clerics tired of her unchangeable teachings but also by sub-Marxist political parties such as Fine Gael and the “Green” party. I am in the United States, attending a summer camp for Christian children and teenagers by the shore of a gentle lake in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts.

Here, pastors and laity of all Christian faiths have been giving the young campers a series of hour-long lectures on everything from why they need not worry about global warming to why the murder of unborn babies, divorce, homosexuality, pseudo-marriage and gender-bender are wrong – wrong not because of some obscure theological principle but because of the harm they do.

Baby-murder first tortures innocent children and then kills them by agonising, piecemeal dismemberment.

Divorce harms children by denying them the statistically-proven best upbringing they can possibly have – a loving, unbroken home in which even the thought of divorce is absent.

Pseudo-marriage harms children by devaluing the concept and the purpose of matrimony and placing civil partnerships between pseudo-spouses of the same sex on an equal footing with proper marriage.

Homosexuality harms its practitioners by inflicting psychological damage and disease upon them, harms children when same sex pseudo-parents are allowed to rear them, and harms the rest of us when sexually-transmitted diseases overspill into the general population.

Gender-bendery harms children as young as five, on both sides of the Atlantic, because the State forces infant schools to preach it to them and thus to rob them of their childhood and to cause them a confusion that can utterly wreck their lives. Male and female He created them, says the Good Book, but now it is male and female and fifty shades of grey in between.

The strength of the West lays in the Christian family.
Recall that all the above-mentioned assaults upon the true family, of which the Holy Family celebrated at Knock is the paragon and the paradigm, have their origin in the programme for the destruction of Western freedom first proposed by emissaries of the Supreme Soviet at the Third Extraordinary Congress of the Communist Party of the United States in 1921, less than four years after Lenin had displaced the democratic government of Kerensky with the grim, murderous dictatorship that would hold most of Asia and half of Europe in its dismal grip for three generations.

Lenin and his ilk knew full well that the strength of the West lay not only in free speech, free assembly and free markets but also in the Christian family, whose structure and conduct were modelled on the Holy Family. By the destruction of the Christian family, and by the consequent detriment to or deletion of the children, the hated West would be fatally weakened.

Though Soviet Communism is no more, eradicated – and not before time – by Pope St. John Paul II, by Margaret Thatcher and by Ronald Reagan, the poisonous, pathological hatred of honest, simple, clean, moral family life that it planted in the souls of the extreme Left regrettably lives on.

Write to the Holy See at once. There is no time for delay.

As I said in my valedictorian address to the splendid children and teenagers who had given up a week of their precious summer vacation to learn of faith and honour, truth and freedom, we must not hate those who hate the family. We do not even hate those who ought to defend it but who, by action or inaction, propose unspeakably to defile the shrine of Knock on Assumption Day.

We love them all dearly: but it is we, not they, who will prevail, for it is we to whom the truth has come from the lips and the example of Him Who is the Way, the Truth and the Life, and of His Blessed Mother.