As If Someone Had Turned Off A Tap

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Here is an event that sociologists and historians still puzzle over: In 1968 there were 19,974 sisters--convents had filled to an all-time high. The following year the flow of young women into the sisterhood nearly stopped. It was as if someone had turned off a tap. The causes are many and complex. Underlying all of them was the fact that the nation was changing. (John J. Fialka, Sisters: Catholic Nuns and The Making of America, St. Martin's Press, 2003, p. 3)

What was the year after 1968? Well, unless I am completely wrong, I believe that it was the year of my high school graduation, 1969. Yes, much happened that year.

Let's have a little review.

Men landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, just two days after Edward Moore Kennedy had driven his 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont 88 off of Dyke Bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, killing Mary Jo Kopechne.

New York City Mayor John Vliet Lindsay lost the Republican Party primary for renomination for a second term to New York State Senator John Marchi on Tuesday, June 17, 1969, by a margin of 51.43% to 48.37%. Lindsay, an inveterate supporter of chemical and surgical baby-killing, ran in the general election on the Liberal Party line,  winning in a three-way race against Democrat Mario Procaccino, the City Comptroller, and Republican Marchi on November 4, 1969.

Ironside began its third season on Thursday, September 17, 1969, with an episode entitled "Alias Mr. Braithwaite," guest starring Joseph Campanella, Philip Pine and Pat Priest (who had played Marilyn in the second season of The Munsters, 1965-1966.) This wonderful program's second episode that year was a two hour segment, "Goodbye to Yesterday, which aired from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., Eastern time, on Thursday, September 24, 1969, guest starred Vera Miles, Philip Carey, Slim Pickens, Cloris Leachman, George Murdock and Dane Clark. It was a sequel to the twenty-third episode of the first season of Ironside, "Barbara Who," which aired on Thursday, February 28, 1968.

The New York Mets, who had finished ninth place in the ten team National League in 1968 with a 73-89, record, move into first place in that year's new Eastern Division of the National League by defeating the Montreal Expos at William A. Shea Municipal Stadium on Wednesday, September 10, 1969, by defeating the sixth (and last) place Montreal Expos in twelve innings by a score of 3-2 as second baseman Ken Boswell (Number 12 on your scorecard) drove in left fielder Cleon Joseph Jones (Number 21) for the winning run, which was scored off of pitcher Bill Stoneman, a starting pitcher who was making a rare relief appearance.

The New York Mets clinched the first championship in the history of the National League Eastern Division at 9:07 p.m., Eastern Daylight Saving Time, as Joseph Paul Torre of the Saint Louis Cardinals hit a tailor-made double-play to shortstop Derrell McKinley "Bud" Harrelson (Number 3), who tossed the ball to second baseman Al Weis (Number 6) for one out as Weis relayed the throw to first baseman Donn Clendennon (Number 22) for neatly turned 6-4-3 double play, causing bedlam in the stands and the field in Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York, at Shea Stadium. The Mets won by a score of  6-0.

The New York Mets won their first National League championship (pennant) by defeating the Atlanta Braves by a score of 7-4 at Shea Stadium on October 6, 1969, as Braves' center fielder Tony Gonzalez, facing a relief pitcher named Nolan Ryan, who had entered the game in the third inning in relief of starter Gary Gentry, grounded a ball to Mets' third baseman Wayne Garrett (Number 11), who threw it over to first baseman Ed "Steady Eddie" Kranepool (Number 7--you're only renting that number, Jose Reyes, do you hear me as that number belongs to Steady Eddie, who played in every one of the Mets' first eighteen seasons, 1962-1979) for the final out. Shea Stadium went crazy again, and there went the ballpark's grass and dirt as scavengers scooped it up for souvenirs. It was a three game sweep of the Braves.

The New York Mets, managed by daily communicant Gilbert Ray Hodges, who gained fame as the great first baseman of the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1948-1957 (and then with the Los Angeles Dodgers from 1958-1961 before finishing his playing career with the Mets in 1962 before retiring on May 5, 1963, to manage the expansion Washington Senators team (known since 1972 as the Texas Rangers), won their first World's Championship by defeating the much-favored Baltimore Orioles by a score of 5-3 in game five of the series. Left-hander Jerry Koosman (Number 36) pitched a complete game victory, which was secured when Orioles' second baseman Davey Johnson (Number 15) hit a fly ball to left field that was caught by Cleon Jones, who dropped to his right knee as he did so. Johnson, of course, would wind up managing the Mets to their only other world's championship as the team defeated the Boston Red Sox on Monday, October 27, 1986, by a score of 8-5 at Shea Stadium.

Do you think that John Fialta, the author of Sisters: and the Making of Catholic America, had any of this in mind when he wrote his history of religious sisters in this country that interweaves solid historical accounts with editorial comments about the "battle of the sexes" between bishops and the religious sisters, thus displaying a gross lack of understanding of the nature of Holy Mother Church, when he referred to the "complexity" of it appeared as though "someone had turned off a tap" as the number of religious women seeking to enter religious life dried up in 1969?

No? Well, let's continue for just a little bit more here, if you will bear with me, that is.

Yes, there was something called Woodstock. I have always hated "rock music." That did not interest me in the slightest. Thank you. I thought that it was a diabolical event at the time, and my view has not changed. Perhaps the drug and hippie culture had something to do with the the "tap" of new women religious vocations being turned off. Perhaps.

There were also a few domestic disturbances caused by the continuation of the Vietnam War without a policy to win. Somewhere around 200,000 people, many of whom were very supportive of the then recently deceased Ho Chi Minh's Communist dictatorship of the so-called Democratic Republic of Vietnam and of the Communist insurgents in the Republic of Vietnam, the Vietcong, showed up in Washington, District of Columbia, on Wednesday, October 15, 1969, as New York Met Joseph Clifford Martin (Number 9) bunted a ball up the first baseline that drove in the winning run against the Baltimore Orioles in the the fourth game of the 1969 World Series, played at Shea Stadium. Around 600,000 "peace loving" souls, people who had no idea that Christ the King is the Prince of Peace and must reign over men and their societies, showed up in the nation's capital on Saturday, November 17, 1969, four years to the very day before Richard Nixon gave his famous "I'm not a crook" press conference in Orlando, Florida:

Orlando, Fla, Nov. 17 -- Declaring that "I am not a crook," President Nixon vigorously defended his record in the Watergate case tonight and said he had never profited from his public service.

"I have earned every cent. And in all of my years of public life I have never obstructed justice," Mr. Nixon said.

"People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got." (Nixon Tells Editors, 'I'm Not a Crook.) 

 

Nixon also sent a Special Message to Congress on the Problems of Population Growth on July 18, 1969, to urge Federal taxpayer support for "family planning:"

It is my view that no American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition. I believe, therefore, that we should establish as a national goal the provision of adequate family planning services within the next five years to all those who want them but cannot afford them. This we have the capacity to do.

Clearly, in no circumstances will the activities associated with our pursuit of this goal be allowed to infringe upon the religious convictions or personal wishes and freedom of any individual, nor will they be allowed to impair the absolute right of all individuals to have such matters of conscience respected by public authorities.

In order to achieve this national goal, we will have to increase the amount we are spending on population and family planning. But success in this endeavor will not result from higher expenditures alone. Because the life circumstances and family planning wishes of those who receive services vary considerably, an effective program must be more flexible in its design than are many present efforts. In addition, programs should be better coordinated and more effectively administered. Under current legislation, a comprehensive State or local project must assemble a patchwork of funds from many different sources--a time-consuming and confusing process. Moreover, under existing legislation, requests for funds for family planning services must often compete with requests for other deserving health endeavors. (Special Message to Congress on the Problems of Population Growth; see also Foggy Bottom's Bloody Tradition.)

 

In other words, Nixon did not want the government to force religiously run institutions to adopt policies to their beliefs. He only wanted every American taxpayer, regardless of religious convictions, to fund the evil of "family planning."

Nixon also gave his so-called "Vietnamization" speech on Monday, November 3, 1969, to outline his Wilsonian plan for a wind down to American involvement in Southeast Asia that would last the Communist takeover of that country on the Feast of Pope Saint Pius X, April 30, 1975 (see A Tale of Two Speeches).

Nope. I don't think so.

Look, with all due respect Mr. Fialta, admitting full well that there were many social factors at work in the 1960s, the simple reason is this: the "Second" Vatican Council made an "accommodation" to the "new principles inaugurated" in 1789 that had helped so much to deform the world, shutting off the wellsprings of grace with the promulgation of the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service on April 3, 1969, and then with its first staging on the First Sunday of Advent that year, November 30, 1969.

As a Dominican priest told man then in college in Ohio, distraught over the fact that he was forced to abandon the traditional Dominican Rite, "This is the first time that I have never consecrated the Sacred Species. I have not offered a Mass." What a poignant observation. And it cuts right to the point, does it not? There is no reason to be mystified, no need to consult sociologists or other gurus of naturalism to understand that false doctrines and abominable liturgical rites are tools of the devil to demoralize Catholics and to draw then more and more into the world.

After all, as Mr. Fialta does point out his book without even realizing the underlying reason of the events he described, there were systematic efforts made to undermine consecrated religious life from the midde-1960s and thereafter. This has been very well documented. Dr. William Coulson, a disciple of the psychology of Carl Rogers, whose "create your own reality" psychology was instrument in shaping the likes of Hillary Rodham Clinton, explained how he helped to destroy the Immaculate Heart of Mary Sisters:

 

 

TLM: Now what year are we talking about, roughly?

COULSON: '66 and '67. There's a tragic book called <Lesbian Nuns, 
Breaking Silence>, which documents part of our effect on the IHMs and
other orders that engaged in similar experiments in what we called
"sensitivity" or "encounter." In a chapter of <Lesbian Nuns>, one former
Immaculate Heart nun describes the summer of 1966, when we did the pilot
study in her order-

TLM: "We" being you and Rogers?

COULSON: Rogers and I and eventually 58 others: we had 60 facilitators. We
inundated that system with humanistic psychology. We called it Therapy for
Normals, TFN. The IHMs had some 60 schools when we started; at the end,
they had one. There were some 615 nuns when we began. Within a year after
our first interventions, 300 of them were petitioning Rome to get out of
their vows. They did not want to be under anyone's authority, except the
authority of their imperial inner selves.

TLM: Who's that on the cover of that book [<Lesbian Nuns>]?

COULSON: This is Sister Mary Benjamin, IHM. Sister Mary Benjamin got
involved with us in the summer of '66, and became the victim of a
lesbian seduction. An older nun in the group, "freeing herself to be more
expressive of who she really was internally," decided that she wanted to
make love with Sister Mary Benjamin. Well, Sister Mary Benjamin engaged in
this; and then she was stricken with guilt, and wondered, to quote from
her book, "Was I doing something wrong, was I doing something terrible? I
talked to a priest--"

Unfortunately, we had talked to him first. "I talked to a priest," she
says, "who refused to pass judgment on my actions. He said it was up to me
to decide if they were right or wrong. He opened a door, and I walked
through the door, realizing I was on my own."

TLM: This is her liberation?

COULSON: This is her liberation. Now, her parents had not delivered her to
the IHMs in order for her to be on her own. She was precious to them. She
describes the day in 1962 when they drove her in the station wagon to
Montecito, to the IHMs' novitiate.  How excited they were, to be
delivering someone into God's hands! Well, instead they delivered her into
the hands of nondirective psychology.

TLM: But to mitigate your own guilt, Dr. Coulson, psychologists don't know
what they are doing when it comes to the inner depth of the human person;
and one would think the Catholic Church, with 2,000 years' experience,
does know what it is doing. This priest was a co-culprit. Had he nipped
this in the bud-but he sounds like Rogers: "Well, it seems to me that
perhaps you might perhaps do this or that."

COULSON: "What does it mean to you?" not "What does it mean to me?" Or to
God.  The priest got confused about his role as a confessor. He thought it
was personal, and he consulted himself and said, "I can't pass judgment on
you." But that's not what confession is. It is not about the priest as a
person, making a decision for the client; rather it's what God says. In
fact, God has already judged on this matter. You are quite right to feel
guilty about it. "Go thou and sin no more." Instead he said she should
decide.

TLM: Okay. Now, why did you choose the IHM order in the first place? Or
did they choose you? 

COULSON: Well, they hustled us pretty good. They were very progressive to
begin with. A shoestring relative of one of Rogers' Wisconsin colleagues
was a member of the community. By then we were at the Western Behavioral
Sciences Institute (WBSI) in La Jolla, which is a suburb of San Diego; as
a Catholic, I was assigned to exploit the connection. I spoke to the
California Conference of Major Superiors of Women's Religious Orders, and
showed them a film of Carl Rogers doing psychotherapy.

TLM: And Rogers' reputation had already grown.

COULSON: Oh yes. Rogers had a great reputation. He was former president of
the American Psychological Association; he won its first Distinguished
Scientific Contribution Award. And WBSI was also the home of Abraham
Maslow, the other great figure in humanistic psychology. 

TLM: What do you mean by humanistic psychology?

COULSON: Well, it's also called third-floor psychology. Maslow referred to
it as Psychology Three. By that he meant to oppose it to Freud, which is
Psychology One, and Skinner and Watson, the behaviorism which is
Psychology Two. We Catholics who got involved in it thought this third
force would take account of Catholic things. It would take account of the
fact that every person is precious, that we are not just corrupted as
Freud would have it, or a <tabula rasa>, which is available to be
conditioned in whatever way the behaviorist chooses; but rather we have
human potential, and it's glorious because we are the children of a loving
Creator who has something marvelous in mind for every one of us. 

TLM: That could be very seductive even for Catholics who could reject the
other two with a simple wave of the hand. Okay, continue now with the
story of the IHMs.

COULSON: As I said, the IHMs were pretty progressive, but some of the
leadership was a little bit nervous about the secular psychologist from La
Jolla coming in; and so I met with the whole community, some 600 nuns
gathered in the Immaculate Heart High School gymnasium, in Hollywood, on
an April day in 1967. We've already done the pilot study, we told them.
Now we want to get everybody in the system involved in nondirective
self-exploration. We call it encounter groups, but if that name doesn't
please you, we'll call it something else. We'll call it the person group.

So they went along with us, and they trusted us, and that is partly my
responsibility, because they thought, "These people wouldn't hurt us: the
project coordinator is a Catholic." Rogers, however, was the principal
investigator. He was the brains behind the project, and he was probably
anti-Catholic; at the time I didn't recognize it because I probably was,
too. We both had a bias against hierarchy. I was flush with Vatican II,
and I thought, "I am the Church; I am as Catholic as the Pope. Didn't Pope
John XXIII want us to open the windows and let in the fresh air? Here we
come!" And we did, and within a year those nuns wanted out of their vows. 

(We overcame their traditions, we overcame their faith.)

 

Yes, it's really pretty simple. Conciliarism is from the devil, lock, stock and barrel.

 

It is no wonder now that one hundred fifty-seven priests in the United States of America are going "public" with their full-throated support for the "rights of conscience" of a conciliar presbyter who promotes the ontological impossibility of women's "ordination" to the priesthood. Why not? The logical end-game of destroying Catholic Faith and Worship is the advancement of more and more outlandish propositions that are opposed, at least ostensibly, by those in favor of the "renewal" effected by conciliarism's "springtime of the Church."

Here is simply a brief excerpt from an article in yesterday's online edition of The New York Times:

More than 150 Roman Catholic priests in the United States have signed a statement in support of a fellow cleric who faces dismissal for participating in a ceremony that purported to ordain a woman as a priest, in defiance of church teaching.

The American priests’ action follows closely on the heels of a “Call to Disobedience” issued in Austria last month by more than 300 priests and deacons. They stunned their bishops with a seven-point pledge that includes actively promoting priesthood for women and married men, and reciting a public prayer for “church reform” in every Mass.

And in Australia, the National Council of Priests recently released a ringing defense of the bishop of Toowoomba, who had issued a pastoral letter saying that, facing a severe priest shortage, he would ordain women and married men “if Rome would allow it.” After an investigation, the Vatican forced him to resign.

While these disparate acts hardly amount to a clerical uprising and are unlikely to result in change, church scholars note that for the first time in years, groups of priests in several countries are standing with those who are challenging the church to rethink the all-male celibate priesthood.

The Vatican has declared that the issue of women’s ordination is not open for discussion. But priests are on the front line of the clergy shortage — stretched thin and serving multiple parishes — and in part, this is what is driving some of them to speak.

“They are saying, ‘We don’t have enough priests, we’re closing down parishes,’ ” said David J. O’Brien, who holds an endowed chair in faith and culture at the University of Dayton, a Marianist Catholic college. “It’s a sign that the pastoral needs are sufficiently grave now that priests are speaking up and saying, ‘Wait a minute, you can’t just ignore the pastoral consequences of the things you do and say at the top.’ ”

Church experts said it was surprising that 157 priests would sign a statement in support of the American priest, the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, because he did much more than speak out: he gave the homily and blessed a woman in an illicit ordination ceremony conducted by the group, Roman Catholic Womenpriests. That group claims to have ordained 120 female priests and five bishops worldwide. The Vatican does not recognize the ordinations and has declared the women automatically excommunicated.

Father Bourgeois, a member of the Maryknoll religious order, received a letter from the Vatican in 2008 warning that he would be excommunicated if he did not recant. He sent the Vatican a long letter saying that he was only following his conscience. The Vatican never wrote back, he said.

The Maryknolls, however, did not dismiss him, and he continued presenting himself as a priest. He is a rather well-known one, at that. Father Bourgeois, now 72, was an American missionary in El Salvador during the death squad era and has made it his ministry ever since to lead antiwar protests outside the United States Army School of the Americas in Georgia.

But now, under pressure from the Vatican, the Maryknolls have sent the first of two required “canonical warnings” that they will dismiss him if he does not recant. Father Bourgeois responded that if he recanted to save his priesthood or his pension, he would be lying. “I see this very clearly as an issue of sexism, and like racism, it’s a sin,” he said in an interview this week from his home in Georgia. “It cannot be justified, no matter how hard we priests and church leaders, beginning with the pope, might try to justify the exclusion of women as equals. It is not the way of God. It is the way of men.”

In a 1994 declaration seen as intended to end the debate, Pope John Paul II issued an apostolic letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, saying that the church “has no authority whatsoever” to ordain women. Among the reasons the church gives is that the apostles of Jesus Christ were all men, and that that has been the church’s practice all along.

Christopher Ruddy, associate professor of systematic theology at the Catholic University of America, said of the recent statements from the priests, “I don’t think anything will come of it.

“Some say the church’s teaching on the nonordination of women is an infallible teaching, some say it’s not defined as such. But it’s clear that an extraordinarily high level of teaching authority has been invoked on that,” said Professor Ruddy, the author of “Tested in Every Way: The Catholic Priesthood in Today’s Church” (Herder & Herder, 2006).

The statement from the 157 American priests says only that they support Father Bourgeois’s “right to speak his conscience” — cautious wording that probably enabled more to sign. The effort was organized by Call to Action, a Chicago-based group that has long advocated change in the church. It is intended to put pressure on the Maryknolls not to go through with dismissing Father Bourgeois.  ( In 3 Countries, Challenging the Vatican on Female Priests.)

 

Oh, yes, occasionally conciliar officials will lop off a head or two, as happened with a conciliar "bishop," William Morris, of Toowomba, Australia, was removed on May 3, 2011, because of his open support for women's ordination (see Vatican - Bishop Who Broached New Rules for Priests Is Ousted). What will happen to the one hundred fifty-seven priests who are attempting to "push the envelope," if ever so gingerly, by supporting "Father" Roy Bourgeois's "rights of conscience" (who's protesting for Bishop Richard Williamson's "rights of conscience? Nothing. Nothing at all.

No, nothing, not even the "new rules" announced last year to forbid conciliar priests and presbyters from participating in "women's ordination" services will stop the not-so-secret efforts on the part of conciliar priests/presbyters to "push the envelope" on the ontological (referring to the nature of things) impossibility of "women's ordination."

I asked Dr. John Page, the Executive Director of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (I.C.E.L.) from 1980 to 2002, when interviewing him in 1993 in his offices in Washington, District of Columbia, for The Wanderer if any of the scores of "experts" listed as ICEL's advisors supported ordination of women to the priesthood. He gave a vague answer, saying only that it was his job and that of ICEL to "push the liturgy into the Twenty-first Century." That answer was not a denial of the presence of perhaps even large number of ICEL "advisors" who supported women's ordination to the priesthood, something that many theologians in the conciliar structures believe is only a "matter of time."

This is, of course, the same strategy used by the American "bishops" to secure "permission" from Giovanni Montini/Paul VI for the distribution of what purports to be Holy Communion in the hand back in 1977. What purported to be Holy Communion was distributed in the hand without "permission" from conciliar officials in the Vatican, thus creating a false "tradition" that the American "bishops" told Montini/Paul VI had become so widespread that it would be impossible to stop.

To paraphrase the late Hubert Horatio Humphrey, the American "bishops" were as pleased as punch that their strategy worked, so much so that they used it to expand the conciliar practice of distributing what purports be Communion under both kinds, thereby creating a "need" for so-called Extraordinary Ministers of the Eucharist to further blur the distinction between the priesthood of the ordained priest and the common priesthood of the lay faithful (the late Monsignor George Kelly, who was well connected with Vatican officials, confirmed this to me in his offices at Saint John's University in 1983 when I was consulting with him about the late "Bishop" John Raymond McGann's infamous persecution of Father Robert Mason, the pastor of Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Massapequa Park, New York, from 1976 to 2008), and they used it yet again to secure permission in 1994 from Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II for "altar girls" in 1994. Wojtyla/John Paul II was not serious about enforcing the ban against altar girls that was reiterated in various postconciliar documents, including Inaestimabile Donum, April 17, 1980, which was issued by the then named Sacred Congregation for the Sacraments and Divine Worship as a follow-up to Wojtyla/John Paul II's Holy Thursday letter to conciliar priests/presbyters,  Dominicae Cenae, February 24, 1980):

18. There are, of course, various roles that women can perform in the liturgical assembly: these include reading the Word of God and proclaiming the intentions of the Prayer of the Faithful. Women are not, however, permitted to act as altar servers. (Inaestimabile Donum.)

 

Inaestimabile Donum, which I thought, quite naively and stupidly, of course, was going to "solve" liturgical abuses in the Novus Ordo service, which is, of course, as noted above, the liturgical abuse par excellence, cited Liturgicae Instauratione, which was issued by the then named Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship on September 5, 1970, as the source for the reiteration of the ban of women from serving at the altar. Interestingly, Liturgicae Instauratione was issued less than ten months after the Novus Ordo went into effect on Sunday, November 30, 1969, as a means of correcting the "unauthorized" abuses that had become very widespread in such a short space of time. Such widespread abuses were, as I have recognized for some time now, the inevitable result of what happens when a false liturgical rite is promulgated and implemented, especially one that was meant to eradicate the traditional Roman Rite (please see Taking The Obvious For Granted).

Just as Martin Luther did not foresee the disastrous consequences of his revolution against the Divine Plan that God Himself instituted to effect man's return to the Catholic Church that he himself denounced but never understood were entirely of his own doing, so is it the case that the conciliar revolutionaries, in their zeal to accommodate what they believed was the Catholic liturgy to the desires of Protestants, did not foresee the liturgical free-for-all that would develop almost as soon as the Novus Ordo went into effect as the parishes under conciliar captivity began to resemble the cacophonous nature of congregationalism (each parish "doing liturgy" a little differently) than the universal nature of Catholicism. Endless efforts have thus been made by these conciliar revolutionaries to put their fingers the dike to prevent the flood of "unauthorized" abuses from spreading. Each of these efforts has failed. They must fail as nothing that is premised on false beliefs can ever be made to "work" for the temporal or eternal good of man, no less, of course, for the honor and glory and majesty of the Most Blessed Trinity.

Here is the section from Liturgicae Instauratione that discussed the "proper" role of women in the staging of the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service:

7. In conformity with norms traditional in the Church, women (single, married, religious), whether in churches, homes, convents, schools, or institutions for women, are barred from serving the priest at the altar.

According to the norms established for these matters, however, women are allowed to:

a. proclaim the readings, except the gospel. They are to make sure that, with the help of modern sound equipment, they can be comfortably heard by all. The conferences of bishops are to give specific directions on the place best suited for women to read the word of God in the liturgical assembly.

b. announce the intentions in the general intercessions;

c. lead the liturgical assembly in singing and play the organ or other instruments;

d. read the commentary assisting the people toward a better understanding of the rite;

e. attend to other functions, customarily filled by women in other settings, as a service to the congregation, for example, ushering, organizing processions, taking up the collection [29].

 

Here one can see the flawed efforts of the conciliar revolutionaries to "hold the line" on some things while permitting other things that are offensive to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and thus injurious to the souls for whom He shed every single drop of His Most Precious Blood to redeem.

Where is the logic in expecting to hold the line against women serving at the altar when they are permitted to touch with their own unconsecrated hands what purports be the Sacred Species?

Where is the logic in expecting to hold the line against women serving at the altar when they are permitted to flood the sanctuary, which is the preserve of the priest and those males who are permitted to serve him as the extension of the hands of Christ, Who is the Chief Priest and Victim and every Mass?

There is no such logic. The falsehoods of conciliarism are as illogical and thus self-destructive as the falsehoods of every other heresy, including Protestantism, which is but a precursor and prototype of conciliarism, especially in its Anglican forms.

Conciliarism has opened up a veritable Pandora's Box of relentless change and innovation that has robbed millions upon millions of Catholics of their sensus Catholicus and bewildered and confused those who do have something left of that sensus Catholicus. Protestations against the nonadmissibility of women to the priesthood ring rather hollow when one considers the fact that women can touch what is purported to be the Sacred Species with their own hands as they distribute Holy Communion to the faithful in their roles as "extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist."

Women can proclaim the Word of God as lectors.

They can lead "priestless" "Communion services."

They can serve as administrators of parishes, having the responsibility, given to them by their "ordinaries," to supervise the work of "priests," thereby further emasculating the notion of the priesthood as an imaging of the Chief Priest and Victim of every Mass. There are women serving as chancellors of the Catholic dioceses that are now in the hands of the conciliar revolutionaries. There has even been some talk from officials in the conciliar Vatican of permitting deaconesses. With little else in the counterfeit church of conciliarism that has not been subject to change and reconsideration and reinterpretation, why should the average Catholic think that Our Lord's own choice exclusively of males to His Holy Priesthood is not going to "change" at some point in the future.

Thus it is that even though the "line" against "ordaining" women has been held by the conciliar "popes," expectations created by egalitarianism and feminism encouraged by the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service have encouraged some priests/presbyters in the conciliar structures to be so bold as to assist women who are playing priests, much like the presbyters themselves, of course, to learn how to stage the Novus Ordo service

What's wrong with the absurdity of "women's ordination," which was assessed so well in Father Vincent Miceli's Women Priests and Other Fantasies, which he asked me to index for him (with old index cards and a manual typewritten back in the early-1980s)? Let me go through it all again.

Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the New Adam, came to undo the effects of the sin of the first Adam, the progenitor, who was a male. Only men can be progenitors. Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is the progenitor of our redemption. He chose twelve males to be His Apostles. Many women were His disciples. They were not present at the Last Supper as Our Lord, Who is both God and Man and thus has complete knowledge of everything and was not "culture bound" as some egalitarians wishing to find an "out" for women's "ordination" insist, ordained the twelve Apostles, including the traitor Judas Iscariot (whom the pastor of one conciliar church in the Diocese of Rockville Centre has placed in Heaven), knowing full well what He was doing. Our Lord broke every Pharisaical norm imaginable (associating with women, Samaritans and public sinners; curing and plucking grain on the Sabbath). Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the New Adam Who wrought our Redemption on the wood of the Holy Cross to pay back with His own Most Precious Blood the debt of human sin that was owed to Him in His Infinity as God, ordained twelve men to serve as the progenitors of the ineffable Sacrifice of the Cross as they offered Holy Mass acting in His very Person (in persona Christi).

As the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen noted, if anyone was worthy to say "Hoc est enim Corpus Meum" and "Hic est enim Calix Sanguinis Mei, Hic est enim Calix Sánguinis mei, novi et ætérni testaménti; mystérium fidei: qui pro vobis et pro multis effundétur in remissiónem peccatórum" it was Our Lady as from whom else did Our Divine Redeemer obtain the Body and Blood with which He redeemed us on the wood of the Cross and which we receive in Holy Communion? Although the Venerable Mary of Agreda relates that Our Lady was in another room in the Cenacle at the Last Supper and was brought Holy Communion by an angel, she was not with Our Lord and the twelve Apostles as He instituted the the Holy Priesthood and the Holy Eucharist for our sanctification and salvation. There are different roles for men and women in the Order of Creation (Order of Nature) and there are different roles for men and women in the Order of Redemption (Order of Grace).

It is no diminution of the dignity of women to point this out.

Was Our Lady "offended" by the fact that she, the fairest flower of our race who had the privilege of Incarnating the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity by the power of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, was not ordained to the Holy Priesthood:? Of course not. No other woman has any "right" to be "offended" at her nonadmissibility to Holy Orders as this is the Holy Will of God Himself, Who acts in accord with the very nature of things as He has created them.

This is not about human respect or "sensitivity" or emotionalism or sentimentality. This is about the truth. Nothing else. And we never compromise the truth for the sake of human respect or "strategy." Not once. Not ever. Not for any reason.

Despite the reaffirmation of the nonadmissibility of women to the priesthood that was made by Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II and was reiterated recently in the addition to the conciliar code of canon law at the direction of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, the simple fact of the matter is that many, although not all, of those who promote the ontological absurdity of women's "ordination" to the conciliar priesthood are permitted to remain in "good standing" in the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism. "Bishop" Emil Aloysius Wcela, a now retired auxiliary "bishop" in the theological and liturgical cesspool known as the Diocese of Rockville Centre, was permitted to be "consecrated" to the conciliar "episcopate on December 13, 1988, even though he was fully and openly on record in support of women's ordination to the conciliar priesthood. There are many other examples of this. Indeed, the disgraced former "bishop" of the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois, Daniel Leo Ryan, permitted an article in support of women's ordination to appear his rag of a diocesan newspaper in 1996, prompting him to lash out at The Wanderer for running an article daring to criticize him for doing so.

Facts must be faced squarely: conciliarism's openness to "change" and to "novelty" and "innovation" has convinced the average Catholic that almost everything about the Faith is subject to change and reinterpretation. Oh, defenders of the conciliarist ethos can talk all they want about "misinterpretations" and "misapplications" of the conciliar documents and decrees. This is so much rationalization of absurdity and sacrilege. The plain truth of the matter is, of course, that the ethos of novelty and innovation and change leads of its very perverted nature to logical conclusions that may not have been "intended" by their progenitors but are the inexorable result of false presuppositions. And Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, the man who greeted a Anglican "priestess" at Westminster Abbey on Friday, September 17, 2010, is not going to "excommunicate" those priests/presbyters who have signed their support for "Father" Roy Bourgeois.

The net result of all of this is--and cannot be anything other than--vast confusion in the minds of the Catholic faithful, most of whom have been so poorly catechized by conciliar "religious education" programs and schools that they are steeped in their own individual worlds of confusion and sentimentality and emotionalism and illogic that are miniature mirrors of the ethos of the false religion of conciliarism itself. After all, a man who can so openly offend the honor and majesty and glory God by esteeming the symbols of false religions with his own priestly hands and agreeing to give "joint blessings" with the false ministers of false religions can do nothing other than preside over a sense of doctrinal and liturgical chaos that keeps the faithful who look to him as a true and legitimate Successor of Saint Peter steeped in their own false conceptions of Who God is and what He has revealed for us to believe.

Yes, the tap of the wellsprings of grace were shut off by the doctrinal and liturgical revolutionaries of conciliarism forty-two years ago, and that is why the world, which has plunging towards the abyss since the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolution and the so-called Age of Reason, is without the sacramental supports that it needs to be put back together again.

Need I remind you once again of this truth? Let me do so regardless: Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order. Everything in our souls and the world falls apart absent the true Faith and our complete adherence to Its truths.

We must pray on this Sixth Sunday after Pentecost and the Commemoration of Saint Christina, to offer up all the sufferings of the moment--whether ecclesiastical, civil or personal--to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary in reparation for our sins and those of the world and, of course, for the conversion of our conciliar revolutionaries and their lapdogs and apparatchiks and flacks and henchmen and henchwomen to the true Faith, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can be no true social order.

May every Rosary we pray help to bring about the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!

 

Saint Joseph, Patron of Departing Souls, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Saint Christina, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints