April 2000
GIVE US A BREAK!
An
Open Letter to the Holy See
THE
EDITOR
His Eminence Lucas Moreira Cardinal
Neves
Prefect for the Congregation for Bishops
Palazzo delle Congregazione
Piazza Pio XII, 10
00120 Vatican City State
Your Eminence
I address this letter to you in the knowledge that the matter of episcopal appointments is not the work of the Congregation for Bishops alone. My comments are therefore directed through you to the various other curial bodies also involved in recommending to the Holy Father the recent appointments of Bishop Murphy-O'Connor to the see of Westminster and Bishop Vincent Nichols to the see of Birmingham.
Quite frankly, Eminence, the faithful Catholics of England and Wales, who retain such filial devotion and obedience to the Holy Father and the Holy See, are scandalised by the promotion of these two notorious, if disparate Modernists to the most influential sees in this country. Despondent resignation would be a more or less accurate description of the sombre mood following the long-awaited announcements. Despondent: because the parlous situation in which the local English and Welsh Church finds itself - the legacy of almost a generation in the vice-like Modernist grip of His Eminence Cardinal Hume and His Grace Archbishop Worlock - left little margin for error with these appointments. Thus the last thing it needed was more of the same i.e. a consolidation of the Hume-Worlock axis through promotion of two renowned protégés of the latter. Resigned: because your fateful choices, which have all but consigned England and Wales to the dustbin of Catholic history after the fashion of the remnant Church in Scandinavia, have only served to confirm the long held view that the Holy See is awash with churchmen on the same Modernist wavelength as their dissident English brothers, unconcerned about the Faith and faithful souls in these Isles and shockingly ignorant of the ecclesiastical and socio-political realities of life in the United Kingdom.
With regard to this last point, we are mystified as to the reason for such ignorance. Given the number of personal pleas, testimonies and entire dossiers regularly delivered to the Roman Congregations in recent years either by mail or in person by reputable, orthodox Catholics, there is no excuse for it. And yet you all remain seemingly impervious to this voluminous documentation detailing the de-facto schism into which the institutionalised dissent and disobedience of our bishops, clergy and Religious have led this local Church. What more can we possibly offer to catch your attention and convince you of our tragic plight? Blood? Has it come to that? Has the quiet, bloodless corruption and loss of souls en masse really become so banal as to be simply waved away in favour of a British realpolitik grounded in false-ecumenism?
This brings me to the curia's dangerously outdated, grossly inflated view of Anglicanism and its role in contemporary English life, which again appears to have unduly influenced the latest selection process. As the passing of the Church of England has clearly escaped the Vatican's notice, may I take this opportunity to assure Your Eminence, once and for all, that the Church of England is dead and buried. A demise, moreover, that occurred long before the celebrated Anglican acceptance of women priests in 1992. In the words of one Anglican vicar: "The Church of England is no more". It has self-destructed - "taken itself to the vet," as another vicar bluntly observed. And as the late English Jesuit Father Paul Crane put it: "whoever heard of union with a rotting corpse?" In other words, the whole corporate ecumenical enterprise in this country is an absurdity; an elaborate sham fostered by our deeply Anglicanised hierarchy, who use it to their advantage in dealings with a Roman curia apparently locked in a romantic nineteenth century vision of religious affairs and potentialities across the Channel. The promotion of equivocal Anglo-Catholic diplomats like Cardinal Hume and Bishop Murphy-O'Connor to Westminster to curry favour with like-minded Anglican leaders is therefore futile, since those leaders stand for nothing and speak for no-one but themselves and an empty shell.
This high-profile but vacuous corporate game deliberately undermines the bread and butter evangelisation so distasteful to many of our ecumenically-obsessed bishops - the conversion of individual Protestants and non-Christians to the one true Faith, not to mention the mass re-conversion of Catholics who are lapsing from the practice of the Faith in the tens of thousands every year. Your Eminence, to both effect that genuine grassroots ecumenism and stem that catastrophic yearly exodus from the Church in England and Wales, it is not via media diplomats seeking a sham unity with the ghost of Anglicanism but convinced and virile Catholic Shepherds working for the restoration of internal Catholic unity that we desperately need. Yet it is precisely the myriad episcopal sins of omission and commission practised over several decades by neo-Modernists like Bishop Murphy-O'Connor and Bishop Nichols that have caused this rupturing of ecclesiastical unity in the first place. Their elevations, as information supplied to the curia readily reveals, are thus utterly incongruous.
Just consider one fleeting example of this incongruity. A shocking sex-education video called A Time to Embrace which clearly implies that homosexual "love" between an older man and a teenage boy is morally equivalent to heterosexual love, was produced for Catholic schools on behalf of the Bishops Conference of England and Wales and is accompanied by a manual carrying the Nihil Obstat of Vincent Nichols. We now find that the new Archbishop Nichols is the prelate charged with defending the Catholic position against attempts by the British Labour government to repeal a law protecting children from the promotion of homosexuality in schools! It therefore comes as no surprise to read in the English press that a typically spineless compromise proposed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, essentially caving in to the homosexual lobby, "is likely to have the full support of the Roman Catholic Church."
Naturally, Eminence, you and your curial colleagues are free to take advice on the suitability of episcopal candidates from whoever you will. But if that advice leads to dysfunctional appointments which only serve to compound the disunity and further the emptying and Protestantising of a local Church, and if the "fear of God" still has any resonance in the Eternal City, then it is surely time to disregard those advisors - whether they be the Papal Nuncio or Establishment Catholics of whatever orthodox celebrity or dissident hue. Instead, it is time for the Congregations to start dusting off and taking seriously the dossiers and correspondence forwarded or personally delivered to them by grassroots faithful who know the real story; those who for years have been struggling on the Vatican's behalf to defend our holy religion against disobedient, heterodox British bishops and clergy. And with several bishoprics vacant or soon to become vacant, you have the opportunity to put their briefings and recommendations to use by at least securing a few safe-havens for orthodoxy in this country.
Although our faith in the curia's ability (or desire?) to appoint orthodox clerics to such vacancies is now at an all time low, we hope against hope in the knowledge that there is an orthodox element fighting against the preponderance of influential Modernist apparatchiks in Rome. We are aware, for instance, that as a result of our lobbying against the dangerous textbook Roman Catholic Christianity, it was Cardinal Ratzinger himself who severely rebuked Bishop Peter Smith in person over his support for the book and demanded that it be withdrawn from Catholic schools throughout England and Wales (an order, by the way, still widely ignored). And so individually and collectively we will continue to supply the curia with the truth about the state of the Church in England and Wales, trusting that our merciful God will eventually guide and inspire you to break up the virulent Modernist hegemony established under the Hume-Worlock axis, by infusing new and unequivocally orthodox blood into our local hierarchy. Every other Western nation but Britain, it seems, has been granted one or two such episcopal standard bearers. Surely, Your Eminence, it is time that the long-suffering Catholics of England and Wales, too, were allowed their token share of orthodox episcopal relief.
Assuring you of my continued prayers for your vital apostolic work,
I remain your obedient servant in Christ
ROD PEAD
Editor