De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.

Am I being unreasonable? On BBC Radio 4's today programme this morning at 08:46 John Humphrys led an item discussing Pope Francis convention of his "shadow cabinet" this week. Apparently, the council "Mavericks to a man..." quoth Humphrys, have been brought together "for a first round of talks on reforming the Catholic Church." WHAT? Where on earth did that come from? This is a Church whose soul purpose is to hold the Apostolic teaching given to us in perpetuity-unchanged-until the parousia, the second coming of Christ. What's to change? Sure, administration, bureaucracy mal-administration...In other words, management. But the stuff itself, the whole point is that objective truth does not change. That's the whole history of the Church. Humprhys, in typically balanced, journalistic, form, sums up the Church by explaining that it's teaching is so hopelessly out of date that everyone in the whole world things it is completely d...

I've been in the beautiful, wild, West of Ireland for ten days with my family. I love it here, it is home to me, a place that has constantly been a part of my life no matter where I have been or lived in England. Mayo has always been home, where the family are, where the familiar places are. I often wonder, and am often asked if I could live here. I dream about it all the time, but one of the real problems I would have would be the Church here. The liturgy is poor, the people seem spiritually starved. The Mass is often dreadful, occasionally bearable. There is no sense of reverence or sacredness, the best you can hope for is an enthusiastic or genial delivery of the canon of the Mass; the responses are rushed and formulaic. Yet Ireland IS Catholic. I went to Mass last Sunday and there were literally thousands of people in St. Mary's Church, Westport . Thousands! It's awesome! Irish people ARE Catholic—it's in their nature, their bones, it oozes out of their p...