testify heelers testify
Bagel Cafe in Lucan waiting for the Light of the Russias.
By chance I came across a copy of the Irish Independent.
It was lying on a table beside me.
The cover date was Thursday 2nd of July 2009.
I picked it up distastefully and began flicking.
On page four there was an article by something called John Cooney.
John Cooney's article claimed parishioners had walked out of a Tipperary church to protest at the unavailability of a priest to say mass.
John Cooney noted that he himself "applauded the gesture as a sacramental boycott."
Hmmm.
Let us try to explain to this dedicated servant of Independent Newspapers who now seems to wish to pose as a Catholic, let us try to explain to him the sheer cretinism of his notion about boycotting the sacraments.
Let us try to explain to him what the sacrament of communion means to those of us who really are Catholic.
And not just posing.
We shall use small words so he'll have a chance of understanding.
The sacrament of communion is the real presence of the creator of the universe in bread and wine at the mass ceremony.
None of us are going to be boycotting the sacrament of communion.
Not now.
Not ever.
The sacrament of communion doesn't owe us anything.
Nor does the Catholic church owe us anything.
Nor does God owe us anything.
We rejoice in the church.
We live in communion.
We serve God.
Not the other way around.
None of us are going to boycott our own rejoicing.
None of us are going to boycott the source of our own lives.
None of us are going to boycott God.
We may boycott John Cooney's God though.
By which I mean we may boycott Mr Tony O'Reilly and Sons, Prop Independent Newspapers.
In fact, many of us, perhaps most of us, have already been boycotting Independent Newspapers.
The irony is that we still end up financing Independent Newspapers and its huge bank debts, because our kleptocratic Fianna Fail government insists on giving Independent Newspapers limitless amounts of our money in the form of State Sector and Health Board advertising.
But we're not going to be boycotting the royal truth of the universe any time soon.
For those who boycott the unutterable truth of God are merly choosing to cease to exist.
That is how Catholics feel about communion.
And John Cooney doesn't speak for us.
Not for any of us.
Not now.
Not ever.
Towards the end of his article John Cooney writes: "In calling for a sacramental boycott, the Irish laity need to challenge Rome and Maynooth to supply leaders at the eucharistic table."
Pure drivel.
No member of the Irish laity has called for a sacramental boycott.
The phrase is John Cooney's.
His alone.
Let him take responsibility for it.
Before God and man.
I flicked on through the Irish Independent.
On page 24 there was an article by someone called Kevin Myers.
Kevin Myers' article touched on various recent events, including the death of Michael Jackson, the rescue of a little girl called Bahiya Bakari from the Indian ocean after an airline crash, and the death of a little boy called Mohammed Junaid Hussein who Myers says was struck by lightning last week in England.
Myers concludes with the following words:
"There is no reason to birth, to death, nor to those events between the two, which we call life. They just are, and that is that."
Ah yes, gentle travellers of the internet.
At least Myers is honest.
This is his world view.
In truth it is also the world view of the whole of Independent Newspapers.
Most of them attempt to conceal it.
So Myers in his miserable egotistical unctious presumptuous vanity has at least a smidgen of integrity, and I salute him for it.
But his keynote is not integrity.
His keynote is arrogance.
Of course Myers is not merely arrogant but also wilfully ignorant.
But still let it be said moderately honest about his own misery.
He doesn't for a moment believe he is accountable to God for what he does.
And I say again.
Neither does anyone else in Independent Newspapers.
And at least Myers is honest.
As honest as a miserable lying atheistic servitor of the O'Reilly family and Independent Newspapers can be.
So Myers says life has no meaning.
We might wonder as to his qualifications to come to that conclusion with such gormless certitude.
I say gormless certitude.
There is another sort of atheistic certitude, well informed though just as misguided.
I had the privilege of being terrified once by the confident anti God statements of an Oxford Univerisity Brit atheistic genius called Professor Flue.
Flue was genuinely a genius.
He was genuinely terrifying.
All my own atheisms were laid bare by his clinical rationalistic expose of faith and belief.
Flue was sneering about the Catholic church and the possibilities of there being a God.
He sneered with such elan.
His beautiful cut glass finely modulated British accent rang with clear unswerving irresistable godlessness.
I have never felt so defeated.
I felt a stone in my heart.
I could never match this.
Unlike the fervourless O'Reilly apparatchik Kevin Myers, this Professor Flue knew his stuff.
Perhaps at the end of the day, we might honestly conclude that Professor Flue is one of the two finest minds of a generation.
(Modesty prevents me from naming the other one.)
I was privileged to be terrified of Professor Flue's sneers about God.
And I was privileged again to see Professor Flue on television twenty years later saying with quiet dignity:
"You see we thought there was limitless time for evolution to have occurred. But that's just not so. From the rationalist point of view it's just not so. From the scientific point of view it's just not so. And then for me the big difference came as we found out more and more about the complexity of the DNA molecule. The building blocks from which human beings are composed. It was just so impossibly wondrously complex. In all honesty I do not see how it is possible either rationally or scientifically to say it came about by chance."
Maybe Kevin Myers knows better.
Maybe his simple sneering is more finely evolved than the analysis of the world's finest theoretical scientist.
We hear lots about atheistic scientists, don't we?
We hear less about atheistic scientists who state honestly and openly that atheism is now for them rationally and scientifically untenable.
But maybe Kevin Myers and Independent Newspapers for all their lack of principle, qualifications, wisdom, experience, intellect and insight, maybe these worthless buffoons, maybe they know better.
Better than the simple peasant theoretical biophysicists anyway.
Everyone gets their fifteen minutes of fame, eh Kevin?
Get off the toilet you horrendous c---.
You're shat around too long for any good you've been doing.
But I digress.
Kevin Myers lists a few tragic accidents and thinks he's disproven the creator of the universe.
Be assured.
Myers is gormless.
Yes indeed.
Genuinely gormless.
Tragically gormless.
All the more gormless because he claims he's an intellectual.
I flicked on a few more pages through the Irish Independent.
I came to page 36.
And lo.
What clown through yonder window breaks.
It is the east.
And Ian O'Doherty is the scum.
Sure enough my eyes had fallen on an article by a nobody called Ian O'Doherty.
Here's larks, thinks I.
Ian O'Doherty is most famous for having written a few weeks ago in the Irish Independent that the Catholic church is a paedophile ring.
Now he was writing about an advertising campaign for ice cream featuring a male model dressed as a priest kissing a female model dressed as a nun.
A picture of the advertisement gilded O'Doherty's semi literate prose.
O'Doherty asserted that it was baffling how anyone could be offended by an ad for a frozen milk product.
Missing the point surely?
It wasn't what the ad was for that had caused any concern.
It was the crass insulting commercialistic manipulation of the symbols of our religion which some of us considered to be, well, crass insulting commercialistic manipulation.
We weren't really offended though.
It's only people like O'Doherty who get offended.
The rest of us actually have a vibrant intellectual critical faculty about life, the universe, and our popular culture, which we express freely wherever and whenever we want.
(Except when it applies to Monica Leech. - Ed note.)
We're not really all that offended by the persecution of the Catholic church in the modern era.
But we certainly know what it is.
And we call it what it is.
Persecution.
The media of Ireland and certain shadowy figures within the judiciary and the political establishments of the Republic of Ireland and elsewhere, and certain cosmically cretinous hangers on like O'Doherty, are seeking to destroy the Catholic church as a platform for public influence.
There's no mystery about what they are doing.
They are doing so either knowingly or unknowingly in service to satan.
There you go.
That's my analysis.
The interesting thing gentle travellers of the internet, is that I'm rarely wrong.
When I call O'Doherty a worthless tit.
When I suggest there's an international satanistic conspiracy to enslave the human race.
Rarely wrong.
After that you make up your own minds.
Offended, moi?
What's to be offended by?
Some little scruff in Independent Newspapers telling lies about the ancient religion?
Offended by it?
Really?
Me?
No.
I call a scruff a scruff.
And a bastard a bastard.
And a worthless oleaginous toad a worthless oleaginous toad.
I'm not in the business of being offended by an atheistic Tony O'Reilly adoring coward like O'Doherty whose lies about the Catholic church will never be forgotten.
No, I'm not in the business of taking offence.
I'm in the business of causing offence.
It's how I get my jollies.
B-st-rd.
Thank God I'm perfect, that's all I say.
Arf, arf.
A little James humour there.
It always does to lighten the mood now and then when you're writing about cowardly mendacious Tony O'Reilly worshipping scum.
Speaking of which, Ian O'Doherty finishes his article with the following sentence:
"But perhaps these people are missing the point - after all in the wake of the revelations about child abuse we've had to try and stomach over the last few months, most people would actually be quite content to think that Irish priests and nuns are having sex with each other rather than the children in their care."
Ah yes.
It's a measure of his class isn't it.
Ian O'Doherty wrote those words and the Irish Independent printed them.
I folded the newspaper.
You've got to understand folks.
These people have no courage, no insight and no journalistic ability.
On the same day that John Cooney called for a boycott of God, and Kevin Myers asserted manfully that there is no meaning to life, and Ian O'Doherty once more compounded his cowardice with yet more lies about the Catholic church, all in the Irish Independent, on precisely the same day, figures were published showing the net indebtedness of Independent Newspapers to be in excess of 1.5 billion Euro. That's one thousand five hundred million.
You must understand folks.
They can't run a newspaper more incompetently than they are doing at present.
There are no losses that can compel Independent Newspapers to wake up and smell the heather.
There are no losses that will ever force these people to end the mendacious liberal posturings of John Cooney, or the mendacious atheism of Myers, or the mendacious juvenile cowardice of O'Doherty.
If losses of 1.5 billion can't stop them, nothing on earth can.
Except God.
You know Cooney, Myers and even the omnipotent O'Doherty really are accountable to God.
(Impotent O'Doherty surely? - Ed note.)
I am not their judge.
They will answer to God directly.
I hope he gives em a good root in the bawls.
(I will. - God note.)
Independent Newspapers though, before facing God, will probably more immediately be accountable to the market.
It will go bust.
Like the Johnston Press who fired me from the Leinster Leader three weeks before Christmas, it will cease to exist.
I say it again.
Independent Newspapers is not going to change.
Short of a Christian conversion among senior management nothing can change them.
Certainly not the collapse of their business.
They owe 1.5 billion quid.
You can't run a company any worse than in such a way that it produces losses of 1.5 billion quid.
That's like a corrupt collapsing bank debt.
Yes they've declared annual profits for the past two decades.
But we can all use accountancy tricks to declare annual profits of a few bucks if in actuality we are in hock to idiot banks to the tune of 1.5 billion quid.
The Heelers Diaries could declare profits of a hundred million a year if some idiot bank would give me a billion to play around with over the next decade.
That's how it's done.
So they're not going to change for commercial reasons.
They've been given money by idiot banks regardless of whether they have any readers or not.
There has been no requirement for them to change.
Until now when the reality check has kicked in.
You know, anti Catholicism was never as clever or profitable as these aardvarks claimed it was.
Aardvarks?
Independent Newspapers management and editorial cadres are made up of poor little Marxist rich kids the flotsam of pseudo intellectual Irish university life in the 1960's.
They were recruited from our universities to form the core ethos and values of Independent Newspapers management from the 1970's through to the present day.
After all the pseudo radicalism of their university days, they suddenly found they weren't so opposed to capitalism after all.
Or at least not to corporatism.
The worst dysfunction of the capitalist system.
The rise of large companies who aren't really accountable to anyone.
The poor little rich Marxists found they could happily serve in such corporate entities.
Tities, indeed.
The great Aonghus Fanning at the Sunday Independent.
The immortal Emmylou Harris.
Dribblers all.
They became champions of hedonism and the atheistic lifestyle.
Perpetually at war with the Catholic church which was the only real threat to their power.
Every year they told us how popular they were.
Every year they declared magnificent profits.
Until at the end of twenty years we discovered that the whole newspaper group is drowning in 1.5 billion dollars of debt.
Seriously though, they've done a brilliant job.
This decrepit outmoded crop of anti Catholics on Independent Newspapers' management and staff have all but killed a 200 year old company.
There's no going back.
Most of us wouldn't p-ss on them now if they were on fire.
The market has already given them all the warnings they're going to get.
Independent Newspaper is going to sink beneath the waves.
And the last thing you'll hear as Independent Newspapers finally does go down, will be John Cooney, Kevin Myers and Ian O'Doherty hunched on the poop deck still screaming their infantile lies about the Catholic church.
And the band played on.
Glub.
Glub.
Glub.
It's the only song they know.
Let's see if I'm right.
Again.
Here endith the lesson.
By chance I came across a copy of the Irish Independent.
It was lying on a table beside me.
The cover date was Thursday 2nd of July 2009.
I picked it up distastefully and began flicking.
On page four there was an article by something called John Cooney.
John Cooney's article claimed parishioners had walked out of a Tipperary church to protest at the unavailability of a priest to say mass.
John Cooney noted that he himself "applauded the gesture as a sacramental boycott."
Hmmm.
Let us try to explain to this dedicated servant of Independent Newspapers who now seems to wish to pose as a Catholic, let us try to explain to him the sheer cretinism of his notion about boycotting the sacraments.
Let us try to explain to him what the sacrament of communion means to those of us who really are Catholic.
And not just posing.
We shall use small words so he'll have a chance of understanding.
The sacrament of communion is the real presence of the creator of the universe in bread and wine at the mass ceremony.
None of us are going to be boycotting the sacrament of communion.
Not now.
Not ever.
The sacrament of communion doesn't owe us anything.
Nor does the Catholic church owe us anything.
Nor does God owe us anything.
We rejoice in the church.
We live in communion.
We serve God.
Not the other way around.
None of us are going to boycott our own rejoicing.
None of us are going to boycott the source of our own lives.
None of us are going to boycott God.
We may boycott John Cooney's God though.
By which I mean we may boycott Mr Tony O'Reilly and Sons, Prop Independent Newspapers.
In fact, many of us, perhaps most of us, have already been boycotting Independent Newspapers.
The irony is that we still end up financing Independent Newspapers and its huge bank debts, because our kleptocratic Fianna Fail government insists on giving Independent Newspapers limitless amounts of our money in the form of State Sector and Health Board advertising.
But we're not going to be boycotting the royal truth of the universe any time soon.
For those who boycott the unutterable truth of God are merly choosing to cease to exist.
That is how Catholics feel about communion.
And John Cooney doesn't speak for us.
Not for any of us.
Not now.
Not ever.
Towards the end of his article John Cooney writes: "In calling for a sacramental boycott, the Irish laity need to challenge Rome and Maynooth to supply leaders at the eucharistic table."
Pure drivel.
No member of the Irish laity has called for a sacramental boycott.
The phrase is John Cooney's.
His alone.
Let him take responsibility for it.
Before God and man.
I flicked on through the Irish Independent.
On page 24 there was an article by someone called Kevin Myers.
Kevin Myers' article touched on various recent events, including the death of Michael Jackson, the rescue of a little girl called Bahiya Bakari from the Indian ocean after an airline crash, and the death of a little boy called Mohammed Junaid Hussein who Myers says was struck by lightning last week in England.
Myers concludes with the following words:
"There is no reason to birth, to death, nor to those events between the two, which we call life. They just are, and that is that."
Ah yes, gentle travellers of the internet.
At least Myers is honest.
This is his world view.
In truth it is also the world view of the whole of Independent Newspapers.
Most of them attempt to conceal it.
So Myers in his miserable egotistical unctious presumptuous vanity has at least a smidgen of integrity, and I salute him for it.
But his keynote is not integrity.
His keynote is arrogance.
Of course Myers is not merely arrogant but also wilfully ignorant.
But still let it be said moderately honest about his own misery.
He doesn't for a moment believe he is accountable to God for what he does.
And I say again.
Neither does anyone else in Independent Newspapers.
And at least Myers is honest.
As honest as a miserable lying atheistic servitor of the O'Reilly family and Independent Newspapers can be.
So Myers says life has no meaning.
We might wonder as to his qualifications to come to that conclusion with such gormless certitude.
I say gormless certitude.
There is another sort of atheistic certitude, well informed though just as misguided.
I had the privilege of being terrified once by the confident anti God statements of an Oxford Univerisity Brit atheistic genius called Professor Flue.
Flue was genuinely a genius.
He was genuinely terrifying.
All my own atheisms were laid bare by his clinical rationalistic expose of faith and belief.
Flue was sneering about the Catholic church and the possibilities of there being a God.
He sneered with such elan.
His beautiful cut glass finely modulated British accent rang with clear unswerving irresistable godlessness.
I have never felt so defeated.
I felt a stone in my heart.
I could never match this.
Unlike the fervourless O'Reilly apparatchik Kevin Myers, this Professor Flue knew his stuff.
Perhaps at the end of the day, we might honestly conclude that Professor Flue is one of the two finest minds of a generation.
(Modesty prevents me from naming the other one.)
I was privileged to be terrified of Professor Flue's sneers about God.
And I was privileged again to see Professor Flue on television twenty years later saying with quiet dignity:
"You see we thought there was limitless time for evolution to have occurred. But that's just not so. From the rationalist point of view it's just not so. From the scientific point of view it's just not so. And then for me the big difference came as we found out more and more about the complexity of the DNA molecule. The building blocks from which human beings are composed. It was just so impossibly wondrously complex. In all honesty I do not see how it is possible either rationally or scientifically to say it came about by chance."
Maybe Kevin Myers knows better.
Maybe his simple sneering is more finely evolved than the analysis of the world's finest theoretical scientist.
We hear lots about atheistic scientists, don't we?
We hear less about atheistic scientists who state honestly and openly that atheism is now for them rationally and scientifically untenable.
But maybe Kevin Myers and Independent Newspapers for all their lack of principle, qualifications, wisdom, experience, intellect and insight, maybe these worthless buffoons, maybe they know better.
Better than the simple peasant theoretical biophysicists anyway.
Everyone gets their fifteen minutes of fame, eh Kevin?
Get off the toilet you horrendous c---.
You're shat around too long for any good you've been doing.
But I digress.
Kevin Myers lists a few tragic accidents and thinks he's disproven the creator of the universe.
Be assured.
Myers is gormless.
Yes indeed.
Genuinely gormless.
Tragically gormless.
All the more gormless because he claims he's an intellectual.
I flicked on a few more pages through the Irish Independent.
I came to page 36.
And lo.
What clown through yonder window breaks.
It is the east.
And Ian O'Doherty is the scum.
Sure enough my eyes had fallen on an article by a nobody called Ian O'Doherty.
Here's larks, thinks I.
Ian O'Doherty is most famous for having written a few weeks ago in the Irish Independent that the Catholic church is a paedophile ring.
Now he was writing about an advertising campaign for ice cream featuring a male model dressed as a priest kissing a female model dressed as a nun.
A picture of the advertisement gilded O'Doherty's semi literate prose.
O'Doherty asserted that it was baffling how anyone could be offended by an ad for a frozen milk product.
Missing the point surely?
It wasn't what the ad was for that had caused any concern.
It was the crass insulting commercialistic manipulation of the symbols of our religion which some of us considered to be, well, crass insulting commercialistic manipulation.
We weren't really offended though.
It's only people like O'Doherty who get offended.
The rest of us actually have a vibrant intellectual critical faculty about life, the universe, and our popular culture, which we express freely wherever and whenever we want.
(Except when it applies to Monica Leech. - Ed note.)
We're not really all that offended by the persecution of the Catholic church in the modern era.
But we certainly know what it is.
And we call it what it is.
Persecution.
The media of Ireland and certain shadowy figures within the judiciary and the political establishments of the Republic of Ireland and elsewhere, and certain cosmically cretinous hangers on like O'Doherty, are seeking to destroy the Catholic church as a platform for public influence.
There's no mystery about what they are doing.
They are doing so either knowingly or unknowingly in service to satan.
There you go.
That's my analysis.
The interesting thing gentle travellers of the internet, is that I'm rarely wrong.
When I call O'Doherty a worthless tit.
When I suggest there's an international satanistic conspiracy to enslave the human race.
Rarely wrong.
After that you make up your own minds.
Offended, moi?
What's to be offended by?
Some little scruff in Independent Newspapers telling lies about the ancient religion?
Offended by it?
Really?
Me?
No.
I call a scruff a scruff.
And a bastard a bastard.
And a worthless oleaginous toad a worthless oleaginous toad.
I'm not in the business of being offended by an atheistic Tony O'Reilly adoring coward like O'Doherty whose lies about the Catholic church will never be forgotten.
No, I'm not in the business of taking offence.
I'm in the business of causing offence.
It's how I get my jollies.
B-st-rd.
Thank God I'm perfect, that's all I say.
Arf, arf.
A little James humour there.
It always does to lighten the mood now and then when you're writing about cowardly mendacious Tony O'Reilly worshipping scum.
Speaking of which, Ian O'Doherty finishes his article with the following sentence:
"But perhaps these people are missing the point - after all in the wake of the revelations about child abuse we've had to try and stomach over the last few months, most people would actually be quite content to think that Irish priests and nuns are having sex with each other rather than the children in their care."
Ah yes.
It's a measure of his class isn't it.
Ian O'Doherty wrote those words and the Irish Independent printed them.
I folded the newspaper.
You've got to understand folks.
These people have no courage, no insight and no journalistic ability.
On the same day that John Cooney called for a boycott of God, and Kevin Myers asserted manfully that there is no meaning to life, and Ian O'Doherty once more compounded his cowardice with yet more lies about the Catholic church, all in the Irish Independent, on precisely the same day, figures were published showing the net indebtedness of Independent Newspapers to be in excess of 1.5 billion Euro. That's one thousand five hundred million.
You must understand folks.
They can't run a newspaper more incompetently than they are doing at present.
There are no losses that can compel Independent Newspapers to wake up and smell the heather.
There are no losses that will ever force these people to end the mendacious liberal posturings of John Cooney, or the mendacious atheism of Myers, or the mendacious juvenile cowardice of O'Doherty.
If losses of 1.5 billion can't stop them, nothing on earth can.
Except God.
You know Cooney, Myers and even the omnipotent O'Doherty really are accountable to God.
(Impotent O'Doherty surely? - Ed note.)
I am not their judge.
They will answer to God directly.
I hope he gives em a good root in the bawls.
(I will. - God note.)
Independent Newspapers though, before facing God, will probably more immediately be accountable to the market.
It will go bust.
Like the Johnston Press who fired me from the Leinster Leader three weeks before Christmas, it will cease to exist.
I say it again.
Independent Newspapers is not going to change.
Short of a Christian conversion among senior management nothing can change them.
Certainly not the collapse of their business.
They owe 1.5 billion quid.
You can't run a company any worse than in such a way that it produces losses of 1.5 billion quid.
That's like a corrupt collapsing bank debt.
Yes they've declared annual profits for the past two decades.
But we can all use accountancy tricks to declare annual profits of a few bucks if in actuality we are in hock to idiot banks to the tune of 1.5 billion quid.
The Heelers Diaries could declare profits of a hundred million a year if some idiot bank would give me a billion to play around with over the next decade.
That's how it's done.
So they're not going to change for commercial reasons.
They've been given money by idiot banks regardless of whether they have any readers or not.
There has been no requirement for them to change.
Until now when the reality check has kicked in.
You know, anti Catholicism was never as clever or profitable as these aardvarks claimed it was.
Aardvarks?
Independent Newspapers management and editorial cadres are made up of poor little Marxist rich kids the flotsam of pseudo intellectual Irish university life in the 1960's.
They were recruited from our universities to form the core ethos and values of Independent Newspapers management from the 1970's through to the present day.
After all the pseudo radicalism of their university days, they suddenly found they weren't so opposed to capitalism after all.
Or at least not to corporatism.
The worst dysfunction of the capitalist system.
The rise of large companies who aren't really accountable to anyone.
The poor little rich Marxists found they could happily serve in such corporate entities.
Tities, indeed.
The great Aonghus Fanning at the Sunday Independent.
The immortal Emmylou Harris.
Dribblers all.
They became champions of hedonism and the atheistic lifestyle.
Perpetually at war with the Catholic church which was the only real threat to their power.
Every year they told us how popular they were.
Every year they declared magnificent profits.
Until at the end of twenty years we discovered that the whole newspaper group is drowning in 1.5 billion dollars of debt.
Seriously though, they've done a brilliant job.
This decrepit outmoded crop of anti Catholics on Independent Newspapers' management and staff have all but killed a 200 year old company.
There's no going back.
Most of us wouldn't p-ss on them now if they were on fire.
The market has already given them all the warnings they're going to get.
Independent Newspaper is going to sink beneath the waves.
And the last thing you'll hear as Independent Newspapers finally does go down, will be John Cooney, Kevin Myers and Ian O'Doherty hunched on the poop deck still screaming their infantile lies about the Catholic church.
And the band played on.
Glub.
Glub.
Glub.
It's the only song they know.
Let's see if I'm right.
Again.
Here endith the lesson.
2 Comments:
"None of us are going to boycott the source of our own lives."
Too true, James, too true. Unless, of course, we're suicidal. Perhaps that was the ntention of calling for a sacramental boycott: spiritual suicide.
"Sacramental boycott" mentioned as a solution to a death of priests shows profound ignorance. What man, young or old, is going to be drawn to bring Christ Jesus to a people who know Him yet boycott Him? Even the people of Ninevah weren't that bad: They repented when they heard the prophet's words.
It reminds me of the great longing of the Odawa (Ottawa) and other Native American Christians in my state. They spent nearly a century without a regular priest. The Odawa and Huron Christians were brought the Good News by Jesuits in the mid-1600s including Fr. Marquette, who spent three years studying native languages before he even went to them. In the 18th century, the wars between the European powers (and colonial revolutionaries) interrupted the missions, so the Christians learned what it meant to truly be without the Sacraments and to pray for priests.
They held onto their faith, but it wasn't until the 19th century that regular priests returned to the area. They had to make long trips to established parishes to receive sacraments.
Imagine Catholics travelling from Belfast to Killarney to receive First Communion and Confirmation - walking or paddling a boat along the coast. I have no doubt that there are our brothers and sisters in Christ who would do just that, making a pilgrimage for the sake of the Eucharist. But sadly there are those "Catholics" who would curse the Church and leave it because of the inconvenience of Christ.
MJ, you are teaching me.
James
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