guests at home not wearing face masks

 

Heelers with a scrubbing brush standing at the kitchen sink in the old family chateau.

I am cleaning the dry household waste, meat packaging and such like, prior to putting it in the bin.

The wet waste, ie anything that can rot, goes in the garden.

So this is what I'm reduced to.

I'm literally washing the rubbish.

I kid you not.

Cleaning rubbish.

Even I.

Even I have not come unscathed through all the pseudo environmental societal neuroses of the past three decades.

Truly civilisation has fallen.

Do you remember the days when we could put rubbish in a bin without cleaning it first?

As I muse thusly, a head pops through the door.

It is Rowena Braithwaite and thankfully the head is attached to her body.

The Jihadis ain't got her yet.

"I think you were prayed for at mass," she announces.

"Really?"

"Well during the prayers of the faithful the priest said: Let us pray for all those who oppose the vaccines, that their hearts may be softened. I immediately thought of you. And I wasn't the only one. People were saying afterwards: I bet he means James. Have you been talking to the priest about the vaccine?"

"It might have come up once or twice."

"Well you're being prayed for."

"It's tough for the Padres. We've got a false Pope, and an abortionist government, and the media have terrorised the priests themselves through slander into mute complaisance to every aberration that comes along. Whatever they say or do, they're going to get attacked for it. If they resist the Flu virus kabookie, the Health Boards will shut them down. Or some skanger will come along and say:  I'm suing you because I got Covid 19 in your church. Still there are priests who have made the call in spite of all that and spoken out against the vaccines. And  against the pointless lockdowns. And against the nonsensical face masks. I'm not alone."

"But the Pope says it's okay."

"He's not the Pope."

"He is the Pope."

"Well he's not a great Pope," I said and somewhere the ghost of cocaine advocating sports pundit Eamon Dunphy was smiling.

"Oh you really are in a binder," Rowena rejoins delightedly, "what with the Pope making vaccines mandatory in the Vatican and local priests praying that your heart will be softened."

"Not at all. Prayers are good for me. I've no complaints about being prayed for. A soft heart won't hurt either if the Almighty decides I need one. But the fact that many of the clergy have been stampeded into this flu panic is not an overwhelming determinant for me as to right and wrong in the matter. No Catholic is born an orphan. We're adults. Spiritually I'm saying. The church guides us and we guide each other. Tradition guides us too. And intellect. And we have the witness of history and of heaven and of the saints. I've got news for you. We all know in our hearts that using pharmaceutical products made out of murdered children is beyond wrong. It's an abomination. Disagreeing with a Pope isn't such a big deal for Catholics, even a false Pope. We think for ourselves and we have been well taught by the heroes who came before including not a few real Popes. Anyway, every Irishman carries the crozier of the Pope of Rome in his own breast pocket. The amazing thing is how we fit it there."

"What do you mean you carry the crozier of the Pope of Rome in your pocket?"

"I mean spiritually we're all Popes ready to step into the breach at a moment's notice. The purveyors of evil can't kill us all even though my best guess is that they're going to try."

When she has gone I stand at my sink pondering.

"What the heck is the Catholic Church playing at?" I murmur.

The Criminologist from the Rocky Horror Picture Show appears with his backing group and, dancing around my kitchen, gives a brief explanation.

"It's just a jump to the left.

And a step to the r-r-r-r-r-right

You put your hands on your hips

And bring your knees in t-i-i-i-i-ight

But it's the satanic freemasonic Cosa Nostra subversion of the Vatican

That really knocks you ins-a-a-a-a-a-a-ne

Let's frame Cardinal Pell for child abuse again

Let's inject a useless unnecessary immorally derived vaccine again

Let's force people to stay in their homes and wear silly face masks for no conceivable health gain again

Let's ingest an unborn baby murdererd by abortion again"

You've got to admit bold readers, the Criminologist from the Rocky Horror Picture Show is on to something.

As the Criminologist leaves, the ghost of Winston Churchill enters and begins to quote himself from his June 1940 speech to parliament, the one he made originally after the Nazis conquered France.

Winston declaims with meaningful portent:

"What General Weygand called the battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of  Perverted Science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say: This was their finest hour."

I nod with less enthusiams than you might expect.

"I know Winnie," I explain wearily. "That's just the sort of thing I used to say when I was trying to get the Irish people to fight the Maloney drug gang, and the thug cop Kinneavey, and the clan gang operating out of the Alke Babish chipper, and the Hutch gang, and the Kinahanes, and the IRA itself, and the satanists Ruari O'Domhnaill and Gwen Healy, and Marian Bruce and Margaret Roche, and all the rest. But people don't listen."

"You must go on to the end," thundered Churchill, quoting himself again I think. "You must fight them in the fields and in the streets. You must fight them on the landing grounds. You must fight them in public discourse. You must fight them when they hijack your police force and your governments and your newspapers. You must fight with growing strength and growing confidence on the internet. You must fight them in your church. You must never surrender."

He left.

Alone once more I thought of the present subversion of our beautiful, ancient and true Catholic church.

My heart was torn.

For I was also thinking of the decent, honorable, hard working Padre on the altar at Kilcullen praying that my heart will be softened.

Lumme.

It is as they say.

The claw of the gawdelpus gets us all in the end.