Patricia McKeever
Editor
Catholic Truth Scotland.
Concerned Catholics in Scotland spent years writing to priests and bishops with concerns following the introduction of the new Mass in 1969, asking for action to be taken to end the various liturgical abuses which were featuring in parishes despite the Vatican documents purportedly seeking to correct them. Repeatedly, the Vatican refused to enforce its own rules. Eventually, the penny dropped and we realised that, humanly speaking, we were wasting our time. Letters sent to the Vatican might bring a polite acknowledgement, but the Bishops either ignored or insulted us, exhorting us to charity while defending dissenters.
Similarly, churches (including the cathedrals in Glasgow and Edinburgh – and no doubt other cities) were selling publications openly attacking or undermining Catholic teaching and morals. Dissenting speakers were being brought into churches and other Catholic premises to address priests and teachers and so, over the years following the Second Vatican Council to the present day, the traditional Faith has all but disappeared in Scotland (and indeed the wider UK and Ireland, if not worldwide).
Two Edinburgh priests in particular were a major cause of scandal in Scotland. Fr Steve Gilhooley and Fr (now Monsignor) Andy Monaghan were using the media to undermine and even openly attack the Church. Gilhooley did this through his column in the Edinburgh Evening News where, among many disgraceful statements, he informed his largely Protestant and secular readership that he’d like to see all dogma kicked out of the pews/Church, and Monaghan achieved the same end through his “Agony Uncle” phone-in radio show, Open Line on Radio Forth 2, where his advice to callers was about as Catholic as Ramadan. Our letters expressing concern to the now deceased Cardinal Keith Patrick O’Brien brought responses from him chiding us for our lack of charity and telling us that the writings of Fr Gilhooley helped many people and that Fr Monaghan was “doing God’s work…” (by encouraging abortions, adultery, cohabitation, and providing telephone numbers for “gay” helplines.)Our right and duty as lay people to engage in such [unpleasant] work is enshrined in Canon Law (Canon 212 # 3). In our newsletter we commented more than once on the strangeness, to put it mildly, of the Cardinal’s defence of these dissenters. I openly remarked that such defence of blatant attacks on Catholic teaching and morals could surely only mean that there was something in the Cardinal’s own personal life that blinded him to the spiritual dangers posed by these priests. Some wondered why we weren’t last seen in civil court! Thus, when his own scandal broke, we were almost alone in Scotland at being shocked but not surprised. An American commentator, however, had beat me to it some years previously when he said that where we witness liturgical abuse, we will find sexual sin.
Well-known local historian and scientist, convert to the Faith, Charles Smith, RIP, was keen to organise some kind of fightback. He hosted a small meeting of like-minded friends in Edinburgh, where we discussed the possibility of producing a simple newsletter to alert our fellow Catholics to the dangers posed by the modernism, the dissent, the anti-Catholic beliefs infecting the Church, by then very evident in liturgy, sermons, publications disseminated in parishes, schools etc.
Thus, in 1999 we published a single page newsletter which was well received. We now publish a 16 page newsletter, distributed to our postal and email list, and available to read in full on our website, bi-monthly. At one time, we sent a copy to every priest and bishop in Scotland; as we approached publication of our 100th anniversary copy, however, we decided to shake the dust, and remove all priests except those who opted to remain on our mailing list. No use casting pearls before swine…
In highlighting the above mentioned scandals of liturgical abuse (now normalised) we came to understand that the essence of the problem in the Church was, in fact, the new Mass itself, which had been created specifically to make it pleasing to Protestants. We began to quote those priests (e.g. Bugnini), and developed our apostolate from seeking to “reform the reform” to promoting the restoration of the traditional Latin Mass and Faith. In addition to the foregoing activities, our concerns included challenging the rise in the number of dissenting speakers and publications promoted by the Bishops, and we also responded to requests from priests to follow up public scandals, such as one Glasgow priest who was living with his “boyfriend” in the church house and others who were known to visit a “gay” bar in Glasgow. We were also approached by the broken-hearted husband of a woman who was involved in an affair with a priest – this in the Archdiocese of St Andrew’s & Edinburgh. None of the scandals which we published were news to the Bishops. Not one. Yet no action was forthcoming from them. We felt compelled, therefore, to bring such hypocritical double-living to the attention of the wider Church community.We considered (perhaps wrongly, as it turns out) that no Catholic would want their hard-earned contributions to their parishes to be used to fund a double-life of sexual activity or support for the so-called “gay culture”.
The majority of our reports, however, are religion-related scandals. The utterances and behaviour of Pope Francis, who just cannot conceal his Marxism, and other examples of what Pope John Paul II once described as “a silent apostasy” but which is now screaming from the rooftops, are typical of the reports which we bring to our readership. In short, the nature and purpose of our apostolate mirrors the nature and purpose of the Church itself – to spread the truths of the Faith, that is, the truths required for salvation, in obedience to Christ’s Great Commission (Matt 28:19-20) and to correct those errors, heresies and immoralities which are obstructing the Church’s mission and obscuring its purpose.
Our stated aim is to keep the faithful informed of the dire state of the Church at this time of crisis, a crisis easily the worst ever to hit the Church. We seek to make a contribution to the restoration of the traditional Catholic Faith, and take as our inspiration, Scotland’s only canonised martyr – St John Ogilvie – who, when asked why he had returned from the Continent of Europe, said “I have come to Scotland to unteach heresy and to save souls.” Saving souls is the only reason the Church exists. It doesn’t exist to make life better or more comfortable for people, and it certainly doesn’t exist to afford any of us the means to justify living at variance with God’s natural and moral law. This truth has been forgotten as modernism and secularism have tightened their grip on Catholic churchmen, from the top down. Catholic Truth is little more than a very small contribution to ending that grip; a small contribution to the restoration, in Scotland, of all things in Christ (Ephesians 1:10).
PATS RESPONSE
WARNING
I will not publish comments personally attacking the author of the above. She has given us ample material to discuss.
Dear Patricia,
I fully accept your point about the liturgical abuses after the New Mass was introduced. Instead of celebrating Mass, many priests regarded the Mass as their own private show that they were presenting and the result was thoroughly embarrassing. Here is an example of what I talk about, from the Redemptorists.
For men like this Redemptorist Mass is a pantomime and they are Cinderella! Maybe they did not get enough parental attention or long enough on the breast?
As for them allowing dissenting publications and speakers? That should have been a matter for the bishop.
Here I must confess that I am and have been a Liberation Theology and a Kung man. And I celebrated a funeral Mass over the Great Modernist George Tyrrell SJ.
But there have been theological differences in the church for 2,000 years. I suppose it’s only heresy we should worry about.
Patricia, I totally respect your point of view and your right to express it.
In Scotland the bishops and priests should be in dialogue with you. That’s the Christian and rational way.
I am very much a Vatican 11 man and far prefer the Novus Ordo to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. Having said that I would have no problem attending a Latin Mass.
The laity have every right to challenge what they see as liturgical abuse, corruption and clergy living double lives.
In any event, I cant see you going away 😃
So they better get used to you.
BISHOP PAT BUCKLEY 