Leprosy in the Church: Why we need to pray the Rosary

Rev. Robert Brucciani

The article which follows this one, ‘Church on the move: Quo Vadis?’ is from a document given to priests at a recent deanery meeting (priests' meeting) in an English diocese. The contents are alarming because they show the profound theological and spiritual bankruptcy of the modern idea of priesthood and they indicate the direction in which those who really wield the power wish to take the Church.

Bankruptcy

Astonishingly, the words God, Jesus Christ, soul, faithful, prayer, Mass, victim, sacrifice, mediator, Mystical Body, heaven, sin, hell, grace, virtue, supernatural, Catholic, sacrament, devotion or the Blessed Virgin Mary are not used once in a document meant to teach the priest how to run his parish.

There are plenty of other words—plenty—but they would leave the reader embarrassed if he had to explain their meaning in a precise and coherent way. Such is the intended style of Vatican II doctrine.

Catholic doctrine, however, teaches us that a priest is an alter Christus whose job is to teach Catholic doctrine, govern the Church and sanctify the faithful. His defining acts are to offer the Sacrifice of the Mass and to administer the sacraments by which the faithful are incorporated into Christ. He will be successful in his ministry in as much as he conforms himself to Christ and thereby saves souls.

Quo Vadis?

What is the direction in which the new unhappy lords of the Church wish to take us? In their tender embrace of the world, they have turned their back on God. They wish to make the Church's doctrine so inclusive as to mean nothing to all men. They wish to make the Church's liturgy so accessible as to evacuate all the mysteries of the faith. They wish to make the Church so merciful as to abandon those who cry for truth and for delivery from their sin. They wish to make the Church's priests so ignorant, powerless and worldly as to make it impossible for them to teach govern and sanctify.

They have created a new religion which seems not so much to deify man as to confuse him, or anaesthetise him, or deter him from any religion at all. Is there any wonder that there are so few vocations?

Cardinal Sarah said as much in his message to a colloquium on the tenth anniversary of the motu proprio, Summorum Pontificum, on 29 April 2017, in Herzogenrath, Germany:

Many refuse to face up to the Church’s work of self-destruction through the deliberate demolition of her doctrinal, liturgical, moral and pastoral foundations. While more and more voices of high-ranking prelates stubbornly affirm obvious doctrinal, moral and liturgical errors that have been condemned a hundred times and work to demolish the little faith remaining in the people of God...

And their motives? The only satisfactory explanation for the dogged perseverance of those who force this new religion upon the diocesan clergy is that they wish to destroy the priesthood and the Church. The project is now 50 years old, the decline is continuous (if not accelerating) and there are no fruits. Fanciful naivety is not a plausible explanation anymore; they are working for the dark side—a new world order.

What is to be done?

My dear brethren, those "high-ranking prelates" of the Church suffer from a spiritual leprosy with no earthly cure—it makes them insensitive and blind to the truth.

The cure is found in our obedience to the command of the Blessed Virgin Mary to the three children of Fatima: pray the Rosary. It saved Christendom at Lepanto and Vienna (more than once), it will save the Church in this current crisis. Pray the Rosary particularly for vocations to the priesthood we need good holy priests. Pray the Rosary — it might seem trite, but then so did bathing seven times in the Jordan to General Naaman.

See also 'Church on the move: Quo Vadis?'

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