Harry Palmer
I asked the driver of the empty bus parked at its terminus stop outside Manchester Airport what time he was scheduled to leave for the centre of Manchester. Before he could respond a woman behind me piped up and advised that the bus in the adjoining bay was due to leave imminently for the city and that perhaps I should head over there?
I thanked her and told them both: “This is the number 103, of course, and it was this route my late father mostly drove between the 1940s and 1970s. I live in New Zealand nowadays and I’d like to ride this route one more time.” So I climbed the stairs of the bus and enjoyed the seven or eight mile journey into the city while sat on the front seat of the near empty bus and from where I enjoyed a wonderfully panoramic, elevated view of the once familiar geography of where I used to live as I passed it by. The route has been changed a wee bit over the years, inevitably I suppose, and with a number of motorways and interchanges having subsequently been built in the area as the airport and city grew in size and importance.
The Wythenshawe estate of council (state) houses local to Manchester Airport, of which I am reminiscing here and where I grew up, was conceived as a ‘garden city’ and was started to be built in the 1930s to house the former inhabitants of Manchester’s notoriously disease-ridden and filthy slums. The design of the place had been well thought out with parks and patches of greenery throughout. Shops, churches and schools and other public amenities were provided too, and the Civic Center, with its Golden Garter night club where the likes of Dusty Springfield once performed, was opened in the 1960s. The night club has been closed many years now – the Civic Center looks empty, lonely and miserable these days – and Wythenshawe became infamous in the
early 21st century when a hooded youth was photographed pointing his fingers like a gun at the back of the head of the unaware Prime Minister of Great Britain, one David Cameron, who was on a visit to the area. The small sub district of Wythenshawe, the one in which I once lived, Benchill, was announced as being the most socially deprived in the whole of the UK by the Index of Multiple Deprivation in 2000 so the refugees from the diseased central Manchester slums and their descendants have apparently gone through a full circle and have unfortunately arrived almost back at where it all started. The result of government “welfare” instead of jobs and a desperately poor culture with the consumption of illegal drugs at its centre.
Gone too, is the Catholic Church of St John Fisher and St Thomas More built in 1937 – replaced by a block of flats – that my dear mother, my three brothers and I attended as we were growing up, though the memories and what I learned there and in the primary school behind the church – the school is still there – remain with me, permanently imprinted on my brain.
Our Parish Priest was Father Murphy. He had a huge and loveable St Bernard, and a couple of curates to keep his eye on, and he and his curates were never seen in public without wearing their clerical uniforms and Roman collars. As Parish Priest he was ‘priest in charge’ and responsible to the Bishop in far away Shrewsbury for his two charges and for the successful ‘running’ of the parish. I sometimes wonder if the sorrowful ghost of Father Murphy and his dog still hang around where his church once stood on Woodhouse Lane.
‘Discipline’ was never mentioned during my growing up but it was implicit in everything I was taught: self discipline, self control. My parents impressed the need of it on me, especially as they didn’t want me causing them to be troubled by the police, as neighboring families and their kids who I used to play with often were.
The need for self discipline was also emphasised in my schooling – the strap was still a useful deterrent in those days of the 1940s and early 50s – and was further reinforced by my Catholic religion. Missing mass on a Sunday or Holy Day was considered to be a mortal sin which guaranteed eternal damnation according to the “Commandments of the Church”. A terrifying prospect to an innocent child. This might all sound a bit harsh to modern ears but it had the advantage of teaching one how to focus the mind. An added advantage when learning such subjects as mathematics and the correct use of English – with its occasional accompanying tests for comprehension and understanding – was how to think critically. And the learning along these lines continued on after I left school, throughout the engineering apprenticeship I served until the age of 21, and beyond into my current old age.
I in fact believe that it is precisely this kind of discipline that has encouraged the growth of our civilisation to its current – or recently current – level of vitality and prosperity.
Modern times appear to have turned the concept of encouraging the growth of the individual in knowledge and wisdom, throughout life, onto its head however. If there is a motto for the way things are now, it’s the one given by the British occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947): “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” How else to explain, for example, the in-your-face and vulgar extravagances of ‘gay parades’?
Since the fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, its arch practitioner, around 1990, collectivism, which is the precursor to socialism and socialism’s seemingly inevitable successor, communism – all three systems have a total disdain for the individual – has become the preferred way for Western governments to view their voters, the people who elect them. They view them not as just as one large group that would be difficult to control, but as a collection of relatively smaller special interest groups, some of whom governments like to curate and pander to, because they, the governments, aim to stay permanently in power. Groups like those who, for example, want to save the planet, promote abortion, etc. These are ‘controlled opposition’ groups.
Taking this idea of grouping people further and, with the help of their media lap dogs, into very dangerous territory, collectivistic-minded and forever scheming politicians have lately begun ‘tilting at windmills’, shadow boxing for the benefit of their fans, an enemy of their own imagination and deliberate manufacture and which could very well descend into real violence.
In inventing these phony groups, ideologically leftist politicians have raised the old meme of good versus evil: they label them as “right-wing extremists”, “spreaders of disinformation”, etc, who are held up as “the enemy of the people”. They like to stigmatise these mythical groups – to keep them on the outer, to be excoriated, verbally abused and punished at every opportunity; to be accused of spreading ‘disinformation’, which they, the government and ‘controlled opposition’ politicians, define as anything seemingly contrary to their own edicts, which are to be treated like the Ten Commandments written on tablets of stone by the hand of God himself, and given to Moses on Mount Sinai.
The Catholic Church, of which I am still a paying member, with remarkable foresight apparently saw the way things were going as early as the 1960s when they organised their Vatican II confab in Rome, which resulted in them throwing out the Latin mass and whose putrefying corpse Pope Francis recently further stomped on as it tried to emerge from its grave – and their not only recommending to priests and bishops that masses should in future be said in the local language, but also for a more laissez faire approach to the rules of the Church that had remained virtually untouched for the previous couple of millennia. So church organ lofts now gather dust and, instead of Bach and old fashioned hymns like “Onward Christian Soldiers”, we have guitarists playing songs like “Shine Jesus Shine”. In other words, the Church hierarchy decided to cast its fate to the wind, throw austere looking tradition with its inherent requirement for the following of the rules – and with it the governing discipline – out the window and instead invite in a collectivistically managed populism, similar in nature to the route politicians of all stripes in the countries of the ‘west’ have chosen to go down in more recent times.
So as a natural follow-on from Vatican II down the subsequent years and in very recent years in particular, we have seen the ‘well connected’ Cardinal McCarrick (who has since been accused of the homosexual abuse of adults and minors and for which he was subsequently ‘laicised’) negotiate a ‘deal’ with the Chinese government on behalf of the current Pope, for it to take over the appointment of bishops within that country’s jurisdiction. They have, in other words, handed over the underground Church in China to the authorities there. In effect, they have thrown it to the wolves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_McCarrick
Then there’s “Father” Travis Clark who was discovered filming pornography with two prostitutes (OK then, “mistresses”) on the altar of his St Peter and St Paul Church at Pearl River, Louisiana.
And “Father” Peter Miqueli of the Church of St Frances De Chantal at Throggs Neck, New York, who stole church takings to pay for the services of one Keith Crist as his BDSM “master”.
One old lady parishioner of this priest and who was obviously well aware of his proclivities, was overheard saying, “I’d never take holy communion from him as I don’t know where his hands have been.”
As a Catholic priest’s main function, by far, is the saying of mass and performing the “Act of Consecration” within it and where the bread and wine are, as we are told, magically transformed into the body and blood of Christ: one has to ask how he can still be considered capable of performing this ritual when his bishop has shuffled him from one parish to another, as apparently is common practice, after he has become the alleged perpetrator of sexual abuse. Especially when the poor bloody laity is apparently still condemned to hell for missing mass on a single Sunday.
We’ve certainly come a long way since the 40 canonised martyrs of England and Wales – and many others – gave up their lives for defying Henry VIII’s “Act of Supremacy”, haven’t we, when Henry, by force, took over from the pope of the time the whole of the English and Welsh Catholic Church at the Reformation and made himself its “Head”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty_Martyrs_of_England_and_Wales
Further evidence of the Church’s falling apart is to be found in Germany, where it is partly funded from taxes by the government. A recent ‘synodal’ consultation involving all those with an interest has produced demands for all the usual goodies: things such as the ordination of women and for homosexuals to be able to marry each other in Church, etc. And, as a consequence the doing of a Martin Luther 2 – separation from Rome – is on the cards if the German Churches’ demands are not accepted by Rome.
And welcomed around the world untouched by scandal, yet enthusiastically still advocating for the homosexual way of life and for gays to be accepted fully into the Church, travels self-proclaimed ‘friend’ – they’re both Jesuits don’cha know – of Pope Francis, “Father” James Martin.
These are just a couple or so many, many such examples of present-day life in the world-wide Catholic Church and the corruption appears to have reached even its highest levels. A yet further example of malfeasance is the ongoing court cases both in London and the Vatican, where high-ranking Catholic clerics and their cronies are accused of being involved in a fraud when the Church purchased a building in posh Kensington, London. The purchase was worth hundreds of millions of pounds sterling, plus similar amounts which were claimed in expenses for ‘facilitating’ the purchase. All this money it has been suggested, was provided from a fund called “Peter’s Pence”, which the Catholic Church collects from its congregations around the world at Christmas each year, ostensibly for distribution to the poor.
And how can I forget Pope Benedict XVI’s claim, in a posthumously published book, that seminaries – where priests are trained – now have gay clubs?
This is a quote from my local Catholic primary school’s recent newsletter:
“We have reached the midpoint of our busy term. On Friday, 19 May the school was a sea of pink. Pink Shirt Day goes beyond one day of the year and serves as a reminder to show our aroha and commitment for creating a kinder, more inclusive Aotearoa where everyone feels safe, valued, and respected regardless of gender identity, sexual orientation, age, ability, religion or cultural background.”
(Got to show off our even further superior virtue by dragging in words like aroha and Aotearoa, haven’t we?)
One has to wonder if these pre-pubescent pupils have actually been informed as to what homosexual ‘love’ (sorry, “aroha”) – referred to here by the code phrase “sexual orientation” – entails?
Added to all this, I have to wonder why the Christian churches in New Zealand were so willing to capitulate, to close down without question or complaint for the first time ever and for many months, simply because the government told them to – and everybody else – using a transparently fake claim of “pandemic” as an excuse. And I don’t doubt that, shamefully, the provision of other vitally important services such as the performing of marriage ceremonies and attending at the bedsides of the dying were also stopped for the same excuse.
This pondering has led me to suspect that government and church interests are converging and that we are witnessing the voluntary self subjugation of the Christian churches – and the selling out of their congregations – to the authority and whim of government. In other words, the Corporate Catholic Church (The “Bride of Christ” as it likes to call itself), in particular, has come to realise that, in order to be able to continue to exist and enjoy a comfortable life, it must become ‘controlled opposition’ similar to government-favoured groups like those which, with friendly pats on the head from collectivist/socialist/communist governments, advocate for the adoption of laws restricting and penalising the lives of citizens in order to “save the planet”; to be able to abort babies in the womb and to euthanise the elderly and those whose lives are deemed to be ‘no longer worth living’ etc, etc; and with which philosophies the churches would – if they don’t already do so – necessarily be required to accept and agree with.
And of course any government threat – which they would announce in the ‘nicest possible way’ of course – to remove the tax advantages that churches have always enjoyed would surely be more than enough to force them to ‘toe the line’.
The lesson? Christian churches should look to completely overhaul their current teaching methods and focus entirely on the formation of an individual’s heart in accordance with the teachings of their founder, his apostles and their worthy successors in order that future generations can individually and confidently enjoy a personal relationship with God through prayer, and with complementing their personal prayer with attendance at periodic gatherings of fellow believers in order to celebrate the sacrifice of the mass.
And to hell with those who only live for the present and prefer the excesses of life – including the overfed and scheming fat cats of the church hierarchy.
The Church will never give heed to this advice of course – they would in fact be scornful of it – because to give up their collectivistic hold, their hegemony over the hearts and souls of the few practicing Catholics left under their influence after years of attrition, would mean final loss of their ‘power’, and great loss of face in front of their fellow oligarchs in politics and in other religions.
In modern politics and in the Church, individuals don’t matter – in fact, they’re in the way.