Why Saint Mary's Church in Orange, Massachusetts is not attracting young people

Bishop Joseph F. Maguire, former Bishop of the Springfield Massachusetts Diocese, was known to be part of the cover-up of sexual abuse within the Diocese.  See here.

Saint Mary's Church in Orange, Massachusetts, the same Church that welcomed prayers for Keith Sullivan, a Youth Minister accused of sexual abuse - see here - (while offering no such prayers for the alleged victim) is now advertising a Memorial Mass for the now deceased Bishop Maguire.

This comes as no surprise as the Church, under Father Shaun O'Connor, has promoted the views of Father Jonathan Morris, a priest who distorted the Church's teaching regarding homosexuality, while banning me from its Facebook page for defending the Magisterial teaching of the Church.

And while Keith Sullivan, arrested by the Nashua Police Department for sexual abuse and kidnapping was welcome at Saint Mary's, apparently Catholics faithful to orthodoxy are not.  This explains why the Church is disintegrating.  One lay person, involved in parish ministry, was overheard saying (to a friend just prior to Mass), that there aren't many kids at CCD and that "young people aren't going to Mass."

Should this really come as a surprise?

Father Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen, O.C.D., in his classic work devoted to the interior life entitled Divine Intimacy, explains that, "Devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel indicates a strong call to the interior life, which, in a very special way, is Mary's life.  The Blessed Virgin wants us to resemble her in heart and mind much more than in externals.  If we penetrate into Mary's soul, we see that grace produced in her a very rich interior life: a life of recollection, prayer, uninterrupted giving of herself to God, and of constant contact and intimate union with Him.  Mary's soul is a sanctuary reserved for God alone where no creature has ever left an imprint; here reign love and zeal for the glory of God and the salvation of men.  Those who wish to live truly devoted to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, must follow Mary into the depths of the interior life...Every interior soul, even if living amid the tumult of the world, must strive to reach this peace, this interior silence, which alone makes continual contact with God possible.  It is our passions and attachments that make noise within us, that disturb our peace of mind and interrupt our intimate converse with God.  Only the soul that is wholly detached and in complete control of its passions can, like Mary, be a solitary, silent 'garden' where God will find His delights.  This is the grace we ask of Our Lady today when we choose her to be the Queen and mistress of our interior life." (Divine Intimacy, pp. 1147-1148).

When a soul is occupied with inordinate attachments to self or creatures or the vain and passing things of this world, it is unable to love God with all its strength and finds itself divided between God and self, between God and creatures, between God and the transitory things of this dying world.  But we are commanded, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with all thy strength and with all thy mind." (Luke 10: 27).

It is these inordinate attachments to self or creatures which lead to dissent and ultimately polarization within the Church.  The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in its Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian, tells us that, "The Church 'is like a sacrament, a sign and instrument, that is, of communion with God and of unity among all men' (Lumen Gentium, 1).  Consequently, to pursue concord and communion is to enhance the force of her witness and credibility.  To succumb to the temptation of dissent, on the other hand, is to allow the 'leaven of infidelity to the Holy Spirit' to start to work." (No. 40).

This leaven of infidelity has, for many years now, crippled many within the Church.  The dissent which has been embraced within the Church has led to polarization.  Why?  Because faithful Catholics who do not [and indeed cannot] accept the dissenting view are duty bound to resist it for the sake of the Church's authentic peace, a peace which Pope John XXIII said, "is not completely untroubled and serene; it is active, not calm and motionless.  In short, this is a peace that is ever at war.  It wars with every sort of error, including that which falsely wears the face of truth; it struggles against the enticements of vice, against those enemies of the soul, of whatever description, who can weaken, blemish, or destroy our innocence or Catholic faith." (Ad Petri cathedram).

There has been much dissent and subsequent polarization within the Diocese of Springfield (as in others) because the leadership (and here we are being most generous in our terms) of the local Church has failed to inspire the faithful (and its own priests first and foremost) to strip themselves of all that is not of God.  While St. John of the Cross assures us that, "The soul has only one will, and if it occupies itself or encumbers itself with anything, it will not remain free, solitary, and pure, as is required for divine transformation," the Springfield Diocese has encouraged an atmosphere of self-will, self-assertion, self-affirmation and self-promotion.  Forgotten is the warning of the Holy Spirit that "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble." (James 4: 6).

We (all of us) must become more Mary-like in heart and mind and not just in externals.  "In every deliberate sin," as Dr. Germain Grisez reminds us, such as dissent from Church teaching or deliberate non-assent, "freedom of self-determination is exercised contrary to what is known to be truly right and good.  In sinning, sinners tend to regard moral truths legalistically, as if they were mere rules blocking them from doing as they please.  Thus, deliberate sin seems to be self-affirming.  Affirming the self and rejecting the limits which deny some forbidden fruit, sinners try to be autonomous, as only God really can be."

Faith demands the renunciation of the sinful self which authentic devotion to Mary necessarily involves.  Pride must give way to humility.  Only then can one find the truth which sets one free (John 8: 32). 

Deacon Scott Colley of Our Lady Immaculate Parish in Athol bans me for defending reverence in the liturgy

Albert Drexel, in Ein Neuer Prophet? (Stein am Rhein: Christiana, 1971) explains that: "The modernism or neo-modernism within Christianity, and especially within the Roman Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council, is above all characterized by a turning away from the supernatural and an exclusive predilection for this world, the Aggiornamento of Pope John XXIII interpreted one-sidedly and hence misapplied. Teilhard's ideology was was a definitive precondition for this. Inasmuch as he turned his back to the past, fused God and the supernatural with the process of a universal evolutionism, and proclaimed religion to be an active participation in a progressive development ending in Point Omega, the basis was given for a humanist cult of the secular." (p. 115).

In the New World Order, man will no longer believe in a God whom he cannot control. Man will worship himself and his new leader who will, like Hitler, be deified: the man spoken of by Saint Paul as the Man of Sin, the Son of Perdition.

The new worship which is emerging is man-centered. And it is reflected in various liturgical actions such as banal pop-style music "concerts" and spontaneous applause over human achievement. Pope [Emeritus] Benedict XVI - while still Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger - wrote a book entitled "The Spirit of the Liturgy," in which he warned that, "Wherever applause breaks out in the liturgy because of some human achievement, it is a sure sign that the essence of liturgy has totally disappeared and been replaced by a kind of religious entertainment. Such attractiveness fades quickly - it cannot compete in the market of leisure pursuits, incorporating as it increasingly does various forms of religious titillation...Liturgy can only attract people when it looks, not at itself, but at God, when it allows him to enter and act. Then something truly unique happens, beyond competition, and people have a sense that more has taken place than a recreational activity." (The Spirit of the Liturgy, Ignatius Press, pp. 198-199).

Since Vatican II, we have entered the time of wretched idolatry prophesied by the Fathers of the Church - for they emphasized the corruption of the liturgy which would prevail just prior to Antichrist during the last days. The Holy Mass is valid in her essence. But years of reckless tinkering with sacred realities has produced a mediocrity-ridden liturgy, a shallow show which has distracted from the holy while driving the faithful out the doors or so weakening their faith that they find themselves paralyzed before the current zeitgeist. Emptied churches, convents and seminaries does not a reform make.

On many occasions during the liturgy at Our Lady Immaculate Parish in Athol, Massachusetts [Diocese of Worcester],the entire atmosphere has been more akin to a circus than a solemn liturgy. I am reminded of the words of the Psalmist:

"Why, God, have you cast us off forever? Why does your anger burn against the sheep of your pasture? Remember your people, whom you acquired of old, the tribe you redeemed as your own heritage, Mount Zion where you dwell. Direct your steps toward the utter destruction, everything the enemy laid waste in the sanctuary.Your foes roared triumphantly in the place of your assembly; they set up their own tokens of victory. They hacked away like a forester gathering boughs, swinging his ax in a thicket of trees. They smashed all its engraved work, struck it with ax and pick. They set your sanctuary on fire, profaned your name’s abode by razing it to the ground. They said in their hearts, “We will destroy them all! Burn all the assembly-places of God in the land!” Even so we have seen no signs for us, there is no prophet any more, no one among us who knows for how long. How long, O God, will the enemy jeer? Will the enemy revile your name forever? Why draw back your hand, why hold back your right hand within your bosom? Yet you, God, are my king from of old, winning victories throughout the earth. You stirred up the sea by your might; you smashed the heads of the dragons on the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan, gave him as food to the sharks.You opened up springs and torrents, brought dry land out of the primeval waters. Yours the day and yours the night too; you set the moon and sun in place. You fixed all the limits of the earth; summer and winter you made. Remember how the enemy has jeered, LORD, how a foolish people has reviled your name. Do not surrender to wild animals those who praise you; do not forget forever the life of your afflicted. Look to your covenant, for the recesses of the land are full of the haunts of violence. Let not the oppressed turn back in shame; may the poor and needy praise your name. Arise, God, defend your cause; remember the constant jeering of the fools. Do not forget the clamor of your foes, the unceasing uproar of your enemies." (Psalm 74)

After leaving the above quotation from then Cardinal Ratzinger's book The Spirit of the Liturgy at the Facebook page of the North Quabbin Catholic Community, Deacon Scott Colley, who manages the Facebook page, blocked me from participation.  And this as he preaches on the importance of being a "welcoming parish."  Welcoming apparently to anyone except those devout Catholics who hold onto tradition and a spirit of reverence in the liturgy.

This comes as no surprise.  For not once have I witnessed a spirit of prayer in Deacon Colley.  He usually arrives at the last moment before Mass and may be seen conversing with friends rather than preparing for Mass.  Reverence is the basis of all true personality.  Dr. Hildebrand explains: "The significance of reverence for the full personality can easily be grasped. The greatest natural endowment, the greatest latitude of talents and capacities can never lead to true personality if reverence is lacking. For the latter is the basis of the second essential component of personality, the perceiving of values, an organic contact with the world of values, and - most ultimate of all - the dying to oneself, the preparation of inner room for Christ. The man without reverence is necessarily flat and limited. This lack is an essential mark of stupidity. Even he whose mind is obdurate and helpless, but who possesses reverence, does not manifest that offensive, tactlessly persistent stupidity of which it is said that 'even the gods struggle against it in vain.'" (Liturgy and Personality, pp. 50-51).

Because lack of reverence may have two roots, Dr. Hildebrand notes that, "..there are two different types of men who lack reverence: the arrogant person and the senseless, blunt one. The root of the first is to be found in pride. The man who lacks reverence because of pride and arrogance approaches everything with conceit and presumption, imagines that he knows everything, that he sees through everything. He is interested in the world only insofar as it serves his self-glorification, insofar as it enhances his own importance...He thinks himself always greater than that which is not himself. The world holds no mystery for him. He treats everything tactlessly, with easy familiarity, and everything seems to him to be at his disposal. To his insolent, conceited gaze, to his despotic approach, the world is sealed, silent, stripped of all mystery, deprived of all depth, flat and limited to one dimension. He stands in desolate emptiness, blind to all the values and secrets of being, circling endlessly around himself...

There is however another form of irreverence, one which is born of concupiscence. The concupiscent man is interested in the world only as a means of procuring pleasure for himself. His is a dominating position in the face of being - not because he wills domination as such but because he wants to use being for his pleasure. He, too, circles around in the narrowness of his own self. He does not face the world with arrogance and conceit but with a blunt stupidity. Stubbornly imprisoned in his own self, he violates being, and seeing it only from the outside, he thus misses its true meaning. To this type of irreverent man the world also refuses to disclose its breadth, height, and depth, its richness of values and mysteries." (Liturgy and Personality, pp. 49-50).

Rather then engaging in knee-jerk hatred against my person for insisting upon reverence in the liturgy, perhaps Deacon Colley should examine his own attitude toward the Holy Mass and his motivations in banning me from participation in the life of the parish?