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| Fritz von Uhde Christ with a Farmer's Family (1887-8) Musée d'Orsay |
Friends throughout the world: translate this, send it to all your priests and Bishops, to Archbishops and to Cardinals. This is the Manifesto that was missing. They have no wealthy German Bishops to speak up for them -- and you could well be one of these victims, let them know who the lost sheep really are, the sheep they have willfully overlooked as they dance around with the princes of the world in empty assemblies.
Who Will Rescue the Lost Sheep of the Lonely Revolution?
Anthony EsolenNovember 6, 2104[Excerpts]
Forgive me, Lord, if I use your words for an admonitory parable. ... That is why you came among us, to call sinners back to the fold. Not to pet and stroke them for being sinners... . ... We do not have Pharisees who preen themselves for having followed the letter of the law and missed its soul. We have Pharisees who preen themselves for disobeying the law, even the most serious admonitions of the law, even your own clear words on marriage and divorce, while presuming to have discovered a soul-of-the-law whose existence has eluded two thousand years of martyrs, saints, popes, bishops, and theologians....
Let me speak for the children of divorce, who see their homes torn in two, because of a mother or a father who has shrugged away the vow of permanence. I see them straining to put a fine face on it, to protect the very parents who should have protected them, to squelch back their own tears so as not to hurt those who have hurt them. Who speaks for them, harried from pillar to post? Who pleads their case, whose parents conveniently assume that their children’s happiness must depend upon their own contentment, and not the other way around? Where is my Church’s apostolate for the children sawn in half, while the Solomons of our time looked the other way?
Let me speak for the children thrust into confusion, to justify the confusion of their parents or of people in authority over them. Here is a boy whose father is absent or aloof. He needs to be affirmed in his boyhood, but he shies away from the other boys. Then sidles the teacher into the garden of his boyhood to suggest to him unrealities that he cannot understand. Who speaks for that boy, lonely and hesitant upon the shore, while his more confident fellows splash and swim? Who comes to his assistance to supply the want of fatherly care? Which of my Church’s bishops in all their years have ever turned a single glance his way?...Let me speak for the children exposed to unutterable evils on all sides. Here is a girl at age twelve who has seen things on a screen that her grandmother could never have imagined. She is taking pictures of herself already, and making “friends” among the sons and daughters of Belial. This is happening under our very eyes. She goes to the drug store and must confront magazines for “women” blaring out their headlines about sex and what without any irony goes by the name of “beauty,” and nobody says, “Why should this be?” Who speaks up for her innocence?...Let me speak up for the young people who see the beauty of the moral law and the teachings of the Church, and who are blessed with noble aspirations, but who are given no help, none, from their listless parents, their listless churches, their crude and cynical classmates, their corrupted schools. These youths and maidens in a healthier time would be youths and maidens indeed, and when they married they would become the heart of any parish. Do we expect heroic sanctity from them? Their very friendliness will work against them. They will fall. Do you care? Many of these will eventually “shack up,” and some will leave dead children in the wake of their friendliness. Where are you? You say that they should not kill the children they have begotten, and you are right about that. So why are you shrugging and turning aside from the very habits that bring children into the world outside of the haven of marriage?
Let me speak up for the young people who do in fact follow the moral law and the teachings of the Church. Many of these are suffering intense loneliness. Have you bothered to notice? Have you considered all those young people who want to be married, who should be married, but who, because they will not play evil’s game, can find no one to marry? The girls who at age twenty-five and older have never even been asked on a date? The “men” languishing in a drawn-out adolescence? These people are among us; they are everywhere. Who gives them a passing thought? They are suffering for their faith, and no one cares. Do you care, leaders of my Church?...What help do you give them? Do you not rather at every step exacerbate their suffering, when by your silence and your telling deeds you confirm in them the terrible fear that they have been played for chumps, that their own leaders do not believe, that they would have been happier in this world had they gone along with the world, and that their leaders would have smiled upon them had they done so?
You want more? More people who do not merit a footnote? What about the men and women abandoned by their spouses? Have you stood up for their rights? What about the innocent men who, after they have been abandoned, become in effect slaves to a corrupt and lawless regime? Have you stood up for them?...Who speaks for the penitent, trying to place his confidence in a Church that cuts his heart right out, because she seems to take his sins less seriously than he does?
Venturing forth into the margins, my leaders? You have not placed one toe outside of the plush rugs of your comfort. Do so, I beg you! Come and see all those whom the Lonely Revolution has hurt. Leave your parlors and come to the sheepfold!
