Two years ago, I established a tab on this website which would provide links to articles about the proposed Fifth Plenary Council of the Catholic Church in Australia. Hearing about the plan had at once aroused my suspicions. The dissenters and destroyers have been hard at work ever since the Church Fathers paraded into St Peters to begin the Second Vatican in October 1962.
As it turned out, my gut reaction to the news was spot on. The effusions of many of the organisers made it clear that a powerful group aimed to take charge and make radical changes to the Church’s governance and doctrine. The document ‘Continuing the Journey’ and the views of Sister Nathalie Becquart, a popular invitee to radical groups around the Catholic world, were explicit enough. See my previous comments about this pretend religious sister. So, I was gratified to come across an article by Professor Greg Craven in the Catholic Weekly, outlining similar misgivings.
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Greg Craven: Plenary ‘reformers’ are really demolitionists
By Professor Greg Craven, The Catholic Weekly, December 2, 2021
Even Beelzebub must feel sorry for the Catholic Church in Australia. Beset externally by enemies in the media, politics and what passes for the intelligentsia, it now has its own self-righteous fifth column.
These worthies like to describe themselves as “reformers”, but they want to reform the Church the way woodworm reforms a house. They really are demolitionists, hoping to clear away the existing Church, and replace it with one in their own image.
On 18 November, the demolitionists had their electronic clan-gathering, grandly titled a “Convocation” around “The Future of Catholicism in Australia”.
The website is very proud that 1500 people participated. To put this in context, the last census revealed 5,210,000 Catholics, so that is a whopping 0.03 per cent. Or for further comparison, outside COVID, 3,000 people visit St. Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney each day. A quarter of a million attended Pope Benedict’s World Youth Day Mass at Randwick in 2008.
So why would one worry about this micro-swarm of gnats? Mainly because, in the wake of the appalling scandal over Church child abuse, some Bishops are briskly walking scared.