I recently received a letter from one of the local leading lights of the dissident group ACTA questioning my judgement for asking whether Deacon Donelly or Bishop Campbell was the first to make public the bishops request for the deacon to have a period of prayer and reflection, and in effect to close his blog down. My correspondent sent me a copy of the statement from Deacon Nick's bog where it clearly stated, that the original statement was actually released by Bishop Campbell's diocesan press office, so really it was a 'no-brainer', his Lordship did it. Letters from such people who try to create a sense of fear in the Church fill me with a certain dread because they normally have a certain malicious intent, you have ask, what are they up to?
Well, I am afraid I am going to do be a little injudicious now, by asking another question, as has been asked elsewhere, who was the interlocutor of Robert Mickens, the now suspended Rome correspondent of the perfidious Tablet, the 'International Catholic Weekly' is. Apparently on Twitter he is a certain 'Chris Grady'. Who is Chris Grady?
Now, I and other clergy who blog have received comments in the past from somebody who identifies themselves as 'Chris Grady'. The ones which I have received I have not published, they are normally malicious and revolve around sexual themes or were simply abusive about Pope Benedict, sometimes both, their content would seem to suggest that the writer was a member of a certain 'lobby' group. On one occasion I had cleric here, he was and is in good standing with the Church and his diocese and because he was also involved in education had been through the whole plethora of safeguarding procedures, Mr Grady apparently wrote making a series of unsubstantiated allegations to my diocese, which caused more than a little distress to me and the other cleric, and set up an uncomfortable situation in my diocese; none of us want to be the cause problems with the 'Safeguarding Office' or even be thought of as being lax in any sense in our parish procedures.
Now it is probably true there are a number of Chris Gradies and the one who hopes for Pope Benedict's death is not the same who leaves hate messages on blogs about him, and this is merely a coincidence but then maybe not. Mischief, innuendo, creating an air of suspicion; all those sins which St Paul speaks of tend to abound where there is an absence of charity, sin is a contagious leprosy that consumes everyone around it, even, maybe especially the innocent, it is worth remembering the Fathers identified charity with orthodoxy and malice with heterodoxy. As Chrysostom says: when one touches a serpent, even with a stick, it rises and tries to strike you, or as we might say today: you can tell a lot about a man (or even a magazine?) by the friends he keeps.
16 comments:
all that is hidden will be made known; Our Lord has warned us. there's something a bit off about using a real-person picture as a fake identifier. I'm guessing Grady and Biretta don't go together?
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why not use that pic of the snake? no mistakes.
I see his facebook account has changed its picture to that of Fr Z. A rather insouciant attitude to copyright?
Father,
I've since cut off viewing it for the sake of my mental health and blood pressure, but I used to peek in on the odious Pray Tell blog now and then just to see what the dark side was up to. I remember a frequent commentor by the name of "Chris Grady" there who always had something acerbically unpleasant to say.
I searched the blog, and it seems virtually all mention of him, and there would've been a lot, has been deleted. Apparently the hand with the scissors missed a few references. I found him mentioned in a post, along with a very brief, but very illustrative comment by him attached, from 2012:
http://www.praytellblog.com/index.php/2012/05/09/pray-tell-onstage-written-on-the-heart/#comments
I'm fairly confident he's your man.
After my experience today I can confirm 'you are not long for the block'.
They have quietly come out of their holes since the new pope took the throne, and made it his own. Masses are slowly being altered to taste. Two changes in the last week alone -inclusive language and blatant omissions from the Missal, "too sensitive to other" Whatever that means
What will become of us?
Cardinal Burke in his TV interview this week publicly stated that Kasper was 'in error' and de facto called him a cheat.
I don't think there will be much of fuss when the inevitable happens, and you are asked to stop blogging. Tragic, but no fuss.
Perhaps all this is a good thing? It needs to come to a head. The poison needs to be drained, purged from the body. October will be the new Spring, one way or another.
I've just gone over to Mr Grady's facebook and I wished I hadn't. The way he and his chums talk about Pope Benedict in other comments is disgusting.
I notice that Paul Inwood blogs on Pray Tell. It's an interesting site and not that bad. The Americans seem well informed. My own pet theory is that the Catholic Church was unintentionally wrecked by the USA in the 1960's as part of the postwar settlement. All this 'Rhine flows into the Tiber' conspiracy theory which keeps the trad bloggers happy is a nonsense. As the late, great Auberon Waugh once wrote of a group of American tourists he spied on the London Underground, they are oblivious to everyone else other than themselves.
Just another of them Comic Singers Father
First let me say, I'm new here, and while I normally would wait a bit before commenting, the above remarks by "Sadie Vacantist", need addressing.
Sadie, while the "blame America" is all too common across the pond, that doesn't mean it should be accepted. Not only is it refective of a hateful, condescending mindset, it's actually blaming the victim, and sinful. The disease that has infected the Catholic, and all other Christian churches didn't originate in the US, and it's been in existence far longer than the 1960s... Marxism, is European in origin, and too many in the UK have flirted with and embraced it. It's not good to allow others to wallow in their sin, Christian love requires informing the sinner, so they cease those acts. Despite Europeans, nearly destroying it's self twice in the last century with communism and socialism, Eastern European communists commiting genocides against tens of millions of Christians, who refused collectivism, you all seem hell bent to keep repeating the mistakes of the past assuming you'll obtain a different result.
It's adherents have been infecting and infiltrating the Catholic and other Christian churches from the 20th century onward. European communist/socialist "theologians" such as Jurgen Moltmann, Johannes Baptist Metz, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, were far more worshipers of the Frankfurt, School, than worshipers of Christ. They inspired the cult of liberation theology, which far from being motivated by compassion for the poor, was proposed by a communist "priest" as a means to exploit the poor, to use them as a cudgel to beat countries into submitting to communism/socialism. Liberation theology, crossed the border into the US and has allowed even more frauds to exploit the positions of trust, clergy have historically had.
If your concern is for the faith, you won't arrive at a solution, by using that concern to let fly with your hatred and bigotry.
MM,
I would blame Americans, in part, but I would go back to the Enlightenment. But then you would counter by suggesting the Protestant Reformation and others maybe Great Schism, yet others the Antioch/Alexandria tension, I suspect it was snake that did it. who first realised our weakness was we are 'oblivious to everyone else other than themselves'.
MM - I don't think the 'blame America' tbeory is that common and as my comment suggests everyone blames the Rhine theologians for the disaster claiming that they were modernists in disguise etc.
I don't doubt marxism played a part but the home of cultural marxism in 1962 was no longer Frankfurt but America - Columbia university in New York.
1962 saw the release of the great John Ford's last masterpiece - "The Man who Shot Liberty Vallance". The film reaches the following conclusion: "this is the West sir, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend". In other words, this brilliant Irish American intellect (more brilliant than the overrated German theologians of the period) was saying what George Orwell had said in his own chef oeuvre fourteen years before: men not only prefer lies to the truth, it's actually worse than that; men worship lies. Ford knows this because he himself has told lies in exchange for money and fame. For unlike Orwell, Ford confesses his own sins in his art as befitting the Catholic mindset.
1962 also saw a Western Europe (and large parts of the World) dominated by the USA both militarily (following WWII) and financially (via Bretton Woods). In my view, the Catholic Church was co-opted into this American project with the Rhine theologians, for example, acting as agents for the process. A process which occurred without notice and, the French apart, unchallenged. Little wonder that the American bishops were so muted about the affair. Our own confused Cardinal, John Heenan, found the American bishops incomprehensible during the council. Perhaps these men sincerely believed that it wouldn't do any harm to export a little bit of the American project here and there even within Catholicism.
Well, the last fifty years have seen the playing out of this failed partnership or synthesis. The American project continues and is now being exported throughout North Africa, the Middle-East and now Ukraine. The collapse of the Church is no more than a minor detail against this background of death destruction. The USA has not exported a dream but a nightmare.
Dear Father Ray,
If Ginge White is correct and indeed "you are not long for the block" (the way things are trending I don't think that is overly pessimistic) I wonder if you might suggest a few books for your little flock here that might sustain us throughout the period of ensuing darkness?
I mean that too. Sort of a Father Ray's Desert Island Bibliography list.
Jadis- perhaps Fr. Z should be notified.
Is there a way that Grady can be reported for abuse on facebook? He wants someone to die, that's an abuse and perhaps it falls into other categories as well.
I wonder if this is the same Chris Grady listed in the preface of "Ceremonies of the modern Roman Rite" by Msgr Peter Elliott?
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