When I visited Medugorje they told me that by chance a all time record 10,000 Irish Pilgrims were visiting Medugorje . Everywhere you went there was Irish accents. This must have been a big change for the Italians as I think they mostly are the main visitor group. About 15 of us went to a restauraunt and I thought a group of Italians were looking at us a bit hostile. My big mountain walking stick fell over and one of them complained, though it might have been because we were drinking too much. One time myself and two friends visited Monte Cassino very early in the morning and the monastery was locked. So we started saying the rosary, singing the Ave between the decades. A large group of Italians came over and joined in , especially the singing. It was so beautiful as the dawn came up in such a Holy spot. At the end one of the Italians asked us where we were from. When we said , 'Ireland' she said 'Ah of course Holy Ireland' and they clapped us. Lovely moment.
I especially remember praying the rosary at the Blue Cross at night with Italians, Croatians and German pilgrims all in our own language and joining in the hymns with the boys from Cennacolo. Happy days, will we ever see them again
I just got home from Mass. I had read that Priests would be sprinkling heads with ashes due to covid. So when it came my turn I noticed Father Joji had a box of q tips! clever, so got the cross on my forehead.
The Italians have quite a reputation around Medjugorje. But when they pray, you forgive them everything. Such uninhibited passion, gripping railings around the statue of Our Lady, talking at the statue as though she was really in front of them, crying, pleading their petitions. Quite awe-inspring.
I have a very different memory of Monte Cassino, lol. When I was a college student living in Rome, 3 friends and I stayed out a little too late and missed the last bus back to campus. So we hopped on a train trying to get as close as possible but weren't sure what we were doing and ended up missing our stop. It was frigid that night, and we panicked and stayed on the train until the ticket man came and threw us out....in Monte Cassino, at almost 1am. It was pitch black, except for one tiny hot dog place called 9 Inch Dog, where we bought one hot dog to split between the 4 of us and stayed warm till they closed at 1am. We shivered through the dark streets (I was shaking hard under 2 thick coats) and peered up the mountain at the monastery of Monte Cassino, wishing we could ask for help. We ended up spending the night in the entrance to a bancomat, lol. We were able to catch a train back to Rome in the morning. A couple days later we were all violently ill, and it spread through the whole campus, heh. Not fun at the time, but what a memory!
Q tips at our parish as well. They also made up small bags of ashes to bring home to our loved ones who could not attend Mass, my parents were so grateful for this.
Our priest was not allowed to give us the ashes so he put them in Holy Water and went up and down the aisle and sprinkled us.
Our churches will be distributing ashes on Sunday since there's snow and power outages everywhere today. I'm curious if theyll do crosses on our foreheads or the new sprinkling.
Monte Cassino the town is pretty dead end. The Monastery itself is wonderful. I went into a little place in town to buy dinner looking froward to taste some wonderful Italian food and it was pretty grim. I don;t know what they did to that poor chicken. It was funny in the hotel as all the guests were watching 'Rocky Bilbo', fighting on v and cheering him on as though it was a real boxing match. The Monastery reminded me of the Shrine of Czestechowa, the Black Madonna, in Poland. It was all bombed flat of course , the town and Monastery during the war. Which explains a lot of why the town is such a dead zone.
My Parish reflects in itself the State of the Church in the West today. From the outside it seems spectacularly successful, economically and as an organisation. It owns two Churches, one of them brand new and costing a fortune. Schools, Old Peoples, home and fold, its own Credit Union , youth club, three priests, a community of nuns to help and who knows what else? Whats not to like? Well whats not to like is that it is dying in spectacular fashion, that's what not to like. It rather reminds me of the most beautiful Royal Castle from the outside. But when you go to visit and look a little closer you can see the sign of Termites, dust and decay everywhere and suddenly it comes home to you it is just about to collapse to the ground in a pile of dust. First of all people are voting with their feet. People simply are not going to Church anymore. They are voting with their feet and leaving. Those who do attend ten to be very elderly and female. Old Ladies in fact. Our Lady of La Salette commented on this fact a long time ago, that only old women were remaining Faithful. Of the three Priests one of them had to be shipped in from India because we literally don;t get any vocations to the priesthood anymore. Of the two other priests one of them is approaching ninety years old and should have been able to retire decades ago. The Parish Priest is in his sixties. We had three Churches but one of them started to fall apart and they had no dough to replace it so it has been closed and left to fall down, derelict. The Catholics that remain in my opinion believe all kinds of weird stuff, such as Sodomy is fine, that there is no such thing as the Real Presence and so on. This is the result of bad Catholic Education for decades, of children being taught be people who were not themselves truly Catholic in any real sense. The last straw is that our Parish has suicided by deciding it is non essential during the Chinese virus threat. There is just no come back from this. The Faithful who have had the Church doors locked in their faces for so long will agree with the Hierarchy and priests that religion is not essential and decide they no longer need something that there own Clergy have told them that they can mage along fine without. So we have a Zombie Church more nor less going along like a vehicle operating on fumes. How did this happen? The answer is quite simple. People stopped praying.
I think when we attend Church today we are meeting two different Churches. A Church that is a Zombie Church (one that is dead about still walking) and a Church that is just being born. These two Churches pass each other in the aisles but never really recognise each other as being different. How to recognise the Zombie Church? Well the Zombie Church is very,very much like the world around you at the moment. This is because it is imbued with the Spirit of the World. The Media and politicians love the Zombie Church and applaud it like crazy. Even when the Zombie Church appears to differ form the Secular world they are very often careful to signal that they are not going to actually do anything about it. So they might say, I don't like abortion..BUT.. or Sodomy is maybe not so nice..BUT. or I believe in Marriage... BUT so they are always with the BUTS.
Poor Joe. Actually, talking about Zombies, I was listening to Dr Marshall to today talking about the average age of the Curial Caridnals, many of them make Joe Biden look like a bright young thins, Nanci too. Apparently the reason why he wants to keep on these very, , very old men in their jobs is that he knows he can trust them. They think like he does. They have to resign but he is not accepting their resignations. https://www.ncronline.org/news/vati...an-bishops-serve-past-age-75-new-motu-proprio
You just wrote the one of the last chapters of the book on the state of the church....UNTIL ..the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary! Until then, the stench of death suffocates..... It’s so hard to witness...good thing we know how the book ends!
The Church reminds me of a big old house. Sometimes the owner of the house has to get new work done is and in order to do so he gets good workmen in, such as St Francis of Assisi, St Dominic, St Ignatious of Loyola and so on. Sometimes the work is relatively minor lie a new kitchen. But sometimes the entire edifice collapses as it did with the Fall of the Roman Empire with the re seeding of the Church by the Irish Monks or the Great Protestant Revolt which was countered by the COunter Reformations saints. The present Fall of the Church is without doubt the Greatest in History. It is a slow stately collapse so many people do not even notice the ceiling fall around out ears. Just as it is the greatest Fall so it will require the greatest rebuilding and the greatest Popes and saints in all of history to do so. This is the work that Our Lady refers to as , 'The Triumph of the Immaculate Heart'. Out of which the Church will rise anew like a Phoenix but in form utterly unlike what she has been before.
