Salford Diocese continues to promote LGBT+ "Mass"
When one considers the paucity of leadership the Catholics of England and Wales are forced to endure, a couple of names consistently float to the surface.
Perhaps the most concerning is Bishop John Stanley Kenneth Arnold, Bishop of Salford. Former Vicar General of Westminster Archdiocese and rumoured to deeply desire the episcopacy of that Archdiocese. He will celebrate ten years as bishop of Salford this September.
Bishop John is a member of the Bishops’ Conference Department for International Affairs; Chair of CAFOD’s Board of Trustees and a Trustee of Caritas Social Action Network. At CAFOD he approved the appointment of the current director who is clearly at odds with Catholic teaching. He is also the Environmental Lead for the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales.He also loves an "LGBTQI+ Mass" - more on some of that stuff here. To me he epitomises so many of the bishops: he likes the trappings and power but is very uncomfortable with what the Church actually teaches.
His diocesan Twitter feed is once again promoting LGBTQIA+++ "Mass":
“Pope Francis asks us to welcome everybody and to accept people as they are, made in the image of God,” Arnold replied, “and I think the Mass should focus primarily on the message of the Scriptures of the day – that we are concerned about the ongoing conversion of all of us.”
I have no doubt every child can. This is not what the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches about this issue and frankly it smacks of moral relativism: Fast becoming the hallmark of this papacy!
They are robbing the faithful of the opportunity of repentance and re-making their lives in the image of Christ. In short, they are doing the opposite of what they are commissioned to do!
So Arnold is demonstrably bad at teaching the faith. His governance at CAFOD has led to the appointment of a director who has expressed opinions fundamentally at odds with Catholic teaching in pertinent areas. He must be a financial wizard or something then? No, in fact from the figures, it looks like Salford Diocese is in serious financial crisis:
Oh dear.
So is it vocations? He must be attracting lots of new priests to the diocese with his forward thinking, progressive agenda, right? Let's have a look on the Diocese of Salford Annual Report and Accounts:
Oh dear. So that's a disaster too!
Is Bishop John completely out of his depth here?
Warbling on about the environment, dumbing down or totally contradicting Catholic teaching, killing his diocese through bad stewardship, bad teaching, mis-management. Are we supposed to just let this happen until the diocese is bankrupt and everything the Catholics before us built up has been destroyed?
It's hard to read much on the Salford Diocesan website with a straight face.
ReplyDeleteIt exudes a certain smug and self-congratulatory tone as it invites readers to climb aboard Big Frankie's new and eco-friendly Disneyfied ' The Big Listen' Church. LGBT-themed Masses? No, thank you.
Let Salford wallow in its infantilisms 'and suchlike fooleries'.
The promoter of these events in the Salford diocese is Mark Dowd who published an autobiographical book entitled 'Catholic and Gay' (2017). He is from Salford and was educated at De La Salle College, Pendleton and St. Cassians College, Kintbury, Berkshire. He says he was sexually abused by an unnamed FSC brother at the College (procured by Brother Dominic Green FSC). Green was the vocations director for the order. Since I attended both schools [Pendleton and Kintbury 1967-72] I can speak from some personal knowledge of the situation and what I have written he has already made known online. The masses began in the Jesuit church of the Holy Name on Oxford Road in 2019, opposite the student union where there was a violent disturbance recently [March 02] against Pro-Life students, probably orchestrated by grass-roots, left-wing activists who are currently pandemic in the city. Bishop Arnold said the first mass and, subsequently, Jesuit and diocesan priests have continued these sacrileges. The masses are now said at St. Augustine's, All Saints, further down Oxford Road from the Holy Name. It was declassified as a parish, along with the Holy Name, decades ago and has been virtually unused for years. I was a history undergraduate at Manchester University [1974-78] when there was a vigorous Jesuit presence at the Holy Name. They later abandoned the church and it was handed over to a convert called Raymond Matus who wanted to establish an Oratorian community there. With the arrival of Arnold in Salford they were moved to St.Chad's on Cheetham Hill Road and the Jesuits returned to the Holy Name. They lived in St.Paul's Catholic Chaplaincy next to the Holy Name for some years hoping to acquire status as an Oratorian house. Matus had two "boys" there, Karl and Benedict, but they are no longer in the frame, because he was in the habit of making fun of their cooking during his sermons. It would be true to say that they are not all they appear to be and are of the same orientation as Dowd. Matus once preached a sermon on Ascension Thursday (which I heard in person) in which he said "When Christ became man he set aside his omnipotence and omniscience". I wrote to Matus twice for a clarification of this openly heretical statement but never received a reply. I wrote to the then bishop of Salford, Patrick Altham Kelly, now teaching philosophy at Valladolid, and he assured me that Matus was an excellent priest and what was I complaining about? Enough for now.
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