FSSP Priest: "the beating heart of this country is in our tabernacles"

I love the FSSP, I love them simply because they appear to be a last bastion of true supernatural faith. That's not to say that there is real faith in other places, but simply to say, in my experience, the priests of the FSSP live a day-to-day metaphysical reality which I find deeply inspiring and deeply lacking in many places. The FSSP stands in stark contradiction to the kind of wordly priests who seem to abound these days; those that do everything they can to explain away Church teaching as something out of touch, old fashioned, or more complex than the plain truth it "seems" to proclaim.

Fr Armand de Malleray heads the FSSP here in the UK. He is genial, approachable but also someone it is easy to look up to. He is a born leader (at least in my estimation) and carries himself in a way which shows he is at ease with this responsibility.

Father Armand addressed the state-encouraged adulation of the NHS in his Good Shepherd Sunday homily at St. Mary’s Shrine in Warrington, England this week (see video below).

“Much as I agree with Prime Minister Boris Johnson in his praise of many NHS doctors and nurses, I cannot agree with his unconditional statement on Easter Sunday last, just two weeks ago: ‘We will win because our NHS is the beating heart of this country. It is the best of this country. It is incomparable. It is powered by love,’”
“With due respect to the Prime Minister, as a Catholic priest, as a shepherd of souls, I must state that the beating heart of this country is in our tabernacles,”
“That beating heart is called Jesus Savior of Man, Iesus Hominem Salvator, or by his initials IHS.”

This expresses a discomfort I think many of us feel. Although we recognise the great work being done by the health service at a particularly challenging time -- this is their job (my own wife is a nurse). De Malleray’s homily addressed the almost total suppression of sacramental ministry to Catholics in Britain because of the pandemic, something he believes is “the worst calamity in the world.”

“Shepherds must not play it down,” he stated. “Shepherds must not excuse it or explain it away. Shepherds must weep for such an evil, and shepherds must actively present to the government the spiritual needs of their flocks.”

In the locked-down United Kingdom, it has become a weekly ritual to applaud and cheer for NHS staff and other “essential workers” on Thursdays at 8:00 p.m. Some people have been publicly shamed by neighbours for not making it to their doorstep for the ritual adulation. This cult-like forced worship is a long way from balanced, as de Malleray made clear:

“How is it possible that Mary Stopes, the main abortion provider in the UK, can boast of the following on its website?” the priest demanded, and read its statement, “COVID-19 measures to not impact our abortion care [sic] clinics as we are providing an essential medical service. You ARE allowed to leave your home to visit our clinics.”

The NHS itself directs abortion-minded women to Mary Stopes through its website. To illustrate the tax-funded medical system’s complicity in abortion, De Malleray also read aloud the NHS’ online claims that “impartial information and support” are available at a number of abortion businesses, including Marie Stopes, and its warnings against “so-called crisis pregnancy centres that claim to provide impartial advice but often do not.”

“My friends, who can ignore that what the NHS calls impartial advice is a heavy and systematic pressure to kill innocent children at cost?” the priest demanded.

“Who can ignore that what the NHS calls ‘partial’ is a compassionate and respectful help to save unborn children?”

De Malleray compared the 20,000 death attributed to the coronavirus by Sunday with the number of abortions committed in the United Kingdom every year: 209,000. The nation’s doctors and nurses are directly responsible for these deaths, he observed.

“Unlike the attributed coronavirus deaths, deaths by abortion are not caused by underlying conditions,” the priest stated.

“Deaths by abortion don’t occur against the efforts of the doctors and nurses, but through their wilful and personal intervention. Deaths by abortion are not accidents occurring by the negligence of NHS staff,” he continued.

“On the contrary, they are considered central to the mission and the ethos of the NHS and of the state.”

De Malleray contrasted the Prime Minister’s Easter Sunday adulation for the NHS with his failure to thank either God or those who prayed for him when he was hospitalised with COVID-19, saying that it showed British society’s spiritual decline.

“That on Easter Sunday morning, when the world celebrated the Resurrection of the Lord, a Prime Minister once baptized Catholic should not have a single word of thanks to the Master of Life for saving his and for the many Christians who offered prayers and sacrifices for his recovery, showed how dramatically we have lost contact with supernatural realities.”

Easter regularly goes unmentioned by the political classes of the UK, however the increasingly marginalised Liberal Democrats are joining Muslims in fasting for Ramadan, with a heavy dose of public virtue signalling thrown in for good measure.

As James Crossley pointed out this week:

"Religion instead functions much as an Afghan rug might in a well-to-do liberal household — something ethnic enough to show that the owners aren’t racist but without any illiberal cultural baggage."

De Malleray stated that good shepherds among the clergy were, “after the example of our Lord, with prayer and sacrifice,” doing everything in their power to return access to the churches to the faithful. He envisioned the Lord asking every priest at his judgement what he did to bring the sacraments to His flock and whether, alongside his adulation of the NHS, the pastor proclaimed the “IHS, Jesus Savior of Man.”

Fr Armand also stated that good shepherds will remind their flocks that their bodies were made for their souls, that the only virus that can kill souls is sin, and that the only remedy for sin is “IHS, Jesus Savior of Man.”