HOLY NUISANCE

I've just read, and posted a comment on, Richard Collins's powerful post "What Do We Expect of a Bishop?" http://linenonthehedgerow.blogspot.com/2010/12/what-do-we-expect-of-bishop.html.

Catholics work hard at blogging. They, we, inform, encourage, support, tweet, and sometimes criticise each other. Some are learned and informative, some are prayerful, some, like me, are just angry.

I have a few slight talents, but an immense capacity for anger when I hear or read of a 'shiten shepherd' leading astray his 'clene shepe' (I like Chaucer, too) with misleading statements on matters of Faith, or feeding obscenities to their children (see the excellent John Smeaton, passim) through immoral sex-intruction teaching materials, or putting the favour of malignant megalomaniac over-paid windbags - the "great and the good" above the call to preach the Gospel.

I know I am not alone in my anger.

So would it be worth making a bigger nuisance of ourselves to weak, cowardly, place-seeking, empire buiding, anti-Papal (the list could go on and on) members of the hierarchy, if only to smoke them out?

In a Yorkshire parish, everyone sang 'ee bah gum!' instead of 'kumbayah'. The 'hymn' was dropped.

We could refuse to sing heretical nonsense at Mass.

We could stop giving money to the C.E.S and helping to pay for Greg Pope, and the scandal of unCatholic, obscene, and immoral sex-instruction in Catholic schools.

Ditto Cafod until it toes the line on 'reproductive health'.

Ditto red-nose day.

We could keep the Ecclestone Square bureaucrats busy with heavy dumps of mail after some dubious, idiotic, or plainly heretical pronouncement by a cleric or circular magician.

And we could be a bigger nuisance to government when it promotes or enforces by legislation, anti-Catholic practices.

Fancy being a Holy Nuisance?

I do.