If There Be Fifty Just Men In the City Should They Perish Withal?

I worship in a parish with a liberal Parish Priest in a liberal Diocese. I make small waves. The young curate has begun to learn the Extraordinary Rite, but has told nobody. I have promised to relearn how to serve his Mass: in a form I learnt 44 years ago and used for only three years.

I was feeling pretty pleased with myself, and then clicking on links in a blogroll, probably Philip's, I came across a posting which described a life of resistance to Modernism in a modern English Catholic Diocese which made realise just how craven I am.

John Kearney has found his vocation: it is, in a spirit of orthodoxy and humility, to stand up to the Diocese of Portsmouth. If you read only one thing today, please read this.

I am reminded of a local St Athanasius: somebody who stands up patiently for God's Truth, but instead of (no doubt as well as) against the pagan, has to do so against the people who claim to be representing God's Church. He has faced the people who do not attack through Ad Clerum confidential letters, but through browbeating ordinary members of the Church into thinking that they, the experts, now understand how the Church of the Ages has been systematically wrong for the last 1900 years. He has stood up to them and they have ridiculed him.

I quoted something by Evelyn Waugh yesterday: "The Mystical Body doesn't strike attitudes and stand on its dignity. It accepts suffering and injustice. It is ready to forgive at the first sign of compunction." This, it seems to me, it what John Kearney has done on behalf of the Mystical Body, and is doing. I am proud to be in Communion with him, but am not worthy to shine his shoes.