These Last Days News - May 30, 2014
3-3. 50 Years Later the Devastating Fruits of Vatican II by Patrick J. Buchanan...
"Satan was present, he listened with careful ears at the great Council. He awaited every move, and he placed his agents among you! Recognize and reconstruct your path. You have been deluded. You are on the wrong road. Turn about now, or you will sow the seeds for your own destruction!
"How many warnings will you receive before the hand of your Father will descend upon you? No date do I give unto all mankind, but only to few. All those who accept the grace given freely for the asking will not be caught unawares. They will prepare themselves. All mankind upon earth should prepare for his death."
- The Bayside Prophecies
Our Lady of the Roses, August 14, 1974
"Yes, My child, even with Vatican II, it started out with the best resolves, but then satan took over the scene. And with his agents he reached into the highest professions, the highest league of the hierarchy, until it saddens Me to say that many priests now are on the road to perdition and taking many others with them."
- The Bayside Prophecies
Jesus, July 25, 1985
WorldNetDaily.com COMMENTARY by Patrick J. Buchanan October 11, 2012
Thirty-seven years after the end of the only church council of the 20th century, the jury has come in with its verdict: Vatican II appears to have been an unrelieved disaster for Roman Catholicism.
Liars may figure, but figures do not lie. Kenneth C. Jones of St. Louis has pulled together a slim volume of statistics he has titled Index of Leading Catholic Indicators: The Church Since Vatican II.
His findings make prophets of Catholic traditionalists who warned that Vatican II would prove a blunder of historic dimensions, and those same findings expose as foolish and naive those who believed a council could reconcile Catholicism and modernity. When Pope John XXIII threw open the windows of the church, all the poisonous vapors of modernity entered, along with the Devil himself.
Here are Jones’ grim statistics of Catholicism’s decline:
Priests. While the number of priests in the United States more than doubled to 58,000, between 1930 and 1965, since then that number has fallen to 45,000. By 2020, there will be only 31,000 priests left, and more than half of these priests will be over 70.
Ordinations. In 1965, 1,575 new priests were ordained in the United States. In 2002, the number was 450. In 1965, only 1 percent of U.S. parishes were without a priest. Today, there are 3,000 priest less parishes, 15 percent of all U.S. parishes.
Seminarians. Between 1965 and 2002, the number of seminarians dropped from 49,000 to 4,700, a decline of over 90 percent. Two-thirds of the 600 seminaries that were operating in 1965 have now closed.
Sisters. In 1965, there were 180,000 Catholic nuns. By 2002, that had fallen to 75,000 and the average age of a Catholic nun is today 68. In 1965, there were 104,000 teaching nuns. Today, there are 8,200, a decline of 94 percent since the end of Vatican II.
Religious Orders. For religious orders in America, the end is in sight. In 1965, 3,559 young men were studying to become Jesuit priests. In 2000, the figure was 389. With the Christian Brothers, the situation is even more dire. Their number has shrunk by two-thirds, with the number of seminarians falling 99 percent. In 1965, there were 912 seminarians in the Christian Brothers. In 2000, there were only seven. The number of young men studying to become Franciscan and Redemptorist priests fell from 3,379 in 1965 to 84 in 2000.
Catholic schools. Almost half of all Catholic high schools in the United States have closed since 1965. The student population has fallen from 700,000 to 386,000. Parochial schools suffered an even greater decline. Some 4,000 Catholic high schools have disappeared, and the number of pupils attending has fallen below 2 million – from 4.5 million.
Though the number of U.S. Catholics has risen by 20 million since 1965, Jones’ statistics show that the power of Catholic belief and devotion to the Faith are not nearly what they were.
Catholic Marriage. Catholic marriages have fallen in number by one-third since 1965, while the annual number of annulments has soared from 338 in 1968 to 50,000 in 2002.
Attendance at Mass. A 1958 Gallup Poll reported that three in four Catholics attended church on Sundays. A recent study by the University of Notre Dame found that only one in four now attend.
Only 10 percent of lay religious teachers now accept church teaching on contraception. Fifty-three percent believe a Catholic can have an abortion and remain a good Catholic. Sixty-five percent believe that Catholics may divorce and remarry. Seventy-seven percent believe one can be a good Catholic without going to mass on Sundays. By one New York Times poll, 70 percent of all Catholics in the age group 18 to 44 believe the Eucharist is merely a “symbolic reminder” of Jesus.
At the opening of Vatican II, reformers were all the rage. They were going to lead us out of our Catholic ghettos by altering the liturgy, rewriting the Bible and missals, abandoning the old traditions, making us more ecumenical, and engaging the world. And their legacy?
Four decades of devastation wrought upon the church, and the final disgrace of a hierarchy that lacked the moral courage of the Boy Scouts to keep the perverts out of the seminaries, and throw them out of the rectories and schools of Holy Mother Church.
Patrick J. Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party's candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and editor of The American Conservative. Buchanan served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national TV shows, and is the author of nine books. His latest book is "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?"
"Therefore, I warn you now as your God: You will stop your intricacies within My Church. You will stop experimenting. I gave you the rules to follow many years ago, two thousand years approximately. And why now, two thousand years later, do you deem it necessary to change My Church upon earth? I, your God, say to you, you will be judged accordingly. You will return My Church to its former glory, and in that manner you will have more vocations and more entering the seminaries, and not fleeing from them as they hear the heresies and all other innovations that are going on within My Church. This is My last and final word to My clergy: Change now or suffer a just punishment and banishment.”
- The Bayside Prophecies
Jesus, June 18, 1986
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