This happened this morning...

I was out and about before 7am today. I wanted to get to Panera early to get a good variety of bagels for Christmas morning. Variety dwindles early so you have to be Johnny OntheSpot.

I stopped by CVS hoping to pick up stocking stuffers before the madness but it didn't open until 9. On my way back to the car, a well-dressed gentleman approached to complain about the fact they weren't open. I laughed and made a remark about the inconvenience and started walking back to my car. The dude followed and before you know it, he was hitting me up for a date. I declined.

As I was trying to politely walk away in the drizzle, thinking in my head "Get me out of this -I don't have time for this Lord", he began to tell me his life story.

Yep: He was a fallen away Catholic who didn't believe in sins.

He doesn't go to Church anymore because he doesn't sin. Said he went to Catholic schools for 12 years and the priests explained to him all about how Church teaching was wrong. He said what I needed was to talk directly to a priest who will tell me the same thing. He is living at a motel because he lost his home. He is 65 and in great health. He's down to smoking pot every 30 days or so. He was mighty proud to tell me that at 65 years old, he had a 35 year-old girlfriend up until a few days ago. She met someone else while she was in jail in Boston.

A real winner slipped right through his fingertips.

Apostate priests stratagem led to a train wreck and he doesn't even know it. He was happy as a pig in mud. Blaming his brother with the fat wife who swindled his mother's house out from under his Jerry Springer backside.

You can't make this stuff up.

I explained that he was lied to and tried to encourage him to go to Church, pick up the resources on examination of conscience and go to Confession and Mass directly after, but he wasn't having it. People stewing in their sins are bewildered by those who use Church teaching and Sacraments to stay in the state that offers salvation.

Every time we turn around the pope is explaining how we are a thorn in his side.



Not to be missed is the line where Crux refers to Pope Francis as "master of discernment".

Francis, a master of discernment, did that yesterday with the Curia, even using his annual address to portray Christmas as an eye-opening opportunity to distinguish between good and bad.

Is that what they're calling misleading people with heresy now?

Ramping up the desert-father ferocity, Francis then critiqued the way that some of those he had appointed to further his reform had been corrupted by ambition or vainglory.

When he had to let them go, they portrayed themselves as victims. Rather than issuing a ‘mea culpa,’ they had blamed their departure on the pope being misinformed, or the Vatican ‘old guard.’ They remained, in short, self-focused, unconverted, and in desolation.

Because living in a world without his ideas is "in desolation"

And this description of a church that serves mammon:

Francis’s Curia, in short, models a global servant Church, as opposed to a monarchic overlord or a corporate headquarters.

You know, the monarchic overlord headquarters that healed the sick, raised the dead, cleansed the lepers and casts out devils.

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.


I get freaked out when I run into victims of the counterfeit church. They are so out of it. Like they're under the spell of something.

I'm not the least bit exaggerating when I say it feels like this:










Here's a guy holed up in a hotel smoking pot, who just lost his girlfriend to someone she met while in jail - and he's trying to persuade me to go see the morlock master of discernment priests who led him into this bunker?

I think I'll stick with the 'desolation' of sobriety, the truth and Sacraments.