The following open letter from Rev. Fr. G.T. Cooper was addressed to fellow priest Fr. P. Mulholland of Hull in the Sprint of 1984, in gratitude and admiration for the latter priest's blunt talk entitled, "Can we believe in Heaven or Hell?" It seems every bit as appropriate now as it did nearly three decades ago.
Nazareth House
Park Road North
Middlesbrough
Cleveland TS1 3LP
Dear Father Mulholland:
OF COURSE, we cannot believe in Heaven or Hell anymore. Whatever good intentions inspired fat jolly Pope John XXIII and his successors, the de facto consequences of the 'aggiornamento' effected by his Second Vatican Council has been the suppression of Our Lord's teaching about Sin, Death, Judgement and Hell. Everything must be bright, cheerful, optimistic. Bags and bags of 'Gaudiam et Spes'. The trouble is that, if you suppress all Our Lord's teaching on Hell, you must, logically, suppress His teaching on Heaven as well. In fact, there is no future life at all. After death, there is only, in Nietszche's phrase 'ewige Kalte und Finsternis' - 'eternal cold and darkness'.
So there is no Hell. We priests are redundant: mere parasites. The Communists are quite right in putting us into Labour camps to do something useful.
The abolition of Hell has also led to the suppression of Our Lord's teaching on the fewness of the elect, the difficulty of salvation, the narrow gate, the difficult way, the bonds, the outer darkness, the weeping and gnashing of teeth, the everlasting fire, eternal punishment, etc.
There is no Hell. That is why no lads want to be priests: there is nothing for them to do. That is why, since 1969, 60,000 priests have gone off with a woman. Utterly bored with their meaningless priesthood, they have sought satisfaction in sex. That is why the laity are destroying themselves with contraception. Why shouldn't they? After all, the phrase 'mortal sin' is completely meaningless. Little wonder churches are emptying!
In short, thanks to the abolition of Hell, the Church throughout the First World is dying.
Now we have mere humanism: the Church as an agency for the UN and the FAO. Or we could say Amnesty International at prayer...if prayer too weren't 'out'.
God have mercy on us.
(Rev.) G.T. Cooper
Catholic
[Published in issue No. 85, 1984, of Approaches. With thanks to Anthony Fraser.]
1 comment:
Aged parent, If one feels one is reconciled with this "reality" but reads these words and has that feeling of fingernails on the chalkboard, one knows that one is not reconciled. Kyrie eleison .
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