Archbishop Lennon of Cleveland is closing 50 parishes and their beautiful churches, as the
L.A. Times reported (click on this post's title) yesterday.
The parishioners do not believe the archdiocese's claims that the closings are "necessary."
Cleveland's so-called ethnic parishes are being hardest hit. Their parishioners, many of them, are from Eastern Europe. Some are valiant Hungarian Freedom Fighters who fled Hungary after the Hungarian Revolution against the atheistic Communists in 1956.
What is wrong with this picture?
Mosques are going up across the USA.
Protestant Evangelicals get many Catholics to apostasize from the True Faith.
So do Protestant Pentecostals, sects, Buddhism, New Age.
They are growing. And how is our Catholic Church doing?
Our American Catholic hierarchy is finding any and every excuse to shut down our Catholic churches everywhere -- hundreds, by now. And our parochial schools. And our seminaries, including right here in our Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
Many of the closings around the USA are, and have been, of stable and even thriving parishes. These parishes typically have beautiful, majestic, traditional, and obviously Catholic churches -- exactly the kind that far too many in our hierarchy and clergy despise.
Bishops who close parishes claim they don't have enough money anymore. Why is there not enough money?
Well, the gargantuan sex abuse settlements, of course. But also...
Don't look now, but we have many fewer Catholics around than we used to, many fewer than we should have. Why?
Many Catholic bishops and many, many Catholic priests thought they were so smart and so trendy in 1968 when they publicly, and in their confessionals, defied Pope Paul VI and disobeyed his pro-life, pro-marriage, pro-woman, anti-contraception encyclical letter
Humanae Vitae.
Now they, and we, are reaping the harsh and evil consequences of their aping the wicked way of the world and disregarding God's providence and plans for our well-being.
We have too few Catholics today. Unnaturally too few!
Countless Catholics contracept out of existence the children God plans to give them. Countless Catholics abort the children God gives them. They are endangering their souls with these sins.
Catholic pro-lifers prophetically warned, right from the start and all along, that this would happen if American Catholics disobeyed
Humanae Vitae.
Catholic pro-lifers are right, but Catholic liberals never listen to them.
Our Church in America needs to make a formal apology to all Catholics for being pro-contraception, and to make a major push against contraception.
This is all the more urgent because so many Catholics coming here from other countries are liable to start endangering their souls by contracepting and aborting their children.
Things would start getting better if all Catholics trusted God and obeyed Catholic truth... and listened to pro-lifers.