22 Jan 22: Cvs

Even before Covid came along I was rejected by my local clergy and unable to be anointed when going in for some hospital procedures - is there any reason for this in reality, or was it just some ecclesiastical hatred towards people of my working class area?

Responding as best one can to some of the understandable but somewhat slightly unique reasonings of the peoples of urban parishes, it seems that the fairest answer is that Covid is a legitimate reason for most delays in pastoral sacramenting, though it might not be a comprehensive reason for avoiding an anointing that is much demanded from some poor little old lady on the distant parish boundaries, but clearly Covid is not always the universal explanation for such delays. There is maybe a more prosaic but more complex answer still available to this Question though, which the parishioner has not quite alluded to, setting aside the understandable shibboleth that clergy can have upper class notions and despise the working classes below them; such a theory though natural to a political mindset in a political village smallville Tennessee setting is unlikely to be the reason for this delay in anointing. Clergy do not think quite like that. It is not in their jerky beef packages. The real solution might lie elsewhere, so do allow me to explain this complex but sudden shift that might have overtaken the good lady through no fault of her own: Since the Second Vatican Council a change was introduced to the pastoral praxes of many parishes with regard to anointing. Since that council all that was required to justify the considerable spiritual somewhat dangerous energies of anointing was some presence of “some danger” to the patient, though not periculo in mortis, but where local parishes and their clergies at popular request are reverting to Tradition, to a new tradition guided format, then this justification for a general anointing generally deployed gives way to the more classical definition of the cause - “in danger of death”, so there has to be a “proximate danger of death” before tradition-guided clergy now stir from their red chaises longues, and minor procedures to leg and arm or whichever no longer qualify as proximate “dangers of death.” Hence the delay probably in this interesting and unique case, IF the local clergies have returned to Tradition for their pastoral reasons for doing things. There are many reasons why a parish clergy Admin might resort to or rather go on to Tradition guided formats, and not just theological ones either, not least the current problem among the woke populations of trendy but olde worlde cities of mass formation hypnosis if not psychosis, as Dr Robbie Malone calls it all out at the present time alongside Dr Steve James; but even before Covid there might have been a decision to change and move on to a 2005 format eventually, shifting pastoral praxis on to the methods of the German Army under Benedict, thus, though not the efficient material cause of the change, Covid itself too might have precipitated the change of praxis in this little old lady's area, since Covid unexpectedly exposed those strange pre-existing flaws and problems in the Novus Ordo style modern parishes after 2005, culminating in an apex and zenith of crisis among the Christian faithful in 2019. Let us briefly adumbrate how this strange and supernatural anomaly actually occurred:

Covid exposed the following pre-existing flaws in Post-conciliar catholicism:

1. Superficiality - lack of spiritual serenity in many noise-guided and hyper-activism guided presbyteries;

2. Invalidity - presbyteries lacking any kind of spiritual intentionality to do what holy mother Church wishes to be done;

3. Not thinking what the Church thinks when she is imposing a sacrament;

4. Not even knowing how the Church is feeling and thinking - no sentire cum Ecclesia discernible;

5. No post-conciliar teaching amounting to doctrine especially on the collective wishes of the presbyterium;

6. The Centre of the Faith having fallen out of the middle of the picture due to Extremism on both sides, to right and left;

7. Verbosity in religion as a kind of horizontal substitute for sacramental theology;

8. No sacramental theology accompanying the key 7 sacraments;

9. No theology pure and simple - no gestures to patristic theologians;

10. Lack of customs and tradition guided mores fidelium, thus loss of foundations to church;

11. Lack of natural theology doctrine of Vatican I or even Vatican II;

12. No conciliar theology present from the aulas of the last council - no formation, except mass formation hypnosis if not psychosis.

So some clergies in some areas of the Midlands have decided to adopt the 3 R's of a return to old custom and old praxis - Retrieval, Restoration, Recovery; of Tradition guided Tradition. The good lady might have suddenly found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time when the goalposts without warning shifted. Such things can happen. They have been happening ever since Benedictus XVI came to power in 2005 wherein he was elected by a majority as pope. The rest is history.