The Desolation of the Church

The desolation of the stripped altar strikes me forcefully this year.  This is exactly where the Church is at right now.  The Holy Thursday stripping of the altar is surely prophetic, since eventually we reached a point where altars would come pre-stripped and pre-desolated, to match the stripped and desolated new rites of Mass and the Sacraments that were to be foisted on us.

(photograph from Wikimedia Commons by Martin Geisler)

The deliberate desolating of Catholic churches, which started even before Vatican II and the Novus Ordo Missae, must in turn be prophetic of an even greater desolation that we are now living in: the desolation of true shepherds in the Church, the suspension of the magisterium, and the appalling spectacle of so many in the hierarchy, all the way to the very top, filling their valuable time with utter irrelevancies, and even openly and actively working for the other side.  Even on the morrow of the consecration of Russia, this is going on very notoriously in Germany, where bishops appear to have formally rejected the Church's doctrines on sexual morality.  

Does this prove that the collegial consecration of Russia did not in fact take place?  I don't know.  I am on record rejecting the theory that Francis Bergoglio is not the true Pope, and saying that I think the consecration has now been performed as asked, even with its accretions of fol-de-rol, but I have also never ruled out the possibility that I am wrong.  Some critics of the Francis consecration cite to Sr. Lucia's account of our Lord's explanation that the consecration had to be done by the Pope in union with all the bishops so that there could be no mistaking the effects as being attributable to His mother's Immaculate Heart, and point to the fact that so far, it seems like nothing has happened.  Must a dramatic reversal of the devil's fortunes in the world follow instantaneously on the heels of the consecration in order for it to be legit?  Maybe.  That would seem to be the most obvious way of establishing cause and effect.  But I don't know that that is the only way.  I do know that in my own experience, whenever God has granted my prayers for a huge, life-changing grace, a period of penance -- mitigated in both length and severity, yet still producing real suffering -- has always preceded the moment in which the grace is actually given.  Maybe, at this late date, when the errors of Russia have not only spread throughout the world but gained ascendency, we are going to have a similar period of penance before the graces are actually given.  It's not like we don't deserve that, and much more.

Now we come back to the liturgical desolation in which Lent culminates.  What we seem to forget is that, unlike the devil, whose infernal headquarters is probably designed and furnished in the same brutalist style as that pictured above, our mother the Church does not intend this desolation to be permanent.  Permanent desolation, in which we have entrenched ourselves for decades in the name of bringing the Church into step with the Modern World, brings on despair, and despair leads to hell.  The desolation of Good Friday and Holy Saturday is mitigated in both duration and severity.  The altar is bare and the tabernacle empty, but they are not destroyed, leaving us with good hope for their restoration.  And this very short, hopeful desolation leads to the Resurrection and eternal life.