Newsletter for
alumni of The Abbey School, Mt. St. Benedict, Trinidad and Tobago, W.I.
Caracas,
28 of March 2021 No.1008 mar D
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Dear
Friends,
This
month we have published four Circulars, and there seems to be material coming
in every day.
Thanks for your help in making it possible to
continue.
EDITED by Ladislao Kertesz, kertesz11@yahoo.com,
If you would like to subscribe for a whole year and be in the circular’s
mailing list or if you would like to mention any old boy that you would like to
include, write to me.
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GEORGE MICKIEWICZ
<amickiew@att.net>
Sun, Feb 7 at 7:46 AM
Dear Brothers in Christ
Many changes have taken place inside the
Church that we attended on special occasions.
Can you identify them?
Please be extra careful and stay
healthy, safe and sound,
George
-----------------------------------------
Jan Koenraadt
<jankoenraadt@gmail.com>
Mon, Feb 8 at 9:08 AM
Dear George,
There have been some changes in the
Netherlands about the catholic church. It's probably a sad development, but it
is gradually happening over here since about 2005, and I can’t neglect the
messaging of it anymore.
Our King Willem Alexander gave a
Christmas speech to the Dutch people. One thing that made me fall from my chair
is his official announcement that Christmas is the feast of the solstice, the
end of the darkness and the beginning of the light. The birth of Jesus Christ
was not mentioned. Because he said it, I think he expressed the mood of the
entire country. Nobody protested, it was not separately mentioned in the news
broadcasts.
Since about 2005 the point was reached
that because of the lack of people going to church, they couldn't afford the
costs anymore. So, they had to start to close down the church buildings. As
there was no other purpose for the church building, all the other ones were
already changed to conference-, holiday- and marriage locations, they started
to demolish the building. In about ten years time they broke down some 1700
church buildings, on average that is about three buildings each week.
We used to have a lot of monasteries,
especially in the south of the Netherlands. But from the '70s on no new novices
joined the monastery. Here in my hometown is the only Benedictine Monastery.
This one was asked first to be the mentor for Mount St. Benedict as Bahia in
Brazil was lost, but we were too small so they went to the Benedictine
Monastery in Belgium. The monastery in my hometown closed down already.
It is a new era that started after
Woodstock and the Flower Power period in the 70s, that of being the boss over
your own self, not letting the church tell you how to live but determining by
your own self what is best for yourself. So now in 2021 most of the nuns and
monks died out of old age and are buried and the monastery building is rebuilt
to apartment buildings or something of the sort.
Things are changing very much over here.
The catholic church is going out of the society. If you want a church ceremony,
you have to look in the yellow pages to find a proper church. When I came to
live in my town in 1984, there were five active church-parishes. now there are
none. They all closed down. If I want to go and pray to Jesus I really have to
look in the yellow pages and maybe there might be some location in another town
nearby.
I think a message about Christ is not
hitting any ground in the Netherlands anymore. It's a new era.
Hope I answered your question about the
situation over here.
Much greetings
Jan Koenraadt
The State of the Catholic Church in the Netherlands today.
------------------------------------------------------------.
Nigel Boos <nigelboos@gmail.com>
To: Jan & Berthy Koenraadt
Mon, Feb 8 at 9:39 PM
Dear Jan,
Thank you for your very interesting
statement on the state of the Catholic Church today in the Netherlands. To my
mind this subject has not been well discussed in the media and it comes as a
great surprise to me to find that your country, one of the true bastions of old
in its history of pride and defence of our faith, has been so severely,
shockingly diminished and destroyed.
Dutch Saints who together had built up
and maintained a healthy, strong church must be turning in their graves today
and one wonders who will next arise and provide a new voice for the faithful
remnant who still hold on to their faith in Jesus Christ.
The present time in which we live must
be a very sad one for those who still hold onto their faith, and Satan is
having a heyday with his seeming conquests over Catholicism. But I sincerely
believe that we are today being called upon to be what we were baptized to be -
i.e. to be Catholic in the true sense of the word. We should continue to attend
Mass, go to the Sacraments, say our prayers and offer our sacrifices for the good
of the country, and for the grace of God to inundate the Netherlands once
again.
The Church might be reeling today, and
may continue like this for a long time yet, but in the end, we know who wins
the battle. Christus vincit! Let us hold onto that strong belief, and
let us hope and pray that the Bishops of the Netherlands will accept their
responsibilities and lead their flocks safely to their eternal destiny.
I call upon all our MSB friends and
classmates of long ago, wherever we now live, to undertake small personal
sacrifices and commit to regular prayer lives (perhaps 15 minutes every day)
for the sake of our beloved, fallen-away catholics of the Netherlands and for
ourselves as well.
With sincere affection.
Nigel
----------------------------------------------------------------------.
Op 7-2-2021 om 12:44 schreef GEORGE MICKIEWICZ:
Dear Brothers in Christ,
Many changes have taken place inside the
Church that we attended on special occasions.
Can you identify them?
Please be extra careful and stay
healthy, safe and sound,
George
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Attila GYURIS <gyuris@yahoo.com>
Mon, Feb 8 at 1:37 PM
Wow!!! That is so sad.
I did not know any of this. It is not in
the news at all.
Is this mainly in the Netherlands only
or is it similar in the other European countries?
Cheers,
Attila Gyuris
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Jan Koenraadt <jankoenraadt@gmail.com>
Mon, Feb 8 at 6:31 PM
Dear Atilla and Csaba,
Yeah man, it's a sad development. It
went gradually. The older generation kept going to church, the younger did not.
Now the older died out, the churches are empty, and the Christian political
parties declined and went into the opposition for the first time in about a hundred
years.
I don't know how it goes in other Europe
countries. I think the development is similar. Germany has a lot of protestant
churches. In France every small village is surrounded around a more than 1000
year old church. Where I stay every year, ten years ago there was still a local
French priest, but now it is a priest of colour from Africa who was converted
by the missionaries. And he has to do five parishes, one every Sunday. There is
a shortage of local priests.
We used to engage first, find a job an a
house, get married and have children. The youth is doing it around, first a
child and then rush to get a house and a job and maybe some years later get
married. A lot of short fused people in society.
Cheers!
Jan Koenraadt
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Donald Goddard <liverpool.petroleum@gmail.com>
Mon, Feb 8 at 10:01 PM
Dear Jan:
What you describe is not only a European
situation. In South Louisiana, USA as Father Harold will attest, he was a
Trinidadian priest in a small town. In Baton Rouge there were priests from
Vietnam and El Salvador. One priest I knew quite well, from the Basque Country
of Spain, was the priest in another small town in Louisiana. It's like this all
over the USA. Simply, no locals are interested in joining the priesthood
anymore.
I hate to burst Jan's bubble, but
although the modern youth situation might be one reason for the
lack of locals becoming priests worldwide, the problem with the dying Catholic
Church goes WAAAAAY deeper than that.
Just to name a few major problems: 1)
That the Vatican Bank is very corrupt is no secret, 2) We all know that leftist
Argentine Pope hugs up with his communist pals, the Castro’s of Cuba and other
leftist dictators in Latin-America that share his same leftist political
views.3) Well known evidence about the large number of mentally sick,
paedophile priests and the higher ups in church hierarchy responsible for
protecting them by moving them around. This has occurred by the thousands not
only in The USA but in many other countries in the world. 4) The sickening
opulence in which Archbishops and Cardinal live in third world countries where
the majority of citizens starve and live-in poverty.
Not wanting to offend any naive Mount
boys who deny such facts, I shall not continue mentioning other worse sad tales
about the Catholic church that have resulted in its demise.
Don G.
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Jan Koenraadt
Dear all,
Wow, was just replying to George
Mickiewicz, didn't expect to stir up things. Thought everybody would bring in
their story. Just tried to describe what's going on over here. I looked it up
on Wikipedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_in_the_Netherlands they have precise figures. I did not make any research, just commenting
out of hand what I observed through time in my own environment. Wikipedia says,
church buildings went down from 1782 in 2003 to 1352 in 2019 while parishes
went down from 1525 to 666. In 2010 about 4.1 million people in the Netherlands
were listed as catholic, that is about 25% of the whole population, but only 1%
attended church at least once a month. People hardly go to church anymore. That
was in 2010, but it continued to decline until now. The majority of Catholics
are in the south of the Netherlands. The north are the protestants, they were
the provinces who fought the 80 year war and got independence from Spain in
1648. The south was just conquered area from the Spanish without
self-governing. But the south were the Catholics. Only after 170 years in 1815
the south was turned into a province with self-governing. Only from 1853 a
diocese was erected in the south. @Donald Goddard, could be very true something
is developing in your area, I did not make a study of it. Could be the
underlying reasons you name. How things are going in other countries I didn't
study. Poland has the reputation of being very catholic, more than 97%. When
pope Carol Woytila visited Poland he rose more than 2 million people, more than
the Beatles did! It urged the Secretary of State to turn the television to the
eyes of president Reagan to watch a bigger power in Eastern Europe than
communism. Lot of countries let the sexual abuse of youngsters inside the
church to be investigated. It happened too in the Netherlands. The
"commission Deetman" did the investigation in 2010 and they reported
that it happened about twice as much as elsewhere. The part…
----------------------------------------------------------.
Tue, Feb 9 at 10:05 AM
I will not read all of the voluminous
presentations on this matter which have been made so far, presentations which
are seeking every possible explanation for the reasons which are causing this
situation, and are very clearly missing the very large elephant sitting in the
room, which if we see it, will leave us with only one legitimate question, why
must our priests be celebrate??
There is nothing in the dogma of our
church which says that they must be so. And now that it is becoming clear that
no one wants the job, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Catholic
religion, of which I am still very much a member, will go the way of the
dinosaurs in just a few years from now, if not addressed.
I don't see anything in the bible saying
that they must be celebrate, but it can very easily be seen as an economic
situation.
A married priest will have a wife [of
course] and CHILDREN since no birth control will be allowed, the church will
then have to rely on the parishioners to support a very large
family.
There are about 900 million Catholics in
this world, let’s say we need one parish priest per 2000 Catholics, that's
450,000 priests. 900,000 with wives and 2.5 million persons with just 2.7
kids each. Why is that such a massive disincentive for attracting new priests
to the church?
Can we afford to allow our entire
religion to collapse through the want of new priests, just to keep in place a
policy which cannot possibly allow the religion to continue? Will we then not
attract a better quality of priest and their wives to man our educational,
medical and other catholic activities?
Tony Vieira
---------------------------------------------------------------.
Howard Ho <jhowardho@gmail.com>
Tue, Feb 9 at 1:27 PM
Tony, who got the word exactly right,
celibate! Who ever wrote that priests should be Celibate messed up the words
and meant they should Celebrate, meaning marriage? That one mistake in mixing
up one word caused this problem for over 2,000 years...my personal opinion of
course,
Howard.
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Joseph Berment-McDowald
<bermentmcdowald@yahoo.com>
Tue, Feb 9 at 1:30 PM
Who said it was 2,000 years? It wasn't.
"The tradition of clerical
continence developed into a practice of clerical celibacy (ordaining
only unmarried men) from the 11th century onward among Latin Church
Catholics and became a formal part of canon law in 1917. This law of clerical
celibacy does not apply to Eastern Catholics.'
-----------------------------------------------------.
Howard Ho
<jhowardho@gmail.com>
Tue, Feb 9 at 2:04 PM
Apologies, I obviously don't have the facts on either the time line or
celibate/ celebrate. Thanks for the info.
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Tue, Feb 9 at 4:37 PM
Well it’s the correction demon in my computer, in correcting of the
word. I meant celibacy of course,
Howard!! but now that you mention it???!! this originated in the 11th century
Eh?? some serious scholars here in this discussion padna!!
Tony
-------------------------------------------------------------------.
EDITED by Ladislao Kertesz, kertesz11@yahoo.com, if you would like to subscribe for a whole
year and be in the circular’s mailing list or if you would like to mention any
old boy that you would like to include, write to me.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Photos:
65TF0002SUBMARINE,
54BP1599BPEGRP, Group
67JK0001EDIMSB, Virgin of the grotto
17LK1583FBTPEGRP,
Thomas Pegus, Keith Allen and Ian Gomes
