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uch has been written about a ‘ de facto schism’ now

increasingly apparent in the Church.

I may be able to shed a little light on this. In the last four years, I have visited hundreds of Catholics in more than a dozen countries across Europe and North America.

In my travels, I have been consistently struck by the fact that the crisis in the Church is remarkably similar across these countries --despite vast cultural differences between, say, Mexico and Germany.

The problem is the same across the West: declining Catholic populations, closing parishes, aging clergy and empty seminaries and convents.

And the response to this crisis? ‘More of the same’. Senior Catholic clerics think that the antidote to the disaster their policies have brought on the Faith is to double down and give us even MORE of the Age of Aquarius.

This is done on little or no evidence. What’s puzzling is that for modern clerics so devoted to evidence, they ignore the fact that all the polls show that liberalizing policies actually drive people away from the Faith. (This is true for Protestants as well.)

The results are in: the Age of Aquarius doesn’t work. Runaway ideology yields negative results. Nevertheless, it’s uncanny how elderly Catholic prelates use their authority to enforce their 1968 worldview on the young:

• Wealthy elderly German prelates facing an imminent drying up of their financial Niagara push their agenda to admit divorced and ‘re-married’ Catholics to Communion. (This despite the fact that interviews with a dozen German priests tell us that there is zero interest in this there.)

•Bishops in Malta and Colombia threaten priests who do not go along with this confusing new agenda. (That they already suffer from an acute priest shortage doesn’t appear to be a concern.)

•Aging seminary headmasters sniff out ‘rigidity’ in their students, targeting those who seem too traditional in their beliefs. (That this has the effect of driving out the few vocations they have doesn’t seem to bother these ideologues in the least. The eventual effect, of course, is that seminaries are closed, and their jobs disappear.)

•Massive church funds are used to stage elaborate charismatic ‘events’ at World Youth Day and similar. (Unfortunately, Catholic evangelicalism doesn't exhibit have much staying power. It's either a gateway to Protestantism or indifference -- mainly because most receive very little actual formation in the Faith.)

•Ancient Catholic Orders continue their fixation on the sloganeering politics of the 1960’s. (As a result, they are being decimated and forced to sell off their properties as spas and suchlike to pay for their retirements.)

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