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| Me, aged 13 |
The very same girl called me a lesbian led a two-faced existence. She egged on other young teens to get blind drunk and be the playthings of boys drenched in cheap cologne. Then she put on airs of being very devout before her mother at Mass. The message that I I absorbed was that holiness was the good mask of the manipulator.
An older girl did have a baby and was rewarded with the insult, ‘stupid girl’. As I said, I wasn’t pious, but it dawned on me there was a wicked chorus of devilish taunting that bullied girls as young as 13: the only way to avoid being called ‘freak’ or ‘frigid’ was to do as the others did, and the only way to avoid being lectured, ‘you were too stupid to use a condom’ was to take the Morning After Pill or later pay for your baby to be dumped in a clinic bucket. Life has never been worse for kids, I thought to myself.
Still we were arrogantly told that we were so ‘privileged’ to be ‘Celtic Tiger cubs’ and that, ‘life has never been better for kids.’ I never dared answer back, life has never been worse.
Then some years back, I had a chance encounter with an Irish mammy from Cork who was taking her fifteen year old to London for an abortion. Having first-hand knowledge of the type of peer pressure the pregnant girl had been under, I tried to intervene and persuade them against the abortion. The Irish mammy would not listen to a word. Paying for her grandchild to be obliterated was about covering up bad parenting. The Irish mammy hadn’t thought it very cool to teach her daughter to stand up to sexual pressure and had turned a blind eye to her early binge drinking. I never found out if the girl remembered getting pregnant. So, she marched her daughter to the clinic. I remember thinking of the 15 year old kid who was born in the 1990s that, life has never been worse for girls her age.
Now I don’t just think this – I believe it to be true. 400 years before that poor 15 year old girl was born Our Lady of Good Success warned that children of our times would have an exceptionally soul-rotting time.
Our Lady of Good Success explained why vocations would be scarce, ‘During these unfortunate times, evil will assault childhood innocence. In this way, vocations to the priesthood will be lost, which will be the true calamity.’ Our Lady said that ‘secular education’ would be ‘one reason for the dearth of priestly and religious vocations’.
Young parents that I’ve met at Latin Masses have said to me that they experienced the same taunting of ‘you’re gay’ if they were not sexually active at a young age and that the reason they home-school is so they will not be putting their child into the same pressure-cooker that they were so badly burned in. Sometimes young home-schooling parents have a hard time explaining to their parents why they are home-schooling their kids. Maybe it is telling that the grandparents of the children who are being home-schooled do not always understand – they may have been born in the 50s and early 60s before things got truly as bad as Our Lady prophesied to Mother Mariana when she said, ‘the Devil will glory in dining upon the exquisite delicacy of the hearts of children.’
Hundreds of years before we were born, Our Lady had made sure that a gift of prayers were being offered for us and our peers. There are a number of reasons to be hopeful, for Our Lady of Good Success assured the good and kind-hearted Mother Mariana that, ‘to test this faith and confidence of the just, there will be occasions when everything will seem to be lost and paralysed. This, then, will be the happy beginning of the complete restoration.’ Our Lady of Good Success, pray for us.
I wrote this column for the Winter Edition of The Mass of Ages, the quarterly magazine of England and Wales' Latin Mass Society. You may read the full magazine here.
The photo below shows the incorrupt body of Mother Mariana, who received the prophecies from Our Lady.
