There is a small scene from the Netherlands that deserves more attention than it will receive.
Auxiliary Bishop Rob Mutsaerts of Hertogenbosch recently described arriving at a parish for Confirmation and seeing a rainbow flag outside the church. Before the entrance procession, he asked one of the boys what he thought of it. The boy shrugged, more or less unmoved by the entire ecclesiastical signaling exercise, and said he would rather have seen a PSV football flag. After Mass, parishioners explained to the bishop that they were an “LGBTQ church,” a “Rainbow Church.” Mutsaerts then asked the obvious question: what does “inclusive” actually mean?
The answer came soon enough.
According to Mutsaerts, he later learned that one boy had been asked to withdraw from Confirmation preparation because he had dismissed “Purple Friday,” a Dutch LGBTQ initiative, as nonsense. The bishop confirmed him a week later in another church. The irony practically writes itself: the “inclusive” parish excluded a teenage Catholic boy from sacramental preparation because he failed to genuflect before the proper flag.
This is the new pastoral regime in miniature. The old Church had boundaries and admitted it. The new Church has boundaries and lies about them. It says “all are welcome,” then quietly defines “all” as those who accept the revolution’s anthropology, vocabulary, and emotional blackmail.
The boy’s crime was skepticism. He saw the flag and failed to be moved. In a saner Catholic world, that would have been called maturity.
Continue reading at Hiraeth in Exile