Steven Hackel thought it was a prank at first when the call came, early in the morning: “What do you mean the church is on fire?” He raced from his Pasadena home to the 249-year-old Mission San Gabriel, which was ensconced in flames devouring the historic structure.
Hackel was not a member of the still active parish; but as a UC Riverside history professor specializing in California’s missions, he was intimately familiar with the small, on-site Mission San Gabriel Museum, which he’d been helping to steer, in various unpaid capacities, for almost a decade.
As 80 firefighters from seven cities battled the four-alarm fire, Hackel and about half a dozen others set out to rescue the museum’s collection, which the fire hadn’t yet reached. They carried out about 100 objects — Native baskets, 17th and 18th century paintings, rare books and photographs — from the museum building, which was intact but for smoke and water damage. They stored the items at the convent next door before relocating them to proper art storage weeks later….
The Mission San Gabriel Museum — a new version of which opens to the public on July 1 along with the mission itself and its renovated church — may be small and little-known. But it’s critically important, Hackel says. L.A.’s Southwest Museum of the American Indian, which was inaugurated in 1907, may be slightly older; the Autry Museum of the American West may be larger, with collections totaling more than 600,000 objects and cultural materials. But the Mission San Gabriel Museum offers curated historical objects within a relevant setting, providing unique context. The mission was established in 1771, the fourth of California’s 21 Spanish missions, and the on-site museum has been in continuous operation since 1908. (Originally located in Whittier Narrows, the Mission San Gabriel was moved to its current location in 1774.)
Its inaugural exhibition — “Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, 1771-1900: Natives, Missionaries, and the Birth of Catholicism in Los Angeles” — is an attempt to publicly recognize “a 250-year-long erasure of the mission’s Native history and to displace a Eurocentric understanding of the legacies of Spanish colonization and Catholic missionization,” the museum said in its opening announcement….
From the L.A. Times
As I have thought, read, and prayed, I have concluded that this fire is a metaphor for the Church at large. Doctrinal arsonists have set the Catholic Church on fire with dissent and false and ambiguous teachings. The exterior looks fine, but the roof has collapsed and the interior has been destroyed. Now Pope Francis has the prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in his pocket with the newly appointed Archbishop Fernandez, who authored the gross and inappropriate kissing book and is widely believed to have been the ghost writer for Amoris Laetitia, which was the camel’s nose in the tent to changing doctrine about gay marriage. I fully expect the synod on synodality to propose sanctifying gay unions and gay sex and ordaining women, and I fully expect Pope Francis to approve in an official teaching that he will claim is infallible doctrinal development. The Church is on fire. All the pieces are in place, years in the making under Pope Francis, for the ascendancy of gayness in the Church as officially blessed. That will be the day I leave the Catholic Church.
I’m nodding in agreement with you. The feminization of males and sexual ambiguity is ripping our society asunder. Meanwhile, infantile hordes of misfits terrorize us with their stupefying focus on correct pronouns, while the world at large is in turmoil with wars and threats of wars, and violence is on our very doorsteps. This is where we are today, our Orwellian existence, and our Church leaders capitulate to temporal humanism.
Maybe the Lord is trying to tell you that the Church is not the buildings.
The Church is the last institution that is teaching the truth about human sexuality.
The Lord wants everyone to be saved.
The world is where it is because people do not pray enough.
You will go to hell if you leave the Catholic Church. Even if the Catholic Church does what you fear (Fear is useless. What is needed is trust. Jesus)
Luke 8:50
Even if what you fear happens, there is no other place where you can get to Heaven..
On a different note, I find it a melancholy sign of the times that a man who hates the Catholic Church would feel justified in burning the Mission to the ground. I suppose those responsible for the Notre Dame Cathedral conflagration were of the same mind. It is as if they are trying to destroy the history of Catholicism itself, rather like cancelling St. Junipero Serra and anyone else available for erasure. I can’t say I have the best command of history, but one has to go back a long way, it seems, to see such venom unleashed on our Church, at least in the western civilization. Africa is a different matter entirely.
The commenters who say that leaving the Catholic Church is a chance card to go directly to hell without passing go and collecting $200, if the Catholic Church does what the poster says – namely, approving gay sex and ordaining women – it will show itself to not be the true church of Christ. In that case, staying in the church would be wrong because it would be a false church. No true church of Christ would approve of gay sex. You can say it’s not going to ever happen, but it’s looking a lot like it is inevitable because the deck is being stacked by the pope and cardinals for that hand to be dealt at the synod. It’s so obvious that high ranking (and low) clergymen want gay sex approved.
Then no one can be saved. Salvation is from the Church. (And no that does not mean that only Catholics can get into Heaven.)
I believe in One, Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
Have faith.
Pray for faith.
The Catholic Church will not have women priests and will not have gay marriage and will not change its moral teaching on sex.
It’s going to approve gay sex when it doesn’t approve heterosexual sex? Get real.
A nun just got in trouble for sexting on a phone. (Yes, that is a sin, too.)
I have an escape clause if the synod goes off the rails and Francis teaches against the faith. If he does that, it will be clear evedince that Bergolio is an antipope, therefore everything in the Church would reset to February 28, 2013, with the See of Peter having been vacant since Pope Benedict’s abdication. In that case, all of Bergolio’s teachings, documents, decisions, appointments, elevations, and judgments would be null. The Church of Christ, the Catholic Church, would be saved.
Sedevacantism is heresy.
That is not an escape clause. It is a temptation.
The devil knows how to trick you into mortal sin and thinking your mortal sin is righteous.
Calling the Pope Bergolio makes it easy for him to know where to tempt you.
Not a single thing Pope Francis has said or done has helped me in my Catholic faith. I knew plenty of people who are in a crisis of faith because of him.
Because of him? or because of what is said about him?
Be doers of the word, not hearers only.
The Catholic Church does not have the authority to ordain women priests. They might be able to ordain women deacons. They were supposed to be studying that but nothing has been said about it.
The Church cannot and will not approve gay marriage. It is not possible in the Church’s sacramental theology to do so.
Please don’t let people preach to you a different Gospel. Do not listen to those who tell you that the Pope is preaching a different Gospel. They are agitators.
Notice if they make money from doing that.
There are some who are sincere but they are also wrong.
Make sure that you have read the Bible and the Catechism. You will be less vulnerable.
Pray the Rosary every day.
Pray the Prayer for the Synod.
The Sin-nod will be a disgrace.