Basement Priest Two: Further Reflections 1970 - 2022

By John Boos M.Afr

It is hoped that this work may stimulate others to search into the precious meanings of their personal lives, and thereby be encouraged to share the importance of their findings among others. Nothing is there to be lost; there is much to be gained. May this book somehow fill the gaps so evident nowadays.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Nov 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9780228884934

John Boos M.Afr

John Boos was born in Trinidad, West Indies, in 1937. His primary and secondary schooling were all done there. After graduation he taught briefly in a college and went on to study law, both in Trinidad and the United Kingdom. He then chose to enter a Catholic missionary order, the Society of the Missionaries of Africa (White Fathers), and after studies in Ireland, England and France was ordained priest in Trinidad in 1970.He was then posted to the West African country of Upper Volta, later to be renamed Burkina Faso. His missionary work has extended from there to Mali, Togo, Canada, Mexico, Algeria, and the United Kingdom. He is now in semi-retirement in Pickering, Ontario, Canada, and helps out in the parishes of the Durham and Scarborough areas, celebrating Masses, weddings and funerals, visiting retirement homes and hospitals, as well as making home visits. He also gives conferences to retreat and prayer groups, as well as to youth groups, as vocation promoter towards the life of a missionary.

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Basement Priest

Two

Further Reflections 1970 - 2022

John Boos M.Afr

Basement Priest Two

Copyright © 2022 by John Boos M.Afr

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-8492-7 (Hardcover)

978-0-2288-8491-0 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-8493-4 (eBook)

Table of Contents

PRE – FOREWORD

FOREWORD

Chapter 1 - Incarnated Innocence

Chapter 2 - JESUS DISCONCERTS

Chapter 3 - Authority Delegated

Chapter 4 - The Pseudo-Reformation

Chapter 5 - St Paul vs the New Testament Writers

Chapter 6 - Fideism? or Works?

Chapter 7 - Power of Suggestion

Chapter 8 - Herd Mentality, or The Sin of Presumption

Chapter 9 - How Could This happen?? Or Voluntarism

Chapter 10 - Professional Opinion on Voluntarism

Chapter 11 - Studies in Reductionism

Chapter 12 - Papal Reductionism

Chapter 13 - Opinions on Humanae Vitae

Chapter 14 - The Winnipeg Statement, and its Effects

Chapter 15 - Both Virgin and Mother

Chapter 16 - Momma!

Chapter 17 - IMPLOSION

Chapter 18 - Why the World has Changed or How Metaphysics Was Lost

Chapter 19 - Return to Sanity

Chapter 20 - Divisions and Beliefs

Pre – Foreword

In my FOREWORD to the author’s first book, BASEMENT PRIEST, I had stated that it was a ‘cannot-put-down’ book, treating of the most important value, Truth itself, which, although it can be resisted, twisted and misdirected, yet can never be changed, it remains. I had also stated that the ‘pearl of great price’, Jesus-Christ, was Truth itself, the key to his work. That this Truth had interacted with cultures in history, philosophy, ideology, and the struggles against its demise, had been highlighted in its pages.

In this his second work, BASEMENT PRIEST TWO, the author offers once more the Person of Jesus as Innocence Incarnate, who not only disconcerts by the unusual quality of his insights into human existence, but also dares to delegate these qualities to fallible humans. This included the risks of corruption and incompetency by the same, which came to a head in the 16th century, popularly known as the Reformation. No quick reform of the existing Church by its hierarchy came about, this eventually occurred with the Council of Trent (1545-1563). The Church, which had built and held European societies together for a millennium and a half, was in dire need of serious interior honesty and recognition of its failures, the causes of which should be better known.

The long-lasting results of the Bubonic Plague of two centuries before, its weakening effects on general society and on the Church, the invention of the movable-type printing press by Johann Gutenberg in 1455, the discovery of the Americas in 1492, all combined to upset the normal running of the Church, still imbued by the mediaeval spirit. Widespread corruption unfortunately followed, and instead of the necessary cleansing and suppression of its inadequacies, existing European society was merely broken asunder by politically-assisted persons intent on following policies of Reductionism, the results of which are glaringly evident to this day. There was in fact no reform of the Mother-Church, merely a separation from her and the formation of many non-Catholic denominations and individually-structured groups, today numbering over forty thousand. The Reformation should therefore more fittingly be called the Pseudo-Reformation.

The splitting of the Church in the 16th century has resulted in several wars among European nations since then, culminating in the two World Wars, the Cold War (1945-1989) and the Korean and Vietnamese Wars, all due to competing philosophical ideologies in the 20th. The continuing philosophical competitiveness in the 21st have but exacerbated the terrible consequences on Faith and Reason, and the stark tragedy of the 1968 Winnipeg Statement and its concurrent temptation to accept a contraceptive mentality has invaded the Church, a result of the rejection of Humanae Vitae of Pope St Paul Vl by the Bishops themselves.

BASEMENT PRIEST TWO shows clearly the need for a fundamental education of the Catholic laity in matters of Faith and Reason. It shows an urgency to correct the absence of basic knowledge of History and Faith so prevalent today among Catholic-Christians, which maintains the current demise of truth in culture. Fr John sees the need to evangelise, presented here as a work of catechetics and apologetics, a prototype for the necessary updating of religious education. It should also interest all denominations of those who profess to be Christians.

This book offers the reader the means of navigating the past, understanding the present, and by so doing serving the future. It belongs on the desk of every Christian educator, parent, clerical member, and individual seeking a deeper understanding of this present moment in our history.

Paul Coates B.A. B.ED. M.DIV

Foreword

This book, the Second of two titled BASEMENT PRIEST, continues to show the heartfelt interest of the author, Fr John Boos, in the ever-present continuing series of problems facing the world. For him, one of the major functions of the virtue of Charity is the objective presentation of revealed Truth. With already fifty-two years of ordination to the Catholic-Christian missionary priesthood to his credit, he has had time to evaluate and assess the whys and wherefores, the ups and downs of world society, and has arrived at conclusions which may startle and challenge. These may also hopefully stimulate those who care to start a serious interiorisation of the great problems of the world, with an intent for remedial action.

Christ Jesus, Incarnate Innocence, is the Inspirer of this work. He Disconcerts through the unique strangeness of his appeal, and Delegates his Authority to mere humans as he moves through their lives. This Authority, rejected by the Pseudo-Reformation of the 16th century, in which no real reform was concluded, caused a new ‘church’ to be founded along Germanic lines. The break-away has now resulted in over 47,000 sects (2018 Gordon-Conwell census) worldwide. Most adepts of these adhere to a faith-in-Jesus-alone belief, conveniently obscuring the many words of Jesus warning against this Fideism.

A Herd Mentality among the gullible has thus been formed because of the strength and manipulative power of Suggestion, giving rise to the saving belief of Presumption. Bereft of the rejected Authority of the Catholic-Christian Church, philosophers of atheistic and other doubtful tendencies have been prolific in their teachings, resulting in Voluntarism and other crude attempts to explain human existence.

This has resulted in a general Reductionism in Christian appreciation, including Papal, of doctrine, through which only part of doctrine is claimed to explain the whole. This has resulted in the disasters of both Humanae Vitae and the Winnipeg Statement of 1968.

The Catholic-Christian Church in Canada has been severely diminished since 1968 due to these two documents. The use and frequentation of the Sacraments - Baptism, Confirmation, Marriage, Order, Reconciliation, Eucharist, Rite of the Sick - have all been denigrated and become less favoured and sought-for. Catholic practice of the faith has lessened, the incomes of Dioceses and Parishes have also clearly diminished, the two-year pandemic and revelations of residential schools have not helped the situation.

Apart from these Church troubles, the world itself has indeed changed, and not necessarily for the better. It is here that the author directs his main attention, observing that the effects of the post-pseudo-Reformation philosophers have caused the developed and civilised Western world to wallow in a miasma of confusion. This confusion he ascribes to the rejection of metaphysical thinking, which itself has given rise to acute liberalism and the sad and previously unheard-of ways of living today – generalised infanticide, transgenderism, acceptance of gay life-styles, repulsive music, etc etc – and which he claims must be fought by a re-appreciation and re-acceptance of the philosophies which had led the world for 1500 years.

It is only by doing the seemingly impossible, according to the author, that there can be a return to world sanity and a recovery of the weakened values which are in serious danger of being lost forever. It will be necessary to recuperate the whole story of revelation, including the indispensable presence of womankind epitomised by the Virgin Mary, for such an about-turn to be accomplished.

Such is the challenge; such will be the fight.

Fr John Boos MAfr.

Chapter One

Incarnated Innocence

No one who has ever heard the bleat of a little lamb can fail to be moved by it. So plaintive, so helpless, so lost without the nearness of its mother. It’s so very like a human infant, one cannot but be moved by the little animal’s pleadings, so unsure of itself – so innocent! So very innocent!

The ancient Hebrews, slaves in Egypt under Pharaoh for hundreds of years, certainly expressed the same sentiments. When Moses, who claimed to have been commissioned by YHWH to offer lamb sacrifices, to smear their doorposts and house lintels with blood of the lambs so as to escape being singled out for destruction by the avenging angel, they were only too willing to comply. The details of the sacrifice and use of the lambs’ blood is explained in Ex.12:1-14. Thus began the exodus of the Hebrews under Moses. They spent forty years wandering in the eastern deserts before arriving in the Promised Land, which they conquered by driving out the tribes there.

This ancient sacrifice, eating the roasted lamb with bitter herbs, as stipulated by Exodus, is continued to this day by observant Jews. It is called Seder, and is to remind them of their escape from Egypt and their installation in the Promised Land. Today they do not slaughter and roast the lamb as Exodus prescribes, but buy prepared lamb from the supermarkets, which fulfils the necessary item for the ceremony.

The Samaritans of today, on the other hand, continue to observe the ancient rite to the letter, the slaughtered lamb being roasted on a cross-like frame placed before an open pit in which a fire is burning, as here:

Exodus stipulates, That night, the flesh is to be eaten, roasted over the fire, with unleavened bread and bitter herbs….it is the pass-over of Yahweh, when I will punish the gods of Egypt (Ex.12:12-13) and this day will be a remembrance for you…..to celebrate as a festival…..a feast…in honour of Yahweh, for all generations.

The scrupulous observance of the Jewish people of the Seder boils down to this: they are to eat real lamb flesh, i.e., it is not a symbolic nor metaphorical meal, no soy or vegan flesh, but real flesh, and from ancient times to this day, this rite has remained unchanged. The rite itself would be invalid, useless, without the real flesh of a lamb.

Eat means to chew, masticate, and swallow, not to spit out the flesh afterwards. By eating, masticating, and swallowing, the Jew knows that this is his way and his truth, the traditional and only way to get and understand why he is alive.

This meaning will be seen to be most important in the second part of this paper.

All Bible-reading Christians of today – whether Catholic or Protestant - accept the strong prophetic words of John the Baptist in John 1:29-30, 34, as he sees Jesus coming towards him, Look, there is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, and Yes, I have seen and I am the witness that he is the Chosen One of God.

During his ministry of about three years, Jesus teaches, pardons sin, performs unbelievable miracles, forms his disciples, and above all his twelve Apostles, so that they may be able to continue his ministry after he leaves them. To a question from his Apostle Thomas, he replies:

I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. No one can come to the Father except through me (Jn.14: 6)

He is in fact preparing them to understand that, though their Jewish traditions have admirably served to remind them of their escape from slavery, their wanderings, and their entry into peace in the Promised Land, yet he is promoting himself as being supremely superior to those beliefs. The definite article the before each qualified abstract noun above is used as the sine qua non of his claim. The the repeated three times means that, apart from him, Jesus, there is no other person or hope available for salvation, for entering into the presence of God.

Before this personal declaration, Jesus had declared to a large group of people who had followed him after the second multiplication of loaves and fishes (Jn.6:1-15), I am the bread of life…come down from heaven….I am the bread of life…..I am the living bread come down from heaven…the bread which I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world (Jn.6: 35, 38, 48, 51).

The people began to argue among themselves about these words and claims (Jn.6: 41, 52-53), to which he replied "I tell you most solemnly, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man (Dan.7: 13-14, 27-28) and drink his blood, you will not have life in you. Anyone who does eat my flesh and drink my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is real food, and my blood is real drink. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me, and I live in him…..whoever eats me will draw life from me…this is the bread come down from heaven…anyone who eats this bread will live forever" (Jn.6: 53-56, 57-58). After this, many of his disciples left him and stopped going with him (Jn.6: 66), so scandalised were they by these words, which no doubt they considered to be cannibalism, which was/is forbidden in Judaism.

Shortly afterwards, at the traditional feast of the Passover, which the Apostles had prepared by his instructions, Jesus took bread, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, Take it and eat…this is my Body; do this as a memorial of me. He did the same with the cup after supper, and said "Drink all of you from this, for this is my Blood, the Blood of the covenant" (Lk.22:19-20; Mt.26:26-28; Mk.14: 22-25).

Jesus uses the words Take and eat, Take and drink in the Gospels. As in the ancient Jewish Passovers, eat, in the Greek translation of the Last Supper event is trogon = chew, masticate, swallow. Our Lord, Divinity itself who had humbled himself to enter into human flesh and nature, is now going further and is allowing himself to be digested in the alimentary system of humans. Can there be any proof of greater love than this?

The death of Jesus had quite shaken those who had believed in him. In the episode of the two disciples walking sadly to Emmaus, who had met a stranger who had opened the words of the prophets to them, and with whom they had sat down to eat, and whom they recognised as Jesus at the breaking of bread before he vanished from their sight (Lk.24:13-35), we get to understand that the breaking of bread was becoming the most important part of the life of the early Church.

After the condemnation, death by crucifixion, burial, Resurrection and ascension of Jesus, the early Christian community remained faithful to the teaching of the Apostles, and to the breaking of bread. The people and the Apostles went daily to the Temple, but met in their houses for the ‘breaking of bread’ (Acts 2: 42-47). This shows that little by little those who believed in the message of Jesus were becoming more aware of their separate identity, and were continuing the new rite he had begun, that of the ‘breaking of bread’, no doubt using the same words he himself had used, quite outside of the time of Passover.

This breaking of bread evolved gradually as the centuries passed, and has become the main source of the spiritual life of Catholic-Christians, the Holy Mass, the Eucharist. The Church has always taught that at Mass, Jesus himself is physically present in sacramental form, and that to receive the Host one should be properly prepared to do so. Belief in the Real Presence is why Catholics bend the knee in entering a church, why there is Eucharistic Adoration, Benediction, Eucharist for the sick, Eucharistic Processions, etc. Every Mass is, in effect, a Passover, where believers can receive the Body of Christ, the True Lamb.

Since the 16th century Reformation, on the other hand, the many thousands of dissident churches of Protestantism have, in effect, decided that what Our Lord had said is not true, that he is not the Way, the Truth, and the Life, that his Eucharistic Discourses to the crowd of people had been untrue, pure rhetoric, a way of pulling the wool over their eyes. This basically means that the Real Presence has become a metaphor, a symbolic myth, for them, and that what they receive is merely ordinary bread at their services.

This goes even further. If it had been obligatory for the ancient Jews to physically eat the real meat of a sacrificed lamb for Passover, which by no form of imagination was metaphoric or symbolic, how is it that in the case of the true Lamb of God, Jesus Christ himself, who came that mankind might have life in abundance (Jn.10:10), that, not only that 16 centuries of Catholic Eucharistic belief in the Real Presence has been trashed by the Reformers and those who follow them to this day, but also that, when he had said This is my Body and This is my Blood, he was merely believed to be speaking in metaphor, or lying?

How can the roasted flesh of a lamb be real, while that of the True Lamb, nailed to a cross, be metaphoric or symbolic? Such a striking example of illogicality is simply staggering. It seems that those who are supposed to believe in the Divinity of Our Lord have in this instance, and in others, chosen to deny Him the right to exercise it, to deny that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Has He been made into a liar?

Many of his hearers walked away after the Discourse on the Bread of Life, for his words were too hard to accept (Jn. 6:66). Those who ascribe to Protestant beliefs are clearly similar to those ancient people who refused.

It is to be hoped that much further investigation on Eucharistic theology should be done by the Brethren separated from the Catholic Church. Jesus must never be presented as a liar, as this instance implies. All the same, if this implication of untruth or unlikely-hood has become so ingrained in Protestant thinking as to be practically immovable, what