The Years That the Locust Hath Eaten

Unfortunately I'm not as familiar with the Old Testament as I am with the New, but thanks to my abiding interest in my distant cousin Sir Winston Churchill I have long been able to quote the passage from the Prophecy of Joel, "And I [The Lord] will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten" (Joel 2:25 - OK, I admit it, I prefer the King James translation to the Douai in this instance).

Churchill used the phrase, to great effect, in one of his memorable pre-war speeches in Parliament at a time when he stood practically alone in attempting to rouse the government of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to the imminent danger posed by the rebirth of Germany under Hitler.  His use of "the years that the locust hath eaten" referred to the period prior to 1936 when England and France, alone or together, could easily have stopped Germany's re-arming had they not lacked the will.

I've often thought of that phrase in the context of the catastrophe which has befallen the Church in the wake of the Council.

Fr. Raymond de Souza has a good column in Canada's least-bad newspaper, The National Post, contrasting what the media and the popular culture want the Church to be with what She must be to be true to Herself and Her spouse.  The occasion of the media's sudden interest in the Church is of course the recent exposure of the cover-up by the Irish bishops of their own clergy's homosexual and pederast scandals, as well as a particular incident in the Pope's old diocese.  They have tried mightily to indict the present Pope with culpability after the fact in these instances and others, but as Fr. de Souza points out the blame for the mishandling of these cases resides with the individual bishops, not the man who currently sits in the Chair of Peter.

He does not pull punches in identifying the cause of their laxity, and what the Holy See (including the former Cardinal Ratzinger) have done to combat it.

Years that the locust hath eaten, indeed.

[UPDATE - I should have realized that the Churchill speech I was thinking of was available online (isn't everything these days?)  Not to distract from the point of this post, but do go and read it if you are unfamiliar with it.  Good heavens, could that man write.  And imagine it being delivered in that unique Churchillian style: the psalm-like cadence of his delivery, the slightly high-pitched voice rising and then descending to a near-growl as he punctuates a point, and the rest.]