THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

Just a bit of chronological context: 'INTRODUCTION TO CHRISTIANITY', which became an almost-instant theological classic, was published one year before Jorge Bergoglio was ordained a priest.

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI






Left, Pera with good friend and sometime co-author Benedict XVI; right, Translation of the headlines: “The pope does politics, and meanwhile, he is reforming doctrine...The Church under Francis is unbalanced
in favor of secularism... He thinks like the liberation theologists. Wojytla and Ratzinger insistently countered relativism because otherwise, everything would be negotiable... Bergoglio has no answers to the
four cardinals’ DUBIA because he does not have good arguments and because of arrogance.”

RVC says ‘Read Pera’s interview to better
understand the Church under Bergoglio’
Translated from

April 7, 2018

Romana Vulneratus Curia (RVC to the friends, foes and usual trolls who infest Stilum Curiae and who have now become legion) has sent us a very brief commentary on the beautiful interview given by former Italian Senate President Marcello Pera [one of Benedict XVI’s ‘faithful atheists’ , about whom I have always asked, “Give that he seems to grasp Jesus’s message so well, why is he still an atheist? Pehaps he does not accept that Jesus is God?], on the eve of the conference in Rome today on “Chiesa, dove vai?” (Church, quo vadis?).

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Dear Tosatti, I attach the interview with Marcello Pera published in La Verita. Between the lines, there emerges two observations beyond the obvious disequilibrium in the Church today. 1) Pope Francis ‘divides’, not unites, the Catholic world. 2) Pope Francis builds walls even as he says he wants to build bridges. Perhaps he is a muratore? [Deliberate play on words, I think: ‘muratore’ is Italian for stone mason or bricklayer. RVC may also be referring to Mason with a capital M.]

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Here are two excerpts from Pera’s interview with Lorenzo Bertocchi:

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Mr. President, the subtitle of the conference on Saturday in which you are taking part is something the late Cardinal Carlo Caffarra said: “Only a blind man can deny that there is great confusion in the Church”. Some would say that these are the words of a prophet of doom.
No, they are the words of one who observes. Cardinal Caffarra knew very well that one does not make prophecies about the Church of Christ, because Christ himself was the prophecy, Christ himself and faith in Christ realize the prophecy. With those words, Cardinal Caffarra was saying that, today, the faith is wavering, subjected as it now is to interpretations which to him seemed contrary to the Church’s deposit of faith. In other words: he was concerned that the Christian message was not being understood in the eschatological sense of salvation, but in the political sense of ‘liberation’. I think he was right. Pope Francis is doing just that, hiding everything in the guise of fighting the Roman Curia.

And yet, he was elected to reform the curia, even if that seems to be plodding along with difficulty.
I believe in the saying ‘curia nunquam reformanda’ (the Curia will never be reformed). Power is always power, and a reform is only a redistribution and transfer of power from one part to the other. What other reason is there to create offices, or consolidate them, or strengthen some while eliminating others? What other reason is there to name subordinates? Only for power – to maintain it or to gain more of it. Curial reform was always a false target that was to serve in order to bring about doctrinal reform ‘painlessly’ [or more appropriately, ‘unnoticed’]. There are sins and problems in the Curia, yes, and some cause scandal, but would they disappear if administrative reforms were made? If one places Y in place of X, what does that mean? It really means proposing a specific interpretation of doctrine against any other.

On the political level, it would seem that ‘the Church’ is steering by sight, especially after the victory of Donald Trump. What do you think of those who say that ‘the Church’ today is unbalanced in favor of the left?
I think that the church of Bergoglio is not unbalanced to the right or to the left. It is unbalanced, period. It is unbalanced in favor of secularism, of social justice, of human rights, of the poor, of immigrants, of economic equality. The church of Bergoglio has taken secularism up on its shoulders, thinking that by doing so and making it her own, the kingdom of Christ can be realized on earth. This, to my mind, is its principle rupture with doctrine and Tradition. I don’t have the technical competence and I may not be expressing myself in the right form, but I think this is a Pelagian heresy – secularism not as a falling down or condemnation, but as elevation and opportunity.

Yet Pope Francis is not the only one who thinks that way. Not just the South American Jesuits, the theologians of liberation and social emancipation, the bishops and priests who think they are ‘of the streets’. Even John XXIII thought so in his encyclical Pacem in terris, and so did Vatican II in large measure, in the conciliar constitution Gaudium et spes.

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It's refreshing to have an outsider, but a sympathetic one, give his take on what is happening in 'the Church' today. It would be most interesting if Mr. Pera could review or comment on Ross Douthat's book, which from all accounts, scrupulously keeps away from anything that could be remotely considered an ad hominem criticism of Bergoglio to argue the facts and implications of what he says and does to the future of Catholicism!

The pope's necessary obedience to the Church

April 6, 2018

In the spirit of this weekend's Conference in Rome in which two distinguished speakers are listed as due to speak on the limits of Papal authority, I here reprint, with its original thread, a piece from last year. I'll add two other relevant pieces tomorrow, including one which brings in the testimony of Blessed John Henry Newman.

Is the pope above the Church? Depends what you mean. There is, of course, no doubt that the Roman Pontiff is the supreme law-giver of the whole state of Christ's Church Militant here in earth. But he is a member of, therefore within, the Church. He is therefore also a subject of the Church. (This does indeed mean that he qua Jorge Bergoglio is subject to the Church and therefore to the Pope qua Supreme lawgiver.) He is not the one person upon earth who is solutus ab omni lege.

Regular readers will recall my repetitious quotation from the writings of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger:

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" ... the First Vatican Council had in no way defined the pope as an absolute monarch. On the contrary, it presented him as the guarantor of obedience to the revealed Word. The pope's authority is bound to the Tradition of faith ... The authority of the pope is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition."

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Although not thus footnoted by its author, this phraseology is clearly based upon a statement by the German bishops after Bismarck had attacked the Definition of Papal Infallibility agreed at Vatican I.

Bismarck had alleged that it made the pope "an absolute monarch". The German bishops replied that Papal Infallibility, being an instance of the Infallibility of the Church, is bound to the doctrine contained in Holy Scripture and in Tradition and definitions already promulgated by the Church's Magisterium.

The pope, they explained, is bound (obstrictus) to those things which Christ set in place in His Church. He cannot change the constitution given by the Church's Divine Founder, and the constitution of the Church is founded in all essential things in the divine arrangement (ordinatione) and is free (immunis) from every arbitrary human arrangement.

Blessed Pius IX praised, in fulsome language, this explanation of the German bishops.

The question of the limitations upon the papal office came up again at Vatican II. In Lumen Gentium paragraph 22 (at the end), Blessed Paul VI, laudably anxious that papal authority should not be given away on his watch, wished to add the words uni Domino devinctus. In the old Abbott translation, this would have made part of the last sentence read "provided that the pope himself, bound fast to the Lord alone [or bound fast to one Master], calls them to collegiate action."

But the Council's Theological Commission refused the pope's request on the grounds that it represented an excessive simplification (nimis simplificata); "the Roman Pontiff is bound to observe Revelation itself, the fundamental structure of the Church, the Sacraments, the definitions of previous Councils, etc. [sic]. All of these cannot be counted".

Indeed he is. Indeed, they can't.

Every pope is as tightly bound in obedience to the Magisterium as you are. He is no more allowed to set aside a syllable of it than I am.

7 April 2018
Still interested in contributing to the debate on the limits of papal authority, today I reprint two pieces with which I accompanied the Solemnity of SS Peter and Paul last year.

St Leo II and St Peter
and the Papal Magisterium


... as I look into the pre-Pius X breviary by my desk, I discover that in even earlier days, June 28, yesterday, was occupied by a great pope, St Leo II (681-683).

Did I say a great pope?

Our Holy Father Pope St Leo II was great because he undertook the unhappy but necessary duty of ratifying the condemnation, by the Sixth Holy Ecumenical Council, of his own predecessor, Pope Honorius I (625-638), as a heretic. As the Vicar of Christ wrote to the Spanish bishops, Pope Honorius "did not, as befits the Apostolic dignity, extinguish the fire of heretical teaching when it began, but by his negligence fostered it".

Some people believe the Petrine Ministry means that a Pope is set in place and guided by the Holy Spirit in order to give exciting new perspectives, perhaps even surprises, to the Church. Not so. Not in a month of Sundays.

As Blessed John Henry Newman taught, in a memorable passage in his Apologia about which I will write more tomorrow, the ministry of the Roman Church, its "extraordinary gift", has always been negative, to be a remora, a barrier against novelty, innovation.

At the jagged and dangerous edge of a high and precipitous cliff, the Pope is the Council Workman whose very simple job it is to put up a notice saying
DANGER: KEEP AWAY.
'Negative', laconic, 'rigid', but, oh, so necessary. A mischievous or homicidal or mischievously homicidal pope who put up a notice reading
ADVENTURE PLAYGROUND
or
YOUR CONSCIENCE WILL TELL YOU WHEN TO JUMP
or
WE WILL ACCOMPANY YOU RIGHT UP TO YOUR JUMP
would be failing in the duty set him by his Master.

Through two millennia, it has been the duty of successive Bishops of Rome to resist, condemn, and extirpate novelty and any attempt to change the Faith.

That is why St Vincent of Lerins (circa 450?) quotes Pope St Celestine (422-432) as writing "Innovation should stop attacking what is ancient", and the next pope, St Sixtus III, (432-440) as writing "Innovation has no rights, because it is inappropriate to add anything to what is ancient; clearly, the faith and belief of our ancestors should not be stirred up by any mixture of filth".

The great Anglican historian of the Papacy, Trevor Jalland, wrote of the "supernatual grandeur" of the Roman Church; "its strange, almost mystical faithfulness to type, its marked degree of changelessness, its steadfast clinging to tradition and precedent".

On this great feast of the Holy Apostles of the Church in Rome, we can do worse than listen to those powerful words of St Leo II. His predecessor Honorius had been Pope when a particular error arose; it had been his duty as domnus Apostolicus to extinguish the blaze; but he was negligent; he failed to do his (negative) duty of repelling innovation; and his negligence led to the growth of the error.

It therefore fell to an Ecumenical Council to condemn him, together with the leaders of the heresy he failed to extinguish, with the unambiguous noun heretics and the unambiguous verb anathematizomen.

There is more than one way of qualifying for the title of Heretic!

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Yesterday, the great Feast of the Holy Apostles of Rome, I strolled down to Sandford lock. I took with me my battered "summer picnic" volume of the Pars Aestiva; and, since Blessed John Henry Newman, Patron of our Ordinariate, must often have walked there from nearby Littlemore, I took also his Apologia pro Vita sua.

I love the Mattins readings for the Second Nocturn, from St Leo I's First mighty Sermon In natali Apostolorum Petri et Pauli. It gets to the heart of the Romanita of the Western Church, and especially of the English Church; St Leo I, the finest Latin stylist since Cicero, explains to the plebs Romana (now the plebs sancta Dei) how all that is meant by being Roman has been transformed ... yet, in transformation, preserved and enhanced ... by the Gospel.

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"For although, glorified by many victories, you have advanced the jus of your imperium by land and by sea, yet, what the labour of war subdued to you, is less than what the Pax Christiana subjected to you".

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The culture of classical Roman antiquity was baptised by St Leo; my view is that he is the one who finally recast the Roman Eucharistic Prayer in a Latinity moulded by the the prayer-style of the old, pre-Christian, prayer-style of early Rome.

Under St Leo, being a Christian finally ceased to be adherence to a foreign and dodgy sect largely followed by Greekling immigrants, and became the new majestic embodiment of all that it meant to be Roman in culture and law and liturgy.

And, with St Augustine [of Canterbury], that Romanita was parachuted into Kent and became the marker too of the Anglo-Saxon Church; the Church of Augustine and Justus and Mellitus; of Wilfrid and Bede and Alcuin. The Kentish king who had considered it beneath his dignity to adopt his wife's Merovingian Christianity rejoiced in the opportunity to receive Christianity from its august and Roman fount. Therein lies the exquisite beauty of "the Anglo-Saxon Church", a Roman island beyond the Alps.

And that same Mr Newman expressed the essence of the Petrine Ministry, of the munus of the Successor of Peter, in an epigrammatic passage:

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"It is one of the reproaches urged against the Church of Rome, that it has originated nothing, and has only served as a sort of remora or break in the development of doctrine. And it is an objection which I embrace as truth; for such I conceive to be the main purpose of its extraordinary gift".

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It is precisely along these lines that Cardinal Ratzinger in a passage of lapidary elegance criticised the bloated and corrupt hyperpapalism of the post-Vatican II period, with its disordered, disordering belief that a pope, especially if backed by a Council, could monkey around at will with Tradition.

It is, Ratzinger asserted, the Pope's job to be the Guardian of the Tradition and the preserver of its integrity and authenticity. This is where the essence of the Holy Father's Ministry lies ... not (as some very foolish and dreadfully noisy people mistakenly think) in being a charismatic innovator, the herald of a God of Surprises.

Heaven forbid that any Pope should ever sink so low, should be so deaf to his true ecclesial vocation.

IMHO, Sandro Magister has significantly raised the bar of his opposition to many actions and statements by the reigning pope by now calling the Catholic Church today, as it is under Bergoglio,
'a church with no leader', though this appears only in the title to his latest blogpost. I do not think he didn't intend it to convey something - because no one doubts Jorge Bergoglio was elected
to lead the Catholic Church five years ago.

But is he leading the Catholic Church as a pope ought to lead? He obviously is not, by the most basic criteria to judge a pope - he has certainly not been a symbol of unity for the Church, but the
opposite, being the main agent of divisiveness today; and he has certainly not been transmitting the deposit of faith intact and inviolate as handed down to him by his predecessors, but rampaging
through it as he pleases.

Bergoglio is obviously leading something else - what I have called from the start, for convenience and simplicity, 'the church of Bergoglio', an ambitious, poisonous flea merrily and opportunistically
riding on the back of the now-hapless elephant that is the Roman Catholic Church, in order to make its way in the world. Because heading the ultimate 'one world religion' is just a side concern for
him. He also means to be the supreme world leader, thanks to his co-option of and by the United Nations and its many agencies that share - and are in a position to advance - his secular priorities.
He is a pope who has abdicated his spiritual mission in favor of a secular agenda that was never the priority of the Church instituted by Jesus Christ. What does it say of Bergoglio that he thinks
he can establish a 'utopia' on earth - free of poverty and hunger by 2030 - when Jesus himself tried nothing of the sort, not even for the people of what was then Palestine, a minor province of the
Roman Empire? He said over and over that his kingdom is not of this earth, "the poor you will always have with you", and in that Sermon on the Mount, which Bergoglio seems to think
consisted only of "Blessed are the poor" (he pointedly and consistently omits the rest of the phrase, i.e., "...in spirit"), Jesus says twice: "So do not worry and say, ‘What are we to eat?’
or ‘What are we to drink?’ or ‘What are we to wear?’ All these things the pagans seek. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom [of God]
and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides." (In the Bible, 'righteousness' means 'moral conduct in conformity with God’s will'.)

But to get back to Magister and his latest blogpost:

In a church with no leader,
2 new protests from bishops and the faithful

April 7, 2018

An anxious and disquieting Eastertide, for those at the top of ‘the Church’ [such as it is under Bergoglio]. In the span of a few days, two of the most revolutionary turning points in this pontificate have been contested by public declarations from cardinals, bishops and the faithful – two watershed developments that would now admit to Eucharistic communion remarried divorced Catholics living in adultery as well as Protestants.

[The most appalling aspect to these twin liberalizations under Bergoglio is that they complete overturn basic Catholic doctrine about receiving the Eucharist, by allowing it for remarried divorces who choose to continue living in adultery and are therefore in a chronic state of mortal sin, and Protestants who do not believe in the Trans-Substantiation and for whom the Communion wafer is nothing but a mark of social belonging, if you will, to a church community.

But how has it come to this?That blaspheming the most supreme of the Church’s sacraments is allowed in the name of ‘mercy’ to those who are, by definition and for very solid reasons, excluded from the sacrament? But that is how unconscionable the decisions of the pontificate have been. When the primary criterion driving its feckless and shameless trashing of the deposit of faith has been to demonstrate Bergoglian mercy which is a travesty of divine mercy because it has neither truth nor justice, nor indeed, authentic charity at all for souls who deserve proper rigorous spiritual care from their pastors, not indulgence for their sins.]

But now two of those cardinals, the German Walter Brandmüller and the American Raymond L. Burke, have again come forward and together with all the participants in a conference held in Rome today, Saturday April 7, have published a DECLARATIO, a profession of faith, which reaffirms the key points of Church doctrine brought into doubt by the onslaught of innovation begun by the current pontificate.

The text of the Declaratio was released in multiple languages at the end of the Rome conference last night. Following is the English text:

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‘Therefore, we testify and confess…’
Final declaration of the conference "Catholic Church, where are you going?"
Rome, April 7, 2018

Due to contradictory interpretations of the Apostolic Exhortation ‘Amoris laetitia’, growing discontent and confusion are spreading among the faithful throughout the world.

The urgent request for a clarification submitted to the Holy Father by approximately one million faithful, more than 250 scholars and several cardinals, has received no response.

Amidst the grave danger to the faith and unity of the Church that has arisen, we, baptized and confirmed members of the People of God, are called to reaffirm our Catholic faith.

The Second Vatican Council authorizes us and encourages us to do so, stating in Lumen Gentium, n. 33: "Thus every layman, in virtue of the very gifts bestowed upon him, is at the same time a witness and a living instrument of the mission of the Church itself 'according to the measure of Christ's bestowal' (Eph. 4:7)."

Blessed John Henry Newman also encourages us to do so. In his prophetic essay "On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine" (1859), he spoke of the importance of the laity bearing witness to the faith.

Therefore, in accordance with the authentic tradition of the Church, we testify and confess that:
1) A ratified and consummated marriage between two baptized persons can be dissolved only by death.
2) Therefore, Christians united by a valid marriage who join themselves to another person while their spouse is still alive commit the grave sin of adultery.
3) We are convinced that there exist absolute moral commandments which oblige always and without exception.
4) We are also convinced that no subjective judgment of conscience can make an intrinsically evil act good and licit.
5) We are convinced that judgment about the possibility of administering sacramental absolution is not based on the imputability of the sin committed, but on the penitent’s intention to abandon a way of life that is contrary to the divine commandments.
6) We are convinced that persons who are divorced and civilly remarried, and who are unwilling to live in continence, are living in a situation that is objectively contrary to the law of God, and therefore cannot receive Eucharistic Communion.

Our Lord Jesus Christ says: "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free" (Jn 8: 31-32).

With this confidence we confess our faith before the supreme pastor and teacher of the Church and before the bishops, and we ask them to confirm us in the faith.

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As for communion for Protestants at Catholic Masses, seven bishops of Germany, including the cardinal of Cologne, Rainer Maria Voelki, have made an appeal to the Holy See against the decision to made by the German episcopal conference to allow it.

This decision, presented in the form of an “orientational aid”, went into effect on March 22 at the end of a meeting of the episcopal conference, where it had been approved by a majority vote after a lively discussion.

The bishops who contested this decision maintain that it touches on a question that is too significant, one that endangers the doctrine and unity of the Catholic Church, to be left to the judgment of individual national Churches or individual bishops or priests. And precisely for this reason they have made an appeal to Rome, asking for a clarification from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under Prefect Luis Ladaria, and the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, under Cardinal Kurt Koch.

The initiative of the seven bishops was covered in the April 4 edition of the German newspaper Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger. The seven signers of the appeal, in addition to Cardinal Woelki, are Ludwig Schick, archbishop of Bamberg, Konrad Zdarsa, bishop of Augsburg, Gregor Maria Hanke, bishop of Eichstätt, Stefan Oster, bishop of Passau, Rudolf Voderholzer, bishop of Regensburg, and Wolfgang Ipolt, bishop of Görlitz.

Whether the Holy See will respond or not, and how, will naturally depend on the pope. Who, when he was questioned once by a Protestant woman who asked him if she could receive communion at Mass together with her Catholic husband, answered with a whirligig of yes, no, I don’t know, you figure it out – and in this manner, opened the way to a great variety of decisions, all of which he has depicted as possible. As Cardinal Walter Kasper afterward confirmed, confidently attributing to the pope the idea that “if two spouses, one Catholic and one Protestant, share the same Eucharistic faith and are inwardly disposed, they can decide in their conscience to receive communion”.

But if a response comes from Rome on this question, it will appear even less justifiable that the pope has kept such a stubborn silence concerning the DUBIA on the other crucial question of communion for the divorced and remarried, this too concerning the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist, “source and summit” of the Church’s life.

Getting back to the Declaratio published by the participants in the conference in Rome on April 7, it must be noted that this is not formulated as a request for clarification - although it incorporates some of the questions raised in the DUBIA - but as a testimony of faith coming from the People of God at a moment perceived as being of “grave danger to the faith and unity of the Church,” because of “contradictory interpretations” of AL [what I consider the concrete lethal form of the poison at the heart of this anti-Catholic Pontificate.]

It is no coincidence that the conference was entitled “Catholic Church, where are you going?” And its subtitle was this statement from Cardinal Carlo Caffarra: “Only a blind man can deny that in the Church there is great confusion.”

The speakers were cardinals Brandmüller, Burke, and, from Hong Kong, Joseph Zen Zekiun, Bishop Athanasius Schneider, the philosopher and former president of the Italian senate Marcello Pera, the canonist Valerio Gigliotti, the bioethicist Renzo Puccetti. There was a replay of a talk given by Cardinal Caffarra in defense of the encyclical of Paul VI “Humanae Vitae,” now under reconsideration. And Cardinal Burke also raised his critical voice in an extensive interview published just before the conference on La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana and in English on LifeSite News.

But perhaps the most original element of the conference, developed by Cardinal Brandmüller and incorporated in the Declaratio,”was the reference to a text by Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801-1890) on the key role of the faithful in bearing witness to the true doctrine of the Church: “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine.”

Newman published this text anonymously in the English Catholic magazine The Rambler, of which he had been the editor. At the time it raised heated controversy. It was republished in 1961 just before Vatican Council II and since then has become a classic.

In it Newman reviews the moments of the Church’s history in which the orthodoxy of the faith was lost by many of the bishops and saved instead by many of the ordinary baptized. And he gathers from this that on matters of doctrine listening to the voice of the faithful - not to be confused with public opinion, but to be verified in its fidelity to the tradition of the Church - is not only desirable, but a duty.

A lesson of history more valid now than ever, and one to which the Declaratio gives voice. In the hope that it may be heeded even by him who sits on the chair of Peter.

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Before I forget, here's one of the articles I bookmarked a few days ago to post ASAP, but I have not gotten round to doing it:
https://onepeterfive.com/cardinal-schonborn-a-council-could-approve-of-female-ordinations/
It shows, alas, how the president (I think he still is, unfortunately) of the Foundation established by the Ratzinger Schuelerkreis to pursue its activities has since become more Bergoglian than Bergoglio. Given the heterodox doctrinal and pastoral positions Schoenborn advocates today, it is appalling to think that this is the person who was the chairman of the editorial committee that drafted the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Yet, perhaps even now, behind the scenes, Schoenborn has already been hard at work with other Bergoglians to effect the many revisions in the Catechism that Bergoglio desires. Schoenborn may yet have the historic distinction of being the only man to head the drafting commitee of the Catechism for two churches - the Roman Catholic Church and the church of Bergoglio.

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‘Amoris Laetitia’ vs. ‘Veritatis Splendor’:
The Bergoglian 'revolution' that threatens
the moral foundation of the Church
by E. Christian Brugger

April 7, 2018

I greatly agree with Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago when he says the reasoning in Pope Francis’s two-year-old document on marriage and family Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love) is “nothing short of revolutionary.” But that’s where our agreements cease.

For to him, this revolution is a boon for the Church. To me, it poses a threat to the foundations of the Church’s belief.

In particular, it threatens our Catholic understanding of morality. Pope St. John Paul II addressed the perennial Catholic understanding in Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth). And he warned against moral theories regnant at the time that led to a rejection of conclusions that the Church held to be definitive.

In particular, he noted four errors of these theories:
1. Consequentialist reasoning: He said they use “circumstances and the situation … (as) the basis of certain exceptions to the general rule” and so “permit one to do in practice and in good conscience what is qualified as intrinsically evil by the moral law” (56).

2. Flawed notion of conscience: He said they wrongfully set in opposition “the precept(s) [of the moral law], which [are] valid in general, and the norm of the individual conscience, which would in fact make the final decision about what is good and what is evil” (56).

3. The idea that moral absolutes are merely ideals: He said that they propose the “very serious error” that “the Church’s [moral] teaching is essentially only an ‘ideal,’ which must then be adapted, proportioned, graduated to the so-called concrete possibilities of man” (103).

4. Setting the pastoral against the doctrinal: And he said that in the name of “so-called ‘pastoral’ solutions,” they propose what is “contrary to the teaching of the magisterium” and “justify a ‘creative’ hermeneutic according to which the moral conscience is in no way obliged, in every case, by a particular negative precept” (56).

In the last two years since AL was released, Catholics around the world have been distressed to see that the model of moral reasoning in AL - called by some advocates [fanatic Bergoglians] as the “new paradigm” [and even Bergopglianism's 'core Gospel'] — embodies these same four errors.

1. Consequentialist reasoning: The “new paradigm” proposes that on the basis of the “immense variety of concrete situations” or, as the Argentinian bishops call them, “complex circumstances,” some Catholics cannot be expected to conform their behavior to the general rule prohibiting engaging in sexual behavior with anyone other than one’s valid spouse; and so proponents support exceptions to the “general rule”; and in these cases, the people are free to receive the Holy Eucharist without changing their sexual behavior.

2. Flawed notion of conscience: Amoris Laetitia states, consistent with Catholic moral tradition, that conscience helps me to judge when an action of mine “does not correspond objectively to the overall demands of the Gospel”; but then it goes on to teach, contrary to Catholic tradition, that conscience must also “recognize with sincerity and honesty what for now is the most generous response which can be given to God,” that is to say, conscience recognizes that I am not able to keep the Gospel’s objective demands here and now; and through this process, it says, we “come to see with a certain moral security that it is what God himself is asking amid the concrete complexity of one’s limits.”

In other words, conscience condemns my action by judging rightly that it is contrary to the Gospel; and then it acquits me from my obligation to live by the Gospel by judging that I am too weak to carry out the Gospel’s command and even allegedly hears God telling me that this is the case.

3. Moral absolutes are merely ideals: Amoris Laetitia constantly refers to the objective and absolute demands of the Gospel for sex and marriage as merely an “ideal” or a “rule,” and it says that God knows not everyone can be expected to conform their lives “fully [to] the objective ideal.” It stigmatizes an obedience-centered approach to living the Gospel as “cold bureaucratic morality,” “nothing more than the defense of a dry and lifeless doctrine,” but calls its own approach a “message of love and tenderness.”

4. Pastoral solutions contra doctrine: Amoris Laetitia refers to its proposals for living the Christian life as “new pastoral methods,” referring to them by various names such as “a process of accompaniment,” “evangelical discernment” and “gradualness in pastoral care” (See Familiaris Consortio, 34).

It teaches that what’s most needed is a kind of “pastoral discernment” that recognizes that the “concrete situation” sometimes does not permit conformity to the “rule … without [causing] further sin” and says that when such a situation arises, the individuals are, in fact, called by God to set the “rule” (i.e., “the overall demands of the Gospel”) aside. And yet Amoris Laetitia confusingly insists that these new pastoral methods “can never prescind from the Gospel demands of truth and charity, as proposed by the Church.”

When Amoris Laetitia first appeared, there was doubt as to whether its pastoral plan conformed to Veritatis Splendor and Catholic Tradition. Its hermeneutic of ambiguity left open a variety of possible interpretations, not all of which were problematic.

But then, in September 2016, the Argentine bishops formally interpreted Amoris Laetitia Chapter 8 as saying that some divorcees who are civilly remarried were free to return to Holy Communion without a commitment to refrain from sexual relations:
“When a declaration of nullity could not be obtained [by civilly remarried divorcees], the aforementioned option [i.e., for the couple “to live in continence”] may not in fact be feasible. However, a path of discernment is likewise possible. If it is recognized that, in a concrete case, there are limitations that mitigate responsibility and guilt, particularly when a person considers that he would fall into a further fault, harming the children of the new union, Amoris Laetitia opens the possibility of access to the sacraments of reconciliation and the Eucharist.”

On the same day of the publication of the text, Pope Francis privately wrote to the Argentine bishops, saying:“I received the writing of the Buenos Aires Pastoral Region, ‘Basic Criteria for the Application of Chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia.’ Thank you very much for sending it to me. And I congratulate you for the work you have done: a true example of accompaniment of priests. … The writing is very good and makes fully explicit the meaning of Chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia. There are no other interpretations, and I am sure that it will do much good.”

When the Pope’s private letter was questioned, rather than saying it held no authoritative status for Catholics, the Pope formally elevated both his private letter and the Argentine bishops’ guidelines to the status of an apostolic letter, formally publishing them both in the October 2016 edition of the official Acts of the Apostolic See with the intent of making them part of his “authentic magisterium.”

By this last act, the Pope officially approved a practice that contradicts the practice of the Catholic Church dating from apostolic times: Prescribing that Catholics who divorce and “remarry” while their first spouse still lives cannot be admitted to Holy Communion because, as living in sexually active relationships with persons other than their presumptively valid spouses, their condition of life objectively contravenes the sixth precept of the Decalogue and thus contradicts the loving union between Jesus and his Church, which is signified by and made present in the Holy Eucharist.

This teaching has been reaffirmed clearly and authoritatively multiple times in the last 40 years:
1. In 1980, by John Paul II: “[They] are unable to be admitted [to Holy Communion] from the fact that their state and condition of life objectively contradict that union of love between Christ and his Church, which is signified and effected by the Eucharist.”
2. In 1981, by the same: “The Church reaffirms her practice, which is based upon sacred Scripture, of not admitting to Eucharistic Communion divorced persons who have remarried.”
3. In 1994, by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF): “They find themselves in a situation that objectively contravenes God’s law. Consequently, they cannot receive Holy Communion as long as this situation persists.”
4. In 1997, by the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “If the divorced are remarried civilly, they find themselves in a situation that objectively contravenes God’s law. Consequently, they cannot receive Eucharistic Communion as long as this situation persists” (1650).
5. In 1998, by the CDF: “Under no circumstances can their new union be considered lawful, and therefore reception of the sacraments is intrinsically impossible. The conscience of the individual is bound to this norm without exception.”
6. And in 2007, by Pope Benedict XVI: “not admitting the divorced and remarried to the sacraments, since their state and their condition of life objectively contradict the loving union of Christ and the Church signified and made present in the Eucharist.”

In addition, when questions have been raised about whether the private judgments of remarried divorcees are sufficient to establish invalidity in their own cases and whether the so-called “internal forum” could be used to resolve questions of the status of their first marriages, both were answered firmly in the negative.

And yet the “process of accompaniment” outlined in Chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia seems to make both a part of its ordinary pastoral plan.

The disparities between the teaching of Amoris Laetitia and Veritatis Splendor and Catholic moral tradition are causing confusion to the faithful. This needs to be addressed by the bishops and the Pope as soon as possible.

That's a rather lame end to this essay. Some bishops already are addressing it, but clearly, not enough of them - even as the pope persistently refuses to make any definitive clarification on any part of AL, and he never will, because if he 'clarified' anything in the sense of how he obviously wants it, then he would be putting his own neck into the noose of material heresy. His continuing silence to all the appeals for clarification is the Bergoglian version of invoking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination.

Insisting on getting any answers from him, one way or the other, is a futile exercise and always was. He is not stupid - he will never self-incriminate himself. Nor will he give any answer that would in any way admit any error in AL, because that would undermine all the groundwork already laid down by his legion of minions.

So let all the concerned cardinals, bishops and laymen focus their attention on fighting the immoral teachings of AL on the parish level, to begin with; and step up the anti-AL campaign by faith-based reason at all levels, from the Internet to parish handouts and somehow to the schools and seminaries. It's a David-and-Goliath situation to work against a reigning pope, but David won because he had the Lord at his side. There is no reason to think he is on Bergoglio's side in this case.

Detail from 'The incredulity of St. Thomas', Caravaggio, 1601-1602.


Not everyone is as lucky as those of us who attend the Church of the Holy Innocents with the certainty that everytime Fr. Peter Stravinskas delivers the homily, we shall find the text in Catholic World
Report on the same day. I am just sorry I failed to post his series of lectures in Holy Week because of news priorities, given my limited time now for the Forum, but I shall try to fit them in
somehow as soon as I can.

Mass today (the 10:30 a.m. TLM at Holy Innocents) was unusual because Fr. Stravinskas celebrated with a deacon (our parish priest himself, Fr. Miara) and a subdeacon (a newly-ordained one from
the Fraternity of St. Peter's, who was serving at his first Mass). The new subdeacon's parents were in attendance, and just before his homily, Fr. S addressed to them in French a special message of
gratitude for their son's vocation.

The wounds of Christ and the doubt of Thomas
It is not an accident that Thomas comes to faith,
not by simply seeing an apparition of Jesus, but only
after being instructed to pay heed to the sacred wounds,
those noble 'tokens of victory and love'
by Fr. Peter M.J. Stravinskas

April 8, 2018

The following homily was preached by the Reverend Peter M. J. Stravinskas, Ph.D., S.T.D., for the Second Sunday of Easter/Divine Mercy Sunday [April 8, 2018], at the Church of the Holy Innocents, New York City.

An embarrassment of riches confronts us today as we observe the Octave Day of Easter, Dominica in albis, Divine Mercy Sunday, Low Sunday, Quasimodo Sunday – take your pick – with readings that lead us to such seemingly diverse things as the experience of peace, the means of forgiveness, the wounds of the Risen Christ, the meaning of faith. Believe it or not, they all fit together.

Like Christmas, Easter is one of those feasts the Church just can’t seem to let go of. We’ve been reminded of that liturgically all week by the special inserts into the Roman Canon, the solemn paschal dismissal, the Easter sequence, and the Gloria every day. The joy of Easter is so great, that the Church continues her celebration non-stop for a full week, but the mystery is so great that it really demands such attention.

The ancient Hebrews were quite fond of octave feasts, so much so that they developed a special understanding of them: The eighth day symbolized for them, and later for the Fathers of the Church, the endless reign of the Messiah in an eternal Sabbath. And that’s what we commemorate today – an Easter that will never end. Let’s try to plumb the depths of this extraordinary, indeed central, mystery of our faith.

It is interesting to note that this Gospel passage is employed by every rite of the Church on this Sunday, obviously due to its connection to the eighth day since the Resurrection of the Lord of life. As the Risen Christ appears, as if from nowhere on Easter night, He offers the frightened apostolic band the standard greeting of Shalom [Peace].

It was not an empty greeting like “Hello”, for it signified a desire that the other receive the experience of harmony, health, healing, wholeness, union with God and neighbor. But Jesus wanted to make very sure that His Apostles understood the full import of His particular intentions on this night, therefore, He immediately went on to demonstrate that He had even more in mind. And so, He begins by making them His delegates or representatives in conferring such peace on others: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

Now what? He breathes on them, but for what purpose? Being good Jews, the Apostles understood the significance instantly. The Hebrew word ruah means “breath” or “wind” or “spirit”. At the dawn of creation, the Book of Genesis tells us, the wind or breath of Almighty God swept over the waters, bringing forth life. In the second chapter of that inspired book, we are told that the Lord God formed the first human from the dust of the Earth and then “blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being” (Gen 2:7).

Jesus clearly intends to bring about a re-creation of humanity as once more the breath of God confers His Spirit on men, restoring them to the fullness of life by the forgiveness of their sins. In other words, in this moment original sin and all personal sins are vanquished as man now is given the possibility of returning to the Garden of Eden.

And how is such a marvelous event to occur? Through Christ’s providence, the Apostles and their successors are to be the Risen One’s agents of this wondrous reconciliation between God and man. Too good to be true? Apparently so, for St. Thomas surely had difficulty imagining that any of it could be true, and in this way he stands for each one of us who also finds it hard to believe not only that our sins can be forgiven, with the whole slate wiped clean, but also that Christ could have risen from the dead. And so, our divine Savior uses Thomas’s hesitancy to believe to teach him – and us – some important lessons of Christian faith.

On the Octave of Easter, then, the Risen Christ reappears in the Upper Room – that same room where He instituted the Sacraments of the Eucharist and Holy Orders ten days earlier, and where the Pentecost gift of the Holy Spirit will be bestowed forty days later.

Once more, He greets His chosen disciples, but then quickly turns His full attention to Thomas. He wants to convince Thomas that He is truly risen, and He does so by pointing to His holy wounds.

Why? Those wounds on the Body of the Glorified and Risen Lord teach us several things. First, they show that this Jesus is not a ghost but a real flesh-and-blood Person. Second, they serve as powerful reminders of the great love of God for us, a love so great that in Christ God died, so that our sins might be forgiven. Third, those wounds illustrate the continuity between the earthly life and ministry of Jesus and His eternal high priesthood, by which He lives to make continual intercession for us before His Heavenly Father (cf. Heb 7:25).

It is not an accident that Thomas comes to faith, not by simply seeing an apparition of Jesus, but only after being instructed to pay heed to those sacred wounds, which are not scars of defeat and ignominy but, as the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich put it, noble “tokens of victory and love.” Because Jesus loved us to death, our sins are forgiven, and that love remains present in the Godhead forever.

Therefore, when we meet Christ face to face on Judgment Day, He will look just as He did during that first Easter season: We will behold Him in glory, but a glory that still teaches us the price of sin. Seeing His wounds on that day will either bring us to the full awareness of what our sins have done and to perfect love of Him forever in Heaven, or to hatred and envy of One Who has such a capacity to love and forgive, and that thought will banish us to Hell.

Jesus, you see, is in a unique position to judge us, precisely because He shared our human condition completely and bore the burden of our sins, which is why the Father has given over to Him the role of judgment of the human race (cf. Jn 5:22). The judgment the Lord most desperately wants to make, however, is that of forgiveness, if only we allow Him to do so.

The Apostles impressed the inhabitants of Jerusalem with their “many wonders and signs” (Acts 2:43), however, the greatest signs worked by the Apostles and their successors are not physical cures but the inner healings which come from the Sacrament of Penance, established by our merciful Savior on this very night. We who have such ready access to this channel of grace know why the Angel of the Resurrection urges: “Do not be afraid” (Mt 28:5).

Six centuries after Julian of Norwich, in 1905 a girl was born to a poor but devout Polish couple. As a teenager, she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in Warsaw. Because she was uneducated, Sister Faustina was assigned the most menial of tasks; in the midst of the tasks of a cook, baker, gardener and housekeeper, the young nun underwent many mystical experiences, during which Our Lord asked her to become both His apostle and His secretary — to announce anew to mankind the Gospel of God’s mercy.

In one of the Lord’s messages to her, He said: “Mankind will not have peace until it turns with trust to my mercy. . . . My daughter, be diligent in writing down every sentence I tell you concerning my mercy, because this is meant for a great number of souls who will profit from it.”

Sister Faustina was also told that the Church should celebrate a feast in honor of the divine mercy – on the Sunday after Easter. Not by accident does the Church on that day read the Gospel text which recounts Christ’s institution of the Sacrament of Penance, which is the surest and clearest sign of the divine mercy.

The young mystic likewise wrote down two prayers dictated to her by the Font of Mercy Himself. The first goes like this, as you well know: “Eternal Father, I offer you the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of your dearly beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, in atonement for my sins and those of the whole world.” The second is like it: “For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.”

Our Lord promised Sister Faustina that great things would happen if people prayed this chaplet of prayers with the proper attitude: “Whoever will recite it will receive great mercy at the hour of death. Priests will recommend it to sinners as their last hope of salvation. Even if there were a sinner most hardened, if he recited this chaplet only once, he will receive grace from my infinite mercy. I desire that the whole world know my infinite mercy. I desire to grant unimaginable graces to those who trust in my mercy.”

Indeed, the Risen Christ’s first gift to His Church was His peace, which flows from His abiding mercy. We need to reflect on that and believe it with all our hearts, thanking God for this gift, which so many people desire and hope for but never realize is so readily available to them.

However, we must not lapse into some kind of soupy, saccharine understanding of mercy, whereby God simply rubber-stamps our sinfulness and tells us we are fine, just as we are. We cannot have access to what the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer condemned as “cheap grace.” There is no such thing as “cheap grace”; the only grace available to us is the grace won by Christ’s saving death. Hence, Bonhoeffer’s signature work is entitled, The Cost of Discipleship.” What cost Jesus His life has a cost for us as well.

Dame Julian, in contemplating the wounds of Our Lord, also prayed for a wound for herself – the wound of true repentance, which entails not only sorrow for sin but a sincere purpose of amendment. Simply put: to claim mercy, one must see oneself as a sinner who hears Jesus say, “Neither do I condemn you,” yes. And then we have to hear the next sentence, too: “Go, and do not sin again” (Jn 8:11).

It should be no surprise, then, to find St. Augustine, playing with the origins of the Latin word for mercy [misericordia], as he informs us that God’s grace moves us “a miseria ad misericordiam” [from misery to mercy]. “Misericordia,” you see, comes from two words which combine to mean “having a heart for the miserable.”

The wonderful Dominican Sisters of Newburgh, who taught me in high school, made us memorize at least one Shakespearean soliloquy a year. In my freshman year, that came from The Merchant of Venice, wherein the Bard of Avon rhapsodized on the beauty and glory of mercy as he had Portia exclaim:

---

The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven}
Upon the place beneath. It is twice bless’d:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest; It becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway,
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute to God Himself,
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this:
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.

---

As beautiful as that soliloquy is, as one commentator has observed, “before Shakespeare wrote it, God was it!”

As I mentioned, Faustina Kowalska was a member of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. And so, it might behoove us to consider the Marian dimension of this as well.

Indeed, God became Mercy Incarnate within the spotless womb of the Virgin Mary. And she understood it all so well that she broke forth into her canticle of praise, the Magnificat: “Et misericordia eius a progenie in progenies timentibus eum” [And His mercy is from age to age on those who fear Him].

Our Lady was not teaching theology from a textbook but from her own experience of life. God had touched her so profoundly by His mercy that she became what the Church’s lovely night prayer to her rightly calls her – “Mater misericordiae“ [Mother of Mercy]. God the Father sought the young maiden’s cooperation with His eternal plan of mercy; God the Holy Spirit overshadowed her with His merciful wings; she became the very seat of Mercy, the Mother of the One Who is “dives in misericordia” [rich in mercy], as the title of St. John Paul II’s encyclical reminds us.

Our world, my dear people, needs to hear the message of mercy perhaps as no other age before. A culture of violence, death, destruction and despair can be healed only by mercy. You and I, like St. Faustina before us, must count ourselves among the apostles of mercy.

But first we must be convinced that mercy has been granted us; otherwise, our words will ring hollow. The result of knowing mercy (which comes from the very core or heart of the Being of God) means being grabbed at the very core or heart of our own being – and that gives birth to the emotion (both divine and human) of joy.

Once more, Our Lady leads the way as she sings out: “Exsultavit spiritus meus in Deo Salvatore meo” [My spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior]. Where mercy spawns joy, melancholy, fear and death are definitively banished.

By a happy coincidence, we heard today the First Epistle of St. John speak of the three witnesses: the Spirit, the water, and the blood (1 Jn 5:8). Are not the rays of blood and water the very symbols of the Divine Mercy devotion? Flowing from the wounded side of the Dead Christ were the streams of the sacramental life of Holy Church in those most basic and fundamental sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist. Lay claim to those grace-filled avenues of mercy in making your own the beautiful and moving Anima Christi:

---

Soul of Christ, sanctify me.
Body of Christ, save me.
Blood of Christ, inebriate me.
Water from the side of Christ, wash me.
Passion of Christ, strengthen me.
O good Jesus, hear me.
Within thy wounds hide me,
Suffer me not to be separated from Thee.
From the malicious enemy defend me.
In the hour of my death call me, and bid me come to Thee,
That with thy saints I may praise Thee for ever and ever. Amen.

---

THE NEW FACE OF HOLINESS? REALLY? Of course, I made up the 'illustration' with the snarling pope, using a new photo just posted online 9 hours ago - it was just too tempting to resist exploiting it. But really,
who would seriously take lessons in holiness from one who doesn't even see the absurdity of issuing a call to holiness in a document filled with unholy nastiness against all those he dislikes? If he cannot even curb
his snarl in public, it's easy to believe all those tales of his nasty hissy fits behind the scenes!


I was positive that sensible Catholics - and reasonably sane persons of whatever faith or no faith at all - would find little to rejoice and exult about the pope's no-occasion apostolic exhortation hyped all week last week by the Vatican and Bergoglians.

To begin with, just because one of his titles is 'Holy Father' does not mean this particular 'Holy Father' is qualified to exhort anyone to holiness! And why on earth would he suddenly feel called upon to exhort to holiness - as though an exhortation by him would somehow exorcise all the shamelessly anti-Catholic diabolical unholiness generated by him and his followers in the past five years!

In any case, despite its deceptive title [Bergoglio has cornered the market on all the possible ways one can use the various Latin synonyms for joy], it turns out it is yet another platform from which he launches invectives against all those Catholics he cannot abide, not content with his daily bully pulpit at his morning Masses in Casa Santa Marta. That he dares indulge in his now-patented insult-mongering proclivities in an apostolic exhortation is a measure of his hubris.

This must be the first papal document ever to be used against Catholics whom the writing pontiff subjectively considers as beneath contempt for being faithful to what the Church has taught down the ages! Or, in general, ever to be used to denounce the pope-author's personal bugbears. Only with Bergoglio do we find official papal documents used so cavalierly as vehicles to propagate a pope's personal views as 'magisterium' and to settle his personal scores in public. The concept of 'abuse' as flagrant misuse of power is obviously alien to him.

Popes in the past have used a wide range of document genres to anathematize - literally - the enemies of the Church. This time, it is the pope himself (perhaps the #1 enemy of the Church today, if only because he is standing in for Satan - and who deserves to be anathematized for his increasingly open apostasy) indulging his open ire and contempt against various categories of Catholics who, are after all, part of the flock entrusted to him when he was elected pope.

In all his rantings and ravings against the Catholics he dislikes, Bergoglio has not once expressed any friendly intention, just sheer hostility. Not the slightest fissure of goodwill and welcome such as he lavishes on his beloved Muslim migrants. Bergoglio feels buoyed, of course, by the robotic acquiescence, kowtowing and incense-bearing of his followers to everything their lord and master says and does, not realizing perhaps that they have thereby mindlessly replaced Jesus in their minds and hearts with Bergoglio as their ultimate lord and master.

I say all the above without having read an iota of Bergoglio's latest - which I have no intention of reading because I am not into masochism - because when more than one sensible and responsible source say the same thing about what I shall henceforth call by a short cut, Gaud-Ex (as I cannot abide to repeat its pompous and oh-so-dishonest title) then it must be so. Let's hear first from Sandro Magister:[


Little joy, and great invective
As Fr. Spadaro seeks to explain Bergoglio
[What is there to explain? If this pope dislikes you,
his wrath will hound you in every way he can do so]

April 9, 2018

The official presentation at the Vatican press office, on Monday April 9, of “Gaudete et Exsultate” - the third apostolic exhortation of Pope Francis after "Evangelii Gaudium" and "Amoris Laetitia" - was a completely useless exercise, in terms both of the worthlessness of the things said, which were not even put into the routine bulletin, and of the insignificance of those who said them: the vicar of the diocese of Rome, Angelo De Donatis; the former president of the Italian branch of Catholic Action, Paola Bignardi; and the journalist Gianni Valente, a close friend of Jorge Mario Bergoglio since before he was elected pope. All three with the air of having done no more than to read in advance the document they had to present, without knowing anything else about it.

To make up for this, however, the editor of La [In]Civiltà Cattolica, Fr Antonio Spadaro, SJ, stepped in immediately to fill in the blanks of the official presentation.

Fr. Spadaro, in fact, posted online that same day, on the website of his magazine - which is printed with the pope’s imprimatur - a presentation of his own, in four languages, of Gaud-Ex [the full title is far too pompous and above all, dishonest, for me to repeat withut gagging!],that proclaims it will reveal its “roots, structure, and significance.” And he did so with such abundance and precision of information as to make one think that the initial compilation of the papal document was probably his work.

In Gaud-Ex, there is nothing that Bergoglio has not already said and written, even long ago. And Spadaro furnishes the index of this:
- the first big interview of Pope Francis with La Civiltà Cattolica in August of 2013;
- the idea of the “holiness of the door just down the way,” borrowed from the French writer Joseph Malègue, dear to Bergoglio;
- some passages of Evangelii Gaudium, the agenda-setting text of this pontificate;
- the “Reflexiones sobre la vida apostolica” written by Bergoglio in 1987;
- the presentation made by Bergoglio in 1989 of the book “My ideal of sanctity” by the Argentine Jesuit Ismael Quiles, who was his professor;
- the maxim “simul in actione contemplativus” (contemplative even in action} of the Jesuit Jerónimo Nadal, one of the first companions of Saint Ignatius of Loyola;
- the book “Discernimiento y lucha espiritual” by the Jesuit Miguel Ángel Fiorito, the spiritual father of the young Bergoglio, who wrote the preface to this in 1985;
- the maxim of Saint Ignatius that is so precious to Francis: “Non coerceri a maximo, contineri tamen a minimo divinum est” (Not to be constrained by that which is greatest, (but) to be contained in that which is smallest, this is divine);
- the concluding document of the general conference of the Latin American episcopate in Aparecida in 2007, of which Bergoglio [read Tucho Fernandez] was the main architect;
- and finally, various morning homilies of Francis at Santa Marta.

But into this basic backdrop, with the general theme of the “call of everyone to holiness,” Pope Francis arranged to weave in a bunch of his invectives - these too recurring in many of his previous writings and talks - against his critics and their objections. [Fine way to call for holiness - by indulging in invective! But as many have pointed out, Bergoglio has never heard of the principle of non-contradiction - or thinks he is exempt from it, and from all other rules of logic and coherence.]

On his objectors within the Church, Francis sketches in Gaud-Ex a profile that is prejudicially dismissive.
- They are those with the “funeral faces” [So speaks the archetypal ‘funeral face’!] who have an “obsession with the law, ostentation in the treatment of the liturgy, the doctrine, and the prestige of the Church.”
- They are those who bend religion “to the service of their own psychological and mental lucubrations.”
- They are those who conceive of doctrine as “a closed system, devoid of dynamics capable of generating questions, doubts, interrogatives.”
- They are those who close themselves off in a “tranquil and anesthetizing mediocrity,” made up of “individualism, spiritualism, becoming closed off in little worlds, dependence, systematization, repetition of prearranged frameworks, dogmatism, nostalgia, pessimism, taking refuge in the norms.”
- They are those who love “to get teary-eyed in a presumed ecstasy” and assert “a ‘dry cleaner’s’ sanctity, everything beautiful, everything just right,” but in reality “fake.”

They are, in two words, the modern “Gnostics” and “Pelagians”, contemporary exponents of these two ancient heresies.

There is one passage, in paragraph 26 of Gaud-Ex that seems to wipe out two millennia of contemplative monasticism, male and female:

---

“It is not healthy to love silence and avoid the encounter with the other, to desire repose and reject activity, to seek prayer and underestimate service. We are called to live contemplation even in the midst of action.”

---

And this is what Spadaro writes, in making his exegesis of this passage: “This is the Ignatian ideal, in fact, according to the famous formula of one of his first companions, Fr. Jerónimo Nadal: to be ‘simul in actione contemplativus.’ Alternatives like ‘either God or the world’ or ‘either God or nothing’ are erroneous.”

Nota bene! “God or Nothing” and “The Power of Silence” are precisely the titles of the two main books by Cardinal Robert Sarah, the most authoritative representative of a vision of the Catholic Church alternative to the one advocated by Pope Francis. [While Cardinal Ratzinger’s second book-length interview with Peter Seewald was ”God and the World”.]

In addition to the invectives against his opponents, Francis also included in Gaud-Ex some responses to criticisms made against him.

For example, in paragraphs 101 and 102, the criticisms of his way of handling the question of migrants: “Some Catholics affirm that it is a secondary issue with respect to the ‘serious’ issues of bioethics. That such things should be said by a politician preoccupied with his success is understandable, but not by a Christian.”

Another example. In paragraph 115 the pope goes after those “Catholic media” that try “to compensate for their own dissatisfactions” by violating the eighth commandment: “Do not bear false witness,” just to “destroy the image of others without pity.” [Ummm! Once again, there speaks someone who habitually indulges in bearing false witness not just against others, but of Christ himself and what he says in the Gospels.]

Curiously, however, this pope nominally put his signature on Gaud-Ex on March 19, Feast of St. Joseph. But also the final unfolding of the 'Viganò saga', the most colossal piece of “fake news” fabricated so far by the pontificate of Francis, and one moreover done at the expense of his innocent predecessor, Benedict XVI.


Here's Steve Skojec's taken on Gaud-Ex, also based perforce on hearsay as he feels no incentive for reading it....

Extra! Extra! Hot off the press:
Bergoglio's call to holiness!
by Steve Skojec

April 9, 2018

The vast majority of the Catholic commentariat will be discussing the pope’s new apostolic exhortation, Gaudete et Exsultate, which was officially released today. The topic of the exhortation is “The Call to Holiness in Today’s World.”

Imagine trying to learn about holiness from the fellow who insists on telling us that hell doesn’t exist, that adultery isn’t really adultery, that the Blessed Virgin Mary wanted to call God a liar, that we can use contraception despite it being a serious sin, that robbing graves is perfectly fine, and so on.

This is the same man who tells us that gossip is “terrorism” but nevertheless mocks faithful priests, scorns the faithful who are concerned with following Church teaching as “rigid” or “Pharisees” or “Neo-Pelagians” or “doctors of the law”, fires three priests working at one of his most important dicasteries without cause, publicly accuses sexual abuse victims of calumny without even meeting with them to hear their concerns, all the while touting his own humility. (He is in fact so frequently engaged in insulting people that he has inspired a compendium of his many unique barbs and epithets.)

I am very far from being a saintly man. So far, in fact, that I wonder if I can ever bridge the wide chasm between who I am and who I need to be. But if there is any man on this planet less capable of helping me to find my way there than, as one priest-friend of mine calls him, “that man in Rome”, I can’t imagine who he’d be. A wolf cannot be trusted to lead the sheep to safe pastures — especially when he is garishly decked out in the garb of a shepherd.

Therefore, to be perfectly blunt, I’m in no hurry to read this latest missive, which, at nearly 20,000 words, is absolutely sparse compared to his previous writings, but over four times longer than my patience will allow. I know I will most likely be forced to discuss it at length over the coming months, but I’m putting it off.

For now, I would much rather spend my time writing about things that have some meaning in our lives beyond the latest papal outrage of the day. It is exhausting to keep up with his constant, clamoring demand for attention, like the incessant clanging of a gong.

It will no doubt contain certain passages of authentic Catholic wisdom, which will be used by papal positivists to bludgeon those critics who will zero in on the “drops of poison” Pope Leo XIII warned us about.

I’m already hearing from friends and colleagues who, in a spirit of mortification (or perhaps morbid curiosity) are already poring over the thing, and they say it’s riddled with all the same kind of cringeworthy word salad, problematic theology, and needless degradations we’ve come to expect from our papal chastisement. As the brilliantly satirical mind behind the Twitter account of the “Vatican Postmaster” informed us last night:

---

Vatican Post Office
@CaproEspiatori
When it come to the environment, Pope Francis leads by example. He so concerned about recycling, he makes an entire Apostolic Exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate out of recycled homilies and insults. Nothing go to waste.

---

The one passage I know I can recommend, pointed out to me by a European friend who got hold of an early copy, is this:

---

161. Hence, we should not think of the devil as a myth, a representation, a symbol, a figure of speech or an idea. This mistake would lead us to let down our guard, to grow careless and end up more vulnerable. The devil does not need to possess us. He poisons us with the venom of hatred, desolation, envy and vice. When we let down our guard, he takes advantage of it to destroy our lives, our families and our communities. “Like a roaring lion, he prowls around, looking for someone to devour” (1 Pet 5:8).

---

[IMH-BEB-O, that is, in my humble but extremely biased opinion, the devil has already devoured the man on Peter's Chair, or perhaps more correctly, has taken him over totally, now acting and speaking through him and in him and with him.]

Thank you, Holy Father. I appreciate your acknowledgement of our work — although, I do wonder where you think the devil lives, what with hell not being a real place.


Best response I've seen so far to Gaud-Ex, and I love Eccles's 'Goad and Insult' cross-lingual wordplay on the title.

Gaudete et Exsultate:
Goad and insult

April 10, 2018

This is the latest instalment in our "How to be a good Pope" series, and explains how you can issue a Call to Holiness, while at the same time settling a few scores.

Five years into your reign, things may not be going too well. Your great work Appassionata Erotica was not received as enthusiastically as you had hoped, and you have a pile of unanswered dubia, filial corrections, letters, e-mails, etc. to deal with. Why, they've even organized a conference in Rome with the theme: "Is Pope Fred bonkers, or simply thick?" This is supposed to deal with some doctrinal questions in as tactful a way as possible.

Also, some cheeky blighter has written a book called The Megalomaniac Pope. You don't intend to read it, but you have a feeling that those skilled in textual analysis may detect traces of criticism in it.

Pausing only to phone up Booze-lager, your man in the Order of Malta, asking him to put a live scorpion in a certain author's bed [suspended Malta knight Henry Sire, author of The Dictator Pope], you rush off to write your exhortation "Goad and Insult". This contains:
1. Some recycled stuff from previous speeches, homilies, rants, interviews with Scalfari, etc.
2. Some attacks on straw men, which your spin-doctor Fr Spidero will interpret as referring to Burke, Sarah, Pope Benedict XVI, St Paul, Jesus, and various other people who have offended you.
3. A huge dossier contributed by Spidero, which proves that you are holy and nobody else is.

Now, the two heresies you are most found of mentioning - a complete mystery to 99% of Catholics including yourself - are Gnosticism and Pelagianism. So mutter in dark tones that some people are guilty of these ancient heresies. It's far more serious than abortion (and anyway, your friend Emma Banana has asked you to go easy on that one from now on).

Perhaps for a change you could accuse your critics of Triclavianism. This is a medieval heresy that three, rather than four, nails were used to crucify Christ and that a Roman soldier pierced Him with a spear on the left, rather than right side (unless someone on Wikipedia has been having a little joke).

You've disagreed with your predecessors. Next, disagree with your successors. Now, the biggest thorn in your side at present is probably that African chap with the girl's name. Let's call him Cardinal Sally. He's very fond of Silence, and has written a whole book about it. This goes against everything you stand for - why, you can't keep silent for more than 30 seconds at a time - so attack Silence.

Who are silent? Nuns. Right, let's take a kick at the nuns. You might even start a new order, the Pope Fred Order of Screaming Nuns, who are forbidden ever to remain silent.

You might also want to take a kick at the Vatican librarian, who shushed Spadaro when he started singing Italian drinking songs in the Sex-and-Shopping section. That'll teach her!

Anyway, you get the idea. Offend as many faithful Catholics as you can - call them obsessive, absorbed and punctilious if they try to keep the commandments - while pointing out that you alone are truly holy. As long as James Martin, Massimo Faggioli, and Austen Ivereigh praise you, nobody else matters!

Wish I could deal with every Bergoglian outrage with as much humor and wit!

It is no surprise that the initial takehome message of the secular media - and therefore of the global public opinion they shape - from Gaud-Ex was Bergoglio's unequivocal elevation of his indiscriminate migration credo to the same canonical standing as the Catholic Church's teaching against abortion. LIFESITE rounds up the major initial reactions so far.

World media see new Bergoglio document
as a'rebuke to anti-abortion activists'
by Claire Chretien


April 10, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – A number of prominent media outlets noticed how sharply Pope Francis veered from the positions of his predecessors by labeling immigration as important of an issue as abortion in his new exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate.

And leftist clerics and Church observers, like Father James Martin, S.J., celebrated the exhortation for its jabs at pro-life, doctrine-supporting Catholics.

“Caring for migrants and the poor is as holy a pursuit as opposing abortion, Pope Francis declared in a major document issued by the Vatican on Monday morning,” Jason Horowitz at the New York Times began. “Pushing back against conservative critics within the church who argue that the 81-year-old pope’s focus on social issues has led him to lose sight of the true doctrine, Pope Francis again cast himself, and the mission of the Roman Catholic Church, in a more progressive light.”

“To answer God’s call to holiness, Christians must care for the poor, the sick and the immigrant just as they care for preventing abortion, Pope Francis wrote in his latest major guidance to the Catholic Church, published Monday,” the Washington Post summarized.

Both of those liberal outlets pointed to the passages in the exhortation where Pope Francis criticizes the “harmful ideological error” of those who dismiss the importance of the “social engagement of others,” such as in immigration or service of the poor.

They “find suspect the social engagement of others, seeing it as superficial, worldly, secular, materialist, communist or populist,” the pontiff wrote. “Or they relativize it, as if there are other more important matters, or the only thing that counts is one particular ethical issue or cause that they themselves defend.”

Migration shouldn’t be seen as a “secondary” or “lesser” issue to “‘grave’ bioethical questions,” Pope Francis continued, suggesting the people who say that are like politicians “looking for votes.”

CNN called this “a pointed rebuke to Catholic anti-abortion activists who focus on the issue to the exclusion of all others” and a rebuke of “narrow-minded Catholics.” Its article mentioned Cardinal Raymond Burke as one of the pope’s “principal critics,” noting Catholics are concerned about Pope Francis “trying to open up Catholic teaching.”

The New York Times used its article to say the pontiff has elevated the “plight” of migrants to “global attention perhaps more than any other issue.” [A militantly pro-active advocacy that totally ignores the havoc already wrought in Europe by Islamic elements intent on establishing Muslim supremacy in Europe in the very near future. But the fact is that media cannot ignore reporting on that havoc everytime it happens, and it happens far more often than Bergoglio has occasion to hype his indiscriminate-immigration line, in which he increasingly sounds like the maddening needle-stuck-in-the-groove endless replays on an old-fashioned phonograph. By sheer force of numbers (in terms of incidents and of victims), the arrogant murderous mania of jihadists will always make more headlines than Bergoglio mumbling his irrational mantras in behalf of Muslims. One might almost say thank God for that, were the crimes not so appalling and the innocent victims piling up relentlessly in what is building up to be a Muslim-caused holocaust of not just non-Muslim victims but their own fellow Muslims who may happen to be in the way of one of their killing rampages.]

The leading liberal newspaper called the document “a distilled expression of Francis’s vision of the church, which is consistent with a view articulated by Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin, the archbishop of Chicago who died in 1996, and who called for a ‘consistent ethic of life’ that wove issues of life and social justice into a ‘seamless garment.’”

It then took Pope Francis's use of the phrase “church militant” – which in Catholic theology simply means the Church on Earth, with the “church suffering” being the souls in purgatory and the “church triumphant” being those in heaven – to call the news website Church Militant a “fringe Catholic website.”

The Times also quoted a Muslim refugee, pushed by the Vatican as available for interviews, as celebrating the pope’s declaration that migration is just as important of an issue as abortion.

“Francis does not use the term, but he clearly favors a ‘seamless garment of life’ approach to these issues,” liberal Villanova Professor Massimo Faggioli wrote at Commonweal magazine. [The sad and reprehensible fact is that Bergoglio and all his bleeding-heart followers have obviously not thought at all of the immense, near-impossible yet completely unwarranted consequences of their cause in terms of costs on the governments of Europe and all European citizens-by-right-and-history. No one could contemplate it and not be appalled - yet Bergoglio and his minions seem to be completely oblivious to the practical aspects attendant to their cause. How dare they choose to feign blissful ignorance of all such consequences?]]

Despite its liberal slant, CNN gave relatively fair treatment to comments Pope Francis allegedly made to a leftist, atheist journalist during Holy Week denying the existence of hell.

“The Vatican issued a vague denial, leaving some to question the true position of the Pope,” CNN continued. It picked up on a subtle distinction that has been a feature of some of the pope’s recent comments: saying that the devil is real but casting doubt on whether anyone is actually in hell with him.

“While Francis does not address the question of hell in his new document, he makes clear that he believes the devil exists and is at work in our world.”

An article from The Independent got the gist of the exhortation right – it puts immigration on par with abortion – but then displayed extreme ignorance about Catholicism by claiming in 2016, Pope Francis “gave Catholic priests the power to forgive abortions.”

Pope Francis extended priests’ ability to forgive abortions without canonical obstacles, something that was already in place in most parts of the world.

The Independent, too, though, highlighted the parts of Gaudete et Exsultate that say the defense of pre-born babies must be on equal footing with defending “the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned.”

It also quoted the quickly-becoming-infamous section decrying the “harmful ideological error” of seeing others’ “social engagement” as “superficial, worldly, secular, materialist, communist or populist.”

Joanna Rothkopf at the feminist site Jezebel celebrated the parts of the exhortation that mention “harmful ideological error” and migration as on par with “grave” bioethics issues.

“The Pope immediately loses me with his full-throated, iconically Catholic defense of the unborn, sure, but that second part feels good,” Rothkopf wrote, referencing the following sentence:

---

Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged, the vulnerable infirm and elderly exposed to covert euthanasia, the victims of human trafficking, new forms of slavery, and every form of rejection.

---

She called the exhortation “a righteous subtweet of America’s allegedly Christian (but not Catholic!) Republican party, which will surely be triumphantly mangled, misinterpreted, or outright rejected with a #NotMyPope.” [A subtweet is a subtle, passive aggressive dig at another.]

Two prominent figures on American pro-life scene found the exhortation confusing and nonsensical. [Doesn't that describe much of the blather coming from this energy-bunny yackety-yak-machine of a pope?]

“Pope Francis is not only a religious leader, but is also the ruler of a sovereign state, Vatican City,” mused Rob Dreher at The American Conservative. “If he really believes what he is saying, let him open the gates of Vatican to as many migrants as want to come. Let him offer permanent residency to them, and provide them and their families with financial assistance.” He continued:

---

If you are a European Christian, you are living in a post-Christian, unbelieving society (the Poles are an exception), a society in which your children will face great hardship in practicing the faith, and their children’s children may have an even more difficult time.

How should you regard flinging to doors open wide to Muslim migrants, who are bearers of an alien religion and culture? The Pope gives no guidance, except to imply that you are a bad Christian for asking that question (“the only proper attitude”).

When Pope Francis invites migrants to turn St. Peter’s Square into a permanent camp, then he will be true to his principles, and lead by example. If he won’t do that, then he and his supporters should reflect on why he’s not doing so, and what it might say about his own sentimentalism and double standards.

Anyway, I cannot grasp why the claim an economic migrant makes on a nation, asking it to grant him the right to live there, as he desires to do, is on the same moral level as the claim an unborn child makes on the community: to permit him the right to live, period.

---

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, said Gaudete et Exsultate “blurs lines and causes confusion” about the moral severity of abortion.

“It is impossible to equate the moral weight of abortion – the direct killing of innocent unborn children occurring on a daily massive scale, here in America and abroad – with any other social justice issue,” said Dannenfelser. “The right to live predates or precludes every other right. It is simple logic. Without the fundamental right to life, no debate can even begin on the rights that follow.”

She continued:

---

The Catholic Church has long taught that abortion is an intrinsic evil that must always be opposed. [The exhortation] by Pope Francis confirms this when he says “Our defence of the innocent unborn, for example, needs to be clear, firm and passionate, for at stake is the dignity of a human life, which is always sacred and demands love for each person, regardless of his or her stage of development.” We all affirm the absolute dignity of the migrants and those suffering from poverty. How we solve these issues are matters of prudential judgment on which Catholics can disagree. Today’s exhortation blurs lines and causes confusion.”

---

Carl E. Olsen at Catholic World Report presented an incisive analysis of the exhortation, focusing on parts that seemed to insult and “take aim” at Catholics with whom Pope Francis disagrees.

Olsen noted some parts of the document affirm Catholic teaching: “the best parts of the exhortation are those summarizing or revisiting the Church’s core beliefs about holiness, sainthood, and the spiritual life.” [Oh, that's easy enough to do. It's also a necessary cover and diversionary tactic. Just as in AL, Bergoglio and his writers mined what they could agree with in Catholic teaching about marriage and the family to provide the thick and fuzzy frosting masking the anti-Catholic arsenic bomb in Chapter 8 of AL, it's even easier to compile texts about holiness from the Church's history of all the known saints and martyrs. Should we praise Bergoglio and Spadaro for that? And what use is citing all that when in the same breath, one spews invectives at those one disagrees with or who disagree with you?]

Olsen noted that homosexuality-pushing Jesuit Father James Martin seemed “giddy” at the portions of the exhortation that the priest says are “taking aim at Catholics with ‘an obsession with the law, an absorption with social and political advantages [and] a punctilious concern for the Church's liturgy, doctrine and prestige.’”

“Martin’s rather giddy Tweet [on the exhortation] carried a strong whiff of ‘giving them what they had coming,’” Olsen wrote. “Would (or should) a papal text on holiness really ‘take aim’ at certain Catholics? Meanwhile, in an online piece for America magazine about the ‘top five takeaways’ from the papal text, Martin explained that the first key point is ‘Holiness means being yourself.’ And what if I’m someone who has a ‘punctilious concern’ for the Church’s liturgy and doctrine? What then?”

(One also wonders: Does Fr. Martin think pedophile priests should just “be themselves”?) [My immediate reaction was: "So Bergoglio being himself is holiness incarnate???" Hitler, Stalin, Mao, all the most notorious evil geniuses in the history of mankind were' being themselves' - does that mean they were all holy? Something about Beroglianism softens brains and scrambles them up, so that 2+2 can be any sum you want it to be except the right one!]

Veteran Vaticanista Sandro Magister offered readers of his blog a biting critique of the new exhortation.

“On his objectors within the Church, Francis sketches in ‘Gaudete et Exsultate’ a profile that is prejudicially dismissive,” Magister observed.

“Curiously, however, the day on which Francis put his signature to ‘Gaudete et Exsultate’ was March 19,” the feast of St. Joseph, Magister concluded. “But it was also the final day of the ‘Viganò saga,’ the most colossal piece of ‘fake news’ fabricated so far by the pontificate of Francis, and moreover at the expense of his innocent predecessor, Benedict XVI.”

• 
• 

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 12/04/2018 03:12]

Photo, courtesy of Edward Pentin

'Church, Where Are You Going?':
A report from the conference
of faithful resistance in Rome

April 9, 2018

A friend of OnePeterFive who attended Saturday’s conference in Rome, “Chiesa, Dove Vai? [Church, Where Are You Going?] in honor of the late Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, shares with us, apart from the content of the various talks which may be found elsewhere, her impressions of the tenor and tone of the conference:

The atmosphere in the conference room was electric! It was standing room only, every seat full, people standing along the walls on both sides. In attendance were clergy, students, lay people young and old, including a large contingency from the Italian pro-life movement. The room was completely attentive and highly responsive to every word spoken throughout the afternoon.

The meeting opened with a video of the late Cardinal Caffarra speaking about Humanae Vitae, in which Caffarra said that the prophecy of Pope Paul VI was that through the contraceptive mentality, in the end “Man would have destroyed his own humanity.”

Cardinal Brandmüller arrived alone and walked very slowly with a cane. He seemed to me to be a metaphor for the state of the Church. He spoke clearly, forcefully, deliberately. He spoke about the confusion in the Church and denounced it strongly.

There was a loud burst of applause when he asked, “Where have we come to when the congregation applauds when the priest announces that he is getting married?” There was further applause when he said that “the sensus fidelium requires sanctity.” He ended his presentation by referring to Canon 212 speaking about “the duty of the laity to manifest their thought to their pastors” and received a long wave of applause.

When Cardinal Burke spoke, there was strong applause to almost every statement he made; His Eminence had trouble getting his speech across because there were so many interruptions for applause.
- For example, when he said that the authority of the Pope “is not magic, but derives from his obedience to the Lord” there was an extended ovation.
- There was likewise a loud and long burst of applause for his statement that Pope’s authority “supra iuris” [over the law] is “only for the purpose of serving the law and never for subverting it.”

His teaching was clear and there seemed to be a new tone of urgency in his remarks. At a certain moment, just as Cardinal Burke was speaking about the definition of papal authority made by the First Vatican Council, one group in the room burst out into shouting, calling for the Cardinal to act, to do something further about the outrageous interview in which the Pope said “Hell does not exist.” The crowd called out to Cardinal Burke, “Stiamo aspettando” [We are waiting] several times. The room had to be quieted by the moderators. The atmosphere was quite frenetic!

As Cardinal Burke was completing his talk and quoting St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, saying that “if anyone preaches to you a Gospel other than the one I have proclaimed…” the entire room burst into shouting out loud, before Cardinal Burke could say it: “Sia anatema! Sia anatema!” – “Let him be anathema! Let him be anathema!”

It reminded me of stories I have heard of the early ecumenical councils during the various controversies of the ancient Church; the Holy Spirit was speaking by acclamation through those assembled! What a built up sense of frustration and urgency was being released, begging the pastors of the Church to act to protect us!

Bishop Schneider spoke very loudly and with deliberate clarity in every single word; his speech had a sense of insistence and strength. His tone was rousing, perhaps even more so than that of Cardinal Burke!
- His emphasis was that the Pope is essentially a “Vicar”.
- He recalled that, for over a millennium, every pope took an oath which read “I promise not to diminish or change anything from what I have received from all my predecessors, but to conserve it with all my strength and my every duty…If I act differently, it will not go well for me at the Last Judgment.”

Bishop Schneider recommended reinstating this oath, and the room went wild with applause! He then quoted at length from Pope Leo XIII about how “the duty of the Pope is to defend the Church from confusion and error.” When he ended the quote, the applause was so strong that he started to laugh, and he said, “But these are not my words! They are the words of Leo XIII!”

He then said “There will be victory with the help of God!” and the applause was once again so loud and long that he again had to clarify: “These are the words of Pope Leo XIII” with a broad smile.

He then quoted Pope John XXIII, “Of all the evils that poison…the worst is the ignorance of the truth…and sometimes not ignorance but an ignoring of what is true.”

He further quoted John XXIII’s condemnation of “the error that all religions are equal” to strong applause. He again had to clarify that the words were not his but those of the Popes.

He continued quoting John XXIII: “Satan continually attacks the Church, and especially the Chair of Peter.”

Bishop Schneider also made reference to a prayer which Leo XIII had composed asking God to protect the Church, in response to a vision he had in 1884 in which he saw Satan going to St. Peter’s Basilica to invade the See of Peter. [This is the famous Prayer to St Michael the Archangel.]

Bishop Schneider noted that this prayer was discontinued so as not to scandalize the faithful, but Schneider said forcefully, “It is no less important now, and greatly needed!” This concluding story was met with a rousing ovation.

All in all, the conference communicated an immense sense of urgency, that things cannot continue on as they are.
- The pastors of the Church must do something to protect their flock from the deceptive spirit of confusion and falsehood which has invaded the Magisterium of the Church. Their flock is demanding it! The salvation of souls demands it!

May all the bishops of the Church hear their flock calling out to them to use the authority and power which has been given to them by Christ to act with clarity and conviction at this decisive moment for the future of the Church and of the world.

This is probably the first time I can ever remember feeling "Right on, Pope Francis!" upon reading the ff news item. (It's a most imperfect analogy but the thought struck me that it was as if the late John Paul II might have issued an apology afterwards for kissing the Koran, or at least some statement to rationalize why on earth he felt called upon to do that!)

Of course, in this case, my approval, even applause, is far from unconditional. The key here is that Bergoglio has shown us he is capable of admitting error, even if in this case, it is error about objective news facts, and his biased and dogged misinterpretation of what until not so long ago he dismissed almost contemptuously as 'calumny'.

Of course, that's different from admitting any error in his own statements, especially when these have to do with bimillennial teachings he is seeking to reverse or overthrow. On that, I don't expect him to fold over and do the humble thing he is doing now about the Chile case.

Thankfully, it appears Mons. Scicluna - as unreliable as he has proved to be on standing firm on doctrine (which was shocking for someone who spent more than a decade at the CDF) - kept enough of his commonsense in dealing with sex abuse accusations to render a report on the Barros case that allowed Bergoglio to reverse himself.

And why not, after all? There is no downside to it - he reinforces his creds as 'the humble pope' and regains some of the creds he has lost in terms of his seriousness about dealing with clerical sex abuse. And now, even the MSM which had turned against him for his stubborn defense of Barros and dismissal of his accusers will suddenly wreathe him in incense once more!

Plus, he's even going to meet with the victims he snubbed mercilessly in Chile and lied about (saying they never asked to meet with him!). Of course, we have yet to see, "So what's next here?" What happens to Barros, the unlikely sword on which the mighty Bergoglio has chosen to fall on, after his earlier absolute certainty that he had done nothing but the correct and proper things with regard to that hapless bishop?


Pope Francis says he made
‘serious mistakes’ over
Chile abuse crisis
by Junno Arocho Esteves

Wednesday, 11 Apr 2018

Pope Francis has apologised for underestimating the seriousness of the sexual abuse crisis in Chile, following a recent investigation into allegations concerning Bishop Juan Barros of Osorno.

The Pope said he made “serious mistakes in the assessment and perception of the situation, especially due to a lack of truthful and balanced information”. [Yeah, well, that's what you can expect in a Soviet-style regime where the Supremo is told only what he wants to hear!]

“I ask forgiveness of all those I have offended and I hope to be able to do it personally in the coming weeks,” the Pope said in the letter, which was released by the Vatican. Several survivors apparently have been invited to the Vatican to meet the Pope.

Abuse victims alleged that Bishop Barros – then a priest – had witnessed their abuse by his mentor, Fr Fernando Karadima. In 2011, Fr Karadima was sentenced to a life of prayer and penance by the Vatican after he was found guilty of sexually abusing boys. Fr Karadima denied the charges. He was not prosecuted civilly because the statute of limitations had run out.

Protesters and victims said Bishop Barros is guilty of protecting Fr Karadima and was physically present while some of the abuse was going on.

During his visit to Chile in January, Pope Francis asked forgiveness for the sexual abuse committed by some priests in Chile. “I feel bound to express my pain and shame at the irreparable damage caused to children by some of the ministers of the Church,” he said.

However, speaking to reporters, he pledged his support for Bishop Barros and said: “The day they bring me proof against Bishop Barros, I will speak. There is not one piece of evidence against him. It is calumny.”

He later apologised to the victims and admitted that his choice of words wounded many.

A short time later, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis was sending a trusted investigator to Chile to listen to people with information about Bishop Barros.

The investigator, Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, is president of a board of review within the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The board handles appeals filed by clergy accused of abuse or other serious crimes. The archbishop also had 10 years of experience as the Vatican’s chief prosecutor of clerical sex abuse cases at the doctrinal congregation.

Pope Francis said Archbishop Scicluna and his aide, Fr Jordi Bertomeu Farnos, heard the testimony of 64 people and presented him with more than 2,300 pages of documentation. Not all of the witnesses spoke about Fr Karadima and Bishop Barros; several of them gave testimony about abuse alleged to have occurred at a Marist Brothers’ school.

After a “careful reading” of the testimonies, the Pope said, “I believe I can affirm that all the testimonies collected speak in a brutal way, without additives or sweeteners, of many crucified lives and, I confess, it has caused me pain and shame.”

The Pope said he was convening a meeting in Rome with the 34 Chilean bishops to discuss the findings of the investigations and his own conclusions “without prejudices nor preconceived ideas, with the single objective of making the truth shine in our lives”. [It sure took him more than two years to get around to that position. But we are still where he alone decides what he considers 'truth' or not! However, since this is a watershed damage control effort by him to regain some credibility on the sex abuse issue, he will surely be most circumspect - one hopes - in his subsequent moves to rehabilitate himself after such a major error of arrogant pigheadedness... So, will he now allow Barros to resign, as the bishop was ready to do more than two years ago except Bergoglio himself asked him to stay on? And what will he do about Cardinal Errazuriz who sits on his Crown Council of Nine, when it was the man, then Archbishop of Santiago, who had decided way back to simply shelve all the accusations against Karadima - and then, to his great shame (I assume, but maybe not!), the case was forwarded to the CDF where it was correctly and properly adjudged.]

Pope Francis said he wanted to meet the bishops to discern immediate and long-term steps to “re-establish ecclesial communion in Chile in order to repair the scandal as much as possible and re-establish justice”.

Archbishop Scicluna and Fr Bertomeu, the Pope said, had been overwhelmed by the “maturity, respect and kindness” of the victims who testified.

“As pastors,” the Pope told the bishops, “we must express the same feeling and cordial gratitude to those who, with honesty [and] courage” requested to meet with the envoys and “showed them the wounds of their soul”.

Following the release of Pope Francis’s letter, Bishop Santiago Silva Retamales, president of the bishops’ conference and head of the military ordinariate, said the bishops of Chile would travel to the Vatican in the third week of May.

The bishops, he said, shared in the Pope’s pain.

“We have not done enough,” he said in a statement. “Our commitment is that this does not happen again.”

I am certainly most happy that someone authoritative has chosen to take on the increasingly noxious and obnoxious Cardinal Schoenborn - him with the slimy smile that represents hypocrisy at its worst, he to whom the adjective 'Slytherine' immediately comes to my mind, referring to the infamous Hogwarts house Slytherin whose members are chosen by the Sorting Hat because they represent cunning, resourcefulness and ambition, and a highly developed sense of self preservation, and whose symbol is, of course, the slithering serpent.

I probably dislike 'the Graf' (German for the title 'Count'), as Fr Hunwicke likes to refer to him, as much as I dislike Bergoglio, and am therefore equally prejudiced against him a priori. But he still carries a lot of weight in the media because after all, he has been on everyone's list of papabile in the past two decades, but since AL, more because Bergoglio has publicly made him his theological reference point, who promptly rubberstamps all of the papal heterodoxies and near-heresies as being 'orthodox' and therefore reassures Bergoglio that he has not so far crossed the line into material heresy.

Therefore, when the man who chaired the editorial committee of the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church says anything these days that has to do with the Church, one must assume he is not merely advancing his own ideas but floating out Bergoglian initiatives to test the waters, as it were... Ed Peters reacts to Schoenborn's latest floater - and one can understand that with Lettergate followed closely by Hellgate, the 'Goad and insult' offensive and by Barrosgate, few have really taken notice of the Graf's latest foray at being Bergoglio's canary in the coal mine, if you will excuse my mixed metaphors.


Should one take Cardinal Schönborn’s
comments on female ordination seriously?

April 11, 2018

Symptomatic of a society experiencing a breakdown of its order are, among other things, casual assertions by prestigious figures within that society that, if taken according to the plain meaning of their words, are deeply opposed to fundamental values within that society, but which, though uttered, raise nary an eyebrow among those charged with care for that society.

Recent comments from Viennese prelate Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, apparently supportive of ordaining women, are opposed, I suggest, to at least three fundamental ecclesiological values but they have occasioned, as far I have seen, no correction whatsoever from Church leadership, and thus seem to be a chilling illustration of the erosion of order in the Church.

Consider, please.

Apparently Schönborn holds that “The question of ordination [of women] is a question which clearly can only be clarified by a council. That cannot be decided upon by a pope alone. That is a question too big that it could be decided from the desk of a pope.” There are least three serious errors in these remarks, all them ecclesiological, and all of them (assuming we are to take cardinals giving formal interviews at their word), quite disturbing.

First, the possibility of ordaining women to the priesthood (and episcopate) was definitively ruled out on ecclesiological grounds by Pope John Paul II in Ordinatio sacerdotalis (1994) n. 4 when he declared that that "the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women”. [Not an argument at all to be used with Bergoglio who blithely overruled JPII's 'last word' on communion for RCDs in Familiaris consortio!]

Whatever additional sacramental, Scriptural, or historical arguments against female ordination John Paul II could have relied on, he framed his conclusive ruling against female sacerdotal ordination in terms of the Church’s in-ability confer such orders on such persons. Schönborn’s claim, therefore, that female “deaconesses, female priests, and female bishops” could someday happen is to contradict a central ecclesiological assertion set out in Ordinatio.

Second, for Schönborn to say that a pope cannot, on his own, rule 0n (specifically, against) the possibility of female ordination is directly to challenge a pope’s authority in the Church as set out in Canon 331, specifically, that the pope “possesses supreme, full, immediate, and universal ordinary power in the Church, which he is always able to exercise freely.”*

*Canon 331 draws heavily here from Lumen gentium 22 and Christus Dominus 2, both of which conciliar documents Schönborn himself cited in crafting the accurate description of papal authority that he provided for the Catechism of the Catholic Church nn. 882 and 937.

Given that John Paul II ruled (yes, from his desk, gasp!) that the Church had no power ordain women to priesthood and that his ruling was “to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful”, Schönborn’s statement, I suggest, directly denies the authority of the pope to issue such an ecclesiological teaching and/or such a directive to the faithful.

Third, in the same breath wherein he denies the authority of a pope to rule as John Paul II ruled, Schönborn claims that the female ordination question (humoring him that there even is such a question in regard to the sacerdotal state) can only be decided by an ecumenical council, committing thereby, I suggest, the ecclesiological error of holding ecumenical councils to be superior to popes and coming thereby perilously close to crossing a line that few modern canonists thought ever could be crossed, that one marked out in Canon 1372, which states “A person who makes recourse against an act of the Roman Pontiff to an ecumenical council or the college of bishops is to be punished with a censure.”

Now the modern Canon 1372 had, as it happens, a Pio-Benedictine predecessor norm, 1917 CIC 2332, which read as follows: "Each and every one of whatever status, grade, or condition, even if they are regal, episcopal, or cardinatial, appealing from the laws, decrees, or mandates of the Roman Pontiff existing at that time to a Universal Council, are suspected of heresy and by that fact incur excommunication specially reserved to the Apostolic See …" .

The great Swiss/American canonist Dom Augustine, commenting on Canon 2332 (in his Commentary VIII: 327-328), granted that appealing to a general council rested on a theory that was “absurd” and “ridiculous”, adding that such an attempt would be “neither excusable nor intelligible”. He observed, in any case, that even cardinals could be charged under its terms and that “it makes no difference whether the general council appealed to is in session or to be held in the future”. Finally, said the scholar, the papal act being contested could be any papal “decree, either dogmatical or disciplinary.” Ordinatio, clearly, is a papal act both dogmatic and disciplinary.

In sum, that such comments, coming from one of the most prestigious figures in the Church today, comments that, if understood according to their plain sense, expressly impugn the sufficiency of a prominent papal act, deny the capacity of a pope to issue such rulings on his own, and imply that an ecumenical council is the only authority that could decide certain ecclesiological matters, that such comments, I say, have not elicited, as far I can tell, a single fraternal correction, is, I think, a sign of how urgently a restoration of order in the Church is needed.

Unless, of course, Cdl. Schönborn is not to be regarded as one who says what he means and means what he says. [Slytherine that he is, surely Schoenborn gave due consideration to each and every word he said and how he said it - this is all by express design. Consider the timing too. Just when some Latin American commission has told the pope he ought to call a synod on the role of women in the Church! Nothing subtle at all about these orchestrations towards the next great Bergoglian initiative - WYMYN PRYSTS!

I really couldn't care less if the Graf makes an ass of himself all over the place - as with his pre-James Martin coddling of LGBTs and hosting a 'seance' for one of the Medjugorje 'seers' in the Cathedral of Vienna (I believe Our Lady missed her 'daily' appointment with the seer on that day). But I care very much, indeed, because he drags Benedict XVI with him into these roiling insalubrious waters, since the media still bill him as 'Ratzinger's star pupil' or 'Ratzinger's protege' - in fact, I think he is still president of the Foundation established by the Ratzinger Schuelerkreis to carry on their objectives). Imagine that he is now the anti-Benedict anti-Catholic pope's theologian du jour!

And BTW, to Carl Olson and Jeff Mirus and all those well-meaning and highly intelligent commentators who insist on praising Bergoglio for the Catholic parts of the "Goad and insult' document, aren't you missing two very important points?
1) Do you really care about the thick and fluffy fancy icing on a cake when all it does is camouflage all the nasty arsenic barbs within? and
2) Should you not hold an author responsible for making a call to holiness when he is himself the prime generator of all the unholiness simmering and burbling in the Church today, and for a lot of personal nastiness that he does not hesitate to indulge in, even in a document that is supposedly a call to holiness? Does this blatant hypocrisy not bother you at all?

Father Scalese had far less technical because far more general objections to the Graf's assertions.

So Cardinal Schoenborn says, echoing the pope:
'Doctrinal development does exist'
Translated from

April 9, 2018

In recent days, Sandro Magister has published on his blog a post in which he showshow Pope Francis uses three different methods to communicate what he wants to:
- By saying so himself in public what he wants and what he thinks without any control or prior verification;
- By making others say in public what he tells them in private conversation; and
- By recommending that the world listen to persons who say what he himself has not said in public or in private, but wants it to be said anyway. [In other words, his basic communications tactic and strategy is subterfuge, deceit, dishonesty – call it what you will - but it is, in effect, a hallmark of this pontificate.]

He makes some examples of how the pope has used these modalities in recent days. Concerning the third one, Magister cites two recent interviews published in the Germanophone press: one by the Benedictine Anselm Grün in the Augsburger Allgemeine on Marhc 30, 2018, and that of the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, to a number of media outlets, among which was the Salzburger Nachrichten, on April 1.

OnePeterFive’s indefatigable Maike Hickson wrote about both interviews on April 2 and April 6, respectively. Would it be a simple coincidence that within a few days (from Good Friday to Easter Sunday!), two interviews should be published touching on the same topic, namely, the priestly ordination fo women?

Here is what Grün said about it: “There are no theological reasons to cite against the abolition of priestly celibacy or against women priests, women bishops and even a female pope. It is merely a question of historical process. It needs time. And the first step should be the ordination of female deacons”. A message there for those who, ingenuously, consider an eventual opening of the diaconate to women very much possible.

For his part, Cardinal Schoenborn commented: “The question of ordaining women is oen that can be decided only by a council. It cannot be decided by a pope all by himself. It is too big a question to be settled from the desk of a pope.”

Reading these statements, I was reminded of those made seven years ago by the then Patriarch of Lisbon, Cardinal Jose da Cruz Policarpo, and other Portuguese bishops, and which I wrote about in June 2011. At that time, the cardinal was forced to make a public retraction [of what he had said about female ordination] shortly before he retired and then died not long after.

[Policarpo had said in an interview that “John Paul II at a certain point appeared to have resolved the question, but I think it cannot be resolved that way. Theologically, there is no fundamental obstacle [to ordaining women priests], but there is this tradition, shall we say, that ‘the Church has never done otherwise’.” Fr Scalese commented at the time:

---

I would like to know what notion Cardinal Policarpo has of ‘theology’ and of ‘tradition’. But what leaves me more stunned is that a Cardinal Patriarch does not seem to appreciate the weight of pontifical interventions. A pope had resolved the question in a definitive and infallible way, and what does the Cardinal Patriarch do? He thinks it is his right to say, “I don’t think the question can be resolved this way”. Well, Your Eminence, how should it be resolved?

---

Scalese explains that once informed of his faux pas,

---

, the cardinal wrote a letter acknowledging that “he had never really thought systematically about the question (so then, why did he speak so categorically of it?). The reactions to my interview have forced me to consider the subject with more attention, and I have confirmed that, above all, for failing to take into account the latest declarations of the Magisterium on the subject, I myself provoked the reactions.” (So it took the indignant reactions for him to realize that he had not ‘taken into account the latest declarations of the Magisterium on the subject’?).

---

He proceeds to reaffirm his absolute communion with the Holy Father (if you can call it communion to ignore or trample his infallible magisterium) and the dignity of women in the Church (which has never been called into question). He ends up reiterating that the question of ordaining women priests only initially seems to be an open question, but that the most recent declarations on the subject by the Magisterium interpret the tradition of ordaining only men as priests “not just as a practical matter, which can change according to the rhythms of the Holy Spirit’s actions [I find it offensive that the catch phrase “The Spirit blows where it wills” has been used to depict the Holy Spirit as capricious and arbitrary!], but as an expression of the mystery of the Church herself which we must accept in good faith”. So why did he not say all this in the interview? He had to wait for the ensuing polemics in order to consider the question seriously and arrive at his new conclusions? In short, the cardinal’s remedy seems even worse than his original offense.”

So far, I have read this story - on the ultimate fate and extinction of a new religious order born in Brussels just a few years ago - from Marco Tosatti who writes
about it in both La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana (LNBQ) and his own blog. It is probably just one of many such unreported incidents of Jorge Bergoglio's arbitrary
abuse of papal power and authority. Self-righteous tyrants, especially those who outrageously lay claim to holiness, do not, in general, advertise their tyrannies.

Bergoglio puts an end
to the fraternity of miracles
The pope signed a decree dissolving the Fraternity of the Holy Apostles in Brussels
which had a number of priests and seminarians in the ecclesial desert of that city
by Marco Tosatti
Translated from

April 12, 2018

Do you remember the case of the Priestly Fraternity of the Holy Apostles of Brussels? In the disastrous panorama of the Church in Belgium and of what is perhaps the most de-Christianized capital in Europe, the then Archbishop of Maline-Brussels, Andre Leonard, had created this fraternity in 2013, inspired by the charism of the French priest Michel-Marie Zanotti-Sorkine.

It had 23 seminarians and 6 priests to begin with. An extraordinary event in a church where the year before, there was not a single new seminarian in the country’s Francophone region.

Mons. Leonard entrusted the Fraternity with a parish in the center of Brussels, Saint Catherine, where their presence soon marked a new flourishing of faith and faith-based activity.

Then Mons. Leonard – a man of faith who had undergone attacks (even physical ones) and humiliations for his defense of the values of the Church – not only failed to get a cardinal’s hat as expected logically, but as soon as he turned 75, his resignation was promptly accepted by Pope Francis.

Who replaced him with Mons. De Kesel, protégé of the controversial Cardinal Danneels (Archbishop of Brussels for … years until his retirement) who had been under investigation for having protected a bishop guilty of sexually abusing his own nephew.

And of course, De Kesel was promptly made a cardinal. One of his first actions was to decide to stop ‘hosting’ the Fraternity, to which in the meantime, another parish had been assigned. His reason for doing so was that many of the Fraternity’s seminarians were French, and for reasons of episcopal solidarity, it would be better that they returned to their own dioceses in France.

The faithful of Brussels did not accept that excuse at all and requested a meeting with the cardinal to express their support of the Fraternity.

---

“Mons. De Kesel no longer wants to host the Fraternity because it has too many French seminarians. Is he not the bishop of the capital of Europe in the 21st century? The principle of episcopal solidarity which he invokes for discontinuing the initiative of Mons. Leonard – despite all the successes of the Fraternity which he himself, De Kesel, acknowledged in the document announcing his decision – makes no sense at all. Of the 80 seminarians now in Namur (site of the Belgian national seminary), only 25 are Belgian. Will he now send home all the African and Polish priests who have come to help us spread the word of Jesus in Belgium? Is the Catholic Church no longer universal and does it no longer transcend borders?”

---

Nonetheless the order was disenfranchised. Yet we write of this sad episode again because in recent days, we received important information on a decisive event in the brief history of the Fraternity – an event that took place in Rome and unfortunately, under the signature of the reigning pope.

In short: While the case of the Fraternity was being discussed in Brussels in an effort to find a solution, two lay couples decided to follow a legal recourse that is normal in such cases, and addressed themselves to the church tribunals in Rome. They presented an appeal against the decision of De Kesel to the Congregation for the Clergy, which under Bergoglio is no longer headed by Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, replaced by Bergoglio during his first month as pope back in 2013, with Mons. Beniamino Stella, onetime Vatican diplomat who headed the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy that trains Vatican diplomats, and who promptly became one of the first cardinals named by Bergoglio. [And according to those in the know, the real 'grey eminence' at Casa Santa Marta.]

In November 2016, so we were told by the couples who made the appeal, the Congregation for the Clergy denied “without giving any reason” their very jus standi, namely, their right to appear before a Church court to present their appeal. At the same time, the Congregation confirmed De Kesel’s decree to dissolve the Fraternity.

In such cases, the last recourse is represented by the Apostolic Signatura, the Supreme Tribunal of the Church, before which any Catholic, lay or clerical, can appeal to defend their ecclesiastical rights. But of course, the Tribunal was no longer headed by Cardinal Burke who had been replaced by Bergoglio with the former ‘Foreign Minister’ of the Vatican, Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, another diplomat.

In December 2016, the lay appellants presented their case to the Apostolic Signatura, whose Promoter of Justice saw merit in their cause, which was to have been presented to the Tribunal’s judges for a decision in the autumn of 2017. “And so, we were confident that justice and truth would finally prevail”, the appellants wrote us.

At this point, the case took a turn for the worst. On November 25, the appellants were informed by a letter from the Signatura that their appeal had run its course and the case was closed. Because, without waiting for the Signatura to decide on the case ‘dum summarium conficiebatur [although a summary had been prepared], the Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy had brought the decree dissolving the Fraternity to the Pope himself for his signature, who thus took on the responsibility for it. And Bergoglio signed it – an imperial act which certainly seems like a blow to the ecclesial rights of those concerned [the Fraternity and the lay faithful who were appealing to Rome in their behalf].

This is a story which certainly does not reflect well on the actions of some people at the top in the ‘reformed’ Roman Curia and on the pope himself. It is an ugly story.
 
Bergoglio and law within the Church:
From monarchy to tyranny, in the case of
a Belgian order he has summarily dissolved
Translated from

April 12, 2018

Today in LNBQ I write about how a Belgian religious community, the Fraternity of the Holy Apostles, has been destroyed, and above all, about how it was denied the right to have recourse to ordinary justice in the Church.

In recent days I received documents that explain how this happened – because the reigning pope signed an act which prevented the normal course of justice to operate within the Church.

I got the documents precisely on the day the pope issued his latest formal document, in which he writes about justice thus:

---

“Blessed are those who thirst and hunger for justice because they will be satisfied” Hunger and thirst are very intense experiences because they are responses to our primary needs and linked to the very instinct of survival. There are persons who aspire to justice with such an intensity and seek it with great desire. Jesus says that they will be satisfied, since sooner or later, justice will arrive, and we can work to that it becomes possible even if we will not always see the results of such efforts”.

---

But that has not been the case for the Fraternity of the Holy Apostles – just as it was not for the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate.

I was about to write a commentary on this subject for the blog but in opening my mail, I found a new message from Super-Ex, which I am passing on to you. I advise everyone to read it, especially my own colleagues in the media.

---

Dear Marco, In your article for LNBQ, you explain the violent destruction by Bergoglio of the Priestly Fraternity of the Holy Apostles in Brussels - beyond and against every juridical procedure codified by the Church.

In doing so, you remind us why Bergoglio, not long after becoming pope, sought to ‘behead’ Cardinal Raymond Burke, whom Benedict XVI had chosen to head the Apostolic Signatura, the church’s supreme Tribunal, to which, as you wrote, “any person in the Church, clerical or lay, can have recourse if he thinks he must defend his rights [within the Church]”.

Why was Burke a problem that had to be resolved immediately? Because his Catholic mind recognizes that even in the Church, the quintessential hierarchical structure, there exists a justice that must be respected so that hierarchy does not become arbitrariness and arrogance.

When Burke points out [as he recently did at the April 7 conference in Rome] the limits of papal authority in matters of doctrine, doing so in full fidelity to Catholic doctrine as it has always been, he was simply speaking out as he would have if he were still the head of the Apostolic Signatura.

What does an ecclesial judge do? Certainly, he seeks to control that authority does not become despotism or tyranny, that it does not become a pretext to prevaricate against a priest, a layman, any baptized person. As a judge, Burke could see to it that Church authority respects its limitations in matters of governance.

But Bergoglio does not want any limitations – he does not think of himself as the Vicar of Christ, but as the absolute master of the Church – be it on doctrine (he couldn’t care less about cardinals, the popes before him, or the Gospel itself), or on canon law.

“If the Church did not have canon law,” Cardinal Caffarra once said, “then she becomes a tyranny and not a monarchy”. Even before The Dictator Pope was written, it had all become evident.

So Bergoglio wanted to change Church teaching about matrimony? He forces the hand of the two family synods he convened [he actually failed to do that but imposed his will anyway on the final declarations], he drafts Amoris Laetitia with the help of a small circle of his most faithful associates, enlists an army of journalists to besmirch his opponents, and refuses to respond to legitimate questions placed to him about that [nefarious] document.

Did he wish to do away with the FFI? His first move was to prevent them from having recourse to Church justice, and so for years, this community and its auxiliary orders have been ‘massacred’ – and all without having been formally charged of anything definite.

Did he want to take over the Soveriegn Order of Malta? He acts imperiously, in haste and fury, relying on the brute force of his ‘supreme’ authority and ignoring all applicable law. [Most notably, the sovereignty of the Order of Malta which has the same stature as the Vatican as a sovereign state in international law. Despite some pro forma mutterings in his captive media at the time this colossal mockery of international law took place, the episode appeared to be just another 'meaningless' wrinkle in history quickly ignored by the chroniclers, whiole the Bergoglio-enabled new masters of the Order seem blissfully uncaring that the Oder's sovereignty has been trampled and trashed so publicly.]

Does he need to prtoect his friend Cardinal Maradiaga? He blocks recourse to any proceedings against him, arrogates all the responsibility to himself, and nothing more is heard about it.

Brussels, in the person of Cardinal De Kesel, wanted the Fraternity of the Holy Apostles eradicated? The Vatican at your service, Your Eminence - obstructing the natural course of canon law and preventing any appeal from even being considered. [If the pope signs a decree dissolving the Fraternity, then any appeal in behalf of the Fraternity becomes moot because the entity in whose behalf the appeal is being made no longer exists.]

Of course, we must acknowledge, sadly, that Bergoglio has not been the first wild boar to rampage through the vineyard of the Lord. We have had arrogant and sinful popes in the past who, like Bergoglio, reveled in their royal court [meaning the sovereign’s retinue, not a judicial court], loved Power, and scoffed at the Law, mistaking their role as Vicar of Christ on earth for that of being God himself.

But for the most part, these were men who abused their power and authority in matters of governance and managing the affairs of the Church (her goods as well as her ministers).

With Bergoglio, however, both governance and doctrine are in the hands of a man who does not recognize any limits to his authority. Who keeps saying words like ‘mercy’ and ‘listening’ which he constantly contradicts in his actions.

But why are there so few cardinals who have openly come out against this abuse of power? Perhaps because most of them fear more the ire of ‘God’s vicar’ than God’s own justice?

I can only end with recalling that at the April 7 conference in Rome [called ‘Church, where are you going?’, but whose theme was really the limits of papal authority], hundreds of faithful came to demonstrate physically, in Rome, their disquiet with the state of the Church today.

They and all like them will surely undergo new anathemas and insults from Bergoglio but it is clear that they will no longer keep quiet.

---

As a former journalist, I know how important it is to be objective in reporting any story - to try and present as best as one can the pros and cons of any issue
involved, without expressing your own judgment or opinion about such issues (or, at least, honestly labelling any statements that may amount to your opinion or
judgment on the underlying issues).

Commentators - who are expected to have opinions on the issues they present - are under no such constraints, beyond presenting contrary arguments fairly.
However, some critics of the reigning pope tend to bend over backwards to try and seem objective about him, no matter how well-known their overall
judgment about his anti-Catholic words and deeds, and therefore, they seek to find some merit somehow in his major papal texts despite their appalling
major defects.

I used the argument earlier: Does all of Bergoglio's pious recycling of orthodox Catholic teaching about the matter on hand - family, or marriage, or
holiness, in the latest case - really make up for the parts of his documents where he is heterodox, near-heretical, anti-Catholic and even anti-
Christian? I don't think it does at all, for he is thereby contradicting much of the orthodoxy he faithfully parrots pro forma, thereby manifesting
his utter hypocrisy and dishonesty on matters Catholic.

Carl Olson and Jeff Mirus - not to mention the now-ubiquitous Chris Altieri whose basic attitude is "Bergoglio can be awful, and let me tell you why, but he's still
the pope and give him a break, will you?" - have preceded Robert Royal in this misguided charity towards Bergoglio in re his recent call to holiness.

Indeed, I would gladly offer extra Masses for this pope if he had limited his 'call to holiness' to only the orthodox part of it, leaving out all the unholy
barbs against those who disagree with him and his self-serving justifications of his questionable actions. Because that way, he would have presented
Catholic teaching uncluttered by his unholy biases.

But he can't and does not do that because he is Bergoglio, because he cannot bear to waste the exercise of his papal authority simply reiterating Church
teaching (much of which he privately rejects anyway) without using it as a vehicle to propagate his own views. He obviously believes they are superior
to anything any Catholic thinker has thought of before, and he means to institutionalize these views so that future generations of 'Catholics' will be citing Bergoglio
instead of Augustine or Aquinas...So let's hear Robert Royal's 'balanced' opinion of Gaud-ex, aka 'Goad and insult':

Pope Francis’s call to holiness
by Robert Royal

April 11, 2018

Among the many sad consequences of the divisions Pope Francis has exacerbated within the Church, we’re now forced to live with an undeniable reality: even when he says good things [none of it original from him] – and there are many such in his new Apostolic Exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate (“Rejoice and Be Glad: On the Call to Holiness in Today’s World”) – they inevitably get drawn into the trench warfare he helped create.

[Of course, Olson, Mirus and Royal don't seem to realize that praising the 'good things' in Bergoglio's documents is like praising a pope for being Catholic, when what else should he be and ought to be? "Oh, so this pope is Catholic, after all! Look what he repeats of authentic Catholic teaching!" DUH! Recycling some Catholic orthodoxy is his obvious battle camouflage, ideological Trojan horse and shameless pretext to call attention to his anti-Catholic, anti-Christian worldview.

He keeps railing against 'gossip' and so-called 'gossipers' but what he is doing is worse. Gossip is usually speaking behind the back of whoever is the target of gossip. Bergoglio is openly and relentlessly denouncing his critics and other Catholics he dislikes with all the armamentarium to which a pope has recourse! Just where is the holiness there, or even the elementary charity?]

His supporters often argue that opposition to the kind of changes he made in a document like Amoris laetitia stems from something like Franciphobia, an irrational dislike. [No! Speaking for myself, all of my antipathy for him is rationally based on the documented anti-Catholicism of what he has said and done since he became pope (and, it turns out, even before he became pope). Raymond De Souza, Aldo Maria Valli, Phil Lawler, Dwight Longenecker, even Raymond Arroyo, all started out being great enthusiasts of the 'new pope' and his 'new springtime for the Church' - until all the evidence started piling up to show how wrong they were in their initial enthusiasm. One can certainly not call their current critical attitude towards this pope 'irrational'. The thing is once you see the emperor is naked, then you tend to notice everything else laid bare by that nakedness and much of it is never pleasant.]

It’s true that some Catholics now show a kind of blind fury at what they believe he is doing. But for many more, as Ross Douthat explains in his must-read book To Change the Church, it didn’t have to be this way.

That’s quite evident in how 'Rejoice and Be Glad' invokes many traditional elements of Catholic spirituality and shapes them for current use. The pope states early on that he hasn’t written a comprehensive treatise on holiness, though in his meandering and sometimes self-contradictory way, he touches – helpfully – on almost everything.

The overall aim is exactly right: “The Lord asks everything of us, and in return he offers us true life, the happiness for which we were created. He wants us to be saints and not to settle for a bland and mediocre existence.”

And most of the pages that follow show ways we can all – whatever our state in life – walk that path. [Then why does he not lead by example, instead of making his 'call to holiness' yet another vehicle to hit out against those who do not agree with his world view! He is not content with his daily bullying from the pulpit at Casa Santa Marta and sundry other ways in which he constantly communicates his flagrant disunity with his Catholic targets. The whole world is his BFF except those members of his flock whom he constantly takes to task without ever uttering a single word to reach out to them!] Pope Francis even warns near the end:

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We will not admit the existence of the devil if we insist on regarding life by empirical standards alone, without a supernatural understanding. It is precisely the conviction that this malign power is present in our midst that enables us to understand how evil can at times have so much destructive force. . . .Hence, we should not think of the devil as a myth, a representation, a symbol, a figure of speech or an idea. This mistake would lead us to let down our guard, to grow careless and end up more vulnerable. . . .When we let down our guard, he takes advantage of it to destroy our lives, our families and our communities.

---

[I find these words incredible, since I am quite convinced that the 'spirit' Bergoglio keeps invoking as dictating everything he has said and done since he became pope is not at all the Third Person of the Holy Trinity but rather Lucifer-Satan. The Holy Spirit has no need to be hubristic as Bergoglio is - since the Holy Spirit is God himself - but Bergoglio's hubris is that which led Lucifer and his band of angels to rebel against God and which keeps the demonic legion from tirelessly seeking to wrest power over human beings from the Creator himself.]

Still, despite such robust warnings, many Catholics now are wary about where such papal sentiments “cash out.” And there are particular problems, some stemming from Francis’s inattention to consistency.

For example: “It is not healthy to love silence while fleeing interaction with others, to want peace and quiet while avoiding activity, to seek prayer while disdaining service. Everything can be accepted and integrated into our life in this world, and become a part of our path to holiness.”

Quite true, of course. But this might equally describe a problem that doesn’t much exist in the modern world – overly “spiritual” Catholics – or refer to contemplative religious orders. The Church admits of many vocations, including contemplative lives, which elsewhere in the document receive praise. [See, when you simply parrot orthodox lines, you don't even realize you are contradicting yourself with your own original statements in the same document! Even the most diligent and Bergoglio-devout proofreader would be unable to remedy such errors in the text!]

I, for one, wish the pope had put greater emphasis on the Catholic contemplative tradition, which is on a par with anything Westerners – especially young people – are seeking in Buddhism or Hinduism.

Instead, he spends pages denouncing contemporary forms of Gnostic and Pelagian heresies, which do exist. But it’s rather obvious that we should be neither too otherworldly nor worldly.

Every reader will have to judge for himself. But for me, amidst the good insights, the pope seems to be wrestling with a world that perhaps once existed, but not very much anymore. His constant pressure here and elsewhere to turn people away from “abstract” theological knowledge or an excessively individual spirituality, towards an otherwise commendable love of God and neighbor, addresses, exactly, who these days?

It would be one thing if Catholic universities, seminaries, chanceries, charities, hospitals, relief agencies, religious orders, lay groups, etc. were bursting with people rigidly and reductively clinging to bare theological formulas – as Francis often seems to suggest. The reality, as even secular commenters recognize, is that we’re living in a post-truth, profoundly chaotic world, and Church. To seek stable principles in order not to be swept away by the tsunami of secularism and heterodoxy is not “rigidity,” but sanity.

I’ve said it before, but in our circumstances, Francis’s famous “field hospital” needs doctors who have studied real medicine. Otherwise, they may have a good bedside manner, but they can’t really cure anything. [And I must once again register my vehement objection to the image of the Church as a 'field hospital', because field hospitals, by their nature, have to send onwards their patients, once their vital signs have been fairly stabilized, to other facilities better able to meet their high-priority health needs. The Church does not do that - it is meant as a refuge for all people needing spiritual assistance, the agency through which they can find God. For intelligent people simply to accept Bergoglio's greatly-flawed metaphor is a measure of how uncritical even they tend to be of this poseur.]

There’s more. Pro-lifers were stung early in the pontificate by his harsh language about Catholics “obsessing” and “insisting” about abortion. They will be once again upset about his own insisting: that social questions such as poverty and immigration are life issues “equally sacred” compared with violent death in the womb and at the end of life.

This version of the “seamless garment” contradicts what the Church has taught since legalized abortion became common. The numbers don’t tell the whole story, of course, but if – say – American border agents were killing 3000 people daily trying to enter the country (roughly the number of children killed daily in America in the womb), the whole world would be outraged.

Refugees, for example, should be of deep concern to Christians, but how to deal with them is a question of prudential judgments, not an absolute like the prohibition against killing innocent life.

The peoples of the world know that this is more than an argument about welcoming the stranger. All over Europe – from Britain to Poland, Scandinavia to Hungary – there is a populist backlash against easy admission of hard-to-assimilate immigrants, often not refugees fleeing war and oppression, but economic migrants seeking a better life. The United States and even Mexico, police their borders, like Australia, New Zealand, and every sane nation.

In spite of such questions, Catholics will benefit from reading this text. There’s much here in the tradition that it’s good to have presented anew. Besides, perhaps the greatest spiritual challenge for Catholics in the modern world is how to practice an authentic spirituality even amid division – and to find the deep spiritual resources that may help us overcome it. [But why would I or any other Catholic waste my time trying to read Bergoglio when, in the Internet age, I can go straight to Augustine or John of the Cross or Teresa of Avila to read about genuine Catholic spirituality? Whose writings, moreover, are in the superlative prose of truly great thinkers, and not the warmed-over commonplaces of a mediocre unoriginal mind?]


Worth noting here what Donald McClarey says about the parity Bergoglio gives to abortion and mass migration in 'Goad and insult':

---

One of the keys to understanding this Pontificate is to pay zero attention to what the Pope says and to focus on what he does. The Pope regularly verbally condemns abortion, but his actions are completely the reverse. From kneecapping the Pontifical Academy for Life, to celebrating pro-abort politicians and giving papal awards to them, to having pro-aborts speak at papal conferences, the Pope has routinely given the impression that he could care less about the fight against abortion. For the ordinary Catholic pro-lifer the best they can hope from this Vatican is malign indifference.

---

For his post below, Magister has a catchy title, whose sense can be appreciated by anyone aware of just how anti-Catholic Jorge Bergoglio is. Unfortunately, the
post itself - and the essay it presents - do not even get into exactly how and why Luther had prefigured Bergoglio's specific 'reforms'. That Luther pre-figured
Bergoglio, yes, but the analogy ends there. Luther's issues against the Church in the 16th century were far different from what Bergoglio has chosen to make issues
in the Church of the 21st century.

While I certainly think that Bergoglio is doing to the Church what Luther did back in 1517, he is doing so far more directly, and consequently, with far more
immediate adverse effects, because everything he does, he does as pope, therefore directly undermining the Church for his own purposes and with all the advantages
on his side, where Luther had to fight the entire institution. Historical circumstances favored Luther so that the battle was not that one-sided, because he
had the support of the German princes and their powerful states, without which his break-off church would never have been viable on the scale that it soon became.

Bergoglio's 'reform' was written before -
by Martin Luther

April 13, 2018

Much has been written in appraisal of the first five years of the pontificate of Francis and of his real or imaginary “revolution.”

But rarely, if ever, with the acuteness and extensive scope of the analysis published below.

The author, Roberto Pertici, 66, is a professor of contemporary history at the university of Bergamo and has focused his studies on Italian culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to relations between Church and state.

His essay is being issued for the very first time on Settimo Cielo.

THE END OF “ROMAN CATHOLICISM?”
by Roberto Pertici

1. At this point in the pontificate of Francis, I believe it can be reasonably maintained that it marks the twilight of that imposing historical reality which can be defined as “Roman Catholicism.”

This does not mean, properly understood, that the Catholic Church is coming to an end, but that what is fading is the way in which it has historically structured and represented itself in recent centuries.

It seems evident to me, in fact, that this is the plan being deliberately pursued by the “brain trust” that has clustered around Francis: a plan understood both as an extreme response to the crisis in relations between the Church and the modern world, and as a precondition for a renewed ecumenical course together with the other Christian confessions, especially the Protestant.

2. By “Roman Catholicism” I mean that grand historical, theological, and juridical construction which has its origin in the Hellenization (in terms of the philosophical aspect) and Romanization (in terms of the political-juridical aspect) of primitive Christianity, and is based on the primacy of the successors of Peter, emerging from the crisis of the late ancient world and from the theoretical systematization of the Gregorian age (“Dictatus Papae”).

Over the subsequent centuries, the Church also established its own internal legal system, canon law, looking to Roman law as its model. And this juridical element contributed to gradually shaping a complex hierarchical organization with precise internal norms that regulate the life both of the “bureaucracy of celibates” (an expression of Carl Schmitt) that manages it and of the laity who are part of it.

The other decisive moment of formation of “Roman Catholicism” is, finally, the ecclesiology elaborated by the council of Trent, which reiterates the centrality of ecclesiastical mediation in man's salvation, in contrast with the Lutheran theses of the “universal priesthood”. An ecclesiology that established the hierarchical, united, and centralized character of the Church; its right to supervise and, if need be, to condemn positions that are in contrast with the orthodox formulation of the truths of faith; and its role in the administration of the sacraments.

This ecclesiology finds its seal in the dogma of pontifical infallibility proclaimed by Vatican Council I, put to the test eighty years later in the dogmatic affirmation of the Assumption of Mary into heaven (1950), which together with the previous dogmatic proclamation of her Immaculate Conception (1854) also reiterates the centrality of Marian devotion.

It would be reductive, however, if we were to limit ourselves to what has been said so far. Because there also exists - or better, existed - a widespread “Catholic mindset,” made up of the following:
- a cultural attitude based on a realism with regard to human nature that is sometimes disenchanted and willing to “understand all” as a precondition for “forgiving all”;
- a non-ascetic spirituality that is understanding toward certain material aspects of life, and not inclined to disdain them;
- engagement in everyday charity toward the humble and needy, without the need to idealize them or almost make new idols of them;
- a willingness also to represent itself in its own magnificence, and therefore not deaf to the evidence of beauty and of the arts, as testimony to a supreme Beauty toward which the Christian must tend;
- a subtle examination of the most inward movements of the heart, of the interior struggle between good and evil, of the dialectic between “temptations” and the response of conscience.

It could therefore be said that in what I call “Roman Catholicism” there are interwoven three aspects, obviously in addition to that of religion: the aesthetic, the juridical, the political. This is a rational vision of the world resulting in a visible and solid institution that fatally enters into conflict with the idea of representation that emerged in modernity, based on individualism and on a conception of power that, rising from the bottom up, ends up bringing into question the principle of authority.

3. This conflict has been considered in different ways, often opposing, by those who have analyzed it. Carl Schmitt looked with admiration to the “resistance” of “Roman Catholicism,” considered the last force capable of reining in the dissipatory forces of modernity. Others have made tough criticisms of him: in this struggle, the Catholic Church is seen as having ruinously emphasized its juridical-hierarchical, authoritarian, external traits.

Beyond these opposing evaluations, it is certain that in recent centuries “Roman Catholicism” has been pushed onto the defensive. What has gradually brought its social presence into question has been above all the birth of industrial society and the consequent process of modernization, which has opened a series of anthropological mutations that are still underway. Almost as if “Roman Catholicism” were “organic” (to say it the old Marxist way) to a society that is agrarian, hierarchical, static, based on penury and fear, which could not find relevance in a society that is “affluent,” dynamic, characterized by social mobility.

A first response to this situation of crisis was given by the ecumenical council Vatican II (1962-1965), which according to the intentions of Pope John XXIII, who had convened it, was to effect a “pastoral updating,” looking with new optimism at the modern world, which meant finally letting the guard down: no longer carrying on with an age-old duel, but opening a dialogue and effecting an encounter.

The world was swept up during those years in extraordinary changes and in an unprecedented economic development: probably the most sensational, rapid, and profound revolution in the human condition of which there is any trace in history (Eric J. Hobsbawm). The event of the council contributed to this mutation, but was in its turn engulfed by it: the rhythm of the “updatings” - fostered also by the dizzying transformations in the surroundings and by the general conviction, sung by Bob Dylan, that “the times they are a-changin’” - got out of hand for the hierarchy, or at least for that part of it which wanted to effect a reform, not a revolution.

Thus between 1967 and 1968 one witnessed the “watershed” of Paul VI, which expressed itself in the preoccupied analysis of the turbulence of ’68 and then of the “sexual revolution” contained in the encyclical “Humanae Vitae” of July 1968.

So great was the pessimism to which that great pontiff came in the 1970s that, conversing with the philosopher Jean Guitton, he wondered to himself and asked him, echoing a disquieting passage from the Gospel of Luke: “When the Son of Man returns, will he still find faith upon the earth?” And he added: “What strikes me, when I consider the Catholic world, is that within Catholicism there sometimes seems to predominate a type of thinking that is not Catholic, and it could happen that this non-Catholic thinking within Catholicism could tomorrow become the stronger one.” [And how much 'stronger' can that be when it is the pope himself today who leads this non-Catholic (I call it anti-Catholic) thinking in the Church?]

4. It is well known how the successors of Paul VI responded to this situation: by combining change and continuity; effecting - on certain questions - the appropriate corrections (memorable, from this point of view, was the condemnation of “liberation theology”); by seeking a dialogue with modernity that would be at the same time a challenge: on the issues of life, the rationality of man, religious freedom.

Benedict XVI, in what was the true agenda-setting text of his pontificate (the address to the pontifical curia of December 22, 2005), then reiterated a firm point: that the great decisions of Vatican II were to be read and interpreted in the light of the preceding tradition of the Church, and therefore also of the ecclesiology that emerged from the council of Trent and from Vatican II. Even for the simple reason that one cannot effect a formal recantation of the faith believed and lived by generations and generations, without introducing an irreparable “vulnus” in the self-representation and widespread perception of an institution like the Catholic Church.

It is also known how this stance caused a widespread rejection not only “extra ecclesiam,” where it manifested itself in an aggression against Benedict XVI in the media and in intellectual circles that was absolutely unprecedented, but - in the manner of Nicodemus and the murmuring that are congenital in the clerical world - also in the ecclesiastical body, which essentially left that pope alone in the most critical moments of his pontificate. This led, I believe, to his resignation in February of 2013, which - apart from the reassuring interpretations - appears as an epochal event, the reasons and long-term implications of which still remain entirely to be explored.

5. This was the situation inherited by Pope Francis. I limit myself only to pointing out the biographical and cultural aspects that in part made Jorge Mario Bergoglio “ab initio” an outsider to what I have called “Roman Catholicism”:
- the peripheral character of his formation, profoundly rooted in the Latin American world, which makes it difficult for him to embody the universality of the Church, or at least drives him to live it in a new way, pushing to the side European and North American civilization;
- his membership in an order, like the Society of Jesus, that over the past half century has effected one of the most sensational political-cultural repositionings ever heard of in recent history, moving from a “reactionary” position to one that is variously “revolutionary” and therefore giving proof of a pragmatism that in many of its aspects is worthy of reflection;
- his estrangement from the aesthetic dimension that is proper to “Roman Catholicism,” his showy renunciation of any representation of dignity of office (the pontifical apartments, the red mozzetta and the usual pontifical trappings, the residence in Castel Gandolfo) and what he calls “customs of a Renaissance prince” (starting with being late for and then absent from a concert of classical music in his honor at the beginning of the pontificate).

I would rather seek to emphasize what could be in my opinion the unifying element of the many mutations that Pope Francis is introducing in Catholic tradition.

I do so basing myself on a little book by an eminent churchman, who is generally considered the theologian of reference for the current pontificate, eloquently cited by Francis as early as his first Angelus, on March 17, 2013, when he said: “In the past few days I have been reading a book by a Cardinal — Cardinal Kasper, a clever theologian, a good theologian — on mercy. And that book did me a lot of good, but do not think I am promoting my cardinals’ books! Not at all! Yet it has done me so much good, so much good.”

The book by Walter Kasper to which I am referring is entitled: Martin Luther: An ecumenical perspective - and it is the reworked and expanded version of a lecture that the cardinal gave in Berlin on January 18, 2016. The chapter to which I would like to call attention is the sixth: “The ecumenical relevance of Martin Luther.”

The whole chapter is built on a binary argumentation, according to which Luther was led to deepen the rupture with Rome primarily because of the refusal of the popes and the bishops to proceed with a reform. It was only in the face of Rome’s deafness - Kasper writes - that the German reformer, “on the basis of his understanding of the universal priesthood, had to content himself with an emergency organization. He continued, however, to trust in the fact that the truth of the Gospel would assert itself on its own, and he therefore left the door fundamentally open for a possible future agreement.” [Kasper retrospectively giving Luther too much credit there! 'The door open for a possible future agreement'? Really?]

But also on the Catholic side, at the beginning of the 16th century, many doors remained open, and in short there was a fluid situation. Kasper writes: “There was no harmoniously structured Catholic ecclesiology, but only approaches that were more a doctrine on the hierarchy than a real and proper ecclesiology. The systematic elaboration of ecclesiology would take place only in controversial theology, as an antithesis to the polemics of the Reformation against the papacy. The papacy thus became, in a way unknown until then, the distinguishing mark of Catholicism. The respective confessional theses and antitheses influenced and impeded each other.”

One must therefore proceed today - according to the overall meaning of Kasper's argumentation - with a “deconfessionalization” of both the Reformed confessions and of the Catholic Church, in spite of the fact that this never portrayed itself as a “confession,” but as the universal Church. One must return to something like the situation that preceded the outbreak of the religious conflicts in the 16th century.

While in the Lutheran camp this “deconfessionalization” has already been widely achieved (with the aggressive secularization of those societies, for which the problems that were at the foundation of the confessional controversies became irrelevant for the overwhelming majority of “Reformed” Christians), in the Catholic camp instead there is still much to be done, precisely because of the survival of aspects and structures of what I have called “Roman Catholicism.” It is therefore above all to the Catholic world that the invitation to “deconfessionalization” is addressed. Kasper invokes this as a "rediscovery of original catholicity, not restricted to a confessional point of view."

To this end, it would therefore be necessary to bring to completion the surmounting of Tridentine ecclesiology and that of Vatican I. According to Kasper, Vatican II opened the way, but its reception has been controversial and anything but straightforward. This brings us to the role of the current pontiff: “Pope Francis has inaugurated a new phase in this process of reception. He emphasizes the ecclesiology of the people of God, the people of God on the journey, the sense of faith of the people of God, the synodal structure of the Church, and for the comprehension of unity is putting an interesting new approach into play. He no longer describes ecumenical unity with the image of concentric circles around the center, but with the image of the polyhedron, a multifaceted reality, not a ‘puzzle’ put together from the outside, but a whole and, since this is a matter of a precious stone, a whole that reflects the light that strikes it in a marvelously multiple way. Reconnecting with Oscar Cullmann, Pope Francis borrows the concept of diversity reconciled.” [This polyhedron bit is one of those elements of the pseudo-intellectual Bergoglio balderdash that Kasper here elaborates a-critically - and unconvincingly. The fundamental flaw in this metaphor is evident: If ecumenism were a 'polyhedron', then the Roman Catholic Church ends up being just one facet of it, yet how can that be, when Catholicism is the matrix from which all other Christian confessions emerged and to which they must return ut unum sint.]

6. if we briefly reconsider in this light the behaviors of Francis that have raised the biggest sensation, we better understand their unifying logic:
- his emphasis, right from the day of the election, of his office as bishop of Rome, rather than as pontiff of the universal Church;
- his destructuring of the canonical figure of the Roman pontiff (the famous “who am I to judge?”), at the basis of which - therefore - are not only the factors of character mentioned above, but a deeper reason, of a theological nature;
- the practical downgrading of some of the most characteristic sacraments of the “Catholic mindset” (auricular confession, indissoluble marriage, the Eucharist), realized for pastoral reasons of “mercy” and “welcome”;
- the exaltation of “parrhesìa” within the Church, of presumedly creative confusion, to which is added a vision of the Church almost as a federation of local Churches, endowed with extensive disciplinary, liturgical and even doctrinal powers.

There are those who feel scandalized over the fact that in Poland an interpretation of “Amoris Laetitia” will go into effect that is different from the one that will be realized in Germany or in Argentina, concerning communion for the divorced and remarried. But Francis could respond that this is a matter of different sides of that polyhedron which is the Catholic Church, [And why is Pertici now adopting this flawed metaphor to apply it to the Church herself? Since when do diametrically opposite pastoral practices reflecting the right and the wrong about the one single truth of faith become co-equal 'facets' of the Church? It's a complete negation of the principle of non-contradiction. Nothing can be both right and not right! But then completely ignoring the principle of non-contradiction is another hallmark of Bergoglianism and Bergoglio's own mindset.] to which could also be added sooner or later - why not? - the post-Lutheran Reformed Churches, precisely in a spirit of “diversity reconciled.” [And there again, how can the Reformed Churches be considered a co-equal facet, as it were, of Catholicism on that faulty Bergoglian polyhedron of ecumenism, when to begin with, they do not believe in Trans-substantiation?]

On this path, it is easy to foresee that the next steps will be a rethinking of catechesis and of the liturgy in an ecumenical sense, here too with the journey facing the Catholic side being much more demanding than the one facing the “Protestant” side, considering the different points of departure, as also a downgrading of the sacred order in its most “Catholic” aspect, meaning in ecclesiastical celibacy, with the result that the Catholic hierarchy will even cease to be the Schmittian “bureaucracy of celibates.”

One understands better, then, the genuine exaltation of the figure and work of Luther that was produced at the top of the Catholic Church on the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of 1517, all the way to the controversial stamp dedicated to him by the Vatican post office, with him and Melanchthon at the feet of Jesus on the cross.

Personally I have no doubt that Luther is one of the giants of "universal history" as it used to be commonly called, but “est modus in rebus”: above all the institutions must have a sort of modesty in carrying out upheavals in these dimensions, on pain of ridicule: the same sort with which we were assailed in the twentieth century, when we saw the communists back then rehabilitating in unison and by command the “heretics” that they had strenuously condemned and fought until the day before: the “Counterorder, comrades!” of the cartoons by Giovannino Guareschi. [Pertici has completely lost me here! I cannot make out the sense of what he is trying to say.]

7. So if yesterday “Roman Catholicism” was perceived as a foreign body by modernity, a foreignness for which it was not pardoned, it is natural that its twilight should now be hailed with joy by the “modern world” in its political, media, and cultural institutions, and that therefore the current pontiff should be seen as the one who is healing that fracture between the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the world of information, of international organizations and “think tanks,” which - opened in 1968 with “Humanae Vitae” - had become deeper during the subsequent pontificates.

And it is also natural that ecclesiastical groups and circles that already in the 1970’s were hoping for the surpassing of the Tridentine Church and interpreted Vatican II in this perspective, after having lived under wraps over the past forty years, have today come out into the open and with their lay and ecclesiastical heirs should figure among the components of that “brain trust” which was mentioned at the beginning.

There remain open, however, several questions that would impose further reflections that are not easy.

Will the operation carried forward by Pope Francis and by his “entourage” see lasting success, or will it end up encountering resistance within the hierarchy and what remains of the Catholic people, greater than the decidedly marginal forms that have emerged so far?

And more in general: what consequences could this have on the overall cultural, political, religious cohesion of the Western world, which, in spite of having reached an elevated level of secularization, has long had one of its load-bearing structures precisely in “Roman Catholicism”?

But it is preferable that historians would not make prophecies and would content themselves with understanding something, if they are able, about the processes underway.

A 'call to holiness' that gives short shrift to the sacraments, which are our direct sources of grace, is yet another anomaly in an already anomalous document that
exhorts the faithful to holiness even as parts of it are yet another tiresome exercise in the pope-author's self-indulgent - and most unholy - screeds against Catholics
who do not share his worldview... That no one among Bergoglio's closest associates, who surely must have vetted the document (if they were not 90% responsible
for it), failed to point out these major defects in a document on holiness, indicates that everyone in the papal court at Casa Santa Marta is on the same wave length
as their lord and master.

A curious absence in
the pope's latest opus
Alan L. Anderson

APRIL 15, 2018

Much has been and will be written about the Holy Father’s latest teaching in his Apostolic Exhortation, Gaudete et Exsultate. Some have latched onto it as an opportunity to bash their perceived opponents in the Church. One writer felt compelled to rush a tweet gleefully proclaiming certain passages as “taking aim” at particular Catholics with whom the well-known tweeter obviously has problems. Others have used the words of the exhortation to support their pet political agendas.

Witness the headlines of major news organizations, which quickly latched on to the seeming moral equivalency posited by His Holiness between opposition for abortion and support for immigration. Considerable ink will be spilled and or electronic bytes consumed in the coming weeks and months trying to parse the Holy Father’s words as to whether a) the Holy Father meant to posit such an equivalency and b) whether such an equivalency does in fact exist.

St. Theresa of Avila once advised, “Let nothing disturb you.” The blessed Doctor would undoubtedly be frantically reasserting this counsel during this stormy pontificate.

There is one thing, though, about G&E which has left this simple layman scratching his head – the fact that in a 22,000-word document that reissues the Church’s millennia-long call to holiness in the faithful, relatively little attention is paid to the primary means to obtain holiness: the sacraments.

The Eucharist is mentioned only five times and doesn’t make its first appearance until paragraph 110, roughly two-thirds of the way through. Similarly, Reconciliation (Confession) is mentioned only six times, also making its first appearance alongside the Eucharist in paragraph 110. In a document written as an exhortation to a holiness that expresses itself in mission, it seems strange to give such short shrift to the means to attain the holiness – the grace – to carry out that mission.

His Holiness forthrightly recognizes the importance of the sacraments when he declares, “The Lord has bestowed on the Church the gifts of scripture, the sacraments, holy places, living communities. . .a multifaceted beauty that proceeds from God’s love.”

Yet he argues, “I will not pause to explain the means of sanctification already known to us: the various methods of prayer, the inestimable sacraments of the Eucharist and Reconciliation, the offering of personal sacrifices, different forms of devotion.”

But is this true? Are the inestimable means of sanctification – Eucharist and Confession – truly “already known,” even to those who profess to be Catholic? [But that is part of the parallel universe Bergoglio inhabits and populates - from which he draws the unreal examples he loves to cite in order to illustrate his pet points. His examples are either fully imaginary on his part, or worse, the exact opposite of what's happening in the real world. Like his infamous remark that people in the Church are talking too much abortion all the time - as if priests in general had been preaching at all against abortion and its cousin, contraception, instead of studiously keeping away from such 'controversial' issues! And if pro-life activists make up for the clerical neglect by their pro-active apostolate of life - which must call attention to their work by talking against abortion - then what is wrong with that? Can one ever err on the side of excess when denouncing the murder of unborn innocents?]

The statistics are well known, dreary, yet bear repeating, here. According to Georgetown University’s, Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), weekly mass attendance in 2017 in the United States stood at only 23 percent. Even worse, again as reported by CARA, only 2 percent of all American Catholics reported going to Confession at least once a month, while fully 75 percent say they go to Confession less than once a year. Or never.

So, no, I’m not at all certain we can assume, as the Holy Father does, that the normative, most efficacious means for sanctification are “well-known.” I’m not sure an exhortation that exuberantly and eloquently calls, as this one does, for a renewed zeal for mission and community will bear the hoped-for fruit absent the infusion of grace to be found only in the sacraments.

St. Augustine taught us that, “The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.” Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, beautifully reiterating the theology of St. Paul observed that, “In the Eucharist a communion takes place that corresponds to the union of man and woman in marriage. Just as they become ‘one flesh,’ so in Communion we all become ‘one spirit,’ one person, with Christ.”

Put simply, Confession and Eucharist are the necessary predicates for the Mission and Community to which G&E So forcefully calls us.

The Holy Father mentions the centrality of “grace” almost forty times in his exhortation, yet only links “grace” to sacrament – the normative source of grace – once. And then only to the grace received in Baptism. Even his most complete treatment of the Holy Eucharist [n.157] only hints at the centrality of the Most Blessed Sacrament to Mission and Community: “When we receive him in Holy Communion, we renew our covenant with him and allow him to carry out ever more fully his work of transforming our lives.”

Not that long ago the Church held an ecumenical council, the primary results of which were: a) to reassert the “universal call to holiness” (as does the Holy Father in this latest exhortation) and b) to exalt, once again, the Holy Eucharist as “the source and summit of the Faith.” Vatican II clearly saw the two are linked.

All of the things to which His Holiness exhorts us – “small gestures” of holiness, lives lived in beatitude, the battle against the devil, discernment, etc. – can only efficaciously be accomplished and bear fruit with the graces obtained in the Blessed Sacrament and, by extension, the other sacraments.

There are other charitable institutions and other philosophies based upon and possessing natural virtues. What raises the Church up, what differentiates Her from, all other human endeavors is this Gift, this gift of the Body, Blood, Soul and, Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the share in God’s life, the grace, which comes with it. It’s the most precious gift She offers to the world.

Thus, I find it curious so little attention is paid in His Holiness’s exhortation to the pivotal role played by the sacraments in attaining holiness. Indeed, to attempt holiness without them would be, well, to flirt with neo-Pelagianism, wouldn’t it?

In fact, utter devotion to the sacraments, especially to daily Mass and Communion, distinguishes each and every known saint in the Church - and probably all the legion of unknown saints as well. And why not, when sacramental grace, which we earn, can only enrich and strengthen the sanctifying grace inhered in us through Baptism entirely on the merit of Christ's redemption.

Yet for the Vicar of Christ to take the sacraments 'for granted' in comparison to diverse other but far smaller ways of earning grace and achieving holiness is exceedingly strange, indeed. Perhaps it is in keeping with his heterodox mindset about the Sacraments - especially Holy Communion, where he allows the individual sinner to subjectively 'discern' his worthiness for communion, leading to sacrilegious communion by persons living in chronic adultery and unwilling to remedy that mortal sin by at least accepting sexual continence as the necessary condition for receiving the Eucharist.

In any case, this is the latest transgression in the growing corpus of the Bergoglian 'magisterium of me-myself-and-I' - in full 'L'Eglise, c'est moi' mode - that largely expresses Jorge Bergoglio's opinions about the subject on hand, rather than to objectively elaborate and clarify the Church's essential teaching on the subject.

---

Happy birthday to him who has taught us with his own life never to place anyone or anything before Christ.

Happy birthday to him who has borne witness with his entire existence that humility is not a false
ostentatious modesty, but awareness of what one can or cannot do, and that everything we are able to do
is a gift of the Lord.

Happy birthday to him who told us, once more, with joy that God is love, that the beginning of being Christian
is an encounter with a Person, and that love should be the mark of our presence in the world.

Happy birthday to him who reminds us, with his silence, that in order to truly understand the Word, we must
enter into the silence of Jesus, the Word himself.

Happy birthday to him who even now, from his little hermitage in the Vatican, takes us by the hand and
accompanies us along the journey of life and faith.

Happy birthday to an extraordinary man, a unique man, a father, a teacher and a friend.

AD MULTOS ANNOS, BELOVED PAPA!

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With my usual thanks to Scenron at LA VIGNA DEL SIGNORE for providing the illustration and the message as he does for every important Benedict XVI anniversary.



Not to forget that three days from now, we mark the 13th anniversary of Joseph Ratzinger's election as Pope, for which Scenron reminds us to make it
a day of prayer for and with Benedict XVI, as we join him with our prayers on his prayer times during the day.

And two video gems from Raffaella as a birthday treat for all of us who love Benedict XVI:


Gemma, Raffaella's indefatigable and invaluable videomeister, assembled the above from rare,
mostly previously unseen photos and videoclips from Joseph Ratzinger's years as a university professor.

Even better is a beautiful hourlong Italian documentary (unfortunately reproduced without credits nor a date, but probably shortly after his election as pope), which gives an overview of Joseph Ratzinger's life from his birth in Marktl-am-Inn to his election as pope.
www.dailymotion.com/video/x6hnbsv
It contains many photos and videoclips besides the ones we have become familiar with, and contains remembrances from persons like someone who was at school with him in his early years at grade school; someone who was with him in the prison camp where ex-German soldiers were rounded up by the Americans (the one who reveals that he asked him what he was writing even in prison, which was Greek verse in hexameters in which he mocked his captors and the Nazis); someone who, as an eight-year-old, took catechism lessons with him in his first assignment as a parish vicar in the Church of the Most Precious Blood in Munich; a student who remembers how popular Ratzinger's lectures were in Bonn that the university opened his courses even to non-theology students; a parishioner at Santa Maria Consolatrice in Rome when the new Prefect of the CDF was assigned the church in 1981 as his Roman parish; his neighbors in Pentling, Therese and Rupert Hofbauer; and his good friends Professor and Margaret Richardi, whose family life he shared. There's Alfred Lapple, the mentor who befriended him in his first year in seminary, who had introduced Joseph to the work of John Henry Newman; and Vittorio Messori and Peter Seewald. And occasional commentaries from the Cardinal himself on various phases of his life. What a beautiful treat on this birthday!

UPDATE
Georg Gänswein: “Benedict spent his birthday
with his brother and we prepared a surprise for him”


Relaxed and with his brother is how Benedict XVI celebrated his birthday. His secretary, Georg Gänswein, explained this during the Rome Reports presentation of a documentary on the pope emeritus.

MSGR. GEORG GÄNSWEIN

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"He's celebrating now at home with his brother, who was with us also this morning. We will go pray the rosary and then the Swiss Guard's band has prepared a small surprise, very typical from Germany. They will play two or three songs and after a short speech the celebration will continue."

---

As for the pope emeritus's health, he assures that he is the same as a few weeks ago when he wrote a thank you note to an Italian media outlet. In it, he admitted his physical decline.

---

"His mind is very good, his physical strength has decreased a little, but he is in good spirits, he is present mentally, and today he is celebrating. The important thing is that he is present. Whether he is writing something important or not, I do not know, but he himself said that we should not expect anything academic."

---

Those closest to him know that Benedict misses his native Bavaria and that is why every year they try to bring a small piece of his country to the smallest state in the world.

And even a little video tribute
from Vatican News

BIRTHDAY FEATURE:
A walk through the pre-papal
life of Benedict XVI
by Deborah Lubov Castellano

April 16, 2018

Editor's Note: To better mark Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s 91st birthday, we bring to you this special feature written by Zenit Vatican Correspondent, Deborah Castellano Lubov, from when she went to Bavaria to physically trace Benedict’s life before becoming Pope.

Ever wanted to have a better idea about what teddy bears, Christmas lists, and miracles meant to young Joseph Ratzinger? And if not before, are you curious now?

Special moments in the early life of Pope Benedict were the discoveries to find on an ‘Inside the Vatican’ pilgrimage that retraced the life of Benedict XVI throughout Bavaria and Rome, guided by well-known historian Michael Hesemann, the co-author with Georg Ratzinger of “My Brother, the Pope.”

Some of the meaningful places this intimate spiritual pilgrimage included were: the charming little town of Marktl am Inn, where little Joseph Ratzinger was born; Tittmoning, where he spent early years through about kindergarten; Freising, where he attended minor seminary and was ordained a priest 65 years ago; Traunstein, where he celebrated his first Holy Mass as priest; Munich, where he served as archbishop; Regensburg, where he taught; and Pentling, where he had designed a simple home where he believed he would eventually retire.

The group had privileged moments they never could have expected, including a private encounter with Pope Benedict’s brother, Georg, in his home in Regensburg, and meeting the third priest ordained with the Ratzinger brothers, Rupert Berger, in his home in Traunstein.




An irony, that hit those participating, was how Joseph Ratzinger, for a long time, was just “the little brother of the famous choir leader, Georg Ratzinger.”
When all three were ordained, the famous one was Father Berger, since he was the mayor’s son.

Until Joseph became cardinal and was called to Rome, even as archbishop of Munich and Freising, he still stood “in the shadow” of his world-famous brother. [One of the headlines announcing his appointment to Munich actually read, 'Regensburg choirmaster's brother is the new Archbishop'.]


In Regensburg, we also visited the home Prof. Ratzinger had built in 1970 and where he lived till 1977 when he was named Archbishop of Munich-Freising.



Do you know where Pope Benedict’s favorite image of the Madonna is? The answer: in a Marian shrine, known as a place of miracles in the charming-beyond-words town of Altoetting where the Ratzinger family, including little Joseph, and his siblings Georg and Maria, would visit at least once a year.

In this place in 1489, two little boys who had been killed, one in a farm accident and another drowning, had been brought back to life after they were brought before the beautiful image of the Virgin Mary of Altoetting.

In fact, today, this place leaves an impression due to all the trinkets (ex-voto) left on the walls outside the shrine as signs of gratitude for miracles that occurred through Mary’s intercession. (Lighting candles is the gesture one does for obtaining miracles, while an ex-voto represents a sign of a miracle received.)

Throughout and surrounding this shrine, there is not actually enough space on the walls to accommodate all the tributes. The wealthy gave items of silver to show their thanks, whereas the less well off and even very poor people, often drew little pictures to show their gratitude. One sees pictures of hospital beds, or even body parts to reflect recovery of the ill, as well as pictures of babies – even photographs from a few months ago — for babies who were delivered safely after complications, or of parents who couldn’t have children, and then all of a sudden found themselves expecting. Moreover, there are painted images of people who were saved from torturous situations in times of war, struggle, or even recent tsunamis, whose survival was attributed to Mary’s intercession.


The home in Marktl am Inn is where Joseph spent his earliest years — he was two years old when he and his siblings crossed the street to look at the Christmas decorations of a small department store just opposite their parent’s home. The apple of the little one’s eye: a teddy bear in the window. Every day, little Joseph would watch and admire. But then one day right before Christmas: tears. Why? The teddy bear was gone… . In Germany, litlte ones get their presents after Holy Mass on December 24th. At this moment, little Joseph’s source of sorrow was removed, when instead he experienced great joy as the teddy bear was under the family’s Christmas tree.

“I promise I’ll be good” was written in his Christmas list at the age of seven. (A promise Joseph Ratzinger certainly kept.) In exchange for his good behavior, the three things he requested very articulately: a vestment for when he would play Mass with his brother Georg, the Mass missal translated into German so he could understand the Latin, and a specific image of the Sacred Heart.



Tittmoning, a small town on the Salzach River, on the Austrian border, where the Ratzinger family lived from 1929-1932, (until about the time that Joseph entered kindergarten), is the place Benedict described as the ‘wonderland' of his childhood. Before going to school, he would stop and pray in church. Here, he began to appreciate the Mass more and more, especially as he observed his older brother serve and his parents sing in the choir.

Also, in this town, where young Joseph began to fall in love with the liturgy, is a Marian Shrine, where he, with his mother and siblings, daily used to go to pray the rosary. We pilgrims braved the steep way up, but it was more than worth it. On the way back, we passed the rapids of a small river running downhill through a forest, giving shade in the summer.

We also visited Auschau am Inn, at the foot of the Alps, where the family had to relocate in 1932, due to Mr Ratzinger’s outspoken criticism of Nazism. Benedict’s family, especially his father, a policeman, always did everything they could to resist the Nazis and keep the family as distant from them as possible. Even this move to Auschau was done so that if soon there would be war, the family could have a home that supplied them with natural resources and food to live on.

In this home, Joseph was often found in solitude reading, his passion, and was a regular reader of Der gerade Weg (The straight way), the most outspoken Catholic Anti-Nazi publication. After Hitler rose to power, its editor, Fritz Michael Gerlach, was arrested and died in the Dachau concentration camp as a martyr; his beatification process started in 2009. Mr Ratzinger always said no to any Nazi offers. The only thing he allowed was his wife to be part of a women’s group which prayed the rosary.



The priests on the pilgrimage had a beautiful moment concelebrating Mass in the Church in Traunstein where Benedict celebrated his first Mass, after having been ordained in Freising.

It was an interesting story how we came to have this Special Mass on a Sunday. While in Rome, during the Mass of Saints Peter and Paul, Robert Moynihan and Deborah Tomlinson of Inside the Vatican found themselves — completely by chance – seated next to the pastor of the parish in Traunstein. The Pastor of St. Oswald’s told them to come instead on Sunday to Traunstein, rather than Saturday, which was the original plan, so that after the Mass, he could show the group different sites — such as where Pope Benedict’s parents spent their last days – and we could have a nice Bavarian lunch together. At this restaurant, historian Michael Hesemann, who is close to the Ratzingers, shared yet another personal detail he knows well, a delicious one.

The German author ordered “Kaiserschmarrn,” a sweet dish he said is Pope Benedict’s favorite. Another gastronomic surprise was trying the white sausages, which apparently, even now, Benedict enjoys in the Vatican, often brought by his brother or by his personal friends from his time in Bavaria.

Another touching moment was learning about Joseph Ratzinger’s close relationship with his sister, Maria, who was at times like an assistant to him, not to mention also housekeeper and personal secretary. Despite being an accomplished professional, she was happy to instead dedicate her time to performing many tasks that would have taken away from his scholarly endeavors.

The small group participating also looked at the richness of the works and discourses of Ratzinger and later Pope Benedict, through interactive discussions led by Robert Moynihan, Vatican expert and founder and editor-in-chief of Inside the Vatican magazine, to enrich their understanding of the Pope Emeritus.

Those participating also enjoyed various other memorable Bavarian moments, along with time for free exploration, eating well, and time of reflection. For instance, we visited the Weltenburg Monastery, on the beautiful Danube River, which brewed the first Bavarian beer a thousand years ago – and still continues to operate - and which served as a retreat for Professor Joseph Ratzinger and his doctoral students during the years when he was a professor in Regensburg.

There was also a very moving visit to Augsburg to see Mary, Untier of Knots, who is so important to Pope Francis that he has made sure she is in Santa Marta; as well as a fun stop at Neuschwanstein Castle, which was the inspiration for the castle in Disneyland.

All in all, this journey, retracing Joseph Ratzinger’s footsteps, and meeting many of those involved in Ratzinger’s journey from the past through the present, between Rome and Bavaria, has left — as the pilgrims all expressed — an impact for them that they will never forget….

Almost all the photos on this spread were taken by Michael Hesemann. I supplemented a few - like adding photos of Aschau-am-Inn and Hufschlag, or the famous post-ordination photos of the Ratzinger brother with their fellow Traunsteiner, Rupert Berger, who was ordained with them; a photo of Traunstein's St Oswald church; and the Ratzinger brothers' joint remembrance card of their ordination and First Mass (they also had individual remembrance cards.

In Googling Marktl, I came across this touching and most unusual way that Benedict XVI's 91st birthday was celebrated today. From the site of the Benedikthaus in Marktl:


At 4.15 in the morning today [the hour at which Joseph Ratzinger was born 91 years ago], 50 wellwishers from Marktl and nearby places gathered in the Birth Room of the Benedict XVI house museum to praise and thank God with prayers and solemn songs for Joseph Ratzinger and his life in the service of God and the Church.

Afterwards, they went in a candlelight procession towards the parish church where baby Joseph had been baptized on Holy Saturday, 16 April 1927, just over 4 hours after his birth. They made a prayer stop at the socalled Benediktsaule (Benedict pillar), a bronze column with scenes from Ratzinger's life in bas relief. [This was installed during Benedict XVI's visit to Marktl in September 2006.]

At the church, the wellwishers used the opportunity to think of their own baptism, crossing themselves with holy water from the baptismal font where the baby Joseph was baptized with the just-blessed Easter water.

Afterwards there was breakfast for everyone in the parsonage.

I would be remiss if I didn't go on record even if one day late on the birthday tributes of Fr Hunwicke and Aldo Maria Valli, respectively (Valli's I have yet to translate, but as usual, he takes one of Benedict XVI's homilies, seemingly at random, but which somehow manage to get to the core of many of the needless 'perplexities' bedevilling and fracturing the Church today, though Benedict XVI himself probably never imagined that this disunity would be brought about by the man who would succeed him as pope (a logical impossibility given that the pope, whoever he is, is supposed to be the visible symbol of unity in the Church, not the principal agent of disunity as Bergoglio is.)


Ad multos annos plurimosque annos ...

April 16, 2018

Today is the birthday of Joseph Ratzinger, sometime Bishop of Rome, and the anniversary of his rebirth in Baptism on the day when the Church was celebrating her Passover.

His pontificate was short, but what enrichment it brought us. The vetusta Novitas of the Bible, the Fathers, and the Liturgy; Summorum Pontificum and Anglicanorum coetibus; the beatification of Newman - how much grace we received in those years through his gentle and generous hands.

It turned out to be a necessary stocking-up of the larder with good and nourishing food; food destined to be our rations during the winter and the ice and the time of tears and cruelty. As we warm ourselves at our hearths today, and hear the wolves still howling outside as they run licensed and unconfined, hungry and increasingly desperate, memories of the good times reassure us that, in the power of the Spirit, and if we keep faith, good times can return.

Veni Sancte Spiritus ... flecte quod est rigidum, fove quod est frigidum, rege quod est devium. (Come, Holy Spirit...Bend that which is inflexible, warm that which is chilled, correct what goes astray). [From the beautiful 'Golden Sequence' prescribed in the Roman Liturgy for the Masses of Pentecost and its octave, usually attributed to either the thirteenth-century Pope Innocent III or to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Stephen Langton. It is one of only four medieval Sequences which were preserved in the Missale Romanum published in 1570 following the Council of Trent (1545–63). Before Trent many feasts had their own sequences. It is still sung today in some parishes on Pentecost.]

And there are at last sounds of the glaciers cracking, and of the trickle of tiny streams running out from beneath the compacted ice ... and the sight of little buds beginning to open beside the streams.

In a manner of speaking, we might say that Pope Benedict's glorious pontificate is still alive among us, since it is to the sinewy strength of his biblical and patristic teaching, and to the structures he left in place, that we continue to turn as we look to the return of the Maytime, when "The happy birds Te Deum sing, 'tis Mary's month of May."

In a justly famous sermon, Blessed John Henry Newman addressed to our Lady some words derived from the Song of Solomon:

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"Arise, make haste, my love, my dove, my beautiful one, and come. For the winter is now past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers have appeared in our land. ... The fig tree hath put forth her green figs; the vines in flower yield their sweet smell. Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come. It is time for thy Visitation. Arise, Mary, and go forth in thy strength ..."

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May the prayers of our Mother gain for us the grace of perseverance in this last dark hour of the apostasy. Was there ever a tyranny which lasted for ever, or an eternal winter?
She will go forth in her strength.
Her Immaculate Heart will prevail.

formed.org/watch/58cc4c2e08a8e56c0cab1ef2
Here, from ROME REPORTS is yet another documentary on Benedict XVI - made while he was Pope - that I am seeing for the first time. It is entitled BENEDICT XVI: A LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE TRUTH, about the man who most likely 'co-wrote' John Paul II's great encyclical on the splendor of truth, Veritatis splendor, a rebuke to all who manipulate the truth in any way and in doing so, violate it.

Everything in the documentary evokes the blessed continuing wonder that characterized pope watching in those days. Every event shown in the video continues to be as moving and wondrous as it was at the time it occurred. (But I must say I find it hard to have John Allen as the principal commentator in the video, though he certainly sounds enthusiastic about his subject - apparently, he was chosen because he had written a biography of Joseph Ratzinger, not very flattering the first time around, but re-published and 'purified' as it were after his subject became Pope - with some assist from Paul Badde, who should have been 'used' much better.) A



And a rather creative and entertaining video about our beloved many-splendored pope...

I find that most people in the media, and even many of the best commentators on Church affairs who like and admire Benedict XVI, seem to have an exaggerated recollection of the 'opposition' to his papacy. When there really wasn't very much of it, and certainly not in the sense of the opposition there is to his successor. The opposition to Benedict XVI was always mainly in the media. His ideological opponents have remained the same ones over the years and always had merely peripheral significance because they were playing against someone who was always so far above and beyond their league so that they were at most gadflies who could easily be swatted down.

Almost like the myth of the Panzerkardinal/God's Rottweiler that surrounded Joseph Ratzinger's 23 years as the official defender of the faith is the myth of the crisis-beset pope who in the end found himself unable to continue with the superhuman task of being Christ's Vicar on earth (and is now continuously mocked and spat upon by the Mundabors, De Matteis, Verrecchios and Canon212s of the world for having 'fled the wolves)].

In fact, the 'crises' of his pontificate were few and far between - and certainly, not all negative or scandalous in the ecclesial or secular sense: Regensburg and Summorum Pontificum, for example, for all the controversy they generated, were seminal and emblematic acts of his pontificate - the first one for its celebration of faith and reason, the other for its celebration of liturgy as our supreme act of worship towards God. And it wasn't as if the controversy went on and on.

At the time, I remarked how amazing it was that for all the fire and fury that the Regensburg lecture aroused in the Muslim world and in Catholic critics of Benedict XVI, the entire controversy really lasted just about two weeks in the news, after which it was softened and redeemed in its true worth by first the unexpected positive reaction of the 130 Muslim scholars to it, and then, six weeks after the lecture, by the almost miraculous success of his trip to Turkey, which had been the seat of the most furious attacks on the Regensburg lecture and Benedict XVI himself, a hostility which he turned around overnight by his visit to the Blue Mosque that won over even Turkey's most militant media.

As for Summorum Pontificum, it is a gift that goes on giving, for every brick added daily to rebuild the liturgy back to what the Fathers at the Council of Trent meant it to be, an indispensable affirmation of the Counter-Reformation.

Other 'crises' were relatively minor and manufactured. Two were related, in that both involved bishops, in both of which incidents it turned out that the Vatican offices meant to prevent such embarassments from happening simply failed to exercise the due diligence they were supposed to bring to bear.

The first had to do with the nomination of Mons. Wielgus to be Archbishop of Warsaw, when it was already well-known in Poland that he was identified in the secret archives of the Communist regime to have been an informer on other priests; the second, on the fact that one of the four Lefebvrian bishops whose excommunication Benedict XVI decided to lift, was unmasked in a Swedish TV documentary timed to sabotage the Vatican announcement, as a Holocaust denier.

Of course, Mons. Williamson's mistaken opinion on historical fact had nothing to do why he was excommunicated to begin with, but many in the Church, bishops included, used the occasion as a pretext to put blame and shame on Benedict XVI, promptly magnified and amplified by the media.

It occasioned, however, one of the most extraordinary moments in the history of the pontificate - Benedict XVI's letter to the bishops of the world, apologizing first for the Vatican's obvious lack of information about Williamson (both the Congregation of Bishops and Ecclesia Dei failed miserably here, where with Wielgus, it was the Secretariat of State and the Nuncio in Poland, along with the Congregation of Bishops, that failed due diligence), and then going on to explain the full context of why he lifted the excommunications, and why the Church cannot afford to continue ignoring the FSSPX and its special charisms. A historic unprecedented letter that read like a Pauline epistle, and one of the largely unacknowledged great documents of his Pontificate. (And how absurd that some Bergoglians are comparing the current pope's letter to the Chilean bishops apologizing for his mistakes in prejudging the Barros case to Benedict XVI's letter!)

But then there was the continuing backdrop to the media's presentation of Benedict XVI - whom they irrationally came to blame for the entire clerical sex-abuse scandal in the Church, when he was the one person who had first acted proactively to put a stop to it and bring some healing and comfort to the victims while bringing their abusers to justice.

New revelations of widespread abuses in Germany and Ireland, in particular, were all laid on Benedict's head to a point where in 2009-2010, three of the world's most powerful media giants (AP, the New York Times, and the Spiegel group in Germany) brought all their considerable resources to bear in order to tie Joseph Ratzinger directly to a case of sexual abuse (the best they could do was to link his brother to one such major case in Regensburg) or of a major cover-up thereof. Nothing credible came out of their huffing and puffing which, it seemed, was intended to constrain him to resign! And so, that highwater tide of media pressure eventually ebbed. Only to rise again with the so-called Vatileaks in 2012.

And like the luridly imagined delusion of seeing Joseph Ratzinger himself sullied by the filth of the Church he had so often denounced, the media imagined and projected the image of 'the scandal of the century' over the petty and picayune revelations of behind-the-scenes bureaucratic wrangling at the Vatican from the few and random documents that the pope's valet pilfered from the pope's desk.

Yet the media found not one of those petty incidents even worthy of investigating - and since when have the media been shy about investigating scandal? It was obviously because like the Ratzinger-the-covert-sex-abuser scenario, or at least, Ratzinger-the-great-protector-of-abusive-priests, that the media giants tried to uncover, there never was any there there in any of the Vatileaks trivial tidbits, titillating as the media made them out to be. Even if, as the author of the Vatileaks book himself pointed out from the start, none of the documents implicated Benedict XVI himself in anything questionable, let alone scandalous or criminal!

And yet the media managed to turn the offended party and victim in this case - the pope whose private papers were purloined - into an indicted co-conspirator, so to speak, in any scandals they implied but never elaborated on nor investigated because no, there was never any there there!

I did not realize the diabolical effects of the media treatment of Vatileaks until all the talk by the cardinal electors before the 2013 Conclave, which appeared to have been fueled primarily by the image of the Benedict XVI pontificate they had derived from the Vatileaks reporting! Namely, Vatileaks had shown them that the greatest problem faced by the next pope was the reform of the Roman Curia!

It was unbelievable how some 120 cardinals, many of whom, on the basis of their CV and career achievements, truly represented the best and the brightest in the Church, could have so completely swallowed the great Vatileaks hoax perpetrated by the media, as to consider bureaucratic inefficiency and incompetence as the major problem of the Church, and not the continuing decline of faith even and especially among Catholics. And with the same incredible gullibility, to buy the Sankt Gallen Mafia's electioneering in behalf of Jorge Bergoglio as the answer to that problem. They were not electing a pope but the CEO of what would soon become, for this CEO, nothing more than the largest NGO in the world, headed by someone with as little credentials to be pope as to be a CEO.

THIRTEEN YEARS AGO TODAY...


Who can forget?


And thanks to Beatrice for leading us to this - the first photo I have seen of Benedict XVI at age 91 + 1 day. From the site of the city of Altoetting:



Photo shows from left, Mons. Georg Ratzinger, B16, Altoetting mayor Herbert Hofauer, and Mons. Wilhelm Schraml, emeritus Bishop of Passau, the Bavarian
diocese to which Altoetting belongs. The two led a delegation from Bavaria who came to Rome April 17 to greet the Emeritus Pope on his 91st birthday.


Today marks the end of what I privately think of as the Benedettian Quattuorduum, bracketed by his birthday on April 16 and the anniversary of his election as pope on the 19th.
I can't believe that some in the outspoken Catholic community online are mocking him for still being alive five years after his retirement, as if it was his 'duty' to pass away ASAP
in order to indulge their meanness. It's appalling how nasty and low they can get! Even if, in some cases, the hostility seems primarily due to the fact that they blame him for the
state of the Church today, because his resignation did make it possible for Bergoglio to become pope. Which begs the question: Would Benedict XVI ever imagine that an anti-
Catholic, heretical and apostate man would succeed him - or even become pope at all, for that matter? Obviously not. Nor did anyone else, other than those who 'bankrolled'
Bergoglio's election.

Other than they and their candidate, did anyone think at all, after February 11, 2013, that the next Conclave would bring the ultimate vengeful victory of the 'spirit of Vatican II'?
Did any of the 'conservative' orthodox cardinals who ended up voting for Bergoglio ever stop to think that they had been sold a wolf in sheep's clothing before they wrote down his
name at least once on their ballot? Are they not, after all, directly to blame for his election?


Fr H has an amusing little commentary on 'Habemus Papam' 2005:

Habemus Papam!

April 20, 2018

Looking back to those happy days when Pope Benedict was elected, I recall two video clips which I would like to see again. This is how I remember them. Any links?

(1) Margaret Hebblethwaite, small red-haired widow of an ex-Jesuit whose 'papal biographies' were far from reliable, was caught on camera at the moment the white smoke went up, in shrill panic. She knew that, for an election to have been made so soon, "It must be Ratzinger".

(2) The same lady, later on, trying to button-hole Cormack Murphy O'Connor and being shouldered aside. Poor Cormack looked as though he had his own grief-management problems ... [O'Connor, recently deceased ex-Arch bishop of Westminster (London), was one of the original members of the Santk Gallen Mafia which pre-dated he 2005 Conclave, and by his own proud admissions afterwards, was among the most pro-active in promoting Bergoglio's candidacy at the 2013 Conclave.]

Fr. Z's recollection of the event is documented in the Fox News coverage for which he was one of the commentators:

Late by several days, but I must go on record with Aldo Maria Valli's birthday tribute to the Emeritus Pope earlier this week. As I had occasion to remark that day, Valli takes one of Benedict XVI's
homilies, seemingly at random, but which somehow manage to get to the core of many of the needless 'perplexities' bedevilling and fracturing the Church today, though Benedict XVI himself probably
never imagined that this disunity would be brought about by the man who would succeed him as pope (a logical impossibility given that the pope, whoever he is, is supposed to be the visible symbol of
unity in the Church, not the principal agent of disunity as Bergoglio is - but the impossible became possible in Bergoglio!). To which Valli adds words from an address by Benedict XVI to the bishops
of the United States on April 16, 2008, when he marked his 81st birthday in Washington during his apostolic visit to the USA and to the UN.

I find this has become an effective way for Valli to criticize the current pope without having to do so directly all the time - simply by quoting words from Benedict XVI that are the polar opposite of
what Bergoglio is, does and says.

Happy birthday, Pope Benedict!
Translated from


Today, April 16, Joseph Alois Ratzinger, the emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, turns 91, and to celebrate the day, I wish to call attention to what he said in the Chrism Mass for Maundy Thursday in 2012. I chose this homily, among so many possible texts to choose from, because I think that in it, Benedict XVI, by underlining some key words at the center of the renewal of priestly vows that all priests at the Chrism Mass, touched two points that are particularly relevant today, in the light of the situation that the Church is living through these days.

The first point is about the munus docendi (teaching duty) of pastors, their responsibility to teach the faithful. He explained that priests, at all levels, are “stewards of God’s mysteries” (1Cor 4,1), and that the ministry of teaching – the munus docendi – is an important part of the goods they administer.

As a steward, the bishop - all the more so, if he is the Supreme Bishop – should never propose personal theories or opinions, because his first duty is to be in the service of the faith:

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All our preaching must measure itself against the saying of Jesus Christ: “My teaching is not my own but is from the one who sent me” (Jn 7,16). We preach not private theories and opinions, but the faith of the Church, whose servants we are…

In this regard I am always reminded of the words of Saint Augustine: what is so much mine as myself? And what is so little mine as myself? I do not own myself, and I become myself by the very fact that I transcend myself, and thereby become a part of Christ, a part of his body the Church.

If we do not preach [about] ourselves, and if we are inwardly so completely one with him who called us to be his ambassadors, that we are shaped by faith and live it, then our preaching will be credible. I do not seek to win people for myself, but I give myself. The Curé of Ars was no scholar, no intellectual, we know that. But his preaching touched people’s hearts because his own heart had been touched.

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The second point was about the zeal for souls, animarum zelus:

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“It is an old-fashioned expression, not much used these days. In some circles, the word “soul” is virtually banned because – ostensibly – it expresses a body-soul dualism that wrongly compartmentalizes the human being.

Of course the human person is a unity, destined for eternity as body and soul. And yet that cannot mean that we no longer have a soul, a constituent principle guaranteeing our unity in this life and beyond earthly death.

And as priests, of course, we are concerned for the whole person, including his physical needs – we care for the hungry, the sick, the homeless. And yet we are concerned not only with the body, but also with the needs of the soul: with those who suffer from the violation of their rights or from destroyed love, with those unable to perceive the truth, those who suffer for lack of truth and love. We are concerned with the salvation of men and women in body and soul.

And as priests of Jesus Christ we carry out our task with enthusiasm. No one should ever have the impression that we work conscientiously when on duty, but before and after hours we belong only to ourselves. A priest never belongs to himself. People must sense our zeal, through which we bear credible witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Let us ask the Lord to fill us with joy in his message, so that we may serve his truth and his love with joyful zeal”.

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At a time like the present that is distinguished, as Prof. Roberto Pertice puts it, by “the deconstruction of the canonical figure of the Roman Pontiff” (in which the pope’s munus docendi often appears linked not to the stewardship of God’s mysteries but to the exigency of proclaiming personal convictions) and by a predominantly horizontal view of the Church, have relegated to second place the animarum zelus based on love for the truth, I believe that Benedict XVI’s words are more pertinent than ever.

I would like to add a recollection dating ten years back, on April 16, 2008, when Benedict XVI marked his 81st birthday in the United States. During that apostolic trip, on the evening of his birthday, he met with the US bishops at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washignton, and gave an epochal address, focused on the idea that the Catholic faith cannot be reduced to a sentimental experience and a private matter, but it should influence the reality of the world. Which requires, he said, that bishops must answer the duty of guaranteeing to the faithful a moral formation that reflects “the authentic teaching of the Gospel of life”.

And the favored place to do this is the family, and, he told the bishops,

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It is your task to proclaim boldly the arguments from faith and reason in favor of the institution of marriage, understood as a lifelong commitment between a man and a woman, open to the transmission of life. This message should resonate with people today, because it is essentially an unconditional and unreserved “yes” to life, a “yes” to love, and a “yes” to the aspirations at the heart of our common humanity, as we strive to fulfill our deep yearning for intimacy with others and with the Lord.

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On that occasion, Benedict XVI also spoke about sexual abuse of minors. He called it one of “the signs contrary to the Gospel of life” and did not mask his ‘profound shame’ for the aberrant behavior of some men of the Church and the mismanagement of the problem by bishops.

He was as firm and courageous in acknowledging the errors of the Church with regard to the sex abuse problem, as he was in defending the family based on the indissoluble marriage between a man and a woman, as he was As a way out, he indicated a resolute process of purification:

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“Indeed a clearer focus upon the imitation of Christ in holiness of life is exactly what is needed in order for us to move forward. We need to rediscover the joy of living a Christ-centered life, cultivating the virtues, and immersing ourselves in prayer. When the faithful know that their pastor is a man who prays and who dedicates his life to serving them, they respond with warmth and affection which nourishes and sustains the life of the whole community”.

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Someone referred to that address as the Church’s Magna Carta for pastoral guidance. Indeed, the words of the Pope (I was present as a correspondent) were striking for the courage of its self-criticism of the Church, the honesty of his analysis, his call to conversion, his lucidity in pointing out the way of prevention, and the total absence of any attempt to make excuses or justifications.

Happy birthday, Pope Benedict.


Yet another video treat thanks to Lella on her blog... A YouTube montage I had not previously seen
with images of Joseph Ratzinger as Archbishop of Munich.

Valli explains his belated disaffection for this pope and his pontificate in an interview for an unabashedly 'traditionalist' Italian website which has just opened its pages to accomodate the ideas of non-traditionalists who have become open critics of the pontificate...

ZONA FRANCA
A new feature of


Amidst the small and big upheavals which are shaking up the Church, a particularly interesting phenomenon has arisen. Namely, the reflections – none of it banal or predictable – by observers who are alien to the so-called ‘traditionalism’ which is attributed to any critical line towards the present situation in the Church. Their arguments are not always congruent to those taken by this site, for example, nor in general, of so-called traditionalist circles.

Indeed, especially as to the causes and the timeline of the crisis, they differ appreciably from us. But they have the value of being honest, intelligent, and especially, that they are not driven by motives of intellectual or professional profit, much less, of power-seeking.

Riscossa Cristiana has therefore decided to give such voices a space called Zona Franca (Free Zone) that guarantees them they can freely say what they think of the issues we most care about. Not because we seek ‘what unites us’ at all costs, but in order to compare intelligently what divided us and what may still divide us. We think it is important to understand what caused the change in their horizons during the past few years. Even if time is not always a gentleman, gentlemen always do know how to make good use of their time. Deo gratias.

‘In the face of the consequences of this
pontificate so far, we cannot keep silent’
An interview with Aldo Maria Valli
by Cristiano Lugli
Translated from


The well-known face of RAI [Italian state TV] journalism, Aldo Maria Valli, worked for many years at TG3 [the newscast of RAI’s third channel] and since 2007, as the Vatican correspondent for TG1, RAI’s premier newscast on its first channel. Writing on his blog, Duc in altum, Valli started in 2016 to express reservations about the pontificate of Jorge Bergoglio, which he subsequently consolidated and elaborated in depth in his last two books: 266. Jorge Mario Bergoglio Franciscus P.P. and Come la Chiesa finì, both published by Liberilibri. Certainly, a big surprise to those who had considered him a supporter of a vision for the Church which appears to have found its achievement in Bergoglio’s work.

So, Mr. Valli, what has changed? What has given rise to your clear and rather critical positions about Bergoglio’s Pontificate? And how difficult was it to get there?
Initially, I was sympathetic to Pope Francis. Shortly after his election, while preparing for a TG1 special on his life at Casa Santa Marta, I asked to see him and he received me most cordially. We spoke at length, and I appreciated his simple faith, his devotion ti St. Joseph and to St.Therese of Lisieux, and his willingness to listen. I sought to understand his perspective, which was to emphasize primarily the fatherhood of God, rather than his commandments, in the effort to bring people closer to the faith and to the Church. But little by little, I could not help notice, with growing discomfort and pain, a great disequilibrium in his preaching. And I refer especially to the idea of mercy disconnected from repentance and conversion, almost as if the human creature had a right to be forgiven and God had a duty to forgive.

This pope never speaks of divine judgment and he wastes no opportunity to discredit divine law as it were only the concern of ‘pharisees’. After Amoris Laetitia, my perplexities grew even sharper, and I decided I could no longer keep silent. Thus was born the first book, 266, in which I consider many problematic aspects of this pope’s teachings (for instance, his view of Islam and his idea of welcoming any and all migrants), and then subsequently, Come la Chiesa finì.

Which is a novel. How do you explain this choice of genre?
It is a story set in an imaginary future, in which, progressively, under the leadership of popes who are all South Americans and who all choose to be called Francis, the Church has strayed from the Truth, and in the effort to seem ever more open to the world and a friend to everyone, she ends up condemning herself to irrelevance. At which point, it has become very easy for the masters of the world to liquidate it once and for all. It is a narrative in which I make ample use of sarcasm and paradox. Readers have told me they laughed a lot. But alas, one laughs in order not to cry. In effect, the novel is a tragedy.

What gave birth to this novel?
My doubts, my perplexities, but also from so much sorrow at seeing the depositum fidei increasingly put at risk and discredited in the name of a generic call to mercy and dialog. It is the sorrow of a son who sees a disturbing disorientation in his father, of the sheep who sees with dismay that he can no longer rely on his shepherd. Of a believer who sees relativism spreading within the Church herself. But I also do not spare my criticism of modernist theology and its language which has had great success in the world and in the mass media, although all it offers is emptiness, or worse, heresy.

Getting back to 266, which is an essay and is considered one of the most exhaustive reviews so far of this pontificate, what would the reader find in it?
I focus on the pontificate of Bergoglio and raise many questions. One above all: Is Francis the ‘pope of mercy’ or the ‘pope of relativism’? I let the reader come to his own conclusion, though I certainly do not hide my perplexity. I could say that I anticipated with this book the DUBIA that the four cardinals articulated over AL.

My questions are radical: What is more important to the ‘church of Bergoglio’? The salvation of souls or the psycho-physical and emotional wellbeing of persons? Then, I tackle more specific issues, starting from the failure to denounce the religious roots of Islamist extremism, to the Realpolitik followed by this pontificate in diplomacy, as we see in its negotiations with China, in which it would seem that the holy See, in order to come to some agreement with the Communist regime in China, seems ready to enter into an agreement which would be equivalent to betraying the libertas Ecclesiae (ecclesiastical freedom), as Cardinal Zen has been denouncing courageously.

In your opinion, did the rupture take place in 2013, or do you think that the prodrome to this crisis must be found in Vatican II, if not earlier?
The discussion would be very long and merit a tract of its own. Vatican II, on the one hand, acknowledged the need to open windows that had remained closed too long, and on the other hand, offered modernism the chance to bring into the Church, along with ‘fresh air’, heterodox theses that substantially replace God with man. Thus, in the first place, our norm is no longer divine law, but what man wants; no longer the Creator’s judgment, but the creature’s psychology; no longer Christian freedom, but a surrender to worldly libertinism; no longer the Commandments as our moral guide, but shortcuts and exemptions; no longer fear of God, but staking the right to self-realization, etc.

Facing up to modernity, which is necessary and even healthy, has triggered a ruinous collapse. From this point of view, we could say that Bergoglio’s pontificate is not so much the cause of the present crisis but the outcome of a process that began more than half a century ago. (i.e. from Vatican-II). Nonetheless, motus in fine velocior (movement has become much faster ultimately) – we are witnessing an acceleration that can only leave us troubled and dismayed.

What do you think of those who had denounced from the start all the apparent problems of this pontificate and remained generally by themselves and often attacked by everyone else?
As I said, I was not among those who denounced the contradictions and ambiguities of this pontificate right from the start. Indeed, at first, I placed my trust in him. But my perplexities gradually came to light and exploded with AL. Other observers did notice these contradictons and ambiguities from the very beginning. As for style, to each his own. For instance, I could never succeed at being aggressive. So I prefer to use irony.

But what matters is that we so-called ‘opponents’ of this pontificate (I think, however, that it is we who are the pope’s true friends), although we have each acted on our own and obviously without consulting each other, are arriving at the same conclusions. It means that the problems are objectively real.

Sometimes, a reader will ask me to ‘join forces’ with other newsman and commentators into some sort of a ‘pressure group’, but I think that our strength lies precisely in the fact that we act independently, with great freedom, and each according to his own character and personality.

As far as I am concerned, I never once felt alone in my positions. Since starting to express my own dubia about this pontificate, I have come to know many new friends, leading to beautiful relationships. Of course, on the other side, there is the fact that some friends of long standing have stopped being seen or heard from, but that’s the way it is. I feel very tranquil. Particularly gratifying to me are the attestations of esteem and respect – not a few – from those who, although they think differently, do acknowledge the passion and intellectual honesty of my positions.

I think the important thing, on the part of those of us who are countercurrent to the mainstream and the ‘ecclesially correct’ these days, is to continue making our case with great rigor, and not to fall into personal attacks, and then, last but not least, to pray for this pope as he always asks us to do. [The problem is, considering how he continues to make new inroads into the deposit of faith, and with increasing gravity, one suspects that his ‘pray for me’ appeals are nothing more than pro forma, as is so much that he does and says to ‘prove’ he is still Catholic.]

What changed with the election of Bergoglio?
- That in the meantime, we have in the Church for the first time the coexistence of two popes, a situation that we are meant to consider ‘normal’ and peaceful, but it inevitably means tensions that can only grow with time (as we saw in the case of Mons. Vigano’s letter to the emeritus pope).
- Then we have this magisterium that is completely unbalanced toward the pastoral to the detriment of doctrine, but which is fundamentally wrong, because pastoral ministry cannot exist on its own but must be founded on doctrine.
- Then there is the new centrality on the word ‘discernment’ that is, however, formulated so ambiguously, to the point that it would seem discernment should lead to justifying sin instead of to respect for divine law.
- Superficiality and ambiguity dominate in this pontificate, even as the ‘famous’ curial reform remains unachieved.

It is a tragic picture in many aspects, within which this pope continues to receive consensus from afar, from those who are not in the Church or no longer in the Church, who feel confirmed in having distanced themselves from the Church, whereas those in his flock right next to him are looking around for leadership and do not at all feel confirmed in their faith.

All of this also in large part due to the pope’s way of communicating – I think in particular of his interviews and his inflight news conferences – that in many ways is not worthy of the Petrine munus and of the pope’s potestas docendi (authority to teach).

Turning back briefly to the Vigano case: whoever asked the emeritus pope to write something about those 11 booklets dedicated to Bergoglio’s theology showed a great deal of arrogance! Benedict XVI answered elegantly, but without masking his discomfiture. And yet at the end, no one felt it necessary to apologize to him, while the man who made the mistake received praise from the reigning pope!

Did your choice to take a position against some of Bergoglio’s actions and statements have any repercussions on your professiona or personal life?
As a believer, I know that the good God sends everything, even trials, for our good. This phase, as painful as it is, is therefore providential. The important thing is to use our reason as illumined by our faith. I believe that we laymen have an important task: we must stay alongside all the many pastors who are now disoriented. Obviously, when one places oneself in the service of truth, there is a price to pay, but nothing can give as much joy as being cooperatores veritatis – a co-worker in the truth.

You are not the first, nor will be the last, to note with courage and honesty the problems that afflict the Church up to the highest levels of her hierarchy. Do you know of a similar situation in the history of the Church, and if so, how different is today’s reality?
It is not the first time that statements of the magisterium which are deliberately left unclear have allowed the coexistence of different and opposing interpretations even on some doctrinal issues, as in the case of AL on the indissolubility of a Catholic marriage and on the Eucharist.

Typical of this was the fourth century with its controversies on the Trinity and on Jesus. At the time, the most widespread heresy was the Arian heresy which questioned the divinity of Jesus. A scholar that I respect, Claudio Pierantoni, has said that the current crisis – with its very serious proportions - is not any less critical than the fourth century crisis. At that time, just as today, heresy became widespread not so much through openly erroneous statements but through generic and ambiguous statements.

It is what we have in AL, where there is no open negation of the indissolubility of marriage, but there is a substantial negation of the consequences that necessarily arise from its indissolubility. Tne there is the ‘case by case’ discernment which is really the Trojan horse for relativism.

What do you think that Catholics faithful to the Magisterium should do at this time?
To pray a lot and to have others pray. By oneself, in groups, in the family. Pray tirelessly for the Church, and above all, for the pope, and continue using reason illuminated by faith, to defend the faith soberly and in tranquility but without shortcuts.

How do we get out of this situation?
I am not a prophet and I do not know. But I have total trust in God. With the help of the Holy Spirit, whom we should invoke incessantly, we will get through. We may not now see the overall design and it may seem that everything is collapsing, but God does not abandon his children.

To make up somehow for the scant reflection so far in this thread of the Alfie Evans story, here is Marco Tosatti's impassioned post reacting to the UK Supreme Court's unconscionable decision on the two-year-old's fate:

Alfie must die, the UK Supreme Court says,
but not to worry, 'it's in his best interests'
Translated from

April 20, 2018

Dear friends of Stilum Curiae, today is one of great dejection for me. I grew up, like many in my generation, and helped in this by other members of my family, inn the idea that Great Britain was a lighthouse of civilization, freedom and courage against totalitarian powers.

I remember the emotion with which I listened to the speeches of Churchill when England and her empire were alone at the beginning to fight Nazism; the emotion of England’s solitary battle against a Napoleon who seemed to be the invincible master of Europe; the beautiful English saying that in his home, a man is like a king in his castle; and the numerous examples of freedom and individual achievements that flourished in that nation.

But the decision of the British Supreme Court to deny a hearing to the parents of Alfie Evans on their side of the case, and to confirm what was substantially a condemnation to death of their two-year-old son, shattered my last illusions of considering Great Britain – and the Anglo-Saxon world, in a wider sense – as a reference point for those who love freedom and the rights of the individual as against those of the state.

What I had always thought of Great Britain has disappeared in the face of the death sentence for Alfie expressed first by the hospital where he is [literally] confined, and then by various levels of a state organization which would kill a boy supposedly ‘in his best interests”. And in doing this, not only are they trampling on the principle of a citizen’s right to free choice, but it abrogates, like a true totalitarian Moloch, the very possibility of the boy’s parents to continue fighting to keep him alive.

A form of persuasive, hypocritical and poisonous totalitarianism has taken the place of a civilization based on the rights of the individual. A terrible macabre face hides behind the ingratiating mask of defending ‘rights’ [Whose ‘rights’, in this case? In which the State appears to have all the ‘rights’, and the individual facing the almighty state has none?] A state that not only denies Alfie’s parents the right to seek a cure elsewhere, but also expropriates, as only totalitarian regimes are capable of doing, the parents’ rights over their own children. This is what Great Britain has become.

All this, aid the total silence – almost, anyway – of the information media that serve the regime’s political culture. But not just in Britain¬ also here, in Italy. Do not worry – it will happen here soon, it’s only a question of time, because we Italians have always been a bit slow to catch up!

Just observe the silence that the Italian media has had in reporting on Alfie’s case, the lack of interest by the paladins of human rights - who in this case, appear to be for the right to death rather than the right to life – who have all chosen to look the other way while a state system decides to kill a boy. We have a society in putrefaction. It is simply amazing how very few so far seem to smell the stench!

I would ask you to go the site of La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana for the latest development on little Alfie’s fight to be allowed to live, of which I shall publish an excerpt):

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The Supreme Court today rejected any recourse to prevent the Alder Hey Hospital from stopping the transport of Alfie Evans to another hospital.

The Supreme Court denied the possibility of a hearing on the case after the London Court of Appeals once more rejected the new arguments from the Evans family lawyers who questioned what amounts to the boy’s state of detention imposed by the hospital, which has refused to allow him to be taken to the Bambin Gesu hospital in Rome.

“Having considered the written positions of the opposing sides on paper,” a spokesman for the Supreme Court said, “the Supreme Court of the United Kingdoms has denied the parents the right to an appeal”. He added that the hospital should “feel free to do what has already been determined to be in the best interest of Alfie”. The Supreme Court therefore approved the plan to suspend further treatment of Alfie and terminate his life.

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Historian Henry Sire discusses
his book 'The Dictator Pope’
The author shares his reasons for writing the controversial book
and his concerns about this pontificate.

April 20, 2018

Henry Sire says he wrote the book The Dictator Pope because he felt it necessary to uncover the “gap” between what he says is the media “facade” of Pope Francis and the “reality as it is known in the Vatican.”

In a March 26 interview with the Register, Sire says that Francis is essentially a “politician who relies on public relations,” a “maverick pope” who manipulates the media and falls short of acting in a collegial manner with bishops.

Pope Francis doesn’t deal with bishops “in a collegial spirit at all,” Sire says, despite the Holy Father’s often stated wish to make the Church more collegial and decentralized.

“They were treated much more collegially under Benedict XVI. No, as I say, Pope France is a dictator,” explains the historian, who is half Spanish and traveled to Buenos Aires to research the book.

Sire chose the pen-name Marcantonio Colonna, the famous 16th century admiral of the papal fleet at the Battle of Lepanto, when he published The Dictator Pope as an e-book last November.

He says he originally chose the pseudonym because the “regime” under Pope Francis is prone to “retaliation” and he wanted in particular to protect those “whom the Vatican might think associate with me.”

He has now revealed his real name to coincide with the book's new edition, which will be published by Regnery on April 23.

Educated at the prestigious Jesuit school Stonyhurst College in England before going on to read history at Oxford University's Exeter College, Sire served as resident historian to the Knights of Malta in Rome for four years until last year. When his name was made public, the Order suspended him, a decision he is contesting on grounds it is illegal.

He says he wrote the book chiefly not out of any personal animosity for the Holy Father but because he is concerned about the wellbeing of the Church under Francis’s leadership, and hopes the book will help the College of Cardinals avoid electing a “completely unknown cardinal” at the next Conclave.

The historian also discusses in the interview the influence of Argentina’s former populist leader, Juan Peron, on Jorge Bergoglio, and the significance of the Kolvenbach Report — a 1992 research document the late superior general of the Society of Jesus, Hans Peter Kolvenbach, had made on Jorge Bergoglio to ascertain whether he was suitable to be appointed a bishop.

Asked why he chose not to write a more balanced book on the Pope, Sire says it was “intended to be an alarm call” for a pope he believes has “gone off the rails.”

“When you’re shouting ‘Fire!’ when the house is on fire, you don’t say: ‘Well actually the fire is doing quite good work cooking the chicken in the kitchen,’” he explains.

In 2015, Sire wrote Phoenix From the Ashes, a comprehensive look at the state of the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council. He views the Council as having objectionable elements, but believes it is up to a future Council to declare whether any of it was heretical.

He defends this approach to the Register, saying that if his views on the modern Church and the Council are considered extreme today, then Catholics up until the 1960s, most of whom upheld continuity and the Church's Tradition, would similarly be viewed as extremists.

Sire says the new edition of the book will include updated information on a variety of subjects, one of which involves Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, the coordinator of the C9 Group of Cardinals advising Francis on Church and curial reform. Sire calls the cardinal's archdiocese one of the “most corrupt” in the entire Church, both in terms of “financial corruption and moral corruption.”

The Honduran cardinal has been embroiled in allegations involving sexual abuse by one of his auxiliary bishops and financial misconduct.

For an alternative view of Pope Francis, looking into his intellectual formation, see this new interview with author Massimo Borghesi which we have just published here.
http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/author-pope-francis-is-a-mystic-trying-to-solve-left-right-dichotomy-in-the
[Borghesi is an Italian professor who wrote a book called Jorge Mario Bergoglio: An Intellectual Biography, an initiative that predated the Vatican publication of an 11-booklet series of commentary by Bergoglian theologians on 'the theology of Jorge Maria Bergoglio'. Apparently this is all part of a propaganda offensive to show that there is really 'something there there' about Bergoglio's thinking. "Hey, world, this is no intellectual lightweight! In fact, he's a mystic intellectual!"

Yeah, right! Like Teresa de Avila or San Juan de la Cruz (John of the Cross)! Neither of which Borghesi cites as among the pope's intellectual influences. In fact, all his influences appear to be 20th century names - Borghesi doesn't even make a token reference to Francis of Assisi in the interview. Are there even any saints invoked other than, necessarily, the Jesuit founder St Ignatius of Loyola? I would so welcome someone researching whether Bergoglio ever invoked Francis of Assisi before his friend Cardinal Hummes nudged him after he passed the two-thirds number necessary to be elected pope to say, "Don't forget about the poor!" - the Eureka moment when Bergoglio got the brilliant idea, "Wow! Let me use the Poverello's name for my papal name!" - his first master PR coup.

Quite as obviously, too, there was never a St. Augustine or a St John of the Cross figure in Bergoglio's life as there was for Joseph Ratzinger or Karol Wojtyla. ]

When Jorge Bergoglio's words tend to be as slouchy as he can sometimes get to be in a physical sense...

Theologian Fr. Murray focuses here on one of the more astounding recent statements of Pope Bergoglio, which is a prime manifestation of the Holy Father's chronic
foot-in-mouth affliction - when he spoke about 'truth idols' last Holy Week... What is a 'truth idol', anyway? For Catholics, Truth is Jesus who said "I am the Way,
the Truth and the Life" - and therefore anything attributed to Jesus in the Gospels is Truth. To uphold the Truth of the Gospels is to uphold Jesus, and if Bergoglio
wishes to call that idolatry, then why not, since we do worship Jesus as God, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, which therefore makes him a 'truth idol', in
Bergoglio's strange, usually self-styled lexicon. But, of course, as Fr. Murray deduces in his analysis, the pope sort of improvised this 'truth idol' thing to justify
the transgressions of truth - and TRUTH himself - in AL... As if anything could justify such transgressions. You can discern all you want, sin is still sin, and
violating truth is violating God himself.

Of truth and idols
by Fr. Gerald E. Murray

April 21, 2018

Pope Francis celebrated and preached at the Chrism Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica on Holy Thursday morning. He addressed the concelebrating priests on the themes of the closeness of God and the closeness that priests should have to their people. This priestly closeness is “an attitude that engages the whole person.” He praised street priests “who are ‘close’, available, priests who are there for people, who talk to everyone.”

Closeness, he believes, is “the key to mercy” and “also the key to truth.” Further, “truth is not only the definition of situations and things from a certain distance, by abstract and logical reasoning. It is more than that. Truth is also fidelity (émeth). It makes you name people with their real name, as the Lord names them, before categorizing them or defining ‘their situation.’”

Then Pope Francis made a startling claim:

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We must be careful not to fall into the temptation of making idols of certain abstract truths. They can be comfortable idols, always within easy reach; they offer a certain prestige and power and are difficult to discern. Because the “truth-idol” imitates, it dresses itself up in the words of the Gospel, but does not let those words touch the heart. Much worse, it distances ordinary people from the healing closeness of the word and of the sacraments of Jesus.

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These words are troubling. An idol is a false god. Idolatry is rendering worship to something other than God – a grave offense against the First Commandment. Idolatry is essentially man worshipping himself through the medium of some created reality. He makes the choice of what idols are important to him. His false god is his own creation, and thus it serves him. This is the complete reversal of the true worship that man owes to his Creator.

Abstraction is the mental process by which we come to know metaphysical realities by considering those material things our reason grasps and drawing rational conclusions. By abstraction, we understand what underlies the reality before our eyes. Thus seeing individual men and abstracting from this knowledge, we come to know the category of humanity, and we begin to understand what constitutes human nature. Abstraction allows reality to reveal itself to our minds.

Truth is the conformity of mind and reality. The truth about God is understood when we accurately grasp the nature and purpose of His creation (natural theology), and when we believe in any supernatural revelation He may make. Jesus told us that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. All truths have their origin in the Truth who is God made man. The Christian understands that the truth is a Person.

Dogmatic and moral truths come from and lead to God. The truth banishes error, especially idolatry, because all truth is found in the Word made flesh. What is true is good and beautiful because it unites us to the good and beautiful God. He created us so that we may know Him by knowing the truth that He is.

Given this, is it possible to make the truth into an idol? Can Catholic dogmatic teachings and the truths of the moral law become false gods that we worship so as to gain “a certain prestige and power”? It’s not possible. The truth as taught by the Church is what unites us to the true God and frees us from the errors of idolatry. Truth is not an idol, it is the remedy to idolatry.

Pope Francis states that “the ‘truth-idol’ imitates, it dresses itself up in the words of the Gospel, but does not let those words touch the heart.” Is the Gospel obscured or falsified by truths taught by the Magisterium of the Church – which are drawn from that Gospel?

If the truth could be an idol, then naturally any use of the Scriptures to illustrate that particular truth would be a charade. But the truth of God cannot be an idol because what God has made known to us is our means of entering into His reality – the goal of our existence.

Francis states that this “truth-idolatry” in fact “distances ordinary people from the healing closeness of the word and of the sacraments of Jesus.”

Here we have the interpretative key to what I think he is getting at. He is defending his decision in Amoris Laetitia to allow some people who are living in adulterous unions to receive the sacraments of penance and the Holy Eucharistic while intending to continue to engage in adulterous relations.

This doctrinal and disciplinary innovation, which contradicts all previous papal teaching and legislation, was confirmed as his unequivocal intention in his letter to the Argentinian bishops of the Buenos Aires region.

Those who defend the Church’s constant teaching and practice on this matter have been subjected to various aspersions. Now they are being categorized as engaging in a horrific violation of the First Commandment because they treat Catholic doctrine as inviolable, and thus binding upon all believers.

If truth could ever lose its quality of being the means to know the will of God, and become something false, and thus evil, then mankind is lost. Without immutable truth, we have no way to live in unity with God, with reality, and with one another.

The good news is that truth can never be false. It’s not an idol, and to defend the truth is not to lead people away from God towards false worship, but rather to invite them to embrace what is, in fact, their deepest desire for goodness, happiness, and peace.

The truth will set you free, it will not enslave you in error and darkness. Those who seek to be healed by coming close to Christ in his sacraments will only realize that goal by knowing and doing what Jesus asks of them. To reject in practice his words about the permanence of marriage and the obligation to avoid adultery, and then assert a right to receive the sacraments risks making an erroneous opinion into an idol.

A lesson in papal history

April 23, 2018

Urban VI was the Pope whose personal failings, including an irascible inclination to torture and execute his Cardinals, led to the Great Western Schism.

There were very serious grounds for suspecting that his election, in 1378, was invalid on account of duress; the Cardinal Electors were under the menace of being torn to pieces by the Roman mob. Indeed, the dear little 1958 CTS pamphlet listing the popes, which never leaves my desk, says simply that his election "has been generally deemed valid" ... not a very wholehearted or ringing endorsement.

A few months later, most of the Cardinals repudiated their allegiance and declared the election invalid.

Yet he is always included nowadays in the list of 'genuine' popes, and the prelate, 'Clement VII', whom the Cardinals then elected in his place, is relegated to the list of 'antipopes'.

It was not until 1429, when 'Clement VIII' abdicated, that Christendom at last had only one claimant to the See of Peter.

Half a century of Schism.

Why am I reminding you of this?

Because, in our present crisis, glib people talk easily about getting rid of flawed popes. Urban VI was, surely, among the half-dozen most flawed popes ever, but securing the consent and collaboration to get rid of him was found to be difficult ... nay rather, in view of the fact that he never was successfully disposed of, one might say 'impossible'.

And, during that half-century, there never was an undisputed pope. Indeed, from 1409 until 1415, there were as many as three claimants simultaneously disputing the cathedra Petri.

I feel that this demonstrates the immense dangers of approaching ecclesial crises with simplistic 'remedies'.

Devising fictional solutions to real problems is no answer. Prayer and the bearing of witness are the Catholic remedy.

I don't think anyone today - even the most unyielding of Bergoglio critics - realistically thinks there is any way to 'get rid' of this pope short of an act of God, e.g., death in his appointed time. And like Urban VI, he will always be listed among the 'genuine' popes, which he is, unfortunately, both de jure and de facto, no matter how much one may wish to conjure him away!

So it's hard to understand those who are always ragging on the 'cowardice' of Cardinal Burke and the handful like him who have consistently raised their voices in civilized discourse against the many deviations of this pope from Catholic orthodoxy, because there really isn't anything more concrete they can do other than point out the errors and the corrections necessary.

If they can't even get Bergoglio to acknowledge a formal letter - or more - sent to him, surely they can't expect him to acknowledge any errors they point out, much less any corrections offered! Let the critics of Burke propose something concrete they think will budge Bergoglio one iota from his chosen course! They don't because they can't.

This pipe dream of having a rump convention of dissatisfied cardinals and bishops meeting to denounce Bergoglio formally - as a heretic, an apostate, unfit to rule, whatever - is just that. Because other than the two surviving DUBIA Cardinals, Burke and Brandmueller, and Cardinal Zen, because of the China issue, there have been no other cardinals willing - or daring, perhaps, is the word - to go on record as criticizing Bergoglio in any way.

Cardinal Mueller has been doing so - in his usual muddled, inconsistent way (one day, he blows hot, another cold) - since he left the Curia, but one finds his statements more self-serving than anything. The cardinals of the Curia - including Cardinal Sarah - are under estoppel in this case: while they are serving at Bergoglio's will, they cannot possibly 'go against' him in any way -principle would require any such opponent to resign his office first.

So a rump convention of 3 cardinals (out of almost 200), and possibly ten bishops (out of more than 5,000) - none more have come out openly against Bergoglio - would really be a joke no one could take seriously. And which none of the 3 cardinals and 10 bishops concerned, to begin with, would even consider 'realistic' in any way.

That said, I briefly googled Urban VI and found this early in his Wikipedia bio:

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Bartolomeo Prignano (pope from 1387-1389) was a devout monk and learned casuist, trained at Avignon. On 21 March 1364 he was consecrated Archbishop of Acerenza in the Kingdom of Naples. He became Archbishop of Bari in 1377.

Prignano had developed a reputation for simplicity and frugality and a head for business when acting Vice-Chancellor. He also demonstrated a penchant for learning, and, was without famiglia in an age of nepotism, although once in the papal chair he elevated four cardinal-nephews and sought to place one of them in control of Naples. His great faults undid his virtues: Ludwig Pastor summed up his character: "He lacked Christian gentleness and charity. He was naturally arbitrary and extremely violent and imprudent, and when he came to deal with the burning ecclesiastical question of the day, that of reform, the consequences were disastrous."

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Sound familiar? It boggles the mind how one can turn from being a devout monk to a mad pope, but it happened! (Or perhaps, like a certain Argentine prelate, he was merely showing his true colors once he tasted power!) There's another brief online bio of Urban VI that begins this way: "Through the centuries many popes displayed distinct unchristian behaviour. Only one of them, however, showed such erratic behaviour that he became generally known as "The Mad Pope". His papal name was Urban VI, but he was born in Naples as Bartolomeo Prignano (±1318-1389). He was a quarrelsome man, who had his own cardinals tortured and brutally murdered. His election had ended the Papal Exile (1306-1376), but his capricious ways resulted in the Great Schism (1378-1417)..."
http://madmonarchs.guusbeltman.nl/madmonarchs/urban6/urban6_bio.htm
The rest reads really lurid, and the stuff of adventure novels, but court life, both royal and papal, in the late Middle Ages appeared to have been quite lurid, and the adventures truly adventurous. In any case, after much searching, I finally found out that the conclave that elected Urban VI consisted of 16 cardinals (it would be many centuries before the cardinal electors ever reached a number beyond 50), so it is not surprising that one of mad Urban's moves was to name 29 new cardinals to pack the rolls in his favor if there were to be a new conclave.

And finally, for more context on the so-called Great Schism in the Church:

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Urban VI (1318-1389) was pope from 1378 to 1389. During his pontificate began the Great Schism of the Church, during which rival popes at Rome and Avignon claimed legitimacy and divided the loyalties of Europe.

Bartolomeo Prignano, who became Urban II, was born in Naples. He became archbishop of Bari and an influential figure in the papal court, although he was never a cardinal. Before his pontificate, he was known as a competent Church official who was interested in reforming the Church to meet the growing criticism of the times.

Much of this criticism stemmed from the "Babylonian Captivity" (1309-1377), or removal of the papacy to Avignon in France. Pope Gregory XI returned the papacy to Rome in 1377 but died in 1378. When the College of Cardinals met to elect his successor, feeling ran high. Outside the conclave, the people of Rome clamored for the election of an Italian pope and even threatened to murder the cardinals. On April 8, 1378, the cardinals decided that, under the circumstances, the wisest choice was Prignano, who took the name Urban VI.

But almost immediately, the cardinals began to quarrel with the new pope, who angered them both by his attempts to make unwelcome reforms in the papal court and by his undiplomatic personality. Thirteen of the cardinals left Rome [remember there were only 16 who elected Urban VI] and went to the city of Fondi. On Aug. 9, 1378, they declared Urban's election invalid, and on September 20 they elected a new pope, Clement VII (Robert of Geneva, a cousin of the king of France). Thus began the Great Schism.

Even today there is disagreement about the legitimacy of the dissident cardinals' action and about their motives. The cardinals themselves argued that Urban's election was invalid because it oc
curred under duress, but they waited four months before they objected. Another factor was the personality of Urban VI, who by all accounts was short-tempered, stubborn, and, in the opinion of some, abnormally violent. Undoubtedly he alienated the cardinals by his manner. But it is probable also that France feared a loss of power from the papacy's return to Rome and so persuaded the French faction of the cardinals to bring a pope to Avignon again.

In any case, the Great Schism brought Urban VI the support of France's enemies and brought Clement VII the support of France and its allies, creating years of bitterness and much loss of prestige for the papacy.

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[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 24/04/2018 10:38]