Obviously, manipulation of the forthcoming 'youth synod' has begun - quite openly and shamelessly as it was done in those two pretend 'family synods' earlier...
Can anyone find me one authentically good report about the pope and the Vatican yesterday, Palm Sunday, when, if only because it was the start of Holy Week,
people - including and especially the pope - ought to have refrained from sinning or being the occasion of sin? Instead, there he was, pontificating in his
tiresome monotone, against the very offense he and his protege Vigano had committed - unapologetically to date - against Benedict XVI. With the worst will
in the world, I could not even have conceived it was possible for him to do any such thing. But Bergoglio has a talent for making the grossly unthinkable
grossly and painfully real.
Calls for orthodoxy, Latin Mass
downplayed in pre-synod document
by David Nussman
VATICAN CITY, March 26, 2018 (ChurchMilitant.com) - Young, traditional-minded Catholics are feeling marginalized and ignored by the Vatican.
Last week, about 300 young people gathered in Rome to help draft a document in preparation for the Vatican's Synod of the Youth in October. The document they composed is meant to provide talking points for the bishops at the synod later this year. According to Catholic News Agency, these young people were "of different cultural and religious backgrounds."
Organizers of the pre-synod used online surveys and social media platforms to gauge young people's opinions. Even though proponents of traditional liturgy were outspoken on these platforms, they claim their opinions were excluded from the pre-synod's final document.
Isaac Withers, a young man involved in writing the pre-synod document, claims the writers were only given a summary of what was said on social media, instead of sifting through the original statements themselves. When he went to a pre-synod Facebook group to see what fellow young people were actually saying, Withers was surprised to see how many were praising the Traditional Latin Mass. He wrote about his experience checking out the comments first-hand:
There was a huge online community asking for the Extraordinary Form to be represented in the document, and I realized going through these comments that we, as a writing team, had not been shown the wealth of online commenting. We were given only a summary of these comments, and so I was saddened to see that many in this group felt disheartened or not listened to.
Withers continues, "I included the phrase, 'reverential liturgies' hoping to express those things, but looking online, I really saw that the document would have been different had the online world been represented properly."
The document would have been different had the online world been represented properly.
Indeed, the pre-synod's final document has only a very brief statement on liturgy, noting,
"Some of us have a passion for 'the fire' of contemporary and charismatic movements that focus on the Holy Spirit, others are drawn towards silence, meditation and reverential traditional liturgies."
One person who took part in the English Pre-Synodal Facebook group, Matt Leitner, said on Twitter that
"it was incredibly refreshing to see so many demands for tradition, reverence and strong leaders that [defend] Church teaching instead of bowing down to modernism...
Then... they ignored us."
Other Catholics shared similar dismay. One young Catholic said about the situation, "As someone who participated in the online Facebook group, there [were] numerous requests for more reverent liturgies and the wider availability of the Extraordinary Form. Many of us were very disappointed and felt ignored that there was no mention of it anywhere in the final document."
Another Catholic man who was in the closed Facebook group, Łukasz Kożuchowski, told Church Militant,
"On the Facebook group 'Pre-Synodal Meeting,' numerous young people (to be honest I was really positively surprised by their number), while writing their answers for questions posed by moderators, mentioned such topics as the Extraordinary Form, traditional unambiguous teaching, reverence in liturgy, etc...
"Unfortunately, when the first draft of the document was presented, there is no mention of any of these. Instead, there were lots of imprecise sentences and cliché slogans. [Hey, guess who their role model is for that!] Negative comments appeared at once, but there was no response from moderators. Members of the group reacted even more strongly when the final version was published, with merely one very ambiguous statement about the Church's tradition.
"A few hours ago, there appeared an official statement of the moderators, in which they accused us of creating a pro-tradition lobby and underestimated the number of people presenting traditional views in the group."
At one point, the pre-synod document states, "There is often great disagreement among young people, both within the Church and in the wider world, about some of Her teachings which are especially controversial today. Examples of these include contraception, abortion, homosexuality, cohabitation, marriage and how the priesthood is perceived in different realities in the Church."
It goes on, "Even though there is internal debate, young Catholics whose convictions are in conflict with official teaching still desire to be part of the Church."
The Synods on the Family a few years ago were used by Vatican media officials to push homosexuality and Holy Communion for those in a state of grave sin. Now, there is concern among faithful Catholics that the upcoming Synod on the Youth will likewise be hijacked by theological dissidents. The National Catholic Reporter has already published a headline on the pre-synod that reads, "Vatican youth meeting notes that some want changes to Catholic teachings."
The pre-synod text repeatedly mentions the role of women in the Church, claiming it should be reconsidered or modernized. But some complain that
the document ignores modern culture's dire need for authentic femininity and authentic masculinity. One young man wrote on Facebook,
"How can 300 people forget about half the youth they are trying to reach? How is it that there is not one mention of the crisis young men are facing? In fact, how can we, as Catholics, talk about authentic complementarity when men and their trials are not even represented at the table?
"For all four of the mentions about the role of women in the Church, I don't understand how we can hope to have 'empowered' women if Their human partners in this life are completely ignored."
Robert Royal from
The Catholic Thing wrote in the lead-up to the pre-synod,
"What we already have is a lot of weak sociology, as we also saw before the two synods on marriage. No one should be surprised if this event turns into something quite different than planned."
Let me try to understand and project what this coming 'sin-nod' will be. As I understand it, only bishops - and a scattering of meritorious priests and laymen personally invited by whoever is pope - constitute the participation in a synodal assembly, which in itself, is a small representation of the full Synod of Bishops which is composed of all the Catholic bishops in the world (so, say 250 out of the 5,000-plus total bishops).
What would be the average age of the bishops who will be sent by their respective bishops' conferences to that synodal assembly? I don't think there is a bishop today who is younger than 40, so even if the national bishops' conferences are really serious about sending the right bishops to this synodal assembly on youth problems, I don't think there's many of them who have a suitable 'bench' of bishops in the 40-50 age group. So they'll probably end up sending their youngest bishop as the token 'youth' (though in some dioceses, that youngest bishop may be 65, for all we know) and filling up their other slots with bishops they believe should and will represent the consensus of each bishops' conference.
And since they are sending them on to represent their dioceses (and countries in general) at the Vatican, where they will be under the direct scrutiny of the pope who is ex officio the presiding officer of the synodal assembly, the bishops' conferences will obviously want to present their best Bergoglian foot forward, so to speak. And so we will get a synodal assembly peopled mostly by bishops who are only too willing the parrot the Bergoglio line on anything whatsoever. Which means the synodal assembly will simply be a rubberstamp to whatever it is Bergoglio and his advisers have in mind for 'young Catholics'. Which, BTW, was Bergoglio's scenario for his two 'family synods'. Except that it turned out that the orthodox bishops in the mix outnumbered - not by much, but outnumbered, anyway - Bergoglio's progressivist minions. You think there's any chance Cardinal Baldisseri, who runs the Bishops' Synod and the assemblies thereof, will allow the bishops' conferences this time to field any synodal participants who are not already a known quantity in terms of agreeing to anything Bergoglio proposes?
Matthew Schmitz, whose public awakening a couple of years ago to the unpalatable truth about Jorge Bergoglio and his unregenerate anti-Catholicism was quite a bold and rare occurrence then among Catholic journalists and writers, now looks at the so-called 'pre-Synod youth document' and strips it of all its bullshit. In which, already, none of the major points made in the document is new at all, because we have been hearing the same chapter and verse from the progressivist bishops, priests and theologians belonging to the 'one thought' order of Bergoglio, and not the least, from Bergoglio himself. I bet a facile satirist - at home with Jesuit casuistry and Tucho Fernandez's weird line of thought - could already write Bergoglio's future post-synodal exhortation based entirely on this piece of trash.
Several French dioceses, seeking to promote their 2018 fundraising drive, had a few young Catholics take a selfie with a young priest. It was the perfect marketing image of diverse, democratic youth—but for one problem. The priest wore a cassock. This long black garment, with its thirty-three buttons, is favored by young priests who have made it the uniform of resurgent tradition. It is the symbol of what young Catholics are, and of what older Catholics don’t want them to be.
Three of the dioceses issued a doctored photo in which the priest appears to be wearing blue jeans. His cassock buttons, representing the years of Christ’s life, were airbrushed away. With a little manipulation, the authorities produced an image of youth acceptable to the old.
Something similar occurred this week at the Vatican, where three hundred youths selected by silver-haired bishops were asked to tell those bishops what young people really want. They were charged with drafting a working document, which the bishops will consult at the Synod on Youth, scheduled for October. In an opening address to this pre-synodal meeting,
Pope Francis said he hoped the event would lead to “a church with a young face.” But the result is a botched plastic surgery, a grotesquerie of old ideas stretched and reshaped to mimic youth.
The document is supposed to have been written by young Catholics for the benefit of bishops, but it eerily repeats what certain bishops have long been saying. For instance, the “youths” declare: “Sometimes, in the Church, it is hard to overcome the logic of ‘it has always been done this way.’” But at the opening of the meeting, Francis had said the same thing: “You provoke us to break free of the logic of ‘it has always been done this way.”
This is not a dialogue; it is an echo.
This makes the document significant — and unsettling.
The document manifests an aversion to whatever is sacred, holy, divine. It laments that “sometimes we feel that the sacred appears to be something separated from our daily lives.” But that is the precisely the meaning of the word “sacred”—that which is set apart.
Sanctity is slyly disparaged. “Sadly, not all of us believe sainthood is something achievable and that it is a path to happiness,” the authors say — and they seem to include themselves among the doubters.
They believe that “erroneous ideals of model Christians feel out of reach to the average person.” What the youth want instead is “a confidant without judgement.” Erring people are held up as the real models of faith, as though Mary’s sinlessness made her distant and cold.
Priesthood and religious life are also deflated. “While these are sacred calls that should be celebrated,” the document wants us to realize the importance of other vocations, including “lay ministry,” “marriage and family,” and something called “role in society.”
Passive-aggressive comments on women’s role in the Church reflect the general bias (“There are great examples of women serving in consecrated religious communities and in lay leadership roles. However…”) After all, if the cloister holds no honor, shouldn’t women want more? If the priesthood is not something set apart and given definite shape, why keep women from it?
Christian morality is likewise called into question. The document asks the Church to open a discussion of homosexuality and gender, “which young people are already freely discussing without taboo.” (In fact, it is hard to think of any topic more surrounded by taboo among both young and old than the sin of sodomy — mere use of the word is enough to elicit denunciation and shunning.)
[Except I bet no one in the LGBTQetc world and their paladins like James Martin would ever think of what they do as 'sodomy', but 'acts of mutual love', for the simple reason that the word derives from Sodom, and they do not wish to be reminded that God visited one of his worst scourges on Sodom and Gomorrah precisely because the inhabitants of those two cities had given themselves over completely to unnatural couplings, which probably included bestiality, as well.]
The authors note that “there is often great disagreement among young people” about contraception, abortion, homosexuality, cohabitation, marriage, and the priesthood. In consequence, “they may want the Church to change her teaching.” [Aye, there's the rub. Because to change Church teaching is the core objective everything Bergoglio says and does. But first, he will make believe he is soliciting the 'consensus' of those most concerned, and then, that he is merely giving voice to that consensus when he writes his post-synodal exhortation imposing yet another sea change on the doctrine of the Church via his pastoral hocus-pocus. Been there, done that! You really think you can keep fooling the faithful this way??? Your act is wearing thin, and even if you manage to pull off the equivalent of leading a cancan line to distract and entertain everyone at this synodal assembly, it won't at all dissimulate what you are trying to do].
Every one of these complaints is a challenge to the Christian idea that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, and so are not our own. We cannot use them however we wish, because they are sacred, set apart for the Lord.
The document even manifests a strange prejudice against the consecrated space of the sanctuary. Its authors declare:
“Above all, the place in which we wish to be met by the Church is the streets.” They further mention “bars,” “gyms,” “parks,” “coffee shops,” “stadiums,” “the workplace,” “prisons,” “orphanages,” “hospitals,” “rehabilitation centers,” “red-light districts,” “war-torn regions,” “marginal neighborhoods,” “rural areas” … apparently the Church should be everywhere but in the churches. [Oh, what a pitiful rehash it is of Bergoglio's call to 'go out to the peripheries', which was always questionable to begin with, because if everyone is at the peripheries, what happens to 'the center'? Are people in the center to be simply abandoned because they are not worth anything compared to those in the 'peripheries'?] At points, the document’s attitude toward sacred ground seems almost hostile (“people are the Church, not the building”) — like those poor demon-possessed characters who cannot pass through church doors.
All this amounts to a kind of functional Arianism, a stress on the Church’s human dimension at the expense of the divine. The document laments that people perceive Christ “as distant from the human experience.” In order to overcome this gap, the document urges us to “understand more deeply the person of Christ, His life, and His humanity.” His divinity goes unmentioned. [All of which is a logical extension of Bergoglio's cavalier treatment of Jesus and of his Church. "Look, I can do much better with your Church than anyone ever did or could! Because, just between you and me, Jesse-boy, I am really far more cunning than you are and much more acceptable to the world! Now try to top that."]
This document does not speak for young Catholics.
- It fails to represent either the Catholic faith or the young people who profess it.
- It conjures and condemns a Church that is too institutional, too hierarchical, too focused on the sacred at the expense of the world.
This image of the Church is a holdover from the 1950s, when the men who now lead the Church were young rebels. They wanted what Michael Novak called an “open church” — and they got it. All the structures against which they inveigh today were dynamited decades ago. The churches they fear to enter have long since been sold. This document is an obvious counterfeit, an old man’s idea [Bergoglio at 81] of what the young must want. He thinks they want what he did.
In fact, they want something different. That cassock-wearing priest is the vanguard of a generational change. If current trends hold, there will be more French priests in traditionalist orders in 2040 than in dioceses and other orders combined.
As Fr. René Dinklo, head of the Dutch Dominican province, has said:
“We are on the brink of far-reaching changes,” because the young want to “re-discover a number of religious practices, rituals, forms of singing and prayer ... which the older generation has set aside.” This liturgical revival is merely the visible expression of a broader embrace of tradition and dogma. Young people want the saving words of Christ, which are found in sound doctrine and by solemn worship. When they ask for bread, do not give them a stone.
But never mind what the young really want.
No youthful assembly, however representative, or pious, could help a church that has to consult a focus group before it is able to preach. It should be easy to see now, after so many decades of failure, that “reading the signs of the times” means navel-gazing, while “dialogue and encounter” is a lone man’s voice echoing in empty churches.
We need once again to put theology before anthropology, asking what our Lord wants before polling public opinion. Our encounter, our dialogue, is with Him.
Schmitz is now the senior editor at FIRST THINGS, a promotion from when he was literary editor at the time of his awakening from Bergoglianism.
Father Z points us to a somewhat related piece by Fr. Dwight Longenecker, who sounds more and more like he belongs to the little but quite impressive group of repented ex-thurifers who have managed to get themselves out of the Bergoglian nightmare... Apparently, Fr. Longenecker has been running a series of 'Ten reasons why...' about some of his pet propositions. But however persuasive the good father's arguments are on this particular proposition, I have one answer that will continue to trump rational, logical and commonsense arguments: Liberal Catholicism will not fade away for as long as Bergoglio is pope (and his successor, because the College of Cardinals he is gradually filling up with his cardinals will see to it they elect a Bergoglio clone to succeed him). So there...
Ten reasons why liberal
Catholicism will fade away
March 23, 2018
The late Cardinal George of Chicago said, “Liberal Christianity is a failed experiment.” At this time in the Church there seems to be a rise in the liberal or progressive wing of Catholicism. However, those who are concerned about this should keep several big picture aspects in mind.
First of all, our dear old Catholic Church, when it tries to keep up with the times, is invariably about twenty or thirty years behind the times. That is to say,
when the Catholic Church started bringing in folk hymns and round churches and groovy priests, the trend had already pretty much reach a peak and was fading out.
The liberalism we are seeing in the Catholic Church at this time is not new. It is not fresh. It is not young. It is not innovative. It is old. It is passe. It is derivative. It is uninspiring.
It is a bunch of old folks who are either trying with one last gasp to resurrect the glory days of the sixties and seventies, or it is a few well meaning intellectuals who really do feel that climate change, neo-Marxism and the adaption of current sexual ideologies are the way to bring the church into the modern age.
Secondly,
liberalism is always a protest movement. It always has to have something to campaign against. But now that it has become the establishment default setting it has rather had the wind knocked out of its sails. Liberalism is driven by anger and if there is nothing to rage about you run out of gas. [But there's plenty to anger them these days - chiefly, that outspoken 'conservative' Catholics have somehow managed to use the internet quite effectively to disseminate their views (many of them being angry views so they're fuelled, all right), and the 'libtards' are taking a beating, simply because they do not have reason and coherence on their side.]
Thirdly,
liberal Christianity is, by definition an adaptive ideology. It believes that to survive, Christianity has to adapt to every age and culture in which it finds itself. If the culture and age in which it finds itself is still residually Christian there’s no problem, but
if the culture and age in which it finds itself is radically anti-Christian, then to adapt to the culture is to cease to be Christian. Thus we have liberal Catholics who, incredibly, support same sex marriage, abortion, remarriage after divorce and who knows what else that isn’t really part of the Christian religion.
Fourth,
liberal Christianity focuses more on this world than the next. It is concerned more with making this world a better place than preparing for a better place. [Great description of the primary mission this pope has taken on for himself as pope!] People aren’t dumb. They soon realize that you don’t need to be religious to make the world a better place, so they sleep in on Sundays. Liberal Christianity is therefore self-defeating.
With this in mind, here are ten reasons why, despite the present appearances, Catholic liberalism will shudder, fade out, flicker and die.
o
Liberalism goes out of date – Because it is concerned with being up to date and relevant it very quickly goes out of date and becomes irrelevant. I realized this when I used to celebrate a LifeTeen Mass at which the music was provided by groovy grannies and hip hop Pop pops. The teens stood there with their arms crossed and with bored expressions. They were having to listen to awful Catholic tunes that were out of date even when they were written.
o
Liberalism is derivative – There is nothing new about Catholic liberals. All their ideas are borrowed from the surrounding culture or from Protestant sects that pioneered them decades ago. It’s second hand feminism. It’s second hand homosexualism. It’s second hand ecological concern. It’s second hand Marxism. Anything derivative is unoriginal and already on its last legs.
o
Liberal Catholicism is moralistic, therapeutic Deism. Rather than a supernatural, vitalized dynamic church, liberal Catholicism has become a set of moral guidelines (usually social morals not personal morals) a method of self-help or therapy combined with a vague spirituality.This doesn’t have much oomph. The batteries die and this kind of religion fizzles out.
o
Liberal Catholicism is increasingly indistinguishable from Liberal Protestantism. I understand fully why Liberal Catholics are so keen on ecumenism with Liberal Protestants. They already believe (or mostly disbelieve) all the same stuff and have the same agenda. They believe they are already unified – and for the most part they are right.
o
Liberal Catholicism is not distinctive. One of the reasons traditional Catholic parishes are thriving and the seminaries and convents and monasteries that are traditionally minded are doing well is because they are distinctive. They look Catholic and they witness to the truth, beauty and goodness of the Catholic faith. When I wear my cassock everyone admires – Catholics and non-Catholics.
Traditional Catholicism is not afraid to make a witness and that’s what people expect and admire in a religion.
o
Liberal Catholic worship is dull and has run out of steam. [Because, I think, they have lost all sense of worship. Otherwise, how could they stand to trash the Mass the way they have done? They probably think 'worship' is beneath them - it is, to their mind, synonymous to kneeling down, and why would they kneel down to anyone but to themselves?] What new direction for Catholic worship? More bland songs and banal choruses? More fuzzy-wuzzy feel-good theology?
[Which is probably what the Vatican's instant series of 'little books' on Bergoglian theology is all about!] More fan-shaped suburban auditoriums with padded pews? People are tired of that and suddenly a beautiful church with Gregorian chant is the thing that is new and exciting and powerful.
o
Liberal Catholic theology is out of touch and irrelevant. [And the Vatican thinks there will be a market for Bergoglian theology, such as it is, and 'retold', moreover, through some dreary and clunky academic theologians??? Oy veh!] I go into ordinary parishes to lead parish missions.
The people are hungry for good, solid Catholic content. The professional theologians in their ivory towers with their worldly politically correct agenda don’t touch their lives. Instead through mens’ conferences, renewal meetings, parish missions and a range of events, the ordinary people are rising up and God is raising up powerful teachers, evangelists, speakers and theologians and Bible scholars to fuel a new wave of grassroots dynamism in the church.
o
Liberal Catholicism is the establishment religion. One academic feminist said to me recently, “I prefer to work within the system.” Well, that’s the kiss of death to any spirit-led movement as far as I’m concerned. The Liberal establishment system might control their journals, their colleges and control things in Rome and in the dioceses, but
the real life of the church is at the grass roots level, and those folks have zero connection with what is really going on.
o
Liberal Catholicism is not refreshing its ranks. [Imagine if the likes of Sorondo, Paglia, Spadaro and Martin developed a youth following to refresh those ranks! Or perhaps there is a burgeoning movement of young Catholics around the world we do not know about who are running to the seminaries with their tongues hanging out in their burning desire to be the next Bergoglio! Can't think of a worse nightmare.] Where are the new vocations for all those religious orders where all the sisters are ancient? Where are the young priests in liberal dioceses? Where are the young brothers and monks for the old liberal religious orders?
The young stay away from these orders. They can smell the rot and if they are not kicked out for being rigid, they clear off.
o
Liberal Catholicism doesn’t need a reformation. It will simply fizzle out. Nobody is listening. The younger ones are not rebelling against it. They’re just ignoring it. Nobody is taking notice. Traditional Catholics aren’t even bothering to fight against the Liberal Catholics very much anymore. They are just rolling up their sleeves and getting on with being historic, orthodox, dynamic, Evangelical Catholics.
Not this Catholic or that Catholic, but just faithful Catholics.
This is why there is no real cause for worry. Time is on the side of the traditional Catholics. The young priests are more traditional. The young nuns, the young monks, the young families. The future is young. The future is strong. The future is faithful.
These are the ones – from our own ranks and from the developing world - to whom the future church belongs. [Please, Lord, let this not be just whistling in the dark.]
I really think Fr. Longenecker wrote this with Bergoglio in mind. Indeed, it would make a great open letter to this pope, simply changing the phrase 'liberal Catholicism' to 'the religion you preach and practise'.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 28/03/2018 07:39]