THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

If 'the Church has disappeared', who is to blame but wrecking-ball Bergoglio?


Of course, it is not just the Church of Ireland that has been ‘absent’ from the ongoing international debates over sexuality, family and marriage, but the ‘universal
Church’ herself, meaning the institution that Jorge Mario Bergoglio has treated as his personal fiefdom to make over into his image and likeness since he was
elected to lead the Catholic Church in March 2013.

That is the burden of the following editorial by Marcello Veneziani (born 1955), author of 36 books of essays and novels on politics and culture. Considered one
of the most representative conservative thinkers among contemporary Italian intellectuals, he has significantly contributed to a revaluation and new
appreciation of ‘traditionalist’ thought. A journalist since 1982, he has written for most of the major Italian newspapers and magazines, and has been an
editorialist for Il Giornale since 1994, and for Il Tempo since 2016. For 20 years, he has been a commentator on RAI (Italian state TV and radio), as well as
the editor of the midnight edition of Giornale Radio RAI (Italian state radio’s newscast).

'The Church' has disappeared
Editorial
By Marcello Veneziani
Translated from

June 15, 2018

But at this point in time, where is the Church and why is she silent? No, I am not referring to the question of migrants and illegal debarkations in Europe, nor to the new Italian government and its plenipotentiary Minister for the Interior Matteo Salvini.

And I am certainly not saying that, given Papa Bergoglio’s five years of mediatic protagonism so far, ‘the Church’ has been taciturn. Which is anything but! I am referring a more important question that is crucial for the world, for the West, for Europe, and above all, for Italy.

‘The Church’ has been virtually absent for some time now on the vital Christian issues to which she has always been most sensitive and responsive, especially during the 35-year combined pontificate of John Paul II and Benedict XVI: family, life, birth, education, Christian civilization, on the one hand – and on the other, de-Christianization, atheistic radicalism, hedonism, bioethical materialism, the Islamic invasion and the persecution of Christians.

Everytime that an event occurs, or new data or statistics emerge, or any movement, an anniversary or a public demonstration focuses on one of these issues, the occasion is promptly met with silence on the part of Bergoglio, of ‘his church’ and the pertinent agencies of that church.

A church of silence.
- But how can it stay silent in the face of the formidable assault on the institution of the family that has been going on for too long now?
- How can it stay silent when individual desire has replaced natural law, when children are created through artificial reproduction, surrogate uterus [the Italian term for this is very descriptive, ‘uterus for rent’], in the face of adoptions by same-sex couples, of the transgender ideology, and the open exaltation and exhibition of LGBT ‘pride’ in every public space?
- How can it stay silent in the face of the unprecedented collapse in the birth rate in the Western world, where the number of deaths now outstrips the number of births; the absence of government support for families, for more births, for the lives of unborn children and against ‘easy deaths’ (euthanasia); the criminalization of words like ‘fertility’?
- How can one fail to react to the hardly concealed annoyance and embarrassed silence of ‘Church’ authorities to all the attacks against Christmas and its religious symbols like the creche, against crucifixes in schools and other public buildings, against religious education?
- How can it stay silent in the face of the powerful, radical and sometimes violent process of de-Christianization taking place, which seeks to eradicate Christian civilization and its roots, its religious values, its moral principles, its customs, symbols and rites; and outside the West, through the persecution and intimidation of Christians?
- How can it stay silent about the fact that the Italian and European population are taking gigantic steps towards the replacement of Christians by atheists on the one hand and by Muslims on the other?

Is it possible that this ‘church’, this pope, his curia, the Italian bishops’ conference and the Italian parishes are in the grip of themes like ‘welcoming’ and pauperism (‘a poor church’) and by those that water down the Christian faith and seek to make it politically correct?

Can ‘the church’ reduce her mission to a limited idea of charity towards the poor, as important as this is, while unconditionally condemning capitalism and the free market? This subject, which will recall to many the Peronism of Bergoglio’s Argentina, is not totally alien to Catholic tradition, but in the encyclicals of John Paul II, for example, it was broached in a spiritual context, not material, and from the point of view of Christian civilization, of Catholic tradition, in which material benefits are necessarily inferior and transitory compared to spiritual benefits. And not in the context of Bauman’s sociology or of a para-evangelical communism! [Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) was a Polish philosopher and sociologist who was driven out of Poland by a Communist purge in 1968, migrating first to Israel then to England, where he continued his work as one of the world’s most eminent social theorists, much influenced by Italian Communism’s pre-eminent theoretician, Antonio Gramsci. Following Freud, he came to view European modernity as a trade-off: that European society had agreed to forego a level of freedom to receive the benefits of increased individual security; that modernity involved control over nature, hierarchical bureaucracy, rules and regulations, control and categorisation — all of which attempt to gradually remove personal insecurities, making the chaotic aspects of human life appear well-ordered and familiar.]

Moreover, this church practises little of the charity and welcoming that it loves to preach: We have not seen any conspicuous donations to the poor from the church’s patrimony, nor any significant ‘adoption’ of migrants by parishes and church institutions. It is a church that preaches ‘tearing down walls’, but the Vatican walls rise conspicuously protective in the heart of Rome, policed by Swiss Guards and their civilian counterparts, the Vatican gendarmerie.

In short, the so-called ‘church of the poor’ is anything but poor, or seriously Franciscan (as in Francis of Assisi), for that matter. Not to mention empty churches, plummeting vocations, and declining Mass attendance. Those admirable missionaries who brought Christ to farflung places of poverty and hunger have disappeared, and in their place, we have in Italy, union members who are recruited to welcome new immigrants into their communities.

The presence and the incidence of Catholics, of the pope, of the church, of Christian principles has disappeared from our daily lives. What we now have are faint traces of Catho-communism, of proletarian Christianity (more precisely, an ideological proletarianism, not found in the actual proletarian peripheries of our country), plus a sprinkling of pauperists and progressivists like the Sant’Egidio Community or Christian Dems (not an abbreviation for ‘demon’!).

The political irrelevance of Catholics in the era of Bergoglio, as we have underscored, has reached an extreme point: never before has the Church played such a small role in orienting consciences, families and citizens. The church appears to have retired from our world [the world of Catholics] and has chosen to go out into ‘the world’ and be shipwrecked with other institutions, seeking a new horizon. A horizon that is certainly not Paradise but, it seems, black Africa.

That the Church as an institution appears to have disappeared from view - because it has been deliberately submerged by the church of Bergoglio - is surely the supreme paradox at a time when never was the nominal leader of the Church so much the protagonist - with the help of the media, he has become arguably the leading protagonist - in the major issues literally consuming the secular West (immigrationism, virtual surrender to Islam, climate catastrophism, welfare statism), all the while going through the motions of being pope (i.e., a spiritual leader) by counter-productive homilies, statements and actions that proactively undermine the faith and disorient the faithful.