On April 16, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI turned 93.
ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI
Resuming this endeavor without much ado after almost a year of inactivity, having relocated in the meantime to Stockton, California, where despite being in California, the pandemic mania was never as manic or all-pervasive as it has been in Manhattan or Frisco/Los Angeles, for that matter. Even I who meet the highrisk criteria of age and co-morbidities have been unencumbered in my activities, as I live within walking distance of my bank, grocery stores, Metro PCS, Target, Office Depot, Home Depot, Best Buy, Walgreens and the main transfer station to get on and off the local buses. Only problem is that with public transport suspended, Lyft and Uber both have less drivers available than usual, so it can take up to 20 minutes for them to find a nearby driver if I have to go someplace I can't walk (I don't drive). I still keep my co-op in New York but who knows when I can travel back there without having to quarantine myself for 14 days when I get back here?
My worst setback is that the nearest TLM is in Sacramento, 45 minutes away by bus, which meant getting up early to get the only Sunday morning bus to Sacramento, in order to attend the 10:30 am High Mass at St Stephen the Martyr church which is run by the FSSP. I must say that the Church of the Holy Innocents in Manhattan has spoiled me for other TLMs (even those I have had to tune to after the churches closed, and that includes reliable Father Z's daily Masses in Milwaukee, those of St. John Cantius in Chicago, and the Institute of Christ the King's Masses in Limerick, Ireland).
Anyway, the pandemic has brought much of everything to an ultimate testing point, and the consensus is that the Catholic Church, still under the nominal - but oh-so-unChristian - leadership of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, has come out for the most part shamed and forever tainted by the treasonous abandonment by the pope and most bishops and priests of their vows and supreme duty to provide spiritual guidance and consolation at all times to the faithful, by abjectly submitting to whatever the secular authorities have dictated. They have therefore abdicated the universal fundamental right to freedom of worship, setting a fatal precedent from which the Church will take a long time to undo.
Bergoglio, of course, keeps building up and escalating his shameless record of un-Popelike, un-Christian betrayals in every way (thankfully, enough right-thinking Catholic commentators have taken due note, renounced and expatiated enough on his behavior and actions, so everything is on the record) that no one should be surprised anymore at his self-indulgent, self-promoting, anti-Church and anti-Christian excesses, including his self-celebratory year of extraordinary events to mark the fifth anniversary of his demented science-defying Greta Thunberg encyclical.
In a Dark Time
by Theodore Roethke
The New Yorker
January 9, 1960
(Collected in The Far Field, 1964)
i
In a dark time, the eye begins to see.
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
ii
What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
iii
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
iv
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
With thanks to THE CATHOLIC THING which featured this poem today. Below, Irish journalist John Waters sums up the consequnce of the pandemic mania which simply morphed into a self-perpetrating, self-deating exaggeration of man's fear of death, disease and suffering.
CORONA VIRUS:
On True and False Infinities
by John Waters
May 23, 2020
The playwright Arthur Miller, while he wrote, would place a card in full view in front of him with one word on it. The word was:
forgo. It was a memo to himself to avoid bringing things to a head until the very last moment, so as to maintain the audience’s speculations and engagement until the final curtain.
In a way, the method catches also a key aspect of the religious sensibility. The “religious” person tends more than others to postpone satisfaction and forgo immediate pleasure or reward in anticipation of an ultimate prize on the far side of the horizon. The religious person knows that every material thing eventually disappoints.
Joseph Ratzinger, many years ago, warned us against the “false infinities” that might mislead us as to the nature of existence. “Infinities” of some kind — satisfactions false or real — are essential. Otherwise, human beings would stop dead in their tracks, as though their batteries had suddenly died.
Desire for infinite, eternal reality, for the embrace of the Creator who generates us, is ultimately what enables us to transcend the limitation of the false infinities, which lure us astray and always leave us deflated.
Man, diverted from the ultimate horizon, grows weary and skeptical. Materialism interposes itself for a time between him and the true destination of his desiring. For a time this encroachment proceeds unnoticed; but over the course of his life, a man discovers that his desiring for earthly things loses its lustre with escalating rapidity, that the false infinities become will-o-the-wisps.
When this happens, a man will either look upward again to the horizon, or downward to the bottom of a glass or pill bottle in search of the dregs of hope. Shadowing these attempts at self-delusion is our ineluctable awareness that we are unable to find in this dimension what we seek: We can’t get no satisfaction. But we try and we try and we try and we try.
In the encyclical
Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict XVI spelled out the process by which this works through a human life:
Day by day, man experiences many greater or lesser hopes, different in kind according to the different periods of his life. Sometimes one of these hopes may appear to be totally satisfying without any need for other hopes.
Young people can have the hope of a great and fully satisfying love; the hope of a certain position in their profession, or of some success that will prove decisive for the rest of their lives. When these hopes are fulfilled, however, it becomes clear that they were not, in reality, the whole.
It becomes evident that man has need of a hope that goes further. It becomes clear that only something infinite will suffice for him, something that will always be more than he can ever attain.
In this regard our contemporary age has developed the hope of creating a perfect world that, thanks to scientific knowledge and to scientifically based politics, seemed to be achievable. Thus Biblical hope in the Kingdom of God has been displaced by hope in the kingdom of man, the hope of a better world which would be the real “Kingdom of God.”
This seemed at last to be the great and realistic hope that man needs. It was capable of galvanizing — for a time — all man's energies. The great objective seemed worthy of full commitment. In the course of time, however, it has become clear that this hope is constantly receding. Above all it has become apparent that this may be a hope for a future generation, but not for me.
In the 1960s, freedom was redefined in Western cultures as the impulse to instantly cash in on every opportunity for pleasure, gain, and reward, with increasing skepticism about “the afterlife” providing an added rationale. The result was a growing but undiagnosed collective dissatisfaction — amounting to collective alienation — camouflaged by the creation of a “freedom escalator” on which previously unrecognized freedoms achieved in turn their fifteen minutes of fame.
The “boomers” (dread word, especially when it seems to include you) having already ceased to believe, then ceased to forgo —indeed repudiated that very idea —and all generations that followed implicitly acquiesced in their cultural leadership.
Since then we have been constructing cultures in which the religious dimension — that certain sense of a place beyond the beyond — is broken off from the collective consciousness, and can be preserved within the individual consciousness only with the greatest attention. Life goes on, but largely by dint of the false infinities, which have become all-important.
With God eclipsed in culture, even the best-adjusted souls need to utilise as stepping stones the tiny pleasures that enliven an otherwise nondescript, meaningless-seeming day.
My book
Beyond Consolation, published a decade ago, was inspired by the death of a colleague, Nuala O’Faolain, at my then newspaper,
The Irish Times, following a short illness with cancer. An atheist, she went on radio soon after she received the terminal diagnosis to speak about her grief and despair.
In one section of the interview, she described how, after hearing the news, she had returned alone to her beloved Paris to revisit, one last time, “some of the joy of living.” She booked a room in a swanky hotel and next morning went out in search of a café. She described buying a coffee and tartine, sitting down and thinking, “Well, this is it. I love this.” She adored being there with her copy of the International Herald Tribune and her thick, crusty slice of bread and milky coffee.
“And it worked great for half an hour. But then I walked too far and fell down and stuff and that didn’t work out too well.”
The devil is in the adjectives: “crusty,” “milky,” “International": all words denoting freedom, albeit of an ephemeral, fragile kind. Yet we instantly recognize the explosion of pure joy that such an evocation can release. The joy of being idle in a foreign country on a sunny morning in a trapped moment of pure, simple pleasure —
a false infinity as real as anything earthly as long as it lasts, but here exposed in the dread light of imminent death.
This is so sad: That Nuala did not come to see the “little infinities” as gifts, or signs, from somewhere beyond.
These things, the religious journey brings us to see, resonate only because there is beyond them the promise of something infinitely greater.
Coronavirus lockdown has brought us to a moment when, many of our “little infinities” withdrawn, we get to face the horizon with an enhanced chance of seeing that all joys, small and great, come from the same place.
It has been remarked already how strange it is that COVID-19 hit the West at the start of Lent. But I wonder if there was before, across the whole of Western civilisation,
a time when the access to both the churches of God and most of the cathedrals of Mammon were blocked at one and the same time.
Not only are our churches closed, but so too are our shopping malls, gyms, and bars, the places to which Western populations have in recent years repaired to pursue
the false-infinite joys that, if pursued obsessively, cause a short-circuit of the Infinite, Eternal, True connection.
Now, with the malls and pubs shuttered, we must make contact with infinities of whatever kind without assistance from middlemen. Although even in lockdown, there are still the off-mainstream diversionary delights on offer from Amazon and YouTube, we are mostly restricted to our contemplations, prayers and meditations, or else those lower-cased varieties of “infinity” capable of being accessed at home with a bottle opener, modem or remote control. It is hard, sometimes, to avoid the thought that this situation is the ambiguous gift of some mischievous, supernatural imagination, and not necessarily an evil one.
Secular materialism imposes pressure on all its subjects to foreshorten their horizons, to draw their desires closer to themselves so that they no longer stretch out toward an infinite Otherness.
In today’s Germany, or Spain or Italy or France or Ireland, it is almost pointless to speak even to the general population about the hope that manifests in Christianity. Even the elderly are cast adrift before a destination that surges towards them, and in this transfixed situation they busy themselves with what they can settle for: those “little false infinities” that make a day seem to be worth living — the trip to the secondhand bookstore to pick up a bargain, the cup of coffee afterward in the café across the road, the stroll in the park listening to a podcast on earphones, meeting an old friend at the gate and luxuriating in another cuppa, and so forth.
It is strange, in an age of ceaseless talk about mental illness, that the authorities of so many countries have so blithely sentenced the elderly, cast adrift on a cultural rock of secular nihilism, to
deprivation of these small pleasures — as though, just as they have forgotten about the indispensability of God, they have now forgotten about the indispensability of what replaced him.
But perhaps, before the months of lockdown become a barely credible half-memory, we may find time to meditate on an experience that, properly observed, may allow us to look more usefully into our driving mechanisms, and comprehend more precisely the nature of our tick-tocking.
Temporarily deprived of so many of our “little infinities,” perhaps we will see that these transient joys are just stepping stones on the road to lasting joys. Let us hope that, when they rediscover their courage, Church leaders will grasp the opportunity offered to remind their congregations of the true meanings of earthly moments of happiness, and direct them thereby to the deepest nature of reality.
Sandro Magister underscores the extraordinary self-centeredness and total disregard for God on the part of Bergoglio in all of his pronouncements and all the 'Laudato si' celebrations he has lined up for the year.
In the celebratory year for 'Laudato Si',
party time for everyone,except for 'My Lord'
May 25, 2020
In these times of global shortages, those who hold the purse strings in the Vatican - the Jesuit Juan Antonio Guerrero Alves and Cardinal Reinhard Marx, prefects respectively of the Secretariat for the Economy and of the Council for the Economy - have issued urgent calls to the heads of the Roman Curia to be “sober” and to “cut the costs of conferences, travel abroad, external consultancy.”
But the celebrations for
Laudato Si’ are evidently an exception. Yesterday, Sunday May 24, was the fifth birthday of the signing of the encyclical, and a whole jubilee year was announced to celebrate it, with a seemingly endless program.
To begin with, there has already been a prologue, “Laudato Si’ Week”, launched on May 16 with a video message from Pope Francis amid evocative images of zebras, camels and savannas, and crowned on Sunday the 24th with the common recitation throughout the world, at noon according to local time, of a prayer composed at the Vatican for the occasion,
so that we may all “know how to listen and respond to the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”
Among those who took part in the preparatory week - with a multiplicity of local initiatives - the United States came in first with 2,316 registrations, followed in the ranking by Italy, France, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, and then other nations, with minor numbers, with China dead last with just one signup.
But there is more in store for them. Because at the end of the summer they will meet together in the “Season of Creation,” as in years past to be observed from September 1, World Day ofPprayer for Creation, to October 4, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, with the commitment to invent and put into practice over the span of those days
acts of “reparation of our relationships with others and with all creation.”
This is an ecumenical initiative launched not only by Pope Francis but jointly by the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, by the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, and by the outgoing secretary general of the Ecumenical Council of Churches, the Lutheran Olav Fyscke Tveit.
In the middle of the 2019 edition of the “Season of Creation,” a global climate strike made headlines on Sept. 20, with students from all over the world skipping school and with Greta Thunberg in the starring role.
[Wikipedia says the strike organizers claimed 4 million participated worldwide, with 1.2 million from Germany alone. That's a minuscule percentage of the worldwide student population!]The strike is expected to have an encore this year.
But before the “Season of Creation” arrives, The Vatican has scheduled two initiatives of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development headed by Cardinal Peter Turkson.
The first, on June 18, will consist of a web seminar (webinar) - - with experts from all over the world, called to formulate “assessments” and plan “future journeys” inspired by
Laudato Si’.
The second will be the publication of an “Inter-Dicasterial Text with Operational Guidelines” as a practical follow-up to the encyclical.
Other webinars unspecified in number and content have also been announced for the autumn, these too organized by Turkson's dicastery.
Not to mention the round table - not via the web but with physical presences - that the Vatican will organize at the end of January in Davos, during the World Economic Forum that brings the who’s who of world powers together every year in that Swiss town.
At the beginning of the spring of 2021, a meeting is also on the agenda - for now only at the “proposal” stage - among leaders of the various religions, also under the auspices of
Laudato Si’ and naturally with the pope.
All of it resulting in the concluding triduum, between May 20 and 22 of 2021, for this 'jubilee year', during which an international conference will be held at the Vatican and a “Multi-Year Action Platform” inspired by the encyclical will be launched.
The final triduum will be gladdened with the voices and sounds of the “Living Chapel” created by Julian Revie in partnership with the United Nations and the Global Catholic Climate Movement, with a choir of children from disadvantaged areas of the world, with the songs of birds recorded in forests devastated by man, with sounds from oil barrels and other recycled materials, and with texts by Saint Francis and by the pope who took his name.
Not only that. The Vatican has announced that it will
- support the goal of the “Living Chapel” to “create natural gardens and sacred spaces” inspired by “Laudato Si’”;
- promote the creation of a documentary film and an “immersive show” on the encyclical;
- join the battle against polluting plastic materials;
- upport the organization “Laudato Tree” in planting one million new trees every year in the arid regions of Africa; and
- launch on social media
the first worldwide competition on reinterpreting the Bible in the light of “Laudato Si’.”
In addition, the Holy See will put to work a number of volunteer dioceses, parishes, families, schools, farms, etc in
“a 7-year journey of integral ecology in the spirit of Laudato Si’,” with the aim of doubling the number of those engaged in it every year and so mobilizing “a critical mass needed for radical societal transformation invoked by Pope Francis.”
To individuals who distinguish themselves through their efforts in the various areas of activity, starting in 2021 the Vatican will assign a dozen
Laudato Si’ awards.
But that's not all. On the agenda of the celebratory year announced a few days ago, two separate events which were initially scheduled for this spring but then postponed until the autumn due to the coronavirus pandemic.
They are two events in which Pope Francis has invested a great deal, but which also reveal the most vulnerable point of his pontificate.
The first will be held on October 15 at the Vatican and is entitled “Reinventing the Educational Global Compact.”
It comes as no surprise that a pope like Jorge Mario Bergoglio would take so much to heart the education and training of the new generations, being a member of the Society of Jesus, which has been,for centuries, a great educator of ruling classes.
But what is striking is the total absence in his educational project of any Christian specificity.
In the video message with which Francis launched the initiative there is not the slightest verbal trace of God, Jesus, or the Church. The dominant formula is “new humanism,” with its accessories of “common home,” “universal solidarity,” “fraternity,” “convergence,” “welcome”… And the religions? These too lumped together and neutralized in an indistinct dialogue.
The novelty of this initiative of Francis consists precisely in the fact that
it is the first time - in the history of the Church - that a pope has made his own and placed himself at the helm of a worldwide educational pact so radically secularized.
The second event, to be convened November 21 in Assisi, has the title “The Economy of Francesco” (the saint, not the pope who bears his name) and has as its objective nothing less than “a pact to change the current economy of world.”
It will be “a festival of the economy of young people with the pope, a middle way between Greta Thunberg and the powerful of the earth,” according to the announcement by the main organizer, economist Luigino Bruni, a member of the Focolare movement and a consultant for the Vatican Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life.
Among the figures who have already confirmed their presence will be the Malthusian economist Jeffrey Sachs, in this pontificate an inevitable guest of every Vatican event concerning the economy and ecology; Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food, who was Bergoglio’s personal guest at the synod for the Amazon; and the Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva, as highly praised among the “popular movements” dear to the pope (she participated in their third world gathering) as she has been discredited by the scientific community worthy of the name.
Curiously, Vandana Shiva and Carlo Petrini were a few years ahead of their time in the condemnation of
the sin of “ecocide” that Francis has said he wants to introduce into the catechism. In fact, in October of 2016, the two of them staged a symbolic trial in Holland, at the Hague, in which they convicted the international biochemical company Monsanto, in absentia, for 'ecocide'.
.
In this other initiative of Pope Francis as well there is a glaring absence of any specifically Christian feature, replaced by a generic alignment with the dominant agnostic ideology of environmentalism, pacifism, and individual rights.
It’s all happening as if the invocation
Laudato si’ from the canticle of Saint Francis had been purged of what comes next: “my Lord.”
[Most of the verses in the saint's Canticle of Creatures start with 'Laudato si, mi Signore.." ("Be praised, my Lord...")].
On the same subject, the usual common-sense reaction of Padre Jorge Gonzalez on his blog...
A year for ‘Laudato si’
(I’d love to be an ostrich)
Translated from
Well! One more ‘incident’. I feel like paying attention to less ‘important’ things, perhaps because we don’t know, we don’t want to, we don’t dare to, ‘they’ won’t let us, or we cannot – best not to get started on why not – dedicate ourselves to things that I think are of extraordinary importance to the Church.
To dedicate an entire year to something, one would imagine it is because the 'thing’ is of extraordinary importance and gravity, and that it is almost a question of life and death that the whole world be made conscious of a reality that it is essential to transform.
It’s another thing when, as the Church, we have nothing more urgent to think about than ecology as a whole.
Quite the contrary. Not to go very far, Rafaela and with her, Joaquina and all the good people of Braojos, Gascones and La Serna
[three mountain villages near Madrid of which Fr. Gonzalez is now parish priest, or cura, having been reassigned from the more central Madrid parishes he had served for 30 years] do take care of the environment, they recycle and sort their wastes religiously – chimney ashes, cardboard, plastic, glassware, batteries, organic wastes. Practically every announcement tells us what is ecological, energy-saving, respecting the environment. The laws say so. We have forest agents who take care of our surroundings, and a unit from the Guardia Civil for the same thing. And there’s the UN and who knows how many other institutions preaching about the ecology all the time.
So I don’t think that our parishes and communities – with probably a rare exception – could be branded as ‘tree killers’, terrorists against nature, totally alien from the subject. On the contrary.
That is why it seems to me we do not need a year to keep insisting on this to us. Of course, there is always room to do better, but this is a concern that is faring more than well, with practically all of mankind aware of it, including the Church, of course.
To dedicate an entire year to ecological concerns is simply to deploy efforts that could be better directed to other matters.
As a servant, speaking from the limited viewpoint of the three rural villages in my care, I will be using the year much better in any of three other directions.
Possibly the most urgent would be to dedicate the year to
Veritatis splendor. I say this because if there is anything that has seeped to our very marrow about the state of the Church today, it is moral relativism, a consequence of doctrinal relativism, under which we have gone from being followers of Christ the Way, the Truth and the Life, to followers of Pilate – ‘And what is truth?’
We see it every day. Depending on your confessor, your spiritual director, your preacher, things can be black, white, green or fuchsia, or they can simply ‘not be’, or ‘seem to be’, or ‘perhaps are’ (what they seem to be). This goes back to ‘the Church' which, far from putting an end to it, encourages and accepts it. I wrote once that to find interpretations from bishops’ conferences that are altogether divergent from Christian morality is simply desolating.
The second possibility for which I would like a year dedicated is the defense of the unborn. According to official data, Spain now has some 100,000 abortions a year. In the world more than 55 million. But this is hardly spoken about in the Church, such that many Catholics, while not fully justifying abortion, exculpate it. Yet the sin of abortion is serious enough to merit excommunication. Is that not worth a year of study, reflection, preaching and consciousness raising?
My third suggestion would be to dedicate a year to the pastoral care and morality of the family. In Spain, the number of marriages has been decreasing every year. In 1981, there were 5.3 matrimonies per 1,000 inhabitants. Now, it is hardly 3 per thousand, of which only 20% are church marriages. Spain has gone from a fertility rate of 14.1 children per 1000 inhabitants in 1981 to hardly 9 today. Another interesting fact is that 40% of Spanish children today are born out of wedlock. Another: 6 out of every 10 marriages in Spain today ends in a break-up.
I could suggest more possibilities. But I leave it to the readers.
But I say that a Church comfortably ‘installed’ in relativism, which loses its members like water down the drain, in a world that yearly suffers millions of assassinations in their mother’s wombs, and in which the family, supposed to be the domestic church, is submerged in utmost crisis. To dedicate a year to ecology seems to me a form of fooling us.
Having said this, I will speak to Rafaela [the cura's quintessential parishioner] about what we can do.