THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

[POSTQUOTE][QUOTE:134986476=TERESA BENEDETTA, 10/5/2017 9:35 PM]
[DIM=8pt][I]I've not really had the time to review the backlog of reports and commentaries on the CORRECTIO, but Aldo Maria Valli's blog today provides an excellent take-off point.[/I][/DIM]

October 5, 2017
‘Heresy’ and ‘schism’ – near-archaic words which would seem to have virtually disappeared from the vocabulary of Catholics - are back in the center of numerous analyses and observations on the present situation in the Church. For many Catholics, who are concerned as much about safeguarding the faith as the unity of the Church, these words are a source of disquiet.

Thence, a question which – without ever losing faith in the Spirit of Truth, “assiduous Advocate and Defender of the work of salvation” (in St. John Paul II’s definition) – is laden with anguish: Now what?

ECCOVI UN LINK DELLA CRONOLOGIA DI "papa" FRANCESCO durante il 2017:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=90DxKFFjp4Q

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Dear Ms Hewitt -
Thank you for your contribution, and welcome to the Forum!
Teresa

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



Sorry... I did not realize that I am unable to modify with the necessary enhancements a post by someone who is not registered with the forum, so my page heading has to come in here...





Peter Kwasniewski has, in the last few days, written two articles on the essentials of Catholicism that have tended to become less and less essential and more inconsequential
in the decades since Vatican II - and are likely to become even more so, given the anti-Catholic hubris of Pope Francis and those who, with him, control the infrastructures and
institutions of the Catholic Church because he is the pope... Kwasniewski first wrote about the Eucharist, but I will start out with the later article on the Four Last Things,
especially Hell..


The reality of hell and the fear of God -
banished from current Catholic awareness
by Peter Kwasniewski

January 17, 2018

In my article “The Fifty-Year Descent to Footnote 351: Our Progressive Desensitization to the Most Holy Eucharist,” I spoke of how the liturgical reform’s many sudden and drastic changes in ritual and ceremonial have contributed to a continual erosion of belief in the Mass as a true and proper Sacrifice and in the Real Presence of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament.

In the present article, I wish to look at a closely related topic, namely, how the holy fear of God, which begins in the dreading of His just punishments for sin and matures into love of Him for His own sake and a desire to dwell with Him forever in heaven, has been undermined by the systematic removal of texts from the liturgy concerning the reality of hell and our need for vigilance and self-denial in order to steer clear of it.

There are many articles that show how radically the prayers were altered in the missal of the Novus Ordo, whether to downplay the subordination of earthly to heavenly things (as, for instance, with St. Albert), or to “purge the mythical element” (as with St. Catherine), or to avoid addressing Christ directly as God (as occurred in Advent), or to downplay the kingship of Christ over societies and governments (as with the reinvention of Christ the King).

The list goes on and on, as Lauren Pristas, Anthony Cekada, and other authors have shown. Here, my purpose is more modest: I will focus on texts that mention hell, and we will see how they have fared in the time between the 1962 Missale Romanum and its intended replacement of less than a decade later.

The most obvious and eloquent testimony to the Church’s doctrine about the Four Last Things (death, judgment, heaven, and hell, as well as their adjunct, purgatory) is the traditional Requiem Mass, which was prayed in the Latin Rite for so many centuries unchanged and is still used wherever the Latin Mass flourishes.

The Requiem Mass organically developed in such a way that there is a balance in its texts between, on the one hand, consolation and confidence in heaven, and, on the other hand, the fear of punishment with prayers for the rescuing of the soul from hell. It is simply catholic in this regard, taking into account the fullness of Gospel teaching about the afterlife.

Needless to say, all of these texts must be recited or sung at every Requiem Mass — nothing is “optional,” just as neither are death, judgment, and an eternal destiny of bliss or pain.

The Requiem is certainly not lacking in consoling or confident prayers. Look at the Introit, the Epistle (1 Thess 4:13–18), the Gradual (Ps 111:7), the Gospel (John 11:21–27), the Secret, the Communion, and the Postcommunion: all of these ask for a merciful pardon and eternal rest, and express confidence that the soul with faith in Christ “will be in everlasting remembrance” and “not fear the evil hearing” (Gradual). The Tract seems to waver between light and darkness:

---

Absolve, O Lord, the souls of all the faithful departed from every bond of sin: and by the help of Thy grace, may they be enabled to escape the avenging judgment and enjoy the happiness of light eternal.

---

The Sequence, the famous “Dies Irae,” gives free rein to terrifying and trembling truths:

---

The day of wrath, that awful day, shall reduce the world to ashes, as David and the Sibyl prophesied. How great will be the terror, when the Judge shall come to examine all things rigorously! … The written book shall be brought forth, containing all for which the world must be judged.

When, therefore, the Judge shall be seated, whatsoever is hidden shall be brought to light, naught shall remain unpunished. What then shall I, unhappy man, allege? Whom shall I invoke as protector, when even the just shall hardly be secure? O King of awful majesty, who of Thy free gift savest them that are to be saved, save me, O fount of mercy! …

My prayers are not worthy, but Thou who art good, grant in Thy kindness that I may not burn in the everlasting fire. Give me a place among Thy sheep and separate me from the goats, setting me on Thy right side. When the reprobate, covered with confusion, shall have been sentenced to the cruel flames, call me with the blessed.

---

The Offertory continues in a similar vein:

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O Lord Jesus Christ, King of glory, deliver the souls of all the faithful departed from the pains of hell and the bottomless pit. Deliver them from the jaws of the lion, that hell not swallow them up, that they be not plunged into darkness. but let the holy standard-bearer Michael lead them into that holy light,
R. which once Thou didst promise to Abraham and to his seed.
V. Lord, we offer unto Thee sacrifices of praise and prayers; accept them on behalf of those whom we remember this day: Lord, make them pass from death to life,
R. which Thou once promised to Abraham and to his seed.[1]

---

Perhaps most telling of all is the Collect appointed for the day of death or burial:

---

O God, whose property is ever to have mercy and to spare, we humbly entreat Thee on behalf of thy servant N., whom Thou hast bidden this day to pass out of this world, that Thou wouldst not deliver him into the hands of the enemy, nor forget him forever, but command that he be taken up by Thy holy angels and borne to the fatherland of paradise; that as he put his hope and faith in Thee, he will not suffer the pains of hell, but may possess everlasting joys.

---

These are strong prayers that deal unabashedly with the gaping jaws of hell and the possibility that we may be consumed by them for unrepented sins. The gates of hell will not prevail against the Church; but they may very well prevail against you or me. Such a liturgy presents the whole of the Catholic Faith. Once again: lex orandi, lex credendi. We believe as we pray. And what we do not pray, we will sooner or later cease to believe — it will be replaced by ersatz doctrine of dubious pedigree.

A wholesome recognition of eternal consequences may be seen in any number of places in the traditional Roman missal. Here is the Collect for the feast of St. Nicholas on December 6:

---

O God, who didst adorn the blessed Bishop Nicholas with countless miracles: grant, we beseech Thee, that by his merits and prayers we may be delivered from the flames of hell.

---

(In the Novus Ordo, this has been tamed into: “We humbly implore your mercy, Lord: protect us in all dangers through the prayers of the Bishop Saint Nicholas, that the way of salvation may lie open before us.”)

The Friday of Passion Week includes this galvanizing Collect:

---

Mercifully pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts: that we who restrain ourselves from sin by voluntary chastisement may rather suffer for a time than be condemned to eternal punishment.

---

The Collect for the Mass of Maundy Thursday speaks with clarity about the fate of Judas:

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O God, from whom Judas received the punishment of his guilt, and the thief the reward of his confession: grant unto us the full fruit of Thy clemency; that even as in His Passion our Lord Jesus Christ gave to each retribution according to his merits, so having cleared away our former guilt, he may bestow on us the grace of His resurrection.

---

The Second Sunday after Easter prays in its Collect:

---

O God, who, by the humility of Thy Son, hast lifted up a fallen world, grant unending joy to Thy faithful; that those whom Thou hast snatched from the perils of endless death, Thou mayest cause to enjoy never-ending delights.

---

The Third Sunday after Pentecost offers one of those magnificent Collects that says so much in so few words, and can be prayed with fervor by anyone who has the slightest self-knowledge:

---

O God, the protector of all that trust in Thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy, multiply Thy mercies upon us: that having Thee for our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not those which are eternal.

---

Of course, the only Eucharistic Prayer ever used in the usus antiquior is the 6th-century Roman Canon, which forthrightly implores the Divine Majesty:

---

We beseech Thee, O Lord, to be appeased and accept this oblation of our service, as also of Thy whole family, and to dispose our days in Thy peace, snatch us from eternal damnation, and count us in the flock of Thine elect.

---

In addition, one could cite pertinent verses from the Sequences Stabat Mater and Lauda Sion, which, while still given as options in the Novus Ordo, are generally skipped over, due to length; they are, as usual, required in the old Latin Mass on certain days of the year.

Gentle reader, would you believe me if I said that none of the foregoing liturgical texts have survived the liturgical reform? But it is true. In some cases, the texts were removed altogether and can be found nowhere in the new books. In other cases, certain texts (such as the Offertory of the Requiem) can be found in a recondite and rarely-used book like the Graduale Romanum, or tucked away as a fourteenth option somewhere, but in practice they have disappeared from the life of the Church. The only place they thrive is where they are front and center as a required part of her public worship, namely, in communities that avail themselves of the traditional liturgy.

Beyond such prayers, hell is mentioned many times each year in the Gospel readings of the traditional Latin Mass, which, thankfully, retains the ancient one-year cycle of readings, rather than the gargantuan off-rhythm two- and three-year cycles of the Novus Ordo.

In the usus antiquior, the solemn pronouncement of Our Lord in chapter 12 of the Gospel of St. Luke — “I say to you, my friends: Be not afraid of them who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will shew you whom you shall fear: fear ye him, who after he hath killed, hath power to cast into hell. Yea, I say to you, fear him” — is read at least four times in the year, namely, for the feast of St. Justin Martyr (April 14), SS. John and Paul (June 26), the Holy Maccabees (August 1), and SS. Tiburtius and Susanna (August 11), as well as any other time the common of several martyrs might be used. In comparison, this passage is read once every other year in the Novus Ordo.

The parallel passage in chapter 10 of the Gospel of St. Matthew — “And fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in hell” — is read for four feasts, those of St. Polycarp (January 26), St. Cyril of Jerusalem (March 18), St. Athanasius (May 2), and St. Irenaeus (July 3). In the Novus Ordo, it is read on one Saturday each year, and one Sunday every third year.

Matthew 5:22, “Whosoever shall say, Thou Fool, shall be in danger of hell fire,” is part of the Gospel on the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost. In the Novus Ordo, this fortunately appears two weekdays per year, and one Sunday every third year.

The pericope of Matthew 18:1–10, which includes these haunting words—

---

Woe to the world because of scandals. For it must needs be that scandals come: but nevertheless woe to that man by whom the scandal cometh. And if thy hand, or thy foot scandalize thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee. It is better for thee to go into life maimed or lame, than having two hands or two feet, to be cast into everlasting fire. And if thy eye scandalize thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee. It is better for thee having one eye to enter into life, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.

---

— is read at least twice each year in the usus antiquior, namely, for the Dedication of St. Michael Archangel (September 29) and the Holy Guardian Angels (October 2). In the Novus Ordo, astonishingly, these verses are never read at all: the “friendly” verses 1–5, 10, and 12–14 are read a number of times, but the above-cited verses about hell-fire are excised. Too scary, I guess.

If I have done the math correctly, over a three-year period, one who attends the traditional Latin Mass daily will hear these particular hell-mentioning Gospels 33 times, while one who attends the Novus Ordo will hear them 13 times.[2] Obviously, there are a lot of other factors one would need to take into account for a full comparison of the presentation of the four last things in both forms of the Roman Rite, a project that exceeds the purpose of this article.

Nevertheless, the comparison just given already exposes the kind of deep differences in lex orandi that I am claiming are relevant for understanding the confusion of our times in doctrine (lex credendi) and morals (lex vivendi).[3]

We have seen that the traditional liturgy prays for the living and the dead in a realistic manner and instructs us accordingly, emphasizing the mercy of God and the attainability of eternal life but not neglecting the Lord’s “avenging judgment” and the real possibility of damnation.

Traditional liturgy inculcates in us a lively awareness of our weakness and dependency on grace, the gravity of sin, the need for penance and asceticism, and the fundamental role that fear of the Lord must play in our interior life. The basic attitude of the worshiper is the one praised by the Psalmist: “Serve ye the Lord in fear, and rejoice before Him with trembling” (Ps 2:11).[4]

Instructed by the Mass of the Ages and other liturgical texts,[5] we believe that
(a) not everyone automatically goes to heaven,
(b) there is an almighty, all-knowing, all-just Judge who will scrutinize our works and give us what we ourselves have sought in our choices — whether glory or shame, beatitude or damnation;
(c) the departed soul desperately needs our prayers because we wish them to be released from the agonies of purgatory, and one of the ways that happens is when members of the Church Militant offer prayers and penances for the dead.

Our actions in this life have eternal consequences, for good or for ill. One of those actions we must discern is whether we are living right now in accordance with the commandments of God, especially the Ten Commandments. This is not an optional examination of conscience for the extra-pious but a required examination for every human being who has reached the use of reason.

In other words, no one may excuse himself before the Judge by saying: “I didn’t know I was supposed to examine my conscience on whether or not I was adhering to the Ten Commandments.” There are some things no one can be blamed for not knowing if they were never told, but there are other things — the natural moral law, in particular — that we are obliged to know and are capable of knowing.

Moreover, the Catholic, having examined his conscience in this manner, must make a discernment about whether he is in a state of sanctifying grace, that he may approach the heavenly Banquet to receive the wounded and glorified Flesh of the Savior. This, after all, is the teaching of no less an authority that the Apostle St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:27–29:

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Whosoever shall eat this bread, or drink of the chalice of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the Body and of the Blood of the Lord. But let a man prove himself; and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of the chalice. For he that eatheth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh judgment to himself, not discerning the Body of the Lord.

---

But these verses, too, have been entirely omitted from the Novus Ordo. One begins to detect a pattern in all of this. The frightening fact, ladies and gentlemen, is that the Novus Ordo systematically downplays the reality of hell.[6]

The virtual disappearance of certain liturgical prayers and readings, and the significant reduction of others, is surely part of the reason, arguably the principal reason, that today’s Catholics are inclined to hold both universal salvation AND an “everyone is welcome” attitude about who may receive Holy Communion. The one view fits the other hand-in-glove.

The Amoris Laetitia debacle can be solved only when there is a broad return to traditional (i.e., Catholic) teaching on all of these subjects. The restoration of this teaching depends for its penetration, efficacy, and longevity on zealous adherence to traditional liturgies (Eastern and Western) where they already flourish, and their complete restoration wherever they do not. As far away as this goal seems, we must never tire of pursuing it, for the bond that unites the lex orandi, the lex credendi, and the lex vivendi is intrinsic, indissoluble, and inevitable.

NOTES
[1] Incidentally, the great antiquity of this Offertory is evident in a number of features. First, it preserves the form of a responsory, which was the original form of all the offertory antiphons. As time went on, the other offertory chants were shortened, but this one always remained in full. (The original verses for other Offertory chants are available in the Offertoriale published by Solesmes.) Second, its Old Testament resonances are characteristic of the classic prayer of the Roman Church, in particular the mention of the promise to Abraham and to his seed (i.e., Christ, as St. Paul teaches in Galatians), and the use of the phrase “sacrifice of praise,” which is how the 6th-century Roman Canon describes the Eucharistic oblation. We are peering here into the very heart of the Roman Catholic liturgy.
[2] The numbers I am adding together are (4+4+4)+(4+4+4)+(1+1+1)+(2+2+2) for the usus antiquior Gospels, and (1+0+1)+(1+1+2)+(2+2+3)+(0+0+0) for the Novus Ordo.
[3] The ideal study aid for this question is Matthew P. Hazell’s Index Lectionum: A Comparative Table of Readings for the Ordinary and Extraordinary Forms of the Roman Rite (Lectionary Study Press, 2016). My Foreword to this volume goes into a number of other disturbing aspects of the revised lectionary. Recently I wrote about the significance of the fact that the Gospel of the wedding feast at Cana is read every year in the traditional Mass (Second Sunday after Epiphany) but only once every three years in the Novus Ordo (Second Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C).
[4] St. Augustine comments on this verse: “Serve the Lord with fear", lest what is said, You kings and judges of the earth, turn into pride. "nd rejoice with trembling" - Very excellently is rejoice added, lest serve the Lord with fear should seem to tend to misery. But again, lest this same rejoicing should run on to unrestrained inconsiderateness, there is added with trembling, that it might avail for a warning, and for the careful guarding of holiness.”
[5] Such as the Athanasian Creed Quicumque vult, whose opening words are like a throwing-down of the gauntlet to indifferentism and universalism: “Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith. Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled; without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.”
[6] We often see the same thing in the dumbed-down versions of traditional prayers that are used in many catechism classes today. I came across an Act of Contrition in a CCD classroom that read more or less as follows: “My Lord, I am sorry for my sins. Help me to live like Jesus and to love everyone I meet. Amen.” A prayer of this sort does not adequately express either perfect or imperfect contrition. Contrast it with one of the traditional versions of the Act of Contrition: “O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all of my sins, because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because these sins have offended Thee, my God, who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to do penance, to sin no more, and to amend my life. Amen.”



The 50-year descent to Footnote 351:
Our progressive desensitization
to the Most Holy Eucharist
by Peter Kwasniewski

January 10, 2018

We did not wake up one fine day in 2017 to find ourselves suddenly confronted with Eucharistic sacrilege being promoted from on high. There was a long, slow process that led to this moment.

It consisted in the gradual dilution of the sacredness of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and of the Blessed Sacrament at its heart, with institutionally tolerated sacrilege along the way. Fifty years of desacralization has ended in the temerity of contradicting the entire Catholic tradition about the most holy of all the Church’s mysteries.

The first major step was the allowance of communion in the hand while standing — a sharp break from the deeply-ingrained practice of many centuries of kneeling in adoration at the altar rail and receiving on the tongue, like a baby bird being fed by its parent (as we see in countless medieval depictions of the pelican that has wounded her breast in order to feed her chicks).

This change had the obvious effect of making people think the Holy Eucharist wasn’t so mysterious and holy after all. If you can just take it in your hand like ordinary food, it might as well be a potato chip distributed at a party.[1]

The feeling of awe and reverence towards the Blessed Sacrament was systematically diminished and undermined through this modernist re-introduction of an ancient practice that had long since been discontinued by the Church in her pastoral wisdom. Nor, as has been well documented, did the faithful themselves request the abolition of the custom of receiving on the tongue while kneeling; it was imposed by the self-styled “experts.”[2]

The second major step was the allowance of lay ministers of communion. This reinforced the perception that the Church had given up all that stuff about the priest being essentially different from the laity, about the Mass as a divine sacrifice and the Eucharist as the Bread of Angels that only anointed hands are fit to handle. True, a priest still had to say the magic words, but after that, Jack and Jill could come up, take bowls and cups, and hand out the tokens of club membership.

The effect of these “reforms” and others like them (the replacement of majestic and mysterious Latin with everyday vernacular; the substitution of guitar and piano ditties for pipe organ and chant; the turning around of the priest to face the people like a talkshow ;host; the removal of altar rails, the de-centering [more like a displacement or banishment] of tabernacle,; the uglification of vestments and vessels, and more) was to weaken and corrupt the faith of the people in the Mass as a true and proper sacrifice and in the Eucharist as the true Body and Blood of Jesus.

No wonder that after this, the idea of the Eucharistic fast, and of preparing oneself for communion by going to confession, went right out the window for the vast majority of people. The Church’s own pastors didn’t act as if they really believed these things anymore, so why should their flocks?

In short, we have lived through, and suffered under, half a century of ritual diminishment and symbolic contradiction of the Church’s faith in the sublime mysteries of the Body and Blood of Christ. As John Paul II and Benedict XVI lamented, there is scant evidence in our communities of any awareness of the distinction between worthy and unworthy communions — one of the most basic lessons children used to be taught in their catechism class.

Children in those primitive “pre-Vatican II days” were taught to practice virtue and avoid mortal sin because they should desire to be able to receive the Lord and be ever more perfectly united to Him, until they reached the glory of heaven where they would possess Him forever.
- They were taught that if one received the Lord in a state of mortal sin, one committed a further and a worse sin.
- They were taught that making a good confession, with sorrow for sin and an intention to avoid it in future, was enough to put this bad situation right and restore them to God’s friendship.
Who could seriously assert that most Catholics believe any of this today, or that they would even recognize, much less understand, the concepts?[3]

Today, at least in certain Western countries, nearly everyone goes up for communion when the time comes. It’s just “what you do at Mass.” Hardly anyone goes to confession; hardly anyone refrains from receiving, out of a consciousness of sin; and rare is the priest who ever preaches about having the right dispositions for communion. (Contrast this with St. John Vianney, who preached relentlessly about these things, and greatly intensified his parish’s commitment to the sacrament of confession and to frequent communion. It’s not for nothing that he’s the patron saint of parish priests. Patrons are meant to be imitated.)

Thus was the ground devilishly prepared for the final stage, in which any impediments to communion are theoretically and practically dissolved. In a general situation where the few Catholics who still attend Mass all receive, it would seem cruel and unusual punishment to single out a handful of so-called “divorced and remarried” people for special treatment: “You are not allowed to go to communion, but meanwhile, the self-abusing and fornicating teens, the contracepting couples, the families who sometimes skip Sunday Mass for sports events — all are welcome to come forward, as usual!”

This is the big picture that explains, to my mind, why the liberals or progressives in the Church are totally incapable of seeing why anyone would object to chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia with its nuclear footnote.[4]
- They do not really believe that the Mass is a true and proper sacrifice of Jesus Christ to the Most Holy Trinity;
- they do not really believe in transubstantiation and the Real Presence;
- they do not believe that one is eating and drinking the flesh and blood of God;
- they do not believe that one who eats and drinks unworthily is eating and drinking his own condemnation, just as those who eat worthily are seeding their souls and bodies for a glorious resurrection.

The Amorites, as we might call them, see “the Eucharist” as a fraternal gathering, a social event, an affirmation of human worth, a “celebration” of God’s “unconditional love,” and whatever other Hallmark slogans come to mind. Within the confines of this horizontal and superficial theology, there is no room for any requirements or prohibitions: everyone is welcome, and anything goes! Since the Eucharist is a meal symbolizing God’s welcome of the sinner, there is no reason to exclude anyone, for any reason, from partaking of the “table of plenty.”

Amoris Laetitia fits into this larger historical trajectory whereby the Mass has been stripped of its transcendent, mysterious, fearful and challenging sacrificial realism and pushed continually in the direction of an ordinary meal with ordinary folks doing ordinary things for a this-worldly end,[5] with a forced spontaneity and embarrassing banality that has failed to attract the overflow crowds predicted by Paul VI.

At such a Mass, is there anything to do but receive communion? Who would ever think of going just for the sake of adoring God and contemplating His beauty? Opportunities and incentives for adoration are practically non-existent in the Novus Ordo, and beauty has fared no better, or rather much worse. In such circumstances, to place a barrier between a free meal and a guest who thinks well of himself for being there is unthinkable.[6]

In truth, the Mass is the unbloody sacrifice of the Cross, made present in our midst; it is simultaneously the heavenly life-giving wedding feast of the now-glorified Christ. The Eucharist is the sacrament of the one-flesh union of a bride adorned with grace and a Bridegroom who is her sole happiness.

I am not surprised to find that, at traditional Latin Masses around the world, including in the United States, one sees two related phenomena: a large number of the faithful availing themselves of confession, before and during Mass; and a fair number of the faithful who remain in the pews and do not go forward for communion. The interior triumphs of the one, the interior trials of the other, are known to God alone.

But this much is obvious: they all came to worship Him. They came in response to His majesty. They came to fulfill a solemn obligation of the virtue of religion. Whether they are personally disposed to receive or not is a question at a different level. This is the sanity that prevails in the realm of tradition; it is the sanity that paves the way for sanctity.

NOTES
[1] In a moving scene in Robert Hugh Benson’s novel By What Authority?, we read the following about the character Isabel’s experience of a Calvinist communion service: “The mahogany table had been brought down from the eastern wall to beneath the cupola, and stood there with a large white cloth, descending almost to the ground on every side; and a row of silver vessels, flat plates and tall new Communion cups and flagons, shone upon it. … The three ministers had communicated by now; and there was a rustle and clatter of feet as the empty seats in front, hung with houselling cloths, began to be filled.” Isabel sees some people receive kneeling, others standing. And all this at a ceremony of Protestants who expressly denied the Real Presence and the sacrificial nature of the Mass".
[2] There is an obvious difference between an original practice, such as early Christians receiving in the hand, and a later re-introduction of such a practice when it has long since become obsolete. In the former case, the practice is innocent. In the latter case, it amounts to a repudiation and a symbolic contradiction of the values represented by kneeling before the host and not handling it oneself.
[3] Msgr. Benson wrote this about his Anglican days: “I was an official in a church that did not seem to know her own mind, even in matters directly connected with the salvation of the soul.… Might I, or might I not, tell my penitents that they are bound to confess their mortal sins before Communion? … The smallest Roman Catholic child knew precisely how to be reconciled to God, and to receive His grace…” (A City Set on a Hill). Does not this Anglican’s description of the problem in his own communion sound frightfully close to what may be found today in the Roman Catholic Church?
[4] Or perhaps we should say footnotes, since there are several that are severely problematic.
[5] It is consistent with the love-blind embrace of the United Nations and the “Greenpeace” environmentalism of Laudato Si’.
[6] We can begin to see the magnitude of the sea change if we imagine what it would have been like had the Kasper Proposal been floated in 1965 —the last year in which we can arguably say that we still had an integral and authentic Roman Rite throughout the entire Church (albeit already orphaned of its opening and closing prayers).

There would have been stunned incredulity and righteous indignation. The proposal wouldn’t have lasted longer than a lit match. No churchman in his right mind would have countenanced it. Progressives today attack traditionalists equally for our love of the traditional liturgy, our dogmatic intransigence, and our commitment to objective morality. They are right see a deep and abiding connection between these things — a connection neatly summed up as lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. [We pray as we believe and as we live.]


The following reflection by Aldo Maria Valli extends the scope of Kwasniewski's essays to the general situation in the Church today. As I have consistently done since 2005, all Biblical translations in English come from the USCCB's New American Bible, revised edition.


'The time will come when people
will no longer tolerate sound doctrine...'
Translated from

January 15, 2018

For various reasons, these days I have been re-reading the Second Letter of Paul to Timothy and I must say that I was surprised by the actuality of its contents. I would even say the surprise was lightning-like. Besides the problems of attribution, into which I shall not enter, the letter is striking for how it succeeds to describe the sufferings faced by the authentic followers of Jesus and for the clarity with which it indicates the duty to fight against present errors of the faith and prepare to fight those in the future.

There are two passages usually most cited from the Second Letter to Timothy: that in which Paul underscores the importance of transmitting the faith in the family, thanks to the women, above all (“I recall your sincere faith that first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and that I am confident lives also in you” and that in which the apostle, in the sunset of his life, strikes a balance sheet that every Christian would wish to share: “I have competed well; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith."

These two passages alone justify reading and rereading this epistle. But here is yet another passage which, in a few strokes, paints a picture in which we can recognie the situation of the faith today: "For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine but, following their own desires and insatiable curiosity, will accumulate teachers and will stop listening to the truth and will be diverted to myths”.

And what ought to be done with false teachers and their myths? “Take as your norm the sound words that you heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. Guard this rich trust with the help of the holy Spirit that dwells within us.”

So you see, there is a confrontation here. On the one hand, false words, peddled as true by those who are really peddling myths to please their listeners. On the other hand, there are the authentic words that must be taken as a model because they come from the teachings of the masters who speak because they have found the truth and have experienced it.

One must get into this confrontation with courage, without being conditioned by questions of opportunity or fear. “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather of power and love and self-control. So do not be ashamed of your testimony to our Lord, nor of me, a prisoner for his sake; but bear your share of hardship for the gospel with the strength that comes from God.” Confrontation brings suffering – that is inevitable. But we are not alone.

I was also struck by the pairing of love and power. The Spirit of Power and the Spirit of Love are one and the same. And it has nothing to do with a saccharine and sentimental idea of love, to which current preaching exhorting to solidariltiy and mass brotherhood has accustomed us.

St Paul writes from prison, as so often happens to those who defend the truth aganst the assaults of the sophisticated. He is therefore ‘in chains’, like a criminal, because those who serve lies and falsehood overturn reality. “But the word of God is unchained”. No one can silence the word of God. And what is this word we may be sure of? It is that “Jesus Christ, descendant of David, arose from the dead! Such is my gospel, for which I am suffering, even to the point of chains, like a criminal. But the word of God is not chained”. This is the central mystery of our faith, which is never sufficiently believed nor announced enough.

It is certain that “If we have died with him, we shall also live with him; if we persevere, we shall also reign with him.
But if we deny him, he will deny us. If we are unfaithful, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself”.

Here we have everything that matters. And that is why we are also urged to remember ‘these things’: “Stop disputing about words. This serves no useful purpose since it harms those who listen.”

It is an invitation to essentiality, to concentrate on that which is truly fundamental. And what could be more important than divine judgment? “Be eager to present yourself as acceptable to God, a workman who causes no disgrace, imparting the word of truth without deviation. Avoid profane, idle talk, for such people will become more and more godless” but not forgetting that “their teaching [false teachers] will spread like gangrene”.

So the task is quite clear. But there is also a strategy to respect, and it is clearly described: “A slave of the Lord should not quarrel, but should be gentle with everyone, able to teach, tolerant, correcting opponents with kindness. It may be that God will grant them repentance that leads to knowledge of the truth, and that they may return to their senses out of the devil’s snare, where they are entrapped by him, for his will.”

What is there to add to that? Any poor comment I make will only spoil those statements.

“But understand this: there will be terrifying times in the last days,” St. Paul warns at one point. “People will be self-centered and lovers of money, proud, haughty, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, irreligious, callous, implacable, slanderous, licentious, brutal, hating what is good, traitors, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, as they make a pretense of religion but deny its power. Reject them!”

I am not an exegete and I apologzie to the experts in Sacred Scripture. I only wished to share some of the feelings and houghts elicited in me by the Second etter to Timothy.

Before I close, allow me to quote from the homily of Benedict XVI on June 28, 2008, at the first Vespers for the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul at the opening of the Pauline Year:

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In a world in which falsehood is powerful, the truth is paid for with suffering. The one who desires to avoid suffering, to keep it at bay, keeps life itself and its greatness at bay; he cannot be a servant of truth and thus a servant of faith. There is no love without suffering - without the suffering of renouncing oneself, of the transformation and purification of self for true freedom.

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[I take the liberty of adding the statements that follow, which are the conclusion of the homily:

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Where there is nothing worth suffering for, even life loses its value. The Eucharist - the center of our Christian being - is founded on Jesus's sacrifice for us; it is born from the suffering of love which culminated in the Cross. We live by this love that gives itself. It gives us the courage and strength to suffer with Christ and for him in this world, knowing that in this very way our life becomes great and mature and true.

In the light of all St Paul's Letters, we see how the prophecy made to Ananias at the time of Paul's call came true in the process of teaching the Gentiles: "I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name". His suffering made him credible as a teacher of truth who did not seek his own advantage, his own glory or his personal satisfaction, but applied himself for the sake of the One who loved us and has given himself for us all.

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I have remarked on it before, but I note with gratitude and satisfaction everytime it happens, that Valli, since he came to face the truth about Pope Francis after Amoris Laetitia, has been very consistent in quoting Benedict XVI as sort of his final word to close any essay he writes with a primarily spiritual or religious theme.

A litany of [new] Bergoglian errors
by Mark Lambert

January 17, 2018

Pope Francis routinely honours, welcomes, greets, and entertains public sinners. No doubt many see in this imitation of Christ:"
When the Pharisees saw this, they asked His disciples, 'Why does your Teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?' (Mt 9:11)
This makes anyone criticising things like his honouring of Dutch abortion activist Elisabeth Ploumen seem like the Pharisees in the Gospel.

But St. Paul commands that the worst sinners must be driven out of the community: 'But now I have written to you, not to keep company, if any man that is named a brother, be a fornicator, or covetous, or a server of idols, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner: with such a one, not so much as to eat". (1Cor 5:11)

It is true that Christ ate with sinners, but He called them to repentance, something Pope Francis never does. Instead, he ignores their grave public sins and pretends all is well, saving his rebukes for those faithful to the Church.

John Allen Jr at Crux offers this interesting and timely insight into Pope Francis' culpability: "What nobody disputes is the fact of the situation, which is that Francis just flat-out knows what’s going on...which means...he gets all the credit when things go right, but also all the blame when they don’t." [Not that Allen sees any culpability at all in Bergoglio!]

Well let's have a look at what went on last week under this Pontiff "who governs in the first person singular".

First there was Fr Chiodi, new appointee to the Pontifical Academy for Life who reportedly said that there are “circumstances ­– I refer to Amoris Laetitia, Chapter 8 ­­– that precisely for the sake of responsibility, require contraception.” When contacted by the Catholic Herald, Fr Chiodi did not deny making the remarks but said he preferred not to comment. Pope Francis revamped the academy last year, removing almost 100 members and appointing 45 new ones.

Church teaching forbids [artificial] contraception under all circumstances. Pope Pius XI wrote that contraception is “intrinsically vicious” and that “the Divine Majesty regards with greatest detestation this horrible crime”. Pope Paul VI wrote in Humanae Vitae that “sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive” is “to be absolutely excluded” and that “it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it”.

So did Pope Francis immediately contact Chiodi and tick him off as he did Cardinal Sarah when he suggested there should be more reverence in the liturgy? Did the CDF issue a statement correcting this error? We heard nothing but silence. In fact, Chiodi's opposition to settled Church teaching is well known, the Catholic Herald reported on it back in June. Should we pretend the Holy Father is unaware? It seems unlikely. Does it mean then that the Holy Father supports Chiodi's opposition to Church teaching?

We also had the vice president of the German bishops’ conference calling for Catholic clergy to bless same-sex unions. This is a bishop of the Catholic Church calling for the blessing of an objective moral evil. Canon Lawyer Fr Gerald Murray said on EWTN's The World Over Live that Bode should repent of this grave sin.

“This, and this is quite simply a statement of fact, this is a total rejection of Catholic doctrine on the immorality of homosexual activity,” Murray said. “For this bishop to say that is a major scandal. He should repent of it and turn away from it because he’s leading people into sin.”

“If I seem angry it’s because I am,” added Murray. “This is infuriating. A shepherd is sent out to lead the sheep to the pure waters of Catholic truth and this man is saying that immoral activity should be blessed? He needs to repent of that teaching.” Bishop against bishop, cardinal against cardinal.

So the CDF, naturally censured him, right? Pope Francis immediately issued a statement condemning his error then, right? Or perhaps he wrote an unprecedented letter, as he did to Cardinal Sarah not so long ago? If you think any of these things happen you are mistaken. Nothing happened.

The Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin said Amoris Laetitia is marked a “paradigm shift” for the Church. The cardinal did not clarify exactly what the “paradigm shift” involved, of course — he couldn't, because there is no logical explanation. This is the sole reason they're using the indefectibility argument now, and a *very* strict interpretation of it at that, is because they *can't* explain Amoris Laetitia's suggestions after months of trying. It's a complete red herring.

The cardinal made his remarks in an interview with Vatican News, the Vatican’s recently launched official media outlet. He is right that Amoris Laetitia is a paradigm shift; it is a political move to divorce the Catholic faith from the fides quae, objective truth, logic and reason. Notice also the complete lack of credible real-world pastoral examples where Amoris Laetitia would apply - strange for something touted as being so "realistic" eh?

Then there was the news that the Pope has appointed Cardinal Roger Michael Mahoney, archbishop emeritus of Los Angeles, as his special envoy at the celebration of the 150 th anniversary of the erection of the diocese of Scranton, United States of America, to take place on 4 March 2018.

Mahoney is an instrumental figure in the cover-up of priestly sex abuses against children and minors in the USA. So much so that his successor forbade him from public ministry due to his woeful handling of abuse cases. The diocese Mahony is being sent to is known for loyalty to the true Faith. Archbishop Chaput is presiding & preaching. They probably asked the Holy Father for a Legate, and it would seem that to send Mahony is a deliberate (and nasty) message.

But perhaps the worst gaff of the week was the almost unbelievable news that Pope Francis has made the Dutch politician and extreme abortion activist Elisabeth Maria Josepha “Lilianne” Ploumen a knight in the Pontifical Equestrian Order of St. Gregory the Great.

After considerable deliberation, the best cronies could come up with on this was to protest that it was unreasonable to suggest that Pope Francis personally took the decision to award a pro-abortion campaigner. Of course, in reality nobody thought that.

What they thought & think is that this would have been inconceivable under John Paul II or Benedict XVI, & Pope Francis must withdraw the honour now. He likely won’t, of course & we’ll all draw our own conclusions.

When they eventually deemed to comment on the story, The Holy See Press Office said the Dutch militant pro-abortion politician Lilianne Ploumen was given the ancient papal honor as ‘diplomatic practice’ for a visiting official head of state delegation to the Vatican. This was a lie. The Holy See does not routinely give Papal awards to the entourage of Heads of State: nor does any one else.

Catholic Deacon Nick Donnelly made this very apposite comment on the present situation:

Note how promptly Bergoglian consigliere Fr. Spadaro got himself into the picture, literally and figuratively, for this latest Bergoglian publicity coup...

Does this join the litany of recent papal errors?

The Pope marries a couple
on the papal airplane. Hmmm.

January 18, 2018

I fairly dread papal trips these days. You never know what is going to happen on the papal airplane. Will there be another presser in which the Holy Father will say something like, “Who am I to judge?” That was a gift – now perpetually taken out of context and abused – that keeps on giving.

I read at Crux that the Holy Father married (witnessed the marriage) of a steward and stewardess on the papal airplane – during the flight.

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Paula Podest, 39, and Carlos Ciufardi, 41, have been together for over ten years. They met in the air, where she was his boss as a flight attendant for LATAM, Chile’s flagship airline. They have been civilly married since 2010. Days before they were scheduled to have their church wedding, an earthquake destroyed the church where they were supposed to marry. [Fr Z's comment: According to the Daily Mail, that was 8 years ago. 8 years… and they haven’t married in church? I suppose they had marriage prep. Also, in the case of an earthquake, the church building isn’t a sine qua non for getting married. It is sad that they couldn’t get marriage in that church, but… [sacramental] marriage is the really important part of the equation, not the building or photos.] [Did the pope's improvised and necessarily abbreviated ritual constitute a proper and valid sacrament of matrimony?]

Today, as they were posing with Francis and the rest of the crew for the official picture, Francis asked them if they were married in the Church. They told him no, and the pontiff immediately took charge, asking them if they wanted him to marry them, and they agreed.

The newlyweds shared the conversation they had with the pontiff with the journalists, with Podest acknowledging that she was “still in shock,” so he did most of the talking, even though, from what they told journalists, “she’s still the boss in the house,” as she was at the airline when they met.

“He asked us if we were married, I said no because of the earthquake, and he said, ‘well, I’ll marry you’,” according to Ciufardi. [One must credit media-meister Bergoglio for quickly seeing an opportunity to post yet another historic papal first, never mind what canon law says about the necessary preparations (including confession and communion) and prescribed ritual for any priest who performs a marriage ceremony - which is, after all, a sacrament, that must be performed properly and solemnly, not improvised on-the-spot as if it were simply a publicity stunt - which this one was, without a doubt!]
“It is historic,” the pope told them. “Never has a pope married a couple on a plane.” [How's that for full awareness that he was doing something 'irregular', but what does it matter? he is the pope and he can do as he pleases, right?]

The spouses asked the pontiff if he was certain about marrying them on the plane, asking him “are you sure?”

When the pope asked for a witness, they tapped the CEO of the airline, and to make sure there was no doubt over the validity of the sacrament, the pope “asked the cardinals who were with him” to draft the license, which they did. The document is handmade, signed by one of the cardinals, also a witness.

“He held our hands, blessed the rings, and he married us in the name of God,” Ciufardi said.

“What he said to us is very important: ‘This is the sacrament the world needs, the sacrament of marriage. Hopefully, this will motivate couples around the world to get married’,” Ciufardi said.
Speaking about the rings, Francis said that they shouldn’t be either too tight, because “they would be a torture,” or too loose, or else they might risk misplacing them.

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These days there are controversies over the meaning of marriage. These days, fewer and fewer couples are marrying.

For example, if a couple who are in an adulterous relationship because at least one party divorced his true spouse and then civilly marries another woman – without the Church giving a declaration of nullity concerning his first, true marriage, can that remarried, adulterous couple be admitted to Holy Communion, even though they haven’t made any commitment to live chaste lives? Some say, “Yes!”, and, by doing so, they call into question the very meaning of matrimony and also the Eucharist. At the very least, they make a mockery of matrimony, trivialize it.

I trust that this well-intentioned gesture by Pope Francis isn’t taken merely to be some sort of stunt, which the badly-motivated will utilize to trivialize the sacrament of matrimony even more than is is being trivialized today.

Another thing: may this couple stay together! It would be… not so great were they to split up after this rather dramatic aerial display. Headline: Papal midair marriage crashes!

I can’t say that I like the whole airplane thing. The Pope makes his calls. Who am I to judge?

Can we put sentimentality aside for a moment? Gestures like this have consequences. This wasn’t some odd priest on an airplane, it was the Vicar of Christ.

Again, this is all very huggy and warm and fuzzy. But let’s think about this.

I wasn’t there, of course, but I think it could have been a good idea to make sure they knew what matrimony is really all about. That’s what marriage preparation is for. They’ve been civilly but not sacramentally married for 8 years. All this time they didn’t seek the sacrament? What’s that about? Maybe the Pope got their story.

When a priest marries a couple, he should be reasonably sure that they know what they are getting into. He can be fairly sure if they had some kind of marriage prep, done by himself or by another priest, etc. You have to know before you witness the marriage of couple – if they are going to enter into this sacramental bond – whether or not they have the right intentions. Does the couple – I’m speaking generically now – any couple – intend to remain together for life? Do they intend for their bond to be exclusive? Do they intend to accept the gift of children?

Also, the sacrament of matrimony is one of the “sacraments of the living”. It should be received in the state of grace, after a good examination of conscience and confession. Not by “surprise”, as it were.

Moreover, you have to ascertain if they are both free to marry, having no previous bond that the Church had to examine. I imagine that, before tying their knot the Holy Father asked them about these things. Right? He was a diocesan bishop. He knows about these things.

The Pope can dispense immediately anything that can be dispensed. But if there is a previous bond… nope. And an airplane isn’t the place to deal with Pauline or Petrine Privilege. Get that wrong when you are Pope and problems result.

Sure, this on-the-spot – well…it was “on-the-spot” only relatively speaking – marriage took care of one instance of a couple living together. There are a lot more out there.

I wonder if the on-the-spot thing won’t spur odd situations:
“The Pope married that couple on an airplane! Why won’t you, Father, marry us right now here at the zoo?”

What do you want to bet that sort of thing will pop up for priests after this?

I hope that this no doubt well-intentioned gesture by the Holy Father won’t also wind up being one of those gifts that keep on giving, but not in a good way.

Anyway, I wish that couple a holy and happy life.

Thoughts on a mid-air marriage

January 18, 2018

Show of hands! Who wants to rain all over the sentimental parade lining up behind (what is being presented as) the pope’s facilitation of married love? Anyone? Anyone?

I thought not. Oh well.

Readers of this blog know that I am no fan of canonical form for marriage (cc. 1108, 1117) — a cure that has far outlived the malady (clandestine marriage) it was designed to treat — but canonical form is still law for Catholics and that law goes to the validity of Catholic marriage.

Based on the reports offered in the media so far, I cannot tell whether the ‘wedding’ that the pope put together for an unsuspecting couple satisfies Church requirements on marriage. Moreover, several other laws impacting the liceity of marriage seem simply to have been disregarded in the event.

As happened several times under earlier administrations, a representative from the Vatican Press Office assures us that “everything was valid”. Such assertions by canonically unqualified and unauthorized PR staff carry, of course, no weight. Real questions worthy of real answers are still raised by this event.

Before getting into details, however, let me say that I am sorry for Paula Podest and Carlos Ciuffardi, two perfectly pleasant flight attendants who paid a courtesy call on their celebrity guest and, next thing they know, their names, faces, and rather odd marriage history are being broadcast to the world. They did not ask for a wedding and were astonished when Pope Francis suggested it. This was not their idea.

Now, about the matter itself:
Popes have jurisdiction for the external forum anywhere on earth (cc. 134, 331, 1108), so Francis can officiate at a wedding anywhere, anytime. [Just to get things straight here: In the canon law of the Catholic Church, a distinction is made between the internal forum, where an act of governance is made without publicity, and the external forum, where the act is public and verifiable. In canon law, internal forum, the realm of conscience, is contrasted with the external or outward forum; thus, a marriage might be null and void in the internal forum, but binding outwardly, i.e.,in the external forum, for want of judicial proof to the contrary.]

But officiating at a wedding means something specific: it means asking for and receiving the consent of the contracting parties to marrying each each other (c. 1108) here and now. Per the Rite of Matrimony, consent is sought from each party individually and must be oriented to marrying the other party at this time; the request is not posed as a joint question to the couple about being married, akin to, ‘do you two want to be married?’, but rather is framed ‘do you marry him/her?’ at this point in time.

If consent (the heart of marriage per c. 1057) is not adequately asked for and received, it is not exchanged, and such a couple would not be married (and, No, ‘Ecclesia supplet’ cannot make up for a failure in what is actually sacramental — as opposed to canonical — form).

The above reports mention, as far as I can see, only the pope’s broaching the topic of marriage by asking the couple whether they wanted to be married, placing their hands together, saying a few inspirational words about marriage, and pronouncing them husband and wife. But such a sequence describes, not at all, a present exchange of consent by the parties. Let us hope, then, that in the actual event considerably more was said than has been reported.

Second, canonical form demands two independent actual witnesses to the exchange of consent, meaning that five persons must be immediately present for the wedding — not folks who heard about it a few minutes later, or who saw something happening and wondered, hey, what’s going on back there? — but five persons acting together and at the same time: a bride, a groom, an officiant, and two other actual witnesses.

While reports are unclear as to how many people actually witnessed this event, and while this photo shows four people in the event (plus a camera man?) and four signatures on a document, another photo shows five names on the marriage document, so one may presume (c. 1541) accordingly.

Third, several canons impacting the liceity of weddings (norms on ‘liceity’ often being regarded as wink-wink rules in Church life, especially when higher-ups model the wink-winking) were apparently ignored here, including:
- the requirement for serious pastoral preparation prior to a wedding (c. 1063),
- administration of Confirmation [if one or both spouses have not been confirmed] before Matrimony (c. 1065),
- urging of Penance and holy Communion before a wedding (c. 1065), -
verification that no obstacles to validity or liceity are in place (c. 1066), securing evidence of the contractants’ freedom to marry (c. 1068) upon pain of acting illicitly without it (c. 1114),
- an expectation that Catholic weddings be celebrated in a parish church (cc. 1115, 1118), and
- making use of the Church’s treasury of liturgical books for celebration of the sacramental rite (c. 1119).

As this story reverberates ‘round the world, now, deacons, priests, and bishops who try to uphold Church norms fostering values such as deliberate marriage preparation, an ecclesial context for a Catholic wedding, and the use of established and reliable texts for expressing consent will, undoubtedly, have the Podest-Ciuffardi wedding tossed in their face as evidence that, if Pope Francis does not insist on such legalistic silliness and only cares about whether two people love one another, why shouldn’t they do likewise? The ministry of conscientious clergy in this regard just got harder.

As mentioned above, I would be happy to see the requirement of canonical form for marriage eliminated, this, for several reasons, one of which is that — long story omitted — we could actually make higher demands of Catholics who want to marry before our clergy than we can currently demand.

But the pope’s example of a spontaneous, zero-preparation, wedding is not at all what I and like-minded others have in mind. This couple undoubtedly gave more thought and attention to what they did by civilly marrying before a magistrate back in 2010 than they could have possibly given to what the pope suggested to them, on a few seconds’ notice, while at work, high above the Andes mountains.

If I have to say it, I will: I hope Podest and Ciuffardi are married and that they live happily ever after, but I worry whenever momentous life decisions are taken on a minute’s notice and under circumstances bound to contribute to one’s being carried away by events.

The pope has opined, apparently more than once, that “half of all sacramental marriages are null”. Here’s hoping that Podest and Ciuffardi beat those odds.

But, more surprises in connection with what some Bergoglio fanatics might well consider the 'wedding of the millennium' so far... Which confirms my first suspicion that the event was not quite all that 'spontaneous' (Why, for instance, would the pope ask airline crew members if they were married in Church during a fairly routine photo session with the crew?)


The mid-air marriage gets muddier

January 19, 2018

Popes on planes aren’t supposed to be a setting from which to draw fodder for canon law essay exams, but as far back as Pope Benedict XVI, such flights have occasioned more than their fair share of papal words or actions carrying canonical implications but undertaken with little apparent advertence to canon law. [As far as I can recall, the canon law question came up when Benedict XVI said in 2007 on his way to Brazil, that he agreed with the Mexican bishops who said Catholic politicians in Mexico had excommunicated themselves by legalizing abortion in that nation’s capital. “It’s nothing new, it’s normal, it wasn’t arbitrary. It is what is foreseen by the church’s doctrine,” Benedict told reporters. That does not sound like he spoke with 'little apparent advertence to canon law'. But the media spun it to say that the pope was himself excommunicating pro-abortion politicians.]

Let’s start with some fact questions in regard to the mid-air marriage recently officiated by Pope Francis. It is emerging that maybe the wedding wasn’t as spontaneous as reported, that maybe the happy couple were not “astonished” at the pope’s allegedly sudden idea, and that maybe the ‘Here?!’ and ‘It was a great surprise’ portrayals were expected.

Last month, in an interview published in emol.com, Podest and Ciuffardi, picked to serve on the cabin crew for the papal visit, talked about their civil marriage from some eight years ago (which they had been too busy to convalidate), and stated that they

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“both hope that in January this delayed [wedding] plan can finally take place on the plane and be officiated over by none other than Pope Francis himself. ‘We would like it. This is our place, our second home, it is where we feel secure.’” In the original Spanish: Ambos esperan que en enero próximo este postergado plan pueda finalmente concretarse sobre el avión y dirigido nada menos que por el mismísimo Papa Francisco. “Nos encantaría. Es nuestro lugar, es nuestra segunda casa, es donde nos sentimos seguros”.

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C’mon, someone was obviously planning something. It would be interesting to know who and what. [It's sad that the 'newlyweds' themselves have added an aspect of falsehood to this entire set-up, because it appears to have been an orchestrated set-up.]

In any event, a slurry of canon law exam questions can be drawn from this event in light of other facts, assuming they are facts (see my D&A no. 3 to the right), as discussed here, including:
— Defend the assertion that “convalidation” in a lack of form situation differs from a “wedding” only in regard to accidentals. Be sure to discuss Canon 1160.
— Discuss whether the official minister at a Catholic wedding can serve as one of the two other “witnesses” for purposes of canonical form (Canon 1108).
— Explain how the manifestation of consent to marriage is be “asked for and received” per Canon 1108 and the Rite of Marriage.
— Discuss how attention to various norms for the liceity of weddings/marriages contribute to the Church’s pastoral responsibility teach the faithful about the importance of marriage. Include at least three examples.
— Discuss the difference between “convalidation” and “radical sanation”. Include in your answer whether witnesses are required for sanations and whether consent is renewed and accepted in sanations.
— Discuss the canonical and pastoral differences between an ecclesiastical authority figure’s disregarding of the law versus one’s dispensing from the law. Give indicators by which the two actions might be distinguished. You may assume a Canon 91 actor.
— Challenge or defend the continuation of the requirement of canonical form for marriage. If you challenge form, account for Cdl. Ratinger’s 1994 remarks on same; if you defend form, account for its being the first step in the sequence that led to the ‘mid-air marriage’ case of 2018.

Fr H's comment so r:

On that mid-air marriage

January 19, 2018

On the one hand, it is extremely good that PF did not just tell them that they were All Right as they were. His action admirably made clear that they needed to get married because, despite their civil 'marriage', they were not in fact married. Eccellente. Clearly, [??? Do we know that?] he will first have taken them aside and absolved them from their acts of fornication, before receiving their consent in the Holy Sacrament of Matrimony. What's not to like?

On the other hand, canonists have been uneasy about the "wedding" in the airliner. It all interests me because twice recently, 2 January and 14 January, I have vigorously argued against the apparent belief of some super-hyper-ueberpapalists, that the Roman Pontiff, just because he makes and dispenses from laws, is himself above the Law.

And if it were to be asserted that "By doing X, PF tacitly dispensed himself from the law(s) against X", I would regard the implications of that approach as thoroughly disturbing ... almost like the Nazi notion that the Fuehrer's will is the Supreme Law. The whole business would suggest the ugly idea that "I'm the Pope and so I can do anything".

Indeed he is and indeed he can't.

God bless the pair of them! And him as well!

I wonder if the journalists will check that they were canonically free to marry, and ferret around to uncover the facts about the Act of God which prevented them from marrying in due form in the first place...

Marco Tosatti comments by way of Pezzo Grosso...

Pezzo Grosso is disconsolate for what
he considers another major error by this pope
Translated from

January 19, 2018

I must say that I was expecting it a bit. After having read reports and seen the images of the mid-air marriage ‘celebrated’ by the pope, launched and disseminated by the Vatican communications machinery, and commented in various ways on the social networks, I told myself, “I’d like to know what Pezzo Grosso will write me this time.” As in fact, he did. The only surprise was that he did not do so earlier. He wrote:

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Dear Tosatti,
I learn from Corriere della Sera that the pope celebrated ‘a surprise marriage’ on an airplane. The newspaper says the couple have lived together for 8 years, civilly married in 2010 and have two children but have wanted to be married in Church. So it has taken them 8 years to want to be married in Church, and then to do so on an airplane, not a church… Then, we are told by the Vatican spokesman that the formula used by the pope to marry the couple was “Are you sure? Are you both sure?”

Well, amen! To play with the sacraments, as with playing with Catholic practice in general, is dangerous. In just a few moments, the pope managed to ridicule the sacrament of matrimony and perhaps even that of penance (did they confess to him formally and did he then absolve them formally that for eight years they have been living as husband and wife without benefit of sacramental marriage?) I will not even get into other required procedures for a Catholic marriage such as prior banns, etc.

Everything with this pope seems to be part of a movie, a fiction, interpreted by an actor who is a master at improvisation, loves to spring ‘surprises’, knows how to create a true-to-life telenovela. But one no longer wonders at what he does – we suffer, and that’s our part. When I read about this latest ‘show’, O thought of Blessed Antonio Rosmini. If he had witnessed this today, then the wounds of the Church* would have been six, not five – the sixth being the perplexing exhibitionism at the summit of ‘the Church’.

---

*Blessed Rosmini (1797-1855, beatified in November 2007 ) wrote a book entitled The Five Wounds of the Church, in which he says that the five main evils of the Italian Church in his time correspond to the five wounds on the hands, feet, and side of the Divine Redeemer.
- He likens the wound in Jesus's left hand to the lack of sympathy between the clergy and people in the act of public worship, which he sees as a result of a lack of adequate Christian evangelical teaching.
- And it is to be accounted for by the wound in the right hand — the insufficient education of the clergy, their secularisation and their alienation from scripture and their bishops.
- This, in turn, was both caused and perpetuated by the great wound in the side, which pierced the Heart of the Divine Sufferer, and which Rosmini sees as a parallel for the divisions among the Bishops, separating them from one another, and also from their clergy and people, forgetting their true union in the Body of Christ.
- The wound of the right foot is compared to the civil power of the Bishops making them into worldly schemers and politicians, more or less intent on selfish interests.
- The wound of the left foot is compared to events of the feudal period, when the freehold tenures of the Church were treated as fiefs by an overlord, or suzerain, who saw in the chief pastors of the flock of Christ only a particular variety of vassals or dependants.

When the pope himself chooses to make light of the sacrament of matrimony by officiating at a 'marriage' that seems to have had everything to do with getting
maximum publicity mileage rather than setting things sacramentally right for a couple who have been living together unmarried for eight years, he is really
telling all the priests of the world that they have the free option to improvise on the sacraments when they want to do so, and not because there
is an emergency that may perhaps require them to improvise as best they can.

Certainly there was no emergency for the Chilean steward and flight attendant, who apparently planned on getting a 'church marriage' in the way they succeeded
to do. Why could not the pope have sat down with them for a few minutes, instead, to tell them, for example: "Tell me who your bishop or parish priest is,
and I shall instruct them to arrange so that you can get married properly in church as soon as the requirements are met"? He didn't because he thinks
of himself as a unique pope in the history of the Church who would set yet another historic example by marrying the couple then and there! Obviously this pope
does not believe in the adage that if you must do anything, do it right and do it well, because you are not serious and sincere if you just do it any which way,
sloppily and wrongly. The pope's cavalier attitude toward the sacraments is an example of the minimalism that Roberto de Mattei describes in his new essay:

Minimalism: the present-day
sickness of Catholicism
by Roberto De Mattei
Translated for Rorate caeli by 'Francesca Romana' from

January 17, 2018

In Italy recently, two videos have been circulating online which give pause for thought. The first replicates the words of Don Fredo Olivero, Rector of the Church of San Rocco in Turin, uttered during Midnight Mass. “Do you know why I’m not going to say the Creed? Because I don’t believe it!”

Amidst the laughter of the faithful, the priest continues: “As if anyone understands it – but as for myself after many years I’ve realized that it was something I didn’t understand and couldn’t accept. Let’s sing something else that presents the essential things of the faith.” The priest then substituted the Creed with the song “Dolce Sentire” from the film “Brother Sun, Sister Moon”.

The Creed sums up the articles of the Catholic Faith. To deny merely one of these articles constitutes heresy. To deny the Creed, in block, constitutes an act of public apostasy. Further, to deny it during Holy Mass, constitutes an intolerable scandal. The removal, suspension a divinis and excommunication of the priest should have been immediate. Yet none of this occurred.

While the media was spreading this incredible news, the lone voice of ecclesiastical reaction came from the other end of Italy, in Sicily, where Don Salvatore Priola, parish-priest and rector of the Marian Sanctuary of Altavilla Milicia, expressed his indignation in a homily against the priest from Piedmont, urging his faithful, and every baptized person, to react publically in the face of such a scandal.

A video reports his impassioned words:

---

“Brothers and sisters – he said – when you hear a priest saying things that are against the Catholic Faith, you must have the courage to stand up and tell the priest - even during the Mass: this is not allowed! It’s time to stand up when you hear things that are against our Creed. Even if a bishop says them even if a priest says them. Stand up and say: Father, Your Grace, this is not allowed. Because we have the Gospel: Because we are all under the Gospel, from the Pope down. We are all under the Gospel".

---

The two opposing homilies call for some reflections. If a priest goes as far as repudiating the Catholic Creed, without incurring sanctions by the ecclesiastical authorities, we find ourselves indeed faced with a situation of crisis in the Church of unparalleled gravity. Even more since the case of Don Frido Olivero is not isolated. Thousands of priests in the world think the same way and act accordingly.

What appears to be something out of the ordinary though, and which consequently merits the total appreciation of true Catholics, is the Sicilian priest’s invitation to stand up in Church and admonish a priest publically, even a bishop, who is giving scandal. This public correction is not only legitimate, but at times a duty.

This is a point that ought to be emphasized. The true cause of the present crisis is not so much in the arrogance of those who have lost the faith, but in the weakness of those, who, conserving it, choose to be silent, rather than defend it publically. This minimalism constitutes our present-day spiritual and moral sickness.

For many Catholics, we should not oppose errors, as it is enough “to behave well”, or resistance should be limited to the defense of the negative, moral absolutes, that is to those norms that prohibit always and in every case, specific behaviors against the Divine and moral law. This is sacrosanct, but we must remember that there are not only negative precepts which tell us what we can never do, there are also positive precepts which tell us what we must do; what works and attitudes that are pleasing to God and through which we are able to love our neighbor.

While the negative precepts (thou shalt not kill, steal or commit impure acts) are formulated in concrete terms seeing as they prohibit a specific action always and everywhere, without exceptions, the positive precepts (prayer, sacrifice, love of the Cross) are not specific, as they cannot establish what we must do in every circumstance, yet they are also obligatory, according to the situation.

The modernists are improperly spreading “situation ethics” from the positive precepts to the negative ones, in the name of God’s love, forgetting that loving means observing the moral law, as Jesus said: “He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them; he it is that loveth me” (Jn 14, 21).

The conservatives for their part, often attest positions of minimalistic morality, forgetting that a Catholic must love God with all their heart, mind, soul and strength (Mk 12, 28-30). For this St.Thomas Aquinas explains that we are all bound not only to the good, but to the greater good, not at the level of action, but in that of love (Mt 19, 12).

The first moral truth is love. Man must love God above all creatures, and love creatures according to the order established by God. There are negative acts that can never be carried out, under any circumstance. Yet there are positive acts, which, in determinate circumstances are mandatory to carry out. This moral duty does not have its foundation in a negative precept, but in the love of God.

Precepts then have a lower limit: what one cannot do, but they do not have a higher limit, since loving God and neighbor have no boundaries and we are perfect in the measure of our love.

John Paul II explains it in no. 52 of Veritatis Splendor. “The fact that only the negative commandments oblige always and under all circumstances does not mean that in the moral life prohibitions are more important than the obligation to do good indicated by the positive commandments. The reason is this: the commandment of love of God and neighbour does not have in its dynamic any higher limit, but it does have a lower limit, beneath which the commandment is broken. Furthermore, what must be done in any given situation depends on the circumstances, not all of which can be foreseen.”

We must oppose the theory of the “lesser evil” with that of the “greater good”. At the level of action, the good cannot be determined a priori, since the actions we might carry out are many, uncertain and indeterminate. However, if the greater good presents itself as clear in our conscience, well defined and as such that we can act upon it hic et nunc (here and now), negligence is culpable: we have the moral obligation to act on it.

The precept of fraternal correction is among the positive moral precepts. One is not always obliged to do it, and one cannot demand it a duty from others, but each one of us must feel bound to react, faced with public negations of the Catholic Truth. Those who truly love God have to follow the example of Eusebius, the layman, subsequently made a bishop, who, in 423, rose up in public against Nestorius who had denied the Divine Maternity.

Don Salvatore Priola’s exhortation to stand up when we hear things said against the Catholic Faith, is an invitation to manifest our maximalism in loving God and not hide our light under a bushel, but put it in a lamp-stand, [in this way] illuminating the darkness of our times with our example.

Meanwhile, Mundabor is relentless with his intemperate language against Bergoglio, but making allowances for that [he is stooping to Bergoglio's level in his invective], there is some truth in what he says...

Minimal crowd for a papal Mass

January 19, 2018



[The photo, as you can see, is from the revitalized, renovated and consolidated Vatican media outlet. Common sense might have advised not releasing the photo
at all, but it comes from their own video. At first I thought - "oh, the photo must have been taken long before the event was scheduled to begin, when only the
early birds were in", but then the popemobile with the pope in it is clearly in the photo so it does reflect the attendance for this papal Mass. Thank God there was
never any such embarrassing photo taken in Benedict XVI's Pontificate... So, all right now, Spadaro, Ivereigh, Tornielli, Allen and all you assorted professional
makers/keepers of the fast-fading myth of the-most-popular-pope-ever, let's hear your explanations! Perhaps a terrorist threat or fear of anti-Bergoglio bombs
kept away the faithful who really and truly love this pope despite all the negative polling that preceded his visit?]

This is the astonishing picture of the epic failure of Francis in Chile.

Who is interested in [an old, lewd, bitter ass] someone spouting sugary nonsense or socialist drivel every time he opens that
[stupid] mouth of his?

Who has any respect for someone constantly sabotaging the Sacraments?

When will the Vatican (and the endless choir of sycophants constantly licking his boots) admit that this man [old, lurid scoundrel]
not only does not attract, but positively repels the faithful?

This man is an embarrassment not only for the Church as a whole, but even to those who support his destructive agenda. Too vulgar,
[too lewd], too grumpy, too short-tempered to keep the lie of the “humble Pope” going.

The more he keeps traveling, the more we will see pictures like this one, which will couple well with the one of a more and more
deserted Saint Peter's Square in the Vatican...

Athenagoras, Orthodoxy's Bergoglio

January 19, 2018

The day Pope Francis moved on from Chile to Peru on his current trip marked the beginning all around the world of the annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which culminates on January 25 with the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul.

Half a century ago, on July 25, 1967, in Istanbul, the ecumenical journey marked the second meeting between Paul VI and the ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Athenagoras. [It followed their historic first meeting in Jerusalem in 1965.]

And on the occasion of this anniversary, Eliana Versace, a Church historian, has published in the “Notiziario” of the Paul VI Institute in Brescia two documents of exceptional interest.

These are two reports sent by the Italian ambassador to Turkey at the time, Mario Mondello, to the Italian foreign minister, Senator Amintore Fanfani.

The first report is a detailed account of that 1967 trip of Papa Montini to Turkey. And the second, a dozen pages or so in length, reports the long conversation that the ambassador had with Athenagoras shortly after that meeting with Paul VI.

A conversation that the ambassador himself found “surprising” and “troubling,” beginning with the personage he found before him: “picturesque,” “ardent and affable,” “perhaps a bit awkward and perhaps a bit histrionic.”

And this character profile itself leads one to associate the figure of Athenagoras with that of pope Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

But there’s more, much more. We now know that there is an extraordinary proximity between the two, precisely in their manner of conceiving of the ecumenical journey.

To grasp this proximity it is enough to read this passage from the ambassador’s report:

---

“To the question from the ambassador on the importance of the theological differences among the various Churches, the patriarch responded vigorously, and said: ‘And how could I attribute importance to them, if there are none?’

To explain the meaning of his words to his surprised interlocutor, he compared himself to a diplomat: ‘You know, theologians are like jurists. Do you diplomats listen to the jurists when you feel that you must carry out some gesture or some important act of international politics? Of course not. Well then, I am a diplomat. Besides, out of scruples of conscience I asked a few theologians to study in what these differences would consist. Well then, you know what they found? That there are none. That’s it. On the contrary, they realized that our Churches separated without any motives for conflict, without any reason, but only because of a succession of actions carried out by one side and the other, imperceptibly. In short, a querelle d’évêques (quarrel among bishops).”
And further on:
“So there was only one path for the Patriarch of Constantinople [himself, Athenagoras] to follow: ‘There is only one Blessed Mother, the same for all. Just as there is only one Christ, the same for all. And we all use the same baptism, which makes us all Christians. Enough with the differences: let us draw near to each other with ‘acts.’ The only path to follow is that of love and of charity, and love and charity impose the way of union.”

---

[Not, of course, that any appreciable 'progress' was made in Catholic-Orthodox relations until in 2007 (40 years since Athenagoras said all that), the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialog between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches made a breakthrough agreement in Ravenna to begin discussing the primary issue that divides the two Churches: the primacy of the pope. But whereas the subsequent meetings of the Commission (Cyprus, 2009, and Austria, 2010) pursued this discussion of "The Role of the Bishop of Rome in the Communion of the Church in the First Millennium" (that is, before the Great Schism of 1057), the two subsequent ones in Bergoglio's pontificate appeared to have dropped that in favor of 'Primacy and Synodality in the Church'.]

And now compare this with what Pope Francis said on February 26, 2017 in a question-and-answer session at the All Saints Anglican Church in Rome:

---

"Your Predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, warned against the risk, in ecumenical dialogue, of giving priority to cooperation in social initiatives rather than following the more demanding path of theological agreement. It appears that you prefer the contrary, that is, to 'walk and work' together in order to reach the goal of Christian unity. Is this true?"
"I do not know the context in which Pope Benedict said this. I don’t know, and so it is a little difficult for me. I cannot really answer this.... Whether he meant to say this or not?... Perhaps it was during a conversation with theologians.... But I am sure that both aspects are important. This is certain. Which of the two has priority?...

And on the other hand, Patriarch Athenagoras’s famous comment – which is true because I asked Patriarch Bartholomew and he said: 'This is true' – when he said to Blessed Pope Paul VI: 'Let us make unity together and leave the theologians on an island to think about it'. It was a joke, but historically, it is accurate. I had doubts but Patriarch Bartholomew told me that it was true.

But what is the heart of the matter, because I believe that what Pope Benedict said is true: we must seek a theological dialogue in order to also seek the roots... of the Sacraments .. of many issues on which we are still not in agreement. But this cannot be done in a laboratory: it must be done as we advance, along the way. We are on a journey, and as we journey, we also have these discussions. Theologians do this. But in the meantime, we help each other, we, one with the other, with our needs, in our lives; also spiritually we help each other.

For example, in the ‘twinning’ [of the parishes] there was the fact of studying Scripture together, and we help each other in our charitable service, in service to the poor, in hospitals, in wars.... It is very important. This is very important.

It is not possible to have ecumenical dialogue while standing still. No. [But in the mindset of Bergoglio and the professional ecumenicists, dialog is the end in itself and becomes a never-ending dialectic that never gets resolved! And what is that but 'standing still'?] Ecumenical dialogue is carried out as we walk, because ecumenical dialogue is a journey, and theological matters are discussed along the way. I believe this betrays neither the thought of Pope Benedict, nor the reality of ecumenical dialogue. This is my interpretation. If I knew the context in which that thought was expressed, I might say something different, but this is what comes to mind to say."

---

And what the pope said on November 30, 2014, on the flight back from Turkey:

---

"I believe we are moving forward in our relations with the Orthodox; they have the sacraments and apostolic succession... we are moving forward. What are we waiting for? For theologians to reach an agreement? That day will never come, I assure you, I'm sceptical. Theologians work well but remember what Athenagoras said to Paul VI: 'Let's put the theologians on an island to discuss among themselves and we’ll just get on with things!'

I thought that this might not have been true, but Bartholomew told me: 'No, it's true, he said that'. We mustn't wait. Unity is a journey we have to take, but we need to do it together. This is spiritual ecumenism: praying together, working together. There are so many works of charity, so much work.... Teaching together.... Moving forward together. This is spiritual ecumenism. Then there is an ecumenism of blood: when they kill Christians, we have so many martyrs.... starting with those in Uganda, canonized 50 years ago: half were Anglican, half Catholic, but the ones [who killed them] didn't say: 'You're Catholic.... you're Anglican….' No: 'You are Christian', and so their blood mixed. This is the ecumenism of blood. Our martyrs are crying out: 'We are one! We already have unity, in spirit and in blood'. […]

This is ecumenism of blood, which helps us so much, which tells us so much. And I think we have to take this journey courageously. Yes, share university chairs, it's being done, but go forward, continue to do so.... I’ll say something that a few, perhaps, are not able to understand: the Eastern Catholic Churches have a right to exist, but uniatism is a dated word. We cannot speak in these terms today. We need to find another way."

---

It is not known for sure where and when Athenagoras is thought to have made his quip about the theologians to be marooned on an island. Certainly not during his first historic encounter with Paul VI in Jerusalem on January 5, 1964, the entire audio recording of which has been made public.

The fact is, however, that the quip has entered the oral tradition, and Francis has resorted to it a number of times for confirmation of his own vision of ecumenism.

Returning to the report of Ambassador Mondello, Eliana Versace has also published a summary of it in L'Osservatore Romano in July 2017.

And it is a letter that has other surprises in store, for example, where Athenagoras tells the ambassador that he is in the habit of addressing Papa Montini as “Paul II, because he is the true successor of Saint Paul, updated for the present time,” or better yet, by the name of “Paul II the Victorious,” “imitating with his hand the gesture that Churchill used to indicate victory.”

In the run-up to the present week of ecumenical prayer, Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the pontifical council for Christian unity, recalled in L'Osservatore Romano that there are two paths that feed into the ecumenical way, from its origin until today.

The first, begun in 1910, took the name of “Faith and Order,” and has “as its primary objective the search for unity in faith,” on the terrain of doctrine and theology.

The second, opened in 1914, took the name of “Life and Work,” and is intended to unify the various Christian denominations, regardless of their doctrinal divisions, in a shared “effort on behalf of understanding and peace among peoples.”

It is patently clear that of these two paths only the second interests Pope Francis. Just as, we now know, it did Patriarch Athenagoras before him.

BTW, the slogan for the pope's visit to Chile was 'Mi paz les doy' (My peace I give you) which is not in quotation marks and is followed by his name Papa Francisco, giving the impression that he is
imparting his peace (whatever that may be), and not that this is something Jesus said! The . Whose peace is he giving? The slogan for Peru is a generic 'Unidos por la esperanza' (United for hope) -
should that not be 'unidos en la esperanza' (United in hope')?

This is the second BBC story that has surprised me these days... Are there cracks now in what was once the MSM's monolithic and relentless hagiography of Jorge Bergoglio?

Pope's 'slander' comment
angers Chile abuse victims

19 January 2018

Pope Francis has triggered anger in Chile after accusing victims of a paedophile priest of slander.

Francis said there was "no proof" for their claims that abuse by Father Fernando Karadima had been covered up by another man, Bishop Juan Barros.

"There is not one single piece of proof against him (Bishop Barros). It is all slander. Is that clear?" the Pope said.

One Karadima victim said the Pope's earlier plea for forgiveness over clerical sex abuse was "empty".

The Pope made his comments on Thursday before celebrating Mass outside the city of Iquique in northern Chile.

"The day someone brings me proof against Bishop Barros, then I will talk," the Pope told journalists.

What is the controversy about?
The Catholic Church suffered a body blow in Chile in 2010 when Father Karadima was publicly accused of molesting several teenaged boys in the capital, Santiago, starting in the 1980s. In 2011, under Benedict XVI, the Vatican found him guilty of abusing teenage boys and sentenced to a lifetime of "penance and prayer".

He never faced criminal prosecution in Chile as too much time had passed, but the judge who heard victims' testimony in a year-long investigation described them as "truthful and reliable".

Mr Cruz says that Bishop Barros was present when Father Karadima - then the bishop's mentor - kissed and groped him and another boy. While Bishop Barros has not been accused of abuse, the Pope has been criticised for appointing him bishop of Osorno in 2015. Barros's ordination ceremony had to be cut short over protests in the cathedral.

What is the response from accusers?
Juan Carlos Cruz was one of the bishop's accusers who was quick to condemn the Pope's stance.

"As if I could have taken a selfie or photo while Karadima abused me and others with Juan Barros standing next to him watching everything," he tweeted.

"These people are absolutely crazy, and @Pontifex (the Pope's Twitter handle) is talking about reparation to the victims. Nothing has changed, and his plea for forgiveness is empty."

Another Barros accuser, James Hamilton, told a news conference the response revealed an "unknown face" of the pontiff. "What the Pope has done today is offensive and painful, and not only against us, but against everyone seeking to end the abuses" he said.

Pope's defence will raise questions
Analysis
by James Reynolds in Rome


Pope Francis began his trip to Chile with an uncompromising message: "It is right to ask for forgiveness and to make every effort to support the victims [of abuse committed by priests]."

This makes his subsequent dismissal of claims made again
st Bishop Juan Barros all the more difficult for victims to understand.

At the heart of this issue lies the Pope's decision to offer his consistent support to the bishop. In 2015, despite opposition in Chile, Francis appointed Juan Barros as the Bishop of Osorno. The Pope was then recorded telling visitors to the Vatican that there was not a shred of evidence that the bishop had covered up crimes committed by a fellow priest. On his trip to Chile, Francis repeated this blunt defence of Juan Barros.

In legal terms, the burden of proof does not lie with the Pope or his bishop to prove the bishop's innocence. But a papacy is also judged in other ways. Some will wonder why the Pope does not offer a more detailed explanation as to exactly why he chooses to believe and defend a bishop against the cover-up allegations made by victims in Chile.

The controversy comes at a time when questions are being asked about the Vatican's efforts to tackle clerical sexual abuse. In 2014, the Pope set up a high-profile commission to advise him. But the two commission members who were themselves survivors of clerical abuse resigned in protest at an apparent lack of progress. At the end of 2017, the commission's term formally expired. Its exact future is unclear. [That the pope has not even bothered to extend its term is indicative in itself of a fundamental lack of seriousness in Bergoglio's periodic iterations of 'zero tolerance' for priestly sex offenders even as he appears to be coddling not a few those who have serious charges of involvement and actual commission of abuses!]

What other response has there been in Chile?
Another senior Catholic figure in Chile, Bishop Alejandro Goic of Rancagua, criticised Bishop Barros's continuing role in the Church, telling T13 radio: "It left me with a bitter taste that a brother of mine occupied a leading role [in the abuse scandal] - that was not good."

He added: "The victims are the priority, they should be the main concern of the Church."

The state co-ordinator for the Pope's visit to Chile, Benito Baranda, told Radio Cooperativa that Bishop Barros "should have stopped being a bishop a long time ago" and that his presence was damaging the Church.

Writing in La Tercera newspaper, journalist Ascanio Cavallo said the Pope's stance could "multiply the wrath" of those who want to see the bishop expelled from his post, but added: "There is no longer any doubt: the Pope supports his bishop."

Earlier in his Chile trip, Francis had met victims of sexual abuse by priests in the country. He cried with them and said he felt "pain and shame" over the scandal. [To which he appears to have a selective bias. Would it not have been more dramatic - and genuinely pastoral - if he had asked to meet with Barros's accusers and listen to their stories, instead of simply dismissing what they say as 'slander'?]

The US-based NGO Bishop Accountability says almost 80 members of Catholic clergy have been accused of child sex abuse in Chile since 2000.

Pope Francis arrived in Peru late on Thursday for a three-day visit which will conclude his two-nation South America trip.

Pope defends accused bishop,
denounces accusers:
The pattern is familiar
By Phil Lawler
catholicculture.org
January 19, 2018

In the bad old days, when Catholic parents reported that a priest had abused their child, and/or that the pastor was aware of the abuse, the bishop might scold them, saying that their complaints were nonsense, saying that they had no proof, accusing them of calumny.

The bishop might make these harsh statements, in the bad old days, even if he was fully aware of charges against the priest — even if he had encouraged the pastor to resign because of his mishandling of the situation.

These were the bad old days.

But in the bad old days the faithful parents still had some reasons to hope for justice:
- They could hope that a petition to Rome would reach the ears of the Pope. But now it’s the Pope who is denouncing the accusers.
- They could hope that the secular courts would provide satisfaction. But the secular courts in Chile have already rendered their verdict —acknowledging the strength of the accusations — and the Pope is not swayed.
- They could hope that mass-media outlets would investigate their claims, putting more pressure on the bishop to take them seriously. But now the mass media still give Pope Francis the friendliest of coverage. [Not in Chile at the moment! And not lately by the BBC!]

In the bad old days, a bishop could dismiss and insult aggrieved parents just because he could: because no one held him accountable.

These are the bad old days again.

It was not accidental that to represent him at the centenary celebration of the Church in Scranton, Pennsylvania, this pope chose disgraced Cardinal Roger Mahony, former Archbishop of San Francisco whose record in pro-active covering-up for the sex-offender priests in his archdiocese was arguably far worse than the late Cardinal Law! Of all the cardinals Bergoglio could have named, why choose Mahony at all? I think it was Lawler himself who commented that this was a deliberate slap at Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia, who was probably the first bishop in the world to have issued pastoral guidelines on AL that upheld Catholic teaching and tradition rather than the open sacramental indiscipline and sacrilege of AL.

When a papal farce unravels instantly
What for does the Vatican have this new amped-up, overhyped Secretariat for Communications when it cannot even manage its bag of abracadabra tricks right?

Remember when Benedict XVI became the object of worldwide opprobrium - and media ridicule - because no one at the Vatican had informed him of FSSPX
Bishop Williamson's Holocaust negationism before he lifted his excommunication? Everyone assumed at the time that Williamson's record was common knowledge
to anyone who would have bothered to google him online, but the fact was that his views about the Holocaust had never been published before Swedish
TV decided to broadcast an interview with him done in November 2009 on the very eve of the day in January 2010 when the Vatican announced
that Benedict XVI was lifting the excommunication of the four FSSPX bishops consecrated illegally by Mons. Lefebvre. [I went into considerable effort
proving this at the time with screen captures of searches about Williamson's published statements before January 2010.]

My point is that the information on Williamson's Holocaust views was obviously not available from the usual sources and resources at the time Benedict XVI
decided to lift the excommunications. Knowing about it would not have stopped the pope from lifting the excommunications but it would have given the
Vatican time to prepare the public and let the whole world know that
1) having erroneous historical views is not an excommunicable sin for the Church - nor a sin at all, for that matter, because stupidity is not a sin if its
worst consequence is to hold up the stupid person to ridicule; and
2) that Williamson's denial of the Holocaust, while lamentable, had nothing to do with why he was excommunicated nor why the excommunication was being lifted.

You would think the Vatican Press Office might have learned something from that 'fiasco' in 2010. So, committing a similar and thoroughly avoidable mistake in
2018 is unforgivable. Especially since obviously there was some preparation for this 'spontaneous' event on the part of the Vatican.

One imagines that in the months preceding the visit, those coordinating the papal visit in Chile would have forwarded the couple's wish-request to the Vatican
(along with the detailed plans for the use of the Chilean airline while the pope was in Chile), and that the competent official(s) 'in charge of papal anecdotes' promptly
seized on it as an opportunity too precious not to exploit for setting yet another historic Bergoglian first.

Obviously, too, their Chilean counterparts failed to inform them (one presumes after the request had already been more or less approved by the Vatican as one of
those 'surprises' that the pope would spring during his trip) that, in fact, the excited couple had spoken about it to a Chilean newspaper (more than one, as it turns out).
Or perhaps both the Chilean papal-visit coordinators and their Vatican counterparts thought that the couple's giving away the game a few weeks before the visit would be
overlooked, given the PR force majeure of a new and unprecedented papal action!

They cannot say the pope was not briefed about it beforehand, because why and how would he know, during a routine souvenir photo session with the plane crew, that
one steward and one flight attendant had been concubines for eight years, and therefore offer to marry them then and there? Bergoglio has taken part in more serious
lies before this for anyone with commonsense to doubt he was complicit in this farce. So how does it feel for a Catholic to have a pope who, on top of all his other
faults and offenses, is also turning out to be a habitual and inveterate liar? Because this is the ultimate significance of this midair marriage farce.

How will the Vatican PR cooks explain egg all over their face with the exposure of their farce?


No, it was not a spontaneous act
nor was it the pope's idea to begin with
By Carlos Esteban
Translated from

January 19, 2018

The story of the airborne wedding celebrated by Pope Francis enroute from Chile to Peru had been presented as something spontaneous by the Vatican Press Office, even though, it turns out, it was months in the making.

As little interest as news of Church affairs may have for most people, most readers would have sat up and taken note of such a ‘touching’ headline: the pope, on a brief flight, has a routine photo session with the plane crew, and somehow learns of a common-law relationship between one steward and one flight attendant, and on the spur of the moment, the pope asks them whether they would him to marry them then and there.

What an extraordinary surprise, what excitement all around! And what a great anecdote, how human and appealing!

There are few labels more horrible than being called ‘enemy of the pope’. And I know that very well because for some time now ‘the pope’s men’ have launched themselves with vengeful joy against anyone who expresses any doubt or objection to the direction which this pope wishes to give ‘the Church’, or to any of his ad-lib statements.

Because today, we have the curious paradox that those who had been most vocal in the past about their ‘doubts’, to say it kindly, on the infallibility of the pope when he speaks ex cathedra on faith and morals, have now become fervent believers in it, even when he speaks of the weather or tells a joke.

According to that curious viewpoint, a ‘friend of the pope’ would be a sycophant, one indulgent to whatever defects or faults he may have – which such a friend would never notice nor question – but will rather celebrate anything the pope does, good or bad.

The friend, in the case we are speaking of, would be anyone who repeats, while wearing a dunce’s cap, the touching anecdote of the midair marriage, underscoring how ‘informal’, good-natured and spontaneous our Holy Father is, and applauding him as at a children’s party.

Ever since bonhomie has been considered an obligatory virtue for the powerful of the world, everyone turns it on fullblast, relentlessly, as if to always do whatever occurs to you when it occurs to you was an extraordinary merit and not self-indulgence. To bypass protocol has become so ‘common’ that following it is what appears extraordinary nowadays and proof of extraordinary self-control.

I wonder if there is not a secret office in the Roman Curia that corresponds more or less to ‘in charge of papal anecdotes’, because one expects Catholic journalists today to swallow anything that is told to them, convinced that their mission is to maintain a fairytale image of everything that has to do with the ecclesial world.

Otherwise, those in the Vatican Press Office [and their counterparts in Chile preparing for the pope’s visit] would have known that in the newspaper La Tercera de Chile on January 11, under the news item entitled ‘The newsman who became a plane steward and who will serve on board the papal flights while in Chile', the now most-famous 'newlyweds' on earth had expressed the hope that their religious wedding “would be realized on the plane and officiated by no less than Pope Francis himself”.

Well! When I had believed [along with everyone else who read the first reports of the mid-air marriage] that the idea came from the pope himself, just like that, to convince the couple that they should take the transcendental step which he would gladly perform for them!

And that background story that they could not have their church wedding as planned because their church was damaged in an earthquake? It becomes laughable when one learns that the earthquake happened in 2010. I know I am not familiar with the state of the church in Chile, but I do not think it is in the same desperate situation as those of Saudi Arabia or North Korea, such that in the intervening 7 years, it was impossible – or even very difficult – for the couple to find a priest who would marry them or a church or chapel where the wedding could take place.

Moreover – and despite the defense to the death of the apologists for AL – it would seem that this pope himself does not take his own writing seriously because he certainly did not give time for the Church to exercise any pre-matrimonial ‘discernment’, nor did he refer the couple to their parish priest so they could do everything properly for a sacramental marriage, nor any other of the prudential measures that AL recommends as necessary to prepare for the sacrament of matrimony.

Perhaps he thinks that for a couple who have cohabited for eight years and had two children without showing any urgency to have a sacramental marriage, a minimum period of reflection was not even necessary. Who knows?


A WORD ABOUT INFOVATICANA FROM ITS SELF-DESCRIPTION ONSITE:
It is a website in Italian and Spanish that considers itself

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"a free and independent medium of communication intended to serve the Catholic Church and society as a ‘cooperator of Truth’ in questions affecting the life of the Church, especially of Catholic lay faithful in the Western world, and the Church’s defense of the non-negotiable principles enumerated by Benedict XVI. Our commitment is therefore primarily the defense of life from conception to its natural end; the defense of the natural family; the defense of the parents’ inviolable right to decide on the education of their children; and in support of policies oriented to the common good without ever losing sight of the true Good News which fills us all with hope: Jesus Christ".]

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Now that we do get 'half-fake' news,
no one calls it that!
Translated from

January 20, 2018

That mid-air marriage performed by the pope? It is half fake news, badly cooked and badly served. Because all Chie had been speaking abut that ‘improvised’ marriage ‘spontaneously’ proposed by the pope for a month before it happened.

Last night, a dear friend of mine who follows Church affairs around the world (apparently through a planetary network of friends) sent me the link to an article in the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio one month ago, about an interview with the captain and the crew of the plane that would ferry the pope while in Chile. It includes a brief interview with the steward and the flight attendant who were married by the pope, in which Carlos and Paula say they have been together eight years, married civilly, with two children (6 and 3), and had planned to be married in church on February 27, 2010, but an earthquake destroyed the church where they were planning to do it. Then it became postponed because of work and the children. But they said, “And so both of us hope that next January this delayed plan will finally be realized on the plane and performed by no less than Pope Francis himself. We would love that. [The airplane] is our workplace, our second home, where we feel safe and sure”.

It is quite probable that at the time of that interview, the pope had no idea whatsoever of who Carlo and Paula were. But it is equally probable that someone (singular or plural) already knew something like this was in the works and let the couple know, because otherwise, how could the couple have hypothesized so freely about an inflight wedding?

So what about everything we have read about the spontaneity of the occasion, of the couple’s dialog with the pope that gave rise to the pope’s ‘inspired’ improvisation, etc? Judge for yourself.

Moreover, a canonist friend points out to me that the pope cannot overrule, no matter how he prefers to ignore rules [that are not his], are the canonical requirements for a sacramental marriage. Proof that both spouses are Catholic (their baptismal certificates), the certainty that neither of them have other marital bonds, [not to mention that they have gone to confession before contracting the sacrament of matrimony]… i.e. Even a pope must make sure that all the required elements are in place [not just a handwritten marriage contract signed by four or five prelates who happen to be around] before he can marry them properly]. [Ah, but I can now see the orchestrators of this farce coming forward to say, “Well, we checked out beforehand that the couple had been both baptized and confirmed in the Church; we advised them to make sure they go to confession before going on the papal flight; and back in 2010, when they were thinking of getting married in church, they said they already took part in the pre-nuptial preparations required by the Church. So yes, everything was in order for the pope to marry them.” Which, of course, gets them out of that jam, but squarely makes them guilty of pre-planning this ‘spontaneous’ event.]

Yet anything goes, it seems, to further embroider the image of a pope very much on the ball, a pope of the people, and thus carry out the scenario that Pezzo Gross yesterday called something straight out of a telenovela.

Deception and banalization
in that midair marriage
by Riccardo Cascioli
Editorial
Translated from

January 20, 2018

When he holds that inflight news conference returning to Rome from Peru, Pope Francis will perhaps have a chance to explain better what he meant by performing a marriage ceremony of sorts for a couple of Chilean plane crewmembers who had been living together for eight years.

The more so because he must also justify that the ‘express’ marriage he performed – about which the whole world learned instantly – had really been amply prepared for beforehand. A December 19, 2017 article in El Mercurio featured an article about the plane crew that would serve the pope while he was in Chile, in which Carlos Ciuffardi and Paula Podest say they hope to be married by the pope on the plane during one of their flights with him. Which is exactly what happened.

One can therefore imagine that the couple had previously made such a request ‘officially’ in some way to those who were organizing the pope’s visit, that the Vatican approved their request, and therefore, that which the Vatican had sought to present as a totally spontaneous impulse from the pope hand instead been planned and prepared for.

It is a disconcerting and incomprehensible concoction which makes not just the present Bergoglian court at the Vatican ridiculous but the papacy itself. Whoever directed this scenario, because it was a staged event, there is more reason to think that this literal coup de theatre was meant to convey a message.

After all, it has been the mark of this pontificate to insist that actions speak louder than words. We must therefore ask – beyond the intentions of the architects of this farce – what impact and what message was intended in this staged gesture of the pope that has been seen and reported across the globe?

Unfortunately, the first impression is that the sacrament of matrimony is not to be taken too seriously, in which sentiment decisively prevails over reason, and in which it is the spouses who are the principal protagonists rather than God. Not very different therefore from the quickie marriages performed in Las Vegas.

This also implies that Church requirements for the proper celebration of a sacramental marriage are merely a useless frill and a obstacle for all those who wish to be married in church. Indeed, there is no state of necessity that justifies not getting married in church, within a nuptial Mass, after adequate pre-nuptial preparation in the Church, after the announcement of banns, and after presenting a series of documents attesting to the baptism and confirmation of the prospective spouses and to the fact that neither of them has any existing marital bonds.

So if the pope shows the world that all these things are superfluous, how can a parish priest now claim all those requirements from a couple who wish to be married in his church? We can now expect increasingly difficult situations for priests whose parishioners will demand a quick marriage without wasting time on the canonical requirements for it.

Just as now, after AL, there are persons who, while remaining in a chronic state of mortal sin for living in adultery, claim that they are absolved of sin “because the pope said so”, or simply [and perhaps, more typically], just go straight to communion without even bothering to go to confession. Not that the pope had said so explicitly, but this is the common perception now, the message that has been disseminated to the faithful because of AL.

Speaking of which, we must consider as nothing more than scrap paper all those parts in which it insists on ‘adequate preparation for marriage’. When it was precisely this pope himself who had said that half of all Catholic marriages are invalid because of the lack of preparation and ‘knowledge’ on the part of couples who say Yes to their marriage vows – to the point that he published two motu proprio that would facilitate and speed up the annulment process for Church marriages [what some canon lawyers have called Bergoglio’s ‘quickie Catholic divorce’].

At the same time, he says in AL that there should be greater responsibility so that young people who wish to get married in church are adequately prepared to do so, and that already existing preparatory courses should be carefully reviewed and carried out to the degree that such preparation is needed.

Not that these instructions in AL have been heeded, because it seems that almost everyone has simply considered that the document is all about giving communion to remarried divorcees. But now, the objective need for couples to arrive at matrimony with full awareness and knowledge of the duties and responsibilities it imposes on them seems definitely cancelled by the pope’s ‘spontaneous’ gesture for the Chilean couple. It would seem that such a preparation is no longer necessary. That all that was needed was for him to ask them, “Are you sure [you want to be married]?” and for them to answer “Yes”. And done! [Did he even say “I now pronounce you man and wife’?”]

[However, as I remarked earlier, the Vatican apologists can always claim that the pope’s handlers made sure all the canonical requirements for a religious marriage had been met by the couple before they got on the papal flight! So there!]
P.S. Even though this 'spontaneous' event was planned, it certainly took all of the media oxygen and effectively 1) replaced the Ploumen case in the headlines; and 2) distracted from the remarkably poor attendance at papal events in Chile.

Finally, for today, Valli's satirical takeoff...

'Welcome aboard Wedding Airlines!'
Translated from]

January 20, 2018

The taxi drives up right in front of Terminal One. A man dressed as pope gets off and walks towards the security gate. They allow him to pass – after all, he is carrying just his usual single briefcase – so he can get on board right away.

“Welcome, Holiness”, says the grinning plane steward. “Today we have six – two in economy, three in business, and one in business-plus”.
“Ummm,” the man dressed as pope feigns to moan. “There are more and more. This is getting to be quite demanding. And where are we going this time?”
“Amsterdam, Holiness. We must hurry. Would you like a whiskey?”
“Thanks, that’s exactly what I need!”

In effect, since Wedding Airlines began its service, requests have multiplied. You cannot imagine how many couples wish to 'get married' in midair, with a pretend pope as an extraordinary celebrant. ‘Marriages on the fly’, they are called, with a nice play on words. So what if the ceremony has neither legal nor religious value? The important thing is to have fun and great souvenir photos!

“Put wings on your marriage!”, says the airline’s slogan. “Put on your seat belts and prepare your rings!”

The airline’s chief competitor, Two Rings, was not too happy, and instead of having a pretend-pope, they only had a pretend-cardinal. To thonk it was they who had first used that line about the seatbelts and rings!

Hardly had the plane lifted off for Amsterdam then it was time to get to work. The first flying couple was a man of 50 and a woman of 40, who had been living together for 20 years, and had three children. They had an economy rite, therefore in narrower space but also faster.

The ‘pope’ smiled, recited his formula, asked the ritual questions and gave his blessing. Then kisses and photos. Done!

The ceremony in business class was a bit more complicated because it also included a brief homily from the ‘pope’. And in business-plus, it also included champagne afterwards – and on special request, the presence of a few newsmen who pretended to be surprised.

After 2 hours and 35 minutes, right on schedule, the Wedding Airlines plane landed in Schiphol, and the ‘pope’ could finally relax. He would see the return flight to catch up on his sleep. Since he agreed to play pretend-pope, he found it increasingly tiresome to go up and down the aisles. Actually, he minded having to give up his regular viewing of some South American telenovelas of which he was a protagonist in the role of the Beautiful Prince of Darkness. But Wedding Airlines paid well.

“All this is blasphemy, to say the least”, wrote two aged cardinals (true ones) in a traditionalist newspaper. But no one minded them.

Things went well until the day – Wedding Airlines was flying from Rome to Tallinn, Estonia – when a Puerto Rican couple in Business-Plus presented themselves for the ceremony.

The pretend-pope was ready with his final blessing, “I pronounce you man and wife, but beware of the turbulence!”, and the situation appeared to be going well when the about-to-be-husband said No instead of Yes.
“Excuse me?”, the pretend-pope asked, with a half smile.
“Excuse me?,” the about-to-be-wife said, with a strained smile.
“NO!” the man repeated.
Without yet understanding what was happening, all 90 relatives of the bride descended on the bridegroom, while his 80 relatives attacked the woman’s relatives.

For a moment, the crew thought that this too was a fake fight, a variation on the theme. But it was not! Anything but mere turbulence! The encounter became so violent that the flight was in serious danger of crashing. And that, decided air control authorities, put an end to these fake marriages inflight.

"Which demonstrates,” the two aged cardinals wrote, “that this whole thing made no sense!” To which the principal progressivist newspaper replied that those two cardinals must be pitied because they failed to understand the logic of ‘image’.

And Wedding Airlines? It changed itself to an airline specializing in divorces with three possibilities: economy (fast), business (very fast), and business-plus (instantly, with champagne).


I apologize...Valli did have an immediate straight commentary on the papal wedding stunt...

My 'dubia' on that midair marriage
Translated from

January 19, 2018

The marriage Pope Francis ‘performed’ on an airplane while travelling from Chile to nearby Peru, was quickly known [and seen] around the globe and elicited great sympathy for the happy and ‘much moved’ couple, and for the pope himself for a gesture that was considered ‘beautiful’ because it was ‘spontaneous’ and ‘anti-conformist’. [Two adjectives which describe this pope’s attitude towards the sacraments in general - as generously displayed in AL and his record of sacramental permissiveness in Buenos Aires before he became pope. Yet what is there for a bishop – much less a pope – to be proud of in ‘spontaneously’ innovating on the Sacraments of the Church which, by definition, ought to conform to prescribed ritual and tradition?]

I think that the pope’s action was quite questionable in the light of the value fo the sacrament of Matrimony. Obviously I will be called obscurantist, legalist, pharisaic for what I am about to write. I don’t care. As a baptized Catholic, I care about the Sacraments.

Many will ask: And who are you to judge? That’s easy: I am a baptized Catholic, and as such it is my duty to be on the side of the truth of the faith.

Obviously, only God can see into the hearts of his creatures, and in this case, my judgment is not about the persons involved. I know that the ‘newlyweds’, a plane steward and a flight attendant, deserve maximum respect. As a baptized Catholic, my concern is for the sacraments. Therefore I ask the following questions:

The reports say that the couple had been planning to be married in Church since 2010, but it didn’t happen because their church was destroyed in an earthquake. But eight years have passed since then during which they have been cohabitating and had two children. [One assumes neither child was baptized – because if the parents had thought of baptizing them at all, they could easily have arranged to get married first before the baptisms.] Since both are gainfully employed, I do not think the impediment was financial. Did the pope even ask them why they had to wait eight years? [Obviously he did not because he probably was provided a briefing paper about the couple to prepare him for his ‘spontaneous’ offer to marry them inflight, and one must assume the briefing paper did not think some such basic questions were even necessary.]

Before ‘performing’ the ceremony, did the pope give them confession and absolution first? [The briefing paper probably assured Bergoglio that yes, both persons were duly baptized and confirmed in the Church, they have no other conjugal ties that would prejudice a religious wedding for them, and that yes, they were told by the trip-coordinators they ought to make sure they went to confession before going on the papal flight.]

We were told that the idea of marrying the couple then and there was a spontaneous offer made by Bergoglio. What is this pope’s idea of matrimony, then? Something that can be done ‘on the fly’ as it were, out of emotion and sentimentalism, and in the name of spontaneity? [Certainly not what he so solemnly wrote in the ‘orthodox’, non-controversial parts of AL! Now you can see what a deceptive sugarcoating all the ‘orthodox’ ballast was for the poison in Chapter 8.]

Celebrating a sacrament the way he did, was he not banalizing it? Did he allow sentimentalism and superficiality to override faith and reason?

The news report said the pope asked each of the partners, “Are you sure?... Then OK!” Does he really think that a sacrament can be thus simplified and, if I may be allowed the word, parodied?

Did he not thereby transform matrimony into nothing more than a sort of happening [Valli uses the English word], a triumph of improvisation, for an occasion that demands, by canon law and tradition, maturity, responsibility and sacredness?

Did he not thereby devalue a sacrament of the Church and reduce it to an extemporaneous event?

Does such a performance not involve elements of protagonism and narcissism – even if unconsciously – on the part of the spouses and the celebrant himself?

In all of this, did the presence of God not become merely an accessory to the fact that could just as well have been ignored?

Would it not have been more advisable – given that the event was pre-planned – to have asked the couple to come to the chapel of the Nunciature in Santiago where a proper sacramental marriage could have been celebrated, Mass and all, in a way worthy of the dignity of the sacrament in which the two spouses are considered to be co-ministers?

Has the pope’s performance preserved and guaranteed the dignity of the sacrament of marriage as the Catechism calls on the ministers of the Church to do for a sacrament which, by its very nature, is intended to be a source of sanctifying grace?

“God himself is the author of marriage”, the Catechism tells us. That being so, was it at all legitimate – even for the pope – to perform a marriage without a nuoptial Mass when there was no urgent reason to do so? [Other than a PR coup of yet another historic Bergoglian ‘first’ that was guaranteed to drive the scandalous Ploumen case out of the headlines!]

Does the Catechism not say that sacramental marriage is a liturgical act that ought to be celebrated with the public liturgy of the Church?

And since the Church, as a concerned mother, recommends to all Catholics intending to marry their participation in a parish course intended to prepare them for marriage, did Carlo and Paula do that? [That’s probably one of the points covered in the briefing paper for the pope – assuming there was one, and if there was none, he should have asked for one when he was briefed about the ‘spontaneous’ gesture he was to come up with - to assure him that he could legitimately go ahead with his act since ‘all the I’s were dotted and the t’s crossed’ to make sure that all canonical requirements (outside of performing the ceremony in church and within a Mass).]

Otherwise, are we then to think that such a pre-nuptial course is really just a formality that would only be a waste of time?

So, the above are the ‘dubia’ that have arisen in this simple Catholic who is not trying to be a killjoy - I am just a poor creature who has in his heart the faith, the Catholic Church, and the sacraments instituted by Christ.

Time-Lapse video of the March for Life in Washington yesterday


www.facebook.com/studentsforlife/videos/10155143300192927/

Full text of President Trump’s
speech to the March for Life 2018:
'We will always defend the right to life'
January 19, 2018

President Trump became the first President yesterday to address the March for Life, now on its 45th year, on a live video feed to the participants.

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We have tens of thousands of people watching this right down the road, tens of thousands. So, I congratulate you, and at least we picked a beautiful day, you can’t get a more beautiful day. I want to thank our Vice President Mike Pence for that wonderful introduction. I also want to thank you and Karen for being true champions for life. T

Today I’m honored and really proud to be the first president to stand with you here at the White House to address the 45th March for Life, that’s very very special, 45th March for Life, and this is a truly remarkable group. Today tens of thousands of families, students, and patriots, and really just great citizens gather here in our nations Capitol. You come from many backgrounds, and many places, but you all come for one beautiful cause, to build a society where life is celebrated and protected and cherished.

The March for Life is a movement born out of love: you love your families; you love your neighbors; you love our nation; and you love every child born and unborn, because you believe that every life is sacred, that every child is a precious gift from God.

We know that life is the greatest miracle of all. We see it in the eyes of every new mother who cradles that wonderful, innocent, and glorious-newborn child in her loving arms. I want to thank every person here today and all across our country who works with such big hearts and tireless devotion to make sure that parents have the caring support they need to choose life.

Because of you, tens of thousands of Americans have been born and reached their full God-given potential, because of you. You’re living witnesses of this year’s March for life theme, and that theme is, ‘Love Saves Lives.’

As you all know Roe versus Wade has resulted in some of the most permissive abortion laws anywhere in the world. For example, in the United States, it’s one of only seven countries to allow elective late-term abortions along with China North Korea and others. Right now, in a number of States, the laws allow a baby to be born [sic, aborted] from his or her mother’s womb in the ninth month.

It is wrong. It has to change.

Americans are more and more pro-life. You see that all the time. In fact, only 12% of Americans support abortion on demand at any time.
Under my administration, we will always defend the very first right in the Declaration of Independence, and that is the ‘right to life.’

Tomorrow will mark exactly one year since I took the oath of office. And I will say our country is doing really well. Our economy is perhaps the best it’s ever been. You look at the job numbers, the companies pouring back into our country, look at the stock market at an all-time high, unemployment at a 17-year low, unemployment for African workers at the lowest mark in the history of our country, unemployment for Hispanics at a record-low in history, unemployment for women, think of this, at an 18-year low.

We’re really proud of what we’re doing.

And during my first week in office, I reinstated a policy first put in place by Pres. Ronald Ragan, the Mexico City Policy.

I strongly supported the House of Representatives’ pain-capable bill, which would end painful late-term abortions nationwide. And I call upon the Senate to pass this important law and send it to my desk for signing.

On the National Day of Prayer, I signed an executive order to protect religious liberty. [I’m] very proud of that. Today, I’m announcing that we’ve just issued a new proposal to protect conscience rights and religious freedoms of doctors, nurses, and other medical professions. So important.

I have also just reversed the previous administration’s policy that restricted state efforts to direct Medicaid funding away from abortion facilities that violate the law.

We are protecting the sanctity of life and the family as the foundation of our society. But this movement can only succeed with the heart and the soul and the prayer of the people.

Here with us today is Marianne Donadio from Greensboro North Carolina... Marianne was 17 when she found out that she was pregnant. At first, she felt like she had no place to turn. But when she told her parents they responded with total love, total affection, total support. Great parents? Great? [Trump asked Marianne. She responded in the affirmative] I thought you were going to say that. I had to be careful.

Marianne bravely chose life and soon gave birth to her son. She named him Benedict which means blessing. Marianne was so grateful for her parents' love and support that she felt called to serve those who were not as fortunate as her. She joined with others in her community to start a maternity home to care for homeless women who were pregnant. That’s great. They named it ‘Room at the Inn.’ Today, Marianne and her husband Don are the parents of six beautiful children. And her eldest son Benedict and her daughter Maria join us here today.

Over the last 15 years, Room at the Inn has provided housing, childcare, counseling, education, and job-training to more than 400 women. Even more importantly, it has given them hope. It has shown each woman she is not forgotten, that she is not alone, and that she really now has a whole family of people who will help her succeed.

That hope is the true gift of this incredible movement that brings us together today.

It is the gift of friendship, the gift of mentorship, and the gift of encouragement, love, and support. Those are beautiful words and those are beautiful gifts.

And most importantly of all, it is the gift of life itself – that is why we march, that is why we pray, and that is why we declare that America’s future will be filled with goodness, peace, joy, dignity, and life for every child of God.

Thank you to the March for life, special, special people. And we are with you all the way. May God bless you and may God bless America. Thank you.

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Now even a trueblue Bergoglian says this:
Pope’s words ‘a source of great pain’
for abuse survivors, says Cardinal O'Malley

Sunday, 21 Jan 2018

Pope Francis’s top adviser on clerical sex abuse has implicitly rebuked the Pontiff over his accusations of slander against Chilean abuse victims, saying that his words were “a source of great pain for survivors of sexual abuse”.

Cardinal Seán O’Malley, the Archbishop of Boston, said he couldn’t explain why Francis “chose the particular words he used” and that such expressions had the effect of abandoning victims and relegating them to “discredited exile.”

In an extraordinary effort at damage control, Cardinal O’Malley insisted in a statement that Francis “fully recognises the egregious failures of the Church and its clergy who abused children and the devastating impact those crimes have had on survivors and their loved ones”.

Francis set off a national uproar upon leaving Chile on Thursday when he accused victims of the country’s most notorious pedophile priest of having slandered another bishop, Juan Barros. The victims say Barros knew of the abuse by Fr Fernando Karadima but did nothing to stop it – a charge Barros denies.

“The day they bring me proof against Bishop Barros, I’ll speak,” Francis told Chilean journalists in the northern city of Iquique. “There is not one shred of proof against him. It’s all calumny. Is that clear?”

The remarks shocked Chileans, drew immediate rebuke from victims and their advocates and once again raised the question of whether the 81-year-old Argentine Jesuit “gets it” about sex abuse.

The Karadima scandal has devastated the credibility of the Catholic Church in Chile, and Francis’s comments will likely haunt it for the foreseeable future.

Cardinal O’Malley’s carefully worded critique was remarkable since it is rare for a cardinal to publicly rebuke the Pope in such terms. But Francis’s remarks were so potentially toxic to the Vatican’s years-long effort to turn the tide on decades of clerical sex abuse and cover-up that he clearly felt he had to respond.

Cardinal O’Malley headed Francis’s much-touted committee for the protection of minors until it lapsed last month after its initial three-year mandate expired. Francis has not named new members, and the committee’s future remains unclear.

“It is understandable that Pope Franciss’ statements … were a source of great pain for survivors of sexual abuse by clergy or any other perpetrator,” Cardinal O’Malley said in the statement. “Words that convey the message ‘if you cannot prove your claims then you will not be believed’ abandon those who have suffered reprehensible criminal violations of their human dignity and relegate survivors to discredited exile.”

Francis’s comments were all the more problematic because Karadima’s victims were deemed so credible by the Vatican that it sentenced him to a lifetime of “penance and prayer” in 2011. A Chilean judge also found the victims to be credible, saying that while she had to drop criminal charges against Karadima because too much time had passed, proof of his crimes wasn’t lacking.

Those same victims accused Barros of witnessing the abuse. Yet Francis said he considered their accusations “all calumny” and that he wouldn’t believe them without proof.

Catholic officials for years sought to discredit victims of abuse by accusing them of slandering and attacking the church with their claims. But many in the Church and the Vatican have come to reluctantly acknowledge that victims usually told the truth and that the Church had wrongly sought to protect its own by demonising and discrediting the most vulnerable of its flock.

Cardinal O’Malley said he couldn’t fully address the Barros case because he didn’t know the details and wasn’t involved. But he insisted the pope “gets it” and is committed to “zero tolerance” for abuse.

“Accompanying the Holy Father at numerous meetings with survivors I have witnessed his pain of knowing the depth and breadth of the wounds inflicted on those who were abused and that the process of recovery can take a lifetime,” he said.

Karadima’s victims reported to Church authorities as early as 2002 that he would kiss and fondle them in the Santiago parish he ran. But only when they went public with their accusations in 2010 did the Vatican launch an investigation that led to Karadima being removed from ministry.

The emeritus archbishop of Santiago [Cardinal Francisco Errazuriz, who represents Latin America in Bergoglio's advisory Council of Cardinals] subsequently apologised for having refused to believe the victims from the start.

Francis reopened the wounds of the scandal in 2015 when he named Barros, a protege of Karadima, as bishop of the southern diocese of Osorno.

His appointment outraged Chileans, badly divided the Osorno diocese and further undermined the Church’s credibility in the country.

Earlier, Steve Skojec provided a most useful recapitulation of the actions versus words contradiction exhibited by this pope on the question of clerical sex abuse:

Pope Francis prompts outrage with accusations
against against clerical sex abuse victims
[Those victims he did not 'meet and cry with' in Chile]
by Steve Skojec

January 19, 2018

In stunning new comments made during his visit to South America this week, Pope Francis has attacked the credibility of victims of notorious clerical sexual abuser Fr. Fernando Karadima. The pope accused abuse victims of “calumny” for their allegations that Bishop Juan Barros, a Karadima protege, knew about the abuse, or even that he watched as it took place.

“There is not one shred of proof against him.” Francis said to a Chilean journalist at the end of his visit to Chile. “It’s all calumny. Is that clear?”

On Twitter, Barros’s “most vocal accuser”, Juan Carlos Cruz, lashed out about the absurdity of the pope expecting proof from his abuse:
“As if one could have taken a selfie or a photo while Karadima abused me and others and Juan Barros standing next to him watching everything. These people from above are crazy and @Pontifex is talking about reparation to the victims. We remain the same and his forgiveness remains empty.”

Cruz reiterated his outrage in an exchange with Crux‘s Austen Ivereigh, when the latter questioned his claims. “Does he need a photo, a selfie, as proof? Sorry Austen, we did not think of it as we were being abused and Juan Barros watching.”

According to the Associated Press, the pope’s “astonishing” comments “drew shock from Chileans and immediate rebuke from victims and their advocates.”

A group of Karadima victims spoke out against the pope’s words yesterday, saying, “This is serious and we cannot accept it … what he has done today is offensive and painful, and it also reveals an unknown face of the Pontiff.”

Those who are surprised by the pope’s comments in Chile are likely more familiar with his [seemingly] tough talk on clerical sex abuse. In September 2015, Pope Francis addressed victims of abuse at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philadelphia in clear, unequivocal terms:

---

I carry in my heart the stories, the suffering and the pain of the minors who were sexually abused by priests. I’m overwhelmed by the shame that people who were in charge of caring for those young ones raped them and caused them great damages. I regret this profoundly. God weeps! The crimes and sins of sexual abuse to minors can’t be kept a secret anymore. I commit to the zealous oversight of the Church to protect minors, and I promise that everyone responsible will be held accountable.

---

In June of the following year, the pope issued a new motu proprio letter taking steps further than just words. Entitled “Come una madre amorevole” (As a Loving Mother), the letter established norms seeking the removal of bishops who have, “through negligence, committed or omitted acts that have caused grave harm to others, either with regard to physical persons, or with regard to the community itself.”

At the time, Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi said that the letter “clarifies that negligence regarding cases of sexual abuse committed against children or vulnerable adults are among the ‘grave causes’ that justify removal from ecclesiastical Offices, even of Bishops.”

During his current visit to South America, Gerard O’Connell of America magazine tweeted about a moment where the pope expressed solidarity with victims:

---

Vatican spokesman, Greg Burke, said Pope Francis “listened, prayed and cried” with a small group of victims abused by priests, when he met them at the nunciature in Santiago, after lunch today. He spent around half an hour with them, alone, without anyone else present.

---

Nevertheless, by the end of the trip, the pope expressed his indignance at accusations against Barros from known victims of Fr. Karadima.

Despite powerful words and moving gestures, the pope’s track record on dealing with perpetrators of abuse or those who covered for them has been wildly inconsistent. While there have been some cases — like that of the conservative Bishop Robert Finn of the diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, who was removed on the basis of what some have termed “politically motivated” charges of neglect — other, more egregious examples have not only gone ignored, but in some cases have been actively thwarted or even promoted by Francis. As we reported in October, 2015, not long after his statement in Philadelphia, the pope’s words and actions on the matter are often worlds apart.

Mons. Barros
The case of Bishop Barros and the controversy that surrounds it is nothing new, though thepope's harsh response in Chile is now bringing attention to an issue that many have never heard about before this week. The appointment of Barros by Francis in 2015 was, in fact, so controversial, that five members of the pope’s anti-abuse commission expressed “concern and incredulity” at the assignment. Similarly, Barros’s installation Mass was forced to be cut short when hundreds of protesters showed up.

It was at this time that Francis first showed his contempt for victims in Chile — a contempt his recent words appear to confirm. In a video from May of 2015, Francis accused those who implicated Barros of being “dumb”: “The Osorno community is suffering because it’s dumb,” Pope Francis told a group of tourists on St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, because it “has let its head be filled with what politicians say, judging a bishop without any proof...Don’t be led by the nose by the leftists who orchestrated all of this”.

Cardinal Danneels
Also of particular note is the pope’s closeness with Cardinal Godfried Danneels from Belgium, who has become perhaps the most notorious member of the so-called “St. Gallen Mafia” — a group of cardinals who worked together to ensure Bergoglio’s election to the papacy.

Danneels was caught on tape in 2010 trying to stop a sex abuse victim from going public. As Marcantonio Colonna later reported in The Dictator Pope, Danneels’s home and his diocesan offices were later raided by police, who seized computers and documentation on abuse allegations. “For reasons that remain unclear,” wrote Colonna “the seized evidence was declared to have been inadmissible, the documents returned to the archdiocese and the investigation was abruptly closed. This despite the fact that individuals had come forward with almost five hundred separate complaints, including many that alleged Danneels had used his power and connections to shield clerical sex abusers.”

Nevertheless, Colonna writes that according to Danneels, the 2013 conclave was for him “a personal resurrection experience.” And sure enough, if one looks closely at the photos of the new pope on the Loggia, standing there in shadows is the triumphant-looking kingmaker himself, the once-disgraced Cardinal Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels.

Later, Danneels — a man who was implicated and even recorded in the act of covering up the clerical abuse of children — would be personally invited by the pope to both 'family synods'.

Father Inzoli
In a January, 2017 report, Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote of a “child abuse scandal” “coming for Pope Francis”. Dougherty detailed the way clerics accused of abuse were able to avoid discipline under Francis by means of powerful friends and connections:

Consider the case of Fr. Mauro Inzoli. Inzoli lived in a flamboyant fashion and had such a taste for flashy cars that he earned the nickname “Don Mercedes.” He was also accused of molesting children. He allegedly abused minors in the confessional. He even went so far as to teach children that sexual contact with him was legitimated by scripture and their faith. When his case reached CDF, he was found guilty. And in 2012, under the papacy of Pope Benedict, Inzoli was defrocked.

But Don Mercedes had “cardinal friends", we have learned. Cardinal Coccopalmerio and Monsignor Pio Vito Pinto, now dean of the Roman Rota, both intervened on behalf of Inzoli, and Pope Francis returned him to the priestly state in 2014, inviting him to a “a life of humility and prayer.” These strictures seem not to have troubled Inzoli too much. In January 2015, Don Mercedes participated in a conference on the family in Lombardy.

Last summer (2017), civil authorities finished their own trial of Inzoli, convicting him of eight offenses. Another 15 lay beyond the statute of limitations. The Italian press hammered the Vatican, specifically the CDF, for not sharing the information they had found in their canonical trial with civil authorities. Of course, the pope himself could have allowed the CDF to share this information with civil authorities if he so desired.

Francis was subsequently forced to laicize Inzoli last summer. But not until the predator priest had shown up at a family conference where he had no business being.

Cardinal Coccopalmerio and his orgying protege
For his part, it was Cardinal Coccopalmerio who had petitioned Francis to give an apartment in the CDF building to his secretary, Msgr. Luigi Capozzi — an apartment that was raided by Vatican police who last year were re[orted to have broken up "a drug-fueled, homosexual debauched party.” (Coccopalmerio had also reportedly requested that Capozzi be made a bishop.)

Is this pontificate starting to crack?
For five years now, Francis’w progressiveist papacy has made him nearly bulletproof with the secular press and the progressive Catholic media. His infamous “Who am I to judge?” comment about a known homosexual priest in his employ helped to land him on the cover of “LGBT news” magazine The Advocate as “Person of the Year” in 2013. He has also graced the covers of Rolling Stone, Time, Newsweek, Esquire, Fortune, People, and Vanity Fair, among others — almost always in a positive context. It’s a distinction virtually unknown to his recent predecessors, who more often than not found themselves maligned for their teachings.


But the victim-shaming by the pope this week may mark a change in his fortunes. A few months ago, a Google search of “Pope Francis” and “Sex Abuse” was likely to return our October 2015 report on Danneels and Barros on the first page of results. But in the wake of the pope’s inconceivably tone-deaf comments in Chile, our report has been buried in a deluge of new stories from major outlets around the world.

Rumors of Bergoglio's temper are a thing of legend, but always reported from behind closed doors, by anonymous sources. His indignation over the Barros accusations is a rare misstep from arguably the most media-savvy pope in history. [Not that rare, since he already unloaded his contempt earlier to that hapless group of tourists in St. Peter's Square. Obviously, something about Barros - or clerical sex abuse in general - touches off a total loss of self-control and discretion in Bergoglio. One would have said it was overflowing outrage at the very thought of priestly sex abuses, but since his angry words were directed first to the Chilean faithful who opposed his naming of Barros to be a diocesan bishop, and then next to the victims of clerical sex abuse, it has to be something else!] Nevertheless, the clerical sex abuse crisis is a powerful third rail in the Church’s relations with the secular world. The damage done here likely won’t soon be forgotten.

Beginning of the end, of blip on the radar?
I’ve said from the outset of 2018 that I think this is the year Francis’s fortunes will turn. The world has reached “peak Francis,” and those who love him, love him for his push towards a new, progressive iteration of Catholicism. The faithful, on the other hand, have had more than their fill of his appetite for destruction. What is certain is that his outrageous comments about abuse victims will not endear him to either camp, lowering his stock among supporters and cementing his reputation among critics.

Still, Francis has enormous good will in the bank among those with a vested interest in the furtherance of his agenda. The news of a papal award being given to one of the most notorious abortion promoters in the world began making international headlines just days after the joint reports first appeared here and at The Lepanto Institute.

For the global Left, this was nothing but a feather in the pope’s cap, but the story was quickly drowned out with coos of wistful approval from women the world over (including true believers) when news broke that Francis had offered, on the spot, to officiate the wedding of two flight attendants on a recent papal flight. The couple, so the story went, was planning to marry in 2010 when their parish was damaged by an earthquake.

Although they have been living together in a civil marriage for years and have two children, they never found the time to be married in a Catholic Church. The “impromptu” wedding was quickly picked up as yet another heartwarming story demonstrating the humanity of “the people’s pope” — never mind that it broke a bunch of canon laws, made a triviality of something sacred, set a terrible precedent that will put priests the world over in a tough situation, and was, contrary to a calculated pretense of spontaneity, actually planned out a month in advance. In other words, it was a cheap and transparent PR stunt, but it appears to have done some good for the pope’s damaged image.

When all the smiley face emojis and animated hearts fade, however, the question will remain: how many tricks does a papacy need to stay afloat when it sees clerical abuse victims unafraid to stand up for themselves as “dumb” people full of “calumny”? For that matter, how many tricks does it have left? [Oh, never fear! As many as Bergoglio can conjure when he pleases! The more important question is, can he get away with new tricks, or variations on previously tried-and-tested tricks? Yes, he can and will - because he is still the pope and can manipulate the institutions and infrastructure of the Catholic Church anyway he wants to in order to insure the triumph of his very own church of Bergoglio.]

The Internet is famous for having a short attention span, but there are some things people have a hard time forgetting. Abusing spiritual power to take advantage of children and vulnerable young adults is one of them. With the armor of this papacy finally cracking, it appears there may finally be a chance for the world to see what some of us have long known: the ugly reality that lies beneath.

Perhaps even more surprising than Cardinal O'Malley's rebuke of the pope is this article by Robert Mickens, Bergoglian DOC, premier cru (to describe him in terms - Italian and French, respectively - used for certified wines from 'first growth' grapes), and perhaps, more significantly, anti-Ratzinger nonpareil, makes some shocking accusations against his idol, which are not really attenuated by his loyal attempts to make excuses for him (Note his seemingly non-sequitur subtitle - though later in the story, one realizes Mickens means that as bishop, Bergoglio himself 'mishandled' priestly sex abuse cases!)

The pope’s bewildering inaction on sexual abuse
There is no question that Francis is authentic —
he does not demand of others what he does not demand of himself
by Robert Mickens

January 19, 2018

Pope Francis has been away in South America this past week and, while in Chile, he drew only modest crowds of supporters. It was the frostiest reception he’s received on any of his 22 foreign trips — at least to those countries with a majority of Christians and certainly in the traditionally Catholic lands of Latin America.

What the trip made glaringly clear is that, despite the support Francis has received for his many good and inspiring steps to restore evangelical credibility to the church and its mission [OK, Mickens, start listing them, if you can!] many people still see him as “all talk and no action” when it comes to the issue of clergy sex abuse — especially in holding accountable those bishops who tried to cover it up.

The best-known case of this in Chile directly involves the pope and his unwavering support of Bishop Juan Barros Madrid, who has been accused of protecting one of the country’s most notorious abusing priests. Many Chileans were angered when the pope allowed the bishop to concelebrate at the largest public Mass of the papal trip.

And while the surprising and touching wedding ceremony [Mickens obviously insists on keeping up the myth though the deception was quite quickly unveiled] that Francis performed for two flight attendants during an inland flight on Thursday may have deflected attention from this for a fleeting moment, it is not likely to reassure the people of Chile — or many other Catholics from around the world — who continue to be disappointed and confused by the pope’s apparent inaction on sex abuse.

This has long been the ugliest blot on his pontificate. And in the course of a few days it is now even uglier.

Pope Francis’d credibility in dealing with sexual abuse has always been questionable, despite the many excuses and the positive “spin” his apologists and adulators have continued to put forth.

It is undeniable that he has done far less than Benedict XVI did in addressing sexual abuse in the church, and yet the press has treated Francis with far greater tolerance for his omissions than it would have ever conceded to his now-retired predecessor. [Must have cost Mickens an arm and a leg to come to this admission!]
Francis simply has been flatfooted on the issue. [Flat-footed? Or not really sincere?]

It took Cardinals Reinhard Marx and Sean O’Malley, members of his C9 “privy council,” to convince the Jesuit pope to establish the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors (PCPM) and other now-aborted attempts to deal with sex abuse.

But after three years of activity, the mandate of the commission’s members has expired. The PCPM has effectively been in mothballs now for over a month.

Marie Collins, who was arguably the most credible member of the commission, shared her frustration this week over the PCPM’s abeyance.

“It appears to me that the obvious lack of urgency or any slight of concern in the Vatican about the commission's current status reflects how unimportant the membership is considered. Also the low priority being given to this issue of child protection despite the assurances so often given by the pope and others that it has the highest priority!” she wrote on her blog.

This is damning. And Pope Francis — and all who support his efforts to reform and renew the church — should be very concerned....

“Why has the pope not disciplined bishops who mishandled sex abuse cases?” Perhaps because he did the same thing.

There is fairly substantial evidence, even if Francis’s supporters have always denied or refused to believe it, that when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires and president of Argentina’s episcopal conference, the future pope did little very little to remove or report priests accused of sexually abusing minors.

Some alleged victims have said Cardinal Bergoglio did not even answer their letters of complaint. They’ve also said he refused to meet them or apologize to them. [This is the first time I have ever seen anything like this published about Bergoglio's record on this issue! I had always wondered about the strange silence! To think this revelation is coming from Mickens! Is he perhaps starting to 'ease into' a critical attitude towards the pope about whom he is among those who have always held him up as the pluperfect pope?]

Perhaps this pope — a man who so deeply lives with the knowledge that he is a sinner who has been forgiven and needs to continually to be reminded of that forgiveness — is hampered by this painful admission: “Who am I to judge other bishops who, to one degree or another, failed to deal with complaints of sexual abuse just as I did?”

Here you may read what a Boston Globe columnist writes about Bergoglio's performance in the matter of clerical sex abuse:
www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/01/19/pope-francis-company-man/kfE0f7wFLDuMN2Uqg2hbQL/story.html?event...
The first line of the column reads:
Let the record show that the promise of Pope Francis died in Santiago, Chile, on Jan. 18, in the year of our Lord 2018.
And its closing lines are:
Well, Pope Francis fooled us. He fooled us all.

I'm not posting the article because the columnist tars everyone in the Church with his working premise that "Pope Francis is a company man, no better than his predecessors when it comes to siding with the institutional Roman Catholic Church against any who would criticize it or those, even children, who have been victimized by it."

Perhaps by this time, Bergoglio has already told the newsmen travelling back to Rome with him from Peru that it was the Holy Spirit as the
'god of surprises' who prompted him to perform his pre-planned 'marriage' gesture on January 19. Get that? Case closed! Who would dare
question the Holy Spirit???...

Conservatives criticize pope’s
impromptu airborne wedding


LIMA, Peru, January 20, 2018 (AP) - The honeymoon, as it were, is apparently over.

A day after Pope Francis grabbed headlines by pronouncing two flight attendants man and wife while flying 36,000 feet over Chile, the conservative Catholic commentariat on Friday questioned the legitimacy of the impromptu sacrament and warned it could cheapen the church’s marriage preparation down the line.

“Do you know what’s a ‘marriage’ ripe for annulment?” tweeted the traditionalist blog Rorate Caeli. “One celebrated apparently on a whim in an airplane whose celebrant cannot even be sure if parties are validly baptized.”

For those who missed the news, Francis on Thursday presided over what the Vatican said was the doctrinally and canonically legitimate wedding of Paula Podest and Carlos Ciuffardi, two flight attendants from LATAM flight 1250 that brought the pope, his delegation and travelling press from Santiago to the northern city of Iquique.

As the happy couple told journalists after the fact - and after serving breakfast - they had hoped to just get a blessing from the pope. They told him that they had been married civilly in 2010, but that their plans for a church wedding fell through when an earthquake hit.

As Ciuffardi told it, the pope proposed that he marry the couple right there, in part to motivate other couples to contract a church wedding at a time when more and more couples are merely cohabitating.

“He told me it’s historic, that there has never before been a pope who married someone aboard a plane,” Ciuffardi told reporters from the back galley. [Even if Carlo and Paula had gone to confession and received absolution before they boarded the plane where they would be married, and had - improbably - told their confessor that they were about to participate in a hoax, they were sinning again when they did go ahead and perpetrate the hoax with the pope as their accomplice!]

The surreal scene had the effect - at least temporarily - of giving Francis a bit of a reprieve after his visit to Chile was dominated by a church sex abuse scandal.

Canon lawyer Ed Peters, a consultor on the Vatican high court but a frequent critic of Francis, questioned whether a host of church laws were followed, including the requirement that the couple undergo pastoral counseling and that the church have evidence that there were no obstacles to the marriage.

In a follow-up blog post Friday, Peters noted a Chilean media report from December saying the couple was hoping for an airborne wedding presided over by Francis, suggesting the portrayal of the surprise ceremony was anything but. Ciuffardi said Chilean reporters had suggested it before the fact, but he insisted he and Podest were only looking for a papal blessing, and that nothing was confirmed until they were airborne.

Conservative blogger Phil Lawler mused that priests might have a harder time trying to properly prepare Catholic couples for marriage, now that Francis had set the papal precedent of completing the process between takeoff and landing.

“Does he ask them to reflect seriously on their commitment? Nope,” Lawler wrote at Catholic Culture. “Does he question them about their years of cohabitation? Evidently not. Does he hear their confessions? Not likely. Plan a dignified ceremony? Not at all.”

To be sure, the naysayers all hail from the Anglo-Saxon blogosphere, which is among the most vocal in criticizing Francis, especially on issues of marriage. [The AP ignores the Italian and Spanish Catholic writers who promptly denounced the pope's 'sacramental games'. I imagine there are a handful of French orthodox Catholic writers as well who have joined in.]

Francis has caused controversy over his cautious opening to allowing divorced and civilly remarried Catholics to receive Communion, so any issue related to marriage is particularly sensitive.

At The Tablet, a more liberal leaning British weekly, Vatican correspondent Christopher Lamb suggested that the airborne nuptials were part of the “paradigm shift” that Francis is trying to press in the Church.

“It’s not that the pope is doing away with the need for rules, for canon law or for paperwork, but rather ensuring it is correctly prioritized,” Lamb wrote. “For the pope, these things must support the spread of the Gospel, and not become like the thorns that grow up and strangle the seeds in the parable of the sower.” [So Lamb thinks that the Sacraments are 'thorns that strangle the Gospel' instead of dutiful rituals meant to obtain sanctifying grace???]

****************************************************************************************************************************************

I searched all available images online for the papal Masses in Santiago, Maipu, Temuco and Iquique, and these are the best I could come up with:



The best attendance was the one in the capital, Santiago, where 250,000 was the crowd estimate. The sparse attendance is understandable in Temuco (especially
for the indigenous Mapuche) and in Iquique, a port city on the Pacific coast of northern Chile, neither of which is a metropolis. But the sparse crowd in Maipu,
just 15 kms away from Santiago, which was intended as a meeting with young people, seems inexplicable unless it was due to poor organization by the papal trip
coordinators and/or lack of interest on the part of young people in Chile.

Antonio Socci is predictably gloomy about what all this indicates - other than the pope's low approval rating in Chile (lowest in all 18 Latin American countries).


January 22, 2018
P.S. The media report that there were 1.3 million at the papal Mass in Lima, Peru.

Just when you think there may be a brief respite - like a couple of days, maybe? - from Bergoglian 'shockers', comes this news from China which is appalling at first glance, and more so, when one thinks of its obvious implication: that this is among the compromises this pontificate is ready to make - and has made - with the godless regime in Beijing, just to achieve that 'breakthrough' in Vatican-China relations that could possibly earn Bergoglio the distinction of becoming the first pope ever to visit China.

The Vatican asks legitimate Chinese bishops
to step aside in favour of illegitimate ones
by John Baptist Lin

---

In short:
Last December, Mgr Peter Zhuang Jianjian of Shantou (Guangdong) was forced to go to Beijing where 'a foreign prelate' from the Vatican asked him to retire now and give up his See to illicit bishop Joseph Huang Bingzhang. He had received the same request last October.

Mgr Joseph Guo Xijin, ordinary bishop of Mindong, is expected to give up his See to illicit Bishop Vincent Zhan Silu, and become his auxiliary bishop instead.

All part of Beijing's program to 'Sinicize' the Church in China, i.e., support that it is independent of the Vatican and must follow
the leadership of the Communist Party.

---

Guangzhou, January 22, 2018 (AsiaNews) – The Holy See has asked Bishop Peter Zhuang Jianjian of Shantou in southern Guangdong province to retire in order to give way to an excommunicated bishop, while another Vatican-appointed bishop was asked to downgrade himself to become assistant to an illicit bishop who is taking his place.

This is the second time in three months that the Holy See made the resignation demand on Bishop Zhuang, who was secretly ordained in 2006 with Vatican approval. However, he is only recognized as a priest by the Chinese government, which on the other hand is in full support of the excommunicated Bishop Huang Bingzhang, a long-time member of the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament.

A Vtican letter dated 26 October 2017 demanded that Bishop Zhuang, 88, resign to give way to the excommunicated bishop, whom the Holy See is going to recognize. “Bishop Zhuang at that time refused to obey and rather ‘carry His Cross’ for being disobedient”, a church source in Guangdong who asked not to be named told Asia News.

In the latest incident, Bishop Zhuang was escorted to Beijing on December 18 from his southern diocese to meet some senior officials from the central government and a delegation from the Vatican, according to the church source.

Before the 4-day trip, the officials had begun to monitor Bishop Zhuang starting Dec. 11. Even knowing the bishop was not in good health and the weather was freezing in Beijing, they rejected his demand not to travel north, but did send a doctor along, as well as seven local government officials, but no priest, the source said.

Lodged at the Huguosi Hotel in Beijing, Bishop Zhuang was taken 'sightseeing' on December 19 and then to the headquarters of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA) and the bishops’ conference the next day, where he met with Bishops Ma Yinglin, Shen Bin and Guo Jincai, the president, vice president and secretary general of the bishops’ conference respectively, the source continued.

The CCPA and bishops’ conference, as well as Ma and Guo, two illicit bishops, are not yet recognized by the Holy See.

On December 21, Bishop Zhuang was taken to the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse. He was first greeted by three officials from the State Administration for Religious Affairs. Then he was led by Fr Huang Baoguo, a Chinese priest who served at the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, to meet with a foreign bishop and three foreign priests from the Vatican.

Since China and the Vatican resumed official contact in 2014, Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, a veteran in China Church affairs, is known to be responsible for the negotiations and has been in China several times for this purpose. It is believed the prelate whom Bishop Zhuang met is Archbishop Celli.

The foreign bishop explained the aim of their travel to China was to do something in order to reach understanding with the Chinese government, and in this case, the 'something' was to let Bishop Huang to become the bishop of Zhuang's diocese.

He reiterated the demand made in the Oct. 26 letter but added an additional term as a 'consolation' to Zhuang - before retiring, he could nominate three priests for his successor to select from as his vicar general.

“Bishop Zhuang could not help his tears on hearing the demand,” the source said. "Because it is meaningless to appoint a vicar general whom the new bishop can remove anytime".

Some bishops in southern China oppose the idea of hastily recognizing Bishop Huang, who was officially excommunicated by the Holy See in 2011 when he accepted illicit episcopal ordination without papal mandate. One of the bishops who asked not to be named told AsiaNews that the Vatican has asked for their opinions. “I do not know the outcome, but this is a bad solution,” he said.

AsiaNews also asked the Vatican for confirmation of the situation in Shantou. A representative familiar with the China dossier said that the letter the bishop received was just a request for opinion on the illicit bishop Mgr Huang. Cardinal Joseph Zen, bishop emeritus of Hong Kong, confirmed the information obtained by AsiaNews.

While Bishop Zhuang was summoned to freezing Beijing, the Vatican delegation reportedly went southward to eastern Fujian province to meet with Bishop Vincent Zhan Silu, one of seven illicit bishops awaiting recognition by the Vatican.

Local sources said Bishop Joseph Guo Xijin, the ordinary bishop of Mindong,and who belongs to the 'underground Church', has been asked to downgrade himself to the level of assistant to Bishop Zhan, as h has to do this in order to be named a coadjutor bishop.

One of the sources said that signing a document agreeing to a 'voluntary' downgrade in rank was previously demanded by government officials from Bishop Guo when he was under one-month detention before the Holy Week in 2017.

Bishop Zhan declined to confirm the meeting or disclose details about the progress of his 'recognition' by the Vatican. He only told AsiaNews that Vatican and Chinese officials have been meeting regularly on the 'negotiations'.

An underground priest in Mindong said he did not know about the Vatican delegation’s visit. “We of course feel that the new situation is difficult to accept, but do we have the right to oppose the Vatican?”, adding that if things goes the way they seem to be going, “I may consider quitting and leaving the priesthood.”

Though downgrading the status of a bishop seems extraordinary or unbelievable in the universal Church, it is not surprising in China. Last October, General Secretary Xi Jinping’s work report for the opening session of the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party called for “new approaches” adopted for works related to ethnic and religious affairs.

An earlier article in Qiushi, a top-level journal on Communist theory run by the Party’s Central Committee, published on 15 September also carried the title “Theory and Innovative Practice on Religious Work since the 18th National Congress of the CPC” in 2012.

Though without clear elaboration on what will be the innovations to be applied to the Catholic Church, the CCPA and the bishops’ conference last December 14, 2017, passed a five-year plan to “sinicize” the Catholic Church in China.

“Sinicization of religion” is a term first mentioned by Xi Jinping in the Central United Front Work Meeting in 2015. It means demanding all religions now practising in China to uphold their independence [from any foreign or international organization, such as the Holy See is for the Catholic Church] and follow the leadership of the Community Party.

For the Holy See to recognize seven illicit bishops (originally eight but one died in 2017), among whom Bishop Huang and two others were publicly excommunicated by the Holy See, is among the issues to be resolved in ongoing China-Vatican negotiations. In exchange, China would have to recognize about 20 bishop-candidates appointed by the Holy See to the 'open' Church and close to 40 bishops in the underground Church. [And how does that square with the regime's Sinicization policy? 'Independence' from the direction or control of any organization or institution outside China would mean the Vatican would have to butt out completely from the Church in China, which would be left at the complete mercy of the regime through the CPCA. Unless Bergoglio and his diplomats have so charmed the Chinese that the latter are willing to make an exception for the Vatican! Is that realistic at all?]

The other obvious question is: If Archbishop Celli's delegation was in China recently to persuade Bishops Zhuang and Guo to give way to two illicit bishops, does that not mean that the Vatican has agreed, at least in theory, to the Chinese demand?]

According to an article by Cardinal John Tong in 2017, the core problem to be resolved in these negotiations is the appointment of bishops.

How to deal with a PR snafu, Bergoglio style...

Pope Francis apologises to abuse victims,
but reaffirms support for Bishop Barros
[But he did not apologize for calling their accusations 'calumny',
only that he should have used the word 'evidence' instead of 'proof'! -
i.e., to him, without 'evidence', the accusations remain nothing but 'calumny']
by Junno Arocho Esteves

January 22, 2018

Pope Francis apologised to victims of clerical sex abuse, saying he unknowingly wounded them by the way he defended a Chilean bishop accused of covering up abuse by his mentor.

Speaking with journalists on his flight to Rome from Lima, Peru, the Pope said he only realized later that his words erroneously implied that victims’ accusations are credible only with concrete proof.

“To hear that the Pope says to their face, ‘Bring me a letter with proof,’ is a slap in the face,” the Pope said.

Pope Francis was referring to a response he gave in Iquique, Chile, when local reporters asked about his support for Bishop Juan Barros of Osorno, given accusations that the bishop may have been aware of abuse perpetrated by his former mentor, Fr Fernando Karadima. The priest was sentenced to a life of prayer and penance by the Vatican after he was found guilty of sexually abusing boys.

“The day they bring me proof against Bishop Barros, I will speak. There is not one piece of evidence against him. It is calumny. Is that clear?” the Pope had told the reporters in Iquique.

His response provoked further outrage, especially from Fr Karadima’s victims who said the Pope’s response made his earlier apologies for the Church’s failure to protect sex abuse victims seem hollow.

Asked about the incident during the flight back to Rome, Pope Francis said he meant to use the word “evidence,” not “proof.” The way he phrased his response, he said, caused confusion and was “not the best word to use to approach a wounded heart.”

“Of course, I know that there are many abused people who cannot bring proof (or) they don’t have it,” he said. “Or at times they have it but they are ashamed and cover it up and suffer in silence. The tragedy of the abused is tremendous.”

However, the Pope told reporters on the papal flight he still stood firmly behind his defence of Bishop Barros, because he was “personally convinced” of the bishop’s innocence after the case was investigated twice with no evidence emerging. [Forgive my cynicism, but was it ever really investigated? I followed the Barros story from the time the first protests were raised against his appointment to Osorno. No such 'investigations' were announced at the time. In fact, the impression was that Bergoglio just wanted Barros installed ASAP, as indeed he was, even if his episcopal consecration Mass was left unfinished because of the protestors in the church and outside it.]

Pope Francis said that while “covering up abuse is an abuse in itself,” if he punished Bishop Barros without moral certainty, “I would be committing the crime of a bad judge.” [The point at the time, in fact, was for him to at least suspend the nomination until a proper investigation could clear Barros. It would not have been a punishment, just a prudent measure that Barros cannot have resented if he is truly as guiltless as he claims to be. But the pope would not even do that! Why not? In the matter of clerical sex abuse, every priest and every bishop - and yes, the pope - should be, like Caesar's wife, above suspicion.

BTW, it was confirmed that Cardinal O'Malley travelled to Peru to join the pope in Lima shortly after the cardinal issued his 'rebuke' but that this was something previously planned. I don't doubt O'Malley's arrival was providential in preparing what the pope eventually said on the plane to salvage whatever is salvageable of the papal snafu.]

During the in-flight news conference, Pope Francis answered eight questions over the course of an hour, although the conference was interrupted by turbulence, which forced the Pope to sit for about five minutes.

As he did in November on his return from Bangladesh, he said he only wanted to respond to questions related to the trip. [No, he would not have anyone bring up the Ploumen case, for example!]

Pope Francis told reporters he appreciated the statement made by Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley, President of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, acknowledging the pain survivors of abuse felt because of the Pope’s statement about Bishop Barros.

“Words that convey the message ‘If you cannot prove your claims then you will not be believed’ abandon those who have suffered reprehensible criminal violations of their human dignity and relegate survivors to discredited exile,” the cardinal wrote.

He also said, “Pope Francis fully recognises the egregious failures of the Church and its clergy who abused children and the devastating impact those crimes have had on survivors and their loved ones.”

The Pope said he was grateful for Cardinal O’Malley’s statement because it struck the right balance between listing what he has done to show his support for sex abuse victims and the pain experienced by victims because of the Pope’s remarks.

Pope Francis also spoke about the scandal-plagued Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, a Catholic movement based in Peru.

The movement’s founder, Luis Fernando Figari, has been accused of the sexual and psychological abuse of members; he has been ordered by the Vatican to remain in Rome and not have any contact with the movement.

“He declared himself innocent of the charges against him,” Pope Francis told reporters, and he has appealed his cause to the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican’s supreme court. According to the information the Pope has received, he said, “the verdict will be released in less than a month.”

Pope Francis also was asked about the status of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, which he set up in 2014. The three-year terms of its members expired in December and some have questioned whether child protection really is a priority when the commission’s membership was allowed to lapse.

Before the terms ended, he said, the members decided to recommend who should serve a second term and offered the names of possible new members.

The final list, he said, arrived on his desk a week before the trip began “and now it is going through the normal channels in the Curia”.


P.S. Another trueblue Bergoglian, the Chilean-born editor and founder of the semi-official Vatican website IL SISMOGRAFO, has apparently come out to openly show his disagreement with Bergoglio over Barros, according to this paragraph in a Crux story today about reactions to Cardinal O'Malley's unexpected reaction to the pope's 'calumny' remark:

---

Luis Badilla, writing in the well-known Italian blog “Il Sismografo”, often labeled as close to the Vatican, published a piece Sunday calling for Barros’s resignation and for the pope to “promptly” accept it, saying that it’s not only the Chilean church that is suffering from the “Bishop Barros War” but the whole Church.

---

I will check out Badilla's article and translate it in full if warranted. I don't think Badilla will be mollified by the pope's half-apology to the victims but will be consternated to find that Bergoglio is even more firmly behind Barros now!... BTW, Badilla has credentials to speak of, insofar as judging the situation in Chile. He had been a minister in the Allende government overthrown by Pinochet, and has lived in Europe since 1973 when he went into exile, but obviously, has kept up his contacts in Chile. For many years, he worked at Vatican Radio.

Well, no, Badilla was not quite mollified, because he claims in a commentary on the pope's 'apology', that if everything is aboveboard about Barros as the pope claims, why has the Vatican not provided any details in the past two years to clear him? I will translate his new commentary before the first one referred to by Crux. As you will note, however, the Bergoglian in Badilla makes extravagant claims for how the pope responded on the Barros case itself.

P.S. for the day: When lack of transparency
creates most serious problems for the Church
that are avoidable or remediable
by Luis Badilla
Translated from
IL SISMOGRAFO
January 22, 2018

Listening today the responses of Pope Francis on his inflight news conference returning from his South American trip regarding the complex and tragic question of clerical sex abuses in Chile and Peru, but specifically on the case of the Bishop of Osorno, Juan Barros, certain events have been clarified which up to now had been perceived, narrated and amplified in radically different ways. [I have not seen any reference to those ‘events’ in any of the news reports I have read so far on the latest Bergoglian newsgab, and if they were significant, not previously disclosed facts as Badilla makes them out to be, I do not see how the major news agencies would have left them out at all.]

What happened on this trip of the pope whould be studied in depth especially by the experts responsible for Vatican communications so they can draw the appropriate lessons.

For no apparent reason, the Vatican and the bishops of Chile chose to keep silent for a long time on the Barros issue.
Which is surprising when one listens to what the pope said today, because that silence would seem to be unjustified and self-damaging. If things were and are as the pope claimed today, one cannot understand why silence was the chosen strategy. It seems like self-damaging behavior. [What are the reasons anyone might want to keep silent about an issue? Silence would be the most prudent way to go if 1) there is really no defense to offer against accusations and/or 2) the accusations are correct to a degree one may consider damaging because of actual facts or as a result of formal investigations made to verify claims. So take your pick, Mr. Badilla, and use your common sense. An added reason would be, as in the case of ‘the silence of the shepherd’ in the face of the flock’s dubia, to show contempt for those who oppose you in any way.]

Listening to the pope – who for the first time, explains and clarifies with details that are to the point, precise and authoritative – decisive moments for the priests associated in the past with Fr. Karadima (who has been tried and sentenced both in Chile and the Vatican for sexual abuses and other crimes), one immediately asks:
- Why were these things not reported to the public at the time they were known with certainty?
- Why were they kept ‘secret’ unnecessarily, and why was it thought necessary not to be transparent, and above all, why was it decided to marginalize the lay faithful of Osorno knowing that they could have provided an essential contribution to ‘straightening out’ the Barros question?

[Again, ask yourself, Mr. Badilla: who chose to ‘marginalize’ the Osorno faithful? Who chose to ignore all the letters they sent to the Vatican? Who called them dumb and stupid for being ‘led by the nose’ about Barros?]

Why do they continue to think that in 2018, and in the age of the Internet, the Church can continue to communicate as it did 50 years ago, or even centuries ago?[I don't think the 'silence' had anything to do with that at all! Bergoglio is certainly the last person in the world to hide his light under a bushel - if he really had any such light (advantageous to him) on the Barros case.] To think that way is an anachronism that seriously damages the image of the Church as we have seen in recent decades because of clerical sex abuses that were kept hidden.

In this sensitive matter on the Barros-Karadima case, some episodes have been made so complicated, chaotic and obscure that today Pope Francis had to justify them, and to do so he had to narrate some things which, had they been published or explained adequately by the Vatican and the Church in Chile in a timely manner, then things would not have proceeded to where we are now. [Yeah, right!]

Perhaps this experience, and these sad events for everyone in the Church – even if not yet definitively clarified – will finally teach that covering up and a lack of transparency does not pay at all today, and will come back with a terrible vengeance.


Here is Badilla’s earlier commentary today – in which however, his call for Barros to resign and for the pope to accept the resignation immediately has been roundly batted out by the pope’s remarks on his airborne news conference as reported by Reuters.

---

In his comments on the plane, the pope disclosed that Barros had offered to resign twice in recent years but Francis rejected the offers. "I can't condemn him because I don't have evidence and because I am convinced he is innocent," Francis said. He said Barros would remain in his place unless credible evidence is found against him.

---

One notes Badilla did not reiterate in his new commentary what in his first commentary below he calls the most evident first step that must be taken in order to proceed to an adequate solution for the ‘Karadima-Barros curse’.

A devastated Church community which was once
a luminous part of Latin-American Catholicism
awaits the resignation of Bishop Barros
by Luis Badilla
Translated from
IL SISMOGRAFO
January 22, 2018

In the sad history of the Chilean bishop Juan Barros, weighed down with reiterated accusations of having covered up the repugnant behavior of his mentor Fernando Karadima, the Church in Chile and the Vatican did not always make the right decisions. There have been errors to the present, including during the pope’s visit to Chile last week.

At first glance, one has the impression that he himself had not had the possibility of evaluating in depth what has been happening in Chile and outside it with regard to this problem which has been going on for years and which Chileans have been calling ‘the Barros war’. Now, one also has to consider the statements by Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston [about the pope dismissing victims’ accusations against Barros as ‘all calumny’.]

It is important to bear in mind that there is no room for further errors, and everyone who bears any responsibility of the present state of affairs in re Barros must evaluate the issue with great seriousness. We have now come to the penultimate error in how this issue has been dealt with – and usually, this next-to-last error is more serious even than the straw that will finally break the camel’s back.

It is not just the Church of Chile and the protagonists of this war who are in play. It is the Catholic Church herself, in her totality and in all her parts, that has to live through this experience with anguish and concern, and as the pope has said many times [he has???], no one can feel he is master of the Church. The community that Christ formed does not belong to the pope, to the cardinals or to the bishops. It is for all Catholics, including the lay faithful who many times, matter little, unfortunately.

Yet, in the circumstances of the Barros war, the lay faithful could be decisive for emerging from the swamp ito which this story has fallen. The Catholic Church will never emerge from the tragedy of clerical sex abuses without the support and contribution of the lay faithful.

Right now, we are getting news from Chile that is concerning and certainly, very serious. It seems that some of the Chilean lay faithful engaged in the Barros war, after the pope made his remark about ‘calumny’ against Barros, has take the opportunity to ‘avenge’ themselves against the weak, terrified and vacillating part of the local Church [How exactly, and in just a few hours since the pope made his remark???] which has been trying to give a new life to a wounded Church that has suffered so much and has been in crisis and declining for many decades.

For the Church in Chile, the problem has become the ‘Karadima-Barros curse’ which has already caused serious havoc in the Chilean community, once a luminous part of the history of Latin American Catholicism.

At this time it is evident what the first thing that must be done in order to restore peace and reciprocal respect and embark on an adequate solution: The bishop of Osorno, Juan Barros, must resign, and the Pope must immediately accept it.

[Badilla's bravura proposal apparently did not withstand the pope's explicit statement that he had already twice rejected Barros's offer to resign and will keep him in place until there is 'evidence' of wrongdoing on his part...I will not translate the concluding parahraphs in which Badilla blames John Paul II – along with the bishops he named to Chile and the succession for apostolic nuncios who supposedly gave him ‘wrong advice’ during the years of the Pinochet dictatorship – for having brought about the decline and crisis of the Church in Chile.]


IL SISMOGRAFO has published a letter from the Community of Laymen and Laywomen of Osorno about the recent developments. I shall post a translation when I can..
www.reflexionyliberacion.cl/ryl/2018/01/22/el-papa-no-nos-escucho-el-cardenal-oma...

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/01/2018 00:52]

Cardinal Spellman with ex-prime minister Winston Churchill in New York City in 1946.

Where are the churchmen with chests?
[And bishops with backbones?]
by FR. GEORGE W. RUTLER
angelqueen.org
January 22, 2018

To have been the proverbial fly on the wall during a conversation, one good time would have been during dinner in the White House on September 2, 1943, when Franklin Roosevelt was hosting Winston and Clementine Churchill with their daughter Mary and the newly appointed ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averill Harriman. The other dinner guest was Cardinal Spellman, just back from a lengthy tour of overseas military units.

Mary was devoted to her father and accompanied him on many wartime trips including Quebec, Washington, and Potsdam. In 1966 when I was a student, she befriended me and invited me to Chartwell when it was being prepared for a public opening, and I had time alone with her father’s paintings. She was better than any fly on the wall and seemed to have total recall of table talk great and small.

The conversation on September 2, fresh from the Quebec Conference, was about the future of Russia. On the next morning, the cardinal had a longer conversation with the president, first about declaring Rome an “open city,” a subject the president had addressed in a press conference on July 23, and then about post-war prospects for Eastern Europe, especially Poland. Roosevelt had expressed a desire that Rome be an open city, but cited Nazi German and Fascist Italian opposition to the idea.

Spellman would recount the conversation himself. In short, he was taken aback by what Roosevelt said so cavalierly about Soviet designs: “There is no point to oppose these desires of Stalin, because he has the power to get them anyhow. So better give them gracefully.”

For the cardinal’s benefit, Roosevelt hoped “although it might be wishful thinking” that the Russian intervention in Europe “might not be too harsh.” Likewise, despite Winston’s embrace of Roosevelt, the Soviet threat strained him greatly, and his plangent message when the president died did not obscure his conspicuous absence at the funeral.

Churchill was not to be ranked among the mystics or ascetics of Christendom. He avowed: “I am not a pillar of the church. I am more of a flying buttress: I support it from the outside.” His instincts were impatient with the Fathers, but he could be moved to tears by good hymns and carefully prescribed the ones he wanted when he died. Loyalty to the Established Church was a patriotic impulse rather than a matter of faith, for the restless dogmas that supported the Establishment varied with the tides; yet he saw through religious sham enough to avow that if he had become a clergyman, he would have enjoyed unsettling the bishops by preaching sermons highly orthodox in character. Of practical ecclesiastical matters he was amusingly ignorant and in 1942 he wanted to have Cardinal Hinsley appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. But that expression was not insignificant, because he saw in Hinsley’s strong voice during the dark war years, a manly and indeed prophetic courage that resonated in ways that could save nations as well as souls.

Of interest here is the deference that someone like Spellman or Hinsley could engender from secular leaders not innocent of cynicism but respectful of integrity. It recalls the tribute that the magnificent curmudgeon, H.L. Mencken, surprisingly paid to Cardinal Gibbons: “a man of the highest sagacity, a politician in the best sense” who never “led the Church into a bog or up a blind alley.” That kind of virile exemplar would find it hard to take root in the ecclesiastical soil today, notwithstanding some venerable figures.

The clerical vacuity that proposes itself as a substitute for apostolic prophecy is especially disappointing, and even dangerous, in our difficult times. In the First World War, Cardinal Mercier said that the sentimental and vapid preaching of his clergy in his tortured country “told the people to love but not why they should do it.”

There should be unflagging caution when clerics are hauled in to add a pious gloss to a political event, which is why strained and cobbled events such as Presidential Prayer Breakfasts court humbug, but these can also be opportunities for flexing the sinews of the Gospel. Nonetheless, on some national civic occasions, benign Catholic prelates miss the opportunity and disappoint the faithful by deliberately neglecting the counsel of Luke 12: 8-9.

Franklin Roosevelt’s fifth cousin once removed, Theodore [who was President three decades before him], did not like Churchill, whom he had met only once and briefly, during the latter’s lecture tour as a youth in 1900. Churchill’s first offense was that he did not rise when a lady entered the room. Theodore told a friend, “He is not an attractive fellow.” Winston was eighteen years younger than Theodore, who had charged up San Juan Hill two months before Churchill had charged at Obdurman, but in ways they were too much alike to get on well.

When Churchill published a biography of his father six years later, Teddy’s assessment written to Senator Henry Cabot lodge, might have been a sketch of himself: “Still, I feel that, while the biographer and his subject possess some real farsightedness … both possess or possessed such levity, lack of sobriety, lack of permanent principle, and an inordinate thirst for that cheap form of admiration which is given to notoriety, as to make them poor public servants.” Similar words are spoken sniffingly today by the media, superior clerics, and preening intellectuals about a president they think is “heinously unsuitable” and a “connoisseur of low culture” and generally not up to snuff.

But carrying the heavy baggage of his many calamitous missteps, such as Gallipoli in 1915, Dieppe in 1943, the Bengal famine of 1943 and his ambiguity about the Normandy invasion, Winston could honestly fit the same Roosevelt’s 1910 description in a lecture at the Sorbonne:

---

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

---

These observations provoke an anxious solicitude for the present state of the Church, for it would be hard to find a surplus of church leaders in the arena of such men. The common instinct for Rotarian jocularity rather than true Christian prophecy resembles the manner of Churchill’s Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, whom the prime minister called “A curious mixture of geniality and venom.” [Brings to mind someone we all know!]

Those anointed to proclaim Christ seem not infrequently reticent about enlisting his Holy Name in what is no less than a spiritual warfare that cannot be won by appeasement. When our bishops were assured by President Obama that there would be no imposition of civil regulations on the Church’s moral standards, specifically in matters of health care, they left a meeting in the White House boasting that they had been promised a good deal. It was their Munich.

It conjured the ghost of Neville Chamberlain waving his piece of paper securing “peace for our time” after meeting Hitler in 1938. When Chamberlain died, Churchill refused to humiliate his memory and paid an eloquent tribute in the House to his predecessor’s virtue, but he could not hide the naiveté that paved the steps winding the way down to near destruction.

As it is a nervous business for prelates to court and be courted by civil power, one might question the wisdom of popes addressing the United Nations or parliaments. A pope is not merely another head of state, and the whole history of the economy of Christ and Caesar makes clear that popes are never stronger than when they are weakest in things temporal.

Surely a man resolved as Pope Francis is to do what is right for mankind was ill-served by those who counseled him on what to say in addressing a joint session of Congress. On that awkward day, the Holy Father spoke of refugees, human rights, the death penalty, natural resources, disarmament, and distribution of wealth, but there was no mention of Jesus Christ. The speech invoked acceptable figures like Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton, but no canonized saint that the nation’s legacboasts. [You're being ironic, right? Surely you cannot be among the naive who think that the pope would have said anything he did not feel like saying, especially since the topics he chose to talk about are, in fact, his 'favrite things'.]

The resources of the Church in the material order are vast, if fading, but her supernatural resources are beyond calculation. An indicting finger points to the neglect of such treasures of talent and grace in lands of privilege, as for example in the mercenary hypertrophy of the Church in Germany. This affects all limbs of the Body of Christ.

Where there are bishops of moral vigor, there will be an abundance of young men willing to take up the call of priestly service. Where the spirit is tepid and refreshes itself on the thin broth of a domesticated and politically correct Gospel, seminaries will be vacant. As C.S. Lewis gave account: “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”

In his Idea of a University, Newman wrote: “Neither Livy, nor Tacitus, nor Terence, nor Seneca, nor Pliny, nor Quintillian, is an adequate spokesman for the Imperial City. They write Latin; Cicero writes Roman.”

The Church needs a Roman vigor that persuades men to rise above self-consciousness. An English bishop reflected: “Wherever St. Paul went, there was a riot. Wherever I go, they serve tea.”

In spiritual combat, there is no teatime, and effective strategies cannot be plotted at conferences, synods, workshops, and costly conventions at resort hotels with multiple “break-out” sessions and mellow music. One fears that a fly on the wall at any of those conversations would drop to the floor out of boredom. “For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?” (1 Cor. 14:8)

This certainly is not a churchman with a chest!



OK, so now we do have the Vatican's English translation of the pope's January 22 inflight news conference, from which I said I would look up
exactly what he said about 'the Barros war'. It piqued my curiosity that Bergoglio-loyalist Luis Badilla - despite calling just hours earlier
in no uncertain terms that the only way to begin clearing up the Barros mess was for the bishop to resign and for the pope to accept
his resignation immediately - would then end up unquestioningly Bergoglio's words and describing what the pope had said in these terms:

---

"for the first time, [the pope] explains and clarifies with details that are to the point, precise and authoritative – decisive moments for the priests associated in the past with Fr. Karadima (who has been tried and sentenced both in Chile and the Vatican for sexual abuses and other crimes)"(about which) "some episodes have been made so complicated, chaotic and obscure that today Pope Francis had to justify them, and to do so he had to narrate some things which, had they been published or explained adequately by the Vatican and the Church in Chile in a timely manner, then things would not have proceeded to where we are now."

---

The best way to judge Badilla's assessment of how Bergoglio handled the question at the inflight newscon is to examine the pope's own words:

---

Juan Pablo Iglesias (La Tercera): At first, your message was very strong about [clerical sexual] abuse, but the last day [in Chile] you made a statement [saying some victims] are committing slander. Why do you believe Barros more than the victims?
JMB: I understand the question perfectly. On [Bishop] Barros, I only made one declaration. I spoke in Chile, and this was in Iquique, at the end. I spoke two times about the abuse, with a lot of strength, in front of the government, which was to speak in front of the country, and in the cathedral with the priests.

What I said to the priests is what I feel most deeply about this case. You know that Benedict XVI began by taking a zero tolerance [approach], and I have continued with zero tolerance. After almost 5 years of being Pope, I have not signed any “permission of pardon.”

In the cases of dismissal from the clerical state, it’s a definitive sentence in first instance. The person condemned has the right to appeal to the tribunal of the second instance. The tribunal knows that if there is clear proof of abuse, they cannot appeal the sentence. What can be appealed are the procedures: lack of procedures, irregularities, then there you have to make a review of the process. If the second instance confirms the first, there’s only one exit left for the person and that is appealing to the Pope, as a grace.

In five years, I have received — I don’t know the number — 20 or 25 requests for “grace” that have come in. I didn’t sign any. Only in one case, which wasn’t grace but the argument of a juridical sentence, in the first year of the pontificate.

I found myself with two sentences, one very serious from the diocese, and one from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which was the strongest. The one from the diocese was very serious and very conditioned… with these conditions, one needs to wait a time to see that… that is, the case wasn’t closed. [Editor's note: The comments appear to refer to the case of Italian priest Mauro Inzoli aka Don Mercedes.]

As must be done with good jurisprudence, always in favor of the accused. I opted for the most lenient sentence, with the conditions.

After two years, it was decided that the conditions weren’t completed and so I let the other work. It was the only case in which I hesitated because there were two sentences and there was a juridical principle in dubia pro reo [in effect, doubt works in favor of the accused, the principle behind the injunction that a jury must convict a person when he is shown to be guilty 'beyond reasonable doubt'] and so for this I opted for that. That is my position. [Bergoglio has grossly misrepresented the Inzoli case here. The man was defrocked under Benedict XVI, but apparently, Bergoglio now says that Inzoli was entitled to appeal his sentence on the grounds of procedural irregularities, i.e., technicalities, what he calls a case of the second instance. But when a CDF tribunal finds someone accused of sex offenses to be guilty because it has clear proof of abuse, by Bergoglio's own definition, it would have been unappealable. Is he saying now that he took it on himself to determine that Inzoli could appeal his case and therefore he - as the person appealed to - restored Inzoli's priestly faculties? Only to revoke it again two years later when an Italian court finds Inzoli guilty of sex offenses (the same or different from the offenses that the CDF tribunal fond him guilty. In this one case alone, Bergoglio chose to use his discretionary power twice to overrule what the CDF and his predecessor had done ( namely penalize Inzoli for his crimes by defrocking him) - first, by even considering that he could act on what appears to be clearly a 'first instance' unappealable verdict, and second, by reversing that verdict on an apparent pretext of 'irregularities' in the first verdict.]

In the case of Bishop Barros, I had it studied, I had it investigated, I had it worked on a lot. [Sandro Magister has a good presentation of Bergoglio's tangle of contradictions (I call them simply lies) about the Barros case, in the light of a letter he wrote to the bishops fo Chile in January 2015 in which he indicated he would ask Barros to resign (this was months before he finally decided to name him Bishop of Osorno) - I will post it after this.

For my part, I can only add that precisely, part of the problem for the opponents of Barros's nomination as bishop was that the pope never ordered a formal investigation of Barros, so we only have Bergoglio's word that "I had it studied, I had it investigated, I worked on it a lot"].

And truly there is no evidence. I use the word evidence. Then I will speak about proof. There is no evidence of culpability, it seems that it will not be found. There is a coherence in another sense. I am waiting for evidence to change position, but I apply the judicial principle basic in any tribunal: nemo malus nisi provetur — no one is guilty until it is proven.

I used the word “proof” and I believe that gave me a hard time. I said it in Spanish, as I remember, I was entering ,and a journalist from Iquique asked me: ‘In Chile we have a big problem with Bishop Barros, what do you think?’ I think that the words I said were these. First I thought about whether to respond or not, and I said yes [I would], because he had been bishop of Iquique, and a parishioner is asking me. I said, the day that I have proof I will speak. I think I said, ‘I don’t have proof,’ but it is recorded, you can find it.

The answer was: the day that I have proof, I will speak. The word ‘proof’ is what caused [concern]. No one is bad si no probetur (if there is no proof). I would speak about evidence and, of course, I know that there are a lot of people who have been abused and that they cannot show proof, they do not have it. They cannot [show it] or sometimes they have it, but they are ashamed and hide it, and suffer in silence. The drama of those who have been abused is tremendous. Terrible.

Two [months] ago I tended to a woman who was abused 40 years ago — married with three children. This woman hadn’t received Communion from that time, because in the hand of the priest she saw the hand of the abuser. She couldn’t go near. And she was a believer. She was Catholic. Sorry to continue in Spanish, but I want to be precise with the Chileans. The word “proof” wasn’t the best [word to use] in order to be near to a sorrowful heart. I would say evidence.

The case of Barros was studied, it was re-studied, and there is no evidence. That is what I wanted to say. I have no evidence to condemn. And if I were to condemn without evidence or without moral certainty, I would commit the crime of a bad judge.

I have another thing to say… I’ll explain it in Italian. One of you came up to me and said: Have you seen the letter that came out? They showed me a letter that I had written years ago when the problem with Barros began. I need to explain that letter, because it is also a letter in favor of prudence, how the problem with Barros was managed.

That letter does not tell of a momentary fact; that letter is the narration of more or less 10-12 months. When the scandal with Karadima was discovered, we all know this scandal, we began to see many priests who were formed by Karadima who were either abused or who were abusers. In Chile there are four bishops who Karadima invited to the seminary. Someone from the episcopal conference made a suggestion that it would be better perhaps if these four bishops renounced their positions, resigned, took a sabbatical year while the storm passed, to avoid accusations, because they are good bishops. [Omitted from his account is that while he implicitly agreed with the suggestion [having asked his nuncio in Chile to inform the bishops concerned], he then explains in his letter to the Chilean bishops that while Barros dutifully submitted a letter of resignation, the pope decided not to accept it because Barros quoted the nuncio in his letter as having said he was going to ask the same thing of the two other bishops associated with Karadima. I will post below Bergoglio's lame and ueber-technical explanation for why he turned down Barros's resignation and the intended one-year sabbatical was changed to merely a monthlong retreat in Spain. It is a pathetic excuse. As Magister said, why did he so readily excuse someone he was prepared to send on a sabbatical just months earlier?]

And Barros, Barros already had been bishop there for 20 years and was about to finish his military bishopric. He was an auxiliary, then bishop of Iquique and then military bishop for almost 10 years, and 20 years a bishop. But let us ask if the accusations against him, perhaps explaining them…and he diligently resigned. And he came to Rome and I told him: ‘No, we don’t play this way, because this is to admit culpability in advance, and then, as in any case, if there are culpable parties, it will be investigated.’ And I rejected it. This is about the 10 months contained in that letter. Then, when he was appointed and all this protest took place, he gave me his resignation for the second time. I said, ‘No, you go.’ I spoke with him for a long time, others spoke at length with him… you go. You know what happened there the day he took possession, the protests. They continued to investigate Barros, [Who is 'they'? It can't be the Vatican, because the pope already said he had the Barros case 'studied, restudied, investigated, worked on a lot" - even though none of this was made known at the time!] but there is no evidence and this is what I wanted to say: I cannot condemn him because I don’t have the evidence and this is what I wanted to say. I cannot condemn him because I do not have the evidence. But I am also convinced that he is innocent. [i.e., he has been acting as the one-man court-judge-jury on Barros.]

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*The ff comes from the letter Bergoglio wrote the bishops of Chile in January 2015 to respond to them about the protests against the nomination of Barros as a bishop:

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However, there then arose, at the end of the year (2014), a serious problem. The distinguished nuncio asked Mons. Barros for his resignation and urged him to take a sabbatical period (one year, for example) before taking on another pastoral responsibility as diocesan bishop. [Obviously, no nuncio would have done that without having been instructed by the Vatican. He is only a go-between.] And he mentioned to him that the same procedure would be used with the bishops of Talca and Linares, but not to tell them about this. Mons. Barros sent the text of his resignation, adding this remark from the nuncio.

As you can understand, this remark of the distinguished nuncio complicated and blocked any further move in the direction of offering a sabbatical year. [Why and how exactly???] I spoke about the matter with Card. Ouellet, and I know that he spoke with the distinguished nuncio.

At this time, following the express indication of the Congregation for Bishops, Mons. Barros is doing a month of Spiritual Exercises in Spain.

---

Magister continues with his account:

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As can be seen, in this letter of his, Francis does not explain why a mere impropriety in writing - and moreover a correctible one - was enough to nullify Barros’s resignation.

Nor much less does the pope cite, or explain, the bewildering about-face that he made with the promotion to the diocese of Osorno of the bishop whom just a short time before he had intended to remove.

This is, in any case, what happened next.
- On March 6, 2015, Francis received in audience the archbishop of Concepción, Fernando Natalio Chomalí Garib, apostolic administrator of Osorno in the interim before the installation of the new bishop.
- On March 21, 2015 Barros made his official entrance into the diocese of Osorno, amid a hurricane of protests.
- Ten days later, on March 31, a statement from the deputy director of the Vatican press office declared that “prior to the recent appointment of His Excellency Msgr. Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid as bishop of Osorno, Chile, the Congregation for Bishops carefully examined the prelate’s candidature and did not find objective reasons to preclude the appointment.” [This was the only statement made by the Vatican at the time about any inquiries into the Barros case. Even then, I was saying, "Given all the passion and anger raised by his nomination of Barros, why does the pope not order a formal investigation to clear the issue once and for all, and suspend the nomination of Barros until an investigation clears him formally and definitively of any offense?" One cannot say it often enough that in the matter of clerical sex abuse with or without cover-up, or the appearance of such, everyone involved must be 'above suspicion'.] Which does not explain why instead until the very end of 2014 the Holy See had opted for the resignation of Barros. [Or why nothing more has been said about the two other bishops who were also Karadima proteges and are presumably under a cloud of suspicion.]

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Magister's commentary on the pope's January 22 exercise in self-indulgence which was in itself an attempt to justify his extreme self-indulgence:

Why this pope married two 'strangers'
and refuses to listen to inconvenient witnesses

Jnauary 23, 2018

As predictably as a functioning cuckoo clock marks the hour, Pope Francis’s words spoken at high altitude, this time during his flight back from Peru to Rome on the night between January 21-22, have produced the umpteenth great confusion:
> Video of the press conference with Pope Francis

There were two explosive subjects of the press conference, both having to do with Chile: the fate of the bishop of Osorno, Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid, and the lightning wedding celebrated by the pope between a hostess and a steward, during the flight from Santiago to Iquique.

In this second case, Francis said that he had judged at once that “all the conditions were clear” for the validity of the sacrament, and therefore it could be celebrated right away. To come to this certainty he explained that the words of the two spouses were enough for him.

Concerning the bishop of Osorno, the opposite took place. The pope said that he “studied and restudied” the case for a long time, but there was no “evidence” for his guilt. And because of this he is keeping the bishop at the head of the diocese, in spite of the accusations that continue to be brought against him, accusations that for the pope are in reality “calumnies.”

In Chile, responding curtly to a question from a journalist, Francis had spoken not of missing “evidence,” but of “proofs.” And for the use of this latter word - in reality little or not at all different from the former - he apologized on the airplane. He held firm, however, to the correctness of the word “calumny” as he applied it to those who say they are victims of sexual abuse that the pope maintains never happened.

He also said, however, that he had never listened to the “victims” because they neither “came to” nor “were presented to” him. When in reality they asked over and over again, publicly, for the pope to listen to them so that he could verify on the basis of their testimony precisely that “evidence” which he continues to say is missing. [Why aren't more Catholics outraged that 'our pope' lies so easily and habitually when it suits his purposes??? How can you have a lying pope and believe in anything else he says???]

During the flight back from Rome, Francis also furnished a new exegesis of the letter he wrote to the Chilean bishops on January 31, 2015, made public by the Associated Press just before this journey to Chile.

From how the letter was written, in fact, it seemed to be clear that Pope Francis himself thought it was right, until the end of 2014, to remove this bishop, only to change his view and promote him, on January 10,2015, to the See of Osorno.

But now it seems that this was not the case. From what Francis said on the airplane it would seem he always maintained that this bishop was “good and capable,” even when “a few people of the episcopal conference” of Chile wanted him to resign. And in fact, not once but twice the pope said that he had turned down his resignation, both before and after the appointment to Osorno, because to accept it would have meant “admitting his guilt,” when instead, he stated categorically: “I am convinced that he is innocent.”

In this tangle of contradictions, it remains unexplained why the victims of the Barros's spiritual guide and mentor, Fr. Antonio Karadima, should have been given the greatest credence at the CDF's deliberations over Karadima's offenses, while some of these same victims are instead not given credence and not even listened to when they accuse the bishop.

Returning to the lightning wedding 'performed' by Francis on the flight between Santiago and Iquique, it must be noted that the event had been anticipated by the spouses themselves a month before, in an interview with the Chilean newspaper “El Mercurio” of December 19:
> Con emoción y nerviosismo: Tripulación del avión que trasladará al Papa en Chile cuenta cómo recibieron la noticia

On the airplane, however, everything seemed to happen by surprise, to judge by the video of the “breaking news” given immediately afterward by the spouses themselves to the journalists on the flight with them:
> The pope: “I’ll marry you, come on, let’s do it!”

And even Francis - according to what he said during the flight to Rome - appeared to have been taken by surprise by the idea of marrying the hostess and the steward, but decided to proceed on the spot, giving immediate credence to the two.

Again, best to give the word to Bergoglio himself:

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Aura Miguel (Radio Renascenca): The wedding on the airplane. From now on, what would you say to the parish priests, to the bishops will be asked by couples if they can marry them I don’t know where, on the beach, on boats, airplanes?
Pope Francis: You’re imagining a cruise with a wedding. Eh, this would be… One of you told me that I’m crazy for doing these things. The thing was simple. The man was on the first flight. She wasn’t there. I spoke with him… then, I realized that he had become awkward. I spoke of life, of how I thought of life, then the life of the family. A nice chat.

Then, the day after both of them were there, and after we took a photograph, they told me this: ‘We were going to get married in a church, we were married civilly, but the day before’ – you could tell it was a small city – ‘the church was toppled by an earthquake and there was no wedding.’ This was 10 years ago, maybe eight, the earthquake was in 2010, eight years ago. And then [they thought]: “tomorrow we’ll do it,” and “the day after tomorrow.” That’s the way life goes and then the daughter [came] and another daughter.

I interrogated them a bit. And the answers were clear, for their whole life…. “You know these things. Do you have a good memory of the catechism?” “We have taken the pre-matrimonial classes.” They were prepared and I judged that they were prepared. They asked me. Sacraments are for people. All of the conditions were clear and why not do today … and not delay it for tomorrow… and maybe after ‘tomorrow’ it would have been eight or 10 years more.

This is the answer. I judged that they were prepared, that they knew what they were doing, that each of them was prepared before the Lord with the sacrament of penance. [Did they say that?] When they had arrived at that point, it was all over. They told me that, they said it to some of you… “We’re going to the Pope to ask if he’ll marry us.” That’s how the thing went. [He's participating in their fiction - er... lie!] But tell the parish priests that the Pope interrogated them well. And then they had done the pre-marriage course, and they were aware. [Well, brownie points for at least thinking of 'interrogating' them, but given the brevity of the flight and the fact that the two plane attendants could not just excuse themselves from their duties for longer than, say, 5 minutes, the interrogation cannot have been much more than pro forma! Regardless, it still was a banalization of the sacrament of matrimony. Did the pope even think of putting on a stole when he 'performed' the marriage? I've checked the pictures - he did not. One would suppose there are things that become ingrained as second nature in a priest, much as an ER trauma doctor immediately proceeds to carry out a required set of protocols the moment he faces a trauma victim.]

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Jorge Bergoglio's inherent indiscipline is evident also in his loose use of language. Of course, loose and even licentious language is expected from anyone who spits out invectives the way this pope does, but should that verbal indiscipline extend even to the use of 'technical' terms to make a point when the speaker himself is not clear about the terms he flings about?

The Pope’s misuse of 'calumny' distracts
from deeper, more troubling questions
The problem with his defense of Bishop Barros is not just that the pope has
a poor grasp of technical legal terminology or that he misuses certain words,
but that he thinks he knows better and refuses to listen to the people who do

[Not a surprise, surely, since he constantly seems to be telling us
that he really knows better than Christ what His Church ought to be]
by Christopher R. Altieri

January 23, 2018

Thursday last week, Pope Francis accused Chilean victims of clerical sexual abuse and their supporters in the Church of “calumny”. It isn’t that the Pope doesn’t believe their accusations of abuse. After the Vatican found their accusations credible, and sentenced their abuser, Fr. Fernando Karadima, to a life of prayer and penance – this was in 2011, under Benedict XVI – Pope Francis decided in 2015 to put one of the criminal cleric’s protégés, Bishop Juan Barros, on the See of Osorno, over the objections of the victims, at least one of whom, Mr. Juan Carlos Cruz, says Bishop Barros knew of his mentor’s crimes and even witnessed them.

Things took an ugly turn, when, later in the same year of Barros’s nomination to the See of Osorno, Francis insulted the people protesting Barros’s appointment. “The Osorno community is suffering because it’s dumb,” the Pope told a group of pilgrims on the sidelines of a General Audience in May of 2015. The story made the rounds in the worldwide press at the time, and then disappeared.

When a Chilean journalist, who was part of a press gaggle at the gate of the venue in Iquique, where the Holy Father was to celebrate Mass on Thursday last week, asked Pope Francis about Bishop Barros, the Pope replied, “The day they bring me proof against Bishop Barros, I’ll speak.” Then he doubled down. “There is not one shred of proof against [Barros],” he said. “It’s all calumny, is that clear?”

On the plane home from Perù – the second and final leg of his South American voyage – Pope Francis revised and extended his remarks, saying, “[If] anyone says with obstinacy, without evidence, that [so-and-so] did [such-and-such], it is calumny.” He then said that Barros’ accusers have brought him no evidence, and concluded, “One that accuses without evidence, with obstinacy, this is calumny.”

The first thing to note is the Pope’s problematic use of the term “calumny”, which is not the leveling of accusations in the absence of evidence, but the leveling of accusations for the purpose of damaging another person’s reputation, and/or the repetition of such accusations for the same malicious purpose, without respect to the truth of the accusations. A person who claims to have seen someone commit a crime, however, is not accusing without evidence. The evidence he brings is essentially co-extensive with his own credibility as a witness.

In the case of Bishop Juan Barros, his principal accuser is a witness, whose testimony a Vatican court found credible enough to use against Barros’s mentor, Fr. Fernando Karadima.

This would not be the first time Pope Francis’s lexical idiosyncrasies were cause for confusion. I still have not met anyone trained in the sacred sciences who can tell me what Francis means when he speaks of “casuistry” – or “abstract casuistry” – though it is clear he does not mean what is generally meant by the term, i.e. the resolution of moral problems by investigation into the specifics of the case and careful application of the general principles of moral science to the specific case, from within the specifics of the case, themselves.

In this case, the trouble is that no one is asking the right questions.

Why is Pope Francis taking a series of maxims lifted from criminal law, and applying them to a personnel decision? Also during the course of the in-flight presser, in explaining his analysis of the Barros case, Pope Francis said, “I am waiting for evidence to change position [on Barros], but I apply the judicial principle basic in any tribunal: nemo malus nisi provetur – no one is guilty until it is proven [so].”

At the risk of belaboring the obvious: the “presumption of innocence” applies to criminal procedure; the only protection it can afford Bishop Barros is found on the other side of a criminal indictment. The other maxim, in dubio pro reo, which Pope Francis invoked in defense of his decision to reduce the sentence against the convicted pedophile, Fr. Mauro Inzoli – over and against the recommendation of the Vatican’s own tribunal – applies principally to the determination of guilt, which in the case of Inzoli was never in doubt, and in any case would have been well known to the legal professionals and trained jurists who handled the case and gave the sentence.

The problem here is not that the Pope has a poor grasp of technical legal terminology. The problem is not even that he keeps using those words, even though they do not mean what he thinks they mean. The former is merely a fact; he is not a lawyer, after all. The latter is symptomatic of an unfortunate quirk of character, which might be overcome or overlooked.

The real problem is that he thinks he knows better, and refuses to listen to the people who do. While that quality of character will be frustrating in a parish priest, consternating in a religious superior, and genuinely difficult to manage in a local Ordinary, it will always – always – prove disastrous in anyone who attains to a position of high leadership.

There is another, prior question, though, which no one is asking: Why is Barros a bishop in the first place? During the presser, Pope Francis gave a summary of the matter, saying, “When the scandal with Karadima was discovered – we all know this scandal – we began to see many priests who were formed by Karadima, who were either abused or who were abusers.” That is what abusers do. They insinuate themselves and their favorites – some of whom are also their victims – into the formation process and then into the leadership structures of the Church, and use their advantages of place and position to protect and promote one another.

“In Chile,” Pope Francis went on to say, “there are four bishops, whom Karadima invited to the seminary.” Barros is one of the four. He was consecrated in June of 1995, when Pope St. John Paul II was in Rome and Archbishop Piero Biggio was Nuncio in Chile. Barros served first as an auxiliary in Valparaiso, then moved to the See of Iquique, then to the Diocese for Military Services. When the See of Osorno became vacant, Francis tapped Barros, even though he was known to have advanced under the aegis of a notorious pedophile, and faced allegations of aiding and abetting his mentor’s abuse, allegations that came from at least one victim, whose testimony a Vatican court had deemed credible.

The bishops of Chile had written to Pope Francis, expressing their concern over Barros’s appointment. Francis responded with a lengthy letter, explaining that he had asked Barros to resign as bishop to the forces and take a year’s sabbatical, only after which he might have been considered for another post. The AP reports that Francis’s Nuncio in Chile, Archbishop Ivo Scapolo, conveyed the request, and explained to Barros that similar arrangements were being made for two of the other bishops who came up under Karadima. Scapolo reportedly asked Barros to keep the plan quiet, but Barros named the two others in the letter he wrote announcing his resignation from the military see.

So, Francis decided that the way to handle this tainted and insubordinate prelate was to give him care of the souls of Osorno.

“When [Barros] was appointed [to Osorno],” Pope Francis said, again during the in-flight presser, “and all this protest took place, he gave me his resignation for the second time. I said, ‘No, you go.’ I spoke with him for a long time, others spoke at length with him. ‘You go [back to your See]’,” Pope Francis told reporters he told Barros. The Holy Father went on to say, “They continued to investigate Barros, but there is no evidence – and this is what I wanted to say,” in the remarks outside the venue in Iquique. “I cannot condemn him because I don’t have the evidence,” Pope Francis repeated, “and this is what I wanted to say. I cannot condemn him because I do not have the evidence. But I am also convinced that he is innocent.”

In short, Pope Francis feels he has to leave Barros in place, because he does not have enough evidence to convict him in open court, and because he is personally convinced of Barros’s innocence.

Speaking in Santiago de Chile in 2011, after the Vatican court came back with the guilty verdict against Karadima, Fr. Antonio Delfau, SJ, of the Chilean province – currently serving as Assistant to the General Treasurer of the Society – is quoted in a New York Times report on the story as saying, “[The conviction] is going to mark a before and after in the way the Chilean Catholic Church proceeds in cases like these, or at least it should.” Delfau went on to say, “From now on, every case of sexual abuse must be treated with meticulous care and not be based on the gut feeling of a given Church official.” [But Bergoglio obviously thinks his gut feeling - in his omniscience borne of direct communication with the Holy Spirit, if we are to go by his words shortly after he became pope - is enough to qualify him, as I said earlier, as one-man court-judge-and-jury as to Barros's guilt or innocence.]

How to explain Bergoglio's pathological compulsion to speak, and speak at length on anything whatsoever? The more he talks, the more he entangles himself in contradictions. Whoever his confessor(s) may be, perhaps they ought to be courageous enough to give him a weekly penance of mortifying himself by giving less interviews, making less off-the-cuff statements, thus avoiding ever-new occasions of sin (lying, especially).


The pope's non-apologetic apology
by Steve Skojec

January 23, 2018

As I reported last week, the pope, while in Chile, the accused victims of clerical sexual abuse perpetrated by Fr. Fernando Karadima of “calumny” for alleging that his protege, papal appointee to the Diocese of Osorno, Bishop Juan Barros, of having either known of or even observed the abuse being performed. “There is not one shred of proof against him.” Francis said.. “It’s all calumny. Is that clear?”

The most vocal accuser, Juan Carlos Cruz, offered a stinging rebuttal, saying, “As if one could have taken a selfie or a photo while Karadima abused me and others, and Juan Barros standing next to him watching everything.”

Barros maintains his innocence, but Karadima, despite his crimes falling outside the legal statute of limitations, was ordered by the Vatican, following an investigation, to retirement and “a life of prayer and penance” and a “lifelong prohibition from the public exercise of any ministerial act, particularly confession and the spiritual guidance of any category of persons”. A judge in Chile also said that while she could not legally move the case forward, proof of Karadima’s crimes “wasn’t lacking.”

So, in a situation where both the state and ecclesiastical courts have found evidence of guilt, the pope effectively called one of the victims a liar because he cannot bring “proof” that his hand-picked bishop stood by and watched while the young man was abused.

There has been more pickup in the secular media than the last time Francis lashed out at the victims in Chile, calling them “dumb” or “stupid” (depending on the translation), but why isn’t every media outlet everywhere running this story? If Pope Benedict had said this, they would have been digging up the most hideous pictures of him they could find and splashing them across front pages everywhere.

Meanwhile, the pope hasn’t learned his lesson. He was chastised in the most pusillanimous way by Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston over the weekend. O’Malley — who chairs [chaired - the Commission 's three-year term has expired and it has not been reconstituted] the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors (PCPM) — said in a statement that “It is understandable that Pope Francis’s statements yesterday in Santiago, Chile were a source of great pain for survivors of sexual abuse by clergy or any other perpetrator”.

A good start, right? But O’Malley didn’t stop there:

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What I do know, however, is that Pope Francis fully recognizes the egregious failures of the Church and it’s clergy who abused children and the devastating impact those crimes have had on survivors and their loved ones.

Accompanying the Holy Father at numerous meetings with survivors I have witnessed his pain of knowing the depth and breadth of the wounds inflicted on those who were abused and that the process of recovery can take a lifetime. The Pope’s statements that there is no place in the life of the Church for those who would abuse children and that we must adhere to zero tolerance for these crimes are genuine and they are his commitment.

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Having sufficiently ameliorated his criticism, “Cardinal Sean” was allowed to remain a useful minion of the papacy, and the pope decided to use his comments as a teachable moment. A moment in which he could say he was sorry – and then double down on what he did wrong in the first place.

During today’s plane presser, the pope explained how he had had the case of Bishop Barros “studied” and “investigated.” He went on:

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I had it worked on a lot. And truly there is no evidence. I use the word evidence. Then I will speak about proof. There is no evidence of culpability, it seems that it will not be found.

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He said he would follow the maxim of “no one is guilty until it is proven.” But he also admitted that

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When the scandal with Karadima was discovered, we all know this scandal, we began to see many priests who were formed by Karadima who were either abused or who were abusers.

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He then discussed how Barros had tried to resign more than once, but Francis had turned him down, saying it would look like an admission of guilt. He then continued:

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I will pass to a third point, that of the letter I explained clearly: what those who have been abused feel. With this I have to ask forgiveness because the word “proof” wounded, it wounded many people who were abused, but I must go to look for the certificate, I have to do that — a word on translation, in the legal jargon, I wounded them. I ask them for forgiveness because I wounded them without realizing it, but it was an unintended wound. And this horrified me a lot, because I had received them. (But) in Chile I received two [abuse victims] as you know, I met others that I kept hidden. In every trip, there is always some possibility. The ones in Philadelphia were published, three (meetings) were published, then the other cases no… And I know how much they suffer, to feel that the Pope says in their face ‘bring me a letter, a proof.’ It’s a slap. And I agree that my expression was not apt, because I didn’t think, and I understand how the Apostle Peter, in one of his letters, says that the fire has been raised.

This is what I can say with sincerity. Barros will remain there if I don’t find a way to condemn him. I cannot condemn him if I don’t have — I don’t say proof — but evidence. And there are many ways to get evidence. Is that clear?

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[In other words, "I may be wrong but you will never find 'evidence' that I am wrong! Hell, no! "I cannot ever be wrong because everything I say and do as pope is dictated by the Holy Spirit". Satan perhaps, disguising himself as a white dove? Is that clear?]

Note that he is not apologizing for accusing them of “calumny” (or “slander”, depending on the translation) but for insisting on “proof” instead of “evidence.” And note that he is only apologizing for the offense, not for the belief he still holds that caused it.

So we have a known victim of sexual abuse by a Chilean cleric — a cleric whose abuse, the pope admits, produced subsequent abusers, as is often the case — and that victim also accuses one of that abuser’s proteges of standing and watching while the crime takes place. And the pope accuses the man of making it all up to slander a man.

It is certainly a possibility that the pope is right. In the absence of evidence, accusations like these have been used to destroy reputations before.

But if it is true, what proof can possibly be brought forward? What evidence? What does the man have to gain by saying it? And what benefit did the pope derive from appointing such a controversial figure in the first place over the protest of his would-be diocese — protests that have made him unable to effectively lead his flock? Why would the pope continue to leave him in place after all of this?

Marie Collins, the abuse survivor who quit the PCPM in 2017 over obstacles to its mandate that included limitation of resources and curial interference, said at the time of her resignation that she believed “the pope does at heart understand the horror of abuse and the need for those who would hurt minors to be stopped.”

She tweeted some quite different messages this morning:

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The Pope is reported as unconcerned by the month long delay in member appointments to PCPM, the proposed names are being vetted by the Roman Curia. These facts says all that is needed to be said about the priority being given to this Commission and this issue in the Vatican #PCPM...

I have been asked by media to comment on the words of the Pope today on the Commission for Protection of Minors and Barros “evidence”. Why comment? It’s a pointless waste of effort. Sorry for such a negative non-comment. It’s just the way I feel right now.

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Even though this story isn’t showing up as broadly or in as damning terms as one might expect were Francis an orthodox Catholic, for some, his papacy has more than lost its luster.

Notice the editorializing language in the Reuters piece I cited above. It shows how serious a stumble this has been for a man who has been a non-stop media rock star: “the pope replied in a snippy tone”... “in an extremely rare act of self-criticism”... “an unusually contrite pope”. These are not complimentary phrases.

In another piece entitled, “Pope Francis, Company Man“, Kevin Cullen of the Boston Globe takes an even bigger swing at the pontiff:

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Let the record show that the promise of Pope Francis died in Santiago, Chile, on Jan. 18, in the year of our Lord 2018.

When Pope Francis slandered victims of sexual abuse, ironically by accusing those very victims of slandering a Chilean bishop who was complicit in that abuse, he confirmed what some critics have said all along, what I have always resisted embracing: Pope Francis is a company man, no better than his predecessors when it comes to siding with the institutional Roman Catholic Church against any who would criticize it or those, even children, who have been victimized by it. [This offensive anti-Catholic broadbrush tarring is why I did not quote more of Cullen's Globe column earlier.]

I offer my hearty congratulations to His Holiness, His Eminence, or whatever self-regarding, officious title that his legion of coat holders, admirers, apologists, and enablers insist we, the great unwashed, call him. Because he has revealed himself like no one else could.

By saying he needs to see proof that Bishop Juan Barros was complicit in covering up the abuse perpetrated by the Rev. Fernando Karadima, Francis has shown himself to be the Vatican’s newest Doubting Thomas. And it’s not a good look.

---

“He has revealed himself like no one else could.” Indeed he has. And now the narrative is beginning to fall apart. [From your pen to God's ears. But I can't be that sanguine. He is pope now, and no one else is, alas, so his is the power and the authority and the wherewithal to continue to do as he pleases.]



I have been wondering why none of the recent reports about the Karadima-Barros case has mentioned that the principal witness against Karadima had accused Barros not just of witnessing some of the abuses Karadima committed but that Barros himself engaged in questionable acts with Karadima. Now, one blogger has brought it up:

Victim accusing Barros of complicity with Karadima
is a 51-year-old Fortune 500 executive
CATHOLIC MONITOR
Monday, January 22, 2018

Did Pope Francis slander sex abuse victims of predator Fr. Fernando Karadima, for whom Francis-appointed Bishop Juan Barros covered up despite witnessing their abuse?

On July 12, 2016, Catholic activist lawyer Elizabeth Yore wrote in THE REMNANT:

---

"Juan Carlos Cruz, now a 51-years-old Fortune 500 executive has repeatedly maintained the culpability of Bishop Barros: "This bishop witnessed my own abuse and that of many other boys over a period of 35 years. Barros was there, and he saw it all."

His statement was corroborated by another Karadima victim, Dr. James Hamilton, now 49: " I saw how Barros watched it all." Cruz also disclosed: "I saw Karadima and Juan Barros kissing and touching each other"...

Over 1300 Catholics in Osorno, along with 30 diocesan priests, and 120 members of the Chilean Parliament sent a letter to Pope Francis urging him to rescind the appointment of Bishop Barros."

---

Yore's 2016 article is a comprehensive account of the Karadima-Barros mess:
https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/2628-vatican-watch-so-much-for-pope-s-child-protection-commission

On the other hand, when the Bergoglian-to-the-marrow FishWrap sees fit to publish this editorial, is this not a new crack in the image?



It is hard even to imagine the pain survivors of clergy sexual abuse have had to endure. After being raped or brutalized by people their communities had taught them to see as nearly infallible, many were left silent for decades, ashamed or just unable to speak.

When they did come forward, their motives were questioned and their integrity impugned. They were savaged, re-victimized, in court proceedings and public announcements, as bishops, diocesan lawyers and church officers denied their charges.

History has shown that the great number of survivors were telling the truth. Any reform that has happened in the church is due to their courageous resolve. The hierarchy was caught in its lies and humbled, but not before unknown numbers of believers were driven out of the Catholic Church. The scandal has cost the church moral authority, credibility and billions of dollars.

In recent years, we had thought chastened church leaders had begun to correct mistakes of the past. We were wrong. The supreme pontiff apparently has not learned this lesson.

Within the space of four days, Pope Francis twice slandered abuse survivors. On the papal flight from Peru Jan. 21, he again called testimony against Chilean Bishop Juan Barros Madrid "calumny." Despite at least three survivors' public accounts to the contrary, he also again said he had not seen evidence of Barros's involvement in a cover-up to protect notorious abuser Fr. Fernando Karadima.

These remarks are at the least shameful. At the most, they suggest that Francis now could be complicit in the cover-up. The script is all too familiar: Discredit the survivors' testimony, support the prelate in question, and bank on public attention moving on to something else.

The insistence with which Francis defends Barros is mystifying. Three separate journalists on the papal flight gave the pope opportunity to say why exactly he believed the bishop instead of the survivors accusing him. The second journalist to ask Francis about Barros on the flight was a Chilean woman. As she spoke to the pope, her voice cracked with nervousness at questioning the church's top leader. She asked: "Why are not the victims' testimonies proof for you? Why do you not believe them?" The pope gave no satisfying answer, only repeating a claim of "no evidence" against the bishop.

Unfortunately, Francis's defense of Barros is only the latest in a number of statements he has made in his nearly five-year papacy that have hurt survivors, and the whole body of the church.

The pope's statements on zero tolerance for abusers have been strong, but again and again he has refused to deal decisively with those who provided cover for the abusers. When he met with the U.S. bishops in September 2015, for example, he praised the "courage" they had shown in the "difficult moments" of the abuse crisis and even noted "how much the pain of recent years has weighed upon you."

One psychologist who counsels sex abuse survivors said at the time that those comments left survivors "punched in the soul-ar plexus by a Catholic pope who discounted their suffering to hold up the supposed suffering of the bishops."

In Chile last week, Francis held a meeting with members of the country's clergy. He recounted several kinds of pain clergy abuse had caused in the country, including that of the victims and their families. But he also spoke of pain suffered by priests not caught up in the scandal.

"I know that at times you have been insulted in the metro or walking on the street, and that by going around in clerical attire in many places you pay a heavy price," the pope told the clergy.

How can the pope compare being insulted on the metro with the terror of a child raped? How?

Apparently, even one of Francis's closest collaborators was flabbergasted by Francis's remarks two days later, when he slapped away journalists' questions about Barros and first called the charges against the bishop "calumny." In a bluntly critical statement, the likes of which we have struggled to find parallel in recent church history, Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley said the pope's slander against survivors had caused them "great pain."

Here, we must applaud O'Malley's action. He could have quietly spoken to Francis. Perhaps he knew that would have left abuse survivors yet again without any prominent defender.

Francis has a beautiful metaphor for the work of bishops and priests as shepherds who walk among the flock and at times behind the flock, allowing sheep to follow the path they sense. The pope had ample warning of what to expect in Chile. That he didn't follow his own advice and listen to the people is much more than disappointing.

Francis's colorful railings against clericalism are often recounted. He has scolded the Vatican bureaucracy for being gossips and careerists and has described the "sicknesses" that afflict them. In 2014, he said one such ailment is the "mental and spiritual petrification" of those "who have a heart of stone and a stiff neck."

Would Francis be chagrined to learn that that is how many would describe his words in Chile and on the papal plane? When it comes to confronting the clericalism that is the foundation for the abuse scandal, the pope's stony countenance is part of the problem. The question we must ask is: Why isn't Francis listening?

And as if the editorial were not enough, there was this blogpost:

Chile controversy contrasts
with image of Pope Francis
by Ken Briggs

January 23, 2018


Illustrating Briggs's blog post is a photo taken in Lima on Jan. 19, showing a sign that reads, "Yes, Francis, here we have proof!", apparently a reaction to the pope's cutting remark in Iquique. Of course, one wishes
there had been more information about this sign...

Pope Francis is suddenly in the midst of a crisis that could damage his papacy irreparably. It swirls around his handling of an issue millions of his admirers believed he was especially equipped to resolve — clergy sex abuse. His personal touch, marked by modesty, candor, compassion, social justice and humor raised hopes that he could stanch the scandalous bleeding. Such optimism arguably became decisive in his election to the papacy.

But that potential is being questioned by his testy reactions this past week to criticism that Bishop Juan Barros, a Chilean bishop he appointed in 2015, had covered up many sexual crimes by a high-profile priest, Fr. Fernando Karadima, a close associate of Barros'. The Vatican found Karadima guilty in 2011.

Francis's open, charming demeanor faded as he angrily chided critics, including those claiming to have been victims of the priest, who contend Barros buried evidence.

Francis bluntly dismissed that charge as hollow "slander."

"It is calumny," he snapped. "Is that clear?" Denying any evidence against the bishop, he added, "The day they bring me proof against Bishop Barros, I will speak."

In the face of adverse reactions to his comment, Francis allowed that a potential witness against the bishop may see it as a demand to "bring me a letter with the proof" and as a "slap" in the face, but otherwise held his ground.

Victims claim that they can supply evidence but that the pope's hasn't met with them to allow them to state their case.

The standoff became the centerpiece of the Chilean stop on the Jan. 15-21 papal visit to South America.

It isn't unusual, of course, to find opposing views on the same incident. If the pope is right, he deserves praise as a protector of human rights. He will stand as a much-needed champion of fair treatment of the accused.

What potentially lends this controversy particular significance is that it appears to reveal a side of the pope that contrasts with his popular image as a "people of God" leader who ordinarily grants a hearing and dignity to the rank and file of the church. He is a "leveler" who has mocked the pretenses of elite church officials and identified strongly with the poorest and most workaday Catholics in his vast community. [Of course, that's the image that the Fishwrap and Bergoglidolators like Mr. Briggs have loved to cherish about Bergoglio - as if they have never read any of his Casa Santa Marta homilettes and his endless litany of invective for Catholics he does not like. And that the persistent stories of his behind-the-scenes temper outbursts appear to be confirmed by the few times he has allowed that outburst to be displayed in public. And what about his boorishness in refusing to even treat cardinals with elementary courtesy because they happen to ask inconvenient questions?]

The rebuke to those very Catholics in Chile who appear to fit that profile poses the troubling question. While his denunciation of social ills was in line with his papacy, his outburst in defense of his appointed bishop shocked many observers. The fact that the flare-ups continued over the next days added an element of surprise and hinted at something more profound.

For Francis to speak harshly and dismissively to people who claim sexual abuse by clergy may be a passing incident. But given the subject and the circumstances, it could portend a major stumbling block: inability to face clergy sexual abuse and cover-up when it hits home.

This obstacle has already caused the downfall of clergy from all ranks. It involves the most volatile parts of personal pride and defensiveness. When the imperative is to look for that speck in one's own eye rather than the log in the eye of the other, the normal coping mechanisms often shut down.

If the pope has shown an outsized response to this grievance in Chile, it may be because one of his own bishops is under suspicion, a matter we might presume is very personal. No doubt it's just as hard for a pope to believe allegations against a valued colleague as it would be for any of us.

I'm not assuming that's the case, but the fiery, categorical retorts from Francis sound as if they come from a place we haven't known in him.

If the reason was that he felt fervently convinced Barros has been wrongly treated and felt compelled to defend him, there's honest courage in that. If evidence isn't being sought and victims' accounts aren't being solicited in pursuit of truth, however, then a papacy's legacy might be on the line. [Before speaking of legacy, how about the pope's sincerity and honesty, to begin with?]

January 25, 2018
P.S. Yet another Bergoglian criticizes the pope on his obdurate (one of the synonyms for this is 'pigheaded') pro-Barros, anti-Karadima-victims position that is incomprehensible to any Catholic who has had to endure the blanket insults from the secular world as a result of the clerical sex abuse scandals in the past three decades. The pigheadedness is even more remarkable in this media-savvy pope who has taken more and more to lying brazenly - one egregious example: that none of the Karadima victims ever requested to meet with him - in order to justify his reprehensible behavior. [He even participated in the convenient lies of the Chileans he 'married' on the plane without benefit of the sacraments (and not even a sacramental stole), just to indulge in a PR stunt to overcome the double embarrassment of the Ploumen case (though it doesn't look like the Vatican is even remotely embarrassed about it, given the absurd 'no big deal!' explanations they have given for that misbegotten 'honor) and the poor reception in Chile.].

Anyway, Fr. Reese, who certainly spared no invectives for Benedict XVI, cannot bring himself to call Bergoglio's double standard for dealing with clerical sex abuse (one for his favored clerics and prelates, another for victims who dare accuse his favorites) anything worse than 'a blind spot' when it is really willful selective blindness for the sake of God-knows-what!

Pope Francis’s blind spot on sexual abuse
By Thomas Reese

January 25, 2018

The overwhelming consensus in the media is that Pope Francis has a blind spot when it comes to sexual abuse.

He may be on the side of refugees, migrants, the sick, the poor, the indigenous and other marginalized peoples, but he just doesn’t get it when it comes to victims of abuse.

The evidence for this assertion is the pope’s unwavering support for the Rev. Juan Barros, whom he appointed bishop of Osorno, Chile, despite accusations from victims that he witnessed and covered up abuse by the Rev. Fernando Karadima, the charismatic priest who in 2011 was found guilty by the Vatican of abusing minors in his upscale Santiago parish.

In a leaked letter to the Chilean bishops, Francis defended his January 2015 appointment of Barros to Osorno. Francis acknowledged that the Vatican was so concerned about the crisis in Chile that it planned to ask Barros, who was the bishop for the military, and two other bishops to resign and take a sabbatical. Despite these concerns, Francis appointed Barros anyway.

Francis’s defense of Barros has been excessive, accusing his detractors of calumny and being leftist agitators. He said he would not believe the accusations until he was given proof.

Cardinal Sean O’Malley publicly corrected the pope’s words:

---

It is understandable that Pope Francis’s statements yesterday in Santiago, Chile, were a source of great pain for survivors of sexual abuse by clergy or any other perpetrator. Words that convey the message “if you cannot prove your claims then you will not be believed” abandon those who have suffered reprehensible criminal violations of their human dignity and relegate survivors to discredited exile.

---

Francis accepted O’Malley’s criticism and apologized for saying the victims need to show “proof” to be believed. But he continued to say that anyone who made accusations against the bishop without providing evidence was guilty of slander.

“I can’t condemn him because I don’t have evidence,” Francis said. “But I’m also convinced that he’s innocent.”

But O’Malley is right. It is often impossible to produce evidence of crimes that are committed in secrecy. It can often come down to whether you believe the victims.

One of the few journalists to come to Francis’s defense is Austen Ivereigh, contributing editor at Crux and author of one of the best biographies of Francis.

“Victimhood doesn’t just elicit sympathy,” he writes, “it lends credibility, and confers moral authority. So, despite the fact that the bishops consistently and firmly deny that they witnessed Karadima’s abuse (and, in the case of Barros, that he ever received a letter detailing that abuse while serving as secretary to Cardinal Juan Francisco Fresno of Santiago), and despite no verified evidence in any civil or canonical case so far that the bishops are lying, the charges against them have stuck in the media.”

He notes that the victims are so far unsuccessfully suing the Archdiocese of Santiago for $450,000. The case “depends on demonstrating that those in authority knew and failed to act on the abuse they suffered.”

“There are plenty of other questions to be asked about the victims’ case,” he concludes, “but few dare to do so for fear of being accused of ‘revictimizing’ them.”

I would argue that both Barros and the victims deserve their day in court, both in civil court and in ecclesiastical court. [Exactly. But whereas the 'Church', specifically, the CDF under Benedict XVI, listened to Karadima's victims in adjudicating Karadima guilty of sex abuses and penalizing him, these same victims making charges against Barros for, at the minimum, complicity with Karadima, are now 'judged' by Bergoglio to be engaging in calumny.Yet he himself never ordered any formal investigation of the charges against Barros. He claims now that he had him investigated, that he studied and re-studied the case, and found no evidence whatsoever of culpability, but all we have is his word for it - which isn't worth very much these days - when at the peak of the protests in Chile against Barros, the most that the Vatican said was this: “The Congregation for Bishops carefully examined the prelate’s candidature and did not find objective reasons to preclude the appointment". Nineteen words against the protests of thousands of Chilean faithful and a letter of protest signed by almost half of the members of the Chilean Parliament! Nineteen words that nowhere conveyed any personal initiative by Bergoglio for any formal investigation whatsoever that he now claims he did. It seems the extent of his initiative at the time was to tell the Vatican Press Office what to say - those 19 words, precisely - as a pro forma sop to satisfy those who were protesting Barros's appointment.]

Francis is not helping by throwing around accusations of slander and calumny. It is wrong to declare, before the process [What process? There is no ongoing process in the Church to clear up the Barros case once and for all, although there may be in Chile's criminal courts!] is completed, that he is convinced the bishop is innocent and his accusers are lying.

His job is to see to it that there is a transparent and legitimate process in place to handle such accusations and then get out of the way. To appoint a bishop to a new diocese before his name was cleared was a serious mistake. Francis’s advisers were correct; the bishop should have taken a sabbatical. [The point, Fr. Reese, is that Bergoglio obviously never wanted any such process to take place. Again, I will say: he decided he would be the only competent one-man court-judge-and-jury ("Heck, why not? What for am I pope if I can't do that?") to decide that Barros is completely innocent of any wrongdoing or the appearance of wrongdoing. There never was such a process and there isn't one now.]

The fundamental problem is that the church has no process for judging bishops that is transparent and has legitimacy with the public.

The bishop may or may not be innocent, but no one will trust a secret process that involves clerics investigating clerics, clerics judging clerics.

The past decades have shown that no profession is good at judging its own, whether police, doctors, lawyers, teachers, politicians, government workers, athletes, coaches, entertainers, spies, the military or clergy. Too often colleagues look the other way and don’t want to believe that their friend is guilty. When guilt becomes apparent, there is the temptation to deal with it internally and keep it secret lest the profession suffer.

It took too long, but the church now has procedures in place for dealing with abusive priests that involve lay review boards, suspension while an investigation takes place, collecting evidence, hearing from victims and zero tolerance for abusers. It is not a perfect system, and sometimes it is ignored, but at least it exists.

There is no similar process for handling accusations against bishops for failing to report and deal with bad priests.

The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors recommended that Francis set up a separate office in the Vatican to deal with bishops who fail to do their job protecting children. At first, he agreed, but then he left the job with the Congregation for Bishops and existing Vatican offices. That was a mistake. The office that creates bishops will never be eager to uncover evidence that the man it helped become a bishop is a failure.

The Catholic Church could learn from secular governments on how to structure itself to deal with crimes and cover-ups, especially those that do not come under the jurisdiction of secular authorities.

The Vatican needs a department of justice with professional investigators and prosecutors who could deal with sexual abuse and cover-ups, as well as financial corruption, theft and other crimes. A separate judicial system should determine whether the evidence of guilt is convincing. The roles of investigators and judges could appropriately be held by lay women and men.

No one should be above the law. It compromises the system when someone like Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone is not called to testify under oath in the case involving the misappropriation of funds to pay for the renovation of his apartment. [I agree. And Bertone himself ought to have volunteered to testify, since he made quite a few statements exonerating himself. Testimony perhaps to the kind of service Bertone rendered to Bergoglio during the months he stayed on as Secretary of State that the Bergoglio Vatican's justice system was willing to 'exempt' Bertone from the court implications of the renovation fund scam, or whatever it was.]

The [Bergoglio Vatican] status quo is not working. [At least, the status quo ante, with Benedict XVI, had none of these scandals, no matter how hard the world's biggest media giants huffed and puffed to 'create' them.] Pope Francis needs to make dramatic changes in the way in which the Vatican investigates crimes, especially those by bishops.

When communion for the remarried was reintroduced into Catholic discussion a few years ago, we were informed that it was a “pastoral” and “merciful” initiative. Those of us who pointed out that the Church had condemned the idea were told not to worry. Doctrine would be untouched, it was said. The question was merely how to apply the unchanged teaching to a diversity of circumstances.

But as the proposal slowly spreads, and as Rome wavers, it is increasingly clear that the abandonment of traditional practice will only create more suffering and confusion. In trying to get round the Church’s teaching, bishops and theologians are inventing a new set of restrictions, whose consequences are harsher than anything that the most rigidly judgmental traditionalist could dream up.

Committing adulterous sex bars one from the sacraments: So Catholics have believed for the last two thousand years. To skirt this doctrine, it has become necessary to distinguish fit adulterers from unfit ones. The fit ones, by various forms of “discernment,” will be encouraged to take communion and also commit adultery. The unfit ones, also by a process of “discernment,” will be barred from communion.

This is the division that runs through the new guidelines from the archdiocese of Braga, Portugal, which lay out a proposed path to the sacraments for divorced-and-remarried Catholics.

The Braga document, like other examples of the genre, buries its spectacularly controversial proposal amid a long list of truisms. Like a teenager trying to slip an awkward request past his parents, it discusses every subject under the sun before saying, “By the way….” [But that was exactly the modus operandi of AL!]

It reflects, without any great profundity, on the nature of education (“a process of empowerment”), the stresses of modernity (“family life has never been easy”), and relationships (“love cannot be reduced to mere attraction”). Reading the document, you would not know that the controversy over communion has caused so much confusion and division in the last four years.

The Braga pathway is supposed to take “a few months,” in which individuals will “discern” whether they can receive communion.
- There will be “regular meetings” with a priest, in order to “distinguish properly each individual case.”
- The discernment will take several things into account, such as the state of one’s marriage, the condition of one’s children, the impact on the community.
- The individual will meditate on Scripture, and on Amoris Laetitia. - At the end, the discerner is advised to “make a list in two columns of the pros and cons of access to the sacraments.” (But don’t get ahead of yourself: “A pro can equate to many cons or vice versa.”)
- Having made a decision for or against receiving communion, one double-checks it in prayer. “If the Lord does not show signs contrary to the decision taken, then, with freedom, accept it.”

When this is imported from the land of abstractions to the real world, it becomes obvious that it is a recipe for spiritual distress and desolation. Under the Church’s perennial teaching — so deep-rooted in history, so strongly affirmed in modern times — everyone in such a relationship is treated equally: If they avoid having sex with their new partner, they can receive communion. But if they join the Braga fast-track, they can be one of two kinds of person: Fit or Unfit. After six months, Mr. Fit discerns that he can receive communion. Mr. Unfit discerns the opposite: that God wishes him to abstain.

Why does Mr. Unfit decide this? However many “pros and cons” he has discerned, none of these can quite explain the prohibition. There is no algorithm to show that being 65 percent on friendly terms with one’s estranged spouse, one’s children being 43 percent OK, and the community being 37 percent scandalized, means that one cannot receive communion. There must be some mysterious, decisive factor which means Mr. Unfit is cut off from God. Like an eighteenth-century Evangelical convinced that he is predestined to damnation, Mr. Unfit is trapped in the darkness.

If this is cruel to Mr. Unfit, it is scarcely kind to Mr. Fit. Can he be sure that he is so much closer to God than Mr. Unfit? And what if, after Mr. Fit has been taking communion for a couple of months, he “discerns” that he is unfit? He must wonder whether he is deceived now about the will of God, or whether he was deceived before.

Discernment is common in Catholic life: People discern whether to enter religious life, to accept a new job, to make a New Year’s resolution. But the Braga guidelines apply discernment to something completely novel: whether one is shut out from the relationship with Jesus of which the Eucharist is the source and summit.

In a diocese that follows the Church’s perennial teaching, you can confess your sins, resolve to avoid them in future, and get on with your life. In Braga, you are asked to spend months brooding on your own worthiness.

Moreover — and this is hardly an incidental point — the deeper the discernment goes, the more certain it is that adultery will achieve that “full knowledge” and “full consent” which are necessary for a mortal sin that kills the life of grace in the soul.

Throughout the Braga guidelines there is an intellectual vagueness, which gives rise to one absurdity after another. For instance, the document mentions confession, but does not explain how Mr. Fit will act in that sacrament. Since he is not asked to renounce adultery, what is he meant to say when he kneels in the confessional? Should he not mention adultery? Should he conclude his act of contrition with: “by the help of Your grace, I will try not to sin again — with the exception of adultery”? The Braga guidelines point to such bizarre consequences, but cannot be bothered to address them.

This remains one of the great ironies of the present doctrinal crisis: Those who talk most about “pastoral realities” and “people in concrete circumstances” (they have been known to say “concrete people”) are also willing to champion the most unworkable ideas.

How refreshing it is to turn from this spectacle to the teaching that St. John Paul II described as “by virtue of the very authority of the Lord, Shepherd of Shepherds”: that anyone who has strayed from their wedding vows is called to return to chastity, and that a generous God will pour out abundant graces to help them do it.

This God is not mentioned in the Braga guidelines. He might get in the way of all that mercy.

How can Bergoglio and his Bergoglian bishops and priests read critiques like this and not wake up to the utter absurdity of discernment, Bergoglio-style, which is really a pretentious hypocritical way of saying "Do what you want to do - your conscience has absolute primacy!"

The Bergoglio modus operandi of wreckovation can be summed up in the words 'slippery slope strategy' - the whole point being to take some seemingly
insignificant step that is really a broad jump to the edge of a slippery slope that leads straight to hell...

Operation Catechism: Homo-heresy attempts
the final assault Catholic doctrine
[Or how the church of Bergoglio is heading straight to hell in a handbasket]
by Andrea Zambrano

January 24, 2018

Change the Catechism! If its doctrine does not coincide with the new desired orthodoxy concerning homosexuality, it will be better to adopt the solution of Alexander the Great, who with one stroke of his sword decided to untangle the Gordian knot in his own way: by cutting it in two.

In the same way, in order to accept and definitively clear the way for homo-erotic practice, it is necessary to address the fundamentals, and from there everything will be easier.

Now that an attitude of laxity and acceptance of homosexuality as a natural variant of human sexuality is becoming increasingly common, there remains only one small obstacle to adding a full affirmation of LGBT rights as an ingredient in the “Christian salsa” – to remove the Catechism of the Catholic Church, considered the last obstacle to be overcome.

Thus the battle will now move to a doctrinal level, but everything must be prepared with an affected and reassuring language which only a certain attitude of clericalism knows how to do.
- Above all, there must first be sent forth pioneers who make themselves interpreters and spokesmen of this line of thought. A small group of theologians and priests, a few bishops and even so-called pastoral workers, who lead a solitary battle outside of all restraint [from the Magisterium], but who place themselves prominently in view in their dioceses, while the silent majority is dozing.
- The last shot, chronologically, is given to certain lay people, according to the precisely-ordered tapestry of the tearful cause.

So reports Repubblica, telling the story of two parents who have accepted their lesbian daughter and have now joined the team put together by the Bishop of Civitavecchia, Luigi Marrucci, who himself belongs to the so-called Christian LGBT movement. “We were firmly convinced that homosexuality was a sin,” they say.

And now? “We prayed and read the parable of the Prodigal Son, and we came to understand that Lord accepts all without judging. Martina is living in the truth and we love her as she is.”

What truth are they speaking about? Certainly not the truth of the Gospel or the story of Sodom in the Bible nor the truth of the Catechism, to which they make a little peep towards the end of the story: “The problem is with the Catechism, which says that homosexuality is an intrinsically-disordered orientation.”

Here we have found the stumbling stone. This is the key observation necessary in order to “finally” clear the way for the homo-heresy in a Catholic tone. In fact this interview did not just happen by chance, rather, it was initiated from afar. Above all, to affirm the incompatibility of the Catechism, i.e., Catholic doctrine, with the world as it is experienced to be, which would be a worldview based on immanent experience and thus not based on truths of the Divine Law. But so it is.

Chronologically, [those who want a Catholic revolution] must now put in doubt the truth about homosexuality as taught by the Catechism, as Avvenire observed in a well-laid out editorial by Luciano Moia: “There are those who, recognizing the Catholic Tradition contained in the Catechism, maintain the necessity of an affective life conducted in chastity. But there are also those, including bishops and theologians, who ask the Church to make a more profound reflection on the significance of sexuality, not excluding a [permissive] revision of moral theology.”

Who is right in this flirtation with moral relativism? The latter group seems to understand. Look at how here they are laying the groundwork to consider the Catechism no longer untouchable, introducing the virus of revision, as if the truth about man and the divine plan for the human race was merely a social construct subject to changing opinions.

After the Avvenire article [May 2017] a top-secret mini-council was held, in the course of which was laid the foundation, so to speak for the future dismantling of articles 2357, 2358, and 2359 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in which it says that “Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, Tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.”

The meeting was promoted by one of the Jesuits who has been most closely involved with the work of clearing the way for homosexuality, a certain Fr. Pino Piva, who for some time has been the most “listened to” – at least in Italy – among homosexuals who profess to be Catholic but who do not accept the way of chastity proposed by the Catechism and also by the 1986 Letter on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons written by then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

This Fr. Piva, newly moved to the Jesuit house in Bologna, has been gathering together groups of LGBT Christians and those operators who have been working in recent years in various dioceses following specific agendas, always being very careful of course to make sure that there are no experiences of prayer offered by Courage or the group called “Lot” run by Luca di Tolve, which hold views on homosexuality faithfully in line with the Magisterium.

Joining this little team is also a bishop, who has helped out at these meetings but without intervening. [Who is he???] The meeting is open to LGBT believers and to priests who have joined them in undertaking the most “diverse” lifestyles, without any pretense of trying to correct them, but rather desiring to throw into the dragnet all of these experiences and approaches as a way of addressing the theme of homosexuality in the life of the Church. There is only one common denominator: being critical of the Catechism, now considered the principal obstacle to a full gay-friendly opening to homo-erotic practice.

Expressions like “sin”? Old-fashioned. “Welcome”? Only if you accept homosexuality as a natural variation of sexuality. “Love”? Only as a jumble of feelings and not as a naturally-ordered plan desired by God.

Little is known about what takes place at this meeting, but something came out on the blog of Fr. Mauro Leonardi, another promoter of the homo-erotic cause, who has been in the game for a long time, even to the point of interviewing Vladimir Luxuria [an Italian “transgender” celebrity who as a Communist politician was the first openly “transgender” member of Parliament in Europe] without discussing or questioning any of her [his??] thinking.

Leonardi, who writes a widely-followed blog, has dropped some real zingers, such as this one: “If however, as is true for the large majority of homosexual persons, one is convinced that the homosexual condition is natural and desired by God, can the only response of the Church really be: ‘As long as you don’t adhere to the Catechism (and besides, the Catechism is not the Gospel) you cannot receive the Sacraments?’ Is it even possible to confess sins which one’s conscience does not believe to be sins?”

In sum, once we have eliminated all objective data on human nature and the divine order, homosexuality is also nothing other than a matter of each person’s opinion. And as such it must be accepted and promoted. In fact, also quoting the bishop present at the Bologna meeting, Leonardi said, “I do not tell you to adhere to the Catechism. I say: the Church still does not have an answer.”

It would be an objectively grave matter if a bishop promotes the thesis of rebellion against the Catechism, which represents not a mere code of laws taken off the street but the normative architecture on which the Faith is based. And it would be just as disturbing that a bishop affirms that the Church still does not have an answer.

Because in reality there actually is an answer which displays a united charity and truth in a truly thrilling way with respect to chastity, to which homosexuals are also called, as the experience of Courage has demonstrated. But now the gauntlet has been thrown down and the crusade against the Catechism must go forward.

How will they proceed? They have also been sharpening their weapons on this strategy:
- Drawing their inspiration from the “revision” of the Catechism proposed by Pope Francis on the death penalty and his pronouncements about the past concerning [the teaching of the Church about] the abolition of slavery. Arguments which are completely different, but useful here to justify a method of dismantling [the Catechism] that can now be useful for the homo-erotic cause.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 26/01/2018 05:43]

Icons of the Argentine Pantheon: Their common thread is Juan Peron, whom Che Guevara, from Cuba, sought hard to bring home from exile. They had become friends but Peron disapproved of guerrilla warfare and warned Che not to start it in Bolivia
because it would be 'suicide'. He was right.

Fr. Blake, thanks to his Argentine waiter-friend, has nailed a great insight into one aspect of Peronism - its caudillismo, the cult of the leader-who-is-always-right - and how this has bled over into Jorge Bergoglio.

Peronism and corruption

January 25, 2018

I had a lesson in Peronism from an Argentinian waiter recently, in Argentina he was a PPE graduate. [PPE - for philosophy, politics and economics - is probably the most 'popular' undergraduate major in British universities and those that style themselves after the British universities.]

Peronism, he said, was the most corrupt form of politics, because you could be a Communist, or a Facist, or a Capitalist, the only thing that mattered was support for Peron, and post-Peron, any other head of State. It is a remnant of 1920s-30s Fascism, where the will of the Fuhrer or Il Duce was all that mattered. Right or Wrong, Good or Bad, Custom or Tradition, Law or Morality, or anything else pale into insignificance and have no validity compared to the Will of the Leader.

Therefore the ideal is to be as close as possible to the Leader, failing direct proximity the next best thing is to be close either to those who are close to the Leader or those know, or claim to know, the mind of the Leader.

Under such a system, moral automony is reduced to slavery because is no mral compass, such abstracts as Right and Wrong are of no importance. All that does matter is Dux Vult (The leader wills it). If the leader is somewhat erratic that doesn't really matter, it just means his followers have to be closer and listen even more intently, and it could be that what was the Leader's will last year or even this morning, might not be so now, or his will expressed to A might be the complete opposite of what was expressed to B.

To the Peronist, the old elite, who based their authority on intellectual expertise or their understanding, or knowledge of - even their fidelity to - the law must be supplanted, as nothing other than the leader's will matters. They represent an alternative authority, and therefore a possible alternative source of power, and certainly a source of evaluation and criticism. Peronism hates intellectuals - they are always totally arbitrary and concerned with what is expedient, what adds to or deepens the leader's power.

Nowadays everyone identifies the rule of Francis as in some sense Peronist. It is a popular conclusion, and I identified it at the beginning of his reign, somewhat positively, as appealing to the ordinary man in that he tried to make the Papacy 'popular'. That was a bit naive of me - it is actually Peronism, which is essentially about making the leader powerful.

The trouble with Peronism, as my waiter friend explaine,d is that far from being a cure for corruption it becomes a source of it The corruption in the Vatican is based on nepotism and patronage. It is the old Italian thing, as dominant in Rome as it is in Palermo: X has done me a favour, therefore I will do a favour for Y, who will do you a favour, in return for you helping Z, who will then be indebted to me.

Peronism thrives on this because relations with the leader, rather than integrity, honour or honesty, are all that matters. It does indeed reduce everyone to slavery because personal integrity is always subject to whatever the leader wants. North Korea is perhaps the Peronist ideal, or at least its reductio ad absurdum.

Peronism [which in this case, has mutated into Bergoglism] cannot tolerate upright men of integrity. But it does approve and welcome the servile and weak and those who are either stupid, indebted in some sense or lack integrity, who are therefore always corruptible. One could list a huge number of Bergoglio courtiers who fit into this category.

In his recent comment in Chile on Bishop Barros, while denouncing Barros's sccusers of being calumnious liars, the Pope quite rightly says "bring me evidence and I will act". It is right and just to have proof, and innocence should be presumed. The problem, of course, is that in other situations he has removed bishops on mere rumour or gossip, as in the case of the [orthodox and traditional and vocation-building] Bishop of Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. [Thank you, Father, for bringing that up. It is certainly a most apposite case to cite. I had forgotten all about it in my outrage with Bergoglio's obsession with Barros.]

In the English-speaking world the norm is: if a priest or bishop is accused of sexual abuse, he is suspended until he is exonerated, and the burden of prove is on him, not his accuser. In Italy, Francis has a reputation of extending 'mercy' to the friends of friends of sexual abusers such as Fr Mauro Inzoli, suspended by Benedict, then rehabilitated by Francis, then suspended again when he was convicted and imprisoned. His own record on sexual abusers in Buenos Aires is reportedly not quite a shining example - it compares very poorly to Cardinal Pell's, even in the 1980s. It is a very Peronist way of acting, where due process or good practice is over-ridden according to the leader's will or friendships.

The same could be said of the 'wedding on the plane' - due process, ritual, law, all seemingly ignored for the sake of what many might see as a stunt.

The Papal award to Liliane Ploumen or his repeated praise of Emma Bonino can be seen in Peronist terms: what matters is not Catholic belief but what is political expedient. It is a good thing in the eyes of the world, or just his friends to praise or honour famous women who might be pro-abortion but, more important to Bergoglio, they are anti-trafficking, anti-violence against women [and pro-indiscriminate immigration].

The latest action of asking Chinese 'underground' Catholic Bishops to step down in favour of State appointees is indeed a Peronist act. The orthodoxy, the past suffering and loyalty of such bishops and their people, counts for little compared with rapprochement with the Chinese Government. [But not for the sake of rapprochement per se, but to pave the way for Bergoglio to become the first pope to visit China. In which he appears to be willing to sacrifice the millions of Chinese Catholics who have chosen to be in the 'underground' Church.]

The message sent to the world is that in its relationship with the world, everything the Catholic Church once believed is up for grabs - and with China, almost as if what is most desired is a Papal visit to China and the 'image' it might bring the Holy See and the Pope personally.

Am I suddenly in an alternate universe – where the Fishwrap editorializes against Bergoglio, Fr. Reese calls him ‘blind’ to the clerical sex abuse issue, and now the German bishops are not siding
with him on his ‘great Bergoglian inspiration' to change the words of one of the key petitions we make to the Lord, in the prayer taught by Christ on that hill overlooking Galilee more than 2000 years ago?


German bishops reject pope’s
translation change to Lord’s Prayer


BERLIN, January 25, 2018 (AP) - Catholic bishops in Germany say they’ve debated Pope Francis’s suggestion to tweak the translation of the Lord’s Prayer, but will leave it unchanged.

France recently changed its translation of “lead us not into temptation” to “don’t let me fall into temptation,” which Francis has suggested was better, to make clearer that Catholics do not believe God ever induces someone into sin.

The pope told Italy’s Church-owned TV2000 last month that a father would never push a son into sin, and “what pushes you to temptation is Satan.”

TV2000 had been broadcasting a series of conversations between the pope and a Catholic prison chaplain, looking at the Lord’s Prayer line by line. The episode broadcast Dec. 6 focused on the line, “Lead us not into temptation.”

But the German Bishops’ Conference said Thursday there were strong “philosophical, exegetical, liturgical and, not least, ecumenical” reasons to leave the present wording unchanged. Among other things, they say the line speaks of “the trust to be carried and redeemed by almighty God.”

Francis recently allowed individual bishops’ conferences greater leeway in translating liturgical texts, after the Vatican had previously centralized the process under Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, making it appear unlikely that Rome will attempt to compel the German bishops to take up the pope’s suggestion.

To some observers of Church affairs, the decision by the German bishops may seem slightly surprising, given that they’re usually perceived as among the staunchest allies and supporters of Pope Francis in the Catholic world.

Mario Tosatti riffs on the issue, venting on the Italian bishops who seem bent on changing their Lord's Prayer the way the pope wants it.
Safe to say they will, after their TV channel dedicated six programs featuring Bergoglio, no less, to tout their 'new' translation.


Perhaps a new Dead Sea scroll will show that
the pope and the Italian bishops are right
about 'editing' the Lord's Prayer?
Translated from

January 26, 2018

I hope that the first-century Gospel fragment written in Aramaic, Greek and Latin (sort of like a Rosetta Stone), on the basis of which the Italian bishops’ conference will be discussing how to change the most important prayer in Christianity, will prove to be authentic.

It dates back to the last years of the first century A.D., and who knows? – in the absence of tape recorders to dear to the Jesuit superior-general – perhaps it may be signed by the Christ, or at least, carry his initials! No, the existence of this fragment (or fragments) has not been revealed, but it ought to exist! Otherwise, with what nerve would any Christian dare to manipulate a 2000-year-old text that has always been considered authentic and prayed this way by generations of Christians?

The last faint hope is that in their fall assembly, when the bishops will decide on the change – from “lead us not into temptation” to “do not abandon us to temptation”, which is the professed preference of [Scriptural and Christological expert[ Jorge Bergoglio – the vote in the secret balloting (God knows what each bishop will vote, but not Galantino, and not even Bergoglio would know), the Italian bishops will vote NO in an act of belated repentance and recovery of faith and pride in the faith. Alas, I am only too aware of how illusory this wish is!

We spoke about the Lord’s Prayer issue with Fr. Nicola Bux recently, and this is what that wise and learned man explained:

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“As for the clause “et ne nos inducas in tentationem", this what St. Thomas Aquinas wrote in his Comment on the Lord’s Prayer. After having pointed out that God ‘tempts’ man to test his virtue, and that to be ‘led into temptation’ means to consent to it: "Here, Christ teaches us to ask God to help us be able to avoid sin, that is, not to be led into temptation from which we would slide into sin, so he teaches us to pray ‘And lead us not into temptation’...

Aquinas, who makes clear that it is the world, the flesh and the devil who tempt man to evil, notes that we conquer temptation with the help of God. How? "Christ teaches us to ask not that we shall not be tempted, but to ask that we not be led into temptation…

Finally, he asks: ‘But perhaps God leads us to evil the moment we say “lead us not into temptation’"? I answer that God leads us to evil in the sense that he allows it because, given man’s repeated and multiple sins, he withdraws his grace, without which man easily falls into evil. That is why we say with the Psalmist: ‘As my strength fails, do not forsake me’ (71,9). And God sustains man so that he does not fall into temptation, through the fervor of his charity, which little as it may be, is enough to preserve us from sin”.

---

In short, that phrase was already ‘problematic’ in Aquinas’s time, but no one thought to change the line, certainly not to sugarcoat it, but rather, it was sought to understand it more profoundly.

In the same conversation, don Nicola called on me to verify some data (which I am guilty of not having done) – namely, if it is true that in Germany, even atheists objected to the change favored by Pope Francis, and that the Protestants announced they were not changing anything. Not to mention that Biblical exegetes of every race and color have been asking whether Bergoglio also intends to change the original Greek text of the New Testament, of which the Latin is an exact translation. [Well, now we have the official stand of the German Catholic bishops - No, they will leave the prayer as it is.]

Recently, the priests who run the blog 'Anonimi della Croce' have been addressing this issue. In one article, they write:

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The line, as it has been translated and universally prayed for centuries, comes from Matthew 16, verse 13a: “and lead us not into temptation”, but which has been maladroitly translated as “do not abandon us to temptation” [in the new official Italian translation of the Bible]. Of course, what prevailed here was the usual ‘political correctness'. How could God possibly ‘lead’ to temptation? [Bergoglio's question and objection!] Let’s change that to a translation that is softer, ‘sweeter’, more sentimental. Which is very very wrong. But I will get back to this point later.

Let us take the verse in question from the original Greek text: “καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν”. The word that interests us her is “εἰσενέγκῃς” (eisenekes), which, for centuries has been translated as “lead to”, but in the new translation, we see it replaced by the verb 'abandon to', which is completely out of place in the clause’s syntax and construction.

The greek verb eisenekes is the aorist [uninflected verb of action simply describing the action, not its time] infinitive of eispherein, made up of the adverbial prefix eis- (in Latin ‘in’ or ‘verso’, indicating a movement in a certain direction) and -pherein (Latin portare, to bring), meaning ‘bring towards’, or ‘bring into’, or ‘lead to’. Moreover the verb is linked to the substantive peirasmon (‘trial’ or ‘temptation’) through another eis. same particle we saw in the verb but used this time as a preposition which requires the accusative form for the object or complement of the verb of motion. Unlike however in Latin or German, eis can only be used with the accusative.

So we see that the Greek construction presents a clear redundancy – it underscores twice the movement towards temptation, and so, evidently, a translation that substitutes ‘do not abandon us to temptation’ is simply wrong, because it implies an essentially static process. [I would say ‘passive’ as against an 'active' mood – as if falling to temptation were God’s fault for allowing us to do so, instead of it being a result of our active will and desire.]

The Latin translation inducere, opportunely used by St. Jerome in his translation of the original Greek to the Latin Vulgate in the 4th century, is composed of ‘in-' and ‘ducere’ which is an exact translation of eispherein, followed by another 'in' and the accusative form ‘tentationem’, therefore in strict correspondence to the Greek construction. Likewise, the Italian ‘indurre in' (again with in- repeated) reproduces the construction of the Latin verb from which it comes and conveys the same significance.

Therefore, the most correct Italian translation which is faithful to the original text is what it has always been: “non ci indurre in tentazione” – lead us not into temptation – and any other translation is misleading and even grotesque.

As I have always said, respect for Sacred Scripture is fundamental, and this is demonstrated in the faithfulness of the translations to the original text [and it’s where the Novus Ordo deviated consciously and most appallingly in terms of the Mass prayers and the Scriptural readings therein]. But the tendency today is to favor the politically correct, always the ‘soft ‘ version, the sugary one, the honeyed. Completely uprooting the true significance of what the Word says to us.

Indeed, many are now asking: How can God lead to temptation? Yet there are so many Biblical passages that show how God puts temptation and trial in the way of man. Which scandalizes those in the ‘new church’ who think that God only has ‘honeyed mercy’, which means they ignore the Cross, and the trials and temptations that come with our being human.

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It all comes back to my hypothesis that Bergoglio does not really think much of Original Sin – because if he did, he ought to know, as all Catholics are catechized, that all the ills of the world and of mankind are the consequences of God driving man out of Paradise because of Original Sin, and how can we complain?

All his campaigning against poverty and hunger, war and violence - and thinking he and his cohorts may be able to eliminate them from the world – is yet another form of the Original Sin, thinking man can do better than God. Bergoglio probably thinks that he would have done better than God in Eden - he would never have driven Adam and Eve out, and never punished them at all, because punishing them – and all mankind with them to the end of time – was not merciful at all.

But the test God required of his first human creatures was a test of the free will he had endowed them with – that was the first trial God put man through:Was man’s free will strong enough to resist the actual temptation that Satan presented them when he showed up in Eden? It was not – and that’s been the human story ever since.

Which is why it became necessary for God to send down his Son to live among men and teach them through his words and deeds what God expects of every human creature so he can take them back to the Paradise from which they had been expelled. The redemption Jesus brought to mankind was the second chance God has given man to recover the nature he was originally endowed with as ‘the image and likeness of God’.]