THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

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

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI





Pope Benedict receives the first edition of THE NEWMAN GUIDE in 2009 from Patrick Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society.

Ten years since faithful Catholic colleges
in the USA embraced Pope Benedict’s vision
for a truly Catholic education


April 24, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – This April marks ten years since then-Pope Benedict XVI challenged American Catholic educators to put Catholic identity and fidelity ahead of other concerns.

And while not everyone embraced his vision, it greatly inspired the 28 colleges and higher education programs recognized by The Cardinal Newman Society for their strong Catholic identity and featured in the 2018-19 edition of The Newman Guide, released today at the completely redesigned and updated website, www.TheNewmanGuide.com.

Pope Benedict told college and diocesan leaders gathered at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., on April 17, 2008, “First and foremost, every Catholic educational institution is a place to encounter the living God, Who in Jesus Christ reveals His transforming love and truth.”

He urged fidelity to Catholic teaching and a properly defined “academic freedom” that does not deny truth — an appeal that is especially relevant today as the Church prepares for the Vatican Synod on Young People, the Faith, and Vocational Discernment this October. Young Catholics in today’s highly secular culture are in great need of education that presents the truth about God, morality, and Catholic life.

A year after Pope Benedict’s address, Newman Society President Patrick Reilly presented him a copy of the first Newman Guide on the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica — a gift to the Pope who inspired it.

The 28 institutions recommended in The Newman Guide share Pope Benedict’s vision for Catholic education. They take seriously the Holy Father’s claim that Catholic education is “integral to the mission of the Church to proclaim the Good News.” They strive to carry out Pope Benedict’s charge, that “each and every aspect of your learning communities reverberates within the ecclesial life of faith.”

The expanded Newman Guide content available online, free of charge, goes beyond highlighting important differences among faithful colleges. It also helps families understand the value of a faithful Catholic education, how to navigate the college search, and how to guide students in growing their faith on campus.

A printed Newman Guide resource will be available in the fall.

As part of its Newman Guide program, The Cardinal Newman Society has expanded its innovative “Recruit Me” program, which invites The Newman Guide colleges to recruit interested high school students, shares college search tips, and allows seniors to participate in the Newman Society’s $5,000 Essay Scholarship Contest.

For graduates of Newman Guide colleges and others, the Newman Society’s new www.CatholicEdJobs.com website connects faithful Catholic schools and colleges with qualified job candidates who are dedicated to their Catholic faith and the mission of Catholic education.

Founded in 1993, the mission of The Cardinal Newman Society is to promote and defend faithful Catholic education at all levels, including elementary, secondary, and higher education. The Society is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, nonprofit organization supported by individuals, businesses, and foundations.





Benedict XVI’s charge to Catholic Educators
Editorial

April 2018

This month marks the 10th anniversary of Pope Benedict’s historic address to American Catholic educators at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Today it remains a key to the renewal of faithful Catholic education.

Benedict’s theme was that the destructive “crisis of truth” in the world today — and especially in education — is rooted in “a crisis of faith.”

This was one of the central themes of his too-short papacy, his priesthood and his professional life as a teacher, theologian, and key collaborator of St. John Paul II.

This holy professor-pope saw the West and Christendom rushing down a path of secularization, by which faith is increasingly viewed as contrary to reason and truth. Pope Benedict warned that this was one of the great dangers of our time.

When named the archbishop of Munich in 1977, he adopted the motto “Cooperators of the Truth” and explained it thus:

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On the one hand, I saw it as the relation between my previous task as professor and my new mission. In spite of different approaches, what was involved and continued to be so, was following the truth and being at its service. On the other hand, I chose that motto because in today’s world the theme of truth is omitted almost entirely, as something too great for man, and yet everything collapses if truth is missing.

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Everything collapses if truth is missing.

Doesn’t that describe the rapid decline of Catholic education, culture and fidelity in recent decades? For Pope Benedict and his saintly predecessor, the renewal of Catholic education was a priority. But the crisis of truth had already corrupted so many Catholic colleges and schools in America.

So even before his 2008 address, Pope Benedict had been sounding the alarm that the Church and the West face what he called an “educational emergency.”

Benedict publicly lamented the loss of hope among many young people — hope that was missing, because so many young people do not know the truth about God and man as His creation.

In his address to American educators, Pope Benedict argued that it is the special privilege and obligation of Catholic education to unite faith and reason, and to teach truth that is revealed by God as well as truth that is observed and reasoned. Even more, faith is not just to be understood, but to be lived.

Therefore, in addition to orthodoxy, the Catholic identity of schools and colleges:

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…demands and inspires much more: namely that each and every aspect of your learning communities reverberates within the ecclesial life of faith. Only in faith can truth become incarnate and reason truly human, capable of directing the will alon the path of freedom.

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Catholic schools and colleges, therefore, can never limit their focus to the intellect. They also bear responsibility for the spiritual development of their students.

How many Catholic schools or colleges today enthusiastically embrace this responsibility for forming their students for sainthood?

Surely not enough of them. This, then, is at the heart of the problem in Catholic education for which Benedict proposed his solutions.

Pope Benedict charged the Catholic educators:

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A particular responsibility therefore for each of you, and your colleagues, is to evoke among the young the desire for the act of faith, encouraging them to commit themselves to the ecclesial life that follows from this belief. It is here that freedom reaches the certainty of truth. In choosing to live by that truth, we embrace the fullness of the life of faith which is given to us in the Church.

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Amen! The work today of The Cardinal Newman Society is profoundly shaped by the vision of Pope Benedict. He could have justly scolded the leaders of America’s wayward colleges and secularized Catholic school systems, and we would have welcomed it. But instead he provided a way forward, a gift of immeasurable value. He gave Catholic educators a mandate to end the crisis of truth by embracing and teaching our Catholic faith, from the classroom to the dorm room.

Together in partnership with our members and the growing number of faithful educators at Newman Guide colleges and Honor Roll schools, the Newman Society takes up Pope Benedict’s charge. With the grace of God, our important mission to promote and defend faithful Catholic education will help bring about the renewal that Benedict so greatly desired.


Pope Benedict XVI’s vision for Catholic education
by Dr. Timothy O'Donnell
President, Christendom College


The following is adapted with permission from a talk given by Dr. Timothy O’Donnell, president of Christendom College, on Feb. 26, 2013. He reflects on Pope Benedict XVI’s address to Catholic educators 10 years ago this month.

I will never forget Pope Benedict XVI, in his historic address to Catholic educators at The Catholic University of America on April 17, 2008. He gave a calmly reasoned presentation of the fundamental importance of the Catholic faith to the mission of Catholic education at all levels.

The Holy Father began his address by referring to those present as “bearers of wisdom,” immediately signifying the august nature of their calling and mission of service within the Church. Rather than seeing the college and university as something separate and distinct from the Church, he placed this educational mission right at the heart of the mission of the Church:
- “Education is integral to the mission of the Church to evangelize.”
- A Catholic school is first and foremost “a place to encounter the living God, who in Jesus Christ reveals His transforming love.”

Here, the Holy Father immediately pointed out the absolute centrality of faith in Catholic higher education. This encounter with the living God is meant to “elicit a desire to grow in knowledge and understanding of Jesus Christ.” Those who encounter Christ within the Catholic school are drawn by the Gospel to begin to live a new life and to pursue seriously the true, the good, and the beautiful.

Education in truth must guide both the teacher and the student toward objective truth, which transcends the particular and the subjective, and points the student out of his narrow world towards the universal and absolute. For it is only when the student comes into contact with universal and absolute truth that he will be able to proclaim the Christian message of hope. This is especially crucial, the Pope observed, when dealing with today’s secular mindset, which struggles constantly with moral confusion and the fragmentation of knowledge and lacks the unified vision that only the Catholic university can give.

Unfortunately, in the wake of the chaos of the 1960s and ’70s — and the confusion following the Second Vatican Council — the uniqueness of Catholic higher education was compromised by an effort to imitate secular models. In the 1967 Land O’ Lakes Statement, a number of influential US Catholic educators proclaimed that, in the name of academic freedom, no Catholic institution of higher learning could acknowledge any authority outside itself. (In practice, however, the only authority from which the universities could claim independence was the Church herself, not accrediting agencies and the like.)

Tellingly, Pope Benedict clearly pointed out that the Catholic identity of a university is “fundamentally… a question of conviction.” He then asked five radically fundamental questions:

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- Do we really believe that only in the mystery of the Word made flesh does the mystery of man become clear? (Gaudium et Spes, 22)
- Are we ready to commit our entire self intellect, will, mind, and heart — to God?
- Do we accept the truth Christ reveals?
- Is the faith tangible in our universities and schools?
- Is it given fervent expression liturgically, sacramentally, through prayer, acts of charity, concern for justice, and respect for God’s creation?

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Only when all these questions can be answered in the affirmative is a college or university truly Catholic: “Only in this way do we really bear witness to the meaning of who we are and what we uphold.”

Those teaching in the Catholic university have a particular responsibility “to evoke among the young the desire for the act of faith, encouraging them to commit themselves to the ecclesial life that follows from belief.” It is precisely in making the act of faith and living that faith within the Church, the Pope stated, that “freedom reaches the certainty of truth.”

Rejecting the relativism which portrays religious faith as a purely subjective matter, the Pope continues, “In choosing to live by that truth, we embrace the fullness of the life of faith which is given to us by the Church.”

The Holy Father then made what I believe is the central point of his address:

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Clearly, then, Catholic identity is not dependent upon statistics. Neither can it be equated simply with orthodoxy of course content. It demands and inspires much more: namely, that each and every aspect of your learning communities reverberates within the ecclesial life of faith. Only in faith can truth become incarnate and reason truly human, capable of directing the will along the path of freedom (Spe Salvi, 23).

In this way our institutions make a vital contribution to the mission of the Church and truly serve society. They become places in which God’s active presence in human affairs is recognized and in which every young person discovers the joy of entering into Christ’s ‘being for others’ (ibid., 28).

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Addressing the false understanding of academic freedom, the Holy Father stated:

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I wish to reaffirm the great value of academic freedom. In virtue of this freedom you are called to search for the truth wherever careful analysis of evidence leads you. Yet it is also the case that any appeal to the principle of academic freedom in order to justify positions that contradict the faith and teaching of the Church would obstruct or even betray the university’s identity and mission, a mission at the heart of the Church’s munus operandi and not somehow autonomous or independent of it.

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I firmly believe that Pope Benedict XVI’s inspiring message and the radical challenge of this address will remain central to any future discussion concerning the purpose and direction of Catholic education in this country.

An Ordinariate Mass in Rome
by Gregory DiPippo

April 25, 2018

This morning, the Roman basilica of Santa Maria in Campitelli hosted a Mass celebrated according to Divine Worship, the Ordinariate Missal, by a group of American and English clergy and seminarians. This was an especially appropriate location both for today’s feast, and for this particular rite.

The ancient Roman church dedicated to St Mark the Evangelist is about a five-minute walk away, in the area where a Roman tradition says he lived and wrote his Gospel, based on the stories told to him by St Peter. Santa Maria in Campitelli, originally known as Sancta Maria in Porticu, was the first cardinalitial title of Henry Cardinal Stuart, scion of the last Catholic ruling family of England.

It has served as a place of prayer for the return of England to union with theSsee of Peter since his death in 1807, a beautiful choice of church to celebrate a Mass that unites the Roman and Anglican liturgical traditions.

The music included the Communion Service No. 2 from the 1940 Hymnal by Healey Willan, propers from the Plainchant Gradual by Palmer and Burgess, the Processional Hymn The Eternal Gifts of Christ the King, JM Neale’s translation of St Ambrose’s Aeterna Christi Munera, a psalm setting by Edward Elgar, and plenty of beautiful organ music.

It is very much to be hoped that this tradition flourish within the Ordinariate certainly for its own sake, but also as a model to Catholics throughout the world for improving the quality of music at Mass generally!

Portrait of Benedict XIV by Pierre Subleyras.

A big 'Thank you' to Fr Rutler for this most engaging profile of the great Benedict XIV, Fr Hunwicke's beloved Papa Lambertini, who was pope from 1740-1758, the holy intellectual and wit with
whom he often indulges in fancied conversations - in Latin, if you please! - about current affairs in the Church.

A faithful Pope of the Enlightenment
by FR. GEORGE W. RUTLER

April 25, 2018

In the early 1950s, children watched a puppet show, "Kukla, Fran, and Ollie", broadcast from Chicago all the way to the Eastern seaboard through the innovative marvel of television. It was more of a children’s show for adults, for how else could the sophisticated puns make sense, or what child could understand how Ollie the Dragon confused “The Mikado” with “Madame Butterfly?” Beulah the Witch was a puppet of a mien too ridiculous to frighten any but the most neurasthenic child. One day she threw down her broomstick and declared that she had decided to abandon witchcraft for the wonderful world of empiricism.

A psychologist, Steven Pinker, author of a new book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Science, Reason, Humanism and Progress seems bemusingly ignorant of how the case of religion as a benevolent partner of empirical science has been addressed eloquently and convincingly over the past several generations.

His notion of reason and science is that it is the other side of the coin of religion and faith, not symbiotic but hostile, with physics unmasking the pretensions of metaphysics. This flies in the face of the fact that most of the nurturers of new knowledge in the eighteenth century were devout religionists.

Has he ever heard of Bacon and Newton and Locke, Montesquieu, Adams, and Tocqueville? And does that caricature of the “Enlightenment” consider that autonomous human reason became the engine of a Reign of Terror and its sequels in the gulags, eugenics, and cultural revolutions of the twentieth century?

If priests in the so-called Age of Enlightenment were sorcerers like Beulah the Witch before she came to her senses, there is the contradictory figure of Pope Benedict XIV who threw down no broom but raised a crozier in the name of the Divine Logos who “came to testify about the Light” (John 1:9).

Prospero Lorenzo Lambertini (1675–1758) was born in Bologna, where his tutors set him on a course that would shape him as one of the greatest scholars in the history of the papacy. The Benedictine pioneer in paleontology and archeology, Bernard de Montaucon, master of Greek and Hebrew, said of the eident prodigy: “Young as he is, he has two societies: one for science and the other for society.”

Montfaucon was not a social butterfly, but he quickly summed up Lambertini’s elegant admixture of scholar and saloniste, for whom there was no tension between the library and the drawing room, and whose amiability made him like one of the Chestertonian angels able to fly because they take themselves lightly.

As Bishop of Ancona, the clergy were devoted to him, and when he was transferred to his native Bologna, his cheerfulness was a tonic for the ills of discontent among some of the priests. It was said that none left his presence sad or angry, and even the less studious among them felt honored by the time he spent reforming the seminary curriculum, with more emphasis on Sacred Scripture and Patrology.

In August of 1740, Lambertini was one of fifty-four cardinals who had struggled and intrigued for six months to elect a pope. The days were baking hot and, though news travelled slowly, that year saw Frederick II assume power in Prussia, the song “Rule Britannia” was first sung at Cliveden, Adam Smith began studies in Oxford, George Whitfield brought Methodism to the colony of Georgia, and the University of Pennsylvania was founded, shortly after the Royal Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.

Finally Lambertini rose and said in weary jest: “If you wish to elect a saint, choose Gotti; a statesman Aldobrandini; an honest man, elect me.” The joke turned on him and the 247th pope was astonished and somewhat befuddled, but not shy about accepting.

Some thought he conceded too much to foreign interests, but it was never at the expense of the Church’s legitimate rights in promotion of the Gospel. It became difficult for the most virulent foes of the papacy to resist the charm of his humor and brilliance, and the local Romans enjoyed passing along his jokes and bons mots. When informed of a rumor that the Anti-Christ had been born into the world and was three years old, he replied: “In that case, I shall let my successor handle the problem.”

Complex matters of revenues required reform of banking systems and regulation of usurious corruption. Daunting was the corruption in the Papal States, especially since the coffers had been exhausted by his predecessors, Benedict XIII and Clement XII. Lambertini restructured the administration of his territories, promoted agricultural reforms, and frequently walked among the poorest people in the most dangerous neighborhoods.

With commonsense, he was lenient in implementing censures of the neuralgic clients of Jansenism. While monies were raised to fight Muslim pirates off Tripoli, the pope had a graceful correspondence with the “Good Turk.” Not hasty in lifting social and financial restrictions against Jews, he at least enjoined the Polish bishops to resist anti-Semitic pogroms, and declared that the ‘blood libel” against Jews was a lie.

The encyclicals of Lambertini are models of precise thought and clearly identified purpose, reflecting his Thomistic formation. The bull Magnae nobis admirationis set the standard for canonical treatment of marriages between Catholics and Protestants, and his laws for canonization lasted right into the twentieth century.

Because of their gravity, he was careful that canonizations not be rushed, but “If anyone dared to assert that the Pontiff had erred in this or that canonization, we shall say that he is, if not a heretic, at least temerarious, a giver of scandal to the whole Church, an insulter of the saints, a favourer of those heretics who deny the Church’s authority in canonizing saints, savouring of heresy by giving unbelievers an occasion to mock the faithful, the assertor of an erroneous opinion and liable to very grave penalties.”

He instinctively would have been cautious about canonizing popes in rapid succession subito lest the practice become like the “apotheosis” of Roman emperors, which was a hint of decay in the Imperial dynasties. That flexibility of the pantheon had made sober Roman citizens cynical, like Vespasian himself: Vae, puto deus fio! (“Woe is me, I think I am becoming a god!”)

Anyone who imagines that the liturgical books were sealed for all ages by Pope St. Pius V like a fly in amber should note that a cataract of changes followed Trent, inciting the liturgical conservatism of Benedict XIV to sulphurous contempt. It was in fact the only one of his many attentions that beclouded his sunny nature.

He opposed the Kalendarium changes, multiple collects, and the number of new Breviary offices with the rank of “Duplex.” The only addition he permitted during all of his eighteen years as pope was to bestow the title of Doctor on Leo the Great. There was a plan to simplify the Breviary, to make it more practical for parochial use, but the resulting four-volume study was so vast, that the task was abandoned, save for a reform of the Roman Martyrology. The Stations of the Cross that the pope erected in the Colosseum stood until they were destroyed by the Italian government in 1870.

An encyclical of 1749, Annus Qui Hunc, gave guidelines to sacred music, denouncing the profane music that had crept into churches, ordered an end to informality and undignified celebrations, and even corrected neglect of proper clerical dress. Much of what exists today in the structures of the Melchites and Maronites are the fruit of Lambertini.

Humility did not tax his love for the beauty of the Mass, whose ceremonials he embellished, knowing the evangelical power of splendor, while prudence mastered the art of pomp without pomposity. He saw the dangers of false humility in advertising austerity, just as he had little use for the kind of uninformed aestheticism that caricatures aesthetics.

The enlightened pope was a feminist in a solid sense, encouraging women in science and mathematics, beginning at the university in his native Bologna even before becoming pope. He enrolled the female pioneer in Newtonian physics and electricity, Laura Bassi, in his group of twenty-five leading intellectuals, his “Benedettini,” charged with promoting theoretical physics and other sciences.

And as a proper liturgist as well as feminist, he abhorred any ideological manipulation of the liturgy as deeply as he resented the politicization of physical science. In so many words, he understood the “theology of the body” before that awkward term was invented and appropriated by half-educated lecturers on the subject.

Consequently, Benedict opposed attempts to invert the anthropology of the sacred rites. He decreed in the encyclical Allatae sunt of July 26, 1755:

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“Pope Gelasius in his ninth letter (chap. 26) to the bishops of Lucania condemned the evil practice which had been introduced of women serving the priest at the celebration of Mass. Since this abuse had spread to the Greeks, Innocent IV strictly forbade it in his letter to the bishop of Tusculum: ‘Women should not dare to serve at the altar; they should be altogether refused this ministry.’ We too have forbidden this practice in the same words in Our oft-repeated constitution Etsi Pastoralis, sect. 6, no. 2, 1.”

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Lambertini has as great a claim as any pontiff for having founded the Vatican museums, as well as establishing four academies for the study of antiquities, canon law, and liturgy, plus augmenting the Vatican library with, among other works, the Ottoboninian treasury of 3,300 volumes.

By one measure, he was a micro-manager, but an edifying one, examining candidates in the Roman College for the chairs of mathematics and chemistry that he endowed, while he also supervised the publication of the works of Galileo. In matters academic and spiritual, he cast a suspicious eye on the Jesuits, and entrusted a reform of the Society in 1758 to Cardinal Saldanya, but that ceased with his death. He never admitted a Jesuit to the College of Cardinals.

Rationalists and skeptics widely respected his knowledge of the world uncontaminated by an inferior worldliness, fascinated by the right way he told them that they were wrong. He suffered fools gladly without making them feel foolish. Of a balanced temper, he had no capacity for sarcasm or insult, and cajoled rather than humiliated.

When the French ambassador Choiseul presumed to instruct him on the appointment of bishops, he took the surprised man by the arm and placed him on the papal chair: Fa el Papa (“You be the Pope”). Even the intimidating Empress Maria Theresa of Austria was bedazzled by the elegance of the pope’s mind and manners, and King George II permitted the free publication of his letters in England. Hard as it is to believe, Voltaire fell under his spell and composed a distich (a verse couplet) in his honor:
"Lambertinius hic est, Romae decus, et pater orbis
Qui mundum scriptuis docuit, virtutibus ornat."

And lest anyone think that this tribute to “Lambertini the father of the world and adornment of Rome. Who teaches that world by his writings and honours it by his virtues” was just a calculating flatterer, the same Voltaire dedicated to him his play “Mahomet” in 1741: “To the head of the true religion a writing against the founder of all that is false and barbaric.”

Lord Chesterfield, whose antennae were attuned to subtleties, suggested that Voltaire was being ironic here. Howbeit, Voltaire had nothing bad to say about the pope, but what he did say about the false Prophet was acidic enough for Muslims to protest in the street in Ain, France when the play was revived in 2005.

Horace Walpole, an inspirer of the Gothic Revival that stood as a rebuke to the Enlightenment, was compelled by this congenial child of “the true light, which enlightens everyone” (John 1:9):

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Beloved By Papists
Esteemed By Protestants
A Priest Without Insolence or Interestedness
A Prince Without Favourites
A Pope Without Nepotism
An Author Without Vanity
In Short A Man,
Whom Neither Wit Nor Power Could Spoil

The Son Of A Favourite Minister
But One Who Never Courted A Prince,
Nor Worshipped A Churchman,
Offers In A Free Protestant Country
This Deserved Incense
To The Best Of Roman Pontiffs
MDCCLVII

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A cordial evening with the three most brilliant successors of Saint Peter, might include the polymath Sylvester II*, this Benedict XIV (matched for wit perhaps only by Leo XIII), and the second Benedict after him. *[I had no idea who he was, but I read his bio on Wikipedia just now - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Sylvester_II - and marvelled anew at the rich variety of 'the best and the brightest' in the Catholic world who did become pope. How fortunate I am to have lived under three of them - Pius XII, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.]

Exactly one hundred years before Lambertini died, a beleaguered cavalier, Sir Thomas Browne, published “Hydriotaphia,” a study of ancient funerary urns in Norfolk, England. Its dedication to “The Ancient of Days, the Antiquaries truest object, unto whom the eldest parcels are young, and Earth itself an infant,” could have been written by the pope who was bright enough to know how little he knew, and was grateful for knowing it.

Thank God for oases like this in the infernal soul-wrenching desert of the daily chronicles about this perverted pontificate!

And here's a tribute to an early martyr of the Church whose life work should set an example to defenders of the faith today.


Left: Engraving of Justin Martyr in André Thévet, “Les Vrais Pourtraits et Vies Hommes Illustres” (1584); right: A bearded Justin Martyr presenting an open book to a Roman emperor. Engraving by Jacques Callot (1632-1635).

The unapologetic apologist:
Five lessons from St. Justin Martyr
Our forebears in the Faith were much stronger than us morally and spiritually. Not for them
the lax observance and flaccid sentimentality that characterize so much of contemporary Christianity.
by Edward Feser

April 22, 2018

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“You can kill us, but you cannot harm us.”
– Justin Martyr to Emperor Antoninus Pius

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By the second century A.D., the Christian religion had spread beyond its original Jewish context into a pagan world that very often misunderstood and hated it. Its circumstances were, in that respect, much like our own. Only worse, of course.

For in those days, to become a Christian was to invite more than merely the contempt of the intelligentsia or mockery within the popular culture. It was to risk death at the hands of the state.

But though in a much weaker position than us politically and culturally, our forebears in the Faith were much stronger than us morally and spiritually. Not for them the lax observance and flaccid sentimentality that characterize so much of contemporary Christianity.

No, the response of the Church to its second-century predicament made the highest demands on the will and on the intellect.
- First, rigid obedience to Christian moral and theological teaching, to the point of death if necessary.
- Second, the rational demonstration of the superiority of orthodox Christian doctrine to the errors of infidels and heretics.

In short, martyrdom and apologetics. That was their program, and it worked. Slowly but surely, the Church conquered the empire that had sought to conquer her. More importantly, she saved the souls of the persecuted and persecutors alike. Sooner or later this program will become ours too. For it is the only program that works, and it is the only program which – in the rigor both of its theory and its practice – can bear witness to the truth of the Catholic Faith.

We cannot expect the world to accept that Faith unless we are able to prove it, and willing to live by it and to die for it.

St. Justin Martyr set the pattern. He is widely regarded as the first Christian philosopher and the first great Christian apologist. As his name implies, he defended the Faith to the death. Having lived c. 100-165 A.D., he was extremely close in time to the era of the Apostles, so that he had a visceral understanding of the ethos and teaching of the primitive Church. Accordingly, his intellectual, moral, and theological credentials cannot be disputed. What might he teach us about how the Church ought to encounter a hostile world?

Lesson 1: The Faith has no place for fideism
Throughout his First Apology, Justin emphasizes that Christians can and must provide “the strongest and truest evidence” for their religion, and that “we do not make mere assertions without being able to produce proof.” The modern reader might find this surprising. For doesn’t Justin speak also of the Christian’s “confession of faith”? And isn’t faith a matter of believing something without evidence?

No, it is not. In traditional Catholic theology, faith is essentially a matter of believing something because it has been revealed by God. And when we speak of “the Catholic Faith” or of “the deposit of faith,” what is meant is that body of divinely revealed moral and theological doctrine that has been handed down to us from the time of the Apostles. But how do we know that something really has been divinely revealed and is not just a human invention? How do we know that the deposit of faith really does come from God? For that, the Church has always acknowledged, we need rational arguments.

In particular, we need what are called “the preambles of faith” – philosophical arguments that establish the existence and nature of God and the possibility of a divine revelation backed with miracles. And we need what are called the “motives of credibility” – philosophical and historical arguments showing that a purported divine revelation is genuine, because it is associated with events that could not have occurred without special divine action (e.g. the resurrection of Christ).

Only if these things can be rationally and independently established can the question of faith even arise, because only when we know through reason that a true revelation has occurred can we have something to have faith in.

Properly understood, then, faith is not in conflict with reason but presupposes rational arguments. And as Justin’s example shows, this basic idea was not the invention of medieval Scholastic theologians like Aquinas but goes back to the very beginnings of the history of the Church.

As Justin recounts in his Dialogue with Trypho, it was his study of Platonist philosophy that prepared the way for his conversion to Christianity. Specifically, Justin’s philosophical formation was in what modern historians of philosophy call Middle Platonism, which had incorporated Aristotelian elements into the Platonist system, such as Aristotle’s famous argument for a divine Unmoved Mover of the world.

Needless to say, Justin and other early apologists were, in their thinking about God and his nature, also deeply influenced by scripture and by Christ’s emphasis on God as our heavenly Father. However, as L. W. Barnard points out in his book Justin Martyr: His Life and Thought:

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The earliest Christian writers were much concerned with God as Creator and far less with his attribute of Fatherhood. This was quite natural in the face of the popular eclecticism of the age which addressed its worship to many deities…

Although… [their] ideas derive from the biblical background of the early Church they also reflect contemporary philosophic speculation. Thus Clement of Rome’s references to God’s ordering the cosmos echo later Stoic beliefs. This influence becomes more pronounced in the writings of the Greek Apologists as would be expected in view of their philosophic training. Aristides of Athens opens his Apology with an outline demonstration of God’s existence based on Aristotle’s well-known argument from motion…

This twofold background is also evident in the writings of Justin Martyr… Justin remained a Platonist even after his conversion to Christianity. He retained the idea of God as unknowable and transcendent, the Unmoved first cause… (pp. 76-77)

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It may seem surprising that a Christian apologist would put initial emphasis on notions such as these rather than on the idea of God as Father, but on reflection it should not be. As Barnard notes, the pagan context in which the early apologists were operating reflected an “eclecticism” which “addressed its worship to many deities.” Hence, much of Justin’s audience did not even properly understand what God is. It is no use preaching that God is a Father and Jesus is his Son if your listeners are likely to interpret that as comparable to (say) Zeus being the father of Apollo.

Hence Justin and other apologists first had to demonstrate the existence of God understood as the transcendent, unchanging, uncaused cause of everything other than himself. Only with that background in place can it be clear that to speak of God as Father is not merely to speak of the head of some novel pantheon. This takes philosophical reasoning, and it is reasoning that even some of the pagan philosophers themselves had already done much to develop.

Hence the apologists could use the work of these philosophers to do double duty: They could appeal to ideas like those of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics as a common intellectual framework by reference to which Christians and pagans could communicate; and they could use these good pagan ideas to criticize the bad, polytheistic ones.

Now, whereas the pagans had too many gods, the trouble with modern secular Westerners is that they don’t recognize even the one true God. But in other respects our situation is not so different from Justin’s. For as with Justin’s audience, the modern secular listener too needs to be given a rational demonstration of God’s existence before he can reasonably be expected to take any specifically Christian claims seriously. Today no less than in Justin’s day, philosophy must establish the “preambles of faith” before faith can be a live option.

Once those preambles are in place, though, the job is still only half done, for the “motives of credibility” have also to be established. Justin’s own way of doing this was to emphasize fulfilled prophecy – and in particular, the various ways in which the Old Testament predicts the details of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth – as evidence that a genuine divine revelation has occurred. This is an appeal to miracles, and nothing less than a miracle – the occurrence of something that cannot in principle have a natural explanation but can only have been brought about by special divine action – possibly can justify the claim that a divine revelation has occurred.

Old-fashioned apologetics of the kind that emphasizes philosophical proofs of God’s existence, historical arguments for the occurrence of miracles, etc., was a staple of the Neo-Scholastic theology that dominated Catholic thought in the decades prior to Vatican II.

But in recent decades it has been dismissed by many Catholics as too “rationalistic,” and resort is made instead to the longings of the human heart, the beauty of the Faith, etc. as means by which to convince a modern audience to take Catholicism seriously. Unsurprisingly, such intellectually soft and subjectivist approaches have succeeded only in giving aid and comfort to the New Atheist accusation that Christianity stems from wishful thinking and lacks any rational foundation.

As the case of Justin (not to mention Aristides, Clement, and other Fathers) shows, the old-fashioned apologetics of the Neo-Scholastics is the approach that actually follows the example of the early Church. The New Atheist phenomenon, as well as the widespread apostasy from the Faith that has occurred in recent decades, show that this approach is as necessary today as it was in Justin’s time.

Lesson 2: The point of dialogue is conversion
As his familiarity with and respect for the best of pagan philosophy indicates, Justin was no bigot. The Dialogue with Trypho recounts his quest to learn from the different schools of thought extant in his day, and he consistently tries to reason with his opponents rather than to heap abuse on them. All the same, Justin was not afraid to criticize pagan culture for its superstition and degeneracy, and he was not afraid to call a heretic a heretic.

Christians of Justin’s day were accused of atheism because they rejected the gods of the various polytheistic religions. Justin does not finesse the issue in the interests of politeness. Rather, in his First Apology, he frankly admits that “we confess that we are atheists, so far as gods of this sort are concerned”; he condemns these false deities as “wicked and impious demons” and ridicules idols as “soulless and dead”; and he commends thinkers like Socrates for criticizing the superstitions of his fellow pagans.

Justin also condemns the sexual immorality and infanticide that were rampant in some parts of the pagan world, and he denounces the view that good and evil are mere matters of opinion as “the greatest impiety and wickedness.”

This was Justin’s model of “inter-religious dialogue”: Where non-Christians get something right, acknowledge and praise it. And where they get something wrong, call them out on it and clearly condemn their errors.

His approach to ecumenism was even more uncompromising. In the First Apology, Justin harshly condemns heretics such as Simon Magus and Marcion, complaining that since these false teachers were labeled “Christians,” their erroneous doctrines often came to be attributed to all Christians, which helped bring the Church into disrepute among the pagans. (Compare the way that fideism and other tendencies and doctrines which the Catholic Church has always condemned tend to get indiscriminately attributed to Christianity in general by New Atheists and other critics.)

This mixture of calm, rational discourse on the one hand and frank criticism on the other may seem paradoxical to some modern readers, but in fact it is perfectly consistent. Justin is interested in pursuing the truth, not in mere affable chit-chat. That is precisely why he both praises the pagans when they get something right and criticizes them when they fall into error. And since he is convinced that Christianity is both true and rationally demonstrable, he wants to persuade pagans to convert to it and heretics to stop distorting it.

These days, “dialogue” has become a buzzword for those who want to avoid proselytization or clear condemnations of doctrinal error. They can find no support for such an attitude in Justin or the other Fathers. On the contrary, the aim of Justin’s Dialogue with his Jewish interlocutor Trypho was to change Trypho’s mind. These days, when a Christian “apologizes,” he is typically badmouthing the Church of the past for its purported wrongs. Justin’s apologetics was aimed at showing that the Church is right.

Lesson 3: Damned if you don’t
Now, the reason Justin was so keen to convert non-Christians was not merely that he held that Christianity is true, though of course that is part of it. The main reason was in order to save their souls. Again and again in his First Apology, Justin warns his readers of the damnation that faces those who do not repent of their sins. He speaks of “everlasting punishment,” “punishment in eternal fire,” and the fate of “the wicked, endued with eternal sensibility, [sent] into everlasting fire with the wicked devils.”

Once again Justin appeals in part to pagan thinkers themselves – in this case, Pythagoras, Plato, and the like – who argued on philosophical grounds for the soul’s survival of the death of the body and its postmortem reward or punishment. But he also has in view the teaching of Christ, who unambiguously warned of eternal damnation. And given his proximity to the time of the Apostles, there can be no doubt that once again Justin was simply reiterating the common teaching of the early Church.

Here too modern Christians have strayed far from the example of Fathers like Justin. Their tendency is instead to hold that all will be saved, or at least to speak as if we may have good hope that all are saved. Justin, like the early Church in general – which, again, was much closer in time to Christ and the Apostles and thus had a much more immediate knowledge of what they actually taught – evidently saw no grounds for such optimism.

Lesson 4: What kills us makes us stronger
With so much at stake, it is no surprise that Justin and so many other early Christians were willing to suffer martyrdom rather than renounce the Faith. As Justin writes in the First Apology:

---

For if we looked for a human kingdom, we should also deny our Christ, that we might not be slain… But since our thoughts are not fixed on the present, we are not concerned when men cut us off.

---

In his Second Apology, Justin explains that Christian steadfastness even in the face of death is part of what drew him to the Faith while he was still a pagan:

---

For I myself, too, when I was delighting in the doctrines of Plato, and heard the Christians slandered, and saw them fearless of death, and of all other things which are counted fearful, perceived that it was impossible that they could be living in wickedness and pleasure.

---

Living in danger of violent death made the early Christians serious. If you are willing even to be slaughtered for Christ’s sake, and know that this is a live possibility, then following his teachings is relatively easy. The hardest decision has already been made. The everyday temptations of the flesh, and the prospect of being scorned by the surrounding culture, are trivial by comparison with being crucified, torn apart by lions, or burned at the stake. This moral seriousness is attractive, and won converts like Justin himself. As Tertullian, another early Christian apologist, famously put it, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”

We modern Catholics in the West are a pretty sorry spectacle by comparison. Whereas our forebears in the Faith were willing to die for it, enormous numbers of contemporary Catholics will not even live by it. They casually reject the solemn teachings of Christ and his Church as if they were options rather than requirements of salvation. Even many orthodox Catholics minimize the significance of unpopular doctrines, and refrain from talking about them even if they would not go so far as to deny them.

Whereas the Christian leaders of Justin’s day faced execution with equanimity, many of today’s churchmen live in terror of finding themselves criticized in the media or shunned by the intelligentsia.

To the Roman emperor reigning at the time of the First Apology, Justin declared, with a nobility that seems beyond our reach today: “You can kill us, but you cannot harm us.” He knew that what counts is our eternal destiny, and that absolutely nothing that we suffer in this life – not the secular world’s contempt, not persecution, not illness or poverty, not even death itself – matters one whit so long as we are true to Christ.

Lesson 5: Go and do likewise
- Where St. Justin and his generation were intellectually rigorous, we are woolly-minded and sentimental.
- Where they insisted on conversion and orthodoxy, we tolerate grave error and immorality lest we hurt anyone’s feelings.
- Where they warned sternly of eternal damnation, we pretend that all is well and thereby endanger souls.
- Where they did not fear even death, we are frightened by bad press.
- Where they won the respect of their persecutors, we have earned the contempt of the secular culture we flatter and endlessly compromise with.
- They converted the world, whereas the world is converting us.
- They had things hard in this life, but have things easy in the next. We want things easy in this life, and will find them hard in the next.
- They were doing something right, and we are doing something wrong.

We need to return to their example. What that requires, as St. Justin shows is, is more intellectual muscle, more moral austerity, more doctrinal consistency, more holy intransigence. Fewer apologies and more apologetics. Less comfort and more suffering. We need to be less effeminate and more like our Fathers.

In the following article, I think Phil Lawler is somehow shooting himself in the foot by underscoring that Jorge Bergoglio is a Catholic. His own book, THE LOST SHEPHERD, is subtitled 'How Pope Francis is misleading
his flock', a formulation that bothered me because a shepherd misleading his flock is not a lost shepherd but a bad shepherd, an unworthy one, who ought not to be trusted with any flock at all.
One might even say in this case that the shepherd has turned out to be the wolf himself in shepherd's garb.

And because in this case the shepherd is supposed to be the pope who is Christ's vicar on earth, any pope who misleads his flock - deliberately and knowingly as this one does - is certainly derelict in his
duty. Would you still call him Catholic, when he chooses to set the wrong example for all Catholics? In the face of his deliberate and determined divisiveness within the Church herself when he,
as pope, is supposed to be the visible symbol of the Church's unity?

And what would you call his relentlessly contemptuous rhetoric for all those Catholics who do not think and do as he does because they uphold and abide by the deposit of faith handed down to our time by the apostles
and their worthy successors, a deposit of faith some part of which Bergoglio seems to delight in flouting every day? I call all of these objectionable Bergoglian manifestations being anti-Catholic. It may be
generic but it is the least controversial and most appropriate description of Bergoglio because the term is a commonsense term that is readily understood and does not involve any technicalities
that encumber words like heretic or apostate.

Yes, the Pope is a Catholic.
But he’s confusing other Catholics.
[But he is not just another Catholic - he was elected to be the leader of all Catholics,
and it is evil of him to delight in sowing confusion and error in his flock]
By Phil Lawler

April 26, 2018

Blogger Mark Mallett has done a real service — and I mean this sincerely — by a long list of links to statements by Pope Francis voicing clearly orthodox Catholic beliefs on topics important to conservative Catholics, including abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, population control, ideology, and the existence of hell. [And how can that be a service? Because, of course, anyone should be able to find numerous examples of 'Catholic' statements made by him - he is, after all the pope - but 1) we must be able to 'discern' what is pro forma - what he says because it is what a pope is expected to say even if he may not mean it or believe it - and what is genuine; and 2) one could conceivably draw up a parallel list of statements he has made that contradict what he says pro forma about a given topic (what Mallett lists) - and thereby prove the point of his insincerity/dishonesty/inconsistency/younameit about specific topics including those critical 'non-negotiable values'whose existence he denies.]

Sure enough, the Pope is a Catholic. [Nominally, at least. Like Hans Kueng is.] But why is that noteworthy?

It’s difficult to imagine that anyone would have compiled a similar set of links to demonstrate that Pope Benedict XVI or Pope John Paul II held conventionally Catholic beliefs. Why is it necessary in the case of Pope Francis?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it? Pope Francis himself has raised the questions about his own orthodoxy, with a long series of provocative public statements. The world expects consistency [AND ORTHODOXY!] from the successors of St. Peter; the duty of the Pontiff (and of every bishop) is to preserve intact the faith that has been handed down from the Apostles.

When any Pope makes a statement that seems at odds with previous expressions of the faith, it is disquieting. When he makes such statements frequently — and, to compound the problem, declines to clarify them — the result is widespread disorientation. This is the phenomenon that I sought to explain in Lost Shepherd: not that Pope Francis is preaching heresy, but that he has spread confusion about the content of orthodox Catholic belief. [And is that not plainly and simply being anti-Catholic? In many ways, is that not much worse than professing a specific heresy? Honorius I was condemned as a heretic by an ecumenical council and his successor pope not because he professed a heresy but that he did nothing to oppose a specific heresy that was widespread in his time. Bergoglio's transgression is worse, IMHO - he has been initiating, disseminating and encouraging one heterodoxy after another, often bordering on outright heresy. Which is obviously no way to 'confirm his brethren in the faith' as his primary task ought to be. When a pope fails in this, as well as failing to be the visible symbol of unity for the Church, then what good is he?]

Take for instance the report circulated recently — during Holy Week, of all times — that the Holy Father had denied the existence of Hell. We still don’t know what the Pope actually said in his conversation with Italian journalist Eugenio Scalfari. We don’t even know whether the Pope knew that Scalfari planned to publish the interview (or his memories thereof). What we do know is that, thanks to the Pope’s penchant for offhand remarks, hundreds of thousands of people were told that the Pope does not believe in Hell.

Once that damage had been done — by Scalfari, I don’t doubt, more than by the Pope — how could it have been repaired? A prompt statement from the Pope, indicating that he certainly does believe in Hell and that Scalfari had misquoted him, might have helped. But such a statement (which was not forthcoming) would not have commanded the same degree of public attention. Of course the Pope believes in Hell. One expects him to believe in Hell. [But does he, in fact? Considering he has made the same statement to Scalfari at least three times and has never once bothered to refute Scalfari's claim categorically.]

And after all what does Pope Francis believe about Hell? He has alluded to its existence on many occasions. Still it is possible that he might proclaim belief in Hell without accepting anything like the ordinary Catholic understanding of what Hell is. It would be theoretically consistent to say (as the Pope has said) that unrepentant Mafiosi go to Hell, and that (as he allegedly said to Scalfari) Hell is the annihilation of souls. So the potential for confusion would remain.

Alternatively, the Vatican might have remarked that Scalfari is an unscrupulous journalist, who was exploiting his personal friendship with the Pontiff to promote his own anti-religious agenda. There would have been a good deal of truth, I believe, in such a statement (which, again, was not made). But that truth would have prompted more pointed questions, about why the Holy Father had agreed to multiple interviews with such an agent provocateur.

One of the Pope’s most enthusiastic supporters, Austen Ivereigh, tackled the latter question on his Twitter feed, portraying the Pope’s interview as a template for the New Evangelization: “This superbly captures the Francis-Scalfari relationship. There’s a Christ-like vulnerability in a pope giving a geriatric atheist the freedom to twist his words. Some Catholics may hate it, but Francis is evangelizing (not proselytising).” [One will never cease to be amazed at the absurdities expressed by Bergoglio's most avid apostles to justify anything he says!]

Maybe Pope Francis was engaged in evangelization when he sat down to talk with Scalfari. [Evangelization, my foot! Bergoglio's conversations with Scalfari serve, I think, to reassure himself from time to time that he is capable of conversing with an 'acknowledged intellectual' at the level he attributes to Scalfari, which is obviously considerable. It's like indulging in mental masturbation, if you will pardon the term - a sheer exercise in self-indulgence.]

But Christians are not the only believers who see in social media an opportunity for promoting their beliefs — or, in this case, their case for unbelief. When he published the claim that Pope Francis had denied the existence of Hell, Scalfari was engaged in his own evangelization, spreading his anti-Gospel. And he did this with finesse, trapping his subject in a box with no exit.

Yes, the Pope is a Catholic. But he sometimes sounds like a confused Catholic, and therefore a confusing Catholic leader. To recognize that problem does not require accusing the Pope of heresy; the confusion among the faithful is trouble enough. [Among the very ones he is supposed to confirm in their faith, not confuse in their faith!]

And the confusion among the faithful — the sense of disorientation —is real. Regrettably, Pope Francis has compounded the problem with his acerbic criticism of the “rigid” Catholics, the “doctors of the law,” the daily Mass-goers, reverent altar-boys, rabbit-like breeders, pro-lifers, and defenders of marriage. These comments — and the nastier remarks by the Pope’s energetic champions on the social media — may bring a sympathetic smirk to the faces of liberal Catholics with master’s degrees from summer theology workshops. But they rattle the simple believers. [And are simply unconscionable in someone who is pope and clearly does not deserve to be, as he proves to us day after day.]


And Fr. H weighs in on the two recent tell-it-as-it-is books on Pope Bergoglio... as well as Fr Rutler's take on Fr H's beloved Benedict XIV...

Could there be an armistice with
the 'Lost Shepherd' or the 'Dictator Pope'?

April 27, 2018

I am a lucky chap; Leila and Philip Lawler have very kindly sent me a copy of Philip's fine book Lost Shepherd: How Pope Francis is misleading his flock. You may be thinking that this is rather like London buses; you wait for half an hour and then a couple come along together ... because last Monday was the publication day of Henry Sire's magnificent The Dictator Pope (about which I have just written a rave review for a monthly periodical). I hope you have already procured and devoured your copies of that volume! Later today, I will reprint my earlier comments on this book.

Although, of course, there are some overlaps between these two books, it is remarkable how comfortably they sit together on the bookshelf. Obviously, there is such a glut of material, that two authors can write books which are complementary rather than identical! Philip's book is, I think, perhaps a tadge gentler than Henry's in as far as it is clear that Philip hoped against hope that things would come right with this pontificate ... that, as we say, it wouldn't come to this ....

I think it "came to this" the very moment PF trudged out to greet the People of God (and the tourists) with an unhappy face, refusing to share the simple joy of the Lord's Flock committed to his charge; when he indicated his determination to mark out the discontinuities of his pontificate by not dressing like a pope and by taking a strange name.

Philip begins his book by observing that every day the pope issues another reminder that he does not approve of Catholics like us ..."day after weary day ... the pope upbraids me..." That's exactly how I feel.

So many of us started by doing our best to put the best possible gloss on this pontificate, and have been mercilessly driven to the realisation that this is not possible. As I wrote recently, every day there seems to be a new provocation, either from PF or from one of his sycophantic cronies.

In self-examination, I have asked myself again and again whether I have fallen into self-absorbed obsession in so often defending Truth against what flows from the man who, after all, does sit on the cathedra Petri.

But, when I was priested on June 9 1968, Bishop Harry Carpenter asked me "Will you be ready, with all faithful diligence, to banish and drive away all erroneous and strange doctrines contrary to God's Word...?" and I replied "I will, the Lord being my helper." If I had instead had the joy of being ordained according to the old Tridentine Pontificale, the Pontiff would have said to us, rather mixing his metaphors, "Sit doctrina vestra spiritualis medicina populo Dei ... ut praedicatione ... aedificetis domum, id est, familiam Dei ..." (May your teaching be a spiritual remedy to the people of God and your preaching build the house, that is, the famiy of God). So what choice do I have?

- Is there an alternative to all this open warfare?
- Could there be an armistice?
- Could PF stop stinging us into continuous reaction?
- Is he a big enough man to do that?
- Could we stop this endless series of criticisms of the pope?

I, for one, would be overjoyed to be able to do so.

I think the first essential proviso would have to be the appointment of someone to the Congregation for Bishops who would be given the power to ensure that the episcopate were re-balanced, and who would confer with PF about redressing the balance in the Sacred College.

For orthodox Catholics, perhaps the biggest worry of all concerns a future which PF is clearly trying to fashion the Church in his own likeness by the unfortunate appointments he makes. Cupich a Cardinal, indeed!!

Additionally, it would be necessary for PF to refrain from uttering into a public forum or a Scalfari anything to which the CDF had not given its previous OK. PF has so grossly enlarged the amount of material which comes to us with Papa dicit attached, that the the entire genre needs to be radically pruned and carefully controlled.

Meanwhile, get The Lost Shepherd to sit beside The Dictator Pope!


Fr George Rutler ...
... gives in Crisis Magazine a very jolly account of Pope Benedict XIV. (Thank-you to friends who drew this to my attention, and to Father for writing it.) [See Fr Rutler's essay two posts above this one.]

The only blemish in the Pope's character appears to have been that he disliked Jesuits and would never deign to admit that type of person into the Sacred College.

Father wittily includes a Latin epigram about Lambertini, including a couple of Teacher's Intentional Errors just to give his readers a bit of intelligent fun in the art of textual emendation.

And, happily, Father does not mention my own favourite Benedict XIV story ... his reaction to the Marchesa who wore, on her imperfectly veiled chest, a very large emerald cross. Given Internet resources, there must be ways that prurient readers can research such things...

He (B14) is upstairs in the Ashmolean, as you know, and along at the end. [He apparently refers to a sculpture bust of B14 in Oxford's famous Ashmolean Museum.] I haven't narrated any of my recent visits to see him because publicising the violence of his judgement on his current successor would simply have got me into trouble. There are sceptical people out there, y'know, who think that when I report our conversations, I am really just giving my own views.

And anyway, I wouldn't want to risk stirring up a gang of inflamed Bergoglianistae, led by the Master of Benets, to take their enraged pickaxes to his patient bust.

"The Dictator Pope"
To refresh your memories, I reprint a piece I wrote when an earlier electronic edition of the Dictator Pope was published under a pseudonym: Marcantonio Colonna.

I do think that this is a very important book. At the present moment, the papacy is more dominant that it ever has been before, its iron grip on the Church strengthened by the mechanisms of the instant world-wide Media. Inevitably and properly, the person and personality of the pontiff himself are subjected to detailed scrutiny, especially when it appears that we are going to have yet more 'surprises of the Spirit' sprung upon us.

This book brings together pretty well everything which can currently be known about PF. I suspect that Marcantonio Colonna is a trained historian, so you will find in his book not only a wealth of information about the rise of PF, but a subtle analysis of the cultural background which has formed him.

Have you ever wondered what people have in mind when they say "PF's Peronism accounts for it all"? Dr Colonna will explain to you what that means.

Would you like a careful explanation of PF's skills in playing people off against each other, in making use of a person and then discarding him, in ruthlessly humiliating or disposing of people whose aptitude for sycophancy he finds insufficiently crafted? It's all here.

Every book has its particular take on things, and Colonna's take on PF will not in itself surprise anyone. It has, I think, become so clear as now to be uncontroversial that what you get in PF is not what it says on the tin.

He is not a kindly humble avuncular figure with a winning smile and a passion for cripples and babies, who spends his days and nights thinking about the poor. He is a hard and determined politician with a vindictive temper and an appetite for power and a disinclination to let anybody or anything stand in his way.

Colonna shows how this was already apparent to PF's own fellow-countrymen well before he burst on to the international scene with his 'Buona sera'. Under Colonna's tutelage, you will not only understand PF's past, but you will be able to hazard an informed guess about what he might do in his future!

The unscrupulous manipulation of the 'Synods'; the dismembering of the Franciscans of the Immaculate; the 'Reform' of the Vatican finances; the assault upon the Knights of Malta; the 'Reform' of the Roman Curia; PF's poor record in dealing with the scandal of paedophile or ephebophile priests; the St Gallen Group and the parts played by Martini and Daneels and Murphy-O'Connor and the rest of them in plotting for the last two Conclaves; the antics of the Vatican's Gay Mafia - Marcantonio's historian's scalpel will expose to your view all the subcutaneous realities of this pontificate.

The whole game is not yet played out; but we already have a lot of data. Let Dr Colonna offer you a guided tour through them!

Bill Cosby and the truth behind
many public idols and heroes
by David Mills
April 27, 2018
By David Mills

April 27, 2018

He lived in my town for a while, which we thought was kind of cool, since he was so famous and so loved. Bill Cosby worked on a doctorate in education at the University of Massachusetts. Friends would excitedly report the rare Cosby sighting. We had America’s beloved uncle in town.

Who was, it turns out, a sexual predator. A really horrible one. Yesterday a court convicted him of three felonies [for which he faces up to 30 years jail time]: “penetration with lack of consent, penetration while unconscious, and penetration after administering an intoxicant.” That’s just one woman, among the 50-some who say he did the same thing to them. The New York Times noted that “In recent years, Mr. Cosby, 80, had admitted to decades of philandering, and to giving quaaludes to women as part of an effort to have sex.”

And he was America’s beloved uncle. Look at the headline of this story from June, 2014, fewer than four years ago: “Bill Cosby Tops List of Most Admired Fathers in America According to New Poll.”

Cosby’s real history offers a lesson, but it’s not an easy one. Don’t believe the world’s story. Don’t take its heroes as your heroes. Question what the world tells you, and don’t take the public image at face value. Don’t, for example, assume America’s uncle and most admired father lives a virtuous life.

Look at the world’s story a lot more cynically than you’d like to. Because what we see is only a picture, created by people who tell lies for a living.

The world lies. Consciously, purposely, unabashedly, psychopathically. A massive, sophisticated, utterly unprincipled industry works without stopping to make you believe things that are not true. That wicked people are lovely people, for example. Vast amounts of money are to be made through creating public heroes. Vast amounts of power are to be gained.

A lot of people invest themselves in making sure you believe those “heroes” truly live heroically. Worse, we invest ourselves. We want heroes. We want the same heroes everyone else has. You and I want to think nice thoughts about people. We don’t want to be cynical. People don’t like cynics.

Imagine that in 2014 when America made Bill Cosby its favorite dad, you told your co-workers or your Bible study that we don’t know what he’s really like and that for all we know he could be a rapist. They’d call you a jerk or a crank. Bill Cosby? Everyone loves Bill Cosby!

You want to see how this works in Hollywood? Watch the classic Betty Davis movie All About Eve. Read histories of the movie industry like Scandals of Classic Hollywood. Look at how many people, including the industry’s best and brightest, covered up for Harvey Weinstein, and a lot of guys nearly as bad. Note how many of his enablers got away with it — Hi Meryl! — thanks to their expert spin doctors and a media who needs them.

Want to see how it works in politics? Look at my recent congressman Tim Murphy. A pro-life hero‚ right up to the day the local newspaper revealed that he wanted his girlfriend to abort their child. He was, by the way, cheating on his wife. When the girlfriend called him on his hypocrisy in making pro-life statements, he wrote back, “I’ve never written them. Staff does them. I read them and winced.” Turned out he was also notoriously abusive to his staff. But who knew? We thought he was one of the good guys. We could only see the image he and his people created.

Scripture teaches this, but we don’t really listen. As I said, no one wants to be a jerk or a crank. The Psalmist tells us, “Put not your trust in princes,” because they can’t be trusted. “Do not look on appearance or on stature,” or riches and public image, the Lord says in I Samuel. “Man looks on the outward appearance” and gets it wrong.

The famous passage in Isaiah we take as a prophecy of our Lord says He has “no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.” We wouldn’t even recognize the Son of God, because He doesn’t look the way we expect a superstar or a superhero to look. He looked even less like that on the Cross.

Jesus saw the same thing. He said to the great and good of His day: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness.” That’s what He thought of the religious ruling class.

Don’t make heroes of the world’s heroes. Some will actually be heroes and some will be monsters like Bill Cosby. You won’t know which is which. The world is that good at telling lies. God’s people live as strangers in a strange land, resident aliens, people who are just passing through. On the way, like the Israelites, we must keep ourselves free of the local gods, the local heroes.

We have our own. The Lord Himself. And all the great saints who’ve gone before us, and all the saints we know.

The unfortunate truth of widespread public gullibility about celebrities and other prominences projected 24/7 by media onto public consciousness can perhaps best be summarized by the fact that for the past two decades now, Americans have told Gallup that the woman they most admire is Hilary Clinton - from when she first became First Lady in 1994, and even after she lost her hubristic bid to become the first woman president of the USA.

A 'popularity' hard to explain, for in her first years as First Lady, she was already tainted by her unprecedented attempt and resounding failure to push through Hilarycare in Congress and the revelations of her financial shenanigans while working as a corporate lawyer in an Alabama law firm while her husband was governor there (remember Whitewatergate?), through to her blaming 'America's vast rightwing conspiracy' for the public disclosure of her husband's multiple sexual adventures and his impeachment for lying about the Monica Lewinsky affair; enough to get her elected as a senator representing New York State to be her springboard to run for president on no other basis than that she was Hilary Clinton, regardless that she had not really had any actual achievements or contributions to the public good; enough to continue being America's
'most admired woman' through all her fumbling and major errors as Secretary of State (worst of which was Benghazi) and go on be the Democratic candidate for President, despite the felonious embarrassments of Tapegate - but not enough, thank God!, to be elected. Especially considering all the various and multiple election shenanigans that continue to be revealed about her campaign. And the fact that from all accounts, she is actually quite an unlikable person with a nastiness that was capable of hounding her husband's bedfellows with substantial damage to the women concerned ...

One can only conclude that perhaps it is not so much the gullibility of Americans that keeps her at the top of Gallup's 'most admired woman' list year after year, but faulty sampling by Gallup all these years! Anyway, let Hilary Clinton be the poster girl for all contemporary false idols...

Alfie Evans, rest in peace!

April 28, 2018

Alfie Evans, the seriously ill toddler who whose plight moved thousands across the world, died in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Tom Evans, Alfie’s father, said in a Facebook post: “My gladiator lay down his shield and gained his wings at 02:30…absolutely heartbroken. I love you my guy.”

Alfie was 23 months old and was in what doctors described as a “semi-vegetative state” due to an undiagnosed neurological condition.

Italy had granted Alfie Evans citizenship in the hope he could be transferred to the Vatican-owned Bambino Gesu hospital in Rome, but UK courts refused, saying a transfer would not be in Alfie’s best interests.

Alder Hey hospital, which had been treating Alfie, removed his ventilator earlier this week against the wishes of Alfie’s parents but with court approval.

He was expected only to survive a few minutes, but lasted five days without ventilation.

Rallies and vigils in support of Alfie took place across the world, and Pope Francis expressed his strong support for the parents.

Volumes can be written and will be about this 'case' and a few other cases similar to it which expose the total moral rot at the heart of Western civilization. It is good to know that enough people still have their values in place to have come out openly and pro-actively in Alfie's behalf as they did for Charlie Gard before him. From such acorns, the oak of morality - which is really elementary fear of God in the Catholic sense - will not pass into extinction as it has already done in the governments and bureaucracies of the West.

Five days ago, Aldo Maria Valli started a blog post on Alfie Evans this way:

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“It is 9:30 in the evening of April 23 as I write these notes. I have just come back from Manoppello where, with my wife Serena and Suor Blandina Paschalis Schlomer, I prayed in front of the Holy Face. For Alfie, and for all children. And that life would triumph over a culture of death. And while I prayed, England was celebrating the birth of the third royal baby in the direct line of succession to the British throne, while on the other, frenetic and dramatic hours passed for those following the fate of Alfie and his young parents, Tom and Kate….”

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That was the day Valli like many others experienced a flare of hope because Italy had made Alfie a citizen so it would have the right to claim the toddler for its own and bring him to Italy where two world-class pediatric hospitals were eager to welcome him. To no avail, unfortunately.

The visit and prayer at the Shrine of the Holy Face in Manoppello is a measure of Valli’s strong sense of personal involvement in this case. His one previous post about it on April 22 was an appeal to the pope to sign a decree making Alfie a Vatican citizen so that he could then intervene directly in his behalf, arguing that the pope could do this entirely on his own, without consulting anyone, whereas granting Alfie Italian citizenship would be a far more difficult and bureaucratic process. (It didn’t as it turns out, even if Alfie’s new Italian citizenship failed to move anything in his favor. Meanwhile, a couple of other Italian sites had been advocating something more radical to put teeth to Bergoglio's public statements so far about Alfie (learning from the Charlie Gard experience, he has been more forthcoming this time to the point that many media writers are crediting him for the Italian government initiatives in behalf of Alfie) - for the pope himself to go to Liverpool and the Alder Hey hospital to take little Alfie back to Rome with him, the way he took back three Muslim migrant families from Lesbos two years ago.)

After April 23, Valli wrote five more posts on Alfie – an imaginary dialog with G.K. Chesterton, two on recent revelations about the behind-the-scenes horrors that appear to be common at the Alder Hey Hospital, one an imaginary dialog with Screwtape, and the following eulogy.

My dear Alfie…
Translated from

April 28, 2018

… I write to you as grandfather. An Italian grandfather who has followed your story minute by minute, and had feared for you and with you. Last night, while your guardian angel was accompanying your soul to heaven, I woke up and could not go back to sleep again. Shortly afterwards came the news that you had left us. We grandparents often do not see or feel well but we do have a sixth sense.

I do not know exactly what pathology you were suffering from. I do know that some persons, speaking paradoxically of your ‘best interests’, did wish to accelerate your death, blocking a series of initiatives that perhaps might have saved you, or at least, have helped you to face your affliction better.

But they robbed you of hope, as they did your most brave parents Thomas and Kate, who were denied the right to decide on what to do with you as if they were just two strangers who had nothing to do with you at all. And I ask myself: Why have some persons (doctors and judges) behaved as they did with you?

It seems to me they treated you as nothing more than a nuisance, an encumberment – not as a little human being to be taken care of with the greatest tenderness and care, but as a problem to be removed as quickly as possible. Which is a very grave sin.

I am not an expert in juridical systems, so I cannot say if the criteria adopted in your country, Great Britain, are better or worse than ours. In any case, in all of this, I have seen a lack of humanity which has left me in dismay.

I know that the word humanity may seem rather generic, but right now I can think of no better word. I refer to the capacity to look another person in the eye, to recognize him as brother, to see myself in him. It is compassion in the literal sense – a suffering together, a participation in my brother’s suffering.

And in this story, there has been a great lack of humanity. Unfortunately, I have heard empty and ambiguous words from men of the Church, which has added to my suffering.

Dear Alfie, now you can finally recover fully in the arms of the Lord. But do not forget us. Interceed for all of us, even for those who did not wish you well. Rather, especially for them. Help us to be better persons. To use the gifts of God more wisely.

Some persons, angered at the way you were treated, lost control to the point of saying “God curse the English”. That was said of us Italians, for quite different reasons, and now, here we go again. Pardon these excesses. Obviously, it is not about nationality. It is a question of being good or not, of being generous or not, of loving or not. Help us to improve ourselves.

You have helped us a lot because you have made us ask ourselves what really counts. Indeed, in following your story, many among us made room once again for God and for prayer. For which we can never thank you enough.

And we thank your dad Thomas and your mother Kate, your very young parents, who have given us a lesson in love. They gave everything of themselves, tirelessly and unsparingly. Despite the gigantic obstacles they had to face, they left nothing for granted. They never left your side, and in them we saw a reflection of the love our Father has for us, the father who will never abandon us.

In many photos, I see you wearing the blue sweater of Everton [an English soccer team], whose motto is Nil satis nisi optimum – only the best is good enough. Unfortunately in your case, many gave not the best but the worst of themselves. But so many others, starting with Thomas and Kate, were attentive and caring, generous, full of charity – which is a reason for hope that no one can take away.

I have learned that perhaps, precisely in response to your story, the law may change in your country to give more weight to the right and duty of parents to decide on the fate of their children. We shall see. If it happens, then we will have another reason to thank you.

Since I imagine that you must now be playing with Charlie, Isaiah and so so many other children forced to lose their lives early, I shall not bore you further. As a longstanding fan of British soccer, allow me to add one more thing: Many people today sang ‘You’ll never walk alone’ in your honor in front of the hospital. But that is the hymn of the Liverpool team, not of Everton. The Toffees sing “We are the pride of Merseyside”.

Then let me say that you were – and are – the pride not just of Merseyside county, but of millions and millions of people in every part of the world. Yes, we are very proud of you, my dear Alfie.

Ross Doutha brings a wider perspective to the Evans story...

Alfie Evans and the experts

April 28, 2018

Some magazine stories are fishhooks; they work their way into your mind and don’t come out. Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker has written several such pieces in the last year, including one about an African-American mother’s battle to keep her brain-damaged daughter alive after the girl was declared clinically dead, and another about the way court-appointed legal guardians in Nevada exploit the elderly placed into their care.

I’ve been thinking about both stories while watching the drama of Alfie Evans, an English almost-2-year-old with a devastating brain condition whose parents were denied the chance to move him to another hospital or country by a decree from doctors and judges that the time had come for him to die.

It is the second such case in the United Kingdom recently, and the basic facts are roughly similar to the last one, in which a baby named Charlie Gard died of a rare genetic condition after the courts similarly ruled against his parents’ desire to take him abroad for an experimental treatment.

In each case, the doctors and judges had plausible medical arguments that the limits of treatment had been reached. (Although in the case of Evans, their expertise was undercut by the boy’s refusal to swiftly die, as predicted, when his breathing apparatus was removed; he lived for five days before expiring.)

But in each case that judgment was deployed for wicked ends, stripping parents who were not unfit of their ability to act as parents, denying them the ability to choose not only last-ditch treatments but even where and how their ailing children died.

It is easy see the relevance here of Aviv’s story about Jahi McMath, a teenager from Oakland declared brain-dead after a horribly-botched tonsillectomy, whose family managed to spirit her away to New Jersey, where religious-freedom laws allow families to reject a “brain-death” ruling and keep a loved one on a feeding tube indefinitely.

Since then Jahi has survived for years despite confident medical predictions to the contrary, and she now gives pretty decent evidence of retaining some form of consciousness, some ability to listen and respond. In California her status as a dead person is under litigation; in a small apartment in New Jersey, in the care of her mother, she is very much alive.

Her fate is thus a case study in why a decent society allows families leeway to defy medical consensus: not only for the sake of parental rights and religious beliefs, not only because biases around race and class and faith creep into medical decision-making, but also because in hard cases the official medical consensus often doesn’t come close to grasping all the possibilities, and letting people go their own way is often the only way to discover where it’s wrong.

But this tendency to arrogate power away from the family is not just an issue for extreme medical cases. In Aviv’s story on guardianship among the elderly, it plays out in a more prosaic and yet similarly shocking form — with old people who are hardly incompetent handed over to professional guardians who sell their assets and consign them to assisted living facilities from which they can’t escape.

The basic dynamic is like the Gard and Evans and McMath cases but with the generational roles reversed: Instead of parents trying to pry their children away from the medical establishment, you have adult children unable to bring their parents home because their state-appointed guardians say no.

Aviv focuses on the Kafkaesque odyssey of Julie Belshe, a mother of three who spent years extracting her parents from the talons of a woman, April Parks, who was later indicted on charges of perjury and theft. But Parks flourished in a larger system designed around the assumption that old people are basically better off without their kids, because offspring are probably motivated either by raw emotionalism or by gimme-gimme avarice, as opposed to the cool wisdom of expert doctors, professional guardians, and wise judges.

Such a system is custom-built for the coming world of post-familialism, the world bequeathed to us by sexual individualism and thinning family trees. Just as more and more children are growing up without the active fathers who fought for Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans or the extended kinship network that saved Jahi McMath, more and more people will face old age without sons and daughters to care for them or to challenge the medical-judicial complex’s will.

It is the tragedy of our future that for many people there will be no exit from that complex, no alternative means of receiving care. But it is the task of our present to ensure that where the family still has the capacity to choose for an aging parent or a dying child, the family rather than the system gets to make the choice.

Yes, that choice may be wrong; it may have its own dark or foolish motivations. But those are risks a humane society has to take, so that in our weakest moments we can hope to be surrounded not just by knowledge or power, but by love.

The Bergoglio files:
Anything-to-be-different 1840.1
NB: 1840 is the number of days so far that Bergoglio has been pope, so 1840.1 represents the first anything-to-be-different initiative that we know he has had today.

I used to remark that the annual Corpus Christi procession in Rome from the Lateran Basilica to Santa Maria Maggiore, approximately a mile along one of Rome's major streets (but not very wide), the Via Merulana, was the tourists' best chance to see the pope fairly up close without need of permits or passes, if he or she just stood along the procession route.

Then Bergoglio - after a first year in which he ostentatiously walked the mile between the two basilicas - decided to give up taking part in the procession but riding ahead instead to Santa Maria Maggiore where he would lead a Eucharistic Adoration and Benediction (at which he never kneels or genuflects) to end the procession. Now it seems the Corpus Christi procession is no longer an option for a fairly upclose papal sighting.

Unless you go to Ostia this year (and who knows where to next year?). Because now he is 'moving' the procession to Ostia. This was the ancient port of Rome on the Tyrrhenian Sea, about 12 miles southwest of the city center, and considered part of the Commune of Rome.

And while one must be happy for Ostia if it should draw a record number of tourists on that day, what then happens in central Rome? Cannot the pope's vicar in Rome, or maybe the Arch-Priest of the Lateran Basilica, lead the Corpus Christi procession in place of the pope? Why, because of a Bergoglian caprice, suddenly deprive central Rome of a revived tradition it has enjoyed since the time of John Paul II?

One surmises that the route of the Corpus Christi procession in Ostia would be fairly brief so that Bergoglio can ostentatiously go on foot. One thing is sure - he won't be 'caught' kneeling in front of the Blessed Sacrament as it is borne on a pedestal in a float that is (was) the centerpiece of the Corpus Christi procession in Rome, and as John Paul II and Benedict XVI used to do. I believe JPII walked the route the first time he revived the tradition, and then chose the float option subsequently. Perhaps that is the reason Bergoglio stopped taking part in the procession - so he won't have to do that (because walking a mile with his sciatica may really have become impossible for him).

It goes without saying that it would be unthinkable to expect him to do that when he will not even genuflect before the Elevation of the Bread and the Wine at Mass, ostensibly because it is painful for him to kneel. Of course, his apologists never explain why, on Maundy Thursdays, he apparently has no problem kneeling down, 12 times in succession, to wash and wipe and kiss the feet of the 12 persons to whom he deigns to demonstrate his humility and service for the cameras of the world!

Could it be that Bergoglio thinks his 12 objects of 'devotion', who are flesh and blood before him - not all of whom are Catholics or believe in Christ - are more worthy of kneeling to than Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament or at the moment of Trans-Substantiation during the Mass? Maybe he does, because he has this idea that every person who is poor, oppressed or disadvantaged in any way not only represents Christ but is Christ himself! Which is going well beyond what it means to say that an ordained priest - no matter how sinful and corrupt he may be - becomes 'in persona Christi' when he offers the Sacrifice of the Mass (or hears confession), and only then!

But if he believes that, then he is more Lutheran than we thought, for denying the reality of Trans-Substantiation - which is the only alibi one can imagine that he could use to justify why he never kneels before the Blessed Sacrament nor genuflects at the Consecration.

Still think he is more than just a nominal Catholic? If he is, he is the most anti-Catholic 'Catholic' imaginable. Yet he is the pope. Kyrie eleison!

Charlie Gard’s parents speak up
What they have been doing meanwhile to assert and uphold
the right of parents over their own children's fate
by Alexander Slavsky

April 27, 2018

LONDON (ChurchMilitant.com) - The parents of a sick British baby who died last year are expressing support for a sick U.K. infant following his failed legal battle and the refusal of the hospital to discharge him.

Charlie Gard's parents, Chris Gard and Connie Yates, released a statement Friday on Alfie Evans, saying, "With heavy hearts, we have watched as Alfie's case has unfolded. For those who have not been in a situation like this, it is impossible to understand the pain Tom and Kate [Alfie's parents] are going through."

Alfie is the 23-month-old with a rare degenerative neurological condition whose has survived more than three days, as of press time, without his breathing and feeding tubes.

Gard and Yates are partnering with Alfie's family to spearhead a change in the law "that will prevent parents experiencing painful and prolonged conflicts with medical professionals. Cases like these will keep happening until the law is changed."

Their son was the sick British baby who died last July after losing his legal battle in the courts, including the London High Court, Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights for an experimental treatment in the United States for his rare genetic disease.

The statement continued:

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Since Charlie's passing in July last year, we have been working with pediatric consultants, medical ethicists, senior lawyers, U.K. politicians and other parents who have suffered through similar situations as us, to try and propose a law that will prevent parents experiencing painful and prolonged conflicts with medical professionals.

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The parents are calling this law "Charlie's Law" while setting up the Charlie Gard Foundation with the almost $1.8 million dollars raised for their son's treatment abroad. It is slated for launch on June 1. The website's description says the foundation's goal is "to become one of the U.K.'s leading charities dedicated to fighting mitochondrial disease," which Charlie was diagnosed with at eight weeks old.

"The foundation raises awareness for the condition, invests in world-class research into viable treatments and supports families whose lives have been touched by this incurable disease," reads the description.

Steven Woolfe, a member of the European Parliament, announced Thursday he is launching the "Alfie's Law" campaign outside the House of Parliament to overturn the law "to bring an end to the tragic situation of parents of young children such as Alfie Evans."

He claimed that parents have "moral rights" to care for their family members while acknowledging the role of doctors and nurses in treating sick children.

Pushing for parents' rights in high profile cases, he continued:

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The cases of Charlie Gard, Aysha King and now Alfie Evans, show a dangerous trend of public bodies depriving parents and families of the right to make decisions they believe are in the best interests of their children. Parents' rights should neither be ignored nor dismissed as irrelevant by hospitals and courts, who believe they know best and have the power, money and resources to overwhelm families who simply want to save their child. We demand a change in the law to restore the rights of parents in such decisions.

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Gard and Yates recognized that "once cases are public it is difficult for people to be fully aware of the complexities and this often leads to ill-informed judgments on both sides and creates unnecessary conflicts."

But they insisted that "hospitals, healthcare professionals, families with sick children, the NHS and the reputation of our own government" are "better for everybody" when "addressing problems" and "creating a platform for transparency and openness so that cases like these can be dealt with before they ever reach the courts."

Alfie was born healthy in May 2016 but after missing a number of developmental milestones, his parents knew something was wrong. In December of that year, the sick toddler suffered a chest infection and was hospitalized for seizures. He remained at Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool, England ever since [to the day he died].


What Alfie Evans unlocked

April 28, 2018

Now that little Alfie Evans has joined the angels, it is worth looking again at what really happened in this event.

We saw something extraordinary emerge. It was called “Alfie’s Army” [just as there was 'Charlie's Army' last year]. At the hospital, crowds gathered to rage against the authorities. Around the world, small groups gathered to pray and protest. Social media was set alight as ordinary people found their voice and vented their frustration, anger and fear.

In the confusion of war many mistakes are made. The actual medical facts were no doubt extremely complicated and the ethical issues were not straightforward. Yes, a dying patient needs to be hydrated, given nutrition and pain relief, but it gets to a point where that person’s body is shutting down and can’t actually process food any longer. Must they be force fed when even that is to no avail? Of course not. Nature can take its course.

No doubt Alfie’s army were swept away by a range of other interlocking and interfering agendas. Sentimentalism played a part. Here was a cute baby boy fighting for life. All the Mama bears of the world unite! PS: I’m not mocking this. (I think it was a noble and beautiful thing to see women rise up to protect a baby.)

Then there was the English class-struggle dimension. Tom and Kate came across as a working class couple and they were locked in a struggle with the ruling elite of Britain – the medical staff, the hospital administration, the judiciary and of course the politicians and ultimately the royal family. The fact that a certain Will and Kate proudly displayed their healthy, privileged baby boy added salt to the wounds. Would a brain-damaged royal prince be given the same seemingly callous treatment?

Now let’s throw in the religious dimension. The brave father traveled to Rome to meet Pope Francis who gave him a compassionate welcome. Meanwhile his own Archbishop of Liverpool sided with the “Big Bad Wolf” of the UK establishment. The drama was heightening day by day.

The narrative emerged that establishment powers conspired against these poor parents depriving them of their child and their choice to seek further treatment in Rome. Was that really the case? The legal experts would weigh in and debate concepts like power of attorney and what rights we hand over when we accept treatment in hospital for ourselves or our loved ones.

So beneath the tragedy of the terminally ill baby boy was brewing another societal story which we would do well not to ignore.

The drama of “Alfie’s Army” should be seen as part of a larger social phenomenon connecting with the Brexit vote, the Trump victory and the rising nationalist movements across Europe.

To put it simply, the ordinary folks have had enough.
- They have had enough of governmental over-reach.
- They’ve had enough of the liberal, “tolerant” ruling classes who are, in fact, increasingly totalitarian.
- They’ve had enough of the technocrats invading their privacy.
- They’ve had enough of the immoral new morality – of naked men cavorting in Pride parades and little boys being castrated and pumped full of drugs because they think they might be girls.
- They’ve had enough of the seemingly helpful and compassionate welfare state who end up controlling the individual and reducing them to dependent drones.
- They’ve had enough of global economic systems, big government, multi national companies and the control of the techno media.

They’ve had enough, but they also realize their ultimate impotence.
- How do you fight this nameless, formless global oligarchy?
- How do you fight against a totalitarianism that smiles, does glossy PR campaigns and seems to be ushering in a brave new world order?
- How do you fight against the media giants, the multinationals, the big government, the unelected swamp lords or the army of sincere do gooders that are controlling your world?
- How do you fight against the domineering well meaning social worker and the bureaucracy behind her?

The totalitarianism we are facing in our age is one that is completely different from communism and fascism.
-They wear business suits, not SS uniforms.
- They control the world with laptops and apps, not machine guns and tanks.
- They persecute with lawsuits not the Gulag.
- They will manipulate and control with their ideologies and propaganda, but it is done through game shows, reality TV, the broadcast news and the respectable BBC.

That is what Alfie Evans unlocked. This is what Alfie’s Army was really about, and that is what the Trump win was really about and that is what Brexit was really about.

It is about the rising rage of the ordinary folks, and the folks on the top of the heap would do well to listen and channel that rage because the more they try to suppress it the greater it will become.

It is well past the day but it's never too late for a tribute such as Robert Moynihan offered Benedict XVI on the Emeritus Pope's 91st birthday. I apologize I didn't get to see it till now.

16 theses on Benedict's 91st birthday
by Robert Moynihan

Monday, April 16, 2018

Today, April 16, is the 91st birthday of Pope Benedict XVI, born in 1927.

So, today is a good day for sending "best wishes" to the man who has thought so deeply, so compellingly, so provocatively, so kindly and so poetically, about the transcendent destination of our wounded human nature — in Christ, with Christ, through Christ — and in so doing, given all of us reason for hope.

This is his greatness, his importance in this secular age, and his contribution to clarity and faith in a time of considerable spiritual and intellectual confusion.

For this, I thank him, sincerely and profoundly.

I thank him for all of this, even though it was difficult to understand and accept his February 11, 2013, decision to resign the papacy — to resign, it seemed to me at the time, his spiritual "fatherhood" as "Papa" — a papacy I had sought to defend against many and powerful, almost always biased and unfair, attacks...

A papacy which, in the end, I felt I had been unable to defend sufficiently... thus (perhaps) contributing to the general sense of isolation Benedict seems to have felt as his papacy journeyed toward its conclusion in that February of 2013, five years ago now... issuing into this unprecedented period of "two Petrine ministries," one public, active, carried out by Pope Francis, and one mystical, contemplative, "Johannine," carried out at the foot of the cross, in prayer and in almost total silence, since March of 2013, by Emeritus Pope Benedict...

16 Theses

1. Gratitude. So, thank you, Pope Benedict, Joseph Ratzinger, for your words, your example of strength in the face of the world, in the face of "the wolves" of our time, whom you warned us against in your inaugural sermon on April 24, 2005... for your humility, your courage, your honesty, your truthfulness, your fidelity.

2. Inspiration for writing. Thank you also for the privilege of speaking with you on many occasions... My writing stems, in part, from the inspiration of our talks. You have helped to give the insight and frame of understanding which has shaped this writing...

3. The Logos. In personal conversations, and in your public teachings — which I read, reported and sought to explain — you emphasized that Jesus is the Logos, the Word, the Utterance, the Expression, of the all-holy Father. This "Christ-centeredness" is the anchor of our faith, of our civilization, indeed, of our universe, of all that was, is and ever shall be...

4. The temptation... At the same time, as you have argued for a "logos-centric" (Christ-centered) vision of human nature and human existence, you have warned against the "great temptation": the Faustian temptation of knowledge-for-power, the Promethean temptation of a "gnosis" which offers the apple of knowledge to our minds while encouraging us to leave behind... our fleshly bodies, and all participation in what is limited, decaying, transient, imperfect — including all imperfect children... including (for example) all Down Syndrome children... in a fevered race toward a "perfect" human race. But the "perfect" (in this gnostic sense) is always... the enemy of the good. Thank you for showing us the danger of this temptation...

5. Witness of holiness.

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"How much we need, in the Church and in society, witnesses of the beauty of holiness, witnesses of the splendour of truth, witnesses of the joy and freedom born of a living relationship with Christ!"
— Pope Benedict XVI, Apostolic Journey to the United Kingdom Sermon, September 18, 2010

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6. The root of the meaning of our lives.

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"Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed. Each of us is loved. Each of us is necessary."
— Pope Benedict XVI, Mass, Imposition Of The Pallium, And Conferral Of The Fisherman's Ring
for The Beginning Of The Petrine Ministry Of The Bishop Of Rome,
April 24, 2005 (full text published below)

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7. Existence of truth and dictatorship of relativism.

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"We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires." - Pope Benedict XVI, Mass "Pro Eligendo Romano Pontefice
Homily of His Eminence Card. Joseph Ratzinger, Dean of the College of Cardinals
Vatican Basilica, Monday 18 April, 2005

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8. The encounter.

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"Christianity is not a new philosophy or new morality. We are Christians only if we encounter Christ... Only in this personal relationship with Christ, only in this encounter with the Risen One do we really become Christians... Therefore, let us pray to the Lord to enlighten us, so that, in our world, he will grant us the encounter with His presence, and thus give us a lively faith, an open heart, and great charity for all, capable of renewing the world."
— Benedict XVI, September 3, 2008, Paul VI Audience Hall

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9. Humility.

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"God loves us; we need only to summon up the humility to allow ourselves to be loved."
— Joseph Ratzinger, Stephan Otto Horn, Vinzenz Pfnür
“God is Near Us: The Eucharist, the Heart of Life”, p.37, Ignatius Press(2003)

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10. Truth.

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"The central question at issue, then, is this: where is the ethical foundation for political choices to be found? Without objective truth, this question seems impossible to answer."
—Pope Benedict XVI
Apostolic Journey to the United Kingdom, September 16-19,2010
Meeting with the Representatives of British Society
Westminster Hall - City of Westminster
Friday, 17 September 2010

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11. Music.

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"Music, great music, distends the spirit, arouses profound emotions and almost naturally invites us to raise our minds and hearts to God in all situations of human existence, the joyful and the sad. Music can become prayer."
— Pope Benedict XVI, after a concert on October 19, 2009

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12. The cross.

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"The cross reminds us that there is no true love without suffering, there is no gift of life without pain."
— Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience, September 17, 2008

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13. Witnesses.

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"Our faith is well founded; but it is necessary that this faith become part of our lives. A great effort must therefore be made in order for all Christians to transform themselves into 'witnesses,' ready and able to shoulder the commitment of testifying - always and to everyone - to the hope that animates them".
— Pope Benedict XVI
Address to 4th Italian Ecclesial Conference
Verona, Italy, October 19, 2006

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14. This moment in history.

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"Dear friends, may no adversity paralyze you. Be afraid neither of the world, nor of the future, nor of your weakness. The Lord has allowed you to live in this moment of history so that, by your faith, his name will continue to resound throughout the world."
— Pope Benedict XVI, Apostolic Journey to Madrid
on the Occasion of the 26th World Youth Day, 18-21 August, 2011,
Prayer Vigil with Young People, Homily
Cuatro Vientos Air Base, Madrid, Saturday, 20 August 2011

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15. The most beautiful thing.

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"There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ. There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship with Him."
— Pope Benedict XVI, April 24, 2005

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16. Fidelity to one's word. “Holiness, I promise from now on my total obedience and my prayer." (March 13, 2013). You promised your full loyalty to Pope Francis, your prayer for him at all times, and you have kept that promise, providing an example for us.


Nothing really provides a better, more direct comparison of Benedict XVI and his successor than to read their words, in which it often seems that what Benedict XVI - and Joseph Ratzinger before he became pope - had to say about faith and morals, doctrine and practice, is a critique of the new order under Bergoglio. A contrast that is so striking it often does not require a commentary to point it out... Benedict XVI's 'inaugural' homily is a great illustration...

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MASS, IMPOSITION OF THE PALLIUM
AND CONFERRAL OF THE FISHERMAN'S RING
FOR THE BEGINNING OF THE PETRINE MINISTRY
OF THE BISHOP OF ROME



HOMILY OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI
St. Peter's Square
Sunday, 24 April 2005

Your Eminences,
My dear Brother Bishops and Priests,
Distinguished Authorities and Members of the Diplomatic Corps,
Dear Brothers and Sisters,

During these days of great intensity, we have chanted the litany of the saints on three different occasions: at the funeral of our Holy Father John Paul II; as the Cardinals entered the Conclave; and again today, when we sang it with the response: Tu illum adiuva – sustain the new Successor of Saint Peter. On each occasion, in a particular way, I found great consolation in listening to this prayerful chant.

How alone we all felt after the passing of John Paul II – the Pope who for over twenty-six years had been our shepherd and guide on our journey through life! He crossed the threshold of the next life, entering into the mystery of God. But he did not take this step alone.

Those who believe are never alone – neither in life nor in death. At that moment, we could call upon the Saints from every age – his friends, his brothers and sisters in the faith – knowing that they would form a living procession to accompany him into the next world, into the glory of God. We knew that his arrival was awaited. Now we know that he is among his own and is truly at home.

We were also consoled as we made our solemn entrance into Conclave, to elect the one whom the Lord had chosen. How would we be able to discern his name? How could 115 Bishops, from every culture and every country, discover the one on whom the Lord wished to confer the mission of binding and loosing?

Once again, we knew that we were not alone, we knew that we were surrounded, led and guided by the friends of God.

And now, at this moment, weak servant of God that I am, I must assume this enormous task, which truly exceeds all human capacity.

How can I do this? How will I be able to do it?

All of you, my dear friends, have just invoked the entire host of Saints, represented by some of the great names in the history of God’s dealings with mankind.

In this way, I too can say with renewed conviction: I am not alone. I do not have to carry alone what in truth I could never carry alone.

All the Saints of God are there to protect me, to sustain me and to carry me.

And your prayers, my dear friends, your indulgence, your love, your faith and your hope accompany me.

Indeed, the communion of Saints consists not only of the great men and women who went before us and whose names we know.

All of us belong to the communion of Saints, we who have been baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, we who draw life from the gift of Christ’s Body and Blood, through which he transforms us and makes us like himself.

Yes, the Church is alive – this is the wonderful experience of these days.

During those sad days of the Pope’s illness and death, it became wonderfully evident to us that the Church is alive.

And the Church is young. She holds within herself the future of the world and therefore shows each of us the way towards the future.

The Church is alive and we are seeing it: we are experiencing the joy that the Risen Lord promised his followers.

The Church is alive – she is alive because Christ is alive, because he is truly risen.

In the suffering that we saw on the Holy Father’s face in those days of Easter, we contemplated the mystery of Christ’s Passion and we touched his wounds.

But throughout these days we have also been able, in a profound sense, to touch the Risen One.

We have been able to experience the joy that he promised, after a brief period of darkness, as the fruit of his resurrection.

The Church is alive – with these words, I greet with great joy and gratitude all of you gathered here, my venerable brother Cardinals and Bishops, my dear priests, deacons, Church workers, catechists.

I greet you, men and women Religious, witnesses of the transfiguring presence of God. I greet you, members of the lay faithful, immersed in the great task of building up the Kingdom of God which spreads throughout the world, in every area of life.

With great affection I also greet all those who have been reborn in the sacrament of Baptism but are not yet in full communion with us; and you, my brothers and sisters of the Jewish people, to whom we are joined by a great shared spiritual heritage, one rooted in God’s irrevocable promises.

Finally, like a wave gathering force, my thoughts go out to all men and women of today, to believers and non-believers alike.

Dear friends! At this moment there is no need for me to present a programme of governance. I was able to give an indication of what I see as my task in my Message of Wednesday 20 April, and there will be other opportunities to do so.

My real programme of governance is not to do my own will, not to pursue my own ideas, but to listen, together with the whole Church, to the word and the will of the Lord, to be guided by Him, so that He himself will lead the Church at this hour of our history.
Instead of putting forward a programme, I should simply like to comment on the two liturgical symbols which represent the inauguration of the Petrine Ministry; both these symbols, moreover, reflect clearly what we heard proclaimed in today’s readings.

The first symbol is the Pallium, woven in pure wool, which will be placed on my shoulders.

This ancient sign, which the Bishops of Rome have worn since the fourth century, may be considered an image of the yoke of Christ, which the Bishop of this City, the Servant of the Servants of God, takes upon his shoulders.

God’s yoke is God’s will, which we accept. And this will does not weigh down on us, oppressing us and taking away our freedom.

To know what God wants, to know where the path of life is found – this was Israel’s joy, this was her great privilege.

It is also our joy: God’s will does not alienate us, it purifies us – even if this can be painful – and so it leads us to ourselves. In this way, we serve not only him, but the salvation of the whole world, of all history.

The symbolism of the Pallium is even more concrete: the lamb’s wool is meant to represent the lost, sick or weak sheep which the shepherd places on his shoulders and carries to the waters of life.

For the Fathers of the Church, the parable of the lost sheep, which the shepherd seeks in the desert, was an image of the mystery of Christ and the Church.

The human race – every one of us – is the sheep lost in the desert who no longer knows the way.

The Son of God will not let this happen; he cannot abandon humanity in so wretched a condition.

He leaps to his feet and abandons the glory of heaven, in order to go in search of the sheep and pursue it, all the way to the Cross.

He takes it upon his shoulders and carries our humanity; he carries us all – he is the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep.

What the Pallium indicates first and foremost is that we are all carried by Christ. But at the same time it invites us to carry one another.

Hence the Pallium becomes a symbol of the shepherd’s mission, of which the Second Reading and the Gospel speak.

The pastor must be inspired by Christ’s holy zeal: for him it is not a matter of indifference that so many people are living in the desert. And there are so many kinds of desert.

There is the desert of poverty, the desert of hunger and thirst, the desert of abandonment, of loneliness, of destroyed love.

There is the desert of God’s darkness, the emptiness of souls no longer aware of their dignity or the goal of human life.

The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast.

Therefore the earth’s treasures no longer serve to build God’s garden for all to live in, but they have been made to serve the powers of exploitation and destruction.

The Church as a whole and all her Pastors, like Christ, must set out to lead people out of the desert, towards the place of life, towards friendship with the Son of God, towards the One who gives us life, and life in abundance.

The symbol of the lamb also has a deeper meaning. In the Ancient Near East, it was customary for kings to style themselves shepherds of their people.

This was an image of their power, a cynical image: to them their subjects were like sheep, which the shepherd could dispose of as he wished.

When the shepherd of all humanity, the living God, himself became a lamb, he stood on the side of the lambs, with those who are downtrodden and killed. This is how he reveals himself to be the true shepherd: “I am the Good Shepherd . . . I lay down my life for the sheep”, Jesus says of himself (Jn 10:14f).

It is not power, but love that redeems us! This is God’s sign: he himself is love.

How often we wish that God would make show himself stronger, that he would strike decisively, defeating evil and creating a better world.

All ideologies of power justify themselves in exactly this way, they justify the destruction of whatever would stand in the way of progress and the liberation of humanity.

We suffer on account of God’s patience. And yet, we need his patience.

God, who became a lamb, tells us that the world is saved by the Crucified One, not by those who crucified him.

The world is redeemed by the patience of God. It is destroyed by the impatience of man.

One of the basic characteristics of a shepherd must be to love the people entrusted to him, even as he loves Christ whom he serves.

“Feed my sheep,” says Christ to Peter, and now, at this moment, he says it to me as well.

Feeding means loving, and loving also means being ready to suffer.

Loving means giving the sheep what is truly good, the nourishment of God’s truth, of God’s word, the nourishment of his presence, which he gives us in the Blessed Sacrament.

My dear friends – at this moment I can only say: pray for me, that I may learn to love the Lord more and more.

Pray for me, that I may learn to love his flock more and more – in other words, you, the holy Church, each one of you and all of you together.

Pray for me, that I may not flee for fear of the wolves.

Let us pray for one another, that the Lord will carry us and that we will learn to carry one another.

The second symbol used in today’s liturgy to express the inauguration of the Petrine Ministry is the presentation of the fisherman’s ring.

Peter’s call to be a shepherd, which we heard in the Gospel, comes after the account of a miraculous catch of fish: after a night in which the disciples had let down their nets without success, they see the Risen Lord on the shore.

He tells them to let down their nets once more, and the nets become so full that they can hardly pull them in; 153 large fish: “and although there were so many, the net was not torn” (Jn 21:11).

This account, coming at the end of Jesus’s earthly journey with his disciples, corresponds to an account found at the beginning: there too, the disciples had caught nothing the entire night; there too, Jesus had invited Simon once more to put out into the deep.

And Simon, who was not yet called Peter, gave the wonderful reply: “Master, at your word I will let down the nets.”

And then came the conferral of his mission: “Do not be afraid. Henceforth you will be catching men” (Lk 5:1-11).

Today too the Church and the successors of the Apostles are told to put out into the deep sea of history and to let down the nets, so as to win men and women over to the Gospel – to God, to Christ, to true life.

The Fathers made a very significant commentary on this singular task. This is what they say: for a fish, created for water, it is fatal to be taken out of the sea, to be removed from its vital element to serve as human food.

But in the mission of a fisher of men, the reverse is true.

We are living in alienation, in the salt waters of suffering and death; in a sea of darkness without light.

The net of the Gospel pulls us out of the waters of death and brings us into the splendour of God’s light, into true life.

It is really true: as we follow Christ in this mission to be fishers of men, we must bring men and women out of the sea that is salted with so many forms of alienation and onto the land of life, into the light of God.

It is really so: the purpose of our lives is to reveal God to men.
And only where God is seen does life truly begin. Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is.

We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution.

Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.

There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ.

There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship with Him.

The task of the shepherd, the task of the fisher of men, can often seem wearisome.

But it is beautiful and wonderful, because it is truly a service to joy, to God’s joy which longs to break into the world.

Here I want to add something: both the image of the shepherd and that of the fisherman issue an explicit call to unity. “I have other sheep that are not of this fold; I must lead them too, and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd” (Jn 10:16).

These are the words of Jesus at the end of his discourse on the Good Shepherd. And the account of the 153 large fish ends with the joyful statement: “although there were so many, the net was not torn” (Jn 21:11).

Alas, beloved Lord, with sorrow we must now acknowledge that it has been torn! But no – we must not be sad!

Let us rejoice because of your promise, which does not disappoint, and let us do all we can to pursue the path towards the unity you have promised.

Let us remember it in our prayer to the Lord, as we plead with him: yes, Lord, remember your promise.

Grant that we may be one flock and one shepherd! Do not allow your net to be torn, help us to be servants of unity! [Words that apply today not just to ecumenism, but even more pointedly and poignantly, to the Church herself, deliberately split into 'us' and 'them' by the very man who should be the symbol and agent of unity.]

At this point, my mind goes back to 22 October 1978, when Pope John Paul II began his ministry here in Saint Peter’s Square. His words on that occasion constantly echo in my ears: “Do not be afraid! Open wide the doors for Christ!”

The Pope was addressing the mighty, the powerful of this world, who feared that Christ might take away something of their power if they were to let him in, if they were to allow the faith to be free.

Yes, he would certainly have taken something away from them: the dominion of corruption, the manipulation of law and the freedom to do as they pleased.

But he would not have taken away anything that pertains to human freedom or dignity, or to the building of a just society.

The Pope was also speaking to everyone, especially the young.

Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way?

If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that He might take something away from us?

Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful?

Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom?

And once again the Pope said: No! If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great.

No!

Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide.
Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed.
Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation.

And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people:

Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything.
When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return.
Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ – and you will find true life.

Amen.

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On the rule of law – and what happens
when it is misused, as in the Alfie Evans case,
or when even the Church hierarchy ignores it
because it is inconvenient
by Maike Hickson

April 27, 2018

Many of our readers must be currently in a certain state of mind, namely: attentively watching a little child – who could be yours or mine – struggle for life in front of the eyes of much of the whole world, and now upon the unjust decision of a secular judge in England, and against the parents’ wishes thus constituting a violation of the that family’s rights. This form of injustice is just too much.

During the last nights, many of us had Alfie in our minds, his beautiful face, and kept praying for him. The ugly face of a secular and “legally positivist” state that does not abide by God’s objective Laws nor a just morality is stunningly evil. For a while, the doctors did not even give the little boy nutrition and oxygen, even though he has thus far survived the termination of the breathing treatment! What is the reason that a state would not let a family take their child to Italy, to a welcoming hospital which is willing to do its utmost to help Alfie in whatever can be done for him now?

I would like to quote here a poem written by Dr. Robert Moynihan about Alfie which reflects our theme here:
"Go on, dear Alfie, son of Albion,
And may your name be praised in time to come
By a race that once stood proud and free
But now has bowed before false law’s decree."

At the same time as we followed Alfie’s fate with love and compassion, some of us keep checking in on the situation in Syria and the larger spreading conflict, after the alleged 7 April gas attack in Douma, Eastern Ghouta which led to the “coalition” strikes against Syria on 14 April. (Some of you might remember that we had launched a petition against it, asking for a thorough and objective investigation of the alleged gas attack. We recommend to your consideration our own report on the petition in the above link because, in the meantime, many prominent Catholics – among them Bishop Athanasius Schneider, John-Henry Westen, Marco Tosatti, Professor Claudio Pierantoni, and Donna F. Bethell – have signed that petition, and it has gained more than 6,700 signatories.)

So far, conclusive evidence is lacking that this gas attack ever actually happened; the chemical weapons’ watchdog organization OPWC just recently finally gathered some samples in Douma and are still investigating other sites. However, civilian journalists – like the award-winning Middle East expert Robert Fisk or the German journalist Uli Gack – are reporting from Douma (or the region) that they could not find any confirmation of the alleged gas attack down on the ground.

The German parliament’s non-partisan legal expert commission has now called the coalition missile strikes on Syria to have been “against international law,” and this in spite of the fact that Germany had politically supported these very strikes.

The head is spinning, and in spite of it, there is a theme that connects these two unrelated topics, namely: the rule of law. Of just law, not an unjust or arbitrary law made up by men. There grows a sense of powerlessness in the face of these desultory decisions that are so obviously unjust and against deliberative reason. In both cases – Alfie and the “coalition” attack on Syria – some observers have spoken of tyranny. Tyrannical methods ignore the rule of law and just impose their own will upon others, without fair hearings and investigations.

We are increasingly living in a time where law is not respected and then abided by, and the little ones are the ones who suffer most. And this impression applies to matters in the world as well as to those now in the Church. Let me here mention some other examples of the same lawless phenomenon, yet these are now only pertaining to the Church herself:

1. For months, there is increasingly strong evidence that Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga Rodrigez has been covering up for immoral conduct of a prelate (Bishop Juan José Pineda Fasquelle) in his diocese and that he himself has been caught in financial dealings that have the stench of corruption.

Edward Pentin, the very reliable Rome Correspondent of the National Catholic Register, has amply reported on these matters. Yet, there is no counter-action taken, and Maradiaga still remains in his office; he is still even advising the pope as a member of the Council of Nine Cardinals, and the prelate who has been accused of immoral conduct is still effectively untouched. As of December 2017, Pope Francis still defended Cardinal Maradiaga against “all the evil they have done against you.”

2. Cardinal Joseph Zen is calling for help while the Vatican prepares an agreement with Communist China that would favor those Catholics in the country who have made their compromise with the Communists, thus leaving the loyal Catholics out in the cold. At the same time that Zen is calling out, China is increasing its suppression of Christian symbols and the practice of the Christian faith.

Professor Thomas Schirrmacher, a Protestant theologian and Associate Secretary General for Theological Concerns of the World Evangelical Alliance, has just said in a laudatory speech for Cardinal Zen that the recent unjust arrest of the loyal Chinese Bishop Vincent Guo Xijin (who had been unjustly asked by the Vatican to stand aside for a government-backed prelate) might well have even halted such a compromise between the Vatican and China: “Thanks to the unexpected arrest of Bishop Guo, which proved every word of Cardinal Zen to be a realistic and accurate description of the situation, nothing has been signed so far […].” Yet, will the Vatican still, quietly, continue to work on such a compromising deal?

3. Cardinal Reinhard Marx has caused a major confusion in Germany after himself promoting and issuing pastoral guidelines that would allow Protestant spouses of Catholics to receive Holy Communion. This scandal has led the pope to halt the issuing of the final version of the pastoral guidelines and to invite Marx and some of his fellow bishops to Rome for some conversations after seven German bishops had raised their voices of resistance.

Yet, Cardinal Marx is still a member of the Council of Nine Cardinals, in spite of all the deserving uproar he has caused, together with Bishop Franz-Josef Bode, his Vice-President, who has been recently airing the idea of blessing homosexual couples.

4. The same German Cardinal Marx has now also closed Altmünster, a one-thousand-year-old Abbey in Bavaria, a religious and historical landmark, in spite of the fact that there were still several nuns living there, and several other younger women who were aspiring to become nuns, and together to maintain the Abbey and to make it grow again.

The Archdiocese of Munich – according to Peter Seewald, the internationally known journalist and interviewer of Pope Benedict XVI – has worked by means of some lies, deceit, intimidation, and sordid methods in order to help shut down this Abbey and to transfer it (and its considerable wealth) to the Diocese of Munich, with the help of a verdict from Rome.

The “absurd situation,” in Seewald’s own words, goes so far that Cardinal Marx has ordered guards to protect the Abbey from the religious women, disallowing them to stay or re-enter! And this at a time where the Catholic Faith in Germany is dying. Why is Cardinal Marx still the President of the German Bishops’ Conference and a counselor of Pope Francis?

As we see in these few examples, law and considerations of justice have no detectable, much less effective, place. Arbitrary action and injustice rule. Yet, God loves the moral law. (And the Laws of God are acts of love.) He actually invented the law and put it into nature, the universe, and, yes, also into our human nature. And only if we follow his abiding acts of love – that is to say, the rules that help us to live a virtuous human life here on earth and may help attain to eternal happiness with Him – will there be more order and sustaining justice on earth.

Yet, now we even have a pope who undermines some of the very laws given to us by God; namely, the laws about marriage, to include the Commandment against adultery. Amoris Laetitia.

Should we not expect that the world will spiral down and plunge into the sea of lawlessness and injustice when even the very vicar of Christ on earth – who is called to preserve and teach and defend God’s Laws – is himself undermining those laws of God and the sense of justice?

In this context comes to mind also Pope Francis’s own decision – very similar to Cardinal Marx’s own – to close down a flourishing order in Belgium. The Priestly Fraternity of the Holy Apostles of Brussels – founded in 2013 by the orthodox prelate then-Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard – had grown, with more than 20 seminarians and six priests.

Yet, his successor, Archbishop Jozef De Kesel, an ally of Pope Francis, made sure it would not grow further. Instead of allowing a normal legal procedure in the hands of the Roman Signatura, Pope Francis took the case into his own hands – and shut down the order. “An ugly story,” in the words of the Italian Vatican specialist, Marco Tosatti.

Just recently Pope Francis has shown another sign of his tendency toward disrespect of God’s Laws and the justice that flows from them. Professor Claudio Pierantoni, an Italian philosopher who teaches in Chile – has shown in a recent interview with Edward Pentin, that Pope Francis has essentially equated, in his recent apostolic exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate (Rejoice and Be Glad), the fight against abortion – which constitutes the violation of the Fifth Commandment – with practical matters of immigration (which often relates to national security issues) – which is a question of prudence, but not as such an object of one of the Ten Commandments. As Pierantoni says:

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There is seemingly no theological error in affirming that the life of the unborn is equally sacred as the lives of the poor, the destitute, etc.

But the problem I see here is that, when we speak of the unborn, we are referring to a specific action, that is the killing of an innocent human being, i.e., assassination. That is an intrinsically evil action, monstrously justified by the law of so many “civilized” countries.

On the other hand, social injustice is something we must certainly strive to overcome, but the positive political actions that really favor the overcoming of poverty are a matter of discussion among different schools of thought.

In general, positive duties are different from negative ones (i.e. prohibitions), because they are the object of prudential judgment, and there is no positive specific action that absolutely has to be carried out in this regard.

For example, it is true that we must be generous towards immigrants, but it is a matter of prudential judgment how many immigrants a country can reasonably receive in a given period of time and under which rules.

Now, it is utterly disquieting that, on the one hand, the Pope has been “flexible” on matters that, according to Catholic doctrine, are the object of a specific and absolute prohibition, saying for example that “we must not insist too much on such issues [of abortion]”, or speaking favorably and even inviting hardline pro-abortion personalities such as Emma Bonino while, on the other hand, supporting in an absolute and rigid manner political decisions about immigration, that are clearly the object of a prudential judgement. In this sense, he gives the strong impression that he uses his papal influence to promote his own political ideas rather than affirming Catholic doctrine, as would be his duty.

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With these lucid words, Professor Pierantoni highlights the tendency of Pope Francis to confuse – and even undermine – the clear Laws of God with His counsels, i.e. invitations to generous action. While His Commandments are binding under the pain of sin, the counsels do not. And in some cases – as with the massive Muslim immigration – it might actually be a question of the survival of Christianity not to welcome it on a large scale.

We will not further delve into the confusion caused by Pope Francis, except to remind our readers that, under his watch, there are now clergymen coming out asking for female popes, female bishops, female priests and deacons; for married priests in the Latin rite; for the blessing of homosexual couples, as well as for the empowering of women within the Church’s hierarchy. The current debate about the new German pastoral guidelines opening to intercommunion of course also has been encouraged by Pope Francis himself.

Does all of this not increase the sense of lawlessness in the Church, that is to say a sense that not one important tradition or rule in the Church remains untouched and unquestioned?

Let us thus pray and implore God to have mercy on us and to give us a pope who loves His Laws and who would help bring us back to a generous humanity, that more love may be lived out in our poor world which has lost its way, has forgotten God, and now reaps the fruits of that defection. May His Mother also help us, with her tender, loving heart – she who also surely now watches over little Alfie. And over the vulnerable children in Syria, too.

Left, one of the very few pictorial representations of Muhammad; right, a 12th century Quran.

What if Muhammad didn’t write the Qur’an?
by WILL JONES

April 26, 2018

Who wrote the Qur’an? You may think the answer to this is obvious: Muhammad wrote the Qur’an. And the crucial difference between Muslims and non-Muslims is whether they believe he was inspired by God to do it. But if you did give that answer, you’d be completely wrong.

For one thing, not even Muslims think that Muhammad wrote the Qur’an. They believe that God wrote it and then revealed it to Muhammad. A technicality you might think. But actually, they don’t even believe that Muhammad, once it had been revealed to him, wrote it down either. He spoke it, preached it, recited it (qur’an literally translates as ‘recitation’). And those around him, his followers, then memorized it, and some noted it down on anything to hand, like palm leaves and stones.

So how did it become a book? According to Islamic tradition, not until after Muhammad had died (in AD 632), under the first caliph Abu Bakr, were these parts all gathered together and arranged into a book. The scribe Zaid was charged with the job of locating all the parts and compiling them into one volume. And around 20 years later, under the third caliph Uthman, the same scribe was charged with gathering all the variant versions that still existed, determining the correct one and burning the rest.

You might think this haphazard process is not one that would have inspired confidence that the final product contained the authentic words, and only the authentic words, of Muhammad. But this is the official story, and Muslims seem happy enough with it.

What do modern scholars think of this story? Not very much, as it happens. There are all sorts of potential issues with the traditional Islamic account, which is derived from sources only compiled centuries after Muhammad.

Perhaps the most significant, and worth leading with here, is that there is mounting evidence that the Qur’an, or at least the bulk of it, predates Muhammad. A number of manuscript fragments have been found which can be dated (by carbon dating of parchment) to well before the time Muhammad was active. It is also packed with agricultural and geographical references which are out of place in the arid Arabian Peninsula, and written in a dialect of Arabic which even early Muslim scholars agreed was not the dialect of Muhammad’s tribe in Mecca. Current thinking is still far from settled, but some evidence suggests it may have originated in the southern Levant or northern Arabia.

So how did it come to be associated with the prophetic vocation of Muhammad of Mecca? That is a question that scholars are really only just beginning to explore, and it is still much too early to give answers with any kind of certainty.

An important dimension of the problem is that the Qur’an consists of two distinct layers, one earlier and one later. Muslim tradition accounts for this in terms of Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina in 622 (the Hijra), when his emphasis shifted markedly from peaceable coexistence with those of other beliefs to a violent intolerance and imperial ambition.

However, the two layers, A and B, are of so completely different a character that it seems difficult to attribute them to the same author or authors. They make use of a very different vocabulary and style, are worlds apart in their rhetorical quality, and evince some very different priorities.

Layer A (which approximates to the 86 suras [chapters] “revealed before Hijra,” though there is some mixing up) is a finely written theological work of high rhetorical skill. It is general in scope, with much of it devoted to recounting biblical (and apocryphal) stories (especially those of Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses) as encouragements and warnings, and referring to the events in them as Signs and those involved in bringing God’s word as Messengers. It shows an intense interest in reconciling biblical traditions with its own theological narrative, and contains very few detailed ethical prescriptions.

Layer B (approximating to the 28 “after Hijra” suras) is completely different: it has a much clunkier rhetorical style (on the most part, though with some finer passages), longer verses, and has many fewer biblical references, makes heavy use of the second person (addressing the hearer directly) and includes many references to the Messenger (singular) who is reciting the Qur’an as a Prophet, emphasizing the need to obey him.

It includes various specific local references to Muhammad, Mecca, the Mosque, and Yathrib (Medina), a host of detailed moral and legal prescriptions, some personal guidance for the Prophet and special dispensations for him (especially about his wives), numerous anti-Christian and anti-Jewish polemics, and many exhortations to fight against the enemy and unbeliever.

Scholars are still investigating explanations for the origin of these two layers. One of the more likely possibilities is that the first layer somehow came into the possession of Muhammad’s community in Mecca, where they began their monotheistic Qur’anic sect, and where they subsequently recognized a prophetic vocation for Muhammad in the Qur’anic tradition. The second layer was then added later by Muhammad (and possibly those around him) following the move to Medina, where the Qur’anic religion and Muhammad’s prophetic vocation quickly became tools for gaining power and building empire.

This is not to say that Muhammad and his companions did not sincerely believe in his prophetic vocation — they may well have done. But those who were aware of the true origin of the Qur’an may have been quite happy to allow Muhammad, seen as the last and greatest of the Messengers and Prophets, to co-opt it to his vocation and incorporate it as he deemed fit.

Alternatively there may be a quite different explanation, such as one in which Muhammad is not involved in the production of the Qur’an at all (such ideas have certainly been entertained by some scholars, referred to as “revisionists”). Whatever the truth though, one thing is looking increasingly likely: that most of the Qur’an originated somewhere quite different with someone quite other than Muhammad of Mecca. And that alone threatens some fundamental Islamic claims about the origins of their religion.

If this information was more widely known amongst Muslims, it would surely have the potential to steer some away from a devotion to the life and example of Muhammad. For how could it not moderate the appeal of the Prophet of Islam, if it became accepted that he could not have been the original messenger of most of Islam’s most sacred text?

For too long have Muslims been cossetted from exposure to the bracing winds of historical-critical scholarship, and the result has been that Islam’s origin mythology has been able to maintain a hold over the minds of Muslims. So many of the radical groups who have waged jihad against the world in the name of their Prophet have looked to his example as a model and inspiration in their struggle.

In our time, when many Muslims are already questioning Islam because of the violent and destructive fruit born of the global Islamic awakening, modern scholarship can play a part in guiding hearts towards a more peaceful path. [That sounds quite naive! One cannot imagine mainstream Islam paying any attention at all - much less giving weight - to any conclusions reached by Western scholars about Muhammed and the Quran. Islam is not about to change by one iota the teaching it has invested through the past 14 centuries in the absolute validity of everything found in the Quran and on the myth of Mohammed, even in the face of the most solid and historically documented scholarship to the contrary.]

Cardinals Marx and Woelki, the two main protagonists of the German Church's 'split' over interfaith communion.

One cardinal, 7 bishops and 4 new DUBIA -
this time, on interfaith communion

May 2, 2018

Last Saturday, April 28, Pope Francis received in audience the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Jesuit Archbishop Luis Ladaria Ferrer, accompanied by the secretary of that same congregation, Giacomo Morandi.

It is reasonable to imagine that they spoke about the clash underway among the bishops of Germany concerning the possibility of giving communion to the Protestant spouses of Catholics.

In confirmation of this, the Vatican press office announced on April 30 that a meeting will be held at the Vatican on May 3 to address precisely this question.

But how has this barged its way onto the agenda? Let’s retrace what led to this.

Last February 20, the German episcopal conference approved by a wide majority a “pastoral manual” of instructions - not yet published, but immediately presented in its essential contents by Cardinal Reinhardt Marx, president of the conference - which says when, how, and why to allow such communion, far beyond the rare cases of extreme necessity provided for in canon law.

But 13 bishops voted against. And seven of these, including one cardinal, on March 22, sent their “dubia” to Rome by way of a letter to the prefect of the CDF asking for a clarification. [They learned a lesson well: if you address any such dubia to the pope, you may never hear from him again.] They also sent copies of the letter to Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian unity, to Juan Ignacio Arrieta Ochoa de Chinchetru, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, and to the apostolic nuncio in Germany, Nikola Eterovic.

The seven signers of the letter are Rainer Woelki, cardinal archbishop of Cologne; Ludwig Schick, archbishop of Bamberg; Gregor Hanke, bishop of Eichstätt; Konrad Zdarsa, bishop of Augsburg; Wolfgang Ipolt, bishop of Görlitz; Rudolf Voderholzer, bishop of Regensburg; and Stefan Oster, bishop of Passau.

It is helpful to recall that Woelki was first secretary and then successor in Cologne to Cardinal Joachim Meisner, a close friend of Joseph Ratzinger and one of the four signers of the famous DUBIA on the correct interpretation of “Amoris Laetitia,” still unresolved because of the lack of a response from the pope. [Actually, when Woelki was still Archbishop of Berlin, and after he was made cardinal by Benedict XVI, he had begun making 'progressivist' statements (chiefly, his support for LGBTs) that cast a doubt on Benedict XVI's decision to make him a cardinal. And in Cologne, he has been in the forefront of outspoke supporters for Islamic immigration to Europe. So it was quite a surprise when he joined the conservative Bavarian bishops in opposing the ReinhardMarx-led push for interfaith communion and assumed nominal leadership of the group as the only cardinal in it.]

Voderholzer was first Gerhard Müller’s assistant on the theology faculty at the University of Munich, then his successor as bishop of Regensburg, and finally an adviser at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith after Müller became its prefect. Moreover, both are editors of the publication of the opera omnia of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. [More specifically , Voderholzer was the founding director of the Institut Papst Benedict XVI founded in March 2008 by Mons. Mueller, then Bishop of Regensburg, to compile and make available to scholars all of the published and unpublished writings of the theologian, bishop and pope Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, as well as all relevant biographical and theological writings. The Institut has been responsible for the publication of THE COMPLETE WRITINGS OF JOSEPH RATZINGER, otherwise referred to as Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's Opera Omnia. At the time, Voderholer, a native of Munich, was professor of dogma and the history of dogma at the University of Trier, and was a recognized expert on the theology of Joseph Ratzinger.]

On April 4, news of the letter appeared in several German newspapers, with an immediate polemical reaction from Cardinal Marx. And over the next few days it emerged that Ladaria had already sent his response. The episcopal conference partially denied this leaked information. But on April 25, it confirmed that a summit would soon be held at the Vatican, naturally under the supervision of Pope Francis, precisely to resolve this conflict.

The German delegation at the summit on May 3 will be made up of Cardinal Marx, Münster bishop Felix Genn, Magdeburg bishop Gerhard Feige, Speyer bishop Karl-Heinz Wiesemann, secretary general of the episcopal conference Hans Langendörfer, a Jesuit, all supporters of the “pastoral manual,” and - to represent the dissenters - Cardinal Woelki and Regensburg bishop Voderholzer.

While the Vatican contribution will come from prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith Ladaria, with his doctrinal section chief Hermann Geissler [a great sup[porter and admirer of Cardinal Ratzinger, with whom he served for decades at the CDF], Cardinal Koch, and undersecretary of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts Markus Graulich, all of them somewhat reluctant to change the current discipline.

More public support for the letter from the seven bishops came on April 20 from Cardinal Gerhard Müller, their countryman and until July last year, prefect of the CDF.

In Müller’s judgment, the openness to intercommunion desired by the majority of the German bishops would result in “an ecclesiological nihilism that opens an abyss that would ultimately swallow up the Church."

Müller presented his argument on the website of First Things in America, and then, in Italy, on La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana. But of course, he will not take part in the summit at the Vatican.

On April 25, Edward Pentin published an English translation of the complete text of the letter of the seven dissenting bishops, in the National Catholic Register.

The letter is reproduced further below. Of the four “dubia” on which the signers are asking for clarification from the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, the most radical is this last one:

"Is it at all possible for a single national episcopal conference, in one particular linguistic region, to make an isolated decision concerning such a question about the faith and practice of the whole Church, without reference and integration into the universal Church?"

What is at stake here, as can be noted, is the actual scope of that process of differentiation which has been set in motion by Pope Francis among the national episcopal conferences, “as subjects of specific attributions, including genuine doctrinal authority” (Evangelii Gaudium 32).

As for the question of communion for Protestant spouses, it is well known that Francis would like to relax the rules. And this is given as certain by another German cardinal, Walter Kasper, who is also the pope’s theologian of reference.

What seems to emerge at the foundation of this conflict is precisely that process of “deconfessionalization” of the Catholic Church - in imitation of what has already happened in the Protestant camp - which Church historian Roberto Pertici has identified on Settimo Cielo as characteristic of the new course of Pope Francis:
> Bergoglio's Reform Was Written Before. By Martin Luther

And here is the March 22 letter from the seven German bishops to the prefect of the CDF, Archbishop Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer. [The protesting German bishops ostentatiously use the honorific 'Eminence' for Ladaria Ferrer who is not a cardinal yet, only an Archbishop on the level of six of the protestors and one 'ecclesial degree' less than Cardinal Woelki.]

---

Your Eminence, my dear confreres,

In the period from February 19 to 22, 2018, the German bishops met for their Spring Plenary Assembly in Ingolstadt.

Under item IL.1 of the agenda, the Bishops were given a so-called "pastoral handout" by the Ecumenical Commission entitled: "On the path of unity with Christ: Confessional marriages and joint participation in the Eucharist" for consultation and decision-making.

According to the text, mixed-denominational couples, as a "practical laboratory of unity,” would take place while the separated churches are "on their way together towards the goal' [presumably, unification. Though one has to be on hallucinogens to think that the goal is anywhere within sight!]

Because of the importance of marriages between Catholic and Protestant Christians in Germany, the statement respects “the pain […of those] who share their whole lives but cannot share God's saving presence in the Eucharistic meal.”

According to the joint Reformation commemoration in 2017, the handout is intended as a voluntary commitment "to provide every assistance to interdenominational marriages, to strengthen their common faith and promote the religious education of their children," offering concrete help and regulation — as declared together with the Protestant Church in Germany in an ecumenical penance and reconciliation service on 11 March 2017 in the Michaeliskirche.

According to this, an opening to Protestant Christians in denominational marriages to receive Communion via Canon 844 (4) CIC 1983 is to be made possible, in view of a gravis spiritualis necessitas [grave spiritual necessity] declared by the document presented on denominational differences of marriage.

On February 20, 2018, the text presented above on non-denominational marriages and the common participation in the Eucharist was voted on in the Assembly. The document was adopted by a 2/3 majority of the German bishops. Of the 60 bishops present, 13 voted no, including at least seven diocesan bishops. "Modi" (amendments) may be submitted until 16 March, but they will no longer call into question the fundamental adoption of the document.

Personally, we do not consider the vote held on 20 February to be right, because we do not believe that the issue we are discussing here is a pastoral one, but a question of the faith and unity of the Church, which is not subject to a vote. So we ask you, Your Eminence, to clarify this matter.

1. Is the document presented here a "pastoral handout" — as asserted by some German bishops — and thus merely a pastoral question, or is the faith and unity of the Church fundamentally called for, rather than the determinations made here?

2. Does Article 58 of the document not relativize the faith of the Church, according to which the Church of Jesus Christ is realized in the Catholic Church (subsists) and it is therefore necessary that an Evangelical Christian who shares the Catholic faith with regard to the Eucharist should also become Catholic?

3. According to nos. 283 to 293, it is not primarily the longing for Eucharistic grace that becomes the criterion for [serious spiritual] distress, but rather the common reception of Communion of spouses belonging to different confessions. In our opinion, this distress is none other than which belongs ecumenism as a whole, that is, of every Christian who seriously strives for unity. In our view, therefore, it is not an exceptional criterion.

4. Is it at all possible for a single national episcopal conference, in one particular linguistic region, to make an isolated decision concerning such a question about the faith and practice of the whole Church, without reference and integration into the universal Church?

Eminence, we have many other fundamental questions and reservations about the proposed solution contained in this document. That is why we are voting in favor of renouncing a derogation and, instead, finding a clear solution in ecumenical dialogue to the overall problem of "Eucharistic communion and ecclesial communion" which is viable for the universal Church.

We ask for your help, in the light of our doubts, as to whether the draft solution presented in this document is compatible with the faith and unity of the Church.

We ask God's blessing for you and your responsible duty in Rome and greet you warmly!

Cardinal Rainer Woelki (Cologne)
Archbishop Ludwig Schick (Bamberg)
Bishop Gregor Hanke (Eichstätt)
Bishop Konrad Zdarsa (Augsburg)
Bishop Wolfgang Ipolt (Görlitz)
Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer (Regensburg)
Bishop Stefan Oster (Passau)

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May 4, 2018
P.S. And the outcome of the Vatican meeting was...TA-DA!

Bergoglio does a Pilate turn -
tells German bishops to
'decide it among yourselves'
Or, a second set of DUBIA that this pope chooses not to answer

Which has got to be the most stupid ruling imaginable - considering that the laissez-faire ReinhardMarxist policy to allow interfaith communion was voted for overwhelmingly in the last meeting of the German bishops conference [for some reason I am unable to get the exact number of German bishops by googling the question, but there are at least 189 because Germany has seven ecclesiastical provinces each having one archbishop and 20 bishops] with only seven dissenting. What unanimity does Bergoglio expect out of that huge disparity??? And if, logically, they will not get a unanimous decision, what then? Or does he think the seven dissenting bishops are mere patsies who will eventually give in???

Bergoglio's 'let each local church decide for itself' policy on yet another matter of doctrine passed off as mere pastoral discretion will simply serve to further disaggregate the universal Church after the ravages already wrought by Amoris laetitia.

And you thought the chaos produced by the Novus Ordo and its freeform as-you-please interpretations was already a major blow to Church unity???

This pope is dismantling the universal Church, local church by local church, when he should be the unifying agent as the supposed symbol of Church unity! What Church unity has he symbolized since becoming pope when he advised his flock, starting with young people, to 'make a mess'? On the contrary, he has done everything possible to foster divisions within the Church! Not that he really cares, of course, because a disaggregated and wrecked Catholic Church is what he needs on which to build and institutionalize the church of Bergoglio!

Anyway, here's the rest of the AP story:

Seven German bishops had written the Vatican asking it to rule on a proposal adopted by a two-thirds majority of the German bishops’ conference to allow Protestant spouses of Catholics to receive Communion in certain circumstances. The conference approved the proposal in February in part as a gesture of ecumenical outreach to Protestants in a country where mixed marriages are common.

The seven conservative bishops had argued the proposal undermines the Catholic faith and shouldn’t be decided by a mere national bishops’ conference.

Pope Francis has sought to decentralize church decision-making in favor of local solutions, and has enraged conservatives by emphasizing conscience and case-by-case solutions to vexing pastoral problems.

According to the Vatican statement, Francis himself asked for the German bishops to try to work out the dispute among themselves. The pope didn’t participate in the meeting, but his request was relayed to the participants by his top doctrinal official, Archbishop Luis Ladaria.

The dispute is the second major one involving the Eucharist, after Francis roiled conservatives with his cautious opening to letting divorced and civilly remarried Catholics receive Communion. There too, conservative Catholics have argued his wiggle room underminesCchurch teaching on the indissolubility of marriage and causes confusion among the faithful. And there too, the Vatican has largely left it to local bishops’ conferences to interpret Francis’s teaching in the way they see fit.

Some of Francis’s harshest critics in that debate have hailed from the German church hierarchy, but he also has strong support for his more flexible approach from the head of the German bishops’ conference, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, who has strongly defended the conference’s outreach to Protestants. [The AP, of course, does not mention that Protestants consider communion as nothing but sharing a meal in Church, a social activity - where Catholics believe that in Communion, the faithful are receiving the transsubstantiated Body and Blood of Christ, Protestants mock the very idea of Trans-Substantiation taking place during the Consecration!]

I just stumbled across the ff while trawling the Web just now - from a November 2016 post by the Canadian blogger Vox Cantoris -
and it is a real gem I had not seen before. The blogger entitled the post 'How to answer a dubium':


Keep this in mind in the immediate future as the church of Bergoglio opens the way to ordaining women starting at the diaconate level.

The new face of holiness!

In the immediate reactions to Gaudete et Exsultate, which I shall hereafter refer to as G&E, two reasonable objections to it were quite specific: the pope's attack
on those he calls neo-Gnostics and neo-Pelagians within the Church - because of their adherence to orthodoxy; and his placing a moral equivalence between
opposing abortion and opposing indiscriminate immigration. Indeed, he ends up calling his 'neo-gnostics and neo-pelagians' heretics - they're the heretics, not
he, whom they accuse of heresy or near-heresy! In which case, Benedict XVI would be the most heretical of all these heretics, despite the absence
of any direct opposition from him of his successor's heterodoxies (to say the least) - because everything he taught was contrary to most of
Bergoglio's 'magisterial' obsessions. Not having bothered to read G&E at all, I came to that conclusion from reading Fr. Scalese's commentary below on just
that aspect of G&E contained in Chapter 2 of the document.

A pope should be above partisanship
[But in 'Gaudete et Exsultate', Bergoglio turns the tables
on his opponents within the Church and calls them the heretics
(for being neo-gnostic and or neo-pelagian by his criteria)]
Translated from

May 4, 2018

We’ve known for a while that Gnosticism and Pelagianism - and what he considers their present manifestations among Catholics – are a form of battlehorse for Pope Francis. [Mere ‘straw men’, in my opinion, imaginary and unsubstantial, and therefore unlikely to be a ‘battlehorse’ in any way.]
- He mentioned them in the programmatic document of his pontificate, Evangelii Gaudium (No.94).
- He mentioned them in his address to the Fifth National Covnention of the Italian Church in Florence on November 10, 2015.
- And in the numberless jabs he has been making, especially against ‘the new pelagians’ in his morning homilettes at Casa Santa Marta.

Last February, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published the letter Placuit Deo on some aspects of Christian salvation, from which I had the impression that it was intended to somehow give a theological foundation to the pope’s insistence on his twinned themes of neo-gnosticism and neo-pelagianism by showing their tendentiously heretical character. Thus, I thought that this would close the question once and for all.

But lo and behold, on April 9, his apostolic exhortation Gaudete et exsultate was published, a call to holiness in the contemporary world, in which, however, the pope re-opened the issue, dedicating an entire chapter to what he calls ‘Two subtle enemies of holiness’, namely Gnosticism and Pelagianism in today’s world – 28 paragraphs out of a total 177, or 16 % of the document, which is significant.

I do not wish to speak now of that exhortation in its entirety. I will only say that the topic of the exhortation was a pleasant surprise since it does not usually come up in this pope’s habitual discourse. But it’s probably not to be wondered at since the pope is a Jesuit. And the Jesuit in Jorge Mario Bergoglio comes out strongly in this exhortation.

Just think of his invitation in the now much-discussed paragraph 26, to be ‘contemplative in action’ or to his many references to St. Ignatius of Loyola (Nos, 20, 69, 153 and Note 124), or to the topics treated in the last chapter (fight against the devil, discernment, examination of conscience), familiar to do those who have any awareness at all of Ignatius’s spiritual exercises.

But what I wish to dwell on exclusively in this post is what the exhortations says about gnosticism and pelagianism. As I had said, I was convinced that with Placuit Deo, we could now consider the argument on these two topics definitively closed. But now, the pope has decided to return to it and in a rather ample manner, almost as if all his previous pronouncements plus Placuit Deo were insufficient to make clear what he thinks about them.

One has to say Pope Francis is generally quite repetitive and not just on these twin topics. And one can understand why, for two reasons: first, because it is inevitable when one has to speak everyday, since it is impossible to invent something new to say everyday; and second, because it can be a deliberate technique to inculcate some concepts which he considers important.

But I, being malicious, suspect that in the pope’s decision to return to the controversy after just two months since Placuit Deo, there is something else. I have the impression that, so to speak, ‘Placuit Deo’ non placuit papae – [the document about] what pleases God did not please the pope. It would seem that the pope was not happy about the CDF document and therefore he decided to personally take it up again, as if to say: “Now let me show you how I would have written that letter (Placuit Deo)!”

What led me to think this was something reported by the National Catholic Register to the effect that G&E was sent to the CDF for review only at the last minute, which did not allow the CDF to make a commentary at all. It would seem then that the replacement of Cardinal Mueller with Archbishop Ladaria, a Jesuit, as Prefect, has not really made relations between the CDF and Casa Santa Marta any better. [Neither Bergoglio nor his paladins have ever made it a secret that they would happily do without the CDF, but how does he go about abolishing what has always been the Vatican's premier dicastery regardless of the name it went by? He can't without incriminating himself formally for his disregard of doctrine in favor of pastoral 'expediencies'. So he does the next best thing, which is to ignore it altogether, except for CYA purposes on the subject of clerical sex abuses. Surely even Mons. Ladaria realizes that the CDF now exists only pro forma, a cover Bergoglio uses to affirm his 'orthodoxy' in the face of all evidence to the contrary.]

Indeed, Placuit Deo – contrary to what Fr. Giuseppe Cavalcoli maintains in his blog where he places G&E on a par with St. Pius X’s encyclical against Modernism, Pascendi domenici gregis (Feeding the Lord’s flock), seeing in it opposition to Lutheranism, modernism, Rahnerism, Lefebvrism and liberation theology, which I believe are totally absent – is a document with a rather frail framework.

Not because what it affirms is wrong (its contents are 100% orhotodx), but simply because it does not achieve the goal that the pope had intended for it: namely, to give a theological foundation to his arguments against contemporary gnosticism and pelagianism.

I think that the CDF officials did the task assigned to them quite diligently: they issued a brief tract on Christian salvation, reiterating what the CDF itself had affirmed in the 2000 declaration Dominus Iesus on the uniqueness of Christ as Savior and on the salvific mediation of the Church.

But when they wished to treat about Gnosticism and Pelagianism in detail, they could only go as far as underscoring the profound differences between the contemporary situation and that during the first Christian centuries, implying thereby that the application of the two terms to current tendencies can only be done in an analogous manner, and not directly:

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“3. Pope Francis, in his ordinary magisterium, often has made reference to the two tendencies described above, that resemble certain aspects of two ancient heresies, Pelagianism and Gnosticism. A new form of Pelagianism is spreading in our days, one in which the individual, understood to be radically autonomous, presumes to save oneself, without recognizing that, at the deepest level of being, he or she derives from God and from others.

According to this way of thinking, salvation depends on the strength of the individual or on purely human structures, which are incapable of welcoming the newness of the Spirit of God.

On the other hand, a new form of Gnosticism puts forward a model of salvation that is merely interior, closed off in its own subjectivism. In this model, salvation consists in elevating oneself with the intellect beyond “the flesh of Jesus towards the mysteries of the unknown divinity”.

It thus presumes to liberate the human person from the body and from the material universe, in which traces of the provident hand of the Creator are no longer found, but only a reality deprived of meaning, foreign to the fundamental identity of the person, and easily manipulated by the interests of man.

Clearly, the comparison with the Pelagian and Gnostic heresies intends only to recall general common features, without entering into judgments on the exact nature of the ancient errors. In fact, there is a great difference between modern, secularized society and the social context of early Christianity, in which these two heresies were born.

However, insofar as Gnosticism and Pelagianism represent perennial dangers for misunderstanding the biblical faith, it is possible to find similarities between the ancient heresies and the modern tendencies just described.” (No. 3)

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What else can this mean? It is obvious that the link between the two contemporary tendencies so decried by this pope and the old heresies is extremely tenuous – and that therefore, the application of the terms Gnosticism and Pelagianism to current tendencies is significantly problematic.

It would seem that the modern terms ‘spiritualism’ and ‘individualism’ are more appropriate, but using these terms would minimize the gravity the pope wishes to attribute to these tendencies by naming them after the ancient heresies.

In G&E, the pope treats these issues in a completely different way. He refers to Placuit Deo only in Note 33 to say that “they present the doctrinal bases for understanding Christian salvation in terms of the neo-Gnostic and neo-Pelagian trends today”. Yet it is interesting to note that the statement in G&E to which Note 33 applies (“It expresses an anthropocentric immanentism in the guise of Catholic truth”) is not at all found in Placuit Deo.

The treatment of Gnosticism and Pelagianism in G&E is far more substantial than what one finds in Placuit Deo. It is also a more colloquial presentation – in the style to which this pope has accustomed us, characterized by cutting and colorful expressions – but replete with numerous biblical, patristic and ecclesiastic references (Note particularly the description of Pelagianism in Paragprahs 49-56). The pope presents Gnosticism and Pelagianism as the ‘enemies of holiness’ (which is the title of the chapter); as ‘falfisifications of holiness’, ‘deceptive propositions’, ‘forms of doctrinal or disciplinary security’ (No. 35); ‘deviations’ (No. 62); ‘drift’ (No. 33); without failing to refer to them ‘heresies’ (Nos. 35 and 47).

Prof. Claudio Pierantoni, in an interview with National Catholic Register, underscores that the gnostics and pelagians described by the pope in G&E do not have the characteristics of the ancient gnostics and pelagians, but those of their theological adversaries:

---

[Pope Francis, being the object of reasonable accusations that he supports situational ethics, and that he has refused to answer the DUBIA about AL and other questions and observations having to do with his many controversial statements – is now making the ridiculous accusation that Catholics who have such questions are for whatever obscure reasons, also ‘gnostics’. It means that he considers them not only heretics but ‘adherents of one of the worst ideologies”.

---

According to Pierantoni, G&E, in effect, is a sort of counter-attack by the Pope against his opponents. If the document is read in the context of the many controversies in the Church today, especially those over AL and situational ethics, one has the strong impression that many passages in G&E are intended expressly as a severe reproach to [condemnation of!] all those persons (cardinals, bishops, priests, theologians, scholars, Catholic bloggers) who oppose the Bergoglian agenda of giving Communion to remarried divorcees and Protestants, of permitting contraception in certain cases, of merely token opposition or suspicious silence in the face of Italian legislative initiatives against the family and against life (in favor of abortion, euthanasia, birth control, and same-sex ‘marriage’).

I do not know if Prof. Pierantoni is right. But I say that the mere fact that a respectable Catholic theologian could even raise such a suspicion is not a good sign. Especially because it means that the children – some of them, at least – have lost trust in the father (the pope), but also because if this is so, then it is because the father himself, one way or another, caused this situation, or at the very least, created the opportunity for the situation to arise.

In any case, he who ought to be the father of all, above and beyond any parties to controversies within the Church, has become an active partisan himself, battling against some of his children. It will be said: There have always been controversies in the Church, and popes have always fought against heresies. That is true.

But the present situation is different. In the course of centuries, the Church has always condemned doctrines – but now, the impression is that the fight is against persons, specifically not against the enemies of the Church, but against those Catholics who profess to be and are acting as sons of the Church.

Let me take just two examples from G&E – one about ‘gnostics’ and one on ‘the new pelagians’:

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"I am not referring to a rationalism inimical to Christian faith. It can be present within the Church, both among the laity in parishes and teachers of philosophy and theology in centres of formation… They absolutize their own theories and force others to submit to their way of thinking.” (No. 39)
“It can affect groups, movements and communities, and it explains why so often they begin with an intense life in the Spirit, only to end up fossilized… or corrupt.” (No. 58)

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He is not condemning any doctrine here but is judging persons. Sincerely, I do not understand this verbal hounding against those who, until otherwise proven, are sons of the Church – perhaps he thinks they are errant – but towards whom, precisely, the pope ought to show patience and charity.

It will be said: even Jesus was not gentle with the scribes and the pharisees. But Jesus could do this, being someone who "knew them all, and did not need anyone to testify about human nature. He himself understood it well” (Jn 2,24-25). It may well be that my idea of the papacy is now outdated - I do not think that a pope should engage in polemics with his own ‘children’. He should be above that.

Without a doubt, I would prefer the Bergoglio who, as pope and Jesuit, speaks of magnanimity as he does in G&E No. 169, or in his 2013 interview with La Civilta Cattolica [Actually, the ff passage cited by Fr Scalese came in the pope’s address to students of Jesuit schools in Italy and Albania in June 2013, months before the Civilta interview]:

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I was always struck by a maxim that describes St. Ignatius’s vision: Non coerceri maximo contineri minimo, divinum est - Not to be confined by the greatest, yet to be contained within the smallest, is divine. What does being magnanimous mean? It means having a great heart, having greatness of mind; it means having great ideals, the wish to do great things to respond to what God asks of us. Hence also, for this very reason, to do well the routine things of every day and all the daily actions, tasks, meetings with people; doing the little everyday things with a great heart open to God and to others. It is to appreciate the small things within the great horizon, that of the Kingdom of God.

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The great Winston Churchill had an aphorism that encompasses the exercise of magnanimity: "In war, resolution. In defeat, defiance. In victory, magnanimity. In peace, good will".

And from my erudite and ever-readable former pastor (when he was the parish priest at the Church of Our Savior on lower Park Avenue,
which was my initial 'refuge' for the TLM), a brief commentary that amazingly brings together many recent developments...

Fr. Rutler’s Weekly Column

May 6, 2018

The exotic concept of spontaneous generation was taken seriously by astute thinkers for a long time before the invention of microbiology. Of course, they knew about the proximate process of birth, but the biological source of life itself exercised such minds as Anaximander six hundred years B.C. and Saint Augustine, Shakespeare, and the philosopher of fishing Izaak Walton, and was at least a puzzle to Darwin.

Spontaneous generation was the theory that living organisms could arise from inanimate matter, like fleas born from dust, or mice from salt, and bees from animal blood and, in the speculation of Aristotle, scallops coming out of sand.

I came across an unintentionally amusing comment from the 1920 proceedings of the American Philological Society published by the Johns Hopkins University Press: “Since insects are so small, it is not surprising that the sex history of some of them totally eluded the observation of the ancients.”

The advent of micro-imagery photography of infants in the womb destroyed eugenic propaganda that this is not a human life. Those who deny that are on the level of those who continued to insist on spontaneous generation after the Catholic genius Louis Pasteur disproved it in 1859.

Cold people who are not only credulous but cruel, admit that the unborn child is human, but say “So what?” At the recent White House Correspondents’ dinner, an astonishingly vulgar comedienne joked about abortion to the laughter of pseudo-sophisticates in evening dress. But even she slipped and used the word “baby.” [!]

Christ used the image of the vine to explain that all life is contingent, not spontaneously generated, but dependent on other lives. “A branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine.” Likewise, those drinking champagne at the fancy dress dinner are related to every fragile life in the womb by a common humanity. To mock that is to de-humanize the self.

On the recent feast of Saint George, there was born in England, whose patron he is, Louis, a prince of the royal house. There were celebratory church bells from Westminster Abbey and a salute of cannons. Rightly so, for the birth of every baby is a cause for rejoicing.

That same day another baby, one with a [supposed but never investigated] neurological infirmity , was deprived of oxygen support by judicial decree and against the will of his parents, who brought him into the world by pro-creation, as stewards of the Creator and not by spontaneous generation. This was in defiance of an effort by Pope Francis to rescue him by military helicopter. As sons by adoption, little Louis and little Alfie are princes of the Heavenly King, not by spontaneous generation, but by divine will.

Pope Leo XIII declared in Rerum Novarum: “The contention that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error.”

An earlier post last week on his blog at National Catholic Register:

The saints slay the dragons
and adore the Lamb
If much is not known about the saints, they know us.
by Fr. George Rutler

April 29, 2018

It occurred to me this past week, celebrating Saint George the Martyr (or “Mega-Martyr” as he is known among the effervescent Byzantines), that friendship with a patron saint, on one’s name day day — 'onomastico' in Italian — is a practice that needs revival.

There are friends and acquaintances, but it is a special privilege to have a heavenly friend as a companion and encourager. It is helpful, but not necessary, to know much about what they did when they were alive here.

In the case of George, little is known, and when the unknown bits are embellished with fanciful legends such as stabbing dragons, they can seem remote. But think of an athlete, who has a native talent for some sport, and how a coach can protect and develop it. In that sense, albeit in a strained analogy, the patron saint is available to help.

There are those called Fundamentalists who object to the whole economy of saintly intercessions. The suffix “-ist” can distort a good thing. An artist well serves art, as a pianist is why there are pianos, but race and sex and things spiritual are not the same as a racist or sexist or spiritualist.

Fundamentals in religion are the cornerstone of Faith, but a Fundamentalist misses the fundamental point of asking saints to pray for us, as if that compromised Christ as the sole mediator between man and God. That uniqueness is the essence of all the Church’s prayers offered “through Christ our Lord.”

The faithful certainly can pray directly to Jesus, but the Lord also wants us to do so not as a solo exercise but as part of his whole Church. He ordered us to pray for others (Matthew 5:44). Saint James said that “the prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effect,” which is why Saint Paul urged "that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all men, for kings and all who are in high position, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way” (1 Timothy 2:1-2).

The saints in heaven are not remote from those who have been baptized, even if our chapels and churches and homes seem far different from the golden environment of the eternal realms, where they “fall down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and with golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints” (Revelation 5:8).

Meanwhile, if much is not known about the saints, they know us. In the case of Saint George, I expect he wants us to know that dragons are real, in the form of the cruelties and vices that afflict mankind, and that the saints can help us to slay the passion and pride of those dragons through the power of the King of Saints: “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace” (John 16:33).

In fact, the Gospel for the Sixth Sunday after Easter today in the Extraordinary Form is a passage from John 16, verses 23-30 that immediately precedes the verse cited by Fr. Rutler, in which Jesus says that we can ask the Father directly anything in his name:

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23... Amen, amen, I say to you, whatever you ask the Father in my name he will give you.
24 Until now you have not asked anything in my name; ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete...
26 On that day you will ask in my name, and I do not tell you that I will ask the Father for you.
27 For the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have come to believe that I came from God.

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[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 06/05/2018 19:24]

St. Pius V and the Battle of Lepanto.

Sermon for the Feast
of St. Pius V, the Great Reformer
by Fr. Richard Cipolla
Preached at the Lepanto Youth Rally
Waterbury, Connecticut
5 May, 2018
Posted on


There is a church in Rome not too far from the train station, Termini. Its exterior looks like many churches in Rome, white marble, baroque style. The fame of this church is not because of its rather over the top late baroque interior that leaves nothing to the imagination.

It is famous because of the statue in one of its side chapels of St Teresa of Avila sculpted by the amazing baroque sculptor, Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The title of the sculpture is St Teresa in Ecstasy, a mind-blowing piece of reality sculpted in marble that catches the moment in which St Teresa is seized by the love of God and pierced by the arrow of the infinite love of God. Once you see this amazing work you never forget it.

But what interests us here on this particular day is the painting above the altar rail in this church. The church is called Santa Maria della Vittoria, Our Lady of Victory. The painting depicts the battle of Lepanto. This youth conference is called Lepanto.

I suspect that many of you hear have never heard of the battle of Lepanto. You have not heard of it for two reasons: you know generation knows little history, especially of the West, and you are mostly products of a 1970s vapid Catholicism that in its own way denies the central role of history in the Catholic faith.

The youth rallies of post-Vatican II Catholicism are either pale imitations of Protestant “pump them full of Jesus” emotionalism or the product of a New Church, a Church lacking any real connection to the history of the Church of 2000 years and wedded to an a-historical and sentimental and deliberate forgetfulness of the essence of the Catholic faith.

But back to Lepanto. The Ottoman Turks, the inheritors of a great Muslim empire, were, like their founder, Mohammed, conquerors - conquerors in the name of Allah. And in the latter part of the 16th century they were preparing for the final assault on the Christian West. They had amassed a huge navy and were preparing to advance to a point where they would be able to conquer Rome herself. And so they gathered an immense fleet and were sailing westward to conquer the West once and for all.

There was a Pope in Rome at this very time, whose feast day we celebrate today, who played a central role in the near miraculous defeat of the Ottoman fleet off the coast of Greece in the Ionian sea, a place called Lepanto.

This Pope became a Dominican at an early age. This Pope took his faith seriously. He walked the talk. The Council of Trent was called in the mid-16th century not only to counter the Protestant Revolt called the Reformation. It was to address the serious corruption in the Church especially among the clergy.

He took seriously his vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and lived a life that mirrored that of St Dominic. His reformist zeal made him unpopular with many contemporaries, but he was called to Rome and was eventually made a Cardinal by Pope Pius IV and named inquisitor general for the whole Church. His office was to combat heresy in the Church.

As the inquisitor general, the man who was to become Pius V, whose birth name, by the way, was Antonio Ghislieri, defended the Archbishop of Toledo, who had been suspected of heresy by the Spanish Inquisition. This honest defense of a man wrongly accused earned him the rebuke of the Pope. But he soldiered on and with unflinching zeal carried out his office in Rome while a bishop in Piedmont in Italy. He fought vigorously for the reform of the clergy and for the reform of the governance of the Church.

And he showed no favorites. When the Pope wished to admit Ferdinand de’Medici, then only thirteen years old, into the Sacred College of Cardinals, he opposed the Pope openly. And for this the Pope banished him from Rome and took away his authority as inquisitor.

He had not even got back to his diocese, when Paul IV died, and with the support of St Charles Borromeo, he was elected pope and took the name Pius V. He immediately set about to reform the clergy and to enforce the canons and decrees of the Council of Trent. In this he was only partially successful. The clergy have always been resistant to real reform. This pope saw clearly the disaster that ensued from the Protestant reformation.

He opposed vigorously the Protestant Huguenots in France and issued the bull of excommunication against Queen Elizabeth, who had declared herself head of the Church in England. Pius V saw what was at stake: the truth and the unity of the Church, and he acted with a clarity unencumbered by a false ecumenism that denies truth itself in the name of openness and liberality.

It was Pius V who understood the tremendous importance of resisting the aggression of the Turks. He understood that the battle being fought was spiritual, and that the stakes were the very existence of the Christian West. So to combat this aggression by the Turks, Pius V formed what was known as The Holy League, consisting of most of Europe except for France.

And so under the command of Don Juan of Austria, this somewhat rag-tag fleet sailed to meet the Turks in battle. The ships of the Holy League were severely outnumbered by the Sultan’s fleet. The Pope ordered Rosary processions in the streets of Roman to pray for the success of the Holy League. And against all odds, the Holy League destroyed the Sultan’s fleet. It is said that the Pope during prayer one day knew that the Christians had won the battle against great odds and that was the fact.

It was not the end of the Ottoman attempts to conquer Europe, but the battle of Lepanto ended the real threat that Christian Europe would be subjects of the Muslim Ottoman empire. And in thanksgiving for the successful outcome of the battle of Lepanto Pius V instituted the feast of our Lady of Victories, under whose banner and intercession that victory was achieved. That feast eventually became know as our Lady of the Rosary.

Too much history, you say. I thought this was a sermon about Christian faith. Yes, but the Christian faith cannot be separated from history, for that is how God acts. He acts through human history, and your generation so often is clueless about history, especially church history. And that is why so many of those in power in the Church have been able to invent a new Church that came into being after the Second Vatican Council, a Church with no expressed continuity with the Church of Jesus Christ in the time and space of two thousand years.

You are the product of a terrible fracture in the history of the Church, where those in power have assumed Jesus’s words, “See, I make all things new”, have taken these words for themselves to declare, frighteningly similar to the Protestant reformers of the 16th century, that we now live in a “new” Church, a Church unencumbered with the noxious accumulation of the past, that encumbrance of Tradition that kept us in bondage: and now we are truly free.

And the sign of that freedom, that false freedom, is the terrible break, the terrible discontinuity that was inflicted on the Church by the despotic imposition of the Novus Ordo Mass and the suppression of the Traditional Roman Rite of the Mass that was and is the living memory of the Church and the living remembering of the Sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross to the Father: the act of redemption.

It was Pius V who standardized the Holy Mass by promulgating the 1570 edition of the Roman Missal and who made this Missal mandatory throughout the Latin rite of the Catholic Church, for he understood so deeply that this Mass, that had organically developed for 1500 years, is the sacred memory of the Church, is the bearer of the Apostolic Tradition, and is central to the very life of the Church founded by Jesus Christ.

And the good news is that, thanks to Pope Benedict XVI, in an act of great courage, gave this Mass back to the Church as one of the forms of the Roman Rite. And this is the Mass that we celebrate here today, in all of its power and beauty, in all of its authenticity. This is the Mass that is ever ancient, ever new, the Mass that is clearly the re-presentation of Jesus’s offering of himself to the Father on the Cross, this, the unbloody Sacrifice that make forgiveness of sins possible and eternal life a real hope for you and me.

From this point on, I as the priest will vanish, I will enter the holy of holies for you and with you to offer the Supreme Sacrifice. This is no Sunday School lesson, this is no didactic school lesson to learn about God. This is worship, worship in Spirit and Truth. And this all in a language that is no longer spoken but yet is the language of the Church, a language that transcends all language barriers in this world and therefore makes worship in spirit and in truth possible in a world that is obsessed with words and deaf to meaning.

It is your generation that will bring about the true renewal of the Church by your acceptance of your role in the battle that must be fought, the battle this is being fought. Lepanto is in the past and yet a part of the glorious history of the Church. And it makes no difference whether you fight the battle as a priest or religious or married man or woman.

The battle being fought now is for the very soul of the Church: whether the Catholic Church will succumb to the temptation to morph into a form of Protestantism that denies the intractable fact of the person of Jesus Christ as THE way, THE truth and THE life, and in so doing embraces a faith that is both sentimental and cynical, a false faith that denies the terrible Difficulty, the holy Difficulty, the joyful Difficulty of the person of Jesus Christ and his Cross, that intractable Difficulty that alone can save.

Martin Mosebach, the German novelist, recently said this: “Every Mass celebrated in the traditional spirit is immeasurably more important than every word of every pope.” For here words ultimately do not matter and become just pointers to that intersection of earth and heaven that takes place here on this altar, here in this place.

We ask the intercession of Saint Pius V that he pray that each of will have the strength and faith to do battle with those who would have us turn away from the Tradition of the Apostles and that we will do this with great joy, that joy that can come only from the deepest encounter with our Lord and Savior.

There are those in high places who would label us as rigid traditionalists, closed off from the love of God. When I look at you who come to worship God in this Mass that is the Tradition of the Church, I see no rigidity, I see no hankering after the good old days, I see no fear of the future: I see young men and women who have discovered the Pearl of Great Price and whose hearts burst with joy because of that discovery.

You and I are the antidote to the eminence grise of the old men who tried and are still trying in Rome and in other places of ecclesiastical power to impose the tired silliness of the 1960s on the whole Church with such disastrous results for the Church.

May the intercession of St. Pius V give us the strength and the joy to carry out our task, a task just as important as the battle of Lepanto.

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

I realize this is a digression, but it is too good an opportunity to pass up to say something more of Bernini's sculpture of St. Teresa. As someone who has been
countless times at Rome's main Termini station over a 35-year period of yearly visits to Italy and even living there for a couple of years - to catch a train to
somewhere in Italy or other parts of Europe - and having Teresa of Avila as my name saint, I always took every chance I could to go to Santa Maria della Vittoria
and contemplate Bernini's stupendous sculpture, the same way I never missed a chance to contemplate Michelangelo's Pieta at St. Peter's Basilica. IMHO, these are
the two most significant religious sculptures of all time. They leave me with my whole being open wide to God and his grace, even as I marvel that human genius
could approximate a divine state so masterfully.


Bernini depicts an episode in the The Life of Teresa de Jesus, better known as Teresa of Avila, founder of the Discalced Carmelites,
in which she undergoes a profound and ecstatic religious experience at the hands of an angel who disembowels her with a gold-
tipped spear. She finds the pain so excruciating that it is glorious, and it causes her to surrender herself wholly to God.
She describes the episode in her Autobiography:

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“I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it... The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.” (Chapter 29, Part 17, of Teresa's AUTOBIOGRAPHY) [/DIM

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A commentary on the sculpture and Teresa's account says this:

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The narration is pronouncedly erotic. The angel pierces Teresa with the phallic arrow and repeatedly plunges the point into her heart in a motion resembling copulation. The sensation is both painful and pleasurable and inspires in her a deep attachment to God, of whom the Angel is an agent and a surrogate.

The overtly sexual nature of the passage was not lost on Bernini. In his composition the angel kneels over Teresa’s prone body, her back rearing up slightly. From her expression, we see that she is overwhelmed, but there is no strain in her face. Her complexion is not is not wracked and twisted, as it would if she were undergoing tortuous pain. Her eyes are lightly closed and her mouth is slack and half agape. She is not crying out, but only moaning.

We recognize these as signs of sexual pleasure, and Bernini is positing that these same signs may also be used to represent spiritual rapture. Of course it is an approximation. He manages to convey sexual extravagance with remarkable fidelity, however he falls well short of representing divine encounter. But it is a doomed project to begin with and Bernini is simply doing his best with what he has.

It is impossible to represent the ecstasy described by Saint Teresa of Avila because they have no precedent in shared experience. The episode with the angel was a revelation intended for Teresa and Teresa alone, and cannot be shared with others who have not undergone the same trial.

In her account of the experience, she struggles with the contradiction of the sensation that is not entirely sensate, and concedes finally that her object is ineffable and beyond the knowledge of those whom God has not made knowledgeable of it.

And so this is the dilemma that Bernini audaciously seeks to solve with his masterpiece: make commonly known the singular event, that which was experienced by one blessed individual and which remains obscured from all others. I believe succeeds, but only to a degree. He shows us the road we must take to reach knowledge, but he can only take us so far up the road. He shows us that the ecstasy of Saint Teresa is like sexual ecstasy that we experience in intercourse with a lover, but it is not perfectly analogous. It is an incomplete representation.

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The 'downfall' of Pope Francis’s closest cardinals
by Maike Hickson

May 7, 2018

The decomposition of Pope Francis’ reign continues. In light of what Onepeterfive has shown in the recent past concerning three of Pope Francis’s closest advisers – Cardinals Maradiaga, Errazuriz, and Marx – it might be of interest that now one of the most prominent Swiss newspapers, Der Tages-Anzeiger, joins the discussion with an article entitled “Downfall of the Cardinals”.

The author of the article, Michael Meier, the newspapers’ religion expert, picks up some of these cases that we have recently discussed, and he says that, after the “enthusiastically” welcomed beginning of the pope’s curial reform, “some of his closest papal advisors have come under pressure and threaten to perish in a whirlwind of abuse scandals.”

“Looking back, Francis did not have a good hand in his decisions concerning cardinals,” Meier adds. “In spite of his zero tolerance policy toward pedophilic clergymen, he himself seems to spare his own people according to an old pattern.”

Meier deals with three cardinals, all of whom are members of the Council of Nine Cardinals, who are called to help the pope with his reform: Cardinals George Pell, Francisco Errazuriz, and Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga. [Why did he exclude Marx, who is perhaps the most egregious transgressor of all, since his transgressions are not personal but ecclesial! And of course, in the case of Pell, he will now be tried in Australia, but like Errazuriz and Maradiaga, who have yet to face any charges at all, formal or otherwise, he must be considered innocent until proven guilty]

In the case of Australian Cardinal Pell and his pending trial in Melbourne for having been too lenient toward clerical abusers under his authority and of having himself violated himself one boy, Meier says that, while Pell insists upon his innocence, Pope Francis already knew of these charges when calling Pell into the C9 Council. [But the charges against Pell have long been known, and though not formalized at the time, it was the reason Benedict XVI withdrew his pending nomination to head the Congregation for Bishops back in 2010. On this pope's advisory council, he represents Australia and Oceania, of which region he has been the most eminent prelate for the past two decades, with a sterling record tainted for the first time in 2009 by complaints dating back to three decades earlier from a couple of accusers. Of course, this pope knew about the charges and probably - and rightly - did not think them serious enough to keep him from naming Pell not just to be on his advisory council but to head the new Secretariat for the Economy, positions which are not as vulnerable to sex-abuse accusations as Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops. ]

Meier then touches upon the case of the Chilean Cardinal Francisco Errazuriz who has been accused by three abuse victims of having given the pope false information about responsible clergymen in Chile and of having blocked the juridical prosecution of the abusing priest, Father Fernando Karadima. [These victims have been saying this for years, and had a chance finally to say it to the pope himself when he met with them last week.]

While Pope Francis now has apologized for his initial rebuke of these abuse victims, Meier says “One nevertheless has the impression that the pope sees the problem only in part... Because also with regard to the deceptive practices of yet another cardinal – Oscar Rodiguez Maradiaga – he does not seem to be overly interested in bringing light into the affair.”

Meier points out that the cardinal from Honduras is accused of both financial irregularity – receiving a 35,000 Euros monthly payment from the Catholic University of Tegucigalpa – and of covering up for the financial and moral corruptions of his auxiliary bishop, Juan José Pineda, who even now represents Maradiaga when the latter is traveling [which he is most of the time].

Pineda is even accused of having sexually harassed some seminarians, according to Meier. The journalist recalls that the pope sent an Argentine bishop to investigate the situation in the Diocese of Tegucigalpa, Maradiaga's diocese. “For a long time now, he [the pope] has his report... But why does he not establish sanctions? Because he wishes to spare his friend Maradiaga?” [First of all, why does he not reveal what the report contains - because for all we know, his investigator may have reported to him that there was 'no there there', and if so, what would be the basis for sanctions? Of course, if the report had been exculpatory of Maradiaga, there is no reason why the pope should not have revealed it right away after he got the report. His silence over the report raises suspicions that there may have been, after all, 'some there there'.

Maradiaga, who is currently in the U.S. for the treatment of his prostate cancer, is “being represented currently by Pineda himself.”

In conclusion, Meier wonders whether “all these fallible cardinals are damaging the curial reform? And the credibility of Pope Francis?” He also asks whether the pope’s choice of cardinals more in the sense of a globalization “pays off.”

“Are some Third-World-Cardinals corruptible? With these questions, one looks forward to the upcoming new appointments to the cardinalate in the middle of May.” [Meier poses an unfair question. Corruptible cardinals are not limited to the Third World!]

The Swiss journalist ends his critical account of Pope Francis’s personnel policy with the comment: “With regard to his choice of personnel and cardinals, one cannot get rid of the impression that this pope acts more according to his gut and after too little reflection.”

I have been remiss in checking out Maureen Mullarkey's blog posts, but she had this recent commentary on the Alfie Evans case in which she zeroes in on the crucial issues brought to light during
the last days of his brief life.

Alfie Evans & the lethal sympathy
of contemporary bioethics

April 30, 2018

Alfie Evans is dead. Deemed unfit to live, the child was sentenced to death by dehydration and suffocation. We shun the term 'life unworthy of life' [a Nazi term used to condemn people to death] but embrace its content. We mask the odor of it with smiling phrases like “end of life care,” cruel details dismissed in the “best interest” of the patient sacrificed to force of law. The act of killing is rephrased in the argot of compassion.

Language loosens constraint from the annihilation of life judged undeserving of the means to sustain it. With that language comes a sea-change in moral discernment. Our experts — lawyers, policy makers, opinion shapers, hospital administrators, doctors as well —have learned their phrases from the relatively new discipline of bioethics. It is the mental and moral vocabulary of bioethicists that provided the rationalizations at work in the sorrowful odyssey of Alfie Evans.

The lethal sympathy of bioethical theorizing has insinuated itself even into the conscience of clergy. British bishops, as a body, assented to those rationalizations.
- They wrung their hands but did not question the law’s refusal to permit Alfie’s parents to take their son out of the country. Not a single bishop demurred.
- While the child defied his sentence by breathing without life support, the bishops stayed safe and silent in their cathedrals. - Worse, they challenged Bambino Gesu hospital to justify its offer to care for Alfie on medical grounds — as if clinical opinion trumped the morality their priesthood was pledged to protect:

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It is for that hospital to present to the British Courts, where crucial decisions in conflicts of opinion have to be taken, the medical reasons for an exception to be made in this case.

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Required reading on the steady diminution of the ancient ideals imbedded in the Hippocratic oath is “Annihilating Terri Schiavo,” a 2006 essay in Commentary by Paul McHugh, M.D., former director of psychiatry at John Hopkins. His early warning has gone unheeded:

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Contemporary bioethics has become a natural ally of the culture of death, but the culture of death itself is a perennial human temptation; for onlookers in particular, it offers a reassuring answer . . . to otherwise excruciating dilemmas, and it can be rationalized every which way till Sunday. . . . The more this culture continues to influence our thinking, the deeper are likely to become the divisions within our society and within our families, the more hardened our hatreds, and the more manifold our fears.

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Looking ahead, he concluded: “More of us will die prematurely; some of us will even be persuaded that we want to.”

[McHugh’s essay is one of others on the limits of psychiatry collected in The Mind Has Mountains (2006). The book is as pertinent today as when it was written.]


At the Deathbed, Edvard Munch (1898)

Simon Lancaster, writing in The Spectator, UK, spotlighted the term vegetative state. This was the wording at the core of Alfie Evans’ state-mandated extinction:

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There were two words that stood out in Mr Justice Hayden’s judgment: the idea that Alfie is in a ‘semi-vegetative state’. These words stood out for the simple reason that Mr Justice Hayden intended them to. He put them in bold and in italics, one of only two occasions he chose to in the 12,000-word judgment. He wanted the words to grab our attention and focus our minds, forcing the other words around them to blur.

So let’s do what he wants. Let’s focus on those words. What exactly does it mean to say someone is in a ‘semi-vegetative state’? Does this term have any scientific validity? Well, a search through the Lancet produces a round number of results – zero. And if you Google the term ‘semi-vegetative state’, most references are about the Alfie Evans case.

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Vegetative state is a purposeful misnomer that blunts our recognition of the humanity of a living person. Lancaster quotes a London doctor who rejects the term:

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What is scientific about it? Wherein does an unconscious man resemble a vegetable? Photosynthesis? Roots? Edibility? Science implies precise observation, confirmed by demonstration, leading to logical conclusions. I challenge anyone to demonstrate to me the vegetable attributes of a man.

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The Inheritance, Edvard Munch (ca 1900)

That recent article brought to mind an impassioned essay written some 15-20 years ago by a clinical neurologist on staff in an American teaching hospital. I did not take notes at the time. The name of the doctor, where he practiced, or where his testimony appeared is gone. Only the substance of his experience, and his drive to tell it, has stayed with me, burned into memory.

He told of a single revelatory instant that shattered assumptions implicit in the vocabulary of his profession:

Together with young residents assigned to him, the neurologist was making routine rounds on the neurology floor. On this fateful day he was stunned to find among the patients his revered mentor in the years of his own residency. Here, lying in the ward unnoted, was a prominent neurologist whose research had advanced the field. The man in bed had discovered a particular chemical compound that was critical in the treatment of brain disorders. Now the neurologist himself was concealed within a vegetative state, declared insensate and devoid of cognitive function.

Shocked into a quixotic impulse, and forgetting the presence of observers, the doctor leaned over the man. In a clear voice, he addressed the older clinician by name and asked him a question that penetrated to the core of the inert man’s momentous achievement: “Doctor, what is the pH-value of [the critical compound]?”

Without moving or opening his eyes, the man in the vegetative state responded: “The pH-value is neutral.” It was the correct answer. He never spoke again.

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O the mind, mind has mountain: cliffs of fall,
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

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Postscript: Pope Francis was admirable in arranging to have Alfie transported to Italy. And yet . . . .
- He made no public rebuke to the British-Welsh bishops in their abdication.
- Forceful in declaring the right of persons to emigrate, Francis stated no opposition to the UK courts’ refusal to allow a sick child out of the country.
- Could not the man who stood at the Mexican border to incite support for illegal migration take his own helicopter to Liverpool? Francis puts his physical presence on the line for his own politics.

What a tremendous act of witness it would have been had he stood outside the Alder Hey hospital to testify against the guise Lebensunwertes Leben [the Nazi phrase that means 'life unworthy of life'] wears in our time. [Well, we now know Bergoglio will only go so far in affirming the right to life when it is about contraception, abortion or euthanasia, where he has been extremely militant about asserting it every chance he gets to advocate the abolition of the death penalty. That is why even his interventions in the Alfie Evans case were mostly generic to begin with (on tweets, yet!), then only seemed to become proactive when the Italian government made Alfie an Italian citizen and it became feasible to provide a helicopter to take him to an Italian hospital. Thank the Italian government for the initiative, with Bergoglio merely tagging along as "#me-too".]

I am assuming it was the initiative of the publisher (Cantagalli) - for marketing purposes - to solicit from Pope Francis a Preface for this new compilation of writings by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI on faith and politics - because one cannot imagine a more divergent view and approach to 'faith and politics' than Bergoglio's and Ratzinger's... Nevertheless, I do not think Bergoglio minded doing it at all, in contrast to how Benedict XVI politely but clearly refused to write a preface for the Vatican-published booklet series consisting of commentaries by relatively no-name theologians on the theology of Pope Francis... The Preface, such as it is, must have been written by one of the pope's minor ghost writers - the prose is pedestrian, and it offers no particular insight nor even a good quotable line.

Pope Francis writes Preface for Cantagalli's 2nd volume
of Ratzinger's collected writings on 'faith and politics'

May 7, 2018

Pope Francis has written the preface for the second volume of collected writings by the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, on the theme "faith and politics" collated and published by Cantagalli.

Entitled Liberating freedom. Faith and politics in the third millennium, Pope Francis describes the work as a sort of compass to "understand our present and find a solid orientation for the future."

He elaborates on the main themes touched upon and concludes his preface saying that together with Benedict’s powerful Opera Omnia these writings are also “ a real source of inspiration for political action that, by placing the family, solidarity and equity at the centre of its attention and planning, truly looks to the future with foresight” .

The volume is scheduled to be launched in Rome at the Sala Zuccari of the Italian Senate on May 11, in the presence of Archbishop Georg Gänswein, Prefect of the Papal Household and particular secretary of the Pope Emeritus together with other political and religious representatives.



Please find below the English translation of Pope Francis’s preface:

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The relationship between faith and politics is one of the great themes that has always been the focus of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's attention and runs through his entire intellectual and human journey: his direct experience of Nazi totalitarianism leads him since his early academic years, to reflect on the limits of obedience to the State in favor of the freedom of obedience to God:

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"The State – reads one of the texts - is not the totality of human existence and does not embrace all human hope. Humankind and their hope go beyond the reality of the State and beyond the sphere of political action. This applies not only to a state called Babylon, but to every kind of state. The State is not the totality. This lightens the burden on politicians and paves the way for rational policy. The Roman State was false and anti-Christian precisely because it wanted to be the totum of human possibilities and hopes. Thus demanding what it cannot; thus forging and impoverishing humankind. With his totalitarian lie it becomes demonic and tyrannical".

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Later, also on this basis, alongside St. John Paul II, he elaborated and proposed a Christian vision of human rights capable of questioning on a theoretical and practical level the totalitarian claim of the Marxist State and the atheist ideology on which it was based.

Because the authentic contrast between Marxism and Christianity for Ratzinger is certainly not given by the preferential attention of the Christian for the poor:

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"We must learn - once again, not only at the theoretical level, but in the way we think and act - that alongside the real presence of Jesus in the Church and in the sacrament, there exists that other real presence of Jesus in the little ones, in the trampled of this world, in the last, in whom he wants us to found Him."

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Already in the 1970s, [Gee, how condescending!] Ratzinger writes with a theological depth, which is at the same time immediately accessible, proper to the authentic pastor. And that contrast is not even given, as he emphasized in the mid-eighties, by the lack of a sense of equity and solidarity in the Magisterium of the Church; and, consequently, "in denouncing the scandal of the obvious inequalities between rich and poor - whether it be inequality between rich and poor countries or inequality between social classes within the same national territory that is no longer tolerated".

The profound contrast, Ratzinger notes, is given instead - and even before the Marxist claim to place heaven on earth, man's redemption on earth - by the abysmal difference that exists as to how redemption should happen: "Redemption occurs through liberation from all dependence, or is the only way to liberation, the complete dependence on love, which would then also be true freedom?».

And so, with a leap of thirty years, he accompanies us to the understanding of our present, as a testimony of the unchanged freshness and vitality of his thought. Today, in fact, more than ever, there is the same temptation to refuse any dependence on love that is not a person's love for their ego, for "the I and its desires"; and, consequently, the danger of the "colonization" of consciences by an ideology that denies the basic certainty that humankind exists as male and female to whom the task of the transmission of life is assigned; that ideology that goes to the extent of planning and rationally producing human beings and that - perhaps for some purpose considered "good" - manages to consider logical and legitimate the elimination of what is no longer considered created, donated, conceived and generated but made by ourselves.

These apparent human "rights" that are all oriented towards the self-destruction of humankind - Joseph Ratzinger shows us with strength and effectiveness - have a single common denominator that consists in a single, great denial: the denial of dependence on love, the denial that man and women are creature of God, lovingly made by Him in His image and to which they yearn as the deer longs for fountains of water (Ps 41). When we deny this dependence between creature and creator, this relationship of love, we renounce the true greatness of human being, the bulwark of their freedom and dignity.

Thus the defense of human being against the ideological reductions of power passes today once again by fixing man and woman's obedience to God as the limit of their obedience to the State. To take up this challenge, in the real change of epoch in which we live today, is to defend the family. On the other hand, St. John Paul II had already understood the decisive significance of the matter: rightly called the "Pope of the family", he not by chance stressed that "the future of humanity passes through the family" (Familiaris Consortio, 86). And along these lines I also reiterated that "the good of the family is decisive for the future of the world and of the Church" (Amoris laetitia, 31).

So I am particularly pleased to introduce this second volume of selected texts written by Joseph Ratzinger on "faith and politics". Together with his powerful Opera omnia, they can help all of us not only to understand our present and find a solid orientation for the future, but also be a real source of inspiration for political action that, by placing the family, solidarity and equity at the centre of its attention and planning, truly looks to the future with foresight.

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Sir Anthony Hopkins transforms into Pope Benedict
for a new Netflix movie on Benedict XVI
By Amanda Cashmore
For Mailonline
May 4, 2018

He's the legendary actor who's played a cannibal, a Norse god and a psychic doctor.

And now Anthony Hopkins is taking on another once-in-a-lifetime role - the former leader of the Catholic church, Pope Benedict, for a Netflix movie.

In character as the Supreme Pontiff, Sir Anthony donned white robes and a large gold crucifix around his neck on Thursday. The 80-year-old was pictured getting out of a black Mercedes-Benz, while shooting the scene where Pope Benedict and Pope Francis meet or the first time. [See photo above.]

Hopkins's white locks were styled in the same way as the former leader of the Catholic Church.

The movie will tell the story of Pope Benedict's election in 2005 following the passing of his predecessor John Paul II.

Jonathan Pryce, known for his work in the likes of Game Of Thrones and Pirates of the Caribbean, takes on the role of Pope Francis.

According to Deadline Hollywood, who first reported the venture, the flick will also go on to detail 'his [B16's] subsequent resignation from the papacy.

The project and its stars were announced in September of last year and began shooting in Argentina in November.

The film is being directed by Fernando Meirelles, while the script was written by Anthony McCarten.

The movie's release date is yet to be confirmed.

Felicitations to Cardinal Eijk for this most unexpected intervention, in which he goes straight to the point and does not bother with pro forma courtesies
towards the pope when enunciating what he sees as a clear error on the part of the reigning pope. He gets my vote for the first badge of courage - for being as
straightforward as he is orthodox - earned by a cardinal since the start of this pontificate. He does not frame his conclusion as a DUBIUM, but as a clear
assertion that Bergoglio's shirking from making a decision on inter-communion is a form of 'apostasy' (the term I myself have always favored over 'heresy'
to characterize Bergoglio's anti-Catholic words and actions)... Will there be more like him? And what retribution might he expect from Casa Santa Marta for
his laudable parrhesia?

Pope ought to have given
clarity on inter-communion
Failure to give German bishops proper directives based on the clear doctrine
and practice of the Church, points to a drift from the truth towards apostasy
by Cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk
Archbishop of Utrecht
The Netherlands

May 7, 2018

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The German bishops’ conference voted by a large majority in favor of directives which entail that a Protestant married to a Catholic may receive the Eucharist after meeting a number of conditions:
- he must have carried out an examination of conscience with a priest or with another person with pastoral responsibilities;
- he must have affirmed the faith of the Catholic Church, as well as having wished to put an end to “serious spiritual distress” and to have a “desire to satisfy a longing for the Eucharist.”

Seven members of the German bishops’ conference voted against these directives and sought the opinion of some dicasteries of the Roman Curia. The consequence was that a delegation from the German bishops’ conference spoke in Rome with a delegation from the Roman Curia, including the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The response of the Holy Father, given through the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to the delegation of the German Conference, that the Conference should discuss the drafts again and try to achieve a unanimous result, if possible, is completely incomprehensible. The Church’s doctrine and practice regarding the administration of the Sacrament of the Eucharist to Protestants is perfectly clear. The Code of Canon Law says about this:

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“If the danger of death is present or if, in the judgment of the diocesan bishop or conference of bishops, some other grave necessity urges it, Catholic ministers administer these same sacraments licitly also to other Christians not having full communion with the Catholic Church, who cannot approach a minister of their own community and who seek such on their own accord, provided that they manifest Catholic faith in respect to these sacraments and are properly disposed.” C.I.C./1983, can. 844 § 4 (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) no. 1400).

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This therefore applies only to emergencies, especially where there is a risk of death.

Inter-communion is, in principle, only possible with Orthodox Christians, because the Eastern Churches, although not in full communion with the Catholic Church, have true sacraments and above all, by virtue of their apostolic succession, a valid priesthood and a valid Eucharist (CCC no 1400, C.I.C./1983 can. 844, § 3). Their faith in the priesthood, in the Eucharist, and also in the Sacrament of Penance is equal to that of the Catholic Church.

However, Protestants do not share faith in the priesthood and the Eucharist. Most German Protestants are Lutheran. Lutherans believe in consubstantiation, which implies the conviction that, in addition to the Body or Blood of Christ, bread and wine are also present when someone receives them. If someone receives the bread and wine without believing this, the Body and Blood of Christ are not really present. Outside this moment of receiving them, there remains only the bread and wine, and the body and blood of Christ are not present.

Obviously, the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation differs essentially from the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which implies the faith that what is received under the figures of bread and wine, even if administered to someone who does not believe in transubstantiation and even outside the moment of administration, remains the Body or Blood of Christ and that it is no longer the substances of bread and wine.

Because of these essential differences, communion should not be administered to a Protestant, even if married to a Catholic, because the Protestant does not live in full communion with the Catholic Church and, therefore, does not explicitly share faith in her Eucharist.

The differences between faith in consubstantiation and that of transubstantiation are so great that one must really demand that someone who wishes to receive Communion explicitly and formally enters into full communion with the Catholic Church (except in case of danger of death) and in this way explicitly confirms his acceptance of the faith of the Catholic Church, including the Eucharist.

A private examination of conscience with a priest or with another person with pastoral responsibilities does not give sufficient guarantees that the person involved really accepts the faith of the Church. By accepting it [the Eucharist], the person can, however, do only one thing: enter into full communion with the Catholic Church.

The draft directives of the German bishops' conference suggest there are only a few cases of Protestants, married to Catholics, who would like to receive Communion by making use of these directives. However, experience shows that in practice these numbers will generally increase. Protestants who are married to Catholics and see other Protestants married to Catholics receiving Communion will think they can do the same. And in the end even Protestants unmarried to Catholics will want to receive it. The general experience with this type of adjustment is that the criteria are quickly extended.

Now the Holy Father has informed the delegation of the German episcopal conference that it must discuss again the draft proposals for a pastoral document on, among other things, administering Communion, and try to find unanimity. Unanimity about what?

Assuming that all members of the German bishops’ conference, after having discussed them again, unanimously decide that Communion can be administered to Protestants married to a Catholic (something that will not happen), will this — while being contrary to what the Code of Canon Law and the Catechism of the Catholic Church say in this regard — become the new practice in the Catholic Church in Germany?

The practice of the Catholic Church, based on her faith, is not determined and does not change statistically when a majority of an episcopal conference votes in favor of it, not even if unanimously.

What the Code of Canon Law and the Catechism of the Catholic Church say should have been the response of the Holy Father, who is, as the Successor of Saint Peter “the perpetual and visible principle and foundation of unity of both the bishops and of the faithful” (Lumen Gentium no. 23).
- The Holy Father should have given the delegation of the German episcopal conference clear directives, based on the clear doctrine and practice of the Church.
- He should have also responded on this basis to the Lutheran woman who asked him on November 15, 2015 if she could receive Communion with her Catholic spouse, saying that this is not acceptable - instead of suggesting she could receive Communion on the basis of her being baptized, and in accordance with her conscience.

By failing to create clarity, great confusion is created among the faithful and the unity of the Church is endangered.

This is also the case with cardinals who publicly propose to bless homosexual relationships, something which is diametrically opposed to the doctrine of the Church, founded on Sacred Scripture, that marriage, according to the order of creation, exists only between a man and a woman.

Observing that the German bishops and, above all, the Successor of Peter, fail to maintain and transmit faithfully and in unity the deposit of faith contained in Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture, I cannot help but think of Article 675 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

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“The Church’s ultimate trial
Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the ‘mystery of iniquity’ in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth.”

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+Willem Jacobus Cardinal Eijk
Archbishop of Utrecht, Netherlands
Utrecht, 5 May 2018

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