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


Unexpected page change. See previous page for earlier posts today, 8/13/18.




How the 'Palestinians' were invented
By Robert Spencer

August 11, 2018

Note: This is an exclusive excerpt from Robert Spencer’s new book, The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS. All quotes are sourced in the book.


In 1948, the nascent state of Israel defeated forces from Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen that had been determined to destroy it utterly. The jihad against it continued, but it held firm, defeating Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon again in the Six-Day War in 1967, and Egypt and Syria yet again in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

In winning these victories against enormous odds, Israel won the admiration of the free world, leading to the largest-scale and most audacious application in Islamic history of Muhammad’s dictum “War is deceit.”

In order to destroy the impression of the tiny Jewish state’s facing enormous Muslim Arab foes and prevailing, the Soviet KGB (the Soviet Committee for State Security) developed the fiction of an even smaller people, the “Palestinians,” menaced by a well-oiled and ruthless Israeli war machine.

In A.D. 134, the Romans had expelled the Jews from Judea after the Bar Kokhba revolt and renamed the region Palestine, a name they plucked from the Bible, the name of the Israelites’ ancient enemies, the Philistines. But never had the name Palestinian referred to anything but a region, not to a people or an ethnicity.

In the 1960s, however, the KGB and Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s nephew Yasir Arafat created both these allegedly oppressed people and the instrument of their freedom, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Ion Mihai Pacepa, who had served as acting chief of Cold War–era Communist Romania’s spy service, later revealed that

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“The PLO was dreamt up by the KGB, which had a penchant for ‘liberation’ organizations. There was the National Liberation Army of Bolivia, created by the KGB in 1964 with help from Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara…the KGB also created the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which carried out numerous bombing attacks…. In 1964 the first PLO Council, consisting of 422 Palestinian representatives handpicked by the KGB, approved the Palestinian National Charter — a document that had been drafted in Moscow. The Palestinian National Covenant and the Palestinian Constitution were also born in Moscow, with the help of Ahmed Shuqairy, a KGB influence agent who became the first PLO chairman.”

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For Arafat to head up the PLO, he had to be a Palestinian. Pacepa explained that

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“he was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-operations school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat’s birth in Cairo, and replaced them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.”

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Arafat may have been a Marxist, at least at first, but he and his Soviet handlers made copious use of Islamic anti-Semitism. KGB chief Yuri Andropov noted that

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“the Islamic world was a waiting Petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep…. We had only to keep repeating our themes — that the United States and Israel were ‘fascist, imperial-Zionist countries’ bankrolled by rich Jews. Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidels’ occupation of its territory, and it would be highly receptive to our characterization of the U.S. Congress as a rapacious Zionist body aiming to turn the world into a Jewish fiefdom.”

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PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein explained the strategy more fully in a 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw:

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The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism.

For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.

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Once the people had been created, their desire for peace could be easily fabricated as well. Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu tutored Arafat in how to play the West like a fiddle. Pacepa recounted:

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“In March 1978, I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest for final instructions on how to behave in Washington. ‘You simply have to keep on pretending that you’ll break with terrorism and that you’ll recognize Israel — over, and over, and over,’ Ceausescu told him [Arafat]…. Ceausescu was euphoric over the prospect that both Arafat and he might be able to snag a Nobel Peace Prize with their fake displays of the olive branch…. Ceausescu failed to get his Nobel Peace Prize.

But in 1994 Arafat got his — all because he continued to play the role we had given him to perfection. He had transformed his terrorist PLO into a government-in-exile (the Palestinian Authority), always pretending to call a halt to Palestinian terrorism while letting it continue unabated. Two years after signing the Oslo Accords, the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists had risen by 73 percent.”

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This strategy continued to work beautifully, through U.S.-brokered “peace process” after “peace process,” from the 1978 Camp David Accords into the presidency of Barack Obama and beyond, with no end in sight.

Western authorities never seem to ponder why so many attempts to achieve a negotiated peace between Israel and the “Palestinians,” whose historical existence everyone by now takes for granted, have all failed. The answer, of course, lies in the Islamic doctrine of jihad. “Drive them out from where they drove you out” is a command that contains no mitigation and accepts none.


A few geographical and historical facts to clarify Spencer's necessarily tendentious presentation above:

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Palestine is a geographic region in Western Asia, usually considered to include the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Israel, and in some definitions, some parts of western Jordan. The name was used by ancient Greek writers, and it was later used for the Roman province Syria Palaestina [what it was in the time of Jesus]. The region comprises most of the territory claimed for the biblical regions known as the Land of Israel (Hebrew:Eretz-Yisra'el), the Holy Land or Promised Land.

Situated at a strategic location between Egypt, Syria and Arabia, and the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, the region has a long and tumultuous history as a crossroads for religion, culture, commerce, and politics. The region has been controlled by numerous peoples, including Ancient Egyptians, Canaanites, Israelites and Judeans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Achaemenids, ancient Greeks, the Jewish Hasmonean Kingdom, Romans, Parthians, Sasanians, Byzantines, the Arab Rashidun, Umayyad, Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates, Crusaders, Ayyubids, Mamluks, Mongols, Ottomans, the British, modern Israelis, Jordanians, Egyptians, modern Israelis and 'Palestinians'.

The boundaries of the region have changed throughout history. Today, the region comprises the State of Israel and the Palestinian territories in which the State of Palestine was declared.

The Ottoman Empire conquered Palestine in 1516 and held sway for the next four centuries except for a brief period in the 1830s when Egypt conquered it. But the British intervened in 1840 to return the region to the Ottomans in exchange for certain concessions. This enabled the Ottomans to consolidate and centralize their rule over Palestine. But from 1880 onward, large-scale Jewish immigration began, almost entirely from Europe, based on an explicitly Zionist ideology, with a consequent revival of the Hebrew language and culture. The British government publicly supported Zionism during World War I with the Balfour declaration of 1917 announcing support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, where the Jewish population only comprised around 3–5% of the total. This was fiercely contested by the largely Arab population of the region.

During World War I, the British fought the Ottomans, who were supported by the Germans, in the Middle Eastern theater. In that time, the British came to occupy the territory that is now Israel and Jordan. With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, its territories in the Middle East were partitioned between the victorious European powers - France won the mandate for Syria and Lebanon, while the British Empire won the mandates for Mesopotamia and Palestine. The British were formally awarded the mandate to govern the region in 1922. The non-Jewish Palestinians revolted in 1920, 1929, and 1936. [In other words, native non-Jewish residents of the region known as Palestine were always referred to indiscriminately since the 19th century as Palestinians.]

The Republic of Turkey came into existence in 1923 after the Turkish War of Independence ended the Ottoman Empire. The European mandates ended with the formation of the Kingdom of Iraq in 1932, the Lebanese Republic in 1943, the State of Israel in 1948, and the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan and Syrian Arab Republic in 1946.

In 1947, following World War II and the Holocaust, the British Government announced its desire to terminate the Mandate, and the United Nations General Assembly adopted in November 1947 a Resolution 181(II) recommending partition into an Arab state, a Jewish state and a Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem. The Jewish leadership accepted the proposal, but the Arab Higher Committee rejected it; a civil war began immediately after the Resolution's adoption. The State of Israel was declared in May 1948.

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More on that festering canker that Bergoglio has just contaminated the Catechism with...

The pope's new Catechism text
on the death penalty will damage the Church
Yes, the revised wording is unclear. But it certainly seems
to imply that previous popes led the faithful into grave error
by Edward Feser

August 8, 2018

Pope Francis has changed the Catechism so that it now declares the death penalty to be flatly “inadmissible”. Whether he is teaching that capital punishment is always and intrinsically evil is a matter of controversy, but taken at face value, the wording of the revision at least seems to say that.

And while it is important to understand the exact magisterial weight of the new text, we also have to deal with the obvious reading: that, as the BBC put it, “Pope Francis has changed the teachings of the Catholic faith to officially oppose the death penalty in all circumstances.”

Along with many other commentators, I have noted that this apparent rupture with Scripture and tradition damages the credibility of the Church and the papacy. A close reading of the new text only increases one’s concern.

The 1990 CDF document Donum Veritatis acknowledges that it is possible for magisterial documents to exhibit “deficiencies,” and that Catholic theologians have the right, and sometimes even the duty, to express respectful criticism of such deficiencies. There appear to be at least three major deficiencies in the revision to the Catechism:

The new wording appears logically to imply that Scripture, the Church’s previous catechisms, and previous popes including St John Paul II all led the faithful into grave moral error.

Here the most problematic element of the revision is its assertion that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person”.

There are a great many passages in scripture that not only allow, but in some cases even command, the infliction of capital punishment. To take just two examples, Exodus 21:12 states that “whoever strikes a man so that he dies shall be put to death”, and Leviticus 24:17 states that “he who kills a man shall be put to death.”

The logical implication of the new teaching seems to be that Scripture therefore commanded nothing less than “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” Yet the Church also teaches that Scripture is divinely inspired and cannot teach moral error. For example, the First Vatican Council declared that the Scriptures “contain revelation without error” and Pope Leo XIII taught that “it is absolutely wrong and forbidden… to admit that the sacred writer has erred.”

These assertions cannot possibly be reconciled. Either
(a) capital punishment is not, after all, an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person; or
(b) being an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person does not, after all, suffice to make an action inadmissible; or
(c) Scripture taught moral error. Something’s got to give.

Notice, though, that we can’t take option (c) without entirely undermining Catholic moral theology, not to mention contradicting ecumenical councils and consistent papal teaching. And option (b) doesn’t really make sense. If a certain action against a person is at least in some cases admissible, then the person is not inviolable in that respect. Hence the only option possible is (a) – in which case the revision to the Catechism is in error.

Catholic critics of capital punishment sometimes respond: “What about slavery and divorce? The Church abandoned Old Testament teaching on those matters, so why not on capital punishment?”

But there are two problems with this response. First, the Law of Moses never commands slavery or divorce. It merely tolerates them, and puts conditions on how they may be practiced. By contrast, it does positively command capital punishment in some circumstances. Hence to hold that capital punishment is intrinsically evil is to imply that Scripture not only tolerated, but positively commanded, something that is intrinsically evil.

A second problem with this response is that if the Law of Moses really had positively commanded slavery and divorce, that would only exacerbate the problem, not mitigate it. To defend the revision of the Catechism against the charge that it attributes moral error to Scripture, it will hardly do for the defender to attribute further moral errors to Scripture!

(In addition, what most people think of when they hear the word “slavery” is chattel slavery – the kind we associate with the early history of the United States, which treats some human beings as the property of others in an unqualified sense. The Church never approved that evil practice in the first place, and that is not what Scripture is talking about either. What was in question in the history of Catholic theology were practices like indentured servitude and penal servitude – servitude in payment of a debt or as punishment for a crime, respectively. Catholic capital punishment opponents who allege a parallel with slavery usually ignore these crucial distinctions.)

Then there is the teaching of previous popes. For example, in 1210 Pope Innocent III famously required the Waldensian heretics to affirm the legitimacy of capital punishment as a condition of their reconciliation with the Church. In other words, he taught that the legitimacy of capital punishment is a matter of Catholic orthodoxy. Pope Francis’s revision to the Catechism seems to imply that the heretics were right all along and that Pope Innocent led the faithful into grave moral error.

To take another example, the 1997 version of the Catechism promulgated by Pope St John Paul II acknowledges that “the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty” – though it also holds that “the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity ‘are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.’”

Pope Francis’s revision to the Catechism seems to imply, then, that John Paul II taught that the Church does not exclude what amounts to “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” Indeed, it seems to imply that John Paul II taught that “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” can at least in some rare cases be an “absolute necessity”!

Then there is the Roman Catechism promulgated by Pope St Pius V and used by the Church for centuries, which teaches:

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Another kind of lawful slaying belongs to the civil authorities, to whom is entrusted power of life and death, by the legal and judicious exercise of which they punish the guilty and protect the innocent. The just use of this power, far from involving the crime of murder, is an act of paramount obedience to this Commandment which prohibits murder. The end of the Commandment is the preservation and security of human life.

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Pope Francis’s revision to the current Catechism therefore appears to imply that the Roman Catechism taught that “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” can be “an act of paramount obedience to [the] Commandment which prohibits murder”. In other words, Pope Francis’s teaching seems to imply that Pope St Pius V’s teaching was not only gravely in error, but perverse in the extreme.

Many further examples could easily be given of past magisterial teaching which, if the revision to the Catechism is correct, would have to be judged to have led the faithful into grave moral error. The legitimacy in principle of capital punishment is, after all, the consistent teaching of Scripture, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and the popes, for over two millennia. (Joseph Bessette and I set out the evidence at length in our book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed.)

Now, part of the problem is that, as I have argued elsewhere, the suggestion that the Church has been wrong for two millennia is flatly incompatible with what the Church claims about the reliability of her ordinary Magisterium.

But another problem is that Pope Francis’s revision implies that popes and official catechisms are susceptible of error that is so grave, and so persistent, that it casts serious doubt on all papal and catechetical teaching – including his own. In short, the pope’s revision is essentially self-defeating.

Pope Francis’s revision to the Catechism indicates that capital punishment was traditionally approved for two reasons: the protection of society, and proportional retribution. Let’s focus for now on the second of these.

Traditional Catholic teaching holds that retributive justice is the fundamental purpose (even if not the only purpose) of the criminal justice system. Punishment, the Church has taught, fundamentally involves the infliction on an offender of a penalty proportionate to the gravity of his offence.

Commenting on this rationale, the revised text says:

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Recourse to the death penalty on the part of legitimate authority, following a fair trial, was long considered an appropriate response to the gravity of certain crimes…

Today, however… a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state.

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Furthermore, the letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) that announced the change claims that
- in the teaching of John Paul II, “the death penalty is not presented as a proportionate penalty for the gravity of the crime.” - the change in teaching about the death penalty “takes] into account the new understanding of penal sanctions applied by the modern State, which should be oriented above all to the rehabilitation and social reintegration of the criminal”, and
- that the older teaching reflected “a social context in which the penal sanctions were understood differently.”

In other words, the change to the Catechism seems to reject the traditional teaching on retributive justice, in favour of a “new understanding” that instead emphasises rehabilitation and reintegration.

The significance of such a change cannot be overstated. The traditional teaching has been consistently reaffirmed by the popes: St John Paul II himself did so both in Evangelium Vitae and in the Catechism he promulgated. The latter teaches:

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Legitimate public authority has the right and duty to inflict punishment proportionate to the gravity of the offence. Punishment has the primary aim of redressing the disorder introduced by the offence. When it is willingly accepted by the guilty party, it assumes the value of expiation.

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Fortunately, this passage survives in Pope Francis’s revision to the Catechism – which altered only the subsequent section, n. 2267. However, it is hard to see how to reconcile the new section 2267’s claim that the Church has a “new understanding… of the significance of penal sanctions” with section 2266’s explicit affirmation of the old understanding of the significance of penal sanctions.

Moreover, the CDF letter contains a strange set of assertions. It says that for John Paul II, the death penalty is “not presented as a proportionate penalty for the gravity of the crime”. But then Pope John Paul II did allow for capital punishment at least in rare circumstances.

The CDF letter’s logical implication would seem to be that John Paul II taught that capital punishment could in principle be used even though it is not a proportionate penalty! But obviously, that cannot be what John Paul II thought. (As Joseph Bessette and I show in our book, the late pope did in fact implicitly teach that capital punishment is a proportionate penalty, and merely held that that was not sufficient to justify actually using it in most modern circumstances.)

Furthermore, the notion that the Church’s traditional teaching about the purposes of punishment might be replaced by a “new understanding” is one that Pope Pius XII explicitly rejected. For example, in his “Discourse to the Catholic Jurists of Italy”, published in 1955, Pius said:

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Many, perhaps the majority, of civil jurists reject vindictive punishment… However… the Church in her theory and practice has maintained this double type of penalty (medicinal and vindictive), and… this is more in agreement with what the sources of revelation and traditional doctrine teach regarding the coercive power of legitimate human authority. It is not a sufficient reply to this assertion to say that the aforementioned sources contain only thoughts which correspond to the historic circumstances and to the culture of the time, and that a general and abiding validity cannot therefore be attributed to them.

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So, Pius XII taught that the “vindictive” or retributive function of punishment is rooted in divine revelation and traditional doctrine, and explicitly rejected the suggestion that it merely reflects historical circumstances and lacks abiding relevance – whereas Pope Francis’s revision seems to imply the exact opposite.

The traditional teaching had a good reason for emphasising retribution and proportionate penalties. The reason is that if we don’t think in terms of giving an offender what he deserves, then we are no longer thinking in terms of justice at all.

If all that matters is rehabilitating and reintegrating people, then we might, in theory, inflict extremely mild punishments or no punishment at all even for the most heinous crimes, if we think this is an efficient way to achieve these ends.

And by the same token, we might inflict extreme penalties for minor crimes, or even on innocent people whose behaviour we want to alter. Nothing is ruled out, in principle, if we throw out considerations of giving offenders what they deserve. To be sure, the revision to the Catechism doesn’t explicitly go this far. But it muddies the waters considerably.

The revision rests in part on empirical assertions that are dubious at best.

The revised text of the Catechism justifies a complete abolition of capital punishment in part on the grounds that “more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens.” The CDF letter adds that “the death penalty [is] unnecessary as protection for the life of innocent people.” However, this is in no way a doctrinal assertion. It is merely an empirical claim that is highly controversial at best – and indeed, in some contexts, manifestly false. Moreover, it concerns matters of social science about which the Church has no special expertise.

The first problem here is that though the “effective systems of detention” to which the revised text refers may exist in wealthy Western countries, there are still large regions of the undeveloped world where the most dangerous aggressors cannot be rendered harmless by incarceration. (Think of the unstable political orders in some African and Middle Eastern countries, or Mexican drug lord “El Chapo’s” escapes from prison.)

The CDF statement and the revision to the Catechism are in this respect strangely Eurocentric in their outlook. Are the lives of potential innocent victims of violent crime in Third World countries of less value than those of wealthy Europeans and Americans?

A second problem is that even in First World countries, the most dangerous offenders sometimes remain a threat to the lives of others even when they are incarcerated for life. For example, they sometimes murder other prisoners and prison guards. Also, drug kingpins and others associated with organized crime sometimes order assassinations, from prison, of victims in the outside world.

A third problem is that the CDF letter and revision to the Catechism ignore the issue of the deterrence value of capital punishment. While some social scientists doubt its deterrence value, there are also many social scientists who, on the basis of peer-reviewed empirical studies, are convinced that the death penalty does significantly deter.

The most that the abolitionist can reasonably say is that the matter is controversial. But if capital punishment really does deter some potential murderers, then innocent lives will be lost by abolishing the practice altogether. The CDF letter’s peremptory assertion that “the death penalty [is] unnecessary as protection for the life of innocent people” is therefore simply not supported by the empirical evidence. (See By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed for a detailed treatment of the evidence for deterrence.)

A fourth problem is that the revision to the Catechism ignores the fact that capital punishment gives prosecutors an invaluable negotiating tool. Violent offenders who would otherwise refuse to reveal accomplices or help solve other crimes are sometimes willing to talk if they can be assured that prosecutors will not seek their execution. When the death penalty is taken off the books altogether, this bargaining chip is gone – and once again, innocent people will pay the price.

In any event, churchmen have no special expertise on these matters. And of course, the essential point is not about these empirical issues, but about the authority of the Church’s perennial teaching – which raises a simple question.

How can anyone justify a radical revision to over two millennia of scriptural and papal teaching on the basis of dubious amateur social science?


Feser's co-author makes this argument in the Wall Street Journal...

The pope makes a fatal error
He says the death penalty is ‘inadmissible,’ though he avoids saying
it is intrinsically evil. He doesn’t note it saves lives
By Joseph M. Bessette
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Aug. 7, 2018

When Pope Francis last week declared the death penalty “inadmissible,” politicians pounced. “The death penalty is a stain on our conscience,” tweeted New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who proclaimed that he stood “in solidarity with Pope Francis” in “advancing legislation to remove the death penalty from NY law once and for all.”

But the pope’s declaration, which contradicts two millennia of Catholic teaching, allies the church with a public policy that would undermine justice and cost innocent lives.

Consider this example that the philosopher Edward Feser and I recount in our book, “By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment”: At a professional conference, a criminologist reported that two burglars had broken into his mother’s apartment and tied her up as they searched for valuables. As they were about to leave, one said: “She has seen us and can identify us. Should we kill her?” “No,” answered the other, “we don’t want to risk the death penalty.” They let her live. One can hardly imagine a clearer example of deterrence.

Another example comes from Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California. In the 1960s she served on the California Women’s Parole Board. At one hearing, Mrs. Feinstein asked an armed robber seeking release from prison why she never used a loaded gun. “So I would not panic, kill somebody, and get the death penalty,” she answered. That convinced Mrs. Feinstein that (in her words) “the death penalty in place in California in the ’60s was in fact a deterrent.”

A third example is recounted by law professor Robert Blecker, who had spent years interviewing prisoners. A veteran criminal told Mr. Blecker that the reason he spared the life of a drug dealer in Virginia whom he had tied up and robbed was because the state had the electric chair. In a similar situation in the District of Columbia, which had abolished the death penalty, the criminal had killed his victim. “I just couldn’t tolerate what they had waiting for me in Virginia,” he said.

These examples are powerful illustrations that the death penalty can and does deter some would-be murderers. Like the rest of us, criminals want to live, and, as the these examples show, they will often adjust their behavior accordingly. Without the death penalty, what incentive would a “lifer” have not to kill while in prison or, if he escaped, while on the run?

There is also a deeper kind of deterrence, largely overlooked in discussions of the death penalty, which doesn’t require rational calculation. When society imposes the ultimate punishment for the most heinous murders, it powerfully teaches that murder is a great wrong. Children growing up in such a society internalize this message, with the result that most people wouldn’t even consider killing another human being.

Here the principle of justice, which demands that malefactors receive a punishment proportionate to their offense, and deterrence of this deeper sort meet. If we abolish the death penalty for even the most heinous and coldblooded murderers, we fatally undermine the idea of justice as the cornerstone of our criminal-justice system. Over time justice will be replaced by a therapeutic or technocratic model that treats human beings as cases to be managed and socially engineered rather than as morally responsible persons.

Apparently, Pope Francis has decided that the death penalty doesn’t save lives. He gives no reasons for reaching this conclusion. We would hardly expect Catholic priests, whatever their rank, to be experts in criminal justice. Unless the death penalty is intrinsically evil — and the pope has made no such claim — then its advisability is a matter for citizens and legitimate public authority. This is what the church has always taught.

By falsely claiming that the principles of Catholicism call for rejecting the death penalty in all circumstances, the pope undermines the authority of the Magisterium, pre-empts the proper authority of public officials, and jeopardizes public safety and the common good.


And this one, from a Jewish commentator...


Pope Francis rewrites Catholicism … and the Bible
by Dennis Prager
August 7, 2018

Last week, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis had changed the Catholic catechism. After 2,000 years of teaching that a moral use of capital punishment for murder is consistent with Catholic teaching, the pope announced that the catechism, the church fathers and St. Thomas Aquinas, among the other great Catholic theologians, were all wrong.

And God and the Bible? They’re wrong, too.

Pope Francis, the product of Latin American liberation theology — along with many other Catholic religious and lay leaders — is remaking Catholicism in the image of leftism, just as mainstream Protestant leaders have been rendering much of mainstream Protestantism a branch of leftism, and non-Orthodox Jewish clergy and lay leaders have been rendering most non-Orthodox synagogues and lay institutions left-wing organizations.

The notion that it is immoral to execute any murderer — no matter how heinous the murder, no matter how many innocents he has murdered, no matter how incontrovertible the proof of guilt — is an expression of emotion, not of reason or natural law or Christian theology or biblical theology.

Regarding the latter, the biblical commandment to put premeditated murderers to death is unique.

First, it is fundamental to biblical morality. The injunction of putting murderers to death is the only law found in each one of the first five books of the Bible (the Torah).

Second, all other sins involving the death penalty were only applicable to Jews (and for thousands of years, Jews regarded those death penalties not as literal but as pedagogic — to teach the seriousness of various offenses in an attempt to create a moral and holy nation).

But the Bible makes it clear capital punishment for murder is applicable to all of humanity. It is the first law God gives Noah after the flood, after commanding him to be fruitful and multiply. Putting murderers to death is therefore the first moral law God gives the world.

Why this draconian penalty for murder? Because the penalty is a statement about the seriousness of a crime, and the God of the Bible deems the wrongful, deliberate taking of a human life the pinnacle of injustice. Allowing all murderers to keep their own lives diminishes the evil of murder and thereby cheapens the worth of the human being. In God’s words, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image” (Genesis 9:6).

It is precisely to preserve the unique worth of the human being that the Bible mandates putting murderers to death.

In 2015, Pope Francis wrote, “today capital punishment is unacceptable, however serious the condemned’s crime may have been.”

Unacceptable? To whom? It is acceptable to about half of American Catholics and about half of the American people. But it is unacceptable to the elites of our time, the people who have the most contempt for Catholicism and every other Bible-based religion.

The death penalty, Francis wrote, “entails cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.” These are all subjective opinions. I suspect most people do not think the death penalty as punishment for premeditated murder is necessarily cruel, inhumane or degrading. What are all of us missing? And why isn’t life imprisonment cruel, inhumane and degrading? (Indeed, opposition to life imprisonment is already the norm in many progressive countries like Norway, where someone murdered 77 people, mostly children, and received a 21-year prison sentence.)

The Pope also writes that no matter how serious the crime that has been committed, “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”

Most of us think it is the murderer, by committing murder, who has attacked his dignity and inviolability, not the society that puts him to death. We also think it is the dignity of the murder victim that is attacked by rewarding the murderer with room and board, TV, books, exercise rooms and visits from family members and girlfriends.

Furthermore, why isn’t keeping a murderer in prison one day longer than is necessary to protect society an “attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person”? For that matter, isn’t every punishment an attack on the dignity of the punished? Of course it is, which is why progressives ultimately oppose all punishment, equating it with vengeance.

In the middle of the night on July 23, 2007, two men entered the Cheshire, Connecticut, home of Dr. William Petit Jr. and his family. They nearly beat Dr. Petit to death with a baseball bat. Then, one of the men raped his wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, and the other man sexually assaulted her 11-year-old daughter, Michaela — an assault he photographed with his cellphone. Dr. Petit managed to escape, but Hawke-Petit was strangled to death; Michaela and Hawke-Petit’s other daughter, Hayley, were tied to their beds; and the house was doused with gasoline and set on fire.

In a 4-3 decision, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment violated the Connecticut Constitution, thereby preventing the execution of the murderers and assaulters of Dr. Petit’s family.

This was Dr. Petit’s reaction: “I think when people willfully, wantingly, without any remorse take someone else’s life, they forfeit their right to be among us.”

For those who believe in the Bible, Dr. William Petit of Cheshire, Connecticut, echoes God’s view. Pope Francis of the Vatican does not.

Benedict XVI: Prophet
Fr. Robert P. Imbelli

August 11, 2018

Note: Fr. Imbelli tells us he was reading some works by Pope Benedict XVI and was moved to extract several passages that seemed to speak powerfully to the multiple scandals in which we find ourselves. We agree, and thought you would like to see them as well. – Robert Royal

During his last trip to Germany, at Freiburg im Breisgau, on September 24-25, 2011, Benedict XVI gave two addresses to German bishops, clergy, and lay leaders. Reports at the time indicated they were not well received by the audience. From the vantage of the present crisis, however, they appear prescient. Here follow extended excerpts from the two discourses:

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“We live at a time that is broadly characterized by a subliminal relativism that penetrates every area of life. Sometimes this relativism becomes aggressive, when it opposes those who say that they know where the truth or meaning of life is to be found.”

“And we observe that this relativism exerts more and more influence on human relationships and on society. This is reflected, among other things, in the inconstancy and fragmentation of many people’s lives and in an exaggerated individualism. Many no longer seem capable of any form of self-denial or of making a sacrifice for others. Even the altruistic commitment to the common good, in the social and cultural sphere or on behalf of the needy, is in decline."

"Others are now quite incapable of committing themselves unreservedly to a single partner. People can hardly find the courage now to promise to be faithful for a whole lifetime; the courage to make a decision and say: now I belong entirely to you, or to take a firm stand for fidelity and truthfulness and sincerely to seek a solution to their problems.”

“The Church in Germany is superbly organized. But behind the structures, is there also a corresponding spiritual strength, the strength of faith in the living God? We must honestly admit that we have more than enough by way of structure but not enough by way of Spirit. I would add: the real crisis facing the Church in the western world is a crisis of faith. If we do not find a way of genuinely renewing our faith, all structural reform will remain ineffective.”

“If the Church, in Pope Paul VI’s words, is now struggling ‘to model itself on Christ’s ideal,’ this ‘can only result in its acting and thinking quite differently from the world around it, which it is nevertheless striving to influence.’ (Ecclesiam Suam, 58) In order to accomplish her mission, she will need again and again to set herself apart from her surroundings, to become in a certain sense ‘unworldly’.”

Freiburg im Breisgau, September 25, 2011
“In the concrete history of the Church, however, a contrary tendency is also manifested, namely that the Church becomes self-satisfied, settles down in this world, becomes self-sufficient and adapts herself to the standards of the world. Not infrequently, she gives greater weight to organization and institutionalization than to her vocation to openness towards God, her vocation to opening up the world towards the other.”

“In order to accomplish her true task adequately, the Church must constantly renew the effort to detach herself from her tendency towards worldliness and once again to become open towards God. In this she follows the words of Jesus: ‘They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world’ (Jn 17:16), and in precisely this way Jesus gives himself to the world. One could almost say that history comes to the aid of the Church here through the various periods of secularization, which have contributed significantly to her purification and inner reform.”

“Secularizing trends – whether by expropriation of Church goods, or elimination of privileges or the like – have always meant a profound liberation of the Church from forms of worldliness, for in the process she, as it were, sets aside her worldly wealth and once again completely embraces her worldly poverty.”

“History has shown that, when the Church becomes less worldly, her missionary witness shines more brightly. Once liberated from material and political burdens and privileges, the Church can reach out more effectively and in a truly Christian way to the whole world, she can be truly open to the world. She can live more freely her vocation to the ministry of divine worship and service of neighbor.”

“It is not a question here of finding a new strategy to re-launch the Church. Rather, it is a question of setting aside mere strategy and seeking total transparency, not bracketing or ignoring anything from the truth of our present situation, but living the faith fully here and now in the utterly sober light of day, appropriating it completely, and stripping away from it anything that only seems to belong to faith, but in truth is mere convention or habit.”

“To put it another way: for people of every era, and not just our own, the Christian faith is a scandal. That the eternal God should know us and care about us, that the intangible should at a particular moment have become tangible, that he who is immortal should have suffered and died on the Cross, that we who are mortal should be given the promise of resurrection and eternal life – for people of any era, to believe all this is a bold claim.”

“This scandal, which cannot be eliminated unless one were to eliminate Christianity itself, has unfortunately been overshadowed in recent times by other painful scandals on the part of the preachers of the faith. A dangerous situation arises when these scandals take the place of the primary skandalon of the Cross and in so doing they put it beyond reach, concealing the true demands of the Christian Gospel behind the unworthiness of those who proclaim it."

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A second regular contributor to THE CATHOLIC THING evokes Joseph Ratzinger on a most secular fact of life in today's world...

On news reports
And why Joseph Ratzinger once said
'There is no such thing as a purely objective news report'
By James V. Schall, S.J.

August 14, 2018

The Gospels are called “good news.” Something was found in them that was “new,” never heard before. It was good, not bad, news. “Bad” news certainly happened, but only if the opposite “good” news was possible. Otherwise, there would just be “news”: News would be something like reading facts on Google. “News” arouses our passions. Something is at stake in its very statement.

“Bad news” has been with the human race since its beginning. No past time or place has been without its share of bad news. In one sense, “bad news” perplexes us more than “good news.” Mankind has vainly sought to identify the causes of bad news and to be rid of them.

The “good news” of Christianity warns us of the “bad news” that recurs in one form or other. The Fall or Original Sin was not something that could be confronted with solely human means. Much classical and modern social thought, nonetheless, sought to prove otherwise. Its efforts have usually made things worse.

Christopher Dawson once remarked that, had we read the Jerusalem Post or the Roman Daily News on the morning after the Crucifixion, we would find hardly any mention of it, other than perhaps a note that three bandits had been executed under Pontius Pilate. The “bad news” of the Crucifixion turned out for the Christians to be a felix culpa, a happy fault – good news.

Recently we worry about “fake news.” Fake news usually is a sensational account of an event or of a person that takes the form of objective reporting. It contains wrong information or otherwise distorted implications. It is a species of lying. The normal reader or listener may take “fake news” as if it were true. But “fake news” is not same as satire. The reader of satire knows that exaggerations and erroneous elements are part of the humor.

On November 15, 1977, Joseph Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI) wrote: “There is no such thing as a purely objective news report.” Everything we read in the press, watch on television, or hear on radio is filtered through some mind that selects what is to be emphasized and how to present it.

At first sight, this view might seem wrongly skeptical. But anyone who watches CNN or MSNBC, to name the worst, and thinks that he is receiving “objective” news is wildly confused. L’Osservatore Romano, the BBC World News, and the Washington Post are not exceptions. The point is that there are no exceptions.

Is this situation such a bad thing? We learn to look at the background assumptions of the person who presents the news. Indeed, we have to consider what we mean by “news.” If every news broadcast of a channel or network spends most of its time telling us how bad or good President Trump is, or how socialism will save us all, we know what we are dealing with. There is nothing wrong with knowing what ideologues think. But something is wrong if we do not know that they are ideologues claiming to give us “objective” reports.

The most important element in “news” is “opinion.” Facts are not really “news.” They are either true or false on evidence. News deals with things that were done, or should or should not be done. Whether we deny “oughts” or not, the news that is important deals with opinions about significant things, with changeable things that are to be praised or blamed. We are dealing with what Aristotle called prudence, with means aimed at ends. We are not dealing with certitudes but with things that can be otherwise.

Our ends ultimately define us. They explain the opinions we give for acting or not acting, speaking or not speaking, the way we do. I recall reading some years ago a discussion of our Founders’ understanding of the First Amendment. It was not designed to protect “news” but “opinions.” An opinion is neither a fact nor a certitude. We mostly must act on the basis of incomplete knowledge.

Aristotle said that the criterion of our action is what the good man would do in the case before us. We are to act on what is reasonable in the given particular circumstances. We need, in other words, wise and prudent men.

In our tradition, the Church, the Senate, and the university provided these wise men. But, in the realm of opinion, we can no longer fully trust any of these sources. Yet it is not a defect but a perfection to look to prudent men to see what we do not.

Ratzinger’s “no objective news report” points to the prudent man whose opinion we can trust to lead us to that highest end for which we were created. The search is not in vain, but neither is it easy. Indeed, in the end, we seek ourselves to become prudent – yes, even wise.

This is not just about the death penalty -
but the very preservation of the Church's teaching authority
by Stefanie Nicholas

August 14, 2018

When I woke up on August 2 to a tweet that Pope Francis had made changes to paragraph 2267 of the Catechism, I knew that I was in for an exhausting phase in my post-conversion life. Without even reading the text in full, or examining the letter to the bishops, or comparing the new wording to past documents, or digging into the historical teachings on the applicability of the death penalty for expiation of sins versus future protection of the innocent, I knew.

“Eye on the ball,” said many a Catholic in the wake of this latest controversy. To an extent, I agree with them – we must not let anything the Vatican does, no matter how egregious, distract us from dealing actively with the present homosexual sex abuse crisis. However, I argued from the beginning that this is the ball.

Pope Francis’s decision cannot be seen in isolation. It must be taken as part of the whole, and as I and many others have argued, it seems this was an obvious “test,” using an already unpopular (and to the average parishioner, irrelevant) issue to gauge how a change to the Catechism will be received. It was never about the death penalty for me. Frankly, I care little about it in the present context of my life in a country that doesn’t even employ it.

No, this is about no less than the very preservation of the authoritative nature of the Church.

The more I turn over this past event in my mind, considering the machinations of the enemies below and their various witting and unwitting helpers above, the more I realize that every bit of toxicity in the Church can be laid at the feet of the crisis of faith within the episcopacy, the clergy, and the majority of the laity.

More specifically, I see that crisis of faith reflected in the crisis of evangelism.

When people don’t have a true supernatural faith, why would they evangelize? Why would they call people to a faith that is a mere set of flimsy humanist doctrines with some Jesus? Why should they care that Pope Francis’s actions have had a real, profound impact on the souls of potential converts, when I would bet that many of them don’t even believe in the reality of eternal damnation or eternal salvation for said souls?

I wish I could show the @USCCB my DMs right now and the number of people contacting me for advice on what to think of everything going on in the Church right now. I respect each and every one of them, and I do my best to respond truthfully and accurately, but this is not my job.

People who evangelize know there is a crisis. We know this is a crisis rivaled by only the Arian heresy. We live each day of our lives picking up the pieces, on the ground, of those earnestly seeking Our Savior.

People who don’t evangelize don’t see it, or they don’t think it extends beyond lack of Mass attendance and sex abuse scandals.

It’s really that simple. Even the neo-con JPII types who cringe at my proclaiming that Pope Francis crossed my red line with this change know there is a crisis of clarity, at the very least. I would argue that it’s largely because they evangelize. If you talk about the faith frequently, you simply cannot choose to avoid the crisis.

I have received many messages from people who have read my frustrated posts on the death penalty, people presuming that I myself am experiencing a crisis of faith due to Pope Francis’s actions, and either encouraging me in my faith (I am thankful for this – one can always use encouragement!) or seeking to tempt me toward Protestantism or back to Eastern Orthodoxy.

My initial reaction to these messages was bafflement. All of these people missed entirely the point of my frustration.

I didn’t talk about this crisis for my own sake. Nor do I enjoy the chaos within the Church, nor do I want Pope Francis’s pontificate to be a failure.

I spent so many hours researching and speaking out about this crisis because I felt that I had to for the sake of others. I care about these crises within the Church because, unfortunately, these crises in the Church have a direct impact on the safety of the precious souls I seek to help.

I know this because I evangelize every single day.

By the grace of God, I have the gift of supernatural faith. Pope Francis’s recent actions, like McCarrick’s actions, have had no impact on my belief in the fact that the Catholic Church is the Church Christ founded, nor on my love for her. This isn’t about me. My faith is more than fine – not for anything I did, let alone deserved, but by the reception of the gift of faith from God. [My own thoughts, sentiments and position, exactly! though I have never been in a position to evangelize as the writer does.]

Though I admit I am a bit of a Catholic wonk and find the Church politics and scandals and ecclesial minutiae interesting on a personal level, my “mission” at this point has never been to cover them in depth, and it’s simply not the best use of my time. I want to know Scripture better. I want to improve my debate skills. I want to be able to answer individual questions in a more timely fashion. I want to put more time into the things that I have found to “work” in opening people’s hearts and minds to the moving of the Holy Spirit. Not on staying up until one in the morning reading about Ott’s eight levels of theological certainty, as fascinating as it may be!

From the earliest days of my conversion, I have been given the opportunity by God to engage in the primary mission of the Church: to bring all men to saving faith in Jesus Christ. That’s what my passion is: encouraging people in their lives to seek out the good, teaching the basics of the faith to non-Christians, overcoming objections to the hard teachings of the Church from Catholics and non-Catholics alike, and actively “going on the offensive” in friendly debate with our non-Catholic Christian brethren to bring them to the fullness of a life for Jesus Christ in His Church.

So it has been an exhausting couple of weeks, because instead of talking about the Eucharist and the road to Emmaus, or explaining the Protoevangelium and Mary, or discussing the Old Testament prefigurement of the papal office, I was trying to explain whether or not people have to follow the Holy Father in his latest teaching.

No pressure. It’s not as though souls are at stake or anything!

This isn’t my job, and it really does not amuse me that it has become my job due to the near total cowardice of the shepherds. I am not alone in this feeling of betrayal. This latest act was the same old story for people who have been evangelizing longer than I have. Though I have experienced some smaller scandals since my conversion (and, of course the ongoing sex abuse problems), this was the first time I had to tweet at people and tell them I could not answer whether or not they should obey Pope Francis.

It was the first time I realized that though I know for myself where the truth lies in this instance – the eternal teaching of the Church that the death penalty is morally permissible – I felt that it would be going too far out of my wheelhouse spiritually if I were to directly exhort another person to hold the same position.

It’s one thing for me to tell someone to ignore the Pope’s stupid tweets about banning guns. It’s another to tell someone to ignore the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

I am a small-e evangelist. There is a right order to the members of the Body of Christ, and I believe that my role as a laywoman should be to respectfully submit to higher authority. Heck, I want to be able to let male members of the laity take the lead over me in a lot of these matters, let alone priests and bishops!

And yet, what else am I to do? Saint Catherine of Siena, ora pro nobis.

I encourage people to read what other reputable folks have to say and prayerfully consider it, and, when appropriate, I share my own overall position on this chaotic Church to which I came home: that I will follow the eternal doctrines of the Church; be confident that one day, the mainstream documents of the Church such as the Catechism will again reflect them; and pray for the Holy Father each and every day.

We are in a time of crisis. We are in a time where we as laypeople must ask ourselves: if not us, who? While right order and submission to authority is important, we can never allow that desire to follow order to supersede our imperative to follow Christ first as the giver of authority.

So we do our best to be the simple women who stayed with Jesus during his Passion. We stay close to Our Blessed Mother. We look to Saint John – to the rare faithful, brave shepherds.

We don’t stop evangelizing the truth, any more than the early Christians did while being persecuted by the external physical enemies of Nero, Diocletian, et al. In many ways, our enemies may be of a worse sort (interior and spiritual), but at least we have the blood of our forefathers and their faith that God would give those new converts faith to appeal to.

Most of all, we pray. We beg for God’s mercy upon us that we may never lead one of His little ones astray.

We have no other choice.

Time to hold prelates accountable
at the Vatican, too
By Phil Lawler

August 13, 2018

John Allen of Crux remarks that if the universal Church seeks to make prelates accountable, it’s unfortunate that Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who has a deserved reputation for trying to protect abusers and conceal evidence remains the Dean of the College of Cardinals.

To be fair, Allen was asking the same question back in 2011 — as was Edward Pentin, in Catholic World Report. And I myself have asked the question again and again and again and again and again and again.

Since Cardinal Sodano is now more than 90 years old, it would seem a natural thing to announce his resignation. In June, Pope Francis announced that four more cardinals would all be given the privileges of cardinal-bishops — from whose ranks the dean is chosen. That might have been an opportune time to name a new dean. Still Cardinal Sodano, the former Secretary of State, retains his title.

And while we’re on the subject… Pope Francis created the Council of Cardinals in April 2013, and named the original eight members of the group to 5-year terms. A quick mathematical calculation shows that those terms expired in April of this year. Again, it would have been a convenient time to replace any cardinals who had been tainted by scandal.

Four of those eight cardinals have now been accused, rightly or wrongly, of either engaging in sexual abuse or covering up the evidence of abuse. Three of those four have passed the age of 75, the normative retirement age for active bishops, so in their cases there were two handy reasons for replacing them. But all four remain in place.

If Pope Francis wants to send a clear message, the opportunities are still open. On the other hand, if all these cardinals remain in place —when it would have been so easy to replace them — that sends a message, too.

And what about 'all the pope's men' and the horrendous messages they send by their brazenly shameless and faith-betraying sycophancy???

Bergoglio has ushered in
a new ultramontane gnosticism
and Rosica is its prophet!
by Mark Lambert

August 14, 2018

Twitter is buzzing this morning with the latest heretical out-pouring from professional papal tailgater, Fr. Thomas Rosica. You may remember this is the the Vatican spokesman & CEO of Canadian Salt & Light TV, who seems unable to avoid embroiling himself in what can best be described as embarrassing polemics.

He infamously made a legal threat against a small part-time blogger who wants to defend Church teaching. He has a long record of dodgy pronouncements and quasi-theology (for another example see here) but these are the men Pope Francis chooses to speak for him. This is something which has puzzled me since the inception of this Pontificate.

Who is Rosica?

Get it now?

This morning's fuss is about a typically sycophantic article written about Pope Francis by Fr. Rosica, entitled The Ignatian Qualities of the Petrine Ministry of Pope Francis and posted on his smoke & litigation Salt & Light blog, and re-posted by Zenit (although the particularly heretical quote below now appears to have been removed by Zenit who have replaced the two relevant sentences with “[…]” however it IS still there in the smoke & litigation Salt & Light blog (for the minute, anyway). There's a lot of verbiage, but amongst it is this bit:


Now explain to me, given this man's position of influence in the Church, how we are NOT living through a major doctrinal crisis? This is the exact opposite of what is taught by the Second Vatican Council which states:

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It is clear, therefore, that sacred tradition, Sacred Scripture and the teaching authority of the Church, in accord with God's most wise design, are so linked and joined together that one cannot stand without the others, and that all together and each in its own way under the action of the one Holy Spirit contribute effectively to the salvation of souls.~ Dei Verbum n.10

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It also has to be said about this article that you would be forgiven for asking whose founder? Which Ignatius? If you read the letters of St. Ignatius, or a classic portrait of the (400 year) traditional interpretation of his charism (as in Joseph de Guibert), you would conclude that Fr. Rosica is talking about a completely different figure and spirit. But that won't be any surprise to anyone following what is going on at present.

This verbiage (it's not Catholic by any measure I recognise) is both sycophantic & unhinged. We should also remember that it takes place amidst the renewed, growing anger at Church leaders over the abuse crises, too! One wonders just why Zenit published it? Rosica relates everything back to Francis though, and if anyone raises problems, he just sees it like this:


I mean this is so brazen - this man is publicly claiming the Church has become a personality cult and that Scripture, Tradition & the Magisterium no longer count for anything. As Nick Donnelly pointed out:


Rorate caeli also remind us:"Let us go back to what the Church actually teaches about the Roman Pontiff in her quite authoritative words in Vatican I (Pastor aeternus):

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The Holy Spirit was promised to the successors of Peter not so that they might, by his revelation, make known some new doctrine, but that, by his assistance, they might religiously guard and faithfully expound the revelation or deposit of faith transmitted by the apostles. Indeed, their apostolic teaching was embraced by all the venerable fathers and reverenced and followed by all the holy orthodox doctors, for they knew very well that this See of St. Peter always remains unblemished by any error, in accordance with the divine promise of our Lord and Savior to the prince of his disciples: "I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren."

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Pope Saint Pius X also appropriately warned the Church:

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But for Catholics the second Council of Nicea will always have the force of law, where it condemns those who dare, after the impious fashion of heretics, to deride the ecclesiastical traditions, to invent novelties of some kind . . . or endeavour by malice or craft to overthrow any one of the legitimate traditions of the Catholic Church; and Catholics will hold for law, also, the profession of the fourth Council of Constantinople: We therefore profess to conserve and guard the rules bequeathed to the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church by the Holy and most illustrious Apostles, by the orthodox Councils, both general and local, and by every one of those divine interpreters the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. Wherefore the Roman Pontiffs, Pius IV. and Pius IX., ordered the insertion in the profession of faith of the following declaration: I most firmly admit and embrace the apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions and other observances and constitutions of the Church.
Saint Pius X
Pascendi Dominici Gregis, 42

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About that Zenit edit of its Rosica story:


The real problem here is the credibility that men like Rosica have by virtue of the Vatican, and the respect we are bound to hold them in by virtue of their ordination. However they are only able to get away with such outlandish and contrary behaviour because so many Catholics do not know their faith at all.

For anyone with a passing acquaintance with Dei verbum, those two sentences by Rosica are like a red light; a Satanic parody of the actual document which seeks to elevate one man, Pope Francis to the position of Christ. Indeed, Rosica has said something similar to that in the past:


What really gets me is that these men were ordained into a Church that they hate and seek to undermine and actually corrupt. Then there is the fact that they are promoted to prominent positions despite constantly repeating positions that are at odds with the Church - AND NO ONE CAN DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT! If you believe what the Church teaches, you are considered to be a bit of a nutter. If you voice dissent, you are considered to be right on.

This has to stop because it is what is killing vocations and leading to the clear hypocrisy of ignorant Catholics which leads to apathy and their abandoning of the faith.

I suppose the only silver lining for Rosica is that because he has blocked nearly everyone on the internet, he's likely completely oblivious to the furore he has caused with this article #RosicaBlockParty.

Almighty & Everlasting God, have mercy on Thy servant Francis, our Supreme Pontiff, & direct him [JORGE BERGOGLIO] according to Thy loving kindness, in the way of eternal salvation, that with Thy help he may ever desire that which is pleasing to Thee & accomplish it with all his strength. Through Christ our Lord.

Pennsylvania priest abuse report
faults Cardinal Donald Wuerl


HARRISBURG, Pa., August 14, 2018 (AP) — The latest on a grand jury report on clergy abuse in six Pennsylvania Roman Catholic dioceses (all times local):

4:15 p.m.
A Pennsylvania grand jury report on clergy sexual abuse faults Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the former longtime bishop of Pittsburgh, over his handling of abusive priests.

The report says Wuerl approved transfers for priests instead of removing them from ministry, oversaw inadequate church investigations and concealed information when priests were reported to law enforcement.

The report also says he advised parishes not to publicly announce or acknowledge complaints, and offered financial support to priests who were accused and later resigned.

Wuerl, who leads the Washington archdiocese and is one of the highest-profile cardinals in the United States, disputes some of the allegations in the report.

He says in a statement Tuesday that he “acted with diligence, with concern for the victims and to prevent future acts of abuse.”

2:25 p.m.
A Pennsylvania grand jury says its investigation of clergy sexual abuse identified more than 1,000 child victims.

The grand jury report released Tuesday says that number comes from records in six Roman Catholic dioceses. The grand jury says it believes the “real number” of abused children might be “in the thousands” since some records were lost and victims were afraid to come forward. The report says more than 300 clergy committed the abuse over a period of decades.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro says the probe found a systematic cover-up by senior church officials in Pennsylvania and at the Vatican.

2:10 p.m.
Pennsylvania officials have released a landmark grand jury report that identifies more than 300 “predator priests” who molested children in six dioceses.

It also accuses church leaders of taking steps to cover up the abuse. The report emerged from one of the nation’s most exhaustive investigations of clergy sexual abuse.

The report echoes the findings of many earlier church investigations around the country in its description of widespread sexual abuse by clergy and church officials’ concealment of it.

The grand jury scrutinized abuse allegations in dioceses that minister to more than half the state’s 3.2 million Catholics.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the former longtime bishop of Pittsburgh who now leads the Washington archdiocese, said ahead of the report’s release that he expected to be criticized in it.

9:30 a.m.
Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, is defending himself ahead of a forthcoming grand jury report investigating child sexual abuse in six of Pennsylvania’s Roman Catholic dioceses.

He says the report will be critical of some of his actions as Pittsburgh’s bishop.

Wuerl wrote to priests late Monday, ahead of Tuesday’s release of the report. He says he acted diligently to protect children while bishop of Pittsburgh for 18 years through 2006.

Court records say the report identifies more than 300 “predator priests” and that grand jurors accuse church leaders of brushing aside victims to protect abusers and church institutions.

Wuerl is already dealing with allegations that a predecessor, disgraced ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, allegedly sexually abused boys and adult seminarians. He said last month that archdiocesan records showed no complaints about McCarrick.

1 a.m.
Time is ticking down to decide what information to black out in a forthcoming grand jury report investigating child sexual abuse in six of Pennsylvania’s Roman Catholic dioceses.

The state Supreme Court set a Tuesday deadline to publicly release a redacted version of the roughly 900-page report.

Some clergy members named in the document say they’re wrongfully accused and are fighting to challenge the allegations against them. The high court says it’ll consider their claims in September, but in the meantime ordered the report released with the identities of those clergy members concealed.

Court records say the report identifies more than 300 “predator priests” and that grand jurors accuse church leaders of brushing aside victims to protect abusers and church institutions.

Cardinal Wuerl named 200 times
in Pennsylvania grand jury report,
responds to criticism
by Ed Condon


Washington D.C., Aug 14, 2018 (CNA)- Cardinal Donald Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington, D.C., and the former Bishop of Pittsburgh, has been named more than 200 times in a Pennsylvania grand jury report, released Aug. 14, after an 18-month investigation into historic allegations of sexual abuse in six Pennsylvania Catholic dioceses.

The cardinal released a statement in response to the report, underscoring the gravity of the sexual abuse for the Church and the real need for repentance for past failures.

“As I have made clear throughout my more than 30 years as a bishop, the sexual abuse of children by some members of the Catholic Church is a terrible tragedy, and the Church can never express enough our deep sorrow and contrition for the abuse, and for the failure to respond promptly and completely,” the cardinal said.

In total, 99 priests from Pittsburgh were named in the report, 32 priests were referenced by the grand jury report in relation to Cardinal Wuerl’s time as bishop. Of these, 19 involved new cases or allegations which arose during his 18 years in charge of the diocese, during the years 1988-2006.

Of the 19 cases which arose during Wuerl’s time as bishop, 18 were removed from ministry immediately. The other cases Wuerl addressed in Pittsburgh principally concerned actions and allegations that arose during the reign of his predecessor, Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua.

Several of these cases inherited from Cardinal Bevilacqua’s time were subject to the report’s most stringent criticisms.

In one case, an abuser-priest left the Diocese of Pittsburgh in 1966, following allegations of abuse. He was allowed to seek ministry in dioceses in California and Nevada. The report says Wuerl authorized him to move from Los Angeles to the diocese of Reno-Las Vegas in 1991, but sources familiar with the Pittsburgh case said that Wuerl was unaware of the 1966 allegations at the time.

A further allegation, concerning past actions by the same priest, was made in 1994 at which time Wuerl immediately informed the dioceses where the priest had been living.

In another case highlighted by the report, Wuerl agreed to a settlement with an abuse victim in his first weeks as bishop of Pittsburgh in 1988. The victim received a total of $900,000 and signed a confidentiality agreement - such agreements were once common in settlements and have been heavily criticized as a means of silencing victims.

While acknowledging that the report contained specific criticisms of his time in Pittsburgh, Wuerl defended his record of handling sexual abuse allegations.

“While I understand this report may be critical of some of my actions, I believe the report confirms that I acted with diligence, with concern for the victims and to prevent future acts of abuse. I sincerely hope that a just assessment of my actions, past and present, and my continuing commitment to the protection of children will dispel any notions otherwise made by this report.”

The report also specifically criticized Wuerl for maintaining financial support for priests who had been removed from ministry, although providing that support is a canonical obligation for bishops. Many dioceses, including those covered by the report, have found themselves obligated to continue providing minimum benefits and support for priests.

Sources close to the cardinal also point out that the grand jury report does not distinguish between proven incidents of abuse and other allegations, saying that the report presumes that any priest accused of abuse should have been permanently removed from ministry, whether the allegation is proven or not. That assumption, they say, is not consistent with canonical norms on the subject.

As the most senior sitting bishop to be named in the report, and having served for so long as the head of a diocese as prominent as Pittsburgh, it was widely expected that Wuerl would be singled out for special attention by the report, and by the state’s Attorney General, Josh Shapiro.

Perhaps the most eye-catching allegation against Wuerl contained in the more than 1,000 pages released is the use of the phrase “circle of secrecy.” These words, the report claims, “were his own words for the church’s child sex abuse cover up.” This allegation is vehemently denied by both the diocese of Pittsburgh and the cardinal.

In an official response released with the report, the Diocese of Pittsburgh said that the phrase “circle of secrecy” appears in paperwork related to the request of a particular priest to return to ministry, and that it was used to make clear that there could be no “circle of secrecy” about the priest’s past problems. The diocese also says that the handwriting in which the phrase is written cannot be definitively attributed to anyone, including Wuerl.

Ed McFadden, spokesman for the cardinal, said that “the handwriting does not belong to then-Bishop Wuerl as the writers of the Report mistakenly assumed. Indeed, the cardinal confirmed the handwriting is not his, and confirmed he neither wrote nor used the phrase while serving as Bishop of Pittsburgh. When the Cardinal’s legal counsel informed the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office about this error – prior to the release of the report – the Attorney General and his Senior Deputy refused to acknowledge the mistake and refused to take any steps to correct the dramatic use and misattribution of the phrase in the report.”

McFadden called the report’s attribution of the phrase “another example that in factual ways, large and small, the Attorney General’s office was more concerned with getting this report out than getting it right. Such a focus detracts from the shared goals of protection and healing.”

In a letter sent to the priests of the Washington archdiocese on Aug. 13, Wuerl wrote that he was shocked at having to confront allegations of abuse almost from the beginning of his ministry in Pittsburgh.

“I cannot fully express the dismay and anger I felt, when as a newly installed Bishop of Pittsburgh in 1988, I learned about the abuse some survivors experienced in my diocese,” he said.

The cardinal said that the experience of meeting with victims of abuse “urged me to develop quickly a “zero tolerance” policy for clergy who committed such abuse,” and that he put in place procedures to ensure allegations were addressed “fairly and forthrightly.”

In his written testimony to the grand jury, Wuerl recounted that in his first months as Bishop of Pittsburgh he had to meet with two brothers who had been victims of abuse. Wuerl said he was profoundly affected by the experience and came away with “a permanent resolve that this should never happen again.”

In 1989, Wuerl established a diocesan committee to evaluate policies for responding to abuse allegations. This committee grew to become the Diocesan Review Board, nearly a decade before the Dallas Charter called for every diocese to have such a body.

In his letter to the priests of Washington, he said that he had tried to live up to his own zero-tolerance standards.

“The diocese [of Pittsburgh] investigated all allegations of child sexual abuse during my tenure there and admitted or substantiated allegations of child sexual abuse resulted in appropriate action including the removal of the priest from ministry,” Wuerl wrote to the Washington presbyterate.

What constitutes “appropriate action” is something that has changed in the years since the sexual abuse crisis at the turn of the millennium and the formation of the Dallas Charter by the United States bishops.

As Bishop of Pittsburgh, Wuerl says he implemented of a policy that formally encouraged Catholics making complaints to also report them directly to law enforcement agencies, and sometimes informed civil authorities himself, even against the express wishes of the person making the allegations.

Of the 19 priests whose original allegations were handled by Wuerl, 18 were immediately removed from pastoral assignments and a kept away from any further contact with children.

But, when allegations could not be satisfactorily established, many of these were given administrative positions in the diocesan chancery, something which would be considered inappropriate under current standards. Unlike the worst examples of earlier abuse cases in dioceses like Boston and Los Angeles, Wuerl is adamant that he never moved an accused or suspected abuser from parish to parish, or left them in parish ministry.

Indeed, from his first year in Pittsburgh, Wuerl acted publicly on issues related to clerical sexual abuse, even in the face of Church opposition.

In 1988, the year he arrived in Pittsburgh, Wuerl removed Fr. Anthony Cipolla from ministry following accusations the priest had molested a teenage boy. Following appeals by Cipolla, the Vatican ordered that the priest be returned to ministry but Wuerl categorically refused, flying to Rome and presenting evidence and arguments in person to the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura. Rome eventually reversed its position and upheld Wuerl’s decision.

While cases of suspected abuse since 2002 have been handled according to the USCCB’s “Essential Norms,” the Cipolla case served as an important template in the 1990’s, making it easier for other bishops to remove priests accused of abuse from active ministry.

Coming hard on the heels of the revelations about Archbishop McCarrick, who preceded Wuerl in Washington, D.C., the cardinal has found himself on the receiving end of very pointed and sustained criticism. Appearing on “CBS This Morning” ahead of the report’s release, he was pointedly asked if he had any intention of resigning. He is likely to face renewed scrutiny and even more difficult questions in the weeks ahead.

The ff was written and published before the Grand Jury report was made public:

Wuerl is lying - and why
Non-members have stood idly by and allowed the Gay Mafia
to spread its tentacles throughout the Church
by George Neumayr'

August 13, 2018

In the immediate aftermath of the catastrophic McCarrick scandal, one American cardinal's denial of any knowledge of McCarrick's predatory behavior stands out: "Our offices are aware only of the same information regarding these allegations that you are seeing in media reports."

That was Cdl. Donald Wuerl's first response to the mushrooming scandal, made through an intermediary tellingly. No one, of course, is buying it. After all, in order to believe Wuerl's claim that he knew nothing about McCarrick's misbehavior, one would have to swallow the following whoppers:
- that Wuerl never read psychotherapist Richard Sipe's accounts of McCarrick's gay predation, which go back at least a decade and were widely circulated on the internet (Sipe is well known to the American hierarchy)
- that the papal nuncio to the United States, who had been apprised of settlements New Jersey archdioceses reached with McCarrick's victims, never breathed a word of these settlements to Wuerl
- that the Church's insurance company, which presumably oversaw the decision to settle, never consulted with Wuerl about McCarrick's record in Washington, D.C.
- that not a single D.C. priest or archdiocesan official who knew about McCarrick's reputation or the settlements ever breathed a word of these matters to Wuerl.

Wuerl's claim of ignorance only raises questions; it doesn't answer any of them. One obvious point of inquiry for any future panel investigating the McCarrick scandal would be: Was it really possible for the New Jersey archdioceses and its insurance company to evaluate the prudence of settling with McCarrick's victims without holding meetings with D.C. archdiocesan officials?
Without examining McCarrick's personnel file in the D.C. archdiocesan office? Without first finding out if that behavior continued during his tenure in D.C.?

After all, how would the insurance company have gauged the need to settle without that crucial information? Presumably, McCarrick was denying it all. Why would the insurance company have settled if the dispute amounted to a he-said, he-said affair, without any later misconduct during his tenure in D.C.?

Any independent panel would need to examine all documents related to the settlement talks. One suspects that those documents would betray evidence of D.C. archdiocesan participation. To take just one example, how did McCarrick, a D.C. archdiocesan employee in his retirement, travel up to New Jersey to discuss the matter? Who paid for that? Who went with him? Surely some D.C. archdiocesan officials accompanied him, unless all of this was resolved over the phone, which is highly doubtful. The panel would need to question McCarrick's aides. What did they know? Did they ever discuss McCarrick-related matters with the D.C. chancery?

Wuerl's denial depends on an utterly ludicrous picture, that of a hermetically sealed scandal leading to hermetically sealed settlements. That never happens in major institutions. It always comes out that a range of people across the affected institution knew about the settlement. That Wuerl didn’t know about the predations of his predecessor is about as likely as Harvey Weinstein's brother and business partner not knowing about the mogul's widely rumored misdeeds.

Then there is the Roman angle: Did nobody at the Vatican tell Wuerl about his predecessor's predations and the settlements to which they led? That strains all credulity. No one has better access to Vatican-held secrets than Wuerl. He is arguably the most powerful cardinal in America and belongs to the Vatican's inner circle.

According to the derelict New Jersey bishops, they informed Vatican officials in Washington, D.C. and Rome about the McCarrick settlements. We are to believe they never passed that information on to Wuerl? Right.

I woke up this last Friday morning to the sad and grimly timed news that Richard Sipe had died. Over the years I talked to Sipe occasionally. I would pepper him with questions about the Gay Mafia in the Catholic Church, a subject he had addressed with great authority in various books and articles. His reporting on the Gay Mafia — much of it deriving from his first-hand experiences as a therapist who worked with troubled priests in the disintegrating, post-1960s Church — was invaluable.

I gather Cdl. Wuerl and other members of the checkered hierarchy breathed a sigh of relief at the news of Sipe's death. Sipe had the goods on them. Or maybe they are muttering to themselves what the French statesman Talleyrand once said after learning of the death of a Turkish ambassador with whom he sparred: "I wonder what he meant by that?"


The company they keep: Wuerl and McCarrick, Ricca and Bergoglio

"Priests have told me that Wuerl is gay," Sipe said to me once during an interview I was conducting for my book, The Political Pope. I had asked Sipe if the Gay Mafia elected Pope Francis. He thought so. We discussed the Msgr. Battista Ricca scandal. Remember that one? It is highly revelant to the McCarrick cover-up and Wuerl's bogus claim that he knew nothing about McCarrick's predatory habits.

Wuerl and Ricca work together on matters related to the Vatican Bank and the administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See. If an independent future panel is assembled to look at the McCarrick scandal — which is a big if — it should focus like a laser beam on the interactions of Wuerl, Ricca and McCarrick.

He who pays the piper calls the tune, and many of the money men of the Church are charter members of the Gay Mafia who have been covering for each other for decades. Non-members of the Gay Mafia have allowed the Gay Mafia to spread its tentacles throughout the Church in part because they are dependent on the fundraising of these charlatans.

Follow the money in the Church — from the McCarrick-founded Papal Foundation (which recently strong-armed its donors for millions given to a crooked hospital in Rome that the Pope and the Gay Mafia wanted bailed out) to the Patrimony of the Holy See — and you will find on that money the fingerprints of the most double-dealing, double-living prelates in the Church.

They understand the purifying and silencing power of raw cash. Their sins are scarlet, but their cash is green — and their cowed colleagues know it. Their sins are scarlet, but their cash is green — and their cowed colleagues know it.

Of course Wuerl knew about McCarrick, just like he knew about Msgr. Ricca, his colleague at the Vatican bank, in whose affairs Wuerl has long been immersed. Ricca rose to the highest ecclesiastical position at the Vatican Bank despite an amazingly sordid history.

Veteran Vatican correspondent Sandro Magister has established beyond any reasonable doubt that Ricca's scandalous bio includes an affair with a member of the Swiss Guard, a beating he received at a gay bar and an incident involving the discovery by firemen of Ricca trapped in an elevator with a young male prostitute.

Wuerl and McCarrick were thrilled when Pope Francis rode to the rescue of Ricca. Recall that Pope Francis's signature line — "Who am I to judge?" — was in response to a question about Ricca. Those words emboldened McCarrick, who enjoyed an astonishing final act under Francis.

McCarrick felt so confident that he started bragging about how he had lobbied for Bergoglio's election after a powerful "Roman" had pressed him to spread the word to his peers about the Argentine prelate. Who was that powerful Roman? That's another question for the yet-to-be-formed panel. In all likelihood, he is one of the Gay Mafia's chief puppeteers.

Richard Sipe, alas, didn't oppose a gay clergy, just a secretive one. But his warnings about McCarrick will remain a monument to his honest testimony. I had wanted to talk to Sipe about the McCarrick-Wuerl cover-up over the last month, but couldn't reach him.

I never found Sipe's proposed left-wing reforms persuasive in the slightest — in fact, they would just make the scandal permanent by gaying the Church formally — but I always respected his reporting on the existence of the Gay Mafia and admired his fearlessness. May he rest in peace.

St Maximilian Kolbe
on truth and faith and holiness
Translated from

August 14, 2018

“No one in the world can change the truth” was the title of the last editorial written by St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish priest killed by the Nazis in Auschwitz on August 14, 1941, after he offered to die in place of another Polish prisoner who was the father of a large family.

“Take me,” Fr. Kolbe said. “I am a Catholic priest and I am old.” (He was only 47.)

The calendar for the first half of August honors an extraordinary series of saints - Alfonso Maria de’ Liguori, Jean Marie Vianney, Domingo de Guzmán (St Dominic), Teresa Benedetta della Croce (Edith Stein), Clare of Assisi), and today, Maximilian Kolbe, whom John Paul II called ‘a martyr of love’ and ‘patron of our difficult century’ when he canonized him in 1982.

In Kolbe’s life, many aspects ruled decisively but his two polar stars were the truth and Mary. In following those stars, he became an apostle, missionary, entrepreneur, and media man who utilized the printed word and radio to spread the Gospel.

He wrote:

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“We should inundate the world with a flood of Christian and Marian writings in every language, in every place, in order to drown in truth every manifestation of error which has found in the press its most powerful ally. We must fill the world of the written word with words of life to give back to the world the joy of living”.

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In 1917, at age 23, in the year of the October Revolution in Russia, he founded the Milita of the Immaculate, a Catholic association which came to number 700,000 members and whose monthly journal, Il Cavaliere dell’Immacolata (The Knight of the Immaculate), reached a print run of one million.

Brilliant in mathematics and passionate about physics and astronomy (he was also an excellent chess player), even at school, he was thinking in terms of interplanetary vehicles. His interests were many and wide-ranging but above all else was his faith. And the truth.

During his years of study in Rome, he asked a friend about Freemasonry: “Is it possible that the enemies of God could be doing everything in their power whereas we remain inactive and at most, we pray but without acting?”

When he realized there were Catholics who indulged their pleasures in immoral films, he said, instead of recriminating, that it would be best if they became businessmen who invented in films with ‘good’ content.

Yet he was combative and determined about his causes and found a way to argue and to teach even when hospitalized. It happened in Zakopane while he was a lecturer in the history of the Church in Cracow.

When he went to Japan as a missionary, his bishop allotted him a sum of money to get a home, but he said it would be put to better use in publishing Catholic magazines.

For his publishing enterprise, he only wished state-of-the-art technology. At Niepokalanow, his first convent, where he first set up a publishing house, he worked tirelessly. Besides the monthly Cavaliere, he also produced a calendar of the Knights of the Immaculate (380,000 in its first run). Then there was the Piccolo Giornale (Small Newspaper) which he published in seven editions for every geographical region in Poland.

Seven hundred brother priests worked with him. Without every giving up in the face of difficulties. They even got to invent a new electric machine to stamp addresses – it would win first prize at industrial fairs in Poznam and Paris.

Kolbe enjoined his co-workers that every number of the magazine must be prepared in prayer and on their knees. When he became ill with tuberculosis, someone put a ‘Do not disturb’ sign of his door but he had it taken off. “Everyone can come to me at any hour of the day or night, always,” he said. “I belong to them”.

In Nagasaki, Japan, where he set up a printing press and opened a new magazine with a monthly run of 18,000, he wrote one of his brother priests: “Our task here is very simple: work hard the whole day, kill ourselves with work, be considered fools by some, and ultimately, to die for the Immaculate. Isn’t this a beautiful ideal of life?”

He travelled, he studied (including the Russian language), and he made plans. And it took a physical toll on him. At one point, he was given only three months to live. But he lived on, and his doctors could not understand how it was possible.

Then everything came to a head in 1939. Officers of the Werhmacht and the Gestapo showed up at the gates of his convent and he was taken into custody. Then began his Via Crucis in a series of jails: Lamsdorf, Amititz, Ostrzeszow, Pawiak, and finally, Auschwitz, where he arrived in 1941 on board an armored vehicle. During the trip, he sang hymns.

When the Nazis decided to choose a few prisoners to condemn to death as a reprisal, one of the latter was Francis Gajowniczek, who begged the Nazis to spare his life for the sake of his family. Then and there, Fr. Kolbe offered to take his place. And on August 14, 1941, he was injected with carbolic acid. The next day, Feast of the Assumption, his corpse was burned.

At one time, Kolbe had said: “I would like to be like dust – to travel with the wind and reach every part of the world to preach the Gospel”.

It is said that during a meeting with some novices, Kolbe, speaking of holiness, sought to show how the objective should not be difficult, by writing a capital W and small w, and then simulating an algebraic equation with the two symbols, he said: “When our will is conformed to the will of God, then we shall be saints”.

He wrote: “No one can can change the truth. We know that very well. But in real life, we sometimes behave as though in certain vases, yes and no can both be the truth. Not even God cancels the truth nor can he change it because He himself is truth in essence. How great is the power of truth – it is really infinite and divine!”

It is really amazing how almost every report, story or anecdote that has to do with genuine goodness ends up sounding like a reproach to the wrongdoings of Bergoglio. I am a sinner, too, but my mistakes, faults and sins do not impact anybody else but me, most of all, and to a lesser degree, those I harm wittingly but more often unwittingly, by these offenses. I do wittingly criticize Bergoglio but what I write and think of him can hardly harm him, and I do not cease praying for him (she says in self-defense!)

Three-dimensional projection of the facial image on the Shroud of Turin.

Latest scientific discoveries
on the Shroud of Turin –
which the media have not acknowledged
and do not wish to know
Translated from

August 11, 2018

Some 2,500 young people found themselves on pilgrimage from August 8-10 to Turin to pray before the Shroud that wrapped the body of Jesus after He was taken down from the Cross.

But that is not the kind of news that makes Page 1 in any newspaper, and not any page at all, for that matter. Because even the so many reports on scientific studies that have confirmed the authenticity of the Shroud are hardly ever reported.

On the contrary, what makes the news is any study that questions its authenticity. Last month, La Repubblica headlined that “Some of the bloodstains on the Shroud are false”. Subtitle: “These are the results of a study done by forensic experts to verify the compatibility of blood traces on the Shroud and the position of the body in the Shroud”.

Corriere della Sera: “Research on the Shroud: At least half of the bloodstains are false”. Subtitle: “Only some are said to be compatible with those of a man who was crucified, according to an experiment done using new techniques”.

The media attention to this report is inexplicable, both for the tenuousness of the hypotheses reported, and because, as the research writers themselves say, the experiment was done in 2014.

Scientist Pierluigi Baima Bollone, honorary president of the International Center for Sindonology in Turin and author of many publications, demolished the new claims by saying bluntly: “It is work that cost so much more effort than it is worth”.

A leading scholar on the Shroud and author of many scientific publications, Prof. Emanuela Marinelli, wrote an article to comment on the ‘new’ report, saying that “the two researchers were never among those who had an opportunity to study the Shroud directly and have never even been near it”.

Marinelli disputed the report in detail but her article only appeared in La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana and was not picked up by any of the important media in Italy. Who are apparently interested in the Shroud only when the story is negative.

Yet in recent days other important scientific studies on the Shroud were also published but were largely ignored by the Italian media. Perhaps because their results do confirm the authenticity of the Shroud?

In particular, a study published in the prestigious scientific journal Applied Optics, on the result of four years research carried out by a multi-institutional team of reserachers from Italy’s ENEA (the Italian agency for research and development of new technologies on energy and the environment), CNR (the Italian National Research Council) and INRIM (THE Italian national institute for research on meteorology).

The research was coordinated by ENEA’s Paolo Lazzaro, who is deputy director of the International Center for Sindonology, and the scientists who carried out the tests were Daniele Murra of ENEA, Paola Iacomussio of INRIM, Mauro Missori of the CRN, and Antonio Di Lascio, a medical doctor.

Their particular objective was to determine why the bloodstains on the Shroud are red and not dark brown as old blood should be. In fact, the color of the bloodstains has been among the points raised in questioning the authenticity of the Shroud.

Their study confirmed that the stains are old blood. “We have demonstrated that the stains are genuine blood stains, with hemoglobin that is old, and uncontaminated by any other substance”.

But they also contain ‘a great amount’ of bilirubin, which is characteristic of blood in two cases: if the person has jaundice, or if the person has been beaten up badly so that his red blood cells shatter, and the liver releases bilirubin in response.” But ultraviolet radiation produces changes in bilirubin which reinforce the color red.

Therefore, the blood on the Shroud is from a man who was tortured, and who did suffer all the wounds evidenced by the bloodstains in the Shroud. Di Lazzaro presented the study at the International Conference on the Shroud of Turin held in Pasco, Washington, in the USA on July 19-22. That symposium significantly demonstrated the authenticity of the Shroud through a number of studies.

In his presentation, Di Lazzaro pointed out that experiments carried out in the past at the ENEA laboratory in Frascati, Italy, proved that ultraviolet radiation on bloodstains resulted in a color similar to the stains on the Shroud, but he said it does not mean that the image on the Shroud was produced by an ultraviolet flash, but only that ultraviolet radiation could have aided in the ‘production’ of the image.

Marinelli added other details: “Besides an intense supernatural radiation as a cause for the formation of the image during a matter-antimatter annihilation at the moment of the Resurrection, as he has hypothesized, Giuseppe Baldocchini also offered a corollary to his hypothesis, namely that the resulting neutron flow from that reaction falsified the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud in 1988 which said it was medieval and not ancient.”

But we are still left with the mystery of how the image on the Shroud, which is definitely not painted, but the result of a superficial three-dimensional ‘burning’ of the linen cloth, something that is scientifically unexplainable.

However, science already tells us with certainty that the Shroud did wrap the body of a dead man who did not stay in it longer than 36-40 hours (because the stains show no signs of putrefaction) and who emerged from the Shroud without any physical movement.

These are exactly the supernatural characteristics that the Gospels say Jesus’s resurrected Body demonstrated to those who saw him afterwards.

There seems no end to the number and variety of outrages that Jorge Bergoglio is capable of...

Pope says ex-president of Brazil
jailed for corruption is a victim of persecution
like Jesus, John the Baptist and Susannah
Translated from

August 11, 2018

Dear Stilum Curialisti –
Thanks to a reader, FM, we can all share the article published by the German news agency katholsiches.info about the extraordinary position taken by the reigning pope on the Lula affair (Lula being the ex-President of Brazil who has been convicted to imprisonment for corruption in a verdict affirmed by two courts).

In my experience, if what the report says is true, then we are talking of a scandalous interference by a pope in the inrternal affairs of a sovereign nation [So is that new? He tried it out most successfully on the Knights of Malta, admittedly a minuscule sovereign international entity compared to the geographical and economic behemoth that is Brazil, but he already set a precedent of scandalous interference there, even if he can hardly take over Brazil as he did take over the Order of Malta!]. Indeed, it is something that any head of state, especially if he also happens to be the Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church, would scrupulously avoid doing if only out of prudence!

But it is clear that when a prominent leftist leader is involved, especially those of Latin America, this pope displays all his impulsiveness, abandoning any semblance of impartiality. As we have seen him to do about other things in our pwn country, Italy, on the issues of immigration, jus soli and related causes. Here then is the article:

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Pope warns against white-gloved ‘coups d’etat’
Translated from
katholisches.info/2018/08/papst-warnt-vor-staatsstreich-mit-weissen-handschuhen

ROME – Pope Francis’s sympathies with leftist politicians is well-known. A few days ago, he compared the judicial process against ex-President Ignacio Lula da Silva of Brazil, to the persecution suffered by Jesus Christ, John the Baptist and other martyrs, according to a Chilean official who spoke to the pope.

[Does Bergoglio have any common sense at all? First, he declares a leftist bishop who dies of a car accident a martyr so he can beatify him. And now, he likens a prison penalty for a corrupt politician – from all accounts, fair and just - to the persecution of Jesus?]

Lula was among the founders and most eminent representatives of the Brazilian Laborers’ Party founded in 1980 and which is in the mainstream of the socialist reform movement. He was head of state and of government from 2003-2011, and is a friend of Brazilian Cardinal Claudio Hummes, who is one of Jorge Bergoglio’s closest friends.

In July 2017, Lula was sentenced to 9-1/2 years of imprisonment for corruption, a sentence confirmed by the Brazilian Court of Appeals in January 2018 which also increased the jail term to 12 years. He has been in jail since April 7, since when his friends and sympathizers have been trying to do everything to get him out.

On August 2, Pope Francis met privately with 3 leaders of the Latin-American Left who sought the audience in order to advocate Lula’s cause. The three were Celso Amorim, who was Lulka’s foreign minister; Alberto Fernandez, who was Cristina Fernandez Kirchner’s chief of staff when she was president of Argentina; and Carlos Ominami, a former Chilean cabinet minister now Senator who calls himself “a progressivist citizen, agnostic and Shintoist”.

The pope spent one hour with them – unusually long – during which his visitors denounced that a subtle ‘coup d’etat’ is taking place in Latin America where leftist officials are being persecuted by judicial means, what Bergoglio calls ‘a coup d’etat in white gloves’. [Not too long ago, Bergoglio called present-day abortion ‘Marxism in white gloves’! What does he mean by 'white gloves'? That the operation - be it a coup d'etat or abortion - is thus 'sterile' in the sense of clean?]

Amorim, who was Defense Minister till 2015 of the government of Dilma Roussef, the Labour politician who succeeded Lula as president, presented the pope with an Italian edition of Lula’s book La Verdad Vencera (Truth will triumph). Amorim told the media later that the pope “is following the developments about Lula with interest and concern”.

Last May 17, in his morning homilette from Casa Santa Marta, Bergoglio took a position when he expressed his concern over ‘false unity’ and the dangers of coups d’etat, speaking of “calumny and defamation” carried out through judicial processes via which make possible a subtle coup d’etat. Observers drew an allusion to events in Latin America and more specifically, Lula’s conviction in Brazil. [The words also presage, almost verbatim, what was reportedly said at the meeting with the leftist leaders on August 2.]

On that day, the Argentine news agency AFN wrote, quoting from what Alberto Fernandez reported of the meeting: “Pope Francis showed great concern for what he calls ‘a coup d’etat in white gloves’”, an expression also used by Amorim, and which Fernandez says is Bergoglio’s.

Papal support for the political left has its share of some comic relief. On January 12, Lula was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment for corruption, and the pope was quoted to have expressed his concern over corruption in Latin America. [That’s rich! As if corruption and Latin America have not become near-synonymous all these past decades!] But it was said that the pope was not referring to Lula’s corruption but to the fact that a presumably corrupt system of justice had sentenced Lula for corruption!

The audience given by the pope to the three advocates for Lula must be seen in relation to the efforts of the Laborers’ Party to present Lula as a candidate in the October parliamentary elections despite his guilty verdict. The Party hopes thereby to get him parliamentary immunity if he wins, an immunity which would supposedly free him from imprisonment. But first, they have to make sure that as a convict, he qualifies to be a candidate. They already tried to run him as a presidential candidate in the elections last spring but the Brazilian Supreme Court denied their motion,

The political Left claims that judicial proceedings against their politicians are an occult form of political action aimed at damaging the politicians concerned. [If they are innocent, what do they have to fear? This way, they know what it's like not to be in power!]

On August 3, through the Internet, Lula let the world know that the pope, at the request of his three advocates, had sent him a ‘personal message’ on which he wrote: “To Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva, with my blessing and a request to pray for me- Francis.” [Bergoglio consistently asks everybody to pray for him, but prayers will not avail if he persists in his wrongheadedness!]

In the Sunday edition of the Chilean newspaper La Tercera, Carlos Ominami wrote an article entitled “With Pope Francis at Casa Santa Marta”, in which he says that the pope had compared the situation of Lula to that of Jesus Christ:

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On the occasion of this meeting which the 3 of us, representing Argentina, Brazil and Chile, had improvised, I wished to make clear that I was there not only out of my friendship and esteem for Lula but also out of my duty to defend democracy in Brazil and the entire region, which was won at great cost.

Actually, the pope did not seemed particularly surprised. To my great surprise, on the contrary, he said that Lula’s story was something very ancient, one that can be found in the Bible, because in different ways, it has happened to Jesus Christ, to John the Baptist, and to Susannah of Babylon…

He also recalled his homily on May 17, 2018, when he said very clearly that in politics, when a coup d’etat is attempted, the media start to talk about people, about national leaders, whom they drag in the mud with calumny and defamation… leading to a court trial which condemns them, and which ultimately results in a virtual coup d’etat”.

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---

Truly, never has a pope expressed himself in partisan terms so openly and unilaterally. No pope before has ever spoken this way in any papal audience.

I very much fear that this appeal to the cardinals of the Church will largely fall on deaf ears - deliberately deaf, that is - much like the Four Cardinals' DUBIA did on Bergoglio, because not even Cardinals Burke and Sarah have reacted so far to Bergoglio's most egregious move yet to show the world - and Roman Catholics, most especially - that, as his shameless sycophant Fr Rosica describes it, the Church is now openly ruled by an individual rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture".

I have yet to rouse from my stupor of disbelief that any Catholic could write what Rosica did, even if his subject, Bergoglio, has shown us again and again that he does consider himself an improvement over Jesus himself, not only in terms of what the Church should be but especially in terms of what Jesus taught - which he edits by omission, falsification and misdirection to suit his personal agenda.

Anyway, how many cardinals, if any, do you think will respond to this appeal?

Pope Francis has revised the Catechism of the Catholic Church to read, “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” This statement has been understood by many, both inside and outside the Church, to teach that capital punishment is intrinsically immoral and thus is always illicit, even in principle.

Though no Catholic is obliged to support the use of the death penalty in practice (and not all of the undersigned do support its use), to teach that capital punishment is always and intrinsically evil would contradict Scripture.

That the death penalty can be a legitimate means of securing retributive justice is affirmed in Genesis 9:6 and many other biblical texts, and the Church holds that Scripture cannot teach moral error.

The legitimacy in principle of capital punishment is also the consistent teaching of the magisterium for two millennia. To contradict Scripture and tradition on this point would cast doubt on the credibility of the magisterium in general.

Concerned by this gravely scandalous situation, we wish to exercise the right affirmed by the Church’s Code of Canon Law, which at Canon 212 states:

---

The Christian faithful are free to make known to the pastors of the Church their needs, especially spiritual ones, and their desires. According to the knowledge, competence, and prestige which they possess, they have the right and even at times the duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make their opinion known to the rest of the Christian faithful, without prejudice to the integrity of faith and morals, with reverence toward their pastors, and attentive to common advantage and the dignity of persons.

---

We are guided also by the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, who states:

---

If the faith were endangered, a subject ought to rebuke his prelate even publicly. Hence Paul, who was Peter’s subject, rebuked him in public, on account of the imminent danger of scandal concerning faith, and, as the gloss of Augustine says on Galatians 2:11, “Peter gave an example to superiors, that if at any time they should happen to stray from the straight path, they should not disdain to be reproved by their subjects.” (Summa Theologiae, Part II-II, Question 33, Article 4, ad 2)

---

Hence we, the undersigned, issue the following appeal:

---

To their Most Reverend Eminences, the Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church,

Since it is a truth contained in the Word of God, and taught by the ordinary and universal magisterium of the Catholic Church, that criminals may lawfully be put to death by the civil power when this is necessary to preserve just order in civil society, and since the present Roman pontiff has now more than once publicly manifested his refusal to teach this doctrine, and has rather brought great confusion upon the Church by seeming to contradict it, and by inserting into the Catechism of the Catholic Church a paragraph which will cause and is already causing many people, both believers and non-believers, to suppose that the Church considers, contrary to the Word of God, that capital punishment is intrinsically evil, we call upon Your Eminences to advise His Holiness that it is his duty to put an end to this scandal, to withdraw this paragraph from the Catechism, and to teach the word of God unadulterated; and we state our conviction that this is a duty seriously binding upon yourselves, before God and before the Church.

Sincerely,

Hadley Arkes
Edward N. Ney Professor in American Institutions Emeritus
Amherst College

Joseph Bessette
Alice Tweed Tuohy Professor of Government and Ethics
Claremont McKenna College

Patrick Brennan
John F. Scarpa Chair in Catholic Legal Studies
Villanova University

J. Budziszewski
Professor of Government and Philosophy
University of Texas at Austin

Isobel Camp
Professor of Philosophy
Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas

Richard Cipolla
Priest
Diocese of Bridgeport

Eric Claeys
Professor of Law
Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University

Travis Cook
Associate Professor of Government
Belmont Abbey College

S. A. Cortright
Professor of Philosophy
Saint Mary’s College

Cyrille Dounot
Professor of Legal History
Université Clermont Auvergne

Patrick Downey
Professor of Philosophy
Saint Mary’s College

Eduardo Echeverria
Professor of Philosophy and Theology
Sacred Heart Major Seminary

Edward Feser
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Pasadena City College

Alan Fimister
Assistant Professor of Theology
St. John Vianney Theological Seminary

Luca Gili
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Université du Québec à Montréal

Brian Harrison
Scholar in Residence
Oblates of Wisdom Study Center

L. Joseph Hebert
Professor of Political Science
St. Ambrose University

Rafael Hüntelmann
Lecturer in Philosophy
International Seminary of St. Peter

John Hunwicke
Priest
Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham

Robert C. Koons
Professor of Philosophy
University of Texas at Austin

Peter Koritansky
Associate Professor of Philosophy
University of Prince Edward Island

Peter Kwasniewski
Independent Scholar
Wausau, Wisconsin

John Lamont
Author
Divine Faith

Roberto de Mattei
Author
The Second Vatican Council: An Unwritten Story

Robert T. Miller
Professor of Law
University of Iowa

Gerald Murray
Priest
Archdiocese of New York

Lukas Novak
Lecturer in Philosophy
University of South Bohemia

Thomas Osborne
Professor of Philosophy
University of St. Thomas

Michael Pakaluk
Professor of Ethics
Catholic University of America

Claudio Pierantoni
Professor of Medieval Philosophy
University of Chile

Thomas Pink
Professor of Philosophy
King’s College London

Andrew Pinsent
Research Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre
University of Oxford

Alyssa Pitstick
Independent Scholar
Spokane, Washington

Donald S. Prudlo
Professor of Ancient and Medieval History
Jacksonville State University

Anselm Ramelow
Chair of the Department of Philosophy
Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology

George W. Rutler
Priest
Archdiocese of New York

Matthew Schmitz
Senior Editor
First Things

Josef Seifert
Founding Rector
International Academy of Philosophy

Joseph Shaw
Fellow of St Benet’s Hall
University of Oxford

Anna Silvas
Adjunct Senior Research Fellow
University of New England

Michael Sirilla
Professor of Dogmatic and Systematic Theology
Franciscan University of Steubenville

Joseph G. Trabbic
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Ave Maria University

Giovanni Turco
Associate Professor of Philosophy
University of Udine

Michael Uhlmann
Professor of Government
Claremont Graduate University

John Zuhlsdorf
Priest
Diocese of Velletri-Segni

---

[I thought Fr Z is incardinated in Madison, Wisconsin; is he also incardinated in Italy?

I do fully expect priest associations such as those in England who recently took the initiative of expressing full public support for Humanae Vitae to join this appeal, and probably a handful of bishops like Mons. Athanasius Schneider. Wouldn't it be a miracle if at least one national bishops' conference joined in, too?

And BTW, how will Bergoglio's tried-and-true critics - in the spirit of Canon 212 - react to Rosica's arrogantly shameless formulation of Bergoglio's hubristic, beyond-Luciferian self-perception?]

I find it significant that Catholic News Service, the news agency of the USCCB, is taking this tack on the McCarrick scandal - though they really have no choice now but to join in the universal censure for McCarrick, but also all those other prelates who knew about his sexual indulgences and chose to keep silent about it. Such as Cardinal O'Malley, who is supposed to be Bergoglio's pointman on 'zero tolerance' for clerical/episcopal sex abuse but who made the lame disclaimer that a letter sent to him three years back about McCarrick's misconduct was considered only on 'staff level' where it was deemed 'not within the purview of the Archdiocese of Boston' and therefore effectively dismissed. But obviously the letter was not sent to him because he is Archbishop of Boston but because he is the pope's front man on these issues.


Details of second letter sent
by a priest to Cardinal O’Malley
describing McCarrick misconduct
by Rhina Guidos
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE

WASHINGTON, August 14, 2018 (CNS) -- In a June 2015 letter to Boston's Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley obtained by Catholic News Service, a New York priest tells the prelate about "sexual abuse/harassment/intimidation" allegations he had heard concerning then-Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick and asks that if the matter doesn't fall under his purview, to forward it to the "proper agency in the Vatican."

The letter "has taken me years to write and send," writes Father Boniface Ramsey, pastor of St. Joseph's Church Yorkville in New York City, who made the letter available to CNS in early August. But it was the second time he had attempted to tell church officials in writing.

In it, he describes for Cardinal O'Malley conversations with the rector of a seminary in New Jersey about trips then-Archbishop McCarrick, as head of the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey, would take with seminarians to a beach house.

During the time period he mentions in the letter, 1986 to 1996, he says he was teaching at Immaculate Conception Seminary at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. He writes of the accounts he'd heard of Archbishop McCarrick's repeated trips to a New Jersey beach house where, after too many seminarians were invited for too few beds, "the extra seminarian was then told that he could share the archbishop's bed."

"Some of these stories were not presented to me as mere rumors but were told me by persons directly involved," he wrote.

In an Aug. 13 phone interview with CNS, Father Ramsey said he didn't know any sexual acts were taking place, "but I thought his (McCarrick's) behavior was extremely inappropriate at the least." He said he was careful about what he wrote in the letter to Cardinal O'Malley because he didn't want to be spreading rumors he'd heard, but he had concerns about the bed-sharing after hearing that it weighed on one of his friends who was tasked with finding seminarians for the archbishop's beach visits.

"I'd never heard of any adult who had sex with McCarrick," he said, but felt the constant bed sharing he'd often heard about was "something he shouldn't have been doing."

The letter dated June 17, 2015, was sent just shortly after the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, headed by Cardinal O'Malley, received its statutes in May 2015. Father Ramsey said he sent it then because he had heard of the formation of the commission and had recently been at the funeral for New York Cardinal Edward M. Egan, who died in March 2015, and saw Cardinal McCarrick there. At that point the prelate was the retired archbishop of Washington.

"I was angry," Father Ramsey told Catholic News Service. "I said 'this guy is still out and about.'"

Father Ramsey said it made him "upset" to see that Cardinal McCarrick, after "this long history which so many people knew about, he could continue to show his face."

He had written a letter about his concerns more than a decade before, in 2000, [TO WHOM???] and it didn't seem to go anywhere, but his new motivation came about when he saw Cardinal McCarrick and "wanted this stuff to stop with the seminarians," he said in the interview. So, he sat down to write a letter -- again.

"The matter does not have to do with the abuse of minors, but it does have to do with a form of sexual abuse/harassment/intimidation or maybe simply high-jinks as practiced by Theodore Cardinal McCarrick with his seminarians and perhaps other young men when he was the Archbishop of Newark," writes Father Ramsey to Cardinal O'Malley.

In a July statement, Cardinal O'Malley said he did not "personally" receive the letter but the statement said "at the staff level the letter was reviewed and determined that the matters presented did not fall under the purview of the Commission or the Archdiocese of Boston..." However, the response from the cardinal's office did not say whether it had been forwarded to the proper agency, as Father Ramsey had requested. [AND THAT SORT OF DISMISSIVENESS IS WHAT BERGOGLIO AND O'MALLEY MEAN BY 'ZERO TOLERANCE'???]

"I never received any acknowledgement, although I have certain knowledge that the letter was received, and that the information was forwarded to somewhere in the Vatican."

In the letter to Cardinal O'Malley, Father Ramsey says that he had in the past told Archbishop Thomas C. Kelly of Louisville, who died in December 2011, about his concerns. Archbishop Kelly told him that "stories about Archbishop McCarrick had been circulating among the American bishops," the letter says, and that Archbishop Kelly mentioned to him a story involving a flight attendant.

In the interview with CNS, Father Ramsey said the story was about a male flight attendant whom Archbishop McCarrick "picked up" on a flight, telling him that perhaps he had a vocation, and ended up enrolling him in a seminary, but there seemed to be reasons other than religious for wanting him there. The flight-attendant-turned seminarian was later kicked out of the seminary.

Father Ramsey writes in the letter that after Archbishop McCarrick was appointed to the Archdiocese of Washington in 2000, he tried to speak to the apostolic nuncio in Washington, who was then Gabriel Montalvo Higuera, about what he knew. The nuncio told him to write him a letter, which Father Ramsey said he sent. He told a priest friend about the letter and that friend tried to dissuade him from sending it, telling him it could hurt him.

"I never received any acknowledgement, although I have certain knowledge that the letter was received, and that the information was forwarded to somewhere in the Vatican," he wrote Cardinal O'Malley.

The writing of the letter didn't seem to hurt Father Ramsey, as his friend had feared. But its revelations also didn't seem to hurt Archbishop McCarrick.

"I found it shocking at the time that Archbishop McCarrick was ever advanced to the Archdiocese of Washington, since I have little doubt that many persons in the Vatican were aware of his proclivities before he was named," he wrote in the letter to Cardinal O'Malley. "And then, of course, on to the cardinalate, which was to be expected for the archbishop of Washington, but still distressing."

Mentioning cases of high-ranking officials disgraced because of sexual misbehavior, he said in the letter that "it seems bizarre to me that Cardinal McCarrick is out and about, a conspicuous presence at religious (including papal) events, being interviewed, giving speeches, serving on committees and the like. Was not what he did at the very least highly questionable? Was it not taking advantage of young men who did not know how to say no to their archbishop? Has it not, for the many laity and clergy who were aware of his actions, contributed to cynicism about the church and the hierarchy?"

Father Ramsey said he did not keep a letter of the one sent in 2000 to the nuncio, but in between the first and the second letter he sent, he said tried to speak with others, including Cardinal Egan, about stopping then-Archbishop McCarrick.

"He (Cardinal Egan) didn't want to hear about it," Father Ramsey said to CNS.

The following article serves to remind us all that the conjunction of so many evil things happening to the Church today is not just about clerical sex abuse, and abuse of power by bishops and other prelates, and the reigning pope's overweening hubris in setting out to show he is an improvement on Christ himself, but a massive failure of faith on the part of the above sinners as well as the great majority of the world's Catholics whom they have brought willynilly under their sway.

No matter how bad you think
the filth in the Church is,
reality is bound to be even worse
by Peter Kwasniewski

August 15, 2018

A long-time observer of the modern ecclesiastical scene wrote to me to share his perspective on the broader significance of the McCarrick scandal. With his permission, I here publish his thoughts, which have been slightly edited for publication.

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Most commentators do not begin to understand the true nature of the problem.

The ring of criminal Nancy Boys is the same ring that has been sedulously working for decades to undermine the integrity of the doctrinal, moral, sacramental, liturgical Church.

These men – McCarrick, McElroy, Wuerl, O’Malley, Mahony, Cupich, Tobin, Farrell, Lynch, Weakland, Paglia, Maradiaga, their lovable mouthpiece James Martin, Thomas Rosica, and far too many others, including ones who have passed on to their eternal fate, such as Lyons, Boland, Brom – are the same ones who have destabilized and adulterated catechesis, theology, liturgy, and most obviously the Church’s commitment to the unchanging moral law, as we saw in the Amoris Laetitia debacle and all that surrounded and succeeded it.

We must connect the dots and not pretend to be shocked when we see, for example, attempts under way to “re-interpret” Humanae Vitae through a false teaching on conscience, or to do away with clerical celibacy, or to introduce female deacons.

To treat the sins of this ring of conspirators as nothing more than a recrudescence of the sex scandals of the past would be to lose sight of their real enormity. These are not just men of bad moral character; they are apostates, and they are trying to remake the Church in the image of their own apostasy. [Thank you, Mr. Unnamed Observer, for using the term I find to be far more accurate to describe what these faith-wreckers led by Bergoglio have been doing.]

The Church has been smashed up in front of our eyes in slow motion for decades and few can even begin to admit that we are now faced with a Church in actual smithereens. The Nancy Boys have conducted their campaign of demolition with a kind of imperial sway. It is not this or that aspect of the Church that is corrupt; the rot is now everywhere. It is a rot on which the McCarrick Ring still sups, like maggots feasting on a corpse.

For this reason, to hear well meaning people say Bergoglio must impanel some investigative body to set things right is Alice in Wonderland lunacy. It’s like putting Himmler in charge of Nuremberg.

We do not need bishops engaging in public penance (although it’s a good idea for their souls and long overdue); we do not need episcopal investigations; we do not need new procedures and new policies. These are all cries for exculpation.

Bishops beating their breasts and then going back to doing nothing about the manifest apostasy at the very heart of the Church will not solve matters.
- We need the apostates identified, denounced, and removed.
- We need a reaffirmation of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Faith.
- To clean up this mess, we have to clean up more than the scandal of homosexuality, with all of its attendant horrors.
- We have to denounce and reject the apostasy that powerful and influential homosexuals and their friends have insinuated into the Church over decades.

Take one example that can stand for many others: Rembert Weakland. The man who paid half a million dollars to a former male partner in litigation, who said sexual abuse reporters were “squealing,” who shredded reports about such abuse and claimed in his autobiography that he did not know that abuse of children is a crime – this was the same man who worked against traditional sacred music (chant and polyphony), calling for modern styles and liturgical dancing; who, according to a source living in Rome at the time, induced a hesitating Paul VI to push forward the Novus Ordo Missae; who criticized the CDF’s document Dominus Jesus that reaffirmed Catholic dogma on the necessity of faith in Christ and membership in the Church for salvation; and who utterly devastated the historic cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Milwaukee with a wreckovation that can be described only as satanic.

It is a package deal. This, above all, is what people need to see. The moral depravity, the doctrinal heresy, the liturgical devastation – all of it goes together. If you have the courage to follow each thread, you will find that any attack on one part of the Church, one aspect of her life, one component of her tradition, already is or will soon be bound up with an attack on the other parts, too. The real “seamless garment” is Catholicism taken in its totality. Either you have the whole or you can’t have any.

Living the devout life – the life of grace enjoined by Christ – is not a mere “option” for the Catholic faithful, even less for Catholic clergy. Living the devout life is a solemn obligation before Almighty God, before the Church, and before one’s own conscience. Those who reject or seek to travesty that life will necessarily fall into apostasy. All of us will, not just the homosexuals.

The difference with the clerical sodomites is that they become professional apostates. It is not enough for them not to believe in the sacraments; they must make others not believe in them as well. They will not stop twisting and mutilating the Church until she blesses their sin, along with many other sins. To achieve their goals, they must wreak havoc on every last aspect of the Church.

This is what the faithful must stop – forget about the contemptible bureaucracy of the USCCB with its well heeled lawyers and slick marketeers. We begin to stop the havoc by calling its source by its real name. McCarrick was not just a predatory sodomite, but an apostate, and all of his “brother bishops” who knew about the double life and still got their pictures taken with him, laughing away at the latest wool pulled over the people’s eyes – you know, the ones who are putting out videos about how unfortunate this is, what a mess, and, you know, it isn’t as bad as people are making it out to be – these are all apostates, too. They’re company men with company cars, driving in a long line to their own burials at the ecumenical cemetery.

One would think the collaborationist bishops would think twice before leaving their bunkers. Yet, as recent tweets, videos, and articles have demonstrated, they are oddly reckless – proof that they underestimate the extent to which their “narratives” (such as they are) no longer persuade or even matter. The tide is turning against the privileged clerical elite and their lavish lavender lifestyles.

One has to marvel at the farcical tenacity of so much denial on so many sides, and the ridiculous lengths to which people will go in the attempt to explain away obvious problems.
- When did Catholics become so delusive, so resistant to reality, so willing to do anything rather than look at the wreckage staring them in the face?
- Why do so many of us have a problem with calling a spade a spade? The only solution is when heads roll, many heads, rolling freely. Let the filth be mucked out, and let fresh air and sunlight in.

The Catholic Church is being rocked to its foundations by a scandal of Modernist apostasy of staggering proportions. We are in “2+2 = 5” territory, and the “conservative” apologists have no real response to that, which is why they insist on treating the McCarrick business as a sex scandal.

They are more concerned about a mendacious, ramshackle, unaccountable episcopate than they are about the deposit of the faith under daily assault, as it has been ever since the progressive European bishops maneuvered into control of the Second Vatican Council, strewing ambiguities and half-truths in its documents and dominating its implementation, particularly in the liturgical sphere – all of which has led us straight into the cesspool of iniquity and heresy in which we are stewing.

We have a colossal problem on our hands, yes, but it is not insurmountable. The above analysis may seem hopeless, but I am not one of those who believe that ecclesial doom is just around the corner.
- The papacy can be set right with a worthy pope.
- The episcopacy can be strengthened if that worthy pope takes action to depose and defrock bishops across the globe and replace them with men worthy of their offices.
- The seminaries can be reformed.
- The Mass of Ages can be restored.
- Catholic education can be revived.
- Catechesis can be regenerated (but not, needless to say, with the latest version of the Catechism).

You may well say: All this, any of this, would be a miracle, heaps of miracles! And I say: Yes, that’s right. Miracles do happen, and we need them now more than ever. With man, it is impossible; with God, nothing is impossible – not even the reform of the papacy, the episcopacy, and the college of cardinals.

Reform begins where it always does in the history of the Church through the ages: with faithful laity, faithful priests and deacons, faithful religious brothers and sisters, faithful bishops – men and women absolutely committed to Our Lord and to the Catholic Faith He has given us, in all of its doctrinal integrity, moral strength, and liturgical fullness.

I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem – and so should you, and every layman, religious, and cleric whom God in His Providence has put into the world at exactly this time, so that we can be part of the solution. No one needs to strut off into permanent opposition or lock down in motionless despondency. It is time to pray for divine intervention like never before, and work with all our strength and skill to make ready the coming of the Lord.

But if God means this time of extreme trial for his Church as a lesson and punishment for faithless man - a metaphysical and metaphorical Great Flood and Sodom and Gomorrah visited on us for our sins - in terms of actual time, what would correspond to the 40 days and 40 nights of the Great Flood before we can make a new beginning? The Great Flood and Sodom and Gomorrah had the great virtue of eradicating all the men who were evil. What would be the contemporary equivalent for achieving that tabula rasa?

The abuse crisis casts doubt
on the whole post-Vatican II settlement
Since 1968, Church leaders have tried to preserve a fragile truce.
But repeated compromises have fostered a culture of deceit
by Matthew Schmitz

August 16, 2018

After the allegations against Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, Cardinal Donald Wuerl told an interviewer: “I don’t think this is some massive, massive crisis.” Bishop Robert Barron has said that describing the priesthood as a “cesspool” would be “deeply unjust”.

Such claims miss the point. Men at the highest levels of the Church knew the rumours about McCarrick and took no action. As a result, the allegations have gravely damaged the credibility of the whole hierarchy. If bishops expect to be taken seriously as witnesses to Christ, the crisis is massive indeed – as the revelations from Pennsylvania underline.

Bishop Barron also cautioned against what he called an “ideological” response. According to the bishop, those who raise concerns about Humanae Vitae, priestly celibacy, or “rampant homosexuality in the Church” may be riding a “hobby horse” and causing a “distraction”.

No one cares for the endless Catholic culture wars, but we should be wary of attempts to shut down frank discussion of how we got here. Bishop Barron’s list of taboo topics suggests that he – like most bishops – is keen to preserve the settlement of 1968.

In that year, Pope Paul VI famously reaffirmed Catholic teaching on birth control in Humanae Vitae, but then declined to discipline the many bishops and priests who rejected that teaching. The result was an uneasy truce: the teaching was formally upheld, but obedience to it was not demanded.

The same dynamic played out in 2005, when the Vatican decided that men with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” should be barred from the priesthood. Countless bishops ignore this guidance; some even tolerate discreet romances. They only require that the priests not openly challenge Church teaching.

Both traditional and liberal Catholics are unhappy with this settlement. Under it, holiness and truth are sacrificed for a superficial peace. This arrangement is fair neither to the people who want to live by Church teaching, nor to those who would rather do without it.

Maintaining this truce makes sense if one is convinced that the post-Vatican II settlement is worth preserving. The McCarrick affair suggests that it is not.

Yes, conditions have improved in American seminaries. Yes, McCarrick’s reported offences occurred years ago.
- But they were known in 2000, when a delegation travelled to Rome to warn John Paul II of McCarrick’s crimes.
- They were known in 2002, when the American bishops put him forward as their spokesman on sex abuse.
- They were known when he retired to the grounds of a seminary, where he was attended by a string of young men.
Whatever one’s view of the underlying moral matter, we must do away with the compromise that established this culture of lies.

We will not be able to begin real reform until we admit that the triumphalist narratives pushed by Catholic flacks are false. Depending on whom you ask, the Catholic Church is in the midst of either a new springtime of evangelisation, initiated by St John Paul II, or a fresh paradigm of pastoral accompaniment, brought about by Pope Francis. The most skilful will explain that we are in the midst of both, and they wonderfully complement each other.

But for people in the pews, things don’t look so great. In 1955, nearly 75 per cent of American Catholics went weekly to Mass. Today, only 39 percent do. Outside of a few Latin Mass and “reform of the reform” enclaves, Mass-going Catholics suffer wrecked sanctuaries, botched liturgies and moral confusion. The springtime is hard to find.

In recent months, I have attended a Mass at which Christ was assigned gender-neutral pronouns, and one at which the homilist proposed that he may have had biological brothers and sisters. (So much for Mary’s perpetual virginity.) At another, I was invited to join a ministry that openly rejects Christian teaching on sex.

Such is the new era of evangelisation, the wondrous paradigm of pastoral accompaniment preserved by the fragile truce of 1968. Speaking as a member of what is called the JPII generation, I no longer think it is worth preserving.

Upholding Catholic teaching on paper but not in reality has led to widespread corruption and contempt for authority. Preserving the peace has required a culture of lies. This is the culture that allowed men like McCarrick to flourish. One way or another, we must sweep it away.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/08/2018 01:22]

Is anyone surprised at this morsel? Something told me not to immediately report on the reigning pope's appointment of a new deputy Secretary of State yesterday - especially as the new man, Edgar Pena Parra, was simply described as a Venezuelan archbishop who had served as Apostolic Nuncio to many countries. So, it turns out he is supposed to be a Maradiaga protege! Maybe wannabe-pope Secretary of State Pietro Parolin also got to know him while the latter was Nuncio to Venezuela. Anyway, it's all in the [Bergoglio] family, a new addition to the apostate hierarchy lording it at the Vatican.

The Catholic Church’s Rotherham
By MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY

August 15, 2018 12:26 PM

[Before anything else, an explanation of 'Rotherham' in the title of this piece: From Wikipedia -

---

The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal consisted of the organised child sexual abuse that occurred in the northern English town of Rotherham, South Yorkshire from the late 1980s until the 2010s and the failure of local authorities to act on reports of the abuse throughout most of that period. Researcher Angie Heal, who was hired by local officials and warned them about child exploitation occurring between 2002 and 2007, has since described it as the "biggest child protection scandal in UK history". Evidence of the abuse was first noted in the early 1990s, when care home managers investigated reports that children in their care were being picked up by taxi drivers. From at least 2001, multiple reports passed names of alleged perpetrators, several from one family, to the police and Rotherham Council. The first group conviction took place in 2010, when five British-Pakistani men were convicted of sexual offences against girls aged 12–16.

---

It must be noted that the Rotherham abusers were civilians who turned out to be largely British Pakistanis, so the scandal in the Pennsylvania dioceses named in the Grand Jury report released Tuesday is so much worse, because the offenders are Catholic priests and bishops who are obliged by their vocation to be holy.]

‘We are deeply saddened.” So begin the many perfunctory statements of many Catholic bishops today in response to the Pennsylvania grand-jury report detailing how priests in that state abused children and how bishops shuffled these priests around.

What deeply saddens these men? The rape of children, the systematic cover-up, or the little schemes to run out the clock on the statute of limitations? Are they saddened by the people who were so psychologically wounded by their abuse at the hands of priests that they killed themselves? What exactly are they sorry about?

Soon the bishops are telling us about a chance for “renewal” after the promised implementation of new policies. They tell us about “overcoming challenges” in the Church. Or they use the phrase “a few bad apples.”

I find it impossible not to notice that these expressions of sorrow never arrive before the courts, the state attorneys general, or the local press arrive on the scene. That fact gives you another idea about what causes the bishops’ sorrow.

Fifteen years ago Frank Keating, the former governor of Oklahoma, resigned from a panel called the National Review Board, set up by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to monitor compliance with the Church’s new anti-abuse politics. He was under intense pressure to resign because he had offended bishops when he said some of them were acting like “La Cosa Nostra,” a reference to the Sicilian Mafia.

Cardinal Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles and other prelates made a great show of detesting Keating’s remarks. Keating refused to apologize. “My remarks, which some bishops found offensive, were deadly accurate. I make no apology,” he said. “To resist grand-jury subpoenas, to suppress the names of offending clerics, to deny, to obfuscate, to explain away; that is the model of a criminal organization, not my church,” Keating said in his resignation statement.

Keating was dismissed as a crank. Hadn’t every consultant and auditor given the the Church’s anti-abuse policies hearty endorsements? Wasn’t it routinely described as a model of safety?

Of course, Keating was right. Mahoney was later exposed as having engaged in an energetic attempt to cover up the truth about his own diocese. He shielded predators from law enforcement and even argued that the personnel files of the archdiocese were protected by the seal of the confessional.

This season is a new round of exposure for Catholic bishops, particularly those who have sold themselves as part of the solution to the Church’s abuse crisis.
- Cardinal Seán O’Malley, who is supposed to have cleaned up in Boston and heads the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, is now trying to explain how it was that he fobbed off a credible report substantiating the well-known reputation of D.C. cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
- Cardinal Donald Wuerl, McCarrick’s successor and a former bishop of Pittsburgh, has always bragged about his record of being a no-nonsense administrator, someone who even fought with the Vatican to have abusive priests removed from ministry. The latest news paints a slightly different picture.

The Pennsylvania grand-jury report names hundreds of predator priests across seven decades of life in six Catholic diocese in the state. Some of the details in the report are so vile and lurid they would have been rejected from the writer’s room of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.

They include priests “marking” their preferred boy-victims with special crosses, priests trading and compiling their own homemade child pornography. At one point in the report, a large redaction is made over what appears to be, in context, a ritualized and satanic gang-rape of a young boy by four priests.

The report implicates bishops of every persuasion. A fastidious conservative such as Bishop James Timlin of Scranton would not allow himself to be seated near the pro-choice Catholic MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews at a commencement ceremony, but in this report he is found writing a consoling letter to one of his priests, a priest who had just raped an underaged girl and arranged for the abortion of his own child. The tone of the letter would be no different if he were writing a priest grieving a deceased grandparent."There there, son, I know it hurts".

We don’t need your sadness, we don’t need new policies. We need better men.

The liberal bishop Donald Wuerl, then of Pittsburgh, does seem to take a hard line in some cases of clerical abuse. But in ones that preceded him, he takes a different approach.

When an abusive priest who had been shuffled out of his diocese reports back to Wuerl’s office that he has information on other abusive priests operating in the Pittsburgh diocese and will inform on them if his stipend is increased, Wuerl advises the priest to write a letter in which he disavows any knowledge of the aforementioned illegal sexual activity. In exchange his stipend is increased.

Wuerl did not implement a zero-tolerance policy against clerical sexual misbehavior; what he instituted was a zero-liability policy for the diocese and a zero-responsibility policy for himself. Wuerl outlined exactly what he did not want to know, and rewarded the man who kept him in ignorance.

Wuerl, who in a recent interview suggested that there was no real crisis in the Church, greeted the release of the grand-jury report with the launch of a website designed by a crisis-public-relations firm, touting his good reputation.

If the events outlined in the Pennsylvania grand-jury report had happened among Pakistani immigrants, rather than the Catholic clergy, the perpetrators would be called a grooming gang. If we treated the Catholic Church the same way as the British public treated the grooming gangs of Rotherham in South Yorkshire, we would be asking tough questions about the culture that produces abuse on this scale. We would ask questions about what twisted form of political correctness dissuaded law enforcement from identifying and confronting the criminal network until now. We might be debating our immigration policy, and possibly shutting down our embassies in the countries from which this gang receives support and reinforcements.

In fact, much of that would be the correct response. The Vatican has previously tried investigating and reporting on America’s Catholic seminaries, offering recommendations on how to fix them. The recommendations were not only weak, but mostly ignored.
- Not a single American bishop has emerged from reviewing the records in his chancery offices and apologized before the cops, the courts, and the news media arrived to ask about the revelations.
- Not a single bishop has publicly demanded that one of his brother bishops resign after being exposed for playing games with the statute of limitations.
- They knew about the powerful cardinal who preyed upon seminarians, they know about the decadent culture of the seminaries where priests are trained. And they tell themselves there is nothing they could really have done about it.

The problem of sexual abuse and blackmail in the Church isn’t reducible to “policy,” and the promises made by bishops to make policy changes should be greeted with extreme cynicism. The problem is personnel. For a number of reasons, the Catholic priesthood has selected for sexual deviancy. Bishops have been selected for their ability to manage legal and social risk, rather than their ability to govern and lead a religious organization.

As one smart canon lawyer put it, men don’t rise through the ranks of the Catholic Church, they are pulled upward by those above them. High-ranking churchmen select for men who make peace with this sexualized culture in the priesthood. They prize collegiality rather than exacting holiness, or even competence.

Cardinal Wuerl was selected by the pope to sit on the powerful Congregation of Bishops, which helps recommend to the pope new candidates for the office of bishop. It’s time we ask why he was deemed suitable for this task.

Other state attorneys general should do investigations like Pennsylvania’s. As a Catholic, I’m tired of waiting for the next red slipper to drop. If the Church cannot govern itself from within, then it will be governed from without. That’s not a policy, but the iron law of history.

“We are deeply saddened,” they say. Spare us this fake public-relations drivel. We don’t need your sadness, we don’t need new policies. We need better men.

John Zmirak: Faithful Catholics
must withhold donations to the Church
And corrupt bishops involved in sex abuse cover-ups must be imprisoned

August 15, 2018

John Zmirak, senior editor at The Stream and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism, advocated use of financial pressure against the Catholic Church to address the sexual abuse scandal following Tuesday’s grand jury report regarding a systematic cover-up of sexual abuse in Pennsylvania dioceses.

Zmirak also called for the imprisonment of priests found guilty of sexual abuse crimes and the bishops who covered it up, during a Wednesday interview with Breitbart News Senior Editors-at-Large Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News

Zmirak noted that the current revelations emerged because “[t]he attorney general of Pennsylvania did what I wish the attorneys general of 49 other states would do. He went into the decades-old criminal conspiracy of Catholic bishops to cover up sexual abuse of minors, mostly boys in their teen years, by priests. Eighty percent of the crimes were against boys, and most of them were between 14 and 17, so it really is mostly a homosexual scandal of post-pubescent boys. It’s not a pedophile scandal.”

Zmirak added, “Unfortunately, for some segments of the gay community, it’s par for the course to cruise for teenagers, and those kinds of men seem to be the ones who are filling the seminaries. The statistics on priests that I’ve read, according to the John Jay report that the Catholic bishops paid for themselves — they weren’t thrilled with the results — [are that] between 18 and 58 percent of Catholic priests are homosexual. That’s compared to two percent of the population at large, so there’s seriously a problem.”

Zmirak examined the relationship between the Catholic priesthood’s celibacy requirement and sexual abuse of children and teenagers by priests.

“I think a large part of the problem is that not that many young men who are straight are willing to be celibate and be priests,” assessed Zmirak. “In past decades, men were willing to do it because it was better than working in the coal mines [or] being a subsistence farmer. They were willing to make the sacrifice. Not that many men are willing to be celibate, but you have a fair number of men who are willing to pretend to be celibate.”

“We have seminaries full of gay men who are practising with each other, who are being seduced by their gay seminary teachers or the rector of their seminary,” remarked Zmirak.

“The former cardinal archbishop of Washington, DC, Theodore McCarrick, would get seminarians to go in bed with him and call him ‘Uncle Ted,'” recalled Zmirak. “If they were willing to cuddle with him and do more than that, he would promote them up the chain to become priests and bishops themselves.”

Zmirak continued, “One of McCarrick’s proteges is Cardinal [Donald] Wuerl, the current archbishop of Washington, DC. … The report that came out yesterday is just staggering, and for which I have to thank the attorney general of Pennsylvania. He did a service to the country, and also unwittingly to the church. Cardinal Wuerl, who presented himself as a big fighter of sex abuse, it turns out that he paid hush money to a priest who was removed from service because of his addiction to child pornography. He paid that man an income for like 20 years, and when that man wanted more money, one of the conditions Cardinal Wuerl put on him was basically that it be hush money; that he not reveal details.”

Zmirak went on, “In case after case after after case, the [attorney general] found that the church purposely ran out the clock on the cases so that they would miss the statute of limitation, and therefore the predators would never be prosecuted. Most of these predators continue to be on the church’s dime.”

Zmirak highlighted an instance of a sex-related cover-up involving a teenaged girl impregnated by a priest.

“Now, many of the worst bishops were the liberal bishops, but there were some conservative bishops who were terrible, too,” said Zmirak. “Archbishop Timlin of Scranton, who was the guy who brought back the Latin Mass to Pennsylvania and claimed to be loudly pro-life, well, one priest statutorily raped a 17-year-old girl, got her pregnant, and pressured her for an abortion which he paid for. What did Timlin do? He left the man in the priesthood, moved him to another parish, and wrote him a very sympathetic note about what a difficult time he must be going through.”

Zmirak added, “There are cases in there of priests engaged in sadomasochistic rituals that involve the desecration of Eucharist and involve getting naked boys to pose like Christ on the cross; diabolical stuff.”

“If you were a sex pervert, and you’re in a religious environment all the time, your perversions are going to take on a religious flavor,” surmised Zmirak. “It’s not that surprising. … I think it’s perfectly plausible that somebody who never had any place in the priesthood in the first place and joined for cynical reasons is going to be cynical and perverse in the way he treats these things. You see anti-Catholic sacrilegious things in the gay community regularly; you see men dressed up in leather outfits as nuns [and] men dressed in leather clothes with a priest collar.”

“[These are not] repressed and recovered memories,” noted Zmirak. “All the attorney general did was get the church’s own internal documents. All they did was open their files.”

Zmirak stated, “All they care about is money and reputation. Any organization can operate like a cult [and] fall into cult-like behavior. This was cult-like behavior. This was mafia-like behavior. I do think that the homosexual takeover of the Catholic priesthood has been a serious problem, where 80 percent of the sex abuse is of teenage boys.”

Mansour noted, “We’re talking about 301 abuser priests, and we’re talking about over 1000 victims. This is over a period of 70 years. The majority of the abusers that we’re talking about are currently dead. Over 90 percent of them are dead. Full disclosure here, most of these things are in the past. Some of the bishops, especially Archbishop Wuerl — now Cardinal Wuerl — are alive, and he needs to answer very clearly. He needs to have his red hat gone, and he needs to go to jail. He needs to be in a yellow jumpsuit. … This is a problem of secrecy and cover-up, and worrying about the institution instead of the victims.”

Zmirak recommended using financial pressure against the Catholic Church to compel its improvement. He also asserted that any panel assembled to investigate the abuse and provide solutions must be run by Catholic laity, not the bishops or priests.

“I want Catholic millionaires who donate to the church on [a] panel [to investigate the abuse], and I want that panel to be wielding the sword of money. … Grab these people by the purse strings and squeeze,” Zmirak said. “Remember, 40 percent of the bishops’ money comes from government contracts serving immigrants through Catholic nonprofits, charities, and relief services. We need to press the Congress to redirect the money away from Catholic nonprofits, because they are keeping the church alive like morphine [or] methadone. They’re keeping the church stoned, but barely alive.”


Zmirak added, “We also need to put some of these bishops in prison. I would like to see federal RICO charges filed against the bishops who were involved in a criminal conspiracy to cover up the abuse of children [and] the distribution of child pornography. There were real crimes here, and I don’t think a damn thing is going to change until at least one — but preferably two or three — bishops are rotting in federal in state prison.”

Mansour noted that Pope Benedict XVI did “a lot to clean up the situation” with the sexual abuse scandal in the Church “for the brief time that he had” as pope, “and he got railroaded, by the way, by the Vatican cabal.”

Zmirak said Pope Francis is unwilling to appropriately address sexual abuse scandals within the Catholic Church.

“[This won’t] happen under Pope Francis, because the Lavender Mafia are the ones who elected him,” appraised Zmirak. “Cardinal Wuerl and Cardinal McCarrick were big boosters of Pope Francis. The guy he appoints vice pope, Cardinal Maradiaga — this Marxist from Honduras — he is heavily involved in covering up sex abuse. This is the Pope of the sex abuse lobby, so while he’s in there, nothing’s going to get fixed.”

“We’re just going to have to wait for God to call him home, and then maybe the next pope will fix things, but I’m not going to wait for the church to fix it,” added Zmirak. “I want Caesar to fix it. We’ve got to put these guys in jail, take away their federal funding, laymen need to cut off their donations.”

Zmirak considered the ordaining of married men: “Start letting married men of good character take training in theology and ordain them to serve, unpaid, as sort of emergency priests, to say Mass. … More normal men would be willing to be priests if they didn’t have to pretend to be celibate.”

“The only people I knew that considered the priesthood, the only seminarians that I knew, all turned out to be gay,” added Zmirak. “They were all conservatives, Latin Mass guys. Thankfully, only one of them got ordained.”

“[Homosexual men] should not be ordained,” advised Zmirak. “Not in our pansexual society. You don’t put gay men in an all-male environment any more than you send men out with 16-year-old girl scouts into the woods. You don’t put people where they’re likely to be tempted. The all-male environment of the priesthood, this is not hypothetical, it has become a gay bath house atmosphere in one seminary after another; even the conservative seminaries.”

“Celibacy is not the only issue, but it seems to be a decisive issue right now,” determined Zmirak. “It seems to be that the Catholic priesthood has become a gay refuge. Compare the statistics: two percent of the general population versus a minimum of 15 to 18 percent and a maximum of 58 percent. Those are all statistics from the church’s own study. Fifty-eight percent was the highest estimate that Catholic researchers came up with based on their surveys.”

Zmirak said cleansing the Catholic church of sexually abusive priests will garner political support from faithful members of the Catholic laity. He noted the reluctance of government officials to hold Cardinal Roger Mahony, the former archbishop of Los Angeles, accountable for his role in covering up sexual abuse.

“The prosecutors thought they would be seen as anti-Catholic and that it would lose them votes. What they need to see now is that it is pro-Catholic. They’re doing the church a favor, and ordinary Catholics will be grateful to see these bishops in handcuffs and orange jumpsuits if this is the stuff they’ve been doing. I guarantee you it will turn out, if this is the last thing that’s going to protect the church, that Caesar has to step in to save the church from its own corrupt bishops, and frankly, its own corrupt pope. Frankly, I really think there’s no political downside. They need to put on their big boy pants and start locking these people up.”

Zmirak concluded, “Unfortunately, now, the pope is not on our side. The pope is not on the side of cleaning this up.”

RORATE NAILS IT:
Did pope-saints oversee
the most massive sex scandal in history?
by Michael Matt
Editor

August 15, 2018

Commenting on the horrific revelations out of Pennsylvania this week, Rorate Caeli's New Catholic provides much-needed context for this massive scandal. Here's the 900-pound gorilla in the parlor:

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...The greatest part of the horrid episodes documented by the Grand Jury report happened in the pontificates of John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II. Some happened before. But as the Church "opened itself to the world", according to the desire of John XXIII, worldly behaviors infiltrated the Church more and more. The horrid episodes represent only what could be found in just six dioceses of one state of one country: the putrefaction runs wide and deep.

How could John XXIII and John Paul II have been canonized? Their systematic failures in the naming of bishops were monstrous. How can Francis dare beatify and now canonize Paul VI, one of the worst popes in history, whose nominations throughout the world, and in the United States, managed to make what was bad truly awful?

Let us be honest: as administrators, John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II were no saints. They may have been validly included in the list of saints, but their express-rite canonizations are shown, with each passing week, to have been horrible mistakes. A considerable period of time and long investigations of their grave omissions and of their disgraceful cover-up of perverted or irresponsible bishops should have taken place before any beatification procedure had ever been opened up.
- The centralization of the administration of the Church went much deeper in their pontificates.
- They assumed the responsibility for each of these small faithful. - They diluted the responsibility of bishops by encouraging and engorging the useless bureaucracies of the bishops' conferences.
- These little faithful, the children who were abused, were also THEIR failures, the failures of each one of them (and also of preceding and succeeding popes in a lesser degree, but these are either living or have not been beatified or canonized).

The time will surely come in the future to reassess these failed pontificates and to do all that is possible to reevaluate these hasty procedures, in which so much pain and so much failure and so much corruption were overlooked.

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The Remnant covered this [recent history of the Church] step by step and blow by blow every two weeks for fifty-one years, and we couldn't agree more with our friends at Rorate Caeli.

In fact, out of near-frantic concern over the future ramifications of a rushed canonization of the very popes in charge during the massive clerical sex scandal, we were among those begging the Vatican to slow down their ill-advised papal saint-making factory. We got nowhere, of course, but we tried.

So now what's going to happen, as another dozen States announce plans to follow Pennsylvania's lead and investigate those responsible for sex crimes in the Catholic Church over the past fifty years?

What will they say about the big "santo subito" movement, so long on emotion and yet short on common sense? We'll see.

But what is beyond doubt is that in its rush to elevate its heroes and canonize its revolution, the Church of Vatican II has severely diminished not only the Church’s venerable canonization process, but also the very idea of sanctity itself.

The Communion of Saints — not unlike the Roman Rite — has become something of a joke, complete with plenty of Halo Awards for the famous, and decrees of excommunication for the faithful.

Remind me again: In the middle of this post-conciliar nuclear winter, why should any faithful Catholic feel obliged to defend the toxic "springtime" of the Second Vatican Council or its increasingly controversial architects?

The Catholic Church’s sex abuse
scandal is a crisis of faith
We don’t need more bland expressions of sorrow from bishops. We need
public penance, resignations, and a new generation of Church leaders
By John Daniel Davidson
THE FEDERALIST
August 16, 2018

The Pennsylvania grand-jury report released Tuesday is difficult to read. It not only details widespread sexual abuse of boys and girls by Catholic priests over the past 70 years, it also reveals a systematic coverup by Catholic bishops across the state.

More than 1,000 children were abused by hundreds of priests, scores of whom were protected by bishops, transferred to new dioceses, or promoted. The scathing 884-page report is one of the most comprehensive investigations ever into the Catholic Church’s ongoing sex-abuse scandal.
- There is the priest who raped a seven-year-old girl in the hospital after she’d had her tonsils out.
- There is the priest who raped a girl, got her pregnant, then arranged for an abortion.
- There is the ring of priests in the Pittsburgh diocese who “shared intelligence or information regarding victims,” created child pornography and exchanged victims among themselves, using “whips, violence and sadism in raping their victims.”
It goes on and on, and it is sickening.

Then there is the insidious evil of the bishops who covered up this abuse.
- The bishop in the Diocese of Erie who, despite a priest’s admission that he had assaulted at least a dozen boys, wrote to thank him for “all you have done for God’s people … The Lord, who sees in private, will reward.”
- Or the bishop in Scranton, writing to the priest who had arranged for an abortion for his victim, “This is a very difficult time in your life, and I realize how upset you are. I too share your grief.”

Indeed, the church hierarchy’s efforts to cover up abuse are the most salient aspect of the report. As Chad C. Pecknold, a professor at the Catholic University of America, told The Wall Street Journal, “Previously, everyone understood that abuse was rampant, and that the church worked hard to try to resolve the problem. What was not clear before, and is clear now, is how many bishops worked just as hard to cover things up.”

The response from U.S. bishops has thus far been tepid and self-serving. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released a bland statement that could have come from any nameless PR firm. “We are profoundly saddened each time we hear about the harm caused as a result of abuse, at the hands of a clergyman of any rank,” it reads. “We are committed to work in determined ways so that such abuse cannot happen.”

Such language echoes the weak response from U.S. bishops recently to revelations of misconduct by former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who resigned last month amid allegations he had for years sexually abused boys and had sexual relations with adult seminarians.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl, successor to McCarrick in the Archdiocese of Washington DC and a former bishop of Pittsburgh for 18 years, has long touted himself as a tough reformer in the clerical abuse crisis. But the grand jury report casts doubt on his conduct in Pittsburgh, detailing at least one case in which he appears to have rewarded an abusive priest for keeping silent about other abusive priests in the diocese.

Such revelations have been met with spin from church leaders. On Tuesday night, the Archdiocese of Washington D.C. launched a slick PR website, TheWuerlRecord.com, defending Wuerl’s handling of abuse over the years. As of this writing, the website had been taken down amid criticism.

This is not what one expects from the successors to the apostles, from men who are “living instruments of Christ the eternal priest,” in the words of Vatican II. A Catholic priest is not a religious bureaucrat authorized to conduct church business, but a living icon of Christ himself, one who stands in persona Christi, “in the person of Christ,” making Christ physically present in the church.

Bishops are both priests and overseers of the local parishes for which they are responsible. They are the shepherds, the protectors, and they have manifestly failed.

What should faithful Catholics conclude from all this? In the coming days and weeks we will no doubt hear, as we have ever since the scandal first broke in 2002, that the problem is with the church itself, with its backward teachings about the celibacy of the priesthood and homosexuality and a host of other things. We will hear calls for the church to change, to become more like progressive Protestant churches that have made peace with moral relativism and ever-shifting doctrine.

All such criticism gets the crisis exactly backwards. The crisis did not arise from the teachings of the Catholic Church, it arose from the abandonment of those teachings by a faction of U.S. priests, bishops, and theologians amid the ferment of the sexual revolution in the 1960s and ‘70s. More than anything, the sex abuse crisis in the church stems from the “culture of dissent” that prevailed in seminaries and dioceses across the country during this time.

What were these church leaders dissenting from? From the church’s teachings, elucidated in Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, on contraception, marriage, sexuality — the very things progressives and dissenters today say the church should abandon.

Yes, some in the church did abandon those teachings, with the result that they lost sight of what a priest is and what a bishop is and what their solemn duties are. Throughout the 1960s and ‘70s in particular, droves of priests renounced their vows and left the church, while others remained in active ministry but indulged themselves, taking on sexual partners, fathering children, and as we know now, abusing innocent children. All the while, prominent theologians were giving them intellectual cover by promoting a culture of dissent within the church.

The crisis, in other words, is not a crisis of Catholic teaching or tradition. It is a crisis of fidelity to that teaching and tradition — it is a crisis of faith.

As for what should happen now, a rising generation of Catholics are demanding more than bland apologies from bishops: They want action. Earlier this month, First Things published an open letter from 44 young Catholics — journalists, academics, and activists — addressed to church leaders and asking for “a thorough, independent investigation into claims of abuse by Archbishop McCarrick, both of minors and of adults.”

“We want to know who in the hierarchy knew about his crimes, when they knew it, and what they did in response,” the letter continues. “This is the least that would be expected of any secular organization; it should not be more than we can expect from the Church.”

The letter asks for the silence about sexual impropriety among clergy to be broken, for bishops to take clear action against priests who flout the church’s teaching on sexuality, and for good priests to be given the freedom to tell their bishops what they know without fear of reprisals. It also asks that “bishops engage in formal acts of public penance and reparation.”

In contrast to the measured tone of the letter, which was published before the grand-jury report was made public this week, the reaction to the report on social media has been more blunt, and the outrage is palpable. Sohrab Ahmari of Commentary called for sackcloth and ashes. National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty replied, “Then the guillotine.”

Rev. William Dailey wrote on Twitter, “Many of us have been saying since 2002 that what needed to happen then, in Dallas, was not a new policy but mass resignations of bishops to acknowledge their utter failure — as individuals but acting in concert — to protect children. Today’s report is an emetic reminder of that.”

I was received into the Holy Roman Catholic Church this past Easter. Some might think it an odd time for someone like me, raised as a Protestant evangelical, to submit to Rome. After all, the church has been embroiled in a sex abuse scandal for more than 15 years, a crisis that has exposed horrifying sin and corruption — evil, in fact — within the ranks of its priests and bishops. Why would someone join the Catholic Church at a time like this?

The answer is simple. I did not join the church because I think its leaders are more holy or sinless than those of Protestant denominations, or because I prefer its style of worship and ritual, or even because I believe it does more good works than other Christian churches. I sought full communion with the Catholic Church because I believe all that it teaches to be true.

Among those teachings — in fact right at the heart of them — is the reality of sin: There is something wrong in the heart of man, and there always has been. That includes priests and bishops. Saint Paul himself warned of predators in the church. In his farewell to the Ephesians he wrote, “I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves men will arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them.”

Paul was echoing Christ, who warned of “false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” That wolves have stolen in among Christ’s flock is nothing new, nor does it mean that the deposit of faith Christ imparted to his church is somehow lacking or in need of an update.
- We don’t need new teachings any more than we need new PR statements from our bishops.
- Instead, we need public penance — truly, sackcloth and ashes.
- We need bishops to demand the resignations of their brother bishops who were complicit in this evil.
- We need thoroughgoing reform of corrupt seminaries across the country.
- And if the leaders of the Catholic Church in America will not do these things, then we need Rome to intervene. [What? The 'Rome' of Bergoglio, O'Malley and their ilk who are all talk and no do? One may have to wait till Hell freezes over.]

I have not been checking out Fr Kirk lately, but two recent posts regarding Bergoglio's outrageous single-handed 'revision' to the Catechism of the Catholic Church are quite typical of his cogent views.

Catechetical

August 5, 2018

What is the status of the Catechism of the Catholic Church?

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was clear at the time of its promulgation. Things are not true because they are in the Catechism; they are in the Catechism because they are true.

The very text bears this out. As the invaluable Ignatius Press Commentary amply demonstrates, the Catechism is rich in references, not only to Holy Scripture, but also to wide-ranging authorities in the unfolding tradition.

Interestingly, Article 2266 on capital punishment, is sparsely attested in this way. Nor does the new rescript do much better: Pope Francis, it appears has no one to cite but himself!

So what are we to make of the recent revision, which the CDF assures us is a ‘development’ – not a novelty – and [supposedly] accords closely with the teaching of St John Paul II?

The argumentation in favour of the change is, I think, very instructive. Here we encounter, once again, our old enemy the Whig View of History, with its repetitive but false syllogism: ‘that was then…but this is now’.

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‘Today, however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes. In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state.’

‘Lastly, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.’

‘Consequently, the Church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide’.

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Note the catena of unwarranted assumptions.
- That in past ages and in cultures other than the post-Enlightenment West, capital punishment can never have been an assertion of the ‘dignity of the person’. Or indeed that those ages and cultures were denied the awareness of that dignity altogether.
- That systems of detention are now universally not only protective of innocent citizens, but also safe and secure for those lengthily detained.
- That capital punishment, contrary to the Church’s perennial belief in judgement and possible redemption beyond death, deprives those who are so punished of that possibility.
- That ‘the Gospel’ (and if so where?) abrogates the provisions of the Mosaic Law in this matter.
And note also the unclarity of the last clause. If the death penalty is ‘inadmissible’, what of those, in states which retain it, who are involved in its administration. Are they, like lawyers, medical practitioners and legislators who administer and assist abortion, guilty of mortal sin?

This list of unsupported assumptions, concluding with a statement which, on closer examination, proves less than pellucid, strikes one as typical of the pronouncements of this pontificate.

The CCC was hailed by Pope Benedict as a tool in ecumenical discussions and made the foundation stone of the Ordinariates. It was, in the Spirit of Vatican II, a collegial work of many hands. If it is now to be revised by one hand and with Papal authority alone its status (and perhaps that of the Papacy) has surely been fundamentally changed.

It does not take much imagination, on the precedent of 2266, to see radical changes to other entries – 2357-9, 1649-51, and 1577-8 for a start. [These sections have to do with, respectively, homosexuality; the indissolubility of marriage, the sinful character of divorce and civil remarriage and why communion must be withheld, and the Church's 'attentive solicitude' so that persons who find themselves in such a situation will not feel separated from the Church.]

Fr Kirk's extrapolation of one significant consequence of Bergoglio's death penalty dictum is very pertinent indeed. I doubt that the Bergoglio Vatican has any answer to this.

The 'cash value' of
the pope's death penalty rescript

August 6, 2018

Whilst theologians and canon lawyers dispute the meaning of ‘inadmissible’ (‘non posse admitti’), the rest of us need to ask: what is the cash value of the recent rescript of para 2277 of the Catholic Catechism?

‘Atque Ipsa devovet se eidemque per omnem orbem abolendae’. ["and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide"). Quite. But what does that mean in practical terms?

For example: China holds the world’s record for judicial executions – the estimated number was 2,400 in 2013, though the total number remains a state secret.
- How will this affect Vatican diplomacy in the present negotiations about the appointment of bishops?
- Can the Holy See be seen to do business with a regime which ostentatiously admits the ’inadmissible’?

I think we will see that it can*. And that the matter is not raised in the delicate talks which ensue.

The fact is that the rescript of 2277 is mere virtue signalling for the benefit of a Western audience and media.

‘His autem temporibus magis magisque agnoscitur dignitatem personae nullius amitti posse.’["Today, however, there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes".) Which is to say: Look at us – at last we are catching up![with the rest of the world].

*"Right now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese", said Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

And on Fr Rosica's vertiginously over-the-top valuation of Bergoglio as the 'individual' who rules the Church above and beyond Scripture and Tradition:



Dictator pope indeed

August 15, 2018

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Pope Francis breaks Catholic traditions whenever he wants, because he is “free from disordered attachments.” Our Church has indeed entered a new phase: with the advent of this first Jesuit pope, it is openly ruled by an individual rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture.

---

So Fr Thomas Rosica on his website ‘Salt and Light’ (aka ‘Sulphur and Brimstone’).

Critics of the present Pope have not been backward in coming forward [in books like To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism; The Political Pope: How Pope Francis Is Delighting the Liberal Left and Abandoning Conservatives; Lost Shepherd: How Pope Francis is Misleading His Flock; etc.)

But none, not even Henry Sire (The Dictator Pope), has been so damningly forthright as Fr Rosica.

If anyone wants to understand the temper of this pontificate, here is the clue. It is a dictatorship careless of due process, for which scripture, tradition (and even the magisterium of recently sainted predecessors) is a mere irrelevance.

There has indeed been a ‘paradigm shift’. All authority, it is being said, is now vested in one man, who is, in himself, the summation of history and the key to the future. (The very claims, as I recall, that Hermann made about Adolf.)

What Vatican I, with its carefully crafted doctrine of Infallibility, and Vatican II, with its doctrine of episcopal collegiality, sought to establish has been swept away. Papolatry rules OK!

Why little Tommy Rosica should choose to spill the beans in this way, when Francis himself is so tentative, faltering and ambiguous, is anybody’s guess. But to blame it all on Ignatius Loyola is surely a fantasy too far.

And Fr Kirk does a great reductio ad absurdum for an argument advanced by the cardinal who lived for six years with McCarrick as his vicar in Washington yet never heard a word at all about McCarrick's sordid sexploits...

Don’t you see?

July 19, 2018

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Cardinal Kevin Farrell, prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, said that ‘priests are not the best people to train others for marriage…they have no credibility; they have never lived the experience.’

---

Now that Cardinal Farrell has explained it to those of us who are slow on the uptake, we can see clearly why Jesus’s views on so many things which are currently controverted can be ignored with equanimity. It was lack of relevant experience, don’t you see?
- He cannot be trusted on the sanctity of marriage simply because he was not married.
- We can ignore his (and St Paul’s) attitude to homosexuality because (so far as we know) they were not gay.
- And both their opinions about the World Cup can be discounted for the simple reason they had never played professional football.

Once you see it, it makes absolute sense.

Of course, what Farrell did not seem to realize when he shot from the lip is that his dictum could be applied with devastating effect to most things - secular and religious - that his idol Bergoglio blabbers about all the time.

I do not find Christopher Altieri's metaphor for the current situation of the US bishops vis-a-vis clerical/episcopal sex abuse (McCarrick scandal) and the knowing complicity of bishops (Pennsylvania Grand Jury report) appropriate. I had to look it up - the November 1957 meeting of 105 Mafia bosses from all over the United States in Binghamton, NY, thenceforth known as the Apalachin meeting, is said to have been the moment when the American Mafia was first brought to the public eye. (55 of the men were arrested before they could flee, and 20 of them were criminally charged and found guilty of “conspiring to obstruct justice, by lying about the nature of the underworld meeting.” )

The McCarrick-Pennsylvania Grand Jury report conjunction is hardly the first time that the 'misdeeds' of some American bishops have been brought to the public eye - just that this time there is widespread acknowledgment even from the US bishops themselves of facts that had long been known by them but deliberately suppressed for reasons unworthy of any Christian, least of all of any ordained minister of God.

The US bishops' 'Apalachin moment' has arrived
An Apostolic Visitation of the Church in the US is destined to fail
if its scope is limited to McCarrick, even if it illuminates
every dark corner in which McCarrick’s baleful influence is hiding
Analysis
by Christopher Altieri

August 16, 2018

The Press Office of the Holy See has issued a statement in response to the Grand Jury Report released in Pennsylvania earlier this week, expressing “shame and sorrow” over the contents of the report, while praising the efforts of Church leaders to implement reforms.

“Most of the discussion in the report concerns abuses before the early 2000s,” the statement reads. “By finding almost no cases after 2002, the Grand Jury’s conclusions are consistent with previous studies showing that Catholic Church reforms in the United States drastically reduced the incidence of clergy child abuse.”

The statement goes on to say, “The Holy See encourages continued reform and vigilance at all levels of the Catholic Church, to help ensure the protection of minors and vulnerable adults from harm.” The statement from the Press Office also expresses the Holy See’s desire “to underscore the need to comply with the civil law, including mandatory child abuse reporting requirements.”

Pope Francis did not speak to the scandal in his remarks to the faithful at Wednesday’s Angelus prayer on the Solemnity of the Assumption, while the Press Office of the Holy See kept silence and declined requests for comment for more than two full days after Pennsylvania authorities released a redacted version of the report, which nevertheless runs to 1,356 pages.

The President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, issued his own statement on Thursday, calling for an Apostolic Visitation of the Church in the US.

Prominent voices from across the spectrum of Catholic opinion found the Vatican’s two days’ silence perplexing and consternating.

CNN quoted Massimo Faggioli, Professor of Historical Theology at Villanova University and a columnist for La Croix International [and unabashed apologist for Bergoglio], as saying, “I don’t think they understand in Rome that this is not just a continuation of the sexual abuse crisis in the United States... This is a whole different chapter. There should be people in Rome telling the Pope this information, but they are not, and that is one of the biggest problems in this pontificate — and it’s getting worse.”

First Things editor Matthew Schmitz told CNN, “[Francis] needs to act now by authorizing a full investigation of the American hierarchy.”

“Victims should know that the Pope is on their side,” the Vatican statement says. “Those who have suffered are his priority, and the Church wants to listen to them to root out this tragic horror that destroys the lives of the innocent.”

Meanwhile, news outlets continue to divulge the report’s findings, while analysis largely confines itself to sifting details and connecting dots, and commentary ranges in tone and substance from heartbroken plaint to heartbroken rage.

The ball is now in the Holy Father’s court, and while his next plays are anyone’s guess, one thing is certain: Pope Francis can ill afford to ignore either the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report or the enormous groundswell of ire, which threatens the foundations of the Church. His moral authority — already greatly diminished by his handling of the crisis in Chile and his apparent paralysis with regard to the scandal-ridden “C9” Council of Cardinal Advisers he chose to spearhead the curial reform that was supposed to be the hallmark of his springtime pontificate — risks permanent compromise with each passing day.

The damage is not only — not even primarily — to this pope or to his pontificate, but to the Office. The papacy has enjoyed greater and lesser esteem through the centuries, though rarely has the efficacy of the institution so much depended upon public regard of it, as today.

The question is: does Pope Francis have the stuff to do what circumstances require?

He does not seem to be interested in institutional reform, yet it is institutional reform the hierarchy needs. As I put it at earlier this year in an analysis piece for the Catholic World Report:

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2017 was a year in which the micro-fissures in the structure began to be visible to the naked eye. 2018 is likely to be the year in which it becomes clear that major structural reform (or engine rebuilding, depending on one’s preferred analogy) cannot be postponed.

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In an earlier piece, addressing the specific issue of reform of the Roman Curia — or rather the lack of progress in reform, I noted how it struck me that Pope Francis did not seem concerned with it so much as he did with the spiritual renewal of Curial officials [A wrong-headed view, I think, because anything Bergoglio says about 'spiritual' renewal is really mere lip service. The only 'spiritual renewal' that would work with the bad eggs in the Curia would be to fire them - but there have been no significant Curial firings en masse in the past five and a half years - so they stop corrupting or undermining the honest work of conscientious Curial servants.]

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Spiritual reform, reform of the soul, repentance, conversion, healing, receptiveness to grace, and docility to the promptings of conscience: all these are essential to the life of every Christian, and only more so to the lives of those Christians who are called to assist the Universal Pastor in his governance of the Universal Church. Even so, the Roman Curia is a bureaucracy, and would be a bureaucracy if it were staffed and run by living saints. It is one thing to undertake a reform of a bureaucracy. It is quite another to undertake a reform of bureaucrats.

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Fr. Thomas Rosica published an essay a few weeks ago, in which he attempted to say something about what difference having a Jesuit pope has made:

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Pope Francis breaks Catholic traditions whenever he wants because he is “free from disordered attachments.” Our Church has indeed entered a new phase: with the advent of this first Jesuit pope, it is openly ruled by an individual rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture.

---

Those remarks are ill considered (and have since been edited), even as an exercise in sycophancy. Their facile parroting of SJ argot does not touch the crux of the matter, which is rather a tension built into the Jesuit character and ethos, for good and for ill. Here is how I placed the matter in another essay for the Catholic World Report:

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The Society of Jesus has never — not for one single hour of one single day since the promulgation of Regimini militantis — had an unproblematic relationship with the hierarchical leadership of the Church. Ignatius wanted his men to be stalwart “Pope’s men” and at one and the same time fearless theological envelope-pushers. The whole Jesuit charism is ordered to the right management — in the Company and in the souls of its members — of the tension that arises instantly and inevitably when those two poles are activated. …

The long and the short of it is that, when you put a Jesuit at the head of the hierarchical leadership of the Church, you risk either collapsing that tension, or exploding it. That is one major reason why we never had a Jesuit Pope before now, and it goes a long way toward explaining why we are in the situation, in which we find ourselves, for good and for ill.

---

Francis, in other words, does not trust institutions — certainly not to reform themselves — and in any case does not seem to know how to run one, except to run it as though it were a Jesuit province and he its superior. At the same time, he trusts the charism of office in a manner ill-befitting a man, whose job is to oversee and discipline the officeholders.

This mismatched mode of trusting was on display in his painfully forthright remarks to pilgrims regarding the sorely tried diocese of Osorno, made on the sidelines of a weekly General Audience in May, 2015, after several months of agitation over the nomination of a bishop to the see, widely believed to have been complicit in the systematic abuse of minors and the coverup of that abuse. “The Osorno community is suffering because it’s dumb,” he told the group. Francis generally has been too willing to take the word of bishops over that of the lay faithful.Unfortunate under any circumstance, such willingness is disastrous when it comes to clerical impropriety.

“[The Church in Osorno] has lost her freedom,” told those pilgrims at the Audience in May of 2015, “by letting her head be filled with [words of] politicians, blaming a bishop without any proof, after 20 years of being a bishop.” It turns out there was proof — evidence, at any rate — and Pope Francis had it, too, against Bishop Juan Barros of Osorno, who allegedly turned a blind eye to the predatory behavior of his mentor, the disgraced former Chilean celebrity priest, Fernando Karadima.

After accusing Barros’s accusers of calumny and facing major blowback, Francis ordered an investigation that led to the resignation of the entire Chilean bishops’ conference, though he has yet to accept the lion’s share of the resignations, including that of Cardinal Ricardo Ezzati, accused of covering up Karadima’s predations. Meanwhile, the civil authorities in Chile are investigating the Church, and have conducted multiple raids on bishops’ offices, including — this week — on those of the bishops’ conference.

Pope Francis has taken some steps, such as demanding that the disgraced former archbishop of Washington, DC, Theodore McCarrick, turn in his red hat. He has also removed bishops for impropriety — Juan José Pineda, the former auxiliary bishop of Tegucigalpa, for instance — though he has supported Pineda’s principal, Cardinal Óscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, a papal friend and confidante who is embroiled in a money scandal of his own and widely suspected of having given the allegedly perverse and lecherous Pineda the run of his archdiocese.

Pope Francis commuted the sentences of two priests convicted of molestation and punished with laicization — an act he later described as a mistake. He also rehabilitated Cardinal Godfried Danneels, inviting him to participate in the 2014 Extraordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the Family, some four years after Cardinal Danneels was caught on tape pleading with a victim of sex abuse by a bishop — Roger Vangheluwe, the victim’s uncle — to keep silent. Danneels went into retirement with his reputation in tatters. [Note how in the recitation of facts that have to do with Bergoglio's handling of this issue, the negative far outweigh anything positive he may have done (the latter usually under force majeure)].

In short, Pope Francis’s approach to abuse seems very much ad hoc [ad voluntas sua] and more precisely ad personam. It is also rather susceptible of influences other than the evidence at hand and the sense of duty to the faithful, which is proper to the office he holds in the Church. Whether he shall discover the resolve necessary to face the crisis —now indisputably global in scope and growing daily — remains to be seen. His record thus far has been, with rare notable exception, frankly dismal.

Meanwhile, there can be no doubt of the US bishops’ moral standing either in the Church or in society more broadly: it is squandered; utterly trifled away. Committees, review boards, commissions of inquiry: none of it will suffice — not even the measures Cardinal DiNardo — who trained and served in Pittsburgh and was an officer of the chancery there before going to staff the Congregation for Bishops in Rome — outlined on Thursday:

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The Executive Committee has established three goals:
(1) an investigation into the questions surrounding Archbishop McCarrick;
(2) an opening of new and confidential channels for reporting complaints against bishops; and
(3) advocacy for more effective resolution of future complaints.

---

While the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issue statements firmly resolving “with the help of God’s grace, never to repeat it,” (rinse, repeat); invite the Holy See to investigate (in language that sounds fair but smells foul); and call for “advocacy for more effective resolution of future complaints,” (advocacy within their own ranks, as though their solution is to call themselves to lobby one another — or advocacy at the Vatican, because “only the Pope has authority to discipline or remove bishops,” so that this hellish debacle should be his problem, not theirs?); the faithful read news articles containing the gruesome details of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report released on Tuesday and reach the conclusion of the Grand Jurors: “While each church district had its idiosyncrasies, the pattern was pretty much the same. The main thing was not to help children, but to avoid ‘scandal’.”

Even the very first criterion is an exercise in blame shifting and obfuscation: “The first goal is a full investigation of questions surrounding Archbishop McCarrick,” DiNardo wrote. That’s too easy by half.

Even an Apostolic Visitation of the Church in the US, which DiNardo’s statement invites, is destined to fail if its scope is limited to McCarrick, even if it illuminates every dark corner in which McCarrick’s baleful influence is hiding. Still, once the Vatican is involved, it will be the Vatican to determine both the real scope of inquiry and the vigor with which to conduct the inquest.

Even so, if the faithful permit the scapegoating of McCarrick, they will be guilty of moral failure not less grave than that of the bishops themselves. McCarrick came from somewhere. McCarrick did not act alone.

Nor will it do, then, for bishops of other places in the US to say that they do not deserve the weight of judgment, which the bishops of Pennsylvania bear. The Grand Jury Report shows how priests were sent to and from the Commonwealth with great ease, and details the facile communication and serene discourse among bishops and their chanceries when it came to “problem cases” — some of them predators, others committed perverts, still others inveterate lechers of the Old School — amounting to a system of cover-up that not only permitted the abuse of minors to continue, but allowed and even fostered a corrupt and morally insane culture throughout the whole body of the clergy, high and low.

The first head of the US Bishops National Review Board, former Oklahoma governor Frank Keating, was not wrong to say of the bishops, in 2003, “To resist grand-jury subpoenas, to suppress the names of offending clerics, to deny, to obfuscate, to explain away; that is the model of a criminal organization.”

Cardinal Roger Mahony condemned Keating’s remarks, and several lay members of the board joined the then-Archbishop of Los Angeles in decrying them. Asked to apologize, Keating refused and resigned.

“I was curious,” Keating told me in a recent interview, “that the cardinals were the ones that were seemingly most offended by what was coming,” i.e. “an anticipated reversal of what went before — a complete change of the clerical culture, in what was permitted and what wasn’t.”

In many ways, the Pennsylvania report’s release is — or deserves to be, at any rate — a sort of “Apalachin moment” for the Church in the United States.

Apalachin, New York, was home to Joseph “Joe the Barber” Barbara, a mafia don who hosted a meeting of organized crime families from all over the country in 1957, at his house in the “sleepy hamlet” on the southern bank of the Susquehanna River. Local law enforcement noted the influx of fancy cars with out-of-state plates and took a closer look. Eventually, authorities intervened. They broke up the meeting and made dozens of arrests. Not many indictments came from those arrests — it isn’t a crime to host a house party, after all — and those there were proved hard to make stick. Nevertheless, the readiness of those policemen once and for all gave the lie to the notion — long-espoused by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover — that there was no nationwide organization of underworld outfits in the United States.

Once facts came to light and rendered that fiction no longer viable, law enforcement at every level from the federal government to the states to every major city set about building dedicated organized crime task forces, which are still in place today.

In this case, it may be that bishops with questionable or troubling records are sincere in their protestations of good faith: if they are sincere, then it is difficult to understand how they can be morally fit for office. If they are not moral imbeciles, then it is all but impossible to avoid the conclusion that they are wicked. Tertium non datur.

Reminder for suffering Catholics:
Satan plays the long game
by Raymond Kowalski

August 16, 2018

Satan plays a long game. We know from the Gospel of Luke that Satan intended to sift like wheat Peter and the apostles.

Writing recently in National Review, Fr. Benedict Kiely has called the Church’s present trial the “summer of shame.” Before our eyes, the successors of the apostles are being sifted as well. Many Catholic commentators are saying the weakness of these wicked prelates is finally being exposed. I fear they may be wrong. Perhaps it is the diabolical strength of these prelates on display.

This moment has been building for centuries. Steve Skojec recently observed that “only a structure already compromised could fall so far so fast.”

In the context of this “summer of shame,” Bishop Robert Barron recently recalled that during the previous go-round of shame 20 years ago, he intuited that the whole sordid mess was “too thought-through, too well-coordinated, to be simply the result of chance or wicked human choice.”

Can we really now allow ourselves to think that we’ve got Satan on the run? That some episcopal hand-wringing will restore Catholic doctrine? That a few resignations will purge the Church of wicked priests, bishops, and cardinals?

I have no expectation that the perpetrators of this scourge are about to give up what has taken centuries to achieve. In fact, they may perceive this summer as their moment of triumph.

Consider the culture into which the apostate hierarchy has blended the Church:
- The pictures of priests offering Mass while wearing rainbow vestments.
- That picture of Cardinal Dolan at this year’s pro-sodomy St. Patrick’s Day parade.
- The Vatican’s homoerotic Nativity scene last year.
- The stories of the “drug fueled gay orgy” in the Vatican apartments last year.
- The free rein given to Father James Martin.
- The content of popular television shows, movies, and stage plays.
- Colleges and college professors, even Catholic colleges and college professors. Providence College, for example.
- Twitter and Facebook – what gets glorified and what gets shamed, or worse.
- How morality has become “hate” and virtue has become “homophobia.”

To fight the scourge that afflicts the Church is to fight the culture. Is today’s Catholic ready to reject it and stand up to it?

I believe that the Satanic cabal now running the Church are counting on social pressure from the culture to see them past this “summer of shame” and beyond to a new “Catholic spring.” How cleverly they are being sifted.

The Gospel of Luke predicts that Peter will survive his trial. Jesus tells Peter, “But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren.”

Then follows this never quoted passage, which the online Bible of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops captions “Instructions for the Time of Crisis”:

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When I sent you without purse, and scrip, and shoes, did you want anything?
But they said: Nothing. Then said he unto them:
But now he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise a scrip;
and he that hath not, let him sell his coat, and buy a sword.
For I say to you, that this that is written must yet be fulfilled in me:
And with the wicked was he reckoned. For the things concerning me have an end. (Luke 22: 35-37)

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Jesus says His contemporaries counted Him among the wicked. Are not those who hew to the constant moral teaching of the Catholic Church today vilified as haters? His instructions, for the time of crisis to come after the Scriptures had been fulfilled, were to fight. It is our turn and our time to fight.

If Hell is like a walled city, its gates have been closing, imperceptibly, for centuries. If nothing is done, they could soon trap all within. But Jesus assured Peter that the gates of Hell would not prevail against his Church. Prevail in what? In the fight that must be waged.

Then-Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen in the 1930s warned of “tolerance” as the problem with the American culture. He defined tolerance as “an attitude of reasoned patience toward evil.”

Eighty years on, patience toward evil has progressed to acceptance of evil. The culture has reached the point where evil now is normal. This where the wicked priests, bishops, and cardinals will take refuge. This is where we must take the fight.

St. Maximilian Kolbe, founder of the Militia of the Immaculata, pray for us.

It is hardly any comfort that Lucifer himself now appears to have taken over the 'leadership' of the Church, or at least, its nominal leader.
In this respect, the invaluable Fr Kirk had a great blogpost not too long ago:


Steve Skojec's take on Fr Rosica and the evil that seems to befog the Bergoglio Vatican goes by way of the Anti-Christ, during which he reveals earlier true-believer gushings of Fr Rosica that I had been unaware of...

Playing with fire:
Rosica, Francis, and the spirit of the Antichrist
by Steve Skojec

August 14, 2018

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“And he shall speak words against the High One, and shall crush the saints of the most High: and he shall think himself able to change times and laws, and they shall be delivered into his hand until a time, and times, and half a time.” – Daniel 7:25

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I wrote before, years ago, that I believe Pope Francis to be a type of the Antichrist. A forerunner. A precursor. A man who “shares some noteworthy characteristics and ideological predilections that have long been foretold” of this apocalyptic figure.

Some people bristled at this. Some scoffed. Fewer, I think, would do so today, especially when re-reading in our present ecclesiastical context the quote I provided from Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen’s Communism and the Conscience of the West:

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The Antichrist will not be so called; otherwise he would have no followers…he will come disguised as the Great Humanitarian; he will talk peace, prosperity and plenty not as means to lead us to God, but as ends in themselves… He will tempt Christian(s) with the same three temptations with which he tempted Christ… He will have one great secret which he will tell to no one: he will not believe in God. Because his religion will be brotherhood without the fatherhood of God, he will deceive even the elect. He will set up a counterchurch … It will have all the notes and characteristics of the Church, but in reverse and emptied of its divine content. It will be a mystical body of Antichrist that will in all externals resemble the mystical body of Christ.

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I invite you to read and compare this to the words of the Basilian father, Vatican spokesman, and founder of Canada’s Salt & Light TV, Fr. Tomas Rosica, published yesterday, about Pope Francis:

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Pope Francis breaks Catholic traditions whenever he wants because he is “free from disordered attachments.” Our Church has indeed entered a new phase: with the advent of this first Jesuit pope, it is openly ruled by an individual rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture.

---

He shall think himself able to change times and laws, and they shall be delivered into his hand…

The same Fr. Rosica gushed, back in 2015 during the pope’s visit to the United
States, that he had “often wondered how Jesus taught on a Galilean hillside.”
And that “tonight in Philadelphia,” he “saw how Jesus taught.”


Again, the following day, as a caption to a photo of the papal motorcade,
“‘See, your king comes to you, gentle & riding on a donkey, on a colt,
the foal of a donkey’- Matthew 21:15 (not in Philadelphia!)”


Most disturbingly, Fr. Rosica said during an interview with Fox News:The backdrop [of the papal visit] is a world steeped in violence and bloodshed and rancor and hatred, and here we have coming — to your city, to your diocese — a real prince of peace. If there’s any princely title that should be associated with Francis, it’s “The Prince of Peace.”
This, Our Lord’s prophetic title in Isaiah 9:6, applied to a man who “breaks Catholic traditions whenever he wants” and who rules the Church by his own dictates “rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture”?

This is some very dangerous fire Rosica is playing with here. Rosica, again, is not just any obscure priest with a papal idolatry problem. According to his own biography:

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Following the announcement on February 11, 2013 of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation, Fr. Rosica was invited by the Vatican to join the staff of the Holy See Press Office and serve as one of the official spokespersons for the transition in the papacy that included the resignation, Sede Vacante, Conclave and election of the new Pope. Fr. Rosica assisted the Vatican during a critical period in Church history. At the end of the Papal transition in April 2013, the Vatican asked him to serve as English language assistant to the Holy See Press Office. From 2013 to the end of 2016, he served in this capacity on behalf of the Holy See Press Office.

---

He is a man known to the pope. He has made comments that are idolatrous and arguably blasphemous. Comments so far beyond the pale that the Zenit news agency quietly made them disappear from an initial report that originally included them.
- Where is the correction from the pope?
- How could a good shepherd allow such a thing to be said without reproof?
- How could a man universally acclaimed as humble fail to be horrified at being described in such a way? In having it suggested that he could simply override Scripture and Tradition at whim?

I’ll give you one theory as to how: he agrees. Because he has demonstrated time and again that what Rosica said is exactly what he believes.

If not this, then what? Is he too busy overturning Catholic teaching to read someone talking about him doing it and, consequently, to correct him?

As Francis continues to unmake the papacy, to shake the foundations of Catholic belief, and to chip away at the deposit of faith, the American Church has received a grand jury report from the state of Pennsylvania outlining the alleged abuses perpetrated by three hundred priests in six of the state’s eight dioceses. Around the country, more allegations are surfacing as the faithful grow increasingly angry at an episcopacy that has betrayed their trust again.

In Chile, just minutes before I began writing this, news broke that authorities were raiding the offices of the Catholic bishops’ conference to obtain evidence on clerical sex abuse. Chile, where Pope Francis stubbornly kept Bishop Juan Barros, accused of complicity in the abuse of young men, calling the people of that country “stupid” for believing the accusations, shaming the victims, until at last public pressure forced his hand. Chile, from whence comes Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz, one of the pope’s council of nine cardinal advisers – a man also accused of complicity in abuse, but nevertheless allowed to retain his position by the pope.

Last night, I was asked by someone what the path forward from here is. How can the Church restore the glory she once had?

My answer: I don’t think there is a path from where we are to what needs to happen. There are many small communities doing it – intentionally living and believing as closely as possible the way Catholics always did before the second half of the 20th century – but I think they’ll always be marginalized as long as there’s an institutional need to perpetuate the lie that the changes were good and that they’ll ever bear fruit. We know they weren’t. We know they haven’t.

The post-conciliar Church is a barren tree. And like the fig tree from scripture, I think Christ has cursed it. It is imploding at an astonishing pace as the errors, the perversions, and even the heresies it promotes continue to be ever more brazen. So I think, as I wrote in my Infinity War piece, that the Church must be almost completely destroyed to be raised up again. It’s the only way. And God is letting it happen – perhaps even accelerating it.

It has to happen. And it’s actually a good thing, even though it doesn’t look like it, that it’s happening in conservative dioceses, too. Because the idea that there’s somewhere to hide from sin, or that careful cultivation of orthodoxy (or, often as not, the veneer thereof) can keep you safe is a big fat lie. I was inside the Legionaries of Christ and Regnum Christi. Their conservatism, their vocations program, their superficial orthodoxy would put the Lincoln Diocese to shame.

We all know how that turned out.

o People need to be led back to personal holiness.
o They need to develop a sense of the worship of God, not this humanistic garbage.
o They need to understand the role of the Church in the world and in relationship to other religions, Christian and otherwise.
o They need to grasp the differences in the roles of the baptismal and ministerial priesthood, respecting and revering the latter without falling into the dangerous kind of clericalism.

There’s so much we’ve lost. We need to get it back and then keep going.

In this, as in all things we’ve suffered over these years of the true Church in exile, the only way out is through.

My addendum:
In 2000, on the centenary of the death of Vladimir Soloviev, Russian philosopher whose work Hans Urs von Balthasar considered “the most universal speculative creation of the modern period” (Gloria III, p. 263), even going so far as to set him on the level of Thomas Aquinas, the late great Cardinal Giacomo Biffi (1928-2015), a Soloviev scholar, wrote the preface to A Soloviev Anthology published in Italy, in which he said this, among other things:

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The accuracy of Soloviev’s vision of the great crisis that would strike Christianity at the end of the 20th century is astonishing.

He represents this crisis using the figure of the Antichrist. This fascinating personage will succeed in influencing and persuading almost everyone. It is not difficult to see in this figure of Soloviev the reflection, almost the incarnation, of the confused and ambiguous religiosity of our time.

The Antichrist will be a “convinced spiritualist” Soloviev says, an admirable philanthropist, a committed, active pacifist, a practicing vegetarian, a determined defender of animal rights.

He will also be, among other things, an expert exegete. His knowledge of the bible will even lead the theology faculty of Tubingen to award him an honorary doctorate. Above all, he will be a superb ecumenist, able to engage in dialogue “with words full of sweetness, wisdom and eloquence.”

He will not be hostile “in principle” to Christ. Indeed, he will appreciate Christ’s teaching. But he will reject the teaching that Christ is unique, and will deny that Christ is risen and alive today. [OK, Bergoglio is not, as far as we know, a vegetarian, and he is anything but an expert exegete (unless it is in the exegesis of Jesus's words in a way that advances Bergoglio's agenda, but check out the other attributes!]

One sees here described — and condemned — a Christianity of “values,” of “openings,” of “dialogue,” a Christianity where it seems there is little room left for the person of the Son of God crucified for us and risen, little room for the actual event of salvation.

A scenario, I think, that should cause us to reflect… A scenario in which the faith militant is reduced to humanitarian and generically cultural action, the Gospel message is located in an irenic encounter with all philosophies and all religions and the Church of God is transformed into an organization for social work.

Are we sure Soloviev did not foresee what has actually come to pass? Are we sure it is not precisely this that is the most perilous threat today facing the “holy nation” redeemed by the blood of Christ — the Church?

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It was a message Biffi would memorably reiterate when Benedict XVI chose him to preach the spiritual exercises at the annual Lenten retreat for the Pope and the Curia in 2007.

Fr Z's recent post on the current satanic crisis in the Church reiterates what he often says: Never under-estimate Satan and even
just the smoke of Satan. He will always be the enemy - directly or through the souls he takes possession of, transiently or permanently.

This scandal is about homosexuality
Wherein Fr. Z offers one of the hardest posts he has ever written

August 16, 2018

This foreword was written after I wrote the rest, as forewords usually are. This is one of the hardest posts I’ve ever written. It was physically uncomfortable to hack this out, and I had to stop several times and walk around before taking up the sword again. I suppose I will hesitate a few times and pray a bit before I hit that PUBLISH button.

One of our comments, under another post, mentions the website of a priest, Fr. Edwin Palka, who explains why some priests have not blown the whistle on homosexual priests and homosexual priest predators. Frankly, his post put some steel into my fingers.

Priests can set discouraging examples for their brethren. They can also set good example for encouragement.

What he wrote is grisly. It is also true. He opens the Ugly Box to let a little purifying sunshine in. I will do the same, and in the same vein.

Folks, I know that you are really angry. The depth of ugly you see in the news is often not nearly as deep as the ugly that some priests see. You are surely and rightly angry. Do you think that we priests are not?

I have to remind myself that when Our Lord cursed the fig tree before His Passion, that wasn’t the model that we priests should employ when it comes to homosexual predator priests.

And let’s be clear. This scandal is about HOMOSEXUALITY.

Some of these homosexual predators are, I think, possessed. Think about it. If you know anything about demonic activity, and this is something that lay people should not get too involved with, then you know that certain demons specialize in certain kinds of sins.
- They will attach themselves like spiritual lampreys to the souls of people who commit them and also to the places where the sins were committed.
- Once a demon gets hold, they claim the right to be there, until the layers of their connection are broken one by one. That’s what exorcism rites do: they break the legalistic claims of the Enemy to be there.

Homosexual sins are particularly grave and their demonic force is concomitantly vile. And these sins also involve the young or those who are subject to the authority or power of the predator. Millstones are not enough. If you wonder about the Lord and capital punishment, HE spoke of the millstone before the Church did.

That’s the supernatural side. There is also the natural side. It seems to me that men with these strong disordered inclinations don’t… how to put this… act like other men. They think differently, they work out differences differently. I know, I know. But that’s my sense of things. It’s hard to articulate.

To explain another issue, I have a couple of anecdotes.

First, way back when, as a seminarian, I remember the pastor of my parish telling us young guys not to write our name in our breviaries or prayer books. He explained that were we to lose the book, someone could claim that it was found in a “house of assignation”. Some of the guys thought that was funny. I didn’t.

My folks were cops. I grew up hearing about and seeing photos of the ugliest human circumstances imaginable. I figured out “blackmail” and “compromise” waaaaay back. Also, if you talk to cops who have been on the job for a while, they will confirm that male on male “violence” is among the worst that they see. Ask cops if you know any pretty well. Ask ER docs and nurses what they see come in and how it was inflicted.

Here’s a not so little factoid for you: In Italian, a derogatory term for a homosexual male is froccio, which etymologically comes from Latin ferox, “savage”. Are all that way? No. Of course not. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t those who are.

Next, still as a seminarian, over breakfast a then-auxiliary bishop told me that when he reported on something to the archbishop, he was shut down: “If I know about it, I might have to do something about it!” Then the auxiliary said, “Remember, John, there are old women of both sexes.” That would be confirmed countless times in the next years. When I went to the seminary rector to complain about the things I was hearing through the walls, their treatment of me only worsened and I got thrown out the second time. That’s how I got to Rome.

In Rome, because I was in the unusual position of curial work and seminary, because of my youth, etc., I was subtly warned of certain well-placed people who would offer this or that, to open this door, to invite into that circle, to climb more quickly, to gain some favors, etc.

I was being warned, mainly, about two groups, the Mafia and homosexuals. Both groups – along with Masons, but I think they were in both these other tribes – wanted insiders, and I was perceived at the time as having the potential to be advanced. Sure enough, every once in a while I would get an invitation, a gift out of the blue, a strong suggestion that X might be a good choice to get ahead.

Years later I read of one of them, a gentiluomo di Sua Santità, found tied up with his head bashed in and homosexual porno video in the VCR. I had met him at the Lateran University, where he for some reason was taking courses along with the seminarians. My “gaydar” is strong, so this guy didn’t get far with me. But some of my classmates….

As a priest, I quickly figured out that, if you were on the wrong side of things, you would be subtly and not so subtly targeted for persecution, of course, but also for compromise, be it homosexual, heterosexual, money, drugs, ambition, whatever your weakness might be. They would set honey traps for you.

If you think about it, if you try to think like the Enemy, doesn’t that make sense? If you can’t get someone to join you in your slime, but you suspect he has your number, you try to get something on him.

Many years ago now, a woman told me about a meeting she went to of some pro-choice feminist organization or other. She said that one of the things they talked about, after the more public meeting was over, was figuring out which one of them could target for seduction certain priests in the diocese who were overtly preaching against contraception and abortion. One of them would do it or they could hire hookers and set honey traps.

It’s classic spycraft, really. Compromise the guy to shut him up.

The problem is, most priests are compassionate guys who, when faced with a woman in distress, might let their guard down. Face facts. Women, who are wired in certain ways, think differently than men. They can wrap guys around their lipstick case if they aren’t wary, and men often are not wary enough. Some tears and a little GBH can work wonders on the naive. That technique goes for the “gay” predators as well. This is one reason why I think that homosexual predators of young men think differently, apart from the help of the demons in their heads.

Also, as a priest, there are the truly sacrilegious ways that some of these agents of Hell will work to shut up priests who don’t and won’t putt from the ruff. They use the Seal of the confessional against the solid non-queer priest confessor. They go to confession to a good confessor to bind him by the Seal. Of course that is pretty underhanded, satanic even. It is a horrible sacrilege.

A lot of good priests know that if they hear something in the confessional they must never ever talk about it. They don’t know what to do, and, in prudence, they clam up about their brethren. This is one reason why the Church’s law discourages a superior of hearing the confessions of those under his authority.

I know guys who simply couldn’t take it anymore and quit. There have been moments when I’ve thought about it myself. But then my cold Prussian fury and stubbornness flares and, I’m sure, the grace to stick it out for whatever I am destined to do or endure.

Dear readers… this is all- out war. It is war on every level, human and supernatural. The Enemy of the soul is a really good general, a relentless and malevolent tactician of destruction of souls and long view strategist The Enemy preys on human weakness. War is horrible, vicious and seriously ugly. Spiritual war is worse than material.

Even now, I was texting with a friend about this new wave of dreck. He wrote:

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These bastards have not only violated countless innocents and stained the Catholic name. They have set in motion the process that will lead good men to suffer greatly to defend celibacy and the seal of confession. It would be so easy to feed a few certified perverts to the secular justice and gain time to ascertain the facts on all others. Because, make no mistake, innocents will be accused and it will be IMPOSSIBLE to talk about burden of the proof without accusations of cover up. Innocents will have again to pay the price of reform the hard way.

They will show good will by targeting the good guys. They’ll find a degenerate in an otherwise sound group and, there, fixed!

The media, and of course bishops, are downplaying the distinctive tract of all these stories, the vice of most offenders. CNN even presents it with a pic of a woman crying.

It will be again a case of white heterosexual Christian men raping women and even when boys are involved it will be only because of a) power b) celibacy 3) culture of secrecy protecting power via seal of confession.

Which is in fact what happened, only it’s the sodomite modus operandi to protect themselves and strengthen their grip over power positions within the Church.

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As I have written before, I do not buy the claims that a high number of priests are homosexual. But I do indeed buy that that percentage is higher among those who have power. The Boys Club perpetuated itself by grooming certain likely fellows with preferential treatment.They made sure that they went to Rome, which could help a future career, or they got the chance at higher studies, the key role in the chancery, the roles that would be good on the CV when it was time to submit a terna. Mind you, that wasn’t all bishops or seminarians or priests. Don’t look cross-eyed at a guy sent to Rome. These days, I am sure that in the vast majority of cases, its because the guy has potential to serve the Church well and that’s the best place to realize the potential.

Do not.. do NOT.. slip into the trap that I see in news stories and fuming posts with sloppy language about how, “These bishops and priests! They all failed us!” No. They did not all fail you. Some did. They’re failures were galactic and all priests are suffering the fallout. But don’t turn your wrath and blame on every priest and bishop. That would surely make the Devil grin. That’s the objective, after all. Through some, attack them all.

Tables are turning on Satan’s plans. However, when you wonder about all this stuff going on, remember that the Enemy plays the long game.

Your calls for short term retribution or for instant action etc. will have their own repercussions down the road. For example, even as many people call for the resignation and removal of this or that bishop, cardinal, etc., keep in mind that there is only one guy, in the human sphere, who signs off on the new bishops and cardinals. Try to picture the results over time if you get what you ask for.

Finally, please take this to heart.
This is a primarily a supernatural battle that is being fought right now. The bloody trenches and killing alleys are directly through the ranks of the Church’s priests, and they directly involve matters intimately tied into the very center of the Church’s core, priesthood and sacraments like Penance.

No priest, no Eucharist, no Church.

This war involves human weakness, identity perversion, and also demonic possession. Hence, our response has to involve all of these dimensions.

Priests and bishops:
Please start saying Masses and having devotions for reparation and for deliverance from the assaults of the Enemy. We have tried and true spiritual weapons, if only we would dust them off, polish them up, and use them. Enough of this mealy-mouthed excuse making and temporizing. Enough of this rubbish about all the really important things that fill the clerical day, like committees and meetings. If you are going to have a meeting, meet about how we have to do reparation, who will be unlocking the church for Exposition and Rosaries and Novena and CONFESSIONS.

Priests and bishops, for the love of all that is Holy, use your mighty spiritual weapons given by Orders and Holy Church’s own authoritative, tried and true Tradition.

And, I’ll say it again and again and again… the Devil HATES LATIN. Let’s stop fooling around. Put the .22 long rifle away and start with the .50 cal already. The time for the MaDeuce of our sacred liturgical worship is NOW. Extraordinary Form, brothers. Stop fooling around. If you Latins out there don’t know and can’t use your whole Latin Rite, then.. who the hell are you, anyway? C’mon guys!

Meanwhile, I am implementing the personal plan I’ve been cobbling together from my convictions, experiences, resolves. I have to be willing to stay on the Cross. Please pray for me that I will stay up there. In spite of my weakness, as a sinner among sinners, I will do my best to adapt, improvise and overcome the obstacles that I am sure will now hammer on me for this post.

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Mary, Queen of the Clergy, protect me and my brethren. If the hour of the Chalice is upon us, ask your Son the High Priest to make our wristbones strong for the nail, our footbones strong for the spike.

As crowned Queen of Angels, bid for us mighty helpers from the celestial choirs, who know God’s will for us even as they contemplate God’s face.

As Virgin Theotokos, tell Joseph your most chaste spouse, which priests need his most urgent aid. How can he refuse your request to show himself, their Terror, to those demons who beset your sons, your priests and bishops?

New Eve Queen, place your foot over the feet of your priests that they will trample the nahash in the vineyard and in their lonely oilpress gardens.

Put your maternal hand on their shoulder as they unworthily stumble along, sinners, in their daily calvaries.

Mary, Queen of the Clergy, protect me and my brethren.

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Cardinal Burke addresses the clergy scandal
by Thomas McKenna

August 16, 2018

SAN DIEGO- Thomas McKenna, the president of Catholic Action for Faith and Family, interviewed Cardinal Raymond Burke this week on the clergy abuse scandal.

Your Eminence, a new wave of clergy sexual abuse has surfaced and is indicating a widespread practice of homosexuality among clergy in dioceses and seminaries across the country. What would you say is the root cause of this corruption?
It was clear after the studies following the 2002 sexual abuse crisis that most of the acts of abuse were in fact homosexual acts committed with adolescent young men. There was a studied attempt to either overlook or to deny this. Now it seems clear in light of these recent terrible scandals that indeed there is a homosexual culture, not only among the clergy but even within the hierarchy, which needs to be purified at the root. It is of course a tendency that is disordered.

I think it has been considerably aggravated by the anti-life culture in which we live, namely the contraceptive culture that separates the sexual act from the conjugal union. The sexual act has no meaning whatsoever except between a man and a woman in marriage since the conjugal act is by its very nature for procreation.

I believe that there needs to be an open recognition that we have a very grave problem of a homosexual culture in the Church, especially among the clergy and the hierarchy, that needs to be addressed honestly and efficaciously.

Your Eminence, many are saying what needs to be done to address this problem is to determine better procedures and structures to deal with it and that this then would be a solution to resolve the situation. Do you agree with that proposal? Or what do you see needs to be done to resolve this crisis in a thorough manner?
There is no need to develop new procedures. All of the procedures exist in the Church’s discipline, and they have existed throughout the centuries. What is needed is an honest investigation into the alleged situations of grave immorality followed by effective action to sanction those responsible and to be vigilant to prevent that similar situations arise again.

This idea that the conference of bishops should be responsible for addressing this is misguided because the bishops’ conference does not have surveillance over the bishops within the conference. It is the Roman Pontiff, the Holy Father, who has the responsibility to discipline these situations, and it is he who needs to take action following the procedures that are given in the Church’s discipline. This is what will address the situation effectively.

The faith of many in the Church, as a holy rather than corrupt institution, has been shaken. People don’t know what to think about their bishops and their priests. How should the faithful respond to this crisis, especially taking into consideration that many are feeling discouraged and ashamed of their Church?
I understand fully the anger, the profound sense of betrayal that many of the faithful are feeling, even as I experience it myself. The faithful should insist that the situation be addressed honestly and with determination.

What we must never permit is that these gravely immoral acts, which have sullied so much the face of the Church, permit us to lose trust in Our Lord, who is the Head and Shepherd of the flock. The Church is His Mystical Body, and we must never lose sight of that truth.

We should be profoundly ashamed of what certain shepherds, certain bishops, have done, but we should never be ashamed of the Church because we know that it is pure and that it is Christ Himself, alive for us in the Church, Who alone is our way to salvation.

There is a great temptation that our justified anger over these gravely immoral acts will lead us to lose faith in the Church or to be angry with the Church, instead of angry with those who, even though they held the highest authority in the Church, have betrayed that authority and have acted in an immoral way.

There existed in the Roman Pontifical (the Latin Catholic liturgical book that contains the rites performed by bishops) for centuries the rites for the degradation of clerics and also of hierarchy who had failed gravely in their office. I believe it would be helpful to read over again those rites to understand deeply what the Church has always understood, which is that shepherds can go astray, even in a grave way, and then must be appropriately disciplined and even dismissed from the clerical state.

Kudos, of course, to Father Z, who had anticipated this last proposal in two posts on July 29 and on August 17 with, respectively, The Rite of Degradation of a Bishop, and The Rite of Degradation of a Priest, as follows:

The Rite of Degradation of a Bishop

July 29, 2018

Something has been nagging me from the back of my mind today. I finally, late in the evening just as I was about to turn in, dredged it up.

One of my favorite Popes, Papa Lambertini, Pope Benedict XIV, was a great canonist and scholar. Among his many contributions, he established the process for canonization that is still in its major aspects in effect today.

He also issued a rite of Degradatio ab ordine pontificali(Degradation from the order of bishop).

If you thought the movie excommunication in Becket was spiffy, get a load of this. In the Pontificale romanum sanctissimi D.N. Benedicti Papae XIV, jussu editum et auctum of 25 March 1752 find the rite of degradation of all the grades of order, major and minor.

In the presence of secular officials. The praenotanda says that the scraping was to be without the drawing of blood. I suspect that there were slips. Even the tonsure was to be scraped. Eventually all clerical clothes are stripped and he puts on lay clothes. However, if later the sentence was found to be unjust, he is to be given back everything publicly, at the altar.

The Degrader is to be vested in amice, alb, cincture, stole and red cope, simple miter, holding his crozier in the left hand. The rite is at the faldstool, versus populum, with the secular judge standing nearby and the rest of the clergy surrounding in their grades. They are to announce to the people in the vernacular what was going on. They then read a Latin decree with pretty stern language “… propter ipsius confessionem, vel legitimas probationes, evidenter invenimus eum ipsum crimen commisisse; quod cum non solum grande, sed etiam damnabile, et damnorum fit, et adeo enorme, quod exinde non tantum divina maiestas offensa….”

The is a stripping of the men of symbols for each and every order, major and minor.

Here is the rite for a bishop or archbishop:

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Si degrandandus sit Archiepiscopus, Pontifex degradator aufert ab eo pallium, sic dicendo:
Praerogativa Pontificalis dignitatis, quae in pallio designatur, te exuimus, quia male usus es ea.

If the man to be degraded (Degradandus) is an Archbishop, the Bishop Degrader removes the pallium from him, saying in this way:
We strip you of all pontifical prerogative, which is symbolized in the pallium, because you have used it badly.

Deinde, vel si degradandus sit Episcopus tantum, Pontifex degradator amovet ei mitram, dicendo:
Mitra Pontificalis dignitatis videlicet ornatu, quia eam male praesidendo foedasti, tuum caput denudamus.

Then, if the Degradandus is only a bishop, the Bishop Degrader takes the miter from him, saying:
The miter being the symbolic ornament of pontifical dignity, because you besmirched it badly in presiding, we denude your head.

Deinde unus ex Ministris tradit degradando librum Evangeliorum, quem Pontifex degradator aufert de manibus degradandi, dicens:
Redde Evangelium, quia praedicandi officio, quo spreta Dei gratia te indignum fescisti, te juste privamus.

Then one of the ministers gives to the Degradandus a book of the Gospels, which the Bishop Degrader snatches away from the hands of the Degradandus, saying:
Give back the Gospel, because in the office of preaching, having despised the grace of God you made yourself unworthy and we properly deprive you of it.

Deinde Pontifex degradator amovet annulum de digito degradandi, sic dicens:
Annulum, fidei scilicet signaculum, tibi digne subtrahimus, quia ipsam sponsam Dei Ecclesiam temere violasti.

Then the Degrader Bishop takes away the ring from the finger of the Degradandus, saying thusly:
The ring, namely the sign of fidelity, we worthily withdraw from you, because you thoughtlessly violated your very Spouse, the Church of God.

Tum unus ex Ministris tradit degradando in manus baculum pastoralem, quem mox Pontifex degradator tollit de manibus degradandi, dicens:
Auferimus a te baculum pastoralem, ut inde correctionis officium, quod turbasti, non valeas exercere.

Then one of the ministers gives a crozier into the hands of the the Degradandus, which right away the Bishop Degrader takes from the hands of the Degradandus, saying:
We take from you the pastoral staff, that hence you cannot exercise the office of correction, which you have thrown into confusion.

Deinde extractis sibi per Ministros chirothecis, Pontifex degradator abradit degradando pollices et manus leviter cum cultello, aut vitro, dicens:
Sic spiritualis benedictionis, et delibutionis mysticae gratia, quantum in nobis est, te privamus, ut sanctificandi et benedicendi perdas officium, et effectum.

Then the gloves having been removed by ministers, the Bishop Degrader scrapes the thumbs and hands of the Degradandus lightly with a knife or shard of glass, saying:
Insofar as it is in us, thusly we deprive you of the grace of spiritual blessing (ability to bless), and mystical anointing (ability to anoint), so that you lose the office and effectum of sanctifying and blessing.

Post haec Pontifex cum eodem cultello et vitro abradit leviter caput degradandi, dicens:
Consecrationem, et benedictionem, atque unctionem tibi traditam radendo delemus, et te ab ordine Pontificali, quo inhabilis redditus, abdicamus.

After this the Bishop lightly scrapes the head of the Degradandus with the same knife or shard, saying:
By this scraping, we terminate the consecration and blessing and the anointing given to you, and we reject you from the pontifical order, for you are rendered unfit.

Tum degradando per ministros extrabuntur sandalia.

Then the shoes are taken off of the Degradandus by the ministers.

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The Rite of Degradation
from The Order of Priesthood

August 16, 2018

A while back I posted about the old Rite of Degradation of a Bishop... The rites are provided for degrading an archbishop, bishop, priest, deacon, subdeacon, all the minor orders backwards, even in rather modern editions of the traditional Pontificale Romanum.

They start to work on you by stripping you of all the symbols of your office, and even scrape your hands with a glass shard or knife to get the chrism off. They do the same for a priest, like a reverse ordination, taking away the chalice, vestment, scraping the fingers again. From deacons they take the dalmatic and book. You get the drift… all the way through the orders you would have received back to tonsure, which of course is when the clerical state began (today, it is with diaconate).

The tonsure part is truly harrowing.

When it is over, the Degrading Bishop is even instructed not even to touch the degraded man. He stands there, head shaved and in secular clothes, now called in the rite “miserrimus ille derelictus… the most wretched outcast” to be turned over to civil authority for his crimes and sentencing. However, the bishop addresses the Judge, who is standing by, and begs the Judge not to kill or mutilate him, for the love of God.

Hence, the Church recognized even in this rite, the right of the State to apply capital punishment, but the Church also begged for mercy. Remember that our liturgical rites – and this is a liturgical rite – are also loci theologici.

NB: These rites were reserved for the worst sort of guy who had committed serious crimes. In Latin: “If the cleric, once deposed by sentence according to the first form [a special formula given previously], seems to be incorrigible, he ought to be excommunicated. And if, after getting into the depth of wicked acts he will still show contempt, then, since the Church has no other option for what do to, the Bishop should degrade him and leave him to the secular authorities: which degradation is done in this way:…”.

In the book, the layout is quite dramatic: There is an inset subtitle: Nunc degradationem subjicimus.

Here is the rite for degrading a priest. I’ll continue to use “Degradandus” as a parallel to “Ordinandus”.

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Degradatio ab ordine Presbyteratus
Ministri tradunt in manus degradandi Calicem cum vino, et aqua, ac Patena, et Hostia, quem Pontifex degradator aufert de manibus degradandi, dicens:
Amovemus a te, quin potius amotam esse ostendimus, potestatem offerendi Deo sacrificium, Missamque celebrandi tam pro vivis, quam pro defunctis.

The ministers put a Chalice with wine, water, and a Paten and Host into the hands of the Degradandus [the priest to be degraded], which the Bishop Degrader wihdraws from the hands of the Degradandus, saying:
We take away from you, nay rather we show that it was already removed, the power of offering sacrifice to God, and of celebrating Mass either for the living or for the dead.

Deinde Pontifex degradator abradit leviter cum cultello vel vitro, pollices, et indices utriusque manus degradandi, dicens:
Potestatem sacrificandi, consecrandi, et benedicendi, quam in unctione manuum et pollicum recepisti, tibi tollimus hac rasura.

Then the Bishop Degrader lightly scrapes with a knife or shard of glass, the thumbs and index fingers of both the hands of the Degrandandus, saying:
By this scraping we remove from you the power of sacrificing, consecrating and blessing which you received in the anointing of your hands and thumbs.

Quo dicto, Pontifex degradator accipit casulam sive planetam per posteriorem partem caputii, et degradandum exuit, dicens:
Veste Sacerdotali charitatem signante te merito expoliamus, quia ipsam, et omnem innocentiam exuisti.

Once said, the Bishop Degrader takes a chasuble or pianeta by the head-opening and strips it off the Degradandus, saying:
We rightly despoil you of the priestly garment signifying charity, because you already cast it off along with all innocence.

Tum Pontifex degradator aufert a degrandando stolam, dicens:
Signum Domini per hanc stolam turpiter abjecisti, ideoque ipsam a te amovemus, quem inhabilem reddimus ad omne Sacerdotale officium exercendum.

Then the Bishop Degrader removes the stole from the Degradandus, saying:
You basely threw aside the sign of the Lord in this stole, and therefore we remove it from you, whom we render unfit to exercise every priestly office.

---

If you were looking for the maniple, the Degradandus loses that when he is unsubdiaconated.

As mentioned, above, the degrading rites continue for diaconate and all through the minor orders to tonsure itself and turning the wretch over to civil authority.

Keep in mind that this rite, in all its medieval and solemn horror is in the Pontifical Romanum of Leo XIII, which is pretty modern. I haven’t checked a newer 1962 Pontificale.

Before I was ordained, I used the Rite of Ordination as a point of meditation every day for quite some time before the date. I did that for diaconate and priesthood.

It seems to me that this Rite of Degradation should be taught in seminaries.

It could be also a serious day of reflection for priests, to show the old rite of ordination side by side with the rite of degradation for all the stages.

I can say this: The careful reading I made to translate it, made my blood drop several degrees, which is really something given that it already runs cold through my chilly heart and icy veins.

There is a bright note, however. There is a Rite of Degradation. The notes talk about reconciliation after penance of those who committed crimina minora… lesser crimes. There are also Rites of Restitution to Orders after suspension.

Degradation is for the worst of the worst. I would say it would have been applied to clerics who promoted homosexuality and/or indulged in it themselves, especially with minors whom they groomed. It would apply to bishops who covered up the abuse of minors and, probably who promoted the homosexual grip on the reins of power in seminaries and chanceries.

The Church applies censures medicinally and also vindictively. The later is never preferred.

BTW… Benedict XIV was one of the Popes who revised the Pontificale Romanum.


The Vatican’s pathetic statement
on the Pennsylvania report
by John Nolte

August 17, 2018

The Vatican released a statement expressing “shame and sorrow” Thursday about the hundreds of predator priests uncovered in Pennsylvania. This statement comes after two days of silence and offers no quote from Pope Francis.

“There are two words that can express the feelings faced with these horrible crimes: shame and sorrow,” the statement reads. “The Holy See treats with great seriousness the work of the Investigating Grand Jury of Pennsylvania… The Holy See condemns unequivocally the sexual abuse of minors.”

“Victims should know that the Pope is on their side. Those who have suffered are his priority, and the Church wants to listen to them to root out this tragic horror that destroys the lives of the innocent.”

In the middle of these platitudes, comes this: “By finding almost no cases after 2002, the Grand Jury’s conclusions are consistent with previous studies showing that Catholic Church reforms in the United States drastically reduced the incidence of clergy child abuse.”

This is what stood out to me… “Almost no cases after 2002.”

We are talking about the kind of sexual abuse against children that would make Harvey Weinstein blush and the Church is using the words “almost no” in its defense.

Let’s read that another way…
Ford Motor: “Almost no Ford Pintos exploded and killed their occupants after 2002.”
The FBI: “Almost no FBI agents were involved in manipulating presidential elections after 2002.”
The local mosque: “Almost none of our Imams sought to radicalize terrorists after 2002.”
CNN: “Almost none of our reporters spread fake news after 2002.”
The Catholic Church: “Almost no children were raped by our priests after 2002.”

And then there is the whole “fool me once” aspect of all this.

These are the kinds of statements we heard 15 years ago when the first child abuse scandal exploded on the Church, and I am afraid empty words are just not good enough anymore.

I joined the Church in 2008 in large part because I was assured this was behind us, assured an unforgivable blot on the 2,000-year-old institution had been eradicated, assured this would not and could not happen ever again. And yet here we are in 2018 with the discovery that the coverup has been ongoing and that the standard when it comes to predatory priests raping children is “almost no[ne].”

Just as unacceptable is this sentence in the Vatican’s statement, “The Holy See also wants to underscore the need to comply with the civil law, including mandatory child abuse reporting requirements.”

You have child rapists in your own home and a gangster mentality protecting those child rapists…
- How can you not be proactive?
- How can you not be calling on every attorney general in all 50 states to launch investigations — with the FULL cooperation of the church — in all 50 states?
- How can you not be demanding these “secret archives” (incredibly, that was the Pennsylvania Church’s term for the secret files detailing the abuse and cover-ups) be released to the public in very diocese, not only here in America but throughout the world?

As a practicing Catholic, someone who loved the Church, who joined the Church as a 42-year-old adult, who was proud to call himself a Roman Catholic, I am horrified, not only by this report (which I intend to read in full), but by a powerful institution’s passive response to an unspeakable evil breeding within its own home.

And how are we to define this passiveness as something other than its own kind of evil?

From a Facebook page that I am too inept to identify but to which I inadvertently linked because of my anomalous forever-postless Facebook access, a comment from George Neumayr, author of THE POLITICAL POPE:

The sulfur fumes from
the reigning pope's 'open windows'

---

Out of the supposedly opened windows of the Church of Pope Francis has come not fresh air but sulfur.

For over five years I have been telling people that he was elected not in spite of the Gay Mafia but because of it. "Gay Mafia," by the way, is a generous phrase. It is actually more like a diabolical gay sex cult. Mobsters, at least the ones I have met in New York, would never do anything as unspeakably depraved as the acts described in the Grand Jury report.

You know who was chosen as the first director of the McCarrick-launched, Wuerl-sustained Papal Foundation (which raises funds to support papal projects that come under the heading of humanitarian or social)? Monsignor Thomas Benestad, a pathological prelate who comes from a banking family -exactly the kind of cufflinked charlatan Wuerl and McCarrick have long cultivated.

According to the Grand Jury report, Benestad - several years before he was tapped for the Papal Foundation - subjected a nine-year-old boy to an act of oral sex, then demanded that the child rinse his mouth out with "holy water."

I have a serious question: Why aren't parents marching on Wuerl's chancery (or Embassy Row penthouse, as it is closer than Hyattsville)? The enraging evil of it all would justify such protests until he quits.

"If I were the man I was five years ago, I'd take a FLAMETHROWER to this place," says Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman. That line sticks in my mind as the surreal cruelty of Wuerlchurch comes more and more into focus.

---

One reader, John Ingram, posted this red-rage comment:

---

What kills me is these talking heads - thinking they are being "balanced" - who state that they are still waiting for Francis to do what he was allegedly elected to do: "reform the Curia."

Hogwash. He was elected to promulgate, directly or indirectly, the UN agenda in the Church: homosexuality, abortion, contraception, euthanasia, open borders, pagan environmentalism, "redistribution of wealth," etc. "Reform the Curia" was just the responsible-sounding veneer to get him elected.

And does anyone seriously think that Francis will clean out the filth, when it was the same filth who got him elected, the same filth with whom he surrounds himself, the same filth whom he repeatedly promotes? I pray that this sleazy demonic house become divided against itself, and that these Satanic perverts start ratting each other out...including the Judas at the top.

---

Surprisingly nothing at all - at least none I have seen - in the Anglophone media so far about this new controversy generated by a fairly new writing by Benedict XVI, despite the fact that the parties
declaring themselves principally offended are the Jews...

Benedict XVI criticized for a new article
on the Jewish-Christian dialog
by Matteo Orlando
Translated from
ILGIORNALE
August 14, 2018

A number of Germanophone rabbis and Christian theologians have harshly criticized Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI for his article on the Jewish-Christian dialog published in the current issue of the German edition of Communio, the international theological journal of which Joseph Ratzinger was a co-founder back in 1972 along with fellow theologians Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac.

The 20-page article was written as a tool for theological instruction and appears in the July-August 2018 issue of Communio but is dated October 26, 2017, and signed by Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI.

It had been written originally as his reflection on the 50th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II declaration on the relationship of the Church with the non-Christian religions, requested by Cardinal Kurt Koch and intended to be a theological instruction tool for internal use in the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and its auxiliary Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, both of which Koch heads.

The cardinal subsequently asked the Emeritus Pope’s permission to publish it in Communio under the title "Gnade und berufung ohne reue" (Mercy and vocation without regrets) [taking off from Romans 11,29 which says “For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable”]. Its subtitle "Anmerkungen zum Traktat De Iudaeis" (Comments on the passage De Iudaeis) promptly generated controversy.
- Rabbi Walter Homolka, rector of the Abraham Geiger College in Potsdam, accused Benedict XVI of encouraging “a new anti-Semitism on a Christian basis” in an interview he gave th the German weekly paper Die Zeit.
- The Chief Rabbi of Vienna, Arie Folger, told the Jüdische Allgemeine, Germany’s largest Jewish newspaper, that it was ‘problematic’ for the former pope to “insist on a Christological impostation of the Old Testament”.
- Michael Bohnke, professor of systematic theology at the University of Wuppertal, commented that “After Auschwitz, I never expected to read any such thing from a German theologian”.

But what exactly did the gentle Emeritus Pope write that has caused such extreme reactions?

Cardinal Koch wrote in his introduction of the article: “After having examined it with great attention… I have come to the conclusion that these theological reflections should be introduced in any future dialog between the Church and the Jews”.

Jan-Heiner Tück, editor of the German edition of Communio, said that the text was ‘remarkable for various reasons’, telling Kathpress in an interview that “Pope Francis has a second voice beside him, so to speak,” when he speaks of Jewish-Christian relations, as in Evangelii gaudium and on other occasions. [???? None of which, to my knowledge, ever raised any comments, much less objections, from the Jews!] Tück added that the article provides “explosive food for thought” and must be confronted ‘benevolently’.

The emeritus Pope is concerned primarily about two questions: the theory of substitution, and the expression “never-revoked Covenant”.

“Both theses – that Israel has not been replaced by the Church, and that the Old Covenant was never revoked – are fundamentally correct, but they are imprecise in many aspects and must ultimately be examined critically”, he wrote.

On November 17, 1980, in Mainz, Germany, Pope John Paul II had affirmed that the Old Covenant had never been revoked and still remains valid.

In this article, Benedict XVI says that it is not God who rescinds an alliance with him, but the people who violate their alliance with God. The re-institution of the Covenant on Sinai “in the New Covenant in the Blood of Christ, in his love which overcomes death, confirms on the Alliance a new form that is valid for always”.

This statement would seem to be a return to the Catholic view that was oriented towards the conversion of non-Christians to Christianity. “The entire relationship between God and his people finds its sum and final form in the Last Supper of Jesus Christ, which anticipated and contained the Cross and the Resurrection”, Benedict XVI writes.

For him, it seems that no ’substitution’ really takes place but rather ‘a journey’ that leads to “one single reality, with the necessary disappearance of sacrificing animals” as practiced in the Old Testament¸”replaced instead by the Eucharist”.

Benedict XVI also reflects on the differences between the Jewish and Christian understanding of the Messiah and on the foundation of Israel as a modern nation state. He sees the latter as a consequence of the Shoah (Holocaust) and a purely political event which has no theological significance and does not form part of the story of Redemption.

The Catholic Church, he says, disagreed with the Zionist project of a ‘theologically founded Jewish settlement” in the sense of a ‘new political messianism” and of ‘a confessional Jewish state’ that considers itself as the fulfillment of divine promises.

His final ‘dig’ appears to be in recalling verses 12-13 from Chapter 2 of the Letter to Timothy, according to which St Paul says, “If we persevere (with Christ), we shall also reign with him. But if we deny him, he will deny us. If we are unfaithful, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself."

Benedict XVI sees the question of Jesus as the Messiah is ‘the true problem between Jews and Christians’. In Jesus Christ and in his blood (the Eucharist), he says the people of Sinai were transformed to a new and eternal Covenant – which he links to the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem less than four decades after the Crucifixion (73 A.D.)

He thinks that the formulation “a Covenant that was never cancelled” was useful in the past, but is not adapted for the long term “to express the grandeur of reality in a reasonably adequate way”.

The Orthodox Rabbinical Conference of Germany sent an open letter to Cardinal Koch on August 2 to ask “whether the Catholic Church is able to appreciate contemporary Judaism” and “how this appreciation is theologically expressed”.

On the other hand, the International Conference of Confessional Communities welcomed Benedict VI’s words ‘with great gratitude’ as an ‘encouraging clarification’ that is significant for Protestant Christians even as they have been ‘falsely depicted in the media as anti-Jewish”.


Marco Tosatti reported on it on his blog:

Christians, Jews and the Covenant with God
Translated from

August 14, 2018

A theological reflection – in the form of an essay – by Benedict XVI has stirred up the always-sensitive relationship between Christians and Jews.

The subject of the discussion, even of polemics, is a 20-page text that Cardinal Kurt Koch, the Church official responsible for dialog with the Christians’ ‘older brothers’, had requested the Emeritus Pope to write. It was to have been for the internal use of Koch’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, but Koch asked Benedict XVI if he could have it published in the German edition of the theological journal Communio
https://www.communio.de/pdf/vorabveroeffentlichung/Communio-Benedikt_XVI-2018.pdf
– and there, the problems began.

In the essay, Benedict XVI says that reflection on some aspects of what has become the mainstream attitude of the Church towards Judaism – namely, salvation and the need (or non-need) for conversion to Christianity in order to be saved.

“Both theses”, he writes, “namely, that Israel has not been replaced by the Church, and that the Old Alliance was never revoked – sre substantially correct, but are imprecise in many aspects and should ultimately be examined critically”.

On November 17, 1980, John Paul II affirmed in Mainz, Germany, that the Old Covenant had never been revoked and still remains valid. It was deduced from this statement that the Jewish people and their religion, in the various forms in which it is practised, is still in full accord with God. Subsequently, these affirmations were included in the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church (No. 121).

In his new essay, Benedict XVI states that “this is, in a certain sense, part of the present teaching [Lehrgestalt] of the Catholic Church”.

But he seeks to show that it is never God who rescinds a covenant with his people, but rather the people of God, mankind, who often violate and break up their covenant with God. In this context, he cites St. Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews in which Paul mentions all the preceding covenants in the Old Testament, “all of which he refers to collectively with the key word ‘first covenant’ which has now been replaced by the New Covenant".

“In effect,” Benedict XVI writes, “part of the true story of God’s relationship with the people of Israel is the rupture of that covenant on the part of man, the first part of which is described in the Book of Exodus”.

The problematic statement – and one of the problems with current Churchh reading of the Jewish situation - comes when Benedict XVI underscores that the New Covenant is ‘valid for always’ because it was formed in the Blood of Christ.

“The re-institution of the Covenant of Sinai in the New Covenant in the Blood of Jesus – which is to say, in his love which overcomes death – confirms a new form on the Covenant which is valid for always”.

One would logically deduce from this statement that the Old Covenant was transformed into the New Covenant, which is valid for always because it derives from the Blood of Christ himself. Some observes think this represents a return to the traditional Catholic views on Judaism.

But after Vatican II and its declaration Nostra aetate, on the Church’s relations with non-Christian religions, there was no more talk of ‘converting’ the Jews – an always thorny question in the light of preceding centuries – and ‘fraternal dialog’ with the Jews was encouraged. Effectively, this meant abandoning the very idea of Christian mission among the Jews since apparently, the Jews have their own way to salvation.

In 2015, on the 50th anniversary of Nostra aetate, the Vatican stated: “In concrete terms, this means that the Catholic Church does not undertake nor support any work of specific institutional mission with regard to the Jews”.

But Benedict XVI writes: “God’s entire relationship with his people finally finds it sum and final form in the Last Supper of Jesus Christ, which anticipates and contains both the Cross and the Resurrection”.

And referring to Jeremiah 31 which prefigures the New Covenant in the Old testament, Benedict XVI explains: “The Covenant on Sinai, was essentially always a promise, an approach towards the definitive and conclusive covenant. After all the destructions, it is God’s love which leads to the death of his Son, which is, in itself, the New Covenant”.

He attempts to redirect the discussion on the theory of substation as follows: "Therefore, in effect, there is really no ‘substitution’ but ‘a journey’ which finally leads to one single reality, with the necessary disappearance of the sacrifice of animals (as in the Old Covenant), which has been replaced by the sacrifice of the Eucharist”.

He also recalls that the Church was never in agreement with the Zionist project of a “theologically founded [Jewish] settlement [Landnahme] in the sense of a new political messianism”. And while politically recognizing the state of Israel as such, the Vatican rejected the idea of a ‘theologically founded state, of a confessional Jewish state” which sees itself as the fulfillment of divine promises.

The last sensitive point of the essay has to do with the theological linking between the rupture of the Old Covenant, the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 73 AD, and the dispersion of the Jewish people in the Diaspora: “But part of the story of covenants between God and man is human failing, man’s violation of the covenant and its internal consequences: the destruction of the Temple, the dispersion of the Jews, the call to penitence which enables and prepares man for the new Covenant. God’s love cannot simply ignore man’s NO”.

Finally, Benedict XVI proposes a passage from the Second Letter to Timothy as relevant to this discussion: “If we persevere (with Christ), we shall also reign with him. But if we deny him, he will deny us. If we are unfaithful, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself."

I have only skimmed the 20-page text in German, and I have no idea how soon I can translate it (unless someone else comes up with a translation). I can only say he must feel very strongly about this to end up writing a 20-page reflection in October 2017 (six months after he turned 90) about how he has reconsidered certain 'stipulations' in Nostra Aetate as imprecise and requiring critical examination... I wish he would carry on this intellectual exercise to re-examine other dubious or ambiguous propositions of Vatican II.

Left, the pastel-gay vestments for the 2018 WMF with a logo ostensibly meant to be a Celtic triskelion; right, top panel: what the letters mean in BDSM and the BDSM's presentation of its own symbols; right, top panel: the Celtic triskelion as depicted in ancient Celtic works of art.

Is the Dublin WMF infiltrated, if not run,
by advocates of sinful sexual lifestyles?

If you had any doubt at all that the organizers of the increasingly dubious World Meeting of Families in Dublin later this month have been infiltrated by - if not composed of - apostates advocating sinful lifestyles, the design for the liturgical vestments to be used therein ought to nail those doubts.

Father Z first raised the alarm over the vestments because of their dubious pastel-gay colors, and then an alert reader called his attention to the 'logo' found on the vestments, which he traced to the website describing BDSM, a variety of erotic practices based on - as their derivation diagram shows - bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism.

Which led me to further research the origins of the 'triskelic' logo used by the BDSM movement, and which obviously, the organizers of the Dublin WFM have adapted as a logo for the liturgical vestments ordered for the event. A design which mirrors the BDSM logo more than it does the Celtic symbols from which it was derived.

All of it, in fact, is a deliberate corruption of two ancient Celtic symbols, the Triskelion and the Triquetra pictured below.


The Celtic people spanned numerous countries including Greece, Italy, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. A people of oral tradition and art, they left behind numerous works of art depicting the world and their beliefs. Celtic art and markings burst with symbols, many of which invoke the energies of Nature and of the Universe itself.

The Triskelion, or life spiral, has also been discovered in ancient Greek and Hopi Indian tradition. Drawn in a continuous line, it represents life’s movement and other three-part elements of life (like past, present and future). Because its symbolism is that of having the will to move forward no matter the circumstances, it is one of the major Celtic symbols for strength.

It is the most often seen symbol on stone art from early Celtic history and appears later in Christian manuscripts to symbolize the Triune deity, along with the Triquetra, or trinity knot.

The Triquetra has three parts that interconnect and symbolizes anything in the world that is bundled in threes (such as mind, body and spirit). Pagan custom associated the triquetra with Odin, the three-fold goddess, and with the three elements of nature – water, earth and air. In Christian tradition, it became a representation of the Triune God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit).

Everyone who wears the vestments designed for the WMF in Dublin - the reigning pope included - will therefore be emblazoned with the logo of a movement that goes exponentially beyond the mere LGBTQ lifestyles that the likes of Fr James Martin, SJ, are seeking to mainline.

It really is not too late to cancel this travesty of a 'family meeting' as many have been advocating. Already, two prominent US cardinals have decided to cancel their appearances in Dublin:
- Cardinal Sean O'Malley, who was supposed to chair a committee and moderate a debate on "Safeguarding children and vulnerable adults",
begged off because "important problems concerning the pastoral care of St John's Seminary in the Archdiocese of Boston and its seminarians require the cardinal's personal attention".
- Today, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the embattled Archbishop of Washington, DC, and a major protagonist in the recently released Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report on eoiscopal misdeed and clerical sex abuses, also announced he will not be going to Dublin, where he was to chair a discussion on the theme "The wellbeing of the family is decisive for the future of the world".

On August 17 it became known that Wuerl’s publisher cancelled the publication of his forthcoming book “What Do You Want to Know?”

On August 18 Wuerl withdrew from presiding the installation mass for Father Kevin Regan, the new parish-priest at St John Neumann parish in Gaithersburg (August 19).

This is the parish where in February 2012 Wuerl fired Father Marcel Guarnizo, then parochial vicar at St John Neumann, because Guarnizo quietly denied communion to a woman who had introduced him to her female lover before a funeral Mass.

Three other major protagonists in Dublin have been the object of protests by many Catholic faithful who find their associations dubious, beginning with
- Cardinal Kevin Farrell, prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity and Family which is overall in charge of the WMF event, whose history includes long and close association with two figures who have become emblematic of the sexual abuse crisis in the Church - Theodore McCarrick and Marcial Maciel.
- Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga of Honduras, whose longtime deputy in Tegucigalpa recently resigned after disclosures of his long-standing sexual and financial crimes, despite which Maradiaga remains the coordinator of the reigning popes Council of Cardinals; and
- Jesuit Fr. James Martin, the Bergoglio church's most prominent advocate of LGBTQ lifestyles, and against whom more than 10,000 have signed an online petition asking that he be dropped from the Dublin speakers' line-up.

Last week, the Irish Times published an editorial calling for the non-participation of three pro-gay Cardinals Kevin Farrell, Donald Wuerl and Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga the Dublin WMF, saying these cardinals should be "investigated, not honoured".

More and more, the Dublin WMF appears to be an occasion designed for - if not by - the devil himself.

The current face of the sex abuse crisis in the USA.

Our Pastor at the Church of the Holy Innocents, Fr. James Miara, devoted his homily today to addressing the current sex abuse/power abuse/episcopal cover-ups overload weighing on the Church, and
did so by reading the letter addressed by Bishop Robert Morlino of Madison, Wisconsin, to the faithful of his Archdiocese, with which, he says, he and any Catholic conscious of sin as an offense to
Almighty God, ought to be in complete agreement.

---

Letter to the faithful regarding
the ongoing sexual abuse crisis in the Church


Dear brothers and sisters in Christ of the Diocese of Madison,

The past weeks have brought a great deal of scandal, justified anger, and a call for answers and action by many faithful Catholics here in the U.S. and overseas, directed at the Church hierarchy regarding sexual sins by bishops, priests, and even cardinals. Still more anger is rightly directed at those who have been complicit in keeping some of these serious sins from coming to light.

For my part — and I know I am not alone — I am tired of this. I am tired of people being hurt, gravely hurt! I am tired of the obfuscation of truth. I am tired of sin. And, as one who has tried — despite my many imperfections — to lay down my life for Christ and His Church, I am tired of the regular violation of sacred duties by those entrusted with immense responsibility from the Lord for the care of His people.

The stories being brought into light and displayed in gruesome detail with regard to some priests, religious, and now even those in places of highest leadership, are sickening. Hearing even one of these stories is, quite literally, enough to make someone sick. But my own sickness at the stories is quickly put into perspective when I recall the fact that many individuals have lived through them for years. For them, these are not stories, they are indeed realities. To them I turn and say, again, I am sorry for what you have suffered and what you continue to suffer in your mind and in your heart.

If you have not already done so, I beg you to reach out, as hard as that may be, and seek help to begin to heal. Also, if you’ve been hurt by a priest of our diocese, I encourage you to come forward, to make a report to law enforcement and to our Victim’s Assistance Coordinator, so that we might begin, with you as an individual, to try and set things right to the greatest extent possible.

There is nothing about these stories that is okay. These actions, committed by more than a few, can only be classified as evil, evil that cries out for justice and sin that must be cast out from our Church.

Faced with stories of the depravity of sinners within the Church, I have been tempted to despair. And why? The reality of sin — even sin in the Church — is nothing new. We are a Church made of sinners, but we are sinners called to sanctity. So what is new? What is new is the seeming acceptance of sin by some in the Church, and the apparent efforts to cover over sin by them and others. Unless and until we take seriously our call to sanctity, we, as an institution and as individuals, will continue to suffer the “wages of sin.”

For too long we have diminished the reality of sin — we have refused to call a sin a sin — and we have excused sin in the name of a mistaken notion of mercy. In our efforts to be open to the world we have become all too willing to abandon the Way, the Truth, and the Life. In order to avoid causing offense we offer to ourselves and to others niceties and human consolation.

Why do we do this? Is it out of an earnest desire to display a misguided sense of being “pastoral?” Have we covered over the truth out of fear? Are we afraid of being disliked by people in this world? Or are we afraid of being called hypocrites because we are not striving tirelessly for holiness in our own lives?

Perhaps these are the reasons, but perhaps it is more or less complex than this. In the end, the excuses do not matter. We must be done with sin. It must be rooted out and again considered unacceptable. Love sinners? Yes. Accept true repentance? Yes. But do not say sin is okay. And do not pretend that grave violations of office and of trust come without grave, lasting consequences.

For the Church, the crisis we face is not limited to the McCarrick affair, or the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report, or anything else that may come. The deeper crisis that must be addressed is the license for sin to have a home in individuals at every level of the Church. There is a certain comfort level with sin that has come to pervade our teaching, our preaching, our decision making, and our very way of living.

If you’ll permit me, what the Church needs now is more hatred! As I have said previously, St. Thomas Aquinas said that hatred of wickedness actually belongs to the virtue of charity. As the Book of Proverbs says “My mouth shall meditate truth, and my lips shall hate wickedness (Prov. 8:7).” It is an act of love to hate sin and to call others to turn away from sin.

There must be no room left, no refuge for sin — either within our own lives, or within the lives of our communities. To be a refuge for sinners (which we should be), the Church must be a place where sinners can turn to be reconciled. In this I speak of all sin.

But to be clear, in the specific situations at hand, we are talking about deviant sexual — almost exclusively homosexual — acts by clerics. We’re also talking about homosexual propositions and abuses against seminarians and young priests by powerful priests, bishops, and cardinals.

We are talking about acts and actions which are not only in violation of the sacred promises made by some, in short, sacrilege, but also are in violation of the natural moral law for all. To call it anything else would be deceitful and would only ignore the problem further.

There has been a great deal of effort to keep separate acts which fall under the category of now-culturally-acceptable acts of homosexuality from the publically-deplorable acts of pedophilia. That is to say, until recently the problems of the Church have been painted purely as problems of pedophilia — this despite clear evidence to the contrary.

It is time to be honest that the problems are both and they are more. To fall into the trap of parsing problems according to what society might find acceptable or unacceptable is ignoring the fact that the Church has never held ANY of it to be acceptable — neither the abuse of children, nor any use of one’s sexuality outside of the marital relationship, nor the sin of sodomy, nor the entering of clerics into intimate sexual relationships at all, nor the abuse and coercion by those with authority.

In this last regard, special mention should be made of the most notorious and highest in ranking case, that being the allegations of former-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s (oft-rumored, now very public) sexual sins, predation, and abuse of power. The well-documented details of this case are disgraceful and seriously scandalous, as is any covering up of such appalling actions by other Church leaders who knew about it based on solid evidence.

While recent credible accusations of child sexual abuse by Archbishop McCarrick have brought a whole slew of issues to light, long-ignored was the issue of abuse of his power for the sake of homosexual gratification.

It is time to admit that there is a homosexual subculture within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that is wreaking great devastation in the vineyard of the Lord. The Church’s teaching is clear that the homosexual inclination is not in itself sinful, but it is intrinsically disordered in a way that renders any man stably afflicted by it unfit to be a priest. And the decision to act upon this disordered inclination is a sin so grave that it cries out to heaven for vengeance, especially when it involves preying upon the young or the vulnerable. Such wickedness should be hated with a perfect hatred.

Christian charity itself demands that we should hate wickedness just as we love goodness. But while hating the sin, we must never hate the sinner, who is called to conversion, penance, and renewed communion with Christ and His Church, through His inexhaustible mercy.

At the same time, however, the love and mercy which we are called to have even for the worst of sinners does not exclude holding them accountable for their actions through a punishment proportionate to the gravity of their offense. In fact, a just punishment is an important work of love and mercy, because, while it serves primarily as retribution for the offense committed, it also offers the guilty party an opportunity to make expiation for his sin in this life (if he willingly accepts his punishment), thus sparing him worse punishment in the life to come. Motivated, therefore, by love and concern for souls, I stand with those calling for justice to be done upon the guilty.

The sins and crimes of McCarrick, and of far too many others in the Church, bring suspicion and mistrust upon many good and virtuous priests, bishops, and cardinals, and suspicion and mistrust upon many great and respectable seminaries and so many holy and faithful seminarians. The result of the first instance of mistrust harms the Church and the very good work we do in Christ’s name. It causes others to sin in their thoughts, words, and deeds — which is the very definition of scandal. And the second mistrust harms the future of the Church, since our future priests are at stake.

I said that I was tempted to despair in light of all of this. However, that temptation quickly passed, thanks be to God. No matter how large the problem, we know that we are called to go forward in faith, to rely upon God’s promises to us, and to work hard to make every bit of difference we can, within our spheres of influence.

I have recently had the opportunity to talk directly with our seminarians about these very pressing matters, and I have begun to, and will continue to, talk with the priests of the diocese, as well as the faithful, in person and through my weekly column and homilies, making things as clear as I can, from my perspective. Here now, I offer a few thoughts to those of my diocese:

In the first place, we must continue to build upon the good work which we have accomplished in protecting the youth and vulnerable of our diocese. This is a work on which we can never rest in our vigilance, nor our efforts to improve. We must continue in our work of education for all and hold to the effective policies that have been implemented, requiring psychological exams for all candidates for ministry, as well as across-the-board background checks for anyone working with children or vulnerable individuals.

Here again, I state, as we have done consistently, if you have knowledge of any sort of criminal abuse of children by someone in the Church, contact law enforcement. If you need help in contacting law enforcement contact our Victim’s Assistance Coordinator and she will help connect you with the best resources. If you are an adult victim of sexual abuse from childhood, we still encourage you to reach out to law enforcement first, but even if you don’t want to, please still reach out to us.

To our seminarians: If you are unchastely propositioned, abused, or threatened (no matter by whom), or if you directly witness unchaste behavior, report it to me and to the seminary rector. I will address it swiftly and vigorously. I will not stand for this in my diocese or anywhere I send men for formation. I trust that the seminaries I choose, very discriminately, to help form our men will not ignore this type of scandalous behavior, and I will continue to verify that expectation.

To our priests: Most simply, live out the promises you made on your ordination day. You are called to serve Christ’s people, beginning with praying daily the Liturgy of the Hours. This is to keep you very close to God. In addition, you promised to obey and be loyal to your bishop. In obedience, strive to live out your priesthood as a holy priest, a hard working priest, and a pure and happy priest — as Christ Himself is calling you to do. And by extension, live a chaste and celibate life so that you can completely give your life to Christ, the Church, and the people whom he has called you to serve.

God will give you the graces to do so. Ask Him for the help you need daily and throughout every day. And if you are unchastely propositioned, abused, or threatened (no matter by whom), or if you directly witness unchaste behavior, report it to me. I will not stand for this in my diocese any more than in our seminaries.

To the faithful of the diocese: If you are the victim of abuse of any kind by a priest, bishop, cardinal, or any employee of the Church, bring it forward. It will be addressed quickly and justly. If you have directly witnessed sexual advances or any type of abuse, bring it forward as well. Such actions are sinful and scandalous and we cannot allow anyone to use their position or power to abuse another person. Again, in addition to injuring individuals, these actions injure the very Body of Christ, His Church.

Furthermore, I add my name to those calling for real and sustained reform in the episcopate, priesthood, our parishes, schools, universities, and seminaries that would root out and hold accountable any would-be sexual predator or accomplice;

I will hold the priests of the diocese to their promise to live a chaste and celibate life of service to you and your parish, and evidence of failure in this regard will be justly addressed;

I will likewise hold every man studying for the priesthood for our diocese accountable to living a chaste and celibate life as part of his formation for the priesthood. Failure to do so will lead to dismissal from diocesan sponsorship;

I will continue to require (with our men and our funds) that all seminaries to which we send men to study be vigilant that seminarians are protected from sexual predators and provide an atmosphere conducive to their holistic formation as holy priests, in the image of Christ;

I ask all the faithful of the diocese to assist in keeping us accountable to civil authorities, the faithful in the pews, and to God Almighty, not only to protect children and the youth from sexual predators in the Church, but our seminarians, university students, and all the faithful as well. I promise to put any victim and their sufferings before that of the personal and professional reputation of a priest, or any Church employee, guilty of abuse;

I ask everyone reading this to pray. Pray earnestly for the Church and all her ministers. Pray for our seminarians. And pray for yourselves and your families. We must all work daily on our own personal holiness and hold ourselves accountable first and, in turn, hold our brothers and sisters accountable as well, and

Finally, I ask you all to join me and the entire clergy of the Diocese of Madison in making public and private acts of reparation to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and to the Immaculate Heart of Mary for all the sins of sexual depravity committed by members of the clergy and episcopacy.

I will be offering a public Mass of reparation on Friday, September 14, the Feast of the Triumph of the Holy Cross, at Holy Name Heights and I ask all pastors to do the same in their own parishes. In addition, I ask that all priests, clergy, religious, and diocesan employees join me in observing the upcoming Autumn Ember Days (Sep. 19, 21, and 22) as days of fasting and abstinence in reparation for the sins and outrages committed by members of the clergy and episcopacy and I invite all the faithful to do the same. Some sins, like some demons, can only be driven out by prayer and fasting.

This letter and these statements and promises are not intended to be an exhaustive list of what we can and need to do in the Church to begin to heal from, and stave off, this deep illness in the Church, but rather the next steps I believe we can take locally.

More than anything else, we as a Church must cease our acceptance of sin and evil. We must cast out sin from our own lives and run toward holiness. We must refuse to be silent in the face of sin and evil in our families and communities and we must demand from our pastors — myself included — that they themselves are striving day in and day out for holiness. We must do this always with loving respect for individuals but with a clear understanding that true love can never exist without truth.

Again, right now there is a lot of justified anger and passion coming from many holy and faithful lay people and clerics across the country, calling for real reform and “house cleaning” of this type of depravity. I stand with them. I don’t know yet how this will play out nationally or internationally. But I do know this, and I make this my last point and last promise, for the Diocese of Madison: “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”

Faithfully yours in the Lord,

Most Rev. Robert C. Morlino
Bishop of Madison

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