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THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

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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





Since this is to be the next great Bergoglio scandal, allow me to re-post this entry from the previous page.



THE NEXT GREAT BERGOGLIO SCANDAL:
Vatican to allow Beijing to name bishops

by Steven W. Mosher

September 15, 2018

It is never a good idea to sign a deal just for the sake of signing a deal

The Vatican is set to sign an agreement with China by the end of the month, one that cedes control over the appointment of bishops to Beijing. In return, we are told, Beijing has agreed to recognize the pope as the head of China’s Catholics.

From my position as a long-time observer of the machinations of the Chinese Party-State, this seems like a bad deal. The pope is ceding his very real authority to name bishops to China’s Communist authorities in return for the promise of symbolic recognition as the titular head of all Catholics in China. Might he not be giving up something for nothing?

The Vatican originally proposed that China follow the terms of an agreement it had reached with the Vietnamese government over the appointment of bishops. Under its terms, the Vatican and the Vietnamese authorities, working together, draw up a list of potential candidates. The Vatican then chooses someone from the list who, once Hanoi ratifies the choice, is consecrated as a bishop by the pope. Such a model clearly preserves papal authority.

This “Vietnam model” was rejected by China, however. As the official Global Times later reported, “Such a model was not accepted by China when it was tested in the country in 2005, as the Chinese authorities want total control over choosing candidates.”

Beijing went on to insist upon a “Chinese model”, under the terms of which the Communist authorities alone will nominate a potential candidate for bishop. The pope must then approve or reject that candidate. If he vetoes the first candidate, Beijing will nominate another.

The pope’s “veto power,” however, is not unlimited.

As a Chinese official familiar with the negotiations was quoted as saying, “We cannot submit endless candidate lists to the Vatican if the pontiff keeps saying no. We may have to appoint bishops unapproved by the pontiff after a set number of rounds of negotiations. Such bishops may not be legitimate under the Church doctrine, but they can still give Church services to Chinese Catholics.”

In other words, the pope may veto an obviously unsuitable candidate or two, but Beijing has made it clear that there is a limit to the number of times a papal veto can be used. It has also limited the amount of time that the Vatican has to respond once a candidate’s name is submitted.

This means that at the end of the day it is the Communist authorities, and not Pope Francis, who will have the final say over who becomes a bishop in the Chinese Catholic Church.


The Vatican is reportedly prepared to make other concessions as well.

Perhaps the most important is that Pope Francis will formally consecrate as bishops seven men who were made “bishops” by the Communist authorities over the past decade. All of these men have been previously rejected by the Vatican as bishop candidates for various reasons having to do with personal morality, public actions, or both.

In a further concession, the Vatican has promised that the Pope will lift the excommunication of the seven illicit “bishops” of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association even before the new agreement is signed.

Second, the Pope will order two bishops of the underground Church, who have faithfully served for decades under intense persecution, to hand over their dioceses to bishops appointed by the Communist authorities. Shantou Bishop Zhuang Jianjian has been ordered to retire, a decision that has caused enormous pain to the local Church, while Mindong Bishop Guo Xijin has been told that he will be made an “auxiliary” of the Shantou diocese he has long headed.

The fate of the forty or so other underground bishops is unknown, although the Times reports that the Communist authorities are expected to recognize the “underground” bishop of Qiqihar, in Heilongjiang province, Bishop Wei Jingyi.

Not long ago, I was told by a senor Vatican official that the signing of a formal agreement with the Chinese Party-State would give Rome the leverage it needs to improve conditions for Catholics in China. His view of the trustworthiness of Chinese officials struck me as naïve, especially in view of the many agreements that Beijing has signed–only to violate–over the years.

It seems to me even more unwise to move forward with an agreement at the present time, when the Communist authorities are engaged in a widespread crackdown on all forms of religious expression in China.

Will the same people who are tearing down churches and burning bibles suddenly cease and desist simply because they have signed an agreement with the Vatican? It seems unlikely, especially given that new regulations restricting religious activities were just announced on February 1st of this year and are being carried out with ever-increasing fervor.

To make matters worse, the purported Vatican-China agreement almost seems deliberately designed to be nonbinding, since its terms are to be kept secret from the world in general, and from Chinese Catholics in particular. How can it be used as “leverage” if its terms are known only to a handful of people in Rome?

The same senior Vatican official insisted that, since “we will be signing an agreement with Xi Jinping himself. . . will they not abide by it?”

I quickly recited to him a litany of agreements that the Chinese government has signed, only to violate. These included the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Sino-British Agreement over Hong Kong, and the World Trade Organization covenants.

It is also clear that Xi Jinping simply will not tolerate “foreign interference in internal Chinese matters.” As I write in Bully of Asia, Xi is channeling the late Chairman Mao, and like him is carrying out a Cultural Revolution in China to eliminate all religions. If the Vatican thinks the proposed agreement will put it in a position to aid the Chinese Catholic Church, much less direct its activities, it is in for a disappointment.

The Chinese Party-State, on the other hand, will undoubtedly use the pretext of a Vatican-China agreement to increase its persecution of the Underground Church in China. It will insist that each and every one of China’s 12 million Catholics worship only in churches approved by the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association. It will use the borrowed authority of the Vatican to further clamp down on unregistered churches in so-called underground communities led by bishops loyal only to Rome.

Those in the Underground Church, who have suffered so much over the decades, may be in for yet another season of suffering.

Expert explains Vatican compromise
with Communist China

by Anita Carey

September 12, 2018

FRONT ROYAL, Va. (ChurchMilitant.com) - An exclusive interview with a Chinese cultural expert sheds some light on why Vatican prelates are compromising with China's Communist government at the expense of the Church.

Steven Mosher is the president of Population Research Institute and a Catholic who has been studying and working in China since 1976. In 1979, he was the first American in China after the U.S. normalized diplomatic relations with the Chinese government and has spent decades in the country living and working with the Chinese people.

"I've basically spent my life studying China," he said.

Mosher traveled to Rome earlier this summer to talk directly with Vatican prelates "to find out what these officials thought the Church would gain from inking an agreement with the Chinese Communist Party."

He said he's been trying to get them "to understand the nature of the regime they're dealing with" and that their purpose is contrary to everything the Catholic Church stands for.

The Vatican has been communicating with the Chinese government since 2005 when the disgraced former cardinal Theodore McCarrick traveled to China to meet with Communist Party officials for the first time.

Mosher explained McCarrick mentioned commonalities between Pope Francis and the president of China, Xi Jinping, and their concern for social issues.

"I don't see any commonalities at all between the Catholic Church and the Chinese Communist Party," Mosher noted.

He said some Church officials who are reluctant to talk about personal morality are swept away by the claims of the Communist Party that they have made great strides in social policies.

"It makes them uncomfortable to talk about personal morality if they're not living the commandments," he said. "It's much, much easier to talk about the social teaching of the Church because that's not an individual obligation, it's a communal obligation, a social obligation that doesn't create a kind of cognitive dissonance in their minds and the kind of conflicts in their mind that talking about, for example, avoiding homosexual behavior requires."

Mosher explained that if a bishop or priest is "not living the Faith with regards to personal morality, he will want to duck that question and segue off into unchallenging talk ... which puts no demands on his conscience or own personal behavior."

He said Cdl. Blase Cupich's recent statement about "not going to go down a rabbit hole," is an example of a desperate attempt to change the subject away from personal morality because of internal conflicts.

Mosher said Xi Jinping is the new "Red Emperor" who has "more power than Mao Zedong." Jinping has control of both the government and the military, something that Mao Zedong didn't. Using the guise of an "anti-corruption campaign," Jinping is purging his enemies from the Communist Party. Over 1.5 million government officials in the past five years have been brought up on corruption charges — but not one of Jinping's supporters, Mosher explained.

In January, after the Vatican asked two legitimate bishops to resign so Patriotic Church bishops could be installed, China's highest-ranking prelate, Cdl. Joseph Zen, blasted the Vatican for "selling out" and caving to the demands of the Communist leaders.

Cardinal Zen wrote an open letter to the media, saying Pope Francis "doesn't know the Chinese communists" and "the people around him are not good at all." He blasted the Vatican, saying, "They have very wrong ideas."

Mosher agreed with Cdl. Zen's assessment that the Vatican does not understand the Communist Party. He explained the China that is presented to casual visitors and diplomats is not the same China that those fluent in the language see. These people are met by a delegation of officials that wine and dine them at five-star hotels and leave them "feeling pretty good about China."

He said because they are either followed or escorted everywhere, these visitors never meet ordinary people or those in the underground Church.

"Cardinal Zen is exactly the kind of person that the Vatican should be relying upon for information and for the formulation of strategy about how to deal with the Communist Party," Mosher said.

Additionally, because of the language barrier, most visitors have no idea what is really going on and only know what the government "minders" are telling them.

"They haven't seen the real China," he said. "They've lived in kind of an alternate reality" during their trip, noting that this is a common phenomenon with many visitors who then come back "singing the praises of the regime."

An example of this was in February 2018, when Abp. Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, the chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, praised the Communist Party for not having slums, its low drug use and a "positive national conscience." Archbishop Sorondo said, "Right now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese."

Mosher said he spent four hours with Abp. Sorondo during his visit discussing the "fundamental disagreements" the Communist Party and the Catholic Church have on human rights issues such as abortion, forced sterilizations and poverty.

Mosher said he had to explain to Abp. Sorondo the reason there are no slums outside of Bejing is that people aren't allowed to live in those slums. Internal passport controls instituted from the Communist Party force around one million of Bejing's poorest to live in crowded basements with five to 10 other people or in older housing that the Communist Party is quickly tearing down.

Last fall, Mosher said, the Bejing city government deemed there were too many people living in the city and summarily evicted three million people who had emigrated there for work but lacked the proper documentation.

"They were basically thrown out into the snow in the middle of winter," Mosher said.

The arrangement the Communist Party wants with the Catholic Church is a "rubber stamping" of who the Party picks to be the bishop, Mosher explained. The Party has said openly in the media that they do not want the "Viet Nam model," where the final choice for bishop is left to the Vatican and respects the authority of the Magisterium. The proposed "China model" leaves the final choice to the Communist Party, and if the Vatican doesn't approve, they can veto the candidate.

Mosher noted Cdl. Zen wondered how many times the Vatican can veto a candidate before the Party eventually ordains their candidate, overriding the authority of the Magisterium.

"At the end of the day, the Party will decide who's going to be the bishop," he said.

"The Communist Party is officially atheistic," Mosher explained. "Their policy is now to gradually eliminate the Catholic Church over time."

In February, Jinping instituted a new policy making it illegal to take children to Mass. It forces all Catholics, even those going to the underground Church, to register with the government and makes parish life activities like prayer meetings and catechism classes illegal. He said, "They want to limit the Catholic Church to celebrating Mass on Sunday."

"The Chinese Communist Party wants to be all things to all people," Mosher said. They are "almost insulted" that the Catholic Church would be filling the unmet needs of the Chinese people because the Party is supposed to be meeting all the needs of the people "on the journey to the socialist paradise."

"That's the recipe for the elimination of the Catholic Church, not tolerance of it," Mosher explained.

Mosher said there is much more on the topic in his book, The Bully of Asia.

A new post:

Religious freedom for Chinese Catholics
imperilled if Vatican deal is inked

by Olivia Enos

September 14, 2018

New reports indicate that a deal between the People’s Republic of China and the Vatican is imminent. If inked, the pact may have serious implications for the religious freedom of Catholics in China, as well as for diplomatic ties with Taiwan, which the Vatican currently recognizes as the official representative of faithful Catholics in China.

The deal purportedly grants the Chinese government power to nominate future bishops. It would also require the Vatican to recognize seven excommunicated Chinese bishops currently operating in China without recognition from Rome.

When the notion of a deal was first raised, Catholics around the world voiced concerns over the role the Chinese government would play in the appointment of Catholic bishops. Under the proposed deal, the pope has veto power over bishops nominated by Chinese authorities. In all other countries, the pope possesses sole authority to appoint bishops.

News of an impending deal comes amidst a crackdown on people of faith throughout China. A Human Rights Watch report estimates that over a million Muslim Uighurs are currently detained in re-education camps in the western province of Xinjiang. Rising persecution of Protestants in China grabbed the attention of lawmakers in Congress who condemned reports that Chinese authorities are burning Bibles, imprisoning pastors, and tearing down crosses from churches.

Religious persecution has long been a feature of Chinese Communist Party rule. Since the 19th Party Congress last October, however, religious persecution has risen substantially.

New Regulations on Religious Affairs, instituted this February, represented an extension of the party’s attempts to Sinicize religious practice—essentially an effort to secularize religion so that it serves the party’s ends.


Finalizing a deal now would send the message that the Vatican is willing to turn a blind eye to Chinese threats to religious freedom—including the persecution of Catholics.

The State Department’s latest International Religious Freedom report estimates that China is home to 12 million Catholics. Some are congregants in China’s officially recognized churches, while others worship in underground churches.

The 2017 report recounts the bulldozing of Catholic churches, the forcible disappearance of Father Lu Danhua (now believed to be held in a religious “re-education” facility), and the detention and imprisonment of numerous Catholic parishioners.

A report on China from Freedom House suggests that persecution of Catholics is on a downward trend, but that religious persecution overall is still rising.

It is against this backdrop that the Vatican intends to normalize relations with China.

Any Vatican deal with Beijing will also affect religious freedom in Taiwan. Taiwan is known for respecting religious freedom. But under the One China policy, the Vatican would likely be required to switch official recognition from Taiwan to China.

Such a transition would sever ties with Taiwan’s last remaining European ally and send a negative message to Taiwanese Catholics who have faithfully operated in accordance with Rome since the Holy See granted diplomatic recognition of Taiwan in 1942.

Before signing a deal with Beijing, the Vatican should think seriously about the message that act would send regarding its concern for religious freedom in China. Any decision should be made with the primary goal of advancing religious freedom for all. Granting the Chinese government authority over the appointment of bishops is unlikely to achieve those ends.

Enos is a researcher in the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation where she writes about international human rights issues including human trafficking, transnational crime, religious freedom, and democratic freedoms, among other social issues in Asia.

There's a significant caveat from longtime China observer and AsiaNews editor Fr. Bernardo Cervellera. It's a significant point he raises, because what does Beijing stand to gain from the agreeement as it stands? It can always go on doing what it wishes to do about religions in the country and about the Catholic Church in particular. The rumored agreement does not inhibit Beijing in anyway from whatever it wishes to do.

It's the Bergoglio Vatican that has been obsessed with having a 'deal' with China at any cost, it seems,for the dubious motive of enabling Bergoglio to become the first pope ever to visit China. No one buys their argument that the Vatican is doing this for the good of the Catholics of China, because it will essentially have no say at all about their fate.


Who knows if China really wants
an agreement with the Holy See?

by Fr Bernardo Cervellera
Editor


According to the Wall Street Journal the "historic agreement" will be signed by the end of September. But announcements of this type have been happening for years. The Pope and the Vatican are ready, but China is divided: it favors the foreign ministry; against the United Front and the Patriotic Association which continue unperturbed to persecute the Church and religions. The silence of Beijing and Xi Jinping.


Rome, Sept. 15, 2018 (AsiaNews) - The authoritative Wall Street Journal (WSJ) yesterday released the news that China and the Vatican "are ready to sign a historic agreement" by the end of the month.

The agreement concerns the procedure for the appointment of bishops, in which China has the power of appointment and the Pope would have the power of temporary veto or confirmation.

On the other hand - according to the WSJ – he would be recognized as "head of the Catholic Church in China" in exchange for which, he "should recognize seven excommunicated bishops" who had been appointed by Beijing and ordained without papal mandate.

In reality, the lifting of the excommunication from seven bishops is the result of a personal journey undertaken by these pastors with the Pope and was no 'leverage' at all in negotiations between the Holy See and the Beijing government.

But beyond these canonical clarifications, it is worth pointing out what the WSJ says in the article: that "the agreement could still fail or be postponed, due to unforeseen events".

And here is the point. For at least three years now, Italian and Vatican journalists have been announcing that an agreement between China and the Vatican is about to be signed - always quoting anonymous people, but "with inside knowledge of the Vatican-Chinese dossier": In November 2016, at the end of the Year of Mercy; then at the end of 2016; then in June 2017; then last March ,and now the end of September. And so far nothing has happened. Jokingly, one of my brothers says that these predictions are like those of Jehovah's Witnesses for the end of the world!

Quoting the Gospel, we can honestly say that nobody knows "neither the day nor the hour" (Matthew 25,13). This "not knowing" does not depend on the Pope and the Vatican.

In the past five years Pope Francis has professed 'great love and respect' towards the Chinese people and their history, and has openly expressed his desire to go to China. For which the Vatican delegation 'negotiating' such an agreement seems willing to grant any concession in order to have even a small, even temporary, agreement with the Chinese giant.

The fundamental question - which few journalists and observers ever pose themselves - is whether China is really interested in this agreement.


In the past, authoritative commentators have attributed the reasons for the delay to the divisions among Catholics in China and in the world. In reality, the significant divisions are within the Chinese Politburo.

On the one hand, there is the foreign ministry, open to international politics, which would be favorable to the signing of the agreement: there would be a massive gain for China in terms of its global image and international reputation, which right now is suffering because of the tug of war with the United States; it would shake Taiwan – left only with the Vatican among EU nations that recognizes it from a diplomatic point of view.

But there is also the United Front, the Ministry of Religious Affairs, and the Patriotic Association, which govern the daily life of Christian communities, enriching themselves with their controls and expropriations of Church property.

For them, any space given to relations with the Vatican represents a threat to their absolute power. For this reason they continue to persist in showing their hegemony: churches and crosses destroyed; seizure of land; bans on young people attending churches; sinicization, that is the assimilation and submission of every activity and of all theological and liturgical thought.

After the Chinese Communist Party Congress last October, the United Front was placed directly under the Party. This means that Xi Jinping, president and general secretary of the Party, is its maximum authority. And so, the waiting could be ended with a single decision by Xi Jinping in wanting to sign the agreement with the Vatican.

But at present, Xi's authority is rather weakened: the frontal confrontation with the US could have disastrous economic consequences for China, for which he is bring criticized from within the Party itself.

In addition, his anti-corruption campaign against "tigers" and "flies" has created a great many enemies. In deciding to sign the agreement with the Vatican, he would have to stand against the United Front, which would add to of those who would like to see him fall from power.

This goes some way to explaining the silent reaction to the WSJ scoop in Beijing newspapers, and the foreign ministry reaffirmation of its "sincerity" in wanting dialogue with the Vatican but without commenting at all upon any agreement.

The Beijing Academy of Social Sciences claims to know "no details of the agreement, or when it may be signed"; while many in the Chinese Church want an agreeement [Which one - the Beijing-led one, or the underground Church? I can't imaging either of the two wanting n agreement of the sort that has been discussed all along!], but nobody knows when this will happen.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/09/2018 22:09]
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Chile, the USA, Germany... and now, the Netherlands joins the roster of countries with new official disclosures about the extent of clerical sex abuses and episcopal cover-ups thereof...


Report links half of Dutch cardinals
and bishops to sex abuses

By MIKE CORDER


THE HAGUE, Netherlands, Sept. 17, 2018 (AP) - A media report linking half of the cardinals and bishops who served in the Netherlands between 1945 and 2010 to abuse cases has drawn the country’s Catholic Church into the church’s global sex abuse and cover-up scandal.

The leader of a group of Dutch victims of abuse by Catholic clergy called Monday for the church to make public all it knows about such cases if it wants to win back trust.

“If they want this misery to end - these are crimes committed against children, you can’t just walk away from that - then they have to make things public and set up a new system where people can file complaints,” said Bert Smeets, an abuse victim who represents a group of survivors called Mea Culpa.

Smeets’s comments came after a weekend report by respected Dutch daily NRC linked 20 of 39 bishops and cardinals to abuse. The paper reported that four bishops committed abuse and a further 16 senior clergymen transferred priests who had been accused of abuse to new locations.

The report was based on a 2011 Dutch Catholic Church report about abuse, victims’ testimony to a commission of inquiry and the newspaper’s own research.


It is the latest sex abuse scandal to rock the Catholic Church. Pope Francis has signaled that he will take action to end what he has called a “culture of cover-up” in the church. He announced earlier this month that he is convening a summit in February to discuss prevention measures and the protection of minors and vulnerable adults.

The 2011 Dutch report, which was independent but faced criticism because it was set up by the church, said that up to 20,000 children suffered sexual abuse at Dutch Catholic institutions over 65 years.

The report said about 800 priests, brothers, pastors or lay people working for the church were identified in complaints, but their names were not released.


In a written reaction to the NRC story, the Dutch Catholic Church said that in confirmed cases of abuse, “bishops did not act with sufficient care” when transferring priests.

The church stressed that it has put in place measures to prevent such cases in the future.


Another 'report' on the Dutch Church comes from Cardinal Eijk, speaking of his own Archdiocese of Utrecht:

Dutch Catholic Church
is rapidly disappearing

By ALEX KING
VOICE OF EUROPE
16 September 2018

Over the next decade, the entire archdiocese of Utrecht is estimated to be reduced from 280 to less than 15 churches that still hold Eucharistic celebrations, according to Archbishop Wim Eijk.

In an interview with a local newspaper, Gelderlander, the Archbishop disclosed that 1 in 10 parishes in his diocese are bankrupt, only 1 in 10 able to be considered ‘rich’, with the other 8 in 10 being somewhere in between.

The problem lies in the fact that there is an ageing population coupled with a rapid decline in church attendance. Catholic Churches are currently seeing an annual decrease in attendance of over 5 per cent, and not all of those who still attend are supporting the church financially.

According to the latest figures from the Nijmegen institute Kaski, an average of 173,500 individuals out of the Netherlands’ 3.5 million Catholics attend weekend church sessions.

According to Eijk, “the church is not being 'closed down' by people who are still coming, or by me, but by those who stay away and do not contribute anymore.”

As well as declining support from the local population, the churches’ huge maintenance costs also means that many of them can no longer afford to remain open.

In 2014, Eijk predicted that by 2028, there will be less than 30 parishes left in the Utrecht diocese, the largest by area in the country. However, the Archbishop now holds a more pessimistic view, suggesting that number will likely fall short and that parishes will have to merge on a large scale in order to survive.
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Calling the release of the above photo to illustrate the pope's supposed-to-be dead-serious meeting with USCCB officials a blunder is a terrible understatement.
It's hard to believe that anyone dealing with communications in any way could possibly have thought there was any upside to this photo in the context of the
PRESENT CRISIS. What it does say is that Bergoglio and his bishop guests did find a moment of levity in their meeting, and of course, they have a right to such
a moment or more than one, even. But what larger purpose did the photo serve other than to underscore that for all the noble-sounding talk coming from Bergoglio
and his Vatican these past five years and a half, they really think that this PRESENT CRISIS is "just another bump in the road that we can all yuk our way through...
we can work it out with a little bit of luck". The rank unseriousness of it all - in short, all pro forma song and dance... And by the way, Mr. Altieri, the 'blunder' has
nothing to do at all with 'media reform'. It has to do with extremely thick numbskulls who are unfit for the work they are supposed to do. Not a good sign from
the 'new improved consolidated' Vatican media juggernaut, the bright guys who also gave us Lettergate. (Don't forget the other Vigano is still behind the scenes there.)


The Vatican’s photo blunder shows
media reform is still a work in progress

Some Vatican staff shared the public's dismay
at the image - but by then it was too late

by Christopher Altieri

September 15, 2018

A pair of photographs released by the Vatican – one in particular – caused quite a stir on Thursday. The offending image showed members of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops Executive Committee sharing a jocular moment during a meeting with Pope Francis. That in itself is nothing too terribly newsworthy.

But the meeting was to discuss the ongoing crisis in the US Church, precipitated by the spectacular fall from grace of one of the hierarchy’s best-known and most influential members: the disgraced former Archbishop of Washington, DC, Theodore Edgar “Uncle Ted” McCarrick. Given that context, people asked how such an image could have been chosen to convey the spirit of the bishops’ response to the crisis.

Officials at the Press Office had not responded to queries from the Catholic Herald as of press time, and responsible figures in the Dicastery for Communication declined to comment on the incident. However, there does appear to have been discussion of the images within the Vatican communications apparatus and an attempt to keep them from being used.

Some Vatican staff only saw the photo once it had been released, and were dismayed. “[We] knew it would horrify people and embarrass the Holy Father and the US bishops,” said one source, who spoke with the Catholic Herald on condition of anonymity. “It’s our job to help get out the message of the Holy Father, and that photograph compromised the message the Holy Father is trying to convey.” By then, however, it was too late.

A series of factors likely contributed to the PR contretemps.

The ongoing reform of the Vatican’s media organs is stalled. The new prefect of the Dicastery for Communication, the experienced layman, Paolo Ruffini, has only been in the job since the beginning of September. Sources say he is not yet fully involved in day-to-day operational decision making.

Then there is the incomplete folding of the once-autonomous outfits – including the newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, which has effective control over the photography of papal events – into the new umbrella Dicastery. Lines of communication between the Press Office and the other offices of the Vatican’s media outfit are not always straightforward, and questions regarding who gets to make which editorial decisions remain imperfectly resolved on the operational level.

The photo became controversial partly because the meeting provided little else that was newsworthy. USCCB President Cardinal Daniel DiNardo issued a statement following the meeting, in which he described the proceedings as “a lengthy, fruitful, and good exchange,” and said, “[Pope Francis] listened very deeply from the heart.”

But this followed weeks of waiting – Cardinal DiNardo first announced that he was seeking an audience on August 16 – and there was no mention of any concrete resolution. Cardinal DiNardo is hoping for the Pope to authorise an apostolic visitation, with authority to look into the McCormick disaster.

We still don’t know if DiNardo will get his wish.


Here is Also Maria Valli's commentary on the occasion - clearly a missed opportunity to advance the Vatican's side of the controversy.

A time for words (not now!)
and a time for action (when?)

Translated from

by Aldo Maria Valli

“Lengthy, fruitful and good” is how the officers of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) described their meeting with Pope Francis on Thursday on the clerical sex abuse crisis. No details were given, and the statement was limited to speaking about an ‘exchange’ with the pope and thanking him for having received them.

The full statement reads:

"We are grateful to the Holy Father for receiving us in audience. We shared with Pope Francis our situation in the United States -- how the Body of Christ is lacerated by the evil of sexual abuse. He listened very deeply from the heart. It was a lengthy, fruitful, and good exchange.

As we departed the audience, we prayed the Angelus together for God's mercy and strength as we work to heal the wounds. We look forward to actively continuing our discernment together identifying the most effective next steps."


Present at the meeting were Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, USCCB president; Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles, vice president; Cardinal Sean O’Malley who heads the pope’s Commission for the Protection of Minors; and the USCCB secretary general, Mons. Brian Bransfield.

The meeting must have been very cordial, at least judging from the photograph that the Vatican chose to release of the meeting, in which the participants appear to be amused and all smiles. (Perhaps the Vatican ought to have sent out another photo in view of the gravity of the subject under discussion.)

Meanwhile, the pope has convoked all the presidents of national episcopal conferences around the world – more than 100 bishops – for a summit at the Vatican on February 21-24, 2019 The move is exceptional, in the same way that the current crisis facing the Church is exceptionally grave.

[I believe it is the first time since the bishops’ conferences were established after Vatican II that the presidents of the bishops’ conferences have been convoked at the Vatican. Though they have no theological standing as such (each president only has his individual standing as a consecrated bishop who heads a diocese and is a legitimate successor to the apostles), they coordinate the activities of their member bishops, each of whom represents a diocese. Bergoglio has said he wants to give the bishops’ conferences a juridical personality – as if this would confer them with a theological standing.]

With this decision, Bergoglio apparently intends to avoid repeating the errors committed in Chile, where the problem was left for a long time for the local churches to handle, with disastrous inactions, so that the pope recently had to intervene, but very late in the game [after insisting for years that reported abuses and cover-ups involving some Chilean bishops were nothing but calumny].

The turnaround Bergoglio wants is clear: to pass from a situation in which he, as pope, appears part of the problem, to one in which he can demonstrate strong authoritative leadership.

He is playing for high stakes. At risk are his personal charisma and his credibility. But no one can say if this meeting with the bishops [who, in effect, will be representing their national churches] can guarantee the desired results.

The risk is that the meeting will produce the usual document with good intentions. But words are no longer enough. Moreover, February seems rather far off.

[Everything about the Bergoglio Vatican’s handling of this CRISIS has been appallingly cavalier – as though they can’t be bothered to take it seriously. First, there was the statement that the pope’s four-days-delayed reaction to the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report, a relatively brief and very generic statement pompously called ‘Letter to the People of God’ was his ‘exhaustive’ response on the matter, and that no further statement or action would be forth-coming from him. Shortly after which, of course, the Vigano Testimony was published, about which, as with the DUBIA, Bergoglio chose not to reply to any of the questions it raised.

What pope – or other church authority, for that matter – would insist on not replying directly to questions regarding essential points of the faith from four individually eminent cardinals, and to a devastating denunciation of his own indifference to sex-offending prelates and priests if they happen to be his friends? Only Jorge Bergoglio.

Then he has the meeting with the USCCB officers who had been requesting it for almost a month – since the Grand Jury report was published – although he had met earlier with two of his pet US cardinals, Cupich and Wuerl. So the meeting takes place, and it is just incredible that all the supposed brains in the Vatican’s new superdiscastery for communications agreed to release the photo that they did.

And now, this meeting to be held in February! Why does it have to be five months off? Bishops can be mobilized in a hurry – it happens every time within two weeks they must be called to Rome to elect a new pope. What’s with the five-month wait till February? Are they hoping that by then, all the furor would have died down, and they can merrily do clerical/curial business as usual?]


Of course, the bishops cannot all be called in at the snap of a finger, but why not a date much closer to now???

And until then? Everything remains as it has been?
- No further action on the McCarrick case?
- No response to the US bishops who, after the Grand Jury report, said the time for words is over and that concrete interventions are needed now to deal with all the rot and discover and disclose all the pernicious links and cover-ups?

As to the three-day duration, does anyone really think that more than 100 bishops coming from dozens of diverse situations and cultures could seriously arrive at anything but the usual document full of good intentions? [To do that, they don’t even have to meet. The word-counterfeiters at Cardinal Baldisseri’s office, aided by the likes of Spadaro and Tornielli (and long-distance by Archbishop Fernandez in Argentina), can very well churn it out now. If they have not already started to do so!]

After the Vigano Testimony, nothing can ever be as it used to be. He has made specific accusations that need to be answered.

The initial maneuver of the Bergoglio camp, which was focused on discrediting the ex-nuncio, appears not to have given the desired results. When as many as 29 US bishops have made statements to the effect that Vigano’s charges should be investigated thoroughly to come up with answers, they are simply expressing what other bishops [and a great many faithful] feel.

In this intricate framework, the thread represented by the case of Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, DC, has raised new questions. Many have called for his resignation, and one of the Pittsburgh schools named for him has taken out his name from the institution.

Now he says he will be going back to Rome to ask Pope Francis to accept the resignation he submitted pro forma three years ago when he turned 75. [Wasn’t he just in Rome less than 2 weeks ago to talk to the pope? Why didn’t he do that then? Obviously he thought he could ride off his personal crisis!]

The question, of course, is why his resignation was never accepted by the pope. [Because he had uses for him obviously – the first having been to name him as Cardinal Burke’s replacement on the all-important Congregation for Bishops after Burke’s banishment from the Vatican.]
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On the Lepanto Institute site, Michael Hichborn reprints this article from a pro-life site. It says in plain words one of the most obvious amoral biases and choices of Jorge Bergoglio - which virtually all
Vaticanistas and mainstream journalists, Catholic or secular, have chosen to completely ignore... How much longer are they going to keep up their myth about a 'Holy Father' who has shown in multiple
ways how 'unholy' he is and can be???



Bergoglio, Bonino and McCarrick:
The pope, the abortionist and the predator prelate

A man is known by the company he keeps and the 'pets' he raises



9-13-2018 (Rockford Pro-Life Initiative)– Is it really possible that Pope Francis ignored, disregarded, or dismissed credible sexual abuse charges against Cardinal Theordore McCarrick?

One extremely disturbing incident in Pope Francis’s recent past may explain this situation.

In 2016 Pope Francis called abortionist Emma Bonino “a great Italian”. Emma Bonino had her own child killed by abortion, she viciously and brutally dismembered and killed over 10,000 little girls and boys in the womb with her own hands, and through her political activism is morally responsible for the murder of over six million children.

Pope Francis publicly called her a great person and in 2017 and allowed her to speak in a Catholic parish in Italy because he likes and supports her position on immigration.

Please think about this for a moment – Pope Francis considers an abortionist “great” who proudly murdered thousands of children with her own hands and advocated for the deaths of millions more. She personally tore the arms, legs, hands, feet, and head off of the torsos of countless little girls and boys. She saw the faces of thousands of children she murdered and she kept on murdering.
all this killing was completely ignored by Pope Francis when he publicly declared her “great”.

Now we come to the case of Cardinal Theordore McCarrick. It is clear that Pope Francis knew McCarrick was a serial sexual predator – it is also clear that just like abortionist Emma Bonino, Pope Francis likes McCarrick’s liberal political positions.

The facts show that just as Pope Francis considered child killing abortionist Emma Bonino a “great” person and ignored her crimes against God and children by allowing her to speak in a Catholic parish, Pope Francis seems to have excused-ignored-protected Cardinal McCarrick.

Based on what we have seen with Pope Francis ignoring Emma Bonino’s murder of children, is it not entirely possible that Pope Francis would also ignore McCarrick's sexual misdeeds, and that Francis could see no difficulty in considering McCarrick a great Cardinal and allowing him to continue to work in the church [as his trusted roving ambassador and counselor on episcopal appointments], exactly as he ended up calling abortionist Bonino 'one of the great Italians of our time'?

Is it not reasonable to believe that when a person can ignore the murder of millions, he can well can ignore the sexual abuse of dozens?

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I came across this item belatedly... Never too late, it provides a broad historical perspective for looking at the PRESENT CRISIS...

Every 500 years, the Church
faces an epochal crisis -
Is this the worst yet?

There are reasons to believe that we are now
entering the biggest crisis the Church has faced


September 6, 2018

There is a fairly common recognition among historians that every 500 years the Church has faced some kind of horrendous crisis. This is no kind of Nostradamian numerical prophecy, but a noticeable, rough pattern.

Around the first 500-year mark of the Church, the West was being crushed under the political implosion of the corrupt Roman Empire and the onslaught of barbarian invasions. Hence began the Dark Ages, wherein the Church did well just to survive in the following centuries.

The next crisis bubbled up around the year 1000. The papacy had been deeply corrupted by Italian nobles in the previous century — so much so that the historians refer to this period of papal venality in the 900s as “The Pornocracy.” A string of good popes, Cistercian reformers, helped draw the Church out of its own mire in the 11th and 12th centuries.

And then, of course, there was the Reformation, commencing in 1517. Last fall I published a book marking the half-millennium anniversary of the Reformation, The Reformation 500 Years Later: 12 Things You Need To Know.

One of the things that especially Catholics needed to know is how bad the popes and cardinals had been in the century leading up to Luther — otherwise the Protestant reaction to ecclesiastical corruption 500 years ago might seem like an unwarranted, peevish reaction of a disgruntled monk, Martin Luther.

And now, here we are in 2018, right on time, 500 years after the Reformation, steeped in another major crisis. As the depth and breadth of the ecclesiastical corruption now unfolds before us, the question is not whether we are in a crisis, but how bad a crisis we happen to be in.

It’s big. Perhaps the biggest so far. Why?

The current systematic embrace of sexual disorder among the bishops and cardinals — even those in the Vatican itself — creates theological disorder. Sexual scandal leading up to the Reformation was sordid enough, but it did not then result in attendant theological malformation.

But things are different now because all too many in the hierarchy desire a fundamental change in the Church’s doctrines on sexuality. Grace builds on nature, the supernatural on the natural. If those in charge of guarding doctrine embrace sexual disorder, theological disorder must be bent to fit. Sexual libertinism needs theological liberalism as its theological complement.

This connection isn’t difficult to understand.
- Marriage is the natural union between male and female — a perfection of their distinct, complementary sexuality.
- In biblical terms, it is the union of male and female that manifests the fullness of the image of God.
- In the Old Testament, God defines His relationship to Israel in terms of bridegroom and bride, and i the New Testament, Jesus is the bridegroom Incarnate, the husband of the Church, His Bride.

These are not mere metaphors, but deep, real connections between God’s mode of redemption and human nature. One cannot, therefore distort natural sexuality without distorting our understanding of the Christ’s relationship to the Church.

If there are any doubts about this, read the Pennsylvania report. Here we find priests sodomizing altar boys and then presiding over the holy sacrifice of the Mass, fishing for prey in the confessional, posing boys naked as Jesus on the cross and taking pictures, using gold crosses to mark out victims for other priests, and using holy water to wash out the mouths of their victims after forcing them into oral sex.

No one can go from orthodoxy to sacrilege and blasphemy without passing through heresy. Those posing as orthodox but engaging in these activities are not an exception to the rule, but an even more pernicious form of hypocrisy that destroys from within what it purports to defend from without.

There is another reason to believe that we are now enduring the worst of the 500-year Church crises:
The Catholic Church has always been universal in aim, but the world is now a cosmopolitan whole. Therefore, the Church has far more comprehensive reach than it has ever had historically, and that means that the ecclesial rot has a more comprehensive reach as well. We are truly experiencing a worldwide scandal as a result.

And yet another. The last 500 year crisis, the Reformation, split apart the Church — seemingly irreparably. But it was a crisis that took place within a still-Christianized culture, and therefore the various Protestant reform movements still had as their aim to remain Christian — indeed, to become even more deeply Christian.

Pushed by these rival claimants who were all striving to be the true church, the Catholic Counter-Reformation had to reform and rebuild orthodoxy to survive, if even sometimes for political reasons.

But today, we live in a largely secularized culture, where the pressure from without is for the Church to shed orthodoxy, and that pressure is matched by secularizing forces deeply embedded within the Church.

Protestants are all pretty much in the same situation as Catholics, struggling to stay afloat in the rising secular flood, so they can be of little help. To make matters worse, the scandals now besetting the Catholic Church all serve as fuel for increasing the secularization of the culture.

So, this is a big crisis, arguably the biggest the Church has faced. That is why half-measures, bishops’ committees, solemn and airy declarations and stonewalling must stop. The Church must be scoured, and it seems that the laity must take the lead in the cleanup.

At the end of my book The Reformation 500 Years Later, I argued that the two greatest enemies facing all Christians were Secularism and radical Islam. I

If I had waited a year to publish and known about the depth of the scandals, I would have named another.



In my naivete of severely under-estimating Macchiabergoglian machinations (my neologism for Macchiavellian as practised by Bergoglio), I thought the NEXT GREAT BERGOGLIO SCANDAL (everything is so negatively hyperbolic about this pontificate one has to refer to its milestones in CAPITAL LETTERS) was to be its agreement with China. How wrong I was!

Here he is no,w pre-empting any possible objections to his next rigged-up synodal assembly by issuing a new Apostolic Constitution no less to fit the Synod of Bishops to the mold we saw used in the recent 'family synods', and worse, to make sure that whatever a synodal assembly convoked by him formally promulgates will be the equivalent of papal magisterium.

A number of Vatican commentators quickly glommed on to the appalling import and implications of all this. Steve Skojec's initial reaction incorporates those of Christopher Altieri and Marco Tosatti, among others.


New Apostolic Constitution appears to formalize
Bergogio's hijacking of the synodal process

While the eyes of most who follow Church news remain fixated on the
near-constant drumbeat of developments on Clerical Abuse Redux
a new papal document launches another likely time bomb.

by Steve Skojec

September 18, 2018

This morning, Pope Francis issued the Apostolic Constitution Epicopalis Communio (EC) – “Episcopal Communion” – which aims to “reform” the synodal process. The document, available thus far only in Italian, makes changes that should be of familiar concern to anyone who paid attention to the 2014 & 2015 synods on the Family.

From Chris Altieri’s commentary today at the Catholic Herald:

The role of the General Secretary appears greatly increased and his powers expanded, along with those of the General Secretariat. These expanded powers especially regard the steering of Synod Assemblies, from their early organisation, through the sessions, to the drafting and approval of final documents — all of which come to be part of the Synod Assembly proper.

Though the Synod of Bishops remains a consultative body, the new law envisions a sort of elision of the body’s teaching authority with that of the Roman Pontiff. Article 18 § 2 reads, “If expressly approved by the Roman Pontiff, the final document participates in the ordinary Magisterium of the Successor to Peter.”

Lawyers will quibble over just what sort of elision that is, as they will also discuss the nature of and extent the participation any document thus approved has in Papal teaching authority.


Once again, we are witnessing an attempt to broaden the scope of papal authority in a dangerous way. Recall the book written by National Catholic Register Rome Correspondent Edward Pentin, The Rigging of a Vatican Synod, about the manipulation that went on behind the scenes at the 2014 Synod on the Family.

That manipulation — aimed at a change in Catholic teaching on sacraments for the divorced and remarried and a reformulation of the Church’s take on homosexual behavior — transpired under the direction of the General Secretary, Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri.

And things got worse in the 2015 synod. The lack of transparency and manipulation escalated significantly between the first and second session. Baldisseri later disclosed that the most controversial parts of the first synod — those on “homosexuality, extra-marital cohabitation, and Communion for the divorced and remarried that failed to gain the approval of the Synod Fathers” in October, 2014, were kept on the table for the 2015 synod by Pope Francis himself:

“It was the Pope’s decision to include the points that did not receive the two-thirds majority,” Cardinal Baldisseri responded. “The Pope said: These three points received an absolute majority. They were therefore not rejected with a ‘no,’ as they received more than 50 percent approval. They are therefore issues that still need to be developed. We as a Church want a consensus. These texts can be modified, that’s clear. Once there has been further reflection, they can be modified.


Baldisseri also indicated that the pope had been involved with, and had approved, every document — including the deeply divisive mid-term relatio — along each step of the synod process:

“The documents were all seen and approved by the Pope, with the approval of his presence. Even the documents during the [Extraordinary] Synod, such as the Relatio ante disceptatationem [the preliminary report], the Relatio post disceptationem [interim report], and the Relatio synodi [final report] were seen by him before they were published.”

He added, wryly: “This point is important not only because of his authority, but also it puts the Secretary General at ease.”

And in terms of just how much authority is purportedly going to be given to these kinds of documents, see Article 18 of EC:

Article 18 – The Consignment of the Final Document to the Roman Pontiff

§ 1. When it has been approved by the Members, the Final Document of the Assembly is presented to the Roman Pontiff, who decides on its publication.

If it is expressly approved by the Roman Pontiff, the final Document participates in the Ordinary Magisterium of the Successor of Peter.

§ 2. If the Roman Pontiff has granted deliberative power to the Synodal Assembly, according to the norm of canon 343 of the Code of Canon Law, the final Document particpates in the Ordinary Magisterium of the Successor of Peter once it is ratified and promulgated by him.

In this case, the final Document shall be published with the signature of the Roman Pontiff together with the signatures of the Members of the Synod.


Does everyone remember when Cardinal Burke argued that Amoris Laetitia was not really an “act of the magisterium”? And that it was merely “written as a reflection of the Holy Father on the work of the last two sessions of the Synod of Bishops”?

This new rule — effective immediately — appears to be an attempt to head such critiques off at the pass. The pope writes:

“I hereby establish that what is decreed in this Apostolic Constitution has full efficacy beginning from the day of its publication in L’Osservatore Romano, anything to the contrary notwithstanding, also if meriting special mention, and that is shall be published in the official register Acta Apostolicae Sedis... I exhort all to welcome with a sincere soul and a ready disposition the norms of this Apostolic Constitution, with the help of the Virgin Mary, Queen of Apostles and Mother of the Church.”[/dim


(It is a dangerous thing for the pope to encourage the faithful to invoke the assistance of the Virgin Mary for help dealing with acts of his pontificate, which is why I wholeheartedly encourage it.)

So what is the upshot of all of this?

We have two upcoming synods – one for addressing the issues facing youth, and one for the Amazon region. Between these two, several controversial issues are expected to be tackled, namely, homosexuality, clerical celibacy, and the inclusion of women in some level of the sacrament of Holy Orders.

Marco Tosatti makes a noteworthy observation today in his column at La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana:

it appears clear, after the two Synods on the Family of 2014 and 2015, and after the announcement of the 2019 Synod focused on the Amazon, that this sort of meeting has changed subtly but radically in its form and purpose.

Prior to Francis, the Synods had a purpose of bringing forth numerous voices speaking about problems that had not been noted before – even if they were at times a bit scattered.

But beginning with the Synod on the Family in 2014, organized, prepared, and conducted under the leadership of Cardinal Baldisseri, we have seen that in reality these mega-events are coordinated to follow a precise agenda, intended and directed from on high.

And, in the final analysis, they serve merely to create a backdrop for documents – Amoris Laetitia is the prime example – which are in large part pre-cooked, to which the contributions of the Synod Fathers make purely cosmetic additions.


How can we not recall the candid confession of Archbishop Forte about the confidential conversation he had with the Pope? “If we speak explicitly about giving communion to the divorced and remarried,” reported Msgr. Forte, referring to a remark made by Pope Francis, “they don’t understand what a mess that will put us in. So we will not speak about it in a direct way – do it in a way that the premises are there, and then I will draw out the conclusions.” After reporting this remark, Forte made a joke, saying, “Typical of a Jesuit.” ...

We must ask what agenda is being brought to the Synod on Youth. After Dublin, and given the presence of Eminences and Excellencies who may easily be ascribed to the pro-homosexual philosophical current in the Church, it is no stretch of the imagination to place among the possible objectives for the Synod another little or big step towards the “normalization” of homosexuality and homosexual relations – stable and loving, of course. The wind from Santa Marta seems to be blowing in that direction. In the facts, not in the statements. We hope we are mistaken.

The presence of those “eminences and excellencies” he refers to is certainly of concern. Tosatti lists them:
One cannot help but be perplexed by certain nominations the Pope has made of the bishops who will attend the Synod. Like the nomination of Cardinal Cupich of Chicago, for example, a man who is in the chain of bishops linked to McCarrick and who has declared that the Pope has more important things to focus on than the denunciation of Archbishop Viganò, such as the environment and immigration. Or Cardinal Joe Tobin, Archbishop of Newark, student and heir of McCarrick in that diocese, who candidly admitted that he had not given any weight to the voices denouncing McCarrick because they seemed unbelievable to him. And then there is Cardinal Marx, and Archbishop Paglia…


It’s almost as if the abuse scandal doesn’t exist, or doesn’t matter at all.

If they think that, they have grossly underestimated the concern — and the anger — of a great many Catholics.
- They appear to have calculated, however, that none of that matters.
- They have ignored the accusations of Vigano (despite saying a response would be forthcoming).
- They have continued to act with impunity despite increasing media and governmental scrutiny, and
- They have demonstrated that there is no slowing the freight train of the Francis pontificate, no matter how many flaming dumpsters they have to plow through on the tracks. The agenda of “reform” must move forward at breakneck speed.


It’s almost as though they don’t care how much damage this is doing to the Catholic Church. Or for that matter, as though they welcome it.


Pope Francis boosts authority
of the Synod of Bishops

In new apostolic constitution, the Holy Father gives the body new powers
including applying magisterial authority to a synod’s final document.


Sept. 18, 2018

Pope Francis has increased the authority of the Synod of Bishops, making it similar though not identical to a legislative parliamentary body that aims to strengthen the involvement of the “people of God” and “further promote dialogue and collaboration” between bishops, and between bishops and the Pope.

In a new apostolic constitution entitled Episcopalis communio (Episcopal Communion), signed on Sept. 15 and made public on Tuesday, the Pope explained how he wished to make the Synod of Bishops a “permanent central body, outside the dicasteries of the Roman Curia” and able to manifest bishops’ concerns for the “needs of the People of God and communion among all the Churches.”

Most significantly, he has taken up Paul VI’s prior suggestion to turn the Synod of Bishops into a deliberative, more legislative body rather than a merely consultative one by stating that the final document will now form part of the “ordinary magisterium of the Successor of Peter,” subject to papal approval.

Originally set up as a permanent institution by Pope Paul VI in 1965 with the motu proprio Apostolica sollicitudo to continue the spirit of collegiality and communion present at the Second Vatican Council, every Synod of Bishops is meant to provide counsel to the Holy Father in a manner that preserves the Church’s teaching and strengthens its internal discipline.

But in recent years, synods [actually, only the two 'family synods' so far under Bergoglio] have been criticized for serving to introduce, sometimes using coercive methods, worldly ways of thinking at odds with the Church’s perennial teaching, especially in the area of morality.

Francis, however, believes synods must continue to be receptive (some would argue subjected) to a changing world ,and with this apostolic constitution he has seemingly enhanced processes already being used.

He reminds the faithful in Episcopalis communio that Paul VI foresaw the body as subject to change (“Like every institution,” Paul wrote, “it can be more perfected with the passing of time”). He highlights the changes in canon law in 1983 and Benedict XVI’s 2006 Ordo Synodi Episcoporum, which among other changes created a general secretariat of the Synod of Bishops. He also cites Pope St. John Paul II who suggested the “instrument” of the Synod of Bishops could be “further improved.”

Francis says he believes a work of renewal must include more “dialogue and collaboration” between episcopates and the Bishop of Rome. The bishop, he explains, is both “teacher and disciple,” made possible when, helped by the Holy Spirit, he “listens to the voice of Christ speaking through the entire People of God, making them ‘infallible in belief.’”

The Synod of Bishops, he goes on to say, must become a “privileged instrument for listening to the People of God,” an “eloquent expression of synodality as a ‘constitutive dimension of the Church’” and a tool for evangelization.

He stresses that it must still retain its consultative basis, but must also be “united in the search for a consensus that flows not from human logic but from common obedience to the Spirit of Christ” — “attentive to the sensus fidei of the People of God” while at the same time distinguishing “carefully from the often-changing flows of public opinion.”

The Pope underlines the importance of the synod fathers being “morally unanimous” if the Synod of Bishops is to be more than consultative. But the document is unclear how synod fathers will vote (until now they have voted on a series of propositions), nor if each proposition will continue to require a two-thirds majority.

Episcopalis communion only talks about achieving a “consensus”, and Bishop Fabio Fabene, under-secretary of the Synod of Bishops, said Tuesday the consensus would simply be “as large as possible between the Synod Fathers.”

Other innovations in the document include formally giving the synod secretariat powers to prepare and implement the synodal assemblies including being able to “avail itself of an adequate number of officials and consultors” (this was a point of contention in previous synods under Francis as those chosen appeared to adhere to heterodox views and so the process was thought to be a “stacking of the deck”).

Further changes include
- formally enshrining new methods of consulting the People of God (i.e. use of questionnaires and pre-synod meetings with lay faithful and people of other religions);
- the establishment of a “commission for implementation” made up of experts overseen by the synod of bishops’ secretary general; and “councils of the general secretariat” comprising members appointed by the Pope who are to prepare synodal meetings and remain in office until five years after the end of a synod.

The Pope closes the document by stressing the “full, supreme and universal power” of the Bishop of Rome, which he “can always exercise freely” but “always united in communion with the other bishops and with the whole Church.”

He concludes by encouraging a “conversion of the papacy” that will make it “more faithful to the meaning that Jesus Christ intended to give it and to the current needs of evangelization.” He also hopes it will contribute to the “re-establishment of unity among all Christians” and help the Church to find a way of exercising papal primacy without “renouncing what is essential to its mission.”

YECCCHHHHH!
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So, finally, AP at least is looking into one of the stories that have resurfaced in recent weeks about Bergoglio's record of dealing with clerical and episcopal sex abuse when he was Archbishop of Buenos
Aires. Will anyone else follow the lead? Even most of the bloggers critical of Bergoglio have not picked up the thread of his Argentine record, about which he has famously claimed that there were never
any clerical sex abuses in his diocese.



Bergoglio's role in defense of
Argentine predator priest under fire

by Luis Andres Henao and Nicole Winfield



A page in one of four books written by Argentine criminal defense attorney Marcelo Sancinetti, with a sentence that reads in Spanish: “The church judges with its own exclusive right". In 2010 Archbishop Bergoglio
commissioned the four-volume, 2,000-plus page forensic study of a legal case against a convicted priest that concluded he was innocent, that his victims were lying and that the case never should have gone to trial.


BUENOS AIRES, Argentina, Sept. 18, 2018 (AP)- Pope Francis’s role in Argentina’s most famous case of priestly sex abuse is coming under renewed scrutiny as he faces the greatest crisis of his papacy over the Catholic Church’s troubled legacy of cover-up and allegations that he himself sided with the accused.

Francis, who at the time was still Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, in 2010 commissioned a four-volume, 2,000-plus page forensic study of the legal case against a convicted priest that concluded he was innocent, that his victims were lying and that the case never should have gone to trial.

The Argentine church says that the study obtained by The Associated Press - bound volumes complete with reproductions of Johannes Vermeer paintings on the covers - was for internal church use only. But the volumes purportedly ended up on the desks of some Argentine court justices who were ruling on the appeals of Father Julio Grassi.

Despite the study, Argentina’s Supreme Court in March 2017 upheld the conviction and 15-year prison sentence against Grassi, a celebrity priest who ran homes for street children across Argentina.

The study, and Francis’s role in the Grassi case, have taken on new relevance following allegations by a former Vatican ambassador that Francis, and a long line of Vatican officials before him, covered up the sexual misconduct of a prominent U.S. cardinal.

Neither Francis nor the Vatican has responded to the allegations that Francis rehabilitated ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick from sanctions in 2013. The Vatican didn’t respond to a request for comment about Francis’ role in the Grassi case.

In an exclusive interview with AP, Grassi’s victim, Gabriel, said he is still waiting for Francis to acknowledge his pain, given the Supreme Court has now ruled that he indeed was assaulted by Grassi when he was 13.

“I’d like for the church to say something, even though I don’t expect it will,” Gabriel told AP, sitting next to his psychiatrist. “No one ever reached out to me,” he said. “No one bothered.”

Francis, the former archbishop of Buenos Aires, wasn’t Grassi’s bishop and bore no direct responsibility for him. But in 2006, he was quoted by the now-defunct Argentine magazine Veintitres as saying the accusations against Grassi were “informative viciousness against him, a condemnation by the media.”

He said he would withhold judgment pending the outcome of the court case, but Grassi himself testified that Bergoglio had “never let go of my hand” throughout the legal process.


Under Bergoglio’s presidency, Argentina’s bishops conference in 2010 enlisted a leading Argentine criminal defense attorney, Marcelo Sancinetti, to research a counter-inquiry into the prosecutors’ case against Gabriel and two other former residents of Grassi’s Happy Children homes whose cases were thrown out in the initial trial.

In the study, Sancinetti concluded that not only weren’t the accusations against Grassi sufficiently proven, “the falsity of each one of the accusations is objectively verifiable.”

In the four tomes, which were produced at an annual clip from 2010-2013, Sancinetti accused Gabriel of changing his story and trying to extort Grassi. But a court years earlier had already thrown out a lawsuit filed by Grassi accusing Gabriel of extortion.

Sancinetti compared the “current trials and condemnations with severe sentences based exclusively on the word of a person who calls itself victim of sexual abuse to the trials for witchcraft of the Middle Ages.” And in the final volume and on his law firm’s website, Sancinetti said Francis in particular had commissioned the work. He didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

Argentina’s Supreme Court disagreed with Sancinetti’s analysis, and on March 21, 2017, upheld Grassi’s 2009 conviction for having sexually abused and corrupted Gabriel.

Through tears, Gabriel had testified that on two separate occasions in 1996 the priest once fondled him, and then performed oral sex on him in his office.

Gabriel, who for a time was placed in Argentina’s witness protection program after suffering a break-in, physical attacks and threats, said he was shocked when Grassi testified that Bergoglio “had never let go of my hand.”

“We were all like ‘wow!’ It was Bergoglio,” he said.

Gabriel said he and his lawyer delivered a letter addressed to Francis two months after he was elected Latin America’s first pope, bringing it to the Vatican embassy in Buenos Aires on May 8, 2013.

In the letter, Gabriel identified himself as a victim of “aberrant crimes of repeated sexual abuse and corruption” by Grassi.

He lamented that court-protected details of his abuse had been exposed by the study, which he said had “denigrated” him personally and contradicted the stated “zero tolerance” policy of both Pope Benedict XVI and Francis.

“I suffered and continue to suffer,” he wrote.

He asked for an audience with the pope “and I earnestly beg you for compassion and help in recovering my faith.”

He never received a reply. In fact, his lawyer said they were threatened at the embassy and don’t know what became of the letter.


Asked why the Argentine bishops conference had commissioned the study, a conference spokeswoman said it was to help bishops understand the case better.

“The bishops conference considered that it could provide more information in view of the canonical procedure,” the conference said in a statement to AP.

Such a study, however, would be unthinkable for use in a canonical trial. While church trials do make use of police investigations and evidence from secular courts, a counter-study commissioned by an entire bishops’ conference could run into jurisdictional problems at a canonical trial, canonists said.

In addition, Gabriel’s attorney, Juan Pablo Gallego, said the books ended up on the desks of some Argentine judges deciding Grassi’s appeals and represented what he called a blatant, albeit unsuccessful lobbying attempt.

The diocese of Moron, which was responsible for Grassi, had long defended its decision to keep him in ministry even after the trial began by saying it didn’t want to prejudice the outcome.

Eighteen months after Argentina’s high court ruled against him, Grassi remains a priest as he serves his 15-year sentence in the Unidad 41 de Campana prison in the province of Buenos Aires.

The Moron diocese said Grassi had been removed from pastoral duties when the trial began, and that he now has been restricted from exercising any public ministry. The diocese told AP that the canonical case is now with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office that handles sex abuse cases.

Julieta Anazco, president of Argentina’s Survivors’ Network of Ecclesiastical Abuse, said the Grassi case was a watershed for Argentina since the victims went up against a celebrity priest who had the backing of Argentina’s Catholic elite, and suffered the public humiliation of being accused of only seeking money.

“They have made the path of our struggle easier for us,” she said. “Thanks to their struggle, many of us were encouraged to denounce (our abusers) publicly.”

She cited the recent case of hearing-impaired victims of the now-notorious Antonio Provolo Institute who came forward to denounce abuse by the same Italian priest accused by Italian Provolo students who in 2014 alerted Francis and the Vatican to his whereabouts. Argentine police have arrested Father Nicola Coradi and raided Provolo schools.

“Before Pope Francis can enact accountability for bishops and other church leaders, he has to own up to the harm he himself caused victims in Argentina,” said Anne Barrett Doyle of the online resource Bishop Accountability, which has gathered the documentation on the Grassi saga.

The case has parallels to that in neighboring Chile, where Francis repeatedly defended a bishop accused of covering up for the country’s most notorious predator, the Rev. Fernando Karadima. Francis discredited Karadima’s victims, who placed Bishop Juan Barros at the scene of their abuse, saying their accusations were “calumny.”

Francis eventually acknowledged he had made “grave errors in judgment” about Barros, apologized to the victims and launched a Vatican investigation that resulted in all of Chile’s active bishops offering to resign.

He has offered no mea culpa about the Grassi case. Gabriel, who works odd jobs off the books and has no credit card, is waiting.

“I’m Catholic, but yes, there are moments when I don’t know if the church represents me.”

In fact, Marco Tosatti had a blogpost yesterday with an illustrative video taken in 2017, in which Bergoglio is asked at a public event about the Grassi case, and he denies twice that he ever commissioned the 4-volume book cited above. His source was PJ Media, as follows:



Pope Francis faced accusations of covering up priestly abuse while he was the archbishop and cardinal in Buenos Aires, a 2017 French documentary reveals. A segment of the documentary, “Sex Abuse in the Church: The Code of Silence,” investigates the pope's assertion that sexual abuse never happened in his diocese.




Selected frames from the video. Can you recall any pope in the age of media ever having been caught snarling and generally looking mean and nasty on camera?

Investigative journalist Martin Boudot traveled to Buenos Aires to find out if the pope was telling the truth. Contradicting the pope's assertion, a group of victims claimed they were sexually abused while Bergoglio [now Pope Francis] was archbishop and told Boudot their cries for justice were ignored.

"Regarding pedophile priests, in his book [Between Heaven and Earth - Bergoglio's conversations with his friend Rabbi Skorka], Pope Francis says there were no cases in his diocese," said Boudot, prompting derisive laughter from the group.

"He wants people to believe that, but it's a lie," said one of the victims. They said they all tried to contact the archbishop after they were abused, but their cries fell on deaf ears.

"He received all the celebrities, like Leonardo DiCaprio," said one of the women. "And for us, not even a quick letter to say he was sorry."


Even worse, in one case, Bergoglio tried to influence the Argentinean justice system in an effort to protect Father Julio Grassi, who is serving the remainder of a 15-year jail sentence after being convicted of sexually abusing teenage boys.

The Argentinian church did everything it could to get Grassi acquitted and the trial was spread over 15 years, according to Boudot. In 2010, in fact, the Argentine Episcopal Conference led by Cardinal Bergoglio ordered a counter-inquiry called "Studies on the Grassi Case."

Boudot said the 2,800-page counter inquiry was actually "a confidential, internal Argentinian Church legal text" that accused the children of "falsification, lies, deceit and invention." The purpose of the study was to overturn the court's decision and get Fr. Grassi acquitted on appeal. [As we know, Bergoglio tried that tactic for 3 years in stonewalling the Barros case, accusing Barros's accusers of calumny.]

"So the pope did commission a counter-inquiry to try to have a priest who had been sentenced for pedophilia acquitted," Boudot reported. What's more, Bergoglio is said to have repeatedly sent the "study" to various judges right before Fr. Grassi's various appeal hearings.

At the center of the counter-inquiry commissioned by Bergoglio was an orphan boy who was allegedly Grassi's main victim. Now an adult, the man spoke about the case for the first time to Boudot anonymously because he's still afraid of reprisals. He explained to Boudot that he received threats and people broke into his home and stole evidence he could have used in the trial. "In the end, the courts took action for my safety and placed me in the witness protection program," he said.

"I'll never forget what Father Grassi kept repeating at his trial: 'Bergoglio never let go of my hand.' Now Bergoglio is Pope Francis, but he has never gone against Grassi's words. So I'm certain he never let go of Grassi's hand!" he added.

Why was very little said about the French documentary before now? And what to say about a pope whose lies are caught on camera?

Remember how at the start of Benedict XVI's papacy, MSM spent weeks, if not months, rehashing a blatantly 'fake news' BBC documentary laying the blame for the culture of covering up sex abuses in the Church on Benedict XVI, falsely attributing to him a CDF document issued long before he came to Rome as CDF Prefect?



Key points in 'defense'
commissioned by Bergoglio
for pedophile priest Grassi



BUENOS AIRES, Argentina, Sept. 18, 2018 (AP) — Here are some key points from a church counter-inquiry into the legal case against a famous Argentine priest accused of sexual abuse.

The four-volume study was commissioned by Argentina's bishops' conference, then led by Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, before he was named Pope Francis. The study concluded that despite being convicted of abusing one boy, the Rev. Julio Grassi was innocent, that the complainants were lying and that the case never should have gone to trial.

Argentina's Supreme Court upheld Grassi's guilty verdict and 15-year sentence in March 2017. The study was obtained by The Associated Press.

THE VICTIM
Grassi was found guilty in 2009 of aggravated sexual assault and corruption of minors in the case of "Gabriel." He was acquitted of abuse in the case of two other accusers.

The lawyer who oversaw the church study, Marcelo Sancinetti, wrote in the epilogue that "the falsity of each one of the accusations (against Grassi) is objectively verifiable,"

The study said that Gabriel tried to withdraw his accusation in the courts and then tried to extort Grassi by visiting him and offering him "help in exchange for help," before the accusation was made public on a TV news program in 2002.

Grassi filed a complaint alleging extortion, but a court threw out the case in 2003 for lack of evidence, long before criminal action against Grassi began.

The study argued that the Catholic Church's system of canon law doesn't have to conform to the findings of secular courts.

"The spiritual decisions of the church cannot remain subject to the decisions of the organs of each state, because that would be equivalent to losing its own authority."

WITCH HUNT?
The study says the trials and sentences of church figures "based exclusively on the word of a person who calls himself a victim of sexual abuse" are comparable "to the trials for witchcraft of the Middle Ages."

COMMISSIONED BY THE POPE
Sancinetti said Francis was responsible for commissioning the report.

"With this, these 'Studies on the Grassi Case' conclude, and with it the work commissioned in 2010 by the Argentine Episcopal Conference and in particular by its then-President Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, today His Holiness Pope Francis."

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'DESTRUCTION', the fourth in a series of five paintings collectively entitled The Course of Empire, created in 1833-1836 by the American artist Thomas Cole, about the growth and fall of an imaginary city.

Rorate caeli posted the following homily today under its Sermons for Sunday feature but gave no other info besides the name of the priest. I assume it was given two days ago, the 15th Sunday of Pentecost, but where? I had to Google the priest's name. He is a peiest of the FSSP (Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter) - born in England of Bavarian descent, trained at the FSSP's seminary in Wigratzbad, and ordained in 2002. After serving with the FSSP in Venice for a decade, he was reassigned to St. Mary's Priory in Warrington, England last February. I assume he gave this homily there.


A sermon
by Father Konrad zu Lowenstein, FSSP

Sept. 18, 2018

At that time, when Jesus approached Jerusalem, seeing the city, He wept over it (Lk 19.41)



Scene the First
This commotion in the street, this inept and brutal joy, alcohol and disorder! What is being celebrated here? A civil massacre. Where are we, dear faithful? France in 1789 in the Reign of Terror, with the Revolutionaries murdering their nobility, raising aloft on a pike the liver of the Princesse de Lamballe?

No, we are on the streets of Dublin in 2018. Not Rachel mourning her children because they are no more, but the rabble rejoicing that they are no more: rejoicing in the 'decriminalization' of abortion. A long word! sophisticated! But less sophisticated the reality behind it: the murder of an innocent child.

But if this is no longer a crime, then what is a crime? Or if this is no longer a crime, what is it? 'Health Care'! And what if the child does not want the care? Too bad! It will be cared for anyway. It has no Stimme, no voice, no say, no vote. If it cries, the State will not hear.

When some months ago some of our hardier parishioners stood by the road-side with pro-life placards, the reaction of the public was mixed. One gentleman, seeing the placard 'Do not kill Babies' wagged his finger admonishingly.

Had he not passed so quickly, one could have said: Good Sir! May I ask you? - I would be interested to know - were you ever a baby yourself? Or perhaps like Adam you came into existence already an adult? Or like some mythological deity maybe you sprang fully clad from the thigh of Zeus? But if you were once a baby, you don’t seem to regret having survived till to-day.

They have bent their bow, a bitter thing, to shoot in secret the undefiled. They will shoot him on a sudden and will not fear. They are resolute in their wickedness. They have talked of hiding snares: They have said: Who shall see them?' (Psalm 63).

Scene the Second
Germany. A gentleman pulls back the muslin curtains of his flat and motions to his 'partner' to come up. In the house opposite: a little girl seated at a table strewn with books, in the company of her parents.

What is this? A crime is being perpetrated before their very eyes! Aux armes citoyens! Take up you mobile-phones: Call the police, the school, the state! Away with them and lock them up!

But what is the crime? Harbouring Jews like AnnE Frank in the 1940's? No, bringing up a child in the knowledge of God in the year 2018: in the knowledge that God is the Creator, that He made man after His own Image, that He created him male and female, that He told them to go forth and multiply and fill the earth; to know, to love, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.

Home-schooling in Germany is a crime punishable with imprisonment – for choosing not to send the child to school to be told
- that there is no God,
- that we descend from the apes, and the apes from gasses;
- that each one chooses whether he is male or female;
- that desires are there to be satisfied wherever they may lead,
- that the true philosophers are the atheists such as Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx, and that Martin Luther was a hero.

This, then, is the crime: not killing an innocent child, but bringing him up in the knowledge and fear of God.

Scene the Third
A secondary-school teacher speaks out against the prevailing ideology. The Head Master: 'My dear friend, it was not very prudent what you said. You realize that there are penalties for this type of thing. I should dismiss you from the school, but in fact you will just have to re-take the year of probation. But please, mi raccommando, nothing like that again!"

What has he done? Spoken against the Communist Regime in Russia, China, or Albania? No, he has spoken up against perversion in Italy, the heartland of Catholicism, and in a Catholic school too: he has dared to criticize unnatural relationships. He has become guilty of 'bullying', ‘hatred', ’racism' if you please.

In his encyclical Immortale Dei, Leo XIII teaches that the state's duty is 'to assure its citizens of all possible means for the acquisition of that supreme and immutable Good to which they aspire', that is to say the salvation of their souls and the Beatific Vision.

A tyranny, by contrast, will seek its own good at the expense of the people. We have seen this phenomenon in Communist Russia and China, but the same is now true of the European Union.

The so-called liberal, libertarian, democratic State has become a tyrant, totalitarian state: as insensate, ruthless, and murderous as all the others. In fact its victims are more numerous (although they are unseen, because unborn, and although the State wears a smile on its face). And meanwhile the surveillance becomes more acute, its iron, vice-like grip tightens.

‘In times of insurrection words themselves change their meaning’ writes Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War, book III. They instigate their insurrection, their revolution of actions and words. Murder is presented as care, perversion as ‘gaiety’, the condemnation of perversion as racism - really the European Union should found a Ministry of Euphemisms to keep pace with the flood of evils they are so feverishly promoting.

We observe in this remarkable linguistic oeuvre not only the inversion of good and evil, but also an element of insanity. What has murder to do with care, perversion with merriment, or its condemnation with the maligning of an ethnic group?

We are reminded of the slogan inscribed on the locked gates of the extermination camps: Arbeit macht frei - Work sets free. What work? What freedom? The words lose reference to reality because the reality in question is too terrible to name.

Causes and effects
What is driving the State? Nothing else but power.
- They are seeking to break down society, by breaking down the family which constitutes its atomic cell:
- The individuals that will remain will be fewer in number and isolated, and thus easier to control.
- The motivation is power: to possess and to revel in possessing: in other words it is the concupiscence of the eyes and the pride of life.

If these are the concupiscences that are driving the State, what is driving the people is that of the flesh. If there were no lust, there would be no unwanted children in the first place. The root cause is, then, that they cannot or will not control the movements of Fallen Nature. And they now feel entitled to follow their desires wherever they may take them. Would that the promoters of perversion had put in the effort to heal themselves, rather than inflicting their disordered passions on entire nations!

Their lust has made them blind. They do not see, they do not even understand, that human nature has a given essence, a given identity, with given finalities. They do not understand in other words that there is such a thing as the Natural Law: the Will of God as expressed in our nature; and that by submitting to it, one can realize that which is good for that nature, and thus lead peaceful, happy lives, good lives.

They do not see that the unborn is a child. For blindness is one of the Daughters of Lust, together with the hatred of God.

But behind the people and the state is another will: the will to destroy on the part of him who was a murderer from the beginning: the will to destroy the family by destroying each one of its finalities:
- procreation by contraception, with abortion as a back-up solution; - education by bad parental example, by bad discipline and instruction, by negligence, by schooling designed to pervert;
- the finality of self-sacrificing love by substituting it with sensual love inside and outside of marriage, presenting this as the ideal and indeed as a necessity for all.

His intention is to destroy the family, its individual members, and society itself: particularly in their relationship to God:
- man as in the image of God,
- marriage as in the image of God’s love for the Church, and s
- ociety in its orientation to become the Mystical Body of Christ, which is the Church.

Such then is the cause of the evil that surrounds us:
- I with my lust say the people,
- I with my power says the State,
- I with my hatred of God, says the devil, born of envy, born of pride:
- I - echoing in the void to which it has reduced the world:
- I who have made myself God, knowing Good and Evil, determining Good and Evil, creating all things, including myself: a nobis sumus - we are from ourselves: we have no need of another, even of a Creator. We rise up in our insurrection, in our revolution: against God: against Eternity.

If this is the cause of our present malaise, then where is it taking us? The triple concupiscence and the devil, its inventor, are seducers: they draw man away from God.

God however is Objective Reality in the ultimate sense: Objective Reality, Being Itself, Absolute Truth, the Perfect Good. In drawing man away from God, then, they draw him away from Objective Reality to subjective reality which is madness; from Being to nothingness; from Truth to falsehood; from Good to evil.

- What madness greater than imposing atheism on entire nations?
- What madness like pretending that marriage (the office of motherhood) can be between two males or two females, bringing up as their own the children that they cannot bear?
- What madness like welcoming new-born babies with joy in one hospital ward and murdering them in another?
- or like keeping old people alive lovingly in one place and slaughtering them in another - in the name of Dignitas, a reality they depict as so venerable and sublime that only the Latin tongue can do it justice.
- What nothingness like the nothingness around us: individuals, families, and society destroyed: the elimination of entire generations.
- No diffusion of goodness, no fruit (or but little), only reductions, void and emptiness.
- What falsehood, what lies, what evil!
- What a world created by man and the devil when they play God!

The cry of the child is not heard by the State, but it is heard by the world of the pure spirits. Wer, wenn ich schriee, mich hoerte denn aus den Ordnungen der Engel? Who if I should cry would hear me then from the choirs of the angels?, asks the poet (Duino Elegies 1, Rainer Maria Rilke). And the cry rises up, together with the cry that cries to Heaven for vengeance, and comes to the ears of the Lord of Hosts.

In Him is all Power; by Him, in His Infinite Wisdom and Goodness, all in the world is either willed or allowed.

‘Christ yesterday and to-day, the Beginning and then End, Alpha and Omega. His are all times and all ages.

To Him Glory and Empire through the universal aeons of Eternity’.

What good He will draw even from these evils we do not know. For us it is to live the best lives we can and trust in Him and His Blessed Mother.

‘And now, o ye Kings, understand: receive instruction, you that judge the earth’. (Psalm 2). ‘Serve ye the Lord with fear, and rejoice unto Him with trembling. Embrace discipline, lest at any time the Lord be angry, and you perish from the just way. When His wrath shall be kindled in a short time. Blessed are they that trust in Him’.
Amen.
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Here's some food for thought... It bears much consideration. After all, it was masterful Soviet propaganda that successfully planted overnight the black legend about Pius XII through the play THE DEPUTY by East German Rolf Hochhuth...

Catholic abuse crisis is likely
no accident, but part of a Soviet strategy
to ‘destroy the Church from within’

by Iben Thranholm


September 17, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – The shocking accusation by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò that Pope Francis helped cover up sexual misconduct — an accusation the Pope has so far declined to answer — as well as the litany of sexual abuse cases among clerics, force any Catholic to ask the question: how could this possibly take place in the moral institution that is the Roman Catholic Church?

One possible — little known, but very important — answer dates back to the Bolsheviks and their Communist leader Joseph Stalin.

Recently, I came across a video on Youtube of a presentation by former Soviet KGB propagandist Yuri Bezmenov, aka Tomas Schuman, who worked for the Soviet Union’s Novosti Press Agency until he defected in 1970. In this 1983 video, he claimed that the West was slowly being subverted into Marxism by the methods of “ideological subversion,” a form of warfare the KGB used against America.


Bezmenov explains that the main effort of the KGB was not conventional intelligence at all. Only some 15 percent of resources were spent on James-Bond-style espionage, while 85 percent was devoted to a slow process called “ideological subversion” or “active measures.”

The main methods used by Marxists in the West, Bezmenov explains, were to “corrupt the young, get them interested in sex, take them away from religion. Make them superficial and enfeebled [...] destroy people's faith in their national leaders by holding the latter up for contempt, ridicule and disgrace [...] cause breakdown of the old moral virtues: honesty, sobriety, self-restraint, faith in the pledged word.”

The main targets were — and remain — institutions of religious faith, education, media and culture, the targets also of the hippie movement of that day. Although to all appearances America firmly rejected Soviet Communism during the Cold War, Bezmenov correctly observes that there was a massive undercurrent of Marxist-Leninist indoctrination at many, if not most, universities and institutions of learning, in the media and artistic communities in the West throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

This indoctrination was never challenged or counterbalanced by fundamental American patriotic values. This was especially true of the entertainment industry. According to Bezmenov, a group of rock or pop-musicians with a message of 'social-justice' sugar-coated in popular 'spiritual' tunes were actually more helpful to the KGB than someone standing in the pulpit preaching Marxist-Leninist doctrine.

The 1983 video shows Bezmenov explaining that the demoralization process in the US had already been completed to a degree beyond the wildest dreams of the top leadership in the Kremlin.

“This process was done by Americans to Americans thanks to a lack of morals. Most of the people educated in the 1960s, intellectuals are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, mass media and the education system. You are stuck with them,” Bezmenov points out.

However, Bezmenov omitted mentioning that the Catholic Church was one of the main targets of the Communists.

Former Communist Bella Dodd spoke on the Communist infiltration of the Catholic Church. Dodd, an important Communist party lawyer, teacher and activist, converted to Catholicism in April 1952 under the tutelage of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.

Stating that the Communist infiltration was so extensive that in the future "you will not recognize the Catholic Church,” Dodd testified before the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). She said, "In the 1930s, we put eleven hundred men into the priesthood in order to destroy the Church from within. The idea was for these men to be ordained, and then climb the ladder of influence and authority as Monsignors and Bishops.”

According to Catholic philosopher and professor Alice von Hildebrand, who was a friend of Dodd, she told her that “when she was an active party member, she had dealt with no fewer than four cardinals within the Vatican who were working for us, [i.e. the Communist Party].”

In her public affidavit Dodd stated, among other things, “In the late 1920s and 1930s, directives were sent from Moscow to all Communist Party organizations. In order to destroy the [Roman] Catholic Church from within, party members were to be planted in seminaries and within diocesan organizations... I, myself, put some 1,200 men in [Roman] Catholic seminaries.

Alice von Hildebrand confirmed that Dodd had publicly stated the same things to which she attested in her public affidavit.

Dodd came to the venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen, heartbroken and finally realizing the terrible irreparable harm she had done by faithfully and effectively following an order of Stalin, namely to recruit men distinguished by their complete lack of faith and moral virtue, and engage them to “infiltrate Catholic seminaries and religious orders.”

Given her talents, her eloquence, her charisma, she was successful beyond all expectations. When her eyes were opened to what she had done, she was tortured by guilt that only God’s infinite mercy could assuage.

Dodd's testimony — that infiltration of Catholic seminaries went back for many decades — sheds some light on the abominable priestly scandal that has plagued the Church in recent years.

Horrified by what she had done so successfully, Bella Dodd told Archbishop Sheen that she wanted to enter the most severe penitential order i

n the Church to try, in some modest way, to pay her crushing debt. She was told by this venerable prelate that her mission was to remain in the world and open the eyes of blind U.S. citizens to the horror of Communism. She obeyed, and from the early 1950s until her death in 1969 she crisscrossed the country giving talks to shake her fellow citizens and open the Americans’ sleepy eyes to the horror of atheistic Communism.

What we are witnessing today in the Church may very well be the horrifying harvest of this infiltration. Obviously “the agents” have made it their mission to admit more men devoid of morals and Christian faith into the seminaries for decades. Keep in mind that many cases of abuse took place already back in the 1960s. It seems that the abuse never was (and remains) a mere matter of priests giving in to temptation, but a comprehensive and pervasive attack on Christian morality and faith by a cunning and profoundly evil enemy.

Alice von Hildebrand writes, in a piece published on Catholic News Agency’s website in 2016:

The facts on infiltration are not meant to deny that some bishops, some heads of religious orders and some priests have not fallen into the very grave sin of either closing their eyes to the horrible sins committed by people under their authority, but to make us aware of the fact that a key factor hardly ever mentioned, or mentioned at all, is that many of the worst culprits were not Catholic priests who had fallen prey to “unbridled lust” but infiltrators who had obtained false baptismal certificates and were plainly agents of Communism and demoralization. (…) I heard from Bella Dodd that these evil men had even infiltrated the Vatican – for the Catholic Church is the arch enemy of Communism: and they know it.[/dim


Sexual abuse of minors and the practice of homosexuality is the perfect way to demoralize the Church and cause it to lose its moral authority in the eyes of the public and among believers, and cause people to abandon the faith.

Thus, the Stalinist anti-Christian mission is now about to reach its goal two generations after Stalin, at a time when the West is facing the second coming of Marxism. With a weakened and demoralized Church, a new Soviet era will face little if any resistance in the West as it begins to take control and subvert the remains of Christian culture.

We can already observe the signs: the suppression of free speech, the tyranny of political correctness, and vicious political and psychological persecution of Christians. Only a purified Church is able to stand up to this kind of diabolical regime.

Most of the priests, bishops and cardinals who have been committing the horrid crimes reported now were very likely at no point true and honest followers of Christ, but planted infiltrators and deliberate enemies of the Church. For this reason, the lay people of the Church must now insist on a total purging of imposters from within the Church.

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My apologies. It appears that last week Lifesite's longtime correspondent covering the Latin American church published a comprehensive account of the Grassi case - the most comprehensive I have
seen so far in English
- while referring to other clerical sex abuse cases 'handled' by then Archbishop Bergoglio in Buenos Aires. A measure of how even Canon212.com and PewSitter - which I check daily
for the leads I wish to pursue - have not been following this storyline closely enough to have missed posting a lead to the LifeSite story...



Pope Francis attacked and stonewalled
sex abuse victims while archbishop of Buenos Aires

by Matthew Cullinan Hoffmann


September 12, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – The world is currently focused on Pope Francis’ involvement in the affair of clerical sex abuser Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. However, the recent claims made by former apostolic nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò against Pope Francis in the matter are only the beginning of a long record of sex abuse cover-ups by Pope Francis and Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio that stretches back decades.

Although Francis famously claimed in his 2010 book On Heaven and Earth that sex abuse by clergy “has never occurred in my diocese” and “in the diocese it never happened to me,” the evidence to date indicates that Pope Francis is involved in multiple cover-ups of clerical sexual predators in South America, including his own archdiocese. His involvement in at least two of these cases has continued during his papacy.

In a 2017 documentary by the French news program Cash Investigation, six different individuals claiming to be sex abuse victims in the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires told reporters that they had been sexually abused by clergy there, and that they had written to Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio to inform him, but that he had never answered their complaints (see video below).



To this day Pope Francis has only expressed regret for one of these cover-ups, the Barros affair, following a massive public outcry in Chile over his strong-arm tactics against victims. The other cases continue to be hushed-up, ignored, and stonewalled.

The pope recently told sex abuse survivors in Ireland that those who cover up sexual abuse are “caca” (feces) and recently said that such priests should be removed and their accusers should be accompanied in the civil courts.

However, Francis has done exactly the opposite, and continues to refuse to meet with victims he not only refused to accompany, but whom he sought for years to discredit with judges.


LifeSite is including links to its sources in the Spanish-speaking and French media regarding these cases so that the public can verify their veracity and to facilitate the reporting by other journalists on this topic.

Perhaps the most egregious case of obstruction, stonewalling, and negligence regarding a clerical child sex abuser on the part of Jorge Bergoglio was that of Julio César Grassi, a priest famous throughout Argentina for his work with poor and orphan children, and who became the subject of numerous accusations by teen residents of his facilities, which led to his conviction for sex abuse of a minor in 2013 as well as other charges and a sentence of more than 15 years in prison.

While refusing to speak to Grassi’s victims, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio engineered a campaign to discredit the victims and to influence the judges in the case, which may have resulted in some of the charges being dismissed.

Despite these efforts, Grassi was convicted in the case of one victim who was able to identify hidden marks and other characteristics of Grassi’s body, and his conviction has been upheld by multiple appeals courts, including a final ruling by the Supreme Court of Argentina in March of 2016.

Nonetheless, Pope Francis continues to allow Grassi to function as a priest. Despite ongoing requests, Francis has not yet met with victims nor apologized to them.

Fr. Julio Cesar Grassi is a priest of the Diocese of Morón, which was under Bergoglio’s metropolitan authority as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. There Grassi personally oversaw a residential facility housing approximately 400 children. The priest’s efforts to raise money for his “Happy Children Foundation” (Fundación Felices los Niños), which managed seventeen facilities throughout the country for over six thousand children, made him a national celebrity and generated the equivalent of millions of dollars in donations annually.

Grassi’s image as a crusader for a humanitarian cause made him a subject of national pride and gave him immense public credibility, as he forged close relationships with some of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in Argentinean society. By the late 1990s he had become a priest celebrity who seemed untouchable.

However, Grassi’s charitable empire began to collapse in 2002 when a series of investigative reports in the Argentinean media revealed a total of five accusations against him of sexual abuse from former residents of his care facilities, some of which had been on file with the police for two years. The alleged victims said that Grassi had made attempts to sexually seduce them and had performed perverse sexual acts on them.

The television program Telenoche Investiga, which first reported the case, reported that Grassi also had been accused of sexual predation against seminarians as vice rector of a seminary in 1997. The country was riveted by the claims and Argentineans were divided over the likelihood of their veracity.

As a result of the media investigations, Grassi was soon prosecuted for over a dozen charges of sexual abuse of three of the purported victims. What followed was a 15-year saga in the courts of Argentina, in which Grassi and his team of over twenty high-power attorneys repeatedly attempted to intimidate and discredit Grassi’s accusers.

“Gabriel,” the victim whose testimony resulted in Grassi’s conviction, says that the harassment against him and attempts to steal evidence from him became so strong that he had to be enrolled in a witness protection program.

His story is corroborated by his psychiatrist and advocate, Enrique Stola, who has stated repeatedly to the press that he himself was threatened and that his house had been entered multiple times by people who had beaten him over his involvement in the case.

One of Grassi’s attorneys, Miguel Angel Pierri, was jailed twice after having falsely portrayed himself as a lawyer for one of the purported victims for the purpose of taking the victim to a court and pressuring him to retract his testimony. The “retraction” was later thrown out by the court when the deception was discovered.

To this show of force by the powerful Grassi was added the clout of the four-member Executive Committee of the Argentine Episcopal Conference, including Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as the conference’s Second Vice President, which sought to portray Grassi’s prosecution as an anti-Catholic conspiracy, a line similar to the one taken by Grassi’s legal team.

In a thinly-veiled reference to the Grassi case, the episcopal conference’s executive committee claimed it was “astounded by the persistence of attacks which, in our day, seek to smear the image of the Church.” While admitting that priests are capable of sinning and expressing a desire to reach the truth, the committee added, “It may be that the hidden side of this campaign is the desire for the Church to lose its trust that society places in it, or for it to cease to expound upon the moral and social consequences of its principles.”

It was this conspiracy-theory approach to the case that Cardinal Bergoglio would maintain after being elected President of the Argentinean Episcopal Conference in 2005, despite the mounting evidence and repeated convictions of Grassi as the years wore on.

Bergoglio’s stealth campaign against Grassi’s victims
Bergoglio was not satisfied, however, with vague accusations of ulterior motives behind the prosecution. While it appears that neither Bergoglio nor the Bishop of Morón undertook a canonical investigation of Grassi, and Bergoglio ignored requests by the victims to discuss their accusations with him, the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires began a stealth campaign to discredit the victims with the judges in the case and secure a verdict of innocence.

Bergoglio’s effort to prevent the conviction of Grassi went so far as to include the commission of a series of four books devoted to casting doubt on the purported victims’ testimonies and attacking the victims themselves. The books were produced for Bergoglio and the Argentinean Episcopal Conference by the eminent jurist Marcelo Sancinetti. The series was entitled, “Studies on the ‘Grassi case,’” and filled more than 2,600 pages.


If Bergoglio could commission a jurist to produce this hefty 4-volume defense of a convicted sex-abuser priest, imagine what he could mobilize to produce a defense of his own self against all his multiple documented misdeeds as bishop and as pope!


The books seek to discredit Grassi’s purported victims, openly calling them “false accusers” and even implying that they are projecting their own homosexual desires onto Grassi. Echoing Grassi’s arguments and those of the Argentine Episcopal Conference, they theorize that the prosecution of Grassi has arisen out of a conspiracy against his “Happy Children Foundation” by several media outlets who were seeking to destroy the organization. In an epilogue Sancinetti goes so far as to compare Grassi to the prophet Daniel placed in a den of lions.

The books were published in secret and never revealed to the public, and they contained no editorial imprint. However, the last of the four volumes, published in 2013, had the following text on the first page dated July, 2013: “With this [volume], these ‘Studies on the Grassi case’ are concluded, and the labor assigned by the Argentinean Episcopal Conference, in particular by Cardinal Bergoglio, then its president and today His Holiness Francis.”

Defenders of the project have claimed that the books were meant only for the bishops of the Argentinean Episcopal Conference, but the evidence indicates that they were meant to influence the judges in the case. The Argentinean news service Infobae reported in 2016 that its sources within the nation’s Supreme Court had confirmed that the books were given to the members of the court. The lawyer of two of Grassi’s accusers, “Luis” and “Ezequiel,” Juan Pablo Gallego, also confirmed the claim in an interview with Infobae.

“The books arrived to the judges of the [Supreme] Court, presumably delivered by supposed emissaries of Francis,” Gallego told Infobae. “What is certain is that we determined that they were received by every judge that had to decide on the Grassi case. They weren’t only delivered to the Supreme Court, where they are held, for example, by Ricardo Lorenzetti; they were also delivered to the judges of the provincial appeals court.”

“I am certain that the judges of the Supreme Court have these books and that they came to them in the name of the Church,” concluded Gallego. Infobae says that representatives of the Supreme Court denied the claim when asked for comment.

The claim that judges were given copies of the book has been confirmed publicly by at least one judge, Carlos Mahiques, who told the French television news magazine Cash Investigation in 2017 that he personally received the books (see program transcript in English here).

“You received this counter-inquiry?” asked the Cash Investigation reporter. “Yes, I did,” responded Mahiques.

“Did it influence your judgment?” the reporter asked. “Absolutely not,” responded Mahiques. “The study is a bit like a detective novel. I think it’s partial in some areas, and extremely partial in others. It’s clearly in favor of Father Grassi. They were trying to exert a subtle form of pressure on the judges.”


Note the parallel questions placed to Bergoglio as pope and his double denial.


Today, Sancinetti refuses to discuss his authorship of the books with the Argentinean press. He repeatedly failed to respond to interview requests from Infobae in 2016, but a colleague told the media outlet, “Doctor [Sancinetti] doesn’t want to give any interview over the topic of Grassi.”

Asked for his opinion about the series of books, Grassi’s “main victim” (presumably “Gabriel,” whose testimony led to Grassi’s conviction) told Cash Investigation (see transcript), “I’ll never forget what Father Grassi kept repeating at his trial: ‘Bergoglio never let go off my hand.’ Now, Bergoglio is Pope Francis, but he has never gone against Grassi’s words. So I’m certain that he never did let go of Grassi’s hand!”

Infobae reports that Grassi used the same phrase when speaking to that news agency in 2009. “[Bergoglio] never let go of my hand. He is at my side as always,” Grassi reportedly said.

Grassi’s victims stonewalled by Bergoglio for over a decade
Juan Pablo Gallego also told Infobae that he attempted repeatedly to talk to Bergoglio in 2003, when witnesses were repeatedly threatened and intimidated by attorneys and partisans of Grassi, to ask him to dissuade Grassi and his team from such tactics. However, he never received a response.

Ultimately Gallego was received by the then bishop of Morón, Justo Laguna, and Argentinean President Nestor Kirchner, “who received the request favorably.”

The psychiatrist Enrique Stola, who treated two of those accusing Grassi of sexual abuse, told a government news agency that the purported victims “Luis” and “Ezequiel” had tried to contact Bergoglio as well, and confirmed that neither of them received a response.

His statement is confirmed by the head of Argentina’s Committee for Monitoring the Rights of the Child, Nora Schulman, who told the Argentinean publication Clarin that Francis “never received the victims of Fr. Julio César Grassi.”

She added that, following the Supreme Court’s ratification of the sentence against Grassi, she expected the victims to approach the Vatican to request Pope Francis’s intervention and to ask that Grassi be removed from the priesthood.

Miriam Lewin, the journalist who originally broke the story on Grassi in 2002, recently told El Pais that she had approached the pope personally to ask him to meet with Grassi’s victims.

“In November of 2015, I went to the Vatican and I spoke for some minutes with the Pope to ask him to make a gesture to victims,” Lewin said. “He listened to me and I thought that he would do it, but he never called them. His rhetoric against pedophilia is very tough, but it should be reflected in concrete acts in this case. The victims need reparation, an apology. It is not understood how Grassi can continue to be a priest.”

After a nine-month trial that included over 130 witnesses, Grassi was convicted in 2009 of molesting one of the three children, given the name “Gabriel” in the media. Three different appeals courts upheld Grassi’s conviction, including Argentina’s Supreme Court. He began to serve his fifteen-year sentence in 2013. He has also been convicted for misuse of public funds in the operation of his foundation, adding two more years to his prison time.

Investigative journalists revealed in 2015 that Grassi has the enjoyment of his own room in the prison with his own office, private bathroom, cable TV, a 21-inch color television, a computer with internet access, a heater, and a minibar. He is accused of paying for these amenities by diverting whole truckloads of food donations from his “Happy Children Foundation” to prison officials. He is now being prosecuted a third time for such abuses.

Despite his repeatedly upheld convictions in Argentina’s secular courts,
- it appears that Grassi has never been tried in any ecclesiastical court.
- Moreover, he has never been stripped of his priesthood, although he is prohibited from the public celebration of the sacraments.
- He continues to wear his collar in prison.
- As late as August of 2017 he was listed among diocesan clergy, which means that the Diocese of Morón was continuing to extend priestly faculties to him, allowing him to hear confessions and perform other sacraments that would be otherwise invalidated. However, the current list of diocesan clergy does not include his name.

Regarding Grassi’s continuing status as a Catholic priest, the Diocese of Morón has stated publicly that the case is in the hands of the Vatican, that is, in the hands of Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis.

In March of 2017, following the Supreme Court’s unanimous ratification of the conviction of Grassi, the Diocese of Morón issued a press release revealing that “The Holy See has opportunely ordered a preliminary investigation regarding the accusations about the conduct of this priest,” and that this had resulted in “a report that was sent to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” and added that the diocese “will act in accordance with the prevailing canonical processes determined by the Holy See.” However, the Holy See has yet to act, leaving Grassi with his priestly faculties intact.

According to the Spanish newspaper El Pais, a source close to Pope Francis admits that Francis has given confessions to Grassi but claims Grassi is exaggerating their relationship. The source also claimed that responsibility in the case lies not with Pope Francis but with the Diocese of Morón, contradicting the diocese’s claim that the pope has responsibility. Nonetheless, the same source tried to defend Grassi as the victim of an elaborate conspiracy and raised doubts about Grassi’s guilt.

“[Bergoglio] didn’t support Grassi,” a source close to Bergoglio told El Pais. “He didn’t go to visit him in jail, but he didn’t speak [about it] because he wasn’t his bishop, and because there was much doubt about his guilt.”

“Behind this scandal [of the Grassi prosecution] there was an economic operation by the rivals of Grassi in important businesses. It wasn’t clear if it was an intelligence operation,” El Pais was told.

According to the Vatican’s press secretariat, also speaking to El Pais, Pope Francis isn’t intervening because the case was handled by a secular court. The secretariat also claimed that Francis is in favor of “absolute support” for sex abuse victims.

“The response of the Pope is always clear: maximum respect for civil justice, zero tolerance of the guilty and absolute support for the victims,” Francis’s press agency stated. “The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is just now in these days giving the required indications and finishing an examination of the situation for the purpose of adopting a definitive resolution.”

The statement was made to El País no later than April of 2017, when the article was published. No decision by Pope Francis or the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has been announced since that time.

In March of the same year, after months of futile attempts to question Pope Francis about the Grassi case, the French journalist Élise Lucet of the television news magazine Cash Investigation confronted Pope Francis in person over his involvement in the Grassi case (see video here; see full documentary in English here).

When asked by Lucet if he had attempted to influence the judiciary in the Grassi case, Francis turned to her with a scowl on his face and waved his arms. “Not at all!” he said. After beginning to walk away, he turned back and repeated the statement insistently, “Not at all!” His scowl then became a smile, he waved, and walked away.

The Holy See Press Office did not respond to our request for comment by press time. However, LifeSite did receive an accidental response to our email that was meant for some other recipient, and we therefore can confirm that they received our request.


P.S. The New York Times picked up and published the AP story on the Grassi case. But Lella on her blog claims that none of the major Italian newspapers have so much as mentioned it.

On CRUX, John Allen has an 'analysis' piece today with a roundup of new developments in the PTESENT CRISIS
cruxnow.com/news-analysis/2018/09/18/take-aways-on-the-latest-twists-in-the-clerical-abu...
but makes no reference at all to the Grassi case.



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Sandro Magister, after Aldo Maria Valli earlier this week, reminds us all of yet another egregiously anti-Catholic Bergoglian initiative - his cavalier hostitity towards
monastic life. One could see this as a supreme disregard as well for the monastic life of prayer that his predecessor has chosen to live since his retirement,
in which after the Church, his main prayer intention is for his successor...

Evidently, the Evil Clown who is the object of Mundabor's blatant contempt is also a master juggler who can keep any number of balls in play enough so his audience
can and do lose sight of the individual balls (devilish tricks, in this case) and will tend to focus only on whatever happens to be in his hand at the moment... One can
almost imagine that the first joint synodal-papal document under the new Jorgecadabra Apostolic Constitution will have a title exalting Homosexualitatis laetitia
or Gaudium homosexualitatis.... Oops! Scratch that. I forgot: 'homosexuality' and its derivatives are not in the lexicon of the church of Bergoglio. They call it clericalism.


Recalling the second of Benedict XVI's '9/12s'
After Regensburg in 2006, his 2007 address to the French cultural elite in Paris
on how the medieval monks' search for God also led to the rebirth of Western
civilization two centuries after the fall of the Roman empire


Sept. 19, 2018

That Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option” is truly “the most important religious book of the decade” - as David Brooks predicted in the “New York Times” - is now beyond a doubt [That's a rather dubious sweeping statement to make], seeing how the discussion it has generated has come to involve even the highest levels of the Catholic Church.

In presenting this book last week in a meeting room of the Italaian Parliament's Chamber of Deputies, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, Joseph Ratzinger’s secretary before and after his resignation from the papacy, did not hesitate to bring the two last popes into the discussion when he said,

“Even Benedict XVI from the moment of his resignation conceived of himself as an elderly monk who feels it his duty to dedicate himself above all to prayer for Mother Church, for his successor Francis and for the Petrine ministry instituted by Christ himself.”


Of course, the Benedict of the “option” - in the book by the American writer Rod Dreher, a Protestant turned Catholic and then Orthodox - is not Papa Ratzinger, but Saint Benedict of Norcia, the great monk of the fifth and sixth centuries who gave rise to a formidable rebirth of Christian faith and culture in the chaos that followed the collapse of the Roman empire.

But the other Benedict, the pope, evoked precisely that rebirth in his memorable address - absolutely worth rereading - of September 12, 2008 in Paris, at the Collège des Bernardins, essentially proposing that the Catholics of today take up and bring to life again the lesson of that great Benedictine monasticism, at the present juncture of civilization:
> "Quaerere Deum"

It cannot be said, however, that his successor finds himsekf in harmony with this vision, according to at least two indications.

The first is the direct attack that La Civiltà Cattolica carried out last January on the book by Dreher, dismissing its “option” as the heresy of a Christianity made up only of the “pure”:
> Saint Benedict in the 21st Century. But "La Civiltà Cattolica" Condemns Him to the Stake

It must be kept in mind that Civiltà, edited by the Jesuit Antonio Spadaro, is not just any magazine, but is printed after every one of its articles has been inspected at the Vatican. Moreover, Spadaro is among the few who have the closest symbiosis with the current pope.

The other indication is more recent, namely, the cold shower with which Francis has doused monasticism, through the apostolic constitution “Vultum Dei quaerere” of 2016 and with the subsequent applicational instruction “Cor orans” of 2018, undermining the material and spiritual autonomy of the monasteries and requiring them to federate under the bureaucratic command of authorities outside of themselves.

The two documents concern female monasticism, but they are the expression of a more general lack of appreciation that Francis has repeatedly shown for the contemplative life with respect to the active life, going so far as to say for example, in the exhortation "Gaudete et exsultate” on the call to holiness in the contemporary world:

"It is not healthy to love silence while fleeing interaction with others, to want peace and quiet while avoiding activity, to seek prayer while disdaining service… We are called to be contemplatives even in the midst of action."


The heavy-handedness of this attack on the contemplative life has been noted with great concern in many monasteries, to which expression has been given by the vaticanista Aldo Maria Valli in this three-part analysis, published in a few days ago:
> Qualcuno vuole liquidare il monachesimo? (Does someone wish to liquidate monasticism?)
> Se nel nome del rinnovamento si distrugge la vita contemplativa (If, in the name of renewal, contemplative life is destroyed...)
> Con lo sguardo rivolto al mondo, non a Dio. Ovvero come snaturare la vita contemplativa (With eyes turned to the world, not to God: How to denature the contemplative life)
[Which 3 articles I am in the process of translating but have not completed]


Naturally, all is not sunny in modern-day Benedictine monasticism, especially in the men's communities, which are marked here and there by lapses and degeneracies that are in some cases quite serious. But Dreher’s proposal, and even more authoritatively that of Benedict XVI in the address at the Collège des Bernardins, wager everything on that quaerere Deum, that “seeking God” which is uniquely at the origin of the monastic life in addition to being a wellspring of civilization, and which must be revived today in its creative authenticity.

It is no coincidence that the latest book by Cardinal Robert Sarah - who shares this vision and is well known to be at the polar opposite of Pope Francis’s approach - bears the characteristically monastic title Against the Dictatorship of Noise, includes an illuminating conversation with the prior of the Grande Chartreuse, and opens with a preface by Joseph Ratzinger:
> Cardinal Sarah Has the Pope On His Side. But His Name Is Benedict

Dreher’s “option” leaves itself open to not a few criticisms, especially on account of its insistence on an “escape” from the world in order to rebuild Christian existence in small, self-contained communities, as in “an ark before the flood comes,” as Reggio Emilia bishop Massimo Camisasca objected.

In discussing the book in the author’s presence in Rome, this criticism was aimed at Dreher by both the editor of L'Osservatore Romano,” Giovanni Maria Vian, and the founder of the newspaper Il Foglio, Giuliano Ferrara, a great atheist-admirer of Ratzinger.

Dreher’s response is that in any case “we ordinary Christians must work to make our faith more monastic.”

But that’s just the point. The great monasticism founded by Benedict did not separate itself from the world. On the contrary, it made a decisive contribution to building modern European civilization, founded on the concepts of the person and of freedom.

If today the “dictatorship of relativism” so roundly denounced by Benedict XVI reigns supreme, it is inevitable that the two linchpins, the person and freedom, will also fall apart.

But this is one more reason why Christians as a “creative minority” should not withdraw in private or into works of charity - as the world desires and applauds - but should continue to work in the public sphere, in the light of quaerere Deum. Doing precisely what Pope Benedict always preached with consistency, not only in the address at the Collège des Bernardins that marked the pinnacle of his pontificate.

Since that address of September 12, 2008, ten years have gone by. If it is true that the Catholic Church as well has had “its September 11” - as Monsignor Gänswein said in commenting on Dreher’s book, referring to the catastrophe of sexual abuse - why not also mark September 12 on the calendar of history as the start of a journey of rebirth for Christianity and civilization? [Except, of course, that the intended rebirth has been so violently interrupted and indefinitely put off by the current pontificate and its unregenerate and increasingly rabid anti-Catholicism.]

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'The Kiss of Judas', by Lorenzo Carracci, ca. 1600 (Princeton Museum of Art), illustrates Fr. Murray's piece in THE CATHOLIC THING.

An Open Letter to Theodore McCarrick
by Fr. Gerald E. Murray

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2018

Excellency, You stand at the center of a devastating and spiraling crisis in the Church triggered in large measure by your past and present behavior.

In your statement published by the Archdiocese of Washington on June 20th, you incredibly maintained your innocence of the two charges of sexual molestation brought by a former minor seminarian of the Archdiocese of New York, claiming you had “absolutely no recollection of this reported abuse, and believe in [your] innocence.”

An innocent man does not “believe” he’s innocent. He knows he’s innocent, and no one would expect him to have a recollection of something he didn’t do. You stated that you were “sorry for the pain the person who brought the charges has gone through, as well as for the scandal such charges cause our people.”

If you did not molest this teenager, then your accuser could not have experienced pain caused by you. Your sorrow should only have been for yourself at having to suffer a false accusation of criminal turpitude by someone you had never molested.

You further stated that, when Cardinal Dolan informed you of the charges, you “fully cooperated in the process.” If you mean that you told the whole truth, then I suggest that it’s time that you come forward to explain yourself to the People of God. Your truthful public testimony now is absolutely necessary for the good of the Church – and your own soul.

I say this because, as reported in a New York Times article, you were also accused of the repeated sexual molestation of the son of a personal friend. You baptized this boy, James, shortly after you were ordained in 1958. The molestation began when he was eleven, and went on for twenty years, according to your accuser.

What was your response to this new accusation? Did you issue another statement denying the charges? No, you resigned from the College of Cardinals. Pope Francis accepted your resignation shortly after.

Your resignation is an admission of guilt. No innocent man would have written the pope asking him to accept his resignation from the College of Cardinals. But this act of partial self-punishment isn’t enough. It isn’t sufficient to repair the damage you have done, or to vindicate the truthfulness of the victims you have gravely harmed.


Pope Francis informed you that you must live “a life of prayer and penance until the accusations made against [you] are examined in a regular canonical trial.” When this trial will take place is unknown.

Why put the Church through the continued agony caused by your refusal to come clean publicly and admit your crimes? Why have you not seen fit, in the sight of God, to go before the world and beg pardon from your many victims, apologize for the scandal to the faithful and to stunned non-Catholics who assumed you were a true servant of Christ, and ask Pope Francis that you be removed from the priesthood?

The Church entrusted to you the dignity of being priest and bishop, and you used them to prey sexually upon innocent young men. You accepted the high honor of becoming a cardinal knowing full well that at any moment your history of homosexual molestation and abuse of authority could be revealed, thus bringing disgrace upon you and upon anyone in authority who, whether believing or doubting reports of such evil behavior, protected you over the years.

You misused your priestly status to gain access to, and then coerce, Catholic boys, seminarians, and priests to participate in immoral acts that caused them serious harm. You left victims all along the way.

Now that you have been exposed, you have retreated into a silence that is only a further instance of your lifelong pattern of deception and deceit.

For the good of your soul and the Church, you must end your cowardly silence and step before the world and tell the truth about your crimes, and about your misuse of your high position.


You need to answer Archbishop Viganò’s charges. You alone can confirm or deny many things that he has alleged:
- Did Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the nuncio in Washington, tell you that Pope Benedict had directed you to leave the seminary where you were living in retirement; that you were forbidden to celebrate Mass in public, to participate in public meetings, to give lectures, to travel, and were under the obligation of dedicating yourself to a life of prayer and penance?
- Did the next nuncio, Archbishop Viganò, repeat these papal commands to you?
- Did these conversations happen or not? If they did not happen, why then did you move out of the seminary and into a parish rectory?
- If they did not happen, then why did you tell Archbishop Viganò, whom you met by chance at the pope’s residence, that Pope Francis was sending you to China?
- Why would he care about your travel plans, unless he had told you that you were forbidden to travel, and now you wanted him to know this was no longer the case?

If Archbishop Viganò is telling the truth,
- Why did you disregard Pope Benedict’s directions?
- When you met with Pope Francis after his election, did you speak to him about these restrictions?
- Did Pope Francis himself indicate any prior knowledge of or release you from these restrictions?


Excellency, the good of the Church and your own true good are inseparable in the current situation. Your complete and truthful public mea culpa is the best thing to do if you want to promote the welfare of the Church and help to resolve this crisis.

As a priest ordained for the same archdiocese as you were, I ask you to remember the priestly mission you received on the day of your ordination at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. You have one last opportunity to make up in part for decades of perfidious behavior, and to act now to advance that mission by truthfully serving Christ and the Church.

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Forgive the flippant banner heading, but I wanted an omnibus heading for the commentaries on our not-so-beloved pope's galloping one-a-day lunacies. His lunacies are, of course, the stuff of apostasy, so nothing to be flippant
about I thank Peter Kwasniewski for the picture that illustrates his post below (I think it could well portray a madman), and my apologies to the Folies Bergere for the take-off on their name...



Pope Francis's 'Great Emergency':
Plastic debris in the world's waters

by FR. GEORGE W. RUTLER

September 19, 2018

That every five hundred years the Church passes through a crisis is not a novel insight. It may be something of a contrived schematic, since there have been other crises as well, but each of those periods of crisis has influenced the Church to an extraordinary and radical degree: The Fall of the Roman Empire, the Great East-West Schism, and the Protestant Revolt.

These days there seems to be a “perfect storm” of events which add up to a fourth crisis, and the faithful must trust that “through toil and tribulation” the purging of corrupt elements will result in a stronger Catholic witness.

Recently, Pope Francis told the press: “I will not say a word” referring to some of the most serious allegations of decadence in the Church, and he has long declined to respond to the dubia of four cardinals on the spiritual economy of marriage.

Some have thought that such reticence is inconsistent with his dogmatic outspokenness on ambiguous matters such as climate change and capital punishment.

Last New Year’s Day, he said: “I would once again like to raise my voice” about immigration, and on Palm Sunday he told young people: “You have it in you to shout” even if “older people and leaders, very often corrupt, keep quiet.” This is why there was an eagerness to hear him when in the course of these most tumultuous months, on the fourth day of World Prayer for the Care of Creation, he finally spoke — but it turned out to be a warning about plastic debris in the world’s waters.

On September 1, 2018, this successor of Gregory I, who saw Latin civilization crumbling, and Leo IX, who grieved at the loss of Constantinople, and Pius V, who pitied souls lost in the heretical northern lands, implored and lamented: “We cannot allow our seas and oceans to be littered by endless fields of floating plastic. Here, too, our active commitment is needed to confront this emergency.” The struggle against plastic litter must be fought “as if everything depended on us.”

It was a sobering moment for all who care for what the Holy Father called “the great waters and all they contain.” The poignancy of such pastoral solicitude inevitably brings to mind the historic document of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People in 2007 which was entitled: “Guidelines for the Pastoral Care of the Road.”

It marked precisely the one thousandth anniversary of the no less important peace treaty with the Vikings signed by King Aethelred the Unready.

The world will long remember this pontifical document’s opening line: “Moving from place to place, and transporting goods using different means, have characterized human behavior since the beginning of history.”

The guidelines also pointed out (n. 21) that “A vehicle is a means of transport…” and observed (n. 23), “Sometimes the prohibitions imposed by road signs may be perceived as restrictions on freedom.”

Drawing on generations of pastoral wisdom, the instruction (n. 24) warned: “The fact that a driver’s personality is different from that of a pedestrian’s, should be taken into account” (n. 24) and cautioned against “rude gestures” (n. 27).

From their own cultural experiences as Italians, the president of the Council, Renato Cardinal Martino, and the Council’s secretary, Agostino Marchetto, titular archbishop of Astigi, noted that “Cars tend to bring out the ‘primitive side’ of human beings, thereby producing rather unpleasant results” (n. 29).

More than a decade later, there is yet to be realized the Pontifical Council’s dream of “periodic celebrations of liturgies at major road points” (n 82). One hopes that the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation will produce more tangible results.

There are cynics who would try to dismiss the plastic pollution emergency as though it were “not a massive, massive crisis.” However, the issue will not go away. You might say that the problem has been with us since plastic first appeared in 1284, as a naturally made compound of tortoise shell and horn. And, of course, 1284 was the year that the Lüneborg manuscript first recorded the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, whom the former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, in a lecture in Villanova University in 2013, used as a metaphor for the charism of Pope Francis. He was unaware that 130 children were never seen again after the Piper led them into a cave.

The first man-made plastic, derived from cellulose, was exhibited at the Great International Exhibition in London in 1862, being the invention of Alexander Parkes. As a specimen of accidental synchronicity, it happened that during the installation of that marvel, the British Minister to Rome, Lord Odo Russell, assured an anxious Pope Pius IX that Queen Victoria would grant him asylum in England should he have to flee the Eternal City.

In the 1967 film The Graduate, Mr. McGuire tells Benjamin: “Plastics. There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?” That optimism, born of naïveté about Fallen Man’s abuse the oceans, is mocked by today’s emergency.

Condemning the privatization of water resources, Pope Francis implied that a large burden of fault is to be blamed on Western capitalists. However, an awkward fact looms: a 2017 report of the “Ocean Conservancy” indicates that more plastic is dumped into the oceans by China, along with Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, than by the entire rest of the world. Indeed, ninety per cent of all plastic in the seas and oceans are carried there by rivers in India, Africa, and mostly China.

Nonetheless, the chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Science, Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, has said: “Right now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese.” In China “the economy does not dominate politics, as in the United States” where President Trump is “manipulated” by global industrialists.

Shortly before the Chinese government bulldozed yet another church and banned crucifixes, Sorondo declared that China was implementing Pope Francis’s encyclical letter Laudato Si better than many countries and “is assuming a moral leadership that others have abandoned.”

Plastic is not mentioned in Sacred Scripture, not even in the New American Bible. But we may safely assume that Jesus would have had difficulty walking on water if it had been filled with plastic trash. Saint Peter found a gold coin in the mouth of a fish but today he might very well find only a piece of styrofoam.

When our Lord fed the five thousand and the four thousand, the leftovers filled twelve and seven kphinoi, or wicker baskets, respectively. These were huge crowds, especially if you add the number of women and children, and more so if 2+2 = 5. But the point is: these baskets were biodegradable, and it would never have occurred to the Master to use plastic trash bags even if such had existed. Eventually the baskets would have decayed and returned to the soil from whence they came. And that is how it should be.

Even the parables can be updated for the present emergency: the Good Ecologist, having recycled ninety-nine plastic bottles, still goes out in search of the one polyurethane bottle that is lost.

On the other hand, our Lord does seem to have had a different concept of moral emergencies, to wit:

“Hear me, all of you, and understand. Nothing that enters a man from outside can defile him; but the things that come out from within are what defile. From within men, from their hearts, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly. All these evils come from within and they defile” (Mark 7: 15, 20-23).

But for many facing the emergency of plastic refuse, that may be a matter for another day.


Pope Francis is no longer hiding
his strategy for manipulating
outcome of the 'Youth Synod'

[Nor, for that matter, other synodal assemblies called by him]

by Peter Kwasniewski


September 18, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – In addition to the delegates elected by the world’s episcopal conferences, the upcoming Synod on Youth has been given 39 special delegates appointed directly by Pope Francis.

This list includes several of his close allies in the hierarchy:
- Cardinal Marx of Munich, President of the German bishops’ conference;
- Cardinal Cupich, who has said that the Church has more important business than dealing with the abuse crisis, such as environmentalism and immigration;
- ardinal Tobin, who denies having known anything about McCarrick, in spite of evidence of hundreds of clergy who knew “all about it”; - Father Antonio Spadaro, editor of La Civilta Cattolica, famous for tweeting that in theology (modern theology?), 2+2=5; and
- Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the deconstructed Pontifical Academy for Life and grand chancellor of the gutted John Paul II Institute in Rome.

All of these figures have been in the spotlight for their heterodoxy, and all have angrily denounced Catholics who oppose the pope’s progressive agenda.

In some ways, this delegate development is not surprising. In another way, however, it is appalling. Many of these men have given evidence of being shameless liars (to use Viganò’s terminology) by denying knowledge of now ex-Cardinal McCarrick’s predations or by denying that the abuse crisis is primarily a consequence of active homosexuality in the clergy.

Like the recent Vatican photo of the private papal meeting on abuse which shows everyone relaxed and smiling, or the now extensive string of papal homilies in which the pope compares himself to the silent Christ in His Passion and writes off his critics as accusers like Satan, this development is one more nail in the coffin of any reasonable expectation Catholics might have to see the pope or any of his senior officials take seriously either the abuse scandal or the devastating report of Viganò.

As regards the upcoming Synod itself, there’s not even an attempt anymore at hiding (as had been the case with the two synods on marriage and family) the papal strategy for manipulating its outcome. Now it is in broad daylight.

On September 17, Pope Francis released a new document, an Apostolic Constitution Episcopalis Communio governing the structure of the Synod of Bishops, which turns the Synod into a permanent body, somewhat like a parliamentary form of government, and, more worrisomely, amplifies the “magisterial” force of the final document produced by a Synod.

In other words, the process by which synodal progressivism will be able to modernize Catholic dogma and morals has been accelerated. One wonders if Pope Francis is worried about how many years he’s got left, and wants to make sure that he changes as much as he can, as quickly as possible.

We already know, from events held in advance of the Youth Synod, that it will represent a one-sided view of youth and what they need and what the Church should give them. Even George Weigel, who has been an outstanding proponent of papal authority over the years, has criticized the upcoming Synod on Youth, saying that there’s likely to be nothing to it but conventional sociology and that the Church seems to be apologizing for her challenging moral teachings.

What is most obvious is that the new traditional voice among practicing Catholic youth will be utterly ignored and stifled, treated as if it does not exist. This is because Francis and his allies would strongly prefer that it not exist.

Will nothing come of the McCarrick affair? Will it be business as usual?
Will the Youth Synod, the Amazon Synod, and a whole host of future Synods irrevocably alter the face of Catholicism?

That is what the pope and his Vatican would like the most; but that is not what they are going to get. As Fr. Zuhlsdorf wrote: “A great deal of the clean up of The Present Crisis will be (must be) driven by lay people, who have, above all, numbers, and who have, ultimately, the money.” And, most importantly, who seem, at this time, to have a monopoly on the orthodox Faith.

Think of it this way. I would wager that at least 75% of believing and practicing Catholic laity today — by “believing and practicing,” I mean Catholics who know the basics of their faith and accept the Church’s teaching on such countercultural issues as divorce, homosexuality, contraception, and abortion — are by now opposed to the progressivist and modernist program of Pope Francis. Perhaps the number is even higher.

In contrast, probably not more than 50% of the lower clergy are skeptical of it or opposed to it. Maybe 25% of the world’s bishops and 15% of the cardinals are hesitant about it or opposed to it.


What this suggests to me is that, at this time in history, the higher one’s position in the institutional hierarchy, the more likely one is to be corrupted and compromised, while simple lay believers are far more likely to be outspokenly committed to traditional faith, morals, and liturgy. This is where future Catholic laity, priests, and religious will come from — not from the Synod machinery of the new German-Italian Axis.

Instead of praying for the success of another rigged Synod, perhaps we need to pray for a real chastisement from God to wake up the Church in its heady echelons. We might consider using the so-called cursing Psalms that were excised from the new Liturgy of the Hours.

In the end, God will have the last laugh (so to speak). And those who are faithful to him will join in, because everyone can now see how manipulated it all is, and that the Synod is speaking for no one but its progressive organizers.


From the California housewife who blogs as ONE MAD MOM, a few very pertinent scriptural notes for Jorge Bergoglio, if he must quote the Bible properly and appropriately...


And the pope 'triples down'
on his Great Accuser idiocy


September 19, 2018

After Pope Francis tripled-down on his “Great Accuser” homilies, I finally got around to reading them for myself, and yep, they were as sad as reported. I never want to take reporting at face value without going to the source.

I hate to say it, but after reading them, I get the feeling that Pope Francis thinks we are naïve, or maybe he’s just naïve himself. Either way, he picked the wrong bible verses to latch onto. Personally, I think it always a bad PR move to put yourself in the role of Jesus, Job, etc.

It also seems to me that Pope Francis also did what he was preaching to everyone else not to do. In our Church, an accusation doesn’t get any bigger than accusing someone of acting like satan. Not one, not two, but three “shoot the messenger” homilies have been lauded by a whole lot of people who have been quite legitimately outed for the clericalism of their compadres who want to normalize same-sex attraction.

So no, Holy Father, I don’t think this is a Job situation at all, or at least you have GREATLY miscast the characters. I think it’s more like a Paul and Timothy situation. I just can’t believe God nor Job would want the evil deeds of others hidden. Do you? Let’s look at Job.


Job 1:6-20

One day, when the heavenly powers stood waiting upon the Lord’s presence, and among them, man’s Enemy, the Lord asked him, where he had been? Roaming about the earth, said he, to and fro about the earth.

Why then, the Lord said, thou hast seen a servant of mine called Job. Here is a true man, an honest man, none like him on earth; ever he fears his God, and keeps far from wrong-doing.

Job fears his God, the Enemy answered, and loses nothing by it. Sheltered his life by thy protection, sheltered his home, his property; thy blessing on all he undertakes; worldly goods that still go on increasing; he loses nothing. One little touch of thy hand, assailing all that wealth of his! Then see how he will turn and blaspheme thee.

Be it so, the Lord answered; with all his possessions do what thou wilt, so thou leave himself unharmed.

So here we’ve gotSsatan telling God that Job only follows Him because he hasn’t faced any hardship. Yeah, that has everything to do with Archbishop Vigano!

Sorry. If Archbishop Vigano didn’t rock the boat, he’s probably be leading a pretty cushy life right now. So the character assassination is way off base here. Talk about hardship, he’s in hiding.

Now let’s look at 1 Timothy. This one sounds a bit more familiar and applicable to the situation. Maybe it should be adopted by anyone who feels the least bit bad that THOUSANDS of people have been molested and raped at the hands of priests. The “worrying about my image” homilies really need to cease. My comments interjected [in red]:


1 Timothy 1:3-20

There were some who needed to be warned against teaching strange doctrines (Sounds quite familiar these days!), against occupying their minds with legends and interminable pedigrees (Some are definitely legends in their own mind, like the ones who end in SJ), which breed controversy, instead of building up God’s house, as the faith does. (Breeding controversy is exactly what the likes of Cardinals Wuerl, Tobin, and Cupich, Bishop McElroy, and Frs. Martin, Rosica, and Reese do.)

The end at which our warning aims is charity, based on purity of heart, on a good conscience and a sincere faith. (What? Paul and Timothy aren’t the “Great Accusers” but their warning is aimed in charity, purity of heart, good conscience, and sincere faith? Somebody else tell me they see the likeness to Vigano, not Cupich!)

There are some who have missed this mark, branching off into vain speculations; who now claim to be expounding the law, without understanding the meaning of their own words, or the subject on which they pronounce so positively. (Do we not see that at EVERY turn with Cupich, Tobin, Kasper, Martin, Reese, Rosica, and a multitude of others???)

The law? It is an excellent thing, where it is applied legitimately; (Yes, the Pontifical Secrets have their place but, as Archbishop Vigano points out, they were never meant to cover up for abusing priests, bishops, and cardinals!!!) but it must be remembered that the law is not meant for those who live innocent lives. It is meant for the lawless and the refractory; (Hmmm. Lawless and stubborn. That would appear to those charged in Archbishop Vigano’s testimony.) for the godless and the sinner, the unholy and the profane; for those who lay violent hands on father or mother, for murderers, for those who commit fornication or sin against nature, the slave-dealer, the liar, the perjurer.

All this and much else is the very opposite of the sound doctrine (and which faction has been trying to promote same-sex attraction as normal and healthy?) contained in the gospel I have been entrusted with, that tells us of the blessed God and his glory.

How I thank our Lord Christ Jesus, the source of all my strength, for shewing confidence in me by appointing me his minister, me, a blasphemer till then, a persecutor, a man of violence, author of outrage, and yet he had mercy on me, because I was acting in the ignorance of unbelief.

The grace of the Lord came upon me in a full tide of faith and love, the love that is in Christ Jesus. How true is that saying, and what a welcome it deserves, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.

I was the worst of all, and yet I was pardoned, so that in me first of all Christ Jesus might give the extreme example of his patience; I was to be the pattern of all those who will ever believe in him, to win eternal life.

Honour and glory through endless ages to the king of all the ages, the immortal, the invisible, who alone is God, Amen. This charge, then, I give into thy hands, my son Timothy, remembering how prophecy singled thee out, long ago.

Serve, as it bade thee, in this honourable warfare, (And this is one of the reasons the charge of “civil war” doesn’t faze me. This is indeed a spiritual war for souls.) with faith and a good conscience to aid thee.

Some, through refusing this duty, have made shipwreck of the faith; (Oh, yes, some definitely have done so.) among them, Hymenaeus and Alexander,(and Cupich, McElroy, Farrell, Wuerl, Kasper, etc., etc., etc.) whom I have made over to Satan, till they are cured of their blasphemy. (No accusing there!)


So, you can see between the two verses, there are valid accusations by St. Paul (I mean he even named names) and a supposition by Satan. Why Pope Francis even tries to go there is beyond me.

It’s like somebody whipped out a concordance and just looked up “accusations” then said, “Hey! There’s a verse that says Satan is an accuser. Let’s go with that against Archbishop Vigano!”, but they never bothered to actually read the rest of the verse. To make matters worse, they then repeated it and will likely continue to do so.

I’m not sure that betting the laity will take anything on face-value is the way to go these days anymore. Google makes it so easy to fact check these days, and people have messaged me saying “I was researching this scandal and came across you!” People are fact checking, as depressing as it is.

That said, there is exposing truth and there is promoting lies. These are obviously quite different. God is the author of Truth, and satan is the author of lies. To say that putting forth truth comes from the devil sounds like something an abuser would say, don’t you think? Fr. Rutler said it best in his interview with Raymond Arroyo: youtu.be/ard3AOk9Bn0?t=646

Well, I’m a parish priest I am in no position to fault or correct the Pope who is the Vicar of Christ. I can only express what moral theologians would call admiration, that is astonishment, at attributing to the Pope, uh, imputing to the devil, an exposure of the truth. Now, the devil is the Prince of Lies the last thing he wants to do is to expose the truth so if the truth is being exposed. that is not the devil’s work. That is the Holy Spirit.


This is how most of us feel, but especially the victims of abuse. We are utterly amazed that those exposing truth are being compared to Satan, especially when the accusations have been corroborated time and again. Satan is the author of lies and tries to suppress the truth. His accusations are false and misleading.

Maybe the Vatican sound-bite creators might want to do some pondering on this verse:

Romans 1:18
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.


And for heaven’s sake, can somebody in the PR department at the Vatican, at the very least, let the Holy Father know that the “I’m silent like Christ” isn’t going over well here?

Another lady, no stranger to reasoned Bergoglio-bashing, has this to say about the Vigano testimony:

In Viganò, Veritas
by Elizabeth Yore

September 20, 2018

And so he spoke. Knowing the personal risks of truth-telling in the Church of Bergoglio, Archbishop Viganò stepped off the ledge without a safety net, confident that the truth would provide a soft landing in eternity.

No one should doubt the validity of his allegations. They ring true, confirmed by eyewitnesses, validated by his integrity and credibility, grounded in the facts, and boldly asserted in spite of dire personal consequences.

These are the markings of a white martyr.

Reeling from the powerful aftershocks of the Viganò testimony, Francis chose stone-cold silence. He uttered nine callous words: “I will not say a single word on this.”

Catholic priests, bishops, and laity are outraged over the pope’s snub of these scandalous allegations. It leaves the Church faithful with only one conclusion: Francis’s stance mimics the famous Latin legal maxim Qui tacet consentit, meaning Silence gives consent.

For decades, Bergoglio operated as the impenetrable stonewaller. He infamously ignored all complaints of clerical sex abuse in Buenos Aires, waiting out the victims until they gave up in defeat and exhaustion.

After five years as pope, and twelve years as cardinal-archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio the Merciful ignores the plaintive pleas and petitions of sex abuse victims and reserves his papal mercy for the perpetrators. His tactics worked to dispirit and discourage victims with his silence and disengagement.

Not surprisingly, Bergoglio famously told his pal, Rabbi Skorka, that he never saw a case of clerical sex abuse in his archdiocese of Buenos Aires. Ignore them, and they will eventually go away.

The papal bully won’t acknowledge the complaints, but he never remains silent. He waits to strike at the opportune moment, when he is in control. Then he pounces. He hurls insults when no one can challenge or question him.

The Bergoglio bully examples abound.

In May of 2015, in St. Peter’s Square, Francis lashed out at Chileans who were protesting his scandalous Bishop Barros appointment. Bergoglio caustically labeled the small group of Chilean Catholics “stupid” and walked away, surrounded by his Vatican Secret Service. Following his papal visit to Chile, the bully Bergoglio had the temerity to call the sex abuse victims of the Barros cover-up “slanderers.”

Francis stalled, scoffed, and balked for three long years by supporting Bishop Barros despite an avalanche of protests from Chilean laity and clerics. An inopportune photograph of evidence of Barros’s guilt surfaced in the media. Francis was thus cornered and capitulated. He was caught in a lie, confronted with evidence that he knew of the victims’ allegations surrounding Barros’s cover-up for over three years.

Francis used his kiss-and-make up session with the Barros victims as a media opportunity to promote homosexuality by stating to Juan Carlos Cruz, the gay victim, “that God loves you the way you are.” How clever of the Jesuit Bergoglio to exploit the victim by affirming the media’s modernist homosexual agenda! Thus, Francis silenced media criticism of his three-year cover-up of the Barros scandal.

Who could forget his yearly Christmas Eve rant at the Curia staff? The Bully alights from his throne, again surrounded by his security force, and unleashes invective at the poorly paid, overworked curial staff on the eve of Christmas, calling them “corrupted by ambition or vainglory” and “corrupted by a cancer of cliques.” Buon Natale!

Who could forget the papal silence and inaction over the Fr. Luigi Capozzi caper, with his sodomitical drug orgy in a Vatican apartment next to the CDF?

Who could forget the papal silence over the furor of the appointment of the notoriously discredited homosexual Msgr. Ricca as head of the papal household and prelate of the Vatican Bank?

Who could forget the papal silence over the scandalous reinstatement of the serial sex abuser Fr. Inzoli?

Who could forget the papal silence over the intemperate firings of the three brilliant and capable priests at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who worked diligently to investigate clergy sex abuse cases?

Who could forget the papal stone-cold silence over the DUBIA?

Who could forget the papal silence over the massive financial and sexual scandal with his vice pope, Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga, this summer?

The subversive campaign to discredit Viganò is now underway, led by the pope himself. On September 11, 2018, at his daily Mass at Casa Santa Marta, Francis suggested that the victims’ allegations against cover-ups by the bishops are the workings of “the Great Accuser.” This Great Accuser – i.e., the devil – is attacking the bishops in order to create scandal.

Now, that’s a moral and theological head-scratcher. Apparently, according to Francis, Catholics who attack bishops for their complicity and participation in the sexual abuse of children are doing the work of the devil. Huh?

His following homiletic utterances lay bare papal clericalism in its vilest form.

In these times, it seems as though the “Great Accuser” has been unchained and is attacking bishops. True, we are all sinners, we bishops. He tries to uncover the sins, so they are visible in order to scandalize the people. The “Great Accuser,” as he himself says to God in the first chapter of the Book of Job, “roams the earth looking for someone to accuse.”

A bishop’s strength against the “Great Accuser” is prayer, that of Jesus and his own, and the humility of being chosen and remaining close to the people of God, without seeking an aristocratic life that removes this unction. Let us pray, today, for our bishops: for me, for those who are here, and for all the bishops throughout the world.


Francis hurls insults in his homilies during the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass when no one can respond or confront him. He fires potshots at Viganò from the safe confines of Casa Santa Marta, beyond the interrogation of the global press.

Incredibly, francis believes that the Great Accuser (the devil) shares the stage with clergy abuse victims and concerned Catholics who accuse the bishops of covering up sex abuse and sexually abusing minors and seminarians. That’s the theology of Pope Francis, folks!

Rome, we have a problem.
- The pope will not deign to respond to the Viganò allegations. He can’t, because they are true.
- He will not respond to the dubia; he can’t.
- He will not respond to any of the scandals swirling around himself and his malevolent papal courtiers. He can’t, because he would have to fire all his collaborators.

Carlo Maria Viganò is now in hiding. Although he is confined somewhere, Viganò has never been more free. His conscience is clear.

Viganò lives by the words of Jesus in John 8:32: “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

The floodgates of the Tiber have been opened, and the Barque of Peter will be tossed violently among the waves of increasing scandals and appalling corruption.

Yet speaking truth is spiritually contagious, spreading courage and hope to the fearful and despondent. Despite the shock of the Viganò testament, the Church received a cleansing balm, bitter, yet breathtakingly bold in its valorous healing power.

Francis will not be able to suppress it.

Viganò the truth-teller haunts the Vatican. He is the most feared of whistleblowers: a man of integrity, uniquely suited to know and witness all the scandals unfolding.

Viganò is now in hiding. Disclosing the truth has its price in Città del Vaticano of Francisco.

As Fr. Malachi Martin warned, “observant Catholics, traditionalist Catholics will become hunted like doves.”

Viganò laid bare the sordid legacy of the Francis papacy. In Viganò, veritas.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/09/2018 02:03]
20/09/2018 20:47
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Utente Gold

Benedict XVI at his desk in Castel Gandolfo (taken in 2010).

Very welcome 'news' about the Emeritus Pope - even if packaged misleadingly by the New York Times:


What do you call it when a news headline says something that the story itself does not say or even bear out?
The above is the New York Times headline today for a significant story about the Emeritus Pope - which,
taken by itself, is out-and-out FAKE NEWS, as any reading of the following story will show. (I am using
the Catholic Herald's headline in reporting the NYT story, since it reflects what the story really is.)


Leaked letters: Benedict XVI
rebukes criticism of resignation

Apparently written to Cardinal Brandmueller
who had openly criticized him for his decision

Headline from

Story by Jason Horowitz


ROME, Sept. 20, 2018 — The remarkable letter last month calling on Pope Francis to resign for allegedly shielding an abusive American cardinal also served as a public call to arms for some conservative Catholics who pine for the pontificate of the previous pope, Benedict XVI. For years now, they have carried his name like a battle standard into the ideological trenches.

Benedict apparently would like them to knock it off. [That's a completely tendentious interpretation of the letters as quoted, which are specific enough about what the pope is referring to - the anger felt by some of his fair-weather friends like Cardinal Brandmueller that he stepped down as pope... In the second place, I know of no conservative Catholic who needs to invoke Benedict XVI's name in order to be appalled over the PRESENT CRISIS in the Church.]

In private letters published on Thursday by the German newspaper Bild, Benedict, who in retirement has remained studiously quiet through the controversies over Francis’s fitness to lead the church, says that the “anger” expressed by some of his staunchest defenders risks tarnishing his own pontificate.

“I can well understand the deep-seated pain that the end of my pontificate caused you and many others. But for some — and it seems to me for you as well — the pain has turned to anger, which no longer just affects the abdication but my person and the entirety of my pontificate,” Benedict wrote in a Nov. 23, 2017, letter to Cardinal Walter Brandmüller of Germany. “In this way the pontificate itself is being devalued and conflated with the sadness about the situation of the church today.”

Requests to representatives of Benedict and Cardinal Brandmüller for comment and authentication were not returned early Thursday. Bild provided the letters in their entirety to The Times.

Cardinal Brandmüller is one of the few cardinals who signed a 2016 letter of “dubia” — from the Latin for “doubts” — demanding clarification from Francis about his apparent willingness to open the door for divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion, which the signatories argue is against church law.

The dubia letter received worldwide attention and served as a de facto declaration of independence from Francis ['Independence' is the wrong word, especially since for as long as Bergoglio is pope, no cardinal or bishop can be 'independent' of him at all; the right word in this case is 'dissociation'] and its signatories, first among them the American cardinal Raymond Burke, have enthusiastically embraced the letter by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, which called on Francis to step down.

Archbishop Viganò claimed that Benedict had imposed sanctions on Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, for sexual misconduct, but that Francis had lifted those penalties. Francis’s defenders say there is no evidence that sanctions were placed on Cardinal McCarrick, who resigned in July, and point to ample evidence that he did not behave as if he were under such limitations. Neither the current pope nor his predecessor has commented.

Part of Archbishop Viganò’s motivation in publishing his letter was to come to the rescue of Benedict, who he felt was unfairly maligned by Italian journalists friendly to Pope Francis, according to Marco Tosatti, the Italian journalist who helped the archbishop draft the letter.

For years, the dissenting cardinals and their supporters have sought to align their cause to Benedict, who promised to remain “hidden to the world” after his 2013 resignation, which he attributed to his waning health and energy. Francis, 81, has made congenial visits to see Benedict, 91, creating white-robed photo opportunities that give the impression of a total lack of tension. [These were all social visits, more precisely, courtesy visits. What would you do if the reigning pope paid you such a visit? Show ill will in his face? Or the grace of good manners and respect for his office?]

But Benedict, the first pope to resign in almost 600 years, refused to fully renounce the papacy, taking the title “pope emeritus” and continuing to live in the Vatican. “The ‘always’ is also a ‘forever’ — there can no longer be a return to the private sphere. My decision to resign the active exercise of the ministry does not revoke this,” he said during his last general audience.

For many supporters of Francis, Benedict’s status casts an unwelcome shadow over Francis and gives license and comfort to his enemies, though the former pontiff has kept a very low profile. Defenders of Benedict say that by living away from the public eye behind Vatican walls, he is actually avoiding the creation of a rival power center.

But in private, even Benedict’s most adamant supporters express frustration with him for quitting and allowing the election of Francis, a more pastoral, less doctrinaire pontiff who they think is ruining the church. They blame Benedict for lacking fight and throwing in the towel in the face of mounting pressure inside the Vatican, especially after he received a 300-page dossier by three cardinals that many in the Vatican believe details an extensive gay lobby within the church.

In a letter to Cardinal Walter Brandmüller of Germany, Benedict said the frustration he and others had publicly expressed risked tarnishing his own pontificate.

In an interview in October of last year with the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Cardinal Brandmüller expressed that frustration publicly.

“The figure of ‘pope emeritus’ does not exist in the entire history of the church,” he said. “The fact that a pope comes along and topples a 2,000-year-old tradition bowled over not just us cardinals.”

He said that he had an interesting dinner party to celebrate a German carnival holiday on the day of the pope’s retirement in 2013. “We were just having our aperitif and were waiting for a missing guest when a journalist called with the question: Have you heard already? I thought the news was a carnival joke.”

Benedict, who is soft-spoken but can also be prickly, was not amused. He wrote in his letter to Cardinal Brandmüller that “Out of this conflation a new agitation is gradually being generated,” which he said could inspire more books like “The Abdication,” by Fabrizio Grasso, which argues that having one or more popes emeriti could fragment papal authority.

(In his book, Mr. Grasso wrote, “Even for those with little imagination, it’s not hard to imagine a possible near future with more than one emeritus pope and, consequentially, an exclusive papal club, which could be no other than a proto-parliament of the Vatican State.”)

Benedict wrote, “All this fills me with concern, and it was precisely because of this that the end of your F.A.Z. interview so unsettled me, because it would ultimately promote the same mood.”

The letter was his second in an exchange with Cardinal Brandmüller. The first, dated Nov. 9, 2017, was even sharper, coming as an immediate reaction to the German cardinal’s newspaper interview.

“Eminence!” he began. “You said that with ‘pope emeritus,’ I had created a figure that had not existed in the whole history of the church. You know very well, of course, that popes have abdicated, albeit very rarely. What were they afterward? Pope emeritus? Or what else?”

He cited the case of Pius XII, who feared capture by the Nazis and prepared a resignation in case that occurred.

“As you know, Pius XII had prepared a declaration in case the Nazis were to arrest him, that from the moment of the arrest he would no longer be pope but once again cardinal,” Benedict wrote. “In my case it would certainly not have been sensible to simply claim a return to being cardinal. I would then have been constantly as exposed to the media as a cardinal is — even more so because people would have seen in me the former pope.”

He added, “Whether on purpose or not, this could have had difficult consequences, especially in the context of the current situation.”


It is not clear what Benedict meant by “the current situation,” but some have interpreted it to mean the dismay among many of his followers about Francis. Benedict seemed to be saying that as a former pope, he was protected from such politics.

“With ‘pope emeritus,’ I tried to create a situation in which I am absolutely not accessible to the media and in which it is completely clear that there is only one pope,” he wrote. “If you know of a better way, and believe that you can judge the one I chose, please tell me.”

After Cardinal Brandmüller apparently begged Benedict’s forgiveness [Quite right he should have! What he told the FAZ amounted to a stab in the back - to the pope who had made him a cardinal. Did he even perhaps write Benedict XVI after February 11, 2013, or after February 28, 2013, to express his reservations directly to him about the renunciation and the use of the title pope emeritus?] and explained how much pain his resignation had caused him and like-minded conservatives, the pope emeritus wrote the second letter. He concluded it by saying, “Let’s pray, as you did with the end of your letter, that the Lord comes to the aid of his church. With my apostolic blessing I am, Your Benedict XVI.”

On his blog today reporting this story (but quoting mostly from BILD - which apparently did not name Brandmueller in its story), Edward Pentin concludes with these two paragraphs:

Cardinal Brandmüller, one of the four cardinals to submit dubia to Pope Francis questioning aspects of his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, has long been a supporter of Joseph Ratzinger, but also the most vocal critic of his decision to resign.

In 2016 he wrote an article calling for a law to define the status of the ex-pope and concluding that the resignation of the Pope “is possible, and it has been done, but it is to be hoped that it may never happen again.” An extended version of the article appeared in the periodical, The Jurist.




Compare the headline and the treatment of BILD with that of the NYT:

A striking exchange of letters:
Pope Benedict greatly concerned about his Church

by Nicholas Harbusch
Translated from

September 20, 2018

Pope Benedict XVI stepped down from the Papacy more than 5 years ago. The new crisis over clerical sex abuses in the Church places this surprising decision in a new light.

Two letters from the Emeritus Pope have now turned up which are shocking and will certainly merit the attention of Church historians. These letters show a Benedict XVI who is deeply concerned about the situation in the Church today.

The letters from November 2017 are to a German cardinal who had expressed criticism about Benedict XVI’s renunciation in a newspaper interview last year.

His main points: That Benedict’s resignation brought the Church to a serious crisis, and that moreover, his resignation was unprecedented in Church history [as an event, clearly not, of course, but perhaps, for its circumstances], and has done serious damage to the Church.

The retired Pope reacted with an angry letter, in which he tells the cardinal:

“I can well understand the deep-seated pain that the end of my pontificate caused you and many others. But for some — and it seems to me for you as well — the pain has turned to anger, which no longer just affects the abdication but my person and the entirety of my pontificate. In this way the pontificate itself is being devalued and conflated with the sadness about the situation of the church today.”


He corrected the cardinal sharply:

“With [the title] ‘pope emeritus,’ I tried to create a situation in which I am absolutely not accessible to the media and in which it is completely clear that there is only one pope. If you know of a better way, and believe that you can judge the one I chose, please tell me.”


Of course, there have been quite a few papal resignations before. But in the context of the cardinal’s criticism, Benedict XVI cites Pope Pius XII who took measures in 1944 to resign the papacy if the Nazis were to arrest him [so they couldn’t say they arrested a pope].

It’s interesting that he implies a comparison with the Nazi-threatened pope.By whom did Benedict XVI feel himself threatened?

“Pray for me that I many not flee from the wolves,” he had said at the Mass that inaugurated his Pontificate in 2005. Who are the wolves? Vaticanista Armin Schwibach, a philosophy professor, told BILD: "He probably means the network of high-ranking church princes who had created a system of power and abuse of power in the Vatican, with whom he had nothing in common.”

Did Benedict even come to fear being poisoned by henchmen of this network? In October 2012, as Der Spiegel reported in May 2015, the president of the Bavarian State Office for Criminal Investigation is supposed to have traveled to Rome to investigate any security gaps in food preparation for the Pope.

[This sounds too melodramatic to be plausible. Since, as pope, all his meals were prepared by the Memores, the would-be ‘poisoners’ would have had to co-opt one of them (or Georg Gaenswein, or Paolo the valet, for that matter) to commit the crime! Or poison any of the foodstuffs brought in regularly from CastelGandolfo for the pope’s kitchen, and thereby risk killing everyone who ate at the pope’s table! Or equally unlikely, poison the pope’s food or drink at any meal he took outside the papal apartment!]

When the cardinal wrote back Benedict XVI to apologize for his public criticism, saying “May the Lord come to the aid of his Church”, the Emeritus Pope wrote in his reply: “Let us pray, as you did at the end of your letter, that the Lord comes to the aid of his church. With my apostolic blessing I am Your Benedict XVI.”


So, does Benedict XVI believe that under his successor, the Church has fallen into a crisis for which only prayer can help?
[Obviously, not just prayer, but pro-active actions by those who wish to contain the crisis, to begin with, and begin to deal with it meaningfully.]

Benedict's successor, Pope Francis, is currently facing allegations that he listened to a powerful US cardinal for advice about the Church in the United States and for some key appointments to the cardinalate [not to mention using him as a roving ambassador who, for example, initiated the dialog with Communist China that may soon lead to an agreement between the Vatican and Beijing about the fate of the Church in China], although he knew that Benedict had punished him for sexual offenses.

The editor-in-chief of the German Catholic news agency (KNA), Ludwig Ring Eifel, told BILD: "The letters provide fascinating insights into the thinking of Benedict XVI. He is obviously very worried about the state of the church."

Benedict's private secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, did not want to comment to BILD on the letters.

He recently said that the Church, shaken more than before by sex abuse scandals and systematic cover-ups, is now experiencing "its own 9/11".

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Is an anti-Christ government fit to decide
who can be pastors of the Church in China -
or anywhere else?

This pope bends to the secular world and anti-Christ leaders

by Alan Keyes

September 20, 2018

Anxiety abounds, among Roman Catholic clergy and laity alike, about the intent and direction of the Vatican since Pope Francis was elected to be the Vicar of Christ on Earth.

When, in the flesh, He walked the earth, Christ was God's Word Incarnate. In the Gospels, He enacted His claim to wield God's authority on several occasions, illustrating it in famously dramatic fashion in his encounter with the adulteress, and those who were bound to act as the executioners of God's law against her sin (John 8:3–10).

Rooted in Christ's imperative to St. Peter (John 21:16–17), the word "vicar" identifies the Pope as Christ's representative, the agent of His ongoing ministry on Earth. The words a Pope speaks in that capacity, and the actions he takes, are as the words and actions of Christ.

In this respect, the Pope stands for Christ as Christ tells us He stands for God. For he says (John 12:45), "Seeing me one sees the one sending me." And again (John 14:9), "Seeing me, one sees the Father. So, how is it you say, 'Show us the Father?" Speaking thus to Philip, the Apostle, He [Christ] substantiates the meaning of His representation of God on Earth.

The Pope enacts for Christ; the agency Christ enacts for God. Therefore, an incumbent Pope must give himself over to Christ. He may well say, as St. Paul says in the epistle, "I live, now, not I: But Christ lives in me."

If this is so, then one who sees the Pope sees Christ; and in Christ, God Himself.

Here then is the challenge for contemporary Roman Catholics:
- The Word and ministry of God reported in the Scriptures has been affirmed and in succeeding ages clarified by Popes throughout the generations.
- Popes have done so in consultation with the bishops and cardinals, successors to the Apostles.
- Informed and guided by the Holy Spirit of God, they are all together supposed to safeguard the Church's teachings, so that those teachings accurately reflect God's written and Incarnate Word, in spirit and truth.

But what if the occupant of Peter's chair, supposedly speaking and acting authoritatively in the name of Christ, contradicts the teachings vouchsafed to him?
- Were all the generations that came before, which were ruled in good faith by the Church's most authoritative teachings, somehow abandoned or deceived and betrayed by the Holy Spirit?
- Did Christ live in those generations as they strove to obey His will, as affirmed by the Church?
- Or does He live in the apparently contrary enactments of a Pope whose teaching casts doubt on that previous affirmation?

Any such an apparent contradiction between the enactments of a Pope and what the Church has consistently represented as the teachings of Christ will inevitably raise doubts and sew confusion among the faithful. Today, we live in just such a confused and doubtful time.

In some quarters, high prelates raise and seek clarification of such doubts, thinking it their duty. Meanwhile, in other quarters, prelates, in similarly high positions, castigate them for being the "enemies of the Pope." Faced with such contention among prelates of superior rank, members of the laity are driven to their knees, praying to the Lord to have mercy upon His Church.

But the common sense on which they rely, to live in Christ from day to day, must come into play when actions approved by the Holy See conflict with the basic premise of the Pope's authority over their life and good conscience.

Such will be the case if, as is being widely reported, Pope Francis agrees to give the anti-Christ government of the People's Republic of China de facto control over the appointment of Roman Catholic bishops in that country.


After all, it is the official policy of the Chinese regime to deny God and Jesus Christ. As St. John observes, this makes the Chinese rulers deceivers, whom the Scripture identifies as anti-Christ: "Who is a liar, but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is anti-Christ, who denies the Father and the Son" (1 John 4: 14–15).

How can anti-Christ government authorities be trusted to perform a function reserved for the Vicar of Christ, wielding His authority? Under Xi Jinping, the official aim of the Chinese government is to force the people of China to idolize their nation. The bishops they appoint will be purveyors of this idolatry.

Isn't every Christian body, as it were, a temple of God's Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19)? How can any such body conform to the instruction of clergy who aim to set up such idol in that temple? Far from being a proper exercise of papal authority, this appears to deliver up the body of the people of China to be made into a blasphemous abomination, worthy of God's wrath.

In the course of Pope Francis's tenure, mists of doctrinal confusion have grown into clouds of doubt, laden with the dismaying prospect of apostasy. The scandal of mostly homosexual clerical sex abuse, which some thought to be in remission, has returned with a vengeance.

Though Pope Francis and the hierarchs he has gathered about himself adamantly seek to suppress the truth, at its core, the clerical sex abuse scandal also involves idolizing human will and power over the will and authority of God, when it comes to the nature and government of human community.


For just as the Chinese totalitarians mean to substitute the idol of national allegiance for the worship of God in Christ, so the sexual libertines mean to substitute the idol of willful pleasure and self-satisfaction for action in conformity with God's will for the perpetuation and care of the human species.

The Word and spirit of God demand that love and care be freely given and received, in God's way and for His sake. Pope Francis and his cohorts seem poised to embrace the insinuating lie of Christ's perpetual adversary, a lie more and more regurgitated by elitists in many parts of the word.

That lie has, from the beginning, seen the exertion of human will and power as the way to fulfill the shared vocation of humanity — rather than the conformation of our will and existence to the lineaments of God.

With this in mind, we have to ponder the fact that Pope Francis appears to countenance the view that secular elitist concerns (climate change, population control, erasing borders) are of higher priority than observing God's benevolent provisions for human life and truly loving community.

Such is the implication of the otherwise spiritually illogical notion that anti-Christ rulers, who reject Christ, in spirit and in truth, are nonetheless fit to determine the character of the leading members of the body of Christ. That belongs to the government of God and Christ, whose rule is a standard no human government may rightly challenge or overthrow.

When that standard is no longer upheld — even unto death, if need be — has faith already departed?


Alan Keyes (born 1950), who has a doctorate from Harvard, is an American conservative political activist, pundit, author and former ambassador. He served as Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs from 1985 to 1987. A traditional Catholic, he ran for the Republican presidential nomination three times (1996, 2000, 2008).


Another Vatican diplomatic blunder
On the 85th anniversary of the Reichskonkordat, no less

By GEORGE WEIGEL

September 20, 2018 6:30 AM

Eighty-five years ago, on July 20, 1933, a concordat defining the legal position of the Catholic Church in the Third Reich was signed by Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) and German vice chancellor Franz von Papen. The Reischskonkordat was then ratified by the Nazi-dominated German parliament some six weeks later, on September 10.

Pope Pius XI, under whose authority Cardinal Pacelli had negotiated this treaty, was under no illusions about German National Socialism; he detested its racial ideology. And unlike some Vatican diplomats who seem to have imagined that the Third Reich would be a short-run thing, the pope likely thought that Hitler and his gangsters would be in power for some time.

So he wanted to negotiate legal protections for the Church so that it could operate pastorally under a totalitarian regime that, with the passage of the notorious “Enabling Act” of March 23, had assumed virtually dictatorial powers.

That one condition for the Reichskonkordat was the de facto destruction of the Catholic-based Center Party was evidently a price Pius XI thought worth paying if the result were the protection of Catholic institutions and pastoral life.

This legal-diplomatic strategy — which seems to have been based on the belief that even a totalitarian regime would honor a treaty commitment — didn’t work. The Third Reich began violating the Reichskonkordat shortly after the ink dried on the treaty.

Then after some two dozen stiff diplomatic notes to Berlin (drafted by Pacelli) had not produced results, an irate Pius XI issued the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge [With Burning Concern] in 1937, had it clandestinely printed in Germany, and ordered that it be read from all German pulpits.

In the encyclical, Pius denounced an “idolatrous cult” that replaced belief in God with a “national religion” and a “myth of race and blood,” and his stress on the perennial value of the Old Testament made it quite clear what he thought of the Nazi swastika and what it represented.

It is beyond ironic, and it borders on the scandalous, that the lesson of this debacle — paper promises mean nothing to totalitarians — has not been learned in the Vatican, which now appears to be on the verge of repeating its mistake by completing a deal with the government of the People’s Republic of China, on the 85th anniversary of the Reichskonkordat.

Vatican sources are calling the deal “a historic breakthrough,” but the only thing “historic” about it is the inability of Vatican diplomacy to learn from history.

To make matters worse, others in the Vatican are conceding that the deal is “not a good agreement” but then go on to suggest that it might pave the way for something better in the future. Really? Haven’t we been down that road before? Isn’t the failed Reichskonkordat a cautionary tale? Is history taught at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, the Church’s graduate school for papal diplomats?

According to the deal as described in various media sources,
- candidates for bishop in China will be chosen by the priests and laity of a diocese, from a list of potential bishops presented by Chinese authorities.
- The result of these “elections” will be sent to Beijing, which will then submit a candidate to the Vatican.
- Rome will then have time to check out the nominee, which it can accept or decline.
- If it’s the latter, a “dialogue” will ensue, presumably to get Beijing to submit another name. But that other name will have been produced by the same rigged system, for it is impossible to imagine that any candidate proposed by the Chinese authorities at the local level will not have been thoroughly vetted for reliability as a Communist puppet.

As described in press reports, this deal is a clear violation of current Church law. Canon 377.5 in the Code of Canon Law states flatly that “no rights or privileges of election, appointment, presentation, or designation of bishops are conceded to civil authorities” — an unambiguous stipulation that gives legal form to the teaching of the Second Vatican Council in its Decree on the Pastoral Office of Bishops in the Church.

Even worse, responsibility for Church affairs in the PRC has now been taken from the Chinese state and given to a bureau of the Chinese Communist Party — which means that the Vatican is proposing to give a right of “presentation . . . of bishops” to Communist bureaucrats, whose interests, it may be safely assumed, are not those of the Church and its mission of evangelization.

Worse still, in terms of the eroding moral authority of a Vatican fumbling its response to clerical sexual abuse and malfeasant bishops, this reported deal comes at a time when the Chinese government is ramping up the persecution of religious groups throughout China, demolishing Catholic churches, stripping others of religious statues, consigning leaders of Protestant house churches to slave-labor camps, and conducting what some regard as a campaign of genocide against the Uighur Muslims.

China intensifies religious persecution and the Vatican signs an agreement with the PRC? Please.

As for the notion that this deal will help bridge the gap between a largely underground Catholic Church loyal to the bishop of Rome and the regime-sponsored Patriotic Catholic Association (PCA), there is no known voice from the persecuted Church in China that supports the proposed agreement.

Why? Because the persecuted Church knows that the PCA is, functionally, a regime tool, even if some of its clergy (including bishops) are, in their hearts, loyal to Rome. It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that a deal whereby Communist-party authorities “nominate” bishops through faux elections conducted by PCA-approved bodies from candidate lists prepared by other Communist authorities is a deal that further empowers the PCA while disempowering the persecuted Church.

So why is this happening? Two explanations occur.

The first is that this misbegotten deal represents the continuing influence in Vatican diplomacy of the Casaroli Gang — the disciples of the late Cardinal Agostini Casaroli, architect of the 1970s Vatican Ostpolitik, which was supposed to make life better for persecuted Catholics behind the Iron Curtain through deal-making with Warsaw Pact regimes.

The Ostpolitik did nothing of the sort.
- It turned the Hungarian Church into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hungarian Communist party.
- It did serious damage to the Church in what was then Czechoslovakia; and
- It facilitated the deep penetration of the Vatican itself by East Bloc intelligence agencies.

This massive policy failure has been quite well documented with materials from former Warsaw Pact secret-police archives. I have written about it extensively, in books readily available in Italian. Yet not a murmur of dissent from the legend of Casaroli the Great is permitted in important Roman circles. And it is second- and third-generation Casaroli acolytes who are the drivers of the reported China deal. They are, it seems, uneducable.

Then there is Pope Francis.
- John Paul II gave the Catholic Church real moral leverage in world politics.
- Benedict XVI offered the post–Cold War incisive commentaries on the political challenges of the 21st century.

That legacy has been squandered through one ill-advised move after another over the five and a half years of this pontificate:
- A Syrian initiative that gave President Obama an excuse not to enforce his putative “red line” and thus strengthened the murderous Assad regime;
- Ddisastrous and counterproductive kowtowing to the Maduro regime in Venezuela and the Communist dictatorship in Cuba that has demoralized the opposition in both countries;
- A refusal to use the words “invasion” in reference to Crimea and “war” in reference to what Russia is doing in eastern Ukraine;
- An approach to Russian Orthodoxy that refuses to concede that the Church’s principal interlocutors in that “dialogue” are agents of Russian state power first, and churchmen somewhere down the line;
- An absolutist approach to the migrant crisis in Europe that has shrunk the space in which a reasonable political compromise could take shape;
- A lot of papal moral capital expended on ephemera like the threat posed by plastic bottles and straws in the oceans.

Mistake after mistake, now seemingly on the verge of being compounded by the betrayal of persecuted Catholics in China through a deal that empowers the Chinese Communist party in its efforts to make the Church an instrument of the state.

The pope could still call a halt to this, and he should. A bad deal in these circumstances is far worse than no deal, for a bad deal further compromises the moral authority of the Church, which is then further weakened in its evangelical mission.


That is the lesson that should have been learned from the Reichskonkordat of 1933. Eighty-five years later, it is long past time for Vatican diplomacy to get on a learning curve.

Since all the diplomatic blunders catalogued by Weigel above were key Bergoglian decisions made amidst much headlines and hullaballoo, what makes Weigel think that the pope he so exalted back in 2013 as the one who would finally make Weigel's 'evangelical Catholicism' a dynamic reality would now call a halt to the China agreement? One that Bergoglio thinks will enable him to visit China as the first pope ever to do so?

Bergoglio has not gone through five and a half years of seeking to bend over backwards for Beijing to now give up something that appears to be all over but the champagne celebrations! Even if nothing whatsoever can rationally justify the admittedly 'imperfect' agreement his diplomats have negotiated for him.

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The cardinal and Gary Keszler.

And what do you make of these two reports from Gloria.TV? Schoenborn blessing a gay partnership is nothing new, nor is his advocacy of gay unions which dates back at least to 2012.

Vienna Cardinal Schönborn
blessed a gay partnership


Sept. 19, 2018

Notorious Austrian homosexual Gery Keszler, 55, revealed on September 4 that Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, 73, "blessed" his gay concubinage.

Keszler is the founder of the Vienna Life Ball, Europe's biggest gay propaganda show. He is a personal friend of Schönborn. They regularly meet for tête-à-tête dinners. In December 2017, both organised a gay propaganda event inside Vienna cathedral.

The shock revelation was made by Keszler during a public conversation with pro-gay Bishop Benno Elbs of Feldkirch, Austria. The meeting was organised by the diocese and published as a video.

Keszler recounted how Schönborn visited him in Keszler's weekend house in Güssing, South Burgenland, on August 15 - the feast of the Assumption - for lunch, in presence of Keszler's gay concubine. Güssing is a 160-km drive from Vienna.

According to Keszler, Schönborn "said grace" and then "suddenly blessed" the two homosexuals. "This was for me awesome", Keszler added.

After the "blessing" they opened a bottle of champagne, that was brought by an 'intimate' of Schönborn.

Keszler said that he was "very, very happy" about Schönborn's "blessing" admitting that his revelation is "a bit of a forced outing" of Schönborn, [Outing him as what? Surely not as a homosexualist, because he has made that publicly known since 2012.] "But since he did it, he will likely agree that I may talk about it."

The Church considers homosexuality one of the four sins crying out to God for vengeance. Homosexuality is almost exclusively
responsible for the Church's abuse and pedophilia crisis.

Schönborn claims that his gay friend
is a liar and 'speaks nonsense'

A misleading headline in view of what the report actually says


Sept. 20, 2018

After Gloria.tv made the scandal known, Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schönborn distanced himself from the Austrian gay propagandist Gery Keszler who credibly stated that Schönborn blessed his gay concubinage. Keszler recounted the scene vividly and full of details.

Schönborn’s spokesman Michael Prüller admitted to LifeSiteNews.com (September 19) that the controversial meeting took place but, splitting hairs, claimed that the "blessing" was not independent but a part of the prayer before the meal, "It is nonsense to make out of this a precedent”, he added.

Prüller's account does not explain why Keszler stated that this "awesome" blessing made him “very, very happy”. Keszler even called his speaking publicly about the blessing “a bit of a forced outing” of Schönborn.

The fact that Keszler, after the denial, seems not to be offended by his friend Schönborn who de facto has called him a liar, indicates that both, Schönborn and Keszler, are part of the same game which is aiming at getting the people accustomed to homosexual blessings by cardinals.

Marco Tosatti, reporting the Sept. 19 story on his blog, commented (my translation):

It's useless to recall what the Catechism of the Catholic Church says about homosexual acts, and how the Church considers sodomy as one of "the four sins that cry to heaven for vengeance".

The irony is that Schoenborn was the chairman of the editorial committee that collated and drafted the present Catechism of the Catholic Church in 1985-1992. Judging by his statements and actions since 2012, apparently he would join James Martin in editing that part of the Catechism about homosexuality.
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has now published images of the two letters sent by Benedict XVI to Cardinal Brandmueller in November 2017.
I shall post translations as soon as I can, if they don't already appear elsewhere.




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Mons. Chaput, archbishop of Philadelphia and a member of the Synod of Bishops’ permanent council, called on Pope Francis, in an August 30 news conference (in the wake of the Vigano 'Testimony'),
called on Pope Francis to postpone the so-called 'youth synod' since "right now, the bishops would have absolutely no credibility in addressing this topic,". Instead, he suggested that the Pope
“begin making plans for a synod on the life of bishops”. Today, he has taken the unusual step of publishing an analysis by an unnamed theologian of the already much-criticized 'working document' for
said youth synod. The wide-ranging analysis warns that the Instrumentum veers dangerously close to heresy – specifically the heresies of naturalism, Lutheranism, and relativism... I suspect that the
theologian author may be Fr Weinandy, a Capuchin like Abp. Chaput, and already a leading critic of many Bergoglian initiatives. Last year, he was dismissed as a theological consultant to the USCCB
after he published his first critical article.





Over the past several months, I’ve received scores of emails and letters from laypeople, clergy, theologians, and other scholars, young and old, with their thoughts
regarding the October synod of bishops in Rome focused on young people.
- Nearly all note the importance of the subject matter.
- Nearly all praise the synod’s intent.
- And nearly all raise concerns of one sort or another about the synod’s timing and possible content.

The critique below, received from a respected North American theologian, is one person’s analysis; others may disagree. But it is substantive enough to warrant
much wider consideration and discussion as bishop-delegates prepare to engage the synod’s theme.
Thus, I offer it here:

Principal theological difficulties
in the Instrumentum Laboris (IL)
for the 2018 synod:


I. Naturalism
The IL displays a pervasive focus on socio-cultural elements, to the exclusion of deeper religious and moral issues. Though the document expresses the desire to “re-read” “concrete realities” “in the light of the faith and the experience of the Church (§4),” the IL regrettably fails to do so. Specific examples:
- §52. After a discussion of the contemporary instrumentalized conception of the body and its effects of “early sexual activity, multiple sexual partners, digital pornography, exhibiting bodies online and sexual tourism,” the document laments only its “disfiguring the beauty and depth of affective and sex life.” No mention is made about the disfigurement of the soul, its consequent spiritual blindness, and impact on the reception of the gospel by the one so wounded.

- §144. There is much discussion about what young people want; little about how these wants must be transformed by grace in a life that conforms to God’s will for their lives.

After pages of analysis of their material conditions, the IL offers no guidance on how these material concerns might be elevated and oriented toward their supernatural end.

Though the IL does offer some criticism of exclusively materialistic/utilitarian goals (§147), the majority of the document painstakingly catalogues the varied socio-economic and cultural realities of young adults while offering no meaningful reflection on spiritual, existential, or moral concerns. The reader may easily conclude that the latter are of no importance to the Church.


The IL rightfully notes that the Church must encourage youth “to abandon the constant search for small certainties (§145).” Nowhere, however, does it note that she must also enlarge this view with the great certainty that there is a God, that he loves them, and that he wills their eternal good.

- This naturalism is also evidenced in the document's preoccupation with the following considerations: globalization (§10); advocating for the Church’s role in creating “responsible citizens” rather than saints (§147) and preparing youth for their role in society (§135); secular goals for education (§149); promoting sustainability and other secular goals (§152-154); promoting “social and political engagement” as a “true vocation” (§156); encouragement of “networking” as a role of the Church.

- The hope of the gospel is noticeably missing.
In §166, in the context of a discussion of sickness and suffering, a disabled man is quoted: “you are never prepared enough to live with a disability: it prompts you to ask questions about your own life, and wonder about your finiteness.” These are existential questions for which the Church possesses the answers. The IL never responds to this quotation with a discussion of the Cross, redemptive suffering, providence, sin, or the Divine Love.

The IL is similarly weak on the question of death in §171: suicide is described as merely “unfortunate,” and no attempt is made to correlate it to the failures of a materialistic ethos. This is also seen in the tepid treatment of addiction (§49-50).

II. An inadequate grasp of the Church’s spiritual authority
The IL upends the respective roles of the ecclesia docens and the ecclesia discens (the Church teaching and the
Church learning). The entire document is premised on the belief that the principal role of the magisterial Church is “listening.”

Most problematic is §140: The Church will have to opt for dialogue as her style and method, fostering an awareness of the existence of bonds and connections in a complex reality. . . . No vocation, especially within the Church, can be placed outside this outgoing dynamism of dialogue...” In other words, the Church does not possess the truth but must take its place alongside other voices. Those who have held the role of teacher and preacher in the Church must replace their authority with dialogue. (In this regard, see also §67-70).

The theological consequence of this error is the conflation of the baptismal and sacramental priesthood.
- From the foundation of the Church, by divine command, the ordained ministers of the Church have been invested with the task of teaching and preaching.
- from her foundation, the baptized faithful have been tasked with hearing and conforming to the preached Word.
- Moreover, the mandate of preaching is co-instituted by Our Lord with the ministerial priesthood itself (Cf. Mt 28:19-20).

Were the Church to abandon her ministry of preaching, that is, were the roles of the teaching Church and the listening Church to be inverted, the hierarchy itself would be inverted, and the ministerial priesthood would collapse into the baptismal priesthood. In short, we would become Lutherans.

Apart from this serious ecclesiological problem, this approach presents a pastoral problem. It is common knowledge that adolescents from permissive households typically yearn for parents to care enough to set limits and give direction, even if they rebel against this direction.

Similarly, the Church as mother and teacher cannot through negligence or cowardice forfeit this necessary role of setting limits and directing (Cf. §178). In this regard §171, which points to the motherhood of the Church, does not go far enough. It offers only a listening and accompanying role while eliminating that of teaching.

III. A partial theological anthropology
Discussion of the human person in the IL fails to make any mention of the will. The human person is reduced in numerous places to “intellect and desire,” “reason and affectivity” (§147).

The Church, however, teaches that man, created in the image of God, possesses an intellect and will, while sharing with the rest of the animal kingdom a body, with its affect. It is the will that is fundamentally directed toward the good.

The theological consequence of this glaring omission is extraordinarily important, since the seat of the moral life resides in the will and not in the vicissitudes of the affect. Other examples include §114 and §118.

IV. A relativistic conception of vocation
Throughout the document the impression is given that vocation concerns the individual’s search for private meaning and truth.

Examples include:
§129. What is meant by “personal form of holiness?” Or, one’s “own truth?” This is relativism. While the Church certainly proposes the personal appropriation of truth and holiness, Scripture is very clear that God, the First Truth, is One; the devil is legion.

§139 gives the impression that the Church cannot propose the (singular) truth to people and that they must decide for themselves. The role of the Church consists only in accompaniment. This false humility risks diminishing the legitimate contributions that the Church can and ought to make.

§157. Why should the Church be about “supporting pathways to change lifestyles?” This in conjunction with exhortations for youth to take responsibility for their own lives (§62) and to construct meaning for themselves (§7, §68-69) gives the impression that absolute truth is not found in God.

V. An impoverished understanding of Christian joy
Christian spirituality and the moral life are reduced to the affective dimension, clearest in §130, evidenced by a sentimentalist conception of “joy.” Joy seems to be a purely affective state, a happy emotion, sometimes grounded in the body or human love (§76), sometimes in social engagement (§90).

Despite its constant reference to “joy,” nowhere does the IL describe it as the fruit of the theological virtue of charity. Nor is charity characterized as the proper ordering of love, putting God first and then ordering all other loves with reference to God.

The theological consequence of this is that the IL lacks any theology of the Cross. Christian joy is not antithetical to suffering, which is a necessary component of a cruciform life.
-The document gives the impression that the true Christian will be “happy” at all times, in the colloquial sense.
- It further implies the error that the spiritual life itself will always result in felt (affective) joy.

The pastoral problem that results from this comes to the fore most clearly in §137: Is it the role of the Church to make youth “feel loved by him [God]” or to aid them in knowing they are loved regardless of how they might feel?

Besides the above considerations, there are other serious theological concerns in the IL, including:
- a false understanding of the conscience and its role in the moral life;
- a false dichotomy proposed between truth and freedom;
- false equivalence between dialogue with LGBT youth and ecumenical dialogue; and
- an insufficient treatment of the abuse scandal.

The wide range of criticisms proposed above is appalling, especially since it simply reflects how anti-Catholic this Vatican has become under an increasingly and unapologetically anti-Catholic pope.

Yet this is the kind of faithless, truth-less rubbish that is increasingly dumped by this pope on Catholics and on the one true Church of Christ. Disposing quickly of all such rubbish ought to be each Catholic's first and foremost ecological concern. What does it profit the Church or anyone to be mindful of physical material ecology when our spiritual ecology is being violated relentlessly and without quarter by the very man who was elected to lead the Church?


Earlier, George Weigel had a brief but blistering critique of the IL in his weekly column for the DENVER CATHOLIC:

Saving the 2018 synod from itself
by George Weigel

September 12, 2018

Anyone looking for a remedy for insomnia might try working through the Instrumentum Laboris, or “working document,” for the XV Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, to be held in Rome next month on the theme “Young People, the Faith, and Vocational Discernment.”

The IL is a 30,000+ word brick: a bloated, tedious door stop full of sociologese but woefully lacking in spiritual or theological insight.

Moreover, and more sadly, the IL has little to say about “the faith” except to hint on numerous occasions that its authors are somewhat embarrassed by Catholic teaching – and not because that teaching has been betrayed by churchmen of various ranks, but because that teaching challenges the world’s smug sureties about, and its fanatical commitment to, the sexual revolution in all its expressions.

A gargantuan text like this can’t seriously be considered as a basis for discussion at the Synod. No text of more than 30,000 words, even if written in a scintillating and compelling style, can be a discussion guide.

The IL for Synod-2018 reads, rather, like a draft of a Synod Final Report. [It most probably is. Its generics will simply be propped up by whatever specifics the synodal fathers may come up with during the actual meeting - - sifted, filtered, edited and supplemented, of course, as the Synod Secretariat deems necessary. And voila! - Bergoglio's post-synodal exhortation -Homosexualitatis...er, Clericalismus gaudium, or whatever - is already 90 percent pre-fabricated!]

And that is a prescription for a failed Synod.

So what might the participants in Synod-2018 do to salvage a useful discussion in October?

They might challenge the IL’s oft-repeated claim that young people want a “Church that listens.” That is so obvious as to be a thumping banality: no one, young or old, wants a Church that’s a nagging, unsympathetic nanny.

And yes, young people (and the rest of us) want a “Church that listens” in spiritual direction and confession to the difficulties we all experience in living and sharing the Gospel and in obeying God’s law.

But above all, and perhaps especially in this time of grave troubles, what young people want (and what the rest of us want, at least in the living parts of the Church) is a Church that lives joyfully, teaches clearly, manifests holiness, offers comfort and support to the needy – and answers our questions clearly and honestly.

Young people (and the rest of us) do not want a pandering Church, but an evangelically-vibrant Church that manifests and offers friendship with Jesus Christ.

Synod participants might also emphasize that the clarity of Catholic teaching on life issues attracts many young people today, precisely because that clarity is in sharp contrast to the incoherence about what makes for human happiness that people of all ages increasingly detect in the lifestyle libertinism of contemporary Western culture.

Someone at Synod-2018 should, for example, talk about the experience of the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., which, for years now, has become both larger and younger.

Success stories in youth ministry should be persistently, even relentlessly, lifted up at Synod-2018.

The IL betrays a soured sense of incapacity, even failure. Yet the past 30 years or so have seen a renaissance in young adult ministry.
- So let someone at Synod-2018 talk about the impressive record of Christian formation compiled by campus ministries like that at Texas A&M University.
- Let someone at the Synod tell the world Church about the intellectual and spiritual achievements of orthodox, academically vibrant Catholic liberal arts colleges and universities in the United States.
- Let someone bear witness to the great work being done on over a hundred campuses by FOCUS, the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, which singularly embodies the “Church permanently in mission” of which the Pope speaks.
- And let’s hope there’s room at Synod-2018 for churchmen to learn about the work of the World Youth Alliance, an international network of pro-life young adults on all continents, whose work is explicitly based on the Church’s teaching about the dignity of the human person.

Synod-2018’s IL contains no reflection on why St. John Paul II was a magnet for millions of young people, which surely had something to do with both his compassion and his clarity about the truth.

Father Karol Wojtyla, who later became John Paul II, led a young adult ministry of challenging spiritual accompaniment a half-century before “accompaniment” became code in some Catholic circles for “This [hard teaching] is really a goal or ideal.”

So let Synod-2018 rescue “accompaniment” and link it to the truth that liberates. That’s the least the Church deserves in this time of purification.

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Subtitle: "When he took office, Pope Francis promised a renewed Catholicism open to the world. Five and a half years and many sex abuses later, the universal Church is split as never before".


Der Spiegel reports on Pope Francis’s
failures, especially in the abuse crisis

by Maike Hickson


September 21, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Germany's leading weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel will publish tomorrow an issue titled “Thou Shalt Not Lie. The Pope and the Church in her greatest crisis,” which contains an 8-page-long story on many of the failures of Francis's pontificate. LifeSiteNews has been able to view an online version of the magazine prior to its print release tomorrow.

A prominent part of that study is an interview with an abuse victim from Buenos Aires who reveals that she and a group of abuse victims wrote in 2013 a joint letter to Pope Francis. They never received an answer, but one of the abusing priests has been evasively transferred to another position.

Der Spiegel, in its 39/2018 issue, is astonishingly critical of Pope Francis in his overall leadership, to include his wavering attitudes concerning many matters – including Communion for Protestants and Communion for the “remarried” divorcees – all of which seem to foster his own fear that he will eventually go “down the history as the one who split the Church” (these words were repeated by Spiegel).

They also cover scandals such as the Father Inzoli case (in which Cardinal Müller intervened), the drug-fueled homosexual party in Rome, the McCarrick scandal and his financial gifts to Rome, and the members of the C9 Council who have been accused of cover-ups (Errazuriz, Maradiaga).

Prominent among the failures of this Pope as described by the magazine – whose journalists traveled to Argentina, Munich, and other places for this article – is his lack of merciful and just responsiveness toward sex abuse victims.

Spiegel spoke with a woman, Julieta Añazco, who had been sexually abused by a priest, Ricardo Giménez, when she was only seven years old. The abuse took place when she went into his tent, during a youth camp, for the Sacrament of Penance.

Añazco comes from La Plata, a city not far away from Buenos Aires. She only later found out, explains Spiegel, that Father Giménez had by then already been transferred to another position due to allegations of his abuse of minors.

This woman – who also gave an interview to the now-much discussed French documentary The Code of Silence: Sex Abuse in the Church and who might become “the woman who brought down the Francis papacy” – said that she suffered much and tried to receive therapy. She now is a member of the organization “Network of the survivors of ecclesiastical abuse” where, according to the German magazine, “she can speak about what happened to her.”

As Spiegel reports, “in 2013, shortly after Bergoglio had been elected Pope, Julieta Añazco and 13 other victims of the priest Giménez wrote a letter in which they described what had happened to them – and why they now still suffered under depression; and had suicide attempts; or why they became drug addicts, while the accused priest continued to celebrate Mass and was in contact with children.”

In December 2013, these victims sent the letter, by registered mail, to Pope Francis. “Three weeks later,” says Spiegel, “there came an acknowledgment of receipt. Then they heard nothing anymore.” The accused priest – Father Giménez – subsequently was transferred to work in a nursing home for the elderly, where he still “shows himself to journalists in his cassock.” “He is respected there and continues to celebrate Mass,” adds the magazine.

As Spiegel further reports, “during Bergoglio's time as cardinal, many of the abuse victims in Buenos Aires [the former episcopal seat of Jorge Bergoglio] had turned to him for help; nobody was permitted access to him.”

Julieta Añazco and other victims now demand a civil legal process against their abusers. There are currently 62 trials going on against Argentine priests. Spiegel says “the number of their victims could be in the thousands.” Añazco underscores: “It is difficult for us, because nobody believes us. We wish to reach the Pope, but he is not interested in us.”

Juan Pablo Gallego – a prominent legal defender of the abuse victims in Argentina – goes even so far as to claim that “Francis is now in exile in Rome – has found his refuge [with immunity] there, so to speak. In Argentina, he would first have to refute the suspicion that for years he protected rapists and abusers of children.”]

Speaking with Spiegel, Gallego then discusses the now-famous case of the child abuser Father Julio César Grassi, who has been imprisoned for having violated boys in the age range of 11 to 17 years.

According to Gallego, Pope Francis had been Grassi's confessor and ordered a 2,600-page long legal study in order to defend Grassi against the abuse charges and “in order to criminalize the victims,” in the words of the Spiegel.

“In 2006, I had a conversation with Bergoglio,” explains Gallego. “He was withdrawn and mistrusting, he said no word about [the fact] that the Church paid Grassi's lawyers. The current image of an open, sympathetic Pope Francis does not fit the man whom I sat in front of at the time.”

Further gleanings from the Spiegel dossier by Ms Hickson:

Unnamed cardinals are quoted about the pope's lying:
Example: 'He is ice-cold, sly, Macchiavellian -
an what is worse, he lies!'

by Maike Hickson


September 22, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Today, the German magazine Der Spiegel, one of the most influential political magazines in Europe, published a report on the failures of the papacy of Francis.

LifeSiteNews previously summed up the parts of this report about the involvement of Pope Francis in a cover-up of abuse cases in Argentina. But the Spiegel authors also make a report from their conversations with unnamed prelates in the Vatican who spoke quite critically about Pope Francis.

According to the magazine, one cardinal not only called the Pope effectively a liar, but he also said: “From the beginning, I did not believe one word of his.” The Spiegel's own comments on this papacy, as we shall see, are no less strong.

One of the high-ranking interlocutors told the journalistic team that, in the Vatican there reigns “a climate of fear and of uncertainty.” [Not the first time this has been alleged and reported even in the MSM.]

“Francis is very good at getting things in motion,” a German prelate is quoted as saying, “but when, in the end, there is only wavering, that for sure does not help.”

Examples of such waverings are to be found, as the Spiegel says, in Pope Francis' handling of the debate about Communion for Protestant spouses of Catholics.

One German cardinal tells the magazine about lies, intrigues, “and a Holy Father who, unlike anyone before him, puts into doubt the truth of the Faith.”

Marie Collins, herself a prominent abuse victim and advocate for victims, speaks about the Pope's and the Vatican's handling of abuse cases thus: “beautiful words in the public and [then] opposite actions behind closed doors.”

Spiegel comments that the Pope might very well ignore the “indications of crimes within his own inner circle” because “he is interested, for reasons of power politics, in keeping one or another cardinal or bishop in his office.” So, in the German magazine's eyes, “Francis [thereby] makes himself vulnerable.”

He fights for years “against global capitalism, but took – like his predecessors – sums of millions from the now-rejected Cardinal McCarrick which he himself had received from donors.”

Or, “the Pope praises the value of the traditional family, but then surrounds himself with counselors and collaborators who live the opposite – in a more or less obvious concubinage with representatives of either sex.”

“Is the Pope still master of the situation?” asks Spiegel. It points out that “criticism [of this papacy] meanwhile comes from a circle much larger than that of globally connected arch-conservatives.”

One of the problems of this Pope, according to the magazine, is that “he is silent in delicate matters” such as the dubia of the four cardinals concerning his post-apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, but also concerning the petition of 30,000 women who have recently requested that he answer the questions arising from the Viganò report. He does not answer these women, he is mute, and “he, rather, leaves the accusation unchallenged that he has known, since June 2013, about the doings of the child-abuser McCarrick.”

When speaking about one of the Pope's close collaborators, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, and his own Archdiocese of Munich, the Spiegel points to the crisis of faith in Bavaria.

“A part of the problem in the Archdiocese, however, is homemade,” it explains. The credibility of the Church there, it adds, is being undermined by the facts that “a high-ranking clergyman of Munich shamelessly places his concubine right in the first pew, and that also in this city, there is indignation about openly homosexual pastors and about an unpredictable Pope.”

“From the beginning, I did not believe one word of his.” These are the trenchant words of a cardinal within the walls of the Vatican: “He preaches mercy, but is in truth an icecold, sly Machiavellian, and, what is worse – he lies.”


New Catholic at Rorate caeli had this comment:

When you're a liberal pope and
you've lost Europe's most liberal weekly...

RORATE CAELI
SEpt. 22, 2018

Der Spiegel is the most important center-left weekly in Europe. Created in post-war Germany, it provides every week the "acceptable view" for liberal minds in the Federal Republic and, therefore, in all of Europe. It is the essential "Gutmensch" media source.

So when you are a Pope in Rome, elected in great measure with the influence and the wide State-provided funds of the wealthiest national church in the world, and you check all the boxes of what the liberal world order asks you to do -- from radical environmentalism and the abolition of national borders to the normalization of homosexuality -- what else must you do to keep their favor?

Apparently, you have to avoid protecting clerical sexual abusers. Yes, even Der Spiegel has a red line: even for the readers of Der Spiegel the promotion of McCarrick and a long history of the protection of questionable people in Buenos Aires is too much...



In the annus horribilis of 2010, when the media revived the clerical sex abuse scandal in the wake of official reports documenting clerical sex abuses in Ireland and Germany going back to the 1920s (in the case of Ireland and the 1950s in the case of Germany), Der Spiegel joined the AP and the New York Times in an openly acknowledged 'consortium' of pooled resources and efforts to find anything that could directly or indirectly link Joseph Ratzinger to any sexual abuse or cover-up in which he himself was involved.

To no avail, as we all know, despite patently desperate attempts to blame him for the later recidivism of a priest abuser sent to Munich from another diocese shortly before he left Munich to become Prefect of the CDF, and for a couple of cases in the USA in which the CDF under Cardinal Ratzinger had made decisions that were hardly cover-ups. None of those took at all, and to their credit, the media power triumvirate eventually gave up.

In the past few days, AP and the New York Times (using the AP story) finally picked up on the reports about Cardinal Bergoglio's record of dealing with clerical and episcopal sex abuses in Argentina.

But the Spiegel report is far more comprehensive, and worse, it effectively calls the reigning pope a liar. Which we all know he is. From story after story that has been well documented even in the mainstream secular and mass media who continue to be Bergoglio's cheerleaders and main propagandists and who, of course, never called the lies for what they are.
- How will the new consolidated Vatican communications juggernaut respond to this? Or will they even bother?
- And will AP, the Times and Spiegel continue to investigate Bergoglio's record in Argentina in dealing with sex abuse cases (of which he has famously boasted he never had any in his diocese)?

Now that the triumvirate is at least admitting by their reportage of the BA record that their emperor has always been naked, despite all the great new clothes they have been claiming to see in him, will they investigate his entire background farther - there are enough substantial leads out there, some of them in books out of Argentina, to follow, just that the international media has always ignored them.


Reporting Hickson's LifeSite story on his blog today, Marco Tosatti adds an interesting PS which he gets from Giuseppe Rusconi, the Vaticanista who runs the site Rosso Porpora:

From Luigi Accattoli, a leak [the Italian word is 'indiscrezione', implying some information indiscreetly revealed] of relevant importance: According to his source, the projected 'response' of the Vatican to Carlo Maria Vigano's 'Testimony' was presented to the pope on Monday, Sept. 17, by Cardinal Parolin and was approved the next day. Therefore, it ought to be a question of houtrs or a few days before it is made public.

Accattoli, former lead Vaticanista for Corriere della Sera who retired some time during Benedict XVI's pontificate, is one of our colleagues who has been most enthusiastically among the Bergogliophiles. Known to be well-linked to the Secretariat of State and the more progressive left wing of the Church (his great friend and colleague, the late Giancarlo Zizola, attributed his employment by Corriere to arch-progressivist Cardinal Silvestri, who was serving as the Vatican 'foreign minister' at the time, and who was one of Bergoglio's 'kingmakers', being in the Sankt-Gallen Mafia), Accattoli's information is not to be dismissed.

It will be interesting to see whether the Vatican response to Vigano will correct, deny or explain the latter's claim that he informed the pope of McCarrick's dubious record when they met on June 23, 2013.


Seeing as it is now the 22nd and the response has not yet been made public, there have obviously been second thoughts about it. Of perhaps the Vatican just did not want it to crowd out the news of the China agreement...


Of course, Bergoglio has lost no opportunity of hitting out indirectly at Vigano and his accusations - the same way he relentlessly hammered on the critics of Amoris laetitia, including the authors of the DUBIA.

What is most objectionable about Bergoglio's cowardice in this respect is that he chooses to use his homilettes at Casa Santa Marta as the vehicle for his attacks.
The General Instruction for the Roman Missal (GIRM) says:

The Homily is part of the Liturgy and is strongly recommended, for it is necessary for the nurturing of the Christian life. It should be an exposition of some aspect of the readings from Sacred Scripture or of another text from the Ordinary or from the Proper of the Mass of the day and should take into account both the mystery being celebrated and the particular needs of the listeners.

Is it not sacrilegious and blasphemous to use the liturgy to advance one's personal agenda citing Scripture to vaunt one's sanctimony?

Someone has compiled Bergoglio's 'homiletic' attacks so far post-Vigano:


Revealing “The Great Accuser”:
How the pope fires back at critics
despite 'pledge of silence'

by Bree Dail

September 22, 2018

Although the pope pledged that he would “not say a single word” about the accusation that he was involved in the coverup of Cardinal McCarrick’s sexual abuse, he seems unable to stop making oblique references to exactly that situation.

There has been a pattern — a theme if you will — that has overtaken the papal homilies of the past few weeks since the allegations first sufraced. Indeed, since news broke of the 11-page testimony from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganó on August 25th, the Roman Pontiff — ho has committed to an official silence in the face of the accusations from Viganó — has been quite vocal, only veiling his words in the thinnest of biblical allusions.

Since the Viganó Revelations, the pope has either directly (or indirectly) referred to this crisis, his critics, or his own actions during no fewer than nine homilies. The themes range from making stark accusations of his critics’ motives and alleged “hypocrisy” — at times comparing them to Satan, the “Great Accuser” — to an apparent equating of his own situation and that of his fellow bishops to that of the innocent Christ during His passion.

The following are direct references:

9/3/2018:
“With people lacking good will, with people who only seek scandal, who seek only division, who seek only destruction, even within the family: silence, prayer.”

9/6/2018:
“There are people who go through life talking about others, accusing others and never thinking of their own sins. … A sign that a person does not know, that a Christian does not know how to accuse himself is when he is accustomed to accusing others, to talking about others, to being nosy about the lives of others. And that is an ugly sign.”

9/10/2018:
“We are on a path, and we are watched by the great accuser who raises up the accusers of today to catch us in contradiction…”

9/11/2018:
“In these times, it seems like the ‘Great Accuser’ has been unchained and is attacking bishops. True, we are all sinners, we bishops. He tries to uncover the sins, so they are visible in order to scandalize the people. The ‘Great Accuser’, as he himself says to God in the first chapter of the Book of Job, ‘roams the earth looking for someone to accuse’.”

9/13/2018:
“Only the merciful are like God the Father. ‘Be merciful, as your Father is merciful.’ This is the path, the path that goes against the spirit of the world, that thinks differently, that does not accuse others. Because among us is the ‘Great Accuser,’ the one who is always going about to accuse us before God, to destroy. Satan: he is the ‘Great Accuser.’ And when I enter into this logic of accusing, of cursing, seeking to do evil to others, I enter into the logic of the ‘Great Accuser’ who is the ‘Destroyer,’ who does not know the word mercy, does not know, has never lived it.”

9/14/2018:
“Our victory is the cross of Jesus, victory over our enemy, the ancient serpent, the Great Accuser” … And the ancient serpent that was destroyed still barks, still threatens but, as the Fathers of the Church say, he is a chained dog: do not approach him and he will not bite you; but if you try to caress him because you attracted to him as if he were a puppy, prepare yourself, he will destroy you.”

9/18/2018:
Per Vatican News: The Pope brought up that it was also the people who yelled “crucify him”. Jesus then compassionately remained silent because “the people were deceived by the powerful”, Pope Francis explained. His response was silence and prayer. Here the shepherd chooses silence when the “Great Accuser” accuses him “through so many people”. Jesus “suffers, offers his life, and prays”, Pope Francis said.

9/20/2018:
With regard to the “doctors of the law,” Pope Francis says that “they have an attitude that only the hypocrites use often: they are scandalized.” And they say: “But look, what a scandal! You can’t live like that! We have lost our values. Now everyone has the right to enter into the church, even the divorced, everyone. But where are we?” The scandal of the hypocrites. This is the dialogue between the great love that forgives all, [the love of] Jesus; [and] the love “by halves” of Paul and of this woman, and also our [love], which is an incomplete love because none of us is a canonized saint. Let’s be honest. It is hypocrisy: the hypocrisy of the “just,” of the “pure,” of those who believe they are saved by their own proper external merits...

And the Church, when it journeys through history, is persecuted by hypocrites: hypocrites within and without. The devil has nothing to do with repentant sinners, because they look upon God and say, “Lord, I am a sinner, help me!” And the devil is impotent; but he is strong with hypocrites. He is strong, and he uses them to destroy, to destroy the people, to destroy society, to destroy the Church. The workhorse of the devil is hypocrisy, because he is a liar. He makes himself out to be a powerful prince, beautiful, and from behind he is an assassin.


9/21/2018:
Per Vatican News: When an apostle forgets his origins and starts off on a career path, the Pope explained, he distances himself from the Lord and become an ‘official’. An official who perhaps does a good job, but he is not an apostle. He is incapable of ‘transmitting’ Jesus; he is someone who organizes pastoral projects and plans and many other things; he is what he called an “affarista” – a “wheeler-dealer” – of the Kingdom of God because he has forgotten from where he was chosen.

Instead of looking at ourselves, Pope Francis said, we tend to look at others, at their sins, and to talk about them. This, he said, is a harmful habit. It’s better to accuse oneself, the Pope suggested, and keep in mind from where the Lord chose us from.


The message delivered on September 21st was particularly nteresting, as just two days ago, Archbishop Victor Manuel “Tucho” Fernández — the papal confidant and ghostwriter (who is known for writing the book, Heal Me With Your Mouth: The Art of Kissing) — claimed that Archbishop Viganó was suffering from a “megalomania” psychosis. In fact, those considered to be in the pope’s “circle of nine” — as well as others engaged in trying to change the narrative in these scandals — have gone directly after the person of the Archbishop, and those delivering his message.

Recall that it was only a few days after National Catholic Register’s Edward Pentin broke the Viganó story that Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga unjustly and viciously attacked Pentin for his investigative work.

Maradiaga, who has been embroiled in his own financial and sexual abuse scandals for months, has been one of the closest advisors to this pope. He also has been directly tied to George Soros through his PICO organization. Soros, for his part, has vast connections to funding extreme leftist organizations - including violent ones, such as ANTIFA. With all this rhetoric, and the resulting vitriol, is it any wonder that Archbishop Viganó took to hiding, reportedly in fear for his life?

The following was obvously written before the disclosure of the DER SPIEGEL dossier on the failures of the Bergoglio Pontificate thus far.

Gear up for the long fight:
It's time to press the attack

by Steve Skojec

September 21, 2018

In January, when I shared my intuition that 2018 was going to be “a year of defying expectations,” “of things not going at all the way we think they will,” and, in fact, “the beginning of the end for Francis and Friends” – I didn’t know what that would look like. It was just a gut feeling, a sense of a shifting of the winds, a turning of the tide, if you will. At the time, I wrote that I didn’t know how it would happen or what we’d get later.

Now, nine months later, things are coming into focus. A nonstop barrage of bad news for this papacy and the explosive re-emergence of the clerical abuse scandal – with implications going all the way to the apostolic see – have shifted public opinion dramatically.

Catholic commentators who would have rolled their eyes at the kind of coverage we were providing here just last year are suddenly out in front, leading charges against the corruption in Rome. It never ceases to amaze me just how quickly everything changed, as though a single spark were enough to light a spiritual conflagration of awakening.

And perhaps it was Our Lady who lit the match.

Now we’re drowning in the fallout. There are far too many stories to cover exposing the true nature of the anti-Church that now co-exists with authentic Catholicism. We can see symptoms of it everywhere. Of recent note:
- the story of how Cardinal Schönborn, editor of the Catechism and handpicked interpreter of Amoris Laetitia by Pope Francis, spontaneously blessed the union of arguably the most notorious gay couple in Austria;
- the report accusing Monsignor Walter Rossi, longtime rector of the Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, of being part of the gay mafia in D.C. just as his predecessor, Bishop Michael Bransfield, has been accused of the same; and
- the story of how Cardinal Cupich has mistreated a priest who, himself a victim of clerical sexual abuse, burned a rainbow flag that once adorned the sanctuary of his parish.

In all of these things, we see signs that the escalation of the conflict between good and evil within the Church – and a possible schism along with it – is coming faster and more furiously than ever before. These stories are all taken from just the past few days, and more are coming all the time.

At the same time, I would caution that as bad as the homosexual and abuse crisis is – and it’s terrifying – we should be equally or more concerned about the attacks on doctrine, on the Gospels, on the structures and offices and credibility of the Church. [The sex abse scandal being only one manifestation of the cumulative effect of all the above.]

The homosexual cabal is an instrument in the larger attempt to destroy the institution of the Church, her sacraments, her sacred priesthood, the papacy, and her efficacy in sharing divine teaching and saving souls. We’ve got to be careful about letting this be the only area of focus.

Because while everyone is distracted by the sexual abuse train wreck, they’re still ramming things through – like the recent apostolic constitution on synods that will be used to force things into the category of magisterial teaching that do not belong there.

We have to keep our eyes on both.

What seems clear, too, is that the pope, once seemingly untouchable, is on his heels. Day after day, homily after homily, he has likened his plight and that of the bishops under fire to that of Christ during His passion, and he has painted his critics and opponents as agents of Satan. One person in Rome told me that Francis, in this contact’s opinion, is “terrified.”

I’m not so sure.

There is a danger in assuming that the advantage will remain ours. There is a danger in failing to continue to press the attack. For all of his rhetorical homiletic firebombs, the pope has continued to stand by his silence in the face of his accusers. Archbishop Viganò remains in hiding for fear of his life. And the upcoming synods this year and next will move forward under the auspices of the new, more authoritative construct already being applied to their final outcome per this week’s apostolic constitution.

What this means is that the Church’s approach to homosexual behavior, clerical celibacy, and women’s ordination (at least to the diaconate) are all very much up for grabs in the minds of Church leaders.

Remember that the German bishops, having encountered data indicating thousands of cases of abuse by their clergy, have decided that these are the issues that need to be reconsidered in the light of their findings.

- the well of anger from the lay faithful, though deep, is not inexhaustible. Even if it were possible, it is unhealthy to sustain a state of rage, day in and day out, for as long as this will take.
- The willingness of the secular media to go after a pope who has championed so many of their pet issues remains unclear, with division in the ranks.
- The occupied Vatican has taken fire, but when the dust settles, how much damage will have been sustained?
- The investigations into abuse claims now being undertaken by civil governments will go on for years. Will a steady drip of horrifying revelations be enough to drive the infiltrators out, or will a disgusted public only turn to apathy and sustained antipathy?

Just yesterday, a friend told me of being out in public with a priest in a Roman collar, only to have a man who saw him grumble about there being a “child-molester” in the building.
- Will such sentiments increase to the point of actual persecution? - Will the faithful – priests and laity alike – suffer the consequences of this anger while the leaders who are actually responsible for it continue to live in luxury, protected from reproach, like the tinpot dictators they are?

After doing this for four years, I will say it’d be nice to be able to have victory in sight. But we’re not there yet. We’ve got to gear up for a sustained fight. We’ve got to pace ourselves – which, if I’m being honest on a Friday afternoon after a month of nonstop knock-down, drag-out airing of dirty laundry and internecine struggles within our faith, sounds absolutely exhausting. But as I told you in my story about the Seven Devils, sometimes the only way out of the mountains is over the top, even if you’ve got nothing left in the tank and have to stumble forward in the dark by only the light of faith.
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So all the speculation was approximately right - an agreement had been reached and it was to be signed by the end of September. The official announcements, of course, were markedly anti-climactic. Not just for saying nothing that had not already been speculated, but for hardly saying anything beyond the fact that there is now an agreement- called 'provisional' without explanation...

Submission: A phantom accord
between the Holy See and China



All that is known at the official level about the accord signed in Beijing today, September 22, by the Holy See and China is that “it concerns the appointment of bishops,” is “provisory” and “provides for periodic evaluations of its implementation.”

Not one more word about its contents.

The accord was signed for the Holy See by the undersecretary for relations with states, Antoine Camilleri, and for China by the deputy foreign minister, Wang Chao.

Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, then added in a statement that for the Holy See the accord “has a pastoral objective” and responds to the need for pastors “who are recognized by the successor of Peter and by the legitimate civil authorities of their country.”

What is not said is that the Chinese authorities will still be first in line in the selection of future pastors, with only a feeble right of veto granted to the pope on any candidates who may not be to his liking.

In this sense, the accord can rightly be defined as “historic,” because it marks a sensational about-face in the journey that the Catholic Church has made over centuries of history to free itself from submission to political powers, particularly in the “investiture” of its pastors.

To begin with, Pope Francis put the accord into practice from the day it was signed, exonerating from excommunication seven “official” bishops installed by the regime and until now never recognized by the Holy See, a couple of them with lovers and children.

Or better, not seven but eight, because Francis has released from excommunication another bishop “who passed away on January 4, 2017, and before dying had expressed the desire to be reconciled with the apostolic see.”

Moreover, one of these pardoned bishops, Guo Jincai, who is also secretary of the pseudo-episcopal conference subjugated to the regime, has been assigned the new diocese of Chengde, instituted "motu proprio" in 2010 by the Chinese authorities and also recognized by the Holy See.


Cardinal Zen on the China-Vatican agreement:
Saying nothing in many words

by Card. Joseph Zen Ze-kiun

September 22, 2018

Hong Kong (AsiaNews) – Following reports about today’s signing of a provisional agreement between China and the Holy See on the nomination of bishops, the bishop emeritus of Hong Kong, Card Joseph Zen, sent the following statement to AsiaNews.

The long-awaited press release from the Holy See is a masterpiece of creativity in saying nothing in many words.

It says that the agreement is provisional, without saying how long it will be valid; it says that it provides periodic reviews without saying when the first deadline will be.

After all, any agreement can be considered provisional since one of the two parties can always ask for a change or even the cancellation of the agreement.

But the important thing is that if nobody asks to change or cancel the agreement, this, even if provisional, remains in place. The word "provisional" says nothing.

"The agreement is about the appointment of bishops". The Holy See has said that many times for a long time. So, what is the result of all this work? What is the answer to our long wait? Nothing is said! Is it secret?

The whole statement boils down to "There was the signing of an agreement between the Holy See and the People's Republic of China on the appointment of Bishops". All the rest are meaningless words.

So, what is the message the Holy See intends to send to the faithful in China with this statement? "Have faith in us, accept what we have decided"(?)

And what will the government say to Catholics in China? "Obey us, the Holy See already agrees with us"(?)

Are we to accept and obey without knowing what must be accepted, to what one must obey? An obedience tamquam cadaver to quote Saint Ignatius?

We are particularly concerned to know if "the appointment of Bishops" also includes giving legitimacy to the seven. Does it include reappointing the bishops of the "underground" community presented this time by the government? What about those who won’t accept reappointment? Do we just thank the government for finally recognising them as bishops emeriti?


[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/09/2018 01:46]
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Fr De Souza, who has had some quetionable backsliding recently about Jorge Bergoglio, has an interesting take on Mons. Gaenswein's '9/11' speech last 9/11...

The Benedict XVI speech
that everyone missed

by Fr Raymond de Souza

Saturday, 22 Sep 2018

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI gave his final September Speech last week in Rome. Benedict didn’t give the speech himself. His private secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, spoke at the launch of the Italian edition of The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher’s much discussed book about how St Benedict’s withdrawal from a corrupt and declining Rome offers a model for Christians today.

For many years now one of my favoured lecture topics is the “September Speeches” of Benedict XVI. The quintet forms an accessible entry point to the thought of Ratzinger/Benedict on how biblical faith relates to reason, science, politics and law.

The five speeches were all given in September and all on papal trips. The first remains the most (in)famous, the Regensburg address of September 12, 2006, in which Benedict argued that biblical faith is reasonable, and therefore to act against reason is to act contrary to faith in the God of Abraham, incarnate in Christ Jesus. Hence, violence in the name of faith – as is claimed by terrorist jihadis – is contrary to reason.

Exactly two years later, September 12, 2008, in Paris, addressing the world of culture at the Collège des Bernardins, once home to the Cistercians, Benedict argued in the opposite direction, namely that the world of reason needs the intellectual motivation provided by faith. The monks were motivated by their search for God, but their work of research on the Word of God gave rise to an entire culture of literature, science and scholarship.

Another two years passed, and Benedict gave his historic address at Westminster Hall on September 17, 2010. The following year at the Bundestag in Berlin, the fourth speech was given on September 22, 2011. The two speeches argued that law and politics had to follow the dictates of reason, not revelation, but that human nature gives rise to a moral order that must be respected.

The final September speech was given the following year on September 15, 2012 in Beirut, where Benedict explored freedom and truth in the context of religious pluralism, articulating a vision of peace for Lebanon and the Middle East.

What marked the September Speeches was their delivery before audiences made up of scholars, diplomats, politicians and the world of culture. It was Benedict addressing the learned as a fellow scholar, but a scholar who knows that faith is also a witness to the truth.

Archbishop Gänswein’s speech last week was also before such an audience, as the book launch was held at the Italian Chamber of Deputies. The topic was typical Benedict, on the relationship of faith to culture. How can faith survive in a hostile culture? And does that culture still need what the faith has to offer?

Gänswein situated his remarks in the light of the sexual abuse crisis. And just as Benedict has long considered the question of the credibility of the faith in the age of reason, Gänswein examined how the Catholic faith can be credible in the face of the moral counter-witness of so many of her clergy.

“If the Church does not know how to renew itself again this time with God’s help, then the whole project of our civilisation is at stake again,” Gänswein said. “For many it looks as if the Church of Jesus Christ will never be able to recover from the catastrophe of its sin – it almost seems about to be devoured by it.”

Gänswein made reference to key speeches of Ratzinger/Benedict on sexual abuse threatening the Church from within, but above all returned to the Paris speech of September 2008. The monks, whose mission was quaerere Deum – to seek God, renewed a civilisation with the broad horizon of their worship and the depth of their witness.

The truth of the faith is not in question due to the sinfulness of the clergy, but there can be no doubt that the credibility of the Church’s witness to that truth is compromised. Gänswein echoed Benedict’s long conviction that the secular order depends for its health on being open to the wisdom to which faith is a portal.

In that regard, just as Benedict’s speeches were saturated in history, ancient and contemporary, Gänswein made a bold diagnosis of the current moment.

“The crisis of the Church is at its core a crisis of the clergy,” Gänswein said. “And that now the hour of the sovereign laity has struck, especially in the new and independent Catholic media, as almost embodied by Rod Dreher.”

Gänswein suggested that Dreher’s approach was developed in dialogue with Ratzinger’s concept of the Church as a creative minority.

“Well, he’s right about that,” concedes Dreher. “But then, most of what I think and write is in some real sense a dialogue with that old monk living in the Mater Ecclesiae in the Vatican.”

Last week, this September, it seemed like the old monk was speaking again.
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