THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI

A blessed and prosperous 2019 to all!

See previous page for January 1, 2019 entries.


December 28, 2018

Father Davide Pagliarani, Superior General of the Society of Saint Pius X, granted an exclusive interview to the French traditionalist website, La Porte Latine, in which he recalls the fruitfulness of the Cross for vocations and families.

He insists particularly on the need to keep the authentic spirit of FSSPX founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre - “a spirit of love for the Faith and truth, for souls and for the Church” - when faced with the recent canonisation of Paul VI and the promotion of synodality in the Church.

It has now been five months since you were elected Superior General of the Society of Saint Pius X, for a twelve-year mandate. These five months have certainly allowed you to make a short overview of the work, founded by Archbishop Lefebvre, complementing your already rich personal experience. What general impression have you made and have you drawn up your first priorities for the coming years?
The Society is a work of God, and the more we discover it, the more we love it. Two things strike me most in discovering the Society’s labours.
- Firstly, the providential character of the Society: it is the result of the result of choices and decisions of a saint, guided only by a supernatural and “prophetic” prudence, whose wisdom we appreciate even more as the years go by and as the crisis in the Church gets worse.
- Secondly, I have been able to see that we are not some privileged people, whom God has spared: He sanctifies all our members and our faithful through failures, trials, disappointments, and in a nutshell, through the Cross - and not by any other means.

With 65 new seminarians this year, the Society holds a new record of entries into its seminaries over the past thirty years. You were Rector of the La Reja Seminary in Argentina for almost six years. How do you intend to foster the development of even more numerous and stronger vocations?
I am convinced that the true solution to increase the number of vocations and their perseverance, does not reside primarily in human and, so to speak, “technical” means, such as newsletters, apostolic visits or publicity.
- First of all, a vocation needs to hatch in a home where Our Blessed Lord, with his Cross and His priesthood, is loved. A home where there is no spirit of bitterness or criticism towards priests.
- Then, it is through osmosis, through contact with truly Catholic parents and priests deeply imbued with the spirit of Our Lord Jesus Christ that a vocation awakens. It is at this level that we must continue to work with all our strength.

A vocation is never the result of speculative reasoning, or from a lesson we have received, with which we intellectually agree. These elements can help someone answer God’s call, but only if we follow what we said earlier.

On October 14th, Pope Francis canonised the Pope who personally signed all the documents of the Second Vatican Council, the Pope of the New Mass, the Pope whose pontificate was marked by 80,000 priests abandoning their priesthood. What does this canonisation mean for you?
This canonisation must call us to a profound reflection, far beyond the emotions of the media that only lasted a few hours and left no deep traces, neither among its supporters nor its opponents. On the contrary, after a few weeks, that singular emotion risks turning everyone to indifference. We must be careful not to fall into these traps.
- First, it seems to me quite obvious that with the beatifications or canonisations of all the popes since John XXIII, they have tried, in a certain way, to “canonise” the Council, the new conception of the Church and of Christian life, as established by the Council and promoted by all recent popes.

This is an unprecedented phenomenon in the history of the Church. The Church, after the Council of Trent, never dreamed of canonising all the popes without distinction, from Paul III to Sixtus V. She canonised only Saint Pius V, and not simply because of his links with the Council of Trent, or of its application, but because of his personal holiness, proposed as a model to the whole Church and put at the service of the Church as Pope. The phenomenon we are currently witnessing makes us think rather of the renaming of roads and city centres, in the aftermath of a revolution or a change of regime.

However, it is necessary to interpret this canonisation also in the light of the present state of the Church, because the eagerness to canonise the Popes of the Council is a relatively recent phenomenon and was seen most clearly with the almost immediate canonisation of John Paul II.

This determination to “hurry things up” shows once again the fragility in which the Post Vatican II Church, is currently situated. Regardless of whether you agree or not, the Council is seen as outdated by the ultra-progressive wing and by the pseudo-reformers, one example being the German episcopate. And on the other hand, the conservatives are forced to admit, by the proof of current circumstances, that the Council has triggered a process that is leading the Church towards increased sterility. Faced with this seemingly irreversible process, it is normal that The current hierarchy, through these canonisations, is trying to restore a certain value to the Council and thus slow down the inexorable tendency of concrete facts.

To make an analogy with civil society, every time a regime is in crisis and becomes aware of it, it tries to rediscover the country’s Constitution, its sacredness, its durability, its transcendent value… Whereas, in reality, it is a sign that everything that comes from this Constitution and that is based on it, is in peril of death and that one must try to save it by all possible means. History proves that these measures are generally insufficient to revive what has had its day.

Three years ago (on October 17th, 2015), Pope Francis delivered an important address promoting “synodality” in the Church, inviting the bishops “to listen to God, so that with him we may hear the cry of his people; to listen to his people until we are in harmony with the will to which God calls us”. According to his own words, (Address of 25/11/2017), it was based on this new synodality, that he promulgated the new laws simplifying the procedure of nullity of marriage, and also that he wrote Amoris Laetitia,as a result of the synod on the family. Do you recognise in this the voice of the Holy Ghost? What can you tell us about this new expression used today by the authorities of the Church?
The cyclical debate on synodality is nothing more than the repositioning in Post-Conciliar times of the Council’s doctrine on collegiality and the problems it has created in the Church.
In fact, they speak about it very often, even in debates that have other objectives or deal with other topics. One recent example was during the last synod on youth, where the subject was mentioned for the umpteenth time. This shows that the hierarchy has not yet found a satisfactory solution – and this is inevitable, since the problem is insoluble.

Indeed, collegiality places the Church in a permanent situation of a quasi-council, with the utopia of being able to govern the Universal Church with the participation of all the bishops of the world. This has provoked, from the national Episcopal Conferences, a demand for systematic and insatiable decentralisation, which will never end. We are faced with a kind of class-struggle by the bishops, that has produced, in some Episcopal Conferences, a spirit that could be defined as pre-schismatic. Again I am thinking of the German episcopate, which offers an example of all the current deformations.

Rome is in a stalemate. On the one hand, concerning the Episcopal Conferences, she must try to save what she can of her undermined authority. On the other hand, she cannot reject the conciliar doctrine or its consequences, without bringing into question the authority of the Council, and consequently the basis of current ecclesiology.

In reality, they all continue to advance in the same direction, albeit at different speeds. The ongoing debates manifest this underlying discontent, and especially the fact that this revolutionary doctrine is fundamentally contrary to the monarchical nature of the Church. A satisfactory solution can never be found, as long as the problem is not definitively rejected.

It is paradoxical, but the Society can help the Church, in reminding the popes and the bishops that Our Blessed Lord founded a monarchical Church and not a chaotic modern assembly. The day will come when this message will be heard. But, for the moment, it is our duty to keep this deep sense of the Church and its hierarchy, despite the battlefield and ruins that lie before our eyes.

How can the Church correct the errors of the Council? After fifty years, is it realistic to think that it will happen?
From a purely human point of view, it is not realistic to think so, because we have a completely reformed Church, in every aspect of her life, without exception. There is a new conception of faith and of Christian life that has generated, on a daily basis and in a coherent manner, a new way of understanding and of living the Church. Humanly speaking, going back is impossible.

But perhaps we forget too often that the Church is fundamentally divine, despite the fact that she is incarnated in men and in the history of men. One day, a pope, against all expectations and against all human calculations, will take things in hand - and all that needs to be corrected, will be corrected, because the Church is divine and Our Blessed Lord will never abandon her. In fact, he says exactly that when he solemnly promised that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). The beauty of the divinity of the Church will be all the stronger, since the current situation seems irreversible.

2018 was the thirtieth anniversary of the Episcopal Consecrations at Econe, conferred by Archbishop Lefebvre, in his extraordinary “Operation Survival” for Tradition. Do you consider that this act was unique by nature and that it was su/ccessful, in the sense that today other bishops agree to confer ordinations and administer confirmations in the traditional rite, or do you think that, as the years go by, other consecrations may need to be considered?
The future of the Society is in the hands of Divine Providence. It is up to us to discern the signs, in the same way as our founder did, faithfully, without ever wanting to anticipate or ignore Divine Providence. We have here, the most beautiful lesson given to us by Archbishop Lefebvre, and many of those who did not understand him at the time, have gradually reversed their judgements on him.

The District of France is the oldest and the largest district, even if it is now closely followed by the US District. What are the human, material and apostolic priorities that you have set for the new superior, Father de Jorna, who was the Rector of the Econe Seminary, for 22 years?
The various priorities can be summed up in a few words. The new District Superior has the beautiful task of ensuring that the true spirit, bequeathed to us by our founder, reigns in all our houses and in all the members of the Society: a spirit of love for the Faith and truth, for souls and for the Church, and in particular, all that flows from it: a spirit of genuine Charity between our members. Insofar as we keep this spirit, we will have a good influence on souls and the Society will continue to attract many vocations.

What a beautiful and exciting program he has! However, it is necessary for the faithful to associate themselves fully with it. You saw them come in their thousands for the recent pilgrimage to Lourdes, during which you celebrated the Solemn High Mass on the Feast of Christ the King. What do you ask of them? What do you offer them?
I was profoundly touched when I saw pilgrims of all ages in Lourdes, and in particular, many families, and many children. This pilgrimage is truly remarkable and also very significant. It reminds us that the future of the Church and vocations is in families where the parents have planted Our Blessed Lord’s Cross. Indeed, it is only Our Lord’s Cross, and the generosity that results from it, that produces large families.

In our selfish and apostate society, chastised by its own sterility, there is no nobler and more precious testimony than that of a young mother surrounded by her children, like a crown. The world may choose not to listen to our sermons, but it cannot help but see this magnificent sight. It also is true for the Society.

Ultimately, and I say it again, it is the same ideal of the Cross, which calls a soul to consecrate itself to God and which calls a mother to consecrate herself generously and unreservedly to the education and sanctification of all the children that Divine Providence wishes to entrust to her.

Finally, this pilgrimage also reminds us, and above all, that any revival can only happen under the mantle of the Blessed Virgin Mary, because in the current desert, there is no place in the world that continues to attract souls as much as Lourdes.

To the faithful of France, I say quite simply: remember that those who preceded you were fighters and crusaders, miles Christi [soldiers of Christ], and that the current battle for the defence of the faith and the Church is without doubt the most important that history has ever known.

I am posting one of the many blogposts by Valli that I have been unable to translate right away, because it ties up with two other items that I will include in this post.

If atheist Dawkins now laments
the 'disappearance' of Christianity...
Translated from

DEcember 27, 2018

Christianity may be disappearing, but what’s to celebrate – when it is being replaced by something worse: Islam!

Words by Richard Dawkins, the ultra-atheist evolutionary biologist and fierce enemy of religions, who is now asking all those who may be rejoicing at what they consider to be the ‘final spasms’ of Christianity to hold the chamoagne, because in place of Christianity, Dawkins says, there will be Islam which is not just much less benign but is ‘the worst religion in the world’.

Dawkins, honorary member of the UK’s National Secular Society, vice-president of the British Humanist Association, and author of the best-selling The God Delusion (published 2006), made the statement in commenting on a recent Guardian article saying recent surveys show that 70 percent of UK residents between the ages of 16-29 do not identify with any religion, 59 percent never attend religious services, and two-thirds have never prayed.

The results of the research, published by theologian and sociologist Stephen Bullivant of St. Mary’s University in London, probably would not be far off similar surveys if they had been done in other European countries. In Sweden, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic, the number of young people profess no religion is even higher In France, Belgium and Hungary, the number is above 60%, and in Finalnd, Denmark, Norway and Spain, above 50%.

“Christianity as a habit, as a norm, has disappeared [in Europe], and probably for always, or at least, for the next hundred years,” says Bullivant. “Cultural and religious identities are no longer transmitted from parents to their children. They just do not seem important anymore”.

If one considers the birthrate among Muslims – which is remarkably far above that of atheists and Christians – it is easy to see how it will be in Europe in the near future. And it is this which has prompted an unexpected defense of Christianity by Dawkins who, in the past, has repeatedly argued that governments have the duty to ‘protect’ children from being indoctrinated in any religion whatsoever, not even the religion that their parents grew up in.

But now he says that, after all is said and done, European Christianity had served as “a bulwark against something worse”.

So why this concern about Islam? Simple, he says. “As far as I know, it is not Christians who make buildings explode, nor do I know of any kamikaze Christians. Nor do I know of any major Christian confession that would apply the death penalty for apostasy”. [Imagine if Catholicism did that! But, of course, even if that were so, Bergoglio has made sure it would never apply to him and his followers, no matter how great their apostasy, because he has declared the death penalty inadmissible!]
It is not the first time that Dawkins has so publicly criticized Islam. As LifeNews reported
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/richard-dawkins-benign-christianity-is-about-to-be-replaced-by-something-wo
last July, a radio station in Berkeley, California, cancelled a programmed interview with Dawkins after it received denunciations from its followers of Dawkins’s comments on Islam. To which Dawkins replied, with a question that many Christians have been asking of the media for some time: “Why is it OK to criticize Christianity but not Islam?” [Before that, Dawkins was already under fire from his erstwhile colleagues because of Twitter remarks against Islam.]

Which brings me to a story I didn't know about before... and which a website has re-published this week...



How the world's most notorious atheist
(pre-Dawkins) changed his mind
A 2007 interview by
Benjamin Wiker
(just before Flew published ‘There is a God’)


EDITOR'S NOTE: For the last half of the twentieth century, Antony Flew (1923-2010) was the world's most famous atheist. Long before Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris began taking swipes at religion, Flew was the preeminent spokesman for unbelief.

However in 2004, he shocked the world by announcing he had come to believe in God. While never embracing Christianity—Flew only believed in the deistic, Aristotelian conception of God—he became one of the most high-profile and surprising atheist converts.

In 2007, he recounted his conversion in a book titled There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind . Some critics suggested Flew's mental capacity had declined and therefore we should question the credibility of his conversion. Others hailed Flew's book as a legitimate and landmark publication.

A couple of months before the book's release, Flew sat down with Strange Notions contributor Dr. Benjamin Wiker for an interview about his book, his conversion, and the reasons that led him to God. Read below and enjoy!

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You say in There is a God, that "it may well be that no one is as surprised as I am that my exploration of the Divine has after all these years turned from denial...to discovery." Everyone else was certainly very surprised as well, perhaps all the more so since on our end, it seemed so sudden. But in There is a God, we find that it was actually a very gradual process—a "two decade migration," as you call it. God was the conclusion of a rather long argument, then. But wasn't there a point in the "argument" where you found yourself suddenly surprised by the realization that "There is a God" after all? So that, in some sense, you really did "hear a Voice that says" in the evidence itself "'Can you hear me now?'"
There were two factors in particular that were decisive.
- One was my growing empathy with the insight of Einstein and other noted scientists that there had to be an Intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical Universe.
- The second was my own insight that the integrated complexity of life itself—which is far more complex than the physical Universe—can only be explained in terms of an Intelligent Source. I believe that the origin of life and reproduction simply cannot be explained from a biological standpoint despite numerous efforts to do so.

With every passing year, the more that was discovered about the richness and inherent intelligence of life, the less it seemed likely that a chemical soup could magically generate the genetic code. The difference between life and non-life, it became apparent to me, was ontological and not chemical. The best confirmation of this radical gulf is Richard Dawkins' comical effort to argue in The God Delusion that the origin of life can be attributed to a "lucky chance." If that's the best argument you have, then the game is over. No, I did not hear a Voice. It was the evidence itself that led me to this conclusion.

You are famous for arguing for a presumption of atheism, i.e., as far as arguments for and against the existence of God, the burden of proof lies with the theist. Given that you believe that you only followed the evidence where it led, and it led to theism, it would seem that things have now gone the other way, so that the burden of proof lies with the atheist. He must prove that God doesn't exist. What are your thoughts on that?
note in my book that some philosophers indeed have argued in the past that the burden of proof is on the atheist. I think the origins of the laws of nature and of life and the Universe point clearly to an intelligent Source. The burden of proof is on those who argue to the contrary.

As for evidence, you cite a lot of the most recent science, yet you remark that your discovery of the Divine did not come through "experiments and equations," but rather, "through an understanding of the structures they unveil and map." Could you explain? Does that mean that the evidence that led you to God is not really, at heart, scientific?
It was empirical evidence, the evidence uncovered by the sciences. But it was a philosophical inference drawn from the evidence. Scientists as scientists cannot make these kinds of philosophical inferences. They have to speak as philosophers when they study the philosophical implications of empirical evidence.

You are obviously aware of the spate of recent books by such atheists as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. They think that those who believe in God are behind the times. But you seem to be politely asserting that they are ones who are behind the times, insofar as the latest scientific evidence tends strongly toward—or perhaps even demonstrates—a theistic conclusion. Is that a fair assessment of your position?
Yes, indeed. I would add that Dawkins is selective to the point of dishonesty when he cites the views of scientists on the philosophical implications of the scientific datau Two noted philosophers, one an agnostic (Anthony Kenny) and the other an atheist (Thomas Nagel), recently pointed out that Dawkins has failed to address three major issues that ground the rational case for God. As it happens, these are the very same issues that had driven me to accept the existence of a God: 1) the laws of nature, 2) life with its teleological organization, and 3) the existence of the Universe.

You point out that the existence of God and the existence of evil are actually two different issues, which would therefore require two distinct investigations. But in the popular literature—even in much of the philosophical literature—the two issues are regularly conflated. Especially among atheists, the presumption is that the non-existence of God simply follows upon the existence of evil. What is the danger of such conflation? How as a theist do you now respond?
I should clarify that I am a deist. I do not accept any claim of divine revelation though I would be happy to study any such claim (and continue to do so in the case of Christianity). For the deist, the existence of evil does not pose a problem because the deist God does not intervene in the affairs of the world. The religious theist, of course, can turn to the free-will defense (in fact I am the one who first coined the phrase free-will defense). Another relatively recent change in my philosophical views is my affirmation of the freedom of the will.

According to There is a God, you are not what might be called a "thin theist," that is, the evidence led you not merely to accept that there is a "cause" of nature, but "to accept the existence of a self-existent, immutable, immaterial, omnipotent, and omniscient Being." How far away are you, then, from accepting this Being as a person rather than a set of characteristics, however accurate they may be? (I'm thinking of C. S. Lewis's remark that a big turning point for him, in accepting Christianity, was in realizing that God was not a "place"— a set of characteristics, like a landscape — but a person.)
I accept the God of Aristotle who shares all the attributes you cite. Like Lewis, I believe that God is a person but not the sort of person with whom you can have a talk. It is the ultimate being, the Creator of the Universe.

you plan to write a follow-up book to There is a God?
As I said in opening the book, this is my last will and testament.

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Finally, here's someone's take-off on THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS, in which the nephew-apprentice tempter in the service of Satan is named Swillpot. It was published in November but its content is timeless...

The making of an apostate
by Regis Nicoll

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Dear Swillpit,
It’s interesting how humans can go through life without giving much serious thought to their faith. Oh yes, they may believe in a supreme Being and an afterlife. They may be members of a church, even leaders or clergy. And they may have mouthed their allegiance to our Adversary [God, for Screwtape and his fellow agents of Satan.] But beyond the sanctuary walls, they live as if he and his teachings are largely irrelevant. You have your demonic forebears to thank for this.

After generations of assailing their spiritual yearnings, we learned that allowing them a small space for religion was better than allowing no space at all. Surprised?

I know it sounds strange, but the more adamantly they reject religion, the more it occupies their thoughts and conversations. In fact, a hardened atheist is apt to spend more of his mental energies pondering “God” and religion than the most ardent believer.

Remember Siggy Freud, and how he was obsessed with the question of “God” till the end of his life? It was even the subject of his last book. Today, dear Dickie Dawkins is following suit. His chart-busting book, The God Delusion, marked the apogee of a career built around the question. It is a cruel irony that the more they insist the matter settled, the more their thoughts are haunted with it and their lives directed by it.

That’s because the Enemy has stacked the deck. He fashioned them to run optimally when they are filled with him. If they try to run on anything less, sooner or later, they will experience an itch they can’t scratch, an unease that won’t subside, or—even—an irrepressible need to rant about a Being that does not exist (it’s funny how the irrationality of this rarely occurs to them!).

This is but the natural consequence of maintaining the swirl of contradictions that their unbelief imposes upon them—as with the insistence of universal human rights in a universe bereft of a rights-Giver. For the tortured soul who values intellectual integrity, keeping the throng of conflicting notions spinning in mid-air requires a constant effort that, for some, just becomes too much.

Oh, how many we have lost in their twilight years! Who could have imagined that the most celebrated atheist of his time, Tony Flew, would have abandoned a lifetime of disbelief? I fear the same fate awaits our dear Dickie.

Yet those who religiously attend their God in the church hour can be counted on, with scant coaxing from us, to leave him there. You see, Swillpit, religion is like a vaccine: a little dose can inoculate a patient from its totalizing effects. A trifling measure is all it takes to dull their spiritual senses, making God’s whisperings fade amid the cacophony of voices in the world outside.

Content that their spiritual house is in order, they easily drift into lifestyles, and even attitudes, that are practicably indistinguishable from their unbelieving neighbors. And as their neighbors look on, they are left to conclude that a faith that makes no difference in the lives of the faithful is one that has no moral authority.

There, my boy, is our silver lining: For, should we, hell forbid, lose the immunized believer to his Maker, he has at least made the job of winning others much the easier for us. Indeed, his kind has done as much (and maybe more) to fill our banquet hall as Nietzsche, Freud, or Dawkins. If it weren’t for them, I fear we would be in a famine down here.

As I hope you recall from Tempters Training, we can’t eradicate their transcendent longing, but we can divert their attentions to other objects, such as Reason, Nature, or Progress. However, over the course of human history, it has proven to be much more useful and easily accomplished to not allow them a free rein in their devotion to God. The key is to work with, rather than against, their natural leanings.

One of our top Tempters put it this way: “It’s like the two strategies in pitching baseball: In the first, you get the batter to think you’re going to throw one kind of pitch, and then throw something else. For instance, if he’s looking for a fastball, you throw a change-up. In the second, you find out what kind of pitch the batter likes, and throw it ‘almost there.’ If he likes it low, you pitch it a little too low. If he likes it inside, you pitch it a little too inside. That’s what I do with my playthings — I pitch it ‘almost there.'”

Here’s how it works, Swillpit: If they’re looking for love, pitch them lust; if security, pitch self-sufficiency; if grace, indulgence; and if rest, sloth. Because of their carnal inclinations, they can be quite easily duped, even willingly so, by these pitches. But far and away, your best pitch is religiosity—i.e., religion, reduced to its most superficial and least demanding elements.

Much to our delight, a little religiosity goes a long way. Just an hour a week sprinkled with familiar hymns, perfunctory prayers, and anecdotal preaching is enough to immunize all but the most difficult cases against his promptings for the rest of the week.

Fortunately for you, your man [Who????] is already in the immunized state. So don’t begrudge him his devotional time. Patiently indulge him his hour; after that, he’s yours—a plaything to be immersed in the values we have smuggled into the world.

This will be more challenging now that he has been struck by tragedy. His sister’s painful and untimely death will certainly push his faith front and center. As long as evil remained a theological concept or something experienced by others, he was content with standard Sunday-school answers. Now that Evil has visited his doorstep, he is finding little comfort in them.

Although upward thoughts are sure to consume his energies over the next days and weeks, you have a prime opportunity to tip the scales decisively in our favor. Just stay attentive to his moods, and ply your skills according to his vulnerabilities, and you will be able to guide him down a path of thought that progresses from questions to doubts and then on to apostasy.

Have you noticed whether he has begun raising his voice to his Maker: “How could you let this happen? What purpose could this serve? She was so young, with a full life before her. Oh, how we loved her! Where are you when it hurts?”?

If not — he will, trust me, he will.

When disasters hit home their thoughts go instinctively to “Why me?”, “Why this?”, “Why now?”, and even “WHY?” This is a natural crossroads of faith: will they trust God and his promises or their senses and their reality? That’s when we step up sowing doubt into their tortured thinking./

The fact that this fellow had been praying, day and night, for his sister’s healing should make your task all the easier. For the first time in his life, he is open to a line of questioning that never troubled him before: “Is God uncaring, negligent, or malevolent, or are some problems just too big for him? Can I, or should I even, submit to a Deity that cannot or will not control a world gone wrong? Maybe he’s just a myth.”

Therefore, help him see his loss as part of a pattern of divine indifference. Draw his attention to the mind-numbing devastation of natural disasters — earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. But be careful to steer him clear of the truth that, without the phenomena of plate tectonics, his planet would be covered in water and uninhabitable save for aquatic life.

But a word of caution: Even the commanding leverage we enjoy in cases like this does not ensure our victory. Need I remind you of Job? There was a wretch who experienced the full blast of hellish attention. Yet, bewilderingly, in the face of the crushing losses he sustained, and despite the urging of his wife, he refused to turn his back on the Adversary. We’re still trying to figure out what went wrong.

All we know, from centuries and centuries of field experience, is that no amount of personal misfortune guarantees our success. But if we remain vigilant, seeking and creating opportunities to work our wiles, our chances are significantly improved.

So stay at the shoulder of your charge. Occupy his thoughts with questions having no satisfying answers this side of the grave. Convince him that he is owed an explanation, and should demand one. Then, when he lifts his fist to heaven, you can relish the sound of his grinding teeth as he endures the prolonged silence.
That, Swillpit, is one of the sweetest sounds you will hear as a Tempter.

Fitfully Yours,
S.

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Regis Nicoll is a retired nuclear engineer and a fellow of the Colson Center who writes commentary on faith and culture. His new book is titled Why There Is a God: And Why It Matters.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/01/2019 17:50]

Here's a Valli item that I ought to have translated sooner. But again, given the subject matter, it is not at all dated... It also gives us yet another indication that "a man is known by the company he keeps", the man in this case being the reigning pope, who has become a willing marionette for the UN and other international ultra-liberal anti-Catholic institutions.

The strange case of Jeffrey Sachs,
abortion advocate and global colonialist
so loved by the Bergoglio Vatican
Translated from

November 21, 2018

“A disturbing program that includes exclusively vegetarian alimenttaion, the exclusive use of electric machines,the complete elimination of fossil fuels, and heavy penalties for governments and institutions that do not comply. This is the new global dictatorship in the name of ‘avoiding’ climate catastrophe.”

This is how editor Riccardo Cascioli, editor of La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, described the ‘ten commandments on climate change’ that came out of the recent ecological conference called by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences [under the bizarre anti-intellectual and ultra-liberal leadership of Bergoglio favorite and fellow Argentine Mons. Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, whom Bergoglio has given free rein to orchestrate as many pro-‘UN agenda’ initiatives as he can think of].
[NB: Cascioli himself has written four books on globalization, climate issues and the Church's position on current life, family and development issues: La possibile globalizzazione (2006), Che tempo farà. Falsi allarmismi e menzogne sul clima (What's the weather going to be? - False alarms and lies on climate)(2008), Il clima che non t'aspetti. Uomo e natura: fatti, documenti, politica e opinioni (The climate you don't expect: Man and nature - facts, documents, policies and opinions), 2016; and with Mons Luigi Negri, Perché la Chiesa ha ragione. Su vita, famiglia, educazione, Aids, demografia, sviluppo (Why the Church is right: On life, family, education, AIDS, demography and development), 2018.]

Cascioli writes:

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In 15 years, we shall all be obliged to become vegetarians (or to eat insets, as an alternative), use only electric-powered vehicles [Is that even possible at all with airplanes???], and install solar panels on our roofs or gardens to provide us with heat. That is not an ugly projection – it is the harsh reality of a new global dictatorship that is progressing in the name of combatting 'global warming'. And its program was summarized on November 15 during the Vaticna’s international conference on “Climate change, the health of the planet and the future of mankind”.

The program was presented by Jeffrey Sachs, who calls himself ‘the global leader of sustained development’, and who is called by the New York Times as ‘probably the most important economist in the world’, and is, of ourse, on the list of Time magazine’s latest roster of ‘100 most influential world leaders’.

Sachs is not just a true and proper authority at the United Nations and its agencies, but he has also come to represent the thinking of the Bergoglio Vatican. One simply had to watch the jubilant expressions of Mons. Sanchez Sorondo that accompanied every sentence of sachs’ programmatic address”.

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Sachs, who now feels very much at home in the Vatican, has for years been exhorting for the global legalization of abortion as the most economical and efficient way to eliminate unwanted children if contraception fails, because it presents low risks and low cost.

Obsessed by the problem of over-population, he says that legalizing abortion must be pursued because it would significantly reduce the birth rate of any country.

But Sachs is a powderkeg not just of ecological catastrophism and abortion-philia. He is also a dedicated advocate of economism, whereby decisions and behaviors are judged solely on the basis of their economic impact, regardless of their moral consequences, and is always supportive of the interests of multi-nationals and big capital. It is not wrong, in his case, to speak of a colonialist mentality because of the substantial scorn with which he regards the problems of poor countries.

One must therefore ask: what is someone like Sachs doing at the Vatican? Professor Benedetto Rocchi of the University of Florence addresses the question in the following article that he kindly asked me to share:

What is Jeffrey Sachs
doing at the Vatican?
by Benedetto Rocchi
Department of Economic and Coporate Sciences
Università degli Studi di Firenze

For the umpteenth time, the Vatican has hosted with full honors Jeffrey Sachs for an international conference on the alleged imminent climate disaster, during which, as a now-habitual fixture of Vatican conferences, the famous economist proposed his proposals for saving the planet, presented in the form of a true and proper Decalogue (the slides projected were framed in the familiar outlines of the Tablets handed by God to Moses).

I shall not discuss the merits of his proposals nor the theories that form their bases. Sachs is, as always, a great self-promoter, and his career demonstrates how well-placed he is among the global powers that be. Which is not surprising, considering the theories and economic prescriptions he advocates.

What really surprises me is why he enjoys such credit at the Vatican, especially after Laudato si. But what is he really doing there?

The question was first asked years ago by Stefano Gennarini on C-FAM, the blogsite of the Center for Family and Human Rights
https://c-fam.org/friday_fax/who-is-jeffrey-sachs-and-why-was-he-at-the-vatican/)
when the Vatican first invited Sachs to a conference on nothing else but climate change.

Gennarini briefly recalled the openly and cynically abortionist positions of this environmental ‘guru’, for whom abortion is simply “a low-risk, low-cost option’ to reduce the birth rate in nations whose populations are still growing. In short, a means of population control like any other.

Sachs’s obsession with over-population was evident fom the subtitle of his ecological best-seller, “The common good: An economy for an over-populated planet” (Italian ed, Mondadori, 2007).

In the two chapters of its Part 3, entitled ‘The demographic bomb’, Sachs, despite himself, has to admit that it simply does not exist, since the global population started trending towards stabilization (i.e., no growth) around 2005. But he strives to show that the ‘demographic transition’ is too slow and must be accelerated through the ‘voluntary eduction of fertility’ in countries where the birth rate is still above simple substitution [new births=new deaths, which is right now at 2.1 children per woman].

Sachs does not linger on the reasons for his impatience. He limits himself to saying on page 176 that “population growth remains excessive” and that “the scarcity of resources is a very real phenomenon”. He cites these as solid facts but offers no empirical (much less scientific) evidence – other than his own very personal alarm about the situation.

After this declaration, made as though it were apodictic [incontestable because it has been demonstrated] in fact, the third part of the book concentrates on the fact that rapid population growth is an obstacle to the economic development of the poorer countries and is therefore a menace to global political stability. But he limits himself to proposing strategies for reducing fertility on countries where the birth rate continues to exceed the death rate.

The arguments that Sachs employs are often of an embarrassing simplisticism. As when he writes about the demographic decline in the Western countries, saying that it is not a problem at all. And, of all things, he cites Italy as an example: “If Italy maintains its present fertility rate to 2300, its population would be reduced from the present 58 million to 600,000. Which would not be bad at all! Think of it – real estate and agricultural property for everyone!"

I will not comment about this statement from the economics point of view – not worth wasting my time. What is worrisome is that he seems to really believe what he is saying. [The other huge elephant in the room that Sachs neglects completely in this asinine projection – and how he can neglect it when he is one of the prime advocates of uncontrolled mass migration - is the birth rate of non-Italian Italians such as the Muslims who now constitute 2.3% of the population (fully one-third of foreign-born residents in Italy and are likely to increase in the years to come, not just by immigration, but by new births!]

In the next half page, he assures us that yes, the demographic collapse will put pressure on social security systems, but he adds that “it simply is not true that the costs will be huge at all” because it will no longer be necessary to invest in improving infrastructures. Besides, one only has to raise the retirement age because people will live longer and yet work less because productivity will be at very high levels.

As though innovations that would result in longer lives and higher productivity were not the result of investments (research and development), and that the impulse for investment and innovation generally comes from the younger population for reasons that do not even require any economics background to understand. And that is just one example of possible ‘complications’ Sachs does not seem to see in the demographic future he so cavalierly but thoughtlessly constructs. The list is long.

Sachs specifies that ‘population stabilization’ should not take place only on the global level, but in every region of the planet. If his presxriptions are followed, “the limitation of demographic growth will take place principally in the poorer countries”, especially in Africa. His reasoning sounds colonialist: “Exponential demographic growth produces rish for the rest of the world…. (because) it increases the probability of mass migrations and local conflicts".

But the approach he suggests does not seem at all to be voluntary: “Any appropriate development policy for Africa or for any other region that has high birth rates must be integrated with any assistance for economic development to require family planning. We must start to see the transition to low birth rates and econoic take-off as a single package”. Does that not sound threatneing enough? [BUt it's nothing new - it's one that has been long integrated in the specific case of assistance in the fight against AIDS.]

More: “We can proceed expeditiously with the battle againnst epidemics and with the improvement of food production… but only on condition that African governments and their partners in development honor their commitments about family planning." Concretely, if the poor countries wich to be aided, they must agree to reduce their fertility through pro-active demographic policies, based first of all on ‘social marketing’ village by village” to promote ‘reproductive health’ practices, meaning contraception and abortion.

What does the Vatican have to say about this colonialist approach to global demographic policy? And to how Sachs in his own way explains how one decides whether to have children?

All the policies proposed by him start off from a strictly economistic model of human generation aimed at presenting potential parents with the dilemma of quality vs quantity in deciding how many children to have.
- Thus, the reduction of infant mortality is not a good in itself but only because it could induce parents averse to reducing the number of children.
- Educating women is positive not beause it is their right but because it raises the ‘opportunity cost’ of the time that they dedicate to caring for their children – one deduces that the time dedicated to their children by non-educated women is of no value at all.
- Rise in agricultural productivity is good because it increases the productivity of the young which would therefore guarantee their economic security in their old age.
- Urbanization of families must be encouraged because there are more economic opportuinities in the city and generally, city women have less children.

Moreover, in an article on the consequences of health status on poor families, Sachs has not hesitated to call it a ‘waste of time’ for parents to care for babies who are destined not to survive: “In conditions of high infant mortality every baby who dies before the age of 5 represents an average loss of 1300-1800 hours of work by their parents… In order to have at least 3 children who will survive beyond age 5, parents must waste 800-3,000 hours taking care of those who will not survive” (A. Hamoudi and J. Sachs, Economic Consequences of Health Status: A Review of the Evidence, Center for International Development at Harvard University, Working Paper n. 30, Dec. 1999).

Here, in my opinion, is the principle question concerning the repeated presence of Sachs in the Vatican. To say that he should be persona non grata because he is an advocate of universal legalized abortion may seem like the rigidity of an intransigent Catholic who is too focused on non-negotiable principles. But Sachs ought to be just as ‘indigestible’ to Catholics who prefer to focus on social activism. It is not by chance that Sachs is the apple of the eye for many progressivist propagandists who recognize in him the most classic exemplification of the spirit of capitalism.

In an interesting and very documented biography (Jeffrey Sachs. The strange case of Dr. Shock and Mr Aid, Verso, London- New York, 2014), Japhy Wilson sees throughout Sachs’s multiform career the red thread of a neo-liberalist defender of a substantially boundless capitalism. A position that was most evident during his well-remunerated and socially as well as economically disastrous consultancy to many governments around the world on whom he urged ‘shock liberalization’, most notably Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But even in his successive endeavors as an economic development expert, Sachs never ceased to put the free market at the center of his proposals, such as the experiment of the Millennium Village Project, under which for 10 years starting in 2006, a group of villages in sub-Saharan African were the recipient of various social initiatives (including, of course, the requisite ‘social marketing’ of bringing down their fertility rate) which was generously financed by the usual international institutions and philanthropic foundations promoting globalization and its corollaries.

These interventions were supposed to remove all the barriers to the integration of these villages into the market economy and therefore favor their development. [Even as a layman without training in so-called ‘developmental studies’, I must ask how this can happen in selected villages, which can only represent a small minority of the country they belong to, as though they constituted ‘regions’ autonomous of the rest of the country!].

One must note that among the financiers of this enterprise were international financial ‘stars’ like Ray Chambers and, of course, the omnipresent George Soros, whose careers in large-scale speculations in the global markets had contributed much to aggravate the situation in the less-developed countries over the past few decades.

Even in his campaign on behalf of the United Nations and so-called ‘sustainable development’ – which was Sachs’s next great undertaking, and the subject about which he was first invited to the Vatican – Sachs has been generously financed through the Columbia University’s Earth Institute, of which he is director, by some of the largest multinationals in the world like General Electrics, GlaxoSmitKline, HSBC, Merck, Monsanto, Nestlé, Novartis, PepsiCo and Pfizer.

Who in this way have been able to give themselves a ‘greenwashing’ for marketing purposes (it makes them look like environmental protectors), which, however, Pope Francis failed to appreciate in Laudato Si, where he wrote: “The subject of sustainable development has often become a diversionary action and means of justification that seemingly subsumes the values of the ecological protection discourse into the logic of finance and economics, in which the social ane environmental responsibility of big corporations is often reduced to a series of marketing and image exercises” (No. 194).

Additionally, beyond population reduction (necessarily not altogether voluntary), Sachs’s prescriptions for global sustainability are ultimately strictly economic:
- Massive doses of technological progress to increase agricultrual productivity (including technologies for genetically transformed food crops, which are internationally copyrighted by Western companies);
- Creation of market incentives to reduce greenhouse emissions (including the sale of ‘emissions’ licenses or exemptions to those who can afford it);
- Insurance and derivatives markets that depend on the status of global negotiations on meteorological risks.
None of it is particularly surprising from a mainstream economist - but very difficult to consider in the light of the Vatican attitude towards global environmental problems according to Laudato si.

So what is Jeffrey Sachs doing at the Vatican? Nothing that could please either the more ‘conservative’ Catholics now the more ‘innovative’. One has to ask whether those who continue to invite him to address international conferences sponsored by the Vatican have ever read his works. Or even Laudato si, for that matter.
[Hah! Ask that of the pope himself!]

Left, Andrea Tornielli and Andrea Monda; right, Paloma Ovejera and Greg Burke. The pope looks as glum in the photo as he was with Trump!

Some speculations now on the surprise year-end 'decapitations' in the Vatican media hierarchy...

The war for control of the Vatican media
Adapted from

December 31, 2018

ROME - The surprising change in the editorship of L'Osservatore Romano is thought to have been the first "official act" of the pope's former 'house Vaticanista' Andrea Tornielli in his new post as editorial director of the Communications Dicastry. However, the Cardinal Secretary of State apparently was not informed of it beforehand and is said to be "very irritated".

The Italian daily newspaper La Verita claimed that former OR editor-in-chief Giovanni Maria Vian was dismissed through the joint intervention of Tornielli and Fr Antonio Spadaro SJ, editor of the La Civiltà Cattolica, official monthly journal of the Jesuits in Rome. Both belong to the Pope's closest circle [and have been acting as his unofficial spokesmen over the past six years, often bypassing regular Vatican media channels].

Tornielli was named to his new position on December 18, in which he exercises editorial control over all the Vatican media outlets. His appointment represents a crucial step in the pope's reform of he Vatican media. Tornielli, who was La Stampa's chief Vaticanista and editor of its Vatican Insider supplement, has had privileged access to Francis. With his appointment, the pope now has direct access [and much more control] of the content and style of Vatican information.

Howver, the Secretariat of State, and in particular, Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, was evidently not informed of the 'dismissal' of Vian, Burke and Ovejero. [In the internal power struggle within the Vatican, this is significant, because heretofore, both the Vatican Press Office and L'Osservatore Romano were administratively under the Secretariat of State.]

The appointment of Tornielli is seen by some in the Italian media as a "reckoning" within Pope Francis's closest but heterogeneous circle of intimates. They see Tornielli and Spadaro as winners of the power struggle. Spadaro is seem as the pope's most influential media adviser. [And will there now be a power struggle between Spadaro and Tornielli? In which case, whose side will Bergoglio take?]

The loser is first and foremost Giovanni Maria Vian [Poor Vian - not that I found him a particularly good editor even during the B16 years - but he was not even given a chance to resign as Burke and Ovejera did], who was replaced by Andrea Monda, a longtime associate of Spadaro [who reportedly recommended him for the OR post]. He is the President of a Roman cultural project called Bomba Carta (Letter bomb) founded by Spadaro. [Unfortunately, the writer does not give more particulars about this project and when it started. I'll have to look it up.]

One of the losers is the Secretariat of State which has simply been overrun by the events at the Communications Dicastery. It is said that Parolin knew absolutely nothing about Vian's dismissal and replacement. [Nor of Burke and Ovejero's resignations.] The pope had neither involved him in the decision-making process nor informed him in advance, despite the historical ties between the Secretariat of State and the two communications offices affected by the changes.

Vatican sources claim that Vian's work as editor-in-chief had never been contested under Bergoglio. The historian-philologist was appointed during the pontificate of Benedict XVI. Under Francis he opened the pages of the OR heterodox, feminist and heretical voices and positions.

La Verità sees in the upheaval "small orthodox methods" at work that are part of an "internal power struggle between many roosters in the same chicken coop".

As far as reconstructable, it was the pope himself wanted to replace Vian, in order to make the OR (now more than 170 years old) stronger as a house medium for the direct support of the Bergoglian line. But the decisive step came from Spadaro and Tornielli.

HIt seems that the pope really wanted Spadaro to replace Vian, but Spadaro refused, and instead recommended his close collaborator, Andrea Monda.

More than four years after the 'reform' of the Vatican media began in 2014, the operation finally seems complete. The pope has not been deterred by unexpected and unwanted setbacks, such as the tragicomic overthrow of his first communications chief, Dario Edoardo Viganò.

At the beginning of the year he had manipulated a letter from Pope Benedict XVI, intending to give Pope Francis a particularly flattering gift for his five-year jubilee on the throne. Viganò, not to be confused with the former nuncio in the United States, had to resign, but the pope promptly set up a new office for him ad personamfor him in the dicastery. [It was thought then that this would enable him to still call the shots, even after a layman, Paolo Ruffini, was named to replace him as Prefect. Now, will the cockfight in the Vatican media henhouse become three-headed - among Vigano, Tornielli and Spadaro, who will prevail???]

For now, Tornielli and Spadaro seem to have taken control of all Vatican media. The new power Tornielli holds obviously weakened the position of the Vatican Press Office and Vatican spokesman Greg Burke.

Francis named Paolo Ruffini as Viganò's successor after he had to accept Viganò's resignation as Prefect unhappily. Ruffini, however, is more of a placeholder. Real influence is not attributed to him. The role that Dario Edoardo Viganò will play in the new configuration remains to be seen. But it is thought that he will not be able to oppose Tornielli. [Really??? Let's wait and see.]


Vatican shakeup shows why journalists
shouldn’t be corporate mouthpieces
John L. Allen
Editor


ROME, January 2, 2019 - When news broke on New Year’s Eve that the Vatican’s two official spokespersons, American Greg Burke and Spaniard Paloma Garcia Ovejero, had resigned, words such as “sudden” and “unexpected” figured in many headlines.

One understands the point, as there had been no advance indication their exits were imminent. However, to be completely honest, I didn’t find the move “unexpected” at all, since I’ve been anticipating it since the two were appointed in 2016.

The reason is simple: Burke and Garcia Ovejero are, at heart, journalists, and journalists just aren’t meant to be corporate mouthpieces.

Both, of course, are devout Catholics, and so when the Church asked them to serve, they said yes. Yet that’s precisely the point - the Church arguably should have known better than to ask, because both Burke and Garcia Ovejero are more valuable on the outside looking in rather than the other way around.

Burke is a veteran American journalist with deep knowledge of Rome and the Vatican. He started out back in the day with the Catholic press, then made his way to Time and Fox News. Garcia Ovejero was the Rome correspondent for the Spanish radio network COPE, the official radio outlet of the Spanish bishops and the second largest radio platform in Spain, where she was known as perhaps the hardest-working journalist in town as well as an incredibly generous and supportive colleague.

Perhaps things would have been different had Burke and Garcia Ovejero been given a real opportunity to shape the Vatican’s message, with direct access to the boss and a meaningful role in the decision-making process. That, however, was never how their roles were conceived - they reported to the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, not Francis directly, which means you had journalists dependent on bureaucrats. [So surely, as a matter of courtesy, they ought to have coup-furnished Cardinal Parolin with their resignation letters, and yet it is reported that he was very 'irritated' at having been kept out of the loop.]

Honestly, that’s never a prescription for success. (Had anyone in power at the Vatican consulted working journalists before this happened, a lot of the heartache might have been avoided.) [That's not necessarily so. It depends on who the pope is. Joaquin Navarro-Valls was a working journalist when John Paul II tapped him to head the Vatican Press Office and be the papal spokesman. And they obviously worked well together for about two decades.]

Rather than advising Francis on how certain decisions or statements will be received before the fact, so that misunderstandings can be avoided and the intended signals actually get across, Burke and Garcia Ovejero were reduced to either managing incidental aspects of the communications enterprise - tweets and Instagram postings, for instance - or basic maintenance of the Press Office itself. Those tasks do not require highly talented, creative and driven journalists to perform.

Let’s be clear - it’s not as if their run at the Vatican Press Office was a flop.

On the contrary, they injected a more relaxed and human ethos to the Press Office, making it a place where journalists actually felt treated with respect and basic courtesy. (That may not seem like much, but believe me, over the last 20 years or so it hasn’t always been the case.)

Further, they pioneered new ways of delivering information - informal “meeting points” between newsmakers and reporters, for instance, steering clear of lengthy prepared statements and making more efficient use of time. They made papal trips user-friendly, another aspect of the experience that couldn’t always be taken for granted.

They understood that the Vatican is an international beat, ensuring that solid translations of important texts were available in the key languages. Details about events, breaking news and developments in stories were relayed in real time, making use of apps such as Telegram.

Both Burke and Garcia Ovejero understand deadline pressures, responding to phone calls and messages in real time - in Garcia Ovejero’s case, even at 3:00 a.m., making many of us wonder when she ever slept. Both also understand the kinds of questions reporters are compelled to ask, not getting rattled or defensive when they came.

Neither Burke nor Garcia Ovejero played favorites, giving preferred journalists or outlets special treatment, which had been a hallmark of the way the system worked since time immemorial.

For all that and much more, anyone who’s had dealings with the Vatican Press Office since they took over owe Burke and Garcia Ovejero a debt of gratitude.

However, it had to be a frustrating situation for both of them, living every day with the gap between the realities of their situation and what might have been.

Given that such a gap is basically hard-wired into the way the Vatican handles communications - which, by the way, is unlikely to change despite all the turnover of recent weeks - it’s fair to say that Burke and Garcia Ovejero always were destined to hit a wall.

One way of thinking about it is opportunity cost: Suppose over the last two years, a pair of extremely talented reporters - people who have excellent contacts, who understand the context of breaking news deeply, and who always get their facts right - had been in a position to tell the story of the clerical sexual abuse crisis, for instance, or the internal tensions unleashed in the Pope Francis era, or the stillborn Vatican financial reform.

By so doing, those reporters could have exposed bureaucratic stalling and misconduct, promoted a better-informed public understanding of the papacy, and perhaps even compelled the Church to clean up its act in some key areas.

Now ask yourself: Would that have been a better use of their time than running what amounts to a gigantic PR copy machine?

In any event, here’s a prediction: We haven’t heard the last of either Burke or Garcia Ovejero on the Vatican beat. Honestly, I suspect their best days lie ahead, as they make their way back to the side of the street where they probably always belonged.

My own reaction about Burke's resignation was one Father Z expressed: "I am delighted for him!". I had admired Burke's work as a journalist, and I appreciated that he was doing so as an Opus Dei supernumerary (i.e, a lay Opus Dei, like Navarro-Valls before him, and therefore obliged to be celibate and to live modestly). Imagine what it must have been like for him the past two years, having to 'speak for' and fight rearguard actions for a pope as anti-Catholic as this one!


Earthquake in the Vatican Media:
The winter campaign of the Bergogliacs

January 3, 2019

What never went right in three years for the flighty monsignor Dario Viganò, head of the Vatican dicastery for communication from 2015 to 2018, has come off in a few days, around Christmas, for his methodical successor, Paolo Ruffini.

The two bastions of L’Osservatore Romano and the Vatican Press Office - which had seemed unassailable because they were overseen by the Secretariat of State, have both fallen under the control of the dicastery, which in turn is more firmly than ever in the hands of Pope Francis’s stalwarts.

The first barrage of this winter blitzkrieg hit its mark on December 18, with the brusque removal of Giovanni Maria Vian as director of L’Osservatore Romano, replaced by Andrea Monda; and with the appointment of Andrea Tornielli as head of the editorial board of the dicastery for communication.

The second barrage was fired on December 31, with the sudden resignation of the American Greg Burke and the Spaniard Paloma García Ovejero, since 2016, the director and deputy director, respectively of the Vatican Press Office, and with the appointment as the new interim press office director, Alessandro Gisotti, who had been the coordinator of social media for the dicastery for communication.

But let’s take things in order.

1. L’OSSERVATORE ROMANO
In eleven years of management, Giovanni Maria Vian, a specialist on ancient Christian literature, gave the official newspaper of the Holy See an original profile.

The first three of its eight pages provided an accurate and objective panorama of international events, such as no other newspaper in the world gives today, with information also on the countries more overlooked by the current news outlets, while the fourth and fifth pages were dedicated to culture, with particular attention to the history of the Church and to Christian art, and with prominent authors, from the historians Gianpaolo Romanato and Roberto Pertici to the specialist on Christian antiquities Fabrizio Bisconti.

The final three pages and part of the first were instead occupied by, in addition to documents and analyses concerning the Catholic Church on the five continents, above all the statements, acts, journeys of the pope, related and reported in their entirety and with varying prominence depending on their importance. All with sobriety, without emphasis. with rare and balanced commentary on the front page, signed by the director.

The layout of the newspaper, including the careful selection of photos and illustrations, was clean and elegant, intended and designed that way not only by art director and deputy editor Piero Di Domenicantonio, but by Vian himself.

With Benedict XVI, a newspaper made this way was entirely suited to the style of that pontificate. But not with Pope Francis.

Vian - whose family was over the span of the twentieth century close to that of Pope Paul VI - never entered into the good graces of Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Nor did he ever give in to the temptation to make L’Osservatore Romano the frontline newspaper of the current pope and his acts, not even of those that are unfailingly exalted as “historic,” “epochal,” revolutionary” by the journalists in his retinue.

The result is that, with Francis, the OR ceased to be read as an expression of the stance of this pontificate. Confirmation of this comes, for example, from the general disinterest - broken only by Settimo Cielo - that last July surrounded the important publication on the Vatican newspaper’s front page of an editorial that was a powerful and detailed defense of Paul VI’s encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” on the fortieth anniversary of its publication, against the “revisions” of its teaching today, broadly underway in Bergoglio’s entourage as well.

With OR not serving the reigning pope the way he wants to be served, the role of expressing the stance of the current pontificate was taken up quickly by the monthly journal of the Jesuits of Rome, La Civiltà Cattolica edited by Fr. Antonio Spadaro [who also quickly emerged as one of two unofficial spokesmen doing for Bergoglio what the Vatican Press Office could not do for sheer ideological and physical distance from the pope].

Dario Viganò, the controversial prelate to whom Francis in 2015 entrusted the general reorganization of the Vatican media, therefore believed it would be child’s play to aim at nothing less than the closure of the OR, reducing it to a meager bulletin of official communiques, to be distributed within the curia.

Vian reacted to this frontal attack by shielding himself behind the Secretariat of State, the real authority of reference to whom the OR and its staff are responsible. And the Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, assured him of his constant support. Thanks to which Vian was able not only to resist Viganò’s offensive and keep the OR alive, but also to hire more journalists, develop and extend the weekly supplements in various languages, give form and notoriety to the monthly supplement “Donne Chiesa Mondo,” the director of which, Lucetta Scaraffia, was also an editorialist and influential in the OR itself.

In fact, the feminist supplement became an emblem of this counterattack. It was launched at the Vatican, on May 3, 2016, with Cardinal Parolin making the official presentation, Vian and Scaraffia beside him, whereas Monsignor Viganò passed through for just a few minutes, mixing in with the audience at the back of the hall.

On that same occasion, the supplement would proceed in full autonomy with funding from the Italian postal system.

So when in March of 2018 Pope Francis had to demote Viganò from prefect to assessor of the dicastery for communication, on account of the disastrous manipulation - unmasked by Settimo Cielo - that he carried out on a letter from pope emeritus Benedict XVI, the match had OR in the lead.

But few noted that in the letter announcing his role change, Pope Francis reiterated that Viganò should carry through the “fusion” of the Vatican newspaper “within the single communication system of the Holy See.”

And in fact it is precisely this operation that the new prefect of the dicastery, Paolo Ruffini, finally brought about shortly before Christmas, with the defenestration of Vian on December 18, without a single word of thanks from the pope, belatedly and stingily granted by letter on December 22, made public the 27th.

On December 19 the affair at the OR was over. In his first editorial on December 20 the new director, Andrea Monda, wrote that he wanted to give voice to an “outsider” Church. A typically Bergoglian adjective and in compliance with the mandate entrusted to him by prefect Ruffini in the act of appointment: to give “a response to the appeal of Pope Francis to be a Church that ‘goes forth’ and to ‘initiate processes’ that are original in communication as well.”

Ruffini knows Monda well. He had him presenting a docu-reality on the teaching of religion in schools, on TV 2000, the channel of the Italian episcopal conference, of which Ruffini was director from 2014 to 2018.

But above all, Monda is closely tied to the editor of La Civiltà Cattolica, Spadaro, who is Bergoglio’s great confidant and the éminence grise of all these maneuvers concerning the Vatican media. Monda has been for years one of the most assiduous frequenters of Spadaro’s literary blog, “Bomba carta.”

Moreover, as his direct superior in the new organizational chart of the dicastery for communication, Monda now finds Andrea Tornielli. the vaticanista closest to Bergoglio and his friend long before he was elected pope. [I think Magister is conflating Tornielli with Gianni Valente, also with La Stampa/Vatican Insider, who with his wife Stefania Falasca, also a Vaticanista, were friends with Bergoglio for years before he became pope, often entertaining him at home whenever the Argentine cardinal was in Rome. In fact, there is nothing in Tornielli's reporting and commentary before March 13, 2013 that indicated in any way a particular friendship with Bergoglio, especially since during Benedict XVI's Pontificate, Tornielli was among the most enthusiastic and outspoken of Ratzingerians in the media.

But one remembers a video in which Tornielli stopped the new pope to exchange more than just a few words with him the day Bergoglio said Mass at the Sant'Anna church just outside the Vatican walls on March 17, 4 days after his election. And from then on, Tornielli has demonstrated nothing but extraordinary devotion and true-believer enthusiasm for Bergoglio through hell and high water.]

Tornielli, formerly the coordinator of Vatican Insider and since January 1, editorial director of the dicastery for communication, is by statute responsible for “the course and coordination of all the editorial lines” of the Vatican media.

After the change of leadership, there have not yet been noteworthy alterations in the OR. But these will be noted soon, because otherwise there would not have been all of this mayhem. And it is likely that they will emphatically reflect the stance of Francis’s pontificate.

2. THE PRESS OFFICE
The sudden resignation of Greg Burke and Paloma García Ovejero from the leadership of the Vatican press office also mark a loss of power for the Secretariat of State, to the benefit of Pope Francis’s “inner circle.”

A problem that is not new, seeing that already with John Paul II, the director of the press office at the time, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, was the direct spokesman of the pope, his friend, more than of the diplomats of the Secretariat of State. [But the director of the Vatican Press Office is not usually thought of as a spokesman for the 'diplomats of the Secretariat of State' - they ought to speak for themselves.]

Burke, 59, American, a former reporter for Fox News and Rome correspondent for Time magazine, was literally brought into the Secretariat of State in 2012 in view of his future role as official spokesman of the Holy See. A position was created specifically for him, as “senior communication advisor” in the Secretariat, and in 2015, he was nmed deputy to Fr. Federico Lombardi, then head of the Press Office, until he replaced him on August 1, 2016,with the Spaniard García Ovejero as his deputy, the first woman to hold this position at the Vatican.

According to Article 10 of the statutes that established the dicastery for communications, the Vatican Press Office reports directly to the Secretariat of State, a norm that has not been formally changed. But evidently this must no longer be the case.

Already during the synod of last October there were signs that something was changing. While at the synod of 2015, it was not Monsignor Viganò, who was already Prefect for Communications, who gave the daily informational briefings to the media but Fr. Lombardi as director of the Press Office.

But at the synod of 2018, this task was instead performed not by Burke, Lombardi’s successor, but by the new Prefect for Communications, Ruffini. Who, among other things, excelled at the rarefied art of sidestepping for an entire month any sort of information or response the least bit capable of making news, at a synod supposedly on the problems of young people, but that one that already promised to be onee of the most useless in history.

Of course the resignation of Burke and García Ovejero, whose work so far had been quite appreciated by the journalists accredited to the Holy See, came after the earthquake created on December 18 with Vian’s defenestration and the appointment of Tornielli as boss of all the Vatican communications media, press office included. Both 'spokesmen' saw their room for autonomy in such great danger as to get them to leave. But this time, without protection from the Secretariat of State.

Because during the 10 days of this upheaval in Vatican media,;Cardinal Parolin was far from Rome. First in the African republic of Mali, then in Taranto, at the biggest steel mill in Europe; then in Iraq, where he was even photographed in a tunnel dug by the Islamic State.

Meanwhile, however, at the Vatican there were others who were tunneling under his secretariat of state.

Parolin’s three trips mentioned above were carried out with an agenda similar to that of a papal journey, and contributed to confirming him as still the only cardinal capable of getting enough votes to be elected, in a hypothetical conclave in the not-too-distant future, as a man of balance after a pontificate characterized by confusion. [This far too early pre-Conclave touting of Parolin over the past 2-3 years - not just as papabile but as the leading papabile, if not the only plausible papabile today - has been a strange advocacy position taken by veteran Vaticanistas like Magister and Allen with little but anecdotal evidence. They assume 1) that Parolin will necessarily be the choice of all the cardinals named by Bergoglio and more, 2) that Parolin is necessarily the person Bergoglio wants to succeed him.]

But before that, the enigmatic accord reached with Beijing under his orechestration - the effects of which have so far been negative for the Catholic Church - had lowered his rating as a papabile.

And now this other sudden 'setback' on the twofold front of the OR and the Press Office’, seemingly abandoned to the enemy camp,
certainly does not accrue in his favor.

[But an earlier report says Parolin was 'visibly' irritated that he had not been brought into the loop about these changes in the communications dicastery which affect his Secretariat as well. Either he is feigning the outrage, or his absence from the Vatican was timed so that he would be out of the way when it was time for the axe to fall on his erstwhile proteges.]

The 20 most popular Catholic World Report
stories and articles of 2018
Hot topics include Freemasons (again!), Pope Francis (of course), Archbishop Viganó,
Cardinals Burke and Müller, homosexual scandals, Jordan Peterson, sentimentalism, and more.
by Carl Olson
Editor

December 31, 2018

Introducing last year’s list of most read CWR articles, I expressed my surprise about the fact that Sandra Meisel’s article February 7, 2017 article on Freemasons was the most read CWR article of the year.

Lo and behold, despite a year full of scandals and surprises, and a flood of mostly negative news within the Catholic Church, Sandra’s article is once again, according to Google Analytics, CWR’s most viewed article of 2018. Should I suspect a Masonic plot?

Meanwhile, quite a few of the other popular articles, not surprisingly, had to do with the turmoil that burst into the open this past summer and early fall, including the testimonies of Archbishop Viganó, remarks by Cardinals Burke and Müller, and various statements made by Pope Francis.

Joseph Hanneman’s pieces on homosexual scandals and the unsolved mystery of Fr. Alfred Kunz were widely, and two of the four (!) reviews of Jordan Peterson’s best-selling (and polarizing) 12 Rules for Life garnered plenty of attention.

Here are Catholic World Report‘s 20 most viewed articles of 2018:

1) Freemasons and their craft: What Catholics should know by Sandra Miesel (Feb 7, 2017) . To see why the Catholic Church has strongly and repeatedly condemned membership in Freemasonry or any of its allied movements requires a glance at Masonic teachings and history.

2) Was Hitler a Christian, an atheist, or neither? (October 26, 2017) by Filip Mazurczak. A review, published in late 2017, of Richard Weikart’s Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich, which examines the controversial—and complicated—issue of the religious views of Adolf Hitler.

3) Archbishop Viganò responds to criticisms of handling of 2014 Nienstedt investigation (August 27, 2018) by Carl E. Olson. The former nuncio to the U.S. flatly denies assertions that he ordered a stop to an investigation of then-Archbishop John Nienstedt of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

4) Cdl. Müller: “We are experiencing conversion to the world, instead of to God” (June 26, 2018) by CWR Staff. In an exclusive CWR interview, the former prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith discusses tensions over the proposed reception of Holy Communion by Protestants, continued conflicts over the Church’s teaching about ordination, and homosexuality and ideology.

5) Cardinal Burke: It is a “source of anguish” to hear suggestions “that I would lead a schism” (January 22, 2018) by CWR Staff. “The truth of the matter is marriage is not an ideal. It is a reality,” says Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke in a lengthy new interview with Chris Altieri. “What frightens me a great deal about the present situation of the Church,” he adds, “is what I would call a politicization of Church life and of Church doctrine.”

6) Illinois priest removed for homosexual porn, misappropriating $29,000 (September 8, 2018) by Joseph M. Hanneman. Rev. Barry J. Harmon, 55, who has been removed from ministry and will apply for laicization, had been accused of using a male prostitute in the 1990s.

7) Jordan Peterson’s Jungian best-seller is banal, superficial, and insidious (April 3, 2018) by Dr. Adam A. J. DeVille. The real danger in '12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos', argues Dr. DeVille, is its apologia for social Darwinism and bourgeois individualism covered over with a theological patina.

8) Why was Pope Francis’s comment about homosexuality and psychiatry changed in official transcript? (September 6, 2018) by Jim Russell. Everything having to do with the current politics of “sexual minorities” revolves around the lie that homosexuality is completely normal and only “unhealthy” if it’s suppressed.

9) A Church drowning in sentimentalism (October 29, 2018) by Dr. Samuel Gregg. Faith and reason are under siege from an idolatry of feelings.

10) Being Frank about Francis (September 4, 2018) by Dr. Douglas Farrow. The McCarrick scandal, let us all admit, is just one powerful gust in the swirling tempest that now surrounds Francis and threatens to capsize both his pontificate and the barque of Peter itself.

11) Catholicism and Mindfulness: Compatible practices or contrary spiritualities? (January 7, 2018) by Carl E. Olson. “The Church’s mystical tradition is rarely, if ever, addressed from the pulpit,” says Susan Brinkmann, author of a new book on the practice of mindfulness, “which leaves many vulnerable to being drawn into eastern forms of prayer that are not compatible with Christian prayer.”

12) Pope Francis “takes aim” in “Gaudete et Exsultate” — and misses? (April 9, 2018) by Carl E. Olson. The many good qualities and substantive passages in Gaudete et Exsultate are often overshadowed, or even undermined, by straw men, dubious arguments, and cheap shots.

13) If Viganò’s “Testimony” is true, Pope Francis has failed his own test (August 26, 2018) by Christopher R. Altieri. The testimony Archbishop Viganò offers is neither perfectly crafted, nor immune to criticism, but it is wide-ranging, detailed, and devastating.

14) “I don’t know if they will ever reveal why he was murdered” (August 15, 2018) by Joseph M. Hanneman. Some friends believed Fr. Kunz’s work as an exorcist or his investigations of sexual corruption in the priesthood may have been factors in his 1998 murder.

15) Videos allegedly show Illinois priests engaged in homosexual acts (October 4, 2018) by Joseph M. Hanneman. Up to a dozen priests shown on cache of videos, sources say.

16) God bless Fr. LaCuesta (December 17, 2018) by Edward N. Peters. These few, balanced, honest, words were twice interrupted by family members for their failure ‘to celebrate the life of the deceased’.

17) The most unexpectedly religious film of the year (April 10, 2018) by Bishop Robert Barron. One would have to be blind not to see a number of religious motifs in John Krasinski’s absorbing film “A Quiet Place.”

18) The unsolved murder of Fr. Alfred Kunz (August 8, 2018) by Joseph M. Hanneman. Twenty years ago, a priest was found with his throat slit at a parish school in rural Wisconsin. Today, investigators are urging the public to come forward with any clues that might break the case.

19) Pope Francis’s new comments on the death penalty are incoherent and dangerous (December 18, 2018) by Fr. George William Rutler. Pope Francis says that his innovative teaching “does not imply any contradiction” of the Church’s tradition but, one has to say reluctantly, it indeed does.

20) Jordan B. Peterson’s “12 Rules for Life” is a call to clarity in an age of chaos (February 11, 2018) by Dorothy Cummings McLean. Why the University of Toronto professor’s bestselling 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is the most thought-provoking self-help book I have read in years.

Based on this list, I am well outside the mainstream of those who read CWR, since I failed to take note on this Forum of stories #1, 2, 6, 7, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 20 - 11 out of 20.

I ought not to have missed #1 on Freemasonry. I didn't think #2 on Hitler was relevant to the Forum. #6 and #15 are both about homosexual scandals involving priests that I felt were small vignettes in the big picture. #7 and #20 are about Jordan Peterson, about whom nothing I have read has stirred any interest in me. #11 is a Carl Olson essay I totally missed. #14 and #18 are about an Illinois priest exorcist who was murdered mysteriously in 1998. #16 is about the priest who preached a controversial homily during the funeral of a teenage suicidee. And #17 is a film review by Bishop Barron that I can live without as I stopped going to the movies more than 20 years ago when admission became more expensive than a ticket to the opera.

Pope Francis, indifferentism, and Islamization
by William Kilpatrick

December 31, 2018

Two young Scandinavian women who were hiking in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco were found dead in mid-December in their tent. ISIS terrorists later posted a video of themselves decapitating one of the victims.

The mother of one of the women told reporters, “Her priority was safety. The girls had taken all precautionary measures before embarking on this trip.”

“Except,” as Robert Spencer commented in JihadWatch, “that it no doubt didn’t even occur to them that what they thought they knew about Morocco’s religion and culture might be inaccurate and designed to whitewash Islam, leaving them ill-informed about a threat that they actually did end up facing.”

If one depended on European media and European schools for one’s knowledge of Islam, one would indeed come away with a misleading picture of Islam. But the same could be said of Catholics who rely on Church pronouncements about Islam.

Ever since the Second Vatican Council, Church leaders have presented a smiley-faced version of Islam which emphasizes the commonalities with Catholicism and leaves out the scary parts. [Which Benedict XVI pointed out in Regensburg - even if he did make it clear that every religion, including Christianity, that yields to unreason ends up being a pathology.]

Over the last six years, the chief proponent of this bowdlerized view of Islam has been Pope Francis.
- He has reassured Christians that Islam is opposed to violence, advised Muslim migrants to find comfort in the Koran, and has portrayed terrorists as betrayers of true Islam.
- More significantly, he has become perhaps the world’s foremost spokesman for an open-borders, let-everyone-in policy toward immigration.
- Seemingly indifferent to the increasingly dangerous situation created by jihad-minded Muslims in Europe, Francis has encouraged a welcoming attitude toward all while scolding opponents of mass migration as fearful and xenophobic.
- In short, Pope Francis has acted as an advocate for Islam.
- He has portrayed it as a religion of peace, the moral equivalent of Catholicism, and a force for good.

A number of people, however, now feel that the pope has seriously misled Christians about the nature and goals of Islam and Islamic immigration. Like the teachers and other cultural elites who left the two Scandinavian women “ill-informed about a threat that they actually did end up facing,” Pope Francis, by whitewashing Islam, has left millions of Christians unprepared for the escalating threat that is now facing them.

The analogy between the misinformed Scandinavian friends and misinformed Europeans does break down in one respect, though. No one forced the young women to travel to Morocco. They went there of their own accord. It’s one thing to invite yourself into the high mountains of Morocco and take your chances. It’s another thing altogether to invite Morocco into Europe and let ordinary Europeans bear the consequences. That is what European elites, with much encouragement from Francis, have done.
- The combination of high Muslim birth rates, mass Muslim migration, and European concessions to Islam’s blasphemy laws has set Europe on a course toward Islamization.
- Islamization, in turn, will spell dhimmitude for Christians. As the Islamic influence grows, Christians will be subject to increasing restrictions on the practice of their faith, perhaps even to persecution.
- It’s possible that Christianity in Europe will be exterminated.


The pope has done much to promote the cause of Islam — so much so that he has been praised by Islamic leaders for his defense of their faith. The questions that then arise are these:
- Is Francis aware of the possibility that Islam will become dominant in Europe?
- Is he aware that this may spell the end of European Christianity? - And if he is aware, does he care?
[How can any thinking person not be aware? But none are so blind as those who refuse to see. And Bergoglio has consistently shown himself to be blind and deaf to any thought, idea, consideration or fact that does not confirm his smug omniscient certitude that he knows more and better than anyone - the Lord in included - what is good for the cosmos, the planet, mankind and 'the Church'.]

For a long time, I thought that Francis was simply naïve about Islam. His counterfactual statements about Islam and his Pollyannaish view of mass Muslim migration must, I thought, be the result either of blissful ignorance or of bad advice from “experts,” or a combination of both.

Now, however, I have my doubts. The catalyst for these doubts is Francis’s approach to the current sex-abuse crisis. I originally supposed that he was naïve about that also:
- perhaps he didn’t realize the full extent of the problem or the full extent of the cover-ups;
- perhaps he wasn’t aware of the numerous lavender networks in seminaries, in dioceses, and in the Vatican itself.
But in light of recent revelations, it no longer seems possible to give him the benefit of the doubt.
- In several cases, he not only knew of the crimes and cover-ups, he took steps to protect and/or promote those involved.

Francis seems determined to push through a revolution in doctrine and morals — what he calls “a radical paradigm shift” — and it doesn’t seem to matter that the men he has chosen to help him achieve his goals are the ones most deeply implicated in the scandals. By all accounts, Pope Francis is a “hands-on” pope who knows exactly what he wants, carefully calculates his moves, and leaves little to chance.

Why, then, should we suppose Francis is completely naïve about the extent of the threat from Islam and from Islamic immigration?
- It’s difficult to imagine that he isn’t fully aware of the widespread persecution of Christians in Muslim lands.
- And it’s just as difficult to think that he’s ignorant of the Islamic crime wave on his own doorstep — the escalating incidence of rape, riots, and terrorist attacks in Europe.
- Does he really believe that such things have nothing to do with Islam?

Unless one assumes that Francis is ignorant of past history and out of touch with current events, one has to entertain the possibility that — to repeat a favorite slogan of his — he wants to “make a mess” in Europe. But why?
- Why risk the damage to the Church that would surely follow on the Islamization of Europe?
- Doesn’t Francis care about the Church? Increasingly, it seems that he doesn’t care.
That’s to say that he doesn’t have much use for the “old” Church —the one that was handed down by the apostles, and has now become too narrow and tradition-bound to suit his liberal tastes.

What he does care about is the new Church of the future — a Church of openness, inclusiveness, and fluidity. Led by the Spirit and free of bothersome dogma, this liberated Church would be able to adjust to the changing needs of the times. If one reads between the lines, that is what Francis and those around him seem to desire.[No one need even read between the lines - he and his fanatics say so directly, and act accordingly, each and every day in a thousand different ways.]

Indeed, one needn’t bother to read between the lines. [Well there, Kilpatrick did the obvious follow-up himself.] Here’s Fr. Thomas Rosica, a media advisor to the Vatican:

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

---

And here’s Francis himself speaking at a conference about Church closings:

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The observation that many churches, which until a few years ago were necessary, are now no longer thus, due to a lack of faithful and clergy … should be welcomed in the Church not with anxiety, but as a sign of the times that invites us to reflection and requires us to adapt.

---

Translation: Francis is not particularly concerned about church closings. Perhaps he even thinks of them as a blessing: a necessary end to the old order of things that will clear the way for the construction of the new order.

What’s the new order? In many respects, it resembles the new world order envisioned by politicians and academics on the left. - Like them, Francis has a dim view of national borders and national sovereignty, and like them, he has an almost unquestioning belief in the benefits of international institutions.
- One gets the impression that Francis would be quite content to let the UN run the world, despite the fact that the UN is increasingly run by leftists and Islamists. For example, Francis has praised the UN’s Global Compact for Migration because he believes that immigration must be governed globally rather than by individual nations.

What does this have to do with Christianity and Islam? Just as Francis seems to favor a one-world government, he also seems to be drawn by the vision of a one-world religion. He hasn’t said so in so many words, but he has given several indications that he envisions an eventual blending of religions. This would not be the “one flock, one shepherd” Church that Christ spoke of but something a bit more diverse.

One way to achieve this unity in diversity is by de-emphasizing doctrine. Doctrinal differences are, after all, the main dividing line between different faiths.
- Thus, by downplaying the importance of doctrine — something he has done fairly consistently throughout his papacy — it’s probable that Francis hopes to smooth the path to inter-religious harmony.
- Just as Francis disapproves of borders between nations, it’s likely that he looks upon borders between religions as artificial and unnecessarily divisive.

This is speculation, of course, but it’s not sheer speculation. As George Neumayr points out in The Political Pope, Francis frequently shows signs of indifferentism—the belief that all religions are of equal value. For example, when speaking of the murder of Fr. Jacques Hamel by two jihadists, he drew a moral equivalence between Islam and Christianity, saying “If I speak of Islamic violence, I must speak of Catholic violence.”

Other signs of his indifferentism are not difficult to find.
- In 2014, he told a group of Protestants, “I’m not interested in converting Evangelicals to Catholicism. I want people to find Jesus in their own community.”
- On another occasion, he criticized Pope Benedict’s “ordinate” for Anglicans interested in becoming Catholics by saying that they should stay “as Anglicans.”
- On still other occasions, he has waxed enthusiastic over Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

Ironically, several examples of his indifferentism can be found in Evangelii Gaudium — ostensibly an exhortation to evangelize. Although the document urges us to spread the joy of the Gospel, it provides a number of reasons why we shouldn’t bother. - The main reason is that we already share so many ethical and spiritual values with other faiths that there’s no point in converting non-Catholics.

Thus, Evangelii Gaudium leaves the impression that Jews shouldn’t be evangelized (an impression that was later explicitly confirmed by the Vatican). Moreover, Francis also seems to exempt Muslims from any need to convert. As I wrote previously in Crisis:

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After reading Evangelii Gaudium’s positive assessment of Islam, one could be forgiven for concluding that the conversion of Muslims is not an urgent matter. And, indeed, there is no suggestion in the document that Muslims should be evangelized. At the most, Christians should dialogue with Muslims about their “shared beliefs.”

---

Rather than converting others, Francis seems more interested in 'learning' from them.
- In Evangelii Gaudium and in numerous talks, he frequently extols the “richness” and “wisdom” of other cultures.
- Whereas Christ commanded his apostles to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…,” Francis’s message is more along the lines of “Go therefore and learn the wisdom of other cultures.”
- Francis’s attitude toward evangelization seems to be summed up in something he said to atheist journalist Eugenio Scalfari: “Proselytism is solemn nonsense.”

If that’s so, then Pope Francis probably has no desire to convert the Muslims streaming into Europe. [Probably? Definitely, by no means, and no account!] After all, like Evangelicals, Muslims also can “find Jesus in their community.” It’s not the same Jesus, but perhaps the resemblance is close enough for someone with scant interest in doctrinal differences.

Exactly what, then, does he have in mind by encouraging mass migration into Europe?

One possibility, as I suggested earlier, is that he envisions a multicultural-type blending of religions. But in order for that to happen, it would be necessary for the respective faiths to dilute their doctrinal positions. Pope Francis seems quite willing to do this on the Catholic side.
- He has already made substantial concessions to the Chinese communist government on the appointment of bishops.
- He seems willing to alter Church teachings in order to build bridges with the LGBT “community” and other sexual revolutionaries. - And, in general, he prefers to be guided by the 'prompting of the Spirit' rather than by the teachings of the Church. [Ah, but which 'Spirit' is prompting him? Certainly not the Holy Spirit sent down on Pentecost Day to watch to the end of time over the Church established by Christ. Paul VI said in 1972 that the fumes of Satan had entered the Church - and they are certainly overpowering now. I cannot help but be reminded of the temptations Satan held out to Jesus in the desert - the power to end hunger forever, the power to provide the world with spectacle (circuses after 'bread' has been provided), and power over all the powers of the earth Might not these be the very blandishments that have worked so well on Bergoglio - who thinks he and the UN can end hunger and poverty by 2030, who thinks that being the most popular man in the world he is in and of himself the spectacle the world has been waiting for, who thinks of himself as de facto leader of the world that he will remake in his image and likeness?]

Moreover, he seems more concerned with political and humanitarian goals than with the goal of getting to heaven.

As George Neumayr has noted in The Political Pope, when awarded the Charlemagne Prize, Francis “used his acceptance speech not to call for the restoration of Christianity, but for the spread of a ‘new European humanism.’”

And, as Francis sees it, the main obstacle to achieving these humanitarian goals are fundamentalist Christians who refuse to integrate with Muslim migrants and, in general, fail to adapt to changing times. Perhaps he thinks that a flood of migrants will force fundamentalists to encounter the “other” and come to terms with their “otherness.”

But what about fundamentalist Muslims? A harmonious world religion dedicated to humanitarian ends would require not only a watering-down of Christianity, but also a considerable moderation of Islam.
- Both in terms of percentages and in absolute numbers, there are far more fundamentalist Muslims in the world than fundamentalist Christians.
- Francis has acknowledged the existence of fundamentalist Muslims, but he claims that they do not represent “authentic” Islam, and he seems to believe, contrary to much polling data, that they are only a small minority. “All religions have these little groups,” he once said.

Whether or not he actually believes that fundamentalists are a small minority, he does seem to have a rough strategy for facilitating the emergence of a more moderate Islam.
- And that strategy is to claim that Islam is already and always has been a moderate and peaceful faith.
- Most notably, he asserted in Evangelii Gaudium that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.” For his considerable efforts in defending Islam as a peaceful and tolerant religion, he has won much praise from important Muslim leaders.

The strategy Francis seems to be employing is referred to by sociologists as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The idea is that if you express high expectations for others, they will endeavor to live up to the expectations and thus fulfill your “prophecy.”

But, according to Robert K. Merton, the sociologist who coined the term, “the self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation.” But the false definition or assumption can evoke “a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true.”

Sometimes self-fulfilling prophecies work and sometimes they don’t. A lot depends on the awareness of the subject. Young children are more susceptible to such influence, while adults who understand what is being attempted are less so. I recall reading an article on a radical Islamic website which accused Pope Francis of using just such a strategy. I don’t remember if the author actually used the term “self-fulfilling prophecy,” but he did complain that the pope was deliberately painting a false but pleasing picture of Islam in order to win over Muslims to a moderate view.

In any event, the self-fulfilling prophecy strategy seems an awfully slender reed upon which to stake the future of the world. For decades now, global leaders have been assuring us that Islam means peace, that violence has nothing to do with Islam, and that the vast majority of Muslims are moderate. Yet most of the evidence suggests that the Western “prophecy” about Islam’s pacific nature is not working. With some notable exceptions, moderates have been losing ground, while fundamentalists are in the ascendancy.

Just as he has little anxiety about the wave of church closings, Francis seems to have little anxiety about the Islamization of Europe. Indeed, as evidenced by his encouragement of mass migration, he seems to have no objection to Islamization.
- Either because he really believes the false narrative that Islam is a religion of peace, or because he believes that the self-fulfilling prophecy strategy will create a more moderate Islam, Francis seems to be at peace with the fact that Islam is spreading rapidly.

Whatever he has in mind, it seems that Pope Francis is betting against the odds. A few weeks ago, those two young Scandinavian women mentioned earlier took a similar gamble when they embarked on a camping trip in Morocco. They were betting their lives on the assumption that the whitewashed narrative about Islam that they had no doubt learned in schools and universities was the correct one. They lost that “bet.” They had, to borrow a line from Casablanca, been “misinformed” about the situation in Morocco.

Whether Francis has been misinformed about Islam or whether he has adopted a strategy of misinformation, he is taking a huge gamble —not only with his own life, but with the lives of millions. 🙆‍♀️When the religion of Muhammad meets the religion of indifferentism, which seems most likely to prevail?

William Kilpatrick taught for many years at Boston College. He is the author of several books about cultural and religious issues, including Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong; and Christianity, Islam and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Jihad. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Catholic World Report, National Catholic Register, Aleteia, Saint Austin Review, Investor’s Business Daily, and First Things.

US bishops on retreat at Mundelein seminary near Chicago.


A spiritual retreat is always a good idea, provided it is not meant, among other things, as a cosmetic feature to sort of put a good face on a situation. The situation being what it is -
the horrific and worsening culmination of the clerical sex abuse scandals cum episcopal cover-up that seemed to have been endemic in the USA in the last four decades of the 20th
century - it's almost like putting lipstick on a pig.

The Jan. 2-8 retreat of the US bishops in Chicago was planned in response to Pope Francis's suggestion to a USCCB delegation during a meeting at the Vatican
Sept. 13, during which basically none of the requests made by the Americans was granted. Instead, the pope apparently suggested they begin 2019 with this
retreat, offering the Papal Preacher Fr. Cantalamessa to be the retreat director. Not sure that was a great idea to begin with, knowing the strange heterodoxies
and sometimes bizarre ideas that this aging Franciscan has been wont to spout at his Lenten and Advent sermons for the Roman Curia.

The problem with the pope's
letter to the U.S. bishops
The framework and assumption that what’s most at stake here is institutional credibility
is exactly what led to cover-ups and protection of clerical perpetrators. Exactly.
by Amy Welborn

January 3, 2019

Pope Francis has written a letter to the American bishops, who are on retreat at Mundelein Seminary this week.

It is, honestly, the usual strange/not-strange message from Pope Francis. Strange in that he goes all over the place except to the specific place where the problem resides, and not-strange in that, well, this is what he usually does, and there’s always a reason for that.

Your experience of reading the letter might be like mine: I read it and nodded and thought, "Well, not bad, that’s true, sure, it’s good for these things to be said, nice point there' — and then I finished, thought about it for a minute, and realized that none of the specific problematic issues had actually been addressed.

Further, the spiritual context which Pope Francis recommends for going forward, it could be argued, actually enables the original problematic actions. Many problematic actions.

To begin with:

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At times of great confusion and uncertainty, we need to be attentive and discerning, to free our hearts of compromises and false certainties, in order to hear what the Lord asks of us in the mission he has given us. Many actions can be helpful, good and necessary, and may even seem correct, but not all of them have the “flavour” of the Gospel. To put it colloquially, we have to be careful that “the cure does not become worse than the disease”. And this requires of us wisdom, prayer, much listening and fraternal communion.

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Quite true, of course.

The first consequence that Pope Francis raises, the first issue that seems to require addressing is that of credibility:

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The Church’s credibility has been seriously undercut and diminished by these sins and crimes, but even more by the efforts made to deny or conceal them. This has led to a growing sense of uncertainty, distrust and vulnerability among the faithful. As we know, the mentality that would cover things up, far from helping to resolve conflicts, enabled them to fester and cause even greater harm to the network of relationships that today we are called to heal and restore.

We know that the sins and crimes that were committed, and their repercussions on the ecclesial, social and cultural levels, have deeply affected the faithful. They have caused great perplexity, upset and confusion…

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This is institutional thinking, isn’t it? It is, in fact, one of the core attitudes that led to the level of this scandal over the past decades (and probably always): This makes us look bad.

One could say that this is really nothing more than the traditional Catholic understanding of scandal — a true and valid way of entering into this situation and its consequences. But it’s actually a little different.

Traditionally, scandal is seen as a negative because it works to obfuscate the power and truth of the Gospel — people can’t see Jesus because you, the one supposedly representing it, have gotten completely in the way. There’s a hint of this here, but the entire passage is really more about the problem of people seeing the institution in a negative light being a problem simply because it’s better that they see it in a positive light.

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[DIM=1opt]The loss of credibility also raises painful questions about the way we relate to one another. Clearly, a living fabric has come undone, and we, like weavers, are called to repair it. This involves our ability, or inability, as a community to forge bonds and create spaces that are healthy, mature and respectful of the integrity and privacy of each person. It involves our ability to bring people together and to get them enthused and confident about a broad, shared project that is at once unassuming, solid, sober and transparent.

---

And so on. The rest of the letter expresses Francis’ usual themes — listen, dialogue, make space for the new, prioritize unity, don’t impose abstractions:

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This approach demands of us the decision to abandon a modus operandi of disparaging, discrediting, playing the victim or the scold in our relationships, and instead to make room for the gentle breeze that the Gospel alone can offer.

Let us not forget that “the collegial lack of a heartfelt and prayerful acknowledgment of our limitations prevents grace from working more effectively within us, for no room is left for bringing about the potential good that is part of a sincere and genuine journey of growth”.

Let us try to break the vicious circle of recrimination, undercutting and discrediting, by avoiding gossip and slander in the pursuit of a path of prayerful and contrite acceptance of our limitations and sins, and the promotion of dialogue, discussion and discernment.

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And so I wonder: Is this situation a problem because it diminished the institution’s credibility and threatens bonds of communion, or because people committed all sorts of sins of commission and omission, used other human beings, did great harm to God’s children, and offended and disobeyed the Lord who created us for good, not evil?

The framework and assumption that what’s most at stake here is institutional credibility is exactly what led to cover-ups and protection of clerical perpetrators. Exactly. That, of course, is nothing the Holy Father would defend and is what his letter is presented in opposition to, but until you shake that framework that privileges the horizontal over the vertical, you’re stuck in the same rut. It’s subtle, but is at the core of so many problems in the contemporary Church, including this one:

Understanding human actions and choices as fundamentally, basically a response to God’s call and yes, law, keeps everything else in context, since, of course, God’s fundamental call is to love.

Understanding human actions as fundamentally, basically oriented towards keeping some sort of peace with others or creating a certain environment without our obligation to God at the center — absolute, unmoving center, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us — makes it really easy for us to create our own reality, including our own definitions for sin and forgiveness.

It’s the difference between living inside the Garden — or outside. That’s really the whole point of Genesis 1-3.

In short, it just seems to me that a week of reflection on this needs to not start with metaphors of jars and pebbles or concerns about credibility, but rather something more along the lines of Psalm 32.

Which it probably did, outside the official public communications.

Anyway, I haven’t even remarked on what struck me as the most problematic aspect of this letter: the deep, repeated call to work together, be unified, be in communion and so on.

Wait, what? Why is that a problem? I mean…isn’t dialogue and communion the point?

[DIM=112t]No. Truth is.

And the reason the harping on unity and scolding about “recrimination” is problematic in this context is that one of the crucial issues leading to this crisis was precisely that: prioritizing of the external bonds between clerics above telling the truth and the privileging of protecting image over allowing consequences to be borne.

Who’s against dialogue and a mature search for answers and new ways forward? Hey, not me! But nothing at all will change if that dialogue is conducted in a context in which we are focused on how we think we should make each other feel and how the world sees us, rather than on how all of this looks to God — or if we’re more invested in saying things that make us seem open-minded and unified rather than saying true things, no matter how harsh they may be.
Is the culture of church leadership in desperate need of encouragement to be more gently tolerant of all points of view and less critical of each other? It seems to me it is pretty much the opposite.

We don’t create the bonds of Christian unity. God does this. Jesus Christ does, through Baptism. Our call is to recognize those bonds, strengthen them and then do the harder thing: be willing to recognize when those bonds have been broken by sin — and courageously say it out loud, no matter what the price.

Editor’s note: This essay originally appeared on the author's “Charlotte Was Both” blog is a slightly different form and is posted here by her kind permission.


Phil Lawler comments on the latter:

Pope’s letter to US bishops:
What NOT to do
By Phil Lawler

January 4, 2019


In November, Pope Francis instructed the Catholic bishops of the US to table their plans for new responses to the sex-abuse scandal. Now, in his letter to the American bishops who are on retreat at Mundelein seminary this week, the Pontiff exhorts them to take action — but not, apparently, the sort of action they had in mind.

To be sure it is no simple matter to discern what action the Pope wants the American bishops to take; his lengthy letter offers them no clear directions. But he writes at length about how they should approach their problems, and in doing so he conveys a strong message about the path he prefers and, more important, the path he wants the American hierarchy to abandon.

First, the Pope tells the American bishops that this is their problem.
- “In recent years,” he writes, “the Church in the United States has been shaken by various scandals that have gravely affected its credibility.”
- He describes their retreat this week as “a necessary step toward responding in the spirit of the Gospel to the crisis of credibility that you are experiencing as a Church.”
- Nowhere does he acknowledge that the scandal has shaken the entire universal Church, and that especially this past year, the most serious questions about credibility have been aimed directly at the Vatican.

Second, the Pope repeatedly exhorts the American hierarchy to avoid preserve unity, to avoid divisions, to act as a fraternal body.
- His dogged insistence on this message— which occasionally escalates into blunt criticism, as when he urges them to “break the vicious cycle of recrimination, undercutting, and discrediting” — strongly suggests that there has been a great deal of public quarreling among the American bishops.

But that is not the case! To a remarkable degree, the American Catholic hierarchy has preserved its public unity, under trying circumstances. In fact, more than a few American Catholics would argue that the pointed reluctance of bishops to criticize each other has been a gross failing: an important factor contributing to the scandal.

Amy Wellborn, arguing that the Pope has sent the wrong message, speaks for many concerned Catholics:

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Is the culture of church leadership in desperate need of encouragement to be more gently tolerant of all points of view and less critical of each other? Seems to me it’s pretty much the opposite.

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Where is the evidence of this disunity, which worries Pope Francis so much? The American bishops have not been criticizing each other; far from it. They have been criticizing the Vatican. They have, in fact, been — gently, respectfully, but insistently — criticizing the Pope himself.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano is not mentioned in the papal letter, but his testimony casts a long shadow across its pages. The Pope and his allies have denounced the former Vatican diplomat as a threat to Church unity, and it is that sort of division that Pope Francis wants the Americans to avoid. Too late!
- Dozens of American bishops are already on record, calling for a thorough investigation of Archbishop Vigano’s charges.
- By his adamant silence — which is conspicuously maintained in this letter — Pope Francis has indicated that he will not approve any investigation.

So now, he tells the American bishops, they should resolve to move on, maintaining unity, without probing further into potentially painful subjects such as the influence of a corrupt homosexual network within the hierarchy and within the Vatican. That topic, the Pope signals, will remain off limits.

In his letter the Pope also offers the very useful and valid reminder that a solution to this scandal cannot be built solely on procedural foundations. It will require a new attitude toward sexual abuse in particular and Church leadership in general. He rightly cautions the American bishops against “reducing everything to an organizational problem.”

Andrea Tornielli, recently hired as editorial director of the Vatican’s Secretariat for Communications — and thus as a leading official interpreter of the Pope’s messages — focused on the need for “a change in our mind-set” in his own commentary on the Pope’s letter. He concluded with a revealing prescription for rebuilding the credibility of the hierarchy: "Credibility is not rebuilt with marketing strategies. It must be the fruit of a Church that knows how to overcome divisions and internal conflicts…"

It’s certainly true that marketing campaigns do not restore a damaged institution’s credibility. But neither does the preservation of a united front. Once again the first order of business, from the Pope’s perspective, is to avoid division and conflict. But the only effective way to restore credibility is to tell the truth.

The papal letter encourages the American bishops to find ways to protect against sexual abuse in the future, but not to look too deeply into how the problem arose in the past: not to investigate the corruption that gave rise to a culture of secrecy and cover-ups, of protecting the guilty at the expense of the innocent.

If the same attitude prevails when the Vatican hosts the presidents of the world’s episcopal conferences in February — and we have little reason to expect otherwise— that meeting will result in further frustration, greater cynicism about Church leadership, more damage to the evangelical mission of the Church.

I say that there is little reason for hope about the February meeting. But not none. Because this week the US bishops are praying over their response to the crisis, and to the papal letter. We should all be praying, too, that their response will be marked by both prudence and fortitude.


I'm glad someone has done a brief round-up of the first appalling Bergogliades in the New Year - before the letter to the USCCB was made public, that is...



Pope Francis rails against
‘hypocritical massgoing Christians’:
‘Better to live as an atheist’
by Bree A. Dail


VATICAN CITY, January 2, 2019 – Pope Francis addressed a crowd of faithful with some jarring remarks during his first Wednesday Audience of 2019. Speaking in the Paul VI Audience Hall, this morning, the pope focused on two reoccurring themes of his pontificate: hypocritical Christians and the “revolutionary” nature of the Gospel.

“How many times do we see the scandal of those people who go to church and stay there all day or go every day and then live hating others or talking badly about people? This is a scandal – it is better not to go to church: better to live as an atheist,” the pope admonished. [Apparently, he does not believe that any grace can accrue to someone who goes to Mass and/or prays in church. It's not as if everyone who goes to Mass and receives communion necessarily goes out and becomes completely unable to sin again. Does he think that of himself? What Catholic pope tells his flock "it's better not to go to church" and worse, to add, "it's better to live as an atheist"?] Did Martin Luther ever tell his followers anything similar?

Reading from his prepared statements, the pope continued, “The Christian is not one who commits himself to be better than others: he knows that he is a sinner like everyone else.” [But those objectionable lines earlier did not seem to me to come from a prepared text - they sounded very much like off-the-cuff Bergoglio adlibbing on whatever text was given him.]

According to the Italian media outlet La Repubblica, reporting from the audience hall, the pope continued to read from his prepared texts, “Where there is Gospel, there is revolution: the Gospel does not leave us quiet, it pushes us: it is revolutionary.”

Pointing to the Our Father, he concluded that St Matthew placed Jesus’ prayer “at the center of the mountain’s discourse… Blessed are the poor, the meek, the merciful, the humble people of heart: It is the revolution of the Gospel.”

The Roman pontiff’s use of the term “revolution” harkens to a recent LifeSite exclusive with Chilean author José Antonio Ureta on his book, Pope Francis’s Paradigm Shift: Continuity or Rupture in the Mission of the Church?

Mr. Ureta explained the concerning trend of some in the Vatican – to include Pope Francis – to label attempts at change in the Church as “revolutions” or “paradigm shifts.” Such terms have found their place in the theological narratives of Pope Francis and his close advisers. [Because that is exactly what they think they are doing. And judging from the apparent success of Bergoglio's anti-Catholic initiatives so far - successful in that even his worst critics admit there is nothing anyone can do concretely to reverse the authority of the pope the moment he wields it, and alas, he is pope - yes, he is doing his very best to bring about revolution or paradigm shift or whatever you choose to call his singleminded obsession to change the Church he was elected to lead into something 'better' in his mind, the church of Bergoglio, because he really does seem to think he is 'better' than Jesus insofar as knowing what His Church ought to be and what His Church ought to be teaching in His name, taking His name in vain and committing sacrilege every time he foists his personal views as Magisterium.

And inasmuch as the only hope of ending Bergoglio's reign of anti-Catholic terror is to pray that God takes a repentant Bergoglio back soon, or however He chooses to rid His Church of this incubus. Meanwhile, each of us can simply try to live a Christian life and in our own small way, show Christ to others by living the faith.]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 04/01/2019 19:01]

An Advent dinner with Cardinal Zen
He says the Vatican’s 'provisional agreement” with the Chinese government
has had a demoralizing effect on the country’s faithful Catholics
by David Pinault

January 2, 2019

Outdoors, a night of mist and drizzling rain on the slopes of Tai Ping Shan (otherwise known to Hong Kongers as Victoria Peak). But here indoors, good food, good red wine, and good conversation, and all thanks to the hospitality of Joseph Zen Ze-kiun.

Shortly before Christmas, His Eminence hosted Jody (my wife and Santa Clara University colleague) and me at a dinner in the private dining room of a guesthouse owned by the Catholic diocese of Hong Kong. For Cardinal Zen it was a chance to publicize once again his longstanding concerns about the future of Catholicism in China. For us it was an extraordinary opportunity to meet a hero of the 21st-century Church, a defender of Christ, and a tireless foe of the Chinese Communist Party.

Many today fear antagonizing the CCP. But His Eminence can draw on a lifetime of surviving harsh challenges. A childhood in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Emigration to Hong Kong just ahead of Mao Tse-Tung’s conquest of the mainland. And a return to China during the Cultural Revolution as a member of the Salesian order of priests, where he witnessed close-up the brutalities inflicted on Christians by Mao’s hordes of Red Guards.

As bishop of Hong Kong and subsequently as a cardinal appointed by Benedict XVI, His Eminence has repeatedly defied Beijing.
- He spoke out against the Communists for their massacre of students in Tiananmen Square.
- He defended Falun Gong followers as the CCP moved to crush them. - And he has voiced support for the right of Hong Kongers to have some say in how they’re governed even as Xi Jinping’s government tightens its grip on the former Crown colony.

Cardinal Zen recalls all these fights as we sit down to dinner. But no sooner has he said grace than he focuses on his latest concern: the “provisional agreement” lately arranged between Pope Francis and Beijing.

Under the terms of this deal, the Communist government will supposedly recognize the Vatican’s authority. But the agreement will also allow Xi Jinping and his officials to hand-pick candidates for appointment as bishops in Chinese dioceses. The Pope will be permitted to veto a choice he dislikes—but he will have no say in initiating the selection of candidates.

We can’t help but ask: Why give a Communist government such ecclesiastical clout? Cardinal Zen frowns in reply. The Holy Father wants a grand entente that will allow him to make a celebratory trip to Beijing and consolidate the papacy’s position on the Communist-ruled mainland. Francis is also eager, says the cardinal, to heal the split in China’s Catholic Church.

Since 1951 Beijing has sought to nullify the Vatican’s authority and Catholicism’s moral independence through the creation — and suffocatingly close supervision — of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA). Yet to this day more than half of China’s Catholics have refused to join the CPA, instead remaining adherents of an underground Church that is loyal to the Vatican and to a chain of authority that goes back to Peter the Fisherman.

This loyalty comes at a cost. “Anything may happen to you,” the cardinal points out to us, “if you’re a member of the underground Church.” Attend a Mass unauthorized by the CCP-approved Patriotic Association, and you risk denunciation, job loss, arrest, or worse. Through it all, China’s underground Catholics have stayed true to Rome. And all for what?

“China’s underground Catholics,” our host tells us, “aren’t afraid of being poor or in prison, of losing their property, or even of dying for their faith. But now they feel betrayed.”

They understand, His Eminence continues, that bishops appointed by Beijing are collaborators with the government, all too willing to rubber-stamp whatever the Communist Party decrees.

So Francis’s “provisional agreement” has had a demoralizing effect. “The Communist Party is now pressuring underground priests to join the Patriotic Association. ‘Sign, sign! The Pope says it’s okay.’ But the priests don’t want to.” Cardinal Zen pauses for emphasis. “They understand what the Communist government is truly like, even if the Holy Father fails to see.”

Both John Paul II and Benedict, His Eminence reminds us, understood a basic reality: there is nothing to hope for in negotiating with a totalitarian dictatorship. Yet the current pope and his advisers think they can bargain with the Communists and get a good deal. “But they will give a lot, and get nothing in return.”

Read these words, and you might mark Cardinal Zen as a gloom-and-doom prophet. And in fact he acknowledges Catholic China’s prospects are grim. But he hasn’t lost hope. He cites the example and inspiring life-story of a fellow Salesian priest—”a confrere of mine,” he says.

Imprisoned under Mao, this missionary was sentenced to slave labor in China’s coal mines. He kept his faith and bore witness to Christ through 30 years’ confinement.

Propaganda officials tried and failed to break him. One day an interrogator slapped a gun on the table and threatened to shoot him on the spot. The Salesian simply smiled. “I’m ready every day for martyrdom.”

Now aged 100 and living in Hong Kong, this survivor recently told Cardinal Zen: “I really thank the Lord for all those years in prison. Before, I used to have so many distractions when I tried to pray.” Through all his sufferings, God gave this living martyr the consolation of divine communion in prayer.

This recollection of his Salesian colleague generates the cardinal’s concluding reflection of the evening. Over coffee he tells us, “In persecution, God has the victory. God is still able to lead everything to a good conclusion.”

To illustrate his point Cardinal Zen cites from memory a meditation on Saint John’s Apocalypse authored in 2006 by Pope Benedict (whom His Eminence refers to with very evident reverence and affection).

Benedict draws attention to John’s vision of Christ as a wounded sacrificial Lamb, who appears before a throng of believers seeking refuge from the torments inflicted by the pagan Roman empire. A mysterious scroll suddenly appears in the midst of this multitude, “a scroll, previously sealed with seven seals, that no one had been able to break open.”

His Eminence quotes Benedict’s reflection on this scene: “Only the sacrificed Lamb can open the sealed scroll and reveal its content, give meaning to this history that so often seems senseless. He alone can draw from it instructions and teachings for the life of Christians, to whom his victory over death brings the message and guarantee of victory that they too will undoubtedly obtain.”

What Jody and I remember most vividly from our evening with the cardinal is his summary of Benedict’s meditation: Only the Lamb that has suffered, that has been martyred and slaughtered, is able to open the sealed scroll. Suffering undertaken in self-giving love can convey wisdom, compassion, and perspective.

What John’s audience faced then, says His Eminence, is what Chinese Christians face now: persecution at the hands of a violent and seemingly all-powerful state.

The path pursued by these believers is the path urged on us all by Benedict: “Follow the Lamb Jesus, entrust yourselves to Jesus, take his path, and even if in this world he is only a Lamb who appears weak, it is he who triumphs!”

For decades underground Catholics have stayed faithful to the Lamb’s path, despite everything inflicted on them from the time of Mao to today’s regime of Xi Jinping.

No one in the 21st century has offered better witness to the suffering of these believers than His Eminence Joseph Zen. Let’s all pray that Pope Francis heeds the wisdom voiced by this cardinal, who urges the Vatican to shun power-politic deals with the Communist state. Let today’s papacy follow instead the path of the “Lamb who appears weak”—the path followed faithfully for so many years by the martyred Church of China.


David Pinault is a professor of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University. His publications include The Crucifix on Mecca's Front Porch: A Christian's Companion for the Study of Islam (Ignatius Press) as well as the novel Museum of Seraphs in Torment (CreateSpace).

A tough year ahead
2018 was a bad year for Catholics.
2019 is almost certainly going to be worse.
by George Weigel

January 2, 2019

2018 was a bad year for Catholics. 2019 is almost certainly going to be worse. Good reason, then, to reflect on two recent texts from the Church’s Office of Readings.

The first is from paragraph 48 of Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church:

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“The end of the ages is already with us. The renewal of the world has been established and cannot be revoked. In our era it is in a true sense anticipated: the Church on earth is already sealed by genuine, if imperfect, holiness. Yet, until a new heaven and a new earth are built as the dwelling place of justice, the pilgrim Church, in its sacraments and institutions belonging to this world of time, bears the likeness of this passing world. It lives in the midst of a creation still groaning and in travail as it waits for the sons of God to be revealed in glory.”

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And the second is from the Spiritual Canticle of the reforming Spanish Doctor of the Church, St. John of the Cross:

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"Would that men might come at last to see that it is quite impossible to reach the thicket of the riches and wisdom of God except by first entering the thicket of much suffering, in such a way that the soul finds there its consolation and desire. The soul that longs for divine wisdom chooses first, and in truth, to enter the thicket of the cross.”

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With those sobering but consoling thoughts in mind, I offer a few speculations about 2019, by way of cautions about the rough waters ahead.
• There will be further revelations of clerical sexual abuse from decades ago, and the false narrative that there is a rape culture in the Catholic Church today will be reinforced.
• More awful details about the behavior of Theodore McCarrick, former archbishop of Washington, will come to light.
• At least U.S. one bishop, and possibly several, will resign after revelations of malfeasance and worse in handling reports of sexually abusive clergy under their authority.
• Rome and certain sectors of the American Church will continue to ignore or misinterpret empirical evidence about the exceptionally high percentage of adolescent boys and young men who have been victims of clerical sexual abuse.
• The February meeting in Rome to discuss the abuse crisis in a global context will disappoint many U.S. Catholics, who mistakenly imagined that it would produce a global plan for reform.
• Too many senior officials of the Roman Curia will continue to insist that the U.S. reaction to clerical sexual abuse and episcopal malfeasance is exaggerated, media-driven, and somehow “Protestant.”
• The determination of the U.S. bishops’ conference leadership to involve expert Catholic laity in the reform of the priesthood and the episcopate will encounter more resistance in Rome.
• No state attorney general or federal prosecutor will launch an investigation of sexual abuse in public schools.
• October’s Special Synod on Amazonia will (obliquely?) appeal for the ordination of mature married men to the ministerial priesthood in that region, but without input from other local Churches that would be seriously impacted by any such concession – including the Church in the United States.
• Ultramontanism – an excessively Petrocentric idea of the Church that misconstrues the teaching of Vatican I and Vatican II by treating the pope as an oracle – will intensify on an increasingly cranky and authoritarian Catholic Left.
• The Holy See will run a huge deficit, even as Peter’s Pence contributions continue to fall throughout the world Church.
• The persecution of Cardinal George Pell will continue but his conviction on “historic sexual abuse” charges will increasingly be seen by rational people as a grotesque miscarriage of justice motivated by scapegoating, anti-Catholicism, and sordid politics in Australia (and elsewhere).
• As the Xi Jinping regime’s persecution of Christians intensifies, the Vatican’s “deal” with the People’s Republic of China will look even worse and its defense will seem ever more implausible.
• Russian Orthodox spokesmen will continue to blame the Catholic Church for the Moscow Patriarchate’s troubles in Ukraine, further compromising the Russian-centered ecumenical grand strategy of the Holy See toward the complex worlds of Orthodoxy.

A tough year lies ahead. Yet Christ, risen and triumphant, remains present and available in the Eucharist, to which serious missionary disciples will have ever more frequent recourse for strength and courage. May His Kingdom come.


2018: The year the Church’s crisis was unmasked
As 2018 turns into 2019, we are at the beginning
of a generational struggle for the soul of the Church.
Analysis
by Christopher R. Altieri


Whatever else 2018 was, it was the year in which the crisis of clerical sexual abuse and coverup revealed itself to be a cancer within the leadership culture of the Catholic Church.

Protracted, persistent, and systemic, the rot in the hierarchy reaches all the way up, and could reach all the way through the Roman Curia and more than one national conference of bishops.

The first major event of the year was also the one during which the global crisis of clerical sex abuse and coverup became permanently attached to Pope Francis.

While on a fence-mending visit to Chile — the first stop on a trip that would have its Peruvian leg almost completely overshadowed by the Chilean fallout — -priest (Pope Francis would defrock him in September) of calumny against Bishop Juan Barros of Osorno. The victims — Juan Carlos Cruz, James Hamilton, and José Andres Murillo
— said Barros turned a blind eye to the predations of Father Fernando Karadima.

Francis eventually apologized, ordered an investigation into the matter, summoned the entire Chilean hierarchy to Rome for an unprecedented emergency meeting, obtained their resignations, and then sat on the lion’s share of them (he has accepted seven of thirty-four resignations, and dismissed two retired Chilean bishops from the clerical state), while Chilean prosecutors began raiding chanceries and offices of the Chilean bishops’ conference.

There were hopes that what appeared to be a genuine falling of the scales and change of heart on the part of the Holy Father — who reportedly said he was “part of the problem” when he met with Karadima’s victims in May — would lead to concrete and sustained efforts to address the crisis. Instead, there was a good deal more talk, and very little action.

As spring turned into summer, l’Affaire McCarrick exploded, opening a gruesome new chapter in the crisis that would dwarf anything that’s touched the Church in the age of modern communication.

By August, it was clear that the hierarchical leadership of the Church in the United States was thoroughly compromised, panicked, and almost totally paralyzed. The release of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report proved beyond doubt that the US bishops’ Apalachin moment had arrived.

That was before the former apostolic nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, released the first of his “testimonies”: a spectacular, 11-page J’Accuse! that deepened existing divisions and opened new rifts in the hierarchy, the professional Catholic chattering class, and the body of the faithful in the US and around the world.

If Viganò had limited himself to exposing the rot, his publications might have been more effective. His original brief was powerful, and could have been stronger, but lacked a measure of discipline. As it happened, he called for Pope Francis’s resignation, exposing himself to accusations he is part of a coup d’eglise and turning the discussion away from the right means of remedy for a situation that had become untenable, and transforming it into a referendum on Pope Francis — who has his share of the blame for letting things come to that.

[I disagree that asking the pope to resign 'weakened' Vigano's testimony. It's a judgment call whether he should have done so or not - but if he were as convinced as he is that the pope did wrong in favoring McCarrick and his counsel despite knowledge of the ex-cardinal's sexual misconduct, then it was consistent for hinm to call for the pope's resignation.

If Altieri and all those who profess to be outraged that Vigano did so have been calling ceaselessly for US bishops who covered up for their erring priests to resign, does that standard not apply - and far more stringently - to a pope who not only covered up but also favored the cardinal in many ways and appeared to have followed his advice on high-level appointments to the Church hierarchy and on delicate diplomatic missions? Can any of the guilty or allegedly guilty US bishops who have covered up for their priests have been more monumentally wrong than the pope has been on McCarrick?

Finally, thinking Catholics did not need Vigano's testimony to know that there has been an ongoing if informal referendum in the Church in the past six years over the conduct or misconduct of this pope.]

As summer gave way to autumn, unforced errors committed by Church leaders at every level continued to pile up, while the crisis deepened and the scandal intensified. Stories broke in other countries, until every inhabited continent was dealing with some part of it. In September, Pope Francis called a meeting of the heads of the world’s bishops’ conferences to discuss the crisis — to take place over three days in February 2019.

The misrule revealed in Buffalo dominated Church news in the United States for a few weeks, but largely gave way to the run-up to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ annual fall plenary in Baltimore. Prepared to vote on reform measures designed to achieve a measure of accountability and stanch the hemorrhage of public confidence, the bishops found themselves hamstrung by an order from Pope Francis—couched as a “request” from the Congregation for Bishops—to delay their vote until after the February meeting.

As autumn turned to winter, a series of stories broke, while others took ugly — if predictable — turns. A rehearsal of them all would run to significant length and quickly become a grotesque litany, though it would include
- the Vatican’s campaign to lower expectations for the February meeting after it raised the stakes on the same exponentially.
- the news that the Vatican allowed an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles accused of sexual misconduct to continue to serve — with restrictions on his ministry secretly imposed by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — for 13 years, and
- that the archbishop of New York apparently allowed a man with multiple abuse allegations settled on his account by the New York Archdiocesan Reconciliation and Compensation Program to continue in ministry (and even sent a letter of suitability for the priest to a California Catholic college as recently as December 4).

The main reason we do not know how deep the rot runs or how wide it has spread, is the Pope’s refusal to order the necessary investigations. At the turning of the year, civil authorities in several countries are poised to solve that problem in a way that cannot fail to devastate the Church’s institutions.

For Pope Francis, whose oft-delayed and much belated reform agenda was already on the rocks, 2018 was going to be a critical year:

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2018 is likely to be the year in which Pope Francis will have to decide whether he will use his immense talents, charisma, and strength of personality to harness and direct the energies of the Curia and the Church in a manner consistent with the best angels of her tradition, or whether he will continue to channel his efforts into a project that appears to have as its only overarching vision the remaking of Rome into a sort of Buenos Aires-on-Tiber.

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In a sense, Pope Francis never got to make that decision. Circumstance decided it for him, with the effective disintegration of his principal reform organ, the “C9” Council of Cardinal Advisers, which became the “C6” in October after Francis relieved three members and apparently chose not to replace them.

To hear the Vatican tell it, the work of the C9 C6 is essentially complete — their draft Apostolic Constitution, Praedicate evangelium, was apparently ready for Pope Francis in June — so there is no need for fresh blood.

Practically speaking, the reform is dead in the water.
- Even if Francis does mark up the draft and send it for fine tuning, then get the fine copy back, promulgate it, and begin to roll it out, the reform will take years to implement.
- Bureaucracies are resistant to change, and the Roman Curia is well practiced in the Fabian arts.
- Plus, institutional reforms are nothing without personnel changes, and there are too many curial officials with too much skin in the game to go quietly.

Two of the three members Pope Francis “thanked for their service” —Cardinals Francisco Errázuriz and George Pell — are embroiled in major sex abuse and coverup scandals in their home countries. Francis dismissed the three senior churchmen in October, but only announced the change in December, after the embattled Cardinal Errázuriz let slip that he was no longer serving on the body. In a year characterized by a widening credibility gap, in which transparency has been declared the order of the day, the delay in the announcement was perplexing, to say the least.

That Cardinal Errázuriz stayed as long as he did was surprising on its own. He skipped the meeting of the Chilean bishops in May, already under intense scrutiny and facing heavy criticism that included calls for his imprisonment from Chilean victims of the man for whom Errázuriz allegedly covered. Francis promised those victims and the whole Church a hard line, but in Errázuriz’s case went with a half-measure.

The scandal and the crisis. The crisis and the scandal.
The two are no longer separable, but they are distinguishable: the crisis is of very long standing, rooted in the mysterium iniquitatis, and at its most basic level a disease of the spirit, a sickness caused by lust for power, which perverts everything it reaches even as it make use of every perversion it encounters on the march through souls; the scandal is an effect, rather than a cause of the crisis, and may yet be harnessed to the good.

“The crisis of clerical sexual abuse [and coverup] is a crisis of clerical culture, and more specifically, a crisis of episcopal leadership,” I wrote in July:

---

The bishops have lost their way, and they have brought the whole Church with them into a quagmire. The only way out is through, and the only way through the filthy muck and slime of half-truth more devilish than outright mendacity, is veracity. The bishops — ll of them and every one of them — must tell the whole, unvarnished truth.

---

All throughout the year, we have learned details of specific abuse cases, which the bishops kept hidden as long as they could.
- Some of the details regarded run-of-the-mill perversion.
- Other details bore the unmistakable mark of the Satanic.
- Others were in between.
- All of them were sickening — overwhelming at times, and permanently scarring to anyone who has become familiar with them—truly and in the strict sense of the word, wretched.

As 2018 turns into 2019, we realize that we are at the beginning of a generational struggle for the soul of the Church. Institutional reforms are needed at every level of ecclesial life. Likewise necessary is a renewal of basic Christian devotion to both charity and piety.

There are more sickening, maddening, heartbreaking revelations to come. Individual bishops from whom we hope and deserve better will disappoint. The hierarchy will fail us again. This is going to get worse before it gets better. We need to be prepared for that. We also need not to lose sight of the good.

It seems paradoxical, but in spiritual warfare, the tiniest act of charity is a greater blow to hell than the most sweeping reform, and the surrender of the tiniest smidgen of bitterness in one human soul a mightier victory for heaven than a thousand searching exposés.

Exposure of rot and sweeping reform are both necessary and urgent, and we all have a part to play in both.
- Nevertheless, the work of the Christian in fear and trembling for his soul’s salvation is the first and perennial task, before which all must give way.
- It is work that requires community, though its working is often secret, even and especially to the one in which it is worked, and the principal worker is Christ.
- The real challenge in 2019 will be to keep Paul’s charge: “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances.”

Meanwhile...
Vatican attempting a McCarrick cover-up?
More proof the pope's investigation is a sham

January 3, 2019

Church Militant has learned from extremely reliable sources that the Vatican investigation into disgraced former cardinal Theodore McCarrick appears to have gone into cover-up mode.

In an unbelievable turn of events, Church investigators are now presenting the accusations against McCarrick from a former altar boy as not credible. But what is proving to be astonishing is the rationale.

The case as laid out to Church Militant is that the then-16-year-old boy went to St. Patrick's Cathedral to seek out McCarrick and serve midnight Mass in 1972 where McCarrick groped and fondled him in the sacristy.

Even though the boy did not go to St. Patrick's with any sexual intentions in mind, investigators for the Vatican are spinning the details in such a way as to say that McCarrick is at least partially exonerated, if not totally, because the boy presented himself to McCarrick and McCarrick did not pursue him.

Additionally, they say that since the boy was 16, a question now arises regarding the age of consent and if this could still be viewed as sexual abuse of a minor.

The investigators now appear to be scuttling both parts of the accusations — was it actual 'abuse' and was the boy an actual minor?

Those with intimate knowledge of the investigation are saying it's part of a "cover-up," claiming the Vatican is trying to recast the molestation as somehow consensual sex — a theme actually brought forward by Chicago Cdl. Blase Cupich at the bishops' November meeting in Baltimore — that consensual homosexual sex involving a priest is a different matter.

The fallout from this latest news has sent shock waves through the ecclesiastical world, especially the archdiocese of New York, which publicly announced the McCarrick news back on June 20.

New York Cdl. Timothy Dolan's entire charge of credible evidence against McCarrick now appeared to be severely jeopardized by the way the Vatican was spinning the case.

James Grein, longtime victim of McCarrick, was interviewed at length by New York archdiocese Vicar General Richard Welch last week about details surrounding his abuse at the hands of McCarrick. [But this interview wa reported to have been done as part of the Vatican investigation of McCarrick. Which most people thought was at least one indication that the Vatican was pursuing the investigation.]

With Dolan's original case against McCarrick apparently blown out of the water by Vatican investigators, Dolan needed to put together another case and do it fast. This one would have to be airtight, and in the case of James Grein, he found it.

Grein's story first appeared in The New York Times but did not identify him by his full name. He first came completely public at the Silence Stops Now rally in Baltimore hosted by Church Militant and a coalition of concerned lay groups.

In his speech at the rally, Grein gave details of the decade-plus homosexual abuse endured by him from McCarrick. He also gave further details on a YouTube video with Dr. Taylor Marshall.

Between the New York Times article, his speech at the rally, his interview with Taylor Marshall and an additional interview he gave Church Militant following his testimony against McCarrick given in New York last week, it appears Dolan may have his airtight case.

But what is extremely telling — as well as disturbing — according to insiders, is that the knee-jerk response from the Vatican seems to be to want to cover up, or in the very least discredit and downplay, the charges against McCarrick, and that, according to some Catholics, is a big red flag that the Vatican is more concerned with cover-up than the truth.

At the moment, U.S. bishops are huddled at Mundelein Seminary in Chicago for a week-long retreat about sex abuse ordered by Pope Francis, and in just six weeks, the sex abuse summit gets underway in Rome.

Given these latest developments and leaks, many are thinking that all of this is just one huge smokescreen, that Rome has no real concern about this issue, too easily adopts a "blame the victim" approach and is content to treat this entire scandal as just an "American thing" that will be forgotten soon enough.

Conclusion: Rome and Pope Francis are the problem here — Rome, Pope Francis and the homosexual clerical culture dominating the Church.

Aldo Maria Valli examines one of the recent Bergoglian bizarreries - a worse variation than an early instance a few days after his election, when meeting with international media at Aula Paul VI for the first time, he said at the end that he was not going to give the customary apostolic blessing in order not to offend those who are not Christian! This time, however, he appears to make a choice against giving an apostolic blessing in the name of the Trinity, as Catholic blessings are always done... It is, of course, the nth manifestation of 1) his narcissism - not just that he must do something other popes have not done (because there is no justifiable reason); and 2) his cavalier attitude toward the Trinity, best exemplified by when he told Scalfari "There is no Catholic God" - which, of course, ignores the fact that the two other monotheistic religions, Judaism and Islam do not recognize Jesus Christ as God, much less the Holy Spirit

The pope and his New Year's Day
'blessing without blessing'
Translated from

January 4, 2019

Some readers have asked me my opinion on the pope’s singular ‘blessing without blessing’ after the Angelus prayers he led from the window of the Apostolic Palace on the first day of the New Year.

I recall that at the end of the prayers, the pope raised his hands and said, “May the Lord bless and watch over you. May the Lord let his face shine for you and give you graace. May the Lord show his face to you and grant you peace. Amen.”

At that point, everyone familiar with the papal Angelus ritual was expecting him to add the standard blessing in Latin: “Et benedictio Dei omnipotentis, Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti descéndat super vos et máneat semper. Amen”. (May the blessing of God almighty, Father, Son and Holy Spirit ,descend upon you and remain forever. Amen".) But nothing.

So why did the pope decide to omit the blessing? I asked some experts and they explained that the pope had used a formulation for blessing almost literally verbatim from Num 6,24-28, which is the first reading in the Liturgy of the Word for the Mass on January 1.

It was a formulation much loved by St. Francis who left it in his Chartula [handwritten notes] as a blessing to one Brother Leone marked with a big Tau the T-shaped cross resembling the Greek letter tau which the Saint of Assisi adopted as his personal symbol].

The Roman Missal, at least in its Editio Typica III – which still does not have an Italian translation after 15 years – does include this formulation as a final solemn blessing among the choices given for certain recurrent holidays.

Therefore, the pope did give a blessing which has a Biblical origin and is duly prescribed in the Missal. The fact that he recited it with his arms open wide could have been a way of underscoring its Jewish character: Old Testament priests, as far as it is known, gave a blessing with upraised hands, as Jesus did at the end of Luke’s Gospel: “Et elevatis manibus benedixit eis“. (And raising his hands, he blessed them.)

Therefore, to this point, nothing really strange about what the pope did. What did provoke surprise and disconcertment was the lack of the final Trinitarian blessing, which conferred the Christian imprint on the Old Testament formulation.

Yes, the Missal does propose various formulations for a final blessing, including that which was used by the pope (and which in many Catholic churches offering the Novus Ordo Mass was surely used at the end of the Mass because it takes its text from the First Reading). But to each of these formulations, it adds the standard conclusion invoking the Trinity: “Et benedictio Dei omnipotentis, Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti descéndat super vos et máneat semper. Amen”.

So what could have been the pope’s intention in omitting the Trinitarian invocation? One of my sources asked around at Casa Santa Marta, and he was told – in confidence – that the choice of ‘blessing without blessing’ had been ‘an extemporaneous decision of the Holy Father’.

From the video, one sees that the pope was reading the blessing he gave from a paper he had before him. So if it was his decision to omit the Trinitarian formula, it means he chose to omit something which was on his prepared text. But why?

Perhaps it is because of the pacifist and ecumenist context of World Peace Day celebrated by the Church on January 1. Among the Waldesians, for instance, the blessing is taken from Num 6,24-28, as the pope did, but without a sign of the Cross nor sprinkling with water.

In conclusion, the pope’s liturgical experts say there was nothing incorrect in what he did, even if there were ‘dissonances’ and a bit of stretching. Which many Catholic faithful could not avoid noting.


What really occupied my time was translating Valli's interview with Fr. Alessandro Minutella, a Sicilian priest who has been excommunicated for schism and heresy because of
his open opposition to the 'Bergoglian church' and his conviction that Bergoglio is not a legitimate pope (and that therefore Benedict XVI remains pope]. I, of course, disagree
with him on the latter points, but his erroneous position in that respect does not diminish the force his arguments that do not rest on that error. It was not easy to translate,
because the priest turns out to be one of those who can cite various sources, especially Scripture, to support his points. And I had to check each citation to make sure he was
not misusing them.



Don Minutella explains:
'Here is why I am fighting the liquid Church'
'It is neo-Arian, neo-Modernist, and neo-Lutheran'
Translated from

January 4, 2019

On November 3, 2018, the archdiocese of Palermo notified don Alessandro Maria Minutella of a decree of excommunication dated August 15, 2018: “The archbishop, Mons. Corrado Lorefice, declares the excommunication latae sententiae, which the priest has incurred for the crime of heresy and for the crime of schism”. The excommunication followed Minutella’s suspension a divinis in 2017.

But although the Church now considers him an ex-parish priest and an ex-priest, don Minutella has not stopped making himself heard. He defines the ‘Church’ under the reigning pope as ‘neo-Arian, neo-modernist and neo-Lutheran’, and turning back the accusation of heresy against Pope Francis, he also adds the accusation of apostasy against one he does not consider a legitimate pope. As a consequence, he never refers to a 'Bergoglio Pointificate', only to a 'Bergoglio government'.[It is unfortunate that Minutella takes this position because whether one likes it or not, Bergoglio is the legitimate pope, and no protests will ever change that.]

Clearly, we have here a singular case that is full of controversial implications. Moreover, don Minutella, by his own admission, expresses himself in a rather explosive manner.

Nonetheless, I think that some of his arguments – beyond the manner in which they are expressed – contain elements worthy of consideration. That is why – and also in response to requests by some of my readers – I decided to ask questions of don Minutella.

I confess that I doubted for some time about whether I should make him be heard on my blog. Because his views could easily scandalize many of the faithful by introducing controversy and divisiveness in a church that is already very much divided internally today. But in the end, I thought that it was a duty to bring certain questions to light, however complicated they may be, because they would help to raise consciousness of the situation we are living through.

I do not have to add that interiewing don Minutella does not automatically mean that I share his positions. It only means that I wish to see in the story of this priest from Palermo a case which deserves attention for the basic questions that are central to his case.

Don Minutella, how are you living this phase of your life? In particular, what are your feelings about the pope and the church?
I would say that actually, the agenda for my apostolate has not been affected much by these last theatrical condemnations (two excommunications).
- I am very busy preparing for a meeting of the Catholic resistance on January 26, which will be the third one after Verona and Milan. We will meet again in Verona – Catholics who are tired of the imposture that is under way in the Church, and who wish to gather around some ‘center’ of the Catholic faith that safeguards the deposit of faith against the contamination it has been getting. [More than contamination! It is being sacked and thrown into disarray.]
- I am also very much involved in the catechesis which I have been giving on the Facebook page ‘Radio Domina Nostra’ and on a web platform, ‘TV Domina’.
- I have found time to write books and to pursue a network of spiritual relations with people from all over Italy and even beyond.

In short, I am very busy. I am really indifferent to the excommunications imposed on me by the Bergoglian chruch which is heretical and apostate. I have been able to demonstrate, with potent arguments, that since Bergoglio took over the church, the neo-Arian, neo-modernist and neo-Lutheran heresy has settled in Rome, in the very center and heart of Catholicism, with a true coup d’etat which has made this Bergoglian church untrustworthy and unfaithful.

I would think that you must be suffering much …
I will tell you that I am very much at peace, even if I do carry in my heart much suffering for how things have been going in the church. I would say that I am feeling very strongly what St. Paul called thlipsis, namely, tribulation – not the bitter tribulation from the world, but the tribulation that comes from God, that which arises from the mystery of the Cross and which makes every apostolate fruitful.

It has always been clear to me, from my days in seminary – whether through passionate study of theology or through the interior light that one gets in prayer, that the Church, which is the mystical Body of Christ, is not a primarily human reality, some kind of corporation, of multinational, but a reality of grace in which the Spirit of the Risen Christ resides.

When, two years ago, I started, in a totally unexpected way, to have a presence in the social networks through defending sane Catholic faith, I never imagined that, evidently by heaven’s will, I would become a point of reference for so many people, even if the media ignore me, or even worse, demonize me. I did not imagine that Radio Domina could so rapidly and without concrete means, disseminate in such a popular way my voice – which has always been loud – in defense of the Catholic faith.

Basically, the two Bergoglian excommunications are the response of an establishment which first found itself unprepared and then even initimidated by a priest in the periphery, one without means and without instruments, who seemed to have thrown himself into the media arena, though sure to be quickly persecuted, but precisely because of this, happy to do so in order to defend the simple faith of the People of God.

I therefore started out – totally obviously to numerical ‘success’ – aware, as I said earlier, that I would earn persecution and condemnation. I knew also that the Lord would be near me, and that I would experience not just the presence of the Blessed Virgin, but also that mysterious, indecipherable joy that comes from being persecuted for announcing the truth of the Gospel.

I feel that, in everything, I am dominated by a great filial devotion, a sort of real relationship with the Blessed Virgin whom I always feel near me and who sustains me in moments of trial.

How does a man of faith react to excommunication?
Excommunication, as St. Thomas Aquinas teaches (S.Th. (Suppl., q.21, a.2)) is an act of judgment that the Church adopts imitating the judgment of God. So I ask myself: Perhaps God wishes that I be formally excluded from the community of believers without any confrontation, without dialog, without any sign whatsoever from the merciful Bergoglio of any attempt at hearing my side?

Everyone can know the things I say because they are in the public domain. Where are the persistent heretical statements I am accused of saying? Even St. Thomas says (S.Th. Suppl., q.21, a.4)/, that excommuniation is unjust and unmerited - “causa excommunicationis est indebita, vel quia infertur sententia iuris ordine praetermisso” (for lack of just cause or for failure to observe juridical norms when imposing it).

Moreover, and this is the most important passage, according to St. Thomas, “ excommunicatus non potest excommunicare (Suppl., q.22, a.3). And Bergoglio, because of an invalid election, incurred excommunication latae sententiae according to the Constitution Universi Dominici Gregis. Therefore, if Bergoglio himself is excommunicated, then I am not, thanks be to God. [Minutella appears to be completely wrong here – because that same Constitution says that no matter what violations were committed in the election of the pope, his election remains valid, though the violators may be penalized individually.]

You have been excommunicated – correct me if I’m wrong – for heresy and schism. Can you explain to me simply why you have incurred condemnation for these charges, and what do you think of them?
To tell the truth, and not out of snobbery, as I said at the start, I have not paid particular attention to the contents of the two excommunications which were, precisely, for schism and heresy. I had been anticipating this for some time, but I knew, through arduous and progressive maturation in personal prayer, that these two excommunications, like my suspension a divinis and dismissal from my parish, are invalid because they come from a government, that of Bergoglio, who is himself heretical, schismatic, and even excommunicated himself latae sententiae because of manueveringsthat had resulted first in the resignation of Benedict XVI and then Bergoglio’s placement in that engineered Conclave of 2013, as we know from Cardinal Danneels who can certainly not be called an anti-Bergoglian. On the contrary!

In one of his books, writing about ecclesial communion, Benedict XVI wrote of an exterior excommunication which, despite everything, cannot involve and simply cannot affect the intimate inner sanctum of conscience. And I am relying on this truth. I feel in my heart that the reasons for my condemnation are not just invalid, but that, on the contrary, especially after the publication of Amoris laetitia, it is Bergoglio who us heretical and schismatic because he scandalously broke with uninterrupted Tradition, and therefore, I believe that what I am accused of constitute merit in the eyes of God.

The climate of fear and terror which Bergoglio has introduced into the Church has not completely succeeded in extinguishing prophecy, because the Church is not a business managed in collaboration with transverse alliances - she is the Spouse of Christ, a mystery of grace and of communion. That is why we had the Dubia from the four Cardinals, and then, on the other hand, the denunciations made by the courageous and admirable Mons. Vigano regarding the ugly and filthy case of the American cardinal McCarrick.

Therefore, here and there, some voices have been raised, sometimes too timidly, then here is this don Minutella who is challenged for his excesses. It is like I am a pesky mosquito that has forced the merciful Bergoglio government to take off its mask.

What do you think is the basic theological question here?
The relevant theological question is that the so-called process of change – apparently innocuous and sometimes even fascinating – that Bergoglio has repeatedly declared to be realizing, really masks a more ambitious plan, which is to ‘sell out’ the Church to the way the world thinks. [Not that this was never evident, which it was from the start!]

A few days ago, Eugenio Scalfari praised Bergoglio once again as the pope who, more than anyone else, has opened the Church to modernity. It is a question obviously that is central and perhaps decisive for the survival of Roman Catholicism. Fr. Antonio Spadaro, one of Bergoglio’s spokesmen, insists on this as do the rest of the pope’s entourage: that the pope is carrying out processes of change simply by starting them and allowing these processes to be discussed and considered in the church as pastoral changes.

But the Church is not a parliament, and the pope cannot carry forward his own ideas. Morever, the Church has for some time been on the dock with the world’s modernist tribunal which quickly condemned her [for being against the spirit of the world]. But Bergoglio upset all expectations. His openings and processes of change have appeared to the Sanhedrin of the modernist intelligentsia as an unexpected, though perhaps maneuvered, ‘absolution’ for the church, in their eyes. In short, theyir view is that the Church has finally ceased to be dogmatic and moralistic, and has opened herself to change.

Now, that may all seem wonderful and pleasing to the world. But the price for the Church is too high, and has not been sufficiently estimated. Churches continue to be emptying out. The participation in Sunday Mass in some countries, like France (around 5 percent of declared Catholics), has dropped to alarm levels, and in Italy, it is a miserable 15%, such that the Vatican has announced the scandalous possibility of selling the churches.

Less and less people are attending the Angelus and celebratory events in St. Peter’s, and even the pope’s much heralded Jubilee Year of Mercy, ended up being a remarkable failure. In which we are seeing the realization of St. Pius X’s prophecy regarding any enthusiastic plan to modernize the Church: “When you do that, my friend those who were in the Church will leave her, but those who are outside the Church will not come in”.

Yet significantly, the churches where the traditional Mass is said are increasingly attended, especially by young people. Prof. Stefano Fontana has been able to prove that this modernization project, which also has and perhaps above all, political motivations, is following the reform ideas of Karl Rahner.

Perhaps also, at heart, Bergoglio wants the Catholic Church, which had long been the inespugnabile bulwark and rock of faith, to be liquid like modern society. The images of famous Italian cathedrals transformed into restaurants with bishops serving as waiters, give the sense of an operation that very probably, as I will later explain, has something of the apocalyptic.

You have spoken about the invalidity of Benedict XVI’s resignation and of Francis’s election…
Progress does not mean rupture, but harmonic continuity. And to all this must be added what I consider to to be still the central question – namely, the invalidity of Ratzinger’s resignation and the engineered election of Bergoglio.

This process of the Church opening up to modernity is no longer just a theological question as it was, for example, several years ago when Cardinal Martini pushed for reform processes. It has become a sordid affair, as the irrefutable existence of the Sankt Gallen Mafia proved, according to the statements of Cardinal Danneels, who is in obvious and easy favor with the Bergoglian establishment, of which Danneels himself is proud to be among its most prominent representatives. [Has anyone raised the fact that in Danneels, but to a lesser degree because Danneels has been guilty only of covering up episcopal sex abuse in Belgium and not of sexual offenses himself, Bergoglio has replicated his favoritism of McCarrick despite knowledge of his sexual misconduct?]

It is true that on this point, especially after the first meeting of the Catholic resistance in Verona last June – boycotted by the media, incidentally, though it was attended by 2,000 people – that I expressed myself in tones that, shall we say, went beyond the line, and objections to my excessive declarations came even from traditionalist circles. But in the Gospel, there is space for both John the Apostle (silent and contemplative) as for John the Baptist (who cries out his prophecies).

I often cite to myself St Padre Pio of Pietrelcina as a model of obedience, although his case (formal objections from the Vatican) became a caricature, since he dissented from some modernist orientations introduced by the government of John XXIII, especially on reforming the traditional Mass.

But there was also St. Athanasius who, for opposing the Arian heresy which was powerfully supported by the imperial power at the time, received four excommunications, but persisted in being a lone voice of protest, one against all, and never ceased to make himself heard.

It is embarrassing that the Bergoglian church has excommunicated me twice, and those very followers of his who have called me a new Luther are ecstatic when, wholly unjustified, Bergoglio praises the Father of the Reformatuon as a man of faith and a witness of the Spirit!

That they would liken me to Luther, who sought to demolish Roman Catholicism because I have placed myself up front – like the Chinese youth who tried to stop the tanks at Tienanmen – to defend the CatholIc faith. I think that this is one sign of the great confusion that Bergoglio has introduced into the church.

What do you think of the method applied by the Church in your case?
It is not that I have pressed forward with a position devoid of content. I have two doctorates in theology, I am the author of several books, a lecturer who has been appreciated all over Italy, an expert on the thinking of Von Balthasar. But above all, I have a heart that harbors pastoral charity. In short, I am one of those few (truly few in a desolate setting) who has not fled from the wolves because I have my sheep at heart.

As Bergoglio says, I have the ‘odor of the sheep’, and I am truly from the peripheries, therefore my condemnation at his hands should suggest doubts on the true intentions of someone who says he wants to build bridges not walls, but excommunicates me without even seeking a confrontation. This Stalinist method was not used even with Luther, because the pope at that time sent a cardinal to try to dialog with him. But the Bergoglian church dialogs with the world while it condemns its own children!

I wish to add once more that I have seen Roman Catholicism – not that which is radically traditionalist – but that in which I was raised (post-Vatican II, the Catholicism of Wojtyla and Ratzinger) assaulted with the end of annulling it. I see in this attack the realization of the third secret of Fatima which spoke of apostasy and loss of faith in Rome itself.

Of course, Mons. Lefebvre in the past already shed light on the risks arising from a deviation of the faith as a result of post-Vatian-II pastoral orientations, and while the popes from Paul VI to Benedict XVI defended the validity of Vatican-II, they did not hide the fact – especially not Ratzinger – of the processes whereby radical-progressivist falangists had appropriated Vatican II (I mean those, for example, which led to the publication of the Dutch Catechsim or to the canonization of the theological thought of Karl Rahner, leading representative of dogmatic and ethical relativism).

Obviously, Vatican II had to be weak in its definitions – or perhaps, sad to say, deliberately ambiguous – since it tried to weave together an improbable fabric from neo-modernism (which had been urging procressivist reforms since the time of Pius X) and Tradition.

In any case, Lefebvre was right in many ways. Paradoxically, there is not much difference between his statements objecting to the reigning relativism and the mysterious ‘cancellation’ of the traditional Mass, predicting a collapse of the faith that would be near-apocalyptic – and the declarations of the wayward Paul VI who spoke of the fumes of satan, of a profound winter for the Church [‘instead of the sunlit days’ expected after Vatican II], of widespread dissent, to the point of asking whether the Catholic faith could survive much longer, and in his dialogues with Paul Guitton, he said he thought the end times were probable and that Catholicism would only survive in a small remnant.

In the historical perspective, how would you judge the situation of the Church today?
I grew up in post-Vatican II Italian Catholicism, immersed in the enthusiasm for Wojtyla’s charisma which nonetheless simply hid unresolved issues. I too inherited a faith almost completely stripped of traditional Eucharistic worship and Marian devotion, even if in southern Italy, those are still rather protected. As an adolescent, I was passionate about Catholic identity and I remember that at the classic lyceum (high school) that I attended, which was one of the most advanced in Communist and neo-Marxist thinking, I had a great desire to defend the Church from the assault of neo-modernism.

Meanwhile, as I said, thanks to John Paul II’s charism, the Church was able to correct the post-conciliar shock even if, like an underground river, theological and liturgical progressivism worked steadily to have a monopoly of control in Catholic academic centers and seminaries in preparation for coup de grace at the right moment. By 2005, they could already create the conditions for Bergoglio to become pope, but evidently, something went wrong with their calculations. 2013 became the decisive year: Benedict XVI’s resignation and Bergoglio’s election, [which I believe to be] invalid because it was orchestrated.

In short, a kind of invisible fracture in which, alongside official Church thinking, i.e., the Magisterium, which, reining in Vatican II, sought to weave it into Tradition, a parallel thinking was being constructed, almost like a Frankenstein monster, which, considering Vatican-II as an ecclesial perestroika, was meant to change Catholic identity forever, with a form of odium and rage against everything that came under the description of ‘pre-conciliar”’.

Benedict XVI, a theologian pope, succeeding Wojtyla, sought as far as he could to withstand the impact of what was by then the inevitable clash between two opposing models of the Church – the official Church which was advocating aggiornamento and dialog, which did carry out a drastic liturgical reform, but now sought to be in continuity with Tradition; and the parallel but increasingly powerful parallel ‘church’ which simply wished to change the Church for always, breaking definitively with Tradition.

The lightning that struck St. Peter’s dome the day Benedict XVI announced his resignation suggests the idea of an impact which is something more than just the final confrontation between those two visions for the Church. In fact, it was a prophetic sign because – and it is here that my commitment comes in - the progressivist/masonic blow to the institutional Church corresponds to the realization of the Third Secret of Fatima.

Bergoglio is worse than the Second Vatican Council. If that council, despite all the attempts by the progressivist phalange to appropriate the Council completely, managed to remain in some equilibrium (despite its obvious weakness), with Bergoglio, we have come to scandalous rupture.

From now on, Church time will be called pre- or post-Bergoglio, because what was once pre- or post-conciliar is no longer relevant. Pre-Bergoglian is everything that is Catholic. Post-Bergoglian is the exact opposite.

In the face of this development – which has led to tbe celebration of the neo-modernist, neo-Lutheran and above all, neo-Arian thought (the most harmful, because it denied the divinity of Christ, and was really the matrix of anti-Christian thought, to whom Jesus is simply a great prophet alongside the founders of major religions), I view it as a grace, not a disgrace, that I have been ‘cast out’. I have decided I will remain a Catholic priest, anchored to Tradition, not a hard-hearted Pharisee, to use one of Bergoglio’s elegant expressions, but a priest who, despite the anti-Catholic assault after Vatican-II, has remained anchored to Tradition.

Why, don Minutella, did you decide to get into the arena?
In everything that I have been describing, I saw the inexplicable silence of so many pastors, incapable of taking the side of truth (out of mistaken idolatry for the notion of obedience to the superior, which nonetheless, ought never to be given if the superior is plainly heretical because then he loses any authority or jurisdiction) [but not in the case of the pope, whose authority and jurisdiction only end when he dies or when he resigns, but until then, remains the supreme authority of the Church.] – in short, I have witnessed the slow but inexorable assault on the faith, the triumph of what Von Balthasar called ‘weltelei’ - an obsession with the world – and therefore, I decided to risk all if only to resist, as the New Testament tells us, the imposture that is underway, for which proclamations are not enough – one must actually stand up for what you believe.

It wounds me not a little to observe the betrayal of the Bergoglian church – seemingly happy to have rediscovered dialog with the world but actually increasingly disoriented in its own identity. Thank God Vatican-II was a pastoral council, there were no dogmas (those divine ‘games’ which ultimately show the linear development of his salvific plan), and therefore, no one was bound by the Vatican-II orientations, especially on the matter of inter-religious dialog, the dialog with the world ecumenism and liturgical reform, in which one breathes nothing but delusion and disorientation.

I think I have inaugurated a new form of response, no longer academic (and increasingly isolated when one chooses to remain anchored to Tradition), nor any hidden strategies. So, I have gone into the arena, openly denouncing (as anyone can verify on Radio Domina Nostra) and with little means at my disposition, without allies, without planning, but only with the sheer force of faith, the heretical bizarreries amd the unacceptable excesses of Bergoglian government which, thank God, is not valid, because Benedict XVI remains pope, and because, as I keep saying, Bergoglio’s election is invalid under the provisions of Universi Dominici Gregis.

When Benedict XVI was asked on the plane flight bringing him to Fatima in 2010, he said that not only was the Third Secret of Fatima now incumbent on us, but that we were facing it as it concerns apostasy in the Church. And that is where you can find the meaning of my battle.

I am not a poor dreamer nor an ill-equipped pentecostal leader.
- We are living through a time when Satan has occupied Rome.
- It is what Our Lady said in La Sallette in 1846: “Rome will lose the faith and become the seat of the Anti-Christ”.
- This is the time of the Satanic invasion predicted by Pope Leo XIII at the end of the 19th century.
- This is the time referred to by Our Lady in Fatima who spoke of apostasy.
- This is the time for the full realization of New Testament texts that speak of the end times (in particular 2 Thessalonians).
- This is the time predicted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, no 675, when, in an unusual apocalyptic tone – it speaks of a ’final trial’ for the Church with the advent of an Anti-Christ.

In all this, even because of the suffering I have undergone and for their not irrelevant consequences, I believe I have a mission that I will carry forward with the strength of faith. Above all, attributing great value to the crown of the Holy Rosary. After that, it will be what God wills.

According to you – and again correct me if I am wrong – Masses celebrated with Pope Francis are not valid. Can you explain why not? How do you think Mass should be celebrated in order to be valid?
I think that is the relevant question. I start from an observation. When he was just a cardinal, Ratzinger knew what was contained in the Third Secret of Fatima. But in 2000, he fully supported Papa Wojtyla’s interpretaiton, even saying that everything about the Third Secret had now been revealed. Except he courageously corrected himself when in 2010, as pope, he affirmed that the Church was being confronted with the Third Secret which has not yet all come to pass.

Even as cardinal, in his book-length interview with Vittorio Messori in 1994, when asked about the Third Secret, he had referred to two Biblical texts (Daniel 9 and Matthew 24) which touch on the theme of desolating abomination. [In Daniel 9, the prophet recounts the vision foretold to him by an angel of the ‘desolating abomination’ that awaits Jerusalem because of the transgressions of the Israelites. In Matthew 24, Jesus refers to the ‘desolating abomination’ cited by Daniel when his disciples ask him ‘what sign will there be of your coming and of the end of the age’ – about which, he says, “many will be led into sin; they will betray and hate one another. Many false prophets will arise and deceive many; and because of the increase of evildoing, the love of many will grow cold…” (Mt 24, 10-12).] A citation which Suor Lucia, in an interview about tNow what is the link between this references to desolating abomination and the Third Secret? I think I have found the aswer. The Roman Pontiff is the visible principle of Communion (as St. Augustine called the Church), and it is about this visible principle that the Eucharist is celebrated. The ‘una cum…’ is not just any mention whatsoever but a decisive point.

[‘Una cum…’ comes from the first prayer in the Canon of the Mass, which starts with ‘Te igitur’, in which the celebrant asks God to accept the offerings and sacrifice of the Mass, “in the first place, for the Holy Catholic Church: deign to purify, guard, unite and govern her throughout the world, together with (una cum) thy servant N (the celebrant), our Pope, and N., our bishop; and all orthodox believers of the catholic and apostolic faith”]*.

It is the Church that celebrates the Eucharistic mystery. Now we are in the presence of two popes. Which of them is really the pope, the visible principle of ecclesial communion? Because communion with one who is not the pope, introduces the question of abomination. It is true that there was a time when there were as many as three popes, each claiming be the true one, because logically, there should only be one Successor of Peter.

But what I maintain is that Bergoglio is not just heretical and apostate, but that he is not in fact pope since his election was maneuvered, and he is therefore liable for excommunication. Then how can we possibly think that the Holy Spirit, who is the invisible principle of Communio, would act in contradiction to himself? Any Mass that says ‘una cum’ Bergoglio is therefore invalid for the simple fact that he is not the visible principle, beyond the fact that he is also heretical and apostate. If he were truly pope, even if heretical, the ‘una cum’ would still make sense. But he is not the pope – therefore, every liturgical action in communion with him is an expression of what Mons. Fulton Sheen called “the mystical body of the Anti-Christ”, more specifically, that of the ‘worldly church’ which Sheen defined as the anti-Church.

I make this reference to Sheen because I find his photographic realism in anticipating the present moment very impressive:

---

“The False Prophet will have a religion without a Cross. A religion without a world to come. A religion to destroy all religions.

There will be a counterfeit Church. The Church of Christ will be one church. And the false prophet will create another. The false church will be worldly, ecumenical and global. It will be a federation of churches.

And religions will form some kind of global association. A global parliament of churches. It will be emptied of every divine content and will be the mystical body of the Anti-Christ.

The true Mystical Body of Christ on earth will have its Judas Iscariot who will be the false prophet. Satan will hire him from among our bishops”.

---

You can see that after an ample discussion on the aporias [aporia - irresolvable internal contradiction] of the Bergoglian rule, I have led towards the decisive aspect, which is that Bergoglio was invalidly elected in a managed Conclave, and threfore all the acts of his government are null and void.

Is there still space for Christ’s salvific action outside of who is truly the Successor of Peter? The form and statute of Catholic identity remain in the physical person of Benedict XVI. Munus identifies – and it cannot be shared. Because Jesus said, “You are Peter”, singular, not “You are Peter”, plural. So an abomination is in place. It fulfills the final part of the Third Secret of Fatima, which speaks of a small Catholic remnant – [I see this as] in union with Benedict XVI, in whom the presence of the Lord remains, while the false church, majoritarian and complacent and headed but Bergoglio who became empowerd by a real coup, is completely devoid of it.

And therefore, if millions of faithful can remain deprived of the Mass since Masses are offered in communion with a false pope – well then, this is part of the ‘desolating abomination’, especially with a priesthood that has become flattened, dull and without initiative. The prophecies of Scripture are being realized, as Ratzinger said, and although God’s actions are mysterious to us, perhaps even unacceptable, they are nonetheless salvific.

A few days ago, one faithful asked me: “Don Minutella, how is it possible that God would allow millions in the Catholic world to be deprived of the real Presence of the Lord?” I replied, “My daughter, change the sense of the question: How is it possible that millions of faithful in the world persist in not seeing the signs of the times? That we are living the Apocalypse?”

Of course, if the popes, starting with John XXIII, had obeyed the Blessed Virgin’s request through Suor Lucia to make the Third Secret known, then today the Catholic masses would be all prepared to the current challenge to the Church. On the contrary, the strategies they chose – as for instance, when John XIII who chose to express an inexplicable optimism, saying poor Suor Lucia was a prophet of doom, or when Cardinal Bertone insisted that the Third Secret had been completely revealed and realized, until Benedict XVI said what he said in May 2010 – have had the opposite effect. Because they were mitivated by human concerns, not by obedience to a request from Heaven.

Fatima is truly the intepretative center of everything we are experiencing now. The popes were fearful of scandalizing the Catholic masses, but now that the the Third Secret is materializing through a false church, a false mass, a false pope, then their failure to disclose the entire truth has produced exactly what the Blessed Virgin wished to avoid when she specified that the Third Secret be revealed in 1960. And so, today, confusion, disorientation, doubt and division reign everywhere. It seems at times, as Paul VI said – though he too was incapable of measuring up to the challenge of Fatima – that the Catholic Church is ‘liquefying’.

Some say that because you passed from being critical of this pontificate to disobedience to the visible authorities of the Church, you yourself have place yourself outside the church.
Perhaps the entire line of arguments I presented above answers that question.
- I obey the reigning pope, who resigned because he was constrained. - I obey the official Magisterium, not the parallel one.
- I obey sane Catholic doctrine as expressed in dogmas and magisterial and catechetical pronouncements, but not the bizarre scenarios of a parallel magisterium which has prostituted itself to follow the fashion of the times.

Benedict XVI remains the Roman Pontiff, and I would give my life for him and for Catholic truth. And if one looks up the definition of a religious sect (since Bergoglian media have accused me of founding a new sect), one reads that a sect is born when a group breaks off from the patrimony of official doctrine. In this light, especially with Amoris laetitia, we who dissent remain Catholic, while this false church of Bergoglio, although in the majority and in command, is sectarian and schismatic.

First of all, the idea of being ‘outside’ the Church is not canonical nor giuridical but spiritual. As the apostle John said – and I am thinking specifically of the false neo-Arian church today – “They went out from us, but they were not really of our number; if they had been, they would have remained with us. Their desertion shows that none of them was of our number.” (1 Jn 2,19). [In which Jesus was preaching about anti-Christs, verse 18 being - “Children, it is the last hour;*and just as you heard that the antichrist was coming, so now many antichrists have appeared. Thus we know this is the last hour.”]

All we need is patience and perseverance that the New Testament synthesizes in one decisive word, hypomoné, while awaiting the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Not long before he resigned, Benedict XVI distinguished between believers who live in hypomone and those who overlook it, citing Heb 10,39: “We are not among those who draw back and perish, but among those who have faith and will possess life.”

Don Minutella, what do those who continue to follow and trust you ask of you?
I really do not have followers, and I am not saying this as rhetoric. I remain a poor priest on the peripheries. Those who trust me are those who simply want to remain Catholic, who turn away from the false church of Bergoglio. And who discern and perceive by paying attention to the so-called sensorium Dei [one’s perception of God], that intimate voice which is always difficult to follow, because exposing the truth demands a price, and who therefore place themselves with the right side, even when, as so often happens, it is unpopular.

How do you judge the present situation of the Catholic Church and what do you see in the future? What are youre strongest concerns and your reasons for hope?
Von Balthasar, observing the slow but inexorable decline of Catholicism after Vatican II, spoke about Cordula – who, according to legend, was a virgin who, confronted by barbarians, hid under the snow while her sisters died martyrs in order to keep their virginity. But at dawn, Cordula emerged from hiding and decided to go and meet her executioners herself, thus sealing her faith with martyrdom.

Von Balthasar said that the Church after Vatican II was like Cordula. With the pretext of dialog with the world, it had really gone into hiding and had lost her identity. It is only when this stage will pass – the Catechism calls it ‘the final trial’ – that the Church will come back to shed her light.

As Benedict XVI said, the Fathers represented the Church as like the moon, mysterium lunae, because she reflects the light of Christ. At this time, in the firmament of history, we are witnessing an eclipse of the moon, because the false church, denying the divinity of Jesus, is walking towards a pantheon shared by all religions.

But when the Immaculate Heart of Mary triumphs, the Catholic Church will be resplendent once more, like the full moon, and mankidn will be able onc emore to ook at St. Peter’s as the radiant center of faith in the only Savior of mankind, Jesus Christ, “the same yesterday, tomorrow and always” (Heb 13,8).

In the meantime, I will proceed, knowing that where I walk, the faithful will only see the that I walk in the footsteps of the Blessed Virgin.


*There is a point I have been wanting to to make about the Te igitur 'una cum...' since Bergoglio became pope. Everytime I pray it at Mass, quite apart from the fact that I privately add 'our Emeritus Pope' after 'our Pope', I have a question when I get to the last line, "and all orthodox believers of the catholic and apostolic faith" - because, from all accounts in the past six years, 'our pope' would not seem to be among those 'orthodox believers'.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 09/01/2019 16:44]

If 2018 began with Jorge Bergoglio's defiant defense of Karadima protege Mons. Barros, only to fold up a couple of months later to acknowledge the truth, 2019 has begin for him
with a new scandal right at his doorstep and for which, prima facie, he appears to have not only covered up for an Argentine bishop accused of sexual abuse and other misconduct,
but even created a plum position for him at the Vatican...I first saw the story on LifeNews.

Argentine bishop promoted by Pope Francis
at Vatican accused of abusing seminarians
by Martin Barillas


ROME, January 4, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – An Argentine bishop, who suddenly resigned from his diocese in 2017 citing health reasons only to be appointed to a top Vatican administrative position by Pope Francis, is now under investigation for sexual abuse, the Vatican said in a statement today.

Alessandro Gissoti, interim director of the Vatican Press Office, said today that accusations against Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta emerged over recent months, about a year after Pope Francis created a position for him as “assessor” of the Holy See’s financial administration office.

Bishop Zanchetta resigned from his diocese of Oran in northwest Argentina in 2017, stating that “a health issue prevents me from carrying out the pastoral mission that was entrusted to me.” He added that he wished to relinquish his post as “soon as possible” so as to receive treatment elsewhere. “Please forgive me for having failed or deceived you,” Zanchetta wrote.

After his resignation, Zanchetta spent some time in Spain before being named as an advisor to the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See, which oversees the various real estate and other properties of the papacy. According to a papal spokesman, Zanchetta was appointed to the administrative position because of his professional abilities. During the investigation, Zanchetta will take a leave of absence from his work at the Vatican.

According to Gissoti, at the time of Zanchetta’s resignation, there had been accusations laid against him of authoritarianism and strained relations with members of the clergy. However, no accusations of sexual misdeeds emerged at that time. Bishop Luis Antonio Scozzina, who currently presides over Zanchetta’s former diocese, has several testimonies about Zanchetta that must still be reviewed.

According to El Tribuno, the newspaper of Salta, a province in northern Argentina, three seminarians accused Zanchetta of abuse and later left the seminary. Ten other seminarians were intimidated to remain silent about the abuse they had witnessed, said the report.

According to media reports, some of Zanchetta’s accusers were subjected to his reprisals and were reassigned. “Knowing the gravity of all types of abuse, the bishop is available to anyone who would like to present a complaint to begin the corresponding procedure for canonical justice, while recalling the right of all victims of abuse to seek ordinary justice [through civil authorities]," said a statement from the current bishop of Oran, an impoverished province that borders neighboring Bolivia.

The alleged abuse, according to testimony provided to the papal nunciature in Buenos Aires, occurred at parties organized by Zanchetta where he offered alcohol to his alleged victims. Reportedly, the seminarians were minors at the time. Zanchetta founded a seminary in Oran where six seminarians were admitted. That seminary is due to be closed.

Zanchetta was under a cloud of accusations even before being named bishop of Oran. According to El Tribuno, Zanchetta was accused of abuse of power and financial misdeeds during his time as bishop of Quilmes, a city near Buenos Aires. A number of priests and laity expressed opposition at that time to his nomination to the Oran diocese. It was Pope Francis himself, a fellow Argentine, who elevated Zanchetta to the post at Oran. Zanchetta was one of the first bishops named by the pope, a fellow Argentine.

Zanchetta hastily left behind his flock in Oran without even a customary farewell Mass on July 29, 2017, after returning from the Vatican where he had offered his resignation to Pope Francis. He departed to Corrientes, several hundred miles away, and was the guest of the archbishop there until the pope accepted the resignation three days later.


Argentine bishop named by the pope
to a specially created position
at the Vatican's main 'moneybags' agency
accused of sexual abuse, other misconduct
by Nicole Winfield and Debora Rey


BUENOS AIRES, Argentina, January 4, 2019(AP) — The Vatican has confirmed that an Argentine bishop, who resigned suddenly in 2017 for stated health reasons and then landed a top administrative job at the Holy See, is under preliminary investigation after priests accused him of sexual abuse and other misconduct.

The case could become yet another problem for Pope Francis, who is already battling to gain trust from the Catholic flock over his handling of sex abuse and sexual misconduct, stemming in particular from the scandal of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

In a statement to The Associated Press, Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti stressed that the allegations against Argentine Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta only emerged in recent months, nearly a year after Francis created the new position for him as “assessor” of the Holy See’s office of financial administration. ['Great' debut for Gisotti as papal spokesman - having to tell a bald-faced lie, as Greg Burke had to be doing before him when circustances required. One wonders how Vatican editorial director Tornielli will spin this story.]

At the time of his resignation, Zanchetta had only asked Francis to let him leave the northern Argentine diocese of Oran because he had difficult relations with its priests and was “unable to govern the clergy,” Gisotti said. Pending the preliminary investigation into allegations of sexual abuse underway in Argentina, the 54-year-old Zanchetta will abstain from work at the Vatican, he said.

Francis’s standing would take another hit if he personally intervened to help out a bishop from his native Argentina — finding a job for him during a Vatican hiring hold-down — and the man later turned out to have credible allegations of misconduct against him.

[[Note how understated the comment is considering the gravity of the situation. Can you imagine how Benedict XVI would have been crucified, quartered and drawn if such a thing had been attributed to him? Yet this was just the kind of story that AP, the New York Times and Der Spiegel pooled resources for in 2010 in order to find any story at all that would how that Joseph Ratzinger was himself directly or indirectly involved in a cover-up of a major clerical sex abuse scandal, and thereby force him ro resign.

This is at least the third story implying Bergoglio's direct cover-up for an Argentine bishop or priest so involved - Der Spiegel last year rightly reported on the case in which Bergoglio and his archdiocese spent time and money - commissioning the publication of four volumes to intervene (to no avail, thank God) in the trial of a priest for sexual abuse.

All the stories implicating Bergoglio so far in cover-ups are worse than any of the stories coming out of the USA of bishops who were guilty of the same thing (except perhaps Mahony of LA who deliberately sent one priest out of the country to evade prosecution) - but why is no one outraged the same way they are outraged at the culpable US bishops? When will Bergoglio's misdeeds catch up with him? Mainstream media just seems to keep glossing over them.]

Zanchetta’s hasty departure from Oran on July 29, 2017 was mired in mystery. He didn’t celebrate a farewell Mass, as might be expected, and he issued a cryptic statement saying he had been suffering a “health problem” for some time, had just returned from the Vatican where he presented his resignation to Francis, and needed to leave immediately for treatment.

A statement issued the same day from his vicar general said Zanchetta had already left Oran, a deeply conservative and poor diocese near Argentina’s northern border with Bolivia that Zanchetta had run since Francis made him a bishop in 2013 in one of his first Argentine episcopal appointments. Zanchetta, the vicar said at the time, would be staying in Corrientes — several hundred kilometers (miles) away — as a guest of the archbishop until Francis accepted his resignation.

Often such procedures can take months, but the Vatican announced Francis had accepted it three days later, on Aug. 1.

Zanchetta then disappeared from view until Dec. 19, 2017, when the Vatican announced that he had been named assessor of APSA, the office that manages the Vatican’s vast real estate and other financial holdings. The appointment immediately raised eyebrows, but Zanchetta appeared nevertheless to have settled in well at APSA, and Gisotti said Francis appointed him because he had an established capacity for administrative management.

It wasn’t immediately clear what Zanchetta’s health problems were at the time of his resignation, but by all indications there were grave problems with his leadership and divisions within the diocesan clergy.

“The reason for his resignation is linked to his difficulty in handling relations with the diocesan clergy, some of which were very tense,” Gisotti said. “At the time of his resignation there were accusations against him of authoritarianism, but there were no accusations of sexual abuse against him.”

Zanchetta spent a period of time in Spain before joining APSA.

The allegations were leveled internally in recent months, Gisotti said, and last week the provincial newspaper in Salta, El Tribuno, reported that three priests had brought accusations against him to the Vatican’s ambassador, or nuncio, in Buenos Aires. The newspaper said the priests had lodged accusations of abuse of power, economic abuse and sexual abuse inside the seminary.

It wasn’t immediately clear how Zanchetta responded to the accusations.

The current bishop of Oran, which is in Salta province, is still gathering evidence and testimony and will forward it to the Vatican, Gisotti said. If the allegations are deemed credible, the case will be forwarded to Francis’ special commission for bishops — an ad hoc group of canon lawyers who have been examining allegations of misconduct against bishops.

The issue of sexual abuse within seminaries has risen to the forefront in the scandal over McCarrick, the retired archbishop of Washington. Francis removed McCarrick as a cardinal in July after a U.S. church investigation determined that an allegation that he fondled an altar boy in the 1970s was credible. After the allegation became public, several former seminarians came forward to report they had been abused or harassed by McCarrick and pressured to sleep with him.

Francis became implicated in the McCarrick scandal after a former Vatican ambassador accused him of knowing of McCarrick’s penchant for seminarians, and rehabilitating him anyway from sanctions imposed by Pope Benedict XVI. Francis hasn’t responded.

Zanchetta had opened his own seminary in Oran in 2016 with six seminarians. According to El Tribuno, the St. John XXIII seminary is due to close soon.

The diocese hasn’t responded to questions about Zanchetta’s departure or the status of the investigation against him. It has, however, issued a statement responding to media reports that the priests who lodged complaints against Zanchetta had suffered retaliation. The new bishop of Oran said the priests had been transferred to respond to the pastoral needs of the faithful.

“Knowing the gravity of all types of abuse, the bishop is available to anyone who would like to present a complaint to begin the corresponding procedure for canonical justice, while recalling the right of all victims of abuse to seek ordinary justice,” via civil authorities, the statement said.

OK, that's the story as reported by the AP in muffled tones. George Neumayr, who is, of course, not unbiased about Bergoglio, comments on the Zanchetta case:


A habit he can't break
The pope dings the American bishops for a lack of credibility but
his own takes another hit in the wake of a new Vatican scandal.
by George Neumayr

January 6, 2019

Pope Francis lectured the American bishops this week on their “crisis of credibility” even as his own reputation took another hit in the wake of revelations about one of his protégés.

It turns out that another McCarrick-like predator has been nesting at the Vatican under the patronage of this famously permissive pope. “Pope Francis’s Argentinean Protégé Accused of Sex Abuse,” reported the Daily Beast.

The accused bishop is Gustavo Óscar Zanchetta, a crony of Pope Francis’s from his days as archbishop of Buenos Aires. According to the story, Zanchetta, who has been accused of preying upon priests and seminarians, has long benefited from his friendship with the pope, first in Argentina, where Bergoglio orchestrated his elevation to a top-ranking position within the Argentinean Bishops Conference and then “made his fellow countryman a bishop right after becoming pope in 2013.”

Zanchetta didn’t last long in that post, resigning in 2017 under a mysterious cloud of priestly complaints and claims of poor “health.” He scurried out of Argentina without even saying a “farewell mass,” according to the story, only to turn up shortly thereafter on “Pope Francis’ doorstep in Rome,” where Zanchetta was quickly thrown a new papal plum:

---

By December, Francis had created a position for Zanchetta in the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, known as APSA, according to the Vatican’s own press statements from the time. The office oversees more than 5,000 lavish properties under the Vatican’s Secretariat of the Economy, run by George Pell, now on a leave of absence to fight historical sex-abuse charges in his home country of Australia.

---

Meanwhile, back in the Argentinean diocese Zanchetta had ditched, outraged priests and parishioners stewed over his scandals:

---

There was speculation by El Tribuno newspaper in Salta, Argentina, that he had a drug problem after he allegedly refused to allow police to search his vehicle during a routine traffic stop, citing his role as a high-ranking bishop as the reason he did not have to succumb to the search.

---

Then rumors started to swirl that Zanchetta had paid off three whistle-blowing priests who had apparently reported him to the local papal nuncio, or Vatican representative, in Argentina.

If true, it would have meant that the nuncio would have alerted members of the Roman Curia in Rome. Then one of two things would have happened. As an Argentinean that Francis made a bishop, the pope was either informed of the trouble on his home turf, or protected from it.

The charges laid out in the Argentinean press include
- mismanagement of diocese funds to buy the silence of several young seminarians between the ages of 20 and 25 that Zanchetta had allegedly sexually harassed and tried to convince to enter into a sexual relationship.
- El Tribuno cites “masturbation, groping and psychological pressure” brought on by the powerful bishop against the priests in training.
- One report outlines lavish gifts used to buy the silence of the young seminarians.

It was only after authorities in Argentina opened up a probe into Zanchetta’s misconduct and media coverage mounted that the pope finally cut him loose this week. The Vatican is once again playing dumb, claiming it knew nothing of the allegations against Zanchetta at the time of his new appointment. But who believes that? This is a pontificate that turned a predator known to Francis, Theodore McCarrick, into a papal envoy and dispatched him to the ends of the earth.

The pope’s plum-throwing to perverts is simply a habit he can’t break, not even at the most intense moment of the abuse scandal. A couple of weeks ago the pope vowed that the Church would “never’ conceal predators again. At that very moment, Zanchetta was working down the hall, overseeing the real estate holdings of the Church, even though one of the reasons for his disappearance from his diocese was that he had misused Church funds in furtherance of his misconduct.

What a debacle, but an entirely predictable one, given this pope’s penchant for permissiveness. Had the cardinal electors shown even a modicum of interest in his governance of the Buenos Aires archdiocese before electing him, they would have known of his enormous laxity — his practice of surrounding himself with deviants, promoting them to positions of power and influence, and then visiting some of them in exile after their shocking lapses became too well known.

Papal biographer Paul Vallely has written approvingly of that latter practice,noting Bergoglio’s visits to Jeronimo Jose Podesta, a bishop booted from the Church during Bergoglio’s time in Argentina:

---

“Bergoglio visited the ostracized bishop on his deathbed and gave him the last rites. He then ensured that the man’s widow, Clelia Luro, and her children were provided for — even though she was a feminist as radical as was imaginable on the Catholic spectrum, who used to celebrate mass with her husband.”

---

A pope, whose signature line is “Who am I to judge?,” was embarrassingly ill-equipped to handle a burgeoning abuse scandal.
- Prelates in the mold of McCarrick and Zanchetta saw his musings on “mercy” as a green light to pedal back to power, which Pope Francis was only too happy to hasten.
- He appears to have regarded their predation as a mere peccadillo, if even that. Recall his creepy joshing with McCarrick, to whom he joked that the “bad ones, never die” and that his advanced age was due to the Devil not having McCarrick’s “accommodations ready” yet.

All of this makes his letter to the U.S. bishops this week even more suspicious. The letter is clotted with rationalizing jargon and odd rebukes, to the point where it is obvious that he is not asking for any real action on the abuse scandal but continued passivity.
- As usual, he implies that the few bishops who care are the villains — “finger-pointing” agents of “dispersion and division,” as if faked-up collegial unity is a greater priority than robust truth-telling in the midst of a scandal on this scale.
- The letter is notable only for its windiness and emptiness.
- It of course contains no acknowledgment of the root cause of the crisis — decades of homosexual infiltration at the highest levels of the Church and throughout the priesthood — and much blather about the “cure being worse than the disease,” which is nothing more than a plea for business as usual.
- He goes on and on about “paradigmatic” shifts and so forth but never mentions the most obvious solutions to ending predation and restoring credibility to the Church — such as, stop promoting predators at the Vatican.


John Allen's commentary is, of course, as muffled as the AP piece. But while it acknowledges all the 'questionable' aspects of the Zanchetta case, there is no hint of censure at all for the possible moral turpitude of the man who heads the Catholic Church today... What will it take for mainstream journalists to start speaking the unpleasant truth about this pope?

Pope's double ‘own goal’
in Zanchetta case
by John L. Allen Jr.

January 6, 2019

ROME – In many ways 2018 was a tough year for Pope Francis with the explosion of fresh clerical abuse scandals in several parts of the world. And in light of news that an Argentine bishop working at the Vatican at Francis’s personal invitation has been accused of sexual abuse, 2019 doesn’t appear to be starting off any easier.

In fact, the case of Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta threatens to become a rare double “own goal” for the pontiff, creating self-inflicted wounds on two critically important reform fronts: the abuse crisis, and the Vatican’s pledge of greater financial transparency and accountability.

The Zanchetta saga began in July 2013, when Francis nominated him the bishop of Orán in the northern part of Argentina. Three years later, Zanchetta left the diocese, citing problems of health that didn’t allow him to deliver adequate pastoral care to such a geographically dispersed territory.

Francis accepted Zanchetta’s resignation just three days after it was offered in August 2017, suggesting to many observers there was some perceived rush to get him out of Orán. There were whispers of some serious problems between Zanchetta and his clergy, but that’s about as far as it went in terms of explaining what had gone wrong.

For the 18 months after leaving the diocese Zanchetta was basically a man without a country, flying below radar with no clear role or assignment. Then in December 2017, the Vatican announced that Francis had appointed his fellow Argentine to a new role of “assessor” at the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA), the department that oversees the bulk of the Vatican’s financial assets.

Because APSA had never had an assessor before, it was unclear at the time precisely what Zanchetta would be doing – and, frankly, it remains a bit unclear today. Italians assumed the appointment was what’s known colloquially as a parcheggio, or “parking spot,” until some better idea of what to do with Zanchetta came along.

Recently, local media in Argentina has reported that three priests have lodged charges of abuse of power, economic abuse and sexual abuse at the seminary in Orán against Zanchetta with the Vatican’s nuncio, or ambassador, in the country.

The Vatican’s new spokesman, Alessandro Gisotti, released a statement on Friday saying that the charges have only emerged in recent months, clearly implying that Francis did not know about them when he named Zanchetta to his Vatican role.

Gisotti also said that the 54-year-old Zanchetta would not perform any Vatican duties while an investigation is underway.

Here’s why the Zanchetta mess could create perceptions of two “own goals,” meaning kicking the ball into your own net, by the pontiff.

First, 2019 shapes up a make-or-break year for Francis on the clerical abuse scandals. He’s coming off a year that featured a massive crisis in Chile, the Pennsylvania grand jury report, the scandals surrounding ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the bombshell accusations by a former papal envoy in the U.S. that Francis himself was in on the cover-up.

The pope is also looking ahead to a critical Feb. 21-24 summit on the abuse crisis for presidents of bishops’ conferences around the world, which the pope’s allies have touted privately as an opportunity for Francis to regain the initiative.
- If that meeting unfolds under the cloud of perceptions that Francis provided Vatican cover for a fellow Argentine running away from abuse allegations, whether knowingly or not, it could undermine his efforts to turn a corner.
- Rather than extolling the virtues of whatever initiatives the bishops discuss, the pope’s brand-new communications team could spend all their time trying to put out fires related to the Zanchetta affair.

The Zanchetta case also raises questions about the seriousness of the pope’s financial reforms, at a time when most observers had already concluded that Francis, for all intents and purposes, has given up.
- Although public attention when it comes to Vatican finances usually focuses on the Institute for the Works of Religion, the so-called “Vatican bank,” insiders know that’s always been a red herring.
- The clean-up operation at the bank began under Pope emeritus Benedict XVI, and in any event, relatively little of the roughly $6 billion in assets controlled by the bank belongs to the Vatican.
- Most of it belongs to religious orders, especially nuns, who need to transfer money easily around the world, along with dioceses and other Catholic organizations.

Instead, APSA is the Vatican’s real financial colossus, controlling both its stock and bond investment portfolio as well as its extensive real estate holdings.
- All in all, the total pool of assets administered by APSA is estimated at $16 to $18 billion, and that’s probably low given chronic under-valuing of property over the years. (Because the Vatican doesn’t intend to sell most of its properties, it doesn’t have them assessed at real market value.)

Insiders, therefore, have known for a long time that the real action in terms of financial reform has to be at APSA, and so far there’s been little indication of fundamental change. For sure, the pope appointing an “assessor” to APSA mostly to get him out of hot water back home doesn’t really come off as a stirring statement of commitment to change.

On both clerical abuse and financial reform, therefore, Francis is arguably opening 2019 already down 0-2, scoring twice for the other team (and on the same play, no less). The good news for the pontiff is that it’s still early, and the year to come will afford plenty of chances to get back in the game. [HOW???? He has not scored anything at all on the sex abuse crisis; his financial reform obviously is sparing APSA; and he is scoring for the other side. For a change, why does not Allen or some other Vaticanista try to write an article now about the good things Bergoglio has done as pope - if anyone can do that!]

Francis's Argentine McCarrick
lives at Casa Santa Marta
by Fred Martinez

January 6, 2018

Associated Press confirmed today that Pope Francis brought to the Vatican a McCarrick-like Argentine bishop, Gustavo Zanchetta, for whom he "created" a completely unprecedented special "position... as 'assessor' of the Holy See's office of financial administration."

Francis obviously considered the Argentine bishop a very special part of his Vatican because: "The role of councilor [also called 'assessor' for Zanchetta] of this dicastery, the central body in the administration of the Vatican, is completely unprecedented" according to Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, as has been the case with some of the Pope's closest collaborators such as ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, AP reported that there are "allegations of sexual abuse" against Zanchetta.
(AP, "Vatican: Argentine bishop at Holy See under investigation," January 4, 2019)

The Latin American website Adoracion y Liberacion reported 6 days ago that Francis appointed Zanchetta a bishop in 2013 despite the fact he "already knew about his background or record (antecedente)... Francis had been personally notified of all this. And despite that, he made the appointment."

The website said the accused Argentinean bishop lives in Casa Santa Marta where Francis lives which, again, shows he is special to the Pope. [Not necessarily. Casa Santa Marta is a hotel, and Zanchetta could be one of those 'permanent' guests like the pope is. Unless he occupies a room in the papal suite, which I don't think anyone is claiming.]

Adoracion y Liberacion reported:

---

"Francis was finally forced to remove Zanchetta [as bishop of the diocese], after the denunciations came from the same clergy, who accused him of different types of abuse, including sexual abuse within the seminary... after the removal, someone 'close to the Pope' would have interceded for Zanchetta, so the complainants now suffer the burden of his accusation... [meanwhile] Zanchetta still occupies his position within... the Vatican."
(Adoracion y Liberacion, "Exclusive: The embarrassing journey of Francisco with Monsignor Zanchetta is confirmed with a great scandal," December 30, 2018)

---

Moreover, Vatican expert Sandro Magister thinks that the alleged predator bishop might be part of the Vatican financial corruption:

---

"At the time of Zanchetta's desertion [accepted by the pope within 3 days as a 'resignation'], the Argentine media described the disastrous state in which Zanchetta had left the diocese of Oran from an administrative perspective, on a par with what happened in the diocese of which he was previously vicar, that of Quilmes. Moreover, news went around of his refusal, asserting his 'status as bishop,' of a search of his vehicle by the police, who were looking for drugs."

---

"This is the man whom Francis has entrusted such an important role in the curia, in close contact with the president of APSA, Cardinal Domenico Calcagno, who meets regularly with the pope and is a tenacious opponent of drastic reorganization of the Vatican finances attempted without success by Cardinal George Pell, prefect of the secretariat for the economy." (Catholic Citizen.org, "Vatican without Peace. Money, Sex, and an LGBT Crèche," December 31, 2017)

Remember Jorge Bergoglio's boast that he never had any problem about clerical sex abuse in Argentina? And here we are with all these stories that appear to be both credible and plausible in which he himself was involved as an enabler or someone who covered up egregiously for sex offender priests. Here's a new story from Argentina that may or may not involve him (the two accused monks
came from the Buenos Aires Archdiocese in 1996, at a time when Bergoglio was auxiliary archbishop [1992-1997]).

Argentine archbishop temporarily closes
monastery after monks arrested
on sexual abuse charges


Buenos Aires, Argentina, Jan 4, 2019 (CNA/ACIPrensa).- Archbishop Marcelo Daniel Colombo of Mendoza, Argentina has temporarily closed the Christ at Prayer Monastery in the town of Tupungato, after two of the community’s founding monks were arrested on sexual abuse charges.

“Without pre-judging the guilt of these priests, which is being evaluated by the canonical and state criminal justice system, it becomes necessary for us, right now, to consider the way to continue this experience of religious life in this context,” the archbishop said in a statement.

On December 27, a police delegation entered the monastery and arrested Fr. Diego Roque and Fr. Oscar Portillo, two priests from Buenos Aires who have led the monastery since 1996.

The priests are accused of sexual abuse, including abuse of a minor, and abuse of authority between 2009 and 2015. They allegedly abused a man who tried to enter the monastery.

Both priests maintain their innocence. They will remain in custody while the facts of the case are being determined.

In his statement, Archbishop Colombo said that the monastery was left with only four brothers and authorities. As a result, he is closing the monastery until further notice.

“The youngest brothers, who very recently entered will return to their family homes and will continue to be spiritually accompanied in their vocational search,” the archbishop said.

The two older members, “one professed and the other a novice, already a priest, will from now on live in a parish community to be designated and will be able to continue discerning their vocational call in a climate of spiritual recollection.”

As for the administration and management of the monastery, Archbishop Colombo said that it will be the direct responsibility of the Archdiocese of Mendoza in the person of Fr. Aldo Vallone, who will serve as Diocesan Moderator of the Christ at Prayer Monastery.

“Sharing the pain that these events cause us, I ask you to accompany us with your prayers,” the archbishop said. “I know of many people who love the Monastery…I ask them to try to understand the unprecedented situation this poses and the indispensable prudential action which is expected of the Church in cases like these.”

Colombo asked for prayers for all those who have suffered abuse. He and called on Our Lady of the Rosary to accompany the community.

I thought the most amazing news in the past three days was this story which, surprisingly, none of the major Catholic commentators and Catholic media appear to have picked up.

ISLAMABAD, jANUARY 7, 2019 (AsiaNews/Agencies) – More than 500 Pakistani Islamic clerics signed the "Islamabad Declaration" against Islamic terrorism, violence committed in the name of religion, and fatwas (edicts) issued indiscriminately by radical ulema.

The declaration was signed yesterday in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, during the "Seerat-e-Rehmat-ul-Alameen (SAW) Conference", organised under the auspices of the Pakistani Ulema Council (PUC).

The initiative represents a turning point in the history of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, [not just in Pakistan's history but in the annals of contemporary Islam!] which has been marked by attacks against minorities such as Christians as well as “infidel" Islamic sects like the Ahmadis and Shias.

The document also contains a special reference to Asia Masih, better known as Asia Bibi, a Christian mother initially sentenced to death on blasphemy charges but later acquitted after nine years in prison. Her case, which is again under review following a campaign by radicals, must be heard with absolute "priority", the declaration says.

The document consists of seven points and contains elements relevant to religious freedom.

In point 1, the resolution condemns murders committed "on the pretext of religious belief", noting that this "is against the teachings of Islam".

The declaration goes on to say (point 2) that no religious leader has the right to criticise the prophets, and (point 3) no Islamic sect must be declared "infidel". Hence, no Muslim or non-Muslim can be deemed worthy of extrajudicial killing. All believers, whatever their religion or sect, have the constitutional right to live in the country following their cultural and religious norms.

From this comes (point 4) the right for religious groups to organise autonomously with the consent of local administrations. Any material (books, pamphlets, audio) that incites religious hatred should be banned (point 5).

The "Islamabad Declaration" recognises that Pakistan is a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country; therefore, (point 6) "it is the responsibility of the government to ensure protection of life and property of non-Muslims living in Pakistan.” Similarly, the government must deal firmly with anyone who threaten the sacred places of non-Muslims living in Pakistan.

The last point (7) the government must implement the National Action Plan against extremism.

To counter violence, the clerics have decreed that 2019 will be the year "to annihilate terrorism, extremism and sectarian violence from Pakistan."

Finally, they deplore fatwas against public servants noting that any adventurism by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in matters of religious freedom cannot be tolerated.

The resolution states that non-Muslims living in Pakistan must enjoy the same rights as everyone else and that the government of Pakistan must protect the basic rights of minorities.


What prompted this sudden burst of enlightenment? This goes far beyond the anodyne platitudes of A COMMON WORD, the manifesto issued by more than 100 Muslim moderate intellectuals back in 2006, responding to Benedict XVI's invitation for a meaningful Christian-Muslim dialog in his controversial Regensburg lecture.

It's just too bad AsiaNews has no follow-up of this news - because without further developments, e.g., the reaction of the Pakistnai government to the Declaration, the reaction of other Muslim groups outside the Pakistani Ulema Council, the background for this totally unexpected and unprecedented declaration, what significance and concrete consequences it has for the permanent Islamic jihad, etc. - it seems difficult to believe this has really happened!

The Man of the Shroud was
crucified and pierced on his left side
New research shows the Shroud shows fractures compatible with crucifixion
and that its bloodstains are absolutely realistic and identify the point
where the side of the Lord was pierced with a lance.
Another study further discredits a 1988 radiocarbon dating
that showed the Shroud dates only to the Middle Ages.
Translated from

January 4, 2019

The preview of the results of new research on the Shroud of Turin was presented in La Stampa on January 2, 2019. The study bears the authoritative names of Flilippo Marchisio, head of radiology at Rivoli hospital, and Pier Luigi Balma Bollone, celebrated sindonologist, who was for many years professor of legal medicine at the University of Torino and is the current director of the Turin-based International Center for Sindonology.

The new investigation took off from the fact that the Man of the Shroud appears to have the right arm six centimeters longer than the left. The authors attribute this discrepancy to a fracture in the left elbow or a dislocation of the left shoulder, both compatible with crucifixion, and also takes account of the forced bedndng of the arms to overcome rigor mortis at the time the Body was wrapped in the shroud before burial.

In the Shroud as it is today, the upper part of the arms and the shoulders are not visible because of the damage caused by a fire in 1532, when the Shroud was kept in the chapel of the Castle of Chambery, belonging to the Duchy of Savoy. Marchisio used CAT (computed axial tomography) on a 32-year-old volunteer with a physique similar to the Man of the Shroud in order to reconstruct the missing body parts through a super-imposition of images.

“CAT allows a perfect reproduction of the body’s volumetrics, allowing for the reconstruction of missing parts without the subjectivity inherent in an artistic recreation,” Marchisio explained. “The resulting image underscored the inconsistency of the position of the shoulders and hands, a further element that proves the hypothesis that the Man of the Shroud was indeed crucified”.

The researchers confirmed that the bloodstians on the Shroud are ‘absolutely realistic’ and identified the exact point at which a lance pierced the left ribcage. Thus, they also identified which internal organs were injured by that lance thrust “which released a collection of blood in the pleural cavity”. Marchisio added that “the blood collected mainly to the right, channeled from the canal formed by the arm adjoining the body up to the elbow, and then collected to form a band of blood in the lumbar region, and that the anatomical relationships revealed by the reconstruction of the missing parts confirm this”.

Marchisio said it is yet another demonstration of the extraordinary consistency of the evidence found in the Shroud: “The more we study the Shroud, the more surprises it has in store for us”.

Also soon to be publiahed is another study by Balma Bollone and Grazia Mattutino, a criminologist at Turin’s Institutte of Legal Medicine who is a veteran of investigating important criminal cases. The study involves some threads from the Shroud, among those that were taken during the carbon-dating investigations in 1988.

Analysis of these threads identified particles of gold, silver and lead, apparently due to the Shroud’s contact with the precious reliquary that housed it. Also identified was an alga which may have come from the water used to put out the fire in Chambery, as well as dust mites, pollen and contaminants from cars. For centuries, the Shroud had been kept in a box that was not watertight. Its periodic public displays have also contributed to modern contaminants.

Precisely because of all the vicissitudes to which the Shroud had been subjected, Sindonologists do not consider the 1988 radiocarbon datings as valid, which showed that the Shroud only dates to the Middle Ages. The Shroud custodians explain that the area from which the threads were taken was defective: a corner that was very contaminated and had also been restored.

Biochemicist Alan D. Adler, member of the Commission for the Conservation of the Shroud, analyzed 15 fibers from the sample used for the radiocardon dating, comparing it with 19 fibers from various other areas of the Shroud, and a found a degree of contamination in the 1988 samples that proves they are not representative of the entire Shroud.

Moreover, because the entire surface of any fabric allows interaction with the immediate environment, it is not possible to find any zone that would be free of such contamination. That is why Beta Analystic, one of the world’s most important laboratories for radiocarbon dating, is very prudent in its analysis of fabrics.

On its site, it says: “Beta Analytic does not carry out any radiocarbon dating unless it is part of a multi-disciplinary study… The lab does not carryout dating of fabrics or other objects of great or inestimable value, unless the sample is sent and paid for by a state agency, by a museum, or by any other recognized institution studying such materials as part of a multi-disciplinary research process. The material can also be sent through a professional archeologist who must attest that the sample is suitable for radiocarbon dating… Samples taken from a fabric that has been treated with additives or preservatives will generate a false radiocarbon dating”.

Thus, investigations of the Shroud must alway be carried out in a mutli-disciplinary context precisely because of the complexity of this unique object which defies science through the mystery of the human figure impressed on it. An imprint that is moving by its dramatic veracity.

Pope Francis: from 'innocent' to 'guilty'?
Bad news from his homeland, Argentina

January 9, 2019

Tough times for the new squad of the pope’s press agents. The first public statement that Alessandro Gisotti, the new director of the Vatican press office, had to make after embarking on his role concerns the case of an Argentine bishop who is in danger of smashing to smithereens the strategy that Francis has adopted for addressing the question of sexual abuse committed by ministers of the Church.

It is the strategy that also inspired the letter that the pope sent at the new year to the bishops of the United States whom he ordered to gather for spiritual exercises in Chicago January 2-9, in view of the summit that will bring to Rome from February 21 to 24 the presidents of all the episcopal conferences of the world.

In this letter as well, in fact, as he had previously done with the bishops of Chile, Francis places himself on the side of the powerless and the victims of power, meaning the innocent “people of God,” against the clerical caste that indeed abuses sex, but in his judgment abuses more than anything else and first of all nothing other than “power.”
- It doesn’t matter that in the case of Chile, Francis himself was the one who, to the very end and against all the evidence, defended the innocence of bishops whom he finally had to acknowledge as being guilty.
- Nor does it matter that in the case of the United States he stands accused of having given cover and honors to a cardinal, Theodore McCarrick, in spite of knowing about his reprehensible homosexual activity.
- In both cases Francis absolved himself either by blaming those who had advised him badly or by refusing to respond to those who - like former nuncio in the United States Carlo Maria Viganò - personally called him to account.
- And for the February summit on the abuse crisis, he was getting ready to reproduce this typically populist dynamic, with himself in the guise of purifier of a clerical caste soiled by power. [His real problem is that he tends to view events in the Present Crisis not as events that need urgent concrete correction, but primarily as opportunities to spin them in his favor, even when the events are so patently negative that any attempted spin is sheer hypocrisy and falsehood.]

But now that the case of Argentine bishop Gustavo Óscar Zanchetta has exploded, all of that becomes more difficult for the pope.

The case was brought up on Christmas Day by the Argentine newspaper El Tribuno, breaking the news that three priests of the diocese of Orán had reported their bishop, Zanchetta, to the apostolic nuncio for sexual abuse against a dozen seminarians, and also that for this reason, on August 1 of 2017, the pope had removed the bishop from the diocese.

In replying on January 4 to this news and to the resulting questions from journalists, Gisotti, the new Vatican spokesman, stated that Zanchetta “was not removed,” but that “it was he who resigned”; that the accusations of sexual abuse “go back to this autumn” and not before; that the results of the investigation underway in Argentina “have yet to arrive at the congregation for bishops”; and that in any case “during the preliminary investigation Bishop Zanchetta will abstain from the work” that he currently performs at the Vatican, as assessor for the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See.

This suspension from work imposed on Zanchetta indicates that the Vatican considers the sex abuse allegations against Zanchetta 'serious'. But even leaving aside the date on which these accusations are said to have been forwarded to the competent ecclesiastical authorities - in autumn of 2018 according to the Vatican press office, in 2015 according to what was reconfirmed by El Tribuno- it is the entire affair concerning this bishop that puts the behavior of Pope Francis in a bad light.

When Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected successor of Peter, Zanchetta was an ordinary priest Who was however well known to the new pope, in that for years he had been executive undersecretary of the Argentine episcopal conference headed by Bergoglio himself. Known and also appreciated, to the point that Zanchetta was one of the very first Argentines whom the new pope promoted as bishop, on his own initiative, bypassing all canonical procedure, on July 23, 2013, at the head of the diocese of Orán, in the north of the country.

But Zanchetta didn’t last long as bishop of Orán. Because of “very strained relations with the priests of the diocese,” which earned him “accusations of authoritarianism” and made manifest his “inability to govern,” the Holy See now recognizes, according to the statements from Gisotti.

The fact is that on July 29, 2017, Zanchetta suddenly disappeared. Without any farewell Mass and without any goodbye to his priests and faithful. He only made it known, from an unspecified location, that he had health problems that needed urgent care elsewhere and that he had just returned to Rome, where he had placed his mandate back in the hands of Pope Francis. Who very promptly, on August 1, accepted his resignation.

Zanchetta was for a brief time the guest of the bishop of the diocese of Corrientes, 500 miles to the south, Andrés Stanovnik, the same one who had ordained him. Only to reappear in Spain, in Madrid, apparently in good health.

Curiously, Madris was also the destination to which Francis in 2015 had directed the Chilean bishop Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid - before promoting him as bishop of Osorno against the opinion of the higher-ups of the Chilean Church and of the nunciature - for a month of spiritual exercises preached by the famous Spanish Jesuit Germán Arana, one of the pope’s most influential advisors in many episcopal appointments, and in this case a tenacious defender of the innocence of Barros, who had already been hit with very weighty accusations of sexual abuse.

The fact is that Zanchetta’s trip to Madrid was also the prelude to his promotion by Bergoglio, who on December 19, 2017 called him to the Vatican to do nothing less than manage the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, APSA, in the new and tailor-made role of “assessor.”

The APSA is the true financial mainstay of the Vatican administration. In addition to possessing substantial liquid and illiquid assets, it plays a role that is comparable to that of a central bank, so much so that the financial reorganization of the Holy See that Francis entrusted at the beginning of his pontificate to Australian cardinal George Pell had none other than the APSA at the heart of the reform.

But then Pell was forced to abandon the undertaking, his reform could not materialize, and APSA became the landing place for characters devoid of administrative competence, who failed in their previous roles, but whom Bergoglio wanted to keep close by, his friends and proteges.

For example, Archbishop Nunzio Galantino, formerly the controversial secretary general of the Italian episcopal conference, whom he named to head the APSA.

When Zanchetta left Orán, the Argentine media described the financial disorder in which he had left the diocese. But that apparently had no effect on his promotion to the APSA “in consideration of his administrative managerial capacity,” as pontifical spokesman Gisotti made a point of saying in his statement of last January 4, before asserting that in any case “no accusation of sexual abuse had emerged at the time of [his] appointment as assessor.”

Whether it is true or not that the accusations instead date back to 2015, as reiterated by the Argentine press, the fact remains that the treatment reserved by Pope Francis for Zanchetta is astonishing, for the incredible lack of “discernment” in evaluating the person, repeatedly promoted to prominent positions in spite of his evident unreliability.

Not an isolated case. But one that suffices on its own to contradict the postulate of the unfamiliarity and innocence of Pope Francis in the face of the abuses of power, rather than of sex as he puts it, by the clerical caste.

The risk is that the summit scheduled at the Vatican from February 21-24 - in terms of how it will reverberate in public opinion - may find Bergoglio not in the role of unspotted guide, but himself as well in the dock of those guilty of having tolerated and covered up abuse. [As I said earlier, what Bergoglio has done to cover up and proactively defend bishops and priests under him who face credible charges of sexual abuse are far worse than any similar cover-up/defense by US bishops other than the infamous Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles, still riding high in Bergoglio's favor despite his documented offenses (sins as wll as crimes) in the matter of protecting subordinates facing sexual abuse charges. While Mahony, unlike McCarrick, has not been accused ot sexual misconduct himself, his feats of cover-up, once they were made known, were so egregious that he ought to have merited similar sanctions as McCarrick... I would expect DER SPIEGEL to follow up its expose last year of a major Bergoglio cover-up with an investigation of the Zanchetta case.]


The Zanchetta situation:
A microcosm of the Present Crisis
The allegations against the pope's Argentine protege apparently involve misrule, bad blood,
and sexual impropriety connected with the seminary he personally founded during his tenure in Orán
by Christopher R. Altieri

January 4, 2019

The story of Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, emeritus of Orán, Argentina — broken Friday by Nicole Winfield for the Associated Press — might be no more than just plain, run-of-the-mill bad. Or it could be the tip of a continent-sized iceberg of a scandal. It is certainly a world-in-a-nutshell instance of almost everything sick and broken within the Church.

Zanchetta is currently under investigation for alleged sexual misconduct. The investigation is being conducted by the current bishop of Orán, Luis Antonio Scozzina, and is in the preliminary stages.
- That we are only hearing of this now would be appalling on a good day.
- That it comes in the midst of a critical worldwide failure of leadership in the Church, with systematic occultation of abuse near the heart of the crisis, and in the wake of promises of transparency repeated ad nauseam, is beyond execration.

The allegations against Zanchetta apparently involve misrule, bad blood, and sexual impropriety connected with the seminary Zanchetta personally founded during his tenure in Orán.
- There are also reports of retaliation against the priests who brought the allegations, setting once again in high relief the conspicuous and intolerable absence of protections for whistleblowers in the Church.

The Press Office of the Holy See confirmed the bones of the report for the Associated Press, and released the interim Press Office Director, Alessandro Gisotti’s remarks on the matter in an email blast to accredited journalists.

When Pope Francis accepted Zanchetta’s resignation from the See of Orán on August 1, 2017, the Press Office of the Holy See noted the development in the daily bulletin, but gave no reason for the move. Zanchetta issued his own statement citing health problems as his reason for resigning.

Now, the Press Office claims his resignation was over problems of governance. “The reason for [Zanchetta’s] resignation is tied to his difficulty in managing relations with the diocesan clergy and to very tense relations with the priests of the diocese,” Gisotti’s statement reads. “At the time of his resignation, there had been accusations of authoritarianism against [Zanchetta], but there had been no accusation of sexual abuse against him,” Gisotti’s statement continued. “The problem that emerged then was linked to the inability to govern the clergy.”

Those two things — serious governance problems and serious health problems — are not mutually exclusive, nor are they incompatible with a simmering moral crisis ready to become a scandal.

There was no reason — no good one, anyway — not to say why Zanchetta was resigning at the time he resigned, along with as much detail as possible regarding the specific kinds of tension there were between him and the diocesan clergy.

Pope Francis appointed Zanchetta to the diocese of Oran early in the first year of his reign. When an early appointment in one’s native country doesn’t work out, it is an embarrassment, but everyone understands these things happen.

After Zanchetta had been in Spain for 3 months, Francis then created a special position for Zanchetta within the powerful department of the Roman Curia, the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA), that manages the Vatican’s real estate and some of the Vatican’s liquid assets.

The sudden and unexpected reappearance of the Argentine prelate, so soon after his sudden and unexpected disappearance, and in a position created specially for him, did raise eyebrows at the time. Gisotti explained in his statement Friday that Pope Fancis did not want Zanchetta’s administrative talents to go to waste.

“After the period in Spain, in consideration of his administrative management capacity, he was appointed Assessor of the APSA (a position for which no responsibility of governance in the dicastery is foreseen).”

So, Zanchetta was such a good administrator — albeit a poor governor — that Pope Francis could not spare him, even with his health in such a fragile state — and the job for which Francis needed him was a tailor-made sinecure in a department already dealing with several scandals. What if they’d just told the whole truth, right from the start? [Then this would not be the Bergoglio Pontificate which habitually operates on lies and deception, on scamming and a prestifigitatory shell game.]

 
Lay collaboration and episcopal authority
Not a jot or tittle of episcopal authority will be damaged
if American bishops collaborate with expert lay people
who understand the boundaries of lay competence.
by George Weigel

January 9, 2019

The Vatican is a hotbed of rumor, gossip, and speculation at the best of times — and these times are not those times. The Roman atmosphere at the beginning of 2019 is typically fetid and sometimes poisonous, with a lot of misinformation and disinformation floating around.

That smog of fallacy and fiction could damage February’s global gathering of bishops, called by the Pope to address the abuse crisis that is impeding the Church’s evangelical mission virtually everywhere.

Great expectations surround that meeting; those expectations should be lowered. In four days, the presidents of over 100 bishops conferences and the leaders of a dysfunctional Roman Curia are not going to devise a universal template for the reform of the priesthood and the episcopate. [/n]

What the February meeting can do is set a broad agenda for reform, beginning with a ringing affirmation of the Church’s perennial teaching on chastity as the integrity of love. In a diverse world Church, that teaching applies in every ecclesial situation. And it is the baseline of any authentically Catholic response to the abuse crisis.

What the February meeting must not do is make matters worse by swallowing, and then propagating, some of the fairy tales circulating in Rome about the Church in the United States: like the noxious fiction that the U.S. bishops have overreacted to what is essentially a media-created crisis.

To be sure, inept or hostile journalists too often fail to report the significant reform measures the U.S. bishops have implemented since 2002 and the positive effects of those reforms. But there is still much reform work to be done in the American Church; most U.S. bishops know that; and for Rome to blame the Church’s current crisis of confidence on the media is a reflexive dodge and an obstacle to genuine reform.

Then there’s the “Protestantization” fairy tale. In Roman circles, it’s said that panicky U.S. bishops cobbled together reform proposals that would gravely diminish episcopal authority by handing great chunks of that authority to lay people — a “Protestantizing” move, as it’s called along the Tiber. To make matters worse, some in Rome blame this alleged “Protestantizing” on what are deemed “too many” converts in the U.S. Church today.

How to begin unraveling this nonsense?

First, it is beyond bizarre for anyone to complain about too many converts in a Church called by the Pope to live “permanently in mission,” radiating “the joy of the Gospel.” In real-world 2019, American adults are baptized or enter into full communion with the Catholic Church because they believe the Catholic Church knows what it is, teaches the truth, and offers them Christ himself in the sacraments. They don’t “convert” to change the Church’s self-understanding.

Second, how does it diminish their authority for bishops to collaborate with orthodox, capable lay people in addressing the current crisis in both its dimensions: clerical sexual abuse and episcopal failure in addressing that abuse?

What the U.S. bishops were prepared to do in November, before an inappropriate Vatican intervention prevented it, was to create a national body of competent lay people to receive allegations of episcopal malfeasance, assess them by a carefully crafted set of standards and report credible allegations to the appropriate Church authorities. Period. Such a process would not only preserve the bishops’ authority; it would enhance it.

In any effective organization, the leader with ultimate responsibility engages the expertise of others in order to do what only he or she can do: make good final decisions. Not a jot or tittle of episcopal authority will be damaged by the American bishops collaborating with expert lay people who understand the boundaries of lay competence. On the contrary, that collaboration is essential if the bishops — and the Vatican — are going to recover the credibility necessary to do the jobs that only bishops and the Vatican can do in reforming the priesthood and the episcopate.

These points must be made forcefully in Rome in February.
- Fictions about American Catholic life and American attempts to impose a universal solution to the abuse crisis on the world Church must be firmly rejected.
- An appropriate pastoral response to a genuine crisis, well-suited to the ecclesial situation of the U.S., should be vigorously defended.
- And the Roman voices saying there are too many converts in the U.S. should be invited to read Matthew 28:19-20. ["Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.*And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”]


Fidelity or idolatry?
The conflict behind us, the crisis among us, the choice before us
To lie and mislead about evil is to be at the service of idolatry.
To cling to position and power rather than confess the truth is a form of idolatry.
by Carl E. Olson
Editorial

January 7, 2019

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“Idolatry not only refers to false pagan worship. It remains a constant temptation to faith. Idolatry consists in divinizing what is not God.”
— Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2113

“For the grace of God has appeared for the salvation of all men, training us to renounce irreligion and worldly passions, and to live sober, upright, and godly lives in this world…”
— Titus 2:11-12

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This past summer, shortly after the news broke about Theodore McCarrick’s many alleged acts of abuse and the cover-ups of the same, I asked a young priest (who had spent many years in Rome) what he thought of the idea that the entire sordid matter was first and foremost about homosexuality.

“It is all about homosexuality,” he said, and then added, “and it is not about homosexuality.” His point, I think, is that any explanation or analysis that avoids the fact of homosexual actions, predatory behavior, and groups of homosexually-active clerics covering up for each other is a false narrative. But the deeper problem (and that really is saying something) is a profound lack of fidelity and a devastating, soul-destroying embrace of idolatry.

Idolatry is a topic that has long fascinated me, and 2018 was, in far too many ways, a year filled with numerous examples and intimations of idolatry.

For those of us who work in Catholic news and follow closely the many tangled and discouraging events in the Church, terms such as “abuse” and “scandal” have become commonplace, a sad part of the daily grind. The first half of 2018 was discouraging; the second half of the year was almost beyond description—or at least description fit for print.

Any morning free and clear of bad or worse news was usually just a passing eye of the hurricane, as more revelations, accusations, or pontifications would surely come before the day would slide into a dull darkness analogous to the grotesque gloom enveloping the Church.

But it is within darkness, as Saint John’s great Prologue indicates, that God chooses to reveal his glory, if only we will see it: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (Jn 1:5). As any artist or photographer can tell you, it is darkness that reveals form and shape — not on its own, of course, but because of how it provides contrast. As such, it distinguishes and separates. And so the Evangelist, in the famous third chapter of his Gospel, writes:

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And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. (Jn 3:19-20).

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The connection to certain revelations of 2018 are obvious. But what has this to do with idolatry? Everything.

There have been countless (and necessary) pieces of analysis written about McCarrick’s evil actions, Viganó’s surprising testimonies, Pope Francis’s promises (and scoldings), and a host of related topics. But few of them, from what I’ve seen, attempt to reflect on matters with reference to the scope of Scripture and salvation history.

In short, while Scripture has numerous themes and can be read on different levels (or in varied senses), the heavy thread of fidelity versus idolatry runs through it like blood in the veins — from the Fall to the Golden Calf, from Solomon’s slide to Daniel’s stand, from Peter’s denial to Peter’s restoration, from the failures of the seven churches to the triumph of the saints who stand in the throne room of heaven.

“Idolatry,” as the Catechism summarizes it, “consists in divinizing what is not God.” And Scripture is filled with stories of men and women trying to divinize and worship people, objects, and even experiences.

There are dozens of references to idols and idolatry throughout the Bible, but even that number doesn’t do justice to the deep focus so often placed on conflicts between worshipping the one, true God and following after false gods and graven images.

“The history of Israel also shows us the temptation of unbelief to which the people yielded more than once,” wrote Pope Francis in Lumen Fidei, his encyclical on faith [Correction: Benedict XVI's encyclical on faith signed and published by Beroglio.]

“Here the opposite of faith is shown to be idolatry.” And fidelity (fidelitas) is faithful devotion. It is, it can be said, the living out of faith in a spirit of worship and self-gift, demonstrated by inward disposition and outward moral uprightness.

There is, after all, a reason that the heart of the Torah is found in the words (Shema): “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD; and you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut 6:4-5).

Note that the people are not told to merely acknowledge or serve God, but to love Him. Completely. This same uncompromising demand is made of by Jesus, who tells the lawyer: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment” (Mt 22:37-38).

The same tension and conflict is at the heart of our lives today. Technology and modernity have not done away with idols; they may, in fact, have spawned spawned countless new variations on the ancient themes. Idolatry “remains a constant temptation to faith” (CCC 2113) precisely because we are made to worship — that is, to declare, profess, and proclaim that God alone is worthy of our praise and adoration — and we will either worship God or something else.

And “if you do not worship God,” wrote Archbishop Fulton Sheen, “you worship something, and nine times out of ten it will be yourself. If there is no God, then you are a god” with your own law, your own rules, and, essentially, your own religion.

And what do these numerous, autonomous little gods do? They use, they abuse, they lie, they indulge, they corrupt, and they destroy.
- To lie and mislead about evil is to be at the service of idolatry. - To cling to position and power rather than confess the truth is a form of idolatry.
- Idols claim to be good while undermining and eventually replacing the good — that is, God.

After Adam and Eve had embraced the lie of the serpent, and thus grabbed ahold of and clutched their idol (that is, themselves), what then did they do? They tried to hide from God, and then they lied to God. Their idolatry created chaos, distorted the truth, and severed communion.

This deviant dynamic is captured well in Lumen Fidei [text by Benedict XVI]:

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Once man has lost the fundamental orientation which unifies his existence, he breaks down into the multiplicity of his desires; in refusing to await the time of promise, his life-story disintegrates into a myriad of unconnected instants. Idolatry, then, is always polytheism, an aimless passing from one lord to another. (par 13)

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Let’s put it in plain terms, in light of the darkness of 2018:
- The abuse of children is a form of idolatry.
- Homosexual acts are a form of idolatry.
- Adultery, fornication, pornography, and masturbation, and every other sexual sin are, at the heart, forms of idolatry.

In the ancient Near Middle East (cf Deut 23:17; 1 Kngs 14:24) and in the later Hellenistic/Roman culture (cf 1 Cor 6:19ff, Rev 2:14, 20) the worship of the pagan gods was often intertwined with sexual immorality. The connection between fornication, corruption, and idolatry is summed up this way by the author of the Book of Wisdom: “For the idea of making idols was the beginning of fornication, and the invention of them was the corruption of life” (Wis 14:10).

A fairly short line could be drawn from what one believed was acceptable sexually and what one believed about God or the “gods”. The same is true today.
- The notion, for instance, that consenting adults should be able to do whatever they wish, as long as “no one is hurt” (so goes the standard qualifier), is usually rooted in a deeply materialist or utilitarian view of man, which in turn flows from amoral assumptions without any notion or consideration of a God who is holy.
- Man is supposedly free to create his own standards, all of which —surprise! - serve his appetites and desires.

Whereas the Church describes marriage as “an apprenticeship in fidelity” (CCC, 2350), marriage has become for many today an arrangement based on emotional satisfaction and material comfort. Spouses become partners, and partners become tools, and tools are always expendable.

The Apostle Paul, in the opening chapter of his epistle to the Romans, directly links sexual immorality, with an emphasis on homosexual acts, with idolatry, writing that those Gentiles who claimed to be wise became, in fact, fools, “because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom 1:22ff).

Today we are flooded with such “wisdom”, being told that pornography is harmless, fornication and adultery are often necessary and acceptable, homosexual relations are natural and wholesome, and transgenderism is not only healthy but an absolute imperative.

The Sexual Revolution spawned the Reign of Gay, which in turn has quickly metastasized into the Tyranny of Transgenderism. While the ancients bowed before graven images and idols built with human hands, we moderns exult in our alleged autonomy from reality and exalt ideologies built with raw, sentimental hubris.

These unnatural actions and dishonorable doctrines have been accepted — in whole, or in part, or in wilting acquiescence — by many in the Church.
- More than a few bishops and priests employ the ambiguities of selective sociology and the babble of trendy psychology while refusing to proclaim the clear teachings of the Church, not just about immorality but also about the nature of man and the reality of a just and holy God.
- Many of these men are simply weak; others are compromised; some are completely complicit.

Both clergy and laity fail in so many ways to identify, expose, confront, and denounce the gods of our age; they refuse to be “destroyers of the gods” that the early Christians were, as described in Larry W. Hurtado’s book on the distinctiveness of those first believers.

And as Hurtado demonstrates, those early conflicts over worship and piety were directly related to power and prestige, for the traditional gods of the Roman world “represented the empire itself … and that conferred legitimacy to Roman rule.” And so, echoing the priest quoted at the start, Christopher Altieri has rightly emphasized this relationship as it exists at the heart of the current crisis:

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We could move all the predators out of the priesthood and into jail cells, and there would still be a crisis of moral culture in the clergy, high and low, almost as bad as it was the day before the purge.

That is because the motor of the clerical culture we have right now – and this is true across the board, top to bottom, without respect to ideological leanings or theological inclination – is the intrinsically perverse libido dominandi (will to power), rather than a perversion of the libido coeundi (sex drive). The former makes use of the latter, and the latter is often a consequence of the former.

But the only way men given over to the latter gain any power or place in any society is by addiction to and direction of the former. Therefore the underlying problem is power.

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In Lumen Fidei, we read:“Faith, tied as it is to conversion, is the opposite of idolatry; it breaks with idols to turn to the living God in a personal encounter.”

The heart of fidelity is found in turning away from staring at dead (but deadly) idols and gazing upon the face of the Savior. This gaze is not merely a look or a glance, but the complete gift of self. As Paul exhorted the Christians in Rome:

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I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Rom 12:1-2).

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This is, without doubt, much easier to say than to do. But it must be said. The call to fidelity, free of jargon and ambiguities, must be uttered again and again. The destructive reality of idolatry — as real today as it was in the times of Moses, Solomon, the Prophets, and Paul — must be exposed. Who will do it?

“The Catholic Church exists for the sole purpose of insisting, in season and out of season, that God be recognized for what He is, and as so recognized, worshipped,” noted Dom Aelred Graham in the 1950s. “The Church is society’s permanent rampart against idolatry. This is the ultimate, in a sense it is the only, sin, the root of all disorder.”

This year certainly could be worse than 2018 unless the Church insists without wavering on the truth about God and man, rebuilds the needed ramparts against idolatry, and pursues righteousness with love and fidelity.

It has taken some time for me to be able to post this review of Antonio Socci’s new book by Prof. Roberto De Mattei, many of whose articles I have posted because of their historical
perspective and because I share most of the views he expresses therein – other than his blanket and unqualified condemnation of all the post-Vatican II popes before Bergoglio
(Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI) for seeking, each in their own way, to uphold the essential teachings of Vatican II, which, by general agreement, were not dogmatic but
pastoral indications.

But this is the last time I am posting anything by him - unless he retracts what he says here - because in this article, he claims that Benedict XVI’s renunciation of the papacy
is ‘morally reprehensible’ and a ‘serious offense before God’. I respect his right to his opinion, of course, but that does not make it acceptable in any way, much less right.
It is simply outrageous and preposterous.

The wonder is that no one so far – and it’s been a few days since this article was first published – has picked this up and expressed outrage over it. Correction:
Steve Skojec at 1P5 picked up on the ‘morally reprehensible’ judgment by putting it in bold face, but did not comment on it at all. I still have to see any other outlet that has picked
up De Mattei’s book review. In fact, I have seen only 3 reviews of Socci’s book so far – by Marco Tosatti (which was rather superficial and disengaged), by Giuseppe Pellegrino (1P5’s
Italian translator who also translated De Mattei’s article for Catholic Family News, and De Mattei.

The apparent snub to Socci's new book does not surprise me - because there could be no great interest among media types and professional commentators in reading about why
Socci thinks Benedict XVI is still pope and why Francis cannot be considered the legitimate pope. Strangely, however, those are not the conclusions Pellegrino reports
in his book review, in which he claims that, notwithstanding the subtitle of the book,

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Socci is not saying that “Benedict did not really resign”; he is not saying “Benedict was coerced into resigning therefore it does not count”;
he is not saying “Francis is not really the pope”…]

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and yet those are the claims Socci has been making all along!

Why did De Mattei even bother to review Socci’s book – other than as an opportunity to make the wild accusation of moral turpitude he has levelled against Benedict XVI? I think
because Socci does command a wide readership in Italy, and so De Mattei could not let the book go ‘unanswered’.

As admirable as De Mattei’s professional career and credentials as a traditionalist Catholic may be, neither he nor any of his likeminded ilk - could measure up in
any way to the Christian virtues, the career and credentials, service and sacrifices, of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI who has excelled in everything he did in the
service of Christ and his Church – as priest, professor, theologian, bishop, cardinal, Curial Prefect and pope – and who most thinking Catholics have thought about as
a future Doctor of the Church.

Why would he suddenly sacrifice his entire lifetime to commit “a morally reprehensible act that is a serious offense to God” by renouncing the papacy? It was a most
selfish act if he did it simply to spare himself from any further concrete responsibility as Successor of Peter. But it was a selfless act in that he realized the negative
implications of his decision and how he would be judged harshly for it – as he has been and continues to be - but he did it nonetheless because he believed it would
be for the greater good of the Church.

Review of ‘The Secret of Benedict XVI’:
Socci’s thesis falls short
by Roberto De Mattei
Translated by Giuseppe Pellegrino from

January 2019

“Holy Mother Church is facing a crisis that is without precedent in her entire history.” This image of the theologian Serafino M. Lanzetta, which opens the latest book of Antonio Socci, Il segreto di Benedetto XVI. Perché è ancora papa [The Secret of Benedict XVI: Why He Is Still Pope] (Milano 2018), would invite readers who wish to better understand the nature of this crisis as well as the possible ways out of it. [What crisis? And how does this review propose any 'way out'?]

Socci is a brilliant journalist who has dedicated three books to the state of the Church under the pontificate of Pope Francis: Non è Francesco. La Chiesa nella grande tempesta [He Is Not Francis: The Church in The Great Tempest] (Milano 2014), La profezia finale [The Final Prophecy] (Milano 2016) and now Il segreto di Benedetto XVI.

Of these three books, the best is the second, above all in the part in which, with accurate documentation, Socci makes a meticulous examination of the most controversial words of the first three years of the reign of Pope Francis. In his latest book, however, Socci develops the thesis which he has already proposed in Non è Francesco, namely, that the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio is doubtful and perhaps invalid, and that Benedict XVI may still be Pope, because he may have not entirely renounced the Petrine ministry. His renunciation was only “relative” – writes Socci – and Benedict intended “to remain the pope, although purely in an enigmatic way and in an unofficial form, which has not been explained (at least not until a certain future date).”

Regarding the doubts about the election of Cardinal Bergoglio, the many clues which Socci examines do not provide sufficient proof to sustain his thesis. [This was always the least tenable point of Socci's contra-Francis arguments.]
- Apart from the canonical subtleties, there was not one cardinal who participated in the Conclave of 2013 who raised any doubt about the validity of the election.
- The entire Church accepted and recognized Pope Francis as the legitimate Pope, and
- According to canon law, the peaceful universalis Ecclesiae adhaesio [adhesion of the universal Church] is both a sign and an infallible effect of a valid election of a legitimate Pope.

Professor Geraldina Boni, in a profound study entitled Sopra una rinuncia. La decisione di papa Benedetto XVI e il diritto [Beyond a Resignation. The Decision of Pope Benedict XVI and The Law] (Bologna 2015), points out that canonical regulations governing the conclave do not consider an election invalid which is the fruit of bargains, agreements, promises, or other commitments of whatever sort, such as the possible planning of the election of Cardinal Bergoglio.

What Professor Boni writes coincides with what Robert Siscoe and John Salza observe, on the basis of the most authoritative theologians and canonists: “...it is the common doctrine of the Church that the peaceful and universal acceptance of a Pope provides infallible certitude of his legitimacy.” [There may have been 'peaceful and universal acceptance' of this pope at the start, but the past six years have seen a great erosion of that 'acceptance' - yes, he was elected pope, but is this a pope

On the right of the Pope to resign, there are no serious doubts. The new Code of Canon Law addresses the possible resignation of the Pope in can. 332 § 2 with these words: “If it happens that the Roman Pontiff resigns his office, it is required for validity that the resignation is made freely and properly manifested but not that it is accepted by anyone.”

The resignation of Benedict XVI was free and ritually manifested. If Benedict XVI was under pressure he would have had to say so, or at least let it be understood. In his Last Conversations with Peter Seewald, he instead declared the contrary, restating that his decision was entirely free, immune from all coercion.

The action of Benedict XVI, legitimate from a theological and canonical point of view, appears however to be in absolute discontinuity with the tradition and praxis of the Church, and therefore morally reprehensible. In fact, the resignation of a Pope is canonically possible propter necessitatem vel utilitatem Ecclesiae universalis, but in order to be morally licit there needs to be a iusta causa (just cause); otherwise the act, while valid, would be morally deplorable and would consitute a serious offense before God.

[Let us examine that statement: "in absolute discontinuity with the tradition and praxis of the Church, and therefore morally reprehensible. Since the eight previous popes whose terms were not ended by death but by varying circumstances, what 'tradition and praxis' are we talking about here? The fact that all the other popes died in office? What makes breaking that 'tradition' morally reprehensible - you may disagree with it but where does it violate morality???]

The reason given by Benedict XVI on February 11, 2013 appears to be totally disproportionate to the gravity of the act:

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“However, in today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the barque of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.”

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Socci knows the canonical doctrine and comments: “Since Benedict XVI does not give exceptional reasons, and since we cannot imagine that he wanted to ‘fall into a grave fault,’ the possibilities – apart from being coerced – are two: either his resignation was not a true and proper resignation of the papacy, or his exceptional reasons were not explained.”

One cannot understand how Socci excludes a priori the possibility of a “grave fault” by Benedict XVI. However, this is precisely what it is. The decision of Pope Benedict XVI has created a situation without precedent.

[There has to be a first time for anything that has no precedent. Why should ‘precedence’ govern something which is very practical in nature? We are not talking Scriptures here, or the Magisterium. Papal resignations are exceptional, so each one is a precedent in itself – especially in its practical concrete manifestations. Moreover, consider this:
- Leo XIII lived to be 93, but we really know very little of how he lived in the final years of his life because the papacy, even at the end of the 19th century, was still very private – the world did not have to know anything about the circumstances of the pope’s private life, and expected only to be told of his statements and actions about the faith and the Church.
- The next popes after Leo XIII all lived to their appointed time by God and died of perfectly understandable illnesses, none of which, with the exception of John Paul II, was particularly ‘visible’ or even perceptible to the world.
- But John Paul II’s very charisma made the papacy the subject of a media cult of personality: Time’s early cover story on him entitled JOHN PAUL II, SUPERSTAR was emblematic.
- And because his persona was larger than life in every way, he became the world’s #1 celebrity, outranking in popularity and certainly in significance any of the usual global celebrities created and promoted incessantly by the media.
- Celebrityhood means a glassbowl existence. But even were he not the celebrity sans pareil that he was, John Paul II - as pope in the age when media had become ubiquitous, and Vatican media itself legitimately publicized everything the pope said and did that was relevant to the Church and to the world - lived in the world's most visible glass bowl.
- And in the final 2-3 years of his life, the glassbowl showed us the terrible physical consequences of the illness he had. No one could be happy about it; at the very least, the images, especially the videos, were very disquieting because one felt for him and his suffering, even knowing that for him, the suffering was his part in the Cross of Christ.
- But the physical effects were only one aspect of his decline in the final years. The other was that he had to delegate governance of the Church to his associates – and by many accounts, their governance was deficient in many ways. For which there has been a considerable amount of criticism.

Joseph Ratzinger knew all this, and when he was elected pope at age 78, he surely thought ahead to what it would be like were he to have a serious degenerative illness as John Paul II had, or were he simply to lose the physical ability to cope with the staggering responsibility of a 21st-century pope.

In his 2010 book-length interview with Peter Seewald (done in the midst of B16’s annus horribilis – when, as Seewald put it, “As though out of a deep abyss, countless incomprehensible cases of sexual abuse from the past came to light – acts committed by priests and religious), Seewald asked: “The great majority of these [clerical sex abuse] cases took place decades ago. Nevertheless they burden your pontificate now in particular. Have you thought of resigning?”

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When the danger is great, one must not run away. For that reason, now is certainly not the time to resign. Precisely at a time like this, one must stand fast and endure the difficult situation. That is my view. One can resign at a peaceful moment or when one simply cannot go on. But one must not run away from danger and say that someone else should do it.

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This was one of the most widely-quoted passages from the book at the time – yet no one, certainly not De Mattei and likeminded supercilious ‘traditionalists’ who now find Benedict XVI ‘reprehensible’, ever commented at the time, “But why is he even talking about resigning, when no pope ought to do that!”

Perhaps because in 2010 and on through the rest of his pontificate, the media pressure on Benedict XVI to force him to resign was so determined and inexorable that everyone – the De Matteis of the world included – did not rule out the possibility of a resignation. So why the sudden outcry when he did resign in 2012, at a time when the artificial apogee of clerical sex abuse scandals had passed and even the much-ballyhooed Vatileaks had no 'there there'?

I’ve argued this from the beginning: Benedict XVI kwould have known full well that he was going to be criticized – though not completely written off as nothing but a villain and worse, the way he has been by De Mattei and his sanctimonious ilk – for resigning for reasons of physical infirmity, on two counts, at the very least: 1) for lacking the courage to carry on, in stark contrast to the example of John Paul II; and 2) that the real reason for his resignation (apart from the theories that he was constrained or pressured) was that he was ‘fleeing from the wolves”. But this is the first time anyone has suggested that his resignation was ‘morally deplorable’ and ‘an offense before God’.

That judgment suggests that a man who until then had been expected to become eventually a Doctor of the Church [before which he would have to become a saint] suddenly lost all his moral compass – and therefore, his sanity as well - in making an ostensibly selfish decision to resign the papacy. Surely even the smug De Matteis realize that. What do they know what it may have cost him to contemplate and pray over this decision, which must have been done over several months if not 1-2 years earlier?]

In the eyes of the world, it caused a desacralization of the Petrine ministry, which has come to be considered like an agency whose president can resign for reasons of age or physical weakness. ][‘In the eyes of the world’ – that really does not care what the Petrine ministry is - no! In the eyes of the De Matteis, yes. Who would now lay the charge of ‘desacralization’ when, in their other arguments, they point out that election as pope is not a sacrament like holy orders or episcopal consecration, but merely election to an office (never mind that the office happens to be one specifically instituted by Christ), a view which in itself desacralizes the office] !!

Professor Gian Enrico Rusconi has observed that Benedict XVI “with his decision to resign says that there is not any particular protection of the Holy Spirit which can guarantee the mental and psychological firmness of the Vicar of Christ on earth, when he is undermined by old age or illness” (La Stampa, 12 February 2013).

[Of course, every Catholic trusts and hopes that the grace of God will see us through every major tribulation – but we never know how and when. Just as we, and persons like Rusconi and De Mattei along with us, trust and hope today that the grace of God will get us through the tribulations the Church is undergoing with Bergoglio, no one thinks that grace will be manifested overnight. In the same way, Joseph Ratzinger had no assurances that God would guarantee his mental and psychological firmness as he entered his 85th year of existence, aware already of his growing physical deficits, to be able to serve the Church adequately as a pope ought to.]

Historically, Popes were always elected in old age and often in terrible physical condition, without any medicine at the time being able to help them, in contrast to what it is able to do today. Yet they never resigned or failed to exercise their proper mission. Physical health has never been a criteria for governing the Church. [De Mattei is a historian, but how can he make the sweeping statement that “popes were always elected in old age and often in terrible condition” when historical facts say otherwise???? Look up the table on ‘Ages of the Popes’ in Wikipedia, in which the average age of popes between 1503-1750 at election was 63 and at death, 70; between 1750-2005, the numbers are 65 and 78; and for the whole span from 1503-2005, 64 and 74. He is being flat-out dishonest for the sake of making a point.]

The old archbishop of Goa in India [De Mattei does not tell us how old he was], weak and afflicted by many trials, asked Pope Pius V to free him from his charge. But St. Pius V responded to him that like a good soldier he ought to die in the field, and in order to instill courage in him he recalled his own sufferings with these words: “We understand fraternally what you feel, We are old just like you, fatigued by many labors, in the midst of many dangers; but recall that tribulation is the normal path which leads to Heaven and that we ought not to abandon the post assigned to us by Providence. Can you perhaps believe that We too, in the midst of so many concerns so full of responsibility, do not at times feel tired of living? And that We do not desire to return to Our former state of a simple religious? Nevertheless, We are determined not to shake off our yoke but to bear it courageously until God shall call us to Himself. Renounce, therefore, all hope of being able to retire to a quieter life...”

On September 10, 1571, a few days prior to the Battle of Lepanto, the same St. Pius V sent a moving letter to the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, Pietro de Monte, in which, in order to encourage the old commander, he wrote: “You will know without any doubt that my cross is heavier than yours, that my strength is now lacking, and how numerous are those who seek to make me succumb. I would certainly have failed and would have already renounced my dignity (something which I have thought of doing on more than one occasion), if I had not more fully loved to place myself entirely into the hands of the Master Who has said: ‘Whoever wishes to follow Me must renounce himself.’” [Although he achieved many great things, Pius V was pope for only six years (1556-1572) - he was 68 when he died of cancer, the year after the victory at Lepanto. The terms of comparison to Benedict XVI are far from analogous. De Mattei ought to have had the intellectual honesty to place the great saint's words in the proper context.]

The abdication of Benedict XVI does not reveal the renunciation of self, expressed in the words of St. Pius V, but rather it manifests the renouncing spirit of the churchmen of our time. It is the renunciation of carrying out the highest mission which a man can fulfill on earth: that of governing the Church of Christ. It is the flight before the wolves by the one who, in his first homily on April 24, 2005, said, “Pray for me, that I may not flee for fear of the wolves.”

[Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI was always known to say, especially to priests, that one cannot hope to do everything one needs to do, and must leave it to God to do the rest. And he told Seewald in 2010 that his first thoughts after he had accepted his election as pope were: “What are you doing with me? Now the responsibility is yours. You must lead me! I can’t do it. If you wanted me, then you must also help me”.

Why did he not apply this to his situation in 2012-2013, when he made his decision to resign the papacy? Surely it was part of his prayer-dialogs with the Lord leading up to his decision. At some point, he must have been led to trust his considered judgment and his gut feeling that resigning so that a younger, more able man could carry on his work of rebuilding the faith and the Church was what God wanted him to do now. For all his perspicacity, it probably never occurred to him to think that his successor might be someone who would turn out to be so anti-Catholic and a slave to the world.

Antonio Socci cites the last official and public discourse of the pontificate of Benedict XVI on February 27, 2013, in which he said concerning his ministry: “The real gravity of the decision was also due to the fact that from that moment on I was engaged always and forever by the Lord. [...] 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.” [This is among the weakest points of Socci’s argument, in which he interprets the statements to mean that Benedict was only resigning his ‘active ministry’ but nothing else about the Petrine ministry. It refers however to the way he conceived his life as ex-pope to be – a life dedicated to prayer in behalf of the Church, a self-imposed spiritual ministry which in no way arrogates any powers, authority, honors and prerogatives of the papal office.]

“A disruptive expression,” comments Socci, “because if with his act of resignation Benedict renounced only ‘the active exercise of the ministry’, it means that he did not intend to renounce the ministry in itself. [...] In the light of this final discourse, one understands why Joseph Ratzinger has remained in the ‘enclosure of Peter’ [the Vatican], he still signs his name Benedict XVI, he calls himself ‘Pope Emeritus’, he still uses the papal heraldic insignia and he continues to dress as Pope.” [These arguments always make me cringe, and I have answered them from sheer common sense many times.]

This affirmation, taken literally, as Socci intends it to be, is theologically erroneous. When he is elected, the Pope receives the office of supreme jurisdiction, not a sacrament carrying the imprint of indelible character. The Papacy is not a spiritual or sacramental condition, but rather an “office”, or more accurately an institution. [Then what’s to ‘desacralize’ as De Mattei argued earlier???]

According to the ecclesiology of Vatican II, however, the Church is above all a “sacrament” and ought to be stripped of its institutional dimension. [????] Here it is forgotten that, if the Pope is equal to every bishop through his episcopal consecration, he is superior to every bishop in virtue of his office, which assures him full jurisdiction over all of the bishops of the world, either considered individually or as a whole. [No one is arguing that. But what does that have to do with a decision to resign as pope? PIn fact, precisely because he has full jurisdiction over all the bishops of the world, he needs to be sure he is able to exercise that jurisdiction adequately and effectively in the way he ought to.]

Socci also makes reference to the questionable study of Professor Stefano Violi, La rinuncia di Benedetto XVI: Tra storia, diritto e coscienza (Benedict XVI’s renunciation: Between history, law and conscience) (“Rivista Teologica di Lugano” n. 2/2013, pp. 203-214), which introduces the distinction between the “office”, which Violi says Benedict resigned, and the Petrine munus, which Violi says he continues to hold. [Socci, of course, will cite any opinion that serves to bolster his own. That doesn’t make the opinion – Socci’s or Violi’s – right. Besides, the Latin word munus can signify any or all of the ff: service; duty, office, function; gift; tribute; offering. In concrete terms, Benedict XVI appears to have held on only to the 'gift' of grace vouchsafed by the Lord to one who was elected Successor of Peter, and to his munus in the sense of offering his life as ex-pope in the apostolate of prayer.]

The bizarre thesis of Violi seems to have inspired Archbishop Georg Gänswein, secretary of Benedict XVI, in his discourse given on May 20, 2016, at the Pontifical Gregorian University, in which he affirmed:

---

“Since February 2013 the papal ministry is therefore no longer what it was before. It is and remains the foundation of the Catholic Church; and yet it is a foundation which Benedict XVI has profoundly and permanently transformed during his exceptional pontificate… Since the election of his successor Francis, on March 13, 2013, there are not therefore two popes, but de facto, an expanded ministry — with an active member and a contemplative member. This is why Benedict XVI has not given up either his name or the white cassock. This is why the correct name by which to address him even today is ‘Your Holiness’; and this is also why he has not retired to a secluded monastery, but within the Vatican — as if he had only taken a step to the side to make room for his successor and a new stage in the history of the papacy…”

---

[This was a most unfortunate occasion, and the statements are gratuitously controversial. There is nothing – in all of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI’s writings about the papacy, before and after he became pope – that indicates he thought the papacy could be an ‘expanded ministry’. And yet, it is assumed that the emeritus pope knew what his secretary would be saying and that he gave him the permission to go ahead and say it. Therefore, his critics are right to pounce on these statements which have no theological nor canonical basis, but appear to be a selfish assertion on the part of the emeritus pope. I think this is the most damaging claim that his critics can make to question his intentions and honesty. I do not know what it served to make it at all.]

Benedict, Socci emphasizes, may have renounced his juridical office, but he continues to exercise “the eminently spiritual essence of the Petrine munus.” His resignation has transformed the papal ministry into an Ausnahmepontifikat (“pontificate of exception”), using the term of Archbishop Gänswein.

“Benedict XVI did not have the intention of abandoning the papacy, and he has not renounced the acceptance of it which he did in April 2005 (even considering it ‘irrevocable’) and thus – strictly using logic – he is still pope... There is objectively a ‘state of exception’, or rather, in the expression of Msgr. Gänswein, a ‘pontificate of exception’, which presupposes an absolutely exceptional situation in the history of the Church and of the world.”

Among the best works which refute this attempt to re-define the pontifical Primacy, there is an accurate essay by Cardinal Walter Brandmüller entitled Renuntiatio Papae. Alcune riflessioni storico-canonistiche (“Archivio Giuridico” 3-4 [2016], pp. 655- 674):
- The tradition and praxis of the Church affirms with clarity, affirms the cardinal, that one man and one man only is the Pope, inseparable in his unity and in his power.
- “The substance of the Papacy is thus clearly defined by Sacred Scripture and by the authentic Tradition, and so no Pope is authorized to redefine his office” (p. 660).
- If Benedict XVI believes that he is still the Pope, simultaneously with Francis, he would negate the truth of Faith by which there exists only one Vicar of Christ, and he would have to be considered a heretic or suspected of heresy. [But despite Gaenswein’s statements, the Emeritus Pope clearly does not ‘believe he is still pope’ – he would be pathologically delusional if he believed that. He has not personally stepped beyond his bounds as an ex-pope, in any way, especially since he had publicly promised to the College of Cardinals before the 2013 Conclave that he would ‘revere and obey whoever would be elected to succeed him’. It is a promise that, I believe, has unfortunately kept him from making any statement that would be seen to violate that promise, no matter what compelling reasons there may be. Because of it, he cannot even avail of his right of dissent or protest as an individual Catholic under Canon 212.]

On the other hand, if the true Pope is Benedict and not Francis, someone ought to note it, and yet not one cardinal has ever done so. [Because it is completely out of the question.] The consequences would be devastating. What would then happen upon the death of Benedict XVI? Would they have to hold a conclave, with Pope Francis still sitting on the papal throne? And if Francis is an antipope, when he dies who would elect the true Pope, since the large number cardinals nominated by him would have to be considered invalid? [But whhy all these unnecessary hypotheticals for a completely imaginary situation that has not occured and will never occur???]

For Socci, the decision of Benedict XVI was a mystical decision. “We are dealing with a true and personal call on the part of God. The call to a mission.” What is this mission? “Benedict does not abandon the flock in danger. He is in prayer in his hermitage, interceding for the Church and for the world, and his comfort and illuminating teaching comes to the Church through a thousand little streams.”

The silent figure of Benedict is for Socci a “presence” in the enclosure of Peter which averts schisms and divisions, which restrains the advance of the Revolution and which assures peace in the world. The “mystical” mission of Benedict XVI is a political mission, which Socci describes thus at the conclusion of his book:

---

“Here we may see the greatness of the vision of Benedict XVI: in an insane historical moment, in which the West, ever more de-Christianized, has absurdly rejected and attacked Russia (a Russia that is finally free and has become Christian) and has sought to marginalize her, sending her back to Asiatic isolation or into the embrace of communist China, the dialogue which the Pope [Benedict] had undertaken with the Russian Orthodox Church aimed at realizing the dream of John Paul II: a Europe composed of people united by their Christian roots from the Atlantic to the Urals.”

---

The mysticism which Socci attributes to Benedict XVI seems to be merely his own literary fantasy, while in his book he ignores the great theological debate between Modernism and anti-Modernism, just as he ignores the Second Vatican Council and its dramatic consequences. The Papacy has been despoiled of its institutional dimension and instead “personalized”. [That is not true at all. For most Catholics other than the Bergogliacs, it retains its institutional dimension, despite the imprudent and unfortunate exaggeration of its 'personal' aspect.]

For Socci, John Paul II and Benedict XVI incarnate the “good”, while Francis is the expression of “evil”. [Characterizing the popes in that way is a personal attribution, not institutional.] In reality, the rapport between Francis and his predecessors is much closer than Socci imagines, if for no other reason than it was the improvident resignation of Benedict XVI which opened the way for Cardinal Bergoglio. [This sentence makes no sense at all.]

The final photographs of Benedict XVI as pope reveal an exhausted man, constrained by Divine Providence [There you are, Prof. De Mattei – you are admitting 1) he was exhausted (more or less the reason he gave for his resignation) and 2) that his resignation was providential! – in other words, he understood right what God conveyed to him in his prayer-dialogs over the decision to resign] [to assist in the debacle which he himself provoked.

[That’s as if he knew the Conclave would result in a debacle. Wasn’t he confident, in fact, that the Conclave would elect someone younger and eminently qualified who would carry on his work to save and revive the faith and the Church, someone like Angelo Scola? And if De Mattei thought that Benedict XVI was an exhausted man in 2012, what does he think of him now? Within one year of his resignation, it was obvious that physical infirmities were getting the better of him. In the media era, one cannot under-estimate the power of images, as I have often argued.

If John Paul II, because of his personal charisma and having been pope for at least a quarter century, could get away with all those images of his physical limitations in the final years of his life, Benedict XVI would never have – every physical sign of infirmity visible in photographs and videos would be used by the media to symbolize what they perceive to be the infirmities of the Church.
- If he were still pope today, what would they make of the fact that he cannot walk without a walker, that he is blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, shrunken with age?
- That given these deficiencies, he would not even be able to say Mass in public without risking some unfortunate accident that would detract from the solemnity of any liturgy he was celebrating?
- That looking as helpless as he does, he would therefore be blamed for delegating the task of governance to subordinates who would be prone to all kinds of mistakes and shortcomings, for which he, Benedict XVI, would be held responsible?]

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the defeated one of the conclave of 2005, became the victor of the conclave of 2013, and Benedict XVI, the victor of the preceding conclave, emerges from the story as the great defeated one. [Because of the faithlessness of the majority of cardinal electors who bought a pig in a poke entirely on the sales pitch of the Sankt-Gallen mafia without bothering to learn more about the purchase they made.]

I esteem Antonio Socci for his authentic Catholic faith and for the independence of his thought. I share his severe judgment on Pope Francis. But the resignation of Benedict XVI, which for Socci was the choice of a mission, is for me the symbol of the surrender of the Church to the world. [Not his resignation, per se, but the decision of the cardinal electors who elected a man few of them really knew about nor bothered to learn about – and who, as it turns out, is the very symbol of the surrender of the Church to the world.]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 10/01/2019 00:41]

You don't have to be a sophisticated media analyst to object most vehemently to the logo chosen by the
Vatican's superdicastery for communications for the pope's trip to Morocco. But the powers-that-be must
have intended it - for the crescent of Islam to surround and swallow the Cross! (In this case, indicated
by two scimitar-like blades. Someone has remarked,'Servant of hope'? Should it not be 'Servant of Christ'?
No, silly, that would be a mortal offense to Muslims!


The pope's incoherent geopolitics
by Chris Ferrara

January 8, 2019

In an address to members of the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, Pope Francis appealed to world government to produce peace and harmony among nations while decrying the rise of “nationalism,” meaning various forms of resistance to the tyrannical encroachments of supra-national bodies on national sovereignty.

The “international community,” he said, is “experiencing a period of difficulty, with the resurgence of nationalistic tendencies at odds with the vocation of the international Organizations to be a setting for dialogue and encounter for all countries.”

“Some of these attitudes,” he continued, “go back to the period between the two World Wars, when populist and nationalist demands proved more forceful than the activity of the League of Nations. The reappearance of these impulses today is progressively weakening the multilateral system” — failing to distinguish the post-Christian nationalism that led to World War I from the neo-Christian nationalism he decries today.

By “nationalistic tendencies,” Francis means essentially what the international radical left means: opposition in various nations, especially Italy, Hungary, Poland and Brazil, to open borders, mass migration, multiculturalism and the eradication of Christian identity in the national ethos.

Francis admits that these “nationalistic tendencies” have resulted in part from “the growing influence within the international Organizations of powers and interest groups that impose their own visions and ideas, sparking new forms of ideological colonization, often in disregard for the identity, dignity and sensitivities of peoples.”

He also declares that with a “spherical” notion of globalization, which “levels differences and smooths out particularities, it is easy for forms of nationalism to reemerge. Yet globalization can prove promising to the extent that it can be ‘polyhedric’, favouring a positive interplay between the identity of individual peoples and countries and globalization …”

Come again?
- On the one hand, Francis decries “nationalistic tendencies” which are really just a people’s attempt to preserve cultural and religious identity against the onslaught of globalist-engineered migratory invasions and the dictates of “ideological colonization” emanating from the EU and the UN.
- On the other hand he calls for “a positive interplay between
-the identity of individual peoples and countries and globalization…”.

But the emergence of “nationalistic tendencies” is precisely an effort by peoples oppressed by globalist powers to preserve “the identity of individual peoples and countries,” which the “international community” is seeking to eradicate.

Thus, as Hungary’s Viktor Orban has declared:

---

“We have built the fence, defended the southern border … Migration is like rust that slowly but surely would consume Hungary. We believe Poles and Hungarians have a common path, common fight and common goal: to build and defend our homeland in the form that we want … Christian and with national values.”

---

Likewise, Brazil’s newly elected “nationalist” President, Jair Bolsonaro, who barely (indeed miraculously) survived an assassination attempt, thanked God for sparing his life and declared as follows on the day of his inauguration:

---

“Brazil will return to being a country free of the chains of ideology. My electoral campaign listened to the call of the streets and forged a commitment to place Brazil first and God above all….

“I place myself before the whole nation, on this day, as the day in which the people began to liberate itself from socialism, from the inversion of values, from big government, and from political correctness….

“We cannot allow destructive ideologies to divide the Brazilian people, ideologies that destroy our values and traditions, destroy our families, which are the foundation of our society.

---

In sum, the “nationalist tendencies” Francis deplores are nothing but the rightful aspirations of peoples oppressed by the “international community” he doggedly defends as somehow necessary to peace among men.

But as Pope Pius XI admonished the faithful and the whole world in 1922, during the very interwar period Francis mentioned in his address, no human organization can ever succeed in a work that belongs by divine ordination to the Catholic Church:

---

“No merely human institution of today can be as successful in devising a set of international laws which will be in harmony with world conditions as the Middle Ages were in the possession of that true League of Nations, Christianity.

It cannot be denied that in the Middle Ages this law was often violated; still it always existed as an ideal, according to which one might judge the acts of nations, and a beacon light calling those who had lost their way back to the safe road.

“There exists an institution able to safeguard the sanctity of the law of nations. This institution is a part of every nation; at the same time it is above all nations. She enjoys, too, the highest authority, the fullness of the teaching power of the Apostles. Such an institution is the Church of Christ. She alone is adapted to do this great work, for she is not only divinely commissioned to lead mankind, but moreover, because of her very make-up and the constitution which she possesses, by reason of her age-old traditions and her great prestige, which has not been lessened but has been greatly increased since the close of the War [World War I], cannot but succeed in such a venture where others assuredly will fail.”

---

But, of course, the farthest thing from the minds of Francis and his Vatican collaborators is the truth that the Church alone “is adapted to do this great work” of promoting peace among men, because she alone is “divinely commissioned to lead mankind” and thus “cannot but succeed in such a venture where others assuredly will fail.”

The current crisis in the Church is such that only a few courageous political leaders are left to attempt to do what the Church should be doing in political society, only to incur the denunciations of Catholic churchmen, including the Pope himself, on account of their “nationalistic tendencies.”

The Church has been turned upside down in a diabolical inversion of the proper order of things, lending support to worldly powers while opposing those who resist them.

This is why Our Lady appeared in Fatima, to call for the Consecration of Russia and the consequent worldwide triumph of Her Immaculate Heart, only five years before Pius XI insisted upon the truth that the human element of the Church has since rejected — with catastrophic results.

20 Latin American leaders criticize
Pope’s call for ‘reconciliation’
with brutal communist regimes


COSTA RICA, January 8, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Twenty former presidents of Latin American nations sent an open letter on Jan. 5 to Pope Francis in which they criticized his call for “harmony” in socialist Venezuela and “reconciliation” in Nicaragua where Marxist governments have ruined these countries' national economies and subjected citizens to torture and summary executions.

Led by Nobel Prize-winner and former president of Costa Rica Oscar Arias, the letter to the pontiff said, “We are concerned that the call for harmony on the part of your Holiness in which, given the current context, can be understood by the victimized nations that they should come to agreement with their victimizers. In particular, in the case of Venezuela, the government has caused the flight of 3 million refugees, which the United Nations predicts will reach 5.9 million in 2019.”

The letter writers were reacting to the Pope’s Dec. 25 Christmas message in which he referred to Venezuela and Nicaragua.

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“May this blessed season allow Venezuela once more to recover social harmony and enable all the members of society to work fraternally for the country’s development and to aid the most vulnerable sectors of the population"...

“Before the Child Jesus, may the inhabitants of beloved Nicaragua see themselves once more as brothers and sisters, so that divisions and discord will not prevail, but all may work to promote reconciliation and to build together the future of the country.”

---

The letter co-signed by Arias and nineteen other Latin American leaders noted that Venezuelans are the “victims of a militarized narco-dictatorship, which has no qualms about systematically violating the rights to life, liberty and personal integrity.”

The following is a translation of the letter:

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We the undersigned, as former chiefs of state and government, have signed statements concerning Venezuela and Nicaragua that stem from the Democratic Initiative of Spain and the Americas (IDEA), and therefore come to you regarding your recent Christmas message in which you call for “harmony” among the peoples of both nations.

As we expressed in a previous message to your Holiness, we understand your concern for the suffering that today, without distinction, all Venezuelans and now Nicaraguans face. The former are victims of oppression by a militarized narco-dictatorship, which has no qualms about systematically violating the rights to life, liberty and personal integrity and, as a result of deliberate public policies and unbridled corruption, has scandalized the world and that have subjected them to widespread famine and lack of medicine. The latter case, in the middle of the year, there were 300 killed and 2,500 wounded in a wave of repression.

We are concerned that the call for harmony on the part of your Holiness which, given the current context, can be understood by the victimized nations that they should come to agreement with their victimizers. In particular, in the case of Venezuela, the government has caused the flight of 3 million refugees, which the United Nations predicts will reach 5.9 million in 2019.

The expression used by His Holiness, who we know which was in good faith and guided by his pastoral spirit, is being interpreted in a very negative way by the majorities of Venezuela and Nicaragua. Above all, there is currently, in these countries, a political dispute that demands understanding, tolerance between conflicting forces with different narratives within a normal or deficient democracy that today unfortunately does not exist there. Their entire populations are subjected to suffering by their governments, under regimes that serve a lie, and social and political leaders, opinion leaders and the press, who suffer jailings, persecution and death, as demonstrated by European and American human rights organizations.

Your Holiness: The encyclical Ad Petri Cathedram declares that the call to harmony must be made, fundamentally, "to those who govern the nations." "Those who oppress others and strip them of their due liberty can contribute nothing to the attainment of this unity” for the intelligence, of the spirits, of the actions, as your predecessor, St. Pope John XXIII, reminds us, and for which we long for the dear people of Venezuela and Nicaragua may regain, based on truth and justice, so that they may enjoy a just peace.

We wish your Holiness a very happy Feast of the Nativity. We look forward to meeting with you at an appropriate time.

Cordially,

Oscar Arias, Costa Rica
Nicolás Ardito Barletta, Panamá
Enrique Bolaños, Nicaragua
Alfredo Cristiani, El Salvador
Felipe Calderón, México
Rafael Ángel Calderón, Costa Rica
Laura Chinchilla, Costa Rica
Fernando De la Rúa, Argentina
Vicente Fox, México
Eduardo Frei, Chile
César Gaviria T., Colombia
Osvaldo Hurtado, Ecuador
Luis Alberto Lacalle, Uruguay
Jamil Mahuad, Ecuador
Mireya Moscoso, Panamá
Andrés Pastrana A., Colombia
Jorge Tuto Quiroga, Bolivia
Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, Costa Rica
Álvaro Uribe V., Colombia
Juan Carlos Wasmosy, Paraguay

---

Antonio Socci zeroes in on the situation in Italy where virtually all the bishops have taken Bergoglio's side against Interior Minister Matteo Salvini's success in 2018 to drastically reduce illegal mass immigration into Italy. I shall avail of the translation available in Rorate caeli:

The Church is collapsing,
but the Vatican has launched
a crusade against Salvini
Translated for Rorate caeli by Francesca Romana from

January 6, 2019

What is going on in the Catholic Church? The situation is not only catastrophic - it’s absurd.
- We hear of churches emptying dramatically in the West and Christians being cruelly persecuted in the East.
- We hear of the disappearance of traditional Catholic movements, of internal clashes in the Curia, of continuous scandals, of immense confusion among the faithful as a result of Pope Francis’s revolutionary 'feats' ( recently he even “forgot” about the dogma of the Immaculate Conception).

Yet the churchmen are not addressing any of this. They are not worried at all. The shepherds are not interested in the sheep going astray and being scattered.
- The Church hierarchy appears to be completely taken up by politics. It’s a real fever. That in itself is already surreal, but not sufficiently.
- The fact is, they don’t want to bring the “social doctrine” of the Church into politics nor the “non-negotiable principles”, as one might like to believe they would.
- Following Bergoglian teaching, they have only one theological-political theme to insist upon and in fundamentalist tones: migrants.

As a result, the migrants have now become their ideological banner, yet also a sort of messianic subject to depose the Christian message, even in Nativity Scenes - as if the angels had proclaimed the arrival of “Jesus, the migrant” to the shepherds, instead of the Birth of the Son of God.

According to the perceptions of ordinary people, the ecclesiastics are only interested now in migrants - they talk only about them. And in effect, the ecclesiastical hierarchy are plunging into politics with the precise intent of going to war with Salvini: he is the Satan to whom they shout “Get behind me!”, as Famiglia Cristiana had plastered infamously on their front cover last year.

It is precisely Salvini - the one who has publicly declared his desire to defend our Christian roots - that is the ‘Evil’ the clerical world is mobilizing and raging against.

Yesterday, Salvini in Abruzzo, replied: “I’m a sinner, but no fool. This year instead of 120 thousand, only 20 thousand arrived: 100 thousand fewer[than last year] saving a billion Euros and [resulting in]far fewer deaths and crimes.”

This means that the Deputy Prime Minister, is not surrendering and doesn’t want Italy going back to being the Refugee Camp of Europe and Africa. The majority of Italians and Catholics think the same as he does.

And it is precisely for this reason now that the “call” to political action against Salvini continues from the Bergoglian establishment.
Responding promptly are the clerical newspapers, the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI) and the Catholic associations (those that are still around).

Yesterday, even the former President of the CEI (today the President of European Bishops), Cardinal Bagnasco, Archbishop of Genoa, who, until lately, had been considered one of the few still in line with the magisterium of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, took sides and made the headlines on La Stampa's front page: “Conscientious objection: The Church’s move against the security decree.” T

“The charge is sounded by Cardinal Bagnasco” who – according to the Turin newspaper – “ is marshalling the Church on the [matter of the] security decree: yes to conscientious objection.”

Referring to the case of “the migrants of the Sea Watch”,
- Monsignor Guerino Di Tora , President of the Commission for Immigrations of the CEI, intervened, thundering: “Those who balk do not have a clear conscience”.
- The Archbishop of Palermo, Monsignor Corrado Lorefice, is railing as well, with an appeal “not to remain in silence in the face of inhuman decrees which aggravate the sufferings of those who are oppressed by poverty and war”.

The same mobilization was not seen, nor such bitter denunciations by the Bergoglian church heard over the last six years when - thanks to the Euro, the politics of the European Union and the Italian governments aligned with it - here in Italy, poverty and unemployment exploded - with thousands and thousands of companies closing. We don’t remember papal mobilizations and searing words in favor of the earthquake victims and their freezing winters.

These are only two examples (we could add the law on civil unions and other feats by prior governments that should have made the Church intervene).

In their (many) ecclesiastical, political rants, you never find criticism of the European Union. On the contrary: the EU explicitly (not to be confused with Europe which is another thing entirely) seems to have become the anchor of political salvation for this clerical hierarchy, this EU which has become the most secular and most anti-Christian, political reality in the West. The Italian clergy speak of it with the same enthusiastic arguments as Emma Bonino.

But what upsets the ecclesiastical class is the fact that the Catholic people are not following them. Actually, they seem to be making the opposite choice, preferring mostly the Lega [
salvini's party] and other ‘sovereignist’ groups.

The most devout Catholics and even the not so devout, prefer to refer to the teachings of John Paul II and Benedict XVI on this issue.

So the disappointment in the clerical elite is palpable. They are generals without an army. Even Father Antonio Spadaro, Pope Bergoglio’s strategist, concedes: "[…] We make reasonable and enlightened discourses, but the people are elsewhere”.

The people are elsewhere alright. Catholics are dissenting from the Bergoglian hierarchy, and applauding Salvini. Even if Pope Bergoglio whips them by declaring that it’s better to be atheists than Catholics who refuse this migrant invasion (Muslim, which, by principle, refuse integration with the host nation).

The Catholic faithful understand, through firsthand experience, that this discombobulating of peoples which enthuses the elite (also the U.N.) is devastating for both the host countries and the countries of origin. The African bishops think the same thing.

Well then, Father Spadaro would like to bring the people, ‘who are elsewhere’, back ‘into line’. So a few days ago he took the floor to draw up a sort of Political Manifesto, publishing it in the Jesuit magazine, La Civiltà Cattolica.

If the Decalogue given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai is called “the ten words”, Father Spadaro wanted to do better: for him “Seven words for 2019” to illuminate the peoples (so he hopes) are sufficient.

Unfortunately, however, they are words that have been heard time and time again, for years, in interventions by exponents of the PD (the Socialist "Democratic Party") and in articles by La Repubblica: fear, immigration, Europe, populism, democracy, etc…

The feeling is that all this railing then will not bring about the formation of a Catholic roster of candidates in the [upcoming] European elections, because to count on it would be exceedingly counter-productive.

Most think that everything will be 'resolved' through the Church's support of the leftist Partita Democrata (PD), especially if the latter is led by Nicola Zingaretti, since, as they say in the Vatican , the Church hierarchy in in the Bergoglian era, get along better with the post-Communists than with Renzi [former Italian Prime Minister and PD head].

Italian archbishop says NO to
‘conscientious objection’ on immigration law
by Thomas Williams

January 8, 2019

An archbishop has broken ranks from fellow Italian prelates, saying that mayors have no right to appeal to conscientious objection to disobey the nation’s immigration laws — an Italian parallel to American sanctuary cities.

Luigi Negri, the former archbishop of Ferrara, suggested Sunday that bishops who have supported or called for recourse to conscientious objection have overstepped their competence, failing to respect the legitimate autonomy of the political sphere in questions that require prudential judgment. Similarly, mayors who appeal to the principle to disobey immigration laws misuse it.

“The right to object is to be defended when fundamental principles are undermined,” Negri said. “Those mayors who use conscientious objection deliberately as a political tool against legitimate actions of superior or equal authorities, abuse the concept.”

According to Catholic teaching, one must refrain from obeying laws that mandate immoral behavior, such as a law requiring people to participate in abortions.

The “security decree” of Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, which among other things facilitates the deportation of illegal immigrants, has raised the ire of certain members of the Italian Catholic hierarchy.

On the same day, the archbishop of Chieti, Bruno Forte, protested the Salvini decree in an interview with the press, claiming that rescuing migrants is not something optional but a “moral imperative.”

Ethically speaking, Forte said, “if something contrary to my conscience is imposed on me, such as refusing help to whole families at the mercy of the sea for days, conscientious objection is justified.”

“Alarmism and talk of an invasion are propagandistic lies that are harmful to everyone, except to those who use them for electoral advantages,” the archbishop said in reference to the interior minister’s allusions to Italy’s migrant crisis.

Archbishop Negri took issue with this line of reasoning, saying that prelates have no right to meddle in secular affairs where moral absolutes do not come into play.

“The issue of security is a matter for dialogue among the secular forces participating in social life,” he said.

“In general, those who exploit the gospel are mistaken,” Negri said, while also defending the Salvini decree, arguing that “a recovery of cultural, human and religious identity is absolutely positive: the famous Christian roots of Europe.”

The archbishop said moreover that not everyone is in a position to integrate into Italian society, which is based on a Judeo-Christian understanding of the person, family, and society.

“Those who seek to integrate must take certain steps in identifying with our society,” he said. “But this may not be enough: a person cannot ask to integrate in Italy while defending Sharia law as a good thing.”

The Catholic Church is the loudest opponent
of Italy’s new anti-migrant policy?
By Chico Harlan and Stefano Pitrelli


ROME — In a small church in central Italy, a priest told his congregation one recent Sunday morning that the motto of Italy’s highest-profile politician — “Italians First” — was antithetical to Christianity itself.

Farther north, another parish priest said that supporters of the country’s new governing hard-line anti-migrant party “cannot call themselves Christian.”

On the island of Sicily, an archbishop speaking in a public square took an even broader swipe, criticizing politicians who drive “their own miserable success” by exploiting fear about migrants.

“The church can’t stay silent,” the archbishop of Palermo, Corrado Lorefice, said during that speech, which marked a local holiday. “I can’t stay silent.”

As Italy’s migration politics swing to the right, the Catholic Church is responding with an oppositional roar.

Pope Francis, during the five years of his papacy, has spoken about the humanity and rights of migrants, cautioning about the anti-immigrant sentiment taking hold in parts of the developed world. But those warnings only recently turned into a clarion in the very backyard of the Roman Catholic Church, where one of the world’s most Catholic nations has ushered in a populist government that pledges to “stop the invasion” and narrow its doors.

In recent weeks, church leaders of all kinds — figures close to Francis and priests speaking on quiet Sundays — have struck back against what they describe as a xenophobic and fear-driven response to the wave of refugees and economic migrants who have reached Italian shores. Their ­voices have stood in relief against a political landscape where few others, even in Italian opposition parties, are delivering that message.

On World Refugee Day, Pope Francis joined critics of the Trump administration's policy of separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“It’s really unprecedented that the official voices of the Catholic Church are so squarely opposed” to an Italian government, said Massimo Faggioli, a Villanova University professor who studies Catholicism and European politics. “That hasn’t happened before. The Catholic Church is the opposition, basically.”

But some of those outspoken church leaders also describe a jolt of alarm, and say that the rise of anti-migrant movements here and in several other predominantly Catholic countries, including Poland and Austria, shows sharp divisions within the faith over how welcoming to be.

The dominant figure in Italy’s new government is Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, who swears by the Gospel, sometimes brandishes rosary beads and describes undocumented immigrants as a “tide of delinquents” whom he wants to send home.

“With all possible respect for the pastor of souls, instead of helping Africa’s poor come to Europe, my duty in the government is to first think of the millions of Italian poor,” Salvini recently wrote on Facebook, in a post responding to the archbishop’s speech in Palermo. “Am I wrong?”

Francis has not spoken explicitly about the shift in Italian politics, but this month he held a special Mass for migrants, and two weeks later, in front of 25,000 people in St. Peter’s Square, asked nations to act “decisively and immediately” to prevent the “tragedy” of migrant deaths at sea.

Francis and new Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte have not had a formal meeting, but Salvini has already met with a high-level church figure, Cardinal Raymond Burke, who is perhaps the highest-profile Vatican critic of the pope, and who has vowed to resist liberal changes.

In country after country, new nationalistic immigration policies have tested Catholic officials — and they have responded in different ways.
- Catholic leaders in the United States have been critical of President Trump on migration, and the U.S. organizing body of bishops described as “immoral” the practice of separating children from their parents at the border.
- In Poland, which has refused to accept a European-mandated quota of refugees, Catholic leaders have been more restrained, offering occasional criticism of the government’s refu­gee refusal, but also supporting a massive gathering last year of Catholics along the country’s border — an event that was seen by some as having anti-Islam overtones.
- In Italy, where more than 650,000 people have arrived by sea since 2014, resentment toward migrants has grown steadily, particularly as other European countries resisted plans to more equitably share the burden of hosting migrants and processing their asylum claims.

Salvini announced upon taking office that he was closing Italian ports to humanitarian vessels, a move that has added to the chaos in the Mediterranean. He has since frequently said he is turning campaign promises into “action.” Polls suggest his party, the League, has become Italy’s most popular.

Some Catholic leaders take that as a sign that their messages ­haven’t come through.

“If there are Christians that feel at ease in saying no to reception, the church must ask itself a question,” Bishop Nunzio Galantino, the secretary general of the Italian Bishops’ Conference and a prelate who is close to Francis, said in an interview. “This means we have spoken about Jesus — performed ceremonies and done liturgies — but we surely haven’t created a mentality according to the Gospel.”

A priest in the town of Teramo, 100 miles northeast of Rome, decided one Sunday morning this month that it was time to address some of those issues. What bothered him most was Salvini’s motto, Italians First, which the priest felt contradicted Catholic teachings about charity and equality.

“My intention is not to lead people to vote,” the priest, Federico Pompei, said in an interview, “but to reflect on the word of God. The Gospel’s motto would be: Mankind first.”

A phrase like Italians First, Pompei said, should “not come from the mouth of Christians.”

When he mentioned Salvini during his homily, most congregants continued to listen. But three people stood up and left.

“My explanation is that plenty of Salvini’s voters are practicing Christians,” he said.

Catholics in Italy have long played a key role in helping migrants, with aid groups offering food and medical assistance and a handful of parishes opening their doors for lodging. The Italian Bishops’ Conference helps to resettle refugees in Italy.

Some Catholic groups are now also trying to play a more active role in softening attitudes toward migrants or calling attention to government policies. One missionary priest, Alex Zanotelli, organized a hunger strike that included sit-ins near Italy’s Parliament, where he said that Francis’s message is “having a hard time reaching the church’s grass roots.”

In June, Caritas, a major Catholic charitable group, organized shared meals in dozens of countries, including Italy, where people could meet with migrants and refugees. The pope said he hoped such encounters could help nurture feelings of “fraternity.”

One of the most notable statements about migration came from the powerful Italian Bishops’ Conference, which released a five-paragraph statement, illustrated on its website with the photo of a weak migrant who had been clinging to flotsam in the Mediterranean before her rescue. The statement didn’t specifically mention the Italian government, but it spoke of the need to “save our own humanity from vulgarity and barbarization” by saving lives, “beginning with the most exposed, humiliated and trampled upon.”

Then, on Wednesday, a mainstream Catholic weekly magazine, Famiglia Cristiana, released the cover illustration of its upcoming issue — featuring a photo of Salvini and a Latin phrase associated with repelling the evil of Satan. The magazine’s headline said its opposition was “nothing personal,” just based on the Gospel. Still, Salvini felt compelled to respond, and he released a statement saying that he didn’t think the comparison was fair.

“I am the least of the good Christians,” he said. “But I don’t think I deserve that label. I am reassured by the fact I receive on a daily basis the support of so many women and men of the church.”


‘Thank you, Francis’ – from
all the masons of the world
Translated from

January 9, 2019

A message from the Freemasons of Spain to Pope Francis is filled with enthusiasm and gratitude: “All the masons of the world join the pope in his petition for ‘fraternity among persons of different religions’.”

This was launched via Twitter from the Grand Lodge of Spain, and underscores the identity of views with the pope as he expressed his message of ‘fraternity’ on Christmas Day.

'An extended version of the tweet said, “In his Christmas message from the central loggia of St. Peter’s, Pope Francis called for the triumph of universal brotherhood among all human beings:

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‘My Christmas wish is one of fraternity. Among persons of every nation and culture. Among persons with different ideas but capable of respecting and listneing to each other. Among persons of diverse religions.

Jesus came to eveal the face of God to all who seek him. And the face of God was manifested in a unique human face. Not in an angel, but on a man, born in a definite time and geography. Thus, with his Incarnation, the Son of God showed that salvation comes through love, welcoming, respect for our poor humanity which we all share in a great variety of racies, languages and cultures… but all brothers in humanity. Then our differences are not a danger but riches. As woth an artist who wants to make a mowaic: it’s better to have tiles of many colors rather than just a few”.

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In highlighting and underscoring the importance of the concepts expressed by the pope, the Grand Lodge of Spain points out: “The words of the pope show the present distance of the Church from the contents of Humanum genus (1884), the last great Catholic condemnation of Freemasonry”.

[In November 1983, the CDF, under Cardinal Ratzinger issued a ‘Declaration on Masonic Associations’ which reiterated that “the Church’s negative judgment in regard to Masonic associations remains unchanged since their principles have always been considered irreconcilable with the doctrine of the Church and therefore membership in them remains forbidden. The faithful who enrol in Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion.”]

In his encyclical, Pope Leo XIII condemned Freemasonry in no uncertain terms, stigmatizing “the great modern error of religious indifferentism and of the equality of all religions”, an attitude that the pope defines as the “most opportune way to nullify all religions, particularly the Catholic faith which being the only one true faith, cannot possibly be bundled up with all the others without enormous injustice”.

The Spanish masons claim that the way Bergoglio condemns religious fundamentalism and asks for fraternity and tolerance brings the Church close to Freemasonry, in a common commitment for universal brotherhood, beyond all political, cultural, national and religious differences.

This expression of esteem for the reigning pope from Freemasonry is news but not surprising. After Paul VI, Jorge Bergoglio, who has been an honorary Rotary Club member since 1999, is definitely the pope most appreciated by international freemasonry.

While John Paul II and Benedict XVI were harshly opposed by masons, the Argentine pope has received repeated praise from them, in Europe as in the Americas. And new praises will be coming since the pope will take part in Abu Dhabi, early next month, at the invitation of Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, in the International Inter-Religious Meeting on Human Fraternity, a theme that is always dear to masons.

The Italian masons have not been remiss in conveying their esteem and sympathy for this pope. Shortly after he was elected pope, Gustavo Raffi, who was at the time Grand Master of Italy’s Great Orient Lodge, told thousands of his followere at a convention:

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“One simply has to look at the walls that separate the Vatican from Italy to understand that something is changing. Let us observe with attention and respect how this pope os accelerating an epochal change in the traditionally refractory structures of the Church in order to welcome the ferments of innovation. His influence will reverberate far beyond the confines of sacristies”.

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Leo XIII’s encyclical against Freemasonry, on April 20, 1884, on “the condemnation of the philosophical and moral relativism of Freemasonry” may be read here:
http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_18840420_humanum-genus.html

It must be pointed out that the encyclical ends with an intense quadruple invocation: to the Virgin Mary so "she may show her power against impious sects”; to “St. Michael, prince of the angelic armies, and destroyer of the enemies from hell”; to “St Joseph, spouse of the Most Blessed Virgin, heavenly patron of the Catholic Church”; and to “the great apostles Peter and Paul, propagators and unconquered defenders of the Christian faith”.

Archbishop urges Irish Catholics
to resist new abortion law
by Michael Kelly

Jnauary 6, 2019

The primate of All-Ireland has insisted that the country’s new abortion law that took effect on January 1 has “no moral force” and it “must be resisted” by Catholics.

Archbishop Eamon Martin of Armagh, Northern Ireland, who also is president of the Irish bishops’ conference, said in a message to mark the legislation that the new law “in good conscience cannot be supported”.

In a May 22 referendum, voters opted by a margin of 2-1 to lift the country’s constitutional protection of the right to life of unborn children. The new law will permit abortion on demand up to 12 weeks’ gestation. It also will permit abortion up to 24 weeks on unspecified grounds for the health of the mother, and up to birth where the child is diagnosed with a life-limiting condition that means he or she may not live long after birth,” he said.

Archbishop Martin urged Catholics to “continue to call and work diligently for its limitation, amendment and repeal”.

A small group of demonstrators gathered for a symbolic protest outside the Irish parliament in Dublin on January 2. Ruth Cullen, spokeswoman for the Pro-Life Campaign, said that the protest stressed that the campaign to overturn the law continues.

“The pro-life movement is deeply saddened at what has happened to our country and about the loss of life that will inevitably result from this unjust law,” she told those gathered.

“We will fight on peacefully but ceaselessly to expose the lies that were told during the referendum campaign and we look forward to a brighter day at some point in the future when unborn babies in Ireland will once again be welcomed in life and protected in law,” Cullen said.

Bishop Kevin Doran of Elphin told Massgoers in his New Year message that Catholic politicians who had advocated for abortion had “chosen a position which is clearly out of communion with the Church”. “There is no point in pretending otherwise,” he said.

Elsewhere, Bishop Brendan Leahy of Limerick appealed to politicians to ensure that women experiencing a crisis pregnancy do not feel that abortion is their only option.

“Regardless of what way anyone voted and the reasons people had for voting as they did, it now behooves all to do our part to make sure that abortion is not the default response that characterises people in Ireland when crisis pregnancies arise,” the bishop said.

“As a society, we need to recognise that while legislation now provides for abortion, it is not primarily what we want. Our moral compass must steer us in an entirely different direction. We must think of the possibilities of life and the love it brings,” he continued.

Bishop Leahy said: “The question for us as a society is whether we still want to promote a culture of life that listens also to the child. I believe there is still a majority of people in Ireland who subscribe to a culture of the protection of the life of unborn but many of those also subscribe to a culture of choice. We cannot let the child be swept away lightly when making these hard decisions."

Bishop Leahy also criticised the limited right to conscientious objection in the new legislation.
- Doctors and other health care professionals will not be obliged to perform abortions, but the law does say they are committing an offence if they do not refer a woman who wants an abortion to another physician who will provide the termination.

He said the absence of more stringent protections for conscience was “outrageous” and called for the legislation to be amended to strengthen such protections.

“Forcing them [doctors] not to choose life would be a most inglorious watermark for this country,” he said. “It goes against the deeper demands of our common humanity to force anyone to do so.”

As the New Year began, Peter Kwasniewski wrote a lovingly detailed response entitled "Twelve reasons not to prefer the Novus Ordo" to a Jan. 1, 2019 article by Fr. Dwight Longenecker entitled 'Twelve things I like about the Novus Ordo Mass'. Kwasniewski starts out by saying, "Each claim he puts forward in his article can be and has been refuted in the ample literature written on the subject, of which he appears to be ignorant. Indeed, the article betrays minimal knowledge of the history, process, and content of the liturgical reform and of the contrasting richness of the traditional Mass"... Here is a follow-up to that response.

The best attacks fail
against the Traditional Mass
by Peter Kwasniewski

January 9, 2019

My article “Twelve Reasons Not to Prefer the Novus Ordo” was greeted with a barrage of snide remarks, flustered dismissals, relativistic claims about “tastes,” and soberly framed objections. As a philosopher and theologian, I care little for empty rhetoric, but I care very much about rational objections, which deserve a response. I have seen every one of these objections, multiple times, on Facebook and in comment boxes.

A typical objection:
The author of the article to which you responded said only that he liked X, Y, and Z about the Ordinary Form (O.F.); he never criticized the Extraordinary Form (E.F.). But you, in responding, defended the E.F. and attacked the O.F. You weren’t being fair to the author’s intention.
- If a person says, “Here are 12 things I like about the O.F.,” and nearly every one of them differs from the longstanding practice of the Church prior to Paul VI’s reform, then it’s not hard to draw the conclusion that the O.F. is flawed in those respects.
- If it is a perfection of the Novus Ordo to be more “accessible,” more “flexible,” more “simple,” more chock-full of Scripture, and so forth, and if these things are lacking in the traditional Latin Mass, which, on the contrary, is remote, inflexible, complex, bound to a more concise ancient cycle of readings, then to that extent the latter is defective.
- If, on the contrary, the usus antiquior is actually superior in those very respects, then it would be irrational to like the Novus Ordo for its defects. [1]

More tellingly, the approach “what I like about liturgy” sets us in the wrong posture toward it. A number of points made by the author might (might) be valid if the Mass were principally about us. The sign that it is not “about us” is that a priest is ordained to offer sacrifice, not to preside over a Bible study or host communal meals.
- A reading group or a supper club leaves all kinds of room for what the given guests (or hosts!) might like better, what might attract, what might tantalize, please, evangelize, retain.
- Sacrifice doesn’t care a whit what others think of it; it just is what it is, and does what it does.

The liturgical reformers rejected the primacy of sacrifice by seeking to abolish or minimize the “private Mass,” such as once rose up from countless altars throughout Christendom, and by modifying the ordination rite and other liturgical texts to downplay as much as possible the idea of the priest as an agent of sacrifice, which they argued was pagan and Jewish, not Christian.

Devout Novus Ordo Catholics will make critical remarks on the TLM like: “I just can’t understand the Latin,” “I think it’s too ornate,” or “The people who attend are too stoic throughout.” At the heart of everything they have said is “I”; it’s about their own preferences.

Former generations knew how to mortify this self-centeredness – how to subordinate it to a heritage, a common good, a tradition seen as taking precedence. Even as John the Baptist testified that “He must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn 3:30), we, too, must “decenter” from ourselves and “recenter” on the mysteries of Christ.

Traditionalists may like and love everything about the usus antiquior or we may not, but that is beside the point. We are committed to the traditional faith, to the truth of Christ, the treasury of the Church handed down to us, and we strive to conform our minds, hearts, likes and dislikes, to that.
- We are perfectly consistent, then, in objecting not only to liturgical Prometheanism, but also to doctrinal deviations like Amoris Laetitia’s opening to communion for “remarried” Catholics and the death penalty change to the Catechism.

Another objection:
The liberals who hijacked the Council, the professional liturgists who designed the Novus Ordo, and Pope Paul VI himself, were brought up on the usus antiquior that you so highly praise. Obviously, they didn’t think it was so great if they all agreed to swap it out for something else.
Here I would like to quote Dr. Alice von Hildebrand from a 2001 interview:

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The devil hates the ancient Mass. He hates it because it is the most perfect reformulation of all the teachings of the Church. It was my husband who gave me this insight about the Mass.

The problem that ushered in the present crisis was not the traditional Mass. The problem was that priests who offered it had already lost the sense of the supernatural and the transcendent. They rushed through the prayers, they mumbled and didn’t enunciate them. That is a sign that they had brought to the Mass their growing secularism. The ancient Mass does not abide irreverence, and that was why so many priests were just as happy to see it go.

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In my book Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness, I comment on this response as follows:

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Liturgical decadence, deviation, and disorder are, like the natural tendency of entropy, a downhill walk for fallen man. Left to himself, left without the guidance of the tradition willed by the Holy Spirit and the example of many saints who have shown us how to walk the often grueling uphill path of fidelity, fallen man will make liturgy conform to his own whims and wants, his own programs and purposes – something easier, and more damaging.

It is the uphill climb, prepared for by self-discipline, that leads to the magnificent vista, the glimpse of a vast and humbling beauty that can only come from the mind of the Creator. “Hate not laborious works, nor husbandry ordained by the Most High. Number not thyself among the multitude of the disorderly” (Sir 7:16-17).

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Let us not beat around the bush: the old liturgical rites, if they are to be done in a truly prayerful and edifying way, require discipline, mortification, serious study and practice, keen attentiveness, great piety, and a deep interior life. Any priest who could rush through them (which happened “back then,” as we all know, and still happens occasionally today) or who was ready to chuck them out the window had already lost his faith and his commitment to the virtue of religion. In Newman’s terms, he had notional assent, not real assent.

It was therefore hardly surprising that such men would want a radical simplification that released them from what had become onerous burdens and meaningless rituals.
- They wanted a drive-through Mass and a lunchable picnic of psalms. - They wanted to “get busy” with the “real work” of “helping the people,” spreading a pure and simple Christian message that whiffed of Marx and Freud.
- The energetic implementers of the Council promoted a vision of Christianity that was all outwardness and no inwardness, all action and no contemplation, all reform and no formality, all up-to-date and never timeless, privileging the homely over the solemn, the casual over the hieratic.
- In short, the Novus Ordo enshrined a generation’s impiety, activism, and worldliness.

Those who were expressly modernist and revolutionary in their intentions (and there were many such) hated the traditional Latin Mass not because of incense, chant, or Latin, which they were willing to harness on occasion for their own purposes, but because its every prayer, gesture, ceremony, and rubric enshrines the Catholic Faith in its premodern and antimodern audacity.

All this proves that something had gone wrong before the Council, and on that bigger topic, there are several compelling theories. But we can see that there were also many who were deeply devoted to the liturgy – the best authors of the Liturgical Movement prove it, when they write with such fervor and insight about the life of worship they lived – and there is absolutely no reason to think the same liturgy would not have continued to be learned, loved, prayed, and passed down by Catholics serious in their faith. The reform was imposed on the Church from above, by ideologues with bright ideas; it was not clamored for by the faithful.

You and others write about the Extraordinary Form through rose-colored glasses, as if “in the old days” it was everywhere offered piously and edifyingly. But this was far from true.
As my quotation from Alice von Hildebrand indicates, I don’t deny that there were abuses. Abuse of the good is always possible for fallen human beings. A ten- or fifteen-minute rapidly mumbled Low Mass was the sort of problem one encountered before the Council. Do such abuses mean that the solution was to reconceive the liturgy “from the ground up”? No. That’s not a Catholic way of thinking about anything, especially the liturgy we receive from our forefathers. The original Liturgical Movement had the right idea: educate Catholics in their heritage, and help them to take hold of it.

The apostles’ liturgy was far simpler than the Latin Mass, and said in Aramaic or Greek. Why do you insist that Catholics today use an elaborate medieval Latin liturgy? We should imitate what the apostles did.
One who makes this surprisingly common objection is adopting a Protestant notion of the Mass as a re-enactment of the Last Supper in the simple gathering of disciples to read Scripture and break bread, which obscures what it really is: the offering of the sacrifice of Christ within the living community of His Body, the Church.

Like Mary, who “treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart” (Lk 2:19; 2:51), the Church too, treasuring up and pondering the sacred mysteries, elaborated their celebration according to the wisdom given to her from above. Christ promised His apostles: “When he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will teach you all truth” (Jn 16:13).

The development of the divine liturgy over the millennia – from Abel’s offering to Melchisedek’s bread and wine, from Hebrew sacrifices to apostolic eucharistia, from the age of monasticism and medieval cathedral chapters through Baroque splendor – is nothing other than the preparation, reception, and explication of the truth given to us in Christ and fully blossoming in the life of His Bride: “Amen, amen I say to you, he that believeth in me, the works that I do, he also shall do; and greater than these shall he do” (Jn 14:12).

Christian worship is not a stage re-enactment of Passover fellowship or time-travel to some chosen favorite century, but a living whole, built up slowly over time by lovers of God and cherished by the Church, who hands down the same liturgical rites from age to age, augmented with new beauties inspired by God to be in harmony with what is already there.

As it develops into the full expression of its essence, the liturgy achieves greater definition and perfection in its secondary elements. This is why its rate of change slows down as time goes on, and what is added, though valuable, is small in comparison to the body of rites, chants, texts, and ceremonies already in place.

This is what liturgical tradition means:
- we do not reinvent our worship by leaping over centuries of faith and devotion;
- we do not produce new anaphoras because we think we need some more variety;
- we do not cast off the cycle of readings hallowed by well over 1,000 years of consistent use and replace them with an altogether new cycle compiled by a group of scholars;
- we do not make optional the magnificent antiphons that are flesh and bone of the Roman rite; and so forth.
Protestants invent liturgy, but Catholics receive it.

It is therefore not only a bad idea, but contrary to the Church’s faith in Divine Providence and in the governance of the Holy Spirit to reject major elements of the Latin Church’s liturgical tradition and to replace them with a combination of artificial archaeologisms and novelties, as was manifestly done in the 1960s and 1970s.

The massive rupture from the preceding liturgical tradition, which extends to every aspect and detail of the liturgical rites, cannot be papered over with platitudes. It is a gaping wound in the Body of Christ. For, as St. Vincent of Lérins maintains:

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The principle of piety admits of only one attitude: namely, that everything be transferred to the sons in the same spirit of faith in which it was accepted by the fathers; that religion should not lead us whither we want to go, but that we must follow whither it leads; and that it is proper to Christian modesty and earnestness not to transfer to postery one’s own ideas, but to preserve those received from one’s ancestors. (Commonitorium, ch. 6)[/dim

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It may be worth adding that the primacy of Latin in the Roman Church was solemnly stated by Pope John XXIII in the Apostolic Constitution Veterum Sapientia of 1962, which has never been rescinded. Conversely, the notion that liturgy ought to be in the vernacular was condemned at the Council of Trent and in Pius VI’s Auctorem Fidei.

This does not mean that liturgy may never be in the vernacular, but only that no one may argue that it must be or even should be. To hold that the Roman Church was mistaken to keep her rites in Latin is a condemned opinion.

You object to “antiquarianism” – going back to earlier centuries to recover lost elements in the liturgy – but the very form of liturgy you are trying to revive is something that belongs to a former time, so aren’t you guilty of the same thing?
The recovery of the usus antiquior does not constitute a form of antiquarianism for two basic reasons.
First, it has never ceased to be celebrated. Even when Paul VI attempted to replace it, a minority of clergy, at first the elderly and later new priests, and finally whole religious communities, continued to use the old missal or made use of both missals.
- Consequently, the usus antiquior embodies an unbroken living tradition, so ancient we cannot even specify precisely when and how it emerged. [2]
- The new Mass, in contrast, has an exact birthday: April 3, 1969. It will shortly be fifty, and boy, how it is showing its age.

Second, it is understandable that over the centuries, certain practices will be modified or lost, due to the pressures of a period of time or a new emphasis.
- Thus, communion in the hand was gradually replaced by communion on the tongue, which was seen to be a more reverent and safer way to receive the Lord’s Body, the worship of which was intensifying.
- It is a form of antiquarianism to try to reactivate those lost elements many centuries after they have perished.
- But the liturgy as a whole is not something that can be modified or lost, except by an abusive exercise of power. (This is why traditionalists are consistent when they also reject Pius XII’s spurious reinvention of Holy Week.) [It's very curious that those 'rad trads' who think Pius XII was the last 'true' pope hardly ever bring up his questionable 'reinvention' of the Holy Week liturgy.]

Hence, the usus antiquior has the right of primogeniture and the right of possession and cannot ever be excluded from the life of the Church. It also happens to be more relevant to the needs of modern Catholics.

Your position implies that nothing in the Ordinary Form is an improvement over the preceding liturgy. Indeed, you even seem to reject it altogether.
I used to think there were some improvements in the Novus Ordo. For instance, I thought it was good to have more prefaces, more readings, and more flexibility for what may be sung (in other words, you can sing the Ordinary without the Propers or vice versa, enabling more chant to be used, instead of an “all-or-nothing” approach).

But the devil’s in the details. As one examines these things more carefully, and most importantly, as one gains experience with both rites, one comes to see many flaws in these supposed “improvements”. Unfortunately, few have the patience or the opportunity to compare the rites, to see what was changed and why, so superficial assumptions tend to rule the day.

Apart from a handful of meager details [3], I see nothing in the Novus Ordo that represents an improvement on the Latin rite that came before it and has a pedigree of centuries and millennia.
- In general, the Novus Ordo is a dumbed down ritual, with a lot of specialist scholars’ pet ideas thrown in and a huge amount of verbiage.
- The results are as could be expected: many Catholics walked away in disgust at the desacralization of worship, and those who stayed or have come along later have absorbed from it flawed notions of what liturgy even is – and that, on the basis of what Vatican II said about liturgy in the first part of Sacrosanctum Concilium, which reads like a theological exposition of Solemn High Mass, not of the Concilium’s Missa normativa.

The Novus Ordo Missae is sacramentally valid (the same may be said for the other sacramental rites), but after that, the whole experiment in modernization is a disappointment, not to say a scandal, once you get to know the riches of the usus antiquior.

And I am not talking only about the Mass. The old rites of Baptism, of Confirmation, of Penance, of Matrimony, of Extreme Unction, and above all of Holy Orders are far superior to their “reformed” versions, from every angle of examination: ascetical-mystical, doctrinal, moral, aesthetic. Even the breviary of St. Pius X, which has its problems, is outstandingly better than the Liturgy of the Minutes, I mean Hours.

I do not reject the new liturgy. It is the Church’s own tradition that repudiates it as a stranger.
- Validity the sacramental rites must have, since Our Lord would not deprive His people of access to grace; a functional licitness they have as well.
- But none of this touches the question of the authenticity of a rite in the line of its own historical development from apostolic roots, or the profound questions of fittingness that surround the enactment of any liturgy.
- Paul VI engaged his authority to impose a new liturgy on the Church, and in doing so, he abused that authority as well as the People of God.

At this point in time, shouldn’t we be working to improve the celebration of the Ordinary Form? After all, it is the rite that 99% of Catholics pray in, and we should do what we can to correct its abuses and elevate its dignity.
In a way, yes, in a way, no. Undoubtedly, it is good for Catholics to be exposed to Gregorian chant; to hear some Latin; to see the priest facing eastward; to see beautiful vestments, smell incense, and hear the jangling of bells; to kneel before the Word made flesh and receive Him on the tongue.

But let’s not kid ourselves: the Reform of the Reform (ROTR) cannot succeed.

Each time an official effort to implement the ROTR acquires steam, it runs off the tracks.
- Benedict XVI abandoned the flock [I detest Kwasniewski when he indulges in Benedict-bashing] in the midst of the first serious effort to improve the postconciliar liturgical wasteland. [He renounced the papacy five years after he had promulgated Summorum Pontificum that recovered and revalidated the old Mass.]
- Cardinal Sarah has been slapped down repeatedly by the Vatican for his modest proposals to make the Novus Ordo look like a Catholic liturgy.
- Pope Francis celebrates Mass in such a ho-hum way that he might as well be the high priest of corporate bureaucracy.
- Islands of Oratorians intrepidly celebrate “the rite of Michael Napier,” inventing a good deal to plug in the gaps of the Pauline missal, but they stand at the margins, resolutely detached.
- Within the mainstream Church, there is a level of mediocrity that keeps asserting itself, like a gravitational force – a Missa normativa that is neither egregiously abusive nor characterized by anything noble, whether “noble simplicity” or its often forgotten counterpart, “noble beauty”. Apart from unexpected redheads, this is the genetic type to which offspring continually revert.

It is clear, in addition, that Paul VI did not have a “high” and “traditional” Novus Ordo in mind when he promulgated the new missal. In his general audience of November 26, 1969, he calmly praised the glories of Latin and Gregorian chant before proceeding to explain that the Church was asking the faithful to sacrifice them forever for the sake of winning over Modern Man.

So those who are busy dressing up the Novus Ordo like the Infant of Prague may display a sort of tragic heroism, but they are working against the clear intentions of the judge who imposed this ball and chain upon us.

On a more practical level, the priest who, inspired by Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy and other such inspirational reading, tries to elevate the Novus Ordo – which generally means enriching it ad libitum with elements already hardwired into the usus antiquior – is going to generate opposition within the flock, and soon enough, complaints will find their way to his bishop.

In nine out of ten cases, the visionary pastor will be called on the carpet and warned off his boat-rocking ways or, sooner or later, moved to another church, while his replacement will come in and undo most of his reforms. I’ve seen this and heard about it countless times. It is perhaps the #1 cause of trauma among the Catholic faithful who are still attached to the Pauline liturgy.

It would take not just one outstanding pope, but several in a row, and several turnovers of the worldwide episcopacy, before the Novus Ordo could look, as a rule, like Catholic liturgy in continuity with the preceding 1,500 years of the Church’s worship. Meanwhile, the souls of the faithful are pulled this way and that, according to the temperamental whims of pastors, bishops, and popes, and one’s children absorb the lesson that Catholic liturgy is more or less the plaything of the most powerful person in control at any moment.

Moreover, the Reform of the Reform should not succeed, because it only masks the fact that the reformed liturgy is itself the fundamental problem, not merely “how it’s done”. This is above all true for the priest. The laity can schlep along Soviet-style with their weekly service, but the priest is the one who has been most grievously deprived of nourishment by the Bauhaus Pauline Mass.
(What Paul VI put into motion during and after Vatican II was as effective in emptying the monasteries and convents of the world as what Henry VIII did to those of England.)

The reality, I’m afraid, is this: the O.F. and E.F. cannot ultimately sit peacefully next to each other because their principles are incompatible. The most serious defenders of the O.F. – scholars like Fr. Pierre-Marie Gy, Msgr. Kevin Irwin, Fr. Patrick Regan, Massimo Faggioli, Andrea Grillo, and almost anyone who writes for PrayTell – are quite clear that the new rites represent a new theological vision born of Vatican II, one that largely repudiates the Tridentine legacy. As Cardinal Lercaro, a major player in the liturgical reform, stated, without expecting to be contradicted: “The historical period that we call Tridentine is closed”.

There can be an uneasy truce, but the things in themselves tend in opposite directions, as we would expect, since they have contrary origins.
- The usus antiquior comes to us by tradition – it long pre-existed the first time an official edition of it was papally promulgated in 1570.
- The Novus Ordo is the creation ex nihilo of papal power, in 1969. Like a sort of parody of Melchisedek, it hath neither father nor mother, but continueth interminably.

Never in the history of the Church had there been a new missal; there had only ever been new editions of the same old missal. And it does no good pretending the two are in continuity: the content is far too different, not only in the texts (orations, antiphons, readings, offertories, anaphoras, etc.), but in the gestures and ceremonies as well. Everywhere there is extensive and profound divergence.[4]

So great is the difference that priests who discover the old Mass find it powerfully transformative for their priesthood, even after having celebrated the Novus Ordo devoutly for many years. Therefore, the priest who loves Christ, the Church, his own soul, and the souls of his flock should learn and then lean upon a Mass that will delight him with “marrow and fatness” (Ps. 62:6), if only as a restful pause in the ever uphill effort, always slightly dodgy and idiosyncratic, to clothe a naked waif that stripped of its devotional and theological garments.

This whole back-and-forth is premised on unrealistic comparisons. Mainstreamers who like the “smells and bells” will contrast their ROTR Novus Ordo – which is as rare as hen’s teeth, constituting perhaps 1% of the Catholic world – with a 1950s speed-muttered Low Mass of Baby-Boomer lore, which basically doesn’t exist anymore in 2019. To be fair, rad trads often do the same when they compare a Solemn High Mass in a Baroque cathedral with a clown mass on a card table. Neither of those is commonplace, either.
What few people seem willing to do is to compare the “median Mass” – that is, what you will typically find on a Sunday: the traditional Missa cantata versus the Novus Ordo in Anytown, USA.
- The former has chant and other sacred music, uses only properly vested male ministers, retains the Roman Canon, distributes holy communion to kneeling faithful on the tongue, etc.
- The latter is valid; has horrible music, altar girls, EMHCs, and lay lectors; uses a fabricated canon; and gives communion in the hand to people standing in a queue.

In this comparison, we win big time. Call it the “Pepsi Challenge” for liturgy: go to a Missa cantata and go to a random Sunday Novus Ordo. Then report back to us, online reader. Tell us we’re wrong.

The lay faithful who attend only the Novus Ordo, or who may have seen a Low Mass once or twice, are at a huge disadvantage. When they read arguments presented by traditionalists, they feel that Catholicism is being attacked, or their personal fidelity, or the holiness of the Eucharist. But none of this is so.
- Many Catholics are admirably faithful to what they have been given, little enough though it be, and the Lord, Who is truly, really, substantially present even in a Mass that sins against His liturgical Providence, can still sanctify their souls.
- But the “spirit of Vatican II,” and the liturgical reform that perfectly embodied it, has deprived them of much of the historical and theological content of Catholicism and left them with a shell, a simulacrum, a substitute.

The Novus Ordo, even at its best, is still a starvation diet compared with the riches in the preconciliar liturgical tradition. God can sanctify prisoners in jail fed on stale crusts and standing water, but this is not the manner in which He would sanctify most of us. “I came that they may have life and have it more abundantly” (Jn 10:10), says Our Lord, and this applies also to liturgical life.

If the longed for renewal of the Church is ever to begin in earnest, Catholics must come to grips with this tragedy of rupture and suppression, yet without giving way to anger or despondency, and with a resolve to seek and to find the fullness of the Faith. In no other way can the Bride of Christ be rescued from the mud and grime that mar her earthly beauty.

NOTES:
[1] The sentiment “I like the fact that the O.F. is all these things” is difficult, if not impossible, to separate from the judgment “I dislike the fact that the E.F. is none of these things” – and from the wish that somehow its “defects” could be overcome in some future revision of it.
- Thus, we have an Oratorian recently opining that the old Mass should be available in the vernacular to make it better conform to Chalcedonian doctrine (!);
- we have a priest providing us with a lengthy list of “improvements” to be imported from the O.F. to the E.F.;
- we have advocates of “pastoral liturgy,” late-hatched offspring of Jungmann, substituting spoken vernacular readings for chanted Latin ones at High Mass, while also violating the symbolic directionality of the lesson and Gospel by reading them versus populum – and then accusing those who follow the tradition of “elitism” and “aestheticism”; and
- on and on it goes, the merry-go-round of “moderns know better” that leaves a bloody mess on the operating floor. I have responded to such flare-ups of tinkeritis in a number of places.

[2] There is reason to believe that the liturgy in Rome was tr2nslated from Greek to Latin in the 4th century under Pope Damasus I (366-384), but the information we possess is sketchy. Henry Sire comments: “We should notice also that the spirit of the new vernacular was the opposite of that in which the vulgarisers of the 1960s did their work. Damasus himself was a fine Latinist, and he took care to write the prayers of the liturgy in a style that looked to the standards of the Roman rhetorical tradition. The Roman Canon, most of whose text as we have it took shape at this time, may be assumed to be his composition; the same is true of the Collects, which, like the Canon itself, reflect the fine cadences of classical prose style. Conventions of pagan prayer that go back to Virgil and to Homer find an echo in the Christian prayers, and, in his care to dignify the language of worship, Damasus sometimes substituted an old pagan word for the familiar Christian term. His Latin liturgy was thus an elevated vernacular, one that deliberately made use of archaism to express the sanctities of worship. The result of his artistry has been to give us, in the traditional rite of the Mass, a distinguished expression of the last age of ancient civilisation” (Phoenix from the Ashes [Kettering, OH: Angelico, 2015], 266).

[3] One example would be the restoration of a suitable number of readings to the Easter Vigil, which readings had been barbarically cut down to four in Pius XII’s assault on Holy Week. On the one hand, the Novus Ordo makes the full set of readings optional (as it does so many things), and, on the other hand, there was no defect in the readings prior to Pius XII. So it was a “solution” to a problem that had been created by the lust for liturgical reform. Put it this way: the more people tinkered with the pre-Pauline liturgy, the more problems they created for themselves, and to these “problems” the Pauline liturgy seemed a solution. But it was perhaps the most outstanding case in history of a cure worse than the disease.

[4]To anticipate another objection: yes, the reformers got much of their raw material from old sacramentaries that had long since fallen out of use in the form in which they are found in manuscript, but they rarely stopped there: they gleefully redacted almost every line to bring it into conformity with their own theories about what “modern man” needed to hear. They could not even take up ancient sources without bowdlerizing and innovating. What hubris! What myopia!



Interior, Jesuit church in Lucerne.

The time has come for
a new Counter-Reformation
in art and architecture
by Duncan G. Stroik

January 7, 2019

We need a new Counter-Reformation in sacred art and architecture.

What was the Reformation’s effect?
- First, it preached iconoclasm, the rejection of the human figure in religious art.
- Second, it reoriented worship, so that people gathered round the pulpit rather than the altar and the baptismal font became more important than the tabernacle.
- At the same time, it lessened the distinction between the clergy and the laity, creating more equality and decreasing hierarchy.
- Third, the Reformation taught a functionalist view of worship, rejecting anything “unnecessary.” e.g., The altar should not have anything on it, for example, and churches should be designed according to seating capacity, with sight lines like a theater.
- Fourth, it elevated the quotidian over the sacred. Churches are thought of more as meeting houses than sacred places. They’re designed to be intimate rather than awesome.

These churches did not, to put it another way, express terribilita, the awesomeness of God. What have we been living through for the past sixty years? A second reformation, only this one came from within. All four of those points characterize mainstream Catholic church building since 1960.

And what do we need in response? A second counter-reformation. One that learns from the first Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries how to make a creative and serious response to the iconoclasm, functionalism, egalitarianism, and “quotidianism” of our time.

And not just in our church-building and our ideas of church architecture.
- In the Counter-Reformation bishops were commanded to return to their dioceses and to take care of their flock, to become the chief teachers of the diocese.
- Priests were to celebrate mass daily, laity go to mass and receive Communion more often, and better preaching and more confession were promoted.
-nEucharistic adoration was emphasized through the joining of the tabernacle to the altar, as well as the forty-hours devotion.
- There was a new emphasis on catechesis and education, including the invention of the seminary for the training of priests.

These developments pushed the Church to renew her commitment to making her churches and her liturgies as beautiful as the Faith itself. She employed art, architecture, music, and liturgy to draw all to the church and then to uplift their minds to those things that are eternal. Elizabeth Lev brilliantly tells the story of Counter-Reformation Art in her new book, How Catholic Art Saved the Faith: The Triumph of Beauty and Truth in Counter-Reformation Art.

We need an architecture today that can do the same in response to the second reformation. It must symbolize the antiquity, universality, and beauty of the Church, as Vignola’s Gesu and Palladio’s Redentore churches did in the sixteenth century.
- This will mean an employment of art and architecture that is evangelistic and catechetical.
- Buildings that are icons on the outside, large and beautiful, with warm yet awe-inspiring interiors that are foci of the community. Churches must express for modern people the Terribilità.

We need a recovery of ancient principles and a restoration of what is timeless and classic.
- The basilica form and the baldacchino, for example, as well as altar rails, side altars and shrines, solemn confessionals, a place set aside for baptism, and saints buried beneath the altar or relics visible for veneration.
- The sanctuary should be set apart, raised up to be the most beautiful part of the church. It should be the focus and the identity, liturgically and devotionally.

We need to revive the iconographic program, the creation of a narrative within the whole building.
- We can’t settle for the “America formula” of a crucifix above the altar, Mary on the left, and Saint Joseph on the right.
- Churches need to be like a good book that can be re-read, like a good symphony listened to over and over, with new things always seen or discovered.

That means the commissioning of custom art should be a priority:
- durable and high-quality materials shaped by highly skilled craftsman and top-quality artists and architects who can employ inventiveness in developing the tradition.
- No copies or regurgitation.
- No off the shelf statues.
- New paintings, sculptures, mosaics, and murals must push the artists to develop new and authentic ways of expressing the timeless truths.

This does not mean antiquarianism, employing a particular style, or trying to go back to a golden age, whether the 1950s or a Romantic notion of the Middle Ages, as wonderful as those times were.
- It means creating churches that are traditional yet contemporary, universal yet local, Roman yet catholic – both/and, not either/or. Churches that combine unity with diversity and learn from the local character, express modern saints, and inventively develop the tradition.

Like the great artists and architects of the Counter-Reformation, we must defend the faith of the Catholic Church through beauty.

[IMG]'Except the Lord build the house':
Restoring a sense of beauty[/IMG]
by Anthony Esolen

Vol 34, January 2019 2019




The men who built the cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres did not have diesel engines, or lightweight metals like soft aluminum or firm titanium, or steel girders. The men who built Europe’s greatest Gothic church did not have cranes that could tower a hundred feet in the air without toppling, while lifting pre-formed blocks of concrete. They did not have computer models. They did not have the calculus. Most of them assuredly could not read.

They had to fit stones atop one another precisely to be both balanced and beautiful, and that meant that the stones had to be cleanly and accurately dressed, shaved with saws, cut to fit. Their carpenters had to know how to build safe scaffolding from the hewn trunks of hardwood trees, to soar ten or twelve stories in the air, supporting the men who, with sledges and pulleys and manual strength, set in place the stones of lovely arches, springing on each side at exactly the same oblique angle from the pillars beneath, to intersect one another at a point clinched by the keystone.

It is not enough to say that Chartres Cathedral is a great work of art. A sketch by Rembrandt is a great work of art. A single rib of a single pillar at Chartres is a great work of craftsmanship. A single panel of one of the lesser stained glass windows along the nave gives us art at its finest. Chartres is a magnificent symphony of countless works of sculpture, glazing, tiling, carpentry, masonry—and poetry and theology too.

It is more than a museum or a collection. In a museum, one work is displayed next to another because it happens to have been created by the same person or in the same country or at around the same time. But every work in Chartres has to do with every other.

I would say that there is nothing like it in the world, except that in fact there are things like it — all the other great cathedrals of the Middle Ages are like it, all over Europe; and thousands of churches, too, some of them the special churches for orders of priests, like Santa Maria Novella, the Dominican church in Florence, and some of them just the principal church for a small town or a village. At the Great Exposition, every entry boasted an inventor, but if you visit many an old church in Europe, you will see frescoes or sculptures created by “the Master of Anytown,” whose name no one knows.

What it is that people believe to be most important in our common life on earth? If you went to the Great Exposition, you might suppose that the most important thing is to make machines that turn things, so as to work other machines, to do things we want them to do, or to make things we want them to make.

If you went to Chartres, you would not need to suppose, you would simply and readily perceive that the most important thing was to sing with the Psalmist, “I rejoiced when I heard them say, Let us go up to the house of the Lord.”

In C.S. Lewis’s fantastical novel That Hideous Strength, when the planet-traveler Ransom prepares to greet old Merlin the mage from Arthurian times, he dons a long red and gold robe. That surprises his friends, but he reminds them that in all other times but our own, “drab was not a favorite color.”

Drab is a favorite color in our day; its companion is garish. I defy any of my contemporaries to name one style of public building that is not now either drab or garish.

Our churchmen have gone along with the movement, mostly drab, but sometimes garish, as witness the big childish banners blaring out a favorite comforting verse (never “It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God”), the glad-handing ceremonies of greeting and peace-wishing, and the priest more comfortable joshing with the attendees than praying with people who are, as he is, as we all are, on the inevitable journey to the grave and in dire need of the grace of God.

When my daughter and I were in Sweden, we stopped in many a rural church built during the Middle Ages and then subjected to artistic reforms afterward. Sometimes I saw shadows that looked like water stains emerging through the plaster of the ceilings. I began to suspect that they were not stains or tricks of the light. When I asked a minister about them, he confirmed my suspicion.

Many fresco paintings were whitewashed away in the so-called Enlightenment. It was that same Enlightenment, in its sanguinary French eruption, that smashed priceless stained glass windows in churches and cathedrals across the country.

“Four fifths of [man’s] greatest art,” said Henry Adams, was created in those supposedly dark days, to the honor of Jesus and Mary. The Enlightenment destroyed more great art than it produced, and what the harbingers of the novus ordo saeclorum did not get around to destroying they slandered.

There was, however, a generally healthy revival of Gothic art and architecture in the nineteenth century, thanks to the efforts of men like A. W. N. Pugin and John Ruskin. When Catholics immigrated to the United States from Italy, France, Germany, Ireland, and Portugal, they did not aim to build trapezoidal meeting houses with clear windows and no representations of the history of salvation. They aimed to build churches, and they achieved that aim.

I have seen an inscription on the façade of a Portuguese church in New Bedford reading, in Latin, “The workmen of Saint Anthony’s built this to the glory of God.” I do not think that the inscription implied that they only paid for the construction. They did hire a master builder, but the men did the work with their hands, their sweat, at risk of life and limb. And these were not rich industrialists but fishermen.


St Thomas Aquinas church after 2011 renovation.

In my home town in central Pennsylvania, the church-builders were Irish coal miners, and they built their Saint Thomas Aquinas Church in Romanesque style, pooling their funds to hire an Italian painter who had done some work on the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington. He came to lowly Archbald, Pennsylvania, and filled the church with paintings, nave and sanctuary, walls and ceiling.

My boyhood church was beautiful. Then came the rage for the drab and the garish, and a good deal of that original beauty was obliterated, spoiled, or pulverized — at considerable expense.

Drab, with garish its cousin, is our enemy. Does anyone go to visit the modern neighborhoods of Rome, built in drab? Does anyone take pictures of a new police station or a new post office? The most prominent features of the new county courthouse where we live are enormous glass “walls,” so that you can see into empty waiting rooms and hallways, and a sheltered area surmounted with a big metal fence and rolls of barbed wire.

Our young people are not only starved for nature. They are starved for beauty. Everywhere they turn, their eyes fall upon what is drab or garish: their schools, the fast-food joint, a baseball stadium, and, of course, their churches.

- I have seen, in Catholic churches, minimalist Stations of the Cross that cannot even be recognized if you are more than a few feet away. The message they deliver is that the Stations are trivial.
- I have seen crosses that look as if a modernist Jesus were flying with wings outspread, like a theological pterodactyl. The message is that the Cross was a brief and unfortunate interlude.
- I have seen the Sacrament relegated to what looks like a broom closet. The message is that it is something to be embarrassed about and that we come to church not to serve God but to celebrate our own central goodness.
- I have seen one sculpture of the supper at Emmaus that has Jesus at one end of the table with the two disciples and two other figures ten or twelve feet away; it looks as if they are arguing with one another, perhaps dickering over the check for the meal. If you were not told that it was the supper at Emmaus, there is no way you could guess it. There is no message but chaos.
- I have seen a baptismal font with bubbles. The message is that flashy technology is to be preferred before silence.
- I have seen beautifully tiled floors, their intricate cruciform patterns bespeaking careful and devoted craftsmanship, covered over with a plush red carpet, wall to wall, such as might be used in a whorehouse down on its luck. The message is that we are the newly rich, with bad taste.

It is long past time to get rid of everything ugly and stupid from our churches, most of it visited upon them since the great iconoclasm of the sixties. We must return to genuine art, art that stirs the imagination and pleases the eye, that entices the soul with beauty - even a dread beauty — before a single word of a sermon is uttered.

“Where your treasure is,” says Jesus, “there will your heart lie also.” We can tell where a people’s heart lies by where they place their treasure.

In material terms we are by far the wealthiest generation of people who have ever lived on earth. Yet our original accomplishments in all of the arts are meager at best.
- Renaissance painting and sculpture, music and poetry, are what you get when a vigorous popular and learned tradition that had already been immensely creative meets again the classics of Greece and Rome. - Modern art is what you get when you repudiate the people, the tradition, and the classics. Individuals are left to trade upon the stock of their native creativity alone, which is not going to be great.

Why would we care to make our churches beautiful when what goes on in them is slipshod and is not felt to be of even temporal consequence, let alone eternal? We do nothing in the week that is more significant than to serve God by prayer. That is a fact. We have forgotten it. Our hearts skip a beat when someone gives us a surprise ticket to the baseball game. Those same hearts plod along at their usual sluggish tempo when we dress for church.

So we end up with stadiums that will not last twenty years before the owners of the ball club demand new ones. Chartres Cathedral has been standing for eight hundred years.

Anthony Esolen is professor of classical literature at Thomas More College. His latest books are Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church and Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture. This article is adapted from chapter two of the second book.