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Super-Ex has some previously unpublished
recollections of Cardinal Caffarra - and
pre-announces a major Catholic symposium
in Rome this spring that the cardinal wished
Translated from
[Obviously, Tosatti's correspondent Super-Ex, is not your generic man-on-the-street, but has Catholic creds in his CV, as one can glean from his latest letter to Tosatti, who has now given Super-Ex his own 'logo'!]
Our Super-Ex – who says he is ex-Movimento per la Vita, ex-Scienza e Vita, ex-journalist for Avvenire, ex-teacher at a Catholic school, but by the grace of God, not ex-Catholic – has written us with a previously unpublished recollection about the late Cardinal Caffarra.
But on top of that, he also gives us advance notice of a gathering in Rome next spring when Catholics will speak about the current state of the Church and will pray together so that, against the strong waves of popular ‘in’ thinking and demagoguery, the ship may continue to stay afloat and navigate through the storm. Against wind and tide! Here is what he wrote:
Dear Tosatti,
Four months ago, Cardinal Caffarra was born in heaven. It is right to remember the man and his silent martyrdom in this time of ecclesiastical swaggering. Caffarra was a man of the Church in all respects: he loved the Church intensely and profoundly with all of himself. And he truly suffered to see her so brutalized and divided.
One day, when I asked him, “But how are you, personally?”, he answered: “Humanly, I am in despair because I cannot see any salvation for the Church today. But as a Christian, I am serene: God will never abandon his boat, even when that seems this is happening”.
When he died, someone recalled one of his addresses that began this way: “xscuse me for the statement. But I would be happier if someone said the Archbishop of Bologna had a lover than if they say that I have any hostile thought against the pope”.
He said that in 2014 – namely, at the beginning of Bergoglio’s ‘doctrinal revolution’. But whoever knew Caffarra closely knows that he would not have repeated those words, neither at the end of 2015, after Amoris Laetitia, nor in the last year of his life, 2017.
Yet Caffarra never crossed certain boundaries. No one ever heard him say a word too much, no one ever saw him make a gesture of anger. Yet he suffered terribly: He – and his fellow DUBIA cardinals – were not considered worthy of a response from the pope, whether written or oral. Not even of an audience with him.
The swaggering Bergoglio, who telephones everyone right and left, who gives interviews as if he were an entertainment celebrity, who pops up at the birthday parties of prelates close to him, who did not hesitate to take up his pen to write a chastising letter to Cardinal Sarah – he could not spare half an hour to meet face to face with a man who was held in highest esteem by both John Paul II and Benedict XVI [And also, at least for show, by Bergoglio himself, who ostentatiously named him as one of his personal appointees to the ‘family synods’ of 2014 and 2015. But that was, of course, pre-DUBIA].
I do not say he should have done this to try to challenge the cardinal’s certainties, or to listen to a position opposite his, but at least as a gesture of charity and respect. [But Bergoglian ‘mercy’ and ‘charity’ are, so it seems, restricted to those he likes (Mons. Ricca, Cardinal Maradiaga, all his other sycophants) or those he champions (undocumented migrants and refugees, Muslims, global warming catastrophists) but does not extend to anyone else.]
When Bergoglio made a visit in April 2017 to Carpi [the neighboring diocese to the Archdiocese of Bologna], he had no time to speak to the cardinal at all – sure, there was a quick embrace for the benefit of the photographers, but after that, nothing more, as the pope attended to the whirlwind of activities programmed for him on the brief visit.
I remember asking the cardinal, “But when you were together in Carpi, face to face, did you speak of the Dubia?” Sadly, Caffarra said that it seemed the pope tried his best to avoid any opportunity for talking, but limited himself to that one photograph.
When I learned on Sept. 6 that Caffarra had died, on the very day when I was tyring to get a pass for Bergoglio’s scheduled October 1 Mass in Bologna, I remembered that failed opportunity in Carpi, and said to myself: “Bergoglio is coming to Bologna, Caffarra’s own city, but not even for that visit, did he schedule any meeting with Caffarra. [Of course at the time the Bologna schedule for the pope was drawn up, no one thought Caffarra would no longer be alive for the visit.] How difficult it is to love one’s neighbor when he is someone you know, and how easy it is to love migrants, strangers, from afar, while pontificating from the Vatican or chatting with journalists on a plane!”
A final curiosity: In the last months of his life, Caffarra thought it might be important to convoke Catholic scholars in Rome in order to confront an issue that is much discussed in the Church, and not just today: papal infallibility. What are its limits, its proper boundaries? I understand that his wish did not fall into the void, and that someone did begin organizing something to that end.
And so shall we soon see in Rome a symposium of courageous Catholics meeting in the name of St. Paul and his teachings? Shall we see someone who will rise to say – in the face of so much ambiguity, heretical tendencies and the silent complicity of the world – an obsequy to the teaching of the Doctor Angelicus: “Thus, St. Paul, who was subordinate to St. Peter, rebuked him publicly because of an imminent risk of scandal regarding a matter of faith. As St. Augustine commented, 'St. Peter himself gave the example to those who govern, so that when they occasionally stray from the right path, they may not refuse as unworthy of them a correction that comes from one of their subjects'? (Summa theologiae, II-II, 33, 4, 2)?
Meanwhile, the undersigned, orphaned of a true father, of saintly priest who was shy, humble, silent and highly cultured (that is, how much farther can he be from the models we now have at the top), comfort myself by reading the cardinal’s last book: Prediche corte, tagliatelle lunghe: Spunti per l’anima (Short homilies, long noodles: Reflections for the soul).
It is not a recipe book for setting up sacrilegious propagandistic lunches in a cathedral [Which exactly what the Archdiocese of Bologna organized for Bergoglio – a sitdown lunch in church with hundreds of homeless men or unemployed men, I believe it was; you’d think the city of Bologna had no other place to hold such a lunch other than within the Cathedral! and you'd think the pope would have objected to such a sacrilege, but then, he would tell us, "How can it be a sacrilege when I am lunching with hundreds of persons, each of whom is Jesus himself for me?"]
Rather, these are pages of ‘healthy doctrine’ we can follow, for our daily life and for our divine life to be. Thank you, Your Eminence, your true faithfulness remains for many a light in the profound darkness, a light that precedes a new day.
] 
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