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A spirit of resistance
out of love for the Church
by Roberto de Mattei
Translated for Rorate caeli by 'Francesca Romana' from
February 7, 2018
As the fifth anniversary of Pope Francis’s election draws near, we hear repeatedly that we are facing a dramatic and absolutely unprecedented ‘page’ in the history of the Church. This is only partly true. The Church has always experienced tragic times which have seen the laceration of the Mystical Body since its very beginnings on Calvary right up to the present day.
The younger generations don’t know and the older generations have forgotten how terrible the years that followed the Second Vatican Council were, of which the present age is the result.
Forty years ago while the 1968 revolt was erupting, a group of cardinals and bishops, who were protagonists at the Council, sought to impose a radical change on the Catholic doctrine of marriage. The attempt was frustrated by way of Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae of July 25, 1968, which reaffirmed the prohibition of artificial contraception, restoring strength and hope to a disorientated flock.
However, the Paul VI of Humanae Vitae, was also the one who caused a deep rupture with Catholic Tradition in 1969 by imposing the new rite of the Mass which is at the origin of all contemporary liturgical devastations.
On November 18, 1973, the same Pope promoted Ostpolitik, by assumimg the grave responsibility of removing Cardinal József Mindszenty (1892-1975) from his office as Archbishop of Esztergom, Primate of Hungary – and champion of Catholic opposition to Communism. Papa Montini had hoped for the attainment of a historical compromise in Italy, based in the agreement between the Secretary of the Christian Democrats, Aldo Moro, and the Secretary of the Communist Party, Enrico Berlinguer. The operation was abruptly interrupted by the kidnapping and killing of Moro in 1978, after which Pope Montini himself died the following August 6th. The 40th anniversary of his death also falls this year. [During which he will most likely be canonized. It saddens me that according to the manmade rules having to do with the 'making of saints', Paul VI is being raised to the honor of the altar where his own mentor, Pius XII, whom people other than the Jews) regarded as a living saint during his papal years, is still a 'Venerable'. ]
During those years of betrayal and blood, courageous voices spoke out which we of necessity recall, not only for the record, but because they help us to orient ourselves in the darkness of the present time. We remember two, prior to the explosion of the so-called “Lefebvre Case”, the French Archbishop whom Monsignor Athanasius Schneider highlighted in a recent interview for his “prophetic mission during an extraordinary dark time of general crisis in the Church.”
The first voice belongs to a French Dominican priest, Father Roger Calmel, who right from the very beginning in 1969 had rejected Paul VI’s Novus Ordo and in June 1971 wrote in the magazine Itinéraires:
“Our Christian resistance of priests and laity [is] very painful as it forces us to say No to the Pope himself about the modernist manifestation of the Catholic Mass. Our respectful but unshakable resistance is dictated by the principle of total fidelity to the living Church of all time - in other words, the principle of living fidelity to the development of the Church. Never did we think of holding back, much less impeding, what some ambiguously call 'progress' in the Church. Rather, we think in terms of homogeneous growth in doctrinal and liturgical matters, in continuation with Tradition, in sight of the consummatio sanctorum...
As Our Lord has revealed to us in parables, and as St. Paul teaches us in his Epistles, we believe that the Church, over the course of the centuries, grows and develops in harmony through a thousand adversities, until the glorious return of Jesus Himself, Her Spouse and Our Lord. Since we are convinced that over the course of centuries, growth of the Church is occurring, and since we are resolute in becoming part of this mysterious and uninterrupted movement as honestly as possible, as far as it is up to us - we reject this supposed progress which refers to Vatican II and which in reality is mortal deviation.
Going back to St. Vincent of Lerin’s classical distinction, the more we desire good growth – a splendid “profectus” - even more do we reject, uncompromisingly, a ruinous “pennutatio”, and any radical and shameful alteration whatsoever. Radical, since it comes from modernism and denies every faith; shameful, since the denial of the modernist sort is shifty and hidden.”
The second voice is that of a Brazilian thinker and man of action, Plinio Correa de Oliveira, author of a leaflet of resistance to the Vatican Ostpolitik, published on April 10, 1974, from his organization 'Tradition, Family and Property' (TFP), entitled "Vatican Politics of Distension towards Communist Governments: not to intervene or resist?"
Corrêa de Oliveira explained: “To resist means that we would advise Catholics to continue fighting against the Communist doctrine through all legitimate means, in defense of Country and Christian civilization under threat...
The lines of this declaration would not be sufficient to contain the list of all the Fathers of the Church, Doctors, moralists and canon lawyers – many of whom have been beatified or canonized – who sustain the legitimacy of resistance.
A resistance which is not separation, nor revolt, nor acrimony, nor irreverence. On the contrary it is fidelity, union, love and submission. “Resistance” is the word we have chosen on purpose, as it has been used by St. Paul himself to describe his stance.
Since St. Peter had taken disciplinary measures to retain practices in the Catholic Faith which survived the ancient Synagogue, St. Paul saw in this a grave risk of doctrinal confusion and harm for the faithful. So he rose up and “resisted” St. Peter “to his face” - yet the latter did not see an act of rebellion in this energetic and inspired action by the Apostle to the Gentiles, but [an act] of union and fraternal love. Furthermore, knowing well where he was infallible and where he wasn’t, he yielded to St Paul’s arguments.
The saints are model Catholics. In the sense that St. Paul resisted, our position is resistance. In this, our conscience finds peace”.
“Resistance” is not a purely verbal declaration of faith but an act of love towards the Church, which leads to practical consequences. Those who resist are separated from the one who has caused the division in the Church, they criticize him openly, they correct him. In 2017, along these lines they expressed themselves with the Correctio filialis to Pope Francis and the leaflet of the pro-life movement appeared with the title: “Faithful to true doctrine, not to pastors who are in error.”
Today, Cardinal Zen’s stance of no compromise in regard to Pope Francis’s new Ostpolitik towards Communist China follows such a line of resistance. To those who defend the Vatican policy, saying it is necessary “to try to find common ground to bridge the decades-old division between the Vatican and China”, Cardinal Zen replies: “But can there ever be anything in “common” with a totalitarian regime? Either you surrender or accept persecution, but remain faithful to yourself (can you imagine an agreement between St. Joseph and Herod?)”.
To those who ask him whether he is convinced that the Vatican is selling out the Catholic Church in China, he says: “Decidedly, yes. If they are going in the direction that is obvious in everything they have done in recent months and years.”
On April 7th a conference has been called in Rome to discuss the present crisis in the Church. The participation of some cardinals and bishops, and above all Cardinal Zen, would give maximum importance to this conference. [I believe this is the meeting first proposed by the late Cardinal Caffarra not long before his untimely death last year.]
We must pray that from the meeting voices will be raised, full of love for the Church and firm resistance to all the theological, moral and liturgical deviations of the present pontificate, without being under the illusion that the solution has anything to do with insinuating the invalidity of Benedict XVI’s abdication or Pope Francis’s election. Taking refuge in this canonical problem, means avoiding debate of the doctrinal problem which is at the root of the crisis we are experiencing.
Blink and you might have missed it. I nearly did - but here's yet another example of blatant lying from the Bergoglio Vatican:
There is a papal commission
re-examining Humanae Vitae -
earlier denied by the Vatican
by Matthew Cullinan Hoffman
February 6, 2018 (LifeSiteNews.com) – An official of the Holy See’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) has admitted in an interview that a papal commission exists to carry out an historical review of the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, according to Kathpress, the official news agency of the Catholic bishops of Austria.
Kathpress reports that it received confirmation of the existence of the papal commission from Msgr. Alejandro Cifres, who has long overseen the archives of the CDF and is currently the dicastery’s Chief of Office.
“It is not certain whether or not a reinterpretation of the ‘pill encyclical’ (Humanae Vitae) is coming soon from the Vatican,” stated Kathpress last week. “The fact that a commission on behalf of the Pope is investigating the genesis of ‘Humanae vitae’ was recently confirmed to the news agency Kathpress by the head of the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Alejandro Cifres.”
Humanae Vitae, an encyclical published in 1968 by Pope Paul VI, famously upheld the Catholic Church’s perennial condemnation of artificial birth control.
However, the writings of Pope Francis are leading some of the Vatican’s theologians to contradict the encyclical, and Francis himself appeared to deny the encyclical’s teaching on the intrinsic evil of contraception in an in-flight press conference in 2016.
When the Italian journalist Marco Tosatti broke the story of the commission’s existence in May of last year, followed by articles confirming it by Maike Hickson and Roberto de Mattei, the Vatican said nothing about the matter for a month, and then responded by denying the commission’s existence.
Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, told the Spanish Catholic weekly Alfa y Omega that, “There isn’t any commission. That has been completely invented.”
In an interview with the Catholic News Agency (CNA), Paglia repeated his denial in a more qualified way, claiming that “there is no pontifical commission called to re-read or to reinterpret Humanae vitae” but added that “we should look positively on all those initiatives, such as that of Professor Marengo of the John Paul II Institute, which aim at studying and deepening this document in view of the 50th anniversary of its publication.”
Fr. Gilfredo Marengo, who was identified as the head of the commission by Roberto de Mattei, also issued a denial, claiming that the story of a commission to revise Humanae Vitae is “an imaginative report.”
Marengo told Catholic News Service that the scholars were members of a “study group” whose aim was to carry out “a work of historical-critical investigation without any aim other than reconstructing as well as possible the whole process of composing the encyclical.”
“Historical-critical” methods seek to understand texts by means of the processes that produced them as well as the social and cultural contexts in which they were written. With regard to the Bible, they have been used in doctrinally orthodox ways but have also been used to justify revisionist forms of interpretation that deny traditional understandings of Scriptural texts.
Additionally, Marengo has admitted that his “study group” has been given unprecedented access to the Vatican Secret Archives for the period of the composition of Humanae Vitae, that is, the mid-late 1960s. The archives from that period are strictly closed to scholars, and are not scheduled to be opened to them for many years.
Marengo has sought to dispel concerns that he is seeking to reconcile Humanae Vitae with Pope Francis’s confused apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, but that is exactly what his recent scholarship appears to do.
Last year, Marengo wrote an article for Vatican Insider called “Humanae Vitae and Amoris Laetitia,” in which he belittles the Church’s condemnation of birth control, asking if “the polemical game – 'the pill yes, the pill no', like today's 'Communion to the divorced, yes or no' - only appears to indicate 'discomfort and strain', [when it is much more decisive in the fabric of ecclesial life.”
In the same article, Marengo parrots the reasoning of AL that seeks to lower Catholic moral dogma to an often unattainable and purely abstract ideal. “Every time the Christian community falls into error and proposes models of life derived from too abstract and artificially constructed theological ideals, it conceives its pastoral action as the schematic application of a doctrinal paradigm,” Marengo wrote, citing AL to assert that “We have presented a too abstract theological ideal on marriage, almost artificially constructed, far from the concrete situation and the effective possibilities of families as they really are. This excessive idealization, above all when we have reawakened trust in grace, has not made marriage more attractive and desirable, but quite the opposite.”
Paglia’s and Marengo’s denials of the existence of a papal commission to revise Humanae Vitae led the Bergoglian site CRUX to mock concerns raised by orthodox Catholic blogs about the commission’s existence, publishing an article headlined “No, Virginia, there’s no ‘secret commission’ on Humanae Vitae.”
“Perhaps the moral of the story is this: If conspiracy theorists would devote the same energy to real reporting as they do to mental gymnastics and connect-the-dots exercises, they might actually know what’s going on once in a while,” wrote Crux's Inés San Martín. [One doubts if San Martin actually sought to find out the truth about the commission - looks like she merely took the word of Paglia and Marengo for it!]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 11/02/2018 14:58] |