I do not find Christopher Altieri's metaphor for the current situation of the US bishops vis-a-vis clerical/episcopal sex abuse (McCarrick scandal) and the knowing complicity of bishops (Pennsylvania Grand Jury report) appropriate. I had to look it up - the November 1957 meeting of 105 Mafia bosses from all over the United States in Binghamton, NY, thenceforth known as the Apalachin meeting, is said to have been the moment when the American Mafia was first brought to the public eye. (55 of the men were arrested before they could flee, and 20 of them were criminally charged and found guilty of “conspiring to obstruct justice, by lying about the nature of the underworld meeting.” )
The McCarrick-Pennsylvania Grand Jury report conjunction is hardly the first time that the 'misdeeds' of some American bishops have been brought to the public eye - just that this time there is widespread acknowledgment even from the US bishops themselves of facts that had long been known by them but deliberately suppressed for reasons unworthy of any Christian, least of all of any ordained minister of God.
The US bishops' 'Apalachin moment' has arrived
An Apostolic Visitation of the Church in the US is destined to fail
if its scope is limited to McCarrick, even if it illuminates
every dark corner in which McCarrick’s baleful influence is hiding
Analysis
by Christopher Altieri
August 16, 2018
The Press Office of the Holy See has issued a statement in response to the Grand Jury Report released in Pennsylvania earlier this week, expressing “shame and sorrow” over the contents of the report, while praising the efforts of Church leaders to implement reforms.
“Most of the discussion in the report concerns abuses before the early 2000s,” the statement reads. “By finding almost no cases after 2002, the Grand Jury’s conclusions are consistent with previous studies showing that Catholic Church reforms in the United States drastically reduced the incidence of clergy child abuse.”
The statement goes on to say, “The Holy See encourages continued reform and vigilance at all levels of the Catholic Church, to help ensure the protection of minors and vulnerable adults from harm.” The statement from the Press Office also expresses the Holy See’s desire “to underscore the need to comply with the civil law, including mandatory child abuse reporting requirements.”
Pope Francis did not speak to the scandal in his remarks to the faithful at Wednesday’s Angelus prayer on the Solemnity of the Assumption, while the Press Office of the Holy See kept silence and declined requests for comment for more than two full days after Pennsylvania authorities released a redacted version of the report, which nevertheless runs to 1,356 pages.
The President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, issued his own statement on Thursday, calling for an Apostolic Visitation of the Church in the US.
Prominent voices from across the spectrum of Catholic opinion found the Vatican’s two days’ silence perplexing and consternating.
CNN quoted Massimo Faggioli, Professor of Historical Theology at Villanova University and a columnist for La Croix International
[and unabashed apologist for Bergoglio], as saying,
“I don’t think they understand in Rome that this is not just a continuation of the sexual abuse crisis in the United States... This is a whole different chapter. There should be people in Rome telling the Pope this information, but they are not, and that is one of the biggest problems in this pontificate — and it’s getting worse.”
First Things editor Matthew Schmitz told CNN, “[Francis] needs to act now by authorizing a full investigation of the American hierarchy.”
“Victims should know that the Pope is on their side,” the Vatican statement says. “Those who have suffered are his priority, and the Church wants to listen to them to root out this tragic horror that destroys the lives of the innocent.”
Meanwhile, news outlets continue to divulge the report’s findings, while analysis largely confines itself to sifting details and connecting dots, and commentary ranges in tone and substance from heartbroken plaint to heartbroken rage.
The ball is now in the Holy Father’s court, and while his next plays are anyone’s guess, one thing is certain: Pope Francis can ill afford to ignore either the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report or the enormous groundswell of ire, which threatens the foundations of the Church. His moral authority — already greatly diminished by his handling of the crisis in Chile and his apparent paralysis with regard to the scandal-ridden “C9” Council of Cardinal Advisers he chose to spearhead the curial reform that was supposed to be the hallmark of his springtime pontificate — risks permanent compromise with each passing day.
The damage is not only — not even primarily — to this pope or to his pontificate, but to the Office. The papacy has enjoyed greater and lesser esteem through the centuries, though
rarely has the efficacy of the institution so much depended upon public regard of it, as today.
The question is: does Pope Francis have the stuff to do what circumstances require?
He does not seem to be interested in institutional reform, yet it is institutional reform the hierarchy needs. As I put it at earlier this year in an analysis piece for the Catholic World Report:
2017 was a year in which the micro-fissures in the structure began to be visible to the naked eye. 2018 is likely to be the year in which it becomes clear that major structural reform (or engine rebuilding, depending on one’s preferred analogy) cannot be postponed.
In an earlier piece, addressing the specific issue of reform of the Roman Curia — or rather the lack of progress in reform, I noted how it struck me that
Pope Francis did not seem concerned with it so much as he did with the spiritual renewal of Curial officials [A wrong-headed view, I think, because anything Bergoglio says about 'spiritual' renewal is really mere lip service. The only 'spiritual renewal' that would work with the bad eggs in the Curia would be to fire them - but there have been no significant Curial firings en masse in the past five and a half years - so they stop corrupting or undermining the honest work of conscientious Curial servants.]
Spiritual reform, reform of the soul, repentance, conversion, healing, receptiveness to grace, and docility to the promptings of conscience: all these are essential to the life of every Christian, and only more so to the lives of those Christians who are called to assist the Universal Pastor in his governance of the Universal Church. Even so, the Roman Curia is a bureaucracy, and would be a bureaucracy if it were staffed and run by living saints. It is one thing to undertake a reform of a bureaucracy. It is quite another to undertake a reform of bureaucrats.
Fr. Thomas Rosica published an essay a few weeks ago, in which he attempted to say something about what difference having a Jesuit pope has made:
Pope Francis breaks Catholic traditions whenever he wants because he is “free from disordered attachments.” Our Church has indeed entered a new phase: with the advent of this first Jesuit pope, it is openly ruled by an individual rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture.
Those remarks are ill considered (and have since been edited), even as an exercise in sycophancy. Their facile parroting of SJ argot does not touch the crux of the matter, which is rather a tension built into the Jesuit character and ethos, for good and for ill. Here is how I placed the matter in another essay for the
Catholic World Report:
The Society of Jesus has never — not for one single hour of one single day since the promulgation of Regimini militantis — had an unproblematic relationship with the hierarchical leadership of the Church. Ignatius wanted his men to be stalwart “Pope’s men” and at one and the same time fearless theological envelope-pushers. The whole Jesuit charism is ordered to the right management — in the Company and in the souls of its members — of the tension that arises instantly and inevitably when those two poles are activated. …
The long and the short of it is that, when you put a Jesuit at the head of the hierarchical leadership of the Church, you risk either collapsing that tension, or exploding it. That is one major reason why we never had a Jesuit Pope before now, and it goes a long way toward explaining why we are in the situation, in which we find ourselves, for good and for ill.
Francis, in other words, does not trust institutions — certainly not to reform themselves — and in any case does not seem to know how to run one, except to run it as though it were a Jesuit province and he its superior. At the same time, he trusts the charism of office in a manner ill-befitting a man, whose job is to oversee and discipline the officeholders.
This mismatched mode of trusting was on display in his painfully forthright remarks to pilgrims regarding the sorely tried diocese of Osorno, made on the sidelines of a weekly General Audience in May, 2015, after several months of agitation over the nomination of a bishop to the see, widely believed to have been complicit in the systematic abuse of minors and the coverup of that abuse.
“The Osorno community is suffering because it’s dumb,” he told the group. Francis generally has been too willing to take the word of bishops over that of the lay faithful.Unfortunate under any circumstance, such willingness is disastrous when it comes to clerical impropriety.
“[The Church in Osorno] has lost her freedom,” told those pilgrims at the Audience in May of 2015, “by letting her head be filled with [words of] politicians, blaming a bishop without any proof, after 20 years of being a bishop.” It turns out there was proof — evidence, at any rate — and Pope Francis had it, too, against Bishop Juan Barros of Osorno, who allegedly turned a blind eye to the predatory behavior of his mentor, the disgraced former Chilean celebrity priest, Fernando Karadima.
After accusing Barros’s accusers of calumny and facing major blowback, Francis ordered an investigation that led to the resignation of the entire Chilean bishops’ conference, though he has yet to accept the lion’s share of the resignations, including that of Cardinal Ricardo Ezzati, accused of covering up Karadima’s predations. Meanwhile, the civil authorities in Chile are investigating the Church, and have conducted multiple raids on bishops’ offices, including — this week — on those of the bishops’ conference.
Pope Francis has taken some steps, such as demanding that the disgraced former archbishop of Washington, DC, Theodore McCarrick, turn in his red hat. He has also removed bishops for impropriety — Juan José Pineda, the former auxiliary bishop of Tegucigalpa, for instance — though he has supported Pineda’s principal, Cardinal Óscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, a papal friend and confidante who is embroiled in a money scandal of his own and widely suspected of having given the allegedly perverse and lecherous Pineda the run of his archdiocese.
Pope Francis commuted the sentences of two priests convicted of molestation and punished with laicization — an act he later described as a mistake. He also rehabilitated Cardinal Godfried Danneels, inviting him to participate in the 2014 Extraordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the Family, some four years after Cardinal Danneels was caught on tape pleading with a victim of sex abuse by a bishop — Roger Vangheluwe, the victim’s uncle — to keep silent. Danneels went into retirement with his reputation in tatters.
[Note how in the recitation of facts that have to do with Bergoglio's handling of this issue, the negative far outweigh anything positive he may have done (the latter usually under force majeure)].
In short, Pope Francis’s approach to abuse seems very much ad hoc [ad voluntas sua] and more precisely ad personam. It is also rather susceptible of influences other than the evidence at hand and the sense of duty to the faithful, which is proper to the office he holds in the Church. Whether he shall discover the resolve necessary to face the crisis —now indisputably global in scope and growing daily — remains to be seen. His record thus far has been, with rare notable exception, frankly dismal.
Meanwhile, there can be no doubt of the US bishops’ moral standing either in the Church or in society more broadly: it is squandered; utterly trifled away. Committees, review boards, commissions of inquiry: none of it will suffice — not even the measures Cardinal DiNardo — who trained and served in Pittsburgh and was an officer of the chancery there before going to staff the Congregation for Bishops in Rome — outlined on Thursday:
The Executive Committee has established three goals:
(1) an investigation into the questions surrounding Archbishop McCarrick;
(2) an opening of new and confidential channels for reporting complaints against bishops; and
(3) advocacy for more effective resolution of future complaints.
While the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issue statements firmly resolving “with the help of God’s grace, never to repeat it,” (rinse, repeat); invite the Holy See to investigate (in language that sounds fair but smells foul); and call for “advocacy for more effective resolution of future complaints,” (advocacy within their own ranks, as though their solution is to call themselves to lobby one another — or advocacy at the Vatican, because “only the Pope has authority to discipline or remove bishops,” so that this hellish debacle should be his problem, not theirs?); the faithful read news articles containing the gruesome details of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report released on Tuesday and reach the conclusion of the Grand Jurors:
“While each church district had its idiosyncrasies, the pattern was pretty much the same. The main thing was not to help children, but to avoid ‘scandal’.”
Even the very first criterion is an exercise in blame shifting and obfuscation: “The first goal is a full investigation of questions surrounding Archbishop McCarrick,” DiNardo wrote. That’s too easy by half.
Even an Apostolic Visitation of the Church in the US, which DiNardo’s statement invites, is destined to fail if its scope is limited to McCarrick, even if it illuminates every dark corner in which McCarrick’s baleful influence is hiding. Still, once the Vatican is involved, it will be the Vatican to determine both the real scope of inquiry and the vigor with which to conduct the inquest.
Even so,
if the faithful permit the scapegoating of McCarrick, they will be guilty of moral failure not less grave than that of the bishops themselves. McCarrick came from somewhere. McCarrick did not act alone.
Nor will it do, then, for bishops of other places in the US to say that they do not deserve the weight of judgment, which the bishops of Pennsylvania bear.
The Grand Jury Report shows how priests were sent to and from the Commonwealth with great ease, and details the facile communication and serene discourse among bishops and their chanceries when it came to “problem cases” — some of them predators, others committed perverts, still others inveterate lechers of the Old School — amounting to a system of cover-up that not only permitted the abuse of minors to continue, but allowed and even fostered a corrupt and morally insane culture throughout the whole body of the clergy, high and low.
The first head of the US Bishops National Review Board, former Oklahoma governor Frank Keating, was not wrong to say of the bishops, in 2003,
“To resist grand-jury subpoenas, to suppress the names of offending clerics, to deny, to obfuscate, to explain away; that is the model of a criminal organization.”
Cardinal Roger Mahony condemned Keating’s remarks, and several lay members of the board joined the then-Archbishop of Los Angeles in decrying them. Asked to apologize, Keating refused and resigned.
“I was curious,” Keating told me in a recent interview, “that the cardinals were the ones that were seemingly most offended by what was coming,” i.e. “an anticipated reversal of what went before — a complete change of the clerical culture, in what was permitted and what wasn’t.”
In many ways, the Pennsylvania report’s release is — or deserves to be, at any rate — a sort of “Apalachin moment” for the Church in the United States.
Apalachin, New York, was home to Joseph “Joe the Barber” Barbara, a mafia don who hosted a meeting of organized crime families from all over the country in 1957, at his house in the “sleepy hamlet” on the southern bank of the Susquehanna River. Local law enforcement noted the influx of fancy cars with out-of-state plates and took a closer look. Eventually, authorities intervened. They broke up the meeting and made dozens of arrests. Not many indictments came from those arrests — it isn’t a crime to host a house party, after all — and those there were proved hard to make stick. Nevertheless, the readiness of those policemen once and for all gave the lie to the notion — long-espoused by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover — that there was no nationwide organization of underworld outfits in the United States.
Once facts came to light and rendered that fiction no longer viable, law enforcement at every level from the federal government to the states to every major city set about building dedicated organized crime task forces, which are still in place today.
In this case, it may be that bishops with questionable or troubling records are sincere in their protestations of good faith: if they are sincere, then it is difficult to understand how they can be morally fit for office. If they are not moral imbeciles, then it is all but impossible to avoid the conclusion that they are wicked. Tertium non datur.
Reminder for suffering Catholics:
Satan plays the long game
by Raymond Kowalski
August 16, 2018
Satan plays a long game. We know from the Gospel of Luke that Satan intended to sift like wheat Peter and the apostles.
Writing recently in National Review, Fr. Benedict Kiely has called the Church’s present trial the “summer of shame.” Before our eyes, the successors of the apostles are being sifted as well. Many Catholic commentators are saying the weakness of these wicked prelates is finally being exposed. I fear they may be wrong.
Perhaps it is the diabolical strength of these prelates on display.
This moment has been building for centuries. Steve Skojec recently observed that “only a structure already compromised could fall so far so fast.”
In the context of this “summer of shame,” Bishop Robert Barron recently recalled that during the previous go-round of shame 20 years ago, he intuited that the whole sordid mess was “too thought-through, too well-coordinated, to be simply the result of chance or wicked human choice.”
Can we really now allow ourselves to think that we’ve got Satan on the run? That some episcopal hand-wringing will restore Catholic doctrine? That a few resignations will purge the Church of wicked priests, bishops, and cardinals?
I have no expectation that the perpetrators of this scourge are about to give up what has taken centuries to achieve. In fact, they may perceive this summer as their moment of triumph.
Consider the culture into which the apostate hierarchy has blended the Church:
- The pictures of priests offering Mass while wearing rainbow vestments.
- That picture of Cardinal Dolan at this year’s pro-sodomy St. Patrick’s Day parade.
- The Vatican’s homoerotic Nativity scene last year.
- The stories of the “drug fueled gay orgy” in the Vatican apartments last year.
- The free rein given to Father James Martin.
- The content of popular television shows, movies, and stage plays.
- Colleges and college professors, even Catholic colleges and college professors. Providence College, for example.
- Twitter and Facebook – what gets glorified and what gets shamed, or worse.
- How morality has become “hate” and virtue has become “homophobia.”
To fight the scourge that afflicts the Church is to fight the culture. Is today’s Catholic ready to reject it and stand up to it?
I believe that the Satanic cabal now running the Church are counting on social pressure from the culture to see them past this “summer of shame” and beyond to a new “Catholic spring.” How cleverly they are being sifted.
The Gospel of Luke predicts that Peter will survive his trial. Jesus tells Peter, “But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren.”
Then follows this never quoted passage, which the online Bible of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops captions “Instructions for the Time of Crisis”:
When I sent you without purse, and scrip, and shoes, did you want anything?
But they said: Nothing. Then said he unto them:
But now he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise a scrip;
and he that hath not, let him sell his coat, and buy a sword.
For I say to you, that this that is written must yet be fulfilled in me:
And with the wicked was he reckoned. For the things concerning me have an end. (Luke 22: 35-37)
Jesus says His contemporaries counted Him among the wicked. Are not those who hew to the constant moral teaching of the Catholic Church today vilified as haters? His instructions, for the time of crisis to come after the Scriptures had been fulfilled, were to fight. It is our turn and our time to fight.
If Hell is like a walled city, its gates have been closing, imperceptibly, for centuries. If nothing is done, they could soon trap all within. But Jesus assured Peter that the gates of Hell would not prevail against his Church. Prevail in what? In the fight that must be waged.
Then-Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen in the 1930s warned of “tolerance” as the problem with the American culture. He defined tolerance as “an attitude of reasoned patience toward evil.”
Eighty years on, patience toward evil has progressed to acceptance of evil. The culture has reached the point where evil now is normal. This where the wicked priests, bishops, and cardinals will take refuge. This is where we must take the fight.
St. Maximilian Kolbe, founder of the Militia of the Immaculata, pray for us.
It is hardly any comfort that Lucifer himself now appears to have taken over the 'leadership' of the Church, or at least, its nominal leader.
In this respect, the invaluable Fr Kirk had a great blogpost not too long ago:
Steve Skojec's take on Fr Rosica and the evil that seems to befog the Bergoglio Vatican goes by way of the Anti-Christ, during which he reveals earlier true-believer gushings of Fr Rosica that I had been unaware of...
Playing with fire:
Rosica, Francis, and the spirit of the Antichrist
by Steve Skojec
August 14, 2018
“And he shall speak words against the High One, and shall crush the saints of the most High: and he shall think himself able to change times and laws, and they shall be delivered into his hand until a time, and times, and half a time.” – Daniel 7:25
I wrote before, years ago, that I believe Pope Francis to be a type of the Antichrist. A forerunner. A precursor. A man who “shares some noteworthy characteristics and ideological predilections that have long been foretold” of this apocalyptic figure.
Some people bristled at this. Some scoffed. Fewer, I think, would do so today, especially when re-reading in our present ecclesiastical context the quote I provided from Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen’s
Communism and the Conscience of the West:
The Antichrist will not be so called; otherwise he would have no followers…he will come disguised as the Great Humanitarian; he will talk peace, prosperity and plenty not as means to lead us to God, but as ends in themselves… He will tempt Christian(s) with the same three temptations with which he tempted Christ… He will have one great secret which he will tell to no one: he will not believe in God. Because his religion will be brotherhood without the fatherhood of God, he will deceive even the elect. He will set up a counterchurch … It will have all the notes and characteristics of the Church, but in reverse and emptied of its divine content. It will be a mystical body of Antichrist that will in all externals resemble the mystical body of Christ.
I invite you to read and compare this to the words of the Basilian father, Vatican spokesman, and founder of Canada’s Salt & Light TV, Fr. Tomas Rosica, published yesterday, about Pope Francis:
Pope Francis breaks Catholic traditions whenever he wants because he is “free from disordered attachments.” Our Church has indeed entered a new phase: with the advent of this first Jesuit pope, it is openly ruled by an individual rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture.
He shall think himself able to change times and laws, and they shall be delivered into his hand…
The same Fr. Rosica gushed, back in 2015 during the pope’s visit to the United
States, that he had “often wondered how Jesus taught on a Galilean hillside.”
And that “tonight in Philadelphia,” he “saw how Jesus taught.”
Again, the following day, as a caption to a photo of the papal motorcade,
“‘See, your king comes to you, gentle & riding on a donkey, on a colt,
the foal of a donkey’- Matthew 21:15 (not in Philadelphia!)”
Most disturbingly, Fr. Rosica said during an interview with Fox News:
The backdrop [of the papal visit] is a world steeped in violence and bloodshed and rancor and hatred, and here we have coming — to your city, to your diocese — a real prince of peace. If there’s any princely title that should be associated with Francis, it’s “The Prince of Peace.”
This, Our Lord’s prophetic title in Isaiah 9:6, applied to a man who “breaks Catholic traditions whenever he wants” and who rules the Church by his own dictates “rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture”?
This is some very dangerous fire Rosica is playing with here. Rosica, again, is not just any obscure priest with a papal idolatry problem. According to his own biography:
Following the announcement on February 11, 2013 of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation, Fr. Rosica was invited by the Vatican to join the staff of the Holy See Press Office and serve as one of the official spokespersons for the transition in the papacy that included the resignation, Sede Vacante, Conclave and election of the new Pope. Fr. Rosica assisted the Vatican during a critical period in Church history. At the end of the Papal transition in April 2013, the Vatican asked him to serve as English language assistant to the Holy See Press Office. From 2013 to the end of 2016, he served in this capacity on behalf of the Holy See Press Office.
He is a man known to the pope. He has made comments that are idolatrous and arguably blasphemous. Comments so far beyond the pale that the Zenit news agency quietly made them disappear from an initial report that originally included them.
- Where is the correction from the pope?
- How could a good shepherd allow such a thing to be said without reproof?
- How could a man universally acclaimed as humble fail to be horrified at being described in such a way? In having it suggested that he could simply override Scripture and Tradition at whim?
I’ll give you one theory as to how: he agrees. Because he has demonstrated time and again that what Rosica said is exactly what he believes.
If not this, then what? Is he too busy overturning Catholic teaching to read someone talking about him doing it and, consequently, to correct him?
As Francis continues to unmake the papacy, to shake the foundations of Catholic belief, and to chip away at the deposit of faith, the American Church has received a grand jury report from the state of Pennsylvania outlining the alleged abuses perpetrated by three hundred priests in six of the state’s eight dioceses. Around the country, more allegations are surfacing as the faithful grow increasingly angry at an episcopacy that has betrayed their trust again.
In Chile, just minutes before I began writing this, news broke that authorities were raiding the offices of the Catholic bishops’ conference to obtain evidence on clerical sex abuse. Chile, where Pope Francis stubbornly kept Bishop Juan Barros, accused of complicity in the abuse of young men, calling the people of that country “stupid” for believing the accusations, shaming the victims, until at last public pressure forced his hand. Chile, from whence comes Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz, one of the pope’s council of nine cardinal advisers – a man also accused of complicity in abuse, but nevertheless allowed to retain his position by the pope.
Last night, I was asked by someone what the path forward from here is. How can the Church restore the glory she once had?
My answer: I don’t think there is a path from where we are to what needs to happen. There are many small communities doing it – intentionally living and believing as closely as possible the way Catholics always did before the second half of the 20th century – but I think they’ll always be marginalized as long as there’s an institutional need to perpetuate the lie that the changes were good and that they’ll ever bear fruit. We know they weren’t. We know they haven’t.
The post-conciliar Church is a barren tree. And like the fig tree from scripture, I think Christ has cursed it. It is imploding at an astonishing pace as the errors, the perversions, and even the heresies it promotes continue to be ever more brazen. So I think, as I wrote in my Infinity War piece, that the Church must be almost completely destroyed to be raised up again. It’s the only way. And God is letting it happen – perhaps even accelerating it.
It has to happen. And it’s actually a good thing, even though it doesn’t look like it, that it’s happening in conservative dioceses, too. Because the idea that there’s somewhere to hide from sin, or that careful cultivation of orthodoxy (or, often as not, the veneer thereof) can keep you safe is a big fat lie. I was inside the Legionaries of Christ and Regnum Christi. Their conservatism, their vocations program, their superficial orthodoxy would put the Lincoln Diocese to shame.
We all know how that turned out.
o People need to be led back to personal holiness.
o They need to develop a sense of the worship of God, not this humanistic garbage.
o They need to understand the role of the Church in the world and in relationship to other religions, Christian and otherwise.
o They need to grasp the differences in the roles of the baptismal and ministerial priesthood, respecting and revering the latter without falling into the dangerous kind of clericalism.
There’s so much we’ve lost. We need to get it back and then keep going.
In this, as in all things we’ve suffered over these years of the true Church in exile, the only way out is through.
My addendum:
In 2000, on the centenary of the death of Vladimir Soloviev, Russian philosopher whose work Hans Urs von Balthasar considered “the most universal speculative creation of the modern period” (Gloria III, p. 263), even going so far as to set him on the level of Thomas Aquinas, the late great Cardinal Giacomo Biffi (1928-2015), a Soloviev scholar, wrote the preface to A Soloviev Anthology published in Italy, in which he said this, among other things:
The accuracy of Soloviev’s vision of the great crisis that would strike Christianity at the end of the 20th century is astonishing.
He represents this crisis using the figure of the Antichrist. This fascinating personage will succeed in influencing and persuading almost everyone. It is not difficult to see in this figure of Soloviev the reflection, almost the incarnation, of the confused and ambiguous religiosity of our time.
The Antichrist will be a “convinced spiritualist” Soloviev says, an admirable philanthropist, a committed, active pacifist, a practicing vegetarian, a determined defender of animal rights.
He will also be, among other things, an expert exegete. His knowledge of the bible will even lead the theology faculty of Tubingen to award him an honorary doctorate. Above all, he will be a superb ecumenist, able to engage in dialogue “with words full of sweetness, wisdom and eloquence.”
He will not be hostile “in principle” to Christ. Indeed, he will appreciate Christ’s teaching. But he will reject the teaching that Christ is unique, and will deny that Christ is risen and alive today. [OK, Bergoglio is not, as far as we know, a vegetarian, and he is anything but an expert exegete (unless it is in the exegesis of Jesus's words in a way that advances Bergoglio's agenda, but check out the other attributes!]
One sees here described — and condemned — a Christianity of “values,” of “openings,” of “dialogue,” a Christianity where it seems there is little room left for the person of the Son of God crucified for us and risen, little room for the actual event of salvation.
A scenario, I think, that should cause us to reflect… A scenario in which the faith militant is reduced to humanitarian and generically cultural action, the Gospel message is located in an irenic encounter with all philosophies and all religions and the Church of God is transformed into an organization for social work.
Are we sure Soloviev did not foresee what has actually come to pass? Are we sure it is not precisely this that is the most perilous threat today facing the “holy nation” redeemed by the blood of Christ — the Church?
It was a message Biffi would memorably reiterate when Benedict XVI chose him to preach the spiritual exercises at the annual Lenten retreat for the Pope and the Curia in 2007.[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/08/2018 22:44]