THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

Is an anti-Christ government fit to decide
who can be pastors of the Church in China -
or anywhere else?
This pope bends to the secular world and anti-Christ leaders
by Alan Keyes

September 20, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

September 20, 2018 6:30 AM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why is this happening? Two explanations occur.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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