BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI



See preceding page for earlier entries today, 8/17/16...



August 17, 2016 headlines

PewSitter


Canon212.com


From C212, focus on 1) the new Vatican superdicastery and 2 what's up with the Islamists and their enablers:

George Weigel has an excellent concise analysis of the 'European Problem' in which he concludes, as Benedict XVI has done over the years, that what's wrong with Europe is that it has lost God and the Christian ethos upon which its great civilization (at least up to the first third of the 20th century) had been built and thrived. He calls it the 'God deficit' and relates it to the now dominant culture of relativism that is the ultimate outcome of what Weigel calls 'the Culture of the Self', relentlessly pushed by the 'me/myself/I'-focused generations from 1968 onwards.

God and Brexit
When biblical religion collapsed throughout Europe,
subsidiarity and respect for difference imploded as well.
The vacuum was filled by a monochromatic notion of 'democracy'
An analysis
by George Weigel

August 17, 2016

Ever since the United Kingdom decided in June to leave the European Union, contending (and sometimes overlapping) explanations have been offered for a vote that stunned the world’s opinion-makers:
- a perceived loss of national sovereignty to a transnational organization;
- concerns over current EU immigration policy and the effect of open EU borders on jobs and the rule of law;
- aggravations with petty bureaucratic regulation by EU mandarins in Brussels.

Together, these amount to what’s often called the EU’s “democracy deficit,” which seems to me real enough.

I’d like to suggest another, perhaps deeper, answer to the question of the EU’s current distress, though: to put it bluntly, the “democracy deficit” is a reflection of Europe’s “God-deficit.” Let me connect the dots.

The founding fathers of today’s European Union — which began with the European Coal and Steel Community before morphing into the European Common Market and then the EU —were, in the main, Catholics: Italy’s Alcide de Gasperi, West Germany’s Konrad Adenauer, France’s Robert Schumann.

Appalled by the self-destruction that Europe had wrought in two world wars, they sought an answer to aggressive nationalism in economic partnerships that would bind the West Franks (the French) to the East Franks (the Germans) so that war between them would be inconceivable. It was a practical idea, it worked, and it was understood to be the first step toward forms of political partnership and integration.

The wager underlying this project, as these men conceived it, was that there was enough of Christian or biblical culture left in Europe to sustain democratic pluralism in a “union” of sovereign states that would respect national and regional distinctiveness.

And that Christian or biblical “remainder” involved the Catholic social-ethical principle of “subsidiarity”: the idea that decision-making should be left at the lowest possible local level (as in classic American federalism, where local governments do some things, state governments do other things, and the national government does things that local and state governments can’t do).

“Subsidiarity” is a check against the tendency of all modern states to concentrate power at the center: which explains why the principle was first articulated by Pope Pius XI in 1931, as the shadow of totalitarianism lengthened across Europe.

Respect for the social-ethical principle of “subsidiarity” also implies respect for cultural difference. And that, in turn, assumes that human beings get to universal commitments —like respect for basic human rights — through particular experiences, not through generalized abstractions.

Or as Polish editor Jerzy Turowicz said to me 25 years ago, John Paul II was a “European” because he was a Cracovian, the heir of a particular experience of pluralism and tolerance, not despite the fact that he came from a unique cultural milieu.

When biblical religion collapsed, as it manifestly has in most of Old Europe and too much of New Europe after 1989, commitments to subsidiarity and its respect for difference imploded as well. The vacuum was then filled by a monochromatic, anti-pluralist notion of “democracy.”

Embodied in EU law and enforced by unaccountable bureaucrats and EU courts, the results of this decayed democratic idea went far beyond idiotic regulations on the shape of tomatoes and bananas to include a concerted attempt to impose a single political culture in Europe, best described as the culture of personal autonomy—the Culture of the Self.

That pseudo-culture is the hollowed-out shell of the Christian personalism that once inspired de Gasperi, Adenauer, Schumann, and the mid-20th-century Christian Democratic parties of Europe. And its political by-product is the EU’s “democracy deficit.”

Forty years ago, German constitutional scholar Ernst-Friedrich Boeckenfoerde argued that the modern, liberal-democratic state faced a dilemma: it rested on the foundation of moral-cultural premises — social capital — that it could not itself generate.

Put another way, it takes a certain kind of people, formed by a certain kind of culture to live certain virtues, to keep liberal democracy from decaying into new forms of authoritarianism more pungently described in 2005 by a distinguished European intellectual, Joseph Ratzinger, as a “dictatorship of relativism.”

The Boeckenfoerde Dilemma is on full display in the European Union, which is in deep trouble because of a democracy deficit that is, at bottom, a subsidiarity-deficit caused by a God-deficit.

Americans would be very foolish to think ourselves immune to a similar crisis of political culture.

Jorge Bergoglio Peron????


I had originally intended this to be a companion piece to Carl Olson's essay on 'Francis and fundamentalism', because while Olson tackled JMB's
astonishingly self-deluding mindset about Islam and religious fundamentalism, in general, Samuel Gregg, author and research director of the
Acton Institute, examines JMB's equally skewed perspective on economics and politics, as well as major personality traits that resemble those
of Juan Peron. Or perhaps not so much of Peron himself, as of his genre - the archetypical supremely autocratic Latin American caudillo in the
mold of the Castros of Cuba and Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, with their mythical 'love for the poor' which is ubiquitous in their rhetoric.

The Pope and Perón
Does a long-deceased Latin American populist
provide us with insight into Pope Francis?
An analysis
by Samuel Gregg

August 03, 2016

Until Jorge Bergoglio was elected pope in 2013, the most famous Argentine of modern times was an army officer and politician named Juan Domingo Perón. Perón served as Argentina’s president from 1946-1955 and 1973-1974.

Although Perón died 42 years ago, the man and the movements he inspired have cast a long shadow over many Argentines’ lives. Given his age, that definitely includes Pope Francis. But do Francis’s ideas and governing-style reflect anything of the thought and words of a man who remains a major reference-point for many Argentines today?

Outside Latin America, most people probably know of Perón because of an award-winning hit musical. First released in 1976 and composed by Andrew Lloyd Weber with lyrics by Tim Rice, Evita traces the life of Perón’s second wife, Eva Duarte (“Evita”). She died from cancer at age 33, but not before Argentina’s Congress declared her “Spiritual Leader of the Nation” in 1952. That underscores the iconic status she was accorded by many Argentines and which Weber and Rice used as Evita’s centerpiece.

Careful readers of Evita’s lyrics, however, soon recognize that it contains considerable criticisms of the Peróns. Evita alludes to widespread corruption associated with Perónist organizations, a cynical attitude on Juan Perón’s part towards his working-class supporters, pseudo-religious cults of personality surrounding the Peróns, and their intolerance of dissent.

Nor is the musical shy about highlighting how the Peróns were out-and-out populists who used nationalist and class-warfare language to whip up resentment against their political rivals and foreigners: specifically, British and Americans.

Like many 20th-century Latin American politicians, Juan Perón’s road to power began with the military. He first became prominent following a military coup in 1943 and his appointment as Minister of Labor. Then-Colonel Perón swiftly introduced labor laws that favored employees and trade unions: so much so that he earned an abiding loyalty from what were called los descamisados (literally, the shirtless ones) or, broadly-speaking, the working-class and the poor. Even today, Argentina’s powerful trade unions remain a bedrock of Perónist support.

Perón’s economic ideas are best described as a mixture of economic nationalism, extensive wealth-redistribution, efforts by the state to coordinate different groups from the top-down (also known as “corporatism”), and a suspicion of markets. This resulted in heavy tariffs on foreign products, subsidies for domestic businesses (especially those close to government officials), and nationalization of key industries.

After being elected president in 1946, Perón was initially elusive about his precise political beliefs. In 1948, he stated that Perónism “is not learned, nor just talked about: one either feels it or else disagrees. Perónism is a question of the heart rather than the head.” [I can literally hear JMB saying that about Bergoglianism!]

In an April 1949 speech to the National Congress of Philosophy, however, Perón outlined a political model called justicialismo. Its goal was what Perón called an “organized community”: one which sought to balance classes and interest-groups so that each exercises “its functions for the good of all.”

Achieving this equilibrium, Perón maintained, required what he called a conductor: someone who, like a military officer, can exercise tactical flexibility in pursuing a strategic goal.

As one of Perón’s biographers Joseph Page observes, justicialismo essentially sought to rationalize the alliance which propelled Perón to power: the working-class, the lower middle-class, trade unionists, and farm-workers. This was accompanied by increasing authoritarianism on Perón’s part, the parodying and demonizing of opponents, and constant appeals to “the people” against real and invented adversaries. In short, Perón’s economic policies went hand-in-hand with increasing restrictions on freedom.

There was, however, another side to Perón’s politics. This had less to do with content than with style. Perón’s emphasis on el conductor’s need to be flexible involved him, Page states, “not only cultivating vagueness but also glorifying it as a virtue.” This in turn produced “flights of nonsensical obscurantism.” [My, my, sounds very familiar, does it not?]

In 1950, for instance, Perón claimed that Perónism “is an ideological position that is in the center, on the left, or on the right, according to circumstances. We obey circumstances.” [Once again, mutatis mutandis, that is exactly what Bergoglianism seems to be! And 'We obey circumstances' is a great three-word description of 'following what the world thinks' as well as of situational ethics - both, of course, cornerstones of Bergoglian thinking.]

Yet there was a method to this apparent madness. And that was a refusal to be limited by principles or the inner logic of ideas. On many occasions, Perón expressed impatience with intellectual abstraction. What mattered was movement and adaptation to existing conditions. [Once again, these are concepts JMB has expressed not infrequently and almost in the same words.]

Some of this will remind readers of expressions used by Pope Francis. Take, for example, Francis’s often-repeated statement: “Realities are greater than ideas.” [A nonsense statement that is simple and short enough to sound profound at first hearing, and I suppose, sounds truly profound to JMB, however senseless it may be!]

Precisely what this means is unclear. After all, an idea is a reality. Moreover, the claim that “realities are greater than ideas” is an idea, just as Perón’s assertion that we must adapt to circumstances is a theory about how we should act.

But is Francis really a Perónist? Or does some of his rhetoric just happen to mirror that of Perón and his followers? These are difficult questions to answer, given (1) Perón’s gift for ambiguity [that Bergoglio has in scads!] and (2) the pitfalls involved in drawing correlations.

It’s no secret, for example, that Francis is, like Perón, skeptical about free markets. That, however, doesn’t automatically make the pope a Perónist. Doubts about capitalism run the political gamut, ranging from royalists to Marxists.

On the other hand, it was impossible for an Argentine of Jorge Bergoglio’s generation not to have a position vis-à-vis Perón. Perón was in exile between 1955 and 1973. Perónist organizations were officially suppressed. Nevertheless, Perón and Perónism remained the alternative for decades to those dissatisfied with non-Perónist governments.

It would also be unsurprising for an Argentine Catholic like Bergoglio to have Perónist sympathies. Perón wasn’t a particularly observant Catholic. At one point, he was formally excommunicated. He also dabbled in Spiritism. Nonetheless, Perón wanted the Church’s support. He occasionally referenced Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno as one of his inspirations. At one point, a Jesuit, Father Hernán Benítez, functioned as a Perón advisor while serving as Eva’s confessor. He also administered the last rites before she died.

Perón turned against the Church in the early 1950s as his regime drifted down the authoritarian path invariably taken by all Latin American populists. The Church particularly resisted its organizations being subsumed into Perón’s corporatist state.

Even so, Perón’s populist rhetoric about los descamisados in a highly class-conscious society struck a chord with Argentine Catholics concerned about poverty. This magnified as Argentina’s economic situation continued deteriorating throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

Looking at Bergoglio’s life in Argentina, there’s no evidence of any significant personal encounters with Perón. There are conflicting accounts of Bergoglio’s views of Perónism as a schoolboy and young man. But according to Armando Rubén Puente, author of the revealing book, La Vida Oculta de Bergoglio (The hidden life of Bergoglio) (2014), Bergoglio grew close to one particular Perónist movement in the early 1970s: the Guardia de Hierro (Iron Guard).

This movement, especially active at the Universidad del Salvador in Buenos Aires, resisted many Perónists’ drift into Marxism and leftist violence. Though influenced by ideas from across the political spectrum, Guardia members worked with those living on the margins. This would have appealed to Father Bergoglio, as would their emphasis on being with “the people.”

It’s also clear that some of the Argentines who developed the teología del pueblo, which has influenced Francis's thought [More than being just influenced by it, he has adopted it for his own, as he and his one-man brain trust Mons. Fernandez have referred to their theology as expressed in Evangelii gaudium as a 'theology of the people'], were close to Guardia Perónism.

Bergoglio’s Guardia empathies were one reason, Rubén Puente suggests, that the young Jesuit provincial was asked in 1974 to join a small group involved in drafting Perón’s political testament. 'El conductor imagined this document would overcome the deep divisions in Argentine society after his death.

That very year, Perón died. Argentina was subsequently paralyzed by a violent leftist insurgency, swiftly succeeded by military repression. Such was the calamitous state in which Perón left Argentina.

In a text circulated to Argentine Jesuits upon hearing of Perón’s death, however, Bergoglio noted that the deceased Perón had been thrice elected by the people and enjoyed their support. That’s undoubtedly true. And for someone like Bergoglio, whose theological outlook has invoked el pueblo since the 1970s, this greatly mattered.

All in all, the evidence suggests that while it’s possible to describe Francis as a Perónist, one should hesitate before drawing too close a link between the pope and Perón himself. [One does not have to. It's enough to observe the striking similarities in personal style and ex-cathedra self-assurance!] Nor should we conclude that Bergoglio embraced all Perón’s ideas or blindly supported anyone claiming the Perónist label.

As Buenos Aires’s archbishop, for instance, Bergoglio often challenged Argentina’s Perónist presidents, Néstor and Cristina Kirchner, who dominated Argentine politics between 2003 and 2015 and whose left-populist policies wreaked further havoc upon Argentina’s already fragile economy.

That said, Perón and Perónism were inescapable presences for any Argentine of Francis’s vintage. In this respect, Perón’s impact upon several generations of Argentines is comparable to that of Ronald Reagan’s ideas and rhetorical style upon many Americans in the 1980s, or Saint John Paul II’s personality and teachings upon many Catholics from the 1980s until the early 2000s.

Correlation isn’t causation. Yet parallels exist between the styles of El Conductor and Francis. [There you go!] These include:
(1) an imprecision of language which strikes many as intentional;
(2) a rhetorical tendency to caricature critics rather than seriously engage their arguments;
(3) an emphasis upon action that’s inattentive to the fact that coherent action depends upon coherent thought; and
(4) an attachment to el pueblo — something invested with almost mystical qualities by Perón and Francis, but which often morphs into populism.

Above all, it adds up to a shared penchant for unpredictability, sometimes, it seems, for unpredictability’s sake. In Perón’s case, it contributed to Argentina enduring decades of economic dysfunctionality, periodic violence, and deep political instability. What it indicates about Francis’s long-term impact upon Catholicism is anyone’s guess. [Though of course, the chaos and confusion within the Church in the past three years and five months already tell us enough of its short- and medium-term impact!]

This post is a few days late but always opportune, and it is occasioned by Antonio Socci posting the homily Benedict XVI delivered on his first Assumption Day Mass as pope in 2005.

In Castel Gandolfo, on Assumption Day, it became SOP for Benedict XVI to walk from the Apostolic residence, in ceremonial mozzetta and choir dress, down the main piazza of the town to the parish church where he celebrated Mass. It was an occasion for the people outside the church (it only has seats for 200) to greet him up close before he said Mass. He would repeat the walkabout after Mass on his way back to the residence, where he would then lead the noon Angelus from a window overlooking the inner courtyard of the Residence, and afterwards receive visitors (most notably town officials and residents) in small private audiences.

It is therefore even more surprising that the quintessential 'pope of the people', as the media regard him, has chosen to do away with this Assumption Day practice - apparently, he thinks Castel Gandolfo is 'tainted' because popes are not supposed to have summer residences, or even to take any summer vacation. Oh no! None of that would be compatible with the humble pope, the pope of the poor.

OK, but what about such a frequently self-proclaimed Marian devotee not even celebrating the Mass of the Assumption wherever he is? Perhaps he did at Casa Santa Marta, but that really is so 'under-stated', one might say, to mark a major feast day of Our Lady. He did lead a holiday Angelus at noon, but from all accounts, his remarks on the Assumption somehow ended up being a boost for feminism. Go figure!

Meanwhile, enjoy these always-marvelous and always-fresh reflections from Benedict XVI, delivered extemporaneously.

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MASS ON THE SOLEMNITY OF THE ASSUMPTION
OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY

HOMILY OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI
Parish Church of Castel Gandolfo
Monday, 15 August 2005

Dear Brothers in the Episcopate and in the Priesthood,
Dear Brothers and Sisters,

First of all, I offer a cordial greeting to you all. It gives me great joy to celebrate Mass in this beautiful parish church on the day of the Assumption.

I greet Cardinal Sodano, the Bishop of Albano, all the priests, the Mayor and all of you. Thank you for your presence.

The Feast of the Assumption is a day of joy. God has won. Love has won. It has won life. Love has shown that it is stronger than death, that God possesses the true strength and that his strength is goodness and love.

Mary was taken up body and soul into Heaven: there is even room in God for the body. Heaven is no longer a very remote sphere unknown to us.

We have a mother in Heaven. And the Mother of God, the Mother of the Son of God, is our Mother. He himself has said so. He made her our Mother when he said to the disciple and to all of us: "Behold, your Mother!". We have a Mother in Heaven. Heaven is open, Heaven has a heart.

In the Gospel we heard the Magnificat, that great poem inspired by the Holy Spirit that came from Mary's lips, indeed, from Mary's heart. This marvellous canticle mirrors the entire soul, the entire personality of Mary. We can say that this hymn of hers is a portrait of Mary, a true icon in which we can see her exactly as she is. I would like to highlight only two points in this great canticle.

It begins with the word "Magnificat": my soul "magnifies" the Lord, that is, "proclaims the greatness" of the Lord. Mary wanted God to be great in the world, great in her life and present among us all. She was not afraid that God might be a "rival" in our life, that with his greatness he might encroach on our freedom, our vital space. She knew that if God is great, we too are great. Our life is not oppressed but raised and expanded: it is precisely then that it becomes great in the splendour of God.

The fact that our first parents thought the contrary was the core of original sin. They feared that if God were too great, he would take something away from their life. They thought that they could set God aside to make room for themselves.

This was also the great temptation of the modern age, of the past three or four centuries. More and more people have thought and said: "But this God does not give us our freedom; with all his commandments, he restricts the space in our lives. So God has to disappear; we want to be autonomous and independent. Without this God we ourselves would be gods and do as we pleased".

This was also the view of the Prodigal Son, who did not realize that he was "free" precisely because he was in his father's house. He left for distant lands and squandered his estate. In the end, he realized that precisely because he had gone so far away from his father, instead of being free he had become a slave; he understood that only by returning home to his father's house would he be truly free, in the full beauty of life.

This is how it is in our modern epoch. Previously, it was thought and believed that by setting God aside and being autonomous, following only our own ideas and inclinations, we would truly be free to do whatever we liked without anyone being able to give us orders.

But when God disappears, men and women do not become greater; indeed, they lose the divine dignity, their faces lose God's splendour. In the end, they turn out to be merely products of a blind evolution and, as such, can be used and abused. This is precisely what the experience of our epoch has confirmed for us.

Only if God is great is humankind also great. With Mary, we must begin to understand that this is so. We must not drift away from God but make God present; we must ensure that he is great in our lives. Thus, we too will become divine; all the splendour of the divine dignity will then be ours. Let us apply this to our own lives.

It is important that God be great among us, in public and in private life.

In public life, it is important that God be present, for example, through the cross on public buildings, and that he be present in our community life, for only if God is present do we have an orientation, a common direction; otherwise, disputes become impossible to settle, for our common dignity is no longer recognized.

Let us make God great in public and in private life. This means making room for God in our lives every day, starting in the morning with prayers, and then dedicating time to God, giving Sundays to God. We do not waste our free time if we offer it to God. If God enters into our time, all time becomes greater, roomier, richer.

A second observation: Mary's poem - the Magnificat - is quite original; yet at the same time, it is a "fabric" woven throughout of "threads" from the Old Testament, of words of God.

Thus, we see that Mary was, so to speak, "at home" with God's word, she lived on God's word, she was penetrated by God's word. To the extent that she spoke with God's words, she thought with God's words, her thoughts were God's thoughts, her words, God's words. She was penetrated by divine light and this is why she was so resplendent, so good, so radiant with love and goodness.

Mary lived on the Word of God, she was imbued with the Word of God. And the fact that she was immersed in the Word of God and was totally familiar with the Word also endowed her later with the inner enlightenment of wisdom.

Whoever thinks with God thinks well, and whoever speaks to God speaks well. They have valid criteria to judge all the things of the world. They become prudent, wise, and at the same time good; they also become strong and courageous with the strength of God, who resists evil and fosters good in the world.

Thus, Mary speaks with us, speaks to us, invites us to know the Word of God, to love the Word of God, to live with the Word of God, to think with the Word of God.

And we can do so in many different ways: by reading Sacred Scripture, by participating especially in the Liturgy, in which Holy Church throughout the year opens the entire book of Sacred Scripture to us. She opens it to our lives and makes it present in our lives.

But I am also thinking of the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church that we recently published, in which the Word of God is applied to our lives and the reality of our lives interpreted; it helps us enter into the great "temple" of God's Word, to learn to love it and, like Mary, to be penetrated by this Word.

Thus, life becomes luminous and we have the basic criterion with which to judge; at the same time, we receive goodness and strength.

Mary is taken up body and soul into the glory of Heaven, and with God and in God she is Queen of Heaven and earth. And is she really so remote from us?

The contrary is true. Precisely because she is with God and in God, she is very close to each one of us.

While she lived on this earth she could only be close to a few people. Being in God, who is close to us, actually, "within" all of us, Mary shares in this closeness of God. Being in God and with God, she is close to each one of us, knows our hearts, can hear our prayers, can help us with her motherly kindness and has been given to us, as the Lord said, precisely as a "mother" to whom we can turn at every moment.

She always listens to us, she is always close to us, and being Mother of the Son, participates in the power of the Son and in his goodness. We can always entrust the whole of our lives to this Mother, who is not far from any one of us.

On this feast day, let us thank the Lord for the gift of the Mother, and let us pray to Mary to help us find the right path every day. Amen.

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I would like to take the occasion to post some of the reactions to that were posted on Socci's combox. They are typical of reactions whenever a blogger or a website posts something about Benedict XVI. These are the first 30 or so of 79 reactions to this particular post. Most of it is understandable, but I will go in later to translate the longer comments. It is always heartwarming to be reminded that there is quite a community of us, worldwide I like to believe, devoted to Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI.

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Alberto Primo
E neanche quest'anno Papa Francesco ha celebrato una Messa per l'Assunzione di Maria.E' troppo occupato ad occuparsi dei profughi per badare a queste quisquilie...

Ivana Fabbri
Grandissimo teologo. Grandissimo PAPA unico vero Pontefice della chiesa,che DIO ti protegga che MARIA Santissima ti avvolga nel suo manto per difenderti da tutti i nemici che ti circondano. Possa tu vedere il trionfo del suo cuore Immacolato.

Pier Luigi Commovente
... e si! Si sente la presenza dello Spirito Santo di Gesù e soprattutto del Padre! ... in lui come pecora riconosco il mio Pastore.

Marco Secondo
Papa Benedetto XVI: il mio papa, il nostra papa! Dio mio,come si sente il soffio dello Spirito Santo in queste Sue parole! E che abisso, teologicamente parlando, se dette parole vengono confrontate con le banalita' che escono dalla bocca di papa Francesco!!

Eleonora Valerioti
Papa Benedetto, che la Madonna Assunta ti protegga perchè abbiamo sempre bisogno di te.

Vera Vida
Quanto mancano queste omelie così profonde ma chiare che aprono proprio il cuore...

Giovanna Bertone
Grazie Papa Benedetto per queste "sante riflessioni", vero sollievo per lo spirito!!!

Guido Sparasci
Le sue "dimissioni" un disegno diabolico partito da lontano, che va via via chiarendosi.

Annalisa Masseroni Robinson
Credo che non abbia mai scritto una riga brutta in vita sua. Riesce a dare dolcezza ad ogni concetto.

Pierangela Salmaso
Il mio Papa Benedetto - lo Spirito Santo si sente meravigliose nelle sue parole. Ritorna mi manchi. T.V.B♡

Sonia Vadnjal
Si, bellissima meditazione, bellissimo ritratto della nostra Madre celeste.

Luisa Tronci
Che meravigliosa preghiera ! Grazie Benedetto!

Rita Serra
Buona festa della Assunta papa Benedetto, sempre con Te.

Antonio Cecoro
Ho letto commosso. Quanta sapienza pregna di preghiera.
Grazie santità ❤

Sergio Massaglia
B XVI, un grande teologo, IL TEOLOGO DELLA FEDE...

Louise du Mois
Bellissima! Che Dio lo benedica...

Nahum da Elcos
Che tristezza non poterlo più sentire e ascoltare.

Alessandro Gerlando Arrigo
Da togliere il fiato.

Marialuisa Di Marzio
Quanta magnificenza...quanto ristoro in queste parole benedette!... Sei "crudele" (senza intenzione, lo so...) poiché regalandoci proprio oggi questa meraviglia di dichiarazione amorosa di Papa Benedetto alla nostra Madre Celeste fai risanguinare in noi la ferita di un vuoto incolmabile...dell'attuale inedia spirituale (prima ancora che dottrinale) che fa l'anima agonizzante....

Sebbene dia tanto dolore il raffronto tra l'abbondanza cui eravamo assuefatti e la penosa attuale indigenza, sia tuttavia benedetto questo sorso d'azzurro!...

Alessandro Scotti
Che Papa!!!

Luigi Esposito
Grande Pontefice, Unico Vero Papa!

Ileana Bertucci
Grazie infinite perché le omelie che ho ascoltato oggi mi hanno lasciato un grande vuoto nel cuore. Leggendo questa mi sono rasserenata e baciata dall'amore di Dio.

Fabio Aiello
Quanto ci manchi!

Nives Cottino
I contrasti diventano inconciliabili.......sante parole, papa Benedetto XVI!

Rosalba Di Bernardo
Quanta dolcezza,quanta serenità e saggezza nelle tue parole. amatissimo Papa emerito BENEDETTO. E grazie a te, ANTONIO. guida insuperabile, Dio ti benedica...

Anna Maria Conti
Otto anni di pontificato e otto splendide omelie per la festa dell'Assunzione dalla Beata Vergine Maria!

Monica Migliorini
Stupenda!

Luisa Ferrari
Grazie per il dono che oggi ci ha fatto: poter leggere queste riflessioni del PAPA ("emerito") dà energia all'animo...

Carmela Lavorato
Grande Benedetto!

Roberto Melis
Bellissima!!!

Nazarena Rampini
Dopo queste parole come si fa a non innamorarci ancora di piu' della Vergine Maria.

Francesca Borzatta
Davvero un'omelia meravigliosa...

Agatino Privitera
Meravigliosa!

Titina Gallo
Viva il Papa....

Giuseppe Ferraro
Parole uscite dalla bocca di un dotto, un teologo innamorato della Madonna...

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But let me end this Assumption tribute with my post on August 15, 2010, in which Benedict XVI did read a prepared text for his homily...




August 15, 2010
The Vatican does not publish any preparatory notes nor the actual libretto for liturgies celebrated by the Holy Father outside St. Peter's Basilica or St. Peter's Square - even if it publishes the full Missal for liturgies he celebrates during trips outside Rome... Coverage of the now traditional papal Mass at Castel Gandolfo on the Feast of the Assumption has also been quite spotty - the news agencies generally are stingy with their coverage of the Mass itself (wherever it is held), and I do not recall ever having seen a photo of the congregation at the Church of San Tomasso in the past five years... On top of which, the English service of Vatican Radio has been spotty this summer - its slideshow is still frozen at the Angelus from last Sunday, and it has not posted any news item for today, much less the text for the homily. So, I will lead off the post with the little there is about the Mass (a grand total of 4 news agency photos in all) and a translation of the homily, and deal with all the photos of Papino interacting with the crowd later.

FERRAGOSTO IN CASTEL GANDOLFO




The Holy Father presided at the Mass of the Assumption in the parish church of San Tomasso di Villanova in Castel Gandolfo this morning. Here is a translation of his homily:

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Eminence, Excellency, Authorities,
Dear brothers and sisters:

Today the Church celebrates one of the most important feasts devoted to the Most Blessed Mary in the liturgical year: the Assumption.

At the end of her earthly life, Mary was carried body and soul to Heaven, that is, to the glory of eternal life, in full and perfect communion with God.

This year will mark the 60th anniversary of when the Venerable Pius XII solemnly defined the dogma of the Assumption on November 1, 1950, and I wish to read - even if it is a bit complicated - the form with which it was dogmatized [made into doctrine]. The Pope wrote:

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...The revered Mother of God, from all eternity joined in a hidden way with Jesus Christ in one and the same decree of predestination, immaculate in her conception, a most perfect virgin in her divine motherhood, the noble associate of the divine Redeemer who has won a complete triumph over sin and its consequences, finally obtained, as the supreme culmination of her privileges, that she should be preserved free from the corruption of the tomb, and that, like her own Son, having overcome death, she might be taken up body and soul to the glory of heaven where, as Queen, she sits in splendor at the right hand of her Son, the immortal King of the Ages. (Apos. Const. Munificentissimus Deus, AAS 42 (1950), 768-769)

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This, then, is the nucleus of our faith in the Assumption: we believe that Mary, like Christ her Son, triumphed over death and already triumphs in celestial glory, in the totality of her being, 'in body and soul'.

St. Paul, in the second Reading today, helps us to throw some light on this mystery, starting from the central fact of human history and of our faith. The fact, namely, of the Resurrection of Christ, who is 'the first fruit of those who have died'.

Immersed in his Paschal Mystery, we have been made participants in his victory over sin and over death. Here is the surprising secret and the key reality of the entire human experience.

St. Paul tells us that we have all been 'incorporated' in Adam, the first man, the 'old' man - and we all share his human inheritance: suffering,death, sin.

But to this reality that we can all see and live every day, a new thing has been added: we are not just heirs of the human race that began with Adam, but we are also 'incorporated' in the new man, in the risen Christ, and thus, the life of the Resurrection is already present in us.

Therefore, that first biological 'incorporation' was incorporation into death, an incorporation that generates death. The second new one, that is given to us at Baptism, is 'incorporation' that gives life.

I will further cite the second Reading today, where St. Paul says: "For since death came through man, the resurrection of the dead came also through man. For just as in Adam all die, so too in Christ shall all be brought to life, but each one in proper order: Christ the first fruits; then, at his coming, those who belong to Christ" (1 Cor 15,21-24).

Now, what St. Paul says of all men, the Church, in her infallible magisterium, says of Mary, in a precise manner and sense: the Mother of God was situated in the Mystery of Christ to the extent of taking part in the Resurrection of her Son with her entire being at the end of her earthly life - she lives that which we await at the end of times when the 'last enemy' is destroyed, death (cfr 1 Cor 15,26). She already lives that which we proclaim in the Creed: "the resurrection of the dead and life everlasting".

We may then ask: what are the roots of this victory over death that was so miraculously anticipated in Mary? The roots are in the faith of the Virgin of Nazareth, as testified by the passage of the Gospel that we heard (Lk 1,39-56): a faith that is obedience to the Word of God and total abandon to divine initiative and action as announced to her by the Archangel.

Faith, therefore, was Mary's greatness, as Elizabeth joyously proclaimed: Mary is 'blessed among women" and 'blessed is the fruit of her womb', because she is 'the mother of the Lord' - because she believes and lives the 'first' of the beatitudes, the beatitude of faith.

Elizabeth proclaims this in her joy and that of the baby who leaps in her womb: "Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.” (v. 45).

Dear friends, let us not limit ourselves to admiring Mary in her glorious destiny, as a person who is very distant from us. No! We are called to look upon what the Lord, in his love, also wished for us, for our final destiny: to live through faith in a perfect communion of love with him, and thus, to truly live.

In this respect, I wish to dwell a bit on an aspect of the dogmatic proclamation, where it speaks of assumption to celestial glory. We are all aware that today when we say 'Heaven' we do not refer to some place in the universe, a star or something similar. No!

We mean something much greater, and something difficult to define with our limited human concepts. With the word "Heaven', we affirm that God, the God who made himself close to us, will never abandon us, not even in death or beyond it, but has a place for us and grants us eternity. We are saying that in God, there is a place for us.

To understand this reality a little better, let us look at our own life: we all experience that a person, after his death, continues to subsist in some way in the memory and heart of those who knew and loved him. We can say that a part of that person continues to live in them, but like a 'shadow', because even this 'survival' in the heart of his dear ones is destined to end.

God however never passes away, and we all exist by the power of his love. We exist because he loves us, because he has thought us up and called us to life. We exist in the thought and love of God - where we exist in all of our reality, not just as a 'shadow'.

Our serenity, our hope, our peace, are based precisely on this: in God, in his thought and in his love, it is not just a 'shadow' of us that survives. In him, in his creative love, we are cared for and introduced with our whole life and our whole being into eternity.

It is his love that triumphs over death and that gives us eternity, and it is this love that we call 'heaven'. God is so great that he has room for all of us.

And the man Jesus, who is God at the same time, is our guarantee that being-man and being-God can exist and live eternally, one within the other.

This means that for each of us, it is not just a part of us that will continue to exist, a part ripped, so to speak, from the rest of us while the other parts end up in ruin. It means rather that God knows and loves the whole man, that which we are.

And God welcomes to his eternity that which now, in this life made up of suffering and love, of hope, of joy and sadness, grows and 'becomes'. All of man, all of human life, is taken in by God and, purified in him, receives eternity.

Dear friends, I think this is a reality that should fill us with profound joy. Christianity does not just announce some generic salvation of the soul in an imprecise afterlife, in which everything that was precious and dear to us in life would be annulled - but it promises eternal life, 'the life of the world to come'. Nothing of that which is precious and dear to us will end in ruin but will rather find their fullness in God.

All the hairs on our head are counted, Jesus said once (cfr Mt 10,30). The world to come will be the fulfillment of this earth, as St. Paul affirms: "Creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God" (Rm 8,21).

Thus, one can understand why Christianity gives strong hope in a luminous future and opens the way towards realizing this future. We are called, precisely because we are Christian, to build this new world, to work so that one day it becomes 'the world of God', a world that will surpass everything that we ourselves could ever hope to build.

In Mary assumed to heaven, fully participating in the Resurrection of her Son, we contemplate the realization of the human creature according to 'God's world'.

Let us pray to the Lord that he may make us understand how precious our whole life is to his eyes; strengthen our faith in eternal life; make us men of hope, working to build a world that is open to God - men full of joy who can perceive the beauty of the future world in the midst of the concerns of daily life, and who live, believe and hope in such a certainty. Amen.

---

WOW! I was not expecting such a fresh, original and beautiful reflection on the meaning of eternal life and heaven in the context of the Assumption, though I should be constantly prepared by now to the constant theological surprises from Benedict XVI.

BENEDICT XVI'S WALKABOUT
Before the Mass






After the Mass

First 'photo sighting' of Mons. Georg this summer!

Let me turn to another Bergoglian outrage to which not enough Catholic commentators are paying attention... The writer of this article
provides an example of a service that Catholic bloggers and websites could do - in preparation for the seemingly worldwide apotheosis
of Martin Luther that many Catholics, starting with our beloved best-pope-EVUH!, are set to carry out during the yearlong 'jubilee'
marking the fifth centenary of his schism from the Church.

As I said, I never really bothered to read about Martin Luther because I did not think he - or any other non-Catholic Christian - would
have anything good to tell me that I have not already learned from the Church, or can learn from her if I must.

But what is being disclosed, for wider public consumption - though in bits and pieces so far - about Luther, his teachings and his life,
have been so appalling one wonders why Catholic writers have not been more outraged. Of course, he must have had his virtues, but
whatever they were certainly do not justify his schism (or all the anti-Catholic positions he took) in any way.

Imagine if a reasonably well-read, knowledgeable and blogger (who should be a diligent researcher as well) could dedicate the next
several months till October 1918, using abundant documentary evidence, to disclose exactly all the ways in which Luther was truly
an enemy of the Catholic faith, and why it is unconscionable that the nominal spiritual leader of Roman Catholicism should be spear-
heading a 'celebration' of Luther over the next fourteen months...

Luther, 'the Macchiavelli of religion'
by Francesco Agnoli
Translated from

August 18, 2016

On the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther's schism, a confrontation among present German cardinals has been going on for some time.

On the one hand, Cardinals Kasper and Marx who unabashedly proclaim their admiration for Luther, and on the other hand, Cardinals Muller, Brandmueller and Cordes, who take the traditional Catholic line and see in Luther a man who 'deformed' the Gospel and broke the Church apart, dividing not just Christianity [yet again - since the Orthodox did that first in the Great Schism of 1054] but Europe as well.

But this is not just about another 'high profile' theological debate. It has implications for natural law and on the way that Christian matrimony is perceived.

Kasper and Marx have been seeking, since Benedict XVI's resignation, to minimize condemnation of adultery and to legitimize, more or less openly, second marriages, providing thus an opening as well to same-sex 'marriage'. So what does Luther have to do with all this?

Perhaps much more than one might think. First of all, in the matter of doctrine, because Luther denies the sacramental character of matrimony and he places it under secular jurisdiction, i.e., under the power of the state. This clearly desacralizes matrimony and deprives it of its traditional supernatural significance [i.e., God himself instituted marriage]

In objective fact, the first thing to recall is that Luther married an ex-Cistercian nun, Katherina von Bora, with whom he had six children. The couple resided in the former Augustinian convent of Wittenberg which was given to them by the Prince-Elector of Saxony (who, in turn, owed Luther the fact that he became the proprietor of all the assets of the Catholic Church in his principality).

Luther and Caterina became the model after whose example the Protestants "did everything they could on every occasion, often as organized committees, to force away religious women from their cloisters so as to marry them".

After the abduction of some women religious which took place on the evening of Holy Saturday in 1523, Luther called the undertaking "a happy robbery" and the perpetrators rejoiced with him that they had "liberated these poor souls from prison" (see Jacques Maritain, I tre riformatori: Lutero, Cartesio, Rousseau (The three reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau).

In those years, many German religious women were forced to leave their convents, usually against their will, to return to their homes or to get married.

The second fact to remember is this: Luther, in order not to lose the support of the Landgrave Phillip of Hesse - "one of the political pillars on which Lutheranism rested" - allowed him to take a second wife, Margarethe of Saal, although he already was married to Christina of Saxony with whom he had seven children.

It was 1539. Luther did not want any noisy scandals, nor did he really want to publicly justify bigamy, but he had to bend to the wishes of Phillip, an incorrigible libertine afflicted with syphilis, because it was "necessary to conserve the integrity of the Reformation's military power".

So he decided to act stealthily: Hoping that no one would learn about it, he communicated secretly to Phillip that the 'supplementary' marriage could be considered 'a necessity of conscience'. In other words, bigamy was OK as long as it is not made public.

Luther and Phillip Melancthon [Luther's longtime friend, eventual theologian who would 'systematize' Luther's thought [Luther's Mons. Victor Fernandez!], and spokesman for the Reformation after Luther's death]: "If therefore Your Highness has definitely decided on taking a second wife, it is our opinion that this should remain secret".

After Phillip did marry his second wife, Phillip sent Luther - who had by then become quite addicted to good food and strong drinks - "a bottle of wine, which arrived in Wittenberg after the secret of the bigamy had leaked out through a sister of Phillip.

Feeling that he was in trouble, Luther - whom Tommaso Campanella called 'the Macchiavelli of the faith" - advised Phillip to declare publicly that Margarethe was not his legitimate wife, "replacing the marriage document with another notarial document declaring Margarete was only his concubine".

Phillip refused and demanded that Luther publicly confirm he himself had granted Phillip the dispensation for the second marriage. But Luther - who, on other occasions, did not hesitate to propose spurious translations of Biblical passages, answered that his advice was given secretly, and "now it has become null and void because it has been made public" (Federico A. Rossi di Marignano, Martin Lutero e Caterina von Bora, Ancora, Milano, 2013, p. 343-347; Angela Pellicciari, Martin Lutero, Cantagalli, Siena, 2013, p. 109-113).

A few years earlier, in 1531, Luther, in one of his countless letters seeking the favor of powerful people, had written to Henry VIII of England that yes, marriage was indissoluble but... if the queen agreed, he could take a second wife, as in the Old Testament.

As we know, Henry VIII sought a dispensation not from Luther but from the pope in Rome, and not obtaining it, he seized the opportunity and proclaimed his schism from Rome [thus the birth of Anglicanism], ultimately having as many as six wives married 'in conscience' (some of whom he ordered killed).

Luther's 'revolution' on matrimony gave him the pretext to cast off his monk's habit and to allow princes to repudiate their legitimate consorts and live in polygamy. But even in matters of doctrine, everything was destined to change gradually.

One must always keep this in mind: Luther always looked at the German nobility as his principal interlocutors whom he needed in order to wage his battle with Rome. And the German nobles, like those ion other European countries, were in a battle with the Church not only for reasons of politics and power, but on the very doctrine of matrimony. Often, the nobles rejected the principle of indissolubility nor the other rules on marriage set by Rome (like forbidding mixed marriages or marriages within a certain degree of consanguinity).

Moreover, for reasons related to their social or hereditary status, the nobles demanded the right to approve or disapprove a marriage, but the Church reserves this right to the partners themselves to decide whether they wish to marry each other. So how did Luther and his church respond to these exigencies by their protectors? By criticizing that marriage could be 'absolutely' indissoluble.

Luther therefore recognized at least four causes for divorce: adultery; impotence occurring during the marriage (impotence before the marriage would be a cause for nullification, as it is in the Church); 'malicious desertion'; and tenacious refusal by the wife to have conjugal relations (Luther would write of this fourth cause: "If the wife neglects her conjugal duty, the civil authorities should compel her, or put her to death".][Oh, Martin Mohammed Luther!]

It was inevitable that Luther's leniencies would generate further assaults on the institution of marriage. Like that of the Anabaptists who approve of polygamy, or Luther's own disciple Butzer, according to whom Jesus never abolished the Mosaic practice of repudiating a spouse (effectively divorcing her), and that it was up to civilian authority to rule on divorce, without limitations or conditions.

Luther and others after him also insisted, with diverse emphases, on the importance of parental consent to marriage [even if their children are adult and can and should decide for themselves???], reproaching the Church for minimizing its importance, and fought against any impediments due to consanguinity. (Jean Gaudemet, Il matrimonio in Occidente, Sei, Torino, 1996, p. 207-2012).

The Catholic Church, at the Council of Trent, examined Luther's positions on marriage and reiterated once again the sacramental character of marriage and its indissolubility, rejecting the legitimacy of Lutheran divorce, reiterating (despite pressures from the French nobility) that parental consent was not binding, and condemning Luther's assumption that it is 'impossible' to live chastely. [So what did he do while he was an Augustinian monk??? Of course, in this, he is echoed today by the likes of Kasper and Marx (and in his own way, JMB) - for whom living by the Gospel is now no more than an 'ideal'.]

The positions taken by the Council of Trent would be reiterated by the Church and her popes for the next 500 years, without any changes.
[Obviously, the church of Bergoglio is not just post-Vat2-conciliar, but even more so, post-Trent!]

August 18, 2016 headlines

PewSitter




Has it come to this that one of the world's leading universities now considers the word 'man' offensive? That's one measure of the lunacy to which
the ideology of 'nothing can be too hyper' secularism has driven its proponents, and the utter mindlessness of political-correctness-trumps-truth-any-time.

---

Liberal lunacy goes mainstream...

The Princeton University HR department has largely wiped the word “man” from its vocabulary.

The relatively new policy in effect at the Ivy League institution spells out the directive in a four-page memo that aims to make the department more gender inclusive.

Instead of using “man,” employees are told to use words such as human beings, individuals or people.

Other guidelines? Instead of “man and wife” use spouses or partners. Switch out “man made” with artificial, handmade or manufactured. Don’t use the verb “to man,” as in to work something, instead use to operate or to staff. Throw out workmanlike and replace it with skillful.

The memo goes on to list a variety of occupations that typically include the word “man” in them and offers replacements: business person instead of businessman, firefighter instead of fireman, ancestors instead of forefathers, and so on.

It doesn't say what to call a man - I suppose it would be a 'male'. But I guess they still have not figured out what to do about the '-man' in human or woman - who, for instance, would ever say 'huperson' or 'woperson'? The crazies are fast taking over American culture - and reducing people's brains to nothing more than a biologic automaton to generate PC reflexes for any and all circumstances!

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Canon212.com


As for the palliating, sometimes appalling Mons. Paglia, Sandro Magister has a good post about how the bishop has come to be a key man in
the Bergoglio Curia, but more anon... It is John Allen who writes about the 'marching orders' given by the Pope to Paglia in this report:
https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2016/08/18/pope-issues-marching-orders-new-pro-life-leader/

Magister obviously had advance notice of the Vatican bulletin yesterday, 8/17, announcing the formation of a new super-dicastery in the Roman
Curia, as he anticipated it in his blogpost of 8/16... in which he describes the further rise of a clerical careerist who has gained the pope's favor
in the way that matters most - getting two plum assignments that are certainly more prestigious and pivotal than the post he has had to give up
because the office he used to lead has been absorbed in the new super-dicastery...

Magister's title plays on the bishop's surname, which means 'straw' in Italian, 'fuochi di paglia' = straw fires. Too bad Paglia isn't one of
JMB's generic 'straw men' from his straw man arguments, but a real flesh-and-blood man and prelate very much in the Bergoglian mold, having
been spiritual adviser to the ultra-liberal (or even radical chic) Sant'Egidio Community from beginnings, and even more Bergoglian now that he
appears have become part of the pope's inner circle...

The latest 'straw fires' on Mons. Paglia
who gets a couple of new plum posts
Translated from

August 16, 2016

On Wednesday, August 17, the Vatican will announce a double papal nomination for Mons. Vincenzo Paglia, as president of the Pontifical Academy for Life as well as Grand Chancellor of the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family.

Paglia was named in 2012 by Benedict XVI as president of the Pontifical Council for the Family after the retirement of Cardinal Ennio Antonelli. But the Council on the Family had earlier been fused by this pope to the Pontifical Council for the Laity.

Now both councils will cease to exist as of September 1, 2016 to be replaced by the new Pontifical Council for the Laity, Family and Life, whose statutes were handed down by the pope ad experimentum last June 4.

Indeed, Paglia had hoped to head the new super-dicastery. Instead, he gets the no less prestigious and double nominations he is getting.

Paglia's nomination to the Curia was one of the most flagrant personnel errors committed by Benedict XVI, though Paglia at the time - other than his Sant'Egidio official function - was Bishop of Terni, to which he was named in 2000. [When he was given the appointment by Benedict XVI, it was openly said that he did it as a

In Terni, he certainly did not - in his faulty administration of diocesan real estate - manifest the wisdom of a pater familias that a good bishop needs.

The 'reproof' is found in the lengthy and detailed farewell communique written in 2014 by the last IOR president (before Pope Francis named his own person) - Ernst von Freyberg, a German banker.

In explaining the slim net profit of IOR in 2013 (2.9 million euro vs 86.6 million in 2012, Benedict XVI's last full year in office), Von Freyberg underscored that among the urgencies that the IOR had to fund in 2012 was "3.2 million euros of financial assistance to the diocese of Terni".

This had to do with the diocese's declaration of bankruptcy when Paglia was its bishop. The diocese was placed under administrative supervision and IOR earlier had to cover half of the 20-million euros of its financial deficit.

But even as a leading light of the Sant'Egidio Community, Paglia had never 'shone' for his competence in dealing with family issues. Not him, nor any of the other leaders of Sant'Egidio, including the movement's founder, historian Andrea Riccardi. Even if the latter was also inappropriately entrusted with family problems while he was Minister for International Cooperation in Prime Minister Mario Monti's 'technocratic' government.

An indication of the Sant'Egidio community's dubious record on marriage and the family, despite its 'brilliant' public facade, was that in 2003, a leading Roman member of 25 years requested the Roman diocesan tribunal to declare his marriage of 25 years - to another Sant'Egidio member - null and void.

He submitted documents that alleged he not only was married 'under constraint' but that this was part of the more general authoritarian system exercised by the Sant'Egidio community which also 'managed' the engagements and marriages of its members.

The diocesan tribunal of Rome accepted his arguments and decreed the 25-year marriage null and void on account of 'constraint'.

But miraculously, none of all this has touched the career of Paglia which has been on the ascendant in this pontificate.

One must also note that Pope Francis was very careful not to invite Paglia's predecessor at the Family Council, Cardinal Antonelli, to take part in his family synods, even if Antonelli's competence in this area is incomparably superior to Paglia's. 'Unfortunately', Antonelli openly expressed with frankness and clarity his opposition to allowing unqualified remarried divorcees to receive communion.

Meanwhile, Paglia was shrewdly doing all he could do in the opposite direction, most notably, by officially sponsoring a seminar of experts and theologians open to pastoral leniency along the lines of Bergoglio and Kasper, whose views came out in a book published by the Vatican in the interval between the first and second Bergoglian family synods.

Besides excluding Cardinal Antonelli from his family synods, the pope had also excluded him from any active role in the John Paul II Institute, whose president was Livio Molina and whose Grand Chancellor till Paglia's appointment was Cardinal Agostino Vallini in his capacity as Vicar for Rome and Grand Chancellor of the Pontifical Lateran University, seat of the John Paul II Institute.

Now, everything has changed. As Grand Chancellor of the Institute, Paglia's function will be more than just honorific. He is to change the personnel and the orientation itself of the Institute according to the new course set by Bergoglio.

As for the Pontifical Academy for Life, which the pope has also asked Paglia to lead, one must expect similar shake-ups there.

Just think that one of its members is the Austrian philosopher Josef Seifert, author of the most 'murderous' demolition yet published of Amoris laetitia, who ends his 26-page critique with an appeal to this pope to retract the 'heretical affirmations' contained in the document.

It remains to be seen whether Paglia will be made a cardinal by JMB, who plans his third cardinal-naming consistory soon, considering that neither of Paglia's two new positions are necessarily 'cardinalatial'.

If he is tapped to get a biretta, could JMB leave out yet again one of his most assidious courtiers, Mons. Fisichella? He was a past president of the Pontifical Academy for Life and currently heads the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization.

Tapping both Paglia and Fisichella would mean two Italians, both Curial officials, in the new papal list for red hats, and that goes against his criteria of not naming cardinals from the Curia nor from Italy because he wants to make way for more countries to be represented in the College of Cardinals, preferably countries on the 'periphery' of just about anything you could think of.

JMB/PF may be boring, especially if you don't particularly like him, and he certainly does not set me on fire the right way, but rather incites me
to fiery outrage or chagrin most of the time. But he is the pope and we cannot 'ignore' whatever he says when he is wrong or even just questionable in
the light of Catholic orthodoxy. When he is right, Deo gratias!, but then, he is merely doing his duty as pope and as a Christian - namely, to transmit
the Word of God to the faithful as we have it from Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium, and not to put his own idiosyncratic, unorthodox
and often heterodox-to-the-brink-of-heretical spin on it....


Pope Francis is boring
[Worse, he continues to insist that
Jesus's miracle of loaves and fishes was not
a literal miracle but a lesson about sharing]

August 18, 2016

This morning [in his GA catechesis on the theme 'Mercy as an instrument of communion'] , Pope Francis claimed that the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes was really about sharing. This was at least the fourth time he's publicly made this claim as Pope, and only God knows how often he did so as bishop or mere priest.

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He shows them that the few loaves and fishes they have, with the power of faith and of prayer, can be shared by all the people. It is a miracle that he does, but it is the miracle of faith, of prayer with compassion and love.

Jesus wishes to withdraw and pray, but seeing the multitudes, is moved by compassion and chooses to remain with them. By instructing his disciples to feed the crowd, he teaches them to have faith and invites them to share in his concern for those in need.

The miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes is a concrete sign of that merciful concern. [It was also a sign of common sense. The people had been there for three days and had run out of food. Of course, they had to be fed.]

---

In other words, it's not really a miracle. Rather it shows that Jesus cared and (it follows) we should care too.

Francis is denying that the miracle, in the sense that we usually understand the meaning of the term "miracle," ever happened.

As all of you know, the story - which occurs six times in the Gospels - is that Jesus miraculously multiplied a few loaves and fishes to feed thousands. It's the second most famous miracle in the New Testament - the only miracle outside of the Resurrection to be recorded in all four Gospels.

Why is it a miracle? Well, this is obvious to any five-year-old. A few loaves and fish cannot feed thousands, no matter how you divide or distribute them and no matter how much anyone cares. Jesus - because He had miraculous powers - simply created more loaves and fish ex nihilo. Poof!

It was magic, or sort of magic. Christians don't usually like that that term because it implies there might be something occult or tricky going on. But, in common sense language, magic gets it mostly right. If you prefer, substitute the term supernatural.

The common-sense understanding of the significance of the miracle was that this was a sign that Jesus was a special man, or more than just a man (at the time of the miracle, no one, or almost no one, understood that Jesus was in fact God). That there would be and were such signs, is alluded to many times in the Bible. The Christian Fathers unanimously understood the miracle in this way.

Now, there are reasons why the sign had the characteristics that it had - why Jesus on this occasion created food out of nothing. Why did He perform this miracle instead of, say, levitating over the crowd or disappearing in a cloud of smoke or whatever?

There are two answers, I think. The first is that it recalled Moses calling manna from Heaven. In the Old Testament, Moses caused or participated in a similar miracle. If Jesus was special, he should at least be able to do what Moses did. This sign showed that Jesus was the new Moses, or, as it would of course be later revealed, much more than Moses.

The second is that all of the miracles of Jesus were not merely arbitrary marvels, but were also symbols or representations of what God does for us as a matter of course.

We don't usually see bread and seafood appearing out of nowhere. But God feeds us "normal" food every day, and He gives us the bread of life at communion.

Even the Resurrection is a miracle of this kind. We don't usually see dead people getting up and walking (except in movies) but, if certain conditions hold, God will in the end resurrect us and give us eternal life.

For Pope Francis, the "miracle" was really Jesus teaching us about sharing.

Pardon me for saying so, but that would make Christianity the stupidest religion ever. I don't (pardon me, again) need some Jewish hippie from 2,000 years ago telling me that sharing is a lovely thing. And neither do you. Both of us know that moral principle already.

Try evangelizing an atheist by saying, look, there was this guy in the first century who said sharing was good. Be prepared to die for Him as a martyr. The atheist would (rightly) look at you as if you were crazy.

We might call this the Faber University version of Christianity:
Sharing is Good.

Now, obviously, I don't think Jesus was merely a Jewish hippie. No Christian does. But Pope Francis seems to think so. There are no miracles, only teachings. And they're pretty obvious teachings. Sharing is good.

And Francis is the man, 2,000 years later to remind us of that fact. Because imagine, we used to think Christianity was [only and] all about anathemas!

As far as I could tell, no Catholic bloggers (at least the ones on my feed) cited this latest howler. That's not to fault them. Far from it. It's, rather, evidence that no one is surprised anymore. The Pope denies another fundamental element of the Catholic faith and makes Christianity dull. Ho hum. What else is new?

I almost didn't write this, for the same reason that other Catholic bloggers didn't write about it. It's not news. It's boring.

The enigmatic Bishop Barron has written that our faith in Christ should set us on fire. Forget, for the moment, the claims that Francis is an anti-Pope or a proto-anti-Christ or (as I have said) the most dangerous man from the point of view of the health of the Catholic Church alive today.

Think of him rather as that awful third-grade teacher that you had. He could make anything boring and unappealing. Vikings are cool and exciting. But you'll always hate vikings because you can't get the memory out of your head of Mr. Milquetoast droning on and on about them.

And when you nodded off or wrote notes to your friends in class, Mr. Milquetoast reprimanded you for not paying attention to his tedious monologue. It's your fault, you see. No one else taught the vikings correctly. He is finally doing so. That you are snoring or throwing spitballs during his lecture shows that you are unappreciative.

Please.

Francis doesn't help to set you on fire. He puts you to sleep.

God (and His Son) is the most fascinating subject there is. Read the Gospels, They are a window on the most amazing thing that ever happened.

Once, God walked among us as a man.

And if you follow Him, you can live with Him forever.

Don't listen to Francis - he'll ruin it for you.
Last Lent, I posted this commentary on JMB's denial at the time (or reduction to tokenism, if you wish) of the miracle of loaves and fishes...


The Pope's Lenten meditation:
Denying the miracle of loaves and fishes…
Again?
by Christopher A. Ferrara

March 14, 2016

Over the past three years we have seen persistent themes in Pope Francis’s various statements, including denunciation of “rigorist” Catholics as “Pharisees” and “neo-Pelagians,” agitation for the admission of the divorced and “remarried” Catholics to the sacraments without amendment of life, a dismissal of doctrinal differences with Protestants as insignificant, a demand for the repeal of all laws authorizing capital punishment, even though the Church has traditionally defended its use for the gravest crimes - but no call at all for the abolition of laws authorizing abortion, divorce, the sale of contraceptives, and gay 'marriage', whose legalization the former Cardinal Bergoglio has consistently failed to oppose as Pope. [How? When he openly proposed legal recognition of same-sex unions in Argentina six years ago???]

All of these are documented abundantly here.


But then there are also minor themes of this disturbing pontificate, involving frankly Modernist “interpretations” of Scripture: Mary was angry with God at the foot of the Cross, Jesus only pretended to be angry with his disciples, Saint Paul boasted of his sins (rather than his “infirmities,” which are not sins), and so forth.

One particular example shows a remarkable persistence in undermining the Gospel account: the reduction of Our Lord’s miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes.

First, Francis declared that Christ’s miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes is “more than a multiplication, it is a sharing, animated by faith and prayer.” Leaving no doubt of his reductionist intentions, Francis on another occasion added the following:

---

…. And we can imagine this now: we can imagine how they kept passing the loaves and fishes from hand to hand until the food reached those who were farthest away. Jesus managed to generate a current among his followers: they all went on sharing what was their own, turning it into a gift for the others; and that is how they all got to eat their fill. Incredibly, food was left over: they collected it in seven baskets….

[Jesus] takes a little bread and some fishes, he blesses them, breaks them and gives them to his disciples to share with the others. And this is the way the miracle proceeds. It is certainly not magic or idolatry. By means of these three actions [taking, blessing and giving], Jesus succeeds in turning a “throw-away” mindset into a mindset of communion, a mindset of community ….

---

Of course, no “sharing” or “community” action was required, because it was precisely the point of Our Lord’s miracle to provide a superabundance of food so that everyone in the crowd of 5,000 “did eat, and were filled (Matt. 14:20)” without having to share anything with anybody. Thus did God Incarnate demonstrate His infinite generosity even in material terms, while providing a physical symbol of the superabundance of grace that would be made available in the Holy Eucharist.

By way of comparison, even Pope Paul VI presented the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes as literally and simply a multiplication, not a “sharing” of food: “With exceptional, inexhaustible prodigality, the loaves then began increasing in number in the hands of the Son of God.”

One thoroughly disgusted priest theologian, often a critic of traditionalist positions, was finally compelled to issue (albeit anonymously) a public protest:

---

Thus, the ensemble of what the Pope really preached… about the loaves-and-fishes event leaves us to draw the inescapable conclusion that, along with so many modern historical-critical biblical scholars, he has taken on board the well-known, century-old rationalistic “demythologization” of this Gospel miracle. So we are left to wonder what other miracles of Jesus he may think require the same treatment…. [The Resurrection, of course - though not properly a miracle, simply God's stupendous and unique manifestation of his omnipotence - has been a favorite target of debunker theologians for 'demythization' by denying that it could be accepted as literal fact. No, it has been described as a mass delusion of the early Christians, a ploy to attract others to the new religion, and mere symbolism. Any mind that would deny the miracle of loaves and fishes as being a literal multiplication of the seven loaves and two fishes to feed 5,000 people, would all the more reject the idea of Jesus resurrecting. Now I must check what JMB has been saying about the Resurrection...]

‘Papa Bergoglio’ has made one of his major priorities clear in the title of his Apostolic Exhortation, “The Joy of the Gospel”. But how much real “joy” will we find in “the Gospel” (singular) if “the Gospels” (plural) on which the Good News of salvation is based turn out to be a historically unreliable blend of fact and legend?

---

Well, it seems Francis is still promoting his view that “sharing” is the miracle Christ performed in feeding the multitude with a few loaves and fishes. This time, only days ago (March 9), his handpicked preacher of Lenten “meditations,” one Father Ronchi, repeated this canard yet again, but upped the ante by explicitly declaring that there was no multiplication of loaves and fishes, only sharing. As Vatican Radio reports with quotations:

---

The miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and the fish shows us that Jesus is “not concerned with the quantity of the bread”, what he desires is that the bread be shared.

“According to a mysterious divine rule: when my bread becomes our bread, then little becomes enough. Hunger begins when I keep my bread to myself, when the satiated West holds on to its bread, its fish, its assets… It is possible to feed the earth, there is enough bread. There is no need to multiply it, it would be sufficient to just distribute it, starting with ourselves. We do not need prodigious multiplications: we need to beat the Goliath of selfishness, of food waste and the hoarding of few…. [Of course, I am biased, but that is statement of political ideology, not a spiritual reflection]

“The miracle is the five loaves and the two fish that the nascent Church places in the hands of Christ, who trusts, without calculating and without holding back anything for himself and for his own supper. It’s a little but it is all he has; it is a little but, it is the entire dinner of the disciples; it is a drop in the bucket, but that drop that can give meaning and can give hope to life… A gift of five loaves of bread is sufficient to change the world.” [Yuck! Such shoddy penny-ante sentiment!]

---

Ronchi dares to reduce the divine miracle to Christ trusting in what the early Church has given Him, which never increases in quantity! Pure rubbish, of course.

As the Gospel account tells us, after everyone in the vast crowd had eaten his fill, the fragments alone filled twelve baskets (John 6:13). Only a literal multiplication of loaves and fishes could have produced twelve baskets of crumbs versus the original five loaves and two fishes that would not have filled even one basket. That is why the Gospel recounts this detail: to preclude the claim that there was no multiplication.

Why this persistence in casting doubt on the only one of Christ’s miracles recounted in all four Gospels? Because the Modernist mind cannot tolerate literal miracles and must always find a way to “de-mythologize” them by reducing them to purely spiritual events.

Consider this example symptomatic of a pontificate that in turn is symptomatic of the invasion of the Church by what Msgr. Guido Pozzo has called the “para-conciliar ideology,” whose action he describes thus: “A foreign way of thinking has entered into the Catholic world, stirring up confusion, seducing many souls, and disorienting the faithful. There is a ‘spirit of self-demolition’ that pervades modernism…”

Sister Lucia called it “diabolical disorientation” among the upper hierarchy. And it this diabolical influence in the Church that is no doubt foretold in the integral Third Secret of Fatima.

Perhaps Paul VI was revealing as much when he himself admitted: “This state of uncertainty reigns even in the Church. It was hoped that after the Council there would be a day of sunlight in the history of the Church. Instead, there came a day of clouds, of darkness, of groping, of uncertainty. How did this happen? We will confide Our thoughts to you: there has been interference from an adverse power: his name is the devil…”


In fairness, you could read Jimmy Akins's lengthy and tortuous apologia-pro-Francesco about the pope's take on the miracle of loaves and fishes,
http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jimmy-akin/pope-francis-on-the-parable-of-the-loaves-and-fishes-11-things-to-know-and
in which he mentions many more instances of JMB citing the 'event' and commenting on it, and goes to great pains to give him the benefit of the doubt
in any and all cases, with the basic argument that the pope is not 'denying' it was a miracle at all because he refers to it as 'the miracle of loaves and fishes'...

Now I am wondering what Luther thought about the miracles Jesus performed. Is his spiritual son on the Chair of Peter today merely upholding Luther???

Not surprisingly, Christopher Ferrara takes a critical look at JMB's two latest high-profile appointments...

Pope places entire Vatican apparatus
on marriage and the family under
two prelates subversive of both
by Christopher A. Ferrara

August 18, 2016

Yesterday the Vatican announced that by motu proprio (his own initiative), Francis has formally erected the new “super-dicastery” of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, the Family and Life (PCLFL), effective September 1.

The new dicastery will absorb (and thus abolish) the Pontifical Councils for the Family and the Laity and will also overlap the function of the still-existing Pontifical Academy for Life, one of whose members, the German philosopher Josef Siefert, published a devastating critique of the disastrous Amoris Laetitia, calling upon Francis to correct its errors against the Faith.

Francis has appointed as head of the PCLFL none other than Bishop Kevin Joseph Farrell of Texas, a “pro-gay” prelate widely denounced for installing as pastor of a Texas parish a homosexual priest who participated in an explicitly “gay” website for homosexual clergy and religious. (The priest was removed only after public outcry over the appointment.)

Farrel clearly accepts as a given that there will be homosexual priests in pastoral ministry. Citing remarks by Francis concerning “respect” for “homosexual persons,” Farrell declared that “The Church still has the expectation that priests must commit to a life of celibate chastity whether they are homosexual or heterosexual.” Still? The expectation? Whether they are homosexual or heterosexual?

So much for the constant teaching and practice of the Church, affirmed by Benedict XVI, that men who consider themselves “gay” cannot be admitted to seminaries as their intrinsically disordered condition renders them unfit for the priesthood, which is configured to the person of Christ, the male par excellence.

As for the still-existing Pontifical Academy for Life, this has been turned over to the “pro-gay” Archbishop Vincenzio Paglia, who replaces Spanish bishop Ignacio Carrasco de Paula as President. Paglia will also take over the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, replacing the Vicar General of Rome Cardinal Agostino Vallini as grand chancellor.

Vallini had denounced the distribution of condoms in Italian public schools as “an initiative [that] can only be combated by the Church of Rome and the Christian families seriously affected by the education of their children.”

Paglia has infamously praised the “gay” propaganda TV series “Modern Family” and it was he who “was also responsible for inviting homosexual couples to last year’s World Meeting of Families.” In defense of the invitation Paglia huffed: “We are following the synod's Instrumentum Laboris to the letter. Everyone can come, nobody is excluded.”

Not surprisingly, Paglia also supports Francis’s pet cause of finding a way to admit public adulterers in “second marriages” to Holy Communion, having published between sessions of the laughably misnamed “Synod on the Family” a book promoting the overthrow of the Church’s contrary teaching and discipline in defense of the indissolubility of marriage, affirmed under John Paul II, especially in Familiaris consortio.

Indeed, as Edward Pentin reported, members of the John Paul II Institute, known for their defense of his teaching in this regard, were systematically excluded from any participation in the Synod’s two sessions.

With the creation of the new “super-dicastery” and these two appointments, Francis has effectively placed the entire Vatican apparatus concerning marriage and family under the control of two prelates who are manifestly subversive of both.

With each passing day, Francis confirms all the more the dire warning of Sister Lucia at Fatima that “the final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family… Anyone who works for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be fought and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue.”

But who would have thought that opposition would be aided and abetted by the very one who occupies the Seat of Peter?

And who would have thought that, in our time, the man on Peter's Chair could say and do so many things that are not just unworthy of the Successor of Peter and Vicar of Christ, but even a dereliction of papal duty because it is something akin to a constant gauntlets-down challenge to the Magisterium of the Church as it has been in its first 2013 years?

The blogger at Dallas-Area Catholic gives an objective assessment of Mons. Farrell who has been his bishop, and says that under Benedict XVI, Farrell had taken the conservative line, but flipped his coat as soon as there was a new pope.
https://veneremurcernui.wordpress.com/2016/08/17/dallas-bishop-kevin-farrell-given-huge-promotion-transferred-to-rome/

From an exclusive interview by ZENIT with Mons Farrell today:

---

And I think that’s why the Pope chose to have two synods on the question of family and the question of marriage, and the “joy of love” in that document [Amoris Laetitia, the “Joy of Love”]. That document needs to be promoted not just among the laity in a generalized term, but also specifically in the family, which is where most lay people live out their lives, in the family, or in a marriage. So praise God that we’ll be able to do something to promote this Apostolic Exhortation, and we will do what we can to promote it.

---

And while I'm at it, here is what John Allen wrote about Mons. Paglia's 'marching orders' from the Pope (I provided a link to the full article earlier:

---

Generally speaking, popes don’t issue explicit marching orders when they name someone to a job. Francis, however, did precisely that on Wednesday, publishing a “chirograph,” usually meaning a papal document whose circulation is restricted to the Roman Curia.

The pontiff opened the letter by saying he wants the activity of Vatican offices dedicated to marriage, family and life issues to be “ever more clearly inscribed within the horizon of mercy.”

After citing his two recent Synods of Bishops on the family and his own document, Amoris Laetitia, drawing conclusions from those gatherings, Francis told Paglia that even “in theological study, a pastoral perspective and attention to the wounds of humanity should never be missing.”

Francis then ticked off several issues he wants Paglia to focus on in his new assignments.
- “Care for the dignity of the human person in different ages of existence.”
- “Reciprocal respect between the sexes and among the generations.”
- “Defense of the dignity of every single human being.”
- “Promotion of the quality of human life that integrates material and spiritual values.”
- An “authentic human ecology,” which can help restore “the original balance of creation between the human person and the entire universe.”

---

I'd say HO-HUM! but one must never do that about anything that comes out of the church of Bergoglio - there's his agenda writ, however generic and innocuous it may sound, for all his faithful myrmidons to follow in any way they choose to read it. KYRIE ELEISON!

August 19, 2016 headlines

Canon212.com


PewSitter



Of course, JMB is naming his mini-me's to positions of power in the Curia, even as he will continue to name
them cardinals and bishops. The church of Bergoglio is forging on, full steam ahead, in his resolute and
steady determination to wreckovate the one true Church of Christ and Catholicism, to set up in their place
a church in his image and likeness and Bergoglianism as its faith...
It's hard not to think of Mundabor's Evil Clown

when it seems as if not just "the smoke of Satan
has seeped into the Church" as Paul VI decried
in 1972, but Satan himself is now encamped within.

And here's what happens when JMB's mini-me's try their best to be more Bergoglian than Bergoglio, to the point of elevating even his inanities to the level of Gospel truth that it would be a sin for any Catholic not to be bound by whatever he says ...

Islam as a religion of peace
and the Vatican’s sacred monkeys
By JOHN ZMIRAK
THE STREAM
August 18, 2016

By making hundreds of statements such as “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded,” the famous Yankees baseball player Yogi Berra gave his name to one kind of quotable malapropism that tortures logic and makes us smile. It’s called a “Yogi Berraism.”

There really should be an English word for a demonstrably false statement that, in the service of a short-sighted and self-defeating agenda, casts discredit on important truths and institutions, and goads good people toward despair.

In fact, the appropriate word to describe such a really extraordinary assertion has already presented itself. We should call such a statement a “Swetland.”

That’s in honor of Monsignor Stuart Swetland, president of Donnelly College in Kansas City. This distinguished Catholic educator really earned such an accolade this week, when he scolded Catholic deacon Robert Spencer on the radio and in print for denying that Islam is “a religion of peace.”

Indeed, Spencer has spent more than a decade documenting just the opposite in news reports and books such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and Religion of Peace.

It’s not that Swetland simply disagreed with Spencer, and the millions of other Catholics who find such a claim bizarre. No, Swetland went on to say that every Catholic must believe that Islam is a religion of peace, regardless of contrary evidence, on pain of rejecting the Catholic Church’s divine authority.

That’s right, Swetland claimed that the assertion “Islam is a religion of peace” is part of the body of Christian doctrine that the Catholic Church has passed on from the apostles, which it’s a mortal sin to publicly contradict. Hence you are putting yourself outside the Church by saying otherwise, and you might even go to Hell for sinful disobedience.

This isn’t the first time that a major Church figure has invoked the threat of hellfire for disagreeing with Pope Francis’s curious personal views. The head of the Vatican’s science office, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, in 2015 made the same claim about the pope’s take on global warming, telling a Vatican conference that Francis’s statements on climate change are just as binding on Catholics as the Church’s ban on abortion.

Now for non-Catholics,this can get a little confusing. You might start to think that the Catholic Church is a pagan cult, which treats the pope like a divinely inspired oracle, who just has to open his mouth to spill out prophetic predictions and mystical insights that we all must cringe at and obey.

Or else you could get the idea that the Church is a totalitarian political party like Stalin’s, which claims that its statements are the infallible “voice of history,” and reserves the right to change its party line on a dime, demanding that every Party member do likewise, on pain of expulsion.

If Monsignor Swetland and Archbishop Sorondo were telling the truth about how the Church teaches, you’d be right to have such suspicions. Such a church as they suggest would indeed be both totalitarian and pagan, an outrage against the First Commandment, since it makes of its own authority a graven image for us to worship. “Antichrist” would not be too strong a word. Thanks be to God that such a church does not exist and never has. [But it does - literally in utero - the church of Bergoglio within the womb of the Church, but seeking mightily to establish itself to supplant the one true Church of Christ with which, however, it will continue to disguise itself!]

Swetland was a little more creative than Sorondo, grounding his assertion about Islam not just in Pope Francis’s latest news conference or climate report, but in a document of the Second Vatican Council.

As Catholic commentator William Kilpatrick notes, the non-dogmatic Vatican II statement Nostra Aetate contained a passage or two of tactful, misleading happy talk about the Islamic faith, accentuating the positive. It’s on that thin reed that Swetland tries to build the case that every Catholic must believe Islam is a religion of peace, or else be tarred as a rebel whose soul is in mortal danger.

Again, forgive me, non-Catholic reader, for this baseball reference. But since the current pope and some of his Yogi Berra minions seem determined to use the papal throne as a bully pulpit for bull droppings, it’s important to make this clear.

Just as Protestants do not expect to learn every truth of, say, chemistry or botany from the Bible, Catholics do not treat the Church’s apostolic traditions as a magic 8-Ball to answer every question of politics or meteorology.

There are only a few, narrowly circumscribed areas where the Catholic Church claims divine protection from error.

1. Truths of faith that the apostles received from Jesus, and passed on to their successors. One example is the fact that Jesus is divine, co-equal with his Father.

Early on, not everyone read the Bible as implying this, and the Church held multiple councils to clarify and reaffirm this crucial teaching. Some putative “gospels” suggested otherwise, which let the Church’s bishops know they were inauthentic.

2. Facts of history that are essential to the story of salvation. For instance, that Jesus really existed, and that the Apostles actually knew him personally, followed him, and spoke with him in the flesh after his resurrection.

3. Instances of divine revelation that were granted to the Apostles during their lifetime, such as the Revelation to St. John. All public revelation, essential to eternal salvation and hence binding on Christians, ended with the death of the last apostle.

4. Truths of morality that accord with the natural law that God wrote in the human heart, and which the Church has consistently and universally taught since the age of the Apostles. Hence abortion, adultery, sodomy, and murder are all things we know with absolute certainty to be wrong.

There are various ways in which the Church has historically formulated and asserted truths from each of these four categories: statements by Church councils, official proclamations by popes, or the unanimous testimony of Church fathers and early Christian tradition.

There is no direct condemnation of abortion in the Bible; that didn’t stop Martin Luther from knowing that it was wrong, from the ancient Christian consensus. There has never been an infallible statement by a Church council or pope condemning incest or murder, for instance; the historic Christian consensus on such issues is so powerful that it never seemed to be necessary.

When a pope or a council of the Church makes a statement about some issue that does not fall into category 1, 2, 3, or 4, it might or might not be true. That depends on how well-informed and intelligent were the men who drafted the document. But it rests on men, on human wisdom and knowledge, and Catholics grant it no special credence, since we know it has no unique divine protection from ignorance, rank stupidity, or error.

Now what about Islam? It didn’t exist in His lifetime, so Jesus didn’t tell his Apostles about it. (So scratch out Category 1.)

The events of Islamic history play no part in the events that led to our salvation. (There goes Category 2.)

Muhammad’s life was 500 years in the future when St. John died, so nothing was revealed about it during the age of the apostles. (That nixes Category 3.)

There is not an unbroken consensus of Christian public witness going back to the apostles that Islam is a religion of peace; nor is that assertion an article of morality knowable by reason or revelation. (And we’re done with Category 4.)

Indeed, those accounts we have of Islam when it did explode in the world are almost uniformly negative: reports by bishops and saints of violent persecution, and attacks upon its anti-Christian teachings, including the Muslim belief that all Christians are idolaters — since Jesus was merely human — who will all be damned to hell along with every Jew.

So where does that leave statements by bishops, popes, and councils about the “true nature” of Islam? In the same category as the pope’s favorite salsa band and most popular salad dressing ordered by bishops at Vatican II: outside the Church’s divine authority.

The assertion that Catholics must believe that Islam is a religion of peace, despite the evident facts of history and Islamic theology, is so outrageously false that it sounds like something a mischievous child might have made up — like the Vatican’s “sacred monkeys,” which Cordelia Flyte invented in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited to tease her sister’s Protestant fiancé.

It’s sad that a Catholic college president insists on preaching about such monkeys, and publicly trying to feed them bags of peanuts.

One of the good things we can say about Pope Francis's statements on secular issues is that he opposes gender ideology. But there is a caveat to his opposition, because while he opposes it, he has a whole section in AL in which he would leave sex education to schools and institutions and leaves parents out altogether. And it's certainly not parents who indoctrinate their children about this false idea of self-assigned gender that contradicts the person's biological sex. All that indoctrination is taking place outside the home now - in schools, institutions and the media who willingly serve this spurious and damaging ideology.

US pediatric doctors say
it is child abuse and dangerous
to push gender ideology on kids
and encourage 'sex change'

August 19, 2016

“Facts – not ideology – determine reality,” the American College of Pediatricians (ACP) said in a warning to legislators and educators about the dangers of surgical and medical sex change operations to children.

“Conditioning children into believing that a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse,” the physicians said.

“Rates of suicide are twenty times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery, even in Sweden which is among the most LGBTQ–affirming countries.”

The group, which aims at getting parents involved in their children’s health and education about health, said, “Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one,” and that, “A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking.”

To the contrary, the group maintained that human sexuality is a “binary trait” and said the XY and XX chromosomes that determine female or male sex are “genetic markers of health” not “genetic markers of a disorder.”

“No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex,” the statement said.

The American Academy of Pediatricians, the larger professional society from which the ACP broke away in 2002, has allowed surgical and medical interventions in minors to suppress the hormones that naturally cause girls to grow into women and boys to men.

AThe ACP says this practice puts American teens at higher risk for physical and mental illness. “Puberty is not a disease and puberty-blocking hormones can be dangerous… as many as 98% of gender-confused boys and 88% of gender-confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty,” the ACP pointed out.

It also noted that children who use puberty blockers to “impersonate the opposite sex” will require cross-sex hormones in late adolescence that in turn can cause dangerous health risks such as high blood pressure, blood clots, stroke and cancer.

One of the statement’s authors is psychologist Paul McHugh. Drawing upon his clinical work with LGBTQ persons as chief psychologist at Johns Hopkins hospital and research as distinguished professor at the university’s medical school, McHugh has criticized what he sees as the American Psychological Association’s embracing of gender ideology at the expense of sound medical practice. McHugh authored an amicus brief filed in the U.S. Supreme Court case that overturned man-woman marriage laws in the U.S. last year.

Pro-LGBT groups criticized the ACP statement saying it would incite discrimination; one group called it an “attack on transgender children”.

A public interest law firm labeled the ACP a “hate group” when it filed an amicus brief with the Alabama Supreme Court which favored exceptions to the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling knocking down U.S. laws protecting marriage as between a man and a woman.

Activists similarly criticized Pope Francis’s recent remarks to Polish bishops where he identified gender “ideology” as a form of “ideological colonization” and linked it to government corruption.

He said, “Today children – children! – are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex. Why are they teaching this? Because the books are provided by the persons and institutions that give you money. These forms of ideological colonization are also supported by influential countries. And this is terrible!”
[Well, there he goes again - finding an economic motive for the advances of secular ideology! He is, of course, right to be outraged about what is taught in schools - but why then, in AL, does he leave parents out of the picture in the sex education of children? It couldn't be an editorial oversight, because the omission of parents in this section is very obvious - whereas parents should not only be primarily responsible for the sex education of their children but also to protect them from the crap like gender ideology now being taught in schools by counter-acting all that garbage with the right Catholic instruction at home.]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/08/2016 02:58]

Rorate caeli has shared the official video of the 2016 Ars Celebrandi workshop held in Poland....

I wish I could post an article a day on this topic until the fifth-centenary hooplah about Martin Luther's heresy is over. It won't, of course, make
the slightest difference to minimize, much less halt, the totally absurd concelebration of Luther's schism by the church of Bergoglio masquerading
as the Roman Catholic Church.

But it would be good for Catholic writers and commentators to take advantage of this occasion to go on record every chance they get to reveal just
what Luther said and did to the Church in renouncing the Faith, thereby spearheading countless other anti-Catholics to set up what by now is an
astounding 33,000-and-counting Protestant denominations.

It is wrong to simply take it for granted that "Well, this man who is now the pope, for better or for worse, has decided he will lead off
the Luther 'jubilee' with a female Lutheran bishop in Sweden", because everything about it is wrong. It cannot be justified in any way,
not even by 'ecumenism', because it is a de facto declaration that Luther was right and the Catholic Church was wrong, and that,
by implication, the future of Christianity lies in suppressing the Catholic Church altogether in favor of Lutheranism, or more
correctly, in our day, Bergoglianism - which is this pope's idea of a one-world religion under him - and an open rejection of
Dominus Iesus, the Church's declaration of her uniqueness as the one true Church of Christ issued in 2000 when Christianity
entered its third millennium.

The Lake Garda statement below is one I ought to have posted at the time it was made public in July, but mea maxima culpa, I did not.]

---

Feast of Saints Cyril and Methodius
July 7th, 2016

Our civilization is so sick that even the best efforts to prop up its few tottering remnants manifest the pathetic illness that has step by step brought the entire structure crumbling down.

The disease in question is a willful, prideful, irrational, and ignorant obsession with “freedom”. But this is a malady that gained its initial effective entry into Christendom in union with the concept of the natural world as the realm of total depravity.

It is crucially important that we recognize both the ultimate responsibility of this willful liberty for the destruction of our Christian and Classical culture as well as the role played by the idea that “incarnated” it historically in our midst.

This is so for two reasons. The first is in order that we may attempt seriously to rid ourselves of their monstrous influence over our own minds, souls, and bodies.

The second is because a massive attempt to masquerade the truth regarding their real character and practical alliance is being mounted in conjunction with the five hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s devastating appearance on the public scene in 1517 — and this for the sake of maintaining their nefarious impact upon believers and delivering the Faith its coup de grace as a meaningful social force.

1517 is not the source of our woe — any more, for that matter, than was 1962 with the opening of Second Vatican Council. In both cases spiritual, intellectual, political, and social diseases that had already long hovered about the Camp of the Saints had by those dates finally coalesced, and were ready for injection into the lymphatic system of Catholic Christendom as one mega-malady.

All of these disorders ultimately reflected a revulsion over the need for the individual and his entire environment to be corrected, perfected, and transformed under the Kingship of Christ: with the aid of faith, grace, and reason on the one hand, and social authority, both supernatural and natural, on the other.

Anyone in 1516 looking for a simple explanation for why he should reject such aids thus had available to him an embarrassment of errors from a myriad of sources indicating that he could do so; and that relying upon his own unguided feelings and will was the pathway to pleasing God.

Nevertheless, the conflicted mind of the Late Middle Ages clearly needed a figure with the talent and rhetorical venom of a Luther effectively to inject this mega-malady into Christendom.

Christian man was too aware of the reality of sin to leap directly into an adulation of individual willfulness. Luther’s concept of the total depravity of the individual and the world in which he lived gave Everyman the apparently pious excuse for succumbing to the obsession with liberty that was required.

After all, a recognition of man’s total depravity seemed to foster
- each believer’s personal need to rely solely on God’s grace to save him;
- of his need to affirm freedom from “enslavement” to the “despotism” of a Law built upon both Faith and Reason and thus,
- escape from a “hopeless” and ultimately spiritually “arrogant” attempt to bend his individual, lifelong workaday thoughts and actions into conformity with the commands of Christ.

It proved to be quite easy over the course of a couple of generations for this negative definition of liberty — as “freedom” from natural and supernatural Law — to be transformed, in the Enlightenment, into the means for ' positive new and redemptive order of things'.

In short, it did not take long for the freedom of depraved man in depraved nature from the restraints of a supposedly impossible Law — in the name of an openness to unmerited grace — to be seen as the providential tool for molding unbridled human thoughts and actions into the building blocks of a new Age of Gold.

In other words, the more that a freedom from restraints actually ensured that the sinful passions of mankind were all released in order to allow flawed individuals to became truly totally depraved, the more that same depravity was now looked upon as something intrinsically good, and even pleasing in the eyes of God.

[Perhaps, JMB was channelling his inner Luther when he said much the same thing in simpler words addressing WYD pilgrims off the cuff last month at the Shrine of Divine Mercy in Poland last month:

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Even if we think that we are the worst for our sins and our shortcomings, He prefers us as we are; in this way His mercy spreads.

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How perverse is that - an outright invitation to go ahead and be the worst you can be, it's all right because God wants that: the more sinful persons there are, and the more sinful they are, the more God can spread his mercy!]

Unfortunately, this logical but sick development of “freedom” has not assured the “dignity of man”. Rather, it has led to nothing other than the triumph of the strongest irrational and materialist wills.

Sad to say, it seems absolutely certain that many of our ecclesiastical leaders are turning 2016-2017 into a year-long paean to the errors of Martin Luther and what the great English Church Historian, Philip Hughes, tells us lay behind them for centuries: “all those anti-intellectualist, anti-institutional forces”; “all the crude, backwoods, obscurantist theories bred of the degrading pride that comes with chosen ignorance; the pride of men ignorant because unable to be wise except through the wisdom of others”. (A History of the Church, Sheed & Ward, 1949, III, 529).

In face of this chorus of undeserved praise [for Luther, coming from the present Catholic hierarchy, of whom the pope has been the most enthusiastic - as if the Church had been wrong all along to excommunicate Luther as an out-and-out heretic, to convoke the Council of Trent and carry out the Counter-Reformation, and to live the past 500 years upholding Catholicism as the one true faith and the Church as the one true Church of Christ], it is our duty as loyal Catholics is to do three things:

First of all, to steel ourselves against the contradictory and tragically self-destructive lies that this adulation of Luther and Company’s irrational and willful principles — what Hughes calls their “five-hundred-year fling” (Ibid.) — actually fosters in practice.

Secondly, to hammer home to others the anti-Catholic and unnatural misery, both spiritual and purely human, that such errors have inevitably caused.

And, finally, to beseech our Holy Father —the successor to St. Peter as well as to the great popes of a vibrant and seriously Catholic Counter-Reformation that fought against the horrors emerging from 1517 — to abandon this misguided attempt to masquerade what Luther and his “freedom” wrought.

For what they truly wrought was ultimately nothing other than what Richard Gawthrop identifies as that “Promethean lust for material power that serves as the deepest common drive behind all modern Western cultures”. (Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth Century Prussia, Cambridge, 1993, p. 284).

Saints Cyril and Methodius, pray for us!

John C. Rao, D.Phil. (Oxon)
Director, The Roman Forum

Rev. Richard A. Munkelt, Ph.D.
Board Member, The Roman Forum

Prof. Dr. Thomas Heinrich Stark
Faculty Member, The Roman Forum

Christopher A. Ferrara, Esq.
President, American Catholic Lawyers Association

Michael J. Matt
Editor, The Remnant

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I like that line about Promethean lust, and I ask myself whether such Promethean lust, not for material power but for a perceived universal power, or authority if you will, vested in one man alone, himself, is what drives JMB.

After all, this is someone who, however genuinely humble he may have been in his earlier life, suddenly woke up to all the possibilities open before him once he was elected pope, and has since seemed to act under the illusion that he alone can set everything right in the world. Even if God himself in the person of Jesus never presumed to do so - if only because everything wrong in the world is man's punishment for the Fall.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/08/2016 06:04]

One thing necessarily leads to another like a chain reaction in any serious criticism of this pope. The greater issue encompassing the problem of this pope's decision to spearhead the Protestant world's celebration of the fifth anniversary of the so-called Reformation is Jorge Mario Bergoglio's apparent conviction not only that all Christian 'confessions' are equal and equivalent means to eternal salvation, but that all other non-Christian faiths are similarly equal and equivalent to Catholicism.

As we all know, he has expressed this conviction in so many different ways since he became pope, and God knows how often and in how many different ways before he became pope. Early enough in this pontificate, I said that very clearly, JMB does not subscribe to DOMINUS IESUS, the landmark proclamation-reiteration in the Great Christian Jubilee Year 2000 of the unicity of the one true Church of Christ, as I had occasion to remark again in introducing the 2016 Lake Garda Statement in the post above.

At the next news conference he holds, someone should ask him pointblank: "What do you think of DOMINUS IESUS?", as some journalist ought to have done so by now. Let him try to wiggle out of that impasse by claiming "I am a loyal son of the Church", when no, he is not. Every time - and it is much too often - he proclaims by word and deed that he thinks all faiths and all Christian confessions are equal and equivalent means of salvation, he betrays the Church.

I think that even the most assiduous of Catholic commentators have failed to protest enough, and on every possible occasion, his singularly outrageous denial of the most basic elements of the Christian faith and of Catholicism, only because it has been unthinkable till now that a pope should explicitly deny the unicity of the Roman Catholic Church as the one true Church of Christ.

But if the nominal head of the Roman Catholic Church does not abide by DOMINUS IESUS, he has no business being pope, even if he had been legitimately elected without the least shadow of technical doubt whatsoever. Is Bergoglio's rejection of DOMINUS IESUS not more serious even than all the near-heresies he casuistically proclaims in AL which have been the object of widespread protests from the most articulate thinkers in the Catholic world today???

Clearly, if he espouses such a generic idea of 'God' and of 'faith', then all his other heterodoxies - that sin is not always sin, that people living in a chronic state of sin could be in a 'state of grace', that there is no hell, etc, etc - are all of a piece with his fundamentally anti-Catholic, pro-'one world religion' mindset.


Is Allah now the 'God' of Avvenire
and 'Comunione e Liberazione'?
Translated from

August 20, 2016

Yesterday, Avvenire published an editorial [which expresses the publication's official line on whatever the editorial topic is] and the heart of it was an enormous whopper that is decisively outside of the Catholic faith.

Unfortunately, the editorial is signed by one of my friends from Comunione e Liberazione (CL), but one must first be a friend of the truth, and thus, it is with sorrow that I must point this out: If the newspaper of the Italian bishops' conference proposes what its editorial says, then we are a step away from the abyss (and also from total ridicule).

Here is the statement by which Avvenire constructs its entire theorem of Bergoglianism:

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Indeed, for any believer - Christian or Muslim or Jew - God is one, great, omnipotent, and merciful. The difference is simply in how each one sees God.

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As we can see, the [negative]'Bergoglio effect' is spreading. [What does it say if that negative effect now permeates the organ of the Italian bishops' conference? Do the individual Italian bishops who may think and act otherwise have any say as to what their newspaper passes on as an official line? Should they not speak out and protest each such presumptuousness made in their behalf?]

Reading this editorial in the CEI newspaper, one would think that the faith of Christians and Muslims [and Jews] is the same faith and that their conception of God is identical. [It simply is not so, of course. 1) Both Jews and Muslims reject the very thought that Jesus is God - to them he was, respectively, just another rabbi or just another minor prophet. And 2) Both Jews and Muslims think that Catholic belief in the Trinity actually makes Catholics polytheistic, not monotheistic.]

But has Avvenire's editor-in-chief, Marco Tarquinio, who was once a 'Ratzingerian', never heard of the Most Holy Trinity which is at the heart of the Christian faith and which Muslims consider to be the worst blasphemy against the one God?

The dome of the Mosque of the Rock, built by the Muslims over what is holy ground to the Jews, and which replaced the old Temple of Jerusalem, features an inscription that says, "God does not have a son".

Indeed, Islam was born out of the rejection of the divinity of Jesus Christ and of the Trinity of God. This rejection was the most radical and violent attack at the very heart of the Christian faith.

[Which makes it all the more incredible that the current pope should go out of his way to defend Islam as a religion when it rejects and attacks the very essentials of the Christian faith. It's as if JMB and all his mini-me's did not know the most elementary facts about Islam, at all. Not all the well-intentioned kumbaya political correctness of Nostra aetate changes by an iota Jewish and Muslim dismissal of Jesus as a mere human.

And I certainly hope that, as a result, Catholic schools have not been teaching what this pope now says on every occasion that he can - all religions that believe in 'god' in any way, shape, or form, are as good as each other. Because if that's what he thinks, he should step down as pope and have himself crowned at the United Nations as Jorge Magnus, Lord of the World, which is really what he aspires to be.]

St John wrote:

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Who is the liar? Whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ. Whoever denies the Father and the Son, this is the antichrist. No one who denies the Son has the Father, but whoever confesses the Son has the Father as well. (1Jn 2, 22-23)

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That seems very clear. It is obvious that the abysmal difference in the conception of self (the person) between Islam and Christianity derives precisely from the abysmal difference in their conception of God.

But Avvenire ignores this. I know for sure that Tarquinio has heard of the Most Holy Trinity and of Christian belief in the Trinity.
However, the times - in the Church as well as within CL - are such that the truths of the faith have now come to be happily set aside in order to give voice to the most absurd whoppers.

It seems to me, watching what is taking place in the Church (and the sad spectacle of CL's 2016 Meeting in Rimini [once a signal annual milestone for the orthodox Catholic world, when CL was still close to what founder Luigi Giussani wanted the movement to be, not the bend-with-the-wind organization it has appeared to become], that we can say many 'ciellini' (from the Italian 'ci' and 'el' for the letters C and L) now seem 'ashamed of Christ', as don Giussani lamented in his last interview (he died in 2005). Now this tendency has become dominant in CL as well as in the Church.

[Things must be so bad in CL today if Socci, a longtime 'ciellini', can say that, and things must be so much worse in the Italian Church than I thought if the official organ of the Italian bishops can dare to articulate its anti-Catholic idea that the God proclaimed by Christians, Jews and Muslims is one and the same.

But why should we be surprised when the heresy does not seem to be considered heresy by most Catholics, and certainly not by the current pope who leads in proclaiming it - so much so that those who follow religious news and commentary seem to be taking it for granted???

That happens to be the dynamic of communications in this Internet-woven global village: repeat anything often enough which is not pro-actively contested, and it soon becomes established as 'fact', and eventually, as 'uncontested truth']

Merely by way of a reminder, I reproduce here some passages from DOMINUS IESUS which tells everyone what the Catholic faith is:

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4. The Church's constant missionary proclamation is endangered today by relativistic theories which seek to justify religious pluralism, not only de facto but also de iure (or in principle).

As a consequence, it is held that certain truths have been superseded; for example,
- the definitive and complete character of the revelation of Jesus Christ,
- the nature of Christian faith as compared with that of belief in other religions,
- the inspired nature of the books of Sacred Scripture,
- the personal unity between the Eternal Word and Jesus of Nazareth, - the unity of the economy of the Incarnate Word and the Holy Spirit,
- the unicity and salvific universality of the mystery of Jesus Christ,
- the universal salvific mediation of the Church,
- the inseparability — while recognizing the distinction — of the kingdom of God, the kingdom of Christ, and the Church, and
- the subsistence of the one Church of Christ in the Catholic Church.

5. As a remedy for this relativistic mentality, which is becoming ever more common, it is necessary above all to reassert the definitive and complete character of the revelation of Jesus Christ.

In fact, it must be firmly believed that, in the mystery of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God, who is “the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6), the full revelation of divine truth is given: - “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him” (Mt 11:27);
- “No one has ever seen God; God the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, has revealed him” (Jn 1:18);
- “For in Christ the whole fullness of divinity dwells in bodily form” (Col 2:9-10).

Faithful to God's word, the Second Vatican Council teaches: “By this revelation then, the deepest truth about God and the salvation of man shines forth in Christ, who is at the same time the mediator and the fullness of all revelation”.

Furthermore, “Jesus Christ, therefore, the Word made flesh, sent ‘as a man to men', ‘speaks the words of God' (Jn 3:34), and completes the work of salvation which his Father gave him to do (cf. Jn 5:36; 17:4).

To see Jesus is to see his Father (cf. Jn 14:9). For this reason, Jesus perfected revelation by fulfilling it through his whole work of making himself present and manifesting himself: through his words and deeds, his signs and wonders, but especially through his death and glorious resurrection from the dead an,d finally with the sending of the Spirit of truth, he completed and perfected revelation and confirmed it with divine testimony.

The Christian dispensation, therefore, as the new and definitive covenant, will never pass away, and we now await no further new public revelation before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ (cf. 1 Tim 6:14 and Tit 2:13).

Thus, the Encyclical Redemptoris missio calls the Church once again to the task of announcing the Gospel as the fullness of truth: “In this definitive Word of his revelation, God has made himself known in the fullest possible way. He has revealed to mankind who he is. This definitive self-revelation of God is the fundamental reason why the Church is missionary by her very nature. She cannot do other than proclaim the Gospel, that is, the fullness of the truth which God has enabled us to know about himself”.

Only the revelation of Jesus Christ, therefore, “introduces into our history a universal and ultimate truth which stirs the human mind to ceaseless effort.

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So, even Socci does not pursue his citation of DOMINUS IESUS to underscore and belabor the fact that this pope, in effect, does not subscribe to the most important point of the declaration - even if he continues to cite Jesus and his Gospel in his 'religious' statements (because it would be sheer apostasy if he did not!).

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/08/2016 19:53]

My immediate reaction upon reading the title of this editorial was - "We should have a pope who will reverse all the negative Bergoglio effects
there are", but that's something that's completely up to God, so meanwhile, let us cope with this pope in the most Catholic way we can
and not stop praying that he may become a genuine Catholic worthy and able to lead the Church....

The first step needed
to get the Church
out of the current crisis
EDITORIAL

August 19, 2016

In his book Magisterial Authority, Fr. Chad Ripperger, PhD, says “the Church will not climb out of this tumultuous period” without reversing the “practice since the Second Vatican Council onward not to police the doctrinal integrity” among bishops, priests and theologians. The crucial observation comes at the end of nearly fifty years of destructive leniency, which has in the Francis pontificate taken on new dimensions.

While under the pontificates of Pope St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI dissident bishops were indeed appointed, there was still the understanding that they had to keep their heads down. Should their doctrinal errors become too manifest they knew they would have to be corrected. Faithful and doctrinally orthodox priests could appeal to Rome for help from pressure to act against their consciences and expect at least some assistance. The situation is now very different.

What was formerly considered open dissent seems now to be seen as avant garde and those bishops who engage in it are not warned by the Vatican, but rather promoted and held up as examples to follow. And what has emerged is a new and alarming trend in the Church which threatens orthodox belief and practice in ways that we have seldom experienced in our 2,000-year history.

There are plans currently underway for national and diocesan synods on marriage and family based on the controversial Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris Laetitia. While these could, given the ambiguity in the papal exhortation, go either way, seeing who has taken up this proposal gives evidence of a very concerning development.

San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy and Brisbane Archbishop Mark Coleridge have both embarked on the synod pathway with McElroy planning his diocesan synod for October and Coleridge planning a national synod for all Australia in 2020.

Coleridge said he expects the national synod to address homosexual “marriage” and “ordained ministry” (a likely reference to female clergy), and any other issues of interest. He adds the caveat that they should not “infringe on the Church’s faith, teachings or morals,” but what exactly Coleridge means by that is unclear as he eschews the traditional understanding of Catholic teachings on sexual matters.

During the Synod on the Family in 2015 Coleridge argued against using the terms “intrinsically disordered” or “evil” to describe homosexual acts. Moreover he argued that the traditional Catholic understanding of loving the sinner while hating the sin “no longer communicates” “in the real world” where sexuality is “part of [your] entire being.”

Changing the language of the Church is also on the agenda for the San Diego Synod.

“During the diocesan synod in October, existing rules and practices which are alienating must be examined,” said McElroy in a statement. In response to the June killings in the Orlando gay club, McElroy said that the Orlando tragedy “is a call for us as Catholics to combat ever more vigorously the anti-gay prejudice which exists in our Catholic community and in our country.”

Labelling homosexual acts as “intrinsically disordered,” as the Catechism does, is “very destructive language that I think we should not use pastorally,” McElroy said in an interview with America magazine.

Amendments to the Catechism on the issue is a realistic possibility. Already Pope Francis has set up a commission to study revising the Catechism on the death penalty.

[P.S. How could I have glossed over such an enormous outrage the first time around! Does JMB now intend to replace, albeit piecemeal, all sections of the Catechism whose content and language he disagrees with?

What genuinely Catholic authorities will he cite to rebut the authorities (Scripture, Fathers of the Church, Doctors of the Church, saints, various ecumenical councils and previous popes) cited in support of what the Catholic Catechism now teaches? Himself? His hireling theologians? More spurious citations of Aquinas? From a pope and his followers who are increasingly Catholic in name only? Any revision of the current Catechism of the Catholic Church in this pontificate should be entitled 'Catechism of the church of Bergoglio', and Bergoglio and his myrmidons, who are Bergoglians to the marrow, should stop calling themselves Catholic.]

Moreover, expectations that conservative bishops would never allow such a drastic change in the language of the Church to describe sexual behaviours that lead to physical and spiritual death should be tempered with the unfortunate realities of the past few years.

In an interview with Crux, Archbishop Charles Chaput voiced support for doing away with the Church’s language of “intrinsically disordered.” [Oops! Another point contributing to the continuing demolition of my personal view five years ago that of all the contemporary US bishops, Chaput was the one I'd pray to become the first pope from the USA!]

“I think it’s probably good for the Church to put that on the shelf for a while, until we get over the negativity related to it,” Chaput told Crux. “That language automatically sets people off and probably isn’t useful anymore.”

Chaput’s concession is troubling given that the Catechism language pales in comparison to the Scriptural condemnations of homosexual acts as gravely depraved and abominable.

The McElroy synod is likely to go far beyond changing the language of the Church. He has repeatedly stressed changing the Church’s priorities and has had the backing of Pope Francis’s ‘favored son,’ Chicago Archbishop Blase Cupich.

McElroy created a furor at the U.S. Bishops Conference meeting last November over a document instructing Catholics on how to vote. McElroy made a pointed argument that the document was out of step with Pope Francis’ priorities -- specifically, by putting too much emphasis on abortion and euthanasia, and not enough on poverty and the environment.

Cupich later praised McElroy’s intervention as a “real high moment” for the conference and supported the move to put degradation of the environment and global poverty on par with abortion and euthanasia.

To understand the vast departure from the Catholic Church as it has been known throughout the centuries from what is being proposed, one need only to look to the statements of Cardinal Raymond Burke and Pope Benedict XVI on those subjects.

Cardinal Raymond Burke has said, “It is heresy to teach that homosexual relations...are not disordered, to teach that they have positive elements.”

Pope Benedict just prior to his election to the pontificate wrote: “Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. ... There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.”

In his encyclical The Gospel of Life, St. Pope John Paul II specifically addressed bishops when he said, “In the proclamation of this Gospel, we must not fear hostility or unpopularity, and we must refuse any compromise or ambiguity which might conform us to the world's way of thinking (cf. Rom 12:2).”

Fr. Ripperger’s call to “police the doctrinal integrity” of bishops, priests and theologians is therefore indeed a crucially necessary way out of the crisis of the Church today. It is a work of mercy and charity needed now more than ever before.

We must pray that Pope Francis will begin to take up this essential duty, or failing that, that his eventual successor will.

August 22, 2016 headlines

Canon212.com


PewSitter

August 23, 2016 headlines

PewSitter

Of course, the cardinal cannot be part of any schism. Orthodox Catholics constitute the authentic Church.
It is the heterodox, the heretics, and the apostates who should leave the Church.



Canon212.com

C212's Frank Walker is really stretching it by posing the ridiculous question he does, but if you had not paid attention to Soros before, the following article makes a good introduction !



George Soros's campaign
for global chaos
The first thing that we see is the megalomaniacal nature of Soros’s 'philanthropic' projects.
No corner of the globe is unaffected by his efforts, no policy area is left untouched.
by Caroline Glick

August 22, 2016

Major media outlets in the US have ignored the leak of thousands of emails from billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundation by the activist hacker group DCLeaks.

The OSF is the vehicle through which Soros has funneled billions of dollars over the past two decades to non-profit organizations in the US and throughout the world.

According to the documents, Soros has given more than $30 million to groups working for Hillary Clinton’s election in November, making him her largest single donor. So it is likely the case that the media’s support for Clinton has played some role in the mainstream media’s bid to bury the story.

It is also likely however, that at least some news editors failed to understand why the leaked documents were worth covering. Most of the information was already public knowledge.

Soros’s massive funding of far-left groups in the US and throughout the world has been documented for more than a decade. But failing to see the significance of the wider story because many of the details were already known is a case of missing the forest for the trees. The DCLeaks document dump is a major story because it exposes the forest of Soros’s funding networks.

The first thing that we see is the megalomaniacal nature of Soros’s philanthropic project. No corner of the globe is unaffected by his efforts. No policy area is left untouched.

On the surface, the vast number of groups and people he supports seem unrelated. After all, what does climate change have to do with illegal African immigration to Israel? What does 'Occupy Wall Street' have to do with Greek immigration policies?

But the fact is that Soros-backed projects share basic common attributes. They all work to weaken the ability of national and local authorities in Western democracies to uphold the laws and values of their nations and communities.

They all work to hinder free markets, whether those markets are financial, ideological, political or scientific. They do so in the name of democracy, human rights, economic, racial and sexual justice and other lofty terms.

In other words, their goal is to subvert Western democracies and make it impossible for governments to maintain order or for societies to retain their unique identities and values.

Black Lives Matter, which has received $650,000 from Soros-controlled groups over the past year, is a classic example of these efforts. Until recently, the police were universally admired in the US as the domestic equivalent of the military. BLM emerged as a social force bent on politicizing support for police.

Its central contention is that in the US, police are not a force for good, enabling society to function by maintaining law and order. Rather, police are a tool of white repression of blacks.

Law enforcement in predominantly African American communities is under assault as inherently racist.

BLM agitation, which has been accused of inspiring the murders of police in several US cities, has brought about two responses from rank and file police. First, they have been demoralized, as they find themselves criminalized for trying to keep their cities safe from criminals.

Second, their willingness to use force in situations that demand the use of force has diminished. Fear of criminal charges on the one hand, and public condemnation as “racists” on the other causes police to prefer inaction even when situations require that they act.

The demoralization and intimidation of police is very likely to cause a steep increase in violent crimes.

Then there are Soros’s actions on behalf of illegal immigration. From the US to Europe to Israel, Soros has implemented a worldwide push to use immigration to undermine the national identity and demographic composition of Western democracies.

The leaked emails show that his groups have interfered in European elections to get politicians elected who support open border policies for immigrants from the Arab world and to financially and otherwise support journalists who report sympathetically on immigrants.

Soros’s groups are on the ground enabling illegal immigrants to enter the US and Europe. They have sought to influence US Supreme Court rulings on illegal immigration from Mexico. They have worked with Muslim and other groups to demonize Americans and Europeans who oppose open borders.

In Israel as well, Soros opposes government efforts to end the flow of illegal immigration from Africa through the border with Egypt.

The notion at the heart of the push for the legalization of unfettered immigration is that states should not be able to protect their national identities.

If it is racist for Greeks to protect their national identity by seeking to block the entrance of millions of Syrians to their territory, then it is racist for Greece – or France, Germany, Hungary, Sweden the US or Poland – to exist.

Parallel to these efforts are others geared toward rejecting the right of Western democracies to uphold long-held social norms. Soros-supported groups, for instance, stand behind the push not only for gay marriage but for unisex public bathrooms.

They support not only the right of women to serve in combat units, but efforts to force soldiers to live in unisex barracks. In other words, they support efforts aimed at denying citizens of Western democracies the right to maintain any distance between themselves and Soros’s rejection of their most intimate values – their sexual privacy and identity.

As far as Israel is concerned, Soros-backed groups work to delegitimize every aspect of Israeli society as racist and illegitimate. The Palestinians are a focal point of his attacks. He uses them to claim that Israel is a racist state.

Soros funds moderate leftist groups, radical leftist groups, Israeli Arab groups and Palestinian groups. In various, complementary ways, these groups tell their target audiences that Israel has no right to defend itself or enforce its laws toward its non-Jewish citizens.

In the US, Soros backed groups from BLM to J Street work to make it socially and politically acceptable to oppose Israel.

The thrust of Soros’s efforts from Ferguson to Berlin to Jerusalem is to induce mayhem and chaos as local authorities, paralyzed by his supported groups, are unable to secure their societies or even argue coherently that they deserve security.

In many ways, Donald Trump’s campaign is a direct response not to Clinton, but to Soros himself.

By calling for the erection of a border wall, supporting Britain’s exit from the EU, supporting Israel, supporting a temporary ban on Muslim immigration and supporting the police against BLM, Trump acts as a direct foil to Soros’s multi-billion dollar efforts.

The DCLeaks exposed the immensity of the Soros-funded Left’s campaign against the foundations of liberal democracies. The “direct democracy” movements that Soros support are nothing less than calls for mob rule.

The peoples of the West need to recognize the common foundations of all Soros’s actions. They need to realize as well that the only response to these premeditated campaigns of subversion is for the people of the West to stand up for their national rights and their individual right to security.

They must stand with the national institutions that guarantee that security, in accordance with the rule of the law, and uphold and defend their national values and traditions.


August 24, 2016 headlines

No major developments overnight, it would seem, but C212 was more uptodate this morning about the Italian earthquake...

PewSitter


Canon212.com


More details on just how George Soros has sought to influence events and negative developments in the Church...

Leaked e-mails show George Soros
paid $650K to influence bishops
during Pope’s US visit
[Not that he had to influence them much, if at all,
to act the way they did as Bergoglian surrogates]
by John Henry Westen


August 23, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – Leaked emails through WikiLeaks reveal that billionaire globalist George Soros - one of Hilary Clinton's top donors - paid $650,000 to influence Pope Francis’s September 2015 visit to the USA with a view to "shift[ing] national paradigms and priorities in the run-up to the 2016 presidential campaign."

The funds were allocated in April 2015 and the report on their effectiveness suggests that successful achievements included, “Buy-in of individual bishops to more publicly voice support of economic and racial justice messages in order to begin to create a critical mass of bishops who are aligned with the Pope.”

The monies were granted to two US entities that have been engaged in a long-term project, according to the report, of shifting “the priorities of the US Catholic church.”

Grantees were PICO, a faith-based community organizing group, and Faith in Public Life (FPL), a progressive group working in media to promote left-leaning ‘social justice’ causes.

Soros has funded left-wing causes the world over and was just found to have been funding an effort to eliminate pro-life laws around the globe.

Board Minutes from the May 2015 meeting of Soros’s Open Society Foundation in New York reveal that in the planning stages of the papal visit initiative, the group planned to work through one of the Pope’s key advisors, Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, naming him specifically in the report.

In order to seize on the opportunity provided by the Pope’s visit to the US, says the report, “we will support PICO’s organizing activities to engage the Pope on economic and racial justice issues, including using the influence of Cardinal Rodriguez, the Pope’s senior advisor, and sending a delegation to visit the Vatican in the spring or summer to allow him to hear directly from low-income Catholics in America.”

In 2013 Cardinal Rodriguez endorsed PICO's work in a video during a visit from PICO representatives to the cardinal's diocese. "I want to endorse all the efforts they are doing to promote communities of faith," he said, "... Please, keep helping PICO."

The post operative report on the funding to influence the papal visit comes in the 2016 report entitled, Review Of 2015 U.S. Opportunities Fund. The Soros group was pleased with the result of their campaign and saw statements by various bishops against presidental candidates who are using "fearmongering" - likely a reference to the GOP lineup, and perhaps Trump specifically - as one outcome of their efforts.

“The impact of this work and the relationships it has fostered can be seen in the broad range of religious leaders hitting pointedly back at presidential candidates for their use of fearmongering,” the report said.

Additionally, the summary report says their funding was helpful to counter “anti-gay rhetoric” in the media. The “efficacy of the media campaign can be seen in the team’s ability to react to and counter the anti-gay rhetoric following the Kim Davis story (the Kentucky county clerk who was jailed for defying a federal court order to issue marriage licenses to gay couples whom the Pope visited),” the report states.

The grant specifically targeted the ‘pro-family’ agenda, redirecting it from defending marriage to being concerned with income equality. “FPL’s media, framing, and public opinion activities, including conducting a poll to demonstrate that Catholic voters are responsive to the Pope’s focus on income inequality, and earning media coverage that drives the message that being ‘pro-family’ requires addressing growing inequality,” says the May report.

Attorney Elizabeth Yore, who served on the Heartland Institute Delegation that traveled to the Vatican in April 2015 to urge Pope Francis to re-examine his reliance on UN population control proponents who promote climate change, spoke to LifeSiteNews about the Soros initiative.

“Catholics serve as a huge and influential voting block in the U.S. election,” she said. Soros, she said, is “using the head of the Catholic Church to influence this key voting block,” with the “bully pulpit of the papacy” to ensure Hilary Clinton’s election.

Yore pointed out “this is not the first time that the unholy alliance of Soros and the Vatican successfully collaborated on a political project.” In 2015, she recalled, “the Soros operatives, embedded in the Vatican, directed Pope Francis’s Environmental Agenda, by delivering for Soros and the UN, an Apostolic Exhortation on Climate Change, and a prized papal endorsement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Pope’s apostolic blessing on the Paris Climate Treaty.”

In terms of the Soros goal of shifting the priorities of the Catholic Church away from moral absolutes, two US bishops stand out as champions of the move. San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy has repeatedly stressed changing the Church’s priorities and has had the backing of Pope Francis’ ‘favored son,’ Chicago Archbishop Blase Cupich. McElroy created a furor at the U.S. Bishops Conference meeting last November over his attempt to change a document instructing Catholics on how to vote.

McElroy made a pointed argument that the document was out of step with Pope Francis’s priorities -- specifically, by putting too much emphasis on abortion and euthanasia, and not enough on poverty and the environment.

Cupich later praised McElroy’s intervention as a “real high moment” for the conference and supported the move to put degradation of the environment and global poverty on par with abortion and euthanasia.

Concluding their report reflecting on the success of the grant to influence the papal visit, the Soros group was very pleased with the results. Looking to the future, they are excited that the long-term goal of shifting the priorities of the Catholic Bishops in the United States “is now underway.”

One might almost consider this interview some sort of a preview for Benedict XVI's booklength interview with Peter Seewald,
set to be published in early September...

How WYD Rio led Benedict XVI
to set a date for his renunciation
by ELIO GUERRIERO
Translated from

August 24, 2016

In Rome, the sky is full of threatening clouds but when I arrive at Mater Ecclesiae, the residence of the Emeritus Pope, an unexpected burst of sunlight exalted below the harmony of the dome on St. Peter's Basilica and the Vatican Gardens.

"My paradise," Benedict XVI had said about his residence in a previous visit.

I was brought to the salon which is also his private library and the title of a book by Jean LeClerq came to mind spontaneously, Love of words and the desire for God, which Benedict XVI had cited in his famous address at the College des Bernardins in Paris in September 2008.

The Pope arrived after a few minutes and greeted me with the smile and courtesy he always has, and said, "I am at #15". I did not understand at first, then he said, "I have read 15 chapters".

I was frankly surprised. Some months earlier, I had sent him a good part of my manuscript [for a new book], but I never expected him to read it in full. I handed him the other chapters and said I was almost through. He said he was happy with what he had read so far, so I asked: "Would it be all right if I asked you a few questions as in an interview?"

He answered as always, kind and practical: "Ask me your questions, and later, send me what it looks like, and we shall see." Obviously, I have done as he asked. He then wrote me to say he agreed to its publication. I could only thank him again for his trust.

Holiness, when you visited Germany in 2011, you said, "We cannot renounce God" and that "There is a future where God is". Do you regret having given up the papacy during the Year of Faith? [Frankly, I do not see the connection between the citations and Benedict's renunciation.]
Of course, I would have wished to have seen the Year of Faith to its conclusion and to write the encyclical on faith that would have completed what I had started with Deus caritas est.

But as Dante wrote, the love that moves the sun and other stars urges us and leads us to the presence of God who gives us hope and the future, In a critical situation, the best approach is to put oneself before God in order to find the faith to continue one's way in life. On his part, the Lord is happy to listen to our desire, to give us the light which guides us in our pilgrimage through life. This has been the experience of the saints, of San Juan de la Cruz and Santa Teresa de Jesus. In 2013, there were many commitments that I felt I could no longer fulfill.

What commitments were these?
In particular, the dates for World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro had already been set for the summer. About this, I already had two firm convictions.

After the trip to Mexico and Cuba (in March 2012), I did not think I would be able to carry out such a demanding commitment. Yet John Paul II had instituted WYD in a way that the physical presence of the pope was indispensable.

It was unthinkable to merely have a TV link or other connections made possible by technology. This commitment was one of the circumstances that made me decide it was my duty to resign. I was confident that even without me, the Year of Faith would conclude well. Because faith is a grace, a gift from God to believers.

Therefore, I firmly believed that my successor, as it did turn out, would have brought the initiative I had taken to the conclusion desired by the Lord.

When you visited the Basilica of Collemaggio in L'Aquila [after the earthquake in March 2008], you left your inaugural pallium on the urn of St. Celestine V. Can you tell me when you decided you had to renounce the exercise of the Petrine ministry for the good of the Church?
For me, the trip to Mexico and Cuba was very beautiful and moving in many ways. In Mexico, I was very much struck to encounter the profound faith of so many young people, in experiencing what seemed to me a glorious passion for God. But I was also struck by the great problems of Mexican society, and to the commitment of the Church in Mexico to find, starting from the faith, a response to the challenges of poverty and violence.

In Cuba, I was impressed by the way Raul Castro wished to lead his nation along a new road without breaking continuity with the immediate past. [With all due respect, I cannot understand why he would say anything of the sort! 'Continuity with the immediate past' in the context of Cuba is simply unthinkable!] But there, too, I was very impressed with the way my brother bishops sought to have the right orientation starting from the faith along this difficult process.

But during that trip, I truly experienced forcefully the limits of my physical resistance. Above all, I realized that I was no longer in a position to make long transcontinental flights because of the time change. Of course, I discussed all this with my doctor, Patrizio Polisca. And it became clear that I would not be able to fly to Rio de Janeiro for WYD in the summer of 2013 - during which the shift in time zone would be extreme. From then on, it was a question of deciding in a relatively short time on the date of my retirement.

After your retirement, many commentators were surprised - almost disappointed in fact - that you chose to remain within the 'fold' of St. Peter and live in Mater Ecclesiae. How did you come to this decision?
I had often visited the Mater Ecclesiae convent since its beginning [under John Paul II]. I often went to take part in Vespers or to celebrate Mass for the nuns who have occupied it successively [a different order of contemplative nuns was chosen every five years to reside at the convent.] My last visit was on the anniversary of the foundation of the Order of the Visitation of Mary [founded in 1610 by St. Francis de Sales] with the Visitation sisters then in residence.

In his time, John Paul II had decided that the building, which once served as the residence for the director of Vatican Radio, should become a place for contemplative prayer, a fountain of living water in the Vatican. Knowing that the Visitandines were completing their residence in the spring of 2012, it was a natural thought for me that it would be the place where I could retire in order to continue, in my way, the service of prayer for which John Paul II had intended it to be.

I do not know if you saw the photos taken, on the day you announced your renunciation, of lightning striking the dome of St. Peter's [The Emeritus nods to indicate he did]. To many, it suggested a sign of the collapse or even the end of a world. But allow me to say this now. Many had expected to commiserate with someone defeated by history, but I see a man who is serene and confident.
That I am. I would have been concerned if I were not convinced, as I said at the start of my Pontificate, that I am only a simple and humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord. From the very start, I knew my limitations, and accepted [his election as Pope] in a spirit of obedience, as I have sought to do all my life.

Then, of course, there were the difficulties, great and small, during the pontificate, but there were also so many graces. I knew that by myself I would not be able to do everything that I should do, and therefore, I had to place myself into God's hands, to trust in Jesus, to whom, as I wrote my book on him, I felt connected by ancient friendship that was increasingly profound.

Then there is the Mother of God, the mother of hope who represents reliable support in our difficulties, and whom I feel very close whenever I recite the Rosary and in my visits to Marian shrines.

Finally, there are the saints, my 'travelling companions' through life: St. Augustine and St. Bonaventure. my spiritual masters; St. Benedict whose motto "Never place anything before Christ" was a familiar reminder to me; and St. Francis, the Poverello fo Assisi, who was the first to show the world as the mirror of the creative love of God, from whom we came from and towards whom we are returning.

Only spiritual consolations?
No. I have been accompanied not just from above. Every day, I get many letters, not only from eminent men of the world, but mostly from humble and simple persons who want me to know that they are close to me and that they pray for me.

Therefore, even in difficult moments, I have had the confidence and certainty that the Church is led by the Lord, and that, therefore, I could put back into his hands the mandate he had entrusted to me on the day I was elected pope.

This support has continued every after my retirement, for which I can only thank the Lord and all those who have expressed and continue to show their affection.

In your farewell address to the College of Cardinals on February 28, 2013, you promised obedience to your successor. Meanwhile, I have the impression that you have also established a human closeness and cordiality with Pope Francis. How would you describe your relationship?
Obedience to my successor was never in question. But afterwards, there has been a feeling of profound communion and friendship. At the time he was elected, I felt, as did many, a spontaneous feeling of gratitude to Providence. That after two popes from Central Europe, the Lord had wished, as it were, to look on the universal Church and to invite us to a wide, more catholic communion.

Personally, I remain profoundly touched of the pope's extraordinary human accessibility where I am concerned. Shortly after he was elected, he sought to reach me by telephone. Having been unsuccessful, he tried again shortly after meeting the world for the first time as pope on the loggia of St. Peter's and he spoke to me with great cordiality.

From then on, he has made me the gift of a relationship that is marvelously paternal and fraternal. Often, I receive small gifts from him and personal notes. Before he leaves on his major trips, he has not failed to visit me. The human benevolence with which he treats me is a grace in this last stage of my life for which I can only be grateful. What he says about being accessible to others is not just words - he puts it into practice with me. May the Lord show him his benevolence every day - this is what I pray for him.

One must wonder whether Guerrero, the theologian who edits the Italian edition of Comunione, asked B16 what he thought about JMB's heterodoxies exemplified best by Amoris laetitia and his free-wheeling interviews. He probably did, but he may have chosen not to include it in the published interview.

The nearest thing we have to what B16 thinks about the state of the Church today is what Vittorio Messori reported after his only visit to him since the retirement. The emeritus asked him what was his view of the state of the Church, and after Messori had said what he had to say, B16 answered, "All I can do is pray".

However, all his expressions of appreciation for JMB's personal kindnesses to him - particularly his words in the Vatican during the brief ceremony marking the 65th anniversary of his priestly ordination - are being used by those hostile to him [and to JMB/PF as well] as proof that he unconditionally supports everything JMB/PF says and does. And that is most unfortunate, indeed. But even more unfortunate if he really did.

Without saying anything about what his successor says and does as Pope - which we understand he cannot do so openly if it meant any disapproval at all (but neither has he had any words of approval, as he scrupulously limits himself to commenting about JMB's benevolence towards him) - his personal gratitude so freely expressed for JMB's goodness towards him would seem to be a most selfish view, but by all accounts, Joseph Ratzinger has never been a selfish person. [Which is, of course, disputed by those who believe that he should have soldiered on as Pope to his dying day, regardless of how incapable he believed he was to do so.]

I had intended to post something about last Sunday's Mass propers in the Extraordinary Form for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost (and still will) but a combination of circumstances has kept me from posting regularly in the past few days. Meanwhile, Fr. Scalese, from his post in Kabul, Afghanistan, has posted his homily for last Sunday based on the Propers for the Ordinary Form (written and delivered in English for his multinational congregation ... It is a very powerful though deliberately under-stated argument against the Bergoglian church of Nice and Easy...

Jesus says: 'STRIVE!'

---

Jesus passed through towns and villages, teaching as he went and making his way to Jerusalem. Someone asked him, “Lord, will only a few people be saved?”

He answered them,“Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough. After the master of the house has arisen and locked the door, then will you stand outside knocking and saying, ‘Lord, open the door for us.’

He will say to you in reply, ‘I do not know where you are from.' And you will say, ‘We ate and drank in your company and you taught in our streets.’ Then he will say to you, ‘I do not know where you are from.
Depart from me, all you evildoers!’(Lk 13, 22-27)
- From the Gospel reading on Aug. 21, 2016
21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Novus Ordo

---

In today’s gospel a question is put to Jesus. It is not the first time that we find in the gospel of Luke someone asking Jesus. As we saw in other occasions, Jesus usually does not answer dir

ectly these questions, simply because they are put in the wrong way. Look at the question in today’s passage: “Lord, will only a few people be saved?” It is a totally abstract question; we would say, a purely academic question, exclusively aroused by curiosity.

What will change in my life, when I have known if those saved are many or few? Definitely nothing! That is why Jesus never answers this kind of questions.

He has not come into the world to take part in academic disputes; he has come to bring salvation. So, what is important is not to know how many people will be saved, but to be concerned about one’s own salvation.

Therefore, he answers: “Strive to enter through the narrow gate.” Here is what really matters: “Strive to enter through the narrow gate.” The only thing you should be concerned for is to get salvation for yourself. And, apparently, it is not so easy.

Let us stop for a while to reflect upon these words of Jesus. First of all, let us consider the verb he uses: “strive” (contendite). It seems that salvation depends on us.

What! We have always said that salvation is a gift of God; it does not depend on our merits; and now Jesus says, “Strive!” There is no contradiction: salvation simultaneously depends on God and on us; it is a gift, but a gift that we have to gain with our efforts. [As it does for any grace from God, big or small, including mercy. God's mercy is infinite but it is not indiscriminate.]

Saint Paul says in the letter to the Philippians: “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling. For God is the one who, for his good purpose, works in you both to desire and to work” (2:12-13).

Why does salvation require an effort of us? Because the gate to salvation is narrow. We cannot delude ourselves, thinking that it is possible to reach Paradise by highway; in the parallel passage of Matthew, Jesus says that the road that leads to life is constricted; like a rough path, requiring great effort, tenacity and watchfulness.

In plain terms, this means that, for us to be saved, we cannot rely on our religious affiliation:“I am Christian; I was baptized; I belong to the Catholic Church.” It is not enough; we have to live — or, at least, to strive to live — according to our membership.

Have you heard what Jesus replies to those who say: “We ate and drank in your company and you taught in our streets”? Jesus says to them: “I do not know where you are from. Depart from me, all you evildoers!”

Another problem, which contributes to make more difficult the attainment of salvation, is that the gate, besides being narrow, will be locked soon. So, we cannot delay, thinking that, whatever time we arrive, it is enough to knock, to have the door opened. Even in this case we will hear the same reply: “I do not know where you are from.”

The second reading is about another element, which adds further difficulty to the achievement of salvation: “My son, do not disdain the discipline of the Lord … Endure your trials as ‘discipline’.”

It is an invitation to accept the “cross” in our life. The letter to the Hebrews explains also the reason of that: “Whom the Lord loves, he disciplines; he scourges every son he acknowledges.”

I think you can easily realize how these teachings are far from the mentality spread among today’s people, even inside the Catholic Church: God is good; God is merciful; everybody will be saved.

Practically, a “low-cost” salvation. But that is not the real gospel; it is just a caricature of it. We have heard what the real gospel says: “Strive to enter through the narrow gate.” AMEN!


Let me preview the Gospel reading from the Extraordinary Form which also sounds like a direct reproof to the disproportionately material goals of this pontificate in behalf of 'the poor', and to all of us when we tend to forget that our first duty to God is to save our own soul, and in the process, be able to help save other souls.

---

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat [or drink], or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?

Look at the birds in the sky; they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are not you more important than they? Can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your life-span?

Why are you anxious about clothes? Learn from the way the wild flowers grow. They do not work or spin. But I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was clothed like one of them.

If God so clothes the grass of the field, which grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, will he not much more provide for you, O you of little faith?

So do not worry and say, ‘What are we to eat?’ or ‘What are we to drink?’ or ‘What are we to wear?’ All these things the pagans seek. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all.

But seek first the kingdom [of God] and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides.
- Matthew 6, 25-33
From the Gospel for August 21, 2016
Extraordinary Form

---

Hilary White who lives in Norcia has a first-hand account of the earthquake that shook the region this morning...

6.2
Living through the earthquake in Norcia
by Hilary White
AUG 24, 2016

It was the noise. I’ve never in my life heard such a horrifying noise. It was so loud, I thought for a moment that my worst child-of-the-Cold War nightmares had come true, but then I realized there had been no flash.

It took me another second – while this appalling roar was still getting louder – to realize it was an earthquake, and probably a really big one. I curled up into a ball with my arms over my head and prayed the roof didn’t collapse on me. I thought of the kitties, and then the monks and then my good friend who also lives in the centro. But there was nothing to do but hope I didn’t die.

The first really big shock was over in a minute, (a very, very, very long minute) and I got up, shaking, and went around the house. Checked on the kitties (who sleep in their kitty-room at night) and they were fine. Pippy blinked sleepily at me, obviously wondering why I was turning on the lights at that hour. (At the first aftershock, while the house waved back and forth like a ship in the wind, he stuck out all his fur and dove under the covers.)

No damage visible in the house. A few things fell off the shelves and the pictures were askew. The power was still on and a glance out the window told me it was still going throughout the valley.

I started calling people, but realized at that moment that my phone was out of credit. Couldn’t even send a text.

I decided to get dressed and go down to town to see if there was anything I could do. To see if everyone was OK. And maybe pray with the monks. While I was dressing we had our first big aftershock. All I could do was wait it out, while the house rocked back and forth and the roar, like the world collapsing, grew and then faded.

By the time I was ready at quarter to four, I heard cars and motorini already heading down the hill to town. I got on my bike at ten to four and everyone was up along my street. People were in their gardens and congregated in clutches along the roads, frightened faces shining white in the street lights.

There was already a traffic jam to get into the city at the Porta Romana, and that was where I saw the first damage. The stone of the arch was sound, but a lot of the plaster was on the ground in pieces. The plaster and stucco of many of the buildings showed large cracks, and a few facing stones were in the street. I’ve since learned that sections of the wall on the north side have come down and are in the road. There is a large crack down one of the medieval defensive towers. The facades of some of the churches are cracked. I’ll have a walk around town later to see for myself.

But generally, the older the house, the better it held up. My friend’s house in town, where I’m using her wifi, was built originally as a monastery in the 15th century and there’s not a single crack anywhere, and only a few broken glasses on the floor. Houses built in the 20th and 21st centuries range from visibly damaged to uninhabitable.

The piazza was full of a couple hundred people, milling about, some with blankets around their shoulders, many with their dogs. Some older people were in wheel chairs and some of the hotel guests had their luggage piled up around them.

The monks were all there, all present and accounted for. The joke was immediately made, “So, this is what it takes to get Hilary up in time for Matins!” Hilarious, guys. [Hilary recently professed as a lay Benedictine Oblate.]

I parked my bike in the piazza this morning, and not in its usual spot between the wall of the Basilica and the monks’ shop. Didn’t want any rocks to fall on it.

Fr. Cassian told me that no one was hurt, but the monastery was damaged and there was “quite a lot of damage in the church.”

Above the painting, the whole section of decorative plaster, including an icon, is what’s all over the floor. (Not my photo. Taken by one of the monastery guests. When I find out, I’ll credit.)

Later, we ventured inside and saw that the Baroque-era plaster work over the St. Benedict transept altar was on the floor. (Never liked it much anyway.)

In fact, quite a lot of the ceiling plaster is on the floor too. Our ceiling is undecorated, so no art was destroyed, and all the paintings on canvas seem fine, but there’s going to be a job of work to tidy up and I’m sure we’ve lost a lot of the decorations. We’re just hoping that the restoration work on the side altars is OK. The scaffolding covering three of them is still up and looks solid.

The gathering in the piazza had an odd air. No one was quite sure if there would be another big quake, and we milled around, chatting and making weak jokes. I was sitting on the steps of the town hall when the roar came again.

People were screaming with fright as the piazza, normally very reliable and solid stone, suddenly turned into a surface more like a trampoline. We clustered in the centre of the piazza as we watched the cross and the statues on the facade of the Basilica, looming far above our heads, wave back and forth like flags.

The aftershocks have continued all day. I was just now over at a friend’s place helping to sweep up broken glass, when another one came. You freeze as the rumble starts, and consider your options. Dive under the big oak dining table? Seems like a pretty good idea…

The five am tremor was the last of the big ones, though (so far) and we started to get reports from the internet on iPhones about other towns.

[Initial news reports indicate that the monastery and Basilica of St. Benedict may have undergone serious damage.]
The towns of Amatrice and Accumoli were the worst, with most of these towns flattened, people dead and missing, shouts heard from under piles of rubble. The latest count from Amatrice (at eleven am) is 22 dead.

This is a mountainous region, with what few roads there are often winding through steep valleys with high, rocky peaks all around, so steep that in winter whole sections remain in constant shadow. The highways often drive right through the mountains and rock falls are common in winter.

We have already seen photos of some of the tunnels partially collapsed. Reports have come in that emergency vehicles are having a hard time getting up to some of the smaller, more remote hill towns. Not many people still live in them, but those who do are nearly all elderly people.

As we started seeing reports of people killed – Amatrice just reported 22 dead and the town “no longer there” – we decided it was time to pray. The early hours of morning before dawn are cold, and the monks were in their hoods. Many of the local people and hotel guests had blankets wrapped around them.

We all stood in a large circle as Fr. Cassian, seated on the steps at the base of St. Benedict’s statue, started the prayers in Latin. A number of people joined us, young and old. A girl about seventeen was standing next to me, wrapped up in a blanket under her boyfriend’s arm. Both were praying the old Latin prayers. All knelt and received the blessing after we sang the Salve Regina through another aftershock.

Some people from the city arrived in a truck and put out chairs. The hotel people came around with blankets. The chief of the Carabinieri arrived in his civies, the mayor was there with his wife. I helped hand around some pastries and fruit. We were asked to stay out of the buildings until at least 15 minutes after the last aftershock. It’s nearly 11:30 and we’re still getting them.

While it was still dark, but the sky was lightening, the monks and friends went to the shop to have something to eat and figure out where we were going to have Laudes. The painted plaster in the ceiling was cracked and much of it was on the floor. A few bottles were broken and we swept up the glass. Someone brought out bananas, pears, cornetti and coffee. We stood around talking and joking.

It’s a funny thing that though we were scared, and with fairly good reason, the mood was cheerful. The first big tremor was over, and we didn’t think there would be another really big shake. We were mostly thinking about all that needed to be done to clean up and get life started again.

Fr. Cassian led the way down to the crypt church – the family home of Sts. Benedict and Scolastica – that has a sturdy vaulted ceiling and has withstood earthquakes since the 2nd century BC. It was an experience I’ll not soon forget, singing the Divine Office, Laudes for the Feast of St. Bartholomew in that ancient place, the monks voices strong and deep, resonating off the stone. Not one beat was skipped as another large aftershock shook us during the Benedictus. No one even glanced up.

Afterwards, I got a call from Vatican Radio, a friend who works in the English section wanted “local colour” for their story. I might post it if I can find it and if I don’t sound like too much of an idiot.

People are still pretty jumpy. Each aftershock, coming every ten or fifteen minutes, is incredibly unsettling. But the mood in town is still very cheerful. We are aware that other places near by weren’t so lucky and there are people here who have gone off to help with trucks and winches and digging equipment.

Meanwhile, I was glad to run into friends in the piazza who told me that all their family are fine – including their dozen-odd pets – but that their house was un-livable. They have a kind of family compound outside town in the country, right at the base of the mountain; mum and dad in one house, brother and sister-in-law in the next, and the two of them in the third. There’s lots of work to be done to fix things up.

But this is Italy, and everyone knows we have earthquakes here. People will help each other, they’ll sweep and tidy, and help to rebuild. They’ll take each other in and make meals and look after the kids while the grownups work. It’s always been this way. It always will be this way. Thank God.