 02/09/2016 07:58 |
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| 02/09/2016 08:06 |
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September 1, 2016 headlines
PewSitter
Canon212.com
I guess those teaser headlines in both aggregator pages yesterday - which was supposed to be the first World Day for the Care of Creation,
or something equally solemn-sounding - say more than enough about JMB's latest innovations in Church teaching but do not quite capture
the absurdity of it. So I leave it to Mundabor to articulate it and elicit some chuckles amid the outrage... Warning: Be prepared for
'the Evil Clown' trademark which Mundabor habitually uses ...
A new level of ridicule:
Suggestions for FrancisChurch
Sept. 1, 2016
The Evil Clown has today reached a new level of ridicule by suggesting that to the clearly imperfect, incomplete, not-at-all-environmental- and-peaceful Works of Mercy, a further two should be added: the first one (that would be the spiritual one) consists in thinking like an enviropacifist fag, and the second (that would be the corporal one) in behaving like an enviropacifist fag. [Mundabor lives in the UK, where the noun 'fag' refers to a laborious, often unwelcome task - and, by extension, the person doing it; and the verb means doing such a task. Not the offensive American usage 'fag', short for faggot or homosexual.]
Congratulations!... What an excellent way to show to everyone what his religion is (hint: #neverCatholicism).
I now proceed to some hypotheses concerning how the new religion of enviropeace fagging might be developed, and what the next moves of the new FrancisChurch [I detest the term because it demeans Francis of Assisi by association, even if Bergogliophiles may believe it is the Poverello who 'gains' by being associated with this pope!] might be. You read it here first, folks!
An addition to the “Our Father”, with words like “and let us not offend the common home”. I know, the words of the Our Father come from Our Lord himself. But hey, in those times we just weren’t ready for the whole message.
A new decade of the Rosary, the “green peace mysteries”. They would show how merciful, peaceful and environmentally conscious Jesus was. For example, when he killed the fig tree, whipped the merchants in the temple, or threatened the lukewarm with hell.
An addition to the Hail Mary, with words like “ Dominus orbisque tecum”, in FrancisSpeak, “the Lord and the common home are with thee”. Will be taught to children of three to make sure they get FrancisChurch early.
There might be further moves, but I think these ones here are the most probable...
[I will omit Mundabor's concluding anti-JMB rant.]
The following is from VOX CANTORIS:
...Bless me Father Bergoglio, for I have "sinned."
- I have used air conditioning at home and in the car and the office in order to control my asthma so that I can function during the day to take on the enormous responsibilities I have for my employees and clients.
- I consume a half tank of petrol every Sunday driving 412 kilometers to attend Mass and return home where I have been appointed to sing the Gregorian chant when I really should forsake this apostolate and attend my own local parish where they care not for the proper celebration of the Holy Mass and in fact, refused my mother's funeral because the request was that it be said in Latin.
- I threw a piece of plastic into the regular garbage last evening instead of making the extra effort to ensure that it ended up in the recycling bin even though most of what is in the recycling bin ends up in the regular garbage.
- I have failed to use compact fluorescent bulbs and maintain a stockpile of beautiful warm incandescents, enough to last me until I am 99 years old, should the good Lord above grant me the grace to live that long.
Hey Jorge, what about Asia Bibi?
Perhaps a few less foreign trips might reduce Bergoglio's carbon footprint. Will someone tell him that the mission of the Church is the SALVATION OF SOULS!
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/09/2016 16:43] |
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| 02/09/2016 09:11 |
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Were it not that a tweet from German state radio refers to this development in a mocking way, I would have thought this story dubious, much as I welcome it if it is indeed true. All these months, I have not been able to process how Angela Merkel, who holds a doctorate in quantum physics, could have volunteered and stood by her 'welcome all migrants without limits' policy, despite what she knew the financial costs would be. And she is surely not blind to its considerable social repercussions not just in Germany but for the rest of Europe. So why? To get a cheap labor force? To do what? Menial jobs that Germans are too hoity-toity to do by themselves? Go figure.
Merkel admits her 'open door'
policy on migrants was a mistake
[Now what does she do with the 800,000
migrants she has let in so far in 2016?]
by LIAM DEACON
September 1, 2016
One year after suspending European Union (EU) rules and inviting “no upper limit” of migrants to Germany, Angela Merkel has admitted she made mistakes.
“We didn’t embrace the problem in an appropriate way. That goes as well for protecting the external border of the Schengen area”, the German Chancellor said in an interview, finally admitting some responsibility for the migrant crisis.
However, she also blamed other EU nations for not acting quickly enough to tackle the problem she helped to create. “In Germany we ignored the problem for too long and blocked out the need to find a pan-European solution”.
When asked if Germany was complacent after years of welcoming migrants from other nations, she said: “I cannot deny that.”
It’s almost precisely one year since the German Chancellor scrapped the Dublin agreement, promising to welcome unlimited numbers of Syrian migrants, no matter how many safe countries they pass through first.
The Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, was quick to slam the “invitation” and accuse Germany of “moral imperialism” as hundreds of thousands of migrants began to flood into his nation. He was accused of racism.
As recently as the end of this July, Mrs. Merkel was defending the decision, repeating her mass migration catch phrase – “we can do this!” – and claiming she “acted in line with my knowledge and conscience”, insisting Germany would “stick to our principles”.
The Chancellor’s sudden change of heart is already being mocked in the German press:
View image on Twitter
Follow
dwnews ✔ @dwnews
#RefugeeCrisis: We can do this! -- dw.com/p/1Jt4r
We can't do this! -- dw.com/p/1JsuU
3:43 AM - 1 Sep 2016
NB: dwnews stands for 'DeutscheWelle News' - DW being Germany's state radio.
“There are political issues that one can see coming but don’t really register with people at that certain moment – and in Germany we ignored both the problems for too long…” Mrs. Merkel also said in the interview.
Some of those “political issues” for the Chancellor were revealed yesterday, when an opinion poll showed the Chancellor’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) haemorrhaging support and the anti-mass migration AfD party surging.
A Forsa poll showed her group in the German legislature had fallen to 33 per cent, down two points from last week and eight points from a year ago. The AfD rose two points to 12 per cent, their second-highest level this year.
Then today, a separate, pre-election poll showed that the AfD has overtaken the CDU in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Cicero magazine reported.
In Italy, La Repubblica reported this on 9/1:
Antonio Socci comments on his Facebook page: "Only Bergoglio is exulting and
continues to push that all governments bring down their frontiers and
allow their countries to be invaded".
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/09/2016 10:22] |
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| 02/09/2016 16:08 |
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New displays of secular ideology
from the pope who pleases Soros
Translated from
September 2, 2016
At the very time when the Viminale (Italian ministry for the interior) was releasing its report about a new wave of migrant 'assaults' on Italy (more than 13,000 in just four days, bringing the total migrant arrivals to Italy in 2016 to 145,000 so far, compared to 103,000 for all of 2015), Pope Francis launched a new 'social' dicastery with he himself taking on the responsibility for the 'department' on migrants and refugees to potentiate to the maximum his ongoing pressures for Europe to throw her frontiers wide open.
The immigrant question has become for him something more than an obsession: It has become one of the ideological dogmas with which he is replacing the bimillenary doctrinal pillars of the Catholic Church.
It apparently has not occurred to him at all that migration, in itself, is a tragedy that ought to be forestalled - in the countries of origin, among intending migrants themselves, and in the targeted 'host' countries.
Likewise, it seems that this pope is indifferent to the crisis of our own society in Italy which can no longer sustain the indigent part of the native Italian population.
As he is indifferent to the enormous problem represented by massive Muslim migrations to Europe by people who cannot [and do not wish it at all] be assimilated to our values and who are very permeable to violent terroristic preachings.
Bergoglian propaganda for indiscriminate immigration ['indiscriminate acceptance of any and all migrants' is the more precise term] began in July 2013 with his trip to Lampedusa - which was quickly taken as an invitation for more migrants to take off from African shores towards Italy, and whose consequences have been particularly devastating for Italy.
The last issue of the foreign policy magazine Limes, dedicated to the migration issue, highlights the 'novelty' of 2016 - that Italy has become 'a target nation for migrants instead of a place of transit'.
The geopolitical magazine says "Italy is changing... (and) to imagine that such profound changes could impact Italy without ripping apart what was our stable social and political-institutional fabric implies the use of hallucinogens. And yet this seems to be the posture of our governing class".
Unfortunately the Bergoglio-Left axis leads not just to under-estimating the problem but, on the contrary, to consider it a positive. Last March, Bergoglio openly admitted that what is taking place is an 'Arab invasion' (his words) which is not in itself to be considered negative.
Moreover, he has justified and praised Islam in every way even as he subjects Catholics (and the West) to a continuous dousing of accusations.
Bergoglio seems to be pursuing a nihilist plan to destroy the identity of peoples and of the Church herself, within which for more than three years now, we have been witnessing a radical reversion of direction.
Up to John Paul II and Benedict XVI - in continuity with 2000 years of Catholic tradition - the Church's fundamental mission had been spiritual (the salvation of souls); the center of the Church's concerns and work had been evangelization to counteract the massive de-Christianization of the nations of Europe, as well as the defense of human life and the family as firm foundations for men assailed by modern ideology.
With Bergoglio, the spiritual and the supernatural disappear, as the entire stage is occupied by those worldly themes previously espoused by the crude South American brand of liberation theology - one might call it a re-warmed Catho-communism.
Indeed, Bergoglio maintains brotherly relations with all the leaders of the South American left, starting with Bolivia's Evo Morales who gifted him with an image of Christ crucified on the hammer-and-sickle, to Brazil's Dilma Rousseff, recently impeached for financial scandals and mismanagement. (Leonardo Boff, one of the fathers of Latin American liberation theology and a personal friend of Bergoglio, has revealed that the pope wrote Roussef a personal letter of support.)
On the other hand, Bergoglio has been coddled by the magnates of the new American capitalism who love to portray themselves as progressivists and carry on the worst anti-Catholic crusades typical of the ideology of political correctness.
The pilgrimage to the Vatican of these secular bigwigs is continuous - the most recent being Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook.
On January 22, it was Tim Cook, Apple's top banana, who brought Bergoglio a huge donation ( pecunia non olet, money has no stink). On January 28, megastar Leonardo Di Caprio presented him with a substantial check for his 'charitable works'. Subsequently, Bergoglio had private audiences with Eric Schmidt, who heads Google, and with Kevin Systrom, founder and chief executive of Instagram.
Yet the pope of the poor virtually slammed the door shut on the husband and children of Asia Bibi, the Pakistani woman who was condemned to death for her Christian faith, when the family came to Europe to find support for her judicial cause. He did not give them a private audience at all [he greeted them for all of 20 seconds behind the ropeline after a General Audience] nor made a public appeal in her behalf.
It would seem that he has his doors wide open at the Vatican only for billionaires and VIPs. But his most powerful and lately most talked-about sponsor is the infamous financial speculator George Soros (who specializes in making lucrative attacks on vulnerable countries and organizations, and who recently threw his considerable resources in vain to defeat Brexit).
Considering the type of causes that Soros supports and finances, he is to be considered a definite enemy of the Catholic Church. His manipulations in this regard came to light recently thanks to hackers who published thousands of documents from Soros's Open Society, in which, among other things, we learned of the extent of his support to the cause of abortion worldwide and of the LGBTs, as well as his fight against so-called Islamophobia, even as his foundation finances anti-Israeli organizations.
And of course, Soros is all for massive migration to Europe which he considers 'a new standard of normality'.
Finally, it also emerged - although one will not read or hear it in the Italian media - that Soros has intervened heavily in order to 'change the priorities of the Church in the United States' by having the bishops aligning themselves with Bergoglio on the social issues. The goal is to bring the Catholic electorate to vote for Hillary Clinton (of whom Soros is a major political donor) and not Donald Trump.
To change the priorities of the Catholic Church means to set aside the themes of life and the family in favor of flying the battle standards for those social themes dear to liberals and the left, in general. [Which happen to coincide with Jorge Bergoglio's personal obsessions.]
In recent decades, many powerful persons and institutions have sought to influence the Catholic hierarchy to subvert the teachings of the Church. But today, for the first time, they have their best ally in the current Bishop of Rome.
In the church of Bergoglio, there are no longer any 'non-negotiable principles', and it has struck heavy blows against the sacraments and moral law. Instead, immigration and the most catastrophist environmentalism have been elevated to indisputable truths.
Yesterday, for example, Bergoglio celebrated the first World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation. There has been no World Day of Prayer for Persecuted Christians, but yes, a World Day of Prayer to save the mosquitos and tiny reptiles for which he shows great concern in his ecologistic encyclical.
It is part of that 'religion of Goddess earth', very New Age, namely, Gnostic, which had proclaimed its triumph with that monstruous light-and-sound montage of apes and other non-human creatures on the facade of St. Peter's last year.
In his message for yesterday's event, Bergoglio called for an 'ecological conversion'. In an age of widespread apostasy, when entire peoples have forgotten God, Bergoglio - earthly vicar of a non-Catholic God, as he described him once - asks for ecological conversion, not a conversion to Christ.
Moreover, Bergoglio - who has so far avoided voicing a cry of pain as his predecessors did for the billion abortions that have taken place in the past 20 years - is asking us to repent "of the evil we are doing to the earth", for the sins we commit by failing to recycle trash, by using plastic and paper, by not using public transport (these are examples he gave).
These transgressions must be confessed and expiated, said the pope who in Amoris laetitia appeared to have shelved those mortal sins that the Gospel has always condemned.
One can see that the change in priorities has been vertiginous. Benedict XVI began his Pontificate denouncing the dictatorship of relativism, whereas Bergoglio is reaping world applause for his nihilist and anti-Christian agenda.
Roberto de Mattei comments on another aspect of the secular vs spiritual emphasis in the church of Bergoglio...
The recent Italian earthquake was devastating,
but spiritual earthquakes are far more serious
by Roberto de Mattei
Translated for Rorate caeli by Francesca Romana from
August 31, 2016
During the Angelus of August 28th Pope Francis announced that he would go to visit the earthquake victims in Lazio, Umbria and Le Marche "as soon as possible", to bring them in person "the comfort of the faith, a fatherly and brotherly embrace and the support of Christian hope."
That "as soon as possible" is not connected to the Pope’s already pre-set schedules as much as to avoid his presence being an obstacle to the work of the firemen, the civil defense and the police force.
As Andrea Tornielli recalls, John Paul II’s blitz 48 hours after the quake which hit Campania and Basilicata on November 23rd 1980, resulted in heated polemics. There were those who said that John Paul II had obstructed the rescue work and distracted the police force from other more urgent tasks.
Benedict XVI, in contrast, waited 22 days before visiting Aquila devastated by the quake of April 6th 2009, and 36 days before going to Emilia, after the earthquake of May 20th 2012.
The choice to put off the papal visit is opportune for various reasons. In the first weeks immediately after the catastrophe, the earthquake victims need material help most of all.
It is in the following months, when their situation doesn’t make the news headlines anymore, that they feel abandoned and need spiritual and moral support. And nobody, more than the Pope, can bring this help which consists mainly in remembering that everything in the Christian life has significance, even the worst catastrophes.
This is the answer that needs to be given to those, like Eugenio Scalfari, who, in La Repubblica of August 28th pontificates about the earthquake in Amatrice as well as all the other evils in the world, asking himself the whys -- not only of the quake that has ravaged central Italy -- but of the chaos which is ravaging the world -- looking for the answer in the cosmic pessimism of Giacomo Leopardi [Italian poet-philosopher, 1798-1837].
It is necessary also to avoid the inevitable accusations of protagonism ready to be hurled at those too fond of the limelight, like Pope Francis, who a few days ago was busy with a film shooting in the Vatican Gardens, connected, it seems, to portraying himself in a film, despite the fact that the Vatican last February had denied Pope Francis’s intention of being an actor.
It is true however, that the tragedy of the earthquake has become part of a tempestuous international scenario. The front pages of newspapers over the past two weeks were practically exclusively devoted to news about the quake in Italy, and little import to some other disturbing information, like the invitation from the German government (to its citizens) to stock up on water and food in anticipation of an eventual national emergency.
The faithful expect the Pope to recall that material disasters destroy bodies, but that there are more violent spiritual and moral cataclysms which sweep away souls; and it is the Catholic Church itself that is being shaken up today, internally, by an earthquake.
On the Internet a photo is circulating of a statue of Our Lady miraculously remaining intact amid the rubble of a church in Arquata del Tronto.
Invocations to Our Lady have multiplied among the earthquake victims and Antonio Socci has made himself spokesman of a request to Cardinal Bagnasco on behalf of some Italian Catholics, to renew the Consecration of Italy to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Yet, there was not even any room for Our Lady at a ‘Meeting’ stand [the Meeting is the annual international symposium sponsored by Comunione e Liberazione which used to be a reliable reflection of Catholic orthodoxy, but in recent years, has turned increasingly 'ecumenical' and secular] in Rimini, since Marian devotion is incompatible with the Muslim and Protestant ecumenical embrace.
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| 02/09/2016 21:49 |
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Bergoglian 'mercy' for conservatives:
Bishop Oliveri's 'resignation is accepted' even if he is only 72;
Bishop Lafitte is out of the Curia; Cardinal Rylko and Mons. Clemens
in limbo since the Council for Laity became part of a superdicastery
Posted by Augustinus
Sept. 1, 2016
1. Today (September 1, 2016) the statutes of the new "Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life" come into force. The new Dicastery is led by Bishop Kevin Farrell (formerly of Dallas) as Prefect; it has as yet no Secretary (a position that can be filled by a layman). The same statutes decree that as of today, the Pontifical Council for the Laity and the Pontifical Council for the Family are deemed suppressed.
The former President of the Pontifical Council for the Family, the Kasperite-leaning Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia (71), was appointed President of the Pontifical Academy for Life only two weeks ago...The appointment ensured that Paglia remains within the Roman Curia.
In contrast, the Secretary (since 2009) of the now defunct Council for the Family, Bishop Jean Lafitte (64, was appointed Prelate of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta in July last year.
Bishop Lafitte had openly opposed the Kasper proposal in the aftermath of the Synod of 2014, reiterating this opposition and his firm defense of traditional Catholic views on the family in a book of interviews published last year as "The Choice of the Family".
With the disappearance of the body of which he was Secretary until yesterday, Bishop Lafitte is now effectively out of the Curia as well. ['Exiled to the Knights of Malta', as it were, like Cardinal Burke was. I wonder what the Sovereign Order feels about being used as a dumping ground for Bergoglian rejects from the Curia! I should hope they feel honored to have Cardinal Burke and Mons. Lafitte as their spiritual directors.]
Unlike the top two officials of the Pontifical Council for the Family, it is not yet clear what positions (if any) will next be assigned to the last President and the last Secretary of the now-defunct Pontifical Council for the Laity.
The former President of this Council was Cardinal Stanisław Ryłko (71), and the Secretary was Bishop Josef Clemens (69). Both were appointed to their positions by John Paul II in 2003, and since last year, Rylko had been the longest-serving head of a Curial dicastery. Meanwhile, Clemens had been one of the longest-serving Bishop-Secretaries in the Curia.
Rylko had been a diocesan priest of Krakow and was ordained to the priesthood in March 1969 by then-Cardinal Wojtyla. Clemens, on the other hand, was then-Cardinal Ratzinger's personal secretary from 1984 to 2003. Neither is outspoken, but both are considered to be reliably "conservative" in their views on doctrine and morals.
The imminent appointment of Rylko to the Archbishopric of Krakow in order to succeed Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz (77) had been widely expected last month, right after World Youth Day in Krakow and before the Pontifical Council for the Laity was to be dissolved. It has not yet happened, though, and in this Pontificate so full of "surprises" it remains to be seen if Rylko will still go to Krakow or another Polish diocese after a temporary "joblessness", or be moved to another position in Rome, or if he will remain prematurely retired.
Bishop Clemens is in an analogous situation. Early retirement is not out of the question: When the Pontifical Council for Social Communications was merged earlier this year into the new Secretariat for Communications, its President since 2007, Archbishop Claudio Celli, found himself unceremoniously retired a few months before he was to turn 75.
Incidentally these latest developments corroborate what we posted about the "purge" of the Roman Curia two years ago:
Speaking of Papa Wojtyla, all reports ... and rumors... also converge in one direction: the new stage of the current purge will not stop at the Ratzingerians (such as Burke or Müller), but would now reach the Wojtylians as well. All conservative Poles in the Curia, and their allies, will be removed when the Curial reform takes place. Their offices could be simply extinguished or merged, and the new leadership would certainly be of a new (actually old liberal) kind.
Müller remains in his post, but it remains to be seen for how long. [Probably depends on how soon the Archbishop of Vienna, currently the papal theological pet, can come to Rome to be the Bergoglian CDF Prefect.]
2. The Vatican also announced today that Pope Francis has "accepted" the resignation of Msgr. Mario Oliveri, 72 years old, Bishop of Albenga-Imperia. Once known as Italy's most "tradition-friendly" diocesan bishop when it came to liturgy and doctrine, he was stripped of all his authority in early 2015 and since then has remained bishop of the diocese in name only. For more on the background to his case see our posts:
1) Setting the record straight on Albenga-Imperia: A clear case of selective enforcement against a conservative bishop (October 2014)
2) Albenga-Imperia Update: Bishop Oliveri stripped of all authority, will remain bishop of the diocese in name only; Coadjutor appointment "begins a Copernican revolution" in the diocese. (March 2015)
Oliveri's successor is his Coadjutor, Msgr. Guglielmo Borghetti, who already had all the authority of a diocesan bishop since March 2015.
Since taking over as de facto bishop of Albenga-Imperia, Borghetti has dismissed (or accepted the withdrawal) of 7 out of the diocese's 12 seminarians (and told one to just be a permanent deacon) while vowing to accept only men from the territory of the diocese itself as seminarians.
He has also reportedly hatched a plan to group together the diocese's smaller parishes into "pastoral units" served by small teams of priests led by a "moderator-pastor".
The resignation was already anticipated as early as June of this year, when La Stampa-Savona reported that Francis himself had "invited" Oliveri to resign when they met in April. That report claimed that Oliveri was going to step down by late August; then another report (in August) predicted more accurately that the resignation was definitely going to take place in early September.
It is worthy of note that among his final acts as Bishop of Albenga-Imperia, Msgr. Oliveri celebrated two Solemn Pontifical Masses according to the 1962 Missal. The first was on July 11 in the little monastery of the Benedictines of the Immaculate in Villatalla, and the second (accompanied by First Communion and Confirmation) was on August 21 in a small parish in Molini di Prelà.
On his blog today, Sandro Magister underscores yet another recent strategic personnel move by JMB that deserves to be at least #3 on Augustinus's list, if not in fact #2.
Two months ago, there was the exile inflicted on Mons. Savio Hon Taifai, secretary (i.e., #2 man) of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, and therefore the highest-ranking Chinese prelate in the Curia, a friend and firm associate of Cardinal Joseph Zen, who was sent by Francis to the middle of the Pacific Ocean to serve as Apostolic Administrator in Guam!
Now, that's a literal exile to the peripheries, or worse, the middle of nowhere. Recall that Benedict XVI appointed Mons. Hon to replace then Mons. Robert Sarah as #2 at Propaganda Fide when he promoted Sarah to head Cor Unum...
Magister's post, BTW, is about how JMB has chosen to forgive and forget all about the evils in China's past (no mention whatsoever of the millions of Chinese sacrificed in Mao's great purges, in the futile madness of the Great Leap Forward and the even greater madness of the Cultural Revolution), so that Communist China can start with a clean slate to arrive at a mutual accommodation with the Vatican about the immediate future of the Church in China, no matter the cost - as long as it results in the historic event of JMB being the first pope ever to travel to China. Which would seem to further drive the underground Church in China deeper into the catacombs.
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| 04/09/2016 00:46 |
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I'm still trying to settle down enough to organize what I can post in the next few hours of time I have available for the Forum after a hectic 24 hours or so that constrained my inactivity here.
But I did want to share right away some lines from a blogger that lifted my spirits a bit today (even if what he/she says is bitter truth presented as black humor) from the daily-increasing secular horror of JMB's church - riding on the Catholic Church, of course, and purporting to be the Church - and the increasingly infelicitous spectacle of domestic US politics...
The Vatican wishes to know which acts of mercy we have performed lately. I have performed one. I have refrained from assassinating Cardinal Schonborn.
....
Hillary Clinton tells us that if elected she "will end evil in the world". I presume that means she will commit suicide on inauguration day.
....
Our "Pope of the People" is always so busy meeting with the little people, the downtrodden, the people who have no say in things, like Mark Zuckerberg.
He ends the blogpost with this:
Can we all get together as friends and pray that George Soros will die? Soon? Not that such a thing would end the world's evils of course but at least one head of the hydra would be cut off. We could also pray that George has a Road to Damascus conversion. [Of course, we can't seriously pray for anyone to die, but we get the point!]
Everyone who is praying for Pope Francis has their own preferred way of doing it but mine is to say a Hail Mary for him so that he will come to his senses before the Church is totally destroyed [From our point of view as 'loyal sons' of the one true Church, it's the only sensible - and the most charitable - prayer intention one can have for JMB.]
The nuggets come from a blog called THE EYEWITNESS,
theeye-witness.blogspot.com/2016/09/bits-and-pieces.html
which has other equally terse and pungent observations on what's happening in the Church and in the world.
Then there's this absolute photo gem from Antonio Socci's Facebook page, of which he comments: "OVERFLOWING CROWDS YESTERDAY AT THE BASILICA OF ST. PETER'S TO BE BLESSED BY PAPA BERGOGLIO AT THE END OF HIS DAY OF 'PRAYER FOR THE CARE OF CREATION' WITH THE PAPAL RECOMMENDATION TO RECYCLE YOUR TRASH."... I have, of course, made up my own title for this...
Not at all the 'Bergoglio effect'
the world has been touting
Does this image befit the most popular pope eh-vuh!???
Does anyone recall having ever seen St. Peter's Basilica so empty for a papal event? Yet this was JMB's much ballyhooed World 'Enviro-Day' in the church of Bergoglio! Were there even any cardinals, bishops and priests in attendance? If so, they must have skedaddled out without waiting for the papal recessional to end. I don't even see any prelates in the recessional with the pope - only security agents behind him!
It brings to mind the asinine comment of a RAI (Italian state TV) commentator who remarked during one of Benedict XVI's Angelus broadcasts that no one was in attendance except the proverbial 'quattro gatti' (Italian for 'four cats', an idiom to describe how few people there are for a gathering). His remark was, of course, belied by the video itself of the event, and rightly so, the man was fired by RAI (or at least taken off the Vatican beat).
What happened here, Mr. High-and-Mighty Prefect for Communications Vigano? Did you not issue any invitations at all - the old-fashioned way - to the Catholic hierarchy present in Rome, and to all the Roman diocesan organizations with some interest in 'the care of our common home'? Do you really think the digital age has made good old-fashioned communications totally obsolete and useless?
You can have all the fanciest digital come-ons online but that does not automatically mean your stuff will be seen by those you are trying to attract. With an infinity of choices a mouseclick away from every internaut, your immediate digital audience consists only of Vatican junkies, the media covering religion, and occasional random visitors.
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Sept. 2, 2016 headlines - addenda
PewSitter
Canon212.com
I was going to add these yesterday before I had to attend to my 'day job', because I had wanted to underscore the headline in both aggregates referring to JMB's 'gratification' over UN goals - which, surely, he knows very well, rest a great deal on so-called 'reproductive rights' which is liberalspeak for population control by any means possible.... Voice of the Family had this reaction.
Pope 'gratified' by UN goals that demand
'universal access to sexual and reproductive health'
September 2, 2016
Pope Francis has said that he is “gratified” by UN goals that call on member states to “ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health” by 2030.
The term “sexual and reproductive health”, as generally defined, includes access to contraception, including abortifacient methods, and, often, other forms of abortion.
In a message entitled “For the celebration of the world day of prayer for the care of creation”, Pope Francis stated that he was “gratified that in September 2015 the nations of the world adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, and that, in December 2015, they approved the Paris Agreement on climate change”.
The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, agreed by nation states in September 2015, consist of 17 goals and 169 targets, which will determine the direction of international aid and action until 2030. These goals were endorsed by the Paris Agreement on climate change.
Among other things, the Sustainable Development Goals call on member states to:
“ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health care services, including for family planning, information and education, and the integration of reproductive health into national strategies and programs” (Goal 7 Target 3)
The term “sexual and reproductive health care services” is defined by United Nation bodies as including contraception, including forms that have an abortifacient mode of effect.
The United Nations Population Fund states that “sexual and reproductive health” includes access for all to “the safe, effective, affordable and acceptable contraception method of their choice”. Furthermore it is used by many international governments, including that of the United States, and by agencies such as Planned Parenthood, to include other forms of abortion.
The World Health Organisation also considers abortion to be integral to “sexual and reproductive health”.
The WHO “develops norms, tools and guidelines on reproductive health in general and abortion services in particular, and supports countries in reforming their health systems. Its role includes:
- distributing existing evidence on abortion;
- assisting Member States in evaluating health systems’ response to the needs of women with unwanted pregnancies;
- promoting methodology in quality control of abortion services; and
- training of trainers in, for example, counselling and abortion care.”
The WHO, as part of its work to promote “sexual and reproductive health”, actively works to “improve access to abortion and the quality of their abortion services” in “countries such as Ireland”, which currently have restrictive abortion laws.
The implementation of the SDG’s call to “ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health care services” will necessarily involve the further extension of attempts by UN agencies and international organisations to radically increase contraception use and access to abortion worldwide.
It will be instructive therefore to consider what is already being done in the name of “universal access to sexual and reproductive health care”.
The “Maputo Plan of Action for the Operationalisation of the Continental Policy Framework for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights” aimed at “Universal Access to Comprehensive Sexual and Reproductive Health Services in Africa”. It was produced in 2006 following a special session of the African Union Conference of Ministers of Health in Maputo, Mozambique.
The document specifically identified “Abortion Care” as an integral part of sexual and reproductive health. It’s plan of action for “Implementing the Continental Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Policy Framework ” included the following resolutions:
5.2.1a Train service providers in the provision of comprehensive safe abortion care services where national law allows.
5.2.2 Refurbish and equip facilities for provision of comprehensive abortion care services.
5.3.1a Provide safe abortion services to the fullest extent of the law.
5.3.2 Educate communities on available safe abortion services as allowed by national laws.
The “Maputo Plan of Action” targets for attaining “universal access to sexual and reproductive health” explicitly includes access to “family planning” and “emergency contraception”.
The document also specifically targets children, stating that “Addressing the sexual and reproductive health needs of adolescents and youth” is a key component of sexual and reproductive health.”
The “Maputo Plan” is one of many projects in which the promotion of abortion and contraception is integral to efforts to achieve “universal access to sexual and reproductive health” around the world.
The implementation of the SDGs will lead to the further spread of abortion and contraception worldwide, bringing about the deaths of countless numbers of unborn children and causing immense harm to individuals and societies.
And yet, Pope Francis has professed himself “gratified” by international targets that will result in unimaginable devastation and suffering for an untold number families around the world.
This is perhaps the most tragic example of the now well-entrenched collaboration between the Holy See and the world’s leading proponents of abortion, contraception and population control, under the guise of promoting sustainable development.
A selection of Voice of the Family’s commentary on this collaboration can be found below.
Holy See rep “welcomes” UN target for “universal access to sexual and reproductive health”, 3 June 2016
Pro-family Catholics disturbed after reports of pope’s comments on contraception, 18 February 2016
Climate agreement welcomed by pope but pro-lifers concerned about language that promotes abortion, 22 December 2015
Cardinal Turkson: Pope Francis ‘has invited people to some form of birth control”, 10 December 2015
‘Sacrilege’: Catholic leaders react to Vatican’s climate change light show, 9 December 2015
Synod adopts alarming sociological approach in place of clear doctrine, 12 November 2015
Voice of the Family statement: Parents are the primary educators of their children, 15 October 2015
Synod fathers who compromise on contraception will be responsible for greater abortion, 6 October 2015
African families gravely threatened by western governments, international agencies and Vatican departments, 18 August 2015
Professor Schellnhuber: climate science and the population problem, 26 June 2015
Launch of new encyclical by head of Catholic agency accused of funding contraception shows urgent need for reaffirmation of Humanae Vitae, 19 June 2015
Voice of the Family statement on the encyclical letter Laudato Si, 18 June 2015
Any discussion on the environment must stem from understanding that the family is the key to sustainable development, 21 May 2015
Vatican endorsement of UN Sustainable Development Goals threatens unborn children, 29 April 2015
Leading global pro-abortion advocates speak at Vatican conference, 28 April 2015
JMB is not naive or stupid. He knows exactly where the UN and the rest of the uber-liberal international bureaucracy stand on population control. He obviously thinks that the SDG goal of 'ending poverty, war and hunger by 2030' - than which nothing could be more hubristic and presumptuous against God's plan for mankind after the Fall, not to mention IMPOSSIBLE - along with their far-out and totally unnecessary plans for climate control, far outweighs the evils of abortion and other kinds of population control.
If you had any doubt at all about where this so-called pope is at, this should cure you of it. Remember that for all his occasional lip service against abortion, he has also said that the Church - and people in the Church - should stop talking about it so much!
And so, when he addressed the UN General Assembly last September, he unconditionally endorsed the UN SDGs, knowing exactly the boobytraps they contain for Catholic teaching. Very few commentators even noted this endorsement at the time, but I have found it one of the more blatant dishonesties of this so-called pope, and twice - first last September, and then again earlier this year, I did my best to underscore it on this thread
P.S. I don't go out of my way to read any Bergoglian text unless it is necessary to do so in order to comment fairly on the whole or part of the text. I do think it is worth reproducing the entire passage which begins with JMB's 'gratification' at the UN SDGs, etc. To wit:
I am gratified that in September 2015 the nations of the world adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, and that, in December 2015, they approved the Paris Agreement on climate change, which set the demanding yet fundamental goal of halting the rise of the global temperature.
Now governments are obliged to honour the commitments they made, while businesses must also responsibly do their part. It is up to citizens to insist that this happen, and indeed to advocate for even more ambitious goals.
Changing course thus means “keeping the original commandment to preserve creation from all harm, both for our sake and for the sake of our fellow human beings.”
The 'original commandment'??? By whom??? It's not in the Tablets brought down from Sinai by Moses, nor is it in Jesus's Great Commandment. Do you see how insidiously JMB sneaks in phrases like that to push his agenda?
Obviously, consciousness of human responsibility for safeguarding God's creation is an outcome of a properly formed conscience, which in turn, arises from living as God commanded man to do in the Ten Commandments. Of which, the first three teach us our duty to God, and the last seven, our duty to others.
In Jesus's formulation of the Great Commandment, the first is to love God above all else, and the second, to love our neighbor as ourself. Again, first what we owe God, and then what we owe each other.
If one follows these teachings well and properly, then respect and care for creation follow. We see it as our duty because Creation is God's gift to us, and because we all partake of Creation. As Jesus said, "Seek first the kingdom [of God] and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides", and he did not mean just material things.
When God created man, he said, "Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that crawl on the earth. God also said: See, I give you every seed-bearing plant on all the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food; and to all the wild animals, all the birds of the air, and all the living creatures that crawl on the earth, I give all the green plants for food. And so it happened."
God did not verbalize any commandment here - but man to whom all these things were given for his good did not have to be told he had to safeguard them so they could continue being good for him. His God-given reason tells him that.
Of course, after the Fall, God-given reason in man-expelled-from-Eden proved easy prey to what God called, in the time of Noah, human wickedness: that which led him to wipe out all of Creation on this earth with the Great Flood - all except Noah, his family, and the animal and plant life on the Ark who would populate the rebirth of Creation.
When the LORD saw how great the wickedness of human beings was on earth, and how every desire that their heart conceived was always nothing but evil, the LORD regretted making human beings on the earth, and his heart was grieved.
By ourselves, we are easy prey to evil, but surely, using air-conditioning or failing to sort our garbage cannot be sins - certainly not done out of wickedness - especially when JMB and his followers think adultery, as in remarried divorcees, is not necessarily a sin, even when Jesus himself said so!
And is the supposed Vicar of Christ on earth, by his own standard, not 'sinning' when he chooses to leave his carbon footprints so prodigally in his frequent globetrotting? He may be guilty of rank hypocrisy, yes, but is he thereby wicked?
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And about the greater fallacy in the Bergoglian messages last week that were broadcast urbi et orbi, in effect, namely: the sanctimonious
motu proprio explaining the creation of his latest superdicastery...
Did Jesus say, 'Go forth and promote
integral human development'?
How this pope has skewed the Lord's mandate
by Christopher A. Ferrara
September 2, 2016
Almost two thousand years ago, God Incarnate launched His Church on its saving mission with these words: “Go ye into the whole world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved: but he that believeth not shall be condemned.” The Catholic Church’s divine commission could not be simpler: convert the world to Christianity for the salvation of souls.
Two thousand years later, however, in the midst of the worst crisis of faith and discipline the Church has ever experienced, we are now presented with this description of the Church’s mission:
In all her being and actions [!], the Church is called to promote the integral development of the human person in the light of the Gospel. This development takes place by attending to the inestimable goods of justice, peace, and the care of creation. The Successor of the Apostle Peter, in his work of affirming these values, is continuously adapting the institutions which collaborate with him, so that they may better meet the needs of the men and women whom they are called to serve.
These are the opening words of Pope Francis’s apostolic letter Humanum Progressionem, which announces a continuation of the vogue in this pontificate: the Novelty of the Week.
This time it was the creation of a new “Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development,” which will absorb and thus abolish the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People, and the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers.
So, according to Francis, the Church is not called to preach the Gospel to all men and baptize them for their eternal salvation, but rather “to promote the integral development of the human person” by “attending to the inestimable goods of justice, peace, and the care of creation.” The “light of the Gospel” is thus merely an aid to the promotion of justice, peace, and the care of creation.
But what about the salvation of souls? Humanum Progressionem explicitly abrogates Articles 142-153 of Pastor Bonus, the Apostolic Constitution of John Paul II, which created the four Vatican departments Francis has just abolished.
Tellingly, Pastor Bonus begins with these words:
“The Good Shepherd, the Lord Christ Jesus (cf. Jn 10:11, 14), conferred on the bishops, the successors of the Apostles, and in a singular way on the bishop of Rome, the successor of Peter, the mission of making disciples in all nations and of preaching the Gospel to every creature.”
Pastor Bonus then proceeds to mention salvation no fewer than eleven times, including the phrases “means of salvation,” “ministry of salvation,” “salvation of souls,” “the work of salvation in the world” and the “mission to work for the eternal salvation of the people…”
Humanum Progressionem, on the other hand, says not one word about salvation, the means of salvation, or the Church’s salvific mission in its declaration of what the Church is called to do in this world. Francis, the Vicar of Christ, does not even mention Christ. [Not the first time, of course, a supposedly important if not seminal Bergoglian text fails to mention Christ or God.]
At the very beginning of his pontificate Francis declared: “The Church is not an NGO” — meaning a Non-Governmental Organization engaged in secular charitable work. [Well, they all start out purporting to be charitable but turn out to be being pressure groups and lobbies for assorted liberal causes! As for JMB's statement about NGOs, that is certainly one his most self-deluding statements, because that is exactly what he has since set forth to do with the Church - making what is now, for all intents and purposes, the church of Bergoglio, into the world's largest NGO bar none, as a willing tool of the second-largest NGO - the UN - with all his maniacal promotion of the most fashionable causes of 'the world' today.]
But what is one to think of a Church whose mission is being reformulated before our eyes to the following: “Go forth and promote integral human development, attending to the inestimable goods of justice, peace, and the care of creation.”
The “light of the Gospel” to which Francis refers is certainly not the light of salvation, without which souls are lost for all eternity. It is something else entirely; something that employs traditional [Scriptural] language to express revolutionary new meanings.
And it is the continuing, immensely destructive revolution in the Church that this pontificate has taken to a whole new level, no doubt hastening the day when God will intervene — in a most dramatic fashion — to bring the unparalleled crisis we now witness to an end.
After the initial 'now look what he's up to' spoofs of the new Bergoglian 'works of mercy' and our sins against the environment, a couple of serious commentaries did come out. The editor of LifeSite News places it all in a larger context.
But Vatican II said a pope cannot do
what this pope is doing: using Church
authority to express personal opinion
by John Henry Westen
Editor
September 2, 2016
Pope Francis’s recent message calling on Catholics to repent of “sins” against the environment seems to come with the fullness of Church authority, not in form but in content.
Although issued only as a papal message, it uses forceful language of repentance, forgiveness, and the need for conversion, to introduce a novel category of sin heretofore foreign to Catholic understanding.
And given that the science of global warming is still under hot contention, and indeed is a matter outside of the Church's competence, the Pope is simply not at liberty to require Catholics to adhere to it.
The Second Vatican Council taught, “It is necessary for people to remember that no one is allowed ( it did not make an exception for popes) to appropriate the Church's authority for his opinion” (Gaudium et Spes 43).
Pope Benedict XVI reiterated the same teaching even more explicitly, saying in 2011, “No one can claim to speak ‘officially’ in the name of the entire lay faithful, or of all Catholics, in matters freely open to discussion.”
Benedict noted that it is altogether appropriate, however, to insist on what he referred to as the non-negotiable matters.
In 2004, Pope Benedict (while still Cardinal Ratzinger) explained that while there are non-negotiable moral issues such as abortion and euthanasia, there are other issues where Catholics may legitimately differ even with the Pope.
“Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia,” he wrote. “For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion.”
Concluding the point, he said, “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 2007 Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis, Pope Benedict listed the non-negotiable Catholic values as “respect for human life, its defense from conception to natural death, the family built upon marriage between a man and a woman, the freedom to educate one’s children, and the promotion of the common good in all its forms.”
When Pope Francis first exhorted the faithful with forceful language to adhere to climate change theory in certain portions of his encyclical Laudato Si, high-ranking Vatican Cardinal George Pell pointed specifically to those portions as non-binding.
Speaking to the Financial Times in the wake of the encyclical, Cardinal Pell said, “The Church has no particular expertise in science . . . the Church has got no mandate from the Lord to pronounce on scientific matters."
But there are varied views in the Vatican about the authority of the Pope’s views on climate change. Argentine Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, a close adviser to Pope Francis and the chancellor of both the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, argued that the pope’s declarations on the gravity of global warming as expressed in the encyclical Laudato Si’ are magisterial teaching equivalent to the teaching that abortion is sinful. [Sanchez Sorondo has emerged as one of the more buffoonish court jesters in the immediate circle of his fellow Argentine Bergogloi.]
Father Robert Sirico, the Acton Institute's founder and president, contested Sorondo’s remarks. It is “important to underscore the distinction between the theological dimension of Laudato Si’ and its empirical, scientific, and economic claims,” he said. “The Church does not [and cannot] claim to speak with the same authority on matters of economics and science … as it does when pronouncing on matters of faith and morals.”
Commenting on the matter in an interview with LifeSiteNews, Father Joseph Fessio, SJ, the founder of Ignatius Press who obtained his doctorate in theology under Joseph Ratzinger, said, “Neither the pope nor Bishop Sorondo can speak on a matter of science with any binding authority, so to use the word ‘magisterium’ in both cases is equivocal at best, and ignorant in any case.”
Fr. Fessio added, “To equate a papal position on abortion with his position on global warming is worse than wrong; it is an embarrassment for the Church.”
On catholicculture.org, there is a double-barrelled attack on the two Bergoglian 'novelties of the week':
On Catholicism and environmentalism
Heading on an e-newsletter from
Jeff Mirus
Sept. 2, 2016
Pope Francis made news this week in two ways. First, he created a new dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. He named Cardinal Peter Turkson as president, but — in a rare move — reserved oversight of migrants and refugees to himself.
Second, and far more controversially, on the occasion of the 2016 World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation (an observance which the Pope created last year), Francis suggested that “care for our common home” (that is, the environment) should be added to both the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.
I parse and raise some questions about the Pope's frequent emphasis on the environment in "Catholics and the environment: Too easily misunderstood?"
As it turns out, both Phil Lawler and I believe trying to add care for the environment to the traditional list of corporal and spiritual works of mercy is a bad idea. We explain in these two pieces:
Catholics and the environment:
Too easily misunderstood?
By Jeff Mirus
Sept. 1, 2016
Pope Francis’s suggestion that care for the environment should be considered a work of mercy may not really require any comment. But I have the feeling that many will find this startling or confusing or distressing. If I’m correct, then there is reasonable cause to address the issue.
I’ve argued in the past (in The Moral Downside of Climate Change) that the problem with a Catholic embrace of environmentalism is that concern for the environment is often used today as a means of seizing the moral high ground, in effect shunting aside far more important moral requirements. In other words, environmentalism is too often a distraction from the hard work of self-analysis and personal reform.
But, of course, when the Church addresses the environment, she is not talking about environmentalism but about Catholicism. It is not [and should not be] a question of adopting the materialistic focus of the environmental movement, or its common failure to distinguish different orders of being, or its pessimism about humanity (which is inescapable without recognizing the nature of the person).
It is rather a question of recovering and applying the truth that all of nature is a gift created by God, and given to us as stewards to use, conserve and bring to fruition for the common good, thereby maximizing God’s glory.
Both Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI addressed environmental concerns in exactly this way, with the human person in the center of the Divine plan.
For example, in 2002 John Paul jointly promulgated a Common Declaration on Environmental Ethics with the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I. In his own encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’, Pope Francis expressed his debt to the Orthodox on this point. And as I explained at the time (in What Laudato Si’ is really about), the Pope’s primary purpose is not to take one side or another in scientific debates. [There's ueber-normalist Mirus speaking! Of course, JMB has clearly taken the wrong side of the scientific debate - and though that may not have been the primary purpose of Laudato si, it is its very premise and pretext - the horse driving the cart of the Bergoglian obsession with environmentalism that more and more borders on professing the Gaean faith of the New Age] Rather:
He argues that even though the problem is of concern to all, Christianity has something special to offer in its understanding that nature is a tremendous gift of a personal Creator, and that God has set man over this gift of nature to conserve and develop it for the purposes God has ordained.
The Pope insists that only if we begin again to see ourselves in relationship to God can we begin again to understand this gift of nature, its meaning, the gratitude it evokes, and the limits and ends it imposes on our stewardship.
Our news story on the Pope’s suggestion — that we should regard care of the environment as an authentic work of mercy — picks up these very same themes. [None of which is disputed by any right-thinking person who believes in God! What's at issue here is the consistently skewed Bergoglian priority/obsession for material and physical concerns over Jesus's injunction to "Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness..." i.e., If each person attends first and foremost to his own spiritual ecology, then his concern for physical ecology will inevitably follow.]
This is true both in Francis’s own remarks and in those of Cardinal Peter Turkson, a long-time proponent of environmental concern whom Francis recently appointed to lead the new dicastery for Integral Human Development. So again, comment may not really be necessary. In one sense, there is nothing untoward here — that is, nothing which should concern us about Catholicism In High Places. [Really???]
No, the problem remains what it has always been with this issue: It is extraordinarily difficult for Christians to avoid further secularization when they believe they are being encouraged by their spiritual leaders to ally themselves with powerful causes that are already championed by the world.
The environmental movement is dominated by secularists who neither recognize the spiritual component of the human person nor know the difference between a human person and an animal or plant.
In general, these people are quite wealthy. They are not prone to take significant sacrificial steps to change their own moral and behavioral flaws — the flaws which render even their environmentalism very selective. As often as not they see restrictions on the birth of new men and women as the key to saving “the environment”.
They do not recognize that the values and attitudes which are essential to proper care for the environment are exactly the same values and attitudes which lead people to respect and treasure all of God’s gifts.
I am referring here to the values and attitudes which lead us to understand and honor the purposes of human sexuality; to make lifetime commitments in marriage; to bear and raise children; to keep our families intact; to eschew divorce, contraception, abortion, pornography, gender theory, euthanasia, radical individualism, and personal luxury; in sum, to resist everything that disrupts the natural order, diminishes gratitude, and obscures the Divine plan.
All of these aberrations are not only theoretically but practically linked to environmental degradation. How many additional energy-consuming households do we have in the affluent West because people cannot stay married? How many persons, animals and plants are biologically degraded by the explosion of contraceptives? How much costly, energy-dependent sensual gratification is demanded by those who will not soothe their own restlessness in God?
People who cannot connect the dots in their most obvious and fundamental behavioral patterns will never — I repeat, never — succeed in caring properly for the environment.
This is simply impossible without learning to see with God’s eyes. And that is the danger implicit in every Catholic effort which is likely to be interpreted as being late to the party, as getting on board a secular train that has already left the station.
If Catholics are not prepared to explain that a proper care for the environment must be rooted in the love of God and obedience to His will in all things, then an emphasis on an apparently worldly initiative can do more harm than good.
With respect to the works of mercy, there is also a major danger in overshadowing the highly personal character of these works by including matters which, by their very nature, require prudential social policies to secure the common good.
I will address this on another day, but surely we can see how easy it is to reduce the concept of personal goodness to political correctness. In the contemporary West, it is a constant temptation to delegate our moral responsibility by voting, and then to criticize those who take a more personal view of their deepest responsibilities.
Does this mean that Pope Francis should not teach the truth about Creation and the care of the environment? Certainly not. This may well be a fruitful starting point in the secular world for a significant exploration of the facts of life. The Pope’s timely reflections on the relationship between science and truth are very pertinent here. [What reflections, exactly? How can he profess any such relation when he takes unsettled 'science' - for which far more evidence leans against climate catastrophism - for indisputable fact??? Because his prinjcipal advisers and ghostwriters on his environmental encyclical happen to be the foremost proponents of the pseudo-science of climate catastrophism?]
But the prudence of emphasizing the environment depends on whether the discussion has really been co-opted before it has even begun. It involves questions about the courage it takes to directly challenge the world by unpopular testimony, as opposed to the appearance of unseemly haste in adding a Christian voice to a gargantuan secular chorus. If Catholic intervention in the discussion of the environment does not make secularists uncomfortable—if it is not perceived by those who reject God as a rather troubling wedge—then the Church is better off emphasizing moral issues that cannot be so easily misunderstood.
It puzzles me that Phil Lawler still finds any Bergoglian novelty 'shocking', as this supposed pope's favorite tactic seems to be 'epater le monde et confondre les fideles' (shock the world and confuse the faithful) at every turn.
The Pope's shocking statement on the environment
By Phil Lawler
Sept 02, 2016
Pope Francis has often surprised, confused, and dismayed me. But nothing that he has said or done thus far in his pontificate has shocked me as much as his Message on World Day of Prayer for Creation.
What troubles me about that message is not the Pope’s call for care of the environment. Any Christian — any deist, for that matter — should recognize the moral obligation to be a good steward of Creation.
If hot-button political debates have predisposed some of us to be leery of environmentalist rhetoric, all the more reason for a Roman Pontiff to seek a different perspective, more consistent with the faith.
Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI made their own strong appeals for ecological sensitivity. Although at times their statements made me uncomfortable [What exactly did they say that did so???], I could not disagree with their overall thrust. (And it is not the responsibility of Vicar of Christ to keep me comfortable; quite the contrary.)
Pope Francis developed these same arguments in greater depth, and with greater vigor, in Laudato Si’. While I had some reservations about some sections of that encyclical, I could and did accept the basic message.
So again — I stress the point because I don’t want to be caught up in the wrong argument — I am not disputing the Pope’s argument that Christians should exercise greater care for the environment. What troubles me is another, more specific aspect of this message: the assertion that care for the environment should be understood as one of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.
Many of the public statements that Pope Francis has issued have raised eyebrows. More than a few have struck me as imprudent, even fundamentally misguided. But in every previous case, the Pope’s statements could be interpreted so as to conform to previous Church teaching.
If his statements had caused confusion — and many of them had — a future clarification could resolve the problem. [Not that any clarifications have always been forthcoming, nor that any so-called clarifications have done other than to compound the confusion, much less 'resolve the problem'!]
But now Pope Francis has added to the traditional lists of corporal and spiritual works of mercy. Unless we simply ignore his statement, young Catholics of future generations will be taught that there are eight works in each category. Alongside feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, there will be listed caring for the environment. Alongside instructing the ignorant and admonishing sinners, there again will be…what, exactly? 'caring for the environment? That change cannot easily be undone.
Let me pause here to confess that I was shocked — I might even say scandalized — when St. John Paul II altered the Rosary by adding the Luminous Mysteries. Could he do that, I wondered? Could a Pope, on his on initiative, without consultation, change a great Catholic tradition? [He did not exactly 'change' it by omitting parts of it or amending the way it is prayed , but he added to it in a positive way - and who could have or would have quibbled his choice of the mysteries he added? My wonder then was that they had not been included to begin with!] And wouldn’t the addition of the five new mysteries upset the ancient pattern in which the 150 Hail Mary’s reflected the 150 Psalms of the Divine Office?
Out of a sense of docility, and not without reluctance, I tried praying the new Luminous Mysteries, and found that they added to my appreciation of the Rosary, and of how our Lord gradually pulled back the veil that hid his divine Nature. Looking back now, I see the addition as entirely organic, enriching the contemplation of the life of Christ.
But in adding to the list of works of mercy, Pope Francis is putting things — virtuous actions, I will concede — in a category where they do not belong. When the Pope recommends turning off unnecessary lights, for example, he is making an unarguably positive suggestion; it is a good thing to do. But it is not a work of mercy, as we have always understood that term.
The works of mercy — as they were understood until yesterday — all have a human person as both subject and object. The object was a person in some kind of need. The subject was you or me: a person challenged to imitate Christ by filling that need.
In the new works that Pope Francis puts forward, the object is the natural environment, not a human soul. And I fear that many people, reading this message, will conclude that the government should make laws to protect the environment — so that the government is the subject, rather than you and me.
Yes, each of us can do his own part to care for the environment — and let me say it yet again, I fully endorse that proposition. But when it is reduced to a matter of turning off lights and joining car pools and separating paper from plastics, that recommendation, however benign, seems somehow beneath the dignity of the papal office.
There is a real danger that by plunging into this sort of mundane specificity, the Pope will dilute the authority of his own teaching office — a danger that his condemnations of blasphemy and abortion will be taken as the same sort of “nice” suggestions as his call for car pools.
Please notice — one last time — that in this brief essay I have not questioned the science behind some of the Pope’s arguments — although I do see legitimate questions to be asked at another time. My concern here is exclusively with the Pope’s willingness to raise environmental concerns to the level of the works of mercy.
Proper stewardship of the environment is a legitimate concern for Christians: a moral imperative. But it is not one of the two great commandments to love God and love our neighbors.
[My point earlier. Nor is it among the Ten Commandments.
Anyway, isn't it troubling that in all the preaching and exhorting JMB does to promote his secular obsessions, he consistently ignores the priority of God - which both the Ten Commandments and Jesus's Great Commandment place above concern for ourselves and others. It seems that for him, God is primarily someone who gives infinitely to his creatures, and whom we should implore for mercy and forgiveness. And what about the three duties we have to God before that, the intentions with which we offer every prayer to God?
1. To adore Thee and give Thee the honor which is due to Thee, who art our one and last end;
2. To thank Thee for the graces and benefits we have received;
3. To appease Thy justice, aroused by our many sins, and to make satisfaction for them;
And only then,
4. To implore grace and mercy for myself and those near to me, for Thy Church, for all afflicted and sorrowing,
for all sinners, for all the world and for the holy souls in Purgatory.
JMB's preaching, in its exclusive focus on the materially poor and afflicted, seems to consistently ignore Matthew 6,25 ("Seek first the Kingdom of God...") and thereby, the entire mission of the Church according to Christ's specific mandate.
He has now subsumed his abiding attention to man's physical and material needs, to his mantra 'caring for our common home' as a priority if we are to able to help each other, a priority which, in his theology, appears akin to worshipping the pagan deity Gaea, Mother Earth. (His fellow catastrophists certainly do!)]
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Teresa of Kolkata,
'saint of the gutters',
now officially a saint
by Nicole Winfield
VATICAN CITY, Sept. 4, 2016 (AP) — Elevating the "saint of the gutters" to one of the Catholic Church's highest honors, Pope Francis on Sunday praised Mother Teresa for her radical dedication to society's outcasts and her courage in shaming world leaders for the "crimes of poverty they themselves created." [Yet another tendentious fiction from JMB!... BTW, I believe Mother Teresa is also the first Nobel Prize winner to have become a saint., a unique conjunction of secular good sense and sancity.]
An estimated 120,000 people filled St. Peter's Square for the canonization ceremony, less than half the number who turned out for her 2003 beatification. It was nevertheless the highlight of Francis's Holy Year of Mercy and quite possibly one of the defining moments of his mercy-focused papacy. [A downside to the event is the obvious exploitation of it - by the Vatican and the Bergogliophile media - to promote JMB's entire mercy campaign. Even if a quick search of quotations from Mother Teresa shows she used the word love, primarily, and secondarily, compassion, to describe her drive - mercy being, of course, just one aspect of love.]
Born Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu on Aug. 26, 1910, Teresa came to India in 1929 as a sister of the Loreto order. In 1946, she received what she described as a "call within a call" to found a new order dedicated to caring for the most unloved and unwanted, the "poorest of the poor" in the slums of her adopted city, Kolkata.
The Missionaries of Charity order went on to become one of the most well-known in the world, with more than 4,000 sisters in their trademark blue-trimmed white saris doing as Teresa instructed: "small things with great love."
At the order's Mother House in Kolkata, hundreds of people watched the Mass on TV and clapped with joy when Francis declared her a saint. They gathered around Teresa's tomb which was decorated with flowers, a single candle and a photo of the wrinkled saint.
"I am so proud to be from Kolkata," said Sanjay Sarkar, a high school student on hand for the celebration. "Mother Teresa belonged to Kolkata, and she has been declared a saint."...
Teresa's most famous critic, [the late] Christopher Hitchens, has accused her of taking donations from dictators — charges church authorities deny. Francis chose to emphasize her other dealings with the powerful.
"She made her voice heard before the powers of the world, so that they might recognize their guilt for the crimes of poverty they themselves created," he said, repeating for emphasis "the crimes of poverty." [Not that she ever sounded that sanctimonious. And I must check whether she ever used the term 'crimes of poverty' in the sense of actions committed by some that result in the mass poverty of others.]
Hundreds of Missionaries of Charity sisters had front-row seats at the Mass, alongside 1,500 homeless people and 13 heads of state or government and even royalty: [former] Queen Sofia of Spain. For the homeless, Francis offered a luncheon afterward in the Vatican auditorium, catered by a Neapolitan pizza maker who brought his own
While big, the crowd attending the canonization wasn't even half of the 300,000 who turned out for Mother Teresa's 2003 beatification celebrated by an ailing St. John Paul II. The low turnout suggested that financial belt-tightening and security fears in the wake of Islamic extremist attacks in Europe may have kept pilgrims away. [Could it also be a sign that the Bergoglio effect is not all that positive, just that the Bergoglio-captive media refuses to acknowledge it? He brought the body of Padre Pio to the Vatican to help launch his Year of Mercy but the turnout, even for Italy's most popular saint, was as disappointing as today. Of course, it's convenient to blame security concerns.]
Those fears prompted a huge, 3,000-strong law enforcement presence to secure the area around the Vatican and close the airspace above. Many of those security measures have been in place for the duration of the Jubilee year, which officially ends in November.
While Francis is clearly keen to hold Teresa up as a model for her joyful dedication to the poor, he was also recognizing holiness in a nun who lived most of her adult life in spiritual agony, sensing that God had abandoned her.
According to correspondence that came to light after she died in 1997, Teresa experienced what the church calls a "dark night of the soul" — a period of spiritual doubt, despair and loneliness that many of the great mystics experienced. In Teresa's case, it lasted for nearly 50 years — an almost unheard of trial.
For the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who spearheaded Teresa's saint-making campaign [and editor of that book of letters], the revelations were further confirmation of Mother Teresa's heroic saintliness.
"If I'm going to be a saint, I'm going to be a saint of darkness, and I'll be asking from heaven to be the light of those who are in darkness on Earth," she once wrote.
Teresa's Missionaries of Charity went on to become a global order of nuns, priests, brothers and lay co-workers. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and died in 1997. Soon thereafter, John Paul placed her on the fast-track for sainthood.
Francis has confessed that he was somewhat intimidated by Teresa, knowing well she was as tough as she was tender. He quipped during a 2014 visit to Albania that he would never have wanted her as his superior because she was so firm with her sisters.
But on Sunday, he admitted that even he would find it hard to call her "St. Teresa," since her tenderness was so maternal.
"Spontaneously, we will continue to say 'Mother Teresa,'" he said to applause.
And now, a personal aside:
I had the most unusual and unexpected spiritual experience today at the traditional Sunday Mass at Holy Innocents Church, when after the Mass, our parish priest, Fr. Miara, blessed each and every person who walked up to the communion rail (everyone in church did, of course) by touching our forehead or lips with a reliquary containing a first-class relic of St. Teresa of Kolkata on the day she was canonized, also anticipating her first feast day as saint tomorrow, Sept. 5, 19 years since she died. Her canonization portrait was displayed on the right side of the altar area, just in front of the communion rail.
Unworthy as I am, I had the unmerited grace to have been presented face to face, albeit briefly - in the course of journalistic assignments - to the two most famous and recent contemporary saints when they were alive: John Paul II on five occasions (thrice in Rome, twice in Manila), and Mother Teresa once (Manila in 1975 or 1976).
To my eternal regret, that single encounter was not what I had hoped it would be. She had come to Manila to inaugurate one of her missionary centers and paid a brief courtesy call on the Governor of Metro Manila (at the time, it was Imelda Marcos). As Mrs. Marcos always did, she presented everyone present in the room, including her official aide, to her guest of honor. The little nun seemed tired, but as she shook my hand, she said "God bless you".
My greatest disappointment was that during the few minutes I observed her in the room before we were sent out, so she and Mrs. Marcos could talk in private, I failed to sense the aura of holiness I expected, similar to what John Paul II radiated (apart from his personal charisma). Perhaps it was made worse because in those few minutes, she was quite formal and never smiled. In fact, I thought I glimpsed some bitterness - something I did not expect to feel in the presence of someone who, even then, was already considered a living saint.
I thought at the time that maybe it was her way of showing her disapproval of the Marcoses. Perhaps yes, that too. But in 2007, when her spiritual adviser released his book Mother Teresa: Come be my light - letters she wrote over a 66-year-period revealed that Mother Teresa did not feel the presence of God in her life for nearly 50 years, something, of course, no one had reason to even suspect!
From a review of the book in Sept. 2007:
Mother Mary Teresa spent 17 years in Calcutta, teaching with a group of uncloistered Sisters, before traveling to Darjeeling in 1946, at the age of 36. During that trip, she believed that Christ spoke to her and called her to work with the sick, the poor, and the dying. Mother Teresa was able to recount conversations she had with Christ, and even recounted her visions of him.
Based on her revelations to her Mother General, her confessor, and even the Pope, she was granted permission to begin her one-woman crusade. It was then that Mother Teresa felt Jesus leave her and stop speaking to her.
"Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love — and now become as the most hated one — the one — You have thrown away as unwanted — unloved. I call, I cling, I want — and there is no One to answer — no One on Whom I can cling — no, No One. — Alone ...
Where is my Faith — even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness — My God — how painful is this unknown pain — I have no Faith — I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart — & make me suffer untold agony.
"
So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?
— Addressed to Jesus, at the suggestion of a confessor, undated
According to her letters, Mother Teresa felt Christ did not communicate with her for the next ten years. It wasn't until after the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958, when Teresa prayed that God would give her some proof that he was "pleased with Society", that she felt the long years of darkness end.
But it was only to be for a brief time, no more than five weeks, before her period of spiritual darkness returned, and continued until her death on Sept. 5, 1997.
Perhaps the moment I glimpsed was an all-too-human reflection of her own 'despair' over what she felt to be the absence of God in her life. Yet, as the book review continues:
The absence of Christ's voice in her life never swayed her from her mission. She remained committed to him and the work he gave her, faithfully and without question.
The Rev. Matthew Lamb, chairman of the theology department at Ave Maria University, says this about the book's impact on society:
It may be remembered as just as important as her ministry to the poor. It would be a ministry to people who had experienced some doubt, some absence of God in their lives. And you know who that is? Everybody. Atheists, doubters, seekers, believers, everyone.
Mother Teresa lived a private Calvary that perhaps God only wills on rare privileged souls who are able to meet such a superhuman challenge to one's faith.
Needless to say, I have spent all these years since she died asking her forgiveness for the far-from-happy thoughts I had harbored about her. Since she was beatified, she has of course joined the pantheon of my patron saints - Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, and Teresita de los Andes (of Chile) - all four being Carmelites, and not surprisingly, because each preceding saint influenced those who followed her example and became saints in their turn. Teresa of Kolkata also began as a sister in a missionary order dedicated to Our Lady (the Sisters of Loreto).
When my lips touched her reliquary today, I felt I have been forgiven by her.
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September 4, 2016 headlines
Canon212.com
As you can see, Frank Walker at C212 chooses to indulge his penchant for a derisive blockbusting teaser-headline, in the matter of Mother
Teresa's canonization today, but he does have a couple of interesting 'off-topic' items, whereaqshis former colleagues at PewSitter choose to
concentrate on listing the major stories on the canonization with minimal 'editorializing'...
PewSitter
We would all do well to join Father Z in this initiative...
“I ask St. Teresa of Calcutta
to intercede with God for…”
by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf
Sept. 4, 2016
On this first day on which Mother Teresa of Calcutta has been elevated to the altars of the whole Church, let us all ask her intercession for some pressing needs for our respective nations, especially for these USA.
In particular I ask St. Teresa of Calcutta to intercede with God for the conversion, or the failure, of Fishwrap. I ask St. Teresa to intercede with God for the conversion, or the failure, of the dems’ presidential candidate. I ask St. Teresa to intercede with God for the conversion, or the utter failure, of Islamic terrorists.
And I add this fervent plea: I ask the new St. Teresa to intercede with God for the re-conversion to genuine Catholicism of the pope who presided at her canonization and the failure of all his misguided anti-Catholic initiatives, including his apotheosis of Martin Luther.[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 05/09/2016 00:24] |
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Right photo: Cardinal Caffarra is greeted by the Bishop of Pavia, Mons. Corrado Sanguineti.
Thanks to Lella and her blog 
for leading me to this item, looking back to the most recent Solemnity of St. Augustine, August 28, as it was observed in Pavia, northern Italy, where his mortal remains repose in the Basilica di San Pieto in Ciel d'Oro, and the homily delivered at the Solemn Pontifical Mass by Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, emeritus Bishop of Bologna, and one of the cardinals whose defense of the family and sacramental marriage before the first Bergoglian family synod in 2014 led to the famous 'Five Cardinals' book, Remaining in the Truth of Christ.
In 1981, after John Paul II's 1980 Synod on the family (from which came Familiaris consortio) Caffarra - a moral theologian who had specialized in the moral doctrine of marriage and the bioethics of procreation - was named by the pope to head the new John Paul II Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family at the Lateran University, going on to establish daughter institutes around the world. Caffarra led the Institute till 1995, when he was named Archbishop of Ferrara-Comacchio (when, fittingly, his principal consecrator was Cardinal Giacomo Biffi.)
He was succeeded by Cardinal Angelo Scola (1995-2002), who went on to become Patriarch of Venice, then Mons. Salvatore Fisichella (2002-2006), who then became President of the Pontifical Council for the new Evangelization; ff by Mons. Livio Melina, recently replaced by Pope Francis with an ultra-liberal monsignor more in tune with the new Bergoglian bosses at the superdicastery of the life, family and the laity.
In 2003, Caffarra was named Archbishop of Bologna, and was made cardinal by Benedict XVI in March 2006. He stayed on in Bologna till his retirement at age 75 in October 2015. (Under any pope but JMB, a bishop like Caffarra would have been kept on till he was 80!)
In 1988, he told the New York Times, commenting on the use of condoms, that acting in accord with morality outweighed any potential "physical harm": "Even the smallest moral wrong is so much greater than any physical wrong. I know this is hard for some to accept when the dangers are great, but the church is here to combat moral wrongs."
In February 2010, he wrote that "public officials who openly support same-sex marriage cannot consider themselves to be Catholic". He said: "It's impossible for the Catholic faith and support for putting homosexual unions on equal footing with marriage to coexist in one's conscience – the two contradict each other."
NB: As August 28 was a Sunday, I cannot find the particular Mass celebrated in Pavia which must have been specific to St. Augustine's feast day as it was celebrated in the evening. Therefore, I do not have a direct source for the readings Cardinal Caffarra refers to in the homily, even if I did manage to track down most of the passages... Thanks to Wikipedia for the biodata on the cardinal, and to the Augustinian site in Pavia for the photographs.
Here is a translation of the homily:
HOMILY BY CARDINAL CARLO CAFFARRA
Solemnity of St. Augustine
Pavia, August 28, 2016
...I consider it a great gift from the Lord to allow me to celebrate this Holy Eucharist by the mortal remains of Augustine, Father of the Church and of the West.
I owe this honor to the benevolence of your Most Excellent Bishop who is young in age but not in wisdom. Thank you, dearest brother.
1. Dear brothers and sisters, altogether, the three readings we just heard have presented us the reality of the Church in her historical condition.
The Church, as we are told in the first reading, is human unity reconstructed through obedience to the teachings of the Apostles and the ‘breaking of the bread’, that is, the Eucharistic celebration. The unequivocal expression of the re-established unity in faith and the sacraments is the disappearance of the categories ‘mine’ and ‘yours’: “They held everything in common”.
If from the first reading we go to the Gospel page, the presentation of the Church becomes quite dramatic. Alongside the loving and attractive figure of the Good Shepherd, rapacious wolves are keeping pace, intending to get into the Lord’s flock in order to ‘capture and disperse’ the sheep. And in the face of the wolves, mercenary shepherds flee in fear from the danger.
But the second reading is even more dramatic. It pre-announces for the Church that “the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine but, following their own desires and insatiable curiosity, will stop listening to the truth and will be diverted to myths.” (2 Tim 3,4).
Dear friends, the contrast could not be more violent: between a Church built on listening to the teaching of the Apostles ,and a Church pervaded by the ‘itch to hear anything different’, listening to confabulators, people ‘following their own desires’.
At this point, we must not commit the error of listening to the Word of God in a ‘chronological’ sense, as if each of the three readings were narrating about different historical periods of the Church – as though a Church that was holy and immaculate at the start has become over time a corrupt and worldly Church. No, this is not what the Word of God is telling us. What then? We begin by going to the school of your Holy Patron Saint who responds to our question in a very beautiful text.
Augustine comments on the Biblical text which narrates the mysterious struggle between Jacob and the angel, from which the father of the Jewish people emerges blessed by God but he will limp for the rest of his life. So Augustine writes: “Jacob’s injury represents the bad Christians, because in the same man, there is God’s blessing as well as lameness… Now the Church is limping. It rests firmly on one foot, but on the other, it is an invalid” (Disc. 5,8; NBA XXIX, pp. 94-95]
The Church which the first reading refers to is the same Church that Paul speaks of in the second reading. The true Church and what we can call the Church of day-to-day is the same reality. It is the same Church which, like Jacob, rests firmly on one foot but limps with the other. A great English writer once said, "For saints and sinners alone, there is the Catholic Church. For respectable people, the Anglican Church will do”. (Oscar Wilde)
“That is why,” Augustine writes, “the Church of Christ has faithful who are firm in their faith, but it also has those who vacillate. The Church cannot be without those whose faith is stable, nor can it be without the unstable”. (Disc. 76, 3.4; NBA XXX/1, P.519)
2. How should we live within our home which is the Church in which, as Augustine has said, there are Christians who are strong in their faith and weak ones?
The Word of God we heard answers this question, addressing distinctly we who are pastors and you, the faithful.
To us shepherds: “Dearest ones… announce the Word, insist on it at every occasion whether opportune or not, admonish, reprove, exhort with doctrine in all magnanimity… Fulfill your task as the announcer of the Gospel”. What tremendous words are addressed to us pastors!
And to the faithful, Augustine says: “Listen [to your pastors] with attention, and we will listen to you with awe… You must listen like the flock of God and observe how God has kept you safe. Whatever be the behavior of whoever is leading you – namely, us, bishops – you will always be safe because of the security that the Shepherd of Israel has given you. God does not abandon his flock.” (Disc. 46,1…2; NBA XXIX, pp. 796-797).
Our cities, our nation, our Europe is going through a mortal crisis. The symbol of this agony is the icy demographic winter that we are experiencing. The Word that God addresses to us shepherds leads us to ask some questions.
Are we fulfilling our task of announcing the Gospel, or do we limit ourselves to exhorting our people to good moral sentiments such as tolerance, openness and welcome?
We must not be deaf to the true need, the consuming need, in the hearts of men and women who are experiencing the dark and sorrowful days that we are experiencing. We shepherds must not be deaf to the anguish cried out from the hearts of mothers and fathers who can only think fearfully about the future of their children.
It is necessary that the pastors of the Church bear witness to God, to say that in every instant, in every event, there is a Presence, a host who guides everything that happens for the good of those whom God loves.
As long as the Eucharist can be celebrated on our spiritual ruins, we can rise again, and we can leave pious moral exhortations to others.
When on August 24, 410, Alaric, king of the Visigoths, sacked Rome, in the general bewilderment – because this had not happened since the Gallic king-warrior Brenno in 390 B.C. – St. Jerome wrote: “The city that had occupied the whole world is now occupied” (Lettera a Principia CXXVII,12; CSEL, t. LVI, pag.154, 16). He adds with great anguish: “In just one city, the whole world has been lost”. Jerome could not see a future.
But Augustine’s reaction was very different. It was not that he suffered less the news that was coming from Rome. “Horrendous things have been reported: massacres, fires, robberies, murders, tortures… We have groaned at it all; often, we have wept, and we have barely managed to comfort each other”. (Discourse on the fall of Rome, 6, PL 40, 715-724)
Yet he brought to completion his book THE CITY OF GOD, a genuine milestone of our civilization. The holy bishop taught his people the right way to place themselves within history – and on the ruins of empire, he sowed the seeds of a new civilization.
What Augustine desired, what he wanted, was to transmit genuine hope at a time when the Roman empire, and within it, his own Africa, was collapsing. On his deathbed, he learned that the Vandals had entered Rome.
He transmitted hope based on faith, the faith that allowed him – after renouncing his plan to retire in prayer and study – to be capable of true participation in the edification of the Church and of his city. The hope that Augustine transmitted was unshakeable, because he was sure that God had come to live for himself our tormented human existence and had saved us from within. It is this God who gives us the right to hope - not just any god, but only the God who has a human face because he himself became man.
And so the Lord will keep away empty words from our lips as shepherds and replace them with words of truth.
2.2. The Word of God is also addressed to you the faithful, telling you: “Do not be among those who no longer tolerate sound doctrine, but are always itching to hear something new. Do not surround yourselves with teachers telling you what you want to hear, nor stop listening to the truth and turn instead to myths”.
It is Jesus in the Gospel who speaks words of comfort to you. He says, “I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture”. (Jn 10,9).
Here is how Augustine explains it. “We can say that we enter when we gather ourselves in, interiorly, in order to think, and that we go out when we externalize our thought through action. And since, as the Apostle says, it is through faith that Christ lives in our heart, entering Christ means thinking in the light of the faith, while going out for him means translating our faith into action before men”. (Commentary on the Gospel of John, 45,15; NBA XXIV, p.913]
And that, dear faithful, is what the Good Shepherd tells us: “Think in the light of the faith, then translate your faith into deeds”.
I shall conclude. In one of his writings against the Manichaeans [of whom he was once a member], Augustine discloses the reasons that he remains the Church: “I am sustained firmly in the Church by the consensus of peoples and individuals. I am sustained firmly by the authority arising from Christ’s miracles, nurtured by hope, augmented by love, and confirmed by antiquity. I am sustained firmly by the succession of Bishops on the same Chair of Peter… to the present Supreme Pontiff. Finally, I am sustained firmly by the very name ‘Catholic’.” (Contro la Lettera di Mani detta del Fondamento 4.5; NBA XIII/2, p.307). [I’ve tried to look for an English translation online of this passage, but can find none, so this is the best translation I can do.]
Dear faithful, listen to your Patron Saint. In these times of serious uncertainty, keep yourselves firmly in the Church. We have true and beautiful reasons to do so. It is in the Church that we encounter our Savior.
In other words, do not allow yourself to be pushed out of our Church by those who appear to have the upper hand right now because they have the reins of power. They are even worse than the limping Catholics Augustine spoke of - they are the very wolves - but the one true Church of Christ is our Church, and the wolves shall not devour her as they please.
Bottom right: Cardinal Caffarra kisses the urn containing the remains of St. Augustine. The urn is normally kept in a lower compartment of the ornate stone sculpture
that forms the saint's tomb; it is brought out only on special occasions.
P.S. While the Cardinal confined himself to general statements in the admonitions he stressed during the homily above, a more explicit account of his thinking today on the major questions about this pontificate is an interview he gave to Maike Hickson in July, which I had saved on my worksite to post, but which it turns out I never did. But since much of what he says is timeless truth, the interview for those who have not seen it before is really news.
Cardinal Caffarra on marriage, family,
AL and confusion in the Church
Interview by
MAIKE HICKSON
July 11, 2016
Editor’s Note: The following is an exclusive interview with Cardinal Carlo Caffara, conducted by OnePeterFive’s Dr. Maike Hickson. It was in a letter to Cardinal Caffarra that Sister Lucia of Fatima revealed that “the final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family.”
My addendum: This is what Cardinal Caffarra revealed in 2008 about Sister Lucia's letter to him:
At the start of the work entrusted to me by the Servant of God John Paul II, [to head the newly created Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family in 1981], I wrote to Sister Lucia of Fatima through her Bishop as I couldn’t do so directly.
Unexplainably however, since I didn’t expect an answer, seeing that I had only asked for prayers, I received a very long letter with her signature – now in the Institute’s archives. In it we find written: "The final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family... Don’t be afraid, because 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". And then she concluded: "However, Our Lady has already crushed its head."
You spoke, in a recent interview, about the papal exhortation 'Amoris Laetitia', saying that Chapter 8 is especially unclear and has already caused confusion even among the bishops. If you had the chance to speak with Pope Francis about this matter, what would you tell him? What would your recommendation be as to what Pope Francis could and should now do, given that there is so much confusion?
In AL 308, the Holy Father Francis writes: “I understand those who prefer a more rigorous pastoral care which leaves no room for confusion.” I infer from these words that His Holiness realizes that the teachings of the Exhortation could give rise to confusion in the Church.
Personally, I wish – and that is how so many of my brothers in Christ (cardinals, bishops, and the lay faithful alike) also think – that the confusion should be removed, but not because I prefer a more rigorous pastoral care, but because, rather, I simply prefer a clearer and less ambiguous pastoral care.
That said – with all due respect, affection, and devotion that I feel the need to nourish toward the Holy Father – I would tell him: “Your Holiness, please clarify these points.
a) How much of what Your Holiness has said in footnote 351 of paragraph 305 is also applicable to the divorced and remarried couples who wish still anyway to continue to live as husband and wife; and thus how much of what was taught by Familiaris Consortio No. 84, by Reconciliatio Poenitentia No. 34, by Sacramentum unitatis No. 29, by the Catechism of the Catholic Church No. 1650, and by the common theological doctrine, is now to be considered abrogated?
b) The constant teaching of the Church – as reiterated by John Paul II in Veritatis splendor No. 79 – is that there are negative moral norms which allow of no exceptions, because they prohibit acts which are intrinsically dishonorable and dishonest – such as, for example, adultery. Is this traditional teaching still believed to be true, even after Amoris Laetitia?”
This is what I would say to the Holy Father. If the Holy Father, in his supreme judgment, would have the intention to intervene publicly in order to remove this confusion, he has at his disposition many different means to do so.
You are also a moral theologian. What is your advice to confused Catholics concerning the moral teaching of the Catholic Church on marriage and the family? What is an authoritatively, well-formed conscience when it comes to issues such as contraception, divorce and “remarriage,” as well as homosexuality?
The condition in which marriage finds itself today in the West is simply tragic. Civil laws have changed the definition, because they have eradicated the biological dimension of the human person. They have separated the biology of generation from the genealogy of the person. But I shall speak about this later.
To Catholic faithful who are confused about the Doctrine of the Faith concerning marriage, I simply say: “Read and meditate upon the Catechism of Catholic Church nn.1601-1666. And when you hear some talk about marriage – even if done by priests, bishops, cardinals – and you then verify that it is not in conformity with the Catechism, do not listen to them. They are the blind leading the blind.”
Could you explain to us, in this context, the moral concept that nothing that is ambiguous is binding upon the Catholic conscience, and especially so when it is proven to be intentionally ambiguous?
Logic teaches us that a proposition is ambiguous when it can be interpreted in two different and/or contrary meanings. It is obvious that such a proposition can have neither our theoretical assent nor our practical consent, because it does not have a sure and clear meaning.
In order to help Catholics in this time of much ambiguous equivocation and “mental reservation,” would there be something that Pope Pius XII could still especially teach us, concerning the questions of marriage and divorce, and on the forming of the little children unto Eternal Life, since he has so amply written about these matters?
The Magisterium of Pius XII on marriage and child-rearing was very rich and frequent. And in fact, after Holy Scripture, he is the author who is most quoted by Vatican II. It seems to me that there are two speeches which are particularly important to answer your question.
The first is the “Radio address on the correct formation of a Christian conscience in the young,” March 23, 1952, in AAS vol. 44,270-278. The second is the “Allocution to the Fédération Mondiale des Jeunesses Feminines Catholiques,” ibid. 413-419. This latter is of great magisterial importance: for, it deals with situation ethics.
The German Jesuit, Father Klaus Mertes, just said in an interview with a German newspaper that the Catholic Church “should now help to establish a human right to homosexuality.” What should be the proper response of the Church to such a proposal? To include the fitting disciplinary sanction, as well as the moral doctrine.
I honestly cannot understand how a Catholic theologian can think and write about a human right to homosexuality. In the precise sense, a (individual) right is a morally legitimate and legally protected faculty to perform an action. The exercise of homosexuality is inherently irrational and hence dishonest. A Catholic theologian cannot – may not – think that the Church must strive to “establish a human right to homosexuality.”
More fundamentally, to what extent may men have a human right – eg., a claim in justice – to do what is wrong in the eyes of God, such as, for example, practicing polygamy?
The issue of individual rights has now changed substantially in its meaning. A right is now identified with personal desires. But we do not have here the space to address this issue from the human legislator’s point of view.
The cardinal chose to answer the ff inter-prelated questions synthetically:
Since Father Mertes has stressed in his interview the importance of separating procreation from the marriage act in order to make the way free for homosexuality – could you explain to us the traditional moral teaching of the Church about the ordered ends of marriage and the primacy of the procreation and education of children for Heaven?
Why is procreation such an important purpose of marriage? Why could it not be that the mutual love and respect between the couple come first and should take precedence? Do you see practical consequences if one inverts the ends of marriage – namely, if one puts mutual love and respect above procreation of children for Heaven?
I would prefer to give a synthesizing answer to these questions. In fact, they touch upon one big question which is of fundamental importance for the life of the Church and of civil society.
The relationship between the aspects of conjugal love on the one side, and of the procreation and education of children on the other, is a correlation, the philosophers would say. That is to say: it is a relationship of interdependence between two distinct realities.
Conjugal love which is sexually expressed when the two spouses become one flesh is the only place ethically worthy of giving life to a new human person. The capacity to give life to a new human person is inscribed in the exercise of conjugal sexuality, which is the spousal language of reciprocal self-giving between the spouses. In short: conjugality and the gift of life are inseparable.
What happened especially after the Council? Against the teaching of the Council itself, many in the Church insisted so much on conjugal love, that procreation was considered merely to be the collateral consequence of the conjugal act.
Blessed Paul VI corrected such a view in the encyclical Humanae Vitae judging it to be contrary to right reason and to the faith of the Church. And St. John Paul II, in the last part of his beautiful Catechesis on Human Love [better known as the Theology of the Body] showed the anthropological foundation of the teaching of his predecessor: namely, the act of contraception is objectively a lie that is said with the spousal language of the body.
What are the consequences of the rejection of this teaching? The first and most serious consequence was the separation between sexuality and procreation. One started with “sex without babies,” and one arrived at “babies without sex”: the separation is complete.
The biology of generation is separated from the genealogy of the person. This leads to “producing” children in the laboratory; and to the affirmation of the (supposed) right to a child. Nonsense. There is no right to a person, but only to things.
At this point, all the premises has been laid to 'ennoble' homosexual conduct, because one no longer sees its intimate irrationality, and all the serious and intrinsic dishonesty of the homosexual union. And so we have come to change the definition of marriage because we have uprooted it from the biology of the person. Really, Humanae Vitae has been a great prophecy!
What is, in its essence, the purpose of marriage and the family?
It is the legitimate union of one single man and one single woman with a view to procreation and the education of children. If the two spouses are baptized, this reality itself [of sacramental marriage] – becomes a real symbol of the Christ-Church union. It gives the married couple a status in the public life of the Church, with a ministry of their own: the transmission of the faith to their children.
In the context of the current increase in moral confusion: to what extent does religious indifferentism (eg., the claim that one can be saved in whatever religion) lead to moral relativism? To be more specific, if one religion favors polygamy but claims itself to be 'salvific', then is polygamy not wrong or nillicit, after all? [Any religion may claim to be 'salvific', but if it is not Christianity as practised by the Roman Catholic Church, then it cannot be 'salvific' in the sense of saving souls.]
Relativism is like a metastasis. If you agree to its principles, each human experience, be it personal or social, will be or will become corrupt.
The teaching of Blessed John Henry Newman has great actuality here. Toward the end of his life, he said that the pathogen that corrupts the religious sense and moral conscience, is “the liberal principle,” as he calls it. That is to say, the belief that with regard to the worship we owe to God, it is irrelevant what we think of Him; the belief that all religions have the same value. [Which is what our supposed pope affirms at every chance he gets. If that were so, then anyone, including the Dalai Lama - a Buddhist who does not believe in any God or Supreme Being (though I am not sure JMB understands that about Buddhism, or he would not have included a Buddhist in his "We all believe in God' video) - would be eligible to become pope.
Newman considers the liberal principle thus understood as being completely contrary to what he calls “the dogmatic principle,” which is the basis of the Christian proposition and affirmation. From religious relativism to moral relativism, there is only a short step. There is thereby no problem in the fact that one religion justifies polygamy, and another condemns it. In fact, there thus purportedly exists no absolute truth about what is good and what is bad.
Would you like to make a comment about Cardinal Christoph Schönborn’s recent remark that AL is binding doctrine and that all the previous magisterial documents concerning marriage and the family have now to be read in its light?
I reply with two simple observations.
The first observation is: one should not only read the previous Magisterium on marriage in the light of AL, but one should also AL in the light of the previous Magisterium. The logic of the Living Tradition of the Church is bipolar: it has two directions, not one. [Taking up from what the Cardinal pointed out earlier as the logical argument: "A proposition is ambiguous when it can be interpreted in two different and/or contrary meanings. It is obvious that such a proposition can have neither our theoretical assent nor our practical consent, because it does not have a sure and clear meaning": Being ambiguous by design and intention, all the carefully constructed casuistries and circumlocutions in AL, esp Chapter 8, are thereby not binding, whatever Cardinal Schoenborn thinks.
He can either retract his lunacy now - but he won't, of course, because he is now bound at the hip to JMB. Or wait until he becomes pope, if ever, to state the most un-Catholic Bergoglian propositions more honestly and unequivocally if he believes them as he appears to do- i.e., sin is not always sin, therefore, the adultery of unqualified remarried divorcees is not sin (forget what Jesus said!), and that, in fact, some couples in irregular unions may actually be in a state of grace - all arguments meant to buttress the self-protectively unsaid but very implicit judgement, "Remarried divorcees may now receive communion".*]
The second part is more important. In his [recent] interview with Corriere della Sera, my dear friend [and eminent victim of the blissfully-deranged-by-Bergoglio syndrome] Cardinal Schönborn does not take into account what has happened in the Church since the publication of AL. [No, he deludes himself that all bishops and theologians accept AL as he and Mons. Cupich of Chicago do.]
Bishops and many theologians faithful to the Church and to the Magisterium argue that, especially on one specific – but very important – point, there is not a continuity, but, rather, an opposition between AL and the previous Magisterium.
Moreover, these theologians and philosophers do not say this with a demeaning or rebellious spirit toward the Holy Father himself. And the point is, as follows: AL says that, under some circumstances, sexual intercourse between the divorced and civilly remarried is morally legitimate. Even more so, it says that, what the Second Vatican Council has said about [elective] sexual intimacy between spouses also applies to them [RCDs] (see footnote 329).
Therefore: when one says that a sexual relationship outside of marriage is legitimate, it is therefore a claim contrary to the Church’s doctrine on sexuality; and when one says that adultery is not an intrinsically dishonest act – and that therefore there might be circumstances which render it not to be dishonest – that, too, is a claim contrary to the Tradition and Doctrine of the Church.
In such a situation like this, the Holy Father, in my opinion – and as I have already written – has to clarify the matter. For, when I say “S is P,” and then say “S is not P,” the second proposition is not a development of the first proposition, rather, but its negation. [But we all know he won't - and barring a miracle of the Holy Spirit, he never will - because the Vatican has already launched a series of moves intended to institutionalize the sacramental leniency allowed by AL - this is the premise of all these moves including the top appointments made by JMB to the new Discastery for Life, Family and the Laity.]
When someone says: the doctrine remains, but it is only about taking care of some few cases, I answer: the moral norm “Do not commit adultery” is an ABSOLUTELY NEGATIVE norm which does not allow of any exceptions. There are many ways to do good, but there is only one way not to do evil: not to do evil.
What is your general recommendation, as a shepherd, to us laypeople, as to what we should do now in order to preserve the Catholic Faith whole and entire and in order to raise our children unto eternal life?
I will tell you very frankly that I do not see any other place outside the family where the faith which you have to believe and to live can be sufficiently transmitted.
Moreover, in Europe during the collapse of the Roman Empire and during the later barbarian invasions, what the Benedictine monasteries then did can likewise be done now by the the believing families, in today’s reign of a new spiritual-anthropological barbarism. And thank God that they [the faithful families] exist and still resist.
A little poem written by Chesterton brings me to this reflection; he wrote it at the beginning of the twentieth century: The Ballad of the White Horse. It is a great poetic meditation on an historical fact. It takes place in the year 878. The King of England, Alfred the Great, had just defeated the King of Denmark, Guthrum, who first had invaded England. And thus came a moment of peace and serenity.
But during the night after the victory, King Alfred has a terrible vision [in Book VIII: 281-302]: he sees England invaded by another army, which is described, as follows:
“… What though they come with scroll and pen, And grave as a shaven clerk, By this sign you shall know them, That they ruin and make dark; By all men bound to Nothing, …. Know ye the old barbarian, The barbarian come again.”
Believing families are the true fortresses. And the future is in the hands of God.
* Believe it or not, one of the recent articles in OR defending AL said there ought to be no dispute at all about AL because nowhere in the document does it say "Remarried divorcees may now receive communion"! (C'mon, would JMB really have gone formally on record as 1) overturning the reiteration of Church doctrine by his sainted predecessor, and 2) making a categorical statement that could be considered heresy?)
But neither do we find anywhere in AL John Paul II's last word on the communion ban - the three sentences from FC 84 that the Final Relatio of the 2015 Synod left out, and which, of course, JMB could not have possibly included in AL because he went through the two-year ordeal of the two family synods which he had called, despite all the malarkey about his concern for the family, primarily to get a synodal consensus to overturn that ban once and for all.
Majority of the participants in both synods clearly were against overturning the ban, but unfortunately and inexplicably, they agreed to a compromise document that omitted those three sentences from John Paul II. An exercise of dishonesty all around - by JMB using 'the family' to pretend that the real subject of these synods was what came to be known as 'the Kasper proposal' about doing away with that communion ban (it was really the Bergoglio proposal that JMB asked his willing acolyte to present to the cardinals first, ahead of calling the synods); and by the synodal fathers who agreed to truncate John Paul II's statement on the communion ban.]
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Truly sick of this man and sickened by him, but he's the pope, and I love the Church and the Catholic faith, so I cannot just stand aside and ignore the evil he represents...
Dear Lord, God almighty, if it be possible, let this cup pass from your Church!
I had to chuckle at the title for Andrea Gagliarducci's Monday musings this week about the Vatican and Church affairs in general:
www.mondayvatican.com/vatican/pope-francis-latest-reforms-show-a-change-of-...
What does he mean 'the latest reforms show a change of paradigm'? Has he just discovered that boiling water is hot?
From the person who was elected pope on March 13, 2013, to his entire pontificate as it has shown itself to be in the past three years and five months, the Church has witnessed a total change of paradigm in both the figure of the pope, the idea of the papacy itself, and worse, in the Church's mission and priorities.
A paradigm, from the Greek word paradeigma meaning 'pattern or example', is a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns that marks and characterizes an area of human activity. The Bergoglio paradigms are as distinct as they can possibly be - fashioned as they are narcissistically in his image and likeness - from the paradigms of the papacy and the Church that Catholics have known over two millennia.
And well they ought to be because they do not apply to the one true Church of Christ - he has obviously chosen to discard all the pre-Bergoglian paradigms - but to the church of Bergoglio. I do not think I can insist on this often enough.
So why has it taken the recent reforms - in particular, the new super-dicastery for 'promoting human development' - for Gagliarducci to suddenly sit up and say, "Hey, there's a new paradigm taking shape and I didn't know it!"
I suppose it is because like most commentators who have wanted to be loyal and obedient to this pope (as they have been - largely - to the popes before him), and as we Catholics, in the pre-Bergoglian paradigm of the Church, are supposed to be to any pope, Gagliarducci has found it difficult, if not well-nigh impossible, to think "But this pope is not really Catholic!" and "He's not reforming the Church - he's making it over into his own church, and doing away with the Church of Christ!"
For the simple reason that both ideas have been unthinkable till now, i.e., they are simply not part of the Pope-Papacy-Church paradigm transmitted to us from apostolic times, through the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and 265 popes before this one. Well, time to wake up and face reality.
I have obviously morphed from someone who sought to be objective at the start about a pope I soon discovered I do not like at all (my problem, obviously, and purely subjective), to criticizing his words and actions every time I found something substantially and substantively questionable from my orthodox Catholic point of view.
But the burden of evidence for a de facto church of Bergoglio has not just been constant but consistent and increasing daily - documented evidence in media reports that I have sought to put on record in the Bergoglio posts I am constrained to make, as much as I dislike doing it.
Because it is my way of documenting his relentless wreckovation of the Church and the seeming advances of the church of Bergoglio, and nothing could be more distasteful. For more than three years now, I have waited and prayed for signs that he might relent and repent, say and do something that will make me light a candle in church and offer a novena of thanksgiving, but day after day, it is more of the same, only worse.
Other critics use the term FrancisChurch, which I object to on two counts: 1) As I have said more than once, using the name Francis demeans the Saint of Assisi, because the church of Bergoglio is certainly not the Church the saint loved and upheld; and 2) to couple that papal name with Church spelled with a capital C implies accepting that he has imposed himself on the one true Church of Christ, when he has merely co-opted it for the church in his image and likeness that he thinks the Catholic Church ought to be.
If he had been a genuine Catholic pope who said and did nothing unorthodox or objectionable to Catholic belief and tradition, I would have been most happy not reporting anything at all about him - media would have all of it covered - because this Forum was not meant to be about popes or the Church in general, but about Benedict XVI and the Church he led.
But I would have been irresponsible to remain uninvolved and mute about the unprecedented trail of confusion and error that this man leaves behind him, complicated by the fact that he appears to have co-opted Benedict XVI in such a way that anything the emeritus says about him and their personal relationship has become widely interpreted as Benedict XVI's unconditional and total support for everything his successor says and does.
To believe that is to believe that Benedict XVI has thrown away everything he stood for in the first 86 years of his life to cast his lot with a man whose very Catholicism is in doubt, a man who rejects DOMINUS IESUS and everything it says about the unicity of the one true Church of Christ. Even senile dementia, God forbid!, would not lead him to do that!
I have become increasingly receptive to extreme expressions of disapproval, to say the least, against this pope. The latest to have done so most explicitly is the blogger who call's himself St. Corbinian's Bear... I can't say I disagree with his title...
If Pope Francis is not the Antichrist,
he'll do until someone worse comes along
September 2, 2016
Over three years, the Bear has made many a piquant comment in many different ways about the man occupying the papacy. Agitprop, parody, sober analysis, and invective. A lot of the time, perhaps too long to remain pointed. The Bear will not make that mistake here.
Now is the hour for the charism of discernment of spirits: "Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world." (1 John 4:1).
If you are reading this on purpose, you probably have the charism of discerning spirits. There is a vast congregation of Catholics who clearly see Pope Francis as an enemy of the Catholic Faith.
Perhaps you imagine the Bear shall say Pope Francis is making the Church smaller and weaker. No. He is not making it smaller. He is utterly destroying it. He is laying the ax to the root. He is an arsonist burning it to the ground. [Here, I beg to disagree. He certainly is trying that, but Jesus said that even the gates of hell would not prevail against his Church.]
Not the external trappings, of course. Those are the only thing in Heaven or on earth that give him his power. [If by external trappings you mean the infrastructure and the institutions that make the Church what she is, yes. He would never dare a fraction of what he has dared so far if he did not already have a ready-made Church to wreckovate and make over into his very own anti-Church, aka church of Bergoglio.]
Pope Francis is turning the Church into just another self-satisfied, high-sounding human organization. [More properly said, 'the church of Bergoglio is just another self-satisfied, high-sounding human organization', the NGO nonpareil that dwarfs its model NGO, the United Nations.]
Now, sin is taught to be holding incorrect opinions on dubious scientific issues of pop culture, such as global warming. It does not take much to change the underlying spirit of an institution, especially when it has been so deranged anyway these past fifty years. [I resent that falsehood! It dismisses all the good work done by John Paul II and Benedict XVI (and even Paul VI, who did after all write Humanae Vitae) - to uphold and defend the faith handed down to them from apostolic times, despite the insidious and relentless sabotage of the Vatican II progressivists. Well now, one of them is the pope, and he is proving to be more radically anti-Catholic than any of them dared to be. Satan is thriving and very much at home in Casa Santa Marta.]
The man wants you to believe he is humble. If you can discern spirits, you will see beyond the shadow of a doubt that he is eaten up with the demon of Pride. The Church has always had it all wrong until Francis the Special came to align it with the world.
Francis is animated by the Spirit of the World. He worships the Prince of the World, and, for all a Bear knows, is his prophet. If you have the charism of discerning spirits, this is obvious. If you don't, you'll never get it, no matter who says it, or what proofs are adduced.
The most powerful weapon he has for the destruction of the Church is the apparent silliness of such claims. That is his cover. [Silly the claims may be, but they are deadly serious because being wrong, they are still made by someone who was elected pope and legitimately holds the immense power and authority that a pope has. And the power of his office is obviously the indispensable attribute that enables him to do all the harm (and evil) that he is doing to the Church. ]
It is fitting for a ridiculous creature, then, to announce it. A Bear, nature's clown, who nonetheless has a Bear's famous nose for sniffing out fires of all kinds. Including those involving brimstone.
The Bear is not saying he is not the Pope. [Not anyone can say so, alas!] Such matters are beyond the ken of Bears. If he is Pope, then he is a very bad Pope. If he is Pope, we have learned just how little Catholicism is required of a man in order to be Pope. [Or that one can be un-Catholic and anti-Catholic and be Pope.]
Pope Francis is not just a fraud, he is a very evil and dangerous man. Friends, try it: Discern spirits. If Pope Francis is not the Antichrist, he'll do until one comes along. [And I thought, before March 13, 2013, that Obama was the anti-Christ! Precursor maybe, looks like!]
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With thanks to Beatrice as usual for leading me to this item - which is about an interview with Mons. Georg Ratzinger looking towards
the tenth anniversary of Benedict XVI's apostolic visit to Bavaria in 2006. Living abroad, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI always subscribed
to the Passauer Neue Presse which he considered his 'hometown' newspaper since its local sections cover all the places he has called home.
The headline shocked me - "Pope Benedict has problems walking and talking (sprechen)"! but then the teaser item itself which introduces the interview has a different headline which says, "Pope Benedict has problems walking and with his voice (Stimme)", which is, of course, less alarming. And further on, it quotes Mons. Ratzinger as saying his brother has difficulties with his voice, not with speaking.
We all watched and heard him deliver the first words he has ever said in public since his retirement at the Vatican ceremony last June to mark his 65th anniversary as a priest, at which time there certainly didn't seem to be anything wrong with his voice, his speech (i.e., the way he talks), his delivery, and his trademark print-ready extemporaneity.
We can only hope that whatever difficulties he has with his voice mean nothing serious. The increasing difficulty with walking and just moving about is more worrisome, and to him, it must certainly be most frustrating for someone who always walked so briskly and elegantly.
On the tenth anniversary of
Benedict's visit to Bavaria
Interview by Karl Birkenseer
Translated from
September 2, 2016
"Optimistically, I must say, both of us are doing well, even if, of course, time takes its toll and leaves its mark," says the brother of emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, in an interview published Friday, Sept. 2, in the Passauer Neue Presse.
Mons. Georg Ratzinger, 92, adds that while both of them have problems with walking, his brother has greater difficulty with his voice but sees better than he does.
Mons. Ratzinger underscores above all his brother's work as a theologian. "In general, the faith has lost much ground, while scientific thinking has been given disproportionate weight. But as a theologian, my brother showed that there is no contradiction between the two, but that faith and reason challenge and complement each other".
In one week we mark the tenth anniversary of the start of Pope Benedict XVI's Apostolic Visit to Bavaria in 2006. His brother, Georg Ratzinger, former Domkapellmeister of the Cathedral of Regensburg, recalls that visit with their hometown newspaper.
Herr Domkapellmeister, you spent a few weeks this summer with your brother, the Emeritus Pope, in Rome. How are you both doing in terms of your health?
Optimistically, I must say, both of us are doing well, even if, of course, time takes its toll and leaves its mark. It spares no one...
Pope Benedict visited Bavaria from Sept 9-14 in 2006. Do you and your brother still have vivid memories of this?
Our memories are vivid interiorly but we rarely speak about it.
The visit was made to the pope's three 'home dioceses' - Passau, Munich and Regensburg. Why exactly are these three dioceses home to him?
Because we spent a great part of our life in these places. My brother was born in 1927 in Marktl, which belongs to the diocese of Passau, and so does Pleiskirchen where I was born in 1924. Afterwards, Tittmoning, in the diocese of Munich, was an important station for our family, and then Traunstein where we lived a long time.
Regensburg played an important role for both of us professionally - for my brother as a university professor, and for myself, as the director of the cathedral choir [the world-famous Regensburger Domspaetzen].
The visit began in Munich. From the airport, the first stop was most especially the Mariensäule (Marian Pillar) in the city center. In short, your brother paid his respects first to the Mother of God, Patroness of Bavaria...
Even if my brother was not directly involved in planning the details of the visit, it was his heart's desire to visit the Mariensäule and there to entrust Bavaria once more to the protection of the Mother of God.
The following day, Sunday, there was a huge open-air Mass in the Munich fairgrounds. In his homily, the Pope already struck the major theme in almost all his homilies during the visit and of his Pontificate - faith and reason...
Yes, because it is a fact that in general, faith has lost much ground while scientific thinking has gained a disproportionate weight. As a theologian, my brother sought to show that there should be no contradiction between the two, but rather, that they challenge and complement each other.
After Munich, it was Altoetting - again dedicated to the Mother of God - and Marktl. There was another big open-air Mass in Altoetting in which you took part. What do you remember about that?
I had stayed overnight at the Capuchin monastery. I was with the man who usually accompanied me at the time, Prof. Franc Mussner who died this year. We were the only ones who were allowed to attend the Mass with our walking canes. Canes and umbrellas were prohibited for security reasons, but we were obviously not dangerous persons.
The Mass was a beautiful festive event. On the altar stage, I was first given a seat that was under the sun, but Prof. Mussner took me to a seat that was in the shade.
The Pope brought a special gift for the Black Madonna of Altoetting - his cardinal's ring that you had given him. Could you describe it?
Not in detail, not anymore. My sister Maria and I had bought it in 1977 from Baumann's (an antique dealer) in Regensburg. [That would have been the year their younger brother was named Archbishop of Munich, and shortly thereafter, cardinal.]] I only know it had a gemstone but I do not remember now what kind. The ring was a gift from the heart, and my brother treasured it most specially. [The ring is prominent in the first official photograph of Benedict XVI that the Vatican sent to Nunciatures and dioceses around the world. It was obviously taken before the Mass inaugurating his Petrine ministry during which he formally received the Ring of the Fisherman.]
Later, of course, he wore the Fisherman's Ring, and we thought about what would happen with the cardinal's ring when he dies. Thus, the idea to offer it to the Madonna of Altoetting. My brother was convinced it was the best place for it...
[Unfortunately, the complete interview is available only in the paper edition of the newspaper or to online subscribers. I hope one of the Georg Gaenswein sites will post the whole interview.]
To get back to the subject of the Emeritus Pope's infirmities, about which I am particularly sensitive because of all the derision directed at him over why he renounced the papacy: These are the age-related infirmities that can afflict an 89-year-old man, infirmities about which, if he was still Pope, the media - and thereby, public opinion - would not have looked on with the kindness and consideration that had been given John Paul II in the final years of his degenerative illness.
Infirmities that critics of his renunciation do not take into account when they mock his reasons of health, or even the specific example he gave of being unable to make any more transcontinental trips. Why would he risk spoiling a big event like WYD by falling ill or having a worse health emergency that would detract from the event itself and even spoil it?
By the same token, if he had continued to be pope, it would have been selfish to require the obvious assistance he now needs to move around and walk, if he had to be assisted just to move at and around the altar when celebrating a liturgy in public. He is the last person in the world to want to have to distract from the liturgy!
One of these critics wrote, in relentless 'Benedict-made-Bergoglio-possible' mode: "He could still have gone on being pope and simply omitted being seen in public". Was he serious? Then the distraction would have been endless speculation about why we don't see him in public anymore, what's really wrong with him, if he's no longer able to carry out his public duties as pope, why does he not resign, who's really running the Church now, etc. Well, he spared us from all that, but his unkindest critics also say, "Spared us for what? To have made Bergoglio Pope???"
But I bet none of these critics would insist that their 86-year-old parent continue to carry out a superhuman job until they die - it is not just about the physical effort it takes, but to be blunt about it, think of what public indignities they risk just because old age generates circumstances that are beyond personal control. Yet Benedict's critics would wish it on him, not on their own kin!
When it was first reported that he would not celebrate the concluding Mass for his Schuelerkreis reunion this year, I kept hoping it was a false report. But as it turned out, it wasn't, and that is really very troubling. What physical faculty has so deteriorated in him, or what new physical condition has developed, that he was unable to do it?
If all this could happen within three years of a retirement that seems, from all accounts, to be undemanding (or at least, when he does only what he feels he is able to do), it might all have been accelerated if he had not retired. Then, the media game would have been: "He's obviously no longer capable - Benedict should resign and give way to someone younger".
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If the following is the 'best' that an advance reviewer of the book can come up with as a teaser, one would think the book has to be a letdown. Though at least
it could be a blessing that it says nothing about any new statement by B16 that would be interpreted by Bergoglio-lovers and Ratzinger-haters alike as total
unconditional endorsement of the Bergoglio pontificate and its misdeeds. Which could mean there isn't anything more beyond what was previously reported
in the pre-publicity for the book, or so I fervently pray!
Some notes on the new
B16-Seewald interview book
Translated from
MUNICH, September 7, 2016 (AFP) - Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, according to a media report, is extremely critical developments in the Catholic Church in Germany.
[Nothing new from him, of course. Even as Archbishop of Munich-Freising, he was persona non grata to most of his German confreres for going against their current, and he articulated his continuing objections most clearly during his state visit to Germany in 2011 as Pope.
But since March 13, 2013, the sui generis worldliness of the German episcopate has erupted into an arrogant display that included not just their overwhelming support for the Bergoglio-Kasper leniencies but also in declaring that the German Church does not have to follow Rome at all, that it can do as it pleases.]
There is a "surplus of unholy bureaucracy", the 89-year-old Joseph Ratzinger says in a new book, according to the Sept. 8 issue of the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung.
He faults the Catholic Church in his home country for 'theoretizing faith' and for its 'lack of a living dynamism'.
The statements come from the interview-book Letzte Spraeche (Last Conversations) with German journalist-author Peter Seewald which comes out in Germany and other countries on Sept, 9.
The Pope who resigned in 2013 for reasons of age Pope also confirms rumours of a homosexual 'old boy' network in the Vatican - that it existed during his pontificate but he believed he had broken it up.
"Whether it has built itself back, I do not know," Benedict added.
With regard to the scandals involving paedophile priests and corrupt machinations in the Vatican, Benedict said he had not completely succeeded to purify the church from "filth" as he had wished for. However, he had dismissed hundreds of paedophile priests and dozens of bishops who failed to act on the issue.
I still think it strange that a full week now since the Elio Guerriero biography went on sale in Italy, I have not come across a single indication so far that anyone was written anything about it! (Which also leads me to think that maybe B16 did not say anything more about JMB than what he was quoted to have said in the pre-publicity. If he had said anything more - especially if it could be interpreted to mean he has inexplicably become a Bergoglio rah-rah 'fan' - surely someone ought to have reported it by now. I sincerely pray, beloved Benedict, that I am not merely whistling in the dark here.
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September 7, 2016 headlines
The two Catholic news aggregators are almost completely out of phase with each other today - it has to do, I think, with when each
last updated its 'above the fold' headline selections...
Canon212.com
PewSitter
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Elective affinities
As Fr Rutler, the historian, recounts to us how Luther looked at Islam in his day, he also raises a couple of points that show [advertently
or inadvertently?] a temperamental affinity between Luther and JMB - whom I consider a greater threat to the Church than Luther ever
was, because he is pope and therefore able, at will, to 'institionalize' his good intentions (as in 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions).
Luther looks at Islam
by FR. GEORGE W. RUTLER
September 7, 2016
Martin Luther cut a figure of such massive importance that reflections on him are a Rorschach test for theologians and historians alike.
In few instances have personality and principle been so melded. If the Dominican Aquinas argued contra and sed contra, the former Augustinian would settle his case by slapping the table: “Dr. Martin Luther will have it so!” Aquinas spoke syllogisms while Luther shouted slurs.
Interpreting the Rorschach blots his own way, Chesterton, no lightweight himself, resented that though Luther’s intellect was negligible in comparison with that of the Angelic Doctor, “his broad and burly figure has been big enough to block out for four centuries the distant human mountain of Aquinas.”
With new attention focusing on Luther for the fifth centenary of his revolution, he still looms in Chesterton’s summary as “one of those great elemental barbarians, to whom it is indeed given to change the world.”
This barbarism consists in a proto-modern confusion of conscience with ego which, as Maritain wrote in his “Three Reformers,” is “something much subtler, much deeper, and much more serious, than egoism; a metaphysical egoism. Luther’s self becomes practically the center of gravity of everything, especially in the spiritual order.” [Hmm, why does that sound so familiar about someone today in whom, like Luther, personality and principle are so melded?]
Those sparring partners, Calvin and Luther, were both young when they made their mark: Calvin wrote his Institutes at the age of 25 and Luther was 33 when he advertised his 95 theses. And the emperor Charles V was 21 when he faced Luther at the Diet of Worms.
But the personality of Calvin does not loom over his works as in the case of Luther. The difference shapes hasty caricatures of Calvin as a Pecksniffian ectomorph and Luther a Rabelaisian endomorph.
Saint Thomas More parodied Luther’s scatological diction when he called him a “buffoon … (who will) carry nothing in his mouth other than cesspools, sewers, latrines…” [But JMB today says Luther was 'medicine for the Church' as he prepares to celebrate the 500th anniversary of his schism. If he turns out to be a modern-day Methusselah and lives to 2054, by his logic, he would also be celebrating the Great Schism as it enters it third millennium. How's that for Bergoglian ecumenism which appears to consist in obliterating from memory the apostasy from Catholicism of the Orthodox Churches in 1054 and of Luther and his 'Reformed' church in 1517?]
On the whole, the Catholic humanist reformers distinguished themselves from Luther by the astringency of their Aristotelian disdain, More’s friend Erasmus being a prime example of this protocol, along with such as Cajetan, Caisius, and Giberti.
One of Luther’s Ninety-Five denunciations of Rome was, “Those who believe that they can be certain of their salvation because they have letters of indulgence will be eternally damned, along with their teachers.” Obviously Luther was not the sort to ask, “Who am I to judge?”
But his judgment courted an equation of the authentic teaching of the Church on indulgences with the corruption of those who crassly sold indulgences. The theses, many of which were reasonable in themselves, risked faulting not just the disease of the limb, but the limb itself.
This is awkward as the 500th commemoration of Luther’s movement follows upon the Holy Year of Mercy for which Pope Francis announced various ways to receive indulgences. Francis has said with measured diplomacy: “I think that the intentions of Martin Luther were not mistaken. He was a reformer. Perhaps some methods were not correct.” [Meaning that even if 'some methods were not correct', the outcome was right??? I think that this Bergoglian apologia pro Luther has been vastly under-reported and worse, not acknowledged as the appalling and unconscionable statement that it is coming from the nominal leader of the Roman Catholic Church.]
If the intentions were honest, it is a fact that, even apart from psychoanalysis of Luther’s immoderate temperament, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” That aphorism is a variant of Vergil: facilis descensus Averno. [The descent to Avernus (Hell) is easy).
According to Johannes Aurifaber, the last words penned by Luther on February 17 in 1546, the day before he died, were in praise of Vergil’s Aeneid. Luther wrote his lines in the same dactylic hexameters Vergil used; but more poignantly, the warning about good intentions paving the road to Hell was given by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux who was a moral hero and spiritual giant in Luther’s estimation.
As a profound scholar of the Wittenberg reformer, Pope Benedict XVI gave Luther his due especially for parts of the German catechisms, but, he also held, as Father Aidan Nichols has written in his The Theology of Joseph Ratzinger, that Luther was a “radical theologian and polemicist whose particular version of the doctrine of justification by faith is incompatible with a Catholic understanding of faith as co-believing with the whole Church, within a Christian existence composed equally of faith, hope, and charity.”
Luther’s attitudes toward Jews degenerated from his 1523 defense of them against “Romanist” oppression. By 1543, he was ranting “On the Jews and Their Lies.” While others have dismissed the “Luther to Hitler” connection as in William L. Shirer’s journalistic study The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Goebbels and other Nazi propagandists freely quoted much of Luther’s diatribes against Jews which, even out of context, are lurid as read from this side of Kristallnacht, such as: “Eject them forever from this country…. First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or a cinder of them.”
Lest the critic be smug, the first real Counter-Reformation pope, the Carafa pope Paul IV, so bungled his zealous reforms, which only reluctantly were applied to his own degenerate nephews, that Catholics more than Lutherans rejoiced at his death.
He was another type of the well-intentioned reformer who had lost sight of the form. Just a decade after Luther’s death, Pope Paul sequestered the Jews of Rome in a ghetto with a gate locked at night, and required that they wear yellow stars on their clothing — a humiliation first imposed in 1215 by Pope Innocent III and not forgotten when Reinhard Heydrich imposed it on the Reich in 1941.
Luther’s case against the Jews was theological, but his counsel to the German nobility Against the Robbing and Murderous Horde of Peasants in 1525 was strictly a civil exercise of cold calculation: “Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog; if you do not strike him, he will strike you, and a whole land with you.”
What then of Luther’s attitude toward Islam panting at the trembling borders of Europe, before Europe even thought of itself as Europe rather than as Christendom? Here is where his personality, as animated by circumstance, defines policy.
In Luther’s thoughts on Islam, there is an increasing censoriousness similar to the intensification of his condemnations of Judaism. At first, he had more pressing matters on his plate and, to the degree that the Turks were a threat to the pope and the Romanists, there was the kind of counter-crusade that might serve the purposes of the reformers.
In his Explanation of the Ninety-Five Theses in 1518, he had argued against warring with the Turks, and was called a compromiser for it. Ten years later he defensively claimed that the popes “never seriously intended to make war on the Turks, but used the Turkish war as a conjurer’s hat… Thus they condemned my article not because it prevented the Turkish war, but because it tore off this conjurer’s hat and blocked the path along which the money went to Rome.”
Initially, Luther took a position not unlike that of Erasmus in his Considerations for a War against the Turks, which said that a renewal of faith in the hearts of Christians would be a stronger weapon than any sword. Luther had declared: “To fight against the Turk is the same as resisting God, who visits our sin upon us with this rod.”
Luther and Erasmus used almost identical language in comparing Islam with the punishing plagues of Egypt, but Luther disdained the Muslims as hopeless enemies and seducers of Christians, while Erasmus hoped for their conversion.
The German heresiarch and the Dutch confessor, one a defrocked priestly son of a devout layman and the other a priestly natural son of a wayward priest, were confederates in their perception that Islam does not mean peace for Christians. As an ancillary and unintended benefit of fighting the Turks, it has been estimated that the Turkish distraction reduced intra-European fighting between Catholics and Protestants by about twenty-five per cent.
Quite as there is no evidence that he actually nailed the Ninety-Five Theses to the mute and mordant castle chapel door at Wittemberg — the description is a later one by Melancthon — no research has been able to certify the remark attributed to Luther: “I’d rather be ruled by a wise Turk than by a foolish Christian.”
But it sounds like a variant of the Orthodox protest in Constantinople when it was menaced: “We would rather be ruled by the Ottoman turban than the Latin mitre!” That defiance crumbled when Constantinople fell and the Greek Orthodox learned that the Muslims were not an improvement over the Venetians.
On one drunken day, the Muslim conqueror Mehmet II publicly raped the fourteen-year-old son of the Orthodox Grand Duke Notaras at a banquet and then beheaded the boy’s father and entire family. But as with Luther’s initial defense of Jews, finding a good word for the Muslims was effective anti-Roman propaganda. The Turks might be a God-sent scourge against the Roman Church that was the “Antichrist.”
Luther thought that a Holy War against the Ottomans would be “absolutely contrary to Christ’s doctrine and name.” However, Turkish assaults on Buda and Pest and the Siege of Vienna in 1529 brought the Crescent too close for comfort to the Cross, and Luther urged Emperor Charles V to fight a war against the Turk — not a religious war but a secular one in respect of his “Two Kingdoms” theory.
One year later Erasmus wrote to Johann Rinck words about the Muslim invaders not without application to the Germany of today, although Angela Merkel is not the Emperor Charles V: “I have more than once been abashed by the nonchalance of other Christian lands, and especially of Germany herself, as if these things in no way affected the rest of us. We become tight fisted, and spend on pleasures and trivialities what we do not want to spend on rescuing Christians.”
In various ways, Islam and the Protestant schools had some affinities. Recognizing Islam as an Arian heresy, Luther thought that any Pope of Rome was worse than the Prophet of Medina. Theologically, Allah as pure will had a certain cogency for Luther who called Reason “that pretty whore.”
After Luther, once marriage was described as a non-sacramental civil union, divorce could be a reasonable solution, albeit with more strictures than in Islam. Luther saw no problem with Henry VIII taking a second wife, just as he had advised Philip of Hesse. There was something of a scandal when it was found out that Luther had told Philip to lie about his bigamy, but the logic was consistent with the Shi’a practice of taqiyya, or lying to promote the faith. [And is there a Shi'a term for lying or distorting to promote one's ideology of faith as we have been getting these days from the summit of the Church's hierarchy???]
The successor of Suleiman, Murad III, one of whose allies had been the Unitarian, John Sigismund, appreciated the affinities between Islam and Lutherans vis-a-vis Catholicism and in 1574 he wrote to the “Members of the Lutheran Sect in Flanders and Spain”:
As you, for your part, do not worship idols, you have banished the idols and portraits and bells from churches, and declared your faith by stating that God Almighty is one and Holy Jesus is His Prophet and Servant, and now, with heart and soul, are seeking and desirous of the true faith; but the faithless alone they call Papa does not recognize his Creator as one, ascribing divinity to Holy Jesus (upon Him be peace!), and worshipping idols and pictures which he has made with his own hands, thus casting doubt upon the oneness of God…
Luther would have been appalled at the misrepresentation of his Trinitarianism, but Lutherans and Calvinists from Holland and England joined the Ottoman forces at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.In 1683 at Vienna, the Hungarian leader of the Lutherans, the traitorous Imre Thokoly, fought on the side of the Turks.
But even Louis XIV, king of the “Eldest Daughter of the Church,” cynically refused to help the heroic Polish king Jan Sobieski [hero of the Battle of Vienna]: not for theological reasons but because of his enmity with the Habsburgs, and in this he was sustaining the 1536 Franco—Ottoman Alliance of Francis I and Suleiman. French engineers actually helped the Muslims to besiege Vienna.
After his defeat, Thokoly had the temerity to ask Sobieski to reconcile him with the emperor. Failing at that, Thokoly eventually lived off an Ottoman pension in Turkey. Better a Turk than a Papist.
Between 1541 and 1699, Hungary suffered Ottoman occupation and the scars of atrocities from that period remain.
In 2015, the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban specifically referred to that century and a half of suffering when he banned Islamic immigration and sealed the Serbian border, and was criticized by condescending European Union bureaucrats, ignorant as they were of that country’s cultural crucifixion.
The Washington Post (September 4, 2015) uncomprehendingly reacted: “But it is somewhat bizarre to think this rather distant past of warlords and rival empires ought to influence how a 21st century nation addresses the needs of refugees.”
Unlike his summonses to eradicate the Jews, Luther was indifferent to the free practice of “Mohammedism” and to the end he allowed: “Let the Turk believe and live as he will, just as one lets the papacy and other false Christians live.”
It is said, based on the meaning of “in cloaca” [in the latrine] in his own disputed description, that Luther was inspired in his interpretation of the Epistle to the Romans during a bowel movement on his commode, which was just recently excavated in time for the 500th commemoration of the Reformation. One imagines the torrent of commentary he might have bestowed upon the world after a modern colonic irrigation. [Luther, for all the good intentions he had, appears to have been afflicted with an irrepressible logorrhea which expressed his 'cloacal' excrement in words such as his slurs against the Church. JMB's logorrhea has not, of course, been so scatological even in his habitual railings against those Catholics he does not like.]
But setting aside the tragic consequences of those years for the Church and the whole world, Luther began a fracture that now has become an opening for an assault upon civilization from Mecca. All because of his obsession: “As the pope is Antichrist, so the Turk is the very devil. The prayer of Christendom is against both. Both shall go down to hell, even though it may take the Last Day to end them there; and I hope it will not be long.”
When asked about the Church lifting her excommunication of Luther, Cardinal Ratzinger said that the question is mute since he is dead and the Church has passed her judgment over to the Eternal Judge.
Five hundred years later, astute men commemorate the passions of those times as a trauma but cannot celebrate them as a triumph. Yet there are prodigies we can celebrate and among them is Saint Thomas More sequestered in the Tower of London in the days of King Henry’s second wife.
That “Man for All Seasons” wrote: “For there is no born Turk, so cruel to Christian folk, as is the false Christian that falleth from the Faith.” |
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Not having read the book yet - I have been trying to get the German edition as an e-book from amazon.de where a Kindle edition is listed as available, but nothing happens when I click on the link - I can only base the following on quotations cited from it so far.
I am not surprised that the statements cited about his successor in the press preview are all positive - he would not say anything negative in a book published when he is still very much alive. These statements are positive
a. In terms especially of Bergoglio's treatment of him - Of course. That's being gracious.
b. In his description of how the new pope came across to him during his initial appearance to the world as pope - "It didn't bother me at all that he didn't wear the mozzetta - what touched me were his words for me". [Those words, too touched me, but I immediately realized it was a natural reflex from someone who would not be speaking as pope if Benedict had not resigned. I do think, with all due respect to B16, it was not necessary to say "It didn't bother me that he did not use the mozzetta" - unless Seewald asked him specifically about it. Otherwise, the rest of the answer sounds too self-centered, even if it is meant to express, for the record, his personal gratitude to JMB.]
c. as a sign of the Church's catholicity - Fine, but the early Church already had popes from Africa.
d. in praise of Bergoglio as a man of 'practical reform' and his past experience as someone who 'knows how to make things work' - Not that there has been any overwhelming evidence of his 'success' as archbishop, other than those same idiosyncracies he has brought to the Vatican as pope; and by all accounts - and Bergoglio's own, who thinks he was too autocratic at the time - his tenure as head of the Jesuits in Argentina was far from felicitous. As for 'knows how to make things work', that remains to be seen in this pontificate.
None of the above however will count with those - led by the media who will tell the public all the latter will ever know about the book (the fraction of Catholics who will buy the book and read it will necessarily be insignificant, as it is for even the best-selling Catholic book, with the exception of the Bible) - who are already saying that Benedict's statements mean he is "very happy with his successor's papacy", as AP reported yesterday, and the extrapolation by all Ratzinger-haters and Bergoglio-lovers that he has thereby given total and unconditional endorsement for his successor's Pontificate and all its misdeeds.
Unfortunately for Benedict XVI and all who love and admire him, that is the overwhelmingly immediate reality of how his words of praise for his successor are being interpreted. In all cases involving media accounts of events as well as persons, perception far outweighs reality - the perception, that is, that media accounts produce in the world at large of such events and persons.
I did not want to comment further on the book until I had read it or seen full quotations of the statements he made about JMB, but Sandro Magister's blogpost yesterday relates to Point (d) that I make above.
How Ratzinger sees Bergoglio;
'He is a man of practical reform'
Translated from
Sept. 8, 2016
"Every pope has his own charism. Francis is a man of practical reform. He was archbishop for a long time, he knows his occupation, he was superior of the Jesuits [in Argentina], and he has the spirit to take actions of an organizational character".
This is the profile of Pope Francis sketched by his predecessor in the interview book that will be published tomorrow. The statement comes from some selected excerpts published in Corriere della Sera today.
And here is a first comment, sent to us by Antonio Caragliu, a lawyer with the Trieste Forum, a student of the philosophy of the law and member of the Unione dei giuristi cattolici.
Dear Magister,
Obviously, one must read the book in full, but I find it interesting that in the preview published today in Corriere della Sera, that Benedict XVI characterizes Jorge Mario Bergoglio as a pope of 'practical reform'.
Ratzinger admits that he lacked decisional and organizational abilities: "I knew this was not my strong point", even as he recognizes it in Bergoglio.
[Frankly, I do not see that he lacked 'decisional' ability. I cannot remember an example during his Pontificate that he failed to make a significant decision when he had to - otherwise, he would have been denounced and consigned to hell by the media and his critics a hundred times over and above how they already denounced him.
Organizational deficiency, probably so - because in the past, he always said he had no talent for 'administration', but a pope is not expected to deal with structural organization and administration directly. For that, he had the Secretary of State - who is de facto Prime Minister, and therefore, head of the Vatican government. Too bad for B16 he relied totally for this on Cardinal Bertone, who may be a loyal friend and outstanding man of the Church, but whose friendship, loyalty and episcopal qualities failed to make him - in seven years as Secretary of State - shape the Curia as efficiently as he could have done, apparently oblivious to the disservice he was doing to Benedict XVI.]
Very much in his style - which respects the role of his predecessor and his own - Ratzinger avoids a direct comparison with his predecessor.But at the same time, in characterizing Bergoglio, even if implicitly, he focuses on the latter's role as the promoter of organizational change - not 'doctrinal', nor even 'pastoral' - but limited to Bergoglio's empathy with others. [I don't see how empathy has a part in organizational change. In fact, Magister has an article today in www.chiesa enumerating the number of Vatican personnel - bishops, priests and laymen alike - now left without a job with the abolition of six pontifical councils that have been absorbed into two new superdicasteries.]
It all seems to be consistent with what Georg Gaenswein said in his controversial address of May 20, 2016.
Let it be clear: The considerations and problems about the entire idea of an emeritus pope and how it has been characterized so far - as raised by canonists and Church historians like Geraldina Boni, Walter Brandmueller, and Giuseppe Sciacca, whose interventions you have published, are real and relevant.
But Gaenswein did not speak on a juridical level, rather, on a theological and spiritual level. His specific description of theRatzinger papacy as 'a papacy of exception' [in the Carl Schmitt definition of such] expressed the intention that what he had to say was not be interpreted juridically, nor in a way that seeks to bring out general and abstract principles applicable in all future cases of an emeritus pope.
The contemplative role that Gaenswein attributes to Ratzinger with the image of an 'enlarged papacy' cannot, by its very nature, interfere in any way with the reigning pope's power except by supernatural means.
Obviously, there could be 'interference' if the emeritus pope does not limit himself to contemplate in silence but speaks in public. And in this book, Joseph Ratzinger does speak.
I am not saying that the problems of defining an emeritus pope from the juridical point of view are not relevant. But in considering the relationship between juridical considerations and what Gaenswein actually said, one must take into account the exceptionality of Ratzinger's status as emeritus pope - precisely because it is exceptional, it cannot be considered a binding precedent), and of the nature of his contemplative role which is not covered by any juridical consideration.
Going back to the book, Ratzinger, in speaking of Bergoglio and his papacy, appears to concentrate on his power of governance, in its strictly managerial aspect rather than 'pastoral' [much less doctrinal!]
From the doctrinal point of view, silence. [Let it be so! Let not the full text show any statements indicating doctrinal approval, or even just laissez-faire, in any way!]
Antonio Caragliu
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Why Pope Francis is wrong about extending
mercy to creation and the environment
Analysis by Carl Olson
Editor
Sept. 8, 2016
Let's start with a surprising statistic: Pope Francis's recent September 1st Message "For the Celebration of the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation" contains, by my unscientific count, thirteen references to "sin", "sins", or "sinned". The short message consists of some 2,074 words.
Those same words (and variations such as "sinning") occur just twelve times in Amoris Laetitia, the Holy Father's much discussed Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the family. And that massive text is the longest papal document on record, coming in at around 55,000 words (nearly 60,000 with footnotes).
As some readers might recall, the Exhortation eschews language that might appear judgmental or "non-pastoral" in even the most objective sense. For instance, the word "adultery" appears just three times - all in describing the "woman caught in adultery" in the Bible. And the word "fornication" never makes an appearance.
Surely adultery is a problem in many marriages; yet it doesn't warrant clear description. Instead, we read of "'irregular' situations", as if an objective state of adultery is akin to realizing that you are wearing a black sock and a blue sock, and hope nobody notices.
The language in the September 1st Message is also surprising. Quoting from the August 2015 Letter that established the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, Francis states:
This Day offers “individual believers and communities a fitting opportunity to reaffirm their personal vocation to be stewards of creation, to thank God for the wonderful handiwork which he has entrusted to our care, and to implore his help for the protection of creation as well as his pardon for the sins committed against the world in which we live.
And then there are these unusual uses of the Pope's favorite word:
Christians or not, as people of faith and goodwill, we should be united in showing mercy to the earth as our common home and cherishing the world in which we live as a place for sharing and communion. ...
Nothing unites us to God more than an act of mercy, for it is by mercy that the Lord forgives our sins and gives us the grace to practise acts of mercy in his name.
To paraphrase Saint James, “we can say that mercy without works is dead" … In our rapidly changing and increasingly globalized world, many new forms of poverty are appearing. In response to them, we need to be creative in developing new and practical forms of charitable outreach as concrete expressions of the way of mercy.
The Christian life involves the practice of the traditional seven corporal and seven spiritual works of mercy. We usually think of the works of mercy individually and in relation to a specific initiative: hospitals for the sick, soup kitchens for the hungry, shelters for the homeless, schools for those to be educated, the confessional and spiritual direction for those needing counsel and forgiveness…
But if we look at the works of mercy as a whole, we see that the object of mercy is human life itself and everything it embraces
Obviously “human life itself and everything it embraces” includes care for our common home. So let me propose a complement to the two
traditional sets of seven: may the works of mercy also include care for our common home.
As a spiritual work of mercy, care for our common home calls for a “grateful contemplation of God’s world” (Laudato Si’, 214) which “allows us to discover in each thing a teaching which God wishes to hand on to us” (ibid., 85).
As a corporal work of mercy, care for our common home requires “simple daily gestures which break with the logic of violence, exploitation and selfishness” and “makes itself felt in every action that seeks to build a better world” (ibid., 230-31).
This is, simply put, troubling, as both Phil Lawler and Jeff Mirus of Catholic Culture have noted in two important pieces on this topic. [I previously posted both articles in full on this thread, in the preceding page, so I will not include here Olson's excerpts from them.]
As Mirus concludes: "To be itself, mercy must always be intensely personal and completely free. It is just this that makes mercy so very special. It is what makes mercy transformative. It is why mercy works." Exactly.
I won't repeat the same points made so well by both men. Rather, I want to note four things:
• Anyone who has studied the subject of "mercy" as it is used in Scripture knows it is a rich and complex topic. It is closely related to compassion and lovingkindness. In Hebrew, the word hesed is often translated as "lovingkindness" and "goodness".
It is a word (used some 150 times in the Bible) that is, as The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery (InterVarsity Press, 1998) states, " almost wholly the domain of God."
Yes, there are of course human acts of mercy. But mercy is an essential quality of God, and it flows from his personal nature. Mercy, put another way, is always demonstrated and lived within a relationship between God and men (and men among themselves).
This is seen, first and foremost, in God's benevolent actions towards men and women. I would even say that mercy is a deeply covenantal quality, for it is through God's mercy that we are called to be the children of God, and it is mercy that continues to shape and form us as his children.
Mercy, simply put, is aimed at the salvation of souls. To speak of mercy being extended to things as opposed to people is simply a misuse of the word; it is, frankly, horrible theology.
• Following on that, there is no instance in Scripture or in Sacred Tradition that I know of in which mercy is described as something extended to "the earth" or "creation" or "the environment".
a use is simply unprecedented, even in the recent writings of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. (Read, for instance, John Paul II's encyclical on mercy, Dives in Misericordia and see how mercy is always extended from one person to another. Always.)
Again, that is not to deny the obligation we all have to be good stewards and to make wise, moral, and prudential judgments in our daily lives as far as our use of food, energy, and material goods. Not at all. But to use it to describe one's treatment of "creation" or the "environment" is deeply problematic and confusing.
• It's notable that Francis, in his Message, quotes only two people: himself and the Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople. And, as far as I can tell, Bartholomew never speaks about extending mercy to creation or the environment.
It's almost as if the Holy Father is using Bartholomew's words as cover for his startling use of "mercy" [a habitual JMB ploy which is most familiar from his selective and sometimes deliberately reworked quotations of Jesus himself to support an argument he is making] — and yet it doesn't appear that Bartholomew shares the same language. And even if he did, what would that mean? As far as I know, Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition trump the notions of Orthodox patriarchs — and, yes, even Catholic popes.
• Finally, I am increasingly convinced that this papacy, for all of its strengths, weaknesses, and oddities, could well be known, down the road, as the Papacy of Sentimentality. It surely is not a papacy adhering to theological rigor or consistency. [Unless it has to do with with his so-called 'theology of the people'(aka liberation theology), then he is consistent and rigorous. But other clergy and laymen being rigorous and consistent about orthodox Catholic theology are, to him, the Pharisees of our day.]
It wasn't long ago that Francis made news for telling some Polish Jesuits that "in life not all is black on white or white on black. No! The shades of grey prevail in life."
But he is quite selective (and, I think, sentimental) in that regard. When it comes to marriage, sexuality, and family, there are apparently numerous shades of grey and very little that is clearly black and white. Thus, references to "sin" are avoided.
But when it comes to the environment and global warming, which Francis has strong emotions about, there appears to be plenty of black and white, and almost no grey at all. [More importantly - and unfortunately, in this regard: In support of his strong emotions, shall we say 'gut reaction', he chooses to use exclusively and unilaterally the questionable side of yet 'unsettled science' (to put it charitably) as proof that his gut reaction is right and can only be the right conclusion about climate change.]
"Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality," warned Benedict XVI, "Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way."
Mercy is not something that can be redefined in an arbitrary way, however good or appealing the sentiment involved.
One cannot argue with the reasoning elaborated by commentators like Phil Lawler, Jeff Mirus and now, Carl Olson, to dispute JMB's view that care for the environment should be among both the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. In short, that man should practise mercy towards the environment.
Of course, JMB's logic is that since all men would benefit if we all took care of our surroundings, then caring for the environment ultimately means caring for ourselves and everyone else. In this way, treating our surroundings is tantamount to treating ourselves and everyone else properly.
Well, let's see him name a commission to revise the Catechism of the Catholic Church "to make it reflect the world as it is today" by setting down his teaching as the definitive teaching on a number of topics in which he differs from preceding magisterium. We'll probably hear about it sooner rather than later. In which fundamental principles of the church of Bergoglio will be enshrined in something still named, alas, Catechism of the Catholic Church but no longer that at all. Because of Bergoglian principles like "There is no Catholic God", or "I am not interested in converting anyone to Catholicism - we all have different ways to reach God", or "There is no hell", and lately, "Sin may not always be sin" and "You may actually be in a state of grace even if you are living in adultery or in concubinage", and now, this expansion of the classical works of mercy.
My greater concern about the Bergoglian obsession with faux mercy - and it has always been in this matter - is the the unintended (I use this adjective charitably) message but unmistakable subtext in JMB's preaching of 'mercy', in effect, that a person can do anything he wants and commit the worst sins possible again and again - or live in a chronic state of mortal sin - but not to worry because God is infinitely merciful and will forgive you again and again - all you have to do is ask, no responsibilities in return (analogous to the welfare- state entitlement mentality: "Gimme, gimme, gimme - you owe me, I owe you nothing".)
Forget about "Go and sin no more" in Jesus's final admonition to the woman he forgave! And that part of the Act of Contrition in which "I firmly resolve, with the help of your grace, to do penance and to amend my life"!
Of course, in Bergoglian theology, it is not at all 'merciful' to speak of sin, and in AL, every casuistic trick is deployed to show how even a sin like adultery defined explicitly by Jesus himself may 'not always be a sin', and why adulterers may actually be 'in a state of grace' (in which case, does that mean they don't even have to go to confession and simply go to communion whenever they please? Which is the reductio ad absurdum of this Bergoglian principle).
I may even go so far as to call Bergoglio's mercy - dissociated from charity and from truth, i.e., lacking caritas in veritate - to be nothing more than a gigantic scam to promote the myth of a pope before whom, it would seem, no other pope had ever given a thought to mercy.
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Dalai Lama "was not invited"
to the Assisi meeting this month
ROME, Sept. 9, 2016 (AsiaNews) – The Dalai Lama "does not plan to visit Assisi for the Thirst for Peace meeting, nor has he received any invitation to the event,” Tenzin Taklha, personal secretary of the Buddhist leader, told AsiaNews.
Currently, the Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso) is in Belgium on a European lecture tour that will also take him to Lithuania, Switzerland and France. He is set to return to Dharamsala [his seat of exile in India] October 3. Then, on the 20th of the same month, he will be in Milan for a series of religious conferences.
With the help of the Community of Sant'Egidio, the Assisi meeting seeks to renew the spirit of the 1986 initiative launched by John Paul II. At that time, the leaders of all religions prayed together, each in his own way, elevating a prayer for peace in the world.
Right after the personal prayer, the various leaders gathered in front of the Sacred Convent for a moment of joint prayer for peace, the Dalai Lama next to John Paul II.
Thirty years later, the Community’s press office told AsiaNews, "More than 400 religious leaders will be present in the Italian town. The panel discussion will address virtually every area of the relationship between faith, society and politics."
Pope Francis will also attend the event on 20 September and meet representatives of world religions. According to the schedule released by the Vatican Press Office on 1 September, the pontiff is set to meet the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, a (not yet specified) representative of the Islamic world and a (also not yet specified) representative of world Jewry, and a meeting with Aphrem II, the Syrian Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch.
Besides not meeting with the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, which has about 15 million members in Tibet and the diaspora, the pope has no scheduled meeting with a representative of Hinduism, which has about 1 billion members, mostly in the Indian subcontinent. [But will Hinduism be represented in Assisi 2016? And who is representing Buddhism, which has about 535 million members altogether in its various denominations?]
adds this most pertinent observation:
It is well known that the Chinese government strenuously objects to public recognition of the Tibetan spiritual leader; it is possible that the Vatican, which is now engaged in delicate negotiations with the Chinese regime, wished to avoid an appearance that could complicate relations between Beijing and Rome. [Of course, the Dalai Lama has been getting the same personal snub, and for foreign policy reasons as well, from Barack Obama all these years....Ah, RealpolitiK! What principles are continuously and willingly sacrificed in your name! ]
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'One sees he has lived his life'
Interview with Peter Seewald
on LETZTE GESPRAECHE with Benedict XVI
by Patrik Schwarz
Translated from
CHRIST&WELT
Weekly Supplement to
DIE ZEIT
September 7, 2016
Editor's Note: This week, the new interview book with Benedict XVI was published, in which he speaks about his life after retirement.
Here is a conversation with his interviewer Peter Seewald, author and journalist...
Peter Seewald, since 1996, three book-length interviews of yours with Joseph Ratzinger had been published, first when he was cardinal and then as Pope. Now you are presenting the Final Conversations with the first emeritus pope in modern times. Was it different this time?
First, it is a world premiere - the first time in history that a pope evaluates his own time in office. On the other hand, there is here an impartiality and unprecedented openness. These conversations were originally not conducted with the thought of being published as such, but they were to be material for a Ratzinger biography on which I am working. That in itself perhaps makes it something different.
What does this book consist of?[
A small part of it comes from when he was still pope, but the greater part was done after his retirement. Thus, the sessions cover a relatively long period.
How did you find Benedict XVI the first time you met with him after his retirement?
He had become frailer and appeared dreadfully exhausted. It was immediately understandable what he said in announcing his renunciation - that he no longer had the strength to carry out the tasks that the Papacy calls for. At the same time, one noted a great relaxation, like someone in an ocean of calm. And one also immediately sensds the humility and simplicity that had always marked him from when he was a student through his entire career.
From the Apostolic Palace to a retirement home: what’s it like for an emeritus pope?
The so-called monastery in the Vatican Gardens is a very simple residence. For the pope as well as for the lay sisters who take care of him, and for Archbishop Gaenswein…
So, a community of seniors rather than a residence for seniors?
Well, the only senior among them is Benedict. Georg Gaenswein is 60, and for a bishop, he is in his prime. In any case, it’s usually Sister Camilla [the interviewer may have misheard - I think the right name is Carmela] who opens the door, usually wearing an apron. Then one takes a small elevator to an upper story [the second floor where the Pope’s living quarters are], where Benedict now uses a Rollator to move about.
What is the atmosphere like during your conversations?
Joseph Ratzinger is very structured, so it always starts out the same way. He asks me how I am, I ask him how he is, and he answers, “Just as it would be for an old man”. And then, we proceed to the interview.
No chatting first, no invitation to lunch afterwards?
No, we have always had to do [these interviews] within a limited time frame. Sometimes, I would ask the nuns, “Could you bring him some water, at least?” But he does not take the time for that, not even coffee.
No worldly pleasures?
My impression is that he really lives today very much in praying and for praying. But one ‘must’ for him is the nightly primetime Italian newscast. His brother once observed that Joseph Ratzinger is a news junkie.
And what about those TV specials that Italian TV invariably has?
When you ask him what TV show he likes best, his answer often is: “Don Camillo and Peppone” [films based on Guareschi’s novels about a smalltown Italian parish priest in postwar Italy and his work in a town which has a Communist mayor]. He goes to bed early.
Meanwhile, it has been more than three years since his retirement. How is he these days?
He himself thought that he would not live much longer after his renunciation. But he is someone who bounces back. At one point, one thinks, “This is going to be the last visit with him”. Then, with the next visit, he seems to have gained new strength, and he says, in the Bavarian dialect, “Now I seem to have recouped”.
How does he cope?
Recently, I said to him, Next year you will turn 90. Surely you will celebrate that. And he said, “Oh, I hope not!”
Is he wrapping it up?
One would say he has lived his life. I won’t say that he is tired of life, but that he has simply given his all. And one sees he has this yearning to leave for that new world that he has so often anticipated in his thoughts, to be closer to his Jesus. He sees his monastic life further reduced, less correspondence, less visitors, less attention.
But is that not contradicted by this book? To express himself on his retirement, his pontificate, on Francis – this, too, is a political act. Obviously, Benedict had a purpose for this. Why is he speaking now?
Of course, he may now be reproved that he has broken his silence, that he wishes to be in the public eye again, or to wield influence. But Pope Benedict is not a shadow Pope. He has stepped down and has not involved himself. Part of the history of this book is that there should not be such a book at all. My interview partner was against it at first.
Against the conversations or against the publication?
Against the publication. And even I did not start out thinking that such a book would be published while he is still alive. The interviews, as I said, were intended as material for the biography I am writing.
So what happened?
It became clear to me as I was transcribing the interview tapes that this was not mere commentary, nor supplementary, to his curriculum vitae, but that it was a historical document. Here, once again, we hear Joseph Ratzinger pure, without media distortions – even and especially about his resignation. That had been truly an unmatchable act about which all he said were the 20 lines in Latin he read in his announcement. About which legends and conspiracy theories have been woven – that he had not resigned of his own free will but that he was compelled to do so by scandals or blackmail. This required authentic information from the historical person himself in order to put a stop to all this nonsense. That is what I sought to convince the emeritus pope.
How do you convince a Pope?
You can only convince someone like Joseph Ratzinger with good arguments.
What were your arguments?
In the more than three years since his retirement, a reading has crept in that makes me downright angry: That Joseph Ratzinger had been the wrong choice for Pope, and that the best thing about his pontificate was his resignation. What nonsense!
It belies the greatness of his theological work, his great contribution to the Second Vatican Council and to the Pontificate of John Paul II, as well as the meaning of his own Pontificate, during which he started a lot of the things that Pope Francis is now continuing.
And so it is important that he should, once more, take a personal stand. Ultimately, this constitutes an open access to the message and inspiration of Benedict XVI. I think this has existential significance for the future of the faith, the Church and society.
A condition for its publication was that it should have the approval of Pope Francis. Which he gave without ifs or buts.
[I had wondered before whether the books JR wrote while he was Prefect of the CDF required the formal imprimatur ['Let it be printed' permission] of John Paul II as his superior. Notwithstanding the condition-request the cardinal had made to the pope before finally accepting to come to Rome to head the CDF, namely, that he would be able to continue publishing books in his personal capacity as a theologian.
Normally, a theologian would submit any work to his diocesan censor who would screen it for any errors of doctrine and would then issue his 'nihil obstat' (Nothing stands in the way) for the book's publication, upon which the bishop would issue his 'Imprimatur'. For theologian-CDF Prefect Ratzinger, the censor would have been his own office. Not that he would or could ever have written anything questionable or contrary to the Catholic faith.
Presumably JMB's imprimatur was formally requested for this book. If this was requested after it had been written, it would have meant that a copy of the manuscript was passed on to be vetted by those who do this for the pope. If only for this reason, it could not have included anything remotely negative about the Pope.
But I have now concluded, to my infinite regret, after reading what Seewald says in this interview, that Benedict XVI himself willingly and knowingly said all the things he says about Francis in this book After his insistence on keeping Cardinal Bertone on as his Secretary of State - a relatively trivial thing compared to this - I disagree 100 percent with Benedict XVI for the first time. Not about his opinions of JMB as a person, because those are his opinions, even if they happen to be the complete opposite of my own opinions.
I question whether it was at all necessary to say the things he is quoted to have said about his successor in the way he is quoted to have said them. Which does imply blanket approval for everything JMB has said and done, even if much of it goes against what Joseph Ratzinger had been preaching and writing in the first 86 years of his life. How is it possible that this implication has escaped him and those around him?]
How do you deal with a pope – by telephone?
No, during all the years we have worked together, we communicate by letters.
So you go to your postbox in the morning, and there you find a letter from the Pope…
In essence, yes. Mostly, it comes in a large envelope, in which Sr. Birgit, his closest co-worker, encloses the letter, often protected by so much cardboard, so that it arrives in good condition.
Was there a lot of correspondence to and fro until he was convinced?
It didn’t need an extended exchange of letters, but he certainly thought about it a lot, and must have prayed about it. Of course, he knows that this decision would set off new criticism of him. Even if this would come primarily from those who, in any case, have always been against him. [Not so. Some of the 'traditionalist' commentators who used to be behind him have now lumped him as just one more lackey of the 'FrancisChurch' they denounce and decry daily.]
Benedict XVI says in the book that he had not expected the election of Jorge Bergoglio as Pope, that he sat in suspense before the TV, like the rest of the world...
Yes, and it seems that even before the new pope stepped into the loggia overlooking St. Peter’s Square, he had placed a call to Benedict who was in Castel Gandolfo, along with his Memores Domini, sitting in front of the TV waiting to see the first appearance of his successor – so no one heard the phone ringing. [It appears they finally connected after the loggia appearance.]
There has always been speculation about the relationship between the two. Francis seems keen to have a good relationship with his predecessor, and it appears that Benedict, in this book, seeks to give the impression that he and Francis are on the same wavelength. Is there real harmony or is this for show?
No, it is not a show. First, the pope is the pope. That is true for every Catholic and even more so for someone who was pope. There has not been a situation like this before.. Everything that they do together is a ‘first’, for which the appropriate form must be found. Even for seeming banalities: How should one address a former pope? What should he wear? How should the reigning pope and the former pope get along? For all of which, there is no tradition that would set the rules. Both of them are virtually creating the papacy in this century. It is reasonable to imagine that there could at some time be three living popes – one reigning and two emeriti. And Frrancis has said that he too can imagine retiring if and when he feels he can no longer carry out his task. [Well, he has since thought that over and has now said more than once that under no condition would he ever think of resigning.]
That’s on the political level. What’s it like on the personal level between the two?
I think there is a good personal closeness between them. In the book, when I ask Benedict if he has any problem with the style of his successor, he says, “No. On the contrary, I find it good”. [Seewald uses the German word 'Art' which, in this context, can mean style or way of doing things; otherwise, generically, it can just mean 'sort' or 'type'.]
In turn, Francis has called his predecessor a great Teacher of the Church, whose spirit “will emerge greater and more powerful with each succeeding generation”. And he has said that he will try with the help of God “to continue in the same direction as Benedict”.
They not only see each other more frequently, they write letters to each other and exchange views. [And would the views on the part of Benedict express his honest views including anything negative? Schwarz should have followed up this statement by Seewald.]
Benedict speaks openly about the difference in temperament between them. I can also imagine that he must raise his eyebrows at many of the things Francis does. But he likes the elan that Francis brings to his job. One sees the difference in their public appearances. Benedict’s presence is one for the concert hall, Francis is the man for the public square.
There are always reports about intrigues in which the adversaries of Francis wish to implicate his predecessor…
But anyone who tries that will simply be banging their head against a brick wall with Benedict.
So there are no discreet hints, no encouraging nods for the critics of Francis?
No. I am sure that not once, not even to Georg Gaenswein, his secretary, has he ever allowed any word of disloyalty to cross his lips.
In editing the book, was anything stricken out?
No, nothing important was left out. But it is true that we spoke about other things for the biography that are not contained in this book because they would be out of place.
At the end of the interview, Benedict refers to a love in his youth.
Yes, he fell in love when he was a student, and it was quite serious.
What do you mean, serious?
That it caused him serious concern. During his first years in university after the war, there were female students, and he had become a very charming man, a good-looking young man, a beautiful soul who wrote poems and read Herman Hesse. One of his fellow students at the time told me that he had quite an effect on women, which he reciprocated. And so, it was not easy for him to decide in favor of the celibate life.
The book is called 'Last Conversations' – it could also be titled 'The Last Judgment'. One notes how Benedict struggled with what he openly calls his inadequacies. Right from the start, he refers to himself as “this poor little man”…
Ratzinger is anything but someone full of himself. That didn’t change when he was Pope, and it is even clearer in this retrospective of his life.
He says that ‘knowing’ others is not among his strengths, and that ‘practical governance is not at all my thing”.
Self-criticism is part of his self-knowledge, and that is overlooked by many critics. He has never shown himself to be authoritarian.
And that is not just coquetry?
No, I have never felt that about him. I believe that in the final stage of his life, he is truly very clear about himself. He admits openly in what ways he felt that he has been inadequate. He says, for example, that he has not always treated everyone with the attention they may have deserved. And he speaks quite frankly about his other weaknesses or about his physical handicaps…
As in ‘my voice is by nature weak’?
Even more serious is the limitation that was not known to me despite the many conversations we had over so many years: that before he was elected pope, he was already fully blind in the left eye, after a brain hemorrhage and inflammation.
The insight into the papacy that Benedict gives us is very surprising. He says the pope is no superman, that he cannot just change things with words of authority. Is the pope less powerful than the world thinks?
The word ‘infallibility’ has led to many false conclusions. Those who know very little about the Catholic Church think wrongly that everything a pope does is infalible, and that therefore Catholics must be submissive. But there are many things a pope cannot change. Benedict has a very realistic picture of the possibilities as well as the limitations of the office. The pope is not the king. Christ is the King of the Church.
In the book, one experiences in many places a touching personality who asks himself the final questions. Despite this, however, one must ask about the political objective of this book: Is this not also an attempt to protect his legacy, to polish, in retrospect, a pontificate that was shabby?
No, he does not see his pontificate as having been a failure. Of course, it had its problems, even some scandals, from which no papacy has been free, not even that of Francis. Benedict’s central declaration in announcing his renunciation of the Papacy was this: “I can leave now, when I am not under any pressure”. As weakened as he was, physically and pscychically, as he described it himself, but he was not under any political pressure – because, he has always said, one must not yield to external pressure.
But despite all that, he is really concerned with what his image will be in the history books…
Even a Joseph Ratzinger is not completely devoid of vanity. But for him, this is limited to wanting to be considered at the level of theological discussion in his time. He is not vain in the sense of wanting to be great in the eyes of others, or to go into the history books, or even to be judged a great pope. When anyone tells him that, he cringes.
What is important to him is that access to his work should not be blocked. And his work is not the announcement of Joseph Ratzinger but the announcement of Christ. And therefore, he perhaps feared that unless he gave his final words about his resignation, a shadow would remain to darken his work on Christ.
After so many books, so many conversations with Joseph Ratzinger, what is the strongest image that remains with you?
Perhaps his last evening as Pope. After the white helicopter had flown him, to the sound of pealing church bells, from the Vatican Gardens to Castel Gandolfo in the Alban Hills, he stood for the last time at the window of the residence, waved to the faithful and said, I think, “Good night”. Then he turned and disappeared from the balcony into the darkness of the house. I asked him what he did then, inside the residence, behind the shutters, on that historic night.
And?
Very laconically, he said – and this is not in the book – “I unpacked my bags”. He may well be a great spirit, he may have all these spiritual concerns, but there is something he likes to do, day or night: Now and then, he loves to dawdle.
[Not quite the note on which to end a conversation about Benedict XVI by his biographer! Perhaps a humanizing anecdote but also trivializing...]
The most objective account - because it doesn't conclude that Benedict XVI approves the Bergoglian pontificate 100 percent - that I have read so far about the book is, surprisingly, from THE DAILY BEAST, by its Rome correspondent...
Pope Benedict’s new 'autobiography':
'I was unsure about Francis
by Barbie Latza Nadeau
THE DAILY BEAST
ROME, Sept. 9, 2016 — Pope Benedict XVI has given his final word. His autobiography, Benedict XVI: Final Conversations, published Sept. 9 in Italian and German, is the fruit of a series of long interviews by German journalist and papal confidante Peter Seewald. The English version will be released in late November under the title Last Testaments.
The cover shows the back of Benedict’s skullcapped head in a fog of incense over a red box, about the same color as his famous Prada shoes, with the words “spiritual testament” and a quote by Pope Francis about how his predecessor “embodies holiness, is a man of a man of God.”
In essence, it is a living obituary for a man who Seewald says is in the waning moments of his long life of 89 years. He is now blind in his left eye and cannot walk unassisted. When Seewald asked if he hoped to see his 90th birthday, Benedict responded, “hopefully not.”
Seewald uses Benedict’s own words intertwined with anecdotes of the long hours they spent together to paint a revealing portrait of a man who can be easily described as misunderstood.
Seewald says that on several occasions he thought Benedict was so weak that he wouldn’t live to see their next meeting. “You realize he has lived his life,” Seewald told Die Zeit when the book came out. “I don’t want to say he is tired of life, but that he has simply given all he’s got to give.”
Benedict was the first pope to resign from office in modern history, setting a precedent that many feel Pope Francis may follow when and if he tires of his fast-paced pontificate.
He describes himself as a “news junkie” and how he was “glued to the television to see who won” as his successor when the black smoke turned to white during the conclave. In his excitement, he ignored a call from Jose Mario Bergoglio, who he knew as a prominent member of the Argentine church. He was shocked when they called Bergolgio’s name to become the next pope.
“No one expected him,” Benedict says. “When I first heard his name, I was unsure. But when I saw how he spoke with God and with people, I truly was content. And happy.”
“What did touch me, though, was that even before going out onto the loggia, he tried to phone me.”
Benedict is also very honest about his shortcomings and frustrations as pontiff. He talks candidly about his battle against a “powerful gay lobby” of a handful of people who tried to influence decisions in the church.
“We dissolved it,” he says matter-of-factly, though Francis has admitted such a group still exists within the hierarchy of the Holy See.
Benedict also admits where he thinks he could have done better. “My weak point perhaps is a lack of resolve in governing and making decisions,” he says about the indecision on many issues that has come to define his papacy. [I have to see what the book actually says about that. Can you think of a major indecision? Deciding to keep Bertone was not an indecision, even if, in the opinion of many, it was a wrong decision.]
“Here, in reality, I am more a professor, one who reflects and meditates on spiritual questions. Practical governance was not my forte, and this certainly was a weakness.”
“But I don’t see myself as a failure,” he says. “For eight years, I did my service.”
He has also grown to appreciate Pope Francis, whose papacy has already overshadowed Benedict’s in the three years since he was elected. “He is a man of practical reform and he also has the spirit to intervene and take measures of an organizational nature,” Benedict says of the new pope.
In the years after Benedict resigned, conspiracy theorists have suggested the German pontiff had been blackmailed or somehow pressured to leave his office. His retirement came after his butler was convicted of passing on his private documents to a journalist and after he was presented with a mysterious red binder that reportedly outlined the many problems facing the church. But Benedict says he wasn’t pushed out.
“It was not a retirement made under the pressure of events or a flight made due to the incapacity to face them,” he says. “No one tried to blackmail me. I would not have allowed it. If they had tried, I would not have gone because it is not right to leave when under pressure. And it is not true that I was disappointed, or anything like that.”
In interviews to promote the book, Seewald has also been giving out tidbits that didn’t make the tome’s final cut, including how Joseph Ratzinger, as he was known before he became pope, fell in love with a woman just as he was about to take his priestly vows.
“There was an infatuation during his course of studies that was very serious,” Seewald told Die Zeit. “One of his fellow students told me he had quite an effect on women — and the other way around. The decision for celibacy wasn’t easy for him.”
One of the greatest disappointments the book reveals is that Benedict’s juicer memoir will be kept private. He kept extensive diaries throughout the time he was the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and throughout his papacy, including the butler scandal and his decision to retire. Seewald says those notes will be destroyed when he dies.
Now that Benedict’s self-reflection has been published, Seewald says the former pope is ready to die, spending his days not dreading his death, but instead “preparing to pass the ultimate examination before God.”
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 11/09/2016 21:30] |
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