BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI



I take the opportunity of the page change to apologize for having been 'inactive' all day Saturday, and it is propitious that I begin this page with the final installment of the most detailed "We accuse..." presented so far in a single statement against the un-Catholic and anti-Catholic actions and statements of the current pope.






One must note that the title of this 'charge sheet' against Jorge Mario Bergoglio acting as pope and nominal leader of the Roman Catholic
Church is the English translation of the title of Pius XI's encyclical against Nazism Mit brennender Sorge.

Here is Part III of the three-part charge sheet against JMB/Pope Francis by The Remnant and Catholic Family News....

With Burning Concern:

We Accuse Pope Francis..

Part II of III
A joint statement by
and

Written by Michael Matt, Christopher Ferrara & John Vennari
Sept. 23, 2016

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LIBER OF ACCUSATION - Part III

A “pastoral practice” at war with doctrine
You have approved as the only correct interpretation of Amoris a moral calculus that would in practice undermine the whole moral order, not just the norms of sexual morality you obviously seek to subvert.

For the application of virtually any moral norm can be deemed “unfeasible” by a talismanic invocation of “complex circumstances” to be “discerned” by a priest or bishop in “pastoral practice” while the norm is piously defended as unchanged and unchangeable as a “general rule.”

The nebulous criterion of “limitations that diminish responsibility and culpability” could be applied to all manner of habitual mortal sin, including cohabitation — which you have already likened to “true marriage” — “homosexual unions” — whose legalization you have refused to oppose — and contraception, which, incredibly, you have declared is morally permissible in order to prevent the transmission of disease, which the Vatican later confirmed is in fact your view.

Thus the Church would “in certain cases” contradict in practice what she teaches in principle regarding morality, meaning that the moral principle is practically overthrown.

In the midst of the synodal sham, but without mentioning you, Cardinal Robert Sarah rightly condemned such a specious disjunction between moral precepts and their “pastoral application”: “The idea that would consist in placing the Magisterium in a nice box by detaching it from pastoral practice — which could evolve according to the circumstances, fads, and passions — is a form of heresy, a dangerous schizophrenic pathology.”

Yet, as you would have it, based on “discernment” by local priests or ordinaries, certain people living in an objective condition of adultery can be deemed subjectively inculpable and admitted to Holy Communion without any commitment to an amendment of life even though they know the Church teaches that their relationship is adulterous.

In a recent interview, the renowned Austrian philosopher Josef Seifert, a friend of Pope John Paul II and one of the many critics of Amoris whose private entreaties for correction or retraction of the document you have ignored, has publicly noted the moral and pastoral absurdity of what you now explicitly approve:

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How should that be applied? Should the priest say to one adulterer: 'You are a good adulterer. You are in the state of grace. You are a very pious person, so you get my absolution without changing your life and you can go to Holy Communion.' And in comes another, and he [the priest] says: 'Oh, you are a real adulterer. You must first confess. You must revoke your life. You must change your life and then you can go to Communion'.

I mean, how should that work?.... How can a priest be a judge of the soul [and] say that one is a real sinner and the other is only an innocent, good man? I mean that seems completely impossible. Only a priest who would have a kind of Padre Pio vision of souls could possibly say that, and he [Padre Pio] wouldn’t say that…."

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With your praise and approval, the bishops of Buenos Aires even suggest that children will be harmed if their divorced and “remarried” parents are not permitted to continue engaging in sexual relations outside of marriage while they profane the Blessed Sacrament.

One casuitical defender of your departure from sound teaching surmises that this means adultery is only a venial sin if one partner in adultery is under “duress” to continue engaging in adulterous sexual relations because the other partner threatens to leave the children unless he is given sexual satisfaction.

According to that moral logic, any mortal sin, including abortion, would be rendered venial merely by one party’s threat to end an adulterous relationship if the sin is not committed.

Even worse, it that were possible, the bishops of Buenos Aires, relying solely on your novelties, dare to suggest that people who continue habitually to engage in adulterous sexual relations will grow in grace while sacrilegiously receiving Holy Communion.

You have thus contrived no mere “change of discipline” but rather a radical change of underlying moral doctrine that would effectively institutionalize a form of situation ethics in the Church, reducing universally binding, objective moral precepts to mere general rules from which there would be innumerable subjective “exceptions” based on “complex circumstances” and “limitations” that would supposedly reduce habitual mortal sins to venial sins or even mere faults posing no impediment to Holy Communion.

But God Incarnate admitted of no such “exceptions” when He decreed by His divine authority: “Every one that putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery: and he that marrieth her that is put away from her husband, committeth adultery (Lk 16:18).” Every one.

Moreover, as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under John Paul II declared in rejecting the “Kasper proposal” that has clearly been your proposal all along: “This norm [excluding public adulterers from the sacraments] is not at all a punishment or a discrimination against the divorced and remarried, but rather expresses an objective situation that of itself renders impossible the reception of Holy Communion.”

That is, the Church can never permit those living in adultery to be treated as if their immoral unions were valid marriages, even if the partners in adultery implausibly claim subjective inculpability while knowingly living in violation of the Church’s infallible teaching. For the resulting scandal would erode and ultimately ruin the faith of the people in both the indissolubility of marriage and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

With your full approval, however, the bishops of Buenos Aires have rejected John Paul II’s admonition in Familiaris consortio that “if these people were admitted to the Eucharist, the faithful would be led into error and confusion regarding the Church’s teaching about the indissolubility of marriage.”

At this very moment in Church history, therefore, you are leading the faithful “into error and confusion regarding the Church's teaching about the indissolubility of marriage.” Indeed, so determined are you to impose your errant will upon the Church that in Amoris (n. 303) you dared to suggest that God Himself condones the continued sexual relations of the divorced and “remarried” if they can do no better in their “complex” circumstances:

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"Yet conscience can do more than recognize that a given situation does not correspond objectively to the overall demands of the Gospel. It can also recognize with sincerity and honesty what for now is the most generous response which can be given to God, and come to see with a certain moral security that it is what God himself is asking amid the concrete complexity of one’s limits, while yet not fully the objective ideal"(AL 303)

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In explicitly approving Holy Communion for select public adulterers in your letter to Buenos Aires you also undermine the ability of more conservative bishops to maintain the Church’s traditional teaching.
- How can bishops in America, Canada and Poland, for example, continue to insist on the Church’s bimillenial discipline, intrinsically connected to revealed truth, when you have dispensed with it in Buenos Aires on the authority of your “apostolic exhortation”?
- On what ground will they stand against a swarm of objections now that you have removed the ground of Tradition from beneath their feet?

In sum, after years of artful ambiguity regarding the standing of public adulterers with respect to Confession and Holy Communion, you now just as artfully declare the purported overthrow of the Church’s doctrine and practice by employing a “confidential” letter you must have known would be leaked, sent in response to a document from Buenos Aires you may well have solicited as part of the process you have been guiding since the sham “Synod on the Family” was announced.

As the Catholic intellectual and author Antonio Socci has written: “It is the first time in the history of the Church that a Pope has placed his signature on an overturning of the moral law.” No previous Pope has ever perpetrated such an outrage.

“Exceptions” to the moral law cannot be confined
Curiously enough, however, your novel moral calculus does not seem to apply to the other sins you constantly condemn while carefully observing the bounds of political correctness.

Nowhere, for example, do you indicate that “complex circumstances” or “limitations that diminish responsibility and culpability” would excuse the Mafiosi you have rhetorically “excommunicated” en masse and warned of Hell, the rich you condemn as “bloodsuckers” or even the observant Catholics you ludicrously accuse of “the sin of divination” and “the sin of idolatry” because they will not accept “the surprises of God” — meaning your novelties.

Your entire pontificate seems to have centered on declaring an amnesty for sins of the flesh only, the very sins that, as Our Lady of Fatima warned, send more souls to hell than any other. [Let me interpose Fr. Hunwicke's logical challenge to Bergoglian mercy: And what about the priests who have been and are sexual offenders, assuming they become truly contrite?]

But what makes you think the moral genie you have let out of the bottle, which you call the “God of surprises,” can be confined only to those moral precepts you deem overly rigid in application? To create exceptions to one exceptionless moral precept is effectively to undo them all.

Your novelty attacks the foundations of the Faith and threatens to topple the Church’s entire moral edifice “like a house of cards” — the very outcome you accused observant Catholics of promoting on account of their supposed “rigorism” and attachment to “small-minded rules.”

But you are heedless of such obvious consequences. When asked about your approach to opposition from “ultra-conservatives,” meaning orthodox bishops and cardinals, you replied with the insouciant arrogance that is a hallmark of your governance of the Church: “They do their job and I do mine. I want a Church that is open, understanding, that accompanies wounded families. They say no to everything. I go ahead, without looking over my shoulder.”

In an astonishing display of haughty contempt for the Church of which you were elected head, you have dared to say: “the Church herself sometimes follows a hard line, she falls into the temptation of following a hard line, into the temptation of stressing only the moral rules, many people are excluded.”

Never before has a Pope declared that he will personally remedy the Church’s lack of openness and understanding and her “temptation” to take a “hard line” on morality so as to “exclude” people. Such alarmingly hubristic pronouncements give rise to the distinct impression that your unexpected election represents an almost apocalyptic development.

Ignoring all entreaties,
you forge ahead with your 'revolution'
As you have gone about your work of destruction, you have ignored every private entreaty addressed to you, including innumerable requests that you affirm that Amoris Laetitia does not depart from prior teaching, as well as a document prepared by a group of Catholic scholars who identified heretical and erroneous propositions in Amoris and pleaded with you to condemn and withdraw them.

It is evident you have no intention of accepting fraternal correction from anyone, not even the cardinals who have requested that you “clarify” the conformity of your teaching with the infallible Magisterium.

On the contrary, the more alarmed the faithful become, the more boldly you act. Continuing your programmatic loosening in practice of the Church’s moral teaching concerning sexuality, you have authorized the Pontifical Council for the Family to publish the first classroom “sex education” program ever promulgated by the Holy See. [Strategically debuting on and distributed in the millions at World Youth Day 2016]

One of the associations of lay faithful that has risen to defend the Faith in the face of the hierarchy’s general silence before your onslaught of dissolvent novelties has published a summary of this horrific curriculum, which blatantly violates the Church’s constant teaching against any form of explicit classroom “sex-education”:
• Handing the sexual formation of children over to educators while leaving parents out of the equation.
• Failing to name and condemn sexual behaviors, such as fornication, prostitution, adultery, contracepted-sex, homosexual activity, and masturbation, as objectively sinful actions that destroy charity in the heart and turn one away from God.
• Failing to warn youths about the possibility of eternal separation from God (damnation) for committing grave sexual sins. Hell is not mentioned once.
• Failing to distinguish between mortal and venial sin.
• Failing to speak about the 6th and 9th commandments, or any other commandment.
• Failing to teach about the sacrament of confession as a way of restoring relationship with God after committing grave sin.
• Not mentioning a healthy sense of shame when it comes to the body and sexuality.
• Teaching boys and girls together in the same class.
• Having boys and girls share together in class their understanding of phrases such as: “What does the word sex suggest to you?”
• Asking a mixed class to “point out where sexuality is located in boys and girls.”
• Speaking about the “process of arousal.”
• Using sexually explicit and suggestive images in activity workbooks.
• Recommending various sexually explicit movies as springboards for discussion….
• Failing to speak about abortion as gravely wrong, but only that it causes “strong psychological damage.”
• Confusing youths by using phrases such as “sexual relationship” to indicate not the sexual act, but a relationship focused on the whole person.
• Speaking of “heterosexuality” as something to be “discover[ed].”
• Using [a “gay” celebrity] as an example of a gifted and famous person.
• Endorsing the “dating” paradigm as a step towards marriage.
• Not stressing celibacy as the supreme form of self-giving that constitutes the very meaning of human sexuality.
• Failing to mention Christ’s teaching on marriage.

The same association observes that the curriculum “violates norms previously promulgated by the very same pontifical council.”

Another lay association protests that it “makes frequent use of sexually explicit and morally objectionable images, fails to clearly identify and explain Catholic doctrine from elemental sources including the Ten Commandments and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and compromises the innocence and integrity of young people under the rightful care of their parents.”

Lay leaders in the Catholic family movement have rightly denounced it as “thoroughly immoral,” “entirely inappropriate,” and “quite tragic.” As one of them declared: “Parents must not be under any illusion: the pontificate of Pope Francis marks the surrender of the Vatican authorities to the worldwide sexual revolution and directly threatens their own children.”

But this radical departure from prior teaching and practice is only in keeping with the novelties of Amoris, which proclaims “the need for sex education” in “educational institutions” while completely ignoring the Church’s traditional teaching that parents, not teachers in classrooms, have the primary responsibility to provide any necessary instruction to their children in this most sensitive area, taking care not to “descend to details” but rather to “employ those remedies which produce the double effect of opening the door to the virtue of purity and closing the door upon vice.”

Your “revolution” is hardly confined to matters sexual, however. You have also recently convened a commission, including six women, to “study” the matter of women “deacons,” which was already studied by a Vatican commission in 2002.

That commission concluded that the diaconate belongs to the ordained clerical state along with the priesthood and the episcopacy and that so-called “deaconesses” in the early Church were not ordained ministers but only ecclesial helpers with no more authority than nuns, who performed limited services for women, but certainly not baptisms or marriages. The “deaconettes” you seem to contemplate would thus be nothing more than women masquerading in clerical garb, as women cannot possibly receive any degree of the Sacrament of Holy Orders.

As you continue to undermine respect for the utter seriousness and supernatural character of sacramental marriage it seems you are preparing to undermine further an already drastically diminished respect for the male priesthood. What is next? Perhaps a “relaxation” of the apostolic tradition of clerical celibacy, which you have already declared is “on my agenda.”

And now, as your “revolution” continues to accelerate, you prepare to depart for Sweden in October, where you will participate in a joint “prayer service” with a married Lutheran [female] “bishop,” head of the pro-abortion, pro-“gay marriage” Lutheran World Federation, to “commemorate” the so-called Reformation launched by Martin Luther.

It is [WAS, before March 13, 2013] inconceivable that a Roman Pontiff would dignify the memory of this maniac, the most destructive heretic in the history of the Church, who shattered the unity of Christendom and opened the way to endless violence and bloodshed and the collapse of morals throughout Europe.

As Luther infamously declared: “If I succeed in doing away with the Mass, then I shall believe I have completely conquered the Pope. If the sacrilegious and cursed custom of the Mass is overthrown, then the whole will fall.”

It is supremely ironic that the arch-heretic you intend to honor with your presence uttered those words in a letter to Henry VIII, who led all of England into schism because the Pope would not accommodate his desire for divorce and “remarriage,” including access to the sacraments.

We must oppose you
At this point in your tumultuous tenure as “Bishop of Rome” it is beyond reasonable dispute that your presence on the Chair of Peter represents a clear and present danger to the Church.

In view of that danger, we must ask:
- Are you not in the least troubled by the scandal and confusion your words and deeds have caused concerning the salvific mission of the Church and her teaching on faith and morals?
- Does it never occur to you that the world’s endless applause for “the Francis revolution” is precisely the ill omen of which Our Lord gave warning?: “Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for in the same manner did their fathers to the false prophets" (Lk 6:26).
- Have you no sense of alarm about the divisions you have provoked within the Church, with some bishops departing from the teaching of your predecessors on the divorced and “remarried,” solely on your purported authority, while others attempt to maintain the bimillenial doctrine and practice you have labored without ceasing to overthrow?
- Do you think nothing of the numberless sacrilegious communions that will result from your authorization of Holy Communion for objective public adulterers and others in “irregular situations,” which you had already permitted en masse as Archbishop of Buenos Aires?
- Do you even recognize that reception of Holy Communion by people living in adultery is a profanation, a direct offense against “the Body of the Lord" (1 Cor. 11:29) worthy of damnation as well as a public scandal that threatens the faith of others, as both Benedict XVI and John Paul II insisted in line with all their predecessors?
- Do you really think you have the power to decree “merciful” exceptions in “certain cases” to divinely revealed moral precepts in order to suit your personal notion of “inclusion,” your evidently benign view of divorce and cohabitation and your false notion of what you call “pastoral charity” in your letter to the bishops of Buenos Aires? As if it were uncharitable to require adulterers and fornicators to cease their immoral sexual relations before partaking of the Blessed Sacrament!
- Have you no respect for the contrary teaching of all the Popes who preceded you?
- Finally, have you no fear of the Lord and His judgment, which you constantly minimize or deny in your sermons and spontaneous remarks, even declaring — exactly contrary to the Creed — that the Good Shepherd… seeks not to judge but to love”?

[Obviously, from Bergoglio's record of the past three years and 185 days, his answer to all the above except question 6 would be a resounding NO, otherwise he would not have said and done what he has said and done so far. Question 6 is a YES, he does think, with unparalleled hubris, that he has the power - and the authority - of the duly elected Bishop of Rome, Successor to Peter, to say and do all that he has done, is doing and will do against the One True Church of Christ, that he obsessively believes he can improve by erecting the church of Bergoglio in its place - in effect, that in the ways he has already acted so far, he really thinks he can do better than Jesus himself!]

We must agree with the assessment of the aforementioned Catholic journalist concerning your insane pursuit of Holy Communion for people in immoral sexual relationships: “This whole affair is bizarre. No other word will do.”

Beyond this, however, your entire bizarre pontificate has given rise to a situation the Church has never seen before: an occupant of the Chair of Peter whose remarks, pronouncements and decisions are blows to the Church’s integrity against which the faithful must constantly guard themselves.

As the same writer concludes: “I say this in sorrow, but I’m afraid that the rest of this papacy is now going to be rent by bands of dissenters, charges of papal heresy, threats of – and perhaps outright – schism. Lord, have mercy.”

Yet almost the entire hierarchy either suffers in silence or exultantly celebrates this debacle. But so it was during the great Arian crisis of the 4th century, when, as Cardinal Newman famously observed:

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The body of the episcopate was unfaithful to its commission, while the body of the laity was faithful to its baptism; [and] at one time the Pope, at other times the patriarchal, metropolitan, and other great sees, at other times general councils, said what they should not have said, or did what obscured and compromised revealed truth; while, on the other hand, it was the Christian people who, under Providence, were the ecclesiastical strength of Athanasius, Hilary, Eusebius of Vercellae, and other great solitary confessors, who would have failed without them.

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If we are to be faithful to our baptism and our Confirmation oath, we members of the laity, unworthy sinners though we are, cannot remain silent or passive in the face of your depredations.

We are compelled by the dictates of conscience to accuse you publicly before our fellow Catholics as demanded by revealed truth, the divine and natural law, and the ecclesial common good.

To recall the teaching of Saint Thomas cited above, there is no exception for the Pope to the principle of natural justice that subjects may rebuke their superior, even publicly, when there is “imminent danger of scandal concerning faith.” Quite the contrary, reason itself demonstrates that, more than any other prelate, the Pope must be corrected, even by his subjects, should he “stray from the straight path.”

We know that the Church is no mere human institution and that its indefectibility is assured by the promises of Christ. Popes come and go, and the Church will survive even this pontificate.

But we also know that God deigns to work through human instruments and that, over and above the essentials of prayer and penance, He expects from the members of the Church Militant, both clergy and laity, a militant defense of faith and morals against threats from any source — be it even a Pope, as Church history has demonstrated more than once.

For the love of God and the Blessed Virgin, Mother of the Church, whom you profess to revere, we call upon you to recant your errors and undo the immense harm you have caused to the Church, to souls, and to the cause of the Gospel lest you follow the example of Pope Honorius, an aider and abettor of heresy anathematized by an ecumenical council and his own successor, and thus bring down upon yourself “the wrath of Almighty God and of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul.”

But if you will not relent in the pursuit of your vainglorious “vision” of a more “merciful” and evangelical Church than the one founded by Christ, whose doctrine and discipline you seek to bend to your will, let the cardinals who regret the mistake of electing you honor their blood oaths and at least issue a public demand that you change course or relinquish the office they so improvidently entrusted to you. [That is an appeal just as futile as any appeal to Bergoglio.]

Meanwhile, we are duty bound to oppose your errors according to our own station in the Church and to exhort our fellow Catholics to join in that opposition, using every legitimate means at our disposal to mitigate the harm you seem determined to inflict upon the Mystical Body of Christ. All other recourses having failed, no other way is open to us.

May God have mercy on us, His Holy Church, and on you as its earthly head.

Mary, Help of Christians, Pray for Us!

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Do you think any of the courtiers and courtesans (in its original meaning) around JMB would ever make him even aware that this 'Nous accusons...' exists??? It is unlikely that on his own, he would come across all the appeals that have been sent to him online - and reported by some media - so how would he learn about them if no one tells him?

The Vatican press office, which speaks for this pope in a direct and literal sense that was not so under his predecessors, has the best excuse for not ever commenting on these appeals - the object of the appeal does not know about their existence, so commenting on them or reacting to them would imply this pope was aware of these appeals which are really impassioned protests, a cri de coeur emitted daily by those of us Catholics who see what Bergoglio has done and is doing to the Church of Christ.

In short, all the present acts of resistance from the laity and some clergy, even some bishops and cardinals, are, for now, nothing more than concrete steps to go on record that in this decade of the first century of the third Christian millennium, not all Catholics are playing dumb sheep in the flock of a shepherd who is really the Big Bad Wolf in disguise.

This is one of those horrific news reports that always get to be grossly under-reported and even ignored... Does the current pope know that the atheist regime he is so publicly courting is carrying out this atrocious practice? But perhaps even if he did, he would include this as among the offenses for which he has explicitly absolved the Communist Chinese leadership for having committed - or presumably, even if they are still committing them - including the killings of millions of citizens in the regime's various purges, 'great leaps forward' and 'cultural revolutions'. (The Bergoglio Vatican's efforts to make nice with China at whatever cost is one of the many Bergoglian novelties that failed to make it to the LIBER OF ACCUSATIONS)...

China’s evil secret:
Forced organ harvesting
by Benedict Rogers

Sept. 22, 2016

‘The scalpel cut into the chest and blood gushed out,” recalled an unnamed policeman in Shenyang, China. “At that time, we had been interrogating and severely torturing her for about a week. She already had countless wounds on her body. We used electrical batons to torture her.”

The policemen described how a secretive government office had sent over two men: one a military surgeon, the other a graduate from a medical university. “No anaesthetics were used. They cut her chest with a knife without shaking hands,” he said.

When the woman, who belonged to the banned Falun Gong movement, shouted out in defiance, the surgeon hesitated. But after a nod from his superior, he continued. “It was extremely horrible,” the policeman said. “I can imitate her scream for you. It sounded like something was being ripped apart.”

Those words rolled across the screen just after the credits at the end of a new film, The Bleeding Edge, to a stunned audience of MPs at Speaker’s House, Westminster, this month. They expose the gruesome practice of forced organ harvesting in China, which the movie depicts. The film features the Chinese-born Canadian actress and Miss World contestant Anastasia Lin, who is leading a global campaign against the practice.

Today in China thousands of prisoners of conscience – potentially including unregistered “house church” Christians – are strapped to operating tables and cut apart by force. Their vital organs are then extracted and sold for use as transplants. In China, surgeons’ scalpels have become weapons of murder and those who wield them have become accomplices to a barbaric trade.

A new report published in June claims that forced organ harvesting is now occurring on a scale far larger than previously imagined. The researchers conducted a meticulous forensic inquiry into the public records of 712 hospitals in China carrying out liver and kidney transplants. They concluded that between 60,000 to 100,000 organs are transplanted each year in Chinese hospitals.

One hospital alone, the Oriental Organ Transplant Centre at the Tianjin First Central Hospital, is performing more than 6,000 transplants a year. China officially claims 10,000 organ transplants per annum, but the authors contend that this is “easily surpassed by just a few hospitals”. The evidence points to what human rights lawyer David Matas called the “mass killing of innocents” in his testimony to the US Congress.

The screening of The Bleeding Edge, hosted by John Bercow, Speaker of the House of Commons, was a significant step forward in an international campaign to bring this evidence to the attention of policy-makers.

Earlier this year Anastasia Lin and the journalist Ethan Gutmann testified at hearings held by the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission, along with Dr Enver Tohti, an Uighur surgeon who admits to having conducted one operation to forcibly remove organs from a prisoner. “In China, the government does not treat people as human beings,” he said.

The US Congress and the European Parliament have passed resolutions condemning forced organ harvesting in China. On October 11 there will be a debate in the House of Commons. Soon after that the MP Fiona Bruce will table an early day motion calling on the United Nations to conduct an inquiry, and urging Britain to ban citizens from travelling to China for organ transplants (research indicates that some Britons have travelled to China for this purpose).

Campaigners are also urging the Government to gather statistics and ensure transparency around so-called “organ tourism”. They want Britain to consider a travel ban on medical personnel and government officials in China who are directly engaged in organ harvesting.

The Bleeding Edge won an award earlier this year from the Catholic Academy of Communication Professionals, which praised the film for its “artistic achievement” and said it “enriches with a true vision of humanity”. Pope Francis has described the organ trade as “immoral and a crime against humanity”. [Did he say that specifically in relation to China, or was it a generic platitude?]

Catholics in Britain should watch the film and join the campaign to urge our Government to work with others to end this horrific crime.

I'm one week late posting this item but it's one that must be included in any day-to-day documentation of the 'Bergoglian crisis' (a term I deliberately use in direct analogy to what the Church has always referred to as the 'Arian crisis')...

Dilution of doctrine
by Ross Douthat

Sept. 17, 2016

Last weekend Tim Kaine, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee and a churchgoing Catholic, briefly escaped obscurity by telling an audience of L.G.B.T. activists that he expects his church to eventually bless and celebrate same-sex marriages.

In short order his bishop, Francis X. DiLorenzo of Richmond, Va., had a statement out declaring that the Catholic understanding of marriage would remain “unchanged and resolute.”

In a normal moment, it would be the task of this conservative Catholic scribbler to explain why the governor is wrong and the bishop is right, why scripture and tradition make it impossible for Catholicism to simply reinvent its sexual ethics.

But this is not a normal moment in the Catholic Church. As the governor was making his prediction, someone leaked a letter from Pope Francis to the Argentine bishops, praising their openness to allowing some divorced-and-remarried Catholics to receive communion.

The “private” letter was the latest move in a papal dance that’s been going on since Francis was elected. The pope clearly wants to admit remarried Catholics to communion, and he tried by hook and crook to get the world’s bishops to agree. But he faced intense resistance from conservatives, who pointed out that this reform risked evacuating the church’s teaching that sacramental marriages are indissoluble and second marriages adulterous.

The conservative resistance couldn’t be overcome directly without courting a true crisis. So Francis has proceeded indirectly, offering studied ambiguity in official publications combined with personal suggestions of where he really stands.

This dance has effectively left Catholicism with two teachings on marriage and the sacraments. The traditional rule is inscribed in the church’s magisterium, and no mere papal note can abrogate it.

But to the typical observer, it’s the Francis position that looks more like the church’s real teaching (He is the pope, after all), even if it’s delivered off the cuff or in footnotes or through surrogates.

That position, more or less, seems to be that second marriages may be technically adulterous, but it’s unreasonable to expect modern people to realize that, and even more unreasonable to expect them to leave those marriages or practice celibacy within them. So the sin involved in a second marriage is often venial not mortal, and not serious enough to justify excluding people of good intentions from the sacraments.

Which brings us back to Tim Kaine’s vision, because it is very easy to apply this modified position on remarriage to same-sex unions. [But from JMB/PF's entire record as Archbishop of Buenos Aires and as pope, the obvious next beneficiaries of formal sacramental leniency from this pope are practising homosexuals, along with unmarried cohabitators. The only question is how he will formally grant this concession - can you see him calling a synod to discuss homosexuals and their lifestyle?]


If relationships the church once condemned as adultery are no longer a major, soul-threatening sin, then why should a committed same-sex relationship be any different? If the church makes post-sexual revolution allowances for straight couples, shouldn’t it make the same ones for people who aren’t even attracted to the opposite sex?

An allowance is not the same thing as a blessing. Under the Francis approach, the church would not celebrate second marriages, and were its logic extended to gay couples there wouldn’t be the kind of active celebration Kaine envisions either.

Instead, the church would keep the traditional teaching on its books, and only marry couples who fit the traditional criteria. But it would also signal approval to any stable relationship (gay or straight, married or cohabiting), treating the letter of the law like the pirate’s code in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies: More what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules.

The cleverness of this compromise, in theory, is that it leaves conservative Catholics with that letter to cling to, and with it the belief that the church’s teaching is supernaturally guaranteed. Thus there is no crisis point, and less risk of imitating Anglicanism’s recent schisms.

In the short run this may indeed be clever. (Clearly, conservative bishops have no idea how to handle Francis’s maneuvers.) But how long will liberal Catholics be content with a settlement that still leaves same-sex relationships in a merely-tolerated limbo, and that leaves open the possibility that a new pope — an African conservative, let’s say — might reassert the letter of the law and undo Franciss’ work?

How long can conservative Catholics persist in waiting for such a pope, and in telling one another — as they’ve been doing, rather miserably, of late — to obey the church of 2,000 years rather than the current pontiff?

And how effectively can a church retain the lukewarm or uncertain if it keeps its most controversial teachings while constantly winking to say, “Don’t worry, we don’t actually believe all that?”

This instability makes it unlikely that Pope Francis will be remembered as a great conciliator or unifier. It’s more likely now that his legacy will be either famous or infamous.

If liberal Catholics have read providence’s intentions rightly, he will be the patron saint of all future reformers.

If not, he will join a group even more select than the communion of saints: The list of popes who came close — too close — to teaching something other than the Catholic faith.

Layman Ross Douthat is far more direct and forthright about the objective situation caused in the Church by AL, JMB's most quintessentially divisive action in the Church so far, and one that was obviously long premeditated and then manipulated openly over two years to take on his position on sacramental leniency, and failing that, to force through his position nonetheless, albeit clothed casuistically and ambiguously.

And so I disagree with Fr. Mark Drew of the Catholic Herald, who refers to a tug of war, when what we have is a grossly asymmetrical confrontation in which the pope (Goliath) holds all the authority cards and all the concrete power residing in the Church hierarchy and infrastructure, against a ragtag, virtually leaderless minority (David) whose only strengths are abstract (truth, the faith, orthodoxy) expressible only in words bound to be lost like flotsam and jetsam in the ocean of public consensus reflecting the dominant secular mentality.

The cartoon and the title are both misnamed. The fight is not about AL in particular, because the Catholic minority so passionately opposed to its worst provisions certainly want no part of the document - Bergoglio and his myrmidons can have full possession of it.



Tug of war over Amoris
Catholics are divided over how far Francis wants to change Church teaching
regarding the remarried. But does he even have the authority to do so?

by Fr Mark Drew

Thursday, 22 Sep 2016

When Pope Francis published Amoris Laetitia five months ago, I predicted that the discussion of the document and its implications for Catholic teaching on marriage and the family would be lively and sometimes acrimonious. So it has turned out. [No prediction was needed. It was a foregone conclusion considering the almost three years of papal and Vatican theatricals that had one clear end in mind: extend Jorge Bergoglio's 'communion for everyone' unwritten law in Buenos Aires to the universal Church via papal writ, with, if possible, the backing of not just one but two bishops' synodal assemblies.]

The debate took a fresh turn last week with the publication of theoretically private correspondence between the Pope and the bishops of his native Argentina concerning the interpretation of a central point.

Before looking at the contents of the leaked letters, it may be useful to refresh our memories about Amoris Laetitia and why it is controversial. Vatican documents rarely hold the public’s attention for long – though the number of impassioned pundits seems to have increased during the current papacy.

Early in his pontificate Pope Francis made clear that he wanted the Synod of Bishops – a worldwide body which since Vatican II has met periodically to discuss topical issues – to discuss the place of the family in the world today and its repercussions for the Church. As a sign of the importance of the issue, the debate would take place over two synods in successive years. [That's quite a bit of revisionism of recent history there, Fr. Drew, considering that the first mention JMB ever made of a synod on 'the family' was in response to a question as to what he intended to do about the communion ban for remarried divorcees - which I think was a planted question so he could give the answer he did. Especially since no one thought to ask him "What's to discuss about this when John Paul II already reaffirmed the communion ban very clearly and explicitly in Familiaris consortio?" Well, his handpicked tactician-executor of synodal maneuvers, Cardinal Baldisseri, was to tell us a few months later, when the first synod was first announced (there was only going to be one, an extraordinary synod, but then, what the heck! throw in an ordinary synod as well the following year), that FC was 33 years too old and had to be updated. Code words for "That communion ban has to go", never mind that it was reaffirmed by a saint this current pope had recently canonized!]

It is usual for each synod to be followed by the publication of a “post-synodal exhortation” where the Pope sums up the bishops’ findings and adds reflections of his own. Amoris Laetitia, the exhortation following these two synods, was the longest papal document in history, reflecting the complexity of the issues involved and the Church’s desire to shed light on the crisis confronting the modern family. [That's BS, Fr. Drew. What new complexities does AL describe that were not already present in FC? AL is lengthy because JMB and his ghosts decided they would dress up their key points written in Chapter 8 with a whole lot of orthodox froufrou reaffirming all that is universally accepted about the Church teaching to dissimulate the doctrinal and sacramental time bombs they sewed into the fabric of the document. And they did succeed in some way because even some of the harshest critics of AL were forced to acknowledge that outside of Chapter 8, much of it was comme il faut, some of it even said to be 'poetically written'.

But who cares about a seemingly lovely confection when it masks the poison it carries in Chapter 8? AL is knowingly and deliberately poisoned in what it implies about profaning the sacraments of matrimony, penance and the Eucharist, and about the nature of sin and the state of grace one needs to receive the Eucharist. Not to forget poisoned droplets outside Chapter 8, such as the whole bit about entrusting sex education of children to schools and other institutions, completely bypassing parental responsibility.]

But the issue which grabbed most attention was the possibility that Pope Francis might change the discipline on Communion for the divorced and remarried. The Pope had given strong hints from the first months of his pontificate that he wished to relax the traditional discipline, which regards marriages contracted by Catholics after divorce and without annulment of the first marriage as adulterous, constituting a bar to reception of the Eucharist.

The synod debates proved inconclusive. There was fierce opposition from many bishops to any relaxing of the discipline, which had been reaffirmed energetically by Pope St John Paul II. In the end, a compromise formula was found, which spoke of re-integrating these Catholics into the full life of the Church under the guidance of clergy but did not specify whether this included Communion. [The compromise was inexplicably and unforgivably cowardly on the part of the orthodox synodal fathers. By agreeing to omit in their final document the three lines in FC 84 in which St. John Paul II reaffirmed the communion ban, they effectively capitulated to Bergoglio, giving him the pretext not to refer to those lines at all and therefore, avoiding the appearance of directly contradicting John Paul II (and Benedict XVI who reiterated the Communion ban in Sacramentum caritatis). Has Edward Pentin or any other resourceful Vaticanista not tried to find the arriere-scene for that flagrant omission???]
All eyes were on Francis. Would he fling open the door which his favoured theologians had managed to prise ajar?

When the Pope’s document came, it seemed to steer clear of giving an unambiguous answer to the question which by now had eclipsed the wider issues treated at such length in AL. But two footnotes in the most controversial section, Chapter 8, seemed like a nudge and a wink to those determined to overthrow traditional doctrine in the name of pastoral openness. They stressed that subjective factors may diminish the guilt of objectively sinful situations and affirmed that in some cases the Church could offer those involved the help of the sacraments.

The ambiguity seemed deliberate – and indeed, the Pope had declared near the beginning of the document that the Church’s Magisterium could not be expected to settle every controverted question.

A debate developed along predictable lines. Conservative pastors and theologians maintained that the Pope was not changing Catholic doctrine. Others hailed a development of practice, setting aside the letter of the law in order to offer sinners the mercy which is, for Francis, the very essence of the Gospel.

The correspondence with the Argentine bishops seems to settle the argument decisively in favour of those who believe that AL liberalises the practice, if not the doctrine.

The bishops sent a draft document to the Pope for comment. It said that a process of discernment with pastors might recognise factors that limit the culpability of divorced and remarried spouses who found themselves incapable of sexual abstinence.

For such people, they wrote, “Amoris Laetitia opens the possibility of access to the sacraments of reconciliation and the Eucharist.” The Pope responded that “The document … completely explains the meaning of Chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia. There are no other interpretations.”

In a sequence of events we have become accustomed to under Pope Francis, the document was leaked, then after a few days confirmed as authentic by the Vatican. From now on, it seems clear that the Pope intends to legitimise a practice which is not only without official precedent, but was also ruled out by a predecessor he himself has canonised. St John Paul II’s 1981 post-synodal exhortation, Familiaris Consortio, unambiguously makes continence a pre-condition for the civilly remarried seeking access to the Eucharist.

The papal intervention presents a twofold difficulty for Catholics who take seriously the teaching authority of the Church, and of the Pope as the chief depository of that authority.

First, it is difficult not to see a contradiction between Francis’s view and the previous teaching, not just of one pope but of his predecessors as a whole.

This leads us to the second problem, which is even more serious because it goes beyond any one teaching and touches upon the nature and scope of papal authority in itself.

Much has been written about the difficulties of harmonising AL with previous teaching. The indissolubility of marriage is a dogma which Francis has no wish to set aside. But its practical consequences are the inadmissibility of subsequent unions while a first spouse still lives. The prohibition on receiving the Eucharist in a state of grave sin, and the necessity of a purpose of amendment for absolution, are equally firm articles of the Catholic faith. Does the Pope’s implicit relaxation of the discipline not set these aside?

Concern has been so deep and widespread that a group of Catholic academic theologians, along with some pastors of souls, many of them based in Britain, have gone so far as to write to the College of Cardinals.

Once more, a letter meant to be private has been made public, and this has created sufficient concern in the hierarchy to lead to some of the signatories of the letter being subjected to pressure from their superiors to distance themselves from its contents. The authors have been careful to point out that they are not saying that Pope Francis is a heretic, but are asking for an official clarification and a rectification of errors. [Fine, you don't have to go so far as to make a technical accusation of 'heresy'. All you have to say is that this pope has made, makes and will continue to make statements that cannot be harmonized with Catholic teaching before him, and are therefore simply wrong. Asking him to rectify his errors is saying he has made errors.]

Most Catholics will be puzzled, and possibly outraged, at the notion that a pope might be suspected of teaching error. [More simply, these are the Catholics who have been brought up to believe that 'the pope is always right' - even if in practice they apply this selectively. The popes - and the Church - cannot be right about contraception and abortion, so let's ignore them on this. But if this pope tells us we can receive communion as we please because we can discern ourselves that we are not really sinning and/or that we are in a special state of grace even without going to confession, then oh yes, indeed, the pope is soooo right!]

Pious repugnance at the very notion may lie behind the discreet episcopal attempts to silence the critics, which is otherwise hard to understand when the Pope himself has called for parrhesia, or courageous frankness, in discussing the issues.

Some knowledge of history and doctrine is necessary to enable us to look at the situation calmly. Catholics believe that the Pope is divinely preserved from error – that he is infallible – only in very specific circumstances. He must, whether presiding over a General Council or acting on his own authority, make it clear that he intends to deliver a teaching that will bind the conscience of the faithful and is irrevocable.

In modern times, only the teachings on the Immaculate Conception in 1854 and the Assumption in 1950 have been proclaimed in this manner, and Francis has made it clear that he is not establishing binding norms – on the contrary, he has said that he wishes to provoke debate. [But his duty as pope is to unify the Church, not to deliberately provoke divisions. Not that he has ever manifested much of this unifying initiative, unless it is with non-Catholic Christians and non-Christians in general.]

The rest of the time the Pope, and the bishops in union with him, are exercising what we call the Ordinary Magisterium. It is divinely preserved from error only when it is constant and unanimous. John Paul II affirmed that the impossibility of women’s ordination, for example, is an example of this type of infallible teaching. [Constant it has been, but no longer unanimous! Watch this pope provoke new divisions over his apparent readiness to open the door to women priests by seemingly encouraging the notion of ordaining women deacons.]

Sometimes a teaching is not derived from unanimous tradition, but arises as a response to a contingent situation. Vatican II said that we must accord the teachings of the Ordinary Magisterium a “religious assent of mind and will”. This is not the same as the assent of faith, but is essentially loyal obedience to the Church’s authority.

So what happens if there appears to be a contradiction in the teaching of the Ordinary Magisterium? Essentially there are three possibilities.

The first is that Pope Francis is right and his predecessors were wrong. The difficulty is that he is one and they are many – and an oft-repeated teaching carries more authority than one issued by only one pope, and in a less solemn form.

The second is that Pope Francis is in error. It may happen that a pope errs in a non-infallible teaching, and he himself or his successor subsequently corrects it. In the 14th century, for example, John XXII taught a doctrine on the destiny of souls after death which he later recanted and which was judged heretical by his successor.

The third possibility is that the contradiction is only apparent and that there has been a development of doctrine which opens up new possibilities without repudiating what has been taught previously. This is the answer favoured by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, seemingly Pope Francis’s preferred spokesman on this issue.

The problem is that, according to the great exponent of the principle of development, our own Blessed John Henry Newman, development is only authentic if it preserves what has gone before and does not contradict it. Cardinal Schönborn has affirmed that this is the case for AL, but I am not convinced that he has demonstrated it with compelling argument. [What compelling argument can be presented to show that AL does not contradict Catholic teaching as we have known it till March 13, 2013?]

The First Vatican Council taught that “the Holy Spirit was promised to the successors of Peter not so that they might … make known some new doctrine, but that, by his assistance, they might religiously guard and faithfully expound the revelation or deposit of faith transmitted by the Apostles.”

The controversy surrounding AL has made it clear that there is work to be done in showing how its teaching may be squared with that of previous popes [Nothing can be done to prove an impossibility! When the pope through AL empowers individual bishops, bishops' conferences, priests - and the very sinners themselves - to 'discern' whether or not they are worthy to receive Communion, without the assurances demanded of other sinners at confession ('to do penance and to amend my life'), that has surely never been taught by any pope before this one. And pace Cardinal Schoenborn, this Bergoglian twist is no 'development of doctrine' - it is a dismissal of specific doctrines to be replaced by new teaching that belongs to the church of Bergoglio, but certainly not to the Catholic Church].

Pope Francis often appears impatient with theological debate and even uninterested in setting out a coherent intellectual account of the orthodoxy which must undergird orthopraxis (correct conduct). The Church as a whole, however, cannot long do without such an account if her claims to teach authoritatively are to possess any real credibility.

The prerequisite for achieving that goal is an intellectually honest recognition of the difficulties in the current exercise of the papal Magisterium and an evenhanded recognition of the right to question and debate. [Canon 212 assures us of this right, and may the tribe increase in size and power of those who are committed to exercise this right actively day in and day out during a pontificate I would describe as amoeban - it takes on whatever shape the pope wants it to take at any moment. The Successor of Peter as an amoeba. Certainly no rock!]

As I don't normally check now what the Vatican media churns out daily - I did religiously every morning in the previous pontificate - I was not
aware of the following development that more Catholic media ought to have picked up- but so far, only by the UK's Catholic Herald,
which prompted me to look up the original report on Vatican Radio, a rather barebones account:

New Catholic-Orthodox agreement
on primacy and synodality

23/09/2016

Catholic and Orthodox theologians have reached agreement on a new joint document entitled "Synodality and Primacy During
the First Millennium: Towards a Common Understanding in Service to the Unity of the Church".


Cardinal Kurt Koch, as president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, co-chaired the Chieti meeting. RV does not mention who was the Orthodox co-chair.

The announcement was made at the conclusion of a plenary session of the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches which took place in the Italian town of Chieti from September 15th to 22nd.

Mgr Andrea Palmieri, undersecretary of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, told Vatican Radio the new agreement is the result of a long process which began with the so-called Ravenna document, published in 2007 on the role of primacy in the early Church.

The new document looks closely at the relationship between the primacy exercised by the bishop of Rome and other Church leaders, he said, and can therefore point to ways of “resolving problems still existing between Catholics and Orthodox today”.

This document, Mgr Palmieri said, “opens the way” to a new phase of the dialogue but does not clearly resolve all the issues on the table. A note on the website of the Moscow Patriarchate, said consensus was reached, even though the Georgian Orthodox Church "disagreed with the individual paragraphs" of the document. The Georgian objections, it said, are contained in a note in the final communiqué adopted by the plenary session.

No agreement was reached in Chieti about the focus of the next plenary assembly which is due to be held in two years’ time in a predominantly Orthodox country.

Here's the CH commentary that places the agreement in the proper context, from Fr. Mark Drew, a parish priest in England who holds a doctorate in ecumenical theology from the Institut Catholique in Paris, and has also studied in Germany and Rome. He is a regular contributer to the CH:

The new Orthodox-Catholic agreement
is a landmark – but there’s a long way to go
by Fr Mark Drew

Monday, Sept. 26, 2016

Last Thursday, the Joint Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church announced that it had reached substantial agreement on the questions of primacy and synodality in the Church.

It was described as a “landmark agreement”, and one source asked excitedly whether Orthodox Churches might soon “recognise the Pope”. Has there really been a historic breakthrough in the process towards healing the thousand-year-old schism between East and West?

That the issue is a thorny one is shown by the recent history of the dialogue. In 2007 a meeting of the Commission at Ravenna produced a statement which recognised a historical right of the Bishop of Rome to be considered as protos, first in the order of bishops in the pre-schism Church, while leaving it to future discussions to see how this primacy might be exercised in a future, reunited Church.

The impact of the Ravenna document was somewhat reduced by the absence of the Moscow patriarchate, the largest Orthodox Church, because of an internal Orthodox dispute.

In 2014 the Commission met at Amman in Jordan, but failed to reach agreement on the theme of “Primacy and Synodality”. This year, with only of the small Church of Georgia expressing reservations, the group meeting in the Italian town of Chieti has managed to achieve a consensus on the issue.

The document, bearing the full title “Synodality and Primacy during the first Millennium: Towards a common understanding in service to the Unity of the Church”, was released as early as Friday. A perusal of it shows that, while it is of undoubted significance as a stage in the dialogue, it is too early to be ringing the church bells to celebrate reunion as if it were just around the corner.

The basic reason why such jubilation would be premature is because the document confines itself to outlining a common reading of the past, rather than going into the possible shape which authority might take, and who would exercise it, in the future unity we all long for.

To quote part of its conclusion, a reading of the history of the first Millenium shows a common theological, liturgical and canonical heritage, on the basis of which Catholics and Orthodox “must consider how primacy, synodality, and the interrelatedness between them can be conceived and exercised today and in the future.”

The fact that the document offers only an analysis of the way things were in the past does not, however, mean that we should minimise its importance. After all, our present divisions are rooted in a long and painful history of gradual estrangement and mutual opposition, in the course of which each side developed a polemical version of history, read in a way designed to bolster its own claims and thus irreceivable for the other.

It should be said at once that the document has accepted a reading of the first Millennium which is more in tune with the way Orthodoxy has tended to see it than that favoured by Catholic apologetics until recent times.

Until such confessional readings of history became unfashionable after Vatican II, Catholics would commonly urge Orthodox to return to the unity of the first centuries from which they were alleged to have gone into schism by rejecting the Roman Primacy which they previously accepted. In line with this view, every sign from the early Church of the East accepting a leading role for the bishop of Rome was interpreted as recognising for him the kind of role he came to play in the post-schism West.

The Chieti document unambiguously rejects this simplification of history. It recognises that even in the West the understanding of Roman primacy was the result of a development of doctrine, particularly from the fourth century, and that this development did not occur in the East: “The primacy of the bishop of Rome among the bishops was gradually interpreted as a prerogative that was his because he was successor of Peter, the first of the apostles. This understanding was not adopted in the East…” The East, in other words, rather than reneging on a common heritage, simply never accepted a development it had not been part of.

On the role of the popes in the early Ecumenical Councils, recognised by both East and West to this day, the document notes that the bishops of Rome were not present at any of them, but were either represented by legates or agreed afterwards to the conclusions. This section concludes with a statement which is music to Orthodox ears [???]: “Reception by the Church as a whole has always been the ultimate criterion for the ecumenicity of a council.” [How does the non-presence of the pope - who was duly represented and/or agreed to the councils' conclusions -at the early ecumenical councils recognized by both East and West not constitute 'reception by the Church as a whole'?]

On the significance of appeal to Rome, which Eastern bishops in the early centuries sometimes exercised when local synods ruled against them, and which Western apologists have stressed as proof of papal authority in the early Church, the document is unambiguous: “Appeals to the bishop of Rome from the East expressed the communion of the Church, but the bishop of Rome did not exercise canonical authority over the churches of the East.”

Have the Catholic members of the Joint Commission gone native? Has the desire to win over the Orthodox, traditionally so suspicious of Catholic motives whenever unity is discussed, led them to concede too much? The reality is otherwise.

Recent scholarship, led by Catholic scholars who have freed themselves from the shackles of a one-sided apologetic no longer in favour with the Magisterium itself, have concluded that papal authority in the form it has taken in the Second Millennium West, can only be properly understood as a doctrinal development in which the East had no part.

Moreover, the intuition that the authority of the pope as universal primate is only properly understood in conjunction with the authority of the episcopacy as a whole, expressed as “synodality” or “conciliarity”, is one that has been embraced enthusiastically by Catholic theology since Vatican II.

So what is the way forward? St John Paul II invited Catholics and other Christians to reflect together on how the bishop of Rome might exercise a form of servant leadership in a future, reunited Church. Joseph Ratzinger, as a theologian and then (more tentatively) as pope, opined that more could not be asked of the East than was granted in the First Millennium.

The Chieti document, if it is ratified by the Holy See, becomes the official Catholic position. As such it is of real significance. Those on the Catholic side who perpetuate the myth of an Orthodox Church subject to Rome, but which one-sidedly “broke off”, will find it uncomfortable reading. It becomes ever clearer that in the wake of Vatican II there can be no “Ecumenism of return” addressed to the East.

Will there be an equal recognition from our Orthodox partners in dialogue that talk of Rome “abandoning her errors and returning to Orthodoxy” is but a mirror image of the same polemical distortion of history? Will both sides be able to agree on the necessary grounds for unity, and the limits it must put to diversity? These are the questions on which hopes for future progress towards the unity which Christ prayed for will depend.

I think I can guess why the Vatican media have grossly underplayed the Chieti agreement - because the current pope really does not believe any of these theological discussions are necessary, as he dismissed them in his airplane news conference on his return from a fraternal visit with the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in Istanbul in November 2014:

---

I believe that with Orthodoxy we are on our way. They have the sacraments, the apostolic succession… we are going along.

What do we have to wait for? For the theologians to agree? That day will never come, I assure you, I am skeptical. Theologians work well, but I remember what was said in connection to what Athenagoras had said to Paul VI: 'Let us advance alone; and let us put all the theologians on an island, to reflect!'...

One cannot wait: unity is a road, a way to follow, to follow together. And that is the spiritual ecumenism: to pray together, to work together, there are many works of charity, there is much work to be done… To teach together… To go ahead together. It is spiritual ecumenism (…)
- Pope Francis, November 30, 2014

---

Thus spake Bergoglio, in November 2014! You think he has changed his mind? He himself has repeatedly said, "I am too old to change what I think!"

Catholics in an age of secular moralism
How do Catholics avoid reducing the faith
to the pursuit of fundamentally secularist causes?
[Hard for 'the-pope-is-always-right' Catholics to do when
their nominal leader is obsessively pushing his fundamentally secular agenda!]
by Samuel Gregg

Sept. 26, 2016

From the Church’s earliest beginnings, Christians have sought to make this world a better place. Whether through thinking about how to order the political realm more justly or by serving the poor in conditions of indescribable filth, great saints ranging from Augustine to Teresa of Calcutta exemplify this living-out of the Gospel message. [A Bergogliophile would have added '...to Pope Francis today' to extend the line to the present! But as carefully generic as Dr. Gregg couches his analysis, many of his negative specifics do refer to the current pope's actions and statements.]

Like everything else in the Church’s life, however, such activities can become distorted as a result of being detached from the truth of Catholic faith.

Indeed, since the mid-twentieth century, many Catholics have effectively reduced the faith to the pursuit of various political, economic and social agendas — so much so that such activism becomes seen as the essence of being Catholic. This essentially amounts to the faith’s absorption into what I’ll call secular moralism.

The term “moralism” is used a great deal today. It’s often employed to stigmatize moral arguments associated with orthodox Christianity or what are often conventionally labelled “conservative” positions. There are, however, legitimate uses of the word within a Christian context.

One is the idea that moral improvement is the way to win God’s favor, or what might be called a type of pious Pelagianism. Another is a deep preoccupation with oneself and others being obedient to moral precepts — an approach that goes hand-in-hand with a heavily duty-based and legalistic mindset.

This type of moralism often degenerates into trying to find loopholes which allow people to rationalize free choices to violate, for instance, the moral absolutes underscored by the Decalogue, Christ, Saint Paul, and the entire Christian tradition. [Of which AL - specifically its Chapter 8 - is Prime Exhibit No. 1.]

Moralism, however, isn’t limited to the Christian realm. It has many secular counterparts. Prominent among these is morality’s reduction to my voracious support for particular causes.

“I am a good person because I favor environmentalism, socialism, liberalism, unions, business, el pueblo, refugees, feminism, the United Nations, pacifism, an end to air-conditioning, nuclear disarmament, etc.” [Which is the exact mindset of JMB and all his fellow progressivists.]

In this world, other peoples’ badness is determined by the fact that they don’t identify with, or have significant reservations about, for example, the contemporary environmental movement, the European Union, or some of the absurd claims made today under the rubric of human rights. Such individuals are relegated to the outer realms of acceptability and assigned a label. This usually involves words like “hater” or the suffix “phobic.”

It’s not that Catholics can be indifferent to something like the plight of refugees. In fact, we should be concerned about such things. But while the Church has always insisted that we may never freely choose to violate the moral absolutes, it recognizes that Catholics can often legitimately propose different solutions to a challenge like immigration.

Secular moralism, by contrast, generally involves denying that there is a prudential dimension to how we choose to do good. With secular moralists, it’s normally their way and no other way. [So what does it say of our current pope that he is the current standard bearer for just such secular moralism?]

If you want to test the theory, try telling one of secular moralism’s high priests (Jeffrey Sachs comes to mind) why you think, say, government-mandated carbon-emissions reductions might not be the best approach to addressing climate change. Then observe how quickly you are stigmatized as bent on destroying the planet or a tool of Big Oil. [You'd get the very same reaction if you said that to JMB, Cardinal Parolin or Cardinal Turkson - or Archbishop Sanchez Sorondo!]

Within the Church, secular moralism rears its head when the faith becomes exclusively identified with improvements of this world. [But that's what is happening under this pope. Not for him Jesus's admonition to "Seek first the Kingdom of God, all these things will be added to you!" No, for him, it's "Let us first find you a country to live in, a home to stay in, food to eat, clothes for your family, and a job that will give you free education and healthcare. Don't worry, Christ has nothing to with any of this, especially if you don't believe in him!"]

And that really matters because it means that the person of Christ and the most essential messages of his Gospel are being marginalized, if not lost altogether.

Again, it’s not that attempting to realize any number of goals in the realms of politics, the economy, or civil society is necessarily wrong in itself. Even popes have lent the Church’s support to particular causes.

One example is Leo XIII’s effort to alleviate the condition of employees in early-industrial capitalism. No one, however, would suggest that Leo XIII diminished the Gospel to promoting the well-being of industrial workers. He spoke ceaselessly, and far more often, of the Christ who lived, suffered, died, and who was restored to life: the Christ who is, as Saint John Paul II wrote in his first encyclical Redemptor Hominis, “the source of a new life that does not pass away but lasts to eternal life.”

In short, while addressing contemporary problems is one aspect of the Church’s mission, spreading the message of Christ’s invitation to eternal life necessarily comes first and foremost for any orthodox Christian. Without this, we become mere secular moralists.

As Joseph Ratzinger pointed out in a homily delivered one month before his election as pope, Christ’s opponents put him to death not for his good works, but because he claimed to be God.

“Jesus's adversaries,” the future pope said, “cannot deny the good works they have seen, but what they can deny is that these good works point to something more, to something beyond the works themselves.”

One sees the same thing today with those who praise Christians’ service to the poor but then object strenuously when those same Christians speak of Christ, his message of redemption and eternal life, and what this means for our free choices.

By definition, reducing the Gospel to promoting temporal causes involves being ambiguous about, ignoring, or subtly denying Christ’s call to eternal life.

In his 1975 Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi (much praised by Pope Francis) [Typical Bergoglian lip service, to occasionally flash his Catholic bona fides when he thinks it's opportune - 'I'm a loyal son of the Church' and all that!]

Blessed Paul VI noted that Christians “are frequently tempted to reduce [the Church’s] mission to the dimensions of a simply temporal project . . . a man-centered goal: the salvation of which she is the messenger would be reduced to material well-being. Her activity, forgetful of all spiritual and religious preoccupation, would become initiatives of the political or social order.”[But that is exactly what JMB, who professes to praise Evangelii nuntiandi, has been doing, which is a betrayal of the primary mission of the Church by the very man who is supposed to be leading her!]

Given the context, the Pope Paul VI's words were clearly a warning to proponents of Marxist-versions of liberation theology, most of whom were — and remain — rather quiet about man’s final destiny beyond death: i.e., oneness with Christ, or the eternal separation from God that we can freely choose for ourselves (also known as Hell).

But Pope Paul’s critique goes beyond that group. It’s also a reminder to Christians of what happens when you read the Scriptures as a message of an essentially this-worldly liberation: something that involves reinterpreting the Resurrection as “symbolic” rather than a real historical event which opened the possibility of immortality with Christ.

In other words, “immanentizing the eschaton,” to rework the phrase coined by the German philosopher Eric Voegelin, leads inevitably to Christianity collapsing into secular moralism.

So how do Christians avoid reducing the Gospel to secular moralism while also fulfilling our Gospel-mandated responsibilities to our neighbor in need?

Part of the answer, we already know. Catholics must take the Scriptures’ presentation of Christ’s life, death, and Resurrection seriously — as the Apostles telling us what really happened — and not sideline their significance for the Christian life because we’re worried that environmentalists, UN officials, or German bishops conference bureaucrats might not take us seriously.

The other part of the answer involves correctly understanding the relationship of our free choices and actions (or “works”, as the Apostle James calls them) to the world which is to come.

Perhaps the best contemporary Catholic statement on this relationship is to be found, ironically enough, in the very document most claimed by those inclined to reduce Catholicism to just another secular moralism and Christ to just another noble sage.

At the end of the third chapter of Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et Spes, the Council Fathers wrote:

---

While earthly progress must be carefully distinguished from the growth of Christ’s kingdom, to the extent that the former can contribute to the better ordering of human society, it is of vital concern to the Kingdom of God. [??? 'Earthly progress is of vital concern to the Kingdom of God?' ????

For after we have obeyed the Lord, and in His Spirit nurtured on earth the values of human dignity, brotherhood and freedom [humanae dignitatis, communionis fraternae et libertatis], and indeed all the good fruits of our nature and enterprise [industriae], we will find them again, but freed of stain, burnished and transfigured, when Christ hands over to the Father: “a kingdom eternal and universal, a kingdom of truth and life, of holiness and grace, of justice, love and peace.”

On this earth that Kingdom is already present in mystery. When the Lord returns it will be brought into full flower. (GS 39)

---

[Why did G&S not simply repeat Matthew 6:33, than which there can be no better formulation of what Christian priorities must be: "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you".]

There is much worth pondering in those sentences. But perhaps the most important points are these.

First, there are no earthly utopias. Today’s utopian is usually tomorrow’s commissar.

Second, eternity does begin in the here-and-now of our daily, often humdrum lives. Our good works, whether those of a senator or a janitor, create fruit — humanae dignitatis, communionis fraternae et libertatis — that lasts. These are the goods which ultimately matter.

At the end of time, long after the rock concert for universal peace and cosmic justice is over, the goods which we have realized through our free choices will be revealed as, Saint Paul reminds us, through fire. What was built on the foundation of Christ, he says, will endure (1 Cor 3:14).

Next to Christ’s offer of eternal life with him, the Church’s doctrine of immortality, and what these say about just how much God loves man, the emotivist satisfactions afforded by secular moralism seem like very poor fare indeed.
Go tell that to the man who now happens to be pope, whose guiding theology appears to be nothing but the rank sentimentalism of 'good intentions', and we know where they often lead to.

I have not posted any item from Fr. Hunwicke lately - in addition to brief items on this and that (the feast of St. Januarius, Assisi 2016, the feast of Our Lady of Walsingham, patroness of the first Anglican Ordinariate to which Fr H belongs, a couple more criticisms of the Anglican Church and the Catholic 'formators' assigned to mentor the Anglican clergy who were joining the first Ordinariate), he had a five-part series on the Anglican Ordinariate and how to use the argumentum ad hominem effectively to neutralize particularly nasty and partisan opponents - a very good series, BTW, which one of these days I will post. But in the past two days, he had two items of more general interest...

A tale of two churches -
and what have they been teaching seminarians?

Sept. 25, 2016

While doing the North, we found ourselves looking over a perfect 'transitional' Augustinian Priory Church, which, as Pevsner observes, was in ruins but still complete enough in the 1840s to make its restoration at that time almost totally reliable.

It is beside a ruined Regency house: if only the Priory were still in ruins; and the Regency house were not in tatters; the whole (immensely romantic) site would be a perfect setting for Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.

I will call it Effchurch Priory; we visited it at noon on the Saturday when forty or fifty people were gathered there for a Tridentine High Mass. It happens, I gather, once a year. An elegant and very accessible sermon on the day's Saint (St Nicolas of Tolentino); perfect liturgy; excellent singing. An enthusiastic and very participatory congregation, who knew their way around the Church's immemorial Liturgy and took part in a natural, relaxed, unforced, often quite loud, way.

Sadly, I did not feel that having heard Mass on Saturday at 12:00 would fulfill the Sunday obligation; so in the evening we went to a Vigil Mass in a town some miles away, which I will rename Offchester. The difference was palpable.

The 1969 rite done very badly. Very little participation; the organ droned out eight stanzas of a hymn tune and not a person made a sound. The parish priest obviously deemed himself a brilliant mystagogue, because every single 'presidential formula', even the pseudo-Hippolytan Eucharistic Prayer, was either changed or interpolated.

There was, unsurprisingly, no sermon. I say "unsurprisingly" because I have met the same liturgical corruption in the South of England, not least in a church where the priest proudly referred to it as "a Vatican II church".

[Fr Z has commentary, in red, on the rest of the item:]

I wonder why some priests of a certain generation and a ‘Conciliar’ culture have such a rooted aversion to preaching. This leads me on to wonder what exactly it was that they were taught in the corrupted and emptying seminaries of the post-Conciliar decades.

We know that (despite Canon 249 and the Veterum Sapientia of St John XXIII) they were not taught Latin or Greek; because of this, they were blocked from sudying Patristics. [They were kept in the fog…. on purpose!]

They did not … clearly … do Liturgy or Liturgical Theology or Practical Liturgy; it appears that they received no education in Scripture, Biblical Theology, or how to open the Word of God for their people.

I somehow doubt that they were all given a deep formation in traditional moral theology or the hearing of confessions, because I know of (another) church in the South of England where the priest explained that the difficulty about hearing confessions was that the Confessional had for many years been used for stacking away the unsold debris of Parish bazaars.

What, in the Name of God Almighty and God most Adorable, did all those men learn in those seven expensive years of ‘priestly formation’? [It was a horror show, let me tell you.]

I know some traddies cheerfully but (IMHO) irresponsibly point out that Monsignor Time will solve the problem of that generation of clergy; [What I have called the “Biological Solution”.] but, in a decade or two’s time, will the joyless and infantilised congregations still be in existence? These are souls for whom Christ died. [“But yet the Son of man, when he cometh, shall he find, think you, faith on earth?” Maybe in small communities. “Base” communities?]

If I were a bishop, I would send round formidable, even terrifying, hit squads of bright, orthodox, and cheerful young clergy with the oil of ordination still damp upon their hands, to teach the dear old gentlemen all the things that their lecturers forgot to mention in the 1970s and 1980s; and to overhaul a radicibus [from the roots] the parish liturgies. [I once thought that we needed a new religious order called The Rubricians. They would go two by two into the world to battle liturgical abuses and teach the erring the error of their ways.]

Cardinal Sarah’s recent extremely sound suggestions could provide a lively and exciting start to a programme of restoring catholic authenticity in the desert areas. And His Eminence, with his true and accurate pastoral heart, clearly understands the urgency of this need. Happily, one hears of diocesan bishops loyally responding to his timely initiative. Let us hope that, on Advent Sunday …

But not, sadly, quite all bishops. One or two Ordinarii locorum prefer to resemble stewards careering crazily around on the Great Liner’s dangerously sloping decks while shouting noisily and inaccurately at anyone they meet about the ‘true post-Conciliar’ alignment of deckchairs.


Once again, questioning
the limits of papal authority

Sept.26, 2016

(1) The latest Catholic Herald has a good piece by a Fr Mark Drew on the ongoing Amoris laetitia crisis. (I cannot resist entering here a snide comment that visitors to this blog have already repeately read most of his points here ... Parrhesia and all.) Father refers to the intimidation [against AL critics and dissenters] experienced in this country as 'discreet' ... but then, we are English, aren't we? In some other places, it has been anything but discreet.

(2) Sandro Magister (Chiesa 21 September) quotes an Andrew Grillo, whom he calls a keen Bergoglian, as forecasting that the next Synod will, among other things, deal with "The Collegial exercise of the episcopacy and the restitution to the Bishop of full authority over the diocesan liturgy".

I presume we all know by now that 'Collegiality' is well established as a code-word for giving improper competences to Episcopal Conferences - a serious potential ecclesiological corruption (upon which Cardinal Mueller spoke well a year or two ago).

But what I am particularly drawing your attention to this morning is the part of the sentence I have put into italics. It means that the bully-boys who hate Ratzinger and his legacy are beginning to set their sights on demolishing Summorum Pontificum and eliminating its admirable doctrinal emphases on Subsidiarity and the auctoritas of Tradition.[

I am only surprised that it has taken the Wolves and their cubs so long to get round to this.

Both of these two superficially diverse items exemplify the same over-arching problem which this increasingly dysfunctional pontificate continually throws up: the limits of lawful papal power. Time to read again what Ratzinger so wisely said on this. And to revisit Pastor aeternus (together with Denzinger 3114 and 3117).

Two recent scientific news reports pertinent to Catholic belief...

Evolution just got harder to defend
by Eric Metaxas

September 14, 2016 | 10:59 AM EDT

A new fossil discovery makes it even tougher for Darwinists to explain the origin of life.

There’s an old story about a chemist, a physicist, and an economist stranded on a desert island with nothing to eat but a can of soup. Puzzling over how to open the can, the chemist says, “Let’s heat the can until it swells and bursts from the buildup of gases.” “No, no,” says the physicist, “let’s throw it off that cliff with just enough kinetic energy to split it open on the rocks below.” The economist, after thinking a moment says, “Assume a can opener.”

The way Darwinists approach the origin of life is a lot like that economist’s idea for opening the can. The Darwinian mechanism of mutation and natural selection explains everything about life, we’re told — except how it began. “Assume a self-replicating cell containing information in the form of genetic code,” Darwinists are forced to say. Well, fine. But where did that little miracle come from?

A new discovery makes explaining even that first cell tougher still. Fossils unearthed by Australian scientists in Greenland may be the oldest traces of life ever discovered. A team from the University of Wollongong recently published their findings in the journal Nature, describing a series of structures called “stromatolites” that emerged from receding ice.

“Stromatolites” may sound like something your doctor would diagnose, but they’re actually biological rocks formed by colonies of microbes that live in shallow water. If you visit the Bahamas today, you can see living stromatolites.

What’s so special about them? Well, they appear in rocks most scientists date to 220 million years older than the oldest fossils, which pushes the supposed date for the origin of life back to 3.7 billion years ago.

This, admits the New York Times, “complicates the story of evolution of early life from chemicals ... .” No kidding!

According to conventional geology, these microbe colonies existed on the heels of a period when Earth was undergoing heavy asteroid bombardment, making it virtually uninhabitable. This early date, adds The Times, “leaves comparatively little time for evolution to have occurred … .”

That is an understatement. These life forms came into existence virtually overnight, writes David Klinghoffer at Evolution News and Views - “genetic code, proteins, photosynthesis, the works.”

This appearance of fully-developed life forms so early in the fossil record led Dr. Abigail Allwood of Caltech to remark that “life [must not be] a fussy, reluctant and unlikely thing.” Rather, “it will emerge whenever there’s an opportunity.”

Pardon me? If life occurs so spontaneously and predictably even under the harshest conditions, then it should be popping up all over the place! Yet scientists still cannot come close to producing even a single cell from raw chemicals in the lab.

Dr. Stephen Meyer explains in his book Signature in the Cell why this may be Darwinism’s Achilles heel. In order to begin evolution by natural selection, you need a self-replicating unit. But the cell and its DNA blueprint are too complicated by far to have arisen through chance chemical reactions. The odds of even a single protein forming by accident are astronomical.

So Meyer and other Intelligent Design theorists conclude that Someone must have designed and created the structures necessary for life.

Meanwhile Darwinists, faced with a fossil record that theoretically pushes the origin of life back further into the past, are forced to assume the metaphorical can opener. They just don’t know how these early cells came into existence, and the more we dig up, the more improbable — rather than likely — life becomes.

For them at least.

The following item is more 'technical' and we could all celebrate this indicator of successful therapy except that the stem cells used were embryonic, not adult, and one does not learn this until almost the very end of the article... Anyway, let us pray that parallel research with adult stem cells could also result in something similar.

First-ever quadriplegic treated with stem cells
regains motor control in his upper body

Sept. 23, 2016

For the first time ever, neuroscientists have treated a total quadriplegic with stem cells, and he has substantially recovered the functions of his upper body only two months into the process.

The Keck Medical Center of USC announced that a team of doctors became the first in California to inject an experimental treatment made from stem cells, AST-OPC1, into the damaged cervical spine of a recently paralyzed 21-year-old man as part of a multi-center clinical trial.

On March 6, just shy of his 21st birthday, Kristopher (Kris) Boesen of Bakersfield suffered a traumatic injury to his cervical spine when his car fishtailed on a wet road, hit a tree, and slammed into a telephone pole.

Parents Rodney and Annette Boesen were warned there was a good chance their son would be permanently paralyzed from the neck down. However, they also learned that Kris could possibly qualify for a clinical study that might help.

Leading the surgical team and working in collaboration with Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center and Keck Medicine of USC, Charles Liu, MD, PhD, director of the USC Neurorestoration Center, injected an experimental dose of 10 million AST-OPC1 cells directly into Kris’s cervical spinal cord in early April.

“Typically, spinal cord injury patients undergo surgery that stabilizes the spine but generally does very little to restore motor or sensory function,” explains Liu. “With this study, we are testing a procedure that may improve neurological function, which could mean the difference between being permanently paralyzed and being able to use one’s arms and hands. Restoring that level of function could significantly improve the daily lives of patients with severe spinal injuries.”

Two weeks after surgery, Kris began to show signs of improvement. Three months later, he’s able to feed himself, use his cell phone, write his name, operate a motorized wheelchair and hug his friends and family. Improved sensation and movement in both arms and hands also makes it easier for Kris to care for himself, and to envision a life lived more independently.



“As of 90 days post-treatment, Kris has gained significant improvement in his motor function, up to two spinal cord levels,” said Dr. Liu. “In Kris’s case, two spinal cord levels means the difference between using your hands to brush your teeth, operate a computer or do other things you wouldn’t otherwise be able to do, so having this level of functional independence cannot be overstated.”

Doctors are careful not to predict Kris's future progress.

“All I’ve wanted from the beginning was a fighting chance,” said Kris, who has a passion for fixing up and driving sports cars and was studying to become a life insurance broker at the time of the accident. “But if there’s a chance for me to walk again, then heck yeah! I want to do anything possible to do that.”

Because the window for performing the surgery was tight, everything needed to go according to schedule in order for Kris to qualify.

Once Kris made the decision to pursue enrollment in the study, dozens of doctors, nurses, rehabilitation specialists and others sprang into action. Because he would need to provide voice confirmation of his desire to participate in the study, Kris had to be able to breathe without a ventilator. Weaning a patient from assisted breathing generally is a three-week process. He did it in five days with the help of a respiratory care team. He signed the paperwork and began a week of assessments, scans and other pre-surgery tests.

In early April, a surgical team from Keck Hospital of USC carefully injected 10 million AST-OPC1 cells directly into Kris’s cervical spine. Nearly six weeks later, Kris was discharged and returned to Bakersfield to continue his rehabilitation. Doctors reviewed his progress at seven days, 30 days, 60 days and 90 days post-injection, and Kris can look forward to detailed assessments after 180 days, 270 days and one year.

Rodney and Annette Boesen say they are amazed at the level of collaboration and cooperation that enabled their son to participate in the study. “So many things had to happen, and there were so many things that could have put up a roadblock,” marvels Rodney. “The people at Keck Medical Center of USC and elsewhere moved heaven and earth to get things done. There was never a moment through all of this when we didn’t think our son was getting world class care.”

The pioneering surgery is the latest example of how the emerging fields of neurorestoration and regenerative medicine may have the potential to improve the lives of thousands of patients who have suffered a severe spinal cord injury.

The stem cell procedure Kris received is part of a Phase 1/2a clinical trial that is evaluating the safety and efficacy of escalating doses of AST-OPC1 cells developed by Fremont, California-based Asterias Biotherapeutics.

AST-OPC1 cells are made from embryonic stem cells by carefully converting them into oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs), which are cells found in the brain and spinal cord that support the healthy functioning of nerve cells. In previous laboratory studies, AST-OPC1 was shown to produce neurotrophic factors, stimulate vascularization and induce remyelination of denuded axons.

All are critical factors in the survival, regrowth and conduction of nerve impulses through axons at the injury site, according to Edward D. Wirth III, MD, PhD, chief medical director of Asterias and lead investigator of the study, dubbed “SCiStar.”

“At the 10 million cell level, we’re now in a dose range that is the human equivalent of where we were when we saw efficacy in pre-clinical studies,” says Wirth. “While we continue to evaluate safety first and foremost, we are also now looking at how well treatment might help restore movement in these patients.”

To qualify for the clinical trial, enrollees must be between the age of 18 and 69, and their condition must be stable enough to receive an injection of AST-OPC1 between the fourteenth and thirtieth days following injury.

Keck is one of six sites in the U.S. authorized to enroll subjects and administer the clinical trial dosage.

And a third scientific news report about water in some other place of our solar system - which could mean a possibility of some life form (living organisms based on carbon, hydrogen and oxygen as are life forms on earth)....

Hubble telescope finds more evidence
of water plumes from Jupiter's moon
By K. N. Smith

September 26, 2016

Hubble hasn’t found aliens on Europa, Jupiter's moon, but it may have found new evidence that plumes of salt water from the moon’s globe-spanning salty ocean can escape through cracks in its icy shell.

Using its Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) instrument, Hubble captured far-ultraviolet images of what could be geysers of water from beneath the surface, erupting in Europa’s southern hemisphere.

If the features in those images are really geysers, that could be very good news for future missions to Europa, providing an easier source of samples from Europa’s subsurface ocean and making it easier to search for signs of life beneath the ice.

Space Science Telescope Institute astronomer William Sparks and his colleagues borrowed a method from exoplanet research and applied it to a potentially habitable world much closer to home (in relative space terms, anyway - Europa is about 390 million miles away).

When an exoplanet passes in front of its star, astronomers can look at the very edge of the visible part of the planet, called the limb, to see what wavelengths of light from the star get absorbed by the thin band of the exoplanet’s atmosphere. Because different chemicals absorb light at different wavelengths, that can yield clues about what alien atmospheres are made of.

In early 2014, Hubble looked for features along Europa’s limb that might absorb the sunlight reflected by Jupiter. Hydrogen and oxygen both absorb light in the ultraviolet wavelengths, so Sparks and his colleagues looked at Europa in the far ultraviolet. Hubble sent home ten images of Europa’s silhouetted surface, and features that might be geysers appeared in three of them.

“Anything that absorbs [light] will appear in our image. We presume it to be water vapor or ice particles because that’s what Europa’s made of and those molecules do absorb at the wavelengths we observed at, which is why we chose those wavelengths,” said Sparks during a press conference earlier today.


Hubble's view of huge plumes of water vapor in 2013, shown superimposed on a photo of Europa; artict's concept of a cross-section of Europa's crust and inner ocean. At its heart, this Jovian moon has an extensive ocean and possible undersea volcanoes.

This is the second piece of evidence for geysers on Europa, following a 2012 Hubble observation of hydrogen and oxygen in potential plumes coming from the same areas of the planet’s southern latitudes. Because Europa is tidally locked with massive Jupiter, it always shows the same face to Earth, much like our own Moon.

The Galileo mission, launched in 1989 and which arrived at Jupiter in 1995, did a single scan for plumes erupting from Europa, but came up empty. If the plumes are really there, says Sparks, they won’t exactly be the Europan version of Old Faithful; they’re most likely intermittent.

“It’s significant because previously there’s just been one piece of evidence that these things exist. Now we’ve got a couple more pieces of evidence that they exist,” said Sparks.

The plumes could become targets for a planned Europa flyby mission, tentatively slated for launch in the 2020s, which will carry a spectroscopic instruments from infrared to far ultraviolet, as well as instruments to measure the composition of samples – such as material from watery plumes. Thermal imaging will also allow the Europa flyby spacecraft to look for hotspots (or at least relatively warm spots) in the ice where plumes might erupt.

It’s possible that the mission could fly a pass, or several, through Europa’s plumes, much as the Cassini spacecraft flew through the jets of water erupting from the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Mission planners are still planning potential trajectories, and they’re interested in narrowing down which of the possible plumes might be the best target.

It’s unlikely that we’ll find life in those plumes, but the flyby mission could look for signs of organic chemistry that might provide a strong clue.

“Even if there is a small amount of biomass in the plumes as they start out from the ocean, by the time they get into space and the radiation environment of Europa at cryogenic temperatures, it’s not going to survive,” said Sparks. “We’d have to be looking for the remains of something that was once protected in the ice or under the ice.”

Of course, the Europa flyby mission, if it gets off the ground, won’t be a true search for life. The flyby will focus on determining whether Europa is habitable in the first place, in part because that’s the part scientists currently know how to do. Scientists have a well-established set of criteria for deciding whether a place is habitable, but they’re still debating what to look for to prove that life exists, or doesn’t exist, on another world.

As for whether there’s life in the plumes, “I would say the jury is out,” said senior Hubble project scientist Jennifer Weissman. “It really depends first on whether these plumes are actually there.”

And that’s still waiting to be confirmed. Sparks and his team were careful to point out that these observations aren’t definitive proof that the geysers are real, although they are compelling when combined with the 2012 evidence from Hubble.

The far-ultraviolet wavelengths are right at the limits of Hubble’s capability. The researchers say it’s likely that the features that showed up in three of the ten images are probably real, rather than some unexpected effect from the instruments, though they can’t completely rule that out. Repeated Hubble observations would help confirm that the STIS instrument is operating properly in the far ultraviolet, which would improve confidence in the observations.

“The other thing that would really, that could potentially nail it would be if somebody came in with a completely independent observing technique and the results were consistent,” said Sparks. Some teams are starting to look for other means of detecting plumes, but that’s probably a ways off.

In the meantime, Hubble observations may offer the best way to keep an eye on Europa and its potential geysers.

“When we cannot fly a mission up close, the next best thing is to use the Hubble Space Telescope and some of its unique capabilities to study Europa from afar,” said Paul Hertz, director of the astrophysics division at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

Scientists hypothesize that below Europa's icy exterior, there's about 3 billion cubic kilometers of water sloshing around in a subsurface ocean. That's more water than we have here on Earth. And because life on Earth requires water, the Jovian moon is one of the top spots in our solar system where scientists would like to search for alien life.

But Europa's ocean is thought to be buried under about 62 miles of solid ice. Which is why it was so exciting, in 2013, when Hubble spied water vapor above Europa. This water vapor may be erupting in plumes from Europa's surface, and if those plumes are shooting up from the inner ocean, a spacecraft could potentially sample the ocean simply by swooping through the plumes--no drilling rig required.

September 26, 2016 headlines

PewSitter


Canon212.com

Great news! Many prominent Catholics who have signed other appeals and protests to this pope on matters regarding family and marriage have now started an initiative that stresses the positive in Church teaching ante Bergoglio...

Firm fidelity to an immutable Magisterium
80 prominent Catholics reaffirm Church teaching on the family and morality
by Marco Tosatti
Translated from

September 27, 2016

A Declaration of Fidelity to the immutable teaching of the Church on matrimony and its uninterrupted discipline was published today by a group of 80 Catholics, including cardinals, bishops, priests, eminent scholars, leaders of family organizations and prominent representatives of civilian society.

The Declaration was published through the Italian association Supplica Filiale (Filial Appeal) which had gathered almost a million signatures online (including 91 prelates) in between the two 'family synods' asking Pope Francis for a word of clarification that would dissipate the confusion disseminated in the Church by Cardinal Kasper's keynote address to the secret consistory of February 2014 on fundamental questions of natural and Christian morality.

Noting that such confusion has only grown among the faithful after the two synodal assemblies on the family and the publication of the post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation Amoris laetitia (and its more or less official interpretations), the signatories of the Declaration say they feel the urgent moral duty to reiterate the bimillenary teaching of Catholic doctrine on matrimony, the family, and the moral discipline practised for centuries with respect to these basic institutions of Christian civilization.

Such a grave duty, the signatories say, becomes even more urgent in view of the growing attacks by secularist forces against marriage and the family - attacks which no longer seem to have the barriers once presented by Catholic practice, at least as this is now generally presented to the public.

Solidly supported by a crystalline and unequivocal teaching, and until recently reaffirmed by the Supreme Magisterium of the Church, the Declaration is articulated in 27 affirmations of truth that are explicitly or implicitly negated or made ambiguous in the language of various ecclesial documents of a pastoral nature.

These have to do, the signatories say, with unmodifiable doctrines and practices regarding faith in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the respect owed to the Eucharist, the impossibility of partaking of the Eucharist in a state of mortal sin, the conditions of repentance in order to receive sacramental absolution, the
universal observance of the Sixth Commandment, the most serious duty not to give public scandal and not to lead the People of God to sin, or to relativize good and bad, the objective limits of conscience, etc.


The preamble to the Declaration is as follows:







The full Declaration is available in English and Italian on the site http://www.filialappeal.org/full
where it will shortly be available in French, German, Spanish and Portuguese on http://www.filialappeal.org/
Those who wish to sign the declaration may do so on the same site.

Sept. 27, 2016 headlines

PewSitter


Canon212.com

I have dilly-dallied about translating the following two items because some assertions by Guerriero directly challenge my interim choice to ignore all the indications in his book and Seewald's that Benedict XVI appears to be publicly giving unconditional support to Jorge Mario Bergoglio - which would mean endorsing all the un-Catholic and anti-Catholic words and acts of the latter. It amounts to a state of denial on my part which I find preferable to protesting passionately, "How could you, Joseph Ratzinger????"

Elio Guerriero visits Benedict XVI:
An old disciple and a splendid professor
By Alessandro Notarnicola

Sept. 23, 2016

“Finally it happened. A few days ago, I took the train to bring my book to Pope Benedict. I was a bit timorous, really. I was bringing the book to the theologian Pope. I, an old disciple, to him, a speldnid professor.”

Thus author and theologian Elio Guerriero, who is a regular contributor to Avvenire, wrote on his Facebook page. A few weeks ago, Mondadori published his Servitore di Dio e dell’umanità. La biografia di Benedetto XVI.

Guerriero accompanied his note with the photo which shows him seated next to the emeritus Pope who looks up smiling from leafing through the book of which, while it was being written, he had agreed to review the manuscript, responding to numerous questions of clarification and providing valuable suggestions to a biography that he had authorized Guerriero to write.

The author recalls his visit: “As soon as I entered the library-salon, I felt good vibrations. I handed him the book, and he paused to look at the cover. He nodded and said, ‘The background color reminds me of Bavaria’. And those who know his love for his Bavarian homeland, the comment was a compliment. Then he went through the Table of Contents attentively, asking an explanation for the theme titles, and thanked me with great conviction. I told him that the public interest shown in the book confirms a widespread perception that we are going through a kind of ‘Ratzinger renaissance’ that has nothing to do with those who insist on seeing a contrast between him and his successor, who say that what he says in public about Pope Francis is dictated by circumstance. Which is nonsense. Pope Benedict is sincere and more free than ever. But those who remember his teaching and his person with renewed interest do not lose sight of his invitation to the essentials of the faith, his writings on love and faith, his appeals about Europe that its leaders ought to have listened to. And even if his attention now seems directed elsewhere, to the next life, I think he is grateful for
the acknowledgment of facts and truth in the book”.

Guerriero explains that since he became a bishop, Joseph Ratzinger had always interpreted his role as servant of God, which explains the title he chose for this book. A role which he has continued even under the ministry of Papa Bergoglio, who is linked spiritually to his predecessor by the concept of mercy. The book starts with a Preface written by Pope Francis and ends with an interview with Benedict XVI.

In the Preface, Pope Francis describes his predecessor underscoring his courage and determination. Guerriero points out that Joseph Ratzinger was always someone who was not afraid to take unpopular positions when it had to do with the good of the Church.

“It is what he did as a theologian, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and as Pope. You will recall his interview book with Messori in 1984, when he criticized liberation theology [as it was then practised in Latin America], incurring great unpopularity. And whereas many theologians had said they had ‘re-formed’ themselves, quite generically, ‘in the spirit of Vatican II’, he was always guided by what the Council ‘dictated’ [what its documents actually say]. He followed the example of Hans Urs von Balthasar who was never afraid to criticize dominant theological positions. And as Pope, he often exhorted bishops and priests to be courageous, not to become mediators of consensus”.

For his blog, Aldo Maria Valli, lead Vaticanista for RAI State TV, interviewed Guerriero:

'Benedict XVI:
Servant of God and of mankind'
Translated from the blog
of Aldo Maria Valli
Sept. 23, 2016

“This ample biography of my predecessor Benedict XVI is welcome: It offers a reliable and balanced overview of his life and the development of his thinking”.

Thus begins Pope Francis’s Preface to Elio Guerriero’s book Servitore di Dio e dell’umanità. La biografia di Benedetto XVI (Mondadori, 542 pp), a work in which the author, a theologian and Church historian who for a long time was lead editor of Jaca Books and San Paolo publications, combines his competence as a specialist with his narrative abilities and his admiration for the emeritus Pope.

Elio Guerriero, how did this book come about and what is its purpose?
I met Cardinal Ratzinger for the first time in 1985. I was working with San Paolo publishing house and I was assigned to pursue the translation of his works in Italian. The work required that we would meet from time to time, and so, in addition to growing acquaintance with his works, our personal relationship also grew. Right away, one noted the difference between the person and the image that was current about him.

Then, he was elected Pope, with a Pontificate marked by extraordinary Magisterium and governing difficulties. [Guerriero appears to adopt unquestioningly the media commonplaces about Benedict’s Pontificate. What specific governing difficulties did he have that were any different from or worse than governing difficulties encountered in the Pontificates of his predecessors – or of his successor, for that matter? There were never any genuine or major scandals, and even the ‘worst’ of his personnel problems (his choice of Cardinal Bertone as Secretary of State, the manufactured problems about Ettore Gotti Tedeschi at IOR) never did result in anything disastrous or injurious in the long run to the Vatican or to the Church.]

But I think the decisive push to write this book came with his renunciation of the Petrine ministry. I felt compelled to underscore that his decision resulted from his faith that the Church is really led by Christ himself, who would, [B]through the Holy Spirit, choose a pastor able to show the way that she must take, which is what has happened.

What does this book add to what we already know about Joseph Ratzinger and his pontificate?
First of all, there are various clarification on the origins – underscoring the importance of the thought of St. Augustine and St. Bonaventure in his formation – of the ideas which were his major contributions to Vatican II, especially to the Constitution on Divine Revelation.

Then it contains an overview of his tenure as Archbishop of Munich-Freising, of which little has been said before this.

And for his long service at the CDF, I highlighted his ability to unify and to promote the faith, especially with the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

In his Pontificate, I showed the importance that Pope Benedict always gave to the Church’s universal call to holiness, which was considered the great novelty of Vatican II. For Benedict XVI, the saints are the best explanation of the Gospel over time. And he also proposed a new humanism for the Third Millennium which is a possible way out for the many difficulties the world is facing today.

Benedict XVI will go down in history because of his renunciation. Do you think he should be remembered only for this or also for other contributions he has made to the Church and to mankind?
Of course, his renunciation will be remembered as a significant turning point in the history of the Church, but the contributions he has made to the Magisterium and to Christian life since the latter part of the 20th century to the present is very rich and comprehensive. Pope Francis refers to that authoritatively in his preface to the book.

For my part, I wish to underscore his insistence on the harmonious collaboration between reason and faith, which he has defended from his first university professorship in Bonn in the late 1950s; his constant evocation of the love of God, which opened the way to the path of mercy that his successor emphasizes; and in recent years, the expression of his tender and passionate love for Jesus [in the JESUS OF NAZARETH trilogy]. Other themes are his idea for serious dialog among religions, his love for Creation, the way of beauty which comes from God and leads back to him.

Pope Francis writes in the preface that the presence of an emeritus Pope is a novelty, and because the two popes love each other, it is ‘a beautiful novelty’. Beyond the esteem that they have for each other, is everything truly well with having two popes, or are there problematic issues?
I would not say there are problematic issues, but about the difficulties that could arise in the event that the reigning pope and the emeritus are not in agreement. But it must not be forgotten either that the difficulties are far from minor for a pope who remains in office despite serious illness. This has been the subject of investigation by canon lawyers.

But I maintain that with Benedict XVI, one must start off with the concept of a service that can be carried out fully if one is in good health. Otherwise, while conserving the properly sacramental aspect of the office, one ought to renounce the exercise of the episcopal or papal mandate. [Diversamente, conservando l’aspetto propriamente sacramentale, conviene rinunciare all’esercizio del mandato episcopale o papale.]

[I had to include the original statement in Italian, because all those who argue that the title 'emeritus pope' makes no sense and is canonically impossible say the reason is that a pope is not 'consecrated' sacramentally as bishops are. From his statement, Guerriero apparently thinks there is a 'properly sacramental aspect' to the papal mandate. I don't know if a competent canon lawyer/Church historian can clarify this issue. Does the 'Mass to inaugurate the Petrine ministry' - during which the new Pope is invested with the pallium and his ring of office - not constitute his consecration as Pope? How can that Mass be any sacramentally less than the consecration of a bishop?]

On the other hand, seeing the example before our eyes, we can only thank God and the two protagonists themselves for their beautiful testimony of communion and brotherhood.

The book ends with an interview with the emeritus Pope. Can you tell us how you found him? What struck you the most at that meeting?
That Pope Benedict has kept his mental lucidity intact. But physically, he inevitably shows his age, 90 next year. In the visits I have made to him, I was struck by the serenity of his spirit, his sincere admiration for his successor [OUCH, OUCH, OUCH! Shall I trust Guerriero on this, or is he simply trying to make nice with the pope who wrote a preface to his book?], his closeness to the life of the Church. This confirms for me the rightness of his decision and the quality of his personal witness which remains even during his years in retirement.

Beatrice notes that the formal presentation of Guerriero's book in Rome was to have taken place yesterday with a completely Bergoglian cast of characters - Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Fr. Federico Lombardi (named by the Vatican to be the new president of the Fondazione Vaticana Joseph Ratzinger/Benedetto XVI, now considered a Vatican agency), and Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Sant'Egidio Community, described best in Beatrice's words, "who recently was in the news as inspirer and coordinator of the Assisi meeting, and who has projected himself as the key man in 're-framing' Benedict XVI as being in continuity with Jorge Bergoglio (not the other way around)". No chances taken by having a Georg Gaenswein who might once again speak of an 'enlarged papacy'!

A Google-translated screen capture of Erzdioezese-wien.at – the official Archdiocesan website of Vienna, Austria. The title appears confusing in English, but the two uses of “equality” stem from words with different meanings in German: Gleichberechtigung (equality of rights) and Gleichmacherei (levelling or uniformization).

Cardinal Schönborn’s website promotes
gender theory as pope praises him for
his 'care of Sacred Doctrine'
BY MAIKE HICKSON

SEPTEMBER 28, 2016

On the official website of the Archdiocese of Vienna, Austria – whose reigning archbishop is Cardinal Christoph Schönborn – two different articles, though not explicitly related to one another, will likely be of great importance for Catholics in the world today.

First, there is to be found the report that Pope Francis himself has just written a supportive letter to Cardinal Schönborn on the occasion of his 25th anniversary as a bishop. Francis praises this cardinal for his leading the Austrian Bishops’ Conference as its President “in a praiseworthy manner” and for his “concordance of word and work” that is so manifest in his personal witness.

The pope also highlights that Cardinal Schönborn in his office as archbishop – and especially in his “care for the Sacred Doctrine” – is notably attentive that the sheep entrusted to him may “follow the path which you [Schönborn] show them with help of your words and your example.”

In the midst of such praise, however, another post on the same official website of Cardinal Schönborn seems to throw some doubt upon the assurance that this cardinal is leading his sheep in the right direction and for the right reasons. His own website [worse, it's the archdiocesan website, not hie personal website] has now published an article about a theologian, Professor Gunter Prüller-Jagenteufel, who recently presented a strong attack on those Catholics who are at all critical of “Gender Theory.”

The Viennese Professor had just helped organize a conference from 22 to 25 September 2016 at the Catholic Theological Faculty of the University of Vienna about the Gender Theory, and he afterwards gave an interview to the Austrian Bishops’ news agency Kathpress.at (the article that is posted on the Vienna archdiocesan website).

In it, this theologian criticizes “anti-genderism,” which is widely spread within ecclesial circles, for its unacceptable generalizations, which are: that gender is merely a social construction; and that heterosexual relationships shall be dissolved and the traditional family destroyed.

He further says: “These often intentional misunderstandings and attacks against the purported ‘left-wing’ movement, which itself comes out of feminism, are in themselves ‘highly ideological’.” Prüller-Jagenteufel is quoted as saying that “gender theory aims at equality and not at leveling down.”

In summing up the discussions from his own 22-25 September conference, Prüller-Jagenteufel says that many people claim that those who support the gender theory want “to create a new man,” just as Marxism strove to do.

Interestingly in this context, he explicitly makes a demeaning comment on Poland and on Hungary – two prominently earnest countries which still try to resist the implementation of the gender theory in their own beset homelands.

The article claims that the Austrian professor merely wants to “deconstruct” certain (unspecified) roles for men and women, but, not to destroy them. Summing up the theologian’s ideas, the article supportively says:

---

It is mostly about questioning labels and about making individual freedom more possible in how we lead our own lives. Additionally, ambiguities that come to us through trans- and intersexuality are only now being better perceived by us today – contrary to earlier times.

---

Prüller-Jagenteufel then also speciously insists upon the fact that both man and woman are made in the likeness of God and that this fact should have (again unspecified) consequences upon our ways of thinking. In this context, he therefore says: “There is a reason why Pope Francis just recently initiated a commission studying the history of the female diaconate.”

As the professor teaches theology at the University of Vienna, his license to teach theology comes from Cardinal Schönborn himself.

The Austrian news agency Kathpress.at, under the Austrian bishops' conference, also published an article on 23 September about the above-mentioned conference on gender theory, quoting several feminists who addressed the conference as promoting the idea of a feminist theology and further promoting the influence of women in general within the Church. They also discredit the gathering resistance against gender ideology and compared “anti-Genderism” with “other right-wing populist movements.”

With just these examples, a Catholic can easily recognize that the Viennese Archdiocese is giving inordinate scope to strongly undermine undermine orthodox Catholic prelates and laymen – such as Cardinal Robert Sarah and Cardinal Carlo Caffarra – who try to defend the traditional Catholic teaching on marriage and the family in its entirety.

It sheds additional light upon what Cardinal Schönborn is progressively promoting, not just allowing, in his own diocese. Thus, it seems doubtful to say that he is leading his sheep in the right direction, as Pope Francis claims. [He is, by JMB's standards!...Yet this man continues to be president of the Ratzinger Schuelerkreis Foundation! Maybe I shouldn't get into the flagrant contradictions inherent in this last fact, a long-standing anomaly, at least as I see it, that has been allowed to stand all these years...]

As cringeworthy as the above item is from VOX CANTORIS (who cites some Spanish press sources for his claim that the new bishop has said "Who can say if embryos are alive or not?", revealing abject ignorance, and that progress is made in tolerance by accepting same-sex marriage), much more morbidly compelling and spine-chilling is the following reflection occasioned by the picture of the new bishop and his mega-loaf 'Eucharist'. What the writer has to say about what went on in a British seminary in the late 1990s is something even the worst anti-Catholic fiction could not fabricate...

Satan's war on
the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass

Wednesday 28 September 2016

As the Canadian Vox Cantoris blog has revealed, Pope Francis has just appointed this sacrilegious character to be the new auxiliary bishop of Merlo-Moreno in Argentina. No true Catholic could view this picture of Mass - complete with vast crumbling loaves, pottery vessels and wine glasses - without experiencing deep interior distress and sorrow. It is above all else a grave offence against the Most Blessed Sacrament. As such, and of course less importantly, it also offends against the sensitivities of genuine Catholics.

As Vox Cantoris also demonstrates, this grave scandal is only intensified by the fact that this sacrilegious priest has spoken in relativistic terms about the life of human embryos and on the theme of homosexual pairings.

Far from being promoted, this priest should be having his priestly faculties suspended by his superiors. I say that for the good of the Church, for the souls of those promoting him, for the priest's own soul and for the salvation of the souls who will be forced to suffer his leadership.

Although shocked, I must say that I am not at all surprised to learn that Fr. Oscar Eduardo Minarro has previously been put in charge of the seminarians in his home diocese.

At so many levels, this latest news gets to the very heart of the crisis searing the Catholic Church. What we are witnessing is nothing short of Satan's war on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

The great St. Alphonsus de Liguori famously warned:

---

The devil has always attempted, by means of heretics, to deprive the world of the Mass, making them precursors of the Antichrist, who before anything else, will try to abolish and will actually abolish the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, as a punishment for the sins of men, according to the prediction of Daniel, 'And strength was given him against the continual sacrifice' (Daniel 8:12).

---

The war from without
Some years before finding Catholic Truth, our family spent about a year in the mid-80's attending a 'free-evangelical church' on Merseyside. The self-appointed pastor was very anti-Catholic and frequently used his weekly platform to rail against the 'ancient whore of Babylon' and the 'Antichrist in Rome'!

At a certain point each week, he would put down his King James Bible and raise up a bap of bread in one hand. In a bold and scoffing voice, he would announce that this was only bread and that it would not change its state. After reading the Last Supper narrative from one of the Gospels, he would then tear off chunks from this bread and share them out with a cup of Ribena.

He was right, of course. As a self-appointed minister with no Catholic priesthood, that bap would indeed remain a mere bread roll. Without Holy Orders or communion with Christ's Church, he could only serve people with his own errant interpretations of Scripture and nourish them with mere earthly food.

Looking back, it is amazing to think that such a strand of real Lutheran Protestant bigotry had survived so intact into mid-1980s Britain. Whilst most of the nation grooved into post-modernity to the musical accompaniment of the Communards and Whitney Houston, here was this little group bashing its tambourines to 'Let the Fire Fall' and babbling in strange tongues...

The point is, this guy hated the Catholic Church, the Catholic priesthood and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. From the amount of time he dedicated to this theme, his hatred for the Catholic Church was clearly a foundational aspect of his entire belief system. As such, he set up his little church to reflect that hatred with a circle of chairs gathered around his chair and a low, unadorned table, on which he stood the King James Bible, a bap and a mug of fruit juice.

Oh, there was also a buzzing overhead-projector for the words to the praise and worship songs. Well, it was the 80s!

As a true follower of Luther's heresies, this chap waged his personal war against the Catholic Church from beyond its borders.

He was wrong, but he was honest.

That pastor was right about one thing though: he described Catholic seminaries as 'cemeteries' where young men go to die spiritually. When he said that, I was a 15-year old Protestant. I never dreamed that I would become a Catholic 6 years later; much less that I would go off to a Catholic seminary 4 years after that. Neither could I have known what trials awaited me there...

The war from within
Far more sinister than the weekly rantings of that pastor fellow was the war on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass that I encountered from within the Catholic Church a whole decade later at Ushaw Seminary.


From 1997-1999, this was the view from my bedroom window at Ushaw on the windswept moors to the west of Durham.

It was consoling to look down at St. Joseph's chapel in the dead of night and see the red Sanctuary Lamp; denoting the Real Presence and flickering through the stained glass window above the Tabernacle. That faithful red sentinel acted like a beacon of hope in the midst of so many of the spiritual storms that my friends and I weathered in that dark place.

It was especially consoling to look out at that crimson lantern when groups of drunken and effeminate gin queens partied beyond my locked door, in the early hours, night after night.

As I found out to my cost, complaining only made matters worse...

A far more serious cause of sleepless nights in that place though, was the manner in which the Blessed Sacrament was treated.

Upon arriving at the seminary, I had been greatly shocked to hear students disparaging Eucharistic Adoration as 'bread worship'. I had also been greatly troubled to learn that we were not allowed to kneel at Holy Mass, even for the Consecration and Elevations. [JMB must have been trained at such a seminary!]

I felt like I'd left the world of 90s Britain for the grim times of Nazi or Soviet oppression.

A theologically orthodox priest told me not to rock the boat if I wanted to get ordained. It became an annoying pattern in those days to hear solid priests telling me to "keep my head down and get ordained".

I remember thinking that I'd either end up with no faith at all, or else as a totally compromised priest, if I were required to keep my mouth shut about everything bad that was happening to Jesus, to Catholic doctrine and to good vocations in that grim place.

Anyway, that priest recommended that instead of kneeling, I should make a profound bow towards the altar at the key moments in the Mass. I was not happy, but there was no other help forthcoming from anywhere else and I could see no other way to reach ordination.

So much for religious liberty', eh!

The next problem concerned the hosts used for Mass. Although not on the scale as that pictured above in Argentina, the breads used were also large, crumbling and powdered. They were circular with triangular segments marked off for 'fractioning' prior to distribution. Every single day, large particles scattered far and wide from these breads. The hurried fractioning process carried out by priests and deacons only made this worse.

Holy Communion was administered standing and in the hand only.

One had to develop a way to surreptitiously consume all the powdery fragments that came away in the palm of the hand.

This was because some members of staff kept a close scrutiny on students to see if they checked or licked their hands after Communion to consume all of the fragments of the Blessed Sacrament. Those caught doing so could expect to receive accusations of 'scrupulosity' on their end-of-term reports.

One morning, a priest stacked about four crumbling triangles of this bread onto my palm as I was the last in the line that day. I never made the mistake of being last in line again...

During the first days at the seminary, each new student was allocated to a small team and told to join them for a 'group Mass' every Monday evening. Again, I was aghast to discover the nature of these Masses: the priests wore lay clothes with no vestments at all and used a low and unadorned coffee table as the 'altar', the deacon and students would lounge on bean bags or even lie giggling like schoolgirls across the floor during Mass, students would 'share personal reflections' or 'bring along something that helps them to pray' after the Gospel, and the paten of hosts was passed around for each person to help themselves and do their own elevation prior to reception...

We even had one priest in our group who replaced the words, 'Lord, we are not worthy to receive you', with the phrase 'Sisters and brothers... you are worthy to receive!'

By the way, that whole 'sisters' thing referred not only to the female lay students, who may be reclining on the beanbags among the seminarians, but to the occasional presence of women who were training to be Anglican vicars at the nearby Cranmer Hall! (As in the burned heretic, Thomas Cranmer...)

Due to the 'pass the paten' procedure prior to the elevation, one had to be careful not to sit next to any of these Protestant lasses, so as to avoid being required to offer them Holy Communion...

To have refused to offer them Communion, or even to have complained of the danger of them trying to receive, would have been one of the fastest tracks right out of the seminary door. Choosing to miss the weekly 'group Mass' would also have quickly become a damaging 'formation issue'.

During those Masses I always knelt for the Consecration regardless of the consequences. Send me home if you like, Jim but, whilst I could just about square bowing toward the altar, lying back on a beanbag was just not on!

Eventually, I was made a sacristan and then head sacristan the following year. This was a brutal crucifixion which included untold difficulties when I discovered that particles of the powdery Blessed Sacrament were literally everywhere.

During that time, I asked the priest in charge of liturgy several times to change to the regular white hosts used by the Universal Church in order to avoid the grave problem of large crumbling fragments. He was not interested because he said I was being 'too scrupulous' and claimed that the "Since Vatican II, bread used at Mass must look like real food".

I could write a book about the problems that I experienced in that sacristy. Basically, I experienced many months of bullying and mockery for trying to gather up the myriad of crumbs of the Blessed Sacrament after each Holy Mass.

Two incidents will have to suffice as illustrations in the limited space here: A non-Consecrated altar bread was once mopped around a paten containing Consecrated crumbs of the Blessed Sacrament by an aggressive seminarian who then thrust the results in my face with the snarled words, "Start eating!"

Another time a priest on the staff discovered me and my late friend Fr. Mike Williams checking a corporal cloth for crumbs in the sacristy after an evening Mass. He came up and scoffed, "Are you checking for crumbs there? What are you going to do when you find them? Take them up to your room and worship them?"

Although it is 17 years since I left Ushaw, I have experienced periods of intense interior anguish every single day since then, with regards to the treatment of the Blessed Sacrament in that place.

I had finally crashed and burned when we were forced to attend a silent retreat led by liberal priests and nuns. One priest sneered when he consecrated the Blessed Sacrament, throwing down the Host and crashing down the Chalice with a sneer each time during his Mass. This fellow, dressed in lay clothes and without any genuflection, also similarly crashed down a Monstrance containing the Blessed Sacrament when he was asked by some of the lads to let us have Adoration during the 'retreat'.

Something broke inside me during that guy's Mass and, although I lasted at Ushaw another 6 months, that was the point at which I know that I lost my vocation and began to suffer terribly in the mind. These are very painful things for me to write here, things I have only shared with my dear wife, family, close friends and spiritual directors, but I now think the urgency of the times demand it.

Several years ago, Ushaw College closed its doors as a seminary due to an unsurprising lack of vocations. I've written elsewhere about orthodox students being persecuted for their orthodoxy in classes and so-called spiritual direction sessions; and of others who were prevented from even joining the seminary by dissenting liberals who grilled them on their selection weekends for admitting to their belief in the hierarchical nature of the Church, expressing their pro-life views or acknowledging their acceptance of Humanae Vitae.


The above picture of a Traditional Latin Mass being offered in one of the small chapels at Ushaw was taken during a Latin Mass training weekend of the Latin Mass Society, in the year that Ushaw ceased to be a seminary. Such beautiful events would never have been allowed to happen when I was there as a seminarian.

Indeed, these very chapels used to be used as store rooms for music stands, mops and buckets. I know, because I often used to pray silently in them after Mass on Sundays. Whilst Masses were regularly offered on coffee tables in bedrooms, lounges and even in the bar, these splendid chapels stood empty for years.

One of my good friends was described as being 'dangerous' by a leftist nun, when he suggested in her presence that Holy Mass should be offered on one of these altars instead of on a circular coffee table in a lounge.

'Animators of lay leadership'
In my first term at Ushaw, the priest-leader came in to our classroom one day and demanded to know our views about having a 'Mass-free ecumenical day' to "celebrate the Millennium". Realizing the danger to our vocations if we crossed swords with him, most of the class remained silent. He then demanded a response from each of us.

One student attempted to give an academic response, by speaking hypothetically in the third party. This priest then countered that he was not interested in such academic opinions, but in how his suggestion made us feel emotionally.

When we had all had to answer, mainly in defence of the Mass, this priest-leader gave us an angry lecture about 'sectarianism'. He said that in 'true ecumenism' we do not just go off and do our own 'little Catholic bit'. He was speaking about the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass...

The following weekend, this priest used his homily at the main college Sunday Mass to berate our year group in front of the whole college body for supposedly holding 'sectarian views'.

We had given up our whole lives, with good friends, careers and financial security, for the Holy Mass and here we were being persecuted for that love by those who were supposed to be forming us to offer the Mass!

In such an environment, orthodox lads quickly learned to keep their heads down. In fact, they were told to do so by everyone from orthodox priests, to prayerful nuns and on to their own friends and families.

This 'keeping your head down' business has allowed the evil in the Church to flourish for at least five decades now. It has got to stop.

Even after several years in the place, vocations could be thwarted at the very last minute. I know a good lad whose ordination was delayed 6-months just because he wore clerical dress on Sundays and to visit the sick!

A few months before diaconate ordination, students could suddenly be required to join engaged couples on a pre-marriage course, wherein leaders were speaking against the Church's teachings on contraception.

Other times, just weeks before priestly ordination, they might be required to attend a Mass where a priest would share the altar with a woman vicar 'saying' her eucharist prayers alongside him in a kind of mock concelebration. In both these cases the student would face a grave moral dilemma - stand up for the Faith or lose their chance to be ordained after so many years.

This all ties in to my recent article referencing Hilary White's comments about a [Bergoglian] purge making it impossible for seminarians to get ordained unless they compromise with the desecration of the Holy Eucharist...

You never knew what was going to happen to you next. I was on two separate occasions made to consume literally dozens of Consecrated Hosts in the Sacristy. These experiences have caused me immense psychological trauma for many years.

The above-mentioned priest-leader who so publicly scolded us for upholding the celebration of Mass for the Millennium also took us for a course of study on Pastores Dabo Vobis, the apostolic exhortation on priestly formation.

Unfortunately, the content of his course did not include much of the actual content of the document! Instead, we were told that our future job as priests would be to act as 'animators''working to 'empower the laity''in taking over the leadership and decision-making in the Church. He suggested that the hierarchical model of the Church was to be replaced by one of lay leadership at the local level.

Again, I've written elsewhere how various priests and laity, who were back-then helping to create a vocations shortage, have since gone on to take on leadership roles in dioceses where they now work to bring on lay leadership in parishes, due to the supposed lack of priests!

Archbishop Elden F. Curtiss of Omaha, Nebraska, was not wrong when he suggested that the vocations crisis was engineered by dissenting liberals.

In our own area, as in so many others in the devastated vineyard of post-Conciliar Catholicism, there are many parishes with aging leftist lay women running things and pushing on with their lay-led 'model of church'. And this goes on even as parishes continue to shrink and close.

'Facilitators at the Eucharistic assembly meal'
St. Robert Bellarmine once said:

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When we enter ornate and clean Basilicas, adorned with crosses, sacred images, altars and burning lamps, we most easily conceive devotion. But on the other hand, when we enter the temples of the heretics, where there is nothing except for a chair for preaching and a table for making a meal, we feel ourselves to be entering a profane hall and not the House of God.

---

The good saint could have been describing that Protestant pastor in 80s Merseyside!


The above picture was taken during the training weekend of the Latin Mass Society at Ushaw College in 2011. The image shows the majestic High Altar in St. Cuthbert's chapel being used for the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass, as it was originally intended, after years of standing unloved and neglected.

When I was at Ushaw, this sanctuary area was actually fenced off by ornate black and gold metalwork. On those occasions when there were sufficient visitors to permit Holy Mass in St. Cuthbert's chapel, the fenced-off High Altar was never used. In fact priests walked past the grand Tabernacle without even a single genuflection.

Instead, Mass was celebrated on a low table-style altar standing on the un-raised chapel floor between the collegiate seating area in the main body of the church. More often, the Mass was offered in the small St. Joseph's chapel or on the coffee tables I have described above.

Conclusion
In all that has been written here, I have tried to convey the reality of a dynamic that was working to force out students who held that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was just that.

Students who tried to live from the traditional conception of the Church, the Holy Mass, the priesthood and Catholic moral teaching, experienced bullying, mockery, psychological pressure and ultimate exclusion.

On the other hand, those who viewed the Church as a kind of social-working NGO, the priesthood as a vehicle for therapeutic counselling, and the Mass as a community meal facilitated by their entertainment skills, were generally given encouragement towards ordination.

Certainly, lads who enjoyed lying on a beanbag for Mass, because "it felt like the Last Supper with Jesus and His friends", would have little problem with the new order of irreverence.

How ironic that the Lutheran free-church pastor on Merseyside thought seminarians became spiritually dead because of their love for the Mass!

How scary that the theology of those leading the seminary seemed closer to his understanding than to that of Catholic Truth!

Indeed, I would say that he was actually closer to Catholic Truth than them because he at least believed that Christ was our Divine Saviour, Who died to save us from our sins. With some of the staff and students, I am not so sure that they even believed this.

In all that has been said here, who can fail to discern the horrid words of the excommunicated heretic Martin Luther echoing down to our times, "Take away the Mass, and you destroy the Church"?

Pope Francis has just appointed the publicly sacrilegious priest Fr. Oscar Eduardo Minarro to the episcopate. In a few weeks Francis will travel to Lund to actually celebrate that same excommunicated heretic Martin Luther.

What we are witnessing seems to be nothing less than the latter stages of Satan's war on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

The most grave warnings of St. Pope Pius X a century ago are now upon us!

St. Padre Pio, that great priest whose whole existence was mystically transfigured by the Holy Sacrifice of Calvary, once said that it would be easier for the world to survive without the sun than to survive without the Holy Mass.

May he help us to remain with Jesus, Our Lady, the True Faith and the most august Sacrifice of the Mass in the days ahead.

It's worth checking the last book in the Bible - we know that God wins in the end!

This, too, is Bergoglian Magisterium!

Last Sunday, JMB gave a homily to thousands of catechists who came to Rome from around the world to celebrate their Jubilee - a homily in which he said some strange, disconcerting and inappropriate words, as follows:

---

It is by loving that the God-who-is-Love is proclaimed to the world: not by the power of convincing, never by imposing the truth [Really????], no less by growing fixated on some religious or moral obligation.

God is proclaimed through the encounter between persons, with care for their history and their journey [True, but that is not catechism at all, in the sense that these catechists must catechize: they have to do catechize literally - teach the essentials of the faith in a systematic way, that is their job - while of course, being careful to practice what they teach!]

This is a valuable teaching: as servants of the word of Jesus we have been called not to parade our appearances and not to seek for glory [It's the first time I have read any such comment on catechists, who certainly are not in their work 'to parade their appearance or to seek glory', because in the first place, the circumstances of catechizing others seriously exclude such illusions!]; nor can we be sad or full of complaints. We are not prophets of gloom who take delight in unearthing dangers or deviations; we are not people who become ensconced in our own surroundings, handing out bitter judgments on our society, on the Church, on everything and everyone, polluting the world with our negativity. [Hmmm, has he listened to his own homilies at Casa Santa Marta, and even this particular paragraph of his homily? As Socrates wisely advised, 'Know thyself!"]

---

The fact that the New York Times even ran the following piece at all is surely an indicator that even they are seeing the Bergoglio
giga-balloon deflating. Matthew Schmitz is literary editor of FIRST THINGS... I do take issue with the tense of the title. JMB continues
to be pope, and things can theoretically change for the better in this papacy (though perhaps not in anyone's wildest dreams, least of all of
orthodox Catholics), but the tense should be present progressive, "Is Pope Francis failing?", by the standards of the media, that is,
which is that of 'the world'. But by the standards of the Church, as late as Vatican II, the pope is supposed to be "the perpetual and visible
source and foundation of the unity both of the bishops and of the whole company of the faithful", who, in "preaching the Gospel of
God to all men...preserves the Church in the purity of the faith handed on by the apostles...and confirms his brethren in the faith",
he fails each of the criteria mentioned.

Has Pope Francis failed?
By MATTHEW SCHMITZ

SEPT. 28, 2016

When Pope Francis ascended to the chair of St. Peter in March 2013, the world looked on in wonder. Here at last was a pope in line with the times, a man who preferred spontaneous gestures to ritual forms. Francis paid his own hotel bill and eschewed the red shoes. Rather than move into the grand papal apartments, he settled in the cozy guesthouse for visitors to the Vatican. He also set a new non-dogmatic tone with statements like “Who am I to judge?” [That is not non-dogmatic. It is worse than dogmatic - it is ideological, very contemporary and secular.]

Observers predicted that the new pope’s warmth, humility and charisma would prompt a “Francis effect” — bringing disaffected Catholics back to a church that would no longer seem so forbidding and cold. Three years into his papacy, the predictions continue. Last winter, Austen Ivereigh, the author of an excellent biography of Pope Francis, wrote that the pope’s softer stance on communion for the divorced and remarried “could trigger a return to parishes on a large scale.” In its early days, Francis’s Jesuit order labored to bring Protestants back into the fold of the church. Could Francis do the same for Catholics tired of headlines about child abuse and culture wars?

In a certain sense, things have changed. Perceptions of the papacy, or at least of the pope, have improved. Francis is far more popular than his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. Sixty-three percent of American Catholics approve of him, while only 43 percent approved of Benedict at the height of his popularity, according to a 2015 New York Times and CBS News poll. [How can a 2015 poll be cited to show Benedict XVI's approval rating 'at the height of his popularity'? It is distressing when someone like Schmitz simply regurgitates data like this without examining it! At the height of his popularity in the USA, which was after his apostolic visit in 2008,a Pew survey gave him an 82% approval rating.]

Francis has also placed a great emphasis on reaching out to disaffected Catholics. [How exactly has he done that? Other than hoping to ride on his phenomenal popularity and its putatively positive - but so far unregistered, except perhaps negatively - 'Bergoglio effect', has he had any specific program at all to do that like the 'Catholics Come Home' initiative in the USA, which predated him???]

But are Catholics actually coming back? In the United States, at least, it hasn’t happened. New survey findings from Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate suggest that there has been no Francis effect — at least, no positive one. In 2008, 23 percent of American Catholics attended Mass each week. Eight years later, weekly Mass attendance has held steady or marginally declined, at 22 percent.

Of course, the United States is only one part of a global church. But the researchers at Georgetown found that certain types of religious observance are weaker now among young Catholics than they were under Benedict. In 2008, 50 percent of millennials reported receiving ashes on Ash Wednesday, and 46 percent said they made some sacrifice beyond abstaining from meat on Fridays. This year, only 41 percent reported receiving ashes and only 36 percent said they made an extra sacrifice, according to CARA. In spite of Francis’s personal popularity, young people seem to be drifting away from the faith.

Why hasn’t the pope’s popularity reinvigorated the church? Perhaps it is too soon to judge. We probably won’t have a full measure of any Francis effect until the church is run by bishops appointed by Francis and priests who adopt his pastoral approach. This will take years or decades. [My God!, and that is a serious cry to the Lord, not merely an expression, save your Church from the unimaginably disastrous cumulative Bergoglio effect by then - which would be a de facto replacement of the one true Church of Christ with the church of Bergoglio.]

Yet something more fundamental may stand in the way of a Francis effect. Francis is a Jesuit, and like many members of Catholic religious orders, he tends to view the institutional church, with its parishes and dioceses and settled ways, as an obstacle to reform.
- He describes parish priests as “little monsters” who “throw stones” at poor sinners.
- He has given curial officials a diagnosis of “spiritual Alzheimer’s.”
- He scolds pro-life activists for their “obsession” with abortion. - He has said that Catholics who place an emphasis on attending Mass, frequenting confession, and saying traditional prayers are “Pelagians” — people who believe, heretically, that they can be saved by their own works.

Such denunciations demoralize faithful Catholics without giving the disaffected any reason to return. Why join a church whose priests are little monsters and whose members like to throw stones? When the pope himself stresses internal spiritual states over ritual observance, there is little reason to line up for confession or wake up for Mass.

Even Francis's most ardent fans worry that his agenda is overdue. When he was elected, Francis promised a cleanup of the Vatican’s corrupt finances. Three years on, he has started to retreat in the face of opposition, giving up an outside audit and taking powers away from his handpicked point man.

Francis has also shied away from big changes on doctrinal matters. Instead of explicitly endorsing communion for the divorced and remarried couples, he has quietly urged them on with a wink and a nod.

Francis has built his popularity at the expense of the church he leads. Those who wish to see a stronger church may have to wait for a different kind of pope. Instead of trying to soften the church’s teaching, such a man would need to speak of the way hard disciplines can lead to freedom. [That was exactly the pope we had before this one!]

Confronting a hostile age with the strange claims of Catholic faith may not be popular, but over time it may prove more effective. Even Christ was met with the jeers of the crowd.


Carl Olson picks up from Schmitz:

'Francis has built his popularity
at the expense of the church he leads'
by Carl Olson
Editor

September 28, 2016

The September 28th edition of The New York Times contains an op-ed by Matthew Schmitz, literary editor of First Things, which poses the question "Has Pope Francis Failed?" — and then makes a succinct and pointed argument for a fairly resounding "Yes." Schmitz's focus is on the famous but increasingly hazy "Francis effect":

---

Observers predicted that the new pope’s warmth, humility and charisma would prompt a “Francis effect” — bringing disaffected Catholics back to a church that would no longer seem so forbidding and cold. Three years into his papacy, the predictions continue. Last winter, Austen Ivereigh, the author of an excellent biography of Pope Francis, wrote that the pope’s softer stance on communion for the divorced and remarried “could trigger a return to parishes on a large scale.” In its early days, Francis’ Jesuit order labored to bring Protestants back into the fold of the church. Could Francis do the same for Catholics tired of headlines about child abuse and culture wars?

---

Schmitz says that perceptions "of the papacy, or at least of the pope, have improved." Francis is, here in the U.S., more popular than his his predecessor: "Sixty-three percent of American Catholics approve of him, while only 43 percent approved of Benedict at the height of his popularity, according to a 2015 New York Times and CBS News poll. Francis has also placed a great emphasis on reaching out to disaffected Catholics."

But, Schmitz asks, "are Catholics actually coming back?" His negative answer to that question is based on the results of a recent survey from Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate suggesting "there has been no Francis effect — at least, no positive one. In 2008, 23 percent of American Catholics attended Mass each week. Eight years later, weekly Mass attendance has held steady or marginally declined, at 22 percent."

In addition, religious observance among younger Catholics has taken a notable turn for the worse:

---

In 2008, 50 percent of millennials reported receiving ashes on Ash Wednesday, and 46 percent said they made some sacrifice beyond abstaining from meat on Fridays. This year, only 41 percent reported receiving ashes and only 36 percent said they made an extra sacrifice, according to CARA. In spite of Francis’ personal popularity, young people seem to be drifting away from the faith.

---

We can also note that the attendance numbers for papal events in Rome have not been on the rise, with a precipitous drop from 2014 to 2015 in the number of people at general audiences, Angelus, and other events. Numbers, of course, only tell part of the story, and they are not, ultimately, the primary indicator of faithfulness, fidelity, and witness. But the second part of Schmitz's essay is not about numbers, but about the specific tone, approach, and vision of Francis for the Church:

---

Francis is a Jesuit, and like many members of Catholic religious orders, he tends to view the institutional church, with its parishes and dioceses and settled ways, as an obstacle to reform. He describes parish priests as “little monsters” who “throw stones” at poor sinners. He has given curial officials a diagnosis of “spiritual Alzheimer’s.” He scolds pro-life activists for their “obsession” with abortion. He has said that Catholics who place an emphasis on attending Mass, frequenting confession, and saying traditional prayers are “Pelagians” — people who believe, heretically, that they can be saved by their own works.

---

Schmitz can only touch on some of these matters in passing, but those of us who have been following this papacy closely from the start know how the past three years have witnessed a steady stream of confusion, hyperbole, "ambiguities, inconsistencies, mixed messages, imprecisions, thinly veiled insults" — not to mention the odd use and misuse of language in the service of more confusion.

"Such denunciations," Schmitz insists, "demoralize faithful Catholics without giving the disaffected any reason to return." I agree. And reading some of the comments left at Schmitz's op-ed only reinforces the overall impression that Francis is mostly liked and lauded by those who see his pontificate as the start of a revolution overthrowing the usual litany of criticisms tossed at the Church: it is too patriarchal, rigid, narrow-minded, moralistic, judgmental, bigoted, homophobic, Islamophobic, etc., etc.

Yes, there are Catholics who are upset and even angry at Francis, but the overwhelming response, in my experience, is simply, "What is he doing? And why?"

These are legitimate and good questions. As veteran Vatican journalist John Allen, Jr., mused in a recent Crux feature:

---

Towards the end of Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis’s document on the family, the pontiff writes that when priests have to make judgments in concrete cases such as pastoral care of divorced and civilly remarried Catholics, they are to do so “according to the teaching of the Church and the guidelines of the bishop.” One wonders if he knew at the time just what a conflicting welter of responses that injunction would elicit.

---

As Allen correctly notes, since the Apostolic Exhortation was released this past spring, "various bishops and groups of bishops around the world have issued guidelines for its implementation, and surveying the landscape, it’s abundantly clear they’re not all saying the same thing."

Put simply: if Francis knew that confusion would result, then we have to wonder at his motives, especially in light of his scathing address at the end of the 2015 Synod. After all, the papacy is supposed to be a clear sign and source of unity, even if the matters addressed are sometimes complex and difficult. And if he didn't suspect that his 55,000 word document would elicit consternation and wildly differing interpretations, then we have to wonder about his foresightedness and prudence. [But it is all by Bergoglian design! What pope mindful of his task to promote and preserve unity in the Church would urge the faithful to 'Haga lio!', as he has done on many occasions? The answer is: A pope who continually makes a mess himself 1) by deliberately causing confusion about Church teaching and 2) by directly insulting Catholics who do not think and behave as he wants members of the church of Bergoglio should behave, while making nice with everyone else, including Islamist terrorists who he refuses to name as such.]

No Catholic should ever be surprised that there is discord and fighting within the Church, but they should be bothered when a pope is so often at the middle of constant conflict, and when that conflict is so often originating in his own perplexing words and actions. Put another way, this is not like dissenting Catholics raging against John Paul II's Veritatis Splendor, which was quite clear in its denunciation of flawed understandings of moral doctrine; rather, it is the unease and bewilderment of Catholics who know or suspect that accomodation, compromise, and sentimentality disguised as "pastoral" kindness are not good for the Church or the world. As I wrote earlier this month:

---

... 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.

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.

"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.

---

Meanwhile, back to Schmitz, who concludes:

---

Francis has built his popularity at the expense of the church he leads. Those who wish to see a stronger church may have to wait for a different kind of pope. Instead of trying to soften the church’s teaching, such a man would need to speak of the way hard disciplines can lead to freedom. Confronting a hostile age with the strange claims of Catholic faith may not be popular, but over time it may prove more effective. Even Christ was met with the jeers of the crowd.

---

Those are strong words. Is Francis trying to soften Church teaching? Personally, I see no way around that conclusion. After all, if Francis never meant to change or soften Church teaching, why the constant reliance on Cardinal Kasper and other Germans, the two Synods, the regular confusion, the jostling and posturing, the endless "gestures", the angry address at the conclusion of the 2015 Synod, the often tortured and purposeful ambiguity of chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia, and so forth?
[I don't know how anyone can still doubt that Jorge Bergoglio wants his church to be the church of Nice and Easy! Catholic-lite, if you will, but that is to demean the adjective 'Catholic'. No, it's not Catholic-lite, but Bergoglio-lite and ever lightening, one fears.]

Did Saint John Paul II, in numerous addresses and major documents, not give the Church enough to ponder and unpack about the meaning of marriage, sexuality, family, the feminine genius, and so many related matters? Has human nature changed so much in the past decade? Has Church teaching become outdated or "out of touch" in a matter of a few years? [Yes, Bergoglio's synodal henchman, Cardinal Baldisseri, said exactly that of Familiaris consortio, a 1981 document. It seems clear that to JMB and his Bergoglians [as in 'Luther and his Lutherans' (i.e., ex-Catholics)], anything the Church taught and practised before March 13, 2013, is outdated and out of touch.]

It is unfortunate — indeed, deeply painful — to see the confusion, turmoil, and frustration so often generated by the Barque of Peter, which should instead be providing solace, comfort, shelter, and clarity amid the dark waves of an increasingly antagonistic and volatile world.

The 'Francis Effect' discussed
in the New York Times
by Kenneth Wolfe

Sept. 28, 2016

Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the papacy of Pope Francis is his unification of traditional Catholics and conservative Catholics.

What started as an uncivil war in March 2013 -- when traditional Catholic sources such as Rorate (which was intimately familiar with Cardinal Bergoglio's work in Argentina) predicted a massive shift to the left, only to be harshly criticized by many Catholic conservatives who blindly defended Bergoglio as one who would continue the incremental restoration of Pope Benedict XVI -- has grown to a point where both camps are now singing from the same Liber.
[But there are still quite a few 'normalists' (like Jeff Mirus) who had apparently finally opened their minds to this pope's insanities but who quickly revert to their faith in the rightness of Bergoglio despite having recognized the manifold faults of AL, which is simply - especially in its Chapter 8 - a compendium of the worst Bergoglian offenses against Catholic doctrine and practice.]

We have written of the 'Francis Effect' a few times, using data such as Pew Research Center's statistics on Mass attendance...Fast-forward to 2016.

Today's New York Times (yes, that is correct) provides an update on the 'Francis Effect' by an editor of First Things (yes, that is correct). Entitled "Has Pope Francis Failed?," the op-ed by Matthew Schmitz in today's print edition, also online, is worth a read.


For some reason, this poster - created at the time SP went into effect - was used to illustrate the Rorate caeli item. A general reminder, perhaps,
that one sure way to confirm, strengthen and inflame our faith is to go to Mass as often as we can, the traditional Mass, if possible, where we can do as Pope St. Pius X advised:

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Don't pray at Holy Mass - pray the Holy Mass, the highest prayer that exists... You must pray with the priest the holy words said to him in the Name of Christ, and which Christ says through him. You have to associate your heart with the holy feelings that are contained in these words and in this manner, you ought to follow all that happens on the Altar. When acting in this way, you have prayed Holy Mass.

---

I must add Mundabor's commentary to the NYT Op-Ed piece. He questions Matthew Schmitz's Catholicism because of a number of statements and assumptions Schmitz makes - which are par for the course in today's journalism, even by Catholic journalists for whom their 'duty' to media always seems to override their Catholicism (whereas it is objective and journalistically mandatory to show both sides of any issue). But Mundabor has other worthwhile insights...

Even NYT writers start seeing
that Francis has failed

Sept. 29, 2016


[Great vignette! Short, sweet, says much!]


When was the last time you heard about the “Francis effect”? Yep, and you now know why: even the secular press knows it did not work.

The article is, as you would expect by a libtard publication like the NYT – the author works for “First Things”, though; more about this later – entirely centered around secular issues. In line with the forma mentis of your average IYI (“Intellectual Yet Idiot”) reader, the Church is seen like a party, or a product, or a firm: where an “innovator” who seems “in line with the times” steps in and “revitalises” the ailing organisation. And this leader does such wonderful things as living in a luxury hotel, wearing black shoes, shooting selfies, and other such like stupid things very much liked by a stupid age.

The article, showing the great ignorance of this author in matters of Catholicism, (but we are talking of Libtards here) even absurdly criticises the Pope because "Francis has also shied away from big changes on doctrinal matters. Instead of explicitly endorsing communion for the divorced and remarried couples, he has quietly urged them on with a wink and a nod".

The secular mind sees the secular Pope at work; it sees him trying to make of the Church something similar to the Democratic Party; it sees, also, that he is failing miserably.

The secular mind cannot understand the Church more than the devil can like holy water. They just do not get that the Church – as an organisation – prospers when she opposes the world, and withers when she cozies up with it.

If they knew this simple truth, they would never invent strange and absurd expressions like the “Francis effect” and mean that it would be good for the Church as an organisation.

The Catholic mind understands the folly of all this. But hey, they are “homophobic”, so they don’t count.

As the author points out, very rightly, Francis has failed miserably even in the other – and originally, we were told, the most important – reason for his appointment: the reorganisation of the inefficient, corrupt Vatican apparatus. We knew that already, because we know that South American dictators tend to be extremely stupid wreckers of everything they touch. But it’ s nice to see that some libtard notices that, too.

However, the obviously Catholicism-free author must have heard, at some point, something about Catholicism at First Things, because he seems to have a very confused idea of how the Church works. Examining the cause of the continuing decomposition of the Church in the US, he writes something that has always been a mainstay of this little effort:"Francis has built his popularity at the expense of the church he leads."

The cult of man damages the Church of God. Francis, in his vanity and folly, presents himself as the good guy in opposition to the bad guys of the sixty generations before his. It can work for him, for a while, until people understand what a phony the man is. But it will never be any good for the Church. This is now apparent, and the “Francis effect” thingy has gone the way of “reading Francis through Benedict”.

The author, who is so blind that he sees something positive in Francis “paying his own hotel bill” and “eschewing the red shoes”, still has some ideas left of what Catholicism is:

---

Those who wish to see a stronger church may have to wait for a different kind of pope. Instead of trying to soften the church’s teaching, such a man would need to speak of the way hard disciplines can lead to freedom. Confronting a hostile age with the strange claims of Catholic faith may not be popular, but over time it may prove more effective. Even Christ was met with the jeers of the crowd.

---

So, is this author Catholic after all, and just too servile to the NYT to write like one? I don’t know, and I am not interested to know. What interests me here is that even the entirely secular outlook of this article must see Francis’s dismal failure.

The Church is the enemy of the world. Francis is the friend of the world. Francis is the enemy of the Church.

And he has failed. Even libtards see it now.

[But there are two levels of failure here: this pope obviously has failed the Church. But the libtards don't see it that way. They cheer that he has failed the Church by rendering her doctrine and discipline fluid in order to conform with the world. But they see that his secular agenda - despite the priority he gives it over what ought to be his only agenda, his spiritual mission as pope - is not prospering beyond slogans and headline-generating platitudes, for the simple reason that all earthly utopias are bound to be unachievable.('Utopia' means 'no place'.) So in that sense, they find him failing - failing to parlay his popularity and his papal authority into concrete measures that will even begin to end hunger, poverty and war, or cause all intending immigrants to be miraculously resettled in host countries where they will be getting more perks than the disadvantaged citizens of those countries themselves.]

Even Libtards see it now.

German Catholics who think the way most of their bishops do will never understand Benedict XVI because they do not wish to understand anyone who is in polar opposition to their views...

Pope Benedict is still
misunderstood in Germany
But 'Letzte Gespraeche' is #1 on the Der Spiegel bestseller list
by MARIE MEANEY

September 29, 2016

In Germany, reality and media-hype are worlds apart when it comes to Pope Benedict’s latest book-length interview called Last Conversations (Letzte Gespräche) in German (and Last Testament in English).

Accused of lacking tact, of wanting to interpret his own pontificate when this should be left to others, and of bashing the German hierarchy when he was himself part of the system are a few of the accusations leveled against Benedict by the Jesuit Andreas Batlogg, editor of the progressive journal Stimmen der Zeit (Voices of the Time). Readers of Last Conversations will conclude that Stimmen der Zeit is more concerned with following the Zeitgeist than preaching religious truth.

Benedict’s simplicity and humility shine through this interview conducted by Peter Seewald. He is not defending himself, but reminiscing, explaining, responding very simply to Seewald’s questions. Originally, these conversations, initiated at the end of his pontificate (though held mostly afterwards), were meant to help Seewald write Ratzinger’s biography. Only after Seewald secured the approval of Benedict and Pope Francis were these revealing interviews published.

Many faithful were shocked, bewildered, and saddened by his announcement that he would abdicate the throne of Peter. It went against centuries of Church practice and seemed to contradict the shining example of St. John Paul II the Great who revealed in his final years the significance of suffering. It was therefore mainly the progressives, for whom Ratzinger had been a thorn in the side, who applauded his decision.

But, contrary to speculations, it was not Vatileaks, the Williamson affair or any of the other scandals [Another well-meaning soul assuming the media's false assumptions: What 'other scandals'? If there was any that was a genuine scandal, it would have been named along with the faux-scandalous Vatileaks and Williamson case, but nothing else is named!] that led Benedict to abdicate.

On the contrary, he insists one should not leave when things are unresolved or at their worst. The reason for his decision was declining health. His energy was on the wane and he felt he could no longer shouldering the heavy burdens of his office. Of course, as he admits, the office of Peter is not merely about executing duties. It enters into one’s being. At the same time, he felt incapable of dealing anymore with day-to-day business.

He sees his vocation differently than John Paul II. Benedict is confident he made the right decision. For somebody who acted fearlessly during his whole life, speaking of the ills of his time whether opportune or not, it would have been out of character to become suddenly pusillanimous. God is the center of his life, and in his heart of hearts, it was clear to him that God not only allowed him to leave, but that it was his duty.

Ratzinger spoke with a prophetic voice his entire life. First, he was rebutted by the conservatives for that reason, and later by the liberals. This is a good indication that truth has always been his guiding-light, rather than the factions of right or left that tend to overlook either the ever-fresh newness of God’s revelation or its timelessness.

In 1958, for example, he published the article “Die neuen Heiden und die Kirche” (“The New Pagans and the Church”) where he spoke about the spreading loss of faith despite a seemingly blooming Church. Though he was simply seeing the signs of the time, the article was viewed as heretical by some, while his colleagues in Freising were shocked and his nomination to the university of Bonn became jeopardized.

On the other hand, his beautiful speech in Freiburg in 2011 was heavily criticized by progressives since he was asking the German church to shed its worldliness, its emphasis on institutions and conventions in order to open itself anew to the call of Christ. It could not have been said in a gentler way, quoting Mother Teresa that what needs to change in the Church is “you and me.”

And yet, it was received badly. The pope wasn’t telling the Church to abandon its wealth, or that it was squandering its money (the extensive national and international charitable outreach of the Church in Germany is very generous). Instead, he wanted a change of heart.

In contrast, Pope Francis was applauded when he called for an end to careerism in the Church, probably because there is no negative prejudice against him from mainstream progressives.

Benedict is also spot-on in the Last Conversations when he speaks about the “union mentality” of Church bureaucrats and officials in Germany who simply view themselves as mere employees working for a paycheck. That the uproar is so great even from the progressive lay-organization of German Catholics, Zentralkommittee deutscher Katholiken [the infamous ZDK], shows that he hit a sore spot, as Archbishop Gänswein pointed out in his defense of the book.

As Seewald points out, Hans Küng was the source of bad press that Ratzinger received following the Vatican Council. They were first colleagues and even collaborators, until Ratzinger realized that Küng no longer saw theology as the means by which Catholic beliefs are explained and defended. Though Ratzinger was not behind the latter losing his mandatum (i.e., his permit to teach at ecclesiastical institutions), he became a target of Küng’s ire. [This happened before Ratzinger came to the CDF.]

When Ratzinger left his position as archbishop of Munich in order to become prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), he was still loved and respected in Germany; after all, he had been a star-theologian of Germany and a good bishop. His reputation changed following a relentless campaign of slander by the press.

We also learn from the book that Benedict’s approach to decentralization mirrors that of Pope Francis, Benedict working towards a greater interaction between the local church and Rome, and only intervened when things were going in the wrong direction.[Since Benedict came ahead, he cannot be mirroring his successor! But that statement on decentralization is also misleading, because what Benedict wished to decentralize only had to do with routine administration, not doctrinal authority as his successor wants.]

He clearly has German bishops in mind when he says that many prelates who opposed decentralization lacked real initiative, probably because their priority was merely to embrace the progressive agenda. Going with the Zeitgeist made the German church conventional and mediocre, instead of emanating the refreshing challenge of holiness.

Ratzinger has always been a man inspired by the timeless newness of the truth. He was deeply formed by the personalism of his day, inspired by Henri de Lubac and von Balthasar to shed the moralistic narrowness of nineteenth century spirituality, advocating a return to the early Church Fathers, opposed to clericalism and seeing the second Vatican Council as an important means of renewing the Church, while opposing the abuses that followed.

But no matter what his critics say, Ratzinger has left a great legacy behind as an author, a pope and a man, and I wouldn’t be surprised if one day he is made a doctor of the Church.

The personal spiritual journey of Seewald makes him uniquely qualified to ask the important questions. He had left the Church in 1973, had become a Marxist and worked for a number of left-wing journals before interviewing Ratzinger in the 1990s, then finally re-entering the Church. His profound understanding of Benedict and Catholicism, as the preface demonstrates, shows that he learned a great deal from his lifetime of experiences.

David Berger, who had gone from being a famous Thomistic, conservative German theologian to outing himself as homosexual in 2010 and criticizing Benedict vociferously, has now come to regret his attacks.

Interestingly, he admits that the press at the time would have eagerly published anything he said against the pope. When a prominent journal invited Berger to criticize Last Conversations, he refused to do so, expressing his esteem for the pope emeritus. The very fact that this book is number one on the best-seller list of the news magazine Der Spiegel is reason for hope.

When reading this book, one is struck by Benedict’s holiness and humility, his serene acceptance of harsh attacks, and his simplicity. Readers will be able to tell that his faith and trust in God is childlike, rather than naïve, because he has weathered many storms. He is not the caricatured inquisitor who arrogantly claims to own the truth, but somebody who knows that “the truth possesses us and has touched us.”

He has now arrived at the threshold of eternity, ready for the loving embrace of the Father. He is, as Seewald formulates it, “in silence and prayer, in the heart of the faith.” This last glimpse into the heart and mind of this holy man can nourish us on our journey during these troubled times in the Church and in the world.

Marie Meaney received her doctorate and an M. Phil. in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford. She is the author of Simone Weil’s Apologetic Use of Literature: Her Christological Interpretations of Classic Greek Texts (Oxford University Press, 2007). Her booklet Embracing the Cross of Infertility (HLI) has also appeared in Spanish, German, Hungarian and Croatian. Before the birth of her daughter, she was a teaching fellow at Villanova University.

Forgive the digression: You want weird? Here's really far-out weird! Welcome to the world we live in! The husband in this case was once female, and the wife once male. But since neither underwent corrective surgery - presumably their genitals remained what they were born with - the husband became pregnant and went on to deliver a baby boy.

Transgender man becomes first
to have a baby with a transgender female
Not unusual really, because they never had corrective surgery, except
that it was the husband (born female) who conceived and delivered

By LAURA MOWAT

Sept. 28, 2016

A transgender couple has become the first to have their own child after the man gave birth to their baby. The couple were able to have a baby because neither had undergone corrective surgery.

Fernando Machado, who used to be a woman, met Diane Rodriguez, who used to be a man, on social media two years ago and started a relationship. [Biologically and in their primaary sex characteristics, Machado remains female and Rodriguez remains male! Otherwise, their coupling would be sterile.]

Ms Rodriguez made headlines in Ecuador in 2013 when she was the first transgender candidate to run for Government.

[If there was no corrective surgery (i.e., they both retain the sex organs they were born with), then presumably the gender 'transformation' was done only through hormones - pumping the woman with male hormones so she took on secondary male characteristics, and the man with female hormones so she took on secondary female characteristics. But the hormonal treatments would have had to stop on the female-now-male to enable 'him' to conceive a baby and nurture the fetus to term.

Indeed, the pictures of the pregnant Machado show him with feminine features without facial hair and with breasts appropriately enlarged in a pregnant woman.]

Ms Rodriguez, who was born a man named Luis, said: "We don't have a name yet, or rather we do, we are just waiting to announce it. Being a mother was never something I thought I could do because I am a transsexual." [But still remains female!]

The new parents have previously spoken of her struggle after coming out to her family about her sex change.

Ms Rodriguez said: “We live as man and woman. I’m a transgendered woman and Fernando is a transgendered man. The process to get here was complex for each of us. Knowing it's our right, we decided to add another member to our family.”

Mr Machado said that when he discovered he was pregnant, he “started crying with happiness, fear and dread”.

He said: ”I had never felt like that before. Wow, at last, I am completely happy.”

The above is from the complementary video to the Letter Appeal of the 45 with some of the signatories speaking out.


Some of 45 signatories feeling the heat
over letter urging clarification of AL


September 29, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) — Some of the scholars who sent an appeal to the 218 Cardinals and patriarchs are under fire for urging them to appeal to the pope for corrective measures to clarify “a number of statements that can be understood in a sense that is contrary to Catholic faith and morals” in Amoris Laetitia.

A few weeks ago, a letter from Pope Francis surfaced that expressed the Holy Father’s support to the bishops of the Buenos Aires, Argentina, pastoral region that read: “No other interpretation” of Amoris Laetitia is valid, consequently allowing the distribution of Holy Communion to divorced/remarried (Catholics) in some cases — certainly one of the hot topics in question.

Many of the signatories of the scholarly appeal remain anonymous to protect their reputation and jobs. Yet some are suffering pressure for their attempt to stay faithful to Church teaching and tradition.

LifeSiteNews has gathered information – confirmed by several of the signatories, including the spokesperson, Dr. Joseph Shaw – that one signatory, who is well known internationally, has lost his position as director of academic affairs at a Pontifical university.

Another was threatened by his bishop that his academic sabbatical would be canceled, but he has found another bishop willing to allow him to begin the process of incardination in his diocese.

Yet another has been forbidden to speak publicly about Amoris Laetitia, and another has been told to rescind his signature.

And a Cardinal put pressure on one of the signatories to withdraw his name.

Two clear conclusions can be drawn:
First, many of the suffering parties are under pressure not by remote institutions but by high-ranking individuals in the hierarchy. Second, the scholars’ document has opened the discussion to a wider public and has given rise to similar demands by individuals and groups.

In an earlier interview regarding the intention of the appeal, Shaw explained: “It is our hope that by seeking from our Holy Father a definitive repudiation of these errors we can help to allay the confusion already brought about by Amoris Laetitia among pastors and the lay faithful, for that confusion can be dispelled effectively only by an unambiguous affirmation of authentic Catholic teaching by the Successor of Peter.”

Regarding the persecution of the signatories, Shaw told LifeSiteNews on September 27: “It is distressing to hear of people, particularly clergy, suffering because they have signed this letter. It was, after all, a private letter to prelates expressing, without rancor or accusations, a request for clarification about questions the objective theological difficulties of which are acknowledged right across the spectrum of opinion. It is particularly disappointing to see Catholics in positions of authority who regard themselves as supporters of the Holy Father, not simply ignoring his repeated calls for parrhesia — fearless and candid discussion — but actively seeking to suppress it.”


Amid all this, of course, is that risible 'soundbite' from the smarmy Archbishop of Vienna, bewailing "I do not understand why there is so much resistance to Pope Francis!" - At least he acknowledges there is 'so much resistance' to his master. As kathpress.at (news agency of the Austrian bishops' conference) reported it:

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Vienna (kath.net/KAP) Cardinal Christoph Schönborn has expressed shock at the resistance from Church circles against Pope Francis: "It hurts me that he faces so much hostility - within the Church. What is this? He is the successor of Peter! He's the pope!" said the Archbishop of Vienna on Tuesday in his homily during the Medjugorje prayer of peace, "Message for you" in the cathedral.

"Many people in the world are grateful for the witness of Pope Francis. For his kindness and his love for the poor and the fallen. It is the gospel that he teaches us," said Schönborn. [The Popes before him taught the Gospel. Whereas Bergoglio is teaching his own selective account of the Gospel with his selective interpretations.]

To learn that the Pope is receiving "so much resistance" from his own ranks, was completely incomprehensible to him. It is important to pray for the Pope, he said. [Oh yes, that he may stop inflicting so much harm on the Church and stop trying to set up the church of Bergoglio in place of the Church!]

---

Here is an excellent analysis of what I would call the technical magisterial flaws of AL which necessarily concern its major flaws of content. It also answers Cardinal Schoenborn's shameless (yes, I will be using this adjective quite often for the smarmy cardinal's increasingly daring offenses against the very Catechism whose drafting he chaired) - and completely unpersuasive - defense of AL as a major act of papal magisterium...

The Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia, issued by Pope Francis at the close of two recent synods on the family, has stirred up more controversy than any other papal document of recent memory.

Commentators — both scholarly and popular — who favor a change in the Church’s view of the sacramental and spiritual status of Catholics living in illicit second marriages have hailed the document. Those seeking to uphold traditional Church discipline concerning the indissolubility of marriage have criticized the exhortation as ambiguous or worse.

Beyond the disputes over its substance (what does the document actually mean?) its supporters and detractors argue over its nature (what level of authority does the document command?). Because of the neuralgic issues at the heart of the document, neither controversy is likely to dissipate soon.

The seeming doctrinal difficulties presented by Al have been explored thoroughly in other articles, some of which have appeared in First Things. Such criticisms of a papal pronouncement inevitably spawn questions about its authoritative character. What sort of a document is this, and how are we to understand its authority? This itself is a contentious question.

In a recent interview, Cardinal Christof Schönborn, whom Pope Francis called “the most competent interpreter” of Al, made the case for the binding character of the document. When asked:

---

Some have spoken of AL as a minor document, a personal opinion of the Pope (so to speak) without full magisterial value. What value does this Exhortation possess? Is it an act of the magisterium?
The Cardinal responded:
It is obvious that this is an act of the magisterium: it is an Apostolic Exhortation. It is clear that the Pope is exercising here his role of pastor, of master and teacher of the faith, after having benefited from the consultation of the two Synods. I have no doubt that it must be said that this is a pontifical document of great quality, an authentic teaching of sacra doctrina.

… There is no lack of passages in the Exhortation that affirm their doctrinal value strongly and decisively. This can be recognized from the tone and the content of what is said, when we relate these to the intention of the text – for example, when the Pope writes: “I urgently ask ...”, “It is no longer possible to say ...”, “I have wanted to present to the entire Church ...”, and so on.

AL is an act of the magisterium that makes the teaching of the Church present and relevant today. Just as we read the Council of Nicaea in the light of the Council of Constantinople, and Vatican I in the light of Vatican II, so now we must read the previous statements of the magisterium about the family in the light of the contribution made by AL.[The chairman of the bishops' commission that drafted the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church has it egregiously and shamelessly backwards? (But then Schoenborn has been consistently shameless in his most outre deviations from orthodoxy!) When has the Church ever used a new document as the 'standard' by which to read previous documents? It isn't even logical.]

---

The Cardinal’s statement does not equivocate. It can be translated into four propositions.
First, AL is a binding document of the ordinary magisterium.
Second, it is meant to be universal in scope.
Third, it bears a doctrinal character.
Fourth, it is to be understood as an authentic interpretation of the deposit of the faith.

These assertions, if correct, are extremely consequential. Under settled doctrine, Catholics would be required to assent intellectually and submit their minds and wills to the pronouncements in the Exhortation. The Cardinal’s conclusions, however, do not withstand scrutiny in light of principles governing the interpretation of magisterial documents.

One does not need a Ph.D. in theology to discern areas in AL that are ambiguous and that have already led to multiple interpretations. Paragraph 299, for example, states that the divorced and remarried “need to feel not as excommunicated members of the Church, but instead as living members, able to live and grow in the Church.” [To begin with the Code of Canon Law in force since 1983 has done away with excommunication as a penalty for RCDs - which is leniency more than enough! Besides, has any Catholic RCD ever presented any complaint, formal or anecdotal, that the local church has made him/her/them unwelcome in any way, shape or form? I do not recall reading any such complaint - and there probably is none, because since 'the world' started to treat divorce as routine, so have most of the ministers of the Church, not to mention the community itself - and anything routine does not raise any eyebrows or invite discrimination at all.]

Does this statement merely admonish censorious pew-sitters concerning the divorced and remarried, criticizing those who may treat them with judgment or disdain? Or does it suggest that one can be spiritually alive while in a state of continued objective mortal sin? Obviously, the latter interpretation, which has been expressly drawn by many, is more than problematic.

Another example of ambiguity in the document appears in Footnote 329: “In such situations, many people, knowing and accepting the possibility of living as brothers and sisters which the Church offers them, point out that if certain expressions of intimacy are lacking, ‘it often happens that faithfulness is endangered and the good of the children suffers.’”

Does the document maintain that the virtue of sexual continence leads to sin and to the endangerment of children, or does it merely underscore the difficulty of living in conformity to the Gospel in difficult situations? The correct interpretation of statements such as these is not clear. [The interpretations are not mutually exclusive and both were probably intended.]

Some positions in AL that are not ambiguous appear to imply the validity of positions that are contrary to the Church’s perennial teaching. In Paragraph 297, one finds: “No one is condemned forever, because that is not the logic of the Gospel!” Such a statement implies the non-existence of hell and even suggests dissimulation on the part of Christ, who preached about hell almost as much as heaven. [It's a direct expression of JMB's personal opinion, since although he mentions Hell once in a while, his cumulative statements about the eventual fate of unrepentant sinners is expressed in that line "No one is condemned forever, because that is not the logic of the Gospel!" It took a lot of chutzpah for him and his ghosts to put in the statement as starkly as that, considering everything Jesus said about eternal damnation. See, it is in seemingly 'minor' statements like this that JMB is caught with his doctrinal pants down, because he obviously is careful to avoid such stark expressions of any of his other near-heretical statements impacting directly on whatever topic is on hand.]

Another example of implied error appears under the heading of “Accompanying, Discerning, Integrating Weakness” in paragraphs 296-299, where the document implies that sexual sins can admit a parvity of matter. One cannot overlook in this regard the much discussed Footnote 351, which many — including the Bishops of Argentina — have cited to support the reception of communion by divorced and remarried couples who have not accepted sexual continence.

Finally, some statements at least appear to contradict longstanding Church doctrine, whether formally defined teaching, the constant Tradition of the Church, or Scripture itself.
- Paragraph 159, for example, rejects the privileged status of perpetual continence.
- Paragraph 295 seems to doubt the sufficiency of grace to overcome human weakness.
- And Paragraph 301 suggests that those who act with full knowledge of grave matter are not necessarily in a state of mortal sin.

Given these difficulties, what is to be made of Cardinal Schönborn’s assertion that AL is a binding document of magisterial authority? His analysis is unpersuasive, for three principal reasons.

First, the document lacks language of formal definition. A clear example of language of formal definition appears in Ordinatio Sacradotalis, wherein Pope John Paul II uses words such as “We teach and declare” to define the Church’s teaching on the priesthood.

Contrast this with the language of AL highlighted by Cardinal Schönborn: “I urgently ask”; “It is no longer possible to say”; and “I have wanted to present to the entire Church.”

Second, AL lacks the theological and juridical precision of binding ecclesial documents, instead relying upon metaphors, imagery, and thick description, rather than clear statements.

And third, if, in fact, the document does contradict either natural or divine positive law, then it simply cannot bind the faithful to the obsequium religiosum, that is, the assent of mind and will, specified by Lumen Gentium 25.

The basic principles of the Church’s doctrine of infallibility provide substantive guidance here.

First and foremost, the Petrine ministry participates in the infallibility of the deposit of Revelation. This is crucial to hold in view, because Revelation is ultimately the criterion of truth.

The special, divine assistance of infallibility is a privilege attached to the Holy Father as the center of unity of the Church, yet this privilege is always given for the entire Church.

Besides the infallibility attached to the Pope’s pronouncements taught with the fullness of his supreme authority (the “extraordinary magisterium”), the “ordinary magisterium” can also be a source of infallible teaching
- when it concerns de fide doctrine (concerning faith and morals),
- when it is marked by unity and unanimity, and
- when it is proposed to be definitive and absolute teaching.

Not every teaching of the ordinary magisterium, however, fulfills these criteria. Some teachings of the ordinary magisterium can be fallible, and do not command interior assent of mind and will, if such teachings are clearly contrary to reason, or to the natural law, or to the divine positive law.

And in all of this one must keep ever in mind that the charism of infallibility is one of assistance and not of inspiration. In other words, the Holy Father cannot create doctrine, but can only explain the deposit of the faith more clearly.

This consideration of assistance versus inspiration raises another question, namely, what is to be done when a direct contradiction appears between one pontificate and another, or between pontifical documents? Cardinal Schönborn suggests that in such cases the older pronouncements must yield to the newer. The Cardinal said that we read Nicaea in light of Constantinople I, and Vatican I in light of Vatican II.

But the Church’s longstanding practice is precisely the contrary. It emphasizes that which is prior, that is, the Church’s tradition, over and against that which is posterior and, therefore, untested. Thus, the typical hermeneutic of the Church is to read Vatican II in light of Vatican I, Vatican I in light of Trent, Trent in light of what has preceded it and so on. In other words, tradition is always privileged as the remote rule of faith.

Responding faithfully to the trans-temporal magisterium of the Church (and not simply to the magisterium of one’s own times) requires holding in view two other principles of interpretation:
First, “the minor must give way to the major.”
Second, the “one must give way to the many.”

Taking the first principle: If there is question of conflict between two pontifical documents, the privilege must be given to the document that bears higher magisterial authority. For example, an apostolic exhortation of one pontificate does not possess more authority than an encyclical of a prior papacy. Thus, AL cannot supersede the encyclical Veritatis Splendor.

Now, when the documents are of the same authoritative rank, the second principle comes into play: One must privilege the harmony of the many pontificates in union with each other, and their unanimity with the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, over the one seemingly dissonant voice.

This concept was famously expressed over 1,500 years ago in the Canon of St. Vincent of Lerins: “Now in the Catholic Church itself we take the greatest care to hold that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all.”

Although AL and St. John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio are both apostolic exhortations, this principle would justify privileging John Paul’s document, because it seems to be more harmonious with prior magisterial teaching, both extraordinary and ordinary.

Ultimately, however, this level of discernment cannot be a matter of private judgment, but of magisterial decision. In case of real conflict between the teaching of various popes or between the teaching of one pontificate and natural or divine positive law, only the magisterium bears the obligation and authority to clarify any errors publicly. [But what if, in this case, the supreme Magisterium, i.e., the teaching authority of the pope, is the very source of grave error???]

The interpretive key that may provide the most utility here is that Church doctrine proceeds by way of the principle of organic development.

This contrasts with the perspective adopted by Schönborn when he says:

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The Holy Father has fundamentally renewed the discourse of the Church — certainly along the lines of Evangelii gaudium, but also of Gaudium et spes, which presents doctrinal principles and reflections on human beings today that are in a continuous evolution.
And again:
There is an evolution, clearly expressed by Pope Francis, in the Church’s perception of the elements that condition and that mitigate, elements that are specific to our own epoch.
And yet again:
To a greater degree than in the past, the objective situation of a person does not tell us everything about that person in relation to God and in relation to the Church. This evolution compels us urgently to rethink what we meant when we spoke of objective situations of sin. And this implicitly entails a homogeneous evolution in the understanding and in the expression of the doctrine.

---

This insistence on the evolution of doctrine is a problematic view, as was recognized most cogently by Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman in the nineteenth century. Cardinal Newman articulated seven “notes” that constitute true development of doctrine, a development that stands in contradistinction to the evolution of doctrine. Newman’s exposition of this concept took up an entire book.

For present purposes, I offer Newman’s own summary. He says that true doctrinal development must be

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...one in type, one in its system of principles, one in its unitive power towards externals, one in its logical consecutiveness, one in the witness of its early phases to its later, one in the protection which its later extend to its earlier, and one in its vigor with continuance, that is, in its tenacity.

---

One could sum this up by noting that a true development of doctrine — a development that requires full assent of mind and will from the faithful — gives life and vitality to the soul. By contrast, doctrinal evolution in which a new teaching sublates and eliminates the earlier teaching in a quasi-Hegelian fashion breeds dissolution, confusion, and death.

In his first encyclical, Lumen Fidei, Pope Francis [Benedict XVI!] wrote: “The transmission of the faith not only brings light to men and women in every place; it travels through time, passing from one generation to another. Because faith is born of an encounter which takes place in history and lights up our journey through time, it must be passed on in every age.”

The Church, and the chair of Peter in particular, has been endowed by her divine founder with the gift of infallibility so that all may know with clarity what they must do to gain eternal life. For this reason, the Church has, in every age, proposed that doctrine which is to be definitively held.

Yet, as Lumen Gentium reminds us, “this infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer willed His Church to be endowed in defining doctrine of faith and morals, extends as far as the deposit of Revelation extends” and no farther.

Thus, the Holy Father and the Bishops in union with him cannot accept “a new public revelation … as pertaining to the divine deposit of faith.” True development of doctrine, therefore, always operates within the analogy of faith; it operates, as Cardinal Ratzinger has noted, in a diachronic and not simply a synchronic sense.

Furthermore, the Church must continually distinguish between what is necessary for salvation — the “wheat” that truly constitutes the deposit of the faith, and the “chaff” of the age that must be cleared away. [The magisterial 'teaching' of this pontificate so far appears to be concerned only with the chaff. (NB: With the exception of Lumen fidei, which was not Bergoglio's but Benedict's.)]

Distinctions are necessary. And for this reason any sort of “creeping infallibility” that would attach the same level of authority to every papal utterance or document must be avoided.

To fail to draw appropriate distinctions — whether between binding and non-binding documents of the ordinary magisterium, or between the development and the evolution of doctrine — is to dim the light of the Petrine ministry and impoverish the faithful.

Jessica M. Murdoch is associate professor of fundamental and dogmatic theology at Villanova University.



To better provide a context for the following item, let me cite from Fr. Z's account of his homily on the Gospel for the 19th Sunday of Pentecost, Sept. 25, in Traditional Mass:

---

...On this 19th Sunday after Pentecost - taking my cue from the Epistle and from the Lord’s parable about the king’s wedding banquet - I spoke about the gift garment. Paul tells us to put on the “new man”. Our Lord describes how the king who gives the banquet has the man without the wedding garment bound hand and foot and then has him thrown outside to weep and grind his teeth in the darkness of night.

A bit of an over-reaction on the king’s part, no? Why the stern punishment?

As per ancient Eastern custom, kings clothed guests in beautiful gift garments as they entered in order to honor them and to make the occasion more beautiful and decorous.

The man without the garment had no excuse: he was given a garment and he refused to put on the king’s gift, thus insulting the king, the other guests, and the occasion itself. That’s what we do when we sin and are “bad Catholics”, we dishonor God and other members of the Church.

We are in the banquet on the KING’s terms, not on our terms. We are in the Church on the Church’s terms, not on our terms...

---

This pope is opening the Lord's banquet
even to those who refuse to put on
the wedding garment that He provides
Translated from

Sept. 27, 2016

I receive and I publish. The author of the first letter is a woman consecrated to a heremitic life. The author of the second is a famous criminal lawyer in Naples.

Both comment on communion for remarried divorcees. The lawyer reacts particularly to the interpretation of AL recently made by the pope's Vicar for Rome, Cardinal Agostino Vallini, who delivered a 17-page interpretation for the clergy of Rome.

Both letter writers are among those 'faithful sheep' referred to by Cardinal Camillo Ruini in an interview published Sept. 22 in Corriere della Sera, when he said [B]he prays to the Lord "that the indispensable search for lost sheep will not place the consciences of the faithful sheep in difficulty".

---

Dear Mr.Magister,
I am consecrated to a heremitic life and I have been following attentively - and without prejudice, as far as is humanly possible - the debate on communion for remarried divorcees, to understand whether an eventual decision of the pope on this issue truly comes within his prerogatives - the power of the keys - or whether, in fact, he wants to duplicate these keys, so to speak, to use against the Master of the house, in order to be able to introduce by deceit those who do not wear the nuptial garment (Mt 22, 1-14), ]b]thus betraying the trust given to the Successor of Peter.

I wish to apply a very simple argument regarding form which is essential for the content in order to get to the heart of the problem.

If the Church gives the possibility of communion to those who, without annulling their Church marriage, had remarried in a civil ceremony or cohabitate with another woman while still being sacramentally bound to the first wife ('one flesh', says the Master of the house), then it means that the Church says it is possible to receive the sacrament of God's infinite holiness and make him dwell together in the same house - the body and soul of the recipient - as sin, because adultery remains a sin, unless doctrine is changed.

Do you think that is possible? I would say No, if we know, even remotely, what sin is. God himself reminded us of this with the immaculate conception of Mary whom he saved from original sin precisely because she would be receiving the Lord himself into her womb. Why? Because God cannot co-exist with sin.

I think that, by carping on the juridical and sentimental aspects, that is, the strictly human aspects, of the question, we are losing sight of the supernatural dimension of our life - the face of the holy and eternal God, the mysterious power of his commandments, that is, his will which we don't have to understand but to accept because it comes from him.

To receive the Eucharist in a state of mortal sin means not just transgressing a commandment of God but - and here is the blasphemy - to 'force' the Lord to cohabit with evil. That is committing an abomination, to use a word which sounds terrible to modern ears, but this is the missing link in the infinite discussion on this topic: the holiness of God.

Why would one wish persons who are in this 'irregular' situation to fall into a greater sin? Does the Church really wish to tell her children that God and the ultimate Divider (evil) can be together?

This is the heart of the problem: that sin is being dismissed by not recognizing it as such, because it is an annoyance and constitutes a stumbling block to our plans. But this dismissal, displacing sin from where it ought to be, ends up situating it, paradoxically, in the same 'place' as God.

Do we realize what such a dismissal and displacement mean?

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"The attempt is horribly devoid of sense but nonetheless fundamentally exciting to take God off a pedestal, to downgrade God, to destroy God even... Man should recognize the depth of sin... and must lay down his pride in shaping his own destiny, his obstinacy to do things as he wants and life his own life, and learn humility which always seeks grace" (Romano Guardini, Il Signore, p. 175)

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Many will object - that this is Old Testament mentality, before Jesus 'brought mercy'. But they are wrong, and by far.

The "It is said..." and "But I tell you..." statements of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5-7) introduce us to the new life in which the old laws and moralisms give way to faith and grace, but they ask and demand much more than did the laws of the Old Testament, because Jesus was not interested in making us comfortable in this life, but in our eternal salvation.] [A basic and obvious fact that one Jorge Mario Bergoglio chooses to ignore consistently.]

Redemption has the absolute necessity of making sin disappear completely, so that we may never to sin again. In the 'fullness of time', we are asked what was not asked of man in the Old Testament: the totality of obedience because now, with redemption, we are made able to put it into practice.

In saying “You have heard that it was said: Do not commit adultery... But I tell you that whoever looks at a woman with desire has already committed adultery", Guardini points out that Jesus was saying the meaning of the commandment goes deeper, it goes even to the intention, because action arises from intention. (Guardini, p. 116)

In Jesus's lengthy discourse, we do not find any cheap mercy as we understand it today, but a very fine sense of sin, not a gross concept, in a crescendo of tone and tension such that at the end, the evangelist notes that "the people were astonished at his teaching" (Mt 7,28).

Jesus was not interested in a doctrine about moral customs but in a full and totally redeemed existence for man. Then let us try to understand that it is not about conceding a right to anyone (legalist thinking) but to acknowledge the holiness of God. But now we have become accustomed to touching the Untouchable [receiving the host in one's hand) and to 'force' the cohabitation of evil with the Lord.

Not to receive communion, in the cases we are speaking of, does not preclude eternal salvation, it does not forever deprive the sinner of the wedding garment he ought to wear for the Lord's banquet, but receiving it unworthily takes away everything (1Cor 11). We cannot wish to push down our brothers into a state infinitely worse than that in which they already are. This is to play the game of the Enemy.

If the Church wishes to grant this possibility it means that she already considers these sinners dead and is leaving it to God to take his own measures.

But who are we to judge these brothers in advance and seeming to dictate to God? Our ways are not his (cfr Is 55,8).

A heartfelt greeting and thanks for your work,

Giovanna Riccobaldi

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Dear Magister,
Cardinal Vallini's commentary on Amoris laetitia has all the elements of a heroic clinging at straws, of twisting around a sticky pole to try and climb it.

Yet it lacks that which, rather incredibly, is lacking almost everywhere else - from the exhortation itself and all the comments about it, favorable or critical.

It is devoid of grace. The grace which made St. Paul say - and this is the Word of God - "Omnia possum in eo qui me confortat" (I am able to do everything through him who empowers me)(Phil 4,13).

The grace that prevents a Catholic from saying that it is impossible to practice sexual continence. Of course, it is difficult, very difficult - to avoid the occasion of sin by not sharing the same bed or the same room - but never impossible.

Moreover, even on the level of elementary logic, if God commanded us to do the impossible, then worse than being a tyrant, he would be a sadist. Yet it is an immutable doctrine of the Church, reaffirmed and clarified at the Council of Trent, that with the aid of God's grace, everyone can practice virtue according to his own state of life.

To me, this seems to be the real problem with Amoris laetitia: its horizontal viewpoint that takes into account only man's depraved human nature and the habits he develops because of that, completely excluding the horizon of the supernatural. Completely.

Psychologisms, sociologisms, borrowed philosophisms - there is room for all sorts of nonsense but nothing on grace. Grace which alone allows us - because whatever is possible is not impossible, and if it is not impossible, it is mandatory - to respect the Ten Commandments and the duties that pertain to our own status, including celibacy or sexual continence, whether priestly, matrimonial or extra-matrimonial.

With regard to the latter, what do we do - and I include Cardinal Vallini - with the fact that, admitting but never conceding that the nullity of a Church marriage can be deliberated on in the internal forum [between confessor and confessee], the couple still are unmarried as far as the Church is concerned, and are therefore not even able to have conjugal relations licitly, in the eyes of the Church?

Thank you for all that you are doing, and a fond greeting in Jesu et Maria.

Giovanni Formicola

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Sept. 30, 2016 headlines

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Canon212.com


For those who follow Vatican news, the pope set out today on a 3-day visit to Georgia and Azerbaijan, former Soviet Republics.
It is his 16th foreign trip as Pope -1 in 2013, to Brazil, 5 each in 2014 and 2015, and 5 so far in 2016 - but he will be making
that trip to Lund, Sweden on Oct. 30 to concelebrate Martin Luther's schism - Luther must have turned somersaults of triumph in
his grave when this trip was first announced. JMB has now outpaced John Paul II in his travels, having gone abroad 16 times
now in the first 3 years and six months of his papacy. JPII made his 16th trip abroad four years after he became pope (it was
necessarily cut down in 1981, when he made just one trip - but to 5 countries) before the assassination attempt on him. However,
he usually travelled to many countries during each trip, and by his 16th trip abroad, he had visited 33 countries, compared to Bergoglio's 25 countries in 16 trips.