BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI



Caught unaware again by the page change, so I have re-posted here the last post on the preceding page...




Once in a while - even during this ascendancy of the church of Bergoglio - one gets a happy orthodox surprise from a prelate of the one true
Church of Christ whose surname is not Sarah, Burke or Schneider. Many thanks to Carl Olson for sharing with us his diocesan bishop's very healthy
views on AL. What a refreshing gust of fresh air in the schizophrenic but more-often-liberal Catholic hierarchy in the USA!

Abp. Alexander Sample of Portland discusses
his pastoral letter on 'Amoris Laetitia'
"As difficult as it can be, and as much of a cross it might be for us,
God’s grace enables us to overcome our struggles, even with sin."

Interview
by Carl Olson, Editor

October 17, 2016

During the first week of October, His Excellency Archbishop Alexander K. Sample of Portland, Oregon, issued "A True and Living Icon", a 13-page "Pastoral Letter on the Reading of Amoris Laetitia in Light of Church Teaching". While addressed to the "Priests, Deacons, Religious and Faith" of the Archdiocese of Portland, the letter has garnered significant attention beyond western Oregon.

Archbishop Sample graciously responded, via e-mail, to several questions about his letter. Below is the full interview.

What was the main reasons for this pastoral letter at this time? Were there specific questions being raised within the Archdiocese, or did you anticipate certain questions and situations based on events outside of the Archdiocese?
When Amoris Laetitia was first released, I indicated that we all needed time to read and reflect on our Holy Father’s message before making practical application here in the Archdiocese of Portland. I myself needed time to digest the content before responding.

I was also surprised by how the Exhortation of Pope Francis was being misused in some circles in ways that were not consistent with the perennial teaching of the Church. I said at the time of its release that I would follow up at some point with further guidance. We had our annual convocation of priests, and I believed it to be the right time to share my guidance with them before releasing it to the wider Archdiocese.

Your letter opens with a strong emphasis on the Trinitarian and Christocentric foundations of the Church's teaching about marriage and family. Do you think those foundational truths need to be better emphasized and understood? Put another way, how much of the confusion and controversy surrounding the Church's teaching on marriage is rooted in lacking understanding of what She teaches about God as Trinity and Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior?
This is precisely the point. I am afraid that we continue to reap the bad fruit of decades now of poor catechesis on the very nature of marriage and family life. How else can we explain the acceptance of a redefinition of marriage on the part of so many Catholics? A proper and sound theological basis for our understanding of marriage must precede any pastoral efforts to strengthen and help marriages.

Marriage comes from the hand of the Creator, and we must understand it in the light of this revelation and even the natural law dimension of the marital covenant. Marriage and family reflect the inner life of the Holy Trinity as a communion of persons. It also reflects the permanent and indissoluble covenant Christ has entered into with us through the blood of his crosS.

"Social contexts do not cause human nature or the human good;" you write, "indeed, only an invariant human good allows us to understand the idea of moral development within human history." Is this, in many ways, the central issue at hand today when it comes to gender ideology, homosexuality, and sexuality in general? How can Catholics better present and explain the Church's rich teaching about anthropology and the meaning of human existence?
This is a serious challenge that the Church must take up with confidence and a renewed vigor. It is very difficult to have a discussion within the Church and with the wider community of society if we cannot even agree on the essential nature of the human person as he or she comes from the hand of the Creator.

We are created in the image and likeness of God and exist according to his plan. We cannot define who we are. God has already done that. It is up to us to humbly accept the nature that he has given to us while helping those who are confused to discover this truth which ultimately brings true happiness and freedom. This education, for our own Catholic people, has to start in the family itself and from the very earliest levels of education in our Catholic schools and faith formation programs.

Your focus is on "troublesome misuses" of AL, and you look in detail at three such misuses. What are the sources of these misuses and why are they apparently so prevalent today?
In many ways my pastoral letter is a re-presentation of some aspects of our Catholic moral tradition, rooted in Sacred Scripture and developed throughout the centuries by the Magisterium guided by the Holy Spirit.

Again, we are reaping the ill fruits of decades of confusion on the morality of human actions. Some have sought to capitalize on this confusion by continuing to offer moral analysis that is not consistent with this sacred Tradition. Pope St. John Paul II sought to clarify these erroneous understandings in his monumental papal encyclical Veritatis Splendor. That is why I rely heavily on his teaching in my own pastoral letter. [Not surprisingly, AL contains not one single reference to Veritatis splendor (Splendor of the Truth), considered to be one of the most comprehensive and philosophical teachings of moral theology in the Catholic tradition. Obviously, many assertions in AL cannot stand the light of truth.]

The first misuse you address has to do with conscience. What is, in your experience as priest and bishop, are the central misunderstandings or distortions about conscience?
As I state in my pastoral letter, it boils down to an erroneous understanding of conscience as a law unto itself. We must indeed obey our conscience, but we must be operating with a well formed conscience. We form our conscience according to the mind of Christ and the teaching of the Church as revealed in the Sacred Scriptures and in the magisterial teaching of Tradition.

The teachings of Christ and his Church are not to be taken as simply suggestions that we are free to accept, accept in part, or reject altogether. We have the duty to inform our conscience in consonance with the truth revealed to us by God.

Conscience can be in error, and it is the duty of the pastors of the Church to vigorously teach the truths revealed to us in order to help our people properly form their consciences. This will enable us to make moral choices that are pleasing to God.

The second misuse addressed is the notion that "Under Certain Conditions Divine Prohibitions Admit of Exceptions", and you make a clear distinction, drawing on St. John Paul II, between the positive commandments and the negative commandments. Why is that distinction so significant?
Because by following the divine commandments we achieve our true happiness both in this present life, but more importantly in eternity. God commands us to do good and avoid evil, simply put. God gives us the positive commandment to do good, for example by living the Beatitudes and the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.

But an individual’s obligation in this regard can vary from one to another, depending on one’s own state in life and personal circumstances. In other words, there is room for individual responses to these positive commands. But negative commandments, the “Thou shall not” commandments admit of no exceptions in the objective.

Generally speaking, no one is forced to act in an evil manner against the commandments of God. One’s personal culpability for sinful actions can be diminished, or even eliminated, if acting out of inculpable ignorance or without full freedom, but the divine negative command still applies in all circumstances. This is an important point that we must be clear about.

We must help and accompany those who do not fully live up to this moral obligation. This can happen gradually in a person’s life, but that does not mean that the divine command gradually applies. It always applies.

The third misuse is the incorrect belief that "Human Frailty Exempts from Divine Command", and it touches on something that seems to be, so to speak, "in the water": the assumption that God's grace really might not be sufficient for everyone or for every situation. How are the current confusions informed by this failure of faith?
We must be reminded of St. Paul’s own struggle with the “thorn in the flesh”, whatever that might have been. He struggled and begged God to remove this from his life. The Lord responded with an assurance that his grace would be enough for St. Paul. We do not know if St. Paul was specifically struggling with sin or sinful temptations, but nevertheless, do we believe that God’s grace is sufficient in our own struggles with sin? Speaking for myself, I believe and know that to be true.

God does not ask of us the impossible. As difficult as it can be, and as much of a cross it might be for us at a time in our life, God’s grace enables us to overcome our struggles, even with sin. If we don’t believe this, then we are doomed to despair and are lost in the darkness. That is the heart of God’s mercy shown to us in the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Savior.

We must believe and trust in the grace of his mercy and love. We must help those who struggle to believe that their lives can indeed be transformed by the cross of Christ and the power of God’s grace.

What sort of responses have you received so far to the letter?
For the most part the response has been very positive. I have received many supportive messages from laity, priests and even some of my brother bishops.

Of course there will always be detractors, but that must never stop us from proclaiming the fullness of God’s mercy rooted in the truth he has revealed to us.

Pope Francis and the new cardinals
It’s been decades since the world’s Catholic episcopate has
been so polarized, a byproduct of the Francis pontificate
by Filip Mazurczak

October 17, 2016

Based on his numerous personnel appointments, it is clear what type of Church leadership Pope Francis prefers. American Catholics have learned this through the election of Blaise Cupich as Archbishop of Chicago and his imminent elevation to the College of Cardinals (meanwhile, orthodox prelates such as Chaput in Philadelphia and Gomez in Los Angeles have been snubbed).

However, the recent election of the new leadership of the European bishops shows that there is significant resistance to this preferred model. The unambiguous, expressive leadership of Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco and Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki will also be a much-needed boost to the Church in Europe.

It’s been decades since the world’s Catholic episcopate has been so polarized. To remember even remotely similar disunity among the world’s bishops, one would have to think back to the early post-Vatican II years, when, on the one hand, the bishops of Canada and the Netherlands openly dissented from Church teaching as expressed in Humanae Vitae, and, on the other, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre of France criticized some of the conciliar reforms and ultimately caused a schism. [Yet as a Council Father, he signed on to all the Vatican II documents, except, he claims, the one on religious freedom, though officially, he is shown to have signed it.]

Today, that polarization is back. This is a byproduct of the Francis pontificate. From his numerous confusing off-the-cuff remarks that straddle the line of orthodoxy to his perception of a false contrast between doctrine and ministry as well as his ambiguity on doctrinal matters (as best expressed by footnote 351 of Amoris Laetitia, possibly the most heatedly debated annotation in Church history), Pope Francis has opened something of a Pandora’s box.

Most of the world’s bishops are in one of two categories: either they emphasize tradition and fidelity to the magisterium of previous popes, or they have adopted an attitude of avoiding controversial topics and emphasizing good rapport with the lay faithful, even when it is in conflict with doctrine. [What about those who are out-and-out Bergoglian mini-me's? They are not an insignificant number!]

The European bishops have also been divided between the two camps. Earlier this month, however, the defenders of tradition achieved a 2:1 victory over the Kasperites when voting on the new president and vice presidents of the Council of European Episcopal Conference, an organization is composed of the heads of the episcopal conferences of 33 European countries and six other European bishops, for 2016-2021.

The European bishops chose Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco of Genoa, Italy, as head of the Italian bishops’ conference, as their president for the next five years, and Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster, head of the English and Welsh bishops’ conference, as well as Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki of Poznan, head of the Polish bishops’ conference, as vice presidents.

Cardinal Bagnasco is definitely a Benedict XVI generation bishop. Strongly pro-life, he has called for the criminalization of abortifacient pills. Since becoming archbishop of Genoa in 2006, he has been a strong defender of the family and natural law. Cardinal Bagnasco has also defended the Tridentine Mass and Benedict XVI’s famous Regensburg lecture, which the mainstream media railed against in 2006, but today, after a seemingly endless wave of Islamic terrorist attacks across Europe in the past couple years, can only be seen as prophetic.

Earlier this year, as Italy legalized same-sex civil unions, Cardinal Bagnasco rallied hundreds of thousands of Italian Catholics to protest this violation of the natural law. While AL has done anything but settled the issue of communion for divorced and remarried Catholics, Cardinal Bagnasco is a strong defender of tradition on this matter. The archbishop of Genoa served as vice president of the European bishops’ conferences during the presidency of Péter Erdő, the orthodox and dynamic archbishop of Budapest-Esztergom and accomplished canon lawyer (who has written more than twenty books on the matter), so Bagnasco’s election indicates a desire for continuity.

Likewise, Archbishop Gądecki is known for his orthodoxy. During the synod on the family, the two geographical blocs that were most uniform in their defense of Church teaching were the Africans and the Eastern Europeans. The latter’s informal leaders were Cardinal Erdő, relator of the synod, and the Polish bishops, headed by Gądecki. Understandably, the Poles were keen on respecting the intellectual legacy of their countryman St. John Paul II.

Shortly after it became clear that AL is an ambiguous document, Archbishop Gądecki was quick to clarify any confusion on communion for the divorced and remarried. While it is true that secularism has swept into Poland (Mass attendance there has declined from 46.6% twenty years ago to 39.1% today), the country still boasts of an intact Catholic culture, as evidenced by the explosion of faith and massive turnout at this year’s World Youth Day in Krakow. A leader from a relatively healthy Catholic nation will undoubtedly be a boost to the European bishops.

Unlike Bagnasco and Gądecki, however, Cardinal Nichols is one of the least orthodox members of the College of Cardinals. Today, the Catholic Church in Britain is enjoying a revival, with priestly and religious vocations on the rise. However, this is happening in spite of, rather than thanks to, Cardinal Nichols’ leadership.

If Pope Francis’s infamous “Who am I to judge?” comment is at least doctrinally correct [What is doctrinally correct about it? Priests as confessors, and the pope as spiritual leader of the Church, have the duty to judge the sins and misdeeds committed by the faithful!], Nichols’s explicit support for same-sex civil unions and “LGBT Masses” is not. Neither is his support for the “decentralization” of the issue of communion for divorcees living in new sexual relationships.

The good news is that two of the three bishops elected to leadership positions in the Council of European Episcopal Conference are defenders of tradition. This is significant for two reasons. First, a large number of the 39 European bishops who voted for new leaders several days ago are cardinals. Since many of them voted for Bagnasco and Gądecki, this is an indication that, if a conclave were held in the near future, there would be significant resistance in the Sacred College to elect any candidates for “Francis II.”

[Not that significant, because if the next body of cardinal electors is kept to 120, as Paul VI decreed, then 77 would be needed to elect a pope, and 39 is 5 less than the required number to keep anyone from reaching 77 votes. And how many of those 39 would have passed away or turned 80 by the time of the next Conclave? And already, there are 54 Bergoglio-made cardinals! No, JMB is playing for the numbers - he needs only 23 more cardinals of his making (two more consistories) - to give him what he needs for the next Conclave to elect his most egregious mini-me, the Archbishop of Manila, as the next pope and the first-ever Asian pope. GOD FORBID!]

Second, Europe and the West face a crisis of faith. The work of Rodney Stark and other sociologists of religion clearly shows that when the salt loses its taste, it simply becomes unattractive, and the best way to revive religion is to stick to tradition. The examples of the Nashville Dominicans or the leadership of recent bishops in Lincoln and Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard in Brussels show that much.

The last three years of episcopal appointments around the world have often disappointed, and sometimes shocked, many orthodox Catholics. If Francis is genuinely as big a supporter of the decentralization of the Church as he often claims, perhaps he should interpret the results of the election of the new leaders of Europe’s bishops conferences as an indication that he could listen to his bishops as to what kind of episcopal appointments they prefer. [Has anything in this pontificate shown that could be possible at all? No, whatever Bergoglio wants, Bergoglio gets as long as he is the duly-elected pope of the Catholic Church, never mind if his church of Bergoglio is in de facto schism with the one true Church of Christ!]

I was peacefully trolling through some sites before calling it a night when I came across this item for Ripley's 'Believe it or not!' Who would have thought this at all?
Is it really wise PR strategy to come out with this piece of utter paranoia about the pitifully few persons they cite (whom nonetheless they describe as a galaxy)
compared to the mega-popularity worldwide of their lord and master, whom they tout as the most popular man who ever walked the earth?

Now JMB is doing a Nixon - with his main propagandists on the staff of LA STAMPA (and therefore principals of VATICAN INSIDER, a 'service' of La Stampa) -
Andrea Tornielli and Giacomo Galeazzi (whom I did not suspect to have gone overboard completely for Bergoglio), compiling an 'enemies list' with the astounding
claim that almost all the disparate elements they list are not just admirers of Vladimir Putin but in fact financed somehow by the Russians!


The main title:
THOSE CATHOLICS AGAINST FRANCIS WHO ADORE PUTIN!
The subhead:
A trip through the galaxy of Bergoglio opponents. A front on the Web that unites followers of Lega Nord (northern Italian
nationalist party), those who are nostalgic for Ratzinger, and enemies of the Council (V-II): "Church in confusion because of
the pope". The Russian leader as a point of reference. Theories on the supposed invalidity of the 2013 Conclave, and polemics
over don George's statements about the 'enlarged ministry' of two popes".
by GIACOMO GALEAZZI and ANDREA TORNIELLI
Translated from

October 16, 2016

[For now, I shall simply translate the introductory paragraphs and the concluding ones:]

Uniting them all is aversion to Francis. The galaxy of dissent against Bergoglio covers the Lefebvrians who have decided to "await a traditional pope" before returning to communion with Rome [But didn't Mons. Fellay meet with Bergoglio and Mueller just a few days ago, as a sign that things are proceeding apace for the FSSPX to come in from the cold?], to the Catholics of the Lega Nord who contrast Francis with his predecessor Ratzinger and have launched a campaign entitled «Il mio papa è Benedetto» (My pope is Benedict).

There are the ultr-conservatives of the Fondazione Leanto and websites close to sedevacantist positions, who are convinced that writer Antonio Socci is right to maintain the invalidity of Bergoglio's election simply because in March 2013, one balloting was nullified without having been counted. The reason? One balloted to avoid any doubts and without any objection at all from the cardinal electors.

And still, prelates and traditionaist intellectuals are signing appeals or portests against the pastoral openings of the Argentine pope towards communion for remarried divorcees and dialog with the Chinese government.

The dissent against the pope unites persons and groups who are very diverse and hardly assimilable:
- There is the 'soft' distancing taken by the online journal La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana and its monthly Il Timone, both edited by Riccardo Cascioli.
- There is the almost daily scolding online of the Argentine pope by Sandro Magister, emeritus Vaticanista of L'Espresso. [Emeritus? I was not aware Magister has been fired or has retired!]
- There are the apocalyptic irredeemable tones of Maria Guarini, who hosts the blogsite "Chiesa e Post-concilio.
- And finally, the harshest criticisms coming from ultra-traditionalist and sedevacantist sites who believe there has been no valid pope since Pius XII.

La Stampa visited the offices and met with the protagonists of this opposition to Francis, which is numerically limited but very much present on the Web, in order to describe an archipelago that traverses the Internet, but even through private meetings with ecclesiastics, mix up their frontal and public attacks on the pope with more articulated strategies.

On the front lines against the pope, the writer Alessandro Gnocci, who writes on the sites Riscossa Cristiana and Unavox: "Bergoglio is carrying out a programmatic surrender to the world, the mundanization of the Church. His papacy is based on the brutal exercise of power. Such a capillary [detailed] debasement of the faith has never been seen before". [AMEN A THOUSAND TIMES!]

....

This composite galaxy of dissent has elected some cardinals and bishops as their reference points.Magister on his blog has launched the papal candidacy of the Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah, who is currently Francis's minister for liturgy, who is loved by conservatives and traditionalists and very muc cited on their websites and publications.

Among those considered the polestars in this world are above all, the American Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, patron of the Sovereign Order of Malta, and the auxiliary Bishop of Astana in Kazakhstan, Mons. Athanasius Schneider.

But beyond the mediatic amplification offered by the worldwide web, it does not seem that any new schisms are on the horizon, such as that carried out by Mons. Marcel Lefebvre in 1988.

Of this, the sociologist Massimo Introvigne is sure: "There are more than 5000 bishops in the world. The dissent has mobilized maybe about a dozen, many of them retired, which just goes to show how thin it is". [Hey, Mr. Introvigne, let the church of Bergoglio do as it pleases - it is already in de facto schism - but the Catholics who uphold the deposit of faith as it was before March 13, 2013, will never ever leave the one true Church of Christ. In that sense, the schism will never come from us.]

Introvigne maintains that this dissent "is present more online than in real life, and is over-estimated. In fact, there are dissidents who write comments on the social networks using four or five pseudonyms to give the impression that there are more of them". [Excuse me??? You cannot be serious - and you can't make the dissent go away by trying to shrug it off!] He thinks this is a movement that "has no success because it is not united. There are at least three different dissents: the political one from American foundations [??? Which ones???], of Marine Le Pen (in France) and Matteo Salvini (Italy) who are not very interested in liturgical or moral issues - they often do not even go to church - but rather focus on immigration and the pope's attacks on capitalism. There is the more radical dissent by the FSSPX, or that by De Mattei and Gnocchi, who reject Vatican II and everything else after. [That is obviously a falsehood. The FSSPX continue to consider the pope has head of the Church - they are hardly sedevacantists - and De Mattei and Gnocchi did not turn critical about the Church until after March 13, 2013, specifically because of Bergoglio's statements and actions that are exaggerations of the worst criticisms against Vatican II.][/DIM] And even if there may be some ranking prelates who lend support to this dissent, the contradictions among the three are destined to explode, and a common front has no possibility of lasting". [Hey, opponents of Bergoglio don't need any formal coalition at all - their common indestructible front is opposition to the anti-Catholic actions and positions of this pope, and that opposition will last for as long as Bergoglio is who he is!]

Introvigne points to a surprising characteristic common to many of these opponents of Bergoglio: "It's the mythical idealization of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is presented as the 'good' leader to contrast with Pope Francis who is the 'bad leader' because of his positions on homosexuality, Muslims and immigrants. Russian foundations very closely tied to Putin are collaborating with the dissenters of the pope".[Introvigne must be hallucinating. I do not ever recall any of the 'villains' mentioned in this piece as having even mentioned Putin at all, much less cite him as a 'good leader'. And of course, that last line appears to imply that Putin's supporters are somehow funding the dissenters against this pope. Can Introvigne offer one factual proof at all of his pathetically implausible scenario?]

BTW, the 'enemies' on the Stampa list appear limited to Italian sites and personalities (even if they somehow include the worldwide network of the FSSPX). Maybe the Fishwrap will supplement Stampa with their list of Anglophone sites and personalities.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 18/10/2016 06:28]

Francis and 'Saint' Martin Luther:
Perfect together
by Christopher A. Ferrara


Font of Error Update #3
Our series on the font of error that is Pope Francis continues with his performance before an audience of Lutheran “pilgrims” from Germany at the Vatican on October 13. That date was the 99th anniversary of the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima; but Francis, who is supposedly devoted to the Blessed Virgin and had his pontificate consecrated to Our Lady of Fatima (which accounts for my early optimism concerning his disastrous pontificate), completely ignored the occasion. Instead, he devoted the day to celebrating the memory of Martin Luther in the Paul VI Audience Hall.


A statue of the arch-heretic shared the stage with Francis during the event, at which two male Lutheran ministers, one sporting an earring, placed into his hands a mammoth ceremonial copy of Luther's 95 Theses, commonly viewed as the landmark for the beginning of the so-called Reformation.

One of the ministers quoted Luther to the effect that he wished his work to be delivered to others who had never read it. Never in his wildest dreams did Luther ever foresee that one of the recipients would be an approving Pope.

Francis spent most of the audience wearing two scarfs, one yellow the other blue, knotted together to symbolize the “unity” between Lutherans and orthodox Catholics that exists only in his imagination. Or perhaps Francis had in view the unity that does indeed exist between Lutherans and the liberalized Catholic majority, who have effectively become Protestants thanks in large measure to the ruinous novelty of “ecumenism.” Today we witness what Pius XI feared when he condemned and forbade Catholic participation in the “ecumenical movement” that had originated in the Protestant sects:

---

Is it not right, it is often repeated, indeed, even consonant with duty, that all who invoke the name of Christ should abstain from mutual reproaches and at long last be united in mutual charity? Who would dare to say that he loved Christ, unless he worked with all his might to carry out the desires of Him, Who asked His Father that His disciples might be “one”.…

This undertaking is so actively promoted as in many places to win for itself the adhesion of a number of citizens, and it even takes possession of the minds of very many Catholics and allures them with the hope of bringing about such a union as would be agreeable to the desires of Holy Mother Church, who has indeed nothing more at heart than to recall her erring sons and to lead them back to her bosom. But in reality beneath these enticing words and blandishments lies hid a most grave error, by which the foundations of the Catholic faith are completely destroyed.

---

Now a hyper-ecumenical Pope is personally engaged in destroying the foundations of the Catholic faith precisely in the name of ecumenism, carpet bombing the Church with cocky latitudinarian utterances, usually delivered with a sneer and a tone of indignant irritation at the orthodox Catholics who would differ with the crowd-pleasing bromides he appears to regard as authentic Catholic spirituality.

Indulging in his customary heretical blather in response to questions put to him by members of his Lutheran audience (the following are my translations, taken directly from the video), Francis declared that Catholics and Lutherans belong to the “one body of Christ.” Yet again Francis flatly contradicted the teaching of his predecessors regarding the members of the Mystical Body.

As Venerable Pius XII solemnly affirmed in conformity with all of Tradition:

---

Actually only those are to be included as members of the Church who have been baptized and profess the true faith, and who have not been so unfortunate as to separate themselves from the unity of the Body,

or been excluded by legitimate authority for grave faults committed. “For in one spirit” says the Apostle, “were we all baptized into one Body, whether Jews or Gentiles, whether bond or free.” As therefore in the true Christian community there is only one Body, one Spirit, one Lord, and one Baptism, so there can be only one faith.

---

As Pius XI, in the course of condemning the “ecumenical movement,” likewise insisted:

---

Since the mystical body of Christ, in the same manner as His physical body, is one, compacted and fitly joined together, it were foolish and out of place to say that the mystical body is made up of members which are disunited and scattered abroad: whosoever therefore is not united with the body is no member of it, neither is he in communion with Christ its head.

---

But the teaching of his predecessors is of no moment to Francis [That would be a relatively minor transgression compared to his now-habitual and utterly shameless misuse or truncation of Jesus's words to bolster his own idiosyncratic notions! Someone just cited online a Bergoglio quotation 'from Matthew' that doesn't even exist!], who revels in saying things that are “foolish and out place” while the world applauds his “humble revolution.”

Further on in his ramblings, Francis addressed a question concerning a region in Germany where some eighty percent of the population professes no religion [One account of this recent flagrant outrage says the person who asked the question was a child - "What must we do to convince others of our faith", or something to that effect]:

---

What must we say to convince them? Listen! The last thing we should do is say: You should live as a Christian — chosen, forgiven and growing in virtue. It is not right [lecito] to convince someone of your faith. Proselytism is the great poison against the path of ecumenism [applause].

You should give testimony of your Christian life — the testimony that is from the heart, the heart they can see. And from this inquietude is born the question: “Why does this man or this woman live this way?” And this will prepare the ground so that the Holy Spirit, who is the one who works in the heart, will do what He must do. But He must speak, not you!

---

It could not be clearer: Francis insists it is wrong to say anything to convince others of one’s faith. According to him, one must simply live as a Christian while God does all the talking through some sort of interior illumination in the people who will supposedly be led to conversion by the mere sight of Christian living.

Francis was not speaking of proselytism in the “negative sense” suggested by the neo-Catholic excuse factory, but rather the very act of persuading people of the truth of the Catholic religion. Nor need Jimmy Akin and the other neo-Catholic artisans of cover-up waste their time with the “bad translation” dodge. The Pope’s exact words in Italian are as follows: “Non é lecito [right or lawful] convincere della tua fede. Il proselitismo [his emphasis] é il velleno [poison, venom] piu forte contro il cammino ecumenico.”

Days before the preposterous Tornielli-Galeazzi-Introvigne hypothesis that admiration for Russia's Putin - and consequently, financial support from 'Russian foundations tied to Putin' - is the common thread found among the disparate groups of opponents to Bergoglio, there was this item from the Financial Post of Canada, from a very secular writer, who explains why Putin today is highly popular among his own people. One can see why the virtues attributed to him in this story could well be appreciated by opponents of Bergoglio, not that any of them, as far as I have read, has ever brought up Putin when criticizing Bergoglio (not necessary at all since sufficient unto JMB is his own wrongdoing). My objection to this article is that the writer only speaks of the good points he sees in Putin, and none of the countervailing criticism...

In Russia’s religious rebirth,
Putin is a new pope
by Lawrence Solomon

October 13, 2016

What explains Putin’s success? Two years ago, amid plummeting oil prices, a plummeting ruble, a contracting economy, the flight of investors and sanctions over Crimea, pundits were predicting Russia’s, and Putin’s, demise.

Yet Putin’s popularity at home has soared — hovering well above 80 per cent according to the Associated Press’s and other reputable polls — despite the hardships caused by rising food prices and falling employment.

Western naysayers who dismiss his popularity as rooted in false values — his control over the press, his bare-chested publicity stunts or chauvinism stirred by his military muscle — misunderstand the great respect and moral authority he commands within Russia and neighbouring countries.

Putin stands for everything craved by a country debased and diminished by 75 years of communism: A principled leader who protects his country from Western aggression, Western contempt and Western values.

While we in the West see ourselves as paragons of enlightenment, the envy of the people who don’t enjoy Western-style liberal democracy, only one in 20 Russians wants to become more like us. The overwhelming majority hews to Putin’s vision of Russian exceptionalism and puritanism.

Unlike almost every other country in the world, Russians have rising birth rates and growing families; unlike almost every other country in the West, Russians are undergoing a religious Renaissance.

Putin, who is baptized, is arguably a greater defender of traditional Christian values than the Pope, who has been tolerant of divorce, abortion, gay marriage and the transformation of what was once an unabashedly Holy Christian Europe into a part-atheistic, part-Muslim continent.

Putin, in contrast, has repudiated the once-official atheism of Communist Russia and embraced the traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church. In diametric opposition to the trend elsewhere in the West, he penalizes divorce, prohibits advertising abortion services, outlaws pornography and campaigns against “homosexual propaganda.”

Unlike the West, which has seen the abandonment of hundreds of thousands of churches or their conversion into restaurants, bars and entertainment venues, Putin has reversed Lenin’s legacy by restoring almost 25,000 churches that had been abandoned or destroyed under communism.

Putin contrasts a decadent West to a profoundly spiritual and moral Russia. In his State of the Union address three years ago, he expressed disdain for the West’s “so-called tolerance — genderless and infertile.”

Russia’s Christian roots also inform its foreign policy, with the Russian Orthodox Church — allied with Syrian churches — in 2011 asking Putin to protect the Middle East’s Christian minorities.

“So it will be,” Putin responded, in what would become a modern-day crusade of sorts. Syrian dictator Bashir Assad not only is a long-standing ally of Russia; he has long been the protector of Syria’s Christian community — 10 per cent of the country’s population — from the country’s Muslim extremists.

The alignment of Syria’s Christians with Russia’s Orthodox Church, combined with Russia’s military and geopolitical interests in Syria, made Putin’s decision to back Assad a no-brainer.

Much of Putin’s moral authority at home, in fact, comes from his judgment abroad. Putin had supported the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (after 9/11, he saw the U.S. as an ally against Muslim terrorism) but he turned against the U.S. when it invaded Iraq, a war he saw as unjustifiable and sure to inflame Sunni Islamic fundamentalism.

Among the Iraq war’s many tragic results has been the decimation of virtually the whole of Iraq’s once-vibrant, 1.5-million-strong Christian communities. Putin on similar grounds opposed the West’s overthrow of Libya’s Gaddafi and Egypt’s Mubarak — a protector of Egypt’s Christian Copts — and supports Egypt’s new president, Sisi, another protector of Egypt’s Christians.

Christianity and the Russian Orthodox Church, in fact, have loomed large in most of Putin’s foreign policy decisions. The West’s attempts to pull Ukraine away from Russia created deep resentment because of the cultural ties between the nations, not least those between their sister Orthodox Churches.

The Crimean Peninsula’s return to Russia was also deeply symbolic, as Putin explained in an address to Russia’s federal assembly:

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“It was in Crimea, in the ancient city of Chersonesus or Korsun, as ancient Russian chroniclers called it, that Grand Prince Vladimir was baptized before bringing Christianity to Rus….

Christianity was a powerful spiritual unifying force that helped involve various tribes and tribal unions of the vast Eastern Slavic world in the creation of a Russian nation and Russian state.

It was thanks to this spiritual unity that our forefathers for the first time and forevermore saw themselves as a united nation … Crimea, the ancient Korsun or Chersonesus, and Sevastopol have invaluable civilizational and even sacral importance for Russia, like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for the followers of Islam and Judaism.”

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Putin’s Russia is not the soulless Soviet Union, but a major Western country that takes its religion seriously, and itself seriously, and is united in its appreciation for a leader who embodies both.

Italian cardinal issues guidelines
upholding Catholic tradition on Communion
by Jan Bentz


ROME, Italy, October 17, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – The implementation of Amoris Laetitia has varied drastically according to interpretation of bishops, as evidenced by the reaction to the document throughout the world.

The discrepancy in implementation could point back to the broad spectrum in which AL can be understood and has led Catholics to previously ask for clarification.

A German bishop recently announced that he sees the core message of AL in the fact that “the Holy Father allows an opening towards the receiving of the sacraments, after an in-depth examine of conscience and spiritual direction.”

Guidelines from Cardinal Vicar Agostino Vallini of the Diocese of Rome, which only recently were published, permit sexually active, cohabitating couples to receive Communion in “limited” cases, as LifeSiteNews has reported.

Conversely, Cardinal Ennio Antonelli, the former Archbishop of Florence, has published his own vademecum for confessors that forbids them to make exceptions, as Vatican analyst Sandro Magister reports.

Pope Francis has himself stated recently that the model diocesan implementation of AL was done by the Argentine bishops of Buenos Aires. In a letter to the bishops there written last month, the Holy Father said there can be "no other interpretation" of AL than to admit divorced and remarried Catholics to Holy Communion in some cases.

But Antonelli, who is also the former head of the Pontifical Council for the Family, took initiative and told priests in his former diocese – in full agreement with Cardinal Guiseppe Betori, the current archbishop – that the guidelines to interpret AL must be in a hermeneutic of continuity with the Church’s Magisterium. That means in plain English that Communion for “remarried” divorced is possible but only if they live like brother and sister.

It is noteworthy that Cardinal Antonelli gave his text to the priests of the Trieste diocese in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region in northeast Italy on October 13.

Moreover, his vademecum has been made available in five languages by the Pontifical Council for the Family for implementation in other dioceses around the world. For English speakers, the text can be found here: http://www.familiam.org/pcpf/allegati/13757/Amoris_Laetitia_ING.pdf

Points 4 and 5 deal with the subjective personal responsibility of the Catholic individual in the case of “remarriage” and divorce.

With regard to chastity in any given difficult case, the vademecum states:

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“I said that the observance of the moral law could be deemed mistakenly impossible for a person, because in reality, with the help of God’s grace, it is always possible to observe the commandments, even to be chaste according to their standard of living. […] God does not command the impossible, but in commanding, urges you to do what you can, and in asking what you cannot do, He helps you so that you can do it (Council of Trent, DH 1536).” And further on:

“Keeping God’s law in particular situations can be difficult, extremely difficult, but it is never impossible. This is the constant teaching of the Church’s tradition. (St. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 102).”

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Point 5 explicates: “Since negative general rules always oblige, without exception, the Christian in an irregular situation is bound before God to do everything possible to get out of the objective disorder and harmonize his behavior with the norm. It may be that his conscience, mistaken in good faith, was not aware of it. However, the priest accompanying him must guide him, with love and prudence, through his discernment and in accomplishment God’s will for him, until he assumes a form of life consistent with the Gospel.”

With these phrases, the handout explains what a “pastoral path of discernment” must really aim to achieve.

The steps that must be taken along the path are enumerated:
1) Verification of the validity of the previous marriage and possible annulment;
2) celebration of a religious marriage or radical sanction of a civil marriage;
3) ending the cohabitation, if there are no impediments;
4) practicing sexual continence, if other solutions are not possible;
5) in the case of an temporarily invisible error and, hence, refusal of sexual consistence, assessment of the possible rectitude of conscience in the light of the personality and the global experience (prayer, love of neighbor, participation in the life of the Church, and respect of her doctrine, humility, and obedience before God);
6) finally, sacramental absolution and Holy Communion may be given.

Made available universally through the Pontifical Council, this handout will likely be used by others in dioceses and parishes worldwide to help clarify the Church’s teaching.


Apropos, I will post one of the articles I had tagged last week. Given that the synods nonetheless 'produced' in AL what Bergoglio would have wanted them to support unequivocally (so he could have been unequivocal about it), Fr. De Souza may be over-estimating the effect of the letter. For me, the fact that it was written at all was and is the big news, though it leaves me more perplexed that the writers of the letter and the apparent majority of the synodal fathers who agreed with their 'conservatism' then compromised inexplicably by not insisting on including the three sentences in Familiaris consortio84 that might have stopped Bergoglio, if he were not Bergoglio, in his malicious track! But given how determined he is about his goals - whatever Jorge wants, Jorge gets - he might still have written (or caused to be written) Chapter 8 of AL with all its semantic tricks and traps, and simply ignored the reiteration of his sainted predecessor's words!

How 13 cardinals changed the course of history
The letter that proved to be the turning point showed
the Holy Spirit was at work in a most unexpected way
by Fr Raymond de Souza

Oct 13, 2016

This time last year the second installment of the synod on the family was unfolding in Rome, the conclusion of which was as yet unknown. Now that we are in the implementation phase of Amoris Laetitia, we can look back on the entire process with greater clarity.

It is now clear that Pope Francis does not believe that the pastoral discipline regarding the inadmissibility of the divorced and civilly remarried to the sacraments is correct and wishes to overturn it. Yet while he has gone to great lengths to make his mind clear on the subject, he has gone to equally great lengths not to formally teach it.

There are two reasons for that. The first is that the tradition is clear, rooted in teaching of Jesus in the Gospel, and it is not possible for even the Pope to change it. Hence Pope Francis has had recourse to ambiguities, hints, private phone calls and leaked letters to let the Church know that he thinks what he cannot teach.

The second reason is that Pope Francis encountered surprising resistance to the AL agenda, first outlined by Cardinal Walter Kasper in February 2014.

The key moment in that resistance took place a year ago, on the opening day of the second family synod in 2015. It was then that Cardinal George Pell handed Pope Francis a private letter signed by 13 cardinal participants in the synod.

The letter objected to the Kasper proposal in substance, and to the attempts to engineer the synod to approve it. The next day, with the existence of the letter still unknown, the Holy Father addressed the synod to reaffirm the procedures in place and to warn participants against conspiracy theories.

The news of the letter, of which there were only two copies – one for the Holy Father and one for Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, secretary general of the synod of bishops – was then leaked to favoured papal reporter Andrea Tornielli.

One supposes that a papal insider – or implausibly, the Holy Father himself – thought leaking the news of the discreet resistance would work to the advantage of the synod managers, putting the traditional party on the back foot, apparently at odds with the Pope. That was a key miscalculation, and the crucial moment in frustrating the Kasper proposal.

The letter of the 13 cardinals, once revealed, illustrated that some of the most senior cardinals in the Church were prepared, for the sake of fidelity to the Gospel, to resist a popular pope. The dynamic of the synod changed then, with the resistance emboldened, not cowed, and in the event the synod fathers refused to endorse the Kasper proposal.

The signatories had all seen what had happened the previous year, when Pope Francis dismissed the leading opponent of the Kasper proposal, Cardinal Raymond Burke, from his post as the Church’s “chief justice” to a largely ceremonial role. Yet they signed. And their collective credibility determined the course of the synod.

The 13, in alphabetical order, included Carlo Caffarra, then archbishop of Bologna, formerly the first president of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family; Thomas Collins, archbishop of Toronto; Daniel DiNardo, archbishop of Galveston-Houston, vice-president of the US Bishops Conference; Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York; Willem Eijk, archbishop of Utrecht; Gerhard Müller, prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith; Wilfrid Fox Napier, archbishop of Durban; John Njue, archbishop of Nairobi; George Pell, prefect of the secretariat for the economy; Norberto Rivera Carrera, archbishop of Mexico City; Robert Sarah, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments; Elio Sgreccia, president emeritus of the Pontifical Academy for Life; and Jorge Urosa Savino, archbishop of Caracas.

The cabinet’s front bench had written to the King. And the sovereign had to take note. When Pope Francis continued his push for the Kasper proposal in AL, he had to do so within the limited room the synod had given to him. So the apostolic exhortation hid its intent in footnotes and ambiguities.

Even now, the guidelines produced by those bishops most keen on the Kasper vision advise that any such admission to Holy Communion be done in secret. Administering the sacraments in secret is a clear sign that something is awry; any pastoral practice so conceived will not endure.

The letter of the 13 cardinals proved to be the turning point. The Holy Spirit was at work indeed, in a most unexpected way. The announcement this week of a consistory of cardinals occasioned commentary upon the role of the cardinals as the special advisers of the pope. In October 2015 the cardinals – 13 of them – gave perhaps the most important advice of recent times. [Still, one that has been heeded in the breach rather than the observance.]

Two Newmans and two 'Catholic springs'
by FR. GEORGE W. RUTLER

October 17, 2016

On a Tuesday in 1852, the thirteenth of July for the literary record since it was a day important for English letters, Blessed John Henry Newman mounted the pulpit of Oscott College, its halls relatively new though designed by Joseph Potter and Augustus Pugin to recall the best of the Tudor times before the depredations of the eighth Henry.

Always attentive to signs of decay, at 51 he claimed to be entering old age but was ready for a second breath, both for himself and his Church. That sermon, “The Second Spring,” is as poetic as homiletic, and could take its place in the annals of free verse as one of its most lyrical samples.

The occasion was the gathering of the First Provincial Synod of Westminster, when the Catholic episcopate had been restored, and hope was mingled with a quality of caution, for the road ahead was not straight and smooth and there were no sureties of rest along the way. That is why Newman took the temperature of the times:

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Have we any right to take it strange, if, in this English land, the spring-time of the Church should turn out to be an English spring, an uncertain, anxious time of hope and fear, of joy and suffering,—of bright promise and budding hopes, yet withal, of keen blasts, and cold showers, and sudden storms?

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The same might be preached today, in this peculiar period when the Church seems as conflicted as our nation, for the issues at hand have never been greater and the commentaries on them both in Church and State are almost burlesque in their shallowness and venality.

Napoleon called China a sleeping giant and various sources have said the same of the Catholic Church. During the present election season, fevered as it is with unprecedented bitterness and banality, the Church could almost pass as a giant more comatose than slumbering.

If anything has stirred the Church, rusty when urban and flaccid when suburban, it has been the discovery of documents revealing cynical attempts by political strategist to subvert and suborn the institution, stripping her of supernatural credentials to become a tool of the State, like the Gallican Church of the French Revolution.

Leaked emails from February 10-11, 2012 record exchanges entitled “Opening for a Catholic Spring?” between the current manager of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, John Podesta, and Sandy Newman, president of a political action group called Voices for Progress.

Sandy Newman is certainly no heir to John Henry Newman nor are his visions of Spring like those of the Second Spring preached at Oscott. For Sandy Newman, “There needs to be a Catholic Spring in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic church.” The mandate for contraception coverage in medical plans might be a rallying point to “plant the seeds of the revolution.”

At the risk of fueling the imaginings of conspiracy theorists, it has been said that paranoia is just having the right information. But even a well-tempered analyst should be taken aback by Mr. Podesta’s reply: “We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this. But I think it lacks the leadership to do so now. Likewise Catholics United. Like most Spring movements, I think this one will have to be bottom up.”

Podesta, who professes to be a Catholic, is past president of the Center for American Progress, a think tank that promotes “LGBT equality and women’s reproductive health and rights.”

To usher in this kind of man-made Spring, John Podesta recommended enlisting the help of the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who addressed the dissident organization Call to Action in 2008, and who has served on the board of the National Catholic Reporter.

Sandy — not John Henry — Newman acknowledged that he has a “total lack of understanding of the Catholic Church” since he is Jewish, and thus he deferred to John Podesta for implementing this anthropogenic climate change. But he does have experience in using the Catholic Church as an agent for community organizing, and in 1993 he hired a young man named Barack Obama to register voters in Illinois.

Later, the same Obama sought to align Cardinal Bernardin with the United Neighborhood Organizations of Chicago, affiliated with Obama’s own group called the Developing Communities Project. In this he was assisted by Monsignor John J. Egan, another community organizer, who was a close associate of the primeval theorist of social restructuring, Saul Alinsky.

That man boasted of his strategy, which was to enlist the sympathies of well-intentioned, if naïve, Catholic clerics, in his essentially Marxist agenda. He said, “To [expletive] your enemies, you’ve first got to seduce your allies.” Eventually, even Cardinal Bernardin disassociated himself with the more extreme organizers including Obama.

Hillary Clinton clearly admired Alinsky, but her senior thesis at Wellesley College disagreed with his view that systemic change is “impossible from the inside” and requires radical revision from external engineering.

Well known is the dedication Alinsky wrote for his Rules for Radicals which was the chief object of Hillary Clinton’s college writing: “Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history … the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”

Speaking of Lucifer, the e-mails of Newman’s advice to Podesta are sulphuric like Screwtape’s animadversions in the Screwtape Letters of C.S. Lewis. They also remind one of the lines of the other Newman, the blessed one, in “The Patristical Idea of Christ”:

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Surely, there is at this day a confederacy of evil, marshaling its hosts from all parts of the world, organizing itself, taking its measures, enclosing the Church of Christ as in a net, and preparing the way for a general Apostasy from it.

Whether this very Apostasy is to give birth to Antichrist, or whether he is still to be delayed, as he has already been delayed so long, we cannot know; but at any rate this Apostasy, and all its tokens and instruments, are of the Evil One, and savor of death….

He promises you civil liberty; he promises you equality; he promises you trade and wealth; he promises you a remission of taxes; he promises you reform. This is the way in which he conceals from you the kind of work to which he is putting you; he tempts you to rail against your rulers and superiors; he does so himself, and induces you to imitate him; or he promises you illumination —he offers you knowledge, science, philosophy, enlargement of mind.

He scoffs at times gone by; he scoffs at every institution which reveres them. He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. He shows you how to become as gods. Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his.

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Addressing the 2015 Women in the World Summit, Hillary Clinton coldly declared that “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”

Not present at that summit was Saint Hildegarde of Bingen, who could have enlivened the proceedings by her description of the wiles and ways of Alinsky’s Lucifer:

Religion he will endeavor to make convenient. He will say that you need not fast and embitter your life by renunciation… It will suffice to love God… He will preach free love and tear asunder family ties... He will condemn humility and foster proud and gruesome dogmas. He will tear down that which God has taught in the Old and New Testaments and maintain that sin and vice are not sin and vice… [The saint, in the opening and closing lines of this description seems to be describing Jorge Bergoglio. Who does not, of course, preach 'free love' as such - but does not think remarried divorcees practising conjugal rights are adulterers and has not criticized the homosexual and transgender lifestyles at all. And he does pay abundant lip service to keeping family ties intact. He, of course, is not condemning humility but ostentatiously flaunts examples of his humility (which thereby become the very opposite of humble), and he is fostering his own proud and gruesome dogmas, those of Bergoglianism and the church of Bergoglio.]

So there we are at this crossroads of culture and, more than that, of civilization itself. Two Newmans proffer two Springtimes and they are not occasional variations of a common climate.

Our nation has endured recent years of eroding faith and moral reason. It cannot endure several years more in the confidence that the erosion can be reversed as though it were just the habit of a cyclical season.

There is a better prospect, but it is possible only if Catholics assent to the lively oracles of the Gospel and cast their votes and vows against those who are against it. The Newman who is blessed saw a Catholic Spring in the pulpit at Oscott that is not the clandestine plot of e-mails:

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I listen, and I hear the sound of voices, grave and musical, renewing the old chant, with which Augustine greeted Ethelbert in the free air upon the Kentish strand. It comes from a long procession, and it winds along the cloisters. Priests and Religious, theologians from the schools, and canons from the Cathedral, walk in due precedence. And then there comes a vision of well-nigh twelve mitred heads; and last I see a Prince of the Church, in the royal dye of empire and of martyrdom, a pledge to us from Rome of Rome’s unwearied love, a token that that goodly company is firm in Apostolic faith and hope.

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Unsaid so far but surely in every thinking Catholic's mind is that the 'Catholic spring' that many leading cardinals who ought to know better - including Ouellet and Schoenborn - and the legions of instant Bergoglidolators in the media and in the world at large vociferously hailed when referring to the new pope back in 2013, is substantially and substantively what the Clinton strategists meant by 'Catholic spring' in the leaked e-mails! But is there anyone at the Vatican who would still pretend that this pope ushered in a Catholic spring other than something that is more like that 'Arab spring' that the world hailed so unwisely and prematurely.

Aqua and I had the great pleasure of attending Fr. Hunwicke's talk in Manhattan's Old St. Patrick's Cathedral last night and speaking to him briefly afterwards. He is just as droll and witty as he is in his blogs. And BTW, the proper pronunciation of his last name, it turns out, is "Hunnick", without the 'w' sound.

His topic was 'Kasperism and the aspirations of episcopal conferences', and he came well-prepared with clippings from the back-and-forth between Cardinals Ratzinger and Kasper between 1999-2001 on whether it is the universal Church or local (particular) churches that has/have ontological and temporal priority, as well as pertinent Vatican documents.

Christopher Blosser, who started the Ratzinger Fan Club site (eventually renamed the Pope Benedict XVI Fan Club) back in 2000 in the wake of the attacks against DOMINUS IESUS, has a compilation of all the articles in this debate-by-correspondence of sorts. They may be consulted at
http://popebenedictxvi.blogspot.com/2008/08/special-compilation-ratzinger-kasper.html)

Anyone who follows Fr. H's blogs will know exactly what he thinks about Cardinal Kasper and about episcopal conferences in general. Kasperism, he said, last night, is the butcher's block on which the Body of Christ (the Church) is being chopped up.

As for whether the universal Church takes priority over local particular churches, he says reasoned consideration would easily show that it is the universal over the particular. That the universal Church is not a sum of Church A + B + C...,etc, but that local churches are - and should be - examples of the universal Church made concrete.

He quotes from a 1992 CDF document, cited very rarely though it deserves attentive reading, entitled 'LETTER TO THE BISHOPS OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH ON SOME ASPECTS OF THE CHURCH UNDERSTOOD AS COMMUNION' signed by Cardinal Ratzinger and approved by John Paul II which says, among other things:

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The Church of Christ, which we profess in the Creed to be one, holy, catholic and apostolic, is the universal Church, that is, the worldwide community of the disciples of the Lord, which is present and active amid the particular characteristics and the diversity of persons, groups, times and places....

Among these manifold particular expressions of the saving presence of the one Church of Christ, there are to be found, from the times of the Apostles on, those entities which are in themselves Churches, because, although they are particular, the universal Church becomes present in them with all its essential elements. They are therefore constituted "after the model of the universal Church", and each of them is "a portion of the People of God entrusted to a bishop to be guided by him with the assistance of his clergy"...

Indeed, according to the Fathers, ontologically, the Church-mystery, the Church that is one and unique, precedes creation, and gives birth to the particular Churches as her daughters. She expresses herself in them; she is the mother and not the product of the particular Churches.

Furthermore, the Church is manifested, temporally, on the day of Pentecost in the community of the one hundred and twenty gathered around Mary and the twelve Apostles, the representatives of the one unique Church and the founders-to-be of the local Churches, who have a mission directed to the world: from the first the Church speaks all languages.

From the Church, which in its origins and its first manifestation is universal, have arisen the different local Churches, as particular expressions of the one unique Church of Jesus Christ. Arising within and out of the universal Church, they have their ecclesiality in it and from it.

Hence the formula of the Second Vatican Council: The Church in and formed out of the Churches (Ecclesia in et ex Ecclesiis), is inseparable from this other formula: The Churches in and formed out of the Church (Ecclesia in et ex Ecclesiis)...

"The universality of the Church involves, on the one hand, a most solid unity, and on the other, a plurality and a diversification, which do not obstruct unity, but rather confer upon it the character of 'communion'". This plurality refers both to the diversity of ministries, charisms, and forms of life and apostolate within each particular Church, and to the diversity of traditions in liturgy and culture among the various particular Churches.

Fostering a unity that does not obstruct diversity, and acknowledging and fostering a diversification that does not obstruct unity but rather enriches it, is a fundamental task of the Roman Pontiff for the whole Church, and without prejudice to the general law of the Church itself, of each Bishop in the particular Church entrusted to his pastoral ministry....

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In which, Fr. H notes, Cardinal Ratzinger liberally quotes from a document, Lumen gentium, passed by 'a body whose authority no one will dispute', namely Vatican II.

He also quotes from Benedict XVI's homily on Pentecost Sunday in 2010:

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Where there are divisions and estrangement the Paraclete creates unity and understanding. The Spirit triggers a process of reunification of the divided and dispersed parts of the human family.

People, often reduced to individuals in competition or in conflict with each other, when touched by the Spirit of Christ open themselves to the experience of communion, which can involve them to such an extent as to make of them a new body, a new subject: the Church.

This is the effect of God's work: unity; thus unity is the sign of recognition, the "business card" of the Church throughout her universal history. From the very beginning, from the Day of Pentecost, she speaks all languages.

The universal Church precedes the particular Churches, and the latter must always conform to the former according to a criterion of unity and universality.

The Church never remains a prisoner within political, racial and cultural confines; she cannot be confused with States nor with Federations of States, because her unity is of a different type and aspires to transcend every human frontier.

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Fr. H argues: Since the Bishop of Rome has the ministry of sustaining the truths of the universal Church in the individual churches, and the diocesan bishop is the foundation of unity in his particular church fashioned after the universal Church, then episcopal conferences muddy the waters because they can be seen to be stealing power from the individual bishops who are members of these conferences, and from the pope who guarantees the unity of the universal Church.

He cites both Cardinal Ratzinger and Cardinal Mueller, in their capacity as CDF Prefects, for having definitively stated that episcopal conferences have no canonical status and only limited doctrinal power. Mueller specifically warned about the danger of ECs taking power away from the pope and individual bishops, and the tendency to act like 'vice popes'. [Of course, in Evangelii gaudium, JMB specifically articulates his intention to delegate doctrinal authority to local churches through episcopal conferences if they could be juridically allowed.]
Yet, as he pointed out earlier in his overview of Kasper's ecclesiology, Kasper has pointed to 'the growing gap between practices in the universal Church and in particular Churches', and his image of 'strict stern men at the barricades' of the universal church with "their adamant refusal of communion to everyone and their tight restrictive rules of eucharistic hospitality", whereby "bishops are pulled in two directions - to take into account the local community and its culture, as Vatican II enjoins, or to apply universal rules ruthlessly as his Roman superiors expect him to do.

Never under-estimate Kasper's capacity to plant a picture, Fr H warns. His language is such that 'it prejudices the discussion by making it seem that something important is not really important' and the other way around.

DOMINUS IESUS of 2000 really got Kasper's goat, he says, prompting him to propose: "There is a solution [for the bishops]: they must have a vital space within which to decide for their own diocese." Freedom does not mean compromises, he adds, "BUT a broad field of ecclesiastical discipline is essentially changeable" [the rationale behind the Bergoglio-Kasper advocacy of eucharistic leniency and other relaxations of Church discipline], and the Church has experienced a great deal of flexibility in rules and regulations in the past decades.

In other words, says Fr. H, Kasper is saying, "We messed up the liturgy in the late 60s and got away with it. So we can mess up other areas of discipline and get away with it". [That's the spirit of AL,all right!]

One other premise attributed to Kasper and his likeminded colleagues among the German bishops is their identification of the Church as being equivalent to the Pope and the Roman Curia. Cardinal Ratzinger remarked on this in an address on the 35th anniversary of Lumen gentium:

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Resistance to the affirmations of the pre-eminence of the universal Church in relation to the particular Churches is difficult to understand and even impossible to understand theologically.

It only becomes understandable on the basis of a suspicion: "The formula becomes totally problematic if the one universal Church is tacitly identified with the Roman Church, de facto with the Pope and the Curia. If this occurs, then the 1992 Letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [cited earlier] cannot be understood as an aid to the clarification of the ecclesiology of communion, but must be understood as its abandonment and an endeavour to restore the centralism of Rome".

In this text the identification of the universal Church with the Pope and the Curia is first introduced as a hypothesis, as a risk, but then seems de facto to have been attributed to the Letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which thus appears as a kind of theological restoration, thereby diverging from the Second Vatican Council.

This interpretative leap is surprising, but obviously represents a widespread suspicion; it gives voice to an accusation heard everywhere, and expresses succinctly a growing inability to portray anything concrete under the name of universal Church, under the elements of the one, holy, catholic of the Church. The Pope and the Curia are the only elements that can be identified, and if one exalts them inordinately from the theological point of view, it is understandable that some may feel threatened.

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[The German bishops are, of course, notorious for reducing the concept of the universal Church to nothing but the pope and the Roman Curia, since their primary criterion for anything appears to be political. And financial - they ca excommunicate you for failing to pay the Church tax that ought to go to them, to the German Church, at any rate.]

Fr H then brings up Apostolos Suos, John Paul II's 1998 Apostolic Letter on the Theological and Juridical Nature of Episcopal Conferences.

The key question about ECs is whether they can autonomously promulgate doctrine that must be accepted by their subjects with religious submission. And the answer is framed thus:

---

Taking into account that the authentic magisterium of the Bishops, namely what they teach insofar as they are invested with the authority of Christ, must always be in communion with the Head of the College [the pope] and its members, when the doctrinal declarations of Episcopal Conferences are approved unanimously, they may certainly be issued in the name of the Conferences themselves, and the faithful are obliged to adhere with a sense of religious respect to that authentic magisterium of their own Bishops.

However, if this unanimity is lacking, a majority alone of the Bishops of a Conference cannot issue a declaration as authentic teaching of the Conference to which all the faithful of the territory would have to adhere, unless it obtains the recognitio of the Apostolic See, which will not give it if the majority requesting it is not substantial.

The recognitio of the Holy See serves furthermore to guarantee that, in dealing with new questions posed by the accelerated social and cultural changes characteristic of present times, the doctrinal response will favour communion and not harm it, and will rather prepare an eventual intervention of the universal magisterium.

---

[Have the German bishops ever submitted any such non-unanimous (for there are a handful of 'conservative' German bishops) teaching to the Holy See for proper evaluation and possible approval?]

Fr H says that with Apostolic Suos, Cardinal Ratzinger 'won' the argument hands down not just on what episcopal conferences can and cannot do, but also on the priority of the universal Church over local Churches.

I purposely delayed towards the end what I found to the be the most striking statements I heard from Fr H last night - a measure of how greatly he esteems Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI.

But first, here is how he started his talk. He quotes from an admonition of the evil Screwtape to his rookie-devil nephew Wormwood after one of the latter's 'patients' had become a Christian:

---

There is no need to despair; hundreds of these adult converts have been reclaimed after a brief sojourn in the Enemy's camp and are now with us. All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favor.

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread but through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans.

All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks around him he sees just that selection of his neighbors whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbors. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like "the body of Christ" and the actual faces in the next pew...

At his present stage, you see, he has an idea of "Christians" in his mind which he supposes to be spiritual but which, in fact, is largely pictorial. His mind is full of togas and sandals and armor and bare legs and the mere fact that the other people in church wear modern clothes is a real — though of course an unconscious — difficulty to him. Never let it come to the surface; never let him ask what he expected them to look like. Keep everything hazy in his mind now, and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by producing in him the peculiar kind of clarity which Hell affords.

---

Emblematic, he implies, of the state and direction of the Church - and the faithful - today. Then referring to one's time frame of history when considering this condition, he remarks: "Ratzinger has been pope much longer than you think. Think of a papal diarchy, a collaborative papacy that began in 1981 and ended in 2013, during which Joseph Ratzinger laid down the theology of that dual papacy. A Wojtyla-Ratzinger condominium."

Other commentators have, of course, previously written of the Wojtyla-Ratzinger papal continuum from 1978 to 2013. But Fr H used terms much stronger even than those much disputed words whereby Georg Gaenswein spoke last May about an 'enlarged papal ministry' with a contemplative (ex)-Pope and an active Pope.

But again, anyone who has followed Fr. H's blog will know how often he brings up Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI - as he often as he does John Henry Newman - to strengthen points that he raises about the life of the Church.

So, thank God for persons like Fr H, and thank God even more for the Wojtyla-Ratzinger 'papal diarchy' and what it gave to the life of the faith, all of which, one prays, will serve good Catholics well during this times of trial.

Now, the Anglophone reactions are starting to come to the Tornielli-Galeazzi Nixon-style 'enemies list' manifesto of pathologic paranoia in behalf
of their idolized pope...

As criticism of this pope mounts,
Vatican insiders fire back
[But not, mind you, with any reply to any of the criticisms -
simply a catalog of epithets attached to names and websites]
by Steve Skojec

October 19, 2016

A thrown knife plunges menacingly into the wall. A handgun slides in from off-screen to fire a warning shot. Words of caution appear on the screen: “The only thing I can tell you is to watch your step.” When I w'as a young boy playing 'Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, silly warnings like these told me I was hot on the trail of the villain.

And now, thirty years later, these same images come immediately to mind after reading Andrea Tornielli and Giacomo Galeazzi’s flailing, indignant riposte to papal critics in the October 16 edition of Vatican Insider [coming from the site's host newspaper, La Stampa]. Their tacky, “hit list”-style screed comes off as little more than comical bravado from the hired thugs of some noirish, two-bit criminal organization who have found someone they don’t want sniffing around their turf. [Three and a half years too late for them to acknowledge this, ain't it?]

This duo of vaticanistas — Tornielli the more notable of the two, particularly since he and Pope Francis have now published two book-length interviews together — don’t waste any time bothering to select a target. The first sentence is a shot from the hip, an indiscriminate accusation against anyone who dares speak a questioning word about the current pontificate: The glue that holds them together is their aversion towards Francis.

From the word go, we are treated to an ad hominem argument — not business, but personal. But who is the “them” in that sentence? Unlike other recent examples of more diplomatically vague smackdowns of papal critics, Tornielli and Galeazzi name names. A whole litany of them.

Among them we find such wide-ranging figures as Professor Roberto de Mattei, fellow top vaticanista Sandro Magister, noteworthy Italian journalist and author (of “Fourth Secret” fame) Antonio Socci, Italian traditionalist blogger Maria Guarini, and even an entire alleged conspiracy “between Hong Kong circles, sectors within the US and Europe’s right-wing” who have raised vocal objections to the Vatican’s dangerous Ostpolitik with China. The 45 theologians who wrote up a list of [canonically defined] censures against Amoris Laetitia get an honorable mention.

Later, ecclesiastical figures like Cardinals Robert Sarah and Raymond Burke make walk-on cameos as opposition forces, as does Bishop Athanasius Schneider. Lest the presence of episcopal spine unsettle anyone expecting a Bergoglian fait accompli, the authors are quick to cite Italian sociologist (and — I’m not making this up — international vampire expert) Massimo Introvigne, who reassures the reader that “There are more than 5000 Catholic bishops in the world, only about ten of them are active in their opposition, many of whom are retired, which shows that it is not substantial.”

Introvigne claims that this opposition “is present both on the web and in real life and is overestimated: there are dissidents who write comments on social networks using four or five different pseudonyms, to give the impression there are many of them”.

For such an easily-dismissed threat, there are a staggering number of fingers pointing in every direction. Lefebvrites and sedevacantists lumped into the same category with breathless angst, along with those who believe that either Pope Benedict’s resignation was invalid or Pope Francis’ election was. The authors spare some token harsh words for a couple of “disappointed ultra-progressives”, but the main thrust is, unsurprisingly, aimed at conservative and traditionalist figures in the Catholic world.

Perhaps the most outlandish thing of all is the title of the authors’ pearl-clutching outburst: [B]“Catholics who are anti-Francis love Putin.” There is, of course, not even the slightest effort made at substantiating such a charge in nearly 2,000 words of mudslinging, save this throwaway conjecture buried at the very end of the piece:

---

Introvigne pointed out a surprising trait that many of these circles share: “It is the mythical idealization of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is presented as a “good” leader in contrast to the “bad” leader, the Pope, because of his stance on homosexual people, Muslims and immigrants. Russian foundations that have strong ties with Putin co-operate with the anti-Francis opposition.

---

This, from the same analyst who stated dismissively that this anti-Francis movement “is not successful because it is not united.”

Well, which is it? Are we all ecstatic Putinistas held together by hate glue, or aren’t we? (The more one ponders this accusation, the funnier it gets.)

One target of the smear campaign has already responded. Fr. Bernardo Cervellera, editor-in-chief of AsiaNews, an official press agency of the Roman Catholic Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, objects to being included in the roundup of suspects:

---

Not a day goes by without AsiaNews publishing reports of the Pope’s homilies, speeches, audiences, summaries of encyclicals. We are among the fastest agencies to offer what the Pope teaches on-line with translations into Italian, Chinese, Spanish and English. Many Chinese, Indians, Latin Americans are grateful for the speed with which they can access the Pope’s words, particularly since the official sites are too slow. We chose to offer this service, which occupies us every day, even on Sundays, to help the Churches in Asia to receive the words of the Pope as soon as possible. We did this with Pope John Paul II, Benedict XVI and now with Pope Francis...

Given this experience, we are very sorry – for their lie, rather than for ourselves – that two Vatican experts have cited AsiaNews among “those Catholics who are against Francis and worship Putin.” Because both statements, regarding the Pope and Putin, are false. I’m not here to list proof of this: all anyone has to do is actually read the articles we write. For us it is a point of honor – and professionalism – never to comment on what we like most about the powers that be, but all aspects, be they complex or contradictory, of a given event. This, for us, means being of service to the truth.

---

In another analysis by Italian Catholic scholar Francesco Colafemmina (as cited by Robert Moynihan in his most recent letter), a certain ancient parallel is observed:"It gives the first and last names of all of them, in a sort of mediatic ‘proscription list’ worthy of Sulla". [Note: In 82 BC, when the Roman leader Lucius Cornelius Sulla was appointed dictator rei publicae constituendae(‘Dictator for the Reconstitution of the Republic’), he proceeded to have the Senate draw up a list of those he considered enemies of the state and published the list in the Roman Forum. Any man whose name appeared on the list was ipso facto stripped of his citizenship and excluded from all protection under law; reward money was given to any informer who gave information leading to the death of a proscribed man, and any person who killed a proscribed man was entitled to keep part of his estate (the remainder went to the state)… Many victims of proscription were decapitated and their heads were displayed on spears in the Forum.]

It indeed appears as though critics of the Bergoglian regime are hitting closer to the mark than can be tolerated. When one’s grip on power is sufficiently firm, acknowledging the arguments of one’s enemies is ordinarily a tactical error. One friend of mine noted this morning that “all tyrannies are filled with paranoids”. [But the duo did not at all acknowledge the arguments of their enemies, only their existence. In fact, they also published the comments of the 'enemies' they interviewed but without any reply. A tactic, I suppose, they thought would show how little they think of such arguments, but if they did think little of the arguments, their screed obviously acknowledges that their side is somehow 'hurting', or why would they go to all that trouble? Even if one of them, Galeazzi, has comically announced that, based on the September site visit count of an Italian firm, only about 25,000 in total get exposed daily to the writings of the persons and sites they have targeted.]

Hilary White, who has lived in Italy for some time now — including several years as a Rome correspondent for LifeSiteNews — offered me her own take on the rationale behind lashing out:

---

The question fundamentally misunderstands the motivations of the arch-narcissists. They don’t think about the long term; they react with narcissistic rage any time they’re crossed. It’s an intimidation tactic.

It’s also very typical Vatican who start every day with the assumption that they can do and say anything they want because of their position. This arrogance is the one main governing principle for dealing with them. They can do no wrong because they are the Vatican, and anyone gainsaying them simply has to be crushed.

Optics. Really. Isn’t. A. Thing. with these people. They absolutely, utterly and completely DON’T CARE what it looks like from the outside. There is no outside. Nothing outside matters… and most especially “anglo-saxons” don’t matter. The contempt they hold all Anglos in is a thing to behold. Really shocking when you meet it.

---

Still, I wonder if their power and influence is more precarious than it superficially appears. They have total control of the Vatican and are stacking the ranks of the curia, yet I’ve received reports from Rome on more than one occasion indicating that the reigning cabal have been surprised, angry, and even somewhat fearful about the potency of their opposition.

They expected the Synod to be a cakewalk. Instead, they had to settle for a Hegelian outcome and a revolution constrained to footnotes. They faced the opposition of 13 prominent cardinals, and the pope was reportedly none too happy about it. Yes, they’re still getting what they want, but they’re actually having to work for it.

But if Hilary is right, and this is simply an intimidation tactic, it’s a spectacularly ineffective one. I can’t imagine anyone mentioned backing down in the face of this too-precious tirade; as Fr. Cervellera has already proven (and no doubt others soon will), the reality is quite the contrary.

It is also important to view Tornielli in context; once known as a Ratzingerian, there is a sycophantic air in his new and close collaboration with the very different style and message of Pope Francis. A longtime Vatican observer I know confided, “I’m reasonably sure that Francis and his team don’t trust Tornielli, but are ready to use him.”

And he does seem useful. He is considered by many to be one of three media figures of particular use to this papacy as unofficial mouthpieces — the other two being La Repubblica co-founder and L’espresso editor Eugenio Scalfari; and the fellow Jesuit and close friend of Francis, Fr. Antonio Spadaro, La Civiltà Cattolica‘s editor in chief.

It is not unreasonable, therefore, to surmise that this naming of names is a not-so-subtle message sent from the Holy Father himself, or at the very least, his closest allies: “The only thing I can tell you is to watch your step.” [Does anyone doubt this operation had JMB's go-ahead???]

Catholic Culture‘s Phil Lawler makes note of the same:

---

Most disquieting of all, it seems likely that what Galeazzi and Tornielli wrote reflects what they have heard from their contacts in the Roman Curia. If that is the case, then some of the people surrounding Pope Francis believe that the Pontiff is the victim of a budding conspiracy. Having adopted the paranoid style, they see enemies wherever there is resistance to their agenda.

---

[Paranoia was, of course, the first thing that came to mind on seeing that article! Paranoia makes stupid - as one immediately saw from their headline and totally unsubstantiated premise equating anti-Bergoglio to pro-Putin and therefore to 'Russian financed' opposition!]

Colafemmina, too, recognizes this as an attempt at a consolidation of power:

---

In any case, there is no precedent for this use of journalism to marginalize, ghetto-ize, criminalize, these admittedly sometimes irritating minorities who do not conform to the unconditional assent regarding Bergoglio… It is unprecedented because this use of the press for geopolitical purposes, in order in the end to cancel all freedom of expression, through the ridiculing of dissent, shows what power such journalism is serving.

---

I believe that part of what we’re seeing here is a Vatican that is trying to look in control while quietly panicking over its inability to comprehend the sort of asymmetrical information warfare they are faced with.

They cannot accurately gauge — let alone neutralize — the expansive influence of critics who operate almost entirely outside of established structures, instead building audiences predominately online and across a broad spectrum of social media platforms.

To use an example with which I am personally familiar, what, other than fear of an out-of-control counter-narrative, could have caused the Vatican Press Office to issue a statement in the name of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI (breaking his silence on current matters facing the Church) to address a decade-old story that merely found new life in the pages of this website? [About a possibly untold part of the Third Secret of Fatima.]

Similarly, not only did Cardinal Pell publicly acknowledge and respond to a Synod walkout petition co-authored by several online Catholic writers (myself included), but reports came to us through back channels that the very effort itself upset top officials in the Vatican. I know of these instances because of my involvement; how many other such stories are out there?

Whatever the motivation, the result, rather than being a substantive rebuttal or show of control, is instead a petulant and amateurish tabloid piece that seeks to discredit and demonize those who — for various reasons, and in various ways — refuse to simply knuckle under to one of the most novelty-obsessed and disruptive papacies in Church history.

It is an unserious effort, and should be treated as such — much like so many of the actions of the pontificate it seeks to defend.

For Catholics from all orthodox perspectives who are troubled by the Francis papacy, it is in fact the love of Christ and His Church that is the glue that holds them together. Any aversion they may feel to the man who holds the office only exists in relation to how far he places himself — and the souls under his care — from that reality.

For me, the aversion is magnified and amplified because it remains unthinkable that a duly-elected pope could say and do so many anti-Catholic things - but there he is!

I didn't think there was any rush to post about the new head of all the Jesuits in the world, elected last week, especially since the initial stories
about him indicated he was an advocate of liberation theology in its Marxist form. Now, Rorate caeli comes up with information about him -
unilateral, to be sure - from someone who has known him and paints a portrait that seems even more revolting than, say, Leonardo Boff, who is
all bark and no bite, because apparently, Sosa Abascal has been quite a Marxist mastiff of the first order, having been, it is claimed here, a major
supporter of Hugo Chavez... And I thought the man he replaces at the Society of Jesus, Fr. Adolfo Nicolas - with his systematic denigration of Christian
evangelization as unequal to comprehending the Oriental cultures like that of Japan (where he spent most of his missionary life) - was bad enough!
One might conclude that the powers-that-be in the Society of Jesus continue to run seriously bonkers, i.e., anti-Christ, in many ways - urged on,
no doubt, by the resounding mediatic success of the very anti-Catholic first Jesuit pope in history.

EXCLUSIVE - The Marxist Revolutionary:
New Jesuit Superior-General revealed
by someone who knew his work in Venezuela

Oct. 19, 2016

Hours after Cardinal Bergoglio was elected Pope, Rorate was the first to bring you inside information from Argentina on what to expect (The Horror: A Buenos Aires Journalist describes Bergoglio).

Now, Rorate, with friends around the globe, has been contacted by a Venezuelan source, eager to tell the world what exactly to expect of the new Superior-General of the Society of Jesus (the Pope's own religious society), Fr. Arturo Sosa Abascal, based on his experience in his native land, now wrecked by the Socialism brought on, in great measure, by Marxist "Catholics".

In reality, the current situation in Venezuela, of widespread hunger and desperation, is exactly what Liberation Theology looks in practice. And Sosa was a big part of this.

---

I have known Father Arturo Sosa Abascal for a long time. Unfortunately, what I have seen in him is not in line with the teaching of Christ.

First of all, he has made of Marxism the lens through which he sees everything including the Catholic Magisterium (which he calls merely “Christian Faith”). He, along with many other Jesuits in Venezuela, has worked for decades in order to build “comunidades cristianas de base” (basic Christian communities) committed to building Socialist societies in Latin America, starting in Venezuela. Communities which live Marxism and Christianity not as the philosophers, thinkers, theologians of Europe, but in their own way.

Once the Jesuits had completed this work, then Father Sosa acted so that theology had to be reconstructed with this commitment of the "grassroots" as the guiding principle, because, as Marx taught, praxis is the birth place of theory, and theory is built in order to guide practice. [To guide practice?, or is it rahter to conform to it, i.e., give it a theoretical basis post facto.]

He claims that the Gospel is the norm of the Christian, but that it cannot inspire the basic commitments and tools of understanding, because these are historically conditioned. So, the experience of "exploitation" decides the fundamental orientation of the grassroots, and from this viewpoint they have to approach the “gospel.”

The Christian faith means nothing else than to be able to approach “the other”, that is to say, "the poor", the "oppressed", which becomes the “point of view”. Thus, faith is mediated by other groups of men. The man of faith has a scientific approach to reality and he has to choose what scientific approach he adopts. Faith will be mediated by this option.

In this moment of history, therefore, the right mediation is that of Marxism, because Marxism is the liberating scientific approach, because it is the best way to unmask the powerful and to guide the struggle of the poor.

After this, he followed the conventional path of Marxist Liberation theology: he rejects the transcendence of Christ’s Kingdom, proposes a political salvation, adopts materialism and even atheism, and assumes that Christianity must liberate the people politically as Moses did with Israel. (See this article: gumilla.org/biblioteca/bases/biblo/texto/SIC1978402_64-...

Father Sosa has lived his life in conformity with these “theoretical” foundations. At the Catholic University Andrés Bello (UCAB), the students never saw him wearing signs of his priesthood. He gave talks side by side with González Fausz [Who is he? I've googled him with no result!] in order to uproot God’s worship from the students (e.g., Spending money in the cult of God is wrong: the best “Christian” tradition since John Chrysostom just took care of the poor).

His work as editor of the journal SIC and as Director of the Gumilla Center served well to destroy the Faith of many a young person, including a very good friend of mine. (The reader can see his papers here: revistasic.gumilla.org/biblioteca-sic/arturo-sosa-s-j/).

In 1989 there was a big popular uprising in Caracas due to the work of a liberal Minister of Economy. It was known afterwards that Fidel Castro was behind it. The “grassroots communities” of the Jesuits worked very actively and the radio station 'Fe y alegria' (Faith and joy) in charge of which were mostly the Jesuits, played an active subversive role. Thus, they became co-responsible in the death of 2,000 people.

Later, the Jesuits worked actively in the coming of the Chavista revolution. There were Jesuits who opposed Hugo Chávez, that is true. Some very strongly. In April 2002, when Chávez was out of office for a couple of days, people heard Father Sosa proclaim that the grassroots “Christian” communities would defend the [Chavez] Revolution to death, that the “right-wing” would see the strength of the Revolution...

This man who has worked very hard all his life to re-interpret Christianity from a Marxist viewpoint, who has done not only “theoretical” work, but direct Revolutionary work, is the one that the Jesuits now have elected as their General.

Perhaps the growing revolutionary moment in Colombia, checked by the population itself in the referendum that voted down Marxist demands that would have been inserted in their own Constitution -- and for which their president won, unsurprisingly, the Nobel Peace Prize), demands that.

But one still remains mystified: what is it that the revolutionaries are after, still? In Venezuela
- they have systematically destroyed the productive infrastructure, agriculture, industry, public administration, the courts, hospitals, schools, even the energy industry that supports the country;
- they have killed thousands of people,
- they have the country at the edge of disastrous famine never before seen on such a scale in the Americas.

What is it that they are after? Probably the only explanation is the utter destruction of God’s world in order to build “a New World” in history.

May God protect us from the revolutionary underworld. May God convert the hearts and open the eyes of his people. And, above all, may Christ protect His Church.

- Antonio Frances [a pseudonym]

---

q

Sandro Magister has not deigned to remark so far on his inclusion in the Tornielli-Galeazzi 'Bergoglio enemies list' - his latest blog posts someone's
reaction to Rocco Buttiglione's defense of AL. But his topic and tone for this week's Espresso/www.chiesa analysis is answer enough, I think!

So many errors, Your Holiness! And some must be red-pencilled!
Francis likes his talk freewheeling, with all the risks that go with it.
Here is a review of his latest whoppers, a dozen in four months. The most sensational with China
by Sandro Magister


ROME, October 19, 2016 – Last June, www.chiesa registered and analyzed a certain number of misinterpretations, gaffes, memory slips and/or errors in the discourses of Pope Francis:
> The Pope Is Not Infallible. Here Are Eight Proofs (13.6.2016)

Since then, Jorge Mario Bergoglio has again committed two of the errors pointed out there.

The first was that of flattering Cardinal Christoph Schönborn with a role that he has never held: “secretary” of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The first time the pope 'promoted' him to this role was April 16, during the press conference on the return flight from the island of Lesbos. And that time, in transcribing the pope’s words in the official bulletin, the Vatican press office had corrected the mistake, replacing the word “secretary” with “member.”

But on June 16, in a discourse to the priests of Rome at the cathedral of Saint John Lateran, the pope repeated his error. In telling the priests how to interpret “Amoris Laetitia” correctly, he advised them to pay attention to the “great theologian who was secretary of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, Cardinal Schönborn.”

This second time, in the official transcription of Francis's words, the error was not corrected.

A bit further on, however, in that same discourse of the pope, a corrective “ex post” intervention was made: In describing the episode of Jesus and the adulterous woman, Francis is supposed to have said, according to the official transcription: “And Jesus sort of plays the fool, he lets time go by, he writes on the ground. . . .”

But in reality the pope had said: “And Jesus sort of plays the 'scemo'...,” an expression that sounds rather harsh in Italian (comparable to "retard"). [Actually, the online English translation given for 'fare lo scemo', the Italian expression JMB used, is 'play the fool', but scemo itself means idiot or fool, and as an adjective, it means dimwitted, dull or stupid. So yes, a retard, if you will. But obviously, JMB was not saying Jesus was any of these, only that he pretended not to understand what the Pharisees were asking him... ]

The second relapse has to do with an imaginary translation - coined in the West and fashionable in the United States on the lips of politicians - of the Chinese word “wei-ji,” conflict, according to which this is made up of two ideograms, one of which stands for “risk” [wei] and the other for “opportunity” [ji]. But Sinologists have pointed out that 'ji' has many meanings, of which the one with the right context in 'wei-ji' is 'critical point', and that 'opportunity' is not conveyed by a single ideogram but by two, 'ji-hui'.]

The first time the pope presented this “hearsay” [really more of an entrenched and widespread error] was on April 24, in a conversation with members of Focolare. And he repeated it a second time on June 18 on a visit to the community of Villa Nazareth.

But then Francis has gone on to new mistakes to be added to the list. One of these has created a certain amount of discussion and has been corrected in the official transcript of the pope’s words.

In the already-cited discourse of June 16 at Saint John Lateran, Francis at a certain point said that he maintained that “most of our sacramental marriages are null,” because the spouses “do not have the awareness” of what they are doing. In the official transcription, “most” was scaled down to “some.”

Few noted, however, that immediately afterward in the same discourse, Bergoglio expressed a somewhat conflicting opinion. After having said, in fact, that he holds most sacramental marriages to be null, he said that on the other hand he maintains as “true marriages,” endowed with “matrimonial grace,” the simple cohabitation practiced in rural parts of Argentina, where - he explained - they start families young but marry in church only later in life.

Another questionable opinion that Francis loves to repeat concerns a [columnar] capital in the medieval basilica of Vézelay, in France.

“On that capital,” the pope has said on at least three different occasions, “on one side there is Judas hanged, with the eyes open, the tongue out, and on the other side is the Good Shepherd taking him with him. And if we look carefully, with attention, the face of the Good Shepherd, the lips on one side are sad, but on the other side they form a smile.”

In reality, no art historian identifies Christ as the second figure, someone who is simply taking the hanged man away for burial. But the pope likes to interpret it this way, in order to confirm the mercy of God for every sinner. [And to underscore his bizarre notion that Judas was never condemned by God, and that in fact, as he and his ghosts write in AL, [B]"No one is condemned forever, because that is not the logic of the Gospel" - never mind how many times the Gospels cite Jesus speaking about eternal damnation.]

[A French specialist in medieval iconography wrote Beatrice on her site www.benoit-et-moi 2016 last June to give a definitive answer to the puzzle of the Vezelay 'capital', which illustrates one of the miracles of St. James (Santiago) for the edification of pilgrims who undertook the pilgrimage to his tomb in Compostela starting off from the Cistercian basilica of Ste. Marie Madeleine (Mary Magdalene) in Vezelay.

Her explanation bears a full translation which I will do later, as a separate post, but in effect,the central figures are neither Judas nor the Good Shepherd, but simply a wicked innkeeper hanged for his crime of accusing two German pilgrims (father and son) of stealing from him in order to appropriate their assets. The father was condemned to hang but the son offered to be hung instead so his father could finish the pilgrimage to Compostela, where he prayed at the tomb of the saint.

Returning home 30 days later, he wished to pray where his son had been hung, and the corpse spoke to him saying he should not grieve but rejoice for he was now with St. James, but that he should seek justice. When he reported all this to the authorities, the innkeeper was arrested and hanged. The son's body was returned to the father and given the honors of a saint.

Therefore, the supposed Judas figure is really the wicked innkeeper who is punished for his sins and goes to hell, while the other part of the capital shows the dead son on the shoulders of his father who is all set to bury him. The son is shown in accordance with medieval iconography which represented souls ascending to heaven as completely nude, hands joined in prayer... Perhaps, someone should send JMB a copy of the Codex Callistinus, the 12th century Book on The Miracles of St. James, where this story is found.]

But he has insisted on his wrong interpretation [though I don't think he would ever admit to being wrong on anything!] on June 16 with the priests of Rome, on August 2 with the bishops of Poland, and on October 2 with journalists on the return flight from Azerbaijan to Rome.

Moreover, Bergoglio sometimes falls into linguistic misunderstandings. For example, with the word “estracomunitario,” which in Italy simply indicates someone who does not belong to the European community.

Francis, however, is convinced that this word has an underpinning of cruelty: “That very cruelty which turns you, who are from another country, into an ‘extra-comunitario’: they take you out of the community, they do not welcome you. Which is something against which we must fight very much.” The pope said this to young Italians on July 28 in Krakow, during world youth day.

Still other times the error is descriptive. For example when on October 12, in addressing the conference of “Christian World Communions,” Francis cited the martyrdom of the “Coptic Orthodox friars slaughtered on the shores of Libya.” [We've all seen photos and videos of that seaside execution - if the murdered Copts had been made to wear execution hoods, which they were not, the pope might have had an excuse to mistake them for 'friars' (not that there are even any friars as such in the Coptic Church)!]

Who were indeed Coptic Egyptians, but laymen, not “friars.” No correction was made post facto to this part of the address, in the official transcription.

Then there was the case of the Spanish trans-sexual whose story Bergoglio told during the return flight from Azerbaijian to Rome on October 2. The story told by the pope differs on various points from the one told by the transsexual after in his audience with the pope, which took place on January 24, 2015, together with his “wife.”

But in recounting the story, the pope appeared to take it as a matter of course that absolution and communion should be given to “married” trans-sexuals, remaining silent on the fact that the applicable discipline of the Church does not permit sacramental marriage for trans-sexuals.

More than an omission, here Francis has indicated a deliberate break with this discipline, but without making a declaration.

See, in this regard, the commentary of Christian Spaemann, a psychiatrist by profession and the son of the illustrious German Catholic philosopher Robert Spaemann:
> Papa Francesco e i transessuali. Le obiezioni di Spaemann

On another occasion the pope made a mistaken prediction, with the result of then finding himself on a collision course with an entire episcopate, that of Colombia.

The error regarded the outcome of the October 2 referendum on the agreement between the Colombian state and the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

Francis, speaking on September 26 at Santa Marta with representatives of the World Jewish Council and predicting that the Colombian people would ratify the peace agreement, went out on a limb, praising supporters of the agreement as persons who “risk everything for peace,” and dismissing its opponents as persons who “risk everything to continue the war, and this wounds the soul.”

Except that the Colombians voted NO, and among the opponents was a large part of the Colombian Church, also desirous of peace but not under the conditions established in the accord.

So much so that for the signing of the document on September 27, Cardinal Parolin came hurrying in from Rome, but no bishop was present, and the episcopal conference called on Colombians to vote for or against the agreement according to their conscience.

Fortunately those words of the pope did not go into the official records, since they were spoken in a private meeting. But they were made known by participants at the meeting:
> Papa Francesco dialoga con membri del Consiglio ebraico mondiale

An attempt at repairing the rift was made by the president of the episcopal conference of Colombia, Luis Augusto Castro Quiroga, who told Vatican Radio:“It’s not that some say yes to peace and others say no. Those who say no consider that the agreement must be corrected in some points, but they too want peace. This is not a case of war and peace.”

But perhaps the most sensational error into which Bergoglio has stumbled lately concerns China.

On October 2, on the return flight from Azerbaijian to Rome, Francis gave a couple of news items that at the time no one was able to verify.

The first: “The Vatican Museums have presented an exhibition in China, the Chinese will present another at the Vatican.”

The second: “The other day there was a conference at the [Pontifical] Academy of Sciences on ‘Laudato Si’,’ and there was a Chinese delegation from the president. And the Chinese president sent me a gift.”

On October 7, however, the agency “Églises d'Asie,” the authoritative voice of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, published a thoroughly documented note that demolished both news items:
> Le président Xi Jinping a-t-il vraiment envoyé un cadeau au pape François? (Did President Xi Jinping really send a gift to Pope Francis?)

To begin with, the Vatican Museums did indeed organize an exhibition, from February 5 to May 2 of this year, on the papacy, the Catholic mission to the Orient, the liturgy and the sacraments. Not in the People’s Republic of China, however, but in the house of ... 'the enemy' to Beijing: in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan.

As for the presumed gift from the Chinese president, a detailed reconstruction made by “Églises d'Asie” ends up defining it as nothing less than “unthinkable.”

On October 11, the agency Asia News of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions in Milan conveniently made the reconstruction by “Églises d'Asie” available to readers of Italian, English, Spanish, and Chinese:
> Églises d'Asie, “Did President Xi Jinping really send a gift to Pope Francis?"
[Maybe that was why AsiaNews - for all its yeoman's job of dutifully translating and reporting promptly everything this pope says and does - was included in the Tornielli-Galeazzi 'enemies list'!]

P.S. It's one thing for a pope to say erroneous things out of sheer misinformation - even 'the perfect pope' JMB is supposed to be can't be expected to know everything - or even to say some harmless white lies, once in a while.

But to distort or truncate Jesus's words or to adapt facts to suit your own version or interpretation or wishful thinking of what these facts ought to be - even if, and especially because, you are pope - is simple dishonesty... when we're speaking of everything else but what Jesus said according to the Gospels. In which case, it is sheer blasphemy, an even more fundamental sin than heresy or apostasy. But, of course, none of the Bergoglio-besotted incense bearers would ever see it that way - how he is, in effect, continually flouting the First Commandment.

His most objectionable megalomania is to think he knows better than Jesus and has license to tinker around with what Jesus said and did to suit his own purposes. If you use the word 'God' which Jesus is, instead of Jesus, then Bergoglio is re-creating the Original Sin of Adam over and over.

New underground 'bishops' in China
a problem for the Vatican
They're considered radical even in their own community

October 19, 2016

HONGKONG - The Holy See is facing a new challenge in China with at least two new "bishops" being "ordained" without papal — or even government — approval, just as it is trying to resolve the issue of bishop appointments by striking an unprecedented deal with China's ruling Communist Party.

The new "bishops" come from the underground church community and are not recognized by either the Vatican or the Chinese state, unlike the existing eight bishops in the mainland who were ordained without Vatican approval but with government backing — the source of the church's core frustration with Beijing.

Father Paul Dong Guanhua from Zhengding in northern Hebei province announced during Sunday Mass on May 22 that he had been secretly ordained as a bishop 11 years ago, using rules which may or may not be permitted to be invoked — adding further to the fissure in the church in China.

He made public his "episcopal" status by wearing his mitre and holding his staff on Sept. 11, according to a source in Zhengding, a stronghold of the underground community counted among the province's 1 million Catholics.

Father Dong even posted his phone number on a popular Chinese Catholic website and on his blog recently calling for anyone wanting to become a bishop to approach him.

"I was ordained by an elderly bishop in 2005 but I will not tell you whom," Father Dong told ucanews.com.

Father Dong denied rumors that he has in turn ordained Father Wang Chengli, apostolic administrator of Heze in eastern Shandong province, or that there are five more self-styled bishops who do not have papal or government recognition.

But Father Dong did admit that he ordained a 51-year-old bishop on Sept. 7 this year. "It's dangerous to reveal who he is under government surveillance," he said.

These defiant bishops vowed to follow the path of the late Bishop Fan Xueyan of Baoding, also in Hebei, who strongly opposed the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA) which is accused of controlling the church for the communist government.

Pope Benedict XVI's pastoral letter to Chinese Catholics in 2007 stated that the CPA is incompatible with church doctrine as its constitution advocates an independent church principle.

Bishop Julius Jia Zhiguo of Zhengding, who is approved by the Vatican but not recognized by the government, announced in a statement on Sept. 13 that Father Dong has incurred automatic excommunication under Canon Law Article 1382 for accepting episcopal consecration without papal approval.

Bishop Jia had previously suspended Father Dong’s priestly ministry some years ago, said the source in Zhengding.

However, Father Dong, with several hundred followers, claimed he was ordained under special faculties that the Holy See granted to the Chinese church in the 1980s, which gives power to bishops to ordain successors in times of persecution.

Pope Benedict's 2007 pastoral letter withdrew the special faculties but allowed individual dioceses to ask for new and updated faculties if particular situations so require.

Church sources close to the Vatican confirmed to ucanews.com that Pope Francis intends to pardon the eight government-appointed bishops during the Year of Mercy as reported by Reuters on July 14. The Year of Mercy ends Nov. 20.

"The pope has been stressing mercy. If he pardons the government-backed bishops for the sake of negotiations, will he show the same mercy to these defiant underground bishops or excommunicate them?" said Father Joseph, an underground priest in Hebei.

There is concern about how the Vatican-unapproved bishops will affect the ongoing China-Vatican negotiations as the next round is due to take place late October. The Holy See hopes Beijing will accept 30 underground bishops into the government-sanctioned bishops' conference when an accord is achieved.

"In the eyes of Beijing, it is just a number of illegal religious personnel be it 30 or 32," said Father Joseph. "The authorities will continue to detain or arrest us or remove us from the diocese if they think it's necessary."

The new self-styled "bishops" are considered radical even among the underground community, and their ordinations have sent shockwaves among Catholics across China after news spread Oct. 10.

On social media and Catholic websites, some Catholics, apparently coming from the open community with links to the CPA, mocked the "so-called loyalty" of the underground community and accused them of hurting the communion of the church.

Underground Catholics in general see the appointments as violating church law but they think it is time for the Holy See to review its China policy and be clear on its stance.

"The Vatican does not appoint bishops but only apostolic administrators for the underground community. It has adopted double standards or ignored irregular issues that could have been settled if it followed canon law," said Father Joseph from Hebei.

The Vatican excommunicated three government-backed bishops for the first time in 2011-2012 and pardoned or kept mute on the bishops who presided over the episcopal consecration. It stressed that such episcopal ordinations are canonically illegal but sacraments administered by the unapproved bishops are valid. [As with the FSSPX.]

Meanwhile, AsiaNews has published a second protest to the inclusion of AsiaNews in the 'Bergoglio enemies list' published by Tornielli and Galeazzi in La Stampa.

On “Hong Kong sectors”
supposedly "against Francis"
by John Mok Chit Wai

October 19, 2016

HONGKONG (AsiaNews) – Recently, an Italian newspaper (with an online English version), has accused AsiaNews of providing space for "an alliance between Honk Kong circles, sectors within the US and Europe’s right-wing" to push Pope Francis to give priority to religious freedom over Church unity in China. The same article cites AsiaNews as among the Catholic groups and people "who are anti-Francis but love Putin."

Yesterday, we published AsiaNews’s response to these allegations. Today we received a response from John Mok, teaching assistant at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who has contributed two articles to AsiaNews on the issue of religious freedom in China and China-Vatican talks: ‘By courting Beijing, Pope Francis is losing China (as well as Hong Kong)’and ‘Xi Jinping and religions: the Party must lead “effectively” and “forcefully”’

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As one of the contributors from Hong Kong who wrote articles for AsiaNews criticizing His Holiness Pope Francis’s diplomatic approach towards China, I was deeply perturbed by recent comments made by some Vatican experts.

The experts accused people from Hong Kong who criticized the current Sino-Vatican negotiations for having “political motivations that are masked by theological and ecclesial questions”, in order to defend “the West’s primacy”. And these people, dubbed as “Hong Kong circles” by the experts, are accused to have formed an alliance with “sectors within the US and Europe’s right-wing”. And all in all, these people are said to be “anti-Francis but love Putin”.

I am indeed a frequent critic of His Holiness over the Sino-Vatican negotiations. I submit articles not only to AsiaNews, but also to Chinese newspapers and online media based in Hong Kong, such as Ming Pao and Initium Media. (Though those experts in Vatican would not have a chance to read them, as I believe they cannot be bothered to read any material from the Chinese media.) But I do not understand many of the accusations directed against us.

All my criticisms are based on one principle: the protection of and the struggle for religious freedom. Religious freedom, I believe, is a basic human right. Though I am not an expert in the Church’s teachings, I do believe that most in the Church would share my judgment, including, of course, His Holiness.

I also believe that religious freedom is a universal value, but not, as many autocrats in Asia would claim, a Western concept that does not apply to Asian societies. If supporting Pope Francis’s call for the protection of Christians against severe persecution in the Middle East would render one his ally, then I do not understand why calling for the protection of Christians in China against terrible and violent oppressions by the Communist Party would make one become his enemy. I sincerely do not understand the logic behind this.

If the Church would like to spread her message in China freely and without the need to give up its full identity, and to unite the Catholics in China, religious freedom is the only guarantee. And if religious freedom is to be protected in China, then genuine political reform is the only way out.

Courting the Communist Party without any call for greater religious freedom, and without recognizing the Party’s growing grip on civil society under President Xi Jinping, would put many Chinese believers in helplessness and agony, and push the Church in China into further splits.

I am a teaching assistant working for a political science department in a local university. I help lead tutorials and discuss with my students about basic concepts in the field. Given my academic training, I cannot understand why criticizing His Holiness’s diplomatic tactics over China would necessarily make me into alliance with the right-wing, and even worse, with Vladimir Putin, the Russian autocrat.

According to my knowledge, both state capitalism and crony capitalism are classified as rightist ideologies, and the current Chinese government is practicing them. Under the Party’s policies, oligarchical corporations grow, workers and farmers are exploited, and property prices skyrocket because of unrestrained speculations.

If one believes that the current Chinese government is 'leftist' because it claims to be so [but mostly because communism has always been considered 'left'], then he is not seeing the real picture. And I do believe that His Holiness is equally concerned with Chinese workers who are suffering from exploitations by large corporations backed up by the Party.

I do support and laud His Holiness’ actions and teachings against reckless capitalist systems, political corruption, social inequalities, and human trafficking. But this does not make me a fan of Xi Jinping.

Putin is an autocrat who recklessly abuses human rights and suppresses dissidents. He shall be condemned. But so shall Xi! If one criticizes Putin for his iron-fist rule, then one should also condemn Xi for his heavy-handed rule! This, I believe, is called consistency and intellectual honesty.

All forms of autocratic rules shall be criticized and struggled against. This should be the common goal for all those who would like to make our world a better place. Yu Pedro Heping, a young priest from Ningxia Province who was found dead mysteriously, also asked the Holy See not to rush for results. Should we then, according to the Vatican experts, count him an ally of “sectors within the US and Europe’s right-wing”?

I am an advocate of Vatican II. I advocate the Church’s dialogue with all cultures, as well as localization. But this does not naturally make me a supporter of His Holiness’s China diplomacy. And according to Gaudium et Spes,

---

“Those who are suited or can become suited should prepare themselves for the difficult, but at the same time, the very noble art of politics, and should seek to practice this art without regard for their own interests or for material advantages. With integrity and wisdom, they must take action against any form of injustice and tyranny, against arbitrary domination by an individual or a political party and any intolerance. They should dedicate themselves to the service of all with sincerity and fairness, indeed, with the charity and fortitude demanded by political life.”

---

All Christians in China, indeed the people in China, are under the “arbitrary domination of… a political party”. Shouldn’t we heed the call from our great pastors to stand up and take action?

Reporters and journalists are responsible for, as His Holiness teaches us, spreading truth, instead of making baseless accusations and sowing the seeds for conflicts. If the Vatican experts would like to learn more about our judgments and opinions, I sincerely invite them to come to Hong Kong and engage in open discussions with us, including priests, believers, activists, and scholars. This, I believe, would be a good way to follow His Holiness’s example in trying to solve conflicts through dialogue.

---

[The young man is to be commended for his frequent evocation of what he can support in 'His Holiness's example', but let us all applaud him for opposing His HolinesS's China diplomacy of expedience.]

Geller could not have chosen a more appropriate illustration of her title!

The Vatican submits to Islam:
Contrast 2006 with 2016!
By PAMELA GELLER

October 20, 2016

Pope Benedict spoke honestly about Islam. Now it has come to light that he was being undermined by a shadowy cabal that wanted to install Cardinal Bergoglio — the present Pope Francis — as Pope and “modernize” the Catholic Church. One thing they’ve certainly succeeded in doing is silencing within the Church all resistance to the global jihad that has victimized hundreds of thousands of Christians. The Church leadership is betraying its own people.

[She then proceeds to post the ff article, about which, however, I have a major objection regarding a blatant untruth about Benedict XVI.]

---

The Vatican submits to Islam (2006-2016)
by Giulio Meotti
Gatestone Institute
October 16, 2016

If 9/11 was the declaration of jihad against the West, 9/12 will be remembered as one of the most dramatic knee-bends of the Western cultural submission to Islam. [Does Meotti realize he just used a metaphor that is the exact opposite of the event he proceeds to describe? How could the Regensburg lecture be considered a knee-bend, much less, cultural submission to Islam???]

On September 12th 2006, Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) landed in Bavaria, Germany, where he was born and first taught theology. He was expected to deliver a lecture in front of the academic community at the University of Regensburg. That lesson would go down to history as the most controversial papal speech of the last half-century.

On this, the 10th anniversary of the speech, the Western world and the Islamic world both owe Benedict an apology, but unfortunately, the opposite happened: the Vatican has apologized to the Muslims.


In his lecture, Pope Benedict clarified the internal contradictions of contemporary Islam, but he also offered a terrain of dialogue with Christianity and Western culture. The Pope spoke of the Jewish, Greek and Christian roots of Europe’s faith, explaining why these are different from Islamic monotheism.

His talk contained a quote from the Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman”.

This keg of dynamite was softened by a quotation from a Koranic sura of Mohammed’s youth, Benedict noted, “when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat”, and which says: “There is no compulsion in religion.”

Pope Benedict’s talk was not a surprise. “It is no secret that the Pope worried about Islam”, Christopher Caldwell noted in the Financial Times of London.

---

“He has doubted publicly that it can be accommodated in a pluralistic society. He has demoted one of John Paul II’s leading advisers on the Islamic world and tempered his support for a programme of inter-religious dialogue run by Franciscan monks at Assisi. He has embraced the view of Italian moderates and conservatives that the guiding principle of inter-religious dialogue must be reciprocità. That is, he finds it naive to permit the building of a Saudi-funded mosque, Europe’s largest, in Rome, while Muslim countries forbid the construction of churches and missions”.

---

In Regensburg, Benedict staged the drama of our time and for the first time in the Catholic Church’s history — a Pope talked about Islam without recycling platitudes. In that lecture, the Pope did what in the Islamic world is forbidden: freely discussing faith. He said that God is different from Allah. We never heard that again.

Intead, the quotation of Manuel II Palaeologus bounced around the world, shaking the Muslim umma [community], which reacted violently. Even the international press was unanimous in a chorus of condemnation of the “Pope’s aggression on Islam.”

The reaction to Pope’s speech proved that he was right. From Muslim leaders to the New York Times, everybody demanded the Pope’s apologies and submission. The mainstream media turned him into an incendiary proponent of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” In the Palestinian Authority area, Christian churches were burned and Christians targeted. British Islamists called to “kill” the Pope, but Benedict defied them.
- In Somalia, an Italian nun was shot dead.
- In Iraq, a Syrian Orthodox priest was beheaded by al-Qaeda and mutilated after the terrorists demanded that the Catholic Church to apologize for the speech.
- The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood pledged retaliations against the Pope.
- A Pakistani leader, Shahid Shamsi, accused the Vatican of supporting “the Zionist entity.”
- Salih Kapusuz, number two in the party of the Turkey’s then Prime Minister (now President) Recep Tayyip Erdogan, compared Pope Benedict XVI to Hitler and Mussolini.
- The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, insisted that the words of the Pope belong to “the chain of US-Israeli conspiracy,” and accused Benedict of being part of the “Crusader conspiracy.”

Security around Pope Benedict was soon massively increased. Two years later, the Pope had been barred from speaking at Rome’s most important university, La Sapienza. After the Regensburg affair, Benedict would not be the same anymore. Islamists and Western appeasers had been able to close his mouth. [That is absolutely false!]

A few days after the lecture, exhausted and frightened, Pope Benedict apologized. I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address … which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims,” the Pope told pilgrims at his Castelgandolfo summer residence. The quote did not “in any way express my personal thoughts. I hope this serves to appease hearts.”

[I always thought Meotti was a good journalist, but clearly about this, he is so very wrong. All he had to do was check back on the Vatican bulletins in Sept. 2016 that had to do with the Vatican response to the 'universal outrage' about Regensburg. The first was a brief statement from Fr. Lombardi on Sept. 14, as reported by John Thavis, then still editor of CNS:

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A few hours after the pope returned from Germany Sept. 14, Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi issued a written statement in the face of mounting criticism from Islamic representatives. Father Lombardi reviewed the papal speech, saying it was very important to the pope that there be a "clear and radical rejection of the religious motivation for violence."

But he said the pope did not intend to make a critical assessment of Islam, much less offend Muslims. On the contrary, Father Lombardi said, the pope's talk focused primarily on the religious shortcomings of the West and the reluctance of truly religious cultures to accept a Western "exclusion of the divine."

"What is clear, then, is the Holy Father's desire to cultivate an attitude of respect and dialogue toward other religions and cultures, including, of course, Islam," the Vatican spokesman said.

---

Two days later, Cardinal Bertone, then just installed as Secretary of State issued a statement that said very clearly:

---

- As to the judgment expressed by the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus cited by him in the lecture at Regensburg, the Holy Father absolutely did not mean to make it his own, but used it as a point of departure to develop, in an academic context, and as is evident from a complete and careful reading of the text, some reflections on the relationship between religion and violence in general, from whatever side it may come.

It is worth calling to attention what Benedict XVI himself recently said in a message commemorating the 2oth anniverary of the inter-religious encounter to pray for peace, called by his beloved predecessor John Paul II in Assisi in October 1986: "...the manifestations of violence cannot be attributed to religion as such but to the cultural limits within which it is is lived and in which it develops over time....In fact, evidences of the intimate linkbetween the relationship with God and the ethic of love are found in all the great religious traditions."

- The Holy Father therefore profoundly regrets that some passages of his lecture could have sounded offensive to the sensibilities of Muslim believers and could have been interpreted in a way that does not correspond at all to his intentions. [Not once did the Vatican use the word 'apology' or 'apologize' for the quotation he cited. What he regretted was not that he had said what he said but that 'some passages of his lecture could have sounded offensive etc". It is Meotti who should apologize that he failed to do his research with due diligence and has thereby insulted Benedict XVI.]

At the same time, in the face of the fervent religiousness of Muslim believers, he has called on the secularized culture of the West to avoid "the contempt of God and the cynicism which considers mockery of the sacred as a civil right."

- In reaffirming his respect for those who profess Islam, he hopes that they may be helped to understand his words in their true sense so that, having overcome this uneasy time, we may reinforce our mutual testimony of "the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men" and our working to "defend and promote together, for all men, social justice, moral values, peace and liberty." (Nostra Aetate, n. 31).

---

[I lifted the above from the news reports I posted in PAPA RATZINGER FORUM on the days mentioned.]

The Pope may have said that to stop further violence. But since then [Since when? 2006? NO, after March 13, 2013!], apologies to the Islamic world have become the official Vatican policy.

“The default positions vis-à-vis militant Islam are now unhappily reminiscent of Vatican diplomacy’s default positions vis-à-vis communism during the last 25 years of the Cold War,” wrote George Weigel, a US leading scholar [recently - not in 2006-Feb. 28, 2013.] [The Vatican’s new agenda seeks “to reach political accommodations with Islamic states and foreswear forceful public condemnation of Islamist and jihadist ideology.”

Ten years since the Regensburg lecture, relevant as ever after ISIS’s attacks on European soil, another Pope, Francis, has tried in many ways to separate Muslims and violence and always avoided mentioning that forbidden word: Islam. As Sandro Magister, one of Italy’s most important journalists on Catholic issues, wrote: “In the face of the offensive of radical Islam, Francis’s idea is that ‘we must soothe the conflict’. And forget Regensburg.”

The entire Vatican’s diplomatic body today carefully avoids the words “Islam” and “Muslims,” and instead embraces a denial that a clash of civilization exists. Returning from World Youth Day in Poland last August, Pope Francis denied that Islam itself is violent and claimed that the potential for violence lies within every religion, including Catholicism. Previously, Pope Francis said there is “a world war,” but denied that Islam has any role in it.

In May, Pope Francis explained that the “idea of conquest” is integral to Islam as a religion, but he quickly added that some might interpret Christianity, the religion of turning the other cheek, in the same way.

“Authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence,” the Pope claimed in 2013. A year later, Francis declared that “Islam is a religion of peace, one which is compatible with respect for human rights and peaceful coexistence.” He claimed that it is the ills of global economy, and not Islam, that inspire terrorism. And a few days ago, the Pope said that “people who call themselves Christians but do not want refugees at their door are hypocrites.”

Pope Francis’s pontificate has been marked by this moral equivalence between Christianity and Islam, which also obfuscates the crimes of Muslims against their own people, Eastern Christians and the West….

Pope Francis is still awaited for a visit at the church of St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray, where Father Jacques Hamel was murdered by Islamists this summer. That killing, ten years after the Regensburg lecture, is the most tragic proof that Benedict was right and Francis wrong.

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One of the happiest items I have come across lately is something truly unexpected. It is even more significant if we look back to all the vitriol
and venom directed at Benedict XVI by the UK media and 'intellectual elite' (read atheists and agnostics) in the months and weeks preceding
his visit, and how he turned all of it around, as he has done everywhere, even in Turkey just six weeks after the Regensburg address!...

One feast day, two popes,
and a remarkable procession
A Eucharistic procession between London’s two Catholic cathedrals
has become a tradition since it began as an act of thanksgiving
on the first anniversary of Benedict XVI's visit to the United Kingdom
This year it will be held on the feast day of St. John Paul II.
by Joanna Bogle

October 20, 2016


The feast-day of St. John Paul the Great is on October 22, and there will be a Blessed Sacrament procession through London on that day.

The procession is an annual event that gives thanks for the highly successful state visit of Pope Benedict XVI in 2010. One year after that visit, it was decided to hold a procession in thanksgiving, and because it was popular it has been held every year since, making this the fifth successive year. [I don't believe I have ever read about any particular Church celebrating the anniversary of a pope's visit not just on the first anniversary - as they did in the UK, when even the Prime Minister released a message - but on subsequent anniversaries as well.]

The procession has so far always been in October to link with the feast of Blessed John Henry Newman (October 8), who was beatified by Pope Benedict during his visit. Next year the plan is to move it to September to link with the actual date of the pope’s visit. But this year, its last in October, the procession happens to fall on the feast of St. John Paul. Which offers an excellent opportunity to see the whole thing in its context.

Both St. John Paul and Pope Benedict visited London’s two Catholic cathedrals —Westminster Cathedral in Victoria Street not far from the Houses of Parliament, and the lesser-known St. George’s Cathedral in Southwark on the other side of the Thames. The Blessed Sacrament procession links the two — which means that it passes over Lambeth Bridge, with Parliament as a rather magnificent backdrop.

It is all rather splendid: altar servers with candles, Knights of Our Lady in white robes, and at the heart of it the Blessed Sacrament held aloft by a bishop with a great cope beneath a canopy and surrounded by candle-bearers...

As the procession wends its way this year, praying and singing, there will be a naturalness about it. Five years is long enough to establish a sort of tradition: some people have come every year, others are newcomers. Over cups of tea or pub conversations afterwards there will be reminiscing and swapping of stories.

A hundred years ago it would have been literally impossible. In 1912 a great Eucharistic Congress was held in London and a procession was planned — but public protests meant that the authorities had to ban it. Catholic adoration of the Eucharist was, back then, widely deemed to be blasphemous and offensive; allowing it in public would have brought protests from dedicated Protestants, many of whom would have seen “popery” as a deadly threat and would have believed, or felt they ought to believe, that Catholicism was in some way dangerous to their nation, homes, and families.

How things have changed! In the final decades of the 20th century, after two world wars and the social shifts of the 1960s and 70s, old-fashioned anti-Catholicism no longer held sway.

In 1982 Pope John Paul II visited Britain. Protests were few and were felt to be odd and out of touch with the general mood: he was a popular figure and was cheered and applauded as he made his way to Buckingham Palace for tea with the Queen.

Pope Benedict’s state visit in 2010 was at her direct invitation; there was much controversy but it didn’t emanate from old-fashioned Protestants. Rather, it came from the new-style atheists, and was directed not so much at papal authority as such but at the Church’s teaching on sexual morality.

Then, when he arrived, something extraordinary happened. This gentle, white-haired, scholarly figure exuded peace, love, and wisdom, and captivated everyone. The mood changed. Crowds surged out to greet him. Suddenly, things felt joyful.

Crowds cheered him through the streets, and the BBC and other media stopped getting campaigners from homosexual lobby groups to talk about sexual matters and started broadcasting news about what was actually happening: the cheering, the people holding up babies to be blessed, the thousands — mostly young — who had gathered to pray with him in Hyde Park.

When Pope Benedict led us all in silent prayer before the Blessed Sacrament there was an extraordinary TV spectacle: thousands of glowing candles, young faces, the darkening sky, the glittering monstrance, and — complete silence. No comment seemed necessary. All was focused on the altar and everyone, led by the Pope, was simply linked, just for those moments, to that other Presence, beyond words.

I had been asked to take part in a TV debate with a well-known homosexualist campaigner but was not anxious to do it. No problem; the whole thing melted away, the program was cancelled. The story was now different: it was about prayer, and a country caught up in something utterly unexpected, a glimpse of something completely other than what had been imagined...

Six years on, there is no point in pretending that the country has been converted to Catholicism, or even that people are generally sympathetic to the ideas, doctrines, and message that the Church cherishes and teaches. On the contrary: in just about every aspect of everyday life — sex, money, work, social justice, reverence for life itself — the common culture seems opposed to Christianity.

But something is present all the same: a recognition that the Church is still there, that God and his love still call to us, that somehow the victory of secularism hasn’t tasted as good as it should have done, that the story continues.

By all the statistics, the Church in Britain should be dead by now. Just recently I came across a book written in the 1980s by an ex-Jesuit announcing that “well before the year 2000” the Catholic Church would in any recognizable sense have ceased to exist in most of the world.

But — well — here we are. It is true that, leaving aside the thriving Church of Africa and Asia, things certainly do seem bleak. But here in London we still see full churches, young people at prayer vigils such as Nightfever and Youth 2000, and — among much else — a procession of the Blessed Sacrament weaving its way from Westminster Cathedral down to Lambeth Bridge and across the Thames.

So what happens next? What does the future hold? One reason for the Blessed Sacrament procession is to continue to claim Christ’s public presence in this city as part of the natural order of things. Papal visits of recent decades have given us a sort of confidence. We make no arrogant claim: we gather in freedom and do not impose anything on anyone. We gather in friendship, and with goodwill, and intend to pass this heritage on to the next generations.

Our city needs prayer. Britain’s confused and in many ways broken social fabric needs the witness of a joyful faith. Old prejudices have gone, and we live with new realities: family break-up, sexual confusion, ugly materialism and consumerism, a sense of empty promises and vapid slogans offering unreal hopes.

The Catholic Church offers something real: its survival and revival is not a tribal witness but an authentic affirmation of truth. God is real, and came to live among men in the person of Jesus Christ. A relationship with him makes sense of everything. His Church is alive and gives witness to his truth.

As Pope Benedict put it: “The Church is alive and the Church is young!” Or, as St. John Paul put it, quoting the Lord himself: “Do not be afraid!”

BTW, Ms Bogle spoke at Holy Innocents last week about the English martyrs, but I could not fit her early evening talk into my schedule...

If you are not seeing any images for now, apparently, Photobucket is undergoing some maintenance work.

Sohrab Ahmari's conversion story is one that I had remarked around the time of Fr. Hamel's murder but did not get around to post about. He is an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal in London and the author of The New Philistines: How Identity Politics Disfigure the Arts. In the Catholic Herald, he gave an account of the long journey that brought him finally to the one true Church of Christ, with a special mention for Benedict XVI. Thanks to Beatrice for calling my attention to this account...

My journey from Tehran to Rome
As a Muslim-born Iranian, I first doubted God,
then flirted with Nietzsche and Marxism.
But the whisper of conscience kept suggesting that I go to Mass
by Sohrab Ahmari

Sept. 30, 2016

On July 26, I announced my decision to join the Catholic Church. Hours earlier, a pair of jihadists had attacked a church in France and murdered a priest, Fr Jacques Hamel, while he was celebrating Mass.

Two months before that, I had begun studying one-on-one with a priest in London, reading Catholic books and immersing myself in the catechumen’s life. But I had no intention of going public with my conversion, not until after being received into the Church.

When news of the killing first broke, I knew next to nothing about Fr Hamel. Photos online showed an octogenarian priest with wispy white hair and a look of quiet, ordinary holiness.

This priest, this man, had been forced to kneel and had his throat slit in the name of ISIS – an evil act that demanded a response. So like any good millennial, I took to my Twitter account and wrote: “#IAmJacques Hamel. In fact, this is the right moment to announce I’m converting to Roman Catholicism.” It was an impulsive thing to do, not exactly in keeping with our Lord’s teaching to be as wise as serpents.

Over the next 48 hours, thousands of people re-tweeted me, and hundreds contacted me through social media. Then my announcement made its way to Christian media. Well-meaning journalists read my Wikipedia entry, noted that I’d been born and raised in Iran, and concluded: Fr Hamel’s final act had been to convert a Muslim.

Thousands more shared these news stories on Twitter and Facebook, usually accompanied by the famous saying of Tertullian that “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church”. I wished my road to Rome had been as easy as “Moslem Writer Moved by Priest’s Martyrdom to Convert to Catholicism” (an actual headline from a Catholic outlet). The real story was much longer and more complicated.

When I was 12, I decided that there was no God. I remember the circumstances only vaguely. The year must have been 1997. I was on holiday with my parents in northern Iran, by the Caspian Sea. Many middle-class Iranians from the capital, Tehran, own modest cottages on the Caspian shore. My parents didn’t, but they had friends who did, and the summertime “villa trip” was a tradition.

I trace some of my happiest memories to these trips. There were usually other children – a delight for me, an only child. The days were invariably spent on the beach. Sharia law demanded strict separation of the sexes at sea. At most public beaches, the regime curtained off the water to create separate men’s and women’s areas. Everywhere there were banners and posters that read: “My sister, mind your veil. My brother, mind your eyes.”

But my parents and their friends usually found hidden corners where men and women could share the beach, away from the watchful eyes of the Islamic Republic’s morality committees. They would even bring bottles of araq, Iran’s searing home made spirit, in defiance of official prohibition. If the morality police showed up in their signature Toyota 4x4s, all wasn’t lost. Most of the officers could be bribed to overlook such iniquities.

The adults in the party would receive a stern scolding. They would make excuses, apologise and vow never to do it again.

Then the officers would say: “Well, if you’re having a good time, give us a taste of your candy.” This was the signal for the men to reach for their wallets, pool their cash and pay off the provincials. (There was always a non-zero chance, however, that the officer in charge was a true believer. Then a flogging could be in order.)

One night during that summer of 1997, in the borderland between childhood and pubescence, I began thinking seriously for the first time about all this. We’d returned to the villa from the beach. The air inside was dank with humidity. Evenings were reserved for cards and a barbecue, but I didn’t feel like sitting at the adult card table or horseplaying with the other kids. Maybe I’d had some dispute with the adults, though I can’t recall the substance.

I do remember retreating to my bunk bed upstairs and cursing everything. Religion, I concluded right then and there, was little more than a ritual of public hypocrisy – one that I’d be expected to perform. In our roshan-fekr (urbane, intellectual) milieu, piety was a sign of backwardness. But we feigned piety in public to keep our heads in the Islamic Republic. The trick was to take care that one’s double lives didn’t intersect.

Well, not if I could help it. At school, I had already begun clashing with my Koran teacher, whose real job was to inculcate students in the regime’s ideology, a mix of Shia chauvinism, anti-Americanism and Jew-hatred. When we returned from holiday, I escalated the war at school. Had I been a bit older it would have landed me in jail. But I was emboldened by the knowledge that soon my mother and I would be granted US green cards and immigrate to America.

At home, I air-drummed to Pink Floyd and read my father’s weather-beaten copy of Catcher in the Rye. My parents had divorced in 1991, but for my sake they’d kept up a charade of being married and living under the same roof. Now the marital theatre was over. The Floyd tapes, the Persian-language Salinger novel and a Japanese Noh mask were my father’s last gifts to me before my mother and I left Iran. I haven’t seen him since.

Eden, Utah (population 600) is a ski resort nestled in the Rockies, a couple of hours’ drive north of Salt Lake City. Eden was where my mother and I first arrived after emigrating from Iran. My uncle, my mother’s brother, had settled there not long after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, and so the Beehive State became our home when we followed him two decades later. We were now in the heart of Mormon country.

Utah was a place of astonishing natural beauty, with a deeply religious and conservative culture. Alcohol in beer was capped at three per cent by law. Coffee was considered sinful. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints maintained seminaries right next to most public schools. It taught that ancient Israelites had come to America, attempted to convert the natives and recounted their trials and New World revelations in golden tablets that form a sort of sequel to the Bible.

Mormonism came as a shock, and the shame of becoming déclassé compounded it. We weren’t wealthy in Tehran, but we lived respectably, in a vast two-storey house my grandfather had built.

In Utah, we initially lived in a tiny mobile home in a college town called Logan after moving out of my uncle’s. When I hitched rides with school friends, I’d ask them to drop me off a few blocks away so they wouldn’t find out where I lived.

Then there was the sheer awkwardness of being fresh off the boat. Thanks to private tutoring and years spent watching American movies in the Islamic Republic, I was nearly fluent in English before ever setting foot in the US. But mastering American mores was tougher. Being secular-minded in Iran was one thing; the free and close proximity to girls in school something else.

Well, all this was fuel for the revolution I’d first launched in the old country. If Shia Islam, with its rich iconography and theology, was all hypocrisy, then Mormonism and America’s Protestant ethic and cheerful consumerism were even more contemptible – and equally repressive in their own way. I’ve moved from one theocracy to another, I used to joke. It was an obscene comparison, but it helped me make sense of my circumstances.

I began dressing in black every day, contrived a gloomy persona and – this last probably saved me – read voraciously. Just before university, I discovered Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in a Salt Lake City bookstore. It set me off on an intellectual and spiritual road that, many years later, would bring me to an unlikely destination: the Roman Catholic Church.

Reading important books on your own in your late teens is an intoxicating business. Your critical faculties are still only half-formed. So you read each author thinking, “He’s so right!” and “Isn’t it just so!” – without pausing to note the differences among the various authors, let alone your own doubts and objections.

That was the case with me, anyway. If I could go back, I would try to read the great books in some coherent order, closely and critically, preferably with a good teacher. I didn’t lack for opportunities to do that. But I was too arrogant to allow anyone to tell me how and what to read.

I began with the half-mad Nietzsche. He proclaimed that God is dead and that Judeo-Christian morality is the product of a slave mentality, allowing the weak to vent their ressentiment at the strong. Well, wasn’t it just so with these obedient Mormons, these American bumpkins? Zarathustra spoke to my soul. I missed most of Nietzsche’s biblical allusions, but it didn’t matter. The point was to surpass God, and good and evil, to arrive at a new morality (whatever that meant).

Nietzsche opened up the whole constellation of existentialist philosophy (mainly Sartre and Camus) and the existential-ish novel (Bataille, Dostoevsky, Hesse and Kafka). I majored in philosophy as an undergraduate, and I would get decent marks with essays arguing, for example, that “the very possibility of a metaphysics is foreclosed after Auschwitz and Hiroshima”, or that “we are condemned to responsibility in a world divested of meaning” (or some such).

My confidence was born of the fact that I had almost no real sense of the things I was writing about – of the gravity of real life. I lived totally in my head. There, the world was meaningless; and if there was any point to life, it could only be reached on the far side of God’s absence.

Camus and Sartre, my existentialist heroes, disagreed over what to do in this meaningless world. Camus favoured a kind of personal and situational ethics over grand political projects. Man’s tragic destiny, the fragility and absurdity of his life, lent him a certain dignity, and the point for Camus was to uphold that dignity. Sartre, the communist, thought it was class struggle that opened the way to man’s true ground of freedom and commitment. I went the Sartre route.

The next stop was Marxism – specifically Trotskyism, a more romantic strand of the totalitarian ideology. In retrospect, it’s obvious why Marxism appealed to me: it went well with the latent anti-Americanism still imprinted on my Iranian mind. With Marxism, I could oppose the US as the evil capitalist hegemon without having to buy into any fanatical Shia mumbo-jumbo. It also assuaged my own class anxieties. My economic displacement, you see, was but a small ripple in the dialectic.

I signed up to a Trotskyite group called Socialist Alternative. In my free time, I hawked its pamphlets and joined labour union picket lines (rest assured, I did my share of hooking up, hard drinking and drugs, too). I wept after finishing The Prophet, Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume hagiography of Trotsky. I wept for a Soviet leader, and became insufferably self-righteous.

But Marxism never was able to answer questions having to do with my inner life. It didn’t banish my personal demons, or give a satisfying account of what I now would call fallenness – my own and others’. Nor, for that matter, did Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, post-structuralism, queer theory or any of the other fashionable philosophies I tried on, each in turn.

Glancing at life’s rear-view mirror, there is always a temptation to impose more cohesion on one’s thoughts than they possessed at the time. I’m no doubt doing that now. But if I were to boil down my worldview as a young man, before I came to the faith, to a single idea, it would be this: man’s place in the world is unsettled; we are homeless.

Capitalism’s pitiless destruction of older social forms, Darwin’s discovery of evolution, Freud’s conquest of the unconscious, the political horrors of the 20th century – all these things had made it impossible to cling to any eternal or permanent truth about humanity. The ancient prophets and philosophers had deluded themselves. Everything about people was a product of historical conditions and social power dynamics. And therefore people were infinitely malleable.

There were only two problems. First, these ideas didn’t withstand the scrutiny of real life. After university, I was accepted into a programme called Teach for America – the British equivalent is Teach First – which dispatches recent graduates to classrooms in the inner cities and underserved rural areas. My assignment took me to the Rio Grande Valley region of Texas, on the US-Mexico border. Nine out of 10 students at my school received subsidised lunches from the government, and the region was (and is) caught in the crossfire of America’s war on drugs.

As a committed leftist, I had to believe that the achievement gap between rich and poor students was purely a problem of redistributive justice. If only schools in the Valley were as richly funded as those in white, suburban districts, there would be no achievement gap.

My teaching career quickly disabused me of these notions. Even in the direst classrooms, great teachers – I wasn’t one, by the way – could make tremendous gains with students by setting high expectations and emphasizing hard work, honesty and tough discipline.

That may not sound like an earth-shattering realization to you, but it was for me. It didn’t lead me directly to Almighty God, but it suggested that there were gradations of character in all human circumstances. That there was great wisdom in old moralistic notions I used to sneer at. And, maybe, that there were permanent things about what makes all people tick. To judge the moral gradations implied some universal standard. And more often than not, that standard arose, not from anything external, but from a voice inside (a whisper in my case).

Well, as CS Lewis would ask: where did that whisper originate? And was it a coincidence that the other view – the one that said that morality is merely a function of power, history, biology, language and so on – gave me an alibi for shutting out the whisper when it became inconvenient?

If there were differences among individuals – if some ideas about right and wrong were better than others – the same held for nations. I’d spent enough time in the US and Iran to tell the difference. Ideologies that saw citizens as infinitely malleable to the whims of the state – modern political Islam is one of them – were capable of any monstrosity. Whereas societies that treated man as inherently dignified, while far from perfect, fostered genuine human flourishing. They were manifestly more pleasant to live in.

Well, where did the West get this curious notion that human beings have an inherent dignity that overrides the whims of Pharaoh? Recognising the Judeo-Christian foundations of the West didn’t make me a Christian, of course. But it helped. If I enjoyed the beauty and ordered liberty I saw around me, then I had to give credit to the ideals that gave birth to it. You couldn’t have one without the other. The beauty and order reflected an underlying truth. It wasn’t my truth, but I no longer lightly dismissed faith.

If pressed back then, I would say: “I don’t have the gift of faith, but I profoundly respect people of faith and their contributions, etc etc.” It was a sort of reverent boilerplate that I’d perfected for the occasion.

It wasn’t true. And this brings me to the second problem I ran into with my materialism. All along, going back to that 12-year-old profession of atheism, when I really wanted something or when I was in trouble, I’d recite the few Koranic verses I knew. Or, more often, I’d supplicate a non-denominational Almighty in the sky. Then, once the desired thing was obtained or trouble past, I’d feel a bit silly and return to my materialist certainties.

My hunger for God persisted, though, and I’d feel the pangs most acutely in moments of great shame. My life’s overall trajectory was upward, but it was marked by bursts of dangerous anger and self-destructive behaviour. Shame begat shame, and the cycle repeated itself, even as I went from material success to success. I needed something or someone to break the cycle.

Twice following bouts of heavy drinking in my early 20s I found myself instinctively, almost spontaneously, going to Catholic Mass. I really couldn’t tell you why, but I just sat in the back pews and felt waves of peace wash over me – without having any clue as to what was going on.

There was no definitive moment that led from those early experiences with the Mass to my knocking on a priest’s door and asking him to instruct me earlier this year. There were no visions or sudden epiphanies.

Somewhere along the way, I resolved to be honest with myself, if not others, about my need for Almighty God.

One milestone was Benedict XVI’s visit to America in 2008. I was deeply impressed by his ministry and remember thinking to myself that this was a very holy man.

I picked up his book JESUS OF NAZARETH. It went over my head, mostly because my grasp of Scripture was still terribly spotty, and you can’t make sense of Jesus of Nazareth without knowing the Bible. I’d read the Passion story in one of the Gospels as an undergraduate and Robert Alter’s marvellous translation of the Pentateuch after college. That was it.

The one thing that stayed with me from Benedict XVI’s book was the Pope’s profound meditation on the idea that Almighty God had become man and entered our history – which is to say, the central mystery of Christianity. Et incarnatus est.

Making some sense of the Incarnation “unlocked”, if you will, the civilisational glories of the West and imbued them with real meaning for me.

Take Caravaggio’s The Denial of St Peter, my favourite painting, a work that can bring me to tears. I could have told you all about Caravaggio’s tumultuous life, spoken at length about why the painting is considered a masterpiece, and recounted the basics about the events he was portraying.

But then I came to understand why any of this mattered: that the Person whom St Peter is denying isn’t just his great friend and teacher, but the very God Himself, God from God, who has entered our fallen world. And whose greatest act is to endure humiliation, be spat upon, crucified and even denied by his friends.

The beauty of the painting became, for me, a sign of the underlying truth. The story of the three denials, in other words, was no longer just a moving narrative, but part of an event upon which all of cosmic history pivots. More than that: an event and an idea that shook me to my core.

Still, I continued aestheticising my spirituality. Among friends I’d sometimes inject Christian themes into the conversation only to quickly add: “You know, I don’t take this stuff to be true – but it is all very beautiful, isn’t it? It’s been a civilising force, no?”

St Peter had nothing on me in the denial department. Until one day I stopped denying.

You may still ask: why Catholicism? Well, I dabbled for a couple of years with Evangelical Christianity. Catholics don’t exactly send you text messages asking: “Would you and your wife like to join us for Sunday service?” Evangelicals do. [True! The one thing one must acknowledge about most evangelicals is how enthusiastic most of them seem to be about their faith and how they constantly try to win others to their faith by direct and active solicitation. Our beloved pope, of course, calls such solicitation 'proselytism' which he considers a major NO-NO for Catholics and bizarrely enjoins us all not to do!]

My mother was Born Again a few years ago, and as a journalist, I would occasionally write about persecuted Christians in Iran and the Arab world. One of my sources, a conservative Evangelical activist who campaigns for the persecuted Church, became a great source of encouragement in my Christian journey. In the end, though, I couldn’t do anything with Evangelical Christianity. I admired Evangelicals, but their theology didn’t satisfy. I couldn’t just blink and conclude “I’ve been saved.”

Life experience had led me to see the Christian idea of the Fall, and our Lord’s gift of radical repentance, as the most sensible solution to the brokenness all around me. That much was clear. But with Catholicism there was the added assurance that came with two millennia of continuous authority.

The Church’s hierarchical character, which so repelled my Evangelical friends, was one of its attractions for me. It meant that, having seen off a thousand heresies, Rome would be less likely to permit the Christian idea to be distorted by the passing fads of the day. And those fads – from leftist politics to “mindfulness” to Indian banana treatments – looked like so many third-rate substitutes for Catholic sacramental life.

Then there was the liturgy. I longed for worship that gave full expression to the mysteries of the Christian faith. The Cross had to be there, but also our Lord’s crucified body – with the pierced side, and the bloodied hands, the scourged and welted back, and the thorns cutting into the forehead. The sacrifice had to be re-staged, and His Mother had to be there, too, because she was our link to His divinity, to His becoming flesh. I longed for the Mass, in other words.

So I returned to the Mass. And eventually I knocked on that priest’s door and told him that I wanted to become a Catholic. “OK,” he said simply. “I shall instruct you.” Now, I can pray, more often than not without feeling a shred of hypocrisy, “Hail, Mary, full of grace …” And add with confidence: “Fr Hamel, pray for us.”

October 20, 2016 headlines

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October 21, 2016 headlines

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Apropos the Bergoglio Vatican's China diplomacy:

Vatican ‘will recognise’
four state-appointed Chinese bishops
by David V Barrett

Friday, 21 Oct 2016

A breakthrough may be near in the long-running dispute between the Vatican and China over the ordination of bishops.

According to the news agency Reuters, the Vatican will recognise at least four Chinese bishops who were appointed by the Chinese government without the consent of the Pope, and who have until now been considered illegitimate by the Holy See. This follows a meeting in mid-August between some of these bishops and representatives of the Vatican.

For over six decades the Chinese Communist Party has contested the right of the Vatican to appoint new bishops to serve the 10 million Catholics in the country. Instead China has appointed bishops who have not been approved by the Church, while “underground” bishops ordained by the Church have risked arrest and imprisonment.

The four bishops who sources say will be recognised are Joseph Ma Yinglin, the bishop of Kunming in Yunnan province; Guo Jincai, bishop of Chengde in Hebei province near Beijing; Yue Fusheng, bishop of Harbin in the northern Heilongjiang province; and Tu Shihua, bishop of Puqi in Hunan province.

Under the draft agreement, new bishops in China will be chosen by local clergy, with the Pope making the final appointment. The Pope will have the power to veto a candidate, for instance on ethical grounds; at least two of the bishops still not recognised by the Church have girlfriends or children.

There are still issues to be resolved. Some 30 bishops recognised by the Vatican work in the “underground” Church, and risk persecution by the state. The Vatican hopes that these bishops will be recognised by the Chinese government.

Of the 100 dioceses on the Chinese mainland, around 30 are without a bishop, and around the same number have a bishop aged over 75.

Although the agreement on the bishops is a major development in relations between the Church and China, it is understood that the topic of full diplomatic relations is not being discussed.

Mons. Andre-Joseph Leonard water-barraged by a bare-breasted Femen...

This heroic prelate would have been
made cardinal under any other pope
by Jan Bentz


October 21, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) — The recent announcement of a consistory of Cardinals in November seems to seal the deal: Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard, the heroically faithful former archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, will be the first head of that See in 200 years not to be appointed cardinal.

Instead, Francis appears to have waited to appoint Léonard's more progressive successor, Archbishop Jozef De Kesel, who will be made cardinal next month.

According to tradition, Léonard would have been eligible to get a red hat some time after the 80th birthday of his predecessor, Godfried Danneels, in June 2013, only months after Francis's election to the papacy. [The unwritten rule is that a diocese cannot have more than one cardinal elector, and cardinals lose the right to vote in a conclave once they turn 80.]

Given the historical status of his archdiocese and the fidelity of his service, Léonard seemed to be one of the most likely candidates to receive the honor, and yet Pope Francis consistently passed him over. [But it's simply naive to think that those factors would have been in Leonard's favor at all where JMB is concerned. To begin with, Leonard is the polar opposite in everything of Danneels, one of Bergoglio's grand electors and a notorious progressivist long before anyone ever paid any attention to Bergoglio's episcopal record in Argentina. In many ways, Leonard is the model of a Ratzingerian cardinal, while Danneels is the prototype of the Bergoglian cardinal. It would have taken a miracle for Bergoglio ever to name Leonard a cardinal. And stuff tradition! If the present Bishop of Rome does not even think the Patriarch of Venice deserves a red hat, why would he give one to the Archbishop of Brussels? To begin with, both Brussels and Venice are in what was once the heartland of Catholicism in Europe - hardly 'peripheries' in the Bergoglian sense.]

A Dutch Catholic, Mark de Vries, is right in quoting the French interview book in which Léonard speaks about the situation, prior to the recent announcement of the consistory. Asked if we was hurt by not being made a Cardinal, Léonard answered:

---

Hurt is too big a word. But it did surprise me since it is a tradition of two centuries. In the past, there have been many archbishops of Mechelen who were never Cardinals, but for two centuries it has become a sort of tradition. Should that remain so? When I thought about it, I told myself it didn’t. It is clear that the current Pope wants to appoint cardinals from countries which never had Cardinals to underline their importance, to not have a College of Cardinals, which is too Euro- or Americano-centric. I think that is a good thing...

It was a little surprising. It is a delicate thing to say about myself, but many have said so in my place: pastorally and intellectually, I have done work which few archbishops have managed. […] As far as I am concerned, I have completed my task in a rather original way. […] In short, [not receiving a cardinal’s hat] surprised me, disappointed me a little, but I got over it easily.

---

The Belgian prelate served in office from February 27, 2010, until June 1, 2015. Pope Francis named his successor, the progressive De Kesel, who made headlines by closing a priestly fraternity instituted by Léonard shortly after taking office. Now De Kesel is rewarded with the red hat.

Though Brussels has fallen into the hands of De Kesel, a protege of the notorious Danneels, Archbishop Léonard can look back on his own impressive heritage. As a learned philosopher and critic of Hegel, he became a member of the International Theological Commission and consequently a consultant for the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith.

At the same time, he has been an enduring witness of the faith and morality in the public sphere.

One of his first tasks was facing the monumental crisis of sexual abuse cases under his predecessor, Cardinal Danneels. During the investigation by police in the case of the sexual abuse of a child, offices of the diocese were raided. The investigation centered around Roger Vangheluwe, then Bishop of Bruges, who stepped down from office after having admitted to having sexually abused a young boy during the time when Cardinal Danneels was Primate of the Belgian Church.

Showing support for Léonard’s efforts to bring clarity to the situation, Pope Benedict addressed a letter to him in which he said:

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At this sad moment, I express my special closeness and solidarity to you, dear Brother Bishops, and all the bishops of the Church in Belgium. […] Thus I hope that justice takes its course, to guarantee fundamental rights of individuals and institutions, while respecting the victims, without preconditions, in recognition of those committed to work with [this Ordinance] and rejection of everything that obscures the noble tasks assigned to it.

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Archbishop Léonard also was a clear voice in defense of the Church's most controversial moral teachings, including those against homosexuality and the use of birth control. For this, he was reprimanded by Deputy Prime Minister Laurette Onkelinx after his appointment as well as by gay activists throughout his time in office.

Léonard explained that the Church does not teach that AIDS is a “punishment from God,” but rather that this “epidemic is sort of intrinsic justice, not at all a punishment.” He continued, explaining that homosexuals who are infected with AIDS have to admit that it might be a consequence of their sexual behavior. At the same time, he insisted that “HIV carriers merit respect” and “must not suffer discrimination,” as an HIV/AIDS activist website reported.

At the same time, Léonard refused to be publicly silenced regarding his stance on homosexuality. He repeatedly called it an “imperfectly developed state of human sexuality which contradicts its [sexuality’s] inner logic.” For these clear words, he was charged with homophobia under Belgium’s “Anti-Discrimination Act” of 2003.

Shocking were the video images of topless FEMEN activists who drenched Léonard with water while he participated in a philosophical discussion with Guy Haarscher on the subject of blasphemy and freedom of speech at the University of Brussels. His witness was inspiring: the Archbishop remained silent in prayer during the whole attack.

Although the red hat of the Cardinals will not crown his head, for his unceasing public testimony and achievements in office — Archbishop Léonard has certainly shown his willingness to spill his heart’s blood for the mission of the Church. He will not remain unrewarded.

Belatedly, but not too much, I post Phil Lawler's commentary on the Tornielli-Galeazzi 'hit list' of who they [and apparently,
the Bergoglio Vatican and not unlikely, JMB himself] consider to be this pope's 'enemies' for simply being critical of some of his
statements and actions...

A Vatican enemies list?
By Phil Lawler

Oct 19, 2016

Last week the Vatican Insider — ordinarily a solid source of news and reasonable analysis from Rome — published a remarkable piece with an inflammatory headline, “Catholics who are anti-Francis but love Putin.” [More importantly, the piece was not simply a Vatican Insider initiative - it was a carryover from the Insider's mother publication, the nationally published La Stampa of Turin, which published it conspicuously last week complete with a diagram of the implied conspiracy surrounding Bergoglio by motley critics said to be targetting him simply because they do not like him - i.e., they have no other reason for their criticisms - and, a whopping non sequitur and sweeping statement with little basis, because they happen to admire Vladimir Putin.]

The article seeks to convey the impression that there is a conspiracy against Pope Francis. “The attack against Francis is global,” the authors write, a bit breathlessly.

The authors lump together disparate groups and individuals, with very different ideas and priorities, as if they formed a united front of opposition to the papacy. All those who have questioned public statements by Pope Francis are seen as “enemies,” not as loyal critics.

As its title suggests, the article smears the Pope’s critics with the claim that they are more enthusiastic about a Russian strongman than about the Vicar of Christ.

The authors, Giacomo Galeazzi and Andrea Tornielli, are not ordinarily prone to sensationalism. They are respected reporters for La Stampa, with solid Vatican sources. Tornielli in particular has frequently broken important news stories, demonstrating that he has access to ranking insiders. [The more important point Lawler misses is that from Day 1 of this pontificate, Tornielli - whose personal ties with Bergoglio go back - quickly proved himself to be the new pope's #1 admirer, advocate and defender in the media. Entirely as if he had not been, until the day before, one of the 'staunchest Ratzingerians' covering and reporting on the Vatican.]

Most disquieting of all, it seems likely that what Galeazzi and Tornielli wrote reflects what they have heard from their contacts in the Roman Curia. If that is the case, then some of the people surrounding Pope Francis believe that the Pontiff is the victim of a budding conspiracy. Having adopted the paranoid style, they see enemies wherever there is resistance to their agenda.

Pope Francis undoubtedly has his critics, as does any public figure. The Vatican Insider fails to distinguish among them, to recognize that they differ not only in their tone (some are harsh and hostile, others cautious and respectful) but also in their prescriptions. The result is an analysis that collapses under its own weight.

After suggesting the existence of a conspiracy, the piece quotes sociologist Massimo Introvigne as saying that the effort against Pope Francis “is not successful because it is not united.” [If it is 'not successful' at all, then why bother about it? It should be nothing but an insignificant fly on an infinitesimal wall in the multiverse of Bergoglio's phenomenal popularity.]

No, of course it is not united! Someone who worries about the pastoral consequences of Amoris Laetitiae does not thereby repudiate the Vatican II stand on religious freedom; someone who has reservations about open borders does not necessarily long for the return of Pope Benedict XVI. The element of conspiracy exists only in the minds of the writers — and, again, perhaps their sources inside the Vatican.

On the list of papal “enemies” identified by Vatican Insider, possibly the most curious entry involves Chinese Catholics who are worried about the state of current negotiations between the Vatican and Beijing.

Here it is very difficult to see how someone could be registered as an “enemy” of the Holy Father, since Pope Francis has made only a few circumspect comments about those negotiations. Nevertheless it seems clear that someone(s) inside the Vatican are unhappy with those who publicize the worries of the ‘underground’ Church in China, and remind us of the dangers of yielding to a regime that is determined to control the Church.

Think about that. The Vatican is negotiating with China. The talks are secret; no official stands have been taken, except in the most general terms. Friends of the Church in China are urging the negotiators to be mindful of the concerns of Chinese Catholics who have already suffered so much for their faith.

Why would that sort of urging be seen as a sign of opposition — unless the negotiators are, indeed, prepared to sell out the interests of the ‘underground’ Church? And why would it be seen as opposition to the Pope, who has not spoken on the issue and has presumably not been presented with an agreement to approve or reject, unless the negotiators are wrapping themselves in the mantle of papal authority?

Father Bernardo Cervellera, whose AsiaNews service appeared on this Vatican enemies list, reacted strongly with his own essay about The “enemies” of Pope Francis. First he defended the attention that his agency has paid to the Catholics who are acting outside the law in China:

---

If I were Pope Francis I would appreciate my Cardinals telling me about the problems that these Christian suffer who are ... very much on the peripheries, the face of the suffering Christ, part of my flock for which I have to give my life.... Unfortunately Pope Francis has few friends of this caliber.

---

The Pope, Father Cevellera notes, “does not need public defenders.” Still less does he need supporters who will dismiss all critics as hostile and presume all reservations about papal statements and initiatives are motivated by hostility. As Father Cervellera puts it, in a ringing conclusion to his defense: “You can also betray a person with too much applause.”

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/10/2016 03:40]

A matter of perspective

I am sure there will always be sanctimonious souls who would fault Benedict XVI (but not John Paul II, Paul VI, John XXIII, Pius XII and earlier popes) for having used the Apostolic Palace in Castel Gandolfo unfailingly - during the eight summers that he was pope, as well as for shorter visits to recharge himself after the strenuous papal activities in Holy Week culminating in Easter, and of course, his first two months after his retirement as pope, and even for two weeks that first summer of his retirement.

I have used an old banner from 2013 to illustrate an era of four centuries which ended yesterday when the entire Apostolic Palace in Castel Gandolfo, including what used to be the Pope's private rooms, became a revenue-earning museum for the Bergoglio Pontificate.

And to give some perspective to the exaggerated and patently false descriptions used in the media to describe the papal rooms in CG, I first post pictures provided to the world in Sept 2014 when National Geographic dedicated an entire issue to a breathless hagiography of the then still-new pope.

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PAPA BERGOGLIO'S 3-ROOM PERSONAL SUITE AT CASA SANTA MARTA
From National Geographic Magazine's Sept. 2014 reportage


Bedroom, sitting room and study.

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The rooms given to the pope probably correspond to the equivalent of the royal suite or presidential suite - and properly so - in Casa Santa Marta, a four-star hotel. But one can be almost sure that the new pope, at the time, may have insisted to stay in the same one-person bedroom he occupied as a cardinal elector, but security and practical considerations made that a non-starter.

Also, he may since have replaced the hotel bed with a basic hospital bed or even an army cot (with a good mattress because of his arthritis/sciatica problems, for which reason he would not be using even simpler sleeping arrangements like a futon or a sleeping bag), but if he did, we would probably have photos of that by now.

Beatrice lifted the following photos from a publication on Castel Gandolfo by the Fondazione Vaticana Joseph Ratzinger-Benedetto XVI. They speak for themselves:

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THE POPE'S PRIVATE ROOMS IN CASTEL GANDOLFO
AS THEY WERE WHEN BENEDICT XVI OCCUPIED THEM AS POPE




Bedroom, private study, and part of the private library.

The private chapel.

The Sala Svizzera, below, was the main room used by the popes till Benedict XVI to receive official delegations and large private audiences.

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Do not forget how AFP reported the makeover of the Apostolic Residence in CG into a revenue-earning museum:

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Pope Francis has definitively renounced the splendors of his summer palace in Castel Gandolfo, 25 km southeast of Rome, by opening its private rooms to tourists, the Vatican announced Friday.

The Argentine pope, champion of simplicity, had already rejected from the start the sumptuous papal apartment in the Vatican's Apostolic Palace, preferring to occupy three rooms of a residence in the little city state....

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What does it say of media reporting today when the world's second largest news agency can perpetrate urban myths with the strategic use of a couple of words that are patently overwrought and simply wrong?
-
P.S. Something else that none of the Vaticanistas ever brought up - when the whole world was intoning Hallelujah and Hosannah to the glories of the humblest pope there ever was, for refusing to live in the papal apartment of the Vatican Apostolic Palace: Benedict XVI himself lived in Casa Santa Marta for three months following his election (April to mid-July) until he went to Les Combes for his first two-week summer vacation as Pope and then to Castel Gandolfo in August and September. He did not move in to the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican until he returned from Castel Gandolfo in October - because in the meantime, the papal apartment had to be renovated for normal use from the necessary adaptations made to it in the final years of John Paul II, when it had to serve also as a medical facility, including an ICU for immediate emergency care. Not that B16, or the media, made any big deal out of it, because it was truly no big deal....

Pope in Sweden could break ground
on inter-communion, bishop says
by Austen Ivereigh

October 21, 2016

The English bishop William Kenney is a key figure in the official Catholic-Lutheran dialogue, and will be with Pope Francis in Sweden at the end of the month. He believes unity is a matter of decades away, and it's possible that Francis may use the trip to make a gesture on inter-communion.

To describe English bishop William Kenney as an “auxiliary of Birmingham” doesn’t capture the depth and range of his longstanding roles in pan-European church bodies - for two terms, for example, he was president of Caritas Europe, and he played a key role in organizing relief efforts for former Soviet countries following the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Next week he will be part of a small, inner core at the joint Catholic-Lutheran commemoration of the five-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation for which Francis will be going to Sweden. It’s the first visit by any pope to Scandinavia since John Paul II’s 1989 visit, which Kenney, incidentally, coordinated.

A fluent Swedish-speaker who spent 37 years in Sweden, Kenney - who also speaks good German - has long been involved with ecumenical dialogues at the inter-Nordic level, especially in the formal dialogue between Catholics and Lutherans.

In 2013 he was appointed by the Holy See as co-chair of the international dialogue between the Lutheran World Federation and the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. [i.e., he ought to have an inside track to the pope, and what he 'predicts' for Lund ought to have some basis.]

[Originally, I was planning not to post the interview part of the report, until I read through it with increasing appallment at all the half-truths and misleading statements made by both Ivereigh and Kenney which have to be read to see how grievous and alarming the faux-ecumenical spirit is today in the church of Bergoglio.]

Recently he sat down with Crux in London to talk through the background to the event, the dialogue that’s expected to take place, and what Pope Francis might do or say to take it to a new level.

The Anglicans were recently in Rome to celebrate 50 years of relations and ecumenical dialogue. The dialogue with the Lutherans has been going on since the 1960s. How would you compare the two?
They’re the two big dialogues that are going on. Both are of the same character, in the sense that not everyone in the Anglican Church is signed up to the Anglican one, and certainly not everyone in the Lutheran Church is signed up to the Lutheran one - there is another Lutheran body, apart from the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), but the LWF is biggest.

But I would suggest that the Lutheran dialogue is nearer to us than the Anglican one is, even doctrinally. As the dialogues go, it has been quite successful.
The dialogue with the Lutherans since the 1960s led to the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. The things that we thought caused the Reformation have been taken away - the excommunication of the Lutherans was lifted, the condemnation of the Catholics were lifted. That is the formal Churches’ position now, it is not just a theological proposition. [The mutual excommunication - as comical as that sounds - was not among 'the things that caused the Reformation', but a consequence of the Reformation. Is Kenney denying that Luther's outright apostasy and increasingly hysterical heresy left him no choice but formal schism????]

There are those who say this has already achieved unity; it is certainly a major step forward, and it has removed most of the problems of the Reformation. [Excuse me, is that then the position of Bergoglio???]

Since then we’ve been trying to find out what it means. It’s like when the Holy Spirit does anything [the Holy Spirit is so abused: everything the hierarchy wish to justify about their statements and actions is attributed to him!] - there’s this huge bomb, and then you try to find out what happened. That’s what we’re in the process of doing at the moment.

The current dialogue, for example, is about the effects of baptism. There are serious Lutheran theologians who say that once you recognize baptism, which we do, then the Eucharist follows automatically, and so we should have inter-communion. That needs discussing.

Of course, some Lutherans don’t sign up to the declaration, and there are Catholics who don’t sign up to it either, but it is a major step forward. The issues which are still left, sexuality and women priests, are the ones that come up in modern times; they’re not the Reformation issues. [OF COURSE NOT! Kenney does not seem to think that the major Reformation issues are many and have to do with essential doctrine (that they do not acknowledge Trans-substantiation, for example, is a MAJOR MAJOR ISSUE by itself) and with many Catholic practices including the Mass and the institution of the Papacy itself that the Reformation ridiculed.]

The women priests question is complicated, because some of the women priests I meet we have no problem with, because what they consider as priesthood has almost nothing to do with what we consider as priesthood. I have received into the Church former Lutheran women priests who, in all honesty, simply wanted to preach, it had nothing to do with sacramental life. [Kenney at least sees that!]

The consensus of the 1999 document on justification stated, if I’ve understood it correctly, that the reasons for the Catholics condemning the Protestant positions and vice-versa no longer hold, and if ever each Church did hold the position that the other said they did, what is now true is that neither Church no longer holds that position. In other words, the Reformation was all a big misunderstanding!
That’s a good popular summary, yes. Would Martin Luther have been excommunicated today? The answer is no, he probably wouldn’t. [I am in no position to mount any canonical arguments to dispute Kenny on that for now, but did Luther even need to be excommunicated when he apostasized himself? Kenny seems to ignore all of Luther's statements that he was superior to Augustine or Aquinas and that there had been no bishop more outstanding than he was in 1500 years of Church history.] And he did not want to split the Church - he came to that, but it’s not where he began.

Of course, you’ll find certain Catholics and certain Lutherans still claiming the other holds those positions, but they are not representative of the mainstream positions of the Churches. The document was approved by Rome, which binds Catholics whether they like it or not; the Lutherans are made up of about 100 churches, and there were about 37 who didn’t, back then, sign up to it. Some have come into line since.

When you read ‘From Conflict to Communion,’ the joint document summarizing that dialogue which has been issued to prepare both Churches for the commemoration, it is quite extraordinary how much convergence there is.

And that’s why some people say we’re there, or almost there.
Of course, Luther would have been very shocked by homosexuality and women’s issues. Ecclesiology remains a key issue. But overall, we’re getting there, and this will inevitably lead to very painful decisions on both sides - about structure, about organizations and things like that.

With the document on justification, the central element of Protestant identity was taken away. Suddenly you can no longer define yourself against the other. I think we’re getting to the part of Catholic-Lutheran dialogue where unity will become a practical possibility, within decades. [In which once again Kenney reduces the Church's differences with the Protestants to merely 'justification'.]

Which raises, of course, what we mean by Christian unity.
The Holy See’s position is that we are working for “visible unity”, without defining what it is. But I can confidently say that’s more than what we’ve got now.

I think the Holy See is very sincere about that objective. If you go back to John Paul II’s Ut Unum Sint, when he asks the other Churches how they would like to see the papacy exercised, it’s because he wants all Christians to acknowledge the pope. He wasn’t saying they had to acknowledge the papacy as it is now, but to have some discussion about what it could be.

He said, “write to me, tell me what you want,” but they didn’t - or only very few. I can remember it took me about two years to get the Swedish church to even answer that.

Francis in Evangelii Gaudium quotes that passage from Ut Unum Sint and says nothing happened with it. What is Francis doing now, or could he do, to make that invitation more concrete to Lutherans?
He could obviously repeat it. He could, if he had the resources, get the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity to follow it up - we need to put skilled people onto it. Certainly Francis’s embrace of synodality has gone down very well with the Lutherans.

‘From Conflict to Communion’ describes that what will happen in Lund is not a celebration, because we don’t celebrate division within Christianity, so what is it about? [Mr. Ivereigh, let not a brown-skinned Filipina tell you this about your native language, but when you commemorate a jubilee, that is a celebration because a jubilee is, by definition, a celebration! Enough of word games!] Is it a celebration of the journey the two Churches have been on towards unity? And why do you think Rome has agreed to kick off the Protestant world’s commemoration of the Reformation in Sweden?
I do know that there was a lot of talk in advance about whether the pope would come, and whether he would take part. But there has always been a Catholic presence at these Reformation commemorations - at least in recent times.

The pope coming, I think, is really his decision: as you know, he’s the man of the symbol, and the symbolic action of being there, whatever he says, is what will really matter.

Why Sweden? Because in 1947 the World Lutheran Federation was founded in Lund, and later went to Geneva. It’s important to note that the invitations are not from the Church in Sweden, they are from the LWF and from the Vatican. My invitation is signed by Cardinal Kurt Koch of the Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the chair of the Lutheran World Federation, Bishop Munib Younan.

So by speaking in Sweden, they are addressing all Lutherans everywhere?
That’s right. [But the Reformation has produced more than just Lutherans! Is it not being celebrated by all the other Protestant sects and denominations??? Why single out the Lutherans alone?]

Which brings us to one of the reasons for the commemoration - to assist with the reception of the document on justification, in other words, to help Lutherans and Catholics get behind it.
That’s right - to gain popularity and knowledge of it, and to say to each other, these Catholics are not as horrible as we thought, these Lutherans are not as horrible as we thought. And let’s get together. [Kenny speaks as though justification were the only theological-doctrinal difference between the Church and Luther-and-his-heirs, or at least the major one! Isn't the question of Trans-substantiation far more essential and substantive??? Or the role and significance of Mary, for instance? I think the Anglicans, because of work done in ARCIC, have been coming around to accepting her almost as much as Catholics do, but I don't think any of the non-Anglican Protestants are anywhere near that. ]

Most Catholics - and no doubt most Lutherans - have never read the document, and may wonder, ‘how does this affect us, in the parish?’ How would you summarize its importance for the person in the pew?
I think it’s very important that people know that the Reformation was a great misunderstanding, we all got it wrong, on both sides, and we’ve lifted excommunications and condemnations and apologized. So we can all be friends. [So is that Bergoglio's core message for this farce of an upcoming celebration? The Reformation was simply a great misunderstanding, the popes and the Church at the time did not need the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation, and we can simply shrug off all the anti-Catholic venom and vitriol of Luther and his heirs as a misunderstanding???

Moreover, BOTH KENNY & IVEREIGH ARE BEING DELIBERATELY MISLEADING ABOUT THIS DOCUMENT ON JUSTIFICATION - by making it seem, to begin with, that justification was the major issue dividing Catholics and Lutherans, which is far from the truth. Just read the papal bull that excommunicated Luther for a list of these issues. They completely overlook the fact that the document was approved by the Vatican under the auspices of the PCPCU (Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity), but not the CDF, and is therefore not a magisterial document, though a clarification was issued jointly by the PCPCU and the CDF, which is magisterial, entitled RESPONSE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH TO THE JOINT DECLARATION ON THE DOCTRINE OF JUSTIFICATION.
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/documents/rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_01081998_off-answer-catholic_en.html
which says in its opening paragraphs:

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It can certainly be affirmed that a high degree of agreement has been reached, as regards both the approach to the question and the judgement it merits. It is rightly stated that there is "a consensus in basic truths of the doctrine of justification".

The Catholic Church is, however, of the opinion that we cannot yet speak of a consensus such as would eliminate every difference between Catholics and Lutherans in the understanding of justification. The Joint Declaration itself refers to certain of these differences. On some points the positions are, in fact, still divergent.

So, on the basis of the agreement already reached on many aspects, the Catholic Church intends to contribute towards overcoming the divergencies that still exist by suggesting, below, in order of importance, [B a list of points that constitute still an obstacle to agreement between the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation on all the fundamental truths concerning justification.

The Catholic Church hopes that the following indications may be an encouragement to continue study of these questions in the same fraternal spirit that, in recent times, has characterized the dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation.

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Which might lead some to say, if not ‘so what?’ then at least, ‘and now what?’
I think you’ve got to start now moving towards that visible unity. There’s no elephant in the room any longer. The elephant has gone back to the jungle and we’re left staring at each other in the same room, not really sure about each other. I think much of the ecumenical stuff now has to be at the local level. One of the big issues - and it will be interesting to see if Francis even mentions it - is inter-communion.

He’s already made a gesture about that, of course, when he visited a Lutheran church in Rome and, during a question-and-answer session, suggested to a Lutheran woman married to a Catholic man that perhaps, if her conscience permitted, she could receive communion in her husband’s church.

He did, but we’re not sure what it meant. He’s never clarified that. There are respected Lutheran theologians who will say that by the very fact that you acknowledge baptism, which we already do, that automatically gives entrance to the Eucharist. That is an accepted theological position, which the Catholic Church does not accept but it respects. That is a way forward.

Already we allow Lutherans and other Protestants who can’t approach their own ministers, in certain circumstances, to receive - that’s allowed. So we can’t say at the same time that they don’t believe what we do. You can’t have it both ways.

You’ve got some Lutherans in Germany saying, because of this, that therefore we should withdraw our approval of the joint declaration, and you’ve got some Catholics in the United States who are saying therefore we should withdraw our recognition of Lutheran baptism. That is theological nonsense, and that is not Rome’s position - we recognize their baptism, and that’s not even open to discussion.

On the Eucharist, Lutherans have more or less the same doctrine as we have. ['More or less the same doctrine' when they do not believe in Trans-Substantiation???? You've got to be mindless to say that!] But you’ve got Lutheran priests with practices that suggest otherwise, but they’re not widespread.

But there is enough convergence for Francis to have made his still-not-entirely-clear gesture?
If I wanted Francis to cause a pleasant revolution in Lund, he would say Lutherans can, under certain circumstances without asking all the time, receive the Eucharist. That would be a major gesture. The sort of thing I would like to see is that in a so-called ecumenical marriage, the non-Catholic party can always go to Communion with his or her partner. That would be a major step forward, and it’s pastorally very desirable.

I wouldn’t want to say, and it won’t happen, that any Lutheran could receive at a Catholic Mass - we’re not there yet, and it would cause confusion. But if you were to say, anybody who is married to a Lutheran and they are both believing…these marriages exist, very much so.

Francis is famously impatient with theological dialogue. He’s not against it, but he’s convinced you need to act together to create spaces for the Holy Spirit to act, and that’s what will bring about the unity. Mission together, act for justice together, show mercy … that’s what brings about unity, and the theological dialogue will catch up. That was more or less the message with the Anglicans.
That’s right. I think the justice part is there already - I can’t remember having a disagreement with a Lutheran over justice and peace issues; there’s at least as much agreement as among Catholics.
Catholics and Lutherans often work together, issue joint declarations - for example, Caritas Internationalis and Swedish Church Aid. On South Sudan, we’re cooperating with the Swedish Church, for example.

We’re also beginning to get somewhere on evangelization and catechesis. The problem is always that we’re not quite teaching the same things yet. [Yet another singularly stupid statement from Kenny who allows his pro-Lutheran enthusiasms to obfuscate his reason. How can the Church agree to evangelization and catechesis by other entities who do not teach the truths of the one true Church of Christ?]

We’re certainly praying together - there’s a constant stream of invitations from both sides. And we’re long past the days of shouting at each other through newspapers. Nowadays you pick up the phone and say, ‘what the heck is going on?’ The relations between Catholic and Lutheran bishops are generally very good.

One of the concrete calls made at the end of ‘From Conflict to Communion’ is to jointly “rediscover the Gospel for our time.” That’s vague, but I’m guessing that it could mean acting together, for example, on refugees, on which Sweden has been exceptional - which is no doubt something Pope Francis will draw attention to.
I think we and Lutherans can say, right now, faced with this huge movement of people, what right do we have to keep people out who are poor and desperate? When our politicians tell us we’re the fifth largest economy in the world? We should be out on the byways, and inviting them in.

It’s interesting that, apart from Italy, which has been fantastic, the countries that have taken in most people are Lutheran. [Yeah, and look what the Muslims have been doing in Germany, as well as in Sweden and Norway and Denmark, for example!] They put the rest of us to shame. That might be something the pope wants to draw attention to. [Mons. Kenney, you put the rest of us Catholics ashamed that a Catholic bishop should make the mindless statements you have made. Of course, you are merely seeking to emulate your lord and master in the Vatican, who is at the root of so much that is 'evil' in the Church today.]