BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI



Development updates added to posting on the Four Cardinals' Letter on the preceding page.



November 15, 2016 HEADLINES

PewSitter


Canon212.com

Thanks to Steve Skojec for placing the right context on the Four Cardinals' Letter to the pope and Cardinal Burke's clear and firm statements on the rationale and rightness of the letter (see interview posted in full in the last post on the preceding page of the thread).

I had been too overwhelmed by the fact that Bergoglio holds all the power cards right now in the so-far-three-years-and-seven-months battle over the soul of the Church, to go beyond merely expressing the hope that the Four Cardinals' Letter will be a rallying point for all the faithful who wish to keep and uphold the deposit of faith as it was handed down to this pope on March 13, 2013, and not as he has so far rifled through it, handpicking long-treasured diamonds of doctrinal and pastoral truth to replace with eye-catching baubles catering to the tastes of CINOs....

Cardinal Burke’s groundbreaking interview
signals official resistance to this pope
by Steve Skojec

November 15, 2016

Cardinal Raymond Burke, one of the signatories of the so-called “Four Cardinals Letter,” gave an interview to Catholic Action in which he explained the reasons behind the letter and why it was time to take the step of releasing it to the public. I believe this interview is a major step in the direction of an official ecclesiastical action to oppose the errors of Pope Francis...

[Skojec proceeds to quote major excerpts from the interview, then proceeds with his comments.]

...There are always complaints that what the bishops and cardinals are doing is too little or too late. Nevertheless, I think this is an incredibly important development. Recall that the Church moves far more slowly than we are accustomed to in the information age where everything is so nearly instantaneous. Amoris Laetitia was only promulgated in April of this year. We are seven months into the fallout, and the steps being taken here are significant. Don’t let the gentleness of the language fool you.

A few thoughts:
- Cardinal Burke is documenting the obstinacy of Pope Francis in terms of his refusal to address “serious ambiguities that confuse people and can lead them into error and grave sin.” He gave all the same examples I did yesterday, and added the Declaration of Fidelity to the Church’s Teaching on Marriage and to Her Uninterrupted Discipline.
- He is making clear that this request for clarification follows a formal process: “There have been many other statements of concern regarding Amoris Laetitia, all of which have not received an official response from the Pope or his representatives. Therefore, in order to look for clarity on these matters, three other Cardinals and I used the formality of presenting fundamental questions directly to the Holy Father and to the Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.”
- He has outlined the history of Amoris Laetitia, has associated Francis directly with Kasper, has re-visted the deeply troubling mid-term relatio from the 2014 synod, has even mentioned his own removal from the synod process itself after 2014.
- He has positioned the adversarial relationship between the four cardinals and Pope Francis in relation to the fixed point of Christ and His teaching. “I, together with the other three Cardinals, are striving to be loyal to the Holy Father by being loyal to Christ above all. ” and “Rather than being a matter of disloyalty to the Pope, our action is deeply loyal to everything that the Pope represents and is obliged to defend in his official capacity.” He is signalling that the pope has a moral duty to defend Church teaching, not to innovate or depart from it.
- He is indicating that he and the other three cardinals are now performing their own duty, “which the Church has the right to expect of us.”

While some dislike the word “clarification,” Burke and the cardinals (and other bishops) who stand with him are asking Francis to state clearly what he believes.

“It would contradict the Faith if any Catholic, including the Pope, said that a person can receive Holy Communion without repenting of grave sin, or that living in a marital way with someone who is not his or her spouse is not a state of grave sin, or that there is no such thing as an act that is always and everywhere evil and can send a person to perdition.”

This statement indicates that they know he has contradicted the Faith, and if he does not recant but rather affirms this, then he will officially stand in opposition to the Faith.

I submit to you that these statements are indicative of something momentous. This could well be the prelude to something unprecedented: the challenging of a sitting pope for the crime of manifest, obdurate heresy. Remember that the “manifest and obdurate” parts are necessary to establish. As Michael Davies wrote in his essay, A Heretical Pope?

---

If, per impossibile, a pope became a formal heretic through pertinaciously denying a de fide doctrine, how would the faithful know that he had forfeited his office as he had ceased to be a Catholic?

It must be remembered that no one in the Church, including a General Council, has the authority to judge the Popes. Reputable authorities teach that if a pope did pertinaciously deny a truth which must be believed by divine and Catholic faith, after this had been brought to his attention by responsible members of the hierarchy (just as St. Paul reproved St. Peter to his face), a General Council could announce to the Church that the Pope, as a notorious heretic, had ceased to be a Catholic and hence had ceased to be Pope. [But who convenes this General Council, by what authority would it be convened, and who would compose it???]

It is important to note that the Council would neither be judging nor deposing the Pope, since it would not possess the authority for such an act. It would simply be making a declaratory sentence, i.e. declaring to the Church what had already become manifest from the Pope’s own actions.

This is the view taken in the classic manual on Canon Law by Father F.X. Wernz, Rector of the Gregorian University and Jesuit General from 1906 to 1914. This work was revised by Father P. Vidal and was last republished in 1952. It states clearly that an heretical Pope is not deposed in virtue of the sentence of the Council, but “the General Council declares the fact of the crime by which the heretical pope has separated himself from the Church and deprived himself of his dignity.“(7)

Other authorities believe that such a declaration could come from the College of Cardinals or from a representative group of bishops, while others maintain that such a declaration would not be necessary. [If there is no declaration, then doesn't everything continue as it is - with Bergoglio continuing to hold all the power cards???]

What all those who accept the hypothesis of an heretical pope are agreed upon is that for such a pope to forfeit the papacy his heresy would have to be “manifest”, as Saint Robert Bellarmine expressed it, that is notorious and public (notorium et palam divulgata).(8)

A notorious offence can be defined as one for which the evidence is so certain that it can in no way be either hidden or excused.(9) A pope who, while not being guilty of formal heresy in the strict sense, has allowed heresy to undermine the Church through compromise, weakness, ambiguous or even gravely imprudent teaching remains Pope, but can be judged by his successors, and condemned as was the case with Honorius I.

---

Cardinals Burke, Caffara, Brandmüller, and Meisner — along with their other as-yet unnamed supporters among the bishops — are giving Francis a way out. They are bringing “to his attention” as “responsible members of the hierarchy (just as St. Paul reproved St. Peter to his face)” the errors which he has fomented. (Remember, John XXII repented of his error after being confronted.)

This is no doubt not only for Francis’s good, but for the good of the countless souls who would be scandalized by any act of public deposition of a pope, and the massive schism that would at last break the Church apart on her many emergent fault lines.

If Francis continues to refuse to address this, these Cardinals, along with any other orthodox prelates yet remaining in the Church, will have no choice but to take action. Anything less will destroy their credibility as apostolic successors and shake the faith of countless souls in the indefectibility of the Church.

As one high-ranking member of the clergy confided to me recently, “Francis is an eclipse of the sun of Catholic truth.” It is long past time for the sun to come out again.

Does anyone really think that, in his hubris (to the point of thinking he can correct Jesus himself, or edit the Word of God to suit his personal agenda), this pope will ever admit any error in AL? And how would the orthodox hierarchy take action exactly, especially if they cannot muster a majority among the world's cardinals and bishops?

P.S. Cardinal Burke also gave an interview to Edward Pentin at NCRegister on the potential critical impulse that the Four Cardinals' Letter could mean for orthodox resistance to Jorge Bergoglio's performance of the Petrine ministry so far...



Cardinal Burke on the 'dubia' re AL:
‘Tremendous division’ warrants action
He elaborates about why four cardinals were impelled to seek
clarity about the papal exhortation’s controversial elements
by Edward Pentin

November 15, 2016

Four cardinals asked Pope Francis five dubia questions, or “doubts,” about the apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love) in a bid to clear up ambiguities and confusion surrounding the text. On Nov. 14, they went public with their request, after they learned that the Holy Father had decided not to respond to their questions.

In this exclusive interview with the Register, Cardinal Raymond Burke, patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, explains in more detail the cardinals’ aims; why the publication of their letter should be seen as an act of charity, unity and pastoral concern, rather than as a political action; and what the next steps will be, if the Holy Father continues to refuse to respond.

---

Your Eminence, what do you aim to achieve by this initiative?
The initiative is aimed at one thing only, namely the good of the Church, which, right now, is suffering from a tremendous confusion on at least these five points. There are a number of other questions as well, but these five critical points have to do with irreformable moral principles.

So we, as cardinals, judged it our responsibility to request a clarification with regard to these questions, in order to put an end to this spread of confusion that is actually leading people into error.

Are you hearing this concern about confusion a lot?
Everywhere I go I hear it. Priests are divided from one another, priests from bishops, bishops among themselves. There’s a tremendous division that has set in in the Church, and that is not the way of the Church. That is why we [must] settle these fundamental moral questions which unify us.

Why is Chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia of such particular concern?
Because it has been the font of all of these confused discussions. Even diocesan directives are confused and in error.

We have one set of directives in one diocese; for instance, saying that priests are free in the confessional, if they judge it necessary, to permit a person who is living in an adulterous union and continues to do so to have access to the sacraments — whereas, in another diocese, in accord with what the Church’s practice has always been, a priest is able to grant such permission to those who make the firm purpose of amendment to live chastely within a marriage, namely as brother and sister, and to only receive the sacraments in a place where there would be no question of scandal. This really has to be addressed.

But then there are the further questions in the dubia apart from that particular question of the divorced and remarried, which deal with the term “instrinsic evil,” with the state of sin and with the correct notion of conscience.

Without the clarification you are seeking, are you saying, therefore, that this and other teaching in Amoris Laetitia go against the law of non-contradiction (which states that something cannot be both true and untrue at the same time when dealing with the same context)?
Of course, because, for instance, if you take the marriage issue, the Church teaches that marriage is indissoluble, in accord with the word of Christ, “He who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery.” Therefore, if you are divorced, you may not enter a marital relationship with another person unless the indissoluble bond to which you are bound is declared to be null, to be nonexistent.

But if we say, well, in certain cases, a person living in an irregular marriage union can receive holy Communion, then one of two things has to be the case: Either marriage really is not indissoluble — as for instance, in the kind of “enlightenment theory” of Cardinal [Walter] Kasper, who holds that marriage is an ideal to which we cannot realistically hold people.

In such a case, we have lost the sense of the grace of the sacrament, which enables the married to live the truth of their marriage covenant — or holy Communion is not communion with the Body and Blood of Christ. Of course, neither of those two is possible. They contradict the constant teachings of the Church from the beginning and, therefore, cannot be true.

Some will see this initiative through a political lens and criticize it as a “conservative vs. liberal” move, something you and the other signatories reject. What is your response to such an accusation?
Our response is simply this: We are not taking some kind of position within the Church, like a political decision, for instance. The Pharisees accused Jesus of coming down on one side of a debate between the experts in Jewish Law, but Jesus did not do that at all.

He appealed to the order that God placed in nature from the moment of creation. He said Moses let you divorce because of your hardness of heart, but it was not this way from the beginning.

So we are simply setting forth what the Church has always taught and practiced in asking these five questions that address the Church’s constant teaching and practice.

The answers to these questions provide an essential interpretative tool for Amoris Laetitia. They have to be set forth publicly because so many people are saying: “We’re confused, and we don’t understand why the cardinals or someone in authority doesn’t speak up and help us.” [The wonder is that the four cardinals waited five months to take formal action with their letter to the pope, even if they had been among the most vocal and articulate in the objections they stated in numerous interviews and articles since AL was issued.]

It’s a pastoral duty?
That’s right, and I can assure you that I know all of the cardinals involved, and this has been something we’ve undertaken with the greatest sense of our responsibility as bishops and cardinals. But it has also been undertaken with the greatest respect for the Petrine Office, because if the Petrine Office does not uphold these fundamental principles of doctrine and discipline, then, practically speaking, division has entered into the Church, which is contrary to our very nature.

And the Petrine ministry, too, whose primary purpose is unity?
Yes, as the Second Vatican Council says, the Pope is the foundation of the unity of the bishops and of all the faithful.

This idea, for instance, that the Pope should be some kind of innovator, who is leading a revolution in the Church or something similar, is completely foreign to the Office of Peter. The Pope is a great servant of the truths of the faith, as they’ve been handed down in an unbroken line from the time of the apostles.

Is this why you emphasize that what you are doing is an act of charity and justice?
Absolutely. We have this responsibility before the people for whom we are bishops, and an even greater responsibility as cardinals, who are the chief advisers to the Pope. For us to remain silent about these fundamental doubts, which have arisen as a result of the text of Amoris Laetitia, would, on our part, be a grave lack of charity toward the Pope and a grave lack in fulfilling the duties of our own office in the Church.

Some might argue that you are only four cardinals, among whom you’re the only one who is not retired, and this is not very representative of the entire Church. In that case, they might ask: Why should the Pope listen and respond to you?
Numbers aren’t the issue. The issue is the truth. In the trial of St. Thomas More, someone told him that most of the English bishops had accepted the king’s order, but he said that may be true, but the saints in heaven did not accept it. That’s the point here.

I would think that even though other cardinals did not sign this, they would share the same concern. But that doesn’t bother me. Even if we were one, two or three, if it’s a question of something that’s true and is essential to the salvation of souls, then it needs to be said.

What happens if the Holy Father does not respond to your act of justice and charity and fails to give the clarification of the Church’s teaching that you hope to achieve?
Then we would have to address that situation. There is, in the Tradition of the Church, the practice of correction of the Roman Pontiff. It is something that is clearly quite rare. But if there is no response to these questions, then I would say that it would be a question of taking a formal act of correction of a serious error.

In a conflict between ecclesial authority and the Sacred Tradition of the Church, which one is binding on the believer and who has the authority to determine this?
What’s binding is the Tradition. Ecclesial authority exists only in service of the Tradition. I think of that passage of St. Paul in the [Letter to the] Galatians (1:8), that if “even an angel should preach unto you any Gospel other than that which we preached unto you, let him be anathema.”

If the Pope were to teach grave error or heresy, which lawful authority can declare this and what would be the consequences?
It is the duty in such cases, and historically it has happened, of cardinals and bishops to make clear that the Pope is teaching error and to ask him to correct it.

---

So Pentin raises the same questions I had earlier. It would seem that someone - perhaps the Four Cardinals - would have to rally together all cardinals and bishops who share their dubia and as a council, declare that the pope is in error on these points.

But how many of the 200+ cardinals and 5000+ Catholic bishops of the world would have to be in that council for its declarations to be taken 'seriously' and not just as a 'mass tantrum' by 'selfishly rigid neo-Pelagian adherents of the law' (never mind that the Law happens to be the Word of God]? And who will then be accused of provoking the 'rupture of unity' instead of seeking to promote unity (never mind that the man who has the primary task of preserving and promoting that unity provoked the rupture in the first place?]

Let us pray that enough cardinals and bishops will come to their senses to see that this pope's doctrinal errors have to be acknowledged and corrected, and that they have it in their collective power to do something about it.



Why hasn’t Pope Francis replied to the four cardinals’ letter?
They have asked for a yes-or-no answer on five fundamental
doctrinal points in AL. His silence is unsurprising.
by Dan Hitchens

Wednesday, 16 Nov 2016

In the Church as in politics, 2016 has been a year of anxiety, anger and sharp divisions. But whereas politics has had its moments of drama – the Brexit vote, the US election – the Church’s internal argument has been mostly confined to private discussions and the occasional leaked document.

Now, however, the controversy may be coming into the open. This week, in a highly unusual step, four cardinals revealed that they had written to the Pope asking for clarification of his recent exhortation Amoris Laetitia. Two months have gone by with no response. Now one of the four, Cardinal Burke, has told the National Catholic Register that if the Pope remains silent, they may have to take the highly unusual step of issuing him with a formal correction.

Readers of this magazine will be familiar with the divisions over Amoris Laetitia. They concern the moral law, the nature of the sacraments and the authority of previous teaching. But it comes down to the question: can remarried Catholics receive Communion if they aren’t living as brother and sister? [Hitchens misses the brunt of the Four Cardinals' dubia! This issue is simply one of five fundamental doctrinal questions raised that have to do with truth and morality.]

The Church has said no, since the first centuries. But in the last few decades there has been a movement to alter this teaching – and it now claims Amoris Laetitia as a source of support.

Cardinal Burke, along with Cardinals Carlo Caffarra, Walter Brandmüller and Joachim Meisner sent a request for clarification to the Pope in September. They received an acknowledgment but no reply, which they said they have taken as “an invitation to continue … the discussion, calmly, and with respect”, by making the appeal public. It is highly unusual for cardinals to go public like this. But then it is also unusual for a Pope not to reply to a letter of this kind. [I am sure someone like Roberto De Mattei has already done historical research on this, but 'unusual' seems to me to be a weak term to describe what is happening. 'Unprecedented' perhaps is more appropriate, at least in recent Church history. If we limit ourselves to the popes since the 20th century, when have any cardinals ever formally protested a pope's doctrinal statements? It is a measure of the gravity of Bergoglio's hubristic self-assertion - in which he feels free to edit the Word of God or deliberately 'interpret' it to suit his own purposes - that things have come to this pass.]

Dr Joseph Shaw, a spokesman for the 45 priests and theologians who have previously asked for clarification of Amoris Laetitia, describes the Pope’s silence as “very troubling”. The cardinals are “men or tremendous intellectual reputation and prestige, who have held some very important posts under more than one Pope”, he says, and their claim is a serious one: “that some of the interpretations of Amoris doing the rounds are incompatible with Scripture and Tradition.” [Does anyone not see that, above all, it is most discourteous of Bergoglio not to even acknowledge receiving the letter from the cardinals? In Spanish, one would call him maleducado (badly brought up). He could have written (or have one of his surrogates answer for him), "I got the letter, I have read your objections, but I choose to let the document Amoris laetitia speak for itself" - since as this item points out later, he cannot very well answer YES or NO to any of the questions.]

Amoris Laetitia only alludes to Communion for the remarried in the vaguest and most indirect terms imaginable. But this question has not gone away – partly because it involves so many other issues. Dr Michael Sirilla, Professor of Dogmatic and Systematic Theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville, says: “The grave confusion that has followed Amoris Laetitia involves fundamental goods of the Eucharist, matrimony, and the objective standards of moral good and evil.” [There you are, Mr. Hitchen!]

Proponents of Communion for the remarried argue that the Church’s moral teaching cannot be simply translated to its sacramental practice. Although the Church might consider an act gravely sinful – for instance, having sex outside a valid marriage – one has to examine the relationship in which the act took place. If it is loving and stable, that has to count for something, surely? So Communion discipline could be changed.

That has been the argument put forward over the last six months – most notably by the bishops of Buenos Aires in a draft document. A leaked letter from Pope Francis praised the bishops’ text.

Why didn’t the Pope openly praise the Argentine document? Perhaps because so many Catholics believe that the Church’s perennial doctrine here cannot be changed. St John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio presented the Church’s teaching as binding. A 1994 document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, signed by the future Benedict XVI, said the same.

Looking to that tradition, several bishops have said that Amoris Laetitia changes nothing. The bishops of Poland, Costa Rica, Alberta (in Canada) and elsewhere say that the divorced and remarried cannot receive Communion unless they refrain from sexual activity.

The two sides of the debate both point to Amoris as justifying their view. [But those who uphold traditional Catholic doctrine are using AL only by bending over backwards and arguing the negative - that 1) a papal document cannot possibly contradict the teaching of the Church, therefore it cannot be saying what it appears to say; and b) what it does say can be interpreted charitably as 'not opposing traditional teaching' in general.]

In Pascendi Dominici Gregis, Pius X said that one of the Pope’s chief roles is “to guard with the greatest vigilance the deposit of the faith delivered to the saints … There has never been a time when this watchfulness of the supreme pastor was not necessary to the Catholic body.” The four cardinals are looking to the Pope to be that guardian. [Despite all evidence to the contrary - that the guardian himself has been pilfering and tampering with that deposit of faith!]

As Dr Sirilla puts it, “Historically, a hallmark of Catholic doctrine has been its beautiful precision, directing souls to eternal salvation. Error is found rarely in the ordinary magisterium. Clarification is urgently needed now.”

The cardinals’ letter takes a traditional form: it asks the Pope to say whether certain teachings are still valid. It asks five questions, anticipating a yes or no answer. Among these questions are (to paraphrase) “Does the teaching on Communion for the remarried still stand?” and “Are intrinsically evil acts always wrong?”

The letter gave the Pope three options. He could answer “yes” to the questions – ie, confirm that previous teaching is still valid – but that seems unlikely given his past statements. He could answer “no” – but that would pit the Pope directly against the authoritative teachings of his predecessors.

So he has chosen the third option, which is to say nothing. The risk is that the controversy – what Dorothy Day, in another context, called “guerrilla warfare in the Church” – will continue.

Fr Edmund Waldstein, author of the Sancrucensis blog, says: “The uncertainty caused by Amoris Laetitia is a grave scandal. Since it is a public scandal, I think that that the cardinals were justified in making their dubia public.” [I don't think anyone - not even Bergoglio's myrmidons - could blame them for going public. After all, they have already individually argued their dubia previously and in public on several occasions in the past seven months, just not as a formal letter to the pope.]

Now that Cardinal Burke has suggested an official correction might be needed, this debate may be coming to a head. But it is unlikely to be settled for good until at least the next pontificate. [I don't know. God works in wondrous ways that we humans cannot discern nor predict.]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 16/11/2016 18:14]

So what's this about JMB partisans
threatening professors who do not
toe the Bergoglio line???

In fairness, I shall start out this post with the P.S. that Sandro Magister adds to his original 11/15/16 report on a frightening initiative that simply adds to the already overflowing deposit of questionable (to say the least) moves and statements by this pope or his surrogates.

---

POST SCRIPTUM – Publication of a letter from the so-called 'Osservatorio' (for Implementing Pope Francis's Reform of the Church) has stirred up a hornet's nest. And has led to identifying its authors - apparently, a handful of Lateran University alumni convinced that they acted meritoriously. But without any links to the Vatican nor to the new leadership imposed by the Pope on the University's John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family, who, in fact, have reacted with outrage.

There remains the question of how pervasive is the inquisitorial animosity against those who are out of line with the Bergoglian pontificate.

---

The English translation of the letter is from Rorate caeli, which preceded it with a scathing commentary that spares JMB no quarter and likens the so-called Osservatorio to a Vatican Gestapo or secret police. I will omit that but cite the rest of that foreword:

'Either defend Amoris Laetitia,
or you're in trouble'

November 15, 2016

...Sandro Magister reveals it today in his personal blog, and calls it a "Sodalitium Franciscanum", in reference to the "Sodalitium Pianum" (SP) St. Pius X supposedly established as an underground network to find Modernists infiltrated in the Church.

The main difference, of course, is that the supposed "SP" tried to do a good thing (that is, avoid the spread of errors and novelties that attempted against the Faith and Morals the Church has always professed), while the Pope's new Banana-Gestapo (like the actual Gestapo or the KGB) tries to do a bad thing: expel from Catholic institutions those who simply want to teach Catholic Faith and Morals as the Church has always taught them -- and warns all that they are being monitored secretly in their classrooms in order to toe the new pro-adultery and pro-cohabitation line.

Magister transcribed the letter received by faculty in the Pontifical Institute John Paul II for Studies on Marriage and the Family (linked to the Lateran University) The threats contained in it are not hollow, because Francis himself intervened earlier this year to completely subject the board of the Institute to HIS new view of marriage (as opposed to Jesus Christ's and John Paul II's), putting strong henchmen in their place. Men who would not mind following orders, even if absurd.

'Sodalitium Franciscanum', would-be
agents of a dubious secret service
Translated by 'Rorate caeli' from

November 15, 2016

Magister precedes the letter with a review of the major overhaul effected by the pope several weeks ago to the leadership of both the Pontifical Academy for Life and the Lateran University-based JPII Institute - more proof, if anyone needed it, of how he has overturned the sainted pope's Familiaris consortio of 1981, which led to the establishment of the Institute...


"To seek clarity". Four cardinals asked this of Pope Francis with four questions - in a letter dated Sept. 19 that they decided to publish yesterday, having no reply at all from the pope - which has become the bombshell story on the eve of this pontificate's next consistory to create new cardinals.

The four cardinals - Walter Brandmueller and Joachim Meisner of Germany, Carlo Caffarra of Italy, and Raymond Leo Burke of the USA - waited almost two months for the pope to respond to their appeal. But many think that the pope is not likely to break his silence at any time in the future.

But at least, on the very same dubia raised by the four cardinals about ambiguities in Amoris laetitia, the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family was to bring some 'clarity' with a Vademecum for pastoral care of the family to be published in January 2017, but which will start to circulate among the bishops of the world in a few days. It was written by José Granados, Stephan Kampowski e Juan-José Pérez-Soba, all of them leading professors of the Institute.

Founded by John Paul II in 1981 after his family synod of 1980, its first president was Carlo Caffarra, then a moral theologian who was not yet a bishop and now one of the signatories of the Four Cardinals' Letter, the Institute grew with branches around the world, with about a dozen branches in the five continents, promoting with perfect fidelity the doctrine of the Church on marriage and the family

But with this pope, that goal has changed, not because of the Institute. Because incredibly, not one of the Institute's professors or officials were invited to the first Bergoglian family synod, and only Prof. Granados, vice-president of the Institute, was invited to the second. Obviously, because the Institute's 'line' was considered incompatible with this pope's course as he finally expressed it [studiedly ambiguous and confused as it is about its most important points] in Amoris laetitia.

To confirm this, Bergoglio last August replaced the officials of the Institute en bloc, naming as its new Grand Chancellor Mons. Vincenzo Paglia, whom he also named president of the Pontifical Academy for Life (which has now proceeded to 'cleanse' its membership of persons known to oppose some of this pope's views), and as Institute president, PierAngelo Sequeri, a highly knowledgeable theologian in many fields except that of matrimony and the family.

As for the president Sequeri replaced, Livio Melina, a universally recognized scholar, he was simply unceremoniously replaced. He did not even merit mention, much less thanks, in the address which the pope gave on October 27 to open the Institute's new academic year. [The earlier 'management' had invited Cardinal Sarah to do this honor, but with the 'regime change', he was unceremoniously replaced with the pope.]

Nonetheless, Melina continues to teach at the Institute [which makes the pope's discourtesy worse - these instances of 'Bergoglio maleducado' are cropping up too often]. Like other professors who have personal fame in their own right, like the Polish anthropolist Stanislaw Grygiel and his wife Monika, canon law professor Francesco D'Agostino, sociologist Sergio Belardinell, theologian-bishop Jean Laffitte (who was secretary of the now-dissolved Pontifical Council for the Family), and of course, the three authors of the Vademecum cited above.

But they all fear that a purge will come sooner or later. Segueri is a well-bred ('beneducato') person who is profoundly incapable of any such initiative. [Magister uses the Italian adjective 'beneducato', the antonym for the Spanish adjective I have used to denounce Bergoglio's discourtesies], but Paglia is not. [Remember, this is the man Benedict XVI appointed president of the Pontifical Council for the Family in 2012 - apparently r, and who a few months later, would tell the press after the renunciatio of February 12, 2013, that at his last meeting with Benedict XVI, the latter was not 'all there', that he did not know who he was talking with nor what was being discussed. More maleducato a curial official could not be!]

Already, an anonymous threatening letter has been sent by e-mail to some of the Institute professors who appear to be in the bullseye. The following is the text of the letter:

---

Subject: Monitoring of studies and teaching in the
Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family

Dear Mr/Ms Professor
Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family
Pontifical Lateran University
Vatican City

As has already happened and is happening for other pastoral, academic, and cultural Catholic institutions, our Observatory for the Implementation of the Church Reform of Pope Francis (OARCPF) – an initiative of a group of Catholic lay people in support of the pontificate of Pope Francis – has begun in the current academic year the monitoring of the contents of publications of faculty and the teachings imparted [in class] in the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in order to make clear the adaptations or eventual disagreements regarding the address made by Pope Francis on the occasion of the opening of the new academic year of your Institute (Sala Clementina, October 28, 2016), in which you were called "to support the necessary opening of the intelligence of the faith in the service of the pastoral solicitude of the Successor of Peter."

In particular, the contents of published works and the imparted classes will be taken into consideration in reference to what is expressed in the apostolic Exhortation "Amoris laetitia", according to the image "of the Church that is, not of a Church thought in one's own image and likeness," orienting research and teaching not anymore towards "a too abstract theological ideal of matrimony, almost artificially built, far from the concrete situation and from the effective possibilities of families as they are" (Pope Francis, mentioned address, October 28, 2016).

To this end, we will make use of the analytical and critical reading of the studies published by the faculty, of the theses of graduation and doctorate approved by the Institute, of the syllabus of classes of of their bibliographies, as well as interviews of students made after classes, in the square in front of the Lateran University.

Certain that we are doing a useful task to improve the service that you perform with dedication to the Church and to the Holy Father, we keep you up to date on the results of our observational study.

Observatory for the Implementation of the Church Reform of Pope Francis (OARCPF)
Section for Rome

---

Of course, it may be something limited to the Lateran University -- but if such a letter affects what one professor teaches out of fear of spreading the truth, the Bergoglian forces will have already triumphed.

OK, so this OARCPF may be a rogue commando operation, for which neither the Vatican nor the new Bergoglio leadership at the JPII Institute can be blamed. But it does indicate the hardcore, intolerant and militantly tyrannical mindset of the Bergoglidolators as typified by the National Catholic Reporter and the worst asslickers in the Bergoglian court. And if such an operation does not now exist, it may well be underway in other forms.

If their lord and master can happily celebrate Martin Luther's schism and call the Reformation 'medicine for the Church', then the only thing that will surprise me from hereon about this pontificate is if, miraculously, Bergoglio acknowledges the errors in AL!

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 16/11/2016 23:14]

I did not want to taint the omnibus post above on the Four Cardinals' Letter and Cardinal Burke's explicit "Here we stand" interviews, with these flippant 'tweets' by one of the Bergoglio surrogates and courtiers/courtisans I find most detestable and truly toxic....



I suppose that is the most that the cardinals will get in response to their letter. That it is delivered by Twitter and in such an insufferably smug way is telling the cardinals they are truly not worth getting any response from the pope, that they not even worth a simple statement from the Vatican Press Office to acknowledge receipt of their letter.



On request for clarification of AL,
the Pope’s silence speaks volumes
By Phil Lawler |

Nov 16, 2016

We should not be surprised that the Pope has declined a request for clarification of Amoris Laetitia.

[I don't think anyone is surprised at all! He can't answer YES to all or NO to all, or even YES to some and NO to others. He's not going to be 'baited' into an answer that will compromise him one way or the other - with his base if he grants he may have erred, at the very least, in some of the language of AL; nor with all orthodox Catholics if he stands up for his unequivocally wrong compromises with truth and morality in AL. That is why AL was written in the casuistically 'open-ended' Rohrschach-blot way it was - so it does not commit him in writing and in a formal document to teaching and preaching error which is a dereliction of his duty as a pope.]

Are faithful Catholics confused by that document? Absolutely. That is the Holy Father’s intent. The confusion is not a bug; it’s a [necessary] feature.

The defenders of the papal document (and those defenders are becoming downright belligerent; see below) insist that the notorious 8th chapter is clear enough, and that the four cardinals who have raised questions about its meaning are merely being argumentative. But if that were the case, the Pontiff could have avoided this public embarrassment by answering the cardinals’ questions. He chose not to do so.

There are only two possible ways to interpret the Pope’s silence. Either he is being remarkably rude [Thank you, Mr Lawler, for saying so] to the men who are his closest counselors, flatly refusing to answer their honest request, or he does not want to give a straight answer. Or both.

The one possibility that can be quickly excluded from our discussion is that the Pope believes the interpretation of Amoris Laetitia is already clear to the faithful. It is not. After two years of intense debate on the most controversial question involved — whether divorced and remarried Catholics may be admitted to Communion — intelligent and informed Catholics are still unsure as to what, exactly, Pope Francis has taught us.

If the papal teaching is clear, how can it mean one thing in Poland, and another in Germany? If the final answer to that vexed question is No in Philadelphia and Portland, how can it be Yes in Chicago and San Diego? If some bishops are interpreting the papal document incorrectly, why have they not been corrected?

Since the revelation that this massive confusion prompted four conscientious cardinals to press the Pope for clarification, several people have asked me how long it ordinarily takes for a Pope to respond to dubia of this sort. There is no good answer to that question, because there is no precedent for this query. Ordinarily, papal documents are clear. If any confusion arises from papal statements, a clarification usually follows quickly — long before any formal dubium could be raised — because the very point of papal teaching is to provide clarity. Usually. But this is a different case.

In any case, nearly two months have passed since the cardinals raised their questions. During that span the Pope has found time for at least two lengthy conversations with his friend Eugenio Scalfari, the leftist journalist. Is it unreasonable to suggest that he should have also found time to speak with four troubled members of the College of Cardinals?

Actually the Pontiff did meet with one of those prelates, Cardinal Raymond Burke, in a private audience on November 10: just a few days before the cardinals made their query public. I have no special knowledge about what took place during that audience, but it is inconceivable to me that Cardinal Burke, who is punctilious in his observance of ecclesiastical propriety, would have failed to raise the matter directly. [Apparently, he got no answers, because four days later, he and his three co-authors of the letter decided to release the texts.]

(The next day, the Pope met in another private audience with Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), who had also received the cardinals’ letter with its list of dubia. Was the topic raised again, I wonder? If so, what instructions did the Pontiff give Cardinal Müller? All we know is that the four cardinals did not receive a response to their questions.) [And Cardinal Mueller, who just went out of his way to write a book about 'Benedict and Francis' with no compelling reason to do so other than to 'make nice' with the boss,, is playing the loyal Curial official who will do as the pope tells him. Maybe, in private, he has spoken to the Four Cardinals and expressed his apologies for having to toe the official line.]

Cardinal Burke and his three confreres have interpreted the Pope’s silence as an invitation to further discussion of the questions among the faithful. That is, frankly, a charitable reading — especially since the topic has already been discussed so exhaustively for so many months.

John Allen of Crux has a different reading of the Pope’s intentions: “Maybe this is his version of Catholic R&D, letting things play out for a while on the ground before he says anything irreversible.” In other words, maybe the Pope is deliberately creating room for pastoral experimentation, to see what works. [AW, C'MON, no one can really think that seriously!]

Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane, Australia seems comfortable with that approach. “Pastoral care moves within ambiguity,” he wrote on his Twitter account. In a bit of a slap at the four cardinals, he added: “We now need a pastoral patience not the quick-fix anxiety voiced here.” [Do not forget the outrageous ultra-liberal Bergoglian statements Coleridge made during the 2015 'family synod'!]

(Speaking of quick-fix anxiety, could I digress for a moment, to ask why the leadership of the Catholic Church has been fixated on this question for the past two years? Where — outside of Germany — is the enormous demand for a change in Church discipline on this matter? [Thank you again, Mr. Lawler. I have been asking that for three years now, but it seems everyone else who has something to say on the matter, starting with this pope, assume that the Communion problem of remarried divorcees afflicts a wide swath of Catholics around the world when common sense would say it can't be so!] Where are the outcries from the faithful? At a time when families are imploding, children are abandoned, and a steadily decreasing number of Catholics even bother with sacramental marriage, how can any rational cleric [let alone the pope himself!] believe that this is the question most urgently in need of attention?)

However, if John Allen and Archbishop Coleridge believe that the Pope is encouraging experimentation by leaving matters unsettled, another observer — one much closer to the Pope — insists that the meaning of Amoris Laetitia has been settled. Father Antonio Spadaro, the editor of La Civilta Cattolica, reacted to the four cardinals’ public letter with a multi-lingual Tweet-storm of harsh statements.

“The Pope has ‘clarified.’ Those who don’t like what they hear pretend not to hear it!” Father Spadaro wrote. He attached a link to an informal letter the Pope wrote to bishops in Argentina, approving of their interpretation of the document. But of course a leaked letter, even from the Roman Pontiff, is not a magisterial document. And the Argentine bishops’ reading of Amoris Laetitia left plenty of questions unanswered; it did not, for instance, address the dubia raised by the four cardinals. [Indicative of the Bergoglian's fixation on RCDs that they appear not to have even paid attention the greater overlying moral issues raised by AL and articulated in the dubia.]

Later Father Spadaro tweeted again: “Amoris Laetitia is an act of the Magisterium (card. Schönborn) so don’t keep asking the same question until you get the answer *you* want...” Now, obviously, he was taunting the beleaguered cardinals. He was certainly not answering their questions about how this “act of the magisterium” should be understood; he was telling them to stop asking pesky questions.

Father Spadaro plays a special role here — indeed he might be accused of conflicts of interest when he responds to critics of the papal document. The Jesuit priest is widely acknowledged as one of the closest advisers to Pope Francis, and often credited with a major role in drafting Amoris Laetitia. So if he wants cardinals to stop asking difficult questions, it is not unreasonable to suspect that the Pope himself wants to bury those questions. And the Pope’s silence conveys the same message.

Why would the Pope avoid answering questions? Why would he allow the confusion to persist? Perhaps because he wants to allow something that goes beyond experimentation: a de facto change in Church discipline, which will entail a de facto change in Church teaching. Perhaps because he realizes that if he makes his intentions clear, loyal Catholics will not accept them.

Thank God for four stalwart princes of the Church who, without accusing the Pope of an attempt to change Catholic doctrine, have made it clear that if that is his intention, they will resist.


BTW, at least someone in the pope's court deigned to acknowledge the Four Cardinals' Letter. No one oltre Tevere has ever acknowledged the online appeal to the pope signed by more than half a million faithful nor the subsequent post-AL letter of 45 prelates and theologians.

Instead of reining himself in, JMB has been just plunging headlong with his unbridled and increasingly embarrassing rhetoric to push an agenda that is far more personal/secular than papal/religious, as some of his more recent remarks which are the subject of this commentary by Carl Olson. The article does not even include quotes from this pope's most recent 'interview' with Eugenio Scalfari, who, as Riccardo Cascioli notes, is really a de facto and full-fledged Bergoglio spokesman now, through whom this pope conveys messages he obviously feels he cannot do through the official Vatican media (because many of the messages are directly un-Catholic or anti-Catholic), although L'Osservatore Romano promptly reprints anything Scalfari reports about his conversations with Bergoglio, and the Vatican publishing house anthologizes them...


Digging into Pope Francis's remarks about
the 'old Latin Mass', 'rigidity' and 'insecurity'
by Carl Olson

November 14, 2016

A November 10th article by CNS reporter Cindy Wooden about a new collection, in Italian, of homilies and speeches given by Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio has been raising eyebrows. And even some ire. The problem, to be clear, isn't in Wooden's reporting, but in some excerpts from the book, specifically, as discussed in a new interview given by Pope Francis to his close confidant Fr. Antonio Spadaro SJ, who is Editor-in-Chief of Civiltà Cattolica. The excerpt in question is at the very end of the article:

---

Listening to people’s stories, including in the confessional, is essential for preaching the Gospel, he [the pope] said. “The further you are from the people and their problems, the further you hide behind a theology framed as ‘You must and you must not,’[WHICH IS WHAT THE TEN COMMANDMENTS ARE!] which doesn’t communicate anything, which is empty, abstract, lost in nothingness.” [So does Bergoglio really think that the Ten Commandments do not communicate anything, are empty, abstract, lost in nothingness'? I've already suspected - since he never refers to them - that in this, as in other things in which he thinks he would improve on Jesus, he believes he knows better than God who should not have framed the Law as a series of 'Thou shalt not...'s. What could be more against the Bergoglian idea of a church-of-nice-and-easy? How dare God lay down the law in this 'negative' way!]

Asked about the liturgy, Pope Francis insisted the Mass reformed after the Second Vatican Council is here to stay and “to speak of a ‘reform of the reform’ is an error.

In authorizing regular use of the older Mass, now referred to as the “extraordinary form,” now-retired Pope Benedict XVI was “magnanimous” toward those attached to the old liturgy, he said. “But it is an exception."

Pope Francis told Father Spadaro he wonders why some young people, who were not raised with the old Latin Mass, nevertheless prefer it.

“And I ask myself: Why so much rigidity? Dig, dig, this rigidity always hides something, insecurity or even something else. Rigidity is defensive. True love is not rigid.” [Dear Lord, has any pope ever spoken so much sanctimonious claptrap????]

---

Those who follow Francis's various addresses and interviews closely will recognize the usual rhetoric: the implication that theology (or doctrine) is somehow opposed to pastoral ministry, the psycho-analysis of those the Pope disagrees with, the pretense to contemplation without evidence of much insight, and the digs — in more than one sense, in this case — at supposed rigidity, insecurity, and defensiveness.

Much could be said about the the excerpt above, but I'll first note, in fairness, that the full context of the remarks isn't known and the remarks are apparently not official translations. [Minor reservations, because he has made similar remarks earlier in situations that were fully reported textually and contextually, with appropriate translations, and that the only relevant context one needs is this pope's known hostility to the EF and to Tradition, in general. He once dismissed any reported enthusiasm among young people for the EF as 'just a fad'.] That said, it's hard to not be disappointed, or even troubled, by the Holy Father's comments and approach. And there are a couple of deep ironies involved.

One of them is that Francis insists strongly on the need to be close to the people and their problems, but then, in remarking on why some young people (and plenty of older people as well) would be attracted to the "old Latin Mass", gives every appearance of not having really been close to any of the young people in question. [When was the last occasion he was close enough to some young people to get a sense of who they are and what their immediate concerns are? I'd guess the now SOP lunch of 12 selected young adults who get to sit down to a meal with the pope on WYD. I doubt any of the 12 would have riffed to him out of the blue about the Latin Mass, but did he bother to ask them whether any of them had any interest at all in the traditional Mass?] *[Below, I have some thoughts on the apparently unfounded myth of Bergoglio as pastor nonpareil of the simple folk!]

I don't attend the Extraordinary Form (EF) [Have you never even tried to attend one, Mr. Olson???], but I know several people who do, including many younger folks, and I have talked to them at length about the EF and the Ordinary Form. To respond to these young people and their motives with shallow neo-Freudian dismissals comes off as both unfair and uncharitable.

A second irony is that this excerpt, as it stands, does not give the impression of a sensitive and caring pastor [And do the morning homilettes give the impression of a sensitive and caring pastor??? They are rather the ramblings of a sanctimonious know-it-all who does not hide his contempt for Catholics he dislikes!], but of an annoyed man who cannot fathom why people many decades younger than himself would think or act differently than he thinks they should.

Part of the problem, to return to a point stressed in detail in my October 2016 editorial, is that pitting theology and doctrine over and against pastoral ministry is going to create a number of problems and will lead, again and again, to a skewed reading of people and events.

What we believe informs how we worship, and how we worship directly affects and informs what we believe — and how we live: Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi. When Francis says, "The further you are from the people and their problems, the further you hide behind a theology framed as ‘You must and you must not,’ which doesn’t communicate anything, which is empty, abstract, lost in nothingness", he clearly has a "rigid" or "dogmatic" sort of theology in mind. [But does a priest-confessor exercising rigid or dogmatic theology when he judges people's sins on the basis of the Ten Commandments as the immutable norm for human conduct that is pleasing to God?]

But doesn't it also cut the other way? When priests and bishops are far from the everyday lives of people, cannot they also turn to banal bromides, clichés, and vague slogans that not only fail to help but even make matters worse? [The problem with know-it-all autocrats like JMB is that they would impose their belief systems on others by jackhammer if need be - and Bergoglio's tedious, often incoherent and always outrageous rhetoric (with a now-familiar set of bromides, cliches and vague slogans peculiar to him) acts like a mechanical jackhammer aimed to drive you out of your mind. And what could be more rigid than a jackhammer, except of course that it has this relentless repetitive pounding motion which it needs to be rigid in order to withstand!]

The best theological traditions of the Church are notable for understanding foundational truths, making careful distinctions, holding firm to objective teachings, recognizing and appreciating the subjective aspects of faith, and then honing in on the specific matter at hand, cutting to the core of what really is — and what should be. [All of which appear to be completely alien and unknown to Bergoglio's basically undisciplined mental processes!]

And the same can be applied to the liturgical traditions of the Church, both in the West and East. The Mass and the Divine Liturgy are first and foremost about the true and just worship of the Triune God and the offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Eucharist, given to the Mystical Body by the Head, Jesus Christ, so that we can be further drawn into the saving, divine life of God.

But — and this is not a news flash, sadly — the Ordinary Form is sometimes said and even "performed" in a way in which this objective truth is obscured so badly that people are confused or even oblivious to what is really happening.

I won't say much here about Francis's statement that “to speak of a ‘reform of the reform’ is an error," wanting to make a couple of points about this statement: "And I ask myself: Why so much rigidity? Dig, dig, this rigidity always hides something, insecurity or even something else. Rigidity is defensive. True love is not rigid.” [The more I read that statement, the more infuriatingly absurd it sounds.]

What is not clear at all is why Francis thinks the "old Latin Mass" is either rigid or attracts people with flexibility-challenged views and attitudes. Is it something he simply assumes? And why the constant use of the term "rigid"? What, exactly, does it refer to here? Is it the rubrics of the EF? The prayers? The culture in parishes that celebrate it? The attitude of those who celebrate it?
[I think he uses the word 'rigid' reflexively because that is what he is himself - absolutely rigid about his personal principle that he must be rigid and inflexibly negative about those Catholics he dislikes, while being flexible with everybody else especially if they are not Catholic.]

Perhaps even more bothersome is the assumption (based on vague and unhelpful negative descriptive) that this "hides something". Perhaps this is the voice of a pastor, but it certainly sounds more like the voice of a psychologist [Meet Jorge Bergoglio Jung!]. And not a very good one at that.

"Insecurity"? Well, could it be that using the term "rigid" to describe certain people is also a sign of "insecurity"? Or "something else"? Put another way, when someone constantly resorts of name calling and clichés to address "the other", how seriously should we take their analysis? How objective and considered can it really be? [He has never been about Catholics he dislikes, mainly because they are orthodox and could not possibly share his anti-Catholicism!][/COLORE

A lot of different people demonstrate defensive attitudes. St. Paul, in many places, was defensive--that is, he made a defense of himself, his apostolic status, and his teachings. Was he "defensive"? I am becoming convinced that if the Apostle Paul were living on earth today, he would not only be passed over for the College of Cardinals, he might be chastised for being pastorally insensitive, rigid, harsh, mean-spirited, judgmental, dogmatic, doctrinaire, and otherwise ill-suited to chat with parishioners, never mind establish churches throughout the known world. After all, he told the Christians in Thessalonika to "stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter" (2 Thess 2:15).

In a recent comment on Facebook, Amy Welborn made a wonderful point about "rigidity" in regards to liturgy:

---

The "rigidity" of the form allows for variety in the experience. That is, if you are sad or happy or grieving or confused, you go to a liturgy in which the form is "rigid" and you have a great deal of inner freedom to meet God as you are. It is a form that trusts God to do his work in the soul.

The experience of a "fluid" form is always - *always* determined by some people in charge. The priest and his priorities/desires/personality, the music ministry, the liturgy committee (if anyone still has those). The "fluid" form is about designing an experience that a few people in charge want others to have.

"Fluid" liturgical forms are preferred by those who want to control others, impose their agendas, don't trust other human beings in their experience, and don't trust God to do his work in people's souls without some manipulative action on their part.

---

This ties in well, I think, to my belief that this papacy is marked, in many key ways, by a soft sentimentality that views anything hard, firm, direct, clear, and objective as dubious, if not outright dangerous. Alas, that perception is only further reinforced by these newly reported remarks.

Finally, that some people think "the old Latin Mass" offers clarity, reverence, beauty, awe, splendor, and joy in ways not always evident in the OF seems to be missed by Pope Francis. That some people welcome the fact that the priest and people submit themselves in love to the liturgy — offering themselves as spiritual sacrifices — rather than try to turn Mass into a performance, or a personal soapbox, is apparently overlooked as well. That's unfortunate. Or worse.

*Some thoughts on the myth of Bergoglio as pastor nonpareil:
I have always had the impression that all his vaunted mantras of 'being with the people', 'going to the peripheries', 'the smell of the sheep', etc, have been primarily populist slogans he slings around, rather than the fruit of his actual experience. Riding the metro in BA and visiting slum neighborhoods often do not really translate to 'knowing' the people.

1. I have waited in vain these past three years and seven months for a whole slew of photos, perhaps a book of photos, or even just a few representative ones of him interacting with simpler folk (the often-used couple of shots showing him in a subway car show him in no apparent relation to others in the same cab, not even to those next to him), to illustrate his common touch; or, lacking photos (perhaps he is so modest and humble that he allowed no photos to be taken at all), how about anecdotes recounted by 'simple folk' whose lives he touched, because in 14 years as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, there should be enough such stories to fill more than one volume? Instead, what we have recently been offered is a collection of his homilies and other discourses from those years.

2. Whenever, as pope, JMB cites some supposed 'pearl' of wisdom or insight about people and their particular situations, what he describes always sounds made up and inauthentic (because they probably are), and not rarely, even highly unlikely. But whereby he nonetheless contributes to the largely unfounded myth of 'the merciful bishop of the people' that became the instant narrative about him the moment his election was announced.

I AM EAGER TO BE PROVEN WRONG BY EVIDENCE TO THE CONTRARY! I cannot imagine that for three years and seven months now, the Bergoglio PR machine (which includes most of the mainstream media worldwide) would have held back on any photographic and anecdotal evidence if there had been more, especially abundantly more, than the few we have seen so far.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/11/2016 21:39]

November 17, 2016 headlines

PewSitter


Canon212.com



A strange consistory - in which the Pope
will not meet with the cardinals gathered
in Rome for the creation of his new cardinals
Is this so he does not have to respond to the Four Cardinals' 'dubia'?
by Marco Tosatti
Translated from his blog

November 17, 2016

On Saturday, a strange Consistory will take place. Strange because unlike on two similar occasions, Pope Francis will not meet with the cardinals gathered in Rome for the rites marking the elevation of new prelates to their rank.

A consistory for the creation of new cardinals is a very special occasion in the life of the Church. Because all cardinals who can come to Rome do come to Rome for the occasion to lend solemnity to an event in which new Princes of the Church are named to be special collaborators and advisers of the Pope. [And, just as important, it qualifies them to be elected pope in their turn.]

It is also a special occasion for the pope who would have a large part of the College of Cardinals gathered around him to receive information, exchange ideas and perceptions, and to convey his message to them directly.

So it was in the two preceding cardinal-making consistories in this pontificate. [This was SOP under Benedict XVI.] In 2014, all the cardinals, both those in the Curia as well as cardinals who are metropolitan bishops, spend two days with the pope, on February 20 and 21 [the infamous ‘secret consistory’ at which Cardinal Kasper preached the Bergoglio-Kasper ‘gospel of the family’], before the formal creation of the new cardinals on February 22.

The same happened the next year, also in February. The meetings were held February 12 and 13, and the formal ceremony on February 14.

But this year, there will be no meeting with the College of Cardinals. The program only provides for the ceremony of creating the new cardinals in St. Peter’s Basilica on Saturday, November 19. The new cardinals will receive their guests in the afternoon, and will concelebrate the Mass with the Pope the following day.

Which will be the formal closing of Papa Bergoglio’s Holy Year of Mercy. What better occasion could there be to discuss his major theme of mercy with his cardinal counselors?

To my knowledge, there has not been an official explanation for this singular anomaly. So, let me hazard a hypothesis.

Last September, four cardinals expressed ideas that are fairly widespread in the Church today – and certainly, in the College of Cardinals – and wrote an embarrassing letter to the Pope, copy-furnished to the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. A letter which, in the absence of any reply from the pope, the four cardinals decided to publish on Monday.

It is clear the pope did not want to respond – and does not want to respond – to the questions formulated by the cardinals following a precise theological scheme in the form of ‘dubia’ which can be answered by a simple yes or no – therefore, the questions do not allow any room for evasion.

One would infer that the questions could have presented by the four cardinals during a consistory with the full college and the pope present – questions which could well have been seconded and followed up by other cardinals who want definitive answers from the pope on the questions raised.

Well, it is because of this that I think the pope has decided not to hold the full consistory this year which might prove embarrassing for him. And he chose to avoid it.



Fr. Scalese offers his thoughts on the Four Cardinals' Letter and the inescapable conclusion that Pope Francis is shirking the inevitable consequences of answering the dubia at all[/I. We would need a contemporary Dante to adequately describe the sad spectacle of papal cowardice that we are witnessing...

This pope seems to forget much of the Sermon on the Mount, from which the only parts he seems to remember are "Blessed are the poor" - without mentioning the significant qualifier 'in spirit' - as if the First Beatitude refers to the materially poor. Matthew 5, Chapter 1, which is the start of the evangelist's account of that Sermon, actually includes Christ's 'teaching about adultery' (v27-230) and 'teaching about divorce' (v31-32), which I don't think we shall ever hear Jorge Bergoglio cite while he is pope.

But Matthew 5 also has the line "Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No.’ Anything more is from the evil one"(Mt 5,37). Jesus said this with regard to oaths - and even if a pope does not pronounce a formal oath, his teaching duty is to say Yes or No clearly and firmly to the faithful, to confirm them in the faith and not to confuse them, as this pope habitually does.

Dangerous polarization
Translated from

November 16, 2016

On Monday, Nov. 14, a letter was made public sent Sept. 19 from Cardinals Walter Brandmüller, Raymond L. Burke, Carlo Caffarra and Joachim Meisner to Pope Francis asking him to dispel the uncertainties that followed the publication of his post-synodal apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia.

Rivers of ink have since been expended commenting on the four cardinals’ initiative, so it would be useless to reiterate things that have already been said. I only wish to point out one aspect that seems to have escaped most commentators.

I get the impression that, in general, commentators have portrayed the cardinals as still awaiting a response from the pope (implying that they made the letter public in order to ‘force’ the pope to answer). Sandro Magister, in his first commentary on the subject, saids: “The four cardinals had waited in vain for almost two months for the pope to reply to their appeal. But there are those who predict that Francis will not be breaking his silence at all.”

Initially, I, too, had interpreted the publication of the letter in that sense, but re-reading the text, I understood that the situation may be different. The cardinals are no longer awaiting a reply from the pope (if they were, they probably would not have gone public with it). Because they already should have a reply – in some form or other. And the reply is the very fact that the pope does not intend to reply to them. That is what is implied in the Introduction to the letter itself. “The Holy Father has decided not to reply. We have interpreted this sovereign decision as an invitation to continue reflection and discussion on the issue, in a tranquil and respectful way.”

“The Holy Father has decided…” So there has been a decision, which the cardinals rightly describe as ‘sovereign’: the pope will not respond to their dubia. Therefore, it is useless to await a reply that will never come. Thus, the decision to publish their letter.

Pope Francis’s is not surprising. Not only because this is how he has decided in analogous situations before, but also because, in principle, he rejects the very process. To respond to the dubia raised by the cardinals would mean he accepts a view of the Church and of the papal ministry which is not his view. And he has expressed this clearly on many occasions.

In the first interview he gave to Fr. Spadaro at the start of his pontificate, he said:

---

If a Christian is restorationist, legalist, if he wants everything to be clear and certain, then he will not find anything. Tradition and the memory of the past should help us to have the courage to open new spaces for God. [They may be open new spaces, but they cannot possibly be for God if these 'new spaces' are pretexts to allow sin, which is an offense against God.]

Whoever still seeks disciplinary solutions today, who has an exaggerated tendency towards doctrinal ‘certainty’, has a static involuted vision. In this way, faith becomes just one ideology among many others. (La Civiltà Cattolica, n. 3918, 19 settembre 2013, pp. 469-470)

---

It’s an idea he takes up again in Amoris laetitia:

---

I understand those who prefer a more rigid pastoral ministry which does not leave room for any confusion. But I sincerely believe that Jesus wants a Church that is attentive to the Spirit that is found in weakness: [the Church as] a mother who, at the very moment when she clearly expresses her objective teaching ‘does not reject the possible good but takes the risk of being soiled by the mud from the street’ (Evangelii gaudium, n. 45] (n. 308).

---

As we can see, we are confronted with two antithetical concepts of the Church and of pastoral ministry:
- On the one hand, that the Church has the duty to ‘bring clarity’, to show the faithful the truths that they must follow. On the other, that the Church should be a ‘field hospital’ in which the wounds of the faithful are treated, showing closeness to them without any legalistic concerns.
- On the one hand, that it is the pastoral duty of the Church to teach revealed doctrine as is. On the other, that the only acceptable pastoral attitude consists of ‘welcome, accompaniment, discernment and integration’.

It is, of course, a fact that there have always been diverse sensibilities in the Church, but I have the impression that we have arrived at a polarization of positions that are not just different, but alternative and irreconcilable.

Papa Bergoglio, in his conversation with Fr. Spadaro to introduce the book Nei tuoi occhi è la mia parola (My word is in your eyes) [What a YECCHH title!], seems to justify the existence of ‘opposition’ in the Church (which is not surprising in someone who claims to have been formed in the ‘school’ of Romano Guardini) [or claims, at least, to have been influenced by him]. He adds that “Opposition helps. Human life is structured in oppositional form. It is what is happening in the Church. Tensions will not necessarily be resolved and homogenized – they are unlike contradictions.”

In the same interview, we find various statements that support this view:"One can discern only in narration, not in philosophical or theological explanations, which can be disputed" (p 455). [That is sheer nonsense. True discernment involves a comprehensive view of the situation or issue being discerned, which includes every aspect that could possibly illumine the situation or issue enough to allow genuine discernment.]
"God manifests himself in time and is present in historical processes (p 468) [DUH!].
"We encounter God along the way… He is always a surprise and so you will never know where and how you will meet him – it is not you who determines the time and place of meeting him" (p 469).
[But God is everywhere – one only needs to be aware of that and it follows that we reach out to him regularly, as we do in prayer. He is not a ‘surprise’ – the surprise consists in that we cannot tell what his plan is for each of us, that however much we may try to achieve certain ends, we do not always get what we desire because it is not God’s will, that sometimes when he seems to close a door, he opens a window, etc.]. "God reveals himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths"(p 474). [What is the Gospel but a compendium of truths enunciated by God himself through his Son, the Second Person of the Trinity? Truths which he gives us to guide how we concretely conduct our life on earth so that it is pleasing to him and will merit eternal salvation for us.]

Personally, I find myself agreeing enough with Papa Bergoglio on the utility – and inevitability – of opposition (although one would have to reconcile this authentically Guardinian idea with the second Bergoglian postulate expressed in Evangelii gaudium, nn. 226-230: “Unity prevails over conflict”).

I agree that “tensions will not necessarily be resolved and homogenized". I am convinced that differences should not be cancelled but appreciated, but I am equally convinced that oppositions – and their polarization – should not be promoted, much less fed, but rather ‘managed’ and ‘synthesized’ into a superior unity that is spiritual, not Hegelian.

As I noted in a recent post, the purpose of authority is to safeguard peace and unity – so, it should never align itself openly with one of the parties in the game, but must carry out the function of mediation. Otherwise, the consequences could be devastating. [For Bergoglio, it is always US (he and his minions) against THEM (those who do not share their worldview and ideology).]

Some believe we are on the verge of a schism, because there are signs that could lead us to think it. Let us hope and pray it does not happen. In any case, I maintain that mere hypothesis that it could happen raises doubts over the validity of the ‘reform’ of the Church under way with this pope.

I am disappointed that Fr. Scalese does not spell out what form such a schism would take if it ever does. Who secedes from what?

Orthodox Catholics will certainly not leave the Church and will not be driven out of the Church, even if they decide they cannot follow this pope in his anti-Catholicism. Anti-Bergoglio cardinals will certainly not elect an anti-pope. Fortunately, as long as we have priests who will say Mass for us and celebrate the sacraments, we do not need the pope at all if he is anti-Catholic. And we shall be united in Christ, even if his supposed Vicar on earth is apostate and derelict to his duty.

Still, Bergoglio remains pope – and will rightfully affirm he was elected to lead the Catholic Church, however much he chooses to betray the Petrine ministry in various ways, of which we have had more than enough demonstrations by now. And there does not seem to be any canonical mechanism to depose him unless he resigns of his own accord, or dies. So how can there be a schism? He certainly is not going to secede. Where else can he confidently say, 'I AM CHURCH!' and mean it literally?

But for as long as he or someone like him is pope, the Church will be divided because the man who happens to be pope is not interested in preserving her unity but in imposing his authority to gain apparent and actual hegemony by installing as many prelates in his image and likeness throughout the world, never mind who is trampled underneath.

Bergoglianism has to be worse than Arianism because the undeclared heresy and apostasy starts with the pope himself. But the Church survived Arianism, and she will survive Bergoglio and Bergoglianism.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 18/11/2016 17:22]

Two significant disquisitions today on the pope's failure to respond to the 'dubia' presented in the Four Cardinals' Letter.

Newman and the current crisis

November 18, 2016

The decision of our Holy Father not to respond to a formal request from four Cardinals to resolve formally some formal dubia, and thus to fulfill the Petrine mandate to confirm (sterizein) his brethren, is a striking event not easily paralleled.

A refusal to respond to such a formal request, even if not published in the official records of the Holy See, can hardly not itself be a formal act. So I turned, as surely we in the Ordinariate instinctively do, to our beloved Patron Blessed John Henry Newman, quo quis doctior, quis sapientior (who could be more learned and more wise)?

---

" ... at one time the pope*, at other times a patriarchal, metropolitan, or other great see, at other times general councils**, said what they should not have said, or did what obscured and compromised revealed truth ... I say, that there was a temporary suspense of the functions of the Ecclesia docens (the teaching Church). The body of bishops failed in their confession of the faith.

They spoke variously, one against another; there was nothing, after Nicaea, of firm, unvarying, consistent testimony, for nearly sixty years ...

---

[Then, it hasn't been that bad for post-Vatican II, since the 3 post-conciliar popes who had also taken part in the Council, especially John Paul II and Benedict XVI, consistently opposed any 'rupture' interpretation of the Council documents, and the few prominent cardinals who disagreed (chief among them, the late Carlo Maria Martini), along with their progressivist followers in the hierarchy and clergy, were never strong enough to 'override' the popes (except in the media). But a significant discontinuity did come with the election of one of them, Bergoglio - far more daring in his overreach than Martini or any other was - which is why we are where we are.]

I am therefore testing in my thoughts (doing what we colloquially call "sleeping on it" and at this moment "thinking aloud") the possibility that the current Roman Pontiff's recent decision may be seen as formally constituting the beginning of a period in which the functions of the Papal Magisterium are in "temporary suspense"; in a vacatio which will be ended at the moment when the same Petrine Magisterial organ as formally returns from dogmatic silence to the audible exercise of the functions rightly attributed to it in Catholic Tradition and Magisterial Conciliar definition; that is, devoutly to guard and faithfully to set forth the Tradition received through the Apostles; i.e. the Deposit of Faith.

I am very fallible and I may have got all this completely wrong. But in any case, we are, of course, all now very much in uncharted waters. As well as using our sextants to the best of our abilities, we are under a moral obligation to go very slowly and extremely carefully, tentatively casting the lead to check where the Ship is heading, and how safely. This is no time for wild impetuosity and no place for loose cannons.

And it is no time for running like frightened and panicking children to ridiculous non-solutions such as the various dippy theories which purport to show that Bergoglio is not pope. He most certainly is. Fully and every bit as much as any other pope ever has been or ever could be. But not in the sense disavowed by Blessed Pius IX and by Benedict XVI, of being an "absolute monarch" with the authority to "reveal new teaching".

Note: *Newman is referring to Pope Liberius; and, in referring to general councils**, he does not mean Ecumenical Councils. He explained later that he follows St Robert Bellarmine in distinguishing between Ecumenical Councils and councils which, even if large, do not count as Ecumenical. So ... not applicable to Vatican II!

Father Z's discourse is much longer, but he offers many excellent points to reflect on... He starts with commenting on the offensive from the 'Smear Machine' mobilized by all those who detest what the Four Cardinals stand for (genuine Catholicism) and are echt Bergoglians, being 1000% for and relentlessly pushing Jorge Bergoglio's anti-Catholic (and therefore anti-Church) agenda. [C'mon, everyone, let's call things as they are!)

More muck from the Smear Machine and
more thoughts on the 4 cardinals' 'dubia' E
by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf
November 18, 2016

The catholic Smear Machine is getting a lift from non-catholics. At Christianity Today, in their “Society” section of all places, comes a piece from someone named Henry Farley, whose name I have not yet encountered before...

You know the smear drill by now.
- They of the Machine use the standard scare-labeling (in this piece, Card. Burke is an “ultraconservative”) along with an unflattering photo.
- They cite their darlings (here, the infamous Timothy Radcliffe). - They make their goofy surmises based on their deep knowledge of Catholicism ("first step to declaring the pope a heretic the Church would be in unprecedented situation”).
- They psychologize the ones they want to belittle (“An emphasis on “personal and pastoral discernment” among local priests and bishops seems dangerous to those who would prefer the comfort of a top down dictate.”)

It’s all so very thin and … greasy.

The day before, he wrote this:

The Smear Machine is grinding. Right on schedule, the liberal news outlets are closing ranks to discredit The Four Cardinals who submitted dubia to the Holy Father about what are generally admitted by reasonable people to be confusing points.

Thought: I suggest to the liberal catholic media to take a page from the lesson book of the secular MSM when it came to a certain recent election. They were wrong from the start about just about everything. Now, they have little to no credibility in the eyes of the no longer so silent majority. Whatever side you were on in that election, take note of the role the media played.

Next thought: I’ve seen in comments and email statements that the dubia are about Communion for the divorced and remarried. Yes and no. That one issue is certainly a concern. But if you read the dubia you see that The Four have asked His Holiness to clarify, after what he wrote in Amoris Laetitia, if there are still absolute moral norms that prohibit intrinsically evil acts and that are binding without exceptions. [Which norms of morality are decidedly not within the ken of the mostly a-moral cogs of the Smear Machine, so all they see is the issue that concerns them more than anything else, not its wider overlying context.]

What are The Four asking? Breaking it down… QUAERUNTUR:
o Are people who live habitually out of keeping with God’s commandments objectively (at least… if not subjectively) in the state of grave habitual sin?

o Even if people are not necessarily in a subjective state of sin, can their circumstances or intentions transform an act intrinsically evil by virtue of its object into an act ‘subjectively’ good or defensible as a choice?

o Can “conscience” authorize legitimate exceptions to absolute moral norms that prohibit intrinsically evil acts by virtue of their object?

As you can see, these questions go way beyond the single issue of Communion for the divorced and civilly remarried.

Thought: In fact, another set of dubia could be conceived about the nature of the Eucharist and what Communion by reception of the Eucharist means. But that’s another bowl of soup...

In an interview with the National Catholic Register, Card. Burke responded to a question from Ed Pentin:

---

What happens if the Holy Father does not respond to your act of justice and charity and fails to give the clarification of the Church’s teaching that you hope to achieve?
Then we would have to address that situation. There is, in the Tradition of the Church, the practice of correction of the Roman Pontiff. It is something that is clearly quite rare. But if there is no response to these questions, then I would say that it would be a question of taking a formal act of correction of a serious error.

---

Some people are jumping up and down in little jowl-shaking circles, squawking that Card. Burke “threatened” the Pope. They, hair on fire, are ready to defend the Pope from these mean Cardinals! These same people have, in the past, as far as I can recall, not been zealous in defense of papal teachings, so this is a pretty interesting development. At least of clear papal teachings….

I saw a piece at the Spanish site Religion Digital [an out-and-out Bergoglian site] entitled: Burke amenaza al Papa con hacerle “un acto formal de corrección de un error grave”… Burke threatens the Pope with making “a formal act of correction of a serious error”

They found someone named Juan Mari Laboa, who quipped “There is no such figure in Canon Law. It’s crazy.”

Thought: I love it when libs start quoting canon law. It guides everything they do, you know!

In the Spanish piece we find: [Fr Z quotes the Spanish original which I have translated here]:

---

Far from being discouraged, the American cardinal explained in an interview with National Catholic Register that if the pope does not answer the letter, 'then we would have to address that situation'.

For Burke,"There is, in the Tradition of the Church, the practice of correction of the Roman Pontiff. It is something that is clearly quite rare. But if there is no response to these questions, then I would say that it would be a question of taking a formal act of correction of a serious error."

...The errors of a pope cannot be judged or proclaimed formally. Like any Christian, you can give an opinion and do so in public, but cannot claim that doing so is 'a formal act of correction'. [Which no one has claimed to do, so far. It would be the next recourse, though how that works out canonically and juridically, I do not know.]*

To correct the pope formally? It's madness! But experts say that what the pope could and ought to do is to call in the four cardinals and take away their rank, which is something Pius X did in his day.

---

*[Can those who issue the act of correction simply do so in their capacity as cardinals, bishops, and priests of the Church to go on the record? But whose record, other than news chronicles? Would it qualify to go on any official record of the Vatican?

For example, if a copy of the 'formal act of correction' is sent to the CDF, as it must be, would the CDF not be obliged to acknowledge receipt of it and make the document part of its archives? Would Cardinal Mueller, assuming he acknowledges receipt of it, not then be obliged to make a formal reply, YES or NO, to the dubia raised in the act of correction? Or will he continue shirking as his boss, the pope, is shirking the duty to say YES or NO to make clear once and for all where Jorge Bergoglio stands on fundamental truths of the faith?]

So… The Four should be striped of the Cardinalate, quoth he!

Apart from being an abysmally stupid move from the point of view of strategy, for that would make The Four martyrs, giving them power when they have none now, and would underscore the importance of the dubia, it would undermine the entire purpose of the College of Cardinals. But that’s how libs do things. They use the boot to the knee, the rifle butt to the forehead, the bullet in the back of the skull. It is a long lib tradition.

Thought: Isn’t it ironic that when members of a consultative body (the College of Cardinals) offer observations or ask for clarifications, the libs, who want much greater involvement from consultative bodies at every level, have a spittle-flecked nutty? [It says even worse of a pope who vaunts to be collegial in a way no pope before him has been before!]

The Pope calls for a little “lío” … ¡Hagan lío!, quoth he… and when he gets some lío, the dissident liberals, newly converted to their ultramontantist papalism, cry FOUL!

Here’s my take on this “formal act of correction”. Let’s not over- complicate it. YET.

Thought: Were a bunch of Cardinals, or even one Cardinal, to submit to the Holy Father a letter or document in which he corrects the Pope’s teaching, that submission would be “an act”.
- If he presented it through channels, or even in person, but with a measure of protocol, which surely would not be lacking, that would be a “formal act”.
- If the letter contained corrections of errors, that would make such a letter a “formal act of correction”.

This doesn’t have to be hard. YET.

At the same time, there is a difference when a score or more of Cardinals sign on than when four sign on.

Thought: To this point, the Cardinals are asking questions. They are requesting clarifications. It is usually a good idea – when dealing at this altitude – not to ask questions to which you don’t already know the answers. The dubia are framed as dubia, but surely the questions contain corrections. This is a gentle way of presenting their concerns. Shift a few words and drop the question marks at the end. Right? But it remains that they were framed as dubia, questions.

The Four turned to the Holy Father and asked him to be what he truly is: our teacher.

Considering that all of the faithful have the right to recourse to their pastors, to seek true teaching, this is a reasonable move. If Joe and Mary Bagofdonuts have the right to recourse, why not Cardinals, whose actual role it is in the Church is to provide counsel on important issues? Don’t Cardinals have at least the rights of the guy in the pew? Libs will give you a different answer on each occasion.

Frankly, more Cardinals should submit more dubia more often!

Thought about the other point: Is there some procedure, some formal process, to correct a Pope? There probably isn’t, other than to form a group of some sort and submit a letter or a statement to him.

Oh… wait… that’s what’s going on.

There is another kind of “formal act of correction”, however. In the history of the Church, if memory serves, Popes have been condemned by Councils. Pope Honorius I (+638), was anathematized by Constantinople III in 680 as a Monothelite heretic. St. Pope Leo II subsequently recognized this Council. It is the 6th Ecumenical Council.

So, Ecumenical Councils seem to be able to make a “formal act of correction” of a Pope, retroactively at least. It is unlikely that a sitting Pope would ratify a Council which condemned him.

Hmmm… had Pope Francis thought about calling a Council, he might rethink his thought. Once a Council were convoked there would be no controlling it. Who knows what would happen?

Thought: There’s a bright spot in the cloud of confusion. Libs are finally reading Canon Law! They have turned to the Code, like hounds on the leash, flanks all a quiver, to charge forth with little yelps of glee in pursuit of their prey, all in the service of the Roman Pontiff. Such zeal!

New converts often show this sort of zeal. It must be an interesting experience for some of these people to want to defend everything a Pope says and come to his aid against the forces of evil!

Thought: I suspect that the Holy Father will determine that it is not in his best interest to answer these dubia. I suspect that he will publicly ignore them.

The Pope surely knows how to write clearly when he wants to. He surely knows how to find people who can write clearly if he wants to. Had he wanted Amoris laetitia to be so clear that it could not be read in different ways, he would have written it that way. [But too concerned about not being branded heretical on the basis of statements he makes in a formal document, he decides that the language on anything controversial should be in Rohrschach-blot mode that technically allows him to deny he is opposing what the Church has taught for two millennia while actually doing so!]

Hence, the lack of clarity serves some purpose. It is hard to determine what that purpose might be. We probably need a little more time to watch how things play out. However, if ambiguity is being used in such a way as to change the Church’s teaching, then I imagine that we haven’t seen the last “formal act” from Cardinals.

Meanwhile, let’s not forget that the dubia of The Four didn’t come like a thunderbolt out of the blue. Since Amoris laetitia, wasn’t there a letter sent by 45 scholars, Catholic priests and prelates? Wasn’t there another letter signed by 790,000? Were there others? I forget.

Thought: Those who say that Amoris laetitia is simply quite clear in every respect and that you must be ignorant of the Gospel if you don’t get it (read: You must be really stupid!) may be overestimating its crystal clarity. [The worst culprit in this respect is the unspeakable soon-to-be Cardinal Farrell, late of Texas, who made that remark, and whose literally wild-eyed and woolly-minded Bergoglian fanaticism puts to shame even that of Mons. Fernandez or Fr. Spadaro.]

Final thoughts: For those of you who are really upset and who don’t know what to do in the face of all this confusion, I will remind you of my view of pontificates as parentheses.

In the history of the Church there are many pontificates. Popes come and go. Some pontificates are long and, like parentheses, some are short. Some parentheses and pontificates are important and some are not. Eventually God, the author of our history, hits “Shift-Zero” and the pontificate ends. Another begins. So, keep a historical perspective. God’s providence is surely at work in this parenthesis as in every other.

Who can know what good and beneficial things, under God’s direction, will emerge out of these catalysts and clashes? Holy Church is indefectible.

After deciding not to meet with the College of Cardinals in full consistory this weekend (no compelling reason to do so, no Kasper-style Bergoglian 'gospel' to share with the cardinals, and every reason to avoid being directly confronted with the Four Cardinals' B]dubiaB] he refuses to answer Yes or No) - yet another bizarrerie from our beloved pope:

Vatican cuts off broadcast of pope's meeting
with Caritas officials and does not report
on the dialog the pope had with them instead
of delivering his prepared text

Beatrice on her site www.benoit-et-moi/2016.fr quotes from a La Croix report today by Nicholas Senese (my translation):

---

"You can listen wisely to my address, and then I shall leave, or I can first listen to what you have in mind and then talk".

Discarding his prepared text, Pope Francis surprised his audience Thursday at a meeting with officers of Caritas worldwide. Engaging in a free and open dialog with them, as he likes to do regularly [??? Occasionally, yes, but regularly???], the pope then launched into a meandering conversation, after encouraging them by saying, "Let the most courageous begin", when the participants seemed hesitant to get the ball rolling.

But the Vatican has not disclosed what happened next, since the live broadcast of the meeting from the Sala Clementina of the Apostolic Palace was suddenly cut short...

Although the meeting had been announced on the pope's official agenda, it was suddenly considered a 'private audience' for which, newsmen were told, the Secretariat of State decided not to issue any text or report of the open dialog.

What was released was the prepared text which the pope did not deliver, but was 'furnished to the participants=, and, in Vaticanspeak, this means that it is considered to have been delivered.

---

What might have been so sensitive or inappropriate or embarrassing about the dialog that the Vatican will not even issue a report?

I could hazard at least one subject that JMB might find touchy, at the very least: Benedict XVI's motu proprio in 2012 saying, among other things, Caritas and other agencies doing charitable and social work as Catholic associations should never hide or dissimulate their Catholic identity while carrying out their work. Then Caritas International president Cardinal Maradiaga wasn't happy at all, and with the regime change, the new Caritas biggie, Cardinal Tagle - in many ways more Bergoglian than Bergoglio - has probably been working to have Benedict XVI's motu proprio rescinded and overriden by this pope!

I think I am justified to post Mundabor's commentary on the pope cancelling a general consistory meeting with his cardinals, when in 2014 and 2015, he needed two days each time to 'dialog' with them (I think now, primarily because he was really hoping he could sway them towards the Bergoglio-Kasper proposals on sacramental leniency.

The pope who won't meet his cardinals
[nor answer them when they write him]

NOV 18, 2016

Oh, the irony!

The Pope of “dialogue” [and of 'collegiality', don't forget!], being open to the “other”, talking to the “peripheries”, listening to the “Spirit”, will not talk to his own Cardinals, who come from all over the world to bring him exactly that openness, and that dialogue, and that voice of the peripheries, that he is always blabbering about.

I doubt this is because the Cardinals care about personal hygiene and, therefore, do not smell of sheep in the accustomed Argentinian fashion. I rather think it’s because there would be a huge elephant in the room, called Dubia.

The Cardinals could address Francis formally about it. They could give him some formal letter, or petition, or imploration, or even warning (I don’t believe this; but he might know something we don’t know). They might talk about it with him or among themselves.

Yet even if no one dared to mention it, the embarrassment would be huge. It would be like being at the reception of, as they say in Italy, “the wife of the hanged man”. The elephant would still be there, and he would be pissing on Francis all the time!

This being the situation, Francis must have decided that openness is only good if people are open to his heresies; that dialogue is only good when he is the only one talking; and that the peripheries are only good if they are his own Argentinian slums full of clearly unrepentant trannies, prostitutes and homos...

Remember when the Evil Clown [Mundabor's own endearment for JMB] failed to show up at a Beethoven concert in his honor? This is another stunt of that sort: if I don’t like to do this, I will simply avoid it. The childishness and selfishness is the same, but this time it is about more than an ignorant peasant bored by Beethoven [That's too strong and perhaps wrong! Remember that first interview he ever did with anyone as pope - with Spadaro in July 2013 - when he spoke all about his classical music tastes??? I don't think it was the music he snubbed at the time, but the very idea of him - the most humble and simplest pope ever- attending a concert, never mind if it was organized in his honor.]

Go on, Francis dear. Make an a.. of yourself in front of everyone again. Show the world what a ...boor you are. [There, someone else has used the word I have used to describe his gross discourtesy with the four cardinals and the 13 cardinals before them!] This could be getting mighty interesting in the next months. We are beginning to enjoy the show.

Hilary White's post on the pope and the dubia disputes that the pope cancelled the general consistory because he is 'scared' of a confrontation - not that anyone has suggested he is 'scared', only that he does not wish to be embarrassed in public (or as public as you can be when you are meeting more than 100 cardinals from around the world) - but because

---

He cancelled the meetings with the cardinals not because he’s afraid of a confrontation but because he has everything he needs. For him and his puppet masters/cabal the only thing that matters is the agenda and implementing it, which they are doing without batting an eye at the dubia. Such things are about as important to them as a mosquito is to you and me.

This is narcissism. For such a person only what he wants is important. He uses people the way you and I use kitchen implements. The cardinals (and bishops) have served their purpose, therefore no further attention needs to be granted them. This kind does not know fear because it has never and can never occur to them that anything can stop them.

---

On the other hand, Steve Skojec references a brief fleeting reference made by the pope to the critics of AL in a lengthy interview with Avvenire's Stefania Falasca, Bergoglio's earliest fan among Vaticanistas (while Ancrea Tornielli was still busy being the ardent 'Ratzingerian' that he once was, Falasca and her husband, fellow Vaticanista Gianni Valente, had been entertaining Bergoglio in their home for years everytime he visited Rome) that I skimmed through fast because the main theme was the Year of Mercy and mercy and all the variants thereof, and I have to reach for a barf bag every time I have to read anything about Bergoglian mercy... But here is Skojec's account...

Frustrated Francis references the 'dubia':
'Some see only black and white'
[Mr. Pope, God laid down the Law in black and white:
'Thou shall...' and 'Thou shalt not...']
by Steve Skojec

November 18, 2016

In a new interview with the Catholic daily Avvenire, on the eve of the consistory and as the Jubilee of Mercy comes to a close, Pope Francis at last addressed — although offhandedly perhaps even flippantly — the dubia presented to him in the Four Cardinals Letter:

---

"The Jubilee? I made no plan", said the Pope. " I simply let myself be led by the Spirit. The Church is the Gospel; it is not a path of ideas."

Francis continued, in his conversation with Stefania Falasca, ”I like to think that the Almighty has a bad memory. Once he forgives, he forgets. Because it is blessed to forgive. For me, that’s enough. The experience of forgiveness teaches one to shift the Christian conception from legalism to the Person of God, who became mercy.” [???? More Bergoglian jabberwocky!]

“Some, as with certain responses to Amoris Laetitia,” the Pope said, “persist in seeing only white or black, when rather one ought to discern in the flow of life . But these critiques – if they’re not from an evil spirit – do help. Some types of rigorism spring from the desire to hide one’s own dissatisfaction under armour,” the Pope said. No one is selling doctrine. [There he goes again, Jorge Bergoglio Jung, with his penny-ante pop psychology, and his obsession with rigorism, of which he does not seem to realize, he is the ultimate epitome, in his unyielding jackhammer-rigid contempt for anyone who does not think like him!]

The Holy Father also referenced the 500th anniversary celebrations of the Reformation in Lund as not a fruit of the Year of Mercy, but rather, of Vatican II. He reiterated again two of his favorite themes — “the ecumenism of blood” and the notion that proselytism is a “grave sin” which he referred to as a “cancer in the Church”.

---

It seems a very minor response to such a major confrontation. What is interesting is that Edward Pentin, the Rome correspondent for EWTN, appeared on The World Over Live today. Though the episode has not yet been made available online, a reader-provided partial transcript of the segment offers insight that confirms our suspicions — that the pope is quite upset about the letter. On the program, Pentin reported:

---

…I do understand, from sources within Casa Santa Marta, that the Pope is not happy at all, that he’s quite …boiling with rage, so he’s really not happy at all with this, but he had been given two months to respond to it, and he chose not to respond to it, so the Cardinals went public.

---

We’ll update this post with the video when it becomes available. Until then, it appears that the letter is at least having some effect.

Considering how infrequently Pope Francis chooses silence, it is astonishing that he can’t answer five simple questions. [Simply because if he were to answer truthfully, he does not want to be labelled early on as the contemporary Liberius, Arius, or, actually what I think most appropriate, Luther; and if he were to lie, then he would be refuting the main points he wanted to drive home and 'institute' within 'the Church' through AL, which would amount to the supreme narcissist admitting error - and could he, would he, ever do that? Or rather, he would have to claim that the Holy Spirit, to whom he attributes everything he says and does as pope, somehow erred or misled him into the errors of AL??? Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we start out to deceive!]

November 18, 2016 headlines

Canon212.com


PewSitter

Leave it to Fr. Rutler to make a definitive commentary on the Trump revolution that overturned the cultural hegemony of ultraliberals on November 8, and the resulting pandemic of hysteria and worse-than-sore-loser contempt for the democratic process that has afflicted the most intemperate of Hillary Clinton's supporters/never-Trumpers, or in the language of previous elections, all those in the full agonizing throes of Trump derangement syndrome....

A populist election and its aftermath
by FR. GEORGE W. RUTLER

November 17, 2016

Considering how many crucial matters were at stake during the recent election, including the right to life and religious freedom, and confronting the preponderant bias in the media and opinion polls, it did not seem melodramatic to hope for a providential Hand to guide things.

Without mistaking optimism for hope, and cautioned by the disappointment that can issue from placing trust in princes or any child of man, there could be much thanksgiving on Thanksgiving Day.

An advantage of living in the center of the universe is that one need not travel, since one is already there. Here on 34th Street in Manhattan, the Jacob Javits Convention Center where the Democratic Party met on election night is a five minute walk west of my rectory, and the Hotel New Yorker where Mrs. Clinton gave her delayed concession speech is five minutes to the east.

On the pavement outside my door, party workers had stenciled images of Mrs. Clinton. The paint must have been thin, for one rain shower washed most of them away.

When Mr. Podesta finally appeared in the convention hall to disperse the crowds, he seemed browbeaten as well he might, for witnesses said that upon being told that she had lost, Mrs. Clinton had to be restrained at the sight of Mr. Podesta’s face.

Some who trusted pundits were shocked that their perception of the American populace was an illusion. Their rampant rage would have been tamer if they had not been assured, to the very day of voting, that the losers were winners.

The reaction confirmed T.S. Eliot in “The Four Quartets”: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” Engraved in journalistic memory are the words of The New York Times film critic Pauline Kael after the 1972 election: “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theatre I can feel them.”

She was telling the truth, for she indeed lived in a social cocoon impervious to the rebukes of reason, and she was less sympathetic than the benevolent Louis XVI not understanding why the head of the Princess de Lamballe was being carried on a pike past his window.

Her number has been multiplied, and the response of thousands accustomed to life in a “rather special world” was to riot when the actual votes shattered their fantasy, although some Hollywood celebrities modified their previous vows to move to Canada (it is always Canada and never Cuba or North Korea) and one changed her mind about moving to another planet, proving the adage: “You can’t go home again.”

More than a few pacifists turned their palm branches into truncheons. In places such as Maine and California, most of the arrested rioters were not registered voters and anonymous patrons paid many by the hour to chant “Love Not Hate” while beating up youths as well as adults.

Fearing further decreases in its shrinking revenues, The New York Times made a pallid apology for misreading the demographics of our culture, coming as close as it could to admitting that it had been quite wrong, by confessing that it had not been quite right. Judging by its front page the next day, that act of contrition lasted twenty-four hours.

The New York Daily News, which once was the most read newspapers in the nation and now is virtually bankrupt, showed no contrition after months of tabloid screeds climaxing on the day after the election with a headline calling the White House a “House of Horrors.”

Free of the early deadlines required by the old styled linotype machines, no newspaper committed a “Dewey Defeats Truman” sort of faux pas. But instead of “Clinton Defeats Trump,” Newsweek magazine had to recall its “Madam President” souvenir edition showing Mrs. Clinton the way she used to smile.

The rout was the political equivalent of the battles of torrid Cermi, frigid Trenton, and stormy Midway, and it should have alerted churchmen. While Catholic voters seemed to have reacted to some condescending and inaccurate expressions about Catholicism during the campaign, the disparity between votes cast for each party, larger than in 2012, still was only 7 percent.

Considering the large number of nominal Catholics for whom doctrine is an encumbrance that is no longer bothersome, the vaunted Catholic population of the United States less the number of actually faithful Catholics, is a Potemkin village.

The precepts of several bishops on responsible voting had been edifying, but a remarkable number seemed to temper their instinctive loquacity with studied reserve. The election was a populist revolt and, while the popular election of bishops probably would be no improvement over the present system, the Church must address the simmering dissatisfaction of the faithful with the clerical establishment, which is as intense as the public vote against the Washington establishment.

Mediocre bureaucrats easily talk about the People of God but they disdain a populism that would consult the people seriously, just as liberal humanitarians think that humans lower the tone of humanity.

Other casualties of the new populism are the “Never Trump” commentators among professional conservatives, comfortable in their settled standards and sure convictions. In their endowed professorial chairs, think tanks, and journals which none but each other read, they clutched their pearls while lamenting the untutored rhetoric of the “gauche, vulgar, shockingly ignorant, oafish and immoral” Trump, as though the White House has long been a Temple of Vestals.

They now offer advice to the president-elect, as fair weather friends underestimating the storm, hoping that general amnesia will wipe away their lack of prescience.

After the election, histrionics have abounded in academia. College campuses have long been breeding grounds for self-absorption and corruption of sense, or what John Henry Newman described in his “Tamworth Reading Room” letters as “a mawkish, frivolous and fastidious sentimentalism.”

A new name for these callow narcissists is “Snowflakes.” This brings to mind the apologia of Mae West: “I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.”
- Professors who never attained moral maturity themselves, reacted by providing “safe spaces” for students traumatized by reality.
- In universities across the land, by a sodality of silliness in the academic establishment, these “safe spaces” were supplied with soft cushions, hot chocolate, coloring books, and attendant psychologists. - More than one university in the Ivy League provided aromatherapy along with friendly kittens and puppies for weeping students to cuddle.
- A college chaplaincy invited students to pray some prescribed litanies that offered God advice in an advisory capacity.

Yet consider this:
- The average age of a Continental soldier in the American Revolution was one year less than that of a college freshman today.
- Alexander Hamilton was a fighting lieutenant-colonel when 21,
- Not to mention Joan of Arc who led an army into battle and saved France when she was about as old as an American college sophomore.
- In our Civil War, eight Union generals and seven Confederate generals were under the age of 25.
- The age of most U.S. and RAF fighter pilots in World War II was about that of those on college junior varsity teams.
- Catholics who hoped in this election for another Lepanto miracle will remember that back in 1571, Don Juan of Austria saved Western civilization as commanding admiral when he was 24.

None of these figures, in the various struggles against the world and the flesh and devil, retreated to safe spaces weeping in the arms of grief therapists. Yet pollsters ritually cite the attitudes of “college educated voters” as though colleges still educate and those who have not spent time in college lack an equivalent or even superior kind of learning shaped by experience.

What will the frightened half-adults do when they leave their safe spaces and enter a society where there is no one to offer them hot chocolate during their tantrums?

Christ formed his disciples in a more practical way: “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves” (Mt 10:16).

We are here today because those disciples did as they were told, and were not shrewd as doves and innocent as snakes. It is not racist, or any other unchristian form of phobia, to recall that the Apostles are Dead White Guys. If that was a liability, they managed well.

Their Master, who wills that none be lost and that all be saved, was a Dead White Guy for just three days. That haunts those huddled in safe spaces, and hallows all who court danger to follow him.

Benedict XVI is well but
is not taking part in
Vatican ceremonies this weekend

From La Vigna del Signore via Beatrice, the photo above was taken yesterday, Nov. 18, of Benedict XVI with a visitor,
Alessandro Manzani, a history professor from the diocese of Imola.

An Italian site reported yesterday that unless there was a highly unlikely last-minute decision, there were no plans
for the Emeritus Pope to attend any of the two main events at the Vatican this weekend.

Benedict XVI had attended the first two cardinal-making consistories of this pontificate as well as the opening ceremony
of the Holy Year of Mercy last year, at the invitation of Pope Francis.

[Read what you will of the Emeritus Pope's decision this time - it obviously does not have to do with health reasons, thank God.]


November 19, 2016
P.S. And read what you will of this gesture...

Pope, new Cardinals visit
Pope-Emeritus Benedict XVI

November 19, 2016



At the conclusion of the Consistory celebration on Saturday, Pope Francis made a visit to Pope-Emeritus Benedict XVI along with
16 of the 17 new cardinals he had just created.

The 16 red-hatted men, led by white-hatted Pope Francis, boarded two buses and made the short journey from St. Peter’s Basilica to the Chapel of the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican.

There they were greeted by Pope-Emeritus Benedict XVI.

The one new Cardinal missing from the group was the 87-year-old bishop from Lesotho, Africa - Sebastian Koto Khoarai, OMI.

Cardinal Khoarai did not make the trip to Rome due to his advanced age and infirmity and shall receive the insignia of his new
office by Papal emissary.

Prima facie, what a beautiful gesture - to bring the new Princes of the Church to 'pay their respects', as it were, to the emeritus Pope. [On their own, none of them might perhaps ever have given a thought to the retired pope, from whom they are separated by the great abyss of Bergoglianism.]

As gestures go, what a great PR move as well! With JMB as the hero (I wonder who suggested it, after B16 had decided not to attend any of this weekend's Bergoglian events), who thereby demonstrated his esteem and generosity towards his predecessor.

But, with my biases, I also think that it was another way of further 'co-opting' Benedict XVI into the Bergoglian church, as he seemed to have cooperated in co-opting himself, with all those words of praise for his successor in the recent interview book with Peter Seewald. (To insure the book would get a nihil obstat from the pope??? And/or in gratitude that he, JMB, gave his permission for the book to be published? This will always be an open sore for me.)

Nothing could be more anti-Catholic and contra-Church (and therefore, anti-Benedict XVI and everything he stood for) than the hair-raising more-Bergoglian-than-Bergoglio statements made by some of the new cardinals - of whom Cardinal Farrell, late of Texas, and Cupich of Chicago, are perhaps the prototype/epitomes - and now, here they were, herded by their lord and master to spend a few minutes of this great day in their life, with someone they probably never liked because of his convictions so diametrically opposite from theirs.

Incidentally, the brief video clip illustrating Fox News' recurrent news report today of the creation of new cardinals in the Church was of their visit to Mater Ecclesiae, showing Benedict XVI addressing them. Willy-nilly, their visit to 'the retired pope' ended up being the highlight of the day.

The video from ROME REPORTS:

Fr. H vents about our beloved pope and a questionable rhetorical habit of his - fundamentally dishonest and technically, lying by omission -
in which he truncates his citations from Jesus (and sometimes reports things Jesus never said), not to mention Fathers of the Church including
St. Thomas Aquinas - so misused and abused in AL - in order to 'support' his heterodox anti-Catholic ideas... I have added the two epigraphs
to elucidate two of Fr. H's premises. The first is St. Vincent de Lerins's complete statement truncated by the pope when he cited it recently,
and the second about 'Bulwerism', a word I am meeting for the first time....

---

[56.]In like manner, it behooves Christian doctrine to follow the same laws of progress, so as to be consolidated by years, enlarged by time, refined by age, [I believe this is as far as JMB quotes the saint, leaving out the substantially qualifying remainder of the sentence] and yet, withal, to continue uncorrupt and unadulterate, complete and perfect in all the measurement of its parts, and, so to speak, in all its proper members and senses, admitting no change, no waste of its distinctive property, no variation in its limits.
- St Vincent de Lerins, Communitorio 2

---

---

Bulverism is a logical fallacy that combines a genetic fallacy with circular reasoning. The method of Bulverism is to "assume that your opponent is wrong, and explain his error". The Bulverist assumes a speaker's argument is invalid or false and then explains why the speaker came to make that mistake, attacking the speaker or the speaker's motive. The term "Bulverism" was coined by C. S. Lewis[1] to poke fun at a very serious error in thinking that, he alleges, recurs often in a variety of religious, political, and philosophical debates.

Similar to Antony Flew's "Subject/Motive Shift", Bulverism is a fallacy of irrelevance. One accuses an argument of being wrong on the basis of the arguer's identity or motive, but these are strictly speaking irrelevant to the argument's validity or truth. But it is also a fallacy of circular reasoning, since it assumes, rather than argues, that one's opponent is wrong.

---

Can black really be white?

November 19, 2016

[There was] a good recent comment on Bulverism ... I suppose we could coin a cognate verb and say that the Roman Pontiff was Bulverising when he waxed eloquent on the deep and dark psychological maladies of all those ghastly young people who have Incorrect and Unbergoglian Tastes in liturgical matters.

It seems to me a term with possibilities. One could say "Don't you Bulverise me, you ..." in a very hostile tone of voice.

A thing I do not quite understand is our Holy Father's purpose in quoting from the Commonitorium of S Vincent of Lerins, cited by him in that same recently published interview.

The passage he alluded to also includes, hough Bergoglio did not quote it, the phrase eodem sensu eademque sententia. Derived by S Vincent of Lerins from the text of S Paul, it was used by B Pius IX, incorporated in the decree on the papal ministry at Vatican I, and contained in the anti-modernist oath.

Very significantly, it was used by S John XXIII in the programmatic speech he gave at the start of the Council. What the Council taught, so he laid down, was to be in the same sense, the same meaning, as the teaching of the preceding Magisterium.

S John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor made clear that it applied to questions of morality as much as to those of dogma. Benedict XVI used this same sanctified phrase in his 2005 Christmas address to the Roman Curia about the Hermeneutic of Continuity. You can find a series of mine on this phrase via the search engine on this blog.

Eodem sensu eademque sententia: (with the same sense and the same meaning) because the teaching of the Church cannot and does not change.

If this phrase means anything at all, it must mean that the teaching of Familiaris consortio (1981; paragraph 84) and of Caritatis sacramentum (2007; paragraph 29), that divorced people who, having gone through a civil form of marriage, are in an unrepented sexual relationship with a new "spouse", should not approach the Sacraments, cannot already ... in less than a decade! ... have metamorphosed or "developed" into its exact opposite.

Even Jesuits, and the Austrian aristocracy [Fr. H's habitual dig at Cardinal Schoenborn, who is a count] cannot really expect to get away with black being white, with non-X and X being identical. Come off it, chaps ...

I needed to google to get the St Vincent quote, and I found in the complete English text of his Communitorio 2, entitled "For the Antiquity and Universality of the Catholic Faith Against the Profane Novelties of All Heresies". [Communitorio means 'reminder' - St. Vincent thought he first of all needed to keep these reminders in mind.]
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3506.htm

It's a long read but well worth it - and the overwhelming impression once gets is that he denounces precisely all the manifold and ingenious ways in which Bergoglio and his courtisans and acolytes have been profaning the Catholic faith... I was going to excerpt some of the most pointed statements used by St. Vincent, but there are just too many. Nonetheless, here is a sampling.

---

[47.] It behooves us, then, to give heed to these instances from Church History, so many and so great, and others of the same description, and to understand distinctly, in accordance with the rule laid down in Deuteronomy, that if at any time a Doctor in the Church have erred from the faith, Divine Providence permits it in order to make trial of us, whether or not we love God with all our heart and with all our mind.

Chapter 20.
The Notes of a true Catholic
[48.] This being the case, he is the true and genuine Catholic who loves the truth of God, who loves the Church, who loves the Body of Christ, who esteems divine religion and the Catholic Faith above every thing, above the authority, above the regard, above the genius, above the eloquence, above the philosophy, of every man whatsoever; who sets light by all of these, and continuing steadfast and established in the faith, resolves that he will believe that, and that only, which he is sure the Catholic Church has held universally and from ancient time; but that whatsoever new and unheard-of doctrine he shall find to have been furtively introduced by some one or another, besides that of all, or contrary to that of all the saints, this, he will understand, does not pertain to religion, but is permitted as a trial, being instructed especially by the words of the blessed Apostle Paul, who writes thus in his first Epistle to the Corinthians, "There must needs be heresies, that they who are approved may be made manifest among you:" (1 Cor 2:9) as though he should say, This is the reason why the authors of Heresies are not immediately rooted up by God, namely, that they who are approved may be made manifest; that is, that it may be apparent of each individual, how tenacious and faithful and steadfast he is in his love of the Catholic faith...

[51.]...When I think over these things, and revolve them in my mind again and again, I cannot sufficiently wonder at the madness of certain men, at the impiety of their blinded understanding, at their lust of error, such that, not content with the rule of faith delivered once for all, and received from the times of old, they are every day seeking one novelty after another, and are constantly longing to add, change, take away, in religion, as though the doctrine, "Let what has once for all been revealed suffice," were not a heavenly but an earthly rule — a rule which could not be complied with except by continual emendation, nay, rather by continual fault-finding;

Whereas the divine Oracles cry aloud, "Remove not the landmarks, which your fathers have set" (Prov 22:28) and "Go not to law with a Judge" (Sirach 8:14), and "Whoso breaks through a fence a serpent shall bite him"(Eccl 10:8), and that saying of the Apostle wherewith, as with a spiritual sword, all the wicked novelties of all heresies often have been, and will always have to be, decapitated, "O Timothy, keep the deposit, shunning profane novelties of words and oppositions of the knowledge falsely so called, which some professing have erred concerning the faith." (1 Timothy 6:20)...

What is "The deposit"? That which has been entrusted to you, not that which you have yourself devised: a matter not of wit, but of learning; not of private adoption, but of public tradition; a matter brought to you, not put forth by you, wherein you are bound to be not an author but a keeper, not a teacher but a disciple, not a leader but a follower.

"Keep the deposit." Preserve the talent of Catholic Faith inviolate, unadulterate. That which has been entrusted to you, let it continue in your possession, let it be handed on by you. You have received gold; give gold in turn. Do not substitute one thing for another. Do not for gold impudently substitute lead or brass. Give real gold, not counterfeit.

O Timothy! O Priest! O Expositor! O Doctor!... engrave the precious gems of divine doctrine, fit them in accurately, adorn them skilfully, add splendor, grace, beauty. Let that which formerly was believed, though imperfectly apprehended, as expounded by you be clearly understood. Let posterity welcome, understood through your exposition, what antiquity venerated without understanding. Yet teach still the same truths which you have learned, so that though you speak after a new fashion, what you speak may not be new.

Therefore, whatever has been sown by the fidelity of the Fathers in this husbandry of God's Church, the same ought to be cultivated and taken care of by the industry of their children, the same ought to flourish and ripen, the same ought to advance and go forward to perfection. For it is right that those ancient doctrines of heavenly philosophy should, as time goes on, be cared for, smoothed, polished; but not that they should be changed, not that they should be maimed, not that they should be mutilated. They may receive proof, illustration, definiteness; but they must retain withal their completeness, their integrity, their characteristic properties....

[58.] For if once this license of impious fraud be admitted, I dread to say in how great danger religion will be of being utterly destroyed and annihilated. For if any one part of Catholic truth be given up, another, and another, and another will thenceforward be given up as a matter of course, and the several individual portions having been rejected, what will follow in the end but the rejection of the whole?

On the other hand, if what is new begins to be mingled with what is old, foreign with domestic, profane with sacred, the custom will of necessity creep on universally, till at last the Church will have nothing left untampered with, nothing unadulterated, nothing sound, nothing pure; but where formerly there was a sanctuary of chaste and undefiled truth, thenceforward there will be a brothel of impious and base errors. May God's mercy avert this wickedness from the minds of his servants; be it rather the frenzy of the ungodly.

[59.] But the Church of Christ, the careful and watchful guardian of the doctrines deposited in her charge, never changes anything in them, never diminishes, never adds, does not cut off what is necessary, does not add what is superfluous, does not lose her own, does not appropriate what is another's, but while dealing faithfully and judiciously with ancient doctrine, keeps this one object carefully in view — if there be anything which antiquity has left shapeless and rudimentary, to fashion and polish it, if anything already reduced to shape and developed, to consolidate and strengthen it, if any already ratified and defined, to keep and guard it.

Finally, what other object have Councils ever aimed at in their decrees, than to provide that what was before believed in simplicity should in future be believed intelligently, that what was before preached coldly should in future be preached earnestly, that what was before practised negligently should thenceforward be practised with double solicitude?...

Chapter 25.
Heretics appeal to Scripture that they may more easily succeed in deceiving.
[64.] Here, possibly, some one may ask, Do heretics also appeal to Scripture? They do indeed, and with a vengeance; for you may see them scamper through every single book of Holy Scripture—through the books of Moses, the books of Kings, the Psalms, the Epistles, the Gospels, the Prophets. Whether among their own people, or among strangers, in private or in public, in speaking or in writing, at convivial meetings, or in the streets, hardly ever do they bring forward anything of their own which they do not endeavour to shelter under words of Scripture....

[65.] But the more secretly they conceal themselves under shelter of the Divine Law, so much the more are they to be feared and guarded against. For they know that the evil stench of their doctrine will hardly find acceptance with any one if it be exhaled pure and simple. They sprinkle it over, therefore, with the perfume of heavenly language, in order that one who would be ready to despise human error, may hesitate to condemn divine words. They do, in fact, what nurses do when they would prepare some bitter draught for children; they smear the edge of the cup all round with honey, that the unsuspecting child, having first tasted the sweet, may have no fear of the bitter. So too do these act, who disguise poisonous herbs and noxious juices under the names of medicines, so that no one almost, when he reads the label, suspects the poison.

[66.] It was for this reason that the Saviour cried, "Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves" (Mt 7:15)

What is meant by "sheep's clothing"? What but the words which prophets and apostles with the guilelessness of sheep wove beforehand as fleeces, for that immaculate Lamb which takes away the sin of the world? What are the ravening wolves? What but the savage and rabid glosses of heretics, who continually infest the Church's folds, and tear in pieces the flock of Christ wherever they are able? But that they may with more successful guile steal upon the unsuspecting sheep, retaining the ferocity of the wolf, they put off his appearance, and wrap themselves, so to say, in the language of the Divine Law, as in a fleece, so that one, having felt the softness of wool, may have no dread of the wolf's fangs....

But what says the Saviour? "By their fruits you shall know them;" that is, when they have begun not only to quote those divine words, but also to expound them, not as yet only to make a boast of them as on their side, but also to interpret them, then will that bitterness, that acerbity, that rage, be understood; then will the ill-savour of that novel poison be perceived, then will those profane novelties be disclosed, then may you see first the hedge broken through, then the landmarks of the Fathers removed, then the Catholic faith assailed, then the doctrine of the Church torn in pieces....

Chapter 26.
Heretics, in quoting Scripture, follow the example of the Devil.

[68.] But some one will say, What proof have we that the Devil is wont to appeal to Holy Scripture? Let him read the Gospels wherein it is written, "Then the Devil took Him (the Lord the Saviour) and set Him upon a pinnacle of the Temple, and said unto Him: If you be the Son of God, cast yourself down, for it is written, He shall give His angels charge concerning you, that they may keep you in all your ways: In their hands they shall bear you up, lest perchance you dash your foot against a stone."

What sort of treatment must men, insignificant wretches that they are, look for at the hands of him who assailed even the Lord of Glory with quotations from Scripture? "If you be the Son of God," says he, "cast yourself down." Wherefore? "For," says he, "it is written."

It behooves us to pay special attention to this passage and bear it in mind, that, warned by so important an instance of Evangelical authority, we may be assured beyond doubt, when we find people alleging passages from the Apostles or Prophets against the Catholic Faith, that the Devil speaks through their mouths. For as then the Head spoke to the Head, so now also the members speak to the members, the members of the Devil to the members of Christ, misbelievers to believers, sacrilegious to religious, in one word, Heretics to Catholics.

[69.] ... And if one should ask one of the heretics who gives this advice, How do you prove? What ground have you, for saying, that I ought to cast away the universal and ancient faith of the Catholic Church? He has the answer ready, "For it is written;" and immediately he produces a thousand testimonies, a thousand examples, a thousand authorities from the Law, from the Psalms, from the apostles, from the Prophets, by means of which, interpreted on a new and wrong principle, the unhappy soul may be precipitated from the height of Catholic truth to the lowest abyss of heresy.

Then, with the accompanying promises, the heretics are wont marvellously to beguile the incautious. For they dare to teach and promise, that in their church, that is, in the conventicle of their communion, there is a certain great and special and altogether personal grace of God, so that whosoever pertain to their number, without any labour, without any effort, without any industry, even though they neither ask, nor seek, nor knock, have such a dispensation from God, that, borne up by angel hands, that is, preserved by the protection of angels, it is impossible they should ever dash their feet against a stone, that is, that they should ever be offended.

Chapter 27.
What Rule is to be observed in the Interpretation of Scripture.

[70.] But it will be said, If the words, the sentiments, the promises of Scripture, are appealed to by the Devil and his disciples, of whom some are false apostles, some false prophets and false teachers, and all without exception heretics, what are Catholics and the sons of Mother Church to do? How are they to distinguish truth from falsehood in the sacred Scriptures?

They must be very careful to pursue that course which, in the beginning of this Commonitory, we said that holy and learned men had commended to us, that is to say, they must interpret the sacred Canon according to the traditions of the Universal Church and in keeping with the rules of Catholic doctrine, in which Catholic and Universal Church, moreover, they must follow universality, antiquity, consent.

And if at any time a part opposes itself to the whole, novelty to antiquity, the dissent of one or a few who are in error to the consent of all or at all events of the great majority of Catholics, then they must prefer the soundness of the whole to the corruption of a part; in which same whole they must prefer the religion of antiquity to the profaneness of novelty; and in antiquity itself in like manner, to the temerity of one or of a very few they must prefer, first of all, the general decrees, if such there be, of a Universal Council, or if there be no such, then, what is next best, they must follow the consentient belief of many and great masters. Which rule having been faithfully, soberly, and scrupulously observed, we shall with little difficulty detect the noxious errors of heretics as they arise....

---

Isn't it absolutely amazing? It's as if St. Vincent lived in our time and was reporting and observing all the manifold offenses to the Catholic faith - and to Christ himself - taking place today, often initiated by the very man who is supposed to be the Vicar of Christ on earth. In other words, the same major threats have always menaced the Church of Christ from the beginning that continue to threaten her today, and these threats have always been by men of the Church who thought and think they can improve on Jesus!

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/11/2016 16:41]

Since Bergoglio became pope, I haven't had much incentive to read Elizabeth Scalia at all (though I posted many of her columns during Benedict
XVI's Pontificate) because she quickly proved to be an ueber-normalist, to whom no pope - in this case, Bergoglio - could possibly ever say
or do anything wrong. A tendency she promoted among her stable of 'Catholic' writers when she was at PATHEOS, though in fairness to her, most
of them were instant out-and-out Bergoglians to begin with. She has since moved to Aleteia where she edits the English edition, and where she
has written at least one pro-Benedict piece that I re-posted, which showed that for all her ueber-normalism that can see nothing wrong with
the current pope, she has, thankfully, not lost her admiration and affection for Benedict XVI. Here is another one - with its tacit assumption
that those who follow Aleteia are not likely to have any sympathy at all for the emeritus Pope.

You haven’t read Benedict because WHY?
If you've been reluctant to read Papa Ratzinger, make doing so
one final act of mercy in the jubilee year. You won't be disappointed.
by ELIZABETH SCALIA

NOVEMBER 19, 2016

Give the much-maligned Pope Benedict XVI [much-maligned only by Bergoglians and the secular media, otherwise a most worthy Holy Father to sensible Catholics, and future Doctor of the Church to those who love him] a fair reading sometime. You’ll be surprised.

About a year or so ago I found myself in the middle of one of those social media imbroglios we should all know better than to take part in. A supposed “fan” of Pope Benedict’s had attributed a sentiment to him that, in light of what I know of Papa Ratzinger, made no sense to me. I asked this rather cranky anonymous entity about it, and there ensued a very strange conversation: the more I quoted Benedict to this person, the angrier he or she became with me.

It was the tenderness of Benedict that seemed to be throwing this person off.

“Tenderness” is a word that has been used with some frequency by his successor, Pope Francis; it is not a word people associate with Benedict. [Such people never having bothered to watch or listen to the inevitable daily videos of him when he was pope - or, if they lived in the USA or other countries he visited, probably never bothering to watch the fullscale media coverage given him and the virtual unanimity of praise even in the usual hostile media, precisely for being the exact opposite of all the falsified and false stereotypes that have persisted for decades about Joseph Ratzinger. In which his gentleness, goodness and holiness radiated in everything he said and did, as it always does to everyone who has ever been exposed to him directly or through video.]

For the ignorant and the perpetually angry, Papa Ratzinger is only a caricature –“God’s Rottweiler.” For others, he is stern rule-keeper, which is just another kind of caricature.

What Benedict was, and is, is a Christ-lover; before he is anything else, he is all Christ’s. To plumb his depths is to begin to drown in a love that is maddening in a way, because it relentlessly points us away from our own concerns for something deeper and finer; something that makes us truly royal children of a Revolutionary King. [And because he is "all Christ's", he has never misused the words of Christ by truncation or omission as his successor habitually does to support an anti-Catholic position nor to suggest in any way that he could improve on the Church Christ instituted.]

What ended the social media contretemps was my reminding the cranky one of Benedict’s exhortation that all people needed to hear the words, “It is good that you exist.”

Interestingly, at that point someone else — a witness to the cyber-melee — who, reading through the mess of input, saw those words “It is good that you exist” and, assuming they belonged to Pope Francis, remarked “very Jesuitical!”

That person, too, was shocked to learn that the words came from Benedict.

Some time later, I gave a friend of mine a copy of Co-Workers of the Truth: Meditations for Every Day of the Year. She likes “daily-reading” books, but when she saw it was Ratzinger-written she objected. “You know I don’t like him,” she told me.

Yes, I knew. “But you’ve never read him.” I said. Reminding her that she is a fair-minded person, I urged her to give the book a chance.

And then one day, she called me, in tears. “He is beautiful!” She said. “I had no idea!”

It seems that a daily serving of Benedict had begun to warm her up, but what got her blowing her nose over the phone was the excerpt for Tuesday, February 18:

---

The sum of human life does not strike a balance if we omit God; in that case, only contradictions remain. It is not enough, then, to believe somehow theoretically that there is a God; we must regard him as the most important element in our life. He must be everywhere. And our fundamental relationship to him must be love.

That can often be very difficult. It can happen, for instance, that one individual has many illnesses… poverty makes life difficult for another. Yet a third loses the persons on whose love his whole life depends… And there is a great danger that the individual will become embittered and will say: God can certainly not be good; if he were, he would not treat me this way.

Such a revolt against God is very understandable; often it seems almost impossible to accept God’s will. But one who yields to this rebellion poisons his whole life. The poison of saying “No,” of being angry with God and with the world, corrodes the individual from within.

But what God asks of us is, at is were, an advance of confidence. He says to us: “I know, you don’t understand me yet. But trust me anyway, believe that I am good, and dare to live by this trust.” There are many instances of saints and great individuals who dared to trust and, in consequence, found for themselves and for others true happiness amid the greatest darkness.
— from Auf Christus schauen (Looking to Christ), pp 109-110

---

“It sounds just like Francis! Like something he would say!” My friend said.

Well, it sounds like Peter, really. This week sees the US release of Benedict XVI: The Last Testament, what is purported to be the last interview he will give to Peter Seewald. As his other talks with Seewald have been phenomenal, I can’t wait to dig into it and see what Papa Ratzi has to tell us about his life, and his joys and regrets, and what last things he has to tell us about the life of faith.

If you have been reluctant to read Benedict, perhaps let this be one final act of mercy as the Year of Mercy draws to a close: give the Pope Emeritus an opening to teach you what he knows. I have never known anyone who has read him and been disappointed.

P.S. On her site, benoit-et-moi/2016.fr, Beatrice points to a Scalia piece in Patheos in January 2015 which I had completely missed, and which she had written, taking off from a statement by Joseph Ratzinger in one of his early books, "It is good that you exist". Here is the first part of that article:

The power of the message
“It is good that you exist”
by Elizabeth Scalia

January 14, 2015

Oftentimes, when I am sifting through angry emails or moderating the comboxes and releasing comments from people who would presume to tell me I am going to hell, or that I am “outside of the church” (as an aside, I am fascinated by people who declare that on the basis of a single word, they know all about me and the state of my soul; there are people in Vegas who would pay cash-money to see that trick) I think back to what my dear Pope Benedict XVI, my spiritual “Pop-pop” has said:

---

It is only when life has been accepted and is perceived as accepted that it becomes also acceptable. Man is that strange creature that needs not just physical birth but also appreciation if he is to subsist . . . If an individual is to accept himself, someone must say to him: “It is good that you exist” – must say it, not with words, but with that act of the entire being that we call love. – from Principles of Catholic Theology

---

[How typical of Joseph Ratzinger that even in a textbook of theology, he finds a direct application to our everyday life - which in these days would be described as 'pastoral' - as he did most admirably in arguably his most sublime theological work, JESUS OF NAZARETH!]

That is one of the greatest life-lessons I have ever come across and tried to absorb, and its one that requires practice. When I get a lot hate mail (currently, it’s mostly of the run-of-the-mill “yer a homophobe” and “yer a fat fag hag” variety, with many consignments to hell between them), I take a breath, and internally say those words to the writer: “It is good that you exist.”

It is astonishing how quickly bringing that thought to mind — remembering that each of us is created and sustained by the ardent “yes” of the Creator — tamps down my old Irish temper, and inspires me to simply pray the prayer Julie Davis shared with me, long ago:
“Lord have mercy on me and bless [insert name here]”...

[A commendable spiritual exercise that I would have to perform everytime I think of people like our beloved pope or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton and all those who think like them. Yes, it is 'good' that they exist, even as it was 'good' that someone like Hitler existed, so we may have prominent and concrete examples of what forms evil can take.

I think, of course, that the context in which Joseph Ratzinger wrote the above-quoted statement has to do with directly reminding any fellow human being who feels he is worthless that yes, it is good he exists, because God created him and God has a purpose for each of us. But narcissists and megalomaniacs do not have to be told 'It is good you exist' - they are already supremely convinced that they are God's greatest gift to mankind.]

Let me post the ff item as a most appropriate companion piece: For all intents and purposes - and literally, if we are to judge by the many
statements he has made since he became pope to denigrate Church tradition and thereby anyone who upholds it and abides by it - respecting
traditional Catholics is not part of Jorge Bergoglio's mindset at all (and that includes the emeritus Pope, despite all of JMB's words and gestures
of supposed esteem... Does anyone doubt that Joseph Ratzinger is among those - and most likely, JMB's the principal target - whenever he
dismisses and denounces 'traditionalists', 'doctors of the law' and 'rigorists', not to mention those 'self-absorbed Promethean neo-Pelagians'?



Respecting traditional Catholics
by Fr. Gerald E. Murray

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

A newly published interview with Pope Francis by Fr. Antonio Spadaro, S.J. has caused much anguish and bewilderment among a group of Catholics who are already disfavored and even rejected by some Churchmen – those who prefer to attend the Tridentine Latin Mass, now known as the Extraordinary Form (EF) of the Roman Rite.

Pope Francis told Fr. Spadaro:

---

Pope Benedict accomplished a just and magnanimous gesture to reach out to a certain mindset of some groups and persons who felt nostalgia and were distancing themselves. But it is an exception. That is why one speaks of an “extraordinary” rite. The ordinary in the Church is not this. [Of course, in dismissing the EF as simply an expedient accommodation granted by Benedict XVI, Bergoglio conveniently ignores the most poignant and crucial line in Benedict XVI's letter to the bishops of the world before he formally issued Summorumn Pontificum: "What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful."]

It is necessary to approach with magnanimity those attached to a certain form of prayer. But the ordinary is not this. Vatican II and Sacrosanctum Concilium must go on as they are. To speak of a “reform of the reform” is an error.

---

A few observations: to speak of a “mindset” is to stigmatize those who see and love the value of the Church’s traditional worship as trapped in an unreflective, fixed way of thinking. [Which is precisely Bergoglio's way, hence I often refer to his 'mindset' - when his mind is set on something, he will not see anything that can possibly change it one iota.]

We teach children the importance of working hard in school to acquire knowledge, habits of independent thought and inquiry, and good criteria of judgment. We do not tell them to study hard to acquire a mindset, which may be described as an unnecessarily constricted or just plain erroneous way of thinking.

Living one’s life according to a mindset means one has fallen short of a fuller understanding. Mindsets are obstacles, not vehicles, to a proper appreciation of truth, beauty, and goodness. Sticking to a mindset is often the result of a positive refusal to see the broader reality for fear of what one might discover. Pity, not praise, is in order when dealing with people who have a mindset.

Pope Francis also spoke about “persons who felt nostalgia” for the EF Mass. What is nostalgia? I take it to mean a sentimental and essentially unreasonable attachment to the past. It can be a harmless reminiscence (“When the Dodgers played at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn . . .”), but when it involves trying to reproduce now what happened in the past, it can be a psychologically destructive impulse.

Is nostalgia the motivating impulse of those older Catholics who like to attend the EF Mass? Certainly not, if my experience is not dissimilar to that of other priests who offer the EF Mass when called upon by the faithful. These Catholics, both young and old, are seeking not to live in the past, but to experience the holiness of the living Christ through His Church’s time-honored worship.

Mindset and nostalgia are loaded words that transfer discussion from the realm of intellectual inquiry to the realm of psychological analysis. The operative question is not “What do these Catholics find attractive and inspiring in the EF Mass?,” but rather “What went wrong in the lives of these Catholics who are attached to the EF and do not find the Ordinary Form sufficient?”

Fr. Spadaro continued and asked Pope Francis: “Other than those who are sincere and ask for this possibility out of habit or devotion, can this desire express something else? Are there dangers?” Pope Francis replied:

---

I ask myself about this. For example, I always try to understand what is behind those individuals who are too young to have lived the pre-Conciliar liturgy, and who want it nonetheless. I have at times found myself in front of people who are too rigid, an attitude of rigidity. And I ask myself: how come so much rigidity? You dig, you dig, this rigidity always hides something: insecurity, at times perhaps something else. . . .The rigidity is defensive. True love is not rigid.

---

[Hah! The greatest irony is that JMB does not seem to realize how jackhammer-rigid he is in his protestations against what he considers rigidity in Catholics, and Catholics only, so far. Note he never condemns the 'rigidity' with which Muslims, even the non-militant ones, live their religion and the words of Muhammad literally, when he is ever so ready to condemn 'rigidity' when Catholics choose to abide by that very deposit of faith that was handed down to him to safeguard and defend when he became pope, but which he seems to see as his to change as he pleases.]

This sweeping psychologizing indicates that the pope sees no reasonable motivations for those want to attend the EF Mass. The young cannot be nostalgic, since they did not grow up with the EF Mass. Rather, they have a “defensive” attitude of “rigidity” that hides their “insecurity” or “perhaps something else.” What does this mean?

Rigidity is a psychological impairment, an unreasonable refusal, if not a complete inability, to change one’s outlook or behavior. Francis says it is “always” a mask for insecurity or “at times perhaps something else,” which I take to mean something worse than mere insecurity. [So what do his own statements say of him and his relentless rigidity???]

In the last fifty years, “rigidity” has been a code word used [by CINOs] to denigrate conservative Catholics who treasure the spiritual patrimony of the Church.

Earlier Pope Francis said: “It is necessary to approach with magnanimity those attached to a certain form of prayer.” Yet this spirit is absent from his remarks that characterize attachment to the EF. [Which is, of course, typical of the contradictions inherent in much of what he says. Being what one might call n unsystematic, sometimes incoherent thinker, he does not realize it when he contradicts himself in his ramblings.]

This is really a caricature. It displays a readiness to find psychological deficits or imbalance as the cause for such interest among both young and old. This line of argument frees one from the need to engage in an objective analysis of the reasons why a young (or old) person might be attracted to the Church’s perennial form of worship instead of to the reformed Mass, as experienced in many parishes.

As regards Pope Francis’s statement that “to speak of a ‘reform of the reform’ is an error,” this notion is something that has been widely discussed and, in some ways, already put into effect (e.g., the 3rd edition of the Roman Missal and the new accurate translation of it into English) precisely because, as Pope Francis told Fr. Spadaro “Vatican II and Sacrosanctum Concilium must go on as they are.” [What they mean by 'as they are' is of course, in the case of Vatican II, seeing it as the birth of a 'new church', and in the case of Sacrosanctum concilium, failing to read what it really says, which does not sanction any of the Novus Ordo features that Bergoglio and company simply assume the document authorizes when it does not - such as the Mass as social occasion/communal meal instead of a sacrifice of adoration, thanksgiving and petition; ad populum over ad orientem; the complete abandonment of Latin in the liturgy; receiving the host in one's hands; using profane music and instruments in the liturgy; or ripping out old altars to put in the tables at which the priest presides at the 'communal meal'.]

The reform of the reform is an effort both to implement the reforms of the Mass that the Conciliar Fathers voted for when they approved Sacrosanctum Concilium, and, as needed, to undo the innovations and accretions they never dreamed of, and that were introduced into the Roman Missal or became standard practice with the new Missal.

Those who love the EF Mass are serious, sane Catholics who seek God in the beauty of sublime worship. They deserve a sympathetic hearing from their shepherds. [That a pope, however much he may be unsympathetic or even hostile to tradition, would be so dismissive of those in his flock who do not share his mindset is truly deplorable - but it is just one indication of how this pope - far from being mindful of his duty to be the symbol of unity within the Church has been actively promoting and fomenting polarization instead.]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/11/2016 23:18]

I thought this comes as an appropriate counterpoint to the pope's Holy Year of Mercy and all his talk about mercy without any reference to justice
and charity. JMB himself did not just unconditionally support the seemingly unwarranted persecution of the FFI by his Congregation supervising
religious orders but has even said harsh statements about them. Is the Vatican going to relent after this? Don't hold your breath! Hell hath no fury
worse than that of a sanctimonious pope and his acolytes who are continually proven objectively wrong in their accusations against their pet
(ideological) targets.


Italian magistrate dismisses accusations of rape and abuse of nuns against FFI founder
by Marco Tosatti
Translated from

November 21, 2016

After almost a year of investigation, an Italian court has dropped charges alleging he sexually and physically abused some sisters of his order's feminine counterpart in the convent of Frigento, against Fr. Stefano Maneeli, founder of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate.

The dismissal of the charges was requested by the public minister (prosecutor) of the Civil Court of Avellino.

Fr. Manelli has been the object of a particularly virulent campaign in the Italian media against his character and person, since the FFI was suddenly placed under Vatican administration and its officials dismissed, a few months into this pontificate. No official reason was ever given for the action [(and subsequent Vatican moves exacerbating the situation) other than a comment by the commissar originally appointed by the Vatican to take over FFI administration (he has since died, but not after having been ordered by an Italian court to pay damages to the Manelli family for having presented defamatory charges against them) that there were 'crypto-Lefebvrian tendencies' in the FFI].

The Vatican initially acted on the complaint of a few FFI members who oppose the traditionalist Rule of the order [but they knew this when they joined the order.] Accusations were made of maladministration, financial misdeeds, and other acts [directly laid at the door of Fr. Manelli, now 80, whose parents (disciples of Padre Pio as was Fr. Manelli himself) are the objects of an active cause for beatification.]

The persecution of the FFI simply grew from bad to worse, extending to similar disciplinary action by the Vatican on their feminine order.
This saga was followed with too much enthusiasm and unquestioningly by the Italian media.

The Avellino prosecutor ruled, in effect, that Fr. Manelli was unjustly accused of committing injury against "the physical and moral integrity of the sisters of the convent of Frigento, committing acts of sexual violence and physical maltreatment against them".

Persons close to Fr. Manelli commented that "The result of the investigations have rebutted the accusations against him, restituting justice and dignity to Fr. Manelli who has been for some time the object of calumnious and defamatory attacks which have been am0lified by the media".

Now that the Magistrature has ruled that Fr. Manelli did not rape, maltreat or kill anyone in Frigento, we must again ask the Congregation for religious orders, its prefect and its secretary: What wrongs exactly has Fr. Manelli done [other than choosing that his order celebrate the traditional Mass within the order - if that is a 'wrong' at all], and what have the FFI done to be treated so harshly [and unjustly!]?

Ironically, the news came just as the pope's Holy Year of Mercy ended. [Not that the pope or the people acting in his name ever showed the slightest mercy for Fr. Manelli and the FFI! One cannot explain away this apparent aggression and utter mercilessness by Bergoglio's Vatican against an order that distinguished itself early for being able to attract many young men to the priesthood! - other than to hold them up as an example to all religious orders so they will eschew tradition and Catholic principles and simply follow Bergoglianism.]

One must sympathize with Mr. Royal who went to Rome hoping to 'chronicle a consistory' but ending up with only the formal cardinal-making rite and the morning-after Mass with the new cardinals... and with all the cardinals who travelled to Rome expecting some facetime, even if en masse, with the pope at the customary full assembly of cardinals... And all they got was Mater et misericordia, co-opting an Augustinian title for New Age Bergoglio platitudes on faux-mercy....

Consistory chronicle: Contrast between
St. Peter's ceremony and an awful week
that underscored division in the Church
by Robert Royal

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2016

The skies cleared after an early rain yesterday, and St. Peter’s looked splendid under that soft bluish-white sky that exists in Rome and nowhere else. The greatest painters have only been able to suggest that gentleness.

Meanwhile, the Holy Father looked very healthy – perhaps the healthiest since he came to Rome. And he seemed genuinely delighted with his new cardinals, hugging them and smiling – notable for Francis because, he’s an outgoing man with individuals and groups in informal situations, but during formal Church events he usually grows very solemn.

The beautiful music, the stately liturgy, the shining interior of St. Peter’s all reflected the long Catholic tradition, reaching across the centuries and gathering diverse beauties along the way, stretching back to the ancient world.

All appeared, on the surface, as if the Church that Christ founded was resplendent, unified, and celebrating a universal mission that, in the very different persons of this unusual group of new Cardinals, it was prepared to carry out, literally to the farthest ends of the Earth.

But to anyone who has been paying attention to this awful week in Rome, as welcome as the spectacle was, the reality was quite different.

The pope essentially admitted as much in his remarks at the Consistory. Evidently referring to the letter sent to him by four prominent Cardinals seeking clarifications about some points in Amoris laetitia, he said, “How many situations of uncertainty and suffering are sown by this growing animosity between peoples, between us! . . .Yes, between us, within our communities, our priests, our meetings.”

But as right as he was to seek to overcome it [or appear to do so!], it was less clear that he understood the sources of this “growing animosity” among Catholics. [Source, not sources, because it is he alone who has caused this widening divide - eagerly seconded of course by all his acolytes and minions in the Church and in the media. It's not that he does not understand this at all - it is just that falsely considering himself infallible (how could he be otherwise if, as he claims, everything he says and does as pope comes from the Holy Spirit himself, therefore his infallibility extends way beyond just on faith and morals), he cannot see why everybody else does not just click their heels together, say "Heil Jorge!" and fall in line behind him unquestioningly.]

For example, Fr. Antonio Spadaro, S.J., the editor-in-chief of La Civiltà Cattolica, a journal often described as an unofficial but authoritative voice of the Vatican (popes for years have vetted articles before they appeared), went so far in a Tweet as to apply a quotation from Tolkien’s Gandalf, “to bandy crooked words with a witless worm", to the four cardinals who, respectfully it should be said, asked for the clarifications of Amoris Laetitia this week.

The Tweet was quickly taken down, but that a man in such a post – and known to be a close collaborator with the Holy Father – would allow himself such a public insult, the kind of words that once said can never really be unsaid, shows something deeply wrong in the Church at this awful moment, and not primarily among those who have asked the pope to say more clearly what he means.

At a press conference yesterday evening, Steve Jalsevac of the consistently informative LifeSite, asked Chicago’s new Cardinal Blaise Cupich about the harsh words and treatment traditional Catholics have been receiving from some of Francis's closest collaborators (Spadaro being only one example). Cardinal Cupich claimed not to know of any such harshness. [The question should have asked about "harsh words and treatment from the pope himself and his closest collaborators".]

Before you – uncharitably – attribute this to bad faith or worse, let me say that in my own experience, traditional bishops too are often quite unaware of similar matters. With the various responsibilities they have, bishops, archbishops, cardinals don’t always follow Catholic news, even in the general way that most concerned Catholics might think. [That's an unusually and willfully naive view! Does Mr. Royal really think that the US bishops, including Cupich, do 'not always follow Catholic news'???]

But there’s another dimension here that I think does involve some progressive blindness. We’ve just seen a political parallel: like the supporters of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, progressive leaders tend to think that the reception they get in liberal media, university settings, gatherings of international elites, reflects the broad realities in the world. They don’t know or appreciate that there are vast numbers of people out there who are hurting and threatened by an anti-Christian culture – and feel ignored by Church leaders.

When people who are merely trying to follow the Gospel hear themselves described as rigid, ignorant, unmerciful, legalistic, judgmental, or by other equally disparaging terms, [BY THE POPE HIMSELF, AND NOT JUST ONCE BUT FREQUENTLY] in the very brittle situation in which Christianity operates in today’s world, it angers them.

And when they see four sincere cardinals compared with “a witless worm,” it makes them think – fairly or not – that Church leaders feel contempt for those who are often the most faithful and active members of the Church.

There’s a sad irony in all this. As Phil Lawler has documented in a brilliant article, Pope Francis deliberately cultivated ambiguity on several matters – in order to let certain differences play out in the Church. He seems to have thought that these would resolve themselves rather quickly and painlessly, or at least turn into some sort of “dialog.” [Umm, forgive my biases, but I do not think that was Bergoglio's 'scenario' at all. He has deliberately cultivated ambiguity on many fundamental anti-Catholic positions of his that would immediately brand him an unequivocal heretic were he to be honest and say exactly what he is purporting to be teaching. Why must serious commentators on Church life like Mr. Royal not come right out and say this?]

As was entirely predictable, the ambiguity has led instead to deep division – division even among the Cardinals in Rome, to be sure, and likely quite soon to division within the College of Cardinals globally. The level of nervousness and uncertainty one hears from every quarter in Rome is something without precedent.

That may be coming to national churches as well. The recent clash between new American Cardinal Kevin Farrell and Archbishop Charles Chaput may just be the beginning. Farrell said that it would have been better if the question of the divorced/remarried had been addressed by the whole U.S. bishops’ conference before individual dioceses, such as Chaput’s Philadelphia, issued regulations.

Chaput has responded, quite rightly, that it’s never been the responsibility of a bishops’ conference, always the responsibility of the local ordinary, to make such decisions: “Why would a bishop delay interpreting and applying Amoris Laetitia for the benefit of his people? On a matter as vital as sacramental marriage, hesitation and ambiguity are neither wise nor charitable.”

A Francis-cardinal, perhaps at the urging of figures in the Vatican, publicly opposing a prominent archbishop who should be a cardinal, is already bad enough. But it’s not hard to imagine that such conflicts will be repeated now, in many other contexts around the world.

After the leak of Pope Francis's letter to the Argentinean bishops, I said I was sad to have to conclude that, for the rest of his papacy, the pope would confront schisms and threats of schisms. I’m even sadder now to see that I was right, and that, sooner than I expected, at this week’s Consistory – usually a time for celebrating a global Church – the pope couldn’t allow the Cardinals to come together as in the past [Once again, Mr. Royal is soft-pedalling this - it wasn't a question of 'allowing the cardinals to come together; the pope simply refused to convoke the cardinals present in Rome for a full consistory, as he did with such eagerness when he had Cardinal Kasper preach to them the Bergoglian-Kapser gospel of sacramental leniency}, probably because it would have led to further public discord.

That’s where we are now. Let’s pray thing don’t turn even worse.


I have yet to post anything on the latest Bergoglian 'gesture' to cap his Year of Mercy - that about all priests now given the faculty to absolve confessed sins of abortion without needing to ask their bishop. I am not so naive as to think that progressivist priests have needed to ask their bishops' permission to absolve before this open extension of a faculty Bergoglio allowed during his Mercy year.

Nor do I question a priest's authority to grant absolution to anyone who confesses to him if he deems the confessee to be sincerely repentant about his mortal sin(s).

What I do object to is that the report will simply reinforce the false belief that it's all right to commit any grave mortal sin, not just abortion - and even to do it again and again - provided you confess and get absolution.

Lax Catholics - and seculars who do not appreciate Catholic teaching at all - will see it as a green light from the pope for Catholic women to abort (and for Catholic healthcare workers to assist them) as much as they want because, in Bergoglio's words,there is no sin that God’s mercy cannot reach and wipe away when it finds a repentant heart seeking to be reconciled with the Father", because, of course,to justify habitual abortion, they will only ever remember and cite the first part of that sentence, and ignore the part about repentance and reconciliation with God.]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/11/2016 01:47]

The good news:
Cats, skinning of, different ways

November 22, 2016

I sense a feeling in some quarters of disquiet, or even panic, because more prelates than the Four haven't made more noise about Amoris laetitia. I would remind such critics that there is more than one way to skin a cat.

Very soon after this document was published, Cardinal Mueller, addressing seminarians, explained that nothing has changed; that the teaching of Familiaris consortio and Sacramentum caritatis is still fully in place. He concluded his assertion with the cheerful "it's-obvious-isn't-it" observation that, if a Roman Pontiff wanted to change such important teaching, he would so explicitly and with full explanations.

The widespread opinion, which seems to me plausible, is that Bergoglio in fact is trying to create ambiguity and confusion and grey areas so that, in the fullness of time [tout de suite, in fact!], heterodox conclusions will emerge from the mess ... while he, Bergoglio, will be immune to any accusation of teaching explicit heresy. [We've known and reiterated that all along, haven't we? This pope seems to think no one has any brains to see through his couldn't-be-more-obvious modus operandi.]

OK; if that's right, do you really expect Mueller to say it? Do you in effect expect the Muellers of this world to resign noisily and thus vacate areas of power for dodgy Bergoglians to be put into? Do you think Bergoglio is happy with Mueller? Why do you suppose he sent von Schoenborn, instead of Mueller, to do the Amoris laetitia News Conference? [Never doubt that at the first possible opportunity, Mueller will be replaced at CDF. Right now, with the dubia in full bloom, JMB more than ever needs Mueller to trump his critics with - "I still have Ratzinger's man as my CDF Prefect, right?, and he has not found fault with me. He has even written a new book about me and my predecessor, about how both of us are serving the Petrine ministry!"]

Or take Archbishop Chaput. He worked hard and fast and got his diocesan guidelines out. No grass grew under his feet. Kevin "Bergoglio-is-the-Holy-Spirit" Farrell criticised him and yet again dragged the Holy Spirit into his expression of his opinions*.

Chaput neatly replied that Farrell had not in fact been a witness of the first synod and had clearly not read the Philadelphia regulations. He then very deftly dealt with the idea that Episcopal Conferences should get themselves behind Amoris laetitia, by pointing out that diocesan bishops, not conferences, were responsible for their dioceses ... and that each bishop individually really loves the Holy Father simply to bits! This man is no fool and no coward. The first American pope?

I rejoice in the initative of the Four. I suspect that other prelates may have whispered in Pope Francis's ear that they agree with the Four; but out of affection and loyalty are not saying so publicly. Why do you think Bergoglio cancelled the talking-shop before the Consistory? Perhaps he, unlike the amnesiac Kev, remembers that there were some quite amusingly noisy episodes during the synods.

And it rather looks as though, in the pleasant anonymity of their polling booths, the American bishops have been contentedly unwilling to vote for Bergoglio's cronies and favourites.

Oh dear!

Miaow! Or, to put it quite differently, Miaow!


*"Each bishop in his diocese has to set certain rules and parameters, but at the same time, I think that they need to be open to listening to the Holy Spirit ..." Ah, the naive, the child-like arrogance of this individual!

Another take on the DUBIA - as the offensive ramps up to demonize the Four Cardinals:

Cardinal Schoenborn says 'dubia'
represent 'an attack on the pope'
Translated from

November 21, 2016

The publication of the DUBIA on Amoris laetitia by the Four Cardinals has strongly shook the Vatican. Pope Francis's entourage had been warned that the questions which the pope has decided it would be 'useless' to answer publicly, would be made public by the four cardinals.

[But has he even answered them in private??? Not that he needs to do that to his immediate circle. because they know very well that AL intends - and says so in studiedly equivocal circumlocutions - the following:
1) YES to unconditional concession of the Eucharist to remarried divorcees who continue to practice their conjugal rights;
2) NO to Veritatis Splendor and the Magisterium it is based on, in its definition of 'intrinsically evil acts';
3) NO to whether a person who habitually lives in violation of God's commandment (such as the Sixth) is considered to be in a grave state of habitual sin;
4) NO to Veritatis Splendor and the Magisterium it is based on, that “circumstances or intentions can never transform an act intrinsically evil by virtue of its object into an act ‘subjectively’ good or defensible as a choice”; and
5) NO to Veritatis splendor and the Magisterium it is based on, that "excludes a creative interpretation of the role of conscience and that emphasizes that conscience can never be authorized to legitimate exceptions to absolute moral norms that prohibit intrinsically evil acts by virtue of their object".]

But they did not think the DUBIA would have such great resonance. [More proof of how they all live in their media-created-and-reinforced fantasy bubble world that arrogantly ignores solid fact in favor of ideological smugness in reporting the world (the Church, or whatever it is they are reporting/commenting on).]

Spirits became so heated that at Casa Santa Marta, a 'preventive' process was soon begun. Since Monday last week, and especially since the arrival of the cardinals in Rome to take part in a consistory which would not include any full assembly of the cardinals meeting with the pope, decisions were being made, for or against any proposed action, in the light of the Four Cardinals' Letter.

Unquestionably, and to put it colloquially, the pope has tripped up. His intention was to open a laissez-faire-laissez-passer (let-them-do-it-and-let-it-pass) modality for unqualified remarried divorcees to receive Communion, but without saying so clearly, which would have been the concrete sign of the Church entering a new era of mercy

The problem is that in the Church, even today [at least until doctrine is formally changed!], such communion requires certain conditions [which AL indicates this pope, through his bishops and priests, would not require]. And yet, to open this 'door of mercy', he would need to say expressis verbis that 'in some cases', adultery is no longer a sin!

The only one among the pope's intimates who could have prevented the pope from this enormous error, to use a weak word for heterodoxy, was Cardinal Schoenborn, Archbishop of Vienna, and chairman of the committee that drafted the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church. [A questionable hypothesis, given Schoenborn's record of shameless Bergoglian bootlicking since March 13, 2013.]

But things happened the other way around. The persons who have the immediate ear of the pope [on AL and all the matters before and after related to it] - like Fr. Spadaro of La Civilta Cattolica, Cardinal Baldisseri, Mons. Paglia and Mons. Semeraro - pushed for the designation of Cardinal Schoenborn as the authorized theological defender of the text which they were preparing.

It seemed to them a great political coup because Schoenborn was a 'renegade', i.e., a post-Conclave Bergoglian who had voted for his friend Cardinal Scola [fact or factoid?].

He was supposed to have been one of 12 cardinals in the Eleven Cardinals' Book Marriage and the family published just before the OCtober 2015 'family synod', which sought to counteract what the family synods had been programmed to do. But the editorial committee in charge of the book decided against including Schoenborn's contribution, not for fundamental reasons - it was rather 'classic' as one can read from its publication in L'Homme Nouveau on Sept. 26, 2015 - but because they thought him too unpredictable and changeable. And so, like the Apostles, the Twelve became the Eleven.

Their caution proved to be wise when, during the October 2015 synod, Schoenborn called for the Catechism to be rewritten in what it says about homosexuality. Moreover, the flexible Archbishop of Vienna then became the primary defender of AL [commended by Bergoglio himself for his presentation of the document at its debut as the proper interpretation of AL].

[I would be more comfortable about re-posting this item if the site had cited its source for the ff information about Schoenborn. It's not professional to omit your source:]

One can understand then why the DUBIA have tried his nerves! Speaking on November 18 during a training course for new bishops at the Tribunal of the Roman Rota, organized to explain the new Church procedure for obtaining a declaration of marriage nullity, Schoenborn
went out of control. [The title of the course was "The 2 Motu Proprio [on marriage annulment] and Amoris laetitia".]

He praised AL as 'a magisterial document', no more, no less [but that's not the first time he has done that],[/COLORE, excoriating its critics, and thus contradicting AL itself which, in its introduction, takes great care to affirm the legitimacy of free discussion about the document. [Yeah, right! 'Free discussion' allowed if you agree with it unconditionally, otherwise you have no right to even speak up!]

Mgr Dimitrios Salachas, exarch of the Greek Catholic Church, speaking the day before, had described AL as 'very orthodox' and that the Oriental Churches were grateful for its 'clarity', which is hardly the document's primary quality.*

Schoenborn went on to vituperate against the questions raised by Cardinals Brandmueller, Burke, Caffarra and Meisner, calling their letter 'an attack against the pope', because 'cardinals shou7ld obey the pope'. [Listen to him! In 2010, as chairman of the Austrian bishops' conference, he led them in denouncing Benedict XVI's nomination of an auxiliary bishop of Linz, sending him a letter that suggested local bishops should be consulted by the pope before making episcopal appointments!]

So, to ask questions for clarification is now disobedience! Never mind that the Four Cardinals wrote: "Allow us, with profound respect, to ask you, Most Holy Father, being the supreme teacher of the faith called by the Risen Christ to confirm his brothers in the faith, to resolve the uncertainties and shed light by being so good as to respond the 'dubia' which we have presented in this letter".

But for Cardinal Schoenborn, AL - which has no magisterial character, not even in the least - [a point the Bergoglians will dispute, and the pope himself, for that matter, who claims that everything he says and does is Magisterium, especially since he also says that everything he says and does as pope comes to him from the Holy Spirit, a hubristic claim and a very early one that very few have taken issue with] is instead a super-dogma. So, grounds for further changes to the Catechism that he might well propose.[BUT DO GET READY FOR A REVISION OF THE CATECHISM, SOONER RATHER THAN LATER, as Bergoglio's way of 'institutionalizing' Bergoglianism within the Catechism of the Catholic Church itself. I could almost bet Schoenborn and company are already hard at work on it.]


Now it's the four cardinals who are being
accused of heresy, apostasy and schism!
A Greek bishop rants on paper and two
of the new US cardinals add their say
by Steve Skojec

November 22, 2016

The number of attacks on the four cardinals for their presentation of DUBIA on Amoris Laetitia are mounting rapidly. Two out of three of the new American Cardinals — Joseph Tobin of Newark and Cardinal Cupich of Chicago — spoke out just yesterday against the four cardinals.

Tobin, described the DUBIA as “troublesome” and went on to say,

---

The Holy Father is capturing the work of two synods, so if four cardinals say that two synods were wrong, or that somehow the Holy Father didn’t reflect what was said in those synods, I think that should be questioned. … just to simply reduce it to a ‘dubium,’ I think it is at best naive.

---

Cardinal Cupich took a more direct line of attack:

---

I think that if you begin to question the legitimacy or what is being said in such a document, do you throw into question then all the other documents that have been issued before by the other popes. So I think it’s not for the pope to respond to that, it’s a moment for anyone who has doubts to examine how they got to that position because it is a magisterial document of the Catholic Church.

---

[It's really a waste of time to even comment on the nonsense spewed by these certified Bergoglian bootlickers.]

That these newly minted cardinals so openly question the naivete and prudence of those who are by many years their senior is indicative of the power they feel as personal appointments of Francis. That they pose questions which seek to place the four cardinals at odds with the magisterium means that there is in an implication, at least, of schism – and even heresy.

But one bishop has now made those charges openly. Frankiskos Papamanolis, the bishop emeritus of Syros, Santorini, and Crete, and head of the Greek Bishops Conference, has now written an open letter to the four cardinals. Its language is striking and direct, and the accusations made therein are incredibly serious.

It is, to be blunt, the kind of language so many Catholics had hoped to see from the faithful prelates of the Church, sent in the direction of Rome.

Let it not be said that the commissars of the Dictatorship of Mercy are not men of conviction. Our translation of the full text of the letter follows.

---

Dearest brothers in the episcopate,

My faith in our God tells me that He cannot fail to love you. With the sincerity that comes from my heart I call you ‘dearest brothers.’

The letter you have sent to the Congregation to the Doctrine of the Faith and that was published last Monday on the site of L’Espresso has even made it to Greece.

Before publishing the document and, still more, before you drew it up, you ought to have presented yourself to the Holy Father Francis and requested that he remove you as members of the College of Cardinals.

Further, you should not have made use of the title of “Cardinal” to give prestige to what you have written, and this on account of coherence with your conscience and to alleviate the scandal you have given by writing privately.

You write that you are “deeply concerned about the true good of souls” and, indirectly, you accuse the Holy Father Francis “promoting some form of politics in the Church”. You ask that “that no one will judge us, unjustly.” He who would say the opposite of what you explicitly write would be judging you unjustly. The words you use have their meaning. The fact that you boast of the title of Cardinals does not change the meaning of the gravely offensive words for the Bishop of Rome.

If you are “deeply concerned about the true good of souls” and moved by “an impassioned concern for the good of the faithful”, I, dearest brothers, am “deeply moved by the true good of your souls”, for your double most grave sin:the sin of heresy (and of apostasy?).

This, in fact, is the way schisms begin in the Church). From your document, it appears clearly that, in practice you do not believe in the supreme magisterial authority of the Pope, strengthened by two Synods of Bishops coming from the whole world. It seems that the Holy Spirit inspires only you and not the Vicar of Christ and not even the Bishops gathered in Synod.

And also the more grave sin of scandal, given publicly to the Christian people throughout the whole world. Concerning this Jesus has said, “Woe to the man by whom scandal comes” (Mt 18:7). “It would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Mt 18:6).
Impelled by the charity of Christ, I pray for you. I ask the Lord to enlighten you to accept with simplicity of heart the magisterial teaching of the Holy Father Francis.

I fear that your mental categories will find sophisticated arguments to justify your work, so as not even to consider it a sin to be subjected to the Sacrament of Penance, and that you continue to celebrate every day the Holy Mass and to receive sacrilegiously the Sacrament of the Eucharist, while you are scandalized if, in specific cases, a divorced and remarried person receives the Eucharist, and you dare to accuse the Holy Father Francis of heresy.

You know that I participated in the two Synods of the Bishops on the family and I heard your interventions. I also heard the comments that one of you made, during the break, about an affirmation contained in my intervention in the synod hall, when I said, “To sin is not easy.” This brother (one of you four), speaking with his interlocutors, modified my affirmations and put in my mouth words that I didn’t say. Further, you gave my declaration an interpretation that could not be gathered in any way from what I had affirmed.

Dearest brothers, may the Lord enlighten you to recognize as soon as possible your sin and to repair the scandal you have given.

With the charity of Christ, I greet you fraternally.

+ Frankiskos Papamanolis, O.F.M. Cap.
Bishop emeritus of Syros, Santorini, and Crete
President of the Episcopal Conference of Greece

---

[That letter rates 1 barf bag for every paragraph! From the remarks of Tobin, Cupich and Papamanolis (added to the Tweets of Fr. Spadaro who compares the four cardinals to 'witless worms'), one comes away with a very poor impression indeed of the 'quality' (or lack thereof) of our beloved pope's most ardent paladins! Cardinal Schoenborn cannot be any less smarmy and more ineffectual. Sorry to have to inflict the texts, but it's to put them on record.]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/11/2016 02:09]

Mr. Condon, who regularly writes canon law pieces for the Catholic Herald, has always been 1000% behind anything the pope says and does, so I am surprised he has this commentary on the recent abortion-related headlines.


The pope’s 'new' abortion-related directive is misleading
and provokes confusion that his curia could have avoided
Even before his Year of Mercy, 99 percent of priests already
had the power to absolve the sin of abortion
by Ed Condon

Tuesday, 22 Nov 2016

Pope Francis is not an expert in canon law. [But he makes it sound that he is an expert on everything, indeed that knows better about everything than anybody else, because "everything I say and do since I became pope has been dictated by the Holy Spirit!" Why else would he be so ineffably smug?]


I do not think His Holiness would mind me putting it that bluntly. In fact I rather suspect that, given his personal style, he would happily agree. [False modesty and false humility are easily professed.] It is far from heresy to point out that a pope might not be a born canonical expert, anymore than it would be unreasonable to suggest that Donald Trump has no particular natural expertise in American constitutional law.

The Pope wears a number of different hats (three, if you take a look at the papal coat of arms) and he is sometimes speaking as a priest, sometimes a teacher, and sometimes as the head of a coherent legal society. The roles are not distinct in how they are exercised, or at least they shouldn’t be, and what he does, or wants to do, as one necessarily has a direct impact on the other two.

It is the job of those around the Pope to take his instructions and turn them into a statement that is coherent pastorally, legally, and theologically; that’s the proper function of all those well-dressed monsignori gliding around the Vatican. Unfortunately they let the side down badly this week and the results have been totally unnecessary confusion.

Yesterday Pope Francis released the apostolic letter Misericordia et Misera. In it he extended the special provision he made for the Year of Mercy which granted every priest the faculty to lift the censure for the grave crime of abortion. That at least was what it should have said.

In fact Misericordia et Misera stated, as did the original letter for the Year of Mercy, that the Pope was granting all priests “the faculty to absolve those who have committed the sin of procured abortion”.

Before trying to dispel the confusion which has, predictably and unnecessarily, grown up around it, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: the language of this statement is wrong – simply, avoidably and basically wrong. And while that is enormously frustrating, it is not the end of the world. It is, however, a damning indictment of those around the Pope who seem either unable or unwilling to ensure even a minimum of theological and canonical coherence in some of what is presented for the papal signature.

[I suspect that they were purposefully loose with the language of the pope's 'concession', and the pope himself wanted it so, because they do want to make it appear that he was and is performing a great act of mercy unheard of in the Church before, rather than merely confirming what the Church already allows in terms of absolving the sin of abortion. The canonical crime of abortion is something else as Condon eexplains below.]

The Curia’s entire purpose is to assist the Pope in putting what he wants into practice, that means when he says “I want every priest to be able to deal with the situation of abortion for the Year of Mercy and beyond”, his minions are supposed to swing into action and prepare the necessary text to reflect what is going to actually happen. This is supposed to go somewhat beyond simply pressing *copy*, *paste*, *print* when they get the original memo from the Pope.

While the meaning of what the Pope wrote is pretty easy to guess if you’re a canon lawyer, it’s legal nonsense in and of itself. So when secular journalists read it and, absent any context for the subject, take the letter at face value, they can be forgiven for (wrongly) assuming that the Pope has changed something regarding the Church’s teaching on the sin of abortion.

Actually, even before the Year of Mercy, 99 per cent of priests already had the power to “absolve” the “sin” of abortion. Any priest who has the power to sacramentally forgive sins has the power to forgive all sins (the one exception to this is a priest cannot absolve his accomplice in a sin against the sixth commandment).

The only priests who could not “forgive” the “sin” of abortion already were those who have had their faculty to hear confessions revoked and thus can’t forgive any sins, except in danger of death.

How the faculty to hear confessions and forgive sins works, in canon law, is like this: a priest gets the “power” to forgive sins through his ordination, but to validly use this power he needs the faculty to exercise it (c. 966 §1). He gets this faculty from the law itself in some circumstances, like in danger of death for the penitent (c. 976), but the normal process is for him to be given the faculty by his bishop for use in the diocese (c. 969 §1).

Once he has the faculty from his bishop to hear confessions and forgive sins in his diocese, the law then extends that faculty to apply anywhere in the world (c. 967 §2). In short: if a priest has the faculty to hear confessions and absolve any sins, he can absolve all sins, and if he has the faculty to do this somewhere he can do it anywhere.

This means that the actual effect of the Pope’s concession of the “faculty” to absolve the “sin” of abortion to all priests is to grant them a faculty which 99 per cent of them already have.

The one-percenters who don’t have the faculty are those who have not already been given it by their bishop, or have had it revoked; those suspended from ministry, for example. Now it is pretty obvious that this is not what the Pope meant, even if it is what he technically said. So what did he mean to say?

What was supposed to be announced, and what would have been announced had his curial assistants done their job, was the concession of the “faculty” to “remit the censure” for the “delict/crime” of abortion.

While every canonical crime is a sin, not every sin is also a canonical crime, though some of the most serious are. Abortion is, for sure, a grave sin. It is also a delict (c. 1398) which carries the penalty of excommunication.

To be clear: there is no such thing as a “reserved sin”, but there are “reserved crimes”. A reserved crime is one where only a person with particular authority can lift the penalty. In the case of abortion, only the ordinary of the territory (the diocesan bishop, for all intents and purposes) can lift the censure, in this case of excommunication.

It is common practice for some bishops to give their priests this faculty by delegation, along with the faculty to hear confessions. But, since the faculty to lift the penalty is not extended by the law, as it is with absolving the sin, to cover everywhere, but is limited to the territory of the ordinary, the power to lift the censure does not travel with the priest, even if he has it at home.

Putting it as simply as possible:
- every priest has the power to forgive any sin, by virtue of his ordination;
- almost every priest (excepting those denied it for good reason) gets the faculty to exercise this power from his bishop, once he has this power in his home diocese he can use it anywhere;
- if the bishop also gives him the faculty to lift censures for certain reserved delicts (like abortion) he can only use this when he is physically in his home diocese.

What the Pope is actually doing, and I hope this will be clarified in the not too distant future, is giving all priests (excluding, let’s hope, the suspended ones) the faculty to lift the excommunication, always and everywhere and on their own. He did this first for the the Year of Mercy and is now making it permanent. [But wasn't this already lifted in the time of John Paul II?]

The Pope has in no way downgraded or mitigated the severity of the sin of abortion, and effectively ending the reservation of the delict is hardly the disciplinary earthquake some people are assuming it is.

Conversely, neither does the Pope’s letter imply that women who went to Confession and received absolution for the sin of abortion before the Year of Mercy did so invalidly – a tragically avoidable fear which has touched more than a few women today. [Strange Condon does not note the more obvious and sure-to-be-widespread effect of these papal directives on abortion: many CINO women will see it as a license to practise habitual abortion since they can always confess and be absolved, ignoring of course the injunction to repentance implicit in Jesus's admonition to the adulterous woman and to all us sinners, "Go and sin no more!"]

While canon law seems very out of fashion in some quarters at the moment, this situation highlights its essential service of clarity and precision for the help of the faithful. Those around the Pope [but most of all, the pope himself] would serve him and the Church better by remembering this.

November 22, 2016 headlines

Canon212.com


PewSitter

We are not alone

Here was my Thanksgiving Day surprise,and many thanks to Beatrice and her site for pointing me to it... A reason to be thankful that by the admission of some leading Bergoglians - though not the usual courtiers - the anti-Bergoglio sentiment is much more widespread than we thought, and this from Italians, where the both MSM and Catholic media have been exclusively, fanatically Bergoglian (with a few isolated exceptions like Giuliano Ferrara's Il Foglio and the vigilant Lepanto Foundation headed by Roberto De Mattei)...

A civil war is under way in the Church
by Marco Politi
Translated from

November 21, 2016

Pope Francis has closed the Holy Door but his message has been accompanied by the rumble of a subterranean crisis: A civil war is under way in the Church. A showdown that challenges the authority of the pope and his reform program.

What's in play are opposing views of the role of the Church, on 'sin' [Politi places the word 'peccato' in quotation marks, as though the very concept of sin were now in question, which is, of course, one of the essential anti-Christian, anti-Catholic positions that Jorge Bergoglio has taken almost unequivocally (almost, only because he has expressed that position in various circumlocutions instead of clearly and directly)],, and the salvation of souls [about which one must wonder if our beloved Holy Father is concerned at all, or at least as much as he is concerned about the salvation of immigrants or of poor people from poverty. But is is a good sign, indeed, that the Bergoglian Politi acknowledges the fundamental Catholic issues with this pope, and does not start out with the absurd meme and ultimate trivia of communion for remarried divorcees.] As in all civil wars, no compromises to the conflict can be expected.

Four cardinals have chosen recently to place Francis's theology directly under accusation, specifically as he presents it in Amoris laetitia (which opens the way to communion for RCDs). [There you have it: the matter-of-fact statement by a Bergoglian of what he and his ilk, and therefore, the pope, perceive to be the main objective and consequence of AL.]

They accuse Bergoglio of having sown 'uncertainty, confusion and disorientation' among the faithful [not only with AL but in most of his major statements and positions!] and ask him for clarity about the document.

The letter presents the so-called DUBIA, formulated in the style of theological contestation, as 'questions on controversial issues' answerable by Yes or No.

And, as if to lay down the challenge even more firmly, the letter was also sent 'for your information' to the official guardian of orthodoxy, Cardinal Mueller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

This is an absolutely unprecedented event in the modern history of the papacy. [Finally, someone in MSM has presented the situation for what it is! Most MSM and Catholic commentators continue to treat the growing discontent/disfavor about Bergoglio among many Catholics as simply 'the usual dissent, except that now the dissenters are not fron the left'] And the first thing that strikes the observer is the embarrassed silence of the Church hierarchy. Not a single cardinal has publicly counter-argued against the DUBIA [apparently Politi has not read the embarrassing bootlicking-Bergoglio non-arguments of the three new US cardinals, and some lesser squawks from a few of the other new cardinals], not a single president of an episcopal conference, not a single official from a major Catholic organization.

Considering that, in writing about the role of conscience as Francis writes of it in AL, the four cardinals affirm that we would come to the point of possible "cases of virtuous adultery, legal homicide, and obligatory perjury".

Two of the cardinals are ex-Curia: Cardinal Brandmueller, who was president of the Pontifical Committee on Historical Sciences; and Cardinal Burke, former president of the Apostolic Signatura. The other two are emeritus archbishops of large dioceses: Cardinal Caffarra, dear to both John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who was Archbishop of Bologna until 2015; and Cardinal Meisner, a close friend of Papa Ratzinger, who was Archbishop of Cologne till 2014.

To dismiss their letter - to which the pope answered indirectly in a recent Avvenire interview, denouncing 'a certain legalism which could be ideological' [Another ironic narcissitic blindspot of JMB who does not seem to realize that it is he who thinks and acts ideologically all the time!] - as merely a frisson from four 'ultra-conservatives' is not to understand the underground tremors that have been developing in the Catholic Church in the past two years.

The four are the tip of an iceberg which is widening and spreading. They speak for many who have not expressed themselves aloud. For years, the media did not understand the depth of the anti-Obama movement which lead to the defeat of his policies on November 8. Now, we risk repeating the same error with Francis. [It's a measure of the Bergoglians' concern if they see this analogy with the anti-Obama animus that led to Clinton's defeat.]

Dazzled by his charisma and the planetary approval he enjoys even among agnostics and non-believers, many ignore the systematic escalation among those in the clergy, the episcopate and the cardinals who question the pope's theology of mercy. [And there, Politi's bias trips him up - it is not just the 'theology of mercy' that is being questioned, that is just one aspect, although a paradigmatic one, of what is questionable about Bergoglio as pope and above all, as a Catholic.]

Between the two 'family synods', there has been a fundamental displacement. In past decades, in the confrontation between reformists and conservatives, the pope remained the arbiter for most of the Church hierarchy. Today, however, he has become the party in question.

Just read the most recent interview of Cardinal Burke, who said that AL "is not Magisterium because it contains serious ambiguities which confuse the faithful and could lead them to error and to grave sin - a document with such defects cannot be part of the Church's perennial teaching".

In two years, there has been a crescendo of dissent within the Church against the pope.
- Before the 2014 synod, five cardinals wrote a book in defense of the traditional doctrine on matrimony.
- Then, another 11 cardinals from all five continents, wrote a similar book, and the authors include important Church personages esteemed by the clergy and the episcopate.
- Meanwhile, 800,000 Catholics, among them 100 bishops, signed an online petition asking the pope to block any innovations.
- As the 2015 Synod began, 13 cardinals wrote Bergoglio questioning the impropriety of how the synodal assembly was being manipulated.

It has become a systematic movement of contestation to which reformist front has only responded timidly [I would use the adverb 'pusillanimously' though masquerading as vituperative arrogance].

In fact, even if many prefer to forget it - in its votations, the 2015 synod rejected the proposal of a 'penitential way' which openly recognized the possibility of communion for RCDs. The traditionalist majority of the synodal assembly said NO.

Meanwhile, there emerged a network of cardinals, bishops, priests, theologians and committed laymen who signed "A Declaration of Fidelity to the Immutable Magisterium of the Church on Matrimony", as 45 theologians wrote 'anonymously' [Not true! They all signed - they simply did not want their names made public for fear of reprisal, but their names were leaked anyway, and some who were employed in the Church did receive threats of removal from office] to each member of the College of CArdinals to point out that certain statements and/or interpretations of AL were possibly 'heretical'.

The anti-Bergoglio movement counts on working with time. In the USA, the under-estimated escalation of the anti-Obama sentiment led to the defeat of the Democrats. In the Church, what's in play is the next pope.

Today, Church historian Alberto Melloni writes of the 'isolation' of Bergoglio. [Really! Weren't Politi and he among the most insistent voices at the time that Benedict XVI was 'isolated' because he supposedly did not talk to anyone, as if he was not always receiving ad-limina visits from bishops around the world, as well as visiting heads of state and government, and traveling quite a bit! So now, how does Melloni say Bergoglio is 'isolated'? For lack of persons sympathetic to him? How about all those courtiers at Casa Santa Marta - Baldisseri, Ricca, Stella, Spadaro, Scalfari, Rosica, Tornielli and the whole captive Italian media???]

Andrea Riccardi, another Church historian, observes that never in the 20th century had a pope found such opposition from bishops and priests. [Can this be true? And we underdogs had the impression we were such a minority! But it must be so if Bargoglians-to-the-marrow like Politi, Melloni and Ricciardi are avowing this now!]

In the civil war under way in the Church, the goal is the post-Bergoglio Conclave: Anyone who will promote and develop the Bergoglian reforms should not become pope. [Yet we already have the candidate of the likes of Politi-Melloni-Ricciardi aiming to become the first Asian pope the moment there are enough Bergoglio cardinals among the electors.]


Politi's piece gives a perspective for an earlier article by Antonio Socci that also drew on the analogy of the Obama-Clinton electoral defeat but was unusually harsh in a perhaps premature judgment (I don't quite see a Goetterdaemmerung as yet at Casa Santa Marta despite the Politi-Melloni-Ricciardi pessimism) - so I did not rush to translate it.

A disastrous pontificate in its twilight
(like the Obama-Clinton era)
Translated from

11/20/2016

Yesterday the New York Times wrote about Papa Bergoglio's 'race against time' in order to transform the Church definitively into a progressivist 'club' as the radical-chic would like it to be. [I must continually take exception to the assumption that Bergoglio can 'transform the Church' because a) he cannot 'transform' the Church of Christ just because he thinks he knows better than Christ did about what the Church ought to be, and b) what he is really doing is to establish his own church of Bergoglio, with its own religion, Bergoglianism, analogous in many ways to Lutheranism, even while he remains formally the head of the Catholic Church.]

In order to do that, the Times says, he must create enough Bergoglian cardinals who will be able to elect a successor in his image and likeness. But it will be arduous, and cannot yet be achieved with this weekend's consistory. [Not all that arduous - if he has 54 Bergoglian cardinals now, all he needs is another 23 - two consistories - to get to the magic 77 to elect a pope. Or maybe he does not need any more new Bergoglian cardinals, if 23 among those who elected him in 2013 will still be around at the next Conclave and have not regretted their vote in 2013.]

In Catholic circles, there is the feeling that this pontificate has ended in a blind alley with the passing away of the international political context in which it was born (the Obama-Clinton era).

The consistory last weekend, the end of the Year of Mercy, and Bergoglio's 80th birthday on Dec. 17, indicate a time of evaluation for this pope, who the modernists are finding to be a disappointment in terms of the revolution they wanted [but aren't they getting it in spades, far beyond the once-daring liberal overtures of a Cardinal Martini?] but judged disastrous by orthodox Catholic (especially since statistics show a continuing decline in religious practice among Catholics).

Let us consider the indicators:
Francis's jubilee year was a flop, and not just for Rome's hotels. Catholics mostly ignored it and those who paid attention were perfunctory.

The pope's trip to Lund on October 31 to commemorate Luther's schism - which had been pre-announced as a historic turning point with a green light for interfaith communion - ended up as just another ecumenical event that did not go beyond the usual declaration of intentions (though leaving many Catholics with distaste for Bergoglio's moral legitimization of Luther).

The topic that dominated Church news for two years - Eucharistic leniency and the adulterous unions of remarried Carholic divorcee - brought him defeat in two synods. [Not defeat, really, because as pope, he could and did trump whatever the synodal assemblies decided that was not what he wanted or willed.]

But he turned the tables on them by his post-synodal exhortation which presumes to change the Church's bimillennary doctrine without saying so explicitly, seeking instead to wreak his revolution through pastoral practice, case by case, as it were.

A de facto upheaval which is considered devastating by many faithful and bishops, to the point that four cardinals representing many other cardinals and bishops - set down the major DUBIA raised by AL in a letter to the pope. One they made public when, after two months, the pope had not answered them at all, thus refusing to clariy the ambiguous points that have generated so much conflict.

He is now in a position of extreme weakness because the duty of the Successor of Peter is precisely to give the word, clear and definitive, in defense of Catholic doctrine.

If he refuses to do so but continues to feed pastoral confusion and doctrinal chaos in the Church himself, then he deligitimizes himself.
[Virtually but not de facto nor de jure! He remains pope as long as he does not resign or die. Or is deposed, but who can do that?]

To the point that Cardinal Burke, one of the Four Cardinals, publicly told the National Catholic Register that "If there is no response to the DUBIA, then I would say that the question comes up of taking formal action to correct a grave error... In fact, inhe t tradition of the Church, there is a possibility of correcting the Roman Pontiff, even if this would be a very rare case".

A recent tweet by Edward Pentin cites a source from Casa Santa Marta claiming that Bergoglio was 'boiling with rage' against the four cardinals [about whom, he told Avvenire, he is not losing any sleep, although similar rage was reported when he got the 13 Cardinals' Letter at the start of the October 2015 synod].

His position is untenable because, to the DUBIA, which must be answered YES or NO canonically, he can do neither: he would either have to reject his own 'revolution' while thereby 'surrendering' to the other side, or publicly admit that he has broken on these points with Catholic doctrine, thereby deligitimizing himself [proclaiming his own heresies].

So he was constrained to do away last weekend with the traditional meeting between the pope and the full assembly of cardinals who had come to Rome for the consistory - because, one would infer, he would not have been able to ignore any questions posed directly to him about the DUBIA. [How's that for pussilanimity - is that what the yellow in the Vatican flag now stands for?]

But Bergoglio's greatest failure is political, considering the three ultra-progressivist political issues have characterized his pontificate: opening wide all frontiers to mass immigration, eco-catastrophism, and a-critical openness to Islam.

Not to mention being on the losing side of recent elections in Argentina and the referendum in Colombia, and above all, Trump's victory in the USA - taken together, it's a political rout for him. Especially since Trump opposes him [and Obama] on all his top three secular agenda items. And because Bergoglio, on leaving the USA last September, had explicitly attacked Trump with a harsh ad personam statement that was altogether uncalled-for and aggressive.

To some observers, the fact that Trump won - and that the Catholic vote was a determining factor in his victory - meant that many American Catholics did not share the pope's denunciation of Trump. [Not that his opinion, or that of any pope, would have influenced how they voted!]

Moreover, not long after the presidential elections, the US bishops themselves voted for a new set of officials for the USCCB. John Allen of Crux said "it was like a referendum on the pope", in which the names dear to Bergoglio all went down. [Judging by who they have been voting for, the US bishops were not more pro-Bergoglio even in 2015 when they voted down the Bergoglian Cupich as a delegate to the family synod, even if Bergoglio then named Cupich to the synod, anyway, among the personal picks he is entitled to as pope.]

The Trump era will lead to the geopolitical twilight of Bergoglianism.

Not by chance, it had been the likes of Obama (and the pro-Obama liberal media circus) who had mythified Bergoglio for having overturned the priorities of his predecessors and virtually adopted the Obama agenda, becoming a kind ofplanetary high priest for Obamism.

[And here, Socci can't help getting into his favorite conspiracy theory:]
It is also significant that talk is starting anew about the strange circumstances that led to the mysterious 'renunciatton' of Benedict XVI.

In recent days, Prof. German Dottori, professor of strategy at the Luiss University in Rome and scientific adviser to Limes [an Italian foreign-policy journal], gave an interesting interview to ZENIT.

He was asked, among other things, on the Wikileaks documents that "reveal hidden aspects of dealings by Hillary Cinton and her staff", such as a letter in 2012 which "shows a specific attention to the Catholic Church". Dottori said:

---

The documents show a strong intention on the part of Hillary's staff to foment a revolt within the Church in order to weaken the hierarchy. Ir would make use of associations and pressure groups created from below, following the example consolidated by the experience in the US civil rights movement. This is not the smoking gun itself, but we are near...

While I have no proof, I have always thought that Benedict XVI was led to his abdication by complex machinations mobilized by those interested in blocking reconciliation with the Russian Orthodox Church, which is the religious pillar of a project for gradual convergence between continental Europe and Moscow.

---

[It doesn't say anything except that Dottori thinks as Socci does, without any 'proof' to present or convincing argument to make. Blocking reconciliation with the Russian Orthodox Church just doesn't sound like motivation enough to 'push' Benedict XVI out of the papacy, much less, for him to to yield to any such pressures.]

Today, with the Trump era, this prospect has become very real for the Church as well as for Europe. And Francis's meeting with Patriarch Kirill would have been a first step if the pope had not hastened right afterwards to 'downsize' an agreement he signed with Kirill.

It is almost impossible, but it would be an extraordinary turnaround if Bergoglio now jettisons the Obama Agenda (also the Scalfari Agenda) in order to adopt the Ratzinger Agenda, accepting the fraternal and corrective hand that the Emeritus Pope holds out to prevent doctrinal deviations leading to an implosion within the Church. [As someone who admires Benedict XVI, I assume he is always ready with such a fraternal and corrective hand but I doubt it has been concretely held out in the case of the specific and serial anti-Catholic offenses that his successor has been guilty of. Would he have tackled him about AL and all the DUBIA it contains?

My only benign take on the fact that the emeritus pope has seemingly allowed himself to be coopted by this pontificate is that he thinks any sign of opposition from him would only exacerbate the existing division within the Church. I understand that, but I find it an unacceptable 'compromise' - however necessary 'to preserve unity in the Church' which clearly does not exist now - with everything B16 stood for before March 13, 2013 because it is a compromise about TRUTH.]

What other way out does Bergoglio have? These days, there has been some rumbling at the Vatican about giving him a 'big shove' for his agenda by calling an ecumenical council (i.e., Vatican-III). Which seems to be absurd, and difficult to realize for practical reasons (including Bergoglio's age).

Some hypothesize he would resign when he turns 80 (on December 17) which would explain this recent consistory that would seem to be in preparation for a new Conclave. [C'mon, Mr. Socci, I don't think even you could possibly see that idea as likely in any way! Bergoglio resign????]

More likely, this pontificate will drag along, wearing out itself (and the Church) in chaos and in political talk about immigrants, climate change, and trust in Islam day after day - while planning to create more Bergoglian cardinals to consolidate his power [and the post-Bergoglio succession to ensure his 'legacy', much as Obama tried all he could to get Hillary Clinton elected.]

November 24, 2016 headlines

PewSitter


Canon212.com


Statement on the Four Cardinals and their 'dubia'
by His Excellency Mons. Athanasius Schneider
Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Saint Mary
Astana, Kazakhstan

---

“We cannot do anything against the truth, but only for the truth". (2Cor 13,8)

Out of “deep pastoral concern,” four Cardinals of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, His Eminence Joachim Meisner, Archbishop emeritus of Cologne (Germany), His Eminence Carlo Caffarra, Archbishop emeritus of Bologna (Italy), His Eminence Raymond Leo Burke, Patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, and His Eminence Walter Brandmüller, President emeritus of the Pontifical Commission of Historical Sciences, have published on November 14, 2016, the text of five questions, called dubia (Latin for “doubts”), which previously on September 19, 2016, they had sent to the Holy Father and to Cardinal Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, along with an accompanying letter. The Cardinals ask Pope Francis to clear up “grave disorientation and great confusion” concerning the interpretation and practical application, particularly of chapter VIII, of the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia and its passages relating to admission of remarried divorcees to the sacraments and the Church’s moral teaching.

In their statement entitled “Seeking Clarity: A Plea to Untie the Knots in Amoris Laetitia,” the Cardinals say that to “many — bishops, priests, faithful — these paragraphs allude to or even explicitly teach a change in the discipline of the Church with respect to the divorced who are living in a new union.” Speaking so, the Cardinals have merely stated real facts in the life of the Church. These facts are demonstrated by pastoral orientations on behalf of several dioceses and by public statements of some bishops and cardinals, who affirm that in some cases divorced and remarried Catholics can be admitted to Holy Communion even though they continue to use the rights reserved by Divine law to validly married spouses.

In publishing a plea for clarity in a matter that touches the truth and the sanctity simultaneously of the three sacraments of Marriage, Penance, and the Eucharist, the Four Cardinals only did their basic duty as bishops and cardinals, which consists in actively contributing so that the revelation transmitted through the Apostles might be guarded sacredly and might be faithfully interpreted.

It was especially the Second Vatican Council that reminded all the members of the college of bishops as legitimate successors of the Apostles of their obligation, according to which “by Christ’s institution and command they have to be solicitous for the whole Church, and that this solicitude, though it is not exercised by an act of jurisdiction, contributes greatly to the advantage of the universal Church. For it is the duty of all bishops to promote and to safeguard the unity of faith and the discipline common to the whole Church” (Lumen gentium, 23; cf. also Christus Dominus, 5-6).

In making a public appeal to the Pope, bishops and cardinals should be moved by genuine collegial affection for the Successor of Peter and the Vicar of Christ on earth, following the teaching of Vatican Council II (cf. Lumen gentium, 22); in so doing they render “service to the primatial ministry” of the Pope (cf. Directory for the Pastoral Ministry of Bishops, 13).

The entire Church in our days has to reflect upon the fact that the Holy Spirit has not in vain inspired Saint Paul to write in the Letter to the Galatians about the incident of his public correction of Peter. One has to trust that Pope Francis will accept this public appeal of the Four Cardinals in the spirit of the Apostle Peter, when St Paul offered him a fraternal correction for the good of the whole Church.

May the words of that great Doctor of the Church, St Thomas Aquinas, illuminate and comfort us all: “When there is a danger for the faith, subjects are required to reprove their prelates, even publicly. Since Paul, who was subject to Peter, out of the danger of scandal, publicly reproved him."

And Augustine comments: “Peter himself gave an example to superiors by not disdaining to be corrected by his subjects when it occurred to them that he had departed from the right path” (Summa theol., II-II, 33, 4c).

Pope Francis often calls for an outspoken and fearless dialogue between all members of the Church in matters concerning the spiritual good of souls. In the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris laetitia, the Pope speaks of a need for “open discussion of a number of doctrinal, moral, spiritual, and pastoral questions. The thinking of pastors and theologians, if faithful to the Church, honest, realistic and creative, will help us to achieve greater clarity” (n. 2). Furthermore, relationships at all levels within the Church must be free from a climate of fear and intimidation, as Pope Francis has requested in his various pronouncements.

In light of these pronouncements of Pope Francis and the principle of dialogue and acceptance of legitimate plurality of opinions, which was fostered by the documents of the Second Vatican Council, the unusually violent and intolerant reactions on behalf of some bishops and cardinals against the calm and circumspect plea of the Four Cardinals cause great astonishment. Among such intolerant reactions one could read affirmations such as, for instance: the four Cardinals are witless, naive, schismatic, heretical, and even comparable to the Arian heretics.

Such apodictic merciless judgments reveal not only intolerance, refusal of dialogue, and irrational rage, but demonstrate also a surrender to the impossibility of speaking the truth, a surrender to relativism in doctrine and practice, in faith and life.

The above-mentioned clerical reaction against the prophetic voice of the Four Cardinals parades ultimately powerlessness before the eyes of the truth. Such a violent reaction has only one aim: to silence the voice of the truth, which is disturbing and annoying the apparently peaceful nebulous ambiguity of these clerical critics.

The negative reactions to the public statement of the Four Cardinals resemble the general doctrinal confusion of the Arian crisis in the fourth century. It is helpful to all to quote in the situation of the doctrinal confusion in our days some affirmations of Saint Hilary of Poitiers, the “Athanasius of the West”.

---

“You [the bishops of Gaul] who still remain with me faithful in Christ did not give way when threatened with the onset of heresy, and now by meeting that onset you have broken all its violence. Yes, brethren, you have conquered, to the abundant joy of those who share your faith: and your unimpaired constancy gained the double glory of keeping a pure conscience and giving an authoritative example (Hil. De Syn., 3).

Your invincible faith keeps the honourable distinction of conscious worth and, content with repudiating crafty, vague, or hesitating action, safely abides in Christ, preserving the profession of its liberty. For since we all suffered deep and grievous pain at the actions of the wicked against God, within our boundaries alone is communion in Christ to be found from the time that the Church began to be harried by disturbances such as the expatriation of bishops, the deposition of priests, the intimidation of the people, the threatening of the faith, and the determination of the meaning of Christ’s doctrine by human will and power. Your resolute faith does not pretend to be ignorant of these facts or profess that it can tolerate them, perceiving that by the act of hypocritical assent it would bring itself before the bar of conscience (Hil. De Syn., 4).
I have spoken what I myself believed, conscious that I owed it as my soldier’s service to the Church to send to you in accordance with the teaching of the Gospel by these letters the voice of the office which I hold in Christ. It is yours to discuss, to provide and to act, that the inviolable fidelity in which you stand you may still keep with conscientious hearts, and that you may continue to hold what you hold now (Hil. De Syn., 92).

---

The following words of Saint Basil the Great, addressed to the Latin Bishops, can in some aspects be applied to the situation of those who in our days ask for doctrinal clarity, including our Four Cardinals:

---

The one charge which is now sure to secure severe punishment is the careful keeping of the traditions of the Fathers. We are not being attacked for the sake of riches, or glory, or any temporal advantages. We stand in the arena to fight for our common heritage, for the treasure of the sound faith, derived from our Fathers.

Grieve with us, all you who love the brethren, at the shutting of the mouths of our men of true religion, and at the opening of the bold and blasphemous lips of all that utter unrighteousness against God. The pillars and foundation of the truth are scattered abroad. We, whose insignificance has allowed of our being overlooked, are deprived of our right of free speech (Ep. 243, 2.4).

---

Today those bishops and cardinals, who ask for clarity and who try to fulfill their duty in guarding sacredly and faithfully interpreting the transmitted Divine Revelation concerning the Sacraments of Marriage and the Eucharist, are no longer exiled as it was with the Nicene bishops during the Arian crisis. Contrary to the time of the Arian crisis, today, as wrote Rudolf Graber, Bishop of Regensburg in 1973, exile of the bishops is replaced by hush-up strategies and by slander campaigns (cf. Athanasius und die Kirche unserer Zeit, Abensberg 1973, p. 23).

Another champion of the Catholic faith during the Arian crisis was Saint Gregory Nazianzene. He wrote the following striking characterization of the behavior of the majority of the shepherds of the Church in those times. This voice of the great Doctor of the Church should be a salutary warning for the bishops of all times:

---

Surely the pastors have done foolishly; for, excepting a very few, who either on account of their insignificance were passed over, or who by reason of their virtue resisted, and who were to be left as a seed and root for the springing up again and revival of Israel by the influences of the Spirit, all temporized, only differing from each other in this, that some succumbed earlier, and others later; some were foremost champions and leaders in the impiety, and others joined the second rank of the battle, being overcome by fear, or by interest, or by flattery, or, what was the most excusable, by their own ignorance (Orat. 21, 24).

---

When Pope Liberius in 357 signed one of the so called formulas of Sirmium, in which he deliberately discarded the dogmatically defined expression “homo-ousios” and excommunicated Saint Athanasius in order to have peace and harmony with the Arian and Semi-Arian bishops of the East, faithful Catholics and some few bishops, especially Saint Hilary of Poitiers, were deeply shocked.

Saint Hilary transmitted the letter that Pope Liberius wrote to the Oriental bishops, announcing the acceptance of the formula of Sirmium and the excommunication of Saint Athanasius. In his deep pain and dismay, Saint Hilary added to the letter in a kind of desperation the phrase: “Anathema tibi a me dictum, praevaricator Liberi” (I say to you anathema, prevaricator Liberius) (cf. Denzinger-Schönmetzer, n. 141).

Pope Liberius wanted to have peace and harmony at any price, even at the expense of the Divine truth. In his letter to the heterodox Latin bishops Ursace, Valence, and Germinius announcing to them the above-mentioned decisions, he wrote that he preferred peace and harmony to martyrdom (cf. cf. Denzinger-Schönmetzer, n. 142).

In what a dramatic contrast stood the behavior of Pope Liberius to the following conviction of Saint Hilary of Poitiers: “We don’t make peace at the expense of the truth by making concessions in order to acquire the reputation of tolerance. We make peace by fighting legitimately according to the rules of the Holy Spirit. There is a danger to ally surreptitiously with unbelief under the beautiful name of peace.” (Hil. Ad Const., 2, 6, 2). [Or, in our day, 'under the beautiful name of mercy'!]

Blessed John Henry Newman commented on these unusual sad facts with the following wise and equilibrated affirmation:

---

While it is historically true, it is in no sense doctrinally false, that a Pope, as a private doctor, and much more Bishops, when not teaching formally, may err, as we find they did err in the fourth century. Pope Liberius might sign a Eusebian formula at Sirmium, and the mass of Bishops at Ariminum or elsewhere, and yet they might, in spite of this error, be infallible in their ex cathedra decisions” (The Arians of the Fourth Century, London, 1876, p. 465).

---

The Four Cardinals with their prophetic voice demanding doctrinal and pastoral clarity have great merit before their own conscience, before history, and before the innumerable simple faithful Catholics of our days, who are driven to the ecclesiastical periphery, because of their fidelity to Christ’s teaching about the indissolubility of marriage.

But above all, the Four Cardinals have a great merit in the eyes of Christ. Because of their courageous voice, their names will shine brightly at the Last Judgment. For they obeyed the voice of their conscience remembering the words of Saint Paul: “We cannot do anything against the truth, but only for the truth” (2Cor 13,8).

Surely, at the Last Judgment the above-mentioned mostly clerical critics of the Four Cardinals will not have an easy answer for their violent attack on such a just, worthy, and meritorious act of these Four Members of the Sacred College of Cardinals.

The following words inspired by the Holy Spirit retain their prophetic value especially in view of the spreading doctrinal and practical confusion regarding the Sacrament of Marriage in our days:

---

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry (2 Tim. 4: 3-5).

---

May all, who in our days still take seriously their baptismal vows and their priestly and episcopal promises, receive the strength and the grace of God so that they may reiterate together with Saint Hilary the words: “May I always be in exile, if only the truth begins to be preached again!” (De Syn., 78). This strength and grace we wish wholeheartedly to our Four Cardinals and as well as to those who criticize them.

---

November 25, 2016
P.S. Fr H comments on Mons. Schneider's letter - no better historical context on the current situation in the Church could have been presented so concisely - and ties it up with a concept of John Henry Newman that Fr H brought up recently...

On suspense of the papal Magisterium
while pope refuses to answer 'dubia'

November 25, 2016

Readers will have read the Letter of Bishop Schneider, and observed the powerful use he makes of the parallels between our present problems; and the period of the Arian conflict, during which apostasy even reached as high as the man who at that time also occupied the Throne of St Peter.

And readers will recall my own advice to study that self-same period, and to do so through the prism of Blessed John Henry Newman, for whose respectability as a testis fidei his recent beatification vouches.

I believe that it is important, especially for clerics and seminarians, to take this period and this subject very seriously, because we need some sound anchoring in reality and Tradition and in approved writers. It is not good enough to be angry or upset and to flail helplessly around without any bearings. That way lies the risk that the Enemy will trap us into unbelief or a heresy such as Sedevacantism.

Mgr Schneider has led the way with his extensive quotations from the Fathers, especially St Hilary ('the Athanasius of the West'), and from St Thomas Aquinas and Bl John Henry.

I will now take up again the point which I explored last time I entered upon this topic: the thought of Blessed John Henry Newman which he encapsulated in a bold phrase: the "temporary suspense of the functions of the Ecclesia docens" (teaching Church), or, as we might say nowadays, "of the Magisterium".

Newman used this phrase as a historical describer ("as a matter of fact"). With the falling away of so many bishops from orthodoxy, it was, he meant, a matter of historical fact that their function of teaching the Truth was not being discharged.

His words were misunderstood by critics ... he was rarely short of those ... as implying that the bishops had lost their capacity to function Magisterially: in other words, his statement was taken theologically. He carefully disavowed this dangerous notion, which, if you think about it, does possess some of the features of the modern Sedevacantist heresy.

In fact, Newman carefully distinguished between Suspense of the Magisterium, meaning that the Magisterial officers of the Church were not performing their function, and Suspension of the Magisterium, which in his view would mean that they had lost their function. The latter he would never assert, and neither should we even think of suggesting it.

This is an extremely important distinction for us to make today. In my last piece on this subject, I suggested that Jorge Bergoglio's formal refusal to respond to the Five Dubia constituted a formal entry into a period of Temporary Suspense of the function of his Petrine Magisterium.

It is a suspense freely chosen by him which he can end at any moment he chooses by giving the clarifications called for, thus "strengthening his brethren" and "devoutly guarding and faithfully setting forth the Tradition received through the Apostles, the Deposit of the Faith". What joy, unalloyed joy, this happy event would cause; what cries of "ad multos annos! Petrus per Franciscum locutus est!"

[But he is kept from making any clarifications by self-estoppel, whereby he has precluded himself either from asserting a fact or denying its opposite fact, because in one case, he would be directly asserting erroneous anti-Catholic principles and be open to charges of heresy which he thought to have evaded in the labored formulations of AL; and in the other, he would have to deny his most cherished assertions in AL and be guilty of lying outright.]

Meanwhile, intelligent thought about the practical and theological implications of the present difficult situation seem to me very much in order. But not only thought.

Let us hope, and pray earnestly to our Lady of Fatima, our Lady of Victories, that we shall never have to adopt and adapt the agonised cry of St Hilary, cited by Bishop Schneider, "Anathema tibi a me dictum praevaricator Liberi!"

God bless and keep our pope!

And meanwhile, all those interested in presenting this self-created papal impasse to the faithful - and it must be underscored and reiterated by every serious thinking Catholic - should do so in terms of the following question: Why can't this pope answer with a simple Yes or No to each of the five questions posed by the Four Cardinals?, re-stating those questions in their simplest form.

Questions framed as formal theological dubia leave no wiggle room - just Yes or No, and refusal to answer Yes or No is sheer evasion which a pope cannot justify because as pope, it is his duty to answer such questions, especially since he himself made it necessary for the questions to be asked.

It won't do to say "Well, I can do what I want to do, and not do what I don't want to do, because I am the pope". Such selfishness cannot justify dereliction of his primary duty as pope - to uphold and defend the deposit of faith, thereby confirming his brethren in the faith.

I had not bothered to read our beloved pope's letter closing his Year of Mercy because from the news reports about it, it was just warmed-up re-servings of his message of faux mercy, but I skimmed through it after reading Roberto De Mattei's commentary, considering it an act of penance to have to read any Bergoglian text and having to block out all negative thoughts while doing so...

New papal contradictions at
the closing of his Year of Mercy
by Roberto de Mattei
Translated for Rorate caeli by 'Francesca Romana' from

November, 22 2016

Among the keys to interpret Pope Francis’s pontificate is certainly his love of contradiction. This inclination of mind is made evident by the Apostolic Letter ‘Misercordia et misera’, signed at the end of the extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy.

In this letter Pope Bergoglio, establishes that those who attend the churches officiated by the priests of the Fraternity of St. Pius X, can receive validly and lawfully, sacramental absolution. The Pope thus rectifies that which constituted the main factor of “irregularity” in the Fraternity founded by Monsignor Lefebvre: the validity of their confessions.

It would be contradictory to imagine that once confessions are recognized as valid and lawful, that the Masses celebrated by the priests of the Fraternity not be considered just as lawful, which are valid in any case.

At this point it is not understood why an agreement is necessary between Rome and the Fraternity founded by Monsignor Lefebvre, seeing as the status of his priests is now de facto regularized, and that the doctrinal problems up for discussion are of little interest to the pope, as everyone knows.

In the same letter, so that “no obstacle arises between the request for reconciliation and God’s forgiveness”, Pope Bergoglio concedes that from now on “I grant to all priests, in virtue of their ministry, the faculty to absolve those who have committed the sin of procured abortion”.

In reality, priests already had the faculty to forgive abortion in confession. However, according to the centuries-old praxis of the Church, abortion is one of the grave sins punished automatically by excommunication. “A person who procures a completed abortion incurs latae sententiae excommunication” says Canon Law (1983) no.1398. Priests, therefore, needed permission from their bishop to remove the excommunication before being able to absolve the sin of abortion.

Now all priests can also absolve the excommunication, without needing to go through their bishop nor they themselves being empowered to do so. Excommunication de facto is dropped, and abortion loses the gravity that Canon Law ascribed to it.

In an interview given to TV 2000 on November 20th, Pope Francis affirmed that “Abortion is still ['Still'? Should the adverb not be 'always'???], a “horrendous crime”, since “it brings an end to an innocent life”.

Can the Pope ignore that his decision to drop the crime of abortion from latae sententiae excommunication, relativizes this “horrendous crime” and allows the mass-media to present it as a sin that the Church considers less grave than in the past and which She [now] easily forgives? [Worse, it encourages habitual aborters, or would-be habitual aborters, among the CINOs, to proceed as usual - "God being so merciful, he would never punish me with eternal damnation, and besides, the pope says there really is no hell. So what's to stop me from having my pleasure when I want it and then simply abort any unwanted consequences?"]


The Pope states in his Letter that “there is no sin that God’s mercy cannot reach and wipe away when it finds a repentant heart seeking to be reconciled with the Father”, but as is evident from his own words, mercy presupposes the existence of sin, and thus justice. Why speak all the time about a good and merciful God, and never about a just God, Who rewards and punishes according to the merits and faults of man?

The Saints, as has been noted, never ceased exalting the mercy of God, unlimited in its giving; but also to fear His justice, rigorous in its demands.

A God capable only of loving and rewarding the good and incapable of hating and punishing evil, would be contradictory - unless one retains that the Divine Law exists, but is abstract and impracticable, and the only thing that counts is the concrete life of man, who cannot help but sin. What is important is not the observance of the law, but blind faith in Divine mercy and forgiveness. [So Bergoglio teaches.] Pecca fortiter, crede fortius. [To quote Martin Luther who said it, more completely, "Sin boldly, but believe even more boldly [in Christ, and rejoice!]']

However, this is the doctrine of Luther, not of the Catholic Church. [Which our Bergoglio - spiritual heir of Luther, founder of Bergoglianism and the church of Bergoglio (while being, unfortunately, also the legitimate Pope) - appears to have adopted.]

Meanwhile, here is the latest reflection from once and future uebernormalist/Bergoglian Jeff Mirus with some advice for those who may be in the throes of Bergoglio derangement syndrome...

About 'turning the corner' on this pope:
A message for those who may have, God forbid!,
'a paralytic preoccupation' with Bergoglio

By Dr. Jeff Mirus

Nov. 22, 2016

CatholicCulture.org has tried to be both accurate and forthright in reporting and commenting on the words and actions of Pope Francis. We have tried to treat Francis as sons treat a father; to give Francis the benefit of every doubt; to recognize the complexity of the issues he addresses; to acknowledge the possibility of differences among Catholics of good will; and to interpret his remarks, ideas and initiatives in the best possible light.

But we have also been forced to admit the Pope’s shortcomings, and in particular the confusion he causes when the faithful compare what the Church has always asked of them with what Pope Francis asks of them.

This has been a source of pain for many deeply-committed and well-informed Catholics. Moreover, the entire problem has been exacerbated by Pope Franciss unfortunate tendency to dismiss his critics — or even merely those who ask for clarifications — as “rigid”, “nasty”, and suffering from “psychological problems”.

I do not intend to recap all of the unfortunate controversies. Suffice it to say here that it is not “proselytism” to want to bring non-Catholic Christians into the Church so that they can enjoy the full range of God’s gifts for our salvation; and it is not “rigid” or “legalistic” to affirm, as we say to God in the Act of Faith, that we believe “all the truths which the holy Catholic Church teaches, because you have revealed them, who can neither deceive nor be deceived.”

Contrary to what Pope Francis often implies, Catholic teaching on faith and morals is not a matter of “laws” or “rules” but of the conformity of the mind with reality, which is the definition of truth. When Pope Francis calls names, therefore, we can barely restrain ourselves from deploying the famous defensive strategy most of us used as children. I mean the little poem that begins “I’m rubber and you’re glue.”

Unfortunately, at a certain point, our serious concern about Pope Francis can become a preoccupation — an unhealthy preoccupation. We can become so tied in knots that we feel as if we cannot get on with our lives, and especially with what God calls us personally to do, until the “Francis problem” is settled. [That's not true for anyone other than the unhealthily obsessed. For Catholics who try to live their faith seriously - doing that while not failing to worship, thank, pray and seek forgiveness from God so we can live with his grace - remains the central goal of everyday. But it does not mean we can ignore the serial and seemingly endless statements and acts of anti-Catholicism from this pope - one does express concern about it everyday because he gives us a new aggravation/provocation everyday. Serious Catholics whose business it is to report and comment on the life of the Church are obliged to pay attention and express their concerns concretely.

As a very minor-league commentator of sort, I do what I do because I believe every anti-Catholic statement and action by Bergoglio ought to be documented for posterity and countered in every way possible. If he had been a pope who went about being pope as his predecessors had done, without his ideological and secular excesses, I would have been perfectly happy to ignore whatever he does, just as I happily ignored what the popes before John Paul II and Benedict XVI did in my lifetime, without danger to my soul as long as I lived what I was brought up to believe about my faith.]

But such a preoccupation serves no good purpose. In fact, it is a dreadful temptation. Satan desires nothing more than for us to become so engrossed by what we frequently perceive as the Pope’s recklessness that we forget our own vocations, our own Catholic mission, our own apostolates. [Tell that to the very few, I think, who have made Bergoglio into their monomania instead of living their lives. They are like persons so addicted to the Internet they can think of nothing else, or do anything else.]

Worrying about the daily confusion and sorrow Pope Francis introduces into our lives can impede us from working on our first priority—which is living our Catholic life in Christ as fully as we possibly can. [There you have it! Any thinking Catholic wouldn't allow someone like Bergoglio to take over his life, in effect, by obsessing about him!]

With only exceedingly rare exceptions, we are in no position to offer correction to the Holy Father. Therefore, it will do us little good to engage in endless arguments over what is wrong, whose fault it is, and how the problems posed by the current papacy might be resolved. And not only will this do us no good, but it can be a significant source of scandal to others, most of whom will have little or no awareness of the issues at stake.

I’d like to suggest that it is time to turn the corner on Pope Francis. Most of us have no cards to play in the game of improving the papacy. But we do have our own callings, our own God-given talents, our own opportunities to engage in the spiritual and corporal works of mercy, to teach the truth and to foster the good.

When we can use something Pope Francis has said or done in our own Catholic service, then we should—all the better! But when we cannot take our inspiration from Pope Francis, we can still reference Our Lord and the Church He founded. We do not need to come up against Francis and grind to a halt. [Who exactly is doing that? Life goes on, the Church goes on, the Catholic faith lives on! And Bergoglio is not immortal.] That’s what I mean about turning the corner.

CatholicCulture.org will neither stop reporting the news nor cease to analyze key issues. But going forward, I strongly suspect we must all focus more on the good to be done than on the obstacles that make it more difficult to do. Insofar as Pope Francis preoccupies us, he has become a distraction [who must be dealt with, regardless]. Therefore, we must refocus our own energies.

We will find that we can do this without any danger of disobedience, since neither evil nor falsehood will ever be imposed on us by the Magisterium — and very few of us take our assignments directly from the Pope. If we are prudent, all of us can get on with our particular Catholic missions, however God calls us to serve, with no need to cast aspersions on anyone. [If the aspersion is merited, why not? I have long gone past being annoyed or troubled about this pope's personal idiosyncracies that I find questionable (he can wear purple harem pants under his white cassock if he wants), but I could never ignore it any time he says or does anything anti-Catholic, which he does with increasing frequency these days.]

I admit that there is no way to hide from these problems, and we should want to keep informed. The point here is that we should be able to take them in stride without losing our serenity. There is far, far more to the life of the Church than can be hindered or helped by any one person, even if that person is the Pope.

There are so many ways we can serve Christ, so many ways we can witness to His goodness and love, so many possibilities to which the only obstacles are in our own hearts. We need to pray; we need to discern God’s will; and we need to act.

Our Lord warned that no one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God (Lk 9:62), yet It seems to me that a paralytic preoccupation with Pope Francis is a kind of looking back. [But tell us, Mr. Mirus, who exactly has been paralyzed out of preoccupation with this pope? You have to be mindless to think he - or anyone else one dislikes - is worth more than venting against as needed, and counteracting if one can!]

I believe this is something we must consider with the greatest possible care. In the battle between good and evil, when our own preoccupations prevent us from moving forward, then we really are looking back. And when this happens, it is not Christ who wins.


Mea maxima culpa:
Who am I to judge?
by Francis J. Beckwith

NOVEMBER 25, 2016


In July 1979, at the age of 18, I spent several weeks at a Youth With a Mission (YWAM) summer camp in Cimarron, Colorado. Nestled on the western slope of the Colorado Rockies, the camp trained a cross-section of young Evangelicals who wanted to become more adept at living and sharing their faith.

Among the other students with whom I spent the most time were two brothers and a sister who hailed from rural Pennsylvania. Although they were Americans, there was just something about them that seemed foreign and unfamiliar. They dressed funny and were inordinately polite, with a wickedly smart comprehension of Holy Scripture that far surpassed their peers. Yet they were also, as it seemed to my arrogant 18-year-old self, embarrassingly out of touch with contemporary culture, especially film and pop music.

As we were hiking one afternoon, I asked one of the brothers, “Who is your favorite Beatle?” To my horror, he replied, “We don’t know any of their names.” I then asked, “Have you ever listened to the Beatles?” The other two, overhearing the conversation, answered in near unison with their brother, “No.”

“Why not?,” I retorted, as if I were placed on this earth to defend the dignity of the Fab Four. What followed was an earful: they gave me a long and detailed account of their family life and the nature of their religious community. They were Mennonite Christians who lived in strict adherence to norms and practices that they were taught are essential to the process of sanctification.

Not really listening with much charity, I quickly judged them and their family as poor oppressed souls who needed to be liberated from the shackles of their narrow-minded faith. Of course, I had the good sense not to tell them directly what I thought. But they probably figured it out by my facial expressions and the incredulous tone of my interrogation.

Over the days that followed, much to my surprise, I found myself not only drawn to these Mennonites but becoming envious of their inner strength and personal holiness. What seemed to me only days earlier as an unattractive stifling of individual self-expression I began to see as an authentic freedom that my feeble reflexes, under the spell of the popular culture, did not have the vocabulary to properly categorize.

I saw in these three young students a degree of liberality, self-mastery, kindness, and love that, unencumbered by the vicissitudes of the present age, put me and my Evangelical peers to shame. It turned out that we were the ones with the shackles and they were the ones who were truly free.

I had not thought about that summer of 1979 for quite some time, until about two weeks ago, when I read Pope Francis’s comments about the growing numbers of young Catholics who are drawn to the Latin Mass. Clearly perplexed as to why anyone would be attracted to this ancient liturgy if they had not been brought up with it, the Holy Father opined: “Sometimes I found myself confronted with a very strict person, with an attitude of rigidity. And I ask myself: Why so much rigidity? Dig, dig, this rigidity always hides something, insecurity or even something else. Rigidity is defensive. True love is not rigid.”

The Holy Father, of course, is correct that “true love is not rigid.” But as with the meaning of any infused virtue, the divine is in the details. For if we “dig, dig,” as Francis suggests we do, we discover there is no such thing as the vice of rigidity, or the virtue of charity, in the abstract.

As I learned as an 18-year-old, and as the Supreme Pontiff no doubt knows as an 80-year-old, impulsive judgments, directed by uncritically inherited prejudices, formed by one’s own narrow experience, may themselves be manifestations of unjustified rigidity, even when they claim to be advancing the cause of human liberation.

This is why, for example, the Holy Father does not believe he engages in the vice of rigidity when he declares in starkly absolutist terms the impossibility of the ordination of female priests, the wrongness of capital punishment, the grave immorality of abortion, the responsibility of first world nations to distinguish migrants from refugees, the goodness of the invitation of God’s mercy, and the power of the papacy to issue authoritative apostolic exhortations and to later clarify or decline to clarify their meaning. [There's rigidity and rigidity. I believe I have remarked often enough that JMB absolutely does not perceive at all his own wrong rigidity about his idees fixes that he would impose on everyone, some of which Beckwith lists above. Just as he does not see that it is right to be rigid about certain bedrock principles, such as the Ten Commandments and the essentials of the Catholic faith, about which there can be no flexibility or compromise.]

In other words, if Pope Francis were an equal opportunity critic of “rigidity in the abstract,” he would unwittingly be contributing to the undermining of his own ecclesial authority. If that were the case, Catholics would have no more reason to take his pronouncements seriously than they would the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Joel Osteen, or Donald Trump.

But clearly that could not be the Holy Father’s intention, especially given his penchant to speak extemporaneously to international media on matters that he believes are of global importance.

Consequently, it would be wise for the Holy Father to not cease “digging” into the hearts and minds of those moved and transformed by the sublimity of the Latin Mass. Perhaps he will discover in these Catholic young people, as I found in my Mennonite friends in the summer of 1979, an unassuming sanctity, joy, and liberality.

Only when I realized that my inability to see this inner beauty and freedom was the result of my being held in bondage to the spirit of the age did I humbly confess, “Who am I to judge?”

One more addition to this assortment of commentaries on our beloved pope:

Is it possible that among the Catholics of Argentina, Jorge Bergoglio knows no one he could trust to be the editor of the new weekly Argentine supplement of L'Osservatore Romano gesture than a longtime Presbyterian friend of his? Sandro Magister gives us the inside story of this new Bergoglian ecumenism-in-practice.

The pope's Presbyterian friend
becomes an OR editor
Translated from

November 25, 2016

For some time there has been a byline appearing more often in L'Osseravore Romano, on Page 1 and the editorial pages. The name is Marcelo Figueroa, who since September, has been the editor of the weekly OR edition created expressly for Argentine readers.

Figueroa is Argentine himself. But he is not a Catholic. He is a Presbyterian pastor who has been the director for the past 25 years of the Argentine Biblical Society.

But above all, he is a longtime friend of Jorge Mario Bergoglio who wants him close to him, and in fact took him to Lund for the celebration of the fifth centenary of Martin Luther's schism.

It is this close friendship with the pope that explains the entry of a Protestant into the 'control room' of the pope's own newspaper and official organ of the Holy See.

In Argentina, it had been Figueroa who brought together, with him as moderator, the then Archbishop of Buenos Aires and Rabbi Abraham Skorka, for a series of conversations broadcast on Channel 21, the archdiocesan TV station, then later transcribed for a book published in Italian by the Vatican publishing house as Conversazioni sulla Bibbia.

The interview series was interrupted after #32 when Bergoglio was elected pope. The 33rd episode was to have been about 'friendship', as Figueroa told OR later.

Now, Figueroa is very much at home in Casa Santa Marta. In the spring of 2015, when he underwent some delicate surgery, the pope was close to him through continuous telephone calls and letters. Then after he had recovered, the pope gave him a long interview in September 2015, for a Buenos Aires radio station.

One year later, he appointed him not just to be editor of the OR's Argentine edition but also as a regular columnist of the main OR itself.

Figueroa's solemn investiture into the latter role was a curious article in two voices by him and the leading editorialist of OR, Lucetta Sacraffia who also edits the paper's Sunday women's supplement.

Entitled 'La sfida ecumenica latinoamericana' (The ecumenical challenge in Latin America), it occupied an entire page of the OR on November 5, constructed in the form of a conversation and an assessment of the pope's visit to Lund, and therefore of the actual relationship between Catholics and Protestants.

But it had a precedent that is useful to recall. A few days earlier, on November 1, Scaraffia had an article in Corriere della Sera on the same topic which had disconcerted many Catholics. It was entitled "Luther, the 95 theses, and the Latin Pope who has now nullified centuries of conflict". She wrote:

---

Today, many of the profound dissensions that caused schism in the Church no longer have reason to exist.
- The problem of salvation - by grace alone, according to Luther, or through good works and the mediation of the Church, as Catholicism teaches - no longer assails anyone.
- Likewise, indulgences which have disappeared from our horizon [Hmm, Scaraffia never read the Bergoglian Holy Year decree that cites the usual indulgence available to those who meet the conditions for indulgence???]
- Or even, life beyond death, an idea which, for decades now, appears to have been dispersed. [DIM=pt][REALLY???? Not in the Church!]
Why then must all this still be litigated? It is like continuing to argue over free access to sacred texts when today Catholics can read the Bible in any edition they choose, in reading groups, where everyone comments spiritedly.

Of course, there are still open theological questions, liked the sacraments -which Lutherans have reduced in number [but also in substance, Ms. Scaraffia, as their notion of the Eucharist as being nothing more than a meal, with bread and wine which are not transsubstantiated at all to the Body and Blood of Christ] - but these are questions which largely do not concern the faithful. [DIM=pt][Yeah, right - to deny Trans-substantiation does not concern the faithful! Nor does the Lutheran notion that confessing to a priest is very simply absurd and senseless. And we could go on... But Scaraffia shrugs off these 'open theological questions'. Well, why not? Her lord and master Bergoglio does!]

---

To some Italian Catholics, like Costanza Miriano who wrote a rebuttal in Il Foglio on November 4, Scaraffia's words showed no concern for the hollowing out of the cornerstones of Catholic faith by the waves of secularization, but rather expressed satisfaction that doctrinal disputes with the Protestants appear to have been cleared away. "thanks to which," she wrote, "the dialog between Catholics and Lutherans has been placed on a footing that goes beyond theological differences. Finally."

A few days later, here was Scaraffia restating her position not in Corriere but on the pope's own newspaper, in a duet with her Protestant colleague Figueroa who shared her views completely.

There did not seem to be any reaction from the Protestants to this casual update on the ecumenical course as perceived by the two leading contributors to the OR.

Whereas, among the Italian Waldensians, there was great concern over how, in that same time period, Eugenio Scalfari of La Repubblica had written about Luther when describing the phone call he got from the pope the day before he went to Lund because 'he wanted to speak to me about the Reformation".
> Francesco, Lutero e il valore condiviso della Riforma

Rebutting Scalfari, a Bergoglian BFF since the latter became pope, with a lethal excoriation, was no less than the most authoritative Waldensian theologian who is esteemed even by Catholics, Paolo Ricca, in the magazine Riforma on Nov. 8:
> Lutero e l'Evangelo della grazia incondizionata:
Adventures and misadventures of the new ecumenical course