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November 26, 2016 headlines

Canon212.com


PewSitter

The lions have, of course, not all been silent. The Four Cardinals with their DUBIA, epitomize bishops performing a basic inexorable function which
most of their colleagues do not apparently think they have, especially vis-a-vis a pope, or are too weak-willed to exercise for a number of reasons;
while the DUBIA epitomize the most serious questions orthodox Catholics have been asking about the Catholicism of this pope who seems focused
on systematically establishing Bergoglianism and the church of Bergoglio. Questions which have continued to pile up and/or recur with alarming
frequency since Bergoglio was elected pope in March 2013.

Silence of the lions
Where are the Von Galens we need today?
Where are the Ambroses? The John Fishers?
by David Warren

NOVEMBER 26, 2016


What is the use of bishops? This has been a question in the minds of many Catholic faithful, through my adult life, as I have learnt from conversation. Often the question itself, or something like it, is asked sarcastically, about one bishop or another who has failed, signally, to uphold Catholic teaching when he was called upon “by events.” The cock crows thrice and then – the possibility fades.

The faithful are told, by this silence or (more often) incoherent mumbling, that when it comes to the witnessing of Christ and Christ’s teaching, they are on their own. They may have the Catechism of the Catholic Church before them, to remind them what’s what in our faith, but if they make a stand they cannot expect their leaders to support them.

Rather, more likely, they are quietly disowned, as “fanatics,” and left to stew in that reputation. For they are now taken to be speaking only for themselves, in a time when anything said with clarity and precision can be dismissed as the outpouring of mere “feelings,” then slandered as “hate speech.”

In a dark time, when speech codes are advancing on every academic, legal, social and political front, the lawless Dictatorship of Relativism is being consolidated.

Anything you say may be, potentially, prosecuted on the argument that it might, potentially, hurt the feelings of unknown members of some vaguely defined, politically favored group. The dissident loses his livelihood, or if he hopes to keep it, must submit to public humiliation and some course of “counseling,” or “sensitivity training,” or “re-education.”

Maoism is thus alive and well on the college campuses; and spreading beyond them. Or Stalinism, or Hitlerism, if the gentle reader prefers. Or “McCarthyism,” insofar as it was conceived to involve show trials.

McCarthyism was defeated, fairly quickly – inside three months – when several prominent establishment figures stood up to the late Wisconsin senator, and said they had had enough. Joe McCarthy was himself labeled a pariah, and his case made a warning to any who might wish to emulate him.

Indeed, a more formidable McCarthyism of the Left was planted in the corpse of that politician, and his name made into a propaganda slogan. But to begin with, I think, there was genuine outrage at the recklessness of McCarthy’s senate hearings, and for the first who stood up, some nerve was required.

As courage will always be required – in all times, in all nations – for those who will oppose an injustice.

We have by now, in the Catholic Church, a legacy of bishops who were brave and worthy, written into the annals of our Saints and Martyrs. Conducted chiefly through the liturgy, they amount in practice to a Third Testament – an exemplary chronicle through twenty centuries in which, by the lives of great men and women, the Life of Christ persisted in this world.

By no means can we say that bishops always fail us; nor even when they fall silent are we necessarily left to fend for ourselves. God finds others who step forward to give the example. It should also be said that we ourselves are entitled, by the grace of our baptism, to step forward – to vindicate the good and the true; to condemn their opposites. But such acts are uncommon.

That they are uncommon is part of the teaching, about sinful man. We are so attached to our worldly comforts, by our worldly imaginations, that in the clearest opposition between right and wrong we will seek the quiet life. And as we could know if only from the Gospels, the man well fed and well housed, well friended and conspicuously decorated (such as a bishop), has more to lose than most. Why risk it all in exchange for public persecution, and the risk of abandonment by his own supporters? For rewards not of this world, invisible except to the eyes of Faith?

Last night, I attended the launching of a fine book at the Toronto Oratory. It is by Father Daniel Utrecht: the best biography we now have in English of The Lion of Münster: The Bishop Who Roared Against the Nazis. His name was Clemens August Count von Galen, and an eloquent column on him was published in this Catholic Thing, a few months ago.

Against the Nazi regime, and especially against its policies of extermination (“euthanasia”) he railed, in just the way every German bishop was obliged to do through the period 1933-45, when most chose a discreet silence, or at best some discreet mumbling.

Von Galen did not wait for the authority to speak, because he had the authority. And it was so apparent to his flock of the Münster diocese, and by word-of-mouth across Germany, that the Nazis did not dare kill him: saving that delicious prospect, as Hitler confided to his inner circle, until after the war was won. That it wasn’t won was at least partly due to this bishop’s brashness.

I like to imagine historical counterfactuals. What if? What if every German bishop had stood as von Galen? Then, perhaps, the regime would have persecuted Catholics across Germany in a repetition of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, or worse. They would have absorbed what the Allies did, in finally taking the Nazis down. In the course of which, quite possibly, they might have reclaimed all Germany from its lapsed Christian allegiance.

Or a like counterfactual. What if rather than just one (Saint John Fisher), all the British bishops had stood up to Henry VIII? What if all had been willing to be martyred – all clergy following their lead, and the Catholic people rising everywhere and not just in isolated regional revolts? Not in violence but in holy stubbornness to say, “This will not pass!”

Such things are finally imponderable, but I entertain the thoughts for the insight they offer into the extraordinary worldly power the Church would have, were it governed by lions.

I am not and never have been a fan or follower of blogger Louis Verrecchio, for whom anything in the Church that came after Pius XII is rotten and invalid, especially Vatican II and everything after it. Nor do I appreciate him and other ueber-traditionalists like him who now treat Benedict XVI with utter contempt and ridicule - mainly because they see him consenting to be 'instrumentalized' by - or voluntarily making himself into a tool for - Bergoglio and his ends, whatever they may be. But in the following post, Verrecchio offers a reflection that I share about yet another Bergoglian nail being driven into the heart of the Catholic faith.

The Bergoglian Christ:
Beaten, bloodied, belittled
by Louie Verrecchio
AKA CATHOLIC
November 26, 2016

Sunday, November 20th, marked the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe.

In his homily, Francis described it as “the crown of the liturgical year;” a nice turn-of-phrase to be sure, but make no mistake about it, in his eyes, Christ Himself remains crownless.

As his preaching that day suggests, the Bergoglian image of Jesus is born, in part, from what appears to be a practical denial of the resurrection:

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‘The Christ of God, the Chosen One, the King’ (Lk 23:35,37) appears without power or glory: he is on the cross, where he seems more to be conquered than conqueror. His kingship is paradoxical: his throne is the cross; his crown is made of thorns; he has no sceptre, but a reed is put into his hand; he does not have luxurious clothing, but is stripped of his tunic; he wears no shiny rings on his fingers, but his hands are pierced with nails; he has no treasure, but is sold for thirty pieces of silver.

---

While one may rightly speak of the “throne of the Cross” where Our Lord appeared “to be conquered,” it would be a most grievous error to imagine that this is where the story ends. [No Christian really thinks that, but Bergoglio's words suggest otherwise.]

Though Francis said, “His kingship is paradoxical,” he never seems to get around to the “other side of the coin” by extolling the extent of Our Lord’s authority, His infinite power, and His social reign.

Rather, he consistently speaks as if to gaze upon Our Lord even now is to look upon one who “seems more to be conquered than conqueror.”

Missing entirely from the Christology of Francis is any indication that he believes in One who is clothed in majesty, sovereignty and glory. It’s as if the resurrection never happened! [Bergoglio does not necessarily deny the Resurrection in those words (he hasn't done so, so far, though he may be among those who think it is really just symbolic; and I should check out what Luther has said about the Resurrection because this may be another Bergoglian Luther-redux), but he eschews even describing the Lord in 'majesty, sovereignty and glory' because the very idea contradicts Bergoglio's false notions of 'humility'! Why he would even think to deny those attributes to the Lord of Lords, God most almighty, is perverse. It would seem like a rejection of the very idea that we ought to worship God, why in the Gloria, we say, "Glory to God in the highest... We praise You. We bless You. We adore you. We glorify You. We give You thanks for Your great glory. O Lord God, heavenly King, God the Father almighty..."

No Christian would ever think of Jesus only as the Crucified One without looking to the Risen Christ, of Good Friday without Easter Sunday, in which the glory of the Resurrection sublimates and crowns the Lord's suffering and death' Which is why the Resurrection - not the Crucifixion which is its necessary prelude - is the keystone of our faith.]

This presumably is why he can only manage to preach a crucified king whose throne is a cross as opposed to the Risen Lord who said of Himself, “I am set down with my Father in his throne.” (cf Apocalypse 3:21)

In establishing the Feast of Christ the King, Pope Pius XI taught:

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After His resurrection, when giving to His Apostles the mission of teaching and baptizing all nations, he took the opportunity to call himself King, confirming the title publicly, and solemnly proclaimed that all power was given Him in heaven and on earth. These words can only be taken to indicate the greatness of His power, the infinite extent of His kingdom. (cf Quas Primas 11)

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How different this image of Christ is from the one espoused by Francis and those who think as he does!

Consider, for example, the words of Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, the man handpicked by Francis to lead the cardinals advising him on the Curia’s reorganization:

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The function of the hierarchy is redefined in reference to Jesus as Suffering Servant, not as “Pantocrator” (lord and emperor of this world); only from the perspective of someone crucified by the powers of this world it is possible to found, and to explain, the authority of the Church.

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[I wasn't aware Maradiaga had said that, which is more than appalling! But then the theology of Bergoglio and his followers can be quite appalling! The authority of the Church comes from Christ, second Person of the Trinity, in his wholeness - and that starts by being Pantocrator, which makes his Passion and Death as Jesus of Nazareth, even more unique, without ever dimming or overshadowing the glory of his Resurrection which demonstrates that he is indeed Pantocrator.]

Apart from a Jesus Christ who is Pantocrator indeed, the authority of the Church that He established is effectively rendered nil, and the function of her sacred pastors is thus reduced to that of a therapist who is called to do little more than “accompany” sinners on the way to Hell.

And isn’t this exactly what is promoted in Amoris Laetitia as interpreted according to the explicit input of its author?

If one simply takes Francis at his word, it is evident [I would be less definitive and say 'it would seem..'] that he worships a false god of his own making – an itinerant first century doer of good deeds; a live-and-let-live liberal who judged nothing and no one, only to be left beaten, bloodied and belittled by those who hold earthly authority.

It is this paltry substitute for Christ the King that Francis urges his listeners to follow; as if the mission at hand primarily concerns finding a remedy to temporal poverty and social inequalities.

An honest appraisal of the last three-and-a-half years makes it difficult to deny that the lord of Bergoglianism bears a striking resemblance to Jesus as viewed through the eyes of most modern day self-described Jews; a rather well-meaning social worker with a revolutionary spirit, who, at the end of the day, was really just an ordinary man.

This, my friends, is the Christological heresy upon which Bergoglianism is founded; namely, a failure to recognize the Divinity of Our Lord. [I have not seen anything that directly suggests this, so far, even if Bergoglio now and then presumes to correct or edit what the Gospels tell us Jesus said. Maybe he thinks he can do that because technically, the words of Jesus reported by the Gospels are the words of Jesus of Nazareth, i.e., Jesus as human being - even if Jesus the man, the Word incarnate, cannot be separated from Jesus as God, second Person of the Trinity. As we pray in the sublime Preface of the Most Holy Trinity, "what we believe by the revelation of thy glory, the same we believe of thy Son, the same of the Holy Spirit, without difference or inequality...the true and everlasting Godhead, distinct in persons, one in essence and equal in majesty" (Never so beautiful as when chanted in Latin).

As I write, the dubia is front and center in the minds of most Catholics, and the questions that it poses can be summarized into just one: Do you, Francis, recognize the Divinity of Christ? [A question which Bergoglio should have no trouble answering on the spot, but someone with canonical standing should formally pose the question to him. A dubium cannot be formally presented in a blog!]

If the answer is clearly yes, then the five questions presented in the dubia would pose no difficulty whatsoever.

On the other hand, if the Pope cannot answer the DUBIA with a simple Yes or No, then Our Lord’s words concerning adultery would appear to be up for revision; likewise Catholic teaching concerning intrinsically evil acts as based upon Sacred Scripture and the Tradition of the Church would seem negotiable on a case-by-case basis.

In fact, it’s not difficult to imagine that presenting the dubia to one who doubts the Divinity of Christ just might be enough to render him boiling with rage.

A translation of the headlines:
Corriere della Sera - Abortion, the Pope's pardon
A turnaround by the Church: Priests can always absolve women and doctors
Il Gazzettino - The pope's turnaround: Abortion is absolved
La Repubblica - The pope and abortion: Yes to pardoning women and doctors
Il Tempo - Go ahead and abort: the pope forgives you
Priests can absolve women and doctors if they repent:
The last apostolic letter revolutionizes the Church
(for the 30th time in 3 years) [I'd like to see Tempo's list]
Il Resto del Carlino - 'Pardon abortion!'
The Pope: Priests can always absolve repentant women and doctors
Il Messaggero - Abortion: The pope breaks the taboo
Il Manifesto [Communist Party organ] - The good shepherd:
On abortion, Papa Bergoglio removes a huge obstacle
Il Mattino - Turnaround in the Jubilee closing letter:
Pope Francis's pardon- 'Women and doctors will always be absolved'

The Italian headlines reporting the pope's statements about forgiving abortion in his letter marking the end of his Year of Mercy are even worse than my direst anticipations of how those statements would be interpreted widely, especially among 'Catholics' already conditioned to think that abortion-on-demand is as established as routine divorce as a 'Catholic fact of life'...

From wisdom to ideology:
What the Church is coming to
Translated from

November 26, 2016

Last Sunday, November 20, concomitant with the closure of the Year of Mercy, Pope Francis signed the apostolic letter Misericordia et misera.

What stirred up the greatest uproar about the document was the pope's conceding to all priests "the faculty of absolving those who have incurred the sin of abortion" (No. 12), a faculty he already granted at the start of the Holy Year but limited only to its duration.

No one is disputing the legitimacy of the pope's disposition, which is among the faculties reserved to the supreme authority of the Church, and which might bring some uniformity and simplification in the normative 'jungle' there was (different dioceses had different norms; there were priests authorized to absolve the sin of abortion, and priests who were not; religious who had the privilege of withholding censure; etc) which only created confusion for the faithful. But allow me to make a couple of observations.

1. In similar situations, we would expect more clarity and precision. I do not think that the provision "I grant, from now and going forward, to all priests, by virtue of their ministry, the faculty to absolve whoever has incurred the sin of abortion" is a gem of juridical rigor. [But this pope objects to 'rigor' in anything, other than in his own ideology-driven statements and actions, so don't expect any rigor in his instructions on the practice of the faith, in which he advocates flexibility above everything. No wonder that instead of being the rock he is supposed to be for the Church, he has been more like a reed easily but proudly bending wherever the prevailing wind blows.]

It is true that this is a pastoral document, not a tract on canon law. But I don't think that 'pastoral' is synonymous to superficial and approximative. First of all, what does he mean by the words "by virtue of their ministry"? Is this faculty granted by the pope different from the faculty that every priest should receive from his bishop in order to absolve sins validly (can. 966, § 1) or is it subordinate to the latter?

In the second place, he does not refer at all to excommunication latae sententiae provided for by Canon 1398 for the crime of abortion. Some will say - "But that is understood! The papal concession refers precisely to absolution from excommunication". Then why not have said so? Why refer only to the sin of abortion? [In canon law, abortion is both a sin and a crime, and the penalty for the crime of abortion (for the aborting mother as for those who assist in the abortion) is automatic excommunication, which only the local bishop can lift.]

Perhaps so the new decree could be better understood by laymen? But for me, this imprecision only creates confusion. To such an extent that at the presentation of the apostolic letter, it took a newsman's question to elicit the answer from the Vatican representative that

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...there will be a reform of the Code of Canon Law to deal with the norms decreed by the pope today, but excommunication is not abolished - what changes is the way by which the sinner can be free of it. Up to now, it was necessary to address a confessor duly authorized by his bishop for this task - generally, the penitentiary of the Cathedral - now absolution can be obtained from any priest, and with absolution, excommunication is also lifted.

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At least, the response was clear, even if one might ask, what is the sense of any excommunication which can be lifted arbitrarily by any priest?

2. But, leaving aside those formal considerations, what leaves us rather perplexed is the timeliness of this new discipline [or, better said, relaxation of discipline]. It must be noted that the pope was absolutely clear in reaffirming the gravity of the sin of abortion: "I wish to reaffirm with all my powers that abortion is a grave sin because it puts an end to innocent life" (Misericordia et misera, n. 12).

But judging from what the newspapers reported the next day (see montage of headlines), it doesn't seem that his words found a mark: one would say that the pope's decision had led to a banalization of abortion. Because as usual, most Italian reporters showed themselves to be quite superficial: but if they understood the pope's statements this way, then how would the common folk understand it since they depend on the media to be informed? I think that this deserves some reflection.

When one wants to communicate a message, most of the time, words - no matter how clear they may be - do not suffice. They must be accompanied by 'signs' (which could be gestures, examples, prohibitions, punishments, etc). This is particularly obvious in the pedagogical field: It is difficult for education that is limited to 'preaching' to produce effective results. Parents who want to teach their children not to use profanities must teach them by example, not just saying so; and at the first vulgar term they hear from a child, they must immediately administer a spanking if they really want the child to learn once and for all that they must never use such words.

The Church, which is a great teacher, has always used this educational method. It is all the more important now, when with so much talk about 'pastoral conversion', certain obvious facts are forgotten.

Let's take a couple of examples:
- Until a few decades ago, Mass was always said in Latin. Why? Was it because the Church wanted the faithful to understand nothing about the rite or because she preferred to use a 'mysterious' language as if it were somehow 'magical'? No, only because the Church wished the faithful to understand that the sacraments act ex opere operato - by their very performance, which is to say, they work intrinsically, independent of our understanding. [More precisely, when validly effected, sacraments confer grace, not as the result of activity on the part of the recipient but by the power and promise of God.]
- Once, communion using both species (bread and wine) was forbidden. But why, when Jesus instituted the Eucharist using both bread and wine? Simply because we must understand that in either specie, bread or wine, Christ is totally present - Body and Blood, spirit and divinity. (In this regard, it can be useful to read Nos 10-15 of the foreword to the General Order of the Roman Missal.)

But it seems that the Church today has lost the wisdom that has always distinguished it in the course of centuries. The Church today seems to have an allergy to any manifestation of severity - as if severity were incompatible with goodness, forgetting that it is an essential element in any formative process. [But severity is another word for 'rigidity', which is a No-No in the church of Bergoglio!]

One would say that today the only urgency is to show man the mercy of God. And certainly I would not object to such an affirmation. I am profoundly convinced that God nurtured saints like Sr. faustina Kowalska and John Paul II precisely to make the world know better the mystery of his mercy.

But divine mercy is not low-cost clemency - and anything that is cheap risks losing value in the eyes of men. A child will not take a too-indulgent teacher seriously. Whoever has gone to school knows that students have neither esteem or respect for professors who are too permissive.

Having lost its ancient wisdom, the Church today [really the church of Bergoglio, not the Catholic Church] is seeking to replace it with ideology.

Pope Francis has always been aware of this danger [but he is nevertheless responsible more than anyone for turning the religion he preaches into implacable ideology that presumes to be infallible and the only right way]. In his Sept 2013 interview with La Civilta Cattolica, he said:

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If the Christian is restorationist, legalistic, if he wants everything to be clear and certain, then he will find nothing. Tradition and the memory of the past should help us to have the courage to open new spaces to God. Today, whoever seeks only disciplinary solutions, whoever tends in exaggerated manner towards doctrinal 'certainty'. whoever seeks obstinately to recuperate the lost past, has a static and involutive vision. In this way, the faith becomes an ideology like many others (pp 469-470).

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[The narcissist never realizes, of course, when he is being guilty himself of the very things he presumes to denounce in others. One cannot cite any statement by a modern pope that is anywhere near as purely, rigidly ideological as the above.]

Then, in an interview published in Avvenire on November 16, 2016, he reiterated:

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With Lumen gentium, [the Church] went back to the source of her nature, to the Gospel. This displaced the axis of Christian conception from a certain legalism which could be ideological, to the Person of God who became mercy in the incarnation of his Son.

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[As usual, Bergoglio distorts facts so cavalierly. When did the Gospel ever cease to be the source of the Church's teaching, and when was the 'Christian conception' ever 'a certain legalism which could be ideological'? What Bergoglio considers 'legalism' is simply the rightful insistence on following the Word of God, starting with the Ten Commandments, and not seek to find exemptions or exceptions to divine law!]

But a few days earlier, on November 11, in one of his morning homilettes at Casa Santa Marta, he admitted that even love can be transformed to ideology. And so can mercy, I might add!

Ideology does not mean something that is false in itself. In general, it is used to describe a 'truth gone berserk', that is, uncoupled from its context, a partial truth that is absolutized but is disconnected from the other partial truths to which it is related.
For instance, are not justice and equality admirable values? But if they are isolated from other equally important values, such as freedom and legitimate pluralism, they become a cruel ideology.

Any truth is transformed to ideology especially when it loses contact with reality, when it forgets the limitations and the conditioning that characterize the human condition. In the face of reality, ideology does not have the humility to adapt itself to reality but demands that reality adapt itself to it. [Which is the presumption underlying almost anything significant that Bergoglio says and does.]

Robespierre certainly had great ideals, but once he realized that the revolution was unable to make them reality, he had no better answer than to use the guillotine against those who did not share his ideology.

Papa Bergoglio ought to know this, since one of his guiding postulates is that "Reality is more important than ideas". In Evangelii gaudium, he wrote that "An idea detached from reality leads to ineffectual idealisms and nominalisms" (No. 232). [Whatever that means! I really squirm when Bergoglio uses pseudo-intellectual language and he becomes even more incomprehensible.] To which I add, an idea detached from reality becomes ideology.

And this can happen even in the Church, even with the most holy things which she is called on to propose and dispose. This happens when an aspect of her preaching becomes 'de-contextualized' (=isolated from the rest of her dogma) and absolutized so that the rest are made to seem no longer important [as in the Bergoglian mercy-ueber-alles, and forget about repentance and 'sin no more'] or when her preaching [that of her ministers, really] appears oblivious to reality or the actual persons she is concerned about.

Well, even the extension to all priests of the faculty to absolve abortion - with its presumption of demonstrating the mercy of God, but ignoring the fact that the faithful might well need some censure to make them realize the gravity of the sin [and crime] - could be a sign of the progressive ideologization of the Church [under this pope].

You want 'signs' - as Fr. Scalese says above - on Bergoglio's real position on abortion? His continuing lip service denouncing abortion as a truly grave sin sounds more and more perfunctory in the light of reports like the following. Read and weep! Morality is a question of black or white, but obviously Bergoglio subscribes to the school of 'fifty shades of grey'.

Francis praises major 'Humanae Vitae' dissenter
as he rebukes ‘white or black’ morality
by Pete Baklinski


ROME, November 24, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – Pope Francis has praised the 1960s German moral theologian Bernard Häring, one of the most prominent dissenters from Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, for his new morality which the pope said helped “moral theology to flourish.”

"I think Bernard Häring was the first to start looking for a new way to help moral theology to flourish again," he said in comments, published today by La Civiltà Cattolica, that were given during a dialogue with the Jesuit order which was gathered for its 36th general Congregation on October 24, 2016 in Rome.

Pope Francis gave his comments while answering a question about a morality he has often spoken about based on “discernment.”

“Discernment is the key element: the capacity for discernment. I note the absence of discernment in the formation of priests. We run the risk of getting used to 'white or black,' to that which is legal. We are rather closed, in general, to discernment. One thing is clear: today, in a certain number of seminaries, a rigidity that is far from a discernment of situations has been introduced. And that is dangerous, because it can lead us to a conception of morality that has a casuistic sense,” he said. [Look who is talking about casuistry! Dear JMB, know yourself!]

Francis criticized what he called a “decadent scholasticism” that his generation was educated in, that provoked what he called a “casuistic attitude” towards morality.

“The whole moral sphere was restricted to ‘you can,’ ‘you cannot,’ ‘up to here yes. but not there,’” he said. “It was a morality very foreign to ‘discernment,’" he said, adding that Bernard Häring was the “first to start looking for a new way to help moral theology to flourish again.”

Fr. Bernard Häring (1912-98) was a key figure during the Second Vatican Council, where he applied the principle of the evolution of dogma (as found in nouvelle théologie) to morality. According to Professor Roberto de Mattei, this “new morality” championed by Häring ultimately “denied the existence of an absolute and immutable natural law.”

Häring was first appointed an “expert” at Vatican II and then later became the secretary of the Commission on the modern world, where, according to de Mattei, he became one of the primary architects of the document Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope), part of which deals with marriage.

According to de Mattei, a vicious battle was waged during the crafting of this document between the progressive and traditional minorities over procreation in marriage.

“This battle went beyond the pill to include the ends of marriage. At issue was the very basis of natural law itself,” he said in a talk given at the Rome Life Forum in 2015.

The progressive element, backed by Häring, eventually prevailed upon Pope Paul VI to leave aside the question of contraception in the document, according to de Mattei.

“The most surprising aspect of Gaudium et Spes, however, is the lack of any presentation of the traditional order of the ends of marriage, the primary and the secondary….The institution of marriage, therefore, is defined without any reference to children and only as an intimate community of conjugal life. Moreover, in the succeeding paragraphs, conjugal love is discussed first (paragraph 49) and procreation second (paragraph 50),” said de Mattei.

After Paul VI released Humanae Vitae in 1968 where he taught unequivocally that “each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of human life” and called the use of contraception “intrinsically wrong,” Häring spent his energy in criticizing not only Paul VI, but also Pope John Paul II, for their stances on birth control and other sexual issues.

Häring was eventually investigated by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in the 1970s for his 1972 book Medical Ethics, where he presents a concept of health that would allow a couple to use contraception if they deemed it the best means to help them fulfill their total vocation, a principle condemned in Humanae Vitae.

Häring became the mentor of Charles Curran, a dissident Catholic priest who aggressively condemned the Church’s teachings on matters such as abortion, contraception, and homosexuality. Curran, who was also investigated by the CDF in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was officially prohibited by Pope John Paul II in 1986 from teaching at any Catholic school and was stripped of the title ‘Catholic theologian.’

Francis called it an “important task” of the Society of Jesus that they “form seminarians and priests in the morality of ‘discernment.’”

It was using the method of “discernment” in response to the Zika virus scare earlier this year that Pope Francis appeared to condone the use of contraception for married couples living in affected areas as the “lesser of two evils.”

Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi confirmed the pope’s words the following day, stating: “The contraceptive or condom, in particular cases of emergency or gravity, could be the object of ‘discernment’ in a serious case of conscience. This is what the Pope said.” Critics said the pope’s move contradicted previous Catholic teaching.

Pope Francis also spoke about the morality of “discernment” in his April exhortation Amoris Laetitia more than thirty times, using the term as a key to opening the door to Holy Communion for Catholics living in adulterous situations.

Immediately following the “smoking footnote” 351, in which critics say the pope allows the divorced and remarried to receive Holy Communion, the pope writes that “discernment must help to find possible ways of responding to God and growing in the midst of limits.”

Four cardinals have recently asked the pope to clarify key passages in the exhortation, asking him a set of five yes-or-no questions regarding the indissolubility of marriage, the existence of absolute moral norms, and the role of conscience in making decisions. They went public with their “dubia” last week after the pope failed to reply.

During his dialogue with the Jesuits, Pope Francis noted the progress that has been made in moral theology since the days of “you can, you cannot.”

“Obviously, in our day moral theology has made much progress in its reflections and in its maturity,” he said. [Once again, as in AL, Bergoglio totally ignores John Paul II's Veritatis splendor (which Benedict XVI considers as probably the sainted pope's most important encyclical) reaffirming the unchanging norms of Catholic morality. He obviously cannot cite a document that contradicts much of his own heterodox morality.]

Fr. Lucie-Smith makes a powerful argument for the necessity of absolute moral standards in the Church, in which he effectively 'condemns' Jorge Bergoglio's moral relativism evidenced in AL without ever once having to bring up his name or office.

Catholics everywhere should be grateful
for the four cardinals’ appeal
Abandoning a belief in absolute moral norms would be a catastrophe for the Church
by Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith

November 24, 2016

Everyone is talking about the dubia, and so I will too, not that there is much need, given the already excellent and authoritative commentary that has come from a variety of sources, as, for example the scholar monk Dom Hugh Somerville-Knapman and the much respected Bishop Athanasius Schneider, the prelate who works at the very margins of the Church in Kazakhstan.

Indeed, what need is there for commentary at all, when one of the authors of the dubia is Cardinal Caffarra, perhaps the greatest of our moral theologians, and another is Cardinal Burke, the best of our canonists?

One of the dubia is as follows:=

---

After the publication of the post-synodal exhortation Amoris Laetitia (cf. n. 304), does one still need to regard as valid the teaching of St John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor n. 79, based on Sacred Scripture and on the Tradition of the Church, on the existence of absolute moral norms that prohibit intrinsically evil acts and that are binding without exceptions?

---

I have not made an in-depth study of Amoris Laetitia, but I do know something about the teaching contained in Veritatis Splendor, which was foundational for my studies in moral theology.

There are, as the Church has always recognised, absolute moral norms that are binding in all circumstances, and there are some acts, evil in themselves, which cannot be justified or sanitised by any circumstance of motivation. To take an example, it is never right to procure a direct abortion, even when you think you have grave or pressing reasons for doing so. It is never right to commit adultery, even if you are offered a compelling inducement (such as saving someone’s life) to do so.

If you decide to abandon belief in absolute moral norms – and St John Paul II recognised this danger, hence the need for the encyclical – then several catastrophic things will undoubtedly follow.

The first is that you no longer set a high bar for the Christian soul when it comes to morality. In so doing you admit to yourself that absolute norms are too hard for the Christian soul to live with [something explicitly articulated in more ways than one by Bergoglio and his ghosts in AL]; in other words you deny the power of the grace of God, won for us on the Cross by the Lord and Saviour of Mankind, which can transform a person and make them capable of living by these norms.

One of the title chapters used by St John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor was “Lest the Cross of Christ be emptied of its power”. But by abandoning the absoluteness of moral norms, you do exactly that.

Second, you undermine the whole concept of Law, and the whole idea of God as a Lawgiver. Now, He is not just a Lawgiver, but to deny the God of Sinai as One who gives us “a Law that shall not pass away, words that shall endure from age to age” (Psalm 148:6), is to make a grave mistake about God, and a grave mistake about human nature.

We weak human beings crave absolutes, and the absolutes given us by God are exactly what we need for human flourishing. To abandon absolutes is to abandon a coherent vision of God, and a coherent vision of humanity.

Third, to undermine the concept of the absolute moral norm, and the relative importance of circumstances and motivations, to move the focus from act-in-itself to the murky world of the often deluded self, and the desires of the self, is to open the way to moral chaos and the narcissism of seeing personal choice as paramount, indeed the only source of morality.

Choice is only good when it is a choice exercised to choose what is good and right. Personal choices, even when they are deeply meditated and chosen for what seem sincerely held reasons, can be catastrophic, both for the choosing person and for those around him or her. To abandon the objectivity of absolutes is to leave the sources of moral guidance reduced to our purely subjective likes and dislikes.

That this has already happened (as we were warned by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue) should all give us great cause for alarm, for the results are plain to see. That the Church should be infected with this way of thinking should, were it not for our faith, lead us to despair.

Finally, if the Church were to abandon its belief in the absoluteness of certain moral norms, and the doctrine of intrinsic evil, it would, to put it mildly, make the Magisterium look incoherent. But it goes much further than that.

A Church that reneges on its former teaching, based on Scripture and Tradition, is a Church that no longer holds to the Truth, indeed a Church that has lost sight of its primary vocation to hold to the Truth and to be a witness to it to the world, indeed a Church that has ceased to be the Church.

We owe Cardinal Caffarra and three brethren a debt of gratitude for their timely intervention, reminding us of our shared Christian vocation to be witnesses to the Truth. Now is the time for Catholics everywhere to make their gratitude plain.


Submitting 'dubia' is a standard part of Church life -
It’s not unreasonable to expect a clear answer
by Stephen Bullivant
Director
Benedict XVI Center for Religion and Society
St. Mary's Unviersity, Twickenham

November 24, 2016

Church doctrine and canonical legislation can be complicated to navigate. Dubia seek to end confusion on all sorts of topics.

Earlier today, while looking for something else entirely, I came across an interesting sentence on the website of the Liturgy Office of the Bishops’ Conference [of England and Wales]:

---

Following a request for information the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales submitted a dubium to the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei which confirmed that in the Roman Rite, whichever Form of the liturgy is being celebrated, the Holydays of Obligation are held in common.

---

Note the casual use here of that technical term, dubium. The root Latin meaning is “doubt” (hence “dubious”), but in this context a better translation is probably simply “query” or “request for clarification”. In any case, as this example demonstrates, the submission of dubia to Rome is, in and of itself, a perfectly run-of-the-mill Church affair.

Such dubia can, and are, submitted by bishops (or groups of bishops, as above) on all sorts of topics. After all, Church doctrine and canonical legislation can be complicated to navigate. Quite what the specific wording of a phrase does or does not mean, or quite how it ought most faithfully be applied in certain “grey area” cases, are not always immediately transparent. In such cases, rather than wing it, clarification may be sought with a short, to-the-point (in some cases, “yes” or “no”) inquiry, directed to the competent office.

Such issues don’t only come up in the Catholic Church, let us not forget. The recent Supreme Court ruling on Brexit, for example, offers a fairly useful secular comparison here.

Some real examples, chosen more or less at random:
Dubium: Do Holydays of Obligation differ in the Ordinary or Extraordinary Form, given that the Feasts corresponding to those Holydays often do?
Responsa: No, answered the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei. (That is to say, a person who normally attends the EF on a Sunday, but who fails to do so on Ascension Thursday, hasn’t thereby missed his or her obligation.)

Dubium: Are already-married candidates for the permanent diaconate – and therefore their wives – obliged to practise “perfect and perpetual continence” after ordination?
Responsa: No, answered the Prefect for the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts.

Dubium: Are Mormon baptisms valid?
Responsa: No, answered the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, with the explicit approval of the Supreme Pontiff. (Incidentally, the CDF also issued an interesting commentary as to why not, despite the fact that Mormon baptisms look like they might be valid).

My point here is simply this. In matters where there exists a legitimate question as to what precisely is the valid teaching and/or practice of the Church, the submission of a dubium (or indeed a concise set of related dubia) by one or more bishops is absolutely standard practice.

So too, though, is the concomitant expectation that they will receive a clear and unambiguous answer, from the relevant authority, for the purposes of settling confusion once and for all.

Cardinal Pell provides an admirable example of how to criticize Pope Francis rightly and severely in the false teachings he espouses without
ever once having to mention his name. In this way, he is upholding the Four Cardinals' DUBIA and giving the right Catholic answers to their
questions... Thank God for at least one cardinal in the pope's inner circle who is not reflexively a yes-man, especially in the things that
really matter to the faith. Too bad the pope will probably never get to read this interview or be told about it.


Cardinal Pell: Some Catholics ‘unnerved’
by current events in the Church
Says conscience must refer to revealed truth and moral law
by Dan Hitchens

Tuesday, 29 Nov 2016


Cardinal George Pell has said that “a number of regularly worshipping Catholics” are “unnerved by the turn of events” in the Church. ['unnerved' is a euphemism - 'appalled' might be the more direct adjective].

In a talk at St Patrick’s Church, London, Cardinal Pell said one cause for concern was false theories of conscience and the moral law.

Cardinal Pell was giving a talk on St Damien of Molokai as part of St Patrick’s series of talks for the Year of Mercy. But he also reflected on Catholicism today. He said that while Pope Francis has “a prestige and popularity outside the Church” greater than perhaps any previous Pope, some Catholics are currently uneasy.

Later in his talk, the Australian cardinal, who has been asked to lead Pope Francis’s financial reforms and is a member of the Pope’s “C9” group of advisors, criticised some of the ideas about conscience which are now current in the Church.

Cardinal Pell said that emphasising the “primacy of conscience” could have disastrous effects, if conscience did not always submit to revealed teaching and the moral law.

For instance, “when a priest and penitent are trying to discern the best way forward in what is known as the internal forum”, they must refer to the moral law. Conscience is “not the last word in a number of ways”, the cardinal said. He added that it was always necessary to follow the Church’s moral teaching. [This 'discernment' via the internal forum is, of course, the keystone of the pope's strategy to allow absolution for mortal sin, or in the case of remarried divorcees who continue to live as man and wife, for living in a state of chronic mortal sin, and therefore, to receiving the Body and Blood of Christ in a technical (because absolved in confession) but obviously farcical and false state of grace. Allowing such condonement of mortal sin case-by-case is simply the start of a the slippery slope towards allowing unconditional 'communion for everyone' as Bergoglio practised in Buenos Aires. And don't you doubt it, all the cardinals, bishops and priests who share this pope's heterodox borderline-heretical beliefs will happily slide down that slope ASAP, if they haven't already gone all the way down.]

The cardinal told the story of a man who was sleeping with his girlfriend, and had asked his priest whether he was able to receive Communion. It was “misleading”, the cardinal said, to tell the man simply to follow his conscience.

He added that those emphasising “the primacy of conscience” only seemed to apply it to sexual morality and questions around the sanctity of life. People were rarely advised to follow their conscience if it told them to be racist, or slow in helping the poor and vulnerable, the cardinal said.

His comments come after three years of debate on the Church’s teaching regarding Communion for the divorced and remarried. Cardinal Pell was among the senior figures who have publicly upheld the traditional doctrine repeated in Pope John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio – that the remarried should not receive Communion unless they are living “as brother and sister”.

But some prominent Catholics have suggested a different approach. For instance, Cardinal Blase Cupich has argued that someone’s conscience might tell them to receive Communion, and that “conscience is inviolable”. [Cupich, of course, is the crassest exponent of Bergoglianism, but both his unequivocal language, however outrageous, and the Bergoglian ideas he espouses, however heretical, are at least honest and forthright, which one cannot say about his lord and master in his crafty ways of trying to avoid making any statement that can be labelled outright heretical - technically, canonically and factually.]

Cardinal Pell quoted Blessed John Henry Newman’s writings on conscience, in which Newman rejected a “miserable counterfeit” of conscience which defines it as “the right of self-will”. He noted that Newman was defending Popes Pius IX and Gregory XVI, who in Cardinal Pell’s words, “condemned a conscience which rejected God and rejected natural law.”

The cardinal also paid tribute to St John Paul II’s “two great encyclicals”, Veritatis Splendor[/Br and Evangelium Vitae, which present the moral law as something binding in all cases.[Do you hear that, Your Holiness???]

Asked whether some Catholics’ unease about the state of the Church was related to false theories of conscience, Cardinal Pell said: “Yes, that’s correct.”

He added: “The idea that you can somehow discern that moral truths should not be followed or should not be recognised [is] absurd”. [Do you hear that, Your Holiness???]

“We all stand under the truth,” the cardinal said, pointing out that objective truth may be “different from our understanding of the truth”.

He also said that while doctrine develops, there are “no backflips”.

Cardinal Pell was asked about the letter to Pope Francis from four cardinals asking for clarification of the Pope’s recent exhortation Amoris Laetitia. The cardinals have asked the Pope to confirm that five points of Catholic teaching are still valid. These include the teaching that the remarried cannot receive Communion unless living as brother and sister, and the teaching that some moral absolutes have no exceptions.

The Pope has not replied to the four cardinals’ request, which was sent two months ago. The cardinals have taken this as an invitation to publish their questions and continue the discussion. The head of the Greek bishops has said that the four cardinals were guilty of “very serious sins” and could provoke a schism.

Asked whether he agreed with the cardinals’ questions, Cardinal Pell replied: “How can you disagree with a question?” He said that the asking of five questions was “significant”.

In his talk, Cardinal Pell portrayed St Damien of Molokai as a sometimes difficult but very holy priest. He noted that St Damien’s ministry was partly motivated by his fear for the souls of the lepers in his care.

The cardinal said that a priest’s pastoral strategy is heavily determined by how many people he thinks will be saved. He said that Jesus’s words, such as “Many are called, but few are chosen,” suggest a lot of people will go to hell. The cardinal said that while he did not relish this idea, “Jesus knew more about this than we did,” and that “our proper tolerance of diversity can degenerate” so that we believe “eternal happiness is a universal human right”. [The latter is the logical consequence of the Bergoglian gospel of mercy in which sinners can simply keep drawing on God's mercy as from an open-ended limitless ATM without amending their lives to sin less, or if possible, as Jesus said, 'to sin no more'; and the corollary Bergoglian suggestion that God is so merciful no one could possibly go to hell. As if we should all simply shrug off what Jesus said of the Last Judgment and everything else he said about burning in hell.

Cardinal Pell said that the truth about eternal punishment had been downplayed, just as a mistaken idea of conscience had become widespread. A sinful life makes it hard to perceive truth, he said, including moral truths – and so not understanding the moral law might itself be a result of sin. “The idea, now, of culpable moral blindness is discussed as infrequently as the pains of hell,” the cardinal said. [There we go! More Catholic essentials that our beloved pope really needs to accept and teach instead of constantly seeking to undermine, explicitly or by omission.]

Didn't see this Douthat column from Sunday earlier - comes from not checking out the NYT regularly...

His Holiness declines to answer
by Ross Douthat

NOV. 26, 2016

“This is not normal” — so say Donald Trump’s critics as he prepares to assume the presidency. But the American republic is only the second-oldest institution facing a distinctively unusual situation at the moment. Pride of place goes to the Roman Catholic Church, which with less fanfare (perhaps because the papacy lacks a nuclear arsenal) has also entered terra incognita.

Two weeks ago, four cardinals published so-caLled DUBIA — a set of questions, posed to Pope Francis, requesting that he clarify his apostolic exhortation on the family, “Amoris Laetitia.” In particular they asked him to clarify whether the church’s ban on communion for divorced Catholics in new (and, in the church’s eyes, adulterous) marriages remained in place, and whether the church’s traditional opposition to situation ethics had been “developed” into obsolescence.

The DUBIA began as a private letter, as is usual with such requests for doctrinal clarity. Francis offered no reply. It became public just before last week’s consistory in Rome, when the pope meets with the College of Cardinals and presents the newly-elevated members with red hats. The pope continued to ignore the DUBIA, but took the unusual step of cancelling any general meeting with the cardinals (not a few of whose members are quiet supporters of the questioners).

Francis canceled because the DUBIA had him “boiling with rage,” it was alleged. This was not true, tweeted his close collaborator, the Jesuit father Antonio Spadaro, shortly after replying to critics who compared him to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Grima Wormtongue by tweeting and then deleting a shot of Tolkien’s Gandalf growling his refusal to “bandy crooked words with a witless worm.”

Meanwhile one of those four DUBIA authors, the combative [MILITANT but not combative, because he is, in fact, consistently non-combative, i.e., non-belligerent, much as Joseph Ratzinger always was, even as he firmly and consistently stood up for the faith] traditionalist, Cardinal Raymond Burke, gave an interview suggesting that papal silence might require a “formal act of correction” from the cardinals — something without obvious precedent in Catholic history. (Popes have been condemned for flirting with heresy, but only after their deaths.)

That was strong language; even stronger was the response from the head of Greece’s Catholic bishops, who accused the DUBIA authors of “heresy” and possibly “apostasy” for questioning the pope.

Who was, himself, still silent. Or rather, who continued his practice of offering interviews and sermons lamenting rigidity and pharisaism and possible psychological issues among his critics — but who refused to take the straightforward-seeming step of answering their questions. [All he has to do is to answer YES or NO to five questions, but he is of course in self-estoppel from committing himself unequivocally on these particular DUBIA.]

It is not that there is any real doubt about where the pontiff stands. Across a period of vigorous debate in 2014 and 2015 he pushed persistently to open communion to at least some remarried Catholics without the grant of annulment. But conservative resistance ran strong enough that the pope seemed to feel constrained.

So he produced a document, the as-yet-unclarified Amoris, that essentially talked around the controversy, implying in various ways that communion might be given case by case, but never coming out and saying so directly.

This indirectness matters because within Catholicism the pope’s formal words, his encyclicals and exhortations, have a weight that winks and implications and personal letters lack. They’re what’s supposed to require obedience, what’s supposed to be supernaturally preserved from error.

So avoiding clarity seemed intended as a compromise, a hedge. Liberals got a permission slip to experiment, conservatives would get got to keep the letter [and spirit] of the law, and the world’s bishops were left to essentially choose their own teaching on marriage, adultery and the sacraments – which indeed many have done in the last year, tilting conservative in Philadelphia and Poland, liberal in Chicago or Germany or Argentina, with inevitable dust-ups between prelates who follow different interpretations of Amoris.

But the strange spectacle around the DUBIA is a reminder that this cannot be a permanent settlement. The logic of “Rome has spoken, the case is closed” is too deeply embedded in the structures of Catholicism to allow for anything but a temporary doctrinal decentralization. [Douthat seems to forget what Bergoglio announced in Evangelii gaudium that he intends to grant bishops doctrinal autonomy as he proudly affirmed how he intended to decentralize authority in the Church.

We may see the implied doctrinal decentralization in AL as a technical dress rehearsal for how Bergoglio's absurd intention to disperse or delegate papal authority on doctrine would work out in practice - even if the idea is obviously preposterous because it would splinter the Church depending on how each bishop thinks 'Catholic' doctrine ought to be, and the Church would then, in fact, lose its catholicity.

The general confusion following AL - though I hate to use the word 'confusion' for anything that results from a Bergoglian misstep, as no one is really confused about what he means, so the reaction is really disbelief that a pope could ever act or speak as he does whenever he is being Bergoglian and not Catholic at all! - is but the brief prelude to a de facto demand on each Catholic to follow his local bishop or not, in other words, to decide whether he will uphold the deposit of Catholic faith or agree instead to professing a Bergoglian anti-Catholic principle!]

So long as the pope remains the pope [and no matter how sanctimoniously this pope claims to decentralize and/or delegate his doctrinal function], any major controversy will inevitably rise back up to the Vatican.

Francis must know this. For now, he seems to be choosing the lesser crisis of feuding bishops and confused teaching over the greater crisis that might come (although who can say for certain?) if he presented the Church’s conservatives with his personal answers to the DUBIA and simply required them to submit. Either submission or schism will come eventually, he may think — but not till time and the operation of the Holy Spirit have weakened his critics’ position in the Church.

But in the meantime, his silence has the effect of confirming conservatives in their resistance, because to them it looks like his refusal to give definitive answers might itself be the work of providence. That is, he thinks he’s being Machiavellian and strategic, but really it’s the Holy Spirit constraining him from teaching error. [It is time once more to ask what Bergoglio means when he tells us that everything he has said and done since he became pope has been dictated to him by 'the Holy Spirit'. And since the Holy Spirit cannot possibly be wrong, we can only conclude that he has been erroneously transcribing/translating/interpreting what is being dictated to him, or that he mistakes the promptings of the very crafty Prince of the World to be divine rather than satanic.]

This is a rare theological hypothesis that can be easily disproven. The pope need only exercise his authority, answer his critics, and tell the faithful explicitly what he means them to believe. But until he speaks, the hypothesis is open.

Correction: November 27, 2016
This column implied that Father Antonio Spadaro had tweeted a quote from “Lord of the Rings” as a rebuke to the cardinals questioning Pope Francis. Father Spadaro has clarified that his tweet was actually directed against his own critics on Twitter. [But the 'clarification' only came days after the tweet first came out and was then deleted a few hours later! Can we really put any faith in the pope's 'clown princes'?]

Yet here's a new papal jester. Dear Lord, not another Bergoglio fanatic in the Curia, you say? You thought Baldisseri or Paglia or Spadaro or Schoenborn are as bad as any Bergoglian bootlicker could be? Read this...

Dean of Rota warns pope could strip
Four Cardinals of their cardinalate
BY DEACON NICK DONNELLY
EWTN News, UK
Nov. 29, 2016

Archbishop Pio Vito Pinto, Dean of the Roman Rota, told a conference in Spain that Cardinal Burke and the three cardinals who submitted the DUBIA to Pope Francis "could lose their Cardinalate" for causing "grave scandal" by making the DUBIA public.

The Dean of the Roman Rota went on to accuse Cardinals Raymond Burke, Carlo Caffarra, Walter Brandmüller and Joachim Meisner of questioning the Holy Spirit. [So Jorge Bergoglio is now the Holy Spirit???? Isn't that a stepback? He already makes like he knows better than Christ, who is of course, co-equal with the Father and the Holy Spirit.] Archbishop Pio Vito Pinto made his astounding accusations during a conference to religious in Spain.

Archbishop Vito's indictment against the four cardinals, and other people who question Pope Francis and Amoris Laetitia, was that they not only questioned one synod of bishops on marriage and the family, but two synods, about which, "The action of the Holy Spirit cannot be doubted." [A true Bergoglian who attributes what might well be Satan's action on them as the action of the Holy Spirit!]

The Dean of the Roman Rota went on to clarify that the Pope did not have to strip the four senior cardinals of their "cardinalate", but that he could do it. He went on to confirm what many commentators have suspected that Pope Francis's interview with Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops, was the Holy Father's indirect response [A NON-RESPONSE REALLY, because he did not address the 5 questions and say Yes or No to each of them - five words are all that are needed to answer the DUBIA completely but he can't even do that]:

During the conference, Pius Vito made clear to those present that the Pope did not respond directly to these four cardinals, "but indirectly told them that they only see white or black, when there are shades of color in the Church." [Ah yes, our 'fifty shades of grey' pope! But morality is always black or white - in natural law as in divine law, something is either good or bad. In the Sixth Commandment, God did not say "Thou shalt not commit adultery, unless Pope Francis or whoever allows you to do so without going unpunished!"]

The Dean of the Roman Rota, the highest canonical court responsible for marriage in the Catholic Church, went on to support Pope Francis's innovation of allowing divorced and "remarried" to receive Holy Communion. In response to a question asking if it was better to grant divorced and civily remarried couples nullity of marriage so they can marry in the Church before they receive Holy Communion Archbishop Vito expressed preference for Pope Francis's "reform":

---

Pope Francis's reform of the matrimonial process wants to reach more people. The percentage of people who ask for marriage annulment is very small. The Pope has said that communion is not only for good Catholics. Francisco says: how to reach the most excluded people? Under the Pope's reform many people may ask for nullity, but others will not.

---

The Dean of the Roman Rota appears to be overlooking the canonical rights of the faithful, including cardinals, to make their concerns about the state of the Church known to the people of God. Can. 212 §3 sets out this solemn right and duty:

---

According to the knowledge, competence, and prestige which they possess, they have the right and even at times the duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make their opinion known to the rest of the Christian faithful, without prejudice to the integrity of faith and morals, with reverence toward their pastors, and attentive to common advantage and the dignity of persons.

---

Cardinals Burke, Caffarra, Brandmüller and Meisner expressed due respect to Pope Francis and his "sovereign decision" not to respond to their DUBIA, while at the same time meeting their right and duty to communicate with the People of God.

For the Dean of the Roman Rota to warn the four cardinals that they could be stripped of their cardinalate for acting in accord with the law of the Church is oppressive. [And utterly STUPID! Thank God even more there is someone like Cardinal Pell in the Curia, who has stepped up to the plate on the fundamental doctrinal flaws of AL where the current Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith apparently sees none at all!]

I rarely find Michael Voris's daily commentary compelling enough to follow, but here he says something meaningful about the state of the union (USA) that resonates in terms of the faith. Yet I disagree that Americans serious about their Christian faith and their eternal salvation are 'hiding behind politics'. Rather, right now, it is politics - the power of the ballot - that enables them to express how their faith informs the way they live their lives. And the popular vote in the recent US presidential elections, as it has done since the second Reagan term, show that the US electorate is pretty much split down the middle, almost 50-50, between 'conservatives' and 'progressivists', i.e., this is a deeply polarized country, and Mr. Trump will need more than 4 years, or even 8, to begin de-polarizing the country...

Hiding behind politics
churchmilitant.com/
November 28, 2016

It's impossible to not notice the massive division that exists in America, expressed most recently in the election: charges of corruption and hate and collusion and bigotry [surely the issues that divided and will continue to divide were not such generic reciprocal accusations which are SOP in any democratic election, but the ideological abyss between the two major political parties, in which Republicans, who seem to have in their ranks more serious Christians motivated by their faith, are mostly politically conservative, whereas Democrats, who appear to embody the post-modern post-Christian me-centered generations, are overwhelmingly progressivist] — and two candidates deeply despised by each other and their opposing camps. But this is just what's bubbled to the surface.

What underlies all of this isn't really arguments over immigration policy and healthcare and the phoniness of man-centered climate change. What's really underneath all of this is a nation wrestling with its own morality — and morality is bound up with religion, no matter how much atheists deny it.

The arguments aren't really about taxes and jobs and energy pipelines; it's about which party, personified in its chosen candidate, will rule the day regarding morality. The fatal flaw in the American system is that we never decided as a nation, never even had the grand discussion, of what constitutes morality and which religion was correct.

The Founding Fathers simply kicked the can down the road and left it for future generations to deal with issues as they came up, perhaps never really expecting any issues would come up since a Christian morality, inspired by Catholic teaching, was the norm

But times have changed, with the ascendancy of a rabid anti-Catholicism spurred on by a love of immorality. Politics has become a cover for arguments about morality, and morality has become a cover for avoiding any discussion about God and religion.

Which religious view of God a people holds does matter. It matters for the very life of the nation — and not just for some philosophical, academic reason, but for the moral choices that will be made. No one who has a correct understanding of religion and God and consequent morality can ever condone abortion, and therefore will reject any politics supportive of it.

You can measure the vitality of a nation's spiritual health by monitoring its politics, not because they lead the nation, but because they reflect the nation. So what America needs is a real battle, not one over politics, but religion.

A society cannot long endure contradicting religions because of the contradicting moralities that flow from them. America has prided itself on its religious diversity, and that wrongheaded notion has now come around to bite us hard.

There is no way that all these religions can be correct, objectively correct. Not. Possible. So a gigantic national throwdown has to happen if America is to remain one nation.

We are now the recipients of the can that the Founding Fathers kicked so hard down the road. That sound you hear in the streets is the can rattling into place.

Our entire destiny is now being shaped. We will either survive as a nation, or we will perish as a group of warring, smaller nations who can no longer agree on first principles.

The only world religion that is "correct" is Christianity. And within Christianity, the only true faith is Catholicism. Everything else, inside and outside of Catholicism, is man-made.

The Catholic Church is Heaven-made. If you are Catholic, then you accept and embrace that. If you don't, if you think it's harsh or mean or not tolerant enough or judgmental, then get out of the Church formally, since you have already left it in principle.

Why would you belong to a Church you don't believe is the authentic Faith, and the true religion? How stupid is that? Think about it. "I belong to a Faith that I don't believe in."

If Catholicism is true — and it is — then every other religion is false, even if they might possess varying limited degrees of some truth. [Tsk-tsk! How un-Bergoglian! The current pope really believes every religion - or lack of one - is just as good as the other. So he doesn't want to convert anyone to Catholicism. What pope in his right mind would ever make such a statement? Well, Bergoglio did, and has done so more than once, so is he, in fact, 'in his right mind', or has his mind been taken over by Satan who has the daemonic ability to make his victims believe that they are really better than God, specifically better than Jesus in the case of Bergoglio who is always editing the Word of God for his own purposes!]

Until we start talking like men and stop hiding behind emotion-driven politics; until we start talking about the great, big elephant in the room, this division will cause the end of a nation.

Right now the battle is between those who believe in God and those who either don't or have wrong notions about God. [And how ironic it is that there are many among us who think that the present Vicar of Christ on earth does have wrong notions about God, or at least, about what the role of the Vicar of Christ and spiritual leader of the Catholic Church is!] It's never been about politics. Politics has just been the bucket for carrying and concealing the real issue.

Here's a more reflective look at the polarized America that Donald Trump is getting set to lead...

Recalibrating the 'culture war'
by Darrell Bock

November 29, 2016

We thought that the culture war was behind us and that we were entering a Brave New World in which Christians would be a harassed minority in a society captive to progressive ideals of personal liberation. [That's still how it has developed in Europe and where America is headed to.]

November 8 proved that expectation wrong in the Electoral College — but not necessarily on the streets. [Although these hate-inflamed demonstrations (mostly Soros-funded, and mostly composed of people who did not even vote, it is said) in some big normally Democratic cities - the numbers never rose to thousands and there were none in smaller cities - mostly marched to show their arrant disrespect for the results of a free and fair democratic election (i.e, sore losers in the worst sense of the word) and extreme hostility towards Donald Trump, they do represent everyone who has become so totally invested in the progressivist agenda (=Democratic agenda=UN agenda=Bergoglio agenda, for the most past) and the culture war is more polarized than ever.]

We still live in a contested environment. The candidate who flouted political correctness won. But his victory does not necessarily represent a victory for religious conservatives—at least, not in the way we’re used to thinking. There are crucial differences between the influential Religious Right of the 1970s, or even that of the 2000s, and the political influence and prospects of religious conservatives today.

Though Trump was elected by a significant margin in the Electoral College, he received slightly less of the popular vote than his opponent did, and significantly less than an outright majority. These numbers tell an important story. The nation is deeply divided. The election result disturbed as many Americans as it elated. Some are outraged enough to march before Trump even takes the oath of office.

Such demonstrations are unprecedented, and they give dramatic expression to how divided we are. There is no moral majority awaiting religious conservative leadership. We’ve been at this for more than a generation, and the divisions have become more evident, not less. Our “victory” will be deceiving if we do not attend to all that is going on.

There also exists an important division among those who handed Trump the win. The evangelical Protestant vote, which has played such an important role in the Republican Party’s success in recent decades, came in three parts. Close to twenty percent did not vote for Trump —through abstention, a third party, or a vote for Hillary. Almost eighty-one percent did vote for Trump.

Hidden in that large number, however, is a crucial reality: The Trump vote was itself divided, with many ballots cast ambivalently or lukewarmly. The back-and-forth among evangelicals before election day shows this to have been the case—with one magazine laying out seven different options for how to vote.

2016 was not like 2000, when evangelicals warmly embraced George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism. Trump occasioned among evangelicals much debate as to whether a vote for him was a vote for good or, at best, for the lesser of two evils. Post-election discussion shows the same, with a recent piece in Christianity Today asking whether the term “evangelical” still has value.

I don’t have hard data, but given my experience, I believe the hold-your-nose Trump support constituted a significant minority, if not a majority, of the evangelical vote. Evangelicals were motivated by specific concerns — the Supreme Court, religious liberty, the pro-life cause, maintaining the rule of law, and constitutional limits on government — as well as by a general feeling that the government had intruded on our lives in excessive ways. Evangelicals, by and large, were not voting for Trump the man, nor for his agenda. Their support was targeted and strategic.

This targeted support for Trump suggests an important change in evangelical voting patterns. In the old Religious Right, voters largely adopted the conservative political agenda without exception. We signed on to the agenda of tax cuts and de-regulation, as well as post–September 11 wars, because we saw this political agenda as part of a broader conservative agenda that included our moral and religious values.

Today, that wholesale support does not exist. The internal fragmentation of what looks, from the outside, like solid support stems from the fact that secular conservatism itself is in disarray. This naturally affects the political judgments of religious conservatives, as it undoubtedly affects secular voters.

Trump’s ideological profile was, and remains, ambiguous. The same is true of his cultural symbolism, which is authoritarian and yet, in places, quite transgressive. Trump’s initial appointments likewise suggest that the internal debate is not over, even within Republican and conservative ranks. Debate among political conservatives spills over into debates among religious conservatives. Sometimes the line between power politics and faith can get blurry.

There are further reasons for evangelical ambivalence. In 2016, evangelicals are more likely to want to promote racial reconciliation than they were in the 1970s, when the Religious Right burst onto the scene. The attitude then was that racial issues had been mostly solved by the changes of 1960s, a belief that present realities show was premature. Similar changes have come about regarding women’s equality and immigration.

Today, many conservative Christian leaders I know will (1) disapprove of any policy changes that divide families through deportation, (2) desire genuine religious freedom across the board as a way to protect the family, and (3) resist generalizations about race as a way to dictate public policy. Families matter deeply to evangelicals, as do the multi-ethnic features of the church.

Thus, for the first time in a generation, overwhelming evangelical support for a Republican presidential candidate coexists with significant misgivings and uncertainty about some aspects of the conservative movement. The internal fragmentation of support for Trump opens the door for conversation across political divides.

As odd as it sounds, the divisiveness of this election has the potential to change the static dynamic of the last few decades. The time for imposing solutions on half our country, whether from the left or the right, has passed. [That remains to be seen in how Trump will govern and how successful or unsuccessful he will be.] Perhaps if evangelicals model a better political discourse among ourselves, the larger society will take note.

So what might this new conversation look like? And does such a recalibration have biblical support?

Talking with those who find President Trump a frightening prospect is a good place to begin. The following are real illustrations of concern, communicated to me by African-American and Hispanic evangelicals who are attuned to what is felt in their larger communities. There is a mother who had to explain to her five-year-old a post-election racial slur that he had heard at school. There are blacks who have been taunted about being shipped back to Africa. There are Hispanics, including native Hispanics, who have received hostile remarks about building a wall.

Pro-Trump evangelicals need to confront such incidents—and others, as when a hijab is ripped off of a Muslim woman’s neck and she is told it will be used as a noose for a hanging. We may be opposed to an imposed political correctness, but evangelicals should seek a respectful, multi-ethnic society, not a nativist one. The church is made up of people from many nations, and God’s work was for the whole world.

2016 provides an opportunity to recalibrate how we see and discuss the culture war. For too long we have seen the battle in purely political terms: If we get the right people in power, we can restore America as a “Christian nation.” But that way of seeing the confrontation was never biblical. It is too simplistic, abstract, and impersonal.

Ephesians 6:12 reminds us that our battle in the world is not with flesh and blood, but with rulers, principalities, and powers. Our battle is for the hearts of people who are persuaded by forces that hold them in bondage, sometimes unawares. The struggle, therefore, is not merely for political power, but instead for words powerful enough to bring others (and ourselves more fully) to see the wounds that an excessive, undisciplined, and selfish freedom can inflict.

The war Paul asks us to fight is not against political opponents seen as an enemy to be crushed. Our mission is rather to inspire our neighbors’ allegiance to a set of ideas that make society better.

The core of the gospel entails seeking engagement with those who are not yet rooted in the gospel. The gospel depicts Christ’s own sacrificial work on behalf of those who had resisted God and needed to be rescued from brokenness [Well put, although I would make the verbs a historical present - 'those who resist God and need to be rescued from brokenness' - because that is who we are whenever we sin. It is such a relief to find someone say that when our Beloved Pope is always saying Christ came to earth only for 'the poor']. At its core are efforts of grace, reconciliation, and living with and loving one’s neighbor. There are standards, but they are seasoned with grace.

Paul described himself as an ambassador for God with a ministry of reconciliation. Take a look at 2 Corinthians 5:17-21. An ambassador does not seek war, but represents the perspective of his nation and Savior. His concern extends beyond one nation. He serves the city he loves, reaches out to the marginalized with empathy, and shows his love tangibly by caring for others. He contends for and represents the truth that he believes holds society together and promotes human flourishing.

As we seek, like Paul, to serve the city we love, we will need a recalibration of battle imagery, an introduction of gospel values, and a new kind of conversation across social, racial, and gender divides. The pursuit of truth and flourishing compels us to a new kind of relating. Evangelicals are uniquely placed to aid in this debate and dialogue — provided they grasp the opportunity gospel values offer. To forego a reset risks turning opportunity into retrenchment and mutual defeat. Delicate times require us to reach a different and better place than where we have been.

Darrell L. Bock is executive director of the Hendricks Center, senior research professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary, and former president of the Evangelical Theological Society.

The 'concern' about Pope Francis
by REV. JAMES V. SCHALL, S.J.

November 30, 2016

A relative recently wrote an e-mail to me in which he made the following off-handed comment:“What do you think of the pope’s recent course change on abortion?” Now, unless I missed something, on this subject the pope has not changed anything.

He has, no doubt, indicated that he wants to downplay its relative importance compared to other issues. He avoids right-to-life marches in Italy. Many of his ecological friends want to control world population.

But the questioner was perceptive, nonetheless. Most people do think that the pope has or soon will change Catholic doctrine on abortion and many other related issues. What is even more surprising is that many think that he has the power simply to change doctrine as if he were a voluntarist potentate free to change things as he wills.

The same issue of changeability comes up with regard to marriage. While the pope has not changed anything on the objective disorder of active gay marriage, most people, especially most homosexuals, think that he has. Their way of life, it is claimed, is simply “good” and must be recognized as such. Not a few passages in scripture, previous church teachings, and common sense, suggest that this recognition may not be such a good idea.

In the case of communion for the divorced, again most people and many bishops consider a radical change has been made. It is just wrapped up in obscure language and promulgated in a strange manner.

The pope is cautious in revealing his hand. Many people have given up on him. They do not understand what he is up to. They do notice the “leftist” tenor of thought of those who support his most publicized public statements.

Four cardinals recently sought, through normal legal and canonical channels, to ask the pope for a clarification of what he means in these areas in which he has written or spoken. (See Bishop Athanasius Schneider’s recent essay in Crisis.) Many are confused.

Has the pope, in his own mind, changed anything substantial; and, if so, on what basis?

Any change in these important questions would bring into question not only the truth of the issue at hand, but also the centuries-long record of consistent orthodoxy in the Church. This abiding consistency is one of the major proof-claims for the Church’s credibility.

Is it possible, I wonder, to articulate the “concern” that many people I know or read about have about the present Church without being sensational, inaccurate, or unfair? What, in other words, is the core of the “concern”?

As it is by now well-known, the pope, at least for now, “dismissed” or ignored these requests of the cardinals for clarity. He seems to maintain that anyone concerned with such issues is “rigid,” or a Pharisee, or even a bit psychotic.

Increasing numbers wonder why the pope cannot just give a brief direct answer to an honest, well-phrased inquiry. After all, this protecting the integrity of what was handed down is the burden of the papal office. To avoid giving answers, when giving answers is your job, seems odd.

In absence of clarity, people look for reasons about why the Holy Father refuses to answer straightforward questions of some import. Is there something hidden that might explain it? People become detectives looking for clues.

The pope rightly maintains that not all questions need to be or can be answered. This is not unlike the notion that all the laws need not all be enforced. To see what laws are or are not enforced is a pretty good indication of what the law enforcer thinks to be important. Likewise, the unanswered questions seem to point to what is really the problem.

II.
Pope Francis has had a good education as befits the Jesuit priestly tradition. But he makes no bones of the fact that he is not himself intellectually oriented in his overall outlook, as were perhaps John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

To be sure, Francis does at times display certain operative principles, like “time is more important than space.” This principle is evidently addressed to critical intelligence in a world in which time and space are inter-related in the scientific textbooks while space is measured in terms of light years.

Christ came in the “fullness of time” to a specific place, which, if it, or a place like it, did not exist, he never could have made it to this Earth in which time is also manifested. But of course, the pope did not deny the existence of space in preference for some obscure notion of time.

The point that I write about here is relatively simple. The “concern” is not so much to “prod” the good Holy Father into answering his mail. Others have tried this approach and failed. Rather it is to articulate the core “concern” that many normal people have about their Church under Pope Francis’s leadership.

The Argentine pope certainly attracts crowds and generous media attention. He is seen kissing little babies, waving, smiling, and talking earnestly with almost anyone from scientists to politicians to mullahs and rabbis. We all recall his visit with the late Fidel Castro.

Pope Bergoglio has been on some twenty travels out of Italy and all over the known world. He dutifully attends to papal liturgical, diplomatic, bureaucratic, and ceremonial functions. At almost eighty, he seems full of energy and zest. He appears in public to enjoy being the pope. He even gets annoyed. He is human.

The people he seems to like the least are practicing Catholics and the poor ecclesial bureaucrats who have to do all the thankless grunt jobs in the Church. He certainly has a good press. [BUT] The crowds at papal audiences seem down, while observers do not yet detect any remarkable “Francis effect” in increased vocations, conversions, or Mass attendance.

But none of these issues seems to be what most concerns people. We are used to maintain that the principle of non-contradiction binds us to the truth of things. Catholicism is a religion that takes mind seriously.

Revelation and reason do not contradict each other. These affirmations about reason and revelation indicate a certain confidence in our Catholicism. When spelled out, what the faith teaches makes sense in all areas. We can articulate what we are talking about without claiming that we grasp absolutely everything about the mystery of being. In fact, we claim that we do not understand everything in all its intelligibility. We do not confuse ourselves with the gods.

What we can figure out by ourselves makes sense also. We hold that what was revealed by Christ still holds and was intended to do so over time. Among these teachings and practices that were revealed was that of the consistency over time of the content of revelation. This consistency of its intelligibility was to be upheld in particular by the office of the papacy.

Thus, what was taught by St. John, by Leo the Great, by Innocent IV, by Alexander VI, by Pius V, by Gregory VI, by Leo XIII, and by John Paul II would be essentially the same teaching, however well or ill it was explicated in a given era.

III.
In this tradition, the [16th century] Jesuit theologians, Francisco Suarez and Robert Bellarmine, at least considered the problem of a hypothetical pope who did not affirm what had been explicitly handed down. In general, they held that a pope who might enunciate any heretical position would cease ipso facto to be pope. But this was an opinion.

The one or two instances in the history of the Church, when a given pope did state something dubious, were usually considered, on examination, to be merely private opinions or not taught infallibly. So the consistency record over time is pretty impressive from that angle.

In this light, the “concern” that exists today is whether the promise to Peter that what Christ did and held would be kept alive in its fullness. The Church thus must avoid contradicting itself; that is, teaching one thing in one generation or area and its opposite in another.

We are not concerned here with equivocation or impreciseness. If some pope did cross this line, we can at least suspect that he would not admit it or see the point. If he had the issue pointed out to him and saw its import, he would simply acknowledge what is the truth and be done with it. Otherwise, a drawn-out struggle would follow to decide who is right.

In a recent talk to the Jesuit Congregation, the Holy Father again spoke of seminaries wherein “law” was taught, where priests became “rigid.” Instead, he advocated what appears to be a version of St. Ignatius’s “discernment of spirits” as the alternative to this “legalism.”

It often seems that the real target is the encyclical Veritatis Splendor of John Paul II that spelled out the conditions for dealing with absolute evils. It is of some interest to reflect on this approach. It may explain the reason why Pope Bergoglio does not answer specific questions about the truth of doctrines.

In Aristotle and Aquinas, the virtue of justice was what upheld the law. The lawmaker is responsible for stating exactly what the law is. We cannot be held to what we do not know. However, the classic discussions of law included a second virtue known as equity or epichia.

It was recognized by the law itself that laws are made for the generality of cases, whereas human action takes place in particular times, places, and circumstances. This awareness meant that observing the purpose of the law sometimes meant not following the letter of the law. As far as I know, no one has ever had a problem seeing this point.

Epichia, however, did not mean that there was no objective standard of right in any given case. It was not a “feeling,” but a judgment of insight about the real rightness or wrongness of an act that took into consideration all its aspects. The assumption was that in every act there was a “right” thing to do, which we searched out with our reason and insight and were obliged to follow.

In the older Jesuit tradition of casuistry, we find a tendency to take the lenient side in a complicated moral or practical issue. It was up to the lawmaker to make things clear. Judges in particular cases did little other than look into these particular complexities. And we should not be constantly changing the law as that too created uncertainty about what we can be expected to know and do. In this sense, the “liberal” position was not merely a subjective position.

The Jesuit tradition of “discernment of spirits” was designed to do just that — discern “spirits,” good ones from bad ones. Particularly, when sorting out one’s choice of a vocation in life, what God wanted this particular person to do, or what particular person to marry, or what task to undertake, we could, with the help of a wise advisor, gain some sense in the way the Lord was guiding us.

It seems to be from this background that the Holy Father derives his antagonism to “legalism.” Whether one can make an easy analogy of “discernment of spirits” and the sacramental confession and judgment of one’s sins is a reasonable question to ask ourselves.

When the Holy Father refuses to answer what appear to entail clear issues, the reason seems to be that he is looking at human action through the eyes of the 'sinner'." The sinner can always, as Aquinas intimated, give some sort of reason for what he does. There is no such thing as an absolutely “evil” act. Evil always exists in some good that can be articulated, and even praised.

On the other hand, we too must “discern” spirits that are leading us away from our own good and from God. How we observe the commandments are signs of the direction in which we are going. The ancient spiritual fathers always taught that eventual damnation began with little things, small faults. One thing leads to another until we had a habit of separating emotions surrounding the good from the good itself. We impose our will, in other words, on objective reality.

IV.
Where do such considerations leave us with regard to the “big” current issues of marital fidelity, abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia, and other issues? No one seems to want us to apply the same kind of thinking, say, to thievery or murder whereby we go through such agonies to decide what is good.

Generally, the expression of “bringing the Church into the modern world” has meant, on examination, that we should devise some way to accept these wide spread and civilly enforced practices as goods.

If we do accept these practices as “good,” we need, at the same time, to recognize that we deny the tradition we are to uphold. We lose all claims to revelation as a consistent guide to action.

To put the best face on it, if we apply the “discernment of spirits” approach to the way we deal with these issues, we ought not to intend, at the same time, to deny the objective standards that are the objects of justice and epichia. If we do, then we have simply contradicted ourselves and should acknowledge it.

In other words, the epichia tradition with its emphasis on an objective “rightness” that we are seeking to know and follow cannot be replaced by a “discernment of spirits” tradition that somehow, wrongly, would justify intrinsically immoral acts.

At their best, both traditions can look at the ones held to live according to the norms of reason and revelation to inquire how they see the issue in the concrete. Neither ought to be a subtle methodology to justify evil or make everything so subjective that no objective order any longer exists. [What one might call TOTAL RELATIVISM, which seems to be Jorge Bergoglio's default mode.]

Rather both, at their best, seek not just to know what was thought at the time the problem arose, but to instruct and guide us to live by those standards that do embody the true good of each person, standards found both in reason and revelation.

So, briefly, to conclude, what is the “concern” that so many have? It is whether a shrewd way of undermining what had been handed down has been introduced into the Church.

I myself do not think opposing “legalism” in favor of “discernment” is a good idea. Law and equity, discernment of both good and bad spirits, are necessary.

Not all questions need to be clarified immediately. I, at least, belong to the school of thought that thinks that the most important ones should be clarified. It is not “legalism” to do so. We are not a people who seek to live in darkness. We seek to live in the light that teaches us about what is.

How the ‘dubia’ drama will end
Pope Francis has declined to answer four cardinals’ ‘doubts’
about his teaching on marriage [and morality in general]
The Church is now in uncharted territory
by Fr Mark Drew

Wednesday, 30 Nov 2016

Prognostications are a dangerous pastime for commentators, and in the papacy of Pope Francis the business of making predictions seems a particularly dangerous one. Back in April, when Francis issued a document called Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”), I warned readers to expect ongoing controversy around an unanswered question. This time I was not wrong.

The unanswered question was the one which had been hotly debated at the two consecutive synods of bishops held in 2014 and 2015 – namely, whether divorced and remarried Catholics might be admitted to the Eucharist in certain circumstances. At the two synods the proposal, pushed by prelates handpicked by Francis, faced strong opposition from many bishops and failed to achieve the necessary consensus. The document produced by the 2015 meeting came up with an ambiguous formula, essentially fudging the issue. [They did not just fudge the issue but evaded it altogether - in quoting chunks of Familairis consortio but deliberately omitting the three sentences by which John Paul II had closed the issue. And the deliberate omission was clearly because the synod fathers knew those three sentences could not and would not be upheld by the current pope - who, however, has no difficulty acknowledging John Paul II's 'last word' on NO to women priests, but is openly REFUSING TO REAFFIRM his predecessor's 'last word' on communion for RCDs (also the abiding word of the Church, as is the NO to women priests). i.e, He, Bergoglio, will choose what of the existing Magisterium he wants to uphold.]

After the synod all eyes were on Francis to see if he would intervene with a clear decision. Popes usually publish “post-synodal exhortations” after these gatherings. Most are anodyne and soon forgotten, but this one aroused feverish hopes and anxieties in a polarised Church. When it arrived, readers thumbed hastily through more than 300 pages to find the eagerly awaited response. That answer, hidden away in two footnotes, was once again ambiguous.

The past six months have seemed at times like a war of attrition. The controversy has centered largely on how the Pope’s words are to be interpreted. Some national bishops’ conferences – Germany, for example – seem more or less united in favour of liberalising the discipline, while others – such as Poland – insist that nothing has changed.

The bishops of Buenos Aires produced a document suggesting that the way is now open for Communion for the remarried in some cases where subjective guilt might be diminished. The Pope responded with a private letter commending this interpretation as the right one. In what has become a familiar aspect of disputes around the Pope’s real intentions, the purportedly private exchange was leaked – a transparent attempt to give momentum to the liberalising tendency.

The division doesn’t just run between national groups; it also divides episcopal conferences internally. Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia published norms for his diocese which made it clear that the discipline there would remain unchanged. Those in irregular unions might receive Communion only if they lived in continence.

His compatriot Cardinal Kevin Farrell, head of the new Vatican body overseeing family issues, criticised Chaput for jumping the gun on what should have been, according to him, decided collegially by the American bishops. Farrell clearly implied that such a policy should be more open to Francis’s favoured “option of mercy”. Amoris Laetitia, he said, was the Holy Spirit speaking.

Amid these manoeuvrings, a bombshell exploded. A letter was made public, addressed to the Pope by four cardinals known to be hostile to any change in the discipline. It took the form of dubia, “doubts”, traditionally addressed to the competent Roman authority by those seeking clarification of points of Church teaching or canon law deemed insufficiently clear.

Of the cardinals concerned, only one is currently serving, albeit in a role of reduced importance. He is Cardinal Raymond Burke, already well known as a conservative “bruiser”. The others cardinals are all retired: Walter Brandmüller, a highly respected academic historian; Carlo Caffarra, Archbishop Emeritus of Bologna and a distinguished moral theologian; and Joachim Meisner, Archbishop of Cologne until 2014 and one of the strongest supporters of the last two popes among the world’s bishops.

The dubia covered five questions, all referring to magisterial teachings of St John Paul II, contained notably in the landmark texts Familiaris Consortio and Veritatis Splendor.

It is evident that the questions, all put respectfully and with detailed arguments, were not innocent, in that their purpose is to suggest that there are difficulties in reconciling Amoris Laetitia, or at least its implications, with established Catholic doctrine. But neither are they purely rhetorical questions: they do present the Pope, or those liberalising theologians he seems to favour, with an opportunity to develop, with concrete and precise reasoning, their assertion that what is underway constitutes an authentic development of doctrine.

The Pope let it be known that he would not be delivering a response to the four cardinals. It was this determined silence which pushed them to make the dubia public. To many, this has seemed a direct challenge to Francis.

As if to confirm this, Cardinal Burke has even gone so far as to state that he and the others may make a “formal act of correction” if the Pope did not clarify his teaching. The clear implication is that the Holy Father is possibly teaching error.

What is the significance of Pope Francis’s silence? And how audacious is the cardinals’ initiative?

The Pope is in a difficult position. If he were to state that the principles taught by St John Paul II were no longer part of the Church’s teaching, he would cause a theological earthquake. Never in modern times has a pope publicly disavowed his predecessor. To do so would provoke open revolt among the many who cling tenaciously to the doctrine of previous popes – not merely the last two, but the entire Catholic tradition as it has evolved over the centuries. It might even provoke a formal schism.

What’s more, it would relativise Pope Francis’s own teaching authority – after all, if his predecessors got it wrong, why should anyone think his own statements had any lasting value beyond his lifetime?

On the other hand, if Francis reaffirms the previous teaching, then he must either abandon his attempts to reform the discipline of the sacraments, or come up with arguments to show that the contradiction is only apparent.

Defenders of the change, chief among them Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, have said that the change they advocate is not a reversal of former teaching but a development of doctrine. I have so far seen nothing which convinces me that this is more than mere affirmation, unsupported by cogent, rational demonstration.

Is the Pope furious with the four authors of the dubia, as some suggest? I doubt it. He has, after all, called for parrhesia – courageous and frank debate.

The signs are that he believes in initiating processes, rather than dictating outcomes. [Go ahead, give him the benefit of the doubt, against all evidence that confirms the doubt (and the DUBIA).]

He should recognise, then, that initiatives which aim at balancing the discussion, even at putting a brake on evolutions judged by many to be inopportune, are a normal part of such processes in a Church which he has called upon to become more “synodal”, or collegial. [That might be so when the issues at stake are minor and procedural, not when they have to do with fundamental doctrine sought to be contravened de facto by unwarranted pastoral practices. Besides, were the two synodal assemblies not the actual exercise of that synodality/collegiality - and yet the pope chose to overturn their consensus on his chosen casus belli! In short, he's saying, "I'm willing to be collegial provided you agree with me, not when you don't!']

I am less convinced of the serene disposition of many who surround Francis and might seek to use his popularity to advance agendas of their own. There have been intemperate and angry reactions. Bishop Frangiskos Papamanolis, president of the bishops’ conference of the minuscule Catholic Church in Greece, charged the four cardinals with schism, heresy and even apostasy.

Nobody who understands properly the Catholic doctrine of the papacy believes that challenging the prudential judgments of a pope makes anybody a renegade from the Catholic faith. But I am concerned that this reaction exemplifies some worrying factors in this debate, beyond the anger and divisive rhetoric present on both sides.

The first is the anti-intellectualism which seems present in some quarters. Bishop Papamanolis reproached the four cardinals with making “sophisticated arguments”, as if this were something unforgivable. Pope Francis has contended that “realities are greater than ideas”. But hardening this into a contempt for rationality and logical discourse risks handing over the Church to the reign of the emotive and the sentimental in a way which cannot in the end sustain its efforts to evangelise. [And anti-intellect(rather than anti-intellectualism) is precisely the heart of this pontificate's communications - Appeal to sentiment and emotion, no one has time for reason and logical discourse, least of all the powers-that-be.]

Secondly, there is the risk of replacing the proper understanding of papal authority with an excessive attachment to a particular pope verging on a cult of personality. [IT IS A CULT OF PERSONALITY. When this pope's courtisans say that to criticize him is to oppose the Holy Spirit - "Off with their heads!", or at least their birettas - it all smacks of the Communist establishment's reflex if anyone dared criticize Stalin or Mao or Fidel Castro.]

I am worried when some of those who were warning against this danger under St John Paul II now seem quite happy to tolerate it under a pope they believe to favour their agenda.

Popes are human beings whose job is to teach Christian doctrine, and in cases of necessity to intervene to restore unity on the basis of truth. They can make errors of judgment in pursuing this task, as they have in the past and doubtless will in the future. They teach and govern in union with their collaborators – the bishops – who have a role in advising them and, if necessary, urging caution.

Pope Francis has chosen to open a debate [which he lost when it was carried on formally for two years running in its appropriate setting, even when it should bever have been debated, to begin with - so he is keeping it open by refusing to accept not just the consensus of those synods but the 'last word' handed down on the issue by a predecessor he himself canonized.] - and I believe that one day, in a global Church requiring globally consistent teaching and discipline, he or one of his successors will be called upon to close it.

The authority of the world’s bishops will need to be involved in such a decision – perhaps in a future synod or even an ecumenical council. [What a colossal waste of time, effort and needlessly polarized passions to correct an obstinate hubristic pope convinced that he alone can be right on any topic he deigns to speak about! But he doesn't even have the balls to answer an unequivocal YES or NO to the DUBIA which could not have beeh framed more simply and fundamentally.]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 30/11/2016 23:12]

The common reference that the Four Cardinals make in framing the five DUBIA that they have asked Pope Francis to answer is John Paul II's
great encyclical Veritatis splendor The splendor of truth).

I therefore think that since it is Pope Francis who has seemed to be completely oblivious of Veritatis splendor and the principles
of morality (not just moral theology) forcefully and unequivocally reaffirmed in what Benedict XVI considers the saint's most
important encyclical, Mr. Olson's title should have been "Pope Francis and the encyclical in the room", i.e, the enormous elephant
in the room that Jorge Bergoglio has appeared to ignore completely... Also, one cannot help noting that rather than 'the splendor of truth',
what we have been getting in this pontificate on many essential articles of the faith is rather the squalor of falsehood and half-truths.

The Four Cardinals and
the encyclical in the room
The essential questions remain what they have always been:
What is freedom and what is its relationship
to the truth contained in God's law?
What is the role of conscience in man's moral development?"
by Carl Olson
Editor

November 28, 2016

How to make sense of the current situation? There is no single answer, for the ongoing saga — encompassing Synods and stratagems, debates and dubia, Exhortations and excoriations, posturings and pontifications — is about a wide range of questions.

Some of them are obvious and capture the headlines, especially: does Pope Francis want to allow those Catholics who have been divorced and civilly remarried access to Holy Communion, even while they continue to live as though married? [Before AL, I used to think that this question was disproportionately overblown as 'the concern' of the Bergoglio pontificate and its progressivist followers, because it affects a very small proportion of the world's Catholics, a minority found mostly in the Western world and perhaps Latin America which has taken its mores after Europe in general. But AL and the way Our Beloved Pope has sought to extrapolate his sacramental leniency for remarried divorcees into similar relativism on conscience and the very idea of sin itself through this unfortunate papal exhortation prove that he was using an otherwise 'minor' issue as the wedge to open the door to moral relativism in the Church (or at least, in the church of Bergoglio).]

But beneath that question are other, very fundamental questions often not voiced or discussed. In the words of one pastor:

---

- What is good and what is sin?
- What origin and purpose do sufferings have?
- What is the way to attaining true happiness?
- What are death, judgment and retribution after death?
- Lastly, what is that final, unutterable mystery which embraces our lives and from which we take our origin and towards which we tend?...

These and other questions, such as: what is freedom and what is its relationship to the truth contained in God's law? what is the role of conscience in man's moral development? how do we determine, in accordance with the truth about the good, the specific rights and duties of the human person?

---

That pastor was St. John Paul II, and he posed those questions in Veritatis Splendor (par 30), his great encyclical on the Church's moral theology, released in 1993. While mindful, again, of the many issues involved, I am increasingly convinced that Veritatis Splendor, nearly a quarter century old now, is the elepha—er, encyclical in the living room.

Of course, it does not stand alone, since John Paul II spoke often and wrote in detail about mercy, marriage, freedom, conscience, and a host of related matters over the course of his lengthy pontificate. In fact, every single issue relating to family, marriage, divorce, Holy Communion, culpability, subjective experience, and objective truth that Pope Francis has sought to address, analyze, explore, and grapple with since he announced the Extraordinary Synod of 2014 had already been addressed, analyzed, explored, and grappled with by John Paul II in the 1980s and 1990s.

Which is not to say that these pressing and often complicated matters should not be raised again or discussed further. Of course not. Rather, it is to wonder at how little attention has been paid in recent years to what John Paul II said and wrote over the course of his long and brilliant pontificate about family, marriage, divorce, Holy Communion, and all the rest. [Benedict XVI has expressed this lamentation many times. But right now, let us limit ourselves to wondering how Jorge Mario Bergoglio could possibly ignore the remarkably rich Magisterium of a predecessor he himself canonized, in seeking to establish his own 'magisterium' that overturns or contradicts in various ways many of the essential principles of Catholic belief.]

The 2014 Extraordinary Synod and the 2015 Ordinary Synod were held in order to address, as the USCCB site states, "topics related to the family and evangelization." This was followed by the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia, which is (at nearly 60,000 words) the longest official papal text in history.

What has been the result of all of this time, labor, discussion, and ink? Judging by events of recent weeks and months, it has been much discord, confusion, and frustration, quite a bit of it revolving around that one question: "Are divorced and civilly remarried Catholics now able to receive Holy Communion?"

Prior to the current pontificate the answer was "No", as it was understood — if not always accepted or practised — that those Catholics who had entered into a second "marriage" without addressing the validity or nullity of their first marriage were, in fact, lving in adultery.

Now, in short, that clear answer has been called into question, since Chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia, entitled “Accompanying, Discerning and Integrating Weakness”) allows, as moral theologian Dr. E. Christian Brugger observed on this site earlier this year, "and seems intentionally [to allow] — for interpretations that pose serious problems for Catholic faith and practice."

Proof of the contention over the now famous chapter is easy to find. Some bishops, such as Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Philadelphia, who is a member of a committee overseeing the exhortation’s implementation in the U.S., reiterated Church teaching: “With divorced-and-civilly-remarried persons, Church teaching requires them to refrain from sexual intimacy. This applies even if they must (for the care of their children) continue to live under one roof.”

Then, in late summer, came news that a group of Argentine bishops had published pastoral guidelines for implementing Chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia indicating, as Dr. Brugger summarized it in another CWR article, "under certain circumstances divorced Catholics in sexually active second unions may receive the Holy Eucharist, even without receiving an annulment."

This was soon followed by even more startling news that Pope Francis had, in a private letter, told the Argentinian bishops that their “document is very good and completely explains the meaning of chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia”. Further, he stated, "There are no other interpretations.”

Apparently empowered by this and other events, then-cardinal-designate Kevin Farrell of Dallas, Texas, took the unusual step of directly criticizing Archbishop Chaput in mid-November, as reported by CNS:

---

I don't share the view of what Archbishop Chaput did, no. I think there are all kinds of different circumstances and situations that we have to look at -- each case as it is presented to us.

I think that is what our Holy Father is speaking about, is when we talk about accompanying, it is not a decision that is made irrespective of the couple... Obviously, there is an objective moral law, but you will never find two couples who have the same reason for being divorced and remarried.

---

Archbishop Chaput, in a November 17th CNS interview, responded by noting that he "was a delegate to the 2015 synod and then elected and appointed to the synod's permanent council. So I'm familiar with the material and its context in a way that Cardinal-designate Farrell may not be." That, in "bishopspeak", constitutes a stern rebuke, followed up as it was by this:

---

CNS: Cardinal-designate Farrell has told CNS that he believes that under Chapter 8's guidance, a pastor cannot say to all divorced and civilly remarried: Yes, receive communion. But neither can they say to all: No, it's not possible unless you live as brother and sister. How would you respond to this observation?
Archbishop Chaput: I wonder if Cardinal-designate Farrell actually read and understood the Philadelphia guidelines he seems to be questioning. The guidelines have a clear emphasis on mercy and compassion. This makes sense because individual circumstances are often complex.

Life is messy. But mercy and compassion cannot be separated from truth and remain legitimate virtues. The Church cannot contradict or circumvent Scripture and her own magisterium without invalidating her mission. This should be obvious. The words of Jesus himself are very direct and radical on the matter of divorce.

---

This point is essential: The Church cannot contradict or circumvent Scripture and her own magisterium without invalidating her mission.

Further, what Archbishop Chaput wrote and said is in complete continuity with what John Paul II wrote and said on many different occasions. Farrell, it seems fair to say, was not just directly criticizing Chaput, but implicitly criticizing John Paul II.

Which brings us to the widely reported story that four Cardinals — Raymond Burke, Carlo Caffarra, Walter Brandmüller and Joachim Meisner — had sent a formal request to Pope Francis, in September, with five questions, or "dubia", about the interpretation of chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia. "

We have noted," they stated matter-of-factly, "that even within the episcopal college there are contrasting interpretations of Chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia. ... [W]e want to help the Pope to prevent divisions and conflicts in the Church, asking him to dispel all ambiguity."

The five questions are as follows (further explanatory notes can be found in the full text):

---

- It is asked whether, following the affirmations of Amoris Laetitia (nn. 300-305), it has now become possible to grant absolution in the sacrament of penance and thus to admit to Holy Communion a person who, while bound by a valid marital bond, lives together with a different person more uxorio without fulfilling the conditions provided for by Familiaris Consortio n. 84 and subsequently reaffirmed by Reconciliatio et Paenitentia n. 34 and Sacramentum Caritatis n. 29. Can the expression "in certain cases" found in note 351 (n. 305) of the exhortation Amoris Laetitia be applied to divorced persons who are in a new union and who continue to live more uxorio?

- After the publication of the post-synodal exhortation Amoris Laetitia (cf. n. 304), does one still need to regard as valid the teaching of St. John Paul II's encyclical Veritatis Splendor n. 79, based on Sacred Scripture and on the Tradition of the Church, on the existence of absolute moral norms that prohibit intrinsically evil acts and that are binding without exceptions?

- After Amoris Laetitia (n. 301) is it still possible to affirm that a person who habitually lives in contradiction to a commandment of God's law, as for instance the one that prohibits adultery (cf. Mt 19:3-9), finds him or herself in an objective situation of grave habitual sin (cf. Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, Declaration, June 24, 2000)?

- After the affirmations of Amoris Laetitia (n. 302) on "circumstances which mitigate moral responsibility," does one still need to regard as valid the teaching of St. John Paul II's encyclical Veritatis Splendor n. 81, based on Sacred Scripture and on the Tradition of the Church, according to which "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"?

- After Amoris Laetitia (n. 303) does one still need to regard as valid the teaching of St. John Paul II's encyclical Veritatis Splendor n. 56, based on Sacred Scripture and on the Tradition of the Church, 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? [/DIM/

---

[The only possible Catholic answers to the above are NO, YES, YES, YES, YES, respectively and unconditionally - no ifs or buts. But Jorge '50 shades of grey' Bergoglio is obviously incapable of doing that, nor can any of his surrogates. I read a headline about Fr. Spadaro claiming that the pope 'has already answered all those questions in depth'. Dubia are supposed to be answered YES or NO. Who cares for 'in depth' answers that will only further muddy and obfuscate already murky waters?]

Note that all five questions mention or reference texts written by John Paul II (the third question references a text citing Familiaris Consortio n. 84 in the key section), and that three of them specifically mention Veritatis Splendor. And then note that Veritatis Splendor is not quoted, mentioned, or cited once by Francis in Amoris Laetitia. It is rather mind-boggling that Amoris Laetitia, which addresses a whole host of moral issues, fundamental principles, and especially the matters of conscience and freedom, completely ignores Veritatis Splendor. [Not mind-boggling at all since this pope has asserted, reasserted, affirmed, reaffirmed and upheld the DICTATORSHIP OF RELATIVISM in everything he says and does!!! He obviously thinks a papal document like Veritatis splendor is the epitome of everything he considers 'rigid' and 'pharisaical', and God knows what psychological motivations he is ascribing to JPII for writing such a document!]

Although John Paul II wrote fourteen encyclicals, Veritatis Splendor is arguably the most important (and the most controversial) of those fourteen texts, described by biographer George Weigel in Witness to Hope as "one of the major intellectual and cultural events of the pontificate."

It was the first papal document to present a comprehensive and cohesive understanding of the foundations of Catholic moral theology, with the purpose, the author stated, of setting forth "with regard to the problems being discussed, the principles of a moral teaching based upon Sacred Scripture and the living Apostolic Tradition, and at the same time to shed light on the presuppositions and consequences of the dissent which that teaching has met" (par 5). John Paul II, in explaining the purpose of the encyclical, wrote:

---

Today, however, it seems necessary to reflect on the whole of the Church's moral teaching, with the precise goal of recalling certain fundamental truths of Catholic doctrine which, in the present circumstances, risk being distorted or denied.

In fact, a new situation has come about within the Christian community itself, which has experienced the spread of numerous doubts and objections of a human and psychological, social and cultural, religious and even properly theological nature, with regard to the Church's moral teachings.

It is no longer a matter of limited and occasional dissent, but of an overall and systematic calling into question of traditional moral doctrine, on the basis of certain anthropological and ethical presuppositions.

At the root of these presuppositions is the more or less obvious influence of currents of thought which end by detaching human freedom from its essential and constitutive relationship to truth.

Thus the traditional doctrine regarding the natural law, and the universality and the permanent validity of its precepts, is rejected; certain of the Church's moral teachings are found simply unacceptable; and the Magisterium itself is considered capable of intervening in matters of morality only in order to "exhort consciences" and to "propose values", in the light of which each individual will independently make his or her decisions and life choices. (par 4)

---

[The sainted pope could never have imagined that one of his
immediate successors would tend to all of the above!]

Having now re-read the encyclical (which I first studied in 1998, under the guidance of moral theologian Dr. Mark Lowery of the University of Dallas), I am struck by how John Paul II again and again addresses the sort of vague language, ambiguous rhetoric, and dubious argumentation used by those who insist Amoris Laetitia points to "revolutionary" and "radical" ways of thinking about and living the Christian life that "cannot simply be reduced to a question of ‘yes or no’ in a specific pastoral situation."

As mentioned, quite a few Catholic theologians treated the encyclical with complete disdain when it first appeared; it was, in some ways, John Paul II's Humanae Vitae. But, as Fr. Richard John Neuhaus noted in a January 1994 First Things symposium, "John Paul takes on those moralists, including Catholic theologians, who say that an evil act may be justified by the end to which it is directed ('consequentialism') or by weighing the other goods at stake ('proportionalism'). It is never licit to do evil in order to achieve good."

In other words, it's not enough to say, "I love this person" and then commit an act of adultery; it's not true to assert that one's subjective state can somehow transform an objective evil into an objective good.

Dr. Russell Hittinger, in the same symposium, made this astute observation: "If we take the century of modern encyclicals according to their logical rather than temporal order, Veritatis should be regarded as the first of the encyclicals." And Hadley Arkes, summed up the document in a way worth quoting at length:

As John Paul II moves on in his commentary, he meditates on the negative injunctions of the second tablet of the Decalogue, and he takes this editing by Christ as the key to a moral distinction: the “positive moral precepts” leave far more room for prudence, in making an allowance for “exceptions.” But the commandments mentioned by Christ from the second tablet were “negative moral precepts,” and John Paul II treats those commandments as far more exacting, far less open to shading or compromise in the name of prudence. These negative precepts, he says, “prohibiting certain concrete actions or kinds of behavior as intrinsically evil, do not allow for any legitimate exception.”

The Pope regards these precepts, then, as the hard, absolute guidelines to the moral life. They repel the claim that the principles of moral judgment are too airy or abstract to offer guidance in any concrete case. They are intelligible, precise — and unyielding. [i.e., RIGID, RIGOROUS, as God's commandments are and ought to be.]

Exacting. Hard. Absolute. Precise. Unyielding. Would the great Pope and Saint John Paul II be called "rigid" today? Perhaps he would be dismissed (as he was a quarter century ago) as too black-and-white, too harsh, too unrelenting. I don't say so glibly.

The term "rigid" seems to be strongly trending these days, proving to be one of Pope Francis's favorite negative descriptives, often linked to the sins of the Pharisees.

A few days ago, the full text of Pope Francis' October 24th "dialogue with the Jesuits gathered in the 36th General Congregation" was released; it contained this statement from the Holy Father:

---

Discernment is the key element: the capacity for discernment. I note the absence of discernment in the formation of priests. We run the risk of getting used to «white or black,» to that which is legal. We are rather closed, in general, to discernment. One thing is clear: today, in a certain number of seminaries, a rigidity that is far from a discernment of situations has been introduced.

Francis then said: I think Bernard Häring was the first to start looking for a new way to help moral theology to flourish again. Obviously, in our day moral theology has made much progress in its reflections and in its maturity; it is no longer a «casuistry.»

---

It was a rather startling remark since the German priest Häring (1912-1998) was a leading dissenter against Humanae Vitae, and, as a 1989 article rightly observed, "has been writing and speaking without hindrance against Church positions for 25 years."

Häring inspired the work of Fr. Charles Curran, the leading opponent of Humanae Vitae from the day it was released by Paul VI in 1968. "Häring himself then and later," wrote Curran in 2013 in praise of the late German theologian, "without doubt became the most prominent and public proponent in the Catholic world for disagreeing with the conclusion of the encyclical."

Häring, in so many ways, was precisely the sort of moral theologian whose thought and work John Paul II addressed and criticized in Veritatis Splendor. Could it be that John Paul II is precisely the sort of moral theologian that frustrates Francis? If not, how to make sense of all this?

Cardinals Farrell, Cupich, Kasper, and others repeatedly emphasize that each situation is unique and different, as if such an observation is a revolutionary leap forward in appreciating the mysteries of human existence. (Actually, in the case of Cardinal Kasper, that might well be The Point.) Then, when it is clear they are on the edge of the cliff of relativism, they insist on their belief in an objective moral law.

The problem is that a truly objective and eternal moral law must exist outside of and above any subjective, temporal situation — and it certainly does, as John Paul II demonstrated so well. Thus, the question is: Where does the uniqueness of my situation end and the objective moral law begin? How do we avoid the grave danger of "a radically subjectivistic conception of moral judgment" (as John Paul II put it) and instead embrace the fullness of the splendor of truth?

A clear answer is quite difficult to find; hence, in large part, the current situation. Instead, there is much talk about "discernment" and "accompanying" and "dialogue", as if the goal is to walk about in a fog until finally bumping into an unexpected solution uniquely customized for this or that specific situation.

Or, as Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn put it, in trying to explain Amoris Laetitia 8, "One cannot pass from the general rule to 'some cases' merely by looking at formal situations. It is therefore possible that, in some cases, one who is in an objective situation of sin can receive the help of the sacraments. ... Because otherwise, there is a risk of falling into an abstract casuistry."

Cardinal Schoenborn seems to argue further that we have now reached a point when the complexities of our unique time have overwhelmed the clarity of objective truth: "To a greater degree than in the past, the objective situation of a person does not tell us everything about that person in relation to God and in relation to the church. This evolution compels us urgently to rethink what we meant when we spoke of objective situations of sin."

Yet John Paul II, it appears, would have none of it, asserting,

---

...some authors have proposed a kind of double status of moral truth. Beyond the doctrinal and abstract level, one would have to acknowledge the priority of a certain more concrete existential consideration. The latter, by taking account of circumstances and the situation, could legitimately be the basis of certain exceptions to the general rule and thus permit one to do in practice and in good conscience what is qualified as intrinsically evil by the moral law.

A separation, or even an opposition, is thus established in some cases between the teaching of the precept, which is valid in general, and the norm of the individual conscience, which would in fact make the final decision about what is good and what is evil.

On this basis, an attempt is made to legitimize so-called "pastoral" solutions contrary to the teaching of the Magisterium, and to justify a "creative" hermeneutic according to which the moral conscience is in no way obliged, in every case, by a particular negative precept. (VS, 56)]

---

That comes in a section ("Conscience and Truth", pars 54-64) which also takes on the faulty notion that the essential work of one's conscience is to make a "decision". So, for example, Cardinal Blaise Cupich has said, "I try to help people along the way. And people come to a decision in good conscience. ... Then our job with the church is to help them move forward and respect that ... The conscience is inviolable. And we have to respect that when they make decisions and I've always done that."

But John Paul II said otherwise:

---

Consequently in the practical judgment of conscience, which imposes on the person the obligation to perform a given act, the link between freedom and truth is made manifest.

Precisely for this reason conscience expresses itself in acts of 'judgment' which reflect the truth about the good, and not in arbitrary 'decisions'.

The maturity and responsibility of these judgments — and, when all is said and done, of the individual who is their subject — are not measured by the liberation of the conscience from objective truth, in favour of an alleged autonomy in personal decisions, but, on the contrary, by an insistent search for truth and by allowing oneself to be guided by that truth in one's actions. (par 61)

---

John Paul II went even further in a passage that certainly could be applied to some of the arguments used for giving Communion to those who are living in objectively adulterous situations:

---

It is never acceptable to confuse a "subjective" error about moral good with the "objective" truth rationally proposed to man in virtue of his end, or to make the moral value of an act performed with a true and correct conscience equivalent to the moral value of an act performed by following the judgment of an erroneous conscience.

It is possible that the evil done as the result of invincible ignorance or a non-culpable error of judgment may not be imputable to the agent; but even in this case it does not cease to be an evil, a disorder in relation to the truth about the good.

Furthermore, a good act which is not recognized as such does not contribute to the moral growth of the person who performs it; it does not perfect him and it does not help to dispose him for the supreme good. Thus, before feeling easily justified in the name of our conscience, we should reflect on the words of the Psalm: "Who can discern his errors? Clear me from hidden faults" (Ps 19:12). There are faults which we fail to see but which nevertheless remain faults, because we have refused to walk towards the light (cf. Jn 9:39-41).

Conscience, as the ultimate concrete judgment, compromises its dignity when it is culpably erroneous, that is to say, "when man shows little concern for seeking what is true and good, and conscience gradually becomes almost blind from being accustomed to sin".

Jesus alludes to the danger of the conscience being deformed when he warns: "The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!" (Mt 6:22-23). (VS, par 63)

---

Much more could be said. The bottom line, for me, is this: if the ambiguities and problems with chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia can be clarified in accord with Veritatis Splendor, what really was the point of the past three years? Why wasn't the Apostolic Exhortation more clear and precise from the start? Was it a failure of competence? Or something else?

But if these questions and concerns are finally addressed and clarified in a way contrary to Veritatis Splendor, what then? At the very least, we will be in deep and troubled waters, for it would mark a break with the Church's perennial teaching on bedrock moral truths.

And, that being the case, if an Apostolic Exhortation written in 2016 can take magisterial precedence over an Encyclical written in 1993, what other teachings of the Church might be up for a less rigid, less black-and-white "evolution" (to borrow from Cardinal Schoenborn)? Contrary to the opinion of Cardinal Tobin, "reducing" this to a dubium is not "naive", but quite necessary. After all, we aren't in this situation because of the four cardinals.

As one veteran observer of Church affairs remarked to me recently, "given the fact that bishops, including prominent cardinals, have different understandings of what AL allows or doesn't allow, and these differences are very public, surely someone in Rome should publicly and officially indicate whether (1) AL maintains the status quo of FC 84, as Cardinal Mueller and certain others seem to think (Archbishop Chaput, the USCCB's point man on AL, among them), or (2) it allows each bishop (or individual priest?) or bishops' conference to decide how AL is to be understood, or (3) AL is supposed to be understood as allowing communion to the civilly remarried, on a case by case basis, so have at it. And, if the last, it would be helpful to know explicitly what principles should be employed to assess each case. This is why we have a Magisterium. 'Figure it out for yourself' is kinda, well, Protestant." Dialoguing with Protestants is one thing; descending into Protestantism is quite another.

So, the four cardinals and the entire Church — not to mention attentive non-Catholics — deserve a clear answer from the Holy Father. Considering how often he gives interviews and speaks to non-Catholic writers, surely he can find the time.

To say so is not an act of rigid rebellion or insecure insolence, but a simple request that the "gift of the New Law", as John Paul II described the deposit of Divine Revelation, be upheld and treasured, befitting those who seek to follow the One who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. As He said: "Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?" (Mt 7:9). [And all we are getting these days are the stones of Bergoglio's indifference to questioning Catholics and his dereliction in his duty of confirming his flock in their faith.]

I would celebrate 100 percent the following commentary by George Weigel if he had directed his criticism not just at the hyper-ultra- Bergogliophiles but at the pope himself whose phenomenal popularity (which remains high in the media, but probably not so any more with the faithful) has emboldened him to make statements and actions no pope who is Catholic and in his right mind, and would ever have dared to make, and that, in fact, no pope in history has made... Mr Weigel remains inexplicably ueber-normalist with respect to this pope, yet it is not fair to heap all the opprobrium on the hyper-Bergoglists without faulting the man who inspires them to such depths of crassness!

A (liturgical) new year’s resolution
Those who think it necessary to support Pope Francis
by rewriting recent Church history need to stop it
by George Weigel

November 30, 2016

If the civil new year is an occasion to resolve to Do Better in the future, the liturgical new year, the real new year that begins at First Vespers on the First Sunday of Advent, is an even better moment for such resolutions. So permit me to suggest a Real New Year’s resolution to those who think it necessary to support Pope Francis by rewriting recent Church history: Stop it.

There was an awful lot of this airbrushing before and during the recent consistory for the creation of new cardinals. And I regret to note that one striking example of it came in a Catholic News Service video-interview with Cardinal Kevin Farrell, recently transferred from Dallas to Rome to lead the new Vatican dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life.

In that interview, the cardinal, who in 2014 was eager for me to give the University of Dallas commencement address in order commemorate the recently-canonized St. John Paul II, seemed to have forgotten that John Paul ever existed.

Thus Farrell, praising “Pope Francis’s great charisma” and “how the people flock to him” and the “amazing” way “he comes down to the people,” finished his tribute to the man who had named him cardinal by saying that all of this was “unthought-of and unheard of twenty years ago.”

Really?

Was John Paul II shot in his apartment by an interloper who had snuck past the Swiss Guard? Or was he shot by a would-be assassin standing in the midst of one of the vast throngs the Polish pope drew to St. Peter’s Square for over twenty-five years?

Has Cardinal Farrell forgotten that, just before Mehmet Ali Agca’s shots rang out, John Paul had handed a small child he had embraced and blessed back to its mother? That was thirty-five years ago this past May 13.

Which means that it’s preposterous to say that it was “unthought-of and unheard of twenty years ago” that a pope should mingle with crowds and embrace the people who were flocking to him. It was happening fifteen years and more before that.

This rewriting of history often goes hand-in-glove with attempts to celebrate Pope Francis's welcome stress on divine mercy [except, of course, that the Bergoglian notion of mercy appears devoid of the justice that goes hand in hand with divine mercy, and of the primary charity that should inform mercy dispensed by humans, namely to help save souls] – by subtly ['SUBTLY?' That word does not exist in the Bergoglian lexicon, unless you consider a relentless jackhammer subtle!] reinforcing the secular world’s stereotypes of Catholicism’s pre-Francis leaders as hidebound, rule-obsessed reactionaries.

Thus Cardinal Farrell worried that “we keep pushing rules and regulations to excess.” Who, one wonders, is the “we” here? And why set “rules and regulations” in contrast to “an encounter with the person of Jesus Christ,” from whom, as the cardinal admitted, “we derive our doctrine”?

Wouldn’t it be better strategy (and better catechetics) to challenge secular stereotypes by reminding the Church and the world that a “yes” stands behind every “no” the Church must say in fidelity to Christ’s teaching?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to remember, with John Paul II, that the Christian moral life is intended to foster happiness, and that the magna carta of Christian morality is the Sermon on the Mount, and especially the Beatitudes? [Yes, but the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes as they are recounted in the Gospels, and as they have been interpreted through more than two millennia of the Church until Bergoglio came along to edit and interpret the entire Sermon on the Mount to suit his purposes.]

By all means, concede that the Church, meaning all of us, sometimes does a lousy job of articulating that “yes” to beatitude so that the “no” can be heard in its proper context: as a warning against acts that lead to unhappiness and sorrow. But please don’t confirm those false and vicious stereotypes of Catholic moral teaching as soul-crushing and freedom-denying, as a manual of nay-saying for killjoys.

Finally, may I suggest that Cardinal Farrell and others celebrating what they deem a Franciscan revolution in the Church refrain from the harsh biblical analogy the cardinal deployed when he said that defenders of the Church’s classic teaching on marriage, and on worthiness to receive holy communion, are like the cranky older brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son? Some of those defenders may fit that description. But the vast majority do not and it is really hitting below the belt to suggest otherwise.

Pope Francis’s contributions to Catholic life are obvious enough that they needn’t be promoted by falsifying history, playing to the Church’s secular critics, or defaming brothers and sisters in Christ. Neither the Holy Father nor the New Evangelization is well-served by such tactics. [But what about the sometimes (or often) unholy Holy Father himself falsifying not just history but the Gospel itself? Or forgetting the Church's mission of evangelization itself, since he promotes religious indifferentism so actively and tells everyone, Christians, non-Catholics, atheists and agnostics alike, that they are 'fine as you are' and that he does not want to convert anyone to Catholicism?

Other reactions to recent rhetorical excesses and abominations of the hyper-Bergoglists...

Cardinals in the Church have rights, too
Bp. Frangiskos Papamanolis, President of the Bishops’ Conference of Greece,
gives little indication that he even knows what is really meant
by terms such as 'apostasy', 'sacrilege', 'heresy' and 'schism'

November 29, 2016

The rashest reaction to the “Four Cardinals’ Five Dubia” so far is that from Bp. Frangiskos Papamanolis, President of the Bishops’ Conference of Greece, whose railing against the questions posed by Cdls. Brandmüller, Burke, Caffarra, and Meisner in regard to Pope Francis’ Amoris laetitia must be read to be believed.

The Greek prelate hurls epithets such as apostasy, sacrilege, heresy, schism, at four brothers in the episcopate (brothers making text-book use of their rights under Canon 212 §3 to pose doctrinal and disciplinary questions that urgently need addressing in our day) giving little indication that he even knows what those canonical-theological terms mean. I’d like to think that even the staunchest defenders of Amoris cringed when they read Papamanolis. Perhaps I am naïve.

While other contenders for an over-reaction prize can be suggested, here I consider the speculations voiced by the Dean of the Roman Rota, Msgr. Pio Pinto, namely, that Pope Francis might strip the four cardinals of their cardinatial dignity.

Setting aside how inappropriate it is for one of the Church’s highest judicial officers to speculate publicly on the possible legal liability of and canonical consequences against bishops as yet uncharged with any crime, let’s review a pope’s canonical authority over prelates holding the office of cardinal.

Eleven canons (1983 CIC 349-359) regulate the institution of cardinal in the Roman Church, including one norm, Canon 351 §2, that states in pertinent part that “From the moment of the announcement [that the pope has created some cardinals,] they are bound by the duties and possess the rights defined by law.” And what might those rights be?

Though largely honorific in nature, “cardinal” is, at least for those under age 80, also an “office” in the Church (1983 CIC 145) authorizing, among other things, one’s voting in a papal conclave (Universi Dominci Gregis [1996] 33). Appointments to the office of cardinal are made for an “indefinite period”, meaning that one holding such an appointment can be “removed” from said office for “grave causes according to the manner of proceeding defined in law” (1983 CIC 193 §1) or could be “deprived” of said office as punishment for a canonical crime duly alleged and proven (1983 CIC 196 §1).

The suggestion that Brandmüller, et al., have committed any canonical “crime” is risible, so that leaves only the possibility of Francis treating a cardinal’s asking questions about his document Amoris as constituting “grave cause” to remove four cardinals from office (and along the way eliminating two electors currently eligible for the next papal conclave). But Francis (who alone can judge a cardinal, 1983 CIC 1405 §1,2º) has not said word one about stripping the four cardinals of their dignities nor of banning any of them from a conclave; such speculation is, so far, entirely Pinto’s.

But assuming, against all precedent and common sense, that one is publicly asking the pope to clarify important questions raised in the wake of his document amounts to canonical “grave cause” for stripping several prelates of their offices, it would still remain to honor at every stage of the removal process numerous canonical rights expressly guaranteed all the Christian faithful, including
- the ability to “defend the rights which they possess in the Church in the competent ecclesiastical forum”,
- the right to “be judged according to the prescripts of law applied with equity”, and
- the right “not to be punished with canonical penalties except according to the norms of law.” (1983 CIC 221)

Note that depriving one of “a power, office, function, right, privilege, faculty, favor, title, or insignia, even merely honorary” is an expiatory penalty for crime under Canon 1336 §1,2º, so the standards of proof should be high indeed (1983 CIC 18). How anyone can conclude, then, based on the facts at hand, that the four cardinals are at risk for deprivation of their office, escapes me.

No one, least of all the four cardinals in question, questions the special authority that a pope enjoys over the Church (1983 CIC 331) nor do they harbor any illusions that a pope could be forced to answer the questions they posed.

My hunch is that the Four Cardinals, while they would welcome a papal reply, are probably content with having formally preserved these vital questions for a day when a direct answer might be forthcoming—a lthough they might yet exercise their own episcopal office as teachers of the faith (1983 CIC 375) and propose answers on their own authority.

For that, these men are, I think, prepared to accept personal ridicule and to suffer misunderstanding and misrepresentation of their actions and motives.

But an actual assault against their offices and against their possible roles in a future papal election? No, I don’t see that happening.

German theologian and author comes to
the defense of the Four Cardinals
by Maike Hickson
THE WANDERER
November 30, 2016

“This Is an Insult Toward Many Catholics!” is the trenchant title of an article written in defense of the Four Cardinals and published today on the Austrian Catholic news website, kath.net.

The author of this text is Dr. Markus Brüning, a German theologian, lawyer, book author, and father. Several of his books have dealt with the question as to how one is to grow in holiness; one book deals with the aspects of the virtues (with a foreword by Cardinal Joachim Meisner, one of the Four Cardinals); another book discusses the importance of the Sacramentals for our lives as Catholics (with a foreword by the persecuted yet loyal Swiss Bishop Vitus Huonder); yet another book discusses the role of the Sacraments in the life of the Saints (with a foreword by our beloved Bishop Athanasius Schneider).

As the specific list of his endorsers already shows, this author is indebted to, and close to, many of the orthodox prelates who are right now themselves leading a spiritual battle against the forces of confusion and of evil in the Church and in temporal society. And Brüning has had the honor now to defend them. For this, he is to be congratulated and he certainly deserves our own support.

In his article, Brüning himself makes it clear that he has supported and defended Pope Francis in the past. Thus, he cannot be justly counted as an outspoken dissident critic of the pope. However, the way in which the Four Cardinals have now been treated has provoked his own just indignation.

He starts his article with the categorical words: “The threat from the Dean of the Roman Rota aimed at the Cardinals: Meisner, Brandmüller, Burke, and Caffarra. Is this what the ecclesiastical, the papal culture of dialogue looks like?”

Brüning even calls this ominous event a “badly made tragedy” and a “bitter reality.”

He continues: “What we have to read from the Dean Pinto from Rome is especially shattering for all those Catholics who for years, and locally, have fought in their parishes for the preservation of [Catholic] doctrine and an ordered liturgy.”

So far, the German adds, these Catholics have been confident that there still “was in Rome an authority which has understood their intentions.” But, says the German author, “this seems now to be different.”

In the current Church, there is talk about “museumlike Christians,” “liturgical nostalgics,” “painters of black-and-white images,” as well as “those who throw rocks at sinners (see AL, no. 305).”

Brüning adds: “The level of [derisive] labeling – sometimes also coming from the pope’s own mouth – only renders one sad any more. And now this, on top of all: four cardinals – who do nothing else but ask the pope to speak clearly about the content of Amoris Laetitia – are being threatened with the removal of their cardinalate. It is obvious that a climate of fear is intentionally being fostered and established in order to ‘shut everybody up.’ But one cannot intimidate the truth, and certainly not in this way!” [Of course, Brüning writes as if Pinto's 'threat' directly reflects the thinking of the pope and/or those around him who encourage him the most in his anti-Catholic actions, when the 'threat' is more likely Pinto's own manic expression of the outrage he feels against the Four Cardinals in behalf of his lord and master.]

Brüning also shows himself “personally wounded” by these attacks, especially those against Cardinal Meisner, whom he knows personally. He says: “Here I feel challenged to take sides with clarity about our beloved cardinal who has supported my book apostolate with a deeply impressive foreword to my last book on the virtues (“Encouragement to Holiness”), describing in a very personal way his own vocation to become a bishop. This man himself had to grow up under Communism [just as Bishop Athanasius Schneider did] and he still became a priest – in spite of the obstacles. He always bravely witnessed to the Faith.”

Brüning comments:

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Here, it is not fitting that a [subordinate] curial member [Archbishop Pinto] should rebuke him. And certainly not in this manner. This clergyman of the Curia can, it seems, only use such [harsh] tones because his own superior – who sets the tone – wants it done, or at least tolerates it.

If this is not the case, the pope should, please, rebuke this [insolent] clergyman – who is now engaged in his fits of anger – and to do it in order to make clear to us Catholics that he himself does not accept such a style in our Church.” Brüning then raises the fundamental question of the conduct [of courtesy and dignity] among Catholics in the Catholic Church...

In any event, we now have not ‘only’ the problem of the unanswered Dubia, no, now we have to deal, in my eyes, also with the question of decency and of the decent treatment ‘of inferiors by their boss.’ Pope Francis, as a matter of fact, has always and repeatedly called for a culture of dialogue [and openness, parrhesia]. This, however, is not what a dialogue looks like, when dialog must begin with respect for those who are of another opinion.

---

Brüning’s argumentation is especially convincing, because he has heretofore been a public defender of Pope Francis. As he points out in his article, he could not imagine at the time “that a pope would write such an ambiguous document [such as Amoris Laetitia].”

But now, says the German, the pope “has to provide clarity, since this nebulous document has spread [ominous] clouds over the Church.”

To those who claim that the pope himself did not even write Amoris Laetitia, or that he is not himself a theologian, Brüning responds: “No: the pope is the supreme teacher of his Church! And a teacher has to teach. If he does not do it in all clarity and truth, the Church then has a serious problem of leadership.”

For all of us Catholics who are still trying to understand the nature and range of the current crisis in the Church, Brüning adds a few considerations that might well be worthy for us to further reflect upon. Since the end of his article is so rich, I shall translate the entire paragraph:

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Much less helpful are the repeatedly presented calls to obey the pope unconditionally. I beg your pardon? We are, after all, not in a dictatorship here. That goes too far.

For me, kairos [the ripe and fitting moment] has come; and, fully so in the sense of Blessed John Henry Newman, we should now question this papalism that we have all-too often practiced in our own circles. Additionally, we have at times the duty to oppose ecclesial authorities.

Let us hear what St. Thomas Aquinas tells us about this matter: "Where, however, the Faith is in danger, one has to correct the superiors publicly, just as St. Paul did it; and as Augustine wrote on this matter: ‘Peter himself has given to the superiors the model that they – if they ever stray from the right path – shall accept not unwillingly when their own inferiors correct them.” (Summa theol., II-II q. 33, 4c)

If one ever should degrade these [four] cardinals, this would be equal to their anticipated canonization! Then they would be in good company with those bishops who were once banned by the majority of the bishops and by the emperor during the time of the Arian conflict, [for example].

Here is then also applicable the words of the Confessor and Bishop Saint Hilary of Poitiers [310-367, Father and Doctor of the Church] “May I always be in exile, if only the truth begins to be preached again!” (Hil. De Syn, 78). Nothing has to be added to it!

---

In looking up the accepted English translation of the quotation from St. Hilary (Hickson was translating from Bruening's German, but the translation above is from Mons. Schneider in his open letter defending the DUBIA), I came across a letter he wrote the emperor of his time who had exiled him for his opposition to Arianism, and as in the words of St. Vincent de Lerins which I excerpted in a recent post, St. Hilary's words sound like he was commenting on the situation in the Church today, and especially of the man who nominally (and alas, formally) leads it:

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Obstinacy in a design adopted on impulse is often extreme, and the desire to oppose everything that resists us never slackens when the will is not subject to reason and when, instead of investigating, we think only of finding reasons to support what we have gotten into our head and of employing all our knowledge to maintain what we desire to think. Thus the matter, which is disguised, pivots on the name rather than on the essence of the thing, and it is no longer a question of what is true, but of what we want to be true.

In other words, men of bad faith who oppose the truth will not yield to any argument, no matter how obvious, for the man of bad faith does not seek the light in any way. He is only interested in what he has gotten into his head, in what he wants, and he will defend it even with absurdities and lies...

However, in a cause which concerns the salvation of the world and in which silence would be criminal, let me be granted a public discussion where the interests of the faith may not be left without defenders. Does that right not belong to you, to me, to every Catholic? To question men who preach their own concepts and not in the least the words of Divine truth, and who commit the whole world to a circle of ever-recurring errors...

Once someone has indulged in these innovations, he no longer knows what to believe, either the ancient doctrine or the new one, and faith becomes the belief of the moment, no longer that of the Gospel. There are as many creeds as there are opinions, as many diverse doctrines as personal fantasies.

We know all too well how many of these professions of faith have been devised since the Council of Nicea. They have reached the point of contesting even the essence of God Himself by ceaselessly adding one novelty after another, by disputing about authors and writings, by creating problems with things that everyone agreed upon, by condemning and anathematizing one another.

And where are the disciples of Jesus Christ? Virtually nowhere. We are swept here and there by all the winds of these competing doctrines. The ones preach to deceive, the others listen for their ruin. The faith we had yesterday is no longer that of today... Amid such uncertainties there is no more faith, not any more in works than in the heart.

---

The hyper-Bergoglists should consider the history of Arianism for a historical context to what Bergoglio is doing to the Church. I have said it before and I say it again that Bergoglianism is far worse than Arianism or Lutheranism because this time, the de facto apostate-heretic happens to be the legitimate pope - who can, does and will continue to mobilize the bimillenary institutions and infrastructure of the Church of Christ to establish the church of Bergoglio even if he continues to feign he is doing what he does for the Roman Catholic Church. He is not - the questionable statements and actions by which he has alienated traditional orthodox Catholics are in fact against the Church and fundamentally anti-Catholic.

Appeal from Card. Burke:
Join today to 'storm heaven with prayer'
on the first day of the month
by DEACON NICK DONNELLY

Dec. 1, 2016



Cardinal Raymond Burke, one of the four cardinals who submitted the DUBIA to Pope Francis, has issued an appeal to Catholics throughout the world to join him today in the 'Storm Heaven with Prayer' initiative launched last year by a US Catholic Action group at the start of the Year of Mercy.

Cardinal Burke offered Mass and led in praying the Rosary at a Rome church this morning.

One of the intentions of Cardinal Burke's Mass has particular significance following the release of the dubia submitted to Pope Francis:

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That bishops and priests will have the courage to teach the Truth and defend the Faith against all her enemies both within the Church and outside the Church. And may all confusion be dispelled from the Church

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67,061 registered Rosary Warriors will be reciting the Holy Rosary and storming Heaven with Prayer in union with the Holy Mass being celebrated by Cardinal Burke.

The 1st of December and the start of the month is dedicated to the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady and the Divine Infancy of Our Lord.

Operation Storm Heaven explains the purpose of Cardinal Burke's appeal:

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When you pray your rosary on December 1st, please remember to pray for the intentions of all the Rosary Warriors, just as they are also praying for your intentions.

You do not need to pray at exactly the same time, but please pray your Rosary at some time on the 1st of December (your local time). We are providing the Mass time for those who wish to pray at exactly the same time as Cardinal Burke celebrates Mass and prays the Rosary.

“The greatest method of praying is to pray the Holy Rosary!” stated Saint Francis de Sales. It is through the Holy Rosary that we will obtain mercy, stop evil, convert nations and bring peace to souls and to the world!

Let us continue to touch the heart of Our Blessed Mother to obtain from Her Divine Son the merciful graces of conversion that our world so sorely needs. And let us also ask for the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary to come soon over the evil of this world, the flesh and the devil.

As we storm Heaven together, please remember especially the following intentions:
o In reparation for all the sins and offenses committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary
o For our families and the salvation of our loved ones
o That bishops and priests will have the courage to teach the Truth and defend the Faith against all her enemies both within the Church and outside the Church.

May all confusion be dispelled from the Church!
May the Culture of Life defeat the culture of death!

o For all police officers that they may be guided and protected by St. Michael the Archangel in their daily duties
o That each of us grows in devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and comes closer to the Sacred Heart of Jesus
o For the continued global expansion of Operation Storm Heaven in 2017

Please share this email with your family and friends and anyone who you think would like to participate in this history-changing Rosary Crusade to storm Heaven with prayer to obtain a tidal wave of mercy from God for our families, our society, our country and the world…in short, for all souls!

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Father Gabriel Amorth, the former chief exorcist of the Vatican who died recently, once explained that the Most Holy Rosary is the most powerful weapon against the devil and the powers of evil. St Padre Pio described the Most Rosary "a weapon of extraordinary power against Satan." During this grave crisis in the Church please join Cardinal Burke in storming heaven with prayer, particularly that bishops and priests will have the courage to teach the Truth and defend the Faith.

Divorce, abortion. . .what’s next?
[As Bergoglio and his bishops take the Church
down the slippery slope to spiritual perdition]
Brad Miner

November 28, 2016

Let’s say I get caught up in the moment and, under the influence of booze and Donald Trump’s quip that he “could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” I walk out onto 5th Avenue (the one in the small town where I live) and shoot somebody. The police station is right there, and let’s say some astonished cop walks over and cuffs me, and that I’m subsequently tried, convicted, and sent to Sing Sing, which for me is – un-metaphorically – “up the river” from here.

Let’s say that in prison I’m plenty sober now and that I spend time in counseling with a priest, and that I become truly repentant. I confess my violation of the 5th Commandment, and the priest is satisfied with my repentance and gives me absolution. I am forgiven.

No matter how much longer I spend in the clink, I am, in the most important sense, a free man.

Finally, let’s say that word of my conversion/forgiveness spreads – the New York Times does a front-page story – and other slightly unhinged fellows begin thinking: Hey, I could finally shoot my boss (wife, girlfriend, bowling buddy – take your pick), go to prison and still go to heaven!

Would murders increase as a result? No. The penalty of 25-to-life (let alone of execution) is simply too great. Besides, most people possess an intuitive understanding that murder is wrong.

These musings are occasioned by the pope’s recent end-of-the-Holy-Year apostolic letter in which he mandates the universal practice of forgiving the sin of abortion.

---

I henceforth grant to all priests, in virtue of their ministry, the faculty to absolve those who have committed the sin of procured abortion. The provision I had made in this regard, limited to the duration of the Extraordinary Holy Year, is hereby extended.

---

Will this decision increase the incidence of abortions among Catholic women? Probably not, although the fact that in his letter the pope also said he restates “as firmly as I can that abortion is a grave sin,” the possibility has to be considered that his modification of canonical procedures on abortion and absolution will potentially have the effect of weakening the gravity of the sin in the minds of young Catholics: women and men. Why? Because abortion is already in most countries legal and widespread – a part of the secular legal culture in which we live.

Even if Cardinal Blase Cupich sort of condemns abortion, Barack Obama “praises” it, in the sense that he has done all any president could do to protect abortion: in supporting Planned Parenthood (“Thank you, God bless you”) and in mandating abortion coverage in health-care plans. And Obama has as much if not more influence these days on American attitudes about abortion than do Cupich or Pope Francis.

But when the pope’s comments pass quickly to forgiveness without a strong condemnation of the evil of abortion, as have his comments regarding adultery in the context of those divorced and remarried without annulment, he – unintentionally, I’m sure [but surely not unknowingly] – diminishes the potency of Catholic teaching vis-à-vis the developing culture, public and personal.

By “developing culture,” I’m referring to the ever-clearer phenomena of preference cascades moving societies away from their traditional rootedness. It doesn’t really matter what those roots are – or were (whether in the United States or in China) – but it matters terribly if cascades of new preferences begin uprooting and destabilizing everyday life.

It may be overstating the fact, but we’re near the point at which it’s all but impossible to make a public case against abortion, not just because infanticide is embodied in law but also because “official” opposition to the law is equivocal. By “official,” I mean those who can make the case against baby murder, but are not doing is ways sufficiently forceful so as to tips the scales towards “life.”

To be blunt: Having lost the legal fight against abortion, bishops (including the Bishop of Rome) have refocused their attention on pragmatic approaches to battles in which they have the assent of ruling elites. Immigration and poverty are two examples; ones in which the views of most bishops and many politicians converge. Never mind that most of those politicians are the ones who oppose the Church on everything except immigration and poverty.

If abortion now becomes for Catholics in the confessional a sin no more problematic than contraception, masturbation, or petty theft, there is a risk that the Church’s opposition to it will no longer have sufficient weight to affect the number of abortions.

Again, it may be that few women with “unwanted” pregnancies will now overcome innate opposition to abortion simply because they believe that, afterward, a “painless” absolution will quickly restore them to grace.

But looking at the direction Pope Francis is following in all matters concerning sexual ethics and at the trend towards making Catholicism a social philosophy that is liberation theology reimagined without explicitly Marxist trappings, I do worry that the Faith is being reduced to a Third Way in competition with socialism and capitalism.

This is a problem, because Catholicism, by being Christ’s church, represents THE Way.

And it’s a problem because this is Pope Francis, about whom one now asks: What’s next?


Cardinal Pell's recent address in London prompted the ff commentary by Carl Olson that reads like Part 2 of his critique of the moral relativism that pervades the current pope's thinking and teaching, clearly unacceptable and inexplicable in the man who is supposed to be the Vicar of Christ on earth:

Cardinal Pell, the 'primacy of conscience',
and the ongoing state of confusion
"Even some bishops seem to believe that any doctrinal reminder,
any precise teaching stems from a narrow restrictive mentality..."
by Carl Olson
Editor

December 01, 2016
Carl E. Olson

Not long after posting my lengthy essay "The Four Cardinals and the Encyclical in the Room", I saw The Catholic Herald had posted a piece on Cardinal George Pell, who was in London to give an address:

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Cardinal George Pell has said that “a number of regularly worshipping Catholics” are “unnerved by the turn of events” in the Church. In a talk at St Patrick’s Church, London, Cardinal Pell said one cause for concern was false theories of conscience and the moral law. ...

Cardinal Pell said that emphasising the “primacy of conscience” could have disastrous effects, if conscience did not always submit to revealed teaching and the moral law. For instance, “when a priest and penitent are trying to discern the best way forward in what is known as the internal forum”, they must refer to the moral law. Conscience is “not the last word in a number of ways”, the cardinal said. He added that it was always necessary to follow the Church’s moral teaching.

---

The point about the true place and rightful role of the conscience was a central point of my essay. Put another way, the essential questions about Amoris Laetitia, especially the much debated chapter 8, are not about mercy or accompaniment or discernment but moral theology and the nature of objective truth.

Back in 2005, Cardinal Pell wrote an exceptional essay for First Things titled "The Inconvenient Conscience" (May 2005), which clarified several misunderstandings (and misrepresentations) regarding what John Henry Newman had actually written about conscience. A couple of excerpts are instructive:

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... a Catholic conscience cannot accept a settled position against the Church, at least on a central moral teaching.

Any difficulty with Church teaching should be not the end of the matter but the beginning of a process of conversion, education, and quite possibly repentance. Where a Catholic disagrees with the Church on some serious matter, the response should not be “that’s that — I can’t follow the Church here.”

Instead we should kneel and pray that God will lead our weak steps and enlighten our fragile minds, as Newman recommends in his Sermon 17, “The Testimony of Conscience.”

Of course, this view of conscience seems profoundly counter-intuitive to modern readers. For Newman, conscience is a hard, objective thing — a challenge to self, a call to conversion, and a sign of humility. And this sits uncomfortably with those who see conscience as a sign of freedom, and freedom as the right to reject what is unpalatable. ...

One master defender of moral truth in our lifetime has been Pope John Paul II. He is also a man learned in modern thought and passionate about freedom and the responsibility that arises from the possession of freedom. And what the pope has aimed at is a path between those who assert moral truth but ignore personal freedom, and those who assert freedom but ignore moral truth.

More, he has charted this path using coordinates established by the Scholastics, developed by Newman, and confirmed by the Second Vatican Council. The pope argues that in their consciences human persons encounter moral truth, freely embrace it, and personally commit themselves to its enactment.

This account (in the pope’s 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor, sections 54-64, for instance) builds upon John Henry Newman’s theory of conscience as man’s free adoption of God’s law. Conscience, in this view, is neither the apprehending of an alien law nor the devising of our own laws.

Rather, conscience is the free acceptance of the objective moral law as the basis of all our choices. The formation of a Christian conscience is thus a dignifying and liberating experience; it does not mean a resentful submission to God’s law but a free choosing of that law as our life’s ideal.

This specifically Catholic view rejects the mistaken doctrine of the primacy of conscience and clearly asserts the primacy of truth.

John Paul II wrote: “It is always from the truth that the dignity of conscience derives. In the case of the correct conscience, it is a question of the objective truth received by man; in the case of the erroneous conscience, it is a question of what man, mistakenly, subjectively considers to be true.

It is never acceptable to confuse a ‘subjective’ error about moral good with the ‘objective’ truth rationally proposed to man in virtue of his end, or to make the moral value of an act performed with a true and correct conscience equivalent to the moral value of an act performed by following the judgment of an erroneous conscience.”

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The primacy of truth. We don't seem to be hearing much about that these days. That's unfortunate, to put it most mildly.

Cardinal Pell, in his recent talk in London, also made this basic but oft-neglected point: "[Pell] added that those emphasising 'the primacy of conscience' only seemed to apply it to sexual morality and questions around the sanctity of life. People were rarely advised to follow their conscience if it told them to be racist, or slow in helping the poor and vulnerable, the cardinal said."

Yes, it is rather strange, is it not, that we don't hear about "accompaniment" and "discernment" when it comes to stealing, embezzling, lying, hating, coveting, murdering, bribing, and so forth. But sexual sins, for some reason, get a special pass.

We are told that matters involving sexuality, marriage, and family are much more "complex" and "complicated" than they once were. I think that is mostly nonsense, even allowing for what modern travel, technology, and communication has done to relationships and lifestyles. After all, those same things have also removed or lessened many of the challenges and difficulties that most or all people faced some 100 or 150 years ago.

In the West, especially, most people enjoy the sort of comforts, leisure, free time, disposable income, and material advantages that could hardly be imagined in the nineteenth century, or even the first half of the twentieth century.

Picking up on Cardinal Pell's point: what if we took the apparently ambiguous and never judgmental approach found in Amoris Laetitia 8 and applied it to, say, unjust employers? Nick Bottom did just that for CWR back in July in a piece titled "A Different Kind of Papal Press Conference":

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Pope Francis: Good morning, everyone. Thank you for coming.

I have invited you today because I have had a change of heart that I must make public. In a homily recently, I spoke rather forcefully about employers who refuse to pay their workers a just wage.

I have had a chance to reflect on that homily in the light of the principles I set forth in my Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia. I brought a copy so I can refer to it as I take your questions. Please be patient with me as I find the appropriate passages, eh?

I believe I was too harsh in describing exploitative employers as “slave drivers” and “true bloodsuckers.” I too must remember that the name of God is Mercy! Amoris Laetitia rightly criticizes those who “hid[e] behind the Church’s teachings, sitting on the chair of Moses and judging at times with superiority and superficiality.” For “it is not enough simply to apply moral laws . . . as if they were stones to throw at people’s lives” (AL 305). As paragraph 308 of AL reminds us, “the Gospel itself tells us not to judge or condemn” (AL 308).

I also regret another remark I made in that homily. The pope must be humble, he must be honest, no? Somewhat precipitously, I said that cheating workers is “a mortal sin! This is a mortal sin!” I must now express that in a more nuanced way.

In Amoris Laetitia I made it clear that I was “speaking not only of the divorced and remarried, but of everyone, in whatever situation they find themselves” (AL 297). That of course includes employers who find themselves in the situation of slave-driving their workers.

For them too, we must keep in mind the distinction between objective sin and subjective guilt. Since there can be in employers’ lives many “mitigating factors . . . it can no longer simply be said that all those in any ‘irregular’ situation” – such as exploiting their employees – “are living in a state of mortal sin and are deprived of sanctifying grace” (AL 301)....

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Read the entire piece, which is not so much satirical as it is illustrative in nature.

On Tuesday it was reported that an American bishop was openly encouraging divorced and civilly remarried Catholics to receive Holy Communion:

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Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego, California, has asked his priests to encourage Catholics who are divorced and remarried to consider whether “God is calling them to return to the Eucharist.”

Following up on recommendations from a diocesan Synod held in October, Bishop McElroy instructed his pastors to post notices in parish bulletins, inviting divorced and remarried Catholics to “utilize the internal forum of conscience” in making their decisions whether they should receive Communion.

Citing the deliberations of the diocesan Synod, the bishop also said that parishes should welcome gay and lesbian couples, and couples cohabitating before marriage. “The Synod pointed to the need to invite young couples lovingly, non-judgmentally and energetically into Catholic marriage and to provide mentors for them,” he said.

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The Diocese of San Diego's July 2016 pastoral message titled "Embracing the Joy of Love" makes some of the same dubious statements about conscience that have become regular fare for supporters of the "liberal" interpretation of Francis's Apostolic Exhortation. For instance:

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Pope Francis widens the focus for this internal reflection of conscience for a Catholic who is divorced and remarried by underscoring that the central question for conscience is "What is my situation before God?"

In conversation with a priest, the believer with humility, discretion, and love for the Church and its teachings seeks to reflect upon their level of responsibility for the failure of the first marriage, their care and love for the children of that marriage, the moral obligations which have arisen in their new marriage, and possible harm which their returning to the sacraments might have by undermining the indissolubility of marriage.

It is important to underscore that the role of the priest is one of accompaniment, meant to inform the conscience of the discerner on principles of Catholic faith. The priest is not to make decisions for the believer, for as Pope Francis emphasizes in The Joy of Love, the Church is "called to form consciences, not to replace them."

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But, as John Paul II makes clear in Veritatis Splendor (par. 54ff), the work of the conscience is to make proper judgments about what is good or evil, not to make "decisions" that are customized for every person. As John Paul II explained:

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The judgment of conscience is a practical judgment, a judgment which makes known what man must do or not do, or which assesses an act already performed by him. It is a judgment which applies to a concrete situation the rational conviction that one must love and do good and avoid evil.

This first principle of practical reason is part of the natural law; indeed it constitutes the very foundation of the natural law, inasmuch as it expresses that primordial insight about good and evil, that reflection of God's creative wisdom which, like an imperishable spark (scintilla animae), shines in the heart of every man.

But whereas the natural law discloses the objective and universal demands of the moral good, conscience is the application of the law to a particular case; this application of the law thus becomes an inner dictate for the individual, a summons to do what is good in this particular situation.

Conscience thus formulates moral obligation in the light of the natural law: it is the obligation to do what the individual, through the workings of his conscience, knows to be a good he is called to do here and now.

The universality of the law and its obligation are acknowledged, not suppressed, once reason has established the law's application in concrete present circumstances.

The judgment of conscience states "in an ultimate way" whether a certain particular kind of behaviour is in conformity with the law; it formulates the proximate norm of the morality of a voluntary act, "applying the objective law to a particular case". (par 59)

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The approach of Bishop McElroy, as well as that of Cardinal Cupich and Cardinal Farrell, seems clearly to be based on the faulty notion of the "primacy of the conscience," which in reality means that the teaching of Christ and the Church about moral truth and moral obligations take a back seat to the decisions made by this or that person about their unique and complicated situation.

That is simply upside down; it is a classic case of the tail wagging the dog. Yes, it is true that the priest does not "make the decision" for people in the sense of forcing them to accept the Church's teaching. But the priest most certainly must articulate and explain the Church's teaching on morality and truth, and insist that a properly formed conscience is formed by conforming in faith and humility to the truth, as John Paul II states:

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It is the "heart" converted to the Lord and to the love of what is good which is really the source of true judgments of conscience. Indeed, in order to "prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect" (Rom 12:2), knowledge of God's law in general is certainly necessary, but it is not sufficient: what is essential is a sort of "connaturality" between man and the true good. ...

It follows that the authority of the Church, when she pronounces on moral questions, in no way undermines the freedom of conscience of Christians. This is so not only because freedom of conscience is never freedom "from" the truth but always and only freedom "in" the truth, but also because the Magisterium does not bring to the Christian conscience truths which are extraneous to it; rather it brings to light the truths which it ought already to possess, developing them from the starting point of the primordial act of faith. (par 64)

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This sort of confusion has been around for quite some time. Fr. Joseph Fessio, SJ, recently pointed out to me an entry made by then-Fr Henri de Lubac, SJ (he was later made a cardinal by John Paul II) in his notebook during (and at) the Second Vatican Council:

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I tried to explain to a bishop from Verdun that, on marriage, the definition of a spiritual ideal and a beautiful loftiness about human love are not enough; it is very necessary to specify a few moral rules and to recall that it is a question of an institution.

To several others, who seemed very little informed about current theories and more or less clear instances of abandonment, I expressed the timeliness of the last encyclical; even some bishops seem to believe that any doctrinal reminder, any precise teaching stems from a narrow and restrictive mentality; the opening of the spirit seems confused in their eyes with an amorphous understanding they would willingly idealize. [Entry for Sept 23rd, 1965; during last session of the Council]

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The more things change...

Brave New Church:
The Counter-Council of Trent
angelqueen.org
November 28, 2016

You may recall that on Oct. 31, 2016, Pope Francis traveled to Lund, Sweden, for a joint commemoration of the Protestant Reformation. Well, it didn’t take long for this milestone event to bear its expected rotten fruit.

In the historic city of Trent, Italy, where in the 16th century the Catholic Church held the glorious Council of Trent to refute the errors of Martin Luther and the Reformation, the Italian Conference of [Novus Ordo] Bishops recently joined up with Protestants to celebrate 500 years of the Lutheran heresy as part of a three-day conference on the Reformation that took place November 16-18, 2016.

One of the featured speakers was the infamous Archbishop Bruno Forte, the main author behind the controversial paragraphs on adulterers and sodomites in the interim report of the 2014 Synod on the Family. (Forte is one of the very few individuals who was personally consecrated bishop by the then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.) [And let that not reflect badly on Joseph Ratzinger, because until March 13, 2013, Forte appeared to be among the 'Ratzingerian' of Italian bishops.]

To add insult to injury, the venues chosen for the joint musical and liturgical Reformation celebrations were precisely the two Catholic holy sites in which the Council of Trent had taken place hundreds of years before: the church of St. Mary Major and the cathedral of St. Vigilius. One may, therefore, speak of a veritable Counter-Council of Trent.

It is clear that the Modernist usurpers of Catholic structures are spitting on the sacred heritage of Catholicism and trying to humiliate us by doing a victory dance, as it were, on top of the ruins of the remaining physical remnants of Catholicism.

Below you will find our working translation of a brief commentary on the abominable spectacle. The Italian original is taken from the Italian web site Inter Multiplices Una Vox, which is a non-sedevacantist source, so keep that in mind that it is written from a recognize-and-resist perspective. [The commentary is unusually mordant!]

Shameless Priests:
The ‘Counter-Council of Trent’ in Trent
by Belvecchio
Translated by Novus Ordo Watch from
INTER MULTIPLICES UNA VOX
November 28, 2016

Strongly supported by the Conference of Italian Bishops [CEI] and reported by many newspapers…. What is it? The ‘Counter-Council of Trent’!

It was a propaganda move aimed at sealing the sensational breakthrough Bergoglio foisted on the history of the Church and the Catholic Apostolic doctrine, by means of an irreverent sensational event that would push the very limits of blasphemy.

The pseudo-canonization of [Martin] Luther amidst the Swedish fog having marked the turning point, the brave Italian priests who are part of what was once the Catholic episcopal body, in agreement with the Protestant “archipelago” of Italy, saw fit to enshrine the unconditional [theological] surrender of the new conciliar church in the province of Trent, in the same city and in the very same churches where the Catholic bishops once irrevocably condemned the German monk’s [Luther’s] revolution against the Church of Christ.

We will not recall here the doctrinal premises which led to the condemnation of the “Reformation”, because it is not the theological discourses that interest us [here] but the sound doctrine based on the words of Our Lord: “But let your speech be yea, yea: no, no: and that which is over and above these, is of evil” [Mt 5:37] and “By their fruits you shall know them” [Mt 7:16].

It will suffice to call to mind the fact that the Protestant “Reformation” was the seedbed from which sprang the modern world, whose fundamental and unstoppable concern is waging war against God….

It was not surprising that Bergoglio’s irresponsible act would pave the way for new initiatives to boost the protestantization of the Catholic Church begun by the nefarious Second Vatican Council. But what was the reason for choosing the city of Trent a few days after Bergoglio’s unconditional surrender, if not to cause in people the impression that the Council of Trent is dead and buried?

At Trent, in the 16th century, the Catholic Church condemned the subversion of Catholic doctrine and life… at Trent today, the new conciliar church whitewashes the subversion and stipulates that the Catholic Church is outdated: Coming from Lund and from Bergoglio, a new phase has begun in the life of the Church, the phase of the official equation of error with truth, and of the definitive rejection of the principle of non-contradiction, by establishing that two things that have always been opposites must now be considered the same.

This new subversive event, strongly supported by the CEI [Italian Bishops’ Conference], has seen some champions of the modern anti-Catholic line that nowadays prevails within the new conciliar church that was once Catholic: from the unavoidable Cardinal Walter Kasper, taking the role of “animator” (among other things), to the unfading Monsignor Bruno Forte, who plays the role of “theologian”.

And these talented champions of anti-Catholicity highlighted as one of the “gifts” of the “Reformation” the centrality of the Word of God in the life of the Church, proposed and implemented by Luther and adopted by Vatican II.

Of course, this is a solemn hoax, used as a crowbar to introduce into the life of the Church the free interpretation of Holy Scripture according to one’s needs — following the example of Luther — and the abandonment of Tradition and the perennial Papal Magisterium — in light of Vatican II.

The [ecumenical] events took place in the Basilica of St. Mary Major, in which took place the meetings of the Council of Trent, so as to enshrine in a particularly incisive way the values of the “Counter-Council of Trent”. And ended in the Cathedral [of St. Vigilius] of Trent, the very same place where the decrees and canons of the Tridentine Council were solemnly proclaimed.

All this took place with the blessing of the [current] bishop of Trent, Lauro Tisi, accompanied by Ambrogio Spreafico, Bishop of Frosinone — both of whom, together with certain Protestant “shepherds”, also officiated a kind of communal celebration in which they literally broke a [loaf of] bread and distributed it to the people in attendance.

A symbolic tribute to Bergoglio, to whom all must show the highest gratitude for paving the road to heresy in the very bosom of the Church of Christ, was unavoidable.

The Catholic agency SIR reports that “as a sign of reconciliation, they brought onto the altar a basket of soil, an interdenominational Bible, and a suitcase as a symbol and icon of all the migrants saved thanks to the humanitarian corridors supported by the Community of Sant’Egidio, the Evangelical Churches, and Tavola Valdese”.

It is clearly another 'ecumenical euphemism' to disguise the subversive action of modern priests who do everything to facilitate the mass arrival in Italy and in Europe of millions of “migrants”, mainly of Islamic faith: This is conducive to the big plan of the New World Order wishing to reduce Catholicism to a mere “denomination”, equal to the others, and incorporate it into a universal secular religion.

In order to achieve this end, it is essential to annihilate the Catholic identity by drowning it in a formless and fluctuating multi-fideism, the much-vaunted new multi-ethnic and multicultural civilization.

Which is a colossal lie, because in such a new society no ethnic group will exist apart from an indistinguishable hybrid race, and there will be no culture apart from that of one single way of thinking, which, in the name of democracy, will not permit any differences [of opinion] or opposition. And the latter will be limited to apart scattered, non-approved groups of Catholics, speciously tolerated, that will have to remain in hiding if they do not want to be wiped out physically, but they will serve as a 'democratic alibi' for the new masters of the world.

To those concerned that what we are writing is political fiction, please, look around and tell us if you can find anything still based on common sense and on the proper order of Catholic social and family life.

There is ruin everywhere: a widespread destruction of order and normality, from which arises the increasingly dense, sulfurous stench of a civilization in decay. And all this is happening with the encouragement and support of those who should be the “shepherds” of Christ’s flock, who have instead become the leaders of hordes of ravenous wolves killing the sheep of the Lord, in the name of an adaptation considered unavoidable in a world characterized by increasingly inhuman elements.

And if anyone thinks that we should mercifully meet sinners [in this ecumenical way] to lead them back to the right path, tell us, please, how many conversions to the Lord have the actions of the new priests of the new conciliar church brought about, and how many people have returned to follow Christ during the three-year “pontificate” of Master Bergoglio?

Perhaps we are blind and deaf, but we cannot find any ray of even dim light in this current landscape of ruins surrounding our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren.

Our only hope is in the Lord, and it is to Him alone that we turn so as to receive … support that will enable us to persevere in the teachings and commands of Christ, with the help and intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. To Mary we turn as petitioners confident to obtain from her divine Son the strength not to fail in this vale of tears, and mercy for the eternal salvation of the souls of us contrite sinners.

My thanks to Belvecchio who uses the terms anti-Catholic and anti-Catholicism which are, I believe, the most appropriate terms for now to describe Our (far from) Beloved Pope and his church of Bergoglio, without having to dispute as yet the canonical and ecclesiastical appropriateness of the terms heresy and apostasy.

IMPORTANT UPDATE
Dean of Rota did not say Pope could strip
Four Cardinals of Cardinalate because of Five Dubia
by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

December 1, 2016

This we now read at Religion Confidencial:

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Religión Confidencial publicó el martes una noticia que ponía en boca de monseñor Pio Vito Pinto, decano de la Rota Romana, la afirmación de que los cuatro cardenales que han escrito al Papa “podrían perder el cardenalato”. La frase, tomada de una entrevista realizada por RC en la que monseñor Vito respondía en italiano, no es correcta. Revisada la grabación, se ha comprobado que lo que afirma es que el Papa Francisco no es un Papa de otros tiempos, en los que sí se tomaron ese tipo de medidas, y que no iba a retirarles la dignidad cardenalicia. La noticia está corregida, pero publicamos esta rectificación por si no fuera suficiente.

Translation by Teresa:
Religion Confidencial published Tuesday a report that attributed to Mons.Pio Vito Pinto, dean of the Roman Rota, the statement that the four cardinals who wrote the pope with their DUBIA,'could lose their cardinal rank'. The clause, taken from an interview by RC in which Mons. Vito replied in Italian, is not correct.

After reviewing the tape, it was shown that what he said was thay Pope Francis is not like a pope from other times who did take such measures, and was not going to withdraw their cardinalates. The report has been corrected but we publish this rectification in case that corrected report was not adequate.

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So now they are saying that Msgr. Pinto did NOT say that the Pope could remove the Four Cardinals from the College. Instead under a Pope [in other times] perhaps that might happen.

So, all of us who jumped on Mons. Pinto for what he supposedly said owe him an apology.

I do have a few issues:
1. One might have expected Mons. Pinto himself to have immediately corrected the report misquoting him.
2. Even cutting out the statement that 'the pope could strip the carDInals of their rank', the rest of his statements with respect to the DUBIA and the Four Cardinals remain outrageous and typically Bergoglidolatrous.
2. Religion Confidencial a) should seriously review its journalistic standards if and when a wrong and misleading translation was made and published; and b) should have reviewed the tape recording of what was said for accuracy before publishing the report, and not do it only after the erroneous report had gone around the world and back.


It's also unfortunate that this is the photo used by the Spanish site to illustrate their interview. Fr. H remarked on it:

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Pio Vito Pinto

Nov. 29, 2016

Name of the Dean of the Rota. I have warned you about him several times. He's one of those who believe that whatever Bergoglio says is the voice of the Holy Spirit - the hypersuperueberpapalists. He's been doing it again, in Spain, and talking about the Four Cardinals being stripped of their dignity. (I thank Professor Tighe for this information.)

Go and look at him. You can see him at EWTN News (English). Captured in the act of doing it.

I looked at the picture and asked myself:
~ is this the face of someone through whom the Holy Spirit is speaking?
~ is this the Face of Mercy?

Dead scary.

I hope that all our Partners in Ecumenical Dialogue are carefully reading about what being in Communion with a Bergoglian Papacy would really be like.

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I find the following report far more troubling - even if not entirely unexpected - than anything Mons. Pinto could say...

Cardinal Mueller says the Vatican
will not reply to the DUBIA
'to avoid polarization'
Translated from

December 1, 2016

Rome-Madrid (kath.net/KAP) - The Vatican will not answer the Four Cardinals' Letter asking the pope for clarity on the question of communion for remarried divorcees. [A persistent and fundamental problem with the way the DUBIA are being reported - as if the RCDs were the only focus, rather than the objective case study that allow the cardinals to ask whether this pontificate is seeking to change the Church teaching on morality, specifically, by advocating moral relativism on sin, conscience and marriage.]

The CDF acts and speaks 'with the authority of the pope' and 'cannot take sides in a war of opinion' which 'risks polarization', said Cardinal Mueller in an interview given Thursday to kathpress in Rome. [But the polarization already exists and is growing more acute daily! Is Mueller in denial???]

Mueller pointed out that the letter was personally addressed to the pope, who could, however, he adds, direct the CDF ad hoc to 'settle the dispute'. [That doesn't make sense. Does Mueller really think this pope would ever delegate to him the authority for answering the DUBIA without telling him exactly which dubium he should answer YES and which NO? The Four Cardinals and the rest of the Catholic world that is fed up with the anti-Catholic evasions of this pope only need five words to 'resolve' the DUBIA.] The CDF is responsible for answering all questions on Church doctrine and practice.

The pope's failure to answer the Four Cardinals' Letter has been taken to mean that he has decided not to answer them at all and that he wishes further debate on the DUBIA. [Right,this pope encourages endless debate that will not resolve anything, instead of clearly teaching what is right and good as he is dutybound to do, being the pope. And why does no one ask him why he recognizes John Paul II's declaration that ordination of women priests is a closed question but does not recognize what the same pope declared equally closed in Familiaris consortio - no communion for unqualified remarried divorcees?]

About the DUBIA over Amoris laetitia, Mueller said, "For now, it is important for all of us to remain objective, and not to allow ourselves to be polarized or not to heat things up". [But, Your Eminence, being 'objective' applies to considering the reason and logic of two sides in a debate, after which one has to make a decision and decide for one or the other. Being objective does not mean being equivocal and ambiguous and casuistic, especially when espousing some concepts that do transgress what Catholics have always believed, as Bergoglio and his ghosts do in AL.]

On the most contentious point itself, whether AL allows communion for RCDs in 'well-founded' cases, Mueller did not answer directly. But he pointed out that the document should not be interpreted as if earlier statements by popes and the CDF on this question were no longer valid.

He especially cited the official reply of the CDF to the pastoral letter of three South German bishops in 1993 on communion for remarried divorcees, in which Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as CDF Prefect rejected the bishops' proposal to give communion case by case.

The indissolubility of marriage must be 'the unshakeable basic doctrine for every pastoral accompaniment', Mueller said. But at the same time, he said, the pope wishes to help all those whose marriages and families are in a crisis "to find a way in accordance with the ever-gracious will of God." [Except that Communion-disqualified remarried divorcees form only a very tiny fraction of "all those whose marriages and families are in a crisis" - the majority of whom certainly can find spiritual support from their local priests if they sought it. Have priests generally rebuffed or been indifferent to their parishioners who have serious family and marital problems and who try genuinely to avoid divorce and other civil 'solutions'? (Unlike, that is, the now petted and lionized RCDs who had no second thoughts about getting a divorce despite what the Church teaches against it, and now typically want to have their cake and eat it too.)]

Müller also rejected reports of alleged 'trench warfare' in the Vatican. Rumors and stereotypes of "power struggle behind the scenes... between reformers and brawlers" only showed a "wrong perception of power categories", that the struggle is for "the victory of truth and not the triumph of power". [How unfortunate - and unworthy of the CDF Prefect - that Mueller uses the term 'brawlers' to oppose to 'reformers'!]

The article has two paragraphs about Mons. Vito Pinto's statement regarding the possibility that the Four Cardinals could be stripped of their rank and the subsequent correction by the Spanish news agency that reported it. But it also says:

But the website left Mons. Pinto's other criticisms of the Four Cardinals as is after their 'review' of the tape recording of the interview. Among this, when Pinto asks: "What church are these cardinals defending?... Making public their letter to the pope is a serious scandal".

December 2, 2016
P.S. Catholic Herald, reporting on Mueller's kathnet interviwe today, added the following with regard to the CDF's 1994 doctrinal letter cited by the cardinal:

The 1994 letter repeated the teaching of St John Paul’s 1981 exhortation Familiaris Consortio, which says that the remarried can only receive absolution, and therefore Communion, if they resolve to live “as brother and sister”.

The letter, which was signed by the then-CDF head Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and officially approved by St John Paul, says that the teaching of Familiaris Consortio applies without exception: “The structure of the Exhortation and the tenor of its words give clearly to understand that this practice, which is presented as binding, cannot be modified because of different situations.”

In the wake of Amoris Laetitia, some bishops have suggested that the Church’s doctrine on divorce, remarriage and Communion might admit exceptions. Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego has issued guidelines which say “the conscience of the discerner” should decide whether to receive Communion.

The 1994 letter, however, says that the decision should be taken in obedience to the Church’s teaching, which conscience cannot override. It states: “The mistaken conviction of a divorced and remarried person that he may receive Holy Communion normally presupposes that personal conscience is considered in the final analysis to be able, on the basis of one’s own convictions, to come to a decision about the existence or absence of a previous marriage and the value of the new union. However, such a position is inadmissible.”

Cardinal Müller also downplayed the controversy over the dubia, saying that it was wrong to think of a power struggle: emphasis should be on “the victory of truth and not the triumph of power”, the cardinal said.

December 1, 2016 headlines

PewSitter


Canon212.com

This is an unusual blog from a blogger who describes himself as, among other things, being 'an abject papologist' (papal apologist), and how he has stopped being that, because of the pope's refusal to answer the DUBIA. His self-description on his blog site begins with:

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Former teacher of writing and literature; freelance writer; convert from Protestantism; abject papologist; sacristan; Benedictine oblate; 3rd degree Knight of Columbus;...

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The title of his blog, which he dedicates chiefly to apologetics, comes from 1Peter 3:15, “Always be ready to give a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you..."... I do have to remark on some of his statements

One might imagine - and pray for - a similar process of reappraisal, both of themselves and of the pope, by many other Bergoglio-apologists and staunch 'normalists' whom AL and the glaringly evident DUBIA it raises may have finally shocked into their right mind. Because 'to give a defense' of our faith does not mean defending a pope, any pope, when objectING to his anti-Catholic positions, especially when the objections have become so widespread and frequent.


How I've changed my mind
about Pope Francis
by Scott Eric Alt

November 30, 2016

I mean, I do like Pope Francis. I’ve defended Pope Francis. I want to believe — I really want to believe — that footnote 351 of Amoris Laetitia can (and should) be read consistently with Familiaris Consortio 84. I have argued as much multiple times on this wery blog.

Footnote 351 of Amoris Laetitia says that “in some cases” couples who are in an irregular marital union but unable to separate for the sake of children can “receive the help of the sacraments.” The main text (par. 305) refers to such a couple as being in “an objective situation of sin,” even if “not subjectively culpable.”

Now, it is standard Catholic teaching that, if grave matter is present, mortal sin nevertheless may not be. If a person is addicted to cocaine, for example, the presence of addiction impairs freedom of the will sufficiently that there is no “subjective culpability.”
Of course, once such a person acknowledges this problem, he needs to get help to break the addiction.

Similarly, a couple who contracted an irregular marriage (divorce and remarriage without annulment, for example) may not be “subjectively culpable” if their conscience had not been fully formed at the time of the wedding. [Does anyone really think that a remarried divorcee - who claims he/she now wants nothing more urgently than to be able to receive communion - did not have a fully formed conscience at the time he/she decided to divorce after a Catholic sacramental marriage and then remarry civilly? Because ostensibly these are the persons, who are far from constituting any significant minority in the Church, in behalf of whom this pope called two synodal assemblies and wrote the most equivocal formal document ever to come from a pope.] Or perhaps they were not Catholic at the time, and their church permitted such a marriage. [OK, Mr Alt, even allowing for these circumstances you would find to be not 'subjectively culpable', how many such exceptions do you really think there could be?]

Again, once the couple become aware of the “objective situation of sin,” it is their responsibility to correct it. They can no longer appeal to their lack of “subjective culpability.”

That said, Pope St. John Paul II recognized the possibility that some couples in such a situation may be unable to separate for the good of their children. In Familiaris Consortio, he said that, were such couples to agree to abstain from sexual union, there would no longer be an “objective situation of sin,” and they would then be free to receive the Eucharist at Mass.

So the question becomes: Are the “some cases” to which Pope Francis refers in footnote 351 the same that John Paul II mentions in Familiaris Consortio. Or are there other cases, unspecified in the text, in which couples can return to the sacrament?

In one public address, Cardinal Schonborn seemed to say that 351 was merely an allusion to FC 84. I wrote about that earlier.
According to Schonborn, a couple who cannot separate, for the good of the kids, must be “careful not to give scandal.”

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Nonetheless they live a married life — not with sexual union, but they live together; they share their life; and publicly they are a couple. So I see the careful discernment requires, from the pastors and from the people concerned, a very delicate conscience. [More importantly, an honest conscience.]

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Well and good. Pope Francis even said that any questions about footnote 351 should make note of what Schonborn has to say, because Schonborn is a good theologian, and he gives great detail, so find what Schonborn says, what do I know, I can’t even remember footnote 351.

Problem is, it turns out that His Eminence Cardinal Schonborn has been a tad inconsistent about this footnote. His words above were in April. Three months later, in July, he gave an interview to Fr. Antonio Spadaro. In that interview, Schonborn says there has been “an evolution” — a “clear” one — in our understanding of factors that mitigate culpability for sin.

Okay, maybe so. But what are these new mitigating factors? Schonborn goes on to quote from Amoris, but that does not answer the question. The closest the text comes is this:

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A subject may know full well the rule, yet have great difficulty in understanding ‘its inherent values,’ or be in a concrete situation which does not allow him or her to decide differently and act otherwise without further sin.

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That lacks — how shall I say? — precision.

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And Fr. Spadaro presses Schonborn.
But this orientation was already contained in some way in the famous paragraph 84 of Familiaris Consortio, to which Francis has recourse several times, as when he writes: “Pastors must know that, for the sake of truth, they are obliged to exercise careful discernment of situations.
Schoenborn: Yes. John Paul II already presupposes implicitly that one cannot simply say that every situation of a divorced and remarried person is the equivalent of a life in mortal sin that is separated from the communion of love between Christ and the Church. [The author of Veritatis splendor, for which "Let your Yes be Yes and your No mean No", as Jesus exhorted, would never suggest any such thing implicitly. He would have articulated exactly what he meant to say.]

Yes. But under which conditions may such a couple return to the sacrament? The pope says the Eucharist is not a prize for the perfect but nourishment for the weak. How can this affirmation be integrated into the classical doctrine of the Church? Is there a rupture here with what was affirmed in the past?
Well, what those “some cases” are, that has to be left to “individual discernment.” There is no “general discourse” that can answer that. We now have a “different hermeneutic.” [The hermeneutic of Bergoglio being different and distinct from the hermeneutic that the Apostles, St. Paul, the Fathers and Doctors, saints and popes of the Church, have used in the past two millennia until March 13, 2013.]

Spadaro will not let it go.
What does ‘some cases’ mean? Can we be given an “inventory”?
No! There is no “inventory.” An “inventory” would be tantamount to “abstract casuistry.” But one thing is for sure, and that is that the pope does not stop short at the kind of cases mentioned by Familiaris.

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Oh. So it’s not just those who agree to live together without sexual union who can return to the Eucharist; there are other cases in which one may do so, but we don’t say what those cases are, because that would be casuistry. We can’t have an inventory, but we must have discernment and conscience. Got it.

***
This is why there is a problem with Amoris Laetitia – because there are sections of it, important sections, that are vague, and which scream out for clarification; but attempts to clarify have led to further vagueness (as in Schonborn’s interview with Spadaro) and inconsistent opinions about what it was that the pope wants pastors to do, and not do, with couples in an irregular union seeking to return to the Eucharist. We have had assurances that Amoris is utterly consistent with Familiaris and yet there are two problems:
- Schonborn’s words have been inconsistent and themselves not at all precise;
- None of these clarifications carry Magisterial weight.
[No! AL is not at all 'utterly consistent' with AC, because it omits the 3 sentences in Par 84 of Familiaris consortio in which John Paul II reaffirmed what had been clear and unequivocal Church teaching till then and, at least, until AL was issued.]


And because they do not carry Magisterial weight, different bishops are interpreting Pope Francis to pretty much be saying what they want him to say, and doing what they want to do, and there is no uniformity or correction where there has been folly. [A flagrant illustration of the folly of this pope's headlong intention announced in Evangelii gaudium to decentralize the papacy to the point of allowing doctrinal autonomy to diocesan bishops! Don't tell me he did not think this would result in a whole spectrum of episcopal dicta that may have nothing to do with the legitimate accepted Magisterium of the universal Church, nor even with his own magisterium, such as it is! Don't tell me he did not think that on remarried divorcees - on which the Church has already wasted more than two years of inordinate, totally unwarranted and wildly disproportionate attention compared to the urgency of strengthening the faith (to which this issue is most counter-productive) - two geographically adjoining dioceses could have diametrically opposite teachings on this point! ]

So four cardinals intervene with a series of questions asking the pope for clarification on footnote 351. The full text is here.

These strike me as fair questions. The cardinals are seeking a definitive, Magisterial answer to some people’s doubts — not answers in interviews, not private lectures, not “go listen to so-and-so.”

The reason a definitive answer is needed is precisely to prevent bishops in some places from running wild and doing whatever they want to the potential harm of souls. If someone in a state of mortal sin, not disposed to receive the Eucharist, receives the Eucharist anyway, that compounds the problem. It is a harm to both the individual who receives and the priest who knowingly distributes. A definitive clarification would, potentially, forestall this.

Moreover, if there has been genuine and legitimate doctrinal development, then that development needs to be spelled out in fairly precise terms. What is this development? How are we to understand it?
Only the pope has the authority to answer such questions. This is why the Church has a pope.

That Pope Francis has refused to answer these questions is a problem. It is tantamount to the pope saying, “I know there is confusion, I know people want it cleared up, but too bad. Figure it out yourself.”
Perhaps that is not an accurate representation of the pope’s thinking, but that’s what comes across. Confusion? Pshaw! Confusion upon your confusion!

And then, when the pope gives an interview attributing concerns to “legalism,” he comes across as condescending. [Mr. Alt was obviously too invested in being a Bergoglio apologist before this that he did not take note of the pope's repeated use of this word and related ones like rigidity and strictness to disparage Catholics who have always tried to keep both the letter and spirit of the Church's teachings.]

And now Fr. Spadaro has written another reminder that the questions have already been answered. Really? By whom? The pope? In what context? Are these answers definitive? Are they magisterial? [Spadaro was quoted to have said "The pope has already answered these questions in depth", to which the immediate logical retort is not just "Really? When?" but "Forget 'in depth' if that means simply all the casuistic circumlocutions and circumventions employed so far by Bergoglio and his attorneys for the defense. The DUBIA are only asking for one word (YES or NO) to answer each of the questions". It is the most abject situation when the pope cannot even do that because he has boxed himself in by his own equivocations which are nothing less than an evasion of the truth.]

Only the pope can speak with authority in answering these questions —not cardinals in interviews, not cardinals in private lectures, not theologians writing in journals, not bloggers on Patheos or One Vader Five.

And also, the Dean of the Rota gives a warning that the pope could strip Cardinal Burke and the other three of the cardinalate for their impertinence in making all this public and causing scandal.

Well, okay, perhaps the cardinals should not have made it public. Perhaps that was ill-advised. But stripping them of their red hats would be “most childish and unbecoming a successor of St. Peter,” to quote one individual commenting on the story on my Facebook page.

And because of all this, the impression many people have is that the pope wants confusion, likes confusion, does not wish to clear up confusion, and if there is confusion he must scoff at confusion. [And don't we all know it by now. That was implicit in his two-word exhortation to the faithful, "Haga lio!" Make a mess. Yet when he first said this four months into his papacy - and he has said it many times since then - no one seemed alarmed about it and many even praised it. As if it was not the primary duty of a pope, any pope, to prevent confusion in his flock but rather to provide clarity about the teachings of the Church. ]

No, the reason we have a pope is so that the pope can provide answers to questions that arise in the Church. Questions have arisen. For the good of the body, for the unity of the Church, the pope must answer the questions. Only the pope can do so with authority. That is why we have a pope.

I want to believe Amoris Laetitia is consistent with Church teaching, but if it is, why does the pope have such a difficult time clarifying that consistency?

Roma, loquere. [Even if his Latin may not be gramatically correct, I think Alt means, "Rome, speak!" as in the saying "Roma locustus est, causa finitas est" (Rome has spoken, the cause is closed).]

A MOST RELEVANT P.S.
With all due respect to Our Beloved Pope, has he ever really stopped to look at the traditional Seven Spiritual Works of Mercy? (No one could seriously consider his addition of an eighth work, spiritual as well as corporal, that has to do with caring for the environment), of which the first three are these:
ADMONISH THE SINNER.
INSTRUCT THE UNINFORMED.
COUNSEL THE DOUBTFUL. -
all of which he generally fails to do as popes ought to do and deliberately neglects specifically in refusing to answer the DUBIA.

December 2, 2016 headlines

PewSitter

The big bold headline above was accompanied by that now familiar picture of a scowling Mons. Pinto venting about the Four Cardinals and
their DUBIA...Instant icon to illustrate 'the face of Bergoglian fanaticism'


Canon212.com

It is not, of course, the New York Times proclaiming that headline - it's Ross Douthat on his blog.


The end of Catholic marriage

December 1, 2016

... Now that the election is over some additional interventions seem necessary to capture what’s happening in Roman Catholicism’s remarkable period of controversy.

My Sunday column talked a bit about the way in which varying interpretations of “Amoris Laetitia,” Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation on the family, have produced variations in official Catholic teaching on marriage from diocese to diocese, region to region – a “submerged schism,” to borrow a phrase from the Vatican-watcher Andrea Gagliarducci, which thanks to the astringent words of certain bishops is no longer even that submerged.

One reading of Pope Francis’s intentions is that this is roughly what he wanted – a decentralized, quasi-Anglican approach to questions where the church and the post-sexual revolution culture are in conflict, in which different parts of the Catholic world could experiment with different doctrinal pastoral approaches to confession and communion for the remarried-without-annulment.

But at the same time, he and his allies have consistently – if not yet magisterially – expressed their strong preference for the more liberal side of the debate, suggesting that if they imagine a decentralization of doctrinal pastoral practice, they also imagine it being temporary, with any differences ultimately resolved in favor of a reformed approach to divorce, remarriage and the Eucharist.

And what is that approach? From the beginning of this controversy there has been a stress, from Cardinal Walter Kasper and then from others, on the idea that the reform being proposed is modest, limited, confined to a small group of remarried Catholics, and thus in no way a public sign that the church no longer believes marriages indissoluble in general.

More recently, among those Catholics proposing a hermeneutic of continuity between “Amoris” and the prior papal documents that it kinda-sorta-maybe contradicts, this stress on the rarity of what the reformers have in mind, the extremities involved, has become crucial to the case for continuity. For instance Rocco Buttiglione, an ally of John Paul II and now a prominent defender of Pope Francis, recently responded to the four conservative cardinals questioning “Amoris” with the following comments:

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The first question the eminent cardinals ask, is whether it is in some cases acceptable for absolution to be granted to people who despite being tied down by a previous marriage, live more uxorio, engaging in sexual intercourse.

It seems to me, that the response should be affirmative given what is written in “Amoris Laetitia” and what is stated in the general principles of moral theology. A clear distinction needs to be made between the act, which constitutes a grave sin, and the agent, who may find themselves bound by circumstances that mitigate their responsibility for the act or in some cases may even eliminate it completely.

Consider, for example, the case of a woman who is completely financially and mentally dependent on someone and is forced to have sexual intercourse against her will. Sadly, such cases are not just theory but a bitter reality, witnessed more often than one would imagine. What is lacking here are the subjective conditions for sin (full knowledge and deliberate consent). The act is still evil but it does not belong (not entirely anyway) to the person. In criminal law terms, we are not in the realm of the theory of crime (whether an act is good or bad) but of the theory of liability and subjective extenuating circumstances.

This does not mean unmarried people can legitimately engage in sexual activity. Such activity is illegitimate. People can (in some cases) fall into non-mortal but venial sin if full knowledge and deliberate consent are lacking. But, one could argue, is it not necessary for a person to have the intention of never sinning again in order to receive absolution? It certainly is necessary. The penitent must want to end their irregular situation and commit to acts that will allow them to actually do so in practice. However, this person may not be able to achieve this detachment and regain self- ownership immediately …

---

So here we have Buttiglione asking us to imagine a painful and complicated case, a second marriage (though of course it need not be a civil marriage; the same logic might apply to cohabitation or a same-sex relationship or a polygamous union or even — especially? — to a prostitute) defined by cruelty and domination, in which the psychological pressure is such that a prudent confessor might regard an imperfect contrition, a halting desire for amendment and escape, as sufficient to grant absolution and distribute the body and blood of Christ.

Such cases certainly exist, and let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that they might provide a possible point of synthesis between the church’s traditional teaching on mortal sin, confession and communion and the new rhetoric of “accompaniment” for divorced and remarried Catholics – an example of how it might be licit for someone in the process of trying to escape from a toxic situation to receive communion along the way, even though their promise of amendment is inherently infirm; an instance where the current pontiff’s stress on gray areas might be consonant with the teaching of his predecessors; a case where John Paul II’s distinction between “sincere repentance” and “the judgement of the intellect concerning the future” might be plausibly applied.

Stipulate all of that, for argument’s sake. (I can hear certain true rigorists clearing their throats; later, gentlemen.) But then turn your eyes to the teaching document recently produced by San Diego’s bishop, the Francis-appointed, beloved-of-progressives Robert McElroy, following a diocesan synod convened to discuss the implementation of “Amoris.” The whole thing is worth reading, but here are some excerpts where Bishop McElroy is writing 0n (theoretically) the same moral issues as Buttiglione:

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… many Catholics who have been divorced and remarried conclude for a variety of legitimate reasons — many of them arising out of caring concern for the effects that an annulment process might have on the feelings of adult children or former spouses — that they cannot initiate the annulment process. What is their status in the Church?

… no abstract rule can embody the many complexities of the circumstances, intentions, levels of understanding and maturity which originally surrounded the action of a man or woman in entering their first marriage, or which surround the new moral obligations to a spouse or children which have already been produced by a second marriage. Thus, Pope Francis rejects the validity of any blanket assertion that “all those in any (second marriage without benefit of annulment) are living in a state of mortal sin and deprived of sanctifying grace.”

This does not mean that there is not a deep level of contradiction in the life of Catholics who are divorced and remarried, as the Lord himself noted in the Gospel of Matthew. But Pope Francis explains that even in the face of substantial contradictions between the Gospel and the existential life of a disciple, the inexorable logic of divine grace[???] seeks ever more progressive reintegration into the full life of the Church … [The logic of divine mercy, upon which man hopes for divine grace if he is truly repentant for his sins, is MOST CERTAINLY NOT to seek 'ever more progressive reintegration into the life of the Church', a very mundane if apparently ecclesiastical consideration, but to is to make man ever more vigilant against offending God habitually by sin in order that when the Last Judgment comes, he may be judged worthy of eternal salvation. McElroy's language betrays how far he has strayed from the essential doctrines of the faith, but then, his concern for 'ever more progressive reintegration into the life of the Church' simply echoes the familiar and misguided 'pastoral' language of Jorge Bergoglio. Yes, misguided, because it cannot be the Holy Spirit who is leading him down the proverbial primrose path to anti-Catholicism.]

… In conversation with a priest, the believer with humility, discretion, and love for the Church and its teachings seeks to reflect upon their level of responsibility for the failure of the first marriage, their care and love for the children of that marriage, the moral obligations which have arisen in their new marriage, and possible harm which their returning to the sacraments might have by undermining the indissolubility of marriage.

It is important to underscore that the role of the priest is one of accompaniment, meant to inform the conscience of the discerner on principles of Catholic faith. The priest is not to make decisions for the believer, for as Pope Francis emphasizes … the Church is “called to form consciences, not to replace them.”

… Some Catholics engaging in this process of discernment will conclude that God is calling them to return to full participation in the life of the Church and the Eucharist. [And what's to stop every couple called on to such 'discernment' from saying 'Yes, that's exactly what God is telling us', in which they, of course, mistake their own will and desire for 'God'? This is also called more familiarly by progressives and all who belong to the me-generations, 'the primacy of conscience. Others will conclude that they should wait, or that their return would hurt others.

In pointing to the pathway of conscience for the divorced and remarried, Pope Francis is not enlisting an element of the Christian moral life which is exceptional. For the realm of conscience is precisely where the Christian disciple is called to discern every important moral decision that he or she makes. [But always in the light of God's absolute moral laws, and not the 'primacy' of subjective conscience.]

---

You will notice a few things about McElroy’s teaching, as opposed to Buttiglione’s analysis. The first is that the language is completely different: Nothing gets called a “grave sin” or an “evil” or even “illegitimate” by the bishop; every tension and contradiction is resolved through gradual but inexorable processes that resemble a conversation rather than a confession. (Indeed, the word “confession” appears nowhere in the entire document; the word “sin” appears only in the quotation from Pope Francis suggesting when the term does not necessarily apply.)

The second is that the priest’s sacramental role and responsibility diminishes dramatically. There is no sense that a confessor might have an active role himself in deciding whether to absolve a sinner, or that a priest might have some obligation (as indeed the priest does under canon law, which San Diego’s priests are effectively being instructed by their bishop to ignore) to protect believers from sacrilege and the eucharist from profanement.

Instead the priest becomes basically a counselor, there to help validate the individual Catholic in a decision that only he or she can make, with no supernatural power or responsibilities of his own.

The third is that unlike in Buttiglione’s unhappy example, the cases being considered by the bishop do not seem extreme or (as he says) “exceptional” in the slightest. Instead, McElroy gives every evidence that he’s talking about the most stable and happy and high-functioning of second marriages, with no hint that abuse or emotional blackmail any other extremity is involved; the only factor constraining the people he’s addressing from taking steps that Catholic teaching requires are the “moral obligations” incurred by the new marriage and the desire not to wound others by going through the annulment process.

Which is why, finally, McElroy seems to take for granted that nobody in such a second marriage would ever consider permanently leaving it, or permanently living as brother and sister, or permanently refraining from receiving communion.

Instead, the decision to receive the body of Christ while living conjugally with someone who is not, from the church’s perspective, your true wife or husband is treated as a question of when, not if — do it now if you feel ready, wait a little longer if it might hurt your kids or your ex-spouse or you feel like have some spiritual maturing left to do.

This is a teaching on marriage that might be summarized as follows: Divorce is unfortunate, second marriages are not always ideal, and so the path back to communion runs through a mature weighing-out of everyone’s feelings — the feelings of your former spouse and any kids you may have had together, the feelings of your new spouse and possible children, and your own subjective sense of what God thinks about it all.

The objective aspects of Catholic teaching on marriage — the supernatural reality of the first marriage, the metaphysical reality of sin and absolution, the sacramental reality of the eucharist itself — do not just recede; they essentially disappear.

Which means that is not at all a vision under which a small group of remarried Catholics in psychologically difficult situations might receive communion discreetly while they seek to sort those situations out. It is, in fact, by implication almost the reverse: The only people who might feel unready for communion under Bishop McElroy’s vision of spiritual maturation are Catholics whose lives are particularly chaotic and messed-up, who don’t feel sure at all about where they stand with God, to say nothing of their kids and ex-spouses or lovers or boyfriends or whomever.

Is Sonia the prostitute from Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” ready for communion in the diocese of San Diego? Maybe not; maybe she should wait a while. But the respectable divorced father of three who gets along well enough with his ex-wife and has worked through all his issues in therapy can feel comfortable receiving ahead of her. This is not communion for the weak; it is communion for the stable and solid and respectable.

Let me make a personal aside, since I don’t mean to sound overly flippant about the virtues of respectability and stability. I am the child and grandchild of divorced couples; I know well the emotional complexities involved in getting to a stable place where people can manage the holidays, deal with blended families, behave decently to one another, etc.

Indeed to Bishop McElroy’s first point, I know very well the emotional costs of the annulment process for the people touched by it, the extent to which the church’s requirements can seem to add burdens to people already going through a lot, and also the extent to which an annulment process that errs on the side of mercy can itself seem like a way in which the church doesn’t take the first marriage’s possible reality as seriously as it should.

But let’s be clear: The way out of all these difficulties proposed by the bishop of San Diego is a way out of the traditional Catholic understanding of marriage, period.

Drop the mention of annulments and the pro forma nod to “indissolubility,” replace “priest” with “pastor,” and there is nothing in his language that couldn’t be reproduced by a Protestant church dealing with the same issues and seeking to reintegrate its remarried members to fellowship and the Lord’s table.

It is a plausible approach if you don’t believe what Catholics are supposed to believe about the sacraments; it is perhaps well-suited to Christian traditions that do not. It is reasonable-sounding response to modern realities; so is Episcopalianism.

But it is not an approach that treats Christian marriage as actually indissoluble, actually real in a way that transcends the subjective experiences of the spouses, and a Catholicism that takes this approach can claim to believe in its historic teaching on marriage only in the most vaporous of ways — which is to say, not.

At prior points in the Francis-era Catholic controversies I have noted with a certain alarm that the “liberal” side and the “conservative” side don’t seem to have much of a theological language in common; we argue past each other because we almost seem to belong to different Christian communities, with different baseline assumptions all the way down to the question of who Jesus actually was.

But what is striking about reading Buttiglione and McElroy back-to-back is that here we have two supporters of Pope Francis who seem to be speaking different religious languages — Buttiglione trying to interpret “Amoris” in consonance with older Catholic ideas and categories, the bishop of San Diego essentially acting as those those ideas and categories have been superseded; Buttiglione envisioning a change that affects a few; the bishop of San Diego envisioning one that’s clearly for the many; Buttiglione laboring to treat “Amoris” as a modest development of doctrine; the bishop of San Diego entirely unconcerned with potential contradiction with the Catholicism of the ancient and very recent past.

Perhaps both men’s readings of Francis’s intentions are plausible; certainly the pope’s public commentary on marriage is now extensive enough to admit of multiple interpretations, modest and sweeping and everywhere in between.

But you will note that only one of these men is a bishop, a public teacher of the faith, a Francis appointee. I am uncertain of the wisdom of the dubia [Does Douthat question the wisdom of presenting the DUBIA to the pope, or the wisdon of the DUBIA THEMSELVES???] offered by the four conservative cardinals, fearful (unlike certain heighten-the-contradictions traditionalists) of what might happen in the church if the pope actually clarified his teaching and intentions. [But we can perhaps safely predict he won't - ever. If he answered the DUBIA in the only possible Catholic way, he would have to correct Chapter 8 of AL and rewrite it, i.e., admit he was in error. But if he answered the DUBIA honestly - YES, NO, NO, NO, NO - in accordance with everything he has ever said and done related to these questions, then he would be self-condemning himself as heretical on these particular areas of doctrine. Which is why he gave himself all that wiggle room in AL, to begin with, that would allow him to insist he has not said anything heretical.]

But if Pope Francis does not mean his apostolic exhortation to be implemented along the sweeping, come-all-eventually-back-to-communion lines proposed by Bishop McElroy, he should say so, and soon. Because in the diocese of San Diego, there may be something called the sacrament of matrimony, but the church itself[CORRECTION: the church of Bergoglio, not the Church of Chrst] plainly does not believe in Catholic marriage anymore.

started December by posting this citation from Benedict XVI's encyclical, Caritas in veritate, a citation that restates the primacy of Truth in the teachings of the Church and the essential importance of ensuring that charity must always be practised in the light of truth. This citation, along with continuing references to John Paul II's Veritatis splendor, in every thoughtful critique of the untruths, half-truths and distortions of truth found in Chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia, underlies three essays TCT offers vis-a-vis AL and the fundamental DUBIA it raises...

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Truth in charity
by BENEDICT XVI
From Caritas in veritate, 2009

I am aware of the ways in which charity has been and continues to be misconstrued and emptied of meaning, with the consequent risk of being misinterpreted, detached from ethical living and, in any event, undervalued.

In the social, juridical, cultural, political and economic fields — the contexts, in other words, that are most exposed to this danger — it is easily dismissed as irrelevant for interpreting and giving direction to moral responsibility.

Hence the need to link charity with truth not only in the sequence, pointed out by Saint Paul, of veritas in caritate (Eph 4:15), but also in the inverse and complementary sequence of caritas in veritate.

Truth needs to be sought, found and expressed within the “economy” of charity, but charity in its turn needs to be understood, confirmed and practised in the light of truth.

In this way, not only do we do a service to charity enlightened by truth, but we also help give credibility to truth, demonstrating its persuasive and authenticating power in the practical setting of social living.

This is a matter of no small account today, in a social and cultural context which relativizes truth, often paying little heed to it and showing increasing reluctance to acknowledge its existence.

Through this close link with truth, charity can be recognized as an authentic expression of humanity and as an element of fundamental importance in human relations, including those of a public nature.

Only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived. Truth is the light that gives meaning and value to charity.

That light is both the light of reason and the light of faith, through which the intellect attains to the natural and supernatural truth of charity: it grasps its meaning as gift, acceptance, and communion.

Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way.

In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. It falls prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word “love” is abused and distorted, to the point where it comes to mean the opposite.

Truth frees charity from the constraints of an emotionalism that deprives it of relational and social content, and of a fideism that deprives it of human and universal breathing-space.

In the truth, charity reflects the personal yet public dimension of faith in the God of the Bible, who is both Agápe and Lógos: Charity and Truth, Love and Word.

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The dangerous road of papal silence
by Fr. Mark A. Pilon

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2016

The letter of the four Cardinals to Pope Francis, and the decision to go public with this document certainly constitute a stunning affair in the history of the Church. When has anything like this ever taken place?

There’s the sad history of Ignaz Von Dollinger, which eventually led to his excommunication, but Dollinger was simply a priest-historian, and no Cardinals ever joined his challenge to Vatican I’s solemn teaching on papal infallibility.

This present event is a dramatic challenge to Pope Francis who, ironically, has several times called for a shaking up of the Church. The Cardinals are all well respected and strong supporters of the papal primacy and the papal office of teaching. Their letter to the pope, copy-furnished the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is a sincere effort to gain some clarity on positions advanced in Amoris Laetitia.

For their troubles, the head of the Roman Rota has openly threatened them with the loss of their status as Cardinals. [This has since been corrected by the Spanish website that originally reported it, that, in fact, what Mons. Pinto said was that this pope could well take away the cardinalate from the FOUR CAARDINALS but that he would not do so because he is not like 'popes in other times'. It does not,however, mitigate, the other statements he made in the same interview excoriating the Four Cardinals and their DUBIA in a diatribe inflamed by venom against opponents of this pope and its corollary, a near-demoniacal fanaticism that motivates the most outspoken Bergoglidolators. A fanaticism illustrated by Mons. Pinto's now familiar photograph that I have called the instant icon representing the face of Bergoglian fanaticism.]

It’s worth noting that only one of the five questions posed for clarification by the Cardinals had to do with admitting divorced and civilly remarried Catholics to the Eucharist. [Because this is merely the take-off point, being the concrete illustration of how this pope in AL appears to contravene underlying and essential truths of the faith as presented in the other four DUBIA.]

In a way, [Not just 'in a way', but substantially and essentially] the other four questions point to even more significant problems relating to the existence of intrinsically evil acts, the objective situation of grave habitual sin, and the critically important formation of an objectively true conscience.

The five dubia were very carefully and succinctly written and followed the traditional method of presentation of such questions to the Holy See.

They ask the pope to explain how certain statements in AL were to be understood in the light of the authoritative teachings of his predecessors as found in Familiaris Consortio 84 (reaffirmed in Reconciliatio et Paenitentia 34, and Sacramentum Caritatis 29 (dubium 1); Veritatis Splendor 79 (dubium 2); (Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts (dubium 3); Veritatis Splendor 81 (dubium 4); Veritatis Splendor 56 (dubium 5). These texts are foundational for the Church’s teaching on moral principles, for an upright confessional practice, and for sacramental discipline.

The letter’s authors insist that their only intention is to remove the confusion: “Theologians and scholars have proposed interpretations that are not only divergent, but also conflicting. . .thereby provoking uncertainty, confusion and disorientation among many of the faithful.”

Cardinal Burke, in an interview with the National Catholic Register, stated that they chose to go public only after they learned that the pope had decided not to respond, which decision is a stunning response from the Chair of Peter. One might almost call it reckless, given the very real potential for dividing the Church.

Indeed, Cardinal Burke addressed this possibility in the interview when he stated that the letter “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.”

Pope Francis already had an agenda for “reshaping” the Church in certain areas of discipline when he came into office, as seems clear from the speed with which he announced the Synod on the Family. It was a perplexing event. His predecessor, Saint John Paul II, had convoked a Synod on the same topic and had issued a brilliant exhortation, Familiaris Consortio.

It was even more telling that little in the preparatory documents, or in the exhortation following the Synod, seemed to have much reference to that earlier exhortation. In retrospect, that Francis had it in mind to alter certain determinations of that earlier Synod and John Paul II’s exhortation appears all but certain.

[Hindsight certainly provides us with more evidence, but this was clear from the beginning. If he did not mean to change John Paul II's 'last word' on the question at all, he had no reason to convoke two synods simply to confirm it. Of course, majority of the Synod Fathers did uphold John Paul II, but this pope simply overrode their majority vote to insist on his own 'last word'.

There is absolutely no statement or action Bergoglio has taken about this question to ever belie that his intention was always to impose on the universal Church the 'communion for everyone' policy (regardless of state of grace or religion) he unilaterally adopted in Buenos Aires. But he was going to do it gradually - starting with the RCDs and unmarried cohabitators, going on next to actively practising homosexuals, and eventually to anyone and everyone who presents himself to receive the Body and Blood of Christ. Including, one supposes (as Fr Hunwicke periodically reminds us), priests who have abused minors, but the pope does not mention them at all because to do so would be politically incorrect.]

Now, it is not only Catholic scholars like the eminent philosopher Robert Spaemann who in 2015 recognized that “This pope is one of the most autocratic [popes] that we have had in a long time.”

In a recent Reuters article, “Pope Francis the manager – surprising, secretive, shrewd,” Philip Pulella argues that Pope Francis, whom he admires and strongly supports, is more like an autocrat than a typical, saintly pontiff.

For instance, Puella says “Francis likes to break rules and then change them once the shock has died down.” And that “after he was elected, he appointed trusted people to lower or mid-level positions in Vatican departments, where they can be his eyes and ears.”

Looking back, the pope’s invitation to Cardinal Kasper to speak to the bishops months before the first Synod on the Family seems almost certainly now to have been a bit of management. [It was blatant shameless management, an open manipulation which would be continued by himself and his Synod minions throughout the 2 synodal assemblies that followed.]

The pope was behind the proposed change from the beginning and was determined to provide access to the sacraments by the divorced and remarried, even if the Synod Fathers did not support it – which they didn’t.

Pope Francis certainly had no mandate from the Synod Fathers to make such a drastic alteration in the Church’s sacramental discipline. [In a way he did have their mandate, of sorts: When the Final Relatio of the 2015 Synod pointedly omitted the three operative statements in Familiaris consortio 84 that constituted John Paul II's 'last word' on communion for unqualified RCDs. No one has yet bothered to explain the rationale for this out-and-out cowardice on the part of the synodal fathers who opposed the Bergoglio-Kasper line, a cowardice that appears to have been motivated only by a desire to compromise. To what end other than to give Bergoglio a reason he can cite for why he decided as he did in AL? They did not need to compromise because they had the clear 2/3 majority, but they chose to.]

Quite the opposite, which should have suggested he would be entering dangerous waters should he choose to do so. But he did, nonetheless, and has since tried to portray his critics as fundamentalist, legalistic, and rigid Catholics, who are troubled and are troubling the Church.

The upshot of all this, as Australian Cardinal George Pell remarked in a lecture in London earlier this week, is that “a number of regularly worshipping Catholics” are “unnerved by the turn of events.” More seriously, there is now widespread confusion about the role of conscience in Catholic moral thought. [There goes that inappropriate word 'confusion' again! Far from creating 'confusion', Bergoglio has unequivocally and sharply polarized Catholics into two irreconcilable camps: the progressivists and CINOs who think like him and would remake Caatholic doctrine in their image and likeness, and whom he has reinforced in their heterodoxy and borderline heresy, against orthodox Catholics who uphold and defend the deposit of faith as the Church has done for more than two millennia until on March 13, 2013, an anti-Catholic pope took over the reins of the institutional church.]

Well, now four cautious and conscientious churchmen openly sought a solution to all this turmoil. Cardinal Burke suggested what might follow if the pope remains silent: “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.”

This really would be quite awful, forcing Church leaders, priests, and lay people into taking sides – a kind of practical schism.[It already exists, and many people have already taken sides, in a polarization that is only bound to escalate. But this pope, who has done nothing but sow disunity, pretends that all he has to do is say it and there will be unity, which he has made impossible.]

Let’s pray it never comes to this. But to avoid such divisions and worse, Pope Francis will now have to do something.

Whose side are we on?
by David Carlin

DECEMBER 2, 2016

If you approve of bank robbery, you won’t be able to condemn the act of shoplifting candy bars from a convenience store. I mean, you won’t be able to do this if you are to be logically consistent. If you approve of a greater evil, you can’t logically condemn lesser evils of the same genus.

Likewise, if you approve of murder you cannot, if you wish to retain your reputation for logical consistency, condemn assault and battery.

Again, if you are a Catholic who approves of adultery, you cannot very well condemn contraception and fornication.

But in the now famous (perhaps I should say notorious?) Chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis seems to approve of what has hitherto been regarded by the Catholic Church as adultery. He asserts – or at least he certainly seems to assert – that in certain circumstances a divorced-and-remarried Catholic should be allowed to consider his/her second marriage a true marriage. In other words, this divorced and remarried Catholic should be free to have sinless sexual relations with his/her spouse and should be free to receive Communion.

This appears to contradict the plain words of Jesus himself, who said (unless the Gospels misreport him) that a married person who marries again while his/her first spouse is living commits adultery. Pope Francis, then, appears to be condoning in certain circumstances what Jesus himself calls adultery. And if the pope does this, how can he then not also condone (in certain circumstances) contraception and fornication?

In short, doesn’t the pope’s blessing of adultery in certain circumstances imply the collapse of almost the entire structure of Catholic sexual morality? Apart from rape and child molestation, what sexual taboos would remain? And won’t the priest or ex-priest who molested boys be able to argue that that kind of thing is allowable “in certain circumstances”?

As for homosexual sodomy, the question of whether or not to condemn it would depend on whether it is more or less a sin than adultery is. If less, then the pope’s permission of adultery in certain circumstances would also apply to homosexual behavior in certain circumstances. If more, then I suppose Catholics could still condemn homosexual conduct.

But in reality, how could they do this if the whole structure of Catholic sexual morality had collapsed? If adultery and fornication deserve approval, who except a genuine homophobe would have the heart to disapprove of homosexual sodomy?

You could still condemn abortion. For abortion, being homicide, is a worse sin than adultery. In the real world, however, everybody who approves of sexual freedom also approves of adultery. Catholics, beginning with popes and bishops, could still condemn abortion, but their hearts wouldn’t be in it. De facto, they would approve of it.

A defender of Chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia might respond to what I have just said by pointing out that the pope is urging us to tolerate second marriages only in very rare and very narrow circumstances. [Oblivious to the fact that any exceptions to the validity of any rule, regulation or law is, in fact, the first step down the slippery slope of totally rejecting that rule, regulation or law.] He does not intend to open the door to the current secular ideal of nearly limitless sexual freedom. True enough.

Likewise, the people who didn’t repair the leak in the dike didn’t intend to have the dike collapse and the land behind the dike flooded by seawater. After all, it was such a big dike and such a small leak. What harm could be done?

Human beings, and I include Catholics in that category, are rational animals. This doesn’t mean we are infallible; it doesn’t even mean that we are very smart. But we tend to be consistent, at least in the long run. Once we adopt the principle, for instance, that “all men are created equal,” it will sooner or later dawn on us that we’ll have to get rid of slavery.

Likewise, once Catholics [all Catholics, one must stipulate, because progressivist Catholics already agree with the pope] agree with the pope that Jesus was in error when he expressed his absolutist views about the indissolubility of marriage, the whole structure of Catholic sexual morality will sooner or later collapse.

And not just sexual morality. The whole structure of Catholicism will collapse. For if Jesus, who (we should remember) was no minor authority figure in the history of the Church, was wrong about marriage, who knows how many other things he was wrong about? And if Jesus was wrong, it is likely St. Paul and other New Testament writers were wrong. And if Jesus and Paul were wrong, who can be confident in the teachings of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church? One small leak in the dike.

Now I don’t write all this as an ultra-conservative. Not at all. If I were able to write the Church’s law regarding marriage and sex, I’d allow everybody at least one divorce; for good people often make big mistakes, especially when young. And I’d have a tolerant attitude toward fornication and unmarried cohabitation, and I’d be only mildly censorious toward an occasional adultery. And if, nearly 2,000 years ago, Jesus had asked my advice, I would have recommended that he adopt my views, inspired as they are by the great moral wisdom of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

For better or worse, however, the Catholic Church is not founded on the wisdom of the very enlightened and progressive present day. It is founded instead on what seems to a truly modern mind to be the provincial “wisdom” of an itinerant Palestinian preacher of the first century – a preacher we Catholics believe to be the all-perfect God incarnate. At least we say we believe this.

If we really believe it, and if a disagreement opens up between Jesus and the pope on the question of the indissolubility of marriage, then, much though it grieves us to separate ourselves from such a good man as Pope Francis, we have no choice but to take the side of Jesus in this dispute.

If we don’t, the dike will collapse.

Is the Gospel opposed to the Law?
by Eduardo J. Echeverria

DECEMBER 1, 2016

Pope Francis regularly objects to views he perceives as dogmatic or rigid, and – he claims – expressive of legalism, self-righteousness, or hypocrisy.

For instance, in his concluding address at the 2015 Ordinary Synod on the Family, he said,

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“The Synod experience also made us better realize that the true defenders of doctrine are not those who uphold its letter, but its spirit; not ideas but people; not formulae but the gratuitousness of God’s love and forgiveness.”

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Here we find a set of contrasts: letter vs. spirit, ideas vs. people, and formulae vs. love and forgiveness. What does he mean by these contrasts? He doesn’t say.

But throughout his pontificate, Francis has criticized the legalist, as he understands him, with such statements as this:“Their hearts, closed to God’s truth, clutch only at the truth of the Law, taking it by ‘the letter’.”

“The path that Jesus teaches us [is] totally opposite to that of the doctors of law. And it’s [the] path from love and justice that leads to God. Instead, the other path, of being attached only to the laws, to the letter of the laws, leads to closure, leads to egoism [self-righteousness].The path that leads from love to knowledge and discernment, to total fulfillment, leads to holiness, salvation and the encounter with Jesus.”

These statements suggest a loosening by Jesus, for example, of the Moral Law’s sexual commands. Yet in Our Lord’s discussion on divorce, remarriage, and adultery with the Pharisees (Mk 10:2-12; Matt 19:3-12), who were intent on keeping remaining loopholes, Jesus closed them in the Law’s sexual commands by further “interiorizing their demands and by bringing out their fullest meaning.” (John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor §15). Jesus’s teaching on the adultery of desire and the indissolubility of marriage leave us with few if any loopholes, much less any room for license.

Thus, the general problem with Francis’s statements is that they seem to set up an opposition between the Gospel and the moral law. But God’s moral law proposes what is good for us in living life in Christ. “The moral law is the work of divine Wisdom,” states the Catechism of the Catholic Church.(§1950)

Pope Francis has unfortunately, on multiple occasions, obscured the vital point that the law is, as St. Paul teaches, holy, just, and good (Rom 7:12), bearing an inherent connection to salvation.

Indeed, the Catechism’s section on the Ten Commandments has 500 paragraphs about God’s law and its inner connection to salvation. Whatever must be said about the moral law and salvation, at the very least it must be clearly stated that we are deceived if we think that we can inherit God’s kingdom without keeping the divine commandments. (1 Cor 5:9-11; Gal 5:16-26)

Furthermore, the pope’s overall emphasis on legalism is such that he never addresses the antithesis of legalism, namely, antinomianism (from Greek anti, against + nomos, law). And we surely live in age of antinomianism, of moral subjectivism, emotivism, relativism, situation ethics.

Moreover, Francis never actually addresses the question: if the moral law is good, which he surely believes it is, then, what is its place in the Christian life?

One thing is clear, as Lutheran theologian David Yeago rightly says, “What one cannot find in St. Paul is any suggestion that grace and the Gospel stand over and against the law as the abrogation of God’s will that we be truly righteous and holy.”

Consider the Pauline principle of 2 Cor 3:6, “for the letter kills, but the Spirit produces life.” Is this what Francis is alluding to in his contrast of letter vs. spirit? He doesn’t say. Briefly, the Pauline principle contrasts letter and Spirit. Significantly, as Herman Ridderbos correctly states, “The antithesis between the law and the Spirit is. . .not situated in the fact that the Spirit places himself over against the content and demands of the law.”

That interpretation is precisely what is suggested by the contrast that Pope Francis draws between “letter and spirit,” namely, that he places the spirit “over and against the content and demands of the moral law.” And one can be excused for thinking this since he states this contrast in the context of claiming that the “true defenders of doctrine are not those who uphold its letter, but its spirit.”

Furthermore, the main point of this Pauline principle is that the letter or law kills because man, given his sinfulness, indeed his enslavement to sin, lacks power to keep the precepts of the law. Thus, the law itself is unable to bring about the obedience of vital faith in sinners. Only the Spirit can bring about this living faith in us.

Moreover, the letter kills, says Victor P. Furnish, “because it enslaves one to the presumption that righteousness inheres in one’s doing of the law, when it is actually the case that true righteousness comes only as a gift from God.”

Perhaps this, too, is what Francis has in mind with the other contrast he draws, “formulae vs. righteousness.” Righteousness doesn’t come from an increased rigor in formulaically obeying the commandments. Still, Jesus demands (see Matt 5:20) a “surplus, not a deficit of righteousness,” as Joseph Ratzinger rightly says.

Thus, the grace of the Holy Spirit is the effective agent who “gives life” by changing the human heart, a change that is given through faith in Christ, enabling us to keep the law out of an interior freedom that is expressed in the obedience of faith.

Yes, for St. Paul, the law declares God’s will. The moral law retains its meaning as, in St. Paul’s words, “holy law,” and as “holy and just and good” (Rom 7:12), and hence no disparagement of the moral law is intended or implied even in his sternest critique of legalism (Gal 5).

Respectfully, one desires a similar clarity on Pope Francis’s part. [Alas for us: Clarity, your name was never Jorge Bergoglio!]

In Italy, Riccardo Cascioli editorializes against the apparent wave of aggression in the Italian directed against the Four Cardinals by secular eminences in the Bergoglio's supposed 'church of mercy' (never mind how merciless the pope and his minions are towards anyone who dares think differently from their worldview):

The intolerable aggression
against the Four Cardinals
by Riccardo Cascioli
Translated from

December 1, 2016

They have been dismissed as 'senile old men', four cardinals isolated from the rest of the world, remnants of a Church that has been superseded, who only see the rigidity of doctrine and do not understand that mercy must be part of life. In short, that they represent 'discards' of the Church, marginal appendices not worthy of even being answered Yes or No.

And yet, the critics must have a great fear of them since for days now, we have been witnessing a crescendo of insults and heavy accusations that constitute a true and proper media lynching, against Cardinals Walter Brandmueller, Raymond Burke, Carlo Caffarra and Joachim Meisner, for having made public after two months the five DUBIA they sent in a formal letter back in September to Pope Francis regarding the main points that he needs to clarify about his apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia.

The campaign against the Four Cardinals has reached calls for them to resign from the College of Cardinals, or suggesting that the pope take away their cardinalatial rank.

Their antagonists have been very diverse: bishops who have personal accounts to settle with one or all of the four, ex-philosophers who reject the principle of non-contradiction, cardinal friends of the pope who despite their age have not abandoned their revolutionary dreams, intellectuals and journalists who consider themselves 'guardians of the [Francis] revolution', and [sui generis] the currently inevitable Fr. Antonio Spadaro, editor of La Civilta Cattolica, and the true 'eminence grise' of this pontificate, such that in Rome, he is being called 'Vice pope' [And what say you, 1) Cardinal Maradiaga who used to have the latter appelation, and 2)Mons. Fernandez back in Argentina, since physical proximity in this case appears to trump your decades of being Jorge Bergoglio's one-man brain trust?][/DIM]

Spadaro, moreover, like some Web-obsessed adolescent, has become a protagonist of stunts on the social networks which leave us flabbergasted: first with a tweet likening Cardinal Burke (and the three others) to 'witless worms' from a Lord of the Rings allusion (a tweet he deleted after a few hours [but which, Cascioli misses to add, he defended days later, claiming he was referring to some persons who had replied to his tweet - he did not think of that defense at the time he deleted the tweet] . But then he returned to launch offensive tweets against the Four Cardinals from an account called Habla Francisco (Francis speaks) which, it has since been discovered, links to Fr. Spadaro's e-mail address at Civilta. [Note the presumption in the title for Spadaro's alternate Twitter account!]

There is also the other inevitable, Alberto Melloni, reference point of the School of Bologna that has been working for decades for a reform of the Church based on the 'spirit of Vatican II'.

The detractors of the Four Cardinals constitute a true and proper tribunal worthy of the Inquisition who by striking out at the caridnals, intend to intimidate whoever has the intention to express even the simplest questions about this Pontificate, let alone articulate any misgivings.

It is a troubling attitude, a defense of the pope that is all the more dubious because it comes from those who openly opposed Francis's predecessors. And all because they asked five simple questions to clarify ambiguous propositions made in Amoris laetitia which have not surprisingly given rise to opposing and irreconcilable positions.

But it must be remembered that DUBIA constitute an instrument that is frequently used in communications between bishops and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [and other Vatican agencies] and through the CDF, to the Pope.

The novelty in this case was that the Four Cardinals went public with their letter and the DUBIA, after two months of waiting in vain for a reply, which the Four Cardinals legitimately interpreted as an invitation to pursue the discussion.

But Melloni calls it "a subtly subversive act, part of a potentially devastating game, with unknown masterminds, that is being played as if we were in the Middle Ages".

In another interview, Melloni says it is 'a subversive act' because to pose the questions 'means putting the pope under accusation, which is a method of the Inquisition'. Unblieveable! That asking legitimate questions has become a subversive activity, likened to the Inquisition!

And what about the 'unknown masterminds' - vague accusations evoking imaginary scenarios to give the impression of some conspiracy that must be confronted decisively. In fact, Melloni continues by saying: "Whoever carries out attacks like this... is someone who intends to divide the Church... which in canon law, is punishable".

So they are criminal because they want to divide the Church. It does not matter that the reality is the exact opposite: The motivation to address the DUBIA to the pope arose precisely from the fact that there is a division in the Church which was made very clear with the opposing interpretations of Amoris laetitia.

There is truly an odor of Maoism in the Church, replete with rumors of analogous Red Guards and a revolutionary avant-garde. All that's missing are the re-education camps. [Not missing, because these would be the seminaries taking the Bergoglian line, and all those endless convocations of priests and bishops at the Bergoglio Vatican for appropriate indoctrination in Bergoglianism.]

Or maybe not, because it seems that such 're-education camps' already exist, at least according to Melloni. In fact, this explains why this pope did not use is vaunted mercy in the case of Mons. Lucio Vallejo Balda – who is serving time in the Vatican prison for his role in the Bergoglio Vatileaks - when the pope has called on all the governments of the world to extend legal clemency to all their prisoners.

"At the end of the Year of Mercy," Melloni says, "one understands why [Vallejo Balda has not received Bergoglian clemency]: Pope Francis does not see in his sentencing a legal penalty but rather a pedagogical gesture for his opponents". In short, punish one in order to educate a hundred.

Which is a truly troubling interpretation, especially if one considers how many today - who are springing to the defense of the pope simply because of doctrinal questions that are legitimately raised and therefore 'normal' in the life of the Church - were those who openly opposed this pope's predecessors. Today, they see in this pope the possibility of cancelling what Paul VI and John Paul II taught about the family.

Paul VI's encyclical Humanae vitae and John Paul II's apostolic exhortation Familiaris consortio have been the bullseye for some European episcopates for some time (Austria, Germany, Belgium and Switzerland), which was evident in the two recent 'family synods'.

Who among them was scandalized when the late Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini wrote clearly and roundly (in the interview-book Conversazioni notturne a Gerusalemme) that HV had produced 'a grave danger' by prohibiting artificial contraception since "(it has caused) many persons to move away from the Church and the Church to move away from the faithful"? And openly hoped for a new papal document which would override HV, especially after John Paul II followed 'the way of rigorous application' of the encyclical?

No one, certainly, because what counts for them is not the objectivity of the Magisterium (whose main reference point is the ord of God) but the ideological program of this avant-garde purporting to be the interpreters of the popular will.

So there is an intimate consistency in the fact that today's papologists were yesterday's rebels. Because from Paul VI to Benedict XVI, these bishops and intellectuals, these 'teachers' of obedience to the pope, had declared war on the Magisterium insofar as it did not reflect 'the spirit of Vatican II', and signed manifestos, documents and appeals openly contesting the reigning pope, whether it was Paul VI, John Paul II or Benedict XVI. [Except, of course, that such opposition was mostly regional, factional and hardly represented a cross-section of the entire Catholic world - not to be compared with the broad-based and widespread opposition today to this pope's anti-Catholic statements and actions.]

Let us recall, at least, the harsh document of the German theologian Bernard Haring in 1988 against John Paul II, which received much support in the usual Central European bastions of progressivism. [Cascioli curiously fails to mention that Our Beloved Pope, addressing a Jesuit assembly recently, paid a profuse tribute to Haring for having 'opened the doors of a constrictive morality' or some such assertions confirming Bergoglio's aversion to Catholic morality as reaffirmed by John Paul II in Veritatis splendor.

This was followed shortly by the 1989 Declaration of Cologne, of the same nature, which was signed by many influential German, Austrian, Dutch and Swiss theologians, quickly welcomed in Italy by, among others, that Giovanni Gennari who now writes a daily column for Avvenire as the supposed 'guardian of orthodoxy'.

Also in 1989, a Document from 63 Theologians: A Letter to Christians was published in Il Regno, openly questioning the magisterium of John Paul II. Among the signatories are prominent names who have been rampant in many seminaries and in the pontifical universities in the past five decades, constituting a true and proper parallel magisterium whose bitter fruits we are now witnessing.

[Surely, the most bitter fruit of Vatican II is our current pope, whose idiosyncratic views on what he thinks the Church ought to be thrived to maturation in the spirit of Vatican II that prevailed in his Jesuit order. The most bitter fruit because he came to be elected pope, thereby able to fully open all the doors and windows of the Church not just to that 'smoke of Satan' Paul VI already perceived to have entered through fissures in the Church, but to Satan himself, whom this pope apparently mistakes for the Holy Spirit.]

They claimed to be victims, but all had brilliant careers - some even becoming bishops, like Mons. Franco Brambilla, now Bishop of Novara and said to be in line to succeed Cardinal Angelo Scola as Archbishop of Milan.

Of course, among the signatories we have the omnipresent Alberto Melloni and his colleagues from the 'School of Bologna' led by the late Giuseppe Alberigo and Enzo Bianchi, Prior of Bose.

The same names continued to publicly attack Benedict XVI, openly mocking him about the correct interpretation of Vatican II which Melloni, Bianchi et al always considered as "a radical and irreversible turning point in understanding the faith of the Church", against the hermeneutic of reform in continuity preached by Papa Ratzinger.

And how can we forget their hysterical reaction when Benedict XVI lifted the excommunication of the four Lefebvrian bishops when they have nothing but praise for the current pope's unilateral openings to non-Catholics and non-Christians?

Now, these are the very persons who presume to condemn cardinals, bishops and laymen concerned about the grave situation in the Church today. They are a gang of hypocrites and whited sepulchers who have been pursuing their own ecclesial agenda for decades, who now use the pope to affirm their idea of 'Church' [in fairness to them, they are simply riding on the coattails of someone who actually has the supreme authority to make all their progessivist ideals materialize here and now, and far beyond their wildest dreams], and now take on the arrogance of those who believe they are now in command of a triumphant and glorious war machine.

They are the true fundamentalists, sustained by a complacent media [representing the world at large] who cannot wait for the day when they will have stamped out every trace of the Catholic identity.

Unfortunately for them, the Catholic identity will not succumb.

Let me close this post with an appropriate statement from Cardinal Robert Sarah:

Cardinal Sarah is concerned over
'confusion' about Church doctrine

November 30, 2016

In a recent interview with the French weekly Catholic newspaper L'Homme Nouveau, Cardinal Robert Sarah expressed his own great concern for the great confusion [once again, I think the right word here is 'division' rather than 'confusion', because the sides are not at all confused on what they believe or choose to believe] prevailing today in the Catholic world, even among bishops, about the doctrine of the Church.

The cardinal feels particularly concerned because as Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of Sacraments, the current disorientation [polarization] involves three sacraments: matrimony, penance and the Eucharist.

Sarah feels that the current state of things derives from deficient Catholic formation even with some of his brother bishops and cardinals.

He underscores that every bishop - he himself, in primis - must uphold the doctrine of indissoluble monogamous marriage which Christ himself spelt out specifically, within which resides the good of every man, woman and child.

It is a truth that necessarily has consequences for the possibility of receiving Holy Communion: "The whole Church has always stood firm that one cannot receive Communion if one knows he has committed a mortal sin [that has not been confessed and absolved] - a principle that was definitively confirmed in St. John Paul II's encyclical Ecclesida de Eucharistia." [Cardinal Sarah rightly points to the general principle about receiving Communion, not just for RCDs.]

"Not even a Pope," he emphasizes, "can override this divine law".

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 04/12/2016 02:36]

OnePeterFive has two new posts that have to do with Mons. Pio Vito Pinto, dean of the Roman Rota. A post by Maike Hickson, quoting further
outrageous statements about the Four Cardinals and the DUBIA made by Pinto to a German news agency, claims that he is not an archbishop
but a mere priest. I am not aware that anyone has called him an archbishop, but he has always been referred to as 'Monsignor', which
means he is among those pre-Bergoglio priests given the papal honorific Monsignor without being a bishop (as Georg Ratzinger, or as
Georg Gaenswein before he was consecrated an Archbishop).

However, the more interesting post is Steve Skojec's expose that Pinto is on the list of leading Catholics who were also Italian Freemasons
made public in the 1970s; and further items Skojec researched about Freemasonry and its onslaughts against the Church. He does not vouch
for the veracity of every claim that is made, but a diligent researcher could - and should - follow up the leads given.

Staunch DUBIA opponent Mons. Pinto
on 1972 List of famous Italian Freemasons
by Steve Skojec

December 2, 2016

I don’t know about you, but I just love a good Freemasonic conspiracy.

Let’s face it: Freemasons have been trying to infiltrate the Church for over a century. They even announced their intentions in the mid 1800s, and were condemned by several popes who had no qualms about expressing the danger they represented to the Faith.

The ubiquity of the threat, however, began to numb most Catholics to its reality. The subtlety of their work makes them appear innocuous, and this is by design. Their method of infiltration was laid out in a document known as The Permanent Instruction on the Alta Vendita, written in 19th Century. In it, they proclaimed their grand designs in a way that, in hindsight, can be seen to have been marvelously effective:

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The Pope, whoever he may be, will never come to the secret societies. It is for the secret societies to come to the Church…

The work we have undertaken is not the work of a day, nor of a month, nor of a year. It may last many years, a century perhaps, but in our ranks the soldier dies and the fight continues…

Now then, in order to secure to us a Pope in the manner required, it is necessary to fashion for that Pope a generation worthy of the reign of which we dream. Leave on one side old age and middle life, go to the youth, and, if possible, even to the infancy. Never speak in their presence a word of impiety or impurity. Maxima debetur puero reverentia [We owe the greatest respect to a child). Never forget these words of the poet for they will preserve you from licenses which it is absolutely essential to guard against for the good of the cause.

In order to reap profit at the home of each family, in order to give yourself the right of asylum at the domestic hearth, you ought to present yourself with all the appearance of a man grave and moral.

Once your reputation is established in the colleges… and in the seminaries – once you shall have captivated the confidence of professors and students, act so that those who are engaged in the ecclesiastic state should love to seek your conversation… then little by little you will bring your disciples to the degree of cooking desired.

When upon all the points of ecclesiastical state at once, this daily work shall have spread our ideas as light, then you will appreciate the wisdom of the counsel in which we take the initiative…

That reputation will open the way for our doctrines to pass to the bosoms of the young clergy, and go even to the depths of convents. In a few years the young clergy will have, by force of events, invaded all the functions. They will govern, administer, and judge. They will form the council of the Sovereign. They will be called upon to choose the Pontiff who will reign; and that Pontiff, like the greater part of his contemporaries, will be necessarily imbued with the…humanitarian principles which we are about to put into circulation…

Let the clergy march under your banner in the belief always that they march under the banner of the Apostolic Keys. You wish to cause the last vestige of tyranny and of oppression to disappear? Lay your nets like Simon Bar-Jona [Peter's Jewish name]. Lay them in the depths of sacristies, seminaries, and convents, rather than in the depth of the sea… You will bring yourselves as friends around the Apostolic Chair...[/dim

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With this in mind, I found it really quite interesting that more than one of our readers has pointed out that Pio Vito Pinto — Dean of the Roman Rota and perhaps now the loudest of the critics of the Four Cardinals — is to be found on the famous “Lista Pecorelli” — a list of alleged Freemasons within the Church.

I say “famous” because many people know about it. I didn’t. But the list has been around since the 1970s, compiled by the Italian investigative journalist — later murdered — who gave it its name: Carmine “Mino” Pecorelli.

In a comment on the 1P5 Facebook page, reader Andrew Guernsey writes:

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Here is a high quality version of the original Pecorelli list, which famously includes Bugnini, the architect of the New Mass
drive.google.com/file/d/0B65x5F_RAFfwQVRjSUVGRUdaWmM/view

Investigative journalist and a member of the elite Propaganda Due (P2) Lodge, Carmine “Mino” Pecorelli, Director of L’Osservatorio Politico, a press agency specializing in political scandals and crimes, was murdered on March 20, 1979.

Prior to his death he published what became known as “Pecorelli’s List.” It contained the names (code names and card names as well) of alleged Freemasons in high level Vatican offices during the reign of Paul VI. Among the prominent prelates identified as Freemasons were Jean Cardinal Villot, whose family is believed to have historic ties to the Rosicrucian Lodge; Agostino Cardinal Casaroli; Ugo Cardinal Poletti; Sebastiano Cardinal Baggio; Joseph Cardinal Suenens; Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, C.M.; and Archbishop Paul Casimir Marcinkus, to name a few.

A priest who worked for Cardinal Ottaviani investigating Modernists in the curia speaks of the authenticity of Pecorelli’s List:
http://padrepioandchiesaviva.com/…/Paul_VI.._beatified…

The principal “list” appeared on “OP” (Osservatorio Politico Internazionale) Magazine of September 12, 1978, the magazine of lawyer Mino Pecorelli, during the brief pontificate of JP1, thus subsequent to that which came out on “Panorama” Magazine of August 10, 1976. And sure enough, Father Pinto’s name is there:

[At the time, the description after his name tells us, he was already working at the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura]

The book Guernsey links is Paul VI Beatified?, by Fr. Luigi Villa. This is where, to the uninitiated, the rabbit hole gets deep. I’ve never had the time or the patience to go through the voluminous materials about Freemasonry and the Church. I have no doubt of the designs of the Masons, nor of the Church’s reasons for condemning them. But I am woefully ignorant of many of the facts on the ground. Of Fr. Villa, the website padrepioandchiesaviva.com says:

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Almost sixty years ago, “Padre Pio first met Father Luigi Villa, whom he entreated to devote his entire life to fight Ecclesiastical Freemasonry. Padre Pio told Father Villa that Our Lord had designs upon him and had chosen him to be educated and trained to fight Freemasonry within the Church. The Saint spelled out this task in three meetings with Father Villa, which took place in the last fifteen years of life of Padre Pio.

At the close of the second meeting [second half of 1963], Padre Pio embraced Father Villa three times, saying to him: ‘Be brave, now… for the Church has already been invaded by Freemasonry!’ and then stated: ‘Freemasonry has already made it into the shoe) of the Pope!’ At the time, the reigning Pope was Paul VI.

“The mission entrusted to Father Luigi Villa by Padre Pio to fight Freemasonry within the Catholic Church was approved by Pope Pius XII who gave a Papal Mandate for his work. Pope Pius XII’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Tardini, gave Father Villa three Cardinals to work with and to act as his own personal ‘guardian angels’: Cardinal Ottaviani [the famous but much-maligned conservative Prefect of the Holy Office at the time of Vatican II], Cardinal Parente and Cardinal Palazzini. Father Villa worked with these three cardinals until their deaths.”

In order to fight this battle, in 1971 Fr. Villa founded his magazine, Chiesa viva, with correspondents and collaborators in every continent. It was immediately attacked by the upper echelon of the Catholic Church: the magazine was ostracized among the clergy and its collaborators were gradually forced to leave. Then they isolated its editor and his few remaining collaborators. The efforts to silence Chiesa viva once and for all also included seven assassination attempts on Fr. Villa!”

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I do not vouch for this information, because I have not verified it. (Readers here have mentioned Fr. Villa on numerous occasions, and have done so favorably.) But I present it to you nevertheless, because it is an interesting piece of the puzzle.

Of the alleged Freemasons on Pecorelli’s list, Fr. Villa writes:

“Pecorelli’s List” found credit even in the Vatican, where a young employee – nephew of a (well known) ecclesiastic (Father P. E.) – had handed a series of delicate “documents” to Monsignor Benelli, then Substitute of the Secretary of State, who made him swear «that he was not lying about so grave a matter». Some photocopies of those “documents” were also in the possession of Cardinal Staffa.

I had “assurance” of this “fact” from a cardinal of the Curia,who later also gave me some photocopies of those same “documents”.

3rd – The “Card Numbers”, reported on the “Pecorelli’s List”, confer a more than credible spin, since Pecorelli was a member of the P2 Lodge (and thus in the know of “secret things”), but also for the reason that, with that list, he had just invited the scarcely elected Pope Luciani to a rigorous control, with the intention of offering a valid contribution to the transparency of the Catholic Church Herself.

In any case, that “list” should have sparked off either a shower of denials or a purge in the ecclesial ranks. On the contrary, not a single “denial” was to be had. As for “purges”, besides, the newly elected Pontiff did not even have the time, perhaps even “because” Pope Luciani, “who had manifested the intention of having a hand in the issue of the IOR and shed a light as to the list of alleged Prelates affiliated to Freemasonry”, He, too, passed away in circumstances and ways as yet unknown. What is more, Mino Pecorelli, the author of that “list”, was gunned down a few months later, on March 20, 1979; hence, with him, were buried all of the other “secrets” concerning that Masonic sect in his possession.

Now, one could ask oneself: why is it that all of the “listed” in that “Masonic list” have never come together in order to deny that public denunciation, complete with detailed “entries” (Affiliation, Registration, Monogram), asking the courts for a clarifying investigation, at least on the graphological analysis of the acronyms at the foot of the documents? How not to recognize, then, that that lack of denials and that prolonged silence are more than eloquent as they take on the value of circumstantial evidence of the greatest import?

The only one to be removed from office was – as we noted – Monsignor Bugnini, the main author of that revolutionary liturgical reform that upset, in a Lutheran form, the bi-millennial rite of the Holy Mass, but it was only after the presentation to Paul VI of the “evidence” of his belonging to the Masonic sect, that he was sent away from Rome and dispatched as a “pro-Nuncio” to Iran...

The buzz about these people had been around since 1970. Let it be no doubt about it: it was not mere talk; it was “confidential information” we at the top of Italian Freemasonry used to pass on to one another”.

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St. Maximilian Kolbe had his own take on the matter. He is famously quoted as quoting a Freemason slogan: Satan Will Reign in the Vatican. The Pope Will Be His Slave.

According to Michael Hitchborn at The Lepanto Institute, this bold proclamation

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was personally witnessed by St. Maximilian Kolbe, who watched Freemasons celebrate their bicentennial in St. Peter’s Square in 1917. St. Maximilian Kolbe saw banners bearing these words amidst the revelry. It’s a jarring and shocking statement, but it is totally in keeping with the aims of Freemasonry and it bears a great deal of significance for us today.

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Hitchborn also notes the plans laid out in the Alta Vendita:

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According to these documents, the Alta Vendita lodge of Freemasonry openly declared that its “ultimate end is that of Voltaire and of the French Revolution – the final destruction forever of Catholicism, and even of the Christian idea.”...

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St. Maximilian Kolbe expounded on this plan at the founding of the Militia of the Immaculata. On October 16, just three days after the miracle of Fatima, the saint wrote:

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“These men without God find themselves in a tragic situation. Such implacable hatred for the Church and the ambassadors of Christ on Earth is not in the power of individual persons, but of a systematic activity stemming in the final analysis from Freemasonry.

In particular, it aims to destroy the Catholic religion. Their decrees have been spread throughout the world, in different disguises. But with the same goal – religious indifference and weakening of moral forces, according to their basic principle – ‘We will conquer the Catholic Church not by argumentation, but rather with moral corruption.‘”

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There is no question that religious indifference and moral corruption are the hallmarks of our present ecclesiastical crisis. The two most scandalous issues facing the Catholic Church of 2016 are the twin pillars of capitulation to Lutheranism as witnessed by the pope’s pro-Luther statements at the commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in Lund, and the deconstruction of the Divine teaching on marriage, sexuality, family, and the Sacraments as launched by the synods of 2014 and 2015 and the exortation they led to: Amoris Laetitia.

And what of Francis? If Fr. Pinto — one of the pittbulls he has unleashed against the Four Cardinals — is a Freemason, does that tie Francis to the secret society? It is well known that Buenos Aires is a stronghold of Freemasonry in Latin America:

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Freemasonry is no stranger to Argentina, as the society has been present here for more than 150 years and has in many ways helped shape its history.

Many of the Argentine forefathers, including Jose de San Martín, Manuel Belgrano and Domingo F. Sarmiento were freemasons, as well as many Argentine presidents. There are currently 130 active Masonic lodges in Argentina, 60 of them in the city of Buenos Aires alone, and if you do a little research, you’ll find their symbology present on many buildings, monuments and even in cemeteries.

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When I read this, my mind immediately called up an image of a captioned statement Francis made in a meeting with Fernando Solanas, an Argentine politician, environmentalist, and film director. During the filmed conversation, he quipped:


In a statement on the occasion of the bicentennary of Argentina’s independence, he explained further:

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We are celebrating 200 years along the road of a homeland which, in its desires and anxieties for brotherhood, projects itself beyond the boundaries of this country towards the Greater Fatherland of which José de San Martín and Simón Bolívar dreamed. This reality unites us in a family of broad horizons and fraternal loyalty. That Greater Fatherland should also be included in our prayers during our celebrations — may the Lord look after it, making it stronger and more beautiful, defending it from every kind of colonization.

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“Fraternal loyalty.” Sounds like something a good Mason would say. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Solidarity.” Solidarity…

It’s probably nothing. Although the notion of Fraternity and Fatherland appear in the Manifesto of the Freemasons.

Masonry preaches peace among men, and in the name of humanity proclaims the inviolability of human life. Masonry curses all wars; it wails over civil wars.

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It has the duty and the right to come among you and say: IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY, IN THE NAME OF FRATERNITY, IN THE NAME OF THE DEVASTATED FATHERLAND, stop the spilling of blood. We ask this of you, we beg you to hear our appeal.

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I’m not going to even to bother making the connection between “cursing all wars” and a certain someone who is always…cursing all wars.

It’s probably all just a coincidence.

Just like the fact that Francis was lauded by the Freemasons upon his election. The Masonic Press Agency (MPA) — self described as “the first structure providing Masonic news and information designated as such” — ran a story upon the election of Francis under the headline, “Jorge Mario Bergoglio elected Pope Francis I at 187 years since the issuance of Quo Graviora Papal Bull against Freemasonry“.
The story itself is brief – just two paragraphs long – and it is simply noted without further explanation that his election took place 187 years to the day since Pope Leo XIII issued the papal bull Quo Graviora against Freemasonry.

In two separate stories in the MPA upon the occasion of his election, we were given yet another glimpse of the odd acceptance of the secret society for Pope Francis. In one, we learn:

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Grand Lodge of Argentina officially welcomed the election of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as the Pope of the Catholic Church and Sovereign of the Vatican. Argentinian Grand Master Angel Jorge Clavero considers that this appointment brought recognition to Argentine nation.

In the last week several Grand Lodges in Latin America, Europe and Asia (Lebanon) welcomed the election of the new Catholic Pope.

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In the other, a stronger but more cryptic statement:

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The Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy expressed his joy regarding the election of Pope Francis. Raffi stated that: “With the election of Pope Francis nothing will ever be the same again.” [emphasis in original]

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[This report was, of course, the most chilling item I remember in the immediate aftermath of the March 13, 2013 election, but unfortunately, my concern about it was quickly swamped by so many other concrete and direct questionable manifestations from the new pope which have preoccupied most of us since then. Let us not forget it - and the on-target strategy described in the Alta Vendita document to subvert and eventually wipe out the Catholic Church.]

A truer statement has likely not been issued by a Freemason since the publication of the Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita. Maybe they got their man after all.

Pinto redoubles his rebuke
of the Four Cardinals
by Maike Hickson

December 1, 2016

After the denial concerning the recent words attributed to Mons. Pio Vito Pinto about the Four Cardinals – namely, that he did not say that the pope would remove the red hats of these Cardinals – the German Catholic website Katholisch.de has published its own interview with Mons. Pinto where he now redoubles his critique of the four prelates.

In this interview, Pinto again uses very harsh language against these Four Cardinals who have expressed their serious concern that Amoris Laetitia could teach the faithful doctrines that go against the traditional Catholic teaching.

Pinto now says about the Four Cardinals:

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They have written to the pope and that is correct and legitimate. But, after there did not come [from the pope] an answer after a few weeks, they published the case. That is a slap in the face. The pope can choose to take counsel with his cardinals; but that is something different from imposing upon him a counsel. [They were not imposing counsel - they simply asked five questions that can be answered YES or NO.

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When the journalist then says in response that the Four Cardinals would answer that they had no other choice, the Italian prelate further responds:

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They are not a council with any kind of competences. On the contrary, they as cardinals are bound in a higher degree to be loyal to the pope. He stands for the gift of unity, the charisma of Peter.

That is where the cardinals have to support him, and not hinder him. By what authority do the authors of the letter act? On the fact that they are cardinals? That is not sufficient. Please. Of course they can write to the pope and send him their questions, but to oblige him to answer and to publish the case is another matter. [It is not the cardinals who are obliging him to answer, but his duty as pope to preserve unity and confirm his brothers in the faith.]

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As others have done before him (and in spite of the facts), Pinto insists that the pope’s family document is based on the work of two Roman synods of bishops – as well as the world-wide questionnaires circulated and received back. He explains:

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The absolute majority of the first synod and a two-thirds majority in the second, in which the members of the bishops’ conferences were present, have exactly approved these theses that now the four cardinals contest. [Which is, of course, an outright LIE!]

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Pinto insists that the pope “does not force, much less does he condemn.” Thus, “some bishops are putatively having difficulties, others pretend to be deaf.” To the claim that Father Pinto himself said that the pope might remove the red hats of these four cardinals he then responds:

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I am not the type who can threaten [people]. To write something like this is quite a journalistic license and is not serious. What I have said is, rather: Francis is a lighthouse of mercy and has infinite patience. For him, it is about agreeing, not about forcing. It was a serious act that these four have published their letter. But to think that he would remove their cardinalate – no. I do not believe that he will do that. […] In itself, as pope, he could do such a thing. The way I know Francis, he will not do it.

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When asked about Cardinal Burke’s words that he would present a formal correction of the pope if necessary, Pinto responds once more with vehemence:

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This is crazy. Such a council of cardinals does not exist that could hold the pope accountable. The task of the cardinals is to help the pope in the exercise of his office – and not to obstruct him or to give him precepts. And this is a fact: Francis is not only in full accordance with the teaching, but also with all of his predecessors in the 20th century, and that was a Golden Age with excellent popes – starting with Pius X. [Another barefaced lie, but necessary for the Bergoglio militants who must protest that their lord and master is not 'changing' anything at all, or as Cardinal Kasper infamously said after AL: "The pope has not changed the doctirne of the Curch, but this [AL] changes everything!" The magnitude of the deception they practise knows no bounds.]

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The Dean of the Roman Rota then also proceeds explicitly to criticize Cardinal Joachim Meisner for his own participation in the publication of the Dubia. When asked as to whether he is disappointed about the four authors of the letter, he explains:

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I am shocked, especially about the gesture of Meisner. Meisner was a great bishop of an important diocese [Cologne] – how sad that he now with this action puts a shadow upon his history. Meisner, a great spiritual leader! That he would arrive at that, I did not expect. He was very close to John Paul II and Benedict, and he knows that Benedict XVI and Francis are in full agreement about the analysis and the conclusions when it comes to the question of marriage. [Go ahead, Mons. Freemason Pinto, lay on LIE UPON LIE UPON LIE!] And Burke – we have worked together. [You'd think they worked as equals, when in fact, Pinto was a subordinate to the cardinal when the latter was Prefect of the Apostolic Segnatura] He seemed to me to be an amiable person. Now I would ask him: Your Eminence, why did you do that? [The extent of Pinto's chutzpah and condescension is unbelievable!]

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Pinto closes this interview with some seemingly flippant, if not superficial, words when he answers the question as to what should now be done: “Pray a little more, stay calm, basta. Officially, this action has no value. The Church needs unity, not walls, says the pope. We know how Francis is. He believes that people can convert. I know that he is praying for them.”

To sum up this interview: Pinto claims that the supreme principle of the Church is unity. He does not mention, much less affirm, that the basis of unity is truth. However, he claims that Pope Francis’s own teaching on marriage is in complete accord with the teaching of the previous 20th-century popes, and especially with Pope Benedict XVI.

However, such claims are the very issues upon which faithful Catholics are now divided! For Pope Francis has indeed encouraged a change in the Church’s teaching on marriage, not in agreement with the previous teaching. Nor is he in agreement with the teaching of Jesus Christ himself! Thus, there comes a point where our loyalty to the Truth of Christ urges us respectfully to speak up, even at the cost of an ostensible unity that is not anymore itself based on the truth.

As Dr. Markus Brüning, a German theologian and book author, said firmly yesterday concerning the “Pinto affair”:

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Much less helpful are the repeatedly presented calls to obey the pope unconditionally. I beg your pardon? We are, after all, not in a dictatorship here. That goes too far.

For me, kairos [the ripe and fitting moment] has come; and, fully so in the sense of Blessed John Henry Newman, we should now question this papalism that we have all-too-often practised in our own circles. Additionally, we have at times the duty to oppose ecclesial authorities.

Let us hear what St. Thomas Aquinas tells us about this matter: ‘Where, however, the Faith is in danger, one has to correct the superiors publicly, just as St. Paul did it; and as Augustine wrote on this matter: ‘Peter himself has given to the superiors the model that they – if they ever stray from the right path – shall accept not unwillingly when their own inferiors correct them.” (Summa theol., II-II q. 33, 4c)

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