BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI



Wasn't expecting the page change. Please see preceding page for many earlier posts today, 1/8/17.



January 8, 2017 headlines

Canon212.com


PewSitter



BOMBSHELL EWTN INTERVIEW (Arroyo, Royal, Murray):
The pope's recent governing actions are
like a caricature of corporate America
by Oakes Spalding

JANUARY 7, 2017

Today's interview, from Raymond Arroyo's World Over Live, is a great indication of where the center of gravity is now moving within the ranks of the knowledgable Catholic faithful.

The interview was with author and apologetist Robert Royal and canon lawyer and priest Gerald Murray. I think it's fair to say that all (including Arroyo) were highly critical of Francis and the recent direction of his pontificate in the wake of Amoris Laetitia.

Among other things they addressed the report - now confirmed by many sources - that the Pope ordered the firings of three faithful [to the faith, but I suppose considered unfaithful to the pope] priests from important positions at the CDF and then belligerently exclaimed that, as Pope, he didn't have to explain himself to anyone.

Hence the jab about corporate America.

The three were somewhat restrained and "respectful" - they didn't claim Francis was a heretic or the forerunner to the Anti-Christ, etc. - but the overall negative sentiments were obvious. And I suspect all three may be less restrained in private.

Schism is coming. [NO, IT IS NOT! Certainly, Bergoglio and his church will not 'break away' from the One Holy Catholic Church since they appear confident they have set the stage for 'irreversibly' remaking the Church of Christ into Bergoglio's ideological image and likeness. Nor will faithful Catholics leave the Church all because of a potentially if not actually heretical pope - after all, he won't live forever, and we can sit out the Bergoglian crisis as the early Church did the Arian crisis, relying on the faith and its bimillennial deposit to live CAtholic lives the best we can, while ignoring Bergoglio's anti-Catholic moves.]

More and more fence sitters are taking sides in their own way. [Which is true! If Bergoglio has lost EWTN, as it would seem he has - with its most prominent personalities Arroyo and Pentin leading the charge against his anti-Catholicism - then he has lost the world's largest Catholic media network (the Galantini gang of Bergoglians at Avvenire and TV2000 in Italy are paltry by comparison) , and Mother Angelica must be happily beaming from heaven that her spiritual heirs are taking the ascendant at the EWTN empire.]

And no, I don't want schism. No true Catholic would. Francis recently privately admitted that he may be the cause of it. But everyone will have to answer to God for the part that he played.

Everyone.

C.S. Lewis once had a character say in That Hideous Strength:

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If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family—anything you like — at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren’t quite so sharp; and that there’s going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous.

Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder.

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Obviously Lewis didn't have the early 21st century crisis (stemming from the late 20th century crisis) of the Catholic Church in mind, exactly. But the point is still apt.

There is no refuge. More and more, to exhibit even "apparent neutrality" is to take a side. Which side are you on? [An early combox reply said "Christ's!" It is worth noting that while all those opposing Bergoglio's anti-Catholic statements and actions keep referring to what Christ taught - and Christ as 'the way, the truth and the life' - the pope's myrmidons only defend him, and his right and rightness in changing things around from what Christ himself defined. St. Benedict's rule, "Never place anything ahead of Christ!", appears totally lost on them.]

Meanwhile, a small sign of hope from Poland...But it is indicative that one feels compelled to 'celebrate' a 40% Mass attendance in a country that is 92 percent Catholic. At first, I thought the headline read "Sunday Mass attendance rises in Poland by 40 percent" which struck me as quite miraculous if true. But of course, I came thudding down from my wishful thinking perch as soon as I read it right...
Another Europe: Sunday Mass Attendance Rises in Poland to 40 Percent

The other Europe:
Polish Mass attendance climbs
[39.1% to 39.8% is a small step up but hardly a climb]
by Gerda Weiser
Translated by EPONYMOUS FLOWER from

January 5, 2017

WARSAW - There is "another Europe". The latest figures from Poland make it clear. The number of Sunday Massgoers rose to 40 percent in 2016.

According to the statistical institute of the Catholic Church in Poland, Sunday Massgoers in the survey population increased from 39.1 percent in 2015 to 39.8 percent in 2016. The number of Communion recipients rose from 16.3 percent to 17 percent, as Pawel Rytel-Andrianik reports in Zenit.

Poland has one of the densest parish nets in the Catholic world. About seven percent of all parishes are run by religious orders. 92 percent of Poles profess the Catholic faith. The number of priests working in parishes is almost 21,000. More than 7,000 religious are also active in the parishes.

In 2015 369,000 baptisms and 270,000 First Communions were offered and 134,000 marriages were consecrated. The figures point to a healthy, positive demographic development.

In more than 60,000 parishes around 2.5 million Catholics are active. A further 1.8 million Catholics are voluntarily active in the social sector, in child care, disability facilities, schools and hospices.

Polish catholicity is characterized by a rich Marian tradition and diverse forms of popular piety. The rosary and liturgical functions, which are based on the Marian works of Fatima, play a particularly strong role.

[For a meaningful comparison, I wish the report stated current statistics for a European country with the same total Catholic population as Poland, and statistics for Poland itself at the peak of John Paul II's Pontificate.]

I am sure I'm not the only one who did a double take on the above headline from EWTN's Great Britain correspondent, Deacon Nick Donnelly, who is usally a reliable reporter and alert commentator. His report begins this way:

In a recent interview, Bishop Schneider explained the importance of not losing a characteristic of the Catholic Church, which is being subject to the Pope. Bishop Schneider, who recently defended the Four Cardinals who submitted the dubia, made his comments in response to a question about the SSPX's discussions with the Holy See.

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“If you remain canonically autonomous for too long, you run the risk of losing a characteristic of the Catholic Church, that is, to be subject to the pope. We cannot make our subjection to the Vicar of Christ dependent upon the person of the pope; this would not be faith. You cannot say that “I don’t believe in this pope, I don’t submit, I am going to wait until one comes along that I like.” [Surely he culd not have meant that being 'subject to the pope' means being subject unconditionally, without the critical exercise that even laymen are called on by Canon 212, if they have good reason to believe that the pope is teaching something not in accordance with the deposit of faith. Otherwise, forget the DUBIA!] This is not Catholic, it is not supernatural; it is human. It is a lack of supernaturality and trust in Divine Providence, that God is the one who guides the Church. This is a danger for the SSPX.”

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I know that a Spanish website recently had a lengthy interview with Mons. Schneider - which is part of my year-start posting backlog - but I searched it twice to find out where he said the above and cannot find it in the site's own published transcript of the interview - in which, in fact, Mons. Schneider notes that when he was asked by the Holy See to visit two FSSPX seminaries, he very gladly noted that the picture of Pope Francis was on display at the sites.

So, I don't think the FSSPX has ever not recognized the pope as head of the Church - they certainly are not sede-vacantists. Mons. Fellay's official photographs always show the reigning pope's photograph in the background. Nor has the FSSPX ever made a statement about 'not believing this pope' (whoever he is or was) and 'waiting until one comes along that we like'.

The quotation does appear in the site's compilation of 'headlines' - or headline-making quotations from the Schneider interview. It must have come from the full interview, of which apparently, the website did not furnish the complete transcript. I am posting that compilation here to get an overview of the Schneider interview.

Interview with Mons. Schneider:
Headlines

January 4, 2017

“There are many places where priests act more like Protestant ministers than Catholic priests”.

“There are families that must travel more than 100 km (60 mi) so that they can go to a dignified Mass and hear sound doctrine”.

“The faithful must ask the priests for kneelers so that they can kneel”.

“We have a eucharistic-heart disease, and as long as we fail to heal it, the whole body will remain ill and will not produce fruit”.

“In today’s climate, it’s a true miracle that we have vocations”.

“Gender ideology is a depravity, a final form of Marxism”.

“If they can, parents should withdraw their children from schools where they are taught gender ideology”.

“There is a mentality of radical relativism within the Church”.

“We should speak up so that the Magisterium might speak clearly”.

“With moral relativism, especially concerning the reception of Communion by the divorced and remarried, we want God to do our will, and not for us to do His”.

“A sacramental female diaconate contradicts the nature of the Church”.

“We have to love the pope supernaturally, praying for him, but not practicing a form of papolatry”.

On the FSSPX and Mons. Lefebvre
“I am convinced that in the present circumstances, Msgr. Lefebvre would accept the canonical proposal of a personal prelature without hesitation”.

“Msgr. Lefebvre was a man with a deep sensus ecclesiae”.

“The episcopal ordinations were done in 1988 because in good conscience he thought that he had to do it, as an extreme act, and at the same time, he said that the situation should not last a long time”.

“If you remain canonically autonomous for too long, you run the risk of losing a characteristic of the Catholic Church, that is, to be subject to the pope.”

“We cannot make our subjection to the Vicar of Christ dependent upon the person of the pope; this would not be faith. You cannot say that “I don’t believe in this pope, I don’t submit, I am going to wait until one comes along that I like.” This is not Catholic, it is not supernatural; it is human. It is a lack of supernaturality and trust in Divine Providence, that God is the one who guides the Church. This is a danger for the SSPX”.

“I have asked Msgr. Fellay not to delay his acceptance any longer, and I trust in Providence, though it is not possible to have 100% certainty”.

“It is my great wish that the SSPX might be recognized and established within the regular structure of the Church as soon as possible, and this will be for the benefit of all, for them and for us. Actually it will be a new force in this great battle for the purity of the Faith”.

“I have told Msgr. Fellay: “Monsignor, we need your presence to join together with all of the good forces in the Church to achieve this union.”

On the Traditional Mass
“The movement to restore the traditional Mass is the work of the Holy Spirit, and is unstoppable”,

“If the Fathers of Vatican II witnessed a Mass like the one we know today and a traditional Mass, the majority would say that the traditional Mass is what they want, and not the other”,

The traditional liturgy is the liturgy of Vatican II, perhaps with small changes. [????]

Before I post the 'Adelante la Fe' interview, Deacon Nick had a more interesting post on Mons. Schneider earlier, speaking about a truly critical subject that hardly anyone in the Church talks about openly. In fact, I don't even remember Benedict XVI talking about Freemasonry, other than the CDF's reiteration of the Church's condemnation of the patently anti-Catholic movement:

Freemasonry is an 'instrument of Satan'
seeking to destroy the Church, says Bishop Schneider
by Deacon Nick Donnelly

January 5, 2017

Bishop Athanasius Schneider, a collaborator with Cardinal Burke and auxiliary bishop of Astana, Kazakhstan, recently gave a lecture on "Mary, conqueror of all heresies", in which he warned that Freemasonry is an "instrument of Satan".

Bishop Schneider made this observation in the context of 2017 being the 300th anniversary of the foundation of Freemasonry with the establishment of the first Grand Lodge in London.

Bishop Schneider described the past 300 years of Freemasonry as turbulent and hidden, in pursuit of a revolutionary and subversive ambition. He described Freemasonry as a "tool of Satan" that has largely shied away from daylight since its foundation.

Bishop Schneider went on to recall St Maximilian Kolbe's recollections of the Freemasons' aggressive celebrations of their 200th anniversary in Rome during 1917, in the middle of the First World War. He referred to how St Maximilian said Freemasonry had openly declared war on the Catholic Church.

The Freemason littered Rome with posters showing the Archangel Michael defeated on the ground trampled beneath a triumphant Lucifer. In their protests against the Catholic Church, the Freemasons also displayed the black flag of the heretic Giordano Bruno, a Dominican friar who promoted materialistic pantheism, a central belief of Freemasonry. (Bruno also denied fundamental doctrines of the Faith).

As a consequence of witnessing the Freemasons' hostility towards the Church in 1917, St Maximilian Kolbe decided to found the Militia Immaculatae [The Knights of the Immaculate] to counteract the actions of Lucifer.

In his lecture, Bishop Schneider went on to declare that the goal of Freemasonry is to eliminate the entire doctrine of God, especially Catholic doctrine. To achieve this goal the Freemasons have used many associations and societies. According to Bishop Schneider, Freemasonry seeks the dissolution of morality because they are convinced that unless they corrupt morality they cannot defeat the Catholic Church since they cannot defeat it with logical arguments.

Bishop Schneider concluded his reflections on Freemasonry by observing that the masonic action to defeat the Catholic Church was currently very topical again. In response to this, he reflected that undoubtedly the Blessed Virgin Mary will in the end crush the greatest Christian threat of all time: the heresy of the Antichrist.

Earlier in 2016 Bishop Schneider gave an interview to Daniel Blackman for One Peter Five during which he discussed the subversive influence of Freemasonry: quote]Bishop Schneider: Freemasonry is in itself intrinsically not compatible with Christian or Catholic faith, it is intrinsically not compatible, because the nature of freemasonry is anti-Christian. They deny Christ, and they deny the objective truths, they promote relativism, which is contrary to the truth, to the Gospel. So they promote the doctrinal errors of the Masonic philosophy. This is incompatible with Christian and Catholic faith.

Freemasonry has also an esoteric aspect, which is not Christian. They have rituals and ceremonies which are esoteric, which they openly admit, and such ceremonials are contrary to the faith. Their symbols and rituals demonstrate that they are against the divine truths in the Gospel – these things show that Freemasonry is another religion. I repeat, Freemasonry is another religion, an anti-Christ religion.

Even when they do good works, philanthropy and so forth, these dangerous things remain. Their philanthropy is not a justification for us to accept Freemasonry, just because of their good philanthropic work. I will never recognise their doctrines and rituals which are against the Divine truths of the Gospel. The Church can never accept this.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 1983 declaration on freemasonry is still valid. According to this Declaration it is a mortal sin to become a Freemason – even pope Francis has not changed this law. This teaching is official and still valid.

In 2013 on his return flight from Rio de Janeiro, Pope Francis made reference to a Masonic lobby. Recently, Cardinal Ravasi, in the Italian paper Il Sole 24 Ore, called for new dialogue and shared values with Freemasonry. Has Masonry won in the Church?
Of course we know that Freemasonry is one of the most powerful influences at all levels of human society. This is manifest and clear. Theoretically, when one is a leader in a very influential anti-Christian organisation, there is the tendency to infiltrate the organisation which is your enemy, it is very logical. So it is logical, over many centuries, that they would have tried and probably succeeded to infiltrate themselves into various levels of the Church – this is clear to me.

It is difficult to demonstrate concretely, to identify, who is a member. It is very difficult and dangerous, because someone may be accused of being a member, then it is proved the person is not a formally a member. It’s because of the secrecy and esotericism of Freemasonry that makes it very difficult.

One can assume that a cleric, a priest, bishop, or cardinal, has some connections with the masons by his speech. We hear clerics speaking like Freemasons, clearly, when they open their mouths, they use terms and concepts that are typically masonic. He could be a member, but you have to prove it, but at least when he speaks he has the spirit of the Freemason - they may not be formal members, but some bishops and cardinals speak clearly with a Masonic spirit. I stress this does not mean they are formally members of the Freemasons.

Wasn't Pope Francis upposed to be carrying on
the progressivist vision of Vatican II to completion?
St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI tried to give a shape and finality to the reforms of Vatican-II.
With Pope Francis, the debates seem back where they were in the early years following the Council.

January 9, 2017

A recent article published in the online magazine The Week and then mentioned in various American media shed light on a particular modus operandi of Pope Francis in tackling the issue of abuse of minors by clergy.

According to the article, Pope Francis is dismantling the set of reforms put into effect by St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI in order to restore the primary responsibility for countering clerical sex abuse to local churches.

[Have I misunderstood the set-up since 2001 all these years? I thought local dioceses still have and ought to have primary responsibility for this, but if they fail to act or act incorrectly, then the complaint can be sent on by anyone to the CDF for investigation and action. Or the local bishops themselves can raise the problem to the CDF if they feel they cannot handle it. But the two cases Gagliarducci cites have nothing to do with decentralizing the activity at all. Nor centralizing in the CDF.

In both, the pope appears to simply have decided he would take charge of everything, no need for the CDF - in the Barros case (Karadima's protege whom he named a Bishop in Chile , without even a semblance of an investigation, despite massive opposition from the faithful), and in the Inzoli case (restoring the priestly faculties two years after the man was defrocked by Benedict XVI, supposedly at the intercession of people close to Bergoglio. BTW, since Dougherty's The Week article came out, where we Anglophones first became aware of the Inzoli case - a truly shameless and shameful one - I had been expecting an immediate protest from the Vatican and an explanation/clarification of the facts about the case, but, if we are to learn anything from the non-handling of the DUBIA, we just aren't going to get any explanations for inconvenient facts.]

To cut a long story short, Pope Francis’s reforms in general seem to be dual-faceted. These two faces are in the end very different. On the one hand, there is a strong push toward the autonomy of local churches, toward a decentralization of functions, especially in doctrinal terms, as is hinted at in the Apostolic Exhortation “Evangelii gaudium,” the real program of the pontificate. [How much more decentralized can it get than the free hand given in AL not just to bishops but to priest-confessors to use their 'discernment' to decide whether remarried divorcees banned from communion should be allowed it after all because they may actually be in a 'state of grace'!!

On the other hand, one notes a progressive centralization, concentrating all the decision-making powers in the Pope himself or in his restricted circle, thus somehow taking power away from the Curial dicasteries that in fact represent a sign of the Pope’s collegial governing. [I think the Curia is far less a show of collegiality than a necessary administrative structure through which a pope must govern the Church, a structure that dates back centuries, long before 'collegiality' became a contemporary buzzword.]

It is then important to understand the rationale of Pope Francis’s reforms. This rationale does not seem fixed, but always evolving. [Which is why it is a misnomer to call it a 'rationale' - which is defined as "the fundamental reason or reasons serving to account for something" or "a reasoned exposition of principles". Because anything fundamental must be fixed, any principle must be fixed - if it is not, if it evolves with circumstances, then it is neither fundamental nor a principle!]

It [this supposed 'rationale'] has among its “pros” that it is supported by Big Media, because it represents positions that the secular media really wants to see the Pope take. On the other hand, his framework is never clear, that decisions seem always to evolve and never to be part of a clear, broad, long-term project. [DIM=pt][Which further shows it is no rationale at all, but rather a case-by-case arbitrary reaction, which can therefore not have a framework at all because it is nothing but relativistic play-dough!]

This 'rationale' was well explained by Bishop Marcello Semeraro, Secretary of the Council of Cardinals, in an article on Curia reform published some weeks ago by Il Regno magazine. Pope Francis outlined it completely in his Christmas Address to the Roman Curia, in which he made a sort of summary of all the reforms he had made, with a comprehensive list of all the “motu proprio” edicts of his pontificate.

What in the end is the core of Pope Francis’s [inherently changeable, being relativistic and situational] rationale?. The issue of sex abuse by clergy offers a good example. It allows us to understand how everything can be traced back to interpretations of the Second Vatican Council.

During their pontificates, St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI tried to give a shape and a finality to the Council’s reforms. With Pope Francis, it seems that the debates have returned to those early years immediately after the Council.

All the issues of this particular debate are as present as they were at the beginning, starting from the push toward local churches as an alternative power to the Pope’s.

Delicta graviora – those “most grave crimes” that include cases of sexual abuse of minors – have a story. They are crimes reserved to the ccompetence of the former Holy Office (now the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) under the Code of Canon Law issued by Pope Benedict XV in 1917. These crimes led to the promulgation of “Crimen Sollicitationis”, a document that provided detailed instructions to diocesan tribunals about how to deal with priests who exploited the Sacrament of Penance in order to make sexual advances on the penitent. The document also included a short section about the so-called crimen pessimum [worst crime], homosexual behavior by a member of the clergy, the norms for which were then extended to the crime of sexual abuse of minors.

After the Second Vatican Council, a wide debate re-opened every previously established principle for renewed discussion, for example, the general idea of decentralizing power by giving more responsibility to bishops, and – even more – by valuing the capacity of the local bishops for discernment of matters in their own dioceses. Some experts also raised the question about the “anachronism” of a judicial trial for clergy under the procedures provided for by canon law, preferring instead a “pastoral approach.”

Obviously, this issue should be interpreted through the lens of those particular years. The approach was not aimed at covering-up cases of sexual abuse. But with time it became evident that the management of cases at a local level could lead to some “gaps” in the reporting system.

Pope Benedict XVI explained the particular climate of those years in the pastoral letter he sent to Catholics of Ireland in 2010, a milestone document for understanding his approach to the clerical sexual abuse scandal and to the way the Church has moved ever since.

Benedict wrote:

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“The programme of renewal proposed by the Second Vatican Council was sometimes misinterpreted and indeed, in the light of the profound social changes that were taking place, it was far from easy to know how best to implement it. In particular, there was a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations. [Note, Mr. Galiarducci: that is Bergoglio's rationale - and the word is used rightly this time, for AL Chapter 8!]

It is in this overall context that we must try to understand the disturbing problem of child sexual abuse, which has contributed in no small measure to the weakening of faith and the loss of respect for the Church and her teachings”.

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Benedict’s analysis explains – but obviously does not justify – what happened prior to and during the years of scandals.

From 1962 to 2001, Crimen Sollicitationis was applied only in cases of abuse involving the Sacrament of Penance. At that time, the Holy Office did not have juridical competence over cases of sexual abuse, but only those that dealt with the abuses occurring in conjunction with sacramental confession. For this reason, during this period only a few cases of abuse were reported to the Holy Office. [Yet, when Joseph Ratzinger became pope, secular media like the BBC peddled outright lies that Crimen Sollicitationis - a 1962 document they attributed to Ratzinger who in 1962 was a university professor in Bonn - was meant to cover up sex abuse crimes by the clergy!]

In 1983, a new Code of Canon Law was issued, but it was not of any help. Canon 1395 states that trial for abuse must take place in the diocese, and the procedures g0et more complicated. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, asked Cardinal José Rosalio Castillo Lara for clarifications – the Cardinal was then president of the Pontifical Council for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts. Cardinal Ratzinger asked how the norms in Canon Law could be correctly interpreted in order to laicize priests who committed sexual abuse.

This happened in 1988. In the same year, Pastor Bonus, the Apostolic Constitution that regulates functions and competences of the Curia offices, was issued. Pastor Bonus extends the range of crimes under the jurisdiction of the CDF even though the Constitution does not provide any list of such crimes.

Because of this omission, local diocesan bishops retained the responsibility for trying priests who committed abuse. In practice, therefore, competence for overseeing such matters in the Roman Curia remained with the Congregation for the Clergy.

2001 was the turning point. After the pedophilia scandal exploded in the Archdiocese of Boston, St. John Paul II issued the motu proprio Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela, through which the authority for investigating cases of abuse was transferred from the Congregation for the Clergy to the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. In 2002, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued the instruction De Delictis Gravioribus, which outlined a detailed procedure to tackle abuse cases.

Centralization was needed, as in the most cases abuse could keep on taking place because dioceses failed to report cases of clergy sexual abuse of minors to Rome, and in many cases they simply moved abuser priests from parish to parish, rather than punishing them.

Joseph Ratzinger was the main inspiration for this change, and he carried on with this path when he was elected Pope. In July 2010, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith introduced some modifications to Canon Law that made clearer how the dicastery would examine and punish cases of clerical sexual abuse of minors. In the very same year, the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith asked Bishops Conferences from all over the world to issue and adopt guidelines in countering abuses starting from May 2012. This letter highlighted three key points: education of future priests or religious brothers, assistance for convicted priests, collaboration with the civil authorities.

Certainly the local churches did not stay silent or inactive. Just two examples: the Commission that the Belgian Church set up after the shock of the Dutroux case in the mid-90s, and the guidelines issued by the Bishops of Ireland during the 90s that help to shed light on scandals in 2010.

But the new, centralized approach, bore much fruit, as proven by the numbers provided by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in January, 2014, on the occasion of a hearing of the Holy See before a UN committee.

These are the data: from 2011 and 2012, Pope Benedict XVI laicized some 400 priests, and the trend signals an increase of defrockings since 2009. In 2009, 171 priests were defrocked; in 2010, there were no priests laicized out of 527 reports to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; in 2011, there were 260 priests defrocked out of 404 reported cases; in 2012, there were 418 reported cases and 124 priests laicized.

It is noteworthy that, despite these data, Pope Benedict XVI’s approach was heavily criticized. [It wasn't his approach the critics bore down on. It was on Benedict XVI himself, whom his critics would not give any credit at all for the fact that from the time the CDF was given competence over clerical abuse cases, he singlehandedly promoted and executed the Church's firm and clear response to the clerical abuse 'scandal'. They had nothing say about the 'approach', because they even refused to acknowledge that the Church was doing what it could by way of correcting the culture that tolerated the abuses and that led bishops to cover up for their erring priests, getting justice for the victims of the abusers, and pointing the way for abusers to make amends and reparation for their crimes.]

It is also noteworthy that, considering these numbers, Pope Francis’s reforms – once again, based on a major centralization through the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, and at the same time major responsibility allocated to the peripheries – were considered effective. [They were? What reforms? With what effects? When?]

It is finally noteworthy that the press is struck by Pope Francis’s lack of forgiveness toward those responsible for the scandals – as he demonstrated again last week on December 28, in a letter addressed to all Bishops on the occasion of the Feast of the Holy Innocents, in which he reiterated the line of zero tolerance toward perpetrators – but at the same time the press forgets that Pope Benedict XVI met with victims, and that St. John Paul II addressed the issue clearly and strongly.
[1) In what way is it noteworthy at all, when it has been SOP - pathetic, preposterous and patently false- from Day 1 of this pontificate for the media to consider everything Bergoglio does to be the first ever by any pope!
2) 'Zero tolerance' is not 'lack of forgiveness'. Zero tolerance has to do with considering sex abuses by priests, especially against minors, a complete NO-NO! that must be punished promptly and accordingly. But Gagliarducci;s awkward formulation brings up one of Fr. Hunwicke's favorite conundrums - in that it would seem Bergoglian mercy can apply to everyone except priests who commit these crimes, as if none of them were capable of true repentance and therefore worthy of absolution not only so that they can 'go and sin no more' but also that they can go ahead with making whatever amends and reparation they came.]

What is more shocking is that the secular world, so judgmental when it comes to sex abuse by clergy, so ready to attack the Church when the crimes and sins of its members come to light, is now backing the return of the management of these cases to the individual diocese, in line with the decentralization that the Pope always hoped for. [Again, it is quite naive to be 'shocked' at this, because the media are really not interested that the Church is doing anything about clerical sex abuses - they want to keep that issue alive as a club to wield against the Church when and as they please!]

Even in these cases, Pope Francis’s decisions are dual-faceted, [??? He did not even bother to resort to the two mechanisms cited below by Gaglairducci, but simply decided on his own. That's not dual-faceted! That's sheer authoritarianism.]

For an “Inzoli case” described in the article in “The Week”, there is a special tribunal for “Delicta Graviora” mandated to assist the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith in the appeals process – though the way this tribunal is going to work has not been specified. For a “Karadima case” and the promotion of a bishop who was linked to Karadima (a well-known abuser – the case was highly publicized because of the protests raised by one of the former members of the Pontifical Commission) there is a special tribunal to judge negligent bishops, a charge which was then redefined as sort of “crime of negligence” as yet without specifics, as it is a crime based on the subjective judgment of judges.

In the end, the problem is not simply in the way things are tackled, nor the people in charge of these matters. The real problem is in the apparent lack of a well-defined philosophy, a “modus operandi,” on the basis of which all the reforms are shaped. There you go - there is no rationale if neither philosophy nor modus operandi are defined - everything is arbitrary and blowin' in the relativistic wind!]

One may agree or disagree with the “modus operandi”, but things could be clearer [Tell us what has ever been clear in this pontificate other than his authoritarianism, his obvious enjoyment of the powers and perks of the papacy, and his utter contempt for any Catholic who does not think like him!], and in the end history will tell.

In the end, there are seemingly no boundaries to assess what this “modus operandi” is. [The arbitrariness of authoritarianism!] The debate is then frozen, as it was in the years that followed immediately the Second Vatican Council. And frozen, too, are the extraordinary newness of the Second Vatican Council, as well as the huge strides forward that the Church has made since the Council.

When the man who is supposed to uphold the deposit of faith and promote the unity of the Church has become the primary cause of so much error and confusion.

Catholics and the present confusion
The faithful are told that they are too “rigid”.
The divorced and the homosexuals are, rightly or wrongly,
convinced that the Church has changed its doctrine
at least implicitly, if not explicitly.
by James V. Schall, S.J.

January 9, 2012

All through the modern era, the primary accusation against Catholicism was its clarity, its being too sure of what reason and revelation meant. It was arrogant. Imagine her claiming that she had a handle on essential truths!

What angered people was not the fact that the Church did not know what she was talking about, but the fact that she did and claimed that she did. People were comfortable with doubt. Doubt makes you free, not truth! Doubt leaves a lot of leeway. People claimed to be scandalized by certitude. To bring the Church into the modern world meant enticing, cajoling, or forcing her or her members to accept the supposed dubiousness of her own positions.

All religions, including Catholicism, are considered to be pretty much mythic. This origin of religion in fable is the majority opinion, especially among the elite. Religion is helpful only insofar as it does not interfere with more important things or claim that its truth was intended for everyone, that it had something to do with the way we should live. Religion was useful to keep the masses occupied. Catholicism is merely the extreme delusion of the religious mind. It brashly affirms that some connection with the divine can be established. Some divine intervention is thought actually to have happened in this world at a given time and place.

Let us add to this mix the multiculturalism and historicism that have governed academia and governments in recent decades. These positions affirm that “truth” varies from time to time and place to place. It changes according to current needs.

The best religion, as it turns out, is a strange variant of negative theology, the idea that we know what God is not, not what He is. Only now we are reasonably assured that God is not. Taken together, all ideas of God reveal a mass of confusion and self-interest. They confuse people. They prevent the “progress” of humanity to a better world. We have found no god in outer space. The Big Bang just happened in an orderly way by accident.

Except for certain strands of recent evangelical Christianity, most Protestant sects accepted the terms of the modern world. The essentials of the sexual revolution have their religious approval. Civil law is supreme over any natural or divine law that might limit the individual or state.

Ecology, itself mostly a blind faith masking itself as science, has reduced man to the terms of what are, erroneously, held to be “sustainable” limits of growth. Eschatology has become this-worldly. Transcendence has morphed into a futurology in which what man is becomes an object of his own science, not something given by nature and God, something discovered and understood by the use of his own reason.

Vatican II presented itself as a massive effort to retain tradition but also to reconcile the Church with the modern world in such a way that they harmonized with each other. It was not noticed at the time, as Tracey Rowland pointed out in her Culture and the Thomist Tradition, that the word “culture” was not neutral.

Modern “culture” already contained some good things, but it also had with in it principles and techniques that could eliminate both faith and even the structure of man as we had known him. In many ways, “to conform oneself to the culture” was a form of religious and intellectual suicide.

In this mix, the thought of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI stood as a corrective. They carefully sorted out the subtle principles and tendencies motivating the modern mind. They identified where these ideas and customs were leading. Under their guidance, it was clear that the mind of Catholicism knew what it was about.

Neither of these two popes had many intellectual peers. Those who were their peers usually recognized their genius. Catholicism understood where it came from in history and tradition. It clarified what it meant in relation to basic modern ideas, ideas that the two popes often defined more clearly than their advocates.

This papal teaching was profound and incisive. Not a few, however, came to think it was over the heads of most people, even most bishops. There is a kind of clericalism, as Fr. Mark Pilon has pointed out, that assumes that the laity cannot think. The request for clarification, which is their due, is often taken for disobedience. We needed a return to the original Gospels, it is said, to the simple life of faith.

Catholicism did not have to present itself before the world as understanding it. It is better to leave things more open, undefined.

In this light, however, with Pope Francis’s more recent emphasis on mercy and the poor, his many off-handed remarks, his hesitancy about explaining doctrine, the Church now, to many, seems confused, unsure of itself. It no longer seems to be a “rock” on which we can build.

The faithful are told that they are too “rigid”. The divorced and the homosexuals are, rightly or wrongly, convinced that the Church has changed its doctrine at least implicitly, if not explicitly. Divine positive law does not seem to hold against what people “do” do. Everything must be discerned. Every act seems an exception, which in a way it is. But there can be no “law” of only exceptions.

Many recent converts begin to wonder whether the Church is not reverting to positions that they thought, in the name of truth, that they had left. It is difficult to see why anyone should convert or even be preached to. To many, the Church seems to present itself as a kind of modern humanism in culture and socialism in political preference.

In the meantime, some three thousand mosques, with much Saudi money, have been built in the United States, probably more in Europe. They are mostly closed enclaves. The decline of population of European citizens has been often noted. Traditional European national populations are being replaced by a more fertile group of Muslims who, for the most part, do not assimilate or convert, either culturally or religiously. Some predict that Sweden will be Europe’s first Muslim country; others think it will be England. And if there is a first, there will be a second.

Islamic thinkers themselves shrewdly seem to opt both for terrorist and for democratic means to expand into Europe and America. The martyrdom and expulsion of so many Christians from the Mideast have gone largely unaccounted for. They appear more as an embarrassment than as objects of justice. Their specific witness seems almost lost.

It is a rare commentator or politician who notes the connection between Humanae Vitae, the decline of population, and the rise of Islam in Europe and America. “Refugees” fleeing into Europe can probably more accurately be described as “invaders” than immigrants, however sad their tale.

We are now experiencing something new, an incipient reaction. With Pierre Manent and Joshua Mitchell, we see that the nation-state and the family are the heart of true civilization. Globalism and world-state notions constantly reveal totalitarian tendencies. Emphasis on the poor has neglected the old Aristotelian notion of the middle-class, by far the majority in any decent society.

What are we to conclude from these considerations? The title of these opinions, and opinions they are, concerned “confused Catholics”. The conclusion is that the confusion of Catholics about the unity and consistency of their faith has dimmed or even taken out of the public order a firm voice that has connected in our civilization the present and the past, time and eternity.

Few seem certain about where the Church stands on many core issues that once were thought to be settled.

Practice does not really replace thought. It merely produces another kind of practice that seeks justification in a different line of thought.

Practice, overtly or covertly, depends on thought. The origin of all deviant practice is deviant thought. The knowing why it is deviant is a function of mind based on a standard of reason. It is the steady “knowing why” that, before anything else, we are missing.

Canon212.com headlines, January 10, 2017



I am glad Mr Pentin has commented on this report which troubled me greatly when Father Z first ran it on his blog. While I understand that
Cardinal Mueller is trying a near-impossible tightrope act to keep his job (he may have valid reasons for doing so, such as 'Better me here than
someone who will simply rubberstamp everything this pope says' - even if he has, in effect, rubberstamped AL definitively with this interview),
has he not considered that this pope will now use these, and previous, less strong statements of his, as proof to wave before
everyone that "Benedict XVI's own appointee as CDF Prefect says AL is A-OK!"? (thus indirectly implicating Benedict XVI himself
in the heterodoxies of AL).

Cardinal Müller’s TV interview causes bewilderment
Vatican’s doctrinal chief criticizes making ‘dubia’ public and yet
it emerges that none of the CDF’s corrections to AL was accepted

January 9, 2017

Cardinal Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said in a live television interview on Sunday that a “fraternal correction” of Pope Francis regarding his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love) is “not possible at this time” because the document poses “no danger to the faith.”

But the cardinal’s comments, made yesterday to Vatican correspondent Fabio Marchese Ragona on the Italian channel Tgcom24, contrast with revelations, affirmed by at least two senior Vatican officials to the Register last week, that the CDF lodged a large number of corrections of Amoris Laetitia before its publication last April, and “not one of the corrections was accepted.”

His remarks also follow widely divergent interpretations of the document, with some bishops’ conferences such as Germany’s saying it allows Holy Communion for some remarried divorcees living in what the Church has always taught is an objective state of adultery, and others such as Poland’s emphatically saying it doesn’t. Individual bishops around the world have similarly been at odds over the issue.

Cardinal Müller did not refer to concerns over these differing interpretations in his Jan. 8 interview, but said instead that “at the moment, a correction of the Pope isn’t possible because there isn’t a danger to the faith.” He was referring to the dubia of four cardinals who asked the Pope Sept. 19 to clarify the teaching contained in Amoris Laetitia given these widely varying interpretations on crucial moral and sacramental matters.

[When the CDF Prefect says that a document as patently 'confusing' - and meant to be so - as AL does not present 'a danger to the faith', he is 1) being willfully blind to the anti-Catholic interpretations of AL Chapter 8 around the world - epitomized by the overwhelming majority of his own fellow German bishops - by supposedly intelligent persons who say, rightly, that they are only following what this pope himself has expressed in writing to some Argentine bishops that their interpretation of AL Chapter 8 is 'the only right interpretation'; and 2) seriously compromising truth itself, since the Supreme Pontiff is supposed to confirm his brethren in the faith, not to confuse and confound them.

Can he even cite a single major dubium presented to the CDF in the past 50 years since it was constituted as such (in place of the Holy Office that it used to be)? No, because the CDF always had the reigning pope's full approval and consent - as it should in anything that involves clarifying essential truths of Catholic doctrine that cannot be relativized in any way!

But this pope instructs the CDF prefect not to reply at all the FIVE DUBIA because he, the pope himself, cannot risk answering the YES and NO questions simply, without ifs and buts: No, because answering the questions the only way that they can truthfully be answered would be an admission that AL Chapter 8 was flawed by its violations of truth, and to answer them honestly (i.e., what he really intended the document to say but with much equivocation and technically-skirting-heresy rhetoric) would be to tie the noose and millstone of heresy around his own neck.]

The four cardinals — Carlo Caffarra, Walter Brandmüller, Raymond Burke and Joachim Meisner — sent the dubia (questions asking simply if 5 passages in the document are consistent with Church teaching) to the Pope “out of deep pastoral concern” in order to clear up “grave disorientation and great confusion” due to these different readings of the document’s teaching. The cardinals stressed they chose to highlight those points in “charity and justice,” for the sake of Church unity.

So far the Holy Father has not formally responded to the questions and has made it known to Cardinal Müller that he is not to respond to them on his behalf. Francis has not publicly given reasons for not doing so, but has implied that the four cardinals and others “persist in seeing only white or black, when rather one ought to discern in the flow of life”.

The cardinals decided to make the dubia public as they took the Pope’s decision not to respond as “an invitation to continue the reflection and the discussion, calmly and with respect.” In Nov. 15 comments to the Register, Cardinal Burke said if the Pope continues not to respond then “it would be a question of taking a formal act of correction of a serious error.” Cardinal Brandmüller later told La Stampa the correction would first take place in camera caritatis (in private).


PewSitter headlines, January 10, 2017

Thanks to La Vigna del Signore whose banner I have adapted with a slight change (adding the year 2017).

FIRST PHOTOS IN 2017:
A visit from Augsburg's Cathedral Choir
January 6, 2016
Story and photos from the diocesan site via





Some members of the choir of Augsburg Cathedral with its director, Reinhard Kammler, visited Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI at his Mater Ecclesiae residence in the Vatican on Thursday, January 6, Solemnity of the Epiphany.

After celebrating Mass at the chapel of the residence, Benedict XVI had a long chat with his visitors, and congratulated Kammler on the 40th anniversary of his 'great team' as he called the choir.



At the end of the meeting, he imparted his blessing on the visitors.

WITH CARDINAL SARAH

And thanks to Beatrice, these two photos from Cardinal Sarah's Facebook page:

Cardinal Burke’s interview in ‘La Verità”:
More cardinals are completely with the Four
by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

January 11, 2017

Lots of lefties are hopping up and down in little circles because the Four Cardinals (Burke, Caffara, Meisner, Brandmueller) offered Five Dubia (questions, narrowly framed, asking for yes or no clarificatory responses) arising from the objective lack of clarity in Chapter 8 of Amoris laetitia. As these catholic libs, chimp-like, fling their stuff around, Cardinal Burke continues to give interviews in an attempt to bring sobriety to the debate.

Today I saw an interview dated 11 January in the Italian publication La Verità. Cardinal Burke is asked some tough questions and he gives straight on answers.

Asked whether they are “inventing” a way to correct formally the Pope, Burke answered “Of course not.” But he points out that, in the past, Popes have been corrected. He sustains that it is an “error” to say that, in certain cases, the divorced and remarried living in more uxorio, can receive Communion. He doesn’t think that that is a heresy, but an error:

---

“No, it seems to me that it can qualify as an error, but we are dealing with a complex situation.

Heresy is the obstinate denial or obstinate doubt, on the part of the baptized, of a truth that one must believe by divine and Catholic faith.

One heresy could be that of one who sustains that there do not exist intrinsically evil acts; to affirm this would be to say something contrary to the doctrine of the Church and would clearly be a heresy.

The affirmation about access to the sacraments of which we were speaking a while ago, on the other hand, refers to a practice (prassi) that contradicts two doctrines: that of indissolubility of matrimony and that of the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. At first glance we can say that certainly it’s an error.”

---

Cardinal Burke confirms that the Four Cardinals are united and that he knows many cardinals who are with them.

The accusations – open from some and veiled from … another – flung at them pretty much roll off his back.

In regard to the accusation that the Four are “doctors of the law” (an insult leveled by Pope Francis at those who resist antinomianism)[a term invented by Luther to say that Christians are not bound by any moral law because faith alone is necessary for salvation]:

---

“It seems to me that the moral law isn’t something that imprisons a person; it is quite the opposite: the moral law frees a person and orients him to fulfill the good. In fact, when there is no respect for moral law there come about chaotic situations and morally there results a kind of imprisonment.

For people of faith, we have to say that the divine law frees, and it is not a negative thing. And then to teach moral law is a great act of charity towards one’s neighbor, because it points to the path of authentic freedom and happiness. It is impossible to affirm that a person can find some form of happiness in sinning.”

---

He was asked:

---

Why so much noise for a problem that many have a hard time understanding?
We are dealing here with a question that concerns the Church in a profound way: matrimony and family, which is its fruit, and they constitute the foundation of the very life of the Church. Our task is not to lose ourselves in difficult or vague questions; we are simply giving our contribution to the growth of the Church in the most elementary cell of life.

---

At this point, let me put up an article I ought to have posted earlier about something that a commentator has labelled 'the sixth dubium'. Particularly interesting because it comes from South African Cardinal Wilfrid Napier, who during the two 'family synods' appeared to have been among the more outspoken 'conservative' bishops, but then after the release of AL, came out fully in support of the document.

An African cardinal asks a good question:
What about Communion for polygamists?
Virtually every priest who has worked in Africa
knows that this is a serious pastoral issue
by Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith

January 6, 2017

Every now and then someone says something interesting on Twitter. Just yesterday Cardinal Napier, the Archbishop of Durban, reminded us all of something we ought not to forget.

---

Cardinal Napier @CardinalNapier
3/3 If Westerners in irregular situations can receive Communion, are we to tell our polygamists & other "misfits" that they too are allowed?
6:28 AM - 5 Jan 2017

---

Cardinal Napier describes a real and pressing question: polygamy is widespread in Africa, and Catholics in the West cannot ignore this.

Catholic teaching and practice must be such that they are able to be inculturated in a wide variety of settings. An initiative might go down well in Berlin or Vienna, but how will it play in Peoria, or Nairobi, or Durban, or Delhi or Manila?

No one particular local Church has a monopoly on truth, and no one particular local culture can claim to have absolute insights that other cultures have to take on board. Cultural imperialism cannot be Catholic. When the missionaries came to Africa, they aimed – at their best – to introduce the Gospel of Christ, not Western culture.

But just as Western cultural insight cannot claim a monopoly on Christianity, African culture too must adapt to Christ and not the other way around, for Christ is the absolute value, and while the cultures of Africa are of value too, they are such only relatively speaking.

Hence, on coming to Africa, the missionaries challenged certain deep-rooted cultural practices and did their very best to stamp them out. Missionaries in Kenya, for example, have fought against female genital mutilation for a century. And they have also condemned throughout Africa the practice of polygamy.

Progress against both practices has been patchy to say the least. We all know of famous polygamists such as the King of Swaziland who currently has 13 wives, and President Zuma of South Africa, who has six. The Church condemns this practice. Not only is it a form of institutionalized adultery, it is also deeply detrimental to the dignity of women.

Polygamists may not receive Holy Communion, and polygamists who wish to be baptised have to abandon the practice first.

President Zuma’s six wives are all concurrent wives, not to mention various other liaisons, but here in the West we have serial polygamy, where people have one spouse at a time, getting a divorce between each new union. What Cardinal Napier’s question raises is this: is there a difference between the two?

For the African Church, this is a pressing issue. For example, in 2004 it was reported that nearly half of marriages in Senegal are polygamous. I know from my own former ministry in Kenya that polygamy is not at all unknown among Catholics. People in that sort of situation might well think that the admission of those in irregular second unions throws them some sort of lifeline.

Four Cardinals, as we know, have submitted five dubia to the Pope on the matter of the correct interpretation of Amoris Laetitia. Virtually every priest who has ever worked in Africa could submit a dubium on this matter too, namely, to quote Cardinal Napier: “If Westerners in irregular [marital] situations can receive Communion, are we to tell our polygamists and other ‘misfits’ that they too are allowed?”

If polygamists were ever admitted to Holy Communion for whatever reason, it would undo a century of work by the missionaries who have consistently taught that marriage is an exclusive and lifelong union between one man and one woman, and can only be dissolved by death. It would also severely damage the credibility of the Church, and undermine the authority of Scripture.

Dubium means doubt, but on this matter there can be no doubt. We cannot admit polygamists to Holy Communion, whether serial ones of concurrent ones, whether Westerners or from other continents.

Statement of the Grand Magistry
Rome, January 10, 2017

---

The Grand Magistry of the Sovereign Order of Malta, in response to the activities being carried out by a Group appointed by the Secretary of State of the Vatican, considers it appropriate to reiterate that the replacement of the former Grand Chancellor was an internal act of the government of the Order.

Thus, considering the legal irrelevance of this Group and of its findings relating to the legal structure of the Order of Malta, the Order has decided that it should not cooperate with it. This is to protect its sovereignty against initiatives which claim to be directed at objectively (and, therefore – quite apart from its intentions – reveals it to be legally irrelevant) questioning or even limiting said Sovereignty.

Article 4 paragraph 6 of the Constitutional Charter is clear when it states that “the religious nature of the Order does not prejudice the exercise of sovereign prerogatives pertaining to the Order in so far as it is recognised by States as a subject of international law” and Article 4 paragraph 5 reiterates that “the Order has diplomatic representation to the Holy See, according to the norms of international law.”

The confirmation of such status under international law is also attested to in the Annuario Pontificio of the Holy See, where the Order is mentioned only once and not amongst the religious orders, but rather amongst the States with Embassies accredited the Holy See.

The different ranks of the members of the Order belonging to different classes should be noted, and therefore also the hierarchical relationships that exist between those members and their superiors.

The Second Class, to which the former Grand Chancellor belonged, is for members of the Order ‘in Obedience’ who make the Promise according to Article 9 paragraph 2 of the Constitutional Charter (see also Article 8 paragraph 1 b) of the Constitutional Charter).

This Promise has nothing to do with the Vow of Obedience taken by the Knights of Justice, who belong to the First Class. Therefore the Knights of Justice “are religious in all respects” (Article 9 paragraph 1 of the Constitutional Charter), whilst they are not ‘Knights in Obedience’.

In addition, according to Article 4 paragraph 2, the Constitutional Charter states that members of the Second Class who have taken the Promise of Obedience are only subordinate to their particular Religious Superiors within the Order.

In the light of these fundamental legal regulations, it is clear that, in strictly legal terms, a refusal to a command ‘in Obedience’ does not justify in any way the involvement of ‘religious superiors’, all the more so as they do not all belong to the Order.

Such involvement, in addition to being legally impossible, is also superfluous in terms of protecting members of the Order: from the time that the members of the Second and Third Class who wish to appeal against disciplinary measures they consider too harsh, can dispute these before the Magistral Courts, as provided for by Article 129 of the Constitutional Code.

Failure to cooperate with the aforementioned Group has therefore strictly legal grounds, thus it is not and cannot in any way be considered as a lack of respect towards the Group, nor towards His Eminence Secretary of State.

The position of the Grand Magistry is that the depositions that individual members consider that they could make to the Group cannot, in their terms and judgments, be in contradiction, directly or indirectly, with the decision of the Grand Master and the Sovereign Council concerning the replacement of the Grand Chancellor.

---

If you wish to read a truly biased account of the above and its background story, read the AP's Nicole Winfield on this:
http://www.wbng.com/story/34229446/knights-of-malta-refuse-to-assist-irrelevant-papal-probe

January 11, 2017 headlines

PewSitter

This morning, PewSitter lags once again, at least on its big bold headline...

Canon212.com


The Catholic Herald has summarized Edward Pentin's recent blogpost on Cardinal Mueller's 'bewildering' interview in this way...

30 other cardinals and a 'significant number' of bishops’
conferences said to have expressed misgivings on AL -
but received no reply from the Vatican

January 11, 2017

The Pope’s apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia has caused widespread concern among cardinals and bishops, according to new reports.

Edward Pentin, veteran Vatican reporter for the National Catholic Register, reports: “Before the document was published, 30 cardinals, having seen an advance draft of the apostolic exhortation, wrote to the Pope expressing their reservations, especially on the issue of Communion for remarried divorcees, warning that the document would weaken the three essential sacraments of the Church: the Eucharist, marriage and confession.”

Pentin also said that a “significant number” of bishops’ conferences have expressed concerns about the document. Furthermore, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), having seen a draft, submitted several pages of revisions. These were not accepted, according to Pentin. The Pope has also not replied to either the 30 cardinals or the bishops’ conferences.

The most significant public response to Amoris Laetitia so far has been the five dubia issued by four cardinals, asking for clarification. One of the four, Cardinal Raymond Burke, has recently said they might issue a formal correction of the Pope if he does not reply. Another, Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, said that any such correction would first be issued privately.

As a not-irrelevant aside, let me post this for a welcome chuckle - a post typical of the writings of Ordinariate Fr. Geoffrey Kirk, an Anglican-turned-Catholic who has very much the same background as a lifelong classicist as Fr. Hunwicke, who has been plugging Fr. Kirk's blog for months. Fr. Kirk is a great satirist a la C.S. Lewis in Screwtape Letters.

And indeed, many of his recent posts have been take-offs on those letters, with the devil Screwtape commending his junior-devil nephew Wormwood for his success with his principal patient one Jorge Bergoglio. Another one of his more diverting genre of posts is a periodic exchange of letters between Justin (Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury) and Franck (Bishop of Rome).

Here is his latest satire, a la Eye of the Tiber....


Infallibility
by Fr. Geoffrey Kirk

JANUARY 9, 2017

To the surprise of many seasoned Vatican watchers, Cardinal Giuseppe Corleone has been named Prefect of the recently formed Sacred Congregation for Subservient Compliance.

Corleone, 78, a native of Caltanissetta, and known in his home diocese as ‘L’enforcer’, had not previously gained a high profile in the media. He now occupies a commanding position in the Curia, with a brief to investigate all other dicasteries and root out all those who are not identifiably ‘on message’.

Asked whether he thought that his role was anomalous at a time when the Church had just concluded a Jubilee of Mercy, Corleone replied: ‘Mercy was last year; this is the Year of Retribution. We need to cleanse the Vatican of all these rigid little coprophiliacs. This is Europe’s last surviving absolute monarchy; and we intend to keep it that way.’

His department has already been nick-named the ‘Get Burke Brigade’ by junior Vatican officials and journalists alike.

Here is some background on Fr. Kirk:

---

On Sunday 1 July 2012 Monsignor John Broadhurst received The Reverend Geoffrey Kirk into the full communion of the Catholic Church through the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham at the Church of the Most Precious Blood, London.

Fr Kirk was an Anglican Priest for 40 years and Vicar of St Stephen’s, Lewisham for 30 years. As Secretary of Forward in Faith, Fr Kirk worked closely with its Chairman, Fr Broadhurst, over the past 20 years in developing Forward in Faith’s vision for unity and truth together with its statement on communion.

He also wrote extensively for “New Directions”, the monthly journal of Forward in Faith. Fr Kirk’s sponsors were Deacon Robbie Low and his wife Sara who were also both closely involved in work of FiF, Robbie was editor of "New Directions", before becoming Catholics several years ago.

The reception took place during the regular 11am Mass at the Church where the London (South) Ordinariate Group worships. Fr Christopher Pearson, the Pastor of the group, prepared Fr Kirk for his reception and said:

Many people have been inspired by Fr Geoffrey’s teaching, preaching and pastoral care over the years. His intellect, writing and wit encouraged a generation in the Catholic movement within the Church of England. I hope that they will now be similarly inspired to follow Fr Kirk's actions in seeking visible unity.

---

Canon212.com - New 'headlines' screenshot, 1/11/17

A firing, a demolition:
Behold the new Curia
From the English service of

January 11,2017

The reform of the Vatican curia that Pope Francis is carrying out is being done partly in sunshine and partly in shadow.

Among the provisions recently adopted in shadow, there are two that are emblematic.

The veil was lifted on the first by the Vaticanista Marco Tosatti, when on December 26 he broke the news of an order the pope had given to a dicastery head to summarily fire three of his officials, an order given without explanations and without accepting objections.

It is now known that the dicastery in question is not second-tier - it is the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. And the three officials fired enjoyed the full approval of their prefect, Cardinal Gerhard L. Müller, in his turn already the target of repeated acts of humiliation, in public, by the pope himself. [But who nonetheless recently criticized the Four Cardinals for making their DUBIA public and said explicitly that there was no occasion to even correct the pope on AL because 'it presents no danger to the faith'. For the CDF Prefect to say that AL - an infinite wellspring of ambiguity which has already sown so much controversy diving the Church's episcopacy, clergy and lay faithful - presents no danger to the faith is quite appalling!

But which of the three rejects is the official whom Francis personally - as Tosatti has reported - reprimanded harshly by telephone for having expressed criticisms against him, which had come to the pope’s ear through an informant?

It is the Dutch priest Christophe J. Kruijen, 46, in service at the CDF since 2009, a theologian of acknowledged expertise, awarded with the prestigious Prix Henri De Lubac in 2010 by the French embassy to the Holy See, unanimously bestowed upon him by a jury made up of the cardinals Georges Cottier, Albert Vanhoye, and Paul Poupard, for his theological thesis entitled: “Universal salvation or dual outcome of the judgment: to hope for all? A contribution to the critical study of a contemporary theological opinion concerning the realization of damnation,” defended at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas under the direction at the time of the Dominican theologian Charles Morerod, afterward rector of the same university and now the bishop of Lausanne, Geneva and Fribourg.

The “last things,” or death, judgment, heaven, hell, are Kruijen’s favored subject for his studies. But he is also appreciated for his excellent essay on the Jewish philosopher and then Carmelite nun Edith Stein, killed in Auschwitz in 1942 and proclaimed a saint in 1998: "Bénie par la Croix. L'expiation dans l'oeuvre et la vie d'Edith Stein" (Blessed by the Cross: Expiation in the work and life of Edith Stein).

In the public writings and remarks of Fr. Kruijen there is not a single word of criticism against Francis. But all it took was a tattle lifted from one of his private conversations to bring him into disgrace with the pope, who brought the whip down.

This too is part of the reform of the curia, by the orders and in the style of Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

The second measure taken in shadow concerns the Congregation for Divine Worship, the prefect of which is Cardinal Robert Sarah, he too the object of repeated public humiliations on the part of the pope, and now condemned to preside over offices and men who are pulling against him.

Directed by the secretary of the congregation, the English archbishop Arthur Roche, a commission has been set up within the dicastery at the behest of Francis, the objective of which is not the correction of the degenerations of the postconciliar liturgical reform - meaning that “reform of the reform” which is Cardinal Sarah’s dream - but the exact opposite: the demolition of one of the walls of resistance against the excesses of the postconciliar liturgists, the instruction “Liturgiam Authenticam” issued in 2001, which sets the criteria for the translation of liturgical texts from Latin into the modern languages.

With Benedict XVI these criteria had been further reinforced, in particular through the pope’s intention to hold firm the “pro multis” of the Gospel and the Latin missal in the words of consecration of the blood of Christ, against the “for all” of many current translations.

But Francis immediately made it understood that this matter left him indifferent. And now, with the institution of this commission, he is meeting the expectations for a modernization of liturgical language championed, for example, by the liturgist Andrea Grillo, a professor at the Pontifical Atheneum of St. Anselm and in great esteem at Casa Santa Marta:
> La traduzione/tradizione impossibile: i punti ciechi di “Liturgiam authenticam”

There are those who fear that after the demolition of “Liturgiam Authenticam,” the next objective, of this or another commission, will be the correction of “Summorum Pontificum,” the document with which Benedict XVI liberalized the celebration of the Mass in the ancient rite.

Here's a most interesting and not irrelevant reaction to Cardinal Mueller's recent defense of AL as not constituting 'a danger to the faith':

Stockholm Syndrome at the CDF:
Has Cardinal Müller been compromised?
by Steve Skojec

January 11, 2017

On August 23rd, 1973, four bank workers in Stockholm, Sweden, were taken hostage at gunpoint by Jan-Erik Olsson, a career criminal who was later joined by a friend of his from prison. After six days — during which the captives were treated harshly, terrified, strapped with dynamite, and kept in a vault — the standoff ended and the hostages were released.

But then, something strange happened. Dr. Joseph Carver, a clinical psychologist, describes what came next:

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After their rescue, the hostages exhibited a shocking attitude considering they were threatened, abused, and feared for their lives for over five days. In their media interviews, it was clear that they supported their captors and actually feared law enforcement personnel who came to their rescue. The hostages had begun to feel the captors were actually protecting them from the police. One woman later became engaged to one of the criminals and another developed a legal defense fund to aid in their criminal defense fees. Clearly, the hostages had “bonded” emotionally with their captors.

While the psychological condition in hostage situations became known as “Stockholm Syndrome” due to the publicity, the emotional “bonding” with captors was a familiar story in psychology...

In the final analysis, emotionally bonding with an abuser is actually a strategy for survival for victims of abuse and intimidation. The “Stockholm Syndrome” reaction in hostage and/or abuse situations is so well recognized at this time that police hostage negotiators no longer view it as unusual.

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Dr. Carver describes four situations in which a foundation for Stockholm Syndrome is present. “These four situations,” he says, “can be found in hostage, severe abuse, and abusive relationships”:

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- The presence of a perceived threat to one’s physical or psychological survival and the belief that the abuser would carry out the threat.
- The presence of a perceived small kindness from the abuser to the victim
- Isolation from perspectives other than those of the abuser
- The perceived inability to escape the situation

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When Cardinal Gerhard Müller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, appeared live on Italian television last Sunday and criticized the DUBIA, saying that there would be “no correction” because Amoris Laetitia presents “no danger to the faith,” many Catholics found themselves examining his face to see if he was blinking out a distress signal in Morse Code.

The bewilderment that has followed his interview continues to generate news, but the reasons why he would say something so obviously contrary to the truth — when Müller’s marginalization casts serious doubt on it being an exercise in fomenting power through the willful, positivistic subversion of reality — remains a mystery.

Nevertheless, I think the psychological descriptions above may shed some light on what we are witnessing. I’m certainly not trained in the subject, but I could not help but map the above-mentioned conditions for Stockholm Syndrome onto Cardinal Müller’s relationship with Pope Francis:

The presence of a perceived threat to one’s physical or psychological survival and the belief that the abuser would carry out the threat.
We have heard for some time about the “climate of fear” at the Vatican. This isn’t new — in an anonymous letter from a former member of the Curia penned in 2015, this exact term was used. More recently, we have seen this fear publicly discussed by not just journalists at LifeSiteNews and the National Catholic Register who have spent time in Rome, but Bishop Athanasius Schneider, who lived under Soviet communism and has compared the situation in Rome to his experiences.

I have described what I call “The Dictatorship of Mercy” — the unrelenting Vatican agenda-by-diktat, couched in the terms of “mercy” and “accompaniment” but as authoritarian as any program implemented by an autocratic regime.

We have been given several recent examples — from the exile of Cardinal Burke to the purges at the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Pontifical Academy for Life to the assault on the John Paul II Institutes for Marriage and Family to the unexplained, papally-ordered firings at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — that opposition will be crushed.

Müller himself is often disrespected and passed over by Francis and his closest advisors. In an interview in January, 2014, Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, a member of Francis’s inner circle, proffered naked scorn at Müller’s rejection of Holy Communion to the divorced and remarried, saying that the prefect “only thinks in black-and-white terms” and that “the world isn’t like that”.

Archbishop Victor Fernández, another close friend of Francis who is believed to be the chief ghostwriter of Amoris Laetitia, gave an interview in May of 2015 that was perceived as a direct attack on statements made by the Prefect of the CDF.

In May of this year, Maike Hickson reported that “Carlos Osoro, the archbishop of Madrid, Spain, forbade Cardinal Gerhard Müller from presenting his new book on hope at the Catholic University San Dámaso, because this book is — Osoro alleges — ‘against the pope‘.”

In December, Kathpress.at, an official publication of the Austrian Bishops’ conference under the leadership of papal ally Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, edited an interview with Müller in such a way as to leave some of his most important remarks about Amoris Laetitia on the cutting room floor.

And on multiple occasions, Francis has signaled his preference — or even deference — to Cardinal Walter Kasper on matters of theology, such that the openly heterdox prelate is known as “the pope’s theologian”. [Skojec forgets the more recent Bergoglian deference to his new theological pet, Cardinal Schoenborn of Vienna.]

Meanwhile, it should be remembered that Müller contributed an essay to the book, Remaining in the Truth of Christ — seen as such a threat to the synod proceedings that it was stolen from the Vatican mailboxes of the synod fathers — and signed on to the so-called “13 Cardinals Letter” that was alleged to have outraged the pope.

Taking all of this into account, Müller has plenty of reason to believe that he is under threat. What form it would take remains an open question, but if he had a fear of reprisal in some form, it would not be without merit. [As the only possible reprisal at this point - he has already received every possible humiliation from the pope - is his dismissal from the CDF, I proffer my hypothesis, repeating myself, that possibly Mueller has been trying his best to hold on to his Curial position because "Better me than someone else who will be this pope's rubberstamp", but this ignores the Realpolitik that Bergoglio is holding him at CDF for now because he can use him as his trump card for all his critics. "See? Even the CDF Prefect appointed by Benedict XVI has my back!"]

The presence of a perceived small kindness from the abuser to the victim
This condition seems, at least superficially, slightly less applicable. That said, despite his (rather tepid) opposition to heterodox interpretations of Amoris Laetitia, Müller still has his job as Prefect — a job which he seems to take seriously, even when others do not. This alone could be perceived as a kindness, even an openness from Francis. [I anticipated this argument in the previous remark, though I disagree that Mueller, based on his Sunday defense of AL, is really taking his job seriously, as he is condoning equivocal ambiguous teaching by the pope as not being 'a danger to the faith', when the CDF is dutybound to demand clarity in the Church's teaching.]

Isolation from perspectives other than those of the abuser
I have often described Müller to others as “essentially under house arrest.” The fear of monitored communications on the part of CDF officials has been noted in these pages before. The forced firings of competent staff members of the CDF at the pope’s command — without any justification — is a clear power play. One source of mine described the situation at the Vatican, as I have previously written, as “like an occupied state.”

Even when travelling in Spain, Müller faced the insubordinant behavior of an archbishop — his hierarchical inferior — who would, it is reasonable to conclude, only have made such a gesture of disrespect if he were protected by Rome. (Osoro has since been rewarded with a red hat. Coincidence?) So while Müller has, in theory, freedom of movement and access to outside perspectives, the dominant power base in Rome — and the very man to whom Müller reports — falls under the category of the “abuser”.

The perceived inability to escape the situation
Sources close to Müller have told me that the prefect and his close advisers believe they can do more good for the faith, and for the orthodox members of the CDF, by staying put — even though the situation is less than ideal. I have heard rumors that the Cardinal even considered retiring, but was persuaded to stay by those who have expressed fears over who might take his place. [There we are! This is really the most charitable scenario one can postulate.]

So while Müller technically possesses the autonomy to leave, one senses that he feels trapped by a moral duty to mitigate the damage being done by Rome. However, it appears increasingly clear that in so doing, he is being co-opted into the very agenda he is ostensibly standing his ground to resist.

So is some version of the psychological effect known as Stockholm Syndrome beginning to affect Müller’s judgment and sabotage his own self-interest? More importantly, is this happening in such a way that Müller himself is now undermining the Catholic Faith he is duty-bound to guard and protect? This seems an increasingly likely possibility.

In Edward Pentin’s January 9 report at the National Catholic Register on Müller’s surprising televised remarks last Sunday, some striking facts were brought to light. Most notable was the contradiction between the Cardinal’s words in the interview and his previous actions. Pentin writes:

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His remarks also come after it has emerged the CDF had clear misgivings about the document before it was published — concerns which were never heeded. One informed official recently told the Register that a CDF committee that reviewed a draft of Amoris Laetitia raised “similar” dubia to those of the four cardinals. Those dubia formed part of the CDF’s 20 pages of corrections, first reported by Jean-Marie Genois in Le Figaro on April 7, the eve of the publication of the document.

Another senior official went further, revealing to the Register last week that Cardinal Müller had told him personally that the CDF “had submitted many, many corrections, and not one of the corrections was accepted”. He added that what the cardinal states in the interview “is exactly the contradictory of everything which he has said to me on the matter until now” and he had the “impression of someone who was not speaking for himself but repeating what someone else had told him to say.”

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Remember, too, this largely-overlooked piece of information in our story of May 2nd, 2016:

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In addition, it has now been reported that that Cardinal Müller was not given the copy of the final version of Amoris Laetitia – but only, instead, a much less problematic text – for his own final doctrinal review. It is once more due to the important work of Guiseppe Nardi that this important fact – which has subsequently been confirmed by other sources – was reported first in Italy, and has now been made known far and wide. While it seems clear that the orthodox forces – with Cardinal Müller at the top – are being increasingly ignored, pushed aside and even bypassed, the progressive forces are in fact being further promoted and now also encouraged in other ways.

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So it is more than a little odd to see Müller defending the orthodoxy of the text. Further, Pentin also reported that in his most recent remarks:

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[Müller] said he felt it was “a loss to the Church to discuss these things publicly”, adding that Amoris Laetitia is “very clear in its doctrine and we can interpret the whole doctrine of Jesus on marriage, the whole doctrine of the Church in 2000 years of history.”

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But certainly, Cardinal Müller’s own public statements stand in rebuke of these comments. In this image made by 1P5’s Matthew Karmel, we see the clear distinction made by Müller in December of 2014:

It is clear that with divergent practices being implemented by various bishops around the world, the pope himself confirming that Holy Communion can be given to the divorced and remarried in certain circumstances, and the official interpreters of the exhortation trying to pass it off as “binding”, we are faced with nothing less than a “separation of the theory and practice of the faith.” If that is, indeed, a “christological heresy” — as Müller himself has claimed — it would therefore constitute a “danger to the faith” by any reasonable standard.

With the stakes thus clarified, certain conclusions are inescapable. If Cardinal Müller thinks he can stand athwart the darkness by staying where he is, trying to tamp down the fires of discontent stirred up by the DUBIA from within the Vatican apparatus by means of a more subtle, diplomatic approach, he is seriously mistaken.

And if he is being told what to say, and willing to do so (recall similar reports that Msgr. Pinto from the Roman Rota was given a papal order to attack the Four Cardinals) then it is impossible for him to be trusted — and it suggests that he has come to identify, somehow, with those who have essentially held him captive in his increasingly ineffectual position.

Recall this synopsis of a recent article at Crux, which struck me at the time as being a description of precisely what has been done to Müller, particularly as regards the accolades and responsibilities given by Francis to Kasper and Schönborn:

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In a nutshell, Pope Francis’s approach to difficult personnel choices is to keep people in place, while entrusting the real responsibility to somebody else and thus rendering the original official, if not quite irrelevant, certainly less consequential.

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Though our readers have often pointed out Müller’s own theological discrepancies, he has consistently been one of the better prelates in Rome during this pontificate. It was sad enough to see him treated this way by the reigning cabal; it is far more disheartening to see him now speaking on their behalf.

It is worth noting that Pentin also reports that

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some 30 additional cardinals, having seen an advance draft of the apostolic exhortation, wrote to the Pope expressing their reservations, especially on the issue of communion for remarried divorcees, warning that the document would weaken the three essential sacraments of the Church: the Eucharist, marriage, and confession. The Pope never responded to that letter either, a Vatican source told the Register.

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Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s well past time for these princes of the Church to man up. They have a moral duty to defend the Faith. Quiet murmuring does not a crown of martyrdom make. Will they or will they not defend their flock? Will they or will they not defend their mother?

Salvation history is quite literally at a turning point, and all that is required to help set things right is a bit of courage. How is it that there is so little to be found?

Reactions from Germany to
Cardinal Müller’s defense of AL
by Maike Hickson

January 11, 2017

In the wake of the recent 8 January defense of the papal document Amoris Laetitia by Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), there have been an increasing number of faithful Catholics now coming forth with reluctant criticisms, while others quote the cardinal in order to claim that the case of the DUBIA has now been closed for good.

In the following, I shall concentrate on three major voices: the German pro-life activist and book author, Mathias von Gersdorff; the German theologian, Dr. Markus Büning; and Guido Horst, the editor-in-chief of the major national German Catholic newspaper, Die Tagespost.

As we recall, Cardinal Müller has claimed that the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia is in accordance with the traditional teaching on marriage and that there is no danger to the Faith coming from this document. He has also now issued a critique of the four cardinals who published their DUBIA with reference to this papal document.

First, let us consider those German Catholics who now criticize Cardinal Müller’s position and recent statement. Mathias von Gersdorff shows himself disappointed with Cardinal Müller’s rebuke of, as well as his distancing from, the Four Cardinals’ own Dubia, and he says that the words of this cardinal thereby now “increase the confusion concerning Amoris Laetitia.” Von Gersdorff, consequently, now raises an important issue and question when he says:

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It is indeed remarkable that Cardinal Müller chooses an interview on television in order to criticize his brothers of the College of Cardinals [the Four Cardinals]. As Prefect of the Congregation of the Faith, he has at his disposal means that are more apt than an eleven-minute-short interview in which merely three minutes are dedicated to the Apostolic Exhortation.

Does such a statement in a television interview have any relevant authority at all? One would have expected from a Prefect that he make such a grave statement – which has caused nearly an earthquake – either in L’Osservatore Romano or in an academic journal of theology.[dim]

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In von Gersdorff’s eyes, Müller did not even have “the time to give sufficient reasons for his critique... Such a short format does not allow a larger explanation which would correspond to the weight of the statement...[A more careful explanation] would have been truly fitting.

It is impossible that Cardinal Müller missed the fact that many bishops and bishops’ conferences already interpret the document [Amoris Laetitia] very differently from Tradition and that they want to allow Communion for the remarried divorcees. That is also the clear tendency in Germany, the homeland of Cardinal Müller...

If he [Müller] thinks it is right to criticize the authors of the DUBIA, then it would be fitting also to criticize those who push ahead and interpret Amoris Laetitia (AL) in opposition to Tradition, with Cardinal [Reinhard] Marx being at the head of all of them.”

A delayed book review here, which I had intended to introduce a chapter from the book that the author himself posted on his blog, but as I have
yet to translate that chapter, here is the review. I shall add the chapter translation itself as soon as I can...Please remember that until AL, Valli
had been among the most ardent Bergoglists among the Vaticanistas.

Aldo Maria Valli:
Questions about this pope
from a son of the Church
by Lorenzo Bertocchi
Translated from

02-01-2017
January 2, 2017

The documented summary-review of Pope Francis's nearly four-year Pontificate so far by Italian State TV's Vaticanista Aldo Maria Valli leaves the reader with many questions, as in an unanswered quiz.

In almost 200 pages, Valli offers a long and detailed series of episodes and citations from the 266th Successor of Peter, raising courteous questions but without leaving any doubt as to the 'perplexities' that this pope has engendered.

In the beginning was Cardinal Kasper. As everyone recalls, at his very first Angelus remarks, the Pope made a praiseful citation of the German cardinal-theologian, who at the time, was rather on the fringes of the Catholic intelligentsia.

Called by the new pope "a theologian on the ball, a good theologian", and praised for his book about mercy, Kasper can be considered the academic reference for what would become - perhaps not all that strangely - the heart of this pontificate: mercy. [Of which, one must note, there's mercy and mercy!]

And we must go back to Kasper again in order to understand the two 'family synods' which this pope synthesized in the apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia. The synodal marathon over almost a two-year period got underway with Kasper's infamous 'gospel of the family' preached to a secret consistory in February 2014 [on express assignment by Bergoglio], which has now led to allowing communion 'in certain cases' for remarried divorces living together adulterously and continuing to do so.

Of all the dissertations on the possible controversial interpretations of divine mercy according to Kasper, there remains the paradigmatic passage that seems to guide the pontificate of someone who is a man of action, and certainly not a theologian or a philosopher [not that theologians and philosophers cannot be men of aciton, as well]: "from the logic of doctors of the law to that of the Good Samaritan". [Typically false Bergoglian dichotomy!]

It is unfortunate, writes Valli, that this line "entails numerous problems". The most serious - especially in the light of 'case by case' erected as a system in AL - would be the apparent "triumph of the contingent over the absolute, of the transitory over the stable, of the possible over the necessary".

Struck by propositions like 'discernment' and 'accompaniment', we ask ourselves whether reality does not end up resolving itself as simply the experience of the individual as the sole judge of himself, of what he believes is good or evil. Many have described this as ignoring moral absolutes and the triumph of situation ethics, which John Paul II condemned in the encyclical Veritatis splendor.

Valli's book hammers away at these questions - questions effectively condensed in the famous FIVE DUBIA presented by the Four Cardinals to the pope regarding AL Chapter 8.

The 'who am I to judge' pope - who made this Generation-Me mantra into a cult phrase, drawn from one of his answers in his first inflight news conference - is the pope of repeated confidential encounters with the king of Italian secularists, Eugenio Scalfari, during which the pope has used other catch phrases like the much-cited "There is no Catholic God".

He has called Martin Luther 'medicine' for a Church that was sick, and took part in opening the fifth centenary year of the Reformation, expressing possible ways towards interfaith communion which he had first treated equivocally [many saw it as an endorsement in yet another relativistic formulation, "Do what your heart tells you!] during a visit to Rome's Lutheran Church in 2015.

On his visit to Lund, Sweden for that joint celebration of Luther's Schism, he took it for granted that the problems separating Catholics and Lutherans on the doctrine of justification would be overcome (despite the 1999 Joint Catholic-Lutheran Declaration on Justification, towards which Cardinal Kasper had been among the most diligent of its drafters) [and to which the CDF, under Cardinal Ratzinger, felt it was necessary to issue a document listing the problems that remain open on that question].

On Islam and terrorism, Valli says the problem is that this pope says nothing "about the problem of violence in Islam". "Just as reductive [as well as irrational and willfully blind] is his reading of terrorism only in sociological and economic terms".

Still on terrorism, this pope let loose another unfortunate buzz phrase in essentially equating Catholic 'fundamentalism' to the Islamic kind. Returning from his WYD trip to Poland, the pope told newsmen on the plane that "I don't speak of Islamic violence because everyday when I read the newspapers, I see the violence taking place in Italy - someone shoots his fiancee dead, another kills his mother-in-law, yet these are baptized Catholics! They are violent Catholics! If I would speak about Islamic violence, then I must also speak of Catholic violence". [Surely one of the most idiotic (and fundamentally anti-Catholic) statements ever made by a pope, by a leader, even by an average person!]

Socio-economic issues are among the repeated topics of 'analyses' presented by this pope - they are cited especially in his advocacy of climate activism as expressed in his encyclical Laudato si, but especially in his sponsorship of 'popular movements' which generally have a clearly Marist matrix. And so, he repeatedly makes generic attacks against 'the system' ["This economy kills!] and the 'idolatry of money', which he even blames as a cause for why young people are more and more rejecting marriage. [When Francis's follies and fallacies are enumerated like this, you have to wonder whether he is not somewhat mentally 'not there'!]

All this, and much more, is found in Valli's 200-page book which details the perplexities that wrack him as a result of his papal chronicle.

At one point, he cites an unnamed journalist who offers a synthesis of the Bergoglio who is pope. It has been pointed out that the Argentine pope is rather repetitive [tiresomely so, ad nauseam] and so, the journalist summarizes using the pope's own recurrent themes and terms:

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God? He is merciful ("He is greater than all our sins!") [Another IDIOTIC statement! So idiotic one cringes in embarrassment for Bergoglio! How can one compare God to sin???? It's like comparing him to Satan himself!]. The Church? let it be poor and for the poor, going outwards to the peripheries, let it heal wounds as in a field hospital.] [I suspect he does not really know what a field hospital is, otherwise he would realize that it is a most faulty metaphor for the Church] Pastoral care? Don't impose duties. just facilitate an encounter with the Lord.

Then there are the corollaries, similarly repeated over and over:'Pastors should take on the odor of the sheep, they should stop gossiping, they should not be careerists. Society? Fight the throwaway culture and money as god ("Corruption is an evil worse than sin") [Another can-you-believe-how-idiotic line!] Grandparents must be respected. Housing, land and jobs must be guaranteed for everyone. [Another one of those mindless Bergoglian Marxist formulations. 'Land' for everyone? In a society that is rapidly and universally urbanizing??? What planet is he living on?]

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I will leave it to the reader who gets a copy of Valli's book to discover the conclusions he draws from the many questions that constellate the pages of this freely open book written with respect by a true son of the Church. [Remember JMB's copout when asked about his attitude towards homosexual practices? "I am a son of the Church - Read what the Catechism says!' Some 'son of the Church' this anti-Catholic pope is!]

1/14/17
THE DUBIA OF ALDO MARIA VALLI

It took me a couple more days before I could get back to finishing my translation of this chapter that the author himself excerpted from his book to post on his blog. It is a formidable analysis that comes from someone who has been a lifelong progressivist Catholic and who, until several months ago, was quite Bergoglian. But AL came along and changed his view of this pontificate to the point that he felt compelled to write a book documenting his critical inquiry into this pope, his statements and his actions.

This chapter, in effect, synthesizes virtually all the major dubia raised in the minds of average reasonable Catholics about this pope and this pontificate - and he formulates his questions as dubia answerable by Yes or No.

Because of its length, I had to do the translation on WORD, which means I must now enter all the format enhancements appropriate to the post - which will probably take me more than an hour to do...

Truth, justice, mercy:
Analyzing the 'Francis method'
by Aldo Maria Valli
Excerpt from his book "266...'
Published on his blog


“I believe in God. Not in a Catholic God. A Catholic God does not exist. God exists”. Words of Pope Francis.

The concept is not new, because it was already expressed, more completely, by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini [whose definitive biography so far was written by Valli] in his interview-book with fellow Jesuit Fr. George Sporschill.

But now an analogous question is being asked, but with a different subject. Not “Does God exist?” but “Is Pope Francis Catholic?”

September 2015, eve of the pope’s trip to the United States: On a pitchblack background, the face of the pope appears in half shadow. It is the cover of Newsweek, and the device is familiar: Whenever the Roman Pontiff is the subject of discussion, he is always depicted in obscurity, or else, facing away, back to the people. But it is the title that is immediately striking: “Is the Pope Catholic?”

The newsmagazine, an expression of a cultural, religious and political world that is certainly not approving of the Catholic Church, dramatizes the provocative question, which arises in part from Francis’s famous words “Who am I to judge a gay person?”, and more generally, because of Papa Bergoglio’s pastoral line, characterized not by condemnation [But which contemporary Pope’s pontificate has been characterized by condemnation???],, not by conflict with modernity but by dialog.

The weekly’s intention was transparent. By asking the question, it hits two birds with one shot: It accuses the Church pre-Bergoglio of having been always retrograde, while at the same time, touching the open wound of the divisions that the Argentine pope has been provoking in the Catholic Church by his decisions and by his [anti-Catholic] line in general.

In fact, the magazine hastens to note that the pope’s popularity in recent surveys of American Catholics, has been in free fall, because many conservative Catholics see him as the Fifth Column of he left and of radical ecologism, while acknowledging that the pope is a ‘superb communicator’ [How can someone who so habitually confused and confusing,If not outright incoherent when he is not insulting, be a ‘superb communicator’?], and “a cunning reflection of the Catholic image’ insofar as he "makes it superfluous to remind Catholics what they believe in”, relying instead on eloquent gestures such as renouncing princely vestments [What contemporary pope has dressed in princely vestments, unless one considers the traditional liturgical vestments preserved from previous popes in St. Peter’s sacristy and occasionally worn by the popes before Francis ‘princely vestments’?], using a utility vehicle for moving around, and choosing to live in a small room in Casa Santa Marta. [Such is the substance of myth that by constant repetition, gets to be established as a convenient factoid. But his room at CSM is hardly small – it is the hotel’s equivalent of a royal suite, and has an adjoining sitting room and study. In fact, a whole wing on one floor of the hotel is occupied by him and his personal and security staff, and if someone would report on the actual square-footage in this papal wing, it could well be beyond the square-footage of the papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace, which did not have to provide lodging for security personnel because by its very location, it is internally as secure as anything could be in the Vatican.]

But the title of Newsweek’s cover story is a reason to reflect: If this question arises in anyone, does it mean that Francis himself is legitimizing it? Is there something in the words, in the teachings and in the gestures of this pope that clashes with the Catholic faith, or at least, does not fully mirror it?

December 8, 2015. An appeal from the American biweekly newspaper The Remnant, which expresses the sentiments of traditional Catholic groups, calls on the pope to step down because

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“a growing number of Catholics, including cardinals and bishops, are starting to acknowledge that your pontificate… is the cause of serious harm to the Catholic Church. It has become impossible to deny the fact, they wrote, that you, Holiness, do not possess the capacity nor the intention to fulfill that which is the duty of every pope according to the words of your immediate predecessor: “He must constantly link himself to the Church in obedience to the Word of God, in the face of all attempt to adapt or dilute it, as in the face of every opportunism’.

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According to the Remnant, instead of focusing on the teaching of the Church on the Word of God, Francis is instead bent on proclaiming his own ideas, doing it in

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“…multiple homilies, news conferences, off-the-cuff statements, interviews with newsmen, discourses of all kinds and idiosyncratic interpretations of the Gospel. These ideas, which range from simply disquieting to plainly heterodox, are perfectly represented by a document that is more or less his personal manifesto, Evangelii gaudium, containing a series of incredible pronouncements which never befoe had any Roman Pontiff dared to say.

“Among this, we must list a statement like “the dream… of transforming everything in the Church because the customs, the styles, the scheduled, the language and every ecclesial structure may become an adequate channel for the evangelization of the present world, rather than for self-preservation”. It is inconceivable that a Roman Pontiff could even hypothesize an inexistent opposition between the self-preservation of the Holy Roman Catholic Church and her mission in the world. [See? That was one of the idiocies I missed noting in my perfunctory scans of a document I find unsupportable in style as well as in content. Idiotic because how can the Church carry out her mission if she does not also take care to preserve who she is and the faith she embodies??? ]

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The signatories do not excuse the pope for writing in EG of the temptation to which Catholics could yield, namely, in the Catholic enclosing himself in ‘structures’ that offer ‘false protection’, in ‘norms’ that transform believers into ‘implacable judges’ and in ‘habits’ whose only purpose is to keep things tranquil.

What the pope calls structures, norms and habits are, in fact, the appeal’s signatories write, the very framework of doctrine that prevents the Church from disintegrating.

The pope’s rebukes, they add, are generic and produce disconcert, whereas his epithets, sometimes insults, which the pope reserves for those who do not think like him, are quite specific against those whom he variously calls ‘fundamentalists’ , ‘Pharisees’, ‘Pelagians’, ‘triumphalists’, ‘gnostics’, ‘nostalgics’, ‘superficial Christians’, ‘gang of the privileged’, ‘peacocks’, ‘pedantic moralists’, ‘uniformists’, ‘arrogantly self-sufficient’, ‘aristocratic intellectuals’, ‘Christian bats who prefer the shadows instead of the light in the presence of the Lord’, and the like.

There are many accusations against the pope in the letter-appeal. In the foreground, his banalization of the concept of mercy, that he has been propagating in the name of a generic ‘tenderness’ which overshadows binding moral rules, whereas the only true ‘revolution of tenderness’ takes place through Baptism.

Now, another magazine cover. This time, in November 2015, the British weekly The Spectator, which has a conservative outlook. It is a cartoon: Francis merrily rides a giant wrecking ball that crashes into a church and reduces it to a pile of rubble, with the title “Pope vs Church: The anatomy of a Catholic civil war”. The thesis of Damian Thompson, who wrote the cover story, can be summarized thus: The ‘disordered’ reforms of Bergoglio and his ‘wild’ declarations are generating apprehensions among average Catholics who think that the pope has gone out of control.

So then: Is Francis not Catholic? Or hardly Catholic? On September 22, 2015, while this pope was in flight from Cuba to the USA, correspondent Gian Guido Vecchi of Corriere della Sera asked the question directly: “First, it was said that the pope is communist, and now some are asking whether the pope is Catholic, more or less? What do you say?”

Here was the pope’s response:

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A cardinal friend of mine told me that one day, a lady came to him very concerned – she was very Catholic, a big rigid, this lady, but a good Catholic, who asked him if it was true that the Bible spoke of an anti-Christ. And he explained to her – that this is said in the Apocalypse, right? Then, she asked if it was also true that it speaks about an anti-pope. ‘But why do you ask this?” the cardinal asked. “because I am sure that Pope Francis is the anti-pope”. “Why would you think that?” he asked. “Because he does not use red shoes”. [See, how consistent he is even in this hypothetical, perhaps imaginary anecdotes! He ridicules this hypothetical ‘very Catholic, good Catholic but 'rather rigid' lady for being idiotic in her ‘rigid Catholicity’! Obviously, this was another notable milestone I missed in the documentation of Bergoglio’s inability to simply say Yes or No to a question.

One would have thought that a pope would have begun by answering, “Of course, I am Catholic. I was elected to lead the Catholic Church. I would not have been elected if I were not Catholic”. Not relate an anecdote that reduces opponents to objects of ridicule.]

So that's the way it is... there are historical reasons for thinking that one is Communist or not… I am sure that I have not said anything that is not within the social doctrine of the Church. .. [Evasion, evasion, your name is Bergoglio! So he shifts to the other accusation without ansswering the first at all, not that he has answered the second either!]

On another trip, when I was preparing to address the meeting of the ‘popular movements’ [in Bolivia], a colleague said to me: “You have held out your hand to these popular movements … but will the Church follow you?” And I said, “It is me who follows the Church”, and in this, I think I am not wrong, I believe I have not said anything that is not in the social doctrine of the Church.

Everything can be explained. Maybe the explanation will give the impression that I am being a bit ‘leftist’, but it would be an error of interpretation. No, my doctrine, in all this, in Laudato si, on economic imperialism and all that, is that of the social doctrine of the Church. And if it is necessary that I recite the Creed, I am ready to do so. [Excuse me! Where did that come from? As if by reciting the Creed if called to do so, he would thereby prove he is Catholic and not a communist???]

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Bergoglio’s response, even if it was off the cuff and in imprecise Italian, allows us to understand the pope’s attitude in the face of some criticisms.

First of all, regardinjg the concern of the ‘good Catholic lady’ who sees in him an anti-pope, he has recourse to the rhetorical device of ridiculing her. “What, I am an anti-pope because I don’t wear read shoes?” As if to say: These ‘good Catholics’, so attached to tradition, are nothing but formalists. Then comes his substantial self-defense: “Actually, I have never said anything that is not contained in the social doctrine of the Church”. [Yes, but that addresses the accusation of being Communist, not of whether he is Catholic!]

But this pope is too intelligent not to know that even the way one says things have a certain importance. In fact, he acknowledges that some of his explanations could appear ‘leftist’.

A bit ingenuous and a bit sly, as he has described himself, and as he always appears when he is with journalists, he says that in order to avoid any doubts, he is even ready to recite the Creed, with which he makes known that he is quite aware of the disconcertment he is provoking in some sectors of the ecclesial community.

But he moves ahead the way he wants to, because he is convinced that today, it is more important to intervene on social injustices, on old and new poverty, on ecological problems and the ‘throwaway culture’ rather than speaking on doctrinal matters and moral questions (those famous ‘non-negotiable values’ in Benedict XVI’s Pontificate – abortion, euthanasia, homosexual practices, artificial procreation) - messages which, in the recent past, were hammered home.

That explains his strategy, although in truth, it has not kept him from reiterating the line of his predecessors on abortion, euthanasia and artificial procreation. [Hardly reiterating, but rather studiously avoiding having to say anything on such topics, because as he told the Italian bishops shortly after he became pope, it is not necessary to have to say the same things again and again. Of course, he does not follow his own counsel because on the secular issues which he has made his priority, he does tirelessly repeat himself again and again!]

Nonetheless, the covers of Newsweek and Spectator, like the petition from The Remnant, tell us that there is a certain discomfort, perhaps even distress about this pope, yet these are only three cases among the many that can be cited. A distress that has only worsened after the publication of Amoris laetitia, his post-synodal apostolic exhortation on ‘family love’.

Although I have become used to discussions and polemics regarding the work of popes (I have been doing this for more than 20 years), I must admit that I have never witnessed a confrontation as strident as this. In Italy, it is perhaps still a bit imperceptible, but it is underway especially on the Internet. And at the center of all the polemics is he, Pope Francis. Praised by some, criticized and opposed by others.

Something similar happened with John XXIII, especially after his decision to convoke the Second Vatican Council. Even Papa Roncalli, who was so loved as to pass into history as ‘the good pope’, was in fact accused of modernism and progressivism. And like Francis, he too was considered by some to be ‘Communist’, or too ecumenical and with little respect for Tradition. [A strange accusation against someone who happily followed every papal tradition, including wearing the red shoes, hats and capes that popes are entitled to wear ‘casually’, and who loved Castel Gandolfo as much as his predecessors and successors, except the present one.] In some circles, his call for aggiornamento [keeping up to date] was seen by some as a betrayal of tradition, and the debate on his actions became heated, but never as harsh and strident as for Francis today, if only because at that time, mass media were not omnipresent 24/7 as today, and there were no social networks which are catalysts of extremisms.

In any case, Bergoglio is between two fires: If the greater part of the criticisms continue to arrive from the ‘right’, even the more progressivist circles are in a state of fibrillation, and after having invested so much hope in him, are now starting to accuse him of inconclusiveness.

So there is a ‘Francis case’. Which one must look into with some inconvenient but inevitable questions: Wny, alongside the hosannahs from many, the increasingly hard stands against him continue to grow? What has gone wrong? What no longer convinces? And what do his opponents fear?

Many claim that those who are ranged againsgt this pope are fearful of the future and of losing their privileges. [??? Ordinary Catholics like me who only wantw to continue living the faith in which I grew up – because it represents a firm foundation for what one must do to be worthy of God’s grace – have no privileges to lose! Daily life is a continuing struggle, but we make do with God’s help which does not have to be material but which does bring joy and comfort in the midst of difficulties.] This hypothesis is widely held, and probably there is some truth to it. But if it's happening, there is more to it.

Juan Carlos Scannone, the Argentine theologian who is a friend of Bergoglio and a Jesuit like him (the theoretician, with Lucio Gera, of that ‘theology of the people’ that has influenced this pope considerably) [a variant of Liberation Theology which advocates its Marxist goals but rejects armed militancy] explains that with Francis, the Church has finally become the paradigm of Vatican II. That from the preceding paradigm, considered a-historical because it started off from ‘what must be’ without considering the reality of the time, we came to the historical paradigm desired by John XXIII, who wanted to take the personal and the subjective more in consideration. [Not true, of course. One only has to read his opening address to the Council in DEcember 1965!]

This was a change, Scannone explains, that is evident in Gaudium et Spes – the root and inspiration for Evangelii gaudium, which seeks to put into practice the method of ‘see, justify, act’, the central pastoral strategy of the Conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellin, Colombia, in 1968, and at every subsequent continent-wide conference until the 2007 Conference in Aparecida, whose final document, drafted under Bergoglio’s chairmanship , is the other source of inspiration for this pope.

[What Valli does not point out is that despite all these Latin-American bishops’ conferences and their hefty final documents – the first of which (Medellin 1968) spelled out the goals, strategy and tactics of frankly Marxist liberation theology with the establishment of the so-called ‘base communities’, going on to more radical documents in Puebla and Santo Domingo in the next twenty five years.

Meanwhile, the churches of Latin America simply continued to hemorrhage their members who joined assorted independent evangelical churches so that by the time Bergoglio became Pope, a continent that had once been 90% Catholic (forever, it seemed) was down to 69% - and in more than half of the countries of Latin America, Catholics now make up less than 50% of the population.

Aparecida in 2005 obviously did nothing to staunch the bleeding. Yet what did a 2014 Pew survey show, conducted during the first year of Bergoglio's Pontificate?
- Protestant Latin Americans attend Church more frequently, read the Scriptures and pray more often than Catholics.
- Catholics, the survey said, are less morally opposed to abortion, homosexuality, premarital sex, divorce and contraception.
- About 60 percent of Protestants surveyed in Latin America said they were looking for a church that “places greater importance on living a moral life.”

What was Bergoglio doing in Argentina all that time? Playing kumbaya with the evangelicals – even then, he had no interest in converting anyone to Catholicism, nor obviously, in stopping Catholics from leaving the Church. The pollsters had a catch phrase: While the Catholic Church was proclaiming an empty ‘preferential option for the poor’, the poor were manifesting a preferential option for the Protestants.

And that is why, Scannone says, this pope is committed to accompanying the poor, why he denounces the throwaway culture, and why he asks pastors to pay attention and solicitude to every single person: Reality is more important than ideas, Bergoglio already liked to say this in 1974, when he was head of the Jesuits in Argentina. [Another Bergoglio idiocy – as if reality could be appreciated independent of the mind!]

To inquire into the roots of this pope's thinking makes us understand how much he is bound to a certain climate – cultural, social and theological – that continues to influence him. But we can ask legitimately: has not that season passed by - at least in some of its important aspects - however heady it may have been for him? [What exactly did he do that kept the church in Buenos Aires together, if he tried at all, and with his decision to give priority to pastoral leniency, if not downright license, was he not bucking the obvious trend that the Catholics leaving the Church for Protestantism were not finding what they wanted in the Catholic Church? As the Pew survey found, the median percentage of converts from Catholicism to Protestantism left the Church for the following main reasons:
Are seeking a personal connection with God: 81%
Enjoy the style of worship at a new church: 69%
Wanted a greater emphasis on morality: 60%]

Today, in the face of the spread of subjectivism and relativism, immersed as we are in ‘liquid’ culture of post-modernity, exposed to the risk of seeing all the instruments that could assure us of moral stanards vanish before our eyes, can the ‘historical paradigm’ introduced by the progressivist reading of Vatican II still be our principal interpretative tool? Is it not perhaps necessary to update and integrate what has gone before into new reflections? Is not the problem today perhaps the opposite of what it was half a century ago?

Today, as a Church, don’t we risk now – which we did not before – of becoming too immersed in history so that we are incapable of having stable points of reference that can enable us to help orient a humanity that is morally out of control?

Theologian Inos Biffi [one of two winners of the 2016 Ratzinger Prize], in an article which never mentions Pope Francis but seems to be addressed to him indirectly, warns against any deviations of contemporary culture that the Church could well assume.

When subjectivism prevails above all, Biffi explains, the subject is "prey to impressions” and “human action ends up missing enlightened solid reason” which is what makes it possible to make good choices.

It is the great problem of our time. We no longer have principles and fundamental ideas to explain who we are and what we do. Or, better said, we have principles and notions which fatally lead us back “to instinctivity or incontestable opinions”, which is to say, allergic to any measure whatsoever.

Which leads us to "the absolutization of the subject, which has become the undisputable principle of good and evil, of valid and invalid”. A question, says Biffi, that would seem at first to be merely anthropological and logical inevitably becomes theological.

To reject this ‘liquidity’ of reality is to reclaim for man his faculty of “discerning intelligibility, order and the light of things as being a reflection of the Word, and therefore of the Father".

This is the dramatic challenge that faces all of us, especially the believer, in this age of a liquid society. But Pope Francis does not seem interested to assume this challenge.

On some occasions he has used harsh words against that which he calls ‘pensiero unico’ [In current discourse, usually used in its original form pensée unique" (French for "single thought") - a pejorative expression for mainstream ideological conformism of any kind, almost always opposed to that of the speaker], except that he uses the term in its original economic and social meaning [that neoliberalism is the only correct way to structure society, implying that mainstream discussion is limited by ideological assumptions of what is possible], not in its philosophical meaning and its possible theological implications.

Therefore, Bergoglio’s theology appears to reduce itself to a theology of rights that excludes duties, or relegates them to the background. [Is this properly called theology, or is it not, rather, ethical philosophy?]

“Spiritual intrusion into personal life is not possible,” he says in that first interview with La Civilta Cattolica in July 2013.

This is one of the most problematic of his dicta. In which Bergoglio takes upon himself, voluntarily or not, a commonplace typical of post-modernity – that individual judgment, or what is commonly called conscience, is always good, or at least, is always valid, something that no one can judge externally, with any universal standard.

But if individual choice, by the very fact of being taken ‘in conscience’, is in itself good and incontestable, are we not in full relativism? [That is quite obvious but very few, even among serious orthodox commentators, ever remarked on Bergoglio’s blatant relativism, evident almost from Day 1 of his pontificate. And we must be thankful Valli calls it by its name. Otherwise, it has been a continuing omission after four years that I find inexplicable considering that his predecessor had been the first world leader and intellectual who ever took such a strong – and widely quoted – public stand against the dictatorship of relativism the day before he was elected pope!]

And is it not perhaps true that along this road of relativism, it would be so easy to arrive at the idea – already widespread in the pastoral activity of the Church’s ministers – according to which ‘sincerity’ and spontaneity cancel out the nature of sin? [One of the heresies proposed with technically evasive casuistry in AL Chapter 8.]

And is it realy merciful to respect the choice of life of every individual who has made his choice freely and sincerely? [Sincerity is in itself a relative term – one can been completely sincere and be totally wrong at the same time.]

Is it not the duty of the Church to expose lifestyles characterized by sin? And is doing this not perhaps the highest form of mercy?

If the Church does not expose sin, if she is not able to make a sinner see clear within himself following Christ’s law, does she not condemn herself to irrelevance? [Which the 9aforementioned experience of the Church in Latin America abundantly demonstrates – in which 60% of those who left the Church for Protestantism claimed their principal reason was that they want ‘greater emphasis on morality’. That seems to me to be the most damning verdict on the church of Bergoglio – the pope’s personal extension to the universal Church of his ultra-permissive, ultra-lenient governance of the Church in Buenos Aires.]

Primacy of conscience [not in the sense of the Catholic formed conscience, but conscience as ‘what I think is right and good for me’] does not mean the impossibility or incapacity to judge. [But a relativistic conscience, what one might call purely self-referential, to use a Bergoglian pet term, is incapable of making any judgment that is not what it wants, what it thinks is right and good for itself.]

At stake here is not just the eternal destiny of the souls who think this way but the authoritativeness of the pope himself.

[So why have not more intelligent Catholics with access to media exposure ever spoken out against this most un-Christian Bergoglian idea of conscience, taken verbatim from the ‘me-myself-I’ self-centeredness of the generations formed by the 1968 cultural revolution – Bergoglio among them.

And with all due respect to Valli himself, who has finally taken off his progressivist blinders to the horrible reality of who Bergoglio really is and what he represents, he was among those who just let Bergoglio’s un-Christian, anti-Catholic ramblings and rantings pass unremarked!]

When Francis says that “everyone has his own idea of good and evil, and must choose to follow the good and combat evil as he conceives them” [one of the most outrageous statements in the first Scalfari ‘interview’ that the Vatican never refuted – even if Scalfari admitted that what he reported were his own paraphrasing of what he deduced from his conversation with the pope – and indeed, for months, reproduced Scalfari’s report on the Vatican webpage dedicated to Pope Francis’s Documents after finally taking it off but including it in the first anthology of the pope’s interviews collected and puiblished by the Vatican publishing house, and what better imprimatur/nihil obstat can there be?], what are we to think?

This is a subjectivist relativist conception of moral conscience which certainly is not what the Church has always taught. Does true good not exist objectively for the Catholic/ [or for anyone using his reason sanely and not selfishly]?

Besides the media manipulations and omissions (that one must always take into account), one must return to the greater problem which comprehends all other problems: In a cultural and spiritual context like ours – which is profoundly characterized by subjectivism (reality must be solved within the particular life experience of the subject, who is the sole judge of himself) and by emotionalism (the criterion for moral action does not come from well-formed reason but in the emotion evoked by living through a particular experience), does not the Bergoglio paradigm make a formidable contribution - not to say, a surrender – to the spirit of the times [Zeitgeist, to use the German term that has been absorbed into English usage], which is already characterized by the trioumph of the contingent over the absolute, of the transitory over the stable, of the possible over the necessary?

In short, is Pope Francis a product of relativism? [HE IS ITS VERY EXPRESSION!] A question which carries another within itself: On the basis of AL, is the “Francis method’ that it proposes intended to bring sinners to salvation, or simply for the ‘wellbeing’ [a subjective feeling] of the individuals concerned?

From a spirituality based on the rights of God and the duties of man, have we now come to a spirituality focused on the duties of God and the rights of man?

“If by fundamentalist one means someone who insist on fundamental things, I am a fundamentalist. As a priest, I do not teach my own thoughts and I do not act for myself. I belong to Christ”. So spoke Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, canonist. A way of saying that he does not agree with the Bergoglio line.

But even the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, is very explicit:
“We have the doctrine of the Church which is expressed in the Catechism, in the Council of Trent, in the two Vatican Councils, in declarations from our congregation. Pastoral care cannot have a concept different from that doctrine – doctrine and pastoral ministry are the same thing. Jesus Christ as Pastor and Jesus Christ as Teacher of the Word are not different persons. And the mercy of God does not contradict the justice of God”. [Brave words said before his recent January 8 capitulation asserting that AL presents no danger to the faith.]

And what about Cardinal Robert Sarah, who in his best-seller God or nothing, maintains that the Church is headed for self-dissolution if it fails to indicate a cure doctrinal and moral way?

“‘I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life’, Jesus said. That is what remain stable. And it is what I seek to bear witness to”, Sarah said in an April 2016 interview.

Despite Benedict XVI’s warnings against relativism, Sarah said, we now find ourselves in a world [and a Church] where everything is possible:

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“We no longer have roots. Nothing stable. But we do have a stable doctrine – we have Revelation. And for us bishops, it is a duty to make our faithful go back to the roots of our faith, to Revelation.

We cannot leave our faithful without a sure and secure way to follow. Without a rock on which to rest and lean on. In the parish, that rock is the parish priest; in the diocese, the bishop; and in the universal Church, the Pope.

We must help the Holy Father assure the faithful that there is stability in the Church. That there is a way, one way forward. And that is Jesus Christ”.

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When he was asked if, like Cardinal Burke, he considers himself a ‘fundamentalist’, he smiled and said, “Yes, of course!”

A pastor like Sarah is too faithful to the pope to engage him in direct polemics, but when he says, for example, that the greatest injustice is to give the need only ‘bread’, forgetting they need God, first of all, then his opposition to the Bergoglio line is not hidden at all.

Moreover, according to critics like Sarah, there is an error underlying Bergoglio’s propositions. That when he and his followers speak of the ‘poverty of the Church’, he really means desacralizing it. That when they say the Church should accompany the needy [in the material and emotional sense], they seem to deny a perception of the grandeur and majesty of God, in whose place, they would substitute human action.

Christ said the truth would make us free, but today, the question of Truth is hardly ever taken into consideration. We have become preoccupied only with freedom, thus our thinking is crippled and incomplete, because there is no authentic freedom without truth.

If the Church will not remind the faithful, on the basis of correct doctrine, of the line between authentic freedom and slavery, then who will show them the way. Sarah says:

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“True freedom is that which commits us to seek the true, the good and the beautiful, to seek true justice. We can only be free in Jesus Christ. Only he can liberate us. And his freedom has nothing to do with what I personally want for myself. The Church should stay along this path”.

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It is not surprising that, especially since AL was published, many observers, including pastors, announced the birth of a new church – ‘the church of Pope Francis’, a Church that is no longer judgmental but ‘in dialog’ in the sense that the dominant culture understands dialog, namely, a neutral and neuter Church, devoid of the ability and will to distinguish, to evaluate, to express a judgment.

Which makes it inevitable to ask: If the Church does not judge, does not distinguish, does not evaluate, then what is her function?

This pope, with his pastoral paradigm of ‘mercy’, seems to say that the purpose of the Church is to console and to accompany, but can one give comfort without any evaluation of the situation? Can there be any accompaniment without first making some judgment [about what accompaniment is necessary]?

Has the pope not decreed, in effect, that the subjective way of living any experience is the only measure to evaluate the moral quality of the experience?

If a grieving Paul VI, in a now-remote 1972, came to the conclusion that “through some fissure, the smoke of Satan has entered the Church”, can we not now ask: Through which fissure has relativism also entered? [The fissure has a name: Jorge Mario Bergoglio, pope and dictator of relativism par excellence!]

At this point in our inquiry, we can maintain that basically, there is not just one kind of relativism, that there are at least two – one bad and one good.
- Bad relativism leads directly to nihilism, and eventually to desperation, to the impossibility of harboring any kind of hope in anything that is stable and absolute.
- Whereas good relativism would be that which, while acknowledging the extreme variablity of human situations, continues to believe in an Absolute.

[‘Absolute’ here does not mean only a Supreme Being who is absolute, but also all the truths that have come to us from this Supreme Being, none of which can be relativized in evaluating any human experience. So, in this sense, all relativism – a rejection that anything can be stable and unchanging despite continually changing circumstances - is just BAD without ifs or buts. This is the relativism so strongly denounced by Benedict XVI and which his successor champions primarily as situational ethics, roundly denounced by John Paul II in Veritatis splendor.]

Some observers claim that with his paradigm of the Good Samaritan, Pope Francis is exercising ‘good’ relativism: he announces Christian hope but takes into account that everything in life is contingent.

Now the great question is: How is he announcing Christian hope: In his catecheses on mercy, he reiterates: “We are all called upon to follow the example of the Good Samaritan who is a figure of Christ. God has bent down towards us, has made himself our servant, and thus he saved us because we too can love eash other as he loved us”.

But what does it mean, exactly that “God has bent down towards us”?

It can be answered: It means sustaining us, encouraging, showing his compassion, help us concretely” [No, he does not always help us ‘concretely’, for which he has reasons we do not understand, but we don’t have to understand in order to bow to his will. If he, the Creator, bends down to us, can we do less than bow to his will?]

Yes, but only that? If we speak about giving Christian hope, does that not mean first of all to ‘transmit’ Jesus? And does this transmission of Jesus [which is a good definition for Christian mission!] consist only in helping others materially and emotionally, or does it not also mean the transmission of essential and inseparable moral standards, without which ‘transmitting Jesus’ would only consist in proof of human solidarity without witnessing to the Truth?

Bergoglio the wrecking-ball.

Why more and more priests can’t stand Pope Francis
He has been pigeonholed as 'a fearless reformer',
but questions are arising about his judgment
by Damian Thompson

Issue of 14 January 2017

On 2 January, the Vatican published a letter from Pope Francis to the world’s bishops in which he reminded them that they must show ‘zero tolerance’ towards child abuse. The next day, the American The Week magazine published an article that told the story of ‘Don Mercedes’ — Fr Mauro Inzoli, an Italian priest with a passion for expensive cars and underage boys.

In 2012, Pope Benedict stripped Inzoli of his priestly faculties, effectively defrocking him. In 2014, however, they were restored to him — by Pope Francis, who warned him to stay away from minors.

Then, finally, the Italian civil authorities caught up with this serial groper of teenagers in the confessional. Last summer Inzoli was sentenced to four years and nine months in jail for paedophile offences. The Vatican, under ‘zero-tolerance’ Francis, refused to supply evidence that prosecutors wanted.

If Pope Benedict XVI had displayed such a hypocritical attitude towards a clerical child abuser, the roof would have fallen in on him: he’d have been driven out of office instead of resigning.

But most of the world’s media have pigeon-holed Francis as a fearless reformer, doing battle against Vatican mafiosi, kiddie-fiddlers and ‘fundamentalists’. This perception made it easy for the Pope’s allies to keep the name of Mauro Inzoli out of English–speaking news outlets until last week.

That perception may change in 2017. For more than two years, leading Catholics have been at each other’s throats over a plan — surreptitiously supported by the Pope — to allow divorced-and-remarried Mass-goers to receive Holy Communion. The secular media have treated this, understandably, as an inside-the-beltway story. It’s difficult to make headlines out of a controversy that even theologians find hard to grasp.

At the end of last year, however, the communion row began to overlap with other controversies, all of which raised questions not only about the Pope’s judgment but also about his state of mind. [Hmmm, after reviewing/recalling a string of documented idiocies from the mouth and pen of this pope, when they are strung together in the above post, one has to ask, "Is he really in his right mind? Is he all there?" I think the intervention of the Holy Spirit may need to be far more fundamental than merely enlightening him to the truth, but in bringing him sanity!]

A man who, when he took office, seemed endearingly informal — paying his own bill at his hotel, refusing to live in the Apostolic Palace, making surprise phone calls to members of the public — now cuts a less sympathetic figure.

He has broken with a far more significant papal tradition than living in the papal apartments or travelling in limousines. He has defied the convention that a pope, once elected, ceases to play nasty curial politics.

Pope Benedict respected this convention. Liberals who were worried that the ‘Rottweiler’ would harbour ancient grudges watched in amazement — and relief — as he turned into a virtual hermit. [He did not turn into a virtual hermit until after his retirement!] This created the factional chaos that led to his resignation [What factional chaos, pray tell! Thompson always has a lamentable tendency to see a summer when there is one swallow. The easily identifiable 'factions' in the Benedict XVI Pontificate were the usual three factions that exist in any administration: those who were genuinely and loyally pro-Benedict, those who were pathologically anti-Benedict [always a minority but a scurrilous and subversive one], and those who just did their work without having to take sides, although such unsung heroes generally have no reason to be hostile to whoever is the reigning pope] — but right up until the end, Benedict was always ‘the Holy Father’.

That title has almost dropped out of use inside the Vatican under Francis, at least in everyday conversation. And, when you hear it, there is an edge of sarcasm. For example: ‘As the Holy Father so wisely says, we all have a natural tendency to eat shit.’

The priest in question is no fan of Francis. But the fact is that the Pope did say it — in public. Last month, he told the media to stop spreading fake stories because ‘people have a tendency towards the sickness of coprophagia’. Which means eating excrement.

Why did he say it? The traditionalist blog Rorate Caeli suggested that ‘ageing or an underlying medical issue’ was responsible for his ‘persistent anger, rancour, vituperation, use of uncouth words (which is known to be increasingly frequent in private)’.

Again, this is an opponent speaking. There is no evidence that the Pope is mentally ill. However, plenty of Vatican employees will testify to his outbursts of temper, rudeness towards subordinates and vulgar language.

He can also be genial, funny and compassionate. But this side of his personality is increasingly reserved for his inner circle and his allies.

All popes have inner circles, it goes without saying. What distinguishes Francis from his recent predecessors is the nature of the alliances he forms. He is far more brutal in the exercise of his power than, say, Pope John Paul II, who certainly had an authoritarian streak in him.

‘Bergoglio divides the church into those who are with him and those who are against him — and if he thinks you’re in the latter camp then he’ll come after you,’ says a priest who works in the curia. [Oh yes, that has been so obvious, almost since Day 1.]

'Bergoglio’, note! - he doesn’t even call him ‘Francis’. Tellingly, this priest used to be a fervent supporter of some of the Pope’s administrative reforms and he doesn’t look back nostalgically at the reign of Benedict, whom he blames for neglecting his papal duties. [Now, that's a new one! 'Neglecting" instead of the usual 'abandoning' levelled at B16 for deciding to give up his papacy!]

But, like so many Vatican employees, he’s sick of Francis’s habit of telling the entire Roman curia that they are modern-day Pharisees — an analogy that casts the Argentinian pontiff in the role of Jesus.

Clearly Francis believes that relaxing the rules on communion for Catholics in irregular marriages is an act of Christlike compassion. This is also the view of the venerable liberal cardinals who campaigned to elect him. It is often said that he is enacting their agenda — and it’s true that Francis is well disposed to liberal demands for women deacons and married priests.

He is not, however, their instrument. In the words of a Vatican observer who held an important position in Rome for many years, ‘He hasn’t taken on the old progressive mantle so much as created his own personality cult.’ Theological niceties bore him. Personal loyalty obsesses him — ‘and if the cardinal electors had done due diligence they would have discovered that he was an extraordinarily divisive figure among the Argentinian Jesuits’.

It’s not hard to detect a Latin American flavour to the deal-making and settling of scores that has become blatant over the past year. Most Catholic bishops had thought Francis was a plain-spoken and perhaps touchingly naive reformer. Instead, they are confronted by a pope who is simultaneously combative, charming, bad-tempered, idealistic and vengeful.

Does that remind you of anyone? The Trump-Francis analogy has been doing the rounds in Rome for months, and not just among the Pope’s opponents.

‘It’s not meant entirely seriously,’ says a well-placed source. ‘No one is suggesting that Jorge Bergoglio is tempted by the same sins of the flesh as Donald Trump. [But outright wordliness, which this pope manifests so much, if not from every pore) because he has to keep up a semblance - he is, after all, still pope), is not limited to sins of the flesh, which Trump appears to have left behind at least since his third marriage more than 10 years ago. Besides, Trump has a set of principles that he has stood by so far, which is clearly not in accord with the prevailing worldly conventional wisdom.]

‘And there’s another difference. The Americans can kick out their old rogue after four years. Francis doesn’t have to stand for re-election by the conclave. Which, believe me, is lucky for him, because after the misery and nonsense of the past couple of years he’d be eliminated in the first ballot.’

With thanks to Beatrice for leading me to this...

Vatican Gendarmerie calendar features
Benedict XVI for April 2017
Translated from

January 11, 2017

On April 16, which will be Easter Sunday, Benedict XVI will turn 90.

To celebrate this extra-special occasion, the Vatican Gendarmerie has used a photo of the Emeritus Pope taken with some of them recently at the Vatican Gardens to illustrate the month of April on the calendar.



Photographed with him are Mons. Georg Gaenswein, a gendarme and two firemen of the Gendarmerie corps.

Left: Murillo, Holy Family with John the Baptist, 1670?; right: Raphael, Holy Family, 1507.


You know how much the principles of Catholic doctrine enunciated in the Four Cardinals' DUBIA extends through the entire fabric of our life when practically every issue you could think of that is most problematic in the Church - pastoral as well as doctrinal - can be tied in to the dubious Bergoglian propositions in AL Chapter 8.

I thank Fr. Cipolla at Rorate caeli for indirectly suggesting that St. Joseph, spouse of the Virgin Mary and foster father of Our Lord Jesus, ought
to be the model and patron saint for all these remarried RCDs selfishly wanting to have their 'wedding cake', i.e., all the joys of adultery,
while also 'eating' the Eucharist. Fr. Cipolla underscores the contrast to St. Joseph's selflessness in following the unique plan God had
for him and his life...


The Holy Family in the shadow of AL
Sermon for the Feast of the Holy Family
by Fr. Richard G. Cipolla

January 11, 2017

This is the first year that the feast of the Holy Family is being celebrated in the context and shadow of Pope Franciss’ Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, the Joy of Love.

The Feast of the Holy Family was added to the Church’s calendar in the first decade of the twentieth century. To contemplate the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph is indeed a good thing to do within the celebration of the Christmas season. The bond of love that existed within this totally unique family is an example for every family to emulate.

But, as I have preached about many times, to hold up the Holy Family as a model for the what we can call normal family, is not an easy thing to do. And when we try to apply our own situation to that of the Holy Family without acknowledging that uniqueness, we are always disappointed.

And so we come here today to celebrate this feast, which is a contemplation of this unique family, this Holy Family, under the cloud of Amoris Laetitia. I say under the cloud in an objective sense, in that there seems to be some confusion about what certain sections of that document really mean, especially Chapter 8.

It is no secret that four cardinals of the Church submitted a private correspondence to the Pope in which they asked for a clarification of certain sections of the Exhortation that could be construed as contrary to Church teaching about the moral life with respect to the Sacrament of Marriage, the role of conscience, and the authority of the Church.

The request for clarification has been met by a refusal to answer the dubia, as they are called, and instead resorting to public press conferences to insist that the Exhortation is based on the outcome of a valid Synod of bishops and therefore there can be no doubt, no dubium, about the results of that Synod nor in the spelling out of its teaching in Amoris Laetitia.

Such monarchial, to say the least, behavior on the part of the Holy See is not only not consonant with the image of the Bishop of Rome as the servant of the Church but also brings forth once again what is the fundamental dogmatic problem in the Church today, a problem that has been growing for at least a century, the problem that is the ever expanding imagined power and authority of the Bishop of Rome.

One aspect of the question brought up by Amoris Laetitia is the objectivity of moral norms. This has been a topic of discussion in the Church for her whole life. The question of whether particular circumstances affecting a particular situation can in fact allow for the breaking of a fundamental moral norm. The Church’s answer to this question has always been that particular circumstances can never justify an act that is intrinsically evil.

St. Pope John Paul II affirmed this constant teaching of the Church in several of his encyclicals. The 1960s saw a resurgence of an attempt to soften this teaching of the Church by an appeal to the relationship between difficult circumstances and the moral law. The protest against Humanae Vitae was a clear example of an attempt to evade the difficulty of living a Catholic life based on the teaching of the Church. This specifically applied to marriage.

What we have seen in the past few years is an attempt to finish what was begun in the sixties but what was held back by St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI. It is a case of back to the future. But now the same flawed understanding of the demands of the moral life, of the role of conscience, and of the power of the Church, are proclaimed in the name of the mercy of God.

The role of conscience, my friends, is not to decide what to do. It is to recognize what is good and what is bad. The role of the confessor is not to decide what is right and wrong in the light of the penitent’s situation in life. The role of the Confessor is to absolve the penitent in the name of the mercy of God and to tell him: God and sin no more.

I want to briefly contemplate the situation of one of the members of the Holy Family, namely, Joseph. We know so little about St. Joseph. The most important is his faith, that he believed what the angel told him about the singular situation of Mary’s pregnancy, and that he acted out his faith by taking on the role of the father protector of this unique family, and he did so in love.

I always wonder why St. Joseph’s Day on March 19 is celebrated with such fervor among some ethnic groups, since objectively we know so little about him. My answer to my own wonderment is that most of us know instinctively that he relates to us, especially those of us who are married, in a mysterious and yet very real way. He took on a task, a role, the role of a father although he did not father the child for whom he was an earthly father, and every married man knows that even when one has fathered children that to be a faithful and loving father is not an easy task, and that a part of the at difficulty is to give oneself even when one wants to keep part of oneself for oneself.

St. Joseph’s situation would give some theologians pause. His acceptance to be the earthly father of Jesus and the husband of Mary with all the moral imperatives that apply without the physical intimacy of a husband and wife and without the deep wonder and joy of looking at his Son as part of himself. This is indeed a unique and difficult situation.

And, surely in this situation, we could declare that the moral norms of marriage do not apply to him and that his failure to abide by those norms could be excused by an appeal to the mercy of God, that the severity and ambiguity of his calling surely can be softened by a God of mercy and surely his Confessor would understand and tell him to not worry too much about following his own conscience as a man in his peculiar situation.

Does that shock you? It should.
- Is this consonant with the Church’s teaching on marriage, on sexuality, on conscience, on living a moral life, on the constitution of the Church ?
- But is this consonant with the deliberate ambiguities found in the teaching of Amoris Laetitia?
- And if it is not, then for the sake of truth, let the Bishop of Rome speak with clarity and cast away the doubts that cause so many good people to suffer because of the doubts that this lack of clarity brings into their own marriages.

It is to the Holy Family that we must pray, pray that each of us in our own families and husband or wife or child may have the grace to live a life of sacrificial love for each other, and that whatever our particular circumstances we know that we have the prayers of Joseph and the Blessed Virgin Mary to really assist us, and above all that we have the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ who is present at this Mass to offer himself for your and me.



Still on the subject of how we Christians ought to look at suffering which is inevitable in any life in many ways and in various degrees... And more: A little-cited reflection of Cardinal Ratzinger on how Communion-unqualified RCDs can deal with this particular suffering...


A serious Catholic way
to “accompany” the sinner
by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Posted on 12 January 2017

Fr Z shares an email from one of his followers:

"I’ve been reading through Ratzinger’s book “Behold the Pierced One“. In it, he addresses the issue of the prohibition of communion to the divorced and remarried (pp.94-98).


A couple of quotes:

---

We can understand how, paradoxically, the impossibility of sacramental communion, experienced in a sense of remoteness from God, in the pain of yearning which fosters the growth of love, can lead to spiritual progress…

When Augustine sensed his death approaching, he ‘excommunicated’ himself and undertook public penance. In his last days he manifested his solidarity with the public sinners who seek for pardon and grace through the renunciation of communion … this is a profoundly arresting gesture.

The ancient Church had a highly expressive practice of this kind. Since apostolic times, no doubt, the fast from the Eucharist on Good Friday was a part of the Church’s spirituality of communion.…

A fasting of this kind … could also be an act of solidarity with all those who yearn for the sacrament but cannot receive it. It seems to me that the problem of the divorced and remarried, as well as that of intercommunion (e.g. in mixed marriages), would be far less acute against the background of voluntary spiritual fasting, which would visibly express the fact that we all need that ‘healing of love’ which the Lord performed in the ultimate loneliness of the Cross.

---

Does this strike you as a more serious way to “accompany” sinners who are in “complicated situations” than simply telling them that they can receive Communion? This doesn’t give the impression that their sins are being overlooked or, worse, condoned. Also, it engages the powerful means of intercession which the Lord Himself praised.

Today vast swathes of the “Catholic” people probably have a vague notion of what the Eucharist and Communion are. For many people today Communion is, I fear, the moment when the lady puts the white thing in your hand just before you sing the song. Getting the white thing means that you’re okay just as you are; you are affirmed in your you-yourself-ness.

Hence, any suggestion to vast swathes, and to the priests who are not really guiding them, that it is perhaps better not to receive is met with disbelief and shock. What a challenge! “How dare you suggest that I’m not okay or that you don’t accept me just the way I am!” Getting the white thing before singing the song has taken on a dimension of belonging to a mutual self-affirmation club.

The controversy over Communion for the divorced and remarried has far reaching implications.

If those living in patently adulterous unions (or any other sinful state) can in fact receive Communion, then was Christ’s teaching about indissolubility … wrong? If it was wrong, if Christ could get that wrong, then is Christ really God?

If Christ isn’t God, then the Eucharist isn’t Christ. If the Eucharist isn’t Christ, then what is Communion? Are we idolators?

If the Eucharist isn’t what the Church has always said it is, then what is the Church? Who are we and what are we doing?...


On the subject of the Eucharist: From Fr Z to Fr H today...

AGNUS DEI

January 13, 2017

...What about the view of liberal protestants that the Eucharist was in origin a simple fellowship meal later perverted, by St Paul or by 'Early Catholicism', into a complex sacrificial mystery?

Happily, this widespread but evidence-free myth has been exploded by a distinguished American Jewish rabbinical scholar, Jacob Neusner [Cardinal Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's special Jewish friend].

When Jesus 'cleansed' the Temple by expelling the tradesmen who facilitated its worship, He was symbolising the replacement of that sacrificial system by His own new Eucharistic sacrifice, to be instituted a few days later. And the principal Jewish sacrifice to be replaced was the daily sacrifice of the Tamid Lamb, paid for by the Temple tax of Jewish males and offered for the whole of God's people.

"The atonement for sin achieved by the daily whole offering is null, and ... atonement for sin is achieved by the Eucharist; one table overturned, another set up in place, and both for the same purpose of atonement and expiation of sin".

The Lamb of God, the Incarnate Word under the visible tokens He has ordained, is the perfect oblation held in his hands and offered by the Christian priest as he stands at his altar every morning. Jesus is the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world.

But according to Common Worship (modern language Gloria, Agnus, and Invitation to Communion) He takes away the sin of the World. The Latin and Greek originals usually speak of sins, while CW has been influenced by John 1:29, which reads sin.

This Johannine singular sees sin as a single corporate turning away from God by fallen humankind. But in liturgy it may not be best to reflect comfortably on the corporate nature of sin, but instead to acknowledge its specific nature. The daily Christian needs to be aware of his own daily and plural sins as he attends the daily pleading of the One Great Sacrifice.

Peter Seewald:
Benedict XVI 'among history's most significant popes' yet
'one of the most misunderstood personalities of our time'
Interview by Paul Senz

January 12, 2017

It is well-known that Pope Francis regularly grants interviews to various media outlets, and has done so since the earliest days of his papacy. As a result, it seems as if each successive interview is received with less fanfare, and the words of the Holy Father are watched with breath a little less bated.

His predecessor, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, was never one to give interviews so frequently. However, over the last 25 years, he has granted four book-length interviews to German journalist Peter Seewald — Salt of the Earth, God and the World, Light of the World, and now Last Testament: In His Own Words (Bloomsbury, 2016). This most recent (and perhaps final) installment in the series of interviews contains many insights into the life and personality of Joseph Ratzinger.

The interviewer, Peter Seewald, brings his own intriguing personal story to these interviews. Raised Catholic, he left the practice of the Faith in his youth and became an ardent communist. It was the time he spent interviewing then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger that famously brought Seewald back home to the Church. Their professional relationship developed into a close friendship, and this can be seen in the pages of this latest book.

The interview sessions comprising Last Testament began before Benedict’s announcement of his resignation, and continued shortly thereafter. As a result, these interviews — which initially were conceived as research for Seewald’s biography of Benedict — became a venue for Benedict to give an unfiltered account of his papacy, of how he views its successes and failings, as well as one more exploration into his analysis of the blessings and problems of today’s world, and a reflection on his life up to this point.

Mr. Seewald spoke with CWR by email in December 2016. His responses were translated by the translator of Last Testament, Jacob Phillips.

---

You were born in Germany to a Catholic family. Can you tell us a little bit about your faith journey up to this point?
During the student rebellions of 1968 I began to engage with politics. Christianity seemed something of a relic from the past then. I felt that its mixture of power and madness had to be overcome in order finally to build a genuinely progressive society. So one day I withdrew myself from the Church. I felt liberated, and I fought for the ideas of Marx and Lenin.

Now, with the passage of time, I’ve left communism behind me. We did not know then what atrocities and millions of victims Maoism left behind in China (or rather, we did not want to know), but it was clear to me that these ideological systems cannot be reconciled with human dignity.

As a journalist who followed developments in society closely, I could now see that with the decline of Christianity in the West, the basic level of our culture, indeed of civilization, completely sank away with it. It was obvious that there was a link between forsaking the conviction that the world is created and belongs to a created order — an eclipse of God — and the danger of a new barbarism.

When I had the opportunity of conducting a long interview with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 1992, I was fascinated by the fact that from the faith, knowledge, and tradition of the Catholic Church there are answers that correspond to the problems of our time. Yes, the message the faith brings with it is an offer that one cannot fundamentally dismiss out of hand.

This is the fourth book-length interview you have done with Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict. Whose idea was it to do one more? Did Benedict go into this with the intention of giving his “final word” on his life and papacy, as far as you know?
Originally, these recordings were not meant for a separate publication, but as an aid to my work on a biography of Ratzinger. However, I then came to see they would constitute an incomparable historical document, and I realized that this text should not be withheld from the world. Pope Benedict was not in favor at first. But I was able to convince him that the book was a good idea. The prerequisite for him was that Pope Francis gave his consent.

So our conversation is not some text published for self-justification, nor did Pope Benedict want to give his “last word.” It just turned out that we had an unexpected chance to get authentic information from [someone who had been] the chief shepherd of the world Church, without any distortion from the media. This book clarifies in particular the circumstances and reasons for the historic resignation, and ends the speculations and conspiracy theories which surround it.

In essence this book is about keeping the doors to Benedict’s life’s work and message open, for this message is something I am convinced is indispensable for the future of the Church, of faith, and of society.

Having done so many interviews with him, and knowing him for so long, was there anything new that you learned in this most recent set of interviews?
Yes, there was a lot. I didn’t know, for example, that he was completely blind in one eye even before his election as pope, that he had heart problems, that he didn’t expect to live long. Expecting a short period of office, one doesn’t make long-term plans but only deals with the most urgent matters.

What hit him hardest was his being reproached for anti-Semitism in connection with the Williamson affair. He is one of the pioneers of Catholic-Jewish dialogue. Had he been properly informed about Williamson’s attitude, the reprieve of the excommunication of the Society of St. Pius X bishops would not have happened. [??? This was never ever hinted at before. One had the impression that if Williamson's denial of the Holocaust had been known to the pope, the excommunications would still have been lifted - which was the right thing to do - because 1) Williamson's personal opinions have nothing to do with the three other bishops; and 2) Williamson's historical revisionism had nothing to do with why he was excommunicated to begin with - historical ignorance is not a ground for excommunication. However, if Benedict XVI had known about Williamson's repeated denials of the Holocaust, then, along with announcing the lifting of the excommunication, the Vatican would make it known that this was done despite Williamson's unfortunate personal opinions because they had no bearing on why he was excommunicated. I hope somewhere, somehow, Seewald makes this correction.]

His humanity is moving. He says that when he needs to think deeply and clearly, he always has to recline on a sofa. And the fact he is not a merely functional character is shown by the story of an unhappy love during his time as a student. He was a fresh-faced, youthful man, who wrote poems and read Hermann Hesse. He had an effect on women, and they had an effect on him. He did not make the decision to be become a celibate priest easily.

The book describes his life in service, [a life] whose whole existence was placed in the service of proclaiming Christ, and which subordinated even his own happiness to the most burdensome and thankless tasks. He suffered enormously for it, without becoming embittered.

The interviews for this book took place both before and after Pope Benedict’s resignation announcement in February 2013. How shocked were you at the announcement?
My reaction was, “Oh no, please don’t, not yet!” A radio reporter called me on my iPhone and asked me whether the news was true or was just a scam.

I always knew that for Pope Benedict resignation was a real option. In our interviews published as Light of the World I asked him if he’d ever thought about resignation, and he answered, “If one’s psychological as well as physical power is no longer sufficient, the pope has the right and even the duty to step down.” But I had not expected it actually to take place at that point of time.

When was your next meeting after the resignation? Did the announcement change your plans?
Our first meeting after the resignation took place in July 2013. This event had of course changed my list of questions. As I mentioned, the background for this project was that it was intended to gather information for a biography. Now propaganda from Ratzinger’s opponents had misleading versions of events dominating the media. They said, “Ratzinger was the wrong choice for pope, the best thing he did was resign.” That was nonsense!

Last Testament shows that his papacy was anything but a failure, notwithstanding problems like Vatileaks, the Williamson affair, and the scant support from certain quarters of the Catholic establishment.

I believe that Benedict XVI was the collegial and prudent pope which the Second Vatican Council had wished for. With him, everyone knew where they stood. And that which he decreed, although perhaps uncomfortable, faithfully corresponded to the teachings of the Gospel. Moreover, he exercised his office with a unique dignity.

The most recent book, as with each of the others, touches on everything from obscure biographical information to the most profound questions about life, faith, and the last things.
Joseph Ratzinger is not a jovial, slap-on-the-back person. There are no cheap gimmicks with him. But at the same time he makes it easy to ask difficult questions unflinchingly, and he impresses you with his answers. And the beauty of his words only serves to deepen the clarity of his thinking even further. Anyone reading even just four or five pages of the book would be impressed with the humility with which the Pope Emeritus answers the questions. You can feel and sense his person almost as if he were there: his character, his thinking, his humility, his humor.

I have been an avid reader of the writings of Joseph Ratzinger for years, including his memoirs and your interviews with him. I still learned a great deal about him from this book. Were there any specific new insights that you gained?
He speaks with a remarkable openness, and neither glosses nor reworks his answers, as politicians like to do in order to present things differently or refine things. It remains a mystery to me, how he could deal with the demands of his stupendous responsibilities as pope in his old age, with his health problems, promulgating three encyclicals and writing his three-volume book on Jesus Christ.

In my opinion, Joseph Ratzinger is one of the most misunderstood personalities of our time. With his contributions to the Council, the rediscovery of the ancient Church Fathers, the revivifying of doctrine, and the purification and consolidation of the Church, he was not only a force of renewal, but as a theologian on the Petrine chair, one of the most significant popes in history.

As a theologian of the people, he has never forgotten that he comes from very simple circumstances, and has always defended the views of the simple faithful against the cold impositions of many university professors.

He is the sort of character that simply won’t exist in the future [if only because the circumstances that 'produced' him - in which his generation was among the last to have had a well-rounded classical education, despite living under Nazi Germany and later, with the far longer dominance of Communism in Europe - were truly unique] — and can be considered overall, therefore, as the Doctor of the Church for the modern era.

How many hours did you spend interviewing Pope Benedict for this book?
Maybe 10 or 12. Because he is a very musical person, a poet, an artist, an encounter with him is always cheering. We laughed a lot together. One of his friends once said: “Ratzinger never complains. He is like Mozart — his problems never affect his work.”

The great drama of his life was perhaps centered on his ability to keep going when otherwise everything would have been lost. Above all, that requires resources of spiritual strength which, he believes, depend on the cultural and intellectual quality of a person. When human beings no longer revere God as holy, then nothing else can be sacred to them. And when people lose their spiritual potency, their intellectual potency soon follows.

How long did you spend researching and preparing for the interview sessions?
It’s hard to say, maybe two months. Because I‘ve been accompanying him as a journalist for more than 20 years, I could gather together a lot of information and then scrutinize what is right and wrong about the image we have of Joseph Ratzinger.

We have here a biography spanning Germany of the 20th century, with all the peaks but also the troughs of a historical personality. According to the Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, Ratzinger is one of the most significant intellectuals of the contemporary world, whose bold reflections provide answers for the moral, intellectual, and cultural problems of our time.

But above all he is an inspired Father of the Church, who leaves behind a body of writings which is almost inexhaustible. There is also an untold amount of material to deal with, which must be situated in relation to history in order for the actions and statements to be understood at all.

The experiences of the aftermath of Nazi-dictatorship, after the atheistic tyrant and apocalyptic Second World War, are a case in point. No one would have dared to say, in 1945, that Christianity is a relic from the past, that we don’t need any longer. On the contrary, it was to be salvation for the future of humanity.

Do you expect to do any other work with the Pope Emeritus in the future? Or other books about him?
I mentioned that I’m working on a biography of Benedict XVI. One gets a closer understanding of someone through personal proximity to them. You can then “read” someone better, so to speak. On the other hand, however, if you are writing on someone who is indeed a “co-worker in truth,” you must above all make sure you’re writing a truthful account, and this necessitates a degree of critical distance.

But with Ratzinger, his life seems to be guided by some force of providence. “Why does everything to do with Ratzinger go wrong?” many people ask. [Anyone who asks that unlikely and most unfounded question has to be more pathologically afflicted even than the most manic anti-Trump bigot in Hollywood!]

But the real question should be, “Why is so much he does so right and good?” Ratzinger always goes for the whole perspective. He is preoccupied with the question of God, what God means for the human being, meaning how he enables the human being to find out who he is. To enter into the fulfillment of life, by turning to the Creator as a creature, to become an incarnation, such as is offered by the Gospel of Christ.

Other popes are characterized primarily by their pontificates. With Ratzinger there is a body of written work which is already great and significant even without his becoming pope. He is not far off being the most widely-read theological teacher worldwide, with editions of his books published in the millions.

Above all, he has shown us that religions and science, faith and reason, are not opposites. And that reason is a guarantor for ensuring that religion that does not slip into false fantasies and violent fanaticism. Last but not least, he put in place initiatives which Pope Francis can now extend, with gratitude.

How would you describe the influence Ratzinger/Benedict has had on you over the years?
From the very beginning, I was impressed by his realism, his courage, and the strength of his spirit.

Joseph Ratzinger sees his Church as a resistance movement against the seductive aberrations of the world, against the God-forsakenness of fundamentalist atheism and neo-paganism.

Ratzinger is a pragmatist — without losing sight of what is big and great, the complete whole, even for a second. That is where his modern edge lies: the critical perspective, the desire to perceive the real nature of things.

How is that possible? By not letting oneself be blinded or manipulated by certain fashions, but at the same time not be narrow-minded or stiff, but open to what must necessarily be changed. Then having the courage to do the things which need to be done.

Neither as a theologian nor as pope did Ratzinger ever put forward his own system of doctrine. He is a teacher for the whole Church, because he always goes to the center, to Jesus Christ. He has shown us Jesus once again, the whole Jesus.

The image of Jesus has become tattered by certain theologies and media representations. No one other than Ratzinger had the authority and gifts to show that we can trust the Gospel, both spiritually and historically. I believe that Pope Benedict has made a decisive contribution against the dilution of the Gospel, and laid the foundations for the faith in the 21st century.

What always impressed me was the continuity of the life of Pope Benedict. The continuity in his teaching, but also in his attitude, being both critical while being formed by love for God and humanity. Perhaps the very fact that he is always slandered makes his testimony all the truer.

At the end of his life, at any rate, he is at peace with himself and in the Lord — quite simply because he always performed his tasks with all the gifts that had been laid in his hands.

I consider Pope Benedict XVI to mark a turning-point, a link between two worlds, one who has built a bridge between the old world and the coming of the new — whatever it might bring. His most important sentiment is: “A society from which God is absent, destroys itself.”

---

This does not look at all like a promising start to another Bergoglian synod. I do not as yet 'discern' what his ulterior motive is for this assembly -
as we always knew what it was for the 'family synods' - but knowing the Bergoglio Vatican's capacity for deception, I actually dread to find out
what it might be. Already, the very secular approach taken in this preparatory document simply reinforces one's misgivings about this pope's
none-too-Catholic if not openly anti-Catholic inclinations...

The coming synod's preparatory document:
Not a word about holiness - perhaps
it is of little interest to this Holy Father
Translated from

January 12, 2017

Today the Vatican published the preparatory document for the next XVth general assembly of the Bishops' Synod on the theme, "Youth, faith and vocational discernment'.

It's a slim 70-page booklet which includes a questionnaire classified by continents and intended for the various bishops' conferences. [Will the bishops answer the questionnaires based on their own assumptions and experience, or on actual genuine - not superficial or token - surveys of young people in their dioceses? What bishops will be named to discuss the problems of young people and look out for them at the actual synodal assembly???]

I have read it, and I found some features striking:
First, in all 70 pages there is no reference to holiness as a model to propose, a goal to aim for, something that is worth one's devotion enough to struggle for.

The only time the word is used is a derivative on Page 50, where it says, "The Church herself is called on to learn from young people: she has the luminous witness of so many young saints who continue to be source of inspiration for everyone". [But they were saints because first, they were taught the faith properly by the Church, and they applied that faith in their daily life! Typically, the pope's acolytes have the cart before the horse.]

Therefore, even when the document mentions exemplary figures, they are described as "close to others, credible, consistent and honest" [i.e., holy or saintly are not among the adjectives used to characterize them - they may be all that, but that's unimportant compared to the qualities mentioned], or as "authoritative believers, with a clear human identity [they could not possibly have animal identities! - the adjective that ought to have been used here is 'Catholic', a clear Catholic identity. But given all the evidence of the past four years, that is not at all something this pope particularly wants to insist upon] , a visible spiritual quality, vigorous educative passion, and a profound capacity of discernment". [Ah, there we are, one of JMB's favorite words. If only he qualifies it as 'discernment of God's will' - even if this is always not given to us humans to discern, despite which we must learn to accept it nevertheless. Perhaps that is why in the Bergoglio lexicon, discernment means consulting your individual conscience to see what you are telling yourself! ]

In short, holiness does not seem to be of interest either as a goal nor as a trait necessary to inspire young people.

Second: Young people are admonished to be vigilant because "you must verify if your choices are dictated by a search for your own narcissistic self-realization [I call this a Freudian slip in which someone's subconscious, JMB's perhaps?, popped up!], or rather by your willingness to live your life by generously giving of yourself". Which leads to: And that is why, "contact with poverty, vulnerability and need is of great importance to understand whether you have chosen a good vocation or not." [That assumes that priesthood or the consecrated life is the chosen vocation, but marriage and family are equally valid choices, and would, realistically, be the more likely choice for most young people.]

And of course, there are recurrent references to 'the poor' throughout the document. Whereas prayer and worship get ten lines towards the end of the document.

The impression is that the document is very horizontally oriented towards social work, 'good works'. Let us see how attractive this approach will be.

My third and final remark: The document does not contain any citations - or call attention to documents - which are not that of the reigning pope - including admonitions against 'rigidity'. Of previous Pontiffs, including he who 'invented' World Youth Day and who in 27 years, inspired countless religious vocations, not a mention at all.

Apparently, for those who prepared this document, the Church was only born on March 13, 2013.

January 13, 2017 headlines

Canon212.com


PewSitter


This was without a doubt the most outrageous news of the day - and what makes it worse is that the document giving episcopal approval of Eucharistic sacrilege, to begin with, is co-signed by Mons. Charles Scicluna, the canonist who made a name for himself, and was rightly praised, as Cardinal Ratzinger's chief 'prosecutor' of clerical sex abuse cases reported to the CDF...

Malta’s bishops tell the remarried:
take Communion if you feel at peace with God
The bishops say that avoiding sex may be 'humanly impossible'
by Dan Hitchens

Friday, 13 Jan 2017

Malta’s bishops have said that remarried people should receive Communion if they think they are at peace with God.

In a new document, "Criteria for the Application of Chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia", the bishops say that if “a separated or divorced person who is living in a new relationship manages, with an informed and enlightened conscience, to acknowledge and believe that he or she are [sic] at peace with God, he or she cannot be precluded from participating in the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist”.

The Maltese document is signed by Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, a former doctoral student of Cardinal Burke, and Bishop Mario Grech of Gozo. It was published in L'Osservatore Romano. [Why on earth did the OR go out of its way to publish this MONUMENTAL OUTRAGE TO THE FAITH?]

St John Paul II and Benedict XVI reaffirmed the Church’s perennial teaching that divorced and remarried Catholics cannot receive Communion, except possibly when they endeavour to live “as brother and sister”.

However, the Maltese bishops say that avoiding sex with a new partner may be “impossible”.

The new document underlines divisions among the world’s bishops over the Church’s traditional teaching, in the wake of Amoris Laetitia. The bishops of Poland and Costa Rica, several North American bishops, and others, have reiterated the traditional teaching, while others have diverged from it.

In November, the diocese of San Diego said that remarried Catholics may “conclude that God is calling them to return to full participation in the life of the Church and the Eucharist.”

Earlier this week Cardinal Raymond Burke said that, if the San Diego interpretation were to become universal, “then the Church’s teaching on marriage is finished.”

The Maltese bishops claim that Amoris Laetitia encourages a new practice because of footnote 351. This, in reference to the integration of people in “irregular situations”, states: “In certain cases, this can include the help of the sacraments.” Although Pope Francis has said he cannot remember this footnote, it has provoked much debate.

Some have argued that it merely reaffirms John Paul’s teaching in Familiaris Consortio: “Reconciliation in the sacrament of Penance which would open the way to the Eucharist, can only be granted to those who, repenting of having broken the sign of the Covenant and of fidelity to Christ, are sincerely ready to undertake a way of life that is no longer in contradiction to the indissolubility of marriage.

“This means, in practice, that when, for serious reasons, such as for example the children’s upbringing, a man and a woman cannot satisfy the obligation to separate, they ‘take on themselves the duty to live in complete continence, that is, by abstinence from the acts proper to married couples.’”

However, the Maltese bishops say that couples should instead “examine the possibility of conjugal continence”. The bishops refer to “complex situations where the choice of living ‘as brothers and sisters’ becomes humanly impossible”.

The Council of Trent states that it is always possible to keep the moral law: It teaches: “God does not command impossibilities, but by commanding admonishes thee to do what thou canst and to pray for what thou canst not, and aids thee that thou mayest be able.” It also states: “If anyone says that the commandments of God are, even for one that is justified and constituted in grace, impossible to observe, let him be anathema.”

Four cardinals, including Cardinal Burke, have asked Pope Francis to clarify that Amoris Laetitia does not encourage divergence from the Church’s traditional teaching. One, Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, has said: “Whoever thinks that persistent adultery and the reception of Holy Communion are compatible is a heretic and promotes schism.”


Canonist Ed Peters had this immediate reaction...

The Maltese disaster

January 13, 2017

The bishops of Malta, in a document that can only be called disastrous, repeatedly invoking Pope Francis’ Amoris laetitia, have directly approved divorced and remarried Catholics taking holy Communion provided they feel “at peace with God”.

Unlike, say, the Argentine document on Amoris which, one could argue, left just enough room for an orthodox reading, however widely it also left the doors open for abuse by others, the Maltese bishops in their document come straight out and say it: holy Communion is for any Catholic who feels “at peace with God” and the Church’s ministers may not say No to such requests.

In my view the Maltese bishops have effectively invited the Catholics entrusted to them (lay faithful and clergy alike!) to commit a number of objectively gravely evil acts.

That their document was, moreover, published in L’Osservatore Romano, exacerbates matters, for it deprives Vatican representatives of the ‘plausible deniability’ that they could have claimed (and might soon enough wish they could claim), as it becomes known that the Maltese bishops went beyond what even Amoris, if interpreted narrowly, seemed to permit.

For now, I make just a few points.
1. The Maltese bishops have fallen completely for the canonically and ecclesiologically false view that an individual’s assessment of his or her own readiness to receive holy Communion (see c. 916) controls a minister’s decision to administer the sacrament (see c. 915). In Malta now, anyone who approaches for the sacraments should be recognized as being “at peace with God”. Objective evidence to the contrary is simply no longer relevant. Canon 916 is thus eviscerated, Canon 915 is effectively repudiated.


2. The Maltese bishops do not seem to know what the word “conjugal” means. They think that non-married people can practice “conjugal” virtues and that they can decide about whether to engage in “conjugal” acts. Nonsense and, coming from bishops, inexcusable nonsense at that.

Non-married people can have sex, of course, but Catholic pastoral integrity does not hold such sexual acts on par with the physically identical, but truly conjugal, acts as performed by married persons.
3. The Maltese bishops, by extending their document to the sacrament of Reconciliation, have basically instructed their priests not to withhold absolution from divorced-and-remarried Catholics who refuse to repent of their “public and permanent adultery” (CCC 2384) even to the point of abstaining from sexual (nb: sexual not “conjugal”) relations.

Incredibly, such a directive raises the specter of green-lighting sacrilegious confessions and the commission of solicitation in confession. No priest should want either on his conscience, let alone both.

4. The Maltese bishops even managed to take swipes at Baptism and Confirmation by opening the door to divorced-and-remarried Catholics serving as godparents contrary to the expectations of Canon 874 § 1, 3º. See CLSA New Comm (2001) 1062-1063.

There are other serious problems with the Maltese document but the above should suffice to show why it is, quite simply, a disaster.

Father Z, citing the above post by Peters, adds the ff comments:

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If you read that rubbish document, note the juxtaposition of “situations” and “ideals”.

This is going to turn into a war if not worse. Different countries different practices.

What will become of the unity of the Church if in one country any unrepentant sinner with the official blessing of the bishop and, when you cross the border into another country, you still need a firm purpose of amendment to be absolved and public scandal must be avoided.

Does that sound like two different Churches? [Yes, it does!. The 'Church' of Malta has effectively apostasized from the one Church of Christ by proclaiming a founding anti-Catholic principle of the church of Bergoglio.]

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Maltagate: At peace with Satan

JAN 14, 2017

A document of openly Satanic inspiration has now been published by the Bishops of Malta. It goes, if possible, even further than Francis, in that the sacrilege that Francis introduced by way of footnotes and stupid rhetoric is now made explicit, and officially sanctioned, and called being “at peace with God”.

As if there existed a Catholic universe in which it is the sinner whO decides whether he is worthy of being admitted to Communion, or altogether in mortal sin (NB: if fornication is unavoidable, then the relevant sin of adultery is clearly not imputable).

Do not, even for a moment, delude yourself that this was not what Francis had in mind from the very start. However, the plan would have been thwarted very soon, if the bishops and cardinals had spoken like, well, Catholics when the time had come.

I needed a number of hours to calm down after reading this – let me say this again – utterly satanical garbage. However, one thing was clear from the very first moment: Cardinal Mueller'S astonishing affirmation that Amoris Laetitia affirms the traditional Church teaching becomes more absurd every day, as we have entire bishops’ conferences openly embracing heresy and sacrilege.

What will cardinal Mueller now do? Will he swiftly act and rebuke, silence and threaten the Maltese bishops? Surely, nothing else can be expected from him now? I would suggest that you do not hold your breath.

I would also suggest that you look at reality in the face here, and recognise that cardinal Mueller isn’t really better than the Maltese bishops...

fr. Z also commented on another outrage from the Vatican today... After Ban Ki Moon and Jeffrey Sachs - both of whom have been virtually consecrated by Pope Francis as his Secular-Acolytes-in-Chief with the rank of Cardinal High Priests - he is about to consecrate a new one.

Is the case not more than compelling enough as it is that Bergoglio's lip service against abortion is nothing more than that/ he has given his blessings to all these 'population control' advocates, and more tellingly, to the UN Development Goals for 2030 which is unabashed in its advocacy of various 'reproductive rights' and population control methods (code of course for unconditional abortion)?

Ehrlich was invited to address a new Vatican-sponsored conference to advance the pope's unfounded but omnisciently obstinate climate catastrophism.

Guess who's the Vatican's
next conference headliner!

January 13, 2017

LifeSite reports that Paul Ehrlich has been invited to speak at an event sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

Paul Ehrlich, perhaps the most famous advocate and promoter of abortion for the sake of population control, has been invited to speak. Compulsory abortions… sex-selection abortions… infanticide.

PAUL EHRLICH? Author of the Population Bomb? THAT PAUL EHRLICH?

Asking Paul Ehrlich to speak at a Vatican event is like asking…
… Sweeny Todd to cater your luncheon.
… Jenna Jameson to preface your book on sacramental marriage.
… Nero to head up the fire department.
… Anthony Wiener to manage your social media.
… Godfried Danneels to head your commission on abuse.

Here's the original LifeSite report:

He supports forced abortion, sterilization-
Next month, he’s speaking at the Vatican.
by Pete Baklinski


VATICAN CITY, January 12, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — The Vatican has invited the undisputed father of the modern, pro-abortion population control movement to present a paper at an upcoming Vatican-run conference.

Dr. Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb is scheduled to speak in Vatican City during the February 27-March 1 conference that will discuss “how to save the natural world.” The Stanford biologist champions sex-selective abortion as well as mass forced sterilization as legitimate methods to curb population growth.

In his 1968 book, Ehrlich went so far as to defend forced abortion, writing: “Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

Titled Biological Extinction, the February conference will address what Vatican organizers call an unsustainable “imbalance” between the world’s population and what the earth is capable of producing. The event is jointly sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

Organizers of the Vatican-run conference predict that if effective steps are not taken to reverse so-called man-made “global climate change,” then up to 40 percent of “all biodiversity on Earth” will be destroyed “by the end of this century,” including a “majority” of species of plants.

“There is no possibility of improving our situation without the widespread adoption of social justice, both as a matter of morality and as a matter of survival,” the event brochure put out by the Vatican states.

With the invitation of Ehrlich to address the conference, how the Pontifical Academies understand “social justice” takes on a sinister aspect.

In The Population Bomb, Ehrlich forecasted “an utter breakdown in the capacity of the planet to support humanity” that would result in starvation for hundreds of millions, predictions that have proved to be false while his theories have been debunked. The biologist predicted in 1968 that half of Americans would die by 1990. India and China would simply die out. By the year 2000, England would also cease to exist. [And here we all are still - including Ehrlich himself, unfortunately.]

Ehrlich mentioned in his book sex-selection abortion as a potentially effective tool for conserving the world’s resources by reducing population, a position he continues to defend.

In a 2011 interview with Mara Hvistendahl, Ehrlich defended sex-selection abortion, stating that “it would be a good idea to let people have their choice so that they could have fewer children and could have what they wanted,” adding that a sex-selection abortion and possibly even infanticide might be a better fate for females than what awaited them in an overpopulated world.

“You can be aborted as a conceptus, you can be killed at birth, or you can be sold into slavery and die in a slum someplace,” he said. “It would be interesting to know how many females you’re keeping out of hideous situations [when they are not] killed or infanticided.”

In the same interview, Ehrlich also defended the principle behind mass forced sterilization, a concept mentioned in a 1977 book he co-authored titled Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, suggesting that mass sterilization working in tandem with sex-selection technology would be particularly effective for population control interests.

Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, criticized the Vatican’s choice of Ehrlich as a suitable speaker.

“Ehrlich’s opinions on biological extinction rates are just as exaggerated as his failed predictions of a human population explosion. Why the Vatican should be giving a platform to this secular prophet of doom is beyond me,” he told LifeSiteNews.

“There are plenty of credible Catholic scientists around whose fact-based opinions should be highlighted by their Church. What's next? Inviting Raúl Castro to speak on human rights?” he added.

The Catholic Church not only condemns abortion but coercive population control methods as well.

Instead of seeing people as “mouths to feed,” “pollution producers,” or “carbon footprint makers,” the Church sees each person as a unique and unrepeatable gift from God.

In his watershed 1968 Encyclical Humanae Vitae that taught about the moral evil of using contraception to space birth, Pope Paul VI warned rulers of countries against using illicit methods of birth control to solve the “demographic problem.”

“Do not allow the morality of your peoples to be degraded; do not permit that by legal means practices contrary to the natural and divine law be introduced into the fundamental cell, the family,” he urged at that time.

Paul VI warned the people of the world then that if contraception became a societal norm it would provide governments with a “dangerous weapon” to manipulate population sizes.

“Who will stop rulers from favoring, from even imposing upon their peoples, if they were to consider it necessary, the method of contraception which they judge to be most efficacious? In such a way men, wishing to avoid individual, family, or social difficulties encountered in the observance of the divine law, would reach the point of placing at the mercy of the intervention of public authorities the most personal and most reserved sector of conjugal intimacy,” he wrote.

Pope Francis has also explicitly rejected population control as a method to combat climate change, writing in his encyclical Laudato Si’ that to “blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some [for lack of resources] is one way of refusing to face the issues.” [And yet he endorsed the UNDG unconditionally - in front of the United Nations General Assembly, in person, in September 2015. At this point, would you ever buy a used Fiat from this man? He is essentially UNPRINCIPLED because he goes with whatever he thinks is expedient for his own personal agenda.]

Given the Church’s outright condemnation of abortion, contraception, and the use of coercive population control measures to curb demographics, it remains to be seen why the Pontifical Academies viewed the famed proponent of population control as a suitable speaker for their conference.

This is not the first time an advocate for positions contrary to the Catholic faith has been invited to attend Vatican conferences. The leaders of both Pontifical Academies have, under Franciss pontificate, surprisingly given prominent platforms to some of the world’s foremost proponents of abortion and population control, including Ban Ki-moon and Jeffrey Sachs.

In 2015, Professor Margaret Archer, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, slammed the Centre for Family and Human Rights Institute (C-Fam), an American pro-life research institute that monitors the United Nations, after it raised concerns about abortion and population control proponents being given a platform at a Vatican conference on climate change. “I am appointed by the Pope and responsible directly to him. I’m afraid that leaves you and your cohort out in the cold,” she told the organization at that time.

Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, also has a history of inviting abortion and population control proponents to Vatican events. He has been criticized by pro-life advocates for unreservedly endorsing the United Nations’ controversial Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which pro-lifers warn include a not-so-hidden abortion and population control agenda. Last year, Sorondo defended inviting then-Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, an abortion advocate, to address a “social order” conference.

Also attending the Vatican conference is African Cardinal Peter Turkson, who in a BBC interview in 2015 said “birth control” could “offer a solution” to the impacts of climate change. Turkson, who has since become the prefect of the Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development, later revised his statement, saying that when he used the term “birth control,” what he actually meant was spacing of births or “responsible parenthood.”

Face it, Bergoglians! Your idol has completely caved in to THE WORLD, and all his pronouncements about God, Jesus and the Catholic Church are as phony as his humility.

Canon212.com headlines, Jan 13-14, 2017

Not surprisingly, Canon212.com has streamlined its January 13 headline summary to the above. One of the topics named in both versions is the following item from the website of Walid Shoebat, a half Palestinian American born and raised Muslim in the USA, who says he was recruited for jihad by an imam at a young age, joined the PLO as a terrorist, was jailed three years in Jerusalem for a failed bombing attack in Bethlehem, and converted to Christianity in 1994. One could say Shoebat is sui generis in his current occupation...

'Everybody will be Muslim because of our stupidity':
Retired Pompeii archbishop blasts 'weak decadent Church'
by Andrew Bieszad
shoebat.com
January 13, 2017

In a scathing and long overdue realtalk criticism of the situation of the Church in Europe and with Islam, Archbishop Carlo Liberati [Bishop Emeritus of Pompeii] said that because of the moral decadence of the European people they have become modern day pagans who have rejected Christianity and hurt the most vulnerable among them and that people are refusing to address the problem.

As a result, he says that Europe who will be conquered by the Muslims once Islam is recognized as a “mainstream” religion within a decade or less:

Monsignor Carlo Liberati, an Italian Archbishop, gave the warning after observing the growing number of detention centres opening up in Europe, suggesting it was a sure fire way to have the Islamic faith become mainstream. He saida;

---

In 10 years we will all be Muslims because of our stupidity.

Italy and Europe live in a pagan and atheist way, they make laws that go against God and they have traditions that are proper of paganism. All of this moral and religious decadence favours Islam...

We have a weak Christian faith. The Church nowadays does not work well and seminaries are empty.

Parishes are the only thing still standing. We need a true Christian life. All this paves the way to Islam. In addition to this, they have children and we do not. We are in full decline.

---

Italy, along with the rest of Europe, has become a hotspot for immigration in the past decade. Figures show that there were 5,014,437 foreign nationals resident in Italy as of January 1, 2015, an increase of 92,352 from the previous year.

Italy has also seen a sharp rise in the number of illegal immigrants who dock on its shores after making the dangerous boat ride from North Africa across the Mediterranean sea.

And there has been a growing number of Eastern Europeans and Romanians migrating to the country since the expansion of the European Union.

Liberati claims Italy’s desire to help other nationalities is leaving its own country’s poor people destitute.

---

We help without delay those coming from outside and we forget many poor and old Italians who are eating from the trash. We need policies that take care of Italians first: our young people and the unemployed.

I am a protester. If I were not a priest, I’d be out there demonstrating in the squares. What is the point of so many migrants that instead of thanking for the food we give them, they just throw it, spend hours with their cell phones and even organise riots?”

---

Liberati even accused the Catholic church of donating too much money to the recent migrants.

---

Giving money to migrants wandering around town is not only wrong, but morally harmful because we encourage their behaviour and they get used to that, not mentioning the fact that we already feed them.

I think sometimes this creates a beggars’ network. I remember that my father went to work very hard as a migrant in Australia so I could go to the seminary. So he has experienced in his own skin the discomfort of poverty and the noble virtue of gratitude.

---

These words are prophetic and they echo what we have been saying for a long, long time here at Shoebat.com- the West is being conquered by Islam because as it has rejected Christianity. Since Islam is the culmination of all Christian heresy, then it is only natural that Europe, which has rejected Christianity and continues to do so unrepentantly, is becoming Muslim, because through Islamization they are perfecting their apostasy.

There is no logical explanation for why Europe or any nation would not only allow such people as these Muslims are who, as the Archbishop and we have pointed out, have absolutely no respect for our society and openly mock any generosity shown to them [while taking full advantage of it to advance their goal to conquer Europe and thereby, Christianity].

This is not just a question of being “super liberal”. This is a sign of manifest spiritual darkness that, through their apostasy, has blinded many Europeans [especially their government leaders] to head down the path of their own destruction. and without any way to help themselves because they have rejected God, Jesus, the only weapon they could have.

Europe could still be saved. But salvation will only come in Jesus and a return to His Faith. It will not come from any human source, and certainly not from ethno-nationalist paganism. But as Europe was once pagan and converted to the Faith, it has now returned to paganism and is completing its apostasy through Islam. This is not just happening in Europe, but also across the world, and echoes Jesus’s words:

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And He said to the disciples, “The days will come when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it.

“They will say to you, ‘Look there! Look here!’ Do not go away, and do not run after them. “For just like the lightning, when it flashes out of one part of the sky, shines to the other part of the sky, so will the Son of Man be in His day.

“But first He must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation. And just as it happened in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man: they were eating, they were drinking, they were marrying, they were being given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.

“It was the same as happened in the days of Lot: they were eating, they were drinking, they were buying, they were selling, they were planting, they were building; but on the day that Lot went out from Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all.

“It will be just the same on the day that the Son of Man is revealed." (Luke 17:22-30)

And the Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge said; now, will not God bring about justice for His elect who cry to Him day and night, and will He delay long over them? “I tell you that He will bring about justice for them quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth? (Luk 18:6-8)

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This comes at what many Catholics are saying is a great crisis in the Church- a crisis so serious, that it may be equal to and even surpass the Arian crisis of the 4th century. This crisis also bears a disturbing semblance to a prediction made as part of the revelations of Our Lady of Fatima.

In the words of the American Raymond Cardinal Burke, “the Faith itself is in danger” over fundamental, unalterable questions of morality:

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“The confusion in the Church over the interpretation of certain passages of Amoris laetitia is evident. That is why I do not see how anyone could be able to say that there is no danger to the faith. Moreover, we have communicated in a very respectful way fiv DUBIA to the Pope, and when they were not given a response, we decided, for the good of souls, to make public that there are dubia and that all the faithful are called to pay attention.”

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Burke, a signer with Walter Brandmuller, Carlo Caffara and Joachim Meisner, then raised the issue of a possible “formal correction” of the Pope. And according to reports from several Italian media outlets drawing from an interview published it the United States [with LifeSiteNews], Burke gave an ultimatum for this “formal correction” that expired after the feast of Christmas, about which Burke said:

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”Many media outlets have misunderstood. In that interview in the United States they had asked me what would be the next steps with respect to the dubia presented to the Holy Father, and I simply said that nothing could happen at that moment seeing that we were about to enter into the liturgical season of Christmas and of Epiphany. Only afterwards could one possibly think of how to proceed, but it certainly was not an ultimatum for a confrontation with the Pope.”

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The dubia revolve around access to Eucharist for the divorced and remarried who live more uxorio [as husband and wife], access that, in certain cases, Amoris laetitia permits. And which instead, the previous magisterium had ruled out on several occasions, except in the case of a commitment to live as brother and sister for those divorced and remarried persons who cannot be separated for valid reasons. Brandmuller has said that the possible “formal correction” of the pope would be able to take place “in camera caritatis” [in private].”

“In fact,” Burke specifies , “I have never said that a public confrontation ought to occur. I agree with Cardinal Brandmüller, the first step would be to ask for a private meeting with the Holy Father to point out to him the unacceptable statements in Amoris laetitia, showing how, in one way or another, they are not adequate to express what the Church He has always taught." [The article goes on to quote more from the interview with Burke in La Verita.]

What the good Cardinal is referring to is a formal list of questions that he and four other cardinals have handed over to Pope Francis asking him for specific doctrinal clarification. This list, called a dubia, is a very serious matter, since it is asking for a formal explanation about certain unclear statements about Catholic morality that have come from Pope Francis and his close associates that have been presented as “pastoral” teachings of the Church.

The issue here is not about the ability to change doctrine- doctrine cannot be changed. The issue here is that if certain teachings about marriage and the family are taught as though they have changed (when in reality they cannot), then it would amount to a massive apostasy within the leadership of the Church. In the words of Pope Pius XII:

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I am worried by the Blessed Virgin’s messages to Lucy of Fatima. This persistence of Mary about the dangers which menace the Church is a divine warning against the suicide of altering the Faith, in Her liturgy, Her theology and Her soul … A day will come when the civilized world will deny its God, when the Church will doubt as Peter doubted. She will be tempted to believe that man has become God.

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How is the situation of Islam an the state of the Church related? Because the two depend on each other.Pope John Paul II famously said that “As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.”

In the case of Europe, these are among the ancient lands of Christendom alongside those of the Middle East. What happens there will not just affect Europe, but the entire world. We know for a fact and we have reported that Muslims are chomping at the proverbial bit to conquer Europe and specifically, Rome because they see the fall of Rome, Italy and specifically, the Vatican as the destruction of Christianity and an eschatological sign of the global triumph of Islam.

They are waiting…

Yet Islam cannot conquer without the apostasy of the Europeans. For centuries, it was the Catholic Faith that enabled Europe to defend itself from the Muslims. Yet today, that same apostasy has rendered Europe unable to help and even willing to participate in its own suicide at the hands of the Muslims.

Right now Europe is on the edge of a major and terrible war. That same war is being mirrored in the Church herself. As the Church goes, so goes the world, and right now the world is running headfast towards paganism and, if the situation does not improve, there is the possibility for an equally great war in the Church through a level of apostasy that has not been seen in centuries.

Jesus came into the world to rescue us from the darkness of paganism, and He will likely return again once the world has rejected Him and is plunged back into the darkness it once came from like a dog returning to its own vomit.

As I have said before and I will say again, keep your lamps full and an extra flask or two of oil on hand. We will all need it in the days to come…


A commentary on the above from Deacon Nick Donnelly at


Archbishop Carlo Liberati has joined a growing number of bishops warning about the threat posed by Islam to Europe due to the collapse of Christianity. On the 2016 anniversary of the defeat of the Muslim army besieging Vienna in 1683 Cardinal Schönborn warned that Islamists were seeking to take advantage of Europeans' religious and moral weakness to conquer Europe: [DUH!!!!]

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Looking at our situation in Europe... we have squandered the legacy we received from our Christian heritage. We've squandered it. And now we wonder what Europe will look like in the future. Not only economically ... but above all human, religious, faith. What will become of Europe? Islamism could indeed be the beneficiary. Will there now be a third Islamic attempt to conquer Europe? Many Muslims think that and want that, and they say this is the end of Europe.

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[Nothing, Your Eminence, is hypothetical about the current situation. Even if the recent string of Islamist terrorism actions in Europe have been undertaken under allegedly 'individual initiative', such initiatives are motivated by the Islamic dream of world conquest and domination. Asking rhetorical questions about he jihadists is like Nero fiddling while Rome burnt, Your Eminence.]

Cardinal Burke has also warned of Islam's political ambitions in Europe. He is the patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, that defeated the attempted Muslim invasion of Malta in 1565. In his book, Hope for the World, Cardinal Burke wrote,

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"If you really understand Islam, you understand that the Church really should be afraid of it: Nothing has changed in the Islamic agenda from prior times in which our ancestors had to defend Christendom from Muslim attacks. They saw that Islam was attacking sacred truth."

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Please note a few posts above that I have posted my translation of a chapter from Aldo Maria Valli's book 266..., which I consider a book-length presentation of all the DUBIA about Jorge Bergoglio harbored by sensible and rational Catholics who value the deposit of faith and the inviolability of the one true Church of Christ.