BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI




April 7, 2017 headlines

PewSitter


Canon212.com


One does not understand all the stopgap measures this pope has been taking that seemingly accommodate the FSSPX canonically before
their overall canonical status is regularized once and for all (if at all, one is tempted to make the caveat now, because for all the
huffing and
puffing in the Bergoglio Vatican over the past few months saying it is all but a done deal, we are getting these piecemeal and rather
dubious concessions instead)... Christopher Ferrara presents most clearly the absurd implications of the latest Bergoglian 'act of mercy'
towards the Lefebvrians...

Merciful pope issues absurd guidelines
on FSSPX marriages that fail to square
with his mercy for public adulterers
by Christopher A. Ferrara

April 7, 2017

With Pope Bergoglio’s approval, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has issued a letter respecting “regularization” of the marriages between adherents of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX). In pertinent part the letter provides that:

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“to reassure the conscience of the faithful, despite the objective persistence of the canonical irregularity in which for the time being the Society of St Pius X finds itself, the Holy Father… has decided to authorize Local Ordinaries the possibility to grant faculties for the celebration of marriages of [SSPX] faithful…;
“the Local Ordinary is to grant the delegation to assist at the marriage to a priest of the Diocese (or in any event, to a fully regular priest), such that the priest may receive the consent of the parties during the marriage rite;
“followed, in keeping with the liturgy of the Vetus ordo, by the celebration of Mass, which may be celebrated by a priest of the Society;
“Where the above is not possible, or if there are no priests in the Diocese able to receive the consent of the parties, the Ordinary may grant the necessary faculties to the priest of the Society who is also to celebrate the Holy Mass…”

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Let us consider briefly the—one must say it—absurdity of these provisions. If the Pope is truly concerned about “reassuring the conscience of the faithful, despite the objective persistence of the canonical irregularity” in SSPX marriages, he could simply decree a radical sanation of every marriage performed by an SSPX priest to date, thus correcting any defect of form arising from lack of delegation by a local ordinary.

Then, going forward, he could simply grant a universal faculty to SSPX priests to assist at all future weddings of SSPX laity, just as he has already conceded a universal faculty to hear confessions validly even without faculties from a local ordinary.

Instead, however, Pope Bergoglio requires a diocesan or other “fully regular” priest to receive the wedding vows while authorizing the SSPX in attendance only to offer the nuptial Mass. The local ordinary is merely granted the discretion, but not given the obligation, to allow an SSPX priest to witness the vows as well if a diocesan or “fully regular” priest is not available. Hence the absurdity of the provisions, which would mean the following, given the previous grant of the universal faculty to hear confessions:
- SSPX priests can validly and licitly offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass at a wedding, but cannot validly or licitly witness the wedding vows.
- SSPX priests can validly and licitly hear the confessions of the bride and groom at any time or place in the world, even in the very church where they are to be married, but cannot validly or licitly witness their vows in that same church on their wedding day.
- SSPX can offer Masses licitly only immediately following an exchange of wedding vows; otherwise all their Masses are illicit.
- SSPX can be present to hear the wedding vows of SSPX adherents, but cannot witness those vows.
- People may confess validly and licitly to an SSPX priest every week, but may not licitly attend their Masses—except at a wedding.
- SSPX priests act regularly when they hear confessions and offer nuptial Masses, but immediately lapse into irregularity whenever they witness marriage vows or offer a Mass other than a nuptial Mass.

What we have here, from the Pope who never ceases to condemn the imaginary Pharisaical legalism and casuistry of orthodox Catholics, is an example of legalism and casuistry that would make even the Pharisees blush. The power of the priesthood is sliced like salami and SSPX priests are given some of the slices while others are held back.

The sum total of these provisions boils down to a declaration by Pope Bergoglio that henceforth no SSPX marriage may be conducted validly or licitly except within the framework he has just erected. He has not regularized SXPX marriages but rather submitted them to diocesan control.

Meanwhile, Bergoglio labors ceaselessly to insure that public adulterers living in “second marriages” receive Holy Communion, having just praised the “guidelines” of the Maltese bishops pursuant to Amoris Laetitia, which mandate that sacrilegious Communion be allowed to any public adulterer who deems himself to be “at peace with God.”

But there must be no marriages for SSPX adherents who feel at peace with God in having recourse to SSPX clergy unless a designated “regular” priest is physically present to witness the vows. Those who fail to follow the letter of canon law must not be allowed any such peace of mind! Peace of mind is for public adulterers only!

That squeaking sound you hear is Pope Bergoglio turning the faucet of his boundless mercy just enough to allow a drop or two to trickle onto the parched precincts of the SSPX. The canonical Chinese water torture of these faithful Catholics continues. Meanwhile, public adulterers around the world are marching up to receive Holy Communion and thereby give the appearance of validity to “marriages” that are nothing more than “disgraceful and death-bringing concubinage,” to quote Pope Pius XI.

Pray for an end to this diabolical farce of a pontificate.

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Today marks the first anniversary of the official release of the worse load of horse manure ever to come out of the backside
of a Jesuit horse (or ass, as you prefer). The stink is just as strong as the first day, and it is slowly but surely
expanding worldwide.

I suggest that the 8 April becomes Heresy Extermination Day; a day in which Catholics all over the words join in prayer
to ask the Lord to put an end to all and sundry heresies, particularly those coming from the Vatican.

“Catholics of the world, unite!”

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Last March 23, TIME magazine’s cover featured the question ‘IS TRUTH DEAD?’ as a conscious homage to its cover ‘IS GOD DEAD’ IN March 1966. The ‘truth’ issue was far from a philosophical
question as the “God’ issue was, but a matter-of-fact query in the age of ‘fake news’ and leaders like Pope Francis and Donald Trump who do not always respect truth. Nonetheless, Aldo Maria
Valli uses the new TIME cover as a take-off for his Lenten reflection on truth...

Rediscovering the desire for the infinite
Citing Benedict XVI, the last authority to interpellate us
directly on the question of truth
Translated from

April 6, 2017

«Is Truth Dead?». The question, in red letters on black, fills the entire cover of a recent TIME magazine issue.

After the defeat of Hilary Clinton and the election of Donald Trump, the mass media in the USA doubtless have to reflect on the question. [The problem is: Do they even know what truth is, since by now, everything in the dominant mentality of the West is relative. The only absolutes are what that mentality holds, or chooses to hold and uphold here and now, depending on circumstances, since for that mentality, nothing is absolute for always. ’Truth’, like Western ethics and morality, has become purely situational.]

The most influential organs of communication not only supported Clinton 1000 percent but also depicted Trump as unqualified and even unpresentable [as a presidential candidate, let alone as President of the United States]. Except that the voters chose Trump.

And one of the figures who was responsible for placing the media on the dock [for a determinedly biased campaign reporting and polling that unanimously predicted Clinton would handily defeat Trump] was Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, which had been in the front rank of Clinton supporters. He was compelled to apologize to Times readers for his newspaper’s ‘poor coverage’ of the 2016 presidential campaign. [A lingering irony of the Times’s heavy betting on Clinton was that by 11 pm of election night, the newspaper had reversed its pre-election odds of 95% chances for Clinton, its ongoing election count now gave her 95% odds of not winning at all. And of course, Sulzberger's apology did not last longer than the day he made it. Almost all of US media have gone on reporting only the negative about Trump - in which the media's distortion of truth and outright falsehoods are far more offensive than Mr. Trump's unfortunate penchant for stultifying hyperbole and deliberate half-truths.]

But beyond the political and social situation in the United States, TIME’s question has a significance that provides a starting point for a more general reflection.

In this our world which is so overloaded with information and already so interconnected instantaneously, can we really say that we know the truth? Or better yet, do we still believe it is possible to know the truth?

It is not difficult to be aware that perhaps the most paradoxical outcome of information overload and the world’s increasing interconnectivity is precisely the widespread impression that the truth escapes us. In the face of every reported event or statement, especially one that strikes strongly from the emotional point of view because of its inherent drama, the first question that now comes to mind is: But did it happen exactly as it is recounted?

And yet, the question does not impel us to seek the truth. Because deep within us, we recognize that the only answer we can give is that there is no ‘truth’, and that we should start by renouncing the effort to seek it.

The question of truth is central in the thinking of every man in every age. But today, at least in Western culture, it is as if we have raised the white flag of surrender. Dominated by subjectivism (for which what is ‘true’ is only that which the individual experiences at a certain moment), subjected to relativism (in which absolute truth is not pertinent to human reason that can only deal with arduous mediation between multiple and diverse ‘truths’), bombarded by information that accumulates chaotically and impelled to store in oru mind what we can of an unprecedented amount of data, then we come to just one disconcerting conclusion: It is not just that there is ‘no truth’ but that we have no use for it, and we must surrender to living in the dark.

Perhaps the last authority who interpellated us directly on the question of truth – confronting us with the tragedy that results from renouncing the quest for truth, was Pope Benedict XVI.

During his entire pontificate, the present Emeritus Pope fought for the truth in everything he said and did. Not just to show us that truth exists – and it has the face of Jesus – but to call on each of us never to give up seeking the truth.

Because, he told us, he who ceases to seek the truth is no longer authentically human – indeed, he is less than human. Because if we maintain that, through human reason, we cannot raise our sights towards the horizon of truth, that we can only be content with mediating among fragments of the truth, it is as if we are amputating ourselves of the most precious and beautiful faculty we possess.

In a couple of books that I wrote on the teachings of Benedict XVI («La verità del papa»,(The Pope’s truth) in 2010, and «Il pontificato interrotto» (The interrupted pontificate) in 2013), I sought to illustrate Joseph Ratzinger’s battle to uphold the right and duty of every individual to interrogate himself generously about truth. In all his written and oral interventions, the question of truth is a continual theme, as we can see very well, for instance in Volume 2 of his trilogy on JESUS OF NAZARETH, “From the entry into Jerusalem to the Resurrection”, which is particularly appropriate reading these days a we approach Palm Sunday and Holy Week.

To the pragmatic question of Pontius Pilate, “What is truth?”, asked with all the skepticism typical of a politician who does not believe in absolutes but only in the practical opportunities and effects of any decision, Benedict XVI echoes, “What then is truth? Can we recognize it? Can it become a criterion in our thinking and desires, in our life as an individual and in that of the community?”

Before such a question, Joseph Ratzinger responds, man today can only rely on empirical sience. And since thought has become weak – or very weak, indeed – and even political ideologies now appear like shadows without substance, what are we left with? And what can science really guarantee us?

Benedict XVI cites the case of the geneticist Francis Collins, who headed the group that deciphered the human genome. Named by Benedict XVI to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Collins is a believer for whom Darwinian evolutionism is inAdequate to explain man in his totality as body and soul. It is true, Collins says ,that we all have something in common with the anthropomorphic apes, but at the origin of everything, there is much more: a God who from the very beginning created not just things but life and the laws of life. He created life because that is how it had to be.

Collins’s is a valuable attempt to hold together physics and metaphysics, empirical science and the mystery of the soul. Nonetheless, Benedict XVI notes, we must admit that even the fact that we can read in the genetic code “the grand mathematics of creation’ does not bring us to the truth. At most, we can say that ‘functional truth’ has become visible, but “the profound truth about ourselves, who we are, where we came from, for what purpose we are in this world, and what is good or bad, cannot unfortunately be read” as we can now read the genetic code.

Rather, he notes, “with our growing knowledge of functional truth, there seems to be at the same time a growing blindness to the truth itself, about what is our true reality and what is our true purpose”.

And therefore? Benedict XVI’s response is clear. If Pilate, the pragmatic and skeptic whom we can see as the image of ourselves, thought that the question of truth was irresolvable (which is why, in political action, he entrusts himself to the logic of power, the only truth from this point of view), the Christian must affirm not only that truth exists but that it is recognizable. The truth of God became recognizable in Jesus Christ because “in him, God entered the world, and thereby raised the criterion of truth into history”.

It is an affirmation which can never be reflected upon sufficiently. As Christians, we insist, quite rightly, on the fact that God, made knowable to us in Jesus, represents a logic opposed to that of the world (weakness rather than strength, sacrifice of oneself instead of domination, goodness instead of cruelty), but this, all told, is a consequence of the moral order with respect to the fundamental novelty represented by the coming of God to the world.

The fundamental novelty is that in Jesus, we are gtiven the key to read everything. Thanks to him, who is God made visible, we are no longer blind. Thanks to him we have an identity card that says not just who we are but why we are.

This is the profound significance of redemption, a concept which in the Church today has perhaps been left too much in a secondary place.

Benedict XVI underscores it effectively: “Let us say that the non-redemption of the world consists, precisely, in the indecipherability of creation, in the non-recognition of truth, a condition that inevitably leads to the dominance of pragmatism, and thereby allows the power of the strong to become the god of this world”.

I repeat: this is a point upon which we do not reflect sufficiently. Sometimes, we believers, intimidated, or at least, made timid and disoriented in the face of the prevalence of subjectivism and relativism, end up by supporting a discourse on moral order (solidarity not selfishness, a sense of brotherhood not hostility, the spirit of forgiveness not vendetta) which is very important but risks being unfounded if it is not centered on the discourse about the truth of God.

Truth which, in Jesus and with Jesus, has been made knowable to man and has become the key to read our history, understood as that of every individual as well as that of the world. Because, devoid of its foundation of truth, the Christian proposition easily falls into nothing more than moralism.

As a father and grandfather, I ask myself: What can I do – not to teach the truth – but at least to transmit the desire to seek the truth? How can I tell those who are younger than me that this quest is well worth the trouble, and that to renounce it at the outset is not a victory for reason but its defeat?

To answer this, I turn again to Benedict XVI, especially the address he delivered on December 14, 2012, to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See. After pointing out that education occupies a priority among the challenges of our time, but that family and school – in the face of the proliferation and wide use of social networks – no longer seem to be the natural terrain for the educational process, that authority is under question everywhere, and that unfortunately, the competence of some educators “is not exempt from cognitive partiality and anthropological deficiency”, Papa Ratzinger concluded, in no half terms, that “nevertheless it is necessary to educate in truth and about truth”.

I believe that every educator should assimilate these words. Rectitude of heart and mind, says Benedict XVI, is certainly most important, but young people have need above all to be aided to raise their sights in order to seek the truth about their own selves, about creation, about life.

“They must be taught that every act by a human being must be responsive and consistent with the desire for the infinite, and that such acts accompany growth and formation in a humanity that is ever more fraternal and free of individualistic and materialistic temptations”.

The desire for the infinite! What a stupendous expression!
And this is what truly makes the difference. This is what the educator, certainly without arrogance but without bending himself to the common mentality, must seek to transmit. Because the desire for the infinite is in every man. It is not about introducing it by force – we must simply inspire it.

I see this well. In the eyes of my children and even in that of my two-year old grandson and my eighteen-year-old granddaughter.

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Towards the 90th birthday of Benedict XVI
By Luca Caruso
Translated from


VATICAN CITY, April 7, 2017 – A lengthy applause in honor of Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI started off the first events for his coming 90th birthday anniversary, promoted by the Fondazione Vaticana Joseph Ratzinger-Benedetto XVI , and which took place in Rome on Friday afternoon, April 6, at the Aula Magna of the Istituto Patristico Augustinianum.

Fr. Federico Lombardi, SJ, currently president of the Foundation, asked Mons. Georg Gaenswein, Benedict’s private secretary, to convey ‘ideally’ the applause for him and the affection of all those who were present on the occasion.

Opening addresses were given by Fr. Giuseppe Caruso and Fr. Giuseppe Costa, director of the Vaticna publishing house LEV.

Fr. Caruso analyzed the spiritual and intellectual bonds between St. Augustine and Joseph Ratzinger, who has called the saint “a good traveling companion in the journey of my life and in my ministry”.

“Can an author build up a publishing house?” asked Fr. Costa, who answered, “Certainly! After 10 years of directing LEV, I can say that it owes to the author Joseph Ratzinger a great part of its growth and the international reputation it has today”.

In his intervention, Fr. Lombardi reviewed the various Foundation activities with the collaboration of various entities and academic institutions around the world, such as annual conventions and international symposia, meetings with students pursuing graduate studies in Rome on the theology of Jospeh Ratzinger, scholarships for deserving theology students and the annual Ratzinger Prizes for theology.

And it is all the Ratzinger Prize winners since 2011 – 13 theologians from 11 different countries – are the protagonists of the comememorative book Cooperatores Veritatis. Scritti in onore del Papa emerito Benedetto XVI per il 90° compleanno [Co-workers for the truth: Writings in honor of Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI for his 90th birthday), edited by Fr. Lombardi and Pierluca Azzaro for LEV.

Three of the Prize winners were present at the event: Fr. Christian Schaller fo Germany, editor of the 16-volume Complete Writings of Joseph Ratzinger (presented originally in German); Lebanese scholar Nabil El-Khoury, who is translating the Opera Omnia in Arabic; amd the Polish theologian Mons, Waldemar Chrstowski.

Fr. Lombardi presented the book, speaking about the essays contined in it, and underscoring the continuing great interest in the person and thought of Benedict XVI, noting that books continue to be written about him, as well as various new anthologies of his writings. These include three new biographies: “Il Papa del coraggio” (Ancora) by Mimmo Muolo, Vaticanista dofAvvenire; “Benedetto XVI. Fede e profezia del primo Papa emerito nella storia” (Edizioni Paoline) by Giovan Battista Brunori, a journalist for TG2, the daily newscast of Italian state TV’s second channel; and “Joseph Ratzinger-Benedetto XVI. Immagini di una vita” (San Paolo), by journalists Maria Giuseppina Buonanno and Luca Caruso.

Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, and a member of the Scientific Committee of the Ratzignger Foundation, delivered a tribute entitled “Una sinfonia di amore e verità nella libertà. Joseph Ratzinger/Benedetto XVI testimone grato della fede pasquale” (A symphony of love and truth in freedom: Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI, grateful witness of Paschal faith).

He pointed out that Joseph Ratzigner was born on April 16, 1927, which was Holy Saturday, and was baptized just a few hours after his birth with the newly blessed paschal water.

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His life was therefore from the beginning immersed in the Paschal mystery, and thus, we clearly comprehend the two key words that mark the entire life of Joseh Ratzinger as a Christian, theologian, bishop and cardinal, pope and emeritus pope – gratitude and benediction. These represent the most evident and credible manifestations of Christian life in the Paschal mystery…
Pope Benedict XVI, born and baptized on Holy Saturday, just before Easter Sunday, stands before us as a grateful witness of Paschal faith. A faith that must be announced constantly and continually to a world in which one seldom sees little of that today, nor of the difine triumph of life over death and of love over hate.

In recalling his birth and baptism, he expressly underscored that he was baptized on Holy Saturday, not Easter, the day that most profoundlt characterizes the nature of human existence ‘which still awaits Easter, which is not yet in full light but trustful that it is headed there’…

Human existence is fulfilled in our earthly pilgrimage, in the ascent from Holy Saturday to Easter. In fact, in the history of salvation, Easter Sunday and Holy Saturday are always contemporaneous. It is this contemporaneity that is at the heart of the faith and the theological thinking of Pope Benedict which can be found in the triad of love, truth and freedom.

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Others present at the event included Cardinals Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals; Tarcisio Bertone, former Vatican Secretary of State; Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council on Culture; emeritus Curial chiefs Manuel Monteiro de Castro, Proper Grech, Jose Saraiva Martins and Josef Tomko; Archbishops Luis Ladaria and Guido Pozzo from the CDF; various diplomats accredited to the Holy See, as well as journalists, theologians and students in Rome.



Earlier, on March 30 and April 1, the Benedict XVI College for Philosophical and Theological Studies at the University of Heiligenkreuz (Holy Cross) in the Cistercian monastery just outside Vienna held two days of celebration in advance of the Emeritus Pope’s 90th birthday.

Leading the festivities was the monastery’s Abbot Maximilian Heim, a Ratzinger Prize winner in 2012, along with Fr. Stephan Otto Horn, coordinator of the Ratzinger Schuelerkreis, and Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity.

The cardinal gave a lecture on March 31 which he later delivered at the presentation of the commemorative book Cooperatores veritatis… in Rome. He presided at a thanksgiving Mass on Sunday, April 1, after which the students of the college named for Benedict XVI [and founded after his visit to Heiligenkreuz in September 2007] released 90 white balloons in his honor.

I am somewhat surprised that John Allen and Inez San Martin left it to an editorial assistant to cover and write this story - they obviously did not think the event worth their while, but then we get the still unjaded point of view of one of their assistants, presumably a young one, who is able to write about Benedict XVI without any preconceived notions, and therefore, more honestly than her bosses might have...

New book shows interest in
Pope Benedict XVI is here to stay
by Claire Giangravè
Editorial Assistant

April 7, 2017

ROME - Priests and theologians, bishops and ambassadors, nuns and scholars braved a spring deluge on April 6 to attend the presentation of a new book dedicated to the life’s work of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI at the Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum of Rome.

Interest in the retired pope shows no sign of slowing down as his essential contributions to the Church and theology continue to be relevant today.

Three new biographies on the German pontiff have been published in Italy this week alone. Three collections of essays by the pope emeritus are also in the works. Italy’s public television, RAI, has produced two new documentaries celebrating the life of Benedict XVI.
celebrating his life.

Enthusiasm over the figure of Benedict XVI is not limited to Italy. All over the world symposiums, meetings and events take place focusing on the pope’s legacy.

At the Augustinianum, the Vatican publishing house and the Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI Vatican Foundation unveiled Cooperatores Veritatis (Co-workers of the truth), a collection of essays by all 13 winners of the Ratzinger Prize analyzing the fundamental contributions made by Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI to the life and and Magisterium of the Church.

The Ratzinger Prizes, established in 2010 by Benedict to serve as the premier international prize in theology, is given to those deemed to have done outstanding scholarly research in Sacred Scripture, patristics, and fundamental theology.

“I have witnessed while working on this project […] the vibrant interest that there is for the figure and work of Ratzinger as a theologian and as a pastor. It is not an interest that diminishes with time but rather increases with time,” said Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, president of the Ratzinger foundation, while presenting the book.

Pope Benedict’s popularity holds its own considering his pontificate fell between two of the most popular popes of all time. In April 2008 a Pew Research Center study found that 83 percent of United States citizens had a favorable view of the pope following his visit. A Pew study also found that Benedict was the main newsmaker in 32 percent of all religion stories studied from July 2007 through May 2012.

The pope’s popularity continues to be felt today even as he has retired to live privately within the walls of Vatican City. On the eve of his 90th birthday, Pope Benedict XVI can still pack an auditorium, be it rain or shine.

The book sets out to show Benedict’s relevance today and offers a glimpse into the reason why he has earned a special place in the hearts of Catholics and non-Catholics alike. The Ratzinger prizewinners hail from 11 different countries and though the majority are Catholic, some profess other religions and beliefs.

“Regardless of the little time available - from December to early April - all 13 (Ratzinger prizewinners) responded with enthusiasm and attention and sent their contribution to this volume,” Lombardi said.

The essays are written in their original language to honor Benedict XVI, a well-known polyglot, though a second edition is already in the works providing translations. Each scholar wrote an essay based on their specific fields and specialization, highlighting the influence that the pope emeritus had in their work.

The topics in the book vary but they all have in common the emphasis on Benedict’s unique approach. From the relationship between Jews and Catholics, to the connection between reason and faith (a stronghold of the pope’s theological contribution) to the consequences and relevance of Vatican II, all the essays are steeped in Benedict’s vision for the Catholic Church.

“At an international and global level Pope Benedict’s message will certainly continue to be of interest for many years and its richness will be distributed from editor to editor,” Don Giuseppe Costa, Director of the Vatican Publishing House, said at the event.

The emeritus pope has already left a lasting footprint, both at the theological and at the pastoral level, which is destined to have an impact on Christianity and the world in the years to come. This latest 460-page commemorative volume is one of many efforts to ensure the legacy of Benedict’s teachings.

As proven by the large number of volumes and publications on Pope Benedict XVI that are being distributed right now, publishing houses are tapping into a growing demand. Even when covering the Vatican in the media, it is known that generally articles with Benedict XVI in the title produce good traffic.

During his presentation, Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, narrowed in on the reasons Benedict XVI still inspires such devotion to this day.

First of all, he said, there is Benedict’s love-based vision of Christianity. Benedict views Christianity as “the religion of love not only due to its origin but also in its deepest nature,” Koch said. “Christianity derives from the love of God, who loves us and guides us men to love and that we gift back to God and consequentially share amongst each other.”

Secondly, Koch described the “democratic” approach to faith by Pope Benedict, viewing his role as that of an interpreter and catalyst for the faith of the ‘little man.’ The mixture of these two ingredients is the secret to the infectious popularity still held today by the retired pope.

As the hundreds of participants at the book presentation made their way out into the pouring rain and flashing lightning above St. Peter’s square, one thing was clear: The teachings by Pope Benedict XVI are here to stay.



Benedict XVI: ‘Images of a life’
Translated from

April 5, 2017

On the occasion of Benedict XVI’s 90th birthday, Edizioni San Paolo in Italy released a book today entitled Benedetto XVI – Immagini di una vita, written by journalists Maria Giuseppina Buonanno and Luca Caruso.



Starting from the historic announcement of Benedict’s renunciation of the Papacy on February 11, 2013, the authors retrace backwards the principal stages of the human and spiritual biography of this ‘humble servant in the vineyard of the Lord’, illustrated by numerous photographs, some of them previously unpublished: From his infancy in Germany in the 1930s, the tragedy of Nazism and the Second World War at the end of which he was an American POW, his priestly vocation, his brilliant academic career, his participation in the Second Vatican Council, his appointment as Archbishop of Munich-Freising and his elevation to the cardinalate, his almost quarter-century as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and the almost eight years of a Pontificate marked by light and shadows.

“Even if the circumstances and places changed and his garments changes from black to red to white, there is no doubt whatsoever that he who is with us in the pages of this book is always the same person and that the interior thread running through his life shows a unity of orientation and a continuity of extraordinary inspiration,” writes Fr. Federico Lombardi, president of the Fondazione Vaticana Joseph Ratzinger-Benedetto XVI in his Preface to the book.

The publisher’s blurb for the book reads:

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Two journalists – Luca Caruso, head of the press bureau for the Fondazione Vaticana Joseph Ratzinger-Benedetto XVI, and Maria Giuseppina Buonano, who writes about Church affairs for the weekly magazine Oggi (Today) – narrate and illustrate the rich and complex personal, theological and pastoral life of Benedict XVI for those who know little about the emeritus Pope.

In nine chapters and 90 photos, the book seeks to illuminate anew the figure and person of the Emeritus Pope, in capturing images from the important stages of his life, from his childhood and youth, his education, his Episcopal and Vatican offices, his election as pope, his pontificate, his renunciation and his life in retirement.

The book was realized in cooperation with the Fondazione Vaticana JR-BXVI, with a preface by Fr. Federico Lombardi, and with a 90th birthday greeting from the pope’s older brother, Mons. Georg Ratzinger.

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Herewith a translation of the letter:

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Holy Father!
Dear Brother!

I greet you from the heart on your 90th birthday! For so many years we have gone through life together. I carry in my heart the bond that I have always felt.

Your days continue to be filled with tireless work in your service as priest, bishop and emeritus Pope. Many people are thankful for this and include you in their prayers. Your words of instruction and confirmation are received by many with great interest and welcome.

I wish you health and strength in the coming years, and above all, the rich blessing of God, in whose service you have placed yourself all your life.

Your brother Georg
Regensburg
January 18, 2017

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According to Wikipedia, Church records since 1295 show that only two popes have lived beyond age 87 – Leo XIII, elected at age 67 in 1878, who died at age 93
in 1903; and Clement XII, elected at age 78 in 1730 , who died 60 days short of his 88th birthday in 1750. Benedict XVI would have been the first pope to reach
age 90 after Leo XIII... My thanks to Beatrice and her site for leading me to this item.

Mons. Gaenswein says Benedict XVI
will have a small birthday celebration
with about 50 guests on Easter Monday
by Barbara Just
Translated from
Katholisches.de
April 3, 2017

Benedict XVI turns 90 on Easter Sunday. His private secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein has revealed HOW the German emeritus pope will celebrate it.

In 2012 when he turned 85, he was still Pope, which prompted major festive initiatives from his Bavarian countrymen. His home diocese of Munich-Freising had a very special gift for him that summer. In August, A special train with at least a thousand costumed folk groups, Alpine guards, musicians and pilgrims left Bavaria to greet ‘their pope’ at his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo, and the Alban hills resounded with their celebratory yodeling and the obligatory gun salute from the Alpine guards.

Five years later, the Bavarians have not forgotten their Pope, now emeritus. But their greeting in Rome will be on a far smaller scale. Bavarian provincial leader Karl Steininger will lead a small delegation of 30 Alpine Guards and musicians to Rome in order to greet Benedict XVI on Easter Monday. Sources have told this newspaper that Bavarian minister President Horst Seehofer and his wife Karin will also be there to greet the pope.

Benedict’s closest coworker, Mons. Georg Gänswein, told Catholic Radio Horeb that there will be a ‘small celebration’ on Easter Monday with about 50 invited guests from Bavaria and Rome. The Mittelbayerischer Zeitung says that the Mayor of Pentling, where Jospeh Ratzinger’s private residence was located [now a museum-conference center for the Institut Papst Benedikt XVI based in Regensburg], will be traveling to Rome, but not Mobns. Rudolf Voderholzer, Bishop of Regensburg.

Meanwhile, the dioceses of Bavaria have called on all the pastors and priests to offer prayers for Benedict XVI on Easter Sunday.

If his health permits, the emeritus pope’s brother, Mons. Georg Ratzigner, is expected to come to Rome for the occasion. Of course, he has always said that in the Ratzinger family, birthdays were not as important as the name days which were celebrated by preference. "It reminds us of our baptism and of the saint for whom we are named and who is supposed to inspire our lives”, he once told KNA.

The Katholischen Akademie of Bavaria will mark the occasion with a two-day conference in Munich on the Christian status of Europe today. The event is sponsored by the Institut Papst Benedikt XVI, the Stiftung Joseph Ratzinger-Benedikt XVI (the foundation that is the formal structure for the Ratzinger Schuelerkreis) and the Fondazione Vaticana Joseph Ratzigner-Benedetto XVI.

The topic is, of course, something that was always dear to the emeritus pope. His Schuelerkreis also discussed it at their last August seminar.

Resource persons will include the German Vice President Johannes Singhammer and former German constitutional judge Udo di Fabio; Gottfried Locher, president of the Association of Evangelical Churches in Europe; and Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich-Freising. Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, was also supposed to speak, but he had to withdraw because the dates fall on Pope Francis’s visit to Egypt.

But Koch will be present in Passau – the diocese in which Joseph Ratzinger was born – for a May 26-27 celebration in honor of Benedict XVI. He will speak about Joseph Ratzinger as “Co-worker for the truth and witness to God’s love”. Theologian Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz, a longtime Ratzinger friend, will speak about the breadth of Ratzingerian thought from his early exposure to St. Augustine to the present. Peter Seewald, with whom Benedict XVI shared his ‘Last Conversations’, published last year, will also be at the Passau event.

The Institut Papst Benedikt XVI has planned a small publishing surprise. On Monday, April 10, it will publish the oldest hitherto unpublished text by Joseph Ratzinger – his 1947 translation to German of Thomas Aquinas’s ‘Quaestio de caritate’ [which the 20-year-old seminarian did at the suggestion of his then mentor, Fr. Alfred Laepple].

When Mons. Gaenswein speaks these days, he understandably has to toe the official Vatican line because he is a Curial official, beholden to the pope (even if this pope did not name him to his position, he did keep him there where Benedict XVI had named him). He allowed himself great latitude in articulating his two popes/dual papacy hypothesis last year, but that's not what he is saying now. As to the relationship between the emeritus pope and his successor, what would have been Andreas Englisch's interest in publicly postulating that all is not as it seems???



GG goes back on his 'two popes' hypothesis,
says relations between B16 and his successor are just fine,
and that talk about a gay lobby was always exaggerated
by ANDREA TORNIELLI
From the English service of
VATICAN INSIDER
April 6, 2017

Benedict XVI’s ninetieth birthday is approaching and Monsignor Georg Gänswein, Prefect of the Papal Household and his private secretary, denies all the rumors and recent new talk about alleged pressure that led Joseph Ratzinger to resign.

Gänswein was interviewed on Matrix, an Italian late night TV show, which aired on Wednesday, April 5, 2017.

The Secretary of the Pope Emeritus responded to questions from Vatican journalist, Fabio Marchese, on the rumors about alleged pressure from the US government under President Barack Obama to push for Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation. Rumors and plots recently relaunched in some articles and interviews, from which Pope Ratzinger ended up emerging as a weak pushover.

“It’s not true, it is invented, it is a groundless statement", Don Georg said. "His renunciation was a free decision, well thought out, as well as prayed over. The things I have read recently are invented and not true. Pope Benedict is not a person who gives into pressure. Quite the contrary. When there were challenges, when both the doctrine and the people of God had to be defended, he was the one who behaved in an exemplary way: he did not flee in front of the wolves, but he resisted, and this would never have been a reason to leave the pontificate and renounce.”

In the interview, Gänswein also talks about the relationship between Francis and his predecessor: “Relations are very cordial, very good, they visit and call each other, they talk. It is clear: Pope Francis is the successor of Peter. Pope Benedict was the Pope, he renounced and now he has retired to pray. To pray means to help his successor and the Church, because the Church is not governed only by words and decisions, but also with prayer and suffering. And that is what he is doing now. There is no misunderstanding. If there are different interpretations, sometimes even a bit mischievous, this... this is life, it is the world and it is the Church. I see no confusion. I see sometimes some nostalgia and some misunderstanding; however, I do not perceive any confusion about the roles, about who is Pope.“ [As there ought never to be, or to have been!]

The secretary of Benedict XVI also answered a question about the “gay lobby” in the Vatican. “I don’t think the gay lobby is a power lobby - he said – there was an attempt to put things right and to give the necessary response.” But “the importance of this group has been exaggerated; an answer and a solution were given at the time. Speaking of power lobby is not only exaggerated, but a hundred times exaggerated."

Andrea Tornielli has, of course, a vested interest in propagating Mons. Gaenswein's affirmations of the official line.

April 9, 2017 headlines

Canon212.com


PewSitter

Antonio Socci has been prompted by an unwarranted attack on him for a recent critique of Bergoglio to make a quick summary of what
makes this pope so indisputably anti-Catholic...

To protest a pope who is destroying the Catholic Church
and does not defend persecuted Christians:
Neither Church tax nor applause for a pope who says Jesus ‘became the devil’ –
Just prayers for his conversion and that the Church may resist during its current ordeal
Translated from

April 9, 2017

Yesterday Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference, attacked me for my last article in Libero [about this pope saying Jesus ‘became the devil’ for us]. Since it is the nth time I have received similar attacks from Avvenire, from assorted ecclesiastics and their circle – I feel authorized, at least for my part, to reject paying my church tax this year.

Indeed, no one can ask anybody to help finance any institution that has been targeting its own members for years. Especially in dishonest ways. Avvenire accuses me of having called certain statements of Bergoglio blasphemous - they claim that I do not present “any valid argument” to support my statements. As if I habitually launch irresponsible accusations against this pope for no reason at all.

The fact is that Avvenire had been very careful not to report the textual statements of the pope upon which my recent criticism was based: when he said, as reported by both Vatican Radio and L’Osservatore Romano in direct quotes, that Jesus “became sin, became the devil, a serpent, for us”.

Words unheard of before – least of all from a pope – but which Avvenire omitted in its report of the homily from which it was drawn, yet the newspaper now accuses me of attacking the pope “without any valid argument”. But that this particular statement by Bergoglio was blasphemous or scandalous is demonstrated by the very fact that Avvenire censored it from its own news report and has therefore not even tried to justify it. [If Avvenire did not report it, it means that for them, the statement was never said – regardless of the reports from the official Vatican sources – so what is there to justify?]

But in fact, the statement in question was not a mere gaffe – they are inadmissible words from a pope (we have never before had a blasphemous pope, and especially, not pronouncing a blasphemy at Mass).

Yet that statement precisely expresses a conviction of Bergoglio that is explained by that entire homily, in which he explains a Biblical passage about Moses not according to Christian exegesis [which, as in the Gospel of John, foretold the Messiah] but – perhaps he may not even realize it – by a Gnostic exegesis. It is a gnosis that ends up melding together Christ and Lucifer as ‘one’ under the sign of the serpent, a gnosis that in the anti-Christian culture of the past two centuries has been quite widespread, as illustrated by a 2003 article in 30 GIORNI by the philosopher Massimo Borghese entitled “The pact with the Serpent”.

But other previous whoppers by Bergoglio point in the same direction.

For example, last March 17, according to a news report, he said: “Inside the Holy Trinity they’re all arguing behind closed doors, but on the outside they give the picture of unity.” ][I checked: The source is ultrahyperBergoglian incensebearer nonpareil Austin Ivereigh, in a CRUX article about an Argentine female theologian Emilce Cuda entitled “The woman who knows how to read Pope Francis”
https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2017/03/25/woman-knows-read-pope-francis/
A woman who claims the pope made the statement ‘jokingly’ to a delegation of theologians in the ff context:

---

She says Francis urged them to do theological ethics with a “hermeneutic of unity in difference”… a theme that recurs in the pope’s intellectual passions: creating processes in which the Holy Spirit forges new synthesis out of disparities and disagreements.

In the meeting, the pope jokingly likened this to the way the Holy Trinity functions. “Inside the Holy Trinity they’re all arguing behind closed doors,” Cuda says Francis told them, “but on the outside they give the picture of unity.”

Cuda says his comparison made her think of something more earthy attributed to Argentina’s famous leader Juan Domingo Perón. “In Peronism, when they hear cats shrieking, people outside think they’re fighting; in fact, they’re reproducing.”

---

Jokingly or not – and in the context it was said, not just a joke - Bergoglio seems to look at God in the ‘image and likeness’ of fallen man, with all our faults and qualities! That is certainly carrying the idea of an anthropomorphic God too far. It is, of course, a measure of Ivereigh’s inbred Bergoglianism that he does not even find the statement questionable and unacceptable for a pope to make.]

A Bergoglian line that the French site Reinformation.tv has called “a most serious blasphemy that contradicts many dogmas” [Not ‘many dogmas’ but the very nature and character of God himself, the Supreme Being and Creator!] and could have an analogous Gnostic basis.

It is impossible to keep quiet when one hears or reads about a pope saying things like this. Yet these outrageous statements are not just said out of ignorance – which in itself is inadmissible in a pope. [Popes are not expected to know everything, but when they say something, their words ought to be correct and authoritative - that is the least we can expect. But if a pope happens to be as supremely hubristic as Bergoglio, he will end up saying the unacceptable whoppers that he does!]

The problem is more serious: The real fear that the summit of the Church is now occupied by a ‘party’ determined to demolish Catholicism itself as we have known it for 200-plus years. [Which is why I insist that the most accurate generic all-embracing adjective to use for this pope is ‘anti-Catholic’!]

Day after day, this pope has been, at the very least, chipping away at the structure of the cathedral of faith [occasionally, blasting holes in it!] – with each blow being part of his strategy of desacralization. [A weak synonym for what it really is: secularization of the Church to homogenize it with ‘the world’!]

Not only has he said that Jesus “became the devil”; that the Holy Trinity is a band of quarrelsome Persons who simply present a façade of agreement; that “there is no Catholic God”; that Jesus, in the episode with the adulterous woman, ‘played somewhat the fool’, that he ‘failed to uphold morality’, and that he was not ‘clean’. He has also said that Mary, at the foot of the Cross, probably lost her faith and railed against God trhat “You told me he [her Son] would reign forever! Liar! I have been deceived”. [But this is a now-familiar Bergoglio device of attributing to the divine what he himself as a human might be thinking! And almost everyone, including the most orthodox Catholic commentators, have tended to let it pass!]

A pope who has split the Church over the sacraments of the Eucharist and matrimony, sowing total confusion over teachings and practices about which the Church cannot be divided. A pope whp has delegitimized ‘mission’ by using the pejorative term ‘proselytism’ for evangelization.

A pope who does not kneel before the Blessed Sacrament, who celebrates Communist tyrants like the Castro brothers and the Beijing despots) while snobbing their victims to the point of inciting rebellion by the Cuban dissidents and even the aged and wise Cardinal Zen of HongKong.

A pope who rejoices in receiving from his comrade President Evo Mortales of Bolivia a chuspa (pouch) with coca leaves and the sculpture of Christ crucified on the ‘hammer and sickle’. A pope who says that Communists are the ones who think like Christians (i.e., Christians themselves do not think like Christians].

A pope who seems he could not care less about Christians persecuted elsewhere but is obsessed with promoting mass migration of mostly Muslims into Europe. A pope who has replaced the priority of announcing Christ with his exaltation of the migrant tides as an ‘invasion that is healthy for Europe’, making this as a dogma of his faith. Instead of exhorting the world to “open your doors to Christ”, he demands to “open your doors to all immigrants”.

A pope who has abandoned the Church’s non-negotiable principles, even as the core Catholic principles on life, the family and sexuality are being assaulted as never before, replacing them with Obamian eco-catastrophism. Who allowed St. Peter’s Basilica to be used for an animalistic sound-and-light show promoting UN goals on climate change, and who has made ‘global warming’ into one of his core dogmas.

A pope who refuses to condemn Islamic terrorism as such, who does not fail to unload daily criticisms and denunciations of Catholics who stand by Catholicism, even as he exalts all other religions especially Islam which he insists on calling Islam ‘a religion of peace’, prompting a vehement protest from Islamist scholar Fr. Samir Khalil Samir, a Lebanese Jesuit who advised Benedict XVI about Islam.

A pope who has repeatedly ignored the massive ‘Family Day’ rallies organized by Italian Catholics but praises persons like arch-abortionist Emma Bonino and former Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, a communist, as ‘great Italians’.

A pope who has named as president of the Pontifical Acdemy for Life (founded by John Paul II) and chancellor of the Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family a man like Mons. Vincenzo Paglia, who in his recent eulogy for the late Radical Party leader Marco Pannella, called him “a man of great spirituality… (of whom) our world needs more men who could speak as he did, and I hope that the spirit of Marco will help us to live in the direction he indicated” [Never mind that all his life, Pannella championed abortion on demand, divorce, euthanasia, same-sex ‘marriage’ and other anti-Catholic practices].

A pope who recently confirmed as Superior-General of the Jesuits a man like Venezuelan political activist Fr. Sosa Abascal, who said that “we really do not know what Jesus really said because there were no tape recorders in his time”, therefore so much for ‘revering’ the Word of God and Sacred Scriptures as Revelation, because everything contained therein must be reinterpreted and contextualized as needed.

For Sosa Abascal, the goal of faith is Bergoglio himself (“I identify myself with anything Pope Francis says”) because if we are not to give credence to what the Gospels say about Jesus, then the Bible itself no longer has any authority.

Bergoglio penalizes and marginalizes cardinals, bishops and religious who are solid in their Catholic faith – the deposit of faith over 2000 years – while he exalts those who are ‘married’ to the world and its ideologies.

For all these reasons – and many others – I have no intention of further contributing to the demolition of the Church by agreeing to pay my share of the annual revenue for the Italian Church [amounting to 8 euro out of every 1000 euro in annual Italian government revenue]. I would rather spend out of pocket directly, to support missionaries, works of charity and religious orders who are truly Catholic.

Moreover, the ‘church of Bergoglio’ is already aswim in funds. But since Bergoglio and his followers continue to pay lip service to ‘wanting a poor Church”, I am only too happy to accommodate them. If they wish to be poor, why continue giving them euros?

The moment we have a pope once again who reveres ‘the Catholic God’ and who defends the Christian people and their faith, then I will sign once again on my annual income tax return that I wish to contribute to the Catholic Church.

For now, we are engulfed in shadows. To paraphrase Chesterton: We do not need a Church that sinks with the world, but a Church that saves the world.

Steve Skojec has done more work on what this pope has said about Jesus becoming sin and worse 'becoming the devil' for us before his most recent sally into this startling and most unseemly papal exegesis, but also on what St. Paul, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas have said about the Old Testament prefiguration of the Messiah...

Pope Francis: Christ “made himself the devil”
by Steve Skojec

April 10, 2017

As a result of H. Reed Armstrong’s recent article on the influence of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac on the thinking of the contemporary Church, I found myself perusing an analysis of von Balthasar’s “Delirious Hope that All be Saved” by Dr. Christopher Malloy, professor of theology at the University of Dallas.

In the midst of that essay, one particular paragraph stood out, because it jogged my memory about something almost entirely unrelated:

---

And as for the related claim that Jesus took on our sins themselves – not simply the punishment due to them – here we have Balthasar coming very close to supporting, if not outright supporting, the notion of penal substitution. Perhaps Balthasar avoids claiming the Christ truly became guilty, thus freeing himself from Luther’s blasphemy on this matter.

But his assertion that Christ takes on damnation itself cannot square with the truth of hell. Hell is a place of sinful alienation, a place of aversion from the divine good. But Christ cannot become averse to the divine good. (On this topic, see Thomas Joseph White, “Jesus’ Cry on the Cross and His Beatific Vision” Nova et Vetera 5 (2007): 573-581.)

The Catholic view regarding Christ’s act is that it was atonement, a vicarious act of satisfaction. By his loving obedience, Christ offered the Father a satisfaction sufficient for the forgiveness of infinitely many persons. Thus, he died for all. However, one must receive the fruit of this redemption by being justified in order to benefit from it.

---

I went immediately and began searching the Internet to find Francis’s own words on this topic, which I recalled reading near the beginning of his papacy. I found the first instance here, at Vatican Radio, from June, 2013:

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What is reconciliation? Taking one from this side, taking another one for that side and uniting them: no, that’s part of it but it’s not it … True reconciliation means that God in Christ took on our sins and He became the sinner for us.

When we go to confession, for example, it isn’t that we say our sin and God forgives us. No, not that! We look for Jesus Christ and say: ‘This is your sin, and I will sin again’. And Jesus likes that, because it was his mission: to become the sinner for us, to liberate us.

---

[See what I mean? It would take a fulltime job just to monitor everything this pope is reported to have said; otherwise any 'compilation' of his outrages will always come short. I do not recall ever having seen this particular quote before!]

Further searching turned up another instance at the invaluable website, The Denzinger-Bergoglio (TDB), taken from the pope’s morning meditation on March 15, 2016:

---

And this is the Mystery of Christ. Paul, when speaking about this mystery, said the Jesus [sic] emptied himself, humiliated himself and destroyed himself in order to save us. And (what’s) even stronger, ‘he became sin’. Using this symbol, he became a serpent. This is the prophetic message of today’s reading.

The Son of Man, who like a serpent, ‘became sin,’ is raised up to save us. […] the story of our redemption, this is the story of God’s love. If we want to know God’s love, let us look at the Cross, a man tortured, a God emptied of his divinity, dirtied [stained] by sin. [When was Jesus ever 'emptied of his divinity, diritied by sin'???] But at the same time, he concluded, a God who through his self-annihilation, defeats forever the true name of evil, that Revelation calls ‘the ancient serpent’.

Sin is the work of Satan and Jesus defeats Satan by ‘becoming sin’ and from there he lifts up all of us. The Cross is not an ornament or a work of art with many precious stones as we see around us. The Cross is the Mystery of God’s annihilation for love. And the serpent that makes a prophecy in the desert is salvation, it is raised up and whoever looks at it is healed. And this is not done with a magic wand by a God who does these things: No! This is done through the suffering of the Son of Man, through the suffering of Jesus Christ.

---

This strange imagery was therefore already fresh in my mind when it came to my attention that the pope had revisited this theme yet again in his morning meditation on Tuesday, April 4, 2017. The following excerpts are taken from a larger translation by Andrew Guernsey of a text as published in L’Osservatore Romano:

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The Pope stated, referring to the passage from the Book of Numbers (21:4-9), “Jesus reminds us of what happened in the desert and which we heard in the first reading.” It is the moment when “the weary people, the people who cannot endure the path, turns away from the Lord, speaks evil of Moses and of the Lord, and encounters those serpents which bite and cause the death.” Then “the Lord says to Moses to make a bronze serpent and raise it, and the person who suffers a wound of a serpent, and that looks at the one of bronze, will be healed.”

“The serpent,” the Pope continued, “is the symbol of wickedness, is the symbol of the devil: it was the most cunning of the animals in earthly paradise.” Because “the serpent is the one that is able to seduce with lies”, he is “the father of lies: this is the mystery.” But then “we have to look at the devil to save us? The serpent is the father of sin, the one that made humanity sin.” In reality, “Jesus says, ‘When I am lifted up, everyone will come to me.’ Obviously this is the mystery of the cross.”

“The bronze serpent healed,” said Francis, “but the bronze serpent was a sign of two things: the sin done by the serpent, the seduction of the serpent, the cunning of the serpent; and it was also the sign of the cross of Christ, it was a prophecy.” And “this is why the Lord tells them: ‘When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am.’

“So we can say,” the Pope affirmed, that “Jesus ‘made himself the serpent,’ Jesus ‘made himself sin,’ and he took upon himself all the filth of humanity, all the filth of sin. And he ‘made himself sin’, he made himself to rise up so that all the people might look at him, the people wounded by sin, us. This is the mystery of the cross and Paul says it: ‘He made himself sin’ and he took the appearance of the father of sin, the cunning serpent.”

“Those who did not look at the bronze serpent after being wounded by a snake in the desert,” the Pontiff explained, “died in sin, the sin of murmuring against God and Moses.” In the same way, “those who do not recognize the strength of God, who made himself sin to heal us, in that man who is lifted up, like the serpent, will die in their sin.”

Because “salvation comes only from the cross, still from this cross on which God made himself flesh: there is no salvation in ideas, there is no salvation in good will, in the desire to be good.” In reality, the Pope insisted, “the only salvation is in Christ crucified, because only he, as the bronze serpent signified, was able to take all the venom of sin and he healed us there.”

“But what is the cross for us?” is the question posed by Francis. “Yes, it is the sign of Christians, it is the symbol of Christians, and we make the sign of the cross, but we do not always do it well, sometimes we do it so so … because we do not have this faith in the cross,” emphasized the Pope.

The cross, then, he stated, “for some people is a badge of belonging: ‘Yes, I carry the cross to show that I am a Christian.’ ” And “It’s fine,” but “not just as a badge, as if it were a team, the badge of a team’; but [rather], said Francis, “as the memory of the man who made himself sin, who made himself the devil, the serpent, for us; he debased himself up to the point of totally annihilating himself.”

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Christ made himself the devil?

The odd thing here is how close Francis actually is to the traditional teaching on the matter, but with a gut-wrenching twist. In the above-cited post at TDB, the Church’s understanding of this mystery is perhaps best explained in these excerpts from St. Thomas Aquinas…

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– ‘He made him to be sin’, that is, ‘the victim of sacrifice for sin’
– ‘He made him to be sin’: that is, ‘he made him assume mortal and suffering flesh’
– ‘He made him to be sin’: that is, ‘made him regarded a sinner’
...
– In Christ there was no proneness towards evil, much less could there be sin

---

And St. Augustine:

What are the biting serpents? Sins, from the mortality of the flesh. What is the serpent lifted up? The Lord’s death on the cross. For as death came by the serpent, it was figured by the image of a serpent. The serpent’s bite was deadly, the Lord’s death is life-giving. A serpent is gazed on that the serpent may have no power. What is this? A death is gazed on, that death may have no power...

Meanwhile brethren, that we may be healed from sin, let us now gaze on Christ crucified; for ‘as Moses,’ says He, ‘lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up; that whosoever believes in Him may not perish, but have everlasting life.’

Just as they who looked on that serpent perished not by the serpent’s bites, so they who look in faith on Christ’s death are healed from the bites of sins. But those were healed from death to temporal life; while here He says, ‘that they may have everlasting life.’

Now there is this difference between the figurative image and the real thing: the figure procured temporal life; the reality, of which that was the figure, procures eternal life. (Saint Augustine of Hippo. Tractates on the Gospel of Saint John, XII, 11)
...

This Word of God made flesh and dwelt amongst us. […] This was the way in which, though immortal, he was able to die; the way in which he chose to give life to mortal men: he would first share with us, and then enable us to share with him. Of ourselves we had no power to live, nor did he of himself have the power to die.

In other words, he performed the most wonderful exchange with us. Through us, he died; through him, we shall live. The death of the Lord our God should not be a cause of shame for us; rather, it should be our greatest hope, our greatest glory. In taking upon himself the death that he found in us, he has most faithfully promised to give us life in him, such as we cannot have of ourselves. [This is, in effect, what every Catholic learns about the meaning of Christ's unique sacrifice so that mankind might be redeemed - not that he 'became sin' but that he took on all the sins of mankind - past, present and to come - in reparation for Original Sin, so that once more, the gates of Paradise might be open for those who, by the grace of God and good works, undertake to avail of the gift of redemption.]

He loved us so much that, sinless himself, he suffered for us sinners the punishment we deserved for our sins. How then can he fail to give us the reward we deserve for our righteousness, for he is the source of righteousness? How can he, whose promises are true, fail to reward the saints when he bore the punishment of sinners, though without sin himself?

Brethren, let us then fearlessly acknowledge, and even openly proclaim, that Christ was crucified for us; let us confess it, not in fear but in joy, not in shame but in glory. (Saint Augustine of Hippo. Sermon Guelf 3 from the Office of Readings, Monday of Holy Week)

April 12, 2017 headlines

Canon212.com


PewSitter


Cardinal Burke speaks out
on recent developments -
while awaiting a papal response to
his request for an audience
(not to mention a reply to the DUBIA!)
by Lisa Bourne




ROME, Italy, April 11, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – Cardinal Raymond Burke has revealed in a new interview that he requested an audience with Pope Francis and has yet to receive a response.

Cardinal Burke also reconfirmed that Pope Francis effectively removed him from having any governance of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta while remaining its Patron.

The American cardinal known for his Catholic orthodoxy addressed several other topics during the wide-ranging interview with InfoVaticana’s Gabriel Ariza.

He said comments by the new head of the Jesuit order that cast doubt on the validity of Christ’s words on marriage must be corrected. Cardinal Burke went on to say that a recent Vatican invitation and public welcome for a male homosexual head of state with his gay lover should not have occurred.

Other than having greeted Pope Francis at a meeting of the College of Cardinals and the Roman Curia for Christmas, Cardinal Burke said he has not spoken with the pope since meeting with him in November. Ariza clarified with the cardinal that he has asked the pope for an audience.

“But I have not spoken to him, and he has not granted me an audience,” said Cardinal Burke. “So I don’t know what he is thinking.”

Some view the pope’s actions against Cardinal Burke in the Knights of Malta controversy as retribution for the DUBIA submitted to Francis regarding his Amoris Laetitia document.

Cardinal Burke reaffirmed for Ariza how it was necessary to make the DUBIA public because of the rampant confusion in the Church about fundamental questions with regard to intrinsic moral evil, the right disposition to receive Holy Communion, and the indissolubility of marriage.

Cardinal Burke mentioned that there are additional cardinals who support the dubia beyond the four cardinals who signed it.

It is not clear whether there will be a formal public correction to Pope Francis, he said. Normally, before taking that step, the cardinals who brought the dubia would approach the pope again to tell him personally that the matter is so grave that they as Church leaders must correct it.

“And I trust that the Holy Father will respond at that moment,” continued Cardinal Burke.

The matter must be approached with “great respect and delicacy,” he told Ariza. “And I do not want to suggest a date that would in any way affect negatively the handling of the matter or would show disrespect to anyone involved.”

Asked by Ariza about the nature of his role with the Knights of Malta after Pope Francis’s February appointment of Archbishop Giovanni Angelo Becciu as special Vatican delegate to the Knights, Cardinal Burke responded, “I have no role right now. I have a title, but I have no function.”

The journalist had first asked the cardinal whether the crisis in the Order of Malta was over. Cardinal Burke told him it was a difficult question to answer.

“For the moment, I am completely removed from any involvement with the Order of Malta,” he said. “While I retain the title of the Cardinal Patron, the Pope has made clear that the only person who can treat questions of the Order of Malta in the name of the Holy Father is Archbishop Becciu. So I don’t know.”

The world’s oldest chivalric order has been the center of turmoil for months involving the Order’s identity and sovereignty. The controversy revolved around Grand Chancellor Albrecht von Boeselager’s involvement in condom distribution via the Order’s charitable work and subsequent violation of his promise of obedience in refusing to resign when asked.

Questions have also been raised over some Knights’ involvement in Freemasonry, and a potential conflict of interest involving members of a Vatican commission appointed to investigate the Order and a very large bequest made to the Knights.

Cardinal Burke confirmed in the interview that Pope Francis had earlier directed him to expel any Freemasons within the Knights of Malta.

However, in an unprecedented and controversial move, Pope Francis took over the sovereign Order, asked its Grand Master to resign, reinstated von Boeselager and created the special delegate appointment, effectively erasing Cardinal Burke’s role as Patron.

Cardinal Burke told Ariza in regard to the disorder within the Knights of Malta that specifics of the bequest must be clarified.

“Because to any person with common sense there is something very strange going on,” he stated. “Regarding this large bequest, a part of which at least was left to the Order of Malta, there is no clear knowledge about who the donor is, what is the exact nature of the bequest, how it is being administered, and that is not right. Those things have to be clear.”

Cardinal Burke went on to say it was very strange that three people directly involved in the bequest given to the Order should be on the so-called “group” investigating the Grand Chancellor’s dismissal and ensuing recommendation that he be reinstated.

And “it does seem strange,” Cardinal Burke suggested, that shortly thereafter von Boeselager’s brother was named to the Commission of Control for the Vatican Bank.

“You had your hands tied,” Ariza queried Cardinal Burke, to which the cardinal replied, “Yes. I respect the order of the Holy Father, and I have nothing to do at the Order right now.”

The cardinal told InfoVaticana he did not know whether his removal as Cardinal Patron was an intended part of the crisis within the Knights of Malta. “Certainly, one thing is clear, that the reinstatement of the Grand Chancellor was a principal objective,” he said.

Cardinal Burke also addressed recent comments by new Jesuit Superior General Father Arturo Sosa Abascal that Jesus’s words against divorce were “relative” and subject to “interpretation.”

“This is completely wrong,” Cardinal Burke stated. “In fact, I find it incredible that he could make these kind of statements. They also need to be corrected.”

The head of the Jesuits contended that Christ’s words “must be contextualized ” because “no one had a recorder to take down his words.” Cardinal Burke termed this as “unreasonable.”

“To think that words in the Gospels, which are words that, after centuries of studies, have been understood to be the direct words of Our Lord, are now not the words of Our Lord because they were not tape recorded,” he said. “I can’t understand it.”

“It is a serious mistake that needs to be corrected,” the cardinal continued, and the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), “the Pope’s organ for safeguarding the truth of the faith and morals,” can make the correction.

Cardinal Burke also criticized the recent Vatican welcome for Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel with his homosexual male partner for the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome.

Pictures were published in the media of the homosexual couple being welcomed. Bettel tweeted afterward, “It was a great pleasure and honour for me and Gauthier to be welcomed by the leader of the Catholic church.”

“I think something has to be done to address the public image that is given by such acts,” Cardinal Burke said. “In the past, the Holy See simply, in a very discreet and respectful way, refused to permit such a thing.”

Such displays send the wrong message, he said.

“We have to return to that because by openly permitting this, the very strong impression is given that now the Holy See approves such situations,” said Cardinal Burke. “So that has to be made clear.”

Similarly, the cardinal pointed to the Vatican allowing population control zealot Paul Ehrlich to speak at a biological extinction conference. Ehrlich made a presentation in February at the invitation of Pope Francis’ Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences chancellor Archbishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo.

Ehrlich is one of many individuals invited to present at the Vatican who contravene Church teaching. The cardinal said his invitation to speak is “a prime example” of the Holy See sending the wrong message.

“I think too the terms for choosing those who are invited officially to come and to speak to the conferences at the Holy See have to be clear,” Cardinal Burke said. “I don’t understand how people who have openly opposed the Church and her teachings can be invited to this kind of conference.”

PewSitter headlines on Islam 4/10/2017

Why don’t we use the best weapon
we could have against Islamists?
By Dave Blount


After centuries of lying low, Islam has re-emerged as an existential threat to civilization. Its vast, decentralized army of maniacs seems unstoppable. Inevitably, driving trucks through crowds of innocent pedestrians will give way to chemical, biological, and even nuclear attacks. But the cult does have an Achilles heel: it depends on its followers believing that the unbalanced seventh century cut-throat Mohammad literally spoke for God. Destroying that belief destroys the enemy.

A weapon that could help accomplish this is in our hands. Back in WWII, Hollywood took America’s side against the enemy. Imagine if it did so again, and if the federal government would drop the P.C. bullshit and admit that the enemy is not ISIS, Al Qaeda, or any other particular faction, but the underlying ideology that drives all of them. Films subsidized by the Defense Department could be cranked out one after the other telling the truth about Islam and its founder.

F. W. Burleigh, author of the highly recommended It’s All About Muhammad, could be on to something:

---

Imagine how [people brainwashed with a sanitized version of Mohammad] will react when they see their “prophet” recruit hitmen like a Mafia don to kill his critics, mass murder people who refuse to join his religion, enslave men, women, and children, and scream “Kill! Kill!” as he and his followers did when they attacked the caravans, towns, villages, and camps of people who rejected him and his cult. Imagine their shudders when they are shown verses of the Koran where Muhammad boasts of his criminal exploits…

---

There is no end to the cinematic potential of the material. … A straight biopic would be great for starters, but Muhammad’s criminal doings can be dealt with from a number of angles. In the epilogue of my book, It’s All About Muhammad, A Biography of the World’s Most Notorious Prophet, I suggest putting Muhammad on trial for crimes against humanity.

In this scenario, he is in the docket of the accused along with his lieutenants, as occurred with Saddam Hussein and his henchmen. Muhammad’s victims are resurrected to testify about what he did to them. The myth of Muhammad as God’s voice box is thus demolished by the people he murdered, despoiled, or enslaved. The real Muhammad is shown for the psychopath that he was.

The canonical material is so vast that it can also be broken down thematically into hundreds of docudramas, one-hour treatments of History Channel quality, all of them starring Muhammad, all of them entertaining and informative.

Naturally Muslims would respond the same way they have always responded to anyone challenging their delusions: with violence. But would we have let terror threats prevent us from making movies about Nazis?

The real problem is that before we can win the hearts and minds of Muslims, we have to win over Hollywood and the federal government, both of which aggressively embrace a delusional rainbows and unicorns vision of Islam that bears no resemblance to reality. Tinseltown will not side with America against Islam — and neither will Washington.

It is wonderful to finally be rid of the over-the-top Islamophile Barack Hussein Obama. But he was only a symptom of an enduring problem. Pre-Obama, George W. Bush responded to the Islamic atrocities of 9/11 by calling Islam a “religion of peace”; anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the history of Islam or of current events knew that to be an absurd lie. Post-Obama, we read this from Secretary of Defense James Mattis, in reference to a dead al Qaeda terrorist: “The death of Qari Yasin is evidence that terrorists who defame Islam and deliberately target innocent people will not escape justice.”

Defame Islam? Yasin personifies Islam, as does every other terrorist going back to Mohammad, who proclaimed himself “victorious with terror.”

Gasps Islam expert Robert Spencer:

---

Mattis, and Trump, and all those in power in Washington in both parties should know this: one cannot defeat an enemy one does not understand. What Mattis says here only fosters the ignorance and complacency that has enveloped us as a thick fog for the last sixteen years.

You can stomp a cockroach on the kitchen floor, but there will still be a thousand more breeding inside the walls. Likewise, killing just one or just 100 Qari Yasins is almost futile. So long as even Mad Dog Mattis sucks up to political correctness, Islam will keep winning.

---

Milo Yiannopoulos creeps me out, but he sure got this right:“Muslims are like the common cold and leftists are like AIDS. It’s easy to fight off a cold… unless you have AIDS.”

Even during the Crusades, when Muslims had overwhelming numerical advantages, they had a hell of time defeating Westerners on the battlefield. Nowadays they stand no chance at all.

But terrorism is not conventional warfare by other means. It is propaganda by other means. It is only effective because of the message it sends, and how we react to it.

We won’t win this information war until we start fighting back. Propaganda can be defeated with truth. But to get to truth, you have to get past moonbattery.


PewSitter headlines on Islam, 4/11/2017

Catching up with Sandro Magister's posts...

From Louvain To Rome,
the euthanasia of 'non-negotiable principles'
[At the very hands of 'Doctor' Bergoglio]
Adapted from the English service of

April 10, 2017

There has been an uproar over events at the Catholic University of Louvain, which has suspended and finally dismissed one of its philosophy professors, Stéphane Mercier, for having written in a note for his students that “abortion is the murder of an innocent person.”


The matter is not surprising, seeing the track record of this university which is nonetheless endowed with the title of “Catholic,” the hospital of which has for some time been openly practicing euthanasia procedures, “from 12 to 15 per year,” according to the rector of the twin Flemish university of Leuven, the canonist Rik Torfs.

[The Universite Catholique de Louvain (UCL) was founded in 1425 but suppressed from 1787-1834 during the Napoleonic period. In 1834, the institution was re-established as two separate entities, the French-speaking UCL and the Flemish-speaking Catholic University of Leuven (Flemish form of Louvain). Despite a court ruling that decided that the UCL founded in 1834 cannot be considered a continuation of the one founded in 1425, the university has nonetheless incorporated 1425 into its official logo.

For centuries, UCL was considered a premier center of educational excellence in Catholic education and theology, but in recent decades, it has adopted the ultra-liberal positions of the dominant Church hierarchy in Belgium exemplified by Cardinal Danneels. Perhaps the most prominent Louvain alumnus known to English-speaking Catholics is the Venerable Fulton Sheen, who obtained his Ph.D. from Louvain in 1923. In 1980, a few months before his death, Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, beatified as a martyr last year, was given an honorary doctorate by the UCL.]

But what is more striking is the substantial approval that the bishops of Belgium have given to the removal of Professor Mercier.

Also startling is the reticence of the newspaper of the Italian episcopal conference, Avvenire, which in giving a concise account of the affair - the more complete documentation of which has appeared on the blog Rossoporpora - avoided taking a position, limiting itself to this: “It remains to be understood what is the meaning of what has been stated by the spokesman of the Belgian episcopal conference.”

Not to mention the silence of Pope Francis, who however has not failed on other occasions to call abortion a “horrendous crime.”

There is in effect a significant discrepancy between how the papacy and much of the Catholic hierarchy speak out on abortion and euthanasia today and how they used to speak out.

What during the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI were “non-negotiable principles” have now become realities to be “discerned” and “mediated” both in politics and in pastoral practice.

The Italian episcopal conference and its newspaper Avvenire are perfect examples of this mutation.

In February of 2009, when Italy was rocked by the case of Eluana Englaro, the young woman in a vegetative state whose life was taken when her nutrition and hydration were cut off, the current editor of Avvenire, Marco Tarquinio, wrote a fiery editorial, calling that act a “killing”.

Today, Avvenire is singing an entirely new [Bergoglian] hymn. Just consider the courteous detachment with which Avvenirerefers to and comments on the law currently under discussion in Italy on advance healthcare directives, abbreviated DAT - instructions meant to be given to physicians beforehand on what lifesaving measures to take or not take in case of loss of consciousness.

One glaring example of this change of course is given by Professor Francesco D'Agostino, professor of the philosophy of law at the University of Roma Tor Vergata and at the Pontifical Lateran University, president of the Union of Italian Catholic Journalists, honorary president of the Italian national bioethics committee, member of the Pontifical Academy for Life [at least until all the Academy members were dismissed recently preparatory to a full overhaul under its Bergoglio-appointed president Mons. Vincenzo Paglia], and editorialist for Avvenire - in short, someone who was a contemporary reference point for the Italian Church on questions of bioethics.

The letter reproduced below brings to light the sea change between what Professor D'Agostino writes today on advance healthcare directives and what he wrote on the same subject ten years ago.

The author of the letter is attorney Antonio Caragliu, of the Trieste bar, he too a member of the Union of Italian Catholic Jurists.

Two observations for better understanding his statements:
- the honorable Mario Marazziti, member of parliament since 2013 and president of the commission for social affairs that deals with the law on DAT, is a high-ranking member of the Community of Sant’Egidio, of which he was spokesman for many years [and of which the ubiquitous and increasingly infamous Mons. Paglia has been spiritual director from the beginning];
- Bishop Nunzio Galantino, secretary general of the Italian episcopal conference and with a direct connection to Pope Francis, who personally placed him in this position in 2013 and confirmed him until 2019, is de facto the sole editor of Avvenireover which he has full and compelling control.

Here is the letter.

---

Dear Magister,

I find it interesting to compare the editorial by Francesco D'Agostino, published in Avvenire on March 30, 2017, entitled "On DAT a good law is needed. Not everything is euthanasia. History calls for courage,” with another editorial of his, published ten years before, also in Avvenire, on April 6, 2007, eloquently entitled “Like a booby trap into euthanasia.”

In 2007 D'Agostino maintained that advance healthcare directives could be considered justified and valid only under certain conditions, among which he contemplated the following:
1. that the physician, the recipient of the advance directives, while having the duty to take them into adequate and serious consideration, should never be bound by law to observe them (just as the physician of a “competent” patient can never be turned into a blind and passive executor of this person’s requests);

2. that the refusal of treatment should not include artificial hydration and nutrition, since these should be considered “pre-medical forms of vital support, endowed with the highest ethical and symbolic value, the suspension of which would in fact carry out a particularly insidious, because indirect, form of euthanasia.” In maintaining this, D'Agostino referred to the December 18, 2003 document of the national bioethics committee on “Advance healthcare directives.”

Now, article 3 of the draft legislation currently under review by the commission for social affairs, headed by the honorable Mario Marazziti, does not respect either of these two conditions.

But in spite of this, Professor D'Agostino writes that “the draft legislation is in no way aimed at introducing into Italy a system that would legalize euthanasia.” On the contrary, only “a devious and malevolent interpreter” could reach such a conclusion, through a “forced interpretation.”

Many Catholic jurists are understandably surprised by the about-face of Professor D'Agostino, who heads their association. [Which only shows that the professor appears to be totally unprincipled - not caring that he is contradicting today what he wrote with equal fervor ten years ago. ]

It is an about-face that, in my view, could find an explanation in the position of substantial approval for the draft legislation currently under review that was expressed by the secretary general of the Italian episcopal conference, Nunzio Galantino, at the concluding press conference for the permanent council of the CEI on January 26, 2017.

On that occasion Galantino said:

---

“On the commission for social affairs, headed by the honorable Mario Marazziti, they are preparing a text that should be looked at with some interest. It has clearly emerged that all the power must not be attributed to the person, because self-determination dismantles the alliance between patient, physician, and relatives, and ends up being only a triumph of individualism.”

---

In short, for Galantino the text under review represents a good compromise - all this in line with the now well-known policy of the secretary general of the CEI, who has been careful to avoid any seeming non-identity of positions between the Church in Italy and the center-left government in office. As if to say that the action of Catholics in politics must be dictated by the views of the high churchman of the day, in this case him [as a surrogate for the Primate of Italy who is also pope], in yet another form of clericalism.

Obviously the situation is unpleasant, from various points of view.

It is to be hoped that Professor D'Agostino, the one of 2007, who is a person of proven intelligence and competence, may sort things out with the Professor D'Agostino of 2017. And then, perhaps, face up to Bishop Galantino. Without seconding him.

Warm regards,
Antonio Caragliu

---

Obviously, Avvenire as well as Prof. D'Agostino [and probably the rest of the newspaper's stable of writers] have come down firmly today on the side of the church of Bergoglio, articulating all its positions as best they can -where in 2007, they were all followers of the one holy Catholic apostolic Roman Church. It is sheer apostasy, and everything that appears in Avvenire must be considered in that light. The Italian bishops' conference must now be renamed the Italian bishops' conference of the church of Bergoglio.


On the first anniversary of AL:
Two bishops speak out for interpreting it
in the light of Tradition
Adapted from the English service of

April 7, 2017

Day after day, the DUBIA submitted to the pope and then made public last November by cardinals Walter Brandmüller, Raymond L. Burke, Carlo Caffarra, and Joachim Meisner on the most controversial points of “Amoris Laetitia” seem to be shared by larger and larger segments of the Church.

Limiting the review only to the cardinals and bishops who have spoken out publicly for or against the step taken toward the pope by the four cardinals, those in favor continue to be more numerous than those against.

Joining the ranks of these latter are the Italian Bruno Forte, former special secretary of the synod of bishops on the family, and the Argentine Eduardo Horacio Garcia, former vicar of Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires and now bishop of San Justo.

While to those who think the DUBIA should be answered have been added - with respect to the previous count by Settimo Cielo that already had them in the lead - cardinals Wilfrid Fox Napier, Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, Mauro Piacenza, and bishops Charles Chaput, already the author of “Guidelines” that made a stir, Luigi Negri, Athanasius Schneider, Tomash Peta, Jan Pawel Lenga.

But even more attention should be given to two particularly significant recent contributions, from a cardinal and a bishop who have both sided with an interpretation of AL decidedly in line with the traditional magisterium of the Church and therefore in support of the initiative of the four cardinals. [But what has been left unsaid in all this is that all those who choose to interpret AL in the light of Tradition are really bending over backwards to be charitable in giving this benefit of the doubt to the Bishop of Rome - despite abundant, overwhelming and continuing Bergoglian evidence to the contrary!]

The cardinal is John Onaiyekan, archbishop of Abuja, in Nigeria, one of the most authoritative and influential personalities of the African continent.

In an extensive interview with John Allen for the portal Crux, when asked about AL and communion for the divorced and remarried Onaiyekan replied:

“There’s nothing the pope has said where we weren’t already working more or less along that line. It may be that a man and a woman are in an irregular condition, but that doesn’t mean they’re excommunicated. We’ve always found a way of welcoming them...

On the other hand, we still let them know that receiving Holy Communion is an external expression of our faith. We cannot judge what is inside your heart, so we must make rules that determine who receives Communion and who does not. Our people are aware that this is the rule...

I like the expression of the pope that they are not, by that fact, excommunicated. [But, Your Eminence, that is what the Church has always said. Why should Bergoglio get any points for reiterating it?] Now, to say that someone is not excommunicated does not mean they can receive Communion. [Now this statement is what Bergoglio ought to have added, but one he could not possibly say honestly!]

“Is there a big debate within the Church on this matter? It’s not really true. There may be some theologians talking about it here and there, but you definitely don’t hear much otherwise, for instance from the bishops’ conferences.”

April 12-13, 2017 headlines

Canon212.com




PewSitter



I am, of course, very unhappy, to say the least, about Mons. Gaenswein's recent statements that Benedict XVI chooses not to step into
the controversy generated by AL because 'it is something so remote from him'. Frank Walker at Canon212.com is dripping with
his now-familiar contemptuous mockery of the Emeritus Pope.

But it is really difficult to justify Gaenswein's choice of words, because how can an issue that involves a fundamental reading
of the Church teaching on the sacraments of matrimony and the Eucharist ever be considered 'remote' to any Catholic,
let alone someone who was Pope and whose reputation had always been solidly orthodox?

Until, that is, we have been led to believe by Mons. Gaenswein's statements over the past four years that Benedict XVI really does
not care at all about the havoc Bergoglio is wreaking on the faith, or worse, does not think Bergoglio is doing anything
wrong at all! This is all so dispiriting on the eve of the Emeritus Pope's 90th birthday, one that he will be marking under the worst
kind of cloud there could possibly be. The Benedict XVI that Mons. Gaenswein makes him out to be is not at all the man I would
still like to think that he is.

A simple statement from him like "Whatever controversies may exist today about the Catholic teaching on marriage, penance and the
Eucharist, the faithful should remember that this teaching has not changed and cannot change nor can be changed" would have been
appropriate - and the least that we who admire him expect of him. In this light, Christopher Ferrara's remarks about Gaenswein's claim
are much too kind - even if he ties it up confusingly with the questions over Benedict's resignation.

The "Pope Emeritus" on Amoris Laetitia:
A devastating "no comment"
by Christopher A. Ferrara

April 13, 2017

Ever since Benedict XVI’s mysterious abdication from the papal throne — for which the faithful have received shifting and unsatisfactory explanations — we have heard again and again from Benedict’s personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, how “serene” and “peaceful” Benedict is concerning his unprecedented decision.

So serene and peaceful, according to Gänswein, that he could not care less about the Bergoglian tumult that has divided the Church as she has never been divided before — concerning a matter of the moral law as basic as the Sixth Commandment.

As the redoubtable Edward Pentin reports, in an interview with La Repubblica — the umpteenth attempt to assure us that nothing at all was amiss with Benedict’s abdication — Gänswein reveals that Benedict “received a copy of Amoris Laetitia [AL] personally from Francis, in white and autographed” and that “He read it thoroughly, but he does not comment in any way on the content.”

No comment? That response could not be more telling. If the one and only “Pope Emeritus” in Church history — a novelty Benedict himself invented — will not defend the orthodoxy of AL, his unwillingness to do so cannot be seen as anything but an implicit recognition that its content, particularly the disastrous Chapter 8, is indefensible. Otherwise, why would the “Pope Emeritus” not simply declare that the teaching of his own successor is doctrinally sound? Answer: he will not declare it because he knows he cannot do so honestly.

Instead, just as Benedict retreated from the Chair of Peter so has he retreated from the chaos that followed in the wake of his abdication. As Pentin recounts, Gänswein “said the former pope is well aware of contrasts [!] made between him and Pope Francis, but does not let them provoke him, and has ‘no intention of entering controversies that feel far away from him.’"

Far away from him? But Benedict is living in what he himself called “the enclosure of Saint Peter” in his last General Audience on February 27, 2013, the day before his renunciation of “the ministry of the Bishop of Rome” became effective. So, according to Gänswein at least, Benedict has not only renounced the papacy but has also renounced any concern about the state of the Church under Francis!

Instead, Gänswein is happy to report (as summarized by Pentin) that “the Pope Emeritus continues to watch the television news at 8pm, receives L’Osservatore Romano, and Avvenire, the Italian bishops’ newspaper, as well as Vatican press releases.”

So, if we are to believe Gänswein, Benedict is more interested in the evening news than in the ecclesial chaos Pope Bergoglio has provoked, which is “very far” from him, even though he lives in the Vatican as Bergoglio’s neighbor, whom Bergoglio trots out for public display on certain occasions.

Regarding that chaos, Gänswein will say only that "Certainly he [Benedict] is taking note of the discussion and the different forms in which it has been implemented.” Different forms? We now have a situation in which the reception of Holy Communion by people engaging in adulterous sexual relations they call “second marriages” is still considered a mortal sin in some dioceses, but is now characterized as “mercy” in others, thanks entirely to AL. But as Gänswein would have it, this disaster is “very far” from the Pope Emeritus, who nevertheless remains attentive to “the evening news at 8 pm.”

I’m not buying it. Something very fishy is going on with these repeated declarations of what Benedict thinks and feels while Benedict himself never speaks directly to the public. I detect the same fishy smell surrounding the whole event of Benedict’s abdication. Or rather, the smell of sulfur.

I believe we haven’t been told half the story of why we have a Pope Emeritus who abruptly abandoned his office only to be succeeded by a Pope for whom the term “Vicar of Christ” seems — let us be honest about this — spectacularly inapt.

I suspect the full story is to be found in the Virgin’s explanation of the apocalyptic vision of the “Bishop dressed in White,” an explanation that surely exists and just as surely has been suppressed by those whose epochal malfeasance the Third Secret very probably indicts.

It is that day of the year when the current Vicar of Christ on earth does before 12 persons what he chooses not ever to do in front of Christ in the Eucharist and in the Blessed Sacrament - kneel! Yes, on this day, he is miraculously able to kneel 12 times in succession and bend for a ritual footwashing and footdrying that ends with a reverent kiss on the washed foot.

Of course, that gesture is far more telegenic and attention-grabbing than 'merely' genuflecting during the Consecration or kneeling when in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. After all more than 400,000 priests and more than 5,000 bishops around the world do the latter every day, which is, of course, no reason for the pope to exempt himself from the ritual gestures of veneration and adoration for the Lord...

And yes, we know the drill: he is really serving Jesus and God in the footwashing ritual - in which every person whose foot he washes represents the suffering Christ himself, so why should I quibble that he fails to genuflect when consecrating the Body and Blood of Christ or does not kneel before the Blessed Sacrament? [Unless, of course, he feels that as the Vicar of Christ on earth, he need not show the traditional gestures of veneration and adoration to the Lord he 'represents']... Fr H has some reflections on Bergoglio's idiosyncratic inculturation of the Maundy Thursday ritual.

Pedilavium or footwashing:
Such a wealth of different meanings
The meaning of this rite, in the intention of
the current pope, has been changed

April 13, 2017

Let me explain.
HISTORY
(1) The sense which the Pedilavium appears (not invariably but) most commonly to have had in the pre-modern period was of humble service done by a superior (Bishop, Abbot) before his own subjects, and in the intimacy of their own close fellowship. Among the feet which Father Abbot washed were those of the young monk whom, perhaps, he had needed yesterday to discipline. His Lordship the Bishop did the same for a presbyter with whom - forfend the thought! - he may have had a less than cordial relationship. Perhaps an equivalent would be Papa Bergoglio washing the feet of curial cardinals including those who had disagreed with him or even presented him with unwanted Dubia!

The Lord did not, as people sometimes carelessly assert, "wash the feet of his disciples", who were many; He washed the feet of a much more limited group, the Twelve.

He did not wash the feet of the people who flocked to hear Him teach in the fields or on the Mountain or beside the Lake or in the village square, or even the feet of the Seventy He sent forth or of the women who ministered to Him; when He washed the feet of the Twelve, it was behind the closed doors of an exclusive Meeting arranged in almost 007-style secrecy. And the implication of St Peter's words was that this had not been the Lord's regular custom.

Washing the feet of a person with whom one has no relationship, no daily fellowship whether for better or for worse, empties the rite of this, historically (I think) its first, meaning. Unless a different meaning is devised, it becomes an empty, formalistic, ritual.

(2) A second meaning of some historic pedilavium ceremonies has been both the humility and the generosity of the great and the grand towards their social inferiors. Holy Condescension. This is the meaning which the rite had when it was used by sovereigns and by some up-market bishops. Food, clothing, money would often be distributed. In the twentieth century, British monarchs restored the rite in this sense, but did not revive the actual footwashing. Specially minted pieces of archaic coinage are distributed. True, the Lord High Almoner still girds himself with a towel, but that is only because this is the sort of thing which the English, a strange race, deem to be 'tradition'.

Meanings (1) and (2) both rest upon presuppositions of status and hierarchy. These are concepts now rather out of vogue. Perhaps that is why the Holy Father has dreamed up a new and completely different understanding of the rite – inculturating it, so to speak, into post-modernity.

(3) This different and new meaning which Papa Bergoglio now wishes to attach to the rite is the boundless love and Mercy of God to all, and not least to those on the peripheries of Society.

This removes any overlaps with meanings (1) and (2) (and it is very far from what the closed and exclusive intimacy of the Last Supper suggests that the Lord had in mind). But, as long as we all understand that this new meaning has nothing whatsoever to do with St John's Last Supper narrative or the Church's ancient liturgical tradition, it seems to me a perfectly reasonable Acted Parable for an innovative liturgist to dream up. No harm in a bit of imagination!!

The Pedilavium as part of the Mass of the Last Supper is, in historical terms, a very recent and completely optional importation into the Liturgy of a ceremony which (where it was done at all) used to be extra-liturgical and took varying forms. Accordingly, I cannot see why any Roman Pontiff, or, for that matter, any junior curate, should not be entitled to juggle around with it, and to give it whatever new meaning or meanings he chooses to suit his own specific social context.

Whether Maundy Thursday, a congested Day on which liturgically quite a lot already happens, is the most apt time for such performances, I very much doubt. Here, I have a constructive suggestion to make...

A RIGID RESTRICTION?
What puzzles me is not that Pope Francis has opted for meaning (3). This is very much in character. What I do find so incomprehensibly strange is the new restriction he has has himself placed on those whose feet are washed, i.e. his demand that they must be Christians. [As he wrote to Cardinal Sarah: "I have reached the decision ... I order that ... from among all the members of the People of God".] [Except, Fr. H, that the pope issued the new decree on 1/6/16, and then on March 24, 2016, which was the first Maundy Thursday of its application, at a reception center housing some 900 refugees outside Rome, “he washed the feet of 11 migrants and one volunteer. Of the migrants, four were Catholic youths from Nigeria, three were Coptic women from Eritrea, three were Muslims, and one was a Hindu youth from India. ”

So he promptly broke with his own new rule. Obviously, however, Bergoglio does not understand the phrase ‘People of God’ as referring to Christians only but to all men. But while all human beings are creatures of God – created by him – not all are necessarily ‘people of God’. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is very specific about the characteristics of ‘the People of God’, and one would expect the reigning pope to know this:

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Characteristics of the People of God
782 The People of God is marked by characteristics that clearly distinguish it from all other religious, ethnic, political, or cultural groups found in history:
- It is the People of God: God is not the property of any one people. But he acquired a people for himself from those who previously were not a people: "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation."
- One becomes a member of this people not by a physical birth, but by being "born anew," a birth "of water and the Spirit," that is, by faith in Christ, and Baptism.
- This People has for its Head Jesus the Christ (the anointed, the Messiah). Because the same anointing, the Holy Spirit, flows from the head into the body, this is "the messianic people."
- "The status of this people is that of the dignity and freedom of the sons of God, in whose hearts the Holy Spirit dwells as in a temple."
- "Its law is the new commandment to love as Christ loved us." This is the "new" law of the Holy Spirit.
- Its mission is to be salt of the earth and light of the world. This people is "a most sure seed of unity, hope, and salvation for the whole human race."
- Its destiny, finally, "is the Kingdom of God which has been begun by God himself on earth and which must be further extended until it has been brought to perfection by him at the end of time."

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[Below, I will post what Vatican-II said about ‘the People of God’ and how the term came to be abused afterwards.]*

This was not previously the rule. Francis has in the past, for example, according to reports, himself washed Moslem feet. And the new restriction seems to me to go directly against the Pope's declared preferred meaning (3). There seems to be something of a self-contradiction here ... perhaps making it emblematic of this pontificate! [So, no, Fr H, in washing the feet of non-Christians even after his decree about limiting this to ‘the People of God’, Bergoglio was being consistent with his commendable goal not to discriminate against any human being for whatever reason -regardless of what the Church teaches about the use of the phrase ‘the People of God’. Perhaps he really ought to commission a Catechism for the church of Bergoglio incorporating his most cherished notions, many of which are anti-Catholic.]

Wouldn't it be more congruous for those symbolically served in this way to represent the entire Human Community without restricting the rite to the Baptised, indeed, without any restrictions? Should it not be open to persons of all religions and none? Dr Dawkins and the Dalai Lama? And Mass-murderers? Rapists and Paedophiles? Victims of ecclesiastical malevolent prejudice such as the Franciscans of the Immaculate? ISIS Suicide Bombers, Neo-Pelagian butterflies, and even Journalists? The Ku Klux Klan and the Cosa nostra? Quot homines tot peripheriae. [All those people on the peripheries!] [Been there, done most of that! Speaking of Cosa nostra, the pope did his footwashing this year at a maximum-security prison in which 50 out of 60 inmates are Mafia turncoats. Perhaps next year, the pope will wash the feet of 12 convicted sex-offender priests. But no women 'washees' this time – performing the pedilavium on women was really the principal feature of the January 2016 Bergoglian decree on footwashing – issued 3 years and 10 months since he started doing as pope all the things he belatedly decreed.]]

A MODEST PROPOSAL
Perhaps, indeed, Papa Bergoglio's new rite could be adopted in exchange for a custom, invented, I believe, by the late Herr Hitler and now rather boringly out of date: hugging babies with 'celebrity' ostentation. This has had its day: we need a substitute. And the Sovereign Pontiff has opportunely hit upon the makings of one.

How might his intuitions be worked up and given a formal shape? What about this:
While being driven round and round the Piazza di San Pietro, the Pope could suddenly leap sylph-like from his popemobile. His security guards would then drag out of the cheering crowd the selected individual and liberate her from her shoes and tights. The ever-faithful, ever-efficient Guido 'Jeeves' Marini would appear ex nihilo, magically, imperturbably, at his Master's side with basin, water and towel. The People's Pontiff could then take it from there.

This would have a wealth of meaning, a real profundity. It would, for example, remind the impenitent that the Eschaton, the Day of Wrath and Doom Impending, could happen unexpectedly, at any moment.

Trade would boom for Roman pedicurists.

*What Vatican II said about ‘the People of God’

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The dogmatic constitution Lumen gentium devoted its chapter II to "the new People of God", "a people made up of Jew and gentile", called together by Christ (section 9). I
- It spoke of "the people to whom the testament and the promises were given and from whom Christ was born according to the flesh" as among those who "are related in various ways to the people of God" (section 16).
- It described in detail the qualities of this People of God in words "intended for the laity, religious and clergy alike" (section 30), while also pointing out the specific duties and functions of the different ranks of which it is composed, such as that of "those who exercise the sacred ministry for the good of their brethren" (section 13).

In 2001, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was to become in 2005 Pope Benedict XVI, stated that the Council's choice of this term reflected three perspectives.:
- The principal one was to introduce a term that could serve as an ecumenical bridge, recognizing intermediate degrees of belonging to the Church.
- Another was to put more in evidence the human element in the Church, which is also part of her nature.
- And the third was to recall that the Church has not yet reached her final state and that she "will not be wholly herself until the paths of time have been traversed and have blossomed in the hands of God".[

Cardinal Ratzinger also declared that the term is not to be understood in way that would reduce it "to an a-theological and purely sociological view" of the Church.
Michael Hesemann wrote:

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After the Council, the expression was taken up enthusiastically, but in a way that neither Ratzinger nor the Council Fathers had intended. Suddenly it became a slogan: "We are the People!" The idea of a "Church from below" developed; its proponents wanted to engage in polemics against those who held office and o carry out their agenda by democratic majority vote.

Although the theological, biblical concept of people was still the idea of a natural hierarchy, of a great family, suddenly it was reinterpreted in a Marxist sense, in which "people" is always considered the antithesis to the ruling classes. The centre of the Christian faith, however, can only be God's revelation, which cannot be put to a ballot. Church means being called by God. Joseph Ratzinger said: “The crisis concerning the Church, as it is reflected in the crisis concerning the concept ‘People of God’, is a ‘crisis about God’ - it is the result of leaving out what is most essential.”
- From Wikipedia, appropriately sourced references

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[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/04/2017 20:28]

My remarks in the 4/13/post about Benedict XVI who Georg Gaenswein says will not step into the AL controversy at all because he feels,
as unbelievable as it sounds, that 'it is all so far removed from him', must henceforth be part of the unavoidable context of all
subsequent posts I make about the emeritus Pope. I will continue to post the positive accounts of him, without glossing over the
inevitable instances of negativity when they are expressed fairly and without malice.




The pope emeritus up close
By Fr. Antonio Tarzia
Former Director of Edizioni San Paolo
Translated from

April 13, 2017

Edizioni San Paolo is a major Cahtolic publishing house that is par t of the Italian multimedia empire run by the male order of Society of St. Paul, a congregation founded in 1914. Its female branch runs a similar publishing house called Edizioni Pauline. Famiglia Cristiana, founded in 1931, is the society's weekly general magazine, reputed to be Italy's most widely circulated in its genre.

Ninety years of grace, ninety years of Christian testimony and a life lived in the service of the community and the Church.

Among the exceptional gifts attributed by friends and his closest co-workers to the man Joseph Ratzinger, we always find his perfect mental lucidity, his impressive ability to synthesize ideas and the charity he lives daily. Of the Beatitudes cited in Matthew (5,3-10), thosewhich he embodies best are: Blessed are the meek, blessed are the pure in heart, and blessed are those who work for peace.

I can attest to all this personally, having had the honor to know him for more thn 30 years now, and to have worked with him a long time when, as a l Cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger became one of the principal and most appreciated authors of Edizioni San Paolo, during the years when I was director of the publishing house.

Of his gentleness, I remember the minor contretemps at the presentation of his book RAPPORTO SULLA FEDE (later published in English as THE RATZINGER REPORT), published by us in 1985. It was a dialog with journalist Vittorio Messori, who was at the time the editor of the San paolo magazine JESUS. The book was a great publishing success. We had organized the presentation with Mons. Josef Clemens,then secretary to the cardinal, later Bishop and secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Laity [I wonder what Clemens’s position is ,now that the council has been absorbedd into the super-dicastery headed by the ultrahyperBergoglian Cardinal Farrell], with a gathering of journalists, photographers and the general public at the Augustinianum congress center in Rome.

We had a full house, including the upper levels, with many bishops and cardinals present. Uninvited but arriving preceded by a uniformed motorcycle escort was the Hon. Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, then minister of the Interior. He said good-humoredly, “I was told by the law enforcement people that there is a gathering here of cardinals and bishops. I wanted to check for myself that it was not a conclave…” Cardinal Ratzinger smiled, shook his hand and returned his greeting, but he appeared to be very uneasy about the exaggeration. [Who would have thought then that 20 years later, the cardinal would emerge pope from the first Conclave of the 21st millennium?]

His shyness was quite evident a few years later in Anacapri where we had travelled to receive the Premio San Michele for snother Ratzinger book. In the city’s Piazza Boffe, on a sunny morning, two boys were playing when the younger of the two noticed the arrival of a group of people, in the mmdist of who was Cardinal Ratzinger dressed in red with his pectoral cross.

“Who is that man? Who is he?”, the boy asked. And the older one cried out, “It is the Pope! The Pope is here!” And perhaps intimidated, they scampered away into an alley.

Psalm 8 came to my mind: “O Lord, our Lord, how awesome is your name through all the earth! I will sing your majest above the heavens with the mouths of babes and infants!” The cardinal was red with embarrassment and sought to change the subject. But an enthusiastic discussion had developed among the group accompanying him (author Marco Roncalli, grandson of John XXIII; journalist Donatella Trotta of Il Mattino; Mons,. Clemens, and Raffaele Vaca, sponsor of the prestigious literary prize given annually). With the conclusion that if the boy’s ‘prophecy’ should ever come true, then Prof. Vaca would be obliged to put up a memorial on a wall in the piazza to commemorate the occasion.

And that was exaclty what happened in 2006, one year after the cardinal was elected Supreme Pontiff. The mayor of Ancapri surrounded by his townspeople put up the commemorative plaque in Piazza Boffe.

For over 20 years, a partnership developed between our publishing house and the cardinal. Almost every year, we published a new Ratzinger book not just for the bookstores but also for the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, the Buchmesse. Among these, we published his many official lectures given around the world ,as well as the homilies that the cardinal gave every Thursday at the weekly Mass he offered at Santa Maria della Pieta, the church of the Collegio Teutonico (German College) inside the Vatican. [Well, imagine that! Here I have been wondering all these years if anyone ever tape recorded those homilies or at least compiled the texts – and it turns out that Edizioni San Paolo did. How many, and for how long, I must now research, because I had estimated that in 22 years, assuming the cardinal as in Rome 40 weeks of every year, that would have been more than 800 homilies. I doubt any cardinal can boast of a similar record!]

His minute handwriting in perfect German was always clear and profound, well documented, and oriented towards a future of Christian peace and holiness. All these books were translated into many languages, some in an incredible number of languages. RAPPORTO SULLA FEDE in more than 15, and his autobiography LA MIA VITA (published in English as MILESTONES), published in 1997 in at least 45 languages. [On his 70th birthday, he decided to recount the first 50 years of his life, ending the account at the time he was asked by John Paul IIto come to Rome to head the CDF].

Every year, his royalties from the books were invested in charitable causes and institutions, in missions, and in orphanages and cloistered convents in Eastern Europe. One year, he failed to deliver a book as expected. He said he had made a vow because as CDF Prefect, he had just asked a priest to keep silent about a controversial teaching for one year, and he offered his vow so that the priest might have the strength to obey the order in charity and sincerity. That priest, it turns out, was the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff. [Does it mean the cardinal made a vow not to write anything himself for a year because he had asked that of Boff? Wow!]

In 1992, I was with Cardinal Ratzinger in Bassano del Grappa when he receive an International Prize for Catholic Culture ,which came with a gold medal. Enrico Scalco, president of the prize-giving organization, also gave him, by statute, a case of grappa with personalized labels. [ [Grappa is an Italian brandy distilled from everything left over after grapes are pressed for winemaking and has 35-60 percent alcolhol by volume.]

With a complicit smile, the cardinal accepted the grappa, saying, “I will share it with my co-workers because I do not drink alcohol. But I know that the grappa of Bassano is very good”. [ [Bassano in northern Italy is where grappa was first distilled in the first century AD.[ We all knew that the cardinal only drank orange juice or tea at table, although he does drink a sip of wine or beer at official functions.

The pope’s fondness for cats is well-known. I remember that in his house in Pentling, there were two – one in bronze is on a pedestal in the garden near the fountain with the Madonna and the ‘barque of the Church’, also in bronze, with three persons on board. “They are not apostles,” the cardinal’s sister Maria told me. “They are the Ratzinger siblings – George, Joseph and me. A gift from the artist Cristina Stadler”.

The other cat, of white ceramic, is in the house, sitting guard over the piano which the cardinal plays now and then for relaxation – liturgical hymns or pieces by Mozart or Beethoven. One day, coming back from Mass, the cardinal placed his zucchetto on the cat’s head, and thereafter, the cat was referred to as ‘His Eminence, the White Cat”.

My most recent encounter with His Holiness was last March 23. I visited him at Mater Ecclesiae, where he spends his days listening to the Wrd of God and praying in thanksgiving and supplication for the Church and mankind. After an hour of affectionate chatting, over memories, current events and future projects, he asked me, “So when shall I see you again?”

“Whenever you wish, Holiness. Just have someone call me and I will come. But for sure, I will ask you for an audience in two years for a special blessing”.

“In two years --- I do not know if I will still be around,” I heard him murmur, and it seemed to me he also closed his eyes.

“Holiness, in two years, I will mark 50 years of saying Mass and I will need a special blessing”.

Looking serene, with a smile and great tenderness, he said to me: “Fifty years as priest! In that case, I will wait for it!” I kissed his hands enfolded in mine, and I left the monastery very moved and very happy.

So now, Holiness, I wish to greet you on your 90th birthday with the beautiful Jewish greeting, “May you live t0 120 like Moses!” And I might add, going beyond Leo XIII, the longest-lived pope in history, who returned to the Father;s house at the age of 93. All the best, Your Holiness!


What Fr. Tarzia does not mention is that, in fact, Edizioni Paoline has come out with a new biography of the Emeritus Pope in time for his 90th birthday. It was written by the Vaticanista of RAI's TG-2 (the primetime newscast of Italian state TV's second channel)...



Benedict XVI: The faith and prophecy
of the firs Emeritus Pope in history
by Giovan Battista Brunori
Translated from his Preface to the book

To write a book on Benedict XVI also means to answer the question: Who is Joseph Ratzinger really? Who is this man who left the papacy after having led the Church through terrible crises for almost eight years?

The idea each of us may have had of Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI may have shattered somewhat on February 11, 2013. His renunciation of the Papacy – one of the most dirompenti gestures ever in the history of the Church – projected into the modern age that which has been called ‘the last absolute monarchy on the planet’.

It was a revolutionary act, a genuine act of reform executed bu a pope who had been called ‘the standard bearer of Tradition’, also the Panzerkardinal [with its connotation of imperviousness to external attack], throwing into confusion both his progressivist adversaries as well as ‘Ratzingerians’ themselves.

It is not a simple task to write the biography of a pope who is still alive, made more difficult in that he is also the first Emeritus Pope in history, still active [???] in his retirement at the Mater Ecclesiae monastery inside the Vatican…

Therefore I have sought to attentively re-read his what has been written about his life and person, as well as his formidable body of writings, and have spoken to many personages who have known him from up close and have worked closely with him, in order to lay down the multiple pieces of a mosaic in order to show the face of a man who for years has inspired and continues to inspire lively debate – much loved and esteemed by so many faithful but who has also had many enemies.

A brilliant European intellectual who has stimulated the circulation of ideas and indicated a path to the future, relying on the sources upon which Catholic identity rests – Sacred Scriptures above all, and the Fathers of the Church, especially St. Augustine.

To a world that is increasingly uncertain and fearful, driven into a crisis of identity by mass migrations [that are changing national cultures in the West dramatically and over the short run], a world turned evil and forced to defend itself from the active hatred of terrorists who have turned their right to believe into a right to kill as their duty to that belief, Joseph Ratzinger has responded by presenting to everyone ‘the Christian difference’: that love is the true face of Christianity.

God is love, he reaffirmed in his first encyclical Deus caritas est. He sought dialog with other religions but without excluding their essential differences in [unspoken] parentheses, without renouncing the Christian identity and to the Christian claim “to have received as a gift from God, in Christ, the definitive and complete revelation of the mystery of salvation”.

But above all, he has shown what truly matters – what is both the horizon and the future of the Church – is quaerere Deum, seeking God, which was the ulterior motive of the Benedictine monks who in the difficult circumstance of the Early (Dark) Middle Ages, became the points of light – with their prayer and work in the fields and their legendary libraries which conserved the treasures of classical culture, transmitting love for culture, for the study of Scriptures and literary classics, for music and song, while promoting a spirit of welcome for strangers and collaboration among all members of society, thus laying the basis for a culture that became the roots of European and Western civilization – a Christian civilization that has now become increasingly fragile.

This is a man who changed and innovated the Church with his constant exhortation for a return to the essentials of faith, to dust off the ashes laid by time over the Christian experience that had made it more opaque, that had suffocated the original fire that had made it irresistible for most of the past 2000 years.

The clarity and linearity of the doctrine he reaffirmed was conveyed to the world by the Holy See which, however, appeared tp be a giant with feet of clay as the Roman Curia, in crisis after crisis, showed itself weak and inadequate in its task of assisting the Pope in the governance of the Church.

Thus, I have also sought to identify and describe the common thread that runs through the many acts and writings of a pope of ideas rather than gestures, of a theologian-pope and a professor-pope rather than an administrator-pope. He is a complex figure who is at the same time simple and linear, an expression of that evangelical simplicity which is the opposite of superficial simplicity but is rather the fruit of authentic spirituality.

I have sought to write the biography of a man who was ever aware he was not a ‘charismatic’ figure in the media sense, one not able to dominate the stage as his predecessor did, but who could and did move the hearts and minds of his audience with the depth of his thinking, his crystalline faith, his spiritually rich words that proposed ideas and values disseminated by the force of reason, but without arrogance nor timidity.

Therefore this is a biography of facts, of events and encounters that have marked the personal history of Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI, but also the narration of his thoughts, his reflections on the Church and the world today, his prophecies of the future, the studies into which from his seminary days he had plunged himself with enthusiasm (which I have tried to follow through its rapid and passionate course over the years) – from his Bavarian origins to his speedy rise in his academic career, and to the vertiginous succession of the prestigious offices he was called on to fulfill in the Church.

Loved by countless admirers, author of worldwide best-sellers on the faith, promoter of an ‘innovative restoration’ as historian Robert Regoli describes in his 2016 biography of the emeritus Pope, many have also feared, opposed, defamed, misinterpreted, misunderstood [or not understood at all] him.

Joseph Ratzinger has been himself ‘a sign of contradiction’, but even in the human ‘contradictions’ during his short and often difficult Pontificate, he has sown seeds destined to flourish, as will no doubt be seen more clearly when time has dispelled the fog of polemic that has often obscured [and continues to obscure] the very real achievements of his Petrine ministry.

A Pope considered by many as destined to be a Doctor of the Church. A man who held his hand firm on the tiller of the Church through stormy waters as Arcbishop, Prefect of the CDF and then as Supreme Pontiff.

A Pope who led the Barque of Peter on a course of transparency, reforming the IOR and battling priestly sex offenses, thus starting the arduous process of cleaning up the filth in the Church that he had denounced on world TV during his Good Friday Via Crucis meditations and prayers just two weeks before the death of John Paul II.

April 14, 2017 headlines

Canon212.com


PewSitter

Maike Hickson, who is probably the only native German speaker who promptly translates from the German media for the
Anglophone Catholic blogosphere, has of course not missed the story accompanying the above cover. I had actually started
translating the article itself yesterday but had only gone halfway through it, so here first is Ms. Hickson's report on it...

Yet another German journalist makes
a discerning critique of the pope
by Maike Hickson

April 13, 2017

The string of eloquent German journalists who have gradually lost patience with Pope Francis does not seem to stop. Now we have another well-known and honorably independent journalist, Matthias Matussek, who has added his own name to the list of reflective papal critics.

Matussek, who is an eloquent Catholic conservative critic and book author, currently writes for the well-established Swiss weekly magazine Die Weltwoche (This week in the world) and the German magazine FOCUS.

In the April 12 issue of Die Weltwoche – which displays on its cover a picture of Pope Francis sitting on a swinging wrecking ball [an image previously used by the UK Spectator] – Matussek characterizes Francis as “gratuitous, appealing, chumming up” and says that this pope reminds us less and less of a Pontifex Maximus. [I translated that trio of adjectives – ‘beliebig, gefällig, anbiedernd’ – as ‘arbitrary, accommodating and ingratiating’ as the most appropriate of the multiple synonyms each word has, in the context of who Bergoglio has shown himself to be these past four years].

With reference to a recent sharp critique of the pope by the British weekly Spectator, “Has the Pope Gone Crazy?”, Matussek proposes to answer the question himself:

“This [query] is not so far off as one would think: in fact, this Argentine Pontifex Maximus has uttered so many confusing, contradictory, and politically provocative things that the members of his press corps have a hard time keeping up with corrections and then recommending certain interpretations. Without judging the truthfulness of the matter here and now, frankly, how does one, for example, moderate this formulation: “Readers of newspapers are inclined toward coprophagy” – i.e., the lubricious consumption of excrement?”

To support his point, Matussek attentively – and with a vivid and sprightly style – enumerates in the following seven pages of his article many of the contradictory scandals that we here at OnePeterFive have extensively – and regrettably – reported on; thus a list of Matussek’s topics should now suffice:
– the scandal that Pope Francis reinstated the perverted priest, Father Mauro Inzoli (“Don Mercedes”) after he had been suspended;
– the pope’s outbursts of temper in smaller circles, as well as his curses, crude expressions and “crudities that are better off not published”; the fact that Pope Francis humiliates his closest collaborators – and this in an increasing fashion;
– the costly decision of the pope to live at the guest house Santa Marta which is a “method of control, in order to get informed at lunch about the happenings in the diverse camps in the Vatican;
– his harsh treatment of his opponents; for example, Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke;
– his decision not to answer the justified Four Cardinals’ Dubia;
– the fact that Pope Francis often makes new laws for the Catholic Church from his own lunch table, rather than going through the channels of the Roman Curia (Matussek quotes here a high-ranking leader in the Curia);
– Francis’s problematic recent comment that it would be better to be an atheist than to be a “hypocritical Catholic”;
– the reaction of the Romans, even to the point of putting up satirical posters about Pope Francis (“The base is mobilizing against Francis - nobody understands him any more.”);
– Pope Francis as the “posterboy of the politically correct way of thinking”;
– that he has twice been on the cover of the magazine Rolling Stone;
– his stopping Cardinal Robert Sarah in his attempt to promote traditional liturgical forms, such as the praying of the Holy Mass ad orientem;
– that the Wall Street Journal declared (in December of 2016) Francis to be the “leader of the global left”;
– his pretentious way ofshowing off his humility by driving in a small used car in front of the White House during his visit to the U.S.;
– his taking Muslim refugee families back to Rome with him, after his visit at Lesbos, but not any Christian refugee families;
– that Pope Francis does not appear to care too much about his own religion (In Matussek’s eyes, the sentence of Our Lord “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life; nobody will come to my Father but through Me” (John 14:6) does not seem to mean very much to the pope.)
– the recent participation of Paul Ehrlich, the promoter of abortion and population control, in a Vatican conference to which he was expressly invited;
– his inclination to give scope to liberalizing progressive ideas such as female priests and the abandonment of priestly celibacy;
– his “Who am I to Judge?” with regard to the homosexuals (“Who else will judge [immoral practices]?” answers Matussek.)
– his “agenda which could lead to the dissolution of the unam sanctam catholicam Ecclesiam given to us “by God,” against whose very gates themselves “hell shall not prevail.”
– Pope Francis and his ‘democratic’ questionnaires about marriage sent out to the world, instead of first and mainly referring to the Bible;
– his “angry” demand to all European countries to “open all borders for immigrants”;
– his neglect of Catholic doctrine - inspite of the fact that the world today increasingly demeans man and lowers him to the level of animals or even plants (Matussek quotes G.K. Chesterton’s “trees have no dogmas; beets are extremely magnanimous”!);

At the end of his breath-taking and spirited – but somewhat disheartening – overview of the recent papal scandals and misdeeds, the German journalist comes back to the truths of our Faith. Matussek defends the Catholic Faith and its truths against his own pope and reminds us that this Faith has existed visibly since the Incarnation of Jesus Christ and His Nativity.

He also explains to his non-Catholic readership that, since the Second Vatican Council, the traditional Mass as it had developed over centuries was “destroyed,” “altars were cut down” and “brutal blocks of sacrifice were put into the spaces of the altar.” Church art decayed into “semiotic delicacies”; the priest addressed the congregation “like a TV moderator”, celebrating Mass “so that people could look at his fingers, just like with a magician in a third-class variety show.”

In light of all this destruction of spiritual and visual beauty, Matussek concludes with piercing words: “The former barricade stormers - all of them now in their eighties and beyond – still hold on to their juvenile nonsense of modernization and adaptation to the Zeitgeist.” With gratitude, Matussek remembers here the act of Pope Benedict XVI to free the Tridentine Latin Mass which, since then, has attracted especially the young. “Mystery returns into the emptied out modern churches, and with it, genuine adoration and meditation.”

Matussek ends his Rundumschlag (tour de force) on a positive note, proposing to Pope Francis that he start working in the direction of restoring Tradition, rather than speculating as to whether “I [Pope Francis] might now go down the history as the pope who split the Church” – as reported by Der Spiegel last December. He adds a passage from the second letter of St. Paul to Timothy, where St. Paul instructs his disciple to “teach the Faith in season and out of season.”

Dare we hope that such wholehearted and faith-inspired articles might also help Pope Francis to convert, after a deep and candid examination of conscience?

For a taste of Mr. Matussek's colorful prose, here is the part I have translates so far:

A pope of sorts
Arbitrary, accommodating, ingratiating – Francis, the pope of the Zeitgeist (spirit of the times)
is less and less one’s idea of a Pontifex Maximus, even as he himself has remarked that for many,
he is seen as the cause of the division in the Church.
by Matthias Matussek
Translated from
DIE WELTWOCHE
April 12, 2017

With refreshing directness, the British weekly Spectator recently asked on its title page, “Has the Pope gone mad?” Which is not so far-fetched as one might think: In fact, since the beginning of his pontificate, the Argentine pope has generated so much confusion, contradiction and partisan provocations that his media-minders cannot keep up with corrections and explanations of ‘what he really meant to say’. For example, how could they ‘moderate’ a formulation like ‘media consumers tend to coprophagia’ (eating excrement)?

And how to explain contradictions such as this: At the beginning of the year, he called on the bishops of the universal Church to adopt a zero-tolerance policy towards any abuse of young people. Something which his predecessor always demanded and carried out.

But one of the over 800 priests and bishops defrocked by Benedict XVI was the Italian priest Mauro Inzoli, nicknamed ‘don Mercedes’ because of his predilection for luxury cars. But he also had a weakness for minors.

Two years after the suspension of his priestly faculties by Benedict XVI, "Don Mercedes" was back on the Roman scene. Pope Francis had lifted his penalty. But when the pedophile priest renewed his swineries even from the confessional, Italian authorities intervened and asked the pope for cooperation in their prosecution of Inzoli. But ‘zero-tolerance’ Francis apparently declined. It seems Inzoli is a friend to some of the pope’s closest friends, and well, ‘my friend’s friend is also my friend’. A rule that applies to most friendly relations in Italy.

And enemies are enemies – and it is really going very bad for this pope’s enemies. One hears that in his small circle of close associates, this pope gives vent to strong expressions, curses, and unprintable ribaldry, and that recently his outbreaks of rage have become more frequent. It is said he loves to humiliate those around him.

Humiliation, he apparently believes, is an important spiritual experience, as though it were a lesson he has drawn from the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola.

Perhaps he should have taken another rule more seriously. That which prohibits Jesuits from aiming for higher ecclesiastical office - unless the Pope expressly requires them in individual cases. Then they would be bound by the rule of obedience. But how do you deal with a Jesuit who has become pope?

Vatican insiders report that, unlike with Pope Benedict, very few refer to Bergoglio – the secular name of the current Successor of Peter – as ‘Holy Father’, and when they do, it is in an ironic way. As in, “The Holy Father has declared, in his immense wisdom, that people love to eat shit”.

The fact that he does not live in the papal apartment three stories above the Bernini colonnade but rather – at considerable financial expense – in the Casa Santa Marta, the Vatican’s four-star hotel, we now believe is not really a sign of modesty and humility, but rather a method of control. In that it enables him to be better informed about what is happening among the various factions in the Vatican.

And this pope makes short shrift of his enemies. He relieved the conservative Cardinal Raymond Burke of his Curial office as Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura (i.e, the Church’s ‘Chief Justice’). Recently [after unceremoniously relieving Burke of his demotion-appointment to be Patron of the Order of Malta – Bergoglio simply appointed a Vatican bishop to take over full powers as the pope’s envoy to the Order, which is the function of the Patron], he sent Burke off to the Pacific island of Guam “to adjudicate an extremely complicated case of abuse that required great expertise” [The Bishop of Guam is accused of misconduct in dealing with clerical sex abuses].

What brought on Bergoglio’s ire against Burke? Because with three other cardinals, he has opposed the Bergoglian liberalization of Church practices regarding communion for remarried divorcees.

Catholics know that marriage is a sacrament, a sign especially in our times when nearly one of every two marriages ends in divorce. The Catechism of the Catholic Church considers marriage – in which the spouses pledge to be faithful to each other ‘for better for for worse’ – indissoluble for three reasons.
First, because the essence of marital love is total and unconditional surrender of the self to each other; second, because it reflects God’s own unconditional faith to his creatures; and third, because it represents Jesus’s gift of himself to the Church with his death on the Cross. And so, a Catholic marriage is not just church bells and wedding cake, but a sacrament, a consecrated act of faith that consolidates the Gospel passage “What God has brought together, let no man take asunder” (Mt 19,6).

At first glance, Francis's document, "Amoris Laetitia," would seem to confirm traditional Church morality. The loosening of the marriage vow is hidden in a footnote with proverbial Jesuitic cunning, one is tempted to say.

It was logical that some cardinals saw the need for clarification. They formulated the DUBIA, questions answerable by a simple Yes or No, whereby the pope could easily dispel the doubts related to the five points that they wish to be clarified.

One of the DUBIA signatories is German Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, a Church historian of undisputed rank. He told Der Spiegel that Sacred Scripture is not a self-service cafeteria. “According to St. Paul, we [bishops] are administrators of the divine mysteries, but without the right to dispose of them as we please”. Meanwhile, he and his three colleagues have not been answered by the pope [who, for all intents and purposes, has made it clear he does not intend to answer them at all, nor the DUBIA directly].

In any case, the Curia is not finding it easy with this ‘Sponti-Hirt’ [the German word for spontaneous is spontan, so it’s a portmanteau word for ‘spontaneous shepherd’, or more precisely, ‘shepherd of the spontaneous’] who loves formlessness and who seems to thoroughly despise his Curial associates.

A high-ranking Curial official says it has come to a point when the pope prefers to decide on Church legislation over lunch with his associates, bypassing Curial committees.

Nor can the Curia forget the way in which, at his last Christmas address to them as in the one he gave in 2014, he denounced the entire Curia as lazy, hypocritical and negligent of their duties, calling them Pharisees, which seems to be his idea of being ‘Jesus-like’.

Now, the chief pastor and teacher of the Catholic Church has declared that is “better to be an atheist than a Catholic who leads a hypocritical double life”. Meanwhile he has described himself ‘a sinner and fallible’ in public, which in itself sounds hypocritical. Should he not rather fight his own hypocrisy, and as a pastor, and ensure that even the most hypocritical ‘atheists’ can see the way back to the Church, to the faith and to truth?

Not a few cardinals are now concerned about possible successors to this pope who has said that he does not think he will be pope for longer than four or five years – a deadline that is due.

But meanwhile, the protests against him have reached the streets, so to speak. Several weeks ago, central Rome was papered with posters carrying a mocking message for the pope, as Romans have for centuries expressed themselves against popes and other leaders. It is as if the base is launching a mobile move against Francis, in ways not less cunning than he.

Before his election, which had been driven by German-speaking cardinals and Benedict-adversaries, his electors ought to have asked questions in his home diocese of Buenos Aires which he ran without gentleness or humor, pushing his policies with the subtlety of a butcher's knife.

In Rome, his pontificate began on a note that was almost ludicrous, greeting the waiting crowd with 'Buona sera' which they cheered enthusiastically. And he was quickly portrayed as a humble simple man, soon to be built up in the secular world as the poster boy of political correctness.

In fact, he has just made his second appearance on the cover of Rolling Stone, a publication not known for citing the Catechism of the Church. This time, he is quoted for his line "This economy kills!" in a flourishing capitalist media enterprise supporting the multibillion-dollar music industry of the United States. [His first Rolling Stone appearance was a Man of the Year tribute for the line "Who am I to judge?" about homosexuality.]...
[I am only halfway through my translation. To be continued...]

Fascinating exchanges over
the meaning of ‘Amoris laetitia’:
Is some clarity emerging?
by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

April 14, 2017


Pope Francis’s document Amoris laetitia has sparked sharp divisions and debates. The sides have drawn up pretty much into two camps… well… three if you count the uninformed, which is pretty large.

For the 1st anniversary of Amoris, Washington DC’s Archbishop Card. Wuerl, noted that the pastoral guidance of Amoris Laetitia, found in chapter 8, has been controversial, but explains why there is no cause for alarm:

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“The hermeneutic required for a fruitful appropriation of the document’s teaching on this point is based on the understanding that none of the teaching of the Church has been changed: This includes the doctrine on the indissolubility of marriage, the directives of the Code of Canon Law, and also the role of individual conscience in the determination of personal culpability…..

“The exhortation does not create some sort of internal forum process in which a marriage can be annulled, or in which the objective moral order can be changed…. Instead, the exhortation places greater emphasis on the role of the individual conscience in appropriating those moral norms in the person’s actual circumstances.”

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Fr Raymond de Souza then made the sound point at the ever iffy Crux that the bishops of Malta, in their guidelines for applying Chapter 8 issued a while back (aka “The Maltese Fiasco”), the bishops of Germany and curial Cardinal Coccopalmerio think that something has changed. Whereas Card. Wuerl tries to uphold John Paul II’s teaching in Familiaris consortio, the others say Amoris revises it.

So, in simple terms within this complicated debate, there are a couple camps. One camp holds that doctrine and discipline haven’t changed, and the other holds that it has. De Souza rightly concludes that they can’t both be right.

Then, again at iffy Crux – and this is another example of why Crux is iffy – the former editor of the ultra-liberal 'Bitter Pill' (aka The Tablet), Austen Ivereigh, and now an editor for Crux – wrote a condescending rebuttal of Fr. de Souza stating:

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The hermeneutic of interpretation of Pope Francis’s document on the joy of love, says Wuerl, is that the Church’s teaching on marriage has not changed. Questioning that idea, de Souza responds that Wuerl can only be right if the German and Maltese bishops are wrong.

This is a classic maneuver of those whom the cardinal accurately describes as “challenging the integrity” of Amoris. De Souza says he hopes Wuerl is right, that “nothing has changed”; but if it hasn’t, then how can the Maltese bishops say “something has changed?”

But Wuerl never says nothing has changed. He says church teaching and laws on marriage haven’t changed.

Something has changed, not in church law or doctrine, but in moral theology and the pastoral application of sacramental discipline.

This shouldn’t be necessary to say, but for the record, Amoris Laetitia throughout its nine chapters upholds, promotes and passionately seeks to restore lifelong, faithful, stable, indissoluble unions.

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In response to Ivereigh’s patronizing response to de Souza comes the deft canonist Ed Peters.

Peters published simultaneously at the Catholic World Report and his own blog In The Light Of The Law a post which reveals the fatal flaw in Ivereigh’s snooty piece. Peters writes (with my emphases and comments in red):

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Sever ‘canon law’ from ‘pastoral pratice’
and lots of things make sense

I am tempted to address at length Austen Ivereigh’s commentary on Fr. Raymond de Souza’s observations on Cdl. Wuerl’s statementon Francis’ document Amoris laetitia, but at a certain point the law of diminishing returns sets leaving such an exercise tedious.

So let me just say: Ivereigh is free to argue that Amoris does not undermine Church teaching on sin, but he needs to respond to those who disagree with his claim with something more than paternalistic tsk-tsk’ing [Peters also noted Ivereigh’s condescension] and, before anything else, he needs to face the simple fact that Wuerl can’t be right (as I think he is, if narrowly read) and the bishops of Malta also be right (as I think they certainly are not)—which is de Souza’s main point.

The reason Ivereigh misses de Souza’s point is, I suspect, that, deep down, Ivereigh thinks that “canon law” and ‘approved pastoral practice’ are two fundamentally different things. [This error has infected a great many people today, churchmen, newsies, etc. It is dangerous.]

Thus Ivereigh could logically hold that canon law (including the barring of divorced-and-remarried Catholics from holy Communion) has remained the same, while at the same time holding that pastors may admit such persons to holy Communion under conditions other than those already recognized by the Church (namely, separation of abodes, or a commitment to live as brother-sister where the irregular marriage is not known). Ivereigh would be right, if canon law has little or nothing to do with what pastors should really do.

At some point I hope that Ivereigh et al will sit down, look at the text of Canon 915 and the numerous ecclesial values behind it, and recognize, among other things, that degrees of personal culpability (which Ivereigh and others go on and on and on about, as if that were the central insight his adversaries lack) have nothing to do with the operation of the objectively oriented Canon 915, the main law that controls pastoral practice in this area.

Whereupon they will do one of two things: (1) accept that tradition and promote it, or (2) acknowledge that tradition and honestly call for changing it. [!] At which point all sides would be talking about the same, and the dispositive, issue.

What I fear is that, instead, Ivereigh et al, ignoring the connection that must, and usually does, exist between law and practice, will simply keep on repeating that canon law has not changed but good pastoral practice has. Which is a huge waste of time.

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Peters got this exactly right.

Let’s be honest about what Amoris says and doesn’t say without verbose fan-dances which attempt to square the circle.

The ongoing debate about Amoris Ch. 8 reveals a possible approach of Pope Francis, who, so far at least, has declined to offer any clarifications. He has not, for example, responded to the Five Dubia of the Four Cardinals.

As Tracy Rowand points out in her terrific new book Catholic Theology:

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If Pope Francis has sympathy for any particular approach to Catholic theology, it is that of ‘People’s Theology’. One of the most extensive articles on this subject is Juan Carlos Scannone’s ‘El papa Francisco y la teologia del pueblo’ published in the journal Razón y Fe (Reason and Faith).

In this paper Scannone claims that not only is Pope Francis a practitioner of ‘People’s Theology’ but also that Francis extracted his favourite four principles – time is greater than space, unity prevails over conflict, reality is more important than ideas, and the whole is greater than the parts – from a letter of the nineteenth-century Argentinian dictator, Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793– 1877) sent to another Argentinian caudillo, Facundo Quiroga (1788– 1835), in 1834.

These four principles, which are said to govern the decision-making processes of Pope Francis, have their own section in his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium and references to one or other of them can be found scattered throughout his other papal documents. Pope Francis calls them principles for ‘building a people’.

A common thread running through each of these principles is the tendency to give priority to praxis over theory. [NOTA BENE…] There is also a sense that conflict in itself is not a bad thing, that ‘unity will prevail’ somehow and that time will remove at least some of the protagonists in any conflict.

The underlying metaphysics is quite strongly Hegelian, and the approach to praxis itself resembles what Lamb classified as ‘cultural-historical’ activity and is associated primarily with Luther and Kant rather than Marx.

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The ongoing conflicts between the camps which have sharply divided over Amoris laetitia may reveal a kind of “Hegelian” approach to doing theology favored by the Holy Father: let the positions clash and, over time, things will settle down and there will have emerged a new approach, changes in doctrine, revised laws, etc.

In the meantime, Ed Peters got it right and Ivereigh got it wrong. De Souza is right to point out that both Card. Wuerl (in what De Souza cites) and the bishops of German and Malta, etc., can’t both be right about Amoris.

Lastly, I renewed my serious questions about why the Knights of Columbus would bankroll Crux if this is what Crux is determined to produce. This is the second time that Crux – with the Knights’ money – has published something troubling by Ivereigh, whom Crux employees an editor.

Perhaps it is time for Knights to think about shedding their KC insurance.

I must express honestly that I consider all the many tributes to Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI on his 90th birthday – and in general, all those that have been published since his retirement – as tributes to who he was, not to the enormous and highly questionable enigma presented to us in the past four years through the two men who have been among his closest associates, Peter Seewald and Georg Gaenswein, who have both acritically propagated uncharacteristic thoughts and attitudes attributed to him. Uncharacteristic in being virtually offensive to the faith and truth that Joseph Ratzinger had always upheld.

I do not recognize the man I have admired most in the world – totally and unconditionally, until his Last Conversations with Peter Seewald was published - in the man whom Gaenswein now says will not get into the AL controversy because “it concerns matters which are so far removed from him”.

Nor will I seek to rationalize or explain in any way what is really behind all these developments which constitute a surrealistic nightmare for me – because no explanation comes to mind which is adequate, much less convincing. If Gaenswein is reporting the honest truth about the emeritus pope’s attitude towards Amoris laetitia (and to his successor in general), then one must question whether, in fact, Benedict XVI continues to have perfect lucidity. And/or has consciously chosen to play blind to the chaos in the Church under Bergoglio’s leadership.

I would never have thought he would get to mark his 90th birthday under these circumstances. How excruciatingly and unbearably painful all this is, even if, for now, it remains a conditional disillusion (conditional because much of it has come from Georg Gaenswein and not directly from the emeritus Pope himself).

Having said that, I do not want this nightmare to get in the way of everything good that he was (and I pray desperately to God, still is) which is the subject of all the tributes to him these days.

The following tribute is by Tracey Rowland, who holds the St John Paul II Chair of Theology at the University of Notre Dame in Australia. She is the author of Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI (Oxford University Press), and one of the most reliable scholars on the thought and work of Joseph Ratzinger.

The Ratzinger revolution
His writings will one day inspire a generation
to revolt against the West's secular consensus
by Tracey Rowland

April 13, 2017

Benedict XVI will celebrate his 90th birthday on Easter Sunday. Cardinal Joachim Meisner famously described him as a man who is as intelligent as 12 professors together and as pious as a child making his First Communion.

If one inserts the words “Joseph Ratzinger” into the Google Scholar search engine, which records academic publications, one obtains some 24,600 hits in four seconds. The words “Benedict XVI” bring up even more results – 66,100. As a comparison, Walter Kasper scores a mere 6,930 and Hans Küng 6,270. Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac score 16,900 and 13,200 hits respectively.

The only theologian of the last century I could find who trumps the 66,100 figure is Karl Barth, who has been the subject of a massive 127,000 academic articles. The Catholic theologian who came closest to Ratzinger was Karl Rahner, weighing in at 41,500 hits.

As Bavaria’s most famous son since Ludwig II enters his 10th decade of life, it is worth considering what the impact of all these publications might be in the brave new world of 21st-century Catholicism. My thought is that the publications of Ratzinger will form a treasury to be mined by future generations trying to piece together elements of a fragmented Christian culture.

Ratzinger himself emphasises that the seat of all faith is the memoria Ecclesiae: the memory of the Church. He believes that “there can be a waxing or waning, a forgetting or remembering, but no recasting of truth in time”. As a result, “the decisive question for today is whether that memory can continue to exist through which the Church becomes Christ and without which she sinks into nothingness”.

In this void of nothingness, he says, in a world without the memoria Ecclesiae, the human person strives for an autonomy that is in conflict with his nature. It is natural, normal and healthy for one’s sense of self to exist within the context of a living history and tradition. Those without such moorings often spend their entire youth trying to “find themselves” without much success and often only after years of painful experimentation.

These reflections on the importance of memory were made by Ratzinger in 1982. Earlier, in 1958, during his theological teenager phase, Ratzinger wrote an essay entitled “The New Pagans and the Church”. In it he observed that whenever people make a new acquaintance they can assume with some certainty that the person has a baptismal certificate, but not that he has a Christian frame of mind. This was a full decade before the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

Today we cannot even presume the existence of the baptismal certificate. Members of the millennial generation find themselves in a situation where they have rarely experienced a fully functional Christian social milieu. To find out about Christianity, especially the Catholic version of it, they watch documentaries and films. They interrogate older Catholics, and google information about the saints, liturgies and cultural practices.

The cultural capital that should follow as a natural endowment upon their baptism has been frittered away, buried and in some cases even suppressed by previous generations. They are like archaeologists. They discover fragments of the faith which they find attractive and then they try to work out where the fragment once fitted into a Catholic mental universe.

When a new generation arises in full rebellion from the social experiments of the contemporary era, craving a human ecology that respects both God and nature, and wanting to be something more than rootless cosmopolitans, Ratzinger’s publications will serve as Harry Potter-style Portkeys, giving creative young rebels access to the missing cultural capital – indeed, access to what Ratzinger calls the memoria Ecclesiae.

High on the list of the missing cultural capital is the realisation that from the earliest times Christianity has understood itself as the religion of the Logos, the religion according to reason. As Ratzinger expresses the principle: “Faith has the right to be missionary only if it transcends all traditions and constitutes an appeal to reason and an orientation towards the truth itself.” The lack of truth, he argues, is the major disease of our age.

One of Ratzinger’s own mentors was Romano Guardini. The Italian-born German theologian wrote that “the Church forgives everything more readily than an attack on truth. She [the Church] knows that if a man falls, but leaves truth unimpaired, he will find his way back again. But if he attacks the vital principle, then the sacred order of life is demolished.”

In particular, Guardini argued that the human will “has to admit that it is blind and needs the light, the leadership and the organising formative power of truth. It must admit as a fundamental principle the primacy of knowledge over the will, of the logos [reason] over the ethos [custom].”

Being well intentioned is necessary but not sufficient. Cardinal George Pell famously described the idea that it doesn’t matter if we make poor judgments providing we mean well as “the Donald Duck heresy”. Donald is always making mistakes but he rarely intends any harm.

Using an expression from the psychoanalyst Albert Görres, Ratzinger has argued that the mentality that wants to give priority to ethos over logos represents the “Hinduisation” of the faith.

Conversely, and with equal vigour, Ratzinger has emphasised that knowing the content of the faith, having an expert knowledge of all the doctrines, is not sufficient, unless the heart is opened by grace. The human intellect needs to search for the truth. It was made for this. But so too the human will was made for goodness, and unless the will is attracted to the good, the intellect is likely to go astray.

This is what Ratzinger means when he uses the medieval maxim “reason has a wax nose”. As most barristers know, the human intellect can be used to formulate arguments to defend all kinds of actions and propositions.

The human head and the human heart thus need to work in tandem. Both require a Christian formation. In this context Ratzinger often asserts that “love and reason are the twin pillars of all reality”. Without these twin pillars in full operational order people end up as “narrative wrecks”.

Without the truth some people are morally rudderless and engage in all manner of self-harming behaviour. There is no rationality giving unity to their actions. Others have the truth but, since they do not love, their human formation is stunted and they often cause great harm to other people.

To those who experiment with all manner of psychotherapy, drugs and Eastern mystical religions in order to discover their inner self, Ratzinger offers the advice that the human person can only find his centre of gravity from a position outside of his self. It is Christ who is the centre of gravity of every human life.

It is Christ who holds a vision not merely of a perfected humanity understood as a universal concept, but for each individual person He holds a vision of what that person could be in co-operation with the gifts of grace.

Acceptance of the Incarnation is the key to understanding humanity. The next indispensable element in a Catholic culture is the concept of sacramentality. There is, in other words, a specific way in which God relates to people through time and space. Here the idea that the human person is composed of both spirit and matter, and that God relates to both, not just to the spirit, is important.

In the sacrament of the Eucharist the mere matter of bread and wine is changed into Christ’s Body and Blood. As Ratzinger describes this moment: “The substantial conversion of bread and wine into His Body and Blood introduces within creation the principle of a radical change, a sort of ‘nuclear fission’, which penetrates to the heart of all being.”

The sacraments, as the word suggests, sacralise human life. They raise it to a higher level. They are also one of the means by which a person receives grace. They are not simply social milestone markers.

A further indispensable element of a Catholic culture is the ability to distinguish authentic Christianity from its various secularist mutations. A common temptation in the present era is for people to try and separate the fruits of Christianity from belief in the basic tenets of the faith as expressed in the Creed.

For example, kindness, patience, putting other people first, caring for one’s neighbour are all fruits of a Christian culture. Secular humanists are often keen to retain these fruits but separate them from belief in God.

This project leads on to what Ratzinger calls “political moralism”. In the absence of a strong Christian culture, the state begins to act as if it were the Church: bureaucrats, especially education department officials, set themselves up in a position analogous to priests. As an alternative to a Christian moral formation they offer various social engineering policies. We end up in the absurd situation where children as young as four are monitored for so-called sexist behaviour.

Many of Ratzinger’s publications, including the encyclical Spe Salvi, offer critiques of the new secular morality, while his earlier encyclical Deus Caritas Est can be read as a Catholic defence against the Nietzschean charge that Christianity poisoned eros (love/desire). Ratzinger does not deny that warped, puritanical versions of Christianity denigrated eros.

However, he distinguishes a Catholic account of sexuality which links eros to agape (love/charity) from those aberrant forms. He thereby provides further support for John Paul II’s Catechesis on Human Love (also known as the Theology of the Body).

This is just a short account of the many elements of an embattled Catholic culture that can be found in the mountains of publications by Ratzinger.

The discovery of Ratzinger by future generations may well lead them on to the literary and philosophical treasures of his Polish friend Karol Wojtyła and the theology of his Swiss friend von Balthasar, his French friend de Lubac, his Italian friend Luigi Giussani and an English author called John Henry Newman.

They may even find Tolkien and a writer from the Orkneys called Mackay Brown, the Norwegian Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset and an Etonian called George from the noble house of Spencer who thought there needed to be a prayer crusade for the restoration of the old faith in Britain (he is known today as Ignatius Spencer).

Through these authors, a generation tired of the banality of cheap intimacy and nominalism gone mad may rediscover the buried capital of a civilisation built on the belief that the Incarnation really did happen. They may also gradually learn to distinguish a secularised Christianity that hooked itself up to whatever zeitgeist wafted along from the real mysteries celebrated in something called the old Christian calendar.

Fatima in Holy Week -
Jacinta and the Crucified Lord
by Sor Lucia dos Santos
From the book Memórias da Irmã Lúcia
(Remembrances of Sister Lucia)

April 13, 2017

This comes from a letter written by the oldest of the Fatima visionaries to the Bishop of Leiria in May 1938.

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Before the events of 1917, except for the bond of kinship that united us, no other particular affection made me prefer the company of Jacinta and Francisco to that of any other child.

On the contrary, her company was at times most unwanted, due to her delicate character. When faced with the smallest quarrel, as those that happen between children when they play, she would be saddened, and go to a corner...

In order to have her back playing with us, the sweetest gentleness that children are capable of at such times were not enough. It was then necessary to let her pick the game and the child with whom she wanted to play it. She already had then a heart very inclined to goodness, and the good God had granted her a sweet and gentle character that made her, at the same time, lovable and attractive.

For some reason I did not understand, Jacinta, along with her brother Francisco, had a special preference for me and came after me to play with them almost always. They did not enjoy the company of the other children and asked me to go with them near a well that was in their parents's backyard. Once we got there, Jacinta picked the games which we would play. Her favorite ones were, almost always, played on top of this well, which was covered with stones on top, under the shade of an olive tree and two plum trees...

As I said before, one of her preferred games was that of prendas. As Your Excellency certainly knows, [in this game,] the one who wins tells the loser to do anything off the top of his mind. She enjoyed asking [us] to run after butterflies until we were able to fetch one and bring it to her. At other times, she asked for some flower that she had chosen.

One day, we were playing this in my home, and it was my turn to tell her to do something. My brother was sitting down, writing near a table. I told her then to give him a hug and a kiss, but she answered:
- "Not this! Ask me to do something else. Why don't you ask me to kiss Our Lord who is there?" (It was a Crucifix hanging on the wall.)

- "Very well," I said. "Climb on a chair, bring it down and, on your knees, give it three hugs and three kisses: one for Francisco, one for myself, and one for you."

- "To Our Lord, I will give as many [hugs and kisses] as you tell me to."

And she ran to get the Crucifix. She kissed and hugged it with so much devotion that I never forgot that fact. Then, she looked attentively at Our Lord and asked:

- "Why is Our Lord nailed to a cross like this?"
- "Because He died for us."
- "Tell me how it happened." ...

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Jacinta and her brother Francisco will be canonized on May 13, the 100th anniversary of the first apparition of Mary to them and their cousin Lucia.

Tolerance No 5
[Essence of Satanic fumes]

Maundy Thursday, 2017

I am reflecting on the process by which a Protestant church dies, and even the Only Church is severely damaged. Today, on Maundy Thursday, we will see this process at work everywhere.

First is the Fear of the Lord. People are scared of hell, and behave accordingly. They might do so according to a wrong set of rules, and be more or less culpable for it; but the Fear of the Lord is there. This is, for example, the Church of England in Jane Austen's day.

At some point the fear of the Lord goes out of the window; but the buildings, the ministers, the entire apparatus remains. At this point hell isn't part of the conversation anymore. Once hell is not feared, being good is not anymore obedience to God, but a sugary feeling of being good because it makes one feel good. The Church of England becomes the Church of Social Justice or, more broadly, the Church of Feeling Beautiful.

This is a slippery slope, though, and this desire of feeling beautiful will, after a while, not tolerate any encumbrance or obstacle. Why would one, say, condemn perversion? Because a) it's disgusting to God and b) it's disgusting to us.

But once the fear of the Lord is gone a) is out of the window, and once feeling beautiful is the moral imperative this will require willingly ignoring the disgust for perversion, covering its stench with a bigger dose of the new 'perfume', “Tolerance No 5”. [Which presumably disguises the stench of sulfur!]

In time, the new scent will be used in such doses that perversion will be forgotten altogether, helped by a new vocabulary (“gay”) and a new moral code (“inclusion”).

At this point even the Church of Social Justice is clearly obsolete, and the Church of Feeling Beautiful has taken over. Every mention of God is now either avoided, or inserted into a completely deformed, actually perverted context: God is now the Great Master Parfumier In The Sky, who encourages and inspires us to choke more and more in the fumes of Tolerance No 5, so that we may lose every conscience [be desensitized???] to the stink surrounding us.

This is now a process common to both the false churches and the Only One. Francis and a good part of the hierarchy openly peddle Tolerance No 5 to the masses exactly as an homosexual Anglican wannabe priest would. The Barque of Peter is completed invaded by it.

I smell the stink as I write this, and I know that this evening the Evil Clown will go around spreading it with a huge vaporiser, his message amplified worldwide by willing and interested (though less and less so) media.

Tolerance No 5 has already factually destroyed a lot of Protestant churches, and has reduced the so-called Church of England to such a state that if the PM were to order, today, to just shut it down, few people would notice, even fewer would complain, and after three weeks the matter would be forgotten altogether. [Not really, because the Queen of England is nominally its head and Defender of the Anglican Faith!]

Tolerance No 5 will, however, never destroy the Only Church. It will damage it, sure. It might wipe it out of entire Continents, certainly. But it will never destroy it, because a good Lord has decreed that this will never happen.

We prepare ourselves for the next spraying of the scent disguised as fragrance, do what we need to do regardless, and wait for the time when fresh air will enter the door of the Only Church again.


No accounting for strange tastes!

The first thing that flashed to my mind on seeing this was Mons. Paglia’s homoerotic mural in the Cathedral of Terni…
And next, why does the illustration for Easter looks more like an Ascension image than the Resurrection? ... Oakes Spaulding
at MAHOUND’S PARADISE has this informative comment about the artist:

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…One might be pardoned for thinking it looks like the sort of cheesy macho buddy Jesus action portrait that a Christian evangelical comic strip artist might have drawn…

Actually, the artist is Victor Delhez, a quasi-surrealist who came to prominence in the 1930s. A Belgian by birth, Delhez would later live in Argentina and Bolivia. He settled in Buenos Aires and became a professor there.

The illustration used on the card is taken from a set of forty that Delhez produced on theme of the Gospels. .. I suspect that a few Catholics would find some of his work offensive. I actually like much of what I've seen, including illustrations to Lord Dunsany’s A DREAMER’S TALES.

But the particular woodcut, above, is pretty horrible, at least in the context of what it is supposed to represent. It deserves all the silly comments that Catholics are currently giving it on social media.

I blame this Argentinian pope for choosing it. Not so much Delhez… [.QUOTE] And I knew I had come across the name of Delhez once before, also in connection with a Bergoglio greeting card. Indeed, here it is – his Christmas card in 2014:




At the time, I asked: “Is there a profound message I ought to get when an ass's ass is by far the most prominent feature, center
foreground, in a Nativity scene?”… Subsequently, of course, we have had reports about Bergoglio’s apparent fascination with poopy
metaphors and lately, his very public visit to a Port-a-potty…

Anyway, here are some reactions to Pentin’s tweet:

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 15/04/2017 22:33]

As I have been remiss in posting the appropriate religious reflections for Holy Week, let me try and make up a bit for that by posting
this essay which focuses ON the rites and significance of these most holy days of the Christian year.

The Easter Triduum: Entering into the Paschal Mystery
Some reflections on three days in Holy Week
that culminates with the Easter vigil
by Carl Olson

April 13, 2017

[Reprint of an essay originally written for the April 9, 2006, edition of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper]

The liturgical year is a great and ongoing proclamation by the Church of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and a celebration of the Mystery of the Word. Through this yearly cycle, the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains, "the various aspects of the one Paschal mystery unfold"(CCC 1171). The Easter Triduum holds a special place in the liturgical year because it marks the culmination of the yearly celebration in proclaiming the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The Latin word triduum refers to a period of three days and has long been used to describe various three-day observances that prepared for a feast day through liturgy, prayer, and fasting. But it is most often used to describe the three days prior to the great feast of Easter: Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday and the Easter Vigil.

The General Norms for the Liturgical Year state that the Easter Triduum begins with the evening Mass of the Lord's Supper on Holy Thursday, "reaches its high point in the Easter Vigil, and closes with evening prayer on Easter Sunday" (par 19).

Just as Sunday is the high point of the week, Easter is the high point of the year. The meaning of the great feast is revealed and anticipated throughout the Triduum, which brings the people of God into contact – through liturgy, symbol, and sacrament – with the central events of the life of Christ: the Last Supper, His trial and crucifixion, His time in the tomb, and His Resurrection from the dead.

In this way, "the mystery of the Resurrection, in which Christ crushed death, permeates with its powerful energy our old time, until all is subjected to him" (CCC 1169). During these three days of contemplation and anticipation the liturgies emphasize the sacrificial death of Christ on the Cross, and the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, by which the faithful enter into the life-giving Passion of Christ and grow in hope of eternal life in Him.

Holy Thursday and The Lord's Supper
The Triduum begins with the evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday, which commemorates when the Eucharist was instituted at the Last Supper by Jesus.

The traditional English name for this day, "Maundy Thursday", comes from the Latin phrase Mandatum novum – "a new command" (or mandate) – which comes from Christ’s words: "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another" (Jn 13:34). The Gospel reading for the liturgy is from the first part of the same chapter and depicts Jesus washing the feet of the disciples, an act of servitude (commonly done by slaves or servants in ancient cultures) and great humility.

Earlier on Holy Thursday (or earlier in the week) the bishop celebrates the Chrism Mass, which focuses on the ordained priesthood and the public renewal by priests of their promises to faithfully fulfill their office. In the evening liturgy, the priest, who is persona Christi, will wash the feet of several parishioners, oftentimes catechumens and candidates who will be entering into full communion with the Church at Easter Vigil. In this way the many connections between the Eucharist, salvation, self-sacrifice, and service to others are brought together.

These realities are further anticipated in Jesus’s remark about the approaching betrayal by Judas: "Whoever has bathed has no need except to have his feet washed, for he is clean all over; so you are clean, but not all."

The sacrificial nature of the Eucharist is brought out in the Old Testament reading, from Exodus 12, which recounts the first Passover and God’s command for the people of Israel, enslaved in Egypt, to kill a perfect lamb, eat it, and then spread its blood over the door as a sign of fidelity to the one, true God.

Likewise, the reading from Paul’s epistle to the Christians in Corinth (1 Cor 11) repeats the words given by the Son of God to His apostles at the Last Supper: "This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me" and "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me."

Thus, in this memorial of Jesus’s last meal with His disciples, the faithful are reminded of the everlasting value of that meal, the gift of the priesthood, the grave dangers of turning away from God, the necessity of the approaching Cross, and the abiding love that the Lord has for His people.

Good Friday - Veneration of the Cross
This is the first full day of the Easter Triduum, a day commemorating the Passion, Cross, and death of Jesus Christ, and therefore a day of strict fasting. The liturgy is profoundly austere, perhaps the most simple and stark liturgy of the entire year.

The liturgy of the Lord’s Passion consists of three parts: the liturgy of the Word, the veneration of the Cross, and the reception of Communion. Although Communion is given and received, this liturgy is not a Mass; this practice dates back to the earliest years of the Church and is meant to emphasize the somber, mournful character of the day.

The Body of Christ that is received by the faithful on Good Friday was consecrated the prior evening at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper and, in most cases, was adored until midnight or another late hour.

The liturgy of the Word begins with silence. After a prayer, there are readings from Isaiah 52 and 53 (about the suffering Servant), Psalm 31 (a great Messianic psalm), and the epistle to the Hebrews (about Christ the new and eternal high priest). Each of these readings draws out the mystery of the suffering Messiah who conquers through death and who is revealed through what seemingly destroys Him.

Then the Passion from the Gospel of John (18:1-19:42) is proclaimed, often by several different lectors reading respective parts (Jesus, the guards, Peter, Caiaphas the high priest, Pilate, the soldiers). In this reading the great drama of the Passion unfolds, with Jew and Gentile, male and female, and the powerful and the weak all revealed for who they are and how their choices to follow or deny Christ will affect their lives and the lives of others.

The simple, direct form of the Good Friday liturgy and readings brings the faithful face to face with the cross, the great scandal and paradox of Christianity. The cross is solemnly venerated after intercessory prayers are offered for the world and for all people. The deacon (or another minister) brings out the veiled cross in procession.

The priest takes the cross, stands with it in front of the altar and faces the people, then uncovers the upper part of the cross, the right arm of the cross, and then the entire cross. As he unveils each part, he sings, "This is the wood of the cross." He places the cross and then venerates it; other clergy, lay ministers, and the faithful then approach and venerate the cross by touching or kissing it.

In this way each person acknowledges the instrument of Christ’s death and publicly demonstrates their willingness to take up their cross and follow Christ, regardless of what trials and sufferings it might involve.

Afterward, the faithful receive Communion and then depart silently. In the Byzantine rite, Communion is not even offered on this day. At Vespers a "shroud" bearing a painting of the lifeless Christ is carried in a burial procession, and the faithful keep vigil before it through the night.

Holy Saturday and Easter Vigil -
The Mother of All Vigils
The ancient Church celebrated Holy Saturday with strict fasting in preparation of the celebration of Easter. After sundown the Christians would hold an all-night vigil, which concluded with baptism and Eucharist at the break of dawn.

The same idea (if not the identical timeline) is found in the Easter Vigil today, which is the high point of the Easter Triduum and is filled with an abundance of readings, symbols, ceremony, and sacraments.

The Easter Vigil, the Church states, ranks "the mother of all vigils" (General Norms, 21). Being a vigil – a time of anticipation and preparation – it takes place at night, starting after nightfall and finishing before daybreak on Easter, thus beginning and ending in darkness. It consists of four general parts: the Service of Light, the Liturgy of the Word, Christian Initiation, and Liturgy of the Eucharist.

The Service of Light begins outdoors (or in a space outside of the main sanctuary) and in darkness. A fire is lit and blessed, and then the Paschal candle, which symbolizes the light of Christ, is lit from the fire by the priest, who proclaims: "May the light of Christ, rising in glory, dispel the darkness of our hearts and minds."

The biblical themes of light removing darkness and life overcoming death suffuse the entire Vigil. The Paschal candle will be placed in the sanctuary (usually by the altar) for the Easter season, then will be kept in the baptistery so that when the sacrament of baptism is administered the candles of the baptized can be lit from it.

The faithful then join in procession back to the main sanctuary. The deacon (or priest, if no deacon is present), carries the Paschal Candle, lifting it three different times and chanting: "Christ our Light!" The people respond by singing, "Thanks be to God!" Everyone’s candles are lit from the Paschal candle and the faithful return in procession into the sanctuary.

Then the Exultet is sung by the deacon (or priest or cantor). This is an ancient and beautiful poetic hymn of praise to God for the light of the Paschal candle. It may be as old as Saint Ambrose (d. 397) and has been part of the Roman tradition since the ninth century. In the darkness of the church, lit only by candles, the faithful listen to the song of light and glory:

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Rejoice, O earth, in shining splendor,
radiant in the brightness of your King!
Christ has conquered! Glory fills you!
Darkness vanishes for ever!

And, concluding:
May the Morning Star which never sets
find this flame still burning:
Christ, that Morning Star,
who came back from the dead,
and shed his peaceful light on all mankind,
your Son, who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.

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The Liturgy of the Word follows, consisting of seven readings from the Old Testament and two from the New Testament. These readings include the story of creation (Genesis 1 and 2), Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22), the crossing of the Red Sea (Exodus 14 and 15), the prophet Isaiah proclaiming God’s love (Isaiah 54), Isaiah’s exhortation to seek God (Isaiah 55), a passage from Baruch about the glory of God (Baruch 3 and 4), a prophecy of Ezekiel (Ezekiel 36), Saint Paul on being baptized into Jesus Christ (Rom 6), and the Gospel of Luke about the empty tomb discovered on Easter morning (Luke 24:1-21).

These readings constitute an overview of salvation history and God’s various interventions into time and space, beginning with Creation and concluding with the angel telling Mary Magdalene and others that Jesus is no longer dead; "You seek Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified. He has been raised; he is not here."

Through these readings "the Lord ‘beginning with Moses and all the prophets’ (Lk 24.27, 44-45) meets us once again on our journey and, opening up our minds and hearts, prepares us to share in the breaking of the bread and the drinking of the cup" (General Norms, 11).

Some of the readings are focused on baptism, that sacrament which brings man into saving communion with God’s divine life. Consider, for example, Saint Paul’s remarks in Romans 6: "We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life."

Easter is in many ways the season of baptism, the sacrament of Christian initiation, in which those who formally lived in darkness and death are buried and baptized in Christ, emerging filled with light and life.

From the early days of the ancient Church the Easter Vigil has been the time for adult converts to be baptized and enter the Church. After the conclusion of the Liturgy of the Word, catechumens (those who have never been baptized) and candidates (those who have been baptized in a non-Catholic Christian denomination) are initiated into the Church by (respectively) baptism and confirmation.

The faithful are sprinkled with holy water and renew their baptismal vows. Then all adult candidates are confirmed and general intercessions are stated. The Easter Vigil concludes with the Liturgy of the Eucharist and the reception of the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of the Crucified and Risen Lord. For as Eastern Catholics sing hundreds of times during the Paschal season, "Christ is risen from the dead; by death He conquered death, and to those in the graves, He granted life!"