BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI



See preceding page for earlier posts today, 5/16/17...



May 16, 2017 headlines

PewSitter


Canon212.com

The following report is quite distressing because it suggests that the anti-Pell (i.e., anti-Church) elements driving this long drawn out campaign to discredit the Australian cardinal is persistent and far from over.

Originally, I was under the impression that Pell was being investigated all this time for covering up about sex abuses committed by priests under his jurisdiction. So I am shocked (apparently, I had been reading all previous reports wrongly) that it now appears there are accusations – and more than one – that he himself may have committed inappropriate conduct with minors not just before he became a bishop but even when he was already Archbishop of Sydney.

The accusations against Pell became international news at the time Benedict XVI was considering to name him Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops back in 2010, at which time the accusations only had to do with covering up for offending priests. Nonetheless, because of the nature of the position to which Pell would have been named, Benedict XVI passed him up and chose Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Canada instead.

The accusations against Pell were renewed and taken to a new level, with formal investigations and all, shortly after Pell was named to head the new Vatican super-dicastery, the Secretariat for the Economy, which as originally conceived, would have made Pell the second most powerful man in the Vatican after the pope himself.

The anti-Pell campaign was revved up in Australia even as Pell’s super-dicastery started being divested by the pope of important powers which were devolved to the Secretariat of State and to one of the Vatican agencies nominally under the Secretariat for the Economy, the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See (APSA, from its Italian acronym).

Pell has therefore been fighting on two fronts – internally, within the Vatican, and internationally, against his enemies in Australia. Except that now, he himself apparently is in the investigative bullseye for inappropriate conduct that he allegedly committed himself.

Pell’s entire history before these accusations was sterling for his firm and steadfast orthodoxy, a figure who has never been a lightweight (literally and figuratively) and is arguably the most outstanding Church prelate ever to come out of Australia and Oceania.

As much as I still seethe over his seemingly denigratory statements about Benedict XVI shortly after the latter stepped down as pope, I pray that the accusations against him will be judged to be unfounded, for his sake and that of the Church.

Reports suggest Cardinal Pell
could face sex abuse charges in Australia

May 16, 2017

According to multiple media reports, Cardinal George Pell, currently the head of the Vatican’s Secretariat for the Economy, could face legal charges in his native Australia over decades-old allegations of sexual abuse.

Police in the Australian state of Victoria, in which Pell’s home Diocese of Ballarat is located, confirmed on Tuesday they “received advice from the Director of Public Prosecutions relating to a current investigation into historical sexual assault allegations.” Pell has long denied the allegations vehemently.

The police investigations surround accusations that Pell inappropriately touched two young boys while swimming in the late 70s, and that he exposed himself in a change room in a surf club in the 1980s.

Those allegations were investigated by Victoria’s SANO unit, which was set up in 2012 to look into new and historic cases of sex abuse at religious and other non-governmental organizations.

Pell became an auxiliary bishop of Melbourne in 1987, before becoming archbishop of the same archdiocese 9 years later. He was moved to Sydney in 2001, and was appointed a cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 2003. Pope Francis picked him to take charge of the Vatican’s finances in 2014, and he moved to Rome.

Pell cooperated with the SANO investigation, and agreed to be interviewed by detectives in the Vatican last October. The investigators returned the findings to prosecutors earlier this year. Now that the Director of Public Prosecutions has given its advice to the police, it is up to the them to decide whether or not to pursue charges.

Police spokesperson Creina O’Grady told local reporters that detectives “will now take time to consider that advice. “As with any investigation, it will be a decision for Victoria Police as to whether charges are laid,” she said. “As this remains an ongoing investigation, we will not be commenting further at this time.”

When the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported on the investigation in July 2016, Pell’s office released a statement “emphatically and unequivocally” rejecting any allegations of sexual abuse.

“The cardinal’s conduct has been repeatedly scrutinized over many years, including before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into the Handling of Child Abuse by Religious and Other Organizations and according to leaked reports, by Victorian Police’s SANO Taskforce,” the 2016 statement said.

“The cardinal does not wish to cause any distress to any victim of abuse. However, claims that he has sexually abused anyone, in any place, at any time in his life are totally untrue and completely wrong,” it continued.

“He denies the allegations absolutely, and says that they, and any acceptance of them by the ABC, are nothing more than a scandalous smear campaign which appears to be championed by the ABC. If there was any credibility in any of these claims, they would have been pursued by the Royal Commission by now,” the statement said.

Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was set up in 2013 to examine the history of sexual abuse in religious and educational institutions, as well as other organizations dealing with young people. It works closely with Victoria’s SANO taskforce, and other local agencies.

On Monday, a new book was released in Australia detailing further accusations against Pell. Cardinal: The Rise And Fall of George Pell, was written by Louise Milligan, a journalist with the the ABC, and includes allegations Pell abused choirboys in the 1990s, when he was Archbishop of Melbourne.

Pell’s lawyers issued a statement Saturday stating the cardinal will not respond to the latest allegations made in the book, other than to restate that “any allegations of child abuse made against him are completely false.”

The statement also said the book was a “deliberate attempt to influence the public opinion in a manner that would make it impossible for our client to receive a fair hearing in court should he be charged” and that Pell “repeats his vehement and consistent denials of any and all such accusations, and stands by all the evidence he has given to the royal commission.”

According to the royal commission, nearly 10 percent of the priests of the Diocese of Ballarat had an allegation of sexual abuse brought against them between 1950 and 2010.

When asked about Pell during his inflight press conference after leaving World Youth Day in Poland on July 31, 2016, Francis said “one must not judge before justice judges.”

Francis also warned against a “media trial” and the “judgement of gossip.”
 
Justice must run its course,
says Sydney archbishop on
abuse claims against Cardinal Pell
Like everyone else, he is innocent till proven guilty



SYDNEY, May 17, 2017 (CNS) – Public prosecutors have submitted recommendations to Victoria Police on whether to try Australian Cardinal George Pell on decades-old abuse allegations, but their advice has not been made public.

Until police decide how to proceed, Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher said he will not be commenting on the case. "Justice must be left to run its course," Archbishop Fisher said in a statement May 17.

Archbishop Fisher said Cardinal Pell, currently head of the Vatican Secretariat for the Economy, "has cooperated in every way with multiple police, parliamentary and Royal Commission investigations."

"Everyone supports just investigation of complaints, but the relentless character attacks on Cardinal Pell, by some, stand the principle of innocent-until-proven-guilty on its head," Archbishop Fisher said. "Australians have a right to expect better from their legal systems and the media. Even churchmen have a right to 'a fair go.'"

Last July, allegations surfaced in a report by the Australian Broadcasting Corp. featuring several people who accused Cardinal Pell of sexual assault; at least one of the accusations had been found to be unsubstantiated by an Australian court in 2002. Some accusations dated to the late 1970s, when Cardinal Pell was a priest in Ballarat, Australia.

He served as archbishop of Melbourne 1996-2001 and archbishop of Sydney 2001-2014 before being asked to serve at the Vatican.

At the time the allegations surfaced, Cardinal Pell dismissed them as "nothing more than a scandalous smear campaign," and a statement issued by his office said that "claims that he has sexually abused anyone, in any place, at any time in his life are totally untrue and completely wrong."

In October, Australian police questioned Cardinal Pell in Rome regarding the accusations.

A Hillarian lesson for Church leaders
by GEORGE WEIGEL

May 17, 2017

Perhaps it was being "overcome with Paschal joy" (as the Prefaces for Easter put it). Maybe it was my guardian angel whispering in my ear. Perhaps I'm just getting older and thus less crotchety. But for a brief moment, at around 0730 EDT on the morning of May 3, I felt a blush of sympathy for Hillary Clinton for the first time in twenty-five years.

The material cause of this unprecedented emotion was that day's Washington Post where, on p. A4 below the fold, I read this headline: "Clinton blames Russia, FBI chief for election loss." As for the frisson of sympathy, it went something like this: "The poor woman. She still doesn't get it."

Get what? Get that she herself was the reason she lost.

The case for that judgment is made at length in Shattered: Inside illary Clinton's Doomed Campaign, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (Crown), which I had just read on a long flight and which has had tout Washington in a tizzy for weeks.

Political junkies will relish the book's story of the infighting between data-driven analysts on the Clinton campaign staff and the on-the-ground pols in the field; the latter sensed that something seismic was shifting in the electorate, which the former refused to believe because of their "models."

But according to Shattered, the fundamental reasons for one of the greatest upsets in American presidential history were that
- Hillary Clinton was unable to articulate a compelling reason for her candidacy;
- her staff couldn't come up with a reason that resonated with voters; and
- no one on that staff had the nerve to tell her that she was the basic problem.

In choosing senior campaign workers, Hillary Clinton evidently valued loyalty above all other virtues, and defined loyalty as never being critical of the boss. Shattered's most lurid revelation is that, after her 2008 loss [for the Democratic presidential nomination] to Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton and her husband devised a loyalty scale by which they measured Democratic members of Congress -- and then took systematic revenge against those who were either not supportive in the 2008 primary contest with Obama or insufficiently supportive.

Thus the word got out: it you want to work for HRC, check your critical faculties at the door. Or as Allen and Parnes put it, while a lot of insiders knew last year that the Clinton campaign's biggest liability was the candidate, "no one who drew a salary from the campaign would tell her that. It was a self-signed death warrant to raise a question about Hillary's competence -- to her or anyone else -- in loyalty-obsessed Clintonworld."

In all of which, I suggest, may be found a cautionary tale for Church leaders, especially bishops.

An old wheeze of Catholic black humor has it that, after a man is ordained a bishop, he'll never again eat a bad meal or get a straightforward answer. It's not true, of course, but there's enough truth lurking inside the clerical cynicism to bear reflection.

The Church's unique, Christ-given structure invests great authority in bishops. And that, in turn, puts a high premium on the ability of the bishop to know his weaknesses and learn from his mistakes. But to know and learn from his weaknesses and mistakes, the bishop has to recognize them -- or be invited to recognize them, if one of a number of vices prevents him from seeing himself making mistakes.

Wives and children do this charitable correction for husbands and fathers. But Catholic bishops don't get that form of correction because they don't have wives and children. So it has to come from somewhere else.

"Fraternal correction" among bishops is an ancient and honorable tradition in the Church. Patristic-era bishops practiced it with some vigor, the most famous case being the controversy between Cyprian of Carthage and Stephen, Bishop of Rome.

Today, bishops' respect for each other's autonomy tends to mitigate against the practice of fraternal correction. Still, if "affective collegiality" means anything, it ought to mean having enough care for a brother-bishop, no matter his position in the episcopal college, to suggest to him that he is off-course, if that is one's conscientious judgment, tempered by prayer.

Fraternal correction is a delicate instrument, to be used with care. If its use completely atrophies, however, the Church risks becoming an ecclesiastical version of Clintonworld.

Are we to think that Weigel, who has thus far maintained utter loyalty to the current pope, is maybe relenting somewhat, and that his warning is addressed above all to the pope, whose great popularity among Catholics polled apparently continues to be 'confirmed' by available surveys today?

I find it amusing and stupid at the same time that 99.9% of American media continue to cite polls showing Donald Trump as no less than the most unpopular US president one could possibly imagine - surveys made by the same people who predicted up to election night 2016 that Hillary Clinton had a 95% chance of winning the presidency. Are they still surveying the same carefully and scientifically chosen people who so skewed the surveyors and the media's objectivity that they deluded Hilary into thinking she was going to be the first US woman president just because she is Hilary Clinton? [Blame all those Americans who for more than 20 years have been choosing her as the most popular American female for no other reason that she managed to maintain such a high media profile since she was the First Lady. And today high media profile = ]

Sometimes I find it hard to decide which contemporary figure I most despise - Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton or Jorge Bergoglio (with apologies to the Papacy as institution). What they all share other than terminal narcissism is their incredible PHONINESS, each in his/her own way.

On the other hand, Donald Trump is so completely 'genuine', it appears, that he is allowing his worst character faults (having to do with egocentrism and narcissism, just as with Obama, Clinton and Bergoglio) to seriously get in the way of his good intentions and undermine his overall credibility, so that at this point, the 'conventional' view is that he is even more unprincipled than Richard Nixon, and some Democrats, of course, are already calling for his impeachment! (However, a recent poll taken among those who voted for Trump shows he continues to be supported unconditionally by 92% of them.)

At least, he succeeded to make Neil Gorsuch a Supreme Court Justice, an action whose positive consequences will potentially endure over the next critical decade, at least. How Trump will do on the other major promises he made during the campaign remains very much to be seen.

Not to unnecessarily open a new post on the pope, here is a lengthy commentary by Donald McClarey on a Bergoglio text that appears to have passed unnoticed before he left for Fatima last week...


This pope and his view of history

May 17, 2017


The Pope has an interesting conception of History as he displayed in a homily he preached before he left for Fatima last week:

During the course of history, Pope Francis said, many of our conceptions have changed. Slavery, for example, was a practice that was accepted; in time we have come to understand that it is a mortal sin.

“God has made himself known throughout history,” he said. “His salvation” goes back a long way in time. And he referred to Paul’s preaching in the Acts of the Apostles when he tells the God-fearing children of Israel about the journey of their ancestors, starting with the Exodus from Egypt until the coming of the savior, Jesus.

The Pope said salvation has a great and a long history during which the Lord “guided his people in good and in bad moments, in times of freedom and of slavery: in a journey populated by “saints and by sinners” on the road towards fullness, “towards the encounter with the Lord”.

At the end of the journey there is Jesus, he said, however: “it doesn’t end there”.

In fact, Francis continued, Jesus gave us the Spirit who allows to “remember and to understand Jesus’s message, and thus, a second journey begins.

This journey undertaken “to understand, to deepen our understanding of Jesus and to deepen our faith” serves also, Francis explained, “to understand moral teaching, the Commandments.”

He pointed out that some things that “once seemed normal and not sinful, are today conceived as mortal sins:

“Think of slavery: at school they told us what they did with the slaves taking them from one place and selling them in another…. That is a mortal sin” he said.

But that, he said, is what we believe today. Back then it was deemed acceptable because people believed that some did not have a soul.

It was necessary, the Pope said, to move on to better understand the faith and to better understand morality.

And reflecting bitterly on the fact that today “there are no slaves”, Pope Francis pointed out there are in fact many more of them…. but at least, he said, we know that to enslave someone is to commit a mortal sin.

The same goes for the death penalty: “once it was considered normality; today we say that it is inadmissible,” he said. [Who, exactly say that it is inadmissible? Bergoglio uses the royal 'we' to imply that his own personal and absolute opposition to the death penalty is shared by everyone else. As if the Catechism of the Catholic Church had not laid down the Catholic Magisterium on the death penalty!]

The same concept, he added, can be applied to “wars of religion”: as we go ahead deepening our faith and clarifying the dictates of morality “there are saints, the saints we all know, as well as the hidden saints.”

The Church, he commented, “is full of hidden saints”, and it is their holiness that will lead us to the “second fullness” when “the Lord will ultimately come to be all in all”.

Thus, Pope Francis said “The people of God are always on their way”.

When the people of God stop, he said, “they become like prisoners in a stable, like donkeys”. In that situation they are unable to understand, to go forward, to deepen their faith – and love and faith do not purify their souls.

And, he said, there is a third “fullness of the times: ours”.

Each of us, the Pope explained, “is on the way to the fullness of our own time. Each of us will reach the moment in which life ends and there we must find the Lord. Each of us is on the go.”

“Jesus, he noted, has sent the Holy Spirit to guide us on our way” and he pointed out that the Church today is also on the go.

Pope Francis invited the faithful to ask themselves whether during confession there is not only the shame for having sinned, but also the understanding that in that moment they are taking a “step forward on the way to the fullness of times”.

“To ask God for forgiveness is not something automatic,” he said.

“It means that I understand that I am on a journey, part of a people that is on a journey” and sooner or later “I will find myself face-to-face with God, who never leaves us alone, but always accompanies us," he said.

And this, the Pope concluded, is the great work of God’s mercy. [I don't think any minimally-catechized Catholic disputes that we seek God's forgiveness when we make a valid confession - but this includes the resolve "to amend my life and to do penance" as we say in the Act of Contrition - the part of it that seems to be completely ignored in the 'welcome-discern-accompany' formula advocated in AL Chapter 8. A part implicit in the Message of Fatima which urges prayer, penitence and suffering to help keep souls from Hell - all those themes avoided by Bergoglio who has reduced the Message of Fatima to a message for world peace!]

As Cardinal Newman noted, Doctrine can develop. He proposed tests to determine whether a proposed change is a development of doctrine -
Newman posited seven notes, I would call them tests, for determining whether something is a development of doctrine or a corruption.
1. Preservation of type
2. Continuity of principles
3. Power of assimilation
4. Logical sequence
5. Anticipation of its future
6. Conservative action upon its past
7. Chronic vigour

Go here to read an explanation of these tests.
http://the-american-catholic.com/2014/11/16/cardinal-newmans-theory-of-development-of-doctrine-and-the-synod/

PopeWatch doubts if Pope Francis has ever heard of these tests of Newman. If he has, he obviously is unconcerned with them. The Pope seems to believe that the Holy Spirit provides us with free flowing continuing revelation, revelation that is free to contradict Church teaching, and even prior divine revelation. This is a common stance of many heretical groups throughout the history of the Church. It is odd and alarming to here it now being echoed by the Vicar of Christ.

In reference to the death penalty the late Cardinal Avery Dulles, a Jesuit, noted the weight of authority in reference to the death penalty:

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In the Old Testament the Mosaic Law specifies no less than thirty-six capital offenses calling for execution by stoning, burning, decapitation, or strangulation.

Included in the list are idolatry, magic, blasphemy, violation of the sabbath, murder, adultery, bestiality, pederasty, and incest. The death penalty was considered especially fitting as a punishment for murder since in his covenant with Noah God had laid down the principle, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in His own image” (Genesis 9:6).

In many cases God is portrayed as deservedly punishing culprits with death, as happened to Korah, Dathan, and Abiram (Numbers 16). In other cases individuals such as Daniel and Mordecai are God’s agents in bringing a just death upon guilty persons.

In the New Testament, the right of the State to put criminals to death seems to be taken for granted. Jesus himself refrains from using violence. He rebukes his disciples for wishing to call down fire from heaven to punish the Samaritans for their lack of hospitality (Luke 9:55). Later he admonishes Peter to put his sword in the scabbard rather than resist arrest (Matthew 26:52). At no point, however, does Jesus deny that the State has authority to exact capital punishment.

In his debates with the Pharisees, Jesus cites with approval the apparently harsh commandment, “He who speaks evil of father or mother, let him surely die” (Matthew 15:4; Mark 7:10, referring to Exodus 2l:17; cf. Leviticus 20:9).

When Pilate calls attention to his authority to crucify him, Jesus points out that Pilate’s power comes to him from above - that is to say, from God (John 19:11). Jesus commends the good thief on the cross next to him, who has admitted that he and his fellow thief are receiving the due reward of their deeds (Luke 23:41).

The early Christians evidently had nothing against the death penalty. They approve of the divine punishment meted out to Ananias and Sapphira when they are rebuked by Peter for their fraudulent action (Acts 5:1-11).

The Letter to the Hebrews makes an argument from the fact that “a man who has violated the law of Moses dies without mercy at the testimony of two or three witnesses” (10:28). Paul repeatedly refers to the connection between sin and death. He writes to the Romans, with an apparent reference to the death penalty, that the magistrate who holds authority “does not bear the sword in vain; for he is the servant of God to execute His wrath on the wrongdoer” (Romans 13:4). No passage in the New Testament disapproves of the death penalty.

Turning to Christian tradition, we may note that the Fathers and Doctors of the Church are virtually unanimous in their support for capital punishment, even though some of them such as St. Ambrose exhort members of the clergy not to pronounce capital sentences or serve as executioners. To answer the objection that the first commandment forbids killing, St. Augustine writes in The City of God:

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The same divine law which forbids the killing of a human being allows certain exceptions, as when God authorizes killing by a general law or when He gives an explicit commission to an individual for a limited time.

Since the agent of authority is but a sword in the hand, and is not responsible for the killing, it is in no way contrary to the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill” to wage war at God’s bidding, or for the representatives of the State’s authority to put criminals to death, according to law or the rule of rational justice.

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In the Middle Ages a number of canonists teach that ecclesiastical courts should refrain from the death penalty and that civil courts should impose it only for major crimes. But leading canonists and theologians assert the right of civil courts to pronounce the death penalty for very grave offenses such as murder and treason. Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus invoke the authority of Scripture and patristic tradition, and give arguments from reason.

Giving magisterial authority to the death penalty, Pope Innocent III required disciples of Peter Waldo seeking reconciliation with the Church to accept the proposition: “The secular power can, without mortal sin, exercise judgment of blood, provided that it punishes with justice, not out of hatred, with prudence, not precipitation.”

In the high Middle Ages and early modern times the Holy See authorized the Inquisition to turn over heretics to the secular arm for execution. In the Papal States the death penalty was imposed for a variety of offenses. The Roman Catechism issued in 1566, three years after the end of the Council of Trent, taught that the power of life and death had been entrusted by God to civil authorities and that the use of this power, far from involving the crime of murder, is an act of paramount obedience to the fifth commandment.

In modern times Doctors of the Church such as Robert Bellarmine and Alphonsus Liguori held that certain criminals should be punished by death. Venerable authorities such as Francisco de Vitoria, Thomas More, and Francisco Suárez agreed. John Henry Newman, in a letter to a friend, maintained that the magistrate had the right to bear the sword, and that the Church should sanction its use, in the sense that Moses, Joshua, and Samuel used it against abominable crimes.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century the consensus of Catholic theologians in favor of capital punishment in extreme cases remained solid, as may be seen from approved textbooks and encyclopedia articles of the day.

The Vatican City State from 1929 until 1969 had a penal code that included the death penalty for anyone who might attempt to assassinate the pope. Pope Pius XII, in an important allocution to medical experts, declared that it was reserved to the public power to deprive the condemned of the benefit of life in expiation of their crimes.

Summarizing the verdict of Scripture and tradition, we can glean some settled points of doctrine. It is agreed that crime deserves punishment in this life and not only in the next. In addition, it is agreed that the State has authority to administer appropriate punishment to those judged guilty of crimes and that this punishment may, in serious cases, include the sentence of death.

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Go here to read the rest.
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2001/04/catholicism-amp-capital-punishment
[I doubt Bergoglio has even bothered to read any of the above - one has the impression that when he has his mind made up about anything, he will not bother to research it or analyze it objectively - no matter how venerable and indisputable the provenance as with the Church's teachings on the death penalty - because it is enough for him that he thought of it, even if he will seek to camouflage his hubris by claiming that it is 'the spirit' talking through him - and most Catholics may conclude he means the Holy Spirit, not imagining it could possibly be a malign and Satanic spirit.]

If the Pope is seeking to reverse the traditional teaching of the Church, rather than simply call for the non-use of the death penalty in most circumstances, than his action raises grave questions indeed, questions that PopeWatch is certain the Pope has not given a second to ponder. [He does not have an apparent history of pondering his pronouncements in any way (much of it is rote formulation in the spirit of Vatican II and incresingly, of Martin Luther), with the possible exception of the long groundwork he laid for AL Chapter 8 starting when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires.]


I feel I must add at least the first comment in McClarey's combox and McClarey's reply:

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Dave Griffey
Wednesday, May 17, AD 2017 at 4:51am

There seems to be debate about whether Pope Francis is trying to say the death penalty is now a mortal sin or not. I’m no expert, but if the Pope can say that what wasn’t mortal sin is now mortal sin, does that mean he could argue that what was mortal sin now isn’t?

Donald R. McClarey
Wednesday, May 17, AD 2017 at 4:59am
I fall along the lines that he was not saying the death penalty is a mortal sin now, but with his stream of consciousness style when going off text, who really knows for certain?

The Pope seems to believe his role is to be a prophet led by the Holy Spirit - prior Church teaching, or Divine revelation, be hanged. That is a view of the papacy not held by any of his predecessors. Turning non-sins into sins, and sins into non-sins, would be no problem for a man who has such an exalted role of his office.

The alarming feature of the current pontificate is not that the Pope is a bad Pope, or even a deranged Pope, but that so few Catholic ecclesiastics have the courage to say that much of what the Pope spouts is pernicious nonsense and that he needs an intervention, STAT. [For those who may not be familiar with 'STAT', it is short for the Latin 'statim', which means immediately, and is used by health practitioners to indicate urgent priority for any test or procedure they order.]

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May 17, 2017 headlines

Canon212.com


For some reason, both aggregators glommed on late to the pre-emptive scoop on Medjugorje that Andrea Tornielli, one presumes with
the papal go-ahead, pulled yesterday...

PewSitter

The big bold headline above links to the Donald McClarey column which I reproduced in the preceding post. But I am very concerned that
I missed seeing Tosatti's post on Humanae Vitae - the link is to 1Peter5's translation of the May 11 post and commentary. Here is my translation of Tosatti:



After ditching JPII's 'Familiaris consortio',
is this pope now targeting 'Humanae vitae'?
Translated from

May 11, 2017

A good source in the Vatican claims that the pope is on the point of naming – if he has not already formed it – a secret commission to examine and eventually study ‘modifications’ to the position of the Church on contraception, as Paul VI laid it down in his 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae. It was the last encyclical he signed [though he lived another 10 years] and formalized what the Second Vatican Council had discussed about this issue.

[Tosatti is wrong on this. Wikipedia, with appropriately sourced citations, says that

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“The last document issued by the council (Gaudium et spes) contained a very important section titled ‘Fostering the Nobility of Marriage"’(1965, nos. 47-52), which discusses marriage from the personalist point of view. The "duty of responsible parenthood" was affirmed, but the determination of licit and illicit forms of regulating birth was reserved to Pope Paul VI.”

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The latter had greatly enlarged a seven-man consultative commission first named by John XXIII in 1960 – with the advent of the contraceptive pill – to study its implications on Catholic teaching. The final commission that issued a report in 1966 had 72 members including 7 cardinals and 9 bishops (among them, Karol Wojtyla of Poland, who in 1960 had articulated the Church position in a book entitled Love and Responsibility), 16 theologians, 13 physicians and five women without medical credentials.

64 of 69 members who voted proposed that artificial birth control was not intrinsically evil, that artificial contraceptives should be regarded as an extension of the natural family planning method, and that Catholic couples should be allowed to decide for themselves about the methods to be employed. The four who dissented, as far as I can research, included the chairman of the commission, Cardinal Ottaviani (then Prefect of the Holy Office that was renamed Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Mons. Wojtyla of Warsaw.]

We have so far not had any official confirmation of the existence and composition of this organism. A request for confirmation or denial that we presented to competent persons at the Vatican has not been answered. Which could in itself constitute a signal – because if there was nothing to it, all they have to say is NO.

One can only speculate on who might be involved – perhaps Mons. Vincenzo Paglia, first of all, who was recently named president of the Pontifical Academy for Life and Grand Chancellor fo the John Paul II Institute for Studyies on Marriage and the Family. Or perhaps the rector of the Universidad Catolica de Buenos Aires, Mons. Victor Fernandez, a major theological shoulder upon whom this pope relies. But these are mere suppositions.

Humanae Vitae was published on July 25, 1968. Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI based their teaching on marriage and procreation on the encyclical.

Montini’s encyclical, which was greeted by great controversy and infinite debates, confirmed the inseparable link between the unitive and procreative significance of the conjugal act. Above all, against almost all expectations, the pope declared that chemical and mechanical means of artificial birth control were prohibited, he condemned abortion and sterilization, and approved natural family planning based on the avoidance of intercourse during the few days of the month when the woman can possibly conceive.

The study commission created to help the pope from a technical point of view ended up in favor of using the contraceptive pill, but a small minority insisted that this violates moral law because its use would separate the unitive dimension of the conjugaconjugal act from its procreative aspect. Paul VI took their position.

In the same document, Paul VI called on Catholic couples to exercise responsible parenthood “with respect to the physical, economic, psychological and social conditions” of the couple. In his famous interview with the French writer Jean Guitton, Papa Montini explained that “If the Church of Christ, whom we represent on earth, should cease to subordinate pleasure to love and love to procreation, then it would be favoring an erotic dehumanization of mankind,which would have pleasure as its only law”.

This essay was written as an afterword for, and will appear in a future printing of, Robert Cardinal Sarah’s The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, published last month by Ignatius Press.

Ever since I first read the Letters of Saint Ignatius of Antioch in the 1950s, one passage from his Letter to the Ephesians has particularly affected me:

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“It is better to keep silence and be [a Christian] than to talk and not to be. Teaching is an excellent thing, provided the speaker practices what he teaches. Now, there is one Teacher who spoke and it came to pass. And even what He did silently is worthy of the Father. He who has truly made the words of Jesus his own is able also to hear His silence, so that he may be perfect: so that he may act through his speech and be known through his silence” (15, 1f).

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What does that mean: to hear Jesus’s silence and to know him through his silence? We know from the Gospels that Jesus frequently spent nights alone “on the mountain” in prayer, in conversation with his Father. We know that his speech, his word, comes from silence and could mature only there. So it stands to reason that his word can be correctly understood only if we, too, enter into his silence, if we learn to hear it from his silence.

Certainly, in order to interpret Jesus’s words, historical knowledge is necessary, which teaches us to understand the time and the language at that time. But that alone is not enough if we are really to comprehend the Lord’s message in depth.

Anyone today who reads the ever-thicker commentaries on the Gospels remains disappointed in the end. He learns a lot that is useful about those days and a lot of hypotheses that ultimately contribute nothing at all to an understanding of the text.

In the end you feel that in all the excess of words, something essential is lacking: entrance into Jesus’s silence, from which his word is born. If we cannot enter into this silence, we will always hear the word only on its surface and thus not really understand it.

As I was reading the new book by Robert Cardinal Sarah, all these thoughts went through my soul again. Sarah teaches us silence — being silent with Jesus, true inner stillness, and in just this way he helps us to grasp the word of the Lord anew.

Of course he speaks hardly at all about himself, but now and then he does give us a glimpse into his interior life. In answer to Nicolas Diat’s question, “At times in your life have you thought that words were becoming too cumbersome, too heavy, too noisy?,” he answers:

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“In my prayer and in my interior life, I have always felt the need for a deeper, more complete silence. … The days of solitude, silence, and absolute fasting have been a great support. They have been an unprecedented grace, a slow purification, and a personal encounter with … God. … Days of solitude, silence, and fasting, nourished by the Word of God alone, allow man to base his life on what is essential.”

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These lines make visible the source from which the cardinal lives, which gives his word its inner depth.

From this vantage point, he can then see the dangers that continually threaten the spiritual life, of priests and bishops also, and thus endanger the Church herself, too, in which it is not uncommon for the Word to be replaced by a verbosity that dilutes the greatness of the Word.

I would like to quote just one sentence that can become an examination of conscience for every bishop:

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“It can happen that a good, pious priest, once he is raised to the episcopal dignity, quickly falls into mediocrity and a concern for worldly success. Overwhelmed by the weight of the duties that are incumbent on him, worried about his power, his authority, and the material needs of his office, he gradually runs out of steam.”

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Cardinal Sarah is a spiritual teacher, who speaks out of the depths of silence with the Lord, out of his interior union with him, and thus really has something to say to each one of us.

We should be grateful to Pope Francis for appointing such a spiritual teacher as head of the congregation that is responsible for the celebration of the liturgy in the Church.

With the liturgy, too, as with the interpretation of Sacred Scripture, it is true that specialized knowledge is necessary. But it is also true of the liturgy that specialization ultimately can talk right past the essential thing unless it is grounded in a deep, interior union with the praying Church, which over and over again learns anew from the Lord himself what adoration is.

With Cardinal Sarah, a master of silence and of interior prayer, the liturgy is in good hands.

I hope there will be increasingly more occasions for Benedict XVI to express himself in public during his retirement. This Afterword for Cardinal Sarah's book in a way strikes out at the 'verbosity that dilutes the greatness of the Word', yet 'in the excess of words, something essential is lacking' - the burden we have all had to carry for the past four years and almost two months, and counting...

Riccardo Cascioli sees great pragmatic significance in Benedict XVI's decision to write the Afterword to Cardinal Sarah's book...

Benedict XVI steps up check the liturgical drift
and to express support for Cardinal Sarah
who has been marginalized at CDW
by Riccardo Cascioli
Translated from

May 18, 2017

“With Cardinal Sarah, the liturgy is in good hands”. Signed, Benedict XVI.

That which at first glance may seem to be nothing more than an act of esteem is really a true and proper bombshell. It means that the emeritus Pope – in his discreet manner – has entered the arena in defense of Cardinal Robert Sarah who, as Prefect of the Conrgegation for Divine Worship, has been isolated and marginalized by the members (bishops, priests and laymen) Pope Francis has assigned to the CDW in a near-complete overhaul, and who has been publicly opposed by the pope in his statement recommending that priests should celebrate Mass ad orientem, even in the ordinary form.

Benedict XVI’s gesture comes in the form of an Afterword for Cardinal Sarah’s second book-length interview, La force du silence(The power of silence) originally published in French and now in an English edition, but still to be translated to Italian. The Afterword was published yesterday in FIRST THINGS.

In it, the emeritus Pope has great praise for the book and for the Cardinal himself, “a spiritual teacher, who speaks out of the depths of silence with the Lord, out of his interior union with him, and thus really has something to say to each one of us.”

At the end, Benedict XVI says “We should be grateful to Pope Francis for appointing such a spiritual teacher as head of the congregation that is responsible for the celebration of the liturgy in the Church.” It is a remark that sounds more like protective armor rather than gratitude.

It is well-known that in the past year, Cardinal Sarah was gradually divested of authority in the CDW, first by the pope’s appointment of members to replace the old composition of the CDW , in effect surrounding Sarah with progressivist figures who are openly hostile to the reform of the liturgical reform advocated and begun by Benedict XVI, and which the Guinean cardinal was trying to pursue.

Then there was the open rejection by the current pope of Cardinal Sarah’s recommendation for priests to resume celebrating Mass ad orientem. Then, without the cardinal’s knowledge, the pope named a commission to study the current translations of liturgical texts. And finally, reported moves by the pope to look into the possibility of an ‘ecumenical Mass’, again bypassing Sarah and the CDW.

This is a decided liturgical drift that strikes at the heart of Benedict XVI’s Pontificate which has placed the liturgy at the center of Church life. In the Afterword, the emeritus Pope reiterates this warning:

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With the liturgy, too, as with the interpretation of Sacred Scripture, it is true that specialized knowledge is necessary. But it is also true of the liturgy that specialization ultimately can talk right past the essential thing unless it is grounded in a deep, interior union with the praying Church, which over and over again learns anew from the Lord himself what adoration is.

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And his final statement: “With Cardinal Sarah, a master of silence and of interior prayer, the liturgy is in good hands.”

This intervention by Benedict XVI, which seeks to cast a protective armor on Cardinal Sarah and emphasize that he is the head of the Vatican’s liturgical office, is unprecedented. Even if it takes the form of an apparently innocuous comment on a book, the ecclesiastical significance of the gesture cannot be missed, indicating Benedict XVI’s concern for what is happening in the heart of the Church.

He has intervened on the one thing which perhaps most characterized his pontificate, the idea that “The crisis of the Church is a crisis of liturgy”, as he used to say, an idea that has been re-launched by Cardinal Sarah.

But we must not forget what Mons. Georg Gaenswein said in a recent interview, in a manner that sounded innocent. Responding to a question about the confusion in the Church today and to the dvisions it has created, he said that Benedict XVI is following closely everything that happens in the Church. This is one way in which he is showing his hand.

May he do so more, and especially, with respect to the infinitely problematic Amoris laetitia ! - about which so far, his only 'reaction', according to Georg Gaenswein, is a most uncharacteristic, implausible nonchalance - "He feels very remote from all of that", or words to that effect.

It’s no surprise Benedict XVI
is praising Cardinal Sarah –
the two enjoy a rare spiritual kinship
The Cardinal and the Pope Emeritus understand that priests and bishops
have a special requirement to constantly renew their life of prayer
by Francis Phillips

18 May 2017

In a rare act of endorsement, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has written the Afterword to a new book by Cardinal Sarah of Guinea entitled The Power of Silence. Cardinal Sarah is the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.

Recently, he made an appeal for Communion to be received on the tongue when kneeling and for priests to celebrate Mass ad orientem, so it is not surprising that Pope Benedict, under whose pontificate the relationship between the Ordinary and the Extraordinary Forms of the Mass was refined, should feel a spiritual kinship with him.

But this is not the primary link between these two men of God. What unites them is something prior to reverent celebration of the liturgy; it is simply man’s relationship to God in prayer.

We tend to think of prayer as requiring words; after all, we are creatures who use language and there are innumerable beautiful prayers in Scripture and the liturgy. But primarily, prayer is silent adoration; not the mere absence of sound or words but that essential quiet needed to hear the still small voice of God in our hearts and respond to it.

What Cardinal Sarah and the former Holy Father share is the conviction – especially necessary today when it is easy to become addicted to the media in all its changing forms – that the Church and the spiritual lives of its members cannot flourish unless we return to the example of Christ himself who, as Pope Benedict reminds the reader in his Afterword, “frequently spent nights alone ‘on the mountain’ in prayer, in conversation with his Father. We know that his speech, his word, comes from silence and could only mature there.”

The Power of Silence is not a promising title in a world full of noise. My own copy, published before Pope Benedict added his own thoughts in his Afterword, has it written by the author, Cardinal Sarah himself. In it, he reminds us that “all the saints have ardently loved silence”.

Indeed, he goes further, warning that “a multitude of sins are due to chattering or listening complacently to the chatter of others” and adding a profoundly disquieting rhetorical question: “How many souls will be lost on the day of the Last Judgment because they did not keep watch over their tongue?” God help us – what a wake-up call that is.

Having reviewed Cardinal Sarah’s earlier book, God or Nothing, which I unreservedly recommend to every Catholic to read, I am reminded that for the Cardinal, “Man is only great when he is on his knees before God”.

Also, that when he was made Archbishop of Conakry, he made the decision to make a spiritual retreat every two months in an isolated place, fasting entirely from food and drink for three days and taking with him only a Bible, a travelling Mass kit and a book of spiritual reading.

One can see why Pope Benedict, whose life now is organised around silence and prayer, should feel inspired to write his Afterword to The Power of Silence. As a theologian he knows that “mere” scholarship is not enough; you have to enter into “Jesus’S silence, from which his word is born.” At present our parish is studying his book, Jesus of Nazareth; it is obvious that his writing flows from his own deep relationship with his subject.

What the Cardinal and the Pope Emeritus also understand is that priests and bishops have a special requirement to constantly renew their life of prayer.

Otherwise, as Pope Benedict points out, when appointed bishop a man can quickly fall “into mediocrity and a concern for worldly success…. Worried about his power, his authority and the material needs of his office, he gradually runs of out steam.”

He concludes his Afterword with the comment that the liturgy needs to be “grounded in a deep, interior union with the praying Church, which…learns anew from the Lord himself what adoration is.”

We are reminded that before prayer becomes contrition, thanksgiving or supplication it is adoration. This adoration is the opposite of what the world has to offer.

Cardinal Sarah, “a master of silence and of interior prayer” as the Pope Emeritus describes him, is a true pastor of souls; his new book, with this endorsement by a man who has clearly been a spiritual mentor to him, should also be essential reading.

So when, if ever, shall we hear a reaction from any ranking Church prelate to Bergoglio's exaltation of a 'Protestant Mary' in Fatima
no less??? For all the chagrin and criticism expressed by a few in the Church hierarchy against this pope's anti-Catholic statements -
heretical, heterodox, what-have-you, but all of them objectionable and unprecedented coming from a pope - they have been few and far
between, and it does seem like since the DUBIA, not one of them has come close to objecting to Bergoglio's increasing chutzpah in making
his anti-Catholic declarations... As if somehow, they have decided to simply roll their eyes and exclaim to themselves, "Here we go again,
and what else is new?", that they see no point at all in speaking up any more if all they get is the pointed papal attitude of simply ignoring
any questions even from his own cardinals... Well, at least, let more priests speak up as 'Fr. Parochus' in the ff post:


A chivalrous priest defends the Church’s Mary
against Bergoglio’s Protestant Mary
by Hilary White

MAY 16,2017

…Back when we started this blog, I had several collaborators for the duration of the Synods, but most of them have returned to their own respective corners of the world, while we toil on. But of course I’m still in touch with many of them privately, and Fr. Parochus just contacted me to ask if he could put in a word of defence for the Real Blessed Mother, Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, of all the angels and saints, against this imaginary usurper that Pope Bergoglio seems to want to put in her place.

Yesterday I saw that Louie Verrecchio [at aka Catholic] had used the same bits of the pope’s Fatima speech we did here, saying that the woman he was describing was obviously the Protestant’s version of Mary. Louie is often intemperate and has gone to some conclusions that I think are not supported by the Real, but he’s often also right.

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For all intents and purposes, the Bergoglian “Mary” is the Mary of the Protestants; an honorable but otherwise ordinary woman.As such, no one can be surprised that he made a mockery of Our Lady at Fatima. We knew that he would, and we can be entirely certain that – barring a truly miraculous conversion – he will continue mocking her, denigrating those who are faithful to tradition, blaspheming Our Blessed Lord, and uttering all manner of heresies.

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There really was a huge rush of commentary over this pope’s visit to Fatima. It seems there is still chivalry left in the Catholic world. Fr. Parochus writes today:

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At Fatima, Pope Francis did not miss the opportunity to spread confusion, and to pour scorn on pious believers. Here are his words:
“Pilgrims with Mary … But which Mary?” – he asked – A teacher of the spiritual life, the first to follow Jesus on the “narrow way” of the cross by giving us an example, or a Lady “unapproachable” and impossible to imitate? ” Who says our Lady is unapproachable? Some things I can with God’s grace imitate. Others are special privileges. “In sin did my mother conceive me,” says the psalmist. Such was not the case with the Immaculate Virgin. ‎ “A woman “blessed because she believed” always and everywhere in God’s words, or a “plaster statue” from whom we beg favors at little cost?”

The contempt here, or apparently here, is appalling. ‎Further Our Lady was blessed from the first moment of her existence, and filled with grace. It was not a result of her faith. The favors she grants are because “she is the almoner ‎of all the gifts won for us by Jesus shedding His Precious Blood,” wrote Saint Pius X.

What should be difficult about it? “The Virgin Mary of the Gospel, venerated by the Church at prayer, or a Mary of our own making: one who restrains the arm of a vengeful God; one sweeter than Jesus the ruthless judge; one more merciful than the Lamb slain for us?‎”

The current Bishop of Rome dislikes the image and idea that our Blessed Mother is “holding back the arm of her Son” from striking us as we so richly deserve. But her work is precisely because the merciful Lord made her that way, as He did Moses, to save Israel from his outraged justice.‎

But at a higher magisterial level than the remarks of Pope Francis is this: When Paul VI beatified Fr. Maximilian Kolbe, he said that Kolbe sang the Church’s praise of our Lady, and that Kolbe’s Marian doctrine was “in no way exaggerated”. So Kolbe said, as St Bernard did before him, that “God has entrusted the entire order of mercy to the Virgin Mary, but the Lord has reserved justice to Himself“.

So we, and above all she, are commanded, “Be merciful as your Father is merciful”, but we have no role whatsoever in the execution of final, eternal justice. (Here is a sobering thought: the angels DO have such a role, for they “will gather up the wicked…” on the Last Day).

There is no opposition between the Lamb of God and the Mother of Mercy. The Virgin Mary is the greatest and most faithful disciple of Christ. But sacred scripture speaks also, and paradoxically, of the “wrath of the Lamb”. As the first and best of redeemed humanity, she is the most charitable and merciful of created persons. She will not judge men at their death, nor on the Day of Judgment.

As our Lady of Fatima in fact said, “pray much for the Holy Father”.‎

We have never been commanded to fear the Virgin Mary, although the demons fear her greatly. But we have been commanded to fear the Lord.

One day some people will face “the wrath of the Lamb”.

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I thank Mundabor for pointing out the fundamental inconclusiveness in the Ruini report on Medjugorje as reported so far only by Andrea
Tornielli. It has to do with the three levels by which a local bishop may judge the authenticity of an alleged apparition (considered by
the Church as 'private revelations' that do not add to the Public Revelation of Scriptures). It may be useful to list these levels here:

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The decision of the local bishop should be one of the following: 1) constat de supernaturalitate (established as supernatural), 2) constat de non supernaturalitate (established as not supernatural); or 3) non constat de supernaturalitate (not established as supernatural).

1. Constat de supernaturalitate. An apparition judged supernatural (formerly called worthy of belief) has manifested signs or evidence of being an authentic or truly miraculous intervention from heaven. This judgment is possible when there is evidence of supernatural phenomena, sound doctrine, moral probity, mental health and sound piety of the seer(s) and enduring good fruits among the faithful.

2. Constat de non supernaturalitate. The judgment that an alleged apparition has been shown to be not supernatural means it is either clearly not miraculous or lacks sufficient signs of the miraculous. Private revelation, for example, which is doctrinally dangerous or which manifests hostility to lawful authority could not come from God. It could even be demonic, especially if there are extraordinary signs accompanying it...

An attitude of pride and judgment toward the Church is a clear sign of his presence. An alleged revelation may also only be a pious rambling, consistent with faith and morals, but lacking evidence of being anything more than the product of human effort. No fraud need be intended, only an active imagination. Finally, it may be that the doctrine may be sound and there may be phenomena, but insufficient to demonstrate supernaturality. In this latter case, there would seem to be a possibility of revision.

3. Non constat de supernaturalitate. Finally, it may not be evident whether or not the alleged apparition is authentic. This judgment would seem to be completely open to further evidence or development.
From https://www.ewtn.com/expert/answers/apparitions.htm
based on the CDF's 1978 "Norms of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the Manner of Proceeding in Judging Presumed Apparitions and Revelations"

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Medjugorje and no end of
deception, opportunism and confusion


May 17, 2017

The news is everywhere so I am sure you will be able to find the links yourselves: the Medjugorje commission has given the most ambiguous, non-answering answer to the scam of Medjugorje, and the CDF has countered with its own, far more critical document. [I have not seen any report of a CDF document, only that Tornielli in his 'scoop' on the Ruini report, claims Cardinal Mueller is, in effect, totally skeptical about Medjugorje.]

Alas, the Church of V-II appears to have only one commandment: Thou Shall Not Offend. [The Great Commandment of Political Correctness]

The commission bent over backward in the most extraordinary way, dividing the apparitions in two groups: the first set of “unannounced” alleged apparitions and the industry of the thousand of alleged apparitions afterwards.

In the first case, the majority (but not all, as Church Militant tell us is necessary) of the members consider the apparitions supernatural. There is no conclusion of constat de supernaturalitate (evidence of supernatural intervention), because – again, according to what CM reports – for that, unanimity would be required. Therefore, even the first apparitions do not pass the test.

The second set of apparitions is destroyed as expected, though even in this case, our heroes stop short of issuing a constat de non supernaturalitate (established as not supernatural). Rather, it seems to me their conclusion is non constat de supernaturalitate (not evident to be authentic), but I will have to read more in detail.

In a third stunning turn of event, it is proposed to examine the possibility of making of the place a sanctuary, under control of the Vatican, because Medjugorje would encourage “spirituality” and blablabla.

Apart from the obvious rebellion of following a fake Blessed Virgin who says un-Catholic things earning the open condemnation of two bishops, the Church, with this train of thought, should establish Lutheran sanctuaries in all important places of Lutheranism (Erfurt, Wartburg, Worms, the lot), as there is no doubt Lutheranism has produced many very pious men and women.

The entire document is an exercise in absurdity: it implies the possibility that people may 1)see the Blessed Virgin and 2) subsequently be deceived by the devil, or by their own stupidity, or by greed, or by vainglory.

This is too stupid for words: any real apparition of the Blessed Virgin must be a transformative experience, it being inconceivable that the Blessed Virgin would appear to people of which she must know they will seed heresy and confusion afterwards.

“Let’s appear to these people”, this fantasy blessed virgin would think. “They will exploit me for decades afterwards and deceive countless people, but hey, it’s on them…” . Do the bishops not see how insulting and utterly stupid this is?

These obvious truths seem to escape most of the bishops in the commission, but they actually don’t. What is happening here is a shameless attempt to find something good in a scam, because an awful lot of people who deem themselves spiritual happen to believe in it.

Don’t insult your intelligence thinking that these bishops have been deceived. They are, as they always do, going with the flow, and are avoiding to rock a boat that would cause cries of indignation from a multitude of dumb fanatics in great need of a doctor and a reality check. Heck, Medjugorje is too stupid even for Pope Francis, what else do you need to persuade yourself of its absurdity!

What the bishops want to do is, in the best case, to embrace the crap, put it under the Church’s umbrella and let it slowly die of neglect and starvation and, in the worst case, to ride this easy wave of “spirituality”. This is wrong and cowardly. Deception must be denounced as such, instead of allowing countless souls to keep deceiving themselves.

A sanctuary for an apparition which is not acknowledged is truly too absurd even for this pontificate.

Then you can just as well made a sanctuary of both the Santiago Bernabeu and the Juventus stadium because millions of football enthusiasts are praying for Real Madrid’s or Juventus’s victory in the Champions League’s final. Really, the level of cowardice in front of every group of organised lunatics has reached levels unthinkable only some years before.

But then again no cardinals and only one bishop have spoken against Amoris Laetitia, so this is par for the course.

While I am as much in awe of supernatural experiences reported by many, many saints as I am by the apparitions that have been certified by the Church, I have also always thought that I never needed miracles to solidify the faith I had been born into and in which I was raised.

So my general reaction to reported apparitions such as those in Akita and in Medjugorje, to name the best-known of such contemporary events, has been "If the apparitions are truly divine in origin, then let us be thankful for them, and learn to 'discern' if the message they purport to convey is in accordance with the deposit of faith. Otherwise, the reported phenomena are probably fake and the work of the devil. Let us be thankful, too, for any positive spiritual fruits borne by such phenomena." The Ruini report - at least as reported by Tornielli - has not changed my position one bit.

Let me end my post by using Mundabor's blog icon, Fra Filippo Lippi's Madonna delle Rocce (Madonna of the Rocks):

Regina Caeli, Ora pro nobis!

May 18, 2017 headlines

Canon212.com


PewSitter

As Venezuela burns,
many Latin Americans ask:
“Where is Pope Francis?”
With Venezuela imploding, many wonder why Pope Francis seems slow
to condemn a left-wing populist Latin American dictatorship that’s brutalizing the population of an overwhelmingly Catholic country.

by Samuel Gregg

May 18, 2017

If you want to see where socialism takes a country, go to today’s Venezuela. After 18 years of a left-wing populist regime committed to “21st Century Socialism,” a once-wealthy and relatively stable nation is coming apart.

For months, thousands of Venezuelans — tired of food shortages, denied free elections, subject to unambiguously socialist economic policies, forced to watch opposition leaders being jailed, burdened by the all-pervasive presence of Cuban “advisors,” and brutalized by security forces — have been protesting in the streets of all major Venezuelan cities.

And what they want is clear: President Nicolás Maduro and his regime must cease behaving like a dictatorship and allow free and fair elections. The government’s response has been equally clear: fiery denunciations of its opponents as “enemies of the people” and, above all, repression, repression, repression.

One institution which has remained free of the regime’s control is the Catholic Church. For years, Venezuela’s Catholic bishops have bravely underscored the abuses of the government first led by the man whose personality and socialist policies lit the fuse for the current conflagration — the late Hugo Chávez — and now by his successor Nicolás Maduro.

Venezuela’s left-populist regime has always recognized the Church as a major support for anyone — Catholic, non-Catholic, believer, non-believer — who opposes what Venezuela’s Catholic bishops called in a remarkably clear and tough-minded January 2017 pastoral exhortation a “totalitarian political system” that seeks to impose its “21st Century Socialism” upon the country. This is despite the “utter failure,” the bishops added, of “socialism in every country in which this regime has been installed.”

Chávez’s response to similar criticism was to publicly insult Catholic bishops while proclaiming, in near-blasphemous terms, that “Jesus was the first socialist.” Maduro has upped the ante. Chávista thugs regularly attack Catholic priests in churches and Catholic university students in the streets. In April this year, they interrupted the Chrism Mass of the Archbishop of Caracas, Cardinal Jorge Urosa, during Holy Week — which included roughing up the cardinal.

There is, however, one question being consistently asked — with greater frequency and visibly growing impatience — throughout Latin America whenever Venezuela comes up in conversation. And that is: “Where is Pope Francis?”

Pope Francis isn’t known as someone who holds back in the face of what he regards as gross injustices. On issues like refugees, immigration, poverty and the environment, Francis speaks forcibly and uses vivid language in doing so.

Yet despite the daily violence being inflicted on protestors in Venezuela, a steadily increasing death-toll, an explosion of crime, rampant corruption, galloping inflation, the naked politicization of the judiciary, and the disappearance of basic food and medical supplies, the first Latin American pope’s comments about the crisis tearing apart an overwhelming Catholic Latin American country have been curiously restrained.

Yes, Francis has called for prayers for the suffering people of Venezuela — though without mentioning the very clear causes of their suffering. The Pope also wrote a letter to Maduro in April 2016, the contents of which are unknown. Maduro then visited the Vatican and met Pope Francis in October.

This was followed by the Holy See serving as a mediator for negotiations between the Maduro regime and the opposition in the last quarter of 2016. The talks, however, collapsed quickly when the government refused to contemplate calling elections or releasing political prisoners.

Francis hasn’t stopped asking for more dialogue between the regime and the opposition. Precisely what that means when the regime’s idea of “dialogue” is to imprison opposition leaders and tear-gas protestors is unclear.

More recently, Francis urged Venezuelans in a May 5 letter to bishops to promote a “culture of encounter” as a way of working towards resolving the country’s rapidly-deteriorating situation. Again, however, one must ask: what sort of “encounter” is supposed to happen between people who simply want freedom and a dictatorship that deploys violence every single day against its own people?

So what’s going on? At least three factors, I’d suggest, need to be considered. First, or so the argument goes, neither the pope nor the Holy See can be a credible mediator between the regime and the opposition if it is seen as supporting one of the two sides.

That’s a reasonable position. But there’s one problem with this argument. Mediators surely aren’t expected to stand to the side patiently waiting for the conversation to resume while one party to the discussion beats the living daylights out of the other. Being a mediator doesn’t imply that you cease speaking the truth out-loud and emphasizing the requirements of justice.

In the years leading up to and following the Polish Communist regime’s declaration of martial law in December 1981, for example, Pope John Paul II was certainly involved in the Church’s efforts to mediate between the government and the Polish people. Yet the pope also made it abundantly obvious that he supported the Polish people’s just aspirations for liberty. At this stage, it’s hard to argue that Francis has made his position vis-à-vis the Venezuelan situation anywhere near as clear.

Indeed, Maduro recently accused Venezuela’s bishops of being out of step with the pope’s call for dialogue when they refused to participate in an effort to rewrite Venezuela’s constitution. Of course, it’s a ridiculous accusation for Maduro to make.

Yet it gains a veneer of credibility by virtue of the fact that Francis has not, in his own words, said anything directly and publicly critical of the Maduro regime. To do so, some believe, would only make matters worse. But how could the situation in Venezuela get any worse than it is right now when your average Venezuelan has lost an estimated 19 pounds in weight because of lack of food?

A second factor worth considering is that Venezuela’s crisis doesn’t fit into Pope Francis’s standard way of explaining contemporary political and economic problems. It’s very hard for the pope to blame Venezuela’s problems on the tyranny of Mammon, financial speculation, free trade agreements, arms-dealers, nefarious “neoliberals,” or any of his usual list of suspects.

Venezuela’s problems are clearly the result of socialist policies being imposed by a left-populist regime upon its own people. The Venezuelan bishops haven’t hesitated to describe this as the “fundamental cause” of Venezuela’s woes.

The Chavez-Maduro regime has certainly created, to use Francis’s words, “an economy that kills.” But it’s not a market economy. It’s a socialist economy freely chosen and created by Venezuelan leftist-populists. There are no mysterious forces “out there” which forced Venezuela down this path (though functionaries imported from Communist Cuba have been doing their best to keep Maduro in power since 2014).

While Maduro regularly blames “Yankee imperialism,” Venezuela’s disastrous situation is squarely the fault of left-wing populist Venezuelans who, like all socialists, refuse to acknowledge that such policies always lead to long-term economic ruin and can only be maintained in place by governments prepared to use “extra-constitutional” methods.

Third, there is the uncomfortable fact that Pope Francis has publicly associated himself with other left-populist Latin American leaders whose ideological outlook and economic policies are very similar to those of Chávez and Maduro.

In 2015, for example, Francis spoke at an event in Bolivia held by the World Meeting of Popular Movements in which he used language that would fit very well into the speech of your average Latin American populist politician.

Moreover, Francis spoke these words while seated next to Bolivia’s President Evo Morales: a Latin American left-populist head of state who professes admiration of Chávez and continues to defend Maduro’s regime.

Speaking directly and clearly about the political and economic damage inflicted by a left-populist regime would imply Francis putting distance between himself and left-populist leaders, movements and governments throughout Latin America, or even criticizing the whole phenomenon of Latin American populism itself. Francis has, however, on at least two occasions (and recently) described Latin American populism as healthy because it makes “the people . . . the protagonists” of their destiny.

All of these associations and sentiments inevitably raise questions in some peoples’ minds about the pope’s willingness to accept that there is a straight line between Latin American populism and regimes like Maduro’s.

Personally, I’m not sure that’s a fair criticism of Francis. While archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio had to cope with a left-populist government which inflicted enormous economic damage upon Argentina. He wasn’t afraid to criticize left-wing populist governments such as those lead by presidents Néstor and Cristina Kirchner. But it wasn’t their populism per se which he criticized. Rather, Bergoglio focused on things like corruption.

Put another way: if Pope Francis was to criticize the Maduro regime’s populist roots, ideology and rhetoric, it would call into question the wisdom of seeing Latin American populism as an essentially positive force. That may be a step which Francis is unwilling to take.

There is, however, a price to be paid for this — at least at the level of perceptions, which, whether we like it or not, matter in our media-driven world. As one Catholic professor remarked to me during a recent trip to Latin America, “Many are saying that the Holy Father would be far tougher and direct if the Venezuelan dictatorship was of the right-wing variety instead of a left-wing regime that’s justified itself from the very beginning by talking endlessly about el pueblo.”

This is, of course, simply speculation on the part of some Latin American Catholics. But the fact that they are openly expressing such thoughts is telling.

It’s also clear that the pope’s apparent reticence to say anything too critical of the Maduro dictatorship is causing some in the Venezuelan opposition to lose patience with Francis.

Consider, for instance, Lilian Tintori. She’s the wife of one of the major opposition leaders, Leopoldo López: a devout Catholic who has been imprisoned since 2014. Every day, Tintori is followed and harassed by the regime’s security forces. She is subject to manifold humiliations every time she visits her husband in jail. Maduro has publicly denounced Tintori as a “terrorist.”

In an interview in Brazil on May 11, Tintori described what she called the pope’s “insistence” that the opposition enter into a dialogue with the Maduro regime as “unacceptable.” For her, the regime’s flat refusal to fulfill any of the minimal conditions, such as the freeing of political prisoners like her husband, means that there’s nothing to dialogue about with the regime—except the terms of its departure from power.

In Tintori’s view, general elections are needed immediately. Instead of talking endlessly about “dialogue,” she argues, the Vatican should spend more time defending the lives and fundamental human rights of Venezuelans that are being violated daily by the regime. Tintori then added that the pope’s claim in one of his mid-air interviews that the Venezuelan opposition was “divided” is simply incorrect. “The opposition,” Tintori said, “is united” and determined to achieve its objective of immediate general elections.

Tintori isn’t alone among opposition leaders in expressing public doubts about Francis’s approach to the Venezuelan crisis. On March 17 this year, Henrique Capriles—another devout Catholic and who ran against Maduro in Venezuela’s 2013 presidential election—stated in an interview that “Pope Francis seems distant” from Venezuela’s crisis. It was long overdue, he added, for Venezuela to become one of the pope’s priorities. “Where,” Capriles exclaimed in evident frustration, “is the pope?”

In recent weeks, the Holy See’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin (who served as nuncio to Venezuela between 2009 and 2013) has stated that Venezuela needs fresh and fair elections. This echoes the position of Venezuela’s bishops. They, however, have been equally insistent that part of the way forward involves “ensuring the rule of law.” This implies a return to a form of government that constitutionally limits the state’s power in society and the economy.

That is anathema to Latin American left-populists. They invariably dismiss rule of law in their usual Marxist-charged terminology as a “tool of the bourgeois oligarchy.” For them to limit (let alone give up) their power is akin to betraying el pueblo and surrendering to “the neoliberal lords of capital.”

It’s tempting to believe that the Maduro government will simply collapse as conditions get steadily worse. North Korea and Cuba, however, illustrate that tyrannical regimes can stay in power for a very long time if they have the will to do so.

Another possible scenario is a military uprising lead by junior army officers sickened by what the regime requires them to do to their own people every day, tired of taking orders from Cuban advisors, and, like millions of other Venezuelans, struggling to feed their families.

There’s nothing, however, in the mindset of left-populist leaders like Maduro to suggest they will let themselves be brushed aside. There’s every reason to believe that the regime would fight back, thus accentuating what is, in many ways, already underway in Venezuela: a bloody civil war.

And then, I wonder, how many Venezuelans will bother asking, “Where is Pope Francis?” They’ll be too busy fighting for nothing less than their lives and liberty.

Cardinal Zen: ‘It seems the Vatican-China deal
is not proceeding. That’s good’
In their desperation for a deal, the Pope's
advisers seem to want 'success at any cost'
by Megan Griffiths

18 May 2017

The Salesian House of Studies has not changed much since it was built on a Hong Kong hillside in the 1930s. But the city around it has altered beyond recognition. Tower blocks, main roads and schools have sprung up and engulfed the mission house. The soundtrack of the presumably once tranquil retreat is now a symphony of constant drilling, rushing traffic and workmen shouting.

Cardinal Joseph Zen himself greets me at the door of the mission house. The humble building is where he began his studies in 1948, when he travelled to the island from his home in Shanghai just a year before Mao Zedong seized control of the mainland. After standing down as Bishop of Hong Kong in 2009, he has returned to the place where it all began for his retirement.

It is not just the landscape around the mission house that has been transformed during Zen’s ecclesiastical career. On July 1, 1997, the handover of the British territory to the Chinese government took place in accordance with the “one country, two systems” principle, granting Hong Kong the right to retain its capitalist economy and political structure.

“I think at the time of the handover there were many different expectations,” says Zen. “Some were very optimistic, some pessimistic. There was a promise of ‘one country, two systems’. But I never believed that it could really work because the communists simply cannot understand our system. The fact is that the 20 years of Chinese control are 20 years of fighting.”

And Cardinal Zen, who only seems to be his 85 years when he cups a hand round his ear to hear what you are saying more clearly, has been a constant figure at the frontline of that fight.

His outspoken personality contrasts with that of his favourite biblical character, St Joseph, whom the cardinal describes as quiet and humble. “He says no word in the Holy Scripture, but I’m not like him. I envy him: I talk the whole time.”

After being made Bishop of Hong Kong in 2002, Zen led the diocese in condemning proposed laws which favoured central government control from Beijing. He even embarked on a hunger strike to oppose educational reforms that would see the Church lose control of its schools.

Cardinal Zen regrets the failure to stop the education laws from being passed. “Unfortunately, at that time people did not realise the dangers,” he recalls, “Only after the government started pushing for so-called patriotic education the people realised: ‘Ah, taking control of education away from the Church was the first step, now the second step is coming.’ ”

Despite this setback, the cardinal continues to campaign for democracy and human rights in the city. Reflecting on the advances made through political activism, he says: “By raising our voice I think we succeeded in saving some things from being damaged by [Beijing’s] intervention. But I think we have to be resigned to the fact that Hong Kong is very weak and all we can do is to prevent things from becoming worse.”

A man of clear principles, Zen maintains that standing up against social injustice is a central teaching of the Catholic Church. He says he learnt this from a “wonderful professor” during his nine years studying at the Salesian Pontifical University in Rome in the 1960s.

One injustice the cardinal has always spoken out against is the persecution of Catholics in China. Born and raised in pre-communist Shanghai, Zen remembers a childhood without discrimination.

“In Shanghai we had a hard life during the war with Japanese occupation, but they didn’t intervene directly in the Church. But when the communists came then we had persecution in the Church – very hard persecution. When the communists took power I could not go back to China any more. I was able to communicate with my family but very carefully.”

As the regime began to expel missionaries, jail priests and destroy churches, relations between Beijing and Rome were severed. There has been no official diplomatic relationship between the two since 1951, something that Pope Francis and the Vatican are eager to change.

But Zen passionately opposes a looming deal between the Holy See and the communist state which would acknowledge the legitimacy of government-appointed bishops in the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA) – the official church.

“In my conscience, I have to shout what my convictions are,” he says, “because it would be a disaster if they accept the wrong agreement. There is no improvement for Catholic life in China. Surely it is going backwards, and I cannot allow that to happen.”

Last year Zen spoke out forcefully against the agreement, telling the Wall Street Journal that “with fake bishops you are destroying the Church”.

But he insists that he is not opposed to dialogue between China and the Vatican. “I am never against the dialogue because you have to talk to have an agreement. But what I say is be careful: what kind of agreement are you going to have?”

Zen also maintains that he is not against everyone in the CCPA. “It’s unfortunate that people make this distinction between the underground and the official church. Even in the official church there are good people who are loyal to the authority of the Pope.”

What seems to rile the cardinal most about the proposed deal is that he and other bishops from China have been left out of the discussion.

“I am a Chinese cardinal,” he says. “There are not many Chinese cardinals. There are two – but I don’t know anything!”

Benedict XVI appointed Zen, along with 30 others, to a Vatican commission on China in 2007. Yet the cardinal says that, since Pope Francis was elected in 2013, the commission has “just disappeared”, without any official notice.

He calls Rome’s lack of communication on the matter “an absolute impoliteness” and accuses those advising the Pope of not wanting to listen to the people on the ground.

The cardinal bangs his fists on the table as he says: “How can they believe they know the situation better than me? Better than Archbishop Savio Hon Tai-Fai, who is the number two in the Congregation of Evangelisation? We are Chinese! We have been in China so many years, teaching in the seminaries, spending six months a year there and seeing what’s going on with our own eyes. They don’t believe us. They don’t listen to us. So terrible.”

Zen says that the Pope’s advisers seem to want to “have success at any cost” with a Vatican-Beijing deal. But the cardinal insists that the Church should not bow to any earthly government.

“We still have so much strength in our Church. That’s a spiritual force. So why not use those forces to strengthen our position? Why don’t they understand that if you hold your position strong you can do something, you can achieve something?”

Despite last year’s furore over the deal, Zen now believes that the prospect of an agreement with Beijing has fallen apart.

“In this moment it seems that things are not proceeding,” he says. “I guess that the agreement about the selection of bishops is ready but not signed. I think the government wants the Holy See to grant everything. Not just about the selection of bishops but many other things to control the Church. But these other things aren’t possible. So then the government refuses to sign. So for me that’s good.”

The cardinal’s firmness on Beijing reflects the steadfastness of his own faith. A Catholic since birth, he says he has never doubted the existence of God. “I didn’t suffer much for my faith,” he reflects. “Everything is smooth in my life. Only this last period when unfortunately I’ve had to fight even the Vatican… But for the rest of my life it was very comfortable, very peaceful. I really cannot complain.”

The cardinal reveals his daily prayer for the next 20 years of Catholic life in Hong Kong and the mainland. “I pray, dear Lord, to strengthen those who are courageously keeping their faith, to give courage to those who are hesitating and to convert those who have given up their faith practically,” he tells me.

“There are many Catholics who need help. The strong people need help, the hesitating people need help and the bad people need conversion. Then there will be complete victory of God.”

Latest statistics:
Seminarians down in the USA and the world,
priests worldwide in decline,
catastrophic decline in women religious
Will vocations survive the new Bergoglian priestly formation document?

May 18, 2017

I. World Statistics
Last month, the Vatican website published a report on the Pontifical Yearbook 2016 and Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae 2015, with a detailed summary of the statistics contained in the latter. Compared to the Vatican's summaries of the information in the Annuarium Statisticum published in previous years, last month's summary has much more detail, and for this we are very grateful.

The summary notes that "In 2015 there is decline in the number of priests from the previous year, thus reversing the upward trend that characterized the years from 2000 to 2014." To be exact, there were 415,656 priests in 2015, compared to 415,792 in 2014.

(Looking into reports from previous years we find that there were 405,178 priests in 2000 -- when the upward trend began again -- 406,411 in 2005, 408,024 in 2007, 412,236 in 2010, and 414,313 in 2012.) Tellingly the decline from 2014 to 2015, while slight, is attributed to the decrease in the number of priests in Europe (less 2,502) outweighing the increases in the rest of the world (up by 2,366).

Although the Vatican report does not mention it, it is no secret that very large numbers of European and North American clergy are in the age range of late 70s to 90s, which explains why the official statistics for priests in Europe and North America have little to do with the actual (and much reduced) number of priests available for, or capable of, pastoral duties on the ground.

As these priests - the last of those ordained in the period between 1945 and 1965 - continue to die off in even greater numbers due to illness and extreme old age within the next decade or so, we expect that the negative effect on worldwide priesthood numbers will become even more pronounced. (According to the summary, priests in Europe account for 43% of priests worldwide.)

As for major seminarians, the downward trend is confirmed: "In 2015 there was a total of 116,843 major seminarians, up(sic) from 116,939 in 2014; 118,251 in 2013; 120,051 in 2012; 120,616 in 2011 and 118,990 in 2010".

We already noted the beginnings of this decline in a post last year. This trend towards decline seems set to continue, with the number of major seminarians now declining continuously in Europe, "in all areas of America" (which would include Latin America), in the Middle East, and in South East Asia, where, it is noted, "the initial growth ended in 2012 (+ 4.5% compared to 2010), and was followed by a marked decline which brought the number of major seminarians in 2015 at a level 1.6% less than the maximum of 2012".

The same phenomenon is noted regarding Oceania: "The highest figure was recorded in 2012, followed by continuous decline – the number of seminarians in 2015 was 6.9% lower than in 2012". Only Africa is bucking the trend with an increase of 7.7% for major seminarians between 2010 and 2015.

For the record, the Centurio blog published a short study in 2014 which already forecast that there will be 323,000 priests worldwide by 2050, based on the trends of 2012 (when there were 414,313 priests) continuing.

In December of last year, the Congregation for the Clergy released a new document on priestly formation that, among other things, lays down (in p. 21) that seminarians should be "helped to recognise and correct 'spiritual worldiness': obsession with personal appearances, a presumed theological or disciplinary certainty, narcissism and authoritarianism, the attempt to dominate others, a merely external and ostentatious preoccupation with the liturgy, vainglory, individualism, the inability to listen to others, and every form of careerism".

With "theological and disciplinary certainty" now considered a defect that must be eradicated from seminarians, only God knows what kind of priests we'll be getting (and how many) in the future. Some might argue that we need not worry about this little passage and that most of the document is sound, but the past year has shown us how brief passages and even footnotes in an official document can cause immense chaos in the Church.

Combined with Pope Francis's well-known penchant for expressing skepticism over conservative institutes that have abundant vocations, for the selective persecution of tradition-friendly dioceses and religious institutes that also have many vocations, and for effectively justifying the lack of vocations in "mainstream" congregations, we are not optimistic that vocations will experience any sort of increase under the current papacy.

The situation is far more catastrophic with regards to the number of women religious: 670,320 worldwide in 2015, down from 705,529 in 2012 and 721,935 in 2010 - a decline of 51,615 in just 5 years.

While women religious have continued to increase in Africa and South East Asia, they have dropped precipitously in the Americas (North, Central and South), Europe and Oceania. With women religious the situation is similar to that of priests in Europe and North America: large numbers of European and North American sisters are very aged, and as they pass away in the coming years the collapse in the overall numbers of women religious will likely become even more dramatic.

II. US seminarians
This month, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate published its annual statistical overview of "Catholic ministry formation enrollment", including seminary statistics. At present the PDF can be downloaded on the main page of their website.

CARA itself is calling seminary enrollments "steady" since 1996. Naturally there have been ups and downs. The last time that there were more than 4,000 seminarians in theology was in the academic year 1986-1987.

Since the academic year 1988-1989 their numbers have fluctuated between the highs of 3,788 (in that same year) and 3,723 (2011-2012) to the lows of 3,114 (1997-1998) and 3,285 (2003-2004). Statistics for college and high school ("minor") seminarians are similarly "steady", although high school seminarians have been in marked decline since the 1990's and as of 2016 are down to 351 -- the lowest in CARA's seminary enrollment records (which goes back to 1967).

However, since 2011-2012, the overall figures show a declining trend for seminarians in the U.S. once more, a trend that has become more pronounced in the last two years. (The following figures have been assembled by Rorate from CARA's more detailed study):



Naturally, these numbers do not tell the whole story; but they are indispensable to understanding where the Church in the US is really headed in terms of vocations.

Catholic blogs and websites tend to focus on the increase in vocations and ordinations in selected dioceses, and indeed it is necessary to extol the link between doctrine and liturgy on one hand and vocations on the other hand.

Nevertheless the stark reality is that the Church continues to have a serious crisis when it comes to vocations and no amount of wishful thinking and selective reporting can obscure it.

'Pirate Writings: The most discussed interventions of a provocative witness’

More than 40 years ago,
Pasolini had foreseen it all

Thanks to Beatrice and her website, benoit-et-moi.fr/2017, for the following essay by Nicolas Bonnal who sent it to her as an excerpt
from his book La culture comme arme de destruction massive" (Culture as a weapon of mass destruction).

Wikipedia (Italian) describes Scritti Corsari as an anthology of articles written by Pasolini for various Italian newspapers including
Corriere della Sera between 1973-1975 and was published in November 1965 after his death.

“His) central theme is Italian society, its evils and its difficulties. Writing as an isolated figure but lucid analyst, he goes against
the world of comme-il-faut and conformism which he saw as responsible for the cultural degradation of society. As a dissenter to such
a society, he succeeded to express with great clarity and no equivocations political and social themes which are still most relevant
today, with a rare and profound spirit of criticism, confronting social questions which were the bases for cultural confrontations then
and now such as abortion and divorce”.

Pasolini, born 1922, was an established poet and novelist, whose politics had ranged from Fascist to Communist and, after 1968, to
Marco Pannella’s Radical Party. He began working in film as a dialog writer for Federico Fellini in the late 1950s and directed his first
film Accatone in 1961. He published eight books of poetry, eight novels, ten books of essays, and directed 12 feature films.

Pasolini was murdered by being run over several times with his own car in November 1975 on the beach at Ostia, in what was described
as a Mafia-style killing. The teenager who confessed to the crime and was convicted for it retracted his confession 29 years later, and
the crime remains unsolved.

How modern culture is destroying our countries
by Nicolas Bonnal
Excerpt translated from his book
‘La culture comme arme de destruction massive’

[In France], one talks about the Italian or Spanish economic catastrophe. I must say that I find that rather funny, because I would much rather talk about the cultural and moral castastrophe in these two countries to whom a great part of mankind owes so much. [And what about the cultural and moral castastrophe in France itself???] I speak about modern culture as a weapon of mass destruction. We are in the midst of such destruction. [OK, there we are!]

The current anthropological [i.e., human] catastrophe was already described by [the late Italian director] Pier Paolo Pasolini in his Scritti Corsari (Pirate Writings] published in Italy in 1974, just before he was assassinated.

Pasolini observed that the true ‘Great Replacement’ – of souls and brains – took place with the world’s Americanization and its corollaries, hedonism and television. The ‘false flags’ he denounces, which were occurring in Italy at a demented pace to “end a political opposition which had surprisingly emerged” played a great role at the start of the 1970s.

Pasolini, who was a strange neo-Marxist (he loved Soviet society), a strange Christian (he opposed the ‘laxity’ of the Vatican following Vatican-II), and a strange homosexual (he opposed abortion), cut to the quick about the Church: “Their silence and their passivity appear like an atrocious euphorical neurosis which makes them accept without any resistance the new hedonism with which those who really have power have replaced the high moral values of the past”.

Pasolini was appalled by the quick death of rural civilization (he was right), underscoring that everything else would disappear – tradition, education, religious faith. At that time, Italian cinema had just ended its last great decade with the disappearance of its great masters Risi, Visconti, Fellini, etc.

He was repulsed by the secularism of those among us whom the mass media had made brain-dead: “It’s a neo-pagan hedonism, that has blindly forgotten all humanistic values and completely alien to all human sciences”.

The tradition of resignation, patience and sacrifice had disappeared. “In effect, Italians no longer wish to give up the convenience and sense of well-being, no matter that it was miserable, that they had attained”. Hurrah to my comfort, death to values!

Even a Church that rallies against these changes will end up collapsing with the death of rural values: “The end of the Church has become inevitable because of the betrayal of millions and millions of the faithful, especially rural people converted to secularism and consumerist hedonism.”

Made up of nihilism, of bovine conformisim and of spiritual and moral nullity, secularism proved to be too tempting, even with a realization of its raging hatred of Christianity and its adoration of everything that serves to replace religion.

Pasolini underlines the contemptuousness of a ‘Christian democracy’ subjugated to the US model, and the contemptuousness of worldly bourgeois Christianity which had recycled itself into ‘the construction of Europe’ and liberal globalization (but, as the apostle says, anger will eventually overcome them).

He writes that the Church after Vatican-II (‘not too cultured’) risked a far from glorious end, and she must do everything in order to avoid this inglorious end, because it would be “most grave to passibly accept her own liquidation”. Which is happening now. [Bergoglio is actively liquidating the one true Church of Christ in favor of setting up his own church, since he seems to think he is ‘wiser and better’ than Jesus was!]

Let me cite my favorite passage from Leon Bloy: "And this procession is contemplated by an immense population, so prodigiously imbecile that one can break their teeth with a hammer and emasculate them with iron pincers, before they realize that they have masters – masters they tolerate, masters they themselves have chosen”. [NB: In his brief homily at the first Mass he celebrated as pope on March 14, 2013, at the Sistine Chapel. Bergoglio cited Bloy’s “Anyone who does not pray to the Lord prays to the devil”.]

Hedonism cares for nothing outside itself (‘Macche sacrificio…’ as Pasolini comments – “What saacrifice...?”) with its primary instrument, television, but it was also well attacked by other cinema masters at the time, like Godard and Fellini: “What sacrifice? What faith? What asceticism?” till we come to “What good sentiments? What good manners?”

His memorable punctuation: “TV was the principal artisan of the victory in the [1974] referendum that legalized divorce in Italy, because the citizenry had been secularized”.

The secularization of the citizenry – that remains. At that time, Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre was also mourning his rural and agricultural ‘church’ (the peasantry), because he thought Marxism itself would not survive an industrial society that has industrialized man himself.

Tolerance was already the dish of the day, among all the bastardized seculars: “The system and hedonism mock saving, foresight, respectability, modesty, reserve – all the good sentiments from yesterday”.

Pasolini concludes that consumerism and hedonism en masse have produced ‘an anthropological revolution’. He was assassinated a few months later.

His film Salo, released after he died, demonstrated the link between libertine liberalism and fascism, via the Marquis de Sade and sexual indiscipline. [Salo was based on De Sade's book The 120 Days of Sodom , and focuses on four wealthy, corrupt Italian libertines during the time of the fascist Republic of Salò (1943-1945) in Italy. The libertines kidnap eighteen teenagers and subject them to four months of extreme violence, sadism, and sexual and mental torture. The film explores the themes of political corruption, abuse of power, sadism, perversion, sexuality and fascism. It was banned in many countries for its explicit scenes of intensely sadistic violence. ]

Once again, I leave it to Mundabor to articulate the outrage I feel, this time reading about the pope saying two days ago that
'God dreams of the transformation of the world" (A parallel construction to his maudlin and false "I dream of a missionary church,
yada, yada yada...' in Evangelii gaudium), to which my initial reaction was to remark"A measure of Bergoglio's hubris is that
he increasingly projects his personality and thinking on God!"

The “dreamer God”
according to a bonkers pope

May 18, 2017

In his catechesis during the General Audience on Wednesday, Pope Francis called God in the grammatical present “a dreamer who dreams about the transformation of the world”. At the same time he claimed that God “has realized the transformation of the world in the mystery of the resurrection.”

This is drunk nonsense even for by the standards of this pope.

God in His Providence has made the world the way the world it is supposed to be made. Whatever sinfulness there is in it, God providentially allowed it in order to make a greater good emerge out of it. God has not created a faulty toy of which He dreams it would work properly. God does not sigh about a perfect world whilst he listens to John Lennon’s “Imagine”.

God is not only Omniscient, but Omnipotent. There is no “dreaming” in Him. There is no separation between what things are and what He would have them to be, if He only could. God has allowed the Fall as He has allowed all the rest, from the Holocaust to… Pope Francis.

The Death and Resurrection of Our Lord, which the man mentions without having any idea of what he is talking about, is exactly the way through which this faulty existence and fallen nature – which will by no means go away - is given the possibility of redemption.

It isn’t the shaping of a new earth. It isn’t a promise of an earth in which hounds and foxes say “good night” to each other before going to sleep. It isn’t the promise of a paradise on earth.

On the contrary, Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life we must follow exactly because of the fundamental flaw we had since birth: Original Sin. The reality of Original Sin is not going to change. Therefore, the reality of evil is not going to go away, either.

The reality of sinfulness due to the Fall has been, once again, allowed by God, with all the consequences and all the sins, all the injustices and all the atrocities from the beginning to the end of time.

Dreams of fundamental transformation of this world are the most obvious indication of lack of faith in the next one.

What we once again see here is an ...... old bloke who never understood jack of anything Catholic and keeps going around spreading sugary nonsense for adolescent cretins like, no doubt, he once was (he is not an adolescent anymore).

There is in him no concept whatsoever of Providence. There is clearly no belief in the Original Sin. Therefore, there is no explanation for the evil in the world. On the contrary, there is this completely bonkers idea of God standing there like a spot-plagued teenager, dreaming of a better world. This is part of the humanisation and banalisation of absolutely everything that has been a trademark of this disgraceful Papacy.

“Imagine” was an openly atheist song. It had to be, as the Christian vision of the world and of the fallen human nature is radically opposed to Lennon’s and Francis’s idea of radical transformation of the human being, and of the possibility of creating a paradise of social justice and harmony on earth, if he only 'behaved'.

There will always be injustice, there will always be conflict, there will always be evil in the world. At the root of the evil is not human laziness, but the serpent.

The reality of the Fall will be part of the human condition for as long as the world exists. All this escapes Francis. He is aligned with John Lennon instead.

Francis is ...clearly either an atheist or a person so confused about God that he thinks Him a sort of Dalai Lama In The Sky, prisoner of all sort of sentimental rubbish.

The ignorance of this man should be an embarrassment to every Catholic. Unfortunately, it seems that around 6000 bishops prefer to keep schtum about it, lest their career should suffer.

I like the subtitle of the German edition: 'Against the dictatorship of noise' - Preface by Benedict XVI.

Sandro Magister provides a clarification on the now-famous 'Afterword' written by Benedict XVI for Cardinal Sarah's second interview-book with
French journalist Nicholas Diat.

Cardinal Sarah has the pope on his side
but his name is Benedict
Adapted from the English service of

May 19, 2017

Cardinal Robert Sarah published his latest bestseller in its original French version without a Preface by Benedict XVI. The subsequent English edition also does not have the Preface. [I am reminded now that at the time the book, La Force du Silence, was first published in France, pre-publication blurbs had indicated it would have a Preface by Benedict XVI, but when the book finally came out, it did not have the Preface. I have to search my files for the pictures that show the change. The publisher never explained their decision.]

But the Preface appears in the just-released German edition, and it will soon be in the Italian edition that Cantagalli will begin to sell at the end of June. The French and English editions will publish it in future reprints as an Afterword.

"With Cardinal Sarah, a master of silence and of interior prayer, the liturgy is in good hands," Benedict XVI concludes in his text, composed during Easter Week 2017.

He writes: "We should be grateful to Pope Francis for appointing such a spiritual teacher as head of the congregation that is responsible for the celebration of the liturgy in the Church."

It is no mystery, however, that Jorge Mario Bergoglio confined Cardinal Sarah to that post in order to neutralize him, certainly not to promote him. In fact he has deprived him of all effective authority, has surrounded him with men who are working against him, and has even disavowed in public his proposals for a “reform of the reform” in the liturgical field.

Proposals that Benedict XVI, however, endorses in full, when in the preface he decries "the dangers that continually threaten the spiritual life, of priests and bishops also, and thus endanger the Church herself, too, in which it is not uncommon for the Word to be replaced by a verbosity that dilutes the greatness of the Word."

[Magister then provides the full text of the Preface/Afterword as published by FIRST THINGS earlier this week.]

Meanwhile, Antonio Socci contributes this information...

Benedict XVI’s ‘Afterword’ to Cardinal Sarah’s
new book provokes great irritation among his critics
Translated from

May 19, 2017]

The attention-getting and beautiful ‘Afterword’ that Benedict XVI has written for a book by Cardinal Robert Sarah, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, is already triggering off an earthquake among those who simply want the Emeritus Pope to shut up.

In fact, one of his detractors refers to him as ‘an emeritus bishop’, clearly rejecting the title Emeritus Pope, going on to write that “It is as if Ratzinger has suddenly renounced his renunciation and now wishes to influence the decisions of his successor”. [Well, ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense!”]

The detractor, a theologian who is obviously very miffed, adds that “Benedict’s move appears even more serious if meanwhile, an inevitable and salutary turnover is being planned for Cardinal Sarah’s present position. It would seem like a defense in extremis (i.e., a last-ditch defense)of a Prefect who has already been divested of authority. [And the theologian's comment sounds like he is telling us Sarah will soon find himself cast out of the Curia like Cardinals Piacenza and Burke before him! Bergoglio probably thinks Cardinal Turkson of Ghana suffices to represent Africa in his Curia.]

He continues: “One thing is sure. As I already indicated a month ago, the interference constituted by a text of this kind on the free exercise of his successor’s authority constitutes a serious interference and an alteration of ecclesiastical equilibrium”.

[My goodness! To praise someone who is not in the good graces of the reigning pope is made out here to be a serious offense. Socci does not identify the writer, but whoever it is, he is saying, in effect, that Benedict XVI in his retirement should not, in general, say anything about the Church, and in particular, not about any of his successor’s officials, in the latter’s good graces or not. As if such a condition was encompassed by Benedict XVI’s voluntary vow on February 28, 2013 of obedience and respect to whoever would succeed him as pope.]

In the light of these extreme reaction against Benedict XVI, I wish to underscore some passages of the text that is the object of protest:

First he cites a reflection by Cardinal Sarah:

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“In my prayer and in my interior life, I have always felt the need for a deeper, more complete silence. … The days of solitude, silence, and absolute fasting have been a great support. They have been an unprecedented grace, a slow purification, and a personal encounter with … God. … Days of solitude, silence, and fasting, nourished by the Word of God alone, allow man to base his life on what is essential.”

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Benedict XVI comments:

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“These lines make visible the source from which the cardinal lives, which gives his word its inner depth. From this vantage point, he can then see the dangers that continually threaten the spiritual life, of priests and bishops also, and thus endanger the Church herself, too, in which it is not uncommon for the Word to be replaced by a verbosity that dilutes the greatness of the Word.

I would like to quote just one sentence that can become an examination of conscience for every bishop: “It can happen that a good, pious priest, once he is raised to the episcopal dignity, quickly falls into mediocrity and a concern for worldly success. Overwhelmed by the weight of the duties that are incumbent on him, worried about his power, his authority, and the material needs of his office, he gradually runs out of steam.”

Cardinal Sarah is a spiritual teacher, who speaks out of the depths of silence with the Lord, out of his interior union with him, and thus really has something to say to each one of us.

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In his analysis below of what Andrea Tornielli has revealed so far of the Ruini report on Medjugorje, Christopher Ferrara exposes the ultimate absurdity of its inconclusive conclusions in a way I failed to see on first reading Tornielli's article because I was thrown off by the first majority verdict that the first seven apparitions in 1981 were, in effect, credible. [NB: I will balance off Ferrara's analysis afterwards with a commentary by Antonio Socci who is an unabashed true believer in Medjugorje.]

This blinded me to what Mundabor points out was the absence of a pronouncement of a unanimous and definitive ‘constat di supernaturalitate’ which would, in effect, certify those apparitions as ‘genuine’ and worthy of acknowledgment by the Church. And if I had considered it further – instead of merely assuming that such a certification would eventually come from the Church through Pope Francis – I would have realized the difficulty inherent in believing one part of the self-proclaimed seers’ tale but not the rest of it which covers the span of time from 1981 to the present.

Of course, I have not checked into whether a commission and/or a Pope is able to ‘certify’ any alleged phenomenon that two successive bishops of the concerned diocese have flatly rejected. According to the article "How the Church Faces Claims of Marian Apparitions" published (February 17, 2011) in The Compass, of Green Bay, Wisconsin,

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The local bishop usually manages the investigatory process, working with the help of a commission of experts such as theologians and medical doctors. The investigation includes questioning of alleged visionaries and witnesses; examining the "fruits of the apparitions" such as conversions and alleged miracles and healings; and evaluating "the veracity of the facts" and "the mental, moral and spiritual wholesomeness and seriousness" of the visionary. Upon completing the investigation, the bishop can either declare the apparition is "true and worthy of belief", declare that it is not true, or seek additional help from the national bishops' conference. If the bishops' conference cannot reach a conclusion, the matter is referred to the Pope, who then calls on the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to either advise or conduct its own investigation”.

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The article was published at the time that Bishop David Ricken of Green Bay, Wisconsin, announced he was recognizing as ‘worthy of belief’ the reported Marian apparitions to Belgian nun Adele Brise in 1859 in nearby Champion. This was the first Marian apparition ever approved in the United States. Bishops before Ricken had encouraged devotions in Champion before 2010 but without making any formal declaration.

One must note that the 1858 apparitions of Mary to Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes were quickly investigated by the Church through a commission established in November of the same year. And on January 18, 1860, less than two years later, the local bishop finally declared that: "The Virgin Mary did appear indeed to Bernadette Soubirous". In January 1862, Pope Pius IX authorized the Bishop to permit the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Lourdes, and in July 1876, the same Pontiff officially granted a Canonical Coronation to the image that was venerated in Lourdes.

In contrast, it was not until October 1930 - 13 years since the last apparition in Fatima - that the local Bishop,following a canonical inquiry, officially declared the visions of Fátima as "worthy of belief".

In the case of Medjugorje, two successive bishops of the diocese where the village is located both declared after the requisite investigations that the alleged phenomena were not supernatural in origin. The bishops did not feel the need to raise the question to the national bishops’ conference. But on March 17, 2010, Benedict XVI took the following initiative:

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An international commission to investigate [the reported phenomena in] Medjugorje has been constituted at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under the presidency of Cardinal Camillo Ruini. This commission, composed of cardinals, bishops, consultants and experts, will work privately and will place the results of the study in the hands of the dicastery.
- Vatican Daily Bulletin, March 17 2010]

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This clearly indicates that the CDF membership would then consider the results of the Ruini commission’s study and vote on it accordingly. Tornielli reports that instead, the pope has asked the CDF members to send their ‘opinion’ (vote) to him directly.

This appears to bypass the CDF itself, starting with its Prefect, Cardinal Mueller, whose reservations about Medjugorje may be gleaned from the fact that although the Ruini report was submitted to the CDF in January 2014, he has not reported out any vote by the full CDF on the report.

It must be emphasized that apparitions, even if ‘certified’ to be supernatural in origin, as those of the ten officially approved Marian apparitions so far (from Guadalupe in the 16th century to recent apparitions in Belgium), are not to be considered an ‘article of faith’ for Catholics, i.e., one is not any less Catholic for failing to believe in any or all such phenomena. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, discussing the Fatima apparitions as a private revelation in his Theological Commentary on the Third Secret in 2000, quoted Cardinal Lambertini, future Benedict XIV, in his treatise which became ‘normative for canonizations and beatifications’:

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“An assent of Catholic faith is not owed to revelations approved in this way; it is not even possible. These revelations seek rather an assent of human faith in keeping with the requirements of prudence, which puts them before us as probable and credible to piety”.

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The Ruini report on Medjugorje:
If only it were a joke
The anti-Fatima ‘apparition’ gains ground
by Christopher A. Ferrara

May 18, 2017

The findings of the long-awaited report from the Ruini Commission (named after its chairman, Cardinal Camillo Ruini), concerning the validity of the so-called Marian apparitions at Medjugorje that have supposedly been going on since 1981, have now been revealed.

The result of the Commission’s labors, which began during the reign of Benedict XVI, is just what one would expect in the post-conciliar epoch: a refusal to state clearly that a proposition concerning the Faith is simply true or false, right or wrong.

This report “splits the difference” between a declaration that the apparitions alleged by the six Medjugorje “seers” are not supernatural in origin and thus a fake, and a declaration — like those pertaining to Fatima — that the apparitions are of supernatural origin and thus worthy of belief. In other words: the apparitions are both true and false, depending on which ones you examine! If only it were a joke.

Catholic News Agency provides an overview of this preposterous approach: the first seven “apparitions,” allegedly occurring between June 24 and July 3, 1981, drew “13 votes in favor of recognizing the supernatural nature of the first visions. A member voted against and an expert expressed a suspensive vote….” [The lack of unanimity appears to be key here against a definitive ‘constat di supernaturalitate’.]

What about the thousands of apparitions thereafter, which allegedly continue to this day at pre-announced times even though the “visionaries” said they would end, and which are filled with repetition, banalities and statements by “the Virgin” positively contrary to the Faith? For example, in one apparition “the Virgin” states: “Before God all the faiths are identical. God governs them like a king in his kingdom.”

Here the Commission adopted an utterly absurd two-step analysis that allowed it to avoid declaring the whole Medjugorje event a fake:
“On this second stage, the committee voted in two steps. Firstly, taking into account the spiritual fruits of Medjugorje but leaving aside the behaviors of the seers. On this point, 3 members and 3 experts say there are positive outcomes, 4 members and 3 experts say they are mixed, with a majority of positive effects, and the remaining 3 experts claim there are mixed positive and negative effects.

If, in addition to the spiritual fruits, the behaviors of the seers is also taken into account, eight members and four experts believe that an opinion cannot be expressed, while two other members have voted against the supernatural nature of the phenomenon.”

So, when the analysis considers the behavior of the “visionaries,” the credibility of their supposed visions diminishes and no consensus even on “good fruits” emerges, although only two commission members are willing to state outright the obvious conclusion that the apparitions are not supernatural and thus are fakes. Yet these same “visionaries” are deemed credible respecting the first seven apparitions by 13 members of this commission of hair-splitters.

In essence, the Commission (except for two members) has decided that the “visionaries” were telling the truth regarding the first seven “apparitions” but that, since then, they have been conducting the longest running fraud in the history of Marian apparitions, concerning which the Commission labors to avoid expressing the truth openly. And these six fraudsters are supposedly the chosen messengers of the Mother of God.

If only it were a joke. Well, it is a joke, but the Vatican is evidently going to take this report seriously despite the objections expressed by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which will be ignored just as surely as they were ignored on Amoris Laetitia.

As Pope Bergoglio remarked concerning the Commission’s “split-decision” during the return flight to Rome after his visit to Fatima: “At the end of 2013 or the beginning of 2014, I received the results from Cardinal Ruini. The commission was made up of good theologians, bishops and cardinals. Good, good, good people. The Ruini report is very, very good.”

What is “very, very good” according to Pope Bergoglio is the Commission’s bogus distinction between “the first apparitions, “when [the ‘seers’] were young” and “the alleged current apparitions” in which the Virgin is depicted as “a telegraph operator who sends out a message every day at a certain time… this is not the mother of Jesus.” Indeed, it is not. Nor could it have been in 1981, for the Mother of God would not appear to people whom She would certainly foresee would perpetrate a decades-long fraud on the Church and the world in Her name.

Curiously, the same Pope Bergoglio who belittles what he views as the hairsplitting of theologians on matters as fundamental as the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist, suddenly finds merit in the hairsplitting of this absurd theological commission respecting the manifest fakery of the Medjugorje apparitions. [Ferrara's opinion - opposed by some Catholic writers like Socci and Tornielli himself who believe in Medjugorje. I cannot think offhand of any Anglophone Catholic writer who has done the same.] But then Pope Bergoglio has never failed to be consistent in his inconsistency. [Ferrara is presuming that Bergoglio has the power – does he? – to ‘certify’ Medjugorje without the participation of the CDF and merely on the basis of non-unanimous conclusions by the investigative commission.]

And so, the ‘anti-Fatima’ phenomenon in Medjugorje gains ground, while the Message of Fatima is reduced by the Pope himself to a prescription for social justice and peace among people of all religions or no religion at all.

What an insult to the Virgin Mother of God, Whose warning to the Church and all of humanity at Fatima continues to be spurned by the blind guides of the upper hierarchy, who march triumphantly toward the edge of the abyss into which they would lead the rest of us.



Antonio Socci is a confirmed believer in the Medjugorje apparitions and in the ‘seers’. He not only wrote a book in 2005 to document his convictions and personal investigations, but also called on one of the ‘seers’ to the bedside of his daughter Caterina in 2009 after she suffered what was thought to be a fatal cardiac arrest at age 24, two weeks before she was to defend her graduation thesis for a degree in architecture. She revived - miraculously, Socci believes, and on that basis, wrote a book on near-death experiences - but remained in a state of coma for about four years. Since then, from what I can gather, she has apparently resumed a ‘normal’ life - wheelchair-bound and unable to speak, but able to understand what goes on around her and going out with family and friends.

His article below is colored as much by his personal belief, as Ferrara’s is colored by his disbelief in Medjugorje. One of Socci's standard lines to support his belief in Medjugorje are statements attributed to John Paul II not necessarily acknowledging the apparitions but the fact that it has become a center of spirituality for many, and that if he were not pope, he would have visited Medjugorje.

For all that, however, his reaction to Bergoglio's statements on Medjugorje is relatively low-key because he only asks that the Vatican make a definitive statement now on the Medjugorje phenomenon rather than evading the issue by passing it off as primarily a pastoral problem.

How Bergoglio messed up
his strategy on Medjugorje
Apparently, he intended to soft-pedal his personal opinions
and avoid alienating Medjugorje believers but has he blown it?
Translated from

May 16, 2017

Alberto Melloni, who with Stefania Falasca is one of the standards of intellectual reference of Bergoglianism, wrote an article on Saturday, May 13, that was destined to be published in La Repubblica the following day, Sunday, with the title ‘Fatima secondo Francesco’ (Fatima according to Pope Francis).

He must have sent it before Saturday evening because even as it was published on Page 1 as intended, Papa Bergoglio belied him that very same day.

Melloni had written:

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“On the apparitions in Medjugorje, there are those who would distinguish between the first apparitions and everything subsequent (supposedly having gone on daily since 1981 to the present), but the pope knows very well that some are hoping he will say NO to the apparitions so that he will confront not just four cardinals full of DUBIA but the people [all who believe in Medjugorje]”.

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It was as if Melloni was telling us that Bergoglio would never fall into such a ‘trap’. But the pope did. Because Saturday evening, on the flight returning to Rome from Fatima, the Argentine pope ‘carpet-bombed’ Medjugorje on the heels of having carpet-bombed Fatima.

In recent months, Bergoglio had made known his ‘disapproval’ of Marian apparitions in general, but particularly those claimed in Medjugorje (apparently, he is not happy about a Madonna more popular than he is), but one also sensed that, for someone who is always and only aiming for ‘consensus’, he would never say anything that would antagonize the people who do believe in Medjugorje. A political tactic of Macchiavellian cunning.

At least, that was the hypothesis of careful observers. And Melloni confirmed it in his article: Bergoglio, we are told, following the compass of consensus and popular success, would never express his contemptuous aversion to the apparitions of one he called (in the inflight newscon) ‘a mailcarrier Madonna’ in order not to set himself up against ‘the people’.

It was a well-considered strategy. Except that, on the plane, he was asked about the commission report on Medjugorje. We cannot tell if Bergoglio simply could not restrain himself, or (unknown to Melloni) had changed his strategy: The fact is he gave free rein to all his opposition to the daily apparitions and messages of Medjugorje.

Thus he blabbed on about something that up till then had been kept strictly under wraps and which should have stayed so [until the Church was ready to give a definitive ruling on the matter], and personally undertook a resounding putdown of the Medjugorje apparitions which hit its devotees like a bomb.

And this is the news he broke: The Ruini Commission, named by Benedict XVI, had done ‘a very good job’ and had concluded that “the first (seven) apparitions made to the ‘seers’ when they were children, must continue to be investigated”. He did not say that those first apparitions were authentic but that they provided material for further investigation.

Meanwhile, he continued:

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About the presumed apparitions which continue to this day, the Ruini commission has its doubts. Personally, I am more negative. I prefer Our Lady as a mother, our mother, not the postmaster of a telegraph office which sends out a message everyday at such and such a time – that is not the Mother of Jesus. So these latter apparitions do not have much value. I say this as a personal opinion. Who would think that Our Lady would say, ‘Come tomorrow at this hour because then I will give a message to so-and-so (among the seers)’? No!

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In short, it was a drastic but laughable demolition. But there is the fact that in Medjugorje, so many have been converted [in the sense of changing their lives for the better], and miracles have happened which however Bergoglio chooses to ignore. Instead, he says that the Church needs to organize for proper pastoral care of pilgrims to Medjugorje.

The day before, he had relativized even the Shrine in Fatima, saying that God can be found everywhere and that it is not necessary to visit places where apparitions, true or alleged, have occurred.

But one already understands that the ‘new’ pastoral ministry for Medjugorje will brush aside [Not necessarily!] the subject of the apparitions and the messagesthat Bergoglio has referred to with unusual sarcasm.

Indeed, one gathers from Melloni’s article that Bergoglio is working on an encyclical on ‘popular religiosity’ which, in general, would “normalize’ and direct the popular devotions of Catholics along the canons of Bergoglianism.

Bergoglia and the modernist establishment now in power in the Vatican despise ‘popular religiosity’ which was loved by John Paul II [Socci omits to mention Benedict XVI, whose homegrown Catholicism embraces a deeply-rooted Bavarian folk piety exemplified by his family’s devotion to Our Lady of Altoetting] and detest the subject of apparitions.

In Fatima, Bergoglio made no references at all to hell, to the prophecy on atheistic communuism, to the persecution of Christians, to heresy, and to the need for penitence and conversion. These are presumably “too Catholic” for a pope who says “A Catholic God does not exist”. [i.e., too Catholic for a pope who is plainly and simply anti-Catholic! Why does even someone like Socci keep beating around the Bergoglian bush of apostasy here?]

The progressivist establishment [in the church of Bergoglio] detest the people’s faith in the supernatural where, in Lourdes for instance [not just in Lourdes, obviously!], the faithful ask for ‘graces’ (the scoffers call this ‘miraculism’ or downright superstition).

But it is the Catholics who go to shrines who still count most in the Catholic Church, they are the ones who fill parishes and town squares, who contribute the otto-per-mille church tax and Peter’s Pence. And so whoever leads the Church cannot afford to lose them.

Thus, the Bergoglian encyclical will seek to ‘normalize’ popular devotion by doing away with prophecies, miracles and themes like the persecution of Christians, sin and penitence and Hell, and everything that modernism detests.

Nonetheless, Bergoglio’s inflight assault on Medjugorje has disconcerted those who believe in Medjugorje. Especially since, the day before, in Fatima, he all but ridiculed the message of Our Lady as reported by Suor Lucia and turned it on its head.

And although some Bergoglianist firemen acted swiftly to minimize the effects of the pope’s words and put out any fires, by feigning that there was nothing problematic at all with what he said, the faithful who believe in Medjugorje quickly realized the weight and impact of Bergoglio’s words. They understand that any devotion to Our Lady of Medjugorje would not be compatible with adherence to Bergoglianism. [Not necessarily!]

But there is supposed to be one message – the only one in four years – in which, according to one of the presumed seers, Our Lady used words of great esteem and approval for ‘the Holy Father’, not named, in August 2014.

Great doubts have been expressed about this message if only for the words used, but some Medjugorje believers who are also Bergoglio fans, ignore these doubts and quickly used the message as a weapon to counter those who criticize Bergoglio in any way, saying the message proves that Our Lady is a great admirer of this pope.

[I find Socci's statements in the preceding two paragraphs incompatible with his stated belief in the 'seers' and the messages they claim to be getting from Mary. Other skeptics about Medjugorje have identified numerous 'messages' over the past 36 years which contradict the Catholic faith.]

But on the plane returning from Fatima, Bergoglio said in effect that he does not believe either in the apparitions nor in the messages, dismissing a ‘mail-carrier Madonna who cannot be the mother of Jesus’. In which, tehefore, he also dismisses the supposedly laudatory message about him.

The chickens have come home to roost. One cannot be both a fan or Bergoglio and a devotee of Medjugorje.

Moreover, at this point – after Bergoglio’s impromptu indiscretions inflight – the Church should now make a definitive declaration on the authenticity of the Marian apparitions in Medjugorje. It cannot elude this thorny problem by feigning that it all comes to merely organizing the pastoral ministry for pilgrims coming to Medjugorje.

Not to do so would make Medjugorje nothing more than a cunning trick unworthy of the holiness of the Church and of Marian apparitions, in general.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/05/2017 03:13]

An escalating rhetoric of demoniacal hatred -
Bergoglian 'mercy' does not apply to anyone who disagrees

Sorry for having been unable to continue posting yesterday - when the following was what I would have posted next, as it is a conjunction
of intemperate eruptions from this pope and his paladins against anyone who does not agree with them (or whom they simply dislike,
as in the case of the vituperation against Benedict XVI for writing a simple Afterword in praise of Cardinal Sarah). The degree of aggression
in these eruptions indicates escalating totalitarianism in this pontificate...

To explain the place names in Tosatti's title, Fumone is the castle in the Naples area where Celestine V was imprisoned by his successor
and where he died, and the Campo de' Fiori is the famous Roman piazza where Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600.

To Bergoglio and his hate brigade:
Why not just send Ratzinger to Fumone
and Burke to the Campo dei Fiori?
Translated from

May 19, 2017

Reading three news reports yesterday made me think that some people are jumpy with nerves. [All three episodes sound more to me like 'arrogant with power', but it may all be whistling in the dark to keep up their own spirits!] And that we are entering a dangerous phase of involution of the type “Off with the head of whoever disagrees with the chief”. It is an unprecedented populist degeneration of the modern Church. I sincerely hope I am wrong, but there are signs which are anything but tranquillizing.

The crux, as I understand it, still consists of the lack of a response – after a distance of eight months – to the five questions addressed to this pope by four cardinals on the most controversial points in his apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia. Questions presented in a spirit of obedience, following a classic procedure in the Church, namely to ask the pope and the Conrgegation for the Doctrine of the Faith, for clarification on doctrinal matters.

Two months after the letter was sent, the cardinals, having learned that the pope had no intention of answering them, made the letter public. Because the questions concern all Catholics, and substantially, they can be reduced to one: Is it licit to receive Communion when one is in a state of mortal sin and without amending the behavior that constitutes that sin?

We do not know why the pope does not wish to answer. [Oh yes, we do – he has Hobson’s choice: He’s screwed whether he answers correctly as against whether he answers honestly.] I seem to recall that a fellow Jesuit close to him said the reason was that the questions were ideological. That doesn’t wash.

It is the task of authority to clarify what it thinks – by doing so, to make evident if the question is useless or on the mark. In the Church, in particular, is a person in authority fulfilling his duty if he does not answer a request for clarity?

Yet instead of answers, endless attacks have been unleased against the four cardinals and whoever else may share their ‘perplexity’. [It’s time newsmen and commentators got rid of this euphemism to describe the stunned disbelief one must continually experience in regard to this pope’s anti-Catholic statements and actions. No objective observer can possibly be perplexed at all because his intentions – borne out by actions and words – have been very clear from the beginning: to dismantle the Church he was elected to lead while building his very own ’church of Bergoglio’ over the rubble of his wreckovation.]

We do not want to believe, as we have been told, that the pope has encouraged or given free rein to his followers in their extreme reactions. Right now,the only one of the Four Cardinals who still has any semblance of official position in the Church – Cardinal Raymond Burke, still nominally Patron of the Order of Malta – is in the field of fire. (We have written enough about the disgraceful Vatican machinations to interfere actively in the internal governance of a sovereign state.) It is Cardinal Burke’s parrhesia – free, frank and direct articulation of his positions – that has most bothered the Vatican.

So we come to the first of the three news reports I refer to: the disconcerting [ad hominem] attack against Burke by Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, conduct most unbecoming and without precedent.

In an interview-book with his fellow Salesian Fr. Antonio Carriero entitled “Solo il Vangelo è rivoluzionario” (Only the Gospel is revolutionary), Maradiaga writes in the Preface about Burke and the DUBIA:

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“That cardinal is a deluded man insofar as he wanted power and has lost it. He thought himself to be the maximum [ecclesial] authority in the United States… He is not the Magisterium. The Holy Father is – it is he who teaches the whole Church. The other [Burke] merely states his personal opinion and does not deserve to be commented on. These are the words of a miserable person”.

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[Words cannot express how contemptible Maradiaga is for writing those lines, most of which is just wrong. To begin with, bishops are a source of magisterium as the pope is. And if an ordinary bishop's authority may be considered less 'consequential' than that of the Bishop of Rome, an ordinary bishop's teaching that reaffirms the deposit of faith as we have always known it is far more important than that of a pope who is deliberately equivocal and sows confusion in his 'teaching'.]

But the point is precisely this: Burke and his fellow cardinals are asking for a clarification of the magisterium purported by the pope, but this is denied to them. For Maradiaga, however, a major supporter of Bergoglio, this is an insignificant matter. For him, it is merely taking issue with a generic, ill-defined ‘Catholic right’ which

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“only wants power not the truth. If they claim to find any ‘heresy’, [the Four Cardinals have prudently and judiciously avoided using that word] in Pope Francis’s words, they are grossly mistaken because they are only thinking like men, and not as the Lord wills”. [And Bergoglio is not thinking ‘only as a man’? On the contrary, it is he who would impose his personal opinions, his personal thoughts, as the teaching of the Church, no matter how grossly they contradict or at the very least confuse what the Church has always taught before him.]

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The virulence of Maradiaga’s words is striking. So where in all this are dialog and mercy, which are his master’s favorite buzzwords?

We come to the second report, in which the protagonist is one Andrea Grillo, a lay theologian of St. Anselm’s, the Benedictine monastery in Rome. Grillo, we are told, is in the commission that has never been officially announced and which was named - without the knowledge of the Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship who should have been the first to know – to study whether and how to devise a mass at which Catholics and Protestants could worship jointly. Which poses not a minor problem since Protestants thinks very differently about the Eucharist and Communion. [For starters, they do not believe in Trans-Substantiation, and so for them, the Communion wafer or bread is nothing more than what it appears, and the Eucharist is not ‘truly the Body and Blood of Christ”.]

The CDW Prefect, Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea, was named to this post by Bergoglio from being president of Cor Unum (the Vatican dicastery that oversees Catholic charities worldwide) preparatory to undertaking structural and administrative reforms in the Roman Curia. In an Afterword to a new book by Cardinal Sarah, Benedict XVI wrote that “with Cardinal Sarah, the liturgy is in good hands”. Which is far from scandalous, except for those who detest Sarah [and traditional liturgy].

This Grillo, whom I do not personally know, went into a verbal fit.

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“One must consider well the singularity of the situation. A pope renounces the exercise of his Petrine ministry. The succession process takes place and his successor is elected. Normally, this happens because of a pope’s death. But when the reason is his ‘resignation’, it opens the institution of the Papacy to the delicate issue of a conflict of authority”. [And why is Grillo suddenly coming out with all this four years and two months after the event? Or, unknown to me, has he been perhaps habitually contemptuous of Benedict XVI?] Which ought to have been overcome by the infliction of silence on the resigned pope. Who cites St. Ignatius of Antioch who said “It is better to remain in silence…” in the words with which he exalts Cardinal Sarah. [St Ignatius was referring to silence in one’s relationship to God, not to 'remaining in silence' in general – otherwise Ignatius ought never to have written or preached anything!]

If not only does he speak but exalts a Prefect who has created continuous embarrassments for the Church and his successor [the new pope], a dangerous conflict opens, which would require more prudent behavior and more responsible words [from the retired Pope]. Provisions must be made in the future for norms that will regulate in a clear and certain way the ‘institutional death’ of a retired pope and the full authority of his successor”. After more unpleasant words disrespectful to Benedict XVI, Grillo says:
“There cannot be a ‘cohabitation’. This has now become very clear. Just as it is evident that, other than the place of residence, wearing white garments and talkativeness should be regulated in detail. The emeritus bishop must distance himself from the Vatican [i.e., leave the Vatican] and shut up for good. Only under these conditions can a true ‘succession’ be configured… The supposed intentions of discretion and humility have clearly been violated in a manner that is almost scandalous.

And I find it truly disconcerting that the emeritus bishop of Rome should thank Francis for a nomination which he knows he contributed heavily to make possible. [He did???] I find this the most serious fact, a sign of clericalism and, I would even say, of hypocrisy”.

---

The solution I would propose is to send Benedict XVI to Fumone, the castle in the Naples area where Celestine V ended his days as a prisoner of his successor. But joking aside, what is scandalous is the climate of aggression shown by the advocates of the ‘new course’ (the Bergoglian course) who exhibit a great deal of spite about which someone at Casa Santa Marta should be concerned.

Finally, the third news report concerns the words of Bergoglio in his morning homilette about the problem of pagans (Gentiles) who wished to become Christian and the discussions among the apostles about this.

---

“The group of apostles who wished to discuss the problem and the others who were creating the problem – they divided the Church, the latter saying that what the apostles preached was not what Jesus said, that they were not preaching the truth”.

---

Then, the apostles come to an agreement that Gentiles may become Christians without having to be circumcised. And Bergoglio says,

---

“It is a duty of the Church to clarify doctrine (Tosatti's comment: Really??? What about the DUBIA then?) in order to better understand what Jesus said in the Gospels, what the spirit of the Gospels is…

But there have always been those people who, without any official position, stir up the Christian community with discourses that upset the faithful – ‘No, he who said such-and-such is a heretic, he cannot say what he says, no, because this is the doctrine of the Church…’ They are fanatics about things that are not clear, fanatics who go about sowing weeds to divide the Christian community. And this is the problem: When the doctrine of the Church, that which comes from the Gospel, that which is inspired by the Holy Spirit – after all, Jesus said, ‘He [the Spirit’ will teach you and remind you of all that I have taught you’ – becomes ideology. This is the great mistake of such persons”. [Excuse me, who is it who has been casting everything he says and preaches in a most ideological way - unabashedly with 'the world' in his secular causes and increasingly anti-Catholic in his 'religious' statements? Typically Bergoglio to see the mote in everyone else's eye while being blinded to truth and reality by the beam of hubristic certainty obscuring the eyes of his mind and heart!]

---

Question: In which of the two groups would you classify Maradiaga and Grillo? And if the pope says that ‘fanatics speculate on things which are not clear’, then why does he not clarify his own ‘teachings’, when asked, and thus cut off ambiguity at the root?

A Crux article has more quotations from Maradiaga's despicable Preface. I think the article should be entitled 'A tale of two Prefaces - one un-Christian, the other Christian'.

Maradiaga bashes Burke
as Benedict lauds Sarah

May 19, 2017

While the coordinator of the pope's 'C9' council of cardinal advisers has dismissed American Cardinal Raymond Burke as a 'disappointed man... upset with his loss of power', emeritus Pope Benedict XVI has defended Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea as someone with whom the Church's liturgy is in "good hands."

Two prominent and sometimes controversial cardinals, both seen as conservatives, recently have drawn stinging criticism in one case and a stirring defense in another, and both have come from extremely high-ranking sources.

American Cardinal Raymond Burke was recently dismissed as a “disappointed man” upset over the loss of his power by fellow Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras, coordinator of Pope Francis’s “C9” council of cardinal advisers.

Meanwhile, Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea, head of the Vatican’s liturgy department, was praised by Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI as someone with whom the liturgy is in “good hands.”

Maradiaga’s comments on Burke came in a new interview book with his fellow Salesian, Father Antonio Carriero, titled Solo il Vangelo è rivoluzionario, published in Italy by Piemme.

Burke, who was removed by Pope Francis in November 2014 as head of the Vatican’s supreme court, is widely seen as the leader of the conservative opposition to the pontiff’s document on the family Amoris Laetitia and its cautious [INCAUTIOUS!] opening to Communion for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics.

He was among four cardinals who submitted a set of questions, called dubia, to Francis, seeking to dispel what they described as “grave disorientation and great confusion” created by the document.

In the new interview, Maradiaga comes out swinging. [Maradiaga's remarks are just so juvenile in their absurdity and falsehood that they are self-condemnatory.]

“That cardinal who sustains this,” Maradiaga said, referring to the criticism ofAmoris, “is a disappointed man, in that he wanted power and lost it. He thought he was the maximum authority in the United States.

“He’s not the magisterium,” Maradiaga said, referring to the authority to issue official teaching. “The Holy Father is the magisterium, and he’s the one who teaches the whole Church. This other [person] speaks only his own thoughts, which don’t merit further comment.

“They are the words,” Maradiaga said, “of a poor man.”

Maradiaga also criticized conservative schools of thought in Catholicism, of which Burke is often seen as a symbol.

“These currents of the Catholic right are persons who seek power and not the truth, and the truth is one,” he said. “If they claim to find some ‘heresy’ in the words of Francis, they’re making a big mistake, because they’re thinking only like men and not as the Lord wants.
“What sense does it have to publish writings against the pope, which don’t damage him but ordinary people? What does a right-wing closed on certain points accomplish? Nothing!

“Ordinary people are with the pope, this is completely clear,” Maradiaga said. “I see that everywhere. Those who are proud, arrogant, who believe they have a superior intellect … poor people! Pride is also a form of poverty,” he said.

“The greatest problem, however, is the disorientation that’s created among people when they read affirmations of bishops and cardinals against the Holy Father,” he said.

Maradiaga called his fellow cardinals to loyalty. “I think that one of the qualities we cardinals [should have] is loyalty,” he said. “Even if we don’t all think the same way, we still have to be loyal to Peter.” [No loyalty is owed to anyone who preaches anti-Catholic doctrine and practice, especially if the one who does so is the man supposed to be the primary defender of the faith, in dereliction of his primary duty 'to confirm his brethren in the faith'!]

Whoever doesn’t offer that loyalty, he said, “is just seeking attention.”

While such public clashes between cardinals are rare, they’re not unprecedented.

During the Benedict years, for instance, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna publicly suggested that Italian Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who served as Secretary of State under St. John Paul II, had blocked an investigation of sex abuse charges against Schönborn’s predecessor, Cardinal Hans Hermann Gröer.

In that instance, Benedict called in both cardinals for a fence-mending session, among other things reminding them that “when accusations are made against a cardinal, competency falls exclusively to the pope.”

Maradiaga also appeared to suggest that Burke may have been disappointed in the outcome of the conclave of March 2013 that elected Francis.

“The papal candidates others wanted remained in place, while the one the Lord wanted is the one who was elected,” he said, “so the dissent is logical and understandable, [because] we can’t all think the same way. However,it’s Peter who leads the Church, and therefore, if we have faith, we must respect the choices and the style of the pope who came from the end of the earth.”

This is not the first time Maradiaga has attacked a fellow cardinal seen as being a conservative.

In 2014, he called on the head of the Vatican’s doctrine office, German Cardinal Gerhard Müller, to “be a bit more flexible” during an interview with Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger, a German newspaper.

Maradiaga said Müller “see things in black-and-white terms,” adding that “the world isn’t like that, my brother.” Maradiaga also accused the German cardinal of only listening to his group of advisors, not hearing “other voices.” [Hear, hear! From the prime paladin of a pope who refuses absolutely to 'hear other voices' not his own!]

Sarah, meanwhile, who was appointed by Francis as Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments in November 2014, has drawn fire in more progressive quarters for his fairly traditional views on the Church’s worship.

In April, for instance, Sarah gave a talk on the 10th anniversary of Benedict’s document Summorum Pontificum, authorizing regular celebration of the older Latin Mass, in which Sarah spoke of a “serious, profound crisis” in the Church caused in part by liturgical changes after the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s.

“Even today, a significant number of Church leaders underestimate the serious crisis that the Church is going through,” Sarah said, including “relativism in doctrinal, moral and disciplinary teaching, grave abuses, the desacralization and trivialization of the Sacred Liturgy, [and] a merely social and horizontal view of the Church’s mission.”

One liberal commentator derided Sarah for nostalgia for a bypassed “golden age.”

Yet in a new afterword to a book by Sarah, Benedict XVI says the liturgy is in “good hands” with the Guinean cardinal, and praises Sarah for his prayer life.

Sarah, Benedict writes, speaks “out of the depths of silence with the Lord, out of his interior union with him, and thus really has something to say to each one of us.

“We should be grateful to Pope Francis for appointing such a spiritual teacher as head of the congregation that is responsible for the celebration of the liturgy in the Church,” Benedict writes.

The afterword’s last line is, “With Cardinal Sarah, a master of silence and of interior prayer, the liturgy is in good hands.”

The book is The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, published by Ignatius Press in translation from the original French edition.

Benedict’s vote of confidence is all the more striking given that when he resigned the papacy in February 2013, Benedict vowed to remain “hidden from the world,” and has rarely broken his silence since. The fact that he chose to do so now, many observers believe, reflects both his passion for the liturgy and also his support for Sarah. [And may he speak out more and more with his characteristic firmness in articulating his views in a tone that is gentle and unthreatening. This Grillo crackpot is pathologically paranoid and crazed or quite simply, malevolent, to have reacted the way he did to Benedict's praise of Cardinal Sarah.]

Riccardo Cascioli takes his shot at Grillo. His title, Il Grillo Sparlante is a play on the name of the character the Talking Cricket (Grillo Parlante) in Pinocchio....

The foul-mouthed cricket confirms
the Vatican's anti-Sarah plot
by Riccardo Cascioli
Translated from

May 20, 2017

If anyone doubts the significance of Benedict XVI’s Afterword to Cardinal Sarah’s book on silence, statements by one of the reigning pontiff’s brownshirts should dispel any doubt.

Andrea Grillo, a lecturer at the Sant’Anselmo Pontifical Atheneum and reputed ‘liturgist and theologian’, who is very much 'appreciated' at Casa Santa Marta, has vented himself with unprecedented violence against Cardinal Sarah – whom he calls ‘incompetent’ and ‘inadequate’ – and against Benedict XVI, whom Grillo never refers to as other than Ratzinger or ‘emeritus bishop’, one he calls the cause for the 'error' made by Pope Francis in making Sarah the Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship.

Grillo is one of the key figures working apart from and behind the back of Cardinal Sarah at the Congregation for Divine Worship, on orders of the pope himself, to proceed to make changes which will contradict the ‘reform of the liturgical reform’ that Benedict XVI had begun and that Cardinal Sarah has wished to pursue.

Grillo is also a member of the commission – which excludes Cardinal Sarah – which has been tasked with the much discussed and disputed revision of liturgical texts in open contradiction of the instructions in Liturgia Authenticam. This is a crucial question which, as we have explained in other articles, threatens to change the very content of the faith.

But this is not the only issue now declared open by this pope in terms of liturgy. Also pending are a stepping back from Summorum Pontificum [apparently the plan is to allow the traditional Mass only to the FSSPX and an abolition of the concept that it is the Extrao5rdinary Form of the Roman Rite], the motu proprio by which Benedict XVI restored the traditional Mass to full legality in the Church today, and the study towards devising an ‘ecumenical mass’ to allow a common Eucharistic celebration with Lutherans.

This is a true and proper ‘revolution’ in the liturgy, and Cardinal Sarah is the last remaining obstacle for its full realization. This is the context in which Benedict XVI, in his discreet and gentle way, wishes once again to underscore the true significance of meaningful liturgy in the life of the Church and to express public support for the beleaguered Cardinal Sarah.

It is a kind of spiritual testament which evidently grated on the nerves of those who wish to consolidate in great haste the founding principles of the ‘new church’ of Bergoglio, and it is clear that Grillo is not speaking only for himself. Thus he dares come out in the open and refers to Cardinal Sarah’s appointment as CDW Prefect to have been ‘an error’, a decision made by Pope Francis in 2014 who, Grillo claims, made the mistake of ‘listening to the opinion of his predecessor’.

[Who forced him to do that, if he really did not agree? But Grillo is being revisionist. Bergoglio removed Sarah from Cor Unum so he could have nothing to do with Bergoglio's idea of charitable work by the Church and Catholic organizations divorced from Catholic identity and principles, while at CDW, he presumably would be unable to do anything without the express approval of the Pope. But Bergoglio could not just cast him off the Curia as he did with Cardinal Burke later, because Sarah is one of only two ranking Africans in the Bergoglio Curia. The other, Cardinal Turkson, is firmly in Bergoglio's pocket and is his leading surrogate on so-called social issues.]

Grillo adds that, moreover, “Sarah has shown, for years, a substantial inadequacy and incompetence in liturgical matters. His harebrained theories and his rigidity have impeded the Congregation from carrying out its regular work”.

As for Benedict XVI, Grillo says, writing the Afterword amounts to ‘a renunciation of his renunciation’, ‘a serious interference resulting in an alteration of ecclesial equilibrium'.

Here is yet another confirmation of what we have been writing for some time and which till now, has been denied officially: that Benedict XVI's gesture, in the eyes of Grillo and the Bergoglian courtisans, "is so much more serious considering that meanwhile, an inevitable and healthy turnover in the office of the Prefect at CDW is being prepared". [The Afterword] appears like a last-ditch defense by Benedict XVI of a Prefect who has been almost completely deprived of authority".

Grillo's attack has surprised up to a ertain point those who have been following attentively what is taking place in the Bergoglio Vatican, because the objectives of the attack and the violence of Grillo's language - which will certainly not detract from his prestige in the Bergoglio court - have reached the level now reached by the select ranks of Bergoglian avantgardists and aspiring revolutionaries. And it is not an isolated case.

These days, a book-length interview with Cardinal Pscar Rodrigquez Maradiaga of Honduras has appeared, in which the coordinator of Bergoglio's Crown Council of cardinal-advisers attacks in no uncertain terms Cardinal Raymond Burke for the DUBIA, calling him "a disappointed man... who wanted power and has lost it" , an accusation which obviously extends to the three other cardinals of the DUBIA.

But about Burke specifically, Maradiaga claims "his thinking does not deserve any comment. They are the words of a miserable person" [the term he used in Italian was 'povero uomo', literally 'poor man', but 'miserable person' is the more appropriate translation.]

Even if we have by now become used to Maradiaga's verbal excesses, intended to discredit other churchmen who are concerned about the Protestantizing drift in the church of Bergoglio, these sarcastic and contemptuous words are unprecedented. But from all appearances. we are just at the beginning...

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/05/2017 00:10]

May 21, 2017 headlines

PewSitter


Canon212.com


I am lighting a candle so that Canon212 gives up this absurd 'Francis-this' 'Francis-that' tags. OK already, what's wrong with a simple
headline like 'FIVE NEW CARDINALS FOR THE CHURCH OF BERGOGLIO'? Which, BTW, is not a 'faithless church' per se - its faith is Bergoglianism -
but rather, quite specifically, 'an anti-Catholic church'.

I have not posted anything lately on the seemingly imminent reconciliation of the FSSPX with Rome - or perhaps, better said, its
rapprochement with the church of Bergoglio, because I am not sure whether it is the Church of Rome that Mons. Fellay and company will
end up 'coming home' to. For this reason, I have come to dread this apparent imminence.

In the following essay, Mundabor, an unabashed traditionalist though not an FSSPX member, presents a linearly logical analysis of his
fears in this regard. Mons. Fellay's recent statements indicate he is willing to acquiesce to the price that the church of Bergoglio is
demanding for the Lefebvrians to be 'accepted back within the fold'. Which fold is the problem - the sheepfold of the one true Church of
Christ, or the wolves-in-sheepskin fold of the church of Bergoglio?

FSSPX: What is going horribly wrong

MAY 22, 2017

Please follow this link
http://www.ecclesiamilitans.
com/primary_sources_for_studying_the_crisis_in_the_sspx_2012.pdf

It's a 38-page booklet prepared by the FSSPX in 2014.
and, among the documents therein contained, isolate and read (at least) these:
1. The one dated 7 April 2012 (Three Bishops to General Council).
2. The one dated 14 April 2012( General Council to Three Bishops) .

I have – not for the first time – read both documents, and found myself – not for the first time – in full agreement with Fellay & Co.

However, I point out to the following. I will present this as a series of short points in an effort to make my thought linear and easy to digest in short pills. What I lose in prose I hope to gain in clarity and brevity.

1. You could have said that Ratzinger was sincerely interested in healing the rift with the FSSPX. You cannot say that Bergoglio is sincerely interested in anything Catholic, at all.

2. This being the situation, mistrust toward any overture from the Vatican is more justified, and must be taken more seriously, than this was the case in 2012.

3. There can be no doubt that every agreement - any agreement at all which leads to a big fracture within the FSSPX - is not worth pursuing, as it is far more important that the FSSPX remains a visible instrument of help to faithful Catholics in a time of crisis; a crisis which we see becoming deeper and deeper.

4. From what I can see up to now, the Vatican has laid no obvious traps. The independence of the Order is not threatened. The Order will maintain its own autonomy. The agreement seems to be no – legal – Trojan Horse.

5. However, Bishop Fellay's interview (about which I wrote yesterday)
https://mundabor.wordpress.com/2017/05/21/what-is-wrong-with-bishop-fellay/
indicates that a different price is being requested: the softening of tones against the Church of Vatican II. This is extremely grave in light of the fact that this is most certainly not the time to soften any tone.

6. In turn, this softer attitude – now officially proclaimed by Bishop Fellay – reinforces the suspicion, certainly present inside the Society, that this embrace will prove deadly, albeit in several instalments.

The recent dismissal of eight French SSPX priests, though obviously connected to other controversies, does nothing to assuage the fear that some bullying - not from Francis, but from the inside of the Society, in order to make the FSSPX more 'acceptable' to Francis and thus “deserving” of reconciliation - is in fact happening.

7. This is a destructive way to go at things. Archbishop Fellay should never put the reconciliation with the Vatican ahead of the danger of a division within the FSSPX. If he did so he would allow the enemies of Tradition to celebrate the tearing in two of the Society. A

Any reconciliation that causes such a bad outcome can most certainly wait for better times, when more orthodox Popes will allow a rapprochement in a different spirit and with far less divisions.

No serious Catholic considers the FSSPX one iota less Catholic without reconciliation. The reconciliation in itself is a lesser good than the continuation of the work of the FSSPX in favour of tradition, her prestige and powerful voice speaking for orthodox Catholic in a time of heretical Popes.

8. Alternatively – and as others and myself have suggested in the past – a much better way is open to Bishop Fellay: A brutal defence of Catholic Truth, against the Pope and his minions, day in and day out. This would assuage fears that the SSPX is “going native”, which is the most important result.

From this position of strength, every proposal of reconciliation – without any do ut des – could be discussed within the Society in a completely different atmosphere. And if, in consequence of this vigorous defence of Truth, no offer of reconciliation comes, so be it.

This would be the obvious evidence that the reconciliation had only one aim: emasculate the SSPX and make of it a shark without teeth.

Bishop Fellay undermines the very mission of the FSSPX when he states that, in consideration of the process of reconciliation, the FSSPX will get softer. He is doing the work of Francis. This attitude can only have as a result a self-imposed obligation to be either silent or very hushed in the denunciation of the thousand evils of the Church.

Even if the authority and autonomy of the FSSPX should remain complete and unchallenged, this attitude would still be tantamount to a half self-castration for the sake of… what exactly? The approval of the biggest rascal ever elected Pope?

Fellay 2017 seems much different to me from Fellay 2012. I do not trust the motives of anyone who, in the face of unprecedented attack on Christ, invites his followers to be less incisive in its condemnation.

The FSSPX must go to war full scale against Francis and his heresies, and leave Francis with the choices of whether to play the “inclusive card” for his own motives (which he has, as he could claim a non-judgmental attitude towards both extremes of the spectrum) or go wherever he pleases.

What is happening is, if you ask me, very wrong. I hope that this line does not prevail. It would cause immense damage to the cause of Traditionalism exactly in a time of emergency. I would prefer for Bishop Fellay to be made to go first.

Mundabor doesn't even get into the worst implication of an FSSPX rapprochement with the church of Bergoglio. It would mean not just agreeing to 'go soft' against the worst aspects of the church of Vatican II, but a very public acceptance of Bergoglianism and its anti-Catholicism. I cannot imagine a worst and more shameful betrayal of FSSPX principles than that. Mons. Lefebvre's ashes will probably reconstitute into a specter that will rise from his grave to protest such a betrayal.

We must all be grateful to Matthew Schmitz for using the perfect metaphor for what the Bergoglio Vatican is seeking to do vis-a-vis the Emeritus Pope. That is
exactly what they have been trying to do - burying him alive - though it is not easy, to say the least, when their intended victim is very likely a future Doctor
of the Church, in whose treasury of thought and writings, one can find multiple magisterial statements that contradict and demolish any anti-Catholic manifestation
by his successor. And which orthodox Catholics can and do cite on every occasion when they have to... In tracing the genesis of Bergoglio's anti-Catholicism
to Walter Kasper's insistent German ultra-liberalism and heterodoxy, Schmitz has very rightly resurrected the long and documented fundamental opposition since
the 1990s between Kasper and Ratzinger.


Though Benedict is still living, Francis is trying to bury him.

Upon his election in 2013, Francis began to pursue an agenda that Joseph Ratzinger had opposed throughout his career. A stress on the pastoral over against the doctrinal, a promotion of diverse disciplinary and doctrinal approaches in local churches, the opening of communion to the divorced and remarried — all these proposals were weighed and rejected by Ratzinger more than ten years ago in a heated debate with Walter Kasper. For better or worse, Francis now seeks to reverse Ratzinger.

The conflict began with a 1992 letter concerning “the fundamental elements that are to be considered already settled” when Catholic theologians do their work. Some theologians had suggested that while doctrine might be universal and unchanging, it could be bent to meet discrete pastoral realities — allowing for a liberal approach, say, in Western Europe and a more conservative one in Africa.

In order to guard against this idea, Pope John Paul II and Ratzinger, then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, insisted that the universal Church was “a reality ontologically and temporally prior to every individual particular Church.” There would be no Anglican-style diversity for Catholics — not under John Paul.

Behind this seemingly academic debate about the local and universal Church stood a disagreement over communion for the divorced and remarried. In 1993, Kasper defied John Paul by proposing that individual bishops should be able to decide whether or not to give communion to the divorced and remarried. Stopping short of calling for a change in doctrine, he said that there ought to be “room for pastoral flexibility in complex, individual cases.” [All this to be elaborated with shameless casuistry as allowable pastoral discernment in Bergoglio's Amoris laetitia, Chapter 8, 23 years later.]

In 1994, the Vatican rejected Kasper’s proposal with a letter signed by Ratzinger. “If the divorced are remarried civilly, they find themselves in a situation that objectively contravenes God’s law. Consequently, they cannot receive Holy Communion as long as this situation persists.”

Kasper was not ready to back down. In a Festschrift [commemorative document] published in 1999, he criticized the Vatican’s 1992 letter and insisted on the legitimate independence of local churches.

Ratzinger responded in a personal capacity the following year. It is because of such responses that he gained his reputation as a rigid doctrinal enforcer, but this caricature is unfair. Benedict has always been a poet of the Church, a man in whose writing German Romanticism blooms into orthodoxy.

We see it here in his defense of Christian unity. He describes the Church as “a love story between God and humanity” that tends toward unity. He hears the gospel as a kind of theological ninth symphony, in which all humanity is drawn together as one:

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The basic idea of sacred history is that of gathering together, of uniting human beings in the one body of Christ, the union of human beings and through human beings of all creation with God. There is only one bride, only one body of Christ, not many brides, not many bodies./dim]

---

The Church is not “merely a structure that can be changed or demolished at will, which would have nothing to do with the reality of faith as such.” A “form of corporeality belongs to the Church herself.” This form, this body, must be loved and respected, not put on the rack.

Here we begin to see how the question of the universality of the Church affects apparently unrelated questions, such as communion and divorce and remarriage. Ratzinger cited 1 Corinthians, where Paul describes the unity of the Church in terms of two sacraments —communion and matrimony. Just as the two become one flesh in marriage, so in the Eucharist the many become one body. “For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread.”

The connections Paul draws between marriage, the Eucharist, and Church unity should serve as a warning for whoever would tamper with one of the three. If the one body of the universal Church can be divided, the “one flesh” of a married couple can be as well. And communion — the sign of unity of belief and practice — can turn to disunion, with people who do not share the same beliefs joining together as though they did.

Kasper’s rejoinder came in an essay published in English by America. It is the earliest and most succinct expression of what would become Pope Francis’s program. It begins with a key distinction: “I reached my position not from abstract reasoning but from pastoral experience.” Kasper then decries the “adamant refusal of Communion to all divorced and remarried persons and the highly restrictive rules for eucharistic hospitality.”

Here we have it — all the controversies of the Francis era, more than a decade before his election.

(It should be noted that overwrought terms like adamant and highly restrictive, for which Kasper has sometimes been criticized, were introduced by an enthusiastic translator and have no equivalent in the German text.)

Hovering in the background of this dispute, as of so many Catholic disputes, is the issue of liturgy. Ratzinger was already known as an advocate of the “reform of the reform” — a program that avoids liturgical disruption, while slowly bringing the liturgy back into continuity with its historic form.

Kasper, by contrast, uses the disruption that followed Vatican II to justify further changes in Catholic life: “Our people are well aware of the flexibility of laws and regulations; they have experienced a great deal of it over the past decades. They lived through changes that no one anticipated or even thought possible.”

Evelyn Waugh described how Catholics at the time of the Council underwent “a superficial revolution in what then seemed permanent.” Kasper embraces that superficial revolution, hoping that it will justify another, profounder one.

He laments that Ratzinger does not see things his way: “Regrettably, Cardinal Ratzinger has approached the problem of the relationship between the universal church and local churches from a purely abstract and theoretical point of view, without taking into account concrete pastoral situations and experiences.”

Ratzinger has failed to consult what Kasper calls the “data” of experience: “To history, therefore, we must turn for sound theology,” where we will find many examples of a commendable “diversity.”

Though Kasper’s language is strewn with clichés (“data,” “diversity,” “experience”), it has genuine rhetorical appeal. We want to believe that there can be peace, peace, though there is no peace between Church and world. Just as we can be moved by visions of unity, we can be beguiled by promises of comfort. The contrast between the two men is thus rhetorical as well as doctrinal: Ratzinger inspires; Kasper relieves.

America’s editors invited Ratzinger to respond, and he reluctantly agreed. His reply notes that baptism is a truly trinitarian event; we are baptized not merely in but into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. We are not made members of one of various local Christian associations, but are united with God.

For this reason, “Anyone baptized in the church in Berlin is always at home in the church in Rome or in New York or in Kinshasa or in Bangalore or wherever, as if he or she had been baptized there. He or she does not need to file a change-of-address form; it is one and the same church.”

Kasper closed the debate in 2001 with a letter to the editor, in which he argued that it “cannot be wholly wrongheaded … to ask about concrete actions, not in political, but in pastoral life.” There the controversy seemed to end. Ratzinger became pope and Kasper’s proposal was forgotten.

Twelve years later, a newly elected Pope Francis gave Kasper’s proposal new life. In his first Angelus address, Francis singled out Kasper for praise, reintroducing him to the universal Church as “a good theologian, a talented theologian” whose latest book had done the new pope “so much good.”

We now know that Francis had been reading Kasper closely for many years. Though he is usually portrayed as spontaneous and non-ideological, Francis has steadily advanced the agenda that Kasper outlined over a decade ago. [Which ought to be evident in even the most cursory reading of his actions and statements as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, but to which the cardinals who elected him in 2013 - including those cardinals who had always been thought to be orthodox and conservative - willfully turned a blind eye when they were caught up in the Sankt-Gallen Mafia's triumphant euphoria that in the seemingly 'mild' Bergoglio they had the perfect Trojan horse to seat on the Chair of Peter so that finally their dream of the 'new church' of Vatican II would be realized.]

In the face of this challenge, Benedict has kept an almost perfect silence. There is hardly any need to add to the words in which he resoundingly rejected the program of Kasper and Francis. And yet the awkwardness remains. No pope in living memory has so directly opposed his predecessor — who, in this instance, happens to live just up the hill.

This is why supporters of Francis’s agenda become nervous whenever Benedict speaks, as he recently did in praise of Cardinal Sarah. Were the two men in genuine accord, partisans of Francis would not fear the learned, gentle German who walks the Vatican Gardens.

And so the two popes, active and emeritus, speaking and silent, remain at odds. In the end, it does not matter who comes last or speaks most; what matters is who thinks with the mind of a Church that has seen countless heresies come and go.

When Benedict’s enraptured words are compared to the platitudes of his successor, it is hard not to notice a difference: One pope echoes the apostles, and the other parrots Walter Kasper. Because this difference in speech reflects a difference in belief, a prediction can be made. Regardless of who dies first, Benedict will outlive Francis.

AMEN! AND THANK YOU, MR SCHMITZ.