BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI



Please see preceding page for earlier posts today, June 21, 2017.





Here is a belated translation of a June 14 blogpost by Aldo Maria Valli on the message of Fatima, prompted by Pope Francis’s recent visit
there, but he does not cite the reigning pope in these selected recollections. Probably because Bergoglio said that the primary message
of Fatima was 'peace', and of course, he never mentioned Our Lady's refrain of 'Penance, penance, penance!' for what the world needs.

The words attributed here to Pius XII (before he became pope) are particularly striking – first, because I had never read them elsewhere
before, and second, because they seem to have intuited, long before there was any big to-do about a Third Secret, at the greater tragedy
awaiting the Church predicted by Our Lady 100 years ago, and which many intelligent and generally reliable commentators have claimed
referred specifically to apostasy at the summit of the Church. (Another reason I am convinced that apostasy, not heresy, is the right
accusation to make against Jorge Bergoglio.)

Fatima and the words
of three popes – Pius XII,
John Paul II and Benedict XVI
Translated from

June 14, 2017

On the occasion of this pope’s trip to Fatima, there has been a renewed interest in the revelations made by Our Lady to the three shepherd children.

According to the book Pie XII devant l’histoire (Pius XII in the eyes of history) by the French authors Georges Roche and Philippe Saint Germain, the future Pope Pius XII – then Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli and Secretary of State to Pius XI – spoke about Fatima in 1933, 16 years after the apparitions, to his friend Count Enrico Pietro Galeazzi, and said that it was a warning against the ‘suicide’ of the Catholic Church which would come about through the destruction of the liturgy and ‘changing the faith’.

Here is how he expressed himself:

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Suppose, dear friend, that Communism were simply one of the more evident instruments of subversion used against the Church and the traditions deriving from Divine Revelation!... I am concerned by the message that the Blessed Virgin gave to Lucia in Fatima. Mary’s insistence on the dangers that threaten the Church is a divine warning against the suicide in changing the faith, her liturgy, her theology and her soul…

All around me I sense the work of innovators who want to dismantle the Holy Church, to destroy her universal flame, reject her ornaments and make her feel guilty of her history… A time will come when the civilized world will deny God himself, when the Church will doubt as Peter doubted. A time when it will be thought that man has become God… In our churches, Christians will search in vain for the red light [of the tabernacle] which shows where God awaits us. And like Mary Magdalene in tears before the empty tomb, they will ask, “Where have they brought him?”

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Cardinal Pacelli also mentioned the Church in the less developed countries of Africa and Asia, saying that a possible salvation for the Church could come from them, from priests raised in cultures less contaminated by modernism.

We have no incontrovertible proof that Cardinal Pacelli actually said these words, but in any case, they are certainly thought-provoking, and some may even call them prophetic.

In my case, re-reading those words attributed to Cardinal Pacelli prompted me to another re-reading. This time, of what Benedict XVI said to newsmen on May 11, 2010, in his news conference enroute to Portugal for an apostolic visit to mark the tenth anniversary of the beatification of Jacinta and Francisco Marto (who were canonized last
May).

He answered a question formulated for the press corps by Vatican Press Office director Fr. Lombardi:

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Holy Father, what meaning do the apparitions of Fatima have for us today? When you presented the Third Secret of Fatima in a press conference at the Vatican Press Office in June 2000, many of us and other colleagues asked if the message of the secret could be extended, beyond the assassination attempt against John Paul II to other sufferings of the popes. Could the context of that vision also be extended to the suffering of the church today, for the sins of the sexual abuse of minors?
First of all, I want to express my joy in going to Fatima, to pray before Our Lady of Fatima, and to experience the presence of the faith there, where from little children, a new force of the faith was born, and which is not limited to the little ones, but has a message for the whole world and all epochs of history, and touches history in its present and illuminates this history.

In 2000, during the presentation, I said that there is a supernatural impulse which does not come from the individual imagination but from the reality of the Virgin Mary, from the supernatural, that impulse which enters into a subject, and is expressed according to the possibilities of the subject. The subject is determined by his or her historic, personal, temperamental, situation.

Therefore, supernatural impulse is translated according to the subject’s possibilities to see, imagine or express it.
But in these expressions, formed by the subject, a content is hidden, that goes beyond, goes deeper. Only in the passage of time is the true depth, that was clothed in this vision, revealed to us, only then is it possible for concrete people.

Here too, beyond this great vision of the suffering Pope, which we can initially circumscribe to John Paul II, other realities are indicated which over time will develop and become clear.

Thus it is true that beyond the moment indicated in the vision, one speaks about and sees the necessity of suffering by the Church, which is focused on the person of the Pope, but the Pope stands for the Church, and therefore it is the sufferings of the Church that are announced.

The Lord told us that the Church will always be suffering in various ways, up to the end of the world. The important point is that the message, the answer of Fatima, it not substantially addressed to particular devotions, but is the fundamental response: permanent conversion, penance, prayer, and the three cardinal virtues: faith, hope and charity.

Here we see the true, fundamental response the Church must give, which each of us individually must give, in this situation.

In terms of what we today can discover in this message, attacks against the Pope or the Church do not only come from outside; rather the sufferings of the Church come from within, from the sins that exist in the Church.

This too has always been known, but today we see it in a really terrifying way: the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from enemies on the outside, but is born from the sin within the church. The Church therefore has a deep need to re-learn penance, to accept purification, to learn on one hand forgiveness but also the need for justice.

Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice. In one word we have to re-learn these essentials: conversion, prayer, penance, and the theological virtues. That is how we respond, and we need to be realistic in expecting that evil will always attack, from within and from outside, but the forces of good are also always present.

Finally, the Lord is stronger than evil and the Virgin Mary is for us the visible maternal guarantee that the will of God is always the last word in history.

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At that time, in early 2010, attacks against the Church were at a peak, specifically attacks against Papa Ratzinger personally, because of priests who had committed sexual abuse on minors, a fact that Fr. Lombardi cited in the question.

Therefore all of us newsmen on that plane, when Benedict XVI cited persecution that does not only come from outside the Church but from within the Church, automatically thought he referred to the so-called ‘pedophile’ scandal and the proceedings then underway against bishops and priests in many parts of the world, whether for direct commission of the acts, or for failure to denounce such acts as soon as they were made known.

But one must point out that the Pope, speaking about the sin that exists in the Church, made no direct reference to the sex abuse scandals. Certainly, he had it in mind, and certainly his words also referred to that scandal, but he meant more than that. Because faithlessness can be manifested in many forms.

I therefore find that there is a visible link between the considerations mentioned by Cardinal Pacelli in 1933 and those of Benedict XVI in 2010, because in both cases, they were referring to the Church and how it keeps the faith.

Along this thought, I was also spontaneously reminded of the German magazine Stimme des Glaubens (Voice of Faith) which had an article in 1981 about a meeting between John Paul II and a group of German Catholics in Fulda, during the pope’s apostolic visit to Germany in November 1980.

To a question about Fatima and the Third Secret, the Pope said it could also refer to natural catastrophes, but he underscored that in any case, the medicine against all evils was the Rosary. And on the future of the Church, he said:

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“We must prepare ourselves to face within not so long for many great trials which may even require the sacrifice of our lives and giving ourselves totally to Christ and for Christ… With your prayers and mine, it will be possible to mitigate these tribulations but it is no longer possible to avoid them because it is only in this way that a total renewal of the Church is possible. How many times in the past has the renewal of the church sprung from bloodshed! It won’t be different this time. We must be strong and prepared, trust in Christ and his Mother, and recite the rosary very very assiduously.”

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In 1980, Karol Wojtyła had not yet been the target of assassination by Ali Agca, which took place on May 11, 1981, but already, he spoke about great trials, risk of life and the need to be prepared.

But also in Fulda at that time, in his homily for a Mass he celebrated for priests and seminarians, John Paul II underscored that, among other duries, a shepherd must watch and be vigilant: “Service is this – to stay awake for the return of the Lord”. And because “the treasure entrusted to us is infinitely precious”, he said the primary duty of a pastor was to “make ever more profound the roots of our faith, our hope and our love for the great works of God” (Acts 2,11).

To stay awake for the return of the Lord, to watch, to be vigilant, to pray in the service of an infinitely precious treasure, deepening the roots of faith ever more in the works not of man but of God. Ultimately, this is what Fatima tells us. It is a message that is always actual. More actual than ever.

June 21, 2017 headlines

Canon212.com


PewSitter


Not that we didn't already expect this - even assume it - because heck! can you imagine 'humble' hubristic Bergoglio giving any cardinal
the slightest opening to dispute AL to his face? One might have thought that the man who is supposed to be 'the servant of the
servants of God' ought to be able to take the parrhesia of dissent in good grace and welcome the occasion to eat humble pie - even if he
just let the dissenting cardinals speak out in consistory and not deign to answer them at all on the floor, either (never mind if he
thus openly display his boorishness)... Mr Pentin charitably allows the pope some wiggle room to do something right for a change.

Pope to skip pre-consistory meeting with cardinals?

June 21, 2017

For the second time in a row, it appears Pope Francis won't be convening a meeting of cardinals ahead of next Wednesday’s consistory for the creation of five new red hats.

In a statement released today, the Vatican only gave details of the consistory for the creation of new cardinals, a courtesy visit, and Mass on the Solemnity of the Saints Apostles Peter and Paul the following day, during which he will impose the Pallia on new bishops.

The traditional pre-consistory meeting is an opportunity for the Pope to consult with members of the College of Cardinals, most of whom will be in Rome for the creation of new princes of the Church. Their role is to act as his closest advisors as well as elect his successor.

Ahead of his earlier consistories, in February 2014 and February 2015, Francis held such meetings. They took place in the Synod Hall, lasted two full days, and were an opportunity for the Pope to hear about issues and concerns from around the world, as well as to update the cardinals on Vatican-related issues and those of the universal Church.

For a pope to skip holding a pre-consistory meeting is rare. Benedict dropped such a gathering ahead of his last cardinal-making consistory in November 2012, during which he created six new cardinals, but he held them for his other four.

The Holy See Press Office has not responded to questions about whether the meeting would be going ahead, but sources say he may meet some cardinals individually.

At the previous consistory last November, the Pope is thought to have preferred to avoid a confrontation with the four DUBIA cardinals who were allegedly planning to resubmit the DUBIA at the meeting, or at least bring up the topic.

Aware that the cardinals had written again a couple of months ago requesting an audience, and having not responded, the Pope may have decided again to avoid any encounter, although as with Benedict in 2012, it may have been due to the small number of new cardinals.

In a statement issued today, the Vatican said that on June 28, at 4pm, the Holy Father will hold an Ordinary Public Consistory for the creation of new cardinals, “for the imposition of the beretta, the consignment of the ring and the assignment of the title or diaconate.”

The consistory will be followed by a courtesy visit to the new cardinals from 6-8pm in the Atrium of the Paul VI Hall, during which members of the public can meet and greet the five new princes of the Church.

At 9.30am the following day, on the Solemnity of the Saints Apostles Peter and Paul, the Holy Father will bless the holy Pallia to be imposed upon the new metropolitan archbishops, and will celebrate the Holy Mass of the Solemnity of the Saints Apostles Peter and Paul.

A second blog post from Pentin today:

Monsignor Bux:
'We are in a full crisis of faith'
Theologian and former consulter to the CDF calls on the pope
to make a declaration of faith, warning that unless
the Pope safeguards doctrine, he cannot impose discipline.

June 21, 2017

To resolve the current crisis in the Church over papal teaching and authority, the Pope must make a declaration of faith, affirming what is Catholic and correcting his own “ambiguous and erroneous” words and actions that have been interpreted in a non-Catholic manner.

This is according to Monsignor Nicola Bux, a respected theologian and former consulter to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith during Benedict XVI’s pontificate.

In the following interview with the Register, Msgr. Bux explains that the Church is in a “full crisis of faith” and that the storms of division the Church is currently experiencing are due to apostasy — the “abandonment of Catholic thought.”

Msgr. Bux’s comments come after news that the four dubia cardinals, seeking papal clarification of his exhortation Amoris Laetitia, wrote to the Pope April 25 asking him for an audience but have yet to receive a reply.

The cardinals expressed concern over the “grave situation” of episcopal conferences and individual bishops offering widely differing interpretations of the document, some of which break with the Church's teaching. They are particularly concerned about the deep confusion this has caused, especially for priests.

“For many Catholics, it is incredible that the Pope is asking bishops to dialogue with those who think differently [i.e. non-Catholic Christians], but does not want first to face the cardinals who are his chief advisors,” Msgr. Bux says.

“If the Pope does not safeguard doctrine,” he adds, “he cannot impose discipline.”

Monsignor Bux, what are the implications of the ‘doctrinal anarchy’ that people see happening for the Church, the souls of the faithful and priests?
The first implication of doctrinal anarchy for the Church is division, caused by apostasy, which is the abandonment of Catholic thought, as defined by St. Vincent of Lerins: quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditur (what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all).

Saint Irenaeus of Lyon, who calls Jesus Christ the “Master of unity,” had pointed out to heretics that everyone professes the same things, but not everyone means the same thing. This is the role of the Magisterium, founded on the truth of Christ: to bring everyone back to Catholic unity.

St. Paul exhorted Christians to be in agreement and to speak with unanimity. What would he say today? When cardinals are silent or accuse their confreres; when bishops who had thought, spoken and written — scripta manent! [written words remain] — in a Catholic way, but then say the opposite for whatever reason.

When priests contest the liturgical tradition of the Church, then apostasy is established, the detachment from Catholic thought. Paul VI had foreseen that “this non-Catholic thought within Catholicism will tomorrow become the strongest [force]. But it will never represent the Church's thinking. A small flock must remain, no matter how small it is.” (Conversation with J. Guitton, 9.IX.1977).

What implications, then, does doctrinal anarchy have for the souls of the faithful and ecclesiastics?
The Apostle exhorts us to be faithful to sure, sound and pure doctrine: that founded on Jesus Christ and not on worldly opinions (cf. Titus 1:7-11; 2:1-8). Perseverance in teaching and obedience to doctrine leads souls to eternal salvation.

The Church cannot change the faith and at the same time ask believers to remain faithful to it. She is instead intimately obliged to be oriented toward the Word of God and toward Tradition.

Therefore, the Church remembers the Lord’s judgment: “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind” (John 9:39). Do not forget that, when one is applauded by the world, it means one belongs to it. In fact, the world loves its own and hates what does not belong to it (cf. John 15:19).

May the Catholic Church always remember that she is made up of only those who have converted to Christ under the guidance of the Holy Spirit; all human beings are ordained to her (cf. Lumen gentium 13), but they are not part of her until they are converted.

How can this problem best be resolved?
The point is: what idea does the Pope have of the Petrine ministry, as described in Lumen gentium 18 and codified in canon law?

Faced with confusion and apostasy, the Pope should make the distinction — as Benedict XVI did — between what he thinks and says as a private, learned person, and what he must say as Pope of the Catholic Church. To be clear: the Pope can express his ideas as a private learned person on disputable matters which are not defined by the Church, but he cannot make heretical claims, even privately. Otherwise it would be equally heretical.

I believe that the Pope knows that every believer — who knows the regula fidei [the rule of faith] or dogma, which provides everyone with the criterion to know what the faith of the Church is, what everyone has to believe and who one has to listen to — can see if he is speaking and operating in a Catholic way, or has gone against the Church’s sensus fidei [sense of the faith].

Even one believer can hold him to account. So whoever thinks that presenting doubts [dubia] to the Pope is not a sign of obedience, hasn’t understood, 50 years after Vatican II, the relationship between him [the Pope] and the whole Church. Obedience to the Pope depends solely on the fact that he is bound by Catholic doctrine, to the faith that he must continually profess before the Church.

We are in a full crisis of faith! Therefore, in order to stop the divisions in progress, the Pope — like Paul VI in 1967, faced with the erroneous theories that were circulating shortly after the conclusion of the Council — should make a Declaration or Profession of Faith, affirming what is Catholic, and correcting those ambiguous and erroneous words and acts — his own and those of bishops — that are interpreted in a non-Catholic manner.

Otherwise, it would be grotesque that, while seeking unity with non-Catholic Christians or even understanding with non-Christians, apostasy and division is being fostered within the Catholic Church. For many Catholics, it is incredible that the Pope is asking bishops to dialogue with those who think differently, but does not want first to face the cardinals who are his chief advisors.

If the Pope does not safeguard doctrine, he cannot impose discipline. As John Paul II said, the Pope must always be converted, to be able to strengthen his brothers, according to the words of Christ to Peter: “Et tu autem conversus, confirma fratres tuos [when you are converted, strengthen your brothers].”

Two pieces of great fact-based satire yesterday from two sites I regularly check out...

13 March 2513

June 21, 2017

It is the 13 March 2513. 500 years ago, in the midst of a great crisis of faith, a heretical Pope was elected to the See of Peter.

No one remembers the event. No one – apart from people passionate of history, particularly of church history – remembers him. The second part of the XX and the first part of the XXI Century are recollected as times of great confusion, but the population at large does not care to remember those obscure times.

There is no need for it. A string of very strong Popes (Pius XIII to Pius XVII, who reigned between 2053 and 2144) fully restored Catholic orthodoxy in less than three generations, and the Church influence on Europe, America and Africa has been so strong since that the obscure times of heresy are barely remembered beside the moniker “one hundred years of heresy” or, more shortly, “the troubles”. Most Catholics don't know about Francis more than they do about the Synodus Horrenda.

There were some smaller challenges during this time. In the middle of the XXIII Century, a movement originating from Germany tried to make adultery and sodomy a venial sin and were therefore called the “Venialists” or, as they called themselves, the “Merciful”. But Pope Benedict XIX completely destroyed the heresy starting from 2352, and in twenty years the name was barely remembered.

Not that it was all so linear as it seems centuries later, mind. It never works that way. Pope Pius XIII was elected only in 2053, after his disgraceful predecessor Francis IV started to offer communion to Muslims and worked at an “interplanetary ceremony” able to unite Muslims, Jews, Hinduist, Sikh and Atheists in a “Common worship” meant to become the standard of a “unifying church of the persons of good will” (the project failed when the Pope died). What we barely notice today was a very bumpy road that went on for many decades then, for several decades from Francis I to Francis IV. But in the end, Truth triumphed. As always.

What did the Church do with Francis I to IV? What she always does with heretics: condemn, destroy, forget.

How many remember Huss or Wyclyffe? Ever wondered why? The Church destroys her heretics in a most definitive way: she obliterates them from the public consciousness.

No, you don't really need to know what Huss, or Wyclyffe or the Sillon movement preached. The Church has taken care that most people will never pose themselves the question. She destroys heretics even in their tombs. They deal with heretics so you don't have to.

And so we are here in 2513, in an age of unprecedented prosperity and religious revival. All is good in Vatican land.

You just have to be patient.

And from the Bear, the item he promised about equal time for Jesuit SG Sosa Abascal following the Bear's post on 1 John 2 and its 'anti-Christ challenge' (which I posted yesterday on the preceding page of this thread). The Bear plausibly imagines how the mustachioed paladin of Bergoglio would respond to that challenge - a response one imagines Bergoglio himself could well make...

Equal time for response
of top Jesuit Fr. Abascal
by Tim Capp

June 21, 2017

Fr. Arturo Sosa Abascal begins, in the best Jesuit tradition, by smiling indulgently at the Bear's simple reading of the text of the First Epistle of John, Chapter 2, verses 18 - 26 in the previous article.

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Ah, si, Oso, the Johannine Epistles. Of course the best scholarship recognizes they were written much later than claimed, by a school that associated itself with the apostle. Their author was not really the apostle, as you would know if you were a genuine scholar. Even the early Church did not know quite what to make of the epistles and Revelation attributed to him. It is doubtful that he was an historical person in the first place.

Even so, Oso, the words are relative and one must understand the audience and purpose of any passage left to us by ancient editors. Then, if you insist on applying it to real-world situations - which is a bad idea - it must be done with great discernment which the laity lack.

The truth is much less dramatic than you have imagined. The authors of this epistle were addressing local churches that had been divided by a different understanding of the new faith, most likely Gnostics of some sort.

In fact, this epistle is not even relevant to Catholics today. For example, we have a much broader understanding of who comprise the People of God on this great human pilgrimage.

Your simple-minded reading of the text out of context would eliminate our Muslim brothers and sisters in their own valid faith-experience of one of the three Great Abrahamic Religions. Such an exclusivist view of the Christian Faith was buried with Father Feeney. [Laughs.]

The requirement is not any sort of intellectual acceptance of some first-century Christ-figure, whose myths were collected around a possibly historical rabbi, or at any rate movement of universal love. Christianity is one of many simple expressions of mercy in today's world, a world that is much larger and more diverse than any imagined by the third-century editors of the Johannine school.

The Church is evolving into a reinterpretation of the Christ-figure that leads it to accompany everyone without exception, but especially those on the peripheries: the poor, the refugees and the migrants. Indeed, we must learn to do without the facile certainties of old labels like 'Catholic,' and even 'Christian.' Labels divide. We must never smugly formulate our brothers and sisters with a word. Only triumphalists do this.

"The existence of the crisis of Global Warming proves to us that we are all just humans being, facing the same threats, the same questions, and finding answers suited to our experience, heritage and language. The answers are unimportant. What is important is the image of each of us touching one another in mute loving ways and finding reciprocal acceptance beyond all ancient arguments, modern borders. or outdated arbitrary cultural constructs such as morality and gender.

Your implication that Pope Francis may be an antichrist, besides being shockingly non-Catholic and uncharitable, shows a naive, even childish proof-texting that is the result of wrenching the text from its context. Catholics can hardly insist on the biblical texts as some sort of 'divine oracle.' That is superstition, and one that the Catholic Church has always condemned. They did not have tape recorders in those days, you know. But I am sure you have not considered that essential fact in your petty bourgeoisie piety.

It is not only futile, then, but dangerous to rely on... [laughs again] your quaint reading of your Bible. Read it for inspiration, if you must, but leave the interpretation of it to scholars who have spent years in training. You are, after all, merely a Bear.

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The Bear's counter-argument: 2 Kings 2:24

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Although the above illustration is taken from the Bear's 'Bearmageddon' collection of bear-related humor,
the Bible quotation cited is authentic.

Elisha was a major Hebrew prophet and a wonder-worker whose story is recounted in the Old testament. A disciple and protege of the prophet Elijah, whom he succeeded as leader of the ‘sons of prophets’ after Elijah was taken up to heaven by a whirlwind. He held the office ‘prophet of Israel’ for six decades (892-932 BC). Shortly after Elijah’s ascension, Elisha went to Bethel where a group of young men [not literally children as the USCCB translation has it, but in the sense of ‘teenage ruffians’ connoted by the Hebrew term used] taunted him for his baldness. Elisha cursed them in the name of Yahweh and two female bears came out of the forest and killed forty-two of the boys.

It has been explained that 2 Kings 2:23-24 is not an account of God mauling children for making fun of a bald man. Rather, it is a record of an insulting demonstration against God’s prophet by a large group of young men. Because these young people of about 20 years of age or older (the same term is used of Solomon in 1 Kings 3:7) so despised the prophet of the Lord, Elisha called upon the Lord to deal with the rebels as He saw fit. The Lord’s punishment was the mauling of 42 of them by two female bears.

The penalty was clearly justified, for to ridicule Elisha was to ridicule the Lord Himself. The seriousness of the crime was indicated by the seriousness of the punishment. The appalling judgment was God’s warning to all who would scorn the prophets of the Lord.*

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Several minutes later, after wiping his muzzle carefully with a napkin and brushing his fangs.) "Nothing tastes worse than antichrist," says the Bear with a toothpick in his jaws, "but what's a Bear supposed to do?"

*Additional commentary on the punishment by bear:

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The prophet must be justified, for he did it by divine impulse. Had the curse come from any bad principle God would not have said Amen to it. We may think it would have been better to have called for two rods for the correction of these children than two bears for the destruction of them.

But Elisha knew, by the Spirit, the bad character of these children. He knew what a generation of vipers those were, and what mischievous enemies they would be to God’s prophets if they should live to be men, who began so early to be abusive to them. He intended hereby to punish the parents and to make them afraid of God’s judgments.

God must be glorified as a righteous God, that hates sin, and will reckon for it, even in little children. Let the wicked wretched brood make our flesh tremble for fear of God. Let little children be afraid of speaking wicked words, for God notices what they say. Let them not mock any for their defects in mind or body, but pity them rather; especially let them know that it is at their peril if they jeer God’s people or ministers, and scoff at any for well-doing.

Let parents, that would have comfort in their children, train them up well, and do their utmost betimes to drive out the foolishness that is bound up in their hearts; for, as bishop Hall says, "In vain do we look for good from those children whose education we have neglected; and in vain do we grieve for those miscarriages which our care might have prevented.’’

Elisha comes to Bethel and fears not the revenges of the bereaved parents; God, who bade him do what he did, he knew would bear him out.

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I have not posted anything from Fr. Scalese in some time, but he had two posts in May that deserve to be more widely read... The first
has to do with a word - rigidity - that I have come to detest because of the wanton use to which this pope has made of it in order to
denounce anyone who obediently follows and upholds any rule or law that Bergoglio disagrees with, even if it happens to come from God
himself.

Speaking of 'rigidity'
Translated from

May 9, 2017

Some may say that I am nitpicking on the Holy Father. The fact is that when a Pontiff – with good intentions that are not for me to question – decides to abandon that sacred aura that has generally characterized popes, in order to place himself at the level of everyone else, it is inevitable that he exposes himself to possible criticism. I think Pope Francis has considered this, but after all is said and done, it does not only not bother him, but it gratifies him.

It is obvious that if a pope does not limit his magieterium to encyclicals and official texts, but he thinks it is useful to deliver an off-the-cuff ‘meditation’ on the day’s Mass reading, anyone can then ‘annotate’ these reflections which are not – as I have said on other occasions – magisterium, properly speaking, but a simple exercise of the Church's munis docendi (teaching function) that any priest has. What matters however is that if he is to be legitimately criticized for these ‘non-magisterial’ excursions, the critique should be kept within civilized bounds and within the parameters defined in Canon 212, Section 3:

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

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On May 5, the First Reading was about the conversion of Saul (Acts 9:1-20). The pope took off from this reading to harp on one of the themes he has favored in his preachings but which we also hear from other clergy who follow his lead: namely, rigidity.

In his homilette, he distinguished between ‘rigid people who are honest’ (among whom he includes Saul of Tarsus) and ‘rigid people who are hypocrites” (such as his often-described but never named ‘doctors of the law’). Of course, the distinction has a real basis – it is true both kinds exist. But it seems to me that the Bergoglian emphasis is not so much between the contrast between honesty and hypocrisy but on rigidity.

Saul’s honesty seems to disappear in the light of his ‘original sin’ of 'rigidity'. The pope seems to disregard that Saul’s honesty, though it does not constitute a title to being divinely elected, placed Saul in a condition such that God could choose him to fulfill his plans.

Papa Bergoglio then makes a statement which I find rather questionable – that [B]Saul ‘was a young man who was rigid and idealistic, with the rigidity of the law that he had learned in the school of Gamaliel”. Personally, I always thought that the formation Saul received from Gamaliel determined his future apostolate, and I do not think it is right to say that Saul learned ‘rigidity’ from Gamaliel. On the contrary! Because if ever there was an ‘openminded’ Pharisee at the time, that was Gamaliel, who is described as “a Pharisee with liberal tendencies in interpreting the law(see Acts 5:34).

It is true that to the Jews later, the Apostle Paul would declare that he had been “formed in the school of Gamaliel in the scrupulous observance of the laws of our fathers” (Acts 22:3). But it is also true that Gamaliel, in addressing the Sanhedrin (high Jewish council), demonstrated a wisdom, a moderation, a tolerance, a mental openness, that can hardly be attributed to a ‘rigid’ person. Of course, Saul learned from Gamaliel a scrupulous observance of the law [How else, Padre Jorge, should the observance of a law be – casual, careless, loose?] but how can we assume that at the same time, he did not acquire anything of Gamaliel’s openmindedness?

When this pope speaks of the conversion of Saul, he describes it in these terms: “There we had an encounter between a man who breathed threats and torture, with another man who speaks the language of gentleness, ‘Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?’

It is right to describe this as an encounter – because such was the experience of Saul on the road to Damascus. But what sounds questionable to me – although understandable in its context – is the opposition of ‘the man who breathed threats and torture’ and ‘another man who spoke the language of gentleness’.

One gets the impression that instead of describing an encounter between two persons, the greater concern was to describe them with labels: on the one hand, a rigid person; on the other, a gentle person. So instead of being an encounter between two persons, it becomes the encounter between two attributes – rigidity and gentleness, with the latter having the advantage.

It may sound like I am nitpicking, but I’m not. My objection is that what best describes a person is no longer being a person regardless of other determinants, but his possession of a certain attribute, in this case, being rigid or gentle.

To pursue this mentality is to risk killing off Christianity, not so much because it judges persons, but because it makes them into abstractions – it replaces the divinity of Christ with some moral values (in Bergoglio’s example, ‘gentleness’). And the conversion of Saul is no longer the encounter between a poor sinner and the Son of God his Lord, but between rigidity and gentleness.

Further comment can be made regarding the pope’s description of the converted Saul: “The rigid child who became a rigid man – but an honest one – became a baby, allowing himself to be led where the Lord called him to go…[This was] the power of the Lord’s gentleness… And Saul, who was blinded after this vision, had to be led by hand into Damascus”.

I might say that this spiritual re-reading of the Biblical text is quite beautiful. But in this case, too, I would also say that certain qualifications must be made. One would seem to gather from the pope’s words that Saul, after his conversion, was transformed by abandoning his rigidity to become gentle like the Jesus he encountered.

Personally, I have always thought that Paul, after his conversion, did not change but remained what he always was – that the only thing that had changed was the cause he fought for. Before that, he had been ‘dogged in maintaining the tradition of his forefathers’ (Gal 1:14). After, he changed that very same zeal into proclaiming the Lord who had appeared to him on the road to Damascus.

Indeed, one would say that God had chosen Saul in this way precisely because he was who he was, for his character – therefore, for his ‘rigidity’, which would be a useful instrument when placed in the service of the Gospel. And this is true not just of Paul but of all the saints. One thinks, for example, of Ignatius of Loyola who was a soldier and remained one, even after his conversion – except he changed the King in whose cause he fought.

That Paul had not changed after his conversion seems to me to emerge clearly in his Letter to the Philippians:

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3 For we are the circumcision,* we who worship through the Spirit of God, who boast in Christ Jesus and do not put our confidence in flesh,
4 although I myself have grounds for confidence even in the flesh. If anyone else thinks he can be confident in flesh, all the more can I.
5 Circumcised on the eighth day, of the race of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrew parentage, in observance of the law a Pharisee,
6 in zeal I persecuted the church, in righteousness based on the law I was blameless.
7 [But] whatever gains I had, these I have come to consider a loss* because of Christ.
8 More than that, I even consider everything as a loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain Christ
9 and be found in him, not having any righteousness of my own based on the law but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God, depending on faith
10 to know him and the power of his resurrection and [the] sharing of his sufferings by being conformed to his death,
11 if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
12 It is not that I have already taken hold of it or have already attained perfect maturity,* but I continue my pursuit in hope that I may possess it, since I have indeed been taken possession of by Christ [Jesus].
13 Brothers, I for my part do not consider myself to have taken possession. Just one thing: forgetting what lies behind but straining forward to what lies ahead,
14 I continue my pursuit toward the goal, the prize of God’s upward calling, in Christ Jesus.l

---

It appears clearly from this text that, in being Christian, what counts is not so much the moral transformation of the person (Paul was already ‘irrepressible’ even before his conversion) as much as the encounter with Christ – ‘the sublimeness of knowing Jesus Christ’ . Therefore what counts is not being rigid or less, but how one puts oneself, such as he is, in the service of Christ.

Another detail that tends to be ignored in the story of the conversion of Paul is the role of Ananias. Did he not show himself to be rather ‘rigid’ when the Lord asked him to go to Saul? Even of Ananias, it is said in another passage from the Acts that he was “a devout observer of the Law’ (Acts 22:12) exactly like Saul was. Yet the Lord used him to make Paul a Christian – Ananias represented Saul’s first encounter with the Church.

The pope’s morning homilette did not omit mention of those rigid persons found in the Church today, especially young people. (Was he perhaps thinking of certain seminarians of orthodox formation?)

---

I am thinking, while I say this, of so many young people who have fallen into the temptation of rigidity today in the Church – some are honest, they are good people, and we should pray that the Lord will help them grow along the path of gentleness”.

---

It is not the first time that the pope expresses his concern about ‘rigid’ young people. But I think that in this case, the Holy Father – who, on other occasions, shows himself to be a good psychologist – has not understood young people.

That which he calls ‘rigidity’ is not a ‘temptation’ into which some of them may fall but it is simply a natural component of being young. It is what we could call ‘idealism’, or even ‘extremism’ and ‘radicalism’ – they are all the same. If a young person does not have an iota of ‘rigidity’, he would not be ‘young’.

Later, life will smooth out his extremes and make hi more moderate and balanced (more ‘gentle’). But woe to a young person who is not an idealist, and woe to us if we are unable to understand – indeed, to appreciate and to channel – the innate extremism of young persons.

In short, I have the impression that, without realizing it, we are slowly transforming Christianity into a kind of asphyxiating moralism. Let us try to accept persons as they are. Let us not label them instead of getting to know them. Let us appreciate them for what they are, even for what, at first glance, may seem to be less politically correct. Above all, let us never forget that “God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones” (Mt 3:9, Lk 3:8).

Fr. Scalese's second reflection is a critique of this pontificate and its spiritually deficient 'program', and its failure so far to achieve even the non-spiritual objectives it set for itself.

What is this pope's
program of governance?
Translated from

May 29, 2017

A reader called my attention to a lecture given by Enzo Bianchi, prior of Bose, in Cagliari (Sicily) on May 23, with a video of it. At 15:57, he 'confides' something about the pope’s determination to carry on =with his reforms:

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One day, the pope was asked in private: “But Holiness, are you really going to bring to fruition all these reforms you are announcing?” His response was, “I am not pretending – what I want is to start processes, and that we shall no longer be able to go back down the road we are pursuing together”.

---

Obviously, these words are indirect quotes, but there is no reason to doubt the pope really said them, especially since they are recounted by someone sufficiently close to the Holy Father.

Actually, Bianchi was not revealing anything new. That the pope wished to ‘initiate processes’ is something he already announced in his very first interview with Fr. Antonio Spadaro published in La Civilta Cattolica in September 2013:

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God manifests himself in a historic revelation, in time. Time begins processes which are crystallized in space. God is found in time, in processes that are under way. We must start such processes more than occupying space. God manifests himself in time and is present in historical processes. This favors actions which generate new dynamics. And it requires patience and waiting.

---

[Eeeewww! My teeth ache and I have to squirm whenever Bergoglio lapses into this pseudo-erudite language!]

It is evident from the above that “starting processes’ is nothing other than a corollary of the first of the four postulates – “Time is greater than space’ - that the pope enumerates in Evangelii gaudium, and which I have written about (Post of May 10, 2016). He tells us in EG:

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One of the faults which we occasionally observe in sociopolitical activity is that spaces and power are preferred to time and processes. Giving priority to space means madly attempting to keep everything together in the present, trying to possess all the spaces of power and of self-assertion; it is to crystallize processes and presume to hold them back. Giving priority to time means being concerned about initiating processes rather than possessing spaces.(No 223)

---

Therefore, about initiating processes, Papa Bergoglio is only repeating one of his guiding principles. He knows very well it would be illusory to think one can change everything overnight – not just because certain processes require time, but also because it is inevitable that once such processes are under way, they will encounter resistances, and therefore, it becomes necessary to slow down in the hope that one may gain ground even over the most recalcitrant. Sometimes, it takes generations for this to happen. Therefore, the important thing is to begin processes without being concerned to have them concluded right away.

But what I have not found in the pope’s earlier statements made in public is what he says next, according to Bianchi: “What I want is that we shall no longer be able to go back down the road we are pursuing together”. He is saying that once the journey is begun, it does not matter how long it will take. What matters is that once it is undertaken – regardless of the time it will take – one can no longer go back. It may seem obvious: if you have decided to make the journey, one would not think of going backward. But Bianchi is able to identify in these words this pope’s determination to carry his reforms forward.

But I personally find this statement rather disquieting. Because they presume there is a program to be accomplished. It is obvious that if I go on a journey, I do so because I wish to reach a specific destination. I am not going out on a stroll. I must have certain objectives to reach, and such objectives are usually framed within a program of action. Which excludes the possibility of turning back – because it would make no sense to set an objective and then turn away from it.

So? You might well ask. Any leader has a program to realize – why can’t the pope have one? But I think the role of a pope is somehow different from that of a political leader. Benedict XVI understood this very well, when he said in his homily at the Mass that formally began his Pontificate:

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Dear friends! At this moment there is no need for me to present a programme of governance. I was able to give an indication of what I see as my task in my Message of Wednesday 20 April, and there will be other opportunities to do so.

My real programme of governance is not to do my own will, not to pursue my own ideas, but to listen, together with the whole Church, to the word and the will of the Lord, to be guided by Him, so that He himself will lead the Church at this hour of our history.

---

I think that is the right attitude for a pope – and all of us – which is, precisely, “to listen, together with the whole Church, to the word and the will of the Lord, to be guided by Him”.

Moreover, Pope Francis himself has said many times that we must always remain open to ‘the surprises of God’. Recently, for example, he was reported to have said in his morning homilette of May 8, 2017:

---

“The Spirit is the gift of God”, of this God, our Father, who always surprises us: the God of surprises”. This is “because he is a living God, a God who abides in us, a God who moves our heart, a God who is in the Church and walks with us; and he always surprises us on this path”. Thus, “just as he had the creativity to create the world, so he has the creativity to create new things every day”, the Pope continued. He “is the God who surprises”.

---

Honestly, I think that one is much more open to ‘God’s surprises’ if one is not bent on doing his own will, who does not wish to pursue only his own ideas, but chooses to listen to the word and the will of the Lord, thus allowing himself to be guided by him, compared to someone who says: “What I want is that we shall no longer be able to go back down the road we are pursuing together”.

What does it mean to ‘go forward’ or ‘turn back’? Are these not concepts which are totally relativistic in the ideological context in which they are used? For me, for example, the Church, in the 50 years after Vatican II, has gone quite a ways down the road, whereas I think that in the past four years, she has turned back (See my posts on February 23, 2016, and January 21, 2017 – of which I am pleased to note, some of my major observations have been shared by others on the blogosphere.)

Yet even if personally I would prefer that a pope, this pope, did not have a ‘program of government’, I am prepared to concede that my view appears to be obsolete today, and that it is possible (if not downright necessary) that the papacy in our day should be on par with models of current political power (as it has done in the past when it assumed certain forms of government characteristic of specific historical periods).

Today it is normal for a politician who aspires to leading a nation to present a program to the voters, and if he is elected by a majority, to have the duty to carry out the program for which he was elected. I do not know if it would be opportune or right for the Church to adopt such a practice – I do not know if current canonical norms would allow it.

But let us assume that this could be one of the reforms to be introduced into the Church. In which case, it would be good that this program of government be in the public domain. I do not mean this should be done before the election of a new pope since canonical rules do prohibit any sort of ‘electoral campaign’ for this purpose, but it would be good that the elected pope publicly announce at the start of his pontificate the line he intends to take and the objectives he intends to achieve during his mandate. This is simply a matter of transparency and respect due to his ‘subjects’.

What then is the program of Pope Francis? We can easily answer that – it is the apostolic exhortation Evangelii gaudium published on November 24, 2013. I discussed this document in my post of April 27, 2016. It is clear beyond doubt that Papa Bergoglio wanted his document to have a programmatic character instead of being a simple apostolic exhortation. [One can say this of his next exhortation AL as well. But what is often ignored is that EG was supposed to be a post-synodal exhortation to the Synodal Assembly on ‘The Word of God’ held under Benedict XVI in October 2012. Yet in EG, Bergoglio virtually ignored half of that synod’s recommendations and specifically fashioned the parts he acknowledged into a statement of his personal agenda for his pontificate.]

But in a document of 260 pages, whose content ranges from the homiletic to an analysis of social problems, it is not easy to identify with bullet points exactly what that program of government is. Early on, however, he himself spells out the programmatic intentions of the document:

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I am aware that nowadays documents do not arouse the same interest as in the past and that they are quickly forgotten. Nevertheless, I want to emphasize that what I am trying to express here has a programmatic significance and important consequences. I hope that all communities will devote the necessary effort to advancing along the path of a pastoral and missionary conversion which cannot leave things as they presently are. “Mere administration” can no longer be enough. Throughout the world, let us be “permanently in a state of mission”. (No. 25) [The last two citations come from the Bergoglio-Fernandez-authored Aparecida Document of the Latin American and Caribbean Bishops’ Conference in 2007.]

---

Therefore, the main objective of this Pontificate would seem to be this ‘pastoral and missionary conversion’ of the Church. This is not the place to analyze whether in the past four years, such conversion has been achieved, or at least, whether it is in fact under way. It is a subject for another day.

For now, I will limit myself to saying that it appears to be a rather generic objective. And one would ask whether it is possible that a more detailed program exists. An answer may be this: Before the Conclave of 2013, there were some meetings among participating cardinals [beyond the regular pre-Conclave sessions of the College of Caridnals] in which a sort of memorandum for the future pope was drawn up. Obviously, this memorandum was never made public, but veteran insiders have provided the guidelines of that pre-disposed platform:

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From the first months of his pontificate, Papa Bergoglio laid down the bases for a wide-ranging agenda, taking off from the platform delineated before the Conclave on the basis of requests made by cardinals expressed in the general congregations held from March 4-11, 2013. There were three main propositions:
- to reform the Curia in order to streamline it and make it more effective;
- to clean up the ‘Vatican bank’; and
- to promote ‘collegiality’ by calling for frequent consultations between the pope, the College of Cardinals and the bishops’ conferences in a way that would favor the participation of the bishops of the world in strategic papal decisions. [Marco Politi, Francesco tra I lupi: Il segreto di una rivoluzione (Francis among the wolves: The secret of a revolution), Laterza, Bari, 2015]

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As one can see, the three priorities on the agenda are, more than anything else, institutional in character. [Apparently, none of the cardinals who took part in the 2013 Conclave even thought at all about the crisis of the faith that has been the Church’s major problem since after World War II. How strange is that for ‘princes of the Church’ who, for the most part (at least in 2013), represented on paper ‘the best and the brightest’ in the Catholic world!]

[Spiritual priorities apart], on these three points, we can legitimately ask where we are today on these three priorites. Someone has noted that this pope has addressed these reforms ‘more out of obligation than of passion” [See Sandro Magister, chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1351176bdc4.htm... “The real Francis revolution marches on to the beat of the officials and bishops he names” – all about the Sankt-Gallen mafia who comprised Bergoglio’s Grand Electors and their ideological confreres whom this pope has been naming to the Church hierarchy].
But for now, that does not interest me. Rather, I want to know – Is this all there is to know? I would be a hypocrite if I did not admit to an idea that has been bugging me: If it is true that the election of Bergoglio was the result of the Sankt-Gallen cardinals’ lobbying (acknowledged by Cardinal Danneels who was one of them in a recent biography) and later by Mons. Georg Gaenswein speaking of the pressures brought to bear in the 2013 Conclave), how can we not think that the agenda of that lobby did not in fact become this pope’s agenda? [We can’t, because his agenda is ideologically if not factually identical to their agenda!] Why else would they have worked so hard to elect him if not to ensure that their goals would be carried out?

[In fact, it has become very clear that, if anything, Bergoglio’s agenda has been even more ideologically extreme and radical than the most extreme ideas ever expressed by the late Cardinal Martini who had been the nominal leader of the Sankt Gallen mafia. The church of Bergoglio is far more radical than Martini and other progressivists dared to imagine possible, especially after the ideological brake to the ‘spirit of Vatican II’ that the orthodox pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI represented.]
In La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, Lorenzo Bertocchi summarized the Sankt-Gallen mafia’s program in this way:

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- A point that unites them is the demand for more autonomy for the local Churches in applying the norms of the universal Church. In other terminology, they demand greater collegiality on the wings of a ‘spirit of Vatican II’ that must be carried out completely, especially but not limited to what are considered to be questions of ‘mere’ ecclesiastical discipline – such as, no surprise, possible Communion for remarried divorcees and doing away with priestly celibacy.
- They also demand a reform in the governance of the Church. It will not be difficult to see this in this brief account of Cardinal Martini’s then well-publicized ‘dreams’ expressed to the Synodal Assembly on Europe in 1999:

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A third dream is that the festive return of the disciples at Emmaus to join the Apostles in Jerusalem may become a stimulus to be repeated every so often during the new century about to begin, in an experience of universal encounter among the bishops of the world that would serve to loosen some of the disciplinary and doctrinal knots that are largely ignored these days although they reappear periodically as hotbutton issues along the path of the Churches of Europe and elsewhere in the Western world. I am thinking
- in general, of the deepening and development of Vatican-II’s ecclesiology of communion.
- the already dramatic lack of ordained priests in many places and for the increasing difficulty of European bishops
to provide for the care of souls in their territory with a sufficient number of ministers of the Gospel and of the Eucharist
- the question of the position of women in society and in the Church
- the participation of laymen in some priestly responsibilities
- sexuality and the discipline of marriage
- penitential practices
- our relationship with the sister Churches of Orthodoxy and more generally, the need to revive the ecumenical goal
- the relationship between democracy and values, and between civilian and moral laws. (Il Margine, n. 9/1999)

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To confront these problems, Cardinal Martini advocated for a new ecumenical council to be called (Vatican III). It is evident that some of the points raised by the then Archbishop of Milan were already faced by Paul VI (contraception, priestly celibacy, etc) and by John Paul II (communion for RCDs, ordination of women, abortion, etc) but in ways other than what the Sankt Gallen cardinals wished.

Since one of these points (communion for RCDs) has since been resolved by this pope in a way that satisfies his Grand Electors, should we not expect that other points brought up by Martini will come up sooner or later and be ‘resolved’ in a way different from what previous popes had decided?

P.S. Let me conclude this post by a reflection from another priest on one of the reigning pope's recent tirades...

On hypocrites
Translated from

June 18, 2017

The schoolyear has ended, and some novices have been consulting me about assignments that they must submit in order to get a final grade for the semester. As if they had not already lost enough time studying nonsense during the schoolyear, some professors have asked them to ‘analyze’ some papal homilettes from Casa Santa Marta.

Now, we know that these sermons of elevated theological content are considered the official magisterium these days, while the bimillennial teaching of the Church is being trampled upon. And the papal cathedra of Casa Santa Marta, besides distilling grand speculations, is now considered in itself a reference point for ‘current doctrine’ inasmuch as the doctrine of ‘always’ is considered messy.

You can dry out your brain just reading these intelligent reflections, but take care – because, through them, the most imaginative theories and the most ludicrous concepts are being introduced to those whose Catholicism is careless, at best. Because it seems the goal of sucsh discourses is always to lead to the perdition of souls.

A few weeks ago, Pope Francis spoke about hypocrites. The #1 tenant of Casa Santa Marta said that the hypocrite does not use the language of Jesus but that of the devil. So I read what he said:

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The hypocrite can kill a community. He may be speaking softly while he is unfairly judging a person. The hypocrite is an assassin. Let us remember this: He starts with adulation – answer him with reality.

But don’t let them [the hypocrites] come with their stories, that ‘this is reality’. Reality is something else. Like ideology, that is reality. [Really??? And I thought one of Bergoglio’s favorite axioms is that ‘Reality is more important than ideas!’ – as if ideas are not reality in themselves (an idea is something actually thought by someone, which he may or may not articulate, which he may or may not act upon, but it is not any less real that the individual thought it, to begin with!] In the end, it is the language of the devil which that forked tongue is sowing in the communities to destroy them.” [Gee, as always, what a marvel of Bergoglian‘syntax non sequitur’!]

Let us ask the Lord to guard us so that we do not fall into the vice of hypocrisy, of camouflaging our attitude, our bad intentions. May the Lord give us this grace: ‘Lord, that I may never be a hypocrite, that I may know to always tell the truth, and that is I cannot do so, to keep quiet, but never, never, to say any hypocrisy.

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Now one can dry up the brain just by reading these intelligent reflections from Casa Santa Marta, but be warned: It is through them that the most imaginative theories and the most harebrained concepts are being introduced to Catholics who are careless at best. And all in the name of seeking the perdition of souls!

I must say that the first thing that occurred to me reading those lines was that the pope was speaking of himself! I could have thought that finally his heart had come to repent and that he wished to confess to his listeners his questionable attitudes that are now well-known to all. “The language of the hypocrite is that of the devil… Start with adulation, but only if it corresponds to reality!... A forked tongue, camouflage, ideology… (this seem to be the gizmos that the hypocrite carries around). But one must respond to him with reality, because otherwise, his forked tongue will sow destruction in the communities.”

So I thought he was preparing to ask for forgiveness. Because I really thought he was speaking of his own behavior, and consequently, of the behavior of his collaborators, accomplices, cronies and associates. But no, he prefers to ask forgiveness for what evil popes before him have done – popes guilty of genocides and inquisitions, or who wree Renaissance princes and doctrinal and moral dictators.

Le us consider, for example, the forked tongue that has inspired the destruction [or degradation, at the very least] of the Eucharist in the past four years.

Because while on the one hand, this pope seems to be getting off on eulogies for the Eucharist – “without which we cannot live, which nourishes us, which is not a prize but a necessity, that is Our Lord himself who remains in us,” and more etceteras spoken in mysticoid mode in some of his homilies and addresses, we now find ourselves with the reality that people living in concubinage or adultery are now officially ‘recognized’ by the church of Bergoglio [as being in a state of grace, no less!, even without confession, much less, any concrete manifestation of amending a life of chronic sin].

Various bishops – among which, most notably those from Malta, Sicily, and Argentina [Fray Gerundio omits to mention Germany and Belgium!] in addition to a host of bishops and parish priests who will never make the news – are ‘normalizing’ all those sinful ways of life, secure in the knowledge that they are supported by this pope.
- While the pope’s followers are shamelessly claiming that Amoris laetitia does not at all lead to communion for adulterers, they are busy giving communion to adulterers who present themselves.
- While the Bergoglians claim that AL does not contradict previous Magisterium (so insist bishops who are treasonous to the faith and who are cowardly enough not to oppose the boss so as not to be sent into exile), in fact they have been contradicting all preceding Magisterium and practices about the Eucharist.
- While they insist that the Eucharist is necessary in Christian life, they are sending a multitude of souls to hell.

As St Paul says, we are all guilty for our own condemnation. And they are guilty who have opened the gates of hell to so many Catholics with “their forked tongue which has sowed destruction in the communities”.
of the very sins they condemn in others.

Today is the Solemnity of Corpus Domini. I don’t know what the pope will be saying in his homilies for the day. But I can assure that I will not believe anything he says. I am not going to swallow that toad even when I see him bestowing a Benediction with the monstrance.

One knows a person by his works, not by his words.
- ‘Paglia de la Vida’ [literally, straw of life, but referring obviously to Mons. Paglia, named by this pope to head the Pontifical Academy for Life] – the fairy bishop depicted in a mural of his former cathedral – claims that even if there are now abortion advocates in his Academy, the Church continues to prohibit abortion.
- Pope Francis may carry on with seemingly pious words about the Eucharist, and I won’t believe him. Because as the Eucharist has been trampled on in recent years, Francis will be – in the eyes of history – the hypocrite who walks around with adulatory words of camouflage, while in reality, he would have destroyed everything in the Church.

But this pope could not care less about any of this. What matters to him for now is arms trafficking, immigration, employment contracts and climate change. Well, the true catastrophic climate change will occur later – at a time of weeping and gnashing of teeth. But may God take us back when we have been properly confessed, as my grandmother liked to say.

Ultimately, one of my novices used some of my reflections, and he ended up being suspended. I do not understand why hypocrisy is always ascribed to ‘you out there’, never to ‘us in here’. But that is exactly what this pope is doing when he gives lessons in moralism. What a shame!

It will be obvious from reading this article why I did not rush to translate it, although it is clear the writers are ‘on Benedict’s side’,
so to speak. I am posting a translation for the record, only because it purports to amplify on an earlier article by the authors towards
the end of May citing an article in the Italian foreign affairs journal LIMES that, in effect, claimed it was the Obama administration that
had been behind the supposed maneuvering that ‘led to the renunciation of Benedict XVI’ - because the US wanted to oppose at any
cost Benedict’s desire to repair the rift between the Roman Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church, as that would supposedly
strengthen Russia under Putin in its increasing rivalry with the United States. If you buy that, you’ll buy the Brooklyn Bridge from the
next guy who will try to sucker you!

This article and its beyond-presumptuous title does not really make any plausible case for the presumed external pressures that led
Benedict XVI to leave the papacy. For which the most plausible reason remains the simplest one – the reason he gave on February 11,
2013: Failing physical strength and infirmities brought on by age which would keep him, already about to turn 86 at the time, from
carrying out his functions as pope in the best way he can, and as the office ought to be served, in the way he has always carried out
all his previous services to the Church in the best way he could.

At best, this article reminds us of all the groups and vested interests that never accepted Joseph Ratzinger as Pope because he
opposed verything they stand for. There are no new revelations, or any specific names or groups identified. At least in 2010, the
New York Times, AP and Der Spiegel publicly committed themselves to sparing no expense to try and pin any personal blame – direct
or indirect – on Joseph Ratzinger for any act of commission or omission that would show he caused and/or took part in the sexual
abuse crisis of the Church and/or covered up any sexual abuse.

One other factor that militates against giving this article any undue weight is that Antonio Socci, the one Vaticanista who has been
adamant about claiming that Benedict was somehow forced to resign by unnamed conspirators, has not bothered to cite this article
at all on his official page.

The end of Benedict XVI’s pontificate:
Unmasking those who were behind it
by Francesco Filipazzi e Riccardo Zenobi
Translated from

June 5, 2017

Following the article we published on May 24 about the renunciation of Benedict XVI, which comes not from us but from the authoritative LIMES monthly journal, new attention has been drawn to reportedly ‘very strong’ pressures on the Roman Curia that many associate privately with conspiracy theories. But unfortunately, our source story this time is so authoritative that critics cannot liquidate it simplistically and therefore, there has been no public contradiction. [When I posted my translation of thatfirst article, I expressed my reservations about exactly how 'authoritative' or even reliable the journal LIMES is.]

The search for truth is one of the principal tasks of a good Catholic, and to respond indirectly to some detractors, we cannot overlook the questions on Benedict XVI’s renunciation, especially not these days when an attack ahs been launched against the Emeritus Pope designed to demolish his teachings; and above all, when an action, which will first be mediatic and then canonical, is imminent against the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, one of the controversies in Benedict’s pontificate, in which he moved something which was thought to be ‘unmovable’, and thus calling down on himself all the fury of the Devil and his emissaries.

Now, this does not have anything to do with judging the validity of Benedict’s resignation or the election of Bergoglio, because we have no proofs to offer about those, but there is evidence of the plot against Benedict XVI, and it is not insignificant.

Before proceeding, let us ask some questions. In everything that has taken place, is taking place and will take place, what exactly has been the role of Pope Francis? Was he aware of everything that took place before his election? Does he really believe in good faith that what he is doing as pope is really for the good of the Church? Only history will tell us. We can only expose the facts as we know them, although of course, we would prefer that sooner or later, the faithful will get concrete answers.

Let us step back to 2010. Massimo Introvigne and Andrea Tornielli were already referring to the alliance between Freemasons and progressivist Catholics. That year, the war against the Church hit its peak and the principal target was Benedict XVI. Because he was considered an ‘inconvenient’ personage who fought the ‘new’ Gnostic-Masonic religion which today, since he left the scene, appears to be triumphant.

Moreover, Benedict XVI also openly questioned the post-conciliar ‘vulgate’ (i.e., the commonly accepted reading of Vatican-II) about some of the consequences, starting with the liturgical, that followed Vatican-II.

The attack was blatant, furious and coordinated. In that context, a Vaticanista who at the time was among the ‘good Catholics’, Andrea Tornielli, along with another Vaticanista, Paolo Rodari [now writing for Repubblica] [One must note that both Tornielli and Rodari were huge ‘Ratzingerians” before March 2013], wrote a book entitled Attacco a Ratzinger. Accuse, scandali, profezie e complotti contro Benedetto XVI (Attack on Ratzinger: Accusations, scandals, predictions and plots against Benedict XVI) (Piemme, Milano 2010). A most interesting analysis in detail, and read in today’s context, it is illuminating about what was taking place concerning the Vatican at that time.

Another personage and author who used to be among the ‘good Catholics’ [and also quite a ‘Ratzingerian’ until March 13, 2013], sociologist Massimo Introvigne, reviewed the book and promoted it strongly on his CESNUR website [CESNUR stands for Centro di Studi delle Nuove Religioni], underscoring its weighty implications.

Let us see what he wrote then (as you can see, we let others speak for themselves, and we are not making up anything):'

---

In conclusion, Tornielli and Rodari ask if it is possible to speak about a plot against the Pope, citing various opinions including mine in an interview that I gave them specifically for this book. They concluded that there were three different attacks under way against Benedict XVI from three different enemies.

The first is the galaxy of lobbyists (secular, homosexual, feminist, Masonic, drug companies pushing anti-contraceptive products worldwide, and lawyers trying to sue the Church for damages to alleged sex abuse victims of priests)…

These lobbyists found traction because they had enlisted in their behalf a second enemy of Benedict XVI made up of Catholic progressivists, including theologians and quite a few bishops and priests, who saw their authority and power in the Church threatened by Benedict’s dismantlement of the interpretation of Vatican II as a discontinuity and rupture with Tradition, an interpretation upon which they had built their careers and fortunes for decades….

---

[And who constituted enemy Number 3??? Would this be the factor cited by LIMES in its article, namely, the United States and all other political interests who wished to prevent any rapprochement between the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church because they saw this as strengthening Russia in their new but undeclared Cold War??? Frankly, I find this ‘sector’ the most tenuous of all the hypothesized enemies of Benedict XVI. What assurance did the politicians and behind-the-scenes movers have that whoever would succeed him as pope would be any less interested in such a rapprochement? Which would, under any circumstances, be very historical indeed, and which an ambitious pope or papabile would wish to achieve, along with a first papal visit to China if possible!]

So, in 2010, Tornielli, Rodari and Introvigne already concluded that there was an alliance among various anti-Catholic lobbies and progressivist Catholics to bring down Benedict XVI. But now, they seem to have forgotten all about it. Their book cam still be bought anywhere and online, and Introvigne’s lengthy hype piece on it is still on the CESNUR site – we invite you to read it.

Now, let us analyze the causes for the plotting against Benedict XVI [if there was one]. Is it, for example just by chance that it was only after Benedict was no longer pope that contraceptives like RU-486 (the morning-after pill) started to be sold in Italy? If there had been a strong opposition against this drug, with adequate information about the risks associated with its use, it is obvious that it would have meant a potentially enormous loss for the drug company. [Not a convincing argument at all! After all, it was already widely available in most other Western countries since … , and the Italian market would not have been such a big piece of the business!]

RU-486 alone was worth tens of millions of euros annually to its manufacturers and distributors. Perhaps, with Benedict XVI still Pope, the Church in Italy would have mounted an opposition – about which the new pontificate did not bother at all.

It is also obvious that the globalist lobbies could not tolerate a thorn in the side like Benedict XVI. The same thing could be said for the homosexual lobbies which can mobilize hundreds of millions of euros - Not to mention the enormous cultural influence they are able to wield. How many careers and businesses have been built on the basis of hyping homosexualism and gender ideology!

As we often point out, it is also clear that money is always the ultimate recourse in any plan to subvert human nature. Money and the ring of power are the instruments Satan uses to sustain the fidelity of his subjects. And here was the good Pope Benedict endangering all of Satan’s plans!

But those who ought to have defended him obviously did not. As Introvigne points out, and as it was obvious to everyone, many renowned theologians and prelates were the best soldiers in the anti-Ratzinger armies. As Tornielli, Rodari and Introvigne already showed back in 2010, the motivations were the same as those of the lobbyists – power, career and obviously, money. Still, as the Italians say, the devil makes the pots but not the lids to cover them up. In other words, truth will out, and now, everything is in the full light of day.

Recent news indicates, for example, that the systematic ‘demolition’ of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate – which was an order anchored to the best of traditionalism and in which vocations flourished – ultimately had to do with the considerable assets associated with the order [specifically, with the lay associations that support the activities of the order, which is vowed to monastic poverty].

There are bishops, who now have blazingly brilliant careers, who are facing major judicial investigations for financial disasters they have brought upon their dioceses. [One must check out this claim. I am aware only of the case of the multiply infamous Mons. Paglia, against whom, however, charges of embezzlement and financial mismanagement have been dismissed.]

But all that is ignored within Bergoglio’s Vatican (even if some of the financial straits resulted from generous gifts and favors to influence-peddling progressivist friends). Moreover, the media have been extremely indulgent to these nefarious personages because they do promote the Gnostic-Masonic agenda of ‘reform’ intended to deform the Church.

In short, if you adhere to the anti-Christian blood oath, they will leave you alone, and you can do as you wish. Even investigations are not to be feared because they will end up being passed over as water under the bridge.

Another example is the big business of immigration. Would a Church still anchored to the traditional virtue of mission sell itself for 30 pieces of silver? Obviously not. But Catholic progressivists are all in the front ranks of those who are sharing the booty from this big business. [How exactly? Are they in league with the human traffickers for whom aspiring immigrants go in hock in order to pay the exorbitant fees they charge for getting them to Europe by hook or by crook? Or do they get the contracts from governments to provide the basic necessities to refugee camps and shelters which could mount to significant sums if we are talking tens of thousands of beneficiaries to provide for?]

But in the grand Masonic-progressivist agenda, there is a major obstacle: Liturgy. As long as bread and wine continue to be consecrated – and trans-substantiated to the Body and Blood of Christ – there is a powerful brake on Evil. And that is why in the past 60 years, everything has been done to reduce the Mass to no thing more than a skit. Of course, the major promoters of this liturgical drift [in the sense of a tectonic displacement, as in continental drift, but on the scale of decades instead of geologic eras!] claim they are doing it for the best reasons, i.e., ‘Jesus-is-joy and one-must-attract-persons’, or so they claim. But that is not what motivates those who are manipulating them.

Thus, the move to restore the traditional Mass to full legitimacy was ferociously fought, mainly by persons – including cardinals and bishops – who know nothing about it, and who, if they did understand what it is that they are being used for, might feel shamed. This are ignorant people for whom merely hearing the words ‘ad orientem’ or anything Latin (even if it was the Novus Ordo in Latin) react as though it were the end of the world!

Well then, Benedict XVI did not limit himself to merely hypothesizing the ‘reform of the liturgical reform, but promulgated an act in the eyes of the Enemy and his emissaries in the Church was something really terrible. He issued the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, which brought back the Missal of Pius V which the progressivists thought they had mothballed forever. And Benedict even dared to say that the Missal of Paul VI could benefit from being ‘irrigated’ somehow by the Traditional Mass.

And so the battle against the ‘Latin Mass’ began right away and it has been ferocious and systematic. However, the energy and power of the old liturgy have proven to be unstoppable, and it is gaining new adherents surprisingly among the younger post-Vatican II generations.

Paradoxically, after Ratzinger stepped down as pope, the traditional liturgical movement did not suffer at all, but simply continued to spread as it continues to do so today, as more and more, in the past for years, Catholics have opened their eyes to the dangers inherent in the cretinized liturgy that the faithful have been offered for too long. Indeed, in some places, even the Missal of Paul VI has become almost a dead letter [for all the liberties that priests have felt free to take with liturgy] and priests who try to follow it properly are vilified. [Has it become that serious in Italy?]

It was therefore obvious that at a certain point Cardinal Sarah, who as Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, had spoken of continuing the ‘reform of the reform’ [as Pope Francis reportedly encouraged him to do when he appointed him to CDW], expecting to recreate the Tridentine spirit, has now become a sacrificial victim, and beyond that, there has now surfaced a certain intolerance and even hostility against the Emeritus Pope who did turn the liturgical tables on his detractors, and worse, is still alive!

The Tornielli-Rodari book is very enlightening about Summorum Pontificum. He reports that the disciples of Mons. Bugnini who are the favored liturgists today [Bugnini was the bishop who chaired the commission that devised the admittedly Protestantized Novus Ordo Mass almost literally overnight] saw Benedict XVI’s motu proprio as an ‘annulment’ of the work of Bugnini and of the post-V-II liturgical reform, but above all, a wound preventing the full achievement of that reform. Therefore there was a collective ‘lifting of shields’ in the name of a council that was supposed to be ‘untouchable’.

Enzo Bianchi, the lay leader of the Bose community who was made a liturgical consultant by Pope Francis, says the traditional Mass relates to ‘a situation that no longer exists’, and for the bishops of France, the ecclesiology of the traditional Mass ‘is not in line with that of Vatican II’ [obviously not, if one takes the premise that Vatican II gave birth to ‘a new church’!] Evidently, for the modernists, the Church was born only in 1965.

Indeed, the French bishops also went on to claim that Benedict XVI’s motu proprio threatened the unity of the Church sub Petro and cum Petro. And went on to attack Benedict XVI frontally. [How exactly? I do not recall much overt attacks reported in the media at the time – and I attributed it to the fact that Benedict XVI had pre-empted much of it by the most rational and sensible explanatory letter he wrote to the bishops of the world accompanying a copy of his motu proprio that he sent to them before it was ever published.]

Other interesting statements made recently by prominent Church personages are also ‘enlightening’, e.g., “The Curia is not governed by the pope”. So is there also a so-called ‘deep state’ at the Vatican?

Among the traps that were laid out for Ratzinger, it is worth recalling what happened because of the Regensburg lecture. The ‘incriminating’ passage that infuriated Muslims around the world had been pointed out by a few Vaticanistas as a harbinger of problems! Did anyone warn the Pope? Obviously not. And why not? Was it because a media strategy to set the stage for a slaughter was already in place? Yet, when Navarro-Valls was the Vatican press secretary, any papal texts that were potentially dangerous were quickly marked out and reformulated. [I hate it when journalists seek to reconstruct recent history approximatively, when it can so easily be researched. The preceding paragraph is a revisionist account of the Regensburg fiasco – not for malicious reasons, but simply out of laziness. To explain that fiasco cannot be done in three sentences.]

Another trap was the nomination of Mons. Wielgus to be Archbishop of Warsaw. He was a conservative priest, but his involvement with the Communist secret service in Poland was widely known on the Internet. Did anyone tell the Pope? Obviously not. And the muckraking machine went into high gear! [This is much easier to explain correctly. Wielgus’s past as a Communist informant on his fellow priests was well-documented in the archives of the Polish service which became open to the public after the communist regime fell. This ought to have been reported to the pope by the Secretariat of State through its Nuncio in Poland, who is responsible for vetting any names recommended for Episcopal appointment. None of that negative information was sent on to Rome and to the pope. And the Congregation for Bishops did not have the brains to doublecheck the Nuncio's 'vetting'.]

And so on, with other traps that were set to trip up Benedict XVI. [Something similar to the Wielgus case - lack of due diligence on the part of the Vatican agencies principally responsible for vetting bishops - led to the over-hyped case that revolved around Mons. Williamson’s Holocaust-denying statements.]

June 22, 2017 headlines

PewSitter


Canon212.com


The news aggregators' headlines seem to be getting more ludicrous daily, but I suppose that is mainly because much of the news having
to do with the Church is also getting to be more ludicrous. I would welcome a more objective, less intemperate and more sober
presentation from those who formulate the headlines for PewSitter and Canon212.com.

Matthew Schmitz of FIRST THINGS scores another great home run for the right team with this article in CATHOLIC HERALD... I did not
realize how a small band of Anglophone Catholic (and I think all-white) journalists - the same names over and over - have become
such first-class Sarahphobe a-holes! To the point that they don't mind the risk of being called racist for their reprehensible treatment
of a black cardinal when they treated someone like Barack Obama with kid gloves and reverence (well, he was, after all, their ideological
soulmate!

Why Cardinal Sarah terrifies his critics
His opponents have attacked his views and called for his sacking.
His response has been a gracious silence.
by Matthew Schmitz

June 22, 2017

A growing crowd wants Cardinal Robert Sarah’s head on a platter. Open a liberal Catholic periodical and you are likely to find a call for the dismissal of the Guinean cardinal who heads the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship:
- “It’s past time for [Pope Francis] to replace Cardinal Sarah” (Maureen Fiedler, National Catholic Reporter);
- “New wine might be needed at the Congregation for Divine Worship” (Christopher Lamb, the Tablet);
- “Curia officials who refuse to get with Francis’s programme should leave. Or the Pope should send them somewhere else” (Robert Mickens, Commonweal);
- “Francis must put his foot down. Cardinals like Robert Sarah … may feel that with a papacy heading in the wrong direction, foot-dragging is a duty. But that does not mean Francis has to put up with them”(The Editors, the Tablet).

Sarah was not always treated as the most dangerous man in Christendom. When he was appointed to his post by Pope Francis in 2014, he enjoyed the goodwill even of those who criticise him today.
- Mickens described him as “unambitious, a good listener and, despite showing a clear conservative side since coming to Rome … a ‘Vatican II man’”.
- Lamb was told by his sources that Sarah was someone liberals could like, the kind of bishop who was sympathetic to “inculturation”.
- John Allen summed up the consensus around the Vatican: Sarah was a low-profile bishop, “warm, funny and modest”.

All that changed on October 6, 2015, the third day of the contentious synod on the family. The synod fathers were riven by the seemingly competing demands of reaching out to people who felt stigmatised by the Church’s sexual teaching and boldly proclaiming truth to a hostile world.

In what has come to be known as the “apocalyptic beasts” speech, Sarah insisted that both were possible. “We are not contending against creatures of flesh and blood,” he told his brother bishops. “We need to be inclusive and welcoming to all that is human.” But the Church must still proclaim the truth in the face of two great challenges. “On the one hand, the idolatry of Western freedom; on the other, Islamic fundamentalism: atheistic secularism versus religious fanaticism.”

As a young priest, Sarah studied at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem and planned a dissertation on “Isaiah, Chapters 9-11, in Light of Northwestern Semitic Linguistics: Ugaritic, Phoenician and Punic”. So it is no surprise that he employed biblical language to make his point.

Western freedom and Islamic fundamentalism, he told the assembly, were like two “apocalyptic beasts”. The image comes from the Book of Revelation, which describes how two beasts will attack the Church. The first comes out of the sea with seven heads, 10 horns, and blasphemy on its lips. The second rises out of the land performing great wonders, and persuades the world to worship the first.

This strange dynamic – one monstrous threat leading men to embrace the other – is what Sarah sees at work in our own time. Fear of religious repression induces some to worship an idolatrous freedom. (I recall the time I found myself the only man left sitting when Ayaan Hirsi Ali ended a speech by asking her audience to give an ovation “To blasphemy!”)

On the other hand, attacks on human nature tempt some to embrace the false reassurance of religious fundamentalism, which has its most horrible expression under the black flag of ISIS. Each evil tempts those who fear it to succumb to its opposite. As with communism and Nazism in the 20th century, both must be resisted.

Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki, head of the Polish bishops’ conference, wrote that Sarah’s intervention was made at a “very high theological and intellectual level”, but others seemed to miss its meaning altogether. Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane decried the use of “apocalyptic language”. (One wonders what he makes of the rest of John’s Revelation.) “The boys don’t like to be reminded of judgment,” quipped one cardinal after Sarah spoke.

A prominent Vatican watcher wrote to me from Rome: “He stepped in it today by talking about the two beasts of the Apocalypse. His popable stock took a hit.” Fr James Martin SJ claimed that Sarah had violated the Catechism, “which asks us to treat LGBT people with ‘respect, compassion and sensitivity’ ”.

One sometimes wants to ask whether, for Catholics like Fr Martin, there are any words in which the Church’s sexual teaching can be defended – since they seem never to employ them. Still, the reaction to Sarah’s speech probably had more to do with simple illiteracy than any difference in principle.

Cardinal Wilfred Napier of Durban said in the run-up to the synod that Europeans suffer from a “widespread ignorance and rejection not only of Church teaching but also Scripture”. He was right. Those who do not live in Scripture and know its figures first-hand are more likely to view biblical language as irrelevant or inflammatory.

On October 14, a week after Sarah’s speech, Cardinal Walter Kasper complained about African interventions at the synod. “I can only speak of Germany where the great majority wants an opening about divorce and remarriage. It’s the same in Great Britain, it’s everywhere.” Well, not quite everywhere: “With Africa it’s impossible. But they should not tell us too much what to do.”

Kasper’s dismissal of Sarah and the other Africans prompted an immediate outcry. Obianuju Ekeocha, a Nigerian Catholic who campaigns against abortion, wrote: “Imagine my shock today as I read the words of one of the most prominent synod fathers … As an African woman now living in Europe, I am used to having my moral views and values ignored or put down as an ‘African issue’.”

Cardinal Napier agreed: “It’s a real worry to read an expression like ‘the Pope’s Theologian’ applied to Cardinal Kasper … Kasper isn’t very respectful towards the African Church and its leaders.”

Kasper’s statement was like the breaking of a dam. Since then, a great wave of abuse has poured over Sarah. His critics have described him as uppity, uneducated and possibly criminal – or at least in need of a good beating.
- Michael Sean Winters of the National Catholic Reporter reminded Sarah of his role (“Curial cardinals are, after all, staff, exalted staff, but staff”).
- La Croix’s Fr William Grim called his work “asinine … patently stupid … red-capped idiocy”.
- Andrea Grillo, a liberal Italian liturgist, wrote: “Sarah has shown, for years, a significant inadequacy and incompetence in the field of liturgy.” [Did anyone read Grillo making this objection when the pope named Cardinal Sarah to CDW more than three years ago??? If there is any truth to your calumny, Mr. Cricket, what does it say of the man who appointed such an incompetent?]
- In the Tablet, Fr Anthony Ruff corrected Sarah. “It would be good if he could study the reforms more deeply and understand, for example, what ‘mystery’ means in Catholic theology.”
- Massimo Faggioli, a Vaticanista who haunts Rome’s gelaterias, innocently observed that Sarah’s apocalyptic beasts speech “would be subject to criminal charges in some countries”. (Having ministered for years under the brutal Marxist dictatorship of Sékou Touré, Sarah hardly needs reminding that open profession of Christian belief can be a crime.)

[Dear Lord, these unscrupulous critics don't even mind feigning ignorance just to undercut Sarah who is undoubtedly far more educated and cultured than all of them put together!]

After Pope Francis rejected Sarah’s call last year for priests to celebrate mass ad orientem, contempt for Sarah broke out in a shower of blows:
- “It is highly unusual for the Vatican to publicly slap down a Prince of the Church, yet not entirely surprising given how Cardinal Sarah has operated…” (Christopher Lamb, Tablet);
- “the Pope slapped down Cardinal Sarah quite strongly, with only a bit of face-saving spared him,” (Anthony Ruff, Pray Tell);
- “Pope slaps down Sarah” (Robert Mickens, on Twitter);
- “Pope Francis … slapped him down” (Mickens again, in Commonweal);
- “a further slap-down” (Mickens once more, a few months later in La Croix). Added up, it makes for quite a beating.
[In a normal climate of civility and truthtelling, the Vatican Press office would and should probably have 'slapped down' all these critics with a simple statement that "The Pope did not mean to slap down Cardinal Sarah at all. He merely meant (whatever facesaving lie they may wish to use)". But they did not - and so, it was a PAPAL SLAPDOWN, all right, no ifs or buts! NO HITS, EITHER.]

Exchanging charges of insensitivity is probably not the best way to settle doctrinal disputes, but the rhetoric of Sarah’s critics reveals something important about Catholic life today: in disputes doctrinal, moral and liturgical, liberal Catholics have become ecclesial nationalists.

Traditional Catholics tend to support consistent doctrinal standards and pastoral approaches regardless of national boundaries. If they do not actually prefer the Latin Mass, they want vernacular translations to track the Latin as closely as possible. They are not scandalised by the way Africans speak of homosexuality or Middle Eastern Christians of Islamism.

Liberal Catholics, meanwhile, campaign for vernacular translation written in idiomatic style and approved by national bishops’ conferences, not by Rome. Local realities require truth to be trimmed whenever it crosses a border. Catholic doctrinal statements should be couched in pastorally sensitive language – sensitive, that is, to the sensibilities of the educated, wealthy West.

One of the advantages of ecclesial nationalism is that it allows liberals to avoid arguing on direct doctrinal grounds, where traditional “rigorists” tend to have the upper hand. If truth must be mediated by local realities, no man in Rome or Abuja will have much say over the faith of Brussels and Stuttgart (this was the point behind Kasper’s dismissal of Africans).

One sees this in writers like Commonweal’s Rita Ferrone, who says that rather than heeding Sarah, English speakers should be “trusting our own people and our own wisdom concerning prayer in our native tongue”. The “we” behind that “our” is not global and Catholic, but bourgeois and American.

What if instead of being put back in his place, slapped down and locked up for violating Western speech codes, Sarah becomes pope? This is what his critics fear most.
- Mickens writes of the dark possibility of a “Pius XIII (also known as Robert Sarah)”.
- Lamb says that Sarah may turn out to be “the first black Pope”. (That would be a beautiful thing – Sarah’s parents, converts in the remote Guinean village of Ourous, assumed that only white men could become priests and laughed when their son said he wanted to go to seminary.)

The same well-connected Vatican watcher who told me that Sarah’s stock fell during the synod now says his fortunes are improving. “People have noticed all the attacks, and his gracious refusal to respond in kind.”

It is indeed remarkable that Sarah has suffered this hail of abuse with such grace. In his newly published book The Power of Silence, we hear his stifled cry of anguish:

---

I painfully experienced assassination by gossip, slander and public humiliation, and I learned that when a person has decided to destroy you, he has no lack of words, spite and hypocrisy; falsehood has an immense capacity for constructing arguments, proofs and truths out of sand.

When this is the behaviour of men of the Church, and in particular of bishops, the pain is still deeper. But … we must remain calm and silent, asking for the grace never to give in to rancour, hatred and feelings of worthlessness. Let us stand firm in our love for God and for his Church, in humility.

---

Despite it all, Sarah is a man unbowed. His book reiterates his call for Mass ad orientem and the rest of the “reform of the reform”: “God willing, when he wills and as he wills, the reform of the reform will take place in the liturgy. Despite the gnashing of teeth, it will happen, for the future of the Church is at stake.”

If Sarah has refused to make himself pleasing to those who run Rome, he is not about to serve any other party either. In this wonderfully individual book, he tells old Islamic folktales, dotes on the suffering and weak, and decries military intervention: “How can we not be scandalised and horrified by the action of American and Western governments in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria?” Sarah views these as idolatrous outpourings of blood “in the name of the goddess Democracy” and “in the name of Liberty, another Western goddess”. He opposes the effort to build “a religion without borders and a new global ethics”.

If that seems hyperbolic, recall that six days after missiles hit Baghdad, Tony Blair sent George W Bush a memo saying, “Our ambition is big: to construct a global agenda around which we can unite the world … to spread our values of freedom, democracy, tolerance.” Sarah views this programme as something close to blasphemy.

He has equally pungent views on the modern economy: “The Church would commit a fatal mistake if she exhausted herself in giving a sort of social face to the modern world that has been unleashed by free-market capitalism.”

War, persecution, exploitation: all these forces are part of a “dictatorship of noise”, whose incessant slogans distract men and discredit the Church. In order to resist it, Sarah turns to the example of Brother Vincent, a recently deceased young man whom Sarah dearly loved. Only if we love and pray like Vincent can we hear la musica callada, the silent music the angels played for John of the Cross. Yes, this book shows that Sarah has a great deal to say: on the mystical life, the Church and world affairs. But for the most part he keeps silence – while the world talks about him.

GOD BLESS CARDINAL SARAH!

Three good pieces in the past two days by Mundabor who is at his best when he upholds good old-fashioned Catholicism such as that in
which he was raised (his description of his Catholic childhood tells me we belong to a kindred generation)... He supplements that with
a familiarity with Catholic theology beyond the ken of a dabbler like me.

Dies Irae, or
Reprobation in a time of Godlessness

June 22, 2017

I have written many times about Garrigou-Lagrange's affirmation that it is reasonable to suppose that the majority of those living in Catholic countries [do their best] to avoid hell. Very reassuring, for sure.

[Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. (1877–1964) was a French Catholic theologian, recognized as one of the leading neo-Thomists of the 20th century. His great achievement was to synthesise the highly abstract writings of St Thomas Aquinas with the experiential writings of St. John of the Cross, attempting to show they are in perfect harmony with each other.

He wrote 28 books on spiritual theology, arguing that infused contemplation and the resulting mystical life are the normal way of holiness of Christian perfection. This influenced the section entitled "Chapter V: The Universal Call to Holiness in the Church" in the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen gentium.

The leading proponent of "strict observance Thomism", he wrote against the Nouvelle Théologie movement, criticising it as Modernist. He is also said to have drafted Pope Pius XII's 1950 encyclical Humani generis, subtitled "Concerning Some False Opinions Threatening to Undermine the Foundations of Catholic Doctrine", and was on the commission consulted by Pius XII prior to declaring the dogma of the Assumption. Among his students were fellow Dominicans Marie Dominique Chenu and Yves Congar who went on to make their name as theologians themselves. But his most famous student was the future Pope John Paul II, whom he supervised by Garrigou-Lagrange for his doctoral research in the mid-1940s at the Angelicum, and whose encyclical Fides et Ratio is attributed to his training under the learned Dominican.]

However, Garrigou Lagrange was writing this in the Fifties, when Catholic ountries or territories like France, Italy, Spain, Austria or Bavaria were almost totally, and solidly orthodox Catholic.

Nor were those the Catholics of today. Very many of them not only went to Mass at least every Sunday, but stood pretty near the Sacraments, knew about salvation more than the reigning pope ever imagined and had, crucially, a great fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom.

If we compare them with today, we see how Catholicism has today become such a thin varnish that I seriously, seriously doubt Garrigou Lagrange would make the same claim today.

Today's “catholics” not only don't go to Mass, but they consider it utterly normal to call themselves (if they must) Catholic whilst making their own religion. They tattoo themselves (grave matter!) without a second thought; try to tell them this is grave matter and you will likely be insulted. They contracept, fornicate, often abort. They distance themselves from everything of the Church past and present that does not square with their own personal theology. Most importantly, they have no compunction about any of this.

In all ages, people have sinned. But in a strong Catholic culture with a strong fear of the Lord, repentance followed the sin, and most people were reasonable enough to be afraid of what a sudden death might do to them.

Perhaps even more importantly, a strong Catholic culture naturally enforced Catholic behaviour in the public square.
- When I was in grade school, not one of the pupils either in my or in my siblings' classes was the son of concubines (this was very easy to see then, because the wife had to take the family name of the husband). Not one. The scenario is inconceivable today even in once Catholic Italy.
- You want more? I knew the first guy who lived more uxorio when I was fifteen (a young teacher at my school).
- I knew of the first non-Jewish boy who was not baptised when I was nineteen, and I still remember mine and my classmates' shock.
- I never had a schoolmate with tattooes.

It was all normal then, but it seems unbelievable today. Today we live in an age of mass rebellion. Still, we think that we should have access to the same mercy our forefathers (who would have been terrified I do not say of concubinage, but of a tattoo!! Something considered the preserve of godless Mariners, Pirates and jail inmates) earned with their fear of the Lord and their access to the Sacraments.

There is a big difference between, say, the girl who sleeps with her betrothed and is afraid of hell for that, and the girl who sleeps with her boyfriend and thinks that she is right, because lurv, you know. The first one is, clearly, also in danger of damnation, but she will always have access to a mercy the second one has cut herself out of.

Still, there seems to be this thinking according to which God's mercy is something due to us [the Bergoglio hook, line and sinker], whilst we rebel against Him not out of weakness, but of sheer hubris. This thinking is so spread today that it is, actually, the default position among many who call themselves Catholic, let alone those who don't.

Fools, all of them. Fools in this generation as in every other before or after, because the rules don't change according to what you think about them. And yes, let us hope that the Lord will look with more mercy on the poorly instructed; but don't expect Him to have the same attitude with those who thought they had no need of, or even resented the instruction.

If we asked our Grand-Grandmother what the probable destiny of a person is who never darkened a church in decades, lived in sin and boasted of it, and died suddenly or anyway unrepented, said grand-grandmother would think we are pulling her leg, and we certainly weren't born Sherlocks. She might dismiss our statement as a bad joke. She might even (if she takes us seriously) slap us in the face for our obvious lack of fear of the Lord.

Interestingly, it is very reasonable to assume that our Grand-grandmother would refuse to recognise the vast majority of our Catholic neighbours as Catholic in any way, shape or form. She would, on the whole, be pretty right.

Heck, I wonder how many children in once Catholic Italy are today actually not even baptised, as their vaguely deist parents think that 'ceremonies are not important' and 'God does not care for formalities'. These are, of course, the offspring of parents who did not believe fornication can lead you to hell if there is lurv, and such rubbish.

"Let's get rid of the rules. I want to have it my own way. Father Faggot, whom I still despise, seems to think the same anyway. I think him an idiot, but I will use his godlessness whenever it's convenient to me.

Does it mean, then, that we live in a time in which the majority are Reprobates? I cannot see how it could be any other way, and it seems to me that those born now are in a much worse situation than those born only 20 or 30 years ago. Logically, it really cannot be any other way.

- If the difference between a strong Church which rigidly enforces Catholic living and the pathetic, effeminate church of today showering her mercy talk on every fornicator is non -xistent or very little, then the Church has no importance.
- If a life of fornication gives me the same chances of salvation as a life of abstinence, let me grab those titties!
- If salvation is showered in the same way on a faithless and on a faithful generation, we and all our forefathers are idiots.

However, we aren't idiots. We are, actually, pretty smart; because we have the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom. A wisdom of which most of this generation seems utterly deprived.

It was this wisdom that kept old sinners near the Sacraments and, in the end, out of hell. The current crop of heathens and self-appointed mini-messiahs has nothing of it. They march toward their judgment in the utter persuasion of their goodness, and in the entitled expectation of whatever salvation they think might exist. They literally think that if there is a God they deserve salvation because they love polar bear cubs.

This is the the thinking of heathens. We know (or do we know it still?) where most of them end.

So yes, we are probably living in an age of mass Reprobation; and this mass Reprobation is made evident to us every day, in that we see that very many around us actually live like picture book reprobates: fornication, concubinage, rejection of the sacraments, tattooes , abortions, soon euthanasia….

And not a care in the world beside climate change.

Canada: The priest as criminal

June 22, 2017

Canada is becoming more and more interesting as an example of Nazi Liberal sub-culture. Predictably, this will hit the local church squarely in the face. A well-deserved punishment for the cowardice and stupidity of the local clergy.

As Gloria TV reports, every priest will be assumed to be a potential criminal starting from 2020: fingerprints taken, never allowed to be alone with children, and – astonishingly – with parents legally allowed to assist to the first confession of the children preparing for Communion (I detect the pungent smell of sacrilege here, and observe that, if needs be, a normal grate would do the job admirably; and failing that, a camera without audio; but we live in stupid times).

What this means is that the Canadian Government is treating priests as a risk category; like a man released from jail for sexual offences, say. He might be good, but boy, he is a… a….. priest!! How can you trust those people?

In a way I understand the Canadian Government: the Canadian clergy must be abundantly infested with perverts, and perverts must be kept away from children. I would welcome the sacking of every perverted priest all over the planet. However, the grave issue of perverted priests should never be allowed to impinge on the Sacraments.

One also wonders whether other obvious categories “at risk” (teachers certainly, and then so-called religious that are not Catholic, including Muslim ones; I remind you here that the so-called religion of peace has no problems with someone screwing a girl of nine) are treated in the same way. Perhaps they are, perhaps they aren't. You never know what Nazi Anti-Clerical Nanny has in store for you.

However, what clearly emerges is this: Fifty years of faggotry within the Priesthood have created a situation of such alarm, that a liberal worldly country now thinks it can decide how the Church administers the sacraments.

Well done, Canadian fag priests and their enablers. Well done, effeminate Canadian clergy. You are now all potential pedophiles. Can't say you don't deserve it. Can't say I think differently, either. You smell like the sheep, and must be kept at distance.

I want you to know I am not sad about this at all.

Perversion is never consistent with
Catholicism, decency or common sense

June 22, 2017

Pity Nancy Pelosi, old botoxed hag marching towards hell with a very solid faith in her 'divinity'. As to the others, perhaps a couple of words are in order.

Firstly, Catholicism has never said that homosexuality is compatible with anything. On the contrary, Catholicism has always maintained that homosexuality is a sexual perversion, and not one iota will ever change in Christ's and the Church's teaching. Therefore, when the old hag claims that homosexuality is compatible with Catholicism, she is saying that Catholicism is a fraud and she does not know jack of Catholicism. She is, therefore, being stupid twice.

Secondly, I wonder whether there are still people who believe in basic decency in Washington or among Democratic voters at large. If you come to the point of thinking that sodomy is in any way normal, it is clear that your mind has already been perverted to the point of not seeing the stench and the filth of sexual perversion. And yes, the two go hand in hand, because it is impossible to be disgusted by sodomy and still think that homosexuality is compatible with anything different from a perverted mind.

Thirdly, these people just forget plain common sense. They think the human brain has worked the wrong way until their own botoxed mug appeared on the scene. Even the Bolscheviks loathed homosexuality, and the Gospel had nothing to do with it. It was just plain thinking, of which even those people were capable.

Pity the old botoxed hag. So old, so vain, so stupid, and such a damn fool.

Cardinal Joseph Zen, octogenarian emeritus Bishop of HongKong, has been fighting any Vatican concessions to China that would militate against the Catholics of the underground Church.

China - and why 'the agreement'
with Rome no longer seems 'imminent'
as the Vatican had led us to believe

June 22, 2017

Last summer, an agreement between the Vatican and China had been given as 'imminent'. But not any more.

Instead of the two sides issuing shared rules on the appointment of new bishops, news is coming from Beijing of bishops who have been incarcerated and disappeared.

Halfway through Lent, Mindong Bishop Vincent Guo Xijin, recognized by Rome but not by the Chinese authorities, was arrested and taken to a secret location for the crime of not wanting to enroll in and submit to the para-governmental Patriotic Association. “So that he may study and learn,” police representatives said about him.

Heading into Easter, the same fate for the same reasons befell the Bishop of Wenzhou, Peter Shao Zhumin. Having reappeared after twenty days of 're-education', he was arrested once again on May 18, without any news about his place of detention. On June 15 he was seen landing at the airport of Wenzhou, in custody, after which he disappeared again.

His elderly mother has said she is afraid that in the end he will be brought back to her in a body bag, as with other abducted bishops, tortured and left to die after years not so long ago: the last two being John Gao Kexian, Bishop of Yantai, in 2004, and John Han Dingxian, Bishop of Yongnian, in 2007.

On June 20, in an official statement, Germany's ambassador to China, Michael Clauss – amid the silence of the Vatican authorities – asked that the Bishop of Wenzhou be set free and expressed concern over the new religious regulations that threaten to "implement new restrictions on the right to freedom of religion and belief." [Maybe the Vatican requested the ambassador's assistance? One hopes so.]

Also still held in isolation is the Bishop of Shanghai, Thaddeus Ma Daqin, arrested immediately after his episcopal consecration in 2012, for having announced on the occasion that he was disassociating himself from the Patriotic Association - in obedience to Rome, which judges membership in it as “incompatible” with the Catholic faith . He has not been released despite the fact that he retracted his statement of disassociation a year ago.

At the time of Mons. Ma's arrest, the diocesan seminary of Shanghai, the most populous Catholic diocese in China, was closed. It was only a few days ago that four candidates who had been ready to receive orders since 2012 were finally ordained - by the bishop of a nearby diocese.

But last Easter, in the cathedral of Mindong, whose bishop had been in confinement, Ma Daqin was allowed to concelebrate along with the unauthorized bishop recognized by the government but not by Rome, Vincent Zhan Silu.

This was a flagrant affront to the Holy See, since Zhan, excommunicated by the very fact of having been consecrated illegally, is not only a prominent member of the Patriotic Association, but is also vice-president of the Council of Chinese bishops, the pseudo- episcopal conference set up by the Communist regime exclusively with bishops in thrall to it, with the claim that this should be the group that selects future bishops.

Since this is the way things are, it comes as no surprise that in Rome, even the most eager supporters of the agreement are now raining on their own parade.
- Back in January Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Secretary of
State, had popped the bubbles and foretold “a long journey.”
- At the end of May, Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Community of Sant’Egidio, tireless proponent of an agreement and someone with a direct line to Casa Santa Marta and the pope, also admitted - in an article in Avvenire - that 'the timeframe has been pushed back'.
- And La Civiltà Cattolica sent the same message at the beginning of June, with an editorial signed by Chinese Jesuit Joseph You Guo Jiang, a Sinologist and professor at Boston College.

To read this editorial, however, the situation of the Catholic Church in China would seem to be all wine and roses, today as in the past. It’s enough to see how it describes the historical point of departure for the current situation: It summarizes the terrible years of Maoism and of the Cultural Revolution in one sentence. “From 1949 until the Chinese policy of the ‘open door’ in 1978, Catholicism has faced various challenges and problems.” Not one word more.

And arriving at the present:

---

The Chinese Catholic Church is called to redefine its role and its relationships with the communist party and with its ideology. . . Once this dialogue is in place, the Catholic Church and Chinese society will not clash any more. . . Catholicism will be able to find a stable place in it if it continues to be the expression of an open Church and a Church with Chinese characteristics and identity.

---

Which means a Church with the “sinicized” face which is the imperative of the regime: a hodgepodge of Confucian values and Marxist ideology under the iron control of the state, just as in Confucian China, it was the emperor who was the supreme authority over religious institutions and the faithful.

But wouldn’t you know it, Civiltà - which under Fr. Antonio Spadaro as editor, has become the “house organ” of Casa Santa Marta - interprets even this in a positive vein.

It cites in support the “historic” interview with Pope Francis given to Francesco Sisci of Asia Times on January 28, 2016. Which in reality was a superb example of Realpolitik pushed to the extreme, both for the intentional silence - agreed on with the interviewer - on questions of religion and freedom, and for the words with which the pope absolved en bloc the past and present of China, urging it to “accept its own journey for what it has been,” as “water that flows” and purifies everything, even those millions of victims whom Francis is careful not to name, even tacitly.

The negotiation, in any case, continues. “There is a commission that is working with China and meets every three months, once here and the next time in Beijing,” Francis said in an interview with El País published last January 22.

But who knows how much it will take to reach an agreement, especially if it is one that cannot [and should not] come 'at any price whatsoever'. “Time is greater than space,” says a postulate dear to Francis. Better that he make time for time.

Another belated post of a Maureen Mullarkey essay...

Notes on our Pope of Peace

May 29, 2017

In Jorge Bergoglio’s lexicon, the words love and peace are vacant of meaning. Love dwindles down to nice feelings; peace shrinks to an ostrich-like refusal to acknowledge encroaching peril.

On the flight back to Rome from Fatima, our shepherd delivered this reversal of reality to the court press:

---

An atheist said to me: “I am an atheist”. He didn’t say what nationality he was or where he came from. He spoke in English, so I couldn’t tell and I didn’t ask him. “I ask you a favour: tell Christians that they must love Muslims more”. That is a message of peace.

---

When he speaks of peace, the pope is directing himself to the West. He is pacifying any lingering impulse — among Europeans especially — to defend themselves, their children, and their civilization against an enemy rising. The enemy is ancient; the papal memory, short. His invocations of peace are little more than the mewlings of an unsuspecting sacrificial goat.

Pope Francis is keen to exhibit solicitude for Muslims en bloc. Does that unhealthy habit qualify him for comparison to women who make marriage proposals to serial killers in prison?

That question came to mind when I read the opening paragraph of Theodore Dalrymple’s City Journal review of Paul Hollander’s new book on why intellectuals (and aspirants to the category) fall in love with dictators and totalitarian regimes:

---

Imprisoned serial killers of women are often the object of marriage proposals from women who know nothing of them except their criminal record. This curious phenomenon indicates the depths to which self-deception can sink in determining human action.

The women making such offers presumably believe that an essential core of goodness subsists in the killers and that they are uniquely the ones to bring it to the surface. They thereby also distinguish themselves from other women, whose attitude to serial killers is more conventional and unthinkingly condemnatory. They believe they see further and deeper, and feel more strongly, than their conventional sisters.

---

What better way to describe Bergoglio’s dogged refusal to grapple with the Islamic worldview and Islam’s theological imperative to violence?

Elimination of the hated kafir is a binding requisite of the faith; terror is its sacrament. The Bergoglian mind, a cocoon of self-congratulation, claims for itself the gnosis required to tame Islam and achieve universal brotherhood.

Bergoglio’s pontificate has taught us that he sees farther and deeper than you and I. And how greatly he feels! For his trip to Egypt, our Pope of Hearts adopted the moniker “Pope of Peace.” By addressing Laudato Sí to every person on earth, Francis insinuated himself as Pope of the Entire Planet. He is the agent of Mercy, an open spigot of empathy with the enemies of his own faith and the civilization that houses it.

Francis has a taste for lethal leftists and a lunatic faith in his personal capacity to piece a fractured world back together again. By his accounting, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men should take lessons from him. His pontificate is a gateway to Eden. But Eden is only for some.

Outside the gate are Catholics with faces like “pickled peppers,” and ones who not share his politics or preen in front of the same mirror. These are the small-hearted “museum mummies,” “slaves of superficiality,” “self-absorbed neo-Pelagians,” “Creed-reciting parrot Christians,” or, most recently, “ideologues of doctrine.”

Yet while he derides traditional — i.e. doctrinally and liturgically conservative — Catholics on one hand, he throws them a bone with the other. It is primarily these traditionalists (“Christians with all the paperwork, all the certificates in order”) who maintain devotion to Fatima. For all his dislike of them, Papa Francis has just pitched some heavy paperwork at these “rosary counters.”

He certified the two Fatima tykes, Jacinta and Francisco Marto, as saints. And he did so on the high ground of heroic virtue, a quality these children never lived long enough to exhibit.

The youngest non-martyrs ever to be canonized in all of Church history, they died quietly in their beds of Spanish flu. Francisco, just short of his eleventh birthday, and Jacinta, ten, were simply two among tens of millions killed by the 1918 pandemic. (

Within a week of Francis’s visit to Fatima, Our Lady of Fatima Church in the archdiocese of Hyderabad, consecrated on May 13, was vandalized by a mob of one hundred. Its crucifix was destroyed and statues smashed.

Sajan Geery, president of the Global Council of Indian Christians stated: "The growing hostility to the Christian faith and the intolerance towards the Christian faithful is an alarm signal".

It is a signal that Jorge Bergoglio gives little evidence of heeding. Were the destroyers Muslim or Hindu? [The majority of Hyderabadis are Hindu; Muslims comprise the largest minority.] AsiaNews does not say.

But what the desecration does tell us is that a pope would serve his office more credibly by enjoining adherents of non-biblical religions to love Christians more.

And dishonesty continues to be the hallmark of AL and its paladins...

I only became aware yesterday of the truly unnoticed 'defense' [it never made it to PewSitter of Canon212's news summaries] back in
February by one Stephen Walford of Pope Francis and his Magisterium, such as it is, and I did not realize that Steve Skojec had replied
to the Walford article yesterday. Which is why, in the following article, Oakes Spalding saves me from doing the necessary backgrounding
and cuts to the heart of all dishonest 'defenses' of AL and consequently of the pope who signed it...I am availing of his article
to take
a shortcut by linking only to the Walford and Skojec articles instead of posting them here.

More than just a footnote on
the Walford-Skojec-Ivereigh
melee over the accursed AL
by Oakes Spalding

June 23, 2017

Steve Skojec just wrote a post at OnePeterFive, Is Amoris Laetitia an Expression of the Ordinary and Universal Magisterium,
https://onepeterfive.com/is-amoris-laetitia-an-expression-of-the-ordinary-and-infallible-magisterium/
where he critiques an article of a few months ago on Amoris Laetitia.

The original article in Vatican Insider, "The Magisterium of Pope Francis: His Predecessors Come to His Defence" by Stephen Walford, http://www.lastampa.it/2017/02/07/vaticaninsider/eng/the-vatican/the-magisterium-of-pope-francis-his-predecessors-come-to-his-defence-x5jzE4YtghvlnRvSvcolGM/pagina.html
was little noticed at the time, but yesterday on Twitter, Pope Francis apologist Austin Ivereigh threw down a sort of late gauntlet
to prominent opponents of Amoris Laetitia, daring them to refute the article.

Stupid is as stupid does! Absolute papolatry does that to you.

Essentially, Walford argues that papal exercises of the ordinary magisterium - papal teaching authority expressed at a lower level of authority than infallible ex-cathedra pronouncements - still demand our assent. Or to put it another way, when a pope intends to teach as pope on a question of faith and morals, he cannot err, even when speaking non-infallibly.

Walford argues that the statements of previous popes support this, in sources as varied as private letters, public audiences and encyclicals. Thus, the claims of Amoris Laetitia - among them, that communion should now sometimes be allowed for people living in irregular marital situations - must be accepted. [Yes, but none of the previous popes he cites ever stood up for anything that was clearly off the Catholic reservation!]

Or to put it even more simply or directly: What Pope Francis says in Amoris Laetitia must be true because he, the Pope, said it. Previous popes would agree. [Previous popes would NOT agree - because the crux is not who says it but what is being said.]

Skojec does a great job of demolishing Walford's argument, and, thus, meeting Ivereigh's challenge. If you haven't already read both pieces - Walford's original and Skojec's response - I highly recommend doing so. Not only is the debate obviously relevant to Amoris Laetitia - the most contentious papal document in at least two generations - but it is also useful in understanding the general question of papal authority. Can a pope ever be wrong? Under what conditions? What is the ordinary (or universal) magisterium? And so on.

One problem is that while Walford's argument can be literally summarized in a tweet, the counter-argument cannot. And this is annoying.

Or worse than annoying. Some would argue that throwing dust is how the devil often operates. By the time you put together a complex refutation of his mix of lies, half truths and, yes, truths, your audience has fallen asleep, or stopped listening because the whole thing is too complicated to follow.

Not that Walford is the devil. For all I know, he's a fine fellow. But he's literally doing the devil's work here, whether he's aware of it or not.

Skojec summarizes the problem with Walford's argument in the final paragraph of his post. The summary is a bit longer than a tweet:
That the Church’s ordinary magisterium is infallible is indisputable. That Amoris Laetitia is an expression of it — particularly where it contradicts or calls into question the magisterial teaching that came before it — is anything but.
That's exactly right, of course, and as good a summary as any.

My contribution to the discussion - a "footnote" - will be to make one observation about Walford's disingenuous use of sources [But he's only following the brazen dishonesty of AL in misusing Thomas Aquinas, John Paul II and a Vatican II document by the simple trick of truncation - and not indicating so by ellipses, as Spaulding argues here.] Skojec didn't point it out (he couldn't point out everything - his post was quite long, as it is). It's the first thing that I noticed, and, indeed, the only thing that I noticed before I stopped looking, after Skojec had published.

Walford begins by using a quote from John Paul II, given at a general audience on March 17, 1993:

---

St. John Paul II described it as the “charism of special assistance” explaining further: “This signifies the Holy Spirit’s continual help in the whole exercise of the teaching mission, meant to explain revealed truth and its consequences in human life. For this reason the Second Vatican Council states that all the Pope’s teaching should be listened to and accepted, even when it is not given ex cathedra”.

---

My translation says, "heard and welcomed" as opposed to "listened to and accepted," but no matter. More to the point is how the excerpt ends.

Due to the fact that in this instance Walford seems to have a preference for Chicago style (which eschews ellipses in certain cases) over MLA style (which requires them in those cases), it's not clear that the excerpt actually ends in mid-sentence.

['Chicago style' and 'MLA style' refer to the two most common formats for written documents like college papers and articles for publication. Their main difference is in how sources used in the document are cited. MLA (for Modern Language Association) requires the use of in-text citations, written directly after the information to be cited. The Chicago style uses two forms of citations: Footnotes, where the citation is placed at the bottom of the page, and end notes, where the citations are placed at the end of the paper on a separate page.]

Let's re-do the last part in MLA style:

---

"For this reason the Second Vatican Council states that all the Pope’s teaching should be listened to and accepted, even when it is not given ex cathedra..." [1].

---

Note the three dots that indicates an ellipsis or omission in the quotation.

It turns out that the part that follows our ellipsis is actually crucial for understanding John Paul II's claim. Unfortunately, Walford breaks off the excerpt in the middle of a sentence. I wonder why.

Here's the second part of the sentence that he does not quote:
...but is proposed in the ordinary exercise of the magisterium with a clear intention to enunciate, recall, reiterate Faithful doctrine.

And now, the full sentence from John Paul II:

---

For this reason the Second Vatican Council states that all the Pope’s teaching should be listened to and accepted, even when it is not given ex cathedra, but is proposed in the ordinary exercise of the magisterium with a clear intention to enunciate, recall, reiterate Faithful doctrine.

---

There's the rub. Whether or not Francis had a "clear intention to enunciate, recall (or) reiterate Faithful doctrine" is the question.

Since many have argued persuasively that the controversial passages of Amoris Laetitia actually contradict Church doctrine, including Church doctrine as reiterated by John Paul II himself in Familiaris consortio and Veritatis Splendor, among other places, we cannot reasonably say that he did. That he will not "answer the dubia," affirming that he did, is indeed, good evidence that he did not.

I take back some of what I said about Walford. He's a man with an agenda, and nothing will stop him from trying to persuade people of the truth of that agenda, even if it's cutting sainted popes off in mid sentence to further his case. That's not exactly innocent. Yes, what he did was dishonest. And that's merely what happens in his second paragraph with his first source. It doesn't bode well.

But in fairness to Walford, he's not unique. Defenses of Amoris Laetitia are riddled with this type of thing. Indeed, Amoris Laetitia itself is riddled with this type of thing, selectively quoting documents from, say, John Paul II or Benedict XVI to attempt to bolster the case, even when in some instances, other parts of the documents or even other parts of the same sections or even paragraphs in those documents contradict the case.

But Walford takes the cake by doing it within a sentence.

Give them their due. They have chutzpah.

More on the DUBIA and some gleanings from Jorge Bergoglio's recent loquacities and his latest indirect circumlocutory non-answers to the Four Cardinals' DUBIA - he never really misses a chance to strike at them to underscore his absolute intransigence on AL and its untruths and deceptions. BUT of course, he will never be caught saying a simple YES or NO to the DUBIA.

I have come to think of this pope as someone who could not possibly take the oath required for any person taking public office in the USA or joining the US military, because how can he possibly take an oath that commits him to saying and doing things "without mental reservation or purpose of evasion". But that is exactly what all of his loquacities are shamelessly made of - MENTAL RESERVATIONS AND CLEAR PURPOSE OF EVASION... almost as if everytime he opens his mouth, one can be sure that in all that verbiage, he will be telling a lie, white or otherwise, at least one but likely to be much more than one.

Bergoglio really thinks he has answered the DUBIA
so why do the cardinals insist on a reply and/or an audience?
[Just that his vocabulary does not include YES or NO -
and in this case, that's all we need!]
by Louie Verrecchio

June 22, 2017


Cardinal Bagnasco has since been replaced as CEI President by Cardinal Bassetti.

Addressing the opening of the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI) General Assembly on 22 May, Francis implored the gathering:

---

“The first of these gifts [of the Holy Spirit] is already in the convenire in unum (coming together in unity), willing to share time, listening, creativity and consolation. I hope these days will be crossed by open, humble and frank confrontation. Do not fear the moments of opposition: entrust yourselves to the Spirit, who opens to diversity and reconciles what is different in fraternal charity.”

---

As His Humbleness spoke, nearly a month had already passed since he had received a letter written on behalf of the four Dubia Brothers formally requesting an audience to discuss the ff:

---

Request for clarification of the five points indicated by the dubia; reasons for this request... [and the] Situation of confusion and disorientation, especially among pastors of souls, in primis parish priests.

---

In spite of this pope's repeated appeals for honest and frank confrontation and openness toward opposition, the aforementioned request for an audience had been met with nothing but silence from Francis.

The author of said letter, Cardinal Carlo Caffara, the retired Archbishop of Bologna, was present in the assembly that day, and there can be no doubt that he, more than anyone else, marveled at the magnitude of hypocrisy on display at that moment.

It is also quite likely that Cardinal Caffara understood very well that certain portions of Francis’s address were aimed directly at himself and the three other troublemakers-in-red who had joined him in co-authoring the Dubia.

For instance, His Hypocriticalness declared:

---

“The Synodal breath and step reveal what we are and the dynamism of communion that animates our decisions. Only in this horizon can we truly renew our pastoral program and adapt it to the mission of the Church in today’s world; only thus can we address the complexity of this time, thankful for the course accomplished and determined to continue it with parrhesia.”

---

For those with ears to hear, Francis is essentially saying:
- Amoris Laetitia is a fruit of the “Synodal” process, which itself is a manifestation of the gifts of the Holy Spirit!
- This is what animated the decision to effectively abrogate mortal sin (AL 301), to declare the Divine Law too lofty for some to keep (AL 301), and to accuse God of asking us to persist in adultery (AL 303); thus addressing “the complexity of this time.”
- Therefore, let us be “thankful for the course accomplished and determined to continue it with parrhesia.”

Parrhesia – open and candid speech. [Yet the punctiliously studied ambiguities of AL are anything but!]

In other words, Amoris Laetitia is a done deal. The only dialogue worthy of having concerns how to implement its “pastoral program.” As such, do not expect an audience ordered toward derailing the effort; it’s too late for that now.

From there, Francis continued his address to the bishops (and one wonders if perhaps he even made eye contact with Cardinal Caffara) as he said:

---

“In reality, this path is marked also by closures and resistances: our infidelities are a heavy mortgage put on the credibility of the testimony of the depositum fidei, a much worse threat than that which comes from the world with its persecutions.

---

NB: In this, Francis is suggesting that Amoris Laetitia – the origins of which can be traced back through the Synods directly to the Holy Ghost – belongs to the deposit of faith!
[Of course, he never heard of the principle of non-contradiction, or if he did, he certainly thinks it doesn't apply to him. This is the line Walford takes when he says that since Catholics accept Tradition, they must therefore accept anything Bergoglio says, because, Walford implies, it automatically becomes 'Tradition' - or in Bergoglio's words, part of the deposit of faith - just because he said them. Never mind that they contradict everything that went before him, including the words of Jesus himself! That is the tragic blind spot in the hubristic logic of Bergoglio and his followers.]

As such, men like the Dubia Cardinals and those who support them, he insists, are guilty of nothing less than infidelity, and this for merely asking five simple yes/no questions that an adolescent should be able to answer!

Following are just a few of the remaining comments offered by Francis that are clearly intended as a response to both the Dubia and the request for an audience submitted by its authors:

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– “If we keep our trust in God’s surprising initiative, the strength of patience and the fidelity of Confessors: we do not have to fear the second death.” [Note: This seems to refer to those “Confessors” who now – surprise! – have the authority to declare persons inculpable for the mortal sins they are determined to continue.]
– “Let us learn to give up useless ambitions and our obsession in order to live constantly under the gaze of the Lord…” [A reference to both the “God of Surprises” and those ambitious Dubia cardinals.]
– “We are exposed to the temptation to reduce Christianity to a series of principles deprived of concreteness…” [“Concrete,” as in immutable doctrinal truths.]
– “Let us open the heart to the knocking of the eternal Pilgrim: let us have Him enter, let us dine with Him.” [The “Pilgrim” Christ who is evolving right along with us!]

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It should be eminently clear that Francis has answered - evasively and with full mental reservations - every doubt, every question, and every request that has come his way relative to the blasphemies and heresies put forth in Amoris Laetitia.

The only step that remains is for God to raise up men among the cardinals with the mustard seed’s worth of Catholic faith to declare what has taken place: Jorge Bergoglio has revealed himself to be a pertinacious heretic; thus no member of the Church, much less her head. [It's so much simpler and more accurate to just call him an APOSTATE!]

Could it be that the letter of Cardinal Caffara was made public, not in a last ditch effort to pressure Francis into responding as some have alleged, but to set the stage for making the case that he already has?

Let us hope and pray and offer sacrifices that grace will abound among all concerned; that this scourge upon the Church may soon be mitigated according to God’s holy will.

Let me end this post with this short but very cogent commentary on Bergoglio's obstinate refusal to deal with the DUBIA once and for all. The former president of IOR has always had a gift for expressing himself on matters of the faith with a remarkably effective economy of words. He proves this again here...


The pope's silence in the face of the DUBIA
is a bold denial of objective truth
by Ettore Gotti-Tedeschi
Translated by Dorothy Cummings McLean for

from

June 23, 2017

I see two implicit messages in the Pope’s failure to answer the DUBIA.

The first implicit message is “I can contradict myself if I want to.” At the start of the first ‘family synod’ in October 2014, the Pope invited the cardinals to speak openly and frankly, without fear of embarrassing the Pope (the famous parrhesia). And yet for months, the Pope has refused to respond privately or publicly to the dubia expressed by four cardinals who represent a large part of the faithful.

The second implicit message seems to be a declaration of the intent to impose a “New Catholic Morality.” This would be founded on the awkward circumstances of the new ethical demands (or requirements) of new situations created by the secularized world, instead of a morality based on the Commandments, the Catechism and the Magisterium, as invoked by the “obsolete” Veritatis Splendor.

In the past, the Church’s concern was to keep the faithful “strong in the Truth” in order to conserve the faith. She therefore discouraged a disposition to interpret doctrine and the magisterium in a subjective and dangerously misleading manner. Indeed, back then the task of pastors was to confirm the certainties of faith by “teaching,” not just by “listening.”

Today, it could be said that you should have subjective and unresolved doubts to demonstrate that you have an “authentic faith.” You must not try to resolve them or seek answers to questions on points of ambiguous interpretation because that would be insolent and arrogant.

Doubts are necessary because it seems that we don’t want to affirm a single, absolute and objective truth. A pluralist and dialectical truth has taken its place because this latter truth, a truth based on the conclusions of a “self-taught” individual conscience, has replaced doctrine as the judge of actions (praxis).

One might say that traditional morality has been overridden by circumstances (not the ideal), and since we should no longer judge (that is, objectively evaluate circumstances), the Church seems to want to renounce the possession of the truth and its teaching (unless it concerns the environment, poverty and immigration) [about which, however, the church of Bergoglio and its secular ideological colleagues persist in purveying half-truths if not outright lies].

Thus, a failure to respond to the dubia confirms that doctrine is abstract and that it is of no use to salvation because truth is transitory, subjective and open to differing interpretations. It is better to dialogue, then, than to teach something that is no longer eternal.

For months, theologians have been forced, or have been obliged, to highlight only a few parts of Amoris Laetitia, neglecting the parts that leave doubts and generate subjective interpretations. This means that AL does not seem to be as “objective” as some assume.

But the controversial points aren’t so marginal, minor or irrelevant to the good parts. I suggest that readers read for themselves the articles in question (AL 297, 299, 301, 305, 329 … ) and ask themselves the questions posed by the four cardinals and Catholics who refer to the Catechism, the Gospel and the specific Magisterium (Casti Connubi, Veritatis Splendor, Familiaris Consortio … ).

The dubia are concerned with what is a grave (mortal) sin here: the possibility of the reception of sacramental absolution and the Holy Eucharist by those who live illegitimately as husband and wife and don’t want to stop. The dubia ask what marital chastity is, and if situations exist in which we must sin because there are temptations greater than our strength. They ask if situations exist in which a form of ignorance justifies sin.

Dear readers, the dubia ask if a new morality is or is not being proposed, and if the help of God, which never fails, aims to keep us from sinning or to keep us from feeling guilt after having sinned. The dubia are not a bizarre and spiteful showing off by four cardinals.

Beware! In the Gospels, Jesus says 15 times that there is a risk of eternal damnation if someone persists in a grave sin, while Amoris Laetitia 297 claims that no one can be condemned forever because it is not the logic of the Gospel. Thus, eternal damnation would seem to have become a heresy.

However, AL 304 says also that the general norms in its formulations cannot embrace all particular situations, implicitly admitting the existence of so many doubts left to subjective and dangerous interpretation.

The Pope’s failure to answer the dubia would illustrate that doubts must be resolved subjectively because Truth is no longer objective. Thus, the Church today seems to be declaring that she does not want to have a doctrine to propose to the world. She believes that circumstance determines doctrine, rather than the contrary. Therefore, the new Church seems to want to give moral suggestions but without precepts, without laws. It is useless to ask if this is so.

Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI at the end of a "Small spiritual evening concert" in his honor last June 16, 2017, in the Vatican Gardens.

The only photo we have so far of the Emeritus Pope this month, courtesy of the Fondazione Vaticana Joseph Ratzinger-Benedetto XVI, but apart
from the fact that it is a very good photograph, the only information provided to us is a caption translated above.

Nothing about what the occasion was for the concert, who offered the concert, nor who are the persons shown in the photograph with him. Also, I do not know
if a 'spiritual concert' has to do with music at all - would it be a concert of sacred music? What was the program and who were the performers? Was it held
in front of Mater Ecclesiae or in front of the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes?

If you have not seen it before, here is the Fondazione's little video about the life of Joseph Ratzinger which was assembled last year and which they have
re-issued on the occasion of the 40th anniversary last May 28th of his episcopal ordination.
www.facebook.com/566735950151496/videos/582647321893692/

The good news is the decline is not precipitous, but where's the vaunted 'Francis effect' here???

Vocations to the priesthood continue
to decline under Pope Francis
by Pete Baklinski


ROME, June 23, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) -- Vocations to the priesthood have continued a downward trend since 2012, according to data recently released by the Vatican’s Central Statistics Office.

“There is a continuation of the decline which has for some years characterized priestly vocations,” the Statistics Office, which operates under the Vatican Secretariat of State, stated in its 500-page Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae that covers up to the year 2015.

One metric for measuring the health of the Church is the number of new vocations to the priesthood to serve the Church’s 1.28 billion Catholics worldwide. A shortage of priests jeopardizes the life of faith for Catholics who no longer have a priest to minister to them.

Vocations to the priesthood rose sharply under the pontificate of St. Pope John Paul II. In 1978, his first year, there were 63,882 seminarians worldwide, but by the year of his death in 2005 there were 114,439.

Total seminarians continued to rise modestly under Benedict XVI, reaching a peak of 120,616 in 2011. They then started a slow decline in 2012, when there were 120,051.

That decline has accelerated under the pontificate of Pope Francis. Total seminarians have dropped from 118,251 in 2013 to 116,843 in 2015.

The Catholic Church has, overall, been experiencing a crisis in vocations to the priesthood. Bishops have been forced to close down parishes where there are simply not enough priests to run them.

But that is not the case for all dioceses.

A number of dioceses in the U.S. have found that where there is faithfulness to Catholic doctrine, vocations to the priesthood flourish.

For example, when Bishop Robert Morlino arrived in the Diocese of Madison, Wisconsin in 2003, there were only 6 seminarians. The diocese was known as a bastion of liberalism, both politically and spiritually. But under his careful direction, the diocese has returned to orthodoxy and begun to flourish.

The bishop shut down dissenting ‘Catholic’ groups. He had pastors read his letters defending Catholic teaching on marriage and the sanctity of life from Sunday pulpits. He returned tabernacles to the center of the sanctuary. He celebrated beautiful liturgies, some of them in the Extraordinary Form. By 2015, the number of seminarians had multiplied sixfold, growing to 36.

There is also the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, where orthodox bishops have inspired more men to become priests per capita than practically every other U.S. diocese.

Lincoln Bishop James D. Conley linked the number of vocations in his diocese directly to faithfulness to Church teaching in a 2016 interview with Catholic World Report.

“Having the security of knowing that the Diocese of Lincoln is 100 percent faithful to Church teaching on faith and morals is very appealing to many young men considering the priesthood,” Conley explained.

The Vatican statistics show that the majority of new vocations are coming out of African countries.

"The sole exception remains Africa, which does not yet seem to be affected by the crisis in vocations and is confirmed as the geographical area with the greatest potential," the stats document states.

The statistics also reveal that in many Western countries, including both Canada and the United States, the number of priests who died in 2015 was greater than the number of new priests ordained.

They also show that the number of Catholic marriages for every 1,000 Catholics continues a downward trend over a five-year period.

This article was made available through La Porte Latine, the website of the French district of the FSSPX... As with the hoped-for
agreement with Beijing, the Bergoglio Vatican had been giving signals it expected 'imminent' agreement with the FSSPX that would bring
them back into full communion with the Church of Rome and grant them the canonical status of a Personal Prelature... The following
exposition by an FSSPX insider would seem to tell us that on both projects - China and the FSSPX - we will continue to be like children
on an interminable journey who will keep asking 'Are we there yet?"

A MAJOR SSPX CLARIFICATION:
Towards a Doctrinal Agreement?
by Father Jean-Michel Gleize, FSSPX
Translated for

from the May 2017 issue of


Father Gleize has been a Professor at the FSSPX’s International Seminary in Écône, Switzerland, since 1996. He was one of the four theologians who represented the FSSPX during the doctrinal discussions with the CDF in Rome between 2009 and 2011, and therefore has first-hand knowledge of the Vatican theologians in general, and Archbishop Guido Pozzo in particular. This article appeared in the May 2017 edition of the COURRIER DE ROME, a monthly French-language newsletter first published in 1964 “to unite Catholics around the Doctrine of the Church... and offers its readers a refutation of the principal errors of the day and shows them the path and light of the Truth” (www.courrierderome.org).

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“You do not enter into a structure, and under superiors, saying that you are going to shake everything up once you are on the inside, whereas they have everything in hand to stamp us out ! They have all the authority."
- Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre

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In a recent interview, Archbishop Guido Pozzo [secretary of the CDF’s Ecclesia Dei Commission which coordinates with traditional communities] declared that “reconciliation will happen when Bishop Fellay formally adheres to the doctrinal declaration which the Holy See has presented to him. It is also the necessary condition for proceeding to institutional regularization, with the creation of a Personal Prelature”.

And in a press-conference given in the airplane during the return journey from his recent pilgrimage to Fatima (May 12-13), Pope Francis alluded to this document, finalized by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at its last sitting on Wednesday May 10.

From Rome’s point-of-view, therefore, it would appear to be a question of a doctrinal agreement. The expression [“doctrinal agreement”] is, however, ambiguous and can be understood in two ways.

In the first possible meaning of this expression, the goal pursued would be for Tradition to recover all of its rights in Rome, and, consequently, for the Holy See to carry out a serious correction of the doctrinal errors which are at the source of the unprecedented crisis which still rages in the Church.

This correction is the goal which is sought after, the goal in itself and final cause, principle of all subsequent action in the context of relations with Rome. This goal is none other than the common good of the entire Church. In this sense, “doctrinal agreement” means that Rome must agree, not with the Society of Saint Pius X, but with the doctrine of all time, and return from its errors.

In a second sense, “doctrinal agreement” could refer to the case of Rome agreeing with the Society of Saint Pius X with a view to its canonical recognition. This recognition would be the goal in itself, principle of all subsequent action. This goal would be none other than the apparent particular good of a society such as the Society of Saint Pius X.

The formulation of a common doctrinal position which would be sufficiently acceptable to both parties would only be the means for obtaining this goal. And it would suffice for this means to be proportionate to the goal - in other words, it would not be necessary for Rome to correct all the errors of the Council; it would be enough for Rome not to impose the profession of these errors. In this sense, “doctrinal agreement” means that the Society agrees with Rome on a certain number of doctrinal affirmations which are exempt from error.

It is to be feared - indeed it is even evident - that Rome understands “doctrinal agreement” in the second sense, and envisages, at best, a regime of tolerance with regard to the Society, but in no way foresees a correction of the errors of the Council. Up until now, Archbishop Lefebvre's successors have made it a point to adopt the perspective of the first meaning. Therefore, it is clear that such a “basis of agreement” will always be insufficient as long as Rome has not inserted a correction of the Council's errors.

In effect, the adage holds true here : “bonum ex integra causa, malum ex quocumque defectu” (an action is good when it is good in every respect; it is wrong when it is wrong in every respect) [1]. The adage must, of course, be understood in the moral sense, and in relation to human acts.

If we take Vatican II as a collection of texts, of course we can always separate truth, ambiguity and error, and we can take each passage concerned in isolation. This separation can take place in the context of a dialogue between experts or a commission of revision.

However, the Church's practice is not to consider texts as such, but rather from a moral perspective, that is to say, insofar as they are, as a whole, the object of adhesion on the part of the Church and Its faithful (therefore of a human act considered morally) and risk causing them scandal because of their errors or ambiguities.

From this point of view, it is not enough to sign a text which only expresses part of the truth ; it is necessary for Rome to profess the entirety of the whole truth and, ipso facto, condemn the errors which completely vitiate all those partial truths which can be found in the Conciliar and Post-Conciliar magisterium.

[At this point in the original French article, Father Gleize interrupts his reasoning and carries out a long and detailed analysis of the main litigious points of Vatican II – religious liberty, collegiality, ecumenism – as well as the Conciliar and Post-Conciliar magisterium, the Novus Ordo Missae and the New Code of Canon Law. He then resumes:]

As we have already explained, our goal is for Tradition to recover all of its rights in Rome. This goal is first in our intention and will be (as always) last in execution [2]. What does “last” mean ? Does it mean that the end of the crisis in the Church will take place at the very end (and therefore after an agreement of the Society with Rome)? Or does it mean that the end of the crisis will coincide with this agreement ?

Our accepting canonical recognition in the current circumstances corresponds to a morally indifferent act, but which has a double effect – a good essential effect and a bad accidental one.
- The good effect is to place ourselves in juridical normality in relation to Rome (and even, for some, to [possibly] benefit from an expanded field of apostolate, which remains to be proven).
- The bad effect is itself double: firstly, the risk of relatavizing Tradition, which would thenceforward only appear as the particular good and the personal theological preference of the Society of Saint Pius X ; secondly, the risk of betraying and abandoning this particular good because of the favens haeresim (heresy-favoring) ambience which characterizes the Conciliar Church per se.

The solution depends first of all on the proportion to be established between the good effect and the bad effect. It is clear that in the intention of our Founder [i.e. Archbishop Lefebvre], it is more important to avoid the bad double effect than to obtain the good effect.
- The good effect [juridical normality] is here less good than the better good [public profession of the Faith] which the worse double effect [risk of relativization and abandoning of Tradition] opposes.
- The public profession of the Faith is more important than canonical normality.

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“What interests us first of all is to maintain the Catholic Faith. That is our combat. So the canonical question, which is purely exterior and public in the Church, is secondary.

What is important is to remain in the Church... in the Church, that is to say in the Catholic Faith of all time and in the true priesthood, and in the true Mass, and in the true sacraments, in the Catechism of all time, with the Bible of all time. That is what interests us. That is what the Church is.
To be recognized publicly, that is secondary. So, we mustn't seek secondary things by losing what is fundamental, what is the primary object of our combat [3]”.

---

Next, the solution depends on the evaluation of the circumstances. Are they such that one can reasonably hope to avoid the bad double effect, that is to say the double risk? Because it is only a risk, no more, no less.

The question can be summed up by asking if it is prudent to place oneself under the authority of the members of the Hierarchy of the Church such as they are in the present situation, that is to say (for the most part) still imbued with false principles which are contrary to the Catholic Faith. Some exceptions could undoubtedly be identified; but they prove absolutely nothing against the the general mindset which, taken as a whole, is only too evident.

We are here obliged to apply the rule according to which things are designated by their dominant element, and to conclude that the members of the Hierarchy of the Church are currently Modernists.

Having said that, two things will help us answer our question: firstly, our own experience, since we have been able to observe that (up to now) none of those who have accepted a canonical recognition from Rome have really been able to avoid the bad double effect; secondly, the experience of our Founder: “You do not enter into a structure, and under superiors, saying that you are going to shake everything up once you are on the inside, whereas they have everything in hand to stamp us out ! They have all the authority[4]”.

In the airborne press conference of May 13, the Pope told Nicolas Senèze of the French newspaper La Croix that he wanted to take his time: “A me non piace affrettare le cose. Camminare, camminare, camminare, e poi si vedrà.” (I do not want to rush things. For now, we must walk, walk, and then we will see", implying that the journey continues in search of a formula "which will allow us to go forward”.

This sheds an interesting light on the issue which we evoked at the beginning of our reflection: In the Pope's mind, doctrinal formulation is only a means. Doctrine, with the unity of Faith which it guarantees, is not the goal of the procedure. The goal would rather seem to be to go forward together towards full communion in a ceaseless dialogue, a dialogue which should (moreover) continue even after a canonical structure has been granted. [But that is exactly Bergoglio’s Hegelian idea of dialog – dialog for dialog’s sake, which will never resolve anything because every new synthesis immediately generates a new antithesis, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. A verbal treadmill and mental calisthenics serving no manifest concrete purpose.]

And full communion (Archbishop Pozzo tells us in the already quoted interview) is mutual enrichment, beyond doctrinal divergences: “The different points of view or opinions which we have on certain questions should not necessarily lead to division, but to a mutual enrichment”. So, would that mean the cohabitation of truth and error in exchange for the price of a common declaration?

Unfortunately, these different points of view do not concern merely equally possible opinions. The questions to which they correspond are not “open” questions about which each and everyone may maintain freedom of thought. These questions have been for the most part definitively resolved by the Magisterium of the Church, well before Vatican II.
- The religious liberty of Dignitatis Humanae and the positive secularism of Gaudium et Spes are condemned by Pius IX’s Quanta Cura.
- The new ecumenical ecclesiology of Lumen Gentium is condemned by Pius XII in Mystici Corporis and Humani Generis because of the absolutely false principle which would like to establish a real distinction between the Church of Christ and the Catholic Church.
- The ecumenism of Unitatis Redintegratio is condemned by Pius XI in Mortalium Animos.
- The collegiality of Lumen Gentium, in that it denies the unicity of the subject of the Primacy, falls under the condemnation of Vatican I.

In the end, this “formula which would allow us to go forward” brings us back once more more to the founding text of the Pontifical Ecclesia Dei Commission, the Motu Proprio of July 2, 1988: in it, John-Paul II affirms that Tradition is living. Benedict XVI's 2005 discourse is its echo and direct interpreter: this life of Tradition is “renewal in continuity”: an evolutionist and Modernist renewal, which means to overcome contradiction via an impossible hermeneutic.

What should our conclusion be? We would simply say that the “Society of Saint Pius X does not have to negotiate a charitable recognition which would save it from a supposed schism. It has the immense honor, after forty years of exclusion, to be able to witness in favor of the Catholic Faith in the Vatican [5]” ...while we wait for Rome to finally decide to expel the perfidious Conciliar errors from the midst of the faithful [6].

NOTES:
[1] Scholastic axiom, which The Catholic Encyclopedia translates as in its article on “Good”: “An action is good when good in every respect; it is wrong when wrong in any respect” (Translator's note).
[2] Saint Thomas Aquinas says in Summa Theologica, Ia IIae, Question 1, Article 1, Ad primum that “although the end be the last in the order of execution, yet it is the first in the order of the agent's intention” (Translator's note).
[3] Archbishop Lefebvre, spiritual conference to seminarians, Écône, Switzerland, December 21, 1984.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Father Gleize is here quoting from René Berthod, Swiss Catholic layman, who died in April 2017 (Translator's note).
[6] Father Gleize is here paraphrasing the sixth verse of the Hymn for Vespers of All Saints, Placare, Christe, servulis.., which begins: “The race perfidious expel from regions where the faithful dwell...”

 

About kneeling
by Tarman Westbury
IGNITUM TODAY
June 21, 2017

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In the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those that are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth. – Philippians 2:10

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I was raised in the Uniting Church, but never truly grasped any of its teachings, and spent several years as an atheist before a series of events and signs led me to conclude that there was a higher, spiritual power, which I eventually came to accept as God. This Easter Vigil, thanks to Divine Providence, I was received into the Catholic Church.

When I first walked into a Mass, what really struck me was when everyone knelt for the Liturgy of the Eucharist. What encouraged me to kneel when everyone else was kneeling was that it is written in the Bible, “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that in due time He may exalt you.” (1 Peter 5:6)

When you feel something inside, you should be able to express that
in a gesture, and that gesture should be a clear and concise representation of your belief.

Humility is not expressed in big, loud gestures. Humility is quiet and small in physical appearance. It’s not seeking attention or approval, but rather the renouncement of yourself in a moment, for the sake of the good of another.*

Kneeling is a gesture of making oneself quiet and small in the face of the presence of God, allowing ourselves to feel small in the presence of God, so that we recognize that we are like grass, which is here one day and gone the next (cf. Psalm 103:15-16; 1 Peter 1:24).

Objectively, we can humbly say, without feeling that we are diminishing our worth, “we are absolutely nothing.” But at the same time, we are so special and of great value to God, Who has created us in His image and likeness, Who has suffered and died for each one of us, so that we may share in His divine life of Love.

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Kneeling does not come from any culture — it comes from the Bible and its knowledge of God. The central importance of kneeling in the Bible can be seen in a very concrete way. The word proskynein alone occurs fifty-nine times in the New Testament, twenty-four of which are in the Apocalypse, the book of the heavenly Liturgy, which is presented to the Church as the standard for her own Liturgy.
— Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, 'The Spirit of the Liturgy'

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*I didn't want to interrupt the flow of Mr. Westbury's reflection, but I cannot resist making these remarks: Do you think JMB has ever thought of humility in the way Westbury says? Our beloved pope seems to prefer ostentatious humility, like that of the Pharisee in the temple comparing himself loudly to a genuinely humble publican.

Not surprisingly for a narcissist, our beloved pope does not seem to realize that whenever he rails about 'the Pharisees', the first idea that comes to the mind of most Christians who have had some exposure to the Bible is that Pharisee in Jesus's tale of 'the Pharisee and the publican', who is, of course, the best example of the Pharisaic hypocrisy that JMB constantly derides and denounces in others.

No, he loves those gestures of 'humility' that are guaranteed to make headlines - disdaining the use of the papal mozzetta and stole which are the visible symbols of his office that a new pope traditionally wears when presenting himself to the world for the first time; allowing the Vatican press office to release that photo of him paying his bill at the Vatican hotel he stayed at before the Conclave (only the Vatican media were present for that 'bill paying'); refusing to use the papal limousines and choosing instead to cram himself into little cars; refusing to live in the Apostolic Palace and taking the far-from-inexpensive choice to occupy a wing of the Vatican's four-star hotel instead; eschewing the apostolic residence in Castel Gandolfo altogether (though he seems never to have thought of opening a center on the vast papal estate there for his beloved refugees); his telephone calls, letters and private audiences with 'ordinary folk' that somehow always get massive publicity and hype; and, of course, kneeling to wash, dry and kiss the feet of 12 selected persons every Maundy Thursday in the full glare of cameras, even if he cannot take a few seconds to genuflect whenever he consecrates the Body and Blood of Christ, nor to kneel in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament...

BTW, we can all cite at least three occasions when he actually knelt and was photographed and filmed doing so - his first much-publicized and photographed first visit to the Salus Populi Romani icon in Santa Maria Maggiore the day after he was elected, and twice with Benedict XVI (in the chapel in Castel Gandolfo and in the chapel of Mater Ecclesiae), but one must suppose he had no choice because how would it look if he did not kneel while his predecessor who is ten years older and needs to use a walker to ambulate, does so without any visible difficulty?]

The excerpt from Joseph Ratzinger cited by Westbury above prompts me to post the entire chapter here...

The theology of kneeling
From 'THE SPIRIT OF THE LITURGY' (2000)
by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

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There are groups, of no small influence, who are trying to talk us out of kneeling. "It doesn't suit our culture", they say (which culture?) "It's not right for a grown man to do this -- he should face God on his feet". Or again: "It's not appropriate for redeemed man -- he has been set free by Christ and doesn't need to kneel any more".

If we look at history, we can see that the Greeks and Romans rejected kneeling. In view of the squabbling partisan deities described in mythology, this attitude was thoroughly justified. It was only too obvious that these gods were not God, even if you were dependent on their capricious power and had to make sure that, whenever possible, you enjoyed their favor.

And so they said that kneeling was unworthy of a free man, unsuitable for the culture of Greece, something the barbarians went in for. Plutarch and Theophrastus regarded kneeling as an expression of superstition.

Aristotle called it a barbaric form of behavior (cf. Rhetoric 1361 a 36). Saint Augustine agreed with him in a certain respect: the false gods were only the masks of demons, who subjected men to the worship of money and to self-seeking, thus making them "servile" and superstitious. He said that the humility of Christ and His love, which went as far as the Cross, have freed us from these powers. We now kneel before that humility.

The kneeling of Christians is not a form of inculturation into existing customs. It is quite the opposite, an expression of Christian culture, which transforms the existing culture through a new and deeper knowledge and experience of God.

Kneeling does not come from any culture -- it comes from the Bible and its knowledge of God. The central importance of kneeling in the Bible can be seen in a very concrete way. The word proskynein [Greek, like Hebrew, has different words to express the action of kneeling, and proskynein refers to 'kneeling in adoration' which is what we see in all Christian images of saints and the life of Christ, starting with the Nativity] [and alone occurs fifty-nine times in the New Testament, twenty-four of which are in the Apocalypse, the book of the heavenly Liturgy, which is presented to the Church as the standard for her own Liturgy.

On closer inspection, we can discern three closely related forms of posture. First there is prostratio -- lying with one's face to the ground before the overwhelming power of God; secondly, especially in the New Testament, there is falling to one's knees before another; and thirdly, there is kneeling. Linguistically, the three forms of posture are not always clearly distinguished. They can be combined or merged with one another.

For the sake of brevity, I should like to mention, in the case of prostratio, just one text from the Old Testament and another from the New.

In the Old Testament, there is an appearance of God to Joshua before the taking of Jericho, an appearance that the sacred author quite deliberately presents as a parallel to God's revelation of Himself to Moses in the burning bush. Joshua sees "the commander of the army of the Lord" and, having recognized who He is, throws himself to the ground. At that moment he hears the words once spoken to Moses: "Put off your shoes from your feet; for the place where you stand is holy" (Josh 5:15). In the mysterious form of the "commander of the army of the Lord", the hidden God Himself speaks to Joshua, and Joshua throws himself down before Him.

Origen gives a beautiful interpretation of this text: "Is there any other commander of the powers of the Lord than our Lord Jesus Christ?" According to this view, Joshua is worshipping the One who is to come -- the coming of Christ.

In the case of the New Testament, from the Fathers onward, Jesus's prayer on the Mount of Olives was especially important. According to Saint Matthew (22:39) and Saint Mark (14:35), Jesus throws Himself to the ground; indeed, He falls to the earth (according to Matthew). However, Saint Luke, who in his whole work (both the Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles) is in a special way the theologian of kneeling prayer, tells us that Jesus prayed on His knees.

This prayer, the prayer by which Jesus enters into His Passion, is an example for us, both as a gesture and in its content. The gesture: Jesus assumes, as it were, the fall of man, lets himself fall into man's fallenness, prays to the Father out of the lowest depths of human dereliction and anguish.

He lays His will in the will of the Father's: "Not my will but yours be done". He lays the human will in the divine. He takes up all the hesitation of the human will and endures it. It is this very conforming of the human will to the divine that is the heart of redemption.

For the fall of man depends on the contradiction of wills, on the opposition of the human will to the divine, which the tempter leads man to think is the condition of his freedom. Only one's own autonomous will, subject to no other will, is freedom.

"Not my will, but yours ..." -- those are the words of truth, for God's will is not in opposition to our own, but the ground and condition of its possibility. Only when our will rests in the will of God does it become truly will and truly free.

The suffering and struggle of Gethsemane is the struggle for this redemptive truth, for this uniting of what is divided, for the uniting that is communion with God. Now we understand why the Son's loving way of addressing the Father, "Abba", is found in this place (cf. Mk 14:36). Saint Paul sees in this cry the prayer that the Holy Spirit places on our lips (cf. Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6) and thus anchors our Spirit-filled prayer in the Lord's prayer in Gethsemane.

In the Church's Liturgy today, prostration appears on two occasions: on Good Friday and at ordinations.

On Good Friday, the day of the Lord's crucifixion, it is the fitting expression of our sense of shock at the fact that we by our sins share in the responsibility for the death of Christ. We throw ourselves down and participate in His shock, in His descent into the depths of anguish. We throw ourselves down and so acknowledge where we are and who we are: fallen creatures whom only He can set on their feet. We throw ourselves down, as Jesus did, before the mystery of God's power present to us, knowing that the Cross is the true burning bush, the place of the flame of God's love, which burns but does not destroy.

At ordinations, prostration comes from the awareness of our absolute incapacity, by our own powers, to take on the priestly mission of Jesus Christ, to speak with His "I". While the ordinands are lying on the ground, the whole congregation sings the Litany of the Saints.

I shall never forget lying on the ground at the time of my own priestly and episcopal ordination. When I was ordained bishop, my intense feeling of inadequacy, incapacity, in the face of the greatness of the task was even stronger than at my priestly ordination.

The fact that the praying Church was calling upon all the saints, that the prayer of the Church really was enveloping and embracing me, was a wonderful consolation. In my incapacity, which had to be expressed in the bodily posture of prostration, this prayer, this presence of all the saints, of the living and the dead, was a wonderful strength -- it was the only thing that could, as it were, lift me up. Only the presence of the saints with me made possible the path that lay before me.

Secondly, we must mention the gesture of falling to one's knees before another, which is described four times in the Gospels (cf. Mk 1:40; 10:17; Mt 17:14; 27:29) by means of the word gonypetein. Let us single out Mark 1:40. A leper comes to Jesus and begs Him for help. He falls to his knees before Him and says: "If you will, you can make me clean". It is hard to assess the significance of the gesture. What we have here is surely not a proper act of adoration, but rather a supplication expressed fervently in bodily form, while showing a trust in a power beyond the merely human.

The situation is different, though, with the classical word for adoration on one's knees -- proskynein. I shall give two examples in order to clarify the question that faces the translator.

First there is the account of how, after the multiplication of the loaves, Jesus stays with the Father on the mountain, while the disciples struggle in vain on the lake with the wind and the waves. Jesus comes to them across the water. Peter hurries toward Him and is saved from sinking by the Lord. Then Jesus climbs into the boat, and the wind lets up.

The text continues: "And the ship's crew came and said, falling at His feet, 'Thou art indeed the Son of God'" (Mt 14:33, Knox version). Other translations say: "[The disciples] in the boat worshiped [Jesus], saying ..." (RSV). Both translations are correct. Each emphasizes one aspect of what is going on. The Knox version brings out the bodily expression, while the RSV shows what is happening interiorly. It is perfectly clear from the structure of the narrative that the gesture of acknowledging Jesus as the Son of God is an act of worship.

We encounter a similar set of problems in Saint John's Gospel when we read the account of the healing of the man born blind. This narrative, which is structured in a truly "theo-dramatic" way, ends with a dialogue between Jesus and the man He has healed. It serves as a model for the dialogue of conversion, for the whole narrative must also be seen as a profound exposition of the existential and theological significance of Baptism.

In the dialogue, Jesus asks the man whether he believes in the Son of Man. The man born blind replies: "Tell me who He is, Lord". When Jesus says, "It is He who is speaking to you", the man makes the confession of faith: "I do believe, Lord", and then he "[falls] down to worship Him" (Jn 9:35-38, Knox version adapted). Earlier translations said: "He worshiped Him". In fact, the whole scene is directed toward the act of faith and the worship of Jesus, which follows from it. Now the eyes of the heart, as well as of the body, are opened. The man has in truth begun to see.

For the exegesis of the text it is important to note that the word proskynein occurs eleven times in Saint John's Gospel, of which nine occurrences are found in Jesus's conversation with the Samaritan woman by Jacob's well (Jn 4:19-24). This conversation is entirely devoted to the theme of worship, and it is indisputable that here, as elsewhere in Saint John's Gospel, the word always has the meaning of "worship". Incidentally, this conversation, too, ends -- like that of the healing of the man born blind -- with Jesus revealing Himself: "I who speak to you am He" (Jn 4:26).

I have lingered over these texts, because they bring to light something important. In the two passages that we looked at most closely, the spiritual and bodily meanings of proskynein are really inseparable. The bodily gesture itself is the bearer of the spiritual meaning, which is precisely that of worship. Without the worship, the bodily gesture would be meaningless, while the spiritual act must of its very nature, because of the psychosomatic unity of man, express itself in the bodily gesture.

The two aspects are united in the one word, because in a very profound way they belong together. When kneeling becomes merely external, a merely physical act, it becomes meaningless. One the other hand, when someone tries to take worship back into the purely spiritual realm and refuses to give it embodied form, the act of worship evaporates, for what is purely spiritual is inappropriate to the nature of man.

Worship is one of those fundamental acts that affect the whole man. That is why bending the knee before the presence of the living God is something we cannot abandon.

In saying this, we come to the typical gesture of kneeling on one or both knees. In the Hebrew of the Old Testament, the verb barak, "to kneel", is cognate with the word berek, "knee". The Hebrews regarded the knees as a symbol of strength, to bend the knee is, therefore, to bend our strength before the living God, an acknowledgment of the fact that all that we are we receive from Him. In important passages of the Old Testament, this gesture appears as an expression of worship.

At the dedication of the Temple, Solomon kneels "in the presence of all the assembly of Israel" (II Chron 6:13). After the Exile, in the afflictions of the returned Israel, which is still without a Temple, Ezra repeats this gesture at the time of the evening sacrifice: "I ... fell upon my knees and spread out my hands to the Lord my God" (Ezra 9:5).

The great psalm of the Passion, Psalm 22 ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"), ends with the promise: "Yes, to Him shall all the proud of the earth fall down; before Him all who go down to the dust shall throw themselves down" (v. 29, RSV adapted).

The related passage Isaiah 45:23 we shall have to consider in the context of the New Testament. The Acts of the Apostles tells us how Saint Peter (9:40), Saint Paul (20:36), and the whole Christian community (21:5) pray on their knees.

Particularly important for our question is the account of the martyrdom of Saint Stephen. The first man to witness to Christ with his blood is described in his suffering as a perfect image of Christ, whose Passion is repeated in the martyrdom of the witness, even in small details.

One of these is that Stephen, on his knees, takes up the petition of the crucified Christ: "Lord, do not hold this sin against them" (7:60). We should remember that Luke, unlike Matthew and Mark, speaks of the Lord kneeling in Gethsemane, which shows that Luke wants the kneeling of the first martyr to be seen as his entry into the prayer of Jesus. Kneeling is not only a Christian gesture, but a christological one.

For me, the most important passage for the theology of kneeling will always be the great hymn of Christ in Philippians 2:6-11. In this pre-Pauline hymn, we hear and see the prayer of the apostolic Church and can discern within it her confession of faith in Christ. However, we also hear the voice of the Apostle, who enters into this prayer and hands it on to us, and, ultimately, we perceive here both the profound inner unity of the Old and New Testaments and the cosmic breadth of Christian faith.

The hymn presents Christ as the antitype of the First Adam. While the latter high-handedly grasped at likeness to God, Christ does not count equality with God, which is His by nature, "a thing to be grasped", but humbles Himself unto death, even death on the Cross. It is precisely this humility, which comes from love, that is the truly divine reality and procures for Him the "name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth" (Phil 2:5-10).

Here the hymn of the apostolic Church takes up the words of promise in Isaiah 45:23: "By myself I have sworn, from my mouth has gone forth in righteousness a word that shall not return: 'To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear'".

In the interweaving of Old and New Testaments, it becomes clear that, even as crucified, Jesus bears that "name above every name" -- the name of the Most High -- and is Himself God by nature. Through Him, through the Crucified, the bold promise of the Old Testament is now fulfilled: all bend the knee before Jesus, the One who descended, and bow to Him precisely as the one true God above all gods.

The Cross has become the world-embracing sign of God's presence, and all that we have previously heard about the historic and cosmic Christ should now, in this passage, come back into our minds.

The Christian Liturgy is a cosmic Liturgy precisely because it bends the knee before the crucified and exalted Lord. Here is the center of authentic culture - the culture of truth. The humble gesture by which we fall at the feet of the Lord inserts us into the true path of life of the cosmos.

There is much more that we might add. For example, there is the touching story told by Eusebius in his history of the Church as a tradition going back to Hegesippus in the second century. Apparently, Saint James, the "brother of the Lord", the first bishop of Jerusalem and "head" of the Jewish Christian Church, had a kind of callous on his knees, because he was always on his knees worshipping God and begging forgiveness for his people (2, 23, 6).

Again, there is a story that comes from the sayings of the Desert Fathers, according to which the devil was compelled by God to show himself to a certain Abba Apollo. He looked black and ugly, with frighteningly thin limbs, but most strikingly, he had no knees. The inability to kneel is seen as the very essence of the diabolical.

But I do not want to go into more detail. I should like to make just one more remark. The expression used by Saint Luke to describe the kneeling of Christians (theis ta gonata) is unknown in classical Greek. We are dealing here with a specifically Christian word.

With that remark, our reflections turn full circle to where they began. It may well be that kneeling is alien to modern culture -- insofar as it is a culture, for this culture has turned away from the faith and no longer knows the one before whom kneeling is the right, indeed the intrinsically necessary gesture.

The man who learns to believe learns also to kneel, and a faith or a liturgy no longer familiar with kneeling would be sick at the core. Where it has been lost, kneeling must be rediscovered, so that, in our prayer, we remain in fellowship with the apostles and martyrs, in fellowship with the whole cosmos, indeed in union with Jesus Christ Himself.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 25/06/2017 00:54]

China’s Catholics:
Perseverance under Peter
As a historian of China, I am convinced that China has never been,
at least officially, less and less open to religions than it is today.
Anthony E. Clark, Ph.D.

June 20, 2017

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“We cannot command our final perseverance, but must ask it of God.”
— St. Thomas Aquinas

“St. Peter is the leader of the choir, the mouth of the apostles and the head of that tribe, the leader of the world, the foundation of the Church, and the ardent lover of Christ.”
— St. John Chrysostom

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Few issues have plagued China-Vatican relations since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 more than the question of papal authority.

China’s political leaders remain uncomfortable with foreign leaders exercising power over Chinese citizens, and Chinese Catholics are among the only people in China who submit to an outside power.

In 1951, China’s new communist government committed itself to solving the problem of the “foreign pope” by installing a Chinese one. Party officials approached the Vincentian archbishop, Joseph Zhou Jishi, and invited him to be the pope. Zhou responded that he would be happy to serve as pope, as long as his election was made by the cardinals of the Church in Rome, and that once elected he would live and lead the entire Catholic Church from his papal apartment at the Vatican.

For his answer, Archbishop Zhou was arrested in May 1951, subjected to three “people’s trials,” and sent to prison. Since 1949 China’s Catholics have struggled to find ways of remaining loyal to the successor of St. Peter that assuage the government’s requirement to obey the pope in only “spiritual matters,” and not in areas of administration.

This situation has created a painful sense of separation between Chinese Catholics and their spiritual leader in Rome, and an expression of this pain was observed recently during the March 15th general audience with Pope Francis at St. Peter’s.

Pope Francis allowed a group Chinese pilgrims to pass through the barrier of Swiss Guards and Vatican carabinieri, approaching him on their knees and sobbing. These Chinese Catholics passed a few tender moments with the successor of the leader of the apostles. No pope has ever visited China, today he remains forbidden from visiting his flock in the Middle Kingdom. While one pilgrim performed the traditional Chinese gesture of obedience, the kowtow, another asked him to bless their statue of Our Lady of Fatima.

There are two realities that define China’s Catholics: Today they are sustained by their abiding devotion to Jesus Christ, and they are plagued by their abiding struggle to navigate between a political requirement to remain distanced from the pope of Rome and a spiritual requirement to submit to his authority. Recent events in China highlight the complexities of this situation.

After an extended period of living under house arrest for refusing affiliation with the state-sponsored Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, Bishop Thaddeus Ma Daqin emerged from his confinement to concelebrate Mass on April 17, 2017 with Bishop Vincent Zhan Silu, who is not in communion with the Holy Father.

Some local Catholics have decried Ma’s concelebration as “blasphemous”. This was Bishop Ma’s first public Mass since 2012, and many of China’s faithful feel betrayed by his unexpected rapprochement with an illicit bishop. “Shen cang bu lu 深藏不露,” exclaim some, which means, “A hidden intention hides below.”

In the same month, a police raid of an “underground” Catholic church in Heilongjiang province left Catholics fearful that the Church’s apparent freedoms gained since the 2008 Olympics are slowly being eroded by renewed state attempts to control and diminish the flock under St. Peter’s successor.

I wrote in August 2016 of rumors that Bishop Ma had released an “admission of his faults,” [AsiaNews reported this as fact, pointing to Bishop Ma's own Facebook posts on which he posted his 'confession'] and that he had reneged his former repudiation of the Catholic Patriotic Association.

For many Chinese Catholics, his concelebration with an illicit bishop represents lost hope that China’s bishops can effectively resist state control, while for many others his concelebration signifies Ma’s practical commitment to preserving the faith in China under the Church’s present circumstances.

Despite the news of Bishop Ma Daqin’s concelebration and the ongoing, and unresolved, saga of reported negotiations between the Vatican and China’s government regarding the current system of selecting bishops, China’s Catholics continue to flourish.

According to a recent report published by UCANews, “There were 4,446 new Catholics baptized in China’s northern Hebei province during Easter, the highest amount in the country during the same time.” Central Shanxi province reported 1,593 baptisms during Easter Vigil, and there were 1,327 at southern Guangdong, 1,234 from northwestern Shaanxi, 1,169 from eastern Shandong, 1,168 from eastern Zhejiang, and 1,097 from central Henan.

Baptismal statistics for China are impossible to accurately discern since two-thirds of the country’s Catholics are members of the “underground” community, and cannot openly report their records. That said, a preliminary report from the sanctioned Church accounts for 19,087 new Catholics in China this Easter.

Other hopeful signs can be found in China’s large cities. In Beijing, for example, the city’s largest church, Beitang (北堂 “North Church”), is being restored largely at the government’s expense, and the former bishop’s residence attached to the Beitang complex is being returned to the Catholic community. Once the stunning Gothic-style church is completely restored it shall again serve as Beijing’s grand cathedral.

The state is funding a major repair and restoration of Shanghai’s St. Ignatius cathedral, first designed by the famous English architect, William Doyle, in 1906. The restoration of these two Catholic churches is costing the government around ten million US dollars, and they will serve the rapidly growing number of China’s Catholics.

Meanwhile, in April, police officials raided a small gathering of unsanctioned Catholics during Mass, heralding what they viewed as successfully “blocking an illegal religious gathering.” Officials ransacked the room and attempted to arrest the huizhang (會長 “community elder”) and priest, all of which briefly appeared in an online video. A still image from that video was posted on the Chinese webpage of UCANews on April 27th.

Events such as this remind the faithful that the situation for Catholics remains complicated, and that “perseverance under Peter” can come with costs. This incident followed the arrests of two “underground” bishops, Bishop Peter Shao Zhumin, of Wenzhou, and Bishop Vincent Guo Xijin, of Mindong, and rumors suggest that these two prelates were seized to prevent them from celebrating Easter Masses.

The state continues to iterate its position that religious activities are allowed as long as they are conducted under the auspices of the Religious Affairs Bureau and the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.

Navigating within these parameters is often rewarded with generous state support, as is now seen in the construction and restoration of Catholic churches throughout China. The central anxiety among those sitting in China’s pews, however, revolves around the question of papal authority within a national system that insists upon total independence from foreign interference. But the technical area of ecclesial authority is not the only issue that occupies the thoughts of China’s Catholics.

The Chinese Jesuit Fr. Joseph Jiang recently published a commentary on the state of Chinese Catholicism in La Civiltà Cattolica, entitled “Catholicism in 21st Century China”, wherein he notes China’s modern malaise due to the empty rewards of materialism. He asks: “Is the Chinese Catholic Church ready to face this challenge?”

Given China’s persistent shortage of clergy, Jiang suggests that the Church in China must “empower the laity to take more leadership roles in the Church’s mission,” so that a more robust spiritual life among the faithful can mitigate the temptations of hyper-materialism. He also recommends that the Church in China more effectively utilize internet networking “to keep up with the times.” What is perhaps most intriguing about Jiang’s essay, however, is his assertion that:

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Because China is so different from the rest of the world, the Chinese Catholic Church needs to learn how to deal with the local culture and political authority. In other words, while keeping its Catholic identity, the Church has to establish a ‘Chinese Catholic Church with Chinese Characteristics,’ if it is to inculturate Church teachings and gospel values that are relevant to the Chinese people and serve both their [own] and Catholics’ spiritual needs.

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In order to “remain relevant to the needs of the new generation,” Fr. Jiang suggests that the Church must adopt itself to the particular realities of modern Chinese society, and he borrows from the rhetoric of China’s communist party, which states that China must have “socialism with Chinese characteristics (Zhongguo tese shehuizhuyi中國特色社會主義),” an idea encouraged by party leaders such as Deng Xiaoping, Hu Yaobang, and Zhao Ziyang.

Just as Marxist economic theories cannot conform precisely to the ideals of Karl Marx, neither can the Church’s conventional model conform precisely to the culture of the Chinese Church. He suggests, though, that China’s Church must keep “its catholic identity.”

To facilitate this accommodation, Jiang asserts that, “the Chinese Catholic Church will have to redefine its role and relationship with the Party and its ideological theories. This does not necessarily mean that the Church has to agree completely with Party politics and values, but it must find flexible and effective ways to continue its mission and ministry in China.”

Fr. Jiang’s assessment and proposal is largely pastoral, and on that level it has several merits. But Jiang’s suggestion overlooks that present realities in China are quite distinct from China’s past.

Before 1949, when China’s political authorities became entirely communist, emperors and presidents had been religious persons, and the question of belief and religious practice was more a matter of “orthodoxy” than a matter of whether or not religion is altogether socially harmful.

China’s current polity at best tolerates religious practice; at worst, it actively seeks to abolish it. China’s emperors were either Daoist or Buddhist, and the president of the Republican Era, Chiang Kai-shek, was a baptized Christian.

Another aspect that complicates Sino-Vatican accord today is the question of the selection of bishops, which China’s government still refuses to return to the pope. China’s emperors, as tyrannical as they often were, never infringed upon the pope’s authority to select priests for consecration to the episcopacy.

When party officials asked Bishop Joseph Zhou Jishi to be the pope of China, an entirely new form of “Chinese Catholic Church with Chinese Characteristics” was proposed by China’s new government. The issue of St. Peter’s role in the Church remains central, and how this bedrock reality of Catholic identity is handled in China will dictate the course of Catholicism in China as it continues its historical path.

Fr. Jiang calls for the Sinicization (“Chinese-ification”) of China’s Church, and I unequivocally agree with that part of his summons; but the Church in China already began this process in the early-twentieth century. It is in fact more Sinicized now than ever before.

To place too much emphasis on the cultural dialogue between contemporary China and Catholicism is overly optimistic. Cultural rapprochement shall be an essential component for improving the spiritual and material lives of China’s Catholics, but many – perhaps most – of China’s Catholics would like to see the issue of Peter finally resolved so that the leader of the apostles can finally visit his flock in China and function as the genuine pastor of China’s Catholics.

I may be accused of stubbornly adhering to a long and persistent antagonism between the Vatican and China’s post-1949 authorities, but I would note that genuine and lasting reconciliation must begin with honesty.

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, in the opening line of his encyclical Caritas in Veritate, wrote that, “Charity in truth, to which Jesus Christ bore witness by his earthly life and especially by his death and resurrection, is the principal driving force behind the authentic development of every person and of all humanity.”

Fr. Jiang’s essay, which I largely agree with, suggests that, “As China and Chinese society in general become more and more open to religions – and to [the] Catholic Church in particular – Catholicism can find a stable place if it continues to be a Church of openness and a Church with Chinese characteristics and identity.”

As a historian of China, I am convinced that China has never been, at least officially, less and less open to religions than it is today. All of my courses begin with a several-week section on Chinese philosophy and religion, and from the Shang dynasty (1600-1045 BC) until the Republican Era (1911-1949), China was far more spiritually minded than it is now.

The fact that China’s Church is indeed growing, and that churches are overflowing with faithful at each Mass is a hopeful reality, and the challenges faced by China’s government actually lie beyond the scope of religious practice.

Creating opportunities for 1.4 billion people to support themselves and maintain an agreeable standard of life occupies much of the discussions held each time the party meets in Beijing.

Yet for Catholics, as long as prayer and Eucharistic gatherings are designated as “sanctioned” and “unsanctioned,” and as long as the pope is viewed as a “foreign threat” to the people of China, there are larger issues to discuss than Sinicization.

Although historical factors will undoubtedly require time and patience as China’s Catholics unhurriedly seek to normalize – yes, with “Chinese characteristics” – their relationship to Rome remains central. As long as bishops, priests, and faithful feel pressed between their loyalty to Rome and their patriotism for their country, incidents such as the illicit concelebration between Bishops Ma and Zhan, and the indiscriminate raiding of private gatherings for Mass shall continue to afflict China’s Catholic community.

All this being said, Pope Francis has made it clear that China’s faithful remain close to his heart. In his May 21, 2017 Regina Caeli prayer, the Holy Father said:

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Next May 24 we will all be united spiritually to the Catholic faithful of China, on the feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary “Help of Christians,” venerated at the Sheshan Shrine at Shanghai. To Chinese Catholics I say: Let us raise our gaze to Mary Our Mother, so that she may help us to discern the Will of God regarding the concrete path of the Church in China and support us in accepting her plan of love with generosity. Mary encourages us to offer our personal contribution towards communion among believers and for the harmony of the society as a whole. Let us not forget to bear witness to faith with prayer and with love, always remaining open to encounter and dialogue.

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Pope Francis has generously opened the path for dialogue with China’s authorities, while also appealing to Our Lady of Sheshan to help “discern the Will of God regarding the concrete path of the Church in China.”

I’ll conclude with an announcement of an event few American Catholics are aware of, a biannual gathering of Chinese and American Catholics sponsored by the U.S. Catholic China Bureau. This year’s national conference will be in New York, from 11-13 August, 2017, at St. John’s University, and the theme of the gathering will be understanding the Chinese Church of the twenty-first century.

I mention this gathering because when I ask Chinese Catholics what they wish most of American Catholics, they quickly reply: “I wish to have a chance for them to get to know us, to know that we are also part of the Church.”

One of the two keynote speakers is a Chinese priest, Father Joseph Zhang, a biblical scholar from China, who will deliver a talk entitled, “Contemporary Chinese Catholicism: Present and Future Realities.”

Events such as this are a remarkable opportunity for Americans to encounter the inspiring spirituality of Chinese Catholics, whose dedication to the successor of St. Peter, and the faith of the apostles, is a moving testament to the work of the Holy Spirit in the Universal Church.

June 23, 2017 headlines

Canon212.com


PewSitter



June 24, 2017 headlines

Canon212.com


PewSitter


June 25, 2017

Since the above banner headline links to a Babel translation from the Spanish, I will use Father Z's commentary on it today - which
translates the pertinent parts better – and tackles the perennial Eucharistic ‘laxity’ brought on by the Novus Ordo and the post-
Vatican II practice of mega-Masses.

When Communion becomes “we get the white thing
in our hands and then we sing the song”

by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf
June 25, 2017

There is a virus-like fixation pandemic in the Church today that everyone has to go to Communion at every Mass. Therefore, even if there are people present manifestly in living in a state of mortal sin, spectacular contortions of doctrine and law are pretzeled together to justify what has NEVER been justified in the history of the Church: saying openly that the unconfessed Catholic in the state of mortal sin who does not have a firm purpose of amendment can be admitted to the sacraments.

If there is a mega-Mass, such as a papal Mass, astonishing lengths are attempted to get a Host out there to every single sincere and pious communicant, as well as the reacher-grabber and souvenir collector.

Of all the words I can think of to describe this, “reverent” isn’t one of them.

I don’t blame the unquestioning organizers… much. They are infected with this aforementioned virus. No… I guess I do blame them. They should know better.

Today I am reminded that The Great One, His Eminence Robert Card. Sarah, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments (which covers how Mass should be celebrated, how to preserve its reverent character, its holiness, its power to communicate what the Perfect Communicator wants to give to the world) has remarked on mega-Masses.

From InfoVaticana comes this with my usual treatment (not my translation but touched up) [Fr Z's remarks in red]:

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Cardinal Sarah denounces mega-masses ‘with thousands of attendees’

“Men and women in adultery and unbaptized tourists who participate in eucharistic celebrations of anonymous crowds can receive without distinction the Body and Blood of Christ.” This is a situation that alarms Cardinal Robert Sarah, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, as he discusses it in his book The Force of Silence [which has now been published in Spanish].

Cardinal Sarah emphasizes the need for the Church to study with urgency “the ecclesial and pastoral suitability of these multitudinous eucharistic celebrations with thousands of attendees.” For the Guinean cardinal, today there is an immense danger of converting the Eucharist “into a vulgar verbena [open-air dance]” and of desecrating the Body and Blood of Christ.

“The priests who distribute the sacred species without knowing anyone and give the body of Jesus to anyone, without distinguishing Christians from non-Christians, participate in the profanation of the Holy Eucharistic Sacrifice,” he writes. [The priest in large parishes can’t know every person who comes to Communion, but in that context it is often easy to tell who isn’t Catholic (by their behavior). But the situation of mega-Masses… well. Also, I note that Eastern congregations are often small enough that the priest can say people’s names as they present themselves for Communion.]

The CDW Prefect warns that “with some voluntary complicity,” those who exercise authority in the church are guilty of permitting the sacrilege and desecration of the Body of Christ “in those gigantic and ridiculous self-celebrations”.

Sarah also regrets that some “priests unfaithful to the memory of Jesus” insist more on the festive aspect of the Mass than on the bloody sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. [ANAXIOS!] [Greek word for ‘unfit and unworthy’]. “The importance of the interior disposition for Communion and of the necessity to reconcile with God by seeking our purification through the sacrament of the confession is no longer 'in fashion',” concludes the prelate.

---

I’m afraid that, for many – even for many priests and even bishops – Communion is now [nothing but] the moment we get the white thing in our hands and then we sing the song.

The “White Thing” is a sign that people like me! Hence, if I can’t have the “White Thing” before we sing the song, I don’t feel good about myself in this setting… and that’s bad. The “White Thing” in the hand is the token that this is a “safe space”.

Just as a reminder, here’s Communion at a mega-Mass in Manila in 2015 during Pope Francis’ visit.
http://www.wdtprs.com/media/video/15_01_19_Manila_Mass.mp4

[in which the host – sometimes two at a time – are passed from hand to hand …]

And this distribution from plastic cups at Rio for Pope Francis’s World Youth Day Mass 2013.

Fr H places our beloved Pope's rigid obstinacy about not answering the DUBIA in the most charitable light he can...

Sporting the 'papal oak':
The pope obstinately locks his door
and mind to the DUBIA cardinals

June 25, 2017

I am finding it difficult to elaborate a workable hermeneutic by which to understand the unwillingness of the Roman Pontiff to allow his door to be opened to the Four Cardinals.

It has been critically pointed out by others that he opens his door to some rather unusual applicants. This seems to me to be not at all a just object of criticism. I applaud him for it. How can anyone fail to notice that, in so doing, he is following the example of his Line Manager, the Second Person of the Blessed and Undivided Trinity? Whom did the Incarnate Word ever turn away?

But ... well, may I put it like this. If I ran a very welcoming household, admitting anyone who knocked, friends and foes, from tramps to parliamentary candidates, talking to all, hearing their troubles, struggling with their worries, and trying to resolve their uncertainties, but refused ever to find a moment to hear and talk with my wife, children, and grandchildren, what judgements ought to be made of me?

The Lord washed the feet of his most intimate friends, and that pedilavium was seen in the Church when Abbots washed the feet of their sons, Bishops the feet of their presbyters. But the present occupant of the Roman See refuses this service of humility to his associates and rigidly confines it to people whom he has, as far as we are informed, never met before. I am impressed by the symbolism of what he does do ... with its gracious imagery of openness to those on the social peripheries ... while being puzzled by the determined rigidity of his exclusions.

Perhaps ... who am I to speculate? ... our Holy Father feels impatient that Four Cardinals are unable to understand his recent document Amoris laetitia. Possibly he suspects that they fail to understand because they are determined not to understand. I know exactly the same feeling. Both in the parochial teaching ministry, and in a scholastic environment, I have sometimes had that very feeling.

In my simplicity, however, I have usually tried to devise other strategies by which to make myself understood. Should I really have just refused to waste my time? Is that the message and example we lesser people are to infer from the conduct of the Vicar of Christ?

Papa Ratzinger once invited to tea a dissident theologian with a life's history of heresy and of malevolent and unpleasantly expressed antagonism towards himself: Hans Kueng. [He didn't have to invite him at all, but he did, noblesse oblige to his adversary once he became Pope.] I thought that was a rather fine and lovely gesture. Or: perhaps not so much a mere gesture as a real and Christ-like openness to a brother in Christ. Was I merely naive to think this? Should Ratzinger simply have locked the door, eaten all the sandwiches himself, licked his lips, and had a nap?

I can understand it if the present occupant of the Roman See has a mental list of people he would rather not meet, which includes bishops whom he has just sacked as well as the Four Cardinals. That would be very humanly and endearingly understandable. Many pastors have, at least in petto, just such a list of parishioners. I once went along one particular street rather than another to avoid the risk of meeting such a person.

But then, in my examination of conscience, it occurred to me: suppose Providence had disposed the likelihood of such a meeting with the intention that some particular good would result from it?

I am finding it quite a struggle to discover the truly Christian and pastoral meaning in locked doors, unanswered letters, and rigid exclusions.

*Male undergraduate sets of rooms in Oxford used to have an inner and an outer door. The latter was called the 'Oak' and it was said to be 'sported' when it was shut. 'Sporting one's Oak' occurred when, in some such emergency as an Essay Crisis or a woman, the undergraduate concerned had no time for socialising.

Will Papa Bergoglio go down in the History books as the Papa Robustus, the Oaky Pope? Will the next step of the Four Cardinals be to compose in Greek elegiacs a paraklausithyron [literally, 'lament beside the door']



From
today, June 25, 2017, this quote of the day (my translation) without a commentary. Who would have thought what the late pope
said 47 years ago would be so frighteningly actual today? And that the non-Catholic thinking is now led by the very man who was elected
to lead the Church!

Paul VI to French writer Jean Guitton
September 8, 1977

---

There's a great turmoil today in the Church, and it is the faith itself which is at issue. I find myself recalling a not-often quoted statement of Jesus from the Gospel of St. Luke: "When the Son of Man comes, will he still find faith on earth?"(18,8).

There are many books these days in which faith seems to be in retreat on many important things but the bishops do not say a word, as if they do not find these books strange. And their attitude is strange to me.

From time to time, I reread the Gospel on the end of time and observe that some of the signs of these end times are emerging today. Are we near the end? We will never know. But we must always be ready, even if the end may be vary far off.

What strikes me when I consider the Catholic world is that sometimes it seems that at its very heart, a kind of non-Catholic thought predominates. And it can happen that this non-Catholic thinking may become the stronger side tomorrow. But it will never represent the thinking of the Church. It is necessary that a small flock [true to the thinking of the Church] subsists, no matter how small it may be.

---

Il Timone fittingly used this illustration for the quotation - fittingly because Cardinal Ratzinger/Benedict XVI would speak repeatedly of a smaller Church,
a Church made up of 'creative minorities' who would lead her to a rebirth after all the ravages of Modernism.

I have been unable to find a date for the photograph but I must assume it was taken after the then Archbishop of Munich-Freising had been made a cardinal in June 1977, because
he is already wearing a red hat. Also, I have not found any other version online of this photo but this one, which is impervious to Photobucket enhancement.[/I

A belated Corpus Christi post
Courtesy of

which has just begun its annual posting of notable Corpus Christi celebrations around the world. Most of the places featured celebrate
the solemnity traditionally on the Thursday following Trinity Sunday.

To my great surprise - and pride - one of the places featured was Alaminos, Laguna, a town of about 50,000 people located some 48 miles
southeast of Manila. Its parish church named for its patron Nuestra Senora del Pilar (Our Lady of the Pillar) is one of hundreds of
churches in the Philippines built during the Spanish colonial era (1571-1896), of which 4 have been designated UNESCO World Heritage
sites, and another 30 or more on a tentative list, plus another 65 that still retain much of their original structures.





The practice of having young girls strew flowers preceding the main image of any procession has been kept in many places in the Philippines,
most especially during the annual Flores de Mayo (May flowers) processions held by parishes and neighborhoods to honor Our Lady during
the month of May.

Have not posted from Fr. Rutler in some time...

The undaunted widow in the Gospel
and the Damas de Blanco of Cuba
by Fr. George W. Rutler
June 25, 2017

The legend of King Robert the Bruce, exiled from Scotland in a cave off the Irish coast in 1306, resembles a similar story in the Bible about King David when he was a boy.

King Robert watched a spider finally manage to make a web after failing in several attempts. Thus the child’s rhyme: “If at first you don’t succeed, Try, try, try again.”

Our Lord’s parable of the unjust judge (Luke 18:1-8) is about a poor widow who persisted in getting the judge to hear her case. The refined translation says that the judge wearied of her importuning, but the Greek has the judge fearing that she would punch him. That was a woman who would not give up.

To discourage is to lose heart. It is a trick of the Anti-Christ and the very opposite of Christ who encourages. “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16).

The widow in the parable reminds one of the Damas de Blanco — Ladies in White — who are wives and mothers of political prisoners in the gulags of Communist Cuba. Mostly Afro-Cubans, they formed in 2003 to protest the large-scale arrest of their kin who included journalists and human rights activists. From then on, every Sunday, they attend Mass in Havana and then process in white clothing to a park where, despite their peaceful witness, they frequently have been beaten and jailed.

Their persistence has been an embarrassment to many outside Cuba who choose to ignore the devastation wrought by Marxism. Even some leading churchmen indulge the gossamer hope that appeasement will convert evil to good.

The Ladies in White were hurt but not thwarted when a U.S. presidential executive order [by Barack Obama] in 2013 lifted sanctions against Cuba, while requiring no reform of its dictatorship. “Peace for our time” was predictably delusional, and political oppression increased: there were 1,095 detainees in 2016, up from 718 in 2015.

Our social media applauded the capitulation, its accompanying festivities, and our own government’s “easy speeches” that, as Chesterton said, “comfort cruel men.”

On June 16 in Miami, our President fulfilled a campaign promise by signing a directive imposing sanctions that will not be lifted until Cuba frees political prisoners and holds free elections. He also explicitly mentioned the persistence of the Ladies in White.

Berta Soler, a leader of the Ladies in White, whose husband has been serving a twenty-year sentence, replied: “These days, Mr. President, when most of the world responds with a deafening silence to the harassment, arbitrary detentions, beatings, house searches, and robberies against peaceful opponents, human rights activists and defenseless women, your words of encouragement are most welcomed.”

It was like the parable of the undaunted widow: “And will not God vindicate his elect, who cry to him day and night?”

This one is another pastor's weekly column - Mons. Thomas Tobin, Bishop of Providence, Rhode Island. At the time our current pope named Mons. Joseph Tobin of Indianapolis a cardinal and named him to head the Archdiocese of Newark [where he has been increasingly and stridently voluble in support of the church of Bergoglio, which he was, of course, expected to be], I had meant to call attention to the fact that the US also has another Bishop Tobin, one that we orthodox Catholics would consider the 'good' Bishop Tobin ... Here, he shares some thoughts which give us a good idea of his orientation and his fair-and-balanced common sense, and how, like Fr. Rutler, he can comment on political and social issues without being ideological...

A few random thoughts...
by Mons. Thomas Tobin
Bishop of Providence

June 22, 2017

A few random thoughts before I take a little break for summer . . .
** It’s just two years since the publication of Laudato Si, the historic encyclical of Pope Francis that calls us to a renewed commitment to the protection of the environment and the care of the earth, our common home. It’s a serious challenge we should all understand and embrace because it is, after all, not just a papal preference, but a divine mandate, an important component of our Catholic Faith.

** Having said that, the negative reaction to President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord has been over-the-top, hysterical even. While we can agree on the need to control global warming and protect the environment, whether or not the Paris agreement is the best or only means of achieving that goal is a legitimate debate. In his encyclical, Pope Francis said, “The Church knows that honest debate must be encouraged among experts, while respecting divergent views.” (#61)

** It also seems to me that some of the liberal politicians and Hollywood types who attacked President Trump over his climate decision could do a lot more themselves to protect the environment if they would just forego their frequent international travels, private jets, splendid yachts, palatial homes, and lavish lifestyles.

** From many quarters today we keep hearing that the Church has to “listen” more – to millennials, the LGBTQ community, the transgendered, feminists, and lots of other groups with particular agendas. I get it. It’s important that we talk and listen to one another, and I know as well as anyone that consultation is an indispensable part of the life of the Church today. However, when Jesus commissioned the Apostles to go forth, he instructed them to teach, not listen, didn’t he?

** And while it’s instructive for the Church to listen to special interest groups, it’s also necessary that those groups listen to the Church, since the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, preserves and promotes the truths of the Gospel and the teachings of Christ. Encounter and welcoming are virtuous practices, but not at the expense of the truth.

** Some clergy numbers in the Diocese of Providence to think about: Since the beginning of this decade we’ve lost 58 priests from active ministry in the Diocese, due mostly to retirement, and we’ve ordained just 18. That’s a net loss of 40 priests from active ministry in the Diocese. The median age of active priests is 59; the median age of all priests, including retirees is 67. There are just 21 priests under the age of 40.

** In commenting on the declining number of priests in the Diocese, a recent letter in the Providence Journal suggested that the answer to the clergy shortage is to allow married priests and women priests. “Evolve or become extinct,” the letter writer advised. In other words, the Church has to change its teachings if it is to survive and prosper. “Prosper... you mean just like the mainline Protestant churches?” I said to myself.

** While we often focus on the challenges we’re facing these days, we shouldn’t lose sight, for even a single minute, of the great work, the beautiful work, the Church is doing every day.

The Catholic Church brings people together in communities of faith for worship and praise, proclaims timeless moral truths, accompanies families in their daily lives, educates children, and serves the poor and needy.

Beyond the government itself, the Catholic Church is the largest provider of charitable services in our state. We shouldn’t underestimate the importance of that contribution. I’m so grateful to, and proud of, the clergy, religious and laity, the employees and volunteers, who enable the Church to accomplish so much good, every day!...

** In this “Year with Mary our Mother,” remember that the summer contains some beautiful Marian feast days in which we honor our Blessed Mother, including – Our Lady of Mt. Carmel on July 16, The Assumption on August 15, and the Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary on August 22.

** I hope that you’ll have a safe, relaxing and peaceful summer. But be sure to stay close to God during the summer, pray and go to Mass every Sunday. God won’t forget you during vacation – don’t forget him either!