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BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Ultimo Aggiornamento: 23/08/2021 11:16
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ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI


********************************************************************************************************************************************

Official statements regarding
the charges presented by
Australian police against Cardinal Pell

June 29, 2017

CARDINAL PELL’S STATEMENT


Good morning to you all.

I want to say one or two brief words about my situation. These matters have been under investigation now for two years. There have been leaks to the media, there’ve been relentless character assassination — a relentless character assassination — and for more than a month claims that a decision whether to delay charges was imminent.

I’m looking forward to finally having my day in court. I’m innocent of these charges, they are false. The whole idea of sexual abuse is abhorrent to me. I’ve kept Pope Francis, the Holy Father, regularly informed during these long months, and I have spoken to him on a number of occasions in the last week, most recently I think a day or so ago. We talked about my need to take leave to clear my name.

So I am very grateful to the Holy Father for giving me this leave to return to Australia. I’ve spoken to my lawyers when this will be necessary, and I’ve spoken to my doctors for the best way to achieve this.

All along I’ve been completely consistent and clear in my total rejection of these allegations. News of these charges strengthens my resolve and court proceedings now offer me the opportunity to clear my name and then return here, back to Rome, to work.


THE VATICAN STATEMENT
Holy See Press Bulletin
June 29, 2017

The Holy See has learned with regret the news of charges filed in Australia against Card. George Pell for decades-old actions that have been attributed to him.

Having become aware of the charges, Card. Pell, acting in full respect for civil laws, has decided to return to his country to face the charges against him, recognizing the importance of his participation to ensure that the process is carried out fairly, and to foster the search for truth.

The Holy Father, having been informed by Card. Pell, has granted the Cardinal a leave of absence so he can defend himself.

During the Prefect’s absence, the Secretariat for the Economy will continue to carry out its institutional tasks. The Secretaries will remain at their posts to carry forward the ordinary affairs of the dicastery, donec aliter provideatur [until further notice].

The Holy Father, who has appreciated Cardinal Pell’s honesty during his three years of work in the Roman Curia, is grateful for his collaboration, and in particular, for his energetic dedication to the reforms in the economic and administrative sector, as well as his active participation in the Council of Cardinals (C9).

The Holy See expresses its respect for the Australian justice system that will have to decide the merits of the questions raised. At the same time, it is important to recall that
- Card. Pell has openly and repeatedly condemned as immoral and intolerable the acts of abuse committed against minors;
- has cooperated in the past with Australian authorities (for example, in his depositions before the Royal Commission);
- has supported the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors;
- and finally, as a diocesan bishop in Australia, introduced systems and procedures both for the protection of minors and to provide assistance to victims of abuse.

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Going nowhere slowly... Is it not a phenomenon in itself that none of those who were so gung-ho over curial reform back in 2013 now have very
little good to say about it, more than four years into this Pontificate? Curial reform has, of course, been just one of those hot-air balloons
launched by the dozens on March 12, 2013, that have since been punctured and irretrievably shredded.


How are those reforms coming along?
The cardinals who elected Pope Francis
hoped for major curial reform. Why isn't it going to plan?

by Fr Mark Drew
CATHOLIC HERALD
29 Jun 2017

In high summer, Rome may be crawling with tourists, but most of the inhabitants have either fled the stifling heat or are hunkered down behind shuttered windows. In the Vatican, once the celebrations for Ss Peter and Paul are over, there is an aura of winding down.

This year, as is often the case, the feast is being marked by the creation of new cardinals. Ahead of the consistory, there was speculation that, for the second time in a row, Pope Francis would not preside over a plenary session of the Sacred College.

That would be unusual, but not unprecedented. The cardinals are supposed to be the Pope’s chief advisers. Given their number and geographical dispersal, opportunities for wide-ranging consultations are rare. Francis has established an inner circle of nine cardinals who meet regularly to advise him. But it does seem strange that he would consider passing over once more an opportunity to sound out a more representative gathering.

Inevitably, this has led to speculation that Francis is trying to avoid forums in which growing discontent might be expressed. Foremost among the causes of this rumbling unease is the continuing controversy over the interpretation and application of Amoris Laetitia, the 2016 document that has raised debate about the admission of the divorced and remarried to Communion.

Readers will remember that last November four cardinals – Carlo Caffara, Raymond Burke, Walter Brandmüller and Joachim Meisner – made public four questions, or dubia, seeking clarification of statements in Amoris, which they deemed in potential conflict with Catholic doctrine. They took the unusual step of publicising their doubts when it became clear that Francis, equally unusually, had no intention of answering them, although they were submitted through the proper channels and in time-honoured form fully respecting papal prerogatives.

Rather than take the overtly confrontational step of issuing a formal correction if Francis continued to ignore the questions, as was at one point suggested, the four chose instead to appeal for dialogue. In early May they wrote requesting a meeting with the Pope, saying that the ambiguities were leading to differing interpretations in different countries, and that this was harmful to the unity of the Church. There was no reply.

On June 20, after six weeks of papal silence, they allowed their letter to be published. This does look like a direct challenge to a pope almost unique in modern times.

On one level, Francis’s choice to avoid a meeting of the Sacred College which might degenerate into an acrimonious confrontation is comprehensible. [That's absurd. After all, these are not teenage gangs raring for a brawl but cardinals, and those among them who would have the most to say to the pope did manage to keep their cool though provoked endlessly and insulted by the pope himself during the two 'family synods'.]

Those close to him maintain that he remains serene in the face of opposition. [Yeah, like what else would they do but whistle in the dark to keep their end up? On the other hand, there are those persistent reports of the supposed Serenissimo blowing his top as he pleases in the confines of Casa Santa Marta.] But the very vocal outrage suggests that many who hope to see him liberalise Church doctrine are anything but serene in the face of opposition.

Changes of pontificate often see adjustments of the pendulum when it comes to the direction of Church policy, but there are those, including some who welcomed the new pontificate enthusiastically in 2013, who now fear an excessive polarisation as a result of Francis’s governing style, which could put at risk both the legacies of his predecessors and his own positive contributions.

The concerns go well beyond the doctrinal row over Amoris. Most cardinals who voted for Cardinal Bergoglio in 2013 were not looking for doctrinal revolution (some were hoping for at least a rapid evolution, although they seem not to have talked that up too much at the time). Many were delighted when Pope Francis emerged as a forceful preacher of mercy and champion of the poor. Nevertheless, almost all expected him to tackle the more mundane task of curial reform.

On that count, four years into this pontificate, there is not only much disappointment about how little has been achieved, but also a growing conviction that little more is to be expected.

Some fear that further changes are more likely to promote the ideological agendas of those pushing for them than to tackle the corruption and inefficiency long decried by critics from all sides of the theological divide.

So deep is the pessimism that even the famously fair-minded Catholic commentator John Allen is now asking “whether the Vatican, as we currently know it, is essentially irreformable”.
[That's a Vaticanista line that has played absurdly for the past several decades since after World War II - which persistently ignores genuine reforms introduced by Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI (who brought financial transparency to the Vatican for the first time in history), but also irresponsibly ignores the fact that much of what they consider 'irreformable' is really a catalog of sins that plague every bureaucracy, and which can be changed only with a change of mentality in the people who run and man that bureaucracy. Yet Bergoglio and his Council of Nine cardinals seem to think that reforming structures is all they need to do, while placing the most unthinkable persons in place to run those new structures!]

The papacy of Benedict XVI suffered from scandals brought about by vices seemingly endemic in the curia. There were constant rumours and periodic revelations of financial mismanagement, moral scandals and character assassinations motivated by the perennial jockeying for position of ecclesiastics seemingly more intent on advancing their own careers than in serving God’s Church.

[And Fr. Drew is being even more irresponsible than John Allen in making these sweeping generalizations. Constant rumors there were, as there always are, but periodic revelations of financial mismanagement? (There was one about the overpricing of a Christmas creche, but what else?)

In fact, the rest of what Drew alleges in this paragraph is nothing but his summary of the Vatileaks book which really revealed nothing new or major in the way of scandal or any other shenanigan. As I keep pointing out, if there were really any there there in Vatileaks, don't you think Allen and dozens of other journalists hoping to be the next Woodward and Bernstein would have worked to get the story or stories out? But ZIP, ZILCH, NADA! Shame on Fr. Drew for swallowing the downright VENOMOUS media line along with their hooks and sinkers about 'scandals in the Benedict Pontificate'!]


The austere, unsmiling figure of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, whose conduct as Archbishop of Buenos Aires visibly eschewed the pursuit of such worldly aims, seemed ideally suited to the challenge of the moment. [Oh yeah, what his own successor described as Bergoglio's habitually funereal face when he was in Argentina simply veiled his steady resolve to undermine Catholic doctrine through undisciplined pastoral practice like 'communion for everyone'. It has become a fullblown scheme to subvert Catholicism now that he is pope and seeking to institutionalize Bergoglianism and replace the one true Church of Christ with the church of Bergoglio. This time, his agenda is embodied in the relentlessly jovial media image of someone who says he 'really enjoys being pope' and the negative of that image in the man who just as relentlessly hurls insults almost daily at those Catholics who do not agree with Bergoglianism!]

Once elected, his nomination of a Council of Cardinals gave the impression of a vigorous, reforming administration. Yet today this process seems to have stalled or even, in some respects, to have been rolled back.

One significant, concrete reform was the creation of a Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, under Cardinal Kevin Farrell, and a Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, under Cardinal Peter Turkson, both replacing a plethora of existing pontifical councils. This was meant to promote a unified direction, and avoid an overlapping and hazy distribution of responsibilities.

Getting on for a year down the line, vital staff are not yet in place, and officials from bodies that are now officially dissolved remain at their desks, not knowing whether they will be employed in the new structures. Impressions of chaos reportedly generate frustration among the most loyal of papal collaborators – which opponents of reform do not fail to exploit.

Confidence in the new set-up was hardly boosted when it was disclosed that the Pontifical Academy for Life, which has been entirely overhauled since it came under the jurisdiction of Cardinal Farrell’s new dicastery, had appointed a member who had spoken in favour of abortion in some cases.

Anglican philosopher Nigel Biggar is on record as supporting termination up to 18 weeks. Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the head of the academy, said he had been unaware of Biggar’s opinions. Some defended the appointment as an example of openness to dialogue in the Jesuit tradition in which Pope Francis is schooled. Others simply saw incompetence.

Curial reform may be experiencing problems in the detail, but the general direction of travel also disappoints many. The Secretariat of State, whose overweening power, combined with an institutional resistance to rocking boats, was seen from the outset as a principle factor in curial dysfunctionality. But it now seems certain to retain its hegemony.

There had been talk of splitting the Secretariat of State up when Francis was first elected, hiving off the oversight of the Roman Curia to a new department, with the diplomats retaining control only of relations with states.

But the secretariat has, if anything, strengthened its hand, overseeing access to the Pontiff by senior officials from other dicasteries. This produces smouldering resentments and the suspicion that entrenched interests are reasserting themselves.

Another area where vested interests seem resurgent is finance. The combative Cardinal George Pell, who was appointed to push through financial reform and given sweeping powers over almost every aspect of Vatican finance, has seen his remit progressively reduced as, one after another, dicasteries and departments have clawed back control of resources and budgets.

Impressions that the Curia remains resistant to transparency were further strengthened on June 20 when Libero Milone, the Vatican’s chief auditor, resigned without explanation. His appointment to the newly created post in 2015 seemed to herald a desire to overcome the notorious opacity of Vatican finances. His departure hardly indicates success.

Francis’s precise role in these manoeuvres, and his attitude towards both progress and setbacks, is unknown. Access to him is a huge issue. Yet the Secretariat of State’s control over this is only partial, since Francis has his own networks of trusted advisers outside the Curia. His decision to reside at the Domus Sanctae Marthae, the Vatican guest house [that's a misnomer to disguise the fact that it actually is a rated four-star hotel], was motivated in large part by the desire to bypass curial channels. Yet this aspect of his pontificate also generates questions.

It is clear that Francis, like a true Jesuit, is used to making decisions alone, after consulting a handful of people. [How is that a trait attributed to 'true Jesuits' and to this pope, as if they were in singular possesion of it? Is that not what any leader of consequence and common sense does?] However, this puts a great deal of power in the hands of a few individuals whose identity and motivations are to some extent shielded from being accountable to the wider Church, including the College of Bishops with whom the Pope governs collegially.

So far, Francis’s popularity has prevented these contradictions from being exploited to damage him and the Church. Doubtless many in the media see in him a chance – perhaps the last – for the Church to accommodate itself to the mores of the secular world, and they are willing to cut him some slack on that account, whereas they gave no quarter to his predecessor.

There are some in the Church who nourish the same hopes. However, they risk making a tactical error if they promote a culture of personality and cry outrage at every perceived criticism, however respectful and moderately expressed. A resurgent ultramontanism, fostered today by those who bemoaned it yesterday, can be turned against them too.

It is a strange thing in the Church to see those who but recently were zealots of orthodoxy cast as dissenters, and erstwhile rebels visibly enjoying a power they were supposed to disapprove of. Some of the former were certainly excessive in their ferocity at times, but it is neither just nor healthy for them to be excluded from the conversation.

The obligation to listen and engage in dialogue is incumbent on all in the Church, including at the very highest level. The Pope should be ready to talk to any and all of those who exist to advise him. The service of Church unity through the clear teaching and defence of the Deposit of Faith needs to be reasserted as a priority.

Likewise, the Pope’s support for the poor and the marginalised – surely the most impressive and necessary of the priorities he brings to the papacy – will look hollow unless it becomes clear that there is no room in the Vatican for those who are not committed to transparent probity.
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Finally, someone has come out with an account of the EWTN 'World Over' episode from last week, in which Raymond Arroyo and his
so-called 'papal posse' look at the latest rumples in the now badly-frayed garment called Amoris laetitia, and thank you, Ms Bourne, ]
as I do not have the time to go through videos, much less to transcribe them....


Pastors should take up the papal slack on AL
and defend the faith against its confusions

by Lisa Bourne
LIFESITE NEWS

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 27, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – Canon Law expert Father Gerald Murray decried the confusion created by Pope Franciss’ exhortation Amoris Laetitia last week on EWTN, saying if pastors don’t vigorously defend the faith they are remiss in their duty.

He noted that, because of the confusion, parish priests are now forced to question whether they should continue to uphold Church teaching that they learned in the seminary, which was carried out by the previous two pontiffs. This is the result of various Church hierarchies around the world now allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion because of the document.

All of moral theology is a whole, Father Murray told The World Over’s Raymond Arroyo, and Catholics can’t separate one aspect from another.

“So if we can cast aside mortal sin for adultery, well, what other sins are now going to going to go off that list?” he asked. “And this is where you have lots of problems.”

“This is not a free-for-all religion,” Father Murray stated. “This is a religion handed down by the apostles from Christ. If we don’t zealously guard it, we’re failing in our duty as pastors.”


Arroyo asked Father Murray and veteran Vatican correspondent Ed Pentin for their perspective on the four DUBIA cardinals’ recent release of a follow-up request to Pope Francis for clarification on Amoris Laetitia.

Father Murray told Arroyo that the issues surrounding the pope’s document must be dealt with, and he heartily supports the cardinals’ effort to get the questions clarified.

Arroyo asked Pentin why there is reluctance on the part of Pope Francis to clarify something so elementary as the Church’s teaching on marriage.

Pentin said there are a number of theories, “but I think the main one is that the pope wants this ambiguity, because he says that these issues aren’t black and white.”
Pentin noted as well that critics say that this goes against previous papal teaching.

Arroyo asked Pentin about why the pope would be reluctant to engage with the cardinals.

Pentin’s answer highlighted the contradiction between the pope’s consistent calls for dialogue with others and his non-response to the cardinals.

“Well, this is the irony,” he said, “because he does want to dialogue with everybody else it seems, but not his own cardinals.”

The cardinals are faced with a real problem in trying to uphold the orthodoxy of the faith, Pentin added.

“So that is of great concern,” he said, “to many of the cardinals, I understand, not just the four who are the dubia four.”


It’s anyone’s guess whether the pope will respond to the cardinals’ inquiry, Pentin told Arroyo, “but it seems unlikely at this stage.”

Father Murray pointed out that the reference to the lay faithful in the cardinals’ recently published request to Pope Francis is very important because it shows that the cardinals are not simply acting on their own thoughts or concerns.

It’s well known that many complaints and doubts have come from the laity as well, he said, and it’s clear these cardinals feel it’s their responsibility as advisers to the pope to bring them to him in the spirit of ministering to the lay faithful.

Arroyo asked the priest whether Pope Francis would again dismiss the cardinals’ request for an audience, and simply invoke the pharisaical and rigid pejoratives as he regularly does.

It is unknown what the Holy Father will say, Father Murray replied, but he hasn’t so far answered the dubia.

“We do know that he has said to the Argentinian bishops of Buenos Aires region that their interpretation of Amoris Laetitia was correct,” Father Murray said, “and that interpretation is not in accord with Catholic doctrine.”

He emphasized recognizing what the question at hand actually is. “This is a question of, ‘What is the faith handed on from the apostles?’” Father Murray said. “And it’s quite clear — our Lord said, a man who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery.”

“Adultery is a mortal sin,” Father Murray continued. “Those who are living in the state of mortal sin in a public way are to be denied Communion by the Church’s ministers, for their own good.”

Receiving Communion in that situation not only scandalizes other people, it could further imperil the salvation of those who do so, the priest stated further.

“So, the unworthy reception of Holy Communion’s always a problem,” he stated, “We try to minimize it, try to eliminate it. But the public rejection of the Church’s teaching on marriage by getting civilly married cannot be tolerated as simply a minor matter.”

Arroyo asked Father Murray to compare the pope’s response to questions over his apostolic exhortation with how he addressed the dispute within the Order of Malta.

“So what I notice here is that certain issues get direct and immediate attention by the pope, and action is taken,” Father Murray said. “For the cardinals not to get an answer from the pope in my mind is not a good thing.”

“The pope is sovereign, he can do what he wants,” he continued, “but it doesn’t make sense, in all other areas where you take swift action when problems are brought to you, or you say you want dialogue – which he’s engaged in dialogue with a lot of people – why aren’t these cardinals brought in -“Look, I know you’re here because you love the Church, we all love the Church, let’s discuss what’s at issue.”

Francis told the faithful to go out and make a mess, Father Murray reminded Arroyo and his viewers, and the four cardinals are simply bringing to his attention that some of this approach is not going in the right direction and Church leaders must deal with it.

“Remember, the pope is a servant of Christ,” Father Murray stated, “so are you and I, anybody in the Church, all the baptized, we’re all under the eye of Christ.”

“So we all have to say to ourselves, 'What would Christ do if a doctrinal question came to him that was of great importance?'” he said. “Would he say to people, look, don’t ask questions because the pope’s gonna get upset? I don’t think so.”
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Thanks to Beatrice, a lead to Robert Moynihan's latest LETTER FROM THE VATICAN, recounting his brief visit with Benedict XVI on June 26. The photos were taken by Mr. Moynihan. I will post his letter as soon as I have a link...
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The arbitrary changes in
the liturgical calendar

Feasts of many worthy saints are
often displaced or moved to and fro


28 June 2017

Today, in the Roman Rite, is traditionally the Vigil of the Solemnity of SS Peter and Paul.

Before the changes initiated under Pius XII began, St Irenaeus had been put onto this day. So, in the admirable ORDO published by the Saint Lawrence Press (giving the Roman Rite as it was circa 1939), Mass today is of that Saint, with commemorations of two octaves and of the Vigil. Or ad libitum, it is of the Vigil, with commemorations of the Saint and of the octaves.

In 1962, St Irenaeus was moved to July 3 so as to unclutter the observance of the Vigil (octaves had by now been abolished). Less than a decade after this, the Novus Ordo Calendar put St Irenaeus back onto today.

Summary: (1) Today is the real festival of S Irenaeus (as well as the Vigil of the Apostles). He spent less than a decade (1962-1970) in exile on July 3. As it happens, the Novus Calendar agrees with the pre-Pius XII Calendar. What the 1962 calendar provides is both 'untraditional' AND out of sync with what the Novus part of the Roman Rite does. This is a matter of everybody in the regiment except my 1962 Johnny being out of step.
(2) Would it really be an act of base treachery to Tradition to correct the 1962 Calendar, at least in those places where the pre-1962 Calendar and the Novus Calendar are in agreement with each other against 1962?
(3) The Roman Rite, like the Byzantine Rite, should be more welcoming to the custom of observing two commemorations on the same day. As it was before the 1960s.
(4) As happened before Pius XII and Bugnini, there should be more ad libitum in the 1962 missal.
(5) Would it be the ultimate crime to allow the use of Last Gospels of commemorated Sundays and Vigils, as used to happen before Pius XII let Mgr Bugnini loose on the Roman Rite?

But there is yet another Saint with a claim upon today!!

St Leo II and S Peter
and the Papal Magisterium.


29 June 2017

Well yes, and so: three cheers for St Irenaeus (see yesterday's blogpost). But as I look into the pre-Pius X breviary by my desk, I discover that in even earlier days, June 28, yesterday, was occupied by a great pope, St Leo II (681-683). (After the introduction of S Irenaeus, he was moved ahead to July 3; isn't calendarical life complicated?)

Did I say a great pope?

Our Holy Father Pope S Leo II was great because he undertook the unhappy but necessary duty of ratifying the condemnation, by the Sixth Holy Ecumenical Council, of his own predecessor, Pope Honorius I (625-638), as a heretic.

As the Vicar of Christ wrote to the Spanish bishops, Pope Honorius "did not, as befits the Apostolic dignity, extinguish the fire of heretical teaching when it began, but by his negligence fostered it".

Some people believe the Petrine Ministry means that a Pope is set in place and guided by the Holy Spirit in order to give exciting new perspectives, perhaps even surprises, to the Church. Not so. Not in a month of Sundays.

As Blessed John Henry Newman taught, in a memorable passage in his Apologia, the ministry of the Roman Church, its "extraordinary gift", has always been negative in a way - to be a remora, a barrier against novelty, innovation.

At the jagged edge of that precipitous cliff, the Pope is the Council Workman whose very simple job it is to put up a notice saying DANGER: KEEP AWAY. 'Negative', laconic, but, oh, so necessary.

A mischievous or homicidal or mischievously homicidal pope who put up a notice reading ADVENTURE PLAYGROUND: YOUR CONSCIENCE WILL TELL YOU WHERE TO JUMP would be failing in the duty set him by his Master.

Through two millennia, it has been the duty of successive Bishops of Rome to resist, condemn, and extirpate novelty and any attempt to change the Faith.

That is why St Vincent of Lerins (circa 450?) quotes Pope St Celestine (422-432) as writing "Innovation should stop attacking what is ancient", and the next pope, S Sixtus III, (432-440) as writing "Innovation has no rights, because it is inappropriate to add anything to what is ancient; clearly, the faith and belief of our ancestors should not be stirred up by any mixture of filth".

The Anglican historian of the Papacy, Trevor Jalland, wrote of the "supernatural grandeur" of the Roman Church; "its strange, almost mystical faithfulness to type, its marked degree of changelessness, its steadfast clinging to tradition and precedent".

On this great feast of the Holy Apostles of the Church in Rome, we can do worse than listen to those powerful words of St Leo II.

His predecessor Honorius had been Pope when a particular error arose; it had been his duty as domnus Apostolicus to extinguish the blaze; but he was negligent; he failed to do his (negative) duty of repelling innovation; and his negligence led to the growth of the error.

It therefore fell to an Ecumenical Council to condemn him, together with the leaders of the heresy he failed to extinguish, with the unambiguous noun heretics and the unambiguous verb anathematizomen.


There is more than one way of qualifying for the title of Heretic!
[What about 'Apostate'? Canon law does not bother about how to deal with apostates because by definition, they are no longer in the Church, i.e. - they have rejected the Church. Of course, out of sheer convenience - he cannot conceivably give up being Pope of the Roman Catholic Church - Bergoglio is currently and most awkwardly straddling the fence that divides the one true Church of Christ from all its would-be replacements, in this case, the church of Bergoglio. Does being this straddler keep us from calling him an apostate de facto???]

P.S. Fr H pursued his thoughts on his blogpost today.

Romanitas
and whatever is a Pope for?


June 30, 2016

Yesterday, the great Feast of the Holy Apostles of Rome, I strolled down to Sandford lock. I took with me my battered "summer picnic" volume of the Pars Aestiva; and, since Blessed John Henry Newman, Patron of our Ordinariate, must often have walked there from nearby Littlemore, I took also his Apologia pro Vita sua.

I love the Matins readings for the Second Nocturn, from St Leo I's First mighty Sermon In natali Apostolorum Petri et Pauli. It gets to the heart of the Romanita of the Western Church, and especially of the English Church.

St Leo I the Great, the finest Latin stylist since Cicero, explains to the plebs Romana (now the plebs sancta Dei) how all that is meant by being Roman has been transformed ... yet, in transformation, preserved and enhanced ... by the Gospel.

"For although, glorified by many victories, you have advanced the jus of your imperium by land and by sea, yet, what the labour of war subdued to you, is less than what the Pax Christiana subjected to you".

The culture of classical Roman antiquity was baptised by St Leo; my view is that he is the one who finally recast the Roman Eucharistic Prayer in a Latinity moulded by the the prayer-style of the old, pre-Christian, prayer-style of early Rome.

Under St Leo, being a Christian finally ceased to be adherence to a foreign and dodgy sect largely followed by Greekling immigrants, and became the new majestic embodiment of all that it meant to be Roman in culture and law and liturgy.

And, with St Augustine, that Romanita was parachuted into Kent and became the marker too of the Anglo-Saxon Church: the Church of Augustine and Justus and Mellitus; of Wilfrid and Bede and Alcuin. The Kentish king who had considered it beneath his dignity to adopt his wife's Merovingian Christianity rejoiced in the opportunity to receive Christianity from its august and Roman fount. Therein lies the exquisite beauty of "the Anglo-Saxon Church", a Roman island beyond the Alps.

And that same Mr Newman expressed the essence of the Petrine Ministry, of the munus of the Successor of Peter, in an epigrammatic passage:

"It is one of the reproaches urged against the Church of Rome, that it has originated nothing, and has only served as a sort of remora or brake in the development of doctrine. And it is an objection which I embrace as truth; for such I conceive to be the main purpose of its extraordinary gift".

It is precisely along these lines that Cardinal Ratzinger in a passage of lapidary elegance criticised the bloated and corrupt hyperpapalism of the post-Vatican II period, with its disordered, disordering belief that a pope, especially if backed by a Council, could monkey around at will with Tradition.

It is, Ratzinger asserted, the Pope's job to be the Guardian of the Tradition and the preserver of its integrity and authenticity. This is where the essence of our Holy Father's Ministry lies ... not (as some very foolish and dreadfully noisy people mistakenly think) in being a charismatic innovator, the herald of a God of Surprises. Heaven forbid that any Pope should ever sink so low, so far beneath his true ecclesial vocation.

I feel that we in the Ordinariate, loyally conscious of the teaching of our Patron Blessed John Henry, and with our warm attachment to the charism of our Founder Pope Benedict XVI, may be particularly called by God to support our beloved Holy Father Pope Francis in this important Ministry and at this critical moment.
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June 29, 2017


Thanks to Antonio Socci for the feastday feature.


PewSitter

PewSitter's big bold banner links to the article by Fr. Drew that I posted earlier today.

Canon212.com

C212 had quite an aggregation of headlines about Cardinal Pell.

The death here is that of the English baby boy Charlie Gard whose 'mercy killing' was welcomed by Bergoglio's 'Minister for Life', Mons. Paglia.
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I GOT SANDBAGGED TODAY BY THE NOTICES YOU SEE REPLACING EACH IMAGE ON THIS FORUM. MY PHOTOBUCKET HOMEPAGE TELLS ME MY STORAGE IS 77%FULL - AND NOTHING ABOUT 3RD-PARTY HOSTING CAPACITY. I HAVE TO TRY TO SORT OUT THE PROBLEM. MEANWHILE, I SHALL NOT POST ANY NEW IMAGES.

P.S. IT SEEMS THAT AS OF 6/28, PHOTOBUCKET NOW CHARGES FOR THIRD-PARTY HOSTING AT A WHOPPING $399 A YEAR.
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Icons of ugliness. Capps captions the left photo as "JPII with the lizard on a stick'.
The BLOBifix captured from a priest's Tweet last June 25: "Sorry, no place for the ridiculous notion of a 'man-god' on a cross".
The COMMIEfix, top right, given to Bergoglio by the proudly Marxist Bolivian president:
"Excellent blunt instrument to inflict massive head trauma immediately upon receipt. Other than that, no."
And bottom right: "The industrial RUSTIfix in the chapel of the National Shrine of Our Lady of the Snows
means far more than the modern faddishness that have given us a disgusting parade of human ugliness"


To post the above photo, I availed of a feature on this forum that I never used before - on the postbox, one can upload a photo, retrieve the URL and put it into the post. Of course, it doesn't help me get back the thousands of images I have in Photobucket, but I am looking for a hosting service that will be able to do that. Meanwhile, I apologize for the visual nightmare presented by all the Photobucket notices all over the pages.

This pope's new BLOBifix
announces triumph of gnosticism

by Tim Capps
ST CORBINIAN'S BEAR
June 29, 2017

Our immediate reaction is disgust with Francis for reducing the crucifix to a Star Trek original series prop. The Bear sees something far more serious than bad taste, however.

"Christ crucified" was the center of St. Paul's preaching, even though the idea of a God in the flesh who was crucified was foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews. In fact, the Catholic Church has always been distinguished from Protestantism by the image of the Crucified Christ versus the "victorious risen Christ" empty cross.

There is little any Protestant could complain about with this abstract, headless, "Chromium Christ." Of course, this is no accident. But neither is it the end of the analysis.

Catholicism has always been closely allied with art. Think of the patronage it gave to Michelangelo for the Sistine Chapel. It is impossible to think of the history of Western art without considering the Church.

Art has always been used to express the Faith, even when the art has been more worldly than Christian, more naive than skilled. Art, good, bad or indifferent, cannot help but say something about the Faith when the Church puts it to official use... Now, here is the West, with the Pope bearing an anti-icon for an anti-Catholicism.

When it comes to what the Church really believes, it is not so much the creed we mumble on Sunday, but the architecture around us, its decoration (or lack thereof); its music; its sound bytes; and the behavior of its priests and prelates with adolescent boys. (The last is not gratuitous and the Bear shall make the connection.)

The art of the new gnosticism
The BLOBifix does not give us a man on a cross. God has not become man. The God-Man has not borne our sins and died a shameful death. If the BLOBifix is not a denial of the incarnation, the Bear knows naught of religion nor art. A few chromium lumps declare the destruction of Christianity and the triumph of Gnosticism.

Imagine you are a detective putting together clues. This is how Trial Lawyer Bear cannot help but see things. Everything means something. From the RUSTIFIX to the COMMIEfix to the BLOBIfix and to the ;izard on a stick'.

The BLOBIFIX is more than another bouquet thrown to Francis's Lutheran sweethearts. More than bad taste, faddishness, or even blasphemy. The Bear sees the shining glyph of an ancient heresy being crammed down his throat.

Ah, greetings to our old enemy: Gnosticism.

The BLOBifix is a heretical symbol of the anti-Christ. Anyone who denies Jesus Christ came in the flesh is an anti-Christ, says St. John, to the few Catholics who still read and believe the Bible.

The plain, empty cross of the most rustic Protestant is preferable to the visual revival of the first serious heresy that tried to throttle Christianity in its crib. Now, the Church has become as weak as an ancient, raddled, lecher, and once more vulnerable to its original enemy.

For the second time and in the same way, the Adversary takes advantage of a weak Church to promote a beautiful vision of spirituality without sin. Of adultery without consequences or even disapproval. That vision has always had a name: Gnosticism.


But as we fixate on Francis, we must remember that he is but the symptom of an advanced stage of a long-term disease.

The Church's Homosexual Abuse Crisis
As for the connection between all of this and Gnosticism… Cardinal Pell from down under has been charged in connection with molesting minors. The Bear uses this as an illustration, rather than proof of anything, and considers Cardinal Pell innocent until proven guilty. There is a reason for statutes of limitations. It is tough to defend against five decades-old accusations.

[I once explained my use of] the term "Homosexual Abuse Crisis," based on the gold standard report commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2002. It was conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York to estimate the nature and scope of reported sexual abuses committed by priests against minors and children between 1975-2002. The report was published in 2004.
http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/child-and-youth-protection/upload/The-Nature-and-Scope-of-Sexual-Abuse-of-Minors-by-Catholic-Priests-and-Deacons-in-the-United-States-1950-2002.pdf

However, it disingenuously exempts homosexuals in its findings. The data, however, could not show a clearer picture of classic homosexual grooming and abuse of adolescent or near-adolescent boys. They make up the overwhelming majority of victims and reveal the unmistakable signature of the homosexual predator.

[NB: The latest USCCB annual report does acknowledge that. I append part of the news item reporting this earlier this month.

WASHINGTON, June 2, 2017 (ChurchMilitant.com) - A new report by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) confirms that the clerical sex abuse scandal is a crisis not of pedophilia but of homosexuality.

The USCCB annual report on clerical sex abuse, released Thursday, confirms earlier findings that the priest sex abuse crisis is a homosexual problem.

According to the report, "Eighty-one percent of the victims were male," and when the age of the victim was determined, only "one in ten were under age ten." The report further confirmed that these findings were "similar to those reported for year 2015."

The John Jay College of Criminal Justice reported similar findings. After the sex abuse crisis exploded in the media in 2002 following the Boston Globe exposé, the USCCB created a National Review Board and tasked the John Jay College to conduct an investigation into clerical sex abuse.

The College's 2004 report revealed that 80 percent of the victims were male, and almost 90 percent were post-pubescent. A report issued in 2011 affirmed these facts, finding 81 percent of sex abuse victims were boys, of which 78 percent were post-pubescent.


Pedophiles are entirely different and usually target much younger children (as young as babies) and are often indiscriminate as to the sex of their victims. The Bear knows this because he was counsel in many, many cases involving both homosexual predators and pedophiles. (Why? Few criminals have the means to afford private counsel - unlike meth dealers, homosexual predators and pedophiles often maintain a respectable place in society, and can hold down decent jobs. Like being a priest, for example.)

Homosexual predators usually respond poorly to treatment because they rarely see anything wrong in their actions. Oft times they have been victims themselves, and as one client put it to the Bear, "It didn't hurt me any, so I don't see what's wrong with it."…

Mercy and the new Gnosticism
Let's take another look at the homosexual abuse crisis that plagued the Church throughout the 20th century. Gnosticism denigrated matter (recall how the headless body of the Crucified One disappears into the BLOBifix) as unspiritual in a scheme where only the spiritual counted. Sin did not matter, since matter was irredeemably evil, anyway. Whatever one did in the flesh could not possibly make the flesh any more evil than it already was. One's spiritual being floated pure above it all.

Can one not hear the echo of Gnostic teachers in the neat division so many churchman have made between homosexual predation and a career devoted to the Church? The natural child of Gnosticism is Antinomianism, an extreme view held by a minority of Protestants that sin does not matter because grace covers all.

Whenever we hear (or must conclude) that sin does not matter because it is expressed through mere matter, over which spirit - called by "mercy" or some other name - must triumph, we should discern the dim advance of ancient Gnostic ghosts threatening to break out into the present.

One might accuse Francis of many things, but false advertising is not one of them.

Remember the monstrous monstrance used in Fatima last month???


I hope the images I have recently posted from the Forum's own upload feature stay. With the first two that I tried, the images appeared but after a while they were replaced by the Image URL preceded by a little icon, so I have tried to repost them (the photo at the top of the page, and a temporary montage serving as signature at the bottom of each post.

P.S. Oh no! The images are disappearing again. Can anyone tell me what it means to get that little icon preceding an image URL - and how does one recover the image???
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June 30, 2017

Canon212.com


PewSitter


If this is indeed official, is anyone surprised? Do you hear Dom Perignon corks popping in Vienna or maybe Boston?
Cardinals Schoenborn and O'Malley have been the only names mentioned so far as 'Prefettabile'!


Pope Francis said not to have
reconfirmed Cardinal Mueller at CDF


June 30, 2017

The conservative Catholic Italian website Corrispondenza Romana is reporting that German Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, the highest-ranking doctrinal authority in the Church [next to the pope, who remains the supreme doctrinal authority with the power to keep the CDF Prefect from exercising his lower authority, as he did in the DUBIA] as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has not been reconfirmed at his post by Pope Francis, and so will end his term of office in two days, on July 2.

The website is describing it as a "firing" of Mueller.

It was known that Mueller went this morning to visit Pope Francis.

There has as yet been no official announcement of this news, so it remain unofficial.

Here is the text of the Italian website (translation follows each line):

Licenziato da papa Francesco il cardinale Müller
(Cardinal Mueller fired by Pope Francis)


Sua Eminenza il Cardinale Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Prefetto della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede dal 2 luglio 2012, è stato licenziato da papa Francesco allo scadere esatto del suo mandato di 5 anni. ("His Eminence Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from July 2, 2012, has been fired by Pope Francis at the exact expiration of his 5-year appointment.")

Il cardinale Müller è uno dei cardinali che hanno cercato di interpretare l'Amoris laetitia, secondo un'ermeneutica di continuità con la Tradizione della Chiesa. Ciò è bastato per annoverarlo tra i critici del nuovo corso imposto da papa Bergoglio. ("Cardinal Mueller is one of the cardinals who sought to interpret Amoris Laetitia according to a hermeneutic of continuity with the Tradition of the Church. This was enough to enroll him among the critics of the new course imposed by Pope Bergoglio.")


Mueller was appointed by Pope Benedict XVI, and is the editor of the Opera Omnia of the Emeritus Pope.

Later in the day, another 'confirmation' - though I suppose we must wait for the Vatican bulletin on July 2 to know it officially:

CORRISPONDENZA ROMANA and RORATE CÆLI have just learned that His Eminence Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Faith since July 2, 2012, has been dismissed by Pope Francis on the exact expiry date of his five-year mandate.

Cardinal Müller is one of the cardinals who sought to interpret Amoris Laetitia along the lines of a hermeneutic of continuity with Church Tradition. This was enough to put him among the critics of the new course imposed by Pope Bergoglio.


This is yet another move, of course, by the Bergoglio Vatican to 'bury Benedict' even while he is still very much alive:


Watch what happens when the tenth anniversary of Summorum Pontificum comes around in the next week! There are no words to denounce sufficiently the Luciferian hubris of the reigning pope!

Steve Skojec has a good overview of the personal moral dilemma that Cardinal Mueller ultimately resolved in favor of standing by his boss - damned if he did, damned if he didn't - and by God, he did! But before going on to his analysis, let us not forget that Fr. Z also sees a third way that Bergoglio could take:

...We recall that His Holiness decided to leave Card. Burke in place for a long time at the Apostolic Signatura without an official reconfirmation of his mandate. That effectively undercut Card. Burke in his role without moving him.

It is possible that the Pope will leave Card. Müller in place without reconfirmation of his mandate. If the Roman Pontiff wants to decentralize what Rome has been doing, that could be a way to urge that action item along in regard to the CDF.

Also, Card. Müller would need something to do. He’s only 69. I suspect that his brother bishops in Germany would not be especially pleased to see him amongst them as a diocesan bishop again. There are fewer and fewer slots available in the Roman Curia these days. There can only be so many patrons of orders of knights. So, where would Pope Francis ask the Cardinal to serve next?


Beleaguered Cardinal Müller
to exit CDF on July 2nd

by Steve Skojec
ONE-PETER-FIVE
June 30, 2017

Rumors of Cardinal Gerhard Müller’s impending departure as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith are nothing new. But last week, a new story hit the radar, largely-unnoticed in the English-speaking world. The Argentinian newspaper Clarín ran a report saying that Pope Francis planned to take advantage of the looming July 2 deadline on Müller’s five-year mandate to send him on his way.

Without Müller in the way [as if he could stop Bergoglio one iota!], Clarín reported, “the path of renewal of the last phase of the pontificate of Jorge Bergoglio, who in December will turn 81, would be open.”

Today, new reports confirming the Clarín story — without any additional detail — are appearing at Corrispondenza Romana & Rorate Caeli. OnePeterFive has confirmed with our own sources close to the CDF that the reports are true: Cardinal Müller will be leaving his position as Prefect of the CDF on Sunday, July 2nd.

It is interesting that Rorate has chosen to frame Müller’s role at the post-Amoris Laetitia (AL) CDF as adversarial:

Cardinal Müller is one of the cardinals who sought to interpret Amoris Laetitia along the lines of a hermeneutic of continuity with Church Tradition. This was enough to put him among the critics of the new course imposed by Pope Bergoglio.


It is true that Müller has chosen to view the post-synodal apostolic exhortation through rose-colored glasses. In January, in an interview with Italian television station TGCOM24, the German cardinal said that “Amoris Laetitia is very clear in its doctrine and [in it] we can interpret [sic] the whole doctrine of Jesus concerning marriage, the whole doctrine of the Church of 2000 years history.” [Didn't his teeth ache like hell while he was saying that B-S???] This may not have been well-received by those who see Communion for the divorced and remarried, regardless of repentance, as a new and different path for the Church.

But during that same interview, he also openly criticized the dubia, saying explicitly that AL does not pose “any danger to the Faith”: [That statement was, IMHO, the most ill-advised statement - because patently UNTRUE - that Mueller ever made. I squirm in embarrassment for him when I think of it.]

Cardinal Müller even said that he was surprised that the Letter of the Four Cardinals to the pope – containing the dubia concerning Amoris Laetitia – had been published. “I do not like that,” he added.

In Müller’s eyes, it is not at all appropriate “almost to force the pope to answer with ‘yes’ or ‘no’” with regard to the dubia, especially because “there is not any danger to the Faith” which would then fittingly call for such a fraternal correction.

Thus, such a correction of the pope “seems to me far away,” according to the Prefect of the Congregation for Doctrine. He also considers it unfortunate that these matters are now being discussed “publicly.”


Müller has thus become an odd and unlikely ally of the current scheme of implementation of AL, and struck a profound blow against the Four Cardinals and their dubia.

Yet he has been treated incredibly poorly by the pope, considering the importance and centrality of his position as CDF prefect.
- He was not given a copy of the final text of Amoris Laetitia for doctrinal review, but instead a much less problematic version of the draft.
- Even so, Müller told a senior official that the CDF “had submitted many, many corrections, and not one of the corrections was accepted”. - He was forced by the pope to fire three of his most trusted priests from the CDF early this year for no specific reason.
- He has been publicly embarrassed by Pope Francis and some of his trusted advisers, who have been allowed to treat him with contempt:

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

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

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

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

And on multiple occasions, Francis has signaled his preference — or even deference — to Cardinal Walter Kasper on matters of theology, such that the openly heterdox prelate is known as “the pope’s theologian”.


In my January 11, 2017 commentary, I outlined the “climate of fear” at the Vatican, and the fear that many who work at the Vatican are being monitored, KGB-style.
- In a related report, I mentioned how “Vatican-issued cell phones and email addresses are treated with absolute suspicion, and reports of employees being quietly dismissed from congregations like the CDF for the crime of agreeing with the resistance to Amoris Laetitia have surfaced.”
- I have personally spoken with individuals who have experienced accidental playback of recorded phone calls when speaking with Vatican sources, or who have been told by sources that they should not discuss things over the phone.
- I also outlined in some detail the stories of abuse received by Catholic journalists, and the claims made by Vatican correspondent Edward Pentin concerning “political manipulation, deceit, and calumny happening within Vatican walls.”

In May, a communique was made public from the Dean of the College of Cardinals to the cardinals living in Rome which called upon a “noble tradition” that prescribed that all cardinals living in the eternal city must “inform the Holy Father, by way of the Secretariat of State, the period of their absence from Rome and the address of their stay.”

And even more recently, I’ve heard reports (as yet unsourced) of more draconian, police-state procedures being carried out — unannounced office raids and long interview/interrogation sessions of staff members.

Sources close to Cardinal Müller had always related to us that the cardinal’s general sentiment was that he could do more good from the inside than from the outside. He was also concerned about who might be tapped to replace him. (In the Clarín story, it is suggested that Cardinal Sean O’Malley is a likely candidate; others believe that Cardinal Cristoph Schönborn may be chosen as an extension of his role as the pope’s handpicked interpreter of Amoris Laetitia.)

But one wonders what good Müller thought he could truly accomplish if he was being actively hindered and was himself afraid to take a firm, unequivocal stance. As I wrote back in January, the cardinal appeared to be manifesting symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome:

It is clear that with divergent practices being implemented by various bishops around the world, the pope himself confirming that Holy Communion can be given to the divorced and remarried in certain circumstances, and the official interpreters of the exhortation trying to pass it off as “binding”, we are faced with nothing less than a “separation of the theory and practice of the faith.”

If that is, indeed, a “christological heresy” — as Müller himself has claimed — it would therefore constitute a “danger to the faith” by any reasonable standard.

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

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

At the time, I cited an article from John Allen at Crux, as regards Francis’s peculiar way of handling personnel issues:

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


But sitting on the fence doesn’t make a man an ally of either side. Mediocrity is never enough to save us. Müller resisted Francis just enough to make himself a problem, but resisted making a stand just enough to lose the trust of those who wanted to see in him a beacon of hope as the Church’s chief defender of doctrine.

By trying to be useful to both sides of this dispute, he became useless to both. And now he’s gone, and he never used the weight and authority of his position to say what he should have said — to stand with the Four Cardinals, and all the countless unnamed Catholics besides, and choose Christ, whatever the cost.


I spoke with Maike Hickson about this story this morning, and she offered a sobering perspective.

“From now on,” she told me, “wherever he goes, he will have people ask him ‘But what did you do? You were there, why did you not say something?'

“As Germans,” she said, referencing the sentiment that still lingers toward the German people for the perception that they did not sufficiently oppose the atrocities of the Nazis, “this is something we have dealt with for sixty years.”


Sources close to Cardinal Müller have indicated that his removal from his position — where he clearly felt a duty to try to work harmoniously with the pope — may in fact lead him to feel more free in his own assessment of the current crisis. [And what will he do? Come calling, biretta humbly in hand, to the Four Cardinals - with whom he had joined hands in the pre-2014 Synod book Remaining in the truth of Christ - and say he will henceforth push the DUBIA alongside them???]

I hope this is the case. And I hope it’s not too late to matter.

[DIM=pt]I doubt Bergoglio would have had the courtesy to inform Benedict XVI beforehand that he is dismissing Mueller. (Not that this is necessary at all, but it's still the civilized thing to do when the man who appointed them is living right there in the Vatican.

I don't think Bergoglio did that at all when he summarily removed Cardinal Piacenza as Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, and then went on to likewise demote Cardinal Burke to a relative sinecure. Not to forget that Cardinal Amato, longtime #2 to Cardinal Ratzinger at CDF, got the 'third way' treatment from Bergoglio who has not reconfirmed him as Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Sainthood.

And not a day goes by now that Bergoglio does not say or do something truly OFFENSIVE!

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The Vatican statement on
baby Charlie Gard

VATICAN RADIO
June 29, 2017

The Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life has issued a statement regarding the case of the terminally-ill English baby, Charlie Gard.

On Tuesday the European Court of Human Rights rejected a plea from the baby’s parents to be allowed to move him to the United States for experimental medical treatment. [They were able to raise enough money from sympathizers to afford seeking the experimental treatment in the US.]

10-month old Charlie was born with a rare genetic condition called mitochondrial depletion syndrome, which causes progressive muscle weakness and brain damage.

He is being kept alive on a life support system, but Britain’s Supreme Court also ruled earlier in June that it was not in the baby’s interest to move him or continue treatment. Specialists at London’s Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital believe Charlie has no chance of survival.

In a statement, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, says the interests of the patient must be paramount, but adds “we must also accept the limits of medicine and […..] avoid aggressive medical procedures that are disproportionate to any expected results or excessively burdensome to the patient or the family. Paglia's full statement follows:

The matter of the English baby Charlie Gard and his parents has meant both pain and hope for all of us. We feel close to him, to his mother, his father, and all those who have cared for him and struggled together with him until now. For them, and for those who are called to decide their future, we raise to the Lord of Life our prayers, knowing that “in the Lord our labor will not be in vain.” (1 Cor. 15:58)

The Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales issued a statement today that recognizes above all the complexity of the situation, the heartrending pain of the parents, and the efforts of so many to determine what is best for Charlie.

The Bishops’ statement also reaffirms that “we should never act with the deliberate intention to end a human life, including the removal of nutrition and hydration, so that death might be achieved” but that “we do, sometimes, however, have to recognize the limitations of what can be done, while always acting humanely in the service of the sick person until the time of natural death occurs.”

The proper question to be raised in this and in any other unfortunately similar case is this: What are the best interests of the patient? We must do what advances the health of the patient, but we must also accept the limits of medicine and, as stated in paragraph 65 of the Encyclical Evangelium Vitae, avoid aggressive medical procedures that are disproportionate to any expected results or excessively burdensome to the patient or the family.

Likewise, the wishes of parents must heard and respected, but they too must be helped to understand the unique difficulty of their situation and not be left to face their painful decisions alone. If the relationship between doctor and patient (or parents as in Charlie’s case) is interfered with, everything becomes more difficult and legal action becomes a last resort, with the accompanying risk of ideological or political manipulation, which is always to be avoided, or of media sensationalism, which can be sadly superficial.

Dear Charlie, dear parents Chris Gard and Connie Yates, we are praying for you and with you.

✠ Vincenzo Paglia
President
Vatican City, June 28th 2017


Marco Tosatti's reaction on his blog is worth sharing:
After quoting liberally from Paglia's letter...

What I would have wanted
to hear from the Church


[Mons. Paglia's] words left me with a strange sensation. The first thing I thought of was that from now on, one must change the Academy's name to 'Pontifical Academy for Life, unless...'

And then I felt in my heart the things that I would have wanted to hear from a Catholic and pontifical academy. I would have wanted to hear, perhaps with a sense of overpowering pain,
- That in the face of the desire of the parents and the possibility they have to try and save their child, it is monstruous that the fate of the child should have to be decided by majority decision in a tribunal of legal experts.
- That however one looks at the court decision [and Mons. Paglia's agreement with it], it amounts to condemning the baby to death [sooner rather than later].
- That to accept it as a matter of fact that a tribunal can decide who lives and who dies, and how, is spine-chilling.
- That it would have been said - prophetically - that for whoever believes in love, faith and miracles, the Church stands alongside the parents even in a desperate battle.
- That to kill hope with the law is horrendous and opens the way to a future of grim and petty bureaucratic death sentences.

And I would have wanted to hear anguish and doubt whether it is right at all that tribunals and strangers should dispose of a baby's life even against the love of his parents.

And on this sad day of victory for bureaucrats, of pedantic bookish lawyers and of death, I would have wanted to hear some impulse of prophecy from the Church.

But apparently all the best intentions of 'the Church' today are already invested in immigrants and the goals of the United Nations.


And from Antonio Socci's Facebook page just now, a statement from Cardinal Carlo Caffarra:
Words from a true man of God
[while Bergoglio stays silent]

June 30, 2017

We have arrived at the terminal of the culture of death. Now it is public institutions, tribunals, who decide if a baby has the right to live or not. Even against the wish of the parents who wish to keep their child alive. We have touched the bottom point of barbarism.

Are we the children of institutions and do we owe our lives from them?Pity the West that has rejected God and his fatherhood and now finds itself dependent on bureaucracy! But Charlie's angel always sees the face of the Father.

STOP [THIS BARBARISM], IN THE NAME OF GOD! Let me remind you of Jesus's words [about crimes to children]:
"It would be better for you to have a great millstone hung around your neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea."
- Cardinal Carlo Caffarra

June 30, 2017



I give up... The images uploaded through the Forum seem to disappear at random to be replaced by the image URL preceded by a little icon. Can someone please tell me what to do about this?... I am able to reload recent photos but not older ones, especially my catalog of staple images (logos, banners and the life), which are in photo files found in the hard drives of the successive computers I have used in the past several years, and to which access is not easy nor immediate.

The best I can do until I find an image hosting service that can retrieve my Photobucket images is to avoid posting images beyond the most essential.

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It seems Bergoglian hubris will never run out of things to crush, demolish, eliminate or erase from the deposit of faith...

Erasing the Magisterium of a Pope

30 June 2017

There is a long standing political tool employed to eliminate opposition which is associated with the past, or a defeated regime. You can see evidence of this tool all around Rome, in monuments both ancient and recent. It is called damnatio memoriae… the condemnation of the memory (of someone).

In effect, the winners destroy even the memory of the losers by effacing and erasing their very names from public view… as if they never existed. [The Communist regimes simply declared them non-persons and probably eliminated all references to them in official documents.] For the ancient Roman, this was a fate worse than death.

The Roman wanted to extend the gloria of his family, especially through public works which would bring honor to their names in perpetuity. Think about the way Paul V put “BORGHESE” smack in the middle of the facade of St. Peter’s Basilica. In any event, walking about in Rome you can see inscriptions wherein the names of the defeated were literally chiseled out or filled in, made illegible.

It has become evident over the last few years, that there is a major agenda item on the slate of those who are around Pope Francis. They are working on the systematic erosion, degradation, scratching out, erasure, the damnatio memoriae of the Magisterium of St. John Paul II. [Surely they would not be so systematic and cocksure about doing this if the directive, explicit or not, did not come from the top!]

John Paul, with his “theology of the body” reinforced the Church’s constant teaching about the inseparable connection of sexual acts and marriage. Today, there are legions made of seemingly disparate groups who tirelessly work along side each other to pull sex and marriage apart.

If they can accomplish that “divorce”, then virtually anything in the Church can be restructured for their own temporal ends, whatever they may be – homosexual “marriage”, Communion for divorced and remarried self-identifying lesbian or questioning giraffes, etc. It’s mostly about sex for the agents in the field, agents of the Enemy of the soul, that is.

[Fr Z should also have mentioned the greater Wojtylian document that Bergoglianism ignores altogether: Veritatis splendor - because Bergoglians consider the absolute moralities of Christian truth obsolete, to be replaced by situational ethics and circumstantial 'discernment'.]

After the 1980 Synod (“walking together”) of Bishops on the Family (sound familiar?), Pope John Paul II responded to a suggestion from the Synod and established the Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family and the Pontifical Council for the Family.

The establishment of the Institute was supposed to be announced by John Paul during his Wednesday General Audience on 13 May 1981. Does that date sound familiar? After John Paul recovered from the assassination attempt, with the help of Our Lady of Fatima, he formally established the institute on the Feast of the Holy Rosary on 7 October 1982, and entrusted it to Our Lady of Fatima.

Thus, the institute was a monument to how Popes and Synods can work together (in a way that doesn’t involved rigging them to pre-determined outcomes) and how the Family and our Marian devotion intersect.

The first head of the Institute, situated at the Lateran University in Rome, was one Carlo Caffarra, later Archbishop Cardinal of Bologna and, more recently, one of the Four Cardinals of the Five Dubia. As a matter of fact, he probably wrote the DUBIA.

As an aside which isn’t an aside, Card. Caffarra, in an interview in 2008, revealed that, when John Paul had asked him to found the Institute, he wrote a letter to Sr. Lucia dos Santos, the last living visionary of the Fatima apparitions. Sr. Lucia wrote back to him and said that the final battle between Christ and Satan would be over marriage and the family. She also said not to be afraid and that anyone who works for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be opposed because this is the decisive issue.

So, the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family is to be renamed: Institute of Studies on the Family.

Nota bene the absence of “John Paul II” and “Marriage”.

The Institute is also now caught up in the restructuring which is going on, so its leadership and, hence, direction will also change.

St. John Paul cannot be erased from the “album of the saints” in which he has been enrolled, but that doesn’t mean that, as many other saints have been, he won’t be forgotten. As I write this, it is the feast of St. Pope Paul I (+767). Do you think about him often?

Moreover, the saintly Pope John Paul would never have thought of his own gloria in establishing an institute for the family and marriage. That doesn’t mean that others won’t try systematically to eliminate the influence of John Paul Magisterium for their own purposes.

I have from time to time suggested that you form “base communities” to combat the onslaught from within and without the Church on our Three C’s of Cult, Code and Creed.

Here’s a suggestion. How about starting a reading group, in your parish or down at the local breakfast and coffee shop (where you might be more welcome in some cases). Choose as your first item Pope John Paul II’s Post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris corsortio, (The Role of Christian Family in Modern World) which he penned after the 1980 Synod (“walking together”).
http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_19811122_familiaris-consortio.html

Read it with others. Read it with a pen in hand.
When you hear something that contradicts Familiaris ask questions.
How else do we learn?

Fr Z had 2 lengthy and very significant posts yesterday with which I am only now catching up. I confess that I had been seeing references to the first of the two topics but I did not think it was that important because I really did not understand what it was about. Well, as the Italians would say, altrocche. Anything but! Definitely not unimportant.

'And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars'

June 29, 2017

Fama volat, it is said. No aphorism is truer than this when it comes to Rome, all the way back to Virgil, who coined it.

So, reminding everyone that we are in the realm of Rumor, I’ve been exchanging texts with Roman sources today about alarming possible developments in Rome.

Two rumors, one worse than the other, follow.

GloriaTV and Rorate have something Roberto de Mattei posted at Corrispondenza Romana about the possibility – contained in a working (not yet official) document – that the Congregation for Clergy will effectively impose concelebration on all priests living in Rome. That is, Clergy – in a working document – will so strongly impose concelebration in clerical residences that they will in effect ban individual, private Masses by priests living in Rome.

This of course is a direct contradiction to the Code of Canon Law can. 902, which guarantees that priests can celebrate Mass individually and privately. I think that concelebration should be safe, legal and rare.

I also hear that there is a Vatican-sponsored conference going on right now until about 7 July in Rome on Clergy’s Ratio Fundamentalis (the document that contains guidelines for formation of seminarians for the priesthood). The Pope mentioned the conference during his General Audience yesterday.

One report from that conference – remember that we are in the realm of rumor – is that ordination to the transitional diaconate is to be moved to the end of the 4th year of theology. At that point there is a break with the seminary. In the next phase the deacon must be in a parish.

Moreover – and this is still rumorville – ordination to the priesthood can be conferred only after a kind of extended pastoral apprenticeship reviewed by laity, who tell the bishop whether the candidate is “mature”. If this lay approval is not forthcoming the candidate is to be dismissed. Of course that would result in the deacon asking to be “laicized”, right? Think about it.

This sounds really protestant to me: he isn’t ordained to priesthood unless he gets a call.

Apparently there was strong push back against this really bad idea.

Think this through. A deacon is in a parish, where he will remain in a kind of apprenticeship to be judged by the pastor and laity. The most organized laity will control this process. I come from Minnesota, where there is a caucus process in political seasons. I know how this is done. The most organized and determine faction will decide the man’s fate. Will the feminazis be heard in the discernment process? You betcha. What could possibly go wrong?

If these developments are true, the result will be the death both of clerical studies in Rome and of vocations to the priesthood in general in dioceses.
- Seminary programs will shrink and bump along until they wither out. - Licentiate programs will die off.
- Moving diaconate till after the fourth year and then imposing time in a parish would interrupt a program of study.
- It would be unlikely that a bishop would be able to send a man back to Rome to finish studies. No man is going to put himself through this, in this present environment.

Gosh. That sounds a great idea for the libs, doesn’t it? They will finally get what they want. Everyone is her own priest. We’ll all be Lutherans who get to pick the “minister” that most resembles ourselves.

Mind you, a Ratio like this goes to conferences of bishops who then make their own adaptations. It could be that much of this will be “adapted” out by your bishops. One can only hope. Nevertheless, this is alarming.

More on concelebration:
I am not opposed in principle to concelebration (which is a Novus Ordo thing, of course). I will concelebrate occasionally, for example, at ordinations to the priesthood and on Holy Thursday, especially with the bishop. Otherwise, I want to say my own Masses.

Concelebration is too prone to wandering minds, inattentiveness, sloppiness, abuses. I’ve seen horrid examples of this, including priests not saying anything at all during the consecration and bizzare handling of the Eucharist.

Can there be poorly celebrated private Masses? Sure. However, a man who is dedicated to saying Mass privately – because of devotion and because saying Mass is a good thing for him and for those for whom he offers it – is less likely to celebrate in a sloppy manner.

Moreover, it seems to me that a concelebrated Mass is one Mass, not many. Why is that a good thing? People can talk about priestly brotherhood and unity blah blah blah. Why are fewer Masses good for anyone? It seems to me that many Masses, properly and reverently celebrated, are good for the Church and for the world.

I wrote about this in an early manifesto on this blog, in 2007: Save The Liturgy, Save The World:

Celebrate Mass well, participate properly – affect the whole world. Celebrate poorly – affect the whole world.

In each age since Christ’s Ascension, people have felt they were in the End Times. They were right. In any moment, when the conditions are right, the Lord could return.

Considering what is happening in the world now, I am pushed to think about the way Mass is being celebrated, even the number of Masses being celebrated. Once there were many communities of contemplatives, spending time before the Blessed Sacrament or in contemplation, in collective and in private prayer.

There were many more Masses. Many more people went to confession.

Who can know how they all lifted burdens from the world and turned large and small tides by their prayers to God for mercy and in reparation for sin?

In addition, the imposition of concelebration for all priests in clerical residences in Rome will also undercut the right of priests to use the 1962 Roman Missal in accord with Summorum Pontificum. [I am sure that was a predetermined collateral effect, hitting another big bird with the same stone!] The use of the older, traditional Missale Romanum is on the rise among younger priests. Many seminarians want it. I’ll bet that scares the daylights out of some who are in power.


As one of my Roman correspondents put it: This is scorched earth tactics. They’re going Carthage ['Delenda est Carthago', remember?] on everything distinctively Catholic to make sure we don’t turn back the Hegelian flow of history again.

We are living in strange times, my friends. ['Strange' is surely understatement! What is a stronger more graphic term than SURREAL - as the past four years and counting have been?]

A response from an 'anonymous cleric'
to the Tornielli/Walford papolatrous attack
on the Four ‘Dubia’ Cardinals

June 29, 2017

A few days ago Vatican Insider, at La Stampa, run by the ultimate Italian weathervane Andrea Tornielli [he always goes where the current papal wind blows!], supplied a piece against the Four Cardinals of the Five Dubia (and against anyone who agrees that more clarity is needed) by one Stephen Walford. Walford’s piece has the feeling of a collaborative effort in papolatry. Of course it was published simultaneously in Italian and in English… because that happens all the time. Right?

Today, Sandro Magister at Settimo Cielo supplied a piece which analyzes the Vatican Insider project. It is published anonymously. The reason for anonymity is that the writer is a cleric (I had a text this morning saying who it is), and in the present lib-dominated environment of mercy a cleric who writes like this will be crushed like a bug.

A good question (itself a response to Walford) is in the piece’s title: “If it were so easy to resolve the dubia, then why hasn’t the Pope responded?”

In a nutshell, Walford proposed (inter alia) that virtually anything that the Pope says in his ordinary Magisterium, he says with the aid of the Holy Spirit, and that it must be accepted by the faithful.

Anonymous Cleric (my title for him) responds (my rapid translation – surely Magister’s own will soon be available):

The arguments of a formal order refer to some affirmations of the Magisterium about the Petrine primacy and reach the conclusion that “Pope Francis – being the beneficiary of the charisma of the Holy Spirit, which helps him also in the ordinary Magisterium (as St. John Paul II taught) – legitimately made reception of holy Communion possible on the part of the divorced and remarried whose cases have been carefully considered."

I will try to respond to these arguments, beginning with the second series, on account of the fact that they are logically decisive: in fact, if all the acts of the Magisterium were always clear and perfect and enjoyed – for the mere fact that they were pronounced by the Pontiff – infallibility (without considering, for example, the tone of the document, the circumstances in which it was pronounced, the fact that a teaching could be relatively new or repeated, etc. etc.), or if every “flatus vocis” [mere, insignificant word] of the Roman Pontiff ought to be considered dogma and should require, always and in any case, the internal assent of the faithful, the question would be closed from the get-go.

In reality, the Magisterium of the Church certainly constitutes a unique body (containing that which the Church proposes to us for belief), of which, nevertheless, not all affirmations have the same value; in other words, not all the pronouncements – even if authentically proposed – require the same level of assent.

The “dubia” of the Cardinals serve also to clarify what weight there can be in an answer in the course of the interview on an airplane and in a private letter to some bishops (indicated by Mr. Walford as if they were definitive interpretations), neither published in the Acta Apostolica Sedis. Certainly both were pronouncements of the Pope, but, as Lumen gentium 25 affirms, the level of adhesion must be deduced “from the character of the documents, from his frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or from his manner of speaking.”

Let’s ask ourselves, by way of an example: “Do the papal interviews on an airplane or do private letters of a Pontiff require – in and of themselves – the same level of assent as the teaching on contraception proposed by documents such as Casti connubi, Humanae vitae, Familiaris consortio, etc. or can one entertain some uncertainties in the face of the aforementioned interviews or letters”?

The response to this is given by the Magisterium itself, beginning with the instruction Donum veritatis in 1990 “On the ecclesial vocation of the theologian”, which is also cited by Mr. Walford:

It can happen, however, that a theologian may, according to the case, raise questions regarding the timeliness, the form, or even the contents of magisterial interventions.

Here the theologian will need, first of all, to assess accurately the authoritativeness of the interventions which becomes clear from the nature of the documents, the insistence with which a teaching is repeated, and the very way in which it is expressed. […]

In any case there should never be a diminishment of that fundamental openness loyally to accept the teaching of the Magisterium as is fitting for every believer by reason of the obedience of faith.

The theologian will strive then to understand this teaching in its contents, arguments, and purposes. This will mean an intense and patient reflection on his part and a readiness, if need be, to revise his own opinions and examine the objections which his colleagues might offer him.

If, despite a loyal effort on the theologian’s part, the difficulties persist, the theologian has the duty to make known to the Magisterial authorities the problems raised by the teaching in itself, in the arguments proposed to justify it, or even in the manner in which it is presented.

He should do this in an evangelical spirit and with a profound desire to resolve the difficulties. His objections could then contribute to real progress and provide a stimulus to the Magisterium to propose the teaching of the Church in greater depth and with a clearer presentation of the arguments.


Moreover, Pope Francis, at §2 of Amoris laetitia, writes:

“The complexity of the issues that arose revealed the need for continued open discussion of a number of doctrinal, moral, spiritual, and pastoral questions. The thinking of pastors and theologians, if faithful to the Church, honest, realistic and creative, will help us to achieve greater clarity.

[I think he forgot he - or his ghost writers - put that in, because his attitude to the DUBIA cardinals and other AL objectors is certainly not that!]
That’s a taste.

The Anonymous Cleric, in effect, dismantles the collaborative attack mounted by Tornielli over the name of Mr. Walford.
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Marco Tosatti has written his second article for FIRST THINGS. It looks like he will be a regular contributor.

Pope Francis was elected with a mandate to undertake institutional reform of the Vatican. But as curial reform has proved difficult, Francis seems to have made it a lower priority. Meanwhile, the corruption and inefficiency of the Curia have not prevented him from pursuing his higher priorities. Increasingly, when he has his own ends in view, Francis simply goes around the Curia — for good and ill.

In four years as pope, Francis has instituted a deeply personal (some might say autocratic) regime that is without precedent in living memory. While the popes have always been absolute monarchs — at least in theory - during the last century they have consistently respected a delicate system of checks and balances, perfected under Paul VI, according to which the pope carefully weighs the advice of the curial cardinals before making decisions.

Pope Francis has all but dismantled this fine-tuned instrument. In consequence, he enjoys a plenitude of power unknown to his last six or seven predecessors.

The story of this shakeup at the Holy See begins on the eve of Francis’s election. Prior to his pontificate, Jorge Bergoglio had never lived for long periods in Rome. His knowledge of the central government of the Church was secondhand. He sent Fabiàn Pedacchio (now his personal secretary) to work in the Curia as his eyes and ears, and he managed to make some good friends in the College of Cardinals, but reports from these sources could hardly have substituted for personal experience.

Dissatisfaction with this situation explains why Bergoglio held several meetings, just before the 2013 conclave, with members of the Spanish Section of the Secretariat of State. Bergoglio was then the pet candidate of the diplomats, led by Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, one of the so-called St. Gallen Group — dubbed a “mafia” by Cardinal Godfried Danneels, another of its members — originally created to bring a “progressive” pope to Rome after the death of St. John Paul II.

In those meetings, the Spanish informants offered Bergoglio a more comprehensive and detailed portrait of the Curia than he had received before—information that proved valuable soon after his election.

Francis’s first move as pope was easily foreseeable. In the Vatican, the right hand of the pope is the secretary of state. He wields immense influence — so much, in fact, that his excessive power was widely criticized by the cardinals before the conclave. Shortly after taking office, Francis replaced Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Benedict’s secretary of state, with Archbishop Pietro Parolin, a progressive nuncio with ties to Silvestrini’s faction. [Actually Bertone stayed on as SecState for six months before Parolin was named.]

As powerful as the Secretariat of State has become, however, there are at least two other offices in the Vatican worthy of a new pope’s full attention. The first is the Prefecture of the Congregation for the Clergy. It controls not only every priest in the world, but every seminary as well.

At the time of Francis’s election, the head of this congregation was the highly experienced Cardinal Mauro Piacenza. Francis dismissed him suddenly and without explanation. In Piacenza’s place, he appointed another nuncio, Beniamino Stella. According to some very knowledgeable sources behind the walls, Stella has placed loyalists in every office to inform him who is favorable to the new regime, and who is not. [Stella is apparently one of the pope's current 'eminences grises' who has managed to stay under the media radar - so far.]

Then Francis turned his attention to the Segnatura Apostolica and, fatefully, Cardinal Burke. The Segnatura is the highest tribunal in the Holy See, and the last word in all conflicts between priests or religious orders and the Vatican. Burke is a widely respected expert on these matters, and for this reason was always quite independent. But like Piacenza, Burke was summarily dismissed and replaced with a former diplomat — in this case, a mild-mannered man by the name of Dominique Mamberti, who was the Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Holy See.

Francis certainly would have liked to change the heads of at least two other congregations — the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, overseen by Cardinal Müller, and the Congregation for the Bishops, led by the Canadian Cardinal Ouellet. For reasons too complicated to elucidate here, he was unable to do this.

Instead, he adopted a new technique to deprive these cardinals of their power — the same method, with slight modifications, that he has used to isolate and undermine the Congregation for Divine Worship when his own appointee, Cardinal Robert Sarah, proved too independent.

What is this new technique? Consider the case of the Congregation for the Bishops. It happened that a certain low-ranking employee of the congregation, a Brazilian priest named Ilson de Jesus Montanari, had maintained a longtime friendship with Fabiàn Pedacchio, the pope’s private secretary. Abruptly, Francis appointed Montanari as Secretary of the Congregation, so that Montanari could monitor Ouellet and inform the pope of his activities.

When the congregation held its next plenary meeting to discuss and vote on new episcopal appointments, three names were submitted for a new auxiliary bishop in a Canadian diocese. Cardinal Ouellet, being Canadian, commented that the first one was very good, and the second too, but as for the third (a man he knew personally), there were problems. With the progressive wing of the congregation supporting the third nominee, a debate ensued and the matter was left unresolved. The next day, Fabiàn Pedacchio visited the congregation and declared that the pope had chosen the third candidate, putting Ouellet in a very awkward position.

Francis also appointed, on Stella’s advice, a new undersecretary at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This appears unnecessary in retrospect, since the pope consistently ignores the congregation’s theological advice anyway. When Francis submitted a draft of Amoris Laetitia for the congregation’s review, Müller returned it with no fewer than two hundred corrections and queries. He received no response, and his suggestions were ignored.

Then came the affair of the three CDF priests. Some months ago, Müller received a letter from the Secretariat of State, asking him to dismiss three priests on his staff. He hesitated, since they were good workers and good priests. But then a second letter followed the first. So Müller asked for an audience with the pope, and after waiting for some time (which would be considered unusual in itself, except that this pope prefers not to meet with the heads of his ministries), asked the reason for the dismissal.

Francis was unequivocal: “I am the pope, and I have to give no reason to anyone for my decisions. I said they must go, and go they must.” Then he stood up and held out his hand, indicating that the audience was over. Müller was deeply distressed. It seems possible that he will be dismissed and replaced by Cardinal Schönborn later this year.

A new undersecretary, loyal to the governing party, was also appointed at the Congregation for Divine Worship. But then Francis took the further step — without informing Cardinal Sarah — of appointing a special committee to study the so-called “ecumenical mass,” in which Catholics and Protestants might worship together. Cardinal Sarah is still officially ignorant of the activities of the committee, which works independently and reports directly to the pope.

Lately there have been rumors of another committee, also under the pope’s direct supervision, to study the possible abrogation of Humanae Vitae in light of Amoris Laetitia. Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, head of the Pontifical Academy for Life, recently told Catholic News Agency that “there is no pontifical commission called to re-read or to re-interpret Humanae Vitae. However, we should look positively on all those initiatives, such as that of Professor Marengo of the John Paul II Institute, which aim at studying and deepening this document in view of the fiftieth anniversary of its publication.” Paglia seems to say both “yes” and “no.”

Since this pope governs dictatorially, living beyond the law of the Curia, there might indeed be no official commission. There might be only a couple of scholars, like Marengo, preparing the groundwork for radical changes — which the pope will proclaim personally.

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A theologian close to Benedict XVI
asks hard questions at Polish bishops'
meeting on 'Amoris laetitia'

GLORIA.TV
June 30, 2017

Monsignor Livio Melina, the former President of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family [soon to be renamed simply 'Institute for Marriage and the Family'], who was sacked by Pope Francis, spoke on June 12th at the meeting of the Polish moral theologians in Nysa about the controversial document Amoris Laetitia. Melina is very appreciated by Benedict XVI, since he had worked with him at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
[IMG][I was not aware of this before - so yet another shovelful of Bergoglio-BS in the ongoing effort to 'bury Benedict' alive.][/IMG]

In his talk, Melina quoted Pope Francis's preference for a "bruised, hurting and dirty Church that was out on the streets" (EG 49). He commented: After Amoris Laetitia "it can hardly be denied that the situation in pastoral care as well as in moral theology is now "bruised, hurting and dirty". For Melina, "it is not certain that this will lead to a renewal of pastoral care."

Cardinal Kasper's interpretation of Amoris Laetitia as a paradigm shift or development of the teaching of John Paul II, Melina calls "a mere ploy" which leaves the question unanswered, how a sacramental discipline that until now has been strictly kept, should now be relaxed by 'discernment'.

Melina criticized those who claim that Amoris Laetitia only has to do with pastoral care and does not touch doctrine. "Doctrine is thus relegated to the museum of precious treasures, but irrelevant for human life." But a pastoral care without doctrine is eventually reduced to a power play, Melina warns.

The position access to the sacraments should be left to the judgment of each one's conscience is particularly disputed by Melina. He points out that, this way, the truth, based on divine revelation, is subjected to the private conscience. Consequently, Melina argues, the priestly words in the sacrament of confession "I absolve you" would have no sense. The priest should rather say, "I take notice that your conscience absolves you."
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So, we now know the cardinal associated with the Vatican monsignor recently arrested by Italian police in the middle of a 'gay orgy with drugs'... From the resourceful Hilary White who got this item from the website of RT News, the 'Russia Today' multilingual international TV network. The website has editions in English, Spanish. German, French, Russian and Arabic...

Former secretary of Cardinal Coccopalmerio
arrested by Italian police for drugs and gay sex



Mexico City, June 29 (SinEmbargo / RT) .- Italian police broke into the apartment of the former secretary of Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, housed in the palace of the former Holy Office in the Vatican, where a Gay orgy with drugs, reports Italian media.

Upon locating the prelate himself, the police arrested him and sent him to the Pío XI clinic for detoxification. He is currently in retreat in a convent in Italy.

The intervention of the security forces came as a result of complaints about the constant arrival of guests to the apartment. Likewise, suspicions appeared regarding the luxury car with a Vatican license plate labeled prelate.

Cardinal Coccopalmerio is the President of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts.

The day before, Ms White had this post:

Let’s play a game! I call it
'Connect the Vatican-perv dots'

JUN 28, 2017

So, the redoubtable Gloria TV posts today about a piece from an Italian paper reporting that an unnamed curial official has been arrested by the Vatican’s police for his involvement in gay drug orgies.

Il Fatto Quotidiano writes that the Holy See’s Gendarmerie disrupted a homosexual drug-party in an apartment of the Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio in Rome, where the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith is located. [The building has a number of residential apartments rented out to Vatican prelates.]
The apartment belongs to a monsignor, who was caught in flagrante. According to Il Fatto Quotidiano, he is the secretary of a cardinal who heads a dicastery of the Roman Curia and who had proposed the monsignor to become a bishop.

The monsignor was brought to the Roman clinic Pio XI in order to be detoxified. His apartment was not one designated for simple monsignors. He also drove an exclusive car with Vatican license plates, which are reserved for higher Vatican dignitaries.

The last bit’s interesting:
Il Fatto Quotidiano writes that the cardinal, for whom the monsignor was working, is well over 75. This is only true for two cardinals at the Roman Curia, Cardinal Angelo Amato (79) of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, and pro-gay Cardinal Francesco Cocopalmerio (79) of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts.


Let’s see if we can line up some of the dots.

Who is Cardinal Amato? His Italian wiki page gives us this (the English language page has nothing):

In an April 2007 address to chaplains, he denounced same-sex marriage and abortion and criticized the Italian media’s coverage of them, saying that they are evils “that remain almost invisible” due to media presentation of them as an “expression of human progress.”


Here’s the Reuters source from 2007:

The Vatican’s second-highest ranking doctrinal official on Monday forcefully branded homosexual marriage an evil and denounced abortion and euthanasia as forms of “terrorism with a human face”.The attack by Archbishop Angelo Amato, secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was the latest in a string of speeches made by either Pope Benedict or other Vatican officials as Italy considers giving more rights to gays.

In an address to chaplains, Amato said newspapers and television bulletins often seemed like “a perverse film about evil”. He denounced “evils that remain almost invisible” because the media presented them as “expression of human progress”.

He listed these as abortion clinics, which he called “slaughterhouses of human beings”, euthanasia, and “parliaments of so-called civilised nations where laws contrary to the nature of the human being are being promulgated, such as the approval of marriage between people of the same sex …”

Amato spoke at a time when the Vatican and Italy’s powerful Roman Catholic Church are at loggerheads over plans for a highly controversial law that would give unmarried heterosexual and homosexual couples some form of legal recognition.

Amato was also secretary of CDF under Ratzinger as Prefect, and was signatory to this rather famous and now totally ignored document: “Considerations regarding proposals to give legal recognition to unions between homosexual persons.”


Now let’s see what Cardinal Coccopalmerio is famous for:

He’s recently become one of Francis’s leading Nothing-to-See-Here apologists on Chapter VIII of AL. [No one mentions that back in December 2015, after the near-fiasco of the Bergoglian 'family synod #1', Coccopalmerio chaired and hosted, along with Cardinal Kasper) the first of eventually regular meetings of so-called 'Amici di Papa Francesco' among Curial papolators.]

But I think his “side” in the larger church-war can be determined less by what he says than what he does, and who is friends are. Specifically this friend. Mauro Inzoli is known to have appealed his suspension a divinis, imposed by Benedict, to the new pope through his two buddies in the Curia; Monsignore Pio Vito Pinto and Cardinal Coccopalmerio.

Inzoli was recently convicted by an Italian court of child molestation – acts he occasionally enjoyed committing in the confessional, and sentenced to four years, nine months in prison. But he was walking around free for quite a while.

His suspension by Benedict was overturned by Francis on the advice of his two close collaborators, Pinto and Coccopalmerio. The suspension was lifted and Inzoli was allowed to celebrate private Masses, ordered to stay away from the kids and to get five years of “counselling.” This lenient treatment, however, backfired a bit because it aroused howls of protest from … well… normal people in Italy who had had rather enough of Don Mercedes.

Today, in addition to the interesting Gloria TV/Il Fatto Quotidiano story, we have the latest on the Inzoli saga: Bergoglio’s Vatican has decided, I suppose, that the public heat was a bit much, and Inzoli has been belatedly laicized. After his conviction and sentencing in a civlian court, the Vatican has reopened his canonical trial.

The information that Inzoli was a clerical abuser with powerful friends comes from Michael Brendan Doherty’s inside sources.

Two people with direct ties to the Vatican tell me that Pope Francis, following the advice of his clubby group of allies in the curia, is pressing to undo the reforms that were instituted by his predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI in handling the cases of abuser priests.

Francis is pushing ahead with this plan even though the curial officials and cardinals who favor it have already brought more scandal to his papacy by urging him toward lenient treatment of abusers.

In 2001, the Vatican instituted a massive reform in how it handled the cases of priests who abused children. The power to deal with these cases was taken away from the Congregation of the Clergy and the Roman Rota (the Vatican’s Court), and placed in the office of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). Subsequently, the volume and speed with which the Catholic Church defrocked abuser priests went up. This was Pope Benedict’s legacy of trying to confront “the filth” in the Church.

Recently, Pope Francis had the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, request an opinion from the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, led by Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, regarding the possibility of transferring competence to deal with abuser priests from the CDF back to Clergy and the Rota. Coccopalmerio’s office responded with a positive answer...

[Once more, demolishing JPII's legacy and 'burying Benedict'!]
So why revert?

Perhaps because the CDF has taken a tough, rules-based approach to the issue of child abuse, which clashes with the more personal autocratic style of this pope. Or perhaps because reforming the reform would reward his allies, and humiliate an antagonist.

Rumors of this reform have been circulating in Rome for months. And not happily. Pope Francis and his cardinal allies have been known to interfere with CDF’s judgments on abuse cases. This intervention has become so endemic to the system that cases of priestly abuse in Rome are now known to have two sets of distinctions. The first is guilty or innocent. The second is “with cardinal friends” or “without cardinal friends.”

And indeed, Pope Francis is apparently pressing ahead with his reversion of abuse practices even though the cardinals who are favorable to this reform of reform have already brought him trouble because of their friends.

Consider the case of Fr. Inzoli. Inzoli lived in a flamboyant fashion and had such a taste for flashy cars that he earned the nickname “Don Mercedes.” He was also accused of molesting children. He allegedly abused minors in the confessional. He even went so far as to teach children that sexual contact with him was legitimated by scripture and their faith. When his case reached CDF, he was found guilty. And in 2012, under the papacy of Pope Benedict, Inzoli was defrocked.

But Don Mercedes was “with cardinal friends,” we have learned. Cardinal Coccopalmerio and Monsignor Pio Vito Pinto, now dean of the Roman Rota, both intervened on behalf of Inzoli, and Pope Francis returned him to the priestly state in 2014, inviting him to a “a life of humility and prayer.” These strictures seem not to have troubled Inzoli too much. In January 2015, Don Mercedes participated in a conference on the family in Lombardy.

So, some of our dots include:
o Coccopalmerio’s boosting of the fast’n loose Maltese interpretation of Amoris Laetitia
o A rivalry between Pinto, (Roman Rota) Coccopalmerio (Legislative texts) and Muller (CDF), a little war that’s been going on inside over how clerical sex abusers are dealt with.
o Muller, who has been rather vocal against the German/Kasper proposal.

Are we starting to form a picture yet? So, who do we put our money on between Gloria TV’s two curial candidates for the gay orgies?

I leave it up to my dear readers to decide.

So now we know... (Though it could hardly have been Cardinal Amato!) Personally, I think Coccopalmerio's cronyism with 'Don Mercedes' is far more emblematic than the fact that his former secretary has just been busted for the sort of thing papal pet Mons. Ricca might have done back in his Montevideo days with a live-in Swiss partner!

And thank you, Ms. White, for giving context to the cardinal's place in the Bergoglian scheme!


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Pope names #2 man at CDF to succeed
Cardinal Mueller as Prefect

by Cindy Wooden
CATHOLIC HERALD
Saturday, 1 Jul 2017

Pope Francis has decided not to renew Cardinal Gerhard Müller’s term as prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).

The Pope has chosen Archbishop Luis Ladaria Ferrer SJ, Secretary of the CDF, as his successor.

“The Holy Father Francis thanked His Eminence Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller at the conclusion of his quinquennial mandate,” the Vatican announcement said. No new position was announced for Cardinal Muller, who at 69 is still more than five years away from the normal retirement age for a bishop.

Anticipating an announcement of the Pope’s decision, both the English Rorate Caeli blog and the Italian Corrispondenza Romana blog presented the Pope’s move as a dismissal of the German cardinal, who originally was appointed to the post by now retired Pope Benedict XVI.

Pope Francis had met Cardinal Müller, whose five-year term was to end July 2, that morning.

While Pope Francis wrote in his exhortation on the family, Amoris Laetitia, that Church teaching on marriage had not changed, both Rorate Caeli and Corrispondenza Romana implied that Cardinal Müller was let go because he insisted that divorced and civilly remarried Catholics could not receive Communion unless they made a commitment to abstain from sexual relations with their new partners.

Other bishops and bishops’ conferences have read Pope Francis’s document as presenting a process of discernment that in certain circumstances could allow some couples to return to the sacraments.

Cardinal Müller was the first Vatican official formally confirmed in his post by Pope Francis after his election in 2013 and was among the 19 churchmen named cardinals that year by Pope Francis.

The prefect of the doctrinal congregation is responsible for promoting the correct interpretation of Catholic doctrine and theology. His office also is responsible for conducting investigations of clergy accused of sexually abusing minors.

Resigning from the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, Marie Collins, one of the founding members and the last remaining abuse survivor on the commission, said members of the Roman Curia were reluctant to implement the commission’s recommendations and she particularly cited Cardinal Müller.

Speaking to reporters in May on his flight from Fatima, Portugal, to Rome, Pope Francis said Collins was “a little bit right” because of the slow pace of investigating so many cases of alleged abuse.

However, the Pope said the delays were due to the need to draft new legislation and to the fact that few people have been trained to investigate allegations of abuse. Cardinal Müller and Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican secretary of state, he added, were looking “for new people”.

As head of the doctrinal congregation, the prefect also serves as president the Pontifical Biblical Commission, the International Theological Commission and the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, which is responsible for the pastoral care of traditionalist Catholics and for the ongoing reconciliation talks with the Society of St Pius X.

The new prefect, Archbishop Ladaria, was appointed congregation secretary in 2008 by Benedict XVI after having worked with him as a member of the International Theological Commission in 1992-1997, as a consultant to the doctrinal congregation from 1995 to 2008 and as secretary general of the theological commission from 2004 until being named congregation secretary.

Archbishop Ladaria was born in Manacor, Mallorca, on April 19, 1944, and earned a law degree at the University of Madrid before entering the Society of Jesus in 1966. After theology and philosophy studies in Spain and Germany, he was ordained to the priesthood July 29, 1973.
He earned a doctorate in theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in 1975 and began teaching dogmatic theology at the Pontifical University Comillas in Madrid. Nine years later, he began teaching at the Gregorian and served as vice rector of the university from 1986 to 1994.

Before the debate over Amoris Laetitia, Cardinal Müller made headlines for his role in the Vatican critique of the US-based Leadership Conference of Women Religious and for his friendship with Dominican Fr Gustavo Gutierrez, considered the father of liberation theology.

In 2004, he co-authored a book, On the Side of the Poor: The Theology of Liberation, with Fr Gutierrez. In the 1990s, when then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger led the congregation before becoming Pope Benedict, Fr Gutierrez was asked by the congregation to write and rewrite articles clarifying some of his theological and pastoral points.

In a 2012 interview with the Vatican newspaper, then Archbishop Müller said he was invited to participate in a seminar with Fr Gutierrez in 1988, and he went “with some reservations” because the doctrinal congregation had criticised aspects of liberation theology that it said were too influenced by Marxist ideology.

“One must distinguish between an erroneous and a correct liberation theology,” Archbishop Müller told the newspaper. While a Catholic must reject Marxist ideas and analysis, he said, “we must ask ourselves sincerely: How can we speak about the love and mercy of God in the face of the suffering of so many people who do not have food, water, medical care; who don’t know how to give their own children a future; where human dignity really is lacking; where human rights are ignored by the powerful?” [That sounds so sanctimonious - as if the Church and those who work in the Church had never before thought of that in 2000 years and needed Liberation Theology to point it out!]

Before being named prefect of the doctrinal congregation, Cardinal Müller had served five years as one of its members and had been a member of the International Theological Commission from 1998 to 2003. Benedict XVI led both bodies until 2005, when he was elected pontiff.

Cardinal Müller has close ties to retired Pope Benedict and in 2008 helped establish the Pope Benedict XVI Institute, which is publishing a complete collection of works by the German-born pope and theologian.

When he was appointed prefect of the doctrinal congregation by Benedict in 2012, he told the Vatican newspaper his job in Rome would be “to relieve part of his work and not bring him problems that can be resolved” at the level of the congregation.

“The Holy Father has the important mission of proclaiming the Gospel and confirming his brothers and sisters in the faith. It’s up to us to deal with the less pleasant matters so that he will not be burdened with too many things, although, naturally, he always will be informed of important matters.” [That certainly didn't happen with Bergoglio, who even exprEssly asked Mueller not to reply to the Four Cardinals' DUBIA!]

Cardinal Müller is a native of Mainz, Germany. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1978 and served in his native diocese as a chaplain and high school religion teacher. With degrees in philosophy and a doctorate in theology, he was a professor of dogmatic theology in Munich from 1986 to 2002.

He was named Bishop of Regensburg in 2002 and Cardinal Ratzinger attended his episcopal ordination. Bishop Müller chose as his episcopal motto “Dominus Iesus” (Jesus is Lord), which comes from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans and is the title of the 2000 document on salvation through Christ alone, issued by the doctrinal congregation under Cardinal Ratzinger.

The good news is that the pope chose to elevate the very well-qualified Mons. Ladaria to Prefect instead of naming his protege Mons Victor Fernandez, or Cardinal Schoenborn, or Cardinal O'Malley as earlier speculated. I believe only Edward Pentin brought up Ladaria's name as a possible successor to Mueller in the frenzy of speculation yesterday that the pope had indeed decided to dismiss Mueller from the CDF... Let us pray that the new Prefect will be faithful to the Catholic faith above all and not to the man who appointed him nor to the wayward order they both belong to.

From Father Z today ...
Reactions to the change of Prefect at CDF
1 July 2017

...Here is something predictably tasteless from the start:

Austen Ivereigh @austeni
CDF now headed by a Jesuit, which means someone who understands discernment, which Müller did not. Key to #AmorisLaetitia.
8:56 AM - 1 Jul 2017 · London, England
9 9 Retweets 20 20 likes

Sycophantic? I suspect he had a hand in the Walford Letter. It has that same whiff of papolatry that these guys display. [It's also typical Bergoglianist arrogance to catch the enemy's foot in the door as he is leaving then slam it shut on the foot! Ah, the many faces of Bergoglian mercy!]

Cardinal Müller reacts to dismissal
in interview with German newspaper

Exclusive from RORATE CAELI
July 1, 2017

Cardinal Müller was in Mainz, Germany, today, for a reunion of his high school class, and he granted an interview to the Allgemeine Zeitung, based in Mainz. Passages from the interview have been published in an article on the newspaper's website. The main topic was of course his dismissal from the CDF. We present here an excerpt from the article in an original Rorate translation:

“The five year term was over,” Cardinal Müller said. Although it is customary to renew the term, in his case Francis decided not to do so.

Francis told him that it was his plan from now in general not to extend such terms, “and I was the first one for whom the plan was implemented,” said Müller. The pope did not give any further reason.

And Müller himself says that he does not know of any further reason why the pope would not want him to continue. “There were no differences between me and Pope Francis,” he said.…

He insisted that there was no quarrel about Amoris Laetitia, the Apostolic Exhortation in which Pope Francis allowed more flexibility in the pastoral care of the divorced and remarried, and which in some points he did not find complete agreement with Cardinal Müller. [It's incredible how Mueller is still in denial 1) that AL does contain material that damages the faith and has damaged the faith, contrary to what he has asserted; and 2) that despite all his bending over backwards to put his personal stamp of approval on AL - including disapproving of the DUBIA - he has also said and written enough to show where he differs from the Bergoglian position, perhaps no more clearly than in the hundreds of objections he raised to the pope to the draft AL he was given to review, all of which were simply ignored. And yet, he claims AL as published does nothing to damage the faith - what then did his hundreds of objections consist of - grammatical errors, spelling errors, semantic quibbling?]

It was regrettable, however, Müller said, that the pope fired three of his officials at the CDF a few weeks [months, actually] previously. “They were competent people,” he said. [Unless the entire interview says substantially more than what the report indicates, does Mueller really fault this pope principally for firing his staff, and not for the DUBIA raised by AL? Denial, your name is Gerhard Ludwig! To the very end, Mueller has shown he was more concerned about being 'apparently loyal' to Bergoglio than he was about speaking truth to power. It's a moral cowardice to rank with Bergoglio's for refusing to answer the DUBIA directly and personally.]

At 12 o’clock on Friday, June 30, he said he learned from Pope Francis himself that he wanted a new prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. “It doesn’t bother me,” said the 69-year-old, smiling. “Everyone has to retire at some point.”

He will stay in the Vatican, that much he has decided. [Surely he means 'in Rome' - because at the Vatican, he has clearly become a reject, yesterday's trash. Benedict XVI gave him use of the apartment next to Porta Sant'Anna which was Cardinal Ratzinger's before he became pope, so he has digs in Rome.]

“I will do scholarly work, continue to exercise my function as cardinal, and do what I can in the care of souls. I have enough to do in Rome.”
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Pope's recent comments make
the faith seem implausible

[Surely not just recent comments!]

By JOHN ZMIRAK
THE STREAM
June 30, 2017

The Catholic News Service released a story on Thursday, June 29, in which Pope Francis spoke to pilgrims in Rome. His talk was a mix of uplifting sentiments and unbalanced, misleading statements. [In short, the familiar Bergoglio cocktail. After all, he's still the pope and can't really go the full monty and strip his speech bare of everything Catholic!]] Half-truths, which out of context might suggest that some atheists’ objections to Christianity have merit. Atheists on the right, for instance, often accuse Christians of embracing naive pacifism and poverty.

Let’s start with the headline — which no, the Pope didn’t write. But the Catholic News Service news agency of the US Catholic bishops, released it, and I’ve seen no correction from Rome. The story is titled: “Pope: Christians fight evil with love, sacrifice, never with violence.”

Here’s how the story unpacked that:

In the Gospel of Matthew (10:16-22), Jesus warned his disciples that he was sending them “like sheep in the midst of wolves.” They could be shrewd and prudent, the pope said, but never violent because evil can never be defeated with evil.

That is why Jesus sent his people into the world like himself, as sheep — without sharp teeth, without claws, without weapons — Pope Francis said. In fact, “true defeat” for a Christian is to succumb to the temptation of responding to the world’s resistance and hatred with violence, revenge and evil.

The only weapons Christians possess are the Gospel and the hopeful assurance that God is always by their side, especially in the worst of times.

Reading that, I spluttered coffee on my PC screen. My father got on a troop ship in 1945 as part of the U.S. Army. He went to “fight evil.” With violence. So does the courageous Kurdish sniper shown in a much-watched recent video. She’s part of a women’s self-defense militia that duels with the rapists and killers of ISIS.


As The Stream has reported, thousands of Syrian Christians fight alongside the Kurds. Are they being un-Christian? Would the editors of CNS care to fly over to Raqqa, disdaining any military protection, and explain that to those Christians — whose sisters and daughters face kidnapping and sale to sex-trafficking gangs?

At this point, defenders of squishy, quasi-pacifism might say, “Of course, there are certain exceptions. Like the Holocaust.” To which the proper answer is: “What part of ‘never’ don’t you understand? Never means NEVER.”

And full-on, consistent pacifists are making inroads under Pope Francis. They held a conference at the Vatican last year. The Church is mulling whether to make a saint of the political crank Dorothy Day, who opposed fighting the Nazis in Europe, the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, or the North Korean regime that invaded then-helpless South Korea. Pope Francis himself in 2015 denounced all weapons manufacturers as “un-Christian.” In the same speech, he complained that the Allies had not bombed the train tracks leading to Auschwitz. Which would have required… hold your breath… weapons.

Such sloppy, lazy rhetoric has consequences. It makes some Christians squeamish or cowardly about the just use of prudent force against evil. But it also does something worse.

Drip by drip, the incessant stream of such unbalanced, one-sided assertions makes the faith itself less plausible. If Christian morality were in fact that absurd, how could we go on defending it? Why should we?

Are we really to believe that Christian morality requires open borders to Islam (as Pope Francis has suggested)? That it considers the use of violence against ISIS somehow a compromise of “pure” Christian principles? That the Church wishes everyone on earth to be as materially poor as Jesus and His apostles?

Yet the pope said that almost explicitly in the same address. As CNS reports:

The Christian lifestyle must be marked by “poverty,” he said, noting how Jesus talks to his disciples more about “stripping” themselves than about “getting dressed.”

“Indeed, a Christian who is not humble and poor, detached from wealth and power and, above all, detached from him - or herself, does not resemble Jesus,” he said.


Again, these are half-truths. Put baldly, without the proper context that explains the good uses of wealth or the need for wise stewardship, they encourage extreme positions that preen as “pure” and “prophetic.” Positions like that of David Bentley Hart, an Orthodox theologian who wrote in First Things that it is intrinsically evil to acquire investment capital — full stop.

Qualifying extreme statements like these does not amount to “watering down” Christianity — unless you think that Christianity is poison. Pacifism and hatred of private property are not elements of the “pure” Christianity, which we compromise because we live in a fallen world. Or because we are worldly. They are falsehoods. They’re little pieces of the truth torn away from its body and cloned in a lab — like monstrous toes or giant prostates.

It’s the task of our pastors to present the full truth of Christ in the bright light of reason. Not to pose as other-worldly prophets, at the cost of replacing Christian truth with a Gnostic caricature incompatible with life. Christ came to give us life, and that more abundantly.

It's futile to go on about 'the truth' or even 'TRUTH' in the person of Jesus himself to those,including our beloved pope, who do not believe there is any such thing as absolute truth - everything is relative and situational and must be tailored to what the moment requires! They spit on Veritatis splendor [vide AL!] and anything that purports to speak of absolute truth and absolute morality.
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I had to rub my eyes several times over when I encountered the headline link to this news report. Without seeing the report itself, I thought that the cardinal referred to was Cardinal Sarah, because the only other African cardinal heading a Curial office today is Cardinal Turkson - who is Pope Francis's surrogate as head of the new Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, which incorporated, among others, the former Pontifical Council for Migrants and Workers. And Turkson has been, of course, most vocal on the international scene in pushing the Bergoglian notion of indiscriminate immigration.

But yes, it is Turkson who is now saying governments should focus on encouraging potential migrants from Africa to stay where they are since "the vast majority of African countries are not war zones from which the populations must necessarily flee". Is Turkson really turning Bergoglian migration policy on its head??? Or maybe the pope has come to his senses about indiscriminate immigration and is using Turkson to signal a most welcome, 'Deo gratias' change in his thinking!


African cardinal in the Vatican urges Europe
to 'turn off the faucet' on immigration

by Thomas D. Williams
BREITBART NEWS
July 1, 2017

Cardinal Peter Turkson, the highest-ranking African prelate in the Vatican [He has seniority over Cardinal Sarah both in terms of how long he has been cardinal and how long he has headed a Curial dicastery] said it is high time to “close the tap” of African immigration into Europe, which has reached new records in recent days.

Asked about recent rumblings that Italian authorities are finally ready to close down ports and begin turning away ships filled with migrants, Turkson told reporters the time has come to “turn off the faucet” of African migration to Europe and instead focus on migrants’ countries of origin.

“It is like water flowing from an open tap,” he said. “It’s not enough just to dry it, you have to turn off the faucet,” he added, noting that the vast majority of African countries are not war zones from which the populations must necessarily flee.

“In my opinion, we can change things in order to keep young people where they are.”

The Cardinal is the chairman of the Vatican office of integral human development, which was born on January 1 as a merger of four former departments and is responsible for issues such as justice, peace, environment, health, humanitarian aid and migration.

Earlier this week, Italian leaders suggested they may finally be ready to block the massive flows of migrants arriving by sea from North Africa, declaring that the current situation is “unsustainable.” Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni said Italy “cannot go on like this,” while accusing other EU nations of “looking the other way,” a criticism echoed by the Ghanaian cardinal.

Turkson said that the rest of Europe has not been “playing its part” in dealing with the migration crisis, which has forced Italy into a situation of emergency.

At the same time, he suggested that closing Italian ports is not sufficient to completely remedy the problem, which must be addressed at the root.

While “the decision of the Italians is internal to Europe,” Turkson said, “one cannot take care of these questions only in Europe.”

“The big problem is addressing this issue at its source from the angle of development, to ensure that people stop arriving into Europe,” said the cardinal.

Turkson insisted that his hardline position is not contradictory to the Christian notion of acting as “good Samaritans” with people in difficulty, but addresses the reality of what countries can bear and what is ultimately causing the crisis.
[A cryingly obvious reality that Bergoglio has obstinately chosen to ignore, he who insists that 'reality is more important than ideas'! Apparently not if those ideas happen to be his!]

Earlier this week, some 13,500 African migrants arrived on Italian shores in the space of just 48 hours, leading local media as well as politicians to speak of an authentic immigrant “invasion” exceeding the country’s capacity of assimilation.

According to official figures, more than 73,000 migrants have arrived in Italy since the beginning of the year, which represents a rise of more than 14 percent over the same period in 2016, when then-record arrivals had reached 64,133.

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Everything in this essay about what our faith teaches us about sin and sinning is surely not news to Bergoglio and his feckless band of apostate followers. It is just that they have deliberately chosen to ignore the hard truths of the faith that they disagree with. And which they would replace with their own convictions, because as men of the early third-millennium Zeitgeist, they firmly believe they know better than the Revelation, Tradition and Magisterium which have made up the deposit of the Catholic faith after more than 2000 years of the one true Church. That is a most condemnable hubris akin to that of Lucifer at the time he led his legion of rebel angels (become instant devils) out of the holy Presence and company of God.

What Catholicism teaches against
excusing and justifying mortal sin

It is never merciful to allow anyone
to continue in a state of sin

by Ralph Martin, PhD, STD
HOMILETICS AND PASTORAL REVIEW
June 28, 2017

It all began with a statement made by a student in a class I was teaching for our License in Sacred Theology (STL) Program at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit. I was conducting a seminar on the stages of spiritual growth for a class made up entirely of priests.

When we were working on the concept of what the scripture says about sins that will exclude us from entering the kingdom – mortal sins – one of the priests spoke up in class and said something quite remarkable, both for its honesty and for its implications for understanding some truths about culpability. He said to his fellow priests:

“Let’s face it, sometimes we use the three conditions that are necessary to commit a mortal sin as a way to rationalize a choice we actually make to sin.
- We deceive ourselves into thinking that the gravely wrong action that we are doing isn’t being done with sufficient reflection or full consent of the will but we are actually freely choosing to do it although with less than full consciousness.
- Although sufficient reflection and full consent can happen in an instant, we often try to cover over our truly free choice to do a bad action with rationalization and self-justification.”


And of course the controversy around the proper interpretation of Amoris Laetitia has put the question of objective wrongdoing accompanied by a lack of personal culpability front and center. As Pope Francis put it:

Hence it can no longer simply be said that all those in any irregular situations are living in a state of mortal sin and are deprived of sanctifying grace. More is involved here than mere ignorance of the rule. A subject may know full well the rule, yet have great difficulty in understanding its inherent values, or be in a concrete situation which does not allow him or her to act differently and decide otherwise without further sin. (AL §301)

This statement has led some bishops, Cardinals and bishops’ conferences to suggest that as an outcome of pastoral counseling couples who have divorced and remarried without submitting their first marriage situation to the judgment of the church to see if they qualify for an annulment may be given permission to “follow their conscience,” if they feel at peace about receiving communion despite their irregular situation.

Other bishops, Cardinals and bishops conferences have concluded that these interpretations are not in harmony with the teaching of the Church or the teaching of Pope Francis’s immediate predecessors.

While the focus of properly weighing “mitigating circumstances” has been almost exclusively directed to the situation of the divorced and remarried, it has been noted by various commentators that this principle can also be applied to other irregular situations such as same sex relationships. [I suppose Bergoglio and his followers have never heard of the slippery slope that follows the first small step in a downhill course.]

This possibility has recently been explicitly affirmed in an interview that Cardinal Cupich of Chicago gave that appeared in The Chicago Tribune. He made the logical point [Which was, of course, the intended and obvious sequitur of the 'Bergoglian amnesty' for the mortal sin of irregular sexual relationships] that if the objective wrong but subjective lack of culpability principle could be broadly applied to the case of the divorced and remarried it must of course also be applicable to other irregular situations such as same sex relationships. “You can’t have one particular approach for a certain group of people and not for everybody. Everyone has the ability to form their conscience well.” (1)

It is not my intention in this article to directly address the issues as they are presented in Amoris Laetitia and the ensuing contradictory interpretations of it, but rather to focus on the comment of my priest student cited above. This is not to deny that my conclusions may have some relevance to the current debate on the proper interpretation and pastoral application of AL. I believe they do.

One of the main points I will be making is that particularly in matters of sexual morality, deception and self-deception are easy to fall into, and this propensity needs to be taken into serious account in judging our own culpability in a particular matter or in guiding others in assessing their own culpability.

Another point I will make is that even in cases of invincible ignorance or severely diminished culpability and whatever the gravely wrong sins that are being committed may be, the pastoral response needs to be not primarily focused on determining culpability but calling to a full life in Christ, to repentance and faith and life in the Holy Spirit. Even in cases where there may be no culpability, the gravely wrong actions that may have inculpably been committed, nevertheless, need to be turned away from and replaced with a holy way of life.

What does the Church teach?
There is a widespread presumption in the general atmosphere of the Church today that the conditions necessary to commit a truly culpable mortal sin are so stringent that such sins must be very rare.

For that reason my priest-student, in a flash of illumination, felt the need to call out himself and his fellow priests as willing participants in self-deception regarding their culpability and that of others.

In this essay, then, we will first examine what the Church actually teaches about the reality of mortal sin, as represented by the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and then consider what light can be thrown on this teaching through the examination of a few of the most relevant scriptures. Our goal is to identify some truths that can be helpful in our own lives and in our pastoral responsibilities.

We find the Church’s teaching on mortal sin – which sums up the moral reflection of the Church through the centuries – in her Catechism of the Catholic Church §1857-61 [hereafter, CCC]. I will also occasionally offer some preliminary commentary in relationship to the example of my priest-student given at the beginning of this essay. I will also put in bold type statements of the CCC that are little known or commented on.

CCC §1857 For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: “Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent.”

CCC §1858 Grave matter is specified by the Ten Commandments, corresponding to the answer of Jesus to the rich young man: “Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and your mother.” The gravity of sins is more or less great: murder is graver than theft. One must also take into account who is wronged: violence against parents is in itself graver than violence against a stranger. (CCC §2072; 2214)

CCC §1859 Mortal sin requires full knowledge and complete consent. It presupposes knowledge of the sinful character of the act, of its opposition to God’s law. It also implies a consent sufficiently deliberate to be a personal choice. Feigned ignorance and hardness of heart do not diminish, but rather increase, the voluntary character of a sin. (CCC §1734)


The gravely wrong actions that my priest-student was referring to were actions that included full knowledge of the gravity of the sin but because of what appears to be “self-deception” denied that a “sufficiently deliberate personal choice” had been made. The example given by this priest would seem then to be a case of “feigned ignorance” that actually worsens the gravity of the sin.

We will examine “feigned ignorance” later on in this essay. We will also see clearly that scripture provides many cases where the hardness of heart that results in the rejection of Jesus’S teaching is clearly thought to be culpable.

CCC §1860 goes on to state that:

Unintentional ignorance can diminish or even remove the imputability of a grave offense. But no one is deemed to be ignorant of the principles of the moral law, which are written in the conscience of every man. The promptings of feelings and passions can also diminish the voluntary and free character of the offense, as can external pressures or pathological disorders. Sin committed through malice, by deliberate choice of evil, is the gravest. (CCC §1735; 1767)


First let me acknowledge that there are clearly cases of inculpable ignorance regarding the commission of grave sins.
- For example, I have talked to young people who were shocked to discover that masturbation was considered to be a grave sin – so accepted has this become in our culture.
- I have also talked to married couples who were shocked to discover that contraception was considered to be a grave sin – so commonly accepted in our culture, and so little spoken of in our churches, has this become.
- And who can fully comprehend the horror of children who are exposed to grave forms of evil and even drawn into them at a very young age who certainly have very diminished culpability if any at all?

It becomes understandable why some moral theologians have sometimes counseled that such apparently inculpable ignorance should not be disturbed by informing such people of the truth. I will argue later in this essay that this is not really a merciful approach to dealing with situations like this.

Also, it is important to note that “no one is deemed to be ignorant of the principles of the moral law which are written in the conscience of every man.” While the implications of the moral law for masturbation and contraception may not be immediately apparent to many, nevertheless the “grave matter” specified by the 10 commandments is held by the Church – and scripture – to be given by God to every human conscience. We will examine briefly the foundation of this teaching in Romans 1 and 2.

The CCC further addresses the question of culpable ignorance:

CCC §1791 This ignorance can often be imputed to personal responsibility. This is the case when a man “takes little trouble to find out what is true and good, or when conscience is by degrees almost blinded through the habit of committing sin.” (Gaudium et Spes §16) In such cases, the person is culpable for the evil he commits.


In my contact with many Catholics in many dioceses I have been astounded to discover how widespread disdain for Church teaching and the teaching of scripture has become in the name of “being an adult and making my own decisions about what seems right to me” and how little concern is evidenced to “find out what is true and good.” [But that is the inevitable but horrific working assumption one has come to make about most Catholics in Western societies in the past several decades after Vatican II! These are the Catholics for whom whatever they read/see/hear in the media has come to represent the Godless, Christless 'gospel' that they believe and live by! And how can we blame them when Bergoglio and his fellow Vatican II progressivists set the example, albeit with all the token trimmings of feigned Christian piety that behooves them as supposed ministers of God!]

After giving talks on some of the more challenging aspects of the teachings of Jesus, I frequently hear such comments as these: “My Jesus would never say that!” or “That isn’t what I’ve heard Pope Francis says!” or “I’m supposed to follow my own conscience, and I feel fine about what I’m doing, and besides the Church has to change with the times!”

I believe that such approaches cloak a troublesome lack of fear of the Lord, regard for the person of Jesus Christ, lack of a sincere desire to find the truth and submit to it, and foolish presumption about virtually universal salvation for everyone.

The second instance in which ignorance does not excuse is an ignorance that is the result of the habit of committing sin. Many people when they first commit an act of adultery, for instance, or who steal to support a drug habit, know perfectly well that they are sinning, but over time, begin to be indifferent to the concept of sin and can even come to justify their actions. Their sinful habit has almost obscured their consciences. Since the obscuring is a result of their own sinful choices, their ignorance does not excuse them from culpability.

What the Catechism teaches about mortal sin

CCC §1861 Mortal sin is a radical possibility of human freedom, as is love itself. It results in the loss of charity and the privation of sanctifying grace, that is, of the state of grace. If it is not redeemed by repentance and God’s forgiveness, it causes exclusion from Christ’s kingdom and the eternal death of hell, for our freedom has the power to make choices for ever, with no turning back. However, although we can judge that an act is in itself a grave offense, we must entrust judgment of persons to the justice and mercy of God. (CCC §1742; 1033). (2)


Since only God can really know the conscience of a person and their degree of culpability, and since self-deception and hardness of heart and feigned ignorance are quite common, it would be foolish for anyone entrusted with the pastoral care of such persons to presume inculpability – just as it would be foolish to presume culpability.

After a time of “pastoral accompaniment” ,we may or may not have some idea of the degree of culpability, but in every case when people are committing objectively gravely wrong acts they are harming themselves – and others if the acts involve others – and very well could be endangering their eternal salvation.

This is why I am suggesting that the focus of pastoral care should not be on determining culpability but calling people to turn away from their gravely sinful (even if not subjectively culpable) actions.

I say this with the understanding that from time to time it is important, particularly in the confessional to make some determination of culpability in order to discern appropriate penances or to assuage false guilt and scrupulosity.

It seems good here to underline the two important principles enunciated by this article of the CCC.:
First of all, the sins explicitly listed in scripture of being of such gravity to exclude persons who commit them from the kingdom of God if they don’t repent (and the adumbrations of these sins as discerned by the Church in the natural law and its subsequent moral reflection), are to be clearly understood and used as a criterion for judging the objective rightness or wrongness of our own and others’ actions.

But secondly, again based on the witness of scripture and Church teaching, only God in the last analysis can truly judge the degree of personal culpability involved in a particular person’s actions, and determine the implications for the eternal consequences in question here.

So, Pope Francis’s famous declaration “Who am I to judge?” is absolutely true as it pertains to ascertaining personal culpability, as it seems he intended, but absolutely untrue if used as it seems he clearly wasn’t intending, to cast any doubt on the objective rightness or wrongness of particular actions. [Dr. Martin, I beg to disagree with your most charitable assumptions as to what Bergoglio intended or did not intend to mean. I believe, in the context of his entire persona and record of statements and actions in the past four years, that he clearly also meant and means the 'absolutely untrue' alternative you point out.]

The case in question that was the subject matter of this famous quote seemed to be the case of someone who in his past perhaps had engaged in homosexual activity but who was now trying to live a morally good life. Pope Francis’s statement was not intended to say that the previous homosexual acts were not gravely wrong and did not require full repentance along with a firm purpose to never commit them again.[Idem!]

Can there be a “sufficiently deliberate personal choice”
made on a deeper level than full consciousness?

Let’s now look more deeply into what a “sufficiently deliberate personal choice” (a phrase we encountered in section 1859 of the Catechism) might actually look like.

In my research into the teaching of Vatican II on Lumen Gentium 16 on how it may be possible for people who have not had a chance to hear the Gospel to assent nevertheless to the saving grace of Christ without even knowing his name, I discovered some interesting reflections on the capacity of human beings to make real personal assents – or rejections – to a light given by God, on a deeper than conscious level. (3) These assents and rejections certainly seem to be reasonably described as “sufficiently deliberate to be a personal choice.”

The Council itself does not precisely clarify how an assent to the saving grace of God without the explicit hearing of the Gospel can happen, but there is an interesting body of theological reflection that attempts to throw light on the question of how exactly it might be possible for someone who is inculpably ignorant(4) of the Gospel to actually come to supernatural faith and charity without the “propositional clarity” of positive revelation.

Karl Rahner points to the probability of there being more dimensions to human consciousness than we have traditionally understood. There must be more dimensions to human consciousness in its knowing and free decision making, more foreground and background, more data, verbalized or not, accepted or repressed, than traditional theology has explicitly recognized. (5)

Two other thinkers, Jean-Guy Pagé6 and Charles Journet cite Jacques Maritain as one who has contributed to their understanding of how this might be possible. Journet posits two kinds of “lights” that come to human beings from God.
- One is “prophetic light” that illumines things that we must perceive for our salvation.
- The other is “sanctifying light” that calls us to assent to what is illumined in the prophetic light. (7)

Journet extensively quotes Maritain (8) on how this process may possibly take place in a “pre-conceptual” manner among those who do not know the Gospel. Maritain himself bases his reflections on the teaching of St. Thomas (ST Ia-IIae, q. 89, a. 6) concerning the theological significance of the first human act of an unbaptized child. (9)

Maritain’s point, following Thomas, is that contained in that first moral act — if it is an act that chooses the good — there may be an embryonic or rudimentary response to a prophetic and sanctifying light given by God that may actually involve a supernatural faith that is salvific, although quite vulnerable and perhaps unstable if it does not come to consciousness.

With this pre-conceptual, pre-notional knowledge, through the will, of the “good which brings salvation,” of the “good by which I shall be saved,” we receive the least degree of prophetic light necessary in order that theological faith should be able to come into action and make the understanding, really, actually, supernaturally, assent to the mystery of the God who 'exists', and who “rewards those who try to find him.” [Based on Hebrews 11:6, the two foundational beliefs — credibilia ­­— that must be present for salvation.]

But this is a provisional, unstable, dangerous state of faith, a state of childhood; and knowledge of the mysteries of salvation will require that it should leave the shadows, be perfected, reach an adult state, and find its first conceptual expression in the two basic credibilia. (10)


Étienne Hugueny, a French Dominican writing in the first third of the twentieth century, makes an even stronger point about the instability and fragility of such a first moral choice.

The good influences of the environment are unfortunately insufficient to prevent the falls and often the corruption of the will in formation; indeed, few there are who are able to resist the evil influences of the environment in which they are developing.

It’s therefore common that the young unbeliever, in a pagan environment, will follow the inclination of his corrupt nature and the evil example of the environment where he lives, when the hour arrives for him to choose his primary orientation to his moral life.

Avoiding therefore the call of God, the number of negative infidels [this refers to unbelievers who have not yet made a positive choice against God but are unbelievers because of the environment of unbelief in which they grow up and which they assent to] will grow; who by a first sin against God who presented himself to their reason, have placed an obstacle to interior illumination or to exterior revelation, through which God would have given them the gift of faith, bringing to perfection their first religious idea. (11)


While the moral teaching of the Church has been built up from scripture, sometimes it takes twists and turns that do not adequately reflect some of the important truths revealed in scripture.

A particular cultural epoch might not be sensitized to perceiving certain truths because of prevailing currents of thoughts. Our contemporary culture has often been characterized as a culture that avoids accountability by viewing everyone as a victim and holding no one to be really responsible.

The culture in which the Church lives at any given time of her journey cannot help but to affect her understanding to some degree. Just as Vatican II spoke of the need to recognize a “hierarchy of truths” without denying the importance of any truth, so too it could be useful to look at scripture to see if what appears to be the current view on the difficulty of committing a mortal sin adequately reflects the teaching and witness of scripture.

The witness of Scripture
The overall sense one gets from the Old Testament is that sin is punished – most often in a way that seems severe – and yet God is always ready to take his people back and show them compassion if they repent.

Another recurring theme of the Old Testament is that when human beings culpably sin they have a strong tendency to deny responsibility.
- The blame shifting in the garden where Eve shifts the blame to the serpent and Adam blames both the woman and the Lord for his participation in the grave sin of disobedience and rebellion is one primary example. God does not accept their excuses or claims of not being culpable and they (and all of humanity) suffer the very painful consequences.
- Moses is punished for striking the rock twice, an expression of distrust in the word of the Lord, and as a consequence is forbidden to enter the Promised Land.
- [King]Saul, among other failures, thinks he has a better idea than the Lord [a very Bergoglian sin!] and disobeys in keeping some of the spoils of war and loses the kingship.
- David, specially chosen by the Lord, does great evil by committing adultery and murder and only repents when confronted by Nathan. While David is forgiven because of his sincere repentance and penance, the punishment is nevertheless severe - the death of the child and endless disunity and rebellion in his own household.

The story of Susanna and the unjust judges in the Book of Daniel portrays in striking manner the corruption of conscience that can occur as one sin leads to another. The injustice of the judges’ court rulings, perhaps motivated by greed, forms part of a complex of sins, involving lust and false witness, and leads ultimately to their undoing and their own deaths as punishment for their sins.

I will put in bold type parts of the text that are particularly relevant to our considerations: “They began to lust for her. They suppressed their consciences; they would not allow their eyes to look to heaven, and did not keep in mind just judgments."Dan 13: 8-9) This is clearly portrayed as a culpable giving in to lust and the willful suppression of their knowledge of “just judgments,” with their death as the punishment.

The New Testament tells us that these examples, and many more, are preserved in scripture for us as a warning:

I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness.

Now these things occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did.
- Do not become idolaters as some of them did; as it is written, “The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play.”
- We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day.
- We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents.
- And do not complain as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer.
These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down to instruct us, on whom the ends of the ages have come. So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall. (1 Cor 10: 1-12, RSV)


It is unfortunately common for many people today to dismiss the Old Testament as outmoded in some of its essential moral teaching, when in fact, it is solemnly reaffirmed in the teaching of Jesus and the apostles and faithfully transmitted to this day in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Putting Christ to the test by flagrantly dismissing his teaching in the area of sexual morality is indeed an incredibly foolish thing to do. This is a mocking of God that will inevitably have severe consequences.

Sexual morality is punished in two ways, in the wretched consequences in this life – to which people enmeshed in these sins are often blinded – and, if unrepented, in the loss of eternal life.

Make no mistake: God is not mocked, for a person will reap only what he sows, because the one who sows for his flesh will reap corruption from the flesh, but the one who sows for the spirit will reap eternal life from the spirit. Let us not grow tired in doing good, for in due time we shall reap our harvest, if we do not give up.(Gal 6:7-9)

Paul’s Letter to the Romans also talks about a culpable suppression of the truth that leads to every kind of disorder with very dire consequences:

The wrath of God is indeed being revealed from heaven against every impiety and wickedness of those who suppress the truth by their wickedness. For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them… (Rom 1:18-19).
This is why, Paul continues:
God handed them over to impurity through the lusts of their hearts for the mutual degradation of their bodies.
- They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and revered and worshiped the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. Therefore, God handed them over to degrading passions.
- Their females exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the males likewise gave up natural relations with females and burned with lust for one another. Males did shameful things with males and thus received in their own persons the due penalty for their perversity. (Rom 1:24-27).


It’s important to note how culpability is explicitly attributed to those spoken about in Romans 1. Indeed, what we have here is a relentless indictment of culpability. Similar to the case of Susanna and the elders who gave in to disordered desires and culpably suppressed the truth, Romans 1 asserts that God has revealed himself in some perceptible fashion to every human being and so no one is without culpability if this revelation is ignored or suppressed or actually rejected in favor of sinful actions.

The sign of their rejection of the truth revealed by God and their refusal to worship him is their addiction to immoral behavior, characterized by homosexual activity and the approval in others of these behaviors as well as many other wicked behaviors.

Satan, the rebellious one whose very identity is formed by rejecting the authority of God, desires to be worshipped and he is working in our culture to require all to bow down to the purported “goodness” of these wicked behaviors.

Those who place themselves above the authority of God and his revelation desperately want to be affirmed in their behavior and won’t rest until they compel everyone to do so. The Roman emperors required this submission of the early Christians from time to time and it produced thousands of Christian martyrs.

There is a tremendous pressure on the Church today and all her members and ministers to blur the truth about these matters to avoid a confrontation with a culture that will not rest until they label us “enemies of the state, enemies of equality, haters.”

Romans 1 communicates the relentless indictment of the culpable suppression of the truth, feigned ignorance and hardness of heart that the CCC warns about, and to which the priest-student in my class shockingly called to our attention.

Romans 2 declares that people will be judged on the basis of the light that they have been given. It is the clear teaching of the Church throughout the ages, based in scripture, that light is given to every human being and how they respond to that light determines their eternal destinies.
This is a basis for what the Catechism asserts in §1860:"But no one is deemed to be ignorant of the principles of the moral law, which are written in the conscience of every man."

As familiar as the ff text from Romans may be, it is well worth reflecting on carefully as it is relevant to these considerations on culpability.

By your stubbornness and impenitent heart, you are storing up wrath for yourself for the day of wrath and revelation of the just judgment of God, who will repay everyone according to his works: eternal life to those who seek glory, honor, and immortality through perseverance in good works, but wrath and fury to those who selfishly disobey the truth and obey wickedness (Rom 2:5-8).


It is important not to overlook in the texts above the supreme importance of obedience to the light that God gives to everyone, to the witness of conscience, to the universal knowability of the natural law and to the explicit Word of God.

While obedience is a virtue that is widely mocked in our culture in the name of a personal freedom that often leads to deep bondage and blindness, it is essential for accessing the mercy of God. God’s mercy is profound but it must be gratefully received with faith and responded to with repentance and lived out in obedience to the revelation of God.

Son though he was, he [Jesus] learned obedience from what he suffered; and when he was made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him. (Heb 5:8-9);
Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever disobeys the Son, will not see life, but the wrath of God remains upon him. (Jn 3:36);
We are witnesses of these things, as is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him. (Acts 5:32).


I think it is fair to say that the emphasis of the Bible is not on determining culpability or degrees of culpability but on clearly calling everyone to a life of obedience to God. The focus is on teaching and demonstrating that committing grave sin is severely punished both in this life and in the life to come.

I would go even further and suggest that the thrust of scripture in both the OT and New Testament is to presume widespread culpability along with widespread self-deception, and the rationalizing, blame shifting, and justification for such sins, that is the tendency of fallen human beings.] [If man after the Fall had been capable of resisting and/or overcoming human nature - the nature of fallen man - then he would not have needed the Son of God to come down to redeem him. But gave him free will which tens to follow the path of least resistance, i.e., the primrose path of Nice and Easy that the church of Bergoglio preaches, a primrose path that can only lead to perdition.]

Not at all unlike the dynamic that my priest-student was claiming was operative in himself and in his fellow human beings when they deceive themselves into thinking that they weren’t really giving a sufficiently deliberate personal assent to the sin.

The sobering declaration in the verse above – “wrath and fury to those who selfishly disobey the truth and obey wickedness” – certainly seems to indicate that “giving in” to selfish, lustful, rebellious desires – risks eternal damnation if not repented before death.

The culpable suppression of the truth and of conscience mentioned in the story of Susanna and in Romans 1 would seem to be an easy enough thing to do when tempted by pride, lust, greed or rebellion – as we frequently are.

Where there is some acknowledgement of lessened culpability in the scripture the actual texts can sometimes be disconcerting. Think, for example, of “Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.”(Lk 12:45-48).

Jesus makes clear that truly invincible ignorance is excusable but now that God has clearly revealed his will in Jesus, those who hear the teaching of Jesus are without excuse: “If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin.”(Jn 15:22).

And we hear Paul preach to the Athenians that“The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all men everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all men by raising him from the dead(Acts 17:30-31). [The LAST THINGS about which the Church hardly ever preaches today, and which the nominal leader of the one true Church of Christ purports to ignore because he, Bergoglio, can be more merciful than God himself who should never have created Hell or even planted the idea of it in the human mind. Yet Bergoglio once in a while pays lip service to denounce Satan! Where then does he think Satan and his infernal legion 'live' if not the flames of Hell which Jesus evoked quite a few times to his followers as the destiny of those who do not repent their offenses against God?]

But perhaps the supreme moment comes with Jesus himself on the cross recognizing that some of those participating in the crucifixion didn’t realize what they were doing. Some may have realized they were participating in an unjust action, but not have realized they were crucifying the Son of God. “And Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.’” (Lk 23:34)

To what extent they eventually recognized their need for forgiveness and accepted it the Gospel is silent. To what extent they knew they were participating in an unjust execution but didn’t know who it was who was being executed the Gospel is silent.

God never delights in the death of the evil-doer, always extends forgiveness and mercy, but mercy and forgiveness need to be humbly received in order to do their work of justification and sanctification in the soul of a repentant believer. (12)

Deliberate unbelief
We sometimes forget that unbelief – not believing the testimony of God Himself in the person of Jesus – is one of the gravest of sins revealed in the scriptures. A

s Fr. Francis Martin puts it: The root sin of the world is the refusal to believe in Jesus and the place he holds next to the Father as the revelation of the Father. The root sin is to reject the truth.He then quotes John 3:36: "Whoever believes in the son has eternal life, Whoever disobeys the son will not see life but must endure God’s wrath." (13)

Culpable unbelief and the heart’s choice to take pleasure in immorality, while a continuing theme of scripture, is particularly underlined as the cause for those who will perish in the deception of the last days. Deception and self-deception often work together.
[Apropos, I captioned one of my contra-AL banners for this thread 'It(AL) is all about deception and self-deception']

The external deception of the evil one and his lies, working directly in the mind and heart of the individual or through the culture of the world, are found to be attractive to the selfish desires of the flesh, and are yielded to with “sufficiently deliberate” personal assent to become culpable self-deception.

It is also clear from the regular warnings of Jesus and the apostles against false teachers and prophets that deception within the thought environment of the Church must be guarded against. [Don't deception and self-deception become second nature if one's worldview rejects the truths reaffirmed in Veritatis splendor, as' our beloved pope' so cavalierly does?]

At one point scripture indicates that the “doctrines of demons” will be infiltrated into the Church by “plausible liars.” Who can deny that just as in the early church, we are again encountering such demonic lies that are leading many to rebel against God and engage in immorality? So many of the points we have already made are repeated again, now, in the context of the last days and the final separation of the human race.

This is the time when the division will become apparent between those who love God and those who disdain him, when the city of God and the city of man constructed against God will be separated for all eternity.

Augustine’s insight into culpability
The CCC notes that there are various factors in a person’s life that may reduce culpability.

CCC §1860 The promptings of feelings and passions can also diminish the voluntary and free character of the offense, as can external pressures or pathological disorders.


Even when culpability is greatly lessened in a person’s current state of “addiction” though, we need to remember the sobering insight of St. Augustine. Augustine acknowledges that by the time he was convinced of the truth of the faith and wanted to live in accordance with it he was actually a slave of sexual sin and not able to get free by his own will-power alone. He was “addicted” in the language of today.

Some might say today that because of the habit of sin he was not fully culpable for repeated sinning. Yet in his remarkable honesty and deep perception of the tangled workings of the human soul, he points out that he was responsible for getting to the point of addiction or slavery by a repeated number of decisions to sin made over a period of time that were freely chosen. I

n other words, he was culpable for having gotten to the point of helplessness but now truly was helpless in significant ways. But over a long period of time, and step by step, the Lord took his desire for knowing and following him as the foundation for leading him out of his addiction, suntil one day in an infusion of grace he was given the opportunity to step free from his sin, and he did.

It is well worth considering at some length his own words. We have seen previously how CCC §1791 points out how conscience can gradually and culpably be deadened through the repeated decisions to commit sin.

I sighed after such freedom [the freedom of Victorinus to turn away from it all] but was bound not by an iron imposed by anyone else but by the iron of my own choice. The enemy had a grip on my will and so made a chain for me to hold me a prisoner. The consequence of a distorted will is passion. By servitude to passion, habit is formed, and habit to which there is no resistance becomes necessity... But I was responsible for the fact that habit had become so embattled against me, for it was with my consent that I came to the place in which I did not wish to be... (14)

In this way I understood through my own experience what I had read, how “the flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh” (Gal. 5:17). I was split between them, but more of me was in that which I approved in myself than in that which I disapproved... Though at every point you showed that what you were saying was true, yet I, convinced by that truth, had no answer to give you except merely slow and sleepy words: “At once”, “But presently", “Just a little longer, please.” But “At once, at once” never came to the point of decision, and “Just a little longer, please” went on and on for a long while...

The law of sin is the violence of habit by which even the unwilling mind is dragged down and held, as it deserves to be, since by its own choice it slipped into the habit. “Wretched man that I was, who would deliver me from this body of death other than your grace through Jesus Christ our Lord?” (Rom. 7:24-5) (15)


Augustine also tells us how God’s grace gratuitously came to him in his genuine helplessness, and describes the means that God used to bring him to the final steps of conversion and liberation.

Lord, my helper and redeemer, I will now tell the story, and confess to your name, of the way in which you delivered me from the chain of sexual desire, by which I was tightly bound, and from the slavery of worldly affairs. I went about my usual routine in a state of mental anxiety. (16)

This was the story Ponticianus told. But while he was speaking, Lord, you turned my attention back to myself... And I looked and was appalled... You thrust me before my own eyes so that I should discover my iniquity and hate it. I had known it, but deceived myself, refused to admit it, and pushed it out of my mind.

But at that moment the more ardent my affection for those young men of whom I was hearing, who for the soul’s health had given themselves wholly to you for healing, the more was the detestation and hatred I felt for myself in comparison with them.

Many years of my life had passed by — about twelve — since in my nineteenth year I had read Cicero’s Hortensius, and had been stirred to a zeal for wisdom... But I was an unhappy young man, wretched as at the beginning of my adolescence when I prayed you for chastity and said: “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”

I was afraid you might hear my prayer quickly, and that you might too rapidly heal me of the disease of lust which I preferred to satisfy rather than suppress. (17)


As our class studied Augustine’s remarkable analysis of deception and self-deception, of bondage and freedom, we all came to understand with greater clarity what the courageous priest/student articulated about the self-deception that can so often be involved in choosing sin at a deeper than conscious level, but nevertheless truly choosing it.

It is time though to draw some conclusions from these reflections that can usefully contribute to a more scripturally adequate “hierarchy of truths” in our thinking and practice concerning serious sin.

Pastoral conclusions
1. The overall thrust of the Bible is to identify what grave sin is and call us to avoid it or repent of it lest we perish. We need to recover a profounder understanding of the gravity of grave sins – their eternal consequences if not repented of before death – which is sometimes masked by now referring to grave sin as “irregular situations.” (18)

2. Very few of us are ever in a situation where we actually need to determine the degree of subjective culpability in someone else’s soul, or even in our own. When those few occasions may occur – for example, in the case of what appears to be truly inculpable ignorance – the pastoral response needs to be similar.

We need to encourage the person to discover the truth and begin to live it as best they can, assisted by grace, the wisdom of the Church, and continuing pastoral care. It must be said though that sometimes when people discover that something they have been doing is gravely wrong they are capable of stopping immediately.

3. The general presumption in scripture is that those who do gravely wrong things are very often culpable. [Again, the unflinching and admirable realism evident in those who had been responsible for 'codifying' Scripture, as to their view of human nature left to its own devices! But that is why man must avail of God's infinite grace and generosity!]

4. There is an acknowledgement in scripture that culpability can be reduced by truly invincible ignorance, but the very act of doing something wrong is nevertheless damaging to the human person(s) engaging in such actions and often carries in its wake the natural consequences of disobeying the law of God, as well as a “lighter” punishment mentioned in Lk 12:45-48. Of course, there is a significant difference in the consequences of grave (mortal) and less grave (venial) sin.

5. There is an abundant witness in scripture to the widespread rejection of the truth and denial of moral responsibility in the response to the preaching and teaching of Jesus and the Apostles. Those who reject the witness of Jesus and the Apostles are most often deemed culpable for their rejection and therefore are said to be on their way to perishing, perdition.

6. There is a massive witness in scripture to the deviousness of the human heart in justifying itself and denying wrongdoing, rationalizing sin, culpably suppressing the truth, “feigning ignorance,” “hardness of heart,” “preferring the darkness.”

7. Doing objectively wrong acts even when personal culpability is lessened because of various factors nevertheless wound the human person and others who may be affected by their sin, and truly compassionate pastoral care, preaching and teaching, must focus on leading people to a life of holiness, not in determining personal culpability, or excusing wrong-doing.

It is not merciful to “not trouble the consciences” of those doing gravely wrong actions. Gravely wrong actions wound the human person even if they are being done in inculpable ignorance.

The Church as a field hospital
[This metaphor is surely one of the most unfortunate, false and fallacious images ever evoked about the Church. Yet no one ever seems to question it. I challenge it, every time it is brought up.]
But, some may ask, what about Pope Francis’s emphasis on the church as a “field hospital for the wounded,” and the need to be a “welcoming” Church, a church of mercy, and to “accompany” people in the messy complexity of their lives and relationships?

The purpose of a field hospital is to bring healing and restore the patients to active engagement in the life and mission of the Church, not to confirm them in a wounded state. [Now Dr Martin mixes it up! A real field hospital is not intended to 'heal' people - it is an emergency first-aid station for urgent-care patients to stabilize them enough so they can be sent on ASAP to a proper facility with the advanced level of care they need. A field hospital cannot afford to hold on to the most serious patients who have a possibility of survival, because being located in a battle zone or catastrophe area, it has to make way for more casualties to triage and provide the necessary first aid. The Church is most certainly not that, at all: you come to the Church, or are brought to the Church, and with the right ministers and 'instruments', she takes care of your spiritual injuries and illnesses, big and small, to the day you die. She does not send you on elsewhere, but she does try to educate you properly in the faith and the daily practice of it, to be able to fend for yourself spiritually and even to help others to help themselves.


The purpose of “welcoming” people to the Church is to welcome them to an encounter with the person of Christ, his truth, love, and holiness, and draw them to deep faith, repentance, conversion and to embrace their baptismal identity as “missionary disciples.” As Cardinal Dolan said on one occasion, “Everyone is welcome but not anything goes!” [The cardinal is very good with quips, but the second part of his quip is not really how it is in the church of Bergoglio, is it, where almost anything goes, in fact - the quintessential embodiment of the 1968 Cultural Revolution in which time warp the Bergoglians continue to inhabit.]

To accompany people is to help people with compassion and patience to see clearly their own situations in light of the Gospel and to take steps to bring them to true friendship with Christ which essentially includes faithfulness to his teaching in all its dimensions.

It is not merciful to keep from people the truth about Jesus, his teaching, and their own situations. It is not merciful to allow people to deceive themselves or be deceived and not challenge the false wisdom of the world, the flesh and the devil which envelops the culture today.

If we are not calling people to take up their cross and die to the world, the flesh and the allurements of the devil, we are not preaching the true gospel. Those who preach and teach will be held to a higher standard and judged on their fidelity to delivering the “whole counsel of God.”

Only God can judge the culpability of the human heart. Our job is to call people to salvation, to righteousness, to repentance, to a life of holiness and mission. The focus of our ministry needs to be not on determining culpability but leading to holiness.

Truly, only God can judge. The time between the first and second comings of Jesus is the time to focus on proclaiming the gracious offer of mercy and forgiveness, won for us at such a price, calling all men and women everywhere to faith, repentance and conversion.

Our primary mission is not to determine culpability but to call to repentance. It is important we be about the master’s business.


End Notes:
1. “Cupich: Pope’s move a ‘game changer’ – document on marriage, family gives priests pastoral license.” April 10, 2017, The Chicago Tribune. Also on line at: Cupich: Pope’s document on sex, marriage, family life a ‘game changer’ chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-pope-catholics-divorce-met-0160408 0160408-story.html
2. Catholic Church. (2000). Catechism of the Catholic Church (2nd Ed., pp. 455–456). Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference.
3. The following section is taken directly from pp. 51-52 of my book, Will Many Be Saved? What Vatican II Actually Teaches and Its Implications for the New Evangelization (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012).
4. See Stephen Bullivant, “Sine Culpa? Vatican II and Inculpable Ignorance,” in Theological Studies, vol. 72, no. 1 (March 2011): 70-86, for a recent consideration of how inculpable ignorance may apply to contemporary unbelievers.
5. Karl Rahner, “Forgotten Dogmatic Initiatives of The Second Vatican Council,” TI, vol. XXII, 9, 99.
6. Jean-Guy Pagé, Qui Est L’église? Le Peuple De Dieu, vol. 3 of 3 (Montréal: Les Éditions Bellarmin, 1979), 63-65.
7. Charles Journet, What is Dogma? (New York: Hawthorn, 1964), 15.
8. Jacques Maritain, “La Dialectique Immanente du Premier Acte de Liberté,” in Raison et Raisons (Paris: 1947), 131-156. Also in translation: The Range of Reason (New York: Scribner, 1952), 66-85 (cited in Journet, 130, ff).
9. See Thomas O’Meara, “The Presence of Grace Outside Evangelization, Baptism and Church in Thomas Aquinas’ Theology,” in That Others may Know and Love—Essays in Honor of Zachary Hayes OFM, ed. Michael F. Cusato and F. Edward Coughlin (New York: The Franciscan Institute, 1997), 119-124, for a useful discussion of this concept in Aquinas. Riccardo Lombardi, in The Salvation of the Unbeliever (London: Burns & Oates, 1956), provides a comprehensive study of the question of what constitutes saving faith and how, in various situations, it might be possible for it to come into existence. Lombardi’s work particularly focuses on the theological works in Latin and Italian that explored this question before Vatican II.
10. Journet, 35.
11. Étienne Hugueny, “Le scandale édifiant d’une exposition missionnaire,” in Revue Thomiste, No. 76 (1933): 217-42, and No. 78-79 (1933): 533-67. The citation is on page 562. This treatment of choice on a deeper than conscious level first appeared in an essay of mine, “Doctrinal Clarity for the New Evangelization: The Importance of Lumen Gentium 16” published in the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly, v. 23, #3, Fall 2011, pp.9-15.
12. For a treatment of some misunderstandings about the meaning of mercy see my book. The Urgency of the New Evangelization: Answering the Call (Huntington, IN: OSV, 2013), 75-95. ↩
13. Francis Martin, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me: The role of the Holy Spirit in the Work of Evangelization,” in The New Evangelization: Overcoming the Obstacles, ed. Steven Boguslawski and Ralph Martin (New York: Paulist Press, 2008), 72-73. See also 74-76.
14. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), bk. VIII, nos. 10-11, p 140.
15. Ibid., bk VIII, nos. 11, 12, pp. 140-141.
16. Ibid., bk VIII, no. 13, p. 141.
17. Ibid., bk VIII, nos. 16,17, pp.144-145.
18. A more casual approach to what is objectively grave sin is linked I believe to a underlying unbelief in what the Word of God and the Church teach about the reality of the final judgment and the reality of heaven and hell. For a thorough analysis of this issue see, Ralph Martin, Will Many Be Saved? What Vatican II Actually Teaches and Its Implications for the New Evangelization (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012).


The author of this essay, Ralph Martin, STD, is director of graduate theology programs in the New Evangelization at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in the Archdiocese of Detroit. He is also the president of Renewal Ministries (www.renewalministries.net). His most recent books are: The Fulfillment of All Desire: A Guidebook for the Journey to God Based on the Wisdom of the Saints, and Will Many Be Saved? What Vatican II Actually Teaches and Its Implications for the New Evangelization.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/07/2017 21:54]
02/07/2017 23:31
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I am unable to access the Corrispondenza Romana site directly because I now get a message that "the site cannot provide a secure connection". But here is Father Z's 'quick translation' of Roberto Di Mattei's reaction to the sacking of Cardinal Mueller...

On the dismissal of Cardinal Mueller
by Roberto Di Mattei
Translated by Father Z from
CORRISPONDENZA ROMANA
July 2, 2017

The removal of Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller represents a crucial moment in the history of Pope Francis’s pontificate. In fact, Müller, who was appointed Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on 2 July 2012 by Benedict XVI, is only 69 years old. It has never happened that a cardinal far beyond five years from the canonical retirement age (75 years) has not been renewed for a second quinquennium (five year term).

Suffice it to think that there are prelates who, even though being ten years older than Cardinal Müller, still occupy important positions, such as Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, President of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, the same cardinal whose secretary was recently caught in flagrante by the Pontifical Gendarmes (Vatican Police) during a homosexual orgy with drugs within a building belonging to the Vatican.

Coccopalmerio, however, showed his appreciation for Amoris laetitia [in a booklet defending its infamous Chapter 8] explaining that “the Church has always been the refuge of sinners,” while Müller did not always hide his perplexities about some untoward leniencies opened up by the papal Exhortation, even if his statements were of a vacillating nature. [Actually, his statements were just as unpardonably equivocal (speaking out of both sides of the mouth) as the AL statements he purported to be 'perplexed' about.]

From this angle, the sacking of Cardinal Müller is an authoritarian act which constitutes Pope Bergoglio’s open challenge to that group of of conservative cardinals with whom the Prefect of the Congregation for the Faith was notoriously close.

Francis moved with force, but also with skill. He started a scorched earth campaign around Müller, requiring himto fire three of his most trusted collaborators. [It seemed Mueller did not have to do anything to fire them - he was simply presented with a fait accompli, and told by the pope that he did not need to explain to him, Mueller, why he fired them!]

He then, up to the last moment, dangled the possibility of renewing Mueller's term without ever giving him explicit assurances. In the end, he replaced him, but not with an exponent of radical progressivism, as would have been the rector of the Catholic University of Buenos Aires, Víctor Manuel Fernández, or the Special Secretary of the Synod, Bruno Forte.

The chosen one is Archbishop Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer, a Jesuit, until today Secretary of the Congregation. His choice reassures and puzzles conservatives. What some of them do not understand is that what matters to Pope Francis is not the ideology of his collaborators, but their fidelity to his plan of “irreversible reform” of the Church. [Is Di Mattei saying then that Ladaria's fidelity is really to the pope and not to the faith? That was the one reservation I expressed upon reading his appointment, which was magnified when I read Edward Pentin's observation that this is the first time ever that the two most important positions in the Church hierarchy are held by Jesuits!]

One really ought to speak more about the 'eradication of conservatives' than of a victory for Pope Francis. [Are they not synonymous???] Cardinal Müller did not share Pope Francis’s line, and he was tempted publicly to assume a contrary position, but the current thesis in the conservative group was that it would have been better if he had kept his post by being silent rather than losing it by speaking. [Oh please, that is as unprincipled as it is unrealistic! Mueller was going to be cast out, regardless, especially since dumping an appointee of Benedict XVI who also happens to be the editor of his OPERA OMNIA series, offered a perfect opportunity for Bergoglio to drive home a nail in the coffin prepared by him and his followers for 'burying Benedict'!]

The Prefect had chosen a “low profile” approach. ['Low profile', my eye! Is that a synonym now for 'downright cowardly and craven'? I hold no brief against Mueller as a person, especially since he obviously has the full trust of Benedict XVI. But I did find his actions as CDF Prefect with regard to AL deceptive and self-deceiving - speaking out of both sides of the mouth, as I have found it best to describe the line he decided to take.]

In an interview with Il Timone, he said that, “Amoris laetitia clearly must be interpreted in the light of the whole doctrine of the Church. […] I’m not pleased, it isn’t right that many bishops are interpreting Amoris laetitia according to their own way of understanding the Pope’s teaching”, but in another statement he also expressed his oppposition to “publicizing” the dubia of the four cardinals. [There, speaking out of both sides of his mouth, right?] This did not prevent his being fired.

The “low profile”, in the strategy favored by some conservatives, is thought to be the lesser evil compared to the loss of a Curial post to their opponents.

[Excuse me??? Some people need a primer on Realpolitik! When it comes to dealing with a totalitarian tyrant, you are either 100 percent for him if you must be heard from at all, or just shut up! Otherwise, you can only lose. But obviously, the CDF Prefect, whoever he is, ought not to shut up when the doctrine of the faith is in jeopardy! Bergoglio must think he has in Ladaria a most docile, pliant and totally supportive collaborator - perhaps more than he thought Schoenborn or O'Malley must be! That really ought to strike terror in the heart of any anti-Bergoglian.

And I was just as wrong in my initial thought that Ladaria's appointment was 'good news', as Father Z was to announce "We have dodged the bullet - it could have been worse"! I am hitting my head against the wall for ever thinking for a moment that Bergoglio would be capable of making a good disinterested decision for the faith!]


This “containment” strategy does not work with Pope Francis. What was the final outcome of this affair? Cardinal Müller lost a precious opportunity to criticize Amoris laetitia publicly and, in the end, he was eventually dismissed, without even having been forewarned.

[I can't believe Prof. Di Mattei thinks this! What precious oppportunity did he lose? Instead of standing with the Four Cardinals - with whom he collaborated before the 2014 Family Synod on a book that addressed the iniquity of the Bergoglio-Kasper position on RCDs - he tells them they were wrong to have published the DUBIA!

At the start of his pontificate, Bergoglio had no qualms in telling a group of religious order leaders from Latin America that they should proceed with whatever they think best "and not worry that Cardinal Mueller will come after you!', an insult followed up by his protege Tucho Fernandez, saying the pope can really do well without a CDF Prefect (maybe that is why Fernandez was not named to succeed Mueller).

And surely, Mueller did not need to be forewarned. I can imagine the audience he had with Bergoglio last week. It must have been short: "Well, Your Eminence, as you must have suspected all along, and as everyone has been speculating, I am not renewing your appointment to the CDF. I am the pope and I don't have to explain why to you, just as I did not have to explain why I fired those three priests from your staff. But think positive! - Now you can have all the time to publish the remaining volumes of Ratzinger's Opera Omnia.
A non rivederci mai!"]


It is true, as Marco Tosatti observes, that he is now more free to express himself. But even if he did, it would be the voice of a retired cardinal and not that of the Prefect of the Church’s most important Dicastery. [Does Prof. Di Mattei really think that if Mueller as CDF Prefect had chosen to support the Four Cardinals against the express instruction of Bergoglio not to answer them, he would not have been asked by the pope to resign on the spot as he did with the ill-starred Fra Festing of the Knights of Malta? C'mon, get real!]

The support of the Congregation of Faith to the Four Cardinals would have been be ruinous for those who today lead the Revolution in the Church [Prof Di Mattei is going around in circles here! In this totalitarian regime at the Vatican, how could the CDF ever have survived open defiance of the Caudillo Maximo??? Defiance by Mueller would have been a possibility but never a probability], and Pope Francis managed to avoid it. The lesson of the story is that those who do not fight in order not to lose, know defeat after they surrender. [And that's Di Mattei's way of expressing my criticism of Mueller for his moral cowardice!]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/07/2017 23:36]
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