BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI

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See preceding page for earlier entries on 7/10/17.
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July 10, 2017

PewSitter


Canon212.com

German source gives Mueller’s
account of how he was dismissed
Bergoglio asked him five questions, after which he said
‘Good, I want to tell you I am not renewing your mandate’ –
and left the room
By Maike Hickson
ONEPETERFIVE
July 10, 2017

After Cardinal Gerhard Müller, former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, revealed that he had personally spoken by phone with the now-deceased Cardinal Joachim Meisner about his recent dismissal, and that this conversation had taken place the night before Meisner’s sudden death on the morning of 5 July, several well-informed sources in Europe in communication with me all used the same expression, namely, they speculated that perhaps Cardinal Meisner had “died of a broken heart.”

In light of the following disclosures about the content of the 30 June meeting between Pope Francis and Cardinal Müller, we might be even more inclined to believe that this was the case – at least as a moral possibility.

The following information comes from the report of a trustworthy German source, who spoke to OnePeterFive on condition of anonymity. He quotes an eyewitness who recently sat with Cardinal Müller at lunch in Mainz, Germany. During that meal, Cardinal Müller is alleged to have disclosed in the presence of this eyewitness certain information about his final meeting with the pope, during which he was informed that his mandate as Prefect of the CDF would not be renewed.

According to this report, Cardinal Müller was called to the Apostolic Palace on 30 June, and he thus went there with his working files, assuming that this meeting would be a usual working session. The pope told him, however, that he only had five questions for him:
o Are you in favor of, or against, a female diaconate? “I am against it,” responded Cardinal Müller.
o Are you in favor of, or against, the repeal of celibacy? “Of course I am against it,” the cardinal responded.
o Are you in favor of, or against female priests? “I am very decisively against it,” replied Cardinal Müller.
o Are you willing to defend Amoris Laetitia? “As far as it is possible for me,” the Prefect of the Congregation for the Faith replied: “there still exist ambiguities.”
o Are you willing to retract your complaint concerning the dismissal of three of your own employees? Cardinal Müller responded: “Holy Father, these were good, unblemished men whom I now lack, and it was not correct to dismiss them over my head, shortly before Christmas, so that they had to clear their offices by 28 December. I am missing them now.”

Thereupon the pope answered: “Good. Cardinal Müller, I only wanted to let you know that I will not extend your mandate [i.e., beyond 2 July] as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Faith.” Without any farewell or explanation, the pope left the room.

Cardinal Müller at first thought that the pope left in order to fetch a token of gratitude, and thus he waited patiently. But, there was no such gift, nor even an expression of gratitude for his service. The Prefect of the Papal Household, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, then had to explain to him that the meeting was over, and that it was time for him to leave.

At the time of this writing, we have not been able to obtain confirmation of these events from Cardinal Müller, nor from his secretary, to whom we reached out for comment. Similarly, we requested a comment from Greg Burke at the Vatican Press Office, but as of press time, we have received no response.

If this report is true – and, given the sources, we have little reason to doubt it – we can well imagine why Cardinal Meisner would have been distressed after hearing about this meeting in the hours before his death.
- Did these five questions with their yes or no answers, if indeed they were asked of Cardinal Müller, constitute a sort of reverse dubia?
- Were the Cardinal’s responses, insofar as they were in accordance with orthodox Catholic thought, the reason he was not asked to continue in his role as Prefect of the CDF?
Of the five questions, three (female diaconate, priestly celibacy, and the promotion of Amoris Laetitia) have been widely discussed as part of the pope’s “reform” agenda.
- But is the female priesthood really expected to be reviewed in relation to the female diaconate, even though Pope Francis has already personally affirmed the understanding that Pope John Paul II ruled definitively against the possibility?
- And what of the final alleged question — the one pertaining to the pope’s dismissal of three priests from the CDF last year without cause? If such a question were asked, was it merely a test of unquestioning obedience? Recall that the pope’s reported answer, when asked by Cardinal Müller about the dismissal of these three priests, was simply to say, “I am the pope, I do not need to give reasons for any of my decisions. I have decided that they have to leave and they have to leave.” [Given that Mueller had already been the recipient of such an arrant display of bad manners by the current ‘Vicar of Christ on earth’ (it gives me shivers just to think about the inappropriateness of it all), he would have known when the pope left the room on June 30 that he had just received another blast of it!]

In an interview with Passauer Neue Press, Müller revealed additional information that appears to support the above-described abruptness of his final meeting with the pope:

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Pope Francis, Cardinal Müller said, “communicated his decision” not to renew his term “within one minute” on the last work day of his five-year-term, and did not give any reasons for it.

“This style [sic] I cannot accept,” said Müller. In dealing with employees, “the Church’s social teaching should be applied,” he added.

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As our own report on Cardinal Müller’s departure documented, he has suffered a number of indignities during his tenure as CDF prefect under the present pontificate. Nevertheless, Müller has taken pains since the announcement of his departure to give the public appearance that his relationship with the pope was not strained. “There were no differences between me and Pope Francis,” Müller told a local German newspaper during the same visit to Mainz when he was alleged to have revealed to his dining companion the context of his final meeting with the pope.

It is not entirely clear if Müller is expressing a lack of conflict between himself and the pope as a sign of solidarity, or in order to emphasize the unexpectedness of the pope’s decision not to renew his term. Whatever the case, he has sought in public to downplay the significance of his departure.

There is little about Müller’s dismissal from one of the Catholic Church’s most prominent ecclesiastical offices that isn’t unusual. As respected Vatican journalist Marco Tosatti noted in his important July 7 essay for First Things, Müller’s departure from the position at age 69 — well before the mandatory retirement age — was “a gesture unprecedented in the Church’s recent history.” Over the past six decades, Tosatti noted, “prefects of the Church’s most important congregation (it has been called La Suprema) have retired due to age or health reasons, or have been called, in the case of Joseph Ratzinger, to become the pope.” None during that time have suffered the indignity of simply being unceremoniously let go.

One anecdote recounted by Tosatti from his own conversations with friends of the German cardinal gives particular credence to the emerging picture that Pope Francis has long treated the prefect emeritus with contempt:

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It appears that Müller experienced life under Bergoglio as a sort of Calvary. This, despite Müller’s statements—he has been a good soldier to the end, and even beyond.

The first step of Müller’s Calvary was a disconcerting episode in the middle of 2013. The cardinal was celebrating Mass in the church attached to the congregation palace, for a group of German students and scholars. His secretary joined him at the altar: “The pope wants to speak to you.” “Did you tell him I am celebrating Mass?” asked Müller. “Yes,” said the secretary, “but he says he does not mind—he wants to talk to you all the same.” The cardinal went to the sacristy. The pope, in a very bad mood, gave him some orders and a dossier concerning one of his friends, a cardinal. (This is a very delicate matter. I have sought an explanation of this incident from the official channels. Until the explanation comes, if it ever comes, I cannot give further details.) Obviously, Mūller was flabbergasted.

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Like Marco Tosatti, we have sought but may never be able to provide an explanation of the incident of the five questions from official channels. We can only say that our sources are not given to idle speculation. They are confident that the events transpired as they have been described.

For now, it is enough to note that under the present circumstances, even the skeptical would have a hard time dismissing a report of such an incident. The stories coming out of the Vatican are more incredible each day — and even the worst of them seem not to merit comment — or more importantly, correction — in the eyes of Church officials. [Precisely! Because that has been the most obvious thing about these periodic reports of Bergoglio’s bad manners – no one in the Vatican establishment (press office or other Bergoglio surrogates) nor among the Bergoglian paladins, like Andrea Tornielli, for example, has even bothered to rebut these accounts. Perhaps they have become so inured to their master’s temper and foibles that they have come to take it for granted and will not rebut because they cannot rebut.]

July 11, 2017
Yet another apology...
Since I was led to Maike Hickson's story above by Marco Tosatti who translated most of it for his Italian readers on his blogpost yeserday, July 10, I did not notice that Tosatti had added an update towards the end of his post, namely:

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There has been a development. We have received an e-mail from the Vatican spokesman Greg Burke which we are reporting, obviously in the light of the details revealed in 1Peter5: "Dear Marco, I read your piece today about Cardinal Mueller. I only have one thing to say: The reconstruction is totally false. I ask you to please publish what I am writing you. Thanks. Greg"

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Is Burke referring to the details recounted by Hickson's German source? How does he know that 'the reconstruction is totally false'? Was he present, or was someone who was present tell him to say so - those being present, one gathers from the account, being the pope, Cardinal Mueller, and at some point, Mons. Gaenswein who reportedly told Mueller he should not wait for the pope to come back because that was it - audience over.

We can rule out Cardinal Mueller; I doubt Mons. Gaenswein was even questioned by Burke; which leaves us with Bergoglio who may have asked one of his flunkies to tell Burke to send the flat denial. If he had told Burke himself - like JPII would do with Navarro-Valls, picked up the phone and gave him the instructions - Burke might have been less laconic with his denial. Like, "Don't take my word for it, but I have it on the most unimpeachable source that the reconstruction is totally false". Let's see if Burke sent the same note to 1Peter5.

BTW, Fr Z, in reporting about Burke's note to Tosatti, writes: "I’ll just add that, when I read those tales [in 1P5], I was pretty skeptical. Also, Greg Burke doesn’t just make statements without consultation." OK, I can understand skepticism about 'the tales', but the second part of the comment seems to say Burke got instructions to write what he did.

Photos courtesy of Paul Badde (left photo), and Michael Hesemann (right photo)

I can’t believe I missed seeing this excellent tribute put together by the redoubtable Maike Hickson at OnePeterFive…

Cardinal Meisner’s witness
on Fatima and the Dubia
Maike Hickson
ONEPETERFIVE
7/8/2017

As we reported earlier this week, Cardinal Joachim Meisner, one of the four DUBIA cardinals, passed away on 5 July apparently while praying his breviary in preparation for offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in the morning.

In the wake of the news of Cardinal Meisner’s death, Dr. Michael Hesemann – the German Church historian who had earlier provided us with an important 1918 document from the Vatican archives concerning the Freemasonic plan to attack throne and altar – wrote on his own Facebook page a tribute to the German cardinal whom he knew personally and well.

In this tribute, Dr. Hesemann quotes from a private letter which Cardinal Meisner had written to him on 29 December 2016, and these words now aptly seem to be a part of the cardinal’s own spiritual testament. (Meisner also wrote a public spiritual testament to which we later shall return. But this more private testament is even more pertinent, inasmuch as Cardinal Meisner himself was the only one of the four DUBIA cardinals who never made public statements about his own participation and support of the DUBIA.)

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“We live in a time of confusion, not only in society, but also in the Church,” he [Meisner] wrote to me on 29 December 2016. How right he was! And he added – writing it down as a message for all bishops, and at the same time, as an explanation for his signing the DUBIA: “The shepherd is appointed by Christ in order to preserve the herd from error and from confusion.”

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After quoting these memorable words about the current crisis in the Church and the intrinsic duty of the pope, Dr. Hesemann writes about the importance for Cardinal Meisner of Our Lady’s message at Fatima:

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He [Meisner] who is more closely connected with the message of Fatima than any other German bishop, and who had met Sister Lucia, the seer, several times, had great hope {this was December 2016) for the centenary year of Fatima in 2017 and “that the Mother of God would not let us drown in confusion and sin…"

That in 2017 the Federal Government [of Germany] would easily pass a law allowing same-sex ‘marriage’ which is anti-Christian, he [Meisner] could not then foresee. However, his last words in his letter to me have become even more pertinent. Yes, they sound like a testament, his last warning, for our time: “Ever since in our society, there barely exists any more the memory of creation, one has also forgotten who and what man is. And that is why everything is topsy turvy now, (but) one still thinks nonetheless, at most, to serve mankind.” [dim]

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We are grateful to Dr. Hesemann for publishing these words of one of the courageous four DUBIA cardinals, who like the other three, has received much criticism in the recent past [from enemies of orthodoxy] for even presenting the DUBIA.

In December 2016, we reported the sharp words from the German service of Vatican Radio and from katholisch.de, the website of the German Bishops’ Conference, which used words such as “treason” and “renegade” with regard to Cardinal Meisner. As we reported at the time, Meisner might also have been especially singled out for such criticism because of his role at the 2005 Conclave to support Joseph Ratzinger’s election as Pope.


Paul Badde and Cardinal Meisner (Photo courtesy of Paul Badde)
Paul Badde, a German journalist, scholar, and Vatican specialist who knew Cardinal Meisner personally and closely for many years, also reminded us in his own very moving tribute to the German cardinal of his important role at the 2005 Conclave. Badde says that it was Meisner who “had, during the Conclave, uncovered and thwarted a plot of the so-called Sankt Gallen Group against the election [of Joseph Ratzinger].” Badde continues,

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At that time, he became “pope-maker,” next to the Holy Ghost of course. “Today, I fought as never before in my life,” he told me at the time, on the way home from the Sistine Chapel to his lodging at the bottom of the Gianicolo hill. More he was not allowed to say.

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Let us now return to the theme of Fatima. Cardinal Meisner once described at a conference how, during his more than 40 years of life under Communism in East Germany, the Communists always had a special aversion against Fatima, such that they never allowed a Catholic to travel to Fatima. [The regime can do that by refusing to give a tourist visa if the destination is Portugal.] "

That was always denied to us… We were not allowed to talk much about Fatima, because it would always be interpreted as anti-Soviet propaganda,” explained Cardinal Meisner. For him personally, it was a sign that “the devil smells it when he gets seriously into trouble” [wo es ihm an den Kragen geht – literally “when he feels tight around the collar”].

In 2016, shortly after the brief meeting in Cuba between Pope Francis and the Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, Cardinal Meisner proposed that this historic event could and should inspire both the Catholic and the Orthodox leaders to “consecrate us all to the Mother of God in the midst of the current difficulties, just as the seer children of Fatima proposed it”, supporting the idea of a Consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Cardinal Meisner showed his devotion to Fatima on other occasions. In 2013, in a homily on the Vigil of the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima on 13 May, Cardinal Meisner gave a most beautiful presentation about the importance of Fatima, and of the Rosary in particular. Remembering the year 1917, the prelate said:

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The light of the Faith went out in East Europe [with the Russian Revolution], but in the West, the light of the Faith once more arose: that is, Mary’s message about the overcoming of evil with the good, about the conquering of tanks and canons through prayer. And that was in Fatima… where Our Lady found a bridgehead from which she helped to overcome the unbelief… Blessed art thou, Portugal, because you have believed!”

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After the attempted killing of Pope John Paul II in 1981 – who strongly believed that it was through Our Lady of Fatima’s intercession that his life was saved – the Pope asked Cardinal Meisner to celebrate a Holy Mass in Fatima iin 1990 - on “the first Fatima Day without the Bolshevist Empire… in thanksgiving for the liberation from Communism.” (We shall soon come back to this 1990 homily.)

In Meisner’s eyes, it was through Fatima that the political change took place in 1989 in East Europe. “As a weapon against godlessness, the Mother of God gave us prayer, but especially the prayer of the Rosary.”

Cardinal Meisner, who had a very vivid and warm homiletic manner, also remembered an encounter he once had, in 1975, as a young bishop in Communist Germany. A group of visiting tourists - who turned out to be Catholics from the Soviet Union (Kazakhstan) and who had not been at Holy Mass for 30 years - came to his Mass in Erfurt (East Germany). [Kazakhstan, is of course, where Mons. Athanasius Schneider has been serving since 1990]

“We are homesick for the Church!” they told him after Mass. And one man put a very pertinent question to Meisner: “Could you give to me some very important information? Which doctrines of the Faith do we have to pass on to our children and to our children’s children so that they may attain to eternal life?”

Cardinal Meisner was still so touched by these words when he related them again in his 2013 homily: “Such an important question had not been put to me before, nor ever thereafter,” he said. However, when he said he would give each of them in the group a Bible and the Catechism, the man from the Soviet Union politely declined, saying that they are not even permitted to have religious books in their own homes. When asked about taking home a Rosary, the man responded: “Yes, we can do that. But, what does this have to do with my question?”


Cardinal Meisner holds up his rosary as he tells the story of his encounter with Catholics from the USSR.

And Cardinal Meisner answered – holding up his Rosary:

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The Rosary begins with a Cross, at which we pray the creed which contains our whole Faith. Then come the three pearls: Faith, Hope, Charity – the whole teaching for life. That is what we have to live. Then follow the other pearls, the whole Gospel in a kind of secret script, which can only be understood by praying hands and hearts.

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The man took the rosary in his hands and said, “Then I have the whole Catholic Faith in one hand!”

The description of that unexpected and abiding conversation related by Cardinal Meisner should be savored in full in the original homily, in German, in order to see the fuller moral beauty of this true story. Would that we could know what happened to these Catholics from Russia ever since 1975!

Throughout this homily, for example, Cardinal Meisner used some beautiful poetic images and combinations of words that spring from his deep Faith and ardent Love of God. He said, for example:

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“When I reach out to the hand of God, I want to have something in my hand. That is the Rosary!”…
“Whoever prays the Rosary again and again, will feel what the brethren felt on the way to Emmaus, when they asked each other: ‘Did not our hearts burn?’… The heart that burns for Christ is the hope of the world. Mary brought this fire to our world in Fatima.” …
“Not theories, but burning hearts will change the world.”…
Using the beautiful image of the sick woman who touched the seam of Our Lord’s garment, saying, “If I only touch this seam, I will be healed”, Meisner said:
“It is with the Rosary, that that seam of Jesus is given into our hands.”
“When we, praying along with these pearls, receive the words of His Life, then these spiritual seeds will bear fruit – 30-fold, 60-fold, 100-fold, unto eternal life! Each pearl is a mysterious germ of life, because it brings us the Gospel into our life and [brings] our life into the Gospel.

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Cardinal Meisner’s ardent love for the Rosary becomes even clearer in this public statement:

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“When I die, then the canons will come and take away my ring, my crosier… But I have written my testament: you have to leave me my Rosary! I want to take it into my coffin! I wish to show it to the Mother of God so that she may show me, after this exile, Jesus, the Blessed Fruit of her life!

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In his fuller spiritual testament, which has now been published in Cologne, Cardinal Meisner writes a letter to Jesus Christ as a testament of gratitude to God, first for having created him as a human being, then for having made him a priest and a bishop, “formed and consecrated by your wounds,” and for having “used me at your Cross, and for having made me worthy of your wounds.” Written in 2011 – during the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI – he also implores his flock always to remain loyal to Peter and thus to remain in the Faith.

Let us now consider what Cardinal Meisner had to say about Our Lady of Fatima in 1990, when he visited Fatima for the first time in his life, and upon request of Pope John Paul II. Dr. Hesemann kindly made this homily available to me which Cardinal Meisner gave to him for publication for Hesemann’s own book on Fatima (Das Letzte Geheimnis von Fatima – The Last Secret of Fatima).

On 13 May 1990, Cardinal Meisner preached:

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In our old Europe which was once the homeland of Christendom, Jesus Christ barely appears in public any more. Mary – and with her, the Church – has been pushed to the margins of the European societies.

Portugal, however, welcomed Mary 73 years ago – just like John under the Cross – into its own. In Fatima, this famous nation has given a realm and homeland to Mary. From Fatima, Mary could start her path in order to carry Christ back to Europe. In Russia and the other East European states, the Christian faith was nearly forbidden. The peoples of East Europe who highly venerate Mary were only able to give her very little space, since atheism had conquered almost all living space. That is why Mary came from Fatima in order to help the distressed disciples of her Son in the East European states.

Fatima is, so to speak, the bridgehead of Mary from whence Mary subverted the East European people in order to bring them Christ, who truly liberates man. Europe must never forget to thank Portugal for having opened the doors to Mary so that she may convert the godless states in the East of our continent… In those years [of Communism], Mary was the most unassuming but omnipresent companion in suffering and the helper of the distressed… [In the Communist lands], not Marx, but Mary, gave man greatness and dignity.

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When we read these words, we must remember that they were written under the deep impression of the final end of Communism in Europe, after seven decades of godless oppression. The deep gratitude of this prelate is palpable in these words. (Yet in 2016, almost twenty years later, he came to the conclusion that we still were in need of the assistance of Our Lady of Fatima.)

But, there are even deeper reasons for Cardinal Meisner’s devotion to Our Lady. In a 2016 interview about his own life – he was born in 1933 under the Nazi regime, lived for more than 40 years under Communism in East Germany, and then faced the challenges of cultural relativism and liberal Catholicism in the West as Archbishop of Cologne – it becomes clear that it was his own mother who taught him the love of the Blessed Mother and of the Rosary.

In 1945, his mother had to flee the approaching Soviets from Breslau (which is today Polish) to the West, taking along with her not only her four own sons, but six other relatives – two grandmothers and four more children! (Meisner’s father was among the Fallen in Russia – die Gefallenen in Russland – who never returned home.) On their way to the West, the extended Meisner family endured terrible situations such as being abandoned in a van in a heap of snow off the main country road, in the winter, in freezing temperatures below zero. In the middle of this dramatic situation and after having even dropped down a slope in this van, the mother lifted up her Rosary, saying: “God is with us!”

When later searching in vain for hours for a room at night in a little village in soon-to-be Communist Germany, the mother suddenly stood still and calmly explained to her four young sons that she, their mother, was now not able to provide for them and that thus they together now must turn to Mary for help. After saying a special German Marian prayer (Hilf Maria, jetzt ist Zeit) [Help us, Mary, now is the time) three times, a man came out onto the street to them, inviting them into his house with the words: “I can no longer bear to watch a mother and her children standing out on the street at night.”

The whole story of Cardinal Meisner’s life is a story of warmth and courage. I have seldom seen such a unique combination of a warm heart and a strong conviction, which gained respect even among his professed opponents. Even Germany’s most prominent feminist, Alice Schwarzer, recently paid tribute to Cardinal Meisner upon his death, saying: “Yes, I liked him.” She felt a friendship with him and she cherished “his humanity and child-like faith” in spite of their differences of opinion, for example, concerning abortion, as Schwarzer wrote.

She said that at their last meeting a year ago, Meisner gave her a little prayer card with a famous poem of St. Teresa of Avila. The lines “Let nothing frighten you, nothing scare you. Everything shall pass - God alone remains the same” touched Schwarzer especially as being quite “consoling.” Is this not a true Catholic witness who stands firm in the truth and reaches out in charity with Christ’s touch to his own opponents? Is this not also the combination of Our Lord and Our Lady? The Truth and Love combined?

Some of the added inspiration for Meisner’s own courage and Catholic witness comes from none other than Cardinal Jozef Mindszenty himself, the great Hungarian martyr of Communism.

Not too long ago, on 6 May 2017, Cardinal Meisner gave witness to this great man. In a homily in Budapest, Hungary, Meisner recounted how he as a 13-year-old boy happened to see a picture of Cardinal Mindszenty facing charges in a Communist court. Meisner said he was so touched by this image – it reminded him immediately of Our Lord’s being falsely accused – that he fastened this image on the wall of his bedroom, so that he could always look at it before he fell asleep and as soon as he woke up.

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“He was the model of a bishop for me… In me grew the desire that I, one day, would be like the cardinal, a Witness of Christ who has the courage also to stand up against the Powerful of this world.

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Much later, he came across the same picture of Cardinal Mindszenty again. He put it into his breviary – “so that I am connected with him in prayer every day” – that same breviary which was in his hands when he died.

“When we bishops are no longer confessors, then the people of God are not in a good situation,” Meisner added, after first speaking about Mindszenty’s own courageous witness and engagement for mankind. Meisner showed himself especially grateful for Mindszenty’s compassion and solidarity with the 9 million Germans who had to flee their homeland after World War II – among them the Meisner family. “Except for Cardinal Mindszenty, no other bishop then defended us at the time. Bishops have to pay attention not to a good response from the media, but to the proclamation of the truth which has been entrusted to them.”

Cardinal Meisner did not only challenge his own fellow bishops. He also challenged all of us Catholics when he said in 2016,

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“Now is the great chance to become a full Christian – half-Christians will perish!... Now one responsibly has to hold up one’s head, or one will lose it… [We have] a great chance truly to witness that we are Christians!”

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A testimony, as Cardinal Meisner has taught us - through his life and his final official act of signing the DUBIA – rooted in love for Christ, that we can best accomplish with the help of Mary.


On 4 April 2005, Cardinal Meisner – significantly just two weeks before the 18-19 April 2005 Conclave in which he played such an important role – visited the Holy Face (Volto Santo) of Manoppello, together with Paul Badde [who has done the most in our day to disseminate information and devotion to this remarkable icon-relic, inspiring Benedict XVI to make a visit to the shrine early in his Pontificate and declaring it a Basilica.]

The Cardinal was so deeply touched by the loving Face of God that he made a little, once more poetic, inscription in the shrine’s own guest book, an inscription which should inspire us all to a deeper love of Our Lord:

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The Face is the Monstrance of the Heart. On the Volto Santo, the Heart of God becomes Visible.
+ Joachim Card. Meisner, Archbishop of Cologne, Pax Vobis!
4/4/2005

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Love helps overcome fear, as Professor Josef Pieper once explained and exemplified to my husband, Dr. Robert Hickson. The Latin word cor – heart – can also be found in the word courage. Love makes one courageous, like Cardinal Meisner’s mother fighting for her own little ones.

May we all learn to love Our Lord and Our Lady so much that we will fight like lions for them. Let us pray for the repose of the soul of Cardinal Meisner, and may we also fittingly hope that he soon will also intercede for us. And thus may his 2016 words about Fatima and the DUBIA also reach the heart of Pope Francis.

********************************************************************************************************************************************It really is most annoying that the Forum server usually registers one post multiple times. I just wasted a lot of time deleting six extra posts of this story. I apologize because sometimes I do not even realize it right away - and all those repetitive posts stay on like a blight...

Canon law and that ‘Humanae vitae’ rumor
In my opinion the central teaching in HV - that artificial contraception is intrinsically evil —
is a proposition infallibly taught by the (ordinary universal) magisterium of the Church.
by Edward Peters
CATHOLIC WORLD
July 11, 2017

Too many Roman rumors, it seems of late, have turned out to be true (or close enough to true) to rule out recent rumors that a “papal commission” has been set up “to reconsider” (perhaps as a step toward repudiating?) Bl. Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae vitae(1968). In any event, a few observations.

1. Humanae vitae itself, as brilliant as it was and as prophetic as it turned out to be, was not an infallible exercise of the (papal) magisterium. But rather than defend that view against the few serious-thinking Catholics who might disagree, let me move directly to my second point.

2. In my opinion the central teaching in Humanae vitae — that contraception employed by married couples (both terms being correctly understood) is intrinsically evil — is a proposition infallibly taught by the (ordinary universal) magisterium of the Church. I say this in light of my third point.

3. That the substance of Humanae vitae is infallibly taught by the ordinary magisterium is masterfully argued in: John Ford & Germain Grisez, “Contraception and the infallibility of the ordinary magisterium”, Theological Studies 39 (1978) 258-312. This article expands on ideas considered in John Ford & Gerald Kelly, “Can the Catholic Teaching Change?”, in their Contemporary Moral Theology (Newman Press, 1963) II: 256-278, but the 1963 article, while very good, need not be read in order to follow the 1978 discussion.

If Ford and Grisez are correct (as I think they are, even in the face of some important challenges over the years) then no substantive modification of Humanae vitae can be wrought by any commission, papal, dicasterial, or otherwise.

4. What one could imagine being discussed hereabouts is whether the rejection of contraception set forth (I would say, infallibly) in regard to conjugal relations is applicable to non-conjugal relations. Some theologians, solidly committed to defending Church teaching against conjugal contraception, have flagged the fact that the anti-contraception tradition, witnessed to in Humanae vitae, has been clearly articulated, so far at least, only in regard to conjugal sex. See, e.g., Ramón García de Haro (Spanish priest, 1931-1996), Marriage in the Documents of the Magisterium: a course in the theology of marriage (Ignatius, 1993) 297-298.

To be sure, others (including the esteemed William E. May, translator of García de Haro) argue that the Church’s rejection of contraception between married couples, already part of the infallible magisterium, also applies to non-conjugal sex (sex that is, of course, by definition, objectively immoral); but it is also possible that the Church’s rejection of conjugal contraception does not apply outside of that context.

I grant, of course, that explaining that difference, not to mention keeping it from morphing into a license for all sorts of morally illicit acts, would not be easy in age ill-equipped to follow subtle discussions and ill-disposed toward even trying, but for those respectful of the Church’s tradition of precision in complex matters, drawing the distinction seems a possibility.

In any case, my main point is this: Before any commission or study group could move against the substance of the Church’s teaching reflected in Humanae vitae, the arguments for its infallible certainty, arguments set forth and steadily defended by Ford and Grisez, would need to be addressed and soundly rejected.

Something I don’t see happening. At all.

HAPPY NAME DAY

TO OUR BELOVED BENEDICT XVI!

---

Pope Benedict on St. Benedict
General Audience
April 9, 2008

Today, I would like to speak about Benedict, the Founder of Western Monasticism and also the Patron of my Pontificate.

I begin with words that St Gregory the Great wrote about St Benedict: "The man of God who shone on this earth among so many miracles was just as brilliant in the eloquent exposition of his teaching" (cf. Dialogues II, 36).

The great Pope wrote these words in 592 A.D. The holy monk, who had died barely 50 years earlier, lived on in people's memories and especially in the flourishing religious Order he had founded. St Benedict of Norcia, with his life and his work, had a fundamental influence on the development of European civilization and culture.

The most important source on Benedict's life is the second book of St Gregory the Great's Dialogues. It is not a biography in the classical sense. In accordance with the ideas of his time, by giving the example of a real man - St Benedict, in this case - Gregory wished to illustrate the ascent to the peak of contemplation which can be achieved by those who abandon themselves to God. He therefore gives us a model for human life in the climb towards the summit of perfection.

St Gregory the Great also tells in this book of the Dialogues of many miracles worked by the Saint, and here too he does not merely wish to recount something curious but rather to show how God, by admonishing, helping and even punishing, intervenes in the practical situations of man's life. Gregory's aim was to demonstrate that God is not a distant hypothesis placed at the origin of the world but is present in the life of man, of every man.

This perspective of the "biographer" is also explained in light of the general context of his time: Straddling the fifth and sixth centuries, "the world was overturned by a tremendous crisis of values and institutions caused by the collapse of the Roman Empire, the invasion of new peoples and the decay of morals". [If we changed the timeline in the opening phrase to "Straddling the second and third millennia after Christ..." and replacing 'Roman Empire' with 'Western world', St Gregory might have been describing our situation today!]

But in this terrible situation, here, in this very city of Rome, Gregory presented St Benedict as a "luminous star" in order to point the way out of the "black night of history" (cf. John Paul II, 18 May 1979).

In fact, the Saint's work and particularly his Rule were to prove heralds of an authentic spiritual leaven which, in the course of the centuries, far beyond the boundaries of his country and time, changed the face of Europe following the fall of the political unity created by the Roman Empire, inspiring a new spiritual and cultural unity, that of the Christian faith shared by the peoples of the Continent. This is how the reality we call "Europe" came into being.

St Benedict was born around the year 480. As St Gregory said, he came "ex provincia Nursiae" - from the province of Norcia. His well-to-do parents sent him to study in Rome. However, he did not stay long in the Eternal City. As a fully plausible explanation, Gregory mentions that the young Benedict was put off by the dissolute lifestyle of many of his fellow students and did not wish to make the same mistakes. He wanted only to please God: "soli Deo placere desiderans" (II Dialogues, Prol. 1).

Thus, even before he finished his studies, Benedict left Rome and withdrew to the solitude of the mountains east of Rome. After a short stay in the village of Enfide (today, Affile), where for a time he lived with a "religious community" of monks, he became a hermit in the neighbouring locality of Subiaco.

He lived there completely alone for three years in a cave which has been the heart of a Benedictine Monastery called the "Sacro Speco" (Holy Grotto) since the early Middle Ages. The period in Subiaco, a time of solitude with God, was a time of maturation for Benedict.

It was here that he bore and overcame the three fundamental temptations of every human being: the temptation of self-affirmation and the desire to put oneself at the centre, the temptation of sensuality and, lastly, the temptation of anger and revenge.

In fact, Benedict was convinced that only after overcoming these temptations would he be able to say a useful word to others about their own situations of neediness. Thus, having tranquilized his soul, he could be in full control of the drive of his ego and thus create peace around him. Only then did he decide to found his first monasteries in the Valley of the Anio, near Subiaco.

In the year 529, Benedict left Subiaco and settled in Monte Cassino. Some have explained this move as an escape from the intrigues of an envious local cleric. However, this attempt at an explanation hardly proved convincing since the latter's sudden death did not induce Benedict to return (II Dialogues, 8). I

n fact, this decision was called for because he had entered a new phase of inner maturity and monastic experience. According to Gregory the Great, Benedict's exodus from the remote Valley of the Anio to Monte Cassio - a plateau dominating the vast surrounding plain which can be seen from afar - has a symbolic character: a hidden monastic life has its own raison d'être but a monastery also has its public purpose in the life of the Church and of society, and it must give visibility to the faith as a force of life.

Indeed, when Benedict's earthly life ended on 21 March 547, he bequeathed with his Rule and the Benedictine family he founded a heritage that bore fruit in the passing centuries and is still bearing fruit throughout the world.

Throughout the second book of his Dialogues, Gregory shows us how St Benedict's life was steeped in an atmosphere of prayer, the foundation of his existence. Without prayer there is no experience of God.

Yet Benedict's spirituality was not an interiority removed from reality. In the anxiety and confusion of his day, he lived under God's gaze and in this very way never lost sight of the duties of daily life and of man with his practical needs. Seeing God, he understood the reality of man and his mission.

In his Rule he describes monastic life as "a school for the service of the Lord" (Prol. 45) and advises his monks, "let nothing be preferred to the Work of God" [that is, the Divine Office or the Liturgy of the Hours] (43, 3).

However, Benedict states that in the first place prayer is an act of listening (Prol. 9-11), which must then be expressed in action. "The Lord is waiting every day for us to respond to his holy admonitions by our deeds" (Prol. 35). Thus, the monk's life becomes a fruitful symbiosis between action and contemplation, "so that God may be glorified in all things" (57, 9).

In contrast with a facile and egocentric self-fulfilment, today often exalted, the first and indispensable commitment of a disciple of St Benedict is the sincere search for God (58, 7) on the path mapped out by the humble and obedient Christ (5, 13), whose love he must put before all else (4, 21; 72, 11), and in this way, in the service of the other, he becomes a man of service and peace.

In the exercise of obedience practised by faith inspired by love (5, 2), the monk achieves humility (5, 1), to which the Rule dedicates an entire chapter (7). In this way, man conforms ever more to Christ and attains true self-fulfilment as a creature in the image and likeness of God.

The obedience of the disciple must correspond with the wisdom of the Abbot who, in the monastery, "is believed to hold the place of Christ" (2, 2; 63, 13). The figure of the Abbot*, which is described above all in Chapter II of the Rule with a profile of spiritual beauty and demanding commitment, can be considered a self-portrait of Benedict, since, as St Gregory the Great wrote, "the holy man could not teach otherwise than as he himself lived" (cf. Dialogues II, 36).

The Abbot must be at the same time a tender father and a strict teacher (cf. 2, 24), a true educator. Inflexible against vices, he is nevertheless called above all to imitate the tenderness of the Good Shepherd (27, 8), to "serve rather than to rule" (64, 8) in order "to show them all what is good and holy by his deeds more than by his words" and "illustrate the divine precepts by his example" (2, 12).

To be able to decide responsibly, the Abbot must also be a person who listens to "the brethren's views" (3, 2), because "the Lord often reveals to the youngest what is best" (3, 3). This provision makes a Rule written almost 15 centuries ago surprisingly modern! A man with public responsibility even in small circles must always be a man who can listen and learn from what he hears. [Cardinal Ratzinger followed this abbot's rule when he was CDF Prefect, where all those who attended the weekly staff meetings he held testify that he would first call on the newest members of the staff to express their views.]

Benedict describes the Rule he wrote as "minimal, just an initial outline" (cf. 73, 8); in fact, however, he offers useful guidelines not only for monks but for all who seek guidance on their journey toward God. For its moderation, humanity and sober discernment between the essential and the secondary in spiritual life, his Rule has retained its illuminating power even to today.

By proclaiming St Benedict Patron of Europe on 24 October 1964, Paul VI intended to recognize the marvellous work the Saint achieved with his Rule for the formation of the civilization and culture of Europe.

Having recently emerged from a century that was deeply wounded by two World Wars and the collapse of the great ideologies, now revealed as tragic utopias, Europe today is in search of its own identity.

Of course, in order to create new and lasting unity, political, economic and juridical instruments are important, but it is also necessary to awaken an ethical and spiritual renewal which draws on the Christian roots of the Continent, otherwise a new Europe cannot be built.

Without this vital sap, man is exposed to the danger of succumbing to the ancient temptation of seeking to redeem himself by himself - a utopia which in different ways, in 20th-century Europe, as Pope John Paul II pointed out, has caused "a regression without precedent in the tormented history of humanity" (Address to the Pontifical Council for Culture, 12 January 1990).

Today, in seeking true progress, let us also listen to the Rule of St Benedict as a guiding light on our journey. The great monk is still a true master at whose school we can learn to become proficient in true humanism.

---

*The qualities of the ideal Abbot that St. Benedict describes are equally the qualities of a Pope, who must be both 'a tender father and a strict teacher, a good educator'. No one will deny that Benedict XVI met those criteria.

Despite the necessarily forced arbitrariness of the categories to fit into his alphabetical scheme, Mr. Westen skims at least 26 topics of concern
to orthodox Catholics about this pope...

An A-Z list of our concerns
about Pope Francis
by John-Henry Westen
Editor

July 11, 2017

The confusion caused by Pope Francis in the Catholic Church is out of control. There have been so many incidents over the last four years that the specifics, despite their grave damage, are often forgotten. In an effort to encourage prayer for an end to the confusion and disorientation in the Church, LifeSite presents the following A-Z list of our concerns about Pope Francis.

Amoris Laetitia
The document so long awaited to bring needed clarification from the Pope served rather to increase confusion the world over as the Pope himself approved interpretations (Malta, Germany) which allowed for Holy Communion to be given to divorced and remarried Catholics.

Burke demotion
Cardinal Raymond Burke was removed from one of the highest offices in the Church, as the supreme justice of the Church's highest court. Instead he, one of the most faithful Cardinals, was given a largely ceremonial position with the Order of Malta and even there his role was stripped.

Cohabitation
Pope Francis said “cohabitations” with fidelity are “real marriage” and “have the grace of real marriage.” On another occasion when the Pope made similar remarks, papal confidante Fr. Antonio Spadaro tweeted a photo of the Pope greeting a couple who “prefer to live together without getting married.”

Danneels [Not DUBIA?]
Cardinal Godfried Danneels, the emeritus archbishop of Brussels, was a personal appointment by Pope Francis to the Synods of Bishops on the family. In addition to wearing rainbow liturgical vestments and being caught on tape concealing sexual abuse, Danneels said in 2013 of the passage of gay “marriage”: “I think it’s a positive development that states are free to open up civil marriage for gays if they want.”

Emma Bonino
In an interview with Corriere Della Sera Pope Francis praised Italy’s unrepentant leading abortionist and proponent of abortion, Emma Bonino, as one of the nation’s “forgotten greats,” comparing her to great historical figures such as Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schuman.

First synod interim document
The scandalous mid-term relatio of the first Synod on the Family was seen and approved-for-release by the Pope according to Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, secretary general of the Synod of Bishops. In a section titled ‘Welcoming homosexual persons’, the document states: “Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community.” It then asks: “Are our communities capable of providing [them a welcoming home], accepting and valuing their sexual orientation, without compromising Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony?”

Gender-confused couple at Vatican
Pope Francis had a widely publicized meeting at the Vatican with a woman who underwent sex-change surgery and her 'wife'. ['He' is still a she who is now married to another 'she!]
On October 2, 2016, Pope Francis referred to a woman who underwent a sex-change operation as a “man.” He referred to her as having “married” another woman and admitted to inviting and receiving them to the Vatican in 2015, describing the couple as “happy”. Clarifying his use of pronouns, the pope said, "He that was her but is he."

Holy See population control
Since shortly after the election of Pope Francis there has been a steady stream of population control pushers speaking at the Vatican. These include: Paul Ehrlich, the father of the population control movement; John Bongaarts, vice president of the pro-abortion Population Council; pro-abortion U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon; and population controllers Jeffrey Sachs and John Schellnhuber. The head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Sciences, Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, who ran most of those conferences, is himself a population control advocate saying on camera at one such Vatican conference that limiting births was an obligation of the Church.

Irresponsible to have 8 children?
On January 19, 2015 while speaking of "responsible" parenthood, the pope cautioned against Catholics being “like rabbits.” The pope spoke about a woman he knows who he said was pregnant with her eighth child after having the first seven by C-section. He said he had “rebuked” her, saying, “But do you want to leave seven orphans? That is to tempt God!” “That is an irresponsibility. [That woman might say] 'no but I trust in God.' But God gives you methods to be responsible,” he said.

“Some think that, excuse me if I use that word, that in order to be good Catholics we have to be like rabbits.” He added, “No. Responsible parenthood!”

Judge – Who am I to….
Despite the avalanche of evidence of harm to the Church from the Pope’s first ‘Who am I to judge’ remark on his first plane interview in 2013, he repeated the line in June 2016 while misrepresenting the Catechism on homosexuality.

Kasper
A few days into his pontificate, Pope Francis praised one of Cardinal Kasper’s books and then selected Kasper to deliver the controversial keynote address to launch the synods on the family. Kasper was a personal appointee of the pope to the synods and regularly meets with Pope Francis. Kasper defended the recent vote of the Irish in favor of homosexual “marriages”, saying: “A democratic state has the duty to respect the will of the people; and it seems clear that, if the majority of the people wants such homosexual unions, the state has a duty to recognize such rights.”

Luther, serious sin to convert
The Pope spoke to an audience before a statue of Luther in the Vatican just prior to his going to Sweden to help launch the 500th anniversary of Lutheranism. The Vatican issued a stamp featuring Luther and put out a document saying Catholics now recognize Martin Luther as a ‘witness to the gospel’.

On another occassion he said it is a “very grave sin” to try to convert Orthodox to Catholicism: “There is a very grave sin against ecumenism: proselytism.”

Multiplication of loaves
During the Angelus of June 2, 2013, he spoke about Christ’s miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes as taking place by "sharing." “This is the miracle: rather than a multiplication it is a sharing, inspired by faith and prayer,” he said.

He was even more explicit about it in July 2015 in a homily preached in Christ the Redeemer Square in Bolivia. Pope Francis said, “This is how the miracle takes place. It is not magic or sorcery. … Jesus managed to generate a current among his followers: they all went on sharing what was their own, turning it into a gift for the others; and that is how they all got to eat their fill. Incredibly, food was left over: they collected it in seven baskets.”

Name-calling against faithful
Pope Francis has frequently castigated faithful adherents of the Catholic faith as “obsessed,” “doctors of the law,” “neo-pelagian,” “self-absorbed,” “restorationist,” “fundamentalist,” “rigid,” “ideological,” “hypocritical,” and much more. In addressing faithful Cardinals at the Synod of the Family, in magazine interviews, book interviews, radio interviews, official church documents, and in homily after homily, he has used condemning language indicating they are “idolaters and rebels who will never arrive at the fullness of the truth,” and “heretics and not Catholics.”

Overhaul of Cardinal Sarah’s dicastery
Cardinal Sarah, head of the Vatican’s liturgical dicastery, called for the faithful to kneel for Holy Communion and priests to face ad orientem for Mass. Pope Francis reacted swiftly to counter the suggestion, having the Vatican press office issue a statement saying that there was no change and stressing the ordinary form is to be preferred. Shortly thereafter the Pope replaced most of Cardinal Sarah’s collaborators in his dicastery with liberals.

Pontifical Academy for Life scandals
Pope Francis named controversial Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia to lead the Pontifical Academy for Life despite scandals such as the Vatican sex-ed program and the homoerotic mural he erected at his former cathedral. Thereafter all the members of the Academy were removed, the pro-life pledge discontinued, and a new list of members named that included anti-life advocates.

Queer selection of Cupich
In 2014 Pope Francis appointed Bishop Blase Cupich as Archbishop of Chicago despite his reputation for telling priests not to join 40 Days for Life. After he demonstrated his dissent to Catholic teaching on homosexuality, saying homosexual couples should be given Holy Communion, Cupich was nevertheless named a Cardinal.

Refusal to answer dubia
After massive confusion around the globe over Communion for adulterers, four prominent Cardinals sent Pope Francis a letter on September 19, 2016 asking for clarification to five key questions. Two months later with no answer received, they went public with their questions and humbly begged the Pope for an answer for the good of the Church. Despite the pleas of theologians and scholars worldwide, and tens of thousands of faithful and clergy, the Holy Father has steadfastly refused to answer. On April 25 the Cardinals formally asked the Pope for a meeting to discuss the matter, but after not even receiving the courtesy of a reply, they released their letter June 19.

Scalfari interviews: ‘Annihilation’ rather than hell?
In March 2015 in an interview with La Repubblica founder Eugenio Scalfari, the Pope suggested no person could go to hell, and proposed annihilation for those who fully reject God. The article says: “What happens to that lost soul? Will it be punished? And how? The response of Francis is distinct and clear: there is no punishment, but the annihilation of that soul.”

There was some controversy over Repubblica's Scalfari interview. The Vatican would neither verify nor deny it in its specific parts, but nevertheless published it in the Vatican newspaper, and on the Vatican website. They later deleted it from the website, only to republish it again, then delete it again. Vatican watchers compared the most controversial part regarding the impossibility of people going to hell for all eternity to the statement from the Pope’s latest exhortation Amoris Laetitia, in which he said, “No one can be condemned for ever, because that is not the logic of the Gospel!”

Traditional youth bashing
"I always try to understand what's behind people who are too young to have experienced the pre-conciliar liturgy and yet still they want it," the pontiff said in a November 2016 interview. "Sometimes I found myself confronted with a very strict person, with an attitude of rigidity. And I ask myself: Why so much rigidity? Dig, dig, this rigidity always hides something, insecurity or even something else. Rigidity is defensive. True love is not rigid."

He spoke similarly in May 2017 when in a homily he spoke “of the many young people in the Church today who have fallen into the temptation of rigidity.” Speaking of those who are ‘rigid’ and insincere, he said, “They are rigid people living a double life: They make themselves look good, sincere, but when no one sees them, they do ugly things.”

Universality destruction
[The universality Westen refers to him is actually the Church's catholicity - which Bergoglio is destroying in both the lower-case c and capital C senses!]
In his 2013 Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis called for a “conversion of the papacy” and expressed a need to give episcopal conferences “genuine doctrinal authority.” Decentralization is a key demand of heterodox clergy in the Church.

During the 2015 Synod on the Family, Pope Francis said he “felt the need to proceed in a healthy ‘decentralization'” of power to the “Episcopal Conferences.” He discussed plans for decentralization with his College of Cardinals both in December 2015 and again in June 2017. In 2016 Pope Francis suggested decentralization as a way forward in the debate over Communion for adulterers.

Vatican doctrine chief dismissal
Cardinal Gerhard Muller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, 69, was removed from his post despite all his contemporary predecessors remaining in office till their retirement. Several Cardinals told Pope Francis to remove Muller, who maintained doctrinal orthodoxy since he was opposing the Pope’s agenda for change. Muller revealed that the Pope dismissed him in a one minute conversation. The move is widely seen as a punishment for opposing the Pope’s agenda.

World Youth Day sex ed
At World Youth Day in 2016, the Vatican released a teen sex-ed program that neglected the parents’ central role in such matters, failed to even mention mortal sin, and included sexually explicit photos and films.

X-rated speech
The dignity of the papacy took a hit when Pope Francis used the scatological terms coprophilia (love of excrement) and coprophagia (love of eating excrement) to bash the media for reporting on scandals within the Church.

Yayo Grassi
When the United States nuncio had pro-family hero Kim Davis meet with Pope Francis at the nunciature during his USA papal visit, Davis was refused permission to take photos of the meeting. When the media asked the Vatican about the meeting they first refused to confirm it, and after some time said that "the only real audience granted by the Pope at the nunciature (embassy) was with one of his former students and his family." The Pope’s former student, Yayo Grassi, was there with his sister and mother and his homosexual partner. They took not only photos but also video in which Pope Francis can be seen embracing Grassi and his homosexual partner.

Zika (contraception)
Pope Francis was asked about “avoiding pregnancy” in areas at risk of Zika virus transmission. “Paul VI, a great man, in a difficult situation in Africa, permitted nuns to use contraceptives in cases of rape,” he said. “On the other hand, avoiding pregnancy is not an absolute evil,” he added. “In certain cases, as in this one, such as the one I mentioned of Blessed Paul VI, it was clear.” Asked for clarification, the Vatican confirmed that Pope Francis was approving use of contraceptives and condoms in grave cases. (A contradiction of Church teaching.)

So now we know: Besides Marco Tosatti, Greg Burke did e-mail the original publisher of the story recounting what else took place at Cardinal's Mueller's
last audience with the pope... Steve Skojec stands by his editorial decision to run the story.

Getting the story in perspective:
Nothing new or surprising
in the 'Five Questions' story
by Steve Skojec
ONE PETERFIVE
7/11/2017

Yesterday, when we hit 'publish' on the story about five alleged questions the pope asked Cardinal Müller before informing him his mandate as prefect of the CDF would not be renewed, I knew we were opening the door to backlash, outrage, and accusations.

This is only the second time (that I can recall) that we’ve published an original story in which we’ve not been able to get direct corroboration from a first-hand source. [The first time was when 1P5 published an article in January 2016 that the pope had' threatened' the 13 cardinals who protested to him in a letter at the start of the 2015 Synod about how the proceedings were being manipulated.]

Both times, I calculated the risk that we could be wrong against the probability that we would be right. Both times, the stories were credible because of our sources and what we already knew about the topic at hand.

We’ve now received multiple points of denial on our story.
- Greg Burke, Director of the Vatican Press Office, was so urgent in his insistence that the “reconstruction is totally false” (interestingly, this is the first time he’s ever responded to my requests for a statement) that he sent an insistent followup less than six hours after the first, which hit my inbox at 2:33AM my time while I was asleep. (Evidently, story corrections are supposed to transpire far faster than DUBIA answers…)
- The personal secretary of Cardinal Müller has denied that these questions were put to Müller and said that our report was “doing damage” to the cardinal, though he did not explain how Müller being depicted as an orthodox prefect willing to stand his ground for the faith in a job he was already unceremoniously dismissed from would harm him.
- We’ve even heard through the journalistic grapevine that Cardinal Müller himself has seen the article, and was “shocked” by it.

Nevertheless, our sources — including the one who spoke to the eyewitness directly — continue to stand their ground, and I think it’s worth investigating the claims made in the report on their merits. [OMG, since the 1P5 source was German, could the 'eyewitness' adduced by the source be Mons. Gaenswein, who, as far as I can tell, appears to have been the only other dramatis personae mentioned in relation to the audience? The plausibility question comes in, because Mueller isn't a head of state so there is no reason why Gaenswein should have accompanied him to the audience, and even if he did, would the pope have allowed him to listen in?]

We’ll set aside for the moment the different standards for journalism between the US and Europe in general, and more particularly, Italy and the Vatican, where the truth appears to be a far more malleable thing. And for the sake of argument, let’s also set aside the veracity of the report itself. What if the entire thing was, for reasons I honestly can’t puzzle out, a fabrication?

Why is the story shocking or outrageous? Is it because it tells us something we don’t already know? Hardly. With the exception of the insinuation-laden question to a cardinal prefect of the CDF about his position on women’s ordination (an already settled matter), every single piece of the puzzle we presented is a known quantity to our readers. Let’s look closer:

The overarching theme in the story is that the pope met with Müller in a very cold and curt way, and asked him a series of questions that either formed the basis of or affirmed his decision not to renew the cardinal’s mandate as prefect.

But we already know that the pope was brusque in his treatment of Müller. Müller himself said so:

---

Pope Francis, Cardinal Müller said, “communicated his decision” not to renew his term “within one minute” on the last work day of his five-year-term, and did not give any reasons for it.

“This style [sic] I cannot accept,” said Müller. In dealing with employees, “the Church’s social teaching should be applied,” he added.

---

We also know that in the past sixty years, no cardinal prefect of the CDF has been let go before retirement age, and that Francis’s decision to let Müller know at the last possible moment and with no rationale given was entirely out of the ordinary and would be construed by any reasonable person as rude.

So what of the questions that Francis is alleged to have asked? His own dubia, as it were? The simple asking of these questions does not in any way signal his personal interpretation of them or the answers he would give. Of course, the implication of getting answers in the negative to all of them as a basis to refuse renewal of Müller’s mandate would seem to indicate that the pope favors the positive answer in each case. But let’s take them one at a time and see what we know about the papal position on each:

1. “Are you in favor of, or against, a female diaconate?”
Hardly a groundbreaking question from a man who formed a commission that is studying this very issue, and who has now replaced the cardinal prefect with the man he personally chose to head up that commission. It is not at all unreasonable to think that the pope considers this issue favorably.

(Müller’s reported answer, “I am against it,” speaks favorably of his orthodoxy in this regard.)

2. “Are you in favor of, or against, the repeal of celibacy?”
The question of revisiting the discipline on clerical celibacy has come up not infrequently during this pontificate. As we reported last year,
- “Bishop Erwin Kräutler of Brazil declared, after his private audience with Pope Francis in 2014, that the pope had encouraged him to further explore this matter and to be “courageous” in doing so.” - Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian liberation theologian and consultant to Pope Francis, said last December that he believed the pope wants to perform a trial experiment on relaxing the discipline in his home country of Brazil after receiving a request from his friend Cardinal Claudio Hummes.
- Vatican experts Marco Tosatti and Sandro Magister have both indicated they see movement in this direction.
- The issue is being pushed by the largest lay Catholic organization in Germany at a time when Germany is facing a massive vocation crisis and the German bishops enjoy unprecedented influence in Rome.
- Francis himself has expressed in public statements an openness toward initiatives that move in this direction.

(Müller’s repported answer, “Of course I am against it,” speaks favorably of his orthodoxy in this regard.)

3. “Are you in favor of, or against, female priests?”
This is the sole standout question, the one point of discussion that has ruffled the most feathers. And this is understandable, because the pope has made clear — that is to say, as clear as he ever makes things — that he believes the door to this question was closed by John Paul II. [So did JPII close the door to communion for RCDs, but did that stop Bergoglio at all from re-opening the door so disastrously???]

I suspect that this is an issue he will not try to push, despite his close adviser Cardinal Reinhard Marx indicating that Francis had praised the work of Bishop Fritz Lobinger, who has written in favor of ordaining women.

But if a female diaconate is something Francis truly wants, is it really too much to believe that a Hegelian dialectic — a method he historically favors — could be an important part of the rhetorical advance?

(Müller’s reported answer, “I am very decisively against it,” speaks favorably of his orthodoxy in this regard.)

4. “Are you willing to defend Amoris Laetitia?”
There is clearly nothing controversial about this question. Amoris Laetitia is the pope’s Magnum Opus and the single most divisive issue in the Church today. It is widely believed that Müller was initially favorable toward the DUBIA but opposed making the questions public — an opposition he has attested to in public commentary that very much undermined the force of the DUBIA cardinals’ work.

Müller has always taken the approach of attempting to interpret AL as changing nothing when it comes to sacramental discipline — an untenable claim, but one that he clearly believes allows him to support the exhortation without compromising his moral position on communion for the “remarried”.

Nevertheless, he has claimed that “Amoris Laetitia is very clear in its doctrine and [in it] we can interpret the whole doctrine of Jesus concerning marriage, the whole doctrine of the Church of 2000 years history,” and further, that in it “there is not any danger to the Faith”.

It is thus reasonable to see why the pope might ask if Müller is willing to defend it, since the pope’s own affirmation of the Argentinian bishops approach, which allows communion for the remarried, is the one about which Francis says there can be “no other interpretation.”

(Cardinal Müller’s alleged answer, “As far as it is possible for me,” the Prefect of the Congregation for the Faith replied: “there still exist ambiguities”, makes perfect sense in light of the above.)

5. “Are you willing to retract your complaint concerning the dismissal of three of your own employees?”
We covered the astonishing story of the unilateral and unexplained dismissal of three priests from the CDF whom Müller himself considered among his best employees and did not want to see go. From our excerpt of Marco Tosatti’s description of the events:

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The head of a dicastery has received the order to remove three of his employees (all of whom have worked there for a long time), and it was without any explanation. He [the Prefect] received these official letters: “….I request that you please dismiss ….” The order was: send him [each of them] back into his diocese of origin or to the Religious Family to which he belongs.

He [the Prefect of the Congregation] was very perplexed because it was about three excellent priests who are among the most capable professionally. He first avoided obeying and several times asked for an audience with the pope. He had to wait because that meeting was postponed several times.

Finally, he was received in an audience. And he said: “Your Holiness, I have received these letters, but I did not do anything because these persons are among the best of my dicastery… what did they do?” The answer was, as follows: “And I am the pope, I do not need to give reasons for any of my decisions. I have decided that they have to leave and they have to leave.” He got up and stretched out his hand in order to indicate that the audience was at an end.

On 31 December [2016], two of the three [men] will leave the dicastery in which they have worked for years, and without knowing the why. For the third, there seems to be a certain delay. But then, there is another implication which, if true, would be even more unpleasant. One of the two had freely spoken about certain decisions of the pope – perhaps a little bit too much. A certain person – a friend of a close collaborator of the pope – heard this disclosure and passed it on. The victim received then a very harsh telephone call from Number One [i.e., the pope]. And then soon came the dismissal.”

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It was clear from this initial report that Müller did not believe this decision was just, and the fact that his opinion on the matter was widely reported in the media would certainly give a basis to the pope to request that he retract such complaints if he felt they indicated insubordination. Müller later confirmed the story directly — and his opposition to the way the pope handled it — in his interview with EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo. There is absolutely nothing far-fetched here.

(Cardinal Müller’s alleged response: “Holy Father, these were good, unblemished men whom I now lack, and it was not correct to dismiss them over my head, shortly before Christmas, so that they had to clear their offices by 28 December. I am missing them now,” is totally in character with his initial objections, and shows that on this issue at least, he is willing to stand his ground for the sake of justice.)

So that dispenses with the five questions. Nothing outlandish, nothing unexpected, no ground that has not already been tread. The fact that the pope is willing to arbitrarily and capriciously dispense with members of the CDF also segues nicely to him being willing to arbitrarily and capriciously dispense with the CDF prefect. There is no incongruity.

And if we’re being perfectly candid, the image of poor Cardinal Müller not realizing that the pope just dropped the microphone and walked out — and sitting there patiently waiting for a token of gratitude for his service until the papal prefect had to gently tell him it was time to go — is so characteristically Müller, that it frankly sells the entire story.

Müller is known to have great esteem for the office of CDF prefect, and believes that he has unique gifts to offer the Church — contributions he takes very seriously and hopes to have recognized. He appears to have been characterIstically unable to see that he has been treated with contempt from the very beginning of this papacy. [Part of what I have called Muller's well-bunkered state of deep denial.]

If this portion of the report is a fabrication, it is an excellent one. It’s not a detail I could see someone thinking to add unless they knew the cardinal very, very well. This particular pattern of behavior in the cardinal is subtle, and really only emerges when one pays close attention to his mode of operation over time.

When I made the decision to run this story, I did it on the basis of trust and credibility. Trust for Dr. Hickson and her sources, and credibility of themes we’ve seen play out over and over and over again.

There was nothing new in our report. There was only the possibility of a more concrete affirmation of what we already know. And because of this, despite the denials — we’ve faced those before — we will continue to give our sources, who stand by their story, the benefit of the doubt unless new evidence emerges to the contrary.

July 11, 2017

PewSitter


Canon212.com


President Trump’s Warsaw speech
by Fr. George Rutler
CRISIS MAGAZINE
July 11, 2017

In the mid-nineteenth century, the poet and playwright Adam Mickiewicz dramatized the theme of his suffering Poland as the “Christ of Nations” and, deprived of its national identity for two centuries, the agony worsened when, in an image borrowed by many, Poland was crucified between the two thieves of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.

It was not the West’s proudest moment when President Roosevelt complained to Stalin at the Yalta Conference that “Poland has been a source of trouble for over five hundred years.” The same Roosevelt had found it convenient to accept the Soviet propaganda attempt to blame the Katyn Forest massacres on the Germans.

Pope John Paul II lamented Yalta in the encyclical Centesimus Annus. That will resonate in the annals of papal teaching more than recent magisterial concerns about the responsible use of air conditioning and the like. For those who have been crucified by tyrants, acquiescence to evil is more consequential that what can or cannot be done about ozone.

On July 6 in Warsaw, in Krasinski Square, President Trump spoke of a culture with which a generation of “millennials” have be unfamiliar: “Americans, Poles, and the nations of Europe value individual freedom and sovereignty. We must work together to confront forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith, and tradition that make us who we are.”

Armchair journalists, for whom the “Christ of Nations” is an enigma, resented “a tiny speech, a perfunctory racist speech,” “xenophobic” and “a catalogue of effrontery” and a comparison was made with Mussolini.

In 1978, Solzhenitsyn once was pilloried for similar themes during a commencement address in Cambridge, Massachusetts: First Lady Rosalynn Carter, with limited experience of Gulags, said he did not know what he was talking about.

Reagan was advised by his Chief of Staff Howard Baker and National Security Advisor Colin Powell not to tell Mr. Gorbachev to take down the Berlin Wall. They thought it was “extreme” and “un-presidential.”

Such commentators might have called the Funeral Oration of Pericles “bellicose” and Queen Elizabeth’s speech at Tilbury “demagogic” and Washington’s “Farewell Address” in Fraunces Tavern “lachrymose and exploitive.”

While not making rhetorical comparisons between the Warsaw Speech and what Lincoln said at Gettysburg, for times change and with it their demotics, in 1863 the Harrisburg Patriot & Union mocked “the silly remarks of the President” and sniffed: “… for the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall be no more repeated or thought of.”

The Warsaw speech mentioned three priests: Copernicus, John Paul II and Michael Kozal. The latter was the bishop of Wloclawek who was martyred by the Nazis in Dachau along with 220 of his priests in 1943. After lengthy torture, the Nazi doctor Joseph Sneiss injected him with a dose of phenol “to make easier” his way to eternity. St. John Paul II beatified Bishop Kojal two days after Reagan’s Berlin speech.

Dr. Sneiss has his disciples now in much of Europe and he would have a busy practice today on our own Golden Shores, in California, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and the nation’s very capital.

Among the irritations in the Warsaw speech were these words: “We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives.” As that was being said, the parents of a gravely ill child, Charlie Gard, were tussling with government officials in London who did not want to release their infant to them.

A Polish philosopher, Zbigniew Stawrowski, has written:

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The fundamental cleavage is not the West v. Islam or the West v. the rest, but within the West itself: between those who recognize the values of Judaeo-Christian Graeco-Roman culture and those who use terms like “democracy,” “values,” “rights” but pervert the latter. So it means democracy of the elites, values of secularism, rights to kill Charlie Gard, marriage that has nothing to do with sex, sex that … is a “private” matter to be funded by the confiscatory state and your duty to support this incoherence…

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The Polish king Jan III Sobieski rescued Christian civilization at the gates of Vienna in 1683. That was one of the “troubles” that Poland has caused in the past five hundred years. We survive because of such troublesome behavior.

Just before the Warsaw speech, former president Obama teased the cautions of the Logan Act by making a foreign policy speech in Indonesia, in which he warned against “an aggressive kind of nationalism.” He was never guilty of that in his many contrite speeches to foreign countries Muslim and other.

At the same time, in an interview with the French journal La Croix, the new Cardinal Archbishop of Newark, New Jersey, denounced “an exaggerated patriotism in the United States,” and alleged that, “President Trump appeals to the dark side of Americans. He speaks to fears, to insecurities.”

The throngs of Poles who cheered the president in Warsaw did not think that he was appealing to their dark side, for their national experience had tutored them harshly in what really makes darkness dark.

Busy as they were preparing picnics and fireworks, few people in New York and New Jersey seem to have read La Croix and the torch carried by “Liberty Enlightening the World,” the Statue of Liberty, which is near Newark, was not unplugged.

Over the July 4 weekend, a large conference of invited Catholic leaders was held in Orlando, Florida, organized as “an ongoing initiative of the Bishops’ Working Group on the Life and Dignity of the Human Person.”

Undaunted by the failure of countless conferences and “renewal programs” over recent decades to accomplish their stated purpose, the organizers cannot be faulted for a lack of optimism in thinking that a new missionary zeal may be born from several days of speeches, seminars, “dialogues” and an occasional performance of soporific “Christian” elevator music.

The tone was upbeat, and one does not want to squelch the Spirit, but the general tone was of human optimism rather than supernatural hope, and not altogether more reassuring than Captain Smith telling the passengers on the top deck of Titanic to ignore any pieces of ice.

Orlando is not Warsaw and Orlando’s Disney World is not Krasinski Square, which was a buffer between the Warsaw Ghetto and the rest of the city. Sleeping Beauty’s castle is safe in Orlando, but the Nazis demolished the Badeni Palace facing Krasinski Square.

If Catholics in the United States would learn about zeal for the Faith, they might consider a trip to Krasinski Square where, in place of Mickey Mouse, is a monument to the Warsaw Uprising. It is a silent instruction about “the dignity of the human person” without cool entertainers and smiling clergymen preaching with “face microphones.”

On the 150th anniversary of the editorial in the Harrisburg Patriot & Union disdaining Lincoln’s remarks at Gettysburg, the editors of that newspaper’s successor, The Patriot News very gentlemanly, and indeed nobly, rescinded those earlier articles:

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…a grateful nation long ago came to view those words with reverence, without guidance from this chagrined member of the mainstream media.

The world will little note nor long remember our emendation of this institution’s record — but we must do as conscience demands. In the editorial about President Abraham Lincoln’s speech delivered Nov. 19, 1863, in Gettysburg, the Patriot & Union failed to recognize its momentous importance, timeless eloquence, and lasting significance. Patriot News regrets the error.

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There is latitude of opinion and taste for assessing the “timeless eloquence” of any modern oratory, of which our nation has been bereft during the last administration despite all sorts of efforts to convince us that Demosthenes haunted the Potomac, even if the presidential speeches were inchoate in logic and blighted in diction.

But it would be much in the order of natural virtue, let alone Christian justice, to ask an apology from those numerous savants who said in 2016 that the man who spoke with lasting significance in Warsaw on July 6, 2017 is “manifestly unfit to be president of the United States”?

Deacon Jim Russell, who serves the Archdiocese of St. Louis, Missouri, and writes on topics of marriage, family, and sexuality from a Catholic
perspective, offers a much-needed historical perspective on how Western society has reached the point where a militant minority - quite
insignificant in relation to the general population - now is able to virtually dictate and influence public policy over the majority
that do not share their unnatural sexual proclivities. And they have done this with the help of media, conventional and online, who aid
and abet this most undemocratic tyranny of the minority over the majority, in large part because the media themselves are a minority
in a world of overwhelmingly non-media people over whom nonetheless the media have been able to exercise this tyranny
themselves in the past several decades.

Re-building a bridge: The connection
between contraception and the 'LGBT community'
We’ve arrived at the end of the road — and we stare into a massive,
rippled fun-house mirror that shows us in its own twisted reflection
the extent of the monumental destruction our journey really caused.
by Jim Russell
CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT
July 10, 2017

Let’s build a bridge. Not a warm, fuzzy, attention-getting bridge between the Church and the ‘LGBT Community,’ whose architects are misguided masters of error, ambiguity, confusion, and dissent.[A direct hit at American Jesuit James Martin, recently named by the pope to be a consultant to his new Secretariat for Communications and author of a new book about 'bridges' that totally disses Church teaching about disordered sexuality.]

Don’t waste your time. Across the globe, we already have built more than a hundred bridges that actually lead to a Catholic sanctuary for those with same-sex attraction. It’s called the Courage apostolate, along with its companion apostolate for families of those with SSA, called EnCourage.

No, the bridge we really need to build right now is a replacement for the bridge that was burned and destroyed over the last century or more. We need to come to terms with how we’ve wandered so far away from the truth of who we really are as human persons. We need to look back on the road we’ve traveled and find a way back to the smoldering ash and timber of the bridge we first crossed and then set ablaze long ago.

We need to rebuild that bridge so that we can get back home where we belong.

Here’s the problem: it’s been about 150 years since we were really 'home', and most folks alive today have no idea what that home looks like. Before we can go back, we need to rediscover what 'home' really is and how we moved so far away from it.

From the beginning (two centuries ago) it was not so…
Many Catholics today already possess the intuition that there is a crucial link, so to speak, between Humanae Vitae and homosexuality.

They can see how the severing of the unitive and procreative meanings of marital relations — and the reduction of marital relations to mere 'sex' — paved the way for the ideologies of 'orientation' and 'gender' that generate so-called “sexual minorities” and 'sexual identities.'

Yet, the genie was let out of the bottle so long ago that most of us can no longer see just how glaringly obvious this connection really is. To get a glimpse, one needs to go back to the beginning of the ideological roots that gave us ‘homosexuality’ and ‘heterosexuality’ and spawned the chaos we have now.

A show of hands, please: How many of you know that the term ‘heterosexual’ was originally used to describe a condition that was considered, in clinical terms, like the term ‘homosexual,’ to be ‘morbid’ or ‘pathological’?

That’s right. These terms were first brought into use in the last decades of the 19th-century by psychologists seeking to classify sexual attractions, emotions, and acts — not persons, not ‘identities’ — associated with sexual abnormality. Of course, this begs the question — if even ‘heterosexual’ was pathological, what was considered ‘normal’ sexual attraction, emotion, and act?

Normal sexual desires and behaviors all had procreative sex as their focus.
- Acts and desires that directed a person toward procreative sexual activity (acts that properly could lead to procreation) were considered ‘normal.’
- Acts and desires reflecting a ‘morbid passion’ for non-procreative sex acts with someone of the other sex were classified as ‘heterosexual.’
- Acts and desires reflecting a ‘morbid passion’ for obviously non-procreative sex acts with someone of the same sex were classified as ‘homosexual.’ How many people are aware of this?

The original thinking of those who popularized the terms ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ was aligned with the natural-law truths upheld by the Catholic Church regarding God’s plan that the only normal and natural expression of sexual behavior is marital relations that are always open to procreation. Frustrating the procreative potential of sexual activity was always wrong. It is what so many psychologists of that late 19th century saw as ‘pathological.’

The seismic shift away from this thinking occurred mainly in the early 20th century — because of the birth control movement. The more socially acceptable birth control became, the greater the need to eliminate the procreative framework associated with categorizing non-procreative heterosexual behavior as ‘abnormal.’

The ‘Roaring’ 1920s reflect that transition, with some medical dictionaries by 1923 still referring to ‘heterosexuality’ as ‘morbid passion,’ while by the end of the decade, the first mainline Christian denomination (the now infamous Anglican Lambeth Conference of 1930) allowed the use of contraception by its members.

And so the new ‘normal’ emerged — the term ‘heterosexual’ was untethered from its ‘morbid’ status and ‘procreative sex’ fell by the wayside as a norm. A new norm began to emerge: the bright line between normal and abnormal was no longer whether your acts were procreative or non-procreative, but was instead about ‘who’ your sex partner was.

The ironic twist here is that normalizing heterosexuality by accepting contraception effectively escalated the stigma associated with having homosexual tendencies. The ‘we-they’ divide, so to speak, focused mostly, and more overtly, on whether your partner was same-sex or not.

Society had stepped firmly upon this bridge that led away from home, and promptly struck the first spark that would ultimately set the whole structure ablaze.

From acts to ‘identity’
Meanwhile, another evolution in thinking was underway. While the psychological distinction that saw homosexuality as a mental disorder held sway, more radical thinkers were thinking that, if this is the ‘kind’ of person who commits these pathological sex acts, then maybe the prevalent view that ‘heterosexuality’ was the mark of sexual maturity wasn’t quite right.

Non-heterosexuality in all its forms was viewed basically as some form of sexual ‘immaturity’ that could be overcome with treatments intended to direct a person to heterosexual maturity. But maybe people who committed homosexual acts were a different ‘kind’ of person altogether, some theorized.

If homosexual attraction were somehow innate and fixed, then no amount of intervention would likely alter the homosexual inclination. Further, then homosexual activity could be said to constitute acts ‘proper’ to this kind of person. It could be said that the homosexual inclination represented this person’s identity — they didn’t merely ‘have’ these attractions or ‘do’ homosexual acts. These people actually ’were’ homosexuals.

The decade of the 1950s ushered in pockets of such thinking, with the first few groups being organized to promote the ‘rights’ of this new ‘kind’ of person — the homosexual. Both individual and communal ‘identities’ were being formed and enhanced well beyond what had existed in the past. But because of the continuing social stigma, and the accompanying illegality of homosexual acts, these efforts were fundamentally underground.

In fact, at this time, the origin of the term ‘coming out’ was actually a rather precise parallel to the social convention of a debutante’s ‘coming out’ to polite society as a young, marriageable prospect for interested young men. When a homosexual ‘came out’ in this era, it was his ‘debut’ to this underground community — he was, still in secret, letting this still-hidden group know he was the ‘kind’ of person ready to behave as a homosexual behaves. It was still not a fully formed declaration of ‘identity,’ but it was close to it.

Even so, this pushed society further out onto the bridge, unconcerned as the smoke and flame billowed from behind.

From ‘identity’ to ‘pride’
What truly crystallized the ideologies of orientation and gender into a panoply of newly recognized identities was the civil unrest of the 1960s, energized by the civil rights movement and the patterns established by a variety of ‘minority’ groups seeking to claim their public place in society.

Alongside this was the advent of the hormonal contraceptive pill and the growing pro-abortion movement, both of which brought renewed attention to the divorce of procreation and sex. As so-called ‘straights’ clamored for their ‘reproductive rights’ and worshipped at the idolatrous altar of ‘the Pill,’ as ‘free love’ won the day and sexual promiscuity was celebrated as liberation, and as racial strife brought prejudice and oppression into the media spotlight, the still-largely-underground ‘homosexual community’ took notice.

Their timing was optimal for the explosive revolution of ‘gay liberation.’ It had been decades since society had set aside the procreative standard for sex. Anti-sodomy laws were viewed as antiquated — after all, didn’t ‘straights’ sometimes do that, too? Right around the time of the perfect storm that gave us the Stonewall Riots in 1969, the slogans ‘gay is good’ and ‘gay pride’ had won the day.

By then, even ‘coming out’ had morphed into ‘coming out of the closet.’ To be ‘gay’ was now to claim publicly one’s own personal identity, which brought with it not only entry into the ‘gay community’ but also public status as an unfairly stigmatized ‘sexual minority’ whose civil rights needed protection because, just like race, ‘sexual orientation’ was now a permanent part of ‘who I am’.

And how could ‘heterosexuals’ object? They had their own ‘straight liberation’ decades before, when non-procreative heterosexual sex became the new normal.

Not only could the rest of the world not object to ‘gay pride,’ it was now up to every person to make the socially correct choice. You either had to accept and affirm — not merely tolerate — this newly liberated ‘kind’ of person who didn’t just act a certain way but was ’gay’ to the core, or you were a bigot, a hater, a ‘homophobe,’ to be socially reviled just like any run-of-the-mill racist.

The end of the bridge was now in sight. But what was that smell of burning wood…and sulfur?

From ‘pride’ to…procreation?
Both the irony and audacity of ‘pride’ is clear in what has followed since then. Initially, the ‘LGBT community’ reassured society that it didn’t want what ‘straights’ had—marriage, and children. No, no - it would be enough just not to be ‘hated.’

But the goalposts constantly moved — 'No, we don’t want marriage, just civil unions! And if you object, you hate us' to 'Now we want marriage [and children] — it’s our right. Let us have it or you hate us'.

Now, in a twisted way, we’ve come full circle, back to the beginning, the point at which procreative potential is desired, but on human terms, not on God’s terms. What was readily jettisoned by ‘heterosexuals’ a century ago is now the ‘marital’ accessory, expectation, and demand of same-sex ‘marriages’: children at all costs.

It’s as though this bridge brought us to a remarkable destination. We’ve arrived at the end of the road — and we stare into a massive, rippled fun-house mirror that shows us in its own twisted reflection the extent of the monumental destruction our journey really caused. We see tortured versions of that which we sought to escape, through the smoke and dust of the hellish horizon of our past.

What would have happened if, a century ago, procreation had remained the benchmark for sexual normalcy, as even the promoters of ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ originally accepted? We’ll never know.

An error in the beginning is an error indeed. There is no path forward, except through the looking-glass, the twisted fun-house mirror that confronts us.

There is only one real way home. We need to turn around, stop burning our bridges, and begin to build again.
 
Fr Z has added his reflections on Deacon Russell’s presentation…

What is the appeal to ‘build a bridge’ really about?

July 11, 2017

I’ve argued here that the homosexualist agenda has been patiently engaged for a long time and is still reaching for that brass ring.
- The homosexualists have slowly been shifting the language about deviant same-sex acts and those who regularly commit them.
- Through the MSM and entertainment industry the image of homosexuality as something hidden and unclean was broken by replacing it with victim status during the flaming up of the AIDS epidemic in certain populations.
- Then the victim image had to be broken and replaced, which was accomplished through cool and with it characters in TV shows and other culture movers. Think of the absurdly high percentage of homosexuals in TV shows, increasing every year. I’ll bet you can’t turn on a TV series now and not find it filled with deviants. BUT! They are the cool and emotionally sensitive ones, who have answers for the dysfunctional and often less attractive ‘hetero’ characters.
- Fuse this culture shift with the rise of no-fault divorce and nearly universal contraception and we have the perfect deadly storm that can rip the sexual act conceptually away from marriage (what’s that?) and procreation (what’s that?).

Now that subcultures are multiplying like viruses, we are just about ready, I think, for the next stage of the assault on the human person and God’s plan. Not content for legalization of same-sex ‘marriage’, the next phase of the homosexualist agenda will soon be implemented: lowering the age of consent (aka the aforementioned the brass ring). [It’s the age at which a person is considered legally competent to consent to sexual intercourse.]

[I had naively assumed that most, if not all, countries in the world had 18 as the legal age of consent. Great was my shock to learn, looking it up today,
that even in the USA, there are a considerable number of states that have it at 16.

In fact, a look at the current map for ‘age of consent’ around the world shows that 16 is the most prevalent age, followed closely by the ‘greens’
on the map (from age 12-14), led by almost all of Central and South America; China, Japan and the Philippines (and I did not even
know this about my own country); more than third of Europe, and a considerable part of Africa.

With that horrific thought – and I’m right and you know it – I direct your gaze now to Catholic World Report [the article I posted above] where there is an important piece about the ‘bridge’ building that Jesuit homosexualist activist James Martin wants to build instead of the bridge that the Church has and can build.

Remember, the agenda has its agents within the Church. If you were the Devil, isn’t that where you would want your agents? Above all?

Whenever I write about any of this, worms come out of the woodwork and send obscene emails as if after all these years that would in some way disturb me. For the record, you poor wretches, I grew up surrounded by cops. I spent my youth (when this sort of thing was still possible) in police stations looking at crime and homicide scene photos and hearing about the cases my folks and their colleagues investigated, raids they conducted. Some of it was really really bad, the stuff of nightmares, which I occasionally did have.

And now I’ve been a priest with over a quarter of a century of hearing confessions under my belt. Priests hear it all. We hear it and hear it and don’t even blink, except to feel compassion and admiration for the courage of those making their confessions. I’ve heard it all. We see it all too, including things like bodies broken on train tracks and poor souls in burn units and mental health wards.

And yet you wretched dopes think that sending hate mail with perversion is somehow going to be effective? You poor sick dupes. I pray for you. But… if you send a threat… I’ll pray for you too, but you’ll also have a whole new experience. But I digress.
Let’s have a good chunk of the CWR piece so you can get the sense before going over there and getting the rest. I’ll provide some signposts… [Instead of re-posting all the excerpts Fr. Z chooses, I will only report the parts that he comments on, and his comments, in red, as usual.]

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…No, the bridge we really need to build right now is a replacement for the bridge that was burned and destroyed over the last century or more. [Did you get that? Over a quarter of a century or more. And this is what Fr. Murray wrote about the other day when he clearly described the pernicious agenda in the Jesuit writer’s book… which did not have an imprimi potest or imprimatur but which did have a nihil obstat from the Jesuit’s superior.]

…Here’s the problem: it’s been about 150 years since we were really ‘home,’[that’s more than a quarter of a century… right? What’s up with that?] and most folks alive today have no idea what that home looks like. Before we can go back, we need to rediscover what ‘home’ really is and how we moved so far away from it.

…They [many Catholics] can see how the severing of the unitive and procreative meanings of marital relations—and the reduction of marital relations to mere ‘sex’—paved the way for the ideologies of ‘orientation’ and ‘gender’ that generate so-called ‘sexual minorities’ and ‘sexual identities.’ [Yep. That’s what I’ve been saying.]

…And so the new ‘normal’ emerged [Isn’t there a TV show by that name?] —the term ’heterosexual’ was untethered from its ‘morbid’ status and ‘procreative sex’ fell by the wayside as a norm. A new norm began to emerge: the bright line between normal and abnormal was no longer whether your acts were procreative or non-procreative, but was instead about ‘who’ your sex partner was. [See what’s happening?]

…Non-heterosexuality in all its forms was viewed basically as some form of sexual ‘immaturity’ that could be overcome with treatments intended to direct a person to heterosexual maturity. But maybe people who committed homosexual acts were a different ‘kind’ of person altogether, some theorized. [This is the ‘made that way’ idea that the Jesuit writer is pushing along with the twisted notion ‘by God’. If homosexuals and same-sex attraction is also made by God, then what can be wrong with normalizing their behaviors and even calling them ‘good’? Remember: the next phase, or brass ring, is the lowering of the age of consent.]

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This is an important essay to read, and keep close by for reference. Russell has brought an interesting new dimension to this discussion, at a good moment in time.

[And I'm thankful to Fr Z for opening my eyes to what's on mainstream American TV these days as I only look at TV - Fox News mostly - just to see what the media are up to these days.]

From the Wikipedia entry for the TV show The New Normal with some edits and notes:

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Bryan and David are a happy gay couple [they’re so gay together!] living in Los Angeles, [where else] with successful careers [they’re gay and successful!]. The only thing missing in their relationship is a baby. [Right, that’s what’s missing!] They meet Goldie Clemmons, a single mother and waitress from Ohio. [Uh ohhhh… not so successful, are you Goldie?] Goldie left her adulterous husband [sounds kinda dysfunctional] and moved to L.A. with her 9-year-old daughter Shania to escape their former life and start over. [Yep, a gal with a few problems. If only there were someone cool and successful to help her?] Jane, Goldie’s conservative grandmother, [OH NO! She’s CONSERVATIVE?] follows them to the city against Goldie’s wishes [More dysfunction, right?] thus causing havoc for her granddaughter and the gaycouple. [Remember them? The happy gays with successful careers who only want a baby?] Goldie decides to become Bryan and David’s gestational surrogate,[what the hell is THAT?] [dolore=#0026ff][It's the technical and legal term, of course, for 'rented uterus', i.e., the surrogate gets a fee for agreeing to be implanted with an embryo provided by the same-sex couple, to carry it for nine months and to deliver the baby, to which she will have no legal right whatsoever] and naturally, [‘naturally’… my God how twisted are the minds that write this] her family gets involved. [And quirky hijinx ensue in which the conservative grandmother – I’ll bet – I haven’t seen it – gets in the occasion good point, but is generally thwarted by the happy successful gays who generally have the sensitive solutions and help everyone just get along. Is that about right?]

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And then there’s Modern Family:

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’Modern Family’ revolves around three different types of families (nuclear, step- and same-sex) living in the Los Angeles area [again] who are interrelated through Jay Pritchett and his children, Claire Dunphy (née Pritchett) and Mitchell Pritchett. Patriarch Jay is remarried to a much younger woman, Gloria Delgado Pritchett (née Ramirez), a passionate Colombian [are there any other kind?] with whom he has an infant son, Fulgencio (Joe) Pritchett, and a son from Gloria’s previous marriage, Manny Delgado.

Jay’s daughter Claire was a homemaker, but has returned to the business world; she is married to Phil Dunphy, a realtor and self-professed ‘cool Dad’. They have three children: Haley Dunphy, a stereotypical ditzy teenage girl; Alex Dunphy, a nerdy, smart middle child; and Luke Dunphy, the off-beat only son.

Jay’s lawyer son Mitchell and his husband Cameron Tucker have an adopted Vietnamese daughter, Lily Tucker-Pritchett. As the name suggests, this family represents a modern-day family and episodes are comically based on situations which many families encounter in real life. [REAL life. Even if people in this earthly vale have complicated situations like that, is that real? I am reminded of Plato’s analogy of reality and the cave.]

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And then there’s Transparent:

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The story revolves around a Los Angeles [what a surprise] family and their lives following the discovery that the person they knew as their father Mort (Jeffrey Tambor) is transgender.

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Yet how many of the 118 million homes that have TV in the USA {the number is provided by Nielsen which does the regular audience ratings) actually know or have even heard of persons and situations presented to them by TV as 'normal'???

However, the point of all this massive brainwashing taking place on TV everyday is precisely to introduce the new amoral and immoral certitudes of the dominant mentality - dominant not by numbers, but by virtue of controlling all communications media and thereby being able to impose itself onto the global mindset - so that the great majority of TV viewers (and media consumers, in general) will soon be led into thinking that these aberrations and anomalies are indeed considered 'normal' today and should therefore accept it all as 'right'!

The incredible reach and influence of mass media and communications today is so frighteningly absolute that they have managed to overturn in just a few decades everything that Christianity has preached for 2000 years. It is not wrong to say that what John Lennon bragged about the Beatles back in 1967 - 'We are more popular than Jesus Christ!" - is exactly what the mass media think they are today. Not just more popular but apparently, far more influential. At least in the short run, so far.

And very apropos, even if Pius X, Catherine of Siena and Peter Damian did not mention the many varieties of sexual deviancy today - all known in Biblical times with the exception of 'transformations' made possible by modern plastic surgery and hormones...

St. Pius X and other saints on homosexuals
How they would have dealt with ‘gay orgies’ at the Vatican
By Pete Baklinski

July 11, 2017

The Vatican under Pope Francis has been completely silent after news recently broke of a high-ranking monsignor who was arrested some two months ago in the act of hosting a cocaine-fueled homosexual orgy in a building right next to St. Peter’s Basilica. [Vatican press director Greg Burke hastened to issue a oneline denial – to two blogsites - of an account of Cardinal Mueller’s dismissal meeting with the pope, but apparently does not think the ‘gay orgy reports require any comment at all from the Vatican. One must therefore presume the Vatican is not contesting the reports at all.]

But silence in the face of blatant sexual deviancy, especially among the clergy, has never been the practice of some of the Church’s greatest leaders, including Doctors of the Church and one saintly pope. During the height of the Renaissance, homosexuality among the clergy was no small problem. Pope Pius V, who was later canonized, directly combatted what he called the ‘horrible crime’ of homosexual practices among the clergy by setting down strict directives.

‘That horrible crime, on account of which corrupt and obscene cities were destroyed by fire through divine condemnation, causes us most bitter sorrow and shocks our mind, impelling us to repress such a crime with the greatest possible zeal,’ he wrote in his 1568 Apostolic Constitution Horrendum illud scelus.

It is interesting to note that Saint Pius V never shrunk from the duty of his high office with statements such as ‘who am I to judge.’ Rather, he combatted homosexuality ‘with the greatest possible zeal.’ Pius V decreed that not only were active homosexual clergy to be removed from the ‘clerical order,’ but they were to be handed over to the ‘secular authority’ for punishment.

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”Therefore, wishing to pursue with greater rigor than we have exerted since the beginning of our pontificate, we establish that any priest or member of the clergy, either secular or regular, who commits such an execrable crime, by force of the present law be deprived of every clerical privilege, of every post, dignity and ecclesiastical benefit, and having been degraded by an ecclesiastical judge, let him be immediately delivered to the secular authority to be put to death, as mandated by law as the fitting punishment for laymen who have sunk into this abyss.”

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Going back to the writings of St. Paul and even further to the Old Testament, the Church has a long history of speaking out against homosexuality. St. Paul warns the Romans (1:26-27) that

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when men chose to worship and serve the creature over the Creator, God gave them up to the‘lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.”

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Elsewhere St. Paul warns that ‘homosexuals’ among other sinners will ‘not inherit the kingdom of God’ unless they become ‘washed…sanctified…justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ’ (1 Cor 6:9-10).
Two saints, both doctors of the Church, who spoke out forcefully against homosexuality within the clergy are Saint Peter Damian, an 11th-century Italian Catholic reformer and Saint Catherine of Siena, a 14th-century religious mystic.

St. Peter Damian wrote his Book of Gomorrah to Pope Leo IX in 1049 at a time when homosexuality and sexual perversion within the clergy were likely more rampant than it is today. Damien showed no false mercy or compromise in condemning sodomy, what he believed to be the gravest of all sins. ”If this absolutely ignominious and abominable vice is not immediately stopped with an iron fist, ‘ he told the Pope, ‘the sword of Divine wrath will fall upon us, bringing ruin to many”.

Damian warned the Pope that the ‘cancer of sodomitic impurity is creeping through the clerical order,’ decrying the sexual abuse of ‘spiritual sons’ by Catholic priests. He warned that all clergy who are habituated to homosexual behavior should be removed from the priesthood, and that the wrath of God is provoked against those who continue to offer the sacrifice of the Mass while committing homosexual sins. According to Damian, the evil of homosexual behavior

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”…surpasses the savagery of all other vices… to be compared to no other. For this vice is the death of bodies, the destruction of souls, pollutes the flesh, extinguishes the light of the intellect, expels the Holy Spirit from the temple of the human heart, introduces the diabolical inciter of lust, throws into confusion, and removes the truth completely from the deceived mind… (and) whoever has soiled himself with the contamination of sodomitic disgrace ... unless he is cleansed by the fulfillment of fruitful penance, can never have the grace of God, will never be worthy of the body and blood of Christ, and will never cross the threshold of the celestial homeland”.

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To priests engaging in homosexual activities, he warns:

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Beware of inextinguishably inflaming the fury of God against you, lest by your prayers you more sharply provoke Him whom you patently offend by your evil acts”.

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Damian expressed profound sorrow for those priests who had fallen into sexual perversion. He promised them that they could be liberated from their enslavement to sin by God and restored spiritually if they repent and do penance.

St. Catherine of Siena said in her famous Dialogues — written as if dictated by God — that priests who commit homosexuals sins appear before God as those filled with ‘stench and misery.’ Such priests, the Lord told Catherine, not only offend by failing to resist their fallen nature, ‘but do worse, committing that accursed sin against nature [homosexual acts]... Like the blind and stupid having dimmed the light of the understanding, they do not recognize the stench and misery in which they find themselves. Continued the Lord to Catherine:

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”It is not only that this sin stinks before me, who am the Supreme and Eternal Truth, it does indeed displease me so much and I hold it in such abomination that for it alone I buried five cities by a divine judgment, my divine justice being no longer able to endure it”. Homosexual sin is traditionally one of the four sins that cry to heaven for vengeance. The Lord told Catherine that even the demons are repulsed by this sin.
“This sin not only displeases me as I have said, but also the devils whom these wretches have made their masters. Not that the evil displeases them because they like anything good, but because their nature was originally angelic, and their angelic nature causes them to loathe the sight of the actual commission of this enormous sin”.
St. Catherine recounted the Lord saying that prayers and tears are the remedies for such sins among the clergy.
“Never cease offering me the incense of fragrant prayers for the salvation of souls, for I want to be merciful to the world. With your prayers and sweat and tears, I will wash the face of my bride, Holy Church. I showed her to you earlier as a maiden whose face was all dirtied as if she were a leper. The clergy and the whole of Christianity are to blame for this because of their sins, though they receive their nourishment at the breast of this bride”.

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Rev. John Zuhlsdorf, a Catholic blogger, wrote that Satan especially attacks clergy because their ‘influence extends over many souls.

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“Take down an individual, okay. Take down a father of a family, better. Take down a parish priest or bishop, even better. Take down officials in the Church’s HQ so that massive scandal can be broadcast by the MSM… a damned ‘good’ day’s work”…

Zuhlsdorf said that it is likely no coincidence that the orgy allegedly took place in the same building where ‘doctrine is overseen for the whole Church and abuse cases are dealt with.’ He said the entire building should be exorcized.
”Enemy demons can attach themselves to places and objects and infest them due to sins that are committed in them and with them. They stick to those places like vile, hell-leeches and claim the right to be there because of those sins until their hold is broken through exorcism. If I were Pope, I would weekly send exorcists around the curial offices to clean house. If I were a bishop, I would weekly send priests around blessing the workspaces of the chancery and sprinkling holy water and even blessed salt”.

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Pope Francis has created
a new path to sainthood
Laying down one’s life for others is now a category under which a person might be beatified or canonized
by Stephen Bullivant
CATHOLIC HERALD
Wednesday, 12 Jul 2017

In an even-more-than-usually frenetic week of Vatican news (or rather, in some cases, alleged news), one might easily have missed an announcement of real significance.

Yesterday, the Holy Father released an Apostolic Letter motu proprio (“on his own authority”). These tend to be short, technical documents. They’re often used to tinker with the wording of Canon Law, or to amend the statutes of some body or other. But they can occasionally be of wide-reaching importance. Summorum Pontificum, for instance, was promulgated motu proprio.

In yesterday’s, Pope Francis created a new category under which a person might be beatified/canonised: laying down one’s life for others. This is now the fourth in what, until the day before yesterday, was a long-established list of three: i) martyrdom; ii) a life of heroic virtue; or iii) having already a widespread, longstanding reputation of holiness. (This last one tends to be used sparingly, and only in exceptional cases. That said, each of the last three popes has used it to honour – one assumes – personal favourites: Kinga of Poland; Hildegard of Bingen; Peter Faber, Angela of Foligno).

Francis’s fourth category is explicitly justified with reference to Christ’s assertion that – in the KJV’s classic phraseology – “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15.13). Indeed the document’s formal title Maiorem hac Dilectionem is, of course, taken from the Latin version of that verse (albeit rather mangling its meaning, with the traditional three-word rule.)

Following this opening quotation, Francis writes:

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Worthy of special consideration and honour are those Christians who, following the footsteps and teachings of the Lord Jesus, have freely and voluntarily offered their life for others, and have persevered until death in this”. Since such heroic offering of life evinces a true, full, and exemplary imitation of Christ it warrants the admiration which the Christian community customarily reserves for martyrs and those having lived a life of heroic virtue.

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Now there are, I think, two possible ways of interpreting this.

The first is to see this as a radical shake-up of what “counts” as authentic holiness, opening up the possibility of sainthood to those who die not just for Christ (i.e., traditional martyrs), but to those who die helping others. This interpretation fits more-or-less neatly into several media tropes surrounding this pontificate. Naturally enough, it raises questions as to whether the change has been made with specific people “in mind”. Media reports speculate that, for example, AIDS workers dying of Ebola might count under this new rubric.

[Oh, the possibilities are endless, in fact. Anyone killed under any circumstances while carrying out an act to help other people - for instance, by a madman, or struck down by a vehicle, while in the act of bringing food to a sick person, or even helping a cripple cross the street . And so, theoretically, in a reductio ad absurdum, we could have victims of violence, pizza delivery persons, school crossing guards and the like in a long queue to be beatified.

There are very good reasons why the Church has been stringent about her 'requirements' for canonization, and Bergoglio’s new motu proprio is yet another means by which he is loosening canonical discipline for an ostensibly ‘good’ reason. It is yet another indication of his tendency for ostentatiously profligate indiscrimination in many of his decisions.

Will he next amend the existing rules for canonization to do away with any examination of the candidate saint’s previous acts and statements if he were someone who simply died while doing a ‘good deed for others’ – whereas those who ‘merely’ led lives of heroic virtue have to be super-scrutinized?

The Church has surely produced countless unrecognized, uncanonized saints in two millennia but if their saintliness in life was never striking enough or widely known enough to have been reported at all, then the great majority of them were probably good persons whose lives either earned them immediate passage to Heaven or a spell in Purgatory, and are, yes, unrecognized saints, since everyone who goes to Heaven belongs to the 'communion of saints'.]

The second is to see it, more mundanely, simply as a codification of previous precedent – a kind of administrative tying-up of loose ends. For, in fact, the Church already proclaims the sanctity of some who, incarnating John 15.13, have willingly sacrificed their own life in order to save that of others.

The most striking example here is St Maximilian Kolbe, whose voluntary death at Auschwitz in place of another prisoner will surely be familiar. One also thinks here of, say, St Damien of Molokai, who died of the same disease – leprosy – of those he dedicated his life to serving.

In neither case, it will readily be admitted, is the manner of their deaths somehow incidental to how we view each man’s sanctity. Don’t get me wrong: both led lives of heroic virtue, and might feasibly have been canonised on those grounds alone. Nevertheless, I doubt I’m alone in thinking that there is something specifically “saintworthy” [If Mr Bullivant is not alone, then he and those who think like him must be a very decided minority among Catholics who have even questioned that Kolbe or Damien deserved to canonized] in each man’s decisive willingness to die – a spur-of-the-moment impulse for St Maximilian; a foreseeable “occupational hazard” of a lifelong commitment for St Damien – over and above the rest of their biographies.

In the case of Kolbe, at least, Popes Paul VI and John Paul II – both of whom knew a fair bit about true sanctity – seem strongly to have agreed. Famously, they beatified and canonised him respectively as a martyr. As St John Paul put it, “In this human death, there was the clear witness given to Christ: the witness given in Christ to the dignity of man, and the sanctity of his life, and to the salvific power of death, in which power of love manifests itself”.

St Maximilian was duly canonised in Pope Paul’s coinage – a “martyr of love” (or “charity”): an exception created for a truly exceptional individual.

The trouble with exceptions, though, is that they set precedents. If Kolbe’s dying-for-others was a radical instance of the imitatio Christi then – again to quote his Polish fellow-saint (albeit slightly out of context) – “But was Father Maximilian Kolbe the only one?” [No, he was not. But if other similar exemplary lives come up – similar not only in the conscious decision to die willingly for others but also in a life of heroic virtue that can be proven in a cause for canonization as St. Maximilian’s could well be – then by all means, let a cause for canonization be presented in their behalf!]

My hunch is that yesterday’s motu proprio was not necessarily so radical an act as it might seem. The existing quasi-category of “martyr of love” – which rightly recognizes a truly Christlike death, but nevertheless sits awkwardly as a species of martyrdom (on any traditional understanding) – is admittedly unsatisfactory. The creation of a dedicated “offering up one’s life for others” category is much, much neater.

I’m not a gambling man, thank God, but I’d tempted to wager that it is precisely this that lies behind the new ruling. A close reading of the text itself (currently available only in Latin and Italian) suggests it is a rubberstamping of an idea that’s been working its way through the Congregation for the Causes of Saints’ committees for some time. (There is mention of a Plenary Session last September, for example.)

The document is, moreover, careful to distinguish this new category from martyrdom proper. There are, for example, no water-muddying mentions of “martyrs of charity”, or anything close. No mention, either, of St Maximilian himself – which, given that he is the most obvious exemplar of the kind of death the document seems to have in mind (to the point, indeed, of “Greater love hath no man” being the very text John Paul II preached on at his canonization), would otherwise be a remarkable omission.

A significant news story, to be sure. But not, I think, the groundbreakingly novel one it might at first seem to be. [That’s because Bullivant seems unable to see it the not-unfounded and not-unreasonable way I do – that this is yet another indication of Bergoglio’s tendency for ostentatiously profligate indiscrimination, even in matters of canonical discipline. His motto seems to be “Open as many doors as I can to make everything as nice and easy as possible for Catholics and liberate them from any and all of the old disciplines”.

Meanwhile, prepare yourself for hundreds if not thousands of new candidate saints from Latin America - all those who were ever killed in the many violent conflicts that have afflicted that continent since the end of the Second World War. The numbers of the new 'saints who willingly gave their lives' will far exceed the martyrs of the Spanish and Mexican civil wars combined.

All the proof necessary, it would seem, is their names on a list of confirmed dead from conflicts with government forces (representing evil, always, and whose dead in the same conflicts can surely not be considered potential saints in any way). Oh, add to those numbers the perhaps astronomical numbers of Africans who have died in similar conflicts. How can Bergoglio overlook them if he starts canonizing Latin Americans by the thousands? The reductio is beyond absurdum.

Let me post this story just to sample how the MSM has been reporting Cardinal Mueller's dismissal. CNN is emblematic of the ueber-liberal, highly
secular MSM today (even as it has also led in the 'fake news' phenomenon promoted by the Trump-haters), but this report by its Vatican correspondent
is fairly objective....

Former top Vatican official
strikes back at Pope
By Delia Gallagher
Vatican Correspondent
CNN
July 12, 2017

ROME (CNN) - A top Vatican cardinal recently dismissed by Pope Francis struck back this week, calling the Pope's treatment of him and other Vatican employees "unacceptable."

"I cannot accept this way of doing things," Cardinal Gerhard Muller said in an interview with German newspaper Passauer Neue Presse.
"As a bishop, [the Pope] cannot treat people in this way."

Francis informed Muller, the former head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Vatican's doctrinal office, that he would not be renewing his contract in a brief meeting on June 30, just two days before the contract expired.

"He did not give a reason," the 69-year-old cardinal said in the interview. "Just as he gave no reason for dismissing three highly competent members of the CDF a few months earlier."

Greg Burke, director of the Vatican Press Office, told CNN: "It was a private meeting with the Pope. We have no comment." [So, 'No comment' here, but to Tosatti and 1P5, which reported a more detailed account, he said, "The reconstruction is totally false".]

Muller's ouster came during a tumultuous week for the Vatican. On June 29, Australian police announced four sexual assault charges against Cardinal George Pell, the head of the Vatican's secretariat for the economy and a top adviser to Pope Francis. Pell has returned to Australia to face the charges.

Muller is not just another disgruntled employee. Although he has been removed as a Vatican official, he remains a cardinal of the Catholic Church, which makes his public criticism of the Pope even more striking.

"I have said this before -- the church's social teaching must also be applied to the way employees are treated here in the Vatican," Muller said, implying that there has been a disconnect between the Pope's teaching and how they are applied within his own curia.

Vatican employees have long complained that the church's lofty rhetoric about social justice and workers' rights aren't always respected inside the Vatican itself, said CNN's Vatican analyst, John Allen of Crux.

"What's unusual here is that the criticism isn't coming from a low-level employee in the Vatican Museums," Allen said, "but a Cardinal who has become a public symbol of tensions around Pope Francis."

Some of those tensions have to do with Francis's attempt to loosen up church doctrine [That's a good honest way to describe it, for a change, instead of "changing Church doctrine and practice to be more merciful" , which is the MSM boilerplate description for any Bergoglian change], for example in the area of giving Holy Communion to divorced and remarried Catholics, an issue which has divided liberals and conservatives in the Catholic Church.

Muller, a conservative, was often seen to be in a difficult position as head of the Vatican's doctrinal office, between supporting the Pope's changes and reconciling them with the doctrinal rules.

"Although he is conservative, Muller never openly criticized the Pope for doctrinal matters," commented Vatican expert Andrea Gagliarducci of Catholic News Agency. "The issue is the way in which he was dismissed," he said.

"People forget," Gagliarducci added, "that there were many cardinals criticizing Benedict XVI and John Paul II at the beginning of their pontificates. No Pope pleases everyone." [Yes, but no Pope before this one has mistreated their critics, nor been rude to their cardinals!]

Muller was replaced by Monsignor Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer, a Jesuit who was second in command to Mueller at the CDF.
.
Muller, 69, a German, was appointed by Francis's predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, who himself once headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

A conservative, Muller was widely seen to be resistant to Francis's attempt to open up the Church's teaching, [One doubts, in view of his documented hemming and hawing, if he was 'widely seen' as that!] particularly on the issue of allowing communion for divorced and remarried Catholics.

Unusually, ['Unusually' is right, given his ambivalent record, but the adverb ought to have been 'expectedly', because this was expected of him as the official guardian of orthodoxy after the pope], Muller gave a recent interview in which he said there should not be different interpretations of church teaching on the subject, putting him at odds with Francis's thinking. The issue is one that divides liberals and conservatives in the church.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is also in charge of handling sex abuse cases involving the church. Francis promised to tackle the crisis, but has faced questions about a perceived lack of action. [First, the crisis was for the most part tackled since 2001 under the two previous Pontificates, and the Church's stand to combat this 'filth' was solidly institutionalized under Benedict XVI. Second, this pope has tried to make it appear that he is even more forcefully carrying on the fight, but he has done little beyond making announcements to that effect, without anything concrete to show for it, as even his media adulators now unanimously concede.]

Melinda Gates says she is ‘optimistic’
Pope Francis will change teaching on contraception
CATHOLIC HERALD
Tuesday, 11 Jul 2017

Melinda Gates has said she is “optimistic” Pope Francis will change Church teaching on contraception.

Gates, who was raised Catholic, said she had “agreed to disagree” with the Church on the issue, claiming that contraception is “one of the greatest anti-poverty innovations the world has ever known.”

In a BBC interview, Gates said her charity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, works “very extensively with the Catholic Church” and has had “many discussions with them, because we have a shared mission around social justice and anti-poverty”.

“I think what this Pope sees is that if we are going to lift people out of poverty, you have to do the right thing for women, and so we have agreed at this point to disagree,” she said.

She added that Pope Francis has not changed Church teaching “yet”, but “these things take time”. She said she was “optimistic” the Church would change its teaching “over time”.

The Foundation is currently co-hosting an international summit in London on the issue of access to contraception in the developing world. Reuters says they expect to raise at least $2.5 billion, and will invest $375 million of that in “family planning” programmes over the next four years.

Her comments come as Britain’s secretary of state for international development, Priti Patel, announced the government will increase aid for family planning and abortion services by 25 per cent, costing the taxpayer over £1.1 billion.

The Government will spend £225 million of taxpayers’ money per year over the next five years providing contraception for developing countries, including abortion services.

Pro-life campaigners have condemned the move, with Anne Scanlan, director of education at charity Life, saying: “This is absolutely shocking. A recent ComRes poll showed that 65 per cent of the public oppose UK taxpayer money being spent on abortions overseas.”

“We call on the Government not to proceed with this new support for the family planning and abortion industry and to instead pursue global initiatives to support women in pregnancy,” she added.

So La Croix now has an international edition - it must mean good times for the church of Bergoglio in France, yes? But not if we are to take this report as typical for the rest of Catholic France. Or, for that matter, for all the other countries around the world that are being surveyed by the Bishops' Synod...

'Synod on Youth' receives
lukewarm response in France

July 12, 2017

On a June afternoon, in a parish hall not far from the Basilica of St Denis, Seine-Saint-Denis, a discussion of the place of young people in the Church is taking place.

“Be careful! It’s not the Church’s role to be a Church only for youth,” warns a layperson from the Mission de France.

“But it is young people who provide the impetus for change,” responds a much younger woman from the French Youth Forum.

“No, it is the whole people of God!” replies the first.

Around 30 young people from a dozen church movements responded to an invitation from the Christian Movement of Rural Youth (MRJC) to share their views for a collective proposal for the Synod on Young People and Vocations, which will take place in Rome in October 2018.

Similarly, the Church of France has been reaching out to young people over the last few months in an effort to understand their aspirations and desires for change in preparation for the Synod.This consultation phase is coming to an end.

Movements and dioceses have until Friday this week to submit the synthesis of their work to the French Bishop’s Conference (CEF). Florence Varaigne, episcopal delegate for young people in the Diocese of Angers, admits that they have “had few responses", even though five young people were involved in the development of the questionnaire.These included a high school student, a university student, a young professional, a person doing civic service and a seminarian, all aged between 16 and 29.

Those who responded to the questionnaire were mostly young involved Catholics.“They appreciate large gatherings such as World Youth Day, but they also need other involvements within their own parishes the rest of the time,” Varaigne believes.

“Many insist on the importance of having priests and laypeople who“make them feel welcome", she continues. She also confirmed the concern expressed by many young people regarding the youth who do not practice their faith.

“Pope Francis wants all young people to have a say, but it is very difficult to reach out to those who are far from the Church,” she explains.

“After some reflection, I realized that Pope Francis’s letter to young people was mostly accessible only to Catholics,” comments Laurence Boher, head of youth ministry in the diocese of Albi in the Tarn region.

In Albi, the pope’s letter, which was published in January along with the preparatory document for the Synod, was mainly shared in the form of a leaflet.

Boher regrets that there was only a “short time” between the publication of the letter and the deadline for responses. Nevertheless, the results were positive, she believes.“We received around fifty responses, which is not bad for our diocese,” she says.

Boher was also impressed by the “joy” expressed by many respondents at finding themselves the center of attention in the Church.

The Diocese of Évry in the Essonne region tried another method, releasing three different questionnaires, one addressed to young people, one to ministers and priests, and another to “people of good will".The Diocese received 64, 36 and 37 responses respectively.

The threefold survey also made it possible to identify what the faithful outside the Synod’s targeted age range (16-29 years) had to say.

“The older generation is preoccupied with the issue of transmission,” says Fr Antoine de la Fayolle, a Dominican priest in charge of youth ministry. “They see de-christianization taking place and ask themselves what their role is.”

The young people of the Evry region, which has a large immigrant population, also raised questions regarding the place of Catholicism with respect to Islam.

“In a de-christianized society that lacks fixed reference points, many are asking how they can find an authentic, intelligent and intelligible faith,” Fr de la Fayolle adds.

It is now up to the CEF to forward the results of the consultations to the Vatican. A National Service for the Evangelization of Youth and Vocations working group, which is accompanied by Bishop Laurent Percerou of Moulins, is due to meet at the end of August to prepare a synthesis that will be sent to Rome by October.

Bishop Percerou is also the Chairman of the Council for Youth Pastoral Care.The Synod’s instrumentum laboris (working instrument) will summarize all national contributions and will be published during the summer of 2018.

Nothing to do directly with the coming synodal assembly, but a significant news item nonetheless for the Church in France...

Cardinal Barbarin of Lyon
exonerated by two French courts
of having covered abuses
From a Google translation of an article in
RELIGION DIGITAL
July 12, 2017]

The Cardinal of Lyon, Philippe Barbarin, "had no intention to prevent the action of justice", the French diocese said in a note announcing the end of judicial investigations into the alleged cover-up by the cardinal of priests accused of abusing minors.

"The resolution cannot be clearer - No crime was found", the note stressed. The diocese points out that two French courts have dismissed the allegations that Barbarin was accused of having looked the other way for abuses committed by priests Jerome Billioud and Bernard Preynat .

"Cardinal Barbarin welcomes the decision of the Judiciary to have brought some truth and peace after a heated controversy that even became defamatory," notes the note, which recalls the "firm support, availability and compassion towards all victims of abuse" demonstrated by the cardinal.

At the end of last year, Barbarin lamented in an interview with "Le Parisien that he had 'realized late' the abuses committed by the priest Bernard Preynat. "If I had been in a more direct relationship with the victims and seen the damage done, I would have reacted immediately," the cardinal said.

The archbishop acknowledged that for the "internally shattered" victims, it is a "great indignation " that this man could have continued to be a priest.

Barbarin said that he has asked Pope Francis for this "very serious case" to be judged canonically as well.

Last March, the alleged victims of abuse, grouped in the association "La Parole Libérée" (The liberated word), wrote a letter to Francis asking for explanations on the management of that case.

In November, bishops, priests and faithful throughout France were called on to participate in masses of penance for sexual abuse committed by Catholic clerics and to ask forgiveness from the victims for their "guilty silence."

How to think about Luther
in the church of Bergoglio
by James Kalb
CRISIS MAGAZINE
July 12, 2017

Traditionally, Catholics have viewed Luther as a heresiarch, and the Lutheran break from Rome as a religious and civilizational catastrophe. More recently, in line with current ecumenical and pastoral initiatives, that view has softened.

The softening has been quite noticeable during the current pontificate. ['Quite noticeable' is a falsehood, as it is only with Jorge Martin Bergluther that Luther's heresy and the catastrophe his schism caused to the Catholic Church have now been set aside as if they had never really mattered! Pope Leo's Bull denouncing Luther's heresies, the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation - these were all sheer BS as far as this so-called pope is concerned! Before him, no pope had ever softened the Catholic view on Luther, not even for the pipe dream of ecumenism.]

The pope recently took part in a joint liturgy with the Church of Sweden to commemorate the five hundredth anniversary of Luther’s rebellion. He has also suggested informally that a Lutheran married to a Catholic might legitimately decide to receive communion from a Catholic priest, and that disputes between Catholics and Lutherans over the doctrine of justification, the basic point at issue in Luther’s split with Rome, are now a thing of the past.

More generally, some papal language regarding law and mercy suggests movement away from the Catholic view that grace enables us to overcome our sins toward Luther’s view that it simply frees us from their consequences.

Examples include the comment in Amoris Laetitia that

---

...conscience can … recognize with sincerity and honesty what for now is the most generous response which can be given to God, and come to see with a certain moral security that it is what God himself is asking … while yet not fully the objective ideal.

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So if you think it’s all you can do, that’s probably all God is looking for. Luther’s pecca fortiter, “sin boldly,” was based on a similar line of thought. [Does anyone doubt whose example JMBergluther has been following in setting up his church of Bergoglio?]

Are these moves in the right direction? The Church is hierarchical, and it is the pope and other clergy who are charged with teaching doctrine and determining appropriate pastoral and ecumenical efforts. Even so, laymen can hardly avoid forming their own views, and many Catholics find that recent ecumenical efforts have done more harm than good, as has a tendency to confuse “pastoral” with “accepting that people do whatever they do.”

Laymen have the right and even obligation to present these concerns. The issues matter a great deal, and not simply for churchly reasons.

Our secular authorities are convinced they have the solution to all social and political problems, at least in principle, and can put it into effect through a global managed system that recognizes nothing human outside it, no authoritative God above it, no enduring human nature beneath it, and no significant history behind it other than the history of its own coming into being. Everything is a social construction, and they will do the constructing. The project is unfounded, overreaching, and destructive, and Catholics should oppose it.

But the ecumenical and interfaith movements, along with proposals for loosening sacramental discipline to accept common practices in the name of “accompaniment,” support it by sidelining specific religious principle. They turn it into something like the British monarchy, which lends historical depth and dignity to a modern utilitarian bureaucracy but does not affect its substance.

So those who view current political and social trends as anti-Catholic and anti-human have an additional reason for concern regarding ecumenical and pastoral tendencies in the Church that support them.

Concern regarding the changing Catholic attitude toward Luther [At this point I doubt that it has already become that throughout the vast Catholic world, but it will very soon be, since 1) this pope is a relentless champion of the change, 2) the bishops of the world today are probably overwhelmingly compliant and willingly pliable to anything he says, and 3) most importantly, mass media report all of this as incontrovertible irreversible ‘gospel truth’!]
is all the more justified because he’s the man who initiated the Protestant split from Rome, a fundamental event in the emergence of the modern world, and a variety of liberal and radical movements have claimed him as an inspiration.

So if we are troubled by the trend toward a global society organized through and through on wholly secular and increasingly intolerant principles, and want to understand where the trend comes from, we should know something about his thought and deeds and their consequences.

A recently published collection of essays put out by the Roman Forum, an organization founded by Dietrich von Hildebrand, can help. Luther and His Progeny: 500 Years of Protestantism & Its Consequences for Church, State, and Society includes pieces by a dozen European and American scholars of varying backgrounds, each with his own outlook and concerns, but all troubled by the man, the movement he launched, and current efforts to enlist them, along with Catholicism, in a grand scheme of political, social, and religious unification. Each essay is independent of the others, but collectively they cover the basic issues that led Luther to reject the Church, as well as the effects of his rebellion on European thought and society.

Taken together they present the picture of a revolution in religion, politics, law, ethics, economics, and even the natural sciences, the effects of which profoundly shape our present world. At bottom, what seems to have led Luther to break with Rome was his overwhelming sense of guilt over his inability to keep the moral law. He was in a mess, and the Catholic road of humility, penitence, forgiveness, sacrament, grace, and sanctification didn’t seem to be working for him, so he decided that the world itself is one huge irreversible mess. Man is totally depraved, reason a snare, free will an illusion, and the Church can do nothing and so is fundamentally useless. To make matters worse, God himself is willful, incomprehensible, and even self-contradictory, since he is good but makes man incapable of anything but evil.

Under such circumstances what do we do, if it makes sense to ask the question when we have no inclination or ability to think or choose rightly? Basically, Luther’s answer was to rely wholly on the mercy of Christ, who might — or might not — choose to cover up our sins and accept us as justified even though we would inevitably remain as corrupt as ever. [Which is exactly Jorge Martin Bergluther’s rationale for his one-sided idea of mercy!]

These are not reasonable views.

How, for example, is a God worthy of love, worship, and trust who condemns to eternal torment sinners he made incapable of acting otherwise, but then arbitrarily chooses some, who are no better than the others, for forgiveness and eternal bliss? The best that can be done for such views intellectually, one of the essayists suggests, is to view them as a precursor of German idealism, which treats contradiction as fundamental to reality and its dialectical resolution as the basis of the self-construction of the Absolute.

At the transcendent level that means, as Luther put it, that “God must first become the devil before he becomes God.” [Ooooh, another recent formulation by Bergluther. He must really have been taking adult instructions in Lutheranism to guide him in laying down the doctrines of Bergoglianism?]

And at the human level, it means faith goes through radically different stages, with the transitions involving overwhelming temptations to unbelief and blasphemy, and ultimate resolution not possible in this world.

Some people think that sort of explanation makes sense, others don’t. A more psychological and likely more comprehensible approach that some have recently proposed is to portray him as a “mystic of mercy,” overwhelmed by the infinitude of divine grace, whose words cannot be taken literally. (Muslims take the same approach with their own mystics, whose words are rarely compatible with orthodox Islam.)

That approach may explain something of the man, but not the movement he started: People don’t look to the incoherent outbursts of mystics for practical tips on the reform of Church, State, and doctrine, but that’s exactly what Luther offered, and what people took from him.

The specifics are complicated. His thought wasn’t coherent, so people took from it what suited them. [Again, remarkably Bergoglian!] At bottom, though, denying the practical effectiveness of religion tended strongly to liberate secular affairs from religious concerns, and destroy the authority and the sacramental structure of the Church. [Idem!] And that, it appears, was the reason for the success of his rebellion.

By insisting on the irrelevance of divine law to what men actually do, Luther enabled secular powers to shake off the authority of the Church, set themselves up as absolute within their domains, and incidentally enrich themselves and their supporters with the property that an ineffectual Church could no longer justify possessing.

All of which remains relevant today. Secular authorities still don’t like religious limitations, so if a contemporary religious leader wants to exchange scorn for adulation, all he has to do is ignore distinctions, loosen restrictions, and proclaim mercy without penitence or emendation of life. Neither talent, virtue, nor rational coherence is needed, only a willingness to go along in order to get along. And there are many high-ranking churchmen who are eager to accept the deal.

I shall now post a couple of essays about Luther by Dale Ahlquist, perhaps the foremost scholar on G.K. Chesterton today. The first one came out in June, and he has written a sequel today, so I am posting them both here...

The Bible, the Reformation and G.K. Chesterton
The Protestants, in separating the Bible from the Church, turned the Bible against the Church.
Forgotten was the fact that it was the Church that gave us the Bible.
Forgotten was the fact that the Bible was, and still is, a Catholic document.
Forgotten, too, was that the Protestant Bible is an abridgement of the Catholic Bible.
By Dale Ahlquist
CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT
June 19, 2017

“I suppose it will take centuries to unwind the coil of confusion and stupidity, which began when the Reformers quite irrationally separated the Bible from the Church.”

Although G.K. Chesterton is admired by both Protestants and Catholics and even non-Christians, the above line does not exactly ooze with Ecumenism. But since we are this year observing the 500thanniversary of the Reformation, we may as well point out how Chesterton exactly identifies the problem that has plagued the Christian world for half a millennium. It has to do with the best of all books: the Holy Bible.

Beginning five centuries ago, Martin Luther, then John Calvin and the other leaders of what is known as the Reformation, opened a giant rift in Christian Europe by separating themselves and their followers from the Catholic Church. They replaced the authority of the Church with the authority of Scripture. They not only separated the Bible from the Church, to the exclusion of the Church, they separated faith from reason, to the exclusion of reason. Confusion followed.
- Protestants began to believe that somehow Catholic teaching was not “scriptural” and consequentially, they deprived themselves of the Sacraments.
- Baptism and Communion became mere symbols, devoid of their supernatural power.
- There was no longer any need for Confession, because salvation came through one act of grace on the cross, and Christ was then removed from the cross, lest we should dwell on that unpleasant business, or worse, worship a graven image on a crucifix.
- The wedding of man and woman lost its divine element, and subsequently sex became separated from marriage, and the family began to dissolve.
- Priests went from being spiritual guides, ushering souls into heaven, to being regarded as agents of hell and darkness.

The Reformer’s separation of the Bible from the Church was aided by the invention of the printing press — a Catholic invention in a Catholic society, Chesterton points out, but one that “has been largely used to turn out whole libraries of lies against that society.”

The Protestants continued to protest not only against the Catholic Church but against each other, as new groups splintered away into even narrower sects with even narrower interpretations of the Bible and what Christianity should be. Purity and righteousness was replaced by Puritanism and self-righteousness, where, rather than condemning the bad uses of good things, the good things themselves were condemned.

Calvin’s emphasis on the Sovereignty of God unwittingly introduced a long string of philosophies that were fatalistic, to the exclusion of free will. What was first a theological predestination paved the way to biological, economic, political, social and psychological determinism, where people were no longer responsible for their own actions but could lay the blame on something outside of themselves that they could not control.

The chaos of the modern world, says Chesterton, “did not come from Christendom but from the disruption of Christendom.”

The Protestants, in separating the Bible from the Church, turned the Bible against the Church. Forgotten was the fact that it was the Church that gave us the Bible. Forgotten was the fact that the Bible was, and still is, a Catholic document. Forgotten, too, was that the Protestant Bible is an abridgement of the Catholic Bible. The Reformers discarded several books and relegated them to the category, “Apocrypha,” which means doubtful. Doubt, the opposite of faith.

But then secular scholars spread the doubt to the rest of the Bible. They began taking apart Scripture through the pretence of textual criticism, and the Protestants found that their one authority had collapsed. They were left with nothing. And most of them left.

The irony is that the very people who warned against an idolatry of sacred writings created a culture that suffers from an idolatry of all writings. Chesterton says,

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“There is seldom so much superstition in kissing the Book as in consulting the dictionary. Modern people, especially urban people, think that anything which has got itself printed has somehow passed an examination and received a diploma; has somehow, in fact, shown itself to be true… They will believe an encyclopedia against an eyewitness; nay, they will believe a newspaper against the naked eye. They buy the newspaper next morning to find out what the meeting they attended last night was really like.”

---

And all this left the Bible in a rather curious position. Chesterton summarised that position almost a hundred years ago, but it is still mostly accurate. He’s especially right when he says “ignorance is increasing about these things.”
- First, there are the Fundamentalists, who appeal to the Bible without daring to appeal to the authority which actually fixed the Canon of the Bible. It is, says Chesterton, “a mythology asserting that the elephant stands on a tortoise and the tortoise stands on nothing.”
- Secondly, there are the “Broad Churchmen” who are actually quite narrow, proposing to use only selections of the Bible in public, the rest being unsuitable.
- Thirdly, there are the Modernist scholars who accuse the Catholic Church of having done in “the midnight of the Dark Ages” what the Broad Churchmen are now doing: making arbitrary selections from the Bible and keeping back the rest from the people. (This is the accusation made against the Church in the popular book The Da Vinci Code.)

The Church, says Chesterton, “has been accused of hiding the Bible; but had it been true, it would have been a less astonishing achievement than that of the Reformation, which succeeded in hiding everything else.” Mainline Protestantism succeeded in concealing Western civilization from its own history.

And then there is the one Church that has kept the unabridged Bible, filling its liturgy with it, chanting its prayers day after day, and applying its ageless wisdom to this age. It has also painstakingly preserved the other ancient documents that not only testify to the truth of Scripture, but demonstrate on the face of them the difference between an inspired and uninspired text.

The Catholic Church, which still teaches the whole Scripture, that can point to all of its own doctrines in the Bible: that baptism is being born again (John 3:5), that marriage is a permanent bond (Matthew 10:11) reflecting Christ and his bride the Church (Rev. 19:7), that we must confess our sins (James 5:16) and show ourselves to a priest (Matt. 8:4), that Jesus founded a Church and appointed its first leader (Matt. 16:18), that he gave his apostles the authority to forgive sins (John 20:23), that unless we eat the flesh of Jesus and drink his blood we have no life in us (John 6:53).

Which brings us back to Ecumenism in the wake of the Reformation. We still have a great duty to appeal to a common love for God and His Son with our Protestant friends, but we also have a responsibility to get them to look honestly at the Bible and at the whole story of what really happened when the Reformers separated the Bible from the Church.

It is not an impossible task. I’ve seen it done quite successfully. It was a faithful, loving, truth-telling Catholic who patiently ushered me from the Baptist church to the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. First he appealed to what we had in common. Then he made me realize what I was missing. It helped because he had gone through the same journey himself. His name was G.K. Chesterton.

Further thoughts on Luther, the Reformation – and Chesterton
Martin Luther had the opportunity to become one of the great saints in the history of the Church.
But he did not believe he was reforming a Church simply because it needed some house cleaning.
By Dale Ahlquist
CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT
July 11, 2017

So, I took some heat from my previous article on the Reformation because I implied that the Reformation was started by Protestants. Apparently I did not spend enough time attacking the Catholic Church, which, as everyone knows, was responsible for the creation of Martin Luther and company.

But since we are still in the midst of our [Not ‘our’ – ‘their’!] year long observance of Luther’s Halloween treat at the door of the Wittenburg Cathedral and all that followed, we can certainly afford to draw out this discussion a bit longer.

So let’s make it clear. There was plenty of corruption in the Catholic Church five hundred years ago. Bishops and Abbots openly kept money and mistresses and used their ecclesiastical privilege to gain political power. The sales of indulgences were going unchecked and did untold damage not only to true piety but to the correct understanding of Purgatory and prayers for the dead. It was a far-reaching scandal throughout Christendom.

But it was not just Martin Luther who spoke out against it. St. Catherine of Siena and St. Bridget of Sweden and others fearlessly and sometimes very effectively confronted the hierarchy. And it wasn’t as if this had not happened before. Three and half centuries earlier a little friar named Francis of Assisi turned a worldly Church around simply by choosing to live out his own life according to what Jesus preached in the Gospels. The result? Genuine reform. [At least for a time. Luther's schism would bring the next great wave of true reform - the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation.]

Martin Luther had the opportunity to become one of the great saints in the history of the Church. But he did not believe he was reforming a Church simply because it needed some house cleaning. He said explicitly that one should not condemn a doctrine on the basis that the man who holds it lives a sinful life [i.e., you don’t condemn Catholic doctrine because Honorius was declared a heretic for being silent about heresies, or Alexander Borgia was a shameless libertine, or Jorge Bergoglio is anti-Catholic]. On the contrary, Luther said, “The Holy Spirit… is patient with the weak in faith, as is taught in Romans 14:15… I would have very little against the Papists if they taught true doctrine. Their evil life would do no great harm.”

There you have it from the Reformer’s mouth. He did not part ways with the Catholic Church because of ne’er-do-well priests and bishops. He thought and taught that Catholic doctrine was false. He rejected the Magisterium, the teaching authority of the Church.

If the bishops had rent their robes and donned sackcloth and ashes, it might have done great good for the Church and the world, but there is no evidence it would have changed Luther’s mind, because what was in his mind was a new theology. Hypocrites have turned away potential followers of Christ throughout the history of the Church. Still happens. But that argument only goes so far.

If the unbeliever wants to blame corrupt bishops for his own doubts about the truth of the Catholic faith, why is he not drawn back to the Church by the witness of the saints? Why isn’t St. Francis of Assisi or St. Catherine of Siena, or more recently, St. Teresa of Calcutta, enough to make him overcome his misgivings about the Church? Saints inspire holiness because they are holy. Rebels inspire rebellion. Even against themselves. Sainthood is always a better option than breaking away from the Church founded by Jesus Christ and set into motion by his chosen Apostles. It was that Church that built Christendom.

But as one observer has pointed out, what Martin Luther’s rebellion was not against a corrupt Pope, it was against a quiet Dominican friar who had been dead for over 200 years. St. Thomas Aquinas. G.K. Chesterton says, “It was the very life of the Thomist teaching that Reason can be trusted: it was the very life of Lutheran teaching that Reason is utterly untrustworthy.”

St. Augustine, a true saint and a giant among converts, was limited in one respect. The only philosophy he knew was that of Plato. St. Thomas Aquinas introduced Aristotle into Christian philosophy, and the Augustinian Platonists never really accepted it. They had a different approach to objective reality. One of those Augustinians was a monk named Martin Luther.

Chesterton argues that the Reformation was really the revenge of the Platonists. You could say it started with a difference in emphasis, you could say it started as a quarrel among monks, but Luther’s emphasis on emotion rather than reason, on subjective truth rather than objective truth, and most unfortunately, on Determinism rather than Free Will, opened the door for an attack not just on Scholasticism but on all philosophy.

[But none of those negative things can be imputed to Augustine! First of all, Augustine (354-430) had nothing to do with founding the order named for him, which came into being only in 1244 when several communities of hermits living in the Italian region of Tuscany came together to ask Pope Innocent IV that they be united under one common Rule of life and one Superior General like other Orders that had recently been founded. The Pope gave them the so-called Rule of Saint Augustine based on about five documents Augustine wrote in his lifetime that served as an outline for religious life lived in community. St. Benedict borrowed much of it when he developed his own Rule in the sixth century. But the Rule of Augustine was never really adopted by any religious order until the 11th century when some clerics thought that the Rule of Benedict, which had prevailed for five centuries, needed to be ‘replaced’ by something more ascetic. The clerics came to be known as Canons Regular or Augustinian Canons whose Rule was approved by the Lateran Council of 1059. But the Augustinian order to which Luther belonged was the Order established in 1244.]

Lutheranism, says Chesterton,

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“…had one theory that was the destruction of all theories; in fact it had its own theology which was itself the death of theology. Man could say nothing to God, nothing from God, nothing about God, except an almost inarticulate cry for mercy and for the supernatural help of Christ, in a world where all natural things were useless.

Reason was useless. Will was useless. Man could not move himself an inch any more than a stone. Man could not trust what was in his head any more than a turnip. Nothing remained in earth or heaven, but the name of Christ lifted in that lonely imprecation; awful as the cry of a beast in pain”.

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St. Thomas and Luther are “the hinges of history,” and Luther managed to loom large enough to block out the huge figure of Aquinas.

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“Luther did begin the modern mood of depending on things not merely intellectual…. He was a forceful personality. He was a bully. He claimed Scripture as his authority and then altered Scripture itself, adding a word here and there in his own translation to accommodate his own theology]. When confronted with the act,”he was content to shout back at all hecklers: ‘Tell them that Dr. Martin Luther will have it so!’ That is what we now call Personality… He destroyed Reason; and substituted Suggestion”.[More eerie pre-figurations of Jorge Martin Bergluther!]

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[Luther and every other Reformer cannot blame the Church for the consequences of their own actions. It is typical to talk about the corruption of certain bishops in Germany, but no one seems to want to discuss the actual heresy of Martin Luther and all that happened in its wake, from the splintering of Christianity into thousands of different denominations to the disintegration of philosophy into one detached and narrow and bizarre speculation after another because we lost the plain common sense, the reason and reality that was once so clearly articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas.

July 12, 2017

Canon212.com


PewSitter






I haven't time just now to translate the article illustrated with this cartoon, but I could not wait to share it. The article is a new summary of Bergoglian
outrages compiled by Giuseppe Nardi for katholisches.info, and there is a Google translation of it here: www.katholisches.info
Apparently, the cartoon goes back to October 2015 but it's the first time I've seen it... Illustrates Bergoglio's confused hubris, I think - is he God
himself, John the Baptist or 'just the pope'?

The Bergoglio Vatican's virtual interment of Benedict XVI - or at least, of his Pontificate - appears to be proceeding apace with this latest report that reflects negatively on the person
who was his most trusted aide in the Curia during his Pontificate - Cardinal Bertone, even if he denies he benefited at all from this deal supposedly done in his name and on his behalf.
Bertone really needs to do a public accounting of that apartment renovation once and for all, because it has been the subject of news reports about its extravagance and
qestioned funding from the very start...

Vatican charges two former hospital officials
with stealing money to furnish cardinal’s apartment
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
July 13, 2017

Vatican prosecutors have indicted the former president and the ex-treasurer of the Vatican-owned children’s hospital for allegedly diverting money from the hospital’s fundraising foundation to pay for renovations on a top cardinal’s apartment.

The indictment released Thursday orders Giuseppe Profiti and Massimo Spina to stand trial in the Vatican tribunal, starting next Tuesday
.
The indictment accuses the two of using 422,000 euros ($481,000) from the Bambino Gesu Pediatric Hospital’s fundraising foundation to pay for renovations on Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone’s apartment starting in 2013, when he retired as Vatican secretary of state.

Profiti, whose administration was the subject of a recent AP investigation into quality of care problems at the “pope’s hospital,” has admitted to the payment but said it was an investment so that the foundation could use the apartment for fundraising events.

Bertone, who had appointed Profiti president of the hospital in 2008, denied knowledge of the payment and said he actually had paid for the renovations out of his own pocket. That suggests that the construction company was paid twice for the same work. Bertone was not charged; the fate of the construction company wasn’t immediately clear.

Profiti resigned as president of Bambino Gesu in January 2015, nine months into a new three-year term [In other words, Pope Francis re-appointed him without apparently vetting him further].

According to the AP investigation, a secret Vatican-authorized task force had reported in 2014 that under his administration, the mission of the pope’s hospital had been “lost” and was “today more aimed at profit than on caring for children.”

The AP investigation found that children sometimes paid the price as the hospital expanded its services and tried to cut costs, with overcrowding and poor hygiene contributing to deadly infection, including one 21-month superbug outbreak that killed eight children in the cancer ward.

The hospital has called the AP report a “hoax” and denied problems. The current Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, has acknowledged there were past problems that the current administration is working to fix.

At the same time the task force was investigating, a Vatican-ordered external audit by PricewaterhouseCoopers confirmed that the hospital’s mission had been “modified in the last few years” to focus on expansion and commercial activities without sufficient governance controls.

The audit, and details of the payment for the Bertone apartment renovations were first revealed in the 2015 book “Avarice” by Italian investigative journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi.

Profiti, who now heads a small medical clinic in southern Campania, told the AP in a May 29 telephone interview that he had told Vatican prosecutors none of the money used from the foundation for the renovations had been intended for childcare. He laughed when told of the results of the 2014 task force investigation and called it “rumor.”

After the initial Vatican-authorized task force turned in its report in April 2014 after a three-month investigation, the Vatican ordered up a second in-house clinical assessment into childcare. After a three-day visit, that investigation found that the hospital in many ways was “best in class.” [This task force was reportedly headed by an infamous American dissident sister who had endorsed the Obama healthcare bill totally.]
 

Pope Francis is behaving like a Latin American dictator –
but the liberal media aren’t interested
by Damian Thompson
on his blog COFFEE HOUSE
THE SPECTATOR (UK)
July 12, 2017

At the end of June, Pope Francis dismissed Cardinal Gerhard Müller from his position as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) – arguably the most important position in the Catholic Church after that of the Pope himself, since the CDF is in charge of doctrine.

Müller was given no notice that the Pope was breaking from tradition by not renewing his five-year mandate – and no explanation. A few days later, on July 4, he explained what had happened in a long phone call to his friend Cardinal Joachim Meisner, one of four cardinals who had challenged Francis on the question of Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics.

Meisner was horrified to hear the details of Müller’s humiliation. And, that night, he died in his sleep at the age of 83.

Now Müller – who has always been careful never to question the Pope – has also broken with tradition. He has spoken angrily about the way he was treated – drawing attention to the fact that a pope who never misses an opportunity to uphold workers’ rights plays by very different rules inside the Vatican. [Thomspon goes on to quote what
Müller told the Bavarian newspaper Passauer Neue Presse - I won't repeat it as it has already been cited more than one in previous posts
on this thread.]

‘Within one minute’, note. [Refers to Müller's words that his dismissal meeting took all of one minute.] And it turns out that Francis has a history of sacking people without explanation. In an article for First Things magazine, the Italian journalist Marco Tossati fleshes out the story: [Refers to the pope firing three CDF priests and refusing to explain to Mueller why. I won't repeat the citation either, because it has been posted here first with Tosatti's original story and then with a 1P5 account of Mueller's recent travails.]

This is not the behaviour of an unassuming pope who thinks of himself as ‘Bishop of Rome’ rather than supreme pontiff. It brings to mind his most authoritarian predecessors – or, indeed, some Latin American dictator who hugs the crowds and advertises his ostentatiously humble lifestyle while his lieutenants live in fear of his rages.

It’s difficult to explain, since Francis is a man consumed by his faith who drew up an admirable plan for reforming the Curia [What exactly was admirable about it since it was mainly and almost exclusively concerned with structural changes and naming some trusted aides of the post to positions where he needs total control?] – even if he’s made almost no progress in doing so.

Don’t expect the English-speaking media to enlighten you. Coverage in secular newspapers is patchy, biased and unreliable – The Times [of London] is perhaps the worst offender – while certain Catholic journalists who write about the Vatican appear to be taking dictation from a liberal faction in the Church that is trying to hijack this pontificate.

I say ‘hijack’, because the progressive churchmen who present themselves as Francis’s allies are pretending to be better connected than they are. The Pope frequently wrong-foots them by saying the opposite of what they expect.

That’s one of the points made by canon lawyer Dr Ed Condon in today’s Holy Smoke podcast discussion about the rapidly deteriorating situation in Rome.
audioboom.com/posts/6098534-is-pope-francis-turning-into...

Ed’s insights are fascinating – and invaluable, because he offers a plausible theory as to why a supposedly approachable pontiff is regarded as a bully by many of the people who work for him.

[Bergoglio famously insisted in one of his first interviews as pope that he won't change who he is because 'he is too old to change'. So we can say that with him ,WYSIWYG - and some of what we see is not just the narcissistic authoritarian curmudgeon that he appears to be, but also the bully who will not hesitate to use his position to run roughshod over his subordinates, and inevitably, the seemingly mal-educated boor with horrid bad manners that is behind the bully.

I sometimes wonder if his grandmother, whom he credits for raising him Catholic, ever lived long enough to see her grandson in this persona which from all accounts, he exhibited openly and consistently when he was named Provincial General of the Jesuits in Argentina in his mid-30s. One of his English biographers, Paul Vallely, theorizes that Bergoglio put on his persona of humility and simplicity in part to make up for that episode.]

P.S. Damian Thompson who, besides being associate editor of the UK Spectator, is also editorial director of the Catholic Herald, of which more than a decade ago, before William Oddie and the current editor Luke Coppen, he was the editor. (I don't know if his present title is a bigger role.) In any case, it turns out he wrote the cover story for this week's issue of the CH dated July 14, 2017, as seen below. And the online edition was gracious enough to share it with its followers one day earlier.


Catholics in the West have adopted the liberal-versus-conservative mindset that has fractured non-Catholic denominations.

Can anything stop Catholic infighting?
Liturgical squabbles, doctrinal rows, vicious public spats:
the Church is once again gripped by a 1970s-style factionalism
by Damian Thompson
July 13, 2017

My first parish priest was a little old man with pebble spectacles who looked like a gorgeously coloured beetle as he bent over the altar in his Roman chasuble. His name was Fr Albert Tomei; my family went to his tiny church – St Margaret’s, Carshalton Beeches, Surrey – on most Sundays between 1966 and 1972.

Those were the years of the great liturgical upheaval after Vatican II, but I can’t say that I noticed many changes at St Margaret’s. Admittedly, I wasn’t paying attention – but, even if I had been, there wasn’t much to see. Fr Tomei did not suddenly turn round to face the people: he flatly refused to install what he called a “kitchen table” in the sanctuary.

He celebrated the New Mass, but usually in Latin. I didn’t listen to his sermons, but I gathered from things my father said on the drive back home that he never missed an opportunity to rail against the new services. My father thought this was bad form, even though he liked Fr Tomei, and from time to time we would escape to a more mainstream parish in Sutton, Wallington or Wimbledon.

When we moved from our Surrey suburb – so leafy that walking along the pavement was like hacking through the jungle – to grim Reading, we were faced with a similar situation. Fr Michael Nugent ran the parish of Christ the King as a benevolent dictatorship. He was almost a caricature of an old Irish PP, with a red face and a booming laugh; his improvised sermons weren’t very tautly constructed, to put it politely. (Not that many of the men in the congregation cared: they were outside having a smoke.)

His conservatism was not consistent, liturgically or politically: when Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative Party, I remember him saying he could never vote for “that adulteress” (a reference to the fact that Denis Thatcher had briefly been married before). Five years later, “that wonderful woman” could do no wrong.

Fr Nugent celebrated Mass with visible joy: at the elevation his face shone and he blinked, as if the Host was illuminated. But there was a lot he didn’t like about the revised liturgy, and there was a distressing scene when someone tried to receive Communion in the hand. He would celebrate in Latin from time to time, but by the mid 1970s that was a rebellious thing to do. It didn’t help that the local bishop was the icily progressive Derek Worlock, who tried to force Fr Nugent into a brutal reordering of the sanctuary. (He failed, but of course it happened in the end.)

Again, our family would sometimes shop around. There was a modern, thickly carpeted church a few miles away where the Mass was uninspiring but the sermons mercifully short. The parish next to that was full-on 1970s trendy, with a game-show pastor and unctuous pastoral assistants; one visit was enough to send us back to Fr Nugent.

Catholics in this country really were a divided community during those years; one priest in the diocese used to amend pastoral letters so that they ended with the words “Derek, by the grace of God and his own cunning, Bishop of Portsmouth”. Even at my school, the Irish Brothers ranged from virtually Lefebvrist (Brother Fidelis) to virtually Methodist (Brother Joseph).

Yet there was no hint of civil war, because after the Council the conservatives were marginalised with incredible speed; I grew up assuming that I’d never attend a Tridentine Mass but that I would live to see women priests.

Fr Tomei, Fr Nugent and Brother Fidelis were not only on the wrong side of history but also on the wrong side of modernist Church bureaucrats, who were determined to see them squashed by the Holy Spirit. Traditionalists in particular were in no position to fight back, though they missed no opportunity to air their grievances. The bitterness of the Latin Mass brigade in those years, though understandable, did so much to damage their cause as any episcopal edict.

Then, thank God, the temperature lowered. Westminster went to the holy but crafty Basil Hume instead of the culture warrior Worlock.

In 1978, John Paul II became pope and turned the blowtorch of his charisma on destructive factions in the Church. The Old Mass was gradually rehabilitated. John Paul declared that the Church had no power to ordain women priests: an irreversible ruling that, I believe, has spared Catholics much pointless distress for centuries to come.

On the other hand, he made no attempt to recreate the pre-conciliar Church, and he established that Catholic orthodoxy can flourish independently of purely Western cultural norms.

Benedict XVI, contrary to expectations, did not try to purge the Church of liberals. His rehabilitation of the Tridentine liturgy was not an attempt to turn back the clock but, rather, to concentrate the minds of all Catholics on the cosmic timelessness of the Mass, irrespective of its transitory forms.

In other words, the years 1978-2013 were a period in which the wounds that were so visible during my childhood slowly healed. So it is disturbing, in 2017, to see them reopening.

I’m not going to blame Pope Francis for this, because in a small way I’ve been responsible for making things worse. At Mass last Sunday, I remembered a recent comment by a Lutheran minister: “That Damian Thompson isn’t necessarily wrong, but he is mean.” [My unkind paraphrase: "That Jorge Bergoglio is often wrong, and he is always mean!"] Some dreadful mistakes have been made during this pontificate, and perhaps my sardonic articles and tweets have amplified their consequences.

On the other hand, a few years ago I did leave journalism for four years to do a PhD in the sociology of religion, and everything I learned during that time tells me that the Church is in trouble.

Specifically, Catholics in the West – and that includes those in the Vatican – have adopted the liberal-versus-conservative mindset that has fractured non-Catholic denominations. It’s as if Christians are required to choose between two set menus, in which social justice comes with a side salad of transgender blessings – or, alternatively, you can opt for solemn liturgy with free-market seasoning.

I’m exaggerating, but I hope you get my point. Secular culture wars have created a dichotomy that is meaningless to Catholics in Africa and Asia, who are often happy to celebrate Mass with exuberant, made-up rubrics but are at the same time as uncompromising as Cardinal Burke on issues of sexual morality.

I won’t presume to suggest a route out of this mess, but I can think of some necessary-but-not-sufficient steps that the Church should take as an insurance against going down the route of the Anglican Communion.

First, liberal Catholics must accept that they’re not going to get women priests or gay marriage. Ever. The Church’s ruling on these matters is absolutely definitive. [Don't speak too soon! Absolutely definitive for the Church, yes, but not for the church of Bergoglio which is what the world and most Catholics are getting! Prohibiting Communion for persons not in the required state of grace is absolutely definitive in the Church, too, but the church of Bergoglio says living in chronic sin can also be a 'state of grace' - just not what the Church calls a state of grace. But of course, Bergoglians don't bother with making any distinctions because they are foisting this deception that the church of Bergoglio is still 'the Church' but 'a new, improved model' of it! ]

Married priests fall into a separate category: I sometimes think that if Francis had pushed through this change, instead of entering the quagmire of divorce and Communion, he might have been surprised by how may orthodox Catholics supported him.

[But there are married priests and married priests. If, as in the case of the married priests who have passed over from the Anglican Church via the Ordinariates, they are already married, then fine, Anglicanorum coetibus allows that, just that they can't ever be Catholic bishops (which is how it is with married priests in the Orthodox Churches). But to allow priests ordained in the Catholic Church - who vow celibacy for life - to get married is, IMHO, unacceptable. It can only cause chaos at every level that I can think of. And it's not going to relieve the priest shortage in any significant way, either. It has nothing going for it.

On the other hand, Bergoglio appears to want to experiment with so-called viri probati, older men of proven virtue, most of whom may be married and have stable families now able to fend materially without them, who are willing at this point in their lives to serve as priests (I think however they would thereafter be prohibited form having conjugal relations, which is a wise ban). Cardinal Hummes and other Brazilian bishops have said this pope wants to try out this idea in the vast but sparsely-populated Amazonia region of Brazil, to serve as a template for expanding the practice worldwide as one way of helping relieve the shortage of priests everywhere.

Of course, we won't get to see how it works right away, because the viri have to be properly trained before they are ordained, which takes at least four years (to abbreviate their period of formation would be criminal!). So even the viri probati are not an immediate 'solution' (and it might be a useful exercise for a diocese in Western Europe or the Americas to do an informal survey of potential viri probati in their jurisdiction and get an idea of how many candidates there might be who would be willing to become priests!]

Second, the Tridentine Mass (I can’t bear the term “Extraordinary Form”) must not be banned again. That would be a betrayal of those traditionalist priests and lay people who stayed faithful to papal authority during the decades when they were treated as second-class citizens by their own pastors.

Third, traditionalists must stop fantasising that one day the whole Catholic world will return to the “timeless” Latin rituals of the pre-conciliar Church. It’s the Mass that’s timeless, not a particular cultural expression of it, however numinous. Demand for the 1962 Missal may grow, but it will always be limited because there is almost no one left who grew up with it. [I don't think that in what's left of my lifetime, I will ever get to see the attendance at TLMs approach even 10%, say, of the worldwide attendance at the Novus Ordo. But I think Thompson under-estimates the number of younger priests and the not-inconsiderable number of younger people now attracted to the TLM, and I like to think these numbers can only grow. If it were not a distraction, I would make a count of the people age 30 and younger who attend the Sunday sung TLM at Holy Innocents, because right now, they seem to make up easily 50% or more of the congregation (strangely, the males outnumber the females in this group), and older people like me - 50 and older - are definitely in the minority. Not to mention that our parish priest himself, who celebrates the Mass beautifully, is only in his early 40s.]

Fourth – and here I can hardly avoid causing offence – reform of the Curia is desperately needed but won’t happen until its culture becomes more international and less Italian. So many of the misfortunes that have befallen both Benedict XVI and Francis are rooted in the Italian way of doing things.

[Sure, Italians as a rule tend to be not as systematic as Germans, for example, nor as strait-laced as one thinks most British persons are, but Thompson and other Catholic observers of the Vatican have this unfair stereotype of Italians upon which they have been blaming the problems of the Curia for decades! The Curia is a bureaucracy - its problems are typical of all bureaucracies. Does it not tell its critics anything that no one can cite a pontificate in modern times when the Curia was ever considered comme il faut? It's the nature of bureaucracies to be generally inefficient if not dysfunctional.

And for all the exaggerations by commentators and reporters, they really have not presented any objective facts to prove that the Curias under John Paul II, Benedict XVI and now Francis, have been dysfunctional in the sense of not providing the bishops of the world the basic services expected from the Curia. Even Bergoglio as Archbishop, one year before he was elected pope, and at a time when not even he thought he would ever be pope, praised the Curia for the work they did for the bishops. (Though he forgot all that very quickly once he became pope.]

Finally, the Church needs to face up honestly to people’s fundamental objection to the Catholic faith. It has very little to do with sexual scandals or styles of worship. The problem is that doctrines such as transubstantiation and the Virgin Birth are hard to believe. These teachings are not negotiable – but, at the same time, they are less plausible to modern people than they were to our ancestors, whose imaginations were formed by societies that were naturally receptive to miracles and metaphysics. [I don't know, but somehow, there must have been something in the way catechesis was taught to Catholic children in my generation (born at mid-20th century) and all the generations before that which made it seem like we imbibed the faith with our mother's milk, and never had to torture ourselves as grown-ups with existential, metaphysical and philosophical challenges to that faith. Or think of all the simple folk throughout history who lived the faith that they were born into (I do think this is significant, as much as the actual content of that faith into which one is born) as best as they could, accepting the facts of the Incarnation, virgin birth, Resurrection and Trans-substantiation without question and wholly 'on faith', literally.]

I’m not going to suggest arguments that will make these teachings accessible, because I struggle with them myself. But the task can’t be accomplished without leaders with a passion for evangelisation and exceptional rhetorical gifts, untainted by factionalism and unconstrained by control-freak bureaucracy.

This is a huge challenge ­– and, sad to say, all the evidence suggests that we shall have to wait until the next pontificate before the Church can rise to it. In the meantime, damage limitation must be the order of the day, before we are all suffocated by the spirit of the 1970s.

Before tackling this short essay by George Weigel, first, let us consider the word BEATITUDE. Its simple dictionary meaning is a 'state of supreme blessedness, utmost bliss, or great joy' and its synonyms are 'blessedness, benediction, grace'. Jesus's Sermon on the Mount is remembered best for the Beatitudes he proclaimed - describing the virtues that men must live in order to be considered ‘blessed’, i.e., in order to find beatitude.

St. Gregory of Nyssa (335-395), brother of St. Basil, friend of St. Gregory Nazianzene, and who, together with them made up the Great Trio of Cappadocian Fathers (even if unlike the other two, he was not declared a Doctor of the Church], described the Beatitudes this way:

---

"Beatitude is a possession of all things held to be good, from which nothing is absent that a good desire may want. Perhaps the meaning of beatitude may become clearer to us if it is compared with its opposite. Now the opposite of beatitude is misery. Misery means being afflicted unwillingly with painful sufferings."

---

Beatitude and the ongoing debate over 'Amoris Laetitia'
Too many churchmen seem unaware of this great achievement of post-Vatican II Catholic theology
and so they remain frozen in time, trapped in the hard rules/soft rules debate.
by George Weigel
CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT
July 12, 2017

Asked to name books that gave me the greatest intellectual jolt in recent decades, I’d quickly cite two.

N.T Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress Press) accepts every grand-slam bid from the guild of Scriptural deconstructionists and skeptics, calmly replies, “I’ll see you and raise you” – and then takes the game with a flourish, leaving the unbiased reader convinced of, well, the resurrection of the Son of God.

Then there is The Sources of Christian Ethics, by Servais Pinckaers, OP (Catholic University of America Press). If I could put one book into the hands of every (and I mean every) combatant in the post-AL debate, Father Pinckaers’s masterpiece would be it. Why?

Because so much of the controversy over Pope Francis’s post-synodal apostolic exhortation reflects the hard rules/soft rules argument about the Christian moral life that Pinckaers explodes.

The moral life, he insists, is not first and foremost a matter of rules; it’s a matter of beatitude. The Sermon on the Mount is the Magna Carta of Christian ethics. Yes, there are rules, or moral norms, but the Church teaches them in order to lead stumbling humanity toward happiness by helping us grow in the virtues that make for human flourishing.

The recovery of this insight – that beatitude is the goal of the moral life and that the virtues are at the heart of Christian morality – is one of the great achievements of post-Vatican II Catholic theology.

[I don't think any serious Catholic, simple or sophisticated, ever lost sight of that - and we didn’t have to read Pinckaers to know it! It's a matter of semantics, or which horse comes before which cart. As Weigel himself puts it, the Church teaches her moral norms in order to lead man to happiness by growing in virtue. So you can't get to happiness without following the rules. Where is it that those who protest AL's apostate propositions are wrong in talking about rules???]

Too many churchmen seem unaware of it, though, and so they remain frozen in time, trapped in the hard rules/soft rules debate. [Certainly, Weigel cannot include in this criticism the DUBIA cardinals and all the good and competent Catholics who, like them, protest AL for incontrovertible reason – primarily, to object to its rejection of Christian truth. Now, none of the Eight Beatitudes refers to truth-telling but at least two of them, and possibly a third one, could be applied to the holy crusade that the objectors to AL are embarked upon:

---

”Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill. “
“Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God”.
“Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice's sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”.]

---

Thus it’s been interesting in recent months to see renewed references to the moral theology of Father Bernhard Häring, C.SS.R. Häring, an anti-Nazi hero during World War II, had a significant influence on the immediate post-Vatican II period; yet, he too seemed strangely imprisoned in a pre-Vatican II mindset. He was something of a rules-centered ethicist before the Council; he remained something of a rules-centered ethicist after the Council. What changed was his approach to the rules: he was a rigorist before the Council and a laxist afterwards. But the rules-centered paradigm was the same.

Which is to say, Father Häring missed the Pinckaers Revolution. And judging from the commentary in the wake of Amoris Laetitia, so did a lot of others, not least among those who think of themselves as the party of Catholic progress.

This is very unfortunate. The Church can and must do a better job of explaining that, behind every “no” the Church says to this, that, or the other human failing or foible, there is a resounding “yes” - a “yes” to beatitude, a “yes” to human flourishing, a “yes” to noble living, a “yes” to a particular virtue. Grasp the “yes,” and each “no” begins to make sense as an invitation to live the virtues that make for a truly fulfilled life.

The Pinckaers approach to the moral life gets us to “yes.” The rules-based approach – in its hard (rigorist) or soft (laxist) form – finds it hard to do that. [NO! First, follow the rules, which can certainly be expressed positively, then you can embark on a life of virtue - in which you will find, even on earth, a foretaste of the beatitude Christ promised. It has been said that all of the Beatitudes have an eschatological meaning, that is, they promise us salvation - not in this world, but in the next – but they also provide “peace of mind in the midst of our trials and tribulations on earth”.]

I might add that there isn’t a shred of empirical evidence to suggest that the lax-rules approach is pastorally successful in bringing the bored, alienated, indifferent, or confused back to a full and sustained practice of the faith, whereas there’s lot of evidence that the living parts of the Church are those that have embraced the Pinckaers approach – which had a decisive influence on John Paul II’s encyclical on the renewal of Catholic moral theology, Veritatis Splendor. But that’s a tale for another time.

I was reminded of the Pinckaers/Häring divide when, a few months back, Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster told a meeting in London that the Church would “persist” in being “awkward” when challenged by the many forms of the sexual revolution. But is that quite the right image? Is the Church being “awkward” (or “obstinate,” another term the cardinal used)?

The 21st-century Church that proclaims certain moral truths in the face of sharp cultural opposition isn’t being different for the sake of being different or mule-headed; and it isn’t being deliberately clumsy. The Church of the New Evangelization [which is certainly not the church of Bergoglio] is saying, “Here’s what we think makes for the happiness you seek. Here are the virtues that make for that happiness, according to millennia of experience. Let’s talk about it.” That’s true pastoral accompaniment.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/07/2017 15:17]

July 13, 2017

Canon212.com


PewSitter






P.S. Mea maxima culpa... I overlooked to do a very important post yesterday which I had been planning to do all along, but I had
a terrible lapse just because both Catholic news aggregators made no reference to the event in their above-the-fold headline summaries.

However, in its weekly bulletin of July 9, my parish church Holy Innocents did underscore the significance of July 13, 2017, being
100 years from the day Our Lady revealed the much-discussed 'three secrets' to the shepherd children of Fatima...

NOT A GAG! It's a sign at the entrance to the hotel suite occupied by the pope at Casa Santa Marta. (I provided the overlaid translation, obviously.)

Visitors to pope's hotel suite
warned 'Complaining not allowed'
by Ines San Martin
CRUX
July 14, 2017

“Complaining Not Allowed” (in Italian, Vietato Lamentarsi), reads the sign, which was recently spotted on the pope’s door by long-time Italian Vatican watcher Andrea Tornielli. In much smaller print, a red warning on the sign defines this as the first law in the protection of one’s health and well-being. [I do not see these words on the sign.]

The sign also warns transgressors, saying that they’re subject to developing a “victim complex” ['victimism' - vittimismo - is the word used] with the subsequent “diminution of their sense of humor and ability to solve problems.”
Complaining in the presence of children, the sign warns, would lead to a double sanction.

The sign closes on a more upbeat note, advising readers that “to become the best of yourself, you have to concentrate on your own potential and not on your limits, therefore: Stop complaining, and act to make your life better.”

The sign was produced by Italian psychologist and psychotherapist Salvo Noé, who gave it to the pontiff after a June 14 weekly audience. Noé specializes in psychology in work environments, and gives lectrues on well-being [Ah yes, well-being - that New Age mantra for the New Ager's daily goal and ideal] to universities, security forces and companies. [It is not surprising Bergoglio appreciates the kind of pop psychology people like Noe purvey, since it is very similar to his own tiresome platitudes.]

According to Tornielli, who got the picture and background from “an old priest who was with the pope earlier this week,” Francis promised to put it up on his office door, but seeing it would look out of place in the Apostolic Palace, he decided instead to put it where he resides.

Though Room 201 is considered the pope’s private quarters, he’s often welcomed people there, mostly long-time friends who are not part of his public agenda. [Most famously, of course, Eugenio Scalfari, who is nonetheless very much part of Bergoglio's pubic agenda. He has become the stalwart mouthpiece through whom this pope first floats his most outrageous apostate statements, important enough to the image the pope wants to present of himself that Scalfari's reportage of the first of what would be periodic 'reconstructions' of papal interviews merited a place in the DOCUMENTS section of the pope's Vatican webpages for months - and after it was, most properly if very belatedly, taken offline, it appeared in the first Vatican-published anthology of Bergoglian interviews.]

Francis has spoken about the dangers of excessive complaining many times, including early on in his pontificate when he said that Christians who complain too much or are melancholic, “have more in common with pickled peppers than the joy of having a beautiful life.” [Thus speaks the onetime perennial pickled-pepper face from his Buenos Aires days - before, that is, he went on to discover how much "I really enjoy being pope".]

A year later, during one of his daily morning Masses, in Santa Marta, the Argentine pope warned against exaggerating difficulties compared to those undergoing major tragedies when praying.

“Our life is too easy, our complaints are over-dramatized,” the pontiff said at the time. “Faced with the complaints of so many people, of so many brothers and sisters who are in the dark, who have lost all memory, almost lost all hope - who are experiencing this exile from themselves, who are exiled, even from themselves, (our complaints are) nothing!”

And yet, the complaints of orthodox Catholics against your relentless daily assault on the deposit of faith and your wreckovation of the Church to set up your own church are not only legitimate and well-founded but essential to the defense of the faith - and therefore just as desperate if not more than those complaints that you appear to be most concerned about. It's just that you refuse to acknowledge any complaints against you at all because you really think you cannot possibly do or say anything wrong!