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Cardinal Sarah vs the innovators in the Church
By Fr. Gerald E. Murray
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 19, 2017
Robert Cardinal Sarah recently gave an address that bears the image of a prophetic warning about the nature of the Church’s present crisis of faith. He says plainly and without hesitation numerous things that are certain to inspire many – and to annoy many others. I am sure he aims at both effects.
His indictment harkens back to the title of his first book, God or Nothing: Catholics inflict great harm upon the Church when they exalt themselves and put their own theories above God and his revealed doctrines. This attitude, seen in all areas of the life of the Church, is most plainly manifest in the liturgical realm. Cardinal Sarah states:
As Benedict XVI often emphasized, at the root of the liturgy is adoration, and therefore God. Hence it is necessary to recognize that the serious, profound crisis that has affected the liturgy and the Church itself since the Council is due to the fact that its CENTER is no longer God and the adoration of Him, but rather men and their alleged ability to ‘do’ something to keep themselves busy during the Eucharistic celebrations.
The concepts of adoration, worship, reverence, homage are unknown to vast numbers of Catholics, including many Mass-goers. A priest friend of mine recently described a large new church as not being a place “where you can pray.” I have been in such “spaces.” They are best described as sets for performances for a comfortably accommodated audience. The tabernacle may be found using Google Maps.
Cardinal Sarah continues:
Even today, a significant number of Church leaders underestimate the serious crisis that the Church is going through: relativism in doctrinal, moral, and disciplinary teaching, grave abuses, the desacralization and trivialization of the Sacred Liturgy, a merely social and horizontal view of the Church’s mission. Many believe and declare, loud and long, that Vatican Council II brought about a springtime in the Church.
Nevertheless, a growing number of Church leaders see this “springtime” as a rejection, a renunciation of her centuries-old heritage, or even as a radical questioning of her past and Tradition. Political Europe is rebuked for abandoning or denying its Christian roots. But the first to have abandoned her Christian roots and past is indisputably the post-Conciliar Catholic Church.
As a student priest in Rome, I was informed that the interiors of her numerous magnificent churches had been preserved from destructive “renovations” due to the fact that the Italian government had to approve any changes affecting these national artistic treasures, which their artistic curators were loathe to do.
Alas, the liturgical and doctrinal innovators were not constrained by any equivalent external or internal restraint. Fr. Thomas Reese, S.J., for instance, has recently written a stunning rejection of Jesus’s teaching on the indissolubility of marriage that “What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder… and I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery; and he who marries a divorced woman, commits adultery.” (Mt.19:6-9)
Fr. Reese, not convinced by the Church’s clear and unambiguous teaching that Our Lord meant exactly what he said, observes:
“Jesus said a lot of things that we do not observe literally without exception. . . .Jesus does not list any punishment for divorce and remarriage. . . .I look upon Jesus’s teaching on divorce as the first feminist legislation because a divorced woman was kicked out on the street with no assets or alimony. Today we live in a different world. How can we be so certain that Jesus would respond in the same way to divorce today?”
The Church has taught indissolubility in many different ages and circumstances, in every part of the Earth, ever since Jesus laid down that teaching. How is Fr. Reese so sure that modern conditions give him and those who agree with him a license to change what has been taught always and everywhere?
Cardinal Sarah sees this kind of insidious subversion for what it is, and is not afraid to speak plainly:
Many refuse to face up to the Church’s work of self-destruction through the deliberate demolition of her doctrinal, liturgical, moral, and pastoral foundations.
While more and more voices of high-ranking prelates stubbornly affirm obvious doctrinal, moral and liturgical errors that have been condemned a hundred times and work to demolish the little faith remaining in the people of God, while the bark of the Church furrows the stormy sea of this decadent world and the waves crash down on the ship, so that it is already filling with water, a growing number of Church leaders and faithful shout: “Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise!” [“Everything is just fine, Milady,” the refrain of a popular comic song from the 1930’s, in which the employees of a noblewoman report to her a series of catastrophes].
For some in the Church today [led by our singularly anti-Catholic pope], Catholic doctrine is subject to rewriting, liturgical worship of God is primarily a chance for people to assemble and express themselves, Catholic moral teaching is now to be considered an example of outmoded rigorism, and pastoral care of the faithful means telling them to do whatever they want as long as it makes them “happy.”
But are we really happy when we reject Our Lord’s teachings and try to convince ourselves that that is what Our Lord would want us to do? Is it not rather the case that any such manipulation of the truth of Christ produces a spirit of anxiety and bitterness that inexorably manifests itself in a frenzied attempt to tear down the rest of Catholic teaching and practice?
It really does come down to God or Nothing.
Meanwhile, the Bergoglian disdain for the faith and Truth is best articulated by a man who has often been called the ‘Vice Pope’ – an appellation never disavowed by the Bergoglio Vatican – who has let loose against the Four Cardinal and their DUBIA in what one can only consider a very conscious surrogacy role for Jorge Bergoglio…
‘Vice Pope’ Maradiaga insults
the Four Cardinals for their Dubia
by Maike Hickson
April 20, 2017
Several Catholic outlets around the world – including Infovaticana and Chiesa e postconsilio – have reported that Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, coordinator of the pope’s “council of nine“, has made some condescending and disrespectful remarks about the four dubia cardinals.
The moderate and characteristically gentle Italian Vaticanista Marco Tosatti went so far as to say that the elderly Honduran cardinal and papal adviser “attacked” these faithful cardinals “with great violence”.
On 25 March, Maradiaga gave an interview on the Swiss-Italian Radio Television Station RSI’s “Strada Regina” program in which he said the following (translation courtesy of Mr. Andrew Guernsey):
I think, in the first place, that they [the four cardinals] have not read Amoris Laetitia, because, unfortunately, this is the case! I know the four and I say that they are already in retirement. [Presumably, Maradiaga thinks that being in retirement means one stops reading anything!]
How come they have not said anything about those who manufacture weapons? Some are in countries that manufacture and sell weapons for all the genocide that is happening in Syria, for example. Why? [What a non sequitur, and a blatant insertion of one of the most cockeyed of Bergoglian notions!] I would not want to put it – shall we say – too strongly ( only God knows people’s consciences and inner motivations), but, from the outside it seems to me to be a new pharisaism. They are wrong; they should do something else.
[No, Your Tegucigalpan Eminence – they are doing exactly what defenders of the faith ought to do, retired or not!] Marco Tosatti commented on this quote: “It is singular that a cardinal uses such offensive terms about other cardinals.”
Maradiaga – who himself is already 74 years old (born 29 December 1942) and thus very close to the official age of retirement – also claimed the following during that same interview:
I think the car of the Church has no gear to go in reverse. It pulls itself forward because the Holy Spirit is not accustomed to go backwards. He always brings us forward. I am not afraid because I know it is not Francis, it is the Holy Spirit who guides the Church, and that, if He has allowed this Pontiff to come, it is for some reason, and we certainly ought to look to the future with hope because, more and more, the Church is God’s, it is not our own. We are only servants.
[Fine lip service, that’s what Maradiaga is jammering! What Bergoglio has been doing to the Church has much less to do with God than with himself, his frighteningly monstrous hubristic ego!]
Infovaticana rightly points out, moreover, that it was this Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga himself who made headlines for having worked out easier access to the Vatican for variously progressivist-activist groups, such as PICO (People Improving Communities through Organizing), which is openly connected to funding by George Soros. As we reported recently, Pope Francis now endorses PICO publicly.
As Infovaticana puts it, Soros also tried – with the help of Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga – to influence the pope during his U.S. visit in 2015, advising the pope to be silent on issues such as abortion and to stress, instead, themes such as economic and racial injustice.
OnePeterFive has previously reported on Maradiaga’s dubious track record:
- Maradiaga, who is the Coordinator of Pope Francis’ Council of Cardinal Advisors, has claimed that the Second Vatican Council made peace with the formally-condemned heresy of Modernism;
- headed up Caritas Internationalis while it held a seat on the governing board of a pro-communist, pro-abortion, pro-homosexual organization;
- has publicly chastised Cardinal Gerhard Müller for being insufficiently “flexible” when it comes to communion for the divorced and remarried; and
- has said that we are heading towards a “deep and global renovation” of the Church which will “encompass all of the historical dimensions of the Church” and include “transformation of the institutions”.
- He further claims that his friend, “The Pope wants to take this Church renovation to the point where it becomes irreversible.”
There is perhaps no more potent example than Maradiaga of how how certain social issues — with a decidedly progressive approach — are being given a priority over moral issues in the current leadership of the Catholic Church. In October of 2013, the cardinal also gave talks in Dallas, Texas and Miami, Florida, where he had the following to say:
This situation demands, the cardinal insisted, that the Church must “proclaim and testify, as a criterion of sociopolitical organization and education, that all men are brothers; and that, if we are brothers, we must fight for establishing relations of equality and to eliminate[sic] their greatest obstacles: money and power. We have to establish as a priority that those majorities who suffer poverty and exclusion (the last) will be the first…
If a passion for the last becomes a mobilizing idea and moral force, we will then have the possibility of creating international politics of solidarity, of economic democracy, the assumption of evangelical poverty, attaining the creation of new social subjects, with a new set of anthropological values and a new purpose for both collective and personal life, all [falsely inspired by Christ and His Beatitudes.” (The Wanderer, 11 July 2013)
It seems that in this new Vatican-driven socio-political reform, the salvation of souls at risk is not, as it were, on the tip of the mind of this professedly progressive cardinal. Moral issues are now often said to have to give way to economic and social issues, or so it now seems.
The four cardinals, however, have tried to defend the abused Laws of God about marriage which indispensably help souls, under Grace, to attain to Eternal Beatitude. Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga implicitly rebukes them for such zeal and dedication, however, and he does it with contumely and harsh language.
As Professor Roberto de Mattei recently reiterated his own concern on the Italian website Corrispondenza Romana, the greatest forms of scandal today are: “the advertisements, the fashions, the apologetics of immorality and of perversion, both through the media, as well as through the laws that approve such a violation of Divine Laws as in the legalization of abortion and of same-sex partnerships…The moral opposition between good and evil is being replaced by the sociological opposition between wealth and poverty.”
It would be fitting now if the four DUBIA cardinals were to request an apology from the haughty and reckless Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga. Publicly.
UPDATE: Andrew Guernsey, our translator for this piece, writes that after viewing the full interview in Italian, he identified another scolding from Maradiaga to the Four Cardinals, which occurs at roughly the 14-15 minute mark:
“…Let us look above all at reality, because to see also if there aren’t many cases of those who are in a second union–we will not enter there because there are many reasons– but that they in a healthy conscience [feel] that their first marriage was not valid and that they have found a new family, they are living in conformity to the law of God, why throw stones? Why? Instead of saying, “How are we doing with the new generation so they can prepare themselves better to have a good family. And this is Amoris Laetitia…
“It happens that so many times the methods that these four brothers [the four cardinals] only look at, who think that they are the bosses of the doctrine of the faith [pensano che sono i capi della dottrina della fede], they don’t look at the very great majority of the faithful who are happy with Amoris Laetitia.”
We’ll just let the irony of that accusation sink in.
Carl Olson offers the ff comments on Maradiaga's unbelievable screed - unworthy for any Catholic, let alone a cardinal:
Cardinal Maradiaga insults the Four Cardinals,
deflects from the issue, plays Holy Spirit card
Analysis
by Carl Olson
April 21, 2017
[After quoting the pertinent passages in the interview]:
...Although relatively short, these remarks speak volumes. Some thoughts:
1) It is revealing, to put it mildly, how often those who criticize the four cardinals — Raymond Burke, Carlo Caffarra, Walter Brandmüller and Joachim Meisner — do so in such a personal, rude manner. This is to be expected of course in the woolly thickets of blogs and personal sites, but this is often the case coming from high-ranking prelates and others who are close to Pope Francis.
That said, they may simply be emulating the Holy Father himself, who has a, well, colorful way of addressing those he disagrees with or thinks need to be put in their place.
To say, as Cardinal Maradiaga does, that Cardinals Burke, Caffarra, Brandmüller and Meisner, have not actually read the controversial Apostolic Exhortation is the sort of low, embarrassing pot shot best suited for teenagers. That he says with such obvious disdain is bothersome, even scandalous.
2) It is a further example of how some of those close to Francis, and even the Holy Father himself, refuse to seriously address pressing, thoughtful, cogent, and important questions regarding marriage, morality, the sacraments, and a number of related matters. Put bluntly, it reveals either a sad superficiality or a dismissive disdain. Neither possibility engenders much trust or peace of mind.
3) The sorry attempt to change the subject by referring to the manufacturing of weapons (a popular theme with Francis, who in June 2015 denounced those who manufacture weapons and then criticized the Allies for not bombing trains during World War II) and the use of the tired — and rather ludicrous — descriptive "pharisaism" not only reveals disdain, but a consistent strategy: to isolate, label, and destroy. The focus (shrewdly, from that perspective) is on the alleged, if vague, faults of critics, who are routinely dismissed as pharisaical, rigid, dogmatic, and so forth.
4) If the four Cardinals are wrong, as Cardinal Maradiaga states, then simply show it. It's starting to remind me of the kid in junior high who claims to have a football signed by Terry Bradshaw but never shows it to anyone because it's in storage, it got lost, and so forth. But he keeps bragging about it. At some point you realize the football doesn't exist.
5) The appeal to the Holy Spirit — also used in equally vague and sloppy ways by Cardinal Farrell back in October 2016 — is a red herring; it is meant to suggest that nearly everything the Holy Father says and does is directly inspired by the Holy Spirit. In fact, Cardinal Farrell stated: "Do we believe that he didn't inspire our Holy Father Pope Francis in writing this document?"
In fact, speaking with some needed precision, papal and conciliar texts are not "inspired" by the Holy Spirit; rather, the Holy Spirit protects the Magisterium from formally teaching error in matters of faith and morals.
The language of "inspiration", strictly speaking, is almost always (if not always) confined to the deposit of faith; that is, divine revelation as transmitted through Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture. Which is why the fathers at Vatican II noted, in Dei Verbum, that "we now await no further new public revelation before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ" (DV, 4).
Insinuating that the Church can change teachings simply because Pope A or Pope B decides he wishes to is problematic, to say the least; this is especially the case when the matter at hand has to do with the very nature of the sacraments, the proper role of conscience, and the life of grace (as I've discussed elsewhere).
6) Who is the "boss" of doctrine? Put more crudely, who tells doctrine what to do? Or what to be? The Catechism, quoting Dei Verbum, states: "Yet this Magisterium is not superior to the Word of God, but is its servant. It teaches only what has been handed on to it. At the divine command and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it listens to this devotedly, guards it with dedication and expounds it faithfully. All that it proposes for belief as being divinely revealed is drawn from this single deposit of faith." (CCC, 86; DV, 10)
Could it be that the four cardinals and those of us who have similar questions and concerns are rightly anxious about how well and how clearly the doctrine of the Church is being guarded and expounded?
7) Finally, the appeal to the "very great majority of the faithful who are happy with Amoris Laetitia" is curious on several counts. For example, are they? How do we know who is happy or unhappy?
Secondly, and more importantly, since when did the truth of Church teaching rely on the happy response of the faithful? How many of the faithful were happy with Humanae Vitae?
How many of the faithful understand the issues at stake — the nature of freedom and conscience, or the relationship between grace and truth — when it comes to this ongoing controversy?
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/04/2017 14:15] |