Bergoglio sees ‘lager’ in Italy
(where there are none)
but not in China or Cuba
[For that matter, were the infamous Soviet ‘lager’ in Siberia ever closed down by Russia?]
Translated from
May 1, 2017
The papacy has for centuries been one of the highest moral authorities in the world. How is it possible that today, a pope can claim – and reiterate the claim – that in Italy, there are concentration camps housing refugees, without a single newspaper protesting, nor a single government minister responding, nor any agency taking on the responsibility of investigating such a terrible accusation?
Has papal authoritativeness fallen to a new low that his words are simply ignored as if they were, I don’t know, the bizarre statements of someone like our Senator Razzi? Or perhaps it is Italy that has fallen so low that she can be hounded with horrible accusations without anyone reacting to defend our poor country?
Here are the facts. A week ago, Bergoglio denounced ‘cruelty’ towards migrants and compared refugee camps to concentration camps. To which one Jewish organization reacted, the American Jewish Committee, which without being reported by the Italian media, requested the pope to “reconsider his unfortunate choice of words”.
Rightly, David Harris, president of the AJC, observed that “the conditions in which [undocumented] migrants currently live in some European refugee camps may be difficult… but certainly they are not in concentration camps”. It is even embarrassing to have to explain that!
In the Nazi concentration camps, Jews [and other ‘undesirables’] were brought like animals packed in boxcars to be enslaved, tortured and eventually exterminated. But today’s migrants – who left their places of origin voluntarily, paying considerable money to the human traffickers who facilitate their departure – have been rescued at sea by our own navy, if necessary, and welcomed and provided with their immediate needs in welcome centers where they are taken care of by the Italian government (and other charitable agencies) while steps are taken to grant them temporary visas.
It is shameful that this colossal work of succor
[at considerable expense to the Italian government whose financial problems are going from bad to worse] should be compared to lager conditions by Bergoglio
[who saw firsthand – and praised – the work of the Italian refugee center in Lampedusa, the nearest European landing for migrants coming from Northwestern Africa].
The pope’s supporters, ever ready to surround him with incense, sought to mitigate his statement by saying the pope was really referring to some detention centers in Libya!
[How absurd! Libya is not in Europe, and is, besides, one of the countries generating refugees.]
But Bergoglio himself belied their well-meaning alibi for him. At his April 29 inflight news conference returning from Cairo, he was asked:
“Several days ago, you compared refugee camps to concentration camps. Was that a lapsus?
Answer: But there do exist refugee camps which are true and proper concentration camps. There are some in Italy, some in other countries, in Germany no!”
Observe how he goes out of his way to say, “In Germany, no!” Because he knows the Germans are very touchy on the subject of concentration camps, and he wished to avoid offending their sensibilities, because he would have provoked great outrage from Germany.
But he seems to think he can spit on Italy with this horrible and unjust accusation because Italian leaders will put up with any insult!
Bergoglio, who lives in a walled city that does not house any refugees, feels he has the right to point the finger at Italy with an accusation that is objectively inconceivable (i.e., one cannot use the term ‘concentration camp’ loosely.)
[One recalls years ago when the notoriously loose-lipped then-President of the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Refugees made the unwarranted remark that the Israeli government had caused the Gaza Strip – which is sovereign and autonomous Palestinian territory - to become a ‘concentration camp’ for Palestinians.]
Even
La Repubblica used this headline:
Pope Francis: ‘Even in Italy, immigrant camps are like lager’. An accusation from a pope who has never denounced the true and proper concentration camps that exist in Cuba or China.
[My question: Did Russia close down all the Soviet gulag camps in Siberia? One caveat: Post-Nazi concentration camps in the Communist countries were not designed for mass extermination, but for torture, forced labor, and eventual death by attrition, yes.] Rather, Bergoglio has been most ‘respectful’ and ingratiating with the leaders of these Communist countries, doing everything to please them.
If Italy were still a normal country, her government would by now have protested Bergoglio’s wrongful charge and demanded his apology, if only from the sovereign of another state. But that has not happened, nor is it likely to happen.
It is the nth episode that is mortifying above all for Catholics who are exposed daily to the humiliation of absurd and often risible statements from this pope. As risible as the other statement he made to the newsmen travelling on the papal plane last April 29, that
“Europe was made by migrants, centuries upon centuries of migrants!”
We all know that the present Bishop of Rome is not exactly well-read, but for him to hazard such ‘historical’ observations is really self-harming!
But even his arithmetic goes wrong! Last week, he said that
“If every municipality in Italy welcomed just two migrants each, then there would be room for all of them!” Except that Italy only has 8,000 municipalities (formally called communes) and the current ‘refugee’ population is not just 16,000, but at least 180,000 arriving every year in the past three years.
Unfortunately, this pope often speaks without careful consideration of what he is saying. As when he said, the day after the jihadist massacre perpetrated at the
Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, “It is true that one should not react violently, but if anyone says a bad word against my mother, he should expect a punch in the face!”
Not to mention his huge theological bloopers, which now constitute a true anthology. From his first
"There is no Catholic God” in 2013, to his most recent sallies :
“Jesus became the devil for our sake”, on April 4, or
“Even among themselves, the [persons of the] Most Holy Trinity are always squabbling, but they give the image of unity” ,on March 17.
This pope has approached the limits of blasphemy which has never happened before in the history of the Church. So it is not surprising that his greatest atheist supporter, Eugenio Scalfari, is emboldened to fire off anti-Catholic sallies of all sorts. We have often pointed these out in this column. But he always has something new.
For instance, in a Page 1 editorial yesterday in
Repubblica, in which he raised a new monument to his friend Bergoglio, Scalfari wrote: “In the inter-religious meeting held Friday in Cairo… all the Oriental religions were present - Muslim, Greek Orthodox, Coptic: the three monotheisms all represented by their highest authorities”.
[Curious that he mentions the Copts, but not Catholics! But then we are dealing here with a 93-year-old dotard who still believes he is the omniscient incarnation of Voltaire.]
With apologies to the Jews - whose religion, it appears, is not monotheistic as far as Scalfari is concerned, nor even an ‘Oriental religion’ (perhaps someone ought to explain to this self-proclaimed omniscient autodidact that monotheism was born with the Jewish people, from whose monotheism both Christianity and Islam derive).
I will omit Scalfari’s other new absurdities. His prose is a vanity fair of untruths. However,
even if we can ignore Scalfari who can write whatever he wants, we cannot ignore the untruths [and blasphemies and heresies] spoken by someone who is supposed to be the Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church.
I did not realize how out of touch I have been with the Italian media - for which I have relied in the past four years on Sandro Magister, Antonio Socci, Marco Tosatti, and Roberto De Mattei for the significant 'can't-miss' stories. But I missed this one from De Mattei who discloses info reported in the Italian media but not, to my knowledge, in Anglophone sources, that is bone-chilling insofar as it tells what now appears to the official position of the Church in Italy on AL:
The scandal of our time
By Roberto De Mattei
Translated from
22/04/17
In the world we have more than enough scandals, and Jesus says, “Woe to the world because of things that cause sin! Such things must come, but woe to the one through whom they come!"
(Mt 18,6). In Catholicism, scandal is an attitude or behavior which leads to sin or the spiritual ruin of others
(CIC 2284).
It is
not enough to keep from committing what is sin in itself. But
one must avoid that which without being sin places others in danger of sinning. As the Dictionary of Moral Theology by Cardinals Roberti and Palazzini says,
to cause scandal is particularly serious when one carries high responsibility, in the world or in the Church (Editrice Studium, Rome 1968, p. 1479).
The forms of scandal today include advertising, fashions, all apology or justification in the mass media for immorality and perversions, and laws which approve disobedience to the commandments of God, such as those which legalize abortion and common-law unions (hetero- as well as homo-).
The Church has always considered it a scandal when divorced Catholics remarry civilly. John Paul II, in
Familiaris consortio, identified scandal as one of the reasons who remarried Catho9lic divorcees cannot receive Holy Communion. In fact, he points out,
“if these persons are admitted to the Eucharist, then the faithful would be led to error and confusion about the doctrine of the Church on the indissolubility of marriage” (No. 84).
Canon 915 of the Code of Canon Law says:
“Persons who may not be admitted to Holy Communion are those who hve been excommunicated, those who are prohibited from doing so as penalty for sin, and those who obstinately persist in manifestly grave sin”.
A declaration in 2000 from the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts was explicit about the prohibition in Canon 215 as it applies to remarried divorcees.
“In the concrete case of admission to Holy Communion of divorced Catholics who have remarried, the scandal – understood as an action which would lead others towards evil – violates both the sacrament of the Eucharist and the indissolubility of marriage. This scandal continues even when this behavior, unfortunately, no longer causes surprise.
Indeed, it is precisely before the deformation of conscience when pastoral action is needed - patient as well as firm - to safeguard the holiness of the sacraments, in defense of Christian morality, and for the correct formation of the faithful” (Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, “Declaration on the admissibility to Holy Communion of remarried divorcees”, 6/24/2000).
After the promulgation of Amoris laetitia in April 2016, that which had always been considered a scandal by the Church is now considered acceptable behavior to be accompanied by understanding and mercy.
Mons. Pietro Fragnelli, Bishop of Trapani and president of the Commission for the Family, Young People and Life of the Italian bishops conference, said in an interview with the CEI’s news agency SIR on April 10 (one year since AL) that
“The acceptance of the apostolic exhortation is increasing in the dioceses, in the sense that
People are seeking to penetrate the profound spirit of AL which asks for a new mentality with respect to love, the family and family life”.
In order to transform the mentality of the Catholic world, the CEI is now engaged intensively in promoting meetings, seminars, short courses for engaged couples and married couples in crisis, above all, as SIR underscores,
with the end of “a change of style that will harmonize pastoral ministry to families with the Bergoglian model”.
According to Mons. Fragnelli,
“we can say without a doubt that a change of mentality is under way both on the part of the bishops as well as the diocesan faithful, in favor of something which is nonetheless still waiting to be achieved, to be sought and to be lived together. We can call it a work in progress.”
The ‘work in progress’ is that, until a few years back, the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts used the expression ‘deformation of conscience’, which means, assuming a mentality that effectively denies the sanctity of sacraments and Christian morality.
Last February 25, during a ‘formation’ course for parish priests, the pope exhorted them in these words:
“Bring near to you, in the evangelical way, through welcoming and encounter, those young people. Who prefer to live together without getting married. On the spiritual and moral spectrum, they are among the poor and the little towards which the Church, in the footsteps of her Master and Lord, wishes to be a mother that does not abandon [her children] but draws them close to care for them”.
[The fallacy of the statement, of course, is that the Church never abandons her children and indeed wishes to keep everyone close by recalling them to the right path when they stray, and certainly doing so does not mean abandoning them.]
According to SIR,
cohabitating unmarried couples, with children or not, made up 80% of those who took part in ‘pre-matrimonial’ courses in Italy in 2016. None of them were told that they live in a state of chronic mortal sin. The very expression ‘irregular union’ is now prohibited [yet it is used in AL].
Last January 14,
L’Osservatore Romano published the pastoral guidelines on AL issued by the bishops of Malta, Archbishops Charles Sciculna of Malta and Mario Grech of Gozo, who said:
“In supporting [persons living in irregular union], we must evaluate the moral responsibility in each case, considering any attenuating conditions and circumstances”. \
In view of such ‘conditions and circumstances’, “the pope teaches that it is no longer possible to affirm that all those who are in a situation which is supposed to be irregular live in a state of mortal sin and deprived of sanctifying grace”.
The consequence is that
"as a conclusion to the process of discernment, carried out with humility, direction, love for the Church and her teachings, and in the sincere search for the will of God and the desire to find a more perfect response to that will, a person who is separated or divorced but who is living in a new union will come to recognize and believe – with an enlightened and formed conscience – that he or she is at peace with God, and no one can bar him from the sacraments of penance and the Eucharist”.
[Dear Lord, everything is wrong with the statement! To begin with, nothing bars these persons from confession – but they cannot be absolved unless they take steps to ‘regularize’ their marital situation, or failing that, to live as ‘brother and sister’ until the union is regularized.
The ‘will of God’ on this matter does not have to ‘searched for’ - it is clearly stated by Jesus himself in his explicit statements about marriage, divorce and adultery. And no Catholic conscience can be called ‘enlightened and formed’ unless it accepts this very explicit will of God and lives by it. That conscience itself would keep the person concerned from unworthily receiving communion.]
One year after the promulgation of AL, the ‘Bergoglian model’ that it imposes would allow all remarried divorcees access to the Eucharist. Unmarried cohabitation is no longer considered a scandal. On the contrary, for Pope Francis, the major scandal of our time is economic and social inequality
[Why is that new when it has been the perennial, inherent and inevitable condition in the world after the Fall?].
In an Easter Sunday letter to the Bishop of Asissi-Nocera Umbra, Mons. Domenico Sorrentino, wrote:
Pope Francis said that the poor are “the proof of the scandalous reality in a world marked by the gap between an immense number of indigent people and the minuscule portion of ‘haves’ who hold the greater part of the world’s riches and claim to rule the destinies of mankind. Unfortunately, after 2000 years of the Gospel, and after eight centuries of St. Francis’s example, we are witnessing a phenomenon of worldwide iniquity and an economy that kills”.
Thus,
the moral opposition between good and bad is replaced by the sociologic distinction between material wealth and poverty. Social inequality would appear to be an evil far greater than the murder of millions of unborn babies and the sea of impurity that is drowning the Western world.
How can we not agree with what Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Mueller writes in his book, ‘
Report on hope’, in which he says:
“The greatest scandal that the Church can give is not that she has sinners but that it stops to identify the difference between good and evil, relativizing these absolutes, and that she stops to explain what constitutes sin, or appears to justify it by a supposedly greater closeness and mercy towards the sinner”.
[It’s all very well for Mueller to write that in his book, but as Prefect of the CDF, he has affirmed on multiple occasions that Amoris laetitia - even its infamous Chapter 8, which does exactly what he calls ‘the greatest scandal that the Church can give’ – poses no danger to the faith at all. That has been reported everywhere. On the other hand, how many will ever get to read Mueller's book?]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 03/05/2017 05:51]