It seems Bergoglian hubris will never run out of things to crush, demolish, eliminate or erase from the deposit of faith...
Erasing the Magisterium of a Pope
30 June 2017
There is a long standing political tool employed to eliminate opposition which is associated with the past, or a defeated regime. You can see evidence of this tool all around Rome, in monuments both ancient and recent. It is called
damnatio memoriae… the condemnation of the memory (of someone).
In effect, the winners destroy even the memory of the losers by effacing and erasing their very names from public view… as if they never existed.
[The Communist regimes simply declared them non-persons and probably eliminated all references to them in official documents.] For the ancient Roman, this was a fate worse than death.
The Roman wanted to extend the
gloria of his family, especially through public works which would bring honor to their names in perpetuity. Think about the way Paul V put “BORGHESE” smack in the middle of the facade of St. Peter’s Basilica. In any event, walking about in Rome you can see inscriptions wherein the names of the defeated were literally chiseled out or filled in, made illegible.
It has become evident over the last few years, that there is a major agenda item on the slate of those who are around Pope Francis. They are working on the systematic erosion, degradation, scratching out, erasure, the damnatio memoriae of the Magisterium of St. John Paul II. [Surely they would not be so systematic and cocksure about doing this if the directive, explicit or not, did not come from the top!]
John Paul, with his “theology of the body” reinforced the Church’s constant teaching about the inseparable connection of sexual acts and marriage. Today, there are legions made of seemingly disparate groups who tirelessly work along side each other
to pull sex and marriage apart.
If they can accomplish that “divorce”, then virtually anything in the Church can be restructured for their own temporal ends, whatever they may be – homosexual “marriage”, Communion for divorced and remarried self-identifying lesbian or questioning giraffes, etc. It’s mostly about sex for the agents in the field, agents of the Enemy of the soul, that is.
[Fr Z should also have mentioned the greater Wojtylian document that Bergoglianism ignores altogether: Veritatis splendor - because Bergoglians consider the absolute moralities of Christian truth obsolete, to be replaced by situational ethics and circumstantial 'discernment'.]
After the 1980 Synod (“walking together”) of Bishops on the Family (sound familiar?), Pope John Paul II responded to a suggestion from the Synod and established the Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family and the Pontifical Council for the Family.
The establishment of the Institute was supposed to be announced by John Paul during his Wednesday General Audience on 13 May 1981. Does that date sound familiar? After John Paul recovered from the assassination attempt, with the help of Our Lady of Fatima, he formally established the institute on the Feast of the Holy Rosary on 7 October 1982, and entrusted it to Our Lady of Fatima.
Thus,
the institute was a monument to how Popes and Synods can work together (in a way that doesn’t involved rigging them to pre-determined outcomes) and how the Family and our Marian devotion intersect.
The first head of the Institute, situated at the Lateran University in Rome, was one Carlo Caffarra, later Archbishop Cardinal of Bologna and, more recently, one of the Four Cardinals of the Five Dubia. As a matter of fact, he probably wrote the DUBIA.
As an aside which isn’t an aside, Card. Caffarra, in an interview in 2008, revealed that, when John Paul had asked him to found the Institute, he wrote a letter to Sr. Lucia dos Santos, the last living visionary of the Fatima apparitions. Sr. Lucia wrote back to him and said that
the final battle between Christ and Satan would be over marriage and the family. She also said not to be afraid and that anyone who works for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be opposed because this is the decisive issue.
So, the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family is to be renamed:
Institute of Studies on the Family.
Nota bene the absence of “John Paul II” and “Marriage”.
The Institute is also now caught up in the restructuring which is going on, so its leadership and, hence, direction will also change.
St. John Paul cannot be erased from the “album of the saints” in which he has been enrolled, but that doesn’t mean that, as many other saints have been, he won’t be forgotten. As I write this, it is the feast of St. Pope Paul I (+767). Do you think about him often?
Moreover, the saintly Pope John Paul would never have thought of his own
gloria in establishing an institute for the family and marriage. That doesn’t mean that others won’t try systematically to eliminate the influence of John Paul Magisterium for their own purposes.
I have from time to time suggested that you form “base communities” to combat the onslaught from within and without the Church on our Three C’s of Cult, Code and Creed.
Here’s a suggestion. How about starting a reading group, in your parish or down at the local breakfast and coffee shop (where you might be more welcome in some cases). Choose as your first item Pope John Paul II’s Post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation
Familiaris corsortio, (The Role of Christian Family in Modern World) which he penned after the 1980 Synod (“walking together”).
http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_19811122_familiaris-consortio.html
Read it with others. Read it with a pen in hand.
When you hear something that contradicts
Familiaris ask questions.
How else do we learn?
Fr Z had 2 lengthy and very significant posts yesterday with which I am only now catching up. I confess that I had been seeing references to the first of the two topics but I did not think it was that important because I really did not understand what it was about. Well, as the Italians would say, altrocche. Anything but! Definitely not unimportant.
'And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars'
June 29, 2017
Fama volat, it is said. No aphorism is truer than this when it comes to Rome, all the way back to Virgil, who coined it.
So, reminding everyone that we are in the realm of Rumor, I’ve been exchanging texts with Roman sources today about alarming possible developments in Rome.
Two rumors, one worse than the other, follow.
GloriaTV and Rorate have something Roberto de Mattei posted at Corrispondenza Romana about the possibility – contained in a working (not yet official) document – that
the Congregation for Clergy will effectively impose concelebration on all priests living in Rome. That is, Clergy – in a working document – will so strongly impose concelebration in clerical residences that they will in effect ban individual, private Masses by priests living in Rome.
This of course is a direct contradiction to the Code of Canon Law can. 902, which guarantees that priests can celebrate Mass individually and privately. I think that concelebration should be safe, legal and
rare.
I also hear that there is a Vatican-sponsored conference going on right now until about 7 July in Rome on Clergy’s
Ratio Fundamentalis (the document that contains
guidelines for formation of seminarians for the priesthood). The Pope mentioned the conference during his General Audience yesterday.
One report from that conference – remember that we are in the realm of rumor – is that ordination to the transitional diaconate is to be moved to the end of the 4th year of theology. At that point there is a break with the seminary. In the next phase the deacon must be in a parish.
Moreover – and this is still rumorville – ordination to the priesthood can be conferred only after a kind of extended pastoral apprenticeship reviewed by laity, who tell the bishop whether the candidate is “mature”. If this lay approval is not forthcoming the candidate is to be dismissed. Of course that would result in the deacon asking to be “laicized”, right? Think about it.
This sounds really protestant to me: he isn’t ordained to priesthood unless he gets a call.
Apparently there was strong push back against this really bad idea.
Think this through. A deacon is in a parish, where he will remain in a kind of apprenticeship to be judged by the pastor and laity. The most organized laity will control this process. I come from Minnesota, where there is a caucus process in political seasons. I know how this is done.
The most organized and determine faction will decide the man’s fate. Will the feminazis be heard in the discernment process? You betcha. What could possibly go wrong?
If these developments are true, the result will be the death both of clerical studies in Rome and of vocations to the priesthood in general in dioceses.
- Seminary programs will shrink and bump along until they wither out. - Licentiate programs will die off.
- Moving diaconate till after the fourth year and then imposing time in a parish would interrupt a program of study.
- It would be unlikely that a bishop would be able to send a man back to Rome to finish studies. No man is going to put himself through this, in this present environment.
Gosh. That sounds a great idea for the libs, doesn’t it? They will finally get what they want.
Everyone is her own priest. We’ll all be Lutherans who get to pick the “minister” that most resembles ourselves.
Mind you, a
Ratio like this goes to conferences of bishops who then make their own adaptations. It could be that much of this will be “adapted” out by your bishops. One can only hope. Nevertheless, this is alarming.
More on concelebration:
I am not opposed in principle to concelebration (which is a Novus Ordo thing, of course). I will concelebrate occasionally, for example, at ordinations to the priesthood and on Holy Thursday, especially with the bishop. Otherwise, I want to say my own Masses.
Concelebration is too prone to wandering minds, inattentiveness, sloppiness, abuses. I’ve seen horrid examples of this, including priests not saying anything at all during the consecration and bizzare handling of the Eucharist.
Can there be poorly celebrated private Masses? Sure. However,
a man who is dedicated to saying Mass privately – because of devotion and because saying Mass is a good thing for him and for those for whom he offers it – is less likely to celebrate in a sloppy manner.
Moreover, it seems to me that a concelebrated Mass is one Mass, not many. Why is that a good thing? People can talk about priestly brotherhood and unity blah blah blah.
Why are fewer Masses good for anyone? It seems to me that many Masses, properly and reverently celebrated, are good for the Church and for the world.
I wrote about this in an early manifesto on this blog, in 2007: S
ave The Liturgy, Save The World:
Celebrate Mass well, participate properly – affect the whole world. Celebrate poorly – affect the whole world.
In each age since Christ’s Ascension, people have felt they were in the End Times. They were right. In any moment, when the conditions are right, the Lord could return.
Considering what is happening in the world now, I am pushed to think about the way Mass is being celebrated, even the number of Masses being celebrated. Once there were many communities of contemplatives, spending time before the Blessed Sacrament or in contemplation, in collective and in private prayer.
There were many more Masses. Many more people went to confession.
Who can know how they all lifted burdens from the world and turned large and small tides by their prayers to God for mercy and in reparation for sin?
In addition, the imposition of concelebration for all priests in clerical residences in Rome will also undercut the right of priests to use the 1962 Roman Missal in accord with Summorum Pontificum. [I am sure that was a predetermined collateral effect, hitting another big bird with the same stone!] The use of the older, traditional Missale Romanum is on the rise among younger priests. Many seminarians want it. I’ll bet that scares the daylights out of some who are in power.
As one of my Roman correspondents put it:
This is scorched earth tactics. They’re going Carthage ['Delenda est Carthago', remember?] on everything distinctively Catholic to make sure we don’t turn back the Hegelian flow of history again.
We are living in strange times, my friends.
['Strange' is surely understatement! What is a stronger more graphic term than SURREAL - as the past four years and counting have been?]
A response from an 'anonymous cleric'
to the Tornielli/Walford papolatrous attack
on the Four ‘Dubia’ Cardinals
June 29, 2017
A few days ago Vatican Insider, at
La Stampa, run by the ultimate Italian weathervane Andrea Tornielli
[he always goes where the current papal wind blows!], supplied a piece against the Four Cardinals of the Five Dubia (and against anyone who agrees that more clarity is needed) by one Stephen Walford. Walford’s piece has the feeling of a collaborative effort in papolatry. Of course it was published simultaneously in Italian and in English… because that happens all the time. Right?
Today, Sandro Magister at Settimo Cielo supplied a piece which analyzes the Vatican Insider project. It is published anonymously. The reason for anonymity is that the writer is a cleric (I had a text this morning saying who it is), and in the present lib-dominated environment of mercy a cleric who writes like this will be crushed like a bug.
A good question (itself a response to Walford) is in the piece’s title:
“If it were so easy to resolve the dubia, then why hasn’t the Pope responded?”
In a nutshell, Walford proposed (inter alia) that
virtually anything that the Pope says in his ordinary Magisterium, he says with the aid of the Holy Spirit, and that it must be accepted by the faithful.
Anonymous Cleric (my title for him) responds (my rapid translation – surely Magister’s own will soon be available):
The arguments of a formal order refer to some affirmations of the Magisterium about the Petrine primacy and reach the conclusion that “Pope Francis – being the beneficiary of the charisma of the Holy Spirit, which helps him also in the ordinary Magisterium (as St. John Paul II taught) – legitimately made reception of holy Communion possible on the part of the divorced and remarried whose cases have been carefully considered."
I will try to respond to these arguments, beginning with the second series, on account of the fact that they are logically decisive: in fact, if all the acts of the Magisterium were always clear and perfect and enjoyed – for the mere fact that they were pronounced by the Pontiff – infallibility (without considering, for example, the tone of the document, the circumstances in which it was pronounced, the fact that a teaching could be relatively new or repeated, etc. etc.), or if every “flatus vocis” [mere, insignificant word] of the Roman Pontiff ought to be considered dogma and should require, always and in any case, the internal assent of the faithful, the question would be closed from the get-go.
In reality, the Magisterium of the Church certainly constitutes a unique body (containing that which the Church proposes to us for belief), of which, nevertheless, not all affirmations have the same value; in other words, not all the pronouncements – even if authentically proposed – require the same level of assent.
The “dubia” of the Cardinals serve also to clarify what weight there can be in an answer in the course of the interview on an airplane and in a private letter to some bishops (indicated by Mr. Walford as if they were definitive interpretations), neither published in the Acta Apostolica Sedis. Certainly both were pronouncements of the Pope, but, as Lumen gentium 25 affirms, the level of adhesion must be deduced “from the character of the documents, from his frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or from his manner of speaking.”
Let’s ask ourselves, by way of an example: “Do the papal interviews on an airplane or do private letters of a Pontiff require – in and of themselves – the same level of assent as the teaching on contraception proposed by documents such as Casti connubi, Humanae vitae, Familiaris consortio, etc. or can one entertain some uncertainties in the face of the aforementioned interviews or letters”?
The response to this is given by the Magisterium itself, beginning with the instruction Donum veritatis in 1990 “On the ecclesial vocation of the theologian”, which is also cited by Mr. Walford:
It can happen, however, that a theologian may, according to the case, raise questions regarding the timeliness, the form, or even the contents of magisterial interventions.
Here the theologian will need, first of all, to assess accurately the authoritativeness of the interventions which becomes clear from the nature of the documents, the insistence with which a teaching is repeated, and the very way in which it is expressed. […]
In any case there should never be a diminishment of that fundamental openness loyally to accept the teaching of the Magisterium as is fitting for every believer by reason of the obedience of faith.
The theologian will strive then to understand this teaching in its contents, arguments, and purposes. This will mean an intense and patient reflection on his part and a readiness, if need be, to revise his own opinions and examine the objections which his colleagues might offer him.
If, despite a loyal effort on the theologian’s part, the difficulties persist, the theologian has the duty to make known to the Magisterial authorities the problems raised by the teaching in itself, in the arguments proposed to justify it, or even in the manner in which it is presented.
He should do this in an evangelical spirit and with a profound desire to resolve the difficulties. His objections could then contribute to real progress and provide a stimulus to the Magisterium to propose the teaching of the Church in greater depth and with a clearer presentation of the arguments.
Moreover, Pope Francis, at §2 of Amoris laetitia, writes:
“The complexity of the issues that arose revealed the need for continued open discussion of a number of doctrinal, moral, spiritual, and pastoral questions. The thinking of pastors and theologians, if faithful to the Church, honest, realistic and creative, will help us to achieve greater clarity.”
[I think he forgot he - or his ghost writers - put that in, because his attitude to the DUBIA cardinals and other AL objectors is certainly not that!]
That’s a taste.
The Anonymous Cleric, in effect, dismantles the collaborative attack mounted by Tornielli over the name of Mr. Walford.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 01/07/2017 05:36]