August 1, 2017
Canon212.com
Canon212 was obviously diligent about updating their 'headlines' today,
but PewSitter made up for its lag by remembering to observe the 49th anniversary of
Humanae Vitae, which seems to be on
the verge of planned extinction.
Which should also remind us all that next year will also mark the first half-centenary of the 1968 Cultural Revolution that gave birth
overnight to the I-me-my generation of sex-drugs-and-rocknroll, 'Who am I to judge?', 'primacy of conscience' and all the despicable
shibboleths of that civilizational watershed.
PewSitter
P.S. I feel it incumbent to post something about what's happening in Venezuela, where this pope still continues to think he
can 'mediate' anything in a hopeless situation that has long gone far beyond a split between the unbelievably totalitarian
President Maduro and the country's bishops who have long opposed his government and that of his late mentor-predecessor
Hugo Chavez.
There is a total disconnect between Maduro and the people of Venezuela whose interests he has completely ignored and sacrificed
to keep himself in absolute power. And Bergoglio was ill-served and ill-advised by his over-rated Secretary of State Cardinal
Pietro Parolin, whose experience as Nuncio in Venezuela in the final years of Hugo Chavez's life and the first months of Maduro's
succession, apparently failed to make him grasp what has been obvious to everyone else for years - that the situation in
Venezuela is far beyond mediation by anyone, least of all by him even if he was acting in the name of Bergoglio.
It is preposterous of wimps, especially clueless wimps who think they know it all, to pit themselves against
resolute ironhanded dictators.
The socialist revolution
devours Venezuela
Any government in a democratic country that failed this spectacularly
would have been relegated to the dustbin of history long ago.
By RICH LOWRY
THE STREAM
August 1, 2017
Venezuela is a woeful reminder that no country is so rich that it can’t be driven into the ground by revolutionary socialism.
People are now literally starving — about three-quarters of the population lost weight last year — in what once was the fourth-richest country in the world on a per capita basis. A country that has more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia is suffering shortages of basic supplies. Venezuela now totters on the brink of bankruptcy and civil war, in the national catastrophe known as the Bolivarian Revolution.
The phrase is the coinage of the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, succeeded by the current Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro. The Western Hemisphere’s answer to Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Maduro has instituted an ongoing self-coup to make his country a one-party state.
The Chavezistas have worked from the typical communist playbook of romanticizing the masses while immiserating them.
Runaway spending, price controls, nationalization of companies, corruption and the end of the rule of law — it’s been a master class in how to destroy an economy.The result is a sharp, years-long recession, runaway inflation and unsustainable debt. The suffering of ordinary people is staggering, while the thieves and killers who are Chavezista officials have made off with hundreds of billions of dollars. At this rate —
The Economist calls the country’s economic decline “the steepest in modern Latin American history” — there will be nothing left to steal.
Any government in a democratic country that failed this spectacularly would have been relegated to the dustbin of history long ago. Maduro is getting around this problem by ending Venezuela’s democracy. The Chavezistas slipped up a year or two by allowing real elections for the country’s National Assembly, which were swept by the opposition. They then undertook a war against the assembly, stripping it of its powers and culminating in a rigged vote this week to create a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution.
The goal of Maduro’s alleged constitutional reforms is to no longer have a constitution worthy of the name. All you need to know about the spirit of this exercise is Maduro’s threat to jail the opposition leaders who boycotted the vote (outside observers estimate
less than 20 percent of the electorate participated, despite the regime’s absurd claim of a popular wave of support).
Denied the ordinary means of dissent via the press and elections, the opposition has taken to the streets. Already more than 100 people have been killed in clashes over the past several months. Worse is yet to come.
Lacking legitimacy and representing only a fraction of the populace, the Maduro regime will rely on the final backstop of violent suppression. It is now the worst crisis in a major country in the Western Hemisphere since the heights of the Colombian civil war in the 1990s and 2000s.
There is no easy remedy to Venezuela’s agony. If mediation were the solution, the country never would have gotten to this pass.
Endless negotiations between the government and the opposition have gone nowhere — the organized crime syndicate that has seized power under the banner of revolution knows it has no option but to retain its hold on power by any means necessary.
The U.S. needs to use every economic and diplomatic lever to undermine the regime and build an international coalition against it.
- We should impose more sanctions on specific officials and on the state-run oil company;.
- We should advertise what we know about the details of how Chavezistas park their ill-gotten gains abroad.
- We should nudge our allies to further isolate the Venezuelan government by pulling ambassadors and breaking diplomatic relations. The hope is that with enough pressure, the regime will crack, and high-level officials will break with Maduro, weakening his position and making a negotiated restoration of democratic rule possible.
In the meantime, the Bolivarian Revolution is proceeding according to its sick logic — and there will be blood.
PPS - I am appending this piece by George Weigel here, which is his belated reaction to the ignorance-ridden, Bergoglian ideology-laden Spadaro-Figueroa riff in La Civilta Cattolica, because he rightly points out the irresponsibility shown by the Vatican Secretariat of State which allowed its publication, to begin with. Not that anyone in that superdicastery would even had dared utter a whimper if the imprimatur came straight from Casa Santa Marta and the Sovereign of the Vatican.
But some of Weigel's reflections on the implications of the article for the Secretariat of State - which is supposed to guide and advise Vatican diplomacy - do go to the point I raised above about the over-estimation given to Cardinal Parolin and his abilities in his current role, not just by this pope but by most commentators.
Even those who 'credit' him for having managed to get back to his Secretariat many administrative responsibilities that had originally been transferred to the now severely castrated Secretariat of the economy, have appeared to overlook or underplay his successful power grab-back within the Vatican. Obviously, with the blessings of the pope, Parolin has made his superdicastery the only linchpin of the Bergoglian Curia. He has appeared to have made his mark consolidating his powers rather than consolidating a coherent Catholic policy on international affairs and geopolitics in general.
Spadaro, Figueroa, and questions of competence
by George Weigel
CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT
August 2, 2017
It’s a safe bet that 99.95% of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics have never heard of
La Civiltà Cattolica [Catholic Civilization], a journal founded in 1850 by the Jesuits of Rome to combat the evils of the age (then taken to be secularist liberalism and freemasonry).
Its current circulation is perhaps half that of
First Things, and while it has recently made attempts to broaden its readership by publishing English, Spanish, French, and Korean editions, it’s also a safe bet that
Civiltà... will remain a small-circulation magazine with a readership confined to what we might call “Catholic professionals:” clergy of various ranks; papal diplomats; officials of the Roman Curia; academics and pundits.
And the vast majority of them will read (or at least scan) it, not for scintillating content, but because
its articles are vetted by the Secretariat of State of the Holy See, and are thus assumed to have some sort of quasi-official status: which means that those articles are taken to reflect the cast of mind of the current pontificate. So if you want to be in the know, you read (or at least scan)
Civiltà....
On occasion, however, that can be a journey through the looking glass and into Wonderland.
Last month,
Civiltà... featured an article co-authored by its editor-in-chief, Father Antonio Spadaro, SJ, and Pastor Marcelo Figueroa, who edits the Argentine edition of
L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper.
The article purported to analyze a startling “ecumenism of hate” in the United States, forged by ultra-conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants, and creepy-dangerous for its indulgence in a new Manicheanism that distorts the Gospel and divides everything in the world into rigid and narrowly-defined categories of good and evil.
This bizarre screed HAS generated weeks of controversy in the blogosphere, during which
Father Spadaro tweeted that the article’s critics were “haters” whose vitriol confirmed the article’s hypothesis – a Trumpian outburst
[Love that expression, detest the unbridled narcissism of its eponym!] ill-becoming a paladin of “dialogue.”
My friends and colleagues R.R. Reno, Robert Royal, and Fr. Raymond de Souza have ably replied to the comprehensive inanities of the Spadaro/Figueroa article:
- its ill-informed misrepresentation of American religious history; - its surreal descriptions of 21st-century American Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism;
- its obsessions with marginal figures in contemporary American religious life like R.J. Rushdoony and Michael Voris;
- its misreading of the dynamics of religiously-informed public moral argument in American politics; and
- its weird description of
the premises of current Vatican diplomacy, which will give comfort to the likes of Vladimir Putin, Raul Castro, and Nicolas Maduro.
Those who care to sift through this intellectual dumpster can consult Dr. Reno’s article, Dr. Royal’s, Fr. De Souza’s. The questions I’d like to raise here involve Civilta's relationship to its putative overseers in the Vatican Secretariat of State.
- What kind of vetting did this misbegotten article get?
[None, I bet. Spadaro has direct access at any time to the Sage of Casa Santa Marta which I doubt even Cardinal Parolin has, much less anyone else in his Secretariat. Spadaro probably sent on the manuscripts for the issue with a note clipped to his tract, "Don't bother reading - His Most Absolute Holiness has approved it absolutely!"]
- Were any knowledgeable experts on U.S. Catholicism or American evangelical Protestantism consulted on what the overseers must have known would be an incendiary piece?
[Neither the authors of the screed nor the supposed overseers would have done that - the first, because like their lord and master, they think they know everything and know it better than anybody else; the second, because they did not need to do anything about a manuscript that already came with the pope's imprimatur.]
- Does the Spadaro/Figueroa article really represent the views of the Secretariat of State about today’s debates at the intersection of religion and politics in the United States?
[If it did not before, it does now! And Parolin better believe it!]
- If the answer to the last is “Yes,” then what does the Secretariat of State make of the American situation as described by the Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Christoph Pierre, in his addresses to the U.S. bishops –
a description that bears no resemblance to the wasteland of madcap pseudo-theology and hatred described by Spadaro and Figueroa?
[Perhaps the Secretariat of State knew nothing either, of what Mons. Pierre would be saying (or cared to know) - since whatever it was, he would never say anything contrary to Bergoglio's thinking.]
- If the answer is “No,” then why was the Spadaro/Figueroa article cleared for publication?
[Because with the pope's far-from-unofficial spokesman Fr. Spadaro as editor of Civiltà..., everyone at State knows it's a useless exercise to pretend they are really 'clearing' anything.]
- Does the Secretariat of State share the authors’ seeming view that murderous jihadists rightly think of those who oppose them as “crusaders”?
[It sounds more to me like an original view from Bergoglio that Spadaro and Figueroa were simply articulating in case we morons still do not get it: Muslims, even jihadists, good! Any Catholic who does not think like Bergoglio, SATAN!]
- And can it be true that
the Holy See’s approach to conflict situations in the world has abandoned the notions of “right” and “wrong,” as the Spadaro/Figueroa article suggests?
[For relativists like Bergoglio and his followers, there is no objectively absolute 'right' or 'wrong', only what they say is right or wrong.]
Because of its relationship to the Secretariat of State, Civiltà... has long been read, not in the way serious readers read serious journals, but like ancient augurs read the entrails of sacrificial animals. Perhaps both the future of this venerable journal and the credibility of the Secretariat of State would be better served by severing the connection. For at the moment, the auguries raise deeply disturbing questions about the competence of both parties.
**********************************************************************************************************************************************************************
BTW, on a most relevant tangent, because it has to do with the ascendancy of Cardinal Parolin and the new ascendancy of his Secretariat of State:
Everyone appears to have given up the Secretariat of the Economy for dead, with Cardinal Pell on indefinite if not terminal leave. In effect, it is, or at least, it is on life support.
But what about the Council for the Economy established by this pope motu proprio in February 2014? It was to be "a new coordinating agency for the economic and administrative affairs of the Holy See and the Vatican City State", further defined as "an entity having oversight for the administrative and financial structures and activities of the dicasteries of the Roman Curia, the institutions linked to the Holy See, and the Vatican City State" - all functions which belonged to the Secretariat of State pre-Bergoglio. Hading this Council for the Economy is another papal pet, Cardinal Marx.
The same motu proprio says that the Secretariat for the Economy,
1) "in keeping with the policies established by the Council for the Economy" is
2)"competent for the economic control and vigilance over the agencies mentioned" and
3)that the Cardinal Prefect who heads the Secretariat for the Economy "acts in collaboration with the Secretary of State."
Surely, Cardinal Pell, reading that motu proprio, ought to have realized that from the very beginning, he was already hobbled since
1) Policy and oversight originate from the Council of the Economy;
2) His Secretariat's functions are limited only to 'economic control and vigilance' - no mention there of administrative control and vigilance; and
3) It is explicitly directed that he must act in collaboration with the Secretary of State, who presumably, and in effect, retains administrative control and vigilance of all Vatican/Holy See structures and agencies.
So all that talk about the new Secretariat for the Economy being co-equal in status and importance to the Secretariat of State was nothing but window dressing. And the Secretariat of State has come out far more firmly in the administrative saddle. (The fact that Cardinal Marx has not so much as raised a pip about this state of affairs - nor even made any statement with the departure of Cardinal Pell - simply means that he is yet another convenient figurehead in yet another sham or faulty structure in Bergoglio's supposed Curial reforms.)
For all of Cardinal Pell's announcements of financial transparency improvements, even his initiatives in this respect were gradually watered down or neutralized by the independent publicity-seeking actions of the head of the Agency for Financial Information and the powers regained or retained by Cardinal Calcagno at the Administration for the Patrimony of the Holy See, which is really the Vatican's de facto Ministry of Finance.
The grave had been dug and the tombstone laid for the Secretariat of the Economy almost at the time it was born - and Cardinal Pell's unfortunate legal challenges in Australia simply represented another shovelful of gravel dumped into that grave. Sicut transit Bergoglio's Curial reform!
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/08/2017 20:11]