THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI

A joyous and blessed Christmas season to all!

For the second year in a row, my thanks to Scenron of La Vigna del Signore for the use of his Christmas banners.

I had never read this meditation by St. Augustine before - my thanks to THE CATHOLIC THING for sharing it with us on Christmas Day.


God’s gratuitous gift
by St. Augustine of Hippo

That day is called the birthday of the Lord on which the Wisdom of God manifested Himself as a speechless Child and the Word of God wordlessly uttered the sound of a human voice. His divinity, although hidden, was revealed by heavenly witness to the Magi and was announced to the shepherds by angelic voices. With yearly ceremony, therefore, we celebrate this day which saw the fulfillment of the prophecy: “Truth is sprung out of the earth: and justice hath looked down from heaven” (Isa. 53,8).
- Truth, eternally existing in the bosom of the Father, has sprung from the earth so that He might exist also in the bosom of a mother.
- Truth, holding the world in place, has sprung from the earth so that He might be carried in the hands of a woman.
- Truth, incorruptibly nourishing the happiness of the angels, has sprung from the earth in order to be fed by human milk.
- Truth, whom the heavens cannot contain, has sprung from the earth so that He might be placed in a manger.

For whose benefit did such unparalleled greatness come in such lowliness? Certainly for no personal advantage, but definitely for our great good, if only we believe.

Arouse yourself, O man; for you, God has become man. “Awake, sleeper, and arise from among the dead, and Christ will enlighten thee.” For you, I repeat, God has become man. If He had not thus been born in time, you would have been dead for all eternity. Never would you have been freed from sinful flesh, if He had not taken upon Himself the likeness of sinful flesh.

Everlasting misery would have engulfed you, if He had not taken this merciful form. You would not have been restored to life, had He not submitted to your death; you would have fallen, had He not succored you; you would have perished, had He not come.

Let us joyfully celebrate the coming of our salvation and redemption. Let us celebrate the festal day on which the great and timeless One came from the great and timeless day to this brief span of our day. He has become for us. . .justice, and sanctification, and redemption; so that, just as it is written, “Let him who takes pride, take pride in the Lord.”

When the Psalmist had said: "Truth Is sprung out of the earth", he quickly added: “and justice hath looked down from heaven.” He did this lest mortal frailty, arrogating this justice to itself, should call these blessings its own, and lest man should reject the justice of God in his belief that he is justified, that is, made just through his own efforts.

Truth is sprung out of the earth because Christ who said: “I am the truth” was born of a virgin; and “justice hath looked down from heaven” because, by believing in Him who was so born, man has been justified not by his own efforts but by God.

Truth is sprung out of the earth because “the Word was made flesh” and “justice hath looked down from heaven” because “every good and perfect gift is from above.”

Truth is sprung out of the earth, that is, His flesh was taken from Mary; and “justice hath looked down from heaven “ because no one can receive anything unless it is “given to him from heaven.”

“Having been justified therefore by faith, let us have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we also have access by faith unto that grace in which we stand and exult in the hope of the glory of God.”

With these few words, which you recognize as those of the Apostle, it gives me pleasure, my brethren, to mingle a few passages of the psalm [which we are considering] and to find that they agree in sentiment. Having been justified by faith, let us have peace with God because “justice and peace have kissed” through our Lord Jesus Christ because “truth is sprung out of the earth”; “through whom we also have access by faith unto that grace in which we stand, and exult in the hope of the glory of God.”

He does not say “of our glory,” but “of the glory of God” because justice has not proceeded from us but “hath looked down from heaven.”

Therefore, “let him who takes pride, take pride in the Lord” not in himself. Hence, when the Lord whose birthday we are celebrating today was born of the Virgin, the announcement of the angelic choir was made in the words: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men of good will.”

How can peace exist on earth unless it be because “truth is sprung out of the earth,” that is, because Christ has been born in the flesh? Moreover, “He Himself is our peace, he it is who has made both one,” so that we might become men of good will, bound together by the pleasing fetters of unity.

Let us rejoice, then, in this grace so that our glory may be the testimony of our conscience wherein we glory not in ourselves but in the Lord. Hence the Psalmist [in speaking of the Lord] has said: “My glory and the lifter up of my head.” For what greater grace of God could have shone upon us than that, having an only-begotten Son, God should make Him the Son of Man, and thus, in turn, make the son of man the Son of God?

Examine it as a benefit, as an inducement, as a token of justice, and see whether you find anything but a gratuitous gift of God.

The stoning of St. Stephen, Pietro di Cortona, Hermitage, Leningrad.


St. Stephen's Dies Natalis
by Michael Pakaluk

December 26, 2018

Today, the day after Christmas, the Church celebrates the feast of St. Stephen, the Protomartyr,” meaning both someone first in time and who serves as an example to us all. One might wonder, why? We are in the Octave of Christmas, after all. What does Stephen’s martyrdom have to do with the birth of Christ?

The Office of Readings today contains a sermon by the 6thcentury bishop, St. Fulgentius, which explains why. Fulgentius is one of those little-known saints whom one is simply astonished to learn about (but all the saints are like that). Can such a man have lived?

He was taught Greek first, before Latin, so that he’d be able to pronounce it flawlessly. As a boy, he committed the entire Iliad and Odyssey to memory. He turned to monastic life after encountering St. Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 36. He spent his adult life looking (always prudently) for a stricter and more austere rule of life, while suffering persecution and exile by Arians.

He was so revered for learning and holiness that once when he showed up at a monastery, the Abbot resigned and said Fulgentius deserved to be Abbot instead. Or when contrary winds once kept his boat in harbor as he was being sent to exile, thousands learned about it and gathered to hear him preach and receive Communion from him.

The sermon begins, “Yesterday we celebrated the birth in time of our eternal King. Today we celebrate the triumphant suffering of his soldier,” which is interesting – not least as showing that the two feasts were juxtaposed as early as the 6thcentury.

Fulgentius draws three connections between two feasts. The first is the connection between birth and death. For a Christian, death is birth unto eternal life, as reflected in the very phrase dies natalis (birthday), to mark the date of passing of one of the faithful.

We want to imitate Christ. As Nicodemus pointed out, we cannot crawl back into the womb to be born again, imitating him on Christmas. But we can imitate him in dying. “Yesterday,” Fulgentius says, “our king, clothed in his robe of flesh, left his place in the virgin’s womb and graciously visited the world. Today his soldier leaves the tabernacle of his body and goes triumphantly to heaven.”

So, Christian, the day after Christmas, reflect on your death, and ask for the grace to die in the same joy that you share on Christmas morning, in imitation of the Infant Christ.

The second connection he draws, already evident in the two quotations, is between Christ, born King – and Stephen, his soldier. This is highly interesting. We speak of the “Kingdom of God,” in which God reigns as King.

But “King” is a correlative term. How do we refer to those “under” the King? Are they “citizens” in this Kingdom, or its “servants”? Fulgentius thinks of them as soldiers, presumably on the grounds that the subjects of a Kingdom asked to show the most loyalty, to the point of giving up their lives, are precisely its soldiers.

The Good News of the arrival of the Kingdom of God is therefore also the news that we have been enlisted as soldiers. Fulgentius’s life showed a real grasp of the demands of spiritual combat. He rightly holds up martyrdom as the fullest and clearest expression of a Christian’s loyalty to his King.

It is said that the frankincense brought by the Wise Men prefigures the Lord’s Passion and Death, but by the same token it prefigures the martyrdom – “red,” “white,” or unnoticed – to which we are called.

But in his sermon, Fulgentius devotes most of his attention to a third connection: that of charity. The charity that brought the Lord to earth is the same charity that brought Stephen to heaven:

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He brought his soldiers a great gift that not only enriched them but also made them unconquerable in battle, for it was the gift of love, which was to bring men to share in his divinity. He gave of his bounty, yet without any loss to himself. In a marvelous way he changed into wealth the poverty of his faithful followers while remaining in full possession of his own inexhaustible riches. And so, the love that brought Christ from heaven to earth raised Stephen from earth to heaven.

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This thought provides an intriguing interpretation of gift-giving at Christmas. It is not to “celebrate” the day, or even to give gifts to others, in order to give them to infant Christ. Instead, the explosion of gifts on Christmas day stands as effect to cause. We are meant to see divine love in the effects – while at the same time through gift-giving we are meant to lead one another heavenward.

Stephen’s martyrdom did this in an exemplary way. Love is a unitive force, strikingly, between him and Saul [his tormentor, later to be the apostle Paul]: “Love was Stephen’s weapon by which he gained every battle, and so won the crown signified by his name [stephanos=“crown” in Greek].

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His love of God kept him from yielding to the ferocious mob; his love for his neighbor made him pray for those who were stoning him... Strengthened by the power of his love, he overcame the raging cruelty of Saul and won his persecutor on earth as his companion in heaven...
Now at last, Paul rejoices with Stephen, with Stephen he delights in the glory of Christ, with Stephen he exalts, with Stephen he reigns... This, surely, is the true life, my brothers, a life in which Paul feels no shame because of Stephen’s death, and Stephen delights in Paul’s companionship, for love fills them both with joy.

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Which leads to the saint’s closing prayer:

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“My brothers, Christ made love the stairway that would enable all Christians to climb to heaven. Hold fast to it, therefore, in all sincerity, give one another practical proof of it, and by your progress in it, make your ascent together".

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Michael Pakaluk, a graduate of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, is a professor at the Catholic University of America. His latest book, on the Gospel of Mark, The Memoirs of St Peter, is coming out from Regnery Gateway in March 2019.

Man’s disorientation at Christmas 2018,
the silence of the cave in Bethlehem
and the silence of Benedict XVI
Translated from

December 24, 2018

…The word ‘loneliness’ truly pictures the general state of mind this Christmas of 2018, when it would seem no one no longer expects anything because there are no more hopes.

Without hope, one manages by coasting from day to day. But the emptiness of life is sought to be filled with words – also empty – about politics, the economy, or religion (which, in the case of the Catholic Church, has become worldly chatter about immigration, climate change or waste recycling).

In the current age of ‘in my opinion’, truth and falsehood cannot be differentiated, and there remains nothing else but to insult each other. Nothing is fulfilling man’s expecations nor is healing man’s wounds.

Among the words which still have something to say to the secular world are those of poets. For example, T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Rock’ would seem to have been written for the world today.

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...The lot of man is ceaseless labor,
Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder,
Or irregular labour, which is not pleasant…
The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change,
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
Forgetful, you neglect your shrines and churches;
The men you are in these times deride
What has been done of good, you find explanations
To satisfy the rational and enlightened mind.
Second, you neglect and belittle the desert.
The desert is not remote in southern tropics
The desert is not only around the corner,
The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,
The desert is in the heart of your brother.”

Then the poet’s voice thunders like a prophet:
"Word of the LORD came unto me, saying:
O miserable cities of designing men,
O wretched generation of enlightened men,
Betrayed in the mazes of your ingenuities,
Sold by the proceeds of your proper inventions:
I have given you hands which you turn from worship,
I have given you speech, for endless palaver,
I have given you my Law, and you set up commissions,
I have given you lips, to express friendly sentiments,
I have given you hearts, for reciprocal distrust.
I have given you the power of choice, and you only alternate
Between futile speculation and unconsidered action…
Much is your reading, but not the Word of GOD,
Much is your building, but not the House of GOD..."

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[To those who may never have read this before, here is the full text of the Choruses from ‘The Rock’:
www.poetrynook.com/poem/choruses-%C3%B4%C3%A7%C2%A3the-rock%C3%B4%C3%...
Hard to believe these words were written for a pageant with words and music staged in London in 1934.]

This ‘endless palaver’ is a background noise which is deafening, and not one word of it can fill up loneliness. A colossal toxic cloud of words envelops the world, and everything seems to become worse and complicated daily. One yearns for silence. But where to find it?

The Word of God is born in silence. Christmas is the event of God-become-man to fulfill the waiting and the loneliness of man, but the birth took place in silence.

In recounting the only true revolution in history, the Gospel does not report a single word from Mary or Joseph in the stable cave of Bethlehem. The Word of God, the creative Logos of the entire universe, arrived in great silence.

Therefore, ‘the silence of God’ is not a sign of his terrible remoteness nor indifference, but on the contrary, it is a sign of his presence, of his passionate love that is living and functioning.

But to recognize this exceptional presence of the divine, one must be able to read the signs. And signs were given both to the shepherds and to the Magi, who read the signs.

To the Magi, it was the star, which according to their lore, signified the birth of a king in Israel. To the shepherds, it was the Baby in the manger. To them, in fact, an angel said: ““Do not be afraid; for behold, I proclaim to you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For today in the city of David a savior has been born for you who is Messiah and Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger” (Luke 2,10-12).

The Savior of the world born in a manger seems a contradictory and absurd sign. But God is a king who lowers and humbles himself out of love for mankind. A love which manifests itself in humility and silence.

The Gospel proceeds to say, “And suddenly there was a multitude of the heavenly host with the angel, praising God and saying: ‘Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to tmen of good will’.”

Pope Benedict XVI explained:

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“Until that moment – the Fathers say – the angels had known God in the grandeur of the universe, in the reason and the beauty of the cosmos that come from him and are a reflection of him. They had heard, so to speak, creation’s silent song of praise and had transformed it into celestial music. But now something new had happened, something that astounded them.

The One of whom the universe speaks, the God who sustains all things and bears them in his hands – he himself had entered into human history, he had become someone who acts and suffers within history. From the joyful amazement that this unimaginable event called forth, from God’s new and further way of making himself known – say the Fathers – a new song was born, one verse of which the Christmas Gospel has preserved for us: "Glory to God in the highest heavens and peace to his people on earth".

We might say that, following the structure of Hebrew poetry, the two halves of this double verse say essentially the same thing, but from a different perspective. God’s glory is in the highest heavens, but his high state is now found in the stable – what was lowly has now become sublime. God’s glory is on the earth, it is the glory of humility and love.

And even more: the glory of God is peace. Wherever he is, there is peace. He is present wherever human beings do not attempt, apart from him, and even violently, to turn earth into heaven. He is with those of watchful hearts; with the humble and those who meet him at the level of his own "height", the height of humility and love. To these people he gives his peace, so that through them, peace can enter this world.” (Homily at Midnight Mass, Christmas 2008)

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Benedict XVI – the ‘sweet Christ on earth’ who for years fascinated us with his teaching – has now become himself a silent presence.

In this time of disorientation, of men who are lonely, who have abandoned God and have deserted the churches, filling up the void with infinite chatter (or, as Eliot says, with abuse, lust and power), God seems to have once again given a sign of his living and powerful presence connoted by silence.

It is the silence of Benedict XVI. For six years now, for the first time in history, we have a pope who speaks with his mysteriously silent presence. Because we live in an exceptional time.

To modern man who, in the 20th century, devastated the world with his ideologies and then accused God for his silence, considering it as indifference to human suffering, to modern man who has reduced God to silence, who no no longer listens to him, who has muzzled and forgotten him, God responds with a silence that has a name and the face of a father.

The great Cardinal Robert Sarah wrote a very beautiful book, “The power of silence: Against the dictatorship of noise”, a book that seems to me dedicated to Benedict XVI, to make us understand the greatness of his present silent witness.

Pope Benedict, in his Foreword to the book, recalls words from St. Ignatius of Antioch: “It is better to remain silent and to be, than to talk and not be.” [The rest of the quotation is worth recalling: “...Teaching is good if the teacher also acts. One teacher ‘spoke, and it was done,’ yet what he did in silence was worthy of the Father. He who has the word of Jesus can also listen to his silence…”]

The silence of God always brings great things.


NB: Socci unaccountably left out from his quotation from the Choruses the following lines:

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But it seems that something has happened
that has never happened before:
though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.
Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say,
but for no god; and this has never happened before
That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason,
And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic.

The Church disowned, the tower overthrown,
the bells upturned, what have we to do
But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards
In an age which advances progressively backwards?

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It was thus in 1934. It is even worse today.


December 26, 2018

Socci has two other noteworthy posts on his Facebook page. For St. Stephen's Day, he quotes from Don Luigi Gussani, late founder of Comunione e Liberazione:

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The Baby, whom we contemplate these days with all the affection and acknowledgment of believers, carries on his face the program of his whole earthly life which is also a message for our questing souls: 'I am born to die for you...'

Christmas and St. Stephen's Day are both lessons in sacrifice, but how do we live them? St. Stephen tells us with his passionate devotion to the Lord Jesus. It may be expressed this way: "no need to feel alone!... When parents feel near to their children, and their children are near their parents. When true friends feel solid and compact in their ideals, does not their strength against every obstacle grow beyond proportion?

Oh brothers, spouses and parents and children and friends are none other than the visible expression of the blessed Christ, the invisible, who is the true spouse and mother and father and child and friend who is always there next to us with infinitely solicitous affection to sustain us with his divine power".

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And a second one today, less benign:
The latest from Bergoglio:

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“So, who is happy in the stable? Our Lady and St. Joseph are filled with joy: They look at the Baby Jesus and they are happy because, after thousands of concerns, they have welcomed this gift of God with such faith and such ove. They are ‘overflowing’ with holiness and therefore with joy. And you will say to me, “But of course, they are Mary and Joseph!” Yes, but let us not think it was easy for them. Saints are not born, they become, and this is true even for them”.]

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Explain to him please what the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is! Mary, from her conception, was already all holy, immaculate. One would expect he would at least remember the basics of his job! [To think that it was not too long ago, he led the worldwide celebrations on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception! He made the slip either because he does not really understand what the Immaculate Conception means, or understanding it, does not accept it; or because he was being his usual thoughtless colloquial crowd-pleaser thinking to himself instead, "How clever am I to think that up!"]

Another famous poem by another modern poet writing in English is cited by a priest on the website of THE CHRISTIAN REVIEW.

Avoiding the 'widening gyre' of our times:
A reflection on the Feast of the Nativity
by Rev. Kevin Bezner
THE CHRISTIAN REVIEW
December 24, 2018

The Irish poet William Butler Yeats opens his poem “The Second Coming” with this stanza:

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

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Yeats closes his poem with these two lines, which ask a crucial question, one that I believe is worth thinking about as we celebrate the Nativity of Our Lord and look forward to the New Year:
[And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yeats wrote his apocalyptic poem in 1916, the horrors of World War I and the bloodshed of Ireland’s Easter Rising still fresh in his mind.

Although the Europe he knew was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with its Christian heritage, Yeats continued to use Christian symbols in writing his highly symbolic, and at times mythic, poetry.

Yeats grew up in Ireland as part of the Protestant elite in Ireland, which heavily oppressed the predominantly Catholic Irish. As an adult, he supported Irish nationalism, but uncomfortable with violence he wrote in his poem “Easter 1916” of the “terrible beauty” that was born in the aftermath of the Easter Rising.

His rejection of the middle-class values of his times led him to dig deep into the occult.

Defining himself as an agnostic, he was attracted to the ideas of the Russian occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the principal founder of a false religion called Theosophy whose ideas influenced today’s New Age beliefs.

Through his digging, Yeats became one of the architects of the anti-Christian, anti-Middle Class, and New Age ideas that many in our society today have embraced.

In A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode, David Perkins writes that Yeats described a number of the writers he had known as tragic but noble and courageous, despite their having been self-destructive in their use of drink, drugs, and sex.

Yeats saw these poets as limited but sympathetic because of “the intensity of the rejection of middle-class existence.”

Yeats, Perkins writes, came to believe that their “self-destructiveness … whatever brought about their personal tragedies had limited their art.”

One of his criticisms of his fellow writers was that even though they had rejected middle-class values they had not found anything else to replace them.

In his strange spirituality Yeats, however, thought he had. Perkins writes: “Only the mystic and the saint, Yeats later believed, could reject nature and the world and still be full.”

The failure of his fellow writers, it seems, only taught Yeats to pay closer attention to his poetic craft. He could not see that their rejection of Christian morality, and his own, was at the heart of their difficulties.

There was nothing to replace. Instead, what was needed was full commitment to Christianity. At this, Yeats and the elite of his time failed miserably.

The mystic and saint Yeats admired was a creation of his own mind, his own will, not the will of God.

“The Second Coming,” a poem about the world by a worldly man who longed to be mystic and saint, says much about the world, but not in the way Yeats intended.

The falcon, human beings, including Yeats, cannot hear the falconer, God. The things of the world do fall apart and do not hold together – when God, the true God, is not at the center.

Anarchy has been loosed by elites such as Yeats, and the world they have created, drowning in blood, murders innocence even today.

Can we really call those who lack conviction the best among us?

The best lacking conviction for Yeats includes intellectuals, artists, poets, politicians, businessmen, and the wealthy. Together, they have birthed and nurtured, with the complicity of so many, the wasteland observed by Yeats’s more astute contemporary T.S. Eliot.

There is much to admire about Yeats: His use of conversational speech to write his poems, his attention to the craft of writing a poem.

But his content, while reflective of the ideas held by many among the elite in his time, and in our own, is often the thought of a deeply confused man.

As we celebrate the Nativity, let us also reflect on Our Lord’s passion, how he carried on the cross the weight of our sins, the weight of the sinful world Yeats cannot see that he has helped birth, a world we too have helped birth through our sins.

Let us reflect on how the rough, slouching beast is defeated, that our sins have been forgiven, and that with prayer and fasting, the weapons the Lord has given us, we will defeat the legions of slouching demons who torment, tempt, and distract us.

Let us not get caught up in the widening gyre. Let us not stumble. Waiting and watching, let instead endure in our prayer and fasting to the end. In enduring, let us give birth to a Christian life well-lived with passionate intensity.

One of Rome's little-known relics is that of Jesus's manger - and it is surprising that it is not better known - whose reliquary is housed in the crypt under the high altar of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.

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The Holy Crib
In the crypt under the high altar lies the celebrated relic known as the Holy Crib - the remains of what was said to have been the manger of baby Jesus, brought to Rome from Palestine in 642 when forces of the Islamic Rashidun Caliphate besieged Jerusalem, which belonged to the Christian Byzantine Empire at the time. The Patriarch of Jerusalem, Sophronius, shipped the relic to Rome to keep it safe from the invaders with the help of Pope Theodosius. The relic has been preserved for centuries in Rome’s St Mary Major basilica, encased in a silver and glass cradle-shaped container in a chapel under the main altar.

Made from the wood of a sycamore tree, the relics consist of five planks, two of which are nearly a yard long and upright in the form of an X. Studies have suggested they were supports for the manger, which may have been made out of clay or limestone.

Every year on Christmas Eve they are carried around the basilica and displayed in front of the altar on Christmas Day.

A statue of Pope Pius IX kneeling before the ancient wooden pieces of the manger serves as an example to the faithful who come to see the first humble crib of the Savior. Pius IX's devotion to the Holy Crib led him to commission the crypt chapel, and his coat of arms is visible above the altar. The precious crystal urn trimmed in silver, through which the faithful can venerate the relic, was designed by Giuseppe Valadier.[/dim


Arnolfo di Cambio's Creche

The spiritual and sentimental image of the reconstruction of the "Crib" in remembrance of the venerated event of Christ's birth, originated in 432 when Pope Sixtus III (432-440) created, within the primitive Basilica, a "cave of the Nativity" similar to that in Bethlehem. Numerous pilgrims returning to Rome from the Holy Land, brought back precious fragments of the Holy Crib (cunambulum), which are now kept in the golden Confessional shrine.

During the following centuries several popes took care of Sixtus III's Holy Cave, until Pope Nicolò IV in 1288 commissioned a sculpture of the "Nativity" by Arnolfo di Cambio.

Many changes and reconstructions took place in the basilica. When Pope Sixtus V (1585-1590) wished to erect the large Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament or Sistina in the right nave, he ordered the architect Domenico Fontana to transfer, without dismantling, the ancient "cave of the Nativity" with its surviving elements of Arnolfo di Cambio's sculpture.

The three Magi, dressed in elegant vestments and shoes in a rough gothic style, and Saint Joseph admire with a sense of wonder and reverence the miracle of the Baby in the Virgin Mary's arms warmed by the ox and the donkey. The original Virgin and Baby by Di Cambio was either lost or damaged, and the sculpture now in place is a 16th century replacement attributed to Pier Paolo Olivieri.

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PF is reported to have visited Santa Maria Maggiore about 67 times since he became pope. It is strange he has never been reported to have visited the Manger altar.


Left: The Manger altar beneath the High Altar of Santa Maria Maggiore; right, top: the manger reliquary; right, bottom, sculture of Pope Pius IX venerating the relic.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 27/12/2018 04:30]

Christmas and Resurrection
Just as the best kind of gifts are not the ones we were expecting,
the best kind of truth comes by surprise.
by Dale Ahlquist

December 25, 2018

We don’t often associate Christmas with resurrection. But we should.

So let’s start by talking about Santa Claus. Christmas is openly under attack in contemporary society where the word has essentially been banned in favor of “holiday” and traditional Christmas carols have been replaced by music that does not even jingle anymore but rather rattles.

However, the “reason for the season” cannot be completely erased even if it is deliberately ignored. The apparently innocuous word “holiday” cannot hide its original meaning of “holy day.”

And even though the 'offensive' baby lying in a lowly manger has been removed from a Christmas 2018 'installation', the figure that has come instead to represent the holiday is still thoroughly Christian and even more problematically,Catholic. He is a fat fellow who magically comes down chimneys and then sneaks away having left all sorts of gifts.

But as G.K. Chesterton, another fat fellow, reminds us: “The Santa Claus who commits a sort of saintly burglary at this time of the year is, of course, the St. Nicholas who was the patron saint of children.”

This ancient Turkish saint drew a devotion that spread across the continents and the centuries. He became so beloved in Germany that his Germanized name is used by English-speaking people. And while we’re at it, we should point out that German Christmas carols are among the best, and they’re not about Santa Claus.

But before we talk about the miracle that St. Nicholas is most famous for, we should talk about magic.

Magic has a bum rap among Catholics. They avoid the word as much as their secularist counterparts avoid the word “Christmas.” And yet the word catches up with them, just as “holiday” catches up with the people trying avoid the Holy Day.

Consider that those three mysterious figures we now generically call The Wise Men were originally known as The Magi, and it’s not hard to figure what the word is connected to. They were seekers of signs and wonders. They were wise because they were looking for a miracle, something supernatural.

Magic, that much abused word, has to do with forces that are beyond the natural. If we associate magic with witchcraft, we are referring to the powers that witches derive from demons. But saints make use of supernatural forces, too, we call their works miracles because they are wonders, which is what the word miracle means.

But we could also call them magic simply because they cannot be explained by any natural laws. In fact, they defy natural laws. The difference between bad magic (or black magic) and good magic (or miracles) is that bad magic changes something good into something bad, puts it under a spell or a curse, deforms and destroys. Good magic restores and heals, takes a bad thing and makes it good again.

The legendary Santa Claus magically breaks into houses not to steal things but to give presents (mostly to children). The real St. Nicholas was generous (especially to young people) but he also performed the miracle of resurrecting the dead, in this case restoring life (and limb) to some children who had been killed by an evil butcher and tossed bit by bit into a pickling tub. Hence he is the patron saint of children.

Contrast this with Medea, “the great type of the ancient and modern witch,” who promised to make an old man into young man by boiling him in a pot.

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“But the old gentleman,” says Chesterton,"like many old gentleman who have attempted to renew their youth like the eagles, found that the experiment began and ended with getting into hot water. But St. Nicholas… found two children literally gone to pot (like modern society), and miraculously raised them unconsumed. He not only renewed their youth like the eagles, he also renewed their childhood — as if two live chickens had walked out of the pot…

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This notion of restoration and resurrection marks the whole difference between good magic and bad. In the first the supernatural is a strong engine for restoring the natural. The only answer to the death of the body is the resurrection of the body. But in all the traditions of black magic there is the opposite idea — the idea of captivity, and not of deliverance.

A lame man cured by a miracle merely drops a fetter from his free human leg. The children cured by St. Nicholas merely escape from the ogre’s prison of a pot. But in the opposite and evil tales of enchantment there is always the clank of chains. The princess is imprisoned in a white hind, as if in an ivory turret. The prince is locked up in a green frog, as if in an emerald casket. But from the awful experiment of Eden to the last Trumpet that makes dead men alive again, the light that lights up every Christian conception is the idea of liberty.

Did you see the surprising way in which Chesterton connected Christmas to resurrection? He did it using Santa Claus and magic. A saint and the miracle of restoration. We probably expected him to tie the Christ Child, whose birth we celebrate, to the Christ who had to die on the cross and then became the Christ who rose from the dead. That works, too. But we were expecting that.

Chesterton uses the unexpected to make his point. Just as best kind of gifts are surprise gifts and not the ones we were expecting, the best kind of truth comes by surprise.

The adventurous route that Chesterton has been taking us on has not even reached its destination yet. He has told the story of Santa Claus and magic to make a further point, an even more unexpected one that could not be more pertinent to the present state of the Catholic Church.

Bad magic, worked by witches and demons, enslaves us. Good magic, worked by God and his saints, sets us free. Freedom is an idea “that lights up every Christian idea.”

But what is the one of the best things we can do with our freedom? Brace yourself. You’re going to be surprised.

Chesterton says, “The most living of all liberties is the liberty to repent.”

Yes, that’s what Chesterton the prophet, like all the prophets before him, is telling us now. To use the great gift of freedom, given by a supernatural act of grace, to do something that will point the world to the God that we all seem to have forgotten. We have forgotten him because we have sinned. We need to get on our knees. As a Church. And repent.


How faithful Catholics can find joy
this Christmas in face of apostasy everywhere
by John-Henry Westen
Editor


December 24, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – “This has been such a grace-filled year!” Those were the words of one of my LifeSite colleagues when I expressed being at a loss to write a positive Christmas reflection considering the state of the Church and the world today. I'm grateful that my dear brilliant friend Maike Hickson permitted me to share her thoughts as my own this Christmas. They were a gift to me, to lift my spirits, and I pray they may be so for you too.

In order for any remedial action to be taken for any malady, a proper diagnosis needs to be made. The patient must recognize the gravity of the illness in order to take appropriate steps to find a cure and root out the problem.

That is the gift we were granted by the Almighty this year. God has revealed so much truth about the state of the Church, opening more eyes to the crisis than we may have dreamed possible. The explosion of clergy sex abuse investigations and revelations around the United States and in different countries beginning with the devastating report on ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick did much to open eyes.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò took up the mantle of whistleblower, calling out Pope Francis as being involved in the cover-up of abuser Cardinals and bishops. The credibility of Archbishop Viganò — which resulted from his own life of holiness and concern for the good of the Church — brought countless faithful, both laity and especially clergy, to a new awareness of the scope and gravity of the crisis in the Church.

The Church has had to come face-to-face with the evil of homosexual acts and the horrendous consequence of not taking that evil seriously.

With the world exacting ever-greater penalties for those who refuse to wholeheartedly celebrate homosexual relationships, the external pressure on the Church to cave in on its constant teaching is fierce. But what is truly crippling is the betrayal of these truths by the successors of the Apostles themselves.

It has become plain for those with eyes to see that there are many Judases in our Church today among the hierarchy who for the love of money, fame, and even, at times, because of unnatural desires of their own, are selling out the truth of Christ.

It is painfully obvious with 85% of clergy sexual abuse victims being male we are dealing with a homosexual problem (by comparison, two-thirds of sexual abuse in general is perpetrated against females).

It is also evident that Church authorities, beginning with the Pope himself, are refusing to acknowledge the obvious. Rather, the finger of blame is being pointed to vague and undefined problems like ‘clericalism’ which leave wide open the possibility of foisting heterodox changes in the Church as supposed solutions for the abuse crisis.

We’ve seen suggestions of married priests, female priests, and altering the Church’s teaching on homosexuality. Cardinals are dueling openly over homosexuality. Bishops are doing the same.

The prophecies of Our Lady of Akita seem to have been realized in our day. “The work of the devil will infiltrate even into the Church in such a way that one will see cardinals opposing cardinals, and bishops against other bishops. The priests who venerate me will be scorned and opposed by their Confreres.”

So we have had a great awakening of sorts, but the really great news — the hope-filled awesome thing that should make us rejoice and fall to our knees in thanksgiving before the Babe in the manger — is that the Almighty has given us the grace not to be seduced.

Through the intercession of His Mother, Our Good Lord has chosen many to see His truth and hold on to it. Those who have been given the grace to see what’s wrong, suffer. But it is a grace to suffer. The saints teach us to thank God for it, thank God for the pain so that we may unite ourselves with Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.

We have been led in these times of uncertainty to embrace the truth more firmly than before, to turn to tradition for solidity and to hold to God rather than men – no matter their stature or standing.

We should be grateful moreover for all the good and holy friendships that have developed in this time of crisis. The crisis has led us to meet and collaborate with great men and women of deep faith who are shining examples of how to live holy lives.

Both Sts. Therese of Lisieux and Louis de Montfort prayed to live in these times. They were not granted that grace, but we have been. What an honor for us to have the opportunity to defend our Lord and His teachings on faith, life, and family.

In these times, when living a life of virtue seems impossible, we must realize that we can do nothing at all by ourselves, but we can do all things through Christ who gives us strength.

We’re defending that Little Baby in the Manger of Bethlehem at the behest and under the direction of His Holy Mother!

A happy and holy Christmas to all of you and best wishes for a blessed New Year!

Belated translation of an interesting post by one of Marco Tosatti's contributors who calls himself Super-Ex because he has been ex- most of the institutions in Catholic Italy but not ex-Catholic....

Lenin and Bergoglio: A similar strategy
for dealing with their 'enemies'
Translated from

December 22, 2018

Dear readers – It’s the way of our Super-Ex. He can disappear for weeks or even months, and suddenly, pop up again for 2-3 days in a row. The impetus for his new reflection was the reigning Pontiff’s annual address to the Roman Curia.

Strangely, he did not insult or abuse anyone as he did in previous editions. [Except Mons. Vigano, indirectly and in generic terms.] But he spoke of sexual abuses – always and only of minors, as if the cases of sexual – more properly homosexual – harassment of priests and seminarians did not count.

And he made many statements that could even sound credible, were it not that over them (and him) hangs the incredibly pervicacious silence regarding Mons. Carlo Vigano’s denunciations. What can one then say of his statements? That is precisely what Super-Ex addresses.

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In order to understand Bergoglio’s statements – devoid of any trace of self-criticism – to the Roman Curia, one must find a historical parallel: Bergoglio is like Lenin, father of Communist dictatorship.

Why? Easily said. In 1917, Lenin understood that Russia had to get out of the World War in order to strengthen his revolution. And he did, as soon as he could, in March 1918, signing a separate peace with Germany.

At the same time, he was clear about what he wished to do: Get out of war with Russia's external enemies in order to carry out a civil war with maximum attention - the war against his internal enemies (the Mensheviks, the revolutionary Socialists, the bourgeois, believers…)

Which Lenin set out to do.

Now, let us see what happened in 2013:
As soon as he became pope, Bergoglio declared global peace with the enemies of the Church. He stopped the ‘culture wars’ that had been fought under John Paul II, Benedict XVI and, in Italy, under Cardinal Ruini. He did so , and continues to do so, in many ways, not least in a public surrender, as it were, to Eugenio Scalfari, founder and editor of Italy’s most anti-clerical and anti-Christian newspaper [and who has been called - and considers himself - the 'pope of secularism'].

And then, soon afterwards, like Lenin, after the external front was closed, he opened the internal front, re-igniting the civil war within the Catholic Church, that which had been going on for some time but especially in the past five decades since Vatican II.

It was a war fiercely fought and carried on by the progressivist theologians of the Council and their followers, by pro-Communist Catholics in favor of divorce and abortion, and promoted by men like Cardinals Martini, Danneels and their ideological ilk, during the last two pontificates.

Bergoglio pursued the war through appointments (Galantino, Paglia, Cupich, Martin…), through marginalization (Bagnasco, Caffarra, Burke, Sarah, Mueller…), through outright manipulation (the synods), through the destruction of religious orders (the traditionalist FFI and its branches, the Novus Ordo Little Sisters of the Mother of the Redeemer in France), through serial heterodox proclamations, through unofficial canonizations of anti-Catholic icons (Luther, don Milani…), through ceaseless anathemas against ‘Pharisees, doctrinaires, rigorists, etc'.

So from terminating the war against anti-Christian nihilism in the world outside the Church [and pro-actively pushing their agenda through the United Nations and the European Union], to prosecuting the civil war against internal orthodoxy – the same strategy as Lenin’s, the same dogmatic and obstinate totalitarian style.

But the analogy does not end there. Today, Bergoglio laments ‘chaos and confusion’ in ‘the Church’, writing that she is “beset by tempests and hurricanes” – which indicates that he is losing the internal war, that the ‘normalization’ [a better term would be ‘homogenization’] he hoped to accomplish in the Church he was elected to lead has not happened.

Even here, Bergoglio takes a leaf from Lenin’s book: No self-criticism whatsoever, not even a hint of it. Rather, continuous accusations against his precedessors and contemporaries who do not follow his line, inventing and pointing fingers at new ‘enemies’, new ‘traitors’, as he sees them.

Revolutionaries always need ‘enemies’, Judases and ‘reactionaries’ to blame, because if nothing goes well, as promised, then someone has to be guilty! If his ‘new church’ has not taken off as he hoped, if the so-called ‘Beegoglio effect’ was nothing but a transient illusion from the early days, there has to be a scapegoat, even at the risk of appearing ridiculous by identifying an honest bishop who has spoken out with the devil (Great Accuser) himself.

Lenin appeared to have won, but he ended up without the use of speech, aphasic. After having said too much. [This was after his third stroke in 2 years, a time that Stalin used to consolidate his hold on the Communist Party and the new Soviet Union. Lenin died in 1923 at the relatively young age of 53.]

Bergoglio continues to speak, a lot, too much. Above all, he seeks to defend himself and he accuses others, ceaselessly. But as more and more are observing, it seems his words are falling into the void, and his list of proscriptions seem increasingly to indicate an impotent rage, the admission of failure.

His adversaries, in fact, are not pulling back, though they are few and subject to humiliation by the pope and his defenders. Even few of his ‘friends’ are pulling for him (how many of the dozens of cardinals he has named have come forth to defend him publicly?). His C9 council has been reduced by attrition [and what’s left has failed to come forth with any meaningful Curial reforms so far]. The sex-abuse scandals have downed many of his principal allies…

Yes, he has made peace with ‘the world’ [to which Christ meant his Church to be ‘a sign of contradiction’], but he is far from winning the civil war. Thanks above all to opposition by outspoken Catholic laity, whose efforts have been decisive and determinative. Laymen who see clearly a betrayal of the Church behind so-called ‘renewal’, and the most insidious clericalism behind the public professions of anti-clericalism.

Even his Minister of Propaganda (Dario Vigano) proved to be a colossal flop, and the new one (Andrea Tornielli) just happens to be the only remaining reserve on the bench. He will do what he can, but with what success?

If you were Bergoglio, would you not be in a rage?

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An earlier new post by Super-Ex touched on 'the silence of Benedict XVI' that Antonio Socci also wrote about a day later, but from a different perspective... Both of them are, of course, sympathetic to B16, and not downright hostile and accusatory as are many who pride themselves on being 'traditionalists'.

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The silence of Benedict XVI

December 21, 2018

For some time now, the silence of Benedict XVI has caused anguish to many Catholics: Why does he not speak? Or, if he does, why so rarely and so softly?

It’s true. Benedict XVI says something whenever he publicly praises persons like Cardinal Sara or Cardinal Mueller, two of the most resolute adversaries to the great Bergoglian confusion [la confusione magna bergogliana]. And he said something quite forceful on the death of his friend Cardinal Joachim Meisner, who was speechless before the abuses of this pontificate.

Yes, he has said some things. But not enough. Perhaps one must think that this ‘silence’ is willed by God. Because it comes amid a long silence by God himself – during a long dark night which has not just lasted the past six years, but which has become more profound than ever in that time.

At times, in history, God is silent, allowing that in the shadows, the desire for light, for truth, for goodness, can emerge gradually in all its potency. How many times has God allowed deceit and falsehoods to seemingly cover everything, and then from one day to the next, overturns all that deceit, as in the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union? [While he allows the deceit to continue in China, Cuba, North Korea, and corrupte regimes like Venezuela!]

Today, God appears silent, while his Spouse, the Church [Not ‘the Church’ but the hierarchy who now speak for the Church] seems to be captivated by every ‘passerby’ each more sickening than the other - by the heretic Luther, by any number of heresies, by the commonplaces and banalities of the politically correct.

Yet how many things take place in silence? One cannot help think of the line from the Magnificate: “He has put down the mighty from their seat”.

And is that not what is basically happening today – in the European Union of the declining Merkel as in the France of the now much-hated Macron.

Remember the electoral victory of Macron, the world’s applause and its expectation that the next step would be the restoration of the fortunes of the Masonic EU. Yet two years later, it seems to be all collapsing. The so-called Macron effect is a bommerang – in which the apparent victors are now weaker than ever.

And is it not the same for Bergoglio? It has now come to a continuous trudging – after the triumphal march of the first two years – but now in more subdued tones. Many Catholics ignore him, many are embarrassed for him, many more have had to be fighting themselves in order not to detest him. Meanwhile, his cardinals are falling, one by one, to scandals and judicial trials.

And Benedict XVI, with all that he represents, is there in the background. In his silence, he is winning Catholics back, as he becomes more revalued, re-read and lamented. He is a small constant flame who represents the faith which cannot be extinguished totally, not even by Bergoglio.

On Christmas Day 2018 years ago, everything took place in silence – and slowly and gradually, everything began to change.

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ALLEGORY OF CATHOLIC FAITH, Jan Vermeer, ca. 1670

Besides the unfailing excellence and orthodoxy of its content, the other thing that distinguishes THE CATHOLIC THING from other Catholic websites is its consistent use of art
to illustrate its themes. The only other one I am aware of who does this consistently is Maureen Mullarkey, but that is because she is an artist by vocation and knows her milieu.
Here, editor Brad Miner introduces us to a Vermeer masterpiece which belongs to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Vermeer’s Catholic “Allegory”
By Brad Miner

December 27, 2018

The Dutch painter Johannes (often Jan) Vermeer (1632-1675) was born in Delft and was baptized in a Dutch Reformed church there. When he was 21, he married Catharina Bolenes, the Catholic daughter of a well-connected Delft woman, who was very much involved in a “hidden” Jesuit church (schuilkerk) next door. (It was illegal then to celebrate Mass in the Netherlands, although the Dutch were then – as now – more tolerant than some other Protestant countries. Back when that was a virtue.)

It’s assumed Vermeer embraced Catholicism before the wedding. But he was not thereafter merely Catholic-in-marriage-only. The faith mattered greatly to him, and this can be seen clearly in one of the canvases he painted between 1670 and 1672, Allegory of the Catholic Faith or, as Protestant sources often refer to it, simply Allegory of Faith.

Thank goodness New York’s Metropolitan Museum, which owns the painting and features it in a new show, “In Praise of Painting” (on display until October 4, 2020), has the integrity to call it by the name the artist intended.

That exhibit’s most prominent painting is probably Rembrandt’s Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, prominent in part because of its size – 56-1/2 x 53-3/4 inches – whereas Vermeer’s work, rather like Leonardo’s, is usually smaller, although at 45 x 35 (about 4ft x 3ft), Allegory is actually one of Vermeer’s larger paintings.

The largest also has a religious theme, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (63 x 56, and painted in 1655 – but not found at the Met). Only thirty-four paintings of Vermeer are known to exist (several others may be by him but are disputed), whereas more than 600 Rembrandts have survived. Even accounting for the fact that Rembrandt lived twenty years longer, Vermeer’s output was modest.

Much of Vermeer’s work celebrates domesticity – the people and places in Delft where he spent most of his life: a prostitute, a milkmaid, music lessons, men and women at work in the home, and several exterior scenes of Delft. My favorite of all Vermeer’s pictures is The Little Street; to my mind, an almost perfect painting.

Vermeer is perhaps best known for his depiction of light and for his use of vibrant colors: ultramarine, from the Latin for “beyond the sea,” the most intense of blues; giallolino, obviously an Italian word for what is now known as “lead-tin yellow” or yellow ochre; and the deep red cinnabar, more commonly known as vermillion.

The at-home settings depicted in most of his paintings, including Allegory, were one or the other of two rooms in his mother-in-law’s house where Jan and Catharina lived. The light, which Vermeer prized and painted with such genius, was best in those rooms. Even in his religious paintings, one finds the trappings of 17th-century Dutch life.

Most scholars believe the woman in Allegory of the Catholic Faith is the repentant Mary Magdalene, symbol of faith in Christ and of the Catholic Church. Her foot is on a globe that she seems poised to push away: she is leaving worldly life to follow Jesus. This argument is supported by echoes in the picture of paintings Vermeer (an avid collector of others’ work) would have known well, in particular, Mary Magdalen Turning from the World to Christ by Jan van Bijlert.

My own impression upon first seeing Allegory was that Vermeer was echoing paintings that depict the Blessed Virgin as she is described in the Book of Genesis, although, I thought, Vermeer’s Virgin is presented very differently. I was thinking especially of Tiepolo’s The Immaculate Conception - Our Lady upon the globe, her heel crushing the snake/a dragon/Satan. In Genesis 3:15, which follows the account of the Fall, God says to the serpent: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; they will strike at your head, while you strike at their heel.” In Vermeer’s painting, the serpent is crushed by a slab of stone.

Of course, when I got home from the Met and looked up the Tiepolo, I had to palm-smack my forehead: Tiepolo lived a century later.

The slab of stone crushing Satan is the “cornerstone” of Psalm 118, the one “the builders rejected [and] has become the cornerstone.” And the apple on the floor near Magdalene’s left foot is, obviously, the very one from Eden. The composition of Allegory, although more complex, is similar to Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance, a better and purer picture (his way with light more fully on display), in which a (possibly pregnant) woman by a window, her jewels arrayed before her, takes the measure of her life. Behind her is a painting of the Last Judgement, artist unknown.

The painting on the wall in the background of Allegory is Vermeer’s recreation, albeit edited, of Jacob Jordaens’ Crucifixion, a painting his mother-in-law, Maria Thins, likely owned. To Magdalene’s left is a home altar with what’s likely a missal and, of course, a crucifix and a chalice. The sphere hanging from the ceiling may simply represent reflection, as in contemplation, which is certainly what Mary M.’s rapt expression seems to indicate . . . or it may simply be a way for the artist to demonstrate his technical skill. [Note how it reflects in miniature the part of the room we do not see in the painting.]

That leaves the leather screen to our right and the tapestry to the left. The tapestry appears in other Vermeer works (and in this case offers more proof that the artist used the camera obscura technique), but it and the screen suggest devices easily deployed to quickly hide the Thins’-Vermeers’ own, small schuilkerk. Given Vermeer’s prominence in Delft and a century of cooling Calvinist tempers, it’s unlikely the great painter himself faced any danger.

But others did, Jan Vermeer knew it, and so he painted it.

I miss the early years at PAPA RATZINGER FORUM when we had time and leisure to indulge in a thread devoted exclusively to religious art (mostly paintings, an occasional sculpture) - of which there is such a huge treasury to keep any forum going forever!




Details from Monreale Cathedral, Sicily:
The Bible in stone and mosaic
by Shawn Tribe

November 30, 2018

One of my favourite endeavours is to show the lesser seen details of famed locales. Few churches rise to the level of iconographic recognizability as that of the Cathedral of Monreale in Sicily, with its Italo-Byzantine masterworks. The most famous view of this remarkable architecture of Christendom is, of course, of the famed apse mosaic of Christ (above).

Justly famed it goes without saying, but what of the rest of the cathedral? Recently Nicola de Grandi, whom many of you will know as the Ambrosian rite expert over at NLM, visited this spectacular building and kindly gave LAJ permission to republish some of his photos.

To that end, I wanted to present some views, some of which will be familiar, others which you are quite a bit less likely to have seen before.

Until I can copy some of the many great pictures, you may view them here:
https://www.liturgicalartsjournal.com/2018/11/details-from-monreale-cathedral-sicily.html

I am dredging my memory so I can dig up Cardinal Ratzinger's impressions of Monreale when he first visited it, and will post them here if I do. If you had only one reason to visit Sicily, then definitely, Monreale is it. It's a staggering experience, so much that it was a total body shock for me to find myself back outdoors under the hot Sicilian sun after hours contemplating the wonders within.

The Octave and the Twelve Days of Christmas
by Canon Aaron B. Huberfeld
Rector of St. Mary’s Oratory
Wausau, Wisconsin


When people pursuing the devout life first undertake to deepen their life in the liturgical year, they are often astonished by the feasts they encounter during what is known as the Octave of Christmas (“octave” means “series of eight”, which can also be confusing, since of course we speak of Twelve Days of Christmas — more on that later).

No sooner do we conclude the office of Christmas Day than we celebrate the feast of the first Martyr. Why is this so? Does the feast of St Stephen just happen to fall on December 26? Why would the Church turn so quickly from the creche to consider the deacon who was stoned to death after Our Lord's Resurrection? And what about the feasts of the following days? What is their connection with Christmas?

The first three feasts of the Christmas Octave have been observed since antiquity. They were always devoutly referred to as the Three Companions.
- We begin with St Stephen, murdered at the direction of Saul of Tarsus, whose conversion we shall celebrate one month later. Stephen was a martyr loquendo et moriendo, by his words and by his death.
- The next day we return to white vestments, for St John is the only Apostle not celebrated in red. He was the only Apostle who did not abandon his Savior at Calvary, and so God decreed that he should be a martyr loquendo sed non moriendo, by his words but not by his death, for he would be miraculously preserved from his execution and end his life in peace on the island of Patmos.
-Then on December 28 we celebrate Childermas, the feast of the Holy Innocents, those little ones of Bethlehem who, as we pray in the collect of their Mass, bore witness to Christ non loquendo, sed moriendo, not by their words, but by their deaths, for they were killed by raging Herod on the chance that one of them might be the newborn King.

Herods are to be found in every age, for sinful rulers always view the kingdom of Christ as a threat to their earthly power. And so on - December 29 we keep the feast of Thomas Becket, the holy bishop of Canterbury who upheld the freedom of the Church from the interference of the state and so was cut down by King Henry II’s men during Christmas Vespers.
- On December 30 we take up again the Mass and Office of Christmas, like a beautiful refrain, and then remain in white vestments for the conclusion of the Octave.
- December 31 is the feast of St Sylvester, celebrated in white because he is the first pope who was not a martyr, bringing the age of martyrs to a close with the peace of Constantine.

On this Seventh Day of Christmas, the Church has emerged from the catacombs, and she brings with her the fullness of her sacramental life. She is mindful of the words of her greatest prophet which have been so wondrously fulfilled:

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There shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a flower shall rise up out of his root. And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him: the spirit of wisdom, and of understanding, the spirit of counsel, and of fortitude, the spirit of knowledge, and of godliness. And he shall be filled with the spirit of the fear of the Lord. (Isa. 11, 1-3)

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These seven gifts of the Spirit of God which rest upon the Anointed One are given in turn to all those who are associated with His Passion by their reception of the Seven Sacraments:

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And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand the second time to possess the remnant of his people...And he shall set up a standard unto the nations, and shall assemble the fugitives of Israel, and shall gather together the dispersed of Juda from the four quarters of the earth...And the Lord shall lay waste the tongue of the sea of Egypt, and shall lift up his hand over the river in the strength of his spirit: and he shall strike it in the seven streams, so that men may pass through it in their shoes. (Isa. 11, 11-12, 15)

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- The day after, on January 1st, this Son of David will submit to the Old Law by His circumcision—but only to bring the Old Covenant to fulfillment.
- Twelve days later, on the Octave of the Epiphany, we shall see Him fulfill all righteousness with His baptism in the Jordan.

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Righteousness comes from the wood of the Cross, at which we draw waters in joy from the seven sacramental founts of our Savior’s pierced Heart. (Isa. 12)

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Why, then, do we not conclude Christmas with its Octave day? Why count “Twelve Days of Christmas”? To find the answer, we must draw from the treasures of the Church’s full liturgical tradition during this season.

If we look to the liturgy before the reforms of the mid-twentieth century, we find that the Three Companions have not left the Christ Child. Each in turn takes his bow as we celebrate the Octave days of St Stephen, St John, and Childermas on January 2nd, 3rd and 4th respectively. And note the prayer for St Stephen’s Octave, which differs only in its opening words from that of December 26:

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Almighty and eternal God, who hast dedicated the first fruits of the martyrs in the blood of Blessed Stephen the Levite...

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And that of Twelfth Night, Eve of the Epiphany:

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Almighty and eternal God, direct our actions according to thy good pleasure, that in the Name of thy Son we may abound in good works.

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If the first seven days of Christmas bring us the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost, it is the Twelve Days as a whole that allow us to yield His Twelve Fruits in our moral and spiritual lives. (Gal. 5, 22-23, Apoc. 22, 2)

Under the general heading of 'more than one way to skin a cat', is this move preparatory to abrogating, or at least greatly weakening, Summorum
Pontificum, as the Italian bishops' conference have urged the pope to do ? (Or more likely, they were urged by the pope, or someone in the
Bergoglio Vatican, at least, to let it seem that the initiative comes from them). This is just another instance of gratuitous nastiness from this
Vatican. Other than bruising their self-righteous egos, what harm could the Traditional Mass do to them whose Novus Ordo is far and away
the form followed by the overwhelming majority of Catholics around the world?

Ecclesia Dei Commission for the Latin Mass
to be made just another office of the CDF

December 27, 2018

Messa in Latino reports (and the information is also relayed by Vaticanista Marco Tosatti) that the Pontifical Commission "Ecclesia Dei" (PCED), the Vatican body in charge of matters related to the Traditional Latin Mass and of negotiations with traditional groups (in particular the Society of Saint Pius X), is set to be abolished shortly, according to highly credible sources.

Its functions would be completely and absorbed as an office in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), to which it has been closely linked since the beginning, and in particular since July 2008, when the Prefect of CDF was made head "ex officio" of Ecclesia Dei.

Despite the close links, the limited structural autonomy of PCED had proven extremely beneficial to the integrity of the Traditional Latin Mass, especially since the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, of July 7, 2007, had given PCED important functions regarding the Traditional Roman Rite.

Is it a first step in the dismantlement of Summorum Pontificum? [God forbid! But this pontificate follows no will but Bergolio's... Looking forward to the views of Fr Z who worked for years in Ecclesia Dei in Rome. Meanwhile, we must pray hard and constantly for the Lord to thwart more of the anti-Catholic measures taken by the Bergoglian regime.]

December 28, 2018
P.S. Father Z has expressed his views, but he also refers us to Edward Pentin's blog, as follows:

Farewell ‘Ecclesia Dei’?
The Vatican body aimed at keeping traditional Catholics in communion with Rome looks
likely to be suppressed, but sources suggest it could actually be a positive development.

December 27, 2018

Pope Francis is expected to issue a papal decree in the coming weeks that will effectively dissolve the pontifical commission charged with bringing separated traditionalist Catholics back into full communion.

Various reliable sources have confirmed to the Register that the Pontifical Commission ‘Ecclesia Dei’ is to be abolished and its work absorbed into the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, of which the commission is already a part.

The Pope’s motu proprio authorizing the change is allegedly still in its drafting stages, but is expected to be published in January. Others say it has already been written and signed.

Although some have voiced concern about the move, first made public in the Italian blog Messa in Latino, sources within the Vatican and elsewhere sympathetic to the commission are more sanguine, telling the Register that the structural change could be positive and actually facilitate regularization of the breakaway Society of St. Pius X.

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre founded the SSPX in 1970 in response to errors he believed had entered into the Church following the Second Vatican Council. Pope St. John Paul II set up the Pontifical Commission in 1988 in response to Archbishop Lefebvre’s decision that year to consecrate four bishops without papal permission, a schismatic decision according to the Vatican which led to Archbishop Lefebvre’s excommunication along with those of the four bishops. Benedict XVI lifted the four bishops' excommunications in 2009.

The commission’s role was primarily to care for Archbishop Lefebvre’s followers who wished to remain united with the successor of Peter, serving as the chief Vatican body in overseeing efforts to regularize the SSPX and bringing them back into full communion with Rome.

The commission has also had the task of regularizing canonical situations of other religious communities of a traditionalist nature, giving them a canonical form corresponding to their charism.

Added to this, the commission has had the responsibility of working with local bishops to facilitate Mass in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite (according to the 1962 Missal) for those faithful who request it, especially after Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 motu proprio Summorum Pontificum which fully liberalized celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass if a “stable group” of faithful asks for it.

But according to the French traditionalist website L’Homme Nouveau, the SSPX has viewed the Pontifical Commission as an obstacle to its negotiations with the Vatican and would prefer to deal directly with the prefect of the CDF, currently Cardinal Luis Ladaria Ferrer, rather than having to go through the current president of the Pontifical Commission ‘Ecclesia Dei’, Archbishop Guido Pozzo. After years of talks between Archbishop Pozzo and the Society, few if any achievements have been made, the article says.

The rumored restructuring may therefore serve to address these concerns which the newly elected superior general of the SSPX, Father Davide Pagliarini, discussed with Cardinal Ladaria at a Nov. 22 meeting at the Vatican.

In a statement issued after those talks, Father Pagliarini stressed that for the SSPX the “fundamental problem is actually doctrinal” which “remains absolutely essential,” and that similarly for the Holy See, no canonical status can be established for the Society “until after the signing of a doctrinal document.”

“This restructuring is more likely a concession to the SSPX who aren’t interested in dealing with a structure like Ecclesia Dei,” said an informed Church source, adding that “what is central at the moment is discussion of doctrine rather than practical aspects.”

Another possible reason for the suppression of the Pontifical Commission could be to do with the reforms of the Roman Curia. A new apostolic constitution, Predicate Evangelium (Preach the Gospel), is expected to be published in the first months of the new year, and much of it is about streamlining curial offices and making them more cost-efficient. At the moment, Ecclesia Dei has a separate budget, so ending the structure and having its staff absorbed into the CDF could help achieve that as part of the curia-wide restructuring.

It could also ensure that various aspects of the commission’s work related to liturgy and religious life are kept within the arguably more sympathetic confines of the CDF rather than delegated to the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, where the interests of the SSPX and traditional Catholics in general are likely to receive a less favorable hearing among officials in both of those dicasteries (CDW prefect Cardinal Robert Sarah notwithstanding).

Much of the alarm about the rumored changes stems from recent reports of some opposition to Summorum Pontificum within the Italian bishops’ conference, and a general belief — yet to be concretely proven — that Pope Francis wishes to repeal it and is opposed to the SSPX. [The first 'belief' is plausible, but I have yet to read any report saying this pope 'is opposed' per se to the SSPX.] Francis, however, has previously made a number of conciliatory gestures toward the Society, most notably granting all of its priests faculties to hear valid confessions during and after the Jubilee Year of Mercy.

Benedict XVI was the first to place Ecclesia Dei under the CDF when in 2009 he made the Congregation’s prefect the ex officio head of Ecclesia Dei rather than a cardinal president, which was the case until then.

For all these reasons, the general approach among sources both within the Vatican and among traditional Catholics is to “keep calm” and to wait and see what the final motu proprio communicates.


More thoughts about upcoming “Ecclesia Dei” document

December 28, 2018

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the implications of a new Motu Proprio by which the Pontifical Commission “Ecclesia Dei” might be suppressed because the “pastoral emergency” for which it was created is no long present...

Earlier I wrote about implications for the religious communities under the PCED and about issues like the [;iturgical] calendar. I wasn’t terribly positive about those elements, since other congregations would probably have to get involved. Not only too many cooks, but not very good cooks.

However, it is a good idea to turn the sock inside out once in a while. Mind you, this is my speculation based on careful sources sparked by rumor.

What if the text of the Motu Proprio, founded on the idea that the “pastoral emergency” is no longer urgent, instead of being negative, winds up to be positive?

What if Francis surprises everyone as he did when he – admittedly in an oddly non juridical way – made it possible for people to be validly absolved by SSPX priests and then provided for the proper witnessing of marriages with valid form? Could there be something else in the Motu Proprio regarding them which could make the PCED’s brief less pressing?

I admit that I am now rather conditioned to suspect anything that comes from this pontificate, given the cast of characters involved at various levels. It is a sad development. Once upon a time, when I heard that a document was coming, I would look forward to it and, when it arrived, dig to find the gold. These days, I dread every rumor of a document and, when it comes, I look for the bad rather than the good. I don’t like this situation.

Hence, I’ll put it out there: if the “pastoral emergency” is over, then what could this mean?
- First, consider that in the 10 years from the promulgation of Summorum Pontificum the number of places where the older Mass is in use has exploded, especially in these USA. Here the number went from some 50 to some 500.
- Next, the number of priests saying the older form is increasing with every ordination.
- Next, the number of bishops saying the older form is increasing every year. We now hear of Pontifical Masses all over the place. Unthinkable 10 years ago.
- Next, the number of vocations entering traditional communities is up. The number of newly ordained for dioceses who say their First Mass in the traditional form is up.

There are positive indications. It would be extremely foolish to try to suppress this movement now. The numbers are up and attempts to suppress would fuel huge resistance.

So, maybe the Motu Proprio will be positive rather than negative. Perhaps it will acknowledge that – with the passing of a pastoral emergency – what is going on is now mainstream....

Please, friends, pray to St. Joseph, the Church’s great Guardian and beautiful builder, to guide the release of the new document.

I learned of this article because Aldo Maria Valli writes about it on his blog today for the benefit of Italian readers. Great thanks to Mr. Weigel for sharing this wonderfully
Catholic experience with us all.

Advent and Christmastide are full of journeys and pilgrimages:
- Mary goes to Judea to visit Elizabeth.
- Mary and Joseph journey to Bethlehem, ostensibly to fill out their tax forms, in truth to fulfill an ancient prophecy.
- Amazed shepherds leave the hills, come to town, and find the desire of the nations.
- The Magi go on a star-led trek and then return to the mysterious East.
- Mary, Joseph, and the Holy Child go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem for what we celebrate on February 2 as the Feast of the Presentation (after which, and only after which, serious Catholics pack up the Christmas crèche).
- The Holy Family flees to Egypt, then journeys back to Nazareth.

Biblical religion taught western civilization that life is journey, pilgrimage, and adventure, not repetitive cycles or one darn thing after another. Advent and Christmas remind the Church of that deep truth. That’s why processions are a helpful way to celebrate these two linked liturgical seasons.

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of participating in one of the most remarkable processions you’d ever want to experience. It took place in Soho, the most decadent part of London’s West End. And it literally stopped people in their tracks on a Sunday evening.

This nocturnal pilgrimage, in which a statue of Our Lady of Walsingham was processed from St. Patrick’s Church in Soho Square to Warwick Street and the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St. Gregory, was the culmination of a weekend-long Advent Mission at St. Patrick’s —w hich, under the leadership of Canon Alexander Sherbrooke, is the vibrant center of the New Evangelization in London.

The weekend mission involved Masses, confessions, conferences, caroling and street evangelization, and a Saturday “Nightfever” experience of prayer, song, and Eucharistic adoration during which some 300 people, many of them unchurched, walked through St. Patrick’s open doors, lit a candle, and wrote down a prayer.

On Sunday evening, after a concluding Mass in honor of the Immaculate Conception, more than 200 of St. Patrick’s Brazilian and Spanish-speaking Latino congregants joined their Anglophone fellow-parishioners in the Marian procession.

Led by a cross, thurifer, candle-bearers, and one of London’s auxiliary bishops, Nicholas Hudson, Our Lady of Walsingham was borne on the shoulders of sturdy men and accompanied by Ambrose, Father Sherbooke’s Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and the parish’s secret evangelistic weapon.

We sang Marian hymns, prayed the rosary aloud — and offered often-startled by-standers, taking a smoke-break outside one of the area’s ubiquitous pubs, a small packet with a candle, a Miraculous Medal, and a Bible verse.

Our route was certainly tawdrier than the Flemish landscape through which Christ carries the cross in Pieter Bruegel’s painting, The Procession to Calvary. But like the Lord, we were on pilgrimage through the world: a world that included the aforementioned pubs, upscale restaurants and cheap curry shops, foreign exchange bureaus, several 24-hour grocers, a pharmacy, two porn shops, and any number of clothing emporia. (Further verifying Oscar Wilde’s observation that life often imitates art, we turned one corner at a high-end jeans outlet called “True Religion”.)

The procession ended at the headquarters church of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, where we sang the Litany of Loretto in Latin before going our separate ways.

St. Patrick’s in Soho is that which every Catholic parish should want to be.
- Its rich pastoral life, which includes an extensive ministry to the homeless, is built around Mass and daily Eucharistic adoration. - The liturgy is celebrated with dignity and beauty; its music is supernal. -
- The parish sponsors an “SOS Prayerline” that has helped thousands of lonely or desperate souls over the past decade.
- The young people who live and work at the parish are not only involved in its liturgical life; one works at an archdiocesan center for trafficked women, another is about to return to the seminary, and all are involved in street evangelization.
This is the “Church permanently in mission” of which the pope writes in Evangelii Gaudium, and like that document, the all-in Catholicism of St. Patrick’s is animated by the joy of the gospel.

To be a pilgrim is to be going somewhere. That somewhere is the Kingdom come among us at Christmas, and coming again in power and glory. The St. Patrick’s Advent Mission procession invited an aggressively secular and sometimes sordid part of London to join that journey to beatitude.

**************************************************************************************************************************************

Because of the additional commentary on the Ecclesia Dei news, I have had to remove the ff item from the original post, and insert it here because the situation in China
today provides a dramatic counterpoint to the simple unabashed public expression of Catholicism in a shockingly secularized United Kingdom, where a recent poll showed that
more than 50% of citizens between 20-28 years of age had no idea whose birth was being celebrated at Christmas.



Street demonstrations to ‘reject Christmas’ and remember Mao instead.

In China, they now say celebrating Christmas is 'a burning shame' -
Why not remember Mao’s birthday on December 26 instead?
A primary school principal in Sixian links Christmas to the invasion of the Western powers during the Opium Wars and after the Boxer Revolution.
High school students swear to fight "the invasion of Western parties" as an "aggression against Chinese culture".
by Wang Zhiyeng


Beijing, December 27, 2018 (AsiaNews) - For the Chinese people, celebrating Christmas is "a burning shame" and "an aggression against Chinese culture"; rather than celebrating the birth of Jesus on December 25, it is better to celebrate the birth of Mao Zedong on December 26th. These are some of the slogans that echoed across some cities in China this week, following the ban on displaying Christmas decorations and prohibiting Christmas-themed gatherings.

For several years there have been attempts to reduce the impact and "spiritual pollution" that Christmas causes among the Chinese population, especially in the university world.

This year prohibitions included the exchange of good wishes, decorations in the windows of the shopping centers, Christmas songs and sales. In recent days the war against Christmas has taken on even more nationalistic tones.

On Christmas Eve, in Sixian County (Anhui), Dong Xuefeng, principal of the city's primary school, gathered schoolchildren and gave a speech saying that Christmas is a disgrace to the Chinese people because of past humiliations received from the powers Western, all Christian.

Dong spoke of the opium wars and the Anglo-French invasion of 1860, which destroyed the imperial summer palace in Beijing (the Yuanmingyuan which, among other things, was designed by European Jesuits). And he continued to talk about the crimes of the powers that invaded China in 1900 (Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, Austria, United States and Italy), after the Boxer uprising. "Apart from the Japanese - he specified - all of them were Christians. The crimes they have stained in China are too numerous to list. "

After him, a pupil gave a speech in which he recalled that the day after Christmas is the anniversary of Mao Zedong's birth. "For the Chinese - he said - this should be the day to celebrate".

On Christmas Day, in the county of Gushi (Henan), in Taohuawu high school the teachers organized a special oath ceremony. Repeating the teacher's words, the students proclaimed: "The invasion of Western festivals is actually an aggression against Chinese culture. As a descendant of the yellow emperor [the legendary forefather of the Chinese race] I swear, starting today, to support self-confident cultural self-consciousness and the legacy of our civilization. I want to follow the Chinese holidays! "

In previous days, in some cities of Inner Mongolia there were demonstrations in the street and in front of businesses of groups that shouted slogans such as "We refuse 'Silent Night' and Christmas!"; "We always remember President Mao Zedong!"

In other places, talks were held about Christmas, its link with the Western powers that humiliated China, the rejection of the December 25th celebration and in praise of the memory of Mao Zedong. The fact that the same issues emerge in different places shows that all the events are orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party's Propaganda Office, which has publicly defended this "war on spiritual pollution", because it helps young people "to correct their vision on life and values".

And that's the China with which the Bergoglio Vatican has signed an unholy pact which grows unholier by the moment, judging by events, even though we really do not know what exactly was agreed upon. Whatever it was, it was apparently a plain and simple sellout to Beijing, and it's hard to decide whether this utter surrender to a totalitarian power is worse than the Bergoglio VAtican's utter capitulation to the UN-EU-globalization agenda of which the reigning pope has become the chief advocate and spokesman.

And how long, I wonder, will AsiaNews - which is the news agency of the Pontifical Ministry for External Missions - be allowed to continue reporting uncensored from China?

December 28, 2018
P.S. Another aspect of Beijing's absolute nailed first against opposition is reported below. Does Jorge Bergoglio really think it is worth all this worsening persecution of underground Catholics and reporters relating nothing but facts to have signed his unholy pact with Beijing just because he wants to be the first pope to visit China? (There really is no other plausible reason for the haste and secrecy with which this was done.) But at what cost? On the backs of all those persecuted since that agreement was made public - and in the future - as though Beijing sees its pact with the Vatican an international seal and guarantee of 'virtue' for the rest of the world for China to tighten its totalitarian screws???


Dozens of 'Bitter Winter' reporters
arrested and interrogated in China
Accused of espionage and subversion, at least 45 contributors have beentaken in; the reporter who filmed
a secret 're-education' camp for Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang “disappeared” after the arrest.
by Lin Yijiang

December 27, 2018


In August 2018, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) authorities designated Bitter Winter a “foreign hostile website” for publishing secret documents and news reports about the CCP’s suppression of religious beliefs and human rights violations. The authorities have retaliated by launching repeated attempts to hack the website, and by targeting reporters and contributors.

Since August, at least 45 Bitter Winter contributors in mainland China have been arrested for filming incidents of, or gathering news about, the CCP’s persecution of religious freedom and violation of human rights.

Reporters are usually detained and interrogated on the charge of “divulging state secrets” or “involvement in infiltration by foreign forces.” Some reporters have been sent to “legal education centers” to undergo mandatory indoctrination, while others have been tortured and abused.

The CCP has intensified its attacks on freedom of the press and those recording human rights violations in China. 'Reporters Without Borders', an international non-profit based in Paris, France, released a report in December, naming China as the country with the most imprisoned journalists.

At least 60 professional and citizen journalists have been arbitrarily detained (strict control of information by Chinese authorities makes it difficult to document the case of every missing journalist, so the number may be higher).

This crackdown on reporters has hit Bitter Winter hard. In mid-October, two contributors were arrested in the southeastern coastal province of Fujian. They are still being detained. The authorities designated them as so-called “first-level persons” that undergo heightened scrutiny, with family visits prohibited. According to insiders, both contributors have been tortured by police.

Another contributor, from Xinjiang, conducted groundbreaking investigative reporting into “transformation through education camps,” including their internal construction. That contributor was arrested at the end of September. To date, his whereabouts remain unknown.

Some contributors who have been released were able to report on their interrogations. According to one, he was told, “You’re in China, so you must abide by Chinese laws. If the state deems that you have violated the law, then you have violated the law. If the Party wants to put you to death, it would be like crushing an ant.” The reporter was further told, “Collecting these materials and reporting about these incidents is a subversion of state power; it is espionage.”

Another contributor remarked, “Covering the news is very dangerous, but we must let the world know the reality of the CCP’s persecution of religious beliefs and its abuses of human rights. They should be condemned and stopped. I think that I will be able to persevere and continue to report.”

For the martyrs of the free press,
Christmas behind bars in China

December 29, 2018

“Looking To China” was the five-column headline that L’Osservatore Romano” - now edited by Andrea Monda - ran in presenting the news that “two Chinese children, ages six and seven, brought flowers before the statue of the Child Jesus together with Pope Francis,” on Christmas Eve in Saint Peter’s Basilica.

Meanwhile, however, things are happening in China that the official Vatican media will never be able to report, gagged as they are by the accord signed on September 22 between the Vatican and Beijing.

Here, in fact, is what was revealed on December 28, the feast of the Holy Innocents, in a press release from the CESNUR, the Center for Studies on the New Religions. It is reproduced below in full. Bitter Winter has been referenced repeatedly by this blog as among the most reliable sources for China news.

---

45 journalists arrested in China
for sending news to 'Bitter Winter'


45 journalists have been arrested in China this month, under the accusation of sending news, videos, and photographs to the daily magazine on religious freedom and human rights in China, Bitter Winter, published since May 2018 in Turin, in eight languages, by the CESNUR, the Center for Studies on the New Religions, and edited by sociologist Massimo Introvigne, who is also director of the CESNUR.

Bitter Winter publishes exclusive news from China every day, provided by a substantial group of Chinese journalists and with commentary by specialists of the CESNUR.

The magazine attained international notoriety when, last month, it published three videos shot inside the heavily guarded reeducation camps for the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang, which were rebroadcast by numerous international news sites and television networks.

Together with the publication of confidential documents of the Chinese Communist Party on matters of religion and photographs of destroyed churches, mosques, and statues of Buddha, as well as news on the mistreatment of dissident Catholic priests that continues in spite of the accord between China and the Holy See, these videos provoked a tough response from the regime.

The arrests have been reported by the CESNUR and by Bitter Winter” itself.

“We have credible news,” Massimo Introvigne affirms, “on the fact that some of the journalists arrested have been tortured to obtain information on who else was sending us news and documents from China. And unfortunately the reporter who shot the videos inside the reeducation camps of Xinjiang has disappeared without leaving a trace. And as has happened to other journalists in China, we fear that he is destined never to be seen again.

“We trust that anyone who takes the freedom of the press to heart will raise his voice to protest against these very grave episodes. As for China, I believe that it underestimates the number of journalists who are willing to risk their freedom for the sake of telling the world about the violations of human rights in that country. The network of ‘Bitter Winter’ does not number a few dozen, but hundreds.”

---

I must look up what Introvigne has written about the unholy Vatican-Beijing secret pact. Introvigne was one of those I had considered a Ratzingerian through and through during Benedict XVI's pontificate, but who promptly turned his coat to become an overweening Bergoglio adulator after March 13, 2013. I would have expected some words from him about that 'pact' in his statement about the crackdown on his collaborators in China.

Krysten Winter-Green, 2016; Catherine Bonnet, 2017; Marie Collins, 2014 (CNS Photos)

For probably the first time in six years, I am posting an article from the Fishwrap because it reports something not found elsewhere for now, and because the reporter,
Joshua McElwee, has had a good record of reporting clerical sex abuse stories in various outlets for the past decade or more.

Exclusive:
Former commissioners of lameduck Papal Commission
for minor victims of clerical sex abuse want
re-evaluation of the group at February meeting
by Joshua McElwee

December 27, 2018

ROME — Three former members of Pope Francis' commission on clergy sexual abuse are calling on the pontiff's February Vatican summit on child protection to reevaluate the structure of the group in order to make it more effective in pursuing policy reforms.

In separate NCR interviews, the former papal advisors emphasized the need for the commission to reassert its independence from the Vatican's bureaucracy, to oversee implementation of its own recommendations, and to meet regularly with Francis.

Several outside experts with long histories in confronting clergy abuse echoed their concerns, and highlighted a lack of clarity and transparency over the purpose and objectives of the now four-year-old group.

Marie Collins, an Irish abuse survivor who resigned from the commission in 2017, said the role of the commission might merit special discussion at the February summit because the frustrations over its work exemplify how the Catholic Church has struggled for decades to address the abuse crisis.

"The commission itself is sort of a microcosm of the global issue ... that work that's being done doesn't seem to produce results," she said.

"We need clarity now about the commission, its purpose, its powers, its future, and exactly where it is going and what we can expect from it," said Collins, who left the group in mid-2017 due to frustration with Vatican officials.

"People put a lot of hope into it, and it has failed to live up to the hope," she added. "There should be some examination as to why."

Krysten Winter-Green, one of six commission members not reappointed by Francis in early 2018 after the end of the group's first three-year term, said she doubted the summit would have the role of the commission on its agenda, but added: "As far as I am concerned, it really should be."

"From inception, the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors has been fraught with critical issues that have impeded progress," said Winter-Green, a New Zealander who lives in the U.S. and provides consulting services to dioceses and religious congregations.

Catherine Bonnet, another of the six members not reappointed in 2018, stressed the need for Francis to begin meeting with the commission more regularly, so he can ask them directly about their proposals. "He never came to one of our meetings," she said, referring to her three years on the group.

"If the commission is only writing reports to Pope Francis … it's not enough," said Bonnet, who is respected across Europe for her research on perinatal violence. "You need a debate and an explanation of why we suggest this."

Francis announced the child protection summit in September, saying that he would host a meeting in Rome on the issue with all of the presidents of the world's various conferences of Catholic bishops from Feb. 21 to 24.

Expectations for the event have been high [Is McElwee speaking for himself here, or expressing the Bergoglian groupthink????], especially after the leadership of the U.S. bishops' conference announced in November that it had been asked by the Vatican to delay voting on a set of proposals to address clergy abuse because of the summit.

The pope has entrusted the organization of the gathering to four men: Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, Indian Cardinal Oswald Gracias, Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna, and Jesuit Fr. Hans Zollner, a current member of the papal commission and president of the Centre for Child Protection at the Pontifical Gregorian University.

The organizing committee said in a Dec. 18 note that the meeting would address three broad areas of "responsibility, accountability and transparency," but did not identify specific issues, such as the commission, that might be covered under that wide umbrella.

But Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley, the president of the papal commission, has said the group will be involved in preparing the meeting.

Zollner's presence on the organizing committee for the summit may point to one question raised by Collins and Winter-Green: whether the group has shifted away from its original construction as a policy change body to an educational one.

They both mentioned the mixing of the work of the commission and Zollner's Centre for Child Protection, an academic institute founded in 2012.

"I think at this point the pontifical commission seems to have completely lost its way," said Collins. "Originally … we were told it was set up to recommend policies for structural change," she said. "It's now become a quasi-educational body, which is really a parallel group running alongside the [Centre for Child Protection, or CCP] — doing much the same work."

"Basically, it's seeing itself as a body which should be promoting education within the church on abuse," Collins added. "We already have that in the CCP, and we don't need a second body doing it."

Winter-Green noted an apparent difference in approach between the commission's Vatican-approved statutes and a Nov. 23 statement by O'Malley.

The statues make clear that the group's role is to "propose initiatives to the Roman Pontiff … for the purposes of promoting local responsibility in the particular Churches for the protection of all minors and vulnerable adults."

O'Malley's statement said the commission is meant to be "making recommendations on best practices for the universal Church for education and prevention programs."

"This press release appears to intimate that the original role and purpose of the [commission] has shifted from 'policy change' to 'education,' " said Winter-Green, adding that the Vatican had failed to "clearly enunciate the unique identity" of the papal commission as compared to the Gregorian center.

Two outside experts who have advised bishops for years on how to confront clergy abuse concurred with the former commission members that the group should come under reevaluation during the February summit.

Francis Sullivan, who led the Australian church's response to a 2013-17 national inquiry into institutional responses to child abuse, said the "first thing" the bishops at the summit should do is "put in place a truly independent commission."

Sullivan, the former chief executive of Australia's Truth, Justice and Healing Council, said the commission should be refashioned so that it is led by a layperson, meets personally with the pope, and has a guaranteed budget to do its work.

Referencing the need for a lay chairperson, he said: "It has to be a lay person, someone whose career is not riding on the performance [of the commission] in the curia."

Kathleen McChesney, a former FBI executive assistant director who left the agency in 2002 to lead the U.S. bishops' then-new child protection office, said she thought it was "necessary" for the summit to discuss the papal commission.

McChesney, who also co-chaired the National Advisory Council of the Conference of Major Superiors of Men from 2014 to 2017, suggested the summit could ask to hear from O'Malley about "what's working and what's not working."

"I don't think a lot of people really understand that it's there or understand what it does," she said. "Some think it's supposed to be for oversight. Some think it's just people that give good ideas to the pope."

"There are some misimpressions," said McChesney. "I think maybe the answer to that would be they need to correct the misimpressions about what it's intended to do, and evaluate … its structure, its mandate, where it needs to go, how it should be staffed."

The abuse commission has come under increasing public scrutiny since its creation by Francis in March 2014.

Collins resigned March 1, 2017, citing a number of frustrations, including dissatisfaction with one Vatican office's refusal [the CDF under Cardinal Mueller, who, among all his post-dismissal sanctimonies, has not bothered to explained this] to comply with a request from the commission, approved by the pope, that all letters sent to the Vatican by abuse survivors receive a response.

When the three-year terms of the original commission members lapsed in December 2017, Francis left the group in abeyance for two months before reappointing eight of the members and adding nine people to its ranks.

Collins, who was part of a group of eight survivors that met with Francis during his visit to Ireland in August, said the pontiff was asked during that meeting about whether he would be giving the commission more support in the future.

She said the pope replied that he had been working to make the group "fully part" of the Vatican bureaucracy, and felt now that the group "was now being honest with him, and he could trust it."

"To me, that said there was something going on during the first term, either there was things going on that members like me knew nothing about or he was being told things by people in the Curia who wanted to resist the commission and wanted to take control of it," said Collins.

She said she wrote to O'Malley in November to ask for an explanation about the pope's statement but has yet to receive a reply.

Winter-Green raised the question of how people are selected to join the commission and said that process is "clouded by a framework of dubious ethics, predominantly political in nature and shrouded in secrecy."

She suggested that the commission needs to create a "formula" for recruitment of members that includes vetting by people outside the group's staff who have "specialty-specific wisdom" they can lend to the process.

Bonnet, who in 2001 was appointed a knight of France's Order of the Legion of Honor, noted that two recommendations the commission had given Francis during her term on the group had not been put in place.
- The first recommendation was that there be an exception to the invocation of the "pontifical secret," or strict confidentiality rules, in cases of child abuse.
- The second was to end Vatican norms setting the statute of limitations in abuse cases to 20 years after the victim's 18th birthday, which can already be waived on a case-by-case basis.

"I think it would be very important for the former commission that what we have asked him to do will be applied," said Bonnet.

Sullivan, McChesney, and each of the former commission members said the February summit should be a time for concrete action.

"The pope should, on day one, lay on the table his outline of a plan of action and they should debate that," said Sullivan. "You've only got people there for three days. It can't be seen as a talk-fest."

Collins used similar language. "It can't be just another talking shop, you know; it has to has to produce something concrete at the end," she said. "It's way past time for simply having discussions and talking about future plans."

Asked if she was hopeful the summit would make important changes, McChesney said she felt "neutral" on that question.

The former FBI official noted that Pope Benedict XVI ordered bishops' conferences around the world in 2011 to put in place standards to address clergy abuse, but that there have not been updates about which conferences have done so.

"Back in 2011, they were supposed to put their policies and procedures in place all around the world, and that didn't exactly happen," said McChesney. "Then the papal commission came, and while they've tried to do some things, there's been controversy associated with that."

"I'd really like to say I'm hopeful," she said. "I'm just neutral on that. I think it's a matter of wait and see."

**************************************************************************************************************************************

The Spanish website Religion Digital, which is unabashedly Bergogliac, published this on December 28 with an inflammatory
headline that editorializes on the content of the letter as follows:

O'Malley denounces Dolan to the nuncio
in Washington for covering up abuses
by Cameron Doody
RELIGION DIGITAL
December 28, 2018

A new bomb threatens to shake the US Church four days after the bishops lock themselves in a retreat, ostensibly to reconsider their response to institutionalized pedophilia.

The president of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors and also archbishop of Boston, Seán O'Malley, has denounced his counterpart in New York , Cardinal Timothy Dolan, before the nuncio in Washington for the cover-up of the crimes of a pederast priest

In a letter dated Dec. 21, Cardinal O'Malley elevated the case of Fr Donald Tiomne to the representative of the Pope in the US, Christophe Pierre, expressing his concern about the "seriousness of the accusations" against Timone, detailed in an article in the New York Times of December 20 (which claimed that Cardinal Dolan compensated two victims of Timone in 2017 and, later, he allowed the abuser to continue in active ministry even to this day).

Another abuse victim with which we have spoken, who prefers to remain anonymous, had informed O'Malley of Timone's aggressions and also the obstructionism he claims he suffered at the hands of Dolan and other Church authorities at the time of denounce the crimes of the pedophile priest.

The survivor revealed to us in great detail how Dolan has allowed Timone to continue holding public masses, teach at universities and continue at the head of the local branch of the Courage anti-homosexual apostolate, even after Dolan established that the Program Independent for Reconciliation and Compensation would financially recompense two victims of Timone last year.

Folan's support for Timone was reportedly such that in 2013, after receiving accusations against the pederast priest, the cardinal went on to praise him as a man "remarkably tender and holy" .

After having argued at first, after the publication of the New York Times report, that Timone would continue in active ministry -because it was the independent compensation program and not the archdiocese itself that had corroborated the abuses of the priest - the ARchdiocese rectified itself and announced that Timone had been suspended.

A correction that has not at all satisfied the victims of abuses and their defenders, such as Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the accountability website bishopaccountability.org, who called "reprehensible" the fact that Dolan allowed for years that Timone will work as a priest with children.

"The cardinal put other children at risk," denounced Barrett Doyle. "What the question raises: how many other accused priests are you covering?"

A CNA story reports another aspect of the Timone story that makes it look worse for the Archdiocese of New York. One expects Cardinal Dolan to come out right away to answer O'Malley's representations to the Nuncio and all the questionable disclosures about Timone and his apparently speial treatment by the Archdiocese. This has to be one of the most embarrassing cases of episcopal cover-up for a sex-offeding priest. :


NY archdiocese issued suitability letter
for priest under abuse investigation
by Ed Condon

December 29, 2018

The Archdiocese of New York told a California college this month that a local priest had never been accused of sexual abuse, even while the priest was being investigated by the archdiocese for several abuse charges. An administrator at the college called the letter “a lie,” and said she can no longer trust assurances from the archdiocese.

On December 4, the New York archdiocese issued a letter stating “without qualification” that Fr Donald Timone had “never been accused of any act of sexual abuse or misconduct involving a minor.”

In fact the archdiocese first received in 2003 an allegation that the priest had sexually abused minors, and it reached settlements with alleged victims in 2017.

The archdiocesan letter was received on December 13 by John Paul the Great University in Escondido, California, where Timone served. According to the university, the letter was not rescinded until after university officials contacted the Archdiocese of New York, following a December 20 New York Times report on the history of allegations against Timone.

Allegations were first made against Timone in 2003 but they were dismissed as “unsubstantiated” by the archdiocese following an investigation by the archdiocesan review board. New allegations were made against the priest during a 2017 investigation by the Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program of the Archdiocese of New York.

Last week, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York told CNA that the archdiocesan review board had reopened its formal investigation into Timone in early autumn 2018.

The officially retired priest, still active at the university and in other contexts, was removed from ministry on December 21, according to the New York Times [i.e., the day after the Times came out with its first story].

Timone has served for the last decade as a visiting priest at the university during the winter and summer terms. His duties included saying Mass and hearing confessions. He taught a class during the summer term of 2018 and was scheduled to lead a seminar in the coming term.

University Vice President for Administration Lidy Connolly told CNA that she was “thrown for a loop” when she heard about the allegations against Timone.

“Fr. Timone has been coming here for more than a decade and New York never told us anything about [the allegations] against him,” Connolly said.

Letters of suitability are issued by dioceses around the world for priests traveling outside of their home dioceses. They have assumed a far greater importance in recent decades, especially in the United States, following the sexual abuse scandals of the last twenty years.

“What do these letters of suitability and good standing mean if they say there’s never been an allegation and there clearly have been?” Connolly asked. “Does this mean we can no longer have priests come visit from New York? At the moment the archdiocese’s word means nothing.”

The December 4 letter was signed by New York’s archdiocesan director of priest personnel, Msgr. Edward Weber.

“I have carefully reviewed our personnel and other records which we maintain,” Weber wrote. “I assure you that Reverend Donald Timone [is] a person of good moral character and reputation and is qualified to serve in an effective and suitable manner as a priest. I have no reason to suspect that the above-mentioned priest is unfit for service as a priest.”

Weber wrote that he could “certify and affirmatively represent without qualification” Timone had “never been accused of any act of sexual abuse or sexual misconduct involving a minor,” and “manifested no behavioral problems in the past that would indicate he might deal with people, including minors, in an inappropriate manner.”

The letter also attests that Timone has “never been involved in an incident which called into question his fitness or suitability.”

In 2017, the Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program paid settlements in response to substantiated allegations that Timone had sexually abused two teenage boys, one of whom eventually committed suicide.

A spokesman for the archdiocese told CNA that, after the December 4 letter was issued, archdiocesan officials conducted an internal discussion about Timone’s status in active ministry.

“The question of Father Timone remaining active in ministry did arise when a letter of suitability was requested for his trip to California,” archdiocesan spokesman Joseph Zwilling told CNA.

“He was initially instructed not to publicly exercise his ministry or present himself as a priest while there; it was followed a few days later with a further restriction of ministry for whenever he returns to New York, while the matter is under review by our review board.”

Connolly told CNA that John Paul the Great University had received letters attesting to Timone’s suitability for more than a decade. She expressed shock and outrage on behalf of the university.

“I’d defend the Church come hell or high water,” Connolly told CNA, “but there is no defending this – the [December 4] letter is a lie.”

Connolly said she contacted the Archdiocese of New York after reading media reports about Timone, to ask why he had been given a clean bill of health. “They totally evaded my questions,” Connolly told CNA.

The Archdiocese of New York declined to comment on why it issued letters for years indicating that no allegations had been made against Timone, even after settlements were paid by the IRCP and Timone became the subject of a renewed investigation by the archdiocesan review board.

The December 4 letter explicitly states that all the relevant archdiocesan files had been checked before it was issued. The Archdiocese of New York declined to comment on whether this had happened in Timone’s case and, if not, whether similar letters had been issued for other priests accused of abuse or misconduct.

Zwilling told CNA that “lessons were being learned” and that a new process had been instituted in the light of the case.

“As a result of our experience with Fr. Timone’s case, in the future, before any letters of suitability will be issued by the archdiocese the request will be passed through the offices of the archdiocesan civil attorney and the Safe Environment Officer,” Zwilling said.

Meanwhile, it turns out the Vatican has been investigating the McCarrick case in its own way, perhaps even with a view to instituting his canonical trial for some specific sex abuses that can be substantiated. Thank God if this is true. Even if it still evades Vigano's question of, in classic Watergate fashion, what Bergoglio knew and when he knew it.

McCarrick abused youth even
during confession, lawyer charges


New York City, Dec 28, 2018 (CNA).- A man who says he was serially sexually abused by Archbishop Theodore McCarrick testified Thursday as part of a Vatican investigation regarding the archbishop’s history of sexual abuse and misconduct.

James Grein testified Dec. 27 in a canonical deposition conducted by officials of the Archdiocese of New York, the Washington Post has reported.

Grein’s attorney, Patrick Noaker, told CNA that the New York officials were acting as “auditors,” or delegates of the Holy See, adding that Grein was told that his testimony was part of an administrative process at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office charged with investigating and adjudicating charges of clerical sexual abuse.

Grein claims that McCarrick, who was a family friend, began abusing him in the late 1970s, when he was 11 years old and McCarrick was in his late 30s and a priest of the Archdiocese of New York.

In July, Grein told the New York Times that the abuse continued for the next 18 years, he said, during which time McCarrick was consecrated a bishop and served as auxiliary bishop of New York, and diocesan bishop of Metuchen and then Newark.

Grein’s testimony this week alleged that McCarrick repeatedly groped and assualted him during confession, his lawyer said. Grein also testified that McCarrick sexually assualted him in a car, later telling the boy’s mother that Grein had spilled a soda, in order to explain a mess in the car.

In November 2000, McCarrick was appointed Archbishop of Washington, where he served until his 2006 retirement. In 2001, he was elevated to the College of Cardinals. About a week after Grein’s allegation was published in the New York Times, McCarrick resigned from the College of Cardinals.

Noaker told CNA that the Archdiocese of New York invited Grein to make a statement for the Vatican about one month ago. The lawyer said he got a call last week asking that Grein testify as soon possible.

The lawyer said that he was told the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is considering trying McCarrick for three canonical crimes the archbishop could have committed while abusing Grein:
- the broad prohibition in canon 1395 §1 prohibiting “persisting with scandal in..[an] external sin against the sixth commandment;” - the specific prohibition in canon 1395 §2 prohibiting sexual abuse against a minor; and
- the crime of solicitation of a penitent in the confessional, established in canon 1387.

A trial or administrative penal process pertaining to those crimes could lead to McCarrick’s laicization. Noaker said he was told that that the “Vatican wants this finalized by the second week of February - the entire case” against McCarrick.

In June, it was announced that a New York review board had found charges that McCarrick had abused another youth to be “credible and substantiated.” While additional allegations of coercive and abusive sexual behavior were subsequently made against the archbishop, he was until now expected to face canonical charges only in the initial case of abuse.

Grein’s testimony suggests that the archbishop could now be canonically tried for abusing multiple victims.

A spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York told CNA that he was unable to provide details on how Grein’s testimony might fit into Vatican procedures against McCarrick. This was “not an archdiocese of New York process,” Joe Zwilling told CNA. “This is a Vatican process.”

Noaker told CNA the abuse McCarrick is alleged to have committed during the sacrament of confession has had profound effect on Grein.

“McCarrick integrated the abuse into the sacrament,” Noaker said, alleging that McCarrick would molest Grein’s genitals while discussing the virtue of chastity. “That really hurt James.”

“This case illuminated for me how damaging it is for someone to be as vulnerable as they are when they come into confession and then to be sexually manipulated during that sacrament.”

The lawyer said that testifying against McCarrick has been difficult for Grein. When Grein recounted a particularly troubling incident, Noaker said, “he closed his eyes, and you could see him going back to that moment, and it was especially gruesome sexual assault, and it was upsetting just to be there. He came out pretty worn out. “He has been so courageous, to go back to these moments,” Noaker said.

While many victims take pains to avoid addressing their sexual abuse, he said, Grein has approached the matter head on.

“Turning around and running at it is not without its pains.” Noaker added. “He did it knowingly and willingly, but not happily.”

Grein has filed a claim in a victims’ assistance program, the Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program of the Archdiocese of New York, Noaker said, but has not yet received indication of whether he will be offered a financial settlement. Noaker said he expects notification to be forthcoming.

The lawyer said that Grein is most interested in healing from his abuse.

“He really wants his Church back. He just wants to be able to go to Church again, and find peace again, and, you know sure, I’m not sure we’re going to get that for him,” Noaker said.

“He said probably ten times yesterday, ‘I just want my Church back. I would like to have Jesus in my life again.’” [Hard to believe that in al this time, and after the public disclosures made, not one priest has attempted to reach Grein and reconcile him to the Church, which is always there fore Grein and others like him, but they have to really want to come back to the Church. Nothing stops them from doing this any time, on their own, or if they can, with the assistance of an appropriate spiritual counselor.]

THE NATIVITY, Drawing by Bartolome Esteban Murillo, c 1665, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Thanks to Fr Z for sharing this beautiful drawing with all of us. To aficionados, Murillo (1617-1682) is the artist of many beautiful depictions of Our Lady (his 'Immaculate
Conception' should particularly be familiar) and many other religius paintings. It is said that in the 17th and 18th centuries, he was the most popular Spanish artist in the
world, whose Baroque mastry was widely imitated.

As the Christmas Octave continues…

December 29, 2018

The Christmas Octave is underway. It is still Christmas! We should revel in the happy feast and celebrate the mystery of the Word’s incarnation and coming into our midst. Happily, the Church halts her liturgical clock for this Octave so that we can view the mystery from various angles and absorb what we can for another year.

In the spirit of the Octave, here is a piece I wrote for the Christmas issue (21 Dec) of the UK’s best (and now US) Catholic weekly, the Catholic Herald, along with the image that accompanied it.

---

The image’s deceptive simplicity is of an order accomplished only by a master. Brown ink pen strokes. Brown wash. Traces of black lead. The economy is illusory, the effect alluring.

Just so is Bartolomé Estebán Murillo's drawing of the Nativity (c 1665) which I spotted in an otherwise disappointing corridor of frequently changed exhibits at New York’s Metropolitan Museum.

The composition isn’t groundbreaking. Baby Jesus lies in a small manger. On the right, at His head, Joseph kneels, leaning on a staff, bent to look into the Child’s face. He exudes protection. At Jesus’s little feet kneels Mary. Prayerful hands thrust forward, she leans in. She is the epitome of longing.

Overhead, chubby putti unfurl a ribbon banner. Were it adorned, we would read, “Glory to God in the highest.” The Child lies back comfortably, rather in the manner of one who has just enjoyed a good meal, near left arm languid, head pillow-propped. You can just see the fingers of His far left hand resting by His belly-button. He gazes straight at His mother.

The image, so simple, so delicate, shouts, “I’m here at last. Love me!”

Love is here incarnate. Love is helpless. Love is wholly lovable.

As I looked at this drawing, I sensed a representation of a personal challenge. Perhaps I read it in that moment through the lens of a recent accident I had, the injuries I sustained which force me daily to rely on the kindness of others. In my independence, the self-sufficiency of routine, I don’t easily ask for help when it comes to personal needs, even when ailing. But now, I am constrained to be helpable. I must let people be good to me. In doing so, I am an opportunity for them to be good to someone.

The Incarnate Word, as we read in Gaudium et spes 22, took up our humanity to reveal us more fully to ourselves. In being so lovable, Jesus reveals that each of us are lovable. He asks us to allow ourselves to be lovable and freely to accept His love. As St Elizabeth of the Trinity wrote, “Let yourself be loved.”

Christmas presents us with the God who emptied Himself of glory and became lovableness incarnate. Allow God to love you. Adore and glorify Him in your ways. Love others in words and deeds, especially the love starved. Allow others to love you.

---

Vatican spokesman and deputy
resign over strategy differences
by Philip Pullella


VATICAN CITY, December 30, 2018 Reuters) - The Vatican spokesman and his deputy resigned on Monday over disagreements on strategy, ending a year of upheaval in the Holy See’s communications structure. [Pulella omits to say that the resignations were immediately accepted without the usual formulas of 'thanks for their good service', etc. One would almot think the resignations were urged on them.]

A brief Vatican statement gave no reason for the resignations.

Spokesman Greg Burke, an American, tweeted that he and his Spanish deputy, Paloma Garcia Ovejero, had quit to let Pope Francis appoint a new team in what was a “time of transition”.

A Vatican source said both Burke and Ovejero had wanted more autonomy from the Vatican department that oversees all communications, known as the Dicastery for Communications.

They quit two weeks after Pope Francis appointed a personal friend, Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli, to become editorial director of all Vatican communications.

The source said it was believed to be the first time both posts (spokesman and deputy) had changed hands simultaneously, underscoring the differences of opinion.

“Paloma and I have resigned, effective Jan. 1. At this time of transition in Vatican communications, we think it’s best the Holy Father is completely free to assemble a new team,” Burke tweeted.

The 59-year-old former Rome-based reporter for Fox News joined the Vatican in 2012 as an advisor in its Secretariat of State and become spokesman in 2016. He is a member of the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei.

Ovejero, 43, a former reporter for the Spanish radio network COPE, was one of the few high-ranking women in the Vatican.

During Burke and Ovejero’s tenure, the top two jobs in the Vatican press room were, unusually, held by non-Italians.

Tornielli is now the third-ranking person in the communications department but his closeness to the pope, whom he has known since before the pontiff’s election in 2013, will likely make him particularly influential.

Monday’s resignations capped a year of tensions in Vatican communications.

Monsignor Dario Vigano resigned as overall head in March after a scandal over a doctored letter, a public relations fiasco two months after the pope warned of the dangers of fake news.

Vigano released part of a letter by former Pope Benedict that was to have remained private, using it to promote a book on the theology of Pope Francis.

A promotional photo for the book released by Vigano blurred a part of the letter in which Benedict declined to write an introduction, saying he was unhappy with one of its contributors.

Vigano was replaced in July by Paolo Ruffini, ex-head of a Catholic television station.

The Vatican said Alessandro Gisotti, an Italian journalist who has handled the Vatican’s social media, would be interim spokesman.

Edward Pentin's account:

Holy See Press Office director
Greg Burke resigns

December 31, 2018

Pope Francis today accepted the resignations of Greg Burke and Paloma García Ovejero after almost two and a half years’ service as respective director and vice director of the Holy See Press Office.

The Vatican announced the news in a brief statement, adding that Alessandro Gisotti, currently coordinator of social media for the Vatican Dicastery for Social Communication, would temporarily take over the running of the office until a new structure is put in place.

In comments on Twitter, Burke, an Opus Dei numerary and native of St. Louis, said “at this time of transition in Vatican communications, we think it’s best the Holy Father is completely free to assemble a new team.”

He added in another tweet: “I joined the Vatican in 2012. The experience has been fascinating, to say the least. Thank you, Pope Francis. Un abrazo muy fuerte [a very big hug].”

Burke, a former Rome correspondent for Fox News, Time Magazine and the Register, was hired as the Vatican’s strategic communications adviser in 2012, before being appointed deputy director of the Holy See Press Office in 2015, and then director in 2016.

Garcia, a former radio host and Rome and Vatican correspondent for various television and news services, tweeted: “Thank you, Holy Father, for these two and a half years! Thank you, Greg, for your trust, your patience and your example.”

Their resignations came as a surprise to many in the Vatican press corps, but follow two significant recent appointments in Vatican communications.

On Dec. 18, Pope Francis chose Italian Vaticanist Andrea Tornielli to be editorial director of the Dicastery for Communication. He also appointed author and journalist Andrea Monda as editor-in-chief of L'Osservatore Romano, replacing Giovanni Maria Vian. Both are likely to take Vatican communications in a different direction.

The departures of Burke and Garcia follow an extensive overhaul of Vatican communications, including a major five-year structural reform program and the appointment earlier this year of a lay prefect of the dicastery, Paolo Ruffini.

In a statement, Ruffini expressed some surprise at the news, saying he had learned of Burke’s and Garcia’s decision, that it was an “autonomous and free choice,” but one he respected.

He praised their professionalism and said he had full confidence in Gisotti, who has also served as deputy chief editor of Vatican Radio.

“The year ahead is full of important appointments that will require maximum communications efforts,” Ruffini said.

Gisotti thanked the Pope for “the trust he has placed in me at such a delicate time for the communication of the Holy See” and thanked Burke and Garcia for their service.

“I know that my job, even if temporary, is particularly demanding but I am comforted by the great merits of my colleagues in the Press Office, whose professionalism and dedication I have been able to appreciate on many occasions,” Gisotti said.

The Italian journalist is the author of “God and Obama: Faith and Politics in the White House,” a 2010 book that examined the faith of the former U.S. President. [Well, what a qualification! Gisotti is clearly a Bergoglio-UN globalist.]

The appointments come after a difficult year in Vatican communications with the sudden departure of Ruffini's predecessor, Msgr. Dario Viganò, in March. Msgr. Viganò resigned after the 'Lettergate' affair, in which he misrepresented a letter written by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and concealed a photograph of it.

Burke appears to be happy with his decision to step down. In follow-up comments on Twitter today, he said simply: “New Year, New Adventures.”

I hope Greg Burke, famously an Opus DEi supernumerary as was the late Joaquin Navarro-Valls, finds time now to examine himself seriously as to whether his work for Bergoglio was within what Opus Dei founder St. Josemaria Escriva Balaguer considered the 'work of God' to which the society's members ought to devote themselves. Or has he gone the way of the present Opus Dei leadership?

I suppose this ends the 2018 'news year' for the Bergoglio Vatican - it was most definitely an annus horribilis for the pope and his followers.

It really does not matter who is the Vatican press spokesman in name - because no one speaks for the Vatican and himself more often and more directly than the reigning pope himself. Often with disastrous consequences, of course. Which he seems to blithely ignore. And so the so-called spokesmen are usually left with nothing to do but try to un-spill the milk and/or pick up the broken pieces, in other words - no matter how zealous and skilled the PR meister is, damage control is impossible with the kind of damage that Bergoglio habitually wreaks. Yet by all accounts, he thinks of himself as a Great Communicator. Fr. Brian Harrison has an appropriate commentary:


Francis undermines the credibility of the Papacy
by Father Brian Harrison

December 31, 2018

Pope Francis’s own never-ending barrage of jabs and swipes against settled Catholic doctrine troubles Catholics.

Just a week ago, in his Christmas address to Vatican officials, the Pope nonchalantly tossed off a denial of Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception by remarking that nobody – not even Joseph or Mary – “is born as a saint”.

Most notably this year, Francis has rewritten our official Catechism so as to condemn capital punishment with a severity that arguably contradicts the Bible-based teaching of all his predecessors.

This kind of thing – and many other examples could be adduced – undermines the papacy’s credibility, which depends on the consistency of its formal teaching down through the centuries.

The newest, and perhaps the best, of various recent books criticizing the present pope’s left-liberal orientation is by Chilean scholar José Antonio Ureta: Pope Francis’s “Paradigm Shift”: Continuity or Rupture in the Mission of the Church? (Spring Grove, PA, 2018: TFP).

A paradigm shift is a profoundly different change in overall direction. Traditional anti-Catholic dissenters like Pelagius, Arius, Luther and Calvin fiercely opposed the Church’s doctrine; but at least they shared her basic assumption that correct doctrine is something supremely important.

But now – alas! – we have a Pope who appears to have shelved that assumption in favor of what might be called a meta-heresy: his general [neomarxist] philosophical view that ‘life’ and action (praxis) take precedence over doctrine. As Francis likes to put it, “reality is greater than ideas”.

But since “reality” constantly changes, this approach gives metaphysical precedence to becoming over being, so that Catholic truth itself gets relativized by political correctness.

Whatever our post-Christian cultural, political and media elites declare to be ‘progress’ for humanity becomes a new and overriding ‘reality’ to which the Church’s hitherto ‘static’ and ‘inward-looking’ doctrine must somehow adapt itself.

We thus find ourselves with a Pope who is neglecting St. Paul’s warning: “Can Christ agree with Belial? Can there be a compact between the temple of God and the idols of the heathen?” (2 Cor. 6: 15).

Fr. H has a terse prognostication for 2019, but I thought the comments on his combox are worth sharing:

Prognostications for 2019

December 31, 2018

I am sure that my admirable friend and brother priest Fr Zed will have some intelligent forecasts to make. I offer only the following humble and baseless guess:
That the abuse crisis will move even closer to PF himself.

---

Paul Hellyer:
I think the abuse crisis is only the tip of the iceberg. The Church is under diabolical attack. It is being slowly destroyed by evil clergy who ignore the teachings of Christ and His Church. The Novus Ordo was the Trojan horse. Homo-protestantisation is the doctrine.
Cease these intellectual games while Rome burns. God bless you all for 2019.

GOR:
My prediction would be that the abuse and cover-up issues will not ‘go away’ as many in the hierarchy, apparently, would like to happen.

Currently, in the US – and probably in many other countries – the bishops have little if any credibility left. That extends also to the Vatican and Pope Francis. I see little hope that things may change any time soon and in all likelihood things will get worse.

The stonewalling by the Pope and his heavy-handed intervention in the USCCB’s annual meeting are telling. Appointing Cdl. Cupich to the organizing committee for the February confab is a further indication. It would be like appointing Judas to audit the charitable receipts. There is a need for a thorough housecleaning – starting at the top.

James:
Pope FRANCIS is a big ZERO.

Prayerful:
Pope Francis as Archbishop Bergoglio and President of the Argentine Episcopal Conference oversaw the publication of two volumes which aggressively questioned the testimony of the orphan victims of Fr Grassi and his fake charity. This was at the time the jury was considering its verdict, and the lawyer for the victims considered it gross interference in a trial.

Someone even put that question to Francis personally (as with the Barros case Latin Americans might be more inclined to do something outside the blogosphere) and he denied that.

There are quite few cases where the role played by Francis passed from the usual malign advocacy for the accused priest (Cardinal Cocopalmiero is claimed to intercede often for Fr Inzoli and other convicted abuser priests) to a form of meddling in the case, which in many places is a crime.

Francis mocks his us when he calls his critics clerical, when there is no one more clerical. My point is that there is already so much available showing his poor attitude to sexual wrongdoing by priests, and nothing has happened except online expressions of annoyance.

---

Because 1P5 involves itself in reporting and commenting on the life of the Church, editor Steve Skojec's roundup of the top ten posts on the site in 2018 are a good indication
of what most concerned au courant Catholics during the year now ending.

December 29, 2018

Well, it’s been another crazy year, and as we get ready to flip our calendars to 2019, we thought it would be informative to look back at the top 10 most read posts of 2018 to see the stories that had the greatest impact this year.

Here they are, in reverse order:

10: Why You Should Pray the Rosary Daily:
15 Reasons Straight From Our Lady

This piece, a collaborative effort of 1P5 and Jeff Stempel of the blog Traditional Roman Catholic Thoughts, which originally appeared at 1P5 the day after we launched in August of 2014, makes a strong showing in the rankings every year. It’s a 101 approach to the history of the rosary, the promises associated with it, and how to pray it. With over 25,000 page views in 2018 alone, this is a perennial favorite that brings people back to the site year after year.

9: Chicago Priest Who Burned Gay Flag Flees
after Archdiocese Threatened him with Forcible Removal

The story of Fr. Paul Kalchik was big news back in September. The situation involved a Chicago-area priest who had been sexually abused by two men – one of them a Catholic priest – as a child and as a young man. When Fr. Kalchik, pastor of Resurrection Parish on Chicago’s Northwest Side, discovered a rainbow flag in his parish with a sordid past, the parish burned the flag as Father performed prayers of exorcism.

The Chicago Archdiocese strongly opposed the decision to burn the flag and attempted to stop it from happening. When Fr. Kalchik went ahead, new Chicago auxiliary bishop Mark Bartosic arrived unannounced at the parish just before a wedding was to begin and told him that he had just minutes to get his belongings together and vacate the premises, or the police would be called to arrest him for trespassing. Fr. Kalchik left for an undisclosed location, fearing, in part, that he would be subjected to involuntary psychiatric evaluation.

This guest post was written by Chicago-area Catholic blogger Oakes Spalding, who filled out details that would have been impossible to obtain without being on the scene.

8: Former Papal Nuncio: Pope Francis Knew about McCarrick,
Covered for Him “to the Bitter End”

Though it comes in at only number 8 on the list, it is arguably the story of the year. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former papal nuncio to the United States, came forward with explosive testimony claiming, among other things, that he personally informed Pope Francis about sanctions imposed on former cardinal McCarrick by Pope Benedict XVI for abusive behavior in 2013. Viganò also called for the resignation of the pope, along with all those “who, by their silence, covered up McCarrick’s criminal behavior, or who used him to advance their career or promote their intentions, ambitions, and power in the Church.”

Subsequent testimonies from Viganò came out in the following months as he went into hiding for fear of his life. But the die was cast by his first brave stand, citing his need “to discharge my conscience before God of my responsibilities as bishop of the universal Church. I am an old man and I want to present myself to God with clean conscience.” The pall of Viganò’s accusations has hung over Francis and the international body of bishops and cardinals ever since, as they struggle to grapple with a new wave of clerical sex abuse accusations and investigations.

7: Shock: Pope to Celebrate New Rite of Mass
at Closing of Youth Synod

It began with good intentions but turned out to be one of the most controversial posts ever published at 1P5. In a rhetorical sleight of hand, the anonymous author of the Whispers of Restoration blog presented the shocking story of the pope offering a new rite of Mass at the closing of the Youth Synod in Rome, complete with quotes from high-ranking Church officials and experts pertaining to the controversy of introducing such a rite.

The catch, revealed near the end of the piece, was that the article was actually describing the creation of the Novus Ordo Missae, and while the quotes were real, they were issued half a century ago. The pope was, indeed, offering a controversial and problematic new rite of Mass at the close of the synod, but it was the very same one that had been imposed on Catholics around the world since 1969.

Though some readers loved the piece, many, who were on edge after having been warned for years about the possibility of a new, ecumenical adaptation of the Novus Ordo, were upset at the bait and switch technique – originally intended to help people who didn’t live through the changes to have some firsthand sensation of what it must have been like.

In a subsequent apology to disgruntled readers, I offered my regrets for failing to properly anticipate audience reaction and for doing anything to damage trust, promising that we would never again take such an approach to any of our articles.

6: RIP, Vatican II Catholicism (1962-2018)

'In this piece, longtime 1P5 contributor Dr. Peter Kwasniewski argues that the Francis pontificate had “brought to a clarity past any reasonable (or unreasonable) doubt, one might even say has amplified to fever pitch, the utter bankruptcy of ‘Vatican II Catholicism,’ with its lightweight liturgy; its unserious opposition to the world, the flesh, and the devil; and its continual compromise with the reigning forces of liberalism.”

It’s a full-throated critique of everything post-conciliar Catholicism has inflicted upon the Catholic faithful, from a diminished liturgy to stripped down sacramental forms to the Church’s approach to the world and morality. Kwasniewski touches the third rail of post-conciliar polemics, saying all the post-conciliar popes – not just the ones we don’t like – played a role in bringing us to the present moment of crisis by being liberals in “slow motion.” “Bergoglio,” writes Kwasniewski, “is the distillation of all the worst tendencies in Roncalli, Montini, Wojtyła, and Ratzinger, without any of their redeeming qualities. Francis’s predecessors were conflicted and inconsistent progressives; he is a convicted modernist.”

5: Why We Need Not (and Should Not) Call Paul VI ‘Saint’
In another piece from Dr. Kwasniewski, the thorny issue of the canonization of Pope Paul VI is tackled, most notably its central question: can we trust modern canonizations when so much has been done to neuter their due diligence in determining the sanctity of the canonized?

In his opening salvo, Kwasniewski lays out his incredibly provocative claim: “Many who have studied the life and pontificate of Pope Paul VI are convinced that he was far from exemplary in his conduct as pastor; that he not only did not possess heroic virtue, but lacked certain key virtues; that his promulgation of a titanic liturgical reform was incompatible with his papal office of handing on that which he had received; that he offers us a portrait of failed governance and tradition betrayed. In short, for us, it is impossible to accept that a pope such as this could ever be canonized. Not surprisingly, then, we are vexed about Pope Francis’s ‘canonization’ of Giovanni Battista Montini on Sunday, October 14, 2018 and have grave doubts in conscience about its legitimacy or credibility.”

4: Sequestered Viganò Speaks:
‘I Am Not the Crow. I Want Only the Truth.’
Archbishop Viganò makes his second appearance on this round-up with this interview with his friend, the Italian journalist Aldo Maria Valli, translated into English first by 1P5’s Giuseppe Pellegrino. Valli was a critical sounding board for Viganò as he plotted out his decision to issue testimony, and Valli asks the kind of follow-up question to the release of that testimony that Catholics around the world wanted to hear.

In the interview, he talks about his status, his motives, his critics, and what he wanted to accomplish with his testimony.

3: Video From Alder Hey Hospital:
“They’re Covering Something Up Big”

So much has transpired in the past 12 months that it seems almost like years ago, but it was in April of 2018 that the story of little Alfie Evans was reaching its denouement. Alfie was a 23-month-old boy in the U.K. who had an undiagnosed degenerative neurological condition that led to him being in a vegetative state, putting his parents in the position of fighting for his life against Alder Hey hospital, where doctors wanted to remove the boy from mechanical life support and allow him to die. Doctors insisted that most of Alfie’s brain had been destroyed by his condition and argued that he could not breathe on his own. Alfie’s parents wanted to remove him from the hospital to seek second opinions and alternative treatment but were legally stopped from doing so by a British court that seemed heavily biased in favor of euthanizing the boy.

In the midst of the highest point of the drama, just days before Alfie’s tragic and suspicious death, Italian Catholic website La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana (LNBQ) published a cell phone video the publication claims captured a conversation between “at least 3-4 unidentified members of the Alder Hey Hospital staff” apparently discussing Alfie’s situation and questioning the hospital’s decision-making in conspiratorial tones.

At one point, a man says, “I’m not supposed to be talking about it, ladies. I’ll get myself into trouble. Or…’cause…I am who I am. Basically. I personally think that this hospital is covering something up big.”

2: The Chalking of the Doors:
An Epiphany Tradition Explained

Proving once again that positive stories about Catholic culture, devotions, and tradition have perennial appeal, this simple explanation of the annual tradition of chalking the doors for Epiphany, co-written by my wife Jamie and myself, has landed near the top of the charts since it first appeared in 2016. With over 55,000 page views in 2018 alone and nearly 50,000 Facebook shares, it is one of the all-time most popular posts ever published at 1P5.

Sometimes, it’s the little things that resonate most.

1: The Amazing Story of How Archbishop Viganò’s Report Came to Be

Proving once and for all that the Viganò story was the story of the year, the number-one post for all of 2018, with over 66,000 views, is this story from Aldo Maria Valli on how the Viganò testimony came to be.

Once again provided through the excellent translation work of Giuseppe Pellegrino, this look at the months leading up to the publication of the Viganò testimony by his acquaintance-turned-friend is both warm and humanizing, but it carries with it an edge of danger, as it noted that Viganò felt the need to go into hiding to avoid real danger to his life and person.

At one point, Valli shines a light on just how widespread Viganò claims the corruption really is:n

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He speaks of the McCarrick case, the ex-cardinal known to be guilty of the most serious abuses, and he makes it clear that everybody knew, in the USA and in the Vatican, for a long time, for years. But they covered it up.

I ask, ‘Truly everybody?’

With a nod of the head the archbishop responds yes: truly everybody.

Asked why they would do this, Viganò responds with an answer that Valli says “freezes my blood”: "Because the cracks of which Paul VI spoke, from which he said the smoke of Satan would infiltrate the house of God, have become chasms. The devil is working overtime. And to not admit that, or to turn our face away from it, would be our greatest sin."

Here, again, the integrity of a man who has recognized the spiritual battle taking place, a man facing the imminent judgment of God, is on display, casting his resolve in eschatological terms: “I am 78 years old, and I am at the end of my life. The judgment of men does not interest me. The one judgment that counts is that of the good God. He will ask me what I have done for the Church of Christ, and I want to be able to respond to him that I defended her and served her even to the end.”

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It’s a stunning piece about a stunning story, and it absolutely deserves to be our number-one post of 2018.

And here's a fitting corollary to tbe above, this time, looking to a worst-case scenario of what 2019 may have in store....[/IMG]

Will 2019 unfold like a bad apocalyptic novel?
No one in 1986 would have thought that things
now taken for granted in the Western world
would ever come to pass - but they have
by John Zmirak

December 31, 2018

I’d like share with you a key analytical tool. It’s akin to the Gini Coefficient, which measures economic inequality across countries. But I call my discovery the GANI Coefficient. It comes from the acronym: “Gunshow Apocalyptic Novel Insanity.”

Now, try to remember how you saw the world in 1996. What you expected from the future. Who in that year imagined any of the following realities in place by 2018?
• That European governments would inundate their people with millions of Muslim men of military age. And pretend that they were “refugees.”
• Those same governments would imprison citizens for complaining about it, dubbing their speech “extremist.”
• The European Court of Human Rights would deem criticism of Muhammad illegal. Even when it is truthful.
• The courts would impose same-sex marriage on 50 states. Those states would punish Christians who refused to acknowledge and take part in such weddings.
• The sad stories of a tiny number of mentally troubled people would lead the media, the medical profession, and governments to declare biological sex a meaningless fiction.
• Those who refused to go along with the idea of sex as a social construct would themselves be designated as mentally ill. They suffer from “transphobia.”
• The Democratic Party as a whole would embrace open borders. And condemn any who resisted as the moral equivalent of Nazis.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Who could have foreseen all of the above? Just one group of people. The authors of self-published apocalyptic novels sold exclusively at gunshows. Hence the Gunshow Apocalyptic Novel Insanity co-efficient. It tells us how much more unthinkably worse things could get, and how quickly.

First, one must look at the rate of cultural change going on around us. Then apply the GANI coefficient. It “predicts” the monstrous, dystopian forms that ominous current events will take. That is, the worst shape imaginable, a shape which only someone typing single-spaced in a double-wide trailer whose windows were covered in “Come and Take It” bumper stickers would have the dot-connecting vision to predict.

So that’s what I’m going to use to make my top three predictions for 2019.

Some Deranged Leftist Will Attack the President, and Be Stopped by the Secret Service. The Media Will Blame … Republicans.
Of course we hope and pray that people keep their heads. But two years of constant, drumbeat demonization of President Trump, his entire family, and everyone around him have had their effect.
- We’ve seen Trump supporters assaulted in public.
- TV and movie stars get away with expressing violent fantasies about the president.
- A Bernie Sanders supporter tried to massacre the entire House GOP leadership, and just barely fell short of succeeding.
-nMass media covered up his motive, which he shouted at the legislators as he attacked: “This is for healthcare!” So reported Senator Rand Paul, an eyewitness.

By styling itself as the “Resistance,” the hard left has painted its opponents as basically … Nazis, and Trump as a kind of Hitler. And what would an addled zealot do to the American Hitler if he got the chance? He’d make like Tom Cruise in the movie Valkyrie, and try to take him out.

If the assailant survives the attack, expect the headlines and chryons on CNN/MSNBC, etc., to unfold as follows.
• Lone assailant’s motives unclear, mental health history under investigation.
• Gunman a white male, baptized Christian, sources say. Attended Sunday school till age 10.
• White House shooter bought weapon used via lax state laws, spurring calls for gun safety legislation.
• Failed assassin’s anti-Trump ties exaggerated, media analysis shows.
• White House gun violence perpetrator’s selfie with Kathy Griffin discovered on Instagram. Republicans pounce.
• New Yorker essayist explains how madness in high office sparks cycle of insanity, violence. Only impeachment can bring us civil peace.
• Republicans try to politicize gun violence, but gain little traction.

Pope Francis Will Join Google, Facebook, the EU and China
in Literally Silencing His Critics.
Earlier this year, Church Militant reported:

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Vatican leaders are now calling for Catholics on the internet who do not meet their approval to be censored. The censorship would come in the denial of official certification from the Holy See. … Paragraph 146 of the final approved Synod document speaks to the need for creating “certification systems for Catholic websites, to counter the spread of fake news regarding the Church.”

Which news about the Church isn’t fake, for Francis? Church Militant journalists found that out for us. They took a snapshot of a list of approved Catholic media at the recent U.S. bishops meeting.v [I posted this entire Church Militant article at the time.]

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Care to explain this, Fr Rosica? And, no, we won’t let you get away with claiming it’s not news... The Father Rosica who drew up that list? He’s the same guy who published an article claiming that Pope Francis is uniquely infallible. That Francis, unlike previous popes, can override previous Church teaching and even the Bible.
As I wrote in the Rome-based magazine Inside the Vatican:

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European governments, which work with their local Catholic bishops to oppose populist parties, regularly censor and punish populist critics. One French court has sent politician Marion Le Pen for psychiatric tests because she shared news of ISIS atrocities.

What the pope apparently has in mind is the global censorship of Catholic sites that don’t back his policies. Google can just include them in the sites it routinely buries as “fake news” or “hate speech” with its left-leaning algorithm. But if European governments join in, it can go even further. Google and social media companies can effectively ban such sites. Only Catholic sites specifically authorized by his minions will be exempt. As only churches approved by his ally, the Communist government, escape demolition in China today.

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- Remember that Google willingly worked with the Chinese government to create a search engine that serves the Communist Party’s thought police.
- In the West, Google routinely buries stories that don’t fit its political slant. How long before stories about the Church get the same treatment?
- Facebook banned Franklin Graham last week. How long before Facebook lets the likes of Fr. Rosica decide which Catholic media venues are “fake”? So their stories just … disappear….

Conservatives, Gun Purchasers, and Vocal Christians Will See Their Credit Scores Lowered.
I know, it sounds crazy to suggest that we here in the West might be subject to something like the new, Orwellian Chinese system of “social scores.” That imposes direct economic costs on Chinese citizens whose politics or religion don’t toe the party line.

Except that it’s already kind of happening.
- The left has launched its trial ballons and so far they are floating. What else does it mean when GoFundMe can ban clients because it disapproves of their views? That happened to Catholics trying to help Fr. Paul Kalchik, whom Cardinal Blaise Cupich removed and tried to institutionalize for stripping a rainbow flag from the sanctuary of his parish. (Parishioners burned the flag on their own initiative.) Thankfully, a pro-religious crowd-sourcing site, FundingMorality.com, let Fr. Paul’s friends continue the fundraising.
- How long before governors like Cuomo and companies like Mastercard approach Experian and Equifax? Then explain to them that people with “hateful” views (on abortion, transgender surgery, fill in the blanks) are a poor credit risk?
- How about when sites like Patreon ban conservatives from fund-raising just because of their views? That happened to a list of prominent, intelligent conservative commentators, including Lauren Southern, Laura Loomer, and “Sargon of Akkad.”
- And when Mastercard and Visa refused to process payments made to ex-Communist, pro-Israel conservative David Horowitz? That was on the say-so of the viciously partisan Southern Poverty Law Center?
- Now New York State is trying to use its vast financial power to force credit card companies to report all their gun and ammunition sales to the State government. Mind you, these are legal products being bought legally from licensed, heavily regulated gun dealers. To purchasers who’ve passed all legal restrictions on their Second Amendment rights.
- How long before governors like Cuomo and companies like Mastercard approach Experian and Equifax? Then explain to them that people with “hateful” views (on abortion, transgender surgery, fill in the blanks) are a poor credit risk?

I’m guessing this happens by April 15. So you might want to make your major purchases before that.

Of course, the GANI coefficient is not infallible. Often, it turns out to have been too optimistic. Please keep that in mind and pray accordingly.

Thanks again to Scenron and his LA VIGNA DEL SIGNORE for the 2019 B16-banner... I also translate the New Year wishes he expressed on his Facebook page:

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Most fervent wishes of peace and everything good. They are wishes which Christian faith makes 'reliable', so to speak, by anchoring them in the event that we are celebrating these days: the Incarnation of the Word of God, born of the Virgin Mary. Indeed, with the grace of the Lord - and only with it - can we hope that the future will be better than the past.

It is not about trusting in a more favorable destiny, much less in the entangled workings of the markets and finance, but to try, each of one of us, to be a bit more good and more responsible so we may count on the benevolence of the Lord.

BUON ANNO to the Catholic Church - that she may always be one, holy and apostolic, in the world, but not of it,

BUON ANNO to Pope Francis - that you may realize a true renewal of the Church, without forgetting Tradition, and to continue to value the prayerful presence of Benedict XVI.

BUON ANNO to our readers and friends on Facebook and Twitter - that we may continue to keep alive the memory of our beloved Pope Benedict,

and BUON ANNO, BELOVED BENEDICT - united with you in prayer, and together with you, let us continue to pray that the Church truly moves forward.

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As a traditional Massgoer, and one raised in the Vetus Ordo, I have always thought of January 1, the octave day of Christmas, as the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus (done according to Jewish custom on the eighth day after his birth). But the Novus Ordo simply did away with that event by moving the Feast celebrating Mary as the Mother of God from October 11, where it was observed before (but not as an obligatory holiday) to January 1, where it is a holiday of obligation. I have absolutely no objection to this, except that I do not understand why the Circumcision as a feast appears to have been thereby eliminated. Even worse, since Paul VI, the Church celebrates the World Day of Peace as the secondary occasion to celebrate January 1 as a holiday...

So I did today what I ought to have done long before - looked up the history of this feast, as follows, from Wikipidia:

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The Second Vatican Council stated: "Clearly from earliest times the Blessed Virgin is honoured under the title of Mother of God" and at an early stage, the Church in Rome celebrated on January 1 a feast that it called the anniversary of the Mother of God.

When this was overshadowed by the feasts of the Annunciation and the Assumption, adopted from Constantinople at the start of the 7th century, January 1 began to be celebrated simply as the octave day of Christmas, the "eighth day", on which, according to Luke 2:21, the child was circumcised and given the name Jesus.


THE CIRCUMCISION, Tintoretto, ca. 1587, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

In the 13th or 14th century, January 1 began to be celebrated in Rome, as already in Spain and Gaul, as the feast of the Circumcision of the Lord and the Octave of the Nativity, while still oriented towards Mary and Christmas, with many prayers, antiphons and responsories glorifying the maternity of Mary. Pope John XXIII's 1960 rubrical and calendrical revision removed the mention of the circumcision of Jesus and called January 1 simply the Octave of the Nativity. [At Holy Innocents, the Mass Proper today, January 1, was entitled "The Octave Day of the Nativity: The Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord".]

The feast of the Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary was first granted, on the petition of King Joseph Manuel, to the dioceses of Portugal and to Brasil and Algeria, 22 January, 1751, together with the feast of the Purity of Mary, and was assigned to the first Sunday in May...[The feast was subsequently extended to some parts of Italy] but it was not included in the universal calendar of the church, although a number of diocesan calendars had adopted it. By 1914, the feast was established in Portugal for celebration on 11 October and was extended to the entire Catholic Church by Pope Pius XI in 1931.

The 1969 revision of the liturgical year and the calendar states: "January 1, the Octave Day of the Nativity of the Lord, is the Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God, and also the commemoration of the conferral of the Most Holy Name of Jesus." It removed the 11 October feast, even for Portugal, stating: "The Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary is celebrated on 1 January in the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God." (The October 11 feast is now observed only by some Traditionalist Catholic individuals and groups.)

In his Apostolic Letter, Marialis Cultus, Pope Paul VI explained: "This celebration, placed on January 1 ...is meant to commemorate the part played by Mary in this mystery of salvation. It is meant also to exalt the singular dignity which this mystery brings to the "holy Mother...through whom we were found worthy to receive the Author of life." It is likewise a fitting occasion for renewing adoration of the newborn Prince of Peace, for listening once more to the glad tidings of the angels (cf. Lk. 2:14), and for imploring from God, through the Queen of Peace, the supreme gift of peace."

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Anyway, here is an excellent commentary on the Solemnity that has superseded the Circumcision - very admirable, except that it makes no mention at all of the Circumcision. If you will allow me an ecclesiastically incorrect thought, I do not think Mary is too pleased that the Circumcision of Jesus - which was, by the way, the first shedding of his blood prefiguring his Crucifixion - has been cast aside so thoroughly. It is, of course, mentioned in the Gospel reading, even in the Novus Ordo, because it occupies a verse in Luke's Gospel.

Celebrate the real New Year
with Mary, Mother of God
by Joseph Pronechen
NATIONAL CATHOLIC REGISTER
December 31, 2018

January 1 is much more than just New Year’s Day. New Year's Day is the octave day of Christmas on which the Church universal celebrates the Solemnity of the Holy Mother of God. The celebration was added in 1969 during the liturgical calendar’s reform. [At which point, Pronechen ought to have mentioned that it replaced the celebration of the Feast of the Circumcision!]

“This date of January 1, which places the feast of Mary Mother of God in relation to the Christmas mystery is well-chosen and corresponds to the most ancient tradition,” notes Mariologist Father Manfred Hauke.

As the Holy See’s Directory of Popularity Piety explains, “The divine and virginal motherhood of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a singular salvific event: for Our Lady it was the foretaste and cause of her extraordinary glory; for us it is a source of grace and salvation because ‘through her we have received the ‘Author of life.’”

In fact, every time we pray the Hail Mary, we proclaim Mary as the Mother of God: "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen."

Every time we use this wondrous title as we pray the Hail Mary, we sing in chorus with the third ecumenical Council of Ephesus which convened in 431 to once and for all settle and declare that Mary is truly “Mother of God.” It was the first Marian dogma.

Mariologist, professor and author Mark Miravalle put it this way, “The first and foremost revealed truth about Mary from which all her other roles and all her other honors flow is that she is the Mother of God. This dogma proclaims that the Virgin Mary is true Mother of Jesus Christ who is God the Son made man.”

Scripture attests to it. Scripture tells us explicitly in the Angel Gabriel’s words to Mary at the Annunciation. And so too with Elizabeth’s words at the Annunciation as the Catechism reminds us (495) adding, “Hence the Church confesses that Mary is truly ‘Mother of God’ (Theotokos).” Later, Paul in Galatians (4:4) proclaims, “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman…”



There would be little need to proclaim this dogma at that third ecumenical council in 431 if it weren’t for an attack by the naughty Nestorius. He would not call Mary “Mother of God” “not primarily because of a mariological error, but because of a Christological error (an error concerning the true doctrine of Jesus),” Miravalle explains. Nestorius divided Jesus into two separate persons, one human and one divine.

When at Ephesus the Church fathers defined this dogma declaring the Blessed Virgin Mary to be the Mother of God or Theotokos (literally “God-bearer”), they were actually protecting the truth that Jesus is “one divine person with two natures, a divine nature and a human nature, and that the two natures are inseparably united in the one, and only one, divine person of Jesus. We see then at Ephesus a case in point of the truth that authentic Marian doctrine will always protect and safeguard authentic doctrine about Jesus Christ.”

The council went so far as to pronounce and affirm: If anyone does not confess that the Emmanuel (Christ) in truth is God and that on this account the Holy Virgin is the Mother of God (Theotokos) in as much as she gave birth to the Word of God made flesh…let him be anathema.”

Not long after, Father and Doctor of the Church St. Gregory Nazianzen made no bones about it, saying: “If anyone does not believe that Holy Mary is the Mother of God, he is severed from the Godhead. If anyone should assert that He passed through the Virgin as through a channel, and was not at once divinely and humanly formed in her (divinely, because without the intervention of a man; humanly, because in accordance with the laws of gestation), he is in like manner godless.”

One saint — St. John Paul II in his encyclical Redemptoris Mater (On the Blessed Virgin Mary in the life of the Pilgrim Church) — reminds us of another saint and Doctor of the Church, John Chrysostom. In the Eucharistic Prayer of [the liturgy of] St. John Chrysostom, right after the epiclesis, the community sings honoring the Mother of God: "It is truly just to proclaim you blessed, O Mother of God, who are most blessed, all pure and Mother of our God. We magnify you who are more honorable than the Cherubim and incomparably more glorious than the Seraphim. You who, without losing your virginity, gave birth to the Word of God. You who are truly the Mother of God."

In the same encyclical, John Paul II noted that “the dogma of the divine motherhood of Mary was for the Council of Ephesus and is for the Church like a seal upon the dogma of the Incarnation, in which the Word truly assumes human nature into the unity of his person, without cancelling out that nature.”

Venerable Fulton J. Sheen loved to write and speak much on the Blessed Mother. He has this beautiful reflection in his magnificent book appropriately titled The World’s First Love: Mary, Mother of God:

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“When Whistler painted the picture of his mother, did he not have the image of her in his mind before he ever gathered his colors on his palette? If you could have preexisted your mother (not artistically, but really), would you not have made her the most perfect woman that ever lived — one so beautiful she would have been the sweet envy of all women, and one so gentle and so merciful that all other mothers would have sought to imitate her virtues? Why, then, should we think that God would do otherwise?

When Whistler was complimented on the portrait of his mother, he said, ‘You know how it is; one tries to make one’s Mummy just as nice as he can.’ When God became Man, He too, I believe, would make His Mother as nice as He could — and that would make her a perfect Mother...

She existed in the Divine Mind as an Eternal Thought before there were any mothers. She is the Mother of mothers — she is the world’s first love...

Any objection to calling her the ‘Mother of God’ is fundamentally an objection to the Deity of Christ. The consecrated phrase ‘Theotokos,’ ‘Mother of God,’ has ever since 432 been the touchstone of the Christian faith…As [Doctor of the Church] John of Damascus said: ‘This name contains the whole mystery of the Incarnation’…It implies a twofold generation of the Divine Word: one eternal in the bosom of the Father; the other temporal in the womb of Mary. Mary therefore did not bear a ‘mere man,’ but the ‘true God.’”[/dim

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There are countless insights, of course, from the Fathers and Doctors of the Church onwards who sing the praises of Mary in her title of Mother of God.

As the Catechism (509) succinctly proclaims in the proverbial nutshell, “Mary is truly ‘Mother of God’ since she is the mother of the eternal Son of God made man, who is God himself.”

We must not forget Mary is both Mother of God and our mother too. Jesus gave her to us, and us to her, from the Cross. Bishop Fulton Sheen had a wonderful way of explaining this in The World’s First Love: Mary, Mother of God.

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“If Mary were only the Mother of another man, then she could not also be our mother, because the ties of the flesh are too exclusive. Flesh allows only one mother…But Spirit allows us another mother. Since Mary is the Mother of God, then she can be the Mother of everyone whom Christ redeemed.”

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Here’s just a tiny taste from the sumptuous banquet of advice saints have given us over the centuries about our relationship to the Mary the Mother of God.

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“Never be afraid of loving the Blessed Virgin too much. You can never love her more than Jesus did.”
- St. Maximilian Kolbe

"Let us not imagine that we obscure the glory of the Son by the great praise we lavish on the Mother; for the more she is honored, the greater is the glory of her Son. There can be no doubt that whatever we say in praise of the Mother gives equal praise to the Son”
- St. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Doctor of the Church

“He who neglects the service of the Blessed Virgin will die in his sins…He who does not invoke thee, O Lady, will never get to Heaven…Not only will those from whom Mary turns her countenance not be saved, but there will be no hope of their salvation… No one can be saved without the protection of Mary.”
- St. Bonaventure, Doctor of the Church

“It seems unbelievable that a man should perish in whose favor Christ said to His Mother: ‘Behold thy son’, provided that he has not turned a deaf ear to the words, which Christ addressed to him: ‘Behold thy Mother.’”
- St. Robert Bellarmine, Doctor of the Church

“No matter how sinful one may have been, if he has devotion to Mary, it is impossible that he be lost."
- St Hilary of Poitiers, Doctor of the Church

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So remember what we pray in both the Angelus and the Hail Holy Queen — “Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God. That we may be worthy of the promises of Christ.”

Anyway, before going further on with this post, I'd like to mention a beautiful practice that is generally observed on January 1 and on Pentecost in the traditional liturgy. Before the Mass begins, the priest presides at the singing of that wonderful hymn to the Holy Spirit, Veni Creator Spiritus, in seven verses to implore divine assistance for the course of the whole year. Which leads to the familiar invocation
"V: Send forth thy Spirit and they shall be created". R: "And thou shalt renew the face of the earth". Then the prayer:

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Oh God, Who hast taught the hearts of the faithful by the light of the Holy Spirit, grant that by the gift of the same Spirit, we may always be truly wise and rejoice in his consolation.

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A plenary indulgence may be earned by this act with the usual conditions of Confession within 20 days, reception of Holy Communion, and prayers for the Holy Father's intentions. [This last has always been a condition for plenary indulgences.]

Now, Father H on the Circumcision and the Feast of the Motherhood of God - I shall omit the second half of his blogpost which has to do with the infamous Thomas Cranmer (1489-1856), a leader of the English Reformation and its first Archbishop of Canterbury, who wrote and compiled the first two editions of the Book of Common Prayer as a complete liturgy for the new Church of England.]

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The circumcision and Mrs Cranmer

January 1, 2019

Sometimes one reads traddy criticisms of the abolition of the title "The Circumcision" formerly attached to January 1. There may be a slight confusion here. But before I explain this, I would like to emphasise the importance of celebrating and teaching ... perhaps in Lent and Holy Week ... the profound significance of the Circumcision within the context of our Lord's complete Jewishness and his identification with the Jewish people. Perhaps I might be permitted a quick and waspish observation that the only picture I know of our Most Holy Redeemer where the artist has troubled to make him look unmistakably Hebrew is by Caravaggio.

The Mass texts of the Roman Church, for centuries, made no reference on January 1 to the Circumcision except in as far as the opening verses of S Luke Chapter 2 were an obvious choice for the Gospel. The whole Mass was about our Lady's Divine Maternity. The 1960s 'reformers' were guilty of many nastinesses, unmandated by the Council, often contrary to the Council; but all they did to January 1 was to give it the title which best fitted the immemorially ancient and exquisite texts of the Roman Church. If you don't trust me, here are the words of [dom Prosper] Gueranger [the great Benedictine (1805-1875) who founded and was abbot for 40 years of the Abbey of Solesmes, France, and author The Liturgical Year, which covers every day of the Catholic Church's liturgical cycle in 15 volumes]:

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"The holy Church of Rome used formerly to say two Masses on the first of January; one was for the Octave of Christmas Day, the other was in honour of Mary ... The Church celebrates today the august prerogative of this divine Maternity, which was conferred on a mere creature, and which made her the co-operatrix with Jesus in the great work of man's salvation ..."

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Well, OK, Dom Gueranger was no longer around in 1931 when Pius XI made the Feast of the Circumcision a universal holiday of obligation.

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Lastly, here is a beautiful meditation for Christmastide from Fr. Paul Scalia, a priest in the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, and a son of the late Justice Antonin Scalia..


ADORATION OF THE MAGI, Giotto, c. 1632, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Bethlehem’s mosaic of humility
By Fr. Paul D. Scalia

January 1, 2019

The secular world is hastily ridding itself of the Nativity scenes it rushed to display after Thanksgiving. Please God, our churches and homes still have them in full view. The crèche is more than decoration. It’s a help to our prayer. Like all our Lord’s feasts, Christmas places us there and then, in Bethlehem, at our Lord’s Birth. The crèche places the scene before our eyes and invites us to learn and imitate the virtues of those at the first Christmas.

The virtue most conspicuous in the crèche is humility. The whole scene is a study in self-forgetfulness. Every figure thinks not about himself but about the Infant in the manger. The Christ Child in turn looks out at us, drawing our gaze to Himself in union with the others. By simple adoration the figures around the crib reveal various elements of humility. Together they make up a mosaic of that virtue.

A first group of figures consists of those below man and those above him: the animals and the angels. The animals – the ox and the ass – reveal the most fundamental form of humility, that of the creature. The inspiration for Saint Francis’s including them in the scene comes from the first chapter of Isaiah:

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An ox knows its owner,
and an ass, its master’s manger;
But Israel does not know,
my people has not understood (Is 1:3).

---

The Prophet contrasts the animals with man. Even beasts have the humility to acknowledge their master. Why can’t man acknowledge the Lord?

The animals in the cave remind us of our created status. The sin at our beginning was a rejection of that creatureliness, the refusal to accept what God made us to be. We wanted something other than He had given us, to be something other than He had made us. We pushed against our created status. We wanted to be like gods.

And we still do. We see this vice writ large in transgender ideology, the rejection of the created limits of male and female. But every sin is an exaltation of the creature over the Creator, and thus a pushing against the limits of our nature. The ox and the ass have the humility to know their status in creation, that they are creatures – not the Creator. In that, at least, they are wiser than we.

The angels reveal something different: humility in being passed over. If the humility of the animals reminds us of our creatureliness, that of the angels remind us of our promotion at the Incarnation. God became man; He did not become an angel. In the order of nature, angels are superior to us; more intelligent, more powerful. But in the order of grace, man has been raised above them. By becoming man God gave our human nature a dignity surpassing even that of the angels. The angels now worship the man Jesus Christ.

The self-emptying of God calls the angels to exercise a similar humility. They are asked to rejoice in being passed over for us who are so far below them. Fallen angels [Satan's legion] resent God’s humility precisely because it requires humility from them as well. The good angels, like those who appear to the shepherds, rejoice in God’s humility. They in effect share in His humility by rejoicing in our promotion above them.

Another group in Bethlehem consists of the shepherds and the magi. These two groups – the poor, uneducated, simple shepherds and the wealthy, learned, sophisticated magi – would not otherwise be associated with one another were it not for the Christ child. Both humbly approach the crib, but in different ways.

The shepherds show us the humility of the empty-handed. We typically associate pride with vanity and boasting of what one has. But pride is simply inordinate self-focus. That can also take the form of excessive concern and attention to what one lacks. Thus, pride can produce despair over one’s inadequacy. By it, a man focuses on his insufficiency and so cannot see the Lord’s generosity.

The shepherds are at peace with their poverty. They show us the humility of the poor in spirit, of those who have nothing to bring. Those men living on the outskirts of society, in the fields with the sheep, have no wealth, no accomplishments, no learning to offer. But their destitution does not disturb them. They display a comfort with having nothing to give the Lord but their attention, affection, and adoration. They are at peace coming before Him emptied handed.

Of course, we all come to Him empty-handed. We have nothing properly ours to offer Him, no accomplishments or achievements we can claim as our own. “What do you possess that you have not received?” (1 Cor 7:4) Rather than turn inward and despair of our nothingness, we learn from the shepherds that humble joy of having nothing but ourselves to bring Him.

The magi, on the other hand, show us the humility of the accomplished. If the shepherds show the humility that keeps us from despair; the magi display the humility that keeps us from boasting.

The magi are the learned, and therefore the wealthy and powerful. Their learning brings them to the crib, and in that way it is good. But for it to realize its purpose, it must yield to the Lord and in that sense be sacrificed. So the magi must humble themselves – set aside their wealth, power, and privilege – to worship the child.

They anticipate the lesson the Pharisees must learn – that the Lord of Israel is not so much attained as received. Even our greatest talents and efforts are but His gifts to dispose us to receive Him. To remain in their proper place and not become a cause for vanity, our talents, gifts, and achievements must yield to the divine authority of the Christ child.

The last humble duo is, of course, Joseph and Mary. Joseph, first, exhibits a humble authority. He is the head of the Holy Family, but the least of the Holy Family. As such, he exercises his rightful authority both faithfully and humbly, always with an awareness of his duty and his unworthiness. He foreshadows the servant leadership of Christ, who came not to be served but to serve. By way of humility, he both accepts the authority entrusted to him and refrains from wielding it in an authoritarian manner.

Mary shows us the authoritative humility. Not authoritative in the sense of having a title or position or any such thing. She counted for very little in the world’s estimation. Authoritative, rather, in the sense that her humility sets the standard for all Christians. Authoritative, because by her humility, she is perfectly conformed to the mind of the Author.

The Lord Himself displays this humility at His Birth and then proclaims it in His words. Even before that, Mary shows forth this foundational virtue. In her there is no self-focus or self-referential thinking to compete with Him. Her humility allows God’s grace to work in her perfectly, to fill her with grace, to make her the exemplary – authoritative – Christian.

Of course, all these forms of humility – of the animals and angels, of the shepherds and magi, of Joseph and Mary – they are just reflections of our Lord’s humility. He humbles Himself to share our created human nature, and thus raises it above the angels. He is the Good Shepherd, born in poverty, coming to us empty-handed. Having all authority, He appeals to us not by the threat of force but by His own self-emptying, by the simple look of a child.

Back alas to the humdrum pitiless world of present reality...


Scandal and loss of confidence in the Church hierarchy
contribute to a heavy spirit as 2018 ends
by Father Raymond J. de Souza, SJ

December 31, 2018

It is unlikely that Pope Francis will publicly describe 2018 as an annus horribilis, as Queen Elizabeth II did in 1992, when a year of scandals in the royal family was crowned by a terrible fire at Windsor Castle.

Scandals there have been aplenty in the Church, but thus far no fire at the Vatican.

The Catholic Church ends 2018 with a heavy spirit. It is not the series of scandals alone, but the loss of confidence in the traditional solution in times of crisis, namely recourse to Rome, as adequate to the task.

The year began with the most catastrophic papal trip in history. The aftermath of the disaster in Chile tainted everything that followed and seriously weakened the capacity of Pope Francis to take effective action.

The papal trip to Chile in January had to deal with the “Barros affair,” the decision in January 2015 of Pope Francis to transfer Bishop Juan Barros from the military diocese to that of Osorno.

The appointment was met with widespread opposition — including physical disruption of the installation ceremony — because Bishop Barros was widely believed to have covered up sexual abuse by his mentor, Chile’s most notorious priest-predator, Father Fernando Karadima. (Karadima was subject to canonical penalties in 2010 and laicized in 2018.)

From 2015 onward, the Holy Father rejected the objections to Bishop Barros in increasingly intemperate language, accusing critics of being “stupid” and politically manipulated.

The plan was to definitively slap down the Barros criticism once and for all in Chile. The papal biographer Austen Ivereigh was on hand in Santiago as the Pope arrived and spent the day with both Bishop Barros and another “Karadima” bishop.

One story from him explained why Pope Francis was courageously standing by an innocent man in the face of a mob screaming for a scapegoat: “Francis’s dogged determination to support Barros against this tide from both Church and society must be counted as one of the boldest — or, perhaps, foolhardiest — decisions of his pontificate,” wrote Ivereigh.

It was soon revealed to be more than foolhardy. It was dishonest. [As so much is dishonest about this pope and the things he says! Does he not realize that at all? It would be more charitable to believe that ("Father, forgive him for he knows not what he is doing"), than the more plausible alternative which is that he knows what he is doing but goes ahead and does or says it anyway because it is expedient for his purposes.]

On the eve of the trip, leaked letters revealed that the leading bishops of Chile had begged Pope Francis not to transfer Bishop Barros. The Pope had even agreed that it would be better if Bishop Barros and the other “Karadima bishops” resigned. Bishop Barros himself offered to resign twice. Yet, in the end, the Holy Father made the appointment and then accused his critics of “calumny,” even when they were making the same objections which he had privately received from the bishops of Chile.

It all proved too much for Cardinal Seán O’Malley, the Vatican’s head of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, who publicly rebuked Pope Francis for doubling down on Bishop Barros when in Chile.

It was an unmistakable sign that the Holy Father, on this issue, had lost the confidence even of those close to him. Never in living memory had a close cardinalatial collaborator of a pope — Cardinal O’Malley sits on the “council of cardinals” — publicly criticized him.

It was a turning point. Pope Francis realized that if he were losing Cardinal O’Malley, he was in danger of losing the flock. He humbly accepted the criticism of the Boston cardinal and, upon return to Rome, reversed course entirely. He sent Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna to Chile to investigate, even though much of what the Holy Father needed to know had already been provided to him in Rome.

When Archbishop Scicluna submitted his report, Pope Francis announced that he had been “badly informed” about what was going on in Chile. [Another lie.] That was another, near fatal, blow to confidence in the capacity of the Holy Father to provide the necessary leadership.

It was clear by now to all that, even if Pope Francis had not been fully informed, he had long since been adequately informed. The problem was manifestly not the information given, but the decisions taken. Guilty of not taking proper action, Pope Francis vigorously moved in the opposite direction. The entire Chilean episcopate was summoned to Rome for a severe and public tongue-lashing, after which all of them submitted their resignations. To date, eight out of some 30 have been accepted, including that of Bishop Barros. No permanent replacements have been appointed.

Pope Francis is obviously not responsible for generations of clerical corruption in Chile, but the complete calamity that followed his decisions has eroded confidence that Rome can be the solution to a local crisis.

For the past four years, decisions in Rome have made matters worse, to the extent that the Church in Chile has now been decapitated and left in temporary limbo; its credibility has been compromised for at least a generation. No other local Church in a time of crisis is eager for the Chilean model to be replicated for them.

Meanwhile, earlier in the year, another crisis was resolved with another blow to papal credibility.

In the Diocese of Ahiara, Nigeria, the appointment of a new bishop, Peter Okpaleke, in 2012 (by Benedict XVI) had been opposed by the local clergy, on the grounds that Bishop Okpaleke was not a local candidate, either of that place or ethnicity. The new bishop was not able even to enter his diocese, and the matter dragged on for years.

In June 2017, Pope Francis decided to resolve it by a fearsome application of raw papal power. All the priests of Ahiara were given 30 days to write a personal letter to Pope Francis, begging his forgiveness and promising to accept Bishop Okpaleke. If they did not do so, they would be suspended.

Faced with an ultimatum, most of them did so. But by early 2018, the wrath of the Pope did not seem sufficient to persuade the Diocese of Ahiara to make its bishop welcome. In February 2018 the Holy Father accepted Bishop Okpaleke’s resignation. The rebellion prevailed, and Ahiara still does not have a bishop.

The Chilean bishops were sacked in May. In June came the revelations of sexual abuse and harassment of minors and seminarians by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. In July he resigned from the College of Cardinals. In August came the “testimony” of Archbishop Carlo Viganò, accusing the Holy Father of knowing that now-Archbishop McCarrick had “restrictions” placed upon him and nevertheless “rehabilitated” him.

Leaving aside the contested allegations of Archbishop Viganò, the fact that a former nuncio — and a former supervisor of nuncios for the Holy See’s diplomatic service — would so publicly criticize the Pope, even going so far as to recklessly call for his resignation, was an earthquake in Rome.

Equally remarkable, not a single senior voice in Rome came unambiguously to the Pope’s defense. Only Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, gave a full-throated defense of Pope Francis — but only after his own conduct was questioned by a subsequent intervention from Archbishop Viganò.

The implications of the Cardinal O’Malley intervention in January were now plain to see.

So eroded was confidence in the Holy Father that a former nuncio could unleash a near-slanderous attack and the senior figures in the Roman Curia would keep quiet. [Come now, Father De Souza, if Vigano's accusations were anywhere near 'slanderous', wouldn't all the cardinals he named have simply answered him point by point to show he was wrong and therefore 'slanderous'. But not one of them has spoken up. Cardinal Ouellet did, apparently on the pope's orders, but in the process, he substantially confirmed much of what Mons. Vigano said. And even Ouellet did not dare call Vigano 'near slanderous'.]

In September, the leadership of the U.S. bishops asked Pope Francis for an apostolic visitation to thoroughly investigate the entirety of the McCarrick affair. How did he rise? Who knew about his behavior?

Pope Francis turned the Americans down flat, reportedly because if he authorized such a visitation for Archbishop McCarrick, he would have to do so for other cases. And what case might the Holy Father have had in mind?

A similar investigation into the entirety of the Barros affair would certainly reveal that Pope Francis had been repeatedly warned not to do what he did.

It is wholly implausible that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) gave its nihil obstat (“no objection”) to the Barros transfer, given their prior investigation of Karadima.

What Archbishop Scicluna investigated in 2018 was, in substantial part, already known at the CDF in 2010, when the Karadima case was heard. And so the bungling of Bishop Barros in Chile has consequences for the McCarrick matter in the United States.

The Holy See has promised a review of the documents in its files related to Archbishop McCarrick. That review is still ongoing, and what, if anything, will be published remains to be seen.

But after 2018, confidence that the Holy See might be helpful in the McCarrick — or any other — matter is seriously in question.

Back alas to the humdrum pitiless world of present reality...


Scandal and loss of confidence in the Church hierarchy
contribute to a heavy spirit as 2018 ends
by Father Raymond J. de Souza, SJ

December 31, 2018

It is unlikely that Pope Francis will publicly describe 2018 as an annus horribilis, as Queen Elizabeth II did in 1992, when a year of scandals in the royal family was crowned by a terrible fire at Windsor Castle.

Scandals there have been aplenty in the Church, but thus far no fire at the Vatican.

The Catholic Church ends 2018 with a heavy spirit. It is not the series of scandals alone, but the loss of confidence in the traditional solution in times of crisis, namely recourse to Rome, as adequate to the task.

The year began with the most catastrophic papal trip in history. The aftermath of the disaster in Chile tainted everything that followed and seriously weakened the capacity of Pope Francis to take effective action.

The papal trip to Chile in January had to deal with the “Barros affair,” the decision in January 2015 of Pope Francis to transfer Bishop Juan Barros from the military diocese to that of Osorno.

The appointment was met with widespread opposition — including physical disruption of the installation ceremony — because Bishop Barros was widely believed to have covered up sexual abuse by his mentor, Chile’s most notorious priest-predator, Father Fernando Karadima. (Karadima was subject to canonical penalties in 2010 and laicized in 2018.)

From 2015 onward, the Holy Father rejected the objections to Bishop Barros in increasingly intemperate language, accusing critics of being “stupid” and politically manipulated.

The plan was to definitively slap down the Barros criticism once and for all in Chile. The papal biographer Austen Ivereigh was on hand in Santiago as the Pope arrived and spent the day with both Bishop Barros and another “Karadima” bishop.

One story from him explained why Pope Francis was courageously standing by an innocent man in the face of a mob screaming for a scapegoat: “Francis’s dogged determination to support Barros against this tide from both Church and society must be counted as one of the boldest — or, perhaps, foolhardiest — decisions of his pontificate,” wrote Ivereigh.

It was soon revealed to be more than foolhardy. It was dishonest. [As so much is dishonest about this pope and the things he says! Does he not realize that at all? It would be more charitable to believe that ("Father, forgive him for he knows not what he is doing"), than the more plausible alternative which is that he knows what he is doing but goes ahead and does or says it anyway because it is expedient for his purposes.]

On the eve of the trip, leaked letters revealed that the leading bishops of Chile had begged Pope Francis not to transfer Bishop Barros. The Pope had even agreed that it would be better if Bishop Barros and the other “Karadima bishops” resigned. Bishop Barros himself offered to resign twice. Yet, in the end, the Holy Father made the appointment and then accused his critics of “calumny,” even when they were making the same objections which he had privately received from the bishops of Chile.

It all proved too much for Cardinal Seán O’Malley, the Vatican’s head of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, who publicly rebuked Pope Francis for doubling down on Bishop Barros when in Chile.

It was an unmistakable sign that the Holy Father, on this issue, had lost the confidence even of those close to him. Never in living memory had a close cardinalatial collaborator of a pope — Cardinal O’Malley sits on the “council of cardinals” — publicly criticized him.

It was a turning point. Pope Francis realized that if he were losing Cardinal O’Malley, he was in danger of losing the flock. He humbly accepted the criticism of the Boston cardinal and, upon return to Rome, reversed course entirely. He sent Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna to Chile to investigate, even though much of what the Holy Father needed to know had already been provided to him in Rome.

When Archbishop Scicluna submitted his report, Pope Francis announced that he had been “badly informed” about what was going on in Chile. [Another lie.] That was another, near fatal, blow to confidence in the capacity of the Holy Father to provide the necessary leadership.

It was clear by now to all that, even if Pope Francis had not been fully informed, he had long since been adequately informed. The problem was manifestly not the information given, but the decisions taken. Guilty of not taking proper action, Pope Francis vigorously moved in the opposite direction. The entire Chilean episcopate was summoned to Rome for a severe and public tongue-lashing, after which all of them submitted their resignations. To date, eight out of some 30 have been accepted, including that of Bishop Barros. No permanent replacements have been appointed.

Pope Francis is obviously not responsible for generations of clerical corruption in Chile, but the complete calamity that followed his decisions has eroded confidence that Rome can be the solution to a local crisis.

For the past four years, decisions in Rome have made matters worse, to the extent that the Church in Chile has now been decapitated and left in temporary limbo; its credibility has been compromised for at least a generation. No other local Church in a time of crisis is eager for the Chilean model to be replicated for them.

Meanwhile, earlier in the year, another crisis was resolved with another blow to papal credibility.

In the Diocese of Ahiara, Nigeria, the appointment of a new bishop, Peter Okpaleke, in 2012 (by Benedict XVI) had been opposed by the local clergy, on the grounds that Bishop Okpaleke was not a local candidate, either of that place or ethnicity. The new bishop was not able even to enter his diocese, and the matter dragged on for years.

In June 2017, Pope Francis decided to resolve it by a fearsome application of raw papal power. All the priests of Ahiara were given 30 days to write a personal letter to Pope Francis, begging his forgiveness and promising to accept Bishop Okpaleke. If they did not do so, they would be suspended.

Faced with an ultimatum, most of them did so. But by early 2018, the wrath of the Pope did not seem sufficient to persuade the Diocese of Ahiara to make its bishop welcome. In February 2018 the Holy Father accepted Bishop Okpaleke’s resignation. The rebellion prevailed, and Ahiara still does not have a bishop.

The Chilean bishops were sacked in May. In June came the revelations of sexual abuse and harassment of minors and seminarians by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. In July he resigned from the College of Cardinals. In August came the “testimony” of Archbishop Carlo Viganò, accusing the Holy Father of knowing that now-Archbishop McCarrick had “restrictions” placed upon him and nevertheless “rehabilitated” him.

Leaving aside the contested allegations of Archbishop Viganò, the fact that a former nuncio — and a former supervisor of nuncios for the Holy See’s diplomatic service — would so publicly criticize the Pope, even going so far as to recklessly call for his resignation, was an earthquake in Rome.

Equally remarkable, not a single senior voice in Rome came unambiguously to the Pope’s defense. Only Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, gave a full-throated defense of Pope Francis — but only after his own conduct was questioned by a subsequent intervention from Archbishop Viganò.

The implications of the Cardinal O’Malley intervention in January were now plain to see.

So eroded was confidence in the Holy Father that a former nuncio could unleash a near-slanderous attack and the senior figures in the Roman Curia would keep quiet. [Come now, Father De Souza, if Vigano's accusations were anywhere near 'slanderous', wouldn't all the cardinals he named have simply answered him point by point to show he was wrong and therefore 'slanderous'. But not one of them has spoken up. Cardinal Ouellet did, apparently on the pope's orders, but in the process, he substantially confirmed much of what Mons. Vigano said. And even Ouellet did not dare call Vigano 'near slanderous'.]

In September, the leadership of the U.S. bishops asked Pope Francis for an apostolic visitation to thoroughly investigate the entirety of the McCarrick affair. How did he rise? Who knew about his behavior?

Pope Francis turned the Americans down flat, reportedly because if he authorized such a visitation for Archbishop McCarrick, he would have to do so for other cases. And what case might the Holy Father have had in mind?

A similar investigation into the entirety of the Barros affair would certainly reveal that Pope Francis had been repeatedly warned not to do what he did.

It is wholly implausible that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) gave its nihil obstat (“no objection”) to the Barros transfer, given their prior investigation of Karadima.

What Archbishop Scicluna investigated in 2018 was, in substantial part, already known at the CDF in 2010, when the Karadima case was heard. And so the bungling of Bishop Barros in Chile has consequences for the McCarrick matter in the United States.

The Holy See has promised a review of the documents in its files related to Archbishop McCarrick. That review is still ongoing, and what, if anything, will be published remains to be seen.

But after 2018, confidence that the Holy See might be helpful in the McCarrick — or any other — matter is seriously in question.


The following story should lead to even more loss of confidence. It is also disturbing because it indicates that Mons. Charles Scicluna, who, as Archbishop of Malta, quickly showed himself to be very Bergoglian in praxis and doctrine, may have also been Bergoglianized even in his prosecution of priestly sex offenders, after this pope gave him a new position at the CDF last November as Deputy Secretary in addition to being Archbishop of Malta...


Vatican blasted for letting
abusive clergy off the hook
Panel established by Pope Francis reduced
sentences of one third of appealing clergy
by Christine Niles


VATICAN CITY , December 30, 2018 (ChurchMilitant.com) - A Vatican panel has come under criticism for sharply reducing penalties imposed on one third of clergy who have appealed their cases.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the panel, headed by Abp. Charles Scicluna of Malta, has rejected recommendations to defrock at least 15 sex abusers, instead reducing their punishments to temporary suspensions ranging from 3–5 years. The clergy come from various countries, including Mexico, Peru and Francis' former country of Argentina.

Established by Pope Francis in 2015, the panel — made up of eight bishops and cardinals — operates within the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), and hears appeals from clergy accused of sexual misconduct.

Formerly, such appeals were heard before the full Congregation, consisting of approximately two dozen prelates, and were rarely successful. Now, about one third of cases on appeal succeed in getting an abuser's penalty diminished, or thrown out altogether.

A case involving a Polish priest ended up with a complete reversal of the ruling, the panel finding that there existed no "moral certitude" that the priest committed abuse, even in the face of newly presented evidence of guilt. Other cases have involved restoring priests to active ministry who had been previously removed for sexual misconduct.

Another case resulted in halting the laicization of an Ecuadorian priest found guilty of abusing around a dozen boys aged 10–14. The priest blamed "mental illness" for his conduct, and the panel ordered a psychological test before proceeding with any suspension. Pope Francis intervened, ordering that the priest be removed from ministry immediately.

And the panel gave what amounted to a slap on the wrist to Abp. Anthony Apuron of Guam, accused by multiple altar boys of sex abuse. Earlier this year, the panel found him guilty of "unspecified crimes," and instead of removing him from ministry, restricting his movements and relegating him to a life of prayer and penance, as is usually the case with guilty clerics, the panel recommended merely that he not return to Guam — a mild rebuke that amounts essentially to early retirement.

In June last year, Cdl. Sean O'Malley of Boston, head of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, criticized the panel's actions, and "tensions over the issue have mounted since," according to sources who spoke with The Wall Street Journal. Various other bishops have also complained to the Vatican about the reduced sentences, noting that they contradict Pope Francis's supposed zero-tolerance policy toward sex abuse.

Francis himself has come under fire for showing leniency toward sex abusers, and was forced to admit his error and apologize in at least two cases.

In 2014, the pontiff reduced the sentence of a priest, Msgr. Mauro Inzoli, whom the CDF had ordered to be defrocked after it found him guilty of abusing multiple boys aged 12–16. Pope Francis reversed the decision, allowing Inzoli to remain a priest, although restricting his movements.

Inzoli was later found guilty in Italian criminal court of molesting five teen boys (evidence revealed the number was far higher, but the cases were barred by the statute of limitations) and sentenced to five years' imprisonment. Francis reinstated the CDF's original order to laicize Inzoli and issued an apology.

A 2017 Associated Press article notes that the pope's actions here were not unique:

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The Inzoli case is one of several in which Francis overruled the advice of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and reduced a sentence that called for the priest to be defrocked, two canon lawyers and a church official told AP. Instead, the priests were sentenced to penalties including a lifetime of penance and prayer and removal from public ministry.

---

The well-known case of Chilean Bp. Juan Barros was considered the worst crisis of Francis's pontificate. In spite of multiple allegations of sex abuse cover-up, the pontiff appointed Barros to the diocese of Osorno, Chile, leading to many months of protests by laity, who accused him of protecting homosexual predator Fr. Fernando Karadima.

The pope claimed the victims were spreading calumny and gossip, leading to Cdl. O'Malley's criticism of Francis' remarks. After public outcry, the pope issued an apology to sex abuse survivors for his comments.

He was forced to apologize again when credible evidence surfaced that not only did Karadima abuse multiple teen males, but Barros knew about it and in some cases even witnessed it. Barros was removed from the diocese.

In addition to Pope Francis's well-documented actions protecting a convicted pederast in Argentina, his continued protection of Cdl. Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, who covered up for the sex abuse and embezzlement of Bp. Juan Pineda, is also a source of continuing criticism for the pontiff.

Nicknamed the "Vice Pope" for his level of power and influence in Rome, Maradiaga heads the pope's council of cardinal advisors (the Gang of Nine, recently reduced to six). Pineda, long considered Maradiaga's right-hand man in the archdiocese of Tegucigalpa in Honduras, was removed in July over credible accusations of homosexual assault of seminarians, as well as financial mismanagement.

Although this evidence, including Maradiaga's own complicity, were revealed in a 2017 Vatican investigation, Pope Francis sat on the report for a year, leading to multiple questions from the public regarding his inaction.

It wasn't until Martha Alegría Reichmann, a longtime friend of Maradiaga, went to the press that the pontiff finally accepted Pineda's resignation.

Reichmann said of Maradiaga in June, "Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga knows everything his right hand does, Auxiliary Bishop Juan Pineda, but he has always covered and protected him."

Maradiaga remains head of his archdiocese, and continues to lead the pope's council of cardinal advisors.


2018 in review:
The Church’s annus horribilis
This was the year that the abuse crisis engulfed the Church,
and those in power failed to live up to the challenge
by Christopher Altieri

December 31, 2018


2018 has been annus horribilis for the Catholic Church. There’s no point mincing our words. The mere rehearsal of the major disasters would run the length of a volume. An exhaustive list of the missteps and failures starting or ending at the Vatican would require a hefty tome.

From the explosion of the Chilean abuse-and-coverup crisis — in Pope Francis’s face, at the end of January — the worldwide body of the faithful has been treated to a relentless succession of half-measures, publicity stunts, and increasingly incredible promises of earnest coming from the Pope and the Vatican. None has been minimally sufficient, let alone satisfactory.

The talk from the Pope and the Vatican regarding the abuse-and-coverup crisis has been equally relentless. It is boring, by now, and that is a problem on its own. The talk, however, is not the worst thing about the past year. The worst thing about the past year has been the double-talk.

Whether it concerns parsing of the difference between “proof” and “evidence” — a subtle distinction, to be sure — or the cavilling of “pardon” — if Francis has not pardoned anyone guilty of abuse, he has previously reduced the sentences imposed and even restored men to the clerical state, who had been penally laicized — he has been artful, rather than frank and direct.

Meanwhile, questions that arose when the generational crisis became a current scandal touching Pope Francis, remain unanswered.

There is the fate of the letter Juan Carlos Cruz wrote, supposedly hand-delivered to Pope Francis in 2015 by his hand-picked President of the Pontifical Council for the Protection of Minors, Cardinal Seán Patrick O’Malley, OFM. Francis publicly stated in 2018 that no witnesses had ever come forward to bring him evidence of Bishop Juan Barros’s misdeeds in relation to his mentor, Fernando Karadima. An adequate explanation for the apparent discrepancy remains wanting.

There is the question of Francis’s knowledge of the character and proclivities of the disgraced Archbishop McCarrick, and the date Francis became aware of them. Legitimate questions remain outstanding as to the extent of papal and curial involvement in promoting and protecting McCarrick and other churchmen.

Francis has repeatedly promised to be transparent, and consistently failed to be forthright.

However, Pope Francis has taken several bold steps in other areas, the most significant of which is his rapprochement with China. He took a beating in the press over the agreement with the Chinese government, the precise terms of which have yet to be disclosed officially, but apparently involve significant involvement of Chinese authorities in the choice of bishops. Whether the arrangement will prove workable in the long run obviously remains to be seen, but the short-term cost has already been high.

The end of the year also saw major news on the diplomatic front: Pope Francis will be the first reigning pontiff to visit the Arabian Peninsula — and celebrate a public Mass — when he goes to the United Arab Emirates in January. He is well-regarded in the country, the population of which is overwhelmingly composed of foreign guest-workers, nearly a million of whom are Catholic. Whatever comes of the visit, the fact it is happening at all is a significant diplomatic achievement.

Pope Francis’s calls for responsible care for creation have continued to be clarion, and his support of migrants’ rights constant. The force of his advocacy in these and other regards, however, has been diminished by public perception of his ability and sometimes commitment to the cause of ridding the Church of clerical abusers and reforming the leadership culture that fed and fostered the crisis. [In other words, why does he not pay more attention and give top priority to the pressing emergency in Church affairs instead of being de facto UN Secretary-General/EU Presidentleader of the Global Left all at once?]

Several year-end analysis pieces have appeared, questioning whether Pope Francis’s apparent inability to get his head around the nature and scope of the crisis — and get out of his own way when it comes to it — might not have permanently scarred his legacy already.

"Damage to his moral authority on the issue has been done,” wrote Nicole Winfield for the Associated Press. “Before his eyes were opened, Francis showed that he was a product of the very clerical culture he so often denounces, ever ready to take the word of the clerical class over victims.”

If Francis is no longer willing to take the word of a cleric over that of an alleged victim, it remains to be seen whether he shall have the force of will to demand and direct real institutional and moral reform.

As we head into 2019, the eyes of the world will continue to be on Pope Francis. The question is whether the Church at the highest levels of governance will finally recognise what Church-watchers across the spectrum of theological and political opinion have understood for some time:
- that this crisis of leadership is the worst to hit the Church since the days of Martin Luther;
- that major reform is necessary and indeed long overdue;
- that not only Pope Francis’s personal legacy is at stake, but the power of the papacy to be a moral voice in the world.

New dispatches from China
Translated from

December 30, 2018

Dear friends, the Dispatches from China this week are particularly tragic – both as to what Maestro Porfiri reports on the situation of ‘clandestine’ Chinese Catholics after the secret pact between the Vatican and China, and for the terrible news about the journalists in China who have been trying to reveal to the world about the tightening screws exercised by the Communist regime in Beijing on every manifestation of freedom.

It is a picture that contrasts greatly with what Italian media and journalists, especially those with close ties to Casa Santa Marta, have chosen to paint so far to justify the secret pact, about which the least that can be said so far is that it is questionable from many aspects. Here is Maestro Porfiri:

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December 30, 2018

Response to a comment from one who read
the ‘Vatican Insider’ interview with
a pro-Bergoglio bishop who was once underground
‘Natan’ commented on my last post, as follows: “At this point, after having read Gianni Valente’s interview in Vatican Insider, either you are a conman, or Valente is. Confusion continues to reign supreme. Valente interviews a once-clandestine bishop who says that things, although difficult, are really ‘going well’. Whereas Cardinal Zen expresses many reservations. So I would like to know where the truth is – at the Vatican or with cardinal Zen”.

My response: Neither I nor Valente is a conman. Obvously, we each have a different interpretation of an important turning-point such as the pact between the Vatican and the Chinese government. About Mr. Valente's interview with Mons. Wei Jingyi – who certainly suffered much in the past for his loyalty to Rome – the bishop gives a very ‘spiritual’ reading of the situation, a reading I certainly respect, but which also confirms the state of things I have been writing about.

Wei says:

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Priests and faithful alike [from the underground Church] ask me: “Now that there is supposed to be ‘unity’ in the diocese, what then are we supposed to do?” And I tell them that in that act of unity between the two bishops [the official one and the clandestine bishop reduced to being his subordinate], it includes the acceptance of the official bishop by all ‘clandestine’ Catholics, as well as the registration with government agencies of all underground priests declaring also their activities. This requires sincerity on both sides.

Obviously, the registration with civilian authorities of priests and their respective activities requires communication and dialog with the government. We must be prepared psychologically to do this. In any situation, whatever the problem, we should proceed step by step, seeking to make our ‘unity’ grow, and this demands our faith.

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But the demand for registration is not just an administrative measure: for the priests who register, it means submitting themselves to very close control by the government and to join the Patriotic Association which has no canonical existence. I think that this situation cannot lead to anything good, a view that is shared by many others who are more informed than I am. I am literally swamped with news about the current situation in China after the Vatican-Beijing pact, of which I can only give part, because otherwise my Dispatches would become infinitely lengthy.

‘Bitter Winter’ and represssion of its informants
Vatican Insider itself reported this news about the Turin-based international magazine on China, Bitter Winter, which has been reporting on religious persecutions in China.

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Forty-five journalists have been arrested in China these months and accused of transmitting news, videos and pictures to Bitter Winter, a magazine on religious freedom and human rights in China, published in eight languages since May 2018 in Turin by CESNUR (Centro Studi sulle Nuove Religione), andedited by CESNUR direector Massimo Introvigne himself…

CESNUR itself and Bitter Winter have reported the arrests. Introvigne said, “We have definite news that some of those arrested have been tortured to find out who else they have been sending news and documents to. Unfortunately, the reporter who took the video inside the re-education camps [for Uighur Muslims] in Xinjiang has disappeared without a trace. We fear that as in the case of other arrested journalists, that we may not see him again. We trust that whoever takes freedom of the press seriously should raise their voices to protest these serious episodes. I also think that we under-estimate the number of journalists in China who are willing to risk their lives to tell the world about human rights violations in China. The network that has been serving Bitter Winter does not just number in the dozens but in the hundreds.”

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In the light of my earlier answer, is it necessary to comment further?

Christmas protest in Hong Kong
Journalist Su Xinqi in an article in the South China Morning Post (SCMP) [HongKong's leading English-language newspaper] reports on a Christmas protest by hundreds of Christian faithful in Hong Kong who oppose the religious persecution on the mainland.

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Five Christian groups and 100 individuals in the city are behind the courageous call to action exhorting believers to attend church services on December 23 and December 30 wearing black clothes ”because Christ is being persecuted – the church in China is persecuted”.

By Saturday night, 352 persons had signed an online petition calling for such action and committed themselves to participating and soliciting other participation, according to Phyllis Luk Fung-ping, co-founder of Mission Citizerns, one of the five organizing groups.

The initiative came about because two weeks before Christmas, the Beijing regime tightened the screws on two important undergound Churches on the mainland.

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SCMP had recently attacked Cardinal Zen for his position against the Vatican-China pact. The infuential newspaper is owned by Jack Ma, founder of the colossal business conglomerate AliBaba with very close ties to the government in Beijing.

More on that pact…
In the Dec, 23 issue of the Sunday Examiner of HongKong, Michael Sainsbury notes:

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“In 2018, the Vatican finally signed an agreement it had long desired with the Communist Party which governs in China, ostensibly on the appointment of bishops, but it did so at a time when Beijing had significantly increased its religious persecution.

The agreement appears to have emboldened Beijing in its desire to destroy all its enemies, real and imagined, including regligious groups which refuse submission”.

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Of course, obedience to the laws of one’s country is right – provided such laws do not stridently violate one’s religious principles – but in this case, it is not just obedience that is demanded. It is government control over how the citizen practices his religion, so that the Christian citizen, in effect, is no longer able to function as ‘salt of the earth’ as the Gospel asks him to be.

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December 28, 2018

Father Davide Pagliarani, Superior General of the Society of Saint Pius X, granted an exclusive interview to the French traditionalist website, La Porte Latine, in which he recalls the fruitfulness of the Cross for vocations and families.

He insists particularly on the need to keep the authentic spirit of FSSPX founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre - “a spirit of love for the Faith and truth, for souls and for the Church” - when faced with the recent canonisation of Paul VI and the promotion of synodality in the Church.

It has now been five months since you were elected Superior General of the Society of Saint Pius X, for a twelve-year mandate. These five months have certainly allowed you to make a short overview of the work, founded by Archbishop Lefebvre, complementing your already rich personal experience. What general impression have you made and have you drawn up your first priorities for the coming years?
The Society is a work of God, and the more we discover it, the more we love it. Two things strike me most in discovering the Society’s labours.
- Firstly, the providential character of the Society: it is the result of the result of choices and decisions of a saint, guided only by a supernatural and “prophetic” prudence, whose wisdom we appreciate even more as the years go by and as the crisis in the Church gets worse.
- Secondly, I have been able to see that we are not some privileged people, whom God has spared: He sanctifies all our members and our faithful through failures, trials, disappointments, and in a nutshell, through the Cross - and not by any other means.

With 65 new seminarians this year, the Society holds a new record of entries into its seminaries over the past thirty years. You were Rector of the La Reja Seminary in Argentina for almost six years. How do you intend to foster the development of even more numerous and stronger vocations?
I am convinced that the true solution to increase the number of vocations and their perseverance, does not reside primarily in human and, so to speak, “technical” means, such as newsletters, apostolic visits or publicity.
- First of all, a vocation needs to hatch in a home where Our Blessed Lord, with his Cross and His priesthood, is loved. A home where there is no spirit of bitterness or criticism towards priests.
- Then, it is through osmosis, through contact with truly Catholic parents and priests deeply imbued with the spirit of Our Lord Jesus Christ that a vocation awakens. It is at this level that we must continue to work with all our strength.

A vocation is never the result of speculative reasoning, or from a lesson we have received, with which we intellectually agree. These elements can help someone answer God’s call, but only if we follow what we said earlier.

On October 14th, Pope Francis canonised the Pope who personally signed all the documents of the Second Vatican Council, the Pope of the New Mass, the Pope whose pontificate was marked by 80,000 priests abandoning their priesthood. What does this canonisation mean for you?
This canonisation must call us to a profound reflection, far beyond the emotions of the media that only lasted a few hours and left no deep traces, neither among its supporters nor its opponents. On the contrary, after a few weeks, that singular emotion risks turning everyone to indifference. We must be careful not to fall into these traps.
- First, it seems to me quite obvious that with the beatifications or canonisations of all the popes since John XXIII, they have tried, in a certain way, to “canonise” the Council, the new conception of the Church and of Christian life, as established by the Council and promoted by all recent popes.

This is an unprecedented phenomenon in the history of the Church. The Church, after the Council of Trent, never dreamed of canonising all the popes without distinction, from Paul III to Sixtus V. She canonised only Saint Pius V, and not simply because of his links with the Council of Trent, or of its application, but because of his personal holiness, proposed as a model to the whole Church and put at the service of the Church as Pope. The phenomenon we are currently witnessing makes us think rather of the renaming of roads and city centres, in the aftermath of a revolution or a change of regime.

However, it is necessary to interpret this canonisation also in the light of the present state of the Church, because the eagerness to canonise the Popes of the Council is a relatively recent phenomenon and was seen most clearly with the almost immediate canonisation of John Paul II.

This determination to “hurry things up” shows once again the fragility in which the Post Vatican II Church, is currently situated. Regardless of whether you agree or not, the Council is seen as outdated by the ultra-progressive wing and by the pseudo-reformers, one example being the German episcopate. And on the other hand, the conservatives are forced to admit, by the proof of current circumstances, that the Council has triggered a process that is leading the Church towards increased sterility. Faced with this seemingly irreversible process, it is normal that The current hierarchy, through these canonisations, is trying to restore a certain value to the Council and thus slow down the inexorable tendency of concrete facts.

To make an analogy with civil society, every time a regime is in crisis and becomes aware of it, it tries to rediscover the country’s Constitution, its sacredness, its durability, its transcendent value… Whereas, in reality, it is a sign that everything that comes from this Constitution and that is based on it, is in peril of death and that one must try to save it by all possible means. History proves that these measures are generally insufficient to revive what has had its day.

Three years ago (on October 17th, 2015), Pope Francis delivered an important address promoting “synodality” in the Church, inviting the bishops “to listen to God, so that with him we may hear the cry of his people; to listen to his people until we are in harmony with the will to which God calls us”. According to his own words, (Address of 25/11/2017), it was based on this new synodality, that he promulgated the new laws simplifying the procedure of nullity of marriage, and also that he wrote Amoris Laetitia,as a result of the synod on the family. Do you recognise in this the voice of the Holy Ghost? What can you tell us about this new expression used today by the authorities of the Church?
The cyclical debate on synodality is nothing more than the repositioning in Post-Conciliar times of the Council’s doctrine on collegiality and the problems it has created in the Church.
In fact, they speak about it very often, even in debates that have other objectives or deal with other topics. One recent example was during the last synod on youth, where the subject was mentioned for the umpteenth time. This shows that the hierarchy has not yet found a satisfactory solution – and this is inevitable, since the problem is insoluble.

Indeed, collegiality places the Church in a permanent situation of a quasi-council, with the utopia of being able to govern the Universal Church with the participation of all the bishops of the world. This has provoked, from the national Episcopal Conferences, a demand for systematic and insatiable decentralisation, which will never end. We are faced with a kind of class-struggle by the bishops, that has produced, in some Episcopal Conferences, a spirit that could be defined as pre-schismatic. Again I am thinking of the German episcopate, which offers an example of all the current deformations.

Rome is in a stalemate. On the one hand, concerning the Episcopal Conferences, she must try to save what she can of her undermined authority. On the other hand, she cannot reject the conciliar doctrine or its consequences, without bringing into question the authority of the Council, and consequently the basis of current ecclesiology.

In reality, they all continue to advance in the same direction, albeit at different speeds. The ongoing debates manifest this underlying discontent, and especially the fact that this revolutionary doctrine is fundamentally contrary to the monarchical nature of the Church. A satisfactory solution can never be found, as long as the problem is not definitively rejected.

It is paradoxical, but the Society can help the Church, in reminding the popes and the bishops that Our Blessed Lord founded a monarchical Church and not a chaotic modern assembly. The day will come when this message will be heard. But, for the moment, it is our duty to keep this deep sense of the Church and its hierarchy, despite the battlefield and ruins that lie before our eyes.

How can the Church correct the errors of the Council? After fifty years, is it realistic to think that it will happen?
From a purely human point of view, it is not realistic to think so, because we have a completely reformed Church, in every aspect of her life, without exception. There is a new conception of faith and of Christian life that has generated, on a daily basis and in a coherent manner, a new way of understanding and of living the Church. Humanly speaking, going back is impossible.

But perhaps we forget too often that the Church is fundamentally divine, despite the fact that she is incarnated in men and in the history of men. One day, a pope, against all expectations and against all human calculations, will take things in hand - and all that needs to be corrected, will be corrected, because the Church is divine and Our Blessed Lord will never abandon her. In fact, he says exactly that when he solemnly promised that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). The beauty of the divinity of the Church will be all the stronger, since the current situation seems irreversible.

2018 was the thirtieth anniversary of the Episcopal Consecrations at Econe, conferred by Archbishop Lefebvre, in his extraordinary “Operation Survival” for Tradition. Do you consider that this act was unique by nature and that it was su/ccessful, in the sense that today other bishops agree to confer ordinations and administer confirmations in the traditional rite, or do you think that, as the years go by, other consecrations may need to be considered?
The future of the Society is in the hands of Divine Providence. It is up to us to discern the signs, in the same way as our founder did, faithfully, without ever wanting to anticipate or ignore Divine Providence. We have here, the most beautiful lesson given to us by Archbishop Lefebvre, and many of those who did not understand him at the time, have gradually reversed their judgements on him.

The District of France is the oldest and the largest district, even if it is now closely followed by the US District. What are the human, material and apostolic priorities that you have set for the new superior, Father de Jorna, who was the Rector of the Econe Seminary, for 22 years?
The various priorities can be summed up in a few words. The new District Superior has the beautiful task of ensuring that the true spirit, bequeathed to us by our founder, reigns in all our houses and in all the members of the Society: a spirit of love for the Faith and truth, for souls and for the Church, and in particular, all that flows from it: a spirit of genuine Charity between our members. Insofar as we keep this spirit, we will have a good influence on souls and the Society will continue to attract many vocations.

What a beautiful and exciting program he has! However, it is necessary for the faithful to associate themselves fully with it. You saw them come in their thousands for the recent pilgrimage to Lourdes, during which you celebrated the Solemn High Mass on the Feast of Christ the King. What do you ask of them? What do you offer them?
I was profoundly touched when I saw pilgrims of all ages in Lourdes, and in particular, many families, and many children. This pilgrimage is truly remarkable and also very significant. It reminds us that the future of the Church and vocations is in families where the parents have planted Our Blessed Lord’s Cross. Indeed, it is only Our Lord’s Cross, and the generosity that results from it, that produces large families.

In our selfish and apostate society, chastised by its own sterility, there is no nobler and more precious testimony than that of a young mother surrounded by her children, like a crown. The world may choose not to listen to our sermons, but it cannot help but see this magnificent sight. It also is true for the Society.

Ultimately, and I say it again, it is the same ideal of the Cross, which calls a soul to consecrate itself to God and which calls a mother to consecrate herself generously and unreservedly to the education and sanctification of all the children that Divine Providence wishes to entrust to her.

Finally, this pilgrimage also reminds us, and above all, that any revival can only happen under the mantle of the Blessed Virgin Mary, because in the current desert, there is no place in the world that continues to attract souls as much as Lourdes.

To the faithful of France, I say quite simply: remember that those who preceded you were fighters and crusaders, miles Christi [soldiers of Christ], and that the current battle for the defence of the faith and the Church is without doubt the most important that history has ever known.