00 10/03/2018 08:46


Now that the book is officially out, expect more reviews of it. [Or maybe not! There are obviously circles where to even think critically of this pope is looked on somewhat as on the magnitude of an excommunicable
sin! Marco Tosatti says enough here to tempt readers who may want to keep on hand a convenient compendium of all the anti-Catholic Bergogliades that one might otherwise lose track of, since there's a new one
almost every day. And at the rate Bergoglio is going, Lawler might well look forward to writing The Lost Shepherd, Volume 2, and so on...

On Phil Lawler's 'The lost shepherd:
How Pope Francis is misleading his flock'
A book review
Translated from

March 9, 2018
“Every day I pray for Pope Francis. And every day (I exaggerate, but only slightly), the pope makes another statement from which one understands that he does not approve of Catholics like me. If the Holy Father would reprove me for my sins, I would have nothing to complain about. But in his homilies at his morning Mass in Casa Santa Marta, the pope reproves me – and thousand upon thousands of other Catholic faithful – for being too attached to, and sometimes, suffering for, the truths that the Church has always taught”.
How many of those who are reading me now could well subscribe to these words? Very many, I believe. But it is not I who wrote them. Rather, it is the start of an excellent book, “The lost shepherd: How Pope Francis is misleading his flock”, by Phil Lawler, an American Catholic of great worth. In 1996, he founded the online Catholic news site, Catholic World News, which was the first of its kind, and its related website, Catholic Culture.org. He had been the first lay editor of Boston’s diocesan newspaper, The Pilot, has written five books, and is a contributor to the Wall street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. In short, he is anything but a ‘fringe Catholic’ or a ‘traditionalist’ [in the pejorative sense this term is often used these days].

Now he has written a book to express what many have perceived: a growing unease about the words, behavior, actions and decisions by the man at the very summit of the Church.
I had been one of the millions caught by the ‘Francis effect’, enthusiastic about his vision… But as time passed, the tone and even the content of the pope’s public declarations first perplexed me no end, and then created unease.

For months, in my work of reporting on the daily news from The Vatican, I did my best to provide reassurances – for my readers and even for my own self – that notwithstanding his alarming comments, Francis was not a radical who was leading the Church far from the ancient sources of her faith. But gradually, with reluctance, and sadly, I came to the conclusion that, in fact, that is who he is.”

Why would I write here about a book when I do not know that it would ever be translated to Italian, and therefore could interest only a limited number among the readers of Stilum Curiae? Because in reading it – and I thank the author for having let me do so, though I do not know him personally – I recognized myself in much of what he writes vis a vis the pope: About the course he has taken and the growing disillusion that has accompanied me in the past five years.

It is a disillusion that is primarily human: not so much about the pope’s politics and policies, even if much of this certainly are and continue to be highly questionable, but as to the human qualities of the person himself as has been revealed to us gradually by his gestures, his craftiness, his decisions, his choice of men around him, and his ‘silences’.

Thus, like so many other Catholics, and myself, Philip Lawler has had to admit to himself and then to others that
“the Roman Pontiff should be the focus of unity in the Church. Francis, unfortunately, has become the source of division. There are two reasons for this unhappy development: the pope’s autocratic style of governance, and the radical nature of the program that he has been pursuing relentlessly.

His autocratic style, which contrasts sharply with his promises of a synodal and collegial government, was never more evident than in January 2017 when he simply ignored and overrode the sovereign status of the Knights of Malta. As Sohrab Ahmari noted in the New York Times, the pope, on this point as on so many others, is on one side, whereas conservative Catholics are on the other. But a pope should not be on the side of any internal disagreement within the Church.”
Lawler writes – prophetically, if one thinks of the coming conference in Rome on April 7 on this very issue – that
“A correct understanding of the limits of papal authority would help to resolve the current crisis. The Bishop of Rome is not a solo potentate but the leader of the college of bishops”, as Lumen gentium made very clear."
[Obviously, Bergoglio thinks instead that the powers of the Bishop of Rome are any and all powers he as pope chooses to exercise, blithely ignoring what Vatican-I - which had decreed papal infallibility in matters of faith and morals – made very clear about the limits to such powers, as Fr Hunwicke never tires of pointing out every so often!]

Frnacis has not taught heresies, Lawler thinks, but
“the confusion he has provoked has destabilized the entire Church. The faithful have been led to question themselves as to what they believe in, what constitutes their faith. They look to Rome seeking a guide and leader, and instead, all they find is more questions, more confusion”.

I stop here. But I advice those who can and wish to do so, to read The Lost Shepherd. May God help us – and him – to find ourselves together, united this time.

The problem with starting out a public career in the global spotlight by exceeding all measures of popularity hitherto attributed to a pope, is that there is no other way to go but down. And when Bergoglio loses the trust of respectable and reputable Catholics like Aldo Maria Valli and Phil Lawler, or Fr. De Souza or Raymond Arroyo, for instance, who started out as great enthusiasts for Bergoglio, he's not likely to get it back soon, if at all, because he seems irretractably set on his anti-Catholic apostate course.

In contrast, when Benedict XVI became pope, he started out with an almost uniformly hostile press who had portrayed him most unkindly for more than two decades as God's rottweiler, the Panzerkardina,l and similar epithets dissing the fact that he firmly and unflinchingly fulfilled his role as defender of the faith and keeper of orthodoxy no matter how unpopular that made him in the eyes of the secular media and of the public opinion that they shaped.

But many of them warmed up to him somehow after, to their surprise, it became evident he was attracting more people to his audiences and Angelus prayers than even the great John Paul II in his peak years. Indeed, most of them reported on his Pontificate evenhandedly for the most part - that is,for as long as there was no whiff of 'scandal' they could exploit against him that would spark a flare-up of their historic animus - Regensburg, the Wielgus affair, Mons. Williamson, the 2010 campaign by the world's most powerful media to link him personally to a sex abuse episode or a cover-up for one, and finally, the media bonanza from the overblown and mostly bogus Vatileaks that they successfully parlayed into a war of attrition that played into his most unexpected decision to give up the Papacy. Which occasioned a gleeful Schadenfreude among all those who were biased against Benedict XVI to begin with, who now turned to open mockery of the stated reason for his stepping down and/or accusations of deserting his office.

One can count on the fingers of one hand the sum total of the episodes that the media exploited to 'justify' the image they had built of Joseph Ratzinger as cold, distant, unappealing and uncharismatic. Compare that to the never-ending barrage of infelicitous and unfortunate Bergogliades we have been subjected to in the past five years, and which get reported by all the media, friend and foe alike, because they really constitute news, though the spin is different depending on whether the reporting source is pro-Bergoglio or contra-Bergoglio.


Aldo Maria Valli calls his readers' attention to a Spanish priest who has been outspoken and calmly judicious about the state of 'the Church' (or what passes for 'the Church') in this pontificate..


Warnings from a Spanish priest
Translated from

March 3, 2018

Santiago Martin is a Spanish priest, born in Madrid in 1954, who founded in 1988 the movement Franciscans of Mary, which received pontifical approval from Benedict XVI in 2007. The movement, which has its own seminary, is now present in some 30 nations an has about 10,000 members.

Always very clear in his analysis of the actual state of the Church, Fr, Martin has not been afraid to speak in these past few years of the confusion and excessive polarization that prevail in the Church, and of the danger of schism.

Through the outlet Magnificat.tv, Fr. Martin noted recently that the issue of priestly ‘pedophilia’ in Chile, which has placed the pope in a difficult position, may have marked a turning point, when for the first time, the progressivist and liberal mass media were not on the side of the pope.

In this difficult context, already marked by profound divisions within the Church, Fr. Martin points out that this pope continues to pile up more issues that would ultimately widen the rifts and increase the prevailing confusion overall.

Fr. Martin cites recent statements of Cardinal Beniamino Stella, prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, who said that the coming synod on the Amazon region of Brazil could be the occasion for opening up the priesthood to viri probati, which in turn would open the door to ending mandatory celibacy for priests.

Martin says the Bergoglio Vatican has thereby opened a new battlefront to add to that already burning and controversial one related to Amoris laetitia and the access to the Eucharist that it would give remarried divorcees who have no intention of changing their adulterous life.

We are facing, says Martin, an acceleration of events that will do no good to the Church. In the present situation, ‘to press on the accelerator’ is dangerous because already “there is too much confusion, too many tensions”, and why open up new fronts of contention?

In another commentary, this time published in the Honduran newspaper La Prensa, Fr. Martin called attention to the activities of the Pontifical Academy for Life, saying it is not normal for its representatives to be openly declaring their support of artificial contraception. Nor is it normal that a group of Catholics who converted from Islam would write the pope, as they have done, to denounce that they feel they have been abandoned by the Church.

The situation is most concerning, Fr. Martin says, because on the one hand, there is a modernist current that seems to be at work in the Bergoglio Vatican on the basis of what has occurred so far in the past five years, and on the other, the Catholic world is growing more disoriented and many faithful no longer feel part of a church that has taken the side of the dominant mentality. Confusion atop confusion, tensions atop tensions, and a way out cannot be seen, because the controversial questions are multiplying rapidly. Throughout all of which concerned Catholics must remain calm and pray a lot.

The danger of schism, Fr. Martin says, is therefore not remote – it almost seems as if we are being pushed to that point. [As usual, my caveat about those who speak of schism, as well-intentioned and as absolutely reasonable as they are, is that they never define what such a schism would be like. Who is breaking from what? Faithful Catholics will certainly not break from the Church – if only because they do not think the church of Bergoglio is ‘the Church’ at all. Nor will Bergoglio and his followers break away because without the entire infrastructure and apparatus of the institutional Roman Catholic Church, they would be nothing but just another wannabe protestant denomination!]

In one of Fr. Martin’s best-known interventions (a lecture entitled "Love, truth and mercy" in May 2014, which can be read here; cibo-spir.blogspot.it/2016/03/lo-scisma-cattolico-santiago-marti... the Spanish priest says:
“The use being made of the concept of mercy is an absolutely demagogic exploitation, and therefore, false and harmful. The concept of mercy, wrongly understood as something apart from the concept of truth – or even the concept of love – can be dangerous, tremendously dangerous. Even for the person who is supposed to benefit from such mercy.”
Fr. Martin continues:
“I believe there are times in one’s life when one must have the courage to speak up. And to speak up frankly and honestly because, as we say in Spanish, ‘he who gives warning is not a traitor’. In order that certain things do not come to pass - and there are just too many possibilities – now is the time to speak up. Others are already doing so, from other aspects – theologial, patristic, dogmatic, canonical…

The New Testament is not the the only testament. The New Testament, which is the Revelation of Christ, completes an earlier Revelation [that of the Old Testament]. To forget that is to cut off the foundation of the building and causing its ruin.

God is love, but that is not the first thing he taught us. First of all, he taught us that he is All-Powerful, that he is the Lord, that he is the Judge. A loving judge, a fatherly judge, a merciful judge, but a judge. Yet we have arrived at a point where the idea of God as judge is dismissed, when it is made to seem like to be a judge is criminal.

Jesus says he is the Way, and he upholds the Decalogue as something that cannot be suppressed or supplanted. No one can do that! And therefore to dismiss morality as it is being done these days – saying that Christianity is not a moralism, by which is meant that one can be a Christian while living on the wrong edge of ethical behavior – is to reduce Christianity to sentimentalism”.

Recently, Fr. Martin called attention to the new appeal by Fr. Thomas Weinandy, the Franciscan theologian who wrote the pope an open letter last summer, made at a lecture in Sydney, in which he explicitly stigmatized those pastoral lines encouraged by this pope which are undermining the very foundations of the ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church’, and which specifically raise the issue of whether this church of Bergoglio is still considers the Eucharist as the source and summit of the life of the Church.

Fr Martin did not hesitate to denounce the German bishops who have now decided to admit, under certain conditions, non-Catholic spouses to Communion. “When the exception destroys the rule” is the title of his intervention which specifically opposes any pastoral work based on the logic of ‘case by case’.

Fr Martin says that following the sentimentalist concept of the Chistian faith, one ends up legitimizing every behavior by self-justification, a concept according to which “I do as I please with my life, and God is happy with that”. [Which is what Bergoglio constantly preaches, in effect: "God loves you as you are. You do not have to do anything but ask for his mercy" - but ask his mercy for what, if, in the Bergoglian universe, each one is supposed to 'discern' whether he is committing sin or not, in which therefore, sin has become a subjective concept, not one defined by God himself in the Ten Commandments and all the countless applications of God's law in both the Old and New Testament!]

“But to affirm that Mercy must be applied at the limits of Truth or against Truth, is certainly against the teachings of Christ”. To affirm that absolute objective Truth does not exist “not only negates 2000 years of Christian thought” but it is also “to regress culturally to a time before Socrates”.

As Joseph Ratzinger said in “God and the World: To be Christian in the new millennium”, in conversation with Peter Seewald,
“No one has the courage anymore to say that what the faith teaches is the truth. It is feared that to do so would be to show intolerance to other religions or other world views. And Christians in turn are reinforced in their fear of a concept of truth that they think is too high”.
[It is very indicative that Valli often ends up one of his anti-Bergoglio commentaries with an appropriate quotation from Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. I am very grateful to him for doing that, not just calling attention to the constant and consistent Christ-abiding wisdom of the Emeritus Pope, but also to the vast gulf that divides the sensibility and mindset of the 265th and 266th Successors of Peter.]

Very apropos, let me add to this post the latest from one of the disenchanted former Bergoglio enthusiasts (in the first full flush of the new pontificate) I mentioned earlier, Fr. Raymond de Souza:

Pope Francis’s first revolution – his clothing
by Fr Raymond de Souza

March 10, 2018

The first decisions required of a man elected in the conclave are prescribed. He must answer the question: “Do you accept?” He must choose his name. After those momentous decisions, the ceremony has its own momentum that carries the newly burdened man along.

On March 13, 2013, Pope Francis made another decision in those first few minutes. It signaled early on what sort of pope he would be. He decided he would not dress as other popes before him did. That he knew so soon and with such confidence that he would not do as his still living predecessor did, and as that long line of those before Benedict did, gave us an early indication of how Pope Francis conceived of himself as successor of St Peter. [Remember Tosatti's line in his book review above that his disillusion with Bergoglio has not been so much with his politics and policies, but with "the human qualities of the person himself as has been revealed to us gradually by his gestures, his craftiness, his decisions, his choice of men around him, and his ‘silences’." Early on, before he even appeared to the world as pope for the first time, Bergoglio's narcissism had quickly asserted itself. I have always argued that it has to be the primary explanation for everything wrong he has said and done as pope - and i his earlier life, for that matter. A fundamental character flaw that is necessarily reflected in everything he says and does.

Every pope, as every human being, has fundamental character flaws, but with the possible exception of soon-to-be Saint Paul VI's widely recognized Hamletlike equivocation on many things, I don't think any of the popes in my lifetime, from Pius XII onwards, ever allowed their human failings to get the better of them in the exercise of the Petrine ministry.]

The white papal cassock – technically a “simar” as it has the shoulder cape indicating the rank of a bishop – is basically the pope’s ordinary clothes when he is visible to others.

And not just when with others. In the 2010 interview book, Light of the World, Peter Seewald, who had spent a lot of private time with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, asked about the sartorial side of papal life: “Instead of a cassock, does he sometimes wear a sweater in his free time?” “No,” replied Pope Benedict XVI. “That is a legacy left to me by the former second secretary of Pope John Paul II, Mgr Mieczysław Mokrzycki, who told me: ‘The Pope always wore a cassock, and so must you’.”

So he did. It was indicative of Benedict’s humility that he accepted instruction on this point from John Paul’s junior secretary. Even in his free time he would conform to the office placed upon him.

When the pope is eating breakfast he wears his cassock. When he is doing something more solemn – blessing the entire world as universal pastor of the Church from the central loggia of St Peter’s, or receiving dignitaries of state in that same official capacity – he customarily dresses differently. That’s why on such occasions popes wear the mozetta – a red (or white) elbow-length cape worn over a surplice.

Pope Francis’s decision to set aside the mozetta and wear the same thing all the time – whether at breakfast at Santa Marta or solemnly blessing the world at Easter – was taken immediately. It indicated then that the Holy Father was comfortable acting independently of consultation with others, that an assertion of papal will would be made against traditional norms of deportment, and that gestures would be a key mode of papal leadership.

There are limits, of course, to how the pope might dress. It would be inconceivable to imagine the pope in a white suit, a businessman with a flair for the dramatic, à la Ricardo Montalbán in Fantasy Island. But for other senior prelates, this pontificate has marked a turn towards more worldly attire, with the business suit being the Holy Father’s preferred garment.

For example, the cardinals on the “C9” began meeting in their filettata cassocks, as was expected from any cleric in the presence of the Holy Father. I remember as a student in Rome that seminarians without their own cassocks would quickly borrow one if they were going to be presented by their bishops to the Holy Father. Now the C9 meets in business suits, where the pectoral cross can be discreetly hidden in a jacket pocket.

As the pictures from last month showed again, even curial priests and bishops on retreat with the Holy Father wear a business suit, though there are a recalcitrant few who wear their cassocks.

That a new expectation was in place was never more clear than in March 2017, when the newly elected prelate of Opus Dei, Mgr Fernando Ocáriz, was received by the Holy Father. The prelate of Opus Dei would not greet the sacristan in his chapel in anything other than a cassock, but he obediently appeared in a business suit to greet Pope Francis. He may well have had to borrow one, like seminarians once did for cassocks.

Does it matter? It is not of supreme importance, but it is important. Clothes may not make the man, but do reflect something real about him. The Catholic Church has given rather a lot of thought to clerical dress, reflecting upon what it means to be in the world but not of it.

The business suit for priests – introduced in countries where religious persecution of Catholics was common – is a shift towards a more worldly Church.

The cassock still remains the default attire for priests, according to the 2014 Directory for the Ministry and the Life of Priests, even though modifications have long been approved for most English-speaking countries. Still, in the presence of the pope it was expected. Then again, Church law also requires concelebrating priests to wear chasubles at Holy Mass if possible, a norm that is always disregarded at the Pope’s daily Mass in Santa Marta.

Clerical dress – for himself and for others – is not the most important decision Francis has made. But it was the first one.

The Bergoglio pontificate is also very much the pontificate of the slippery slope. Being permissive and careless about minor infractions eventually - sooner rather than later - ends up in condoning grievous mortal sin such as chronic unrepentant adultery as AL does, or, as the same document implies, even chronic mortal sin in persons who are active unrepentant homosexuals or otherwise sexually deviant.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 10/03/2018 16:21]