Late by several days, but I must go on record with Aldo Maria Valli's birthday tribute to the Emeritus Pope earlier this week. As I had occasion to remark that day, Valli takes one of Benedict XVI's
homilies, seemingly at random, but which somehow manage to get to the core of many of the needless 'perplexities' bedevilling and fracturing the Church today, though Benedict XVI himself probably
never imagined that this disunity would be brought about by the man who would succeed him as pope (a logical impossibility given that the pope, whoever he is, is supposed to be the visible symbol of
unity in the Church, not the principal agent of disunity as Bergoglio is - but the impossible became possible in Bergoglio!). To which Valli adds words from an address by Benedict XVI to the bishops
of the United States on April 16, 2008, when he marked his 81st birthday in Washington during his apostolic visit to the USA and to the UN.
I find this has become an effective way for Valli to criticize the current pope without having to do so directly all the time - simply by quoting words from Benedict XVI that are the polar opposite of
what Bergoglio is, does and says.
Happy birthday, Pope Benedict!
Translated from
Today, April 16, Joseph Alois Ratzinger, the emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, turns 91, and to celebrate the day, I wish to call attention to what he said in the Chrism Mass for Maundy Thursday in 2012. I chose this homily, among so many possible texts to choose from, because I think that in it,
Benedict XVI, by underlining some key words at the center of the renewal of priestly vows that all priests at the Chrism Mass, touched two points that are particularly relevant today, in the light of the situation that the Church is living through these days.
The first point is about the
munus docendi (teaching duty) of pastors, their responsibility to teach the faithful. He explained that priests, at all levels, are “stewards of God’s mysteries”
(1Cor 4,1), and that the ministry of teaching – the
munus docendi – is an important part of the goods they administer.
As a steward, the bishop - all the more so, if he is the Supreme Bishop – should never propose personal theories or opinions, because his first duty is to be in the service of the faith:
All our preaching must measure itself against the saying of Jesus Christ: “My teaching is not my own but is from the one who sent me” (Jn 7,16). We preach not private theories and opinions, but the faith of the Church, whose servants we are…
In this regard I am always reminded of the words of Saint Augustine: what is so much mine as myself? And what is so little mine as myself? I do not own myself, and I become myself by the very fact that I transcend myself, and thereby become a part of Christ, a part of his body the Church.
If we do not preach [about] ourselves, and if we are inwardly so completely one with him who called us to be his ambassadors, that we are shaped by faith and live it, then our preaching will be credible. I do not seek to win people for myself, but I give myself. The Curé of Ars was no scholar, no intellectual, we know that. But his preaching touched people’s hearts because his own heart had been touched.
The second point was about the zeal for souls,
animarum zelus:
“It is an old-fashioned expression, not much used these days. In some circles, the word “soul” is virtually banned because – ostensibly – it expresses a body-soul dualism that wrongly compartmentalizes the human being.
Of course the human person is a unity, destined for eternity as body and soul. And yet that cannot mean that we no longer have a soul, a constituent principle guaranteeing our unity in this life and beyond earthly death.
And as priests, of course, we are concerned for the whole person, including his physical needs – we care for the hungry, the sick, the homeless. And yet we are concerned not only with the body, but also with the needs of the soul: with those who suffer from the violation of their rights or from destroyed love, with those unable to perceive the truth, those who suffer for lack of truth and love. We are concerned with the salvation of men and women in body and soul.
And as priests of Jesus Christ we carry out our task with enthusiasm. No one should ever have the impression that we work conscientiously when on duty, but before and after hours we belong only to ourselves. A priest never belongs to himself. People must sense our zeal, through which we bear credible witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Let us ask the Lord to fill us with joy in his message, so that we may serve his truth and his love with joyful zeal”.
At a time like the present that is distinguished, as Prof. Roberto Pertice puts it, by “the deconstruction of the canonical figure of the Roman Pontiff”
(in which the pope’s munus docendi often appears linked not to the stewardship of God’s mysteries but to the exigency of proclaiming personal convictions) and by a predominantly horizontal view of the Church, have relegated to second place the
animarum zelus based on love for the truth, I believe that Benedict XVI’s words are more pertinent than ever.
I would like to add a recollection dating ten years back, on April 16, 2008, when Benedict XVI marked his 81st birthday in the United States. During that apostolic trip, on the evening of his birthday, he met with the US bishops at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washignton, and gave an epochal address, focused on the idea that
the Catholic faith cannot be reduced to a sentimental experience and a private matter, but it should influence the reality of the world. Which requires, he said, that bishops must answer the duty of guaranteeing to the faithful a moral formation that reflects “the authentic teaching of the Gospel of life”.
And the favored place to do this is the family, and, he told the bishops,
It is your task to proclaim boldly the arguments from faith and reason in favor of the institution of marriage, understood as a lifelong commitment between a man and a woman, open to the transmission of life. This message should resonate with people today, because it is essentially an unconditional and unreserved “yes” to life, a “yes” to love, and a “yes” to the aspirations at the heart of our common humanity, as we strive to fulfill our deep yearning for intimacy with others and with the Lord.
On that occasion, Benedict XVI also spoke about sexual abuse of minors. He called it one of “the signs contrary to the Gospel of life” and did not mask his ‘profound shame’ for the aberrant behavior of some men of the Church and the mismanagement of the problem by bishops.
He was as firm and courageous in acknowledging the errors of the Church with regard to the sex abuse problem, as he was in defending the family based on the indissoluble marriage between a man and a woman, as he was As a way out, he indicated a resolute process of purification:
“Indeed a clearer focus upon the imitation of Christ in holiness of life is exactly what is needed in order for us to move forward. We need to rediscover the joy of living a Christ-centered life, cultivating the virtues, and immersing ourselves in prayer. When the faithful know that their pastor is a man who prays and who dedicates his life to serving them, they respond with warmth and affection which nourishes and sustains the life of the whole community”.
Someone referred to that address as
the Church’s Magna Carta for pastoral guidance. Indeed, the words of the Pope (I was present as a correspondent) were striking for the courage of its self-criticism of the Church, the honesty of his analysis, his call to conversion, his lucidity in pointing out the way of prevention, and the total absence of any attempt to make excuses or justifications.
Happy birthday, Pope Benedict.
Yet another video treat thanks to Lella on her blog... A YouTube montage I had not previously seen
with images of Joseph Ratzinger as Archbishop of Munich.
Valli explains his belated disaffection for this pope and his pontificate in an interview for an unabashedly 'traditionalist' Italian website which has just opened its pages to accomodate the ideas of non-traditionalists who have become open critics of the pontificate...
ZONA FRANCA
A new feature of
Amidst the small and big upheavals which are shaking up the Church, a particularly interesting phenomenon has arisen. Namely, the reflections – none of it banal or predictable – by observers who are alien to the so-called ‘traditionalism’ which is attributed to any critical line towards the present situation in the Church. Their arguments are not always congruent to those taken by this site, for example, nor in general, of so-called traditionalist circles.
Indeed, especially as to the causes and the timeline of the crisis, they differ appreciably from us. But they have the value of being honest, intelligent, and especially, that they are not driven by motives of intellectual or professional profit, much less, of power-seeking.
Riscossa Cristiana has therefore decided to give such voices a space called Zona Franca (Free Zone) that guarantees them they can freely say what they think of the issues we most care about. Not because we seek ‘what unites us’ at all costs, but in order to compare intelligently what divided us and what may still divide us. We think it is important to understand what caused the change in their horizons during the past few years. Even if time is not always a gentleman, gentlemen always do know how to make good use of their time. Deo gratias.
‘In the face of the consequences of this
pontificate so far, we cannot keep silent’
An interview with Aldo Maria Valli
by Cristiano Lugli
Translated from
The well-known face of RAI [Italian state TV] journalism, Aldo Maria Valli, worked for many years at TG3 [the newscast of RAI’s third channel] and since 2007, as the Vatican correspondent for TG1, RAI’s premier newscast on its first channel. Writing on his blog, Duc in altum, Valli started in 2016 to express reservations about the pontificate of Jorge Bergoglio, which he subsequently consolidated and elaborated in depth in his last two books:
266. Jorge Mario Bergoglio Franciscus P.P. and
Come la Chiesa finì, both published by Liberilibri. Certainly, a big surprise to those who had considered him a supporter of a vision for the Church which appears to have found its achievement in Bergoglio’s work.
So, Mr. Valli, what has changed? What has given rise to your clear and rather critical positions about Bergoglio’s Pontificate? And how difficult was it to get there?
Initially, I was sympathetic to Pope Francis. Shortly after his election, while preparing for a TG1 special on his life at Casa Santa Marta, I asked to see him and he received me most cordially. We spoke at length, and I appreciated his simple faith, his devotion ti St. Joseph and to St.Therese of Lisieux, and his willingness to listen.
I sought to understand his perspective, which was to emphasize primarily the fatherhood of God, rather than his commandments, in the effort to bring people closer to the faith and to the Church. But little by little, I could not help notice, with growing discomfort and pain, a great disequilibrium in his preaching. And I refer especially to the idea of mercy disconnected from repentance and conversion, almost as if the human creature had a right to be forgiven and God had a duty to forgive.
This pope never speaks of divine judgment and he wastes no opportunity to discredit divine law as it were only the concern of ‘pharisees’. After Amoris Laetitia, my perplexities grew even sharper, and I decided I could no longer keep silent. Thus was born the first book,
266, in which I consider many problematic aspects of this pope’s teachings (for instance, his view of Islam and his idea of welcoming any and all migrants), and then subsequently,
Come la Chiesa finì.
Which is a novel. How do you explain this choice of genre?
It is a story set in an imaginary future, in which, progressively, under the leadership of popes who are all South Americans and who all choose to be called Francis, the Church has strayed from the Truth, and in the effort to seem ever more open to the world and a friend to everyone, she ends up condemning herself to irrelevance. At which point, it has become very easy for the masters of the world to liquidate it once and for all. It is a narrative in which I make ample use of sarcasm and paradox. Readers have told me they laughed a lot. But alas, one laughs in order not to cry. In effect, the novel is a tragedy.
What gave birth to this novel?
My doubts, my perplexities, but also
from so much sorrow at seeing the depositum fidei increasingly put at risk and discredited in the name of a generic call to mercy and dialog. It is the sorrow of a son who sees a disturbing disorientation in his father, of the sheep who sees with dismay that he can no longer rely on his shepherd. Of a believer who sees relativism spreading within the Church herself. But I also do not spare my criticism of modernist theology and its language which has had great success in the world and in the mass media, although all it offers is emptiness, or worse, heresy.
Getting back to 266, which is an essay and is considered one of the most exhaustive reviews so far of this pontificate, what would the reader find in it?
I focus on the pontificate of Bergoglio and raise many questions.
One above all: Is Francis the ‘pope of mercy’ or the ‘pope of relativism’? I let the reader come to his own conclusion, though I certainly do not hide my perplexity. I could say that I anticipated with this book the DUBIA that the four cardinals articulated over AL.
My questions are radical:
What is more important to the ‘church of Bergoglio’? The salvation of souls or the psycho-physical and emotional wellbeing of persons? Then, I tackle more specific issues, starting from the failure to denounce the religious roots of Islamist extremism, to the Realpolitik followed by this pontificate in diplomacy, as we see in its negotiations with China, in which it would seem that the holy See, in order to come to some agreement with the Communist regime in China, seems ready to enter into an agreement which would be equivalent to betraying the
libertas Ecclesiae (ecclesiastical freedom), as Cardinal Zen has been denouncing courageously.
In your opinion, did the rupture take place in 2013, or do you think that the prodrome to this crisis must be found in Vatican II, if not earlier?
The discussion would be very long and merit a tract of its own. Vatican II, on the one hand, acknowledged the need to open windows that had remained closed too long, and on the other hand, offered modernism the chance to bring into the Church, along with ‘fresh air’,
heterodox theses that substantially replace God with man. Thus, in the first place, our norm is no longer divine law, but what man wants; no longer the Creator’s judgment, but the creature’s psychology; no longer Christian freedom, but a surrender to worldly libertinism; no longer the Commandments as our moral guide, but shortcuts and exemptions; no longer fear of God, but staking the right to self-realization, etc.
Facing up to modernity, which is necessary and even healthy, has triggered a ruinous collapse. From this point of view, we could say that Bergoglio’s pontificate is not so much the cause of the present crisis but the outcome of a process that began more than half a century ago.
(i.e. from Vatican-II). Nonetheless,
motus in fine velocior (movement has become much faster ultimately) – we are witnessing an acceleration that can only leave us troubled and dismayed.
What do you think of those who had denounced from the start all the apparent problems of this pontificate and remained generally by themselves and often attacked by everyone else?
As I said, I was not among those who denounced the contradictions and ambiguities of this pontificate right from the start. Indeed, at first, I placed my trust in him. But my perplexities gradually came to light and exploded with AL. Other observers did notice these contradictons and ambiguities from the very beginning. As for style, to each his own. For instance, I could never succeed at being aggressive. So I prefer to use irony.
But what matters is that
we so-called ‘opponents’ of this pontificate (I think, however, that it is we who are the pope’s true friends), although we have each acted on our own and obviously without consulting each other, are arriving at the same conclusions. It means that the problems are objectively real.
Sometimes, a reader will ask me to ‘join forces’ with other newsman and commentators into some sort of a ‘pressure group’, but I think that our strength lies precisely in the fact that we act independently, with great freedom, and each according to his own character and personality.
As far as I am concerned, I never once felt alone in my positions. Since starting to express my own dubia about this pontificate, I have come to know many new friends, leading to beautiful relationships. Of course, on the other side, there is the fact that some friends of long standing have stopped being seen or heard from, but that’s the way it is. I feel very tranquil. Particularly gratifying to me are the attestations of esteem and respect – not a few – from those who, although they think differently, do acknowledge the passion and intellectual honesty of my positions.
I think the important thing, on the part of those of us who are countercurrent to the mainstream and the ‘ecclesially correct’ these days, is to continue making our case with great rigor, and not to fall into personal attacks, and then, last but not least, to pray for this pope as he always asks us to do. [The problem is, considering how he continues to make new inroads into the deposit of faith, and with increasing gravity, one suspects that his ‘pray for me’ appeals are nothing more than pro forma, as is so much that he does and says to ‘prove’ he is still Catholic.]
What changed with the election of Bergoglio?
- That in the meantime, we have in the Church for the first time the coexistence of two popes, a situation that we are meant to consider ‘normal’ and peaceful, but it inevitably means tensions that can only grow with time (as we saw in the case of Mons. Vigano’s letter to the emeritus pope).
- Then we have
this magisterium that is completely unbalanced toward the pastoral to the detriment of doctrine, but which is fundamentally wrong, because pastoral ministry cannot exist on its own but must be founded on doctrine.
- Then there is the new centrality on the word ‘discernment’ that is, however, formulated so ambiguously, to the point that
it would seem discernment should lead to justifying sin instead of to respect for divine law.
- Superficiality and ambiguity dominate in this pontificate, even as the ‘famous’ curial reform remains unachieved.
It is a tragic picture in many aspects, within which
this pope continues to receive consensus from afar, from those who are not in the Church or no longer in the Church, who feel confirmed in having distanced themselves from the Church,
whereas those in his flock right next to him are looking around for leadership and do not at all feel confirmed in their faith.
All of this also in large part due to the pope’s way of communicating – I think in particular of his interviews and his inflight news conferences – that
in many ways is not worthy of the Petrine munus and of the pope’s potestas docendi (authority to teach).
Turning back briefly to the Vigano case: whoever asked the emeritus pope to write something about those 11 booklets dedicated to Bergoglio’s theology showed a great deal of arrogance! Benedict XVI answered elegantly, but without masking his discomfiture. And yet at the end,
no one felt it necessary to apologize to him, while the man who made the mistake received praise from the reigning pope!
Did your choice to take a position against some of Bergoglio’s actions and statements have any repercussions on your professiona or personal life?
As a believer, I know that the good God sends everything, even trials, for our good. This phase, as painful as it is, is therefore providential.
The important thing is to use our reason as illumined by our faith. I believe that we laymen have an important task: we must stay alongside all the many pastors who are now disoriented. Obviously, when one places oneself in the service of truth, there is a price to pay, but nothing can give as much joy as being cooperatores veritatis – a co-worker in the truth.
You are not the first, nor will be the last, to note with courage and honesty the problems that afflict the Church up to the highest levels of her hierarchy. Do you know of a similar situation in the history of the Church, and if so, how different is today’s reality?
It is not the first time that
statements of the magisterium which are deliberately left unclear have allowed the coexistence of different and opposing interpretations even on some doctrinal issues, as in the case of AL on the indissolubility of a Catholic marriage and on the Eucharist.
Typical of this was the fourth century with its controversies on the Trinity and on Jesus. At the time, the most widespread heresy was the Arian heresy which questioned the divinity of Jesus. A scholar that I respect, Claudio Pierantoni, has said that
the current crisis – with its very serious proportions - is not any less critical than the fourth century crisis. At that time, just as today,
heresy became widespread not so much through openly erroneous statements but through generic and ambiguous statements.
It is what we have in AL, where there is no open negation of the indissolubility of marriage, but there is a substantial negation of the consequences that necessarily arise from its indissolubility. Tne there is the ‘case by case’ discernment which is really the Trojan horse for relativism.
What do you think that Catholics faithful to the Magisterium should do at this time?
To pray a lot and to have others pray. By oneself, in groups, in the family. Pray tirelessly for the Church, and above all, for the pope, and continue using reason illuminated by faith, to defend the faith soberly and in tranquility but without shortcuts.
How do we get out of this situation?
I am not a prophet and I do not know. But I have total trust in God. With the help of the Holy Spirit, whom we should invoke incessantly, we will get through. We may not now see the overall design and it may seem that everything is collapsing, but God does not abandon his children.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/04/2018 14:49]