00 22/01/2019 01:33
Is religion dead?
Translated from

January 17, 2019

I have been making use of my library ladder these days to get hold of books which have been gathering dust on unreachable shelves. After having sneezed at least 5 times, my eyes came on a small booklet with a brown cover which seemed to urge “Read me!” So I started reading. And did not stop till the end.

It is called Religione e future by Sergio Quincio (1927-1996), a theologian and an exegete in his own very personal way, and whom older readers in Italy may recall. The edition I have is from 2001, but it was first published in 1962, which is significant to consider. Quinzio, who was 34 at the time, wrote it around the time Vatican-II was opening.

Shortly after I started reading, I came across this striking statement in a paragraph entitled ‘The disappearance of religion’: “A word that could easily be cancelled from our vocabulary without making our current ideas inexpressible is the word ‘sacred’”.

I said to myself, So this is why the book was urging me to read it. For some time I had been reflecting on the end of the ‘sacred’, and here was an author who said 56 years ago what I was thinking.

The etymology of the word sacred is somewhat complicated and I will not dwell on it here. Let us just say that its roots convey the ideas of separating and prohibiting, on the one hand, and following and adoring, on the other.
- Whatever is not profane is sacred.
- Whatever pertains to God and not to the ordinary is sacred.
- Sacred time and space are separated from ordinary time and space.
- Whatever leads us to God and to adoring God is sacred.

Quinzio notes that the word ‘sacred’ cannot possibly be taken out of the vocabularies of the civilizations that have preceded ours. If we did, then we would deprive them of something essential for them to express what they think of life, of the world, and of man himself. But contemporary man could well do without the word. If preceding civilizations found much that is sacred in life, today, nothing is sacred – rather, contemporary man thinks that it is beautiful and useful to desacralize everything.

I don’t intend to embark on a disquisition about modernity and post-modernity, if only because I do not think I am capable, but still I think that a distinctive feature of our time is precisely the rejection of the sacred.
- There are no more reserved, separate, distinct times and spaces for man’s various concerns. Everything is muddled.
- There is no more time and space left for man to take a step back and leave room for God.
- Instead, very often – even among men of the Church – it is God that ought to take a step back and leave room for man.

Even some persons who believe in God often manifest that they no longer have any idea even of what is sacred. One does not have to be a religious anthropologist to appreciate this. One simply has to go to any Catholic church on any Sunday.
- People enter the church, which is supposed to be a sacred and consecrated space, as if they were coming to a meeting.
- It is very rare to see anyone genuflecting, very rare to see anyone making the sign of the Cross in a way worthy of the gesture.
- is very rare to see anyone showing reverence, much less worship.
- Silence, an expression of the sacred, has been eliminated from the liturgy and replaced by the protagonism of man – priest and congregant alike – who celebrates himself.

But what do we expect when the men of the Church have spent decades doing everything to eliminate – or at the very least, to reduce and dilute – the sense of the sacred? I shall not spend time denouncing here what has been so often denounced – the elimination of high altar, liturgy celebrated verso populum, the elimination of communion rails, the very garments worn by the Mass celebrant, the indiscriminate access to the sacristy even during Mass by laymen, etc, etc. It is clear that the Church, after the Novus Ordo reform, for many reasons we do not need to revisit, has herself worked hard to desacralize churches and her rites as much as possible.

The result, as Quinzio wrote, is that for us – which includes believers, which includes Catholics – nothing is sacred anymore. And even when we are celebrating a rite – as solemn as it may apprar to be – we are not glorifying God but contemplating ourselves.

But Quinzio’s reflections in 1962 include many other points that kept my nose glued to the dusty pages of his book. As when he rites: “Religion, from being a virile occupation, has become typically female, an effeminate activity, and young people now think it is a matter of honor and a proof of maturity to despite it”.

He expresses in a sentence a concept which comes to mind whenever I hear anyone say that the Church ought to give ‘more room’ to women. Now I will be called sexist, retrograde, etc, but any demand to give more room to women in the Church can only come from those who do not know the reality of the Church. Because in the parishes today, women already have a lot of room, more room than ever before, which is perhaps too much. Not through their fault but throught he fault of the men who simply are not there, who have virtually disappeared from parish life. So it is difficult to deny that Catholicism has been undergoing a feminization.

Going ahead with Quinzio: Reflecting on the Protestant churches, with which it is fashionable for Catholics today ‘to seek dialog’ earnestly, Quinzio asserts at some point: “The survival of these churches in the world has been at the price of renouncing their faith which has been transformed everywhere more or less into a generic liberalizing moralism.”

Which is very true and evident especially if one travels in northern Europe. But one has to ask: Why must Catholics seek dialog so much with those who have stripped themselves or are stripping themselves of faith? Why are we not seeking instead to convert these brethren?

So many other pages I could quote from Quinzio. As when he observes that today, since there is no more religion, so there is no more true atheism. The time has passed when believers and non-believers could debate directly. But not now, when indifference [and religious indifferentism] reigns even among those who still nominally consider themselves believers or non-believers.

Quinzio also notes that many believers have reduced God to a mere father figure, overruled by his children, who think he is not capable of any judgment. Or even when they say that true religion – here one must think of all those saccharine theoreticians of listening, of tolerance, of being open – is not just vague affected comfort but ‘a powerful force’ that is ‘absolute’ which has to dp with blood and death.

And how to react to a statement in which Quinzio observes that religion no longer creates anything. Look around you: There is no more Catholic poetry, Catholic architecture, Catholic music, Catholic painting. Only, at the most, imitations done in mockery or as provocations (a word dear to those who have nothing to say), or even downright counter-testimonials (as we see in the horrible new churches which appear planned and designed to repel the faithful instead of attracting them).

I stop here, because there are just too many citations worth pointing out. Quinzio does not mince words when he says ‘religion is dead’, and although ‘the ritual cadavers of the great religions’ continue to circulate, th truth is that man today lives without religion and does not even notice the need for it (because he no longer even has the vocabulary to express such a need).

Almost 60 years since the book was first published, one could add that one may observe some symptoms of a return to religion, but it is more like seeking to use religion to satisfy some human need. Man can exploit religion, even if he can no longer abandon himself to contemplation, is unable to render glory to God, can no longer feel any sense of wonder while presumptuously placing himself at the center of everything.

Conclusion? “The truth is that man’s capacity to believe and to hope has undergone a terrible collapse.” And it is preciscely this decisive capacity that has leaked out in all but a very small part of our culture and civilization”.

How sad, someone will say. No. As Quinzio himself observes in one of his Fragments of Religion (the concluding part of the libretto), "there is an appointed time for everything, we are told in Ecclesiastes”. Even an appointed time for the return of religion and a sense of the sacred. To try to recognize such a time, with the help of the Lord, is probably what we are meant to do for now.

I think the following item - rather shocking in its own way - is among the developments that constitute part of the progressive 'loss of religion' as practised by our reigning pope himself...


'Goodbye even to the traditional blessing of the lambs on the Feast of St Agnes' [One is tempted to think Bergoglio can't stand the odor of real sheep!]

Update on ‘Abolition of
Catholic Tradition by Bergoglio’

January 20, 2019

We are coming out with this editorial for another sad update – the umpteenth. We were alerted by a brief Facebook entry by Mons. Eleuterio Favella [a traditionalist Roman priest] who wrote:
• Tomorrow January 21, contrary to an a very old tradition, the pope will not bless the lambs whose wool will be used to weave the palliums for this year’s batch of new metropolitan bishops.
• After having been transferred in the Bergoglio years from its traditional location in the Urban VIII Chapel of the Apostolic Palace to a rather anonymous St. Martha Hall, the brief but significant ceremony – which apparently no longer means anything to the reigning pope – has been suppressed without explanation, and no apologies to the Trappist priests of Tre Fontane in Rome who raise the lambs and formally deliver them to the pope, and to the Benedictine nuns of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, tasked for centuries with fattening the lambs then shearing their wool to use for weaving the palliums.
• Though with some modifications, the sacred ceremony, celeerated on the Feast Day of St. Agnes, survived the post-Vatican II ritual changes, and was particularly loved by the last two pontiffs who were not Roman – John Paul II and Benedict XVI who never failed to demonstrate his well-known fondness for animals during the ritual.
• After a progressive downsizing of the ritual in recent years, the suppression this year is another step – which may be small but is nonetheless paradigmatic – along the way of an unstoppable degradation of the ‘outgoing church’ which obviously does not know what to do with sacred symbols.

We checked the Vatican calendar of Pontifical Liturgical celebrations for which there is nothing listed for the pope on January 21. [I also checked the Vatican’s daily bulletin today, January 21, and it only contained a list of the private audiences given by the pope.]
- In January 2018, the pope was on an apostolic trip somewhere, so the absence of the ceremony was justified.
- And the “Presentation of the Lambs on the Feast of St. Agnes” was observed by this pope in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017.
- But not this year.

Which leads us to update our sad list of liturgical events eliminated from this pope’s calendar:
– The pope’s public Mass on August 15, Feast of the Assumption [which had been celebrated by the popes before him in the church of Castel Gandolfo; Bergoglio has refused to use the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo, but what keeps him from saying the Assumption Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica?]
- The First Vespers of Advent at St. Peter’s basilica – with or without the Pontiff.
- Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament by the pope when he makes pastoral visits to various churches.
- Eucharistic Adoration in St. Peter’s Square during important Church events. (Even during the pope’s Jubilee Year of Mercy, not a single public Eucharistic Adoration was held in St. Peter’s Square[.
- Since last year, the procession in central Rome on the feast of Corpus Domini – the pope decided to do it in Ostia, a far suburb of the capital. [Since 2015, after ostentatiously choosing to walk behind the float carrying the Blessed Sacrament for the whole procession route between the Lateran Cathedral and Santa Maria Maggiore in 2014, he has not taken part in the Roman procession at all, choosing instead to await the processants at the Santa Maria Maggiore, where he presides at the final Benediction but without ever genuflecting in front of the Blessed Sacrament. At his age and with his ailing knees and sciatica, he obviously is unable to do the walking anymore, but neither is he capable of kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament on the float as John Paul II and Benedict XVI did – because he never kneels or genuflects for the Blessed Sacrament, though he has no trouble doing that with each of the 12 persons whose feet he washes every Maundy Thursday].
- No Eucharistic Adorations during his apostolic voyages or at WYD [??? I thought there was one in Rio].
- No more doves used at the traditional greeting to Italian Catholic Action at the Angelus on the last Sunday of January: Colored balloons are used instead [since a seagull brutally attacked one of the doves in 2014].
- And if we are to go by what he did at last New Year’s Day Angelus, no more apostolic blessing to the faithful in order not to offend non-believers.

Oh, but he has added a ritual for a holiday he created: the First Vespers for Creation on September 1 (and the corresponding Mass next day).

What can we say? Let us pray! And listen to the words of St Paul which no one preaches anymore from 2 Timothy:
“1 I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingly power:
2 proclaim the word; be persistent whether it is convenient or inconvenient; convince, reprimand, encourage through all patience and teaching.
3 For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine but, following their own desires and insatiable curiosity, will accumulate teachers
4 and will stop listening to the truth and will be diverted to myths.
5 But you, be self-possessed in all circumstances; put up with hardship; perform the work of an evangelist; fulfill your ministry.


Let us also listen to the Venerable Fulton Sheen who wrote these prophetic words in 1948:
“[Satan] will set up a counterchurch which will be the ape of the [Catholic] Church...
with all her external characteristics, but in reverse and emptied of its divine content.”
The Antichrist will not be so called; otherwise he would have no followers. He will not wear red tights, nor vomit sulphur, nor carry a trident nor wave an arrowed tail as Mephistopheles in Faust. This masquerade has helped the Devil convince men that he does not exist. When no man recognizes, the more power he exercises. God has defined Himself as “I am Who am,” and the Devil as “I am who am not.”

Nowhere in Sacred Scripture do we find warrant for the popular myth of the Devil as a buffoon who is dressed like the first “red”. Rather is he described as an angel fallen from heaven, as “the Prince of this world,” whose business it is to tell us that there is no other world.

His logic is simple: if there is no heaven there is no hell; if there is no hell, then there is no sin; if there is no sin, then there is no judge, and if there is no judgment then evil is good and good is evil. But above all these descriptions, Our Lord tells us that he will be so much like Himself that he would deceive even the elect — and certainly no devil ever seen in picture books could deceive even the elect. How will he come in this new age to win followers to his religion?

The pre-Communist Russian belief is that he will come disguised as the Great Humanitarian; he will talk peace, prosperity and plenty not as means to lead us to God, but as ends in themselves...

The third temptation in which Satan asked Christ to adore him and all the kingdoms of the world would be His, will become the temptation to have a new religion without a Cross, a liturgy without a world to come, a religion to destroy a religion, or a politics which is a religion — one that renders unto Caesar even the things that are God’s.

In the midst of all his seeming love for humanity and his glib talk of freedom and equality, he will have one great secret which he will tell to no one: he will not believe in God. Because his religion will be brotherhood without the fatherhood of God, he will deceive even the elect.

He will set up a counterchurch which will be the ape of the Church, because he, the Devil, is the ape of God. It will have all the notes and characteristics of the Church, but in reverse and emptied of its divine content. It will be a mystical body of the Antichrist that will in all externals resemble the mystical body of Christ...

But the twentieth century [now the 21st century] will join the counterchurch because it claims to be infallible when its visible head speaks ex cathedra on the subject of economics and politics, and as chief shepherd of world communism.
- FULTON J. SHEEN, Communism and the Conscience of the West (Bobbs-Merril Company, Indianapolis, 1948), pp. 22-25.
Even Fulton Sheen could not have remotely imagined that within 65 years of his prophetic words, Satan or the Anti-Christ would manifest himself as the elected pope of the Catholic Church, no less! I apologize to anyone who may think that with this statement, I have gone too far. It's just that the accumulated weight of daily evidence seems to bear it out.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 22/01/2019 17:17]