This is probably the best reaction I have read so far on Benedict XVI's April 2019 essay on the roots of the clerical sex abuse scandals in the Church. It states what ought to have been most obvious about the essay, but which even a 'hawk-eyed' Benedict watcher like me’ missed’ - I always took it for granted that, of course, Benedict XVI would have answered the Five DUBIA No, Yes, Yes, Yes and Yes, as any orthodox Catholic would. But taking this for granted is far from having before you eyes a written articulation of those answers by the Emeritus Pope himself- although not primarily intended to answer the DUBIA - in a restatement of the truths underlying those answers...
The occasion was most unexpected. But apparently, the Emeritus Pope saw an opportunity to express himself on the most troubling consequences for an already much-beleaguered faith because of his successor’s un-Catholic and anti-Catholic statements and actions - whether you consider these heretical or not. And he availed of it to great effect, so far.
It was a genius move for him to get an imprimatur, as it were, from his successor, through his Secretary of State, so no one can accuse him of being underhanded in any way. Devious, yes, but necessarily so, in order to let the world know he has not derelicted on his Catholic duty, despite the constraints of his self-imposed 'silence' and vow of obedience to his successor.
I think it is important to note that, as far as we can tell, he expressed none of this to any of the visitors who have seen him at Mater Ecclesiae, and in that sense, he has kept his ‘silence’. Bergogliac Benedict-haters like Robert Mickens – and with him, many others in the secular and in the supposedly Catholic media - immediately rose up to protest, “This time, Benedict has really gone over the line!” What line?
As a Catholic, he is fully entitled to exercise his duty and right under Canon 212.3, and that is what he has done. Without any gratuitous statements or gestures to underscore that he was doing just that, in his analysis of the sexual abuse crisis as fundamentally a consequence of the crisis of faith. Which effectively means the absence of God from the hearts of even those who were ordained to serve him and his Church, no matter how much they they try to continue to appear Catholic pro forma. It is the worst evil that could befall His creatures.
The DUBIA were answered
Only not by the pope who should have answered them
by Elizabeth A. Mitchell
May 11, 2019
Perhaps it was because Notre-Dame de Paris was burning. Perhaps it was because the best place to hide something from view is in plain sight. Or perhaps it was because we look for power in wind, earthquake, and fire, but miss the “still small voice” of God when He passes by.
(1 Kgs 19:11-13)
Whatever the reason, the world watched, read, and missed the answers to the DUBIA proposed by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in his April essay, “The Church and the Scandal of Sexual Abuse.”
In offering a three-part response to the crisis in the Church, he indirectly answers the five dubia that Cardinals Brandmüller, Caffarra, Meisner, and Burke presented years ago to Pope Francis.
The pope emeritus fulfilled a duty that Pope Francis has not, namely, to maintain the bishops and all the faithful in the unity of the Church’s constant teaching on faith and morals.
What did the pope emeritus say? He gives the Church and the world an unequivocal No, Yes, Yes, Yes, and Yes. Five questions, five answers.
Dubium One: It is asked whether, following the affirmations of “Amoris Laetitia” (nn. 300-305), it has now become possible to grant absolution in the Sacrament of Penance and thus to admit to Holy Communion a person who, while bound by a valid marital bond, lives together with a different person more uxorio (in a marital way) without fulfilling the conditions provided for by Familiaris Consortio n. 84 and subsequently reaffirmed by[] Reconciliatio et Paenitentia n. 34 and Sacramentum Caritatis n. 29. Can the expression “in certain cases” found in note 351 (n. 305) of the exhortation Amoris Laetitia” be applied to divorced persons who are in a new union and who continue to live more uxorio?
Benedict’s response: No.
“We run the risk of becoming masters of faith instead of being renewed and mastered by the Faith. Let us consider this with regard to a central issue, the celebration of Holy Eucharist. Our handling of the Eucharist can only arouse concern. . . .What predominates is not a new reverence for the presence of Christ’s death and resurrection, but a way of dealing with Him that destroys the greatness of the Mystery. . . .The Eucharist is devalued into a mere ceremonial gesture when it is taken for granted that courtesy requires Him to be offered at family celebrations or on occasions such as weddings and funerals to all those invited for family reasons. . . . It is rather obvious that we do not need another Church in our own design. Rather, what is required first and foremost is the renewal of the Faith in the Reality of Jesus Christ given to us in the Blessed Sacrament. . . .And we must do all we can to protect the gift of the Holy Eucharist from abuse.”
Dubium Two: After the publication of the Post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia (cf. n. 304), does one still need to regard as valid the teaching of St. John Paul II’s Encyclical Veritatis Splendor n. 79, based on Sacred Scripture and on the Tradition of the Church, on the existence of absolute moral norms that prohibit intrinsically evil acts and that are binding without exceptions?
Benedict’s response: Yes.
“Pope John Paul II, who knew very well the situation of moral theology and followed it closely, commissioned work on an encyclical that would set these things right again. . . .It was published under the title Veritatis splendor. . .and did indeed include the determination that there were actions that can never become good. . . .He knew that he must leave no doubt about the fact that the moral calculus involved in balancing goods must respect a final limit.”
Dubium Three: After Amoris Laetitia n. 301, is it still possible to affirm that a person who habitually lives in contradiction to a commandment of God’s law, as for instance the one that prohibits adultery (cf. Mt 19:3-9), finds him or herself in an objective situation of grave habitual sin (cf. Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, Declaration, June 24, 2000)?
Benedict’s response: Yes.
“A society without God – a society that does not know Him and treats Him as non-existent – is a society that loses its measure. . . .Western society is a society in which God is absent in the public sphere and has nothing left to offer it. And that is why it is a society in which the measure of humanity is increasingly lost. At individual points it becomes suddenly apparent that what is evil and destroys man has become a matter of course.”
Dubium Four: After the affirmations of Amoris Laetitia n. 302 on “circumstances which mitigate moral responsibility,” does one still need to regard as valid the teaching of St. John Paul II’s Encyclical Veritatis Splendor n. 81, based on Sacred Scripture and on the Tradition of the Church, according to which “circumstances or intentions can never transform an act intrinsically evil by virtue of its object into an act ‘subjectively’ good or defensible as a choice”?
Benedict’s response: Yes.
“There are goods that are never subject to trade-offs. There are values which must never be abandoned for a greater value and even surpass the preservation of physical life. . . .God is (about) more than mere physical survival. A life that would be bought by the denial of God, a life that is based on a final lie, is a non-life.”
Dubium Five: After Amoris Laetitia n. 303, does one still need to regard as valid the teaching of St. John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor n. 56, based on Sacred Scripture and on the Tradition of the Church, that excludes a creative interpretation of the role of conscience and that emphasizes that conscience can never be authorized to legitimate exceptions to absolute moral norms that prohibit intrinsically evil acts by virtue of their object?
Benedict’s response: Yes.
“The crisis of morality. . .was chiefly the hypothesis that morality was to be exclusively determined by the purposes of human action that prevailed. . . .Consequently, there could no longer be anything that constituted an absolute good, any more than anything fundamentally evil; (there could be) only relative value judgements. There no longer was the (absolute good), but only the relatively better, contingent on the moment and on circumstances. . . .But there is a minimum set of morals which is indissolubly linked to the foundational principle of faith and which must be defended if faith is not to be reduced to a theory but rather to be recognized in its claim to concrete life. All this makes apparent just how fundamentally the authority of the Church in matters of morality is called into question. Those who deny the Church a final teaching competence in this area force her to remain silent precisely where the boundary between truth and lies is at stake.”
Benedict’s response ends the deafening silence from the Vatican with regard to the fundamental questions of faith addressed by the DUBIA. He answers them, clearly and unequivocally. He knows the hour is late.
Benedict warns us that “the very faith of the Church” is being called into question. “It is very important to oppose the lies and half-truths of the devil with the whole truth: Yes, there is sin in the Church and evil. But even today there is the Holy Church, which is indestructible. . . .Today God also has His witnesses (martyres) in the world. We just have to be vigilant to see and hear them.”
Elizabeth A. Mitchell, S.C.D., received her doctorate in Institutional Social Communications from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, in Rome, Italy, where she worked as a translator for the Holy See Press Office and L’Osservatore Romano. Mitchell writes from Wisconsin, where she serves as Dean of Students for Trinity Academy, a private K-12 Catholic school. Her dissertation, “Artist and Image: Artistic Creativity and Personal Formation in the Thought of Edith Stein”, focused on the saint’s understanding of the role of beauty in evangelization. Mitchell also serves on the Board of Directors of the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, WI, and is an adviser to the St. Gianna and Pietro Molla International Center for Family and Life.
On the other hand, we have Fr. De Souza who has turned all jesuitical on us and wrongheadedly chosen to give Jorge Bergoglio the benefit of the doubt, yet again, after having spent the last two years at least, trying to show us through his commentaries that he had taken off the blinders about his fellow Jesuit to see him for the knave that he is. His principle reason for not agreeing with the Open Letter authors that Bergoglio cannot and should not be accused of heresy does not stand up: that they are "attempting to interpret in a precise way a teaching style that is not intended to be precise".
Excuse me, Father! He is the pope - how can he intend his teaching not to be precise? What happened to Peter's mandate from Christ to 'confirm your brothers in the faith'? He cannot even aspire to be a teacher, much less to confirm anyone's faith in anything, if he has made a habit of imprecision - both deliberately to dissimulate his true intentions, and because it arises from his own disordered way of thinking which expresses itself in his disordered, often incoherent, use of words.
In the middle of his arguments, Fr De Souza seems to poke ironic fun at the Spadaro principle that in Bergoglio's world, 2+2 is often 5. An assertion that should never be dismissed as being mere silliness because six years of this pontificate has abundantly shown us that it is the 'logic' by which Bergoglio and his world operate...Yet after six years of this relentless Bergoglian assault on our commonsense and on the Catholic faith, Fr. De Souza still calls it 'the puzzling pontificate'? What is puzzling about it when Bergoglio and his followers have told us from the start that "In four years, he will change the Church"? Should Fr. De Souza not focus on the frightening implications of Bergoglio's wreckovation of the Church so far rather than indulging himself by joining the 'heresy wars"?
The puzzling pontificate of Pope Francis
The signatories of the open letter accusing the Pope of heresy are attempting to
to interpret in a precise way a teaching style that is not intended to be precise
by Raymond J. de Souza, SJ
It’s a grave matter — and for that reason practically unprecedented — for learned and respected Catholic scholars to accuse the Holy Father of heresy, as recently was done by 19 signatories to an open letter.
The letter has occasioned much analysis. A certain consensus has emerged that where there is smoke there is usually fire, but in this case there is plenty of smoke but no real fire. And calling for the fire brigade when there isn’t a fire actually raging may lead to a certain complacency about all the smoke in the air.
I agree with the consensus that Pope Francis is not guilty of heresy, in part due to the fact that his teaching style is not sufficiently clear as to sustain such a charge.
I would not make the charge myself. But if a theologian of the world-class reputation of Dominican Father Aidan Nichols and a philosopher of similar status, professor John Rist, would take this step, it is noteworthy on those grounds alone. Father Nichols and Rist are serious scholars who know the Catholic tradition far better than nearly all of their critics. They deserve to be heard.
If they are crying wolf, it is not because they are out to make mischief; it is because there are wolves about. Even if the charge that the chief shepherd is indeed a wolf is not sustainable, it does not mean that the flock is entirely safe from danger, even from the pastors of the Church.
There is here a flawed approach. The signatories of the letter are attempting to interpret in a precise way a teaching style that is not intended to be precise. To put it another way, a pontificate whose principal interpreter — Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro, the editor of the magazine La Civiltà Cattolica — argues that in theology 2+2 can equal 5 is a pontificate that challenges the usual way of understanding pontifical texts. [No, Fr. De Souza, there should only be one way, the correct way, to read any pontifical text. If it is not clear and it is imprecise, it ought to be rewritten or tossed into hellfire. It is the worst sign of Bergoglio's disregard for - and maybe basic ignorance about - the primary duty of a pop,e that he treats tradition, papal protocol and magisterium according to whim, rather than upholding and keeping intact the deposit of faith handed down to him to be transmitted intact to the flock he serves.']
Consider some recent examples of papal communication.
On the recent return flight from North Macedonia, Pope Francis answered a question about the study commission he had set up to investigate the history of women deacons in the Church. This was a major study of great import, which long ago reported and about which nothing has been publicly said.
Pope Francis gave a long answer, summarizing that the commission did not come to a consensus. His answer is at best confusing and does not cohere easily. At the end of the answer, it is possible to reach various, contradictory conclusions about the state of the issue.
We can think also of the Holy Father’s response to a question a few years ago about whether the non-Catholic spouse in a Catholic-Protestant marriage can receive Holy Communion. The answer was a meandering collection of half-sentences and ellipses that muddied rather than clarified an issue on which Church teaching is actually reasonably clear.
Last month, Pope Francis gave an audience in which he answered questions about the international arms trade and the “Nigerian mafia” in Italy. The Holy See Press Office thought those remarks ill-advised, and so they were simply omitted from the official transcript, despite being captured on video. The issue there was not what the Pope’s words meant, but whether they existed in the first place.
That recalls the famous incident when Pope Francis stated that the “great majority” of marriages are “invalid.” That too got ex post excision, with the official transcript rendering it that “some” marriages are invalid, completely changing the meaning of what the Holy Father said.
These examples are not the doctrinal matters raised in the accusation-of-heresy letter. Nevertheless, they indicate an informal approach to papal teaching that emphasizes general dispositions rather than precise definitions. It is intended to be taken seriously, but not literally, to adapt the post-2016 election characterization of Donald Trump’s rhetorical style. [Donald Trump is not pope, and his effectivity as US president does not depend on his tweets or his self-indulgent pronouncements, but on the policies he is able to have made into law and to execute, and the people he depends upon to do this.
On the other hand, the faith - and the souls - of 1.2 billion Catholics are affected by anything the pope merely says or is reported to say. "The pope says... so it must be right" is both an immense responsibility no pope can ignore and an awesome power that can easily be misused as Bergoglio has been doing.][/di]
The same is true of the most serious charge in the heresy letter, namely that the teaching of Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love) in Chapter 8 is not compatible with the teaching of the 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor. That’s rather evident to anyone who reads the two texts side by side for their plain meaning.
But the Holy Father himself, echoed by many senior bishops, has insisted that no doctrinal change has been made. [Just because they say so does not mean it is so! This is not even a valid argument. When it comes to matters of faith and morals, anything equivocal is simply unacceptable. Has Fr. De Souza, like the pope and his praetorian phalanx, forgotten Jesus's words in Matthew 5,37 "Let Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No.’ Anything more is from the evil one"? That's not from the DUBIA cardinals, nor from the Open Letter writers but from the Lord himself. Would it be a stretch to say that all of Bergoglio's equivocations and doublespeak truly come 'from the evil one'?]
So it may be that Amoris Laetitia conforms to Veritatis Splendor in an unusual manner, as if 2+2=5. Or maybe that it contradicts settled teaching on the Eucharist in a manner that might be heretical. Or it might be that nobody really knows the answer, and the whole matter remains ambiguous. [oclore=#0026ff][What bullshit! What is ambiguous about the fact that Bergoglio caused the Argentine bishops' interpretation of AL's discernment BS about the Eucharist to be entered into the Acta Apostolicae Sedis as equivalent to a papal decree - authorizing Eucharistic sacrilege, in this case? It was an unforgivably cynical way of seeking to escape any technical accusation of material heresy since he is letting others say outright what he dare not say himself. This last option is not satisfactory, but it is not heresy.
Another example is the teaching in 2018 that the death penalty is “inadmissible.” To say that the death penalty is intrinsically evil would be a departure from Catholic tradition. But the new teaching did not say that. It said that it is “inadmissible,” a novel term with no fixed meaning in Catholic theology.
Indeed, that term was evidently chosen because it was new and had no fixed meaning. So it is not possible to conclude that the teaching of Pope Francis on the death penalty contradicts earlier teaching. [Just listen to that jesuitical blather that only underscores how ludicrous it is!]
The examples can be multiplied. Even on the issue on which Pope Francis seems unambiguous — open borders for migrants and refugees — there is doubt. Returning from Sweden in 2016, he departed from his usual emphasis, saying that countries should only accept as many refugees as they can reasonably integrate. So is the Holy Father in favor of welcoming all those who “knock on your doors,” as he said in Bulgaria this week, or just as many as can be handled properly? Both. Or perhaps neither. Or something in between.[Hah! And you, Fr. De Souza, are taken in by that one extremely rare outlier, if not the only one, in Bergoglio's almost daily riffs, thousands by now, about open-door illegal immigration???]
May 15, 2009
P.S. I had noted earlier that Fr Hunwicke, one of the original signatories/co-authors of the Open Letter t bishops about the reigning pope's heresies, has so far refrained from mentioning the Open Letter on his blog. Today, he did bring up something that ought to be remembered by Fr. De Souza and all those who would deny any heresy on the part of Bergpglio, simply because his language is never clear. Never mind that such ambiguous language is obviously deliberate to avoid anyone accusing him of material heresy when he is knowingly ambiguous, and even if his anti-Catholic intentions are unmistakable in everything else.
Hermeneutics of Magisterium (1)
May 15, 2019
Some five years ago, PF wrote:
"I have written an encyclical and an apostolic exhortation, and I continually make declarations and give homilies, and this is Magisterium".
On a more recent occasion, he said that the liturgical dispositions of the 1960s and 1970s were 'irreversible', and added: "This is Magisterium".
Such an understanding of what Magisterium is and how magisterial teaching operates seems to me to be at the level of toddler-talk. It must give rise to the suspicion that none of the teaching of someone who functions at this sort of level can be analysed as adult or as authentically magisterial.
Yesterday, he shared this ominous report:
14 May 2019
Bullies
Earlier in this pontificate, I received a letter from a friend which included these words:
"You will know that all of us who require the nihil obstat of the Holy See for our work have been threatened with its removal if we identify with any formal criticism. I received a renewal of this 'advice' only this morning".
[The nihil obstat is a certification by an official censor that a book is not objectionable on doctrinal or moral grounds, and that therefore it can be published without fear of church censure.]
Lovely lot, these Bergoglians, aren't they?
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 15/05/2019 17:19]