I often regret that Sandro Magister does not post often enough on his blog - twice a week is probably the most he does - but it says something that for the second time in a row when I find time to post something on this forum after a few days absence, his new blogpost is the one I consider most significant to post first... The primary dictionary meaning of 'phantasm', BTW, is 'a figment of the imagination', in which sense, this pontificate and this pope are serial purveyors of miscellaneous phantasms - and in a plainer word, 'lies' - that are all toxic to the faith.
Proselytism - Pope Francis's phantasm
May 22, 2019
In entitling the speech given on May 20 by Pope Francis to the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, Vatican News, the official digital news bulletin of the Holy See, emphasized his umpteenth inevitable broadside against “proselytism.”
The text that Francis was reading did not mention it, but the pope could not resist making this addition off the cuff:
“There is a danger that is popping up again - it seems overcome, but it pops up again: confusing evangelization with proselytism. No. Evangelization is testimony to Jesus Christ, dead and risen. It is He who draws in. This is why the Church grows by attraction, and not by proselytism, as Benedict XVI had said. But this confusion has arisen to some extent from a political-economic conception of evangelization, which is no longer evangelization. Then the presence, the concrete presence, through which they ask you why you are this way. And then you proclaim Jesus Christ. It is not seeking new members for this ‘Catholic society,’ no, it is showing Jesus: that He should show himself in my person, in my behavior; and with my life opening up spaces for Jesus. This is evangelizing. And this is what your founders had in their hearts.”
Further on Francis added, again off text:
“On this allow me to recommend to you the last sections of ‘Evangelii Nuntiandi.’ You know that ‘Evangelii Nuntiandi’ is the greatest pastoral document of the post-Council: it is still recent, it is still in effect, and has not lost its power. In the last paragraphs, when it describes what an evangelizer should be like, it speaks of the joy of evangelizing. When Saint Paul VI speaks of the sins of the evangelizer: the last four or five sections. Read it well, thinking of the joy that he urges for us.”
None of these extemporaneous additions are surprising. Both the criticism of proselytism and the exaltation of “Evangelii Nuntiandi” are the mantra of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, every time he speaks of missions.
But it is the why and the how of this twofold insistence of his that are difficult to understand.
If by “proselytism” Francis means a missionary effort pushed to the extreme 'forced', so to speak, and measured by the number of the newly baptized, it is a mystery how he could have the conviction that this is a real “danger” in the Catholic Church which “is popping up again today.”
Because if there is one incontestable reality in the Church of the past half century, it is not the excess but the collapse of the missionary drive.
It is a collapse that was well-known to Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI, who tried in various ways to oppose it and call the Church back to an authentic mission: the first, among other ways, with a synod on evangelization and with the subsequent apostolic exhortation “Evangelii Nuntiandi” of 1975; the second with the 1990 encyclical “Redemptoris Missio”, the third with the 2007 “Doctrinal note on some aspects of evangelization” and with a new synod on the missions.
Without receiving a favorable welcome for these appeals of theirs, except in the vitality of some young Churches of Africa and of Asia or, in the West, in a few isolated pockets that have been able to keep alive the authentic missionary impulse. Among which none other than the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions received in audience three days ago by the pope.
One member of this institute was Fr. Piero Gheddo (1929-2017), to whom John Paul II entrusted the composition of the encyclical
Redemptoris Missio and who even before that was among the main authors of the missionary decree
Ad Gentes of Vatican Council II.
[In which the participation of then Vatican-II peritus Joseph Ratzinger, alongside the now Venerable Fulton Sheen, among others, I recalled last week with a post on the final drafting session for Ad Gentes held in Nemi, Italy, in 1965.]
But contrary to his predecessors and on the basis of an opposite interpretation of the missionary experience of the Church in the last few decades, Francis seems to want instead to put the brakes on the missions.
In essence, he wants a silent “testimony” to the Christian faith with one’s life, with one’s behavior, in the first place with love of neighbor.
And only after the testimony eventually prompts questions does he encourage “proclaiming Jesus.” But without ever clarifying this second step, and instead stopping every time with insisting on the first, the only healthy alternative - for Francis - to the much-deplored “proselytism,” complete with citations from Paul VI’s encyclical
Evangelii Nuntiandi, which Bergoglio thinks to be “the greatest pastoral document of the post-Council.”
However, even Francis’s frequent recourse to this document of Paul VI opens contradictions. Because it is true that Paul VI assigns a “primordial importance” to the silent testimony of life, in the hope that this may touch minds and hearts and ignite an expectation. But immediately afterward he writes:
“Nevertheless this always remains insufficient, because even the finest witness will prove ineffective in the long run if it is not explained, justified - what Peter called always having ‘your answer ready for people who ask you the reason for the hope that you all have’ - and made explicit by a clear and unequivocal proclamation of the Lord Jesus. The Good News proclaimed by the witness of life sooner or later has to be proclaimed by the word of life. There is no true evangelization if the name, the teaching, the life, the promises, the kingdom and the mystery of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God are not proclaimed.”
And that’s not all. Because
proclamation is not enough - Paul VI continues - if it does not “arouse a genuine adherence in the one who has thus received it,” an adherence to the Church and a desire to become an evangelizer in turn. “Witness, explicit proclamation, inner adherence, entry into the community, acceptance of signs, apostolic initiative:” all of this is, for Paul VI, the “complex process” of evangelization.
Francis systematically skims over all of this. [As he consistently omits passages from the Gospel quotations of Jesus which do not reflect what he, Bergoglio, chooses to 'teach' as 'Christian' doctrine.]
And even the appeal he addresses to the missionaries of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions - to reread in the last paragraphs of “Evangelici Nuntiandi” the warnings of Paul VI against “the sins of the evangelizer” - appears contradictory.
If for example one rereads section 80 of the exhortation, one will see that
Paul VI brands as errors precisely those modes of thinking that for the most part apply to the many supporters of the current pontificate, and that in fact paralyze any sort of missionary impulse:
“One too frequently hears it said, in various terms, that to impose a truth, be it that of the Gospel, or to impose a way, be it that of salvation, cannot but be a violation of religious liberty. Besides, it is added, why proclaim the Gospel when the whole world is saved by uprightness of heart? We know likewise that the world and history are filled with ‘seeds of the Word;’ is it not therefore an illusion to claim to bring the Gospel where it already exists in the seeds that the Lord Himself has sown?”
And again, in section 78, against certain facile domestications of the truths of faith:
“The preacher of the Gospel will be a person who even at the price of personal renunciation and suffering always seeks the truth that he must transmit to others. He never betrays or hides truth out of a desire to please men, in order to astonish or to shock, nor for the sake of originality or a desire to make an impression. He does not refuse truth. He does not obscure revealed truth by being too idle to search for it, or for the sake of his own comfort, or out of fear.”
Of course, Bergoglio trusts that most if not all, of those he addresses will always follow the path of least resistance and not even bother to read what he asks them to read, simply taking it for granted that all they have to know is what he tells them, and trusting his word that what they have not read will be consistent with what Bergoglio says. In which they cannot be more wrong: This man is a deliberately purposeful serial obscurantist, in the dictionary meaning of the term - "a person who deliberately prevents the facts or full details of something from becoming known" - and not in the misleading way Bergoglio and his fellow anti-Catholics use to describe any Catholic who sticks to what the faith has taught in its first 2012 years.
As to doing mission work primarily through 'witness', i.e., teaching by example, Spain and Portugal would never have evangelized the Americas and their Catholic outposts in Asia if their missionaries - usually a handful in each expedition - had relied on 'witness' alone to evangelize.
What could a handful do - with no knowledge of the local language and limited means to traverse the newly-conquered lands - to evangelize by example, unless they first did as they did out of necessity: learn the local language as fast as they could, and immediately teach those they could immediately reach the basics of the faith, and with the missionaries' example of living the faith, gain converts convinced enough of their new faith to spread it by word and deed to their countrymen, and so on and so forth? Sure, there were also mass conversions effected by sheer dint of conquest, but that didn't mean the missionaries simply left them to their own devices and did not seek to inculcate in them the essentials of the faith in doctrine and practice.
And after the initial years of conquest, obviously Catholic missionary work in Latin America had become effective enough so that indigenous religions, with their pantheism and polytheism, not to mention pagan rituals involving human sacrifice, died out on the continent and in neighboring Central America. Catholic faith did not require other sacrifices to propitiate God than the Supreme Sacrifice offered by Jesus which the faith relives daily in the sacrifice of the Mass.
How sad that Bergoglio, who grew up in Latin America, could so ignore the history and reality of the evangelization that made it possible for him, among tens of millions of Latin Americans since the 16th century, to be born and raised Catholic, and hence to qualify to be elected pope in his case (even if, alas, his Catholicism appears to have been nothing but a veneer he expunges daily in word and deed).
I was going to translate Antonio Socci's latest Libero column blasting the pope and his mindless minions in the Italian Church for their open electioneering against the candidates of Italy's current majority party for the European Parliament. The Lega is headed by Interior Minister Matteo Salvini who has been called Satan by pro-Bergoglio Catholic periodicals in Italy because he opposes mass illegal immigration to Italy, upholds Italian national sovereignty, and last weekend took out his rosary during a political rally in Milan to say he wished to consecrate Italy to the Mother of God. Bergogliacs quickly accused him of 'instrumentalizing' his faith for political purposes.
The first image pair on the left was CRUX's illustration of an AP article entitled 'Italy's Catholic establishment faults Salvini for rosary"; Salvini has referred to the power of the Rosary more than once before at political rallies, doing what no other politician does and has done to profess his Catholicism openly .
Christopher Ferrara, commenting on these developments in his Fatima Perspectives, has translated much of Socci's column, so here he is:
Italy's anti-'mass migration' minister:
More Catholic than the pope?
by Chris Ferrara
May 21, 2019
LifeSiteNews reports that during a rally attended by a huge crowd in the Piazza del Duomo in Milan, outside its world-famous cathedral, Italy’s deputy premier and interior minister Matteo Salvini “appealed to the six patron saints of Europe, Ss. Benedict of Norcia, Brigid of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, Cyril and Methodius, and Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)… then kissed his rosary, looked up to [the] statue of the Blessed Mother atop the 14th-century Milan Cathedral and said: ‘I entrust Italy, my life, and your lives to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, who I’m sure will bring us to victory.’”
Salvini is the head of Italy’s Lega (League) Party, which is part of a growing pan-European movement for the assertion of national sovereignty against the tyranny of the EU, including its insane policy of Islamization through the mass migration of predominantly military-age Muslim males into EU member states.
Salvini’s checkered personal life aside (a divorce and a child born out of wedlock), the objective significance of his words is a stunning development in European politics, whose arid secularity had long since buried in the desert sands of post-Christian and post-modernist Europe even the bare mention of God, much less His Blessed Mother.
And who should be perceived as the most formidable opponent of Salvini’s rude interruption of the sociopolitical status quo but Pope Francis?
[It must be remembered BTW that Bergoglio, who often touts his great Marian devotion, once derided pro-lifers praying the rosary beofre aborton centers as 'professional bead counters". That's how devoted he is to Mary. Of he had been the pope at the time of the Battle of Lepanto, he would have led an armada to welcome the conquering Ottoman Muslims!]
In a blistering column entitled “The Electoral Campaign of Bergoglio,” Italian Catholic journalist Antonio Socci notes the
“collective obsession of the elite” (my own translation) with Salvini, giving rise to
a “party of demonization” that “appears to be envenomed by the desire to cripple him and stave off the victory of the Lega [in the next elections].”
But what Socci finds most disconcerting is that
the party of demonization has “identified as its moral and political leader a bishop who should occupy himself with the things of the Church, a bishop who is not even Italian and is the head of a foreign state, that is, Jorge Mario Bergoglio.”
“For weeks,” Socci continues, “Bergoglio has been engaged in an electoral campaign to the applause of the media, employing the theme of migrants. Heedless of the fact that, finally, with departures [from Africa] blocked, there has been a vertical drop in the number of victims at sea, he continues to impose his bombardment of Italy to surrender to mass immigration (but he does not welcome even one of them in the Vatican)…. Lucia Annunziata [a prominent liberal journalist-activist] yesterday celebrated ‘the opposition of Pope Bergoglio’ to Salvini.”
Not for Francis, notes Socci, is any concen for the crisis of faith in Italy, which has seen a further seven percent drop in Church membership during this pontificate. Nor does he seem much concerned with the worldwide persecution of Christians by communists and Islamists, whom he never criticizes as such, whereas for Christians “he reserves ferocious criticisms and even insults…”
What appears to occupy this Pope is “politics rather than God. A politics of the extreme Left that, for example, leads to him to receive in the Vatican royalty such as the Leoncavallo Social Centre [a leftwing social justice organization], but not the Catholics of Family Day or the March for Life, who are disgusted.”
Socci notes the damning fact that Francis has said of Salvini: “I cannot and do not want to shake his hand,” whereas “instead he shook the hand of Emma Bonino… an ultra-abortion, anticlerical laicist” Francis has lauded as “one of the greats of Italy today.”
Meanwhile,
“Bergoglio’s right-hand man, Father Spadaro, has unleashed horrified invective against Salvini because he held up a Rosary before the gathering in Milan (Bergoglio prefers Bonino and Napolitano, who wave very different banners).”
In sum, Socci concludes — as should be obvious to all but the most resolutely obtuse by now —
“many in the Vatican have forgotten God and pretend that everyone else has done the same. But the Catholic people do not want to betray their own faith and their own values. To Bergoglio, who makes objectionable declarations (even on Jesus) and conducts the politics of the Left, the greater part of Catholics prefer Salvini, who invokes the protection of the Madonna for Europe…”
Writing for Crux, the liberal commentator John Allen clucked his disapproval over the telling fact that “
when Salvini mentioned Pope Francis, the crowd booed.”
Lost on people like Allen is the chilling reality of the situation that crowd reaction reflects: that the Catholic people, even a not very observant Catholic people, have reason to believe that one of their politicians is more Catholic than the Pope. Yet another sign of an ecclesial crisis like no other the Church has ever witnessed.
Here is the AP story on Salvini and his rosary:
Italy’s Catholic establishment
faults Salvini for rosary
by Nicole Winfield
ROME, May 20, 2019 (AP) - Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini on Monday defended his invocation of God at a political rally, after Italy’s Catholic establishment criticized it as a cynical exploitation of faith ahead of European Parliament elections this weekend.
Salvini brandished a rosary and entrusted Italy to the Virgin Mary at a rally on Saturday, which featured a host of far-right European leaders. He spoke glowingly of St. John Paul II and retired Pope Benedict XVI for having tried to remind Europe of its Christian roots.
Asked to comment, the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, said God was for everyone and “invoking him for yourself is always very dangerous.”
An Italian Jesuit close to Pope Francis, Father Antonio Spadaro, denounced the use of the rosary and the invocation of God for political campaigning. Spadaro, who has criticized the influence of right-wing evangelicals in U.S. politics, tweeted a photo of a commemorative coin of U.S. President Donald Trump being promoted by U.S. evangelicals as a “point of contact” with God.
“There are those who in electoral campaigns use God and saints, and those who even sell coins to pray for the re-election of their candidate,” he said. “The exploitation of religion seems to know no decency.”
Salvini has increasingly sought to portray his anti-migrant policies as driven by a desire to save lives by discouraging migrant crossings from Libya, and as being entirely consistent with the Christian message. At least one Italian bishop has warned voters that anyone who votes for Salvini’s League isn’t Christian.
In a tweet Monday, Salvini refused to comment directly.
“I’ll continue to give witness to my Faith with my work for a more beautiful and secure Italy. Gossip I’ll leave to others. Amen.”
The Italian Catholic magazine
Famiglia Cristiana said
Salvini’s performance “was the latest example of the exploitation of religion to justify the systematic violation of human rights in our country.” [What phantasm is the magazine talking about??? FC is the magazine that featured Salvini on its cover last year with the headline, "Begone, Satan!"]
It was a reference to
recent criticism by U.N. human rights investigators that Salvini’s migrant policies violate international human rights conventions. [Excuse me! what a preposterous claim! If they think they have a case, why don't they sue Salvini at the International Court of Justice or one of those ultra-liberal UN tribunals the left loves to patronize? If they don't file a formal complaint, it means they can't because they don't have a case and are merely blowing hot and poisonous air.]
LifeSite had a very good round-up of the reaction to Salvini's trbute to Mary and the Rosary in MILAN last weekend...The headline should really read "Vatican leaders outraged that a Catholic politician should openly show he is Catholic"...
Vatican leaders outraged as anti-immigration
Italian minister commends Italy to Mary
by Lisa Bourne
May 20, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — The Catholic Italian politician with whom Pope Francis reportedly refuses to meet because of his immigration stance held and kissed a rosary during a political rally over the weekend and invoked the Blessed Mother, drawing criticism from some quarters and support from others.
Deputy Premier and Interior Minister Matteo Salvini also commended his country, its citizens, and himself to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, something unheard of from a Catholic political leader.
During a Saturday political rally attended by tens of thousands in the Piazza del Duomo in Milan, Salvini appealed to the six patron saints of Europe,
The Tablet reports - Ss. Benedict of Norcia, Brigid of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, Cyril and Methodius, and Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein).
Salvini then kissed his rosary, looked up to statue of the Blessed Mother atop the 14th-century Milan Cathedral and said, “I entrust Italy, my life, and your lives to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, who I’m sure will bring us to victory.”
Salvini, head of Italy’s Lega (League) Party, led the rally with 10 other populist European leaders ahead of this week’s European Parliament elections, in a growing resistance to centralized European Union (EU) control, and in particular, support for tightening immigration laws.
Salvini is a conservative Catholic politician known for prioritizing his country over the European Union, garnering himself the “nationalist” label by the media and the left.
Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro, editor of
La Civiltà Cattolica and close confidant of Pope Francis, was among the Catholic figures disapproving of Salvini’s use of the rosary at the rally. Spadaro issued several critical tweets, spreading the criticism on Facebook as well, saying Christians should be outraged.
Last year, Spadaro opposed a proposed Italian law mandating that crucifixes be placed in all public buildings, accusing Salvini’s League party on Twitter of seeking to use the crucifix as an action figure, which is “blasphemous.”
Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin issued an apparent rebuke of Salvini as well on Sunday.
“I believe partisan politics divides, but God belongs to everyone,” Parolin told reporters at the Cathedral of St. John Lateran. “Invoking God for oneself is always very dangerous.”
Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, president of the European Bishops’ Conference, also denounced Salvini to Italian newspaper La Stampa, according to The Tablet, saying particular groups cannot appropriate Christian values and that “acceptance and integration are essential values of the Gospel” and have “no color.”
Bishop Domenico Mogavero, of Mazara del Vallo, a port in western Sicily, head of the judicial affairs panel of the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI), said Salvini can no longer call himself a Christian, according to ANSA new service.
“We can no longer stay silent over the bragging of an ever more arrogant minister,” Mogavero said.
“We can no longer allow (people) to appropriate the sacred signs of our faith to peddle their inhuman, anti-historic views, diametrically opposed to the Gospel message,” he said. “Those who are with him cannot call themselves Christian because they have reneged on the commandment of love.”
Italian Catholic weekly
Famiglia Cristiana termed Salvini’s kissing of the rosary and response to the pope an instance of “fetishist sovereignty.”
Enzo Bianchi, lay [non-Catholic] founder of the ecumenical Monastic Bose Community and an influential figure in the Italian Church, said he was “profoundly disturbed” by Salvini’s actions.
“How is it possible that a politician today, at an electoral rally, can kiss the rosary, invoke the patron saints of Europe and entrust Italy to the immaculate heart of Mary for the victory of his party?” Bianchi tweeted. “Catholics, if you love Christianity, do not be silent. Protest!” [Protest what? A Catholic doing what the so-called Catholics in the church of Bergoglio ought to do but are too cowardly to do? How Bergoglian to avoid professing the Catholic faith in any way, especially in public that 'the world' would find offensive and objectionable! Nothing could be more 'politically incorrect' and therefore taboo, verboten, in the church of Bergoglio!]
At the same time,
Catholic Herald columnist and associate professor of theology for the Catholic University of America C.C. Pecknold offered reasoned analysis, pointing out among other things that Salvini echoes what Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah has said on immigration.
Sarah, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, has affirmed a nation’s right to differentiate between refugees and economic migrants and acknowledged a globalist effort to de-Christianize the West via mass migration. He has also criticized the idea that social justice issues such as immigration displace or are on the par with the Church’s primary purpose to save souls.
Pecknold also noted that Salvini quoted Sarah in his speech, along with G.K. Chesterton, Pope Saint John Paul II, and Pope Benedict XVI.
Conceding that Spadaro’s politics are different from Salvini’s
[more significantly, his church- the church of Bergoglio - is not the Catholic Church of Salvini and all Catholics who do not abide by Bergoglianism], Pecknold said he was nonetheless baffled by Spadaro’s comment that rosaries in politics should anger Christians.
“The Church does not have political models to commend, or defend,” Pecknold wrote. “The Church teaches precepts which are elevating standards for any order. Salvini appears to be cognizant of these principles, and that should be praised by the Church, regardless of policy disagreements.”
“There is nothing wrong with rosaries in politics” [What an undertatement! Pius V and the Catholic armada that defeated the Ottoman Muslims in Lepanto under the banner of Our Lady of the Rosary would have something to say to that!], he said. “We need whole nations consecrated to Our Lady.”
While Salvini was one among 11 European leaders to appear at the rally Saturday, the Associated Press reports that most of the tens of thousands of supporters who filled the square outside Milan’s Duomo cathedral were there for the Italian interior minister, with League flags filling the square among a “smattering” of national flags from other countries.
Pecknold had also written that at the end of the campaign rally, when Salvini commended himself and his country to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, “the Milan crowd cheered with Beatle-mania-like vigor.”
Salvini mentioned Pope Francis during the Milan rally Saturday, answering Francis’s comments to a group of journalists that same day at the Vatican not to forget that the Mediterranean had been turned into a cemetery due to migrant drownings.
“To His Holiness, Pope Francis,” Salvini said, “I say that the policy of this government is eliminating the dead in the Mediterranean with pride and Christian charity.”
The crowd promptly booed at the rally when they heard the pope’s name, The Tablet report said.
Several Italian publications reported in recent months based on information from anonymous sources that Pope Francis refuses to meet with Salvini because of Salvini’s strong stance against illegal immigration — this while Francis has met on repeated occasions with supporters of abortion and other issues in conflict with Church teaching.
More recently,
papal almoner Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, a close aide to Francis, said as well that the Vatican would deny Salvini a papal blessing for the same reason, comparing Salvini to an abortion-provider and Venezuelan dictators in making the point.
[Thus speaks the lawbreaking Vatican official who knowingly performed a criminal act against another state (Italy) for a stunt that was really in behalf of a Commmunist organization that has been occupying an abandoned building for years and made it into a commercial center - complete with a 1000-capacity disco and rave center, a movie theater and other revenue-making enterprises, including rent from a few dozen families in whose behalf Krajewski claims he pulled his stunt. Latest development is that not only is an Italian magistrate laying the appropriate charges against Krajewski, but he is also being dunned for having allegedly promised after he restored electricity to the illegally-occupied building that he would pay the accumulated bills - at least 300,000 euros - that the bulding occupants never paid the electric company.]
Immigration policy is a prudential issue over which Catholics can disagree regarding specifics of its handling. Abortion, however, is a mortal sin and non-negotiable according to Church teaching.
Francis continually signals support for open immigration, condemning attempts to stem the tide of Muslim immigration into Europe, even at the cost of national security.
Since 2015, Europe has faced large-scale to crisis-level immigration, mostly from Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and Africa.
Many migrants risk and lose their lives while trying to move, and there is rampant disagreement over refugee status, national sovereignty and security concerns, and terrorism and crime, as well as the burden of funding social support for migrants and refugees.
A complicit media establishment has continually downplayed any downside to open borders in most arenas throughout the crisis.
The pope has condemned walls related to national borders on more than one occasion — a veiled reference to U.S. president Donald Trump for Trump’s national security policies deferential to the U.S. Along this same ostensible vein, Francis even said in 2016 that “building walls” instead of “building bridges” “is not Christian.” Then he said again last month, “He who builds a wall ends up a prisoner of the wall he built.”
Salvini said on Monday that he would like to meet the pope, and he cited the Catechism to say the possible limits of welcoming immigrants had been exceeded.
“I would like to be received by the pope, but I have never asked for it,” Salvini said. “If the occasion will arise, I will be more than willing to meet him,” Salvini added, according to ANSA.
Salvini said welcoming migrants “is a ‘duty within the limits of the possible,’ according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church(, and) the possible has been surpassed.”
On Monday before an ANSA forum, Salvini questioned the idea that invoking the Blessed Mother is offensive.
“I hear I’m being called inhuman because I go around with a crucifix in my pocket,” he said. “May I ask for Mary’s help, or will someone be offended?”
Salvini admitted to being a sinner and said it does not stop him from keeping a rosary with him, Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle’s Qantara.de reports.
“I am the last among good Christians,” said Salvini, “but I am proud to always have a rosary in my pocket.
Salvini tweets a PS to relate what happened at a May 21 rally:
"Today at Gioia de Colle, I was moved - Signora Maria came n a wheelchair to the piazza just to meet me and present me with a crucifix, saying, "Matteo, I am with you". Such eetings give me the strength to go on and never to back down".
The 00:27 video clip shows him greeting the lady in the wheelchair who gives him the crucifix which he kisses.
twitter.com/matteosalvinimi/status/1130952670389256193?fbclid=IwAR1Va_Qwe0Om3ZmMY7QpjtwtLQx7tq1Ch1wPDDKGD1loqwUtJPt...
The new president of Brazil has even been more 'blatant' than Salvini in professing his Catholicism:
President has Brazil consecrated
to Mary by 'old rite' bishop
Bishop Fernando Arêas Rifan consecrated Brazil on May 21 in presence of President Jair Bolsonaro to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Arêas Rifan heads the old rite Personal Administration of Campos, an Old Rite Diocese which is unique in the world.
At the end of the ceremony, President Bolsonaro signed a consecration document. Catholic parliamentarians attended.
[More information from Wikipedia about Mons. Rifan and the diocese of Campos: Rifan is the Apostolic Administrator of the Personal Apostolic Administration of Saint John Mary Vianney established in January 2002 by Pope John Paul II for traditionalist Catholic clergy and laity within the Diocese of Campos. It is the only personal apostolic administration in existence, and the only Catholic Church jurisdiction devoted exclusively to celebrating the pre-1965 form of the Roman Rite.
The diocese was headed from January 1949 to 1981 when he retired by Bishop Antônio de Castro Mayer (died 1991), who opposed the use of the Novus Ordo in his diocese. The priests of Campos who shared his traditionalist Catholic views formed themselves into the Sacerdotal Society of St. John Marie Vianney (SSJV). In 1988, Mons Mayer joined Achbishop Marcel Lefebvre in consecrating the four bishops of the FSSPX, for which, like Lefebvre and the four bishops, he was excommunicated. In 2001, through the mediation of the Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos (died 2017) who was then the head of Ecclesia Dei, the SSJV wrote Pope John Paul II asking to be received into full communion with Rome. In answer, the pope granted them their request and subsequently arranged for the Personal Administration to enable them to continue using the traditional liturgy exclusively.]
5/23/19
Sandro MMagister has posted a PS to his May 22 blog commentary:
More on 'proselytism'
Translated from
May 23, 2019
My post yesterday on the nth assault by Pope Francis on ’proselytism’
[really an attack on active Christian mission -
"you do not have to preach Christianity at all, just live it"] prompted the following letter from Prof. Leonardo Lugaresi who is a scholar specialist on the Fathers of the Church. Readers of this blog will remember hi recent illuminating commentary on the topic of ‘the wrath of God’.
Dear Magister,
I found your article on May 22 on the myth of proselytism very timely, and I particularly appreciated your invitation to read Paul Vi’s Evangelii nuntiandi not in a reductive and misleading way.
That [Catholic] mission can be achieved substantially by the silent witness of a virtuous Christian life – which is certainly indispensable, and no one disputes this - is an error that has become increasingly cultivated in ‘the Church’ , along with the pious illusion (which is really not so pious as one can see) that in this way, Christians would be better ‘accepted’ in the world while avoiding differences and divisions which could harm dissemination of the Gospel, but which would, in fact, result in attracting ‘remote’ persons to thereby spontaneously wish to adhere to faith in Christ. [Which is a most unrealistic and totally false idea of human nature after the Fall!]
Of course, this can happen in isolated cases. and it is undeniable that there are countries in the world with concrete situations in which it is difficult to do anything else [i.e., where active Christian mission is not possible]. But to make ‘silent witness’ the norm for Christian mission is a true and proper betrayal of Christ’s mandate which was unequivocal: “Go, therefore, and make disciples (mathetéusate) of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them (didaskontes) to observe all that I have commanded you.” (Mt 28, 19-20)
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The Fathers of the Church, who lived in a world that was by no means ‘easier’ than ours, were fully aware of this. I am happy to bring up an acute observation by Tertullian which I think is most pertinent to the question. At the start of his Apologeticum (3,1), he comments on the effects of ‘good example’ by single Christians on a society that is generally hostile to Christianity:
What to say then of the fact that many, with eyes closed, have such an odium for the very word Christian that, even while acknowledging a good example, nonetheless condemn the quality?, Thus, “Oh, Gaio Seio is a good man, except that he is Christian”, or, “I find it surprising that Lucio Tizio, who is such a wise man, has suddenly turned Christian”. No one stops to reflect that if Gaio is good and Lucio is wise, it is because they are Christian, or whether one becomes good and wise by being Christian.”
In a non-Christian world, one that is hostile to Christianity such as the world in which Tertullian lived, and the world in which we now live, the silent witness of ‘good living’ by Christians is not enough. Because it becomes ‘sterilized’ by the world which reduces it to mere individual phenomenon, one that is ‘private and therefore culturally and socially irrelevant.
Witness does not suffice if it does not become ‘critical’ – and therefore inevitably ‘public’- which is to say, if it does not cause others to consider the link between goodness, of which Christian life is an undeniable sign and witness, and the fact that Christ is the only reason underlying that goodness. [For which purpose, the Gospel has to be preached as well as lived.]
The inconvenient question posed by Tertullian is precisely that which the world would never think about. So it is totally illusionary to expect that Christian witness – if it is ‘true’ in the sense of being able to question worldly living – could expect not to be met with hostility and contradiction.
Christian living is, in itself, a judgment on the world [Christ warned that it would always be ‘a sign of contradiction’] – and it cannot be otherwise, in the forms and limitations with which from time to time, circumstances make it possible to express the faith in words – as Evangelii nuntiandi says very well in the passage you cited quoting 1Peter 3,15 – in order to ‘give the reasons’ on which that life and the judgment it implies are based.
Cordially,
Leonardo Lugaresi[/dim
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 24/05/2019 17:30]