Please see preceding page for earlier 7/2/09 entries.
Peter's necessary work
Translated from
VATICAN CITY, July 2, 2009 (Fides News Agency) - Pope Clement the Roman, recounting the deaths of the apostles Peter and Paul, observed that the envy of some in the Christian community itself had facilitated it.
After two thousand years, the same sin lives on in men.
There are those who are happy these days about the Pontifical Magisterium, if only because it has put a brake on the 'discontinuity' interpretation of Vatican-II, saying that widespread conflicts in the fields of doctrine, Catholic education adn liturgy are the result of misunderstanding
[deliberate, I believe] because the Council was clear about what it intended.
The Pope is 'Peter', head of the apostles.
His brother bishops legitimately pasture the flock of Christ
only in effective and affective union [or 'communion', the term Benedict XVI prefers] with Peter.
Otherwise, the Church will revert to its experience in the 4th century when almost all teh bishops of the world yielded to the will of an Arian (heretical) emperor.
At the time, only the Pope and a handful of bishops faithful to him kept the Catholic faith intact.
The Pope is where he is,among other things, as a reminder that the Church is not a human structure. And this too is not a small part of why so many diverse cultures and peoples find their identity in Church.
As the servant of God John Paul II often said, we are in the midst of a 'silent apostasy', which is becoming ever less silent and ever more obvious.
In the history of the Church, there has never been such a widespread lack of faith. The adversary is subtle and plants its barbs so deep in the hearts of suggestible Catholics that they are almost invisible.
Remember the prophet Daniel who warned that the 'enemy' would gain power over all nations in a peaceful manner and by flattery. ("He shall come in peace, and obtain the kingdom by flattery".)
Cardinal John Henry Newman suggested that apostasy by the people of God always precedes the advent of 'anti-Christs' - tyrants like Antiochus and Nero, Julian the Apostate, the atheist leaders of the French Revolution - each of them a 'type' or 'presage' of the anti-Christ, who was to have come at the end of history, when the mystery of iniquity would have manifested its final and most terrible insensibility.
The inability of believers to live their own faith, Newman warned, as in preceding epochs, would lead to "the kingdom of the man of sin, who negates the divinity of Christ and elevated himself in his place"
(M.D.O’Brien,
The Enemy, Cinisello Balsamo 2006).
There has been the attempt to reduce the Church to a global humanitarian agency with the utopian delusion that unity among nations can be realized through international organisms and not through Christ.
But the Lord, even if he sleeps in the boat during a storm, will wake up when he must and tame the waves. Then he will turn to us and ask why we have so little faith.
In the meantime, we must bear the Cross. We observe betrayal. And we suffer.
Newman writes on: "The goal of teh devil, when he sows revolution in the Church, is to throw it into confusion so that its attention is distracted and its energies dispersed. In this way, we will be weakened at the very time in history when we need to be even stronger."
And more from Newman:
"'But why does the Holy Father not act?', people ask. 'Why can he not impose obedience on dissident bishops and priests?' Well, he has done so repeatedly and in the most Christian way. But he does not have a police force nor an army. Lately, he has been more firm with the dissidents... But the solution is not authoritarianism, because that would simply pour gas on the flames of rebellion.
"The Holy Father will work for as long as there is light. He reminds us all of He who carried the Cross and died on it. In his own hands, that is all he carries: a Cross, and he always talks about the triumph of the Cross. Those who do not wish to listen must answer to God" (Ivi,p 402-403).
When one reads the nonsense spewed forth these days by 'Catholic' media like America magazine and the National Catholic Reporter, then the barbs of the enemy are far from hidden. I would like to see this affliction of logorrhea - foul and fouler in more ways than one - as some sort of a last-ditch resistance by an enemy consigned to the trenches.
But alas, being in the trenches can also mean 'entrenched' as I fear dissident Catholics are throughout the world, where they are enabled if not actually urged on by their dissident bishops and clergy who have absolutely lost all their scruples and couldn't care less that they had vowed poverty, obedience and chastity.
They claim they are following Vatican II but it is clear most of them have not read the Vatican II documents in a long time - if they ever have at all (probably simply swallowing the snake-oil peddled to them by the 'discontinuity' advocates).
These false prophets have managed to convince the predisposed that Vatican-II has sanctioned every Catholic to do as he pleases - the so-called 'primacy of individual conscience' - never mind what the Church teaches; pride-full power-obsessed bishops that Vatican II has made each of them the absolute authority over their own diocese, no matter what the Pope says [whom they can openly defy and even berate]; and all-too-willing priests that obedience is outmoded, and chastity is to be denounced as unnecessary for priests.
And that all such lack of scruples can be cancelled out if the priest or bishop or layman showed enough social activism to work among the poor and disadvantaged to try and change society.
Instead of living up to the Apostles of whom they re successors, they have chosen to be virtual apostates, as Cardinal Newman has called them.
Our tireless Benedict is continually trying to catechize them otherwise - but will they listen? It seems quite a number of European bishops never bothered to read his letter to them last March, and one suspects the same bishops and all like-minded priests will not even bother to read the Pope's letter to all priests for the Year for Priests.
One has to wonder, when was the last time such dissidents really prayed? And being who they are, how can they offer daily Mass with a clear conscience?
Surely it couldn't have been as bad in Cardinal Newman's time - if only because across a distance of almost 200 years, the numbers involved today are decidedly much greater, and there was not the instant information connectedness that there is now...
So I resolve to observe the Year for Priests by redoubling my prayers for all priests and bishops to be authentic men of God and friends of Christ as the Holy Father keeps exhorting them to be!....
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 15/07/2009 22:18]