Assorted reflections on Luther, failed utopias,
Kennedy and anti-Catholicism in 1960s USA,
the collapse of the church in Bavaria under Cardinal Marx,
and 320 million radical Muslims who believe
all infidels must be exterminated
From his February 2017 column VIVAIO for
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Translated from
January 14, 2017
I happened to see the latest issue of the magazine in which Bolaffi (the oldest and largest philatelic business) reports the stamps to be issued this year. I see the page dedicated to the stamps from Vatican City State which announces an issue 'which is astounding' to use the words of the writer of the article: nothing less than a Holy See stamp celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Obviously, the image on the stamp is that of Martin Luther.
If the laymen at Bolaffi are 'astounded', it cannot be otherwise for Catholics who know how Papa Bergoglio made it a point to fly to Sweden (where, among others, the forced introduction of Lutheranism in the 16th century, for purely economic reasons, namely, for the state to acquire the properties of the Catholic Church, was brutally anti-popular and created many martyrs) to honor the 'courage' of that
friar who dared to challenge the Church and break away to set up his own Church. So, we Catholics should not be surprised at all about the stamp.
But, about Francis's 'brother Martin', I have found a brief incomplete list of the expressions which that 'meritorious reformer' used in his writings to refer to the Roman Pontiff:
Pig. Anti-Christ. Fleecer of his own flock. Diffuser of bloodshed. Wolf. Dog. Perverter of Holy Scripture. Wicked and perverse blasphemer. Adversary of Christ. Christ-deformer. Crucifier of Christ. Devil. Satan. Sacrilegious. Ignorant. Author of every impiety. Master of frauds and impostures. Scoundrel. Lowlife. Prostitute's snout.
[???] Pestiferous. Corrupt... And the litany can go on and on.
[One sees JMB learned his lessons well from 'brother Martin' and even improved on him in devising and improvising his 'little book of insults' for Catholics he would not wish to be part of the church of Bergoglio!]
It is important to note that with this cascade of insults and abusiveness, Luther, as he himself said, did not mean them only for the hated pontiffs in his time, but anyone, past, present or future, who had occupied or would occupy the Chair of Peter.
Yet, in Sweden, Francis was received with ostentatious enthusiasm by the top leaders of whatever is left - not very many - of the Lutheran community there. A community that has never retracted any of the insults hurled by Luther against the popes.
So, there was great hypocrisy on the part of those who consider Luther as a messenger of God, whose only word is not only to be taken seriously but to be venerated.
What truth could there be in festivities made for a pope by the followers of someone who could not find enough offensive words to insult the popes?
And how much authentic Christianity could there be in these festivities as if nothing bad had ever happened in the Church because of Luther, and yet, for Christ, hypocrisy is one of the worst sins?
Back to Luther. Many times he said this: "Reason is directly opposed to faith, therefore it must be abandoned. In every believer, it must be killed and buried." Thus, apologetics was prohibited and considered blasphemous insofar as it tried to reconcile reason and faith.
This was the ironic reply of a Catholic who had converted from Protestantism, Jacques Maritain: "Thus Luther gave mankind a great liberation. He liberated us all from intelligence and reflection. He liberated us from that tiring, incessant need to think, especially, from thinking with logic".
When I took my exams from the classic lyceum [secondary school] I attended, and while waiting to be enrolled in a university, I answered a newspaper ad and got a positive answer. So for a couple of months, I went to the Venice Lido, not as a tourist, but as an assistant to the concierge of a hotel which catered to the cinema crowd, and was always overcrowded during the city's annual film festival, therefore additional help was needed. I was taken on because I could manage some other languages besides Italian, which was necessary for the job since almost all the guests were foreigners,
Among the first things the concierge taught me was to ask hotel guests arriving there for the first time: 'Are you vegetarian?" If yes, "Strictly vegetarian?", which would mean the 'vegan' diet, as it is called these days. This was to be transmitted to the hotel kitchen, since the hotel had its own restaurant.
I was surprised by the number of Yes answers I got, since for us Italians, vegetarianism seemed bizarre, and its more radical form, the 'vegan', was quite unknown so that we didn't even know what it was called.
I noted that, especially with those who were 'strictly vegetarian', i.e., the Jacobins of nutrition, there were some Englishmen, but most of them were from Germany and the Scandinavian nations. Namely, from the lands which had been Lutheran for centuries and still are, at least officially.
Since at the time I was far from any religious concerns, I did not realize the paradox then. Only later would I discover the maledictions loosed by Luther against the monastic life which he had lived for many years [as an Augustinian friar].
Among the things that made him most indignant was that which in monastic language is called 'penances' - fasting, and especially, a vegetarian diet which was, unfortunately for him, the daily diet for Augustinians of strict observance. Once he took off his cassock, he called abstention from meat 'inhuman', not just for monks but for everyone else.
As soon as he had the power to create a new church, one of his first steps was to cancel the Lenten schedule of fasting and abstinence from meat on Fridays. So, just as he married a nun in order, in his own words "to defy the devil who invented chastity and imposed it on priests through his instrument, the Roman pope", he only ate wurstel and roasts as if there were no tomorrow, and on Holy Week, he asked to be served only large steaks.
[Perhaps that's the reason why he came to be afflicted by chronic constipation which in turn inspired an obsession with crap. Hmm, does that remind you somehow of someone???]
So, is it not curious that vegetarianism was born and became virtually a mass phenomenon in the lands where to eat meat always was, if not a precept, then at least a religious exhortation? Nations which also rediscovered fasting not just for health but also for esthetic reasons - that fasting so hated by Martin Luther.
Speaking of Germans, I find in Friedrich Hoelderlin - a poet, not a theologian, and a Protestant, not a Catholic - a surprising reflection:
"The imprint of the divine is in the Catholic Eucharist which contains the Maximum (God himself) in a minimum, the negligible weight of the consecrated host".
Another poet, Charles Peguy, French, wrote at the start of the last century but already anticipating the times: "Modernism, with its obsession for dialog, would have us pretend that we have no beliefs in order not to offend anyone who is not a believer".
[He predicted political correctness a century ahead!]
And an American who wrote in French, a convert from Protestantism to Catholicism, Julien Green, wrote to an agnostic:
"You ask for miracles. But is not your indifference to religion a miracle, for you are indifferent to what is decisive for your life and for your eternal life?"
For a couple of months, the US presidential elections have been an obsession for us in Italy. The media cannot seem to talk of anything else. I was reminded of 1961 (I had just turned 20 and so, I was an aware witness) when the first 'Catholic' President entered the White House. 'Catholic', in quotes, but officially he was Catholic, even if, while leaving the judgment to God, from what we could see during his brief time in office, Kennedy's Catholicism was hardly evident in his private life nor in his acts of governance.
Among other things, the 'pink legend' created about him by his tragic death, had airbrushed out of his biography one decision of his which cost much blood and tears, and eventually, humiliation for the United States. People forget that in fact, it was Kennedy's decision that started the Vietnam War which would become the first defeat ever for United States armed forces.
But it is also forgotten that the Vietnam war, as bloody as it was senseless, was ended by that Richard Nixon about whom the media had constructed a black legend.
But to go back to the 1961 elections. The fact that candidate Kennedy was a Catholic unleashed a reaction of impressive violence, in which the
Americans showed that their 'tolerance' did not include anyone baptized in the Roman Catholic Church.
There was a wave of hatred, and much money was invested by American magnates to make sure that 'their' America would not be other than Protestant. Millions of booklets and pamphlets to defame Catholicism, millions of letters sent to individual voters, thousands of radio and TV spots.
The hysteria was such that a Rev. Harvey Springer (a Protestant pastor famous for his newspaper columns and was called 'God's cowboy from the Rocky Mountains') publicly called for Catholics to be expelled from the United States which had, after all, been founded by the Pilgrim Fathers, who were apostles of the Reformation.
So it is curious that despite these premises, Kennedy later became very popular. But this was because of the media, for whom a young and good-looking President, with a big smile worthy of Hollywood, with a beautiful wife and attractive young children, and an administration that was labelled the New Frontier (a slogan that titillated nationalistic pride), was pure manna.
But the hostility from Protestant fundamentalists remained. Millions of hypotheses have been advanced about Kennedy;s assassination in Dallas but strangely, few have spoken of any 'religious' reason, although this was considered by the secret services to be among those most deserving of investigation. Namely, a homicidal initiative by Protestant fanatics who could not 'stand' a Papist in the White House.
A small reminder for those who were not alive in the 1970s, perhaps the worst years, insofar as it was attempted - obviously with disastrous results - to put into practice the theories of the Revolution of 1968. Because it confirmed what realists have always said:
Those who want to create paradise on earth always end up provoking hell.
Those years were also the heyday of Franco Basaglia, the psychiatrist whose name came to mean anathema to thousands of Italian families though at the time, he was acclaimed as the
ne plus ultra of social progressivism. He certainly acted in good faith! Based on his experience as a psychiatrist with the inmates of mental hospitals, he noted, quite rightly, that things had to change about these institutions. At the time, whoever was not communist was labelled a fascist.
But this psychiatrist was truly Communist. Among other things, he was among the intellectuals who signed the infamous appeal published in
L'Espresso which led to the assassination of Policeman Calabresi - a repugnant document which was a death sentence for that policeman, a man who had lived a Christian life of conviction and consistency.
Basaglia in those years elaborated a totally theoretical method based on the slogan,
"Society can make you crazy, but society - anti-capitalist society - can heal you". Imprisoned by the extremism which brought him the applause of intellectuals and politicians, he ended up preaching that
madness does not exist, that there had always and only been people who, if treated with the right social behavior, would turn out to be 'normal'. Or even that normalcy itself does not exist, either.
In the political climate of the time, this all led in 1978 to a law abolishing all mental institutions,thus laying the burden for the care of mental health patients, including all those sent home from the institutions that had been abolished, on their families.
Basaglia and his allies preached that
a mental institution was equivalent to life imprisonment, from which everyone should be liberated. In practice, of course, patients were discharged at the expense of their families, since the 'support structures' projected by the law either did not materialize at all, or those that did came with great delay and lacked enough competent and committed personnel.
It was the usual failure of utopias even when it was claimed they were being realized. If I bring it up now, it's because among my clippings, I found an article by Basaglia from 1978, the year his law was approved. The 'democratic' psychiatrist wrote: "In China, the overwhelming majority of so-called insane people are healed politically, with the thought of Mao Tse-tung, which they were made to read, or had it read to them. A solution that may seem simplistic to a Westerner but which has a great advantage that must be acknowledged: which is to treat the mentally ill liked everybody else, since the Chinese government runs an enormous politico-pedagogical system focused on the education of its people".
No comment, obviously.
Munich, Germany - an archdiocese with almost two million baptized Catholics.
Seminarians in 1979: 390. Seminarians in 2015: 0. Yes, 0. Not even one.
The office of diocesan statistics - the Church in Germany is as rich in money and in organizations as it is poor in spirituality and orthodoxy - published a document comparing 1959 (the year John XIII announced he was convoking Vatican II) and 2015. The comparison is impressively pitiful.
- Priests: 7000 then vs 2015.
- Churches: 3139 vs 1200.
- Self-declared Catholics (in 1959, Bavaria was considered a historical bulwark of the faith) 99.8% of the population, therefore, almost everyone. In 2015, 48%.
The document informs is that
half of the churches that are still open and active today will close within the next five years.
The comment of the diocesan Curia:
"If this downward trend continues at the same rate, the survival of the diocese can be guaranteed only for another ten years". Ecclesia fuit! (There was once a church!)
The diocese has been led for the past 10 years by that Cardinal Reinhard Marx who is listed among the progressivist bishops and in 2013 was named by the new pope to the council of cardinals who were to advise him in the governance of the universal Church
[and who was also later named Chairman of the new Council for the Economy]. We are not so stupid as to ignore that the pre-agony status of the church in Munich is very much in the context of the crisis we know in the Church.
But in all sincerity, we must ask what 'advice' could possibly come for a 'renewal' of the universal Church from a cardinal diocesan archbishop who, after ten years in place, now has not a single seminarian, and who himself announces the imminent disappearance of his diocese?
[NB: At the time Jospeh Ratzinger was named Archbishop of Munich in 1977, it was the second largest diocese in Europe, after Milan.]
Among my notes from recent readings,I find a small text from Joseph de Maistre which I think worthy of reflection: "If Jesus Christ were not God, then Mohammed would be considered the greatest apostle and benefactor of the human race, because he tore mankind away from its idolatry of idols, bringing mankind the purity of the one God announced by the Jews but which only Islam would have been able to spread on every continent".
Who knows if those Westerners who are against Christianity realize that to bring it down means to elevate to the highest level the religion of which Mohammed was the prophet and founder and which now terrorizes the world?
Finally, in conclusion, and apropos: I am looking at the forecasts of the American agency most cited in religious sociology (Pew), and this is the situation:
- There are now 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, and constantly increasing.
- At least 20 percent of them are considered radical, who read the words of the Quran literally with its exhortations for Muslims to exterminate all infidels.
This means there are some 320 million potential 'terrorists' as we would call them but who would consider themselves 'glorious martyrs'.
So I say with some selfishness that there are good reasons today to be happy one is old and to lament the future of our young people who will be part of the
umma, the worldwide Muslim community.