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    00 24/01/2017 20:30




    ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI



    Please see preceding page for earlier entries today, 1/24/16. Unable to post yesterday due to computer problems.




    I had translated part of this editorial by Riccardo Cascioli, editor-in-chief of La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, but never got around to posting it. Now THE CATHOLIC THING has published a full translation, informing its readers (and me) that Cascioli is also president of the European Center for the Study of Population, Environment, and Development (CESPAS). As those who follow my translations of his previous articles on the environment may recall, he is also the author of at least two books on the environment, so he is not just an armchair commentator.

    Population controllers once again
    invited to pontificate at the Vatican
    by Riccardo Cascioli

    JANUARY 24, 2017

    The man who symbolizes global birth control will be arriving in the Vatican to give a lecture on how to save the planet by sacrificing human beings. It seems unbelievable, but so it is. We’re speaking of Paul R. Ehrlich, the American biologist who became famous in 1968 with the book The Population Bomb. That was the beginning of the fortunate (at least for the author) season of eco-catastrophe literature, whose real target was humanity.

    Arousing terror about an uncontrolled demographic explosion, Ehrlich and those following him pushed individual governments and international organizations to adopt drastic measures of population control: sterilization and forced abortions became, from then on, normal in developing nations.

    One example: 400 million babies were not born in China thanks to Ehrlich and company’s suggestions, and tens of millions of baby girls were victims of sex-selection abortion (in China, but also in India and other countries where, for economic and cultural reasons, families prefer male children.)

    If there were any justice, Dr. Ehrlich ought to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.     Instead, thirty-nine years later, he’s receiving the honor of entering the Vatican in great pomp and circumstance, invited by the Pontifical Academies of Sciences and Social Sciences, both headed by Msgr. Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, the occasion being a symposium on biological extinction: titled, “How to save the natural world on which we depend,” which will be held February 27 to March 1.

    It’s only natural then that Ehrlich’s presence in the Vatican has raised protests from American pro-life and pro-family groups, and not only for moral reasons, but scientific ones as well. What will this man have to say of interest to us, given that he was wrong in the predictions he made with such arrogance?

    “The battle to feed all of humanity is lost,” he began his book in 1968. And he foresaw 10 million dead of hunger every year in the United States beginning in the 1970s; hundreds of millions were supposed to die in China and India because of the demographic explosion.

    Back then the world population was around 3 billion. Well, after almost forty years, that population has more than doubled and not only did those prophecies not come to pass, the numbers of malnourished and underfed globally has declined in both absolute numbers and percentages.

    A charlatan, then, but for the Pontifical Academies mentioned above [[at least for Mons. Sorondo, as I do not believe any genuine Catholics in those academies are applauding the coming visit of Ehrlich!], he’s a scientist who can make an important contribution to saving the planet, which now seems to be the main preoccupation in parts of the Vatican. But it is right – as a petition launched in the United States asks – to demand that the Holy See withdraw the invitation to this sinister figure.

    It needs to be recognized that the real problem is not Ehrlich: he’s rightly a target because of his notoriety and as the symbol for certain battles to eliminate man from the face of the earth. But the real problem lies in the symposium itself, in its approach to the problems of the Creation: given that the other speakers are all – more or less – in line with Ehrlich. Some are also famous beyond academic circles, such as Mathis Wackernagel, inventor together with William Reese of the idea of the “ecological footprint,” an attempt to give a scientific foundation to human harm to Earth.

    Indeed, much of the data that the Pontifical Academies present in the introduction to the Symposium comes from the literature of Wackernagel’s Global Footprint Network, which operates in the name of eco-catastrophe. And among the speakers certainly one couldn’t leave out John Bongaarts, vice president of the Population Council, founded in the 1950s by the Rockefellers, precisely to promote birth control. Bongaarts obviously will deliver a presentation on the state of population and future prospects.

    I could go on about the people who will be pontificating at the Vatican on this occasion, and the arguments – better, the lies – presented by the Pontifical Academies to justify the need for a meeting of this sort.

    It’s good, however, to keep in mind that this is not a bolt out of the blue, but the result of a path begun a while ago in the Vatican among whose protagonists is the already mentioned Msgr. Sánchez Sorondo, an Argentinian, and the Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson, formerly president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and now head of the new Super Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development, which will include Justice and Peace, Cor Unum, and Migrants.

    By putting the so-called environmental emergency first and using the concept of “sustainable development,” [as the Vatican does in full support of the UN whose means to achieve such 'development' clearly include population control and 'reproductive rights' which is the secular called for killing babies when they are not convenient to women who find themselves pregnant], one arrives inevitably at considering humans dangerous to the planet, inverting the Christian view of man.

    And despite Laudato si’s declarations to the contrary, you start thinking controlling births as possible under certain conditions, then go on to abstain from opposing the argument [This is the stage at which our current pope is now on the public stage - despite his lip service to the faithful denouncing abortion], and finally become an open supporter. [I do not doubt that Bergoglio opposes abortion when he has to say anything about it directly, but his open support and unconditional sponsorship of the UN and its leaders like Ban Ki Moon and Jeffrey Sachs who are out-and-out advocates of population control and 'reproductive rights' casts doubt on his sincerity.]

    At the time of a Vatican conference dedicated to the theme of climate change, I wrote in April 2015 that the Church is preparing to accept control of births. There, too, the presentation of the theme and the speakers, among whom there was the U.N. economist and theorist of sustainable development Jeffrey Sachs, clearly showed the path the Vatican had taken. Then came the shocking declaration by Cardinal Turkson in a December 2015 BBC interview that it is good to control births – by natural means, of course (he couldn’t entirely avoid moralizing).

    Laudato Si, though reconfirming much of preceding magisterial teaching, also adopted for the first time the concept of “sustainable development,” which sees a conflict between population on the one hand and development and environment on the other. In addition, the great space given to the theme of man-caused climate change and development has given other weapons to those who have for a long time been pushing the Church towards eco-catastrophe and anti-birth positions.

    And now, this new conference in the Vatican, Ehrlich or no Ehrlich, will signal another important step towards the penetration of the Church by the neo-Malthusians whose end goal is support, via public policies, for birth control.
    [Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 24/01/2017 20:59]
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    00 24/01/2017 21:29

    And who more deceitful than those who framed and wrote AL, deliberately ignoring not just Canon 215 but everything explicit in Scriptures, the Magisterium and the Catechism
    against unworthy reception of the Eucharist?

    Three ways to not deal with Canon 915
    Or three ways by which the 'pro-Amoris' wing is trying to get around
    the Church's clear teachings about why unqualified RCDs cannot receive Communion
    Analysis
    by Edward Peters, JD, JCD

    January 24, 2017

    Any canonist citing canon law in defense of doctrine or discipline these days should expect to be compared to a Pharisee and tritely accused of ‘throwing the law at pastoral problems’.

    Antinomianism, you see, which has taken hold in many places, routinely regards the invocation of inconvenient laws as an act of moral violence and usually views lawyers as hypocrites suffering from psychological disorders.

    Oh well, let’s talk about a canonical issue with profound implications for the Church in our day, shall we?

    Specifically in regard to the debate over admitting divorced-and-remarried Catholics to holy Communion, a steady ‘dissing’ of canon law is crucial because canon law — and the centuries of accumulated pastoral wisdom and doctrinal clarity that it represents — lies directly athwart the campaign to admit Catholics to Eucharistic communion on their own terms instead of on Christ’s terms and the Church’s.

    Whatever damage to Catholic doctrine and discipline some might espy down the road — say, abandoning the indissolubility of Christian marriage, eliminating repentance as a condition for forgiveness of sin, absolutizing private conscience against public order, usurping the Church’s authority over the sacraments, and so on — it all begins by admitting divorced-and-remarried Catholics to Eucharistic communion upon, in the final analysis, their own assessment of their own conscience, chiefly by using Amoris laetitia as cover.

    Canon 915, however, as has been explained many times, forbids the distribution of holy Communion to those who “obstinately persevere in manifest grave sin” and, because ecclesiastical tradition is unanimous that divorced-and-remarried Catholics figure among those who “obstinately persevere in manifest grave sin” (CCC 2384), this law poses a major problem for the ‘pro-Amoris’ wing. To deal with that problem, three approaches to Canon 915 have, I think, emerged.

    #1. Ignore Canon 915. This is the approach followed in Amoris laetitia itself and by, say, the Buenos Aires plan. Passing over Canon 915 in silence offers two advantages:
    - first, the Communion-admission debate can be steered almost exclusively toward prolix discussions of personal conscience (about which there is always one more thing to say);
    - second, bishops and pastors who, faithful to the Catholic sacramental order, affirm that holy Communion must be withheld in these cases, can do so without directly running afoul of any clear assertion in Amoris. But see # 3 below.

    # 2. Belittle Canon 915. This approach marks most essays by amateurs and appears variously as a patronizing tsk-tsking of any benighted enough to think that law has something to do with life, o rnigh-on clueless comments about the canon, and occasionally old-fashioned ridicule of canon law.

    Belittling Canon 915 taps into the antinomianism now running through the Church and it appeals both to writers unequipped to discuss competently the complex matters at hand and to readers unequipped to recognize that emotion is being substituted for reason.

    # 3. Violate Canon 915. This is the approach recently approved by the bishops of Malta in stating that holy Communion cannot be withheld in these cases but, as noted here, their action does not run directly afoul of Amoris for the simple reason that Amoris said nothing about Canon 915.

    Precisely in that both #1 and #3 can be sustained by appeals to Amoris leads me to agree with the Four Cardinals that, on this point anyway, the ambiguity in Amoris is irresolvable and thus the document urgently requires official clarification.

    That all three approaches to Canon 915 are unacceptable seems self-evident to me but I cannot reinvent my arguments for so holding every time a new name wades into this fray. I trust my writings thus far can be located by those who wish to be better informed.

    Still I thought it useful to pause for a few minutes and to suggest that the ‘pro-Amoris’ wing really does know that Canon 915 summarizes what stands between them and their goals and that they have developed, therefore, three (albeit unacceptable) ways to not deal with that ancient rule.


    In the following piece, Fr. De Souza respectfully points out the obvious logical flaws in the arguments - I prefer to call them non-arguments - of those who would defend this pope and his AL tooth-and-nail (when there is no bite to their teeth nor any steel to their nail)...

    ‘Amoris Laetitia’, Malta and conscience
    According to the logic of the Maltese bishops     (all 2 of them) and their defenders,
    subjective conscience can annul universal moral principles in matters of sexuality
    by Father Raymond J. de Souza, SJ

    January 23, 2016

    The Church opened 2017 with another ride on the Amoris Laetitia roller coaster, with bishops issuing contradictory guidelines on the interpretation of its ambiguous eighth chapter.

    The most notable intervention was that of thbishops of Malta, who wrote explicitly that Catholics who are divorced and civilly remarried, should they feel “at peace with God,” can receive absolution in confession and holy Communion.

    Bishop Steven Lopes of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter [for the US and Canada] wrote a few days later that the Church’s traditional teaching had not been changed and cannot be changed; couples who are not validly married but living a sexual relationship cannot receive absolution or Communion without at least an intent to abstain from sexual relations.

    The Maltese guidelines were published in L’Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, suggesting that Pope Francis favors the proposed change in the traditional sacramental discipline.

    I had written last year that Amoris Laetitia is destined to be forgotten, as it does not itself address with sufficient gravity the key issues at stake. The relevant canons from the Code of Canon Law (915 and 916) are simply never mentioned. Indeed, the question of Communion is never explicitly mentioned, only hinted at in an ambiguous footnote.

    Given the long and detailed tradition it was attempting to modify, if not overturn, Amoris Laetitia would have had to address the relevant issues forthrightly and with a great deal more sophistication than it does. The magisterium is a public act of teaching; it cannot proceed by stealth.

    I stand by that earlier assessment, but before Amoris Laetitia is set aside for practical purposes, it is now likely that there will be several years of confusion, conflict and even rancor, unless the Holy Father chooses to resolve the crisis. He does not appear inclined to do so.

    Given that Amoris Laetitia itself is the cause of the contradictions now arising, it is not evident that a further papal intervention would resolve the matter. It is possible that it would produce a genuine crisis. [1) A papal intervention answering Yes or No to the FIVE DUBIA would at least resolve the situation one way or the other – in that everyone will know for sure what this pope is really saying in AL Chapter 8, i.e., Papa locuta est, causa finita, as they say. Except, of course, this papa cannot locuta honestly without professing heresy, which is why he did not in AL and he won’t now, despite all pressures.

    2) There already is a crisis – greater than any the Church has faced in modern times – which is exacerbated daily the more this pope and his followers insist on their NON-ARGUMENTS.]

    We can see hints of that coming. Austen Ivereigh, author of a biography of Pope Francis and one of his most enthusiastic defenders, in a column about the Maltese guidelines, advances an argument for the modification in sacramental discipline without a change in doctrine. The argument aims to save Amoris Laetitia from contradicting Catholic teaching, but puts much more of the tradition in peril.

    However, it is the only path Pope Francis has left open to supporters of a change, as he has persistently insisted that Amoris Laetitia changes nothing in the teaching about marriage, confession and holy Communion.
    - If none of the general principles (doctrine) have changed, but the practice (discipline) has, the only possible path is to suggest that the general principles somehow do not apply in particular circumstances.
    - If that cannot be done, then a change in sacramental practice means that the teaching has effectively been changed and that the Church no longer teaches the indissolubility of marriage, the necessity of a purpose of amending one’s life before absolution can be granted, or the need to be in a state of grace to receive holy Communion.

    So the stakes are very high, and it is necessary, for these supporters of change, to show that general principles can be maintained but do not apply in particular circumstances.

    (This does not address the question of public scandal addressed in Canons 915 and 916, where there is “manifest” grave sin. The question of scandal was not addressed by the Maltese bishops, but was by the Buenos Aires bishops, who envisaged Communion being given in private in order to avoid that.)

    The obvious starting point for advocates of change is that one might commit an objective mortal sin but not be subjectively culpable for it due to a lack of full knowledge or full consent. There is nothing problematic about that, as it is standard confessional practice to make that distinction.

    However, in the Amoris Laetitia approach, there can be no lack of knowledge that the behavior is objectively wrong, as the lengthy accompaniment that Amoris Laetitia proposes (Chapter 8 is entitled, “Accompanying, Discerning and Integrating Weakness”) requires not only a knowledge of the Church’s full teaching, but a “love of Church teaching.” It is difficult to love the Church’s teaching and simultaneously judge that it does not apply in this case, or that God does not want it to apply in this case.

    It is, though, possible to imagine a situation where there may be some defect in full consent. That is the narrow ground on which defenses of Amoris Laetitia must stand.

    Those who have argued for the change in practice suggest that in particular circumstances one party might be coerced into sin by the other party and therefore is not culpable (Rocco Buttiglione), that a lack of faith might reduce culpability (Buenos Aires bishops) or, now, that abstinence from sexual relations might be “humanly impossible” (Maltese bishops).

    This brings to the fore the question of conscience, which is the “judgment of reason” that applies general moral principles to particular circumstances. The argument being advanced is that personal conscience might judge that universal norms do not apply. Indeed, as the Maltese bishops put it, they might be “humanly impossible” to observe.

    While this approach is an attempt to save Amoris Laetitia, a much greater crisis is being invited. Ivereigh admits as much, which defenders of Amoris Laetitia have heretofore been reluctant to do.

    “The even more substantial departure, arguably, is from another of John Paul’s teaching documents, Veritatis Splendor in 1993, which argued against moral relativism and the misuse of conscience to justify a subjective morality,” writes Ivereigh. “The four cardinals who signed the letter challenging Pope Francis over Amoris specifically cite Veritatis, asking if it still holds that, as they paraphrase it, ‘conscience can never be authorized to legitimate exceptions to absolute moral norms that prohibit intrinsically evil acts by virtue of their object.’ Grasping the nature of this shift that so concerns the Amoris critics is key to understanding this dispute.” [SO IVEREIGH ADMITS THERE IS A SHIFT!]

    Indeed it is. It makes the dispute all the more grave, touching the entirety of the moral life, not marriage alone.

    “The law’s core principle, that adulterers may not receive the Eucharist, still stands,” continues Ivereigh. “But while Amoris is very clear about not wanting to create new norms or laws, it is also very clear about fostering a new attitude. What Amoris seeks is a new attitude on the part of the Church toward those who are in irregular situations, one that moves from a primary focus on defending the law and the institution from contamination toward a focus on the need for accompaniment and healing of the victims of divorce, especially those seeking integration into the Church.” [Crap! When the so-called 'accompaniment and healing' constitutes precisely in 'contaminating' the law and the institution of marriage??? And 'integration into the church' is a false expression - RCDs who are not qualified to receive the Eucharist were never 'un-integrated' from the church, If anything, they did so themselves by knowingly violating Church teaching on divorce and adulterous 'remarriage', but the Church no longer formally excommunicates them for that - it does insist that they cannot receive the Body and Blood of the Lord sacrilegiously.]

    Ivereigh accepts that a plain reading of Amoris Laetitia’s eighth chapter is at odds with Veritatis Splendor. But the latter deals with the whole of the moral life, not just the painfully difficult cases of irregular marriages. Does the “new attitude” of Amoris Laetitia apply beyond marital matters?

    For example, imagine a situation where, over many years, a businessman has built up a large factory, perhaps several. The business is profitable in part because he keeps the wages of his workers low. Attempts to unionize the workforce have not been successful, mainly because the owner has made explicit threats to shut down the business rather than negotiate with a union. Secretly, he has threatened union organizers with violence against their property, against their families and against their persons.

    Now the businessman has a conversion of heart and begins to practice his Catholic faith once again. In confession, knowing the Church’s teaching about economic justice, he confesses to exploiting his workers and frustrating their right to unionize. The confessor asks him if he intends to change his labor policies. The man replies that his business does much good, is the most significant employer in the town, and a network of suppliers depend upon him. The business might not survive if it adopted better labor practices. Indeed, it seems to him “humanly impossible” to do so.

    In any case, having thought it through, the businessman has concluded that what God is asking him to do in this situation is to continue to run the factory as he always has. He tells the confessor that he is at peace with God. Should the confessor absolve him of his grave sins, tell him to receive holy Communion and continue as before?

    Or consider a man who traffics in young domestic workers, exploiting them for their labor, but nevertheless he supports his entire extended family on what he extracts from his clients. He now regrets the situation into which he has fallen, recognizing his patterns of sinfulness are largely due to malign influences in adolescence after his drug-addled parents left him to fend for himself on the streets. Yet to give up his immoral trade would throw his entire extended family into poverty. He genuinely fears that his “business colleagues” might kill him if he tries to get out. He considers it humanly impossible for him to do so. Is his judgment of conscience — that he is doing all that he can and that the usual moral prohibitions do not apply to his situation — valid?

    Or if a marital situation is preferred, what about a wife whose husband is rendered impotent in a traffic accident while she is only 25? Let’s say she is exemplary in caring for him and utterly devoted to their two children, the second of which she was carrying at the time of the accident. Yet two or three times a year she engages a male prostitute because she finds it impossible not to have sexual relations on occasion. Given the complexity of her situation and good efforts as a wife and mother, could not a confessor accept that she is “at peace with God”?

    Those situations are deliberately dramatic to make the point. But there are other far less dramatic situations, where extricating oneself from a habitually sinful situation would be more difficult than sexual abstinence for a couple in an irregular situation.

    Neither the Maltese bishops nor Ivereigh — and certainly not the Holy Father — are explicitly advocating that conscience operates differently in marital situations. However, if Veritatis Splendor is undone by Amoris Laetitia, which Ivereigh is suggesting explicitly and the Maltese bishops implicitly, then it is incumbent upon them to show how the role of conscience can apply in one area of the moral life (sexual morality and marriage) differently than it applies in other areas of the moral life.

    Veritatis Splendor was written in 1993 to correct a trend in moral theology that began in the 1960s, which was to create a special category for sexual matters in which conscience — understood in a radically subjective way — could override universal moral principles.

    It was frequently invoked in discussion of extramarital sexual activity, contraception within marriage and abortion, though to a lesser degree. At the same time, judgments about economic matters and social justice were made with ever greater force.

    Invoking the magisterium of Blessed Pope Paul VI, Pope Benedict XVI explicitly taught in Caritas in Veritate (2007) that the Church’s social teaching includes her teaching on marriage, family and life, trying to bridge the distance that had grown in the Church between “pro-life and pro-family Catholics” and “social-justice Catholics.”

    Amoris Laetitia threatens to exacerbate that divide because, as the logic of the Maltese bishops and Ivereigh makes clear, there is a category of behavior — sexual morality — in which subjective conscience can annul universal moral principles due to the difficulty — or “human impossibility” — of observing the moral law.

    The Maltese bishops claim to be following the approach of Pope Francis. In his daily homilies and press interviews, and in Amoris Laetitia, the Holy Father does speak about matters of marriage and sexuality differently than he speaks on other matters. The “Who I am to judge?” Pope when it comes to homosexuality daily delivers judgments, frequently harshly, on a wide variety of other behavior. Pope Francis has never spoken of the potentially excusing role of conscience when he excoriates business interests.

    The Maltese guidelines may be the first time that bishops have officially taught that the moral law is impossible to observe, contradicting the plain teaching of the Council of Trent. Their guidelines expose the very shaky foundation of Amoris Laetitia, which is why it will not long endure.

    But in raising the stakes to include the fullness of the Church’s teaching on conscience, it is more likely now that a great crisis will occur before Amoris Laetitia is set aside.

    Apropos this obstinacy by the church of Bergoglio and its leader about certain anti-Catholic truths, here's a good post today from Rorate caeli:

    Dictionary of Contemporary Theology:
    'Bergoglianism'

    January 24, 2017
    Berg·o·glian·ism
    noun

    A spiritual disease of Argentinian origin first found in the early twenty-first century and thought to be the result of a localization and intensification of various strains of mid-late twenty-century modernism.

    Initial symptoms include institutional and ritual iconoclasm, incomprehension of the nature, duties and limits of one’s office, irresponsible utterances in public, incessant nepotism [favoritism of his spiritual kin???] and a propensity to gratuitously insult one’s collaborators, officials and clergy. If not treated immediately the pathology advances rapidly towards heresy.

    Secondary symptoms include a pastoralism that promotes sacramental heteropraxy, megalomaniacal pretensions, a refusal to engage in substantial, critical or collegial dialogue with one’s collaborators or to respond with evangelical clarity (cf. Mt 5:37) to substantial questions duly posed, episodes of extreme anger, and vindictive aggression towards one’s junior officials.

    For those whose spiritual nutrition is sound, Bergoglianism is not normally contagious. Persons with indications of Modernism in any of its forms, or Ultramontanism, are at high risk of infection.

    In its secondary form, Bergoglianism is, save for supernatural intervention, spiritually terminal.

    [Medieval Ligurian bergoglio, of unknown origin; see Olio in the Dictionary of Indo-European vegetable words. Article by Father XY.]


    Personally, I would add 'Bergoglianism' first of all to:
    1) List of world religions, in the same non-Catholic Christian (?) category as Lutheranism; and
    2) DSM-5, the current edition of the American Psychiatric Association's universally recognized Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) which provides a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders.
    'Bergoglianism' would come as a sub-classification of
    Narcissistic Personality Disorder DSM-5 301.81 (F60.81)
    which is signified by the presence of any 5 of the ff 9 criteria:
    o A grandiose logic of self-importance
    o A fixation with fantasies of infinite success, control, brilliance, beauty, or idyllic love
    o A credence that he or she is extraordinary and exceptional and can only be understood by, or should connect with, other extraordinary or important people or institutions
    o A desire for unwarranted admiration
    o A sense of entitlement
    o Interpersonally oppressive behavior
    o No form of empathy
    o Resentment of others or a conviction that others are resentful of him or her
    o A display of egotistical and conceited behaviors or attitudes
    I REST MY CASE.

    [Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 25/01/2017 19:18]
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    00 25/01/2017 20:49


    Thanks to Father Z for calling attention to this blogpost by a lay American family man who does not give his name although his 'About' page gives a lot of other information and pictures of himself and his family...

    It is so heartening that there are still enough orthodox Catholics in Malta to mount such a protest - in a country where the legalization of divorce two years ago set the seal on how much this once ultra-Catholic island-nation has been secularized.

    Even more damaging to the faith of course is the recent action of the island's two bishops openly advocating that, under Bergoglio's AL, if a Communion-unqualified RCD feels 'at peace with God' then he can go ahead and receive communion (I am not sure if they even have to go to Confession!).

    Of course, the two bishops are merely formalizing what must be common practice in 98% of Catholic churches around the world where everyone present at Mass simply walks up to 'receive the Lord' regardless of his state of grace. Under AL, it would seem everyone is always in that state of grace required in order to receive the Eucharist worthily if he thinks he is 'at peace with God'. In which the much-touted Bergoglian discernment becomes synonymous to 'automatic self-absolution of any sin whatsoever and a consequent worthiness to receive Communion'... Which, if it holds for persons living in chronic adultery, then it should also apply to everybody else for other sins, including those who may have committed a onetime mortal sin like killing someone or raping a child - in short to any sin whatsoever, so that in effect, we have the 'abolition of sin' which Eugenio Scalfari correctly identified three years ago as a key Bergoglian concept.

    [Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 25/01/2017 23:37]
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    00 25/01/2017 22:24
    January 25, 2017 headlines

    PewSitter


    Canon212.com

    What the heck just happened here? How could the Grand Master of a sovereign state under international law,
    an officer elected for life - abdicate at the pope's request?

    Pope Francis to name delegate
    to run Order of Malta

    VATICAN CITY, January 25, 2017 (AP) - The Vatican said Wednesday it was taking over the embattled Order of Malta in an extraordinary display of papal power after the Order’s grand master publicly defied Pope Francis in a bitter dispute over condoms.

    The move marks the intervention of one sovereign state — the Holy See — into the governance of another, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, an ancient aristocratic order that runs a vast charity operation around the globe.

    The Vatican said Fra’ Matthew Festing, 67, offered to resign as grand master Tuesday during an audience with the Pope, and that Pope Francis had accepted it on Wednesday.

    The statement said the Order’s governance would shift temporarily to the order’s No. 2 “pending the appointment of the papal delegate.”

    The naming of a delegate signals a Vatican takeover, harking back to the Vatican’s previous takeovers of the Legion of Christ and Jesuit religious orders when they were undergoing periods of scandal or turmoil.

    But those are religious orders that report directly to the Holy See. The Order of Malta is a sovereign entity under international law, making the Vatican intervention all the more remarkable.

    Fra’ Matthew had refused to cooperate with a papal commission investigating his ousting of the order’s grand chancellor, Albrecht von Boeselager, over revelations that the Order’s charity branch had distributed condoms under his watch.

    Fra’ Matthew had cited the Order’s status as a sovereign entity in refusing to cooperate with what he said was an act of internal governance. Many canon lawyers had backed him up, questioning the Pope’s right to intervene.

    But Fra’ Matthew defiance had been fraught from the start, given that he took a promise of obedience to the Pope as a top-level knight, and regardless was the leader of a prominent Catholic order who was entering into a public fray with the leader of the Catholic Church. [Let's hear now from all those canonists who unanimously said Festing was right not to cooperate with a Vatican commission named to investigate an internal act of governance in his Order. If he would not cooperate with that investigation, why on earth did he offer to resign his own position? Let's say he did it out of courtesy - it was absolutely naive to think the pope would not gladly accept his offer so he can do with the Order of Malta as he pleases???]

    The dispute once again pitted Pope Francis against Cardinal Raymond Burke, a leading conservative and Pope Francis critic who also happens to be the Pope’s envoy to the order.

    Cardinal Burke had been by Fra’ Matthew’s side on December 6 when Fra’ Matthew first asked, then demanded Boeselager’s resignation. Boeselager refused, but was ousted two days later under a disciplinary procedure he contends violated the order’s own rules.

    Boeselager had been the Knights’ health minister when its charity branch Malteser International was found to have been involved in programs that distributed thousands of condoms to poor people in Burma.

    Church teaching forbids artificial contraception. Boeselager has said he stopped the programmes when he learned of them. The Order’s leadership has said the scandal was grave, that Boeselager had hidden the revelations of the programs, and called it “disgraceful” that he had refused an order to obey Festing and resign.

    Boeselager has challenged his removal, appealing to the Knights’ internal tribunal.

    Many of the Order’s members had lamented how the confrontation with the Holy See had drawn unwanted negative attention to the Order, which relies on donations to fund its charity works around the globe.

    Pope Francis appointed a commission to investigate after Boeselager said he had been told by Fra’ Matthew, in Cardinal Burke’s presence, that the Holy See wanted him to resign over the scandal. The Vatican secretary of state has said the Pope wanted nothing of the sort and wanted the dispute to be resolved through dialogue.

    Last week, the Holy See said it expected the order to cooperate with its probe, and in a sharply worded statement said it planned to take action to resolve the dispute.

    The Order of Malta has many trappings of a sovereign state, issuing its own stamps, passports and license plates and holding diplomatic relations with 106 states, the Holy See included.

    The Holy See, however, has a unique relationship with the Order since it is a Catholic entity, and the Pope appoints a cardinal to “promote the spiritual interests” of the Order and its relationship with the Vatican. Pope Francis appointed Cardinal Burke to that position in 2014 after removing him as the Vatican’s supreme court justice.

    The Order traces its history to the 11th-century Crusades with the establishment of an infirmary in Jerusalem that cared for people of all faiths. It now counts 13,500 members and 100,000 staff and volunteers who provide health care in hospitals and clinics around the world.

    Full text of Vatican statement:
    Yesterday (January 24), in audience with the Holy Father, His Highness Fra’ Matthew Festing resigned from the office of Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

    Today (January 25) the Holy Father accepted his resignation, expressing appreciation and gratitude to Fra’ Festing for his loyalty and devotion to the Successor of Peter, and his willingness to serve humbly the good of the Order and the Church.

    The governance of the Order will be undertaken ad interim by the Grand Commander pending the appointment of the Papal Delegate.

    Canonist Ed Condon, who has been very unequivocal about asserting the sovereignty of the Order of Malta over papal orders regarding the order's own internal governance does have an immediate reaction piece:

    The Vatican has destroyed the
    Order of Malta’s sovereignty
    What if Italy does the same to the Vatican?
    by Ed Condon

    25 Jan 2017

    The most remarkable thing about the Order of Malta controversy is not that the Grand Master, Fra’ Matthew Festing, has resigned. That is extraordinary enough, especially given that it was apparently on the invitation of Pope Francis.

    No, the most astonishing feature of the story is today’s announcement that the Pope will install an Apostolic Delegate to run the Order. In effect, this abolishes the Order as a sovereign entity. Under international law, what we are seeing is effectively the annexation of one country by another.

    How did it come to this? Somehow, the small clique who rallied around the former Grand Chancellor, Albrecht Boeselager, have managed to turn a matter of the Order’s own internal governance into a full-blown diplomatic crisis between the two oldest and most prominent sovereign entities in the western world.

    The clique never had much of a case. As I have written before, there is no question that, legally speaking, the commission set up on the recommendation of the Holy See’s Secretariat of State to investigate his sacking of Boeselager was and remains totally illegitimate.

    It is clear that Boeselager was dismissed, following his refusal to resign, according to the approved legal process of the Order. It has been alleged that Fra’ Festing “defied” Pope Francis by dismissing Boeselager.

    But any opinion the Pope may have expressed before the event would have been in the much-rumoured letter on the matter from the Pope directly to Cardinal Burke, the Holy See’s envoy to the Order. This letter has not even been formally confirmed as existing, let alone leaked. Its purported contents remain the great unanswered question at the heart of this whole affair.

    As far as one can tell from the various reports, the Pope actually gave no indication that he was opposed to the firing of Boeselager. In fact, the Holy Father seems to have been deeply concerned about the gravity of the allegations against Boeselager and even at the possibility of masonic infiltration of the Order’s membership and activities.

    The fact that the actual text of this letter has remained totally confidential speaks volumes about the discretion and respect for the Holy Father of both the Cardinal Patron and the Grand Master, even as they have been publicly accused of the opposite.

    Fra’ Festing’s humility and courtesy are typical of the man. He has served the Order and the Pope well, with total devotion and respect for the obligations of the law and his position. And now, he has been forced from his position for doing his duty. Yet Boeselager – who refused to obey a direct order from his sovereign – and his allies have triumphed.

    These allies have carried out a sordid campaign of leaked letters from Cardinal Parolin’s department, which served the sad and obvious end of framing a public narrative in which Fra’ Festing supposedly “defied” the explicit wishes of the Pope. In fact, even according to the confused and changeable timeline constructed by his friends, it was clear that Boeselager was dismissed well before Cardinal Parolin’s apparent (and still illegitimate) intervention.

    The sad and severe consequences of this chain of events are considerable. The international legitimacy of the Order of Malta is now in ruins, its constitutional integrity and diplomatic standing now seem beyond repair.

    Today’s announcement of an Apostolic Delegate to be appointed by the Pope represents, essentially, the total abrogation of the Order’s sovereignty. Yet the consequences for the Holy See itself may, in the longer term, be equally or even more severe.         [In effect, Bergoglio has treated the Sovereign Order of Malta like he treated he Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, who were unfortunately a religious order clearly existing at by 'permission' of the Vatican which could therefore just take over the entire Order. Wherever they are, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez must be applauding Bergooglio's demonstration of absolute caudillaje in the most ruthless Latin American tradition.]

    The disregard for the mutually sovereign relationship between the Holy See and the Order sets a precedent in international law, which will now lurk under the Secretariat of State’s dealings with other governments like an unexploded bomb.

    If the Holy See can so brazenly insert itself into the internal governance of another sovereign entity whose legitimacy stems from a mutual agreement under international law, it now has no legal defence should another sovereign body, say the government of the Italian Republic, choose to view the independence of the Holy See as a similarly anachronistic formality.

    Cardinal Parolin should prepare to see today’s actions cited as legitimate precedent when the IOR, commonly called the Vatican Bank, finds its sovereign independence under renewed pressure from other countries or international bodies.

    Pope Benedict XVI said that “a society without laws is a society without rights”; the naked disregard for the law shown in recent weeks has sown a bitter harvest for the Holy See’s diplomatic corps to reap in the future.

    For those less concerned with the diplomatic and legal aspects of this situation, there is one over-riding truth which has emerged from all this. It is now clear that for all the great hopes of curial reform which accompanied the election of Pope Francis, the Vatican remains a place where cliques and personal networks have more authority than the law, and where leaking and smearing remain part of the everyday business of governance.

    The Pope himself is, as he has often stated, not a lawyer, nor is the law something he is known to have much interest in. Those in his curia who have prompted him to this action have deliberately served him, the office of the papacy, the international sovereignty of the Holy See, and of course the men and women of the Order of Malta, incredibly badly. I suspect it is now just a matter of when, not if, they come to regret it.

    And what, other than strengthening a reputation for strong-arm tactics, does the Bergoglio Vatican hope to gain by this unseemly and unwarranted show of force???

    Roberto de Mattei, too, had an immediate reaction, but even he cannot explain why Fra Matthew folded so easily...


    The Pope and the Order of Malta:
    a Pyrrhic victory?
    by Roberto de Mattei
    Translated by 'Francesca Romana' for Rorate caeli from

    January 25, 2017

    The resignation of Fra Matthew Festing, Grand Master of the Order of Malta, imposed on him by Francis on January 23rd, risks being a Pyrrhic victory for the Pope.

    Pope Bergoglio has in fact obtained what he wanted, but had to use force, violating both law and common sense. And this is destined to have serious consequences not only inside the Order of Malta, but among Catholics from all over the world, increasingly perplexed and bewildered about the way Francis is governing the Church.

    The Pope knew he had no legal status to intervene in the internal affairs of a sovereign Order and even less so to demand the resignation of its Grand Master. He knew also that the Grand Master himself would not have been able to resist the moral pressure [And why would a pope's demand be a 'mOral pressure' at all since it was so completely WRONG AND ILLEGAL???] of a request for his resignation, even if illegitimate.

    By acting in such a way, Pope Bergoglio has exercised an act of dominion openly in contrast with the spirit of dialogue established as the leitmotif during the Year of Mercy. [Please, 'dialog' for Bergoglio and the dialog-meisters means an endless dialectic in which nothing ever gets resolved since every synthesis is always challenged by a new antithesis, and on and on, the way it is in this relativistic world]

    However, what is graver still, is that the intervention took place “to punish” that part of current the Order which is most faithful to the immutable Magisterium of the Church, because instead, the Vatican supports the secularist wing, which would like to transform the Knights of Malta into a humanitarian NGO, a distributor of condoms and abortifacients “for good reasons”.

    The next designated victim appears to be the Cardinal Patron, Raymond Leo Burke, who has the dual offence of having defended Catholic Orthodoxy inside the Order and of being one of the four cardinals who criticised the theological and moral errors of the BergoglianeExhortation, Amoris laetitia.

    In his meeting with the Grand Master, Pope Francis announced his intention “to reform” the order, that is to say, the resolve to alter its religious nature, and in the name of pontifical authority , he wishes to emancipate the Order from its religious norms and morals. This is a plan for the destruction of the Order, which, naturally, will be able to occur solely by the surrender of the Knights, who unfortunately seem to have lost the militant spirit that distinguished them on the fields of the Crusades and in the naval battles off Rhodes, Cyprus and Lepanto.

    In acting so, however, Pope Bergoglio has lost a lot of credibility not only in the eyes of the Knights, but of an increasing number of the faithful who see the contradiction between his captivating and mellifluous manner of speaking [you think????], and his intolerant and threatening ways.

    From the center we pass to the peripheries, on which this pope is purportedly focused. A few days before the Grand Master of the Order of Malta’s resignation, other news along the same lines shook up the Catholic world.

    Monsignor Rigoberto Corredor Bermùdez, Bishop of Pereira in Colombia, by a decree on January 16, suspended a divinis the priest Alberto Uribe Medina, because, according to the communiqué of diocese, he had “voiced publicly and privately his rejection of the Holy Father Francis’s doctrinal and pastoral teaching, most of all, as regards marriage and the Eucharist.” The diocesan communiqué adds that as a result, the priest “has separated himself publicly from communion with the Pope and the Church.”

    Don Uribe therefore, has been accused of being a heretic and schismatic for having rejected Pope Bergoglio’s pastoral indications, which, in the eyes of many cardinals, bishops and theologians have the smell of heresy, precisely because they appear to depart from the deposit of faith.

    Which means that a priest who refuses to administer Holy Communion to the divorced and remarried or to practicing homosexuals is suspended a divinis, while those who reject the Council of Trent and Familiaris consortio are promoted to bishops, and perhaps nominated cardinals, as probably Mons. Scicluna, Archbishop of Malta is expecting, being one of the two Maltese Bishops who have now authorized Holy Communion for RCDs who continue to live as man and wife.

    The name of this small Mediterranean island seems however to have a strange tie to Pope Bergoglio’s future, less troublefree than we can possibly imagine.     [???? He has just scored a double Maltese 'victory' for what it's worth, and both for dubious cases/causes - the first, to win over the island's bishops to the heterodoxies of AL, and the second, to take over a sovereign order that has a 900-year proud history behind it (but after this???]

    Who is orthodox today and who is heretical or schismatic? This is the great debate on the horizon. A de facto schism, as the German daily Die Tagespost defined it - that is, a civil war in the Church, of which the war going on inside the Order of Malta is only a pale prefiguration.
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    00 26/01/2017 19:38

    AUTOCRAT OF THE VATICAN

    Two more immediate reactions to the Bergoglian power-grab in Malta...

    The ideological purge at the Vatican
    By Phil Lawler

    Jan 25, 2017

    For most of us, who are not Knights of Malta, the resignation of the group’s grand master will have little immediate impact. But the unprecedented papal intervention into the affairs of that venerable body fits into a pattern that should, at this point, worry all faithful Catholics. Under Pope Francis, the Vatican is systematically silencing, eliminating, and replacing critics of the Pope’s views.

    [But it's more than just the ideological purge we should be worried about - or have been worried about for some time now. It is, first of all, about the basic character of this man who happens to be the pope right now, about which, alas, there is nothing any of us can do. Of which his ideological purge is just one manifestation.

    No need for me to go into his distinctive character features - which most objective observers know from consistent manifestation in the past four years - because one can refer to the DSM-5 criteria for narcissistic personality disorder (see a few posts above) to see what is wrong. But other commentators have remarked that it sometimes seems, and increasingly so, that Jorge Bergoglio is not all there, no matter how cunning he may have been so far. There is both outright madness as well as deliberate method here - and it is a lethal combination for the Church that they should reside in the same person.]

    During the reigns of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, “progressive” Catholics frequently complained about a crackdown on theological dissent. On the rare occasions when the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a warning about a wayward theologian’s published works, there were anguished warnings about a reign of terror at the Vatican.

    Now a crackdown really is occurring — instigated by the Pontiff who famously asked, “Who am I to judge?” [even as he has been daily and insistently casting the most insulting judgments about those who do not think like him or whom he dislikes for one reason or another - the Biblical person who sees the mote in other's eyes but not the beam sitting completely athwart his eye and mind's eye].

    And the objects of the current crackdown are not theologians who question established doctrines, but Catholics who uphold the traditional teachings of the Church.

    The first and most prominent victim of the purge was Cardinal Raymond Burke, who was exiled from the Roman Curia soon after Pope Francis took office, and given a mostly ceremonial post as patron of the Knights of Malta. It is ironic — and perhaps not coincidental — that the latest incident involves his new charge. [It may not be coincidental but certainly highly opportunistic to take advantage of an administrative shake up in the Order to somehow get back at Cardinal Burke, even if it is rather monstrous to let the hapless but conscientious Fra Matthew take the first blow in an apparent resumption of vendetta against Burke.]

    The Pope himself asked for the resignation of Fra’ Matthew Festing, after a disagreement that apparently began with the discovery that the Knights of Malta had been involved in a condom-distribution program. The Vatican jumped into the fray — on the side of the man who was responsible for that involvement.

    In asserting control over the situation, Pope Francis was not deterred by the argument [more than argument, it is simply incontrovertible fact] that the Order of Malta is a sovereign body under international law. Indeed the Vatican announced that the Pontiff plans to appoint a papal delegate to lead the group. “Under international law, what we are seeing is effectively the annexation of one country by another,” remarks canon lawyer Ed Condon.

    (Condon goes on to observe that if the Pope goes ahead with his plan, and the Knights of Malta accept his delegate, the precedent thus created will “lurk under the Secretariat of State’s dealings with other governments like an unexploded bomb.” The next time Italian banking authorities demand records of financial transactions at the Vatican bank, or an American attorney for sex-abuse victims seeks to subpoena the dossiers of laicized priests, the Vatican will be in the awkward position arguing that, as a sovereign body, it is not subject to external intervention: the argument that was brushed aside in the rush to bring change at the Knights of Malta.)

    But again, the furor over the Knights of Malta is not an isolated incident. Recent weeks have also seen:
    - The wholesale replacement of the prelates on the Congregation for Divine Worship [and more recently, the appointment of a whole slew - more than 20 - new theological consultants to the CDW]: another unprecedented move, producing an entirely new panel that will be more friendly to the preferences of Pope Francis, and less supportive of the tradition-minded prefect, Cardinal Robert Sarah.
    - The abrupt dismissal of three clerics on the staff of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. No explanation for the firings was given, and according to published reports, the Pope made a point of saying that he was not obliged to give an explanation. But reliable Vatican sources explain that the clerics had been accused of making unflattering comments about Pope Francis — not in public, but in private conversations with colleagues. [And the Vatican has not belied this account at all or in any way!]
    - The contemptuous treatment of the Four Cardinals who submitted DUBIA about Amoris Laetitae, by people who are perceived as surrogates for the Pope. And for that matter, the Pontiff’s own studied refusal to answer questions from prelates who should be his trusted advisers.

    All these incidents have occurred in a Vatican where the climate has already been formed by the Pope’s tongue-lashings of the Roman Curia, by the blatant manipulation of the Synod of Bishops, by the Pontiff’s daily denunciations of “doctors of the law” and “rigid” clerics. A clear picture emerges: of a Roman Pontiff determined to impose his own will on the universal Church.

    In a syndicated column that appeared last week, George Weigel effectively punctured the myth, popular in liberal circles, that Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI imposed ideological control over the Vatican. Those Pontiffs, Weigel points out, regularly promoted men with dramatically different theological outlooks to the College of Cardinals, bestowing red hats on Cardinals Kasper, Marx, Tagle, Mahony, Daneels, Hummes, McCarrick, and yes, Bergoglio. [Of those names, only Tagle was named by Benedict XVI.]

    The same cannot be said of Pope Francis, who has elevated his potential allies (in the US, Tobin and Cupich) while passing over more senior prelates (Chaput, Gomez, Vigneron, Lori) whose approach do not match his own.

    Writing in the National Catholic Reporter last December about the Pope’s bid to pack the College of Cardinals, Father Thomas Reese remarked approvingly that this was “the most revolutionary thing Francis has done in terms of church governance. He is doing everything possible to make sure that his legacy is continued by insuring his successor is someone who reflects his views.” Reese was honest enough to say that if Pope John Paul or Benedict had made the same sort of appointments: “Frankly, I would have been outraged.”

    Outrage would have been a reasonable response then, if those earlier Popes had restricted promotions to men who shared their personal opinions. It is a reasonable response now.

    Pope seizes power from the Knights of Malta,
    brutally ending 900 years of their sovereignty
    by Damian Thompson

    25 January 2017

    The Knights of Malta – an ancient Catholic order that dates back to the crusades – have enjoyed the privileges of a sovereign state for 900 years. Last night the Order of Malta was effectively stripped of its sovereignty in what appears to be a brutal power-grab by the Vatican.

    Pope Francis demanded and received the resignation of the Grand Master, Fra’ Matthew Festing, a devoutly orthodox Englishman of (even his critics agree) unimpeachable orthodoxy and personal morality. The Vatican has now taken charge of the order while the knights search for a grand master acceptable to Francis.

    Canon lawyer Dr Edward Condon this morning tweeted out the reaction of many Catholics: “In terms of international law, the Holy See just annexed another sovereign entity”.
    A source close to the order puts it more bluntly: ”It’s like an invasion. Nine hundred years of sovereignty wiped out overnight”.
    Festing’s ‘resignation’ follows a complicated row over the dismissal of the order’s Grand Chancellor, Albrecht von Boeselager, who was accused of permitting the distribution of condoms by the order’s international charitable arm.

    Boeselager appealed to his friend, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, who set up an inquiry made up of Boeselager’s allies. Festing and the leadership of the order refused to accept the authority of the inquiry, because – they maintained rightly – that the Vatican had no temporal authority over a body that is independent under international law.

    The argument over Boeselager and the condoms is convoluted, to say the least. [Much of the background has been explained by Edward Pentin's reporting on this story.] The former Grand Chancellor may or may not have a case; what is certain is that he is extremely well-connected.

    Allies don’t come more powerful than Parolin, the Pope’s foreign secretary, whom many suspect of twisting the Pope’s arm in this matter.     [Is anyone really capable of twisting Bergoglio’s arm unless he wants it to be twisted?]

    The humiliation of Festing is a dreadful business. He is a good-natured and holy man who, until his appointment in 2008, was an archetypal English ‘Catholic toff’ – Ampleforth and Cambridge, former Guards officer, son of a field marshal, no less, and on his mother’s side descended from Blessed Sir Adrian Fortescue, martyred in 1539.

    Pope Francis likes him – so why has he sacked him so abruptly, without adequate explanation? Is it another manifestation of the erratic behaviour I described in a Spectator article earlier this month? [There we are! Thompson is one of the rare commentators who has more than once questioned whether this pope is really all there!]

    Boeselager – himself monumentally grand, and the son of one of the 1944 Wehrmacht plotters against Hitler – must feel vindicated today. Whether he can afford to relax is another question.

    Let me draw your attention to one of Pentin’s reports in the National Catholic Register, which contains the following intriguing information:
    Also behind the dispute were allegations of an ambitious German association vying for control of the Order, accusations that the Grand Master was being overly authoritarian, and conflicts of interest among members of the Holy See commission. Three members of the commission along with Boeselager have also been involved in a $118 million donation held in a trust in Switzerland. Despite documentation proving the contrary, the trust denied any connection with the Order.

    Will the Vatican, which has just hounded a good man out of office and trashed the sovereignty of its most ancient and loyal chivalric order, now also investigate this mysterious donation?


    Meanwhile, to heap insult atop injury, there's this tweet from the person who has been reporting on the Knights of Malta story for THE TABLET, using Vatican sources primarily. So maybe this isn't just an idle tweet:


    Sacked Grand Chancellor of
    Knights of Malta reinstated
    by Christine Niles
    CHURCH MILITANT
    January 25, 2017

    ROME (ChurchMilitant.com) - The former Grand Chancellor of the Knights of Malta, dismissed from the order after a condom scandal, has reportedly been reinstated.

    This takes place only one day after Grand Master Matthew Festing stepped down after nine years as head of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, at the request of the Holy Father. The Order announced Wednesday it would convene a Sovereign Council to formalize his resignation January 28:
    The Grand Magistry of the Sovereign Order of Malta announces that Grand Master Fra' Matthew Festing has convened an extraordinary session of the Sovereign Council for 28 January 2017 for the acceptance of his resignation from the office of Grand Master. This is in accordance with Article 16 of the Constitution of the Sovereign Order of Malta.

    Christopher Lamb, a writer at the U.K.'s Tablet, tweeted late Wednesday morning: "Hearing that Von Boeselager now reinstated as Grand Chancellor of @orderofmalta with all decisions taken post-Dec 5th revoked."

    Church Militant asked for the source of the reports, and Lamb responded, "Sources inside order + Cardinal Parolin's December letter says action against Boeselager should be suspended."

    [The article goes on to recap how this story has played out since it earned world headlines.]
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    00 27/01/2017 03:51


    Some black humor reactions to Malta-grab... Fr Z further refers us to Eye of the Tiber with this:

    Knights Of Columbus amassing troops
    as Vatican prepares to take over Malta
    EYE OF THE TIBER
    JANUARY 26, 2017

    Tensions have escalated between conservative and liberal Catholics today as Knights of Columbus members amassed on Malta’s border, which was recently annexed by the Vatican.

    Maltese U.N. Ambassador Marcallino Galea told EOTT this morning that the Knights of Columbus had amassed more than 40,000 knights on the border of Malta.

    “These numbers may reflect some very bad intentions and this is the last thing we would like to happen,” Galea said. “Our hope is that the Vatican will come to its senses and that they will come to understand that they cannot continue order us around and to tell us where we can or cannot park in our own parishes.”

    Pope Francis has pledged to take counter-measures against Malta, which he accused of sending saboteurs into the Vatican to carry out liturgical-terrorist acts in which priests say the Latin Mass in Rome.

    Pro-Vatican separatists have been fighting near Malta’s border for months now, with hundreds of Maltese civilian casualties from shelling, mines, and tickling people to death with fluffy ostrich plumes from their stupid hats.

    “Casualties are horrific, yes, but what is worse than death is that they are infiltrating our churches and nagging parishioners about becoming members of the Knights of Columbus. They are torturing innocent bystanders by continually reiterating how good their life insurance policy is. Please send help.”


    And there's this: Not bad for an instant parody of Marc Antony's oration for Julius Caesar...


    Remarks at a Maltese funeral

    January 25, 2017

    Friends, Maltese, countrymen, lend me your ears;
    I come to bury Fra Matthew Festing, not to praise him.
    The evil that men do lives after them;
    The good is oft interred with their bones;
    So let it be with Fra Matthew. The noble Francis
    Hath told you Fra Matthew was ambitious:
    If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
    And grievously hath Fra Matthew answer’d it.
    Here, under leave of Francis and the rest–
    For Francis is an honourable man;
    So are they all, all honourable men–
    Come I to speak in Fra Matthew's funeral.
    He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
    But Francis says he was ambitious;
    And Francis is an honourable man.
    He hath upheld the doctrines of Rome
    Whose tenets were laid down by Christ:
    Did this in Fra Matthew seem ambitious?
    When that the poor have cried, Fra Matthew hath wept:
    Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
    Yet Francis says he was ambitious;
    And Francis is an honourable man.
    You all did see that on the internet
    A subordinate distributing condoms to poor souls,
    Which Fra Matthew made him rue: was this ambition?
    Yet Francis says he was ambitious-- and did not accompany;
    And, sure, he is an honourable man.
    I speak not to disprove what Francis spoke,
    But here I am to speak what I do know.
    You all did love Christ once, not without cause:
    What cause withholds you then, to mourn for His servant?
    O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
    And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
    My heart is in the coffin there with Fra Matthew--and the Sovereign Order of Knights---

    And I must pause till it come back to me.

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    00 27/01/2017 18:36
    PewSitter headline, 1/27/17

    If you thought we had heard the worse of the latest Bergoglian show of force/farce, read and prepare for more teeth-gnashing....



    Pope declares all of Festing’s recent acts ‘null and void’
    in a letter from Cardinal Parolin to the Order of Malta
    Details emerge about what happened during the Pope’s meeting with the ousted Grand Master.
    by Edward Pentin
    NATIONAL CATHOLIC REGISTER
    January 26, 2017

    Pope Francis has declared that all actions taken by the head of the Order of Malta and its governing council since the dismissal of Albrecht Freiherr von Boeselager last month are “null and void,” including the election of Boeselager’s replacement.

    Writing on the Pope’s behalf to members of the Order’s governing council Jan. 25, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin stated that the Holy Father, “on the basis of evidence that has emerged from information he has gathered, has determined that all actions taken by the Grand Master after December 6, 2016, are null and void.”

    He added: “The same is true for those of the Sovereign Council, such as the election of the Grand Chancellor ad interim.”     The Council elected Fra’ John Critien as Boeselager's temporary replacement.

    Cardinal Parolin began his letter by re-emphasizing that the Grand Commander, Ludwig Hoffmann von Rumerstein, is now in charge of the Order, adding that “in the renewal process which is seen as necessary,” the Pope would “appoint his personal Delegate with powers that he will define in the act of appointing him.”

    Grand Master Fra’ Matthew Festing submitted his resignation Jan. 24, according to a Jan. 25 Vatican statement. The Vatican added in the communiqué that the next day “the Holy Father accepted his resignation.”

    The Vatican also said the governance of the sovereign Order would henceforth be undertaken “ad interim by the Grand Commander pending the appointment of the Papal Delegate”.

    The Pope summoned Fra’ Festing to the Vatican on Jan. 24 on the strict instruction not to let anyone know about the audience — a modus operandi that has been used frequently during this pontificate, the Register has learned. During the meeting, Francis asked Fra’ Festing to resign immediately, to which the Grand Master agreed. The Pope then ordered him to write his resignation letter on the spot, according to informed sources.

    The Register has also learned that the Pope told Fra’ Festing that the reason for asking for his resignation was the Pope's conviction that he has to do a new, complete investigation of the Order, and that such an investigation would be more easily conducted if the Grand Master resigned.

    The Register has been told that the Pope then had Fra’ Festing include in his letter of resignation that the Grand Master had asked for Boeselager's dismissal under the influence of Cardinal Raymond Burke, the patron of the Order. However, as patron, the cardinal has no governance in the Order and can only counsel the Grand Master, meaning the decision to dismiss the Grand Chancellor belonged solely to the Grand Master.

    Asked if it could confirm this version of events surrounding Fra’ Festing's meeting with the Pope, the Vatican told the Register Jan. 26 it does not comment on private conversations.

    If the Grand Master was pressured to resign, some within the Order are speculating about the validity of his resignation as it was demanded immediately without giving him time to consider the matter. They also are concerned it heralds a future purge of the Order.

    Furthermore, some are asking that if all the acts of the Grand Master since Dec. 6 are null and void as Cardinal Parolin stated in his letter, would that also include Fra’ Festing’s act of tendering his resignation to the Pope.

    On Saturday, the Sovereign Council meets to vote on whether to accept the Grand Master's resignation.

    The dispute between the Order of Malta and the Vatican dates back to last month when, on Dec. 6, Fra’ Festing dismissed Grand Chancellor Albrecht Freiherr von Boeselager, the Order’s third most senior leader.

    Fra' Festing asked Boeselager to resign and, when he twice refused, the Grand Master dismissed him on grounds of insubordination.

    The primary issue behind the call for Boeselager’s resignation was that he was deemed ultimately responsible, following the Order’s own internal commission of inquiry, for allowing contraceptives to be distributed by the Knights’ humanitarian arm. The Order also said there had been other “confidential” factors in play, as well as a “failure of trust.”

    Pope Francis made clear to Cardinal Burke that he was "deeply disturbed" about the matter and wanted it resolved, but as it was an internal matter of governance for the sovereign Order, he did not specify precisely how it should be rectified.

    Boeselager protested the charges against him, and argued against the manner of his dismissal. He called for his case to be heard by a tribunal of the Order, and appealed to the Pope who then appointed a five-member commission to look into the unusual circumstances of his sacking.

    Fra’ Festing refused to cooperate, saying the commission was interfering in the Order’s sovereignty and right to govern its own internal affairs.

    Other factors behind this dispute have been allegations of an ambitious German association vying for control of the Order, accusations that the Grand Master was being overly authoritarian, and conflicts of interest among members of the Holy See commission.

    Three members of the commission along with Boeselager have also been involved in a $118 million donation held in a trust in Switzerland. The trust denied any connection with the Order, despite documentation indicating the contrary...

    Here below is a translation of Cardinal Parolin’s letter:
    Distinguished Members of the Sovereign Council,

    I wish to inform you that H.M.E.H. Fra’ Matthew Festing, Grand Master of the Order, on January 24, 2017, tendered his resignation to His Holiness, Pope Francis, who accepted it.

    As the Order’s Constitution provides in Art. 17 § 1, the Grand Commander will assume the responsibility of governance ad interim. Pursuant to Art. 143 of the Order’s Code, he will inform Heads of State with which the Order maintains diplomatic relations and the various organizations belonging to the Order.

    To help the Order in the renewal process which is seen as necessary, the Holy Father will appoint his personal Delegate with powers that he will define in the act of appointing him.

    The Grand Commander, in his role as Interim Lieutenant, will exercise the powers contained in Art. 144 of the Order’s Statute until the Papal Delegate is appointed.

    The Holy Father, on the basis of evidence that has emerged from information he has gathered, has determined that all actions taken by the Grand Master after December 6, 2016, are null and void. The same is true for those of the Sovereign Council, such as the election of the Grand Chancellor ad interim.

    The Holy Father, recognizing the great merits of the Order in carrying out many works in defense of the faith, and in service to the poor and the sick, expresses his pastoral concern for the Order and hopes for the collaboration of all in this sensitive and important moment for the future.

    The Holy Father blesses all members, volunteers and benefactors of the Order and supports them with his prayers.

    Pietro Cardinal Parolin
    Secretary of State


    Roberto De Mattei posted an immediate reaction to Parolin's letter:

    Will the Malta Knights fold or resist?
    Cardinal Parolin's unconstitutional letter
    by Roberto De Mattei
    Corrispondenza Romana
    Special Edition
    January 27, 2017

    [Cardinal Parolin's] letter constitutes the latest Vatican slap in the face to the Order of Malta; it is an offence to its constitution, history and dignity.

    All scholars of the law agree in attributing the Order of Malta’s complete independence from the Holy See as far as its internal governance is concerned. The Holy See cannot interfere in the administrative affairs of the Order, but only intervenes in what regards the religious life of its professed Knights.

    Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Secretary of State, in a letter dated January 25, addressed to the Members of the Sovereign Council of the Order, who, on January 28 are to gather together in Rome at their headquarters in Via Condotti, writes, that Pope Francis:
    • will nominate a “papal delegate”; an utterly odd figure for the Order of Malta
    • confirms the resignation of the Grand Master, which will not be official until ratified by the Sovereign Council
    • attributes to himself the power to render null and valid, all of the Grand Master’s and the Sovereign Council’s acts carried out after December 6 2016, re-integrating therefore Albrecht von Boeselager and dismissing the new Grand Chancellor Fra John Critien.

    The position that each of the components of the Supreme Council will take on January 28 is to be made public. If they accept the diktat without a murmur, they will go down in history for having surrendered completely; if, with due respect toward the Vicar of Christ, they resist, they will show to the world that their Catholic and chivalrous spirit is still alive and is able to oppose the unjust exercise of power.

    Knights of Malta insist on
    sovereignty amid papal takeover

    ROME, January 27, 2017 (AP) — The Knights of Malta is still insisting on its sovereignty in its showdown with the Vatican, even after Pope Francis effectively took control of the ancient religious order and announced a papal delegate would govern it through a “process of renewal.”

    The Knights’ current grand master, Fra’ Matthew Festing, was at work Friday at the order’s swanky Rome palazzo near the Spanish Steps, pending a meeting of his governing council to either accept or reject his resignation.

    The Saturday meeting is no rubber-stamp formality: It’s evidence of the order’s sovereign status under international law, which is recognized by the more than 100 countries that have diplomatic relations with the Knights of Malta and essentially consider it a state.

    Festing, a 67-year-old British aristocrat, met Tuesday with Francis and said he would resign after he lost an internal power struggle [How exactly did he lose it? Festing was very much in charge until the dismissed Boeselager went whining to Parolin and the Vaticaqn stepped in!] that started with a scandal over condoms. Festing sacked the Knights’ foreign minister, Albrecht von Boeselager, over the condom scandal.

    But the Vatican intervened on Boeselager’s behalf and announced this week that the pope had accepted Festing’s resignation and would name a papal delegate to run the order.

    The Knights of Malta is an ancient chivalric order that runs hospitals and clinics around the world. It counts 13,500 Knights, Dames and chaplains, 80,000 permanent volunteers and 25,000 employees, most of them medical personnel who lend first aid in war zones, natural disasters and conflict areas.

    The Knights are questioning the pope’s right to name a delegate to govern the order, since its sovereign constitution clearly sets out the process for selecting interim leadership and the election of a new grand master.

    “Festing is the grand master,” order spokesman Eugenio Ajroldi di Robbiate told The Associated Press. “If he resigns, the sovereign council will take the appropriate decisions.”

    The saga has sown chaos within the Knights, but the Vatican’s actions have added to the tumult.

    For starters, Francis named a commission to gather information about Boeselager’s ouster, and packed it with Boeselager allies. They were essentially asked to report back objectively on a power struggle between a friend and the religious superior — Festing — who removed him.

    Then, the Vatican seemed to ignore the order’s sovereign status altogether in announcing Festing’s resignation and that a papal delegate would be named to govern.

    And finally, Franciss’ deputy, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, said in a letter this week that all of Festing’s decisions since Boeselager’s Dec. 6 ouster were “null and void” and that the papal delegate would “assist the order in the renewal process which is seen as necessary.”

    The tone of the letter, reported by the National Catholic Register and confirmed by the order, made clear that Parolin believes he is now calling the shots.

    It was addressed to the sovereign council and said the order’s No. 2 would govern temporarily “until the papal delegate is appointed.” No mention was made of the order’s laws that call for the No. 2 to organize an election for a new grand master within three months.

    The order’s spokesman, Ajroldi di Robbiate, said Parolin’s letter represented the Vatican’s interpretation of events, but nothing more.

    “Every decision concerning this must be taken by our sovereign council,” he said.     [Well, let us hope they stand tough!]

    Not incidentally, in a further show of Vatican insensitivity and arrogance, a Vatican bulletin today formally announced the appointment of the dismissed Chancellor's brother as a member of the IOR Board of Supervisors.



    Papal power can go too far
    Francis is not the first pope to intervene in an Order’s affairs -
    John Paul II did with the Jesuits in 1981
    [But the Jesuits are a religious order, not a sovereign international entity,
    And only very few Knights of Malta are professed religious!]
    by Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith

    January 26, 2017

    The Vatican takeover of the Order of Malta has a possible precedent – from 1981, when St John Paul II intervened in the internal affairs of the Jesuit Order. [No, it cannot be a precedent! The Jesuits are a fully religious order, properly under the supervision of the Vatican through the Congregation for religious orders. The Knights of Malta are primarily a sovereign international entity with exactly the same juridical status as the Vatican, and while they are also a religious order, most of its membership is lay, and only a few are professed religious.]

    The then General, Padre Arrupe, elected for life, had been incapacitated by a stroke. The Jesuits decided to elect a certain Fr O’Keefe to run the Order in the incapacity of Arrupe, but the Pope intervened and appointed Fr Paolo Dezza to run the order until such a time as a new General could be elected. After a period of two years the Pope gave permission to the Jesuits to elect a new superior.

    At the time, this extraordinary intervention by the Sovereign Pontiff was considered by some as an outrageous interference in the affairs of a religious order which, like all religious orders, had been until then allowed to govern itself and rejoice in its own autonomy. There were many who saw this action by John Paul II as a sign of creeping papal power, and an arrogation to himself of powers that no other Pope had used for centuries.

    But amidst all the noisy criticism, others were quietly pleased by the Pope’s action, seeing it as a necessary take over of the Jesuits who, under Arrupe, had lost their way. One thing was certain: Asas Supreme Pontiff, the Pope was quite within his rights to intervene as he had. The Pope has “supreme, full, immediate and universal ordinary power” in the Church, as Canon 331 puts it..

    No Catholic could possibly dispute the claims made by Canon 331. Whether they permit the Vatican intervention into the Order of Malta is another matter: Ed Condon has argued that they do not. But whatever the legal situation, such huge powers lose their force and effectiveness the more they are invoked.

    The Pope’s authority, paradoxically, is diminished through use. As in the British Constitution, the Royal Prerogative is best left unused and unchallenged. For the Pope’s power [the powers he has legally and canonically, not what he perceives to be his ‘power’],, though having a sound legal basis in Canon Law, is something more than that – it is a moral authority, and to be preserved by being used sparingly.

    That the Pope should now intervene in the affairs of the Knights of Malta, at the behest, it seems, of the friends of a disgruntled member of the Order, sacking the Grand Master for no very clear reason, brings the papal power into disrepute. As with the reports of the sacking of three officials from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, this seems to be an example of the papal supreme power used for the purposes of micromanagement. [It would be micro-management if he had any right at all to intervene in the internal governance of the Knights of Malta, but he has zero right to do so, and this is such enormous effrontery and usurpation of power on his part that if he were not pope, the whole world would be up in arms against him now!].

    One of the unique selling points of this papacy was supposed to be synodality and the devolution of power to the margins. Instead what we seem to be seeing is the centralisation of power and decision- making to a degree unimaginable in previous papacies. Members of Protestant and Orthodox churches may perhaps with some justification point to this sort of behaviour as an abuse of papal power.

    So what is happening in the Order of Malta? One thing is certain, and that is Fra’ Matthew Festing, the former Grand Master, a true son of the Church, will not tell us, but will keep loyally silent. But those who read about these things in the papers will ask the question. And they may well ask, too, what is happening in the Catholic Church? [What is happening in the Church is anti-Catholic Jorge Bergoglio who, for worse it would seem because certainly not for the better, was elected pope!]
     
    Canon212.com headlines, 1/27/17 PM

    C212 was behind the curve this morning on the Malta-grab developments but it has caught up tonight and has new stuff about how this pope is now going after one of the few new developments in the Novus Ordo, namely, the replacement of the original extremely protestantized English translations of the Mass prayers and readings by a translation that brings back the elegance and rich language of the Latin from which they were derived (I believe Cardinal Pell was the chairman of the commission that was responsible for the new translation)...
    [Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 28/01/2017 04:27]
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    00 28/01/2017 05:56
    What history may tell us about
    a pope who allowed wrong teaching
    [which the hapless Honorius did not originate]
    By Fr. Regis Scanlon, OFM,Cap.
    CRISIS Magazine
    January 27, 2017

    Today cardinals and bishops are intensely divided over whether or not invalidly married Catholics living in adultery can receive Holy Communion. Fifty years ago, this kind of question would have boggled the minds of Catholics everywhere, because the answer would be both obvious and simple: “No!”

    The question has arisen today because a recent and controversial church document has thrown this question into doubt. Amoris Laetitia, the apostolic exhortation of Pope Francis issued last spring, seems to be saying the answer can be “Yes!,” if it is necessary to protect a couple’s relationship and the good of their children.

    This apparent doubt about Church doctrine has many Catholics thinking they are living in a nightmare. Is the Church breaking apart? Can I trust the Church anymore? How can I help my children understand what the Church teaches about marriage?

    But, a similar situation of great confusion happened 1,500 years ago during the papal reign of Honorius I (625-638). Can we learn a lesson from the strange case of Honorius I and apply it to the confusion that exists in the Church today? I believe so.

    Honorius was pressured to react to a popular heresy Monothelitism, which held that Jesus Christ possessed only one will naturally. [Ah, but there’s the fundamental difference from the situation with Bergoglio! It is he who is the originator of the ‘heresy’ or near-heresy – and it is he and his minions who are seeking to pressure the entire Catholic world into accepting this pope’s anti-Catholic teachings as that of the Church.]

    But the Church teaches that Jesus Christ has two inseparable but distinct wills or two distinct operations naturally. However, the Church also teaches there is only one will and one operation in Christ morally. In other words, there is no opposition between the two wills and two operations in Christ.

    Although Honorius believed the Church’s true teaching, he wanted to avoid trouble in the Church and offending the Monothelitites, one of whom was the Emperor Heraclius. Similar to today, bishops wanted clarification, but Honorius counseled silence.

    He advised bishop Sergius saying:
    That our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son and Word of God, by whom all things were made, is Himself one, operating divine and human things, the sacred writings plainly show. Whether, however, on account of the works of the Humanity and Divinity, one or two operations ought to be proclaimed and understood, these things do not belong to us; let us leave them to the grammarians, who are accustomed to display to the young their choice derivations of words…. We exhort your Fraternity to preach with us, as we do with one mind with you, in orthodox faith and Catholic unity — avoiding the use of the introduced terms, one or two operations — that there is one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God, most true God in two Natures, operating divinely and humanly.

    Note that the Pope said, “…these things do not belong to us; let us leave them to the grammarians…” The Pope thought that the truth was plain enough and the Church didn’t need to clarify it further with terms, like two operations and two wills.

    About 40 years after Honorius died, however, the Sixth General Church Council condemned the fact that Honorius had remained silent. Pope Leo II, the successor to Pope Agatho, accepted this condemnation with some qualification. In his confirmatory epistle sent to Constantine Pogonatus, Leo II stated:
    We also anathematize the inventors of the new error, that is, Theodore, bishop of Pharan, Cyrus of Alexandria, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter, ensnarers, rather than guides, of the church of Constantinople; and also Honorius, who did not illumine this Apostolic Church with the doctrine of the Apostolic tradition, but allowed it, while immaculate, to be stained by profane betrayal.
    [It is hard to believe that Bergoglio is not aware of this historical precedent – namely, that Honorius was anathematized not for sharing the heresy himself, much less for having started it because he did not, but because he allowed it. Is not Bergoglio’s offense with AL far worse because he originated these equivocal formulations that are 'not according to the doctrine of the apostolic tradition', and worse, against the very letter and spirit of the words of Christ himself regarding matrimony and adultery, and St. Paul’s exhortations about worthiness for the Eucharist?]

    And, in his epistle to the bishops of Spain, Pope Leo II also stated:
    Those, however, who contended against the purity of Apostolic doctrine, departing, have indeed been visited with eternal condemnation; that is, Theodore of Pharan, Cyrus of Alexandria, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter, Constantinopolitans; with Honorius who did not extinguish the incipient flame of heretical dogma, as befitted Apostolic authority, but, by neglect, nourished it.
    Therefore, Honorius’s decision was condemned — not because he actively preached falsehood or heresy — but because he “neglected” teaching the truth. As Pope Leo II pointed out, even during the silence of Honorius, the apostolic tradition and teaching remained untouched and “immaculate.”

    This ancient case helps us to relate to Amoris Laetitia. After all, Pope Francis has remained silent, apparently allowing his bishops to judge the meaning of the document for themselves without his help in the face of calls for clarity amidst confusion and anguish. Actually, while Honorius’s silence affected the doctrine of the faith (theory), Pope Francis’s actions are even more serious since his silence pertains to moral acts (practice) which more directly and rapidly affect the people.

    When Pope Francis issued his apostolic letter Amoris Laetitia, he stated in paragraph no. 3 that the questions raised by the previous synod on the family did not need to be answered by the “intervention of the magisterium.” So even though a person may consider Amoris Laetitia a magisterial document by its form, the matter discussed internally in the document clearly shows that the mind of Pope Francis was not to officially decide any matter on faith or morals.

    The key unanswered question which is causing people so much anguish is: Can someone living in an invalid marital union, i.e., actual adultery, continue to have sexual relations and receive Holy Communion? A number of cardinals and bishops throughout the world, especially in Germany, are telling the press and their people that Amoris Laetitia gives permission to do so. But the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith [not as definitively as it ought to, because it cannot truthfully do so at this time!] and other bishops and cardinals say that Amoris Laetitia does not give this permission.

    While parts of Amoris Laetitia are susceptible to various interpretations, footnote 329 of Amoris Laetitia is clearly contrary to the Catholic Faith and Sacred Tradition of the Church. It uses footnotes in a deceptive manner to lead invalidly married couples to think that they can receive the sacraments and continue having sex—if their abstinence will be harmful to their own relationship and their children (as if each act of adultery is not always more harmful to themselves and their children!). Since footnotes are not part of the text, footnote 329 is probably not the work of the pope or the magisterium.

    But, when Pope Francis was asked by cardinals to clarify the precise meaning of Amoris Laetitia, he refused. This failure to act by Pope Francis has caused Church leaders around the world to spin off in opposing directions. No wonder Catholics are confused.

    For example, the moral position of footnote 329 was recently adopted by the Bishops of Malta who lead one of the first dioceses ever created in the Church.

    These bishops [all 2 of them, as I like to underscore] claim that, according to Amoris Laetitia, there are “complex situations where the choice of living ‘as brothers and sisters’ becomes humanly impossible.” Consequently, if “a separated or divorced person who is living in a new relationship manages, with an informed and enlightened conscience, to acknowledge and believe that he or she are [sic] at peace with God, he or she cannot be precluded from participating in the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.” This effectively annuls Can. 915 and 916 of the Code of Canon Law.

    However, while it may be very difficult at times to keep the 6th commandment on chastity, one cannot say that it is “impossible” for anyone. The Council of Trent (whose teachings are as valid today as they were during the Council years of 1545 to 1563) declared in an ex cathedra statement that: “If anyone says that the commandments of God are, even for one that is justified and constituted in grace, impossible to observe, let him be anathema.”

    The Church has always taught that: “There are acts, which in themselves, independently of their circumstances and intentions, are always gravely illicit by reason of their object; such as blasphemy, murder and adultery. One may never do evil so that good may result from it.”

    In other words one cannot appeal to the “end justifies the means” as a reason to justify “blasphemy, murder, and adultery” or a “sacrilege” “especially when committed against the Eucharist” (Rom. 3:8). A couple, therefore, cannot commit adultery or a sacrilege for the sake of their own relationship or their children.

    So, why does Pope Francis remain silent?
    As of today, we do not know, and this is why we must be careful. While we can advise, plead, and complain to the pope (like St. Catherine Siena) about his actions and lack of action, we cannot officially judge him. [I don’t think anyone critical of this pope labors under any illusion that we think about him, i.e., how we judge him on the basis of his questionable actions and statements, can have any ‘official’ weight at all, that it only has weight as far as it contributes to a general consensus about him among orthodox Catholics. ]
    Only a pope can judge a pope, which is not the same thing as fellow archbishops and cardinals exercising their authority to correct false statements.

    Pope Francis and his Amoris Laetitia will certainly be judged by a later pope. Will he receive a better judgment than Honorius? Only God knows. But we do not know everything. There may be reasons unknown to us why Pope Francis is refusing to settle the dispute. [Pray tell us at least one such reason!] And, when all is said and done, he may receive a better and more favorable judgment from future popes than Honorius received.

    The lesson to be learned from all this is that popes do make mistakes, but sooner or later the Church corrects them and continues on safely under the care of the Holy Spirit. [Dear Lord, please make this pope correct himself. Come, Holy Ghost….]


    Apropos, Phil Lawler has this cri du coeur which one has long inferred from is reactions to AL, but the title of which makes me say DUH! Hasn't this pope been almost from Day 1 of his pontificate?


    Pope Francis has become a source of division
    By Phil Lawler
    CATHOLIC CULTURE
    Jan 27, 2017

    Every day I pray for Pope Francis. And every day (I am exaggerating, but only slightly), the Pope issues another reminder that he does not approve of Catholics like me.

    If the Holy Father were rebuking me for my sins, I would have no reason to complain. But day after weary day the Pope upbraids me — and countless thousands of other faithful Catholics — for clinging to, and sometimes suffering for, the truths that the Church has always taught. We are rigid, he tells us. We are the “doctors of the law,” the Pharisees, who only want to be “comfortable” with our faith.

    The Roman Pontiff should be a focus of unity in the Church. Pope Francis, regrettably, has become a source of division. There are two reasons for this unhappy phenomenon: the Pope’s autocratic style of governance and the radical nature of the program that he is relentlessly advancing.

    The autocratic style (which contrasts sharply with promises of collegial and synodal governance) has never been quite so evident as this week, when he has tossed aside the independent and sovereign status of the Knights of Malta. Writing of that remarkable coup in the Wall Street Journal, Sohrab Ahmari observed that it “has divided the church along familiar lines.” Ahmari (a recent convert to Catholicism) continued:"As with other recent disputes — communion for the divorced-and-remarried; the status of the Latin Mass; Vatican engagement with China’s Communist regime — conservatives are on one side and Pope Francis is on the other."

    But a Pope should not be on “one side” of disagreements within the Church. Certainly the Roman Pontiff must make decisions and set policies. But unlike a political leader, he is not expected to bring his own particular agenda to his office, to promote his own allies and punish his opponents.

    Whereas we expect President Trump to reverse policies of President Obama — just as Obama reversed policies of President Bush — we expect a Pope to preserve the decisions of his predecessors. Because Church is not, or should not be, divided into rival parties.

    Every Pope makes controversial decisions, and every controversial decision leaves some people unhappy. But a prudent Pontiff avoids even the appearance of acting arbitrarily. Mindful of the fact that he serves as head of a college of bishops — not as a lone monarch — he does his best to propose rather than impose solutions to pastoral problems.

    Although he exercises enormous authority within the Church, a Pope also acts under considerable restraints. He is empowered to speak for the universal Church, but in a sense he forfeits the ability to speak for himself. The Pope cannot be partisan. He is expected to settle arguments, not to start them. At the Council of Jerusalem, St. Peter set the standard for his successors: hearing out the arguments on both sides and then rendering a judgment (in this case, ruling against the stand that he himself had previously held).

    By its very nature the Pope’s role is conservative, in the best sense of that word. He is charged with preserving the purity and clarity of our faith: a faith that does not change. Since our fundamental beliefs were set forth by Jesus Christ, no prelate can question them without subverting the authority of the Church that our Lord founded — the same Church that gives him his only claim to authority.

    While he is the supreme teacher of the Catholic faith, the Pope can only teach what the Church has always taught: the deposit of faith that has been passed down to him from the apostles. He can speak infallibly, but only when he proclaims and defines what faithful Catholics have “always and everywhere” believed.

    In short the Pope cannot teach something new. He can certainly express old truths in new ways, but if he introduces actual novelties, he is abusing his authority. And if his “new” teachings conflict with the established doctrines of the Church, he is undermining his own authority.

    Many faithful Catholics believe that with Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis has encouraged beliefs and practices that are incompatible with the prior teachings of the Church. If that complaint is accurate, he has violated the sacred trust that is given to Peter’s successors. If it is not accurate, at a minimum the Holy Father owes us explanations, not insults.
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    00 28/01/2017 20:14

    Well, the Order of Malta sure folded up easily – not just without a fight, let alone a whimper, but in total abject capitulation to whatever it was that the pope and Cardinal Parolin wanted them to do! Goodbye to a 902-year-old history….


    The Sovereign Council, the government of the Sovereign Order of Malta, met this afternoon in the Magistral Palace in Rome. On the agenda was the resignation from Office of Grand Master presented by Fra’ Matthew Festing, in accordance with article 16 of the Constitution of the Order of Malta. The Sovereign Council accepted his resignation from office. Conforming to the Constitution, the Pope has been notified of the resignation of Fra’ Matthew Festing, [A blatant farce, since it was the pope who demanded and got Festing’s resignation on the spot!] which will be communicated to the 106 Heads of State with whom the Order has diplomatic relations.

    In accordance with Article 17 of the Constitution, the Grand Commander, Fra’ Ludwig Hoffmann von Rumerstein, has assumed the office of Lieutenant ad interim and will remain the Order of Malta’s head until the election of the successor of the Grand Master. The Sovereign Council thanked Fra’ Matthew Festing for his great commitment during his nine years in office.

    Subsequently, the Sovereign Council presided over by the Lieutenant ad interim annulled the decrees establishing the disciplinary procedures against Albrecht Boeselager and the suspension of his membership in the Order. Albrecht Boeselager resumes his office as Grand Chancellor immediately.

    In a letter sent yesterday, 27 January 2017, to Fra’ Ludwig Hoffman von Rumerstein and the members of the Sovereign Council, Pope Francis reaffirmed the special relationship between the Sovereign Order of Malta and the Apostolic See. The Pope affirmed that the Lieutenant ad interim assumes responsibility over the Order’s government, in particular regarding relationships with other States. Pope Francis noted precisely that his Special Delegate will be operating on “the spiritual renewal of the Order, specifically of its professed members.” The Sovereign Order of Malta ensures its full collaboration with the Special Delegate whom the Holy Father intends to appoint.

    The Sovereign Order of Malta is most grateful to Pope Francis and the Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin for their interest in and care for the Order. The Order appreciates that the Holy Father’s decisions were all carefully taken with regard to and respect for the Order, with a determination to strengthen its sovereignty. [MORE FARCE! How can any right-minded person think the Knights’ Council is anything but totally co-opted and cowed by the pope and cardinal Parolin! ]
    The Lieutenant ad interim together with the Sovereign Council will soon convoke the Council Complete of State for the election of the successor of the Grand Master, according to Art. 23 of the Constitution.


    The papal wrecking ball
    Another week of Francis puzzling and punishing conservatives.
    by GEORGE NEUMAYR
    AMERICAN SPECTATOR
    January 27, 2017

    Under Pope Francis, the new orthodoxy is heterodoxy and woe to those who don’t conform to it.

    Headlines appeared this week announcing that the pope “had taken over the Knights of Malta after condom dispute.” In the past, such a headline would have suggested a papal crackdown on condom distribution. In this case, it refers to Pope Francis punishing an organization that fired an official implicated in the distribution of condoms. Pope Francis was dismayed by the removal of a Knights of Malta official who had overseen the order’s humanitarian agency, which had been handing out contraceptives to prostitutes and aid workers in Asia.

    The essence of the complicated story is that that official had liberal friends in high places at the Vatican who swooped down to reinstate him after his firing by the head of the Knights of Malta. The upshot of it all is that the conservative who fired the liberal is now gone (forced out by Francis), the liberal has now been restored to his former position as grand chancellor, and the once-sovereign order is now under the control of Pope Francis for deviating from his liberal wishes.

    The Tablet’s Christopher Lamb, who is a de facto stenographer for the heterodox prelates who now run the Church,[a great description for the scribes who serve the current High Priests of the Temple of Bergoglio] sums the controversy up as a papal rebuke to the traditionalists in the order, a snub of Cardinal Raymond Burke (the conservative American who serves as its ceremonial head and whose wings have now been clipped by the pope’s “delegate”), and a victory for German liberals (whom Lamb comically casts as white-hatted lovers of the poor, as opposed to those awful conservatives so fixated on the order’s “quasi-monarchic” ways). One of those liberals is Munich’s Cardinal Reinhard Marx, who has been outspoken in his opposition to the Church’s moral teachings.

    Once again, the pope’s priorities have been revealed. Countless Catholic organizations, schools, and orders, starting with the pope’s own, the Jesuits, promote heresy and scandal of one kind or another. Yet he never lifts a finger to police any of them. On the contrary, they receive his warm praise. Only conservatives fall under his withering gaze. He is indulgent toward every flock except his faithful own, whom he showers with epithets, from “rigid” to “judgmental” to “neurotic.” His papacy has proceeded like an endless serious of Onion parodies.

    Pope Francis has endorsed condom use (to stop the Zika virus) and told Catholics not to breed “like rabbits.” So it is altogether fitting that Paul Ehrlich, the most extreme population control advocate in history (who has called for compulsory abortions and contraceptives to “save the planet”), has been invited to a Vatican conference in February on “Biological Extinction.” Under Pope Francis, the Vatican has become a magnet for the West’s most anti-Catholic activists, many of whom contributed to the pope’s encyclical on global warming.

    The Ehrlich invite throws light on the Knights of Malta controversy and the relativistic mumbo-jumbo the pope’s aides have used to try and explain it away. The pope’s secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, wrote to the head of the Knights of the Malta that firing an official implicated in a condom-distribution scandal is contrary to “dialogue,” but the pope “has never spoken of sending someone away!” Except conservatives, of course. He just sent away the recipient of that very letter.

    For all of his endless rhetoric about “autonomy” and “respect for differences,” Francis is the most autocratic and purge-happy pope in many decades. He is the quintessential “tolerant” liberal who rose to power by disobedience (as archbishop of Buenos Aires, he disregarded Vatican directives) then retains power by demanding absolute obedience from others.

    Were he calling for obedience to Church teaching, no one could fault him. But he is not. He is calling for obedience to his own modernist whims. While he purges conservatives from the Church, he clears out space in it for her enemies.

    From the corridors of the U.N. to the halls of Havana and Beijing, anti-Catholic statists can always count on him to soft-pedal their encroachments upon the Church, as evident in his outrageous recent interview in which he said that Chinese Catholics can “practice [their] faith in China.” No, they can’t. [Like Donald Trump, Bergoglio does not mind lying outright to suit his present purposes. The ones faithful to Catholic orthodoxy are treated brutally.

    How is it that the pope can look upon Chinese communists so benevolently while viewing conservative Catholics so sternly? Future historians will find it astonishing that at the beginning of the 21st century the pope didn’t so much protect Catholics as join in their persecution.

    [Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 29/01/2017 19:55]
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    Two leading Italian commentators on Church affairs agree that the entire Vatican farce regarding the [no-longer] Sovereign Order of Malta appears to have an ulterior goal, namely, to deprive Cardinal Burke of the sinecure he how holds as Patron of that Order.

    On January 26, shortly after the Vatican announced that the pope had demanded and obtained the resignation of Matthew Festing as Grand Master [sovereign elected for life] of the Order, Riccardo Cascioli, at La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, had a lengthy commentary, of which this was the second paragraph:
    At stake are many important questions: above all, the correspondence of charitable activities to Church teaching, and the self-governing autnomy of a sovereign entity like the Order of Malta. But it has become evident by the tone of Vatican statements on the issue that the objective is the head of Cardinal Raymond Burke who is the Patron of the Order (whose duties are spiritual oversight of the Order, which has professed religious among its leadership and members, and effectively, the pope’s nuncio to the Order)…
    Today, it is Sandro Magister's turn:

    After the Grand Master of Malta,
    guess whose head will fall next
    From the English service of

    January 29, 2017

    Decapitated by the pope of its Grand Master, the Englishman Matthew Festing, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta not only has ratified his forced resignation on Saturday, January 28, but it has turned back the hands of time to the fateful 6th of December, 2016, reinstating in the role of Grand Chancellor the very man who on that day had been removed from it and suspended from the Order, the German Albrecht Freiherr von Boeselager.

    What reversed the fortunes within the Order, to the point of driving it to this act of total submission to the bidding of Pope Francis, were three acts carried out in rapid succession by the pontiff himself:
    - the summoning of the Grand Master on January 24 with the order given to him to resign;
    - the letter on the following day from secretary of state Cardinal Pietro Parolin with the specification of the pope’s wishes; and - finally two letters on January 27 from the pope himself, with a further specification of the role to be performed by the “pontifical delegate” whose arrival has been announced: “for the spiritual renewal of the Order.”

    And it is this last element that is the most newsworthy in the statement released this evening by the Order. As Settimo Cielo had correctly reported, Pope Francis has in effect granted the Order the faculty of proceeding according to its constitutions concerning its interim regency - now assumed by the Grand Commander of the Order, Fra' Ludwig Hoffmann von Rumerstein - and the appointment of the new Grand Master.

    So the “pontifical delegate” will neither replace nor overlap the legitimate governance of the Order, as many had hoped or feared. Instead he will accompany it with the task of “spiritual” guide. A task, that is, very similar to the one that already belongs by statute to the cardinal patron.

    The decapitation inflicted by Pope Francis on the Order of Malta is therefore twofold. Because what is falling is not only the head of Grand Master Festing, but also, de facto, that of cardinal patron Raymond Leo Burke. Meaning the ones who had brought about the removal of Boeselager in the certainty that they were thereby putting into practice the mandate entrusted to them by the pope, in a December 1 letter to Burke: to “promote the spiritual interests of the order and remove any affiliation with groups or practices that run contrary to the moral law.”

    That removal, instead, set in motion an unprecedented clash within the Order of Malta and between the Order and the Holy See, the narrative of which was discernible in the combative statements released by the Order until a few days ago. Today there is no more trace of those statements. They have all been removed from the official website of the Order. [What is an adjective that is the hyperbole for 'abject' to describe what has happened to the Order of Malta?]

    But it is difficult to believe that the tumult can be neutralized simply by the act of submission to the pope carried out by the new regency of the Order on Saturday, January 28.

    Yesterday, on his Facebook page, Antonio Socci had two reminders from St. Thomas of Aquinas:
    For us:
    “Do not pay attention to him who is talking to you, but to what he says!”

    For Bergoglio:
    Since they constitute an immediate danger for the faith, prelates must be reminded of the following, even publicly. Thus did St. Paul, who was subordinate to St. Peter: he rebuked him in public because of imminent danger of scandal regarding a matter of the faith. As St. Augustine said of this, “St. Peter himself gave the example to those who govern so that if they should diverge at any time from the right way, they should nor reject it as unworthy any correction to which they are called”.


    Great editorial comment on the Order of Malta collapse - with an unpleasant metaphor. Actually, a used condom would have been more appropriate but that would be visually gross...




    As usual, one is grateful to Maike Hickson for keeping us abreast of what the German media are saying about Church affairs…

    As in the Church, a German faction
    is central to the crisis in the Order of Malta
    by Maike Hickson

    1/28/2017

    While a stunned and confused Catholic audience is now watching the seeming papal takeover of the Order of Malta, there also arises now a kind of inner conflict within the ranks, especially from some more conservative or traditionalist Catholics. An introductory presentation of this manifold debate might thus be a way of bringing out more truth about the larger current situation.

    Part of that truth seems to be that the conflict within the Order of Malta reflects the ongoing larger struggle within the Catholic Church between “progressive” and “conservative-traditionalist” elements. But, first we shall turn to the controversial debate among “conservative” Catholics concerning the crisis of the Maltese Order.

    In an article published on 25 January 2017 in the conservative German Catholic newspaper Die Tagespost, its Rome Correspondent Guido Horst has now turned to defend the controversial German Maltese Knight, Albrecht von Boeselager, and even to accuse Professor Roberto de Mattei’s organization Lepanto Foundation and certain “English-speaking media” (perhaps Edward Pentin) of spreading in Rome a “Black Legend” concerning the current conflict in the Order. In Horst’s words, this alleged “Black Legend” says that:
    The “liberal” camp of Boeselager and the German branch of the Order [of Malta] had looked on for a long time, noting how, in humanitarian projects of the Order, … there took place in Asia and in Africa the distribution of contraceptives [when the German Von Boeselager was Grand Hospitaller, i.e. Health Minister, of the charitable order].

    The Grand Master [Fraʾ Matthew Festing] and the Cardinal Patron Raymond Burke had wished to preserve the moral integrity of the Order, and thus it came to a struggle with the Great Chancellor [von Boeselager] who finally had to leave. After his initial support for Burke, [Pope] Francis then made a volte-face and established a Vatican commission inclining with sympathy for von Boeselager and, with it, thus damaged the sovereignty of the Maltese [Order]. Now those “liberals” have won against the “conservatives.”
    In Horst’s eyes, “this Black Legend was spread, not least of all, by English-speaking media outlets and organizations such as the Lepanto Foundation which sharply criticize the pope with regard to Amoris Laetitia.” The German journalist then proceeds to defend von Boeselager himself:
    Such a legend, however, does not correspond to reality. Boeselager himself had helped to end the condom cooperation. A liberal German branch of the Order does not exist, but, rather, only a financially strong German Association does exist, which has weight among the members of the Order.
    Horst then proceeds to underscore that the Germans themselves had nothing to do with the fact that, in 2014, a new government of the Order (under Von Boeselager, now promoted to Grand Chancellor, or Prime Minister had been elected which was reportedly not to the liking of the Grand Master. Horst also affirms that open conflict between Festing and von Boeselager broke out
    when the German baron was told that the pope wanted him to resign his position. That was false. Francis wanted a dialogue within the Order. So now the Grand Master had to go. Lies don’t travel far. The Order has now to resurrect itself out of the debris.
    What Horst implies here is that Cardinal Burke and Fraʾ Matthew Festing have been mendacious, by allegedly lying to von Boeselager about the pope’s desire when these two met with von Boeselager in order to request his resignation. That is a serious claim. It would thus be helpful in this context if Cardinal Burke himself would now come out into the public and speak about the whole affair, stating at least the main facts.

    Since Horst makes some grave charges against the so-called “conservative” camp (Festing and Burke) within the Order of Malta – as well as within the wider Catholic Church and the Catholic media – it might be useful now, for the sake of clarity, to quote another German journalist who has no ties or sympathies whatsoever with that same conservative camp. Here I speak of Julius Müller-Meiningen, the well-informed Rome Correspondent for the prominent German newspaper Die Zeit who, in spite of his very outspoken sympathies for the overall Francis reform, has a candor and willingness to speak truths even if they do not completely support Pope Francis and his followers.
    Müller-Meiningen wrote a January 26, 2017 article for Die Zeit‘s sectionChrist&Welt in which he describes the conflict concerning the Order of Malta.

    Entitled “Die Krise mit Tradition” (The crisis with Tradition), the article describes a conflict between, on the one hand, the progressive camp of von Boeselager and the German branch of the Order, and, on the other hand, the conservative camp of Cardinal Burke and Fraʾ Festing. The journalist says:
    In the Order of Malta, a clash of cultures is taking place. A battle is being fought on a smaller scale as that which is happening in the whole Catholic Church. The struggle – fought with different means – is about almost everything: about the right balance and about the right understanding of Catholicity, Tradition, Doctrine, and Mercy. With the special – yes, nearly decisive – participation of German Catholicism.
    [Clearly, the ‘conservatives’ just lost decisively. At least, the crisis appears to have exposed what the Knights of Malta have become – spiritually corrupted by the secular influences of powerful members like the German ‘knights’ who have financial clout.]

    Müller-Meiningen describes how, in 2014, the German branch of the Order of Malta had gained great influence at the election of the new government, to include the choice of von Boeselager as new Grand Chancellor. [Or might it have been more accurate to say that ‘the German branch got its way by electing a new government ehaded by one of them’?]

    He says that this development within the Order was analogous to the new orientation within the whole Catholic Church with Pope Francis turning away from “seemingly cold dogma” towards a “pastoral leniency toward the sinner.” But then, the pope assigned Cardinal Burke – who has resisted Pope Francis in his attempts to promote Cardinal Walter Kasper’s ideas concerning remarried divorcees – to be the Patron of the Order of Malta. [Did he think perhaps it was a mere sinecure in which Burke would and could do little, if anything, to advance Catholic orthodoxy? Was he already aware in 2014 - which is when Van Boeselager became Chancellor – that the Order of Malta was turning progressivist and therefore he expected Burke to find no toehold there?] But, according to Müller-Meiningen, Burke decided to take a “hyper-active” role in his new position. [How exactly? If he was 'hyper-active', surely we would have heard about his 'excesses' by now from the German clique and their supporters!]

    Müller-Meiningen adds that von Boeselager – among “many other members of the Order” – was “not happy” with Burke’s appointment. Here, again, the Germans took a prominent resistant role, as Müller-Meiningen now explains: “The German clique in the Order especially feared and demurred at the ultra-conservative approach of the U.S. Cardinal, who is one of the four signatories of the letter with five DUBIA concerning Francis’ Magisterium which was published weeks ago.”

    During the period when the conflict over Amoris laetitia intensified, the German journalist claims, the conflict with Burke grew, as well, in the Maltese Order. ”The Grand Chancellor von Boeselager is said to have been very indignant about Burke’s nomination [as the Cardinal Patron] because he sensed that the cardinal would try to bring the Order into line”.

    Following Burke’s formal appointment, von Boeselager increasingly was asked by his superiors to justify some of his own actions as the coordinator of the international social services of the Order. There were internal investigations. Müller-Meiningen then quotes a German representative of the Order, Erich von Lobkowicz, who said that “a battle was taking place between all that Pope Francis stands for and a tiny clique of ultraconservative fastidious old diehards in the Church — diehards that have missed the train in every conceivable respect.”

    The Zeit journalist , for his part, says Burke and his camp “wanted to preclude the danger that this Catholic Order – though sovereign – would now change into a charitable non-governmental organization [NGO],” while the progressive camp comparably feared that the Order would now be turned into “a traditionalist flagship.”

    It is in this context that Müller-Meiningen draws a comparison with the German role in the larger Church with regard to the indulgent relaxing of some of the Church’s moral teaching. Here he explicitly mentions: Cardinal Kasper; the German-speaking group at the 2015 Synod on the Family; Cardinal Christoph Schönborn’s official presentation of Amoris Laetitia; as well as Cardinal Gerhard Müller’s own recent distancing of himself from the Four Cardinal’s DUBIA and because of his claim now that the doctrine of Amoris Laetitia is “very clear” – after which statement many “staunch Catholics no longer understood” what was really happening in the Church.

    Last but not least, Müller-Meiningen adds Cardinal Reinhard Marx to that progressive list “of the phalanx of pioneers of reform Catholicism” because Marx definitely has “a good connection” with the German Maltese Knights, especially with Erich von Lobkowicz, their President; and thus Marx is now said also “to have intervened in Rome in favor of von Boeselager.”

    Müller-Meiningen himself is skeptical, however, as to whether Pope Francis's decision to establish a Vatican commission for the purpose of investigating the Maltese Order case “was a good idea.” (His article was written before the retirement of Fraʾ Festing.) Nonetheless, his presentation of the current conflict with – and within – the Order of Malta is quite helpful and effectively contradicts – though most probably, unwittingly - Guido Horst’s notion of a Black Legend allegedly spread by the “English-speaking media” and the purportedly biased Lepanto Foundation.

    Another German-speaking source should be quoted in this context, moreover. The conservative Austrian Catholic website, Kath.net, had investigated the incipient conflict within the Order as early as December 15, 2016 [which means it did so after the Order had announced the decision to dismiss Von Boeselager as Grand Chancellor]...It has its own well-informed sources within the Order and in the Vatican, so that it was able to gather and present facts that might not yet be well known, or known at all, to the English-speaking world.

    For its own truthful reporting, Kath.net has consequently been now recently threatened with legal consequences by lawyers on behalf of von Boeselager. Kath.net wrote about this “aggressive” litigious letter publicly and said that it essentially requested from the Austrian website that they be “silent on well-known matters of fact – for which there are renowned witnesses within the [highest ranks of the] Order and in the Vatican.” However, Kath.net did not rescind any of its own articles on the matter of the Order of Malta, and especially those specifically on von Boeselager himself.

    Therefore, let us now consider more deeply two of those articles already published by Kath.net – which is neither an “English-speaking media” nor part of the Lepanto Foundation.

    On 15 December, 2016, Kath.net reported on the incipient conflict between “two camps” within the Order of Malta. The website says:
    A small circle from the German-speaking branch of the Order does not merely want to preserve the advantages of exclusivity and sovereignty; but it wants to loosen the ties to the Catholic teaching and the connections with the pope which are, in their view, too strong.The far larger part [of the Order] is loyal to their founding mission of the defense of the Faith and wishes – after recent negligences – to strengthen this dimension [and ethos].
    Kath.net also shows that it was none other than von Boeselager himself who opposed such a strengthening of the spiritual dimension of the Order:
    For this [a strengthening of the spiritual dimension], a few years ago it happened that an internal commission was established which was to produce new guidelines for the actual practice (lived) spirituality among the members of the Order. After a year, Albrecht Freiherr von Boeselager – who was then the Order’s Great Hospitaller – took these nearly finished guidelines and discarded them, favoring, instead, a more watered-down re-making of the old statutes and rules, which, consequently then disappeared into a drawer.
    In addition, Kath.net also shows how under von Boeselager’s authority – and for some years – certain putatively charitable Malteser programs (in collaboration with the UNHCR) took place in Africa which included the distribution of condoms. The Austrian website adds:
    Von Boeselager and the German branch of the Order to which he belongs simply ignored the work of an investigatory commission concerning these allegations – which were established upon request from the Vatican – which showed that violations against the teaching of the Church were indeed taking place. Other problems were added in and by and through Germany which included direct interventions against the Great Master and the Order’s government in the Vatican – but nevertheless, the influence of the German branch continued to grow.
    According to Kath.net, in 2008, the newly elected Grand Master Fraʾ Festing (elected during the pontificate of Benedict XVI) “tried to follow the guidelines of the Vatican’s Secretary of State and thus especially proposed the election of [celibate] Knights with perpetual vows – so-called Professed Knights – for the four highest offices of the Order’s government.”

    This attempt failed, because three of the new positions were then filled by the Order with three Knights who were without perpetual vows.     Thus it seems that the original guidelines coming from the Vatican under Benedict XVI were not sufficiently heeded, in spite of Festing’s own attempts to implement them.

    This might explain why von Boeselager was later so indignant about Cardinal Burke’s appointment as Patron Cardinal, since Burke had been an important collaborator of Pope Benedict XVI, who had also appointed him in 2008 to be the official head of the Apostolic Signatura in Rome.

    The evidence presented by Kath.net suggests that the current conflict is, indeed, a conflict between Pope Benedict’s attempt to Catholicize the Order of Malta more fully, and Pope Francis’s collaboration with those other elements within the Order who did not want to go along with that kind of religious restoration.

    In this context, it is also important to note that on December 28, it was Kath.net which claimed (before Edward Pentin’s own reporting on Cardinal Marx’ role) from its own special sources – that it was Cardinal Reinhard Marx who had intervened with the pope in favor of von Boeselager. As we all know, Cardinal Marx represents that part of the Church’s hierarchy which wishes to allow Holy Communion for the “remarried” divorcees, against Pope Benedict XVI’s own final teaching in this matter.

    Julius Müller-Meiningen , in the above-quoted article for Die Zeit - ends his analysis with the following comment:
    The progressive wing of the Order [of Malta] sees Pope Francis as a pioneer for an updated and contemporary organization of the Maltese Order. For the others, he is a phenomenon that will pass away one day. Much like his predecessor, Benedict XVI, who retired four years ago. He was, in the eyes of the Catholic traditionalists, once an unswerving rock in the turmoil of the Zeitgeist. But, he was, after all, also a German who then became weak, who came down from the cross and who, with his retirement, thereby made the current disorder altogether possible in the first place.

    [It’s not easy to defend Benedict XVI from snide remarks and accusations like this because what he has said so far about his successor, what has been published of it, anyway – never mind if the statements may have been made in his first interviews with Peter Seewald after the resignation, and therefore well before he or anyone else had any idea what catastrophes Bergoglio had in mind for the Church – seem to show he is 100 percent behind Bergoglio, even if his entire life and work are testimony that he could not possibly be.

    But to blame him for the fact that Bergoglio was elected to succeed him – because that is what it means when his critics (including Maike Hickson, the 1Peter5 and Remnant writers) mindlessly say that he is responsible for the current disorder in the Church – is to blame him for not being omniscient. But not one of his present critics, who were once among his most ardent admirers, nor any of the Vaticanistas (not even Andrea Tornielli) ever predicted that Bergoglio would be elected in the 2013 Conclave.

    Blame Benedict XVI for stepping down as pope if you will, because he was human enough to admit that in February 2013, he found himself increasingly unable to carry out the office of pope the way a pope ought to do - but you cannot blame him for the unfortunate choice made by the 2013 Conclave because it is their choice which has led to this disorder. Does anyone think that if, say, Cardinal Scola or Cardinal Erdo had been elected pope, that the Church would come to this state, in which the pope who is supposed to symbolize the unity of the Church is instead the most active agent for its current division?]

    Does it, then, still astonish us – in light of these tragic changes since Benedict’s resignation – that Stephan Freiherr Spies von Büllesheim himself, the Chancellor of the German Association of the Order of Malta, at once rushed in to thank Pope Francis for his recent intervention (and unmistakable intrusion into the Order’s sovereign affairs) – as we see in his January 27 interview with the German Bishops’ website Katholisch.de?

    Von Spies speciously insisted in that interview that “a German clique [Seilschaft – interestingly exactly the expression used the day before by Julius Müller-Meiningen] does not exist” in Rome and that “we are utmost grateful that the Holy See has assisted the Order in this constitutional crisis so quickly and so safely [by requesting Fraʾ Festing’s abdication].”

    Significantly, the German Bishops’s own website also asked von Spies the rhetorical question as to whether Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke is still tenable to be the Cardinal Patron of the Order of Malta?” [Obviously NOT! The Cardinal Patron of the Order is also supposed to be the papal nuncio to he Order, i.e., the pope's personal representative, but the Vatican has announced that Bergoglio will be naming 'a personal delegate' to supervise in his behalf the 'necessary renewal' of the Order that he has ordered completely outside any right he may have over the Knights of Malta. Obviously, he does not expect Burke to fall in line with that. Which, I think, leaves Burke with no honorable way out but to resign here and now.]
    [Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 30/01/2017 16:47]
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    00 30/01/2017 17:56



    I had to translate this lengthy commentary so I could not post it earlier, but it represents yet another clear-eyed commentary on the latest
    Bergoglio show of autocratic even if illegitimate and unwarranted force by a respected Vaticanista who, until Amoris laetitia, had tried to
    give this pope and his pontificate every benefit of the doubt. No longer, obviously...

    The Order of Malta: Looking at
    the roots of the confrontation
    Translated from

    January 25, 2017

    “Distinguished members of the Sovereign Council, I hereby inform you that His Eminent Highness Fra’ Matthew Festing, Grand Master of the Order, submitted his resignation on January 24 to the Holy Father Francis who accepted it”.

    That is how the Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin begins his letter to the members of the highest governing body of the Order of Malta. The letter, dated January 25, also stipulates that from hereon, it would be the Grand Commander who would take on the reins of government ad interim.

    The letter constitutes the final act of a very harsh controversy, without precedent, between the Order and the Holy See but also within the Order itself. But it certainly is not the conclusion of an episode which still has many obscure aspects.

    Recapitulating, let us recall that the now ex-Grand Master, Robert Matthew Festing, an Englishman from Northumberland, son of a British military officer, descendant of a Knight of Malta who was martyred in 1539, wrote out his resignation during a face-to-face confrontation – which we can imagine would have been rather dramatic - with Pope Francis. Why did he do so?

    The crisis began last November when the Grand Master, the sovereign authority in the Order, dismissed the Grand Chancellor (foreign minister as well as chief executive) Albrecht Freiherr von Boeselager, a German jurist, son of Baron Philipp von Boeselager, a cavalry officer who was involved in the failed assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944.

    The facts in contention date back to the time when Boeselager was the Grand Hospitaller (in charge of the Order’s worldwide charitable work), with the accusation that, in the context of humanitarian and medical assistance made available by the Order, he did not prevent the distribution of condoms and artificial contraceptives, and even of abortifacients, in Africa and Asia as a measure against the transmission of HIV/AIDS, which is, of course, a violation of Catholic teaching, therefore, considered a grave misconduct by an official of the Order whose goal is not merely to assist the poor and the sick but also to defend the faith.

    But Boeselager rejected all the accusations [Did he? Initial reports quoted him as defending what he did because he did so as ‘a liberal Catholic’], refused to take responsibility for the charges and twice refused the invitation to resign his post, even when the invitation became a direct order). Therefore, a disciplinary proceeding was also initiated against him.

    At this point, the Holy See intervened. Informed of what happened, Pope Francis on December 22 [16] days after Boeselager was dismissed] created an investigating commission to “gather facts that will inform the Holy See completely and as soon as possible” to shed light on the whole affair.

    The five members of the Vatican commission are Archbishop Silvano Maria Tomasi, former Vatican observer at the UN office in Geneva; Gianfranco Ghirlanda, Jesuit canonist from the Gregorian University; Count Jacques de Liedekerke, who was Grand Chancellor of the Order in 2001-2004, a Belgian lawyer who founded international legal study centers in Brussels and Antwerp; Marc Odendahl, a Swiss financial expert and administrator of various founjdations; and Lebanse bankere Marwan Sehnaoui. [The presence of two finance professionals in the five-man commission is interesting, to say the least.].

    Festing immediately rejected any Vatican intervention in the internal governance of the order, calling it ‘unacceptable’. He said Boeselager’s dismissal was “an inernal act of governance of the Sovereign Order of Malta which consequently falls solely under the Order’s competency”. In a successive statement, Festing reaffirmed his firm intention not to cooperate with the Vatican commission, “if only to safeguard the order’s sphere of sovereignty
    with respect to initiatives of a form objectively – i.e., beyond intentions which are juridically irrelevant - meant to question that sovereignty or at any rate, to delimit it”.

    The sovereignty and autonomy of the Order: that is what Festing was defending. Indeed, it must be remembered that the Order of Malta has a constitutional charter, last reformed in 1977, which states that “the Order is a subject of international law and exercises sovereign functions” (Art 3, par. 3) by its own organs of government, its own legislative organs, and its own courts.

    Under international law, the Order of Malta is a sovereign State - it issues its own passports, it has diplomatic relations with more than 100 countries around the world, and it is represented at the United Nations and the European Union exactly as the Holy See is.
    That is why Festing did not hesitate to send an official note in which he speaks of a ‘mistake’ by the Vatican Secretary of State to even form the investigating commission.

    But the Holy See was not backing off. Its investigation continued and finds out that Boeselager had not committed any irregularity, or at least, not in the terms presented by Festing. [How long did that investigation last? A few hours????] At this point, it was clear that the dispute was really beyond just the specific case of Boeselager’s actions – that it had become a true and proper confrontation betweem Festing and the Vatican.

    Since the Cardinal Patron of the Order (i.e., the pope’s nuncio to the Order) is Cardinal Raymond Burke - whom Francis had demoted from president of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura and is one of the Four Cardinals who sent the pope a letter on their DUBIA about Amoris laetitia (a letter which the pope never answered), and because Burke, throughout the confrontation, has sided with Festing – the question is whether the Boeselager case is really the casus belli for a conflagration with a much wider scope

    Underlying this confrontation are the economic and financial interests of the Order (it has been revealed, for instance, that a generous Frenchman recently donated 120 million Swss francs to the Order deposited in Liechhtenstein), and the internal conflicts in the Order, which have been going on for some time, regarding both the management of its assets, as well as what the Order ought to be: one, as it has always been, which has a strong religious brand that upholds correct Catholic doctrine, or should it be something more secular, more like an NGO that is not bound by any religious restrictions?

    Before attempting an answer, let us first try to understand better what the Order is. We can be aided here by the most recent study on the Order – the book L’Ordine di Malta. Storia, giurisprudenza e relazioni internazionali ((De Luca editori d’arte, 2016), by Piero Valentini.

    The author, a military official in Italy’s Financial Guard Service, is a ‘devoted donor’ – one of the categories into which members of the Order can belong to – and as such, he carries out volunteer service in the Order’s Italian aid corps involved in civil protection and humanitarian assistance.

    Starting with the Order’s motto (Tuitio fidei et obsequium pauperum – ’defense of the faith and service to the poor’ – Valentini reconstructs the Order’s history, sets out its international juridical status (even with relation to the Holy See, with which it has a co-equal status under international law), explains the origins and the nature of this juridical status, delineates the functions of the Order’s officials, and illustrates the activities of the Knights of Malta in the contemporary world.

    So we find out that the Order if Malta, whose history begins in the 11th century, with the defense of and assistance to pilgrims visiting the Holy Land, is not just one of the oldest Catholic religious orders, but is effectively (as Festing made clear in his initial responses to the Vatican investigation) a primary entity in international law.

    Most of its present membership of 13,500 (knights and dames) are lay persons, all vowed to exercise Christian charity, but some of them are consecrated persons, like Festing himself [but von Boeselager is not].

    One becomes a member by co-optation, and in the past, by tradition, the Knights of Malta belonged to European nobility [Boeselager is a noble Festing is not] although today, nobles are in a minority. But members must be of proven faith and Christian practice, have undisputed morality, and have earned merits related to the Order’s goals.

    Today, the Order works especially in the field of medical and social assistance as well as in humanitarian interventions. It works in more than 120 countries, and has diplomatic relations with 104 of them. It manages numerous institutions to carry out its work: hospitals, ambulatory facilities, medical centers, institutes for the aged and the disabled, homes for terminally ill patients. When natural calamities occur anywhere like earthquakes and floods, Malteser International – which is the Order’s aid agency – is always at the front lines. Through CIOMAL (International Committee of the Order of Malta), the Order proides assistance to lepers in places of the world where leprosy continues to be a public health problem.

    The highest authority in the Order is the Grand Master, who is elected for life by the General Council of the State. He is assisted by the Sovereign Council, whose members are elected by the General Chapter, which is the Order’s assembly of representatives that meets every five years.

    The financing for the Order’s activities comes principally from the generosity of its own members and from private donations. In some countries, the Order has agreements with the local governments. For its activities in the poorer nations, the Order gets financial assistance from the European Commission and other international organizations.

    The Order’s central seats (which enjoy extra-territorial sovereignty) are located in Rome. The organs of government and the residence of the Grand Master are located in the Palazzo Magistrale, on via Condotti. The Grand Priorate of Rome, comprising members who live in central Italy, has its seat in the Villa Magistrale on the Aventine hill. This is also the location for the Order’s Embassy to the Republic of Italy.

    In his book, Valentini tackles a sensitive topic which has become very relevant in the light of recent events: how to reconcile the Order’s sovereign prerogatives – equal to that of a true and proper State even if the Order has no territory – with the sacred and apostolic nature of a religious order that, as a religious order, is also under the authority of the Church? How to harmonize the demands of international law and canon law?

    The answer lies in the statement of Pope Pius XII on January 24, 1953, which established definitively that the Holy See recognizes the Order of Malta as a subject of international law and that consequently, “the relations between the two institutions cannot be circumscribed only by canon law but must necessarily be regulated by the norms and practices under public international law”.

    In practice, the papal statement of 1953 says that the Order of Malta is answerable to the Holy See insofar as it is an institute of consecrated life (therefore, on matters which concern the religious and spiritual competencies of its consecrated members), whereas, as an entity with the status of a sovereign State, it is independent of the Holy See in civilian matters.

    Thus, the Order has a dual juridical configuration within which – as we are seeing these days – there is room for maneuvering by whoever wishes to make one or the other configuration prevail. [But is it not quite clear that the Vatican’s canon law authority over the Order as an institute of consecrated life only concerns the religious and spiritual activities of the few consecrated Knights of Malta? Festing’s exercise of his authority as elected Sovereign of the Order does not concern his religious or spiritual life at all, although one can now see that as a consecrated Knight, he does owe obedience to the Holy Father, and could not therefore disobey him when he was summarily asked to resign!]

    It must be noted nonetheless that in the Annuario Pontificio which lists all the organisms of the Holy See, the Order of Malta is not listed among the religious orders, but among the embassies accredited to the Holy See. [Obviously, because of the overwhelmingly lay membership of the Order, the Holy See post Pius XII and pre-Bergoglio never considered the Order as a regular religious order as, say, the Jesuits or the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate.]

    Now, let us put Valentini’s book aside, whose contents go far beyond the few facts mentioned here, and turn our attention to the letter sent by Cardinal Parolin on January 25 to the members of the Sovereign Council, in which he announces: “In order to help the Order in the process of renewal which is considered necessary, the Holy Father will nominate his personal delegate whose powers he will define when he makes the appointment”.

    Therefore, the pope thinks ‘a process of renewal’ is ‘necessary’ and that such a process will be led by the pope himself through a personal representative. A renewal towards what? With what objectives? On the basis of what principles?

    Right now, we do not know, but it is clear that the pope wants to carry out substantial changes, that he wants to direct these changes himself, and therefore maintains that he has the juridical power that will allows him to do this – far beyond his competency which covers only the religious and spiritual practices of the Knights who have taken monastic vows.

    Cardinal Parolin continues:
    The Holy Father, on the basis of the evidence that emerges from the information provided to him, has decided that all the acts committed by the Grand Master after December 6, 2016, are null and invalid. The same is true of the acts of the so ereign Council, such as the election of a Grand Chancellor ad interim.
    December 6, 2016, was when Grand Master Matthew Festing, in full possession of sovereignty and in the presence of Grand Commander Ludwig Hoffmann von Rumerstein and by the representative of the pope, Cardinal Raymond Burke, presented Grand Chancellor Albrecht Freiherr von Boeselager with a list of incorrect actions and behavior for which his resignation was requested.

    And, as we said earlier, Boeselager, despite his vow of obedience to the Grand Master, refused to resign, even after Festing was then obliged to make the request an order.

    Now, it is clear that to declare null and invalid all the actions by Festing and the Sovereign Council after December 6 – including the election of a temporary Grand Chancellor – means not just to repudiate and totally write off the government of the Order but to inflict on it (and has done so already) a heavy penalty. This is the clearest way to show that it is the pope who is in command here.

    It must be noted that Parolin’s letter also contains an expression of thanks to Festing for the work that he has done – which is customary in such cases. Yet the letter concludes this way.
    The Holy Father, acknowledging the great merits of the Order in carrying out so many works to defend the faith and to serve the poor and the sick, expresses all his solicitude for the Order and hopes for the collaboration of everyone at this sensitive and important moment for its future. The Holy Father blesses all the members, volunteers and benefactors of the Order and supports them with his prayers.
    [While I realize that the pope probably had nothing to do with the wording of this letter, especially of these ‘customary diplomatic pleasantries’, my first reaction was ‘Never has a papal blessing ever sounded so fake’.]

    In short, while the axe has fallen on Festing’s head, the pope has made clear that he considers the entire Order in his grip.



    Before closing, it seems opportune to recall the words that Benedict XVI said to the members of the Order on February 9, 2013, just two days before he announced that he was renouncing the papacy when, with ‘affectionate thoughts for all of you’, he expressed his gratitude for the Order’s work in favor of the neediest. Particularly noteworthy is what Papa Ratzinger said, recalling the first days of the Order:
    The occasion for this meeting is the ninth centenary of the solemn privilege Pie postulatio voluntatis dated February 15, 1113 by which Pope Paschal II placed the new ‘hospitalier fraternity’ of Jerusalem named after John the Baptist, under the protection of the Church and made it sovereign, constituting it into an order of ecclesial right, with the faculty of freely electing its own superiors without the interference of any lay or religious authority.
    Note the expressions “…made it sovereign… with the faculty of freely electing… without interference…”.

    Then, in another passage, Benedict XVI, citing the Order’s motto, «Tuitio fidei et obsequium pauperum», said:
    These words summarize very well the charism of your Order which, as a subject of international law, does not aim to exercise powers and influences of a worldly character, but wishes to carry out in full freedom its own mission for the integral good of man, body and soul, looking towards both individuals as well as the community, especially those who have the greatest need for hope and love.
    Note well: “…as a subject of international law” and ‘in full freedom’.

    Let us see what comes next...

    Has anyone in the Bergoglian media cheering squad come up with any attempted defense at all of this pope's shameless and shameful power-grab and obvious intention to ride roughshod to trample down any opposition to his will???

    I am translating next Marco Tosatti's latest commentary on Bergoglio's power games.

    P.S. Apparently Austin Ivereigh, who has turned out to be Bergoglio's most ardent paladin in the AL and Malta wars, has come up with a rationale for the pope's actions against the Order: It goes back to alleged actions by the Knights of Malta in Argentina to depose him as Archbishop of Buenos Aires and a whole load of allegedly related series of events that may or not have any merit at all. Andrea Gagliarducci goes into all of it on the premise that ‘one must understand’ anything this pope does in the light of his experience in Argentina.
    http://www.mondayvatican.com/vatican/pope-francis-and-the-order-of-malta-a-key-to-understanding-this-pontificate

    Which is all fine – we get the Peronist/caudillo authoritarianism, as well as the unilateral ultraliberal policies and actions of the then Archbishop of Buenos Aires with respect to (or probably, better said, without respect for) orthodox Catholic practice. But it surely does not earn Bergoglio any brownie points for allowing his personal pique/vendetta/whathaveyou against the Knights of Malta to cause him to go overboard with a shameless power grab as he has done! Mr Gagliarducci, 'understanding' this pontificate does not in any way diminish i8ts faults nor the gravity of these!

    BTW, Ivereigh also adds that when Festing was head of the UK Knights of Malta, he took part in some cover-up of an abuse case, so let’s see how the truth shakes out in that.


    The Vatican vs the Order of Malta
    Too many questions without answers
    in a strange and ugly story
    Translated from


    What an ugly and strange story we are witnessing with regard to the Order of Malta these days. A story which we are learning bit by bit through dramatic episodes as they are revealed, but with the impression that we are missing many other elements, perhaps very important. [I should say! – since we now have the Ivereign account about Jorge Bergoglio’s personal recriminations against the Knights of Malta in Argentina for having allegedly worked against him years ago in Buenos Aires.]

    What we are seeing is an internal confrontation – officially because of the anti-Catholic distribution of condoms, contraceptives and even abortifacients by the Malteser charitable institutions in Asia and Africa – between the now pope-dismissed Grand Master, an Englishman, and the pope-reinstated Grand Chancellor (under whose term as Grand Hospitaller the distribution of the anti-life drugs took place), a German. The latter having the impressively ‘violent’ support of the pope. A position that can only be astounding in a pontiff who does not stop preaching about ‘mercy’.

    Behind the scenes, some refer to an old battle that has gone on for years between the German and British chapters for control of the Order which has a formidable treasury. And this, after the Germans had completely deprived the Italian chapter of all authority, according to those who are privy to internal affairs in the Order.

    Complicating all this is also the fear – present for years in Vatican circles – that members of a very different group, Freemasonry, have managed to infiltrate the ranks of the Order. Not for any spiritual reasons, but because they see the possibility of doing business profitably as members of the Order.

    The Order is of course a sovereign State which issues its own passports and has other sovereign prerogatives, and it does charitable and humanitarian work around the world, which means it has excellent contacts. So it makes for quite a tempting target.

    It is probably this element which is referred to in one of Edward Pentin’s reports on this crisis. He says that Cardinal Raymond Burke, Patron of the Order, met with the pope on November 10 to discuss the problem of the distribution of anti-life agents. The pope was said to have been ‘ very concerned’ by what the cardinal reported. And reportedly told Burke explicitly that he wanted the Freemasons out of the Order, asking for appropriate action. On December 1, Burke received a letter in which the pope underscored the cardinal’s duty to promote the spiritual inteersts of the Order and thus prevent any affiliation with groups – or practices – that are contrary to Catholic morals.

    On the other hand, there was an ongoing internal process against the Grand Chancellor who was accused of having allowed – or at least of not having been vigilant enough – against the distribution of contraceptives by the Order. He refused to resign his position as first requested and then ordered, and was consequently expelled for disobedience. Which he quickly protested to the Vatican [where he has powerful friends, including the Cardinal Secretary of State].

    His appeal found a ready audience. The Boeselager family name is in the Gotha list of the Holy See’s economic experts [ and his younger brother was recently named, amid all this brouhaha, as one of the members of the IOR’s Board of Supervisors] . There are all sorts of connections between that world and Vatican diplomacy, which is under the Secretariat of State.

    The Vatican created an investigating commission of which three out of five members prominent figures international Catholic financial initiatives, especially in the Swiss-German area. And almost overnight, this commission presented a report to the pope which was heavily weighted against the Grand Master.

    Who, in the meantime, with every valid juridical reasons, rejected the right of the Holy See to interfere in an internal matter of the Order, much less to order a commission to investigate the Order internally. Cardinal Secretary of State Parolin acknowledges that the pope did write a letter to Cardinal Burke advising dialog and not the expulsion of anyone.

    Then the story quickly took a more dramatic turn. The Grand Master was called in by the pope, who imposed resignation upon him – who knows how. A Vatican letter then spoke of a 'pontifical delegate’ to be named, immediately raising the thought that the Vatican was taking over the Order administratively [ as it did with the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate], but it was then made clear that the papal delegate would be concerned only with ‘the spiritual renewal of the order’ [effectively shunting aside Cardinal Burke, whose duty that is as Patron of the Order].

    There will be a convocation of the Chapter General and the election of a new Grand Master, but meanwhile, the once dismissed Grand Chancellor has been re-integrated, since the pope has declared that all acts by the Grand Master and his Sovereign Council starting from December 5 are null and invalid. Of course, the law experts are questioning this, but if the interested parties – namely, the Knights themselves – soon proved only to eager to swallow this toad, surely no one can protest in their name!

    So, these are the pieces of the puzzle, and anyone can move them as they wish and try to find some sense. Of course, too many pieces are missing, which means that all that many questions remain open.

    Is it possible that this whole episode was caused by the distribution of contraceptives in areas where there is a high risk of AIDS? Since I started covering the Vatican, I was always told that in mission areas, when a Catholic spouse has HIV, Catholic missions have allowed the use of condoms.

    Is it all because of Cardinal Burke’s ‘rigidity’, as some Vatican circles suggest, in order to add one more blow against the cardinal who is one of the Four who wrote the letter on the DUBIA to the pope. And is not exactly loved by this pope? Could be. But he did get a letter from the pope. Perhaps he understood from his conversation with the pope that he should advise the Grand Master to be ‘severe’ about anti-Catholic elements and practices within the Order. Except that the Vatican soon disavowed him.

    There is at least one recent precedent at the Vatican. When Cardinal Pell was given the task of reforming the financial structure and administration of the Vatican, he was told to proceed as he thought best without bothering who might be affected. Like the good football player that he was, the Australian cardinal did exactly that. Except that little by little, he discovered that his Secretariat for the Economy was being peeled off, layer by layer, like an onion. With the pope’s approval.

    A friend of mine who has great experience in business, particularly Vatican affairs and finances, thinks that the real key to this whole drama is to be found in the colossal fortune of the Order, and the possibility that it could use this clout to influence the affairs of the Church. [But why would they want to do that all of a sudden? In the past, they impacted the Church by offering their support in material and human resources when the Church had to fight her terrestrial enemies, as at the Battle of Lepanto.]

    Why did the pope decided to act so ruthlessly? Did he do it on his own initiative, or was he pushed or advised to do so? Some say that one of the possible reasons is his love for (and closeness) to the Church in Germany.

    Also, what did the Pope say, show, or threaten the Grand Master with, who the day before they met, had been so firm in his statements of upholding the sovereignty of the Order, and then in minutes, was prevailed upon to sign a resignation letter then and there, and who knows what else?

    Certainly, the outcome of the pope’s audience with the Grand Master is not an example of the ‘dialog’ that he had advised just a few days earlier to resolve the dispute between the Grand Master and the Grand Chancellor. But in the Vatican, no one is surprised at the pope’s capacity to be violent – not physically, but morally. And as we have seen, in small things and large, dialog with the pope seems to be very much like that of the Queen of Hearts with Alice: “Off with their heads!”…

    I said this is an ugly and strange story. I would have preferred not to witness it, and especially not that the pope is a protagonist in it.
    [Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 31/01/2017 03:23]
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    00 31/01/2017 05:43
    January 30, 2017 headlines

    PewSitter


    Canon212.com



    Obviously, this pope is becoming more brazen every day in what he says and does (Malta powergrab being the most brazen and most recent I know of - and who knows what has happened since I last looked.

    The method in his particular madness is he figures in his perhaps unhinged but relentlessly cunning mind, that if he keeps up delivering new outrages to the Catholic world everyday, the ongoing Bergoglio-inflicted trauma will have numbed readers and listeners so much that they stop paying attention even if the outrage level goes off the charts.

    It's already happening with Catholic commentators. The above homily was delivered January 27 with hardly a reaction, yet can anything be more outrageous than for a pope to urge 'prudence' on obeying the commandments because "obeying all the commandments, all of them... paralyzes you... doesn't allow you to go forward"?

    I've reproduced the Vatican Radio report as a screen capture to make sure it is exactly as they reported it and in the context of the entire scrambled '(h)omelette' as he usually gives them. So unless Mons. Vigano's designated unscrambler-synthesizer of this particular nonsense seriously misunderstood what the pope was trying to say and therefore unwittingly omitted significant words and phrases from his/her synthesis-paraphrase of Bergoglio, or the translator from Italian to English made serious errors in translation, then WYSIWYG - that's what he really said.

    [Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 31/01/2017 17:35]
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    00 31/01/2017 19:46
    In this topsy-turvy world, what could be more paradoxical, contradictory and unlikely than the headlines cited below?

    NYTimes: Trump creating Christian theocracy
    US Bishops: Trump against Christian faith
    Negative reactions to President Trump's executive order regarding refugees range
    from unhinged to unthinking to clichéd, none of which are helpful or necessary.
    by Carl E. Olson

    January 30, 2017


    The New York Times and the U.S. bishops appear to have very different understandings of President Trump's motivations, but do seem to arrive at an equally negative conclusion.

    First, here is Times editor David David Leonhardt's take, titled "Trump Flirts With Theocracy":

    Let’s not mince words. President Trump’s recent actions are an attempt to move the United States away from being the religiously free country that the founders created — and toward becoming an aggressively Christian country hostile to other religions. ... On Friday afternoon, of course, Trump signed an executive order barring refugees and citizens of seven majority Muslim countries from entering the United States. [What the anti-Trump media, i.e. 98% of all media, carefully omit to say - as this one does, and the message from the US bishops also does - is that the 'ban' is not a ban - it's a moratorium on certain immigration procedures, 30 days for one, and 120 days for another, and for Syrian refugees, until the procedure for vetting them properly is fully reviewed. But no - everyone talks as if Trump had just clamped down permanently on all travelers to the USA, whatever their religion, race, sex or orientation, from certain countries! Most of the protestors have not even read what the executive orders say and have simply relied on the deliberately FALSE reporting of the media.] It was his way of making good on a campaign promise to ban Muslims from the country.

    The order also said it would eventually give priority to religious minorities from these countries. And if anyone doubted who that meant, Trump gave an interview Friday to the Christian Broadcasting Network, explaining that its goal was indeed to help Christians. Fortunately, many Christian leaders are opposing the policy.

    I expect that Trump’s attempts to undermine the First Amendment will ultimately fail. But they’re not guaranteed to fail. He is the president, and he has tremendous power.

    The attempts will fail only if Americans work to defeat the White House’s flirtations with theocracy — as so many people began to do this weekend. This passionate, creative opposition may help explain Trump’s weakening of the ban on Sunday. Yet the struggle to defend American values is clearly going to be a long and difficult one.

    The USCCB has now released a joint statement, signed by Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, vice president of the USCCB, which states in part:
    The bond between Christians and Muslims is founded on the unbreakable strength of charity and justice. The Second Vatican Council in Nostra Aetate urged us to sincerely work toward a mutual understanding that would "promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom." The Church will not waiver in her defense of our sisters and brothers of all faiths who suffer at the hands of merciless persecutors.

    The refugees fleeing from ISIS and other extremists are sacrificing all they have in the name of peace and freedom. Often, they could be spared if only they surrendered to the violent vision of their tormentors. They stand firm in their faith. Many are families, no different from yours or mine, seeking safety and security for their children. Our nation should welcome them as allies in a common fight against evil. We must screen vigilantly for infiltrators who would do us harm, but we must always be equally vigilant in our welcome of friends.

    The Lord Jesus fled the tyranny of Herod, was falsely accused and then deserted by his friends. He had nowhere to lay His head (Lk. 9:58). Welcoming the stranger and those in flight is not one option among many in the Christian life. It is the very form of Christianity itself. Our actions must remind people of Jesus. The actions of our government must remind people of basic humanity. Where our brothers and sisters suffer rejection and abandonment we will lift our voice on their behalf. We will welcome them and receive them. They are Jesus and the Church will not turn away from Him.
    It's important to point out, I think, that neither of the above texts actually links to or quotes from the executive order in question. You will search the order in vain to find any direct reference to Muslims or Islam. Yes, of course the executive order zeroes in on countries that are predominantly Muslim— but those countries were chosen in large part because of precedent set by the Obama administration (I think that's what is known as "an inconvenient fact").

    But there seems to be something of a double standard, or at least some confused rhetoric, at play here since we are constantly told — by Pope Francis, by various bishops, by many political leaders — that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism. But when an executive order addressing terrorism and "foreign-born individuals" who may well commit acts of terrorism, it is immediately seen as directed against Muslims. That's just a tad incoherent; or, as the old saying goes: having one's caking and eating it too. (On a semi-related note, when did "Muslim" become an ethnicity?)

    The executive order, somewhat ironically, includes this
    In order to protect Americans, the United States must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles. The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law. In addition, the United States should not admit those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred (including "honor" killings, other forms of violence against women, or the persecution of those who practice religions different from their own) or those who would oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation.
    But, hey, why bother reading the actual document when you can simply rant like a loon (some good examples here) and act as if the world just ended.

    My point here is not to analyze or even defend the executive order, which seems to my non-expert eye to be fairly commonsensical but has elicited thoughtful and learned criticism from some conservatives. Meanwhile, others have pointed out that the hysteria and hyperbole appear to be far more about going after President Trump than about putting the executive order into any sort of proper context. For instance, from David French at NRO:
    The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

    In 2002, the United States admitted only 27,131 refugees. It admitted fewer than 50,000 in 2003, 2006, and 2007. As for President Obama, he was slightly more generous than President Bush, but his refugee cap from 2013 to 2015 was a mere 70,000, and in 2011 and 2012 he admitted barely more than 50,000 refugees himself.

    The bottom line is that Trump is improving security screening and intends to admit refugees at close to the average rate of the 15 years before Obama’s dramatic expansion in 2016. Obama’s expansion was a departure from recent norms, not Trump’s contraction.

    So, no, this executive order isn't an act or theocratic hubris, nor is it an assault on Christian beliefs (unless taking prudential steps to address terrorism against the U.S. is to be viewed as such an assault).

    While I appreciate the warm sentiment behind the bishops' statement that the "bond between Christians and Muslims is founded on the unbreakable strength of charity and justice," I think we would be better served by both a careful examination of facts and some honesty about the situation at hand. Not all Muslims are interested in charity and justice. And, yes, ISIS and similar groups are Islamic. As French points out:
    Trump’s order was not signed in a vacuum. Look at the Heritage Foundation’s interactive timeline of Islamist terror plots since 9/11. Note the dramatic increase in planned and executed attacks since 2015. Now is not the time for complacency. Now is the time to take a fresh look at our border-control and immigration policies.


    I agree. Less heat, please, and more light.

    UPDATE: I should have included this paragraph from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which summarizes Catholic teaching about how nations should respond to refugees and immigrants:
    The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin. Public authorities should see to it that the natural right is respected that places a guest under the protection of those who receive him.

    Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants' duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens.     (par 2241)
    [Unfortunately, neither the pope nor his fellow sanctimonious bishops apparently never bothered to check what the Catechism actually says about immigration!]

    Also, see this new NRO article by Andrew C. McCarthy, who has been an advisor to the Trump administration as it works to put together its approach to refugees, immigrants, and dealing with the threat of terrorism:
    These bans are not the ultimate objective. The goal is to give the public immediate protection while the government has a few months to refine threat-based vetting procedures.

    As already noted, there were implementation problems with Trump’s EO. Nevertheless, if our choice is (a) the Washington approach of never getting to a good national-security policy because it could offend Islamists and the Left, or (b) Trump’s approach of imperfectly implementing a good national-security policy at the risk of offending Islamists and the Left, then give me Trump’s approach every time.

    All that said, though, we should not hide under our beds in shame every time an Islamist, a Democrat, or a media talking-head spews: “Muslim ban!” Of course we’re banning Muslims. We’re moving to an exclusion of radical Islam, and radical Islam is exclusively made up of Muslims.

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    00 31/01/2017 19:46
    In this topsy-turvy world, what could be more paradoxical, contradictory and unlikely than the headlines cited below?

    NYTimes: Trump creating Christian theocracy
    US Bishops: Trump against Christian faith
    Negative reactions to President Trump's executive order regarding refugees range
    from unhinged to unthinking to clichéd, none of which are helpful or necessary.
    by Carl E. Olson

    January 30, 2017


    The New York Times and the U.S. bishops appear to have very different understandings of President Trump's motivations, but do seem to arrive at an equally negative conclusion.

    First, here is Times editor David David Leonhardt's take, titled "Trump Flirts With Theocracy":

    Let’s not mince words. President Trump’s recent actions are an attempt to move the United States away from being the religiously free country that the founders created — and toward becoming an aggressively Christian country hostile to other religions. ... On Friday afternoon, of course, Trump signed an executive order barring refugees and citizens of seven majority Muslim countries from entering the United States. [What the anti-Trump media, i.e. 98% of all media, carefully omit to say - as this one does, and the message from the US bishops also does - is that the 'ban' is not a ban - it's a moratorium on certain immigration procedures, 30 days for one, and 120 days for another, and for Syrian refugees, until the procedure for vetting them properly is fully reviewed. But no - everyone talks as if Trump had just clamped down permanently on all travelers to the USA, whatever their religion, race, sex or orientation, from certain countries! Most of the protestors have not even read what the executive orders say and have simply relied on the deliberately FALSE reporting of the media.] It was his way of making good on a campaign promise to ban Muslims from the country.

    The order also said it would eventually give priority to religious minorities from these countries. And if anyone doubted who that meant, Trump gave an interview Friday to the Christian Broadcasting Network, explaining that its goal was indeed to help Christians. Fortunately, many Christian leaders are opposing the policy.

    I expect that Trump’s attempts to undermine the First Amendment will ultimately fail. But they’re not guaranteed to fail. He is the president, and he has tremendous power.

    The attempts will fail only if Americans work to defeat the White House’s flirtations with theocracy — as so many people began to do this weekend. This passionate, creative opposition may help explain Trump’s weakening of the ban on Sunday. Yet the struggle to defend American values is clearly going to be a long and difficult one.

    The USCCB has now released a joint statement, signed by Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, vice president of the USCCB, which states in part:
    The bond between Christians and Muslims is founded on the unbreakable strength of charity and justice. The Second Vatican Council in Nostra Aetate urged us to sincerely work toward a mutual understanding that would "promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom." The Church will not waiver in her defense of our sisters and brothers of all faiths who suffer at the hands of merciless persecutors.

    The refugees fleeing from ISIS and other extremists are sacrificing all they have in the name of peace and freedom. Often, they could be spared if only they surrendered to the violent vision of their tormentors. They stand firm in their faith. Many are families, no different from yours or mine, seeking safety and security for their children. Our nation should welcome them as allies in a common fight against evil. We must screen vigilantly for infiltrators who would do us harm, but we must always be equally vigilant in our welcome of friends.

    The Lord Jesus fled the tyranny of Herod, was falsely accused and then deserted by his friends. He had nowhere to lay His head (Lk. 9:58). Welcoming the stranger and those in flight is not one option among many in the Christian life. It is the very form of Christianity itself. Our actions must remind people of Jesus. The actions of our government must remind people of basic humanity. Where our brothers and sisters suffer rejection and abandonment we will lift our voice on their behalf. We will welcome them and receive them. They are Jesus and the Church will not turn away from Him.
    It's important to point out, I think, that neither of the above texts actually links to or quotes from the executive order in question. You will search the order in vain to find any direct reference to Muslims or Islam. Yes, of course the executive order zeroes in on countries that are predominantly Muslim— but those countries were chosen in large part because of precedent set by the Obama administration (I think that's what is known as "an inconvenient fact").

    But there seems to be something of a double standard, or at least some confused rhetoric, at play here since we are constantly told — by Pope Francis, by various bishops, by many political leaders — that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism. But when an executive order addressing terrorism and "foreign-born individuals" who may well commit acts of terrorism, it is immediately seen as directed against Muslims. That's just a tad incoherent; or, as the old saying goes: having one's caking and eating it too. (On a semi-related note, when did "Muslim" become an ethnicity?)

    The executive order, somewhat ironically, includes this
    In order to protect Americans, the United States must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles. The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law. In addition, the United States should not admit those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred (including "honor" killings, other forms of violence against women, or the persecution of those who practice religions different from their own) or those who would oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation.
    But, hey, why bother reading the actual document when you can simply rant like a loon (some good examples here) and act as if the world just ended.

    My point here is not to analyze or even defend the executive order, which seems to my non-expert eye to be fairly commonsensical but has elicited thoughtful and learned criticism from some conservatives. Meanwhile, others have pointed out that the hysteria and hyperbole appear to be far more about going after President Trump than about putting the executive order into any sort of proper context. For instance, from David French at NRO:
    The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

    In 2002, the United States admitted only 27,131 refugees. It admitted fewer than 50,000 in 2003, 2006, and 2007. As for President Obama, he was slightly more generous than President Bush, but his refugee cap from 2013 to 2015 was a mere 70,000, and in 2011 and 2012 he admitted barely more than 50,000 refugees himself.

    The bottom line is that Trump is improving security screening and intends to admit refugees at close to the average rate of the 15 years before Obama’s dramatic expansion in 2016. Obama’s expansion was a departure from recent norms, not Trump’s contraction.

    So, no, this executive order isn't an act or theocratic hubris, nor is it an assault on Christian beliefs (unless taking prudential steps to address terrorism against the U.S. is to be viewed as such an assault).

    While I appreciate the warm sentiment behind the bishops' statement that the "bond between Christians and Muslims is founded on the unbreakable strength of charity and justice," I think we would be better served by both a careful examination of facts and some honesty about the situation at hand. Not all Muslims are interested in charity and justice. And, yes, ISIS and similar groups are Islamic. As French points out:
    Trump’s order was not signed in a vacuum. Look at the Heritage Foundation’s interactive timeline of Islamist terror plots since 9/11. Note the dramatic increase in planned and executed attacks since 2015. Now is not the time for complacency. Now is the time to take a fresh look at our border-control and immigration policies.


    I agree. Less heat, please, and more light.

    UPDATE: I should have included this paragraph from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which summarizes Catholic teaching about how nations should respond to refugees and immigrants:
    The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin. Public authorities should see to it that the natural right is respected that places a guest under the protection of those who receive him.

    Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants' duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens.     (par 2241)
    [Unfortunately, neither the pope nor his fellow sanctimonious bishops apparently never bothered to check what the Catechism actually says about immigration!]

    Also, see this new NRO article by Andrew C. McCarthy, who has been an advisor to the Trump administration as it works to put together its approach to refugees, immigrants, and dealing with the threat of terrorism:
    These bans are not the ultimate objective. The goal is to give the public immediate protection while the government has a few months to refine threat-based vetting procedures.

    As already noted, there were implementation problems with Trump’s EO. Nevertheless, if our choice is (a) the Washington approach of never getting to a good national-security policy because it could offend Islamists and the Left, or (b) Trump’s approach of imperfectly implementing a good national-security policy at the risk of offending Islamists and the Left, then give me Trump’s approach every time.

    All that said, though, we should not hide under our beds in shame every time an Islamist, a Democrat, or a media talking-head spews: “Muslim ban!” Of course we’re banning Muslims. We’re moving to an exclusion of radical Islam, and radical Islam is exclusively made up of Muslims.

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    00 31/01/2017 21:14
    Robert Moynihan's take on the Malta powergrab: 'Follow the money'!... Though I can't figure out why the pope should get involved in a potential financial scandal. Unless his ultimate vendetta on the Knights - some members having supposedly worked against him in Argentina - is to somehow divest them of their treasure? With nothing in it for him but 'Gotcha! Payback time!" ???]
    Letter #5, 2017:
    Knights of Malta and Freemasonry, #2
    by ROBERT MOYNIHAN
    January 26, 2017

    “One of the difficulties with the Order (of Malta) is that there is a split between those like Matthew Festing who regard the Order as a religious institution doing charitable work in the light of the teachings of the Church and others who would like to see it becoming a merely secular institution following the mores of the world at large. This is the essence of the Festing v Boeselager issue. The distribution of contraceptives was part of the issue…” — A comment several days ago on the American Catholic website onePeterfive

    “It seems that pills and condoms are diverting attention from another very serious story, involving money. A huge bequest from a French member directed towards the French association was instead secretly placed in a slush fund of some sort. The lawyer who did the work on it in Switzerland is under investigation, and those in the know include various members of the Vatican commission, who would in effect be examining their own actions.” — Private email from a member of the Knights of Malta

    “In 1314, the Order of the Knights Templar was dissolved and the major part of its property was conferred on the Hospitallers, that is, on the elite troops of the Knights of Malta.” — Interview in La Stampa of Turin with Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, for 28 years professor of Medieval History at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, an expert on the history of the Knights of Malta. [His words indicate that the Knights inherited much of the the enormous wealth of the dissolved Knights Templar.]

    Meanwhile, Crux tries to 'play fair'...

    Pope’s adventure with the Knights of Malta
    risks undermining rule of law
    by Kurt Martens

    January 30, 2017

    [Editor’s note: Yesterday, Crux contributing editor Austen Ivereigh argued that Pope Francis’s intervention with the Knights of Malta brings a chance for needed reform. Today, Kurt Martens, a Professor of Canon Law at the Catholic University of America, contends it’s legally dubious and risks undermining respect for the rule of law.]

    After suffering a stroke on August 7, 1981, Jesuit Superior General Pedro Arrupe, SJ, could no longer continue his service to the Society and had wanted his assistant to take over. Pope St. John Paul II, however, proceeded to appoint Father Paolo Dezza as his personal delegate to lead the Jesuits until the thirty-third General Congregation was convoked in the fall of 1983 to accept the resignation of Arrupe and elect his successor.

    It was this scenario, nicknamed the “Jesuit Playbook,” which apparently was used to end a conflict within the Sovereign Order of Malta. But the comparison between the Jesuits and the order does not fly. Yet the fine distinctions are not always clear to everyone, and the successive events of these past days and weeks call for serious legal reflection.

    The Order of Malta is not, like the Jesuits or the Franciscans, just another religious institute. Granted, there are religious aspects, for example, the profession of religious vows of the first rank in the Order, and a long history and tradition, but the order is first and foremost a subject of international law in its own right, and not subordinate to another subject of international law, the Holy See.

    The sources of the order’s law are the Constitution, the Code of the Order, and, in addition and ancillary to these two, canonical legislation. The Grand Master can further issue legislation to provide for what is not covered by the Constitution and the Code.
    Moreover, international agreements, customs and privileges of the Order, and the Code Rohan - a code in force on the island of Malta until it was invaded by the French in 1798 and the order lost its territory, and in as far as this Code Rohan is not in contradiction with the current norms - make this legal system complete.

    A special place is foreseen in the order’s law to regulate its relations with the Holy See, but it is clear that the Holy See has no jurisdiction over the internal governance of the order. There are diplomatic relations between the two, and the Holy Father appoints a Cardinal Patron to see to the spiritual welfare of the members of the order. Yet, this cardinal has no governance role whatsoever within the order.

    It thus came as a surprise that the Press Office of the Holy See released a statement on Tuesday, January 25, 2017, according to which the Grand Master had resigned from office the day before in an audience with Pope Francis, and adding that the Holy Father had accepted this resignation.

    From a purely legal point of view, this statement is highly problematic: while there is a privileged relation between the Order of Malta and the Holy See, there is no governance role for the Holy See in the Order of Malta.

    Article 16 of the Constitutional Charter stipulates that the resignation from office by the Grand Master must be accepted by the Sovereign Council and, to be effective, communicated to the Holy Father, but in no way accepted by him.

    Similarly, the process to elect the Grand Master does not provide for the intervention of the Holy See in the form of an approval: the newly elected Grand Master informs the Holy Father of his election and takes the oath in the presence of the Cardinal Patron (article 14 of the Constitutional Charter). This oath resembles the oath any Head of State takes when assuming office.

    Interestingly enough, a day before the announcement of the resignation of the Grand Master, the Holy See Press Office announced that Pope Francis had confirmed the canonical election of the new prelate of Opus Dei (although it incorrectly added that the pope had subsequently appointed him): yet, this is an example where the Code of Opus Dei, a personal prelature erected by the Holy See and governed by canon law, explicitly provided for such an intervention.
    Opus Dei is not a sovereign entity, and has no standing at all in international law.

    Unfortunately, the legal reasoning used in this saga is, in general, of poor quality. In a letter of January 25, 2017, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, wrote that all the acts of the Grand Master and the Sovereign Council after December 6, 2016, are null and void.

    Provided one can follow and accept his reasoning - why would the prime minister of one sovereign entity declare the acts of another sovereign entity null and void? - logic then leads to the conclusion that the resignation of the same Grand Master and him convoking the Sovereign Council to accept that resignation are also invalid acts.

    There is also another reason why the resignation may be invalid: If indeed the Grand Master was told to resign during an audience with the pope and had to write his letter of resignation during that audience, as certain news outlets have reported, it is questionable that the necessary freedom to make such an act of resignation was present.

    And what are we to make of the confusion in the various letters that have been made public? The letter of January 25 by Parolin states that a papal delegate will have governance in and over the order and that no immediate election of a new Grand Master will take place, while the pope’s letter of January 27 to the members of the Sovereign Council says the papal delegate will only oversee the spiritual renewal of the Order.

    What can we learn from this unfortunate history between the Holy See and the (Sovereign) Order of Malta? At least two main points can be raised.

    First and foremost, the position of the Order of Malta under international law is similar to the one of the Holy See: both are not countries, yet they are both recognized as subjects of international law, capable of maintaining international relations with countries and other international entities.

    But when one takes a handbook on international law, at best the Holy See and the Order of Malta can be found in the chapter entitled “Special cases.” By undermining the position of the Order of Malta, getting involved in its internal governance and threatening its independence, the Holy See has created a precedent that should not be repeated. It could, in the long run, threaten its own position in the international field.

    That brings us to the second point. Pope Francis, in a 2013 address to the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization, talked about the need for credible witnesses who make the Gospel visible by their lives as well as by their words.

    John Paul I, in his only address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, summarized the service of the Holy See as two-fold, first by participating at the level of governments or international entities in the search for better solutions to the problems of the world, and, second by forming consciences through the proper pastoral activity of the Church.

    The Holy See has a neutral position, and can therefore speak freely and disinterestedly. The authority of the Holy See is therefore first and foremost moral in nature. That authority is much needed in today’s rapidly evolving world, and will be more and more needed.

    It is to be hoped that the adventure with the Order of Malta, and what appears to be the ignoring of the rule of law, has no lasting consequences for the position and authority of the Holy See - particularly at this time, when it is precisely the rule of law to which we appeal to protect the most vulnerable in our society such as the unborn, immigrants and refugees.
    [Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 31/01/2017 22:02]
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    00 31/01/2017 23:15
    The 'two truths' revisited
    by James V. Schall, S.J.

    January 31, 2017

    Considerable turmoil has been generated by a Vatican-related Tweet. It proposed that two plus two equals four in science, but in theology the sum could equal five. This “possibility” of five was not exactly new or even startling, except perhaps for its source. The two-truth theory has its uses, no doubt.

    Machiavelli famously proposed that human freedom would be exponentially expanded if at least the prince rid himself of the distinction between good and evil. In effect, he proposed a version of this theory that is usually associated with the Muslim thinkers, Averroes and Al-Ghazali.

    The “truth” of politics and the “truth” of morality are both true. We affirm that evil should not be done. But sometimes it should be done. In that case, evil becomes good.

    The two-truth theory held, in its purest form, that a truth of reason and a truth of religion/theology could contradict each other. But both are still true.

    The Aristotelian tradition held that this situation could not be the case. One view was right; the other was wrong. Reason cannot contradict reason, be it human or divine.

    That is what reason means. A thing cannot be and not be at the same time in the same way in the same circumstances. This is called a “first principle.” It is so called because nothing can be clearer from which to deduce the principle. We affirm that something exists. At the same time, we implicitly deny that it is something else.

    The average man may not be carried away by these seemingly esoteric reflections. In truth, they are quite fascinating. Some ancient Greeks and Romans dickered with such thoughts, as did later the followers of Occam. The people who, on a large scale, first utilized the proposition that a truth of reason and a truth of theology could contradict each other were seeking to defend Allah.
    Why did Allah need defending? It was because of a book he is said to have written manifesting his mind. The men who developed these notions were pious men. They were sharp enough to see that, in a book said to be revealed, contradictory claims were made. Something had to be done to cover the reputation of the god against evident inconsistencies.

    The solution that such thinkers came up with, when spelled out, was remarkable. They did not deny that contradictions existed. They said that Allah could will one thing on Tuesday and its opposite on Wednesday. The latest affirmation is always the binding one but it can change tomorrow. In thinking these notions through, things became ever more complicated.

    If the will of Allah could affirm one thing on Tuesday and its opposite on Wednesday, he could do the same thing with all the laws of nature. Since truth is not grounded in logos, but in voluntas, the only way we could know that the sun will arise in the morning is if God wills it and we believe it. He could will that it not come up. These presuppositions mean that we cannot really rely on “nature” for anything.

    In this perspective, nobody but Allah does anything. It is blasphemy to suggest otherwise. If we make a fortune one day but lose it the next, in both cases it is the will of Allah. Our enterprise has nothing to do with it. Our skills or lack thereof mean nothing. Science cannot really exist in such a world. No incentive is found to investigate “nature” if it can be otherwise at every instant.

    A Christian/secularist version of this theory exists, particularly in moral and political philosophy. Nature is evaporated of any content. The difference between Islam and this western view is not so great when we come right down to it.

    One theory makes Allah’s will responsible for what goes on, so that whatever happens is Allah’s will. The other theory places the will in the individual person so that he is not subject to any ordered nature, but only to his own will.

    The Machiavellian version is simply “What the prince (democracy) wills is the law,” to cite a Roman law adage, later cited by Aquinas. In a conflict of individual and collective will, the latter almost always wins, as Hobbes saw.

    Why are two-truth theories proposed? Almost invariably they arise to justify what cannot be justified in reason, including the reason of faith. When some position, said to belong to revelation, can only be justified by denying that the Divinity is bound by reason, by logos, we know we are dealing with the two-truth issue.

    Ultimately, the justification of “heresy” always involves, in its logic, the denial of reason. Or to put it the other way around, when we see that what is called “revelation” needs to resort to arbitrary will, divine or human, to justify itself, we know that we have reached incoherence.
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    00 31/01/2017 23:24


    Tripling the DUBIA
    for Pope Dubius Maximus
    by Father Celatus
    THE REMNANT
    January 30, 2017

    By now much of the world is aware that four Cardinals of the Church have presented Pope Francis with five dubia regarding the papal apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia. Among these Cardinals — the only one not retired (yet) — is Cardinal Burke, who provided this helpful description of dubia in an interview:
    "Dubia is the plural form of the Latin word dubium which means a question or a doubt. When, in the Church, an important question or doubt arises about the faith itself or its practice, it is customary for bishops or priests or the faithful themselves to articulate formally the question or doubt and to present it to the Roman Pontiff and his office which is competent to deal with it. The formulation of an individual question or doubt is a dubium. If more than one question or doubt is articulated, they are called dubia."

    As the Cardinal notes in his elaboration, the faithful themselves can present dubia to the papal office. Already several years ago —back in the Tridentine indult days — some traditional Catholics exercised this right and submitted dubia to gain concessions from the Vatican that Catholics may in good conscience fulfill their Sunday obligation by attending Masses at SSPX chapels and could make financial offerings at those Masses, so long as they did not intend any schism. Of course, the SSPX has never been in schism.

    So what shall we say about the five dubia presented by the four Cardinals to Francis of Rome? It is a good start, though long overdue and with a limited scope. Perhaps we can assist the Cardinals of the Church by offering for their consideration additional dubia that could be presented to errant Francis:

    1. Whether in light of the traditional association of the Foot Washing at the Last Supper with the priestly office of the Apostles and their successors that you intended to teach, by your personal example of the inclusion of women in the Mandatum of the Sacred Liturgy of Holy Thursday, that women may be admitted to Holy Orders and the ministerial office of the priesthood?

    2. Whether in light of the traditional association of the Foot Washing at the Last Supper with Christian baptism that you intended to teach, by your personal example of the inclusion of infidels in the Mandatum of the Sacred Liturgy of Holy Thursday, that non-believers share in the supernatural grace of baptism or are equal in divine favor and supernatural standing before God?

    3. Whether in your comments upon a Gospel text that you intended to teach that the Immaculate Blessed Mother sinned against God by accusing the Lord of “lies” and deception? "The Gospel tells us nothing: if she said a word or not ... She was quiet, but in her heart - how much she said to the Lord! 'You told me then - that's what we have read - that He will be great. You told me that You would give him the throne of his father David, that he will reign over the house of Jacob forever. And now I see Him there!' The Blessed Mother was human! And perhaps she would have wanted to say, 'lies! I have been cheated!'” - Pope Francis

    4. Whether you intended to teach that there exists no Purgatory or eternity of Hell and that souls which do not achieve a state of beatitude will be annihilated when you — allegedly — said the following in an interview? “There is no punishment, but the annihilation of that soul. All the others will participate in the beatitude of living in the presence of the Father. The souls that are annihilated will not take part in that banquet; with the death of the body their journey is finished.”

    5. Whether you intended to teach by your own pastoral example in the course of a phone call to a Catholic who was in an adulterous relationship that Catholics in an objective state of mortal sin can worthily receive Holy Communion and should present themselves for Holy Communion?

    6. Whether by your letter to the Argentinian bishops affirming their interpretation of Amoris Laetitia you affirm that Catholics in an objective state of mortal sin can be admitted to Holy Communion?

    7. Whether your liturgical practice of failing to genuflect in the presence of the Most Holy Eucharist is a willful disregard of liturgical rubrics and longstanding practice and reflects your personal doubt or disregard for the Real Substantial Presence of Christ, as defined by Sacred Tradition?

    8. Whether you had knowledge of or conspired with or cooperated in any manner with any Cardinals of the 2013 papal election consistory to advance or secure your own election as pope?

    9. Whether you had knowledge of or conspired with or cooperated in any manner with anyone within the Vatican or elsewhere to occasion the abdication of Pope Benedict by force or fear?

    10. Whether by your question “Who am I to judge?” you intended to teach that you as Pope or the Church in general lacks the authority to objectively judge homosexual activity as mortally sinful?

    11. Whether by your statement, “And then, a person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian”, you intended to deny the right of a government to regulate its borders for the protection and common good of its own citizens?

    12. Whether in your papal prayer video in which you state, “In this crowd, in this range of religions, there is only one certainty that we have for all, we are all children of God”, you intend to teach that there is ontological equality between the baptized children of God and the non-baptized?

    13. Whether in the same papal prayer video in which an image of the Christ Child is presented among symbols of false religions you intend to teach that false religions of themselves can be salvific?

    14. Whether your public praise of dissident theologian Bernard Haring and your support for a moral theology of “discernment” is intended as a rejection of the immutable character of natural law?

    15. Whether your refusal to respond to the five dubia of four Cardinals regarding Amoris Laetitia is because you adhere to the serious errors in doctrine and practice for which they ask clarifications?

    Imagine that! With a little effort and no embellishment, we were able to triple the number of dubia arising from this pontificate.

    The fact is this pontificate is one dubium after another on a nearly daily basis and the pontificate itself is one BIG dubium. How about a new name for Francis: Pope Dubius Maximus?
    [Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 01/02/2017 20:09]
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    00 01/02/2017 17:17
    February 1, 2017 headlines

    Canon212.com


    PewSitter


    Other than that he's doing his best to stay on the current tightrope he is walking in this pontificate, one does not know what to make of CDF Prefect Mueller who, several days ago, said there was nothing to correct about Amoris laetitia because 'it presents no danger to the faith' and rebuked the Four Cardinals for going public with the DUBIA on AL that they sent the pope and copy-furnished him. [Thereby rebuking his colleagues, with three of whom he was among the co-authors of the best-selling book Remaining in the truth of Christ released in time for the opening of the first Bergoglian 'family synod' in 2014 (the fifth author was Cardinal De Paolis)].

    He has been blowing hot and cold about the major issues surrounding AL, and his standard and unchanging line is that AL can only be interpreted in accordance with the Church's pre-Bergoglio teaching. Fine. But if it were so, then Bergoglio did not need to call two synods at all. He could simply have reaffirmed John Paul II's statements in Familiaris consortio underscoring the Communion ban for unqualified RCDs. But he clearly was and is against that ban, and thought he could get the synodal assemblies to agree with him on granting sacramental leniency in some way or form to these RCDs. And when they did not, he went ahead anyway and decreed his will in AL - however studiedly casuistic and therefore clear as mud the expression may have been. How is it that the CDF Prefect does not think the resulting worldwide split over interpreting AL isn't 'a danger to the faith'?

    Now in a new interview he appears to be criticizing all those bishops who are interpreting AL with sophistries, but in exactly the way the pope has made it known - in a variety of ways direct and indirect - that he wants it interpreted. I thought it might be Mueller's way of criticizing the pope himself and therefore, answering the DUBIA in some way, but it turns out that he uses a circular argument that answers nothing and obstinately holds the pope and AL absolutely blameless. He surely must be aware that any moment, the pope can decide to jiggle his tightrope and send him tumbling down to be replaced by someone who is completely subservient to the pope. What does it avail him to bend over backwards and shirk clarity exactly as his pope does?


    The pope remains silent on the DUBIA
    but the CDF Prefect replies somehow
    Adapted from the English service of

    February 1, 2017

    The Four Cardinals' DUBIA about Amoris laetitia sent to the pope was copy-furnished to Cardinal Gerhard L. Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, but he has said he cannot answer these questions without the approval of the pope himself.

    But now, he has given an extensive interview that is coming out today in the monthly Catholic magazine Il Timone, conducted by editor Riccardo Cascioli and Lorenzo Bertocchi, entitled "La verita non si negozia" (Truth cannot be negotiated).

    In the interview, the cardinal does not use the word “dubia,” but he refers to the questions the four cardinals are asking to have clarified as “apertis verbis” [open questions].

    And he lashes out against those bishops for what he calls their interpretive “sophistries” instead of acting as leaders for their faithful, and are thus like “the blind leading the blind.” [Does that not apply, word for word, to his pope, not just in the matter of AL but in many other fundamental Catholic issues, as well?]

    Here are the key passages of the interview.
    Can there be a contradiction between doctrine and personal conscience?
    No, that is impossible. For example, it cannot be said that there are circumstances according to which an act of adultery does not constitute a mortal sin. For Catholic doctrine, it is impossible for mortal sin to coexist with sanctifying grace. In order to overcome this absurd contradiction, Christ has instituted for the faithful the Sacrament of penance and reconciliation with God and with the Church.

    This is a question that is being extensively discussed with regard to the debate surrounding the post-synodal exhortation “Amoris Laetitia.”
    “Amoris Laetitia” must clearly be interpreted in the light of the whole doctrine of the Church. [...] I don’t like it, it is not right that so many bishops are interpreting “Amoris Laetitia” according to their way of understanding the pope’s teaching. This does not keep to the line of Catholic doctrine. The magisterium of the pope is interpreted only by him or through the congregation for the doctrine of the faith. [But neither the Pope nor the CDF is coming out with a clear interpretation, so each bishop interprets for his faithful according to the bishop's ideological tendencies!] The pope interprets the bishops, it is not the bishops who interpret the pope, this would constitute an inversion of the structure of the Catholic Church.

    To all these who are talking too much, I urge them to study first the doctrine [of the councils] on the papacy and the episcopate. The bishop, as teacher of the Word, must himself be the first to be well-formed so as not to fall into the risk of the blind leading the blind. [...] [This is absurd, when five one-word answers (YES or NO) from the pope would make everything clear and not dependent on each bishop taking a crash course in Church history and doctrine!]

    The exhortation of Saint John Paul II, “Familiaris Consortio,” stipulates that divorced and remarried couples that cannot separate, in order to receive the sacraments must commit to live in continence. Is this requirement still valid?
    Of course, it is not dispensable, because it is not only a positive law of John Paul II, but he expressed an essential element of Christian moral theology and the theology of the sacraments. The confusion on this point also concerns the failure to accept the encyclical “Veritatis Splendor,” with the clear doctrine of the “intrinsece malum.” [Whereby Mueller correctly answers the first dubium from the Four Cardinals.]

    For us marriage is the expression of participation in the unity between Christ the bridegroom and the Church his bride. This is not, as some said during the Synod, a simple vague analogy. No! This is the substance of the sacrament, and no power in heaven or on earth, neither an angel, nor the pope, nor a council, nor a law of the bishops, has the faculty to change it.

    How can one resolve the chaos that is being generated on account of the different interpretations that are given of this passage of Amoris Laetitia?
    I urge everyone to reflect, studying the doctrine of the Church first, starting from the Word of God in Sacred Scripture, which is very clear on marriage. I would also advise not entering into any casuistry that can easily generate misunderstandings, above all that according to which if love dies, then the marriage bond is dead. These are sophistries: the Word of God is very clear and the Church does not accept the secularization of marriage.

    The task of priests and bishops is not that of creating confusion, but of bringing clarity. [Well, tell that to the pope, because 1) he above all is responsible for promoting unity in the Church, instead of which he is the primary agent responsible for the current deep split in the Church, and 2) and it is also his task to confirm the faithful in their faith, not to continually confound and confuse them as he has been doing.]

    One cannot refer only to little passages present in “Amoris Laetitia,” but it has to be read as a whole, with the purpose of making the Gospel of marriage and the family more attractive for persons. [Another copout by Mueller. Was the message of the pre-Bergoglio modern popes on the beauty of matrimony and the family 'unattractive' compared to what Bergoglio says in AL? The problem, however, is that all the positive affirmations in AL have been overshadowed from Day 1 by the studied and heterodox equivocations of its Chapter 8. How can one read all the other chapters used as gift-wrapping to mask the poison in Chapter 8, when the latter is so egregiously objectionable?]

    It is not “Amoris Laetitia” that has provoked a confused interpretation, but some confused interpreters of it. [If it was clear to begin with, then there would be no confusion at all. Of course, it is the document's cynical equivocations that has provoked all the confusion.]

    All of us must understand and accept the doctrine of Christ and of his Church, and at the same time be ready to help others to understand it and put it into practice even in difficult situations. [That is exactly what the pope - and Mueller, by extension - have refused to do. FIVE WORDS, Your Eminence, in answer to the DUBIA, is all that the faithful - bishops, priests and laymen alike - need to know to end the 'confusion'.]

    Magister concludes:

    So comments Cardinal Müller, who among the "confused interpreters" of "Amoris Laetitia" cannot help but have included the Argentine bishops of the region of Buenos Aires. [Gotcha!]

    To whom, however, Pope Francis wrote expressing his complete approval: "El escrito es muy bueno y explícita cabalmente el sentido del capítulo VIII de 'Amoris laetitia'. No hay otras interpretaciones."…

    [Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/02/2017 01:14]
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    Those who follow this thread are well aware by now of the change of heart by one of the most prominent Italian journalists and Catholic authors (he wrote the definitive biography of Cardinal Carlo Martini) who was always known as a progressivist. He is the second major Italian journalist and author to have done so, but the first one, Antonio Socci, had a change of heart just a few months into the Bergoglio pontificate and wrote a book to document his objections. Valli has likewise written a book to chronicle his change of heart...

    Italian author's admiration for Pope Francis turns to
    disenchantment over his ‘superficiality’ and ‘ambiguity’
    Interview with Aldo Maria Valli
    By Jan Bentz


    January 31, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — An Italian author who was supportive of Pope Francis at the beginning of his pontificate has changed his mind during the past few years and grown cold toward his leadership of the Catholic Church.



    Interesting that the pictures on Valli's bookshelves are with Benedict XVI.

    Aldo Maria Valli, a Vatican journalist for the Italian TV station TG1, spoke with LifeSiteNews about his latest book, “266: Jorge Maria Bergoglio, Franciscus” in which he lays out how his initial liking for Pope Francis has faded over time.

    “My problem about him culminated with Amoris Laetitia,” Valli explained during an interview in which he touches upon Islam, ecologism, the superficiality of Francis, and how the Church under this pope is betraying her mission.
    Mr. Valli, what was the intention of writing this book and what prompted it?
    I wanted to express my perplexity that arose from some parts of the teaching of Francis, especially after Amoris Laetitia. To sum it up: on the one hand, I see a certain superficiality, on the other hand, an ambiguity.

    I especially see superficiality in three distinct arguments: the unity of Christians, the acceptance of migrants, and the dialogue with Islam.

    With regards to the unity of Christians, when the Pope asks to leave out some theological aspects in order to concentrate on things that Christians of different confessions have in common, he seems to me to be risking wanting to divide by zero.

    The Church is not a welfare office, or at least that is not her first role. If everything is reduced to social work, without awareness of theological fundamentals, then there is risk to dilute the faith and to cut away the basis of everything. Furthermore, without theological depth the dialogue also remains generic benevolence.

    We should never lose sight of the fundamental question of truth.

    In regard to migrants, it seems to me that the Pope is too generic when he says to open the doors without thinking about the problem of the defense of the Christian identity and the European identity especially. It is true that Europe is composed of different cultures, but it is also true that there would be no Europe – as we know it today – were it not for Christianity, and also, Europe has known moments in history during which it had to defend itself against Islam.

    Concerning dialogue with Islam, I think that the Pope is superficial when he affirms that extremists exist in all religions. This is surely true, but it is equally true that Islam has a particular problem with violence and the origins of the problem are within the Koran. It is a given fact that we cannot ignore and the best way of helping our Muslim brothers is to make them realize it.

    The ambiguity lies mostly with Francis’s teaching of mercy. God is without doubt a merciful father, but it is not possible to separate mercy from justice. If we do so, then we risk transforming mercy into God’s duty and the obtainment of mercy into man’s right. It is not like that. Mercy is a gift offered for those who are open to conversion, to penance, and to recognition of their sin. Furthermore, mercy is not the soft slap of a father who forgets all. If it were like that, then the principle of personal responsibility would be defeated and liberty would be self-abased.

    We have to ask ourselves in the end [what the goal of Christian living is]: a generic psychological-physical well-being or the salvation of the soul? If we do not ask for salvation, then we risk putting man in the center, not God.

    Did you approve of Pope Francis after his election to the papacy? Did something in your opinion of him change?
    Yes, in the beginning, I was very happy with the election of Francis because I thought that for the Church in Europe and the West, it would be helpful to see reality from a different point of view than usual. I thought that the South American Pope could give freshness and a youthful spirit to the Church as the Church in the West seemed to have grown tired.

    Step by step, I had to realize, though, that in Francis there exists a kind of inconclusiveness, too much doctrinal confusion, and a certain flattening of himself to the dominant mentality of the world, as we see in Laudato sì. My perplexity exploded after Amoris Laetitia.

    When Pope Francis says that each one has his idea of good and evil, and has to follow it, where is this idea rooted?
    I believe that the Pope essentially wants to say that in the religious field and in the faith, we cannot lie to ourselves; but once more, his reasoning seems to be superficial and ambiguous. The Church does not just have the right but the duty to show the difference between good and evil. She has the duty to teach that there is an objective good and it can be followed in the light of the Gospel.

    Today, we live immersed in a mentality that is fully deprived of the normal points of moral reference. From a moral standpoint, humanity has skidded. The Church is the last bulwark still standing in defense of the distinction between good and evil and for the moral education of the person. If then the Church also gives in to this prevailing “weak thought” and serves the exigencies of a “diluted society,” then she betrays her own mission.

    One of the goals of the Pope seems to be to integrate all into the Church. How so? Is that possible? [How can anyone say that of someone who has gone out of his way to alienate all those members of the Church who do not think as he does or whom he dislikes for some reason or other? That is precisely one of the two ways by which he is violating his duty as pope – he has been the principal factor for the deep split in the Church today, when the pope ought to foster unity; and he has been confusing and confounding the faithful with his idiosyncratic and heterodox ideas instead of confirming them in their faith.].
    Yes, it is certainly close to the heart of the Pope to integrate all, but I see that the results are not at all brilliant. Those who are far away from the Church stay away, and they get the impression that they are right to do so. Those who are close grow more and more perplexed.

    I do not expect confirmation of lay dogmas (I think of ecologism, feminism, or radical subjectivism) from the Church. I expect instead an alternative vision, presented with courage. When the Pope receives too much applause from the world, then something is not right.

    You talk about a “good” and “bad” relativism in your book. Can you explain what you mean by that?
    In a few words, ‘good’ relativism is that which brings me to see the reasons of others and brings me into an honest discussion about the great questions of life, also cultivating healthy doubts. “Bad” relativism is when I come to believe that there is no truth, no absolute truth, and that for man ,only that which can be empirically proven can be true, as if human reason was incapable of appreciating the absolute, as if the human mind is incapable of transcendence. These are questions linked to the teachings of Benedict XVI and are truly great themes - unfortunately, we have forgotten the answers all too quickly.

    What will happen with the papacy and the unresolved ambiguity of Amoris Laetitia in the near future?
    Honestly, I don’t know. I see that in many communities there is a certain confusion and that priests and bishops who are not disposed to follow the line dictated by Casa Santa Marta are running into serious problems. It is curious that all this happens in exactly this pontificate that has made mercy its distinctive feature.
    I am afraid that after the time of Francis, it will be necessary to have a restorative pontificate to bring order back into doctrine and pastoral care. But let us not lose hope in the Holy Spirit!

    Earlier this week, one of the most veteran of Catholic commentators in Spain, now 73, who has written the rubric/blog called La Ciguena de la Torre (The stork in the tower) for decades, wrote this brief piece for the liberal Spanish newspaper ABC. I hope I find the will he has to completely ignore what this pope says and does, to the point of not bothering to report or comment on what I find objectionable to the faith.

    A pope who perplexes and
    makes me very concerned
    by Francisco Jose fernandez de la Cigona
    Translated from
    ABC
    January 29, 2017

    I do not read the countless interventions of Pope Francis for various reasons.

    The first is that there is so much that it is impossible for me to keep up. I do not have the slightest intention of dedicating my life to read what he says. My faith does not require it. If one day, he has something to say ex cathedra that I have to believe on faith, then I will be there.

    The second reason is that I am fed up with his insults to my ecclesial beliefs. Which I did not invent but which the Church has always taught. To me and to all other Catholic for 2000 years. Based on the words that Christ himself said. Or are the Gospels not reporting his words?

    The third is because I find some of the things he says – or is reported to say - disputable, and I do not have either the time or the wish to study them.

    The fourth – which is the most overwhelming – is that it seems to me that all the enemies of the Church are enchanted with this pope, whereas some ‘excellent sons’ of the Church, many of them well-prepared with what there is to know about the faith, do not seem to be very concerned about him.

    This pope, who is the pope we now happen to have, is no angel, and about this, I have not the slightest doubt. If an angel should come….

    Now I find myself writing this article for a medium that is not exactly against the pope – indeed, quite approving of him….

    [Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 01/02/2017 22:32]
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