THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI

When I Google “it’s not the same religion” – in quotes – the first result I get is a tweet from Hilary White about Archbishop Gómez of Los Angeles giving communion to the pro-abortion mayor.

When I Google “Novusordoism isn’t Catholicism” – in quotes – I get an entire category of posts from Hilary at her “What’s Up With Francis-Church” blog filed under that label. The most significant of these – a post entitled “To touch the sky: ‘Novusordoist’ New Paradigm isn’t the same religion” – begins with an excellent description of this phenomenon that Hilary and others (myself included) have been trying to explain for some time:

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The fact that we don’t really yet have an official name for the New Paradigm (and probably won’t for another couple of centuries) has made it difficult to help clarify what I mean when I say that in effect, most regular novus ordo Mass-going Catholics don’t believe the same religious things as previous generations of Catholics believed. I’ve said it many times, and I’m not alone, that “Novusordoism isn’t Catholicism.” It’s become a bit of a catchphrase.

I’ve also often used the term “New Paradigm” to refer to the creation of what is in essence, if not yet in name, the new thing created after Vatican II. I am gratified to see that the Pope’s closest collaborators are starting to promote this term themselves to describe it. Makes things easier.

How do we define it? We’ve talked about the “false floor” of the Novusordoist New Paradigm and the vast “lost city,” full of treasures, of the Catholic Faith that has been suppressed and buried since Vatican II that very very few Catholics know is down there. We’ve talked about how it’s so difficult to explain because of the great success of the NuChurchians at suppressing even the language we use (no, not Latin) to describe the concepts.

For the people who re-booted the Church in 1965, Orwell was taken as a how-to manual, not a warning. A great deal of the content of the Faith has been memory-holed, and a new edifice has been created in the gaps.

They’ve created a kind of bubble or “Matrix” – a whole false new world the very existence of which is unknown to the people living in it.

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And when the old world – the one our Catholic grandparents and great grandparents would instantly recognize, in precisely the opposite way they’d feel if they walked into an average suburban parish in 2018 – makes an appearance, the guardians of the false new world seek quickly to tamp it down, to grind it out, to ensure that everyone within earshot knows “that’s not who we are anymore.”

One recent example is that of Cardinal Wilfrid Napier of South Africa, who was given a great deal of credit by “conservatives” after he pushed back on some of the machinations during the synods on the family. On Twitter, however, where he is among the more active and engaged cardinals, he has long since put to rest the notion that he is anything but a company man for the Francis Regime. Most recently, this came in the form of his critique of a traditional Mass offered by Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami.

“A Mass in extraordinary form,” tweeted a very pleased-looking Archbishop Wenski, “sung at St. Mary’s Cathedral on Feast of St. Michael the Archangel at conclusion of meeting of Society for Catholic Liturgy. Around 500 people attended.”


The photos Wenski included in his tweet show an event looking every bit like the Catholicism that endured for centuries, not the newfangled cheap plastic imitation most of us are used to.

Napier’s riposte to this happy event came like a tactical strike on the joyful hope evident on the faces of the young men standing with the bishop in the final photo.

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“Looking at this pictures [sic],” he tweeted, “reminds me of my childhood some 70 years ago. That was a time when there was a universe between the Clergy especially Bishops and Lay Faithful! Some might call it the age of supreme Clericalism. To me it’s a reminder of what we should never ever be again!”

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“Supreme clericalism.” Something “we should never ever be again.” This is how a voting member of the College of Cardinals - thought by many to be a “conservative” - describes the beautiful ritual vestments, gestures, and liturgical actions of the Mass of the Ages – a beauty designed to give glory to God, not to elevate the men offering the sacrifice. A liturgy where God, not the “presider,” was the center of attention.

Napier is not the lone prelate in recent weeks to make an overt attack on Catholic tradition. Bishop Felix Genn of Münster – who has been accused of facilitating homosexual indoctrination of children and of not allowing his priests to preach on Catholic sexual morality from the pulpit – was reported to have said in a press conference last month, “I can tell you firmly: I do not want pre-conciliar clerical guys and I will not ordain them.”

Genn, also considered a “conservative” in some circles, will be attending this week’s Synod of Youth. Readers will perhaps remember with some irony that one of the early controversies surrounding this synod took place during its preparatory phase, in which many youth participants in the creation of a synod preparatory document felt that their voices were not heard when they asked for a focus on more reverent liturgy – specifically the traditional Mass. From my report at the time:

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“I’m sure by now you’re probably aware,” read an image of one Facebook comment with all the identifying information redacted, “of the dumpster fire that is the 2018 Pre-Synodal document.” “Refreshingly, the VAST majority of responses in the group were demanding greater access to the Tridentine Mass, recapturing tradition, and greater reverence in the Mass (Whether it be EF or OF)”. Nevertheless, the commenter wrote, “many of us were shocked to find there is no mention of this in the final document” and “many young people are not happy with the current way things are going, despite what the Pre-Synodal document would have you believe.”

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Why does it so often seem to be the case that the same bishops who are allowing sexual license so much latitude are the very same who find their inner disciplinarian when it comes to the Church’s traditional expressions of worship and piety?
These men are not, as is demonstrated by the growing demand for the Church’s venerable liturgy, populists. They are not REALLY expressing the will of the faithful. They are giving the faithful what they want them to have, and they’re giving it to them good and hard.

Another recent indication of the desperate attempt to widen the rift between the pre- and post-conciliar Church is the push from Cardinal Schönborn – archbishop of Vienna, famed editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and handpicked representative of the pope’s interpretation of Amoris Laetitia – to allow the ordination of women to the diaconate. In a tweet that was published, then quickly deleted, the cardinal was quoted as saying, “I was only recently able to consecrate deacons again. A great joy. Perhaps I will one day be able to consecrate women to the diaconate…. Dear priests, have the courage for teamwork!”

Despite the disappearing act, it wasn’t long before the tweet was confirmed in a story for the Catholic News Agency (CNA). “Cardinal Christoph Schönborn,” wrote Anian Christoph Wimmer for CNA, “has said that in his view, whether the Church could ordain women as deacons remains an ‘open question.'”

The Archbishop of Vienna was speaking Sept. 29 to 1700 delegates from parish councils and other bodies in St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Reflecting that he recently had ordained 14 men to the permanent diaconate, he added, according to local news agency Kathpress, “perhaps one day also female deacons.”

Schönborn said that there had been female deacons in the Church in times past, and that “basically, this [question] is open.”

In April of this year, Schönborn had made comments indicating that an ecumenical council could change the prohibition against female ordination laid out by Pope John Paul II in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. “The question of ordination [of women] is a question which clearly can only be clarified by a Council,” the cardinal said. “That cannot be decided upon by a pope alone. That is a question too big that it could be decided from the desk of a pope.”

Asked what he meant about women’s ordination, Schönborn clarified that he was speaking of “deaconesses, female priests, and female bishops.” In June, however, he backtracked – offering what may have been a calculated Hegelian synthesis – saying that for women, only “the diaconate, the first degree of ordination” was on the table.

Admitting that “there have never been female priests in the Catholic Church” from “the beginning,” Schönborn conceded that “even Pope Francis has said that this is not foreseen in the Tradition.” But evidently, so long as we’re not making women into priests and bishops, ordaining them to the diaconate is perfectly fine.

Just. Keep. Moving. The Needle.

We hear it again and again – that the reform must press on; that what has come since the council is “irreversible.” Whether it’s the pope saying it about the liturgical “reform” or the cardinal secretary of state saying it about the Vatican II “process” of transforming the Church, this notion of irreversible forward progress away from what the Church was into the thing that they have remade it to be is driven home with such frequency that it becomes taken for granted.

[The Church is not immutable, resolute, and timeless; she is in a state of constant flux. “It is not possible to go backwards,” the pope admonishes us, referencing liturgical reform, “We must always go forward. Always forward! And those who go backward are mistaken…”

They want us to believe that the past is dead. That our patrimony has been gutted. That we’d better mourn it and move on, because what we have now is all we will ever have – until they change it again, and tell us we’d better like it.

The progressive “theologian” Massimo Faggioli tweeted not long ago that he hoped it was not “overly optimistic to assume that Catholics should all agree on the fact that the secular state is preferable to a theocratic state.” He then noted, apparently anticipating a deluge of papal documents supporting just the opposite, “If you quote from the magisterium, try with something published after 1944.” They don’t just move the goalposts. They take them right out of the stadium.

In an essay on the liturgy for Commonweal, Faggioli again focuses on the division between the pre- and post-conciliar Church. He laments that in his motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, Pope Benedict XVI created a “fait accompli” resulting in a “new ‘bi-ritualism’” in the Roman Rite – the bringing back of an old liturgy when a new ersatz one has taken its place – which Faggioli amusingly sees as itself a violation of tradition. He also notes the role reversal of those who support the new liturgy and the old:

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This new bi-ritualism is not, for the most part, an accommodation for those who grew up with the old Latin Mass; it’s aimed at a new generation of traditionalists, born after 1964, who grew up with the novus ordo. The disputes between the advocates of the liturgical reform of Vatican II and advocates of the extraordinary form are – another paradox – disputes between an older generation advocating the new and a younger generation advocating the old. These disputes have wounded the sense of communion between Catholics. The rancor of this conflict in the United States was a painful surprise for me when I first moved to this country.

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They are terrified – terrified – that the revolution has very little appeal to future generations. And so they must do all they can to subvert their interest in bringing back the Church’s sacred treasures and traditions, or the doom of all they have worked for will be the real fait accompli.

One needn’t look only to the heterodox ideologues in the Church to find the tension between historical Catholicism and the present. In a discussion about a public tiff between Bishop Morlino of Madison, Wisconsin and the fiery Catholic journalist and author George Neumayr, a friend familiar with the diocesan situation in Wisconsin related that the bishop, known as one of the greatest friends of tradition in the American hierarchy, allows the old Mass, but only by priests who will also offer the Novus Ordo. There are, to my knowledge – and I’ve been asking around – no exclusive TLM chapels in Madison.

If this is true, it would be entirely unsurprising. The same is the case in the much-touted diocese of Arlington, Virginia, which has no fewer than half a dozen Sunday TLMs (and probably more) each week at various parishes. Many see that diocese as the “mecca” for traditionalist Catholics, but if you want a Mass every day of the week in the old form, you’ll have to bounce from parish to parish day by day – or else it’s the SSPX, or you leave the diocese altogether for neighboring West Virginia. [So I thank God daily that in Manhattan, we have the Church of the Holy Innocents which offers the TLM every day, and twice on Sundays!]

This is the daily reality – and dare I say it, the schizophrenic nature – of the post-conciliar Church. Even as demand for tradition grows, even as love for tradition blossoms, our hierarchy remains inextricably chained to a mode of Catholicism that is a manifest failure.
- It has not retained the faithful; it has not produced vocations; it has not held off the forces of secularism; and as has become painfully clear, it has not even successfully maintained clerical celibacy and holiness.
- And yet, every faithful bishop and priest is forced to offer his pinch of incense to the council, to the new Mass, to the low-expectations motif of just how valid and probably not heretical it all is.

But it is wholly, woefully insufficient to sustain the faithful. That has continued, and does continue, and will continue to be made clear as the people filling the pews of every non-traditional chapel continue to diminish, or simply fill the space for other reasons while having no intention of actually honoring what the Church teaches.

But ask a priest who has had the opportunity to learn the old Mass after knowing only the new, or has immersed himself in the old theology, or has performed a couple of old-rite baptisms, and the majority of time you’ll hear, through a nervous smile, or a serious look, that the experience was transformative for him.
- That once he partook of the incredible richness of the Church’s extraordinary and fathomless stores, he no longer felt that they can continue to offer merely what is now considered “ordinary” – or at the very least, that doing so makes him deeply uncomfortable.

Such priests recognize that the treasures that enliven their vocations, nourish their flocks, and act as a bulwark against a hostile world are right there at their fingertips, so how can they continue to treat them as though they are merely a matter of taste or preference?

As the faithful begin to arise from their slumber, awakened by scandal after scandal, and look with new, critical eyes at how we got to where we are, I suggest that they also take a hard look at all that began changing in 1965, and the birthright that was stolen from them.

Many of our readers here have already taken this journey, and they know how difficult it can be to discover that the “hermeneutic of rupture,” as Pope Benedict called it, is in fact very real. Many of the faithful will now be making it anew.

I ask that in particular our community here not shun or scorn those new to these discoveries, but welcome, mentor, and teach. Be patient and kind. Recognize that people will be surprised and angry at what they discover. If you’re anything like me, you didn’t always have these answers, either. If you’re anything like me, you resisted accepting the hard truth about the hijacking of our Church by men who had anything but the best interests of the souls entrusted to her care in mind.

We’ve got a lot of work to do, but more and more people are becoming invested in restoration every day. If that’s not a sign of hope, what is?

As the 'youth synod' opens
by Robert Royal

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2018

Note: I am in Rome for the Synod on “Young People, Faith, and Vocational Discernment,” which begins today. I’ll be here, Deo Volente, essentially the whole month of October. It’s an inopportune time for such an event:
- Tthe abuse crisis – and the involvement in that crisis of several bishops participating in the synod – have damaged the Church’s credibility with young people.
- The “Working Document” (Instrumentum Laboris) is cumbersome and deeply flawed – more sociology than theology – as our friends Archbishop Chaput and George Weigel have argued.
- And the “Instrumentum” betrays signs of wanting to move the Church more in the direction of secular culture rather than moving the culture in the direction of the Church.

But the show goes on. The Catholic Thing will be bringing you regular synod reports (daily, if warranted) from Rome, as well as our regular columns during October. This is a crucial moment: Oremus pro invicem. – R.R.



There was a time when Synods were blessedly boring affairs. Priests, bishops, cardinals, even popes would catch up on their sleep, or correspondence. It’s said that Pope John Paul II even sketched out a book while the proceedings of one such event droned on. Pope Francis has decided to make them much more active – and contentious – affairs.

Just yesterday, Cardinal Baldisseri, Secretary General of the Synod of Bishops, questioned the “loyalty and honesty” of Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput. After the tumultuous 2015 Synod on the Family, Chaput was elected to the Council of the Synod of Bishops (basically the planning committee) with the most votes for any single candidate by the bishops of the whole world. His recent offense? Substantial criticisms of the Working Document intended to guide the month’s proceedings.

Pope Francis’s own latest document on synods, the apostolic constitution Episcopalis Communio (Italian, no English yet) seems to aspire to make them almost perennial, like sessions of Congress or Parliament. That text also at least seems to devolve some authority to bishops meeting as a body – an authority that can even become part of the Church’s magisterium – if approved by the pope.

That may look, to some, like a good development, a kind of opening towards decentralization and democracy in a Church that, in many respects, resembles an elected monarchy. But caution is called for. In the modern world, we’ve made a shibboleth of democracy, though wise heads – from Aristotle to America’s Founding Fathers to several modern philosophers – have long warned that carefully thought out institutional arrangements are needed to make such things work.

There’s some doubt whether that kind of clarity has been brought to bear on things as this Synod opens. On Monday, at a Vatican presentation of the Synod on Youth, it was even unclear what the procedures would be for the bishops to vote.
- Would it be on the overall final document, a text produced by a small group of drafters chosen in advance and – as thirteen cardinals protested in a letter to the pope before the previous synod – therefore easily manipulated to produce a desired outcome?
- Or will there be real debate on specific provisions and paragraphs as in the past, thus allowing the bishops meaningful input into what such a document will say – and not say?

That such basic questions have not been considered – and resolved – well in advance of the process that begins today does not bode well for the outcome.

Other, less trusting voices in Rome suggest that gaps in procedure have been left, not out of inattention, but on purpose, so that the final products may be massaged as desired. One of the desired outcomes – again, say the darker voices – is that something on accepting (i.e., “accompanying”) LGBTQs and beyond will appear for the first time in a Vatican document, with the approval not only of the pope but of bishops from various countries.

There is further reason for worry. We’ve seen how multiple Protestant bodies have essentially abandoned Christian moral teaching through the influence of popular assemblies. And this is not only a matter of the conclusions that they reached – inevitable as they almost are once you take current culture as the standard and Christian tradition as malleable.

The mere fact that the Church debates, at the very highest levels, “the value of homosexual relationships,” Biblical teaching on divorce, the very words of Genesis “male and female he created them,” contraception and abortion, and other such hot-button questions raises an even larger issue.
- Is Christian teaching ultimately just a series of time-bound, historically conditioned guidelines, changeable as social conditions change?
- Or – as we have always believed – is it the revelation of the eternal in time, a communication from God that seeks to guide us out of the murkiness of a world darkened since the Fall?
- And unfixable by approaches that falsely give the impression that what we face are merely practical human problems?

These are all serious and foundational questions. And when you add into the mix – as is the case this month – questions about how to reach young people whose specific views and general mentality have been almost entirely shaped by a toxic culture that finds nothing normative in God, nature, or human nature, it’s not hard to see the potential for explosions, intended and unintended.

Even in the best of circumstances, it would be hard to see how we would get from where young people currently are to the fullness of the Catholic faith. And we are far from the best of circumstances.

Several members of the pope’s C-9 cabinet of Cardinals themselves have problems as large as the rest of the Church. And the failed efforts at the simplest reforms: financial transparency, accountability for sex abuse, and the mere administration of the Vatican, don’t exactly inspire confidence that Rome can lead us towards a better future.

And as if all this were not enough, there’s a lot of pressure on the American delegation to the Synod. Unlike in the past, there seem to be fewer bishops on hand who will press for traditional teaching against well-entrenched forces seeking innovations and worse. Not all the American delegates can be counted on, but despite all our problems at home, we still have a vital and viable Church, at least for the moment. That’s not the case in many parts of the world today. Our bishops will have a lot riding on their shoulders.

Pope Francis has asked Catholics to pray the Rosary every day this month “in communion and penance, as a people of God, in asking the Holy Mother of God and St. Michael the Archangel to protect the Church from the devil, who always aims to divide us from God and among us.”

And we might also pray that those charged by God Himself with the responsibility to bring us all together do not add to the already large divisions that trouble the whole Church.



What is that? #Synod2018

October 3, 2018

For the opening Mass of the Synod, this (see photos) is what Francis carried, rather than a crosier or a ferula.

First impression…

It looks like a V with a nail through it.

V…

V…

Viganò?


Scottish young people’s
Letter to a Synod bishop

October 3, 2018

The UK’s best Catholic weekly, the Catholic Herald, has the text of a letter signed by 107 “young people” aged 18-35 in Scotland, to Archbishop Cushley of St Andrews and Edinburgh in Scotland.

Some of their statements are, I think, not what the riggers …er, organizers of the Synod want to hear.

The full letter to Archbishop Cushley. My emphases and comments:

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Your Grace,

We write to you in advance of the upcoming Synod of Bishops on “Young People, the Faith and Vocational Discernment”. As young Catholics across Scotland, we would like to express our hopes and concerns for the future of the Church in this country.

In some of the discourse surrounding the synod, we have noted a trend of suggesting that difficult aspects of the Church’s teaching, in matters of morals and matters of faith, need to be downplayed, or even put aside, in order to be relevant to people’s lives and sensitive to their difficulties.

Some even imply that priests who hold to orthodox teaching are out of touch with the lives of lay people, and of young people especially. However, it is in fact this line of thought that is utterly in contradiction to our lived experience.

What made us become and/or remain Catholic, against ever increasing cultural pressure, are those aspects of the faith that are uniquely Catholic, not things that can be found in social clubs, in NGOs, or in political parties.

What matters is precisely the Church’s claim to truth; Her liturgy and Sacraments; Her transcendent doctrine, communicated in teaching but also through beauty and goodness; Her understanding of the human person, laid out so powerfully for the modern world by St John Paul II; [whose body of teaching this pontificate’s Team seems bent on erasing] and Her moral teaching, that while so very challenging, also offers the only path to true joy and human flourishing as we see in the lives of the saints. These are the things that convince us that here is something worth the sacrifice, something good for us and for every human being.

Young Catholics are inspired by the heroic virtue espoused by the Church, in opposition to the cynicism and pessimism of postmodern culture. A faith that merely legitimises the habits we would otherwise have anyway is simply not worth it.

Far from being “out of touch”, it is those priests who proclaim orthodox teaching in its fullness with joy and courage who have brought the light of Christ into our lives, and really offered us His Mercy – the remedy for a broken world, which does not pretend human brokenness is irremediable, but truly heals and gives the grace we need to live new lives of virtue. To those priests, we are unendingly grateful.

Sadly, far too few young people have encountered this fullness of the faith lived out visibly and confidently. A young Catholic father in America recently wrote to Archbishop Chaput [He’s that guy whom Francis warned against in his conversation with Archbp. Viganò. He’s the guy who dared to raise his voice in the last Synod and who has commented on the Instrumentum Laboris of this Synod.] that “The disastrous effect that Beige Catholicism (as Bishop Robert Barron aptly describes it) has had on my generation can’t be overstated.”

God has, in His mysterious ways, providentially and gratuitously blessed us with encounters, pastors, and formation that many of our peers have not had. [The implication is that there are not enough priests of the kind they describe. Why is that, I wonder.] We desperately want to share this great gift with so many lapsed and non-Catholics among our family, friends, and colleagues, who have not rejected Catholicism but a poorly-understood shadow of it. If the synod is to bear fruit, it is with this task that it must help us.

- We need to ensure that our local Catholic communities are permeated with a Catholic worldview, and unashamed that such an orientation is very different from the prevailing cultural trends.
- The sacramental life, beyond just Sunday Mass, needs to be obviously and visibly the foundation of Catholic existence.
- We must draw on our rich heritage to ensure the liturgy is celebrated with beauty and splendour [Like the stick Francis carried at the opening of the Synod?] so as to reveal and draw us into the profound mysteries taking place.
- We need to see the various vocations lived out fully and joyfully, with parishes and dioceses forming a living iconography of faith, so that we can discern God’s will for our own lives, not in isolation but in an ecclesial context.

Young people need the chance to get to know our priests as priests – not just as administrators, nor presiders rushing from church to church, nor again merely as pals, but as fathers, whose fatherhood is rooted in their sacramental identity as men called and set apart to absolve and to offer the Holy Sacrifice. [Set apart?!? Like… yikes!… clerics?!?] Young Catholics find priests who live their vocation to celibacy faithfully and joyfully to be highly credible witnesses to the joys and challenges of life in Christ.

The Church must be proactive and not merely reactive in facing the crisis affecting marriage and the family.
- To a large extent, Catholic married life has come to be treated as little different from secular relationships.
- Our economic and social structures are based almost entirely around a presumption of contraception, and this makes it extremely difficult for any couples who live faithfully according to God’s commandments. - So many of our generation are living with the consequences of broken families, and this has engendered a cynicism about marriage.

However, these young people have never been shown an alternative and therefore the Church has a great opportunity and obligation to clearly, confidently, and joyfully proclaim the truth about marriage.

Young Catholics have a right to hear these truths at a local level so that our parishes are consciously supportive of the vocation to holiness in married life. This is vital since it is firstly in the family that vocations are fostered and it is on this foundation that an authentic renewal of Catholic culture and the life of the Church will be built.

There is no doubt that discovering and living out one’s vocation is very difficult in the modern world, as indeed it has been in every age. However, we know that God’s grace is enough for us and we hope and pray that a renewed faith and confidence in this will suffuse the Church and inspire young people to discern and live out their vocations faithfully.

Entrusting the synod to the intercession of St John, youngest of the Apostles, we assure you of our prayers.

Yours sincerely in Christ,

SIGNATORIES

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A SYNOD WITHOUT FAITH: An article published in Italy's Il Foglio on Sept. 29.

Meanwhile, more from Archbishop Chaput - who is obviously resigned to the fact that he can never hope to be named a cardinal in this Pontificate - restating
his objections to the synod which has just opened (despite his and other prominent Catholics' calls earlier for the pope to just call off this synodal assembly
because of the low credibility bishops have right now related to the still unresolved clerical/episcopal sex abuse mess in the Church. Sandro Magister introduces
Mons. Chaput's new article as follows:

A synod off the rails:
The criticisms of the Archbishop of Philadelphia

Oct. 3, 2018

Today is the beginning of a synod with a rather vague title: “The young, faith, and vocational discernment.” But even more flimsy is the document on which the synod fathers have been called to “work.”

The document is called, sure enough, “Instrumentum laboris,” working instrument, and it is the outline for the discussion to follow. Which for that matter has already begun, with strong criticisms that have been focused precisely on the formulation of this preparatory text.

These criticisms have been voiced above all by the archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles J. Chaput, elected by the previous synod from among the select intercontinental group of bishops charged with organizing the current synod.

And then, seeing that the synod would be held no matter what, he published on Saturday, September 29, the following critique of the “Instrumentum laboris,” choosing as his platform the Italian opinion daily “Il Foglio”.

In Chaput’s judgment, the preparatory document of the synod “needs to be reviewed and revised,” because “as it stands, the text is strong in the social sciences, but much less so in its call to belief, conversion, and mission.”

The critique of Chaput - whose thinking is shared by the four bishops whom the episcopal conference of the United States has elected as its representatives at the synod - greatly irritated the Vatican control center, to the point that Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, secretary general of the synod at Pope Francis’s beck and call, directly attacked Chaput, although without using his name, during the press conference for the presentation of the assembly, on Monday, October 1:

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“Someone has said at first to cancel the synod and then that the ‘instrumentum laboris’ is not well made. However, he’s just one. And then the person in question has said that he does not agree because he had a theologian study the text. But the person in question is a member of the ordinary council of the secretariat of the synod, and was present at the time when the draft text was presented, and if he had any objection he could have expressed it, and we could have calmly inserted it. So I do not understand why he has made these statements. So much for loyalty and honesty.”

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Properly speaking - unlike what Baldisseri said - Chaput did not “have a theologian study” the document. He instead made his own the criticisms of the “Instrumentum laboris” that a theologian had sent him some time ago. A theologian whose name has not been made public, but whom Chaput himself called “a respected North American theologian” in presenting him to the readers of “First Things". [I am convinced that the theologian author is our now familiar Fr. Weinandy, a Franciscan Capuchin like Mons. Chaput.]

Magister proceeds with summarising the main points made by the theologian in his article. He also links to the original English article from which the Il Foglio translation was made, as follows:

A synod without faith:
One does not serve the Pope and the Church
through sentiment and sociology
by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

American Catholics have always had a special love for the Holy See. Two of the reasons are obvious: Until technology abolished distance, Rome was safely 4,500 miles away; and unlike her role in Europe, the Church in the United States has never been politically dominant, with all the ugly baggage that implies.

A third reason has been six decades of impressive men in the Chair of Peter.

So when Pope Francis visited Philadelphia at the end of the 2015 World Meeting of Families, nearly a million people turned out to welcome him. Many were families with teens and young children. Many waited hours in line, in the heat, to get through security. Francis was visibly surprised and moved. I was standing beside him. I witnessed it.

Three years later, thanks to a former U.S. cardinal, a Pennsylvania statewide grand jury report, and abuse problems in Chile and elsewhere, the Church is in turmoil. In this turbulent environment, the Holy See will host a world synod of bishops, October 3-28, in Rome. Keyed to the theme of “young people, faith, and vocational discernment,” a more ironic, and more difficult, confluence of bad facts at a bad time for the meeting can hardly be imagined.

This does not mean the synod need fail in its work. Francis’s personal appeal and the goodwill it can engender remain strong. Viewed globally, the Church’s outreach to young people has more than enough bright spots. In the United States, groups like the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS), the Thomistic Institute, and others have a strikingly positive record with young adults.

This is why many young priests, like those who wrote an open letter to delegates of the impending synod earlier this month, see an opportunity in the synod’s subject matter. As they make clear, the synod’s success depends on a profound confidence in the Word of God and the mission of the Church, despite the sins of her leaders.

The young American clergy who signed the open letter are a lesson in conviction. Men who commit themselves to the Catholic priesthood at a poisonously negative time, a time when the reputation of bishops can hardly be deeper in the tank, are either fools or men of God.

I know some of these young men. They are not fools. When they say, “our culture is all too eager to sell us false idols. Only the Gospel, lived in its radical vigor, can satisfy. Christ alone is the answer to the challenges for our generation,” they mean it, and they will act on it – no matter how skeptical the audience; no matter how implausible they sound to secular ears.

It’s in the light of their faith, and the faith of other young men and women like them, that the synod’s “Instrumentum Laboris” or “working document,” needs to be reviewed and revised. As it stands, the text is strong in the social sciences, but much less so in its call to belief, conversion, and mission.

In a sense, this isn’t unusual. All synod working documents are works in progress. All undergo discussion and adjustment by the Synod Fathers. This is important, because the 2018 text does seem to lack some quite vital elements.

To borrow the words of one theologian, the document seems to suffer from a range of “serious theological concerns . . . including:
- a false understanding of the conscience and its role in the moral life;
- a false dichotomy proposed between truth and freedom;
- a pervasive focus on socio-cultural elements, to the exclusion of deeper religious and moral issues;
- an absence of the hope of the Gospel; and
- an insufficient treatment of the abuse scandal".

Comments like these sound harsh, but they are not wholly unwarranted. A synod that deals with issues of sexuality and young people should also deal -- honestly and thoroughly -- with the roots of a clergy sexual abuse disaster involving minors.

These are serious matters. Hopefully the 2018 gathering will allow them to be engaged candidly and the text sufficiently improved to ensure the synod’s success. The Francis pontificate has been described as God’s medicine for Churchmen whose notion of the Christian life has grown ill from an overdose of abstraction.

In like manner, neither the Pope nor the Church is served – particularly in a time of humiliation and crisis – by an overdose of sentiment, accommodation, and sociology. Faith demands more than that.

Youth Synod goes forward, seemingly
headed down a wide and dangerous path

October 3, 2018

It's underway. Despite Archbishop Chaput's call for a delay or cancellation – which the Newman Society supported – the Synod on Young People, the Faith, and Vocational Discernment is proceeding in Rome.

We have grave concerns that too many Synod organizers and gadflies with the ears of powerful officials are using it to advance their agenda to dilute Church teachings and, instead of calling young people to join the Church on the narrow path to Christ, are plotting to have the Church move to meet them on the secular world's easy, wide path.

How so? By seemingly discarding centuries of wisdom about formation and how to evangelize young people under the guise of offering a listening ear, "meeting them where they are," and attention to "practical realities," which would appear to be code for giving in to worldly concerns.

But isn't that precisely what has brought about today's crisis in the Church?

Accompanying young people down the secular world's wide path is not the way to God. Permissiveness and dependence on human relationships is tempting, but it is treacherous and full of deceivers, thieves, and (yes) predators who strive to ruin souls.

Young people don't need the Church to walk with them on this dangerous path, they need to the Church to show them the way to Christ!

Christ's way is the narrow path. It is Truth, and it is hard, except for God's grace and mercy. A formation that gives young people the tools, knowledge, and moral discipline to help carry the Cross is the true path of holiness.

Synod organizers don't seem to believe this is possible today. But they only need look at thriving parishes with traditional devotions, the growing Catholic homeschool movement, the examples of faithful Catholic schools like those recognized by the Society's Catholic Education Honor Roll, and, of course, the counter-cultural Newman Guide colleges that take their Catholic identity seriously.

These places prove that the traditional way of forming young people works! This is precisely why The Newman Society proposes faithful Catholic education as the best response to the "contemporary 'crisis of truth' [that] is rooted in a 'crisis of faith,'" as Pope Benedict explained to American Catholic educators 10 years ago.

It is a shame that the organizers of the Synod ignore this success.

And it's hard to imagine a worse time for the world's bishops to gather for a Synod on Young People.

Too many Church leaders have demonstrated an appalling lack of concern for the safety of children and young adults from predator priests and bishops. How do the Synod fathers assure parents, educators, youth ministers, and others that they speak with authority – the authority of Christ – if key Synod participants and even Pope Francis himself will not respond forthrightly and decisively to the scandals and accusations that have rocked the Faithful?

Moreover, as The Cardinal Newman Society and others like the intrepid Robert Royal have warned for months, the Synod organizers seem disinterested in taking the necessary steps to bring the authentic Truth of our Faith to young people.

Our reports on the Youth Synod's preparatory documents have exposed serious flaws in the Synod organizers' favored approaches of attending to youthful desires and permissive "accompaniment."

But even a cursory glance at the Instrumentum Laboris, or working document, for the Synod exposes a social-progressive mindset that clouds the importance of Christian formation. The document seems more about "taking care of young people" than teaching them Truth.

The "realities" for young people that are considered by the Synod's working document include globalization and diversity, social and economic inequalities, war and violence, injustice and exploitation, jobs and unemployment, intergenerational relationships, digital media, sports and entertainment, immigration, and so on.

To the extent that sexuality is discussed, there is no sense of crisis. Instead, the document seeks more "practical" conversation about fundamental teachings on sexuality.

Education gets far too little attention. When it is discussed, it is primarily in the secular context of academics and career, not with the mission of evangelization.

We hope that some of the faithful bishops attending the Synod, and there are a number of them, are able to redirect the discussions and outcome. But assuming that not much good will come out of it regarding effectively leading young people away from the secular world's siren call, families – in partnership with faithful educators and trusted priests and bishops – must go all-in on the renewal of Catholic education.

A renewal of Catholic education – by which we mean the Christian formation of young people in the home and in schools – is critical to the renewal of the Church's mission of evangelization.

The disastrous results of prior generations' rebellion against authority and moral discipline – against Truth itself – have reached a culmination in the horrific scandals among so many unfaithful priests and bishops. At least, we hope and pray this is the turning point.

Now is the time when our message of fidelity and responsible formation can resonate. It is for this reason that now – in our 25th anniversary year – the Newman Society is refocusing and redoubling our efforts on recognizing faithful Catholic education and holding it out as a model for the Church.

By setting more and more young Catholics on the narrow path, the true Way of Christ, we will once again see the heroism and the holiness of the saints. And by their example, and by the sacrifice of true educators, and with God's grace, we will see the renewal of the Church and Catholic life.

In the Gospel of St. John, from the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel, (the date of Archbishop Carlo Viganò’s second attestation), Jesus observes, “Here is a true child of Israel. There is no duplicity in him.”

One can’t help but ascribe this same observation to Archbishop Viganò. His brave and bold witness rings authentic and true. There is no duplicity in him. As the messenger of the hidden and hideous, Viganò urgently proclaims the unvarnished truth to the faithful.

What is next for the Church? This question hangs, like the sword of St. Michael, over the pope, bishops, and laity. We cannot walk away in disgust, although the temptation is ever present and seemingly justified.

Now that we know, we must act. We must stay, dig in, and fight to purify the Church from the evil that engulfs it. God chose us to live during this precise time of monumental crisis. We will be judged on our personal and sustained effort to cleanse Holy Mother Church.

During the decades of clerical sex abuse in America, cowardice, conniving, immorality, and cover-up dominated the episcopacy. Once the screaming headlines vanished, it was back to business as usual. Devastated and disgusted millions left the Catholic Church. Nothing changed; homosexual predation populated the clerical ranks in America, the world, and the Vatican.

Viganò continues to sound the alarm that the Catholic Church is engulfed in the corrupt clutches of the “homosexual current.” Reading Viganò’s two testaments underscores that the Catholic Church is imploding at every level.

It’s no surprise that Pope “Who Am I to Judge” Francis remains steadfastly silent, intentionally inactive, content to slow-walk any requests for investigations into McCarrick and the Viganò allegations. With each passing day of deliberate inaction, a child or a seminarian remains at dire risk of exploitation and assault. With the upcoming Synod on Youth and Vocations, the papal dismissive silence perpetuates the grave risk to body and soul of boys and young men.

Don’t be fooled. Francis is signaling his permission with a wink and a nod to the global current of homosexuals in the Church.

The Viganò testaments read like a criminal indictment, laying out documentation with specificity and clarity, from a firsthand eyewitness, which names the co-conspirators involved in a modernist plot to overthrow the Catholic Church. This able prosecutor has clean hands, no ulterior motive, armed only with knowledge based on years of service and observation.

What does the pope’s abject silence and inaction in the face of endless charges of criminal sexual exploitation of seminarians and minors indicate? The only rational conclusion is that Francis is totally indifferent to or acquiesces to this immoral conduct.

This is truly remarkable moment in the history of the Church. There has never been an archbishop who exposed the filth by naming names of the conniving and guilty hierarchy in the Vatican and around the globe. Don’t the countless suffering clergy abuse victims deserve as much?

Viganò unleashed a growing restlessness, a militant resistance movement of faithful Catholics determined to restore the Church to purity, fidelity, and the sacred. Now that this bronze door is opened, it will never be closed, despite the concerted effort of a complicit pontiff. Ultimately, the laity must demand that the reign of Francis I and his “current” of malefactors end in ignominy.

The Truth is self-evident, argued Thomas Jefferson. By its essence, truth confirms itself, powerfully, without force or weapons. It is sufficient unto itself, shining a bright light into the darkest corners of the soul and mind. Its power not only shines, but shatters and convulses evil powerful institutions and people.

In the battle of good and evil, the truth stands as a formidable enemy, who must be squelched and defeated at all costs by the evildoer. Once it is proclaimed, the truth cudgels the sinister and the demonic, throwing him off balance, forcing him to make so many mistakes that he teeters on chaos and instability.

We are witnessing such mayhem in the Vatican. The pressure of the Viganò truths exposed the mind and soul of Jorge Bergoglio. As they say in the military, Viganò smoked out the enemy, like an avenging angel. Francis is now exposed. His cabal has been outed and named.
Nothing will ever be the same in the Church until this apostasy has been defeated.

It’s been one month since the Viganò verities descended upon the Church. They hang like a suffocating black cloud over Vatican City, choking its inhabitants, forcing them to run for cover, gasping for air, covered in the filth of their malevolence.

Yet don’t be fooled: the Francis cabal is doubling down on its secrets, threatening truth-tellers, tightening the noose, and battening down the hatches of the Barque of Peter. These people are in survival mode, and they won’t relinquish power. They will fight to the bitter end.

The polluted climate of the Francis papacy will not change until, as Viganò pleaded, “everyone, especially Bishops … (must) speak up in order to defeat this conspiracy of silence that is so widespread, and to report the cases of abuse they know about to the media and to civil authorities.”

This statement, more than any other, instills panic in the papacy.

Archbishop Viganò knows who knows.

How pitiful that Archbishop Viganò must plead with Cardinal Marc Ouellet to confirm the cover-up of the Church’s most notorious sexual predator. If Ouellet hesitates, he ought remember the admonishment of St. Thomas Aquinas: “as a matter of honor, one man owes it to another to manifest the truth.”

Why are our bishops and cardinals such faithless cowards? The answer lies in the stirring words of St. Catherine of Siena in a letter to Pope Gregory XI in 1376:

---

A shepherd, such as this, is really a hireling! Not only does he fail to rescue his little sheep from the clutches of the wolf; he devours them himself! And all because he loves himself apart from God. He does not follow the gentle Jesus, the true shepherd who gave his life for his little sheep. How dangerous then, for oneself and for others, is this perverted love!

---

Carlo Maria Viganò sacrificed everything. He stepped up, stood at the front of the line on this battlefield, inspired by the love of the Blessed Mother and Jesus Christ, with nothing but the truth as his shield.

Where are his brother bishops? Where are the laity?

The words of the great Catherine of Siena resonate today. Catherine, like Viganò, fearlessly spoke truth to the pope:

---

Delay no longer, for your delaying has already been the cause of a lot of trouble. The devil has done and is doing his best to keep this from happening, because he sees that he will be the loser.

---

Catholics, heed St. Catherine’s battle cry, before it is too late:

---

Raise the standard of the most holy cross, for it is with the fragrance of the cross that you will gain peace.

---

Ms Yore, an international child abuse attorney who has investigated child abuse cases including some against priests, turns her investigative eye on Theodore McCarrick's cozy alliance with Democrat Presidents and a host of leading Democrat politicians, many of whom have been leading sanctimonious attacks on Supreme Court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh. She wrote this for the website of the Center for Security Policy, founded in 1998 by 30 national security policy practitioners "to perpetuate the time-tested policy Ronald Reagan used to such transformative effect during his presidency: 'Peace through Strength'." ... Read this article and shudder!!!

The predator and his Democrat allies
by Elizabeth Yore

October 3, 2018

“It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”
― Noël Coward

This past week, Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill) were busy posturing for the television cameras during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. Both senators seized the airwaves to castigate Kavanaugh for his association with his high school friend, Mark Judge. The insinuation was unmistakably clear, painting both Judge and Kavanaugh, as drunken frat boys who took advantage of Ms. Blasey-Ford (although all her alleged witnesses deny the assertion).

Leahy lashed out at Kavanaugh for his high school friendship with Mark Judge, prompting a heated exchange. Durbin caustically demanded that Mark Judge be “subpoenaed from his Bethany Beach hideaway and be required to testify under oath, but he has not.” Without a scintilla of evidence of wrong doing by Kavanaugh, the Democrats reduced the hearing to ‘guilt by association’ circus. Holier than thou posturing is nothing new in the Swamp.

If these Democratic Senators choose to play the guilt by the company you keep card, then their long affiliation with the most notorious sexual predator in the Catholic Church should be scrutinized carefully.

After all, grown men, not teenagers, should be judged by the company they keep. Senators, practice what you preach or change your speech.

Since the Senior Senator from Illinois raised the issue of beach houses in the Kavanaugh hearings, Senators Durbin and Leahy should explain to the American public about their political and personal collaboration, and that of their Democrat Party with the notorious Cardinal Theodore “Uncle Ted” McCarrick, who preyed on and sexually assaulted young seminarians at his beach-house hideaway.

The ever pompous Patrick Leahy pontificated that, “how this Judiciary Committee handles this nomination will be viewed as a reflection of how seriously our society views credible claims of sexual misconduct.” Leahy commented that the hearing was “unbelievable, almost surreal.”

What is truly ‘surreal’ and ‘unbelievable’ is Leahy’s lengthy and friendly association with the notorious sex offender, Cardinal Ted McCarrick. How closely associated was Senator Leahy with this serial predator?

Leahy admitted that he and his wife, Marcelle went out to dinner “many times” and socialized with McCarrick often. Leahy described his emotions as “heartbreaking” over the disclosure of McCarrick decades of sexual predation. Unlike Judge Kavanaugh, who has neither socialized nor seen Mark Judge in years, Leahy saw McCarrick as recent as a few months ago on St. Patrick’s Day and “gave no hint that anything was wrong.” So much for Leahy’s instincts for predators.

Curiously, the Democrats forged an early alliance with this notorious predator. Theodore McCarrick is a household name among the political elite in Washington. McCarrick never met a Democrat politician he didn’t love; together they shared a liberal socialist agenda as the powerful cardinal provided precious ecclesial cover for the globalist platform of the Democrat Party.

McCarrick loved to travel the world, collecting global political connections, while serving as the Democrat’s spiritual/political dealmaker. In 1999, McCarrick was appointed Commissioner of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom by the powerful Democrat Minority Leader, Senator Tom Daschle. In that role, the predator prelate hopscotched around the globe, with his valuable diplomatic passport and diplomatic immunity no less, under the guise of promoting religious freedom.

Like every skilled predator, McCarrick sought and found respectability and access to new hunting grounds. Thanks to Democrat power brokers, Theodore McCarrick was given a passport to prey.

He was rewarded for his diplomatic globetrotting and willingness to put a Catholic face on the anti-Catholic Clinton Global Initiative.
- In 2000, President Clinton, also a notorious predator, awarded Theodore McCarrick with the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for his diplomatic junkets.
- Clinton acknowledged he sent McCarrick, to a “litany of countries he has visited sounds more suited to a diplomat than an archbishop: the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, the countries devastated by Hurricane Mitch, East Timor, Ethiopia, Burundi, Cuba, Haiti, Colombia.”
- Clinton capped off the award with the now creepy sounding accolade, “Archbishop, we thank you for your devotion to all God’s children.”

In 2001, McCarrick was elevated to the highest Catholic ecclesial title of Cardinal of Washington D.C. and the Democrat Party found its Catholic apologist in chief as he circled the globe, on behalf of the U.S. State Department and White House promoting the left’s agenda.

Except for pesky sex abuse settlements in 2005 and 2007 with sex assault victims, McCarrick never missed a step and built a close working relationship with the Democrats well after he retired as DC Cardinal in 2006.
- He happily served as Obama’s diplomat-at-large traveling to Iran, China, Africa, Armenia, and Haiti and several other countries, promoting the latest democrat cause de jour: inter-faith dialogue, peace, de-nuclear proliferation, normalization with rogue states. You name it.
- McCarrick happily put a Catholic face on the Obama foreign policy initiatives.

When McCarrick wasn’t jumping on planes, he served as the Democratic elite’s personal prelate.
- He married and buried the rich and famous of the DC democratic aristocracy, calling the Kennedys, Bidens, Russerts, Leahys, Durbins as his friends.
- McCarrick even presided over the Arlington Cemetery burial of Senator Ted Kennedy, the funeral mass of VP Joe Biden’s son, Beau, and the funeral of NBC Meet the Press host, Tim Russert.

Yet, more high stake diplomatic negotiations were awaiting Cardinal McCarrick in Obama’s critical second term.
- McCarrick became even more influential and indispensable with the Cuba and Iran deals in the offing, as the democrat President plotted to create a lasting legacy in his final four years.
- Once again, the Democrats turned to Ted McCarrick to provide back door covert diplomatic channels for Iran and Cuba. Enter, McCarrick’s buddies, Senator Judiciary Committee Democratic Senators Durbin and Leahy.

In September 2013, Senators Durbin and Leahy, began to assist with secret plans with the White House to normalize relations with Communist Cuba. At the invitation of his good friend, Senator Patrick Leahy, Ted McCarrick found himself in the center of delicate diplomatic negotiations with the Castro government.

Along with another McCarrick’s other powerful close friend, Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, McCarrick shuttled diplomatic letters between the the White House, Cuba, and the Vatican.

McCarrick delivered for Obama an indispensable ally in the Cuba secret negotiations, his old friend, Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis.

Along with McDonough and a very small closely held team, the predator prelate landed in the White House situation room, drafting documents and giving advice, as the Obama Administration covertly negotiated thehighly secret Cuba deal using McCarrick and the Vatican as diplomatic mediators.

No doubt, McCarrick could be counted on to keep secrets!

Apparently, the FBI and NSA didn’t conduct background checks of individuals invited into the Obama White House’s top secret situation room to conduct high stakes covert negotiations. Surely, they knew or chose to ignore the criminal and highly blackmail-able conduct of their top negotiator, McCarrick, who already had been subject to civil settlements for sexual abuse.

No FBI background checks for a notorious sexual predator already the subject of two sexual abuse settlements?

Yet, now Democrats Leahy and Durbin demand a 7th FBI background check of Federal Appellate Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

How does a notorious serial sexual predator gain access into the top secret situation room to negotiate a sensitive covert diplomatic deal?

Did Senators Leahy and Durbin vouch for the character and background of Cardinal McCarrick to the White House and National Security Council?

Or, more troubling, did McCarrick’s life long molestation history and criminal background even matter to the Obama Administration?

Here’s the bottom line: Senators Leahy and Durbin jeopardized national security by inviting a serial sexual predator into top secret negotiations. In their flawed judgment, they enabled a highly blackmail-able McCarrick to be trusted with state secrets.

This raises serious questions about the judgment of Leahy and Durbin. How could they collaborate with such an evil and dangerous man, thus potentially jeopardizing national security? What other secret Obama deals did McCarrick act as a high stakes diplomat?

The Obama Administration increasingly sought out McCarrick’s diplomatic assistance.
- Iran loomed large on the foreign policy list. During the run up to the Iran negotiations, McCarrick travelled to Iran to seek the release of the detained American hitchhikers, whose detention posed a PR propaganda obstacle to the Obama Iraq deal.
- When the highly controversial Iran deal needed much needed political cover, McCarrick delivered the support of the American Catholic Church for the Iran boondoggle. Nothing like a Washington Post Op-ed by an American Cardinal to silence the opposition. Ever the complicit Democrat lackey, McCarrick penned an Op-Ed in the Washington Post in support of the Obama’s controversial Iran Deal.

The democrat duo of Ted McCarrick and Senator Leahy did more than just break bread. In September 2015, Cardinal McCarrick and Senator Patrick Leahy co authored a Washington Times Op-Ed for prison reform, entitled “Giving Voice to the Disadvantaged.” Their editorial focused on the Pope Francis/Democratic Elite/Leftist agenda of elimination of the death penalty (recently declared by Francis), elimination of mandatory/minimum sentencing, etc.

Whenever the Democratic Party needed a strong Catholic voice to silence conservative Catholic criticism of radical Islam, Ted McCarrick stepped up to the microphone as the Catholic proponent and leader in the Inter-Faith dialogue. Never one to be discouraged by Islamic violence, McCarrick could be relied upon to employ the power of the Catholic Church to minimize growing concern over Islamic radicalism.

In December, 2015, Democrats Dick Durbin, Pat Leahy, Tim Kaine and Ted McCarrick collaborated with other faith leaders on a joint press release in response to the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino.
- They warned against hateful and xenophobic speech and reaction in response to these Islamic terrorist events.
- The Democrats and their complicit Cardinal quickly cautioned that U.S. refugee policy must not be restricted or halted because of Islamic terrorist attacks.
- Citing the words of Pope Francis, the authors urged an end to incendiary remarks about stopping Syrian refugee resettlement.

Cardinal McCarrick wrote in the press release that “the U.S. has the most secure refugee resettlement process in the world. Refugees are the most scrutinized and screened individuals to enter the U.S.”

Why would McCarrick vouch for the highly dubious vetting process for refugees? Perhaps, he was swayed by the fact that the US Bishops were awarded by the Obama Administration in 2016 more than $91 Million in grants for refugee resettlement.

Is that sizeable award a payback for McCarrick’s diplomacy on behalf of Obama?

Senators Leahy and Durbin participated in the scurrilous character assassination circus against Justice Brett Kavanaugh, with their sanctimonious and snide attacks. It’s no surprise that hypocrisy pulses through the political bloodstream in Washington, as witnessed by Senate Judiciary Democrats.

The Kavanaugh confirmation hearings replaced orderly legislative process with violent political theatre, elevating deceit over honesty, sanctimony over testimony. Not surprising, this has been called the Summer of Scandal in Washington, capturing the deplorable revelations about DC Cardinal McCarrick and, now the destructive Kavanaugh hearings. Will Leahy and Durbin learn an important lesson?

It’s obvious that Democrats are shocked by honesty and fooled by deceit. Judge the man, not the boy, by the company he keeps.

Fr Scalese recently wrote a two-part blogpost which covers quite a lot of ground, all of which is designed to underscore the relentless maneuverings in this pontificate to fundamentally change the Church
that Jorge Bergoglio was elected to lead, into a church made in his likeness and image....

A more synodal Church?
By all means, but...

September 19, 2018

Revolutions have always been fundamentally elitist events. The most striking example is the Neapolitan revolution of 1799, which is the subject of the Saggio storico (Historic essay) by the 18th century Neapolitan writer Vincenzo Cuoco. He says that the 1799 revolution failed because it was a ‘passive revolution’, one imposed on the people.

But even successful revolutions such as the French Revolution of 1789 or the Russian Revolution of 1917, were not less elitist than that of Naples, even if the textbooks insist on portraying them as phenomena involving the masses. They succeeded not because they were popular uprisings but because, at a certain point, they became dictatorships, and a strongman – e.g., Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin – was able to impose them on their people in a definitive manner.

The true popular phenomena are, instead, those counter-revolutionary insurgencies (starting with that of the highly Catholic Vendee region in southwestern France in 1793) [the uprising led by the Catholic and Royalist Army was suppressed after several months by the Revolution’s Committee of Public Safety after several months, with a death toll from mass killings amounting to as many as half of the region’s 800,000 population at the time] which were nevertheless destined to fail for want of the right leader/strongman.

Yet revolutionary elites have always paid lip service to the people – with a capital P – even if this was nothing for them but a slogan, an abstract idea. They had little interest in people as flesh and blood. They had little interest in reality, only in ideology.

'The people' - real people – are generally non-‘revolutionary’ but attached to tradition. Which was demonstrated by the many popular insurgencies against the French Revolution and attempts to impose Jacobine ideas on the rest of Europe. Even in the following centuries, every time that the people were given the opportunity to express themselves freely, they usually responded with an attitude of moderation.

Consider what has been happening in recent years in the Western world where, even in the absence of an official revolution, power has become concentrated in the hands of a few elite. Obviously, they – like elites at all times in history – have presented themselves as advanced, mentally open and sensitive to the needs of mankind. They spout words like democracy, freedom, equality, human rights, etc. In fact, they have been occupied exclusively with perpetrating their own privileges.

In recent years, the people – better said, various peoples (because ‘the people’ do not really exist and are nothing but an abstraction) – have started to open their eyes, and when given the chance to vote, they have chosen to vote with the parties that are populist, despite the brainwashing carried on by the media that are totally controlled by the elite.

The Church is not an exception to the rule. For many years, there has been a revolution under way that claims to be carrying out reforms demanded by the base – the so-called 'People of God’. But it actually is a true and proper revolution carried on by a narrow elite which little by little has succeeded to occupy all the important positions of power, getting to the very top of the Church hierarchy in recent years.

Even in this case, their talk is all about 'the people of God', 'a church of the people', 'base communities', 'decentralization', 'more space and scope' for local Churches, bishops’ conferences, laymen and women. When in fact, we are witnessing a centralization never before seen in the history of the Church and the dissemination of a mentality that is increasingly clerical [in the sense of religious authorities exercising considerable power over ‘the People of God’].

There is much talk about ‘listening’, but there is a refusal by these authorities to consider any position other than their own, and no form of dissent is allowed. One has the impression that the elite who currently hold power in the Church are only interested in carrying out a pre-defined agenda that can in no way be modified.

The paradox is that traditionalist Catholics who have always opposed any kind of reform – because they believe that it could call to question the hierarchical structure of the Church and undermine the Roman Pontiff – are now the first to question the initiatives of this pope, and some have gone so far as to ask for his resignation.

Whereas progressivist Catholics, who have always supported the rights of local churches, bishops’ conference, laymen, women, and Third World peoples, have had no qualms about climbing the ladders of power in order to carry out their agenda. Yet all their initiatives in these categories, to whose emancipation in the Church they have contributed, are turning out to be anything but revolutionary. Just think, for example of their opposition to the ‘new course’ proposed by the African bishops or by the US laity.

So even in the Church, the real people are showing themselves to be much more conservative than expected. And the revolutionaries are, once again, only the elite. Conservation of the faith has never been endangered by giving more participation to the base of the Church. The danger comes only from the clerical elite.

This long introduction leads me to comment on the new Apostolic Constitution Episcopalis communio about the Bishops’ Synod, published on September 15 and presented at a news conference the next day.

Apart from the form of the document – as an apostolic constitution, which calls to mind the pressures publicly exerted on this pope by some German bishops about a year ago to decree his reforms in such a form, precisely, so as to ‘set them in stone’ – I do not feel I can express a judgment on what it contains.

I have read it, and I did not find anything revolutionary about it. But to make an evaluation, one would need to have direct experience on the matter, which I don’t have. My only concern is about the words that came after the fact.
- To take one example, if one writes about “listening to the People of God” (No. 6), it is to be hoped that such listening happens. But one fears that this listening will be reduced to the usual platitudes exchanged among ‘the People of God’.
- If one writes about ‘consulting the faithful’, by all means! But one fears that this means consulting the usual participating organisms constituted by elites at the parish, diocesan, national and Roman levels.

There is also the more serious concern expressed in La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, well summarized in the title to the article by Stefano Fontana: “The agenda has been written; the Synod is only a pretext”. Strong words but certainly not without basis. We all remember vividly how the last two Bergoglian synods went. One fears therefore that this synodal assembly is merely a malleable instrument for introducing Church reforms of an subversive nature. I hope these concerns will be shown to be excessive.

But I am impelled to reiterate here that, granting that this and other reforms are inherently ‘good’ and conceding the good faith of those promoting such reforms, one should not fear a more synodal and more popular church. As I have sought to show earlier, one need not fear the people, much less the People of God.

Rightly, Episcopalis communio brings up the sensus fidelium, which a bit freely but correctly translates as “the instinct of the people of God”. The People of God cannot err by believing their faith. It is easier for an individual to err – even if he is a bishop or the pope – than it is for the entire community of the faithful.

I continue to be amazed, during this time of a profound crisis in the Church, by the requests for ‘cleansing’ of the Church that comes from the faithful here in Italy. In the face of a clergy which has shown itself to be wanting in many essential aspects, there is a laity that has not been content to remain scandalized but demand that the Church be cleansed.

These laity did not just fall from heaven. They have grown up among us for years – we too have contributed to form them. And certainly, these are those on whom the magisterium and example fof John Paul II and Benedict XVI have left a mark. These are the faithful who listened to what we – priests, bishops, popes – have told them. They have taken us seriously. It is some of us who have failed to take seriously what we have told them… So why should we fear giving more space to the laity?

Likewise, I don’t think we should fear giving more space to bishops. The Church has always been synodal and has preserved the deposit of faith precisely through ecumenical councils and bishops’ synods, among other modalities. In this regard, I would advise reading the most interesting presentation made by Prof Dario Vitali at the presentaiton of the new Apostolic Consitution.

Seeing what has been happening in the Church in our days, one would say that the Orthodox Churches, with their fundamentally synodal structure, have preserved their faith better than we have done in the Latin Church with our primatial struture. Ecumenical councils and bishops’ synods can only work for the good of the Church if they take place in the spirit of obedience to the Holy Spirit and fidelity to Tradition.

The only thing we should fear are the lobbies which have tried to take possession of these organisms to make them instruments for subverting the Church. But I have the impression that such plots - which were rather easy to machinate in the recent past (think of all the active lobbying that took place during Vatican II) – have started to become more difficult to carry out with the means [and faciity and rapidity] of communication that we have today.

But it is necessary that the faithful be closely vigilant to discourage any attempts at manipulating future synods and councils to that they may function properly. [How exactly - since only a privileged few laymen selected by the pope can participate in such assemblies, and I don't think their participation comes with a right to vote.]

The primacy of Tradition

October, 2018

Let me continue with what I started out to discuss in my Sept. 19 post, as I did not think I said everything I needed to say. Not that anything I wrote then was wrong, but that it was inadequate. In effect, I was limited to urging my readers not to be afraid of synodality and to be vigilant against the danger of lobbies. Which is true.

But the danger does not come only from lobbies.
- It can also come from bishops who take part with good faith in a synodal assembly but with the wrong attitude, thinking they would be able to decide anything.
- It is a danger that even the pope risks – namely, exercising his primacy with the maximum of good faith but in the spirit of someone who thinks he has absolute power.

What do I want to say? We could be discussing pontifical primacy and synodality to decide which comes first. But we would be forgetting that the problem does not merely lie in those two realities. The problem is how a council, a synod or the pope’s very ministry itself, are understood.

We may be forgetting that primacy and synodality are not absolute but relative values – they are merely the functional instruments for a superior good that they must pursue. Which is: the preservation, deeper understanding and transmission of the deposit of faith.

Paul’s command to Timothy was clear: Depositum custodi (1Tm 6:20; 2Tm 1:14). Unfortunately, in the current Italian translation of the Bible, the word ‘deposit’ has disappeared – as though it were incomprehensible – and was replaced by a paraphrase which nonetheless does convey the sense, namely “Safeguard that which has been entrusted to you”, in the first citation, and “Safeguard the precious good that was entrusted to you”, in the second.

In the first Letter to the Corinthians, Paul underscores the importance of transmitting that which has been received.
«Ego enim accepi a Domino, quod et tradidi vobis” (For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you) (1Cor 11:23); and «Tradidi enim vobis in primis, quod et accepi” (For I handed on to you as of first importance what I also received) (1Cor 15:3).

If this sense of tradition is lacking, then both the bishops’ meeting as well as the exercise of papal primacy would be transformed into a manifestation of despotic, arbitrary and discretionary power.

Recently, Fr Thomas Rosica, who has been the Vatican Press Office’s English language briefing officer since the first ‘family synod’, wrote that the pope can do whatever he wishes to do:

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Pope Francis breaks Catholic traditions whenever he wants because he is “free from disordered attachments.” Our Church has indeed entered a new phase: with the advent of this first Jesuit pope, it is openly ruled by an individual rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture. (The Ignatian Qualities of the Petrine Ministry of Pope Francis, July 31, 2018)

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Upset by these disquieting statements, I decided to re-read the Dogmatic Constitution Pastor aeternus from Vatican I. As usual, if we are limited to reading the dogmatic definitions of some documents, we thereby lose the theological richness they contain which form the basis for the definitions.

If we read Chapter 4 of the Constitution, “On the infallble Magisterium of the Roman Pontiff”, we find a series of citations which make us understand how we must consider papal magisterium, apart from the limits placed on papal infallibility by its dogmatic definition.

First of all, it takes on the ‘Ormisda formula’ from the Fourth Council of Constantinople: Prima salus est, rectae fidei regulam custodire. – Salvation consists first of all in safeguarding the norms of correct faith (Denzinger-Schönmetzer = DS 3066).
Then the Second Council of Lyon is cited: [Sancta Romana Ecclesia] prae ceteris tenetur fidei veritatem defendere. – Before anything else, the task of defending the truth of the faith is the responsibility of the Roman Church. (DS 3067).
There follows quick historical review summarized thus: [Romani Pontifices] ea tenenda definierunt, quae sacris Scripturis et apostolicis traditionibus consentanea Deo adiutore cognoverant. – The Roman Pontiffs have defined that whatever they have acknowledged to conform to Sacred Scriptures and to apostolic traditions must be maintained. (DS 3069).

But that which follows is the most interesting [the one often cited by Fr Hunwicke in this regard, one he urge his readers to ‘learn by heart’]:

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Neque enim Petri successoribus Spiritus Sanctus promissus est, ut eo revelante novam doctrinam patefacerent, sed ut eo assistente traditam per Apostolos revelationem seu fidei depositum sancte custodirent et fideliter exponerent.

“The Holy Spirit was not promised to Peter’s successors so that they should, by His revelation, disclose new teaching, but so that, with His assistance, they should devoutly guard and faithfully set forth the revelation handed down through the apostles, the Deposit of Faith.” (DS 3070).

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Finally, one must not forget the Declaration of the German Bishops in Jan-Feb 2875, which, as far as I know, is the only authoritative interpretation of the dogma of papal infallibility which was ratified by Pope Pius IX himself:

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[Infallibilitas papalis] restringitur ad proprietatem summi magisterii papalis: id vero coincidit cum ambitu magisterii infallibilis ipsius Ecclesiae et est ligatum ad doctrinam in Sacra Scriptura et in traditione contentam necnon ad definitiones a magisterio ecclesiastico iam latas.

Papal infallibility is restricted to the proper exercise of the supreme teaching authority which coincides with the infallible teaching authority of the Church itself, which must be within the scope of the teaching contained in Holy Scripture and in tradition, as well as to the definitions already promulgated by the Church Magisterium. (DS 3116)

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Therefore, the pope cannot do whatever he wants to do. He, too, is subject to the authority of Revelation which is contained in Scriptures and in Tradition. He cannot elaborate new doctrines.

Let us repeat, in case it is not sufficiently clear:

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“The Holy Spirit was not promised to Peter’s successors so that they should, by His revelation, disclose new teaching, but so that, with His assistance, they should devoutly guard and faithfully set forth the revelation handed down through the apostles, the Deposit of Faith.”

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The pope’s duty is to scrupulously safeguard and transmit the deposit of the faith with full fidelity to the faithful. The bishops too, meeting in an ecumenical council or in a synodal assembly, havethe same duty. They cannot think that the Spirit will reveal something new!

Because before synodality, however opportune, and even before papal primacy itself, there exists the primacy of Tradition, to which everyone – popes, bishops and faithful – are obliged to submit.

Only if fidelity to Tradition once again becomes the supreme and undisputed norm can primacy and synodality have any meaning and therefore able to help and enrich us in their turn. Otherwise, neither primary nor synodality are useless and must be cast aside like “salt which has lost its taste… is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.” (Mt 5:13).


P.S. A propos from Fr Hunwicke:

The Holy Spirit is not
'the private personal bailiwick of PF'

Oct 4, 2018

So there I was, the other day, strolling down St Giles without a care in the world... Then I stopped as I recognised a brother priest. After Rome, Oxford must be one of the most priested cities in the World. Urbs felicissima. We exchanged fellowship.

"When you get home", he advised me, "have gin. A very, very stiff gin. Then another. Then read the Communique of the CBCEW [Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales] just issued at the end of their ad limina visit to the Holy See. Then have some more gin".

I always do my best to take the advice of brother clergy. I have profound confidence in their sacerdotal wisdom. I soon saw what he meant about the gin.

The Communique includes a passage which seemed to me familiar:

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"[PF] is indeed gifted with a unique grace of the the Holy Spirit of God. Even in this time of turmoil, the Holy Father is so clearly rooted in God and blessed by God. His peace is secure. His life is serene. We know, because he showed us his heart. It is the heart of a loving father. In our turn, we affirmed our deep communion with him and promised him our love, support, and prayers. We expressed confidently these sentiments on behalf of all the faithful Catholics of England and Wales."

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It seemed familiar because it is manifestly from the same drafting hand which composed a letter to PF on the fourth anniversary of his election to the Throne of S Peter. "On behalf of the Catholic Community of England and Wales ... we thank God that the Holy Spirit guided the Church in the process of your election and that the same Holy Spirit guides and supports you day by day".

I would have to concede that such statements are probably not formally heretical. After all, each of the Baptised is gifted with a grace of the Holy Spirit which must be unique - crafted specifically for each differently created and variously loved individual. Praise be to God for this.

But if these encomia are meant to have any meaning beyond that of sycophantic woffle, then give me instead ... any day of the year ... the robust common sense and deft Bavarian humour with which Pope Benedict XVI responded when some fool of a journalist asked him whether the Holy Spirit guided Papal Conclaves.

Call me an unfaithful Catholic if you like, but I have no desire to be associated with these papolatrous statements implying that the Holy Spirit is the private personal bailiwick of PF. They seem to me to come close to blasphemy.

Nor am I very clear what is meant by "deep communion". I think I understand "communion" as a theological and canonical concept. I think I know the difference between being in full, and being in unfull, communion with the Church.

But what on earth are these gradations of deepness in the matter of Communion? "Are you in Communion with the See of Rome!" "Up to a point, Lord Copper".

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League in the USA, has more often than not taken the side of Pope Francis on most developments in this most anti-Catholic Pontificate. So I am puzzled by - and thankful for - what is for him, based on his pro-Bergoglio record, a seemingly gratuitous comment on the results of the most recent Pew poll on Bergoglio's popularity in the USA. This time, he stands on the side of Catholics who demand that the pope uphold traditional moral values, i.e., the veil of delusion about Bergoglio is slipping off the eyes of many Catholics.. Here is a press release from the Catholic League:


PEW POLL ON POPE HAS SOME GOOD NEWS
It shows US Catholics see his handling of the sex abuse crisis
as a failure to stand up for traditional moral values

October 3, 2018

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on a new poll by the Pew Research Center on Pope Francis:

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The pope’s popularity has taken a major hit in the U.S., and it is directly traceable to the way he has handled clergy sexual abuse. By a margin of two-to-one, Catholics give Pope Francis negative marks on this issue.

Over the last four years, those who rate the pope’s handling of sexual abuse as “excellent” or “good” has dropped from 54% to 31%; 62% now rate his performance as either “fair” or “poor.” Only 13% today believe he deserves an “excellent” rating, as compared to 36% who say he deserves a “poor” one.

Even among church-going Catholics, the pope does not fare well: the share who give him positive marks has been cut in half in just three years, dropping from 67% in 2015 to 34% in 2018. His rating among men and women is about the same.

This is not good news for Pope Francis. Surely his refusal to accede to the request by U.S. bishops, a request strongly supported by Catholics across the spectrum, to investigate how Theodore McCarrick was able to ascend the ranks of the hierarchy — is driving much of the negative perception. Unless the dossier that Rome has on McCarrick (it is said to be thick) is open to scrutiny, the optics are not likely to change.

There is one glimmer of positive news in the survey that is sure to be overlooked in many quarters. The pope’s positive rating on the issue of “standing up for traditional values” slipped dramatically from 81% among all Catholics in 2014 to 55% today; his negative numbers jumped from 15% to 35%.

What’s so good about that? It suggests that the pope’s failure to do a good job handling clergy sexual abuse is seen by Catholics as a reflection of his declining support for traditional moral values.

This matters because dissident Catholics — the ones who want the Church to change its teachings on sexuality in a more liberal fashion— find little support for their agenda among most Catholics. To put it differently, the perception that the pope is not standing up for traditional moral values (the way he is expected to) accounts for the dramatic decrease in his favorability ratings.

The logic is sound. Most homosexual priests (they are responsible for 80% of the problem) practiced restraint in the 1950s, but when the Church relaxed its guard in the 1960s and 1970s, they were given a green light to act out. Add to this the influx of homosexual seminarians during this time—driving good heterosexual men to leave—and the makings of a scandal were all but assured.

Respect for traditional moral values needs the support of everyone in the Church. Then we will see the progress that Catholics want.

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For some reason, Photobucket has 'released' all my old files that they had deactivated (taken offline) last year, so that images I downloaded through them for both PAPA RATZINGER FORUM and BENEDETTO XVI FORUM are once again visible - and re-usable. They also have a reasonable pricing plan now that is far from the $400 annual fee that they wanted to charge last year when I was forced to stop using them.

The Simoniac Pope by William Blake, ca. 1825 [Tate Gallery, London]. The pope depicted is Nicholas III.

Of Dante and our current crisis
By Anthony Esolen

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2018

In these bad days I have called to mind Dante’s Inferno. I think of the structure of the City of Dis, the Hell within Hell. Outside of its miserable walls are punished those sinners who gave in to immoderate desires for things that are naturally good, such as the intercourse of the sexes, male and female, food and drink, and wealth; and who misused faculties that are natural to the human person, such as anger and the longing for rest.

But your ticket for entry into Dis is an active malice, the tang of loving things that are simply evil.

The first of these sinners are the heretics, whose prime representatives are men of powerful intellect who denied the immortality of the soul, and therefore cut themselves off intellectually from the roots of life itself. It is an offense against the image of God in man. They dwell in tombs just within the walls of Dis, and are, as it were the front end of a pair of brackets, enclosing all of Dis’s depr,aved citizens.

At the other end, in Hell’s dead center and bottom, we will find the traitors, the worst of whom, Judas Iscariot, is chewed and mangled forever by the worst of the fallen angels, Satan.

Between heresy and treachery lie violence and fraud, the lion and the fox. Fraud is more wicked than violence, Dante says, because it perverts man’s highest power, that of the mind; therefore it is punished in a lower ring, that of the Malebolge, the ten Pouches of Evil.

In one of those pouches we find the Simoniacs, those who traded in ecclesiastical offices; they are planted upside down in holes in the ground that parody the baptismal font, with their feet slicked with oil and set aflame.

The violent are divided into three groups, according to the victim of the violence: worst are the violent against God Himself. These suffer the punishment of a rain of fire-flakes that spark the burning sands beneath them. They must take that fire lying down (blasphemers), sitting at the brink of the gulf of the fraudulent (the usurers), or racing about continually (the sodomites).

If Nature is the daughter of God, Dante reasons, then those who violate Nature in their sexual deeds, meant for the bringing of new life into the world, show their contempt of the Creator Himself. If human industry is the daughter of Nature, then those who do nothing for their wealth but rub coins together to make them breed are blasphemers too, as are the sodomites.

It is not pleasant to ask where in this scheme the wicked prelates of our time belong. Perhaps the question is too narrow. In our age of easy travel, after all, people can get around. Bishop Black might touch down in Sodom, in scorn of God, but only after he has supinely accepted the heresies that make Sodom conceivable to him; and then he takes the Eucharist in hands that smell of that foul city in an act of blasphemy.

But he cannot rest there. His fundamental “creative” sin must remain always in act; there is in fact no end to it, nor can there be. So he weaves about himself a web of sinners of like mind, and this is preeminently the sin of simony, which in this instance is to replace the bride of Christ with a male in drag, and set him about to pander and procure.

It would be cleaner just to sell the mitre and crozier for good old ill-gotten money. But all of this is to commit treason against Christ, who gave His life for the Church, to have her as his bride, pure and without spot.

It appears that if we pull at one string of the rats’ nest, we will catch the rest too. I am not saying that all of the bad bishops have been formal heretics, or that they have all been sodomites or men who condoned that sin in others, or that they have all made a habit of putting priests and other bishops in their hip pockets, or that they have all built their lives upon betraying Christ and His Church at every pass.

There is no need to make that claim. Nor do I say that we should always expect to find, among the prelates of Sodom, plenty of the other two ways that Dante identifies of being violent against God – in our time, the blasphemy of gross liturgical abuses, and the laundering of millions of dollars pressed from the hearts of the faithful.

Not always, not always. I do not make any universal claim. One sinner is not the same as another. The great general claim will do.

Nor do I say that the people in the pews have been paragons of orthodoxy, charity, truth, and fidelity. We have not. But now we know why some of our superiors have treated the most faithful of the laity with irritated indifference at best, and thinly veiled hatred at worst.

It is hard to take divorce seriously, I suppose, or cohabitation, or the smutty stuff peddled to children in many a Catholic school, when you have your hands down a seminarian’s pants, or when you seat your homosexual lover in the front pew, or when you cannot bring yourself to call God “He,” because the pronoun is too personal for comfort.

Perhaps the scandal will have this immediate effect: The next time you find a prelate who treats the Mass with blithe innovation, or who pushes a rainbow of sexual wickedness in the schools, or who seems allergic to the masculine character of Christ Himself, or who hedges himself with yes-priests and yes-nuns who promote these things, you will wonder perhaps where he is and what he does on a Friday evening.

That may not be fair. But what in this scandal has been fair?


Where else will we go?
by Randall Smith

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2018

Some say that people are leaving the Catholic Church over the current scandals. This confuses me. In whom did you have faith? The priest? The bishop? Or God? If your faith was in a priest, a bishop, or even the pope, then what you professed was idolatry, not Christian faith.

Am I downplaying the seriousness of the scandal or the damage it has done? No, but let’s put things into perspective. If you ask, “How can I continue to have faith in the Catholic Church considering all these horrible acts?” you might put yourself in the place of the Jewish community after the Holocaust. They had to ask themselves: “How can I continue to have faith in God considering all these horrible acts?”

How can we continue to dedicate ourselves to a community so unfaithful to God?
- Moses asked the same question when he saw the infidelity of his fellow Jews in the desert.
- The prophets asked the same question when they saw the injustices of the people in the Promised Land.
- The early apostles must have asked themselves the same question when they saw that it was one of their own company who handed Jesus over to His enemies.
- And Peter himself, the “rock” on which the Church was to be built, denied he even knew the Lord in His most desperate hour of need. What could anyone do to compete with that?

Life in the Church has rarely been simple.
- How hard would it have been to stay in the Church when one’s friends, neighbors, and family members were being martyred, torn to shred by animals or burned alive, for refusing to deny their faith?
- How hard would it have been to stay in the Church when so many of one’s other friends, neighbors, and family members had given in and denied Christ in the face of the threats of the Roman authorities.
- What would you have done when the Arian crisis split the Church in two, with the supposedly “Christian” emperor Constantine and most of the empire siding with the Arians?
- How about when three men all claimed to be pope in the fourteenth century?
- Or when the Protestant Revolt split Christendom and much of the Church hierarchy was corrupt and moribund?
The Council of Trent was a great gift of the Spirit, but it didn’t commence until 1545 (Martin Luther authored the 95 theses in 1517), and it didn’t wrap up until 1563, nearly twenty years later.

Imagine being a Catholic in the midst of these scandals.
- What would you have done?
- Would you have been one of those who stayed and fought the good fight in faith?
- Or would you have been one of the many who said, “That’s it. I’m out”?

But then where would you have gone? That’s the question Peter asks Christ. “Lord, where else shall we go?” Who else has the words of everlasting life?

I’m sorry, but did I miss something?
- Did Christ found some other Church – the Church with the good people [only]?
- The Church with the perfect liturgies?
- The Church in which all the clergy and laity are doctrinally correct and without sin?
Because I’ve never seen it. I’ve never read about it in the Scriptures, nor did the Fathers and Doctors of the Church mention it.

Quite the contrary; they repeatedly talk about the human element of the Church being sinful and in need of Christ’s redemption.

Are these scandals keeping people away from the Church? Please. People are staying away from the Church because the Church makes uncomfortable moral claims and because Catholics aren’t a living witness in society to the truth of that teaching.
- Surveys have repeatedly shown Catholics to be little different from the general public in their opinions on fundamental moral issues.
- Catholics in San Francisco threatened to sue their own bishop when he tried to enforce basic moral principles on the Catholic schools. - Archbishop Chaput is held at arms’ length by many Catholic universities, while Cardinal Mahoney, supposedly under penance the way ex-Cardinal McCarrick was, travels freely.

Ask priests and editors of “conservative” Catholic websites what kind of blowback they get when they try to tell the laity they should pay a living wage, be fair and honest in their business practices, or exercise a preferential option for the poor.

What kind of priests and bishops would you expect to get when large portions of the laity revolt if they hear anything from the pulpit about abortion, contraception, fornication, and same-sex sexual activity?

Large proportions of American Catholics wanted bishops who would look the other way as they openly violated fundamental Catholic teaching.
- Why are they surprised now to discover that some of these men “bent the rules” in their personal lives as well?
- Was fidelity what people were looking for? Or a winning personality and the ability to raise money?
- Wasn’t the latter the reason why so many institutions now so self-righteously condemning McCarrick earlier lavished him with honors and praise?

C.S. Lewis once complained about a culture that produces “men without chests” and then expects of them virtue.“We laugh at honor,” wrote Lewis, “and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” An American Catholic Church that laughed at Catholic social teaching and Catholic sexual morality should not be shocked to find doctrinal and moral traitors in its midst.

What do we do now? Demand the truth? Certainly. But as the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel insisted, you demand truth by living in the truth.

We should say of authentic Church teaching what St. Augustine said about the Gospel: “If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don’t like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself.” [Ahem! Does that not describe the hubris and narcissism of Jorge Bergoglio to a T?"]

Are you a Catholic? Then stop worrying – and act like one.

Robert Royal reported faithfully from Rome on the two Bergoglian synods that preceded this one. Here is his report from opening day.

Papal Aspirations:
Day 1 of his 'youth synod'
by Robert Royal
Editor

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2018

Weighing official communications about a Synod – unofficial sources are usually known quantities with greater or lesser degrees of reliability – has always been a guessing game. The past few synods on the family took guessing to a whole new level as various intermediaries in various languages with various agendas (not always Catholic) tried to put their mark on each day’s proceedings, often with little connection to what the bishops had actually discussed.

Yesterday, day one of the Synod on Young People, there was – after some back and forth – no official briefing.

But there were two major texts from Pope Francis, which lay out his hopes for the next four weeks – and the future of the Church. Francis’s language is notoriously ambiguous, and, even when you get the large lines of what he’s saying, he’s never easy to interpret. But his homily at the inaugural Mass and his Opening Address to the synod participants are of interest for what they say – and don’t say.

Two-third of Americans have lost confidence in Pope Francis, according to recent surveys, because of his handling of the abuse crisis. And many traditional Catholics have, unfortunately, become skeptical about almost anything he says. It’s worth the effort, however, to understand at least what he said yesterday that he’s hoping to achieve.

I’m going to take the two texts in reverse temporal order. The address to the Synod participants came late in the afternoon yesterday, the homily at the morning Mass.

Much of the address to synod participants encourages young people to new ways of using their energy and enthusiasm in efforts to preach the Gospel. But it also sounds some notes that we’ve often heard in the past:

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The Synod we are living is a moment of sharing. I wish, therefore, at the beginning of the Synod Assembly, to invite everyone to speak with courage and frankness (parrhesia), namely to integrate freedom, truth and charity. Only dialogue can help us grow. An honest, transparent critique is constructive and helpful, and does not engage in useless chatter, rumours, conjectures or prejudices.

And humility in listening must correspond to courage in speaking. I told the young people in the pre-Synod Meeting: “If you say something I do not like, I have to listen even more, because everyone has the right to be heard, just as everyone has the right to speak.”

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Any conversation, of course, requires mutual speaking and listening. - But it’s difficult not to think that in many current (and endless) “dialogues,” listening has all but obliterated the Church’s obligation to speak the truth of the Gospel.
- Further, the “listening” seems to be only open to certain voices. Towards the end of the address, Francis remarks,

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“Do not let yourselves be tempted, therefore, by the ‘prophets of doom,’ do not spend your energy on ‘keeping score of failures and holding on to reproaches,’ keep your gaze fixed on the good that ‘often makes no sound; it is neither a topic for blogs, nor front page news.’”

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Fair enough, but this might also be regarded as an excuse not to listen to those of us – say the tens of thousands of subscribers to this site and similar ones – who believe things are approaching a critical moment. These too are “bold” voices that deserve a hearing.


The morning homily – to a skimpy crowd – took a different tack. Probably the most noteworthy passage came near the end, when the pope quoted a line by the visionary German poet Hölderlin, who is almost unknown in the English-speaking world: “May the man hold fast to what the child has promised.”

This comes from a poem about grandmothers (a frequent reference point for Francis) and expresses the desire to remain faithful to what we loved in the warmth of grandmotherly security as children.

But Pope Francis situates that line in an unusual context: the Second Vatican Council. He tells the Synod Fathers: “Many of us were young or taking our first steps in the religious life while the Second Vatican Council was drawing to a close.” It’s often pointed out that Francis is the first pope to have been ordained after that council (1969). He seems here to feel some sort of desire to recapture the hopes and dreams of a renewed Church that eclipsed nearly everything else in the 1960s.

For many people – the present writer included – those dreams were mostly illusions.
- Thousands left the priesthood and religious orders (Jorge Bergoglio’s own Jesuits declined sharply).
- The liturgy was not “renewed” but wrecked (and people in large numbers stopped going to Mass);
- the world was not converted; instead, large numbers of Catholics were converted by the world; and
- the Church receded in importance as a sure moral and spiritual guide.

Whatever possibilities for renewal existed in the 1960s – and there were many better roads not taken – the empirical results are clear beyond dispute.

Pope Francis seems to believe that a return to that spirit will produce a different outcome now. By any objective measure, the Church experienced improvements during the papacies of his predecessors, St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI. But as we’ve seen from his clear efforts to reverse much of their magisterial teaching, Francis seems to believe that they took a wrong turn, some sort of flight backwards, rather than making an effort to do well what the Church, in the decades after the Council, did badly.

You get the impression that he believes the Church didn’t go far enough after Vatican II. That dogma, canon law, tradition, are a drag on the immediate operation and inspirations of the Holy Spirit – and outreach to young people.

Any thinking person knows that rules and habits can be stifling, but it’s hard to see “clericalism,” traditionalism, or conservatism as the main problems affecting the Church at the moment and preventing the evangelization of the young. If anything, people – including young people – seem to come to the Church, if they come at all, precisely because they’ve had enough of empty dialogue, endless questioning, the seeking that never finds.

These are all themes that will be very much in play in coming weeks. Hope is one of the theological virtues, and we cannot predict what God has planned. But it seems as clear as anything can be in the rough and tumble of human existence that what we need is a truly new inspiration by the Spirit, not an echo of a failed agenda now a half-century old.


And here's what I think is a bet-hedging, covering-ass analysis by Bergogliac John Allen who does see some of the writing on the wall and obviously does not want to end up once again as poor a prophet as he was before the 2005 Conclave, when for years, he never considered Joseph Ratzinger papabile until just two days before the Conclave began.


Why this synodal assembly
may be the most important of all
John L. Allen Jr.
Editor

Oct 3, 2018

ROME - Today is the opening day of the third Synod of Bishops under Pope Francis, and despite the seemingly anodyne subject - “Youth, Faith and Vocational Discernment” - it’s potentially the most significant summit so far on this pope’s watch.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the bishops are gathering in Rome in a moment in which the Church faces perhaps its gravest crisis since the Protestant Reformation in the form of the worldwide clerical sexual abuse scandals, and the eyes of the Catholic world will be on how they choose to engage it.

Founded after the Second Vatican Council by Blessed Pope Paul VI, who’ll be canonized at the midway point of this gathering on Oct. 14, the Synod of Bishops brings together a cross-section of bishops from around the world to discuss some specific theme, leaving it up to the pope what to do with their deliberations.

The first two synods during the Francis era triggered earthquakes ad intra, meaning within the Church’s internal life, with deep tensions over the question of allowing access to Communion for Catholics who divorce and then remarry outside the Church. Those synods culminated in Amoris Laetitia, the pope’s 2016 document on the family in which he opened a cautious door for that access, triggering a ferocious debate among Church insiders that still hasn’t abated.

This time, however, the storms surrounding the synod aren’t just ad intra - though they definitely are that - but also ad extra, meaning the Church’s relationship with the wider world.

The clerical abuse crisis has badly damaged the Church’s moral credibility, made it difficult to move the ball on anything else the Church cares about, and called into question the standing and personal integrity of Church leaders at all levels. Inside the Church and out, there’s a level of anger and disillusionment that’s crippling.

In the run-up, some leading prelates actually called on Pope Francis to cancel or postpone this synod and instead just deal head-on with the issues raised by the abuse crisis. Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia, for instance, suggested that Francis begin preparations for a synod on the life of bishops.

In reality, however, it almost doesn’t matter what subject the pontiff has invited bishops here to discuss. From the moment most of them get off their plane flights, they’ll want to talk about it, and whether it’s on the synod floor or during coffee breaks or at lunches and dinners, that’s exactly what they’ll spend a good chunk of the month doing.

Further, it may not ultimately matter if the bishops themselves want to face the music, because they’re not the only ones taking part. There are also 36 young “auditors,” meaning participants without voting rights, and there’s already talk that some of them want to ask for “clarification” on recent events - perhaps not so much about the Viganò charge specifically, but the crisis situation tout court. [Good luck to them! Bonne chance, as the French say - which is more appropriate for its literal double entendre. THat I would idiomatically translate in this context as 'Fat chance!']

Of course, that won’t be the only topic of conversation. The questions of how the Church should relate to youth, how it can pass on the faith to the next generation, and how it can nurture vocations of all sorts are pressing and real - perhaps especially so in the developed West, where a strong share of young people appear profoundly alienated and mistrustful of institutions of all sorts.

To add extra portent, this is the first time a summit of bishops has been convened after a sitting pope has been directly accused by one of his own ex-aides of mishandling abuse allegations, in this case the charge by Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò that Francis ignored a 2013 warning about misconduct concerns surrounding ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

Under these circumstances, the bishops gathered in Rome during October will feel enormous pressure to face up to the realities of the moment. Survivors, child protection advocates and experts, reformers within the Church, and ordinary rank and file Catholics stung by the scandals will all be looking to these bishops to supply some sort of hope.

At the Vatican news conference on Monday, I asked Italian Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, who runs the synod in the name of Pope Francis, if he’s concerned that the fallout from the abuse scandals will cast a shadow over this gathering. The gist of his response was that he doesn’t see the present crisis as an “impediment” but an “opportunity,” meaning a chance to show the world a church struggling honestly to get things right.
[Yeah, right! When he says he won't even have the final document of this assembly published! What is it with this pope and his vassals who keep talking of transparency but then choose to keep very significant things secret - like the actual text of its provisional agreement with China. And now this.]

That brings us to why this synod is such a high-stakes exercise for Francis, and really for him alone. To be clear, this is not a synod on the abuse crisis. Something of the sort will come in February, when Francis has summoned presidents of the bishops’ conferences around the world to join him in Rome for a three-day summit on child protection.

Yet suppose the prelates gathered in Rome this month do a creditable job of articulating the anger and anguish that their flocks are feeling, and lay all that at the feet of the pope. [I very much doubt they'll even be given a chance to articulate any of that. They will probably be ruled out of order the moment anyone brings up anything that is not already spelled out, pre-digested in the synodal assembly's working document! Don't believe Bergoglio's usual blather about parrhesia - it was worthless before and remains worthless. One would wish him to start by exercising parrhesia himself in response to Mons. Vigano's central question (and to the DUBIA and the CORRECTIO FILIALIS before that), but he won't because he can't without either perjuring or self-incriminating himself.]

Then the next question will be what he’s going to do about it - and it’s not entirely clear that waiting for the results of another meeting in February, in itself, will quite do the trick. [But he won't have to do anything about it if the subject matter is made completely taboo at this assembly!]

‘LGBT’ should not appear in Vatican documents,
Archbishop Chaput tells synodal assembly
by Diane Montagna


VATICAN CITY, October 4, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) — Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia today told Pope Francis and members of the Synod of Bishops that “LGBTQ” and other similar language should not be used in the Vatican Youth Synod document.

In his intervention this morning on the floor of the Vatican’s Synod Hall (see full text below), Archbishop Chaput told the Pope, cardinals, bishops and young people convened in the Synod Hall:

---

“There is no such thing as an ‘LGBTQ Catholic’ or a ‘transgender Catholic’ or a ‘heterosexual Catholic,’ as if our sexual appetites defined who we are; as if these designations described discrete communities of differing but equal integrity within the real ecclesial community, the body of Jesus Christ.

“This has never been true in the life of the Church, and is not true now. It follows that ‘LGBTQ’ and similar language should not be used in Church documents, because using it suggests that these are real, autonomous groups, and the Church simply doesn’t categorize people that way.” ”

---

Archbishop Chaput’s remarks come just three days after Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, General Secretary for the Synod of Bishops, refused to remove the term “LGBT youth” from the synod’s working document (Instrumentum laboris).

At an Oct. 1 Vatican press conference, LifeSiteNews reminded Cardinal Baldisseri that he had initially claimed the phrase “LGBT youth” was a quote taken from a pre-synodal document compiled by young people at their meeting with the Pope and Synod organizers, March 19-24, 2018.

We told Baldisseri that we had looked at the final document compiled by young people, and the acronym “LGBT” appears nowhere.

“It’s not there?” Baldisseri replied. “No,” we said.

This correspondent therefore asked Cardinal Baldisseri if he would consider removing the phrase “LGBT youth” from the Instrumentum Laboris to avoid it being inserted into the final document, and becoming part of the Magisterium of the Church.

“Look, I am not removing anything,” Cardinal Baldisseri responded. “The Synod Fathers will discuss it article by article. All the texts, even the loftiest in the world, will be discussed.”

The passage in question, contained in paragraph 197 of the Instrumentum Laboris, reads:

---

Some LGBT youth, through various contributions that came to the Secretariat of the Synod, wish to “benefit from a greater closeness” and experience greater care on the part of the Church, while some ECs [Episcopal Conferences] ask what to propose “to young people who instead of forming a heterosexual couple decide to form a homosexual couple and, above all, wish to be close to the Church.”

---

The Holy See has never before used the acronym “LGBT” in a Vatican document.

Fr. James Martin, SJ [passionately militant 'patron satan' of LGBTQism], swiftly responded to news of Archbishop Chaput’s synod intervention, tweeting out:

No mention of Archbishop Chaput’s intervention was made at the synod press briefing today.

Father Thomas Rosica, the English language media attaché to the synod, who spoke with journalists after the briefing, also made no mention of Chaput’s remarks.

Asked if “homosexuality” and “gay relationships” were part of the interventions, Father Rosica replied: “Not those exact words, the issue was present, but there wasn’t any dominant issue.”

Father Rosica did confirm that sexual abuse was raised in several interventions. “The sex abuse issue has affected young people, and they want clarity, transparency, authenticity from us.”

Here below is the full text of Archbishop Chaput's intervention at the Synod.

---

SYNOD INTERVENTION
Chapter IV, paragraphs 51-63
+Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.
Archbishop of Philadelphia
10.4.18

Brothers,

I was elected to the synod’s permanent council three years ago. At the time, I was asked, along with other members, to suggest themes for this synod. My counsel then was to focus on Psalm 8. We all know the text: “When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast established; what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him?”

Who we are as creatures, what it means to be human, why we should imagine we have any special dignity at all – these are the chronic questions behind all our anxieties and conflicts. And the answer to all of them will not be found in ideologies or the social sciences, but only in the person of Jesus Christ, redeemer of man. Which of course means we need to understand, at the deepest level, why we need to be redeemed in the first place.

If we lack the confidence to preach Jesus Christ without hesitation or excuses to every generation, especially to the young, then the Church is just another purveyor of ethical pieties the world doesn’t need.

In this light, I read Chapter IV of the instrumentum, grafs 51-63, with keen interest. The chapter does a good job of describing the anthropological and cultural challenges facing our young people. In fact, describing today’s problems, and noting the need to accompany young people as they face those problems, are strengths of the instrumentum overall.

But I believe graf 51 is misleading when it speaks of young people as the “watchmen and seismographs of every age.” This is false flattery, and it masks a loss of adult trust in the continuing beauty and power of the beliefs we have received.

In reality, young people are too often products of the age, shaped in part by the words, the love, the confidence, and the witness of their parents and teachers, but more profoundly today by a culture that is both deeply appealing and essentially atheist.

The elders of the faith community have the task of passing the truth of the Gospel from age to age, undamaged by compromise or deformation. Yet too often my generation of leaders, in our families and in the Church, has abdicated that responsibility out of a combination of ignorance, cowardice and laziness in forming young people to carry the faith into the future.

Shaping young lives is hard work in the face of a hostile culture. The clergy sexual abuse crisis is precisely a result of the self-indulgence and confusion introduced into the Church in my lifetime, even among those tasked with teaching and leading. And minors – our young people – have paid the price for it.
Finally, what the Church holds to be true about human sexuality is not a stumbling block. It is the only real path to joy and wholeness.

There is no such thing as an “LGBTQ Catholic” or a “transgender Catholic” or a “heterosexual Catholic,” as if our sexual appetites defined who we are; as if these designations described discrete communities of differing but equal integrity within the real ecclesial community, the body of Jesus Christ. This has never been true in the life of the Church, and is not true now. It follows that “LGBTQ” and similar language should not be used in Church documents, because using it suggests that these are real, autonomous groups, and the Church simply doesn’t categorize people that way.

Explaining why Catholic teaching about human sexuality is true, and why it’s ennobling and merciful, seems crucial to any discussion of anthropological issues. Yet it’s regrettably missing from this chapter and this document. I hope revisions by the Synod Fathers can address that.

---

Here is how the Vatican Insider - virtual house organ of Casa Santa Marta - reported Day 1 of the synodal deliberations. I am unable to access the original Italian report - and the site's English translation is awkward, to say the least.


Migrants, abuses, sexuality among
the first interventions at the synod
by Iacopo Scaramuzzi
from the English online edition of

October 4, 2018

VATICAN CITY - Migrants, “almost all young people”, sexual abuse and other “failings” for which the Church wants to ask forgiveness, the question of sexuality and corporality, dimensions that should not be contained but accompanied in the development of the person: these are some of the issues that emerged during the first morning of the Synod on Young People the Pope opened yesterday morning in the Vatican (3-28 October).

Having formed the commission for information, Cardinal Robert Sarah resigned for personal reasons. [A puzzling sentence, until I read towards the end of the story that Cardinal Sarah was elected to the Committee on Information but that he declined it, and Cardinal Napier of South Africa was chosen to take his place.]

The meeting fell on the day of Saint Francis [i.e., Oct 4 is the liturgical feast of St Francis of Assisi] and began with good wishes and applause to the Pope.

Among the 25 speeches of the morning, the Prefect of the Vatican Department for Communication, Paolo Ruffini, reporting for to his first briefing in the Vatican press room, said there was talk of the need to listen to young people in the concrete situations in which they find themselves, of the many young people “discarded” from the present society, of the capacity of “prophecy” of the young, of the difficulty experienced by the Church in transmitting the faith to the new generations, of youth ministry that must not “tame” the young, of inter-generational relations, along with many other controversial issues.

Such as “the forgiveness that the Church has asked for and continues to ask for not being up to the tasks, in all fields, including the theme of abuse”, Ruffini said. “Not only that: one can and must ask for forgiveness also of other shortcomings that all of us, priests, religious and laity, may have had”, all issues to be included in the more general dimension of “credibility” of the Church and in the “discernment on what the Church must do or has not done enough”, in order to “recover the capacity to listen” to young people.

There were “five or six” synod fathers who openly talked about the request for forgiveness, the sociologist Chiara Giaccardi said during the briefing, while others “implied” this theme as a more general “awareness of general defect, which is the tip of the iceberg of the Church’s failures to live its mandate fully”.

Giaccardi referred to some interventions on the “theme of sexuality and corporeity”, which she said was “faced by many of the synod fathers in a very open and frank way, recognizing this dimension not as the enemy of a person’s development, but, on the contrary, as fundamental, because not cultivating all of a person’s dimensions means handing them over to drift if not to perversion.

Some interventions, she said, recognized the “lack of accompaniment of this dimension” and the need to “rethink it in an integral way, not only contain it but help it to express itself in a way that is beautiful and develops their personality.

But the most emotional moment - Ruffini said, was "when we talked about migrants, almost all of them young”. [What exactly did they say about migrants?]

During the briefing, moderated by the director of the Vatican press room, Greg Burke, and attended also by the Argentine bishop Carlos José Tissera and the young Vietnamese auditor Joseph Cao Huu Minh Tri [refers to one of 35 young lay people chosen to take part as auditors without voting rights], the members of the commission for information, elected yesterday, were announced. In addition to Ruffini and the Jesuit Antonio Spadaro, editor of La Civilta Cattolica, the members are Cardinals Wilfried Fox Napier, Luis Antonio Tagle, Gérald Cyprien Lacroix and Christoph Schoenborn and Msgr. Anthony Fisher. The Undersecretary of the Synod, Msgr. Fabio Fabene, confirmed that Cardinal Robert Sarah, initially voted, had declined “for personal reasons”, and Fox Napier took his place.

Pope Francis “invited to frankness (parrhesia) and I believe that his invitation was accepted”, Giaccardi said. “There was no downplaying, no sugar-coating, there was much frankness and authenticity. It’s a good sign for the beginning, the Church of this synod is not a plastered [???] one”.

For Ruffini, “Nothing surprised me to the point of making me jump off the chair. What I have perceived instead is the constant desire to dream with the young, to look at the world with their eyes to make the Church walk with them”.
[Oh please! Speaking of 'no sugar coating'!]

Father Spadaro intervened to explain that both the Pope’s request for three minutes of silence after every five interventions and the invitation not to feel bound to the prepared text fall within the typically Jesuit discernment applied to a Synod that “is not a Parliament or a debate of ideas and opinions but a place of discernment”. [Right, pile on the candy frosting!]


Ruffini then announced that during the briefing, the names of the fathers or auditors present will not be indicated, nor will it be specified who said what so to “tell how the thought of the Synod in its communion forms [???] , in a procedure so different from that which I saw in environments other than the Church", the former director of TV2000 said.

To the journalist who expressed the “prayer” of giving indications on the identities and geographical areas of the various participants, Greg Burke replied by concluding the briefing, that “it is the first time that we finish a press conference with a prayer”.

The final document that will be approved at the end of the Synod, Msgr. Fabene explained, could be approved en bloc or paragraph by paragraph: “It will depend very much on how the document will be done: neither one nor the other possibility is excluded”. [In any case, Synodal drill sergeant Cardinal Baldisseri has already announced that the document will not be made public!]

From Giotto's frescoes of THE LEGEND OF ST FRANCIS (Basilica of St. Francis, Assisi : Left, "Miracle of the Crucifix' in the church of San Damiano. Right, "Institution of the Crib at Greccio".


Fr Z had a most appropriate post yesterday to help correct the mistaken notion that the poverty and simplicity of Francis of Assisi applied to his ideas and practice of what liturgy demands...


St. Francis of Assisi – TWO points

October 4, 2018

On this Feast of the great St. Francis of Assisi, I offer two things.

First, I invite all of you to pray to St. Francis to intervene and end the persecution of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate.

Next, this is what St. Francis wrote about liturgical vestments.

A long time friend, the Great Roman Fabrizio™ once put together texts which give insight into what Francis was really about. He pulled quotes from the texts of Francis, most not translated into English elsewhere. He uses the exact words of St. Francis as found in the original Franciscan Sources and quoted in Latin (or Italian) original when available online. Otherwise, he transcribed them from the print edition. And online source for St. Francis’ own writings: OPUSCULA OMNIA SANCTI FRANCISCI ASSISIENSIS

The Poor Man of Assisi would not have been into clay pots and gunny sack vestments for Mass.

MYTH: Francis hated the “triumphalism” of the Roman Liturgy. He wanted Mass celebrated in barns, the Sacred Species held in shoe boxes or recycled bottles. And he couldn’t stand the “ritualism” of liturgical norms and devotional practices (and shall we mention his murky understanding of the doctrine on the Eucharist?):

---

Epistola ad custodes

To all the custodians of the Friars Minor to whom this letter shall come, Brother Francis, your servant and little one in the Lord God, greetings with new signs of heaven and earth which are great and most excellent before God and are considered least of all by many religious and by other men.

I beg you more than if it were a question of myself that, when it is becoming and you will deem it convenient, you humbly beseech the clerics to venerate above all the most holy Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ and His Holy Name and written words which sanctify the body.
- They ought to hold the chalices, corporals, ornaments of the altar, and all that pertain to the Sacrifice as precious.
- And if the most holy Body of the Lord is left very poorly in any place, let It be moved by them to a precious place, according to the command of the Church and let It be carried with great veneration and administered to others with discretion.
- The Names also and written words of the Lord, In whatever unclean place they may be found, let them be collected, and then they must be put in a proper place.
- And in every time you preach, admonish the people about penance and that no one can be saved except he that receives the most holy Body and Blood of the Lord.
- And whenever It is being sacrificed by the priest on the altar and It is being carried to any place, let all the people give praise, honor, and glory to the Lord God Living and True on their bended knees.
- And let His praise be announced and preached to all peoples so that at every hour and when the bells are rung praise and thanks shall always be given to the Almighty God by all the people through the whole earth.
- And whoever of my brothers custodians shall receive this writing, let them copy it and keep it with them and cause it to be copied for the brothers who have the office of preaching and the care of brothers,
- and let them preach all those things that are contained in this writing to the end: let them know they have the blessing of the Lord God and mine.
- And let these be for them true and holy obedience.

---

Do you think Jorge Bergoglio ever read the above, or other references to the Poverello's deep reverence for the fitting celebration of liturgy? Or knew this about St. Francis?

The McCarrick case is haunting the Youth Synod
[And well it should! May it lead to genuine parrhesia on clerical
and episcopal homosexuality as the tap root of the crisis]
by Christopher Altieri

October 5, 2018

One of the most striking things about this month’s Youth Synod is what is missing. [Deliberate omission has been a key communications tactic and strategy of this pontificate from Day 1.]

We have heard from various quarters about the Synod Fathers’ need to be the leaders of a “listening Church” – and to lead by example – and we have heard about the bishops’ “credibility deficit” in various ways and modes of diction. But the root problem, the abuse crisis, often remains the elephant in the room.

Some bishops, it’s true, have acknowledged it quite frankly. Before coming to Rome for the nearly month-long gathering, Bishop Frank Caggiano of Bridgeport, Connecticut told the National Catholic Reporter, “I am going to advocate that the synod needs to make [the crisis] a major topic now, without a doubt.”

Caggiano went on to tell the Reporter, “It’s about leadership being accountable. It’s about transparency. I think the greatest scandal is when, you know, things are not accounted for, or hidden or not transparent. That shakes people’s faith.”

Bishop Caggiano began to make good on his promise in a floor speech in the synod hall on Thursday. “Bishop Caggiano – one of the American delegates – gave a very good intervention,” said Bishop Robert Barron on Thursday evening at a colloquy sponsored by the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture.

“[Caggiano] made the observation – with which I very much agree – that, if you go back ten years, let’s say, and you look at surveys of why young people stay away from the Church, or feel alienated, the sex abuse scandal was not up near the top. It was often mentioned, but way down [on the list],” said Bishop Barron. “Many other things were far higher on the list,” he continued. “Now, that has shifted around, in the wake of the recent outbreak.”

While one may lament that the bishops only make a show of addressing the crisis under the aspect of scandal – in essence a marketing liability – one may suppose that something is better than nothing, and that the maxim “better late than never” also applies.

Nevertheless, all the bishops in the world talking all the day long will not repair the real injustice done to victims, nor will it restore the trust that is in tatters, nor will it serve to remove the scandal – in the technical sense – of moral decay in the clerical and hierarchical leadership culture, high and low – a scandal epitomised by the revelations regarding the disgraced former archbishop of Washington, DC, Theodore McCarrick.

The US bishops have asked Pope Francis to sanction a special investigation into the affair.
- They announced their intention to seek the measure on August sixteenth, and waited nearly a full month before getting the opportunity to present their request formally.
- The meeting between the Pope and the leadership of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops on September 13th did not end with an announcement of the authorisation of any such investigation or any other concrete steps.
- Though the Vatican has not confirmed it, Pope Francis appears to have rejected the measure.

“If you’re serious about getting to the bottom of what happened with McCarrick, then you need access to what the Vatican knew, and when it knew it,” said John Allen, the founder and editor-in-chief of Crux and Bishop Barron’s partner in dialogue on Thursday evening. “You need to know: when was the Vatican informed about the concerns about misconduct that were surrounding McCarrick? Who was informed? What did they do about it? Who was informing them? Answers to those questions are only going to come if there is a serious Vatican commitment to an investigation,” Allen said.

Gonzalo Martinez, a graduate student in computer science at Notre Dame and one of the seven featured young speakers at Thursday’s event, told the Catholic Herald, “It is true: we focus a lot more on the coverup – and that is hurtful, that is [behavior] that we do not expect,” he said. “Covering up is not a solution,” Martinez continued. “Stopping the scandal by covering it up is not a solution.”

Martinez went on to offer a blunt observation, which he stated as a matter of fact. “That doesn’t mean that we are going to stop believing,” he said. “[The bishops] were chosen for a reason: they were not chosen by us, they were chosen by Christ to lead His Church.”

And how about this for the raging paranoia now being feigned (faked!) by the Bergoliacs? Again, typical 'turning the tables' tactic to deflect back legitimate criticisms and questions which the pretend paranoid and his paladins are unable to answer in any positive way.

Father Spadaro’s latest conspiracy theory
By Phil Lawler

Oct 03, 2018

When Philip Pullella translated a Twitter post by Father Antonio Spadaro, the veteran Reuters correspondent found it necessary to add an editorial comment: “Don’t shoot the translator! (me)”.

It’s easy to understand Pullella’s caution, because if you thought these were the journalist’s own words, you might conclude that he had gone… Well, let’s look at the text. This, again, is Father Spadaro’s comment:

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It is no longer possible for journalists to keep quiet about the fact that there is a campaign of disinformation against Pope Francis which links American and Russian interests. You don’t have to read only Antonio Spadaro to understand that.

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An international conspiracy, uniting the US and Russia in a bid to undermine the Pope: have you seen that theory advanced anywhere else but in the writings of Father Spadaro? Perhaps you have, if you spend your time searching through the online fever swamps.

The Jesuit editor, who has become the most vociferous critic of anyone who dares question papal policies, is also apparently a fan of conspiracy theorists, as he demonstrated last year with an eccentric attack on American religious conservatives.

Still it’s alarming to see this sort of wild accusation. Remember, Father Spadaro has the Pope’s ear. [Bergoglio and his co-cabalists at Casa Santa Marta will really stop zt nothing - no matter how absurd - to seek to make him the victim instead of the major culprit on many of these 'burning' issues facing the Church today.]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/10/2018 21:44]

Striking Poll:
Collapse of pope's support
in the US on all fronts

October 5, 2018

Please, take a look at the Pew poll released just a couple of days ago, in which American Catholics give their opinion on the current Bishop of Rome.

It is a much better poll than the usual "approve/don't approve" type of poll, since it goes to the heart of what a Pope actually does. And it is all the more shocking because it includes all self-declared Catholics, and not practicing Catholics. One can only imagine the view Catholics who go at least to Sunday Mass every Sunday truly think about the current Roman Pontiff.


Division, division
and more satanic division

Posted on 5 October 2018

I have over the last weeks watched the Kavanaugh hearings. This morning I listened to speeches of Senators before the cloture vote. The cloture vote passed and the vote to confirm Kavanaugh’s nomination to SCOTUS will take place in some 30 hours.

I have listened to Feinstein (D-CA) and Schumer (D-NY) this morning. Again and again on news I have seen interviews with other Dem Senators. Their rhetoric is exemplary. It is mesmerizing.
- Theirs is a superb demonstration of sheer prevarication.
- They lockstep forward with unsubstantiated assertions and the pretzel twisting of facts.
- They – with their shadow masters – activated a coordinated mob of paid protesters while inciting the violation of civil liberties against the other aisle, including even violence.
- Each moment at a microphone brings more apocalyptic hysteria and the rejection of common sense.

That’s the essence of political libs: they demand that you reject facts as they rely on endless process to wear out the other side under a hail of vilification, shouting harassment, personal destruction, interruption and delay.

Now that the cloture vote has been taken and passed, watch the fury of the left stoke the storm.

On the churchy side of things, don’t we see much the same? It’s a little quieter, but not by much.
- If libs in the more secular sphere demand – with innuendo and screeching – that you deny the facts in front of your eyes, in the ecclesiastical realm they softly press that 2+2=5.
- Because they already possess the seats of power after which secular libs slaver, they eliminate those who would resist one by one from what they claim they want, namely, dialogue and discernment and “walking together”.
- They place themselves above the written, established process when is isn’t sufficiently preventing resistance and, with a raw imposition of will, override their own rules and reason.
- Their moves, though veiled, remain visible to the attentive. - Moreover, they justify their deceits and authorize their wiles because they see themselves as entitled by the fact of their moral superiority.

Now that the Synod is underway, watch for the multiplication of manipulations. Today, for example, we were told that the interventions of the members would not be made known because this is a “spiritual” process of “discernment”. As if our knowing what they say will affect the members. Do they have no resolve of their own? So much for listening, transparency and their highly touted dialogue.

In both the secular and sacred sphere the media plays a galactically important role. The mainstream media takes one side, blatantly, backing and spurring on the mob and their coordinators.

At least, thanks be to God and to the resolve of a few, there is now an alternative media.
- In the secular sphere it began with talk radio.
- In the ecclesial sphere there were small publications and then EWTN.
- Now there is the great force multiplier, the internet.
We cannot easily be silenced and driven from the public square. It can still be done, but when it is done, people see the sheer imposition of power and will and the stink of it lingers in memory.

Meanwhile, all around us we see division, division and more satanic division.

This world has its Prince, as the Lord warned. This world’s Prince, the Enemy, the Devil and the Father of Lies, creates division.

Remember what the Italian proverb says: “Il diavolo non può nascondere la coda. … The devil can’t hide his tail.” Old Scratch always let’s us know what he is up to. Making it apparent makes us accomplices. We have choices about what we see in the activity of the demon around us. Moreover, “Il diavolo non gioca mai da solo. … The devil never plays alone.”

Remember too that certain sins attract and allow demons to attach to things, places and persons. Steps must be take to drive them off.

Each of us has power to effect healing.
- Our own calling is to manifest the image of God in which we are made in what we say and do.
- We have God-given vocations which call us to certain roles in life.
- If we are clean within, through good use of the sacraments and diligent prayer and action, God will give us every actual grace that we need.
This sort of person, fasting and kneeling and praying is a strong bulwark against the machinations of the Enemy.

Go to confession.

Also, I will repeat what I have said so many times before. Collectively we Catholics have a resource of ineffable influence on every dimension of human life to the edges of the globe and even beyond the doors of death.
- Our sacred liturgical worship is the mightiest activity there is, bar none, greater than galaxies.
- We must have a restoration and revitalization of our enervated and compromised sacred liturgical worship.
- We must restore its integrity and continuity and then bring every good human endeavor to it for sanctification. Then we can take our aspirations back out into the world.

SAVE THE LITURGY. SAVE THE WORLD.


The common thread in these seemingly unrelated posts is that they confirm the work of Satan that has become increasingly evident in this pontificate. The following posts have to do with what the pope was carrying at the opening Mass of the synodal assembly yesterday - not at all your typical bishop's crozier or ferula, even though it does feature a face that one must assume to be Christ, whose crucifixion is stylized by having a giant nail pass through his hands stretched upward rather than to the side.

I had never seen the word 'stang' until today, when quite a few bloggers noted that what the pope carried was a form of the witch's stang. A term about which you will find many recent articles on Google... After the Mass yesterday, Ann Barnhardt, whom I cite on these pages rarely and very judiciously, and who insists on referring to Bergoglio only as Anti-Pope, had two posts about it, as follows (I confess that for this post, I have suppressed Barnhardt's use of 'Anti-Pope' before Bergoglio's name, and also the adjective she used to describe Fr Rosica):


Stang given to pope by woman
wearing Wiccan red string bracelet

October 4, 2018

The red string bracelet is a very common talisman in witchcraft/Wicca and Kabbalah, which is basically a hybrid of Talmudic Judaism and witchcraft.


Here in the picture is the pope being presented with the stang he carried yesterday by two females at a “youth rally” at the Circus Maximus in Rome in August,
you can clearly see the woman on the left, holding the stang, is wearing the knotted red thread talisman bracelet.

Some references:
“The Red Thread (and the Initiatory Process)” – must read
“Red Thread on the Wrist”
Citations on this are practically endless.

The companion post goes farther, but considering that what appears to be a Christlike face appears carved on the cleft of the Y in this particular stang, Bergoglio and those around him may simply have considered it a stylized crucifix and may have no idea at all of what a stang is. So since it was presented to him at a pre-synod youth rally, he would have thought it appropriate to use it for the opening Mass of the event. Therefore, it was probably with no satanic or witchy-kitchy ideas in mind that the stang was used. In any case, if one goes by what the stang is supposed to be for witches, then the very fact that these young women decided to give the pope a stang in the guise of a crucifix probably manifests diabolical cleverness in managing to give Satan an overt place in a papal mass, no less. Satan in the guise of Jesus crucified, yet....

Satanists manifesting:
Bergoglio carries a stang –
the ritual staff of withcraft

As I have said and written before, one of satan’s most clever moves has been to foment, encourage and push mentally ill and demonically oppressed people to LOUDLY broadcast insane, ridiculous, totally false “conspiracy theories”. We all know the types and categories. Mind control beams, “chem trails”, shape shifting lizards, underground civilizations, flat earthers, the list goes on and on and on.

What this has done is make it almost impossible to point out, discuss, and warn about ACTUAL sinister goings-on and actual, honest-to-goodness conspiracies that are very real. We all know that the word “Freemasonry” in the U.S. is automatically lumped into the above category, even though in Europe Freemasonry is largely understood to be the extremely powerful and influential socio-political entity that it is, and many Europeans further understand that the core of Freemasonry is the desire to exterminate the Catholic Church and replace it with the one-world secular humanist political religion of Freemasonry.

Trying to warn about such things as the musloid political system gets one lumped in with “conspiracy theorists”, as does trying to warn about the massive infiltration, influence, power and agenda of the sodomite cabal, both in the secular realms of politics and entertainment, AND in terms of the infiltration of the Institutional Church.

Perhaps the most difficult actual conspiracy to discuss without being dismissed out of hand is the actual cult worship of satan. But, it is real, and it is manifesting before our eyes, so someone has to call these things out knowing full well that to do so means that 99.9999% of the populace will instantly call one a “crazy fool”. That’s fine. If fitting in to this culture constitutes sanity, then please God, let me never be sane.

Note the prominent iron nail, and the human form [I assumed the face was supposed to be that of Jesus] at the base of the fork. Textbook Stang.

It is a MORAL CERTAINTY that the stick that Bergoglio tried to pass off as a ferula yesterday in the Mass opening the Sin-nod on Sodomy is a “STANG”. Bergoglio said ts was a “gift” from “young people” who SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED that he use it in the opening Mass of the Sodo-synod. That story right there by itself is DAMN PECULIAR.

A Stang is a witch/warlock’s ceremonial staff. It is always forked, and always has an iron nail driven through it. Ideally it has a human form carved or integrated into it somehow. The Stang signifies several things, the first being a satan himself. Read the quote below from a witchcraft blog:

---

“Gary describes the Stang as primarily a symbolic tool rather than a working one, and as such it stands in for the Devil himself, holding his power and his dual nature. The Devil and the Stang is often less about strict duality and more about the transgressing of boundaries, The Devil being a spirit I often think of as non-binary and difficult to define in terms of absolutes.”

---

Almost like a… “god of surprises?”

Sounds familiar, eh? Like every Casa Santa Marta sermon, and every airplane presser? Yeah. That’s mild compared to this quote from the same article:

---

“The witch is bound to no dogma. This makes them a threat to a Christianity established on doctrine. The witch insists everything in creation has its place. The Church insisted on two contrary substances God and The Devil. The witch strives for synthesis.” - Nicholaj De Mattos Frisvold, Craft of The Untamed.

---

Let us revisit the quote of the Canadian priest Tom Rosica, who is, once again, the English language press spokesman for this Sodo-synod from just a few weeks ago:

---

“Pope Francis (sic) breaks Catholic traditions whenever he wants because he is “free from disordered attachments.” Our Church has indeed entered a new phase: with the advent of this first Jesuit pope (sic), it is openly ruled by an individual rather than by the authority of Scripture alone or even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture. “
-Fr. Tom Rosica, Vatican press spokesman

---

Anyway, the iron nail in the Stang symbolizes multiple things, including a phallus/coitus, a mocking of the Crucifixion of Our Lord, and is the triple motif of the threefold serpentine, telluric and cainic “powers”.

The “serpentine” meaning is obvious – the devil himself, in the garden, “gifting” Adam and Eve with the “liberating” and “enlightening” words, “No, you shall not die the death. For God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil.“

The word “telluric” refers to earthly power, whose source and symbol is “the serpent”, “deep in the earth”.

The third motif symbolized by the iron nail in the Stang is the Cainic “powers”. Now, hold on to your hats. Here’s the opening from the Wiki article on “Cainism”, and remember folks, we are talking about Cain, whose sacrifice God rejected and he thus murdered his brother Abel because as St. John teaches, “Cain slew Abel because his works were evil, while those of his brother were just (1 John 3:12), and we read in Hebrews that “by faith Abel offered to God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain” (Hebrews 11:4).”

The oldest source is to be found in Irenaeus, adv. Haer. i. 31. He tells us that the Cainites regarded Cain as derived from the higher principle. They claimed fellowship with Esau, Korah, the men of Sodom, and all such people, and regarded themselves as on that account persecuted by the Creator. But they escaped injury from Him, for Sophia used to carry away from them to herself that which belonged to her.

One thing I learned in researching the actual cult worship of satan once I learned about and confirmed that the Vatican is the nexus of satanism in the world today, is the fact that satanists are commanded, at some point once they have sufficient power, to openly MANIFEST their satanism.

If the Bergoglian antipapacy doesn’t constitute “having sufficient power”, then I don’t know what would.

I am morally certain that Bergoglio’s carrying of a Stang with the iron nail so prominently positioned, into the opening of a farce synod whose entire agenda is the ratification of sodomy, is a clear case of manifestation of satanism.

And if that makes me a conspiracy theorist, so be it. Some conspiracies are real.

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O prince of the Heavely Host, by the power of God, cast into hell satan and all evil spirits who prowl throughout the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

Christopher Ferrara, apparently, unaware of stangs and such, simply sees a metaphor for the pontificate and the current synod in the forkec staff...

A forked staff: Perfect symbol for
the synod on youth and blah,blah,blah
by Chris Ferrara

October 4, 2018


As one website observes, when the Antichrist arrives to preach his lies among men, seducing “(if it were possible) even the elect” (Mk 13:22), his forked tongue “will have the eloquence of angels, his honeyed words will pierce to the very heart of those who hear him. His arguments and positions will be so well presented that even those who recognize him will be hard pressed to resist what he has to say.”

The Antichrist will make the devil’s ultimate sales pitch. For now, however, the forked tongue belongs to lesser voices, lacking all eloquence and nuance, including those who will be spouting empty demagogic slogans and emotivist rubbish at the Synod of Youth and Blah, Blah, Blah now underway in Occupied Rome.

We have heard it all before at the last phony Synod, which was merely a disguise for what Francis wanted from the beginning and shamelessly passed off as the voice of the Holy Ghost. And now — bearing a forked staff, appropriately enough — Francis has said it all again in his homily at the beginning of this elaborate stage show for further subversion of the Church: [Ferrara goes on to quote a substantial chunk of that homily, which I will omit here because it is the usual Bergoglio blather that is almost embarrassing in its phoniness.]

Here we go again: “prophesy and vision,” “dreams and hopes,” “see their situations,” eschewing “conformism,” moving beyond what is “secondary,” freedom from “prejudice and conditioning,” rejecting “moralistic or elitist postures” versus “the realities of our people.”

In other words: another poisonous dose of situation ethics to follow the recent scandal of “permission” for Holy Communion to be administered to people who intend to continue engaging in sexual relations within “second marriages” which constitute “none other than disgraceful and base concubinage, repeatedly condemned by the Church,” to quote Blessed Pope Pius IX.

This preposterous sham of a Synod features the attendance of two communist Chinese bishops handpicked by Beijing from the ranks of the Catholic Patriotic Association, which, following the Vatican sellout of the Underground Church, promptly declared its “independence” from Rome.

Francis ludicrously declared in his homily that the attendance of these puppets of Beijing and its “independent” pseudo-Church means that “the communion of the entire Episcopate with the Successor of Peter is yet more visible thanks to their presence.”

The inevitable outcome of this sham (barring a veritable miracle) will be a further erosion of the Church’s moral foundations under the specious pretext of an expression of the “ordinary Magisterium” that takes into account “situations” and “concrete realities” — as if reality and morality were somehow opposed, when in fact it is conformity to God’s moral law that leads a soul to the reality of true freedom.

God help us. God rescue us. Holy Mother of God, intercede for us and obtain for the Church that holy and courageous Pope who will put an end to this utter madness by doing at long last what You requested of the Roman Pontiff nearly a century ago at Tuy: the Consecration of Russia to Your Immaculate Heart.

So, finally, a document earlier reported to have been ready on Sept. 17, for publication the day after, has finally been released., more than three weeks later. It had been billed as 'the Holy See's response to Mons. Vigano's Testimony' but the document focuses only on the McCarrick case, does not mention Vigano at all, and most importantly in this respect, makes it appear that Bergoglio first heard about McCarrick's misconduct in September 2017 when the New York Archdiocese informed the Vatican about a complaint from a man alleging that McCarrick had abused him when he was a teenager.

It goes on to give Bergoglio the credit for ordering a thorough preliminary investigation by the Archdiocese - as though the latter had sought his permission to investigate the accusation, something they could perfectly go ahead and do and their own, and which, we all presumed, was what they did... In short, by making no mention at all of the central question about the Vigano Testimony - namely, that the ex-nuncio informed Bergoglio about McCarrick's record in June 2013 - the statement implies he did not, i.e., he lied, if Bergoglio now claims, as this statement makes it appear, that he first heard of McCarrick's misconduct in September 2017.

---

HOLY SEE PRESS OFFICE STATEMENT
ON MCCARRICK CASE
October 6, 2018

After the publication of the accusations regarding the conduct of Archbishop Theodore Edgar McCarrick, the Holy Father Pope Francis, aware of and concerned by the confusion that these accusations are causing in the conscience of the faithful, has established that the following be communicated: [So 'concerned' that this reponse comes 3 months after the New York investigation results were made public in July and more than one month since Vigano's August 27 Testimony in which he relates the June 2013 meeting with Bergoglio. It took the Bergoglian wodsmiths that much time to craft this masterpiece of evasiveness.]

In September 2017, the Archdiocese of New York notified the Holy See that a man had accused former Cardinal McCarrick of having abused him in the 1970s. The Holy Father ordered a thorough preliminary investigation into this, which was carried out by the Archdiocese of New York, at the conclusion of which the relative documentation was forwarded to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

In the meantime, because grave indications emerged during the course of the investigation, [It was not 'in the meantime', and it was not because of grave indications emerging during the course of the investigation, but only after it was revealed that three New Jersey dioceses had settled abuse complaint against McCarrick in the past, and the latter finally decided to resign his cardinalate], the Holy Father accepted the resignation of Archbishop McCarrick from the College of Cardinals, prohibiting him by order from exercising public ministry, and obliging him to lead a life of prayer and penance.

The Holy See will, in due course, make known the conclusions of the matter regarding Archbishop McCarrick. Moreover, with reference to other accusations brought against Archbishop McCarrick, the Holy Father has decided that information gathered during the preliminary investigation be combined with a further thorough study of the entire documentation present in the Archives of the Dicasteries and Offices of the Holy See regarding the former Cardinal McCarrick, in order to ascertain all the relevant facts, to place them in their historical context and to evaluate them objectively. [But it will be Bergoglio's agents who will look into these documents, so we will only have their word for it if it turns out they tell us they found nothing wort reporting - as Bergoglio says his 'investigators' found 'nothing' against Mons. Ricca. The Vatican cannot be compelled to assign 'outside' investigators to look into its documents, and there is no 'Freedom of Information' Act that journalists and other interested parties may invoke to obtain copies of relevant documents. Not that there would be any to obtain if the Vatican disinfected and whitewashed McCarrick's dossiers as it did Ricca's - particularly those documents referred to by Vigano in his Testimony, if they have not already been shredded to confetti and burned by now.]

The Holy See is conscious that, from the examination of the facts and of the circumstances, it may emerge that choices were taken that would not be consonant with a contemporary approach to such issues.

[Forgive me if I color the rest of the Vatican text purple because i find hypocrisy lurid and makes my flesh crawl.]
However, as Pope Francis has said: “We will follow the path of truth wherever it may lead” (Philadelphia, 27 September 2015). Both abuse and its cover-up can no longer be tolerated and a different treatment for Bishops who have committed or covered up abuse, in fact represents a form of clericalism that is no longer acceptable.

The Holy Father Pope Francis renews his pressing invitation to unite forces to fight against the grave scourge of abuse within and beyond the Church, and to prevent such crimes from being committed in the future to the harm of the most innocent and most vulnerable in society.

As previously made known, the Holy Father has convened a meeting of the Presidents of the Bishops’ Conferences from around the world for next February, while the words of his recent Letter to the People of God still resonate: “The only way that we have to respond to this evil that has darkened so many lives is to experience it as a task regarding all of us as the People of God. This awareness of being part of a people and a shared history will enable us to acknowledge our past sins and mistakes with a penitential openness that can allow us to be renewed from within” (20 August 2018).

---

In his analysis for CWR, Christopher Altieri is more explicit about the objections I expressed above and rightly concludes that this pope now talks of "sharing responsibility" for fixing this unholy mess, when he is the only one with any power to do any thing about it... And not by another delaying tactic such as this 'thorough study' by his own people which is likely to be a whitewash, partial or total.

Pope’s ‘thorough study’ of McCarrick files unlikely to satisfy
It sounds little more than a delaying tactic meant
to lead public attention and blame away from the pope
Analysis
by Christopher Altieri

October 6, 2018

ROME, October 6th, 2018 — The Press Office of the Holy See released a communiqué on Saturday afternoon, offering the first direct response to the 11-page letter of “testimony” published in late August by the former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò.

The Vatican communiqué promises “to ascertain all the relevant facts, to place them in their historical context and to evaluate them objectively.” The subject of the effort to ascertain “all the relevant facts” is to be “the entire documentation present in the Archives of the Dicasteries and Offices of the Holy See regarding the former Cardinal McCarrick.”

In other words: we are in essence looking at a promise to review documents on file.

The Holy See promises the review will be “thorough”, though it says nothing about who will be conducting the “thorough study” or with what precise mandate, let alone what powers of discovery — if any — those tasked with the “thorough study” are to have.

The paperwork review will be “combined” with the information gathered during the Archdiocese of New York’s preliminary investigation, which the Archdiocese forwarded to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

It is hard to say what the “thorough study” promised by the Vatican will be.

For one thing, “The entire documentation present in the Archives of the Dicasteries and Offices of the Holy See regarding the former Cardinal McCarrick,” could be very vast, or relatively thin, depending on what construction one puts on the word “regarding”.
[And, more importantly, the pope's investigators could well shred any documents that would tend to support Mons. Vigano's claims, and say none of the documents he cited exist at all! We know what happened to the reports that caused the Secretariat of State to recall Mons. Ricca from Uruguay - because the pope himself told us in JUly 2013 that he had ordered an investigation of Ricca's background and 'nothing' questionable, much less 'incriminating', was found.]

It is easy to say what the “thorough study” will not be: an independent, transparent, and credibly complete investigation, apt to discover the extent of the rot in the Roman Curia (let alone the reach of McCarrick’s corruption in the United States).

In his letter, Viganò alleged a coverup of the conduct of the disgraced former Archbishop of Washington, DC, going back nearly twenty years and involving three popes — including Francis — as well as three Cardinal Secretaries of State — including the current one, Cardinal Pietro Parolin — and dozens of other very senior Churchmen.

McCarrick fell spectacularly over the summer, but he did not rise alone, or unaided — and while he was ascendant, he brought men with him. The state of affairs leaves the entire US hierarchy under a cloud of suspicion. The US bishops’ credibility is in tatters, and they are by their own admission unable to police themselves. Their requests for assistance from Rome to investigate their own conduct have not been granted.

The announcement of a credible accusation and the referral of McCarrick’s case to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith came in June of this year. More than a month later, Pope Francis accepted McCarrick’s resignation from the College of Cardinals. A statement from the Press Office of the Holy See announcing the acceptance of McCarrick’s resignation from the College reported that Pope Francis had also, “ordered [McCarrick’s] suspension from the exercise of any public ministry, together with the obligation to remain in a house yet to be indicated to him, for a life of prayer and penance until the accusations made against him are examined in a regular canonical trial.”

The Communiqué from the Holy See on Saturday reiterates the measures in place against McCarrick — suspension from ministry and a life of secluded prayer and penance — but made no mention of a trial.

The Communiqué also promises, “The Holy See will, in due course, make known the conclusions of the matter regarding Archbishop McCarrick,” though it is not clear from the Communiqué what “the matter” is.

There is language in the Communiqué to suggest we might expect some unflattering reports regarding Pope St. John Paul II and Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI. “The Holy See,” the Communiqué says, “is conscious that, from the examination of the facts and of the circumstances, it may emerge that choices were taken that would not be consonant with a contemporary approach to such issues.”

It is also unlikely that either Cardinal Angelo Sodano or Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone — former Secretaries of State under Francis’s two most recent predecessors — will escape with their reputations intact. Both were implicated in Archbishop Viganò’s August letter. Both by rights ought to have known about McCarrick.

Sodano would have received the letter solicited by the Apostolic Nuncio to the US at the time, Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo. Written in late 2000 by Fr. Boniface Ramsey, OP, after the announcement of McCarrick’s appointment to Washington, the letter detailed reports Ramsey had heard from seminary students regarding McCarrick’s penchant for inviting himself into bed with seminarians.

Cardinal Bertone allegedly received evidence from Archbishop Viganò’s immediate predecessor, the late Archbishop Pietro Sambi, stemming from an Indictment Memorandum prepared by a priest punished with laicization for abuse of minors, Gregory Littleton of Charlotte, and summarized by Viganò in his capacity as Delegate for Pontifical Representations.

“As Pope Francis has said,” the Communiqué continues — quoting the Holy Father’s own remarks of September 27th, 2015, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a group of victims of sexual abuse, “‘We will follow the path of truth wherever it may lead.’ Both abuse and its cover-up can no longer be tolerated and a different treatment for Bishops who have committed or covered up abuse, in fact represents a form of clericalism that is no longer acceptable.”

Right now, the path the Holy See is following seems to lead away from Pope Francis. [Are we at all surprised???]

The concluding paragraph of the Communiqué commences with a renewal of Pope Francis’s “pressing invitation to unite forces to fight against the grave scourge of abuse within and beyond the Church, and to prevent such crimes from being committed in the future to the harm of the most innocent and most vulnerable in society.” It goes on to remind us of the meeting of the Presidents of the world’s bishops’ conferences, scheduled for February of the coming year.

The Communiqué then quotes the Holy Father’s August 20thLetter to the People of God.

“The only way that we have to respond to this evil that has darkened so many lives,” the quoted portion says, “is to experience it as a task regarding all of us as the People of God. This awareness of being part of a people and a shared history will enable us to acknowledge our past sins and mistakes with a penitential openness that can allow us to be renewed from within.”

This “thorough study” could be a very little step in the right direction — certainly too little and arguably too late, given the legitimate impatience of the faithful and the manifest readiness of Caesar to clean the Church’s house. There is little reason to credit it as anything other than a time-buying measure: in essence, a delaying tactic.

In any case, it is something for Pope Francis to talk of sharing responsibility for fixing this unholy mess, when he is the only one with any power to do any thing about it.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 07/10/2018 20:03]

Youth Synod 1st Week:
Wide variety of topics discussed,
and concerns about transparency
Challenges ranging from migration to absentee fathers have been addressed, but decision
not to release detailed information on discussion may point to a 'surprise' at the end


October 6, 2018

As the Synod on Youth comes to the end of its first week, many of the challenges facing young people have already been discussed, but precise details about the proceedings are scarce as heavy restrictions continue to be placed on public access to information.

The media is given daily verbal summaries of what has been talked about in the synod hall, but who said what on the synod floor is not identified, unless the synodal fathers themselves publicly circulate their interventions, which they are free to do.

No printed summaries of the interventions are issued at media briefings and, unlike in previous synods, individual language briefings are briefly given ad hoc in the press hall rather than in individual rooms as in the past.

Pope Francis spoke briefly in the free discussion on Thursday, but news of this only trickled out later, and the media was not given a summary or text of what he said.

On Friday, the president of the synod’s information commission, Paolo Ruffini [recently named Prefect of the Communications Superdicastery], shared a little more information by providing a list of who was speaking that day, but in effect, this synod is being held under a kind of Chatham House Rule whereby information disclosed during a meeting may be reported, but the source of that information may not be identified.

Perhaps sensing a backlash against this appearance of secrecy and lack of transparency, the secretary of the information commission, Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro, spontaneously interrupted Thursday’s press briefing to remind reporters this synod is “not a parliament but a place of discernment.”

Delegates must “feel free to say whatever we want,” he said, and “know what they say will remain in the hall.” If everything "were repeated externally,” he added, “it would limit freedom, as it’s a spiritual context.” [B as in bull and S as in s---! And shut up already with the discernment crap - all you Jesuits today are betraying St. Ignatius right and left with all your misuse of that term and a general disregard of his basic rules for the order.]

Although unsaid, another, probably more likely reason, is that the synod organizers want delegates to feel free to express all kinds of views no matter how heterodox, and don’t want the negative publicity that might result.

The Pope’s call at the beginning of the synod for parrhesia (to speak with courage and frankness) is also seen to allow a wider array of views to be aired while at the same time revealing where synod fathers stand on various issues. [And is anyone still taken in by these periodic calls for parrhesia - full, frank and direct discussion - from someone who avoids it like the plague when he needs to exercise it himself? He chooses instead the verbal disease of logorrhea on any subject on which he thinks himself a master (which is on just about everything except the DUBIA, the Correctio Filialis and any specific criticism requiring a specific response from him...And say the synodal fathers do get to exercise full parrhesia on the synod floor, but it all amounts to 'sound and fury signifying nothing' (other than giving them an opprtunity to vent and so mollifying them in some way Because Bergoglio will go ahead and decree what he wants to decree regardless of what anyone else may think.)]

Particularly useful information has nevertheless come into the public domain thanks to several synod fathers handing the full texts of their talks to reporters, or publicly sharing their synod experiences.

Had they not done so, there would have been no public information, for example, that Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia had spoken against using ‘LGBT’, the term used by the homosexual lobby, in Church documents, or any other contents of his speech.

Instead media were merely told that poverty, war, despair and unemployment were “big themes” and that the issue of homosexuality was “present.” Ruffini said the LGBT question was not discussed the following day, but added that this term “was used in some papers from bishops’ conference sent into synod, and in some remarks received, which is why it was included in the instrumentum laboris.” [AND THE SERIAL LYING CONTINUES!]

The issue is significant as many believe this synod is being subtly used as a vehicle for introducing heterodoxy and, in particular, acceptance of the ‘LGBT’ homosexual agenda in the Church (the term was controversially used in the synod’s working document).
- Observers also believe this issue will find its way into the final document which, for the first time under new rules, could become part of the papal magisterium depending on the Pope’s approval.
- According to some sources, the main substance of that document is actually already written [no one had to be a prophet to assume this is the case!], hence the lack of transparency, the absence of a mid-term report, and ambiguities over voting procedures at the end of the synod.

Possibly connected have been words from Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti, president of the Italian bishops’ conference and known to be close to Pope Francis, who said Oct. 5 that he is “convinced that Pope Francis will give us some surprise” and “will for sure invent something before the conclusion of the Synod.” [Can a flunky be so stupid as to say his lord and master is sue to 'invent' something before the synod ends? Next time, instead of going through all the expense to the Vaticand and all the dioceses sending representatives to Rome, why not skip holding a synodal assembly, simply send the pope's prepared 'post-synodal exhortation' to all the bishops of the world for their approval and comment, and voila! a brand-new Bergoglio document he can even proclaim as the equivalent of a council document because it had the participation of all the bishops of the world as if he had actually held an ecumenical council.]

Meanwhile, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, president of the German bishops’ conference, said synod is truly an opportunity to "to change not only the mentality but also structurally" the way of being the Church.

Despite the concerns over what has been left out of the flow of public information, plenty has been already discussed at the synod. Ruffini has given fairly extensive verbal summaries of the interventions and free discussions.
- These have included an emphasis on “listening to young people where they are,” the family being the place “where faith can be transmitted,” that religion needs to be “open to dialogue and witness.”
- More has been said about the “prophecy of the young” and some have called for forgiveness of the Church and not just for clergy sexual abuse — an appeal most notably made by Archbishop Anthony Fisher who released his speech in full.
- Greater “empathy of the Church” has been mentioned, as has the importance of intergenerational relations and the role of grandparents.
- The Church “shouldn’t be paternalistic or have a hypocritical attitude,” should “fight against attraction to luxuries,” and instead stress “values that lead to happiness.”
- Ruffini said the synod fathers spoke about the young feeling “victims of the lies of politicians and the media,” and see society as being largely “based on lying.”
- They feel a “loss” due to “excessive liberalism, a loss off motherhood, fatherhood.” - Some underlined the importance of music and sports which the young are deeply involved in, that the Church must speak the language of these areas, and also the “digital language.”
- Others have said the young “expect to be engaged in debates, in environmentalism, ecology, and the Church needs to support them” in these arenas.
- The young, a synod father said, “want to be taken seriously, challenged, and if they make mistakes, they want adults to help them” and “to trust them.”
- The young also “need to pray, to rediscover silent prayer, mystical prayer, and the Church must also pray for the young.” Praying for the young, a synod father said, “means listening them to them.”
- Also discussed have been pre-marital sex and the issue of chastity and abstinence. Failing to be chaste before marriage “could either urge people to marry before they’re ready for marriage, or lead them to abandon the sacrament [of marriage].”
- Ruffini denied there was a desire to weaken the Church’s teaching on pre-marital sexual relations among any of the synod fathers; rather, he said, the synod father in question raised this “topic that we’re faced with,” adding that the instrumentum laboris “insists on listening and understanding what happens in society.”
- Also mentioned has been “the loss of the idea of a father” among many young people, and one synod father made the point that it is the father “who transmits faith more than the mother.”
- The young “need to listen to older people” but “this is at risk,” one synod father from Africa said, and losing this would “involve losing memory of one’s roots.”
- Another synod father spoke of the “challenge posed by the digital era,” what he called “information obesity,” while another quoted Pope St. John XXIII to much applause: “Tell the young the world existed before them, but tell older people it will also exist after them.” [This is probably the only 'original' thing I have seen in all the plethora of platitudes that have been quoted.]
- Others have spoken about how multiculturalism and diversity can be “agents for change” for the young, how it is “important to ensure Church’s doctrine is better known to the young,” and that some mothers and fathers “should ask for forgiveness” from their children because they don’t have time to support or properly raise them. “We all need to be forgiven and children themselves will need to be forgiven,” the synod father said.
- Several synod fathers also spoke about the “reduced effectiveness” of marriage and the family “in transmitting faith, identity, vocation, mission” in societies with many broken families.
- One bishop observed that the Church needs new models, rhetoric and media to “speak our perennial truths, being aware that young people are not just a ‘demographic’ or a ‘market’ but a ‘theological place’ where the Word of God is revealed, pondered and communicated.”
- The liturgy has been discussed, with one bishop calling for “a liturgy that is better suited to present times, so it can be more participatory, more understandable, otherwise the youth might consider it dull.”
- Another suggested the Church “must learn from the Pentecostals about the kinds of worship music that attracts the young and kinds of homiletics that excite them.”

Asked if the traditional form of the liturgy was discussed, Archbishop Fisher told reporters Friday that it was as young people’s tastes are “very diverse, also within cultures” and that even if some are wanting “Pentecostal, loud and very catchy tunes, there are others that love Gregorian chant and all between and all other aspects of liturgy.”

But he said what is held in common is a “real appreciation that beauty matters” and it is not just about argumentation and giving reasons for the faith, although that is very important.

He said young people also want good, well prepared homilies, and “likewise they don’t want bad music that makes them feel uninspired” or people who are “unwelcoming to them.”

Archbishop Fisher told reporters he had “great hope” for young people in this synod as people are “not just talking about challenges but what’s working” and “suggesting ideas of what we could do that was new, and a better version of what we’ve been doing.”

He also said he had been observing Pope Francis “with great affection and reverence,” saying he welcomes each person every day, listens to all the presentations, and is “clearly very engaged.” It is a “wonderful thing for us to know and see,” he said.

***

Here below are the moderators for the language working groups which are meeting at various times during the synod and will be discussing themes raised in the general congregations.

For French-speaking bishops:
CIRCULUS GALLICUS “A”: S.E. Mons. MACAIRE, O.P., David
CIRCULUS GALLICUS “B”: S.E. Mons. LACOMBE Bertrand
CIRCULUS GALLICUS “C”: Em.mo Card. NZAPALAINGA, C.S.Sp., Dieudonné
For English-speaking bishops:
CIRCULUS ANGLICUS “A”: Em.mo Card. GRACIAS Oswald
CIRCULUS ANGLICUS “B”: Em.mo Card. CUPICH Blase Joseph
CIRCULUS ANGLICUS “C”: Em.mo Card. COUTTS Joseph
CIRCULUS ANGLICUS “D”: Em.mo Card. DiNARDO Daniel N.
For Italian-speaking bishops:
CIRCULUS ITALICUS “A”: Em.mo Card. DE DONATIS Angelo
CIRCULUS ITALICUS “B”: Em.mo Card. FILONI Fernando
CIRCULUS ITALICUS “C”: Em.mo Card. RAVASI Gianfranco
For Spanish-speaking bishops:
CIRCULUS HIBERICUS “A”: Em.mo Card. RODRÍGUEZ MARADIAGA, S.D.B., Oscar Andrés
CIRCULUS HIBERICUS “B”: Em.mo Card. LADARIA FERRER, S.I., Luis Francisco
For German-speaking bishops:
CIRCULUS GERMANICUS: S.E. Mons. GENN Felix
For Portuguese-speaking bishops:
CIRCULUS LUSITANUS: Em.mo Card. DE AVIZ João Braz

The pope and his accusers
Can Francis change the church while stonewalling on sex abuse?

Oct. 6, 2018

Let me ask you to do the impossible, tear your mind away from the Kavanaugh affair for a moment, and cast your eyes from the new Rome to the old one — from the American Empire’s judicial wars to the similar mix of scandal, polarization, and intrigue in the Roman Catholic Church.

The pontificate of Francis and the presidency of Donald Trump have been odd mirrors of one another for a while — populist leaders, institutional crises, norm violations, #metoo scandals, leaks and whistle-blowers and cries of “fake news” and more. And as the Trump era has moved toward its Kavanaugh crescendo, the Catholic drama has also escalated, with the church’s doctrinal conflict and its sex abuse scandal converging in a single destabilizing crisis.

This month the crux of the drama is the Synod on Young People, a meeting of bishops in Rome that like prior synods in the Francis era is a chance for the pope to prod some alteration of church teaching on sexuality through a process stage-managed to give the appearance of consensus.

No such consensus was evident in the prior two synods, in which the contested issue was divorce and remarriage, but the pope forged ahead with an ambiguous revision of church teaching, currently half-digested around the Catholic world. This time, thanks to his appointments there are fewer bishops in opposition, and the synod’s endgame is probably some ambiguously liberalizing statement on homosexuality, contraception or both.

The promise of such change would normally guarantee the pontiff a wave of favorable media coverage. But glowing profiles of Francis are no longer easy to write, because the pope is now besieged by sexual scandal and his initial response was in a style familiar from Trump-era American politics — a mix of stonewalling, scapegoating and literal demonization.

The most notable of his accusers, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, charged the pope and many prominent cardinals with having knowledge of the crimes of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and allowing him to maintain honor and influence nonetheless. Viganò’s allegations were flavored with conservative theological grievances, but their broad outline has held up under scrutiny, and the Vatican has finally been forced to promise, as of this weekend, a "thorough study of the entire documentation present in the Archives of the Dicasteries and Offices of the Holy See regarding the former Cardinal McCarrick."

Whether this is a real investigation or a P.R. move remains to be seen, but it's a welcome change from the initial response, which consisted of sermons from Francis in which the pope likened himself to a silent, blameless Christ and claimed that the Great Accuser, the Devil, was at work in allegations against bishops.

If so, Lucifer seems to have a lot to work with, including a newfound scrutiny of the pope’s tenure in Argentina, where victims are accusing him of chilly indifference to clerical sex abuse. The story is getting particular attention in Germany, home of many of Francis’s allies in the hierarchy; the newsmagazine Der Spiegel has a cover package that casts a cold eye on the pope, with harsh quotes from Argentines suggesting that “he protected for years rapists and abusers.” [To which, remarkably, there has not been a peep of any reaction whatsoever from the Vatican, nor the usual arrogant loudmouth Bergoglio surrogates. COMPLETE SILENCE on the Spiegel dossier.Their denial of reality seems to hinge on the principle, "If you ignore it, it does not exist'.]

To Francis’s allies much of the scandal is dismissed as a plot by his enemies, an attempted coup by frustrated conservatives. [This is absurd. There is no evidence cited by anyone at all that Vigano did what he did in collusion with or at the urging of other 'conservatives', though he did have the good sense to have two respected Italian Vaticanistas of long-standing (both admittedly outspoken critics of Bergoglio's anti-Catholicism) vet his Testimony to make sure it passed journalistic muster.]

But if so it’s the most ineffectual coup imaginable, with no actual plan for changing the direction of his pontificate. Michael Brendan Dougherty of National Review likened Viganò’s bombshell to the failed putsch by Turkish officers against Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which led nowhere because none of the higher-ups could execute a plan. [But Viganò espoused no plan at all, except to call on the pope to resign - which is wishful thinking that not a few Catholics share, but it remains just that. Because realistically, the only way to get rid of Bergoglio is if he resigns, which he won't, or if he dies, which is in God's hands. That is why all the 'action' so far on the part of Catholics increasingly concerned about how this pope is deliberately trampling on the Deposit of Faith has consisted in online appeals that assume his 'good faith' in both the literal and symbolic sense - neither of which he obviously possesses. Five years and going on seven months now, it is clear that only a handful of cardinals and slightly more bishops are even brave enough to speak out against some of Bergoglio's most egregiously objectionable actions and statements. So the laity can obviously expect nothing from them. So, for Dougherty and people like him who ought to know better, it is really absurd to even think that Vigano's letter was intended to launch a putsch of any kind! It was a very public alarm, that's all - like tolling church bells to warn people of a major imminent danger - and it has worked and is working as such.]

So it is among the church’s conservative cardinals: To talk with anti-Francis churchmen is to encounter not Machiavellian plots but despair and bafflement and impotence.

Which the pope senses, seemingly, because his response to the scandals has been to refuse obvious adaptations — there have been no further resignations in his corruption-tainted inner circle, no Roman investigation of the American church despite the specific request for one from the American bishops — while plunging ahead boldly on other fronts.

So far the current sex abuse agony has been punctuated by - a papal revision of church teaching on the death penalty
- a dramatic, high-risk deal with the Communist government in Beijing.
This month’s synod may provide further doctrinal punctuation.
No scandal is big enough, apparently, to derail the pope’s ambitions to leave the church permanently changed.

But this approach guarantees that the scandals will keep coming. As the bishops met in Rome, there was a story stateside about a group of American donors funding investigations into sexual and financial improprieties among the College of Cardinals, trying to expose the other red-hatted McCarricks before the next papal conclave rolls around.

This effort was quickly attacked as a right-wing witch-hunt, animated by an un-Catholic sense of the church as a contested political space. Which is a fair critique — except that the pope himself is the one driving the church to that point, by treating traditional piety as a roadblock to his efforts, by demonizing whistle-blowers in an age of awful scandal, and generally behaving less like a pastor than an ideologue in white.

The truth is that Francis can pre-empt the right-wing partisans with a Roman housecleaning, an American investigation, an accounting for both his own record and his predecessors’ failures. Perhaps all this will happen. The alternative, silence and stonewalling, promises a church permanently in flames. [Which is what Bergoglio wants and has been espousing openly - Hagan lio! even if it means internal arson and he has been the hand that both ignites the flames and gleefully feeds them.!]

Two new statements from the Vatican
'addressing' the Vigano testimony
Neither seems to take into account the gravity
and magnitude of the Church's trust deficit
by Robert Royal

October 8, 2018

Two statements came out from the Vatican over the weekend, basically during the pause in the Synod for the Sunday observances. Both dealt with the McCarrick case, and were partly a reaction to the constant presence of that case and – indirectly – other abuse cases in synodal conversations about the Church and young people.

That’s become a necessity because, as Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher put it last week, many people were harmed and lost trust when they were young; and “The Church has to be the safest possible place for a person.”

The two new documents, however, still leave room for doubt [What an understatement!] whether Rome understands what it would take for many people to trust that the Church will take the steps needed to make that really happen. (In addition, Cardinal DiNardo and Archbishop Gomez, president and vice-president of the U.S. Bishops’ Conference meet with the pope today. The new documents also seem timed to put that meeting into a certain context.)

The first text came Saturday as a brief, official Communication from the Holy See, saying that Pope Francis was aware of the confusion among the faithful since the revelations about McCarrick and wanted them to know about several phases in the investigation. As mounting evidence arrived from the Archdiocese of New York, the Holy Father accepted McCarrick’s resignation from the College of Cardinals, “prohibiting him by order from exercising public ministry, and obliging him to lead a life of prayer and penance.” This most Catholics already knew.

It continued: “the Holy Father has decided that information gathered during the preliminary investigation be combined with a further thorough study of the entire documentation present in the Archives of the Dicasteries and Offices of the Holy See regarding the former Cardinal McCarrick, in order to ascertain all the relevant facts, to place them in their historical context and to evaluate them objectively.” The pope admitted that this investigation may discover that decisions were made in the past in ways that we would not choose today, but that “We will follow the path of truth wherever it may lead.”

This is all basically as it should be – except for one thing. Has the pope only now decided that the “entire documentation” in the files needs to be studied along with recent accusations? [Obviously yes. Under tremendous pressure from the fact that this issue was hardly to be resolved by simply accepting McCarrick's resignation of his cardinalate, and that it - and the general crisis over this pope's handling of the clerical/episcopal sex abuse mess - aren't going away for now, no matter what distractions the Vatican contrives to strew in the way.]

We know that the Vatican is maddeningly slow in such matters. But McCarrick resigned in late July. We are now well into October. Does it take that long for a modern pope to decide – or announce the decision – that the files will actually be examined? And we are still five months away from the February meeting of presidents of national bishops conferences, which Pope Francis has called to address the abuse crisis globally. There seems to be, to put it mildly, no sense of urgency in the Vatican about this case and others. [ABSOLUTELY NONE AT ALL. Don't forget the pope's 4-page 'Letter to the People of God' which was his belated response to the release of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report, about which the Vatican said it was an exhaustive response to the sex-abuse issue and not to expect any further response from the pope! Not too many observers took issue with the cavalier dismissal by the Bergoglio Vatican of the scandals uncovered because 'they all took place before 2002, since when things have improved significantly'. No, they did not. Unless you consider McCarrick's 'rehabilitation' under Bergoglio and his status as his confidante on US matters and as emissary to diplomatic flashpoints like Cuba and China, a 'significant improvement' - and his case was just the most egregious of all the Bergoglian lapses in observing his much-hyped 'zero tolerance' for clerical/episcopal offenses having to do with sex crimes.

This is not mere nitpicking. We live in the age of instant communication. For a long time, it’s looked as if Rome was not going to do very much more than it usually has – which, to the eye, seems woefully inadequate – even after the August bombshell Testimony of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. That Testimony claimed that the pope has known about McCarrick since early after his election in 2013. Therefore, “In this extremely dramatic moment for the universal Church. . . .Pope Francis must be the first to set a good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up [Cardinal Theodore] McCarrick’s abuses and resign along with the rest of them.”

Which brings us to the second document, released yesterday, by Cardinal Marc Ouellet, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops. Ouellet published a letter addressed to Viganò; it looks as if the pope himself will not reply.

Calling Viganò’s charges “incomprehensible and extremely reprehensible,” Ouellet bluntly said, “I tell you frankly that to accuse Pope Francis of having covered-up knowingly the case of an alleged sexual predator and, therefore, of being an accomplice of the corruption that is spreading in the Church, to the point of considering him unworthy of continuing his reform as the first pastor of the Church, is incredible and unlikely from all points of view.”

Ouellet has himself been accused by Viganò of knowing and not really saying anything about McCarrick. So his claims cannot be entirely unbiased. And he seems to weaken his own defense by admitting that he knew of Pope Benedict’s restrictions on McCarrick, but that these were not formal “sanctions” that Pope Francis then lifted, as Viganò has characterized them.

That has been a serious bone of contention from the very beginning and some – the present writer included – have wondered about the status of those restrictions and any relaxing of them that may have occurred. Pope Emeritus Benedict himself has publicly said that he does not remember their exact nature. [No, he has not, much less publicly! How can Mr Royal perpetrate an error originally reported in Edward Pentin's reportage on the first Vigano testimony, improbably attributing the statement to one Tim Busch, a conservative fatcat from California? Who has subsequently denied he said it. Which stands to reason because 1) How could he have obtained any statement from Benedict XVI, to begin with, and 2) simultaneous with the Vigano Testimony??? Who in the world can have direct access to Benedict XVI's cellphone? And obviously, Busch has no direct access to Mons. Gaenswein either, or we would have heard it. I think Mr Pentin should lay that canard to rest properly.]

Nevertheless, all this does confirm that Viganò is entirely correct about at least one large point: many people, including the pope, knew that McCarrick’s misbehavior was grave enough that he was strongly told to stay in retirement in Washington and not to appear in public. He disregarded those restrictions, of course; even more blatantly – as many observers remarked – after Jorge Bergoglio’s election.

Ouellet says there are no documents in the files of the Congregation for Bishops formally sanctioning McCarrick because they did not then have as much evidence as they have now. But this in itself speaks of a serious breakdown: did no one care enough about past and potential future victims that they didn’t take the initiative to look further? [As I said in my fisking of Ouellet's letter, his congregation could have started with the three New Jersey settlements with victims as the most concrete and immediately available evidence of wrongdoing by McCarrick. But obviously, the congregation didn't even bother looking into the allegations they did have knowledge of. Why not? Because McCarrick was not only a cardinal but also one of Bergoglio's privileged pets?]

Even Ouellet, in the heat of his rebuke of Viganò, says he is surprised how McCarrick was able to become cardinal-archbishop of an important city like Washington given what was already in his file. And, he says, that’s worthy of investigation.

But here, too, the loss of trust in the system raises some doubts. We know that McCarrick was not high on the list of candidates to become archbishop of Washington. Is there nothing in the McCarrick file at the Congregation for Bishops about how he leapt over a dozen better candidates? Viganò suggests that two homosexual advisers have been bypassing the usual process for bishops’ appointments in recent years.

Certainly, if decades ago, McCarrick had similarly powerful patrons in the Vatican, there must be some record of when and where they intervened. And how doubts were circumvented. You can’t help but feel that Ouellet has given an incomplete account of the files and what they suggest. [The 'incomplete' is deliberate, because it is part of the Bergoglian strategy of obfuscation to get out of a jam Omit mentioning anything that might have negative implications - because we will simply shred any such document out of existence, and who is to know it unless beforehand you hint at its existence in any way!]And that only a more open and independent review of the whole matter will resolve various questions and – let’s hope – restore trust.

The Holy See is suffering under a severe trust deficit at the moment, partly deserved, partly not. [Partly deserved or not, the trust deficit is there and growing by the minute as fast as the US national debt.] But it exists and must be dealt with, lest it become even worse.

We’ve just seen sharp criticism of the Vatican-China agreement by many observers – so sharp that Cardinal Zen has called on Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State (and the person responsible for the details of the agreement), to resign for his betrayal of the underground Church in China.

So in a short period, an archbishop (Viganò) has called on a pope (Francis) to resign, and a cardinal (Zen) has called on another cardinal (Parolin) to resign. There’s been nothing like this in modern times. Is it any wonder young people are often confused and uncertain whether the Church is worthy of their trust?


Cardinal Ouellet’s letter to Viganó
makes two important admissions –
and a puzzling claim
by Joseph Shaw


October 8, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Those observing the developing controversy which has followed Archbishop Viganó’s extraordinary denunciation of Pope Francis had their patience rewarded by an official response from a leading Cardinal, the Canadian Marc Ouellet.

As Prefect of the Congregation of Bishops since 2010, he is uniquely qualified to confirm or deny what is perhaps the central factual claim of Viganó’s testimony. This is that in 2009 or 2010 (I quote from Viganó’s testimony):

---

Pope Benedict had imposed on Cardinal McCarrick sanctions similar to those now imposed on him by Pope Francis: the Cardinal was to leave the seminary where he was living, he was forbidden to celebrate [Mass] in public, to participate in public meetings, to give lectures, to travel, with the obligation of dedicating himself to a life of prayer and penance.

---

(McCarrick had retired at the usual age from the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. in 2007. On June 20, 2018, he was stripped of the title of Cardinal in light of allegations that he had sexually abused a minor. He retains the rank of Archbishop.)

This claim is explosive because following the election of Pope Francis, McCarrick was, as one journalist approvingly expressed, “back in the mix and busier than ever,” having been “more or less put out to pasture” by Pope Benedict.

Archbishop Viganó made a special point in his testimony of pointing to Cardinal Ouellet, among others, as able to corroborate his claims. In a second public letter, he addressed Cardinal Ouellet directly:

---

Your Eminence, before I left for Washington, you were the one who told me of Pope Benedict’s sanctions on McCarrick. You have at your complete disposal key documents incriminating McCarrick and many in the curia for their cover-ups. Your Eminence, I urge you to bear witness to the truth.

---

So what has Cardinal Ouellet said in response? The key passage on this question of substance, in a long letter, is as follows:

---

The former Cardinal, retired in May of 2006, had been requested not to travel or to make public appearances, in order to avoid new rumors about him. It is false, therefore, to present those measures as “sanctions” formally imposed by Pope Benedict XVI and then invalidated by Pope Francis.

After a review of the archives, I find that there are no documents signed by either Pope in this regard, and there are no audience notes from my predecessor, Cardinal Giovanni-Battista Re, imposing on the retired Archbishop the obligation to lead a quiet and private life with the weight normally reserved to canonical penalties.

The reason is that back then, unlike today, there was not sufficient proof of his alleged culpability. Thus, the Congregation’s decision was inspired by prudence, and the letters from my predecessor and my own letters urged him, first through the Apostolic Nuncio Pietro Sambi and then through you, to lead a life of prayer and penance, for his own good and for the good of the Church.

---

In the first sentence Cardinal Ouellet makes two admissions:
- first, that the Holy See was well aware of “rumors” about McCarrick, before Viganó’s appointment as Nuncio in 2011;
- secondly, that McCarrick was indeed under orders not to travel or make public appearances.

The rest of the quoted passage, and indeed the rest of Cardinal Ouellet’s letter, reads like an attempt to play down the significance of these admissions.
- Ouellet denies the existence of any paper trail linking the sanctions on McCarrick to Pope Benedict personally, and
- he points out that the sanctions, if we may call them that, did not arise from a canonical trial. However, since it was clear from Viganó’s original letter that the sanctions were not publicly known, neither point is surprising.

As the canon lawyer and Catholic News Agency editor Edward Condon remarked on this passage: “Sounds like a precept to me.” The point is that McCarrick was clearly placed under an obligation to observe these conditions, which were imposed by his canonical superiors, and delivered to him in person by the Pope’s official representative in America, and, on one Nuncio’s retirement, emphatically reiterated by his successor.

The significance of Viganó’s claim was never in the precise canonical category of McCarrick’s “life of prayer and penance,” but in the fact that there was something which Pope Francis later de facto lifted or rendered irrelevant.

Did Pope Francis know about the accusations against McCarrick?
- We might similarly ask whether Pope Francis was ignorant of the accusations of cover-up made against the Belgian Cardinal Godfried Daneels when he personally invited Daneels to participate in the Synod on the Family.
- In both cases, if by some chance Pope Francis did not know, it is hard to accept that no member of his staff, seeing such an innocent mistake, would not have felt obliged to inform him.
- On the other hand, Pope Francis was clearly aware of the accusations against the abuser Fr. Mauro Inzoli, when he lifted sanctions against him, and of the accusations of cover-up against Bishop Juan Barros when he appointed him to a Chilean diocese against the wishes of his fellow bishops.

The fact is that Pope Francis clearly felt a certain freedom in brushing aside such accusations, which in the Barros case he memorably attributed to “leftists.” He has since apologized for his handling of that case, and may perhaps feel a similar contrition for his handling of others like it.

Another aspect of the defense of Pope Francis over McCarrick undermined by Cardinal Ouellet’s letter is the question of the Pope’s “silence.” When confronted by the news of Viganó’s testimony, Pope Francis said that he would “not say one word” about the matter. In a series of sermons, he later seems to make this silence into a virtue, even comparing it with the silence of Christ before His accusers.

From a public relations perspective silence is an appropriate response to accusations so absurd that their credibility would be enhanced, rather than reduced, by taking them seriously. However, the decision has clearly now been made that the policy of silence [feigning for more than a month to ignore the substance of Vigano's claims] is not working.

Viganó’s accusations cannot be ignored; instead, a senior cardinal has stepped forward to address them: the very cardinal, in fact, whom Viganó most wanted to hear from. This is an acknowledgement, however reluctant, that the accusations are worthy of response.

Finally, Cardinal Ouellet criticizes not only Viganó’s detailed claims, but his action of making them. Addressing Viganó directly, he exclaims: "I wish that I could help you return to communion with him who is the visible guarantor of communion in the Catholic Church."

This is a very puzzling statement. The Pope is indeed “the visible guarantor of communion in the Catholic Church,” but it does not break communion with a pope to criticize him, even harshly, or even unjustly.
- It is a profoundly worrying sign that a senior Cardinal should confuse the bond of communion with the Pope, which derives from baptism, with support for a particular Pope based on his personal qualities.

As far as is publicly known, or implied by Cardinal Ouellet’s letter, Archbishop Viganó has not disobeyed any command of his superiors; nor is he under any canonical penalty or (to use Cardinal Ouellet’s distinction) informal restriction.

Contrary to Cardinal Ouellet, those most loyal to the Pope at this moment of crisis are those who, if necessary in defiance of considerations of career and reputation, speak and hold fast to the truth, to make possible the cleansing of the Church from the “filth” which Pope Benedict warned besmirches it.

Nothing exciting or really new in the news and commentary I have seen today, October 10, which are mostly variations on the same theme of THE PRESENT CRISIS. But Sandro Magister did have something strange to report - yet another weirdness in the living gallery and tableau vivant of weirdnesses that is the Bergoglio Vatican...

A new team, or rather two,
at the Vatican, on 'Life and Family'

October 9, 2018

While the attention of the media was distracted by the work of the synod and by the statement from the Holy See on the McCarrick case, on Saturday, October 6, Pope Francis appointed the new members and advisers of the newly created Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life under Cardinal Kevin Farrell [McCarrick's roomie for six years in Washington DC].

Reading their names holds not a few surprises in store.
In the first place, among the members of the dicastery there is a glaring failure to name the president of the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAV, from its Latin name), Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, and the chancellor of the same. Monsignor Renzo Pegoraro. These absences appear all the more strident taking into consideration the close connections between the academy and this dicastery, which is evident in the updated statutes of both.
- Is this the sign of a decline of the pope's partiality towards Paglia?
- Or of a growing irritation in the Secretariat of State over his uncontrollable activism and his statements that are often embarrassing for the Holy See?
- Or of a friction between Paglia and Cardinal Farrell, prefect of the dicastery, who appear to have very distant and contrasting visions on sexuality, family, and bioethics? [They do??? I had the impression both of them were LGBTQists - Paglia perhaps more than Farrell.]

The second and third reasons appear to be the most plausible. Of course, the absence of Paglia is even more striking if one thinks of the important role played by the past president of the Pontifical
Academy for Life, Elio Sgreccia, today a cardinal, in the Pontifical Council for the Family, which was the precursor to the current dicastery - for several years he was also its secretary - and with the even more important role played by Paglia himself in the same pontifical council, of which he was president until its breakup.

A considerable influence in this absence of officials of the PAV life among the members and advisers of the dicastery must have been Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, whose strategy, over this past year, has been that of seeking to gloss over the increasingly evident contrasts between Cardinal Farrell and his coworkers - in particular his undersecretary, Gabrielle Gambino, on the one hand, and on the other Paglia and his own underlings, particularly the Jesuit Carlo Casalone, former head of the San Fedele cultural center in Milan - in the recent past a hotbed of disconcerting bioethical innovations.

Casalone has been working in tandem with moral theologian Maurizio Chiodi of the Theological Faculty of Northern Italy - now working in Rome in the “inner circle” of Pope Francis, alongside his confrere Antonio Spadaro, and omnipresent at the PAV.

To control the blaze, like a good fireman. Parolin has tried to separate fire and “paglia” [straw]. “Divide et impera.” And perhaps he has done just that with this selection of the members and advisers of the dicastery.

Now, however, there will be not one but two “authorities” on bioethics and the family within the Holy See: on one side, the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, and on the other, the PAV and the [Bergoglianized[ John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences at the Lateran University, which is
also by Paglia, with nominal president PierAngelo Sequeri in a manifestly subordinate position.
- Will this twofold channel of Vatican bioethics work, moreover with a pope not personally versed in the subject, unlike his two predecessors?
- Or will it instead create confusion among the bishops who on their ad limina visits will make the rounds of the dicasteries and of the other Vatican institutions in search of guidelines and clarifications on the delicate questions of life, sexuality, procreation, family, biomedical research, euthanasia, that arise in their countries?
- To which will they pay heed if they hear two different bells?

In the second place, a carefful reading of the names of the members and advisers appointed by Pope Francis reveals that they include members of the PAV currently in office, meaning that they were reconfirmed after the statutes were updated, like Manfred Lütz, a personal friend of Joseph Ratzinger, Laura Palazzani, and Monsignor Jacques Suaudeau, who was for several years assistant for studies at the academy with Sgreccia, both of them former members who were 'sensationally' excluded after the updating of the statutes, along with the American Thomas W. Hilgers, founder and director of the Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction and one of the leading experts on natural family planning, a courageous and combative defender of “Humanae Vitae”. All three have known "conservative” positions on Catholic bioethics based on the magisterium of the popes and of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith.

Does this means that, unlike the PAV, Farrell's discastery will aim to position itself on the “traditional” side of Catholic bioethics, leaving it to Paglia to be “open” on controversial issues or to cultivate new issues like robotics, ecology, artificial intelligence?

Or in other words: Will there be two strands of anthropology and of the ethics of life, of sexuality and of the family that will develop in parallel or even in conflict with each other, in the bosom of the Holy See? [That's Bergoglio and his minions for you! Confusion is their master strategy - why be clear and unequivocal about anything at all, when being ambiguous and ambivalent will maybe 'please' or placate everyone who, as with AL, will choose to interpret Bergoglio's 'confusion-ism' the way they want to?]

On the “enduring of evil”
By James V. Schall, S.J.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2018

In his treatise “On Pastors,” Augustine wrote: “’You have failed to strengthen the weak,’ says the Lord. He is speaking of wicked shepherds, false shepherds who seek their own concerns and not those of Christ.”

The turmoil about deviant pastors and bishops is not wholly a new one. Christ, in a famous passage, stated that the Scribes and Pharisees sat on the Chair of Moses. Follow what they say, not what they do. The weak need the strength of the strong. But the strong can choose themselves over others.

The corruption of the shepherds affects more than themselves. Their corruption essentially consists in their establishing their own rules, not in following the example laid down by Christ for that office.

God is often blamed for permitting evil in the world. This tolerance, it is claimed, proves that He is not God, or even that He causes evil by not preventing it. Augustine is famous for stating that God could permit evil in a good world if, and only if, by allowing it, a greater good could follow. Evil can thus be the occasion of an unexpected good coming about.

We would not know what mercy is, for instance, if we had nothing to forgive or be merciful about. We are not, however, to do evil in order that good can happen. But if we do evil, the Lord can bring something good from our actions, from the good that remains in us in spite of our sins.

“There are men who want to lead a good life and have already decided to do so,” Augustine continued, “but are not capable of bearing sufferings, even though they are ready to do good. Now it is part of the Christian’s strength not only to do good works, but also to endure evil.”

Some of this understanding of evil was already in Plato. His fundamental principles were these:
1) It is “never right to do wrong.”
2) “Death is not the worst of evils.”
3) “Nothing evil could harm a good man.”
4) “It is better to suffer evil than to do it.”

Initially, these principles seem counter-productive.
- Why not return evil for evil?
- Why is the man who does both evil and good not better than the one who restricts himself to the good?
- To do what is evil means to place ourselves first. We are not to lay down our lives for our friends. We are not to lay them down at all if we can help it. We are to trust both our sword and our primacy.

In 1977, Joseph Ratzinger wrote that modern thought wants to “redeem suffering by removing it: not redemption through suffering, but redemption from suffering.” Man does not expect “divine assistance but the humanization of man by man.” (Co-Heirs of the Truth, 123):
Man takes the place of God. He will remove suffering by his own means. The ways of God through endurance and suffering are rejected. We are left with what we can make of ourselves in this world. Having set out in a noble cause, as is often the case, we make things worse by following our own rules.

Charlie Brown and Lucy are walking home after school. He asks her: “Did the little boy who sits in front of you cry again today?” Lucy turns to Charlie to explain: “He cries every day! All the simple childhood fears. . . .Fear of being late for school, fear of his teacher, and fear of the principal.”

In the third panel, she goes on: “Fear of not knowing what room to go to after recess, fear of forgetting his lunch, fear of bigger kids, fear of being asked to recite. . .” Finally, Lucy, undaunted, continues: “Fear of missing the school bus. Fear of not knowing when to get off the school bus. . . .Fear. . .”

To all of this, Charlie, obviously dazed by it all, simply says: “Good Grief!!” (You’re the Greatest, Charlie Brown, 1964).

As the weepy little boy in front of Lucy at school had to learn, we have to endure many evils to survive in this world. Some of them are pretty messy. We wonder what the world might be like if noting evil or even inconvenient were in it.

The Lord gave us an imperfect world to see what we would do within it. Our record is our history. We are supposed to make an already good world more livable. But we can, and often do, make it a hell on earth. We have to endure the sins of others. They have to endure ours.

Some hate God for putting us in this situation of having to choose the good and endure what is evil. Others realize that this fallen world is the only one in which we ourselves could exist. Charlie was right – even our “grief” can be “good” if we endure it.

This is a rare, probably historic, reaction from a student at the Jesuits' Fordham University in New York, which has been a reliable bastion of progressivism. (I say rare because the default position of all American college students for the past several decades since the Vietnam War has been a relentless but mostly uninformed and totally biased ultra-liberalism.) Here, the student expresses herself openly and forthrightly about THE PRESENT CRISIS, specifically supporting Mons. Vigano in his quest for answers to evidently dubious events and circumstances within the Church hierarchy. Obviously she's not the kind of 'young people' selected by the dioceses and the Vatican for the pre-synodal assembly, whom, nonetheless, Synod administrator Cardinal Baldisseri falsely blamed for incorporating the term LGBT in their pre-synodal summary, from which he claims provenance for using the term in the much-criticized working document of the 'youth synpd'..

A Fordham University student
expresses support for Mons. Viganò
by Olivia Ingrassia
Fordham University student

October 10, 2018


This past August, former papal nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò released a revelatory letter that detailed how Pope Francis was well aware of ex-Cardinal McCarrick’s heinous clerical abuse. This scathing letter divulged that Pope Francis not only lifted sanctions placed on the sexual predator by Pope Benedict XVI, but also covered for him, even making McCarrick his “trusted counsellor.”

While many have discredited the 11-page epistle merely as a far-right tactic to oppose the Jesuit Pope, this report is undoubtedly concerning, especially since the Vatican has remained silent and neither denied nor addressed these claims. This has left many demanding further responses from the pontiff, who has instead deferred to “silence and prayer” during these most tumultuous times.

However, despite the potential danger, many prelates have courageously defended Viganò’s claims. For example, Cardinal Raymond Burke said that, “the declarations made by a prelate of the authority of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò must be totally taken to heart by those responsible in the Church.” Burke continued, speaking to the validity of calls for the Pope’s resignation if these allegations are proven true.

Similarly, Monsignor Jean-Francois Lantheaume and also spoke on the veracity of these claims and questioned Francis’s taciturnity in the wake of these searing allegations, equating his silence to cover-up.

In addition, Viganò recently broke his silence and doubled down on his original letter, stating that his testimony was published “during a crescendo of continual news of terrible events, with thousands of innocent victims destroyed and the vocations and lives of young priests and religious disturbed," and asserts before God that it is true. Viganò, who has reportedly activated the death switch, [???] pointed to the fact that neither the Pope nor any Cardinal in Rome denied his testimony, and accused Pope Francis of slander and hypocrisy.

Others, like Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, rejected the letter and came to the defense of the Holy Father. In an interview in September, Cupich egregiously suggested that the Church should not go down a “rabbit hole” on the issue of sexual harassment, and ought to instead focus on ostensibly more important issues such as the “environment” and “protecting migrants”.

The disgraced Cardinal, a known advocate for the heterodox pro-LGBT agenda, is currently in the midst of a crisis of his own, as he recently removed a priest from his archdiocese who burned a 'pride' flag (let us not forget that Pride is the deadliest sin).

This priest, Father Kalchik, was the victim of clerical abuse when he was a teenager, and has since been forced into hiding “out of fear that Cardinal Cupich would take him away by force,” which is what he told the independent Catholic news agency Church Militant in a recent interview.

Cupich echoed the Pope’s sentiments that this crisis has little to do with homosexuality and is instead the product of “clericalism,” and was also named in Viganò’s letter as one who is directly involved in the despicable cover-up of the Catholic Church’s homosexual corruption.

(I’d be neglectful if I failed to mention that while Abp. Viganò and Father Kalchik are living in a state of fear over the wrath of the Vatican for bringing to light possible heresy within the hierarchy of the Church, disgraced ex-Cardinal McCarrick was sentenced to a rather peaceful life of prayer and penance in a Kansas friary, not too distant from an elementary school.)

Similarly, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the Archbishop of Washington DC, has repeatedly denied that he had any knowledge of the years of sexual misconduct complaints involving McCarrick, his predecessor. However, new revelations from the Washington Post have emerged that may dispute his claim, as Wuerl was among those named in a 2005 abuse settlement agreement that included allegations of McCarrick’s harassment.

Father Patrick Ciolek was one of the many seminarians abused by McCarrick and stated that it is “inconceivable” that the diocese would have failed to notify Wuerl, who at the time was the Bishop of Pittsburgh, where Ciolek was located.

In his original letter, Viganò challenged Wuerl’s [alleged] ignorance, and said that as McCarrick’s successor, he would have been “the first to have been informed” of the harassment. Now, calls for Wuerl’s resignation are stronger than ever, as the cardinal, swamped in controversy, has been to the Vatican since the allegations surfaced.

Likewise, other prelates in the United States were also mentioned by Viganò, including Cardinal O’Malley of Boston and Cardinal Tobin of Newark, which is the impetus behind many calls by theologians and lay leaders alike for the U.S. bishops to follow their Chilean brethren and resign en masse.

It is necessary for the Church to purge its clergy here in the United States, and as one letter stated, "Only then might the wrenching work of healing begin.” For the Catholic Church to rise from the ashes of its worst scandal in modern times, a mass resignation must occur immediately. And only then should Pope Francis follow suit.

The Pope’s approval rating is plummeting, and the longer he remains silent, the more the world continues to wonder and is driven to believe the validity of the brave testimony by Viganò. Yes, this would be unprecedented, but so are these accusations, and the only true way for us to feel at peace with the leadership of the Holy See is if everyone involved in these crimes are exorcized.

Moving forward, the crux of the aforementioned issue is clear, and all involved directly or in the cover up need to be purged at once. Namely, the powerful homosexual subculture within the Church must be drained, and as affirmed by Father Dominic Legge, “the main, persistent problem is with homosexually active priests.”

Dr. Alice von Hildebrand--the wife of former Fordham professor Dietrich von Hildebrand--who has close ties with Fordham University herself where she was both a student and a professor, told Church Militant in a 2016 interview, “Stalin, soon after he came to power, ordered his cronies to invade Catholic seminaries ... with young men that had neither faith nor morals. Now ... the ideal cases: homosexuals.”

Bella Dodd, an agent with the American Communist Party from 1927-1949, who was a close friend of the von Hildebrands after she converted to Catholicism under the direction of Archbishop Fulton Sheen, recounted how she recruited some 1,200 young men to infiltrate the Church under Stalin’s orders.

Others, such as Father David Marsden, have also noted this deeply concerning presence, calling the seminary a “cesspool of liberal theology and heterodoxy.”

In order to combat this issue, we must not be complicit.
- Laymen are encouraged to withhold any donations to the USCCB until the Bishops take responsibility for their misdoings, lest we continue to allow them to lead souls to Hell.
- In addition, at the USCCB’s annual meeting--which will be held from November 12-15 in Baltimore, Maryland--demonstrators will be organizing the Silence Stops Now campaign to demand the end of this deafening silence, the resignation of those involved in the cover up in any way, as well as an investigation and a prosecution of any criminal activity.

Finally, and most importantly, for my fellow students at a Jesuit institution, we must be knowledgeable of these grave accusations, and mustn’t simply dismiss these claims because we are led to believe they are false by those in positions of authority.

The von Hildebrands, who have spoken to the corruption, and many mentioned in the letter have close ties with Fordham University in particular, including McCarrick himself who was one of the most revered alumni of this institution. Further, Carlo Maria Viganò spoke in 2014 at an event promoting Catholic education, at which Fordham leadership was present.

Lastly, Father Martin, arguably the most outspoken ringleader of normalizing homosexuality within the Catholic Church, and who many believe is leading souls to Hell yet is a frequent guest at Jesuit student gatherings, is not carrying the torch of St. Ignatius, and instead, as Viganò said it best, “chooses to corrupt the youth [and] is nothing but a sad recent example of that deviated wing of the Society of Jesus.”

Pope Francis is not immune to sin merely because of the nature of his position, or because he is a Jesuit. There should be zero tolerance for substantiated evidence of this magnitude, and though He is the ultimate judge, Viganò is correct: “Pope Francis must be the first to set a good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarrick's abuses and resign along with all of them.”

In these trying times within the only Church that traces itself back to Jesus Christ, and the oldest institution in the history of the world, we must be vigilant, and not succumb to the hypocrisy of those in power.

We thank Viganò for his bravery in releasing these truths and pray for his safety and for the healing of the Only Holy and Apostolic Church. Still, we remain faithful and optimistic because, in the prescient words of Hilaire Belloc,

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"The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine — but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight."

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Vatican II and Bergoglio's 'youth synod'
By Eduardo J. Echeverria

October 10, 2018

In his recent opening speech at the Synod of Bishops on Young People, did Pope Francis, as many have claimed, actually re-capture John XXIII’s vision in his opening address to Vatican II? [Really? Thank God, I didn't have to read any of that patent and nauseating papolatry!]

Pope Francis states that “sophisticated theological argument” is unnecessary “to prove our duty to help the contemporary world to walk towards God’s kingdom.” What then is needed?

Chiefly needed, he says, is the freedom to speak the truth with charity. This need is exercised in the practice of dialogue in which we listen to each other [He certainly does not practice what he preaches. In fact, he openly violates what he preaches!]] before we present a mutually honest, transparent, and construct ive critique of each other’s views: “The first fruit of dialogue is that everyone is open to newness, to change their opinion thanks to what they have heard from others.”

He adds, “Let us feel free to welcome and understand others and therefore to change our convictions and positions: this is a sign of great human and spiritual maturity.” This “openness” is so important to Francis that he takes it to be a “sign of a Church that really listens, that allows herself to be questioned by the experiences of those she meets, and who does not always have a ready-made answer.”

Indeed, “The accumulation of human experiences throughout history is the most precious and trustworthy treasure that one generation inherits from another.” Let’s call this the “learning Church.”

At the heart of dialogue is discernment. What is discernment? This key concept in Pope Francis’s thought is not easy to grasp. He says it is “an interior attitude rooted in an act of faith.” Prior to becoming pope, Jorge Bergoglio wrote, “In a heart disposed by the active presence of the Holy Spirit, discernment is the capacity to recognize the work of God and the temptations of the Demon. Discernment is possible only by being open to the action of God.” [By his own definition, he fails to discern 'the temptations of the Demon' because they coincide so completely with his own desires and intentions!]

All this sounds very modern and spiritual, but missing is discernment’s grounding in the New Testament. For example,
- “And this I pray, that your love [in Christ] may abound still more and more in knowledge and all discernment, that you may approve the things that are excellent.” (Phil 1:10-11)
- Among the gifts of the Holy Spirit, one is given the gift of “prophecy, to another discernment of spirits” (1 Cor 12:10)
- “But solid food belongs to those who are of full age [spiritually mature], that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil” (Heb 5:14).
- “Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment” (John 7:24),
- “By all means use your judgment, and hold on to whatever is good. Steer clear of evil in any form.” (1 Thes 5:21-22).
- In the Old Testament, we read, “the discerning heart seeks knowledge.” (Proverbs 15:14)

Clearly, the drift of these passages suggests that the biblical sense of discernment or judgment means exercising a proper discrimination to understand where we are in the flow of the culture, with all its challenges and opportunities.

If “listening,” “openness to newness,” “experience,” and “change” are characteristic terms of Francis’s approach to discernment in his opening address at the current Synod, we find an utterly different approach in John XXIII’s opening address at Vatican II.

First, regarding Vatican II’s aims, John states, “The greatest concern of the Ecumenical Council is this, that the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine should be more effectively defended and presented.” [To which Bergoglio simply says,"Up yours! There is no deposit of faith other than what I say and do".]

A more effective defense and presentation of the Christian faith presupposes ressourcement. This, a key conciliar goal, means a return to the authoritative sources of the faith, Scripture, and Tradition, in order to revitalize the present. It is a creative retrieval of these sources in order to move forward faithfully.

A second key goal of Vatican II is aggiornamento, meaning – according to John XXIII – “looking at the present times which have introduced new conditions and new forms of life, and have opened new avenues for the Catholic apostolate.”

Francis’s description of discernment along with its characteristic terms of listening, openness, experience, change, etc., are features of aggiornamento. But in John this was not an isolated motive for renewal, which it seems to be in Francis’s opening synod address.

Francis urges us not to forget about divine revelation because it “enlightens and gives meaning to history and to our existence.” An orthodox Christian obviously could not think otherwise. Still, absent from Francis's address is any reference not only to the nature of divine revelation but also the central role of the Church’s teaching in her ongoing life.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church is helpful here:

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“There is an organic connection between our spiritual life and the dogmas. Dogmas are lights along the path of faith; they illuminate it and make it secure. Conversely, if our life is upright, our intellect and heart will be open to welcome the light shed by the dogmas of faith.” (§89)

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This is the “teaching Church,” which is completely absent in Francis’s address, but not in John XXIII.

Third, of course, ressourcement is not merely about repeating the teachings of the Church; otherwise, it would not need a “creative retrieval” in order to move faithfully forward. Rather, says Pope John:

---

What is needed is that this certain and unchangeable doctrine, to which loyal submission is due, be investigated and presented in the way demanded by our times [aggiornamento]. For the deposit of faith, the truths contained in our venerable doctrine, are one thing; the fashion in which they are expressed, but with the same meaning and the same judgment [eodem sensu eademque sententia], is another thing.

---

John’s call for ressourcement includes aggiornamento, but the latter is subordinate to the former. His approach doesn’t separate the “listening Church” from the “teaching Church.” It is pastoral in the sense that truth and mercy co-exist and mutually influence each other in the Catholic Faith’s response to the challenges and opportunities of the day.

It would help to incorporate John XXIII’s approach in the Synod’s reflections on Youth.

Why did the Vatican not ask Beijing to release
imprisoned clerics before signing its deal?


HONGKONG, October 5, 2018 (UCAN) -Liu Honggeng, a priest of the underground church in Baoding Diocese of Hebei province in northern China, is still missing after being taken away by authorities three years ago.

His family queries why the Vatican did not ask the Chinese government to release detained underground clerics before signing the Sino-Vatican provisional agreement.

Father Liu's father, 83, suffers from myocardial infarction and cerebral infarction, while his mother, 81, suffers from heart disease, high blood pressure and knee joint rheumatism. She needs to take drugs every day.

A source who wants to be unnamed told ucanews.com that Father Liu's parents hope to see their son in their lifetime. He said their request is not too excessive as they only request either a visit or a phone call.

His family still do not know what crime he committed AND question why they have no right to visit the priest.

On May 7, 2015, Father Liu, now 47, suddenly went missing after talking with a relative on the phone in Baoding. His family contacted police but they did not follow up and investigate.

Church members later found out the Father Liu was being detained in a remote place in Xieshang village in Qingyuan district. Some visited the priest, who said he had been told that he had been arrested by the national security of the Qingyuan district with no reason given.

In October, Father Liu's mother was due to visit her son but he was moved elsewhere and could not be contacted. Since then, his parents, relatives and friends have had no news of the priest.

Despite the recent China-Vatican deal that recognized eight illicit bishops, the source said there had not been a single word about detained underground clerics, making Father Liu's family less hopeful.

The source quoted the family as saying that the government has a guilty secret if it will not release those detained clerics, including underground Bishop James Su Zhimin of Baoding, who has been missing for more than 20 years.

Bishop Su, now 86, was arrested in 1997 for refusing to join the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA). He has since been seen only once, in 2003, when he attended a hospital in Baoding.

The source said that if Chinese authorities were sincere, they should release all detained underground church clerics. "This is a very simple truth but why can't [Vatican Secretary of State] Cardinal Parolin see it?" he asked.

Father Liu's family and friends expect the government will use the agreement to try to persuade the priest to join the CCPA but they believe he will refuse.

"They have shown me the priest's diary in which he clearly states that he prefers to be in a prison rather than sign or verbally promise any agreements," the source said.

Father Liu was also detained in 2006 when his younger brother had talked with him on the phone, saying that the priest felt depressed but preferred to be detained since he could serve God quietly.