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THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

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30/10/2018 23:34
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ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI








As far as I have been able to learn online, neither the Vatican nor any of the usual Bergogliac paladins ever gave any public reaction to the Der Spiegel 19-page dossier on this pope, with the devastating cover title, THOU SHALT
NOT LIE. Must we assume it is because they are unable to refute anything that the dossier cites to underscore and highlight Bergoglio's plethora of errors and faults? Which also means their tacit admission that this pope
does lie when he thinks he has to
... Let me attempt a not very clever wordplay remark: So it seems that the papocchio (Italian for 'imbroglio') in which our pope is up to his ears deep, i.e., the Bergoglio imbroglio,
if you will, has much to do with his habitual lying, i.e., Bergoglio Pinocchio has much to answer for the papocchio he is in.


Pope's repeated remarks about the Great Accuser mean
to distract attention from his lack of resolve and leadership

[At least on the crisis of confidence and faith arising from the clerical sex abuse scandals and cover-ups -
because he has tons of resolve and leadership to spare when it involves his personal agenda for 'the Church']

If he does not make an effort to address the rot, and soon, then impossible
not to conclude that his interests do not constitute the true good of the Church.

by Christopher R. Altieri

October 28, 2018

The burgeoning crisis of leadership in the Catholic Church that is the result of organized coverup and winking at rot in the moral culture of the clergy, high and low, was largely absent from the reports of the Fathers’ consultations at the XV Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops over the past weeks.

Nevertheless, Pope Francis’s remarks to the prelates on Saturday, at the close of their work, show unmistakably that the crisis continues to occupy his mind. [If only, it seems, to think of every ploy he can to deflect the issue off the headlines and away from him!]

In extemporaneous remarks to the Synod Fathers gathered in the Synod Hall shortly after they voted to approve the final document, Pope Francis first made his perfunctory thanks to the organizers. Then he said, “Because of our sins, the Great Accuser seizes the advantage, and — as the first chapter of the Book of Job tells us — goes about the earth looking for whom to accuse.” It is a theme that has become familiar over the past several weeks.

“In this moment, he is accusing us strongly,” the Pope went on to say, “and this accusation becomes persecution.” Francis noted the persecution of Christians in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East, as well as in various other parts of the world. Pope Francis said the persecution of which he speaks also takes the form of “continuous accusations,” the purpose of which is “to sully the Church.” Then, he offered this:

The Church is not to be sullied: her children, yes, we are all dirty, but the mother is not — and this is the moment to defend our Mother — and we defend our Mother from the Great Accuser by prayer and penance. [Typical Bergoglian error of imprecision, arising from an untidy, undisiplined mind! No one is accusing Mother Church of anything. All the accusations are against the men who run the Church and who have committed grave sins. Only non-Catholics could equate the institutional human church with Mother Church who is the divine Spouse of Christ.]

This is why I asked, in this month that ends in a few days, for people to pray the Rosary, to pray to St. Michael Archangel, to pray to Our Lady, that she might always cover Mother Church. Let us continue to do so. This is a difficult moment, because the Accuser, through us, attacks our Mother — and no one is to lay a finger on our Mother [the Church]. This, I had it in my heart to say at the end of the Synod. [Some cardinal or bishop in the synod hall ought to have sent the pope a private note pointing out the flagrant fundamental error of his santimonious statements.]


On the one hand, he acknowledges that the bishops are to blame: “The Accuser, through us, attacks our Mother,” On the other, the bishops seem to get a pass, because they are simply sinners just like everyone else. It is as if he will not see that the bishops have already harmed the Church by their winking and coverup, while the people within the Church, who are clamoring for transparency and accountability from the bishops, are motivated by the very filial love he praises.

The final document of the Synod does contain some reference to the crisis. In Paragraph 30 we read, “It has become clear that our work is cut out for us, when it comes to eradicating the forms of exercise of authority on which the various forms of abuse are grafted, and of countering the lack of accountability and transparency with which many cases have been managed.”

Paragraph 30 of the final document goes on to say, “Desire for domination, the lack of dialogue and transparency, the forms of double life, spiritual emptiness, as well as psychological fragilities: these are the terrain on which corruption flourishes.”

The pope is not wrong to call for prayer and penance — no Christian can fail to confess that we need much more of both — but the Church must be governed, and Peter’s office is for the governance of the Church. Governing means putting aside personal interests — not ignoring the noise of division and agitation, but rising above it — and acting for the true good.

In any case and inescapably now, the presence of serious rot reaching the highest echelons of Church governance is laid bare. We must fathom full extent of it. We must discover its origin, as well as the proximate and more remote causes of it. We must have it out.

Pope Francis alone in the Church holds power by indisputable right to make the source and reach of the rot known, and to begin at any rate to rid us of it. That is the one thing needful, and that is the thing Francis refuses to give. The documentary review he has promised is at best a half measure. At worst, it is a scrap thrown to dogs about the table.


Pope Francis did not create this crisis. He is not to blame for the rise of evil men before he assumed the supreme governance of the universal Church, nor is he to be saddled with the guilt of his predecessors’ unhappy decisions and unready responses. [Yes, he is to be blamed, insofar as he has chosen precisely such men - McCarrick and his ilk - to be among his closest associates and advisers.] Francis is Pope now, however, and that means he is chiefly responsible for her earthly welfare.

Whatever one thinks of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, it is largely owing to his testimony that the rot is exposed.

Some in the Church are of the opinion that the former nuncio to the United States is a hero of the faith. Others believe he is a scheming Machiavel, ambitious and cunning, and thirsty for the ruin of men by whom he feels himself wronged.

It is evident that his motives — like those of all men — are alloyed: he used his original letter to impugn the reputations of men with no discernible tie to his core allegation, [Altieri is completely wrong! All those named by Vigano they knew and/or had to know about McCarrick's record but show not to say anything about it, much less do anything about it] or to sully the names of certain others in ways not strictly necessary to the making of his case. [Mentioning specific facts about specific persons - and we must now conclude Vigano did not make up the things he claimed because not one of those 32 persons he named in the first Testimony has come forward to profess innocence or ignorance! - in the course of making an argument does not amount to 'sullying' anyone's name; it is simply stating the truth. Altieri is bending over backwards to be the devil's advocate against Vigano, for all that he basically accepts the latter's testimony.]

There is another fact, bright-shining, adamant and ineluctable: Archbishop Viganò’s motives are largely irrelevant.

If his aim was to topple the pontificate of Francis, then it was a fool’s errand from the start: Apostolica Sedes a nemine iudicatur — the Apostolic See is judged by no man — and if part of his purpose was to destroy his enemies in the Curia, let him be tried for it in open court and pay the price of his folly. (Such a trial would also give him ample room to make his case before a candid world, and expose the miscarriages not only of the reigning Pontiff, but of the last two and their underlings, as well. If Francis would right the Church and see Archbishop Viganò held to account for his intemperances, then there is arguably no better way to achieve both in one.)

I think that Archbishop Viganò drew too facile an equation of silence with complicity in his third testimony, when he addressed himself to his brother bishops. Many of them — especially those in the Roman Curia — are legitimately pained in conscience, racked between love of the Church and fear for their souls’ safety, should they abjure an oath sworn in good faith. [And what oath is that? Loyalty to the person of the pope? It is one thing to be loyal to the Papacy as an office and institution, another to be loyal to the person who occupies the office even when he is in error.]

Nevertheless, Viganò was right on the fundamental point. Those two goods can never be the poles of a dilemma for any true son of the sinless Mother, nor can they ever face a true spouse of the spotless bride as genuine alternatives in a devil’s choice. Salus animarum suprema lex. (The salvation of souls is the supreme law.) [Which obviously counts for nothing, for all those cardinals, bishops and priests who prefer to keep silent than denounce error and sin.]
I am posting this Bonhoeffer axiom as an addendum:

Pope Francis still has a chance — perhaps his only one left — to right the ship.

There is no wicked power in the universe that can reach him [???? How so, when Satan appears to have set up residence as co-tenant and/or incubus at Casa Santa Marta????], and no faithful son or daughter of Holy Church, who would not support him to the last in any sincere and whole-hearted effort to set her aright.

If he does not make that effort, and soon, then it will become impossible to avoid the conclusion that the interests he is pursuing do not constitute the true good of the Church.

That effort must begin with transparency: justice must be seen to be done.


[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 31/10/2018 04:47]
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Observations on the final days of the 'youth synod'
Is the Final Document truly a fruit of the collegiality and
synodality, so frequently touted by the pope and his team?
Or was it spresented to the Synod Fathers as a fait accompli?

by Fr Nicholas Gregoris
Founding Member, Priestly Society of Blessed John Newman

October 28, 2018

Pope Francis celebrates the closing Mass of the Synod of Bishops on young people, the faith and vocational discernment in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican Oct. 28. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)


The 2018 Synod on Youth, Faith and Vocational Discernment was overshadowed, in part, by the “Summer of Shame,” as it was often termed in the media, as clerical sex abuse took center-stage from damning accusations against disgraced then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick to the devastating Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report; from the three explosive testimonials of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò implicating the Pope and several hierarchs in his inner circle for cover-up of clerical sex abuse to Cardinal Marc Ouellet’s ad hominem attack on Viganò (which affirmed, ironically, many of Viganò’s factual claims); from scandals being unearthed in the Pope’s native Argentina and his former Archdiocese of Buenos Aires to others erupting in neighboring Chile, where two bishops were laicized recently.

[After the fact, it's time to comment on the pretend title for this synodal assembly - 'youth, faith and vocational discernment' (people with brains never believed that pompous title for a moment)- and how other than the use of the word 'youth' (for which I think 'young people' is more appropriate since it is more specific and never to be confused with 'youth' as a quality), there appeared to be little of faith and of vocational discernment in the final document. Besides, didn't Fr Spadaro tell us in so many words that this was really 'a synod on synodality'? How's that for changing horses in midstream? Or to use a more appropriate horse metaphor, the so-called 'youth synod' was originally intended to be the Trojan horse through which legitimization of sexual deviancy would be sneaked into Church teaching, but since that obviously did not fly at all for most of the synodal delegates, the Bergoglio Vatican is now pretending that it was 'synodalization', not legitimizing sexual deviancy, that they were sneaking into the synod! Doesn't matter - it was all a big game of deliberate deception, a three-week exercise in futility to distract attention from the growing megacrisis of Bergoglio's pontificate.]

Then, at the outset of the Synod, and at various intervals during the gathering, pressure was exerted by certain ideological groups to “baptize,” as it were, the use of the acronym “LGBT,” which found its way into the “Instrumentum Laboris,” despite its not having appeared in any pre-synodal documents, contrary to what Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, Secretary General of the Synod, had claimed.

In fact, in the “Final Document” the paragraph which received the most non-placet votes was the one concerning homosexuality. Apparently, as a block the African Synod Fathers voted “non-placet,” and likewise Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia (so went the word in the Vatican Press Office circles). This should come as no surprise in light of Chaput’s intervention at the beginning of the Synod in which he condemned in no uncertain terms the gender ideology associated with LGBT identity politics.

Chaput’s argument was rooted in an orthodox Christian anthropology which refuses to accept the notion, albeit politically correct, that Catholic Christians should not identify themselves or be identified by others as “lesbian”, “gay”, “bi-sexual” or “transgendered” because the baptized are children of God whose human and Christian dignity does not depend on their expressed sexual orientation or preferences.

Saturday evening, journalists accredited to the Holy See Press Corps made their way amidst downpours in Rome to wait a few hours in the Sala Stampa for the bishops to finish voting – paragraph by paragraph (something not originally envisioned but clearly demanded by the bishops – on the “Final Document”, which is mercifully much briefer than the verbose “Instrumentum Laboris.”

The “Final Document” of the Synod contains much of the sociological language and data of the “Instrumentum Laboris.” It also records many of the same biblical references (e.g., the Lucan pericope of Jesus accompanying the disciples of Emmaus and the call of the young prophet Samuel), all of whom, attentive and docile to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, responded generously to the divine call, accepting the divine invitation to become God’s spokesmen.

Before Paolo Ruffini (Director of the Sala Stampa) and Greg Burke (Papal Spokesman) gave the final “Press Briefing” of the Synod on Saturday evening (around 9pm, Rome time), we journalists were able via a live feed to follow the final events taking place in the Synod Hall.

Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri thanked the Pope, the Synod Fathers, the young people who were auditors, not to mention the fraternal delegations. There was a sense of joyful relief, and the Synod Hall erupted in sustained applause on several occasions.

After Cardinal Baldisseri spoke, the Pope gave his final address in which he reminded us that synodality is an integral part of ecclesial life not limited to the Synod Hall but something of the Holy Spirit’s inspiration that transcends the Synod proceedings to touch the universal Church in all its particular churches and episcopal conferences, in which the young people are called to play a more active role of leadership and co-responsibility, a concept found in the “Final Document,” together with the notion that the role of women must likewise be more positively appreciated and valued in the Church’s internal life in all sectors.

Pope Francis also reminded us that the Church is our Holy Mother whom we must always defend, even if we as members of the Church remain poor sinners. In this regard, Pope Francis recalled the patristic expression, “Casta Meretrix,” referring to the Church as holy in her essence and yet sinful in her individual members.

Finally, citing the Book of Job, the Pope warned us that the “Great Accuser” is pro-actively not only accusing Holy Mother Church but attacking and indeed persecuting her members, especially in the ancient lands of the Eastern Churches.

The most moving moment of the final session of the Synod was when the Pope and all those present in the Synod Hall sang the “Te Deum” in Latin as an act of gratitude to Almighty God for the successful termination of the Synod.

Let us return for a moment to the Opening Mass of the Synod on Sunday, October 3, when from the first moment the Pope appeared on the sagrato of Saint Peter’s Square, he caught everyone’s eye as he carried a wooden pastoral staff that in certain circles was jokingly compared to a Wiccan staff. [It is, in fact, a stang in form and function.]

As I had expected, Pope Francis used this same staff for the Synod’s Concluding Mass on October 28. One wonders if he will use this staff on a regular basis, or he will consign it to a Vatican storeroom.

Pope Francis’s homily for the Opening Mass of the Synod was focused on Scripture passages in which the theme was young people dreaming. His tone was optimistic, but the content was vague. His homily for the Closing Mass of the Synod was centered on the Gospel of the day, taken from Mark, in which Jesus heals the blind man Bartimaeus. The Pope highlighted elements of this passage, relating them to key themes of the Synod like “discipleship” of Jesus in a “journey of faith”; “listening” to Jesus as an exercise of the “apostolate of the ear,” as Pope Francis cleverly termed it [That's clever? It's meaningless, as is a lot of Bergoglio blather!]; the priority of “drawing close” to Jesus in a communion of life and love, which bears fruit in the concrete actions of daily life over and above the extremes of “doctrinalism” (whatever that is) and “activism.”

The other day, after the 1:30pm Synod Briefing, I walked into a restaurant on the Borgo Pio in the area of the Vatican and, as I settled into my place to have lunch, I noticed two Synod Fathers from Africa seated in front of me. They were towards the end of their meal and were trying to figure out something on their bill. The Italian waiter made attempt after attempt to communicate with them in Italian, to no avail. Finally, something clicked, and they were able to pay the bill and leave the restaurant. I had no idea what their original or even secondary language was. However, I could tell that their knowledge of Italian was at level zero.

Then it dawned on me: How can these Synod Fathers understand well enough the “Final Document” written in academic and elevated Italian, without an even basic knowledge of Italian, let alone interpreters or a working translation?

This is something Diane Montagna already wrote about for LifeSiteNews.com, but I thought I needed to confirm her concerns as my own from personal experience of the phenomenon. Frankly, I cannot understand how a document can be considered “magisterial” when so bishops who voted for it did so based on a text written and presented to them in a language they barely understand, or at least not in any great theological depth.

When this question was raised by Montagna in the Sala Stampa, the answer that came back was in reality a non-answer. So much for transparency! It reminded me of Nancy Pelosi telling congressmen that they would understand Obamacare after it was implemented. Perhaps we need a Synod of Bishops on Social Communications and how journalism functions in the 21st century in the world outside the confines of the Vatican. Arguably, there is more transparency in the Trump White House than in the Vatican.

From my perspective as a journalist, this secrecy is counter-productive and only serves to cement the idea that synods are indeed rigged or pre-cooked events.

Bishop Robert Barron, Auxiliary of Los Angeles, has expressed the opinion that any meeting as international and complex as a synod must in some way be fixed in advance. This I can understand as far as procedures go, but not in terms of the “Final Document,” which gives me the distinct impression that large swathes of it were written in advance of the Synod.

Perhaps I am wrong, but this would not detract from my basic argument that a Synod’s Final Document should be written in a language which the majority of the Synod Fathers comprehend. To pretend that the universal language of the Church is Italian is ridiculous. As far as I am concerned, its use is forced onto the Synod Fathers and has become a pretense for Italian prelates and periti, working on orders of the Pope, to exercise direct control over the synodal process in such a way that the Final Document says what they wanted it to say from the outset.

Then I ask myself: Is the Final Document truly a fruit of the collegiality and synodality, so frequently touted by Pope Francis and his equipe? Or is it something that is presented to the Synod Fathers as a fait accompli, requiring less than an informed vote due to their own deficiencies in the Document’s original, working language?

The Concluding Mass of the Synod was mainly in Italian, which also struck me as odd, considering that the Synod Fathers represented the Universal Church whose official mother tongue is Latin, not Italian. To be fair, certain parts of the Mass were in Latin like the Gloria, Credo and Pater Noster. However, given the challenge that Italian presented for many Synod Fathers, I wondered how they were able to concelebrate the Mass (especially the Eucharistic Prayer) in that language – when Latin would have surely been more accessible to the vast majority.

The Entrance Procession and Recessional were impressive as, first, the young people who were auditors at the Synod entered Saint Peter’s Basilica ahead of the concelebrating priests, followed by the Synod Fathers (the Eastern patriarchs and bishops looked splendid in their gold vestments and jeweled crowns!), and the Pope who carried that odd, wooden pastoral staff that made its curious debut at the Opening Mass of the Synod.

For my part, I climbed a narrow ladder to take my place on a rickety scaffold near the medieval bronze statue of Saint Peter. Near me were two young Carmelite nuns in their brown and white habits who had been sent by their Order to cover the Synod. Dutifully, we all knelt for the epiclesis and words of consecration and then climbed our way down the scaffold and back up again to receive Holy Communion.

The Sistine Chapel Choir was on its game. It has made a lot of progress from my seminary years in Rome back in the early 1990s when they were jokingly referred to as “The Sistine Screamers.”

A nice collaboration took place between Monsignor Palombella’s Cappella Musicale Sistina and Monsignor Frisina’s choir. A few of the more beautiful pieces that I enjoyed singing were the entrance hymn, “Jubilate Deo“; the “Eccomi” offertory hymn, whose refrain was in Italian, but whose verses varied from Spanish to English and then back to Italian; and the moving Communion “Pane di Vita Nuova,” whose eight verses alternated between English, French and Italian. Likewise, I appreciated the near-perfect execution of the “Kyrie,” “Gloria,” “Credo,” “Ubi Caritas,” and the concluding Marian antiphon, “Salve Regina.”

The auditors played various roles in the Mass. Some were lectors, others read the Petitions, and still others brought up the gifts at the Offertory. The servers of the Mass were seminarians from the Collegio Urbano “Propaganda Fide,” started by Saint John Leonardi (feast: October 9), Founder of the Order of Clerics Regular of the Mother of God, who have graciously offered me hospitality for my last three Roman sojourns. It happens that the Rector of the Collegio Urbano is my classmate from the Pontifical Gregorian University, Monsignor Vincenzo Viva, a priest of the Diocese of Lecce in the Puglia region of southern Italy.

Before the Solemn Pontifical Blessing, Cardinal Baldisseri, standing at a podium near the Papal Chair, and behind whom stood representatives of the young Synod auditors, read the Italian (presumably the original!) version of “The Letter of the Synod Fathers to Young People,” after which there was applause as the Pope got up to embrace Baldisseri, as well as each of the young persons flanking him.
31/10/2018 05:45
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Proposition 146 of the 'final document' of the 'youth synod' contains something so preposterously insane that it could be Exhibit A to prove that the synodal
fathers who voted for that document 'paragraph by paragraph' really were braindead by the time they got to it (after that, there were 21 more
propositions to vote on).
No one in his right mind would have approved it, for many obvious reasons. My own immediate reaction was:
[And the synodal
flunkies approved that line of raving idiocy????
Excuse me, now some little committee somewhere - at the parochial, diocesan and Vaitcan level - whose Catholicism is
suspect at best, and who maybe know next to nothing about Catholicism will 'certify Catholic sites'???? For what? And by whose criteria?]

Fr Z was openly derisive and combative:

Certify Catholic sites? BWAHHHHAHAHAH! Yeah, that’ll happen. And guess who would be in charge of something like that.

If they want to know the meaning of total, unrestricted and asymetrical warfare just try that. They won’t know what hit them.


Just as important as the question of how such an insane proposition could ever have been made, to begin with, is how it was approved by 234
delegates, with only 6 No's
, according to the Vatican's tally sheet. The six still mentally functioning voters who said NO deserve a special 'sense and sensibility'
medallion struck for them!

New Catholic at Rorate caeli had this commentary
:

Liberal censorship: Synod asks Vatican
to create offices at every level to
'certify' acceptable Catholic websites


October 30, 2018

The most astonishing demand of the "Synod Fathers" who approved their final document without actually reading it is in paragraph #146...

Well, well, well... We know what those "certification systems of Catholic sites" mean: a new form of censorship.

The old censorship, which was excellent in intent, tried to protect Catholics from books promoting heresy and immorality. But this was when many in the Vatican itself were not themselves promoting heresy and living in utter immorality.

You can just imagine that a man in the shape of Uncle Ted McCarrick could be in charge of this "Vatican Digital Commission" that would promote the "Vatican Certification" of acceptable websites: those promoting sodomy would be accepted, while those promoting the Baltimore Catechism would be rejected...

Father Hunwicke went at it earlier...

Censorship-
The Bergoglians are at work on it ...


October 29, 2018

In the chaos of the 1960s, one notable casualty was the Church's system of the censorship of books. This disappearance was, I think, inevitable; in that febrile and aggressive atmosphere, it is inconceivable that the process of waiting for a diocesan Censor Librorum to read a book and make his comments, then for him to negotiate with an author about his/her ambiguities, and to agree a text ... then for the Ordinary or his VG to issue the imprimatur ... it is inconceivable that such a system could have survived.

Then add Humanae Vitae and the spate of dissenting books and articles which would have needed to be refused the Nihil obstat ...

There was undoubtedly rejoicing at the disappearance of the pre-modern apparatus of censorship; predictably, especially among 'liberals'.

Clandestinely, this development led to a new and only semi-visible form of censorship. The dominance of certain 'schools' in Academe, especially in subjects such as Liturgy, Biblical Studies, and Moral Theology, made it increasingly difficult to secure publication of ideas which defended or explicated Tradition.

Although the boot was invisible ... it was now on the other foot.

But now comes the paradox. The disappearance of Censorship preceded, at a polite distance, the emergence of the Internet. And in our own age it has become very difficult for anybody to monitor, let alone to control, the myriad ideas and opinions which can flicker across the World's computers.

And, among all this material, orthodox and traditional statements and ideas have as free an access as everything else to the many fora of discussion. I very much doubt if the examination and critical assessment of this pontificate would have been as open and free as it has been, had the Internet not existed.

But now ... Synod 2018 Paragraph 146.

"The Synod hopes that in the Church appropriate official bodies for digital culture and evangelisation are established at appropriate levels ... Among their functions ... [could be] certification systems of Catholic sites, to counter the spread of fake news ..."


I very much dislike the look of this. It is no secret that some members of the CBCEW were, for years, very nervous about bloggers and especially clerical bloggers. The disgraceful episcopal suppression of one famous diaconal blog became quite a cause celebre. Management had lost a significant control. It is only a year or two since my friend Fr Ray Blake bravely put on the public record that he had found tanks parked on his lawn: tanks in the shape of his Bishop passing on the cheerful news that "The Cardinal doesn't like ...".

We seem to have come a long way from those broad sunlit uplands when Benedict XVI (remember him? The 'Rat', the 'Inquisitor', the 'Panzer Cardinal'? Yes, that one) encouraged blogging, and especially clerical bloggers. Now, the era of the boors and the bullies.

Shall we, in a few years' time [Oh no, Fr H, not 'in a few years' time' - that wouldn't help the Bergogliac cause. How about 'just a few weeks from now'?] , discover that we have Diocesan, National, and Worldwide systems for closing down free discussion in the Church? After all, the Synod will have "called for it", won't it?

"Synodality" sounds so democratic, modern, open and free. What's not to like? And this Synod has concluded with the usual flurry of synthetic Bergoglian rhetoric about the Holy Spirit. In such liberated and happy times, don't you need to be paranoid to be suspicious?

Don't you believe it. Bullies are bullies are bullies.

Aldo Maria Valli had a more detailed commentary on Prop 146 on his blog today, but I have yet to translate it... Equally surprising, if not appalling, to me
is that other than the 4 above, so far I have seen no yelps of outrage elsewhere.



[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 31/10/2018 05:52]
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A Church drowning in sentimentalism
Faith and reason are under siege from an idolatry of feelings

by Samuel Gregg

October 29, 2018

Whenever I teach graduate seminars, I lay down one rule for the participants. While they’re free to say what they think, they cannot start any sentence with the words “I feel . . .” or ask a question which begins “Don’t you feel . . .?” Quizzical expressions immediately appear on some students’ faces. Then I inform them I couldn’t care less what they feel about the subject-matter.

At that point, there’s at least one gasp of astonishment. But before anyone can even think “trigger,” I say, “Perhaps you’re wondering why I’m not interested in your feelings about our topic. Well, I want to know what you think about the subject. We’re not here to emote to each other. We’re here to reason critically together.”

The puzzled looks disappear. Students, it turns out, grasp that reasoned discussion can’t be about a mutual venting of feelings. And that’s as true for the Church as for graduates.

Catholicism has always attached high value to reason. By reason, I don’t just mean the sciences which give us access to nature’s secrets. I also mean the reason that enables us to know how to use this information rightly; the principles of logic which tell us that 2 times 2 can never equal 5; our unique capacity to know moral truth; and the rationality which helps us understand and explain Revelation.

Such is Catholicism’s regard for reason that this emphasis has occasionally collapsed into hyper-rationalism, such as the type which Thomas More and John Fisher thought characterized much scholastic theology in the twenty years preceding the Reformation. Hyper-rationalism isn’t, however, the problem facing Christianity in Western countries today. We face the opposite challenge. I’ll call it Affectus per solam.

“By feelings laone” captures much of the present atmosphere within the Church throughout the West. It impacts how some Catholics view not only the world but the faith itself. At the core of this widespread sentimentalism is an exaltation of strongly-felt feelings, a deprecation of reason, and the subsequent infantilization of Christian faith.

So what are symptoms of Affectus per solam?

One is the widespread use of language in everyday preaching and teaching that’s more characteristic of therapy than words used by Christ and his Apostles. Words like “sin” thus fade and are replaced by “pains,” “regrets” or “sad mistakes.”

Sentimentalism likewise rears its head whenever those who offer reasoned defenses of Catholic sexual or medical ethics are told that their positions are “hurtful” or “judgmental.” Truth, it seems, shouldn’t be articulated, even gently, if it might hurt someone’s feelings. If that was true, Jesus should have refrained from telling the Samaritan woman the facts about her marital history.

Affectus per solam also blinds us to the truth that there is —as affirmed by Christ Himself — a place called Hell for those who die unrepentant. Sentimentalism simply avoids the subject. Hell isn’t a topic to be taken lightly, but ask yourself this question: When was the last time you heard the possibility that any of us could end up eternally separated from God mentioned at Mass?

Above all, sentimentalism reveals itself in certain presentations of Jesus Christ. The Christ whose hard teachings shocked his own followers and who refused any concession to sin whenever he spoke of love somehow collapses into a pleasant liberal rabbi.

This harmless Jesus never dares us to transform our lives by embracing the completeness of truth. Instead he recycles bromides like “everyone has their own truth,” “do whatever feels best,” “be true to yourself,” “embrace your story,” “who am I to judge,” etc. And never fear: this Jesus guarantees heaven, or whatever, for everyone.


That isn’t, however, the Christ revealed in the Scriptures. As Joseph Ratzinger wrote in his 1991 book To Look on Christ:

A Jesus who agrees with everything and everyone, a Jesus without his holy wrath, without the harshness of truth and true love is not the real Jesus as the Scripture shows but a miserable caricature. A conception of “gospel” in which the seriousness of God’s wrath is absent has nothing to do with the biblical Gospel.

The word “seriousness” is important here. The sentimentalism infecting much of the Church is all about diminishing the gravity and clarity of Christian faith. That’s especially true regarding the salvation of souls.

The God fully revealed in Christ is merciful but he’s also just and clear in his expectations of us because he takes us seriously. Woe to us if we don’t return the compliment.


So how did much of the Church end up sinking into a morass of sentimentalism? Here’s three primary causes.

First, the Western world is drowning in sentimentalism. Like everyone else, Catholics are susceptible to the culture in which we live. If you want proof of Western Affectus per solam, just turn on your web-browser. You’ll soon notice the sheer emotivism pervading popular culture, media, politics, and universities. In this world, morality is about your commitment to particular causes. What matters is how “passionate” (note the language) you are about your commitment, and the cause’s degree of political correctness —not whether the cause itself is reasonable to support.

Second, let’s consider how faith is understood by many Catholics today. For many, it appears to be a “feeling faith.” By that, I mean that the Christian faith’s significance is judged primarily in terms of feeling what it does for me, my well-being, and my concerns. But guess what? Me, myself, and I aren’t the focus of Catholic faith.

Catholicism is, after all, a historical faith. It involves us deciding that we trust those who witnessed to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who transmitted what they saw via written texts and unwritten traditions, and who, we’ve concluded, told the truth about what they saw. That includes the miracles and Resurrection attesting to Christ’s Divinity. Catholicism doesn’t view these as “stories.” To be a Catholic is to affirm that they really happened and that Christ instituted a Church whose responsibility is to preach this to the ends of the earth.

Catholic faith can’t therefore be about me and my feelings. It’s about capital-T Truth. Human fulfilment and salvation consequently involves freely and constantly choosing to conform myself to that Truth. It’s not about subordinating the Truth to my emotions. In fact, if Catholicism isn’t about the Truth, what’s the point?
[Which is why Bergoglianism, which rests on 'absolute' relativism - and therefore recognizes no absolute Truth - is, and cannot be other than, anti-Catholicism. Or worse: Since Jesus said "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life", anyone or anything that is anti-Truth is really anti-Christ. And the Vatican's 'successor of Christ' epithet for Bergoglio suggests the latter does think of himself as Jesus 2.0, the new improved version. I do not know how Bergoglio will work in the Holy Spirit into his blasphemous delusion, but have no fear, Spadaro or Rosica may soon enlighten us on Bergoglio's 'Christomorphosis'.]

Third, sentimentalism’s pervasiveness in the Church owes something to efforts to downgrade and distort natural law since Vatican II.
Natural law reflection was in mixed shape throughout the Catholic world in the decades leading up to the 1960s. But it suffered an eclipse in much of the Church afterwards. That’s partly because natural law was integral to Humanae Vitae’s teaching. Many theologians subsequently decided that anything underpinning Humanae Vitae had to be emptied of substantive content.

While natural law reasoning recovered in parts of the Church from the 1980s onwards, we’re paid a price for natural law’s marginalization. And the price is this: once you relegate reason to the periphery of religious faith, you start imagining that faith is somehow independent of reason; or that faith is somehow inherently hostile to reason; or that your religious convictions don’t require explanation to others. The end-result is decreasing concern for the reasonableness of faith. That’s a sure way to end up in the swamp of sentimentalism.

Other reasons for sentimentalism’s traction in today’s Church could be mentioned:
- the disappearance of logic from educational curricula,
- excessive deference to (bad) psychology and (bad) sociology by some clerics formed in the 1970s,
- inclinations to view the Holy Spirit’s workings as something that could contradict Christ’s teachings,
- syrupy self-referential Disney-like liturgies, etc.
It’s a long list. [Of which all four above apply to Jorge Bergoglio, except that he was formed in the 1960S, not the 1970s. So little wonder he is who he is!]

The solution isn’t to downgrade the importance of emotions like love and joy or anger and fear for people. We aren’t robots. Feelings are central aspects of our nature. Instead, human emotions need to be integrated into a coherent account of Christian faith, human reason, human action, and human flourishing — something undertaken with great skill by past figures like Aquinas and contemporary thinkers such as the late Servais Pinckaers. Then we need to live our lives accordingly.

Escaping Affectus per solam won’t be easy. It’s simply part of the air we breathe in the West. Moreover, some of those most responsible today for forming people in the Catholic faith seem highly susceptible to sentimentalist ways.

But unless we name and contest the unbridled emotivism presently compromising the Church’s witness to the Truth, we risk resigning ourselves to mere NGO-ism for the near future.

That is to say, to true irrelevance.
[Irrelevant to the faith, without a doubt. But oh, how relevant, ingratiating and pleasing to the world and to every person claiming to be Christian but who really only wants to be coddled and cosseted in his putative 'faith' as Bergolianism does!]

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Left, Asia's husband and daughter, Ashiq Mesih and Eisham, when they came to Rome in 2015 to seek the pope's help for Asia. He met them briefly at a post-audience rope line.


As far as I am concerned, I believe this has been the biggest news of the year so far for Christians - the better because it is so unexpected. Let us thank God for this but
also pray fervently for Asia and her family, that there may be no new reversals - you can never tell in countries like Pakistan - and that someone (perhaps the pope) can get them
out of Pakistan right away and out of danger from fanatic Muslims.


Pakistan Supreme Court acquits
Christian woman sentenced to death


Wednesday, 31 Oct 2018

Pakistan’s Supreme Court has acquitted a Christian woman who was sentenced to death for blasphemy in 2010.

Asia Bibi was convicted after being accused of insulting Mohammed during a row with her neighbours over drinking water.

Chief Justice Saqib Nisarm said Bibi could walk free from jail in Sheikupura immediately if not wanted in connection with another case.

The judges said the case was based on flimsy evidence, and that the prosecution had “categorically failed to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt”.

The decision will likely enrage some Islamist groups, who had vowed to kill Bibi if her sentence is overturned.

The BBC reports there is a heavy police presence outside the Supreme Court, and that protesters are also gathering in Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar.

Bibi’s family say they fear for their safety and may now have to leave Pakistan.

CNN has a more detailed story...


Asia Bibi's death penalty conviction overturned
By Sophia Saifi and James Griffiths

October 31, 2018

Islamabad, Pakistan (CNN)- Pakistan's Supreme Court has acquitted a Christian woman who has been on death row for almost eight years on blasphemy charges.

Asia Bibi, a mother of five from Punjab province, was convicted of blasphemy in 2010 and sentenced to hang after she was accused of defiling the name of the Prophet Mohammed during an argument the year before with Muslim colleagues.

The workers had refused to drink from a bucket of water Asia Bibi had touched because she was not Muslim. At the time, Asia Bibi said the case was a matter of women who didn't like her "taking revenge."

She won her appeal against the conviction and subsequent death sentence on Wednesday.

Islamist movement Tehreek-e Labbaik (TLP) had previously vowed to take to the streets if Asia Bibi was released, and protests broke out in Islamabad and Lahore soon after the ruling was announced.

Within hours, the protests were large enough that government officials in the cities were urging people to stay inside and avoid adding to the chaos. Demonstrators blocked a motorway in Lahore and a road linking Islamabad and Rawalpindi has been closed off. Angry workers from the TLP have also staged sit-ins and chanted slogans against Pakistan officials and judges.

In response, police officials invoked Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which prevents the gathering of more than four people.

The country's Prime Minister Imran Khan slammed the protests as a "disgusting response" to the top court's decision.

"You are not aiding Islam by talking about killing judges and by killing our generals who have sacrificed so much for our country," Khan said in defense of the verdicts. "I am appealing to our people: Do not get caught up by the words of these people who only want to increase their vote bank."


In his statement, made Wednesday on Pakistani state-run TV, the PM warned the TLP to halt the protests. "This government will not stand aside and see property and livelihoods being destroyed. Do not force us to take action."

In its ruling, the Supreme Court court quoted Shakespeare's "King Lear" in its ruling, saying Asia Bibi appeared to have been "more sinned against than sinning."

"Even if there was some grain of truth in the allegations leveled in this case against the appellant still the glaring contradictions in the evidence of the prosecution highlighted above clearly show that the truth in this case had been mixed with a lot which was untrue," the ruling said.


David Curry, CEO of Open Doors USA, an organization that lobbies on behalf of Christian minorities, said in a statement that "we are breathing a sigh of relief today."

"These charges stemmed from her Christian identity as well as false accusations against her," he said. "We are hopeful that Pakistan will now take additional steps to offer religious freedom and basic human rights throughout the country."

Under the Pakistan penal code, the offense of blasphemy is punishable by death or life imprisonment. Widely criticized by international human rights groups, the law has been used disproportionately against minority religious groups in the country and to go after journalists critical of the Pakistani religious establishment.

Her case has attracted widespread outrage and support from Christians worldwide, and condemnation from conservative Islamist groups in Pakistan, who have demanded the death penalty be carried out and threatened widespread protests in the event of her being freed.

The case has been extremely divisive within Pakistani society, splitting liberals and conservatives and leaving even many supporters afraid to speak out on Asia Bibi's behalf.

In 2011, senior politician Salman Taseer was shot dead by his own bodyguard for voicing support for Asia Bibi and condemning the country's stringent blasphemy laws. His killer, Mumtaz Qadri, immediately surrendered to police and was later executed, becoming a martyr for many hardline Islamists.

At his funeral in 2016, thousands converged on the northern city of Rawalpindi as the Pakistani media was blacked out to prevent riots. Leaders of prominent Islamist political parties attended the funeral as supporters of Qadri carried signs in celebration of his "bravery."

Qadri's grave, in the capital city of Islamabad, has since become a shrine for those supporting Asia Bibi's death sentence.

Amnesty International researcher Rabia Mehmood said that one of the reasons the Asia Bibi case has become so polarizing and controversial is the Pakistani government's failure to take "effective measures to curb the campaign of hate and violence incited by certain groups in the country following her conviction, in fact the state has shown immense tolerance for the narratives of hate."

She previously highlighted a tweet by a media organization linked to TLP, which last year led to violent anti-blasphemy protests, warning the court to "think carefully before making any decision."

In May this year, Pakistan's Interior Minister, Ahsan Iqbal, was shot and wounded in his shoulder in an incident police sources linked to the 2017 demonstrations.

"We can only hope that (the Asia Bibi case) becomes a watershed moment when it comes to blasphemy laws in Pakistan," Mehmood said.

The verdict in Asia Bibi's favor sends "out a message of hope and will be a step in addressing human rights abuses, religiously motivated discrimination and violence targeted at religious minorities and even Muslims who are accused of committing blasphemy."

CNN understands that at least two Western countries have offered Asia Bibi asylum once she has been released. Such a move will likely be greeted by mass protests by Islamist groups, which could turn violent.

It will also prove a key test for new Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, who courted the country's religious right during his successful campaign and has voiced support for blasphemy laws.

Khan should "take a stance against the intimidation of Tehreek-e-Labbaik, whose leaders have demanded that Khan fulfill his promises to make Pakistan an 'Islamic state'," Pakistani journalist Rafia Zakaria wrote for CNN last month.

"Instead of snubbing the international community, one that Islamists see as impinging on Pakistan's move toward a full theocracy, Khan could emphasize the need to embrace it and to work with it. In other words, Khan could choose to stand with the innocent woman instead of the rabid and bloodthirsty extremists." [And it appears he has done so - at least for now. God bless him and keep him firm in his decision.]

Outside of Pakistan, Asia Bibi's case has become a rallying call for many Christians, particularly Catholics.

The Catholic association Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) led prayers for Asia Bibi's release last week in the UK, at a ceremony attended by her husband Ashiq Masih and daughter, Eisham Ashiq.

"We have prayed 10 years now for our sister, Asia, and I am confident that our prayers will be heard, and the judgment will go in favor of Asia, her family and the entire Pakistani Christian community," Father Emmanuel Yousaf said in a statement from the group.

The family met with Pope Francis at the Vatican in February, during which the Catholic leader reportedly described Asia Bibi as a "martyr," [He did? I obviously missed reading that. Memo to myself: do a fact check.] according to ACN President Alessandro Mondeduro.

Francis's predecessor, Pope Benedict, previously called for Asia Bibi's release.

In her 2012 book "Get Me Out of Here," Asia Bibi included a letter to her family urging them not to "lose courage or faith in Jesus Christ."

Sophia Saifi reported from Pakistan. James Griffiths reported from Hong Kong.
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After decades of sexual abuse and thousands, if not tens of thousands, of abuse victims, much of the institutional Church - and its hierarchy reaching up to the pope -
continue to refuse to even say the word 'homosexual' or any of its derivatives. Which aggravates their obvious denial of reality
- of the pink and lavender and
rainbow-colored elephants merrily rampaging though the Church while all those around pretend to see nothing.

To use the word 'clericalism' as the scapegoat that also allows them to avoid saying homosexuality makes it worse, because clericalism is a different sin and
crime altogether from homosexual practices forced by 'men of God' on children and young men
.
Of course, clericalism on the part of the sex offenders certainly
facilitates indulging their lusts by coercion on younger people for whose spiritual welfare they are dutybound to look after... On his blog today, Sandro Magister cites the testimony
of former Newsweek Religion editor Kenneth Woodward in a recent article published surprisingly in the leftist and ultraprogressive 'Catholic' magazine, Commonweal.

In the preceding page, I posted LifeSite's report on the article. Magister provides the link:
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/double-lives


New charges of homosexuality in the Church - but Bergoglio
is silent, won't even say the word, and blames
'clericalism' and the Great Accuser for the present woes


October 31, 2018

At the closing of the synod on Saturday, October 27, Jorge Mario Bergoglio once again identified the “Great Accuser,” Satan, as the ultimate author of the accusations unleashed against him, the pope, in order to strike out in reality against “Mother Church”: “This is why it is time to defend the Mother. […] Because the Accuser in attacking us is attacking the Mother, but the Mother is not to be touched.”

With this Francis justified yet again his silence in the face of the accusation - publicly addressed to him by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former nuncio to the United States - of having long kept with him as a trusted advisor the now-no-longer-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, even though like many others both in and outside of the Vatican, he knew about his homosexual activity with seminarians and young people.

But there is another silence to which the pope constantly adheres - about the homosexuality actively practiced by many churchmen. Francis never mentions it when he denounces the scourge of sexual abuse. What is instead at the origin of everything, he maintains, is “clericalism.”

Even the final document of the synod, in the paragraphs concerning abuse, adopts the pope's view [And why not? Since that was their raison d'etre!]and defines clericalism as “an elitist and exclusive vision of vocation, which interprets the ministry received as a power to be exercised rather than a free and generous service.”

The pope's silence on homosexuality and his insistent diagnosis that the real issue behind clerical sex abuse and cover-ups is clericalism, have been met with strong criticism above all in the United States, where public opinion both Catholic and not, progressive or conservative, appears to be is more demanding than ever for truth and transparency from the Catholic hierarchy.

One particularly revealing expression of this public opinion is the article that came out on October 26 - right when the synod was wrapping up - in Commonweal, a storied magazine of “liberal” American Catholicism. It was written by Kenneth L. Woodward, for 38 years the Religion editor at Newsweek:
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/double-lives

[Magister proceeds to quote excerpts from Woodward's article.]

Now that the 3-week synod is over and done with, what will Bergoglio do in the next 12 weeks or so until the February conference he called of the presidents of all bishops' conferences around the world to discuss the PRESENT CRISIS? Nothing like holding off any farther papal action or statement for another three and a half months (since it was first announced), right? By which time IT may have gone away and/or the media furor will have died down - or so the pope must think - but it can't really go away when there's a four-day meeting at the Vatican about it, can it?

So, what will we have in February 2019? More blahblahblah and landmines strewn all over, as Fr Z said of the final document of the recent synod? Bergoglio recently spoke of an 'apostolate of the ear'. Please, please STOP!, as the hapless young man of Valli's imaginary dialog would plead - no more of these meaningless words and improvisations.]

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Despite the Pope’s best efforts,
the Youth Synod lacked any sense of urgency

The evangelical zeal I've encountered in many young people was just not there

[What urgency? Bergoglio called the assembly hoping
to legitimize sexually deviant lifestyles in the Church
but soon realized he wouldn't get that, so suddenly,
we are told it was really a synod on synodalization']

by Fr Raymond de Souza

31 Oct 2018

I giovani! Yes, 'the young people'! It seemed as if every synod speech, media interview and commentary exalted over the presence of the young “auditors” - some three dozen 20- and 30-somethings invited to spend the three-plus weeks of the synod with the Holy Father and the bishops.

They were protagonists, not merely spectators, we were told. And the insertion of the young people into what remains, in large part, a bureaucratic exercise was supposed to inject a measure of energy and model of evangelisation.

Perhaps, but I have my doubts. Admirable though they were in their own faith and leadership, I found their approach more bureaucratic than I had expected. Many of the auditors, when asked what they planned do upon returning from the synod, spoke of urging their bishops to do this or that, or working with the youth commission of their bishops’ conference.

Their own personal testimonies of faith were inspiring, but they often sounded like those employed by a commission rather than being seized with the urgency of missionary discipleship. I have worked for 15 years in campus evangelisation with many zealous missionaries, and have never heard any speak about collaborations with agencies of an episcopal conference.

The young auditors addressed a concluding message to the Holy Father. It sounded a lot less like the Acts of the Apostles than it did promotional material from the Dicastery of Integral Human Development.

“New ideas need space and you gave it to us,” they wrote to Pope Francis. “We share your dream: an outgoing Church, open to all, especially the weakest, a field hospital Church. We are already an active part of this Church and we want to continue to make a concrete commitment to improve our cities and schools, and the social and political world and working environments, by spreading a culture of peace and solidarity and by putting the poor at the centre, in whom Jesus himself is recognised.” [YECCCHHHH!Pure Bergoglian blather and bunkum!]

Jesus just barely made it into the message, which meant the auditors were not listening very carefully to the bishops. [Jesus has little chance of being in the picture, with cherrypicked young Bergogliacs all eager to ingratiate themselves with someone who thinks he is the new Jesus, 'successor of Christ', as VaticanNews styles him.] The synod fathers themselves had decided to write a message to the youth of the world, and the first draft was soundly rejected for not clearly beginning with Jesus. So they fixed it.

“In these days, we have gathered together to hear the voice of Jesus,” the bishops’ revised text began. “And to recognise in Him your many voices, your shouts of exultation, your cries and your moments of silence.”

Or perhaps the young people were listening. The mammoth final document, though organised around the biblical encounter on the road to Emmaus, meandered through so much material that the simple urgency of the Gospel proclamation was lost.

St John Paul II was the (deliberately) forgotten figure of this synod [as he was in the two prior Bergoglian synods - not forgotten, so much as trampled over into irrelevance, the whose figure and teachings have to be replaced by that of Bergoglio], so it was never likely that we might have heard from him, but one longed for something like what he said at World Youth Day in Paris in 1997:

It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise…


Pope Francis himself – who spent hour after heroic hour in the synod hall [What's so heroic about wanting to make sure that his presence would at least remind everyone present why he called the assembly, to begin with, and to rein in any audacious bishop who might have wanted to follow Mons. Chaput's example from Day 1 of the assembly] – seemed to catch that something of that urgency was missing.

B]“How often, instead of making the Lord’s words our own, have we peddled our own ideas as his word,” he preached at the closing Mass. [And Fr De Souza thinks that's an indication he felt enthusiasm was lacking??? It's yet another example of Bergoglio condemning others for what he himself does all the time - peddling his own ideas as Jesus's word. Surely, De Souza could not have missed the irony - or the hypocrisy - ot that statement????]

“How often do people feel the weight of our institutions more than the friendly presence of Jesus.” [Ah, yes! Another unwitting self-condemnation! Certainly, the weight of his institution - the papacy - than which there is no weightier institution in the Church, imposing novelty upon novelty in the church of Bergoglio masquerading under him as the Roman Catholic Church - has effectively stamped out the presence of Jesus for many of the faithful whose faith is faint and flickering at best.]

The synod is a weighty institution, a place more inclined toward procedural intrigue than Spirit-filled proclamation. So there was a genuine freshness in the novel presence of the young auditors, though some Vatican officials gushed so profusely about it that it made me wonder if they had ever been around young people before.

But I rather suspect that many of those chosen were rather more at home in Church institutions than at work in the vineyard itself. To use the language of Pope Francis, more in the sacristy than out in the street.

My entire priesthood has been spent with young adults, a true mission field. And even if the labourers may be few, there are very impressive missionaries out gathering in the harvest. Their contributions were missed at the synod.

Much was made of the young auditors’ cheers and applause in the synod hall, a departure from the usual practice of keeping a respectful silence during the speeches, all the better not to disturb those who wish to sleep.

But the bishops who were gathered, much less the Holy Father, do not need cheerleaders. They need the witness of those who have found that “Jesus that you seek”, rather than those who are eager to “improve our cities and schools”.

The synod is likely to do little harm. [Oh, just you wait! We haven't heard the last word on it till Bergoglio writes his Gaudium homosexualitatis, or whatever!] But it was a missed opportunity. [Opportunity for what? What do you expect when you have captive synodal fathers, trying to ingratiate themselves to two dozen 'youth auditors' and the pope at the same time, who are so braindead or Bergoglio-conditioned they can pass something as preposterous as Prop 146 and its committees 'at every appropriate level' to certify Catholic writing? And who knows how many such examples of stupidity can be found throughout that cesspool of drool that is the final document of the synod!]


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'The Letter': One year later
by Thomas G. Weinandy, OFM, Cap.

OCTOBER 31, 2018

A year ago tomorrow I made public a letter that I wrote to Pope Francis expressing my deep concern about the “chronic confusion” in the Church and the way that his “seemingly intentional lack of clarity risks sinning against the Holy Spirit.”

In the immediate aftermath of the letter’s publication, I received over 300 emails and over 40 letters (most from the United States, but a fair number from many countries around the world) – all of which, except two, were positive.

Moreover, over the course of the past year I received another 100 or so emails and even Christmas cards from people I did not know – all of which were, again, positive. The majority of the responses were from the laity who expressed their support and invariably thanked me for giving expression to their concerns and thoughts, but believed either that they did not have the ability to articulate them or felt, if they did express them, that they would not be heard or taken seriously.

Besides the laity, I also received significant responses from Catholic academics and, surprisingly, from over thirty bishops – all positive. And this does not include the many affirmative comments, from laity, academics and bishops, I have received in person when speaking at or attending conferences over the past year.

Many people have expressed their regret that I have suffered because of the letter, but I have suffered very little compared to the joy I have experienced – the delight of knowing that so many of the faithful were grateful and pleased at what I had done.

What I want to highpoint in this brief message, however, is not the importance of my letter to Pope Francis or the positive responses to it, but what for me is the significance of what Jesus is doing in his Church.

Readers may recall that, while I was in Rome last year, I spent a considerable amount of time in St. Peter’s praying about whether I should articulate my apprehensions and concerns about this present pontificate. In the end, I asked Jesus for a sign.

If he wanted me to write something, I asked that he allow me, within about a five-hour time frame, to meet someone I knew but had not seen in many years, and that I would never expect to see in Rome at this particular time. The person could not be from the United States, Canada or Great Britain. Moreover, in the course of our conversation, the person would have to say to me – “Keep up the good writing.”

That is a very complex sign to wish for, say the least, and I now believe that it is in itself an inspiration of the Holy Spirit because, on my own, I could never have concocted such an intricate scenario. Jesus did fulfill the sign in every particular and did so in a most marvelous way, for the person he chose to enact the sign was an archbishop.

Two clerics publically mocked and made fun of the sign and its fulfillment, but here I want to offer my personal opinion concerning its importance – at least its significance for me.

That Jesus fulfilled my requested sign struck me as Jesus expressing his own concern for the troubling situation that presently exists within the Church, his body. From this personal perspective, I thought that, in the end, his loving concern for his Church far exceeds my own, and what he is doing is far more important than the writing of my letter to Pope Francis.

I came to see my letter as a mere postscript to the concern Jesus himself manifested when he fulfilled my sign. Others may have different interpretations or no perspective at all, but I thought it worthwhile that I share my own understanding.

A great deal has happened within the Church in the year since I made public my letter. I do not need to rehearse all of the evils that have now come to light. They are common knowledge. The concerns and apprehensions that I expressed in my letter are more relevant now than they were a year ago.

The Body of Christ presently suffers more than it did then – and I fear the suffering will become even more intense. Moreover, in the midst of what has been exposed, many commentaries and analyses have been published in newspapers, journals, the Internet, and in blogs, some better than others, but all decrying the present ecclesial situation and often offering ways forward.

For me, what is presently most troubling is the vague, uncertain and often seemingly nonchalant ecclesial response to the evil, not only to the grievous sexual misconduct among the clergy and bishops, but also to the scandalous undermining of the doctrinal and moral teaching of Scripture and the Church’s magisterial tradition.

Likewise, there appears to be little awareness of or concern for the suffering that this mentality has inflicted upon the Church, especially upon the laity.


Significantly and sadly, even if those in authority were to make adequate responses to the evil at hand from this point on, it would not be sufficient to rebuild the trust that has been broken by their past words and actions.

Yes, many in high ecclesial positions are good and forthright men, but they are not the ones who are presently being listened to, or making the decisions, or setting the ecclesial tone.

I am, nonetheless, hopeful. I am hopeful because I know that many are praying and even fasting for the renewal of faith within the Church. Moreover, I am convinced more now than a year ago, that by exposing all of the evil, the Lord Jesus is in the process of purifying his body, the Church.

The present sin within the Church is often terrifying and disheartening to see. It is good for us to keep in mind, however, that the fire of the Holy Spirit may burn, but its burning is unto holiness – and that is wondrous to behold.
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Resuming my post on the 'youth' synod's Prop 146, here first is Aldo Maria Valli's comment...

Te synod, communications,
and the desire to control

Translated from

October 30, 2018

The final document of the ‘youth synod’ – an indigestible brick – written by someone who aspires to omniscience, also touches on the use of communications technologies. It does so in a section entitled ‘Mission in a digital environment’ where, after maintaining that “the digital environment represents a challenge on multiple levels for the Church”, states that “it is the young people themselves who ask to be accompanied in discerning the mature modalities of life in an environment that is today strongly digitalized, which allows for availing of its opportunies while forestalling its risks” (No. 145).

I would really like to know who ‘gave birth’ to such concepts. Young people wish to be ‘accompanied in discerning…’ [when it comes to using computers]??? What? Where? When? If I look around me, I see none of this at all. What I see are many adults and older people, like myself, who would very uch want to be ‘accompanied’ by young people to understand a bit more and to be able to make some use of all this digital deviltry.

But when I ask my own daughters to do this for me, first they snort, and then tell me they have other things to do, and finally mumble something incomprehensible to me. And when finally, after much insistence on my part, they deign to explain something to me, they speak and fiddle around with the computer so rapidly that I can understand nothing. I would like so much to ‘avail of the opportunities’ offered by these new means of communication, but I cannot find anyone with the patience to ‘accompany’ me.

But the other passage in the document that is dedicated to communication is this: [He cites Prop 146].

Now, apart from finding it paradoxical that the Vatican should give us lessons about fake news – after the Vatican itself had been the protagonist of a mega-‘fake news’ event (Remember the news conference where a message from Benedict XVI was presented as ‘approving’ of Pope Francis’s theology, when in fact, he had declined to write an essay that would supplement that already written by 11 [mostly no-name] theologians to celebrate the Bergoglian theology), this proposal 146 to “manage systems to certify Catholic sites” has something more than disquieting. How shall we translate this bureaucratic language into a single word? ‘Censorship’? Or ‘muzzling’?

I don’t know why what comes to my mind right away is the old Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with its efficient ‘offices’ in which diligent apparatchiki evaluated, rated, checked, corrected [all written material for publication] and eventually manipulated, censored or prohibited their publication.

The proposal suggests that at the Vatican, the subject of digital communications, especially via websites and blogs, is evidently an open nerve.

I ask: how could they possibly launch such an operation? Who and how could anyone possibly keep an eye on an indescribably enormous mass of information, news and commentary on the Internet? It would need a sort of all-seeing, sharp-eyed and implacable Big Brother [or a multitude of Big Brothers] with a police apparatus like the vastest and most sophisticated systems of thought control in totalitarian states.

So, does the Vatican think it is equipped for this? [We know it is not – so how much less would similar offices ‘at the appropriate level’, i.e., parochial, diocesan and national, be equipped to do this? Yet, believe me, I am expecting maybe Cupich or Tobin announcing shortly how their respective dioceses are already setting up such an office!] Is it going to use the new super-dicastery for Communications to do this, or will it institute a new organism dedicated to this task?

I have a suggestion for how to name such a new organism – something like Commission for the Security of the State. You don’t think so? Just listen to how it sounds in Russian: Komitet Gosudarstvennoj Bezopasnosti, much more familiar, of course, by its initials KGB.

On the other hand, some representatives of the ‘church of mercy’ [better yet, ‘church of misericordism’, the ideology of mercy, rather than mercy itself] (such as the Jesuit ‘patron saint’ of LGBTQ, James Martin), have already made it known that ‘the church’ ought to regulate some sites thought to be insupportably ‘traditionalist’ and ‘conservative’ by simply closing them down.

But I know that these misreicordists like James Martin ought to resign themselves for now to the fact that most of those who produce these ‘insupportable’ websites and blogs, who are for the most part independent, also live in countries in which, for better or worse, freedom of thought and expression is still safeguarded. And therefore, a great over-arching ‘certification’ system would seem to be unrealizable.

Of course, I unxerstand that this thing called ‘freedom’ is intolerable for anyone who argues in favor of ‘certifying’ Catholic content. But I don’t know what they could do about it. The misreicordists must simply resign themselves to this fact.

On this subject, I would ask: When Jesus said “ Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No.’ Anything more is from the evil one” (Mt 5,37) in his Sermon on the Mount, did he imagine such a system of certification? On the other hand, did not the Superior-General of the Jesuits, Fr. Sosa, say that there were no tape recorders in Jesus’s time, so who knows what he really said?

But I recall another apposite statement – “During a time of universal lying, to tell the truth is a revolutionary act”. George Orwell wrote that. He who understood more than well enough about Big Brothers, thought control and dictatorial regimes. [Apropos, for Antonio Spadaro, Orwell also said, "Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two equals four".]

Meanwhile, LifeSite News compiled a few other reactions from Catholic tweeters:

Vatican’s proposed Soviet-style tactic
to quash dissent invites questions, derision

by Doug Mainwaring
[IMG]http://u.cubeupload.com/MARITER_7/LOGOLIFESITE.png
[/IMG]

October 29, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – The Vatican has indicated that it will adopt the tactics of leftist activists and seek to silence the voices of those who don’t fully agree with the agenda of the current pontificate.

The final Youth Synod Document proposes a system to “certify” Catholic sites in order to counteract what it deems to be “fake news about the Church.”

Crux’s Christopher White tweeted:

Keen Vatican watchers were quick to zero in on the troubling proposal embedded in paragraph 146 of the final Youth Synod Document, recognizing it as part of a continuing effort by progressive forces within the Church to rid itself of criticism by shutting down conservative Catholic websites.

Many saw it as outlandish.

“Yeah, that’ll happen!” wrote Fr. John Zuhlsdorf in his Fr. Z’s Blog. “And guess who would be in charge of something like that.”

Zuhlsdorf predicted that such a measure would trigger the exact opposite effect, awakening a conservative sleeping giant, unleashing many more critical voices.

“If they want to know the meaning of total, unrestricted and asymmetrical warfare just try that,” he continued. “They won’t know what hit them.”


The Vatican Post Office, a twitter account that often offers humorous takes on Vatican missteps, immediately recognized the inherent danger in such a scheme and delivered a pithy, albeit stinging, response:

[SUPER DUPER NOTE!]

The Vatican is still reeling two months after former papal nuncio Carlo Maria Vigano published his first testimony revealing scandalous details about the hierarchy’s handling of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s decades of homosexual abuses against seminarians and adolescents.

Vigano’s truth-telling was viewed as a betrayal by progressive prelates who want to fully detoxify homosexuality and normalize it within the Church.

“Vatican leaders are now calling for Catholics on the Internet who do not meet their approval to be censored. The censorship would come in the denial of official certification from the Holy See,” explained Michael Voris at churchmilitant.com.

While details about how the process would work have not been disclosed, “What is clear is that leaders in the Vatican are feeling the heat and are concerned about continuing to lose control of their carefully constructed narrative,” said Voris.

Voris then offered a litany of important questions raised by the synod proposal:
● What would be the criteria for applying and being granted certification?
● How many sites would be eligible?
● Is the Vatican communications office sufficiently staffed with people fluent in multiple languages to review each website during the application?
● How frequently would the renewal process be triggered?
● Would a renewal process even exist?
● What would be the mechanism for revoking a "certification" already granted? (The presumption is that the certification would not be in perpetuity, but even that is a presumption.)
● Would "certification" apply to just postings designated as news, or would it extend to commentary?
● And if commentary would be included, would certifiers sitting in the Vatican communications basement be sufficiently trained in cultural nuances and social circumstances to render a verdict on the commentary?
● If a given commentary on a newsworthy issue were determined to be out of bounds by the Vatican toleration and certification police, would that one instance trigger an automatic revocation of the certification?
● If not, how many "chances" would be granted before the certification would be withdrawn?
[NAAAHHH... futile questions. None of those who voted for Prop 146 got as far as considering them at all because I bet the certification bit didn't even register on any of the 234 synodal fathers who voted YES, because if it did, who in his right mind would have voted YES to such a preoposterous and totally objectionable idea which is also totally impracticable???? Which the voter ought to have realized as soon as he read it - but, as I said, brain-dead after 146 previous propositions voted on and three weeks of tedious playing at "We're doing really significant work here to be able to accompany young people" - and the hell with saving their souls. Or any souls for that matter, including theirs.]

Pointing out that thousands of articles in many languages would have to be reviewed daily, Voris notes that a “behemoth” bureaucratic agency would have to be created to handle the workload.

Voris sees inclusion of the impractical proposal in the final synod document as a thinly veiled ploy. “The real reason any talk like this is being presented in official Church documents is because it creates the appearance that some Catholic sites are simply untrustworthy and should not be followed.”

The proposal comes just as other forces within the Church have launched campaigns to shut down conservative websites.

Jesuit Fr. James Martin recently “urged his nearly one million social media followers to get Facebook and Twitter to shut down LifeSite and Church Militant,” reported Austin Ruse, president of C-fam, in Crisis Magazine. “He also called on his followers to complain to their bishops. He, too, believes these groups must be silenced.”

“Fr. Martin charges that outfits like Church Militant and LifeSite are nothing more than social media mobs sent to harass the innocent,” continued Ruse. “However, counting Facebook and Twitter, Fr. Martin’s social media presence is twice the size of Church Militant, LifeSite, and Lepanto combined. And Martin has never hesitated to unleash this sometimes-threatening social media mob.”

“Making false charges is straight out of Fr. Martin’s playbook,” he added.
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I hope this new book calls attention to the stalled cause for Pius XII's beatification and eventual canonization. His chief postulator, Fr. Peter
Gumpel, has said that there are already several miracles attributable to Pius XII, including "one quite extraordinary one". What, then, is keeping
the Congregation for the Causes of Sainthood from seriously investigating these miracles? Benedict XVI declared Pius XII 'Venerable'
in 2009, based on the recommendation of a committee he named in 2005 to study records in the Vatican Archives having to do with Pius 'record'
on the Holocaust. But since then, there has been no movement on his cause - whereas, rather improbably, his secretary, who became Paul VI,
is now a saint. I hope the next pope returns prudence, sanity and reason to the 'saint-making' process which has become too ideological,
arbitrary and therefore, questionable and unsatisfactory.



Pope Pius XII: 'His tiara turned into a crown of thorns'
German historian and author Michael Hesemann argues that Pope Pius XII deserves beatification,
and even canonization, for what he did to save as many Jews as possible during the Holocaust

by Deborah Castellano Lubov

October 26, 2018

Pius XII was never “Hitler’s Pope,” as some have argued, but was instead Hitler’s strongest enemy, says historian Michael Hesemann after 10 years of research in the Vatican Secret Archives.

Hesemann laments that the pope, born Eugenio Pacelli, “is not even beatified.” The results of Dr. Hesemann’s studies have been published in German in the book Der Papst und der Holocaust; an English edition is expected soon. Hesemann says his intention with the book is “to kill the black legend of the Hitler’s Pope” and to further the cause for Pius XII’s beatification.

Catholic World Report recently spoke with Hesemann about his book and its subject.

Why you are so interested in Pius XII, and why did you decide to write a book about him?
This book is overdue, and so is the beatification of Pius XII. Most of his successors are already canonized; his “right hand,” Msgr. Montini, who later became Pope Paul VI, has his canonization next Sunday [Editor’s note: Since this interview took place, Pope Paul VI was canonized by Pope Francis on October 14]. I don’t question its legitimacy, not at all, but someone was missed; Pius XII, whose “heroic virtues” were promulgated by Benedict XVI in 2009, one of the greatest popes in Church history, is not even beatified yet.

Why is that, in your opinion?
His caUse is on ice, if you will, for political reasons, out of fear that Jewish groups might be upset and protest. This is absurd, since no pope in history did what Pius XII did, to save as many Jews as possible during the darkest hours of human history, the Holocaust. And this is what I prove in my book The Pope and the Holocaust.

What were your sources for the book
It is based on 10 years of research in the Vatican Secret Archives. Already, three weeks after the “Kristallnacht” — the pogrom night of November 9, 1938 — [Pius XII] initiated what, if successful, would have been the biggest rescue operation in history. He tried to get visas for 200,000 Jews when 230,000 were still living in Hitler’s Germany. Unfortunately, he did not succeed, due to a lack of cooperation of the Catholic nations, but over the next years at least 40,000 Jews were smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Central Europe with visas obtained by the Vatican, [with] tickets paid for by the Pope and, often enough, false papers including forged baptism certificates. Pius XII did everything he could to save as many Jews as possible.

What distinguishes your book on Pius XII from others on the same subject?
It is not a biography of Pius XII but a study on how the Pope and the Vatican reacted [to] the Holocaust. It includes an overview [of] all the documents I discovered myself in the Vatican Archives, dealing with the pontificate of his predecessor Pius XI, when Eugenio Pacelli, who later became Pius XII, was his Secretary of State, and an evaluation of the nearly 8,000 pages of documents already released and published by the Vatican on order of Paul VI in an 11-volume-edition which was completed in 1981 — and was, unfortunately, widely ignored by historians.

Besides, I show the important role Pius XII played in a conspiracy of German generals to overthrow Hitler, which eventually produced the “Valkyrie” coup d’etat of July 20, 1944, when Colonel von Stauffenberg tried to kill Hitler with a bomb placed underneath his desk.

What was the involvement of Pius XII in that operation?
The Pope blessed this plan and the conspirators, since it was the fastest way to end the slaughter of six million innocent men, women, and children and the most brutal war in history.

How does your new book help clear up incorrect perceptions of Pius XII?
It kills the “black legend” of “Hitler’s Pope,” of the Pope who was silent when six million Jews were slaughtered. Pius XII was not silent at all. Before the Germans occupied Rome in September 1943, he protested three times against the deportations and killings of Jews, namely in August 1941, at Christmas 1942, and in June 1943.

When he realized that public protest would not help anybody but only caused more brutal counter-reactions by the Nazis, he used diplomacy; we know of more than 40 diplomatic interventions trying to stop the deportations of the Jews not only in Germany, where his nuncio met with no success at all facing Hitler’s fanatic hate, but also in the vassal states of Nazi Germany, in Vichy-France, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Romania, and Bulgaria, where the representatives of the Pope had several successes, delaying or ending the transports of Jews to the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and Majdanek.

Do we know how many Jews survived the Holocaust thanks to an intervention of Pope Pius XII?
Indeed; [in my book] I show how 443,000 Jews were saved by delays or halts of deportations, and that an additional 463,000 Jews were saved because Romania, Bulgaria, and Italy (until 1943) refused to hand over “their” Jews to the Nazis after a diplomatic intervention of the Holy See and its diplomats.

Then, exactly 75 years ago, Hitler ordered the deportation of all 8,000 Roman Jews, and on October 16, 1943 the first roundup and arrest, of 1,259 persons, begun. When he learned about it in the early morning of that day, Pius XII immediately ordered the German Ambassador Von Weizsäcker to the Vatican, where his Secretary of State, Cardinal Maglione, threatened [Von Weizsäcker] with an open papal protest. But the ambassador refused to report this to Berlin.

Then what happened?
Knowing about Hitler’s order to occupy the Vatican and arrest the pope, Pius XII had a “plan B.” He sent his nephew, Carlo Pacelli, to an Austrian bishop residing in Rome, Msgr. Hudal, who had contacts [with] the German occupiers of Rome. Hudal wrote to the Nazi Commander of Rome, Major General Stahel, pointed to the consequences of a papal arrest, and convinced him to call Heinrich Himmler, requesting to stop the arrests. The “Reichsfuehrer” of the SS gave this order [to cease the arrests of Roman Jews], and 252 persons were released; “only” 1,007, instead of the 8,000 ordered by Hitler, were sent to Auschwitz. For the survivors, the Pope opened more than 200 Roman monasteries, convents, and the Vatican State, hiding more than 4,300 people during the next seven months. Since nobody in the Vatican knew that the 1,007 Roman Jews were sent to a death camp —the original order said they were to be sent as “hostages to Mauthausen,” a labor camp in Austria — for the next several months, the Vatican tried to learn more about their whereabouts and to send food and warm clothes to them; [however] most of them were killed in the gas chambers the day they arrived in Auschwitz.

What else does your book demonstrate?
It proves that Pius XII was never “Hitler’s Pope,” but [was] indeed Hitler’s strongest antagonist, his most efficient enemy; that [Pius XII] was not silent at all, and just did not wish to give a pretext for even more severe measures and repercussions by the Nazis. He realized that efficient help was more useful than public condemnations. His priority was to save as many Jews as possible.

Behind the scenes, he collaborated with conspiracies against the Nazis as…with the Allies to end the war as soon as possible. He even encouraged American Catholic soldiers to fight side by side with Stalin’s troops, saying that the war was not about their atheist communist ideology, but in defense of their Russian homeland occupied by the Nazis, and [was] therefore legitimate. His “nihil obstat” broke all American resistance against an alliance with Stalin to defeat Hitler and the Nazis.

What does your book show that hasn’t been published before?
A great part of the documents I quote in my book were either never before published — like the ones I discovered myself in the Vatican Archives — or come from the abovementioned collection of nearly 8,000 pages of documents, published by the Vatican on order of Pope Paul VI.

This is a rather absurd fact: although everybody blames the Vatican for “not opening the Archives,” it is widely ignored that the most important documents were already published. Well, the Vatican made a little mistake. Paul VI was a Francophile and had ordered Father Blet, a French Jesuit, to edit and [include commentary for] this collection, the Actes et documents du Saint Siege relatifs a la Seconde Guerre mondiale, in French. Unfortunately, the most eminent Holocaust historians are mostly English, American, or Israeli. For sure, they know some German, but certainly many of them don’t read French. The result was that a true treasure of historical documents was widely ignored.

I myself waited for 10 years to get access to the “closed section” of the archives. I work with an American Jewish organization, the Pave the Way Foundation, specializing in inter-religious dialogue, which greatly supported me during my research. For several times we met with the Secretaries of State of the Holy See, first Cardinal Bertone, then Cardinal Parolin, and were always assured that it was only a question of months until the archives would open. I waited and waited, but nothing happened. At the same time, those who know assured me that 90 percent of all relevant documents were already published in those eleven volumes.

I started to read and evaluate them and found out that they indeed deliver a coherent picture of what happened: we might not have all stones of the mosaic, but 90 percent are enough to create a clear picture. This is what I tried in my book. When one day the archives open [to the general public], I might add some details here and there — but the overall reconstruction of the events will still be valid.

Those documents show us a completely different Pius XII than the black legend which, as we know today, was created and promoted by the Soviet KGB to interfere in the papal elections, the conclave of 1963. Thank God, it did not influence the cardinals, but it darkened the image of Pius XII. Now we have all the facts together to clear his memory and to show Pope Pacelli as he really was: a man who scrupulously tried everything to save as many human lives as possible during the greatest humanitarian crisis in history…

That’s why I say clearly that the Church has nothing to fear. The lies about Pius XII have 'disturbed' the reconciliation of Catholics and Jews. The truth about him can only bring them together.

Could this help with leading toward his canonization? Opening the archives?

Hesemann: I hope so. I had a long discussion with the Pope’s (Francis, not Pius) Jewish friend, Rabbi Abraham Skorka, a wonderful man, but on one point we did not agree. He thinks that Pius XII should have protested more loudly, should have openly condemned Hitler — this, Skorka said, “was his prophetic duty.” “Even if that would have costed tens of thousands of human — of Jewish — lives?”,I objected. “Yes, it was his duty,” the rabbi insisted.

I can’t agree. The Jewish Talmud teaches us that he who saves one human life, saves an entire world. Pius XII saved nearly a million Jewish lives. A public gesture would have destroyed all possibilities to help them. To say it frankly: Pius XII did not want to buy the applause of the free world or future generations with the blood of innocent Jews or Catholics. For him, saving lives was his priority and highest moral duty.

Do you hope to see Pius XII beatified?
He deserves beatification and even canonization more than any pope of the 20th Century, since his tiara had indeed turned into a crown of thorns. I hope that my book, that the facts I document, convince all skeptics to change their opinion.

Regarding the archives, the earlier they are opened, the better. It is already documented what Pope Pius XII did to save nearly a million Jews. And I am sure, not too many additional historians would even come and do research themselves, after they find out that 90 percent of all-important documents have already been published, and can be consulted even on the Internet. But it is important to open the archives to the public as a symbolic act: To convince the world, including the Jewish community, that the Vatican indeed has nothing to hide.

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'...And deliver us from evil. Amen.

Many thanks to Christopher Ferrara for compiling this overview of the Bergoglian modus operandi for imposing the church of Bergoglio onto the one true Church of Christ by abusing the powers and authority of the head of the Roman Catholic Church which a majority of misguided cardinal electors chose him to be in March 2013. It is something that longtime critics of Bergoglio's hubris have long and lengthily commented on separately or collectively, but this needed to be written down as a bulleted list - a ten-point plan, in this case - to be better understood at a glance by casual followers of Church news and Catholics who still have any modicum of conviction that this pope is not, in truth and in fact, anti-Catholic.

The Synod as 'the arm of Leviathan'
by Christopher Ferrara

November 1, 2018

Over the past five years [and seven months, going on eight), Jorge Mario Bergoglio, as Pope Francis, has perfected the modus operandi by which he proposes to remake the Church according to his liking [and 'in his image and likeness', as I always like to say!]

Recall, in that regard, the stunning admission of Father Thomas Rosica, English-language attaché of the Vatican Press Office, that with Francis we now have a Church “openl'r even its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture…”

And this absolute dictator, Rosica further declares (or better: exults) “breaks Catholic traditions whenever he wants” because he is “free from disordered attachments.” Disordered attachments, that is, to perennial Catholic teaching and practice, commonly known collectively as Tradition.

The modus operandi follows this ten-point plan:

(1) determine which Catholic tradition will be broken and then call a Synod to provide cover for the break;

(2) stage-manage the Synod from start to finish, stacking its voting membership with bishops sympathetic to the break;

(3) produce a “Final Document” that purports to represent the Synod’s decisions, but which is pre-written by the Synod controllers installed by Francis, who insert whatever “goodies” Francis would like to see, whether or not the Synod Fathers actually discussed them;

(4) strew the Final Document with poison pills in the form of ambiguities opening the way to the planned break with Tradition;

(5) rush the Synod Fathers into voting for the windy, absurdly verbose and impossible-to-digest Final Document on the Synod’s last day, providing review copies only in Italian;

(6) declare the entire sham a work of the Holy Ghost no one may question;

(7) follow up with implementation of the “decisions of the Synod” — meaning the decisions of Francis — including an “Apostolic Exhortation” that exhorts the break with Tradition;

(8) remind everyone forcefully that Francis, who “humbly” depicted himself as merely “the Bishop of Rome” on the night of his election, is really the Supreme Pontiff, who must be obeyed even if he flatly contradicts every one of his predecessors (e.g., by authorizing Holy Communion for public adulterers or by declaring the death penalty an immoral attack on human dignity despite 2,000 years of contrary Church teaching);

(9) announce that the Catholic Church is now “a synodal Church” and stay tuned for the next synodal bulletin from “the Spirit”;

(10) condemn as Pharisees and rigorists, in league with the Great Accuser, anyone who objects to the “decisions of the Synod” or the corruption, including sodomy, rife among Francis’s inner circle of Synod managers and other Tradition-breaking co-conspirators, including the head of his very household [Mons Ricca, that is, manager of Casa Santa Marta], caught in flagrante delicto with a young man in a malfunctioning elevator.

This would be a preposterously elaborate joke if it weren’t exactly the truth about our unprecedented situation in the midst of this incredible pontificate.

In his masterwork 'Leviathan', a defense of the absolute authority of the civil ruler even over matters of right and wrong, Thomas Hobbes wrote:

This is the Generation of that great Leviathan, or rather (to speak more reverently) of that Mortal God, to which we owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defense. The “major part” having chosen the sovereign and thus given birth to the mortal god of the State, “he that dissented must now consent with the rest… or else be justly destroyed by the rest.” [Cfr. Leviathan, II 17, 18]


Today, in the Church, the “major part” of a conclave having chosen Francis, we are told that we must obey without question “the mortal god” whose own publicity apparatus has repeatedly called him “the successor of Christ.” But, perhaps even worse than Hobbes’s vision, “the Immortal God,” including His Sixth Commandment [and his Second and his Eighth - repeatedly and personally], appears to have been forgotten under the reign of this mortal one, and anyone who opposes him must be destroyed. [Just to underscore Bergoglio's frequent and flagrant personal violations of the Decalogue: The Second Commandment is "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord they God in vain'; and the Eighth Commmandment is "Thou shalt not bear false witness...", or as Der Spiegel flatly puts it, "THOU SHALT NOT LIE".]

From which dystopian catastrophe may God, through the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, soon deliver His Holy Church.

In the past several months, George Weigel - an early enthusiast of Jorge Bergoglio, whom he held up as the pope who would realize Weigel's vision of 'evangelical Catholicism' - has not held back on his criticisms for many aspects of this pontificate, especially as it has to do with governance overall, and more specifically, with how it has failed to deal decisively with this year's raging forest fire on clerical/episcopal sex abuse scandal - the worst yet since this monster first reared into the world's eye back in 2002 - and lately, the so-called 'youth synod'. Remarkably, however, he has managed never to direct any of his criticism at the pope himself - as though he were not the actual deus ex machina of everything Weigel criticizes. And BTW, where's the Catholicism at all in what his hoped-for apostle of 'evangelical Catholicism'??? Weigel wrote about the 'youth synod' almost daily for the Catholic Herald's roundup of news and commentary on the synod. The following is his concluding article.It is a no less devastating critique for all that it avoids blaming the pope directly.

Concluding unscientific post-scripts
to the recent synodal assembly on 'youth'

by George Weigel

October 29, 2018

The fifteenth ordinary general assembly of the Synod of Bishops, convened by Pope Francis to reflect on “Youth, the Faith, and Vocational Discernment,” is now history – unless you subscribe to an extreme notion of “synodality,” advanced by some bishops last week, which hints at an ongoing synodal process that will presumably include, in due course, the Parousia, the Last Judgment, and the Wedding Feast of the Lamb.

Some good things happened in Rome this past month. [OK, let's hear the 'good news' first.]
-Catholics from all over the world got to know each other’s stories and experiences, which helps shake all of us out of our comfort zones.
- Catholicism today is genuinely “catholic” in the sense of “universal” or “global,” and to live that, not just think or read about it, is a bracing and revivifying experience of solidarity.
- It can also be sobering, as when you’re told by an impressive African bishop that one of his seminarians was recently murdered and that he’s had to close several parishes because of the threat of massacres when large groups gather in his strife-torn country, Cameroon.
- Synods are also opportunities for catching-up with friends in the great Catholic family.
- There was even some serious reflection on what makes for effective evangelization of young adults: [Yup, something relevant to the supposed synodal theme.] in the Synod’s language-based discussion groups, in some eloquent interventions in the synodal general congregations, and in the Synod’s “Off Broadway” venues, including restaurants, coffee bars, and in more than one wonderful Roman gelateria. (I think it a safe bet that no one loses weight at a Synod, despite a lot of walking around.) [Wrong term, Mr Weigel. You must have meant 'walking together'. Please be mindful of the Bergoglio lexicon!]

These affairs always take time to digest, so what follows is a mosaic of impressions that I hope will give readers of these LETTERS a little more sense of what happened during Synod-2018 and what it might portend for the Church’s immediate future.

The Smuggler Synod?
In 449, Emperor Theodosius II summoned an ecumenical council, which was to be led at Ephesus by Patriarch Dioscorus I of Alexandria. The Church was bitterly divided over complex theological questions of the relationship between the human and the divine in Christ: “monophysites” held that Christ had only a divine nature for which his humanity was a kind of disguise, while the anti-monophysites affirmed two natures, divine and human, in the one divine person of Christ – the formula eventually adopted by the Council of Chalcedon in 451 after an intervention by Pope Leo the Great.

Theodosius’s council was a failure, as many bishops declined to attend; and ever since, what was intended to be “Ephesus II” has been known in much of the Christian world as the “Robber Council,” or “Robber Synod.”

It is an open question whether this month’s exercise will come to be known as the “Smuggler Synod.” For there was a lot of smuggling going on before and during Synod-2018.

The smuggling began in the Synod’s preparatory phase. A “pre-Synod” meeting of young people in March 2018 was thoroughly rigged, according to the accounts of some brave souls who were there because the Synod managers either misidentified them or wanted them as cover.

Working sessions were conducted long into the night, the goal being to get inserted into the meeting’s final document a number of progressive Catholic approaches to human sexuality. One discussion group leader banned an opening prayer before the group’s meetings – what had been proposed was a joint recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, and the Doxology – saying that this might make the non-Catholics present uncomfortable.

The Synod managers and the new Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life trumpeted this meeting as a great advance in “listening;” it was an exercise in manipulation and spin.

Then there was the Synod’s Instrumentum Laboris, or working document. Into it was smuggled the phrase “LGBT youth,” which had not appeared in the pre-Synod meeting’s reports, claims by Synod general secretary Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri notwithstanding.
- Other language more redolent of the New York Times op-ed page than the Catechism of the Catholic Church got smuggled into the Instrumentum Laboris, which also included a lot of mind-numbing, down-market sociology, organized in what one Synod father described as a “manic-depressive” schema that lauded young adults on one hand and then lamented the sour state of everything (including young adults) on the other.

The auditors appointed for the Synod – lay people, in the main, and many of them young adults – were carefully chosen (or smuggled in) to reflect the priorities of the Synod managers. Smuggled out, so to speak, were representatives of successful, global young adult initiatives like FOCUS and the World Youth Alliance.

Thomas Andronie, one of the Official Young Adults and head of the lavishly funded official youth organization of the German Church, gave a blistering speech in a synodal general congregation in which he essentially proposed reconstructing Catholicism as Lutheranism.

Unofficial young adults, orthodox and vibrantly evangelical, had an impact “Off Broadway,” but their virtual exclusion from the Synod’s official proceedings was an example of the smugglers erecting a Trumpian wall around the Synod’s official work, presumably for fear of ideological contamination.

The smugglers really got their act into high gear in the Synod’s last week. As Cardinal Oswald Gracias, the archbishop of Mumbai, and Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the archbishop of Westminster, both noted with some vigor, there had been very little discussion of “synodality” in the Instrumentum Laboris, in the general congregations, or in the Synod’s discussion groups; and there was no serious push for including a lengthy discussion of this seemingly arcane topic in the Synod’s draft final report.

But presto! There it was, and it elicited a spirited debate between the proponents of “synodality” (who never seemed to be able to define precisely what that meant, besides a lot more meetings for everyone – or chosen everyones – to attend), and those who objected on several grounds:
- that the concept was theologically nebulous, susceptible of manipulation, and in tension with the teaching of Vatican II on the role of bishops in the Church;
- that a discussion of “synodality,” whatever it meant, had nothing to do with Synod-2018’s topic, “Youth, the Faith, and Vocational Discernment;” and
- that, as “synodality” hadn’t been a major issue in the general congregations and discussion groups, it shouldn’t figure prominently in the final report. Was another agenda being smuggled into the Synod at the last minute?

And then there was the draft final report’s claim, in nomine synodalitatis (as it were) that the Final Final Report was to be read in continuity with the Instrumentum Laboris, which in previous Synods had been deemed (and by Cardinal Baldisseri, no less) as the “seed” that “dies” so that the final report might be born.
- This struck more than one Synod father as an attempt to smuggle into a now-expanded Synod work product (i.e., the Final Final Report + the Instrumentum Laboris + who’s knows what else) the “LGBT” language that had been severely criticized in the Synod’s general congregation sand discussion groups, as well as other notions dear to the Synod managers.

And why was a document (the Instrumentum Laboris) that had been staff-prepared being granted some sort of permanent and authoritative status in a Synod of Bishops? Vigorous opposition led to this absurd notion of a working document incorporated as an interpretive device into an ongoing synodal process being modified in the Really Final Draft Final Report [RFDFR], which only spoke of the “diversity and complementarity” of the Instrumentum Laboris and the Final Report.

Local-Option Catholicism?
As discussion of the “synodality” paragraphs in the RFDFR intensified in the Synod’s last forty-eight hours, Anglophone and African bishops began to sense that the rude beast slouching through the Synod’s final week, wearing a sandwich-board identifying it as “Synodality,” might signify an effort by the Synod managers, presumably with the acquiescence of the Pope, to remake the Catholicism of the future into a local-option federation of national or regional Churches with differing (and perhaps even conflicting) theologies and pastoral practices.

To bend toward the charitable for a moment, it’s just conceivable that at least some proponents of “synodality” may be trying to give a new expression to the diversity of charismatic gifts in the Church described by St. Paul in the first reading at Mass on the Synod’s last working day:

And he gave some as Apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers, to equip the holy ones for the work of ministry, for building up the Body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of faith and knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood to the extent of the full stature of Christ… [Ephesians 4:11-13].


In other words, some proponents of “synodality” may be imagining that that this often-vague concept is a response to the complexity of a Church in which
1) all the baptized are recipients Holy Spirit’s gifts and thus “protagonists” of the Church’s life;
2) there is episcopal governance by Christ’s will; and
3) there is a pope with supreme authority, also by Christ’s will.

No serious student of either theology or history will deny that there have been different and legitimate attempts to “order” this complexity over two millennia, some of them more successful than others in advancing the Church’s essential mission of evangelization.

So discussion of how to keep all those moving parts moving in the same direction is welcome – as long as it is open and honest. But those are precisely the qualities missing from the rushed discussion of “synodality” at Synod-2018.
- The topic was smuggled into the Draft Final Report after virtually no discussion in the Synod itself;
- The voting on the relevant sections of the Really Final Draft Final Report on Saturday was marred by the Synod general secretary’s refusal to have the third part of the RFDFR translated before the vote; and
- The impression was thus created that this entire business was being bulldozed through by the Synod managers in a thoroughly, er, unsynodal manner.

Moreover, the references to multiple tiers of “synodality” in the RFDFR and thus the approved Final Report seemed to some bishops – again, Anglophones and Africans – to open the door to local-option Catholicism. [Wasn't that door already thrown wide open by Bergoglio starting with his 'cunning' footnore in AL??? The horse of local-option Catholicism has been out of the barn and running through the episcopates of the world since AL was published.]

Thus the Extraordinary Synod on Amazonia next year could “synodally” decide that ordaining mature married men (viri probati) to the priesthood was pastorally important and request the Pope’s approval of that practice, which the Pope would then give in recognition of the principle of “synodality.”

Or the German bishops’ conference (perhaps joined by the Austrian and Belgian bishops’ confererences) could “synodally” decide to have some form of liturgical blessing for so-called “same-sex marriages,” which practice would also receive a nihil obstat from the Bishop of Rome, recognizing those local Churches’ “synodal” authority.

And before long, the Catholic Church would have been deconstructed into a simulacrum of the Anglican Communion, a lot of which is dying from, among other things, a surfeit of “synodality.” ['Before long'? Is that deconstruction not long under way starting with Evangelium gaudium and its dictum that the pope could grant episcopal conferences autonomy on doctrinal statements? See, this pope has been piling up one incremental change after another that even his most efficient critics tend to lose track of what has gone before in their outrage over whatever the latest Bergogian madness happens to be!]

Against charges sure to emerge from the portside of the Barque of Peter, it must be underscored that these are not the concerns of Ultra-Traditionalists at war with Vatican II. Rather, they are the entirely legitimate concerns of some of the Church’s most dynamic bishops, all of whom are proponents of the New Evangelization. What they see in this local-option Catholicism is a prescription for utter incoherence leading to evangelical failure.

The Magic Kingdom against itself
Denizens of the Holy See and friendly observers sometimes refer to the reality inside the Leonine Wall as the “Magic Kingdom,” a gentle dig at the Vatican’s sometimes puzzling ways. During Synod-2018, however, the Holy See sometimes seemed to be working against itself, one hand not knowing what the other was doing.

One example of this was the Draft Final Report’s use of the language of “sexual orientation,” which strikes many Americans as a merely descriptive phrase, but which has a very different valence or connotation in international organizations where the Holy See is determined to play a role.

For years, Vatican representatives have worked hard to keep “sexual orientation” out of international treaties, covenants, reports, etc., because they know that this usage opens the door to international legal approval of (and insistence on) so-called “same-sex marriage,” transgenderism, and so forth.

Yet here was that very same language in a draft Synod final report, and no complaint seems to have been heard from the Secretariat of State [or from the pope's critics, either, who found so much else to rant against about this synod that this 'minutia' of Vatican incoherence had escaped them]. Had there been a change in Vatican policy, such that the Holy See now had no objection to the use of the language of “sexual orientation?” If so, why? And if not, why didn’t Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Secretary of State, explain why this language had long been considered a red flag by the Vatican? [There probably is an effective change in Vatican policy on this, but thus far undeclared - and if this is so, Parolin or any of his fellow paladins for Bergoglio would not call attention to this, would they? But just watch what the Vatican representatives say officially at UN gatherings.]

Criticism of this usage from other quarters led to its being modified in the Really Final Draft Final Report. But the sense that there is a disturbing degree of chaos behind the Leonine Walls these days was reinforced.

Another instance of a lack of coordination (not to mention oversight by the Secretariat of State) involved the RFDFR’s rejection of “all forms of….discrimination” against people who experience same-sex attraction.

The sentiment is unexceptionable but the language, as one Anglophone bishop consistently pointed out, was dangerous and the text should deplore “all forms of….unjust discrimination.” Why? Because, the bishops explained [and contrary to the slogan by the 'Who am I to judge' pope], bishops have to make all sorts of “discriminations” or judgment calls in their ministry, [Hear that, Your Holiness, Bishop of Rome???] e.g., in choosing teachers for Catholic schools.

Suppose a teacher in a Catholic school files a civil suit claiming “discrimination” because he or she has been relieved of their position after entering into a same-sex “marriage;” would that person not be able to cite the Synod’s final report in his or her favor, unless the report distinguished between legitimate, prudential choices and “unjust discrimination?”

These may seem minor points, but they are quite real in everyday pastoral life, and the fact that that’s not recognized says that Those In Charge are not as on-the-ball as they should be.

Previous engagements
A great deal was made of the fact that two bishops from the People’s Republic of China, Guo Jincai and Yang Xiaoting, would be attending a Synod of Bishops for the first łtime.

Both bishops had once been excommunicate (one as recently as mid-September), because they had been illicitly ordained. They were warmly welcomed by Pope Francis in his homily at the Synod’s opening Mass, and proponents of the Vatican’s recent deal with the Chinese government on the appointment of bishops lauded the two Chinese bishops’ presence as a first fruit of that arrangement and a step toward the deeper unity of the Church.

Then, after ten days or so, the Chinese bishops left, pleading previous engagements at home. One could only wonder what those engagements might be. [I don't think this was publicized at all!!! Imagine that!]

It then turned out that the two bishops had been proposed by the Chinese communist party (which now has supervisory responsibility for religious bodies in China) and then accepted by the Vatican. That sequence, plus their premature departure, seemed to signal that the “first fruit” of the new Vatican/China deal might be a bit rotten, as many had feared.

One also wonders what impression all this made on young adults in China who are pondering the Catholic Church and its message. If the message conveyed by this subplot is that the Church is another puppet of the Chinese communist party and the Chinese government, it is difficult to see how evangelization in China will be advanced among the young people who were supposed to be the Synod’s primary concern.

Meanwhile, within ten days of the bishops’ return to China, the Chinese authorities destroyed the Marian Shrine of Our Lady of Sorrows in Dongergou (Shanxi province) and Our Lady of Bliss, also called Our Lady of the Mountain, in Anlong (Guizhou province). No word has yet been received from Bishop Marcello Sanchez Sorondo, Chancellor of the Pontifical Academies, on whether these demolitions have caused him to reconsider his description of China as a country that brilliantly embodies Catholic social doctrine.

Cleaning the slate, or The Missing Pope
At a dinner during the Synod’s final week, the Polish bishops at Synod-2018 – Stanisław Gądecki, archbishop of Poznań, and Grzegorz Ryś, archbishop of Łódż – wondered aloud why there was no reference in the draft final report to the teaching or experience of John Paul II, the most successful papal youth minister in modern history and the author of the Theology of the Body, Catholicism’s most developed (and persuasive) answer to the claims of the sexual revolution.

Similar questions were posed to me by Cardinal Kamimierz Nycz and his auxiliaries when I met with them in Warsaw during a brief visit there during the Synod. Thanks to an amendment proposed by the two Poles, the Theology of the Body did get a mention in the Really Final Draft Final Report (as did the Catechism of the Catholic Church). Still, the questions the archbishops raised were not misplaced, and one possible answer to them sheds further light on the Church’s immediate future.

The first thing to be noticed about this attempted airbrushing is that it is quite out of character in high-level Church documents. Vatican II made copious references to the magisterium of previous popes, especially Pius XII. In their magisterium, John Paul II and Benedict XVI made similar, extensive references to the work of their predecessors.

This was not simply a question of good manners; it had a serious theological purpose, which was to demonstrate that, even as the Church’s thinking and teaching develops, that developed thought is in continuity with what has gone before, even as the Church’s experience and reflection leads it to draw new meanings from the treasure chest of the Deposit of Faith. [Good! About time someone pointed out that this pope is guilty of the most arrant bad manners - and as I have remarked before, his late grandmother, whom he credits all the time for having raised him, must be haunting him in his dreams for forgetting all about 'good manners and right conduct' that I am sure she would have tried to inculcate in him. Being pope, in this case, is no guarantee the pope-person will always be mindful of something as basic as that. Heck, if he even flagrantly violates three of the Ten Commandments habitually, would he be likely to obey his dead grandmother when he defies God himself? ]

This now seems to have stopped.
- Amoris Laetitia, the apostolic exhortation completing the work of the Synods of 2014 and 2015, only quoted John Paul’s apostolic exhortation on marriage and the family, Familiaris Consortio, in a bowdlerized form.
- John Paul’s encyclical on the renewal of Catholic moral theology, Veritatis Splendor, has virtually disappeared in the present pontificate.
- Now comes Synod-2018, which struck concerned Synod fathers as a deliberate attempt to marginalize the pope who reinvented Catholic young adult ministry in his extensive pilgrimages and in the phenomenon of World Youth Day (which other Synod fathers actually proposed eliminating).

No one is entirely sure what is going on here. But it is not beyond the bounds of propriety to suggest that, in today’s Rome, there is a devaluing of continuity coupled with a misunderstanding of the development of doctrine and a fascination with papal autocracy. [Weigel constructsthe statement in a way that avoids having to identify who is 'misunderstanding' and 'being fascinated'- everything points back to Bergoglio, but Weigel can't bring himself to do that so far.]
- More-than-hints of that were already evident at Synod-2014 and Synod-2015, and one prominent proponent of Pope Francis’s style of governance has even suggested that his “discernment” is independent of Scripture and tradition – a species of ultramontanism that would make Henry Edward Manning and Alfredo Ottaviani blush.
- The problem has now come into clearer focus, and it was deeply disturbing to more than a few of the bishops at Synod-2018.

On just not getting it
The Synod’s final report has a very weak statement on the sexual abuse crisis and its deadening effects on the evangelization of young adults, despite strenuous efforts from Anglophone bishops to get the Synod to make a strong statement of apology and contrition and a pledge of serious reform.

The pushback against this came from, among others, Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, the Synod’s general secretary, but it also reflected the obtuseness of Vatican officials and Latin American bishops who continue to insist against all the evidence that much of this crisis is a media-generated attack on the Church.

The weak statement makes itself even weaker by identifying only one causal factor – clericalism – in the sexual abuse of the young by priests and bishops. To be sure, “clericalism” in the sense of a warped idea of sacerdotal or episcopal power, and “clericalism” in the sense of a caste protecting its own, are both involved in this crisis.

But over the past few months, the diagnosis of “clericalism” as the root malady here has too often been a means of dodging the hard, empirical fact that the overwhelming majority of this abuse in the U.S. (and, it seems elsewhere) has involved sexually dysfunctional clergy preying on young men.

That form of denial is unworthy of a Synod and will likely make it more difficult to address clericalism, the burning issue of chastity in Holy Orders (and indeed in all states of life in the Church), and the crisis of confidence in Church leadership to which too many in Rome seem determinedly oblivious.

The New Evangelization vs. The Museum
Several contributors to these LETTERS [the Herald feature devoted daily to the synod during its three-week run] have remarked on the fault line in the Church between bishops confident in the power of the Gospel and committed to its unambiguous proclamation, and bishops who seem to have been worn down by the Zeitgeist of the post-modern West and are seeking some sort of truce or accommodation with the reigning cultural powers.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the former are from the living parts of the Church, while the latter, in the main, come from those sectors of the world Church where Catholic practice has been dying for decades. One hopes that the experience of spending a month with the former will energize the latter.

But when one hears a bishop saying that secularization is a good thing because it gets us out of the mindset that Catholicism can be genetically transmitted, one’s hopes start to flag.

I’ve spent the better part of the last decade arguing that Catholicism-by-osmosis is over, and that friendship with Jesus Christ has to be proposed and offered; but that doesn’t mean I think the kind of aggressive secularization one sees in, say, parts of western Europe or Québec is on the side of the angels. Those pressures are only “helpful” if they’re met by bold, confident evangelization that also pushes back against attempts to drive believers to the margin of society.

A month in Rome also sheds light on another facet of this fault line between the emboldened and the beaten-down, and that is laziness – what I came to think of as the Museum Complex during my work in the Eternal City on Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches.

I was reminded of it during the Synod’s first week when I was near Piazza del Popolo for lunch with two friends. I was a bit early, so I strolled up the Corso to that magnificent square. There are five churches in the immediate vicinity (meaning within two square blocks or so), and every one of them (including those with some splendid Caravaggios) was locked tight at 1 p.m. and would remain so for the next three or four hours. A friend to whom I commented on this replied that Santa Maria del Popolo is “almost never open.”

I had the same experience in the Piazza Santi Apostoli last week. Walking toward the world’s best rigatoni carbonara at the Ristorante Abruzzi, I had hoped to be able to pray for a few moments at the Basilica of the Twelve Holy Apostles. It was locked tight at 1 p.m. (having been closed by then for an hour) and wouldn’t re-open until 4 p.m..

During those four hours, like up the Corso at Piazza del Popolo, hundreds if not thousands of tourist and shoppers would pass attractive and historic churches – none of which would open its doors in welcome to them, suggesting the possibility of prayer.

It’s the Museum Complex at its worst: the Church as custodian of an architectural and artistic patrimony, rather than the Church as evangelizer.

Given the Italian passion for pranzo (long lunch) and the post-luncheon riposo (siesta), I could imagine these churches being closed for an hour or two. But four hours? What does that say about the Roman Church’s idea of itself? Has the Vicariate of Rome gotten the memo about the New Evangelization? What is happening to Pope Francis’s idea of a “Church permanently in mission” in his own diocese?

'The most disliked man in Rome?
It really is time for Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, the 78-year old General Secretary of the Synod of Bishops, to hang up his spurs.

After an initial show of bonhomie on the Synod’s first working day, Cardinal Baldisseri reverted to the petulant style that has marked his interactions with members of both the Synod general council and each Synod’s working commissions since his appointment five years ago.
- His intransigent refusal to have documents translated into languages other than Italian is both an obstacle to real discussion and a means of manipulation and control.
- He consistently refused to let members of Synod-2018’s drafting commission have draft materials in electronic form, complaining about “leaks” from English-speakers.
- He stormed out of a meeting of this synod’s communication commission after a heated discussion of translations, saying on his way out the door that “Next time it will all be in Latin!”
- As noted above, he would not provide translations of the key third part of the Really Final Draft Final Report (which included the most extensive discussion of “synodality”), and no one thought this simply a matter of time-pressure.
- Further, and as also noted previously, he resisted a strong statement on clerical sexual abuse and episcopal malfeasance in the RFDFR, seemingly clueless about the gravity of the crisis throughout the world Church.

None of this contributes to comity or collegiality; and whatever 'synodality' means, it isn’t advanced by such boorish behavior. The cardinal’s aggressive stubbornness is also an insult to bishops who are every bit as much successors of the apostles as Baldisseri, but whom he nonetheless treats as if they were refractory kindergarteners, especially when they insist that they know their situations better than Baldisseri does (as on the abuse crisis).

If Pope Francis is serious about making the Synod of Bishops work better, he will thank Lorenzo Baldisseri for his services and bring in a new general secretary – right away. [Good luck with that! Remember that one of Bergoglio's immediate decisions after having been elected pope - besides declining to wear the pope's official mozzetta and stole for his first appearance to the world - was to give Baldisseri, inexplicably, a prominent place next to him on the loggia and unofficially naming him a cardinal then and there.]

After the exhaustion
The Synod process seems designed to wear everyone down, thus making it easier for the Synod’s mandarins to get their way. [Are we surprised? That's all part of the master strategy by Bergoglio and his zombies to get their way, whatever it costs.]

So it’s not surprising that there’s a sense of deflation at the end of Synod-2018. There are also more than a few worries about how the Church is going to weather the rough seas into which it is being steered. [By whom, Weigel will not of course say.]

Still, there was some very good work done here this past month. [Now, it's time to whistle in the dark!]
- New networks of conversation and collaboration were built.
- Nothing completely egregious got into the Final Report, thanks to some hard and effective work. [Footnote 161 in AL was not 'completely egregious', exactly - making it a footnote was intended to avoid that. But it was the burden of the whole document - the poison pill in an otherwise elaborate confectioner's cake of pious platitudes from known Church teaching. Someone should start seriously listing down the 'egregiously deceptive' elements of that Final Report.]
- New Catholic leaders emerged on the world stage. [Who? I have to get myself informed on that one!]
- And there were, as always, many experiences of fellowship, and the grace that flows from the Holy Spirit through solidarity in a great cause.

In that sense I’ve been glad to have been here. And like others, I suspect, I’m grateful that Synod-2018 has given me a clearer understanding that business-as-usual is not an adequate model for the next months and years of Catholic life.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/11/2018 22:06]
02/11/2018 23:21
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Utente Gold
I think Mr Altieri meant an attitude of 'couldn't care less' when he uses the word 'carelessness' in his headline and article. 'Carelessness' is the opposite of carefulness, but in the context of the article, it really means 'unconcern' on the part of the Vatican... I thank him for putting together the facts about these three US bishops, each accused of a different transgression having to do with the ongoing and worsening sex-abuse crisis. I did not want to be reporting piecemeal as their stories develop...


The Vatican’s carelessness is on display as new US scandals break
The cases of Bishops Holley, Malone, and Jenik indicate
a new phase of unconcern on the part of Church leaders

by Christopher R. Altieri

November 1, 2018


Si cela vous plaît, très Saint Père, pouvons-nous avoir notre Visite Apostolique maintenant? [If it is all right with you, Most Holy Father, can we pleace have our Apostolic Visitation now?]

The US and Roman theaters of the crisis in the Catholic Church have entered a new phase of carelessness [unconcern!]
- for the reputations of men who may or may not have done grave wrong;
- for the right of Christians of every age and sex and state of life to know the truth; and
- for the good of the Church.

That we are entered upon such a phase is amply attested by the removal of Bishop Martin D. Holley from the See of Memphis; the allegations that Bishop Richard Malone of Buffalo covered up for priests accused of abuse; and the revelation that the Vatican was informed as early as 1994 about the strange proclivities of the disgraced former archbishop of Washington, DC, “Uncle Ted” McCarrick.

Now, we learn that another bishop — New York’s 74-year-old auxiliary John Jenik — has a “credible and substantiated” allegation against him. The allegation reportedly concerns incidents that date back many years, and involves a victim who was a minor at the time.

The Archdiocese of New York has offered no further details, though the New Yok Times on Wednesday reported that the victim is 52-year-old Michael Meenan, who was 13 at the time the alleged abusive relationship began.

Meenan has also complained of abuse committed in 1984 by his religion teacher at Fordham Prep; he received compensation for the incident in 2016. Meenan told the New York Times he brought his allegation against Bishop Jenik to the archdiocese in January; he says the archdiocesan review board interviewed him last week.

Bishop Jenik wrote a letter to the parishioners of Our Lady of Refuge parish, where he has been pastor for more than 30 years. He denied the allegations, of course. In fairness, “credible and substantiated” is a low standard: it basically comes to mean the allegation is not manifestly false, and is capable in principle of being investigated. Jenik also managed in his letter to mention his recent hip surgery, and his upcoming operation on the other hip.

In a letter of his own addressed to the parishioners of Our Lady of Refuge, the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, wrote, “Although Bishop Jenik continues to deny the accusation, loyal priest that he is, he has stepped aside from public ministry, and, as we await Rome’s review, may not function or present himself as a bishop or priest.”
- Why did it take the archdiocese 10 months to interview Meenan after he made his allegation against Bishop Jenik?
- Was the archdiocesan review board investigating the allegation, and if so, what was Bishop Jenik doing all these months while the investigation was underway?
- Was he under any sort of restrictions? If so, of what sort?
- When did the Archdiocese of New York inform Rome of the allegation against Bishop Jenik?
Those are just a few of the questions a minimally candid statement on the matter would answer. For that matter, the statement might have mentioned that Cardinal Dolan ordained Jenik a bishop in 2014. Did he ask Pope Francis specifically for Jenik as an auxiliary? [I must mention that there's a recent article out there accusing Cardinal Dolan of covering up some priest's sexual misconduct when Dolan was Archbishop of Milwaukee. Perhaps journalists should begin invetigating such accusations when they are made, instead of simply reporting them. If the accusation is serious enough, and not just petty harassment, someone should be able to uncover pertinent facts for or against Dolan.]

Any family in which the head of the household failed to disclose such pertinent information in similar circumstances would be fairly judged dysfunctional. Cardinal Dolan has said he is “impatient” with the Holy Father’s handling of the crisis. Now, it appears he has taken a page from the Vatican’s book.

The Vatican’s 'carelessness' is on display in the matter of Bishop Holley. A summary of all the claims and counter-claims in the Holley case would run to significant length. Suffice it to say that
- we know the Vatican cited a “management issue” in justification of Holley’s removal.
- The apostolic administrator appointed by Pope Francis to lead Memphis in the interim, Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, Kentucky, gave an interview to CWR in which he did not deny knowing more about the reason for Holley’s ouster, but only said, “I have to rely on statements of the Vatican about this; I can’t speak beyond that.”

Archbishop Kurtz demurred when CWR asked him whether Bishop Holley’s removal is unusual, and took care to explain that he is not in Memphis as an investigator or a fixer: “I can’t comment on how unusual it is, other than to say that sometimes there are changes. As I told the people in Memphis, my task is not to deal with what went on before this change, but what is happening presently.”

One reason for the Vatican’s caginess regarding Holley’s removal may be a general reluctance to be seen as managing too closely the affairs of ordinary ecclesiastical jurisdictions; such behavior does not appear to comport well with the Vatican’s claims — behind which it has successfully shielded itself from civil liability in abuse cases — that bishops are not agents or employees of the Holy See in any legally pertinent sense.

The real reason behind Holley’s ouster may be so grave that the bishop of Memphis could not be allowed to stay one more day in his See, and the danger to the Church so sinister that disclosure of even a part of the reason would further imperil her.

If it is not, then the refusal to disclose the reasons for Holley’s removal is, at the very least, inexcusably careless of Holley’s reputation, not to mention the rights of the faithful to know the truth about the state of the Church and the conduct of their pastors.

Suppose for a moment that the “management issue” is no more than run-of-the-mill poor job performance.
- Why is that enough to earn this bishop a pink slip, while elsewhere all manner of moral negligence and even malfeasance seem to be tolerated for long periods of time?

For example, Pope Francis let Bishop Michael Bransfield retire — not altogether peacefully — at 75, though Bransfield was under a cloud of suspicion for years and is now under investigation along with the diocese he used to lead. There are plausible reasons for handling Bransfield as the Vatican did, but the long-suffering faithful (and many of the clergy) in Wheeling-Charleston are impatient with half-truths and assurances that all is well in hand.

If mismanagement is a reason for removal, then it is worth asking how much longer Bishop Richard Malone will remain in the See of Buffalo.

Earlier this week “60 Minutes” aired an interview with Bishop Malone’s whistle-blowing former executive assistant:

The hundreds of pages Siobhan O’Connor uncovered included personnel files and memos. They revealed that for years Bishop Malone allowed priests accused of sexual assault such as statutory rape and groping to stay on the job.

The August exposé by local ABC affiliate WKBW that led to the “60 Minutes” report is more detailed, and more damning. Here is the case of Father Art Smith, suspended in 2011 after school officials complained of grooming behavior. Malone rehabilitated Smith when he took over the diocese in 2012:

Documents show the principal reported to the diocese that Father Smith refused to stay away from the school, showing up outside a classroom in April 2012. The principal fired off a letter to the diocese saying, “This man is a predator and a groomer of young children. Something needs to be done… As school principal, I feel the students in grade 8 have been injured and troubled by the actions of this man more than originally thought.”

The WKBW report then details how Malone returned Father Smith to active ministry, giving him a post at a nursing home. Smith also heard confessions at an event for young people that included hundreds of teenagers. When she heard of it, Principal Hider wrote to Malone:

“If a teacher would have been grooming children and had inappropriate relations with a minor, they would have been fired and lost their license to teach… Yet a priest who has a history of inappropriate contact with the youth was among the youth ministering the sacrament of Reconciliation.”

WKBW reports that Bishop Malone replied to Hider to the effect that Father Smith’s behavior was not technically in violation of the Charter for the Protection of Young People. Let that sink in.

Bishop Malone issued a statement ahead of the “60 Minutes” report, explaining his reasons for declining an interview with the program:

First, the Church is in the eye of a storm largely as a result of wrong decisions made decades ago and even some made recently, as I have acknowledged. But, our efforts and our focus have always remained steadfast: protect the children and reconcile with the victims.

Second, while “60 Minutes” is free to interview whomever they wish for this story, it is clear to me and my staff that your roster of interviews did not include those who are aware of the full extent of the efforts of our Diocese to combat child abuse. Nor does it include those who urge me every day to stay the course and restore the confidence of our faithful.

The first reason is at best self-serving. That second one, though — boy, howdy. Had he accepted the interview, Bishop Malone would have been on the roster. Is there perhaps someone in his diocese better informed on the matters he listed who might have gone in his stead?

On Wednesday, Bishop Malone’s communications office released a statement calling Siobhan O’Connor’s testimony “plainly and embarrassingly contradictory,” and published several emails the diocese claims “demonstrate [O’Connor’s] complete admiration for [Bishop Malone] and his efforts to lead the Diocese.” The diocese does not address the allegations, but attacks the woman who brought them — with proof — before the public.

Was Bishop Holley’s mismanagement worse than that of which Bishop Malone was first accused in August? At the very least, a power responsible for oversight of bishops’ conduct should open an investigation into Malone and his management of the Buffalo diocese.

If Pope Francis believes he can stonewall, or go to ground and wait for the anger to subside, he is sorely mistaken.

The sweltering summer of 2018, which saw the simmering discontent of the long-suffering Catholic faithful in the United States boil over and set fire to the kitchen, will spread rapidly to other rooms in the house.

Indeed, the anger has already spread beyond the confines of the visible Church: more than a dozen states in the US have opened or are considering criminal investigations; the District of Columbia —which has no authority to conduct criminal investigations — has opened a civil investigation; US attorneys are conducting a broadening federal probe.

If Church leaders’ concerns are for scandal, then their silence —from the Vatican on down — is terribly miscalculated. The true scandal is the carelessness [unconcern] at every level of Church governance toward the broad public who have a right, as I put it in an open letter to Bishop Thomas J. Tobin of Rhode Island at the start of the summer, “to the Gospel and therefore a right to the Church as Christ intends her to be, rather than as you have made her[.]”

In any case, the Catholic Church’s house will be clean. The only questions are whether it shall be God’s Vicar on Earth who cleans it, or Caesar, and whether the cleansing shall come before or after the fire sale.

[One wonders all the more which of the spinmeisters at Casa Santa Marta thought that a good way to hold off any decisive action by the pope in this regard was to call the heads of episcopal conferences to a four-day meeting at the Vatican in February 2019! Maybe it was the pope himself who thought of it, who knows? Or at the very least, he was fully on board with it... Yet if none of Bergoglio's three-week synodal assemblies so far has not even managed to produce a fairly decent Final Report, in clear language everyone can understand about the general and generic abstractions they expatiate on ad nauseam, what can that four-day meeting do to address a crisis that has been decades in the making???]


Karadima victims file complaint
against C9 Cardinal Errázuriz


November 2, 2018

Three victims of former Chilean priest Fernando Karadima filed a complaint last week against Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz Ossa, accusing him of perjury in the civil suit for compensation for damages filed against the Archdiocese of Santiago.

The complaint was filed in a Santiago court Oct. 25 by attorney Juan Pablo Hermosilla, representing Juan Carlos Cruz, José Andrés Murillo, and James Hamilton.

The legal action states that in September 2015 Cardinal Errázuriz, Archbishop Emeritus of Santiago, gave a statement as a witness under oath which “in the light of subsequent facts constitutes the crime of perjury.”

In his statement, the cardinal said that when he was Achbishop of Santiago, “in June 2006, I did not close the process (against Karadima) but put it on hold; the resignation of the priest from the parish is for them to decide.”


However, several weeks ago an e-mail was seized by regional prosecutor Emiliano Arias Madariaga which Cardinal Errázuriz sent Feb. 1, 2009 to the then-Apostolic Nuncio to Chile, Archbishop Giuseppe Pinto.

According to La Tercera news Cardenal Errázuriz says in the e-mail:

“Out of respect for Fr. Karadima, I did not ask the Promoter (of Justice) to interrogate him; I just asked Bishop Andrés Arteaga his opinion. He considered everything to be absolutely implausible. As it was beyond the statutes of limitations, I closed the investigation. That is how I wanted to protect them, aware that my way of proceeding, if the accusers would one day bring the case to the press, would turn against me.”

Based on this, the complainants are asking the Public Prosecutor’s Office to issue a summons to Cardinal Errázuriz as the accused, and as witnesses Archbishop Pinto; the minister of the Court of Appeals, Juan Manuel Muñoz; Cardinal Ricardo Ezzati Andrello of Santiago; and the Auxiliary Bishop of Santiago, Andrés Arteaga Manieu.

This complaint relates to the lawsuit for “moral damages” against the Archdiocese of Santiago filed in 2015 by Cruz, Murillo, and Hamilton, in which they ask for 450 million pesos (about $640,000) in compensation, in addition to a public apology from the Church for the alleged cover-up of abuse committed by Karadima.

Regarding the e-mail by Cardinal Errázuriz, according to El Mercurio news, the Court of Appeals “did not accept the request to incorporate the document made ad videndi (in order to be seen) by the plaintiffs’ counsel at the hearing of the case, given that it was not added in a timely or legal manner to the case” and so could not be used as evidence.

The Court of Appeals also denied the request by the Archdiocese of Santiago for the court to to ask the Vatican to provide all the documentation from the canonical investigation surrounding Karadima compiled in the report by Archbishop Charles Scicluna.

Karadima was found guilty of sexual abuse by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2011.

On Oct. 26, the Santiago Court of Appeals rejected the appeal by the Karadima victims which sought to cancel a Nov. 20 conciliation hearing the civil courts ordered in the lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Santiago for cover-up.

The appeal filed Oct. 24 argued that the process of conciliation would be very trying for the victims. However, the president of the Ninth Chamber of the Court of Appeals, Miguel Vasquez, explained to the press that this action “is not a way to reject a conciliation.”

That is, the way to proceed is “formally to formulate it at the hearing, or simply not make any presentation.”

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Left, an Islamist lynch mob; right, Christians pray for Asia Bibi's safety.

Asia Bibi to leave Pakistan
after dramatic acquittal

by Munir Ahmed
-

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, November 1, 2018 (AP)- A Christian woman acquitted in Pakistan after eight years on death row for blasphemy plans to leave the country, her family said Thursday as radical Islamists mounted rallies for a second day against the verdict, blocking roads and burning tires in protest.

The developments followed a landmark move by Pakistan’s Supreme Court on Wednesday that overturned the 2010 conviction against Asia Bibi for insulting Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. The charge of blasphemy carries the death penalty in this majority Muslim nation.

Bibi’s acquittal immediately raised fears of religious violence - and presented a challenge to the government of new Prime Minister Imran Khan who came to power this summer partly by pursuing the Islamist agenda. Khan warned Islamist protesters on Wednesday night not to “test the patience of the state.”

Bibi remained at an undisclosed location Thursday where the 54-year-old mother of five was being held for security reasons, awaiting her formal release, her brother, James Masih told The Associated Press.

Masih said his sister simply would not be safe in Pakistan. “She has no other option and she will leave the country soon,” he said. Masih would not disclose the country of her destination but both France and Spain have offered asylum.

Bibi’s husband, Ashiq Masih, had returned from Britain with their children in mid-October and was waiting for her to join them, the brother added.

Meanwhile, more than 1,000 Islamists blocked a key road linking the capital, Islamabad with the garrison city of Rawalpindi on Thursday, demanding Bibi be publicly hanged. Authorities deployed paramilitary troops, signaling they could move in to clear the roads.

Hundreds also blocked another key motorway, linking Islamabad with major cities such as Lahore and Peshawar, chanting slogans against Bibi and demanding her execution.

Opposition lawmakers in parliament called Thursday for reforming the judicial system and Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy law - so that innocents like Bibi wouldn’t spend years languishing in jail.

Hafiz Saeed, a radical cleric wanted by the United States, urged followers to hold rallies across Pakistan on Friday to condemn Bibi’s release. Saeed is the founder of the outlawed Lashkar-e-Taiba group, which was blamed for the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people.

Protesters, rallied by firebrand cleric Khadim Hussain Rizvi, also set up roadblocks and burned tires in the southern port city of Karachi while hundreds clashed Thursday with police in various parts of eastern Punjab province.

Many parents kept their children from school, fearing more violence.

The Islamists also called for the killing of the three judges, including Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar, who acquitted Bibi.

The three are on the hit list of Rizvi’s Tehreek-e-Labbaik party, which has demanded a public execution for Bibi. Rizvi has managed to turn out tens of thousands of supporters in the past, often forcing authorities to bow to his demands on religious matters.

Tehreek-e-Labbaik claimed Thursday that two of its supporters were killed by police fire during overnight clashes in Karachi. No government official could immediately confirm any casualties.

[Yet didn't someone say - in a formal pontifical document no less (Evangelii gaudium) - to "Avoid hateful generalizations, for authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to any form of violence?" But who is he to speak of 'authentic Islam' or of 'proper reading of the Koran' when Islam's own most revered scholars through the centuries, and countless historical events and incidents in the past and today, have upheld Muhammad's gospel of conversion by force?]

In his televised speech, Prime Minister Khan warned the Islamists: “Let me make it very clear to you that the state will fulfil its responsibility.”

Bibi’s lawyer, Saiful Malook, has gone into hiding as the extremists had threatened his life as well.

On Wednesday, cleric Afzal Qadri, with Rizvi by his side, urged a crowd of supporters outside the Punjab provincial parliament in the city of Lahore to revolt against army chief Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa and overthrow Khan’s government.

Bibi’s acquittal, however, has been seen as a hopeful sign by Christians in Pakistan, where the mere rumor of blasphemy can spark lynchings. Religious minorities, who have been repeatedly targeted by extremists, fear the law because it is often used to settle scores and to pressure minorities.

In 2011, Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab, was shot and killed by one of his guards for defending Bibi and criticizing the misuse of the blasphemy law. The assassin, Mumtaz Qadri, was hanged for the crime, but later was hailed by religious hard-liners as a martyr, with millions visiting a shrine set up for him near Islamabad.

Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s minister for minorities, was also killed in 2011 after he demanded justice for Bibi.

Bibi was arrested in 2009 after she was accused of blasphemy following a quarrel with two fellow female farm workers who refused to drink from a water container used by a Christian. A few days later, a mob accused her of insulting Islam’s prophet, leading to her 2010 conviction.

Bibi’s family has always maintained her innocence and says she never insulted the Muslim prophet.



UPDATE

Asia Bibi's release suspended
Bowing to Muslim extremist demands, government will review her acquittal
which means that meanwhile she can be held in prison indefinitely


November 2, 2018

The release of Asia Bibi, a mother of five, has been delayed as the Pakistan Supreme Court was ordered to review the decision to acquit her of blasphemy. Asia has spent eight years on death-row.

Members of the fanatical Muslim TLP party protested the verdict blocking the whole country. In order to quieten them down, the government agreed to order the review and to bar Bibi from leaving the country.

It is unlike that the acquittal will be overturned but the review could take years, leaving Bibi in prison.

The TLP called for the death of the three Supreme Court justices involved in Bibi's acquittal. Police arrested two prisoners last month for plotting to kill her. There is no way that Bibi and her family could remain in Pakistan after a release from prison.

Minorities minister Shahbaz Bhatti, a Catholic, and Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer were both assassinated for advocating on her behalf and opposing the blasphemy laws. Bibi’s Lawer, Saif Mulook, a Muslim, has fled the country because of security concerns.
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The adjective 'woke' has entered the American English lexicon, when its proper grammatical form ought to be 'awakened', as in waking up from deep delusion
or thralldom. A 'woke' commentator explains:

To be "woke" is to be aware — to be in a state of attention — essentially to have one's eyes open to reality. From what I've seen, it is used
most often in contexts involving social injustices such as racism and classism. To be woke is to notice nuances, micro-aggressions, and
underpinnings of prejudice and injustice in all situations. And, as a famous cliché states, "Once you see something, you can't un-see it."

It is very applicable to the experience described below. Once you see what's wrong with this pontificate and in much of 'the Church', you can't un-see
it.
You can make all kinds of excuses for it, but that won't change the facts and their terrible consequences. Let us pray that more Catholics awaken to the reality
of what is happening in 'the Church' today.



Becoming a ‘woke’ Catholic in 2018
by Shane Ball

November 1, 2018

I am a loyal son of the Church, Catholic born and raised. I studied for the priesthood for two and a half years, was loyal to the pope and reverential to my bishop, and I teach theology at a committedly Catholic high school. I was what some might style a “true believer,” until my worldview changed in August – and not necessarily for the worse.

Here is how I became a “true believer":

I grew up in the era of Pope John Paul II and saw him twice as an adolescent: World Youth Day in Denver and in Baltimore in 1995. When John Paul II died, and after the next conclave had convened, I was pursuing a graduate degree in theology at Franciscan University and was ecstatic that my favorite theologian, Cardinal Ratzinger, was to be the next pope.

Looking back nostalgically now, it seemed like a golden age of the Church, where the popes could always be counted on to teach the truth, indifferent to the fads of the day. The Church stood as a rock and a stronghold against the buffets of the world.

My love for the Church led me to the next logical step: to test my calling to the priesthood at the Pontifical College Josephinum [in Columbus, Ohio]. The claim to fame of the Josephinum is that it is the only pontifical seminary outside Italy – under the authority of Rome instead of the local bishop. This further added to the attitude of fealty I had to the office of the pope.

The Josephinum was experiencing a renaissance of sorts when I entered, with an emphasis on orthodoxy and tradition. Our rector had brought back our “pontifical” cassocks, a distinctive cassock with red piping that was an identifier of which pontifical college one attended. We were near maximum capacity, with an enrollment larger than the campus had seen since the 1960s.

Liturgies on campus were grandiose, especially on Sundays and feast days. Seminarians who had a love for or wanted to explore the traditional Latin Mass weren’t accused of clericalism or sent to the psychologist for reprogramming. The Latin Mass was regularly offered, and a practicum class on it was available for seminarians who wished to celebrate it after their ordination.

I left the Josephinum after the first year of Francis’s pontificate. My loyalties to Francis that year remained consistent even as it became increasingly clear that he was going to be a different kind of pope. While he lacked the theological acumen of a Wojtyła or Ratzinger, his attitude of humility and sincerity made him a model shepherd.

In 2016, my wife and I were married, and the obvious destination for our honeymoon was Rome. We obtained newlywed tickets to the pope’s Wednesday audience, which provided an opportunity to shake hands with the pontiff after the event. As Francis approached, my wife asked, “What do I say to him?” I told her to ask him to pray for us. When she did, Francis looked her in the eye and submissively said in clear English, “Please pray for me.” [That's his shtick - and I am not saying he does not mean it. He probably does mean it most fervently, but in the sense of "Please pray for me that I achieve all the things I want to do". Which is why I never pray for the intentions of this pope. But I do pray daily for him to see the error of his ways, that he may cease to be anti-Catholic and be the pope that good popes are meant to be.

And I do pray daily for all the intentions of Benedict XVI, because I know that he prays for all the things any good person wishes for the good of mankind in general and of all those who have specific needs that require God's comfort, alleviation, relief and resolution, and for the Church and all who work in her and for her.]


My wife was instantly enamoured of Francis, and I was appreciative to have met a second pope (I met Benedict in 2006 while studying abroad in Rome). However, 2016 was also the year of Amoris Laetitia, and the corresponding dubia, and I was beginning to have some reservations about Francis.

As time went on, Pope Francis became more and more difficult to defend. Last school year, I had a non-Catholic student ask me in a class on divine revelation and Scripture why the pope didn’t agree with the Biblical teaching on homosexuality. I was confronted with contradicting a millennia-old moral teaching of the faith or appearing to be at odds with the vicar of Christ, a position that would have been untenable anytime earlier in my life.

This tension came to a head in August with the release of the Pennsylvania grand jury report. I remembered my position during the scandal of 2002. I had towed the party line: the allegations of abuse were isolated; the media seized on it because of anti-Catholic bias; the percentage of abusers in the priesthood was equivalent to other professions, etc.

It was different this time. Fool me once, shame on the Church; fool me twice, shame on me. Particularly insidious this time was not just the abusive priests, but the number of bishops who were seemingly complicit.

I had until that time avoided the intrigue of Church politics. My parents had tried to turn me on to Michael Voris and Church Militant when I was in the seminary, but I rejected these outright. I thought it was offensive to badmouth the bishops, nor did such media represent my experience of the Church at the Josephinum.

It’s a disheartening feeling when you learn you have been duped. Nobody likes to be wrong, but I had been. I had been downright gullible in my lockstep adherence to the bishops. The school year was just beginning, and my principal asked me about addressing the Pennsylvania grand jury report. At that point, it was too fresh for me; I didn’t want to address it with my students. I took the Pope Francis approach: silence, and hope it will fade away.

But it didn’t. The next week, Archbishop Viganò’s testimony dropped. The corruption went all the way to the top. This was a game-changer. I began consuming all the Catholic news media I could and discovered a world of new resources beyond just EWTN and the National Catholic Register – OnePeterFive being one of them.

As bishops came out and began to address Viganò and the crisis, I became increasingly more disgusted. It was obvious that many of the bishops were third-rate politicos. They made statements that sounded as though they were crafted by P.R. firms and lacked the humility and sincerity of spiritual fathers. Many seemed more interested in their public image and careers than the toll their incredulity was having on the Church.

If this were the end of the story, it would just be the sad account of a faithful Catholic turned cynic. The fact is, though, that this whole crisis has produced much spiritual fruit in my life. For those who feel ready to throw in the towel, I hope to offer some encouragement.

One of the ubiquitous questions surrounding the crisis is, “What can I do?” The most common refrain has been to pray the rosary daily, along with a preponderance of references to Our Lady of Fatima.

I had been in a phase of spiritual and intellectual sloth during my summer break from school, so I did a deep dive into Fatima. What I discovered was enlightening beyond belief. The intrigue of whether Russia has been consecrated to the Immaculate Heart or whether the Third Secret has been fully revealed is beyond the scope of this article, but it certainly didn’t bolster my confidence in the integrity of the Church hierarchy. I couldn’t be indignant about whether the hierarchy has complied with the message of Fatima, nor could I control what they do. I can control only what I do.

Our Lady gave the laity specific instructions at Fatima, too: pray the rosary every day, and do penance in reparation for sin. After leaving seminary, I fell away from the basics, and it was necessary to get back to my roots as a Catholic. Besides praying the rosary every day on my knees, I have gone back to abstaining from meat and food outside meals on Fridays.

I fear that some might find this recommendation simplistic or anti-climactic, but we must trust in the power of our “spiritual weapons,” as Archbishop Viganò says in his third epistle.

OnePeterFive was influential in helping me see the connection between the crisis and the decline in our liturgical sensibilities, so I attended a traditional Latin Mass for the first time since seminary. My family is not ready to make that leap yet, but I intend to continue going as often as I can.

When the crisis has come up in my classes, I have connected it with Fatima so the students don’t become disheartened. I remind them of Our Lady’s words on July 13, 1917: “In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph.” This should be our mantra.

When saying our rosary, focus on the second Hail Mary for the theological virtue of hope. Pray that souls might not be lost to this crisis but might be emboldened in the faith. I also encourage a serious mediation on the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary as the Church follows her Mystical Spouse on the Via Dolorosa.

Remember the faithful who are praying in agony for God’s will to be done within their beloved Church.
- Pray that Christ delivers His Church from its scourges, its mockery, and its cross, which is weighed down by bad shepherds.
- Pray that Christ protects His Church from a world that would crucify it on the cross of abuse and corruption, if it could.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us.



Oh look, another Catholic blogger has come up with a list describing the Bergoglian modus operandi, this time for dealing with sex abuse:

The Bergoglo-Clinton 5-step program
to deal with sex abuse charges

by Fred Martinez
THE CATHOLIC MONITOR
November 01, 2018

Step 1: Pope Francis and the media, like Bill Clinton's wife Hilary, say it's all a "vast right-wing conspiracy."

Step 2: Francis calls it, including credible sex abuse cover-up charges, a "Great Accuser" eruption, like Clinton's wife and "co-president" Hilary referred to credible rape charges against her husband as a "bimbo eruption."

Step 3: Francis's friend Cardinal Cupich says the Italian pope is really Latino, just as black feminist Toni Morrison called Clinton "our first Black president."

Step 4: Francis's friends, like the Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli and Cardinal Maradiaga the "vice-pope," say some of McCarrick's victims were over 18 years old and the McCarrick scandal is only "of a private order", just as the liberal media dismissed the Lewinsky scandal as a consensual, adult relationship that was only a private affair.

Step 5: Francis's friend Cupich says Francis's scandal is a "rabbit hole" because he has the "bigger agenda" of the environment and migrants, just as Bill's friends in the media said the Lewinsky scandal [and the impeachment vote that resulted] was a distraction from his getting on with the work for the American people.

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church.

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I'm all for fairness and objectivity in reporting, but what passes for these in accounts about the recent 'youth synod' is like putting lipstick on a pig. The errors of omission and commission in that synod and its final document are so many and appalling that it is really quite disingenuous of intelligent writers like George Weigel and Robert Royal to begin and end their devastating critiques of the synod with sugarcoating that is too cloying to be taken seriously.


Synod 2018: An intermediate reckoning
by Robert Royal

November 1, 2018


A few days ago, I promised one last report on the Synod and its final document, but only after I had taken time to read the whole text – which still only exists in Italian – and to consider it carefully. There were many quick journalistic reactions, useful in themselves, but they tend to focus on the usual controversial points and stir up emotions that are then forgotten within a couple of news cycles.

If we want to be a Church, however, that does more than just try to grab onto a few shreds of truth among the swirling digital and spiritual waters around us, we owe it to ourselves to make a serious effort – even in online forums such as TCT – whenever we can to move more deliberately, dive more deeply.

Still, it’s less than a week since the final document was approved, so this is only an “intermediate-range” assessment. More, much more, will need to be said and done in coming days because the fallout from this synod will probably be with us for decades.

But at least I’ve done a first, penitential slog through all 25,652 words now – which is mercifully about 10,000 fewer than the original Working Document – though partly through the fog of jet lag and despite several mishaps in the course of traveling home. (A New Commandment I give unto you: Do not trust NJ Transit to get you from Manhattan to Newark Airport.)

In particular, I was looking for an answer to the main question, as I formulated it in the previous report, “Which future for the Church?”
- Would the Synod Fathers accept vague language about sexuality and synodality that could lead to anything – and probably will, as the vague formulations of Vatican II did in the 1960s and 1970s; or
- Would they affirm not only Catholic moral teachings in a world that doesn’t understand them, but also the Church’s sense of itself as, of course, engaged with the world, but as possessing a truth and a Spirit that is not of the world.

The crucial points are there in the document, but smothered by committee-speak to the point that – if you read through the entire text without specially looking for such things – you’d hardly notice them. And these, of course, are the main concerns for anyone truly distressed over how to help young people negotiate our troubled time.

The one real strength of the document is the overall realization that young people today live in a much changed and rapidly pluralizing (some might say fragmenting, even self-destructing) world. In a way, that’s a cliché, of course, since the world is always changing. But the pace and scale and nature of change now is something unique. [It's a strength to state something that is so obvious to anyone who carries a smartphone, which is probably 90 percent of all who live in the Western world??? Give me a break!]

So far as I know, only Eamon Martin, who bears the suggestive title Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, spoke cogently about the value the Church’s steady wisdom could have for young people struggling with such forces. [And I am surprised he did, because John Allen's favorite papabile, the cardinal from Manila about whom this Filipino does not feel proud at all, said during the synod that he was thankful for all the young people participating as auditors 'for teaching us', without saying anything about the duty of bishops and priests to teach young people! Cardinal Tagle's mindset and language is soooo nauseatingly Bergogliac.]

Sadly, the notion of sin has almost disappeared from the world of the young – as it also very nearly has from the document. The Devil is nowhere mentioned in those thousands of words, or the age-old struggle between Good and Evil. Is all that too strong a brew – is the whole dynamic of Redemption too overwhelming – now for the young people the Church seeks to help?

Which is why you can’t help wishing the Synod Fathers had gone easier on the repeated calls for dialogue, accompaniment, listening, etc., which, given the urgency of the challenges, sound terribly weak.

Subjects like the environment, immigration, etc., which also came up repeatedly over the past month, are, by comparison and by far, of secondary importance. There was no sense of putting first things first.


I’m reminded of how, at Vatican II, the whole question of Communism – the foremost anti-human ideology of its day, responsible for 100 million deaths in the twentieth century – was excluded from the Council’s deliberations, and on purpose. (At one point, 400 priests at the Council from 86 different countries proposed a formal condemnation of this murderous ideology, but the proposal was rejected.)

Various factors and subsequent explanations have been brought forward to explain how such a thing happened. But the simple fact remains that the bishops of the Catholic Church meeting in a formal ecumenical council could not find a way to express their rejection of the greatest evil of their time.

I wonder how we will look back at the past four weeks. The Bishops at the Youth Synod mention subjects like the sexual revolution, abortion, divorce and the breakup of the family, the digital pseudo-world, the flattening of the human horizon by widespread materialist and scientistic attitudes in modern societies.

But the almost ritualistic repetition of listening, accompanying, discerning [It's a Bergoglian meme he has managed to wash into the brains of his followers - including the cardinals and bishops who took part in the synodal assembly - so that it has become second nature with them!] reminds me of nothing so much as the old Christian-Marxist dialogue. The Church during the Cold War was dealing with a deadly serpent and treated it as if it was merely another dialogue partner. Indeed, lots of Christians went over to the Marxist/socialist side. The reverse was far more rare.

Where is the clear talk about discerning a religious vocation? About marrying? About having children – marriage and children being one of the ways young people often find their way to full adulthood and faith in the modern world?

If you want to dabble in sociology – as the Synod organizers clearly did – social science itself has shown beyond all reasonable question that marriage, family, children constitute the documented pathways to a better life, happiness, health, prosperity, and religious commitment. Was it too judgmental or controversial to say this outright? And to encourage young people to marry and have children if they don’t have a religious vocation? Instead, the text spends much time fretting over social pathologies; social and spiritual remedies are given very gingerly treatment in very general terms.

And as our courageous American Archbishop Charles Chaput has pointed out, the deadly evil of sex abuse received shamefully inadequate treatment in just three flat paragraphs while the text flirts with the sensitivities of young people about homosexual activity and same-sex attraction.

You have to read almost one-third of the way into the text before you come upon some real religious approaches to problems youth face – for example, the hope that the sacrament of Confirmation can become the beginning and not the end (as it more commonly is for most Catholics) of an adult commitment to the Faith.

And despite all the handwringing in the text about the need to understand how young people today are driven by images, feelings, and peers – and often seek a religion of well-being, the bishops are, at one point, forced to acknowledge: “In Christian communities, sometimes we risk proposing, without intending it, an ethical and therapeutic theism that responds to the human need for security and comfort instead of the living encounter with God in light of the Gospel and in the force of the Spirit.”

But on to another large question about both the text and the event. The late introduction of “synodality,” a topic barely discussed by the bishops themselves over three weeks, seems to reflect the intention of Pope Francis to make the whole Church “synodal.” He emphasized that theme in the midst of the 2015 Synod on the Family, and was visibly frustrated and angry at the end of that Synod when the deliberations and voting of the participating bishops did not give him the outcome he desired .

This time, the process was far more tightly managed. Two bishops named by the pope worked out the last quarter or so of the Final Document, which deals with “synodality.” And the pope himself seems to have been involved in the drafting. But this last-minute, and not very carefully thought out proposal for changing the understanding of the whole Church was itself not very “synodal” or polite.

Even quite reasonable requests by the bishops that translations be done in a timely way for those who do not know Italian so that they could give careful attention to what they were being asked to approve (within short time-frames as well) were rather brusquely turned away – a strange thing when the alleged desire of “synodality” is for all to listen and be heard, to “walk together” in an open and respectful and intelligent dialogue.

So in the end, we got a document that was not exactly the result of a consultative process, even among the bishop delegates.
- We have a new conception of a “synodal” Church in which all are part of the conversation and “walking together,” but in different ways
– some proper authorities, others their collaborators, still others voices of various experiences who are to be encouraged in their differences, but also expected somehow, by an unspecified process or mechanism, to come together in a symphonic whole.

It took America’s Founding Fathers four months to write a carefully worded Constitution that would both give order to a diverse nation and, as far as humanly possible, avoid the danger of tyranny. It wasn’t until the year after that the people ratified it, and another year until it came into effect.

Synodality – a matter of far greater import for the whole world – received no such serious treatment this past month. One wonders whether it’s really supposed to be treated seriously, or will become just another example of idealistic religious language with no real connection to anything.

And, in the final analysis, this document is addressed to whom?
- Under the old system, the bishops, in consultation with one another, produced a text on some topic and presented their conclusions to the pope for his approval or disapproval. (The rest of us were just incidental observers, so to speak, of the synodal process.)
- In the current dispensation, the pope himself seems to have been involved in the drafting, and it’s quite unusual for anyone to send a message to himself. Especially a message that he says could now become part of the ordinary magisterium.

So is the text – for most people sequestered for now behind the barrier of the Italian language and of a forbidding complexity and length – meant for the pope, the bishops of the world, the Catholic faithful? Does anyone know?

The Synod Fathers proposed, and then actually wrote, an additional brief message directly to young people, which you can read by clicking here. That at least has a definite purpose and audience, a gallant gesture, though I myself wish it had more sheer evangelical fire.

For all its lumbering indecision, the Final Document ends well, indeed very well in its closing, 167thparagraph. On this All Saints Day, it’s good for us to read words reminding us that the whole point of the Faith and of human existence is to become a saint:

Through the holiness of the young, the Church can renew its spiritual ardor and its apostolic vigor. The balm of holiness generated by the good lives of so many young people can cure the wounds of the Church and the world, recalling us to that fullness of love to which we have always been called; young saints spur us to return to our own first love.

[Is Mr Royal really taken in by this fancy-schmancy blarney? This is really lipstick on a pig. What 'holiness of the young'? Holiness is not a quality automatically associated with being young, especially when we think of young Catholics today who are baptized but not really bred in the faith, because hardly or poorly catechized. Even to say 'the holiness of the innocent' when referring to the truly innocent (babies and children before the age of reason) is, at worst, inappropriate. The balm of holiness in persons of any age, whatsoever, not just the young, is good for the Church and those around them. The language of that paragraph is pandering. Besides, one must also relate it to the rest of the document to really see it in context.]


Youth Synod document looks like repeat
of past synods that undercut Church teaching

by Lisa Bourne


VATICAN CITY, October 31, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) — Preliminary reports after the Vatican’s Youth Synod question whether the final document released last weekend portends further undermining of Church teaching.

In an apparent repeat of the 2015 Synod on the Family, Catholic principles on sexuality, and the Church’s governance and apostolic nature may be in for another ambiguous reinterpretation ushered in by dubious processes during the Youth Synod.

The “Synod on Young People, the Faith and Vocational Discernment” ended Saturday, with the entire final document getting the required two-thirds majority for passage.

Sections of the document on sexuality, synodality and the role of women in the Church, and the document’s deference to the working document (Instrumentum laboris) met with notable pushback in the vote from some Synod fathers but passed anyway.

Further adding to concerns over the final document is Pope Francis’s release of an Apostolic Constitution [a few notches more authoritative than a post-synodal exhortation] just before the Youth Synod that aims to augment the magisterial force of the final document generated by a Synod.

The 2015 Synod on the Family and its 2014 predecessor turned into a battle over Communion for Catholics living in objectively sinful situations.

Called with a theme of addressing issues faced by the family today, the Synod on the Family was widely considered to be conducted with a predetermined outcome — the tacit approval of Holy Communion for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics and others living in otherwise non-marital unions.

Irregularities surrounding the Synod processes, ostensible manipulation behind the scenes, and the use of ambiguous language in Synod documents signaled an assailing of the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage. Amoris Laetitia, the pope’s exhortation resulting from the Synod on the Family, has drawn disparate interpretations by episcopal conferences worldwide, bringing about the feared end with regard to Communion.

In the Youth Synod final document,
- there is indistinct language that could open the door for normalization of homosexuality in the Church, and
- it also contains wording suggesting it should be read in light of the Instrumentum laboris, or working document, which contained the term LGBT, the first time for a Vatican document to have the loaded political term.

The concept of Synodality — typically understood to mean a decentralization and democratization of the Church and the magisterium away from the papacy and the Vatican to local churches – was included in the final document, when it hadn’t been widely discussed during the Synod.

This has been a talking point of Pope Francis in his pontificate but was a surprise in the final document, suggesting it was likely slipped in by among synod officials appointed by the pope. [And you think the pope had nothing to do with that?]

Further, language in the final document calling for the “presence of women in ecclesial bodies at all levels” — and that their participation be included in “ecclesial decision-making processes” — raised a red flag related to tampering with the apostolic nature of the Church, rejecting Christ’s intent for episcopal leadership, and weakening the spiritual fatherhood of priests.

The final document for the Synod on Youth was released in Italian. An English translation is expected in the next few weeks. The English translation of the final document from the Ordinary Synod on the Family ending October 25, 2015, was not released until mid-December 2015.

Msgr. Charles Pope of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., thought it would be problematic to apply magisterial authority to the Youth Synod document. The idea of listening is just fine, he told LifeSiteNews, but giving the document that sort of authority would go too far.

“That’s not our understanding of the magisterium, at least historically,” he said.

Regarding the insertion of Synodality to the final document, it really isn’t a synod if it’s called for one thing but then becomes about another, he added, with people behind the scenes pulling levers, as has happened in all of the three last synods. Why go through this process then?, Msgr. Pope asked.

While the term LGBT did not make it into the final document, the term “sexual inclination” did, along with vague language on ministering to homosexual individuals, that could be read as a green light for affirming homosexual behavior.

This effort to insert ambiguous language that would destabilize Church teaching recalls the Synod on the Family, which pushed “accompaniment” of couples in “irregular unions,” the primacy of “conscience” with regard to individuals in adulterous or other sinful unions discerning that they could receive Communion, and also a “healthy decentralization” of power, referencing a push to redirect power away from the papacy and toward episcopal conferences.

The paragraph on sexuality in the Youth Synod final document says among other things that “there are questions concerning the body, affectivity and sexuality which require a deepened anthropological, theological and pastoral elaboration.” It references “paths of accompaniment in the faith of homosexual persons” and speaks of these paths helping these persons “to recognize the desire to belong to and contribute to the life of the community; and to discern the best ways of achieving it.”

It also says these “paths of accompaniment” are to help homosexual individuals “integrate the sexual dimension more and more into their personality, growing in the quality of relationships and walking towards the gift of self.”

The Church does not define human beings by their sexual inclinations, whether ordered or disordered. The Church teaches as well that homosexual inclinations are objectively disordered, and homosexual acts gravely immoral, and that sexual intercourse, or the marital act, is reserved for a man and a woman sacramentally married to each other.

Regarding ambiguity pertaining to sexuality in the final document, Msgr. Pope said he would have preferred a more rigorous articulation of Church teaching, and that God’s teaching involves more than people’s feelings.

While the language may not itself outright defy Church teaching, he said, it certainly doesn’t offer the teaching either.

“There’s a lot of stuff in the showroom, but there isn’t much in the stockroom,” said Msgr. Pope.

“We have to get people reacquainted with what God teaches,” he continued, “who we are and how He made us. The Church is not going to change what God has taught about human sexuality. Let’s go back to the source.”

Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput told the National Catholic Register that the expressed need for “deepening” or “developing” our understanding of anthropological issues is one of the most “subtle and concerning” problems in the text.

“Obviously, we can, and should, always bring more prayer and reflection to complicated human issues,” Chaput said, but stated further that the Church “already has a clear, rich, and articulate Christian anthropology. It’s unhelpful to create doubt or ambiguity around issues of human identity, purpose, and sexuality, unless one is setting the stage to change what the Church believes and teaches about all three, starting with sexuality.”

The archbishop said the final document, “while not without its own flaws, is an improvement over the original instrumentum laboris text.” He did not comment on the final document’s call to be read in complementarity with the working document.

Archbishop Chaput, who had raised concern over the working document in advance of the Synod, had also told Francis and the other Synod Fathers in his intervention that the term LGBT should not be used in the Youth Synod document.

“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.”


Chaput, who had called upon the pope to cancel the Synod on Youth in light of the Church’s surging sexual abuse crisis, criticized the final document’s treatment of the abuse scandal, terming it “frankly inadequate and disappointing on the abuse matter.”

“Church leaders outside the United States and a few other countries dealing with the problem clearly don’t understand its scope and gravity,” he said. “There’s very little sense of heartfelt apology in the text. And clericalism, for example, is part of the abuse problem, but it’s by no means the central issue for many lay people, especially parents.”

Jesuit Father James Martin, Vatican communications consultor and fervent proponent of LGBT affirmation, praised the Synod’s final document’s use of the term “accompaniment,” and said it “acknowledged that the church doesn't know everything about LGBT people and (as with other groups) must listen to them.” Martin also lauded the document’s acknowledgement that many in the Church already work to minister to persons identifying as LGBT, [The wily Martin says this, as if the term LGBT were found in the final document, which it is not - hoping that if he and his ilk repeat it enough, people will start to believe it is in the final document. But since it isn't, perhaps Martin is sure the pope will use it in his post-synodal exhortation] and said it “spoke clearly of the need to reach out, include and look for ways for LGBT people to be part of the life and mission of the church.”

Canadian priest, professor and commentator Father Raymond de Souza noted how Francis released the new Apostolic Constitution right before the Synod, allowing him to designate its final document as magisterial, and said that, as this is a novelty, it remains to be seen what magisterial declaration for the Youth Synod document would bring.

He pointed out how the final document referenced the Instrumentum laboris, prepared months before the Synod, and how it said it should be read in “complementarity” with the final document, questioning how the two documents could add up to be magisterium.

“That adds a further question about status,” Father de Souza said. “The ‘working document’ was not prepared by the synod, nor was it voted upon by them. How then could it have any status at all, let alone that of being ‘complementary’ to a potentially magisterial document?”

[Which just goes to show that Bergoglio's synod-handler circusmasters did not even bother to consult the text of the new Apostolic Constitution when they rammed through the proviso that the IL was to read as a complement to the final document. Worse even is that the synod delegates who voted for that proviso constituted at least two-thirds of the assembly. And they are supposed to be among the best and the brightest in 'the Church' today! How scary is that????

Because what does that say of them?
1) They were not even aware of the Apostolic Constitution Bergoglio snuck into the 'magisterium' before the synod, just as he snuck in his decree on fast and free marriage annulments before the second 'faily synod' began; or
2) They knew about it - and that it makes synodal declarations part of the Magisterium - and were happi;y unquestioning about all that; and
3) If they knew about it and approved the proviso on the IL, anyway, then they did so mindlessly and robotically,
because how can any person in his right mind fail to see that the very defective IL - which was not prepared by them, was roundly criticized by many of them, and obviously not voted on by them - cannot in any way, shape or form be considered part of the Magisterium, i.e., of official Church teaching, with or without Bergoglio's sneaky Constitution?

But this is just one of the many ways this synodal assembly was a travesty of what a synodal assembly ought to be, or of what any democratic deliberative body ought to be. I suggest some Vaticanista get a list of all those who voted NO for the IL proviso - and on this basis, release the names of the HOPELESS IDIOTS AND BERGOGLIO ROBOTS who voted Yes for it.


Father de Souza wrote in the National Catholic Register about another significant issue with the Youth Synod – that of translation obstacles. The text of the document was read in Italian in the Synod hall, but only available in Italian via hard copy, and there wasn’t sufficient time for Synod Fathers to process it.

This mirrored the 2015 Synod on the Family that resulted in Amoris Laetitia, where non-Italian-speaking bishops and cardinals had to vote on the final document presented in Italian without the option of going outside the Synod hall for translation assistance.

Chaput had written in his column as well about the ambiguity of rules and process at the Youth Synod, and also the lack of needed translations.

There was friction because of the translation problems at the Youth Synod, de Souza wrote, and it was unclear why the Synod secretariat could not takes steps to see that translations were provided.

“In his concluding address, Pope Francis said that the document now needs to be prayed over, studied and reflected upon, before proper decisions can be made,” Father de Souza said. “Prayer, study and reflection would have also been suitable before it was approved.”

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 04/11/2018 00:42]
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In the absence of anything truly newsy about the Church today, Fr. H's citations of Dom Gregory Dix and the Mass as Sacrifice above all else, makes an appropriate reflection for any day of the week...


Holy Mass:
A Sacrifice first before
it is a Sacrament


November 3-4, 2018

Traddies ... rightly ... complain that 'mainstrream' Catholics have usually never been taught about Transsubstantiation.

The poor things are even less likely to have been told about the Mass as a ... er ... the Sacrifice. Once a well-meaning proof-reader corrected, in a ms of mine, "Sacrifice" to "Sacrament", convinced that I had simply made a typo!

Here is Dom Gregory Dix [1902-1952, Anglican Benedictine monk whose writings on liturgy Fr H loves to cite]:

"For the primitive Church the doctrine of the Sacrifice of the Mass was of primary importance. Today Church-people make the Sacrifice to depend on the Sacrament. The Primitive Church made the Sacrament to depend on the Sacrifice.

I am speaking of something which is the essence of all religion - the attempt of the creature to achieve union with the creator, to leap the chasm between God and man; to ascend above its derived creaturely being to the self-existent being of God Himself.

It must contain two things: (1) the attempt to leave behind the status of being a creature; and (2) the attempt to ascend from its own natural being and rise to God.

Here we meet with tragedy. Man, being a sinner, cannot make that leap. That supreme act of religion is for him impossible. Death is the penalty which God has imposed on sinners.
- The acceptance of death is the supremely moral act of human existence.
- We have sinned but accepted the consequence of our sin.
That is one half - the negative side of the act of religion. But obviously, if there is to be sacrifice, it cannot be done by sinful people as an act of suicide.

It is here that we have the New Testament doctrine of our Saviour as the Second Adam. He is very Man - He accepted death, sinless though he was, as the penalty of sin. His death is the representative act of death of all mankind, as Head of the human race.

As St Paul said, 'To recapitulate in Christ all things'. His death is His entrance into the glory of God. So that His death has the full character of Sacrifice; and it is a representative act on behalf of all mankind. It is the Sacrifice, par excellence.

Before He died, Christ consigned the whole meaning of His sacrificial death to an Action.
- He took bread and broke it, and said 'This is my Body'.
- He took the cup and said 'This is the New Covenant in my Blood'. - He gave to that Act the character of a sign - an effective sign: 'As often as ye eat this Bread and drink this Cup ye do proclaim the Lord's death till he come'.

I only have time to insist on the enormous importance, in that connection, of bearing in mind the New Testament doctrine of the Church as the Body of Christ; a doctrine which Protestantism from the beginning has virtually denied. It took up the position that first the individual was 'justified' and then he joined the church.

That is not New Testament doctrine. It is not the Catholic doctrine. - Christ cannot be separated from His Church.
- Christ and the Church are one thing.
- Because the Church is the Body of Christ, Baptism actually makes us part of Christ, and Confirmation is the imparting of the Spirit to His members. That is a consequence of Baptism, and in the Primitive Church Confirmation immediately followed Baptism.

It seems to me strange that the doctrine of the Church is in very great danger of being lost sight of in questions of reunion. You and I believe that the Sacrifice of Christ is not renewed but extended in the Church's Sacrifice in the Eucharist.
- Because the Church is one with Him, its members rightly take upon their lips the words which were so often upon His lips: 'Our Father'.
- His prayer is the Church's prayer; His mission is her mission; His action is the Church's action - not associated with Him, but one action.
- He lives and reigns in the Church, which is His Body.
- Death is His entrance into glory; His death our entrance to God - our perfect sacrifice, proclaimed as such in every Eucharist.




First Mass in Brazil, Meirelles, 1860.
Victor Meirelles (1832-1903) was a Brazilian painter who is best known for his works relating to his nation's culture and history. The Mass painting (completed in 1860) is one of his best-knwon works, reproduced in many history textbooks and on Brazil's 1000-cruzeiro note.


Fr H has run two installments of the post so far. I will update this post as he runs the rest of it.

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Jorge Bergoglio will never manage to lift the pall of satanic fumes that has enveloped 'the church' he leads until he at least calls the root evil by name, because the disordered human condition of homosexuality has driven much of the clerical/episcopal sex abuse crimes, cover-ups and connivance that have characterized this particular ecclesial scourge.


Study after study has shown the linkage, but most church prelates today continue to deny such linkage. The latest report is this:



On Nov. 2, the Ruth Institute published a new report that dares to ask a question many researchers — and Catholics — have been afraid to ask: What has been the role of active homosexuality and homosexual subcultures in the priesthood and in seminaries on the sex-abuse crisis? [That is not quite true, as one can judge from major reports that have been published on this correlation.]

The report — which indicates a very strong correlation between homosexual priests and homosexual subcultures and the incidence of clergy sexual abuse — is in part a response to the two important studies commissioned by the U.S. Bishops in the face of the sex-abuse crisis that were conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

The 2004 study was entitled, “The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States,” and the 2011 report was called, “The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010.”

The 2011 report was heavily criticized at the time of its release for its assertion that it found no evidence that homosexual priests were to blame for the abuse crisis, despite the fact that more than 80% of the victims were male and that 78% were postpubescent. Critics claimed that the report bowed to political correctness and fear of a backlash in academia.

Seven years on, the Ruth Institute has weighed into the research of the sex-abuse crisis, specifically addressing the issue of homosexuality. A global nonprofit organization, the Ruth Institute was founded by Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D., to help study and find solutions to the toxic impact of the sexual revolution.

The new report was the work of Father D. Paul Sullins, Ph.D., a senior research associate of the Ruth Institute. Father Sullins recently retired as professor of sociology at The Catholic University of America, in Washington, D.C., and has focused on same-sex parenting and its implications for child development, the trauma that women suffer following abortion, and the impact of clergy sex abuse. A former Episcopalian, Father Sullins is a married Catholic priest.

The central thrust of the report is that
- the share of homosexual men in the priesthood rose from twice that of the general population in the 1950s to eight times the general population in the 1980s, a trend that was strongly correlated with increasing child sex abuse.
- At the same time, a quarter of priests ordained in the late 1960s report the existence of a homosexual subculture in their seminaries, rising to over half of priests ordained in the 1980s, a second trend that was also strongly correlated with increasing child sex abuse.

Father Sullins spoke to the Register about the report on Oct. 31. Aware of the controversy that will surround any effort to research the possible role of homosexual priests in the clergy sex-abuse crisis, including the likelihood he will be demonized and called a homophobe, he said bluntly, “To people who hate the truth, the truth looks like hate.”

It is probably safe to say that your report is going to spark some controversy. Why do you feel that this type of study is so long overdue?
There is a widespread denial of any possible negative effects of homosexual activity or any findings that might not be benign for homosexual persons in the scholarly realm. And I think that, to some extent, that’s true for the scholarly work that’s been done on Catholic clergy sex abuse. There’s not been a willingness to confront the evidence on this topic, and I don’t know if I want to speculate further than that.

Do we have clerics who just don’t want to see or don’t want to know that we may have embedded homosexual activity among priests that’s wreaking harm in some ways to the Church? That may be the case. We have found in the last six months that there’s a possibility that bishops have not pursued a wide knowledge on this topic.

Some have called it a cover-up. There’s evidence that there’s a lack of energy or interest in finding out the relation of homosexuality to this activity. I don’t know if I would call it a cover-up. I may have used the word “cover-up” in the paper just to go along with the common term, but it may be if there’s a cover-up that it’s also extended to releasing data about the sex abuse and in authorizing folks to look at it. For example, in the data release to the John Jay Institute at John Jay College of Criminal Justice — which, by the way, did two wonderful reports on abuse with a lot of very helpful information — the data that the bishops released to them, the diocese was de-identified. They were not able to tell in what diocese the instances of abuse occurred.

Why do you think that was?
Well, I don’t know why that was. Typically, you will de-identify individuals because you don’t want to impugn the reputation of individuals. That makes a lot of sense. But if you have an institution where you have a widespread problem, whether it’s abuse or embezzlement or theft or whatever, you’d like to know in what sectors of that institution that occurred more frequently than others. Typically, you would like to say, “Well, over here in this division, they had a great record. Let’s try to see what we can do to make the whole institution more like this division, so as to reduce this unwanted behavior.” That did not occur here. Could it be that the bishops, some bishops, did not want to know, did not want to have people know what dioceses were better and what dioceses were worse? I don’t know.

We know from what John Jay College did report that there were a number of dioceses who had no or very few instances of sex abuse over the last 50 years. We don’t know what those are. That might be a kind of a cover-up, or not letting us know everything that we would like to know in order to address the abuse.

Now, by contrast, the recent grand jury report from Pennsylvania put everything out there. We know exactly where and when each instance of abuse occurred. I do look at that data to some extent in this report, and it’s very helpful, but we have a possibility to do much more investigation and report on data like that, which will begin to let us know:

Were there dirty dioceses and clean dioceses? We’d like to know that about seminaries. Were there dirty seminaries and clean seminaries? We have these reports of homosexual subcultures and seminaries that have been affected by abuse. We don’t know what seminaries those are. Wouldn’t it be helpful to us if there was a handful of seminaries that were really spawning this kind of behavior and lots of clean seminaries that weren’t?

It would really help us a lot to be able to know that in order to address this problem and to eliminate it as best we can and for the safety and security of our children, particularly our young boys.

When you read the John Jay Report when it first came out, what was your initial reaction to it?
Well, actually, I didn’t read it when it first came out. Like everybody else, I kind of glanced at it, but I have read both John Jay Reports recently. We should say [John Jay] came out with a report in 2004 on the nature and scope of the abuse and followed that up in 2011 with a great study on the causes and context to the abuse. And in between those two, they had gathered more data; they had surveyed some of the offenders and so had access to some clinical data that really was very helpful and reported very well.

My analysis focuses mostly on that second report, and what I take issue with is the conclusion that the abuse was unrelated to the presence of homosexual men in the priesthood over the period of abuse.

The John Jay Report in 2011 denied that that was the case because they said that the trend of abuse did not correspond with the trend of homosexual men in the priesthood - abuse was highest in the mid-1970s. But the reports of homosexual activity in the seminaries did not increase until the 1980s.

So they argued that since by the time we were aware that they had these kinds of lurid homosexual cultures and homosocial activities in the Catholic seminaries, the abuse was already declining so it couldn’t have had anything to do with that activity or with the presence of homosexuals. And so I critically examine that thesis. I really don’t have a general criticism of the John Jay study at all. In fact, I have a lot of appreciation and admiration for that study.

But for that particular point, I point out that the percent of homosexual men who are ordained in any year or the presence of homosexual activity in seminaries can’t relate very strongly to the percent of homosexual priestS in priesthood. Because each year we ordain a relatively small proportion of new priests. It’s about 1%. So even if all of that 1% were homosexual, it doesn’t affect the percent of homosexual men and the priesthood very much at all.

What we have to do is to look at what percentage of men were of a homosexual orientation in the entire presbyterate in any given year in order to see if that is correlated with the incidents of abuse — and even more importantly to see if that’s correlated with the percent of victims who were male in any year. And so that’s what I do in this report.

I use data from a survey that was done in 2002 that measured the sexual orientation of Catholic priests and used a modified Kinsey scale, which in this case was a five-point scale, measuring from a completely homosexual orientation to completely heterosexual orientation and then categories in between; and also ask about year of ordination and the year of birth.

And so from that, I’m able to compute what percentage of priests reported a homosexual orientation in any given year, going back to the 1950s. And when I overlay that trend with the trend and abuse, it’s almost a perfect correlation. The correlation is 0.98. A perfect correlation is 1.0. [In percentage terms, it is 98% and 00%, respectively.] So it’s as close an association as you can get.

In the 1950s, about 3% of priests were of a homosexual orientation, by their own reports. By the 1980s, that had risen to over 16%. So we have sort of a fivefold increase in the percentage of priests who are homosexual, in a pretty straight line from the 1950s through the 1980s. And we have a very similar increase in abuse incidents over that same period, and we don’t know the sexual orientation of any particular abuser.

So we’re inferring from the association of those two correlations that there’s some influence of one on the other. So my conclusion has to be the opposite of that of the John Jay Report.

It’s almost axiomatic among a number of very prominent figures in the Church that there is no correlation, and they cite the John Jay Report. And then we can add to that anyone who tries to investigate that type of a correlation is often accused of either scapegoating homosexual priests or of outright homophobia. What is your response to that?
I’ve been called homophobic and hateful before for studying these kinds of things. I would say that if it’s a choice between being called homophobic and allowing more young boys to be abused, I would choose to be at risk for being called homophobic.

The question is: Are we on the side of abusers? Are we on the side of victims? I think that the words of Our Lord about the importance of young children and the horribleness of those who would lead such young children astray in my mind outweigh anything that someone could call me.

I’m not hateful toward anyone, to my knowledge. … I don’t think that these results in any way imply that homosexual persons are natively inclined or internally inclined to commit abuse at a greater rate than heterosexual persons.

In fact, we know that that’s not the case. Most child abuse that happens in most settings is perpetrated by heterosexual males. It usually in families, and so I don’t think that in any way we can infer these results to something that generally happens with homosexual persons.

I do look at the influence of these homosexual subcultures in seminaries, in encouraging and promoting abuse. And I find that it explains about half of the high correlation of the abuse with the percentage of homosexual priests. So something was going on beyond just mere sexual orientation to encourage this horrible immoral activity that has wrought such harm to so many victims.

My experience in studying homosexuals has been this: that to people who hate the truth, the truth looks like hate.

You mentioned in your research that there is this presence of a homosexual subculture in a lot of U.S. seminaries. And as you’ve also noted, that the John Jay Report was unable to identify specifically which seminaries were particular problem areas for that, what needs to be done in your view with respect to seminaries in order to address this problem, especially given the high likelihood — as we are seeing globally in places like Honduras and elsewhere — that this is an ongoing problem that has yet to be resolved?
Well, the first thing that needs to be done is to stop the denial. We need to recognize that there’s a problem. And the idea that we want to keep from acknowledging that homosexual activity in seminaries or in the priesthood might be related to these kind of harms is really an important first step.

The impulse that we don’t want to say anything that might stigmatize homosexual persons is an understandable one. But it has to be weighed against the potential for greater harm for these victims. How many times do we want to go around this block again and keep denying what is becoming increasingly obvious, and taking steps to address it?

I do not know exactly what steps should be taken in seminaries. I’m sure there are people that have much better ideas than I would about that, but the first step I would recommend is to investigate thoroughly what seminaries, what professors, what persons, were complicit in promoting this kind of activity, because we don’t know.

The John Jay Report let us know what diocese each offender was in, but did not let us know what seminary each offender had attended. Now, if we need just that piece of information, we could correlate abuse in the seminaries and find out which seminaries graduated priests that were engaged in less abuse; it seems to me that would be an important piece of information to know.

And then we can begin to look at what the characteristics of those seminaries were; we might find that it’s related to particular professors and particular groups of persons, many of whom are still in the priesthood and still with us. It’d be great to know what the continuing effects of that activity are, but also to be able to identify places where it may still be going on.

This report is being released just ahead of the U.S. bishops’ fall assembly, where they will be discussing issues related to the McCarrick scandal and other aspects of clergy sexual abuse. Is it your hope that the report’s findings will assist the bishops in better understanding the factors in play regarding clergy sexual abuse and in drafting new policies that can deal with them more effectively?
I certainly hope that that will be the case. But not just the bishops. Any actor of goodwill that works to relieve the Church of this crime that is so harmful to our children, to our young people, is someone that I would like to help. And I hope that the information in this report is helpful to them from any point of view.

If the bishops have a will and a mind to seriously address this issue, then I hope it’s helpful to them. But what we’re finding out is that if the bishops aren’t going to clean house, others are. We now have a federal investigation into some Catholic dioceses, and we’re likely to have many more. And I have to say that I welcome that.

Like most Catholics today, the credibility of our bishops, to me, is in question on this issue. I hate to say that. I love the Church. I love my bishops. I think my own bishop, Cardinal [Donald] Wuerl, has been maliciously and unfairly characterized, and he’s done a lot better job on this issue than is generally known. But I think that, generally speaking, the bishops, as a group, cannot be trusted to solve this problem at this point, and that other folks, I think, might be more reliable and more clear about what to do.





It is with major reservations that I post this article. I had thought it positive, from the title Magister gave it, but I was not prepared for certain broad and outrageous accusations of pastoral laxity and permissiveness - to the point of gross dreliction of their Petriune duty - on the part of John Paul II and Benedict XVI....

Cardinal Brandmueller, Church historian:
On Gomorrah in the 21st century


November 5, 2018

“The situation is comparable to that of the Church in the 11th and 12th century.” As an authoritative Church Sciences from 1998 to 2009, Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, 89, has no doubt when he sees the present-day Church “shaken to its foundations” on account of the spread of sexual abuse and homosexuality “in an almost epidemic manner among the clergy and even in the hierarchy.”

“How could it have come to this point?” the cardinal wonders. And his answer is found in an extensive and detailed article published in recent days in the German monthly Vatican Magazin edited by Guido Horst and entitled "Homosexuality and abuse- Confronting the crisis: Lessons from History":
> Homosexualität und Missbrauch - Der Krise begegnen: Lehren aus der Geschichte
In its complete Italian version:
> Omosessualità e abusi - Affrontare la crisi: le lezioni della storia


Brandmüller refers to the centuries in which the bishoprics and the papacy itself had become such a source of wealth that there was “fighting and haggling over them,” with temporal rulers claiming that they themselves could apportion these offices in the Church.

The effect was that the place of pastors was taken by morally dissolute persons who were attached to the corresponding endowment rather than to the care of souls, by no means inclined to lead a chaste and virtuous life.

Not only concubinage, but homosexuality too was increasingly widespread among the clergy, to such an extent that Saint Peter Damian in 1049 delivered to the newly elected pope Leo IX, known as a zealous reformer, his Liber Antigomorrhianus, [Book against Gomorrah, but translated commonly to English as "The Book of Gomorrah"] in the form of a letter, which was an appeal to save the Church from the “sodomitic filth that insinuates itself like a cancer in the ecclesiastical order, or rather like a bloodthirsty beast rampaging through the flock of Christ.”

Sodom and Gomorrah, in the book of Genesis, are the two cities that God destroyed with fire on account of their sins.

But the thing more worthy of note, Brandmüller writes, was that at that time, “almost simultaneously a lay movement arose that was aimed not only against the immorality of the clergy but also against the appropriation of ecclesiastical offices by secular powers.”

“What rose up was the vast popular movement called ‘pataria,’ led by members of the Milanese nobility and by some members of the clergy, but supported by the people. In close collaboration with the reformers associated with Saint Peter Damian, and then with Gregory VII, with Bishop Anselm of Lucca, an important canonist who later became Pope Alexander II, and with others still, the patarini demanded, even resorting to violence, the implementation of the reform that after Gregory VII took the name ‘Gregorian’, and which called for "a celibacy of the clergy lived out faithfully" as well as "against the occupation of dioceses by secular powers.”

Subsequently, of course, it disperesed into pauperist and anti-hierarchical movements, on the verge of heresy, and was only partially reintegrated with the Church “thanks to the farseeing pastoral action of Innocence III.”

But the “interesting aspect” on which Brandmüller insists is that “the reforming movement broke out almost simultaneously in the uppermost hierarchical circles in Rome and among the vast lay population of Lombardy, in response to a situation considered unbearable.”

So then, what is similar and different in the Church today, with respect to back then?

What is similar, Brandmüller notes, is that then as now the ones expressing the protest and demanding a purification of the Church are above all segments of the Catholic laity, especially in North America, in the footsteps of the “marvelous homage to the important role of the witness of the faithful in matters of doctrine” brought to light in the 19th century by Blessed John Henry Newman.

Now these faithful find beside them only a few zealous pastors. But it must be recognized - Brandmüller writes - that the impassioned appeal to the upper hierarchy of the Church and ultimately to the pope to join them in combating the scourge of homosexuality among the clergy and the bishops is not meeting with correspondingly adequate responses, unlike in the 11th and 12th centuries.

Also in the Christological battles of the 4th century - Brandmüller points out - “the episcopacy remained inactive for long stretches.” And if it remains so today, with respect to the spread of homosexuality among sacred ministers, “this could be based on the fact that personal initiative and the awareness of their responsibility as pastors on the part of the individual bishops are made more difficult by the structures and apparatus of the episcopal conferences, with the pretext of collegiality or synodality.”

As for the pope, Brandmüller attributes not only to the current one but also to his predecessors the weakness of not opposing the currents of moral theology according to which “what was forbidden yesterday can be allowed today,” homosexual acts included. [Excuse me, Your Eminence - but can you point to a single statement or document by either Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II or Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI ever countenanced such 'immoral' theology? That is all so unfair to these two popes.]

It is true - Brandmüller acknowledges - that the 1993 encyclical “Veritatis Splendor” of John Paul II - “in which the contribution of Joseph Ratzinger has not yet been duly recognized” - reconfirmed “with great clarity the foundations of the Church’s moral teaching.” But this “ran up against widespread rejection from theologians, perhaps because it had been published only when the theological-moral decay was already too far advanced.[That was already the case at the time of Vatican-II which is why it produced the calculatedly ambiguous documents it did, aimed at pleasing everyone with questionable concessions here and there, instead of standing firm on the Magisterium. And Jorge Bergoglio happens to be the exemplary fruit of that Vatican-II ambiguity and relativism. Besides, at least Veritatis splendor is on the books - it may be a dead letter for Bergoglio, but that does not detract from its inherent value and can be consulted by anyone who has access to the Internet.

It is also true that “some books on sexual morality were condemned” and “two professors had their teaching licenses revoked, in 1972 and 1986.” “But,” Brandmüller continues, “the truly important heretics, like the Jesuit Josef Fuchs, who from 1954 to 1982 was a professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University, and Bernhard Häring, who taught at the Redemptorist Institute in Rome, as well as the highly influential moral theologian from Bonn, Franz Böckle, or from Tübingen, Alfons Auer, were able to spread without interference, right in front of Rome and the bishops, the seed of error. The attitude of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the faith in these cases is, in retrospect, simply incomprehensible. It saw the wolf come and stood looking on while it ravaged the fold.

[I am frankly outraged by this accusation coming from Brandmueller - who seems to have turned against Joseph Ratzinger with a vengeance since the latter decided to step down from the papacy. It's a personal animus I cannot understand, much less why the cardinal seems to delight in publicizing it the way he does.
- First, the theologians he cites are all Germanophone, so their influence was primarily in the German-speaking field.
- Moreover, whatever anti-Catholic views they disseminated obviously was not going to make a significant difference all told, because in the second half of the 20th century, 90 percent of theologians in the German-speaking countries were already openly dissident - and what could the Church do against that kind of a preponderance?
- Remember these dissidents were, for the most part*, also clever enough not to cross a certain threshold that would endanger their ability to go on expressing themselves. (*Hans Kueng was careless enough to be the object of censure and discipline by the pre-Ratzinger CDF.])
- The CDF did its best to censure those that it could (those who could be proven to have stepped across the line- and anyone can go online to check out just which theologians were censured, how and for what).

As for the theologians Brandmueller lists as examples of the CDF merely 'looking on as the wolf ravaged the pack', I did a quick check since the only name familiar to me was Häring (Bergoglio's favorite moral theologian].
- Josef Fuchs, 1912-2005, turns out to have chaired the study commission on contraception whose recommendations Paul VI turned down when he promulgated Humanae Vitae. He was a lifelong Rahnerian, and if the Church could not find anything outright censurable in Rahner's work, then it is unlikely Fuchs went beyond Rahner.
- Bernhard Häring (1912-1998) was a peritus at Vatican-II whose multi-volume book 'The Law of Christ' published in the 1950s emphasized a moral theology of 'Christian love' while downplaying the importance of sin. (He was obviously among the forerunners of Bergoglian misericordism.) He was the most outspoken critic of Humanae Vitae (1968) and was duly investigated by the CDF (way before Ratzinger's 1982-2005 tenure as Prefect) but was 'exonerated'. He wrote no new books between 1978 and 1992, after which he published three volumes that were basically autobiographical. What was there for Ratzinger's CDF to investigate?
- Franz Böckle (1921-1991) was an expert and scholar on the theology of Karl Barth, whose influence like Rahner's, peaked in the 1950s-1960s. Neither theologian, for all the questionable doctrines they disseminated, was ever investigated, much less censured, by the Church.
- Alfons Auer (1915-2005) taught ethics at the University of Tuebingen at the time Hans Kueng and Joseph Ratzinger were teaching theology. Obviously, he never became a household word like his two colleagues, which would at least mean he was not up to their level. But his obituary in the Times of London says: "As early as l960 Ratzinger had joined a group openly critical of Auer’s first major work in which he pleaded for a Christianity that was more “open to the world”. Nor did Ratzinger feel he could go along with Auer’s thesis that reason and conscience must both override the teachings of the Church..." However, the only two books of his that I could Google (I have translated the German titles) were written in 1976 (Utopias, Technology and Quality of Life) and in 1984 (Environmental Ethic: A Theological Contribution to Ecological Discussions). Neither of which would appear to occasion or merit censure by the CDF.

Cardinal Brandmueller obviously has manifold resources far beyond what one can glean from a quick google check, but the fact is that - at least in the Anglophone and Italian arenas of discussion about Church life, none of these names other than Häring's are ever brought up as 'wolves who ravaged the flock'.
- Did Brandmueller, during the years he served at the Vatican, ever call Ratzinger's attention to these 'wolves' and ask him to do something about them?
- That would have been like asking the Vatican to 'do something' about the largely dissident bishops and priests of the German-speaking countries.
- Even assuming he had wanted to, personally, Joseph Ratzinger could never have started a new Inquisition-like pursuit of these dissidents without all the institutional requisites in place - the backing of the pope and of canon law, to begin with.
- Most importantly, does not Cardinal Brandmueller realize how futile any action is today against heretics and apostates, especially if the accused heretic/apostate happens to be the pope? The best theologian critics of Bergoglio have proposed and analyzed ways to do this and have been just as frustrated - and conceding futility - as Robert Bellarmine or Melchor Cano theorizing in their day. Brandmueller ought to be the first to realize this, since the famous DUBIA of which he was one of the proponents was simply dumped by this pope into the dustbin of history.

So much for Cardinal Brandmueller's unfair and unjust accusation against the CDF - and implicitly against Benedict XVI - for simply 'looking on' as the wolves ravage the flock.


The risk is that on account of this lack of initiative on the part of the upper hierarchy even the most committed Catholic laity, left on its own, might “no longer recognize the nature of the Church founded on the sacred order and slip, in protesting against the ineptitude of the hierarchy, into an Evangelical-style communitarian Christianity.”

And instead, the more the hierarchy, from the pope down, feel supported by the effective resolve of tthe faithful to renew and revive the Church, the more a true housecleaning can be performed.

Brandmüller concludes:“It is in the collaboration of the bishops, priests, and faithful, in the power of the Holy Spirit, that the current crisis can and must become the point of departure for the spiritual renewal - and therefore also for the new evangelization - of a post-Christian society.”

Brandmüller is one of the four cardinals who in 2016 submitted to Pope Francis their “dubia” on the changes being made in the doctrine of the Church, without ever receiving a response.

This time will the pope listen and take him seriously into consideration, as Leo IX did with Saint Peter Damian? [Even as a rhetorical question, this should not even be asked!]
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Due process and natural justice-
and the courage to face opponents

[None of all that in this pontificate, alas!]

November 5, 2018

It is not easy to know what to make of the precipitous removal by PF of an American bishop called Holley.

For nearly two millennia, Roman pontiffs have intervened to remove dysfunctional bishops. This was happening even before the Catholic Church had such a thing as Canon Law. And one can understand why, given the present atmosphere, it might be necessary for a Universal Primacy to act quickly in an emergency. And readers will remember the many depositions by Pope Hildebrand of simoniacal bishops. So, on balance, I think I feel that the presumption must tilt in favour of the Holy See. But ...

But the situation is profoundly unsatisfactory. In CATHOLIC ECCLESIOLOGY, the main ministerial realities are,
- firstly, the Petrine See, the universal source and instrument of Unity, which presides over the agape of the Universal Church. And,
- secondly, the local Bishop, Successor of the Apostles, is the minister who presides over the unity and orthodoxy of his local Church which is, let us never forget, the Catholic Church in that place.

As Leo XIII taught, and Vatican II repeated, diocesan bishops are not mere Vicars of the Pope, like the regional managers of a supermarket chain. The deposition of bishops ought to be a matter of enormous rarity, as being a very unusual (if occasionally unavoidable) disruption of the natural order and sacramental structure of Christ's Church Militant.

We do now have Canon Law; and it is difficult to understand why such removals should not be done with a due process, rather than by means of phone calls to and from Nuncios. It is reported that Bishop Holley was asked to resign so that, in accordance with Canon 185, he could be granted the title emeritus. [What an absurd pretext! Just using such a pretext would be unthinkable to anyone in his right mind.] This suggests that he was not suspected of an ecclesiastical offence.

And our world is one in which NATURAL JUSTICE is deemed proper. I must declare an interest here. I became even more convinced of this when I was told, the day before being received into Full Communion, that two English Catholic bishops had refused to give me a positive votum and that my scheduled admission to the presbyterate of the Ordinariate had therefore been put on hold. Verbally, it was made clear to me that this related to my preference for the Vetus Ordo; but I was never given any formal explanations in writing or a meeting with those concerned so that they could tell me face to face what the problem was and hear my own account of myself.

It was a very unpleasant business and I do not wish to relive it. My point is that Christ's Church should be a transparent place in which affairs are transacted in visibly just ways.

It should never be possible for somebody to feel, or other people to suspect, that personal prejudice, individual liturgical preferences, or the operation of old-boy networks, were operating to the disadvantage of any laic or cleric or bishop.

Otherwise, we have that 'Arbitrary Power' which we Anglo-Saxons have for centuries claimed to mistrust
.

Finally: the habitual REFUSAL BY PF TO MEET PERSONALLY AND PHYSICALLY bishops whom he is deposing is arguably unChristian as well as unmanly; not to say, plain cowardly.

He may be a dab hand at ladling repetitive abuse down public microphones, but he is very 'shy' about seeing people ... even four of his Cardinals when they asked for an audience! This is not one of the least of the scandals of this pontificate. For me personally, it was his treatment of the late Bishop Livieres at the beginning of this pontificate which first made me seriously uneasy about what sort of person had obtained possession of the Roman See. [Mons. Livieres was the highly successful Catholic bishop of La Plata in Uruguay, with record vocations in a diocese that upheld Catholic orthodoxy, whom Bergoglio dismissed summarily because apparently, other Uruguayan bishops disliked him, and whom he refused to see when the bishop came to Rome to find out just why he was being dismissed.]

Some readers may remember the adamant refusal in audientia by Archbishop Errington to resign when Pius IX asked for his resignation, couching this as a request for a personal favour. A century and a half later, we are, apparently, suffering a more tyrannical and arbitrary regime than ever has been attributed to Pio Nono. [Pio Nono is Italian for Pius the Ninth.]
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ROME- While Synod-2018 was trying to grasp the polyhedron-like character of “synodality” and wrestling with the differences among sexual inclination, sexual orientation, and sexual attraction, tectonic plates were shifting beneath the surface of world Christianity.

Like similar shifts in geology, which can produce tsunamis and earthquakes, dramatic movement in the underlying structures of ecclesiastical life can lead to great historical consequences. The recent decision by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople to grant autocephaly to a unified Ukrainian Orthodox Church — which would mean that church’s independence from the Russian Orthodox Moscow patriarchate — is precisely such a dramatic, tectonic shift, perhaps the greatest in Eastern Christianity since Constantinople and Rome formally severed full communion in 1054.

This is, then, a Very Big Deal. That it got virtually no attention during Synod-2018, either inside the Synod hall or in the Synod’s “Off-Broadway” conversations, says something (not altogether edifying) about the self-absorption of Catholicism as it continues its seemingly endless wrestling with the ethics of human love, the exercise of authority in the Church, and a raft of sexual and financial scandals. [It also got virtually no attention in the Catholic media, much less in MSM! I posted on these pages what I could at the time, going to the Moscow Patriarchate's website for their announcements and statements.]

But one Synod father was paying close attention to what was afoot 2,300 kilometers northeast of here, and that was the ever-more-impressive Sviatoslav Shevchuk, Major-Archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, largest of the Eastern Catholic Churches that are Byzantine in liturgy and polity but in full communion with Rome.

Many commentators, including your scribe, have viewed what may be the impending independence of Ukrainian Orthodoxy in terms of its potential to derail Vladimir Putin’s attempts to recreate a simulacrum of the old Soviet Union in the name of a historic “Russian space” (Russkie mir).

Others, your scribe again included, have speculated on what Ukrainian Orthodox autocephaly would mean for ecumenical relations. Vatican ecumenists have bet most if not all their chips on Russian Orthodoxy as the “lead Church” in Eastern Christianity. That position will become even more untenable if Russian Orthodoxy loses a considerable proportion of its parishes and congregants to an independent Ukrainian Orthodoxy recognized as such by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, first among equals in the Orthodox world.

It was Major-Archbishop Shevchuk, however, who put all this in its most appropriate context when, during the Synod, he gave an interview to my friends John Allen and Ines San Martin of Crux. There, he described any impending Ukrainian Orthodox autocephaly as a matter of a people reclaiming its spiritual and historical heritage, which had been hijacked for centuries by Muscovite claims to be the sole heir of that legacy.

What was happening, the major-archbishop said, was the exercise of a people’s right to “have its own interpretation of its religious past, present, and future … the right to have its own voice.”

Shevchuk also foresaw major ecumenical implications, as a reunited Ukrainian Orthodoxy might enter into a more fruitful, if challenging, dialogue with both the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the center of the Catholic Church’s unity in Rome. As the major-archbishop put it, a realized autocephaly for Ukrainian Orthodoxy would “mark a new period in the history of the Universal Church. I don’t believe it will be an easy period, but definitely interesting and also an impulse of the Holy Spirit.”

Major-Archbishop Shevchuk was appropriately concerned about Moscow’s immediate response to an independent Ukrainian Orthodoxy, for Russian Orthodoxy “thinks in geopolitical categories” and speaks “the language of threats, blackmail, and … ultimatums.”

That is simply realism, given the vitriol that has recently poured out of the Patriarchate of Moscow, which has broken communion with Constantinople, refuses to pray for Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in its liturgy, and blames the move toward Ukrainian autocephaly on the White House, the Vatican, the Greek Catholics of Ukraine, and other bogeymen.

I do wonder, though, whether the major-archbishop might not agree that, in the long view, Ukrainian autocephaly will be good for Russian Orthodoxy. Why?
- Because it could help liberate that Church from its historic role of chaplain to the czar-of-the-day.
- Because such a liberation might encourage a recovery of the vast spiritual riches of Russian Orthodox piety and theology, now being suffocated by political games and power plays. And
- because it might, over time, accelerate what we should all be praying and working for: the genuine reconversion of Russia, which could be a spiritual powerhouse but won’t be, so long as the Gospel is mortgaged to state power.



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Vatican pressures publisher to 'restrict'
future editions of Valli's book in the Vigano case

by Juliana Freitag

November 5, 2018

An Italian author has just published a volume detailing the work of whistleblower Abp. Carlo Maria Viganò — but Church officials have pressured the publishing company to restrict future editions so as to protect Pope Francis' image and reputation.

At the end of October, renowned Vatican expert Aldo Maria Valli announced the release of his latest book, Il caso Viganò — Il dossier che ha svelato il più grande scandalo all’interno della Chiesa ("The Viganò case — the dossier which unveiled the Church’s greatest internal scandal"). The book is a compilation of all of Valli’s articles about the astounding testimonies of former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States and titular archbishop of Ulpiana Abp. Viganò.

From Viganò's first statement alleging Pope Francis covered up for ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, to Valli's account of his private meetings with the former nuncio, the book is an attempt to document these turbulent events, as described by Viganò, for posterity.

The book's introduction is a revised version of the commentary Valli exclusively offered to Church Militant laying bare his reasons to enter this battle for truth. (The only important text missing is Viganò's third testimony, made public on October 19, also through Valli's blog — one day before the book’s official release.)

Valli is one among several Italian journalists personally contacted by Viganò to help publish his letters, along with Marco Tosatti and print newspaper La Verità. Valli remains in contact with the archbishop and has many times presented Viganò's commentary about his personal struggle to help expose a corrupt power system in the Church hierarchy.

Church Militant reached out to Valli to ask him about the significance of putting down in a book his experience with Viganò and his attempts to blow the whistle on clerical corruption.

Viganò's memorial, however one decides to judge it, constitutes a historical fact in the life of the Catholic Church. For the first time an archbishop of such high rank, a diplomat at the service of the Holy See, has come out with revelations on the moral corruption in the hierarchy.

Church historians will have to study these events that we see today as simple news. Therefore I think that the collection of articles I've dedicated to this affair might become useful.

I hope the reader can pick up on my suffering. As Abp. Viganò himself did, I've also decided to come out in the open after much reflection and prayer. Our faith is in danger, and it's our duty to stand up for doctrine and Catholic thought.


About the Vatican's silence on the affair, Valli said:

I don't think we'll have clear-cut answers during this pontificate. Ambiguity is a distinctive trait of the Church these days. I honestly don't know how this is going to end. I have no elements to predict Viganò's future, either. But it certainly saddens me very much to see that a man like him, a true servant of the Church, is forced to live in hiding. It's truly inadmissible, especially in today's Church, where there's so much preaching about "dialogue."


Another of Valli's observations involved the role of independent Catholic media in reporting facts that destroy the false narratives of a press complicit in covering up sex abuse:


Blogs are acquiring a decisive importance for uncontrolled and unconditioned information. At this point I'd say it's counter-information in respect to a certain type of narrative imposed on the public opinion by the major press. As for myself, it's a very beautiful experience, because through my blog I've tightened relationships that give me new connections and new friendships every day. I think it's significant that when Abp. Viganò decided to make his explosive testimony known, he turned to me and other bloggers. Evidently he saw us as an efficient, reliable and credible means, capable of reaching many people while not subject to any conditioning. Communications-wise, this is a moment of deep, very positive, changes.


Those changes are not being ignored by the Roman Curia. Valli spoke to Church Militant days before the release of the final Youth Synod document, which contains an alarming paragraph hinting at possible censorship of Catholic websites not approved by the Vatican.
Paragraph 146 speaks about the creation of "certification systems for Catholic websites, to counter the spread of fake news regarding the Church."

Last year Church Militant was the target of the Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica (an article reportedly approved by Pope Francis himself), the only Catholic publication whose contents are reviewed by the Vatican's Secretariat of State, Cdl. Pietro Parolin.

It's also paramount to note that one of the first accomplishments of the much-criticized Vatican media reform was the "Lettergate" scandal, where the prefect of the Dicastery for Communication, "simple-priest-turned-czar" Msgr. Dario Edoardo Viganò, had to resign for doctoring a letter from Benedict XVI supposedly commending the theology of Pope Francis.

And the quasi-totalitarian measures don't stop there: Recently Church Militant learned that Fede & Cultura, the publishing house for Valli's Il Caso Viganò, was compelled to restrict further editions of the book. It was the first time Valli had worked with Fede & Cultura, whom he called "courageous" for their publishing choices.

Fede & Cultura confirmed with Church Militant that they were put under "irresistible pressure from within the Church not to publish anything else that would depict the Pope in a bad light." Perhaps Pope Francis’s next surprise motu proprio will announce the reform of the Index librorum prohibitorum (the "List of Prohibited Books").

Ah, but it turns out the Bergogliacs have come out with an instant book to 'counter' Valli's - and you can bet its publisher is not being pressured by the Vatican to 'restrict further editions'.


'THE DAY OF JUDGMENT: Conflicts, power wars, abuses and scandals. What is really happening in the Church'. The upper righthand blurb says "With exclusive documents and unpublished testimonies on the
Vigano case, and the request for the impeachment [sic] of Pope Francis".



The authors are La Stampa/Vatican Insider journalists Andrea Tornielli (as much an unofficial spokesman of Bergoglio as Fr Spadaro) and Gianni Valente, the male half of the
Vaticanista couple (the wife is Stefania Falasca who writes for Avvenire) who had been friends of Jorge Bergoglio for several years before he became pope.

But go read the Vatican Insider blurb on the book - I can't stomach its crass hypocrisy and smugness.

https://www.lastampa.it/2018/11/06/vaticaninsider/the-pope-vigan-and-the-dossiers-war-the-background-in-a-book-GbjrTHSJeIwdbQzfVSaGAI/pagina.html

Are we to believe that this book will provide the answers that the VAtican has refused to give? What an elaborate and expensive ploy ! And to dispute what exactly?
If they had any answers, they could have been given short and sweet and promptly - not wait to be published in a book.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 07/11/2018 19:36]
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