THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI

See preceding page for earlier entries today, 11/26/18.

Catherine of Siena:
Pious paladin against Church corruption
[Or, How to reproach popes respectfully and well]
By Matt Chicoine

November 24, 2018

Catherine of Siena perfectly exemplifies how a person can be both faithful to the teaching of the Gospel while also be firm when injustice occurs in the Church.

Over the past several months, news about the sexual abuse scandal within the bowels of the Catholic Church hierarchy rocked not only the faith of the Catholic faithful but also caused huge distrust to linger over the 2,000-year-old Church instituted by Jesus Christ.

As a cradle Catholic, I am appalled and viciously angry over the vile sins of those men who committed abusive sexual acts on innocent victims. I am also disgusted by the cowardice of those leaders who knew had knowledge of the evils going on and did absolutely nothing to stop it. As a parent of young children who attend a Catholic school, I am a little scared about how to reconcile the love of God with these heinous acts.

On social media, I have seen an array of reactions regarding the news of Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report and the deeds of a disgraced cardinal, and former archbishop of Washington D.C. Theodore McCarrick. While the most common words to describe these articles include: angry, disgusted, sorrowful, desolate, and confused, I did come across a quote which helped provide perspective — and dare I say it – even hope.

The following quote also came from another archbishop, but one on the good end of the spectrum of holiness — Venerable Fulton Sheen. As an advocate for truth safeguarded in the Catholic Church, I imagine he would be just as angry, if not more as me, on the news of the priestly abuse against minors. According to him, “Judge the Catholic Church not by those who barely live by its spirit, but by the example of those who live closest to it.” In other words, our litmus test on the validity or invalidity of the truth housed within the Catholic Church should not be based on hypocrites, but rather on the saints!

The aim of every Catholic is to be a saint. A saint is not a perfect individual who never, ever sinned in their life, but rather a saint is someone who pledges to live a holy life and always seeks forgiveness and mercy whenever they offended God and neighbor. According to Lumen Gentium 5, “Therefore in the Church, everyone, whether belonging to the hierarchy or being cared for by it, is called to holiness, according to the saying of the Apostle: “For this is the will of God, your sanctification”.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church has this to say about saints,

---

We believe in the communion of all the faithful of Christ, those who are pilgrims on earth, the dead who are being purified, and the blessed in heaven, all together forming one Church; and we believe that in this communion, the merciful love of God and his saints is always [attentive] to our prayers. (CCC 962)

---

Although a plethora of individuals are canonized as official saints by the Catholic Church, I thought of one particular saint immediately who despised corruption in Church leadership as much as anyone — St. Catherine of Siena. Along with being a strong female saint, Catherine was also a layperson. Despite holding no official leadership position in the Catholic Church, she boldly confronted the pope and urged him to return to Rome. [She lived in the 14th century when corruption ran roughshod through the hierarchy].

As a member of the laity myself, reflecting on Catherine of Siena’s life and testimony to truth helped remind me of three important facts. On top of her courageous witness to face corruption within the Catholic Church no matter the cost, I discovered another fact about St. Catherine of Siena that provides further evidence I need to share what I learned from her: she is the patron saint of Pennsylvania — the very location where this insidious cover-up occurred. Coincidence? I think not!

Reading nearly 100 pages of her various letters to Church clergy, secular leaders, and lay faithful,
http://www.storyofasoul.com/resources/sienaletters.html
I learned a lot about Catherine’s theology and her strong desire to reform the Catholic Church.

Below are four primary reasons the Sienese saint should be the standard-bearer in our fight against corruption in the 21st century.

1. Stand for truth, stand against corruption
Among the most famous thing Catherine of Siena is known for is her persistent petition to the spope to end the corruption in the Catholic Church. Influenced by the secular state the papacy moved to Avignon, France. The ability to balance firmness and charity in her tone in letters to Popes Gregory XI and Urban VI show the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the holy lay handmaiden of God. Respectfully, Catherine began her letters by addressing the Supreme Pontiff as “Most holy and dear and sweet father in Christ sweet Jesus”.

Over time she gets more and more firm in her message, but Catherine continually hopes for the reformation of the pope’s human failings, “But, I hope, by the goodness of God that you will pay more heed to His honour and the safety of your own flock than to yourself, like a good shepherd, who ought to lay down his life for his sheep” (Letter to Gregory XI).

Along with the Sienese saint’s letters to the pope, she also wrote to cardinals regarding Church corruption. In a letter to three Italian cardinals, Catherine states,

---

Return, return, and wait not for the rod of justice since we cannot escape the hands of God! We are in His hands either by justice or by mercy; better it is for us to recognize our faults and to abide in the hands of mercy than to remain in fault and in the hands of justice. For our faults do not pass unpunished, especially those that are wrought against Holy Church.

---

Similar to the crisis the Church faces today, it is good to remind the hierarchy to repent, assuming we first ask for forgiveness for our own failings.

2. Cauterize sin not cover it up
Another key theme in Catherine’s writings is the need for spiritual surgery when sin infects the body of Christ. She warns against the lukewarm treatment of correcting sin tendencies. In a letter to Pope Gregory XI, Catherine proclaims, “If a wound when necessary is not cauterized or cut out with steel, but simply covered with ointment, not only does it fail to heal, but it infects everything, and many a time death follows from it.” The indifference toward the sexual abuse scandal by the Church leadership, for sure the perception of indifference, is something that Catherine of Siena would denounce!

3. Trust in God’s infinite mercy
Along with her tough stance on corruption and ardent desire to confront sin, the Italian saint refers to the infinite bounds of God’s mercy. A focus on justice without mercy, leads to a cold and inhumane approach to correcting sin. However, in the tradition of Catholic Church teaching, Catherine presents a balanced approach to judgment and mercy.

As often as she writes about the abuses of the hierarchy, the Doctor of the Church mentions God’s mercy just as often. Doing a word search over the course of her many letters, Catherine uses the word mercy no less than 79 times. Ideally, I would like to cite all examples, but that would lead to quite a length article! Her most powerful message I found occurred in a communication to Raimondo of Capua of the Order of the Preachers,

---

“Be sure that in all things you have recourse to Mary, embracing the holy Cross, and never let yourself fall into confusion of mind, but sail in a stormy sea in the ship of divine mercy.”

---

Shying away from the trials and suffering will not sanctify the Church in Her time of peril. Catherine reminds us to cling to the mast of the Cross and look to Mary, Star of the Sea, to guide us.

4. Be gold tested in fire
The final point I wish to make as to why an examination of the witness, word, and life of the simple 14th-century saint is essential to reforming the 21st century is Catherine’s persistent focus on suffering as a means to galvanize our faith. She uses the image of 'a divine furnace' to describe how painful suffering actually reforms us more beautifully and stronger than before.

Writing to Brother Matteo di Francesco Tolomei of the Order of the Preachers, Catherine offers words of encouragement that hope is founded in the love of God, “kindled by the fire of divine charity.” In another letter, to religious sisters, she longed for the passing of their suffering in saying,

---

Dearest mother and daughter in Christ sweet Jesus: I Catherine, servant and slave of the servants of Jesus Christ, write to you in His precious Blood: with desire to see you so clothed in the flames of divine charity that you may bear all pain and torment, hunger and thirst, persecution and injury, derision, outrage and insult, and everything else, with true patience; learning from the Lamb suffering and slain, who ran with such burning love to the shameful death of the Cross.

---

Today more than ever, the laity should learn from the incredible witness of this Doctor of the Church. “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.”

Many of those who grew up in the pre-Vatican II era can’t understand why anyone born after, say, 1970 could possibly be attracted to the traditional Latin Mass. After all, they reason, who wants to go back to the days when the priest “turned his back to the people” and “mumbled in a dead language,” when only a “few old women” went up for Communion and most of the congregation “daydreamed” while these same old women said their Rosaries?

I can still remember hearing these arguments, when I, as a 16-year-old, went to RCIA classes at St. Albert’s parish in North Tonawanda, N.Y. in the mid-1990s. “Ya like Latin, huh?” said Deacon Brick, my instructor, with an incomprehensive look on his face when I told him I preferred the TLM. Deacon Brick and others of his generation couldn’t fathom how any young Catholic would want to return to a past they thought they had buried for good.

This was my experience of the Mass:
- We used missalettes that weren’t easy to flip back and forth fast enough between the opening prayers and the readings for the day.
- The pastor would call out sarcastically, “I can’t hear you!” if the congregation didn’t make the responses loud enough.
- Some congregants talked all through Mass.
- People wandered in late continuously almost up until Communion time.
- Everyone received, no matter how late he came in or how little he paid attention to what was going on.
- The music was always either Peter, Paul, and Mary-style folk tunes or selections from Marty Haugen and Dan Schutte. Occasionally, we would sing the opening lines from Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”
- When it was time to say the Our Father, we ended with the Protestant doxology of “for the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever, amen.” (In those days, nobody held hands during the Our Father and raised them up toward the ceiling during the doxology, which came later on.)
- I dreaded the Sign of Peace because, inevitably, a person with a cold or what sounded like tuberculosis would come to Mass halfway through, sit in front of me, and thrust his hand out.

My Mass experience was not spiritually uplifting, to say the least. I never felt as if I was in God’s presence. It just seemed like something bland and trite that Catholics had to suffer through one hour a week.

When I was 15, I found out through watching shows on PBS such as David Macaulay’s Cathedral and Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth that there was this thing called the Latin Mass that, until 30 years earlier, was the ordinary way most Catholics had worshiped for century after century, until Pope Paul VI got rid of it and replaced it with the watered down, Protestant-style service I was used to. I was determined to find one of these Latin Masses and see what it was like.

During those days, that was way easier said than done. In the mid-’90s, the traditional Mass was almost nonexistent. Summorum Pontificum wasn’t for another 13 years. Providentially, soon after I watched Cathedral and The Power of Myth, I noticed something strange in the Buffalo News religious advertising section. St. Joseph’s Cathedral in downtown Buffalo, N.Y. was celebrating a Latin Mass on Easter Sunday. I somehow convinced my family to attend.

If you’ve never been to a traditional Mass, find one at a cathedral on Easter Sunday if you can. The choir opened with Resurrexi, et Adhuc Tecum Sum. To this day, I’ve never heard any choir sing the propers quite as beautifully.
- Clouds of incense wafted from the high altar.
- Almost everyone there, from the celebrant down to the congregation, behaved with reverence and solemnity.
- The sense of the sacred was overwhelming. It made me imagine what it must have been like in old St. Paul’s in London or Notre Dame in Chartres before the Protestants and modernists took over.
- The Mass was night-and-day different from and superior to anything I’d ever attended before. Even all these years later, I’ve never found any TLM to equal it.

Six months later, I was taking RCIA classes with Deacon Brick. The reason I hadn’t had First Communion at a younger age was because I’d never been officially baptized. My parents couldn’t find anybody to be my godparents because everybody they knew had lapsed by the time I was born. My grandparents eventually agreed to become my godparents, but that didn’t happen until high school.

So a hospital chaplain had baptized me when I was 18 months old and in danger of death, but the Church didn’t recognize the baptism. I had to drop out of religious instruction classes, and I flirted with becoming a Protestant and didn’t fully return to the Faith until I was well into my teens, thanks to the traditional Mass.

Yet the Mass that brought me back to Catholicism was almost anathema to the priest and deacon who finally received me into the Church. Many years later, the pastor, Father Fisher, retired around the same time Pope Benedict issued Summorum Pontificum. In his last sermon, Fisher criticized the move, saying Latin is a barrier to participation because the people in the pews have to understand everything going on.

Why do so many of us who were born after Vatican II prefer the traditional Mass and devotions that those in charge of the Church then, and who still run the Church now, disparage and oppose? I’ll mention a few reasons from my own experience.

The first one is that everything about the Mass – the Latin language, the vestments, the rubrics, the celebrant’s orientation – points to God. The Mass is not about you; it’s about God. Eastern Catholics call Mass the Divine Liturgy because it has divine origins.
- Every prayer, gesture, and ritual action comes from Our Lord himself, the apostles, or other saints throughout the centuries.
- Each addition deepened our understanding of the Mass’s purpose and ends.
- All of the subtractions and changes that Annibale Bugnini and his committee made to the Mass eliminated its sacral character and supernatural effects.
- The vernacular language, stripped down vestments, reversed table, Protestant hymns, and Communion in the hand make the Mass look like less of what it is – Christ’s sacrifice on Cavalry – and more like an ordinary social event.

The second reason is related to the first. Because the traditional Mass emphasizes reverence, it attracts people who want reverence and take their faith very seriously. People who attend the Novus Ordo can still be devout and serious, and priests can celebrate the New Mass reverently, but it’s a lot harder.

A regular Novus Ordo Mass-goer who is serious about his faith is more likely to rub shoulders with those who are not and encounter people who are casual about what they believe and how they act, and the New Mass encourages rather than discourages those tendencies. Simply put, a more reverent liturgy helps the average pewsitter become a saint, and it’s easier to do this surrounded by like-minded people focused on their salvation instead of on the things of this world.

A third way the traditional Mass is superior is because it’s not your grandparents’ Latin Mass. Elderly people who tell us youngsters that in the old days, the priest rushed through the Mass, that it was almost always a Low Mass and nothing special, wouldn’t recognize how much care and effort most celebrants and choirs put into their Latin Masses now.
- A sung High Mass is the norm, and the choir more often than not knows how to sing Gregorian chant.
- The priest at the altar is usually devout, and he says the Mass slowly and with great reverence.

A fourth advantage the Mass of Ages has over the Novus Ordo is in the cycle of readings.
- The Vatican II revolutionaries scrapped the old cycle of readings because they thought there wasn’t enough Scripture. Instead of a one-year cycle that emphasizes our falleness and need of God’s grace, the new cycle is a three-year run designed to get through the whole Bible. The new lectionary also took out, incredibly, a lot of passages that point to the Four Last Things and our need for a savior.
- The old Mass readings are quality over quantity. Someone who attends the TLM regularly will get weekly reminders that make it more likely he’ll examine his conscience, repent of his sins, and work on his weaknesses.

These are just a few of the reasons younger people have returned to the liturgy their forebears rejected.

Many of those who love the Novus Ordo can’t understand why anyone could go back to the bad old Latin Mass.

Many of those who prefer the Latin Mass can’t understand why anyone was so eager to get rid of it.

An explanatory note on the title of Valli's post:
Ápoti, from the Greek ápotos, means ‘those who do not drink it’ – in contemporary lingo, ‘those who do not drink the [poisoned] Kool-Aid’ – is a term invented and disseminated in 1922 by the Italian writer Giuseepe Prezzolini (1882-1982), in which he criticized the politics of the time [the beginnings of Fascism in Italy]. It has been applied to describe those who have been disenchanted by contemporary groupthink and no longer go by appearances but wish to get at the truth. Pressolini hmself said that apoti "withdraw from the tumult of forces in play in order to clarify their thoughts and revive traditional values, keeping themselves above the fray, in order to save a patrimony worth saving that will one day be fruitful again”. Another Italian writer, Indro Montanelli, said later that being an apotos ought to be the essential characteristic of a journalist, whose mission ought to always be to seek out and report the truth. [From Wikipedia]

Report of an encounter between ‘apoti’
Translated from

November 27, 2018

He is a young man with a robust physique. His eyes look at you without uncertainties. He is a member of a religious order and wears its habit. He says that once he had a certain sympathy for ‘the Church of renewal and aggiornamento’. He was not really a modernist, but he certainly was suspicious of those who spoke in defense of tradition and who warned against certain deviations evident after Vatican II.

Then everything changed. His eyes were opened during the course of this pontificate. He did not become a Lefebvrian but he started to understand the concerns expressed by those he used to mistrust and now recognizes in himself the same commitment to safeguard Catholic doctrine and to respect Catholic tradition.

We were meeting for the first time, not having any previous acquaintance. But a harmony was quickly evident. He says that within his order, he has been completely marginalized
- when he first started to express his doubts and perplexities about the direction taken by this pontificate,
- when he said that he did not share its misericordism [the ideology of mercy, rather than the virtue of mercy], nor its markedly horizontal and social concept` of evangelization,
- when he made it clear that he had no enthusiasm for a ‘church’ that seeks the applause of the world at any cost, his superiors relieved him of all the tasks assigned to him.
Not even a chance for dialog: criticism, no matter how respectful, was inadmissible, of the things taking place in a church that preaches building bridges and not walls.

I told him I understood his situation very well and that he certainly has not been the first to tell me something similar. He smiles. He says he does not have the least rancor towards his superiors. Indeed, he feels at peace and thanks the Lord because, he says, everything he is experiencing now has allowed him to place some order in his life, to assign priority to the things that really count, and to have more than enough space for prayer.

[A note of caution: In the rest of this article, and in most of his articles, Valli continues to refer to the church Bergoglio is leading as ‘Church’ with a capital C (and without the quotes). I disagree, and will therefore place those quotes wherever he refers to ‘Church’.]

We speak of liturgy, and he says he has now chosen the Vetus Ordo, which he believes is strange for someone who never before considered himself a traditionalist. But his progressive awareness of the 'Church’s’ continuing trend of protestantization pushed him naturally towards the Holy Mass celebrated in the traditional way – now it no longer seems to him exotic in any way but something that is ‘absolutely natural’ – the only Mass that can be considered truly Catholic.

We walked in silence and suddenly found ourselves sighing together. We laughed over this because for some time now, any conversation among ‘perplexed’ Catholics has usually ended in a big sigh.

So, we ask:
- Where does this ‘Church' which follows the world really wish to go?
- What is the final goal of this ‘Church’ which only wants to be ‘friendly’ and has therefore stopped speaking of sin and divine justice, which is happy that she has the applause of those who champion the dominant thought?
- Where is it going when it makes it clear that all religions are really equivalent?
- What does it think it will obtain by putting itself in the service of the world, for getting that it can only be of service to the world only if it is of service to God?

We look at each other again and sigh. It is time to say farewell. Time has passed so fast. We thank each other for the company. He says: “You know, sometimes I think I may be crazy. When I see that everyone seems to be going in a certain direction, I wonder – is there something wrong with me? Then I meet someone like you and I understand that I am not crazy”.

I would like to cite to you Giuseppe Prezzolini and his famous “Società degli Apoti” – those people who, even if they have to pay a personal price for it, choose to think for themselves, not content with slogans that may sound good and are very much in, but that do not mean anything.

When Prezzolini first spoke of the apoti, he stirred up a passionate debate among Italian intellectuals in his day. But today, for those of us who are contemporary apoti, who is there to debate, as we flounder in an ocean of conformism, ignorance and superficiality?

Meanwhile, my new friend has left, but not after a mutual promise to meet again. To encourage each other and to sigh together. Which is already something in itself.
 
P.S. Six weeks since his last blogpost on October 13, Fr. Giovanni Scalese posted today to explain his silence - and that it means he has decided once again to withdraw from blogging (as he did once before) because he finds it a futile exercise in that he is unable to change anything and that others - like established journalist bloggers - are already doing much of the commentary he is likely to make.

It is significant that his October 13 was entitled 'Un papa eretico?' in which he reflects on the interview given by Mons. Nicola Bux theorizing on all the ways by which a heretical pope could be dealt with, and yet dismissing them all in the end by saying none of them is practical or practicable. Scalese's first paragraph read (my translation):

---

I have never been enthusiastic about disputes regarding the eventuality of a heretical pope. Why? Perhaps because it is a case that could not really happen? No - I have no doubt that a pope, like any of us, can fall into heresy. [Worse, apostasy!] And this has nothing to do with papal infallibility which, as we know has its definite limits.

The problem is that such disputes are totally sterile: Once it has been established [how and by whom?] that a pope is heretical [or apostate], then what can be done? We find one example of such a sterile discussion in the interview given by Mons. Nicola Bux to Aldo Maria Valli...

---

I agree completely about the sterility of disputing what to do about Bergoglio - other than praying for him that he may not further damage the Church and that he may save his own soul - but that should not preclude thinking Catholics from exposing his anti-Catholicism everytime it finds expression in word or deed, because to be militant, one must always be vigilant first.

Fr. Scalese's closing words in today's post are: "Till you hear from me again, if and when God wills..." I will miss Fr. Scalese's often refreshing 'out of the box' thinking even on the most widely accepted facts about this anti-Catholic pontificate, so I hope he does not stay away too long.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 28/11/2018 19:59]

THE SECRET OF BENEDICT XVI. Why he is still pope.


Today, the new book by Antonio Socci went on sale in Italy. Marco Tosatti has a lengthy commentary on it today that I still have to translate. I believe it is Socci's third book on
the subject in the past five years.

I translated the following a few days ago about the book but did not get around to posting it as a matter of urgency, because I am not entirely sympathetic to the whole exercise
of casting doubt on the validity of 1) Benedict XVI's resignation and 2) of Jorge Bergoglio's election as pope.Any valid arguments, if there are, for one or both hypotheses
count for nothing in effect, because they cannot change the hard historical facts as they stand: Benedict XVI did resign, and Bergoglio was, in fact, elected pope.

Of course, I am not surprised that Antonio Socci continues to plug away at this double hypotheses of which he has been the leading purveyor (as he has been about the hypothetical
'fourth secret' of Fatima, namely, what the Church has supposedly failed to disclose about the Third Secret). And he may well be right about his hypotheses on the recent wrinkle
in papal history and about the 'fourth secret', but just like all the theoretizing about Bergoglio's heresies and/or apostasy, nothing practical, unfortunately, can really
be done to change the history of both matters in any way that has practical consequences for the Church and the faithful.

Nonetheless, the book appears bound to be a bestseller in Italy, if we go by this commentary published 5 days before the book was officially released.

Socci's new book is already
a publishing phenomenon
before it is actually on sale
Translated from

November 22, 2018

What is there to say but that Antonio Socci has once again hit the mark? All he had to do was publish a link on his Facebook page about his new book for it to land right away on Amazon Italy’s best-seller lists – 20th among current bestsellers and obviously number one among religious books. Which means that in less than 24 hours, thousands of copies had alread been 'sold'.

Yet the book itself is not available for sale until November 27 – so it has been ordered on sheer trust.

Once more, the public appears to be unusually interested in the hypothesis that Benedict XVI is still pope, and some faithful continue to ask about the reasons for his renunciation and what are the theological consequences of his decision.

For the benefit of those whose hackles are up and bristling against the ‘Ratzinger widows and widowers’, no one is suggesting that the retired pope should be made pope again, but yes, to at least understand something about his resignation.

[They proceed to quote the publisher’s blurb, which I have translated below:]

---

According to many observers, the Church is going through the most serious crisis in her history. Increasingly it is asked what really happened in 2013 with the surprising ‘renunciation’ of Benedict XVI, his choice to be called Emeritus Pope, and the coexistence of ‘two popes’
- Why has Benedict XVI become a ‘sign of contradiction’?
- What was occurring then on the geopolitical level?
- Who was fomenting a ‘revolution’ inside the Catholic Church?
- Did Benedict XVI really ‘resign’?

These are the questions that Antonio Socci seeks to answer through facts, and the gestures and words of Benedict XVI in the past six years, in which he uncovers, as in a fascinating thriller, that he has really remained the Pope, with still unexplored consequences.

This engaging and documented inquiry seeks to understand what is happening in the Vatican, but above all, investigates the ‘mysterious mission’ to which, it seems, Benedict XVI felt himself called to do for the Church and for the world. The author hypothesizes that there could be something supernatural at the origin of his decision and a new revelation from Fatima [????] concerning not only the Church but the entire world.

---

Of course, the hyper-belligerent Ann Barnhardt also recently released a 2-hour video in which she argues
not just that Benedict XVI is still the pope but also that Bergoglio is an anti-Pope. It is, in fact, entitled
'The Bergoglian Anti-Papacy':

Nonetheless, she appears just as contemptuous of Ratzinger as she is of Bergoglio, which is typical
of many 'rad-trads' like Mundabor and Louie Verrecchio - and for which I cannot 'forgive' them
even if I share some of their opinions about Bergoglio.

Here's how one Catholic proposes to practice 'the Benedict option' in his own way during this hellish anti-Catholic interregnum in the history of the one true Church
of Christ. It's the logical choice I have personally undertaken, in which I am very blessed to have as my elected parish church the Church of the Holy Innocents with its reverent
and truly beautiful revival of the best in Catholic tradition.

How to find a proper priest
in 'the Church' today
by Raymond Kowalski

November 27, 2018

Pope St. Pius X foresaw it. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen saw the signs of its imminent arrival. Michael Davies experienced it and documented
its early attacks on the liturgy. Ross Douthat has chronicled its continued progress. Elizabeth Yore has put it into global context.

Put on it whatever label you want, but the fact of it is undeniable. “It” is the destruction of the institutional Roman
Catholic Church from within, now manifested by the current pontificate.


I've seen references to this Bergoglian 'youth synod'-related event but have not seen this video before.

If you doubt that this is the case, you have only to view the video that was projected onto the façade of the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, at the conclusion of the Synod on the Youth, which depicted the crumbling of that church and, by extension, of the whole institutional Church.

How could this have happened? The successors of St. Peter were endowed with unerring authority by Christ to lead and govern his Church. Most answers come back to something like “diabolical infiltration.” Really?
- So the gates of Hell have prevailed, despite the promise made by Jesus Christ himself?
- Has the latest successor of Peter been sifted and found destined for the fire?
- Are all faithful Catholics now obliged to follow him to their ultimate destruction?

The sedevacantists have an attractive answer: Satan has not prevailed. Francis is not the pope. There has not been a valid pope since 1958 with the death of Pope Pius XII. Thus, Francis may be safely ignored. With this argument, they bludgeon those who hold that Pope Francis is the valid pope, but his manifest errors can and must be resisted.

Personally, I do not find compelling the notion that the Barque of Peter has been steering itself for 60 years with no captain. It is difficult even for a loyal crew to stay on course without a captain when the wind shifts or a pirate vessel approaches. And, as Dr. Peter Kwasniewski has recently asked, how will we know the authority of the new captain if and when he takes command?

Equally unappealing is the notion that the passengers and crew of the Barque of Peter must obey without questioning when the captain gives orders to steer for the rocks. I never thought of myself as a mutineer, with all of the attendant consequences of being one. Yet must I participate in the mutiny in order to be saved?

This debacle has been decades, if not centuries, in the making. My generation has no time to figure out how it happened in spite of the Church’s divine protection, nor what the true state of affairs in the papacy has been for the last 60 years.

We will not live to see the restoration of the Church as we once knew it. All we can do is live the faith that is ingrained in us. Leave the present conundrum for scholars and theologians to solve. For us, the only thing that matters is to prepare for our own particular judgment as best we can.

My strategy starts with Mass and the sacraments. With the Mass and the sacraments, particularly Holy Eucharist, Confession, and Extreme Unction, we have the best chance of achieving Heaven and avoiding Hell. But it gets tricky right off the bat. Because to avail ourselves of these means of grace, we need priests. Validly ordained priests. Priests who understand and believe what it means to be an authentic Catholic priest.

Are Novus Ordo diocesan priests validly ordained? Are SSPX priests validly ordained? Are FSSP priests validly ordained? Does being in communion with the Holy See validate or invalidate a priest’s orders? You can find sincere, well reasoned, and well supported arguments on both sides of these questions. But that’s the problem: they are arguments. I have read the arguments, and, with my darkened intellect, I have assented to some and rejected others.

A diocesan priest of the Novus Ordo, a priest of the Society of St. Pius X, a priest of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter – all, I believe, are validly ordained. I do not have the means (or time) to vet the orders of each individual priest. So if they are wearing a Roman collar, that’s a start on determining whether they are what I regard as an authentic Catholic priest.

The next step is not so easy. I must find out if a particular priest truly believes in the Real Presence and understands that the Mass is a sacrifice. At one time, this would have been taken for granted. Now we are learning that two generations of priests were malformed in their seminaries. Ordination is not sufficient assurance, therefore, that this is an authentic Catholic priest. This is why I have the temerity to judge for myself.

I know one of those malformed priests. We went to school together. He became a diocesan priest. I have attended some of his Masses. He believes that the Missal – and I am talking about the new Missal – contains only suggested words and actions. Say the black and do the red! I silently scream. I left his Masses wondering if I had really fulfilled my Sunday obligation.

Then a trusted person told me that this priest has even attempted to consecrate coffee and doughnuts. Was he absent from seminary the day they covered matter and form? I can safely conclude that Father Freelance and priests like him do not meet my criteria.

Michael Voris refers to the post-Vatican II church as the “Church of Nice.” I call it the “Church of Nothing Special.” That church understands that the biggest impediment to universal membership is belief in the divinity of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity and His Real Presence on the altar. And so the Eucharist is a “symbol” and the Mass is a “meal.” Priests who view the Eucharist and the Mass this way do not meet my criteria.

Priests like these can be of no help to me because I am sure that their liturgical innovations and doctrinal misconceptions mirror their similarly distorted moral views. I do not need or want their accompaniment on this final leg of my journey. Do not join me on my path; show me instead the better path.

So I use a priest’s liturgical style, his comportment during Mass, and the content of his homilies as outward signs of his inward beliefs. (This applies especially to Novus Ordo diocesan priests.)
- Does he reverently say the words of consecration without additions, subtractions, or changes?
- Does he bow? Does he elevate the host and chalice? Does he genuflect?
- Does he reverently consume the Body and Blood of Christ?
- Does he remind the congregation that only those in the state of grace may approach for Communion?
- Does he preach on theological matters?
- Does he preach on life, death, Heaven, and Hell?
- Is this the priest I would want my family to call when it comes time for my own last anointing?

If the answers are “yes,” I have probably found a fantastic priest.

Fortunately, there are some shortcuts for identifying a fantastic priest. A priest who can and does offer Mass according to the 1962 Roman Missal is almost guaranteed to believe in the Real Presence and the Mass as sacrifice. So I look for a priest who wears a biretta. It is the ultimate in virtue-signaling. [Priests who celebrate the TLM don the biretta when they arrive at the altar before the Mass and when they leave it after the Mass, and if it is a sung Mass or High Mass, in between, while seated to allow the choir to finish chanting the Gradual and Collects, the Gloria and the Credo. This is something I noticed after Summorum Pontificum. In the TLM of my childhood and adolescent years in the Philippines, I don't remember ever seeing any priest wear a biretta in church or outside it.]

Here is the full text of the interview - conducted in German, one presumes, and then translated to English by Ms Hickson herself -
that Fr Hunwicke has praised and Sandro Magister has called imperdibile (not to be missed):

Cardinal Mueller speaks out on
the Present Crisis and its link
to homosexuality in the clergy
Interview by Maike Hickson


ROME, November 21, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (2012-2017), has granted LifeSiteNews an interview in which he discusses in depth the problems of the current clerical sex abuse crisis.

In this discussion about the abuse crisis, Müller does not shy away from pointing out that the Church needs to address the problem of practiced homosexuality in the ranks of the clergy, saying that "homosexual conduct of clergymen can in no case be tolerated."

He states, however, that leaders in the Catholic Church still underestimate this problem. The prelate states: “That McCarrick, together with his clan and a homosexual network, was able to wreak havoc in a mafia-like manner in the Church is connected with the underestimation of the moral depravity of homosexual acts among adults.”

Cardinal Müller also challenges the Vatican for its lack of earnest investigations — early on [which means he is chalenging John Paul II and Benedict XVI as well] — into the rumors concerning McCarrick [more than rumors, there were reports!] , saying that a public apology is needed. [Who will apologize in behalf of John Paul II - the pope who canonized him? And will Cardinal Mueller ask Benedict XVI to issue a public apology???

He adds that “there should very clearly come out a public explanation about these events and the personal connections, as well at each step; such an explanation could very well include an admission of a wrong assessment of persons and situations.” [Ibid.]

Cardinal Müller criticizes as a “disastrous error” the changes in Canon Law that have been made in the 1983 Code of Canon Law which, when dealing with priestly offenses against the Sixth Commandment, does not even mention homosexuality as an offense anymore, and which contains a less rigorous set of penalties against any abuser priests. [I wish we had heard him say this while he was CDF Prefect. Has he discussed this with Benedict XVI ever? The Code of Canon Law was revised in 1983 under John Paul II, and there is a famous picture of him signing the new code, with Cardinal Ratzinger standing at his side.]

Returning to the matter of the abuse crisis, the German prelate explains that in the Church, “it is part of the crisis that one does not wish to see the true causes and covers them up with the help of propaganda phrases of the homosexual lobby. Fornication with teenagers and adults is a mortal sin which no power on earth can declare to be morally neutral.” He calls the “LGBT” ideology within the Church “atheistic,” and adds, in light of the recent Youth Synod in Rome, that the "LGBT" term “has no place in Church documents.”

Moreover, Cardinal Müller, in light of his stricter handling of sex abuse cases at the CDF, wonders whether there was a homosexual lobby in the Vatican which was glad to see him being dismissed: “But it could be so that it has pleased them that I am no longer tasked in the Congregation for the Doctrine to deal with sexual crimes especially also against male teenagers.”

[Excuse me, Your Eminence: 1) Surely you are aware that Benedict XVI ordered three cardinals to study this gay lobby in the Church, and that they did prepare a report that was duly handed over to the new pope, who apparently dismissed the dossier as insignificant because he did nothing about it, nor even ever refer to its findings. Fine time for Your Eminence to 'wonder' now 'whether that lobby exists'. (BTW, it is not unlikely that something about McCarrick may have been in the gay lobby dossier commissioned by Benedict XVI - especially since, as most accounts show, he did impose some sanctions on McCarrick sometime in 2008 or 2009.) 2) Let's not make this out to be about you and your dismissal! Bergoglio did not need anyone to make him conclude that you were persona non grata to him, as CDF Prefect or as anything else.]

Discussing possible reasons for his sudden dismissal from the CDF – for which Pope Francis never gave him any reasons – Cardinal Müller comes back to his defense of Catholic doctrine on marriage with regard to Pope Francis' post-synodal exhortation Amoris Laetitia. He says: “Amoris Laetitia has to be absolutely in accordance with Revelation, and it is not we who have to be in accord with Amoris Laetitia, at least not in the interpretation which contradicts, in a heretical manner, the Word of God. And it would be an abuse of power to discipline those who insist upon an orthodox interpretation of this encyclical and of all the papal magisterial documents.” [I really don't remember Mueller being as emphatically 'orthodox' as this at the time he came to a studiedly neutral defense of AL as CDF Prefect! He would not have dared being so direct. The only positive thing I can remember about his position at the time was that he made it known the CDF had sent dozens of comments about the document, none of which were taken into account. Of course, we were never told what those comments were, which logically would have had to be doctrinal demurrals if not outright objections. ]

The German cardinal recalls the correct role of the Pope as the guardian of the Faith when he says: “The Magisterium of the bishops and of the Pope stand under the Word of God in Holy Scripture and Tradition and serves Him. It is not at all Catholic to say that the Pope as an individual person receives directly from the Holy Spirit the Revelation and that he may now interpret it according to his own whims while all the rest are to follow him blindly and mutely.” [Right! He can say it now - he couldn't say it then, when he was still CDF Prefect. I understand the whole blah-blah-blah about being loyal to the pope when you are a member of his Curia. But bishops (and cardinals) pledge the same loyalty to the pope when they are consecrated. And though that happens to be the way of the Church, it is sickening to me that such an oath has to be upheld even if the pope happens to be wrong. It makes people like Mueller seem crass opportunists once they start speaking their minds when they believe they are free of that loyalty yoke.]

The full interview follows. [Except for a couple of fundamental objections, I will not interpose any comments for now - and I don't know that I will bother to. And I am sorry, Your Eminence, that I have all these skeptical reservations about you. Thank you anyway for forcefully stating in this interview some truths that need to be said.]

---

The U.S. bishops have just ended their fall assembly in Baltimore, where they were not permitted to vote on national guidelines concerning episcopal involvement in sexual abuse cases (either by commission or by omission or cover-up), because the Vatican told them not to do so. The new guidelines would have contained a code of conduct and a lay-led oversight body to investigate bishops accused of misconduct. Many Catholics in the U.S. had been waiting for some concrete steps, and they are now indignant. Do you think this decision wise, or do you think the U.S. bishops should have been able to set up their own national guidelines and commission, just as the French bishops have themselves done this month?
One has to make a strict distinction between the sexual crimes and their investigation by secular justice – in the eyes of which all citizens are equal (thus a separate lex [law] for the Catholic Church would constitute a contradiction to the modern, democratic state of law) – and those canonical procedures for clergymen in which the ecclesial authority determines the penalties for any misconduct that diametrically contradicts the priestly ethos.

The bishop has the canonical jurisdiction over each clergyman in his diocese, which is connected, in special cases, with the Congregation of the Faith in Rome, which acts in the authority of the Pope. If a bishop does not comply with his responsibility, then he can be held accountable by the Pope. The episcopal conferences can set up guidelines for prevention and for canonical prosecutions, both of which give the bishop in his own diocese a valuable instrument.

We need to keep a clear mind in the middle of the situation of crisis in the U.S. We will not succeed with the help of a lynch law and a general suspicion against the whole episcopacy or of “Rome.” I do not see it as a solution that the laymen now take control, just because the bishops (as some believe) are not capable of doing so with their own strength. We cannot overcome shortcomings by turning upside down the hierarchical-sacramental constitution of the Church.

Catherine of Siena candidly and relentlessly appealed to the consciences of popes and bishops, but she did not replace them in their positions. That is the difference to Luther, due to whom we still suffer from the split of Christianity.

It would be important that the U.S. Bishops' Conference assume its responsibility with independence and autonomy. The bishops are not employees of the Pope who are subject to directives nor, as in the military, generals who owe absolute obedience to the higher command. Rather, they carry together with the successor of Peter, as shepherds appointed by Christ Himself, responsibility for the Universal Church.

But from Rome, we may expect that it serves the unity in the Faith and in the communion of the Sacraments. This is the hour of a good collaboration in overcoming the crisis, and not of the polarization and of a compromise, so that in Rome one is angry about the U.S. Bishops, and in the U.S., people are angry about Rome.

An essential part of the discussions during the USCCB meeting was still the McCarrick scandal and how it was possible that someone like McCarrick could rise to the highest levels of the Catholic Church in the U.S., with much consequential influence in Rome. What are your own reflections on the McCarrick case and what the Church should learn from the fact that there was a network of silence that has surrounded a man who in his life constantly defied the Church's laws by practicing homosexuality, by seducing seminarians who were dependent upon him and thus leading them into sin, and, worst of all, by abusing minors?
I do not know him and wish to abstain from any judgment. I hope that there will soon be a canonical process at the Congregation for the Faith, also in bringing light into the sexual crimes committed with young seminarians.

In my time as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Faith (2012-2017), nobody told me anything about this problem, most probably, because one would have feared from me a too “rigid” reaction. That McCarrick, together with his clan and a homosexual network, was able to wreak havoc in a mafia-like manner in the Church is connected with the underestimation of the moral depravity of homosexual acts among adults.

Even if in Rome one supposedly only heard some rumors, one had to investigate the matter and to check the truthfulness of the accusations and also to abstain from any episcopal promotion [of McCarrick] to the very important diocese of the capital city [Washington, D.C.] and likewise to abstain from appointing him to become a cardinal of the Holy, Roman Church.

And when there even has already been paid some hush money – and with it, the admission of his sexual crimes with young men – then every reasonable person asks how such a person can be a counselor of the Pope with regard to episcopal appointments. I do not know whether this is true, but it would need to be clarified.

The hireling helps in the search of good shepherds for God's fold – nobody can understand this. In such a case, there should very clearly come out a public explanation about these events and the personal connections, as well as the question as to how much the involved Church authorities knew at each step; such an explanation could very well include an admission of a wrong assessment of persons and situations.

Did you during the last five years witness cases where then-Cardinal McCarrick was given considerable influence or specific missions by either the Pope or the Vatican?
As I said, I was not informed about anything. [That was not the question! Surely you had eyes and ears to notice who had influence withg Bergoglio!] One said that the Congregation of Faith was merely responsible for the sexual abuse of minors, but not of adults – as if sexual offenses committed by a clergyman either with another clergyman or with a layperson would not also be a grave violation of the Faith and of the holiness of the Sacraments. I stressed again and again that also homosexual conduct of clergymen can in no case be tolerated; and that the Church's sexual morality may not be relativized by the worldly acceptance of homosexuality. One also has to differentiate between sinful conduct in an individual case, a crime, and a life carried on in a continuously sinful state.

One of the problems of the McCarrick case is that, already in 2005 and in 2007, there were legal settlements with some of his victims, yet the Archdiocese of Newark – at the time under Archbishop John J. Myers – did not inform the public, nor its own priests, about them. He thus withheld vital information for those who still worked with McCarrick or trusted him. As did Cardinal Joseph Tobin, when he became, in January of 2017, the archbishop in Newark. To my knowledge, neither Myers nor Tobin has issued an apology for this omission and breaking of the trust of their priests. Do you think the Archdiocese should have made known the fact of these legal settlements, especially since in 2002, the U.S. Dallas Charter had called for more transparency?
In earlier times, one assumed that one could solve such difficult cases quietly and unobtrusively. Then, however, the offender was also able to continue to abuse the trust of his bishop. In today's situation, the Catholics and the public have a moral right to a publication of these events. It is not about accusing someone, but about learning from the mistakes.

Can such a moral problem ever be solved by setting new guidelines, or do we need here in the Church a deeper conversion of hearts?
The origin of this whole crisis lies in a secularization of the Church and the reduction of the priest to the role of a functionary. It is finally atheism that has spread within the Church. According to this evil spirit, the Revelation concerning Faith and morals is being adapted to the world without God so that it does not interfere anymore with a life according to one's own lusts and needs. Only about 5% of the offenders are being assessed as pathologically pedophile, whereas the great mass of offenders have freely trampled upon the Sixth Commandment out of their own immorality and thus have defied, in a blaspheming way, the Holy Will of God.

What do you think of the idea to establish a new Church law that proposes excommunications for abuser priests?
Excommunication is a coercive penalty and has to be removed immediately in the case of repentance by the offender. But in the case of serious abuse and other offenses against the Faith and the unity of the Church, one can impose the permanent dismissal from the clerical state, that is to say a permanent interdiction to act as a priest.

The older 1917 Code of Canon Law had a clear set of penalties placed upon an abuser priest, as well as upon a homosexually active priest. These concrete penalties have largely been removed in the 1983 Code which is more vague and now does not even mention explicitly homosexual acts. Do you think, in light of the grave abuse crisis, the Church should return to a more rigorous set of automatic penalties in these cases?
That was a disastrous error. Sexual contacts between persons of the same sex completely and directly contradict the sense and purpose of sexuality as grounded in creation. They are the expression of a disordered desire and instinct, just as it is a sign of the broken relationship between man and his Creator since the Fall of Man.

The celibate priest and the married priest in the Eastern Rite have to be models for the flock and also have to give an example that the redemption also encompasses the body and the bodily passions. Not the wild lust for fulfillment, but the bodily and spiritual self-giving, in agape, to a person of the other sex, is the sense and purpose of sexuality. This leads to responsibility for the family and for the children that God has given.

During the recent Baltimore meeting, Cardinal Blase Cupich stated that one should “differentiate” between consensual sexual acts between adults and the abuse of minors, implying that a priest's homosexual relations with another adult is not a major problem. What is your own response to this kind of approach?
One can differentiate everything – and then even consider oneself to be a great intellectual – but not a grave sin which excludes a person from the Kingdom of God, at least not as the bishop who is duty-bound not to exhibit the taste of the time [“Zeitgeschmack”], but rather, to defend the truth of the Gospels. It seems the time has come “when they will not endure sound doctrine; but, according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears: And will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables” (2 Tim 4:3f).

In your work as the Prefect of the CDF, you had the oversight over many clerical sex abuse cases that the CDF investigated. Is it true that the majority of the victims in these cases were male adolescents?
More than 80% of the victims of these sexual offenders are teenagers of the male sex. One cannot conclude from this, however, that the majority of the priests are prone to homosexual fornication, but, rather, only that the majority of the offenders have sought out, in their deep disorder of their passions, male victims. From the entire crime statistics, we know that the majority of offenders of sexual abuse are one's own relatives, even the fathers of their own children. But we cannot conclude from this that the majority of fathers are prone to such crimes. One has always to be very careful not to make generalizations out of concrete cases so that one does not thus fall into slogans and anti-clerical prejudices.

If this is the case – and the German bishops' sex abuse study, as well as the John Jay Report, showed similar numbers – should then the Church not more directly deal with the problem of the presence of homosexual priests?
In my view, there do not exist homosexual men or even priests. God has created the human being as man and woman. But there can be men and women with disordered passions. Sexual communion has its place exclusively in the marriage between a man and a woman. Outside, there is only fornication and abuse of sexuality, both either with persons of the opposite sex, or in the unnatural intensification of sin with persons of the same sex. Only he who has learned to control himself fulfills also the moral precondition for the reception of priestly ordination (see 1 Tim 3:1-7).

We seem to have a situation in the Church right now, where there is not yet even a consensus present that acknowledges that homosexually active priests have a large part in the abuse crisis. Even some Vatican documents still speak of “pedophilia,” or of “clericalism” as the main problem. The Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli even goes so far as to claim that McCarrick did not have homosexual relationships, but that they were rather about his exercising power over others. At the same time, we have others, such as Father James Martin, S.J., who travels the world (and even was invited to the World Family Meeting in Ireland) and promotes the idea of “LGBT-Catholics” and even claims that some saints have been probably homosexual. That is to say, there is now a strong tendency in the Church to downplay the sinful character of same-sex relationships. Would you here agree, and if so, how could – and should – this be remedied?
It is part of the crisis that one does not wish to see the true causes and covers them up with the help of propaganda phrases of the homosexual lobby. Fornication with teenagers and adults is a mortal sin which no power on earth can declare to be morally neutral. That is the work of the devil – against whom Pope Francis often warns – that he declares sin to be good. “Some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to spirits of error, and doctrines of devils, speaking lies in hypocrisy, and having their conscience seared.” (1 Tim 4:1f)

It is indeed absurd that, suddenly, ecclesial authorities utilize the Jacobin, Nazi, and Communist anti-Church combat slogans against sacramentally ordained priests. The priests have the authority to proclaim the Gospels and to administer the Sacraments of Grace.

If someone abuses his jurisdiction in order to reach selfish goals, he himself is not clerical in an exaggerated form, but, rather, he himself is anti-clerical, because he denies Christ Who wishes to work through him. Sexual abuse by clergymen is then, at most, to be called anti-clerical. But it is obvious – and can only be denied by someone who wishes to be blind – that sins against the Sixth Commandment of the Decalogue stem from disordered inclinations and thus are sins of fornication which exclude one from the Kingdom of God, at least as long as one has not repented and made atonement, and as long as there does not exist the firm resolve to avoid such sin in the future. This whole attempt at obfuscating things is a bad sign of the secularization of the Church. One thinks like the world, but not as God wills it.

At the recent Youth Synod in Rome, a similar tone could be heard. The working document uses for the first time the term “LGBT,“ and the final document stressed the need to welcome homosexuals in the Church, and it even rejected “any form of discrimination” against them. However, do such statements not effectively undermine the Church's standing practice not to hire practicing homosexuals, for example as teachers in Catholic schools?
The LGBT ideology is based upon a false anthropology which denies God as the Creator. Since it is in principle atheistic or perhaps has only to do with a Christian concept of God at the margins, it has no place in Church documents. This is an example of the creeping influence of atheism in the Church, which has been responsible for the crisis of the Church for half a century. Unfortunately, it does not stop working in the minds of some shepherds who, in their naive belief of being modern, do not realize the poison that they day by day drink in, and that they then offer for others to drink.

Can we not now say that we have a strong “gay lobby” within the ranks of the Catholic Church?
I do not know that because such people do not show themselves to me. But it could be so that it has pleased them that I am no longer tasked in the Congregation for the Doctrine [of the Faith] to deal with sexual crimes especially also against male teenagers.

You recently revealed that, while you worked at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the Pope set up a commission that was to counsel the CDF concerning possible penalties for abuser priests. That commission, however, tended to have a more lenient attitude toward abuser priests, unlike you who wished for a laicization in grave cases (such as the Father Mauro Inzoli case). Now the Jesuit magazine America revealed last year – at the time of your dismissal from your position as the Prefect of the CDF – “that a number of cardinals had asked Francis to remove Cardinal Müller from that post because he had on a number of occasions publicly disagreed with or distanced himself from the pope’s positions, and they felt this was undermining the papal office and magisterium.” Do you yourself see a possible connection between your own stricter standards and attitude toward abuser priests and a group of cardinals close to the Pope who wish a more lenient approach? If this is not the case, would you still say that you were removed because of your firmer defense of orthodoxy?
The primacy of the Pope is being undermined by the sycophants and careerists at the papal court – that is what the famous theologian Melchior Cano has already said in the 16th century – and not by those who counsel the Pope in a competent and responsible manner. If it is true that there is a group of cardinals who accused me in front of the Pope of the deviation of my ideas, then the Church is in a bad state. If these would have been courageous and upright men, they would have spoken with me directly, and they should have known that I as a bishop and cardinal am to represent the teaching of the Catholic Faith, and not to justify the different private opinions of a Pope. His authority is extended over the revealed Faith of the Catholic Church and not over the individual theological opinions of himself or those of his advisers.

They can perhaps accuse me of interpreting Amoris Laetitia in an orthodox way, but they cannot prove that I deviate from the Catholic doctrine. Additionally, it is irritating that theologically uneducated people are being promoted to the rank of bishops who, in turn, think that they have to thank the Pope for it by means of a childish submission. Perhaps they could have read my book The Pope. Mission and Mandate (Herder Verlag; is it available in German and Spanish; the Italian and English translations are being currently made). Then we could continue to discuss things on that level.

The Magisterium of the bishops and of the Pope stand under the Word of God in Holy Scripture and Tradition and serves Him. It is not at all Catholic to say that the Pope as an individual person receives directly from the Holy Spirit the Revelation and that he may now interpret it according to his own whims while all the rest are to follow him blindly and mutely. Amoris Laetitia has to be absolutely in accordance with Revelation, and it is not we who have to be in accord with Amoris Laetitia, at least not in the interpretation which contradicts, in a heretical manner, the Word of God. And it would be an abuse of power to discipline those who insist upon an orthodox interpretation of this encyclical and of all the papal magisterial documents. Only he who is in the state of Grace can also fruitfully receive Holy Communion. This revealed truth cannot be toppled by any power in the world, and no Catholic may ever believe the opposite or be forced to accept the opposite.

In which fields were you yourself as the Prefect of the CDF the most opposed to innovations that were proposed for the Church? Which parts of your witness do you think, looking back, contributed most to your being dismissed and treated in such a manner that you were not even given any alternative position in the Vatican?
I did not oppose any innovation or reform. [YOU WIMP!!!! Not the double standard on adultery and communion made possible by AL? Not the singlehanded revision of the Catechism regarding the death penalty? Not the fast-track 'Catholic divorce' enabled by Bergoglio? Not the unlawful interference and cooption of the Sovereign Order of Malta? To mention only those off the top of my head???] Because reform means renewal in Christ, not adaptation to the world.

I was not told what the reason was for the non-renewal of my mandate. This is unusual because the Pope otherwise lets all the prefects continue their work. There is no reason which one would dare mention without making oneself look ridiculous. One cannot, after all, state in stark contradiction to Pope Benedict, that Müller is lacking the sufficient theological qualifications, that he is not orthodox, or that he is neglectful in the prosecution of crimes against the Faith and in the cases of sexual crimes. That is why one prefers to be silent and leaves it up to the left-liberal media to make spiteful and gloating comments.

Some observers are currently comparing your removal from your important position in the Vatican – which certainly is also due to your own polite resistance concerning Amoris laetitia [Sure didn't look like any kind of resistance at the time - 'obsequious acquiescence' was more like it, hedged of course by the CYA blather about "it must be interpreted according to Catholic doctrine" when Footnote whatever was clearly not according to CAtholic doctrine!] – with the lenient treatment that someone like the former Cardinal McCarrick has received. Even now, he has so far not yet even been laicized, in spite of his criminal conduct. So, it seems to some that those who try to preserve the Catholic teaching concerning marriage and the family as it has always been taught are being set aside, while those who are in favor of innovations in this moral field are being leniently treated or even promoted – as, for example, Cardinal Cupich and Fr. James Martin. Would you like to comment on this?
Everybody can reflect upon the criteria according to which some are being promoted and protected, and others are being fought and eliminated.

In the context of the seeming suppression of orthodox Churchmen and the promotion of progressive representatives, Father Ansgar Wucherpfennig, S.J. has just now received from the Vatican the permission to go back to his position as the rector of the Jesuit graduate school in Frankfurt, in spite of the fact that he argues for female ordination and the blessing of homosexual couples. He is now even asked to publish articles on these matters. How would you comment on this development?
This is an example of how the authority of the Roman Church undermines itself and how the clear expert knowledge of the Congregation for the Faith is being pushed aside. If this priest calls the blessing of homosexual relationships the result of a further development of doctrine, for which he continues to work, it is nothing but the presence of atheism in Christianity. He does not theoretically deny the existence of God, but, rather, he denies Him as the source of morality by presenting that which is before God a sin as a blessing.

That the recipient of the Sacrament of Holy Orders has to be of the male sex is not the result of cultural circumstances or of positive, but changeable, Church legislation, but, rather, it is founded in the nature of this Sacrament and its divine institution, just as the nature of the Sacrament of Matrimony requires the difference of the two sexes.

From your observations, do you think the Church is getting close to having sufficient and consistent control over the abuse crisis and has found the right remedies; or what do you think is so far still the major obstacle for a substantial improvement? How can the Church gain back her trustworthiness in the eyes of Catholic families?
The whole Church, with her priests and bishops, has to please God more than man. The obedience in the Faith is our salvation.

---

RIP - Robert Morlino, S.J., Archbishop of Milwaukee (2013-2018)
Because of his adherence and promotion of the traditional Mass, I chose photos showing Bp. Morlino in traditional garments, including the cappa magna (right).


I have been remiss in posting about the death last week of Archbishop Robert Morlino, who was the Ordinary Fr. Zuhlsdork worked under
and whom he always called the Extraordinary Ordinary. Fr Z himself posted two tributes from others to illustrate the extraordinary man, priest
and bishop that he was.


Two stories about a great bishop

November 26, 2018

Two recent pieces about the late, great Extraordinary Ordinary, Bishop Robert C. Morlino of Madison, tell you a great deal about the man, who was misunderstood by many – purposely in the case of quite a few.

First, there is a piece by Rocco Palmo, entitled "The Mouth that Roared",in which he writes, among other things:

---

A late-life favorite of John Paul II – with whom he bonded over their shared Polish heritage – the bishop once noted privately of how, upon his transfer to Madison in 2003, he was told that “Rome wanted a fighter” in the secularist mecca, and that’s precisely what they got. Absolutely no one agreed with everything he said – he would’ve found that boring – yet whatever one made of it, the tidal waves of reaction only went to prove how he could never be ignored.

Still, the octane level of the quotes in print obscured the piece that made it work – the telling glint in the eye that his bark was far worse than his bite. In other words, even if Morlino’s zingers made it sound like he’d chew your leg off (if not both), in reality, odds were he’d end up cooking you dinner instead… and sitting down to eat in an open shirt, still wearing his apron – then running back and forth to serve everything himself – those meals were something to behold.

---

Next, there is a piece at Facebook by someone who truly knew him well, Mr. Kevin Phalen, who served in Morlino’s chancery for a long time. There is an extremely important anecdote in here about the oath that bishops have to make. Here it is with my emphases:

---

The Diocese of Madison lost her shepherd on Saturday night, and I lost a very good friend. I’ve known Bishop Morlino for just over 40 years, and I was his Chancellor, both in Helena and Madison, for roughly 14 of those years. I honestly think I know him better than anybody.

I met him at Moreau Seminary at the University of Notre Dame in August of 1977. I was new to the place, and he walked over to introduce himself. “Hi, I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Father Bob Morlino. I’m a Jesuit priest, and I head the diocesan formation program.” …the cherub face, the constant smile… I stood up and took his hand, looked him in the eyes and said, “I’m Kevin Phelan, I’m a candidate for Holy Cross, and I don’t like Jesuits very much.” He laughed loudly, and I thought, “Thank God, at least someone in this place will get my sense of humor.”

Over the years I made him laugh a lot, and he did the same for me. I made him laugh on purpose, and he made me laugh because he was one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met. A lot of times he just didn’t know it.

Another old friend of his, Ed Carey of the Diocese of Kalamazoo, reminds me too often that he knew the Bishop before me. Ed was also a Candidate for Holy Cross the year before I got there. As an accounting major in college, Ed found himself in need, along with a few other new seminarians, of a crash course in philosophy. The rector told them to seek out the Jesuit on the 4th floor as their guide. Ed and the guys approached Fr. Morlino and asked for help.

The way Ed tells it, Morlino immediately took a yellow legal pad and wrote out a list of 25 or so books, with the instructions to read one book per week, and then on Tuesday nights he would discuss it with them as a group. Ed insists that he read every book. I had a similar experience the next year. I certainly needed help with Aquinas.

Fr. Morlino must have kept the list, because when I asked him for help, he had it handy. The same instructions: read a book a week and we’ll discuss it. I looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. He said, “You’re not going to read all these, are you?” “No.” I felt no need to lie. He took the list back and said “Fine, just come up on Tuesday nights and I’ll talk you through them.” It was a good plan.

I’ve heard rumblings over the years that the Bishop was mean to his priests. As a chancery insider, I can tell you that the charge simply isn’t true. He loved the priesthood with everything he had in him. That’s why at the height of the abuse scandal he was able to ordain over 40 men. Those men saw his love for the priesthood, and wanted to share that with him.

It’s why he brought in the Society of Jesus Christ the Priest, and it’s why they came. Madison wasn’t on their original list. They saw the Bishop as a man worthy of their love for the priesthood, and so they came, and they stayed. I know of many priests in the Diocese who are beholden to the Bishop, but those are their stories to tell, not mine. But I can assure you, the guy was all about the priesthood.

I’ve heard people say that the bishop was arrogant. Well, if I’m being completely honest (I always was with him, so I might as well be with you), he could come off as arrogant from time to time. He was extremely smart and extremely well educated.

But the truth of what some called arrogance was really more frustration. You see, for the life of him he couldn’t understand how people expected him to be anything more or less than a Catholic bishop.
- He was a teacher of the Catholic faith because he firmly believed that it was handed down from Christ to His apostles, and from those apostles to him.
- He didn’t change the faith because it wasn’t his to change. The faith belongs to Christ, the message is from Christ. Morlino knew he was just the messenger.
That doesn’t sound so arrogant, does it? He wasn’t a man of his time, he was a man of eternity and unapologetically so. I can assure you, he was all about the faith.

I can tell you about the night before his ordination to the episcopacy. I had a front row seat (literally). The guests had all gone, and we were sharing a nightcap before the big day. There were only two bedrooms in the Bishop’s house, so I was the only one with him.

He started crying. Honestly, I’m uncomfortable with displays of emotion, but the longer I was with him, the better I did. Trying to read his mind, I told him that I was certain his dad, his mom, and of course his granny were all looking down from heaven with big smiles on their faces. He called me an idiot.

“Well then why the hell are you crying,” I fired back. He replied, “You were in the chapel with me today. You knelt there while the Nuncio administered the oath. Did you not understand the words?!” “THEY WERE IN LATIN. OF COURSE I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND THEM!” He actually thought that was funny, and it broke some of the tension.

But he turned serious again as he explained that the oath basically obliges him, at the risk of losing his soul, to teach the Catholic faith, the true Catholic faith, and only the Catholic faith.

For those offended by him for not being more negotiable in interpreting the faith, I can assure you that he firmly believed that if he couldn’t save his own soul, he probably wouldn’t be all that helpful with anyone else’s. I can assure you, the guy was all about the salvation of souls.

I have a million stories of the bishop. In the next week or so, I’ll be with his friends both old and new. There is no family; he was the last in his line; there will be no more. I’ll close by saying something that is terrible theology and will probably surprise you.
I don’t believe that Bishop Morlino is in heaven. He would often joke that when he got to the pearly gates, good St. Peter would hand him the keys to Purgatory and point the way, telling him to turn off the lights and lock the door when he left. But I don’t think the Bishop is in Purgatory either.

As I mentioned, I think I know him better than anybody, and my best guess is that he’s exactly where he wants to be – standing before the gates of Hell, with his promise cross in one hand and sacred scriptures in the other, shouting the Gospel into the darkness with all the formidable strength of his younger days; in the hopes that he can get just one more lost, lonely, and beleaguered sinner to turn around, look into the face of the Risen Lord and say “YES.” I think I mentioned that he was all about saving souls; and I knew him better than anybody.

---

Kevin is a great guy, whom I met when I moved to Madison, with a great sense of humor. His notion about the final state of souls at that of that wonderful piece leads me to suggest to Kevin – and he will understand this in the wry way I intend it – “Don’t quit your day job.”

Still, there is a point: Our Lord harrowed “hell” before His resurrection. Okay, it wasn’t the Hell of final damnation. However, if there were a bishop whom I could imagine saying, “Hang on a moment”, and then checking over his shoulder for one more soul to help, it would be Morlino.


Fr Z makes good on his promise to share teh Bishop's Oath with us:


The Oath: Every Bishop's Aaron and Hur

November 26, 2018

Consider what is entrusted to a bishop.

Consider how he, like everyone else, struggles with the world, the flesh and the Devil.

Consider that, though fortified with the graces of the sacrament of orders and defended by the holy angels, a bishop is hated and pursued by the forces of hell with a persevering malice that we humans can only imagine with vague analogy.

Consider his judgment before the Just Judge when it is his time.

Consider his final reward, forever and ever, will be as a bishop in whatever state he will be his, heaven or hell.

Consider the weight of the burden that a diligent, faithful bishop feels, which the ever-harried Augustine of Hippo described as a sárcina, the massive backpack of the Roman solider.

Consider too the vineyard into which the bishop is sent to tend, with its obstinate vines, vagaries of “weather” and pressing foes.

Did you know that Bishops must make a special oath before they are consecrated?

Surely this oath, seriously considered, reflected upon by a man about to be consecrated, is intended to strengthen him in his ministry. When resolve flags, should he remember his oath, a bishop under siege might remember himself and stand up ready to do what must be done.

The oath is meant to uphold his tired arms, as Aaron and Hur did for Moses during the battle.







CONSIDER HOW MANY BISHOPS AND CARDINALS TODAY WOULD BE FOUND WOEFULLY WANTING BY THE STANDARDS OF THIS OATH!

Sire's celebrated book initially came out under the pseudonym Marcantonio Colonna.

He called Pope Francis a dictator:
Now the pope proves him 'wrong' by punishing him
An interview with Henry Sire
By JOHN ZMIRAK

November 27, 2018

First, would you please remind our readers of the main thesis of your book, The Dictator Pope?
The thesis of my book is, basically, that the cardinals in 2013 elected Jorge Bergoglio without knowing what sort of man he was.
- That he was in fact a prelate who represented some of the most corrupt aspects of the Latin American Church.
- Or that he had always shown himself not so much a churchman as a politician, and a life-long follower of the Argentinian dictator Perón.
- That he has deceived the Church by a false image of amiability and liberalism.
- And that his reputation as a reformer is a fraud.
- He in fact governs the Church in a political and dictatorial style such as none of his predecessors conceived of.

I’ve read in news reports that because of this book, you’ve been expelled from the Order of Malta. Can you please share with us how the Order informed you of this? What justification did they give?
I was first suspended in March 2018, pending a judicial procedure to decide upon my expulsion. Two weeks ago I received a letter from the Grand Chancellor with a decree of the Grand Master. It announced that the Order had decided to cut through the procedure, skipping the hearing before a tribunal to which it was supposed to lead, and to expel me by simple fiat. The decree also falsely states that my expulsion was voted for unanimously by the Sovereign Council. In fact it was not submitted to the Council’s decision at all. The justification given is, of course, that my criticism of Pope Francis is incompatible with my membership of the Order.

Please tell our (mostly evangelical) readers a bit about the Order, its history, and the recent changes imposed upon it by Pope Francis.
The Order of Malta is the medieval order of the Knights Hospitaller. It was founded at the time of the Crusades to defend the Holy Land. It gets its modern name from the period 1530-1798. That’s when it governed Malta and served as a naval force protecting Christian shipping in the Mediterranean. Since the 19th century it has been based in Rome and devotes itself to charitable activities.

The change imposed on it by Pope Francis consists in his having forced the previous Grand Master, Fra Matthew Festing, to resign in January 2017. That was after he had tried to dismiss the Grand Chancellor Baron Boeselager. Why? For his responsibility in the Order’s distributing condoms in the Far East as part of its charitable work. Boeselager was reinstated on the Vatican’s insistence. He is now in absolute control of the Order. Thus, the superior who tried to uphold Catholic moral teaching has been punished by Pope Francis. The man who violated it has been rewarded.

How do you answer this decision by the Order?
I will of course appeal. Before the decree arrived, I was in the middle of conducting a very effective defense, with the help of my lawyers. It was based on the glaring irregularities committed by the Order in initiating my prosecution. The decree of expulsion is fully of a piece with that irregularity. So are the lies which have been used to justify it. It is important to expose the lawless domination that Grand Chancellor Boeselager is exercising over the Order.

Is your expulsion part of a pattern of coercion, intimidation, or slander aimed at those critical of Pope Francis? Can you list some other recent instances?
The Grand Chancellor has acted in this way towards me because his position in the Order is based on his having been forced upon it by the Vatican. He has no alternative but to act as the Vatican’s stooge.

Is there a pattern of intimidation of Pope Francis’s critics? Of course there is. The essential thing to grasp about the coup d’état of 2017 is that it was not aimed at the Order of Malta. It was aimed at Cardinal Burke, who served as Cardinal Patronus of the Order (after Pope Francis had demoted him from Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura).

Bear in mind that Francis is now nearly eighty-two. He is not going to last for ever. Burke was gaining great influence from his position, as one might expect from the Order’s worldwide prominence. In Fra Matthew Festing, Cardinal Burke had a good friend who was fully in sympathy with him in matters of doctrine and liturgy.

By dismissing Festing, Pope Francis was taking away Cardinal Burke’s main support. And reinstating Boeselager, who had been Burke’s enemy from the beginning. The Pope simultaneously suspended Cardinal Burke de facto. It was a classic act of power-politics, undeterred by any consideration of the Church’s moral teaching.

How does this papal policy of trying to silence critics match up with Jorge Bergoglio’s previous career in the Church?
Bergoglio’s critics in Argentina were mainly members of his own order, the Jesuits. Many of them resented his time as their national superior in the 1970s. By 1990 Bergoglio had been sent into a virtual internal exile by his order. But he was able to gain the sympathy of the then Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Quarracino, to get himself appointed auxiliary bishop and eventually successor to Quarracino as archbishop.

His main ally in this ascent, incidentally, was the criminal Monsignor Roberto Toledo, the general secretary to Cardinal Quarracino. He was later found to have forged Quarracino’s signature in a multi-million-dollar fraud. He has never been punished, being protected by Bergoglio once he became archbishop.

The most serious criticism Bergoglio had to face as Archbishop of Buenos Aires? It came again from two Jesuits, Fathers Yorio and Jalics, who accused him of having betrayed them to the military dictatorship while he was Jesuit superior. Bergoglio was able to massage his record in that respect. The full facts remain unclear to this day.

What aspect of Pope Francis’s decisions and statements do you find most troubling as a Catholic?
Pope Francis’s critics tend to concentrate on his doctrinal quasi-pronouncements, whether official or off-the-cuff. For myself, I see the main evil in the practical effect that Francis’s ambiguity is having in the Church. Everyone sees that he is giving a free rein to heresy.
- I am especially appalled by the horrendous condition of the Society of Jesus. Its General, Fr. Sosa, is an outright heretic.
- Propagandists like Fr. James Martin are allowed to undermine Catholic moral teaching day by day.
- Then there is the de facto Blitzkrieg against Catholic Tradition. See the destruction of the Franciscans of the Immaculate. And now of the Little Sisters of Mary, which has just been revealed.
- The latest word is that the Italian bishops want to ban the Traditional Mass again and to get Summorum Pontificum revoked.
The damage that Pope Francis has contrived to do to the Catholic Church in a mere five years and a half is beyond belief.

What advice do you have for Catholics whose faith has been shaken? Do they need to develop a more realistic, historical sense of the narrow limits of papal authority? Can you recommend some good, accessible reading on the subject? (Maybe The Bad Popes, but what else?)
It is true that Catholics need to emancipate themselves from the papolatry which has developed over the last century and a half. It has taken the place of a traditional understanding of the papal office. There have been some very bad popes in our history. It’s in such an exceptional situation that we now find ourselves. As to the reading I would recommend, there is my own book Phoenix from the Ashes. I wrote it precisely to address the point you raise. And to put the present crisis in historical perspective.

How should Catholic bishops, priests/religious, and laymen respond to Francis?
We need to continue to affirm Catholic truth. Not to let Pope Francis think he can revolutionize the Church without opposition.

For the same reason, we should not be contemplating anything resembling schism. Bear in mind that Francis is now nearly eighty-two. He is not going to last for ever. His behavior is provoking strong revulsion. We may expect that the next pope at the very least will not continue in the Bergoglio line.

Pope Francis and his minions represent the last gasp of the 1960s generation. They are making abundantly clear that the result of their antics is the destruction of the Church. The younger generation has not been subject to the sixties mythology. As they rise to the top we can expect to see in the next twenty years a return of true Catholicism. And a realization that the “Spirit of Vatican Two” has been totally discredited.

Do you expect to see a schism before, or perhaps during, the next Conclave to elect Francis’ successor?
If a schism occurs under Pope Francis it will probably be from the left. For example from the German bishops. They are showing that they are determined to do as they please, regardless of Catholic teaching. Your suggestion of a schism in the Conclave itself is interesting.

Pope Francis has already taken us back to the age of the Borgias, with his unscrupulous maneuvering and his suppression of opponents.
One can’t rule out that the next Conclave will take us back even further. To the divided conclaves of the Middle Ages and the election of an anti-pope.

I suggest that the first step of the popes of the Modernist obedience will be to take a leaf out of the book of the past sixty years. To canonize themselves while living, without waiting for the inconvenient preliminary of death. The pope-worship that Francis relies on for his ascendancy will thus be granted its perfect expression.

What would you say to non-Catholic Christians who are puzzled by all these events?

Various historians have pointed to the clearest proof that the Church is of divine foundation. Namely, the appalling rulers it has endured over the last two thousand years. No merely human institution could have survived such scandals.

I myself find it difficult to say anything to non-Catholics at the present time. I can only hang my head in shame. But the answer has always been in the results. Invariably the Church has recovered from its scandals. Its worst periods have always been followed by times of glorious resurgence. There is no doubt that the same will happen again.

Those who are young today can expect to see an age of good popes. And the full recovery of Catholic tradition. The rejection of contemporary heresy. And a great florescence of the religious life of the Church. [Yes, but dear Mr Sire, first the significant institutional changes wrought by Bergoglio have to be corrected. None of that is going to happen overnight - in fact, it may take generations to extirpate all the negative consequences.]

Another brilliant gem of a commentary from Fr. Rutler...

A nursery rhyme this Pope
would do well to read
by FR. GEORGE W. RUTLER

November 27, 2018

---

“Will you walk into my parlour?” said the Spider to the Fly,
“’Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy;
The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,
And I’ve a many curious things to show when you are there.”

---

Mary Howitt wrote 180 books with her husband, and was a friend of Wordsworth and Dickens, but is remembered perhaps most of all for her children’s parable about insects, written in 1828. She forsook her ardent Quaker roots sometime after moving to Rome, where she became a Catholic, less because of the Latin culture and more for her admiration of Pope Leo XIII and his social commentaries. She admitted that she loved the pope and not the papacy.

Combine her spider and fly with our Lord’s admonitions about sheep among wolves, and serpentine cleverness with dovelike innocence, and we have a whole menagerie as commentary on naïveté. It is possible to combine all the tragedies of the modern age into a montage of the perils of unwitting ignorance in the face of evil.

The spectacle of Neville Chamberlain standing in an unprecedented protocol between the King and Queen on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in 1938, cheered for having secured “peace for our time”—horresco referens — is not the proudest moment in modern royal history. But on the death of the appeaser two years later, Churchill, with characteristic chivalry, paid him a tribute in the House of Commons:

---

Whatever else history may or may not say about these terrible, tremendous years, we can be sure that Neville Chamberlain acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle in which we are now engaged. This alone will stand him in good stead as far as what is called the verdict of history is concerned.

---

It remains that the verdict of history is more acclamatory regarding Chamberlain’s successor. While there is some confusion as to whether Churchill, in January 1940, as First Lord of the Admiralty, precisely said that an appeaser hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, he will be the last to be eaten, he did say verbatim: “Appeasement in itself may be good or bad according to the circumstances. Appeasement from weakness and fear is alike futile and fatal.” It was a trope on divine words: “For the simple are killed by their turning away, and the complacency of fools destroys them…” (Proverbs 1:32).

Posterity was not well served by the manner in which Franklin Roosevelt found humor in the verbal gymnastics between Stalin and Churchill at Yalta, the latter being treated as a fly by both Stalin and FDR. That searing moment in history was not overlooked by the author of the encyclical Centesimus Annus who came from the Poland that had been crucified by the moral lassitude of FDR and his “Uncle Joe.”

There would be a flashback to Lincoln Steffens saying of the Soviet Union, that he had seen the future and it worked, and one of George Bernard Shaw clutching a small statue of Stalin. And then there would be Helmut Schmidt’s recollection of a conversation he had had about the Berlin Wall with the benighted Jimmy Carter: “Then, I realized how little my counterpart understood of the situation in a divided Europe and the power of the Soviet Union and its interests.”

Adroit diplomacy secures amity, but at its worst it lets loose ministers who are innocent as serpents and wise as doves. Charles de Gaulle, who was not subtle, said: “Diplomats are useful only in fair weather. As soon as it rains, they drown in every drop.”

Without succumbing to cynicism, it is possible to see a mixture of calculation and callowness in the 2018 provisional agreement between the Holy See and Communist China, recognizing the primacy of the Pope, but at the price of a scandalously clandestine arrangement giving the Chinese government a role in the appointment of bishops. This is in direct abuse of Canon 377.5 in the Church’s own Code.

Ever since Constantine, and certainly since Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne in 800, ecclesiastical and civil threads have been intertwined. The mediaeval Investiture Controversies were the background for the sixteenth-century appointment privileges granted to the French crown and the nineteenth-century Concordat between Pius VII with Napoleon.

In the year that Mary Howitt wrote about the Spider, nearly five of every six bishops in Europe were appointed by heads of state. Right into modern times, Spain and Portugal invoked the Patronato Real and the Padroado respectively, but these involved governments that were at least nominally Catholic.
- The 1933 Reichskonkordat with the Nazi government was soon recognized as a maladroit concession for which the Holy See continues to justify itself.
- But Pius XI honored the Faith with his subsequent condemnations of Fascism.
- The Vatican’s accommodationist “Ostpolitik” in the 1960s made Cardinal Mindszenty a living martyr.
- The Second Vatican Council sought, largely successfully, to reserve the appointment of bishops to the Sovereign Pontiff (Christus Dominus, n. 20). But this was also in the context of an agreement with Russian Orthodox observers — and therefore obliquely with the Soviet government, not publicized — that the Council would never mention Communism by name, history’s worst oppressor of Christians.

It was a jejune exercise in diplomacy, sterile in result, and remedied only by figures who rejected such supinity: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher.

The mellow response of the People of God to the recent canonization of Pope Paul VI is in significant contrast to the reaction of many to the diplomatic betrayal of Cardinal Mindszenty in 1974.
- After years of heinous torture, the Primate of Hungary tasked the papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Villot: “Why do you appoint bishops in the countries of the Eastern bloc? It would be better if there were none, rather than those whom the government allow you to appoint.”
- When Mindszenty refused to renounce his see of Eszertergom and the primacy, Paul VI declared his jurisdictions vacant, informing the “white martyr” of this on November 18, 1973. The cardinal said it was a crucifixion worse than his physical tortures.

Upon Villot’s retirement in 1979, Cardinal Casaroli succeeded him, pursuing the same “Ostpolitik.” This writer remembers graffiti in Rome during this period: “Mindszenty Si. Casaroli No.” There is a poignant conundrum today: Paul VI has just been canonized, and mention of Mindszenty remains mute.

It was my privilege to know Cardinal Ignatius Kung Pin-Mei of Shanghai, who endured thirty years in prison, and Archbishop Dominic Tang Yee-Ming of Canton who was imprisoned for twenty-two years, seven of them in solitary confinement. The retired Cardinal Archbishop of Hong Kong, Joseph Zen, sees a betrayal of those who have suffered so much for Christ.

Time will tell if the present diplomacy is wise. An architect of this agreement, Cardinal Parolin, said: “The Church in China does not want to replace the state, but wants to make a positive and serene contribution for the good of all.” His words are drowned out by the sound of bulldozers knocking down churches while countless Christians languish in “re-education camps.”

A fly would be mistaken if it thought that the Communist spider would nominate worthy bishops. Cardinal Zen, just a few years short of his ninetieth birthday, has made two arduous and futile trips to Rome, hoping to staunch this diplomatic wound.
- Redolent of Mindszenty, he has said: “Pope Francis does not know the real Communist Party in China.”
- Of Cardinal Parolin, the Secretary of State who signed the agreement, he told a reporter: “I told the pope that he has a poisoned mind. He is very sweet, but I have no trust in this person. He believes in diplomacy, but not in our faith.”

- Pope Francis agreed to recognize the legitimacy of seven Communist-approved bishops, previously excommunicated, while removing two bishops loyal to Rome.
- Since the signing of the Vatican-China pact, a bishop appointed by the Vatican has been arrested by the Communist government and placed in a “re-education camp” with no comment from the Vatican. This was Bishop Zhumin’s fifth arrest in two years.
- Two government-sponsored bishops, one of whom was excommunicated by Pope Benedict in 2010, were welcome guests at this year’s Synod on Youth.
- One month after the diplomatic pact, the Chinese government contemptuously destroyed two Catholic shrines in the provinces of Shanxi and Guizhou.
- Uncertain is the fate of thirty bishops of the “Underground Church” loyal to the Holy See.

Cardinal Zen laments the “annihilation” of the Catholic Church in China.
- State supervision of the Catholic Church has been placed under the total control of the Chinese Communist Party by a directive of Xi Jinping who, having abolished limits to his term of office, is a virtual dictator of the entire country.
- He has forbidden prayers, catechesis, and preaching to be published online.

Meanwhile, Bishop Marcelo Sanchez, Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Science, has hailed Communist China as the world’s best exemplar of Catholic social teaching and called it a “Land of Wonders.” Father Bernardo Cervellera, editor of AsiaNews, responded: “The idolization of China is an ideological affirmation that makes a laughing stock of the Church and harms the world.”

There is a fourteenth-century maxim which warns: “He who sups with the Devil should have a long spoon.” The Vatican might need to change spoon to chopsticks.

Cardinal Zen offers more edifying counsel to his persecuted Catholic flock: “They take away your churches? You can no longer officiate? Go home, and pray with your family. Till the soil. Wait for better times. Go back to the catacombs. Communism isn’t eternal.”

Groundwork for the recent Vatican-China accord was laid by ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick. He made at least eight trips to China over twenty years, advocating closer ties with President Xi Jinping. - While privately inhibited by Pope Benedict XVI, who also cancelled negotiations with Communist China, McCarrick was rehabilitated by Pope Francis, in whose election he claimed to have been a protagonist, after which he was sent on another mission to China.
- In an interview in 2016 for a semi-official journal of the Chinese government, The Global Times, McCarrick said that similarities between Pope Francis and Xi Jinping could be “a special gift for the world.” He explained: “A lot of things that China worries about, [Pope Francis] worries about: about the care of poor, older people, children, our civilization and especially the ecology.”

It is true that Pope Francis has frequently expressed more affinity for socialism than for capitalism. During his trip to Bolivia in 2015, he somewhat anachronistically invoked the fourth-century Saint Basil of Caesarea to condemn “corporations, loan agencies, and certain free trade treaties.” Indulging his propensity for coprological metaphors, the pope called capitalist profits the “dung of the Devil.”

Of the twelve apostles, only one was a diplomat, and he is the only one of them who was not a saint, having drunk a toxic cocktail of arrogance and naïveté. This recipe is still fatal.

Mary Howitt, moral dissector of the Spider and the Fly, had reason in her generation for devotion “to the pope and not the papacy.” In the ticking hours of our generation, there may be some cause for reversing this. It is a matter too grave to be tossed about lightly in a mere essay, but there is wise counsel in the ending of her poem:

---

And now dear little children, who may this story read,
To idle, silly flattering words, I pray you ne’er give heed:
Unto an evil counsellor, close heart and ear and eye,
And take a lesson from this tale, of the Spider and the Fly.

---

I translated this for what it is worth. Which is, IMHO, not exactly the ‘sensation’ Socci makes it out to be. The dots he appears to connect are faint and tenuous at best, at least
with respect to what he makes of a ‘new’ discovery from the official documentation of the Fatima apparitions, what Benedict XVI has to do with it, and what he calls ‘Benedict
XVI’s mission’. I doubt he has any stronger arguments he hasn’t made before as to why he thinks Benedict’s resignation as well as Bergoglio’s election as pope are both invalid.
In any case, as with the endless blather about how to deal with Bergoglio, this question of the legitimacy of the resignation-election events is a futile sterile topic.


Preview excerpt from my new book:
A ‘sensational’ unpublished detail from Our Lady’s statements at Fatima
could help illuminate the actual mission of Benedict XVI
Translated from

November 27, 2018

My new book published by Rizzoli is out today. Brief excerpts from it are published today in Libero, La Verita and Il Giornale. Additionally, articles about it were written by Marco Tosatti and Maria Giovanna Maglie. Ff is the excerpt published in Libero:

The prophecy of Fatima on our time is eloquent and food for reflection. But perhaps there is still more that has remained in shadows and which is truly disquieting. There is a ‘detail’ that has emerged after so many years…

It is known that Jacinta and Francisco died not long after the apparitions from the deadly Spanish flu that ravaged all of Europe in those years… Jacinta was particularly linked to the figure of a pope – obviously a future pope relative to her time.

In the third memoir written by Lucia, dated August 31, 1941, she reports a vision by her young cousin (canonized last year along with her brother Francisco) that brings to mind Benedict XVI. But in the official documentation on the Fatima apparitions, Jacinta also talks to her interrogator about a statement by Our Lady… A brief but terrible phrase made during her last apparition on October 13, 2017, the day of ‘the miracle of the sun’ witnessed by some 70,000 people, including some journalists…

I learned about it when a friend from Padua who went to Fatima on a pilgrimage texted me about it while he was attending a course on the Fatima messages, entitled “Course on the message of Fatima – ‘The triumph of love over the tragedies of history’”…

In the final part of the course, concerning historical documentation, all the apparitions are reported. In the chapter on the October 13, 1917 apparition, one reads on page 40 a statement from Jacinta: “And taking on a sadder look, [Our Lady] said: “Do not further offend our Lord who is already very offended! If the people amend their lives, the war will end. If they don’t, the world will end!”

I had never before read this last statement in the official texts found in reference libraries. In fact, in Sor Lucia’s Memoirs…, the apparition of Oct. 13, 2017, is recounted twice, but the sentence reported by Jacinta does not appear. Nor does it appear in other books about Sor Lucia, interviews with her, nor in her letters.

Who, then, reported those words by Our Lady? When? What is the official source? Is it reliable?

The course contains a footnote that cites “the interrogation by Dr. Formigão, in ‘Documentação Crítica de Fátima, I,' p. 142. This refers to the volumes that contain all the interrogations made of the 3 shepherd children after the apparitions and other documents relating to those events.

…A cursory review of Volumes I and II of that documentation series – volumes which cover the year 2017 (…) shows that in the interrogation made on October 19, 2017 by Fr. Manuel Nunes Formigão at the Marto home, those words (which Lucia never mentioned) were said by Jacinta in her answer to Question #8.

On that same day, Fr. José Ferreira de Lacerda also questioned the children. His account shows that on his Question #22 (What did Our Lady say?), Jacinta again gave the same answer, ending with “If the people do not amend their lives, the world will end”…

Also among the documents found in those volumes is a letter from Fr. Manuel Pereira da Silva who was present at Cova da Iria on October 13 and who writes to his friend Fr. António Pereira de Almeida, as an eye- and ear-witness, that he heard the children speaking of ‘the end of the world’ unless mankind ‘does repentance and amends its ways”.

(…)It is not clear why Jacinta reports hearing those words but Lucia does not. However, there are still quite a lot of Lucia’s unpublished writings which could contain this and other information.

Moreover, many times during subsequent years, Sor Lucia cited a prospect similar to what Jacinta attributed to the Madonna, as in her well-reported conversation on December 26, 1957, with Fr. Agostino Fuentes, who was the postulator for the beatification of Jacinta and Francisco.

In that conversation, we find many disquieting expressions. For example: “Punishment from Heaven is imminent”. Or “Many times the Most Holy Virgin told my cousins and myself, that many nations will disappear from the face of the earth”. Or “Father, the Most Holy Virgin did not tell me explicitly that we have come to the end times, but there are three reasons that lead me to believe it”. [Unfortunately, Socci does not state those reasons, at least not in this excerpt.]

More: “Father, my mission is not to tell the world about the material punishment that certainly awaits it if it does not convert in time to prayer and penitence. No. My mission is to remind each of us that we are in danger of losing our immortal souls if we persist in sin”… What Lucia says does not promise a better future.

Yet the sentence reported by Jacinta is striking because in 1917, three shepherd children in a remote Portuguese village could not possibly have imagined that less than three decades later, nuclear weapons would be invented that are literally capable of putting an end to the world and to human history. They could not have known that. But she who spoke to them and said those words knew.

Reason itself, confirmed by historical events, has shown that in our time, it has become unfortunately quite realistic to speak of ‘the end of the world’, or at the very least, to consider such an apocalyptic tragedy among the list of concrete eventualities.

So much so that in the 1870s, Paul VI spoke about it seriously with his friend, the writer and philosopher Jean Guitton:

---

“There is a great turmoil at this time in the Church, and it is the faith itself that is in question. And I repeat to myself that obscure statement Jesus made in the Gospel of Luke: “When the Son of Man returns, will he still find the faith on earth”… I have been re-reading the Gospel on the end times, and I believe that at this time, some signs are emerging. Are we near the end? We will never know. But we must always be ready. Even if it could still be far off”.

---

To get back to the ‘prophecy’ stated by Jacinta, one must consider that it is a private revelation and a conditional prophecy – that it could happen if mankind does not repent and change its way of life. Yet it is difficult to claim that this (repentance and amendment) has happened. The exact opposite appears to be true: Mankind has taken a turn for the worse.

And yet, in the Fatima messages, much was made about Russia – its consecration and its conversion. Sor Lucia said in that 1957 conversation that “Russia will be the instrument chosen by God to punish the entire world unless we first sobtain the conversion of that disgraced nation”.

In this case, we must acknowledge that something ‘major’ has truly occurred where Russia is concerned: Not just the bloodless collapse of Communism, and of the ideologically atheistic regime which sought to cancel God and faith from the world, but indeed a change so radical whereby Russia today is one of the large nations where Christianity has become more important in the life of society and is not opposed and fought against as in Western Europe.

Here is where we see the greatness of Benedict XVI’s vision: At a historical moment of madness, when the increasingly de-Christianized West has absurdly rejected and attacked a Russia that had finally become Christian again and free, and has sought to marginalize her, consigning her to Asian isolation or to the embrace of Communist China, the dialog that Benedict XVI began to undertake with the Russian Orthodox Church aimed at realizing a dream of John Paul II: a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals of peoples united by their Christian roots. [Query: Has Bergoglio not been working to 'advance' such a dialog and in fact succeeded to meet face to face with Patriarch Kirill? He is also 100 percent behind the Russian ORthodox Church in its dispute with Patriarch Bartholomew and its handling of the Ukraine politico-religious mess. Does that not make him a player in this game that Socci describes?]

What he planted – now nurtured by his prayers – is an evangelical seed that could truly germinate into something wonderful. Not just for Christianity, but for all of Europe and the entire world. To conjure away a mad end to human history.



George Soros and one of his puppets...

There's not much more meat either in the conspiracy theory that at least identifies the evil Hungarian billionaire financier George Soros as the master puppeteer-financier
who supposedly enabled the Obama-Clinton-Democratic establishment to somehow push Benedict to resign so they could bring in Bergoglio to do their bidding.
All other conspiracy theorists never name any responsible parties nor cite any plausible way B16 might have been 'coerced'! They just assume "He was coerced.
Period. No need to know how and by whom!"]

First, though, the blame-Soros 'theorizers' have to tell us exactly what pressures could have plausibly been brought to bear on Benedict XVI (and by whom), short of threatened
blackmail. Because if Joseph Ratzinger were blackmailable in any way, the world would have heard about it decades ago, or at least, in the wake of his resignation. But not even
rumors. Anyway, what follows is interesting for what it says about the unspeakable Soros... which is worth looking at if only for the inspired graphic above.


Conspiracy theories, conspiracy facts,
confirmation biases, and 'the resignation that wasn't'

November 28, 2018

Today we do conspiracy theories moving toward becoming conspiracy facts.

This post is inspired by a lively exchange that took place on my Twitter feed yesterday. The subject matter of the exchange was the “resignation, that wasn’t”, made by His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI.

Now, what this blogger found interesting about this particular exchange, and the major take-away from this experience, is the level of emotion introduced by one of the sides. The lesson that needs to be learned here, is that whenever one of the sides employs EMOTIONS in a debate, that side is conceding that it has no rational, logical nor dispassionate arguments left at its disposal.

In a poker game, it’s known as a tell.

And now to the conspiracy theory -> conspiracy fact...

Over the years, it has been commonly held in circles that derive their view of reality from objectively observable occurrences, that one of the major, if not the sole benefactor of most radical left wing causes is GEORGE SOROS.

Globally!

In fact, it was even once considered a conspiracy theory to make an assertion that George Soros was funding DISSIDENT “c”atholic groups who promoted an un-Catholic agenda and that these groups even tried to install a DISSIDENT bishop of Rome.

And then this appeared:

At present, this conspiracy theory has taken on the air of a “conspiracy fact”, given that making a statement to this effect is now considered to be acceptable in polite society, namely, that George Soros has a “moneyed” interest in changing Catholic teaching on a whole host of issues, including who the Roman Pontiff should be.

With respect to the “resignation, that wasn’t” of HH Pope Benedict XVI, it is highly probable that one of the “conspiracies” that was launched and financed by the Soros-funded Podesta group, was to put in motion a PROCESS that would bare exactly those results.

Yes, folks, the Overton Window has moved on this one, as per above email exchange.

So today, a post from Tom Luongo, which appeared on the Zero Hedge website explains to what extent, George Soros is a benefactor of radical left wing causes.

Among those causes funded by Soros, could have been a scheme to bring about the “retirement” of a sitting Roman Pontiff.

I will leave off here, but remember dear and loyal reader, coincidence does not equal causation. However, the next time someone wants to shut down debate by using what are called the “relevance fallacies”, point him to this post.

---

Have we reached 'peak Soros'?
by Tom Luongo

George Soros is losing. He still thinks he’s winning. But, in reality, he’s losing.

All around you, if you look closely enough, you will see the spectre of George Soros lurking behind the headlines. The caravan, net neutrality, regulating Facebook, the de-platforming of independent media, color revolutions and election meddling, refugee creation and manipulation, the trolls on Twitter, your blog and YouTube, etc.

All of these things we see in the headlines today are a product of George Soros’ money and his singular obsession with re-creating the world in his image.

Soros himself is a product of the times. A multi-billionaire who could only exist in an era of unprecedented corruption of the basic foundations of society. An age where the dangerous mix of Marxist ideology governs the somewhat unfettered free flow of capital has resulted in the mother of all bubbles in making money on money.

A primary thesis of this blog is that corrupt money begets a corrupt society. Corrupting the prices we pay for the things we buy dissociates us from their true cost of ownership and the opportunity costs of making different choices.

It has given rise to a seemingly all-powerful class of money-changers who manipulate policy to arrogate unearned wealth to themselves, known as rent, and then use that new wealth to fund their next scheme to fleece people of their time.

Because the aphorism is true, time truly is money. Time is the only true scarce natural resource. Everything else is, ultimately, recyclable, just ask Einstein.

And men like Soros understand that filling your time with distractions keeps you poorer than you would be otherwise. This is the main mechanism by which they steal your wealth.

The process of political and ideological radicalization that his NGOs excel in are part of this scheme. Get the people outraged over irrelevancies, emotionally charge them up and then set them against each other until the political system breaks.

Even when it fails ultimately, like in Armenia, it succeeds in wasting a year of millions of people’s lives. Time lost to the machinations of a madman.

How much time do we as Americans spend worrying about the issues du jour concocted by Soros and his cohort Tom Steyer? And the sad truth is that we need to worry about these issues, even though the costs are high.

Why?

Because Soros’s goal is the destruction of the United States and what it stands for. He is chaos incarnate continually using his money to stoke conflict which ends in a Hobson’s Choice for us, damned if we do, damned if we don’t.

That choice today is one between a Facebook and Silicon Valley that has way too much power over governing our speech, hiding behind broadly-worded EULAs [end user license agreement - had to look that up, computer ninny that I am] or accepting regulation of them for abusing their power.

Think about how egregious the treatment of conservatives and alternative press is at the moment. It’s completely one-sided. Now ask yourself the obvious question. Why?

Why would they do this knowing it will result in people getting angry and calling for something to be done?

Because, lightbulb, that was the plan all along.

Notice how today Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook are being set up to be the fall guys for this situation. If you can’t see at this point the man behind the curtain pulling the strings on this to achieve this very goal then you aren’t woke or red-pilled. You are part of the problem.

You are just another of George Soros’s useful idiots.

Governments on both sides of the Atlantic are lining up now to make Zuckerberg into the villain for not answering the their concerns over Facebook’s data handling.

Zuckerberg is the patsy.

And Soros will get what he wants: compliant, paid-for, bureaucrats and politicians ramming through legislation that gives them oversight into social media platforms to regulate not only their behavior but yours.

Game. Set. Match.

If that’s the case then why do I think we’ve reached Peak Soros?
Because none of this is working anymore. Look around you.
- Just this week, out of nowhere, Soros’s Open Society Foundation packed its bags and left Turkey after its founder was arrested for fomenting dissent.
- Last month OSF and his Central European University pissed off out of Hungary where Viktor Orban put his foot down against Soros’s malign influence on Hungarian culture.
- The Russians threw him out years ago and there’s an arrest warrant out for him there.
- He fought these latter two countries for years before finally leaving.

And OSF pulls out in a day? Reason? They are guilty and Soros is losing his cover. Everywhere where opposition to globalists is hardening Soros is pulling up his tents and running away.

Bullies are weak. Soros hides behind the venal and the vain. He’s never built anything of value, only won a rigged version of a zero-sum game, i.e. currency trading.

He’s not an entrepreneur, he’s a vampire. And vampires don’t build things, they destroy things other people love while being unloved themselves.

The overthrow of the government in Armenia didn’t go as planned either, as Nikol Pashinyan failed to form a government even after he gave lip service to remaining a friend to Russia. No one bought that line and Pashinyan’s people’s revolt has left a a vacuum in its wake, but one that won’t be filled with a Eurocratic stooge under Soros and NATO’s control.

But most importantly, fewer and fewer people are falling for the Hobson’s Choice I described earlier that Soros gins up to move the political ball in his direction.

Now, instead, he is resorting to openly backing voter fraud in Broward County and Georgia. He’s paying protesters to harass Senators over a Supreme Court nominee and organizing a violent storming of the U.S. southern border which is quickly becoming a political albatross around the Democrats’ neck.

Lies are expensive.
- That’s why men like Soros need so much money.
- It’s why they continue to also manipulate markets, sow discord and volatility at the same time that they push open conflicts which rightly scare rational people half to death — like Ukraine’s ham-fisted attempt to draw Russia into a shooting war in the Kerch Strait here.

Their lies are being debunked in real time. I’ve said before. These men may be the smartest men in the room but the are not smarter than the room itself. From here on out for George Soros and his ilk in The Davos Crowd, victories will get more expensive and losses harder to overcome.

This is why control over the flow of information, control of The Wire, as I talked about recently is so very important. It’s why decentralized platforms are so important and why personal connections we make here in the cyber-world need to be anti-fragile.

It’s also why we’ve reached Peak Soros.

---

Fr Weinandy said it best last week: If the February summit of episcopal conference presidents tackles the problem of homosexuality in the clergy, the pope is serious about resolving the Present Crisis. If not, then he is not. Well, more and more, it looks like the pope is totally un-serious, despite all the seeming hustle and bustle about preparing for that meeting.
- Start with the fact that the PRESENT CRISIS came to a head in June with the first public disclosure of McCarrick's sexual misconduct (June 20), aggravated by the long-awaited Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report released August 14. And what did Bergoglio do?
- The pope chose to write a platitudinous and very generic 4-page letter to'The People of God' many days after the Pennsylvania expose, about which Vatican said it was his 'exhaustive' response to the crisis and that nothing more should be expected from the Vatican. I felt then that hardly anyone reacted to that summary ploy to "forget about it - it's over".
- Then came Mons. Vigano's first Testimony on August 27 - which the pope decided he was not going to answer at all. Nothing formal, of course, but there followed a barrage of indirect attacks at Vigano, mostly through a sacrilegious use of the pope's morning homilies at Casa Santa Marta. The homily is part of the liturgy, and to use it to promote a negative personal agenda is sacrilegious.

Besides, all he had to do was say - yes or no, did Vigano talk to him about McCarrick's misconduct when they met one on one in June 2013 and he, the pope, had opened the subject himself by asking Vigano what he thought of McCarrick! That he could not even do that means either that he cannot deny it because it is true, or that even he has compunctions about denying it in public outright if it is true - because think of the many lies, big and small, that he has publicly said without having to account for them, except perhaps to his confessor, if at all!
- Meanwhile, all the pope's men concentrated their fire on discrediting Vigano while still not giving any answers to the questions he raised.
- Vigano came out with a second testimony in which he challenged the Prefect of Bishops, Marc Ouellet, to publicly disclose what he knew of the McCarrick case from his congregation's own files.
- The Vatican promptly used Ouellet as a willing tool, 'with the poep's permission', to answer Vigano - but it boomeranged, of course, because Ouellet confirmed much of what Vigano alleged about McCarrick, but lamely dismissed the main question of Vigano's June 2013 meeting with the pope by claiming that the latter could not be expected to remember everything he discusses with persons he receives in private audience. That's a real hooter, and I am surprised someone with Ouellet's brains agreed to field that one.
- Indeed, it was not until September 12, obviously on the prompting of the pope's Crown Council of cardinal advisers, that they announced the pope was calling a meeting in late February 2019 of all the heads of episcopal conferences "to discuss preventing clergy abuse and protecting children". This was one month since the publication of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report, and Bergoglio had to be arm-twisted into it by his cardinal advisers.

Meanwhile, what did Bergoglio do in response to the urgent demand for a full-scale investigation of the McCarrick case both from the US bishops and from the US faithful, so the public could know the extent of his misconduct - and how he managed to carry it on for decades as one of the Church's most prominent men and in the last 5 years, as one of Bergoglio's closest advisers and agents?
- He delayed for a full month the US bishops' request to meet with him on how to deal with the crisis.
- When they did meet, he rejected their request for an apostolic visitation that alone would be able to unearth all the relevant documents and interview all the relevant witnesses about the McCarrick case.
- He announced instead on October 6 (15 weeks after McCarrick was first publicly exposed) that the Vatican itself would review its own files on McCarrick.
- When the US bishops decided they would devote their fall meeting this year to discussing the plans they had drawn up to deal with the crisis, he blocks them at the last minute from doing that, claiming they should wait until after the February meeting.

In one fell swoop of an astonishing display of autocratic dictatorship - goodbye subsidiarity, goodbye synodality, and a full welcome to the church of deceit, dishonesty and sheer bad faith, in every sense of this term. No one, other than Coupich and his ilk, and the media that remain 'loyal' to Bergoglio, right or wrong, had anything good to say about this move. And we thought Bergoglio couldn't possibly top that outrage, though by now, we ought to know this man is capable of anything, no matter how stupid, to get his way, by hook or by crook.

With Cupich as organizer,
February conference in Rome
will do little but try for damage control
By Phil Lawler

November 27, 1018

If you held out any hope that the Vatican might finally respond effectively to the sex-abuse scandal — that the February meeting could possibly prompt some real action — those hopes should have been shattered by the stunning announcement that Pope Francis had appointed Cardinal Blase Cupich to the organizing committee for that February event.

This is the same Cardinal Cupich who said, regarding the latest eruption of the scandal, that the Pope was “not going to go down a rabbit hole on this.” If you want to start a serious discussion of the abuse question among the world’s top Catholic prelates, you need to get past the gatekeeper. And at least one gatekeeper for this February meeting thinks that if you go through that gate, you’ll be headed down a rabbit hole. Good luck.

You’d like to think that in February, the presidents of the world’s episcopal conference will recognize that they are dealing with a scandal of immense proportions, a scandal that threatens the evangelical mission of the Church. But again, Cardinal Cupich told a TV interviewer that the issue shouldn’t be overemphasized. “The Pope has a bigger agenda,” he said, and as a first example of those “bigger” issues he mentioned “talking about the environment.”

Ordinarily, if you’re planning a conference, you’d choose organizers who take a special interest in the subject at hand. Cardinal Cupich has made it abundantly clear that he does not regard the sex-abuse scandal as a matter of paramount importance. Yet the Pope chose him to help organize this conference. Why?

To answer that question, let’s look at the second reason why the selection of Cardinal Cupich is astonishing.

The scandal that erupted this summer, and prompted the Pontiff to schedule this meeting for February, involved three issues:
- sexual abuse by clerics (as illustrated by the Pennsylvania grand-jury report),
- the unmasking and forced resignation of former cardinal McCarrick, and
- the testimony of Archbishop Vigano that Vatican officials, including Pope Francis himself, were previously aware of McCarrick’s perfidy.

Only one of those issues — sexual abuse by priests — is on the agenda for the February meeting.

But the subject for the meeting [going by its formal title], is “The Protection of Minors”. Period. There is no mention — at least not in the Vatican’s announcement of the event —o f homosexual activity among the clergy, of homosexual influence in the hierarchy, of how McCarrick rose to ecclesial power, or of the Vigano testimony.

Some bishops would like to see the scope of the Vatican inquiry expanded to include those other topics. To be specific, more than 80 American bishops have called for a formal Vatican inquiry that might clear up the questions raised by the Vigano testimony.

Cardinal Cupich is not one of those prelates. On the contrary, he has dismissed the Vigano testimony. So it’s fair to assume that as an organizer of the February conference, he will work assiduously to keep a tight focus on “the protection of minors.” And that, I suggest, is the reason why he was appointed to the organizing committee.

But I’m not finished yet. In his eye-opening testimony, Archbishop Vigano said that Cardinal Cupich is one of the American prelates whose rise through the ranks can be traced to the influence of the disgraced McCarrick. True, that charge is unproven, but neither is it disproven. [Does anyone really need court-standard proof of this other than common sense and the fact that no one has denied it????]

Any serious Vatican inquiry would be forced to weigh the truth of Vigano’s claim. But now the cardinal who should be under a microscope is instead sitting on the organizing committee — in an ideal position to block uncomfortable questions about his own possible involvement in the scandal.

If the February conference is intended as an exercise in damage control, the Cupich appointment makes sense. If the conference is intended to prompt reform, the appointment makes no sense at all. So I conclude that this meeting — which one scarred veteran of the Vatican battles has described as the “last chance” for Vatican credibility — will produce nothing more than “enthusiastic words” about the fight against sexual abuse.

At this point, why should we expect more?
- For most of five years, the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors has been working in these same vineyards, with little to show for it.
- The Commission strongly recommended a special tribunal to hold bishops accountable; that proposal was formally approved, then quietly shelved.
- Commission members have complained that their work is opposed by other offices within the Roman Curia, and ignored by many of the world’s episcopal conferences.

Pope Francis could have given this existing Commission the clout that it needs to produce real reform. He could have summoned the leaders of the world’s episcopal conferences, and instructed them to carry out the suggestions of the Pontifical Commission.

Or, as just a small step in that direction, the Pope could have named Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the chairman of that Commission, to the organizing committee for the February meeting. He did not. While Cardinal O’Malley insists that he still has the Pope’s full confidence, and he will take part in the February meeting by virtue of his position on the Commission, it is still noteworthy that he is not on the organizing committee.

Think about it:
- The February conference is dedicated to the protection of minors. - The Vatican already has an office devoted to precisely that topic. - But that office will not be in charge of organizing the meeting. - The Commission that has already spent months speaking with victims, and devising plans to protect them, is not setting the agenda.

Since the pressure for Vatican action this year has come primarily from the United States, it is fitting that at least one prominent American prelate should have been involved in the planning. If not Cardinal O’Malley, why not Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the president of the US bishops’ conference?

Once again an explanation is close at hand, and it is not encouraging. Cardinal DiNardo led an American delegation to Rome this summer, to urge the Pope to conduct an inquiry into the McCarrick scandal and the Vigano charges. The Pope declined. If Cardinal DiNardo were placed on the organizing committee, he might be tempted to look for another way to jump-start that broader investigation.

Whereas Cardinal Cupich, when asked about the McCarrick/Vigano mess, replied that “this is not on the Pope’s plate to fix. This is on us.”
- Cardinal Cupich knows the Pope’s thinking.
- And Pope Francis knows full well what Cardinal Cupich will contribute to the task of organizing the February meeting.
- For Cupich, the sex-abuse scandal as seen through American eyes — the scandal that includes McCarrick and homosexual influence and Vatican complicity — is “not on the Pope’s plate to fix.”

Look for more headlines on this issue in February, but do not expect any substantial movement. Help is not on the way.

The stench from 'Cupich church'

November 25, 2018

The winds of scandal whipping around the Church’s gay pederasty problem are not dissipating but picking up speed. This is foiling the devious plans of Pope Francis, who deliberately scheduled his “abuse summit” six months out in the hopes that few would care about it by then.

News of that quickie gathering of bishops scheduled for next February commanded little respect from the laity before this week, but even less now that its primary American organizer has been announced — Blase Cupich, who owes his elevation in large part, according to Archbishop Carlo Viganò, to the very molester, Theodore McCarrick, whose scandal the summit will supposedly address.

It was McCarrick who whispered in the pope’s ear about appointing the relatively obscure Cupich to the immensely important archdiocese of Chicago. Overnight this appointment turned the nebbishy Cupich into the most powerful cardinal in America. In Baltimore at the fall bishops’ conference, Cupich was revelling in this status, playing with his cufflinks as he held court before awed staffers.

Cupich is of course the least credible American figure to address the abuse crisis. His resolve to purge the mini-McCarricks who populate the priesthood and hierarchy from the Church is nil. To the critical question — Should the Church continue to ordain homosexuals? — Cupich’s answer is a resounding yes. This, along with his left-wing politics, has turned him into a media darling. Notice that all of the media’s recent take-downs of derelict leadership steer clear of Chicago.

Cupich has famously vowed not to follow Viganò down his “rabbit hole” and says he will focus instead on the promotion of the pope’s enviro-socialist political program. At the Baltimore conference, Cupich was running interference for double-living prelates, urging his colleagues to see such misconduct as “consensual” and thus not worthy of strict regulation.

Cardinal Oswald Garcia of Mumbai, by the way, is also on the abuse summit’s organizing committee. He is the Cupich of India, so brainwashed by the pope’s moral relativism that he has taken to telling socially conservative Indians that they need to lighten up about LGBT rights. Garcia has also been known to censor out of his priests’ homilies any “offensive” references to the sinfulness of homosexual behavior.

Not a single McCarrick crony has been demoted under Pope Francis.

One of them, Paterson (New Jersey) Bishop Arthur Serratelli, presides over an openly corrupt diocese. A wispy protégé of McCarrick’s, Serratelli is known for, among other acts of astonishing corruption, making Fr. Hernan Arias, a credibly accused gay predator, his vocations director.

Arias no longer holds that post, but he remains pastor of St. Margaret of Scotland despite the fact that he is under Vatican investigation for an allegation of sexual assault against a college student who was thinking about becoming a priest. Serratelli knew about this charge before he made Arias vocations director, according to a source close to the Paterson chancery.

Arias is so close to Serratelli that people in the know in the diocese refer to him as “Mrs. Serratelli” or the “First Lady,” said this source. “Serratelli, Arias, and Edgar Rivera (the current vocations director) go on vacation every year together to the Dominican Republic,” added this source. The whereabouts of Arias are not known, even though on paper he remains St. Margaret’s pastor.

Another corrupt Paterson priest on the run is Fr. Patrick Ryan, who (I’m told by well-placed Paterson sources) is under state investigation for embezzling money from St. James of the Marches parish to finance his gay lifestyle. “He has been ripping off the second collection for years, and with some of that money bought a house for his gay lover,” according to a chancery-connected source.

When I saw Serratelli in Baltimore, I asked him about the status of Ryan. Is he under investigation for embezzlement? Serratelli refused to answer. When I asked him about Ryan’s checkered background — sexual misconduct charges dogged him during a previous posting in Albany — Serratelli visibly winced and started babbling about how “lawyers had checked everything out.”

Why did Ryan leave Albany for Paterson? Speculation abounds. “He used to cruise parks up there,” says one priest. Another source suspects that Ryan got to Paterson on a “prisoner exchange” — a trade of deviant priests undertaken by former bishops of Paterson and Albany designed to keep inquiring cops at bay.

Staffers at Ryan’s parish decline to answer any questions about him. Parishioners have been told that he is on leave for “health reasons.” It is the same template Serratelli used to explain Arias’s disappearance from his post: “Due to the stress he has been experiencing, Father Arias has requested and received time away from his parish, St. Margaret of Scotland in Morristown, for health reasons.”

“Health reasons” is becoming as hackneyed a departing explanation for the Church’s nabbed deviants as “the need to spend more time with family” is for vanishing pols.

Cupich claims that the upcoming abuse summit will put such a culture of evasion behind the Church. It is far more likely to cement official lies in place. High among those lies is that the abuse scandal revolves around “children,” Cupich’s carefully chosen word, even as case after almost every case involves male teenagers.

The scandal is one of homosexual indulgence, precisely the McCarrick problem that the beneficiaries of his sinister
influence and dirty money have no interest in solving.

To paraphrase a Victorian poet's line about homosexual love - 'the love that dare not speak its name' - homosexual activity is 'the sin of which the Bergoglio Vatican dare not speak its name'. They call it 'clericalism' instead in a blatant misdirection. How can you possibly confront a problem with a view to resolving it if you don't even acknowledge what it is?

I find the following article undermined by the fact that the sin of 'heresy' that the writer attributes to Fr James Martin can be attributed in far greater measure to the reigning pope himself - especially about partially quoting the Catechism - because the pope habitually edits Jesus's words to fit his own purpose! So if Fr. Kusick calls on bishops to ban Martin from their dioceses for this what should they do about the pope who is a worse offender???? And it all falls under what Cusick describes as 'exploiting uncatechized Catholics', and worse, in the pope's case, catechizing them wrongly because he is catechizing them about the church of Bergoglio, not about the one true Church of Christ!

BISHOPS: BAN JESUIT FR. JAMES MARTIN NOW
'He exploits uncatechized Catholics'
By Fr. Kevin M. Cusick

November 25, 2018

The bishops in Baltimore were stymied in their attempt to pass meaningful and effective measures to impose their own sexual morality guidelines on themselves. The Holy Father shot down their planned votes on two measures to police themselves by asking them not to act.

Stephen P. White in The Catholic Thing makes the point that the Pope, in effect, humiliated our bishops, and I'm inclined to agree.

He also says the Pope may be angered by their lack of support for him in reaction to the explosive charges levied by Abp. Carlo Viganò. It is true that they have rightly called for an investigation of Viganò in connection with the McCarrick malfeasance. Their call to Rome for releasing all documents in connection with McCarrick was voted down. I think we can be certain that Pope Francis doesn't want anybody who believes Viganò to get their hands on any documents at all.

Recognizing the connection between homosexuality and preying upon minors is something the bishops can act on without permission from Rome. They can begin by shutting down the James Martin, S.J. road show.

You may remember that Martin was disinvited from speaking at the Theological College. The authorities there denied that the decision had anything to do with his subversive message, but stated instead that they wish to avoid controversy. It was a small victory.

Martin spreads confusion about Catholic teaching in his books and talks, telling a homosexual man, for example, that he looks forward to the day when he and his "partner" can kiss each other during the "Sign of Peace" at Mass. This is clearly an acknowledgment and approval of the sodomitic relationship two such men share.

This is clearly in violation of the teachings of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, our Church's application of Scriptures and Tradition to faith and morals. He partly quotes those portions of the Catechism he can twist to his evil purposes. Such a deception helps him to maintain credibility among the more gullible.

Martin's heresy is the worst sort imaginable. His partial quotations of the Catechism only to undermine its teaching is not pastoral or compassionate. [Bergoglio's 'heresy' is even worse - because it is Jesus himself he partially quotes or even edits to falsely support his personal and papal agenda.]

Everything Cusick writes from here on really ought to be addressed to the reigning pope, not just to Martin and the other bishops besides the Bishop of Rome:

The Church's mission is not to accommodate to the world and penultimate agendas. The Church's mandated mission imposed by her divine founder is to lead souls to Heaven, to make saints. Encouraging mortal sin does the opposite. This is why Martin needs to be restricted by every bishop.

Until the bishops unite behind a common mission to teach faith and morals, clearly and univocally in each diocese, we cannot begin to make the Church safe for the vulnerable of any age. The sexual abuse of any person is a violation of Church teaching on chastity. Every vocation demands chastity.

No permission from the Pope is ever needed to teach faith and morals. It is the charge from Christ Himself to Peter, the first pope, and every other bishop thereafter to "Teach them all I have commanded you" in connection with the mandate to baptize all nations with the invocation of the Trinity.

Christ taught by His own example of holiness and affirmation of the Ten Commandments that God's teaching on marriage between one man-husband and one woman-wife cannot be changed. He said not one jot or tittle of the law will be changed until it all comes true. He intended this above all in regard to the Decalogue, the Sixth Commandment, which says that no violation of the vows between husband and wife can under any circumstances be violated without sinning.

This is intended for those within marriage, who share an exclusive relationship. By the same token, it is intended for those outside of any marriage for whom all genital expression is forbidden with others, married or unmarried.

The sexual faculty is given for the generation of children within the expression of the married love of man and woman alone. No one else may share in the gift no matter how their errant attractions may unfortunately tempt them. God's grace is enough, for "with God all things are possible." The hope with which each one of us lives each day is inspired by the promise of God that we can all share in His life now and forever by loving His truth. No matter how we fail or fall short, He is always ready to welcome us back and does so through nothing less than a sacrament, that of confession.

We cannot love what we do not pursue. Thus, the task for each of us is to know the truth and to make it the operating principle of our lives. We just need to be authentic: to live what we believe.

Martin can never speak for God's love or serve the true good of others until he reorients his life around Jesus Christ and His truth — all of it. Truth is inconvenient and may sometimes be uncomfortable on our way to Heaven. We enter into the combat of holiness for the eternal reward no matter the cost. True courage is required.

Joseph Sciambra is working very hard to help our bishops speak out and stop Martin. He is on Twitter, among other venues, tracking Martin's heretical teachings and opposing them with the truth of faith. Sciambra once lost his soul in the homosexual "lifestyle" and then rejected that lifestyle for the sake of truth. At josephsciambra.com, he says Martin is not "compassionate" or "sensitive," but rather the opposite:

---

In his recently published book, Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity, Martin repeatedly applauds "The Catechism" for bolding stating that homosexuals must be treated with "respect, compassion and sensitivity and that 'every sign of unjust discrimination'" must be avoided.

Yet, he also denounces the same Catechism for being "needlessly hurtful" toward homosexuals because, in his words, the Church describes "one of the deepest parts of a person — the part that gives and receives love" as "objectively disordered."

---

James Martin is full of nonsense:
- The part of every human being that gives and receives love is not contained in his or her sexual organs, but in the intellect and will, which give and receive love independently of the physical operation of the body.
- We all know individuals who are permanently disabled and unable to experience marital genital expression because of war injuries, disease or accident. Will we tell them they cannot love their spouse as a result? Everyone can easily see what an insult this would be.

A most damning indictment tweeted by Sciambra: "I gave up on the bishops long ago. I recall the day — a certain AB doesn't listen; except to whining LGBT advocates. I confronted his secretary at a public event. He laughed after I told him that openly partnered gay dissidents held (paid) positions of authority at a local parish."

Martin exploits the uncatechized portion of the Catholic Church and enables those who hate the Faith and seek only to undermine the body of Christ.
- Call on your bishop to permanently ban him from any speaking engagements and reject his books and other writings. James Martin opposes the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
- Any bishop who does not ban him now is guilty of undermining the faith of the Church by cooperation in the sin of heresy and immorality.
- Any bishop who betrays his divine mandate to protect and save the flock cannot be saved.

He, for example, and to begin with???

It is never pleasant to deal with 'friendly fire'. I obviously disapprove of this continuing exercise in futility, and it angers me that two individuals I consider generally trustworthy
for their intelligence and good judgment could be so committed to it - Socci totally (and not surprisingly because he has always advocated his hypotheses that really do no honor to
Benedict XVI but on the contrary cast him in a suspicious light), and Tosatti to some degree because he is surprisingly open to the 'arguments' Socci uses. Tosatti wrote this
the day the book went on sale in Italy... I had so many remonstrations about Tosatti's presentation and what he cites from Socci's work that it took me a while to put this together.

How Marco Tosatti buys
into Antonio Socci's new book

November 27, 2018

It is an engaging work. More, it is substantially disquieting in the literal sense of the word, because it nullifies the quiescence with which all of us who experienced Benedict XVI’s dramatic resignation and its consequences accepted it, one might say, ‘naturally’. And above all, if I am not wrong, this book wishes to infringe on the quiescence about the actual governance of the Church, about the reigning Pontiff and about his court.

It starts off from something evident to all: that the Catholic Church,“Holy Mother Church is facing a crisis that is unprecedented in its history”, as Fr. Serafino Lanzetta has written.

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., in the Washington Times, used the same language: “The time has come for Pope Francis to acknowledge that he is the head of the Catholic Church at a time of unprecedented crisis”. [Perhaps the magnitude of the crisis is not totally unprecedented, but the nature of it is, because it rests totally on the fitness or unfitness of the man elected in 2013 to be the head of the Catholic Church, or better still, on whether he is a genuine Catholic at all, or fundamentally anti-Catholic.]

The author rightly observes that “The sad series of abuse scandals now ravaging the Church – with a Vatican hierarchy that is not facing it – is just the iceberg tip of a great spiritual disorientation”, the sign of a loss of faith and of confidence in what which was – and still is, for many – Catholic doctrine. He underscores:

---

“The tragedy, more vast and profound, has its nodes in the crisis of credibility regarding the pontificate of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who has been the source of immense confusion for the faithful, and the incumbent risk of deviations from Catholic doctrine that could lead Christianity to apostasy and schism”.

---

Socci places Benedict XVI’s resignation in its historical context. Up till then, the Church had not surrendered to the spirit of the world and to storms developing from the past, starting with the French Revolution and the subsequent two centuries of attacks from secular and anti-Catholic forces. It was the only bastion against the globalization of conscience. And Benedict XVI kept it so, because in his words:

---

“That is why the Church has always sought, as far as it is possible, in the hostile darkness of the world, to keep worldly forces from underminin the purity of the faith, of Catholic doctrine, and from denaturing the divine mission of the Church. Which has always known that it would withstand persecution, fearing nothing abut it but the martyrdom of the body. But she has always sought to safeguard herself from the powers of the world and the heresies attacking the soul of the Church.”

---

With the Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton leadership in the USA – in continuity with Bill Clinton’s presidency in the 1990s - a secular ideology also known as the ideology of the politically correct had imposed itself on a global scale to support US planetary hegemony and financial globalization. To this, the pontificate of Benedict XVI had become an obstacle. At a time when the Catholic Church was totally defenseless because it had no allies in the world.

With the presidency of Barack Obama, society changed – and the Church had to face same-sex unions, widespread abortion on demand, embryonic stem cell research. And the US conference of Catholic bishops found itself at odds with Washington on some aspects of Obamacare and the rest of the so-called ‘liberal’ agenda.

“Pray for me, that I may not flee from the wolves out of fear”. We all remember those words [pronounced at the homily for his inaugural Mass as pope] from Benedict XVI, so mysterious and disquieting. [No one found them mysterious and disquieting at the time. It was natural for the Supreme Pastor of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics to use the Biblical metaphor of wolves preying on sheep. But after February 11, 2013, suddenly everyone was quoting it as an omen!]

Socci recalls that “The pope thereby indicated a series of elements to keep in mind: apostasy in the Church, hatred of the faith on the part of the world, the Anti-Christ and perverse ends for everything”.

He also recalls that Benedict XVI said [in his post-retirement interview book with Peter Seewald] about his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, another great adversary of the Western powers who seek uncontested mastery of the world, body and soul:

---

We spoke in German which he knows perfectly. We did not make profound stattements, but I believe that he, a man of power, also realizes the necessity of faith. He is a realist. He saw that Russia suffered from the destruction of morality. Even as a patriot, and as a leader who wished to bring back Russia to a significant power role, he understands that the destruction of Christianity threatened to destroy Russia itself. He realizes that man needs God, and I believe he was himself intimately moved by this. Even when he met Pope Francis for the first time and presented an icon to him as a gift, he first made the sign of the Cross and kissed it...]

---

[Some may think this as naive as George W Bush saying intemperately he looked into Putin's eyes and saw his soul!]

Benedict’s resignation remains for many a great question, a continuing inquiry with many concomitant answers. Socci offers the hypothesis of the analyst Germano Dottori:

---

“Although I have no proof whatsoever, I have always thought that Benedict XVI was led to abdicating through complex machinations by those who wished to block Catholic reconciliation with the Russian Orthodox Church, the religious pillar for a project of progressive convergence between continental Europe and Moscow. For similar reasons, I think that was why the way to the Papacy was blocked for Cardinal Scola, who as Patriarch of Venice, had been in talks with Moscow”.

---

[I had to look up who this Dottori is – he’s a political science professor at a Rome university and is a member of the editorial board of LIMES, the Italian foreign policy journal. He writes geopolitical analysis essays, but the paragraph quoted by Socci is not exactly an analysis, and words no one would go by, since Dottori himself starts out by saying that he has no proof whatsoever for what he ‘thinks’ happened.]

[Anyway: That’s it??? That’s what Socci thinks was behind Benedict’s renunciation??? It is not as if Benedict XVI had ever pushed Catholic unification with the Russian Orthodox Church in any way, least of all as being on the top of his agenda! He was friendly with the Patriarchate of Moscow which had been unilaterally hostile to John Paul II simply because he was Polish, but there was never any indication that he pushed for Vatican-Moscow ‘unification’ any more than he advocated reunification with the Orthodox Churches in general.

And who might be “those who wished to block Catholic reconciliation with the Russian Orthodox Church”? The Obama-Clinton-Democrat establishment was anti-Catholic because the liberal agenda is fundamentally an anti-Catholic agenda. I am no diplomatic analyst, but I do not see that any proactive anti-Benedict stealth campaign by that group, financed by Soros or not, could have been motivated in any way by seeking to block a Vatican-Moscow rapprochement. Even assuming there was such a motivation, how exactly could they have pressured Benedict to resign?

Some have pointed to the closure of the Vatican ATMs for a few weeks in January 2012 as a kind of financial pressure. Of course it was an inconvenience, but a minor one and transient, because under Benedict XVI, for the first time ever, the Vatican’s books were opened to international scrutiny by the European Council’s Moneyval, no less, in order to give the Holy See and its financial system the seal of approval by the international banking community. Which it got.

There was not even a hint that the Vatican’s financial agencies under Benedict XVI were in danger of fiscal discredit by having to pay out any sum of money to collective or individual depositors, as the Vatican had to do in the 1990s when the Vatican bank had to pay out more than $200 million dollars to depositors when Banco Ambrosiano, a bank in which the Vatican was the major investor, crashed. After Benedict’s resignation, at least two expose books have been written about the Vatican’s turbid finances, and neither of them reported any significant financial pressure, threat or problem that could have had anything to do with Benedict’s resignation.

We are left with a threat of blackmail – but about what? As I remarked earlier, the world would have heard about it long ago if Joseph Ratzinger was in any way blackmailable, and why; and if not earlier, then surely after he was no longer pope, what was to stop anyone from publicizing any such information if there was any at all?

In short, we are back with the simple fact that not one conspiracy theorist casting doubt on the reasons Benedict XVI resigned has given any plausible argument at all to support that doubt.]

“No one has sought to blackmail me. I would not have allowed it at all. If they had tried to do so, I would not have resigned simply because one does not resign under pressure”, Benedict XVI has said.

But Dottori’s analysis is interesting. We are looking here at a plan for a unipolar world with American hegemony – which would therefore seek to hold down a Russia that has become independent and autonomous. That is [???] the last ideological folly midwifed by the 20th century totalitarianisms… It is a suicidal imperialistic project for the United States, and very dangerous for the world, but which has profoundly impregnated the American establishment (whether neocon or liberal) that even Donald Trump – who defeated them and this ideology – now finds himself severely hampered by this ideological power bloc which seems stronger than the President of the United States because it has the so-called ‘deep state’ in its grip”.

[This is absurd. Tosatti has gone off the rails himself, as has Socci obviously, to be taken in by such generic ‘off the top of my head’ so-called analysis by Dottori. The ‘deep state’ and the establishment/power bloc it works for in the United States have specific ultra-liberal agendas that are primarily domestic – everything that has to do with sexuality and the family, with climate and the environment, with immigration and multi-culturalism.
1) To begin with, such agendas are already widely carried out in Western Europe and Canada, sometimes to a far more advanced degree than they are in the USA, so the US has no need to impose them on other nations.
2) A unipolar US hegemony in the world was antithetical to everything that Obama-Clinton and they stood for in foreign policy – at least publicly. Because publicly, they were for disengagement from every trouble spot anywhere in the world, and indeed sought to make nice with everyone, including Russia, as Hillary Clinton famously sought to ‘reset’ US-Russian relations which the Democrats falsely claimed had been ruined by George W Bush.]

It is important to remember, and Socci does well to point this out, the Obama-Clinton maneuver to organize a ‘revolution’ in the Church. [Fine, we all saw the Podesta e-mail, but did they ever get around to doing what they intended? If they did, surely someone somewhere would have spilled the beans about it by now to say what, who, where, when and how about the whole operation and take due credit for both Benedict’s resignation and Bergoglio’s election. It’s one thing to talk about ‘organizing’, another to actually do it.]

In effect, there was a revolution as we saw and as we see. And not a few link this to the powerful financial and ideological groups which opposed the Church under Benedict XVI, and those US bishops called ‘culture warriors’ disparagingly by the mercenary media of the present regime.

For his leadership on the policies advocated by the culture warriors, “Benedict, during his pontificate, was subject to systematic and continuous attacks, finding himself quite isolated, to the point of not having any more power in the Curia”, Socci notes.

[I may be guilty of selective recall, but I do not remember either Socci or Tosatti – nor even Tornielli, whom at the time I considered a true Ratzingerian – ever writing that Benedict had no more power within the Curia. First of all, because I do not recall anything important he wanted done that was not done. Bertone did bypass him treacherously in the maneuvering to get rid of Gotti Tedeschi in the IOR in 2012, but I see that as the arrogance of Bertone exercising his power as chairman of the IOR’s supervisory board without clearing his action with the pope.

At the time, the only Vaticanista harping on Benedict’s supposed ‘isolation’ in his ‘ivory tower’ was Marco Politi – and even he, in his post-resignation appraisal of B16 for Vatican Radio, did not fault him for no longer having any power in the Curia. This is a black myth borne out of the Vatileaks fallacies - what was peddled as 'fact' (and mindlessly and uncritically bought wholesale by the cardinal electors) even if nothing disclosed in Vatileaks showed a Benedict 'powerless' against the Curia, as even the Vatileaks book author underscored that none of the leaked documents reflected badly on Benedict himself.]

So, resignation. Then the Conclave. And one of the meetings that was key in organizing the election of Bergoglio took place at the British Embassy in Rome. (As if there were not enough meeting halls in the convents and monasteries of the city.) Socci notes: “This direct role played by a power that has been historically anti-Catholic (and which was also the cradle of Freemasonry) is rather singular. Whoever knows a bit about the formidable British ‘imperial’ foreign policy could easily infer that there was a strong political interest by the UK to have Bergoglio elected”. [Or it could simply be that the embassy accommodated Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, the ringleader of the pre-conclave pro-Bergoglio efforts, who was at the time Primate of Britain or some such, by providing him with a convenient meeting place.]

Let us point out in passing, for lack of space, to the most interesting analyses that have to do with what is happening in Europe and the world with the aim of annulling borders and identities in order to more easily manage the new masses meant o serve a faceless capital [??? authority? nation state?] Which brings us to the heart of this work: Benedict XVI’s resignation, and above all, what it meant, and to what extent, and from what exactly did he resign?

“We must ask: has he really renounced the Petrine ministry totally? Is he no longer pope?” Socci answers himself: “From the subjective point of view, we can therefore [??? how??? why???] affirm that his intention – which is decisive in order to define the action he made – was not to be no longer pope… It is evident that – even if he had renounced the papacy, he intended to still remain pope, although in an enigmatic manner and in an unprecedented form, which has not been explained (at least up to a certain point)”. [By what alchemy or authority does Socci dare to say "he intended to still remain pope" as though he read into Benedict's mind!!! As Mundabor says, what literate person anywhere does not know that 'emeritus pope' means former pope, ex pope, no longer pope???]

Indeed, one must remember that, speaking of the Roman Pontiff [he was actually speaking of himself as retired pope]: “Always means for always – in that he can never really return to privacy. My decision to renounce the active exercise of the ministry does not revoke this”. [Unfortunately, from a man with the precise and disciplined thinking of Joseph Ratzinger, this explicit statement of renouncing ‘the active exercise of the [Petrine] ministry” is rightly seized on as grist for the mill by Socci and those who believe that he never meant to completely step down as pope. Granted that what he meant was that as a private person, he would continue to exercise an inactive or passive ministry of prayer, though without any role at all in the governance or leadership of the Church – which is, in fact, what he has been doing - it was not perhaps an appropriate way of saying it.

And it has come back to ‘haunt’ him, because it makes it seem that he was less than honest when he announced his renunciation, though it defies reason and common sense why he should dissimulate in any way when he undertook such a historic step as the first pope ever to resign of ‘his own free will’. He may not have been coerced into it, but is it not worse to be dishonest about your real intentions? Not that I believe he was dishonest at all, because Joseph Ratzinger and dishonesty just don’t go together. But I wish he had never said those words about renouncing ‘the active exercise of the ministry’.

Besides, Socci and company ignore that on a later occasion, his last address as pope to the college of cardinals on February 28, 2013, he explicitly said: “And among you, in the College of Cardinals, there is also the future pope to whom today I promise my unconditional reverence and obedience.” Those are not the words of someone who thinks that in retirement, he expects to be ‘co-equal’ to the ‘future pope’ in any way whatsoever.

And in hindsight, I now find that it was an unnecessary statement to make – one would assume that he, like any other Catholic, would owe that to the next pope. But for all his prophetic powers, he surely did not imagine that the next pope was going to be such a serious threat to the faith and the Church he is supposed to lead that even if he, Benedict XVI, has decided that Bergoglio has gone too far, he cannot now say or do anything that would violate that spontaneous public promise of ‘unconditional reverence and obedience’. Perhaps if he had not used the adjective ‘unconditional’… I still hope that B16 does not pass away without leaving a written testimony denouncing his successor’s anti-Catholic words and deeds.]

The author is right to underscore this distinction. Right or wrong, it has not been sufficiently considered by observers, especially canonists and scholars (leaving aside journalists who are, by definition simplistic and a bit asinine, even the brilliant ones).

“In the light of that last statement, it is clear why Joseph Ratzinger has remained ‘in Peter’s enclosure’, that he still signs himself as Benedict XVI, calls himself ‘emeritus pope’, retains his papal coat of arms and continues to dress like a pope,” Socci says.

[All of which is rather asinine and childish reasoning:
1) He has remained ‘in Peter’s enclosure’ for practical reasons that were well explained at the time he resigned – living in the Vatican affords him the best possible security without the unnecessary expense required by giving an ex-pope (like an ex-US president) appropriate security wherever he decides to spend his retirement.
2) He signs himself as Benedict XVI - without the ‘PP” after it as he is no longer pope - because, retired or not, dead or alive, he is still Benedict XVI.
3) He rightly calls himself ‘emeritus pope’ which simply means ex-pope or retired pope, as in ‘emeritus professor’ or ‘emeritus bishop’.
4) He retains his papal coat of arms because it is the last coat of arms pertaining to the last ecclesiastical office he held in the Church. [When popes die, are their coats of arms 'retired'? No, they continue to be associated for the rest of time with the popes they belong to.]
5. He does not continue to dress like a pope. He wears the white cassock and the zucchetto, but never with the capelet and sash that a pope in office wears, and never again with red shoes.]

Therefore, unlike what has happened before in the history of the Church, today there two de facto popes – who each reciprocally acknowledge, in a rather ambiguous manner, their legitimacy.

[THAT IS SO NOT TRUE, SIGNORI SOCCI E TOSATTI! What’s happened to your brains?
- There are not two de facto popes today – we are not back in medieval Avignon and the era of two popes.
- There is only one reigning pope, de facto and de jure, who has explicitly underscored that he is the only pope at the moment.
- The other pope is ‘emeritus’, ex-, retired, no longer pope, whatever you and others may obstinately continue to think.

Is it too much, at the point, to ask that Benedict XVI issue a simple statement that will put an end to all these futile assertions simply assuming absurdly that “he never intended to fully step down as pope” – when for all intents and purposes, in word and in deed, he has not presumed at all on any papal prerogative?

Moreover, presumably because of that public promise of ‘unconditional reverence and obedience’ he made on February 28, 2013, he is not even able to make use of his fundamental right as a Catholic under Canon 212.3, to wit:

---

"According to the knowledge, competence, and prestige which they possess, they have the right and even at times the duty to manifest tothe sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make their opinion known to the rest of the Christian faithful, without prejudice to the integrity of faith and morals, with reverence toward their pastors, and attentive to common advantage and the dignity of persons.”

---

It is an exceptional and unprecedented situation. Which poses another enormous problem. At this point, some ask: Does canon law not consider a doubtful resignation as an invalid resignation with the colossal consequences one can imagine?”

The problem is not linked only to Benedict’s decision. Socci notes: “On the other hand, there was also an obvious inconsistency becausethe resignation announced on February 11 did not take effect immediately as it should have [says who?] but not until 20:00 on February 28, without any reason, technical or pastoral, neither evident nor declared, in the effectiveness of the renunciation 17 days later”.

[Oh, come on! After almost six years, to come up with this ‘additional problem’. Absolutely no one questioned this at the time – because it seemed quite clear: Benedict had decided to step down as pope, but he also indicated when that would be. What is wrong with that? No one had forced him to resign with the threat, “It must be effective as soon as you announce it”.

It seemed natural to everyone – he was not delaying it for an unreasonable period of time, but only long enough to make the necessary practical and logistical arrangements, both for his departure and for the preparation for the conclave. Where does it say in canon law that a papal resignation must take place the moment it is announced? Especially when there is properly no one who needs to formally accept a papal resignation?]

This delay opens the resignation farther to its possible invalidity:“The reason for which actus legitimi, like acceptance of a job or resignation do not tolerate conditions or terms", says an expert [PLEASE IDENTIFY!], “resides in the fact that these are acts that take effect through the pronouncement of certa verba, as the Roman jurists would say, such as to logically be incompatible with a delay of the act that takes effect with that certa verba. Therefore the fact that acceptance or resignation are included in this juridical category implies the radical invalidity of the act" [Benedict’s resignation in this case]”]
[THAT IS SUCH A LOAD OF BULLSHIT. I don't care what legalistic quibbling and Latin terms it gets into - it is nothing but meaningless quibbling, totally and transparently insubstantial.]

The canonist’s [WHO IS HE, and why should his opinion have any weight at all?] conclusion is clear: “The object of irrevocable resignation is, in fact, the executio muneris through deed and word (agendo et loquendo) (doing and speaking) not the munus [ministry] entrusted to him once and for all… Limiting his renunciation to the active exercise of the ministry constitutes the absolute novelty in Benedict XVI’s resignation.”

[So many things prima facie wrong with that opinion, because it is just one man’s opinion, and we are not even told who he is. As a journalist, Socci should have sought corroboration of such an opinion by at least one other respected and reputed canonist, not depend on one man’s very iffy sayso!

As to the burden of this last argument, Benedict XVI did not say those words about the active ministry in the renunciation message itself, so even technically, one can dismiss the opinion of this 'expert'. And going by his opinion, anything Benedict XVI said after February 11, 2013 when he delivered his renunciation announcement no longer counts because he ought to have been considered resigned the moment he delivered those words…

I did expect better of Socci than to pass off these flimsy, easily dismissable arguments as the apparent mainstays of his case. And better of Tosatti than to be taken in by the flimflam.]

The above elements were confirmed by the Prefect of the Pontifical Household, Mons. Georg Gänswein who said that the resignation of Benedict XVI – “who decided not to renounce the papal name he had chosen” [Did GG actually say that? No pope can renounce the papal name he has chosen, and even if he did so, history will continue to call him by the name he chose after he was elected pope] and that it was different from that of Pope Celestine V, who after abandoning the papacy – ‘went back to being Pietro dal Morrone”.
[ 1) Of course, the two resignations were very different. Also, Celestine did not abandon the papacy. His resignation was imposed by a rival cardinal who became his successor, even if Celestine did not oppose it and apparently wished to leave office after only five months, though certainly not as the prisoner he became of his successor. Celestine was a reluctant pope, a Benedictine monk of strict observance who was uprooted from his decades-long hermitry at the advanced age of 79 as the surprise compromise choice of a conclave that had been deadlocked more than two years.
2) As prisoner of his successor, and someone who had made it clear he did not want to be pope, it would have been unseemly for anyone at the time to still consider Celestine ‘pope’ after he was deposed, and even for his successor, it was more convenient that his prisoner be plain Pietro di Morrone, not Pope Celestine. BTW, he remains Pope Celestine V in historical annals.]

Gaenswein went on with a most surprising and ‘sensational’ statement: “Therefore, from February 11, 2013, the papal ministry was no longer as it was before. It is and remains the foundation stone of the Catholic Church. Yet it is a foundation that Benedict XVI has profoundly and lastingly transformed in his exceptional pontificate [Ausnahmepontifikat, in German]." He implied that this was the kernel of a double ministry, the point at which one sees the ‘collegial dimension’ of the Petrine ministry, ‘almost a ministry in common’. A concept that sooner or later must be clarified.

[I think that the best judgment on this concept – enunciated by Gaenswein but which he conceivably could not have expressed publicly without the approval of Benedict XVI – was a universal dismissal of it, even from those closest to Benedict XVI. As a trial balloon, it came to a most embarrassing flapdown. Whatever the reason(s) B16 approved launching it, if he did, it’s hard to justify it at all, because it supports the hypothesis of the Soccis of the world that he does not really consider he has resigned the papacy totally – and Gaenswein’s affirmations are not just out of place but also a total contradiction of the clear-thinking and honest Joseph Ratzinger the world had always known. It also feeds into the other cruel bias fanned and promoted by Frank Walker every chance he gets, habitually referring to Benedict XVI as a ‘bot’ i.e., someone’s robot (Gaenswein’s and/or Bergoglio’s), and Gaenswein as his ‘manipulative minder’.]

Whoever opposes or wishes to impugn this view of the facts will still have to face the question of the validity of a resignation that is doubtful and/or partial. [Most emphatically, NO! Those of us who have common sense will simply continue accepting, though with great lamentation, that Benedict XVI resigned and has been replaced with an unmitigated disaster.]

This is the explosive package that Antonio Socci has launched with this book, with arguments that ought to be on the table in any discussion on and in ‘the church’ today. A series of questions and challenges [to my mind, completely unnecessary] that await precise answers.

Needless to say, I also find this book and similar books completely unnecessary, but apparently, there is a demand out there for anything that feeds undisciplined and unfounded speculation. I prefer things simple. No one could possibly regret and lament Benedict XVI's resignation more than I, but I did not have any problem accepting it, trusting that he had prayed enough to be sure it was God's will for him to do so.

And while I may question the validity of Bergoglio's election on a number of grounds, these grounds were and are obviously not strong enough to invalidate what the cardinal electors decided. I am realistic enough to know that any event that is universally accepted as valid de facto and de jure will stay on the history books as irreversibly, irrevocably valid - no matter how many questions are raised that cannot be answered.

So I do not wish to waste my time on fruitless speculation and hypothesizing that will not change the historical fact written in stone that Benedict XVI resigned as pope and Jorge Bergoglio was elected to be his successor. Hence, my impatience and annoyance with those who insist on thinking otherwise without any plausible grounds at all for their opinions.

 

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 01/12/2018 18:57]

The Last Judgment (Il Giudizio Universale), Michelangelo, 1536-1541

The post is obviously belated, but its message is timeless for everyone who wishes eternal salvation.

Sermon for the Last Sunday after Pentecost:
Learning the Four Last Things with Dante
by Father Richard Cipolla

November 25, 2018

From today’s Gospel [in the Traditional Mass]:

---

[B]For as the lightning comes forth from the east and shines even to the west, so also will the coming of the Son of Man… And he will send forth his angels with a trumpet and a great sound, and they will gather His elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other. (Matthew 24:27 ff.)]

---

Literary critics are a prickly and opinionated group, but they have always agreed that one of the greatest works of Western Literature is Dante’s Divine Comedy, both as poetry and as human epic.

A few years ago a human rights organization called Gherush 92, which acts as a consultant to the United Nations body on racism and discrimination called for the banning of Dante’s Divine Comedy, specifically the first part called the Inferno, from the classroom. Dante’s epic is “offensive and discriminatory” and has no place in a modern classroom, said Valentina Sereni, the group’s president.

She went on to say: “We do not advocate censorship or the burning of books, but we would like it acknowledged, clearly and unambiguously, that in the Divine Comedy there is racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic content. Art cannot be above criticism”. She goes on to say that school children who studied the work lack the “filters” to appreciate its historical context and were being fed a poisonous diet of anti-Semitism and racism.

One could not ask for a better example of where post-modern Western culture is than this irrational screed from Signora Sereni. And for us here this morning, we just heard the gospel for this Sunday which speaks of the Last Things, and speaks in graphically violent and unambiguous terms: that all of this will come to an end and an integral part of the end is judgment, judgment by God on every person who is part of, as we say, this world.

This business about banning the Divina Commedia is of existential interest to me, for I taught the Inferno in my Advanced Latin Class at my school along with the sixth book of Vergil’s Aeneid, both of which have to do with depictions of the Underworld, or, in impolite circles, Hell.

The fact is, and this is what is relevant to Catholics, that Signora Sereni’s fears of students lacking filters to screen out the trash in the Inferno are quite unfounded. For the fact is that there are no filters to screen anything out. Or rather, the filters work very well indeed in a culture in which the individual and his wants are central to understanding anything at all.

Most students, including Catholic students, would treat the Inferno as they would any literary composition of the Past, as if they were reading Paradise Lost, or Don Quixote, or Huckleberry Finn, or, better still, Alice in Wonderland. The very premise of the Inferno, that God’s justice demands the existence of Hell of which the denizens are tortured by various punishments for eternity, is incomprehensible to most students of today in Western culture, including those Catholics who have undergone the “rigors” of religious education in order to gain the prize of Confirmation.

They are what concern us here today, but we cannot dismiss our concern as well for those who are the products of a denatured and de-Christianized Protestantism for which post-modern culture has effectively neutralized the sting of the Gospel.

Where can one begin to address Signora Sereni’s difficulties with those in Dante’s Hell? With the lustful? With the heretics? With the blasphemers, with the sodomites, with the usurers, with the panderers, with the murderers, with those who betrayed their country and their friends, with Judas Iscariot, with Lucifer?

There is nowhere to begin, for the decadent Western world in which we live will not tolerate judgment of any kind: except that judgment that is safe, the judgment that does not concern them. And so they revel in condemnation of corporate greed (a bit close to the bone all too often in this part of the world), of the rich not caring enough about the poor, about the state of education for minorities, about the inequality of the sexes in the workplace, and so forth. But this condemnation is of the moment and of no personal moment. It has no eternal consequences. It is posturing, it is posing, for none of this relates to the judgment of God and the Last Things, over which they or we have any control.

When one teaches the Inferno, one has a choice: to teach it as one of the greatest literary work of the Western canon and to comment on it as if one were commenting on an insect preserved in aspic, talking only about the beauty of the poetry, the sweep of history, the relationship to Classical literature, etc, etc. Or, while teaching all of the above, one teaches the context of the Inferno which is Dante’s deep Catholic understanding of the essence of things:
- the Natural Law that is given by God,
- the presence and meaning of the Catholic Church in everyday life and in history,
- the terrible reality of sin and its consequences,
- the awe-full justice of God, but also the harrowing of Hell and the reality of redemption in Jesus Christ and the mercy of Purgatory and the joy of Heaven: all this, all this, but yet and also
- the reality of the horror of Hell that is the place forever of those who have rejected in an absolute way the offer of the mercy of God in the redemption made real by the Cross of Jesus Christ.

The Divine Comedy, the journey to God, is the essence of the drama of what it means to be a man, a human being.
- It is not the base existential allure of Waiting for Godot.
- It is not the insane but plausible Superman of Nietzsche.
- It is not the debased sentimentality of contemporary belief that all is permissible as long as it hurts no one else.
- It is not the Catholicism that is reduced to the mawkish strains of “Let there be peace on earth” and “Eagles’ wings” against which the gates of Hell are more than a match.

We have heard so much in the past few years about the mercy of God, as if the mercy of God does not depend on the justice of God. Without justice there can be no mercy.

The mission of the Church is not primarily to proclaim the mercy of God. The mission of the Church is to proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. The mercy of God is surely seen and exemplified once and for all in the Cross of Jesus Christ. There is no greater symbol of God’s mercy and love.

Those silly “resurrected Christs” that are placed on a cross over an altar in some Catholic churches are a product of sentimentality and denial of the justice of God. And yet when one looks at the Cross one sees there the terrible, horrible, judgment of God on this world of sin, that God would have to have his Son die in this way: what does that say about this world, about you and me? The obvious answer is quite negative.

But you see, the deepest answer to that question is Love, there is the answer. But not the cheap love the world would have us believe in, love defined as what I want to do, love defined apart from the laws of God, love defined so as to upturn reality into perversity, a false love that is doomed to hell, as Dante saw, as Christ told us, as St. Paul wrote, that is doomed to death, for it is the opposite of Love.

The gospel today speaks clearly of the second coming of Christ, a time of judgment, a time when the justice of God will be revealed and will be exacted.
- This will be a time, yes, a time of mercy for those sinners who have repented and who have believed in the Lord Jesus Christ as their Savior. And those will hear those words: “Come ye blessed of my Father…”
- But this will also be a time of justice, when the wicked who have not repented, who have reveled in their sinfulness, who have spit at the law of God, will receive their reward.

And it will probably much worse than anything Dante could have imagined.

I am posting this series with my usual reservations about the loose use of the word 'schism' generally ,to mean a division in the Church which is far from a genuine schism in the formal sense. In the Catholic Church, this means one faction breaking away to set up its own religious shop, as it were.

ACTUATING SCHISM
by Patrick Archbold

November 27-30, 2018

PART I

---

To a very small circle, Pope Francis is said to have self-critically further explained himself as follows: “It is not to be excluded that I will enter history as the one who split the Catholic Church.”

---

That quote is from Der Spiegel. But it is Spiegel’s correspondent in Italy, Walter Mayr, who characterizes that statement as self-critical. Based upon all the evidence to date and what I think may be coming, I suspect that is a misreading of the statement. The Pope wasn’t being self-critical, he was telling you the plan.

Going back to the early days of this papacy, I spilled considerable ink trying to warn Catholics about the abuse of the Synods to further the nefarious goals of those who seek to permanently change the Church.
- I warned of the pre-ordained nature of the charade.
- I warned about how ambiguity would be used to further the ends, followed up Papal documents imposing what cannot be accepted.
- And I warned of the consequences to those bishops and priests who did not get with the program.
All that happened, and then some. It isn't that I am particularly prescient, but I knew the playbook which they were using to run the game.

But even I didn't expect the absolutely brazen way they have gamed the synod system. At this last synod, not only did they do away with all the rules in advance and pack the synod with the pliant, but they actually published a synod document that was substantially about a topic that wasn't even discussed at the synod, synodality itself. You must hand it to these folks, they are the honey badgers of heretics, they just don't care. We'll get back to synodality in a moment.

In the wake of this latest farce, I have been mulling some ideas about what comes next.
- First, more of the same, for sure. We can count on this process to continue. Gamed synods producing pre-ordained results to continue to move the heretical ball down the field. But that isn't enough.
- Faithful Catholics in the Church, particularly those in certain communities, are very loud and have caused the Vatican more problems than they are willing to put up with.

They made all the rule changes and gamed the synod system in direct response to the problems they encountered in the Synod on the Family.
- The votes caused problems, let's do away with votes.
- But even with all the process changes that made the inevitable outcome inevitable, they resent having to do it.
- The problem isn't the rules, it's 'those people'.

It is commonly remarked by some, myself included, that the Church has been in a de facto state of schism for some time, only that those who no longer hold to the Church's teachings refuse to leave.
- Now, they are not just here but they are in charge. [That was the whole point of their persisting over the last six decades.]
- They didn't seek their own alternative church or power structure, they instead took the long view and were covetous of the name Catholic and its power structure.
- They didn't want their own Church, they wanted ours. [Only they have no right to call the church of Bergoglio 'the Church' as in the one true Church of Christ.] Now they have the power and they use power.

So these are the questions they must be facing:
- How do you get rid of those Catholics who are fighting against your power?
- How do you get rid of faithful Catholics who, by definition, tenaciously cling to the one true church?
- How do you get the true Catholics out of the true Church?
- How do you turn a de facto schism into a real one?

As it turns out, like with all other things, these people have a playbook. They know what worked in the past and they will use that model. In fact, they are already doing it. Piece by piece, they have been putting in place mechanisms that will give faithful Catholics no quarter. Over the next days, I will explain what steps they have already taken and what we might expect.

PART II

What do I mean by “no quarter.” What I mean is they are taking a series of steps intended to give faithful Catholics, particularly traditional Catholics, no place to go other than where they want us.

In short, they are executing a series of plays from their playbook intended to put traditional Catholics in a position in which they must capitulate or be disobedient to some degree. It is the disobedience they seek.

There are parallel steps and sequential steps involved here, but the important thing to understand is the pattern. By understanding the plays in the playbook, the game plan emerges. I quoted Pope Francis yesterday saying, “It is not to be excluded that I will enter history as the one who split the Catholic Church.” I suspect that sentence is the game plan. To separate traditional Catholics from the Church. [Correction: 'their church'.]

So, let’s start getting into the detail. Today I will cover the “no quarter” plan as it pertains to vocations.

Most people are now familiar with what Pope Francis, through his apparatchiks, did to the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate. What happened to the FFI establishes a pattern that we have seen repeated several times since.
- A handful of progressives within an order write a complaint letter (or some other alleged transgression) that the Vatican appoints a commissioner to oversee an Apostolic Visitation. In the case of the FFI, it was 5 men who complained of a "crypto-Lefebrvist" drift. That’s all it took.
- The founder is sent packing under a form of house arrest.
- And new vocations and formation are immediately stopped, and draconian rules imposed. Capitulate or get out.

But it is this pattern of visitation and destruction that we will see time and time again. They shortly after repeated the same process with the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate. As will see, when they want you gone, this is the play in the playbook.

We have seen this same scenario play out again and again. The visitation process was used in South America as well to remove traditional-leaning Bishop Rogelio Livieres Plano. Some have claimed this was ostensibly because of his appointment of Msgr. Urrutigoity (a legitimately bad actor) as vicar general.

As we know, the list of Bishops that have shielded bad actors in their dioceses is a mile long, but the destruction of the traditional-leaning Bishop was swift. Cardinal Wuerl, I remind you, is still the Archbishop of DC and “Uncle Ted” McCarrick is still a priest. Interestingly, that is not the reason given by the Vatican. As Ed Pentin reported:

---

The Vatican has said Bishop Rogelio Ricardo Livieres Plano was removed last month not so much because he appointed a priest accused of sexual abuse as his vicar general or allegations of embezzlement – as many had thought – but because of internal disagreements.

“The important problem was the relations within the episcopacy and in the local church, which were very difficult,” Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said Sept. 26.

Concerns about the former vicar general, Father Carlos Urrutigoity, were “not central, albeit have been debated,” he added. "There were serious problems with his management of the diocese, the education of clergy and relations with other bishops," Father Lombardi said.

---

More recently we have seen the same modus operandi used in Memphis to remove Bishop Martin Holley. I can't even tell you why he was removed. Neither can he as it turns out. He was given 24 hours notice of the visitation. He was provided no findings. He wasn't provided any report. He was offered no chance at clarification or defense. And then was told the Pope said he must resign.

Now I don't know anything about Bishop Holley or why they wanted him gone, but the message and the method is clear. When they want you gone, they can make you gone. They aren't even going through the motions any more and any and all sense of due process or rights under canon law have been dispensed with. That should make any Bishop nervous, which is exactly the point. You can see below an interview with Bishop Holley and Raymond Arroyo. The shock and disgust at the process is clear on Arroyo's face.


The visitation and destruction method has again recently played out in France. The Petites Sœurs de Marie Mère du Rédempteur committed the double crime of being a little "too conservative" and having some assets that the local Bishop coveted. As Hilary White reports:

---

According to the lay organisation, (that you can find here on Facebook) following a merger of the sisters’ retirement homes with another [order] in Mayenne, Bishop Scherrer found himself an ex-officio member of the board of directors of the civil management association of these assisted nursing homes.”

He reportedly began issuing orders about the management of these homes, despite his lack of experience in the field. Naturally these decisions met with resistance, and the bishop’s response was to initiate a “canonical visitation” on the order, an action that in our current epoch has become tantamount to a declaration of war.

His two visitators, unsurprisingly, gave him a report on the life of the sisters that found them to be too traditional – accusing them of “sectarian excesses,” objecting to their return to the traditional habit and their rejection of modern media in the enclosure – which was then sent on to the Roman Congregation for the Institutes of Consecrated Life of Cardinal Joao Braz de Aviz, of odious ill fame. (One has to wonder, while reading the story that follows, whatever happened to the good cardinal’s commitment to “dialogue”…)

The result of this delation was that the Congregation “suspended the Council of the Congregation and sent the Superior General and the Mistress of Novices into exile to distant monasteries for an indefinite period.” This left three apostolic commissioners, appointed by Rome, in charge of the congregation. An appeal by the sisters for a new canonical investigation was refused by the Congregation.

---

As a result, 34 of the 39 sisters have asked to be released from their vows. We have seen the same thing happen to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. We watched that putsch happen in real time. Sovereign, not so much.

Whether you are a traditional leaning order, moderately conservative, or even a bishop not getting with the program, the message and method is clear. When they want you gone. They can make you gone.

So that is one play from the playbook and we have and will see it play out again and again. No recourse, no rights, no justice, just gone. But that isn't enough. They also have to make sure they have no place else to go. As shocking and upsetting as is the abuse of power described above, there are things the Pope has done that I think are even worse.

The Pope has put in place rules that are meant to make sure that not only do religious have no place to go, but that they will never have to deal with this problem again.

To understand this in its proper context, I would like to back up for a second. Yesterday I visited the topic of the abuse of the synod process. Back in the first iteration of the Synod on the Family, the Pope was embarrassed and annoyed by the push-back he received from some bishops. The rules allowed discussions, statements, voting that did not conform with the pre-ordained ends. So the rules were changed so that would never happen again.

So let's revisit what happened after they destroyed the FFI. A handful of the FFI, fed up with what had happened and determined to try and live the religious life they justly desired, sought to be incardinated in other diocese and form new groups under a local bishop. They wanted to start over. But this could not be allowed.

The Pope's hand-picked commissar for the FFI, Fr. Fidenzio Volpi, was so enraged that Bishops would welcome them and escape their clutches, that he took the unprecedented step of attending the Assembly of Italian Bishops (CEI) in Assisi in 2014. There he "warned" the Bishops there to not even consider such thing, or else. (We will come back to the CEI in a later installment.)

So you had this priest warning bishops not to use their own legitimate authority to cross the regime or give quarter to any of the recalcitrant. Truly it is shocking. But that was just the beginning. Like before, when the rules allow things they don't like, the rules must be changed.

Canon law allows for Bishops to erect institutes of consecrated life in their diocese which Bishops have always had broad authority to do, and which some of the smashed community members sought to do. In 2016, Pope Francis issued a decree that "clarified" canon law and requires that a Bishop get permission from the Holy See first. See, they just want to make sure there are no "redundant" charisms.

"The bishop is always responsible in his diocese – but he has to evaluate the answer, the opinion, of the Congregation," Bishop Arrieta said."After [hearing] the opinion of the Congregation, he remains free to act in one sense or in the other; but he has to balance the opinion of the Congregation."

It is necessary "to avoid new institutes being erected on the diocesan level without sufficient discernment of the originality of the charism," which determines the way the members will live out the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience, the Congregation added in a statement cited by CNS.

So you Bishops who want to do something like that, you need to check with us first, but just keep in mind that you don't accidentally trigger a visitation. That is a nice diocese you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it.

When I say, no quarter, I mean NO quarter.

But trust me, that is just the beginnings of the sorrows. In my next post I will detail the changes directed at nuns, changes that will utterly destroy any chance at authentic traditional Catholic life. After that, I will detail how they will use these changes to come after you, Joe traditional Catholic.

PART III

And now we come to the nuns. As angry and as pessimistic as what I have already recounted might make you, what is being done to the nuns boggles the mind. While the above actions are targeted at individuals and groups, individual missiles, these rule changes are nuclear. This change "signals the end of the contemplative monastic life."

The Pope has rightly identified cloistered monasticism as the lifeblood of the Church. Hilary White has done the most comprehensive investigation into what is happening here. Her work is crucial and will be cited throughout the rest of this article. Go read every link in full. Anyway, Hilary says of the cloistered religious:

---

Once they’re inside, the world forgets about them. But contemplative religious life is like the mitochondria of the Church. The power source of the cell that makes all the other systems function. The mitochondria are the most unobtrusive and hidden of the organelles of the body, and for a very long time their purpose was not fully understood. But now we know our lives depend on the health of this tiny, secret and hidden little thing. And mitochondrial disease – when the mitochondria fail to function – is devastating.

---

It has been clear for years that Pope Francis clearly dislikes contemplative orders and he has made numerous unkind remarks about them in the first few years of papacy. In 2016, Pope Francis issued the Apostolic Constitution Vultum Dei quaerere which contains new "guidelines" that showed clearly that the eye of Sauron had spied the contemplatives.

The first thing it did was set a minimum time of formation to nine years. Nine Years. Different orders had traditionally been left to do things there own way and some had long formation period and some shorter. But to now impose a minimum 9 year formation across the board. Especially in this time of later vocations, this change could be a back-breaker for certain communities.

But that isn't all, VDQ also promoted the use of Federations of Monasteries as the universal governance model. These federations are universally progressive institutions, think the Leadership Conference of Women's Religious, that take over all the administrative functions of the associated monasteries. This governance model along with the progressives in the Church has been the death knell of any traditional Catholic orders and we have seen the complete collapse of these groups over the last 50 years.

But that Apostolic Constitution was just the opening salvo in a bombing run determined to wipe traditional Catholic monasticism off the planet. In April of 2018, the Pope issued "Cor Orans" which is the instructions on how to implement VDQ. It makes impossible the continuation of traditional Catholic monstasticism.

In addition to imposing the minimum 9 years of formation, it imposes upon every order that they must belong to a federation. These federations effectively take over the formation of all the nuns. No longer can individual monasteries form those that live with them. No, those seeking the cloister will be forced to ongoing travel to these conferences in which they will be formed by the progressive federations.

---

One nun said: “In the past, each Community has been free to implement whatever type of ongoing formation program that they see fit. We were not required to implement some one size fits all (liberal re-education) program into our daily lives. I cannot imagine how this is all going to play out.”

---

Well, we know exactly how this is all going to play out. But for clarity's sake, this report on the words of José Rodríguez Carballo, responsible for this document's implementation, and secretary (#2 man of the Congregation. [He was Superior-General of the Franciscan Orders when Bergoglio called him to the Vatican, and it was subsequently disclosed that under his management, he had brought the Order to utter bankuptcy.] He is reported as saying: “With this explicit reference to the Second Vatican Council, we point to our profound conviction that the council is the point of reference, non-negotiable, in the formation to the consecrated life.”
Not the charism of the order, nor the rule, nor the Patristic tradition, nor the Doctors, nor the mystics, nor any of the 2000-year-old tradition of religious life, from the Desert Fathers to the giants of the Tridentine period; just Vatican II.

And only, apparently, a single “interpretation” of it, if we are to judge by the soap and oil Braz de Aviz poured on the ruffled feathers of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious – the most virulently anti-Catholic organisation of “Catholic” religious in the world – and by his vicious persecution of the Franciscans of the Immaculate.

Carballo continues his remarks, giving us a clue as to his feelings towards strictly cloistered, contemplative religious life: “A consecrated life, a life in God but inserted in the ecclesial family, in the church – inserted in the world. Not in conflict with the world, but inserted in continuity,” he said.

In another speech, Carballo "called “some forms” of religious life “antiquated” and claimed that they “say hardly anything to people today.” These, he said “will not remain even though they have [had] a certain success.”

To this end they have also made sure that they can kill off any holdouts. Under these rules the Congregation can evaluate the "autonomy" of any monastery and if they don't like what they see. You. Are. Gone.

Someone else pointed out that under this document none of the currently flourishing conservative or “traditionalist” monasteries or communities could have been founded. This includes the specifically traditionalist Benedictines of Mary Queen of Apostles in Missouri or more mainstream “conservative” groups like the Sisters of Life in New York.

The deadman’s switch: Too many oldies? Too many Trads? You’re done.

---

Art. 8 §1. Juridical autonomy needs to be matched by a genuine autonomy of life. This entails a certain, even minimal, number of sisters, provided that the majority are not elderly, the vitality needed to practice and spread the charism, a real capacity to provide for formation and governance, dignity and quality of liturgical, fraternal and spiritual life, sign value and participation in life of the local Church, self-sufficiency and a suitably appointed monastery building. These criteria ought to be considered comprehensively and in an overall perspective.
§2. Whenever the requirements for a monastery’s genuine autonomy are lacking, the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life will study the possibility of establishing an ad hoc commission made up of the ordinary, the president of the federation, a representative of the federation and the abbess or prioress of the monastery. In every case, the purpose of this intervention is to initiate a process of guidance for the revitalisation of the monastery, or to effect its closure.
And no sneakily recruiting from other countries either…
§6. Even though the establishment of international and multicultural communities is a sign of the universality of the charism, the recruitment of candidates from other countries solely for the sake of ensuring the survival of a monastery is to be absolutely avoided. To ensure that this is the case, certain criteria are to be determined.

---

I will paraphrase Hilary in her summation of the above. Too many oldies? Too many Trads? You’re done. And you may not recruit from other countries.

There is actually so much more to this story and I cannot do it justice in this short treatment. Traditional Catholic monasticism is done. It cannot and will not survive this onslaught, if nothing changes.

So now we have seen how they can and do destroy any religious group or prelate who crosses them, we have seen them change the rules to disallow any new orders to form in a diocese without their approval, and we have seen how they have changed the rule to destroy traditional contemplatives and prevent any new groups from being formed.

Step by step they have been destroying avenues for religious to practice traditional Catholicism.
- They are simply not giving traditional Catholics with a vocation anywhere to go, except where they want you to go.
- They are diligently and systematically cutting off all avenues of escape.

This is critical in understanding my thesis about how they may in the future cause the split in the Church for which Pope Francis has openly pined.

So we have covered a shocking amount of destruction, all documented, that has already occurred. We have discovered their playbook and we can see how they repeatedly use the same process. In the next installment, we are going to take a look at a recent story that didn't get much attention. But I look at it with an eye to all that they have done and extrapolate it further. This is where things get really interesting.

PART IV

...we have seen how the synod process has been twisted into something unrecognizable, something with only the ability to tell the emperor, in ways preordained, how wonderful his new clothes are. This last synod was hijacked and produced a document that in large part was about a topic not even discussed, synodality itself.

The politburo approved Catholic media will tell you that synodality is all about decentralizing the governance of the Church closer to the people in the form of the Bishop's conference. This, obviously, could not be further from the truth.

In an incredible validation of the lie, before the ink was even dry on the synod document on synodality, the Pope personally intervened to publicly castrate the USCCB before they even thought about even discussing doing something useless about the abuse scandal. It was quite the show, even for veteran Church watchers.

In order to understand what the push for synodality is all about, you have to look at the above described pattern. In every step, they have restricted the rights of bishops and other groups to act on their own and under their own authority in a way that conflicts with the super-dogma of Vatican Two-ism.

Synodality is not about empowering Bishop's conferences, as undeniably demonstrated in Baltimore.
- It is about restricting the ability of any single bishop to act on his own.
- It is about making sure that no stray orthodox bishop can be a bastion of tradition and a safe space for traditional Catholicism. - He can't allow new groups of religious to form in his diocese, he can't invite traditional nuns to set up shop in his diocese, and if he does anything too traditional, he will be on the receiving end of an apostolic visitation for the crime of not getting along with his Bishop's conference.
All of this has been about cutting off all escape paths for traditional Catholics.

Well, that is not entirely true. Some escape paths they will leave open. I opened this essay with a quote from Sun Tzu, "To a surrounded enemy, you must leave a way of escape." Cut off all paths of escape but one. Get your enemy all into one place by making them think they have no place else to go.

Everything up to this point is my series of essays has been about what they have already done, with minimal analysis and even less speculation. I want to be upfront that what follows is speculative, but based upon the demonstrated tactics we have already discussed. See enough plays in the playbook, you begin to discern the gameplan.

I think that the key piece of evidence for what may be coming was in a little story out of the Italian Bishops' conference (CEI) recently that had only little notice. I will note that the CEI is a bishops's conference on which early on Pope Francis performed an uncanonical takeover and placed his hand-picked guy at the top, making the CEI a wholly owned subsidiary of Francis Inc.

A few weeks back, at a gathering of the CEI, a bishop arose (this would not happen without Bergoglian approval) to attack Pope Benedict's Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum. He advocated the position, contrary to Pope Benedict, that the traditional mass HAS BEEN ABROGATED, and that Pope Benedict proceeded from false premises and that Summorum Pontificum should be retracted.
Mons. Redaelli, bishop of Gorizia (who we know how to have obtained a degree in canon law at the Pontifical Gregorian University) asserted that the Old Missal of John XXIII had been abrogated by Paul VI (and this contrary to what was declared by Benedict XVI in the Motu Precisely) and therefore the Summorum Pontificum , since the legal premises from which the steps move is wrong, is ineffective in the part in which it affirms the continuity of validity of the ancient missal and recognizes its unchanged vigor today. For this reason, the motu proprio is a legal " non-sense " and the "Tridentine" liturgy has not been legitimately re-established by the motu proprio and can not be considered liberalized.

Given that the commonsense consensus now among the Catholic critics of our anti-Catholic pope is that no one but God can really do anything about him - in terms of stopping
his satanic onslaught on the institution that Christ established, we are left to consider what we laymen can do until God resolves the Bergoglio problem.

Well, to begin with, to underscore just how catastrophic the PRESENT CRISIS is, we are never to stop exposing what this pope is doing wrong. The crisis
is not confined to the mountain of issues raised by the sex abuse phenomenon and its roots in priestly and episcopal homosexuality, but rather, it encompasses
the entire appalling and worsening state of the institutional church which has been appropriated by Bergoglio for his own ends.

Last week, Edward Pentin blogged about a talk recently given by Mons. Nicola Bux, following on his interview with Aldo Maria Valli (in which he discusses all the possibilities
available, historical and theoretical, to deal with the Bergoglio problem - effectively to get rid of him for valid canonical and theological reasons - and admits that
none of it is doable because none of it is practicable, which is why none of it has ever been tried at all).

Fine, let us all agree it's a futile exercise to continue speaking of fraternal or filial correctio or whatnot for someone who clearly does not wish to be corrected because he knows better
than Jesus himself what a church ought to be. Even more fruitless is fantasizing about a conclave of enough cardinals (how many is enough out of a present membership
of some 120 electors and 80 more non-electors) that will declare Bergoglio no longer pope in some acceptably plausible way and elect a new pope! This fantasy is
really a virtual impossibility anyway, considering that there aren't even five cardinals today willing to take an unequivocally courageous stand against this pope's anti-Catholicism!

I take heart in that if the underground Church in China found enough priests and bishops to sustain their sacramental life all these decades, surely we will have
them too for our future [imminent?] catacomb years! It looks more and more like any 'Benedict option' to isolate us from the church of Bergoglio will have to be lived deep
under ground.


Pope Francis’s ‘paradigm shift’:
What it means and how to respond to it

November 30, 2018

To contend with the current crisis in the Church, it is necessary to proclaim the truth and resist any “paradigm shift” that distorts the truths of the faith.

This was the advice given by Msgr. Nicola Bux, a respected theological consultor to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, at a Nov. 29 Rome conference on Pope Francis’s pontificate.

The centerpiece of the conference, hosted by the Tradition, Family, and Property lay movement and the Lepanto Foundation, was José Antonio Ureta’s book Pope Francis’s Paradigm Shift: Continuity or Rupture in the Mission of the Church? — An Assessment of his Five-year Pontificate — a work which Msgr. Bux described as a “valuable tool” for understanding Francis’ first half-decade as pontiff.

Msgr. Bux, who was a consultor to the Congregation of the Doctrine for the Faith under Benedict XVI, said the key to understanding this pontificate is realizing what this “paradigm shift” means.

Although not formally defined, it is widely believed to refer to a “pastoral conversion” in which pastoral approaches to concrete situations take precedence over doctrine or legal structures.

According to Ureta, this paradigm shift (once described by Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin as a “new spirit, this new approach”) is “above all an inversion of factors: doctrine and the law must be subordinate to the lived life of contemporary man.”

But according to Msgr. Bux, such a concept presents a number of dangers. He referred to a recent reflection by Stanislaw Grygiel, a professor of philosophical anthropology and longtime friend of Pope St. John Paul II, who wrote that by submitting divine reason to pastoral praxis, the “Person of Christ becomes just one opinion or hypothesis that was applied yesterday but no longer today.”

In effect, Grygiel wrote, it is a Marxist principle — that man’s social practice alone is the criterion of the truth — which has entered the Church and become popular with “many Latin American professors.” It is a “metaphysical and anthropological error” hardly recognized by students, Grygiel added, something “they will pay dearly for, and unfortunately we will pay for, as well.”

“Marxism has crept into the mentality of Western intellectuals and of many men of the Church, so as to induce them in their practice to modify the doctrine of the Church, that is, the Person of Christ,” Grygiel wrote, referring to Karol Wojtyla’s Sign of Contradiction, the spiritual exercises he preached for Pope Paul VI and the Roman Curia at their 1976 Lenten retreat. “The confusion that follows constitutes the greatest danger for the Church.”

“So what must we do?,” asked Msgr. Bux. “Always proclaim the truth because ‘the truth will set you free,’” he said. By contrast, to be “silent when one has to speak is just as vile a lie as to speak when one has to be silent,” he warned.

He also reminded those present that John Paul II “never used words of compromise” when defending the truth of the person. “He was not a Peronist,” Msgr. Bux said. “Therefore the error we are witnessing in the Church allows us to detach man from the truth and chain him to praxis, which decides how man and things should be.”

Furthermore, Msgr. Bux noted, “every praxis that produces truth is reduced to politics,” and proposed that this is, in essence “the paradigm shift of Pope Francis.”

Drawing on Ureta’s book, he further pointed out that for Francis, “truth is a relationship” and therefore “relative... Thus, the prevailing perspective in which he [Francis] moves is politics, whether it be political or ecclesiastical questions, of Venezuela, of Ukraine or China,” Msgr. Bux explained.

And again quoting Grygiel, he said that Pope St. John Paul II “never did politics” because for him, being a priest, bishop and then Peter meant entrusting his work “to the truth of man, revealed in the Person of Christ.” This enabled him to be “one of the greatest politicians” able to “change the world.” Furthermore, the fear of God kept him from “adding something of himself” to the Word of God. “Christ is to be worshipped, not modified,” Grygiel wrote. “John Paul did not adapt Christ to the world.”

Msgr. Bux went on to explain that only through conversion to the love of God can true dialogue take place, otherwise the Church is turned into a “mere human organism, reduced to a bureaucratic organization,” and is not able to “realize the sanctification of the world.”

He asserted that orthodoxy puts forward the notion that the faith “continually” has the ability to “judge the world” but today, the opposite has happened. Instead of “purifying the humanist values of modernity with the Catholic faith, perhaps without wishing it, Paul VI and the Second Vatican Council actually brought about postmodernity, the fruit of which was this 'paradigm shift'.

He argued that this has led to a sense within the Church that to oppose the world is something negative, “to be overcome in the name of tranquillity,” but this is contrary to the belief that a Christian is a “foreigner in the world and can never rest easy, as John Paul II and Don Giussani [founder of the Communion and Liberation movement] agreed.”

Elaborating on this point, Msgr. Bux said the “radical paradigm shift” now in vogue means to “believe in an urgency” to bring justice to the world in terms of “eliminating poverty, or of fair trade, fraternity,” or mixing it with “extreme situations” such as “migrants, homosexuals, divorcees.”

Yet often one does not hear the words “Jesus Christ,” he observed, and the Mass is “reduced to a television show with dance and applause.” And all this is happening, he said, “while in the world reference to God is absent” and the world itself “becomes more and more indifferent, an enemy of the Church, of religion, of the faith, of God.”

He went on to refer to words of Eugenio Scalfari, who said after one of his interviews with the Pope, that Francis was pushing for a “change” in the “concept of religion and divinity” that would result in a “cultural change” that would be difficult to modify. “If that were to happen,” Msgr. Bux warned, “the consequences would be catastrophic.”

Already, he said, the missionary drive is “diminished, a sign of a crisis of faith.” He then pointed out a stark contradiction in Francis’ words: on the one hand, in Evangelii Gaudiums, he affirms that mission and proclamation of the Gospel are the “paradigm,” but on the other hand, and “in a Peronist way as they say in Buenos Aires,” he has said there is “no Catholic God” and that proselytism “is a solemn nonsense; not to convert but to serve, to walk together.”

Msgr. Bux then drew further on St. John Paul II, in particular a quotation from his encyclical Veritatis Splendor: “The unity of the Church is damaged not only by Christians who reject or distort the truths of faith but also by those who disregard the moral obligations to which they are called by the Gospel.”

He also addressed Ureta’s recommendation in his book to resist those Church leaders who read the “paradigm shift” as a “rupture” with the Church’s teaching and tradition.

Msgr. Bux made the point that the Holy Spirit “was not promised to Peter's successors to reveal a new doctrine, but to guard the deposit of faith.” And quoting recent comments of Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Fatih, he noted that the Pope’s authority extends “over the revealed Faith of the Catholic Church and not over the individual theological opinions of himself or those of his advisers.”

Because of this, Msgr. Bux said, “there are occasions in which it is legitimate to prudently suspend assent.” When the Cross of Christ is “made vain,” in order not to lose faith he proposed “conscientious objection and fidelity to the Pope in spite of the Pope" — again quoting from Ureta’s book.

“The evolution in the Church's understanding of the Gospel over the centuries is not a question of a paradigm shift,” he concluded, “but of the development of doctrine, organic and in continuity with the faith.”

P.S. Most interestingly, after posting the above, I came across the following analysis of the current cultural and ideological divide in the USA which, mutatis mutandi, uncannily mirrors almost every aspect of the deep abyss that separates so-called 'conservatives' and 'traditionalists' in the Church from the Bergogliacs and their assorted progressive fellow travelers. The great difference being that neither side in the US 'war' has anyone with the absolute power and authority that Bergoglio unhesitatingly deploys because he does not recognize any limitations at all to his power and authority as pope.

The following article is adapted from a lecture delivered by the author at Hillsdale College on September 27, 2018, during a two-week teaching residency as a Eugene C. Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Journalism. It was published in IMPRIMIS, the monthly speech digest of Hillsdale College 'dedicated to educating citizens and promoting civil and religious liberty by covering cultural, economic, political, and educational issues'. Hillsdale College in Michigan, founded in 1844, prides itself in a liberal arts curriculum 'based on the Western heritage as a product of both the Greco-Roman culture and the Judeo-Christian tradition'.

The author is a Harvard PhD in government and senior fellow at the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. He is a recipient of the 2018 Bradley Prize, he is the editor of several books, including Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought (with William F. Buckley Jr.), and the author of I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Future of Liberalism.

America's cold civil war
by Charles R. Kesler
Editor, Claremont Review of Books

October 2018 issue

Six years ago I wrote a book about Barack Obama in which I predicted that modern American liberalism, under pressures both fiscal and philosophical, would either go out of business or be forced to radicalize. If it chose the latter, I predicted, it could radicalize along two lines: towards socialism or towards an increasingly post-modern form of leadership. Today it is doing both.

As we saw in Bernie Sanders’s campaign, the youngest generation of liberals is embracing socialism openly—something that would have been unheard of during the Cold War. At the same time, identitypolitics is on the ascendant, with its quasi-Nietzschean faith in race, sex, and power as the keys to being and meaning.

In the #MeToo movement, for example—as we saw recently in Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle—the credo is, “Believe the woman.” In other words, truth will emerge not from an adversarial process weighing evidence and testimony before the bar of reason, but from yielding to the will of the more politically correct. “Her truth” is stronger than any objective or disinterested truth.

In the Claremont Review of Books, we have described our current political scene as a cold civil war. A cold civil war is better than a hot civil war, but it is not a good situation for a country to be in. Underlying our cold civil war is the fact that America is torn increasingly between two rival constitutions, two cultures, two ways of life.

Political scientists sometimes distinguish between normal politics and regime politics.
- Normal politics takes place within a political and constitutional order and concerns means, not ends. In other words, the ends or principles are agreed upon; debate is simply over means.
- By contrast, regime politics is about who rules and for what ends or principles. It questions the nature of the political system itself. Who has rights? Who gets to vote? What do we honor or revere together as a people?

I fear America may be leaving the world of normal politics and entering the dangerous world of regime politics—a politics in which our political loyalties diverge more and more, as they did in the 1850s, between two contrary visions of the country.

One vision is based on the original Constitution as amended. This is the Constitution grounded in the natural rights of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution written in 1787 and ratified in 1788. It has been transmitted to us with significant Amendments—some improvements and some not—but it is recognizable still as the original Constitution. To simplify matters we may call this “the conservative Constitution”—with the caveat that conservatives have never agreed perfectly on its meaning and that many non-conservatives remain loyal to it.

The other vision is based on what Progressives and liberals, for 100 years now, have called “the living Constitution.” This term implies that the original Constitution is dead—or at least on life support—and that in order to remain relevant to our national life, the original Constitution must be infused with new meaning and new ends and therefore with new duties, rights, and powers. To cite an important example, new administrative agencies must be created to circumvent the structural limitations that the original Constitution imposed on government.

As a doctrine, the living Constitution originated in America’s new departments of political and social science in the late nineteenth century — but it was soon at the very forefront of Progressive politics. One of the doctrine’s prime formulators, Woodrow Wilson, had contemplated as a young scholar a series of constitutional amendments to reform America’s national government into a kind of parliamentary system — a system able to facilitate faster political change. But he quickly realized that his plan to amend the Constitution was going nowhere. Plan B was the living Constitution. While keeping the outward forms of the old Constitution, the idea of a living Constitution would change utterly the spirit in which the Constitution was understood.

The resulting Constitution—let us call it “the liberal Constitution”—is not a constitution of natural rights or individual human rights, but of historical or evolutionary right. Wilson called the spirit of the old Constitution Newtonian, after Isaac Newton, and that of the new ConstitBution Darwinian, after Charles Darwin. By Darwinian, Wilson meant that [B instead of being difficult to amend, the liberal Constitution would be easily amenable to experimentation and adjustment. [/] paraphrase the late Walter Berns, the point of the old Constitution was to keep the times in tune with the Constitution; the purpose of the new is to keep the Constitution in tune with the times.

Until the 1960s, most liberals believed it was inevitable that their living Constitution would replace the conservative Constitution through a kind of slow-motion evolution. But during the sixties, the so-called New Left abandoned evolution for revolution, and partly in reaction to that, defenders of the old Constitution began not merely to fight back, but to call for a return to America’s first principles. By seeking to revolve back to the starting point, conservatives proved to be Newtonians after all—and also, in a way, revolutionaries, since the original meaning of revolution is to return to where you began, as a celestial body revolves in the heavens.

The conservative campaign against the inevitable victory of the living Constitution gained steam as a campaign against the gradual or sudden disappearance of limited government and of republican virtue in our political life. And when it became clear, by the late 1970s and 1980s, that the conservatives weren’t going away, the cold civil war was on.

Confronted by sharper, deeper, and more compelling accounts of the conservative Constitution, the liberals had to sharpen—that is, radicalize—their own alternative, following the paths paved by the New Left. As a result, the gap between the liberal and conservative Constitutions became a gulf, to the extent that today we are two countries—or we are fast on the road to becoming two countries—each constituted differently.

Consider a few of the contrasts.
o The prevailing liberal doctrine of rights traces individual rights to membership in various groups—racial, ethnic, gender, class-based, etc.—which are undergoing a continual process of consciousness-raising and empowerment. This was already a prominent feature of Progressivism well over a century ago, though the groups have changed since then.

Before Woodrow Wilson became a politician, he wrote a political science textbook, and the book opened by asking which races should be studied. Wilson answered: we’ll study the Aryan race, because the Aryan race is the one that has mastered the world. The countries of Europe and the Anglophone countries are the conquerors and colonizers of the other continents. They are the countries with the most advanced armaments, arts, and sciences.

Wilson was perhaps not a racist in the full sense of the term, because he expected the less advanced races over time to catch up with the Aryan race. But his emphasis was on group identity — an emphasis that liberals today retain, the only difference being that the winning and losing sides have been scrambled. Today the white race and European civilization are the enemy—“dead white males” is a favored pejorative on American campuses—and the races and groups that were oppressed in the past are the ones that today need compensation, privileges, and power.

o Conservatives, by contrast, regard the individual as the quintessential endangered minority.
- They trace individual rights to human nature, which lacks a race. Human nature also lacks ethnicity, gender, and class.
- Conservatives trace the idea of rights to the essence of an individual as a human being. We have rights because we’re human beings with souls, with reason, distinct from other animals and from God. We’re not beasts, but we’re not God— we’re the in-between being.
- Conservatives seek to vindicate human equality and liberty—the basis for majority rule in politics—against the liberal Constitution’s alternative, in which everything is increasingly based on group identity.

There is also today a vast divergence between the liberal and conservative understandings of the First Amendment. Liberals are interested in transforming free speech into what they call equal speech, ensuring that no one gets more than his fair share. They favor a redistribution of speech rights via limits on campaign contributions, repealing the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, and narrowing the First Amendment for the sake of redistribution of speech rights from the rich to the poor. Not surprisingly, the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform called for amending the First Amendment!

There is, of course, also a big difference between the liberal Constitution’s freedom from religion and the conservative Constitution’s freedom of religion. And needless to say, the liberal Constitution has no Second Amendment.

In terms of government structure, the liberal Constitution is designed to overcome the separation of powers and most other checks and balances.
- Liberals consistently support the increased ability to coordinate, concentrate, and enhance government power—as opposed to dividing, restricting, or checking it. This is to the detriment of popular control of government.
- In recent decades, government power has flowed mainly through the hands of unelected administrators and judges—to the point that elected members of Congress find themselves increasingly dispirited and unable to legislate. As the Financial Times put it recently, “Congress is a sausage factory that has forgotten how to make sausages.”

If one thinks about how America’s cold civil war could be resolved, there seem to be only five possibilities. One would be to change the political subject. Ronald Reagan used to say that when the little green men arrive from outer space, all of our political differences will be transcended and humanity will unite for the first time in human history. Similarly, if some jarring event intervenes—a major war or a huge natural calamity—it might reset our politics.

A second possibility, if we can’t change the subject, is that we could change our minds. Persuasion, or some combination of persuasion and moderation, might allow us to end or endure our great political division. Perhaps one party or side will persuade a significant majority of the electorate to embrace its Constitution, and thus win at the polling booth and in the legislature.

For generations, Republicans have longed for a realigning election that would turn the GOP into America’s majority party. This remains possible, but seems unlikely. Only two presidents in the twentieth century were able to effect enduring changes in American public opinion and voting patterns—Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. FDR inspired a political realignment that lasted for a generation or so and lifted the Democratic Party to majority status. Ronald Reagan inspired a realignment of public policy, but wasn’t able to make the GOP the majority party.

Since 1968, the norm in America has been divided government: the people have more often preferred to split control of the national government between the Democrats and the Republicans rather than entrust it to one party. This had not previously been the pattern in American politics. Prior to 1968, Americans would almost always (the exceptions proved the rule) entrust the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Presidency to the same party in each election. They would occasionally change the party, but still they would vote for a party to run the government. Not so for the last 50 years.

And neither President Obama nor President Trump, so far, has persuaded the American electorate to embrace his party as their national representative, worthy of long-term patriotic allegiance.

Trump, of course, is new to this, and his party in Congress is basically pre-Trumpian. He did not win the 2016 election by a very large margin, and he was not able to bring many new Republicans into the House or the Senate. Nonetheless, he has the opportunity now to put his mark on the party. In trying to do so, his populism—which is not a word he uses—will not be enough. He will have to reach out to the existing Republican Party as he has done, adopt some of its agenda, adopt its electoral supporters, and gradually bring them around to his “America first” conservatism if he is to have any chance of achieving a political realignment. And the odds remain against him at this point.

As for moderating our disagreements and learning to live with them more or less permanently, that too seems unlikely given their fundamental nature and the embittered trajectory of our politics over the last two decades.

So if we won’t change our minds, and if we can’t change the subject, we are left with only three other ways out of the cold civil war.

The happiest of the three would be a vastly reinvigorated federalism. One of the original reasons for constitutional federalism was that the states had a variety of interests and views that clashed with one another and could not be pursued in common.
- If we had a re-flowering of federalism, some of the differences between blue states and red states could be handled discreetly by the states themselves.
- The most disruptive issues could be denationalized.
The problem is, having abandoned so much of traditional federalism, it is hard to see how federalism could be revived at this late juncture.

That leaves two possibilities. One, alas, is secession, which is a danger to any federal system —something about which James Madison wrote at great length in The Federalist Papers. With any federal system, there is the possibility that some states will try to leave it. The Czech Republic and Slovakia have gone their separate ways peacefully, just within the last generation. But America is much better at expansion than contraction. And George Washington’s admonitions to preserve the Union, I think, still miraculously somehow linger in our ears. So secession would be extremely difficult for many reasons, not the least of which is that it could lead, as we Americans know from experience, to the fifth and worst possibility: hot civil war.

Under present circumstances, the American constitutional future seems to be approaching some kind of crisis—a crisis of the two Constitutions. Let us pray that we and our countrymen will find a way to reason together and to compromise, allowing us to avoid the worst of these dire scenarios—that we will find, that is, the better angels of our nature.

Avoiding another Roman fiasco in February
There are disturbing signs that Those Who Just Don’t Get It are still not getting it.
A warning on some pitfalls the February 2019 meeting should avoid.

by George Weigel

December 5, 2018

By peremptorily ordering the American bishops not to vote on local remedies for today’s Catholic crisis of abusive clergy and malfeasant bishops, the Vatican dramatically raised the stakes for the February 2019 meeting that Pope Francis has called to discuss the crisis in a global perspective. [When will the time come that Weigel writes that main clause properly, i.e., "...Pope Francis [not 'the Vatican' which does not do anything this pope does not want or order] dramatically raised the stakes for the February 2019 meeting that he called to discuss the crisis in a global perspective". Or, in a broader sense, when, if ever, will Weigel identify PF as the leader of THOSE WHO JUST DON'T GET IT? He is spot on in most of his criticism about what's happening in 'the Church' but he makes it appear as if all these awful things had no known or specific author, origin or cause - which is rather like describing the horrors of Nazi Germany and failing to point out that Adolf Hitler was the single enabler of it all!]

How the Americans taking decisive action last month would have impeded Roman deliberations in February — the strange explanation offered by the Vatican for its edict — will remain an open question. Now, the most urgent matter is to define correctly the issues that global gathering will address. As there are disturbing signs that Those Who Just Don’t Get It are still not getting it, I’d like to flag some pitfalls the February meeting should avoid.

1. The crisis cannot be blamed primarily on “clericalism.”
- If “clericalism” means a wicked distortion of the powerful influence priests exercise by virtue of their office, then “clericalism” was and is a factor in the sexual abuse of young people, who are particularly vulnerable to that influence.
- If “clericalism” means that some bishops, faced with clerical sexual abuse, reacted as institutional crisis-managers rather than shepherds protecting their flocks, then “clericalism” has certainly been a factor in the abuse crisis in Chile, Ireland, Germany, the U.K., and Poland, and in the McCarrick case (and others) in the United States.
- There are more basic factors involved in the epidemiology of this crisis, however. And “clericalism” cannot be a one-size-fits-all diagnosis of the crisis, or a dodge to avoid confronting more basic causes like infidelity and sexual dysfunction.
- “Clericalism” may facilitate abuse and malfeasance; it doesn’t cause them.
[Well, Mr Weigel, who was it that first blamed this whole mess on 'clericalism'? The most charitable thing one can say is that Bergoglio used it as a euphemism so as not to say the word 'homosexual' or any of its word forms at all.]

2. The language describing the crisis must reflect the empirical evidence.
“Protecting children” is absolutely essential; that is the ultimate no-brainer. But the mantra that this entire crisis — and the February meeting — is about “child protection” avoids the hard fact that in the United States and Germany (the two situations for which there is the largest body of data), the overwhelming majority of clerical sexual abuse has involved sexually dysfunctional priests preying on adolescent boys and young men. In terms of victim-demographics, this has never been a “pedophilia” crisis, although that language has been cemented into much of the world media’s storyline since 2002. If the Rome meeting ignores data and traffics in media “narratives,” it will fail.

3. Don’t ignore the devastating impact of a culture of dissent.
Ireland and Quebec demonstrate that sexual abuse occurred in the pre-conciliar Church. Still, the data suggest that there was a large spike in abuse in the late 1960s, 1970s, and much of the 1980s: decades when dissent from Catholicism’s settled moral teaching was rampant among priests, tacit among too many bishops, and tolerated for the sake of keeping the peace. That appeasement strategy was disastrous.

February meeting-planners have said that the Church needs a change of culture. Does that include changing the culture of dissent that seems to have been involved in spiking the number of abusive clergy and malfeasant bishops? Then let the bishops gathered in Rome in February issue a clarion call to fidelity to the Church’s teaching on the ethics of human love, as explained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. And let them affirm that ethic as a pathway to happiness and human flourishing, rather than treating it a noble but impossible ideal. [Wrong tack, Mr Weigel. Bergoglio has done everything he can to ignore Veritatis splendor, as he chose to ignore JPII's 'last word NO' to communion for remarried divorcees. Now you want him to 'resurrect' Theology of the Body which allows no room at all for disordered sexuality???]

4. Forget bogus “solutions.”
How many times have we heard that changing the Church’s discipline of celibacy would reduce the incidence of clerical sexual abuse? It’s just not true. Marriage is not a crime-prevention program. And the data on the society-wide plague of sexual abuse suggests that most of these horrors take place within families. Celibacy is not the issue. The issues are effective seminary formation for living celibate love prior to ordination, and ongoing support for priests afterwards.

5. Resist playing the hierarchy card.
Drawing on lay expertise does not diminish episcopal authority; it enhances it. Bringing lay expertise to bear on this crisis is essential in getting at the facts and to restoring the badly-eroded credibility of too many bishops — and the Vatican. The leadership of the U.S. bishops’ conference understood that, and the majority of American bishops were prepared to act on that understanding with serious remedies. The February meeting must be informed of those remedies — and it should consider how Roman autocracy made a very bad situation worse. ['Roman autocracy', Mr Weigel? 'Bergoglio's arrogant autocracy' more appropriately describes what happened.]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 06/12/2018 00:15]

Excommunication

December 5, 2018

Some people have been wondering about the existence of Excommunication as a remedy available under Canon Law.

I can see why these anxieties have arisen. During a period of ecclesial tyranny like the present, such a penalty has the potential to be very dangerous. Perhaps it is less likely that PF would impose such a penalty ... after all, it might damage his carefully crafted PR image ... than that the theologically illiterate sycophants and careerists who are cheerfully riding along with this regime might do so in order to demonstrate the degree of their pathetic submission (I am employing, from "theologically" down to "submission", Cardinal Mueller's admirably frank and useful recent terminology).

But I do not agree with suggestions that excommunication should therefore be abolished. It is an essential (and biblical) concept. And, with regard to a particular priest who, according to media reports, has been excommunicated in the archdiocese of Palermo, I would rather not express opinions. That is because I know nothing about the case. I would remind traddies that it is dangerous to lionise anybody ... and that there are nutters in Traddidom just as there are (in such generous abundance!!) in Trendidom.

And, even in such unusual times as these when the evidence of Diabolic involvement grows daily more obvious, I think our fall-back position should be to trust the pastors in the Church until and unless we have good and clear evidence to justify doing otherwise.

BUT...

There is one reform which I do regard as highly and most urgently necessary, both in issuing a sentence of excommunication and in asserting that a particular person has incurred such a penalty latae sententiae [i.e., in the very act of committing the offence].

A very precise explanation should be publicly issued, both in canonical and theological terms, of why such a penalty is being imposed or discerned.
- Such an explanation should be prepared to run the risk of being too lengthy and too detailed and, if necessary, too technical.
- It should be utterly clear and should avoid woffly managerial episcobabble and convenient ambivalence, as well as the condescendingly 'clericalist' manner which seems to come so often with the Grace of Episcopacy.

As far as I am aware, [the bishop of] Palermo has not done this.
- Both the person concerned, and the Holy People of God, have a right to such facts.
- And if penalties also have the purpose of deterrence, it is proper that other people should know clearly what they should avoid in order not to suffer the same penalty.
- And academic communities, theological and canonical, should have the materials upon which to base an informed judgement about the validity and prudence of the proceedings. (There is no space for the Fuehrerprinzip* in a Christian community.)

This is what we of the Anglo-Saxon cultural tradition sometimes call ACCOUNTABILITY.

I hope it is not 'cultural imperialism' to commend it to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies!

*[The ideology of the Führerprinzip sees each organization as a hierarchy of leaders, where every leader (Führer, in German) has absolute responsibility in his own area, demands absolute obedience from those below him, and answers only to his superiors. The supreme leader, Adolf Hitler, answered to no one.]

I know I should add here a little summary of the Fr. Minutella excommunication in Sicily that Fr. H refers to but I need a little time to put it together. Fr H's post however gives me an occasion to post important information about excommunication itself, shared a couple of weeks ago by canonist Ed Peters:

Excommunicated Catholics are still Catholic

November 20, 2018

An essay published some five years ago purporting “to clear up confusion about excommunication” recently popped up again and sowed anew confusion on several aspects of excommunication. I don’t recall responding to the original publication but I will briefly respond now.

Preliminarily, there are, of course, several good points made in the essay, such as noting that excommunication is rarely imposed these days and that the sanction is primarily aimed at the reform of the offender. But at least two hot-button issues related to excommunication were wrongly presented in the essay and warrant correction.

The first is the mistaken idea that, upon excommunication, a “person is no longer a member of the Catholic Church.” Actually an excommunicated Catholic is still a Catholic in rather the same way that a convicted felon is still a citizen. An excommunicated Catholic is simply (sadly, but simply) a Catholic who is excommunicated.

Canon 205 recognizes as Catholic any baptized person who is joined with the Church “in its visible structure by the bonds of profession of faith, of the sacraments, and of ecclesiastical governance.”

Now a priest who, say, violates the seal of confession (an excommunicable offense under 1983 CIC 1388) might well believe everything Catholics believe, share in the seven sacraments to the extent allowed by canon law (and, mind, all Catholics are restricted from certain sacraments under certain conditions), and acknowledge the governance of the Church in the very act of accepting the excommunication and in working diligently to have it lifted — as happens from time to time.

Such a priest, regretting his act and distressed by his excommunication, does not need to make a ‘profession of faith’ (as if he were coming into full communion from some other religious body) but rather admits his specific fault and seeks the lifting of the Church sanction.

If the foregoing does not suffice to show that excommunicated Catholics are still Catholics (albeit excommunicated ones), consider:
- Excommunicated Catholics are still bound to attend Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation (1983 CIC 1247), something non-Catholics are not required to do;
- Excommunicated Catholics are still bound to observe the Church’s laws on marriage (1983 CIC 1059) something non-Catholics are not required to do; and
- Excommunicated Catholics are still bound to contribute to the material needs of the Church (1983 CIC 222, 1262), something non-Catholics are not required to do.

I could list another score of canons that excommunicated Catholics are bound to observe in ways that non-Catholics are not so bound, again, in rather the same way that felons are still bound by the laws of the state while in prison (e.g., prisoners are still subject to income taxes and might have to file tax returns from behind bars). All of these serve to demonstrate that excommunicated Catholics are still Catholic.

In short, while there are some ways for a Catholic to cease juridically being a Catholic (e.g., “defection” from the Church, a topic too far afield from ours), excommunication is not such a way. Excommunicated Catholics are still Catholic. Bad Catholics, sure; but Catholics.

Second is the mistaken idea that “legislators who promote abortion and make it possible … surely must incur the penalty” of excommunication. No, they don’t, but I have made this point in so many venues that I see little use in making it again.

Those interested in seeing why those reprehensible Catholics who vote to legalize abortion are, for all that, not excommunicated for abortion, or for anything else, (as if, you know, merely dodging excommunication for one’s evil deeds suffices to show the goodness of such deeds) can look here
http://www.canonlaw.info/2007/05/case-for-applying-canon-1398-to.html
or more generally here
http://www.canonlaw.info/canonlaw915.htm
for more information.

There are still other problems in the recirculated essay—such as its uncritical reference to the lifting of Lefebvrite excommunications and to the subsequently regretted lifting of Williamson’s sanction, both matters I consider to have been canonically botched, as discussed here: Edward Peters, “Benedict XVI’s remission of the Lefebvrite excommunications: an analysis and alternative explanation”, Studia Canonica 45 (2011) 165-189; reprinted in Canon Law Society of Great Britain & Ireland Newsletter 172 (Dec 2012) 1, 8-29.

But let the above two examples suffice to show that, in dealing with matters of canon law, especially penal canon law, and most especially with matters of excommunication, readers should beware.

Father Z's comment:

---

Bottom lines:

- It isn’t as easy to get excommunicated as one might think.
- Excommunication, it isn’t easy as thinking that someone ought to be excommunicated.
- “You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means”
- People who are excommunicated are still members of the Church!
- People who are excommunicated are still obliged to fulfill their Sunday Mass obligation, but they cannot go to Communion.
- People who are excommunicated must have the censure lifted before they can receive any sacrament, including Penance (NB: danger of death is game changer).
- If you are excommunicated, really, do something about it.
- Not all priests have faculties to lift the censure imposed for all offenses/sins.
- Talk to someone!

Okay, that’s a little more than what Peters wrote. But check his post anyway!

BTW… he thinks that latae sententiae excommunication should be abolished. In This Present Crisis I am tempted to bring it back vitandus!

---

Only some 150,000 came to PF's big Mass in Dublin compared to 1,000,000 for John Paul II in 1979. At 150,000 Mass attendance, the Irish government, in effect, spent 113 euro for every Massgoer. Or put it another way, PF was in Dublin for 36 hours -
$472,000 euros for every hour he was there.

by Ian Mangan
December 4, 2018

I am posting this small item not so much to question the cost of the trip (I have no standards by which to judge the actual costs incurred) but simply to show the kind of expenses incurred by the host
country in hosting a papal visit or a state visit by a majorleader or a papal visit. The figures could well be reasonable, more than reasonable or inflated.

Earlier this year Pope Francis paid a historic visit to Ireland.
The arrival of Pope Francis marked the first time Ireland has hosted a papal visit since Pope John Paul II's visit in 1979.

This year's 36-hour papal visit was met with mixed reactions from many people across the Ireland, with some welcoming the event while many others protested the prospect of hosting Pope Francis due to Ireland's fractured relationship with the Catholic Church.

The attendance for the papal mass in Phoenix park was considerably lower than in 1979 with just under 152,000 people in attendance.

Approximately 1 million people attended Pope John Paul II's papal mass in 1979.

Despite the low turnout Organisers of the World Meeting of families were recorded saying that the entire visit was a tremendous success.

Organisers said that the low turnout was due to poor weather conditions and RTÉ's extensive coverage of the event which meant more people decided to watch from home.

Today, however, the total cost of the visit has been revealed. The entire spend for the event stands at just under €17 million with €800,000 outstanding.

Solidarity TD Paul Murphy shared the figures online via Twitter and slammed the use of public money to fund security and management of the event.

"I've no problem with state facilitating Pope's visit but paying millions for event management and security for a Catholic Church event?"


The breakdown of the the entire cost shows exactly what services the money was spent on to facilitate the visit.

Just under €5 million was paid out to the firm Actavo for camera platforms, fencing and standby crew.

Over 2 million was spent on management of the event including plans, car parks management, advice and consultancy and route management for the pope.

Around €5 million was spent across a number of on site services including hiring stewards, portable toilets, IT equipment, medical provisions, marquee hire, generators, staff meals, ATMS and Tree surgery works among other services.

Pope Francis, Absolute Monarch:
Behind the scenes of the new Italian
translation of the Lord's Prayer

December 6, 2018

The ban imposed on the bishops of the United States on November 12 against voting on two very strict measures they wanted against sexual abuse committed by members of the hierarchy is not the only blatant recent case of interference by Pope Francis in the decisions of an episcopal conference.

During those same days, in fact, Francis also imposed his will on the Italian bishops gathered in plenary assembly, ordering them to replace the sixth petition “and lead us not into temptation” found in the Lord's Prayer [which is said at Mass], because in his judgment, it is “not a good” translation of the text of the Gospel. [Yeah, right! Since when did Jorge Bergoglio ever distinguish himself as a Biblicist, much less as a translator of ancient texts? Of course, the most appalling thing about Bergoglio's 'opinion' is that he wishes it imposed over and above more than 2000 years of Catholic Tradition upheld and never once changed by all the Father and Doctors of the Church and the vast array of great minds that has distinguished Catholicism from its very beginnings (starting with the great St Paul). That he dares do this and in the manner described herein is one measure of his unprecedented - and totally wrong-headed, if not evil - abuse of papal authority.]

The assembly was held behind closed doors, and at the end of the work only the result of the discussion was released, with the passing of the new formulation for the sixth petition: “and do not abandon us to temptation.”

But how did we get here? This is how Settimo Cielo reconstructed the genesis of the decision.

When the question was put to discussion in the hall, on the afternoon of Wednesday, November 14, a few bishops spoke out in defense of the traditional version, asking that it be kept alive and if anything explained better to the faithful, instead of being changed.

In effect, the words “e non ci indurre in tentazione” - on a par with the English version in use in the United States: “and lead us not into temptation” - are an exact reproduction of the Latin translation still in effect in liturgical chant: “et ne nos inducas in tentationem,” which in turn is strictly faithful to the original Greek: “kai me eisenénkes hemás eis peirasmón.”

But from the moderator’s bench these voices were quickly hushed. The bishops were told that the “non ci indurre” would have to be replaced no matter what, and that the only thing they were allowed to discuss and vote on was the selection of the new translation.

This because “it had been so decided.” And the thoughts of everybody in the hall went to Pope Francis.

As the new formulation, the presidency of the episcopal conference proposed the one already contained in the Italian version of the Bible approved by the Holy See in 2008 and subsequently placed in the national liturgical lectionary: “e non abbandonarci alla tentazione.”

It was, however, allowed to propose alternative new formulations and submit them to a vote, as long as each of them had the support of at least 30 bishops.

The archbishop of Chieti and Vasto, Bruno Forte, notoriously close to the pope, gathered the necessary signatures and proposed as an alternative this other translation: “and keep us from falling into temptation.”

In support of this proposal Forte affirmed that this was the version preferred by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, a great specialist in the Bible, as well as being close to the liturgical versions of the “Our Father” in other Romance languages, approved by the episcopal conferences of Spain: “Y no nos dejes caer en la tentación” and France: “Et ne nous laisse pas entrer en tentation.”

[The French version of the Lord's Prayer that I have been reciting all these yearssays, "ne nous soumets pas a la tentation" (literally, 'do not subject us to temptation'] which I believe captures the essence of this petition as Benedict XVI explains it in his chapter on the Lord's Prayer in JESUS OF NAZARETH, vol. 2, pp 160-164. The translation I use obviously predates that cited by Magister. I have, of course, been unaware that there is a new French translation. Just now, I checked the Missel Communautaire published by Bayard in 1995 - I bought it in June 1995 at the St Joseph Oratory in Montreal in order to have a Novus Ordo reference if I needed it - and in the appendix, Les Prieres du Chretien, the Lord's Prayer (La Priere du Seigneur, as it is punctiliously called] uses the words I have been using all these years (Et ne nous soumets pas a la tentation, p 1199).]

But against Forte came Cardinal Giuseppe Betori, archbishop of Florence, who as a biblicist and then as secretary general of the CEI had been an active promoter of the translation of the “Our Father” that went into the new official version of the Bible and the lectionary for the Mass.

Betori objected that Forte’s reference to Martini was inappropriate, because in reality even this illustrious cardinal preferred “non abbandonarci,” on a par with another erudite deceased cardinal, Giacomo Biffi, he too now cited as a witness.

To which Forte counter-replied by asserting that he had discussed the matter with Pope Francis, who had said he was okay with “fa che non cadiamo in tentazione.” [So Forte inadvertently opens the curtain to confirm the 'wizard' behind all this!]

Commotion in the hall, a quick reaction from Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti, and a brief back-and-forth between the two.

Then came the vote, which revealed an assembly split precisely in half: with 94 votes in favor of the proposal of the presidency and 94 in favor of Forte’s proposal.

According to the rules an amendment needs a majority of the votes to be approved, otherwise, even in the case of a tie, it does not pass.

So in the end “non abbandonarci alla tentazione” prevailed, but just barely, by a single vote. [Who cast this deciding vote?]

For the record, when the new version of the “Our Father” was approved for the lectionary in 2002, Betori, who at the time was secretary general of the CEI, said: “The possible adaptation of this translation for liturgical rite and individual prayer will be made at the time of the translation of the third edition of the ‘Missale Romanum.’ But the decision that is being made now predetermines to a certain extent the future decision, since it is difficult to imagine the coexistence of two formulations.”

Today the new formulation enacted back then is no longer just “possible” but has become reality.

And it could not have been otherwise, seeing how Pope Francis imposed on the general assembly of the CEI the replacement of the traditional version, even blocking any bishop from coming to its defense.

Meanwhile, as of December 5, in his Wednesday general audiences the pope has begun a cycle of catecheses precisely on the “Our Father.’ It will be interesting to listen to him when he gets to the petition he wanted to have retranslated.


*[I should perhaps explain why I pray the Lord's Prayer in French. Since I pray the Rosary very often and to keep me from reciting it by rote, I alternate saying the prayers in English, French, Spanish and Latin, although lately, I have been saying it mostly in Latin which is a perfect attention-focuser.]

A belated post that nonetheless I wish to put on the record...


Cardinal Müller seeks to thread the needle,
but misses the canonical mark
The idea that airing dirty laundry is what harms the credibility
of the Church is part of the problem. Arguably, it is the problem.
by Christopher R. Altieri

December 2, 2018

The Prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, granted an interview to Italy’s La Stampa recently, in which he struck a critical stance toward the former nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, saying in effect that the call for Pope Francis’s resignation that ended his first bombshell dossier in August was intemperate and a case of overreach.

The interview with La Stampa came on the heels of another interview, also in-depth, with Life Site News, in which the former prefect criticized the Holy Father’s response to the crisis, and called for a thorough investigation of l’Affaire McCarrick.

Taken together, the pair of interviews suggest Cardinal Müller is engaged in an effort to thread the needle between opposing factions and bring a measure of moderation to an increasingly tense and acrimonious impasse in the Vatican. While Müller’s search for a via media and call for all sides to work together to face the crisis are both welcome, his remarks to La Stampa contained elements that call for critical attention.

Cardinal Müller’s assertions to the effect that the Cardinals are the only ones who can ask the Pope for clarification, and must do so privately — viz. “This, however, must take place in a private way, in its own proper places, and without ever making a public polemic with attacks that end up putting the credibility of the Church and her mission in doubt.” — fly in the face of canon law (cf. CIC 212§2-3), the Pope’s own repeated calls for full involvement of all the faithful in every state of life, and common sense.

These are matters touching the public weal of the whole Church. Every member of the faithful has a stake in the issue of this crisis, as do the people who have not heard the call to accept Christ, or have accepted it - for they have a right to the Gospel, and therefore to the Church as Our Divine Lord intends her to be.

To insist that only high Churchmen have a say in these matters frankly reeks of precisely the clericalism, which Pope Francis insists is at the heart of the crisis and that every candid observer readily admits is a major driver of the malaise in the culture of the Church’s hierarchical leadership.

The idea that airing dirty laundry is what harms the credibility of the Church, moreover, is part of the problem. Arguably, it is the problem.

Cardinal Müller’s insistence that adequate norms already exist is likewise problematic, even rather incredible.

“We have sufficient norms in Canon Law,” Müller told La Stampa, citing the 2001 motu proprio, Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela. “First, we must do what is already established and indicated as necessary and obligatory by the existing norms,” he continued. The former Prefect also noted, “There are the already existing norms of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, yet not always all the bishops have collaborated with our department.” He went on to say, “They have not informed [the CDF] as [they ought].”

Conspicuously absent from Cardinal Müller’s discussion — which included contemplation of eventual legal reforms (only after the Curial leadership and perhaps the bishops talked it over) — was any mention of Come una madre amorevole [Like a loving mother] [Frankly, I'd forgotten all about this, probably because the Vatican media themselves failed to publicize it enough, for which there must be a reason!] , the abortive reform that Pope Francis originally touted as a hallmark and signature of his commitment to combatting abuse, which would have streamlined the process for investigating, prosecuting, and removing negligent or malfeasant bishops.

Marie Collins, the Irish abuse survivor and victim advocate who served three years on Pope Francis’s Commission for the Protection of Minors before resigning in frustration, accused Cardinal Müller of foot-dragging and obstructionism vis à vis the aborted reform, as well as of general unresponsiveness.

Müller, for his part, says he did his best, and tried to do more, but was stymied from above. Pope Francis did dismiss three clerics from service in the CDF prosecutor’s office. That happened over Müller’s strenuous objection, in an episode that Vatican watchers generally agree played a significant role in Müller’s departure from the dicastery.

Suffice it to say the system is broken.

As I am too prejudiced against Mueller for his wussiness, equivocation, opportunism and generally speaking out of both sides of the mouth before and since his dismissal as CDF Prefect, I will refrain from further comment. Other than to say that for a cardinal left without any specific responsibility, he has found a way through these periodic interviews to keep himself in the news.