THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI

See previous page for earlier entries today, January 26, 2019.

Six days late, but an apology nonetheless
Though bishop claims he was 'bullied' by the media
into his rush to judgment against the boys on Jan. 19

Bishop Roger Foys apologizes to Nick Sandmann
and Covington Catholic families
by Cristina Laila
GATEWAY PUNDIT
January 25, 2019


After initially condemning them on January 19, Roger Foys, the Bishop of Covington, finally apologized to Nick Sandmann and other Covington students who were smeared with an edited video [accusing them of racism and bigotry against a native American who tried to provoke them but failed] after the March for Life in Washington, DC.

The Diocese fell for fake news and immediately condemned the Covington Catholic boys.

On Friday, nearly a week after the media onslaught and a myriad of death threats, the Diocese finally withdrew its condemnation of the boys and apologized.

The Bishop said in a letter to Covington Catholic parents that since that condemnation, “other video clips” have surfaced showing the teens did nothing wrong, and that the same people who put pressure on the Diocese to condemn the students are now putting pressure on them to retract. [????]

“We are sorry that this situation has caused such disruption in the lives of so many. We apologize to anyone who has been offended in any way by either or our statements which were made with good will based on the information we had. We should not have allowed ourselves to be bullied and pressured into making a statement prematurely, and we take full responsibility for it,” the letter read.

“I especially apologize to Nicholas Sandmann and his family as well as to all CovCath families who have felt abandoned during this ordeal,” the Bishop said. “Nicholas unfortunately has become the face of these allegations based on video clips. This is not fair. It is not just.”

The Covington Catholic teens have lawyered up and they are preparing to bring massive amounts of lawsuits against media outlets and celebrities who defamed and libeled them over an edited video.

As reported by TGP’s Cassandra Fairbanks, a team of very high profile lawyers are joining together to fight for justice for the Covington Catholic High School students who were ruthlessly attacked by the media following a school trip to DC for the March for Life.

Kenton County Prosecutor Rob Sanders is also aggressively pursuing the terroristic threats posted to Twitter to the Covington Catholic teens. Mr. Sanders said in an interview with Fox News Laura Ingraham that subpoenas and search warrants have already been issued and justice will be served.


The greater sins in the
mass hysteria over the Covington boys
by Anthony Esolen

JANUARY 26, 2019

I dislike writing about failure and sin, and dearly wish that the leaders of my Church would give me less occasion to do so.

Everyone by now has heard about what happened to boys from Covington Catholic High School. They were at the Lincoln Memorial, waiting for the bus home to Kentucky. They were in Washington, of course, to protest the murder of unborn children. In other words, unlike almost everybody else who goes to Washington to protest, they were there not to campaign, not to condemn a political party, and not to demand something for themselves, but to protect human lives that are now vulnerable to destruction. Some of them were wearing a Make America Great Again cap.

Then they were harassed, in the vilest terms, by members of what appears to be a lunatic group, the “African Israelites.” They did not respond in kind. They began to chant school chants, to drown out the insults. At that point another protest group came into the picture. They yelled at the boys too, telling them to go back to Europe. This one was led by an American Indian (I too am native; I was born in the United States), beating a drum, within inches of the face of a boy he had apparently targeted. The boy, nonplussed, held his ground and smiled a frozen smile.

Let us enumerate the sins that followed. The Diocese of Covington, along with many another organization and person, leapt to condemn the boy in harsh terms. They did so without knowing what happened. After all, they were not there.

This is called PREJUDICE, or RASH JUDGMENT. You have the tree and the noose ready, and you say so publicly, before you know a thing. What prompts the sin of PREJUDICE? A variety of things, in this case.
- One was race hatred: many people leapt to judgment because the accused were white.
- One was our endemic contempt for boys.
- One was political faction: people who do not believe as I believe about X – fill in the blank – are not simply mistaken, short-sighted, ignorant, or simply possessed of a different judgment about what is possible or advisable for the common good. They are wicked.

That was shortly followed by VINDICTIVENESS. People called for the boy to be expelled, and they were glad to subject him, his family, and his school to national disgrace. The glee of vengeance causes people to lose all sense of proportion, and to forget their sins.

Unless I am much mistaken, this is not a land of saints. To be rude to an old man is bad, even when the old man is behaving in a disgraceful way. Place the worst construction upon the boy’s action. [The worst construction has been to describe his fixed smile as a SMIRK. Whatever you choose to call it, he did not say a word to the nasty old man, he did not wag a finger or spit in his face. And by all accounts, he signalled his friends not to do anything that might seem like provocation.]*

Each of us has done plenty of things that are a hundred times more wicked, vile, and destructive than is that sin in question. If the boy deserved expulsion for that, we should all deserve, for our worst sins, protracted torments followed by slow hanging. The very call for a wildly disproportionate and ruthless punishment was such a sin.

A lot of people began to have second thoughts. Others roamed over the Internet to find something, anything, that would cast the school in a bad light. Some said that the boy did not himself write his sometimes ungrammatical apologia, explaining what happened. They had, of course, no evidence for their accusation.

This was the sin of CALUMNY. By this time, people knew quite well that the boys had not sought out any confrontation, and that they had been already abused by grown men aplenty.

To abuse the weak – children, women, youths – is at least a sin of COWARDICE, and to call them “faggots” and “incest kids” compounded the abuse with the sin of OBSCENITY. To withhold the truth about the context of the incident, truth that would mitigate any guilt, or exonerate entirely, is to commit the sin of DETRACTION.

The Indian with the drum and his group showed up at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception the next evening, attempting to disrupt the Mass. This was a sin of SACRILEGE, against the holy place and the worship of innocent people; in the context of what they had already done, it was the sin of CONTUMACY, and of SOWING DISCORD.

The school had to remain closed the following Monday, and the boy and his family have received plenty of threats of violence and death. I have seen some of these. Incitement to a felony crime is nothing for police to take lightly. These are, at the least, sins of MALICE, not of intemperance; sins committed not in the heat of a situation that has come upon you suddenly, but in the cold; deliberate, calculated, intentional.

At the worst, they are sins of VIOLENCE, and of vicarious participation in the evil that is wished, if someone should be so mad or so wicked as to burn or kill.

I am not calling for the prejudicial, the contumacious, the cowardly, the deceitful, the vindictive, the factious, the malicious, and the violent to be strung up. The point is that, surrounding these boys and taking their words and actions in the worst way they can reasonably be taken, are crowds of people committing the sins I have named, sins that are many orders of magnitude more miserable.

That people can commit them and not be aware of the trap they have set for their own feet is simply astonishing to me. I do not understand it. I’m not a saint. I daresay they are not saints, either. But they think they are.

They must think they are, because nobody, knowing that he is steeped in moral sewage from head to toe, would rave and rage at the filth on his neighbor’s shoe. It would be worse than nonsensical. It would be like begging for the vengeance of God to come down upon you.

*It has surprised me very much that in the flood of positive commentary in favor of the aggrieved Covington boys, no one has pointed out they did something that is most unusual in this day and age: They had to stay there for 2 hours listening to the vilest insults, and did not succumb in the least to lashing back with any violent word or deed.

Yet even 5 minutes of that kind of insult would have unleashed reactions worthy of the worst episodes of disproportionate violent rage from the insultees.

But did anyone even lay a hand on anyone in that confrontation? If anyone had, violence would have erupted - and between the black Israelites and the native Americans staging a demo for their own cause, there was no lack of anti-Catholic anti-life elements who would have used any pretext to get physical against the Covington boys.

Their apparent amusement at the elderly Indian's in-your-face challenge to Nick Sandmann was, I submit, their version of 'turning the other cheek'. The very fact that they decided to drown out the insults against them by chanting their school songs was very much grace under pressure. For all that they may be typical teenagers of their generation, somehow their Catholic upbringing kicked in when it was necessary. It doesn't necessarily make them saints, but at least it made them behave decently when targeted for insult.

If Pope Francis were to give a real-life lesson to the young people he is meeting in Panama, he could do no better than setting up the Covington boys as worthy Catholic youth who defied provocation and who have ended up as white martyrs bearing up with the world's scorn in a most Catholic way.

But of course, none of the pope's high-powered communications counselors would have called his attention to the incident. Like Bergoglio himself, they snootily think 'Has anything good ever come out of the USA?" Which would be well for them to think when considering the likes of Jeffrey Sachs and the procession of the rich and the powerful who have come to the Vatican to be photographed with the pope.

On the other hand, I gave a silent cheer for the Polish lawmaker who reacted to the story promptly by saying the boys should be invited to address the Polish Parliament - now that's someone who quickly saw something exemplary in the boys' conduct that adults in a similar situation may well have botched.

Fr. Sirico at the Acton Institute had one of the most insightful commentaries on the Covington Catholic boys 'saga' in choosing to discuss the instant fake news-based, media-powered fury against them as the result of GOSSIP. He cites an anecdote about St. Philip Neri (1515-1595) that I never heard before - and that obviously Jorge Bergoglio had never read about either, because what better precedent could he cite for his periodic pontifications against gossip than that genial Doctor of the Church who was one of the great figures of the Counter-Reformation, and was so popular in Rome he came to be called the third apostle of Rome after Peter and Paul...



The sinister and irreparable nature of gossip is memorably illustrated in the penance St. Philip Neri once gave to a woman who had confessed it to him. He told her to walk through the streets of Rome plucking a chicken. Humbled, the woman accepted the penance. When she returned to him and reported she had completed the penance the saint told her to now go and collect all the feathers she had plucked.

“But Father Philip,” the woman is reported to have replied, “That would be impossible. I have no idea where they have blown to.”

“Now you see, my daughter, the effects of gossip,” he said.

Today we see gossip spread by journalists as recently demonstrated in much of the coverage of the Covington Catholic High School students attending the March for Life. Surely you know the whole story by now:

On Saturday, a story went viral that the previous day the Covington kids, wearing MAGA hats, while waiting for the bus that would take them back to Kentucky after they took part in the Marh for Life, found themselves boxed between racially charged groups of activists - the Indigenous People’s March and a black version of the Westboro Baptists known as the Black Hebrew Israelites. Both groups of adults hurled vile and provocative words of contempt at the boys. The image that emerged was that of an American Indian activist Nathan Phillips (who, the next day attempted to disrupt Mass at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception), beating a drum in the face of one of the boys while chanting a war cry into his face. The boy quietly listened and smiled.

The gossip dimension of this affair begins as usual with an edited video of the encounter which was picked up by the “news” media (including the New York Times). It reported this encounter as a group of white teenagers racially harassing a venerable tribal elder and Vietnam Veteran. And so the feathers blew across the nation, confirming Lord Acton’s observation that, “Common report and outward seeming are bad copies of the reality.” We can be thankful to Robby Soave over at Reason who went through the tedious task of gathering some of the feathers by examining the available video footage in its entirety, providing additional context,

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…the rest of the video — nearly two hours of additional footage showing what happened before and after the encounter—adds important context that strongly contradicts the media’s narrative.

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Most were not as careful with the truth. That lack of care extended to a lack of care for the persons at the center of the story, as Sara Aldworth helpfully pointed out,

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What started for those students as a trip to the March for Life, ended in public shaming, death threats, and even calls for them to be forever condemned, with no mercy...

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We fail to respect the reputation of persons when we make rash judgments and engage in detraction or calumny.

Many have made rash judgments about the persons involved in this story (including officials in the Diocese where the boys live and their own school). Some (not all) have apologized.

How many shared these stories about people they do not know with people who also do not know them, just like feathers down the alleyways of Rome? Much of what has been shared is calumny, stories contrary to the truth which harm reputations and cause others to make false judgments about the parties involved.

Gossip is a form of bearing false witness (a violation of one of the Ten Commandments), it is a grave sin, and one that demands more than an apology. It demands repentance. Let this tragic media frenzy be an occasion for all of us to lead more responsible and merciful lives.

For any of the boys from Covington Catholic High School who should chance upon this article: You will be called upon to explain and defend your beliefs in the moral foundations of Western Civilization. For any of you so inclined to come, you will be awarded a full scholarship to attend the Acton University in June here in Grand Rapids to help equip you in this regard.

For those who may not know about Acton University, it is the annual four-day intense and very Catholic super-seminar
that Fr. Zuhlsdorf always attends and recounts to his readers:

For lack of other news these days as compelling as the Covington Catholic boys' saga,let me post here
a couple of Italian-focused but no less interesting items from Marco Tosatti and Antonio Socci.

Are the Bergoglians out to challenge
Salvini in the next elections?
All about a neo-Catholic political party in the works
Translated from

January 24, 2019

Pezzo Grosso has written us – with amazement and indignation – to comment on the attempt to give life to a sort of new Catholic political party by ex-Prime Ministers Romano Prodi and Enrico Letta, with Bishop Massimo Camisasca of as the matchmaker. Anyone who knows the careers of these partners and the exceptional milestones through which they brought our unfortunate nation can well understand PG’s amazement, and even more, his indignation.

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Dear Tosatti, things keep turning for the worse in the name of democracy. Democracy is an idea, not a fact. And it is a false idea when it lies and deviates from truth and natural law. Which becomes more intense and therefore dangerous when the filthiest transverse politics of power succeed to influence a democracy by the use of resources and means at their disposal.

I beg you to read about this new consortium which implies a new coalition between the Church and big business. The Church in this case being [a formerly good] Bishop Camisasca of Reggio Emilia, getting into an alliance with ex-Christian Democrat Prodi [who famously prided himself as being an ‘adult Catholic’], so adult as to be considered decrepit - representative of the American Democratic Party establishment, president of the advisory Baord of Goldman Sachs, consultant to the international rating agency on Italy’s credit standing.

As if that were not bad enough, the third member of the founding committee of this new party is Enrico Letta, who was coopted as Prime Minister (President of the Council of Ministers) by then President Giorgio Napolitano, who replaced him with Mario Monti, who was later sacked by the same Napolitano who replaced him with Matteo Renzi.

And what are these three milords supposed to do? To launch Bergoglio’s own political party in time for the next European elections. Of course, the party will be ‘catholic’, And of course, it will be anti-Lega [Interior Minister Matteo Salvini’s party].

Of course the party will be ‘Europeanist, migrationist, environmentalist and pauperist”. It is exactly what Bergoglio wants, and with him, what the Italian bishops’ conference, George Soros and Emma Bonino and Emmanuel Macron want.

Dear Tosatti, don’t you feel like making a statement of protest? If the news about such a party is confirmed, then we have arrived at the unacceptable, something that is against nature. True Catholics should feel it is their resposnsibility to dissuade the vanguard from this initiative and to simply tell them: Just. Stop. There.

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And from Socci, as always, a fascinating foray into Italian culture and history in his patriotic dedication to asserting everything that is good about the Italian identity...



How Galileo was a souvrainist and populist by deciding
to write his later books in Italian, not Latin
Translated from

Januaryv 21, 2018
Let us say a scientist decided to write his important and innovative scientic essays in Italian and not in English which he knows well. And let us say he does this because he wishes that his essays may be read and understood not just by adepts but above all, everyone in Italy, including those sons of the people who do not know English because they had to go to work instead of going to school.

If that happened today, the person concerned would probably be assailed by charges of provincialism, souveranism (or sovereigntism) and populism. Accusations which these days will spare no one – all it takes is some hint that contradicts the dominant one-thought and its fashionable alienophilic cosmopolitanism. But something of the sort happened in the 17th century in Italy, and its protagonist is one who today is rightly and universally considered a giant of thought who gave much to mankind.

He was no less than one whom many consider the founder of modern science, whom everyone considers a model of genius, of openmindedness and opposition to pseudo-scientific and pseudo-philosophical conformism – Galileo Galilei.

Of course, the international language in his time – even for science – was not English but Latin which functioned then as English does now.

Annalisa Andreoni in her splendid book “Ama l’italiano (segreti e meraviglie della lingua più bella)” (Love Italian: The secrets and wonders of a most beautiful language), notes that Gaileo is not only the inventor of the modern scientific method we all know, but he was also the first major scientist to abandon Latin and choose Italian as the language with which to communicate his discoveries to the world”.

Yes, he wrote his earlier books and even the Sidereus Nuncius of 1610 in Latin ['Sidereal Messenger' in which he first recounts his discoveries of the valleys and mountains of the moon, the four moons of Jupiter, the countless stars of the Milky Way, and earthshine, using the newly-invented telescope] but he intended to translate them to ‘Tuscan’, as he had already written ‘La bilancetta’ in his native tongue in 1586 when he was only 22. [The work, "The little balance", is a tribute to Archimedes, describing an accurate balance for weighing things in air and in water. ]

But Andreoni underscores that ‘after his return to Florence, “Galileo definitively chose his mother tongue to write about science". And so he wrote his subsequent books in Italian:
- Il saggiatore (1623) ('The Assayer', generally considered one of the pioneering works of the modern scientific method, first broaching the idea that the book of nature is to be read with mathematical tools rather than those of scholastic philosophy, as generally held at the time);
- Dialogo sopra i massimi sistemi del mondo (1632) ['Dialog concerning the two chief world systems,' in which he compares the Copernican worldview, in which the earth and other planets circle the sun (heliocentric view), with the Ptolemaic, where everything in the universe circles around the earth. In 1616 the Inquisition declared heliocentrism to be formally heretical; heliocentric books were banned and Galileo was ordered to refrain from holding, teaching or defending heliocentric ideas. Responding to mounting controversy over theology, astronomy and philosophy, the Roman Inquisition tried Galileo in 1633 and found him "vehemently suspect of heresy", sentencing him to indefinite imprisonment. Galileo was kept under house arrest until his death in 1642]; and
- His last great work, I Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze attenenti alla mecanica e i movimenti locali (1638) ["Discourses and mathematical demonstrations relating to two new sciences on mechanics and motion", covers much of his work as a physicist in the past 30 years, in which the three dialo participants represent what Galileo thought in his younger years, in middle life and in the present].

Writing in Italian was a sensational choice that was completely analogous to that of another great Tuscan, Dante Alighieri, when he decided to write his great epic poen in the Tuscan ‘vulgate’ rather than in Latin which was the language of theology (in fact his decision to write it in Italian caused great scandal).

Of course, Galileo arranged to have his Italian books translated to Latin for the benefit of foreign scientists who did not know Italian at all. But, Andreoni notes, “Galileo made a conscious choice to use Italian, based on his conviction that our language already possesses all the expressive pontetialities needed for scientific argumentation”.

Likewise in terms of the readership for his books, “It was as if, choosing between being understood by his scientific peers throughout Europe or by the ‘illiterate’ Italians around him, Galileo chose the latter”.

He manifested this in three famous letters to Mark Welser, a German politician and intellectual in which Galileo discusses sun spots, but does so in Italian. He explains to Welser that it is because “I want it to be read by everyone, and that is why I have wrttten my most recent treatise , il Discorso intorno alle cose che stanno in su l’acqua o che in quella si muovono]”. In fact, Galileo observes that there are many young people who are sent to study in order to become doctors, philosophers and other analogpus professions even it they are ‘most inept”, whereas other young people, though intelligent – are not able to study and therefore have a chance to know Latin at all because it is more important that they earn a living.

So Galileo wanted to be read by those who have the eyes to see the works of creation and the intelligence to understand them like philosophers. What could be more populist and anti-elite?

Seventeenth-century Italy was not politically united but it was, culturally and spiritually. Language is the clearest face of an identity. And in fact, Italian literature soon adopted the “Tuscan’ of Dante and Petrarch as the national language, which was also one of the factors that eventually led to political unification (though badly done).

Galileo did not stop with launching Italian as a language of science but cultivated our language and our literature at a very high level. - Andreoni fecalls that he gave ‘two lectures at the Accademia Fiorentina on the architecture of Dante’s Inferno, and he commented on Orlando furioso [Ludovico Ariosto’s chivalric epic poem about the French knight Roland who had been among Charlemagne’s paladins who fought against invading Saracens to keep them out of Europe.]
- He also became an academist of the Crusca [an Italian society for scholars and Italian linguists and philologists established in Florence in 1583 to preserve the purity of the Italian language - it is the world’s oldest linguistic academy]. Galileo collaborated in drafting the first two editions in 1621 and 1623 of the Academy’s standard Dictionary - the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca – which became the model for the standard academic dictionaries in France, Spain, German and England.]

The very quality of Galileo’s ‘scientific Italian’ would earn him the admiration, 200 years later, of Giacomo Leopardi [the philosopher-philologist who is considered Italy’s greatest 19th-century poet]. To rediscover our identity as Italians is also to rediscover the brilliant Italian talents the world has envied us for.

One important item I failed to post in a timely manner:


Chinese priests abandoning their ministry
out of opposition to the Patriotic Association
An 'official' Chinese priest who is a friend to underground priests says
many of them feel 'betrayed' by the Vatican's recent agreement with Beijing.
by 'Father Peter'


Beijing, January 25, 2019 (AsiaNews) – Several priests in the underground community are giving up on their mission because they are in conflict with the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association (CPCA), this according to Father Peter, a priest in the official community, and a friend of underground priests, in a message to AsiaNews.

Fr Peter defends the choice of "conscience" of his friends, noting that they feel "betrayed" by the Vatican, especially after the interim agreement between Beijing and the Holy See on the appointment of bishops.

In fact, while the agreement supposedly amends the CPCA's wor,k at least with respect to episcopal appointments (Pope Francis has said that "the last word belongs to me"), it apparently does not clarify the relationship of the Vatican with this supervisory body of the Chinese Communist Party, whose goal is to build a "self-sufficient" Church, one that is "independent" from the Holy See.

In his 2007 Letter to Chinese Catholics, Benedict XVI had said that the CPCA’s status was "incompatible with Catholic doctrine". On several occasions, Pope Francis reiterated that Pope Benedict’s Letter "is still valid". But he has accepted de facto that bishops and priests may belong to the CPCA as a sort of "lesser evil". Especially since CPCA membership is a precondition for government 'recognition' of hiterto clandestine Catholics.

In his letter, Benedict XVI said that recognition by the government can take place "on condition that this does not entail the denial of unrenounceable principles of faith and of ecclesiastical communion", citing precisely "certain bodies” that force “people involved to adopt attitudes, make gestures and undertake commitments that are contrary to the dictates of their conscience as Catholics” (n.7).

An example of the CPCA’s domination over bishops was the recent celebration of 60 years of the "independent" Church, in which 48 bishops participated and praised one of the most painful events in the history of the Church in China.

In light of the situation, some Vatican insiders believe that the role of the CPCA should be addressed in future talks between the Vatican and China. Meanwhile, the members of underground communities feel "abandoned".

I remember what Cardinal Joseph Zen said: "If the Holy See and the Chinese government really reach an agreement, allowing illegitimate bishops to lead their dioceses, the priests of the unofficial Church could freely follow their consciences. If unable to proclaim the Gospel, they could go home and work in the fields." I did not expect Card Zen’s prophecy to come true.

Not long ago, a priest from my town phoned me, asking me to go with him to visit another priest who had left his mission and gone home. During that meeting, after the initial joy of seeing each other again after a long time and sharing our stories, we could not fail to mention the many problems faced by the Chinese Church after the signing of the agreement.

During the conversation, our fellow priest said he decided to go home was because he could not accept to become the assistant of a parish priest from the Patriotic Association.

The priest went on to explain:"For more than 30 years I have fought against the Patriotic Association, and now they want me to become the assistant priest of a PA priest. I cannot accept it, I have no choice but to go home."

Hearing these words, I felt indescribable pain in my heart. In the face of this, what can we say about what the Vatican has done? I respect the conscience of this brother of mine. He has the right and the moral obligation to obey his faith and his conscience.

I recently heard from a friend that another priest, who was working in Henan, had gone back home. I know him well. He is a very enthusiastic and very humble young priest, but he too has become a victim of the Sino-Vatican agreement.

in addition to the two cases that I mentioned there are others. I fear that throughout China there are many priests living the same situation: they have been faithful and have defended their Catholic faith, but suddenly they have been betrayed by Rome. They cannot violate their conscience, but even more they cannot go against their faith. The important thing is that they don’t lose their missionary vocation.

If the secular power deprives them of their divine power, if they do not receive any support or comfort from the Church, then they truly are like the crucified, "suffering" Christ. Like Jesus on the Cross, the only thing they can do is cry out in utter powerlessness: "Father, why have you forsaken me?"

Claustrofobia: Contemplative life and its destruction.[The Italian title plays on the word 'instructions' (istruzioni) referring to the pope's new decrees radically changing the nature of the cloistered orders, whereby the insertion
of the letter 'd' before istruzioni, changes the word to distruzioni (destruction).

Cloistered convents:
A silent extermination underway
thanks to 2 new papal decrees

January 25, 2019

Dear friends, my new book has just been published. Entitled Claustrofobia. La vita contemplativa e le sue (d)istruzioni, (Claustrophobia: Contemplative life and its destruction), it is published by Chorabooks and dedicated to the dangers which cloistered orders are facing because of new Vatican dispositions.

[Valli goes on to quote from the publisher’s blurb, which he obviously wrote for them. Here is the translation of the blurb that I posted a couple of days ago, posted on the preceding page of this thread:]

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A life of prayer, contemplating the divine mysteries and in reparation for the sins of the world, is a great treasure which has been conserved in convents and monasteries that have lasted centuries. But today it is in great danger. Not from an exterenal attack but by the initiative of the Catholic hierarchy at its summit.

The attack comes from Pope Frnacis's Apostolic Constitution Vultum Dei quaerere and the instructions for its application, Cor orans, a normative mechanism that threatens the autonomy of monasteries, weakens their independence, and with the pretext of aggiornamento (updating) and 'correct formation', questions the very idea of isolation and the cloistered life.
- Why this sudden 'claustrophobia' on the part of the Vatican?
- Why must it dilute the choice of those who decide to consecrate their lives to prayer behind cloisters?

One finds behind this decision an idea of spirituality which is totally horizontal - everything played out in a way that is incapable of seeing the beauty and grandeur of a relationship that is exclusively with God. It is a most serious situation which is clearly denounced in the book.

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Following is the Introduction to the book, written by a cloistered nun who prefers to remain anonymous.

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The last battle
by ‘A cloistered nun’

I got to meet Aldo Maria Valli in Rome, thanks to a common friend, and the meeting confirmed the positive impression I got from reading his latest books and the articles published on his blog - in which he succeeds to give voice to the sentiments and disorientation that we nuns, as also many other Catholics, are seeking to focalize internally.

In Valli’s blog, we find a real love for the Church and for the truth, that ‘precious pearl’ spoken of in the Gospel, for which one is ready to sell everything. It is along this line and perspective that the author’s interest has turned to us, cloistered nuns, and the latest papal documents that mean to impose a new ‘discipline’ on contemplative life which has a millenary tradition in the Catholic Church.

The very specific way of life that is ours as cloistered nuns is not immediately understandable to contemporary sensibility: in a way, it brings us the spirituality of the desert, where God leads his beloved spouse to speak to her, heart to heart, far from every creature that could distract her from him. Up till now, the cloister has been the sign of an exclusive encounter with God, in isolation from the world, in order to affirm the indispensable importance of seeking God, of the primacy of God.

In this sense, Valli’s new book inspires reflection. Indeed, it is permeated by one question: WHY?
- Why tamper with such a precious treasure, and one that has worked for a thousand years?
- What is at stake in the game that I being played here?
- What are the true reasons for this pope’s moves against traditional contemplative life?

This topic is different from those usually treated by the author, but no one who reads him can miss the red thread that unites all the topics he writes about: love for the Church and love for the truth. On our part, suffering from the assaults that have been launched against the faith and the Church – which we all know about – becomes even more intense when facing the apparent intention to destroy the monasteries and convents as they have existed so far in the Church. It is the last fortress which the Enemy targets, the last bulwark in which prayer still constitutes an act of resistance, in which lives are consecrated (‘wasted’ in the view of some) for no other reason than to praise God.

With what dismay we cloistered nuns find ourselves in this battle, carried out against us with arrogance, threats and psychological coercion! The worse for being carried out in the silence and hiddenness of convents. It is a silent extermination of monasticism, not just spiritually and culturally, but even materially (through controlling the assets of all convents). This is the willful extermination of a millenary structure that has survived virtually intact to our day.

And that is the true purpose of these two documents concerning our complex and delicate reality: Under a slogan that obsessively calls on us to ‘avoid isolation’ [which is ridiculous when isolation is the necessary condition for the cloistered life], one sees the intention to create a new ‘monasticism’ in which all nuns are to be placed under identical forms of aggiornamento (updating) and indoctrination, up to and including changing the rules that until now have been specific to each order. [The papal decrees violate the basic right of each order to make its own rules based on its specific charism.]

It is a silent extermination, because even within the church herself – considering that the monastic vocations are always carried out hidden from the world – this epochal change in the structure of convents is taking place and is being imposed without public awareness and to the general disattention of public opinion.

We must proceed to carry out this epochal change, we are told from ‘on high’, in order to “update the millenary contemplative life” – and it must be done quickly, by May 2019!
- WHY? Why such haste? Why this obsession?
- How could it be possible to structurally ‘update’ monastic life with its millennial history in just a few months? [And in dozens of orders around the world!]
- And why impose such radical changes through an ‘instruction’, which is the lowest grade among all the document categories of the Roman curia?

Perhaps jurists will be able to cite exceptions on the basis of law, though the instructions forbid any form of recourse, which is an impediment characteristic of dictatorial regimes in which forced mass re-education is unconditionally imposed.

In this context, and Aldo Maria Valli knows it well, whoever seeks to say something out of tune with the choir is exposed to public ridicule and accused of working for blind conservatism against ‘rightful renewal’. This is the reaction met by those convents which, seeking to ask dispensation from the instruction, are now the targets of church institutions [leading the charge being the very Congregation in charge of religious life] and their indispensable progressivisits.

And yet we must do battle. It is far from the monastic temperament to be a protagonist, to be out in the open even if it is in a good cause. But nothing keeps us from supporting whoever gets down to the arena in defense of Truth.

So we welcome this small but precious new book by Valli, who is an expert connoisseur of the Catholic world and a tried and tested Vaticanista, who gives voice in this book to us who have no public voice by the nature of our vocation, and who is seeking to have our voice heard by a larger public, a public which must be sensitized to the fact that everyone who is baptized is challenged by this attempt to destroy not just Church history and traditions but the Church itself.

The world more than ever needs monasticism, as the Church received it from its holy founders and as so many cloistered nuns and monks have lived it till now, for the benefit of the entire Church. We need cloistered nuns and their convents. They are hidden but they are authentic bulwarks of faith and prayer. We need to keep breathing the air of freshness that is found in the ‘desert’ of these places close to God.

Valli’s book includes three articles previously published on his blog that raised ample discussion. But it also includes the dismaying account of a meeting called by the Congregation for religious orders with cloistered nuns from all over the world – an assembly that raised many disquieting questions which even the reader without any particular knowledge of cloistered life will stop to reflect upon.

The new documents affecting cloistered life attempt to treat all monasteries at the same level – those that have always proved vital, and those with problematic situations. And in order to enforce this, impositive tones are used, with expressions such as "demanding" and "deferring to the Holy See", used meticulously in a multiplication of provisions. Everything about this Vatican initiative had the atmosphere of control, not of respect.

It is clear that the final battle has opened up, a particularly insidious and decisive battle, because it is aimed at the conquest and destruction of a last fortress. It will require commitment and courage from us, but also increasingly strong and resolute prayer. With the aim of allowing those who have consecrated their lives in claustral isolation to God to continue doing what we have always done, the unum necessarium – to occupy ourselves only with God, the Supreme Beloved.

---

On to another kind of attempted extermination....

Silencing Catholic speech
by David Carlin

FRIDAY, JANUARY 25, 2019
January 25, 2019

Ideological defenders of homosexuality argue that all disapproval of homosexual conduct arises from “homophobia” and that all speech against homosexuality is, therefore, “hate speech.” In the United States, in recent decades, this campaign against homophobic hate speech has been very effective. Almost never nowadays does anybody dare to utter a public word of disapproval against homosexuality.

What about the Catholic Church? Has the homosexualist campaign against “hate speech” had the effect of silencing the Church, of preventing it from communicating its ancient teaching that homosexual sodomy is sinful?

If my anecdotal information is reliable, it is a rare priest who gets into the pulpit at a weekend Mass and reminds his parishioners that homosexual conduct is seriously sinful. In some cases, probably not many, this silence on the part of priests is the result of their disagreement with Church teaching on the subject.

But in most cases, their silence is likely just a matter of discretion (the kind of “discretion” that is, as Falstaff says, the better part of valor). Why upset parishioners, many of whom disagree with the Church teaching on homosexuality, and not a few of whom have friends or family members who are gay or lesbian? Let sleeping dogs lie.

“Besides,” the priest can say to himself every time he decides not to preach on this touchy topic, “everybody knows what the Church teaching is. No need for me to remind them.” [Exactly what Jorge Bergoglio said, as pope, regarding what the Catechism teaches about homosexuality and its practie!]

This is true to a certain extent. The Catholic Church is famous for its super-strict sexual ethic, according to which the only morally legitimate sex is that which takes place between husband and wife without contraception and within the context of monogamous marriage.

If you know that, then you know that the Church condemns homosexual conduct. Leaving aside the fact that some people don’t actually know this (it’s amazing what perfectly obvious things some people don’t know), there is a distinction between believing something in the abstract and actually believing it.

Take, for example, another element of the Catholic sexual ethic: the teaching that marital contraception is a serious sin. “Everybody knows” in an abstract way that this is what the Church teaches, but not many American Catholics think this is what the Church actually believes. Why not? Because for a half-century, ever since Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the traditional Church teaching on this topic in his encyclical Humanae Vitae, parish priests have pretty much left the topic of contraception alone.

The priest knows that the younger married couples in his parish (if he’s lucky enough, in many places, to have any younger couples) are almost certainly practicing contraception, or are getting ready to practice it as soon as they achieve their desired quota of children; and he knows that many of his older parishioner couples used to practice it when the wife was still young enough to get pregnant.

So it is not a sin that is rare and almost unheard-of among his parishioners, like murder or bank robbery. To sermonize against murder or bank robbery would indeed be a waste of time. But to sermonize against contraception would be to call the attention of parishioners to a sin commonly committed in the parish. Yet for the priest to sermonize against contraception would be to antagonize parishioners and make himself unpopular. Better, then, to remain silent on the topic.

But this silence, when it persists year after year, decade after decade, pastor after pastor, gradually persuades the average person in the pews that the Church isn’t truly serious when it says that marital contraception is a serious sin. The Church must think that marital contraception is a minor sin or perhaps not a sin at all.

William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), often called “the father of American Unitarianism,” once wrote that Calvinism went into decline in and around Boston, not because Congregational ministers sermonized against Calvinist doctrines, but because they no longer preached in support of these doctrines.

The anti-Calvinists didn’t preach against the doctrines of predestination, total depravity, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, etc. They just remained silent about these matters. And then one day the best people in Boston woke up and realized that they were no longer orthodox Christians and had become Unitarians.
Something not very different from this is happening in American Catholicism with regard to homosexual behavior (not to mention other elements of Catholic sexual ethics). Perhaps no priest is preaching against the traditional Catholic teaching. But not many are preaching in support of it either. As a consequence, the moral disapproval of homosexual conduct that should be found and used to be found in the hearts and minds of Catholics is withering away.

And so the answer to the question I asked above – “Has the homosexualist effort to silence all criticism of homosexual behavior been effective among American Catholic priests?” – is a definite: YES.

The success of this “let’s silence the Catholic Church” campaign imposes, it seems to me, a fourfold obligation upon Catholic bishops and priests to preach vigorously against homosexual conduct. This must be done:
(1) in order that the Catholic moral doctrine regarding homosexuality not fade away;
(2) in order to say in no uncertain terms to pro-gay ideologues and their anti-Christianity allies, “You will not silence us on this or any other Christian topic”;
(3) in order to give encouragement to faithful Catholics, many of whom sometimes fear that the Church is about to discard or water-down this element and other elements of the Catholic faith. And
(4) and to give encouragement to non-Catholic Christians who, whatever their disagreements with Rome, look to the Catholic Church as Christianity’s Rock of Gibraltar.

Catholics and everybody else, both friend and foe, must be assured that the Catholic Church is not about to walk down the path that has been trod by liberal Protestant churches; that is, it is not about to discard one element after another of Christianity, thereby drawing closer and closer to atheism.

New archbishop of Lima
very much in the Bergoglio mold
of 'spirit of Vatican-II' bishops
News Analysis
by John L. Allen Jr.
Editor

January 27, 2019

ROME - Pity poor Peru. Last January Pope Francis visited the country, yet no one paid any attention because his earlier stop in neighboring Chile, with its massive clerical abuse scandals and the pope’s maladroit response that incensed survivors and critics worldwide, completely overshadowed it.

Now a year later, Francis has delivered one of his most important episcopal appointments anywhere in the world in Peru, and once again it’s like a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear. Just like last time, the pontiff is stealing the show in another Latin American nation, this time Panama for World Youth Day, and to the extent anyone has the attention span to absorb other Catholic news, it’s focused on the abuse scandals in the run-up to Francis’s summit for presidents of bishops’ conferences on the subject next month.

Peru, it would seem, just can’t catch a break in terms of public attention.

Yet what Francis did on Friday by replacing Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani of Lima, who’d barely turned 75 (the normal retirement age for bishops), with Father Carlos Castillo Mattasoglio, a diocesan priest of Lima, ranks right up there with the nominations of Blase Cupich in Chicago, Carlos Aguiar Retes in Mexico City and Matteo Zuppi in Bologna as game-changing moves by a pope determined to impose a more progressive, “spirit of Vatican II” stamp on the world’s corps of bishops.

In each of those previous cases, Francis named a moderate-to-progressive to replace a leader of the Church’s conservative wing: the late Francis George in Chicago (who died in 2015) and Carlo Caffara in Bologna (2017), along with Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera of Mexico City, who’s still going strong in retirement at 76.

All three men were perceived as solidly “John Paul II-Benedict” bishops, committed to a muscular evangelical reassertion of Catholic identity vis-à-vis secularism, and all three were leery to varying degrees of some of the new currents in the Church that had surfaced in the wake of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).

By moving in a different direction, Francis sent signals that the Catholic Church is under new management, once again, in the eyes of the pope’s fans, taking up the path of aggiornamento (“updating”) marked out by St. John XXIII and the council.

Pari passu, the same thing can be said of the transition in Lima from Cipriani to Mattasoglio, only arguably in even more concentrated and crystal-clear form.

For decades, Cipriani, a member of Opus Dei, has been among Latin American Catholicism’s most stalwart critics of liberation theology, the post-Vatican II current that sought to place the Church on the side of the poor in struggles for social change. Opponents saw it, especially at the peak of the battles in the 1980s and 1990s, as a thinly veiled effort to sprinkle holy water on Marxist social analysis.

Cipriani played a leading role in attempts to rein in Father Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian theologian often styled as the “father” of liberation theology because his 1971 book Teología de la liberación gave the movement its name. Despite various reviews of Gutierrez’s work both by the Peruvian bishops and by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - often instigated by Cipriani - he was never accused of doctrinal error, and especially under his personal friend, German Cardinal Gerhard Müller, former prefect of the CDF under Francis, Gutierrez has enjoyed a more or less complete rehabilitation.

However, the tensions with Cipriani in Lima were sufficiently unpleasant to help induce Gutierrez to join the Dominicans instead, finding there a more congenial and receptive environment for the kinds of teaching, preaching and research he wanted to do.

Mattasoglio, it should be said, calls himself a “student” of Gutierrez and has referred to the “preferential option for the poor,” the signature phrase associated with liberation theology, as “irrevocable.” The new archbishop’s official biography notes that he first met Gutierrez when he entered Peru’s National Union of Catholic Students in the late 1960s, and that the two developed a “lasting friendship.”

Also strikingly, Mattasoglio’s background is as a professor of theology at the Pontifical Catholic University in Peru, where Cipriani has fought titanic battles over the years to attempt to exercise tighter ecclesiastical control and to enforce a more pervasive sense of Catholic identity.

Specific issues have included a gay student group being permitted to take part in campus events, and a university survey concluding that most Lima residents believe couples should live together before marrying and a woman need not remain a virgin until marriage.

Eventually the wrangling between Cipriani and the university became so intense that Francis was compelled to dispatch an apostolic visitor, Hungarian Cardinal Péter Erdő, to try to calm the waters, and even that mission produced only mixed results.

By selecting a theologian from the university faculty to take Cipriani’s job, Francis would appear to have made a fairly clear statement about which side in that dispute enjoys his sympathy.

In a sense, Cipriani is used to not getting his way - he was defeated at least four times as a candidate for president of the Peruvian bishops’ conference, in a country with the highest number of prelates linked to Opus Dei in the world. Yet it’s still fairly unusual to see a cardinal’s legacy disassembled in real time quite like this, especially one who has been in charge of his archdiocese for almost 20 years.

Given the staying power of bishops, Lima’s new management could exercise influence even well beyond the shelf life of the papacy in which it rose to power.

For Americans of a certain age, all this will feel eerily reminiscent of the era of Archbishop Jean Jadot, who served as the pope’s man in America from 1973 to 1980, mostly under St. Paul VI, and who shaped an entire generation of moderate-to-progressive bishops such as Raymond Hunthausen in Seattle, John Quinn in San Francisco and Rembert Weakland in Milwaukee.

The same kinds of prelates are being tapped today, suggesting that one way for Americans to grasp what’s happening is that “Jean Jadot is alive and well and living in Lima.”

If only, that is, Peru could get anyone to notice.

The pope answers questions inflight. Next to him, the new 'interim' Vatican sokesman, Alessandro Gisotti.

I had reserved this space for any reports or commentaries of significance about the recent WYD 2019 in Panama City. As usual with Bergoglio events, the pope himself undercuts
the significance and appropriate evaluation of the main event by the not always positive headline-making statements in his post-event airplane news conferences. This last event
was no exception.


This pope’s calculatedly
contradictory statements
[Often made in the same breath]
by Riccardo Cascioli
Editorial
Translated from

January 29, 2019


The pope’s inflight news conference returning from Panama confirmed his tendency to use a language containing statements that contradict each other, so that in the end, his listeners may choose to hear that which they want to hear. But any careful examination of what he says always makes it clear which way he intends to go.

This one offered a number of interesting take-off points [as his extended extemporaneities usually do]. But remembering always that whatever he says on these occasions are not Magisterium but are his personal opinions and which Catholics should consider as nothing more than that.

[But no! Mr Cascioli, you forget he once said that “Everything I say is Magisterium” – yet another measure, of course, of his hubris, since the personal opinions of popes do not constitute Magisterium at all, and none of his predecessors ever claimed their personal opinions did. Yet that arrogant presumption by Bergoglio is only a step away from declaring “Everything I say is infallible” , even if he does not say so in formal papal documents, and even if what he says is not directly about faith and morals, the only two categories whereby a pope may be infallible – always on the condition that what he says does not contradict what the Church has taught for more than two millennia.]

Nonetheless, the mere fact that such opinions are emitted by the pope means they are destined to ‘orient’ the Catholic public and to create the perception among non-Catholics of how things really stand within the Church.

Moreover, it is worth discussing this if only because on the one hand, they furnish us with indications of the pope’s reasoning process, and on the other hand, they offer indications on the pastoral choices that he is already carrying out or intends to carry out.

The main fact that leaps to the eye is the self-ontradictory way this pope epresses himself – affirming one thing but also its opposite, such that his listeners can take away whatever part of the binomial they agree with.

An obvious example of this was his reply to a question on priestly celibacy. First, he defended with drawn sword the ‘gift’ of celibacy and its perennial validity which he says he does not even remotely intend to question.

But then he cites an exception: “Such a possibility remains only in the most remote places – like some of the Pacific slands, but it is something to think about [doing away with priestly celibacy] when the pastoral need arises”. Meaning, “if there are not enough priests and the Eucharist can be distributed only rarely, then…” It is clear therefore why some newspapers headlined that as far as this pope goes, priestly celibacy is untouchable along with any other opening about married priests.

In fact, if one looks deeper into his answer, it is clear that he is at his favorite methodology of ‘initiating processes’ so dear to him. [It is the tried-and-true technique of the camel sticking one foot into the tent until, unimpeded, he fully gets in.]

He starts with the exceptions: those remote places, which are visied by a priest only once a year (which is not a new problem, but previous popes have never considered this a reason to think of allowing married priests), and then the exceptions soon become the rule. Moreover, the German bishops have already started down this road, and the subject of viri probati will be on the table at the special synod on the Amazonia which takes place in Rome this October.

At the inflight news conference, the pope also threw in the hypotheses of one Fr. Fritz Lobinger on a ‘reduced’ form of the priesthood for married man – as if it had been an extemporaneous thing he just thought of, to point out that there are many hypotheses to consider. But no! – this is something he has been thinking about for some time.

Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich, one of the pope’s closest collaborators, said in November 2017, referring to the idea of married priests, that in 2015, during the German bishops’ ad limina visit to Rome, the pope had urged them to read the works of Fr. Lobinger. It becomes clear here which way the pope wants to go.

Another example of this pope’s way of speaking every which way is on the subject of migrants. During this pontificate, he has hammered away on the themes of total welcome for migrants, of open frontiers towards everyone, to the point that his most wild-eyed followers have started to demand the excommunication of those who merely want to rein in uncontrolled and indiscriminate immigration into Italy.

But on the plane – and in fairness, not for the first time – the pope spoke in moderate and detailed terms about the issue, even getting to the subject of “let us help intending migrants first in their own countries” – words that would sound plausible if they were said by Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini. So once more, one could take from the pope’s statements what best matches his own opinions.

But even in this case, the real process the pope has initiated must be understood in the overall context of the interventions and mechanisms he has set in motion over the past six years: Every rule that every so often he articulates in favor of open welcome is accompanied by a massive dose of interventions and gestures to support those who advocate the abolition of national frontiers [to favor the entry of migrants]. Many of the Itaian bishops have become true and proper ‘ultra’-migrationists in this respect.

In any case, this calculated method of ‘putting forward’ his thoughts equivocally inevitably creates a lot of confusion, frustration and division, which one sees in the way observers and many of the faithful often come to verbal blows because of this pope’s self-contradictory statements.

Not having followed the Panama WYD in any way, I thought my only take-away message from it would be the following account which I could not miss because photos of
the monstrosity were ubiquitous on the Internet. I will just cite this account by an obviously biased site, whose major biases I happen to share... I should have known
better, of course, that the pope's subsequent inflight pontifications always amount to a barrage of new outrages, mostly anti-Catholic from the papal lip, a virtual
M16 aggressive weapon always set to automatic fire.



Top: The Panama 'monster-ance'; bottom left, the pope elevating the monstrance in Panama; bottom right, doing the same in Fatima in 2017. The Fatima monstrance was supposed to represent the Miracle of the Sun in the final
appearance of Our Lady to the three shepherd children. What is wrong with traditional monstrances that they must be replaced with something contemporary if this something represents a distraction?

MONSTER-ANCE!

January 26, 2019

Covering the horrid theological and liturgical junk the Vatican II Sect puts out on a daily basis, one gets used to a lot, but there are times when you just want to jump out of your chair and yell, “No way! They can’t be serious!”

Today was such a day.

“Pope” Francis is currently spreading his Masonic-Naturalist poison in Panama on the occasion of World Youth Day… Whereas yesterday evening saw a Novus Ordo version of the Stations of the Cross (with dancers, of course!), tonight’s big event was a vigil prayer service.

When the time came for “Eucharistic” adoration, Francis made himself comfortable in a chair while everyone else knelt. [Of course, there are no pictures to be seen online – at least, so far – of the pope seated for the Adoration, but I am sure the video must show it somehow (I must admit I have no desire to look at these videos)] There was no footwashing ceremony scheduled, his knees must have conked out once again, but that’s just business as usual.

The lowlight of the evening’s ceremony was the “monstrance” used for adoration. Screenshots taken from the video of the event show a hollow metal statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. There is a separate and removable receptable for the Novus Ordo version of the Blessed Sacrament, which gets placed into the hands of the statue. Not only is it ugly, it is also very disturbing when seen from the front… The immodest overtones are more than evident. [ALso, whoever designed the ensemble forgot to provide a base for the monstrance other than the 'hands' of the statue, so the pope has to hold it by the bottom part of the frame holding the Eucharist.]

The full video of the entire spectacle can be found here:


[Yes, the ensemble was not pretty, if not exactly downright ugly, and rather unflattering to Our Lady – the face looks old and distorted - but I do not see the immodest overtones that are supposed to be evident. The entire concept is bizarre, if not theologically wrong, because Mary’s womb was the original Tabernacle of tabernacles…

Somewhere, it is mentioned that the statue was fashioned out of melted bullet casings, and everyone can attribute whatever symbolisms he wants to that. But the whole point of Eucharistic Adoration is to focus the worshipper’s attention on the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, not to distract him or her – however transiently – with some unexpected and unjustified bizarrerie.

One recalls with pleasure WYD Madrid 2011 when the monstrance used for the Eucharistic Adoration and Rayer Vigil led by Benedict XVI was the 500-year-old Monstrance of Toledo - “popularly known for being used during the Corpus Christi procession each year in Toledo - almost 9 feet tall and made of gold and silver”, considered the ‘finest example of Spanish silverwork of all time”. That occasion in Madrid was, of course, made unforgettable and spectacularly awesome by a surprise torrent and hailstorm that ‘halted’ the event for about 20 minutes, and which the Pope and the almost 2 million young worshippers who were there endured while it lasted and then calmly went on with the Adoration.

Obviously, Bergoglio cannot be blamed for the bizarreries foisted on him. But isn’t Mons. Guido Marini, master of papal liturgical ceremonies, supposed to make a site visit beforehand to any place the pope is visiting just to make sure that all liturgical preparations are comme il faut? Did he not visit Panama City beforehand and did he not know of the ‘monster-ance’ commissioned for the Eucharistic Adoration? And if he knew about it, did he approve of it? In the same way, one must then assume he approved of the commissioned monstrance used by Bergoglio in Fatima in 2017.]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 01/02/2019 15:38]

Thank God! But let us continue praying until she gets out of Pakistan safely and with her family in Canada...

Left, Asia's husband with one of their daughters when they were in Rome to ask the pope, among others, to intercede for her - in vain, of course.

Asia Bibi allowed to leave Pakistan after
Supreme Court upholds her acquittal for blasphemy
The mother of five spent eight years in prison following
an argument with Muslim women about drinking from a bucket of water
By Neville Lazarus

January 29, 2019

Christian Asia Bibi is allowed to leave Pakistan after the country's top court upheld her acquittal on blasphemy charges.

Ms Bibi, who spent eight years on death row, will now be free to join her daughters who fled to Canada and were granted asylum there.

The 54-year-old was acquitted in October - eight years after she was convicted with the death penalty for allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad in a dispute with her neighbours.

But she has remained under guard at a secret place since her acquittal two months ago by the Pakistani Supreme Court, as Prime Minister Imran Khan's government attempted to quell anger over her exoneration by radical Islamists, who staged nationwide protests and almost brought the capital Islamabad to a standstill.

More than 3,000 members of the radical Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) group were arrested on charges of terrorism after the protest, with its leader and high profile members still in prison.

This afternoon, three members of the Supreme Court of Pakistan dismissed their appeal against Ms Bibi's acquittal. [I wish someone would write about the courageous justices who voted to acquit Ms Bibi in both two verdicts. That the Supreme Court of Pakistan even considered to hear the case at all was already quite a surprise - but that they have now acquitted her twice is extraordinary. One did not think - after reading all we have about the unquestioned supremacy of Islam in Pakistan - that the country's Supreme Court, not to mention its current president, would not take a hard line against this Christian woman, but it seems they do uphold the rule of law and abided by sheer common sense in deciding she had not committed blasphemy at all! May their tribe prosper and may there be many more Muslim public officials like tme.]

Heavy security surrounded the court as the verdict was due, with paramilitary troops and quick response units deployed in sensitive areas in the capital.

Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin infamously said - after Asia's first acquittal - that her case was entirely an 'internal matter' for Pakistan, implying that, therefore, the Vatican could - and would - do nothing to help her and her family find asylum anywhere, least of all at the Vatican! Remember those Muslim refugees Pope Francis brought back to the Vatican with him in a spontaneous gesture (to set an example of 'welcome' for all migrants) after a trip to the 'migrant' camp in Lesbos??? Has he lifted a finger for any persecuted Christian anywere yet?

On the contrary, he has left all those faithful underground Catholics in China twisting in the winds of arbitrary official persecution by Beijing if they refuse to join the 'official church'. Which Bergoglio has honored and placed above the clandestine Catholics by rehabilitating formerly excommunicated official Chinese bishops (a couple of whom reportedly have families they openly live with) and, adding insult to injury, placing them in charge of dioceses formerly headed by underground bishops while reducing the latter to subordinates.

Where is there in the gospel, or in plain decency, that justifies all that? And simply because Bergoglio wants to be the first pope to visit China???

***********************************************************************************************************************************************************************

Not entirely unrelated to the above story is this commentary by Antonio Socci, which is not the first paradox-rich criticism of a pope everyone hailed at the beginning as not just 'the most popular pope ever' but also - and quite admiringly - as the most populist of popes.


Bergoglio versus 'the people'
Translated from

January 27, 2019

It is becoming increasingly clear that for the peoples of the East and of the West, Papa Bergoglio has become a ‘big problem’.
[Even critics as trenchant about Bergoglio as Socci is would probably not make such a sweeping statement - because while this pope may have become a ‘big problem’, to the Church and to the world at large, few among those peoples are even aware of it. To most of them, he is 'the pope' which means he could not possibly be a problem at all in general. But let's allow Socci to make his case.]

The ‘Venezuela case’ has made this obvious, as does the Vatican’s alliance with the Communist Chinese regime, and before that, the eplosion of the immigration emergency wich has destabilized Italy and most of western Europe.

On all three subjects, Bergoglio is in frontal conflict with the people most affected, and, of course, with the policy of the White House under Donald Trump. It was not by chance that the pope attacked Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Bergoglio’s ponitifate is, in fact, a product of the Obama/Clinton era of world politics, whose agenda he has been carrying forward though he no longer has the political support of many governments of the West (France’s Macron is already a very lame duck). [But there still remains Merkel’s Germany which is the de facto leader of the European Union and which just signed an agreement with France – once Germany’s most targeted historical enemy in Europe – to somehow strengthen the common bond with Macron of Europism versus nationalism.]

But the first Bergoglian destabilization obviously has targeted the Church which had represented, up till Benedict VXI, the oldest and most authoritative institution in the world. Which now, under Bergoglio, has been precipitated into what is arguably the greatest crisis in her history.

[As divisive as Arianism was – and even more substantially and institutionally, as the Great Schism of 1057 and Luther’s Schism in 1517 – the crisis today is not just of agreater magnitude but of a different order of weight, for two principal reasons:
1) The world today, unlike the world in the centuries of Arianism and of the two great schisms so far, is almost immeasurably vaster in its population but is also thoroughly blanketed and permeated by a communications network that simultaneously and instantaneously disseminates information across the planet, in a way that was unthinkable in its scope and power even just two decades ago; and
2) More importantly, because the main cause of the Present Crisis happens to be the man who is supposed to be pope – therefore. symbol of Church unity and defender and upholder of the faith, he who is supposed to confirm his brethren in the faith Instead, he is the opposite of all that, because he is basically anti-Catholic in the views he is most active at promoting, and anti-Christ for daring to edit Jesus’s words to suit his personal purposes, and for acting as if he knows better than Christ what the Church should be, namely one in his, Bergoglio’s, likeness and image.

Even Bergoglio’s most perceptive critics fail to hammer away at this anti-Christ hubris that drives everything Bergoglio says and does. Yet it must be pointed out again and again, every time he says and does something that harms the faith, He cannot be spared the most obvious criticisms just because he happens to be the legitimate pope. On the contrary, it becomes dutiful to point underscore the point insistently, repeatedly and relentlessly.]

Bergoglio has radically overturned the connotations of the papacy. It is no longer about a spiritual message, but a worldly one. No longer does it have any supernatural (divine) significance, but only and always, political. He has replaced the announcement of Christ as the only Savior with the announcements of the politically correct United Nations which bear the rabid anti-Catholic stamp of the radical left.

It is the ‘old’ Liberation Theology reborn. It is not by chance that Cardinal Cipriani, for 25 years Archbishop of Lima and Primate of the Peruvian Church, was promptly replaced when he reached 75 by a priest, Carlos Castillo, who was a leading disciple of Gustavo Gutierrez, founder of LT [as it came to be preached and practiced in Latin America in the 1980s onwards, after being born among the progressivist theologians of Belgium].

The Argentine pope is friendly and on terms of close dialog with illiberal regimes – be they Islamic, socialist or communist – while he is consistently harsh against the Western leaders who do not think like him (notably Trump and Italy’s Matteo Salvini).

In Latin America, he has had nothing but friendship [and even praise] for Cuba, the Venezuela of Maduro, and President Evo Morales of Bolivia [the only head of state enlisted in the frankly socialist and leftist ‘popular movements’ Bergoglio has encouraged, assembled and met with a number of times over the years], the one who gifted him with a crucifix fashioned out of the hammer-and-sickle.

In recent days, 20 former heads of state and/or government in Latin America protested in an open letter Bergoglio’s Christmas Day message urbi et orbi in which he spoke in positive terms of Venezuela and Nicaragua. They said:

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“The [people pf Venezuela] are victims of oppression by a militarized narco-dictatorship, which has no qualms about systematically violating the rights to life, liberty and personal integrity and, as a result of deliberate public policies and unbridled corruption, has scandalized the world and that have subjected them to widespread famine and lack of medicine. In Nicaragua, in the middle of last year, 300 were killed and 2,500 wounded in a wave of repression”.

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In that context, the signatories of the letter said, Bergoglio’s words “can be understood by the victimized nations that they should come to agreement with their victimizers. In particular, in the case of Venezuela, the government has caused the flight of 3 million refugees, which the United Nations predicts will reach 5.9 million in 2019”.

Yet for the refugees from Maduro’s regime, Bergoglio has shown none of the obsessive interest he continues to show for the migrants who have been seeking to enter Italy [at least 500,000 succeeded in the five years before the change of leadership in the Italian government last year].

Instead, the Vatican provoked a diplomatic scandal when it chose to send a representative to the recent swearing-in of Maduro for a new [and illegitimate] term as president, an event that was snubbed by most South American and European countries.

Meanwhile, the Venezuelan people protest to no avail, the Venezuelan bshops denounce the oppressions by Maduro’s regime, and Venezuela itself is in an institutional crisis because the president of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidò (with the support of the free world, including that of the USA under Trump) has been recognized as the legitimate interim President of Venezuela as he seeks to liberate the Venezuelan people from the successor of Hugo Chavez.

Which was all very embarrassing for Bergoglio, who was in nearby Panama and but chose not to say a word about the Venezuelan situation.

[Asked about what words he had for Venezuela at his airplane news conference on Jan 28, this is what he said with his typical incoherence and refusal to take the right side:

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I support in this moment all of the Venezuelan people – it is a people that is suffering – including those who are one side and the other. All of the people are suffering. If I entered to say, “listen to these countries,” or “listen to these others who say this,” I would be putting myself in a role I don’t know. It would be a pastoral imprudence on my side, and it would do damage. The words. I thought about them and thought about them again. And I think with this I expressed my closeness, what I feel. I suffer for what is happening in Venezuela right now. And for this I desire that they come to an agreement. I don’t know, not even saying to come to an agreement is okay...

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It must be pointed out that even an exclusive interview given by this pope to a Chinese journalist in 2018 was shocking, in the words of Sandro Magister, “for the words with which the pope absolved in toto China’s past and present, saying the regime should ‘accept the way it took for what it was’ like ‘running water which purifies everything’, including the murder of those millions of victims of the Chinese Communist regime whom the pope was careful never to refer to, not even in veiled terms”.

[This is, of course, one of those stunning statements – made with absolute, calculated and self-serving moral relativism to advance a personal agenda - that, if said by any world leader, and worse if said by a pope, would have earned Bergoglio the widespread condemnation of the media – or at the very least, strong protest.

But the statement was simply ignored by almost everyone and was not even brought up by the media when the Vatican and China announced their ‘secret deal’ last year. A convenient deliberate glossing over which spared Bergogliacs from even having to defend their master for those incredible words, which even the most critical commentators appeared to have forgotten themselves in their denunciations of the Vatican’s deal with China.

If Bergoglio had been so quick to absolve the Communist Chinese for all the political massacres they carried out in the past, why are we now surprised that the Vatican is silent in the face of the escalating anti-Christian persecutions carred out by Beijing since signing the agreement with the Vatican? Those persecutions are ‘trifling’ compared to the scale of the political massacres that have defined the Communist Chinese regime, so how and why should the Vatican protest them?]

And that is how the Vatican signed an agreement which has substantially turned over the Church in China to the Chinese Communist government.

It is the same indifference [to which one must attach the adjective ‘scandalous] which the Cardinal Seretayr ofta, Pietro Parolin, manifested when he said recently that the Vatican was doing nothing to help Asia Bibi and her family because the tragedy of that poor Christian woman “was an internal question for Pakistan”.

Meanwhile, in Italy, Bergoglio continues to think he has the right to dictate the country's immigration policy, which is a prerogative of the State alone. Yet Bergoglio has had a leading responsibility for the formidable wave of unwanted immigration that inundated Italy for five years until the change of government last year.

And not just with his continuous almost daily interventions to open up Italy’s frontiers to undocumented immigrants. It was learned recently that back in October 2013, after another mass drowning of would-be migrants off Lampedusa, he made a direct telephone call to then Premier Enrico Letta, who in response launched Operation Mare Nostrum [whereby the Italian Navy stationed ships off the northern African coast to rescue would-be migrants from their frail boats (provided them as transport by the human traffickers they paid to get them to Italy) and to bring them to Italy safely, in effect, opening wide Italy’s doors to illegal immigration.]

This is a pontificate that has been pernicious not just for the Church but for peoples en masse.

And what about this?

Pope slams Catholic media for ‘cruelty,
exaggerated self-praise, denouncing heresy’
by Jeanne Smits


January 29, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Catholic media that identify and condemn statements and actions not in line with Catholic doctrine are opposing the “centrality of compassion” and hampering evangelization in substance, Pope Francis told the bishops of Central America during his meeting with them at World Youth Days in Panama.

His words triggered an editorial piece by Andrea Tornielli on VaticanNews in which the new editorial director of the Dicastery for Communication doubled down on Franciss’ attacks, comparing his words to a “photograph of a reality that unfortunately is plain for all to see” and adding his own criticisms of “media that proclaim to be Catholic.”

These are the Pope’s precise words:[ quote]I am worried about how the compassion of Christ has lost a central place in the Church, even among Catholic groups, or is being lost – not to be so pessimistic. Even in the Catholic media there is a lack of compassion. There is schism, condemnation, cruelty, exaggerated self-praise, the denouncing of heresy…

Fr. H's latest addition to his occasional feature of brief notes picked up from the writings of Blessed John Henry Newman...

Fromthecardinalsdesk

January 30,2019

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"The Pope is infallible in actu, not in habitu -- in his particular pronouncements ex cathedra, not in his state of illumination, as an Apostle might be."
- Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman

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Post Scriptum: I thank a friend for the information that Blessed John Henry's second miracle has been unanimously approved. [I've googled this just now and cannot see any such report. Let us pray Fr. H's friend has it right.]

I wonder if we shall hear more about plans for the Canonisation after the CBCEW post-Easter meetiing.

It would be jolly to get some fun this autumn.

Dottore subito ...

If Blessed Newman does get canonized soon - and under this pope - do you think he would have the wisdom and courage to also declare him forthright as a Doctor of the Church?

Wikileaks publishes crucial letter
on the Vatican's effective takeover
of the Sovereign Order of Malta
The December 2016 letter shows Pope Francis supported Cardinal Burke's view
against the distribution of contraceptives by the order's humanitarian arm -
but then he promptly reinstated the responsible official, though he had no right to do so

January 30, 2019

Wikileaks today published a confidential letter confirming that Pope Francis strongly opposed the Order of Malta distributing contraceptives as part of its humanitarian work and that he wished the issue be “completely resolved.”

In the letter, dated Dec. 1, 2016, and addressed to Cardinal Raymond Burke, the patron of the Order of Malta, the Holy Father stressed that the Order “must ensure that the methods and means it uses in its initiatives and healthcare works are not contrary to the moral law.”

He added that if, “in the past, there has been a problem of this nature, I hope that it can be completely resolved.”

The Pope was referring to the findings of an investigation by the Order, published in January 2016, which documented that Malteser International, the Knights’ large humanitarian aid agency, had distributed thousands of condoms and oral contraceptives, mainly to help prevent prostitutes in the Far East and Africa from contracting HIV/AIDS, but also as a program for family planning.

This had taken place while Albrecht Freiherr von Boeselager was grand hospitaller (1989—2014) and ultimately responsible for the work of Malteser International. Boeselager had been made aware of the issue at least since 2013, according to the Order, but was accused of taking inadequate action — an accusation he disputed.

In his Dec. 1 letter, the Pope told Cardinal Burke he would be “very disappointed if — as you told me — some of the high Officers were aware of practices such as the distribution of any type of contraceptives and have not yet intervened to end such things.”

“I have no doubts,” the Pope continued, “that by following the principles of Paul and ‘speaking the truth in love’ (Ephesians 4:15), the matter can be discussed with these Officers and the necessary rectification obtained.”

The letter was written in response to an earlier, Nov. 10 private audience between the Pope and Cardinal Burke.

The Register learned at the time that Pope was “deeply disturbed” by what the cardinal told him about the contraceptive distribution. Francis had also made it clear during that meeting that he wanted Freemasonry “cleaned out” from the order, and demanded appropriate action.

Francis made an oblique reference to that in the Dec. 1 letter, writing that members of the Order “must avoid secular and frivolous behaviour, such as membership of associations, movements and organisations which are contrary to the Catholic faith or of a relativist nature.”

If any Knights are members of these groups, the Pope went on, they “should be asked to remove themselves from the Order, because their behaviour is incompatible” with the faith and membership of the Order.

Based on these strong words of the Pope, on Dec. 6, Cardinal Burke and then-Grand Master, Fra’ Matthew Festing, confronted Boeselager and ordered him to step down — an order he twice resisted, leading to him being forcibly dismissed for insubordination (unlawfully, according to Boeselager) using a disciplinary procedure.

About a week later, the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, then expressed his disapproval of the dismissal, saying the Pope had asked for “dialogue” to be used and had never called for the expulsion of anyone.

Some alleged Cardinal Burke had told Boeselager that the Pope had instructed him to tell him to resign, but the cardinal firmly denied this.

In a separate confidential letter to Fra’ Matthew, dated Dec. 6, 2016, and also revealed today by Wikileaks, Cardinal Burke wrote that the Pope requested “necessary vigilance” over the works of the Order, “especially the purification of a mundane spirit and of the use of methods and means contrary to the moral law.”

He asked for the Grand Master’s “fullest cooperation lest the Holy Father find it necessary to address directly his concerns through a visitation of the Order.”

Following his dismissal as Grand Chancellor, Boeselager appealed to Pope Francis, leading to Cardinal Parolin forming a five-member commission of inquiry. [To begin with, what right did Boeselager have to appeal an internal governing decision of the (then) Sovereign Order of Malta to the Vatican, and what right did the Vatican have to start its investigation? Up to that point, the Vatican and the Order of Malta had co-equal status as sovereign institutions recognized by the United Nations. The Church's supervision of the Order had to do only with whether the Order was upholding and carrying out the teachings of the faith - yet Boeselager, for all his initial denials, was in documented violation of the Church teaching against contraception; he later said he did authorize the distribution of contraceptions in his capacity as an 'adult Catholic', as if somehow that were separable from his persona as a high-ranking Knights of Malta official.]

Three of the members named by Parolin to his investigating committee were linked to a mysterious $118 million fund in Geneva (as was Boeselager), Fra’ Matthew said one of them was a known Freemason, according to a separate document published today by Wikileaks.

The leadership of the Order resisted the commission largely on the grounds that it interfered with the Order’s sovereignty, but on Jan. 23, 2016, the Pope summoned asked Fra’ Matthew to the Vatican and asked him to resign on the spot. All the earlier decrees dating back to Dec. 6 were annulled and Boeselager was reinstated as grand chancellor on Jan. 28. The Pope subsequently appointed Cardinal Angelo Becciu as special delegate to represent the Holy See to the Order, supplanting Cardinal Burke’s role.

Wikileaks’ publication of the Pope’s letter and other documents today has brought some clarity to the Pope’s approach at that time over the contraceptive issue — an approach that, on paper at least, was clearly allied to that of Cardinal Burke.

But many questions relating to this troubled chapter in the Order’s history remain unanswered, particularly why the Pope sided with Cardinal Parolin and Boeselager over Cardinal Burke and Fra’ Matthew, and the role the mysterious Swiss fund played in the affair.

If anything, all this illustrates for the nth time the blatant duplicity of which Bergoglio is capable and which he exercises as he pleases.

Like his blanket absolution of the Chinese Communist Party for all the millions they massacred to enforce Communism, Bergoglio's intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign power and his very public power grab that resulted in the emasculation of a once sovereign Order of Malta have not been sufficiently denounced and appear to have been quickly forgotten by even the most dedicated of Bergoglio's public critics.

Any single one of Bergoglio's lengthening string of hubristic acts would have long sunk any other pope or secular leader. But why and how does he continue to thrive - even if increasingly contested - despite all his acts of evil - because that is what they are???

More than ever, one recognizes the abiding truth of Edmund Burke's words: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

The dam has clearly broken wide open on any compunctions the reigning pope may have about asserting - nay, imposing - himself and his 'truths' on anyone willing to be imposed upon by an agent of Satan. Everyday, in some way, he manages to flood the media with the poisoned waters of his twisted but calculatedly apostate thinking. Just in assembling the few posts I have today, we find that he has
1) contradicted his pious declarations on paper telling Cardinal Burke in December 2016 that the Knights of Malta official responsible for authorizing the distribution of contraceptives in Asia ought to be removed and anyone with Masonic associations must be rooted out of that Order;
2) castigated Catholic media for various sins including 'the denouncing of 'heresy' as a lack of compassion;
3) implied a moral equivalence in the 'suffering' of Maduro and that of the Venezuelan people he has oppressed and victimized;
4) artfully dissimulated his intentions for eventually allowing married priests by saying there were only rare possibilities where that could be considered at all and going on to praise the book of a German priest who advocated a reduced priesthood for married men;
5) appeared to modulate his unconditional support for unrestricted mass migrations to Europe and the West by mouthing some pieties about 'first let's help these intending migrantx in their own homelands' (and of course, no one thought to ask him how exactly he proposed to do that to the Muslim nations of Africa which his beloved migrants are fleeing)

And here below, yet another assault on Catholic marriage, providing a new but fallacious ground for declaring matrimony invalid...

POPE FRANCIS’S ADDRESS TO THE ROMAN ROTA
Can every dissatisfied spouse now get an annulment
because she doesn’t satisfactorily experience
'spiritual riches and communication' from her spouse?
by Bai McFarlane

January 29, 2019

Zenit published the Vatican-provided text of Pope Francis’s annual address to the Roman Rota today.
https://zenit.org/articles/popes-address-to-the-tribunal-of-the-roman-rota-2/

When the Pope gives this annual address, it is understood to be the legislator’s instruction about canon law. The Roman Rota is a Tribunal of appeal available to any aggrieved party in a judicial canon law case.

Pope Francis discussed the duty of the Church to assist couples, and the obligation of bishops and priests.

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There is a need for a triple preparation for marriage: remote, near and permanent. It is advisable for this latter to include in a serious and structural way the various phases of married life, through an accurate formation, intended to nurture in spouses the awareness of the values and commitments proper to their vocation.

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In my work upholding marriage, it would be most welcome if Bishops and priests would exercise the pastoral care of teaching the faithful and point out that
- no-fault divorce is often cruel marital abandonment which is a fracturing of the marriage contract to live in the same household.
- A dissatisfied spouse, alternatively, should commit oneself to cooperating with experts who have a good track-record of strengthening marriage. Fracturing the contract to live together – by divorce – is condemned by the Catechism.

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CCC 2384 Divorce is a grave offense against the natural law. It claims to break the contract, to which the spouses freely consented, to live with each other till death.

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Of concern in the Pope’s address to the Roman Rota is his description of an essential element of marriage, unity.

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So as to be validly contracted, marriage requires of each of the betrothed a full unity [italic in original] and harmony with the other, so that, through the mutual exchange of their respective human, moral and spiritual riches – almost by way of communicating vessels – the two spouses become a single entity.

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If this is the language now used by judges of the Roman Rota to decide that a marriage is invalid, we are at a shocking turning point. According to the literal meaning of the text, if one spouse feels she is not experiencing harmony and spiritual riches from the other, to her satisfaction, then she can argue her marriage is invalid because she doesn’t have the requirement for validity enunciated by the pope.

In 1987, Saint Pope John Paul II corrected those who erroneously spread the error that valid marriage requires the parties to be successful communicating vessels who are a harmonious single entity.

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For the canonist the principle must remain clear that only incapacity and not difficulty in giving consent and in realizing a true community of life and love invalidates a marriage. Moreover, the breakdown of a marriage union is never in itself proof of such incapacity on the part of the contracting parties.
- They may have neglected or used badly the means, both natural and supernatural, at their disposal; or
- They may have failed to accept the inevitable limitations and burdens of married life, either because of blocks of an unconscious nature or because of slight pathological disturbances which leave substantially intact human freedom, or finally because of failures of a moral order.

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I’ve read many, many writings about grounds for annulment and most critical is a proper understanding of the vocabulary.

The most popular ground for invalidity used by U.S. tribunals is that the marriage consent is invalid because a party did not consent (with proper mental capacity c 1095.2) to the essential duties and properties of marriage, or one was not capable of fulfilling the essential duties/properties (c. 1095.3).
- If a party does not, in reality, consent to an essential property of marriage, or a party is incapable of upholding an essential property of marriage, then the party does not validly consent to marriage (c. 1095 & 1101). So, it is very important that we correctly understand the essential properties:

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Canon 1056. The essential properties of marriage are unity and indissolubility, which in Christian marriage obtain a special firmness by reason of the sacrament.

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If the Pope’s 2019 Address to the Roman Rota is attempting to require as an essential element of marriage the “harmony with the other, so that, through the exchange of their respective riches they become a single entity,” he is contradicting Cardinal Raymond Burke, former Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Roman Rota and Defender of the Bond at the Signatura; the late Cardinal Edward Egan, former Roman Rota judge, professor at Pontifical Gregorian University, and one of six editors of the 1893 Code of Canon law; and Saint Pope John Paul II himself.

The 2019 Address to the Roman Rota is mixing up poetic language about marriage with canonical vocabulary. For example, two spouses cannot become one entity; it is impossible. Though, we’d expect priests to use this poetic language in homilies or marriage preparation, it wreaks havoc when used to define requirements for validity.

In 2015, Ignatius Press published a book “When Is Marriage Null? Guide to the Grounds of Matrimonial Nullity for Pastors, Counselors, and Lay Faithful” by Paolo Bianchi, with a forward by Cardinal Burke. The word unity, as an essential property of marriage does not refer to harmony, spiritual riches, and becoming a single entity. It is really simple: If one excludes unity, one intends to engage in sexual intercourse with other persons besides one’s spouse (See page 125, When is the Marriage Null. by Bianchi).

Cardinal Egan warned about the problem of hinging validity on the spouses’ harmony. See his paper in the Scholarly Journal of the Roman Rota, “The Nullity of Marriage for Reason of Incapacity to Fulfill the Essential Obligations of Marriage”.
http://marysadvocates.org/incapacity-for-obligations-edward-egan/

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Over the past several years, a new genre of Canon Law essay has come into being. The format has been repeated so often as virtually to constitute an art form, something on the order of the sonnet or the sonata. The author opens by announcing with evident pleasure that a wondrous, new discovery has recently been made regarding the nature of marriage. The discovery is this: Whereas theologians and canonists had for centuries held that Titius and Titia consent to conjugal acts on their wedding day, in our more enlightened times we have come to know that to which they actually consent is rather marriage itself.

The opening theme or premise having been exposed and developed, the author then moves on to drawing a series of conclusions from his and our discovery. And the conclusions, in a variety of formulations, come more or less to these :
(1) The «merely physical» , «carnal» , even «animal» view of marriage which so long stalked the unhappy path of Catholic theological and canonical thinking has at last been abandoned;
(2) In its place we are now to admit a more «spiritual» , «human» , and «personal» understanding of marriage in which the central issue is the relationship between the partners, their mutual fulfillment, «completion» , integration, and enrichment;
(3) Hence, we are finally in a position to acknowledge that a marriage in which such a relationship has not been achieved or at least could not have been achieved in appropriate measure is invalid and susceptible of being declared such by tribunals of the Roman Catholic Church.

Faced with commenting on this kind of thing, one hardly knows where to begin. For not only is the premise false, there does not even seem to be any reason why the conclusions might flow from it were it other than false. (page 10)

If a poet pens, something of this sort, we may be charmed, just as if a pastor preaches something of this sort, we may be inspired. For the acts to which married people bestow upon each other a right are so intimate, human, and personal, that we can almost think of marriage as though it entailed a gift of the married couple themselves, one to the other. «Almost » , that is, poetically or rhetorically as opposed to philosophically, juridically, precisely.

… Still, what is permitted the poet and the pastor is rightly denied – among others – the jurist, except, of course, when the jurist be a canonist who occasionally has the good sense to set aside his toga and ascend either Parnassus or the pulpit. (page 22)
- Egan on 'Essential Obligations of Marriage'

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The inimitable Fr. Rutler, who draws at will from his vast grasp of history and literature in his commentaries, directs a particularly forceful denunciation at the governor of New York state...

The appalling acts of Andrew Cuomo
by FR. GEORGE W. RUTLER
Pastor, St. Michael's Church
Hell's Kitchen, New York City


There was a literary symbiosis between G.K. Chesterton and Henri Ghéon somewhat like the musical one between Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky. Ghéon’s biography of Saint John Vianney, The Secret of the Curé d’Ars, is enhanced by the brief commentary that Chesterton added to it.

Chesterton mentions a mayor of some French town who not only commissioned a statue of the rationalist Emile Zola, but, intent on further provocation, ordered that the bronze for it be forged from the bells of a church.

This rings a bell, if you will, when reminded that an ecstatic Governor Andrew Cuomo chose to sign into law our nation’s most gruesome abortion bill on January 22, the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, to raucous applause and cheering in the state capitol. In a fallen world, dancing on graves requires no instructors.

Then Cuomo ordered that One World Trade Center in Manhattan and the Alfred E. Smith Building in Albany be illuminated in pink lights. The ancient Caesars dressed in red as the token of victory. Cuomo chose pink.

Mark the ironies: the Freedom Tower is at the site of the memorial to the dead of 9/11, and listed on that somber shrine are eleven “unborn babies” killed with their mothers. As for Al Smith’s building, that chivalric Catholic personality would have resigned rather than endorse infanticide.

In Orwellian Newspeak, just as a concentration camp is called a “Joycamp,” the killing of innocent unborn infants is sanctioned by a “Reproductive Health Act.” This macabre euphemism declares that it is legal to destroy a fully formed baby seconds before birth and, should it survive a botched attempt to cut it up, attendants are allowed to let it die. The abortionist does not even need to be a medical doctor. Under certain conditions an ambiguously defined “authorized practitioner” might qualify.

The legislation was deferred over the years by politicians who, if not paragons of empathy, were appalled by its excess. It has only passed because the Democrats now control both houses of the New York state legislature. Politics aside, the governor teased a religious question.

Not only did he mention that he once was an altar boy, but he concluded the signing celebration by praying for the legislators: “God bless you.” It was an echo of the time that Barack Obama invoked God’s blessings over a national gathering of Planned Parenthood.

A popular singer, Charlie Daniels, was so taken aback by this that he tweeted: “The NY legislature has created a new Auschwitz dedicated to the execution of a whole segment of defenseless citizens. Satan is smiling.” Theologians may differ as to whether the Prince of Darkness can laugh, but he certainly can smile as a way of showing that, in a Miltonian sense, evil is his good.

Meanwhile, the bleak visage of Governor Cuomo should be shielded from children allowed to live, for it resembles with each declining day a grotesque icon of the Giver of Life in reverse.

From his rambling rhetoric, untutored diction, and scant intellectual formation, we may assume that Governor Cuomo has escaped the brush of Lord Acton’s aphorism that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Cuomo’s power may not be absolute, although it has now proven deadly, but even power that is not absolute enjoys a blithe courtship with vice. His official website now displays the cook with whom he shares a home in a relationship that would have exercised John the Baptist. This has barred him from Holy Communion as a disciplinary norm, if not a canonical penalty, and in recent times he has observed this.

But, as a pre-eminent canon lawyer, Dr. Edward Peters, has indicated, Cuomo’s communicant status is further impeded by Canon 915 because of his promotion of the “Reproductive Health Act.” Dr. Peters says: “Penal jurisdiction in this matter rests with the bishop of Albany (as the place where some or all of the canonically criminal conduct was committed, per Canon 1412), and/or with the archbishop of New York (as the place where Cuomo apparently has canonical domicile, per Canon 1408).”

Canonical discipline should not be caricatured as a “weapon” since it is properly punitive to promote justice and prevent scandal as well as medicinal to reform and safeguard the spiritual state of the offender.

These matters are beyond the ken or jurisdiction of a parish priest, but it is clear that it is not sufficient for churchmen blithely to suppose that an adequate response to the massacre of innocents by the inversion of reason merits nothing more than an expression of “profound sadness.” The faithful are entitled to the expectation that their bishops will qualify as vertebrates in more than a purely anthropological sense. Our Lord did not chase the moneychangers out of his Father’s House with a whimper of melancholy.

Although our Founding Fathers rejected anhereditary form of government, it roams like a ghost through various corridors of state. One is hard-pressed to convince people that Andrew Cuomo would be presiding in Albany had his father not formerly occupied his seat. Just as Andrew engages a reverie of his days as an altar boy, so Mario invoked his membership in the Legion of Mary.

However, Mario rightly resented any imputation of a family connection to the Mafia. He is to be credited for his familial piety. This writer was a good friend of Mario Cuomo’s predecessor, Governor Hugh Carey, and I can attest that Carey much regretted not having blocked an abortion bill during his tenure. But when Carey was out of office, and devoting himself to Pro-Life witness, he was hounded and threatened about this by his successor Mario in a way redolent of The Godfather.

Perhaps Andrew Cuomo is succumbing to the temptation that some of the senators of classical Rome detected as evidence of decadence: the apotheosis, or divinizing, of emperors in an Imperial Cult complimentary to the traditional deities. Ignoring the objections of more than 100,000 petitioners, Andrew named the Tappan Zee replacement bridge over the Hudson River in honor of his father.

The Romans also developed the custom of Damnatio Memoriae which erased the memory of disfavored predecessors. This fate was dealt out to 26 of the emperors before Constantine. The Egyptians did something similar when they erased the memorials of the pharaohs Hatshepsut and Akhenaten. In like fashion, Andrew Cuomo eliminated the name of former Governor Malcolm Wilson from the old bridge which was blown up last month.

In dark ages, there was a superstition that a bridge would only be safe if sacrificial victims, preferably children, were buried in its foundations.
- Peter Ackroyd mentions this in his history of London.
- It was more than a legend as a child’s body was found in the foundation of the Bridge Gate at Bremen.
- It was a ritualized practice in Japan, called Hitobashira.

If Andrew Cuomo persists in ignoring the petitions of the people of Rockland and Westchester counties, and keeps the name of his father for the duration of the construction, there will be enough sacrificed bodies to ensure the soundness of the Mario Cuomo Bridge and all of them innocents. Herod Antipas could not have been prouder of his father (who did not enjoy a good reputation in Bethlehem).

One theory is that some Church leaders have been reluctant to annoy Governor Andrew Cuomo in the midst of civil investigations of the Church, given the recriminatory personality of the man. But accommodation is a weak strategy.

After the Munich agreement, Winston Churchill said,

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“And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”

---

Corroborating that warning, just three days after his “Reproductive Health Act,” on January 28, Andrew Cuomo “celebrated” the passage through the state senate of the “Child Victims Act” aimed at Catholic Institutions.

While contemplating the Crucified Christ, Doctors of the Church have seen his flesh as paper, his blood as ink, and the nails as pens. So the Word of God is blotted out by the words of the morally illiterate.

After Governor Cuomo signed the “Health” act, he handed his pen —having driven the nail into Christ — to a grinning and grandmotherly woman whose ample lap could have held several children. Alas, she had none.


And Father Z introduces a news report at LIFE News with these words:

CREEPING INFANTICIDE
It had to happen. If it was successful in NY,
it would be attempted in other states..

Read at LifeSite about a bill in Virginia that would allow abortion even at the point of giving birth. Good heavens… is “abortion” even the right word at that point.

---

Virginia Democrat squirms defending bill
allowing abortion even while a woman is giving birth
by Doug Mainwaring


RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, January 30, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – A Virginia House Delegate has proposed legislation that would allow abortions up until the moment of birth.

In a shocking exchange during a subcommittee hearing about the bill, the bill’s chief proponent hesitantly admitted that the measure would permit aborting children even as a mother has begun dilating in preparation to give birth.

Delegate Kathy Tran, a Democrat from Northern Virginia, was asked, “How late in the third trimester could a physician perform an abortion?”

Tran replied, “through the third trimester. The third trimester goes all the way up to forty weeks...I don't think we have a limit in the bill.”

“Where it’s obvious a woman is about to give birth?” asked the chairman of the subcommittee, Delegate Todd Gilbert. "Even when she has physical signs that she is about to give birth? and she's

“My bill would allow that, yes,” responded Tran.

“I certainly could’ve said a week from her due date and that would’ve been the same answer, correct?” asked Gilbert.

“That is allowed in the bill,” answered Tran.

Known as the Repeal Act, Virginia House Bill 2491 would eliminate current restrictions on late-term abortions.

According to the bill’s summary, the proposed law:
o Eliminates the requirement that an abortion in the second trimester of pregnancy and prior to the third trimester be performed in a hospital.
o Eliminates all the procedures and processes, including the performance of an ultrasound, required to effect a woman's informed written consent to the performance of an abortion; however, the bill does not change the requirement that a woman's informed written consent be first obtained.
o Eliminates the requirement that two other physicians certify that a third trimester abortion is necessary to prevent the woman's death or impairment of her mental or physical health, as well as the need to find that any such impairment to the woman's health would be substantial and irremediable.
o Removes language classifying facilities that perform five or more first-trimester abortions per month as hospitals for the purpose of complying with regulations establishing minimum standards for hospitals.

When Delegate Gilbert pressed both Tran and a spokesperson for NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia for an example of the mental health conditions which might necessitate the late-term abortion of a baby, neither were able to come up with a single example.

The gruesome legislation proposed for the Old Dominion comes close on the heels of New York’s recently enacted abortion law which also removes protections for the unborn, permitting abortion up until birth.

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[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 31/01/2019 03:54]

Annibale Bugnini: Reformer of the Liturgy
by Yves Chiron
Foreword by Alcuin Reid
Angelico Press, 2018 (214 pp)

Lament for the liturgy
The book on Bugnini is indispensable both for its historical depth and breadth but also
to understand how we received the only liturgy that most Roman Catholics have ever experienced.
by Conor Dugan

January 27, 2019

Fifty years ago this April, Pope St. Paul VI issued the Apostolic Constitution, Missale Romanum, which promulgated the Novus Ordo Missae, the New Rite of the Roman Mass. The Novus Ordo went into effect the first Sunday of Advent, November 30, 1969.

This new missal was the culmination of efforts set into motion by the first of the four constitutions promulgated by the Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, which called for the Latin Rite’s “liturgical books . . . to be revised as soon as possible”, to employ “experts . . . on the task”, and to consult the bishops of various parts of the world in the revisions.

To say that the faithful’s experience of worship changed in the period from 1963 through 1969 [Actually, the change took place in 1969, because until then, the traditional Mass was still used everywhere] is an understatement. The language, gestures, orientation, and much else in the Mass changed — sometimes overnight [All this did change literally overnight!]
- How did the Church go from the Sacrosanctum Concilium to the Novus Ordo?
- What was the process that led from that Constitution, promulgated on November 22, 1963, to the Novus Ordo that went into effect just six years later?
- It is to these questions that Yves Chiron, a noted-French historian and writer, directs himself in his newly-translated book Annibale Bugnini: Reformer of the Liturgy.

The late-Archbishop Bugnini, was the Italian Vincentian who served as the influential secretary of the Consilium ad exsequendam Constiutionem de Sacra Liturgia (the Committee for the Implementation of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy). Chiron’s work is both a biography of Bugnini and a succinct overview of the Consilium’s work in implementing and imposing the liturgical reform that gave us the Novus Ordo and the current Liturgy of the Hours.

Chiron’s work is inequal parts impressive and depressing.
- It is impressive because Chiron avoids both polarizing starting points and conclusions, shows a great command of the primary sources, and in under 200 pages gives a succinct overview of the Consilium’s work.
- Chiron’s biography is a sober, objective, and well-researched account. His Bugnini is no bogeyman.
- It is depressing because the book gives an unvarnished window into the political machinations, processes, and frequent failings behind the liturgical reform.

In reading Chiron’s book, one understands at a deep level Joseph Ratzinger’s trenchant but charitable critiques of the post-Vatican II liturgical reform. For instance, in his 1998 memoir Milestones, Ratzinger wrote:

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It was reasonable and right of the Council to order a revision of the missal such as had often taken place . . . But more than this now happened: the old building was demolished, and another was built . . . Setting [the Novus Ordo] as a new construction over against what had grown historically, forbidding the results of this historical growth, thereby makes the liturgy appear to be no longer a living development but the product of erudite work and juridical authority; this has caused us enormous harm. For then the impression had to emerge that liturgy is something “made,” not something given in advance.

---

Indeed, this book helps one understand why Ratzinger has stated that “with respect to the Liturgy,” the Pope “has the task of a gardener, not that of a technician who builds new machines and throws the old ones on the junk-pile.”

Chiron’s book shows that the Consilium’s work too often was that of a technician rather than a gardener. In Chiron’s account we see the (self-inflicted) wound that continues to harm the Church to this day. Chiron’s book is indispensable both for its historical depth and breadth but also for understanding how we received the only liturgy that most Roman Catholics have ever experienced.
 
Bugnini’s early years
Bugnini was born to a pious Italian family in the Umbrian hills ,and like two of his siblings entered religious life, joining the Vincentians. As young priest, Bugnini was a liturgical innovator. He experimented with the dialogue Mass, something that had already become relatively common. The dialogue Mass consisted of “the faithful reciting the ‘responses and prayers’ that were otherwise said by the server(s).” But Bugnini went beyond this, having “the assembly say aloud a sort of paraphrase of the text of the Mass.”

Bugnini’s words concerning his achievement are revealing of a mindset that would come to dominate the liturgical reform: “The ‘inert and mute’ assembly had been transformed into a living and prayerful assembly.” Bugnini viewed active participation — what some would say is better described as actual participation — as equal to or at the very least primarily expressed through verbal actions — speaking and responding.

This view of participation sees it not primarily as an inner phenomenon, by which the faithful enter more deeply into the mystery of Christ’s Incarnation, death, and Resurrection, made present in the liturgy, but rather something manifested by outward actions and demonstrations.

When Bugnini became editor of the Vincentian liturgical journal Ephemerides Liturgicae, he had a platform from which to “broadcast his ideas for a liturgical reform.” Like so many other tasks to which Bugnini put his energies, the journal, which had been moribund, began to flourish. Bugnini commissioned a survey of liturgical needs and desires. The survey was generated by Bugnini’s wish to “rejuvenate the liturgy, ‘ridding’ it of the superstructures that weighed it down over the centuries.”

Bugnini wanted to pursue a “streamlining of the liturgical apparatus and a more realistic adaptation to the concrete needs of the clergy and faithful in the changing conditions of our day.”

Again, the words Bugnini used to describe the liturgy - 'superstructures', 'apparatus', 'changing conditions of our day' - are revealing of a certain mindset. It was a mindset that Bugnini would use his significant organizing skills to put into effect as secretary of the Consilium.

The Second Vatican Council
After Pope St. John XXIII announced his intent to convoke the Second Vatican Council, Bugnini was appointed to serve as secretary to the preparatory commission for the liturgy for the Council. Perhaps the most significant of the preparatory commission’s suggestions was that “the “‘structure’ of the ‘so-called-Mass of Saint Pius V’ had to be ‘reformed’ in such a way that additions be suppressed and that other elements improved or embellished,” and that “elements genuine, fundamental, and suited to our times should be cultivated.”

With the inception of the Second Vatican Council, Bugnini suffered the first of two significant demotions in his ecclesiastical career. Bugnini, with good reason, had expected to be named the secretary of the Council’s Commission on the Liturgy. Instead, that position went to another priest. Bugnini would serve simply as a peritus, an expert. But Bugnini would not be out of favor for long. Sacrosanctum Concilium was the first constitution adopted by the Council Fathers on November 22, 1963. In early 1964, the Consilium was established with Bugnini as its secretary.

It is with the inception of the Consilium that Chiron’s book takes on the pace of a gripping novel. A key to understanding the Consilium was its autonomy from the Roman Curia. It could function in ways that normal curial congregations could not. And given that Bugnini had already established a strong relationship with Pope Paul VI and that Bugnini was the day-to-day administrator of the Consilium, he had considerable power. As Chiron writes, Bugnini “was truly the architect of the reforms that were about to begin.”

And the reforms began almost right away and in a piecemeal fashion. Chiron documents something we too often forget. While the Novus Ordo did not go into effect until Advent 1969, significant liturgical experimentation and changes were being undertaken in the six years between the promulgation of Sacrosanctum Concilium and the Novus Ordo’s implementation. The Holy See issued several documents, produced in large part by the Consilium that revised portions of the Mass and allowed for different options prior to the implementation of the Novus Ordo. [Since I lived in the Philippines at that time, none of these interim changes were reflected or even hinted at in the practices of the Church in the Philippines.]

For instance, Inter Oecumenici, issued in 1964, called for
- the recitation of the Our Father in the vernacular by priest and congregation together,
- introduced the prayer of the faithful,
- suppressed the Last Gospel and the Leonine Prayers, among other things, and
- introduced the possibility of Mass facing the people. As Chiron writes, this concession was soon to become the norm” with Paul VI “himself giving the example.”

In 1967, the Holy See issued another instruction on the liturgy, Tres Abhinc Annos. Chiron states that it introduced “significant modifications to the celebration of Mass” including
- reducing the number of the priest’s gestures — kissing the altar, signs of the cross, and genuflections, and
- “completing the introduction of the vernacular into the Mass by allowing the Canon to be said aloud and in the vernacular.”

The Consilium would continue to revise the new rite in the years to come, soliciting feedback from cardinals and bishops attending the 1967 meeting of the Synod of Bishops. The Mass was also tested in front of the synod fathers, though the reaction was decidedly mixed.

After further revisions, in January 1968, over the course of three days, the Consilium celebrated three versions of the new Mass in front of the Pope, using different Eucharistic prayers and different “modes of celebration.” This new version of the Mass added the “Sign of Peace,” which had not been used at the demonstration of the Mass to the Synod of Bishops.

What is striking about Chiron’s description of these experimental Masses is the way in which the new Mass was essentially Beta-tested. Reading Chiron’s description, one cannot help but think of engineers in a design studio designing a product, tweaking it, and then testing it out on a pilot group before introducing the product to market.

This new Mass was not the result of the slow organic growth of certain practices and the paring back of others. Rather, it was the product of experts and technicians working it out abstractly in a “laboratory.”
“Even before the final Novus Ordo was promulgated,
- the Holy See permitted the use of eight new prefaces and the three new Eucharistic Prayers in addition to the Roman Canon.
- The finalized Novus Ordo “synthesized and made official changes that had already been taking place.” These included the following: - “a more communal penitential part of the Mass;
- more numerous and diverse Sunday readings spread out over a three-year cycle;
- a restored ‘universal prayer’;
- new Prefaces; a changed Offertory;
- three new Eucharistic Prayers . . . ;
- modified words of consecration, identical in all four Eucharistic Prayers;
- the Pater noster said by the whole congregation, [and]
- suppressed many genuflections, signs of the cross, and bows.”
In short, the Mass we know today.

Bugnini’s final years
In Chiron’s final two chapters, he discusses Bugnini’s fall from grace and eventual service as Apostolic Nuncio to Iran. Bugnini seems to have served ably and nobly as the nuncio. And, as relations between the Vatican and Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and his Society of Saint Pius X worsened, Archbishop Bugnini urged restraint and mercy. He even “suggested that the celebration of the traditional Mass might be authorized,” subject to certain conditions. The Vatican rejected this advice. On a visit to Rome for medical care in 1982, Bugnini died of an embolism. He was buried with the epitaph: “Liturgiae amator et cultor”— Lover and Supporter or Cultivator of the Liturgy.

Chiron’s book provides a helpful vehicle by which to assess, at least partially, Bugnini and his efforts at liturgical reform. If one were to base this assessment simply on output and results, Archbishop Bugnini must be judged a resounding success.
- In the space of six years he took the general directives of the Second Vatican Council and engineered a new missal for the Latin Rite.
- The Mass, which had been celebrated for centuries in Latin, was now celebrated, almost exclusively, in the vernacular.
Within a half-decade, Mass went from being celebrated ad orientem in both the East and West, to being almost exclusively celebrated versus populum in the Latin Rite.
- The reforms directed and overseen by Bugnini have become deeply embedded in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church.

And, yet, reading this wonderful book in light of the 50 years since the Novus Ordo’s implementation, Bugnini’s legacy is decidedly more mixed, even negative. Bugnini and the other members and consultors who manned the Consilium were undoubtedly experts in the practice and history of the liturgy. Bugnini's legacy, however, raises the very important question whether they were, as Paul VI famously described the Church, “experts on humanity.”
- The buzzwords of their articles, talks, and titles of their books betray their biases and presuppositions and suggest that they were not experts on humanity.
- For instance, Dom Botte’s book describing his inside view of the liturgical reform is titled From Silence to Participation. Bugnini described the transformation of the “inert and mute assembly” into true participants. Such descriptions are a common theme.
- The liturgical reformers failed to see how silence could be a form of participation, indeed perhaps a deeper participation than the recitation of banal translations.
- The reformers also seemed unable to credit ordinary lay people with the ability to learn and penetrate the mysteries of the Mass as it was already being celebrated. If these people could not “understand” the words, they could not truly worship.
- Bugnini had to paraphrase the Mass to make it “accessible.” This both assumes that one can really comprehend phrases such as, “Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my body,” and obscures the manner in which mystery and comprehension coincide and overlap. As we begin to grow in knowledge, we realize that God’s mystery is even greater than we ever imagined.

“The reformers’ zeal for relevance and for a liturgy fit for contemporary man was and is a fool’s errand. As soon as one “updates” a liturgy, it is suddenly out-of-date. The new new man succeeds the new man. And so on and so forth. Nor does this chasing after relevance take into account man’s eternal and universal thirst for transcendence.

Finally, Bugnini and his fellow reformers put a premium on rational comprehension and stark simplicity. But this was done at the expense of basic human anthropology and a proper understanding of God.
- We are not simply spirits, but embodied souls who need to touch, to feel, to taste, to see.
- When we no longer kneel, genuflect, kiss, adore, we often cease to believe.
- We may now “understand” the words of the liturgy but at the expense that we do not actually believe them.
- Further, God is superabundant. His language is superabundance. He expresses Himself in ways that seem excessive, even superfluous. Why should our worship of Him be any different?

Chiron’s book is a great gift to the Church. While we cannot change the past, Chiron gives us the ability to see it clearly, to assess it with honesty, and to ask the deep questions that will help us avoid making missteps in the future. Bugnini was clearly well-intentioned. He loved the liturgy. [His way, however. Not that which had organically developed over centuries, the liturgy that nurtured all of the Church's Fathers and saints. It's like saying 'Bergoglio loves the Church' - yeah, but his church, not the Church Christ instituted.] But so many of his actions undermined rather than cultivated the liturgy he loved. May we avoid repeating his mistakes.

Still on the subject of liturgy - would Bugnini have approved of the absurd but open license with which bishops and priests have since abused 'his' liturgy? 


The Eucharist as a snack
Translated from

January 29, 2019

The case I am concerned with here would have been perfect for my feature ‘Right men in the right places’. but I have chosen to treat it on its own because it demonstrates very well the point we have reached in liturgical degradation, an expression of theological and spiritual degradation before which one is left without words.

I refer to the Mass celebrated in Innsbruck by Austrian Bishop Hermann Glettler on January 29, during which the young people who took part gave communion to each other, and all of it seen live on ZDF television. Here is how the webite messainlatino,it. recounts it:

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At the Offertory, the high school students took the microphone to explain that they were ‘preparing the table”. And the video shows the communion that they subsequently gave to each other.




But the young people apparently had to ‘swallow’ the irreverent novelty proposed and allowed by their bishop. On the video one sees the displeased expressions of some of the kids who, after receiving communion from one of their colleagues, walk away rapidly while making the sign of the Cross, while others approached the improvised ‘eucharistic ministers’ with classic adolescent sniggering.

This is a shame for which the Bishop of Innsbruck is responsible before God and the Church.

We already observed earlier the ‘artistic’ strangenesses introduced by this ‘creative’ bishop’, but we never imagined that he could allow the children themselves to give communion to each other during one of his masses.

The video also shows a boy holding for the bishop a ciborium with the consecrated hosts while in the background, an instrumental group is playing ‘New Age’ music.

This is the spiritual level to which Austria has been reduced – a nation that was once resplendent in its Catholic devotion and courageous testimonials in defense of the faith.

Not afraid of being branded as neo-pelagians or hypocrites (but better than bearing the guilt for disturbing the faith of children), can we say that this schismatic way of conceiving liturgy is also dangerously dis-educative for the young and ground for ‘scandal’ to the entire ecclesial community?

What are the faithful of Innsbruck waiting for in order to address this scandal to the competent Vatican dicasteries (the Congregationf or Divine Worship and the Congregation for Bshops) in order to safeguard their own faith and above all, t protect the faith of their children and grandchildren?

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I have little to add to this account, including its final question. Only a prayer for reparation.

I conclude this post with an item I had been waiting to post for several days... And here it is - a fitting counterpoint to the Bugnini story and the radical changes he engineered to create the Novus Ordo...

Should a priest introduce the old Mass
to a congregation that does not request it?
by Peter Kwasniewski

January 21, 2019

Let’s begin with the most obvious point, which nevertheless still needs to be said. As per Summorum Pontificum, if the faithful themselves request the traditional Latin Mass, the pastor must provide it for them, or at least make arrangements for another priest to provide it.

He is not allowed simply to say no. He might say “yes, but first I have to learn it” (and then the laity, already prepared, will tell him that they will cover all his expenses); or “yes, but at this difficult juncture — with the new elementary school, the prison ministry, the nursing home, and the recent death of the vicar — I won’t be able to learn it, so I will ask around and try to get a Mass started for you next month.”

And of course, the pastor will always make such responses with a smile and gratitude for the devotion of his faithful to the rich traditions of the Catholic Church.

But what about a situation where the people are basically content with what they’ve got? They are accustomed to the “Ordinary Form” and know nothing else; they are not asking for anything else. Let’s even say, for the sake of argument, that the parish is on the upper end of the Ratzingerian scale and is already putting into practice the ideals of the ROTR, [reform of the reform] such as ad orientem, use of Latin and Gregorian chant, fine sacred music, beautiful vestments, kneeling for holy communion, and the like.
- Is there anything “wanting” to such a community?
- Is there any reason for the pastor himself to introduce the usus antiquior?

Yes. There are two basic reasons to do so.

First, for the priest’s own benefit. In an article published in Catholic World Report, “Finding What Should Never Have Been Lost: Priests and the Extraordinary Form” (one of many such articles now online), we find testimonies from priests about the effect that celebrating the usus antiquior has had on them, and why they find it so moving.

One priest says: “It has a mystical, contemplative, and mysterious quality, with its use of Latin, the gestures, the position of the altar, and the prayers, which are more ornate than we have today.”

Another priest remarks: “I was a lifelong Catholic, and I’d never experienced the Mass in that way. I didn’t imagine such a Mass existed. I was enthralled by it. When I celebrate the Mass, it has less to do with me, the priest, and is more about God.”

A third priest states: “The Tridentine Mass has changed me. I like its reverence, and it’s helped me see the Mass as a sacrifice, not just a memorial.”

Every priest I know who offers the traditional Latin Mass — and I have spoken with hundreds over the years — experiences in a powerful, almost visceral way the awesomeness of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and of the mystery of the priesthood on account of many elements in the liturgy that were unfortunately removed in the reforms of the 1960s:
- the humble approach to the altar at the beginning, which is saturated with the humility and piety that befits “being about the Father’s business”;
- the many times the priest must bow or genuflect, the many kissings of the altar and signs of blessing;
- the exquisite attention to meaningful detail in one’s posture, attitude, and disposition;
- the profound prayers of the Offertory;
- the immersion into silence at the Canon, so piercingly focused on the mystery by which the immolation of Christ is renewed in our midst;
- the care that surrounds every aspect of the handling of the Body and Blood of the Lord, from canonical digits to thoroughgoing ablutions;
- the Placeat tibi and Last Gospel, which bring home the magnitude of what has taken place: nothing less than the redemptive Incarnation continuing in our midst.
How could this not hugely benefit a priest in his interior life, and lead him further along the path of his vocation and his sanctification?

The second reason for a priest to make the usus antiquior available even when his congregation has not requested it is for the spiritual benefit of the congregation itself.

One of the priests interviewed in the aforementioned article points out: “Ninety percent of Catholics today have had no experience of the Church before Vatican II. They don’t know about its traditional art, architecture, or liturgy.”

As Joseph Ratzinger lamented more than once, there was a rupture if not in theory, then certainly in fact. Catholics were separated from the traditions of the Church; indeed, adhering to traditions came to be seen as a sort of infidelity to Vatican II and to the new spirit it ushered in, which was supposed to newly engage modernity and bear the harvest of a new evangelization.
- This does not seem to have happened, or not with the fullness that had been desired and promised.
- If anything, it tended to encourage skepticism towards anything preconciliar and a promethean temptation to refashion the Church according to the latest fads and theories.

Although the worst of the “silly season” may be over (at least in most places), the People of God still suffer from the effects of this widespread deracination. What better way to root them again in the two millennia of Catholicism than by enriching them with the form of worship that nurtured the great saints of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque, and the entire Tridentine period that stretched over four and a half centuries?

In the memorable words of Pope Benedict XVI’s letter to bishops, Con grande fiducia: “It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place.”

This can only be a “win” for the faithful in the parish, stretching them in good ways.
- It will develop new habits of meditative and contemplative prayer; - it will strongly confirm the dogma that the Mass is a true and proper sacrifice;
- it will intensify their adoration of the Most Holy Eucharist and their veneration of the ministerial priesthood (which is not a species of clericalism);
- it will open their minds to a wider world of Catholic culture and theology; and
- last but not least, it will support the effort to celebrate the Novus Ordo in a more traditional manner by showing where the ROTR paradigm came from in the first place — in other words, why we do certain things this way rather than that way.

We may conclude this part of our exposition with the striking words of the late Darío Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos during his tenure as the president of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei:

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Let me say this plainly: the Holy Father wants the ancient use of the Mass to become a normal occurrence in the liturgical life of the Church so that all of Christ’s faithful – young and old – can become familiar with the older rites and draw from their tangible beauty and transcendence. The Holy Father wants this for pastoral reasons as well as for theological ones. (London, 14 June 2008)

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When asked at a press conference on the same day “Would the Pope like to see many ordinary parishes making provision for the Gregorian Rite?,” His Eminence replied:

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All the parishes. Not many — all the parishes, because this is a gift of God. He offers these riches, and it is very important for new generations to know the past of the Church. This kind of worship is so noble, so beautiful — the deepest theological way to express our faith. The worship, the music, the architecture, the painting, make up a whole that is a treasure. The Holy Father is willing to offer to all people this possibility, not only for the few groups who demand it, but so that everybody knows this way of celebrating the Eucharist in the Catholic Church.

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One question I am often asked by laity and clergy is: “How should the Extraordinary Form be introduced where it has not yet existed?” I think what they mean is largely practical: when, how often, and with what preparation or accompaniments.

My advice has always been to do it gradually: to start quietly (I mean, without fanfare) by scheduling a monthly Mass; then, once this Mass is known to be celebrated and there is some congregation for it, to offer catechesis to the rest of the parish in homilies, and a kindly invitation. After this has gone over well and has become an accepted fact, the frequency can be increased to once a fortnight or once a week.

At this point, the priest reaches a crossroads: if he judges that the community will respond favorably and his head will not be handed to him on a platter at the chancery, he could celebrate the usus antiquior several times a week. I have seen regular parish schedules where it is offered as the daily Mass on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, or where there is a Sunday Mass and a weekday Mass.

To get even more particular, it has often worked well to introduce a traditional Latin Mass on Saturday morning, because this is a “low traffic” time of the week, and least likely to ruffle feathers. In some parishes there isn’t even a normal Saturday morning Mass, so nothing has to be swapped out. Another possibility is First Fridays and/or First Saturdays, because these are well-loved but traditional devotions, and the Latin Mass can be viewed as their natural complement: it sounds like a special thing being done for a special devotion. Another pastor I know introduced a monthly evening Mass just for men and boys, as part of a program of adoration, rosary, Mass, and fellowship; he will soon introduce a monthly evening Mass just for women and girls.

Introducing the usus antiquior on Sundays or Holy Days is at once the most important step and the most difficult.
- It is important to do so eventually, because only in this way can the treasure of the old liturgy reach the largest number of faithful.
- It is obviously difficult because of the need (in some places) for many Masses offered by a single priest, as well as by the challenge of an already-existing schedule that parishioners are loath to see modified.

Still, even here there can be a way forward. For example, if there is already a quiet early morning Mass, one might convert this into a quiet Low Mass, being careful to repeat the readings from the pulpit in the vernacular before the homily.

If there is a “contemporary youth Mass,” why not try the wild and crazy New Evangelization experiment of substituting a Gregorian Missa cantata for it instead? A lot of young Catholics are bored or turned off by the pseudo-pop music and the implicit dumbing-down that liturgical planners assume to be necessary for the smartphone generation. As always, some youths might stop coming, but others would find in it a radically new experience that appeals to them in mysterious ways. New people would come — and bring more people. It could end up being quite successful.

In all of this, I am painfully aware of the reality on the ground.
- There are many priests who feel that their hands are tied on account of the hostility, on the part of the bishop, the chancery, the presbytery, or the parish, towards anything traditional.
- This is a deplorable aspect of our decadent situation, but it is not a dead end.
- In such cases, a priest still profits from learning the usus antiquior, as he can offer it privately once a week on his day off. - This will be to his own spiritual benefit for all the reasons already given, and, by connecting him to a wealth of tradition, influence for the better his understanding of what liturgy is and how it should be celebrated in any rite or form.

Sexual abuse of nuns by priests:
The story we hardly hear about

January 30, 2019

To judge by what Pope Francis has written and said - most recently on the plane that brought him back from Panama to Rome - sexual abuse committed against minors by priests will be the main topic of the summit convened at the Vatican from February 21 to 24 between the pope and the presidents of some 130 Catholic episcopal conferences in the world.

The risk is that of bypassing, however, that plague which statistically turns out to be prevalent among the perpetrators of abuse in Europe and in North and South America, meaning homosexual activity with the young and very young.

[Hold it there! Didn't the John Jay Criminal College report on sexual abuses committed by priests in the USA make it very clear that the great majority of abuses were committed against adolescents rather than against children? And therefore that pedophilia - a specific pathologic sexual attraction to children - was not the major category of these sex abuse crimes but male homosexuality which satisfies its lusts with older boys? And that, unlike pedophiles, homosexual priests are like the garden variety of male homosexuals who rarely prey on male children because that's not their thing. In any case, sexual abuse is sexual abuse - and the summit ought not to limit themselves to just one kind.

One is curious about the methodology to be used at the February summit. The overwhelming majority of the participating bishops' conferences will not have the detailed reports commissioned by the US, German, Belgian and Dutch bishops.
- How have they been asked to give the summit a ballpark overview of the extent of clerical sex abuse in their respective countries?
- And would this include, as it should, not just male victims of abuse, but also girls and women?
- And more to the point of this item by Magister, what about nuns who have been the target for decades of McCarrick-like abuse of clerical power to subject them to the lusts of the priests and bishops they work for and work with?
- Have the summit organizers devised a systematic way whereby the participants could serially consider all the different categories of sexual abuse that may and can be committed by priests and bishops?

Just going through the list of possible questions facing the February summit - and very brief answers from all those bishop-presidents concerned - would take up all the four days which is all they have to work out something. You can see how much of a Hail Mary pass Bergoglio is attempting in trying to defuse the crisis - or feigning it, anyway - by calling a summit he knows very well is unlikely to come up with any action plan that will be applicable to everyone, because there simply can't be a one-size-fits-all plan.

Unless most of the bishops will decide to adopt Jorge Bergoglio's line (lie) that "Fortunately, sex abuse was never a problem in my diocese!". In which case, the summit will be left to consider the clerical sexual abuse crisis in those countries that do have statistics and data galore documenting their respective crises.]

But there is still another sexual abuse plague over which, so far, there hangs a pall of silence. And it is that of sexual abuse committed by clergy against nuns. It is a plague that is widespread above all in Africa, but also in Asia.

The most sensational scandal of this kind has been under way for months in India. Its protagonist is Bishop Franco Mulakkal, until recently head of the diocese of Jullundur, in Punjab, as well as a consultant at the Vatican for the Pontifical cCouncil for Inter-Religious Dialogue, who ended up in jail and is now on trial. He has been accused of sexually abusing a nun of the Missionaries of Jesus in Kerala a dozen times between 2014 and 2016. The bishop claims he is innocent.

It is above all in Africa and Asia that the episcopal conferences, eight years after the order received from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, have not yet developed guidelines for handling cases of clerical sex abuse of minors. And what has the CDF been doing all this time with the non-compliers?
- What does Cardinal Mueller have to say about that - after all he was there for five of the past six years.
- What about Cardinal O'Malley, Bergoglio's pointman on this matter? - All these past six years, did he ever follow up with the CDF how to deal with the laggards?
- And what did the CDF do with the plans that wer submitted by the compliant episopal conferences?
It all sounds like the hopeless bureaucratic mess one would expect from all the jawing and blathering going on at these Vatican meetings, synods, assemblies and summits!]

One of the reasons for this inertia - as Pope Francis himself has observed - is the scanty awareness, on these continents, of the gravity and universality of the question, imagined as pertaining only to the West. And this also applies to the plague of homosexual activity.

At the same time, however, there is also a lack of awareness of the gravity of that other plague, that of sexual abuse committed by clergy against nuns. And it is a form of blindness that primarily afflicts the Churches of Africa and Asia, where the phenomenon is most widespread, but of which the Churches of the West and even the mother Church of Rome are guilty.

One must go back to the nineties to find the first systematic accusations, forwarded by nuns to the Vatican authorities. But what is more grave is that since then very little has been done not only to counter the phenomenon, but at least to bring it to light.

It must be noted that the spotlights were focused on this reality by the Catholic media.

The first to break the silence, in March of 2001, was the National Catholic Reporter, which in an extensive article by John Allen and Pamela Schaeffer, made public the two accusations forwarded confidentially to the Vatican, the one signed in 1995 by physician and AIDS specialist Sister Maura O’Donohue, and the one signed in 1998 by Sister Marie McDonald, superior of the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Africa:
> Reports of abuse. Sexual exploitation of nuns

The latest is the French newspaper La Croix, which in an article by Constance Vilanova oast January 17 expanded with new testimonies the two chief accusations of Sister O’Donohue, concerning 23 countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, and of Sister McDonald:
> En Afrique, les religieuses victimes de la loi du silence

As the La Croix headline says, the code of silence continues to reign supreme, both among abusers and victims, and among the respective hierarchical superiors, who tend to tolerate and cover up the misdeeds of the former, while blaming the latter for their misfortunes and even punishing them.

This code of silence that has its roots in a plurality of factors, at the origin of the abuse:
- the idea that celibacy and chastity for consecrated persons only socifically prohibit marriage but not sexual relations;
- the fear of contracting AIDS, which makes nuns a “safer” sexual object for abusive priests;
- the woman’s position of subordination to the male in society and in the Church;
- a lack of esteem for female consecrated life, on the part of bishops, priests, and laity;
- the financial dependence on the diocese of many small female religious congregations;
- the material and spiritual support given by clergy to nuns in exchange for sexual services.

It even happens that the priest or bishop may force into an abortion the nun he has gotten pregnant.

Last November 23, the International Union of Superiors General released a statement in which it asks “that any woman religious who has suffered abuse, report the abuse to the leader of her congregation, and to church and civic authorities as appropriate.” But it is not a given that the nun who reports will receive help. In fact, what often happens is the opposite.

Sister Mary Lembo, from Togo, is preparing a doctoral thesis on relations between priests and nuns in Africa, at the psychology institute of the Pontifical Gregorian University, in Rome. She has thoroughly analyzed 12 cases of sexual abuse and told La Croix that the code of silence continues to reign in Africa because there the figure of the priest “is respected and at the same time feared. The victims tend to blame themselves. In cases of abuse, it is often the religious sister who ends up under accusation, it is she who has drawn the looks and the attention to herself, it is she who ends up being condemned.”

For Pope Francis, the number one cause of sexual abuse is “clericalism.”

In Europe and the Americas this is debatable theorem, especially if applied to homosexual activity, where both within the church as in nthe secular world, it has become accepted as a matter of fact and in many countries, legitimized.

Lucetta Scaraffia , a church historian and editor of the monthly supplement on women published by L'Osservatore Romano, wrote in a January 12 article for the Spanish newspaper El Pais, about "an undervalued phenomenon, that of abuses of members of the clergy towards religious women, classified by hierarchs as 'romantic relationships'.

But instead of being consensual romantic relationships, they represent the imposition of a man in a position of power over a vulnerable woman. Sometimes, nuns are forced to endure an unwanted relationship by their own superiors, fearing reprisals against their order if they do not submit".


Early this year, the case of the bishop and the Kerala nun led the Associated Press to research and run this article about nun abuse by priests in India.\..

A long history of nuns
abused by priests in India
By TIM SULLIVAN


KURAVILANGAD, India, January 3, 2019 – The nuns talk of Catholic priests who pushed into their bedrooms and of priests who pressured them to turn close friendships into sex. Across India, they talk about being groped and kissed, of hands pressed against them by men they were raised to believe were representatives of Jesus Christ.

At its most grim, nuns speak of repeated rapes, and of a Catholic hierarchy that did little to protect them.

The Vatican has long been aware of nuns sexually abused by priests and bishops in Asia, Europe, South America and Africa, but it has done very little to stop it, The Associated Press reported last year.

Now, the AP has investigated the situation in India and uncovered a decades-long history of nuns enduring sexual abuse from within the church. Nuns detailed the sexual pressure they endured from priests; nearly two dozen nuns, former nuns and priests, and others said they had direct knowledge of such incidents.

Still, the problem is cloaked by a powerful culture of silence. Many nuns believe abuse is commonplace, insisting most sisters can at least tell of fending off a priest's sexual advances. Some believe it is rare. Almost none talk about it readily, and most speak only on the condition that they not be identified.

But this summer, one nun forced the issue into the open.

When repeated complaints to church officials brought no response, the 44-year-old nun filed a police complaint against the bishop who oversees her order, accusing him of raping her 13 times over two years. A group of nuns launched a public protest to demand the bishop's arrest.

The protest divided India's Catholic community. The accuser and the nuns who support her are now pariahs, isolated from the other sisters, many of whom defend the bishop.

"Some people are accusing us of working against the church," said one supporter, Sister Josephine Villoonnickal. "They say, 'You are worshipping Satan.' But we need to stand up for the truth."

Some nuns' accounts date back decades.

Like the sister, barely out of her teens, teaching in a Catholic school in the early 1990s. It was exhausting work, and she was looking forward to time at a New Delhi retreat center.

The nun is a forceful woman who has spent years working with the poor. But when she talks about the retreat her voice grows quiet.

One night, a priest in his 60s who was supposed to be leading the nuns in reflection went to a neighborhood party. He came back late and knocked at her room. She could smell the alcohol.

"You're not stable. I'm not ready to meet you," she said.
But the priest forced his way in, tried to kiss her and grabbed at her body. Weeping, she pushed him back enough to slam the door.

Afterward she quietly told her mother superior, who let her avoid meeting the priest again. She also wrote anonymously to church officials. The priest was re-assigned. But there were no public reprimands, no warnings to other nuns.

She was too afraid to challenge him openly. "For me it was risking my own vocation," she said.

Caught at this intersection of sexual taboo, Catholic hierarchy and loneliness, sisters can be left at the mercy of predatory priests. It can be particularly hard for sisters from deeply conservative Kerala.

"Once you grow up, once you get your first menstruation, you are not encouraged to speak normally to a boy," said a nun from Kerala, a cheerful woman with sparkly glass earrings. That naivete, she said, can be costly.

Like the time she was a novice nun, still in her teens, and an older priest came to the Catholic center where she worked. He was from Goa, another coastal state. When she brought the priest his laundry, he grabbed her and began to kiss her.

"The kissing was all coming here," she said, gesturing at her chest.
"He was from Goa. I am from Kerala. In my mind I was trying to figure out: 'Is this the way that Goans kiss?'" She soon understood what was happening but couldn't escape his grip. Eventually, she slipped out the door.

She quietly told a senior nun to not send other novices to the priest's room. But she made no official complaint.

In the church, even some of those who doubt there is widespread abuse of nuns say the silence can be enveloping. Archbishop Kuriakose Bharanikulangara calls abuse "kind of sporadic. Once here, once there." But "many people don't want to talk," he continued.

The rapes, the nun says, happened in a small convent in rural Kerala, where the sisters at the St. Francis Mission Home spend their days in prayer or caring for the aged. The rapist, she says, was the most powerful man in this world: Bishop Franco Mulakkal.

Mulakkal was the official patron of her community, the Missionaries of Jesus, wielding immense influence over its budgets and job assignments. Every few months, the nun says, Mulakkal would visit the convent. Then, according to a letter she wrote church officials, he raped her.

Mulakkal angrily denies the accusations, accusing the sister of trying to blackmail him to get a better job.

"I am going through painful agony," said Mulakkal, who was jailed for three weeks and released on bail in October. Many in Kerala see Mulakkal as a martyr, and a string of supporters visited him in jail.

The sisters who now cluster around the nun who leveled the accusations see things very differently. "Many times she was telling him to stop. But each time he was forcing himself on her," said Villoonnickal, the nun, who moved back to Kerala to support "our survivor sister."

Catholic authorities have said little about the case, with India's Catholic Bishops' Conference saying in a statement that it has no jurisdiction over individual bishops, and the investigation and court case must run their course.

"Silence," the conference said, "should in no way be construed as siding with either of the two parties."


And here's a report from 2002 referring to the initial expose about nun abuse cited by Magister...

Vatican confirms report of sexual abuse
and rape of nuns by priests
in 23 countries, mostly Africa
July 2002

The Catholic Church in Rome made the extraordinary admission yesterday that it is aware priests from at least 23 countries have been sexually abusing nuns.

Most of the abuse has occurred in Africa, where priests vowed to celibacy, who previously sought out prostitutes, have preyed on nuns to avoid contracting the AIDS virus.

Confidential Vatican reports obtained by the National Catholic Reporter, a weekly magazine in the US, have revealed that members of the Catholic clergy have been exploiting their financial and spiritual authority to gain sexual favours from nuns, particularly those from the Third World who are more likely to be culturally conditioned to be subservient to men.

The reports, some of which are recent and some of which have been in circulation for at least seven years, said that such priests had demanded sex in exchange for favours, such as certification to work in a given diocese.

In extreme instances, the priests had made nuns pregnant and then encouraged them to have abortions.

The US article was based on five documents, which senior women from religious orders and priests have presented to the Vatican over the past decade. They describe a particularly bad situation in Africa. In a continent devastated by AIDS, nuns and early adolescent girls, are perceived by some as safe sexual targets. The reports said that the church authorities had done little to tackle the problem.

The Vatican reports cited countless cases of nuns forced to have sex with priests. Some were obliged to take the pill, others became pregnant and were encouraged to have abortions. In one case in which an African sister was forced to have an abortion, she died during the operation and her aggressor led the funeral mass. Another case involved 29 sisters from the same congregation who all became pregnant by priests in the diocese.

The reports said that the cultures in some African countries made it almost impossible for a young woman to disobey an older man, especially one seen as spiritually superior. There were cases of novices who applied to their local priest or bishop for certificates of good Catholic practice that were required for them to pursue their vocation. In return they were made to have sex. Some incidents of sexual abuse allegedly took place almost within the Vatican walls.

Certain unscrupulous clerics took advantage of young nuns who were having trouble finding accommodation, writing their essays and funding their theological studies.

Forced to acknowledge the problem, the Vatican has tried to play down its gravity. In a statement issued yesterday the Pope’s official spokesman, Joaquin Navarro Valls, said: “The problem is known and involves a restricted geographical area. Certain negative situations must not overshadow the often heroic faith of the overwhelming majority of religious, nuns and priests”.

One of the most comprehensive documents was compiled by Sister Maura O’Donohue, an Aids co-ordinator for Cafod, the London-based Catholic Fund for Overseas Development.

She noted that religious sisters had been identified as “safe” targets for sexual activity. She quotes a case in 1991 of a community superior being approached by priests requesting that the nuns be made available to them for sexual favours.

“When the superior refused the priests explained they would otherwise be obliged to go to the village to find women and might thus get Aids.”Sister O’Donohue said her initial reaction to what she was told by her fellow religious “was one of shock and disbelief at the magnitude of the problem”.

While most of the abuse happened in African countries, Sister O’Donohue reported incidents in 23 countries including India, Ireland, Italy, the Philippines and the United States.

She heard cases of priests encouraging the nuns to take the pill telling them it would prevent HIV. Others “actually encouraged abortion for the sisters” and Catholic hospitals and medical staff reported pressure from priests to carry out terminations for nuns and other young women.

O’Donohue wrote in her report how a vicar in one African diocese had talked “quite openly” about sex, saying that “celibacy in the African context means a priest does not get married, but does not mean he does not have children.”

The head of the Vatican congregation for Religious Life, Cardinal Martinez Somalo, has set up a committee to look into the problem. But it seems to have done little beyond “awareness raising” among bishops.

More recently, in 1998, Sister Marie McDonald, mother superior of the Missionaries of Our Lady of Africa, put together a paper entitled The Problem of the Sexual Abuse of African Religious in Africa and Rome.

She tabled the document to the Council of 16, made up of delegates of the international association of women’s and men’s religious communities and the Vatican office responsible for religious life. She noted that a contributing cause was the “conspiracy of silence”.

When she addressed bishops on the problem, many of them felt it was disloyal of the sisters to send reports.

“However, the sisters claim they have done so time and time again. Sometimes they were not well received. In some instances they are blamed for what happened. Even when they are listened to sympathetically nothing much seems to be done” One of the most tragic elements that emerges is the fate of the victims. While the offending priests are usually moved or sent away for studies, the women are normally chased out of their religious orders, they are then either to scared to return to their families or are rejected by them. they often finished up as outcasts, or, in a cruel twist of irony, as prostitutes, making a meagre living from an act they had vowed never to do.

One of the few religious in Rome willing to talk about the report was Father Giulio Albanese, of MISNA, the missionary news agency. “Missionaries are human beings, who are often living under immense psychological pressure in situations of war and ongoing violence. On one hand it’s important to condemn this horror and it’s important tell the truth, but we must not emphasise this at the expense of the work done by the majority, many of whom have laid down lives for witness” said Fr Albanese “The press only talks about missionaries when they are killed, kidnapped or are involved in something scandalous” he added.

As the Vatican digests the unpalatable evidence of how their own priests are ruining the lives of their sisters, many Catholics hope a strong message may come from on high. With the American bishops, the Pope spoke in clear terms about paedophile priests, telling them this was a scourge that had to be faced. Some now hope that he may be equally courageous in denouncing an evil which has been covered by silence and shame for too long.

Meanwile, skepticism just keeps building about the upcoming Vatican 'summit' on... 'the protection of minors', as I think it now sanctimoniously but honestly called. When it was supposed to be to discuss the PRESENT CRISIS and its roots in a widespread, longstanding and in some cases, deep-seated homosexual culture that has been flourishing among sinful bishops and priests.

The Vatican and diocesan and parochial bureaucracies throughout the world already have a surfeit of charters and protocols aimed at the 'protection of minors' from sexual abuses by priests (and some bishops) - none of which will ever work if the measures do not confront the homosexual root of the problem. That the pope himself - and all his ideological fellow travellers - refuse to even say the 'H word' and any of its variants - shows the sinful hypocrisy and shameless state of denial they are wallowing in.

William Kilpatrick's essay should really be entitled 'Is the pope really serious about the abuse crisis?' - because he clearly is not, having been and being still the #1 protector of predator priests and bishops - which is plain and clear from any reading of his documented actions and words to this effect, as a cardinal and as pope. And as the pope goes, so goes the Church hierarchy which, under this pope, have been virtually reduced to dumb unprotesting sheep led to spiritual and moral slaughter by their 'shepherd'.

Is the hierarchy really serious
about the abuse crisis?
by WILLIAM KILPATRICK

February 1, 2019

According to a June 2017 Gallup survey, nearly half of U.S. Catholics (49 percent) had a “high” or “very high” opinion of the honesty and ethical standards of clergy. By early December 2018, the number had fallen to 31 percent.

Most of the difference is likely attributable to the new reports of earlier cases of sex abuse (most, though not all, involving adults) that began to surface in the summer of 2018. Since new scandals are being revealed on a weekly basis, it’s probable that confidence in Church leaders will continue to drop. One can assume, moreover, that the credibility of Catholic leaders has dropped even further among non-Catholics.

In short, the Church’s public witness has been badly damaged and is likely to suffer further damage. The scandals will certainly affect the credibility of Catholic teachers and clergy when they teach about sexual ethics. But because the scandals also involve lying, cover-ups, cowardice, financial fraud, cronyism, abuse of power, and possible blackmail, they will result in a general loss of confidence in the Church’s authority to speak on any moral matter.

The damage is compounded by the fact that the abuse revelations come at a time when the Church is under fierce attack from the secular left. As the Church becomes more vulnerable, the attacks are likely to increase. The slandering of Covington Catholic pro-life students by the media, and the smearing of the Knights of Columbus by two U.S. senators is just a taste of what is to come.
- The abuse scandals are likely to result in more attempts by the left to push the Church out of the public square and to diminish its influence in other ways.
- At the same time, federal and state authorities will be tempted to exert more control over the affairs of a weakened Church.
- Meanwhile, more Catholics will leave the Church, more churches and schools will close, and more young men will be dissuaded from entering the priesthood.

According to Professor Scott Hahn, the current crisis in the Church is worse than the crisis precipitated by the Reformation. Others have described it in even more apocalyptic terms. Cardinal Raymond Burke has characterized it as “possibly the worst crisis that it’s [the Church] ever experienced.” “Our Lady warned us at Fatima about an apostasy from the faith,” said Burke. “I believe there’s been a practical apostasy from the faith with regard to all questions involving human sexuality…” [But Your Eminence, the pope's array of apostasies and his apostate tendencies go far beyond matters of sexuality, and always have!]

Expanding on Cardinal Burke’s remarks, Fr. Ladis Cizik [and countless other commentators before him, whoever he is!] likened the crisis to the “final trial” spoken of in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (675):

---

Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth.

---

Whether this is the “final trial” of the Church or only the worst crisis since the Reformation, it is difficult to see it as anything other than an extremely serious crisis — one that should evoke an equally serious response.

But Pope Francis and the men he has surrounded himself with don’t seem to see it that way. Although they may use words such as “serious” and “grave,” their actions indicate that they don’t plan to do anything serious about it.

Take the long-awaited summit on clerical sex abuse to be held at the Vatican from February 21-24. The fact that the meeting will only last four days suggests that it is only meant to reassure the public that something is being done. It’s highly unlikely that the kind of reforms that are now needed in the Church can be discussed and formulated in a few days.

And there are other reasons to be suspicious.
- For one thing the summit is being billed as “The Protection of Minors in the Church.”
- Yet the present crisis is not mainly about the abuse of minors. It’s about the abuse of seminarians by priest and bishops, consensual sex among priests, and the coverup of such sexual misconduct by bishops and cardinals.
- The February meeting has been engineered to avoid the root problems — one of which is the existence of a homosexual subculture within the Church.
- As one “well-informed” source told LifeSite News, the meeting is a “masterpiece of hypocrisy” in the making.

Another reason to doubt that the summit is meant to seriously address any of the above problems is that the man Pope Francis has appointed to organize it has a major conflict of interest. Cardinal Blase Cupich, let’s recall, is one of the prelates named in Archbishop Viganò’s indictment of corruption in the hierarchy. Cupich is mentioned in the Viganò statement as being “blinded by his pro-gay ideology,” which suggests that Cupich is not the man you would call on if you were really serious about uncovering a homosexual subculture in the Church. Moreover, Viganò suggests that Cupich was elevated to the position of Archbishop of Chicago precisely because of his ideology:

---

The appointments of Blase Cupich to Chicago and Joseph W. Tobin to Newark were orchestrated by McCarrick, Maradiaga and Wuerl, united by a wicked pact of abuses by the first, and at least a cover-up of abuses by the other two.

---

In light of these charges against Cupich, one would think that Pope Francis would want to keep him a good distance away from any supervisory position regarding the summit. Yet, in what can only be described as an in-your-face act of brazenness, Francis appointed Cupich to organize and shape the summit. In short, Francis is more interested in preserving a certain ideology than in preserving any semblance of impartiality.

And so, the man who dismissed Viganò’s allegations as a “rabbit hole” to avoid is now in charge of guarding the rabbit hole lest anyone be tempted to explore its labyrinth of warrens.

As I observed in a previous article, the gravity of the scandals needs to be met with an equally grave response. What might that be? - Archbishop Viganò who wrote of the “grave, disconcerting and sinful conduct of Pope Francis” called on the pope to resign.
- Phil Lawler has asked the guilty bishops to make a public confession of sin and public acts of repentance.
- Scott Hahn believes that Archbishop McCarrick and others like him should be excommunicated.
- An international online petition co-sponsored by Pro Ecclesia (based in Switzerland) and LifeSiteNews has asked, among other things, for "a declaration from the Holy Father stating that any bishop who has covered up for abuser priests will be removed from his office pursuant to the norm of canon 1389 CIC".

But that last request would put Francis in a rather awkward position. There is a good deal of evidence that Francis himself has covered up for or promoted abusers on several occasions both as pope and as archbishop of Buenos Aires.
- Although Archbishop McCarrick was a well-known abuser, Pope Francis lifted the sanctions against him and made him a trusted advisor and official envoy.
- Despite what the Telegraph [and many other sources] described as a “string of homosexual affairs,” Francis appointed Battista Ricca as prelate of the Vatican Bank.
- After the Vatican received evidence of sexual harassment of seminarians by Argentine bishop Gustavo Oscar Zanchetta, Francis promoted him to the position of assessor of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA) which oversees the Vatican’s investments and its considerable real-estate holdings. And this, despite the fact that Zanchetta had also been accused of mishandling diocesan finances.
- An Italian priest, Mauro Inzoli, known as “Don Mercedes” for his lavish lifestyle, was found guilty of abusing boys by an ecclesiastical court and he was suspended from the priesthood by Pope Benedict XVI. Francis reinstalled Inzoli to the priesthood in 2014. Subsequently, an Italian civil court sentenced Inzoli to four years imprisonment for sexual crimes.
- When he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio went to bat for Father Julio César Grassi, who was accused of sexual abuse of minors and seminarians. To prevent the conviction of Grassi, Bergoglio commissioned a series of books that cast doubt on the victim’s testimonies. Although Grassi was eventually sentenced to 15 years in prison, the pope reportedly declined to meet with his victims or to remove him from the priesthood.
- A recent article by journalist Marco Tosatti provides a list of prelates who have been favored, protected, promoted or rehabilitated by Pope Francis despite their record of covering up for abusers.

The list includes: Cardinal Godfried Danneels, Cardinal Roger Mahony, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Cardinal Errazuriz Ossa, Bishop Juan Barros, Bishop Juan Jose Pineda, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, and Archbishop Kevin Farrell.

Why does Pope Francis show so much favor to people who are morally compromised? According to Tosatti, Francis’s behavior “leads us to think that the pontiff chooses or prefers people who have a past, and at least one skeleton in their closet.” Tosatti speculates that such people are more easily manipulated. [Of course, Bergoglio is holding them lieterally by the short hairs!]

But it may simply be that the pope prefers the company of people who have flamboyant lifestyles. Judging by his frequent condemnation of rigid, puritanical, and fundamentalist Catholics, Francis may simply feel more comfortable in the presence of “liberated” Catholics —those who lead daring double lives, flout convention, and wink at middle-class morality. [And is that less morally objectionable than Tosatti's hypothesis? What does it say about Bergoglio that he'prefers' the company of such people????]

A clue that this might be the case can be found in a book-length interview with Francis by Dominique Wolton, the founder of Hermes magazine. In the interview the pontiff makes a point of emphasizing that sexual sins are the “lightest sins.” Priests, he says, should not focus on what he calls “below the belt” morality, because the more serious sins are elsewhere. As a model of a good confessor, he mentions a cardinal who told him “that as soon as somebody goes to him to talk about those sins below the belt, he immediately says; ‘I understand, let’s move on.’”

The author of the piece on Wolton’s book suggests that Francis’s “minimization of sins of sex — and of homosexual practices widespread among the clergy — may explain his silences and his tolerance toward concrete cases of abuse, even by high-level churchmen he has esteemed and favored.” [But all of that indicts Bergoglio even more for moral turpitude. Sin is sin, and mortal sin is mortal sin, and every sin originates in the mind and heart of the sinner, even and especially what Bergoglio so cavaLierly dismisses as 'sins below the belt'. But what objective morality, what Catholicism, is left in a pope who castigates Catholic media, as he did recently, for, among other things, 'denouncing heresy'?]

Other recent popes may have had a more sophisticated view of sexuality than the average Catholic, but when it came to basics, their beliefs were not that different from, say, faithful Catholic parents living on a farm in Kansas. But with Francis “we’re not in Kansas anymore.” That line, of course, is from The Wizard of Oz. And appropriately so. Because with Francis at the helm, the Church is sailing dangerously close to over-the-rainbow territory.

All of which suggests that nothing much will come of the sex-abuse summit.
- We can expect some tightening of the rules that are already in place for the protection of minors.
- And we can expect much talk about the Church’s commitment to protect children, but very little about widespread immorality among priests and bishops.
- There will likely be some acknowledgement of those pesky below-the-belt sins, but the general tenor will be “let’s move on”—
- meaning, now that we’ve held this perfunctory discussion of the sex-abuse crisis, let’s talk about the really important issues such as world peace, global warming, the plight of immigrants, and the needs of LGBTQ families.
- One can safely assume that there will be no calls for compromised bishops or the pope to resign, no public confession of sins, no defrocking, and no excommunications.

In other words, there will be no real acknowledgement of the disastrous and dangerous state into which the Church has fallen, no firm purpose of amendment, and no real attempt at reform.
- Instead, we will be encouraged to move on and to ignore the fact that the same compromised people remain at the helm and continue to set the course.
- In the meantime, the faith of countless Catholics will continue to erode, the Church will be seen as increasingly irrelevant, and the enemies of the Church will continue to grow in power and ferocity.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/02/2019 23:38]

Aldo Maria Valli is properly worked up about one of those statements that the reigning pope made so cavalierly during his last inflight news conference.
A statement that has largely passed unnoticed among so many other statements flagged with more headline-grabbing red alerts...

Does the pope not realize that sex education
is already done in schools but does not work?
Translated from

February 1, 2019

“I think there ought to be sex education in schools,” Pope Francis said in answer to a journalist who asked him on the plane returning from Panamawhat could be done about the scourge of precocious pregnancies in Latin America.

Yet whoever has anything to do with education knows that so-called sex education provided in schools has been a failure, especially in places like South American where the problems resulting from rampant sex are the gravest. And this is not according to traditionalist Catholics whom seculars, progressivists and Catholics who are ‘in’ love to condemn as bigots and hypocrites. This is according to studies and investigations conducted by absolutely secular research institutions.

As, for instance, a major study by Cochrane, a global network of researchers in the health field, on more than 55,000 adolescents who underwent courses in “'exual and reproductive health' in various parts of the world- from Europe to sub-Saharan Africa to Latin America. They concluded that those courses “had no effect whatsoever on the number of participating young people who were subsequently infected with HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases”. Nor on reducing the number of precocious pregnancies.

The study curiously notes that only when schools provide incentives (such as free uniforms or small cash payments) for remaining in school for the extra course – beyond usual school hours – is there some improvement, in terms of less STDs and unwanted pregnancies among the course participants.

A few years ago, the British Medical Journal reported that “contrary to what one might think, sex education interventions, instead of improving sexual health, could merely worsen the situation”.

Serious and profound studies on this supject explain that the best results come not from having sex education classes, but rather, moral education in the wider sense – transmitting to the young people essential principles about the value of each person, of the body and of abstinence, and when they are taught to protect themselves – in all aspects, including the sexual, from being exploited as consumers.

That what truly makes the difference is not teaching sexuality from a technical point of view [which seems to be the burden of most ‘sex education’ classes] but rather to educate young people in the value of waiting for the right time, of giving oneself, of sharing. But none of this is done in sex education classes today, because schools are focused on the functional view of sex, which in the end, simply promotes the use of condoms.

That is why the Church has always maintained that because of the delicate nature of the subject matter, educating young people in affectivity [the ability to experience feelings, emotions, judgment, motivations] and sexuality should not be done in school, especially since such ‘teaching’ is often used to transmit a certain ideological view.

And that is why the pope’s words on sex education alarmed not a few Catholics. One reader wrote me:

---

"I am truly dismayed by Bergoglio’s initiative advocating sex education in schools. I am a doctor, now of advanced age, who never obscured sexual awareness and knowledge from my three children, and now as a grandfather, I have advised my children discreetly to do the same for their children.

I would never have accepted that a school gave my children sexual information superimposed on what I myself am capable of giving them. If only because only I as a parent understands the stage of maturation that my children and my grandchildren have reached.
T
Moreover, to teach all the children in a class in the same way can be more dangerous than it is educational. How can one think that children who grow up with parents who make an exhibition of their sexuality could be taught in the same way as children whose parents practice their sexuality in private as they should?

Also, it is not enough to teach them about using condoms [which are far from failproof] – all prostitutes use them, but they still end up being STD ‘samplers’. Obviously, because they continue to be infected by new customers. There must be a priority for educating young people in affectivity before sexuality."

---

From a female reader:

---

“As an elementary school teacher, I have had to accept the intervention in my classes of so-called experts in ‘affectivity training’ which is nothing but sexual education. Seeing the depressing results of their work, I am convinced that I would have done a much better job by myself: just providing honest scientific information would be enough."

---

With his usual language that says in effect, that A is true but also B, the pope in his inflight statement also stipulated, “One must offer objective sexual education as is, without ideological colonization”, but the problem is that in school today, even where there may not be a true and proper ‘ideological colonization’, nonetheless what prevails is a totally horizontal and profane vidw of life from which every supernatural dimension has been eliminated and which presume to resolve by ‘technical’ answers questions which deserve to be met through the teaching and application of moral virtues.

That the pope’s sally on sex education was at the very least ‘singular’ compared to the line that the Catholic Church has always held – namely, that sex education of their children is the responsibility first of all of parents in the context of a child’s overall formation – is shown by the enthusiasm with which his words were welcomed by those who most strongly oppose the Christian view of the individual and of sexuality.

Here, for example, was the immediately well-publicized comment from a representative of Italian Radicals:

---

“As a convinced anti-clerical, and precisely because of this, I cannot but highlight that the peremptory statement of Pope Francis, ‘sex is a gift of God”, is revolutionary, being the antithesis of 2000 years of sexophobic Catholic culture, according to which sexual practice is unutterable (one does it but never says so) if not diabolical, and always directed only towards the goal of procreation, which also barely hides a near-zero consideration of women.

Pope Francis did not just limit himselves to enunciating a new idea [for the Church, the person means] but rightly indicates a new goal to be achieved as a consequence of those words: offering courses in sexual education – we prefer to call it sexual information, but let us not nitpick the pope’s words – in the schools. I wish to underscore here that Pope Francis has broken a taboo which has been followed by all his predeccessors from Peter onwards”.

---

It’s hard to say in a few lines everything that is wrong with such a series of false statements which demonstrate either an abysmal ignorance or total bad faith or both.
- Francis has certainly not been the first pope to say sex is a gift from God. What else was St. John Paul II’s theology of the body which was at the heart of his teachings on sexuality and matrimony?
- As for the idea that before this pope, the Church had near-zero consideration for women, has anyone read the same pope’s Mulieris dignitatem (On the dignity of women) which is a true and proper hymn to women?
[And, more importantly, what is the Church’s devotion to Mary but its apotheosis of womanhood?]

But why must we waste time with those who, instead of first informing themselves to know what they are talking about, prefer to wallow in their prejudices?

What is most disquieting – and saddening – is that the pope’s words, unfortunately, are such as to merit the enthusiastic support of those who have always advocated abortion and euthanasia, those who have always upheld the culture of death rather than the culture of life.

Edward Pentin blogged earlier on one of the pope's more striking
self-contradictory ambiguities on that inflight news conference:


Pope Francis says NO
then MAYBE to married priests

January 29, 2019

During his inflight press conference from Panama, Pope Francis gave conflicting signals about the ordination of married men in the Latin rite, on the one hand saying he was personally opposed to it while at the same time open to considering possible radical exceptions.

His comments come as an upcoming synod on the Amazon in October is expected to debate the possibility of ordaining married men in order to alleviate priest shortages — a move that some observers say is a means of allowing married priests universally through the back door.

Central to the Pope’s comments were his references to missionary Bishop Fritz Lobinger, emeritus of Aliwal, South Africa, known to be a pioneer of the idea of viri probati — the ordination of older married men of proven virtue.

Although the Pope reiterated several times during the press conference that he could not see himself ordaining married men, he made it clear that it was “something to study, think, rethink, and pray about.”

Referring to areas suffering shortages of priests, he said “some possibility” exists for married clergy in “very far places,” adding that when there is a “pastoral necessity, the pastor should think of the faithful.”

But it was his emphasis on Bishop Lobinger’s ideas, contained in his 1998 book Like his Brothers and Sisters — Ordaining Community Leaders, that drew most attention. The Pope described the book as “interesting” and warranting further study.

A native of Regensburg, Germany, 90-year-old Bishop Lobinger has long championed his proposal to ordain community elders, or a “team of elders,” who would carry out a special ministry. These men, selected from their communities, could be married and not have attended seminary. The theory, Bishop Lobinger says, is based on the early Church.

In a 2010 article in US Catholic, he outlined his proposal and firmly advocated the ordination of married men, saying if the Church “continues to admit only celibate, university-trained candidates to ordination, there will be no hope of ever overcoming the scarcity of the sacraments.”

He claimed hundreds of bishops agreed with his radical proposal while acknowledging that hundreds of others did not, fearing that it “might solve one problem” only to then create “bigger ones.” But in common with the Pope, he called for a greater discussion of the issue so that “it will become more apparent that certain proposals will not work while others will.”

He also predicted pressure to ordain women would increase if his proposal were accepted: “Because the majority of proven local leaders are women, it is unavoidable that the question of their inclusion among ordained elders will arise, though present Church law does not permit it,” he said.

The Pope’s reference to Bishop Lobinger comes as little surprise as Cardinal Reinhard Marx recommended he read the retired bishop’s works when the German bishops were on their ad limina visit in 2015.

It also comes after various statements in recent years advocating possible changes to allow married clergy, notably from Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, and the prefect of the Congregation for Clergy, Cardinal Beniamino Stella.

Bishop Lobinger’s theories are also backed by Bishop Erwin Kräutler, whom Francis appointed last March to a pre-synodal council which is preparing the Pan-Amazonian synod in October.

Bishop Kräutler, an Austrian missionary who ministered in the Brazilian rain forest from 1981-2015, has openly said finding ways to address the priest shortage will be one of the main topics of the upcoming synod. As a result, he believes the synod will lead to the ordination of married men to the priesthood and women to the permanent diaconate.

In an interview with the Austrian Catholic news agency Kathpress soon after the announcement of the synod in December 2017, he said: “Perhaps even Bishop Fritz Lobinger's suggestion will be taken up.”

In his comments to reporters, the Pope said Bishop Lobinger’s book “could help to think about the problem” and that “the theology should be studied.”

Fraternity - word of the year - as L'Osservatore Romano announced.

It took quite a while for Maureen Mullarkey to complete her essay reacting to the reigning pope's 'word of the year' - fraternity - as he bandied it about in his
Christmas Day urbi et orbi message. Part 1 was published Jan 8 and Part 2 only on Jan. 29. Because of the lag, I am posting both parts together here:

Francis and mirages of fraternity - Part 1

January 8, 2019

Pope Francis’s Christmas message, clotted with the word fraternity, was such a brew of pernicious banality that it is hard to know where to start. From the perspective of our 24-hour news cycle, a Moloch that feeds on contrived obsolescence, the papal dispatch asks to be addressed before the end of Christmastide.

However, what matters is not one passing item in the news but its substratum, something steady and abiding. In this case, that bedrock something is hostile to the very civilization — however flawed —which has sustained the Church that gave it life and breath.

This pontificate hungers for a kind of matricide. So, permit me, please, to work toward Francis’s baleful Christmas message by degrees.

Step back from the mess of it and begin, instead, with Daniel J. Mahoney’s The Idol of Our Age. The book’s subtitle How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity applies in spades to Francis and his doctrinaire maunderings.

Mahoney, a political philosopher, places discussion of “the perplexity that is Francis” in a larger historical context: that of the modern, “progressive” moral order derived from the convolutions and fallacies of what is termed “social justice.”

Writing as a Catholic layman, he summarizes his approach to Francis in the Introduction:

---

For the first time in the history of the Church, we have a pope who is half-humanitarian and thoroughly blind to the multiple ways in which humanitarian secular religion subverts authentic Christianity.

With winks and nods, he challenges the age-old Catholic teaching that there are intrinsic evils that cannot be countenanced by a faithful Christian or any person of good will. In a thousand ways, he sows confusion in the Church and the world. His views on politics are summary, to say the least, and partake of ... inordinate egalitarianism.

Pope Francis has displayed indulgence toward left-wing tyrannies that are viciously anti-Catholic to boot. His views on Islam are equally summary and partake of an unthinking political correctness (the Koran, he insists against all evidence, always demands non-violence). He has spoken respectfully about Communism, the murderous scourge of the twentieth century.

---

Mahoney wastes no sympathy on Francis’s open flirtation with pacifism. While Christianity is incompatible with terrorism and wars of aggression, charity requires legitimate authority to shield those in its care from tyranny and aggression. He quotes Roger Scruton: “...the right of defense stems from your obligation to others.”

Mahoney echoes Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man in Immoral Society (1932). Niebuhr’s tragic view of history and human nature contrasts with Francis’s failure — or refusal — to face the world’s complexities by ducking behind a sentimental utopianism that paralyzes. As Niebuhr understood, morality does not imply passivity in the face of evil. Mahoney draws on that insight to remind us that few Christians know how to think politically. Jorge Bergoglio is not among those few.

The Sermon on the Mount is not a call for societal suicide or even a guide to public policy. As scholars have noted, Christ’s “effusive” praise for the Roman centurion on the road to Capernaum (Mt 8:5-13) is hardly compatible with pacifism.

Yet in a recent book of interviews with a French social scientist, Pope Francis declares that “no war is just” and that one “always wins with peace.” He has obviously not considered “the peace of the grave”. By seemingly siding with peace at any price, he prevents statesmen, Christian statesmen, from carrying out their responsibilities to justice and the common good.

Francis does not consider the potential existence of that moral monstrosity: an unjust peace. His thinking on such matters avoids engagement with the varied motives that animate human ambitions — from blind hatred and religious fanaticism to lust for power: "One expects more expertise in the soul from the Holy Roman Pontiff, and not the crude and reductive economism he regularly displays." (Mahoney)

Francis blesses the city of Rome, and all the wide world, with a wish for fraternity. Weightless, the word replays as if promoting a brand name.
- Shelves are stocked with the product line: “bonds of fraternity,” ” relations of fraternity,” ” wishes for fraternity,” “the foundation and strength of fraternity.”
- Cans are labelled: “Fraternity among individuals of every nation and culture. Fraternity among people with different ideas . . . . Fraternity among persons of different religions.”

Jesus of Nazareth said nothing about fraternity. Rather, he told us to love our enemies. That is not the simple, smiling precept it is too often taken to be. It is more clear-eyed than it sounds to us. We moderns are two thousand years past the precariousness of Jewish listeners chafing under Roman domination.

Implicit in Jesus’s injunction is recognition that enemies are real. They exist. Beyond the bounds of pity and remote from feelings of kinship, enemies marshal themselves against us and seek our ruin.

To love them is first to know them. And the knowing does not absolve them from their intentions nor exempt them from the consequences of their acts. Neither does it disburden us from protecting those in our care. In this context, to love is to wish ultimate good, not damnation, to the enemy. It is a love that has nothing sentimental or emotionally tender about it.

The Book of Genesis presents us with an elemental, cautionary story about man’s aptitude for brotherhood. Untethered from a biblical sensibility, Francis forgets that history began east of Eden, in that place where Cain slew his brother Abel. Cain’s act of fraternal enmity insures that, pace Baudelaire, there is no such thing as the race of Abel. Righteous Abel died childless. It is the race of Cain that fills the world. From within the dogma of Original Sin emerges realization that we are Cain’s progeny, not Abel’s.

No reference to fraternity appears in the gospels. It was the Enlightenment that bequeathed us the word. It is from Robespierre, not Jesus Christ, that the word fraternity acquired its laurels. In circulation during the French Revolution, the tripartite motto —fraternité, égalité, liberté — gained public currency from Robespierre’s 1790 speech celebrating the organization of the National Guard.

Every tricoteuse in Paris, knitting beside the guillotine, could mutter fraternité. It is a bloodstained locution. Unmindful of its historic resonance, Francis seizes the word, drenches it in treacle, and intones:

---

Our differences are not a detriment or a danger; they are a source of richness. As when an artist is about to make a mosaic, it is better to have tiles of many colors available, rather than just a few!... As brothers and sisters, we are all different from each other. We do not always agree, but there is an unbreakable bond uniting us, and the love of our parents helps us to love one another. The same is true for the larger human family, but here, God is our “parent,” the foundation and strength of our fraternity.

---

Francis shrinks the complex realities of cultural difference —o f distinct patrimonies, of disparate aims and interests — to the accidents of skin color. “Tiles of many colors” falsifies the realities of the lived life in the trenches of geography and time.

Fidelity to truth — truth on the ground where we live — demands we ditch mawkish references to the “human family.” There is no such entity. We are all one species, but we are a family only in the taxonomic sense (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, et alia). To pretend otherwise is to denature the concept of family, dissipating the word, bloating it into a mystical fog drained of humane application.

Pope Francis & mirages of fraternity - Part 2

January 29, 2019

In his book The Idol of Our Age, Daniel J. Mahoney devotes a chapter to “Pope Francis's Humanitarian Version of Catholic Social Teaching.” Mahoney’s subtitle — How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity — sets the tone of his appraisal of Francis. A careful writer and a courteous man, he is concerned to give due weight to both the consistencies and inconsistencies of Francis’ relation to traditional Catholic teaching:

---

We need a “hermeneutic of continuity” that forthrightly confronts Francis’s ample continuities and equally ample discontinuities with the great tradition that preceded him. We owe the pope both respect and the full exercise of the arts of intelligence.

---

[Yes, of course, but the obvious problem with Bergoglio is that even just one of his 'ample discontinuities' far outweighs and nullifies his 'ample continuities' which are to be expected because, after all, he cannot simply reverse more than 2000 years of Catholic teaching wholesale - he's mad but there is method in his madness, a method that will not make him stab himself in the heart by professing total apostasy from the Church in one fell swoop and threby undercutting the very authority that now conveniently enables him to dismantle that teaching brick by brick, as it were!]

Assertions of respect for the papal office thread through the text, a careful hemstitch joining obeisance to critique:

---

“We owe this pope our respect and our judgment, but..." .

“Pope Francis is admirably critical of abortion and population control . . .but . . . .”

Evangelli Gaudi “draws on the work and insight of Franciss’ great predecessors . . . but . . . .”

“Pope Francis has important and interesting things to say about sin, relativism, and divine mercy . . . but . . . .”

“He is at his best when he thinks and writes in continuity with the full weight of Christian wisdom . . . but . . . .”

---

Dyads pile up. It is a courtly convention to assure us that Mahoney is no flame thrower: "Be advised, Reader, that the author is a judicious scholar mindful of manners due the dignity of the papal office." Nevertheless, the heap of buts signals severe discrepancy between soothing precedent and disquieting intent.

When “the arts of intelligence” are applied to the actions of an office holder who distorts his office, it is reasonable — even mandatory — to withhold respect from him.
- An office confers authority.
- How that authority is used determines the degree of respect held out to the officeholder.
- Respect is earned through right use of authority.
- It is forfeited by misuse.
- Deference toward a man who disfigures his office is a species of complicity in the disfigurement.
(Consider Yeats’ question. It applies here: “How do we know the dancer from the dance?”)

Mahoney’s politesse is the requisite stance of a distinguished faculty member in a Catholic institution (Assumption College, Worcester, MA). It is also a deflection from the fact that this pope’s “ample continuities,” all scrupulously observed, are carriers of rupture and contradiction. Protective coloration, they camouflage intent, disguise fracture, and conceal political ideology under stripes of synthetic piety.

It is a devious tactic — the old Fabian approach. Francis is waging, by degrees, a war of indirection and attrition against the very civilization that honors and sustains the papacy. Francis brings to the Chair of Peter a ruinous cunning that lulls the credulous to accept his reduction of the Great Commission to a left-wing policy mandate.

Put simply, Jorge Bergoglio knows how to boil a frog.


It is difficult to determine what else he knows that is of significance. Francis’s Christmas hymn to fraternity was an embarrassment of politicized porridge and theological incoherence. It goes from bad:

---

What is the universal message of Christmas? It is that God is a good Father and we are all brothers and sisters.
To worse:
I want to mention, too, all those peoples that experience ideological, cultural and economic forms of colonization and see their freedom and identity compromised, as well as those suffering from hunger and the lack of educational and health care services.

---

Reference to colonization is code for sins of the West, a hint that migrants flooding toward the West are simply claiming their due. These “pilgrims” herald a new dawn of fraternity between competing religions and national interests. The lion will lie down with the lamb on the Korean Peninsula, in Africa, the Ukraine, the Middle East. It’s easy. All you need is love.

Even the most besotted papalist should spot the rot in this:

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May this blessed season allow Venezuela once more to recover social harmony and enable all the members of society to work fraternally for the country’s development...

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Social harmony? Absence of it is the engine of Venezuela’s tragedy? Not hyperinflation and the starvation economy created by the same anti-market “social justice” nostrums that socialist dictators admire? Monica Showalter responded to the delusional tenor of the Christmas address:

---

Venezuela became a hellhole in no small part because of the heavy permeation of the social fabric by Liberation Theology... I recall that back in the Hugo Chávez heyday, when the country was beginning its road to servitude, the Maryknoll magazines were full of praise for the Chavista government, even when it was starting to get obvious that the social fabric was unraveling. . . Remember when Chávez announced on the radio that it was OK for the poor to steal, based on biblical doctrine?

---

That last refers to a 2000 “Hello, President” talk by Chávez in which he declared people were “allowed to steal if you’re hungry.” Venezuelans wasted no time accepting this unofficial invitation to crime.

Earlier this month, Venezuelan bishops issued a statement that Nicolás Maduro’s new, contested presidential term is “morally unacceptable” because “his government has caused a human and social deterioration in people and in the wealth of the nation.”

Mary Anastasia O’Grady reported that within hours of the swearing in of opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s interim president, he was recognized by the U.S. and some 20 other democracies, 11 of them in Latin America. [The European Union quickly followed suit.] Others advised Maduro to leave the country.

Rightly calling Maduro “an international symbol of human rights abuse,” O’Grady adds: “The tyrant isn’t entirely alone. Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Hezbollah stand with him.” S

Still, Francis refuses to censure Maduro. He prefers the role of mediator — as if it were possible to split the difference between despotism and freedom, economic collapse and solvency, cruelty and the common good. Or between good and evil.

Negating his own emphasis on fraternity, the pope stonewalls his brother bishops in Venezuela. He will not join his voice to theirs in calling tyranny to account. Calculated neutrality toward the source of Venezuela’s desperation suggests that Francis’s insistence on impartial mediation covers a preference for Maduro.

Francis’s Urbi et Orbi message appealed to the child Jesus to “bring relief to the beloved land of Ukraine “ and to . . “ the inhabitants of beloved Nicaragua.” “May the child Jesus allow the beloved and beleaguered country of Syria to . . . find fraternity.” “May the little child whom we contemplate today . . . watch over all the children of the world.”

These milksop pieties mimic charitable empathy but lack its substance — the spiritual dignity that resides in political intelligence and in truth-telling. Francis would have Catholics binge on syrup while he travels the world flattering global anti-market forces poised to create more Cubas, more Venezuelas, more poverty and desolation.

The child in the manger grew into a Man Who bled out on a Roman cross. Here in the shadow of that cross, it is to Him we send our prayers. Francis’s infantilizing sentimentality contributes nothing to the welfare of nations. It serves only to impair understanding — of the Incarnation no less than of governments.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/02/2019 15:41]

What better way to end the Christmas season after the Mass commemorating this beautiful feast day than this lovely and masterful poem by the kaleidoscopic intellectual and Catholic wonder that was John Henry Newman, written by him four years after he converted to Catholicism. From Prof. Barb Nyman on the Blessed CArdinal Newman site, we have this invaluable introduction:

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With this ingenious poem, Blessed John Henry Newman weaves together the entire liturgical year using the theme of light as the thread. In Newman’s day (and still in the Traditional calendar), the Christmas season ended 40 days after Christmas on February 2nd with simultaneous feasts: the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple. These feasts are an extension of Christ’s Nativity.

It was Simeon to whom Mary presented Jesus, and in his prophecy to her, found in the Gospel of St. Luke (2:34-35), he told Mary her heart would be pierced with a sword. Before Simeon gave this prophecy to Our Lady, he referred to her infant Son as the Light to be the revelation of the Gentiles, and because of this, light and candles play an important role in the Mass, when the candles for devotional use throughout the year are blessed, hence the name for this Feast – Candlemas.

Newman not only brings all of this into the poem in the first two stanzas, but manages in the third stanza to extend the light imagery up to and including the Paschal candle, lit on Holy Saturday.

Before the Paschal candle is lit, though, there will be the long “dim” season of Lent. In another masterful stroke, Newman, in the fifth stanza equates the sword which pierces Mary’s heart to the wounds we give Our Lord by our sins.

The regular rhythm and uniform lines of 4 iambic feet alternating with lines of 3 iambic feet, give this lovely poem the sound of a hymn, which indeed Newman intended for it to be.

In the last stanza, Newman brings light into all time, by reminding us that Jesus is and ever shall be the light of the world, and His Mother, our mother, music to us, rest for the weary soul.

The Virgin Mary presented Jesus in the Temple as a child, and at the foot of the Cross she stands next to her Son. Both in joy and in suffering, she reflects the light of Christ. Are we ready to stand with her, and to allow Christ’s light to shine in our hearts?

---

CANDLEMAS
by John Henry Newman, 1849

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THE Angel-lights of Christmas morn,
Which shot across the sky,
Away they pass at Candlemas,
They sparkle and they die.

Comfort of earth is brief at best,
Although it be divine;
Like funeral lights for Christmas gone,
Old Simeon’s tapers shine.

And then for eight long weeks and more,
We wait in twilight grey,
Till the high candle sheds a beam
On Holy Saturday.

We wait along the penance-tide
Of solemn fast and prayer;
While song is hush’d, and lights grow dim
In the sin-laden air.

And while the sword in Mary’s soul
Is driven home, we hide
In our own hearts, and count the wounds
Of passion and of pride.

And still, though Candlemas be spent
And Alleluias o’er,
Mary is music in our need,
And Jesus light in store.

---

Though this beautiful hymn is not found in hymnals, nevertheless, it is sung in many oratories to the grand tune: Old Winchester.


P.S. on Candlemas


Simeon's Song of Praise, Aert de Gelder, ca. 1700.


One of the most beautiful canticles from the New Testament, Simeon's Nunc dimittis - his song of praise when he beheld the infant Jesus as the fulfillment of the promise made to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not die until he had seen the Messiah - is the traditional 'Gospel Canticle' of Night Prayer (Compline) in the Divine Office, just as Benedictus and Magnificat are the traditional Gospel Canticles of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer respectively.

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Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine, secundum verbum tuum in pace:
Quia viderunt oculi mei salutare tuum
Quod parasti ante faciem omnium populorum:
Lumen ad revelationem gentium, et gloriam plebis tuae Israel.

“Now, Master, you may let your servant go
in peace, according to your word,
for my eyes have seen your salvation,
which you prepared in sight of all the peoples,
a light for revelation to the Gentiles,
and glory for your people Israel".
(Luke 2, 29-32 )

---

Witnesses to the light
Candlemas marks the goal or telos of the Nativity —
the coming into the world of the Light of the World and
recognition of that Light by those for whom God prepared it.
by David Paul Deavel

February 2, 2019

Happy Candlemas! Now, and only now, is the feast of Christmas complete.

While many on the standard secular/Protestant calendar think it was complete on December 26 or whenever the last relative has been celebrated with, and many Catholics who pay attention think it concludes with Epiphany, it really is only concluded now.

Today is the day on which the tree, whose needles are now mostly on the ground, must be taken down. Today the crèche must go.

But today is the end of the Christmas season in more than just a conclusory way. Today’s feast marks the goal or telos of the Nativity — the coming into the world of the Light of the World and the recognition of that Light by those for whom God has prepared it.

Clearly not everyone recognized this tremendous event for what it was worth. We read in John 1 that “He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not” (1:10). Our Lord did not grow up surrounded by paparazzi — how on earth could any child grow “in stature and wisdom, and favor with God and men,” as Luke puts it, under such circumstances? He did not face being the subject of TMZ stories and People Magazine spreads. “TMZ reports: ‘Light of the World’ Gone for Three Days — Response to Mother Doesn’t Sound Very Perfect, Does It?”

No, the Revelation of the Light was given to select witnesses who represented the world who did not know Him. And who were those witnesses at the Nativity? Who is in that crèche that I must now box up?

I think one of the most profound analyses of the witnesses was given in G. K. Chesterton’s 1925 classic The Everlasting Man. And before I get to Chesterton’s understanding of those crèche-figures, I need to explain a little bit about what he was doing in that book as a whole.

In The Everlasting Man, Chesterton is setting about to respond to the universal history given by his friend H. G. Wells in The Outline of History. Wells’s vision was the modern evolutionary and progressive vision of things in which things start from a very simple accidental beginning and continue to get more complicated and, well, better, as time goes on.

Chesterton’s view is very different. He has no problems with the mechanics of evolution per se, nor that the world began in a less organized fashion and became more organized. After all, that is also the picture of Genesis 1 in which God creates a cosmos, an ordered thing, out of chaos. But Chesterton distinctly departs from Wells in thinking that man is simply a slightly more evolved form of other life — what the New Atheists today call a “jumped-up monkey.”

No, in Chesterton’s outline of history, there are three important turning points:
- First, when God creates out of nothing and makes the chaos which he will shape into order.
- Second, when man, who is not just quantitatively different with his big brain and more complex structure, is created.
- And third, when Christ comes into the world.

Particularly after the creation of man, Chesterton does not think of history as one smooth ride of progress from the less complicated to the more, from the worse to the better, but instead as a drama in which man is created with all the dignity and power with which he always had. Sure, he’d be willing to admit that evolution continues with the human species — thank God, after all, that most of the race developed the capacity to drink cow’s milk.

But he does not think of early humans as “cave men” and modern humans as sophisticated and morally developed creatures. Instead, he sees the history of the world as a history of man advancing technologically, politically, and intellectually, but always hindered by his own lack of moral power— by the effects of original sin — and consequently cut off from the God who made him.

In fact, the rise of technology and civilization is always, for Chesterton, a very dodgy thing, for the “lower” and “simpler” forms of human life are more human and the “higher” and “more complex” forms of life often end up being abhorrent. Barbarism is not always opposed to civilization. Barbarism is often what civilization is.

Think of those memes of the rise of man which depict man starting as a bent-over monkey, gradually growing taller and larger, and finally erect and looking out onto the world — and then in the final picture he is again bent over, looking at his smart phone. A very Chestertonian meme indeed.

The outline of history is not, for Chesterton, ultimately about technology, but about man finding moral and spiritual fulfillment — it’s about finding or, perhaps better, remembering the God who made us.

And in the history of the world, there have been essentially two kinds of approach to the truth about that God who, because of sin, is left behind.

The first is that of the mythologists, which is to say, the poets, which is to say, most ordinary people.[????]
- They see the beauty of the world — and its ugliness, too - and know that there is truth behind it.
- Not only do they know there is truth behind it, but they know that there is a true someone behind it.
- And they believe that the way to get to that truth is through the power of the imagination.
- They believe, says Chesterton, “that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.”

The thing about poets is that their sensibility is very particular. They do not see beauty as an abstraction but as a vivid and particular quality of things themselves. It is not “the science of afforestation,” says Chesterton, but “this particular forest” in which they see the piercing light. Do they really believe, however, in the spirit of the trees? Or the goddess in the grove?

Chesterton observes that most people are like children: Do they really believe that to step on a crack will really break their mothers’ backs? No, mythology, poetry, paganism — and it’s all wrapped up together — is a kind of daydream of reality.

It is, as the theologian Paul Simon would have said, all about “hints and allegations” that are taken alternately sincerely or insincerely, depending on any number of factors. They are shadowy realities that ultimately, as Christians, we believe are foreshadowings.

And yet a word more about the grotesque and the ugly side of paganism. Those foreshadowings are indeed shadowy, the more humanity went on, especially when knowledge and technology were growing.

When children cease to believe in the leprechauns and fairies, they do not therefore cease to believe that there is something out there — they quite often seek out that truth of things on the grotesque side. The relatively innocent side of paganism is often left behind and something crueler approached. If they can no longer believe in or be attracted to good angels and fairies, humans will often seek out the demons.

This is what Chesterton sees as in the late antique world before the coming of Christ.
- The playful superstition of humanity is abandoned in favor of what he calls a “realistic superstition,” the “sort of superstition that does definitely look for results.”
- This is the world of Carthage and its sacrificing of children by parents in order to gain good results in this life.
- This is the kind of magic that is, in many ways, indistinguishable from modern science.
- Its goal is not to enjoy the gods’ company but to gain their power.

I think about Conan the Barbarian before he is about to get revenge, telling his god Krom that he doesn’t pray to him often, but that he wants Krom to help him get revenge on his enemies — and if he doesn’t, says Conan, “to Hell viss you.”
- It is Voldemort exploring dark magic.
- It is our billionaires who are trying to become “transhuman” and live forever.
- It is our politicians who please their base by legislating for abortion until pretty much after birth.

But there is a second way to the truth that doesn’t involve gods or demons — and that is the way of philosophy. It is truly Robert Frost’s “road less traveled” in the history of the world. For it is usually only a few who will pursue this path.
- They do not take the poets and the poems very seriously at all.
- At best, they will want to take the myths and abstract a theory about the nature of things or even the nature of God.
- At worst, they will want to perhaps ban the poets, as Plato suggested.
- But they rarely will acknowledge that they are on the same plane as the mythologists.
- They are content to work out their sometimes brilliant and sometimes idiosyncratic understandings of things.

Chesterton is content to acknowledge many of the great advances of the great philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Pharaoh Akenhaten (the one who worshiped a single sun god), Confucius, even the Buddha.

But there is one problem with all the philosophers. Let me quote Chesterton at length here for a minute:

---

...The point about them is that they all think that existence can be represented by a diagram instead of a drawing; and the rude drawings of the childish mythmakers are a sort of crude and spirited protest against that view.

They cannot believe that religion is really not a pattern but a picture.. None of them could understand a thing that began to draw the proportions just as if they were real proportions, disposed in the living fashion which the mathematical draughtsman would call disproportionate. Like the first artist in the cave, it revealed to incredulous eyes the suggestion of a new purpose in what looked like a wildly crooked pattern; he seemed only to be distorting his diagram, when he began for the first time in all the ages to trace the lines of a form and of a Face.

---

And thus do we come to the Incarnation in which the wild diagrams of the philosophers and the wild day dreams of the poets start to come together.

For Chesterton there are three sets of witnesses to the Incarnation —the poets, the philosophers, and finally the demons — or, more precisely, the demon worshippers. Who are they?

First, the poets. It was the shepherds out in their fields to whom the news is given first. And shepherds are, for Chesterton, the kind of men who had mythologies — who sensed most “that the soul of a landscape is a story and the soul of a story is a personality.”
- They were the ones for whom the message was seen as the confirmation of what they had dimly suspected: that “holy things could have a habitation and and that divinity need not disdain the limits of time and space.”
- Mythology was always a search for the truth under the guise of beauty and the limits of material reality.
- It was not wrong, the shepherds discovered, in being “as carnal as the Incarnation.”
- These witnesses to the light represent the people of the world who long for a shepherd — a true, 'populist' leader who will never let them down. Who will show them the face of God. And they have found him.

Who, then, are the philosophers? Chesterton again:

---

The truth that is tradition has wisely remembered them almost as unknown quantities, as mysterious as their mysterious and melodious names - Melchior, Caspar, Balthazar. But there came with them all that world of wisdom that had watched the stars in Chaldea and the sun in Persia; and we shall not be wrong if we see in them the same curiosity that moves all the sages. They would stand for the same human ideal if their names had really been Confucius or Pythagoras or Plato.

They were those who sought not tales but the truth of things; and since their thirst for truth was itself a thirst for God, they also have had their reward. But even in order to understand that reward, we must understand that for philosophy as much as mythology, that reward was the completion of the incomplete.

---

Philosophy was, is, Chesterton reminds us, no different than mythology is — search for the truth. And now in the Wise Men we see the searchers finding what they searched for — the truth, and it is found in a religion. And not only in a religion, but in a fairly narrow religion at that, one that, like their philosophy, had looked askance at the mythologies of the world. I often wonder if Melchior or Balthazar was one of those guys who wears a t-shirt that says, “It’s Not the Destination, It’s the Journey.” He would have had to take it off.

Who represents the demons? Who represents the dark side of paganism? It is Herod, who believes the reports of the philosopher-kings (and who knows? Perhaps he had heard of the shepherds, too?) and wants to use those reports to ensure he remains on the throne by killing this king of the Jews. This witness to the Light is a hostile witness, one who wishes to extinguish it as soon as possible — and he is willing to sacrifice all the baby boys of Bethlehem in order to accomplish it.

“The demons also, in that first festival of Christmas,” says Chesterton, “feasted after their own fashions.” And yet the Light was come and would enlighten the world — when it erupted into the world, there was a kind of undermining of our ordinary life going on.

What then do we celebrate on this Feast of the Presentation? Chesterton does not go on to discuss this ending of the Christmas story in The Everlasting Man. But I think we can extrapolate here.

If the witnesses to the light represented the world on the search for truth, either innocently or with malign intent, then Saints Simeon and Anna represent for us the completion of the tale.

Can we trust shepherds, foreigners, or even kings who believe some tale about a king who comes to right a world that has been wrong seemingly from the beginning?

No, what the Feast of the Presentation brings to us is the validation. Sure, you can diagnose yourself on Web MD and you can have all sorts of smart neighbors who have read all about the symptoms of what they think you’ve got in a number of articles and you can listen to your neighbor who either with sadness or ill-disguised glee tells you that you must have the disease because her cousin’s mother-in-law’s neighbor had it and she heard that it was just like what you have. But when you want to be certain, you go to the medical center and you hear from the crusty old doctors who know what they’re talking about.

Saints Anna and Simeon are the crusty old doctors who have been around forever. Anna the Prophetess, we know from the Scripture, had been widowed for many years. Instead of taking up Zumba or traveling to Europe or political advocacy, she had spent her time in the temple, “worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day” (Lk 2:37). She had done the preparatory work to see the light and she was rewarded, for as Luke tells us, she came up just at that moment and saw the child Jesus and and spoke of him to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem (v. 38).

Curiously, we get less biography of St. Simeon, but we do know that he was also righteous and devout — and he was “looking for the consolation of Israel, and was filled with the Holy Spirit.” He was rewarded according to the promise that he would not see death before the arrival of the promised anointed one of Israel.

Some of the traditions around him are, if not true, revelatory.
According to one, he was one of the translators of the Greek translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint — and had been corrected by divine providence when he wanted to translate Isaiah 7:14 as simply “a young woman shall conceive.” It would be a “virgin,” he was instructed. According to another, he was 360 years old.

I don’t think we have to take these literally to take them seriously. Like Anna, he had spent much time in prayer and study of the Scriptures that foretold the Messiah. He had literally studied the whole circle of divine truth — 360 degrees — and he was ready when called upon by God to identify the Light to the Gentiles.

If there’s a lesson for us in Anna and Simeon, it is that we stand in their place. Unlike the pagans who knew only shadows from their philosophical and poetic searches, we have the truth in front of us in our very midst.
- Do we study?
- Do we desire the coming of the Lord’s Christ in our own lives where we have left him out?
- Do we spend our time in the temple praying?

For it is our call as Catholics to be, not shepherds or wise men, but dwellers in the presence of the Light who take that Light into ourselves in order to pass it on and help others see it.

David Paul Deavel is Editor of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture and visiting assistant professor of Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

From my favorite Jesuit of all time, the indomitable Father Schall, who gave all his admirers and friends a brief scare during the recent holidays over a touch-and-go
post-surgical complication that he lived through in time to mark his 91st birthday on January 20. Ad multos annos!!!!

Life and death with a Jesuit:
Father Schall on the important things
Interview by
Kathryn Jean Lopez

Jan 29, 2019

Jesuit Father James V. Schall had a close call at the age of 91 earlier this month. A longtime professor of politics at Georgetown, he’s been living in retirement with his brother Jesuits in Los Gatos, California.

“At 91, one has little leeway. The old hide-and-seek cry, ‘Here I come, ready or not,’ is in place,” the priest said. “We do not know the day or hour. So, we abide in what is given to us in the now. We do not know if we are ready – we just try to be, to have faith and courage".

In an email exchange, Kathryn Jean Lopez spoke to the Jesuit about life and death.

What is best about life?
What is best about life? The first thing is having it, actually being in existence and knowing that we exist as this human being, that we do not cause ourselves to exist. We are given life. What is best about life is to know that it is a gift rather than some blind development with no internal meaning to itself as this, and not that, being.

Following on this realization of our own existence, what is best is knowing that we are not alone. We live among others and seek and rejoice in our friends. We discover in revelation that we are also to become friends of God. Our lives are often filled with sin and suffering, when we need others most, for forgiveness, for help, for understanding.

What is best about life is also the fact that we can walk this green earth, see things, and especially to get to know what not ourselves is. We exist also that what is not ourselves in all its variety and complexity can be known to us. We are not deprived of the world or others because we are not they. Instead in knowledge, the world and our friends return to us. We know a world that is not ourselves; we are blessed.

What is most challenging about life?
Finding its order. My book, The Order of Things, goes into this issue. At first sight, the world seems a chaos, a disorder. But the earth and all in it reveal an order that is not there because we put it there. We find it already there. This is what we discover when we discover anything.

Modern (and Muslim) voluntarism will claim that nothing is stable (an old Greek view also). Everything can be its opposite. Therefore, there are no evils. But there are evils, due precisely to a lack of order. Moral evil is a lack of order that we put in our own thoughts and deeds because we reject that order that is given to us that constitutes our own real good. The challenge of life is to deal with the reasons for evil without despair or without affirming that evil is good.

Even in the worst circumstances, we strive to see what is in order. But when it is our responsibility to affirm or allow that order, we can prefer our own ideas. In doing so, we implicitly reject the being that is. Thanks to the Redemption, this rejection can be repented and reordered, but even here, we are required to act in a way that confronts what is really wrong.

We are responsible for our own lives. In the end, the story of our personal existence will be told in terms of how we lived and understood the gift of life that we have been freely given.

What’s most unappreciated about life?
In a way, I suppose it has to do with what Aristotle said was the beginning of our knowledge, namely, our capacity to wonder. Samuel Johnson (whose life is simply one of amazing wonder) cautioned that we are not to go about just wondering. We are to learn and come to conclusions. We are to know the truth of things, we in our very own minds.

But we are provoked by what is not ourselves. What is out there beyond our ken? We are not content simply to say, “I do not know or want to know.” We come to full knowledge only gradually. And we never cease to wonder about what is out there even when we know something about it.

So, I would say that what is most unappreciated about life is the adventure of it, the sense that it is really going someplace, and this lovely world is not its ending but beginning.
- In addition, we do not appreciate how much we can damage ourselves and others when we do not know the truth of things and reject the order of things to impose our own order on our lives and world.
- We have been redeemed, but we have not been excused in our freedom. We are not able to be friends with one another or with God unless we choose, by the way we finally live, to do so.

What is the most important gift of your life, besides life itself? Your priesthood? The sacraments?
I have long said, and urged the point on anyone who will listen, that the best thing that our parents give us is brothers and sisters, and eventually along with their children. Even if my two good brothers are with the Lord, their welcome to me and our own hassles have been a context of life that has always been a consolation to me. My good sister and my two step-sisters are also here.

Of course, priesthood and sacraments, the life of the Church as I have been given in the Society of Jesus, loom large. The Order in my time has provided me with education and opportunity that I could not otherwise imagine for a young man from a small town in Iowa. I have lived for a time in some great cities — San Francisco, Rome, Washington.

But the great gift to me was the chance to live a life relatively free to read and write and wonder how it all fit together. I have never been a “specialist,” and it probably shows, but I have thought often about the whole. I think that leisure to wonder about what it is all about has been a great gift to me.

I have loved teaching and the students that somehow kept coming to my often meandering classes in which I was often but one step ahead of them, and not always then. Indeed, having young men and women there, to tell them just what there is to be read that will open their eyes to what is, has been part of this gift.

If I could entice but one student to read Joseph Pieper—an Anthology or E. F. Schumacher’s A Guide for the Perplexed, I would be happy with the chance of being there to see the delight the student saw on actually reading these good books, or Plato or Aristotle or Augustine or Aquinas or Johnson.

Are you ready? And how do you know that you are?
At 91, one has little leeway. The old hide-and-seek cry, “Here I come, ready or not,” is in place. We do not know the day or hour. So we abide in what is given to us in the now. We do not know if we are “ready” – we just try to be, to have faith and courage. If we had certitude about these things, we would already be dead.

Are there any last words that you might like to add in the unlikely event that this is your last interview?
What an amusing way to put it! The “unlikely event”! Yes, Schall can be long-winded. I noted the other day that the complete listing of what I have published according to date and source since my first essay in The Commonweal, in 1954, comes to about 150 pages. This includes books, book reviews, chapters in books, academic essays, columns, lighter and shorter essays, interviews, letters to editors, and newspaper essays. Indeed, St. Augustine’s Press is yet to publish one of these days a collection of my earlier JVS interviews.

I think that my last words remain those that I cited from Chesterton at the end of the “Last Lecture” — that all inns lead to that Great Tavern at the end of the world when we shall drink again with our friends in that eternal life that is offered to us by our very God when he called each of us out of nothing to exist and participate in His inner life.[

The Trinity has always fascinated me. A chapter in my first book, Redeeming the Time, was entitled: “The Trinity — God Is Not Alone.” Aristotle wondered if God was lonely and therefore lacked one of the highest of human values.

Since there is otherness, love, and inner-relationship in God, He does not need the world to explain his glory. The world as we know it reflects His glory, but His glory as it is awaits us. Our lives transcend the world, even while we remain in this world, with all its own tragedy, drama, and uncertainties. The last words remain —we are bound for glory, Deo Gratias!

How I wish that Fr. Schall had had a chance to meet with Joseph Ratzinger one on one, and vice-versa. The emeritus is nine months older than the Jesuit, but it would have been fascinating to see the interaction between two outstanding Catholic minds that sprung from their humble beginnings as a Bavarian village kid and an Iowa farm boy, respectively - who also share an uncommon passion for the vocation of teaching.

I hope Benedict XVI is aware of all the wonderful things Fr. Schall has written about him and his ideas, and that Ignatius Press will come out with an anthology of those writings. One of the major intellectual satisfactions possible during the Ratzinger Pontificate was that any major document or book by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI would soon be followed by a brilliant commentary from Fr. Schall, whom we can all remember fondly and gratefully for having been the first major voice to quickly grasp the seminal quality and significance of the Regensburg lecture and write about it promptly. (But I especially love him for his unflagging and oft-mentioned appreciation of Spe Salvi, perhaps the greatest short document ever written by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI - even if, for many, it was overshadowed by the unprecedented popular and intellectual success of Deus caritas est, his first and completely unexpected innovation of the papal encyclical genre. Both DCE and Spe salvi would, of course, go on to sell in the millions within weeks of their publication, unprecedented for any official papal document and unlikely to be matched again.)]

St. Michael's Golden-Domed Orthodox Cathedral in Kiev.


The transformation of the 'Eastern Lung'
by Myroslav Marynovych

February 2, 2019

Though almost no one in the West has taken notice, there has been a recent development important for all of global Christianity. A new Autocephalous Church of Ukraine was created during the Kyiv Orthodox Church Synod on November 15, 2018 – a move that has been welcomed by the Ukrainian Catholic Church.
- Is this just another outbreak of “Ukrainian nationalism” at a time when Russia has become increasingly active?
- Or the result of rivalry between Constantinople and Moscow for influence over Ukraine?
- And what does this event mean for the Orthodox as well as the Catholic Church?

In reality, it is a continental shift in the Church. St. John Paul II often urged Europe to breathe with two “lungs” – Western and Eastern. The “Western lung” is generally well understood. But what is the “Eastern lung”?

From the 11th to the 14th centuries, the answer was unequivocal: the Christian East was organized around two centers: the Church of Constantinople (including Greece and Athens) and its “daughter” Church, the Church of Kyiv, from which Christianity spread to other eastern lands.

Between the 15th and 18th centuries, a spectacular “continental” drift occurred, and Moscow displaced Kyiv (or Kiev). From then on, the Christian East was centered in Constantinople and Moscow. Muscovy incorporated into itself both the territory of ancient Kyivan Rus’ and the ecclesiastic Kyiv Metropoly, to become the Russian Empire.

The distinctive features of ancient Kyiv spirituality were rigorously whittled down to conform to the interests of the Moscow model of caesaropapism. “Suspicious” church books were burned. Dissident church figures were repressed.

Kyiv was subjected to the “Third Rome” (Moscow) under both the Czarist and Communist dictatorships. It was only the collapse of the USSR that defrosted the Stalinist glacier. What Kremlin propaganda presented as local nationalisms, allegedly destroying Christian unity, was the liberation of peoples and their ecclesiastical communities from the monopolistic influence of the most powerful of nationalisms: Russian chauvinism.

In Ukraine, the idea of an autocephalous Orthodox Church was reborn. The Kremlin and its subservient Russian Orthodox Church countered in two ways.
- The first was a methodical discrimination against both ecclesiastical and political developments in Ukraine.

As one Ukrainian observer has remarked, Russian propaganda used terminology apparently taken, at first glance, from “the Western dictionary of ‘humanitarian values’, but in fact operated with werewolf-ideas, parasite-ideas, and phantom-ideas” (Andriy Baumeister). The Western world did not notice this manipulation and, at least until recently, accepted it at face value.

- The second method consists in propagating the concept of the “Russian world,” put forward by Kirill, the Moscow Patriarch, which is in fact a quasi-religious imperial doctrine proclaiming the “spiritual unity” of all Russian-speaking and Orthodox peoples.

This became a way to legitimize the Russian Federation’s war against Ukraine, allegedly for the sake of protecting the Russian-speaking population. Now Kremlin propaganda is preparing the world for a possible new attack against Ukraine to “protect” the Orthodox population.

So today we are witnessing a deep transformation of the “Eastern lung.”
- The Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople sensed where things were headed and took the unusual move of intensifying its activities in the Orthodox world.
- Even though the Ecumenical Patriarch is only first among equals – not the sole leader of the church (like the pope in the West) – he took public responsibility for the fate of the daughter Church in Ukraine, which had been uncanonically severed from Constantinople.

There are many signs that the Eastern Slavic part of the “Eastern lung” is still largely dysfunctional. Communism was a deep trauma from which the peoples of the former Soviet republics have not yet totally recovered. In many places, people lost the Christian culture and true understanding of what Christian faith means. So, distressing news – on both the political and religious fronts – may still be forthcoming from Kyiv. But in spite of everything, serious reorganizing in underway, and future changes will affect the whole Christian world.

The influence of Constantinople may prove to be extremely important. This has already been manifested in the establishment of the Statute of the newly constituted Ukrainian Church, which substantially modified administrative procedures in the direction of democracy.

So far, Western Christians have been concerned primarily with preserving the recent status quo with Moscow, as if the Russian Orthodox are simply the whole of the Christian East. In Western eyes, this seemed crucial to Christian peace and ecumenical dialogue. The Vatican’s diplomacy has been careful not to intervene in the intra-Orthodox affairs. [How long can the reigning pope continue to 'ignore' the watershed Orthodox situation in the Ukraine? Of course, he complicated - and maybe compromised - the Church's position by taking the side of Russia in its invasion of the Ukraine, assiduously courting the Patriarch of Moscow, Kirill, with whom he hopes to seal a historic rapprochement by being the first pope to visit Moscow (the same kind of wooing he employed to get Beijing to come nearer to inviting him to 'China?. And how does his open wooing of Kirill affect his relation with the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew to whom he all but kowtowed literally when he visited Istanbul? The latter has absolutely no cards to deal with the Vatican. He cannot speak for all the Orthodox Churches, only for his much-reduced, almost token constituency in Istanbul.]

But the present situation creates a clear challenge for the Catholic Church. Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna stated recently: “How is the Vatican to interact with the new autocephalous Orthodox Church in Ukraine? If it recognizes it, that means conflict with the Moscow Patriarchate. If the Vatican does not recognize the new Church, that means conflict with the Ecumenical Patriarchate.”

The Western Churches must realize that the old status quo can no longer be maintained. The situation calls for a radical overhaul of current positions, including the reconsideration of the present models of ecumenism.
- Conscientious Christians cannot simply consider Russia’s language of ultimatums and exclusion as acceptable any longer.
- Ukrainian Orthodox believers are a legitimate part of the Christian oikumene and at present are under siege.
- They can become a catalyst for a civilized transformation of the entire post-Soviet space, starting with Russia.

Westerners would do well to understand the new realities in Eastern Europe, and that including Ukrainian Churches in broader contacts with the world can bring many more benefits than their continuing isolation.


After the fall of Communism, many Westerners expected that the Slavic world, long forced to remain silent, would finally be free to make its proper contribution to Christian culture and the entire globe. Today, with the establishment of an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church, it may well be that an important voice is finally beginning to be heard.

Myroslav Marynovych is Vice-Rector for mission at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine, and a President of the university’s Institute of Religion and Society. He was a founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, a prisoner of conscience (1977–1987), head of the Amnesty International structures in Ukraine (1991–1996), and former President of the Ukrainian Center of PEN International.'

Jesuit scholar of Islam assesses
the pope's visit to the UAE
by Edward Pentin


Egyptian native Father Henri Boulad says the historic visit offers a ‘golden opportunity’ to address some ‘thorny issues,’ but urges Pope Francis to take a more realistic approach toward Islam.
Edward Pentin

Pope Francis arrives in Abu Dhabi on Sunday, becoming the first pope in history to set foot on the Arab Peninsula. The key event of the Feb. 3-5 visit is a “Human Fraternity Meeting” of inter-religious leaders aimed at prompting the values of brotherhood and peaceful dialogue.

For Melkite Jesuit Father Henri Boulad, the visit could mark a “step forward in Christian-Muslim relations” provided the Holy Father raises “clearly sensitive issues” affecting the region.

An expert of Islam and author of nearly 30 books in 15 languages, Father Boulad told Register Rome correspondent Edward Pentin via email Jan. 19 that he expects the Pope to call on the Arab nations to face up to their responsibilities to welcome Muslim migrants from countries such as Iraq and Syria, but he also asked that the Holy Father change his position on Islam, calling his approach “much too naive and angelic.”

In an interview with the Register in 2017, Father Boulad said Islamist terrorists were applying what their religion teaches them, but that the Church had failed to address this because she had fallen prey to a leftist ideology that is destroying the West.

A native Egyptian, Father Boulad says that for dialogue to be fruitful, “we need a common basis of values and principles on which we all agree,” and that, given the UAE’s openness, the country “could — and should — play a key role to find such a basis in order to build together a permanent peace.”

Father Boulad, what is your opinion of the visit, the first by a pope to the Arab Peninsula? Is it a step forward or could it foster syncretism?
This first visit of a pope to the Arab Peninsula could mark a step forward in Christian-Muslim relations, provided that Pope Francis raises clearly certain sensitive issues, such as:
• the apostasy considered by Islam as a crime punishable by death; moreover, the UAE do not recognize or authorize the teaching of any religion except Islam.
• The status of second-class citizens and submission (dhimmi) for non-Muslims raises the issue of religious freedom.
• The status of women and the issue of citizen equality should be dealt with.
• If the Emirates disassociate themselves from Islamist terrorism, we expect them to firmly condemn the Muslim Brotherhood, Daesh [ISIS] and other extremist groups.
• Given the immense wealth available in the UAE, we expect them to give special care for Muslim migrants that have been coming over to Europe. Their support should be in concert with the oil monarchies of the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia.

Therefore, we are expecting the Pope to urge these Arab-Muslim countries to face up to their responsibilities vis-à-vis their Muslim brothers seeking to emigrate. [I'd be very surprised if he did that! Why wouldn't he have thought about that all these years, after nagging the European nations to take in all the Muslim migrants from AFrica and the Middle East? Besides, how many of those migrants seeking entry to Europe would even think of migrating to SAudi Arabia or the Emirates???] By welcoming them, they would spare them the cultural shock of their integration into Europe. COLORE=#B200FF]It is outrageous that these Gulf countries refuse to open their doors to Syrians and Iraqis welcomed by far-less-wealthy neighboring countries, such as Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Egypt. [But those welcomed in these countries are genuine refugees from the Iraqi and Syrian conflicts, for whom the immediate priority is just to get out ASAP of whatever hellhole they find themselves in, and for whom the nearest quickest recourse is usually one of these neighboring countries. They are not the Bergoglio hordes - those Muslim migrants from African seeking a new and more prosperous life in Europe while reinforcing the already significant Muslim enclaves in the major European cities! None of the Middle Eastern countries would nor could welcome refugees in such numbers!]

Do you think such visits to Muslim-majority nations can be more damaging than helpful to the Church and the faith?
Such visits cannot be damaging. Rather, they offer a golden opportunity to frankly address some of the thorny issues raised above, which require concrete answers. This visit could encourage the UAE to open up to a more liberal Islam. The Pope should emphasize that the Emirates are already on the right track, by their openness to Christians, to modernity and to human rights. I would highlight several recent initiatives in the Emirates, which augur the best for a new era in Christian-Muslim relations:
• Qatar is financing the construction of a Maronite church in Keserwan (January 2019);
• A cathedral will be built in Bahrain;
• Abu Dhabi will see the inauguration of St. Elias Cathedral; [and]
• The only Kuwaiti priest, Father [Emmanuel] Gharib, is able to celebrate the Bible in Bedouin attire.
However, we should not lose sight of what The Observatory of Religious Freedom says about Bahrain [e.g. non-Muslim missionary activities among Muslims are not allowed; the country’s Shia majority continues to face oppression] and the UAE [e.g., Muslim citizens do not have the right to change religion. Apostasy in Islam is punishable by death]. [As if see'hear/speak-no-Muslim-evil Bergoglio would ever bring that up!]

Do you think Francis has in any way improved in his interaction with Islam?
Unfortunately, no. I feel that Pope Francis has hardly changed his approach to Islam in any way. His policy of the outstretched hand is always the same: that is to say, much too naive and angelic. Massive migration to Europe, mainly from Muslim countries, which he supports, shows that he loses sight of the serious societal problems that will arise: the non-integration/assimilation of Muslims in host countries, the incompatibilities of Islam with human rights, secularism, freedom and equality — not to mention the contradictions in the Pope’s statements.

On the one hand, he asks the host countries to respect the culture of immigrants, their Islamic worldview and traditions. And on the other hand, he asks Muslims to integrate and to respect the laws of the host country. It is quite difficult to reconcile these two opposite views, since Muslims consider the Sharia [law] to stand above the laws of the secular European host countries.

It is well known that Muslims have never integrated in countries invaded by them. Rather, they have forced the conquered countries to lose — often permanently — their ethnic and cultural identities, their religions, their languages and their traditions. This is a serious problem that arises more and more with political Islam in Europe. The Pope seems to ignore the history of Muslim conquests and the societal problems posed to Europe by political Islam. This endangers European identities, their traditions and their Judeo-Christian roots. [Thanks, Fr Boulad, for articulating that self-evident fact, even if you may just have struck apoplexy into Spadaro, Tornielli and the rest of the worst of the Bergogliacs.]

In conclusion, I would say that the Pope’s visit to the UAE could help Islam in getting out its present confrontation with the modern world. The only reasonable way is dialogue. For such a dialogue to be fruitful we need a common basis of values and principles on which we all agree. Given the openness of the UAE, they could — and should — play a key role to find such a basis in order to build together a permanent peace. [Yeah, right - the old standby panacea for all conflicts - dialog for the sake of dialog, just to seem like something is being done. As if anyone could dialog away the inherent Muslim objective of world conquest, in which anyone who does not become Muslim will be reduced to abject dhimmitude, as this pope already is (but in his case, gladly and voluntarily).]

I don't know about you, but if you had any reservations at all about Papa Wojtyla's first 'inter-religious' meeting in Assisi in the name of universal brotherhood, what do you think the inter-religious 'Human Fraternity Meeting 'in Abu Dhabi would be? Shall we not be hearing more blood-curdling Masonic affirmations of brotherhood - his word of the year - from Jorge Bergoglio of the Grand Lodge of the Vatican???
 

Oh, the reigning pope misses the mark on a great many things - which pile up by the day - but not because he's a poor marksman. He misses deliberately - because in the case of the clerical sex abuse crisis, he persists in a state of denial about its principal root cause. And in his assault on Catholic morals and tradition, it is because he's busy setting up his own marks - why waste time calling attention to all those old marks from the 2013 years that preceded his pontificate?

Pope Francis misses the mark
in focusing on clericalism and synodality
A recent essay by papal biographer Ivereigh about the pope's approach to the abuse
crisis fails to recognize the pressing need to start with institutional reform.
by Christopher R. Altieri

February 3, 2019

Papal biographer Austen Ivereigh has written a piece for Commonweal, on the meeting of the heads of the world’s bishops’ conferences scheduled for February 21-24 to discuss “the protection of minors and vulnerable adults”.

Francis is right, Ivereigh contends, to urge us to deflate our expectations of the meeting — especially those of us who are expecting major reforms to come from the gathering.

The thing is, very few people are expecting major policy changes to come from the meeting, nor are there many people expecting the meeting to fail solely on the basis of their lack.

The main concern of skeptics — of those, at least, who do not see the whole thing as a mere publicity stunt — is that the meeting is fighting the wrong battle, i.e. “child protection” narrowly construed, rather than the rot in Church leadership and leadership culture.

Ivereigh’s framing of the business is therefore a strange hybrid: a cross between a straw man and a red herring.

Ivereigh’s central thesis regarding the crisis and Pope Francis’s approach to it is not unsound: the Holy Father sees the crisis as a particularly sickening manifestation of the libido dominandi, the only Christian response to which is and must be radical conversion to Christ. The word Francis uses to convey his sense of the specific evil at the root of this crisis is “clericalism”. Ivereigh is right on that and so is Pope Francis.

To say that clericalism is at the root of the crisis is true, but it doesn’t get us very far.

As long as there are clerics, there will be clericalism. We need clerics to do their work in the Church, with and against the forces of disorder in the soul that are themselves the cause of human brokenness and of its peculiar manifestation in men of the clerical state. Still, this crisis will not pass without soul-reform: in a word, conversion — and more particularly — the conversion of the Church’s hierarchical leadership.

Ivereigh is also correct when he says that institutional reform is insufficient. “New norms, guidelines, and mechanisms will be necessary,” Ivereigh says, “but they are by themselves powerless to bring about the metanoia to which the Holy Spirit is calling the Church.” That’s right.

One of Pope Francis’s major problems — and Ivereigh’s in his analysis — is that neither recognizes the pressing need to start with institutional reform. In fact, they both get it exactly backward. “Before talking about new protocols and procedures,” Ivereigh accurately paraphrases Pope Francis’s remarks to journalists traveling with him to Rome from Panama last Sunday before quoting Francis directly, “we [the bishops] must become aware.”

The hierarchical leadership of the Church has had decades to become aware of the wickedness plaguing the Church. The crisis has been on Rome’s radar for more than half a century.

Even if that were not so, any man who does not understand immediately and viscerally how awful the sexual abuse of minors is, has no business exercising Orders. That anyone with difficulty wrapping his head around the awful enormity of such abuse should have been admitted to a discernment program, let alone to formation, is itself a scandal in both the colloquial and the technical senses of the term. On the individual or micro level, the only responsible thing to do with a bishop who doesn’t get it, is to deprive him of his see.

When it comes to the macro level of institutional reform, pace Francis and Ivereigh, history both sacred and secular is replete with examples of culture following law. Whether one looks to St. Gregory the Great, or the Cluniac reforms, or Trent, or the II Vatican Council — or even further back, to King Josiah or David or Moses himself — one will find enlightened rulers using legal reform to drive the renewal of culture.

The US Supreme Court did not wait to strike down Plessy for fear the country just wasn’t ready for racial integration. Ten years later, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act over and against the protests of citizens who urged “moderation” and “prudence” and not forcing people to give up their racist ways until they saw the error of them.

In any case, the need to raise awareness in some quarters is no reason to truncate reform efforts in others.

Whether owing to a desire for everyone to be on the same page, or owing to specific concerns over the legalities of the reforms the US bishops prepared to adopt at their Fall Meeting, the Pope’s decision to impede the US bishops was frankly indefensible.
- For one thing, the US bishops were not looking to strengthen their child protection protocols, but to achieve a measure of accountability for themselves in the wake of revelations incontrovertibly manifesting their failures of oversight.
- For another, there would have been ample opportunity to fine tune the measures in concert with the Roman bureaucracy after the bishops passed the measures.

Then, Ivereigh’s treatment of the incident that sparked the current phase of this crisis ignores or elides certain pertinent details, which tend to vitiate his analysis.

Ivereigh says, “When Francis stubbornly defended his nomination of Bishop Juan Barros to the Chilean diocese of Osorno, he was caught up in a web of institutional desolation.” Again, Ivereigh is not wrong. What he ignores, or elides, is Francis’s own role in creating and perpetuating that institutional desolation. “I was part of the problem,” Francis reportedly told the victims he had repeatedly attacked in public as calumniators, before “new elements” came to light, which prompted his decision to send his crackerjack investigator, Archbishop Charles Scicluna, to look into things.

Ivereigh goes on to say, “[Francis] was presented by the local church with a false picture, one that concealed the truth not just about the abuser priest Fernando Karadima, but about the widespread corruption and cover-up in many dioceses.” That is a very incomplete summary of the matter, and inaccurate in two crucial particulars.

First, the “local Church” did not present Pope Francis with a false picture — the bishops did.
- The Chilean faithful had been crying foul over the ineptitude, irresponsibility, and downright corruption of their hierarchical leaders for at least a decade.
- The faithful of Osorno were vocal and organized in their opposition to Barros’s appointment.

Francis’s response to the suffering faithful of Osorno was to tell them their suffering owed itself to their own stupidity. [The Church in] Osorno suffers,” Pope Francis told pilgrims who had asked him about the situation in Osorno when they met him on the sidelines of a weekly General Audience in May of 2015, “because she is stupid, because she does not open her heart to what God says and she lets herself be carried away by the idiocies that all those people say.”

Second, the “incomplete picture” line is more than merely evasive.

Pope Francis reportedly received an 8-page letter from Juan Carlos Cruz no later than April 2015, detailing Barros’s role in enabling then-Fr. Fernando Karadima’s abusive behavior and in covering it up. If Francis did receive the letter, then he had evidence of Barros’s wrongdoing, perhaps a month before he spoke with the pilgrims and years before he publicly accused Karadima’s accusers of calumny.

The Chilean bishops also warned Pope Francis against the appointment of Barros to the See of Osorno. They likely knew which way the wind was blowing, and cannot be accused of having unalloyed motives. Nevertheless, Francis had fair warning from them, as well.

In fact, a letter obtained by the Associated Press, which Pope Francis sent to the Chilean bishops in early 2015, shows that Francis wanted Barros and two other “Karadima bishops” to resign and take a sabbatical year before receiving any new posting — in essence, to send the tainted men into quiet ecclesiastical retirement. In the letter to the Chilean bishops, Francs alludes to something that happened to derail that plan, though what it was remains unclear to this day.

Ivereigh praises the genius of Pope Francis’s approach to the crisis, and cites the Pope’s newfound reliance on the faithful as evidence of his turnaround:

---

New norms, guidelines, and mechanisms will be necessary, but they are by themselves powerless to bring about the metanoia to which the Holy Spirit is calling the church. Only God’s grace and mercy can do this; and these are found in His people. Hence the pope’s call in August to the whole people of God to pray and fast. The people of God is the “immune system” of the church, as he told Chile’s Catholics. If that immune system isn’t working, no amount of procedural reform will be sufficient. Clericalism is a problem that affects every member of the church in one way or another, and so we can expect its solution to involve every member.

---

That is textbook gaslighting. It might not be quite tantamount to saying that priests never would have abused the children and the bishops never would have covered it up if only the laity were better Christians, but it does share the blame for the crisis without even suggesting a real responsible role for the laity in the solution.

For centuries, the clergy have expected the lay faithful to pray, pay, and obey. For all his talk, the closest thing Francis has offered in the way of a concrete remedy to the awful, untenable state of affairs into which we have fallen as a result of clerical chauvinism, is more of the same.

Ivereigh goes on to say that Francis’s vision of a “synodal” Church is just what we need for these troubled times:

---

If clericalism is the disease, synodality is the cure. Only when the church embraces its identity as what the Second Vatican Council said it was, the people of God, can the clericalist mentality behind the crisis be expunged. This means clergy and the hierarchy serving Christ in the people rather than the people serving priests as if they were Christ. It means getting over the institutional self-involvement that has led to so much desolation and denial, and putting the poor, the hungry, and the abused back at the center of the church’s attention, where they belong.

---

Just as Francis himself could not resist a sop to his favorite talking points in the closing lines of his Letter to the Faithful of Chile, Ivereigh — riffing on Francis’s Chilean letter — cannot avoid trying to make the crisis about something else.

This is the heart of the problem with reducing the crisis to “clericalism”: in technical language, it is an inadequate heuristic. Said simply: it is a catch-all — a cartoon villain — a bogeyman.
[A spectrally tenuous and false stand-in for the insidious homosexual culture in the Church that has spawned the use and abuse of clericalism to promote and protect that culture.]

I didn't quite know how to go about posting this. It's the biggest news of the day on the ecclesial front but it has not yet been reported by the Vatican media - at least not as of
1:00 am Tuesday, Feb 5, 2019, Eastern Daylight Saving Time.

It does not appear on the Vatican Press Office bulletin for February 4, but because of refernces to it in canon212.com's afternoon headline postings, I started looking it up online -
and was referred to the website of the 'Human Fraternity Meeting' which carried the photo above, as well as the full text of the document that was signed (of which I have
reproduced only the most alarming statement that the first Catholic commentators remarked upon). My own interest was piqued by why such a document was co-signed by
the pope and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University in Egypt, implacable foe of Benedict XVI but apparently now a Bergoglio BFF.

The item that pointed me to that website had the following headline:
Muslim Council of Elders' 'Global Conference of Human Fraternity' outlines a vision of global fraternity in Abu Dhabi
which startled me! The reigning pope actually went to Abu Dhabi to attend a 'human fraternity meeting' convoked by the world's Muslim Council of Elders!

Yet the Vatican in announcing the pope's trip to Abu Dhabi last December only said this:

---

Vatican City, Dec 6, 2018 (CNA/EWTN News)- Pope Francis will travel to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates Feb. 3-5 to participate in an international interfaith meeting, the Vatican announced Thursday.

“This visit, like the one to Egypt, shows the fundamental importance the Holy Father gives to inter-religious dialogue. Pope Francis visiting the Arab world is a perfect example of the culture of encounter,” papal spokesman Greg Burke said Dec. 6.

The papal trip is the second visit to a Muslim country scheduled for 2019; Pope Francis will also visit Morocco March 30-31.

The Abu Dhabi trip’s theme is “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace,” a line taken from a prayer by St. Francis of Assisi, with a focus on “how all people of goodwill can work for peace,” according to the Holy See Press Office.

Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan issued an invitation to Pope Francis, along with the Catholic Church in United Arab Emirates.

“We look forward to the pope’s historic visit aimed to maximize opportunities for dialogue and coexistence among nations,” the crown prince said, according to Al Arabiya...

---

What the Vatican never disclosed was this about the 'human fraternity meeting' - which it never even mentioned in the December 6 announcement.

---

Taking place under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the
UAE Armed Forces, the conference is convened by the Muslim Council of Elders, an Abu Dhabi-based independent international organisation
headed by His Eminence the Grand Imam of Al Azhar Al Sharif, Dr Ahmed El-Tayeb, to discuss the encouragement of fraternity as a core human value.

Dr Sultan Faisal Al Remeithi, Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Elders, said: “This distinguished forum in Abu Dhabi reflects the important cultural and
humanitarian role that the UAE plays in promoting a global culture of peace and reinforcing the key concept of citizenship while remaining respectful of diversity
and tolerance of different faiths.”

The conference is being held in conjunction with the inaugural visit of His Holiness Pope Francis, Head of the Catholic Church and Sovereign of the Vatican City
State to the UAE. Under the theme “Make me a Channel of Your Peace”, Pope Francis’s visit – the first of its kind to the Arab Gulf region - represents a call for
global fraternal collaboration based on peaceful dialogue and cooperation, mutual tolerance, and a rejection of extremism and violence...

---

So now we know why Al-Tayyeb figured in the signing of the document - this was his project all along, into which he corralled the man who happens to be the world's most willing dhimmi. Which explains the otherwise puzzling words in the introductory paragraphs of the document, as follows:

---

This transcendental value [human fraternity] served as the starting point for several meetings characterized by a friendly and fraternal atmosphere where we shared the joys, sorrows and problems of our contemporary world. We did this by considering scientific and technical progress, therapeutic achievements, the digital era, the mass media and communications. We reflected also on the level of poverty, conflict and suffering of so many brothers and sisters in different parts of the world as a consequence of the arms race, social injustice, corruption, inequality, moral decline, terrorism, discrimination, extremism and many other causes.

From our fraternal and open discussions, and from the meeting that expressed profound hope in a bright future for all human beings, the idea of this Document on Human Fraternity was conceived. It is a text that has been given honest and serious thought so as to be a joint declaration of good and heartfelt aspirations. It is a document that invites all persons who have faith in God and faith in human fraternity to unite and work together so that it may serve as a guide for future generations to advance a culture of mutual respect in the awareness of the great divine grace that makes all human beings brothers and sisters..."

---

My first reaction on reading those two paragraphs was: "Wait, the pope has not even been in Abu Dhabi for 24 hours - how and when could these meetings have taken place?" I assumed the meetings meant he had met with most of the conferees - when it turns out the meetings referred to were the prior meetings he had had with Al-Tayyeb, resulting in a document that obviously was prepared way beforehand, and whose blathering platitudes, insincerities and hypocrisies I would not waste any time with. But others will, because there is so much to fisk in this document.

But obviously one cannot ignore the statement claiming that "The pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings." It is, 'at best', Bergoglio's familiar religious indifferentism - unforgivable in a pope - now formally expressed in a document that he and Al-Tayyeb want to circulate to all the leaders of the world.

Yet a pope professing religious indifferentism is, in effect, apostasizing from the faith, as the first commentators on the document seemed to agree upon. An opinion expressed in the strongest terms, as follows:

Bergoglians are the party of apostasy...
by The Editor

February 4, 2019

Today, if not beforehand, Jorge Mario Bergoglio publicly and manifestly apostatized from the Catholic Faith, when he signed the “Human Fraternity Document” which professes all religions to be “willed by God in His wisdom.”

The Human Fraternity Meeting official website gives the text of the document: the outrageous affirmation is found under the second bullet point, which reads:

---

Freedom is a right of every person: each individual enjoys the freedom of belief, thought, expression and action. The pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings. This divine wisdom is the source from which the right to freedom of belief and the freedom to be different derives.

---

Apostasy is apostasy, whether you apostasize in the bathtub or on the papal throne; whether you do so out of fear of being slain by a Jihadi or whether you do so for a mess of pottage, an invite form George Soros, or a photo op. The reason or cause or motive can be different, but the result is the same: you reject faith in the One True God.

While a man may apostasize by embracing a non-Christian Faith, such as Judaism or Islam, he can apostatize also by affirming that which destroys the entire faith. Thus, its apostasy to say such things as, “God does not exist” or “God is a devil”.

If you were to say God wills that religions be different and many, then you have also apostasized, because you are saying that God is indifferent to religion. But the god who is indifferent to religion is not the Christian God. So by saying such a thing, you have taken as your god, the Father of Lies.

Some of the most fundamental names of God, of which no Christian can feign ignorance, is that God is True, One, Good and exists. To deny any of these is apostasy....

In canon 1364 §1, the Pope levels excommunication latae sententiae against all apostates, even if they be the Pope. This is how the Pope in promulgating the Code of Canon Law protects Catholics from future popes who apostatize. Those who have not the faith will say, the Code of Canon law does not bind the pope (though canon 38 contradicts them), or that to deny God is the author of only one true religion is not apostasy (they will attempt to pretend that Judaism of old still exists, and that Talmudic Judaism is not another false religion). But Catholics know better.

Finally, they will call Catholics names for saying what I just said. Maybe they will even call me a “sedevacantist” — I am not, becauase I hold with Canon 332 §2 that Benedict is still the pope — but no Catholic, even those who still think that Benedict’s resignation is valid, are sedevacantists for holding such things, as it is simply common sense to say that Bergoglio is an apostate when he publicly signs a document which contains such a statement.

Please put your local priest on notice about what Bergoglio said, and INSIST that his name no longer be mentioned in the Canon. Catholics are right to disrupt the Mass, if need be, to shout down anyone who thinks otherwise. [That's in the same overwrought, hyperbolic and unrealistic tone as don Minutella's dictum that any Mass in which the priest mentions this pope in the Te igitur is thereby invalid because Bergoglio is not the legitimate pope.] We have this right, because God is a God of Truth, He is no condoner of falsehood of any kind. And our Baptism requires that we hold fast with God in this.

Please put your Favorite Cardinal on notice. Write or call or email him, however you can contact him. Remind him, that if he will not stand up and defend God as the author of One True Religion, he is an apostate too. [By that standard, all of the current crop of cardinals are apostates. If they didn't even have the backbone to join the Four Dubia cardinals in opposing Amoris laetitia, does anyone expect them to question an open apostasy by this pope?]

Remind the clergy, in particular, that if some sort of division arises among those who say that Bergoglio is by this an apostate and that he is not by this an apostate, that the division is not caused by those who say he is, but by Bergoglio for signing such a document, and by those who refuse to acknowledge the magnitude of that sin.