THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI

Right, teen hero Ray Shehata who summoned police to the rescue before he and 50 others could have been burned alive by vengeful bus driver.

Italian citizenship promised for
teen 'hero' who saved 51 lives with SOS call
Various sources
March 22, 2019

Italy's government has promised to award citizenship to an Egyptian boy who saved 51 lives with his SOS phone call to police.

Thirteen-year old Ramy Shehata is being praised as a hero for saving everyone on board an Italian school bus that was hijacked near Milan then set on fire.

Italy is in shock after the dramatic rescue of 51 children who were allegedly taken hostage by their school bus driver who torched the vehicle, reportedly in protest at Mediterranean migrant deaths.

A spokesman for Italy’s military police, Marco Palmieri, praised the quick thinking of Shehata, who hid his mobile phone when the driver was confiscating those of the other passengers.

"The driver doused petrol on the bus and threatened to blow it up," Mr Palmieri told CNN. "He requested all the children's mobile phones - but one kid managed to hide and called us. You know how canny kids are these days," he said.

Italy’s military police, known as the Carabinieri, said the boy helped to pinpoint the location of the bus.

"Ramy called us and had his head down looking through the glass door and was able to read the signs on the road, giving an exact location of where the bus was and where it was going," a spokesperson said.

The office of Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini called Ramy Shehata, who is from Egypt, a "little hero" and said he would be granted speedy citizenship.

"The Interior Ministry is ready to take on the expenses and speed up the procedures to recognise citizenship for the little hero," a statement from the interior ministry said. "The hope is to attribute... citizenship to Ramy and remove it from the bus driver".

Ramy's father Kahled Shehata told Italy's ANSA news agency his family arrived in Italy in 2001.

"My son did his duty, it would be nice if he could now get Italian citizenship," Mr Shehata said.

The Italian driver of Senegalese origin on Wednesday hijacked the bus as it was taking the 12-13 year-olds from a gym to school in Crema, east of Milan.

Armed with two petrol canisters and a cigarette lighter, the accused Ousseynou Sy threatened the youngsters, took their telephones and told the adults to tie them up with electric cable.

According to CNN, Carabinieri spokesman Marco Palmieri said the driver allegedly yelled "I need to avenge the deaths in the Mediterranean."

The Milan police anti-terrorism unit has been charged with investigating the hostage-taking, during which Mr Sy reportedly told students: "No one is getting out of here alive."

The incident prompted Italy's populist government to demand that the driver lose his Italian citizenship.

"He blocked all the doors with chains," teaching assistant Tiziana Magarini told news agency AFP. "He showed me a knife and told me to tie up all the children."

The 40-minute ordeal, during which the bus also slammed into a car, was brought to an end when police managed to smash windows open and get those onboard out just as the driver set fire to the vehicle.

A dozen children and two adults were taken to hospital for smoke and fume inhalation, according to emergency services.

"It's crazy, absurd, it's unacceptable. Someone has to pay, and dearly," said Filippo Razzini, the father of a pupil at the school in the small town of Crema who was not on the bus.

"It's good to go back to school today because unfortunately these things are today a reality. But if it were up to me I'd be out there waiting for this guy somewhere," he told AFP.

Ousseynou Sy's lawyer said his client had wanted to "draw attention to the consequences of (Italy's) migration policies".

Italy has clamped down on immigration under far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, demanding it close its ports to charity vessels rescuing migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean.

Mr Salvini said Mr Sy should have his citizenship, granted in 2004 after his marriage to an Italian, revoked. "We shall do all we can to ensure this nefarious person is stripped of his Italian nationality".

Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio of the League's governing partner, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, agreed. "I think it is a duty to withdraw immediately the citizenship of this criminal," said Mr Di Maio.

Mr Sy could lose his citizenship if convicted of a terror attack under a tough security decree introduced last year.

Mr Salvini's far-right League party is riding high in the polls in part because of its tough anti-migrant stance.

The driver had no links with Islamic terrorism and "acted as a lone wolf", Alberto Nobili, head of counter-terrorism at the Milan public prosecutor's office, told a news conference.

Mr Nobili said Thursday that Mr Sy had planned the hijacking over several days and "wanted the whole world talking about his story".

He posted a video on YouTube to explain his actions and call on relatives and friends in Crema and Senegal to take action, saying: "Africa -- arise."

Mr Sy got his Italian citizenship and job in 2004 and managed to keep subsequent convictions for drink driving and sexual assault of a minor secret from his employer, the Corriere della Sera newspaper reported.

A neighbour told La Stampa newspaper that he was known as "Paolo". "That's what we called him because his name was too complicated. I saw him go out every morning, he drove a bus. A quiet man but solitary," she said.

Colleagues told Italian media that Mr Sy's separation from his Italian wife, with whom he has two teenage children, was "when his problems started".

William Kilpatrick contrasts the relatively sparse media reportage of the Italian schoolbus hijacking with the saturation coverage of the mosque massacres in New Zealand, but while he has a good point about the Italian story not fitting into the ultra-liberal media narrative about both terrorism and immigration, the more obvious reason is that, thankfully, the bus hijacker failed to kill his hostages, which made it less the stuff of headlines than massacres in two mosques that took the lives of at least 50 Muslims. Moreover, the New Zealand massacre story also id not conform to the usual storyline of "Muslim kills Christian worshippers in church", because this time Muslim worshippers were the victims though the mass killer does not claim to be Christian
and that's not something the media can twist otherwise.


Don't Italian lives matter?
Why did most American media and outlets, notably Google News,
give little attention to the kidnapping/attempted murder
of 51 choolchildren and their chaperones in Italy?
]by William Kilpatrick

March 23, 2019

On March 15th an anti-immigrant white man, who wanted to send a message to the world, killed 50 people inside a mosque in New Zealand. Five days later, a pro-immigrant black man, who also wanted to send a message, kidnapped and tried to immolate 50 children on a school bus near Milan, Italy.

If you missed the first story, you must be a hermit living in the Idaho backwoods in a cabin with no TV, radio, or internet access. If you missed the second story, you can be forgiven because, outside of Europe, it didn’t receive much coverage.

According to the European media, the bus driver, an “Italian citizen” who migrated from Senegal several years ago, hijacked his bus-full of middle school children, forced the three school chaperones to handcuff the children with plastic ties, then took off on the highway, ramming into cars along the way. When he was stopped by a police barricade, he set fire to the bus which he had previously doused with fuel.

Luckily the police were able to break the bus windows and free the students. No one was seriously injured but several children suffered shock, bruises and smoke inhalation. The bus driver, Ousseynou Sy, told the panicked children that what he was doing was revenge for his own three children who had died while crossing the Mediterranean in an attempt to get to Italy. He told police that he was retaliating for the thousands of migrants who had drowned in the sea crossing in recent years.

I first became aware of the bus hijack while browsing the Jihad Watch website around 2 p.m. on the day of the incident. Robert Spencer’s piece contained a long excerpt from a Telegraph article published hours earlier. I wondered when the American media would pick up the story.

At 4:30 p.m. I checked Google News. There were plenty of articles about the New Zealand mosque massacre, but nothing about the near-massacre in Italy. I checked again at 6 p.m. Still nothing, but there were 6 headline stories about the New Zealand shooting with a “click for more stories” link which brought up dozens more stories about the mosque attack. I thought to myself that Google News was a bit slow on the uptake. I assumed that they were trying to decide how to minimize the story.

At around 7:30 p.m. Fox News carried a brief account of the hijacked children and the blazing bus. I tried Google News again. There was nothing about Italy, but one could have spent most of the evening reading all the stories about New Zealand. In addition, there was a Snopes piece entitled, “Did ‘Muslim militants’ kill 120 Christians in Nigeria in February/March, 2019?” [Snopes is an online fact-checking and investigative reporting service that appears to have its own agenda.]

To put the New Zealand attack in perspective, a number of Christian and conservative sites had run stories about the almost daily attacks on Christians by Muslims in Nigeria. The Snopes piece was an obvious attempt to undercut that narrative. It emphasized that the Muslim-Christian troubles in Nigeria should be understood as a range war—conflicts and clashes between farmers and cow herders over land. As Snopes presented it, the Nigerian massacres were just like the stories of farmers and cowboys fighting over grazing lands in the old West. And shame on you for thinking it has anything to do with Islam.

I checked Google News again at midnight and at various times the next day, and found nothing about a bus hijacking in Italy; but, again, there were numerous stories, new and old, about the New Zealand tragedy. Perhaps in a few days Snopes will do a “fact check” showing that the Italian bus incident was not presented in the correct context.

Those of a certain age will remember a story from 1976 about a school bus full of children that went missing for 36 hours near the town of Chowchilla, California. Along with their driver, the children had been kidnapped by three men who after an 11 hour drive, hid the bus and transferred the children to two vans which had been hidden underground in a rock quarry. Happily, the children, aided by their driver, managed to escape.

Another school bus full of children went missing two days ago in Italy. Only it didn’t go missing from sight. It went missing from the news. Not entirely, of course, but for such a big story the coverage seemed minimal; and, as of this writing, Google News hasn’t covered it at all. That’s strange.

It’s a great big look-at-me story full of drama and human interest. Most parents, especially those with school-aged children who take buses to school would want to know about a story like this. Grandparents would also want to know. Wouldn’t you? Don’t the people at Google News have children? Don’t they care? Or is something else at work? The Chowchilla school bus story was nationwide news for several days, but that was in a time before the news became highly politicized.

Google News didn’t run the story because it undercut the narratives that they had been pushing for days. One of those narratives is about widespread anti-Muslim bigotry, or “Islamophobia” for short. But the story out of Italy didn’t fit that narrative. The revengeful bus driver wasn’t bigoted against Muslims. In fact, seeing that he comes from Senegal, a country that is 92 percent Muslim, he most probably is a Muslim.

Another narrative that Google favors is that opposition to immigration creates a climate that leads to violence. After all, the New Zealand shooter had pronounced anti-immigrant views. But the Italian bus driver was very much the opposite. He was pro-immigration—so much so that he was willing to kill 50 children in order to protest Italy’s new restrictive policy on immigration.

If you don’t think that Google is biased and is deliberately trying to manage what we are allowed to know, imagine that the children on the bus were Muslim, and their driver was a white nationalist anti-immigrant. Would Google have given the story the silent treatment?

The other reason that Google and other media don’t want to dwell on the story is that the bus driver’s views on immigration are uncomfortably close to their own, and it wouldn’t do for people to think too much about that fact. Like Ousseynou Sy, the media elites tend to think that borders should be open and that all migrants deserve to be safely escorted across the sea (the kidnapper’s views on immigration also happen to closely coincide with those of Pope Francis, a majority of European bishops, and the USCCB).

Sy railed against Interior Minister Matteo Salvini’s immigration policies, but as Ned May observes in Gates of Vienna', “[he should] have realized that his actions were an affirmation of Mr. Salvini’s argument against allowing third-world immigrants into Italy.”

Of course, the people who write the news do realize that. They are smart enough to know that Mr. Sy’s behavior is not a good advertisement for their own open-borders position. And so, they have given him short shrift. The story came and went in the blink of an eye. The New York Times claims it carries “All the news that’s fit to print,” but Google News along with numerous other news outlets has a different agenda—something along the line of “All the news that fits our narrative.”

It’s bad enough that Google won’t cover stories that challenge its view of the world. What’s worse is that it’s been trying to silence those who will. As I mentioned earlier in this piece, I came across the bus hijack story in Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch. For a long time, Spencer has complained that Google’s search engine division has been targeting Jihad Watch by adjusting its algorithms in order to make it difficult to find his site.

Other media companies and financial giants — Facebook, Patreon, MasterCard and Visa — have also attempted to silence Spencer in various and sundry ways. Spencer fears that in the wake of the New Zealand massacre, leftist and Islamic groups will soon succeed in their attempts “to silence all criticism of jihad terror and Sharia oppression of women and others.” This won’t happen by means of legislation, he says, but through “a complete de-platforming.” “We will be able to speak,” says Spencer, “but no one will be able to hear us, as we won’t be allowed on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the rest.”

Does it really matter that much if Spencer’s site is taken down? Aren’t there plenty of other sources to bring us the needed information? The answers are, “yes, it really does matter,” and “no, there aren’t plenty of other sources.” Moreover, those alternative sources that do exist can also be charged with “Islamophobia,” and quickly find themselves without a platform and without funding.

You’re reading about the aborted bus massacre here because I first read it about it on Spencer’s site. It’s true that I would most likely have come across the story even if Jihad Watch were no longer in business. It was, after all, a sensational story complete with a wild bus chase, brave students, heroic police, and photos of the bus engulfed in flames and children reuniting with loved ones.

But how about all the smaller stories that, taken together, give us a picture of how cultural jihad and violent jihad are changing the face of the globe?

Had there been no Jihad Watch, I would have missed many of these. I don’t subscribe to dozens of international newspapers, and I don’t have far-flung correspondents who will alert me of the latest jihad outrages in France, Germany, India, Nigeria and elsewhere.

Here’s a small sampling of stories I’ve read because of links from Jihad Watch that I might have otherwise missed over the last 10 days:

• Canada: University cites New Zealand Massacre as reason for cancelling Islamocritical talk by ex-Muslim.
• London’s Muslim mayor defends arrest of Christian preacher: “There’s not an unlimited right to free speech.”
• MI5: Number of “far right” terrorism cases “absolutely dwarfed” by the number of jihad terror cases.
• Germany: 200 cops arrest 10 Muslims who were “plotting…to kill as many people as possible.”
• Germany: Muslim migrant crimes concealed to prevent “prejudice.”
• Netherlands: Utrecht jihad mass murderer left note saying he acted in the name of Allah.
• Netherlands: Muslim migrant who was “reading the Qur’an a lot” stabs Jewish father and son.
• Australia: Muslims plotted jihad massacres to “defeat all the infidels.”

Well, you get the picture. Jihad is now a normal event in the Western world, and the Islamization of Europe is well underway. But, if the anti-Islamophobia zealots have their way, don’t expect to have that clear picture for much longer. They want you to see only what they want you to see. And they want you to look at it only through the rose-colored lenses that they provide.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 27/03/2019 05:51]

Video: Francis, If you don't want to be
the Vicar of Christ, then get out of there!


March 26, 2019



These people are not kissing Jorge Mario Bergoglio, it is not all about him, and his person, as he seems to think.

They want to kiss Peter, the Vicar of Christ. It's monstrous to deny them that.

SHOULD YOU KISS THE POPE’S RING?

March 25, 2019

I’ll admit it. I’m not a fan of Pope Francis, but I’m a faithful Catholic and a priest so I don’t usually criticize him. Plenty of other do, so I reckon I can keep my big trap shut and do my job.

However, for some reason this video that has surfaced on Twitter showing Pope Francis deliberately refusing to allow people to kiss his papal ring has got me riled up.

Should it worry me? Probably not. It’s not big deal, right?

I’m not so sure. It seems to me there are a couple of issues here. The first is the traditional devotion of the faithful. In some places it is customary for the people to kiss the pope’s ring or the priest’s hands. When I was visiting a parish in California some time ago with a large Filipino congregation, I was embarrassed when all the women kissed my hand in greeting, and wanted to pull my hand away like the pope does. [In the Philippines, I was raised to kiss the hands of my grandparents and assorted aunts and uncles, as well as my parish priest and our school chaplain (the only two priests with whom I had routine contact) both in greeting and respect, and as a sign of asking for the person's blessing. More, in fact, since the colloquial expression for doing so was 'to make amen', as if to say that by doing so, one was also saying "I am subject to your command". An alternative form was to bow and bring the honored person's hand up to touch one's forehead.

When I commented on this the parish priest explained, “Yes, it’s embarrassing, but that’s what they do. It’s their custom. Once you understand that they’re not honoring you they are honoring Jesus in you as the priest, then you will be okay with it, plus, it's bad manners to pull away just as it would be if a French person wants to give you one of those double kisses on each cheek.”

Therefore I do actually think it’s disturbing that the pope behaves in this way.

First of all, as the priest in California explained, it seems discourteous. It is part of good manners to adapt to the customs and traditions of the people we are with as much as possible, and the higher position you hold the more this applies.

There’s an old story about Queen Victoria who was visiting the widow of a miner. She sat down at the poor kitchen table and the old woman poured the Queen a cup of tea. Some spilled into the saucer and the old widow picked up the saucer and slurped the tea from it. The Queen copied her. It was poor table manners, but the greater courtesy was to respond gracefully to one’s host.

The second problem with the Pope’s behavior is more troubling. It would seem that he had not yet figured out that being the pope is not about him. This tendency to impose his personality and opinions on the papacy was there from the beginning in his refusal to wear the mozzetta and papal stole when he appeared on the balcony. Then when he decided not to live in the apostolic palace.

These displays of “humility” are embarrassing and indicate (like not allowing people to kiss his ring) that he sees himself as bigger than the office he holds.

The difficult with these displays is that they are not much more than theatrics. There are more substantial things Pope Francis might do to make his point. Wouldn’t a top to bottom house cleaning of the Vatican finances complete with total transparency do much more to make the point about poverty and faithful stewardship than the histrionics of living in the Casa St Martha? Wouldn’t it be truly humbling if the Pope were to root out the gay mafia in the church rather than promote them?

The fact is, when Catholics honor their priest they should be honoring Jesus in that man. The priest should understand that and echo St John the Baptist – pointing to Jesus and saying, “He must increase and I must decrease.”

Likewise, to kiss the pope’s ring is not to honor that man, but to honor St Peter, whose successor he is.

Is it possible that the Pope does not understand that the people who wish to kiss his ring wish to honor St Peter and not him? If he does not, then it would seem that he has not learned one of the basic lessons that every priest should learn –that it’s not all about him.


Catholics and the kissing of rings… or not.
Wherein Fr. Z rants.

March 26, 2019

UPDATE:
I saw this at the Catholic Herald:

---

A Vatican spokesman said the Pope was “amused” by the reaction to the video. “Sometimes he likes it, sometimes he does not. It’s really as simple as that”

---

. The pope was “amused”? “Sometimes he likes it, sometimes he does not. It’s really as simple as that”?
Whatever this is, it isn’t simple when you are on the receiving end of his “back hand”.

The start of my original post earlier today:

It could be that you have tried to kiss the hand or ring of a bishop, only to have him snatch it away in an extravagant and conspicuous gesture of humility.

You’ve perhaps by new seen the painful video – it is painful to watch – of the Pope jerking his hand away, even with force, from happy, smiling people at Loreto, Italy, who want to kiss his ring.

In another post, I added a note that public figures often, through repetitive stress to their hands from enthusiastic well-wishers, start defending their digits from painful grabs and twists. I grant that popes have to do that. But that does not seem to be what is going on in this infamous video.

And, it seems that Francis is not consistent.

Bergoglio rule: You may kiss my ring if you are a consecrated person, or a halfclad male, but not if you are just any layman (What about half-clad females?)

In Italy there is a long custom of the baciamano. It is a gesture of courtesy (from courtliness), loyalty, submission. It is deeply ingrained in Catholics to kiss the ring of prelates, because there was also an indulgence attached. There was once an indulgence attached to kissing the hands of the newly ordained.

Catholics of certain cultures are pleased to kiss the hands of priests, whom they see as alter Christus, because their hands touch the Holy Eucharist. During the celebration of the Roman Rite, it is formally inscribed in the rubrics to kiss the hand of the celebrant and objects presented to him and taken from him. These are the famous solita oscula… the usual kisses.

Kissing the hand of the priest, kissing the ring of the bishop – and especially of a pope – is about as Catholic as it gets. It is in our DNA. Does it carry with it the traces of the trappings of a bygone age and highly stratified societies? Sure.

So what? Why is that bad?

Fr. Dwight Longenecker jumped into the discussion with a post at his place. [Fr Z proceeds to quote from the post, which you can read in full above.]

Quite a few times here I’ve written about why we must deck out our liturgical celebrations with the best that we can muster, why we must dress our sacred ministers in glory, for the most glorious of all actions, our sacred liturgical worship. The finery is not about them.

Libs will, like jackasses, bray about the “triumphalism” and ridicule what the Church has through centuries done out of sheer love. Catholics low and high, poor and rich, gave from their earnings, meager or great, the material representation of sweat and devotion, their money, to build beautiful churches, to obtain fine liturgical objects, to develop art and choirs and windows and statues.

The beauty and the gestures are about self-gift, submission, gratitude. Catholics know that graces come from God through the mediation of outward signs, through the minister of sacraments, through the matter of sacraments, through our many symbols. They know that when they kiss the ring of a bishop, they honor much more than, say, the unworthy Most Rev. Fatty McButterpants, by God’s mysterious ways disgraceful wearer of his office.

A whole world of mystery opens up through these gestures and signs. The one who performs the gesture, comes to a threshold of encounter.

Can anyone who truly understands what authentic religious experience is ridicule this powerful impulse of the devout Catholic to revel in and create and support these threshold signs and gestures?

Take, for example, the way that a bishop is vested – by others – for a Solemn Mass. He must sit, with docility, and allow himself to be dressed, rather like the paschal lamb about to have his throat cut. Layer after uncomfortable layer is imposed on him by ministers who work him over literally from head to toe, from miter to those odd booty things on his feet.

Every object and garment of his pontificalia has meaning. When he allows someone else to put the ring on his finger – a nuptial sign of his vocation – he prays:

---

Cordis et corporis mei, Domine, digitos virtute decora, et septiformis Spiritus sanctificatione circumda.… Adorn with virtue, Lord, the fingers of my body and of my heart, and wrap them about with the sanctification of the sevenfold Spirit.

---

“The fingers of my heart”! It is as if the very beating heart of the man who accepts the ring can reach out to touch those who come to him for what he can give.

Snatch that away?!?

Perhaps more bishops should celebrate the traditional form of the Roman Rite, and drink in with these prayers the deep draughts of identity, finely curated by the faithful through millennia of love!

The priest who learns the older, traditional form, with its vesting prayers, its prayers after Mass in the Breviary, with the many reminders of who he isn’t during the Mass, is never the same thereafter. Identity is offered in these rites. If so for the priest, how much more for the bishop.

It is interesting that, in these days, I’ve never met a mean bishop who is willing to celebrate the traditional form on a regular basis. In the past, there were quite a few. But… now? I’m not looking for suggestions of names, but I’m racking my brain about the men I’ve observed over the past 30 or so years. And I mean regularly, not rarely.

I’ve met a lot of truly nasty liberal bishops who won’t have a thing to do with tradition. Yes, there are kind men as well. I like to imagine how they would benefit from the gifts of tradition.

When We have been elected Pope, and the lib bishops come to pretend and to prevaricate, I’ll slip the ring off and put it in my back pocket. They can kiss it there.

But seriously, these gestures are important for us as Catholics.

In 1 Timothy, Paul gives advice to a young bishop, in charge of a community being disturbed by the “circumcision party”. He quotes Deuteronomy in a way that cuts two directions: “Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.”
- We must respect our elders in the Church, who do so much work for the Lord.
- However, we also shouldn’t starve the faithful who are also workers in the Church.

Snatching your hand away “muzzles the ox”. Fathers, Bishops, accept honors with submission and cheerful gratitude, recognizing all that lies behind them.



Why did they do away with the Novus Ordo 'Mass table' for the pope's Mass? Maybe to allow more people into the chapel which is really quite small.

The pope did do something right in Loreto -
he said the Mass ad orientem
But spoils it all by not genuflecting at the Consecration

---

Pope Francis faced the Lord during his March 25 Mass in the famous Italian shrine of Loreto, central Italy.

Francis celebrated on the altar of the Holy House which is the house of Nazareth where the Incarnation took place. Angels brought it to Loreto, and is now a chapel inside the basilica.

gloria.tv/article/M9DkE63JHEjj4U38FFnC9FyjS
The video clip shows the entire Consecration with the camera looking bown on the pope and what he is doing - and he is consistent about not kneeling for the Consecration... Watch him next Maundy Thursday kneel before each of the 12 persons he has chosen to be the object of his humility, as he washes, dries and kisses their feet...

---

The following post by Aldo Maria Valli is tagged with a warning: "This rubric . is using IRONY If you are allergic to irony, please do not read it."

Bad thoughts
The pope just does not want
any Gollums going after his ring
Translated from

March 26, 2019

Women and the world
As you may have learned, Prof. Luceta Scaraffia and the entire staff of L’Osservatore Romano’s monthly supplement on women in the Church and in the world, Donne Chiesa Mondo, submitted their resignation en masse to the pope, reportedly due to incompatibility with the editorial line of the new OR editor, Andrea Monda.

“it seems to us,” Scaraffia wrote, without masking her bitterness, “that a vital initiative has been reduced to silence and we are back to the antiquated and arid practice of decisions made from above, with direct masculine control of women who are supposed to be responsible”.

An unprecedented case for the pope’s newspaper. But we can now reveal the real reason for the resignations – that, in fact, new editor Monda wishes to change the supplement’s title to Donne Chiese Monda.

Lord of the ring
And as you may have seen on video, the pope, during his visit to Loreto on Monday, withdrew his hand many times when people approached to kiss his ring. [Although he had no problem having it kissed by nuns and priests.] And he rejected the attempt rather theatrically, raising curious questions.

Many interpretations have been given. A gesture of humility? A desire not to give too much importance to the Fisherman’s ring? The need to finish up quickly with having to greet so many people individually?

None of this! Thanks to our sources, we can now tell you the pope’s real reasons.

We all know that one of the advisers Bergoglio most listens to is Argentine Bishop Victor Manuel Fernandez, known as Tucho, whose principal merit is having written a book entitled “Heal me with your mouth: The art of kissing”, a truly important text in contemporary theology.

Fernandez himself told us that he had advised the pope agains thaving his ring kissed. “A kiss may heal you, but it may also infect you – you don’t know how many germs are transmitted this way,” he told the pope. “Believe me, because I know about kissing!”

And so the pope rejects people kissing his ring. It is an example of health protection under the principle of integral human ecology that is so dear to the pope, according to La Civilta Cattolica. And so the video will be used in promotional campaigns advising the public how to avoid getting the flu.

Update:
Get thee behind me, Gollum!
It now seems that the reason given us by Monsignor Tucho was skillfully thought out in order to hide the real reason for the pope’s singular behavior.

The real reason has to do with disquieting news received by the Vatican Secret Service that a certain Gollum, who is described as faithless and unreliable, is in search of the One Ring that can assure him of unlimited power. Therefore, the papal decision – unhappily taken but imperative – to avoid any risky contact with persons unknown.

Let’s see what happens next.

I have refrained so far from posting anything on Cardinal Marx's announcements and statements about a coming German synod whose outcome, he says, will be 'binding' on the subjects for discussion. Binding on whom, one might ask? And by whose fiat?George Weigel puts it all together...

An open letter to Cardinal Reinhard Marx
by George Weigel

March 27, 2019

Your Eminence:

I noted with interest your recent announcement of a “binding synodal process” during which the Church in Germany will discuss the celibacy of the Latin-rite Catholic priesthood, the Church’s sexual ethic and clericalism, these being “issues” put on the table by the crisis of clerical sexual abuse.

Perhaps the following questions will help sharpen your discussions.

1) How can the “synodal process” of a local Church produce “binding” results on matters affecting the entire Catholic Church? The Anglican Communion tried this and is now in terminal disarray; the local Anglican churches that took the path of cultural accommodation are comatose. Is this the model you and your fellow-bishops favor?

2) What does the celibacy of priests in the Latin-rite have to do with the sexual abuse crisis? Celibacy has no more to do with sexual abuse than marriage has to do with spousal abuse. Empirical studies indicate that most sexual abuse of the young takes place within (typically broken) families; Protestant denominations with a married clergy also suffer from the scourge of sexual abuse; and in any event, marriage is not a crime-prevention program. Is it cynical to imagine that the abuse crisis is now being weaponized to mount an assault on clerical celibacy, what with other artillery having failed to dislodge this ancient Catholic tradition?

3) According to a Catholic News Agency report, you suggested that “the significance of sexuality to personhood has not yet received sufficient attention from the Church.” Really? Has St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body not been translated into German? Perhaps it has, but it may be too long and complex to have been properly absorbed by German-speaking Catholics.

Permit me then, to draw your attention to pp. 347-358 of Zeuge der Hoffnung (Ferdinand Schoeningh, 2002) the German translation of Witness to Hope, the first volume of my John Paul II biography. There, you and your colleagues will find a summary of the Theology of the Body, including its richly personalistic explanation of the Church’s ethic of human love and its biblically-rooted understanding of celibacy undertaken for the Kingdom of God.

4) You also note that your fellow-bishops “feel…unable to speak on questions of present-day sexual behavior.” That was certainly not the case at the Synods of 2014, 2015, and 2018, where German bishops felt quite able to speak frequently to these questions, albeit in a way that typically mirrored today’s politically-correct fashions.

And I’m sure I’m not alone in wondering just when the German episcopate last spoke to “present-day sexual behavior” in a way that promoted the Church’s ethic of human love as life-affirming and ordered to human happiness and fulfillment, at least in the years since its massive dissent from Humanae Vitae (Pope St. Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical on the ethics of family planning)? But that, as I understand Pope Francis, is what he is calling us all to do: Witness to, preach, and teach the “Yes” that undergirds everything to which the Church must, in fidelity to both revelation and reason, say “No.” [Oh dear! So Mr Weigel has not rid himself of his Bergoglio blinders for all his broadsides and sharp attacks on the most egregious outrages in this pontificate! As if somehow all these anti-Catholic things have been happening without Bergoglio' participation. You'd think from this last statement that Amoris laetitia or the Abu Dhabi delaration, to name just two, had never happened.]

5) The CNA report also noted that your “synodal process” (which, in a nice tip of the miter to Hegel, you described as a “synodal progression”) would involve consultations with the Central Committee of German Catholics. My dear Cardinal Marx, this is rather like President Trump consulting with Fox News or Speaker Pelosi consulting with the editors of the New York Times.

If you’ll pardon the reference to Major Heinrich Strasser in Casablanca, even we blundering Americans know that the ZdK, the Zentralkomitee der Deutschen Katholiken, is the schwerpunkt, the spearhead that clears the ground to the far left so that the German bishops can position themselves as the “moderate” or “centrist” force in the German Church. You know, and I know, and everyone else should know that consultations with the ZdK will produce nothing but further attacks on celibacy, further affirmations of current sexual fads, and further deprecations of Humane Vitae (based, in part, on the ZdK’s evident ignorance of the Theology of the Body and German hostility to John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical on the renovation of Catholic moral theology, Veritatis Splendor).

Your Eminence, the German Church — the Catholicism of my ancestors — is dying. It will not be revitalized by becoming a simulacrum of moribund liberal Protestantism.

I wish you a fruitful Lent and a joyful Easter.

As outrageous as Cardinal Marx and the German Catholic establishment are, anti-Catholic antics cannot be more disturbing than the anti-Catholic things perpetrated by the reigning pope...

Pope asks universities to disseminate his claim
that ‘diversity of religions’ is ‘willed by God’
by Maike Hickson


March 25, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – The Vatican’s office for promoting inter-religious dialogue [it's a Pontifical Council, no less] has asked Catholic university professors to give the “widest possible dissemination” to a controversial joint statement signed by Pope Francis last month that claims a “diversity of religions” is “willed by God.” The office adds that the request comes from Pope Francis himself (read full letter below).

The letter of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, which was obtained by LifeSiteNews, is dated February 21, 2019. It was sent last week to Catholic university professors in Rome, together with the attached "Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together" which Pope Francis signed with Grand Imam Ahmad el-Tayeb in Abu Dhabi on February 4.

Bishop Miguel Ayuso Guixot, secretary of the Pontifical Council, wrote in the letter that the “Holy Father has asked this Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue to contribute to the widest possible dissemination of the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together” as it had been originally signed by Pope Francis and by Ahmad el-Tayeb, Grand Imam of Egypt’s al-Azhar Mosque.

Guixot asked professors, priests, and sisters at universities to "facilitate the distribution, the study, and the reception” of the document, adding that the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue “will be grateful to you already now for any possible initiative, in the frame of this institution, which aims at the spreading of this Document.”

The letter also quotes some passages from the Abu Dhabi document, in which both signatories pledge “to convey this Document to authorities, influential leaders, persons of religion all over the world, appropriate regional and international organizations, organizations within civil society, religious institutions and leading thinkers.”

The signers promise to “make known the principles contained in this Declaration at all regional and international levels, while requesting that these principles be translated into policies, decisions, legislative texts, courses of study and materials to be circulated.” A further aim is to “educate new generations” in the sense of this document for world peace and fraternity among peoples and religions.

Critics have called passages in the document "false" and "heretical."

Cardinal Raymond Burke said the passage which says that God wills a diversity of religions, is wrong and should be removed.

The statement “has to be removed from this accord because it’s not correct,” he said.

Bishop Athanasius Schneider said earlier this month that in a private conversation he had with Pope Francis on the matter, the pope assured him that the "phrase in question on the diversity of religions means the permissive will of God."

Prominent Catholic philosopher Professor Josef Seifert criticized that – in spite of the private correction of this disturbing sentence which Pope Francis himself made in conversation with Bishop Schneider and his fellow Kazakh bishops – the Pope still wants this document to be disseminated without the statement being corrected.

The February 21 Vatican letter, as it was sent to Catholic university professors on March 21, thus aims at disseminating an ambiguous document that sparked much controversy among Catholics when it was first published on February 4, 2019, especially since it does not contain a formal correction of the following particular sentence:

---

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.

---

At the time, Bishop Schneider – among many other voices – contradicted such a statement, since “Christianity is the only God-willed religion.” “Therefore,” he said, “it can never be placed complementarily side by side with other religions. Those would violate the truth of Divine Revelation, as it is unmistakably affirmed in the First Commandment of the Decalogue, who would assert that the diversity of religions is the will of God."

In comments to LifeSiteNews, Seifert strongly criticized the controversial passage of the Abu Dhabi statement. The claim that the “diversity of religions” is “willed by God,” he stated, means the “rejection of the Christian Faith: How can God bind eternal salvation to the Faith in Jesus Christ and then, from the time of Creation, will religions which reject this Faith?”

“How can He mandate us to go out into the world to teach the Gospels to all nations and to baptize them, but at the same time wills religions which reject the Gospels and Baptism?” Seifert further asked. In his view, with this claim, the document “directly rejects the Church's absolute claim to truth (which by the way is also held by Islam for its own religion),” and, with it “the whole Creed (since each sentence of the Creed contradicts the creeds of many other religions), all dogmas of the Church, all of her moral teachings.” At the same time, the Austrian professor added, “not only all heresies, but also all non-Christian religions are being given the honor to be willed by God.”

Professor Seifert also commented on the fact that Pope Francis has had a letter sent to Catholic universities in order to disseminate this contested Abu Dhabi document. In spite of the fact that Bishop Schneider received from Pope Francis a sort of indirect correction of this Abu Dhabi statement, “Pope Francis obviously has not only not rescinded this statement, but now even has it sent out to all universities with the request for universal dissemination.”

This is an “unprecedented heresy of all heresies,” Seifert explained, “to spread this unaltered declaration” that the diverse religions are willed by God “without the slightest (and, what is more, unconvincing) declaration that it is merely about the permissive will of God.”

According to Josef Seifert, a private remark (as given in the presence of Bishop Schneider) is not sufficient, in order to rescind “the approval of all heresies and of all those religions which are in contradiction with Christianity as it is to be found in the Abu Dhabi declaration.”

Seifert said that the statement read at face value places the Pope "outside the Church and of the Christian Faith in general, as well as outside of reason."

"For, how could God will contradictions to those most important revealed truths which are simultaneously also willed by Him? This assumption would make God either a lunatic who violates the foundation of all reason – the principle of non-contradiction – and who is a monumental relativist, or a confused God who is indifferent to the matter of whether people witness to the truth or not."

Professor Seifert said that Catholics have the duty to defend the Catholic truth.

“According to the natural law, all priests, cardinals, bishops, and laymen are duty-bound to call upon the Pope to either reject this sentence [about the diversity of religions willed by God] or to resign as Pope," he said.

I must thank Fr Hunwicke whose comment on the above pontifical directive called my attention to the occurrence which aggravates and perpetrates the outrage of the Abu Dhabi Declaration's false anti-Christian premise about the supposedly God-willed diversity of religions....

Interesting...

March 26, 2019

PF has asked the Pontifical Council concerned with 'dialogue' to promote his grossly flawed document claiming that God wills diversity of religion. That council is doing so by commending it for study in Catholic universities.

The normal method of disseminating authentic teaching is by means of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and the world-wide Catholic Episcopate, fellow-teachers with the Roman Pontiff of Catholic Truth.

It is a matter for joy that PF has not contaminated these means by making use of them. The status of the document can thus clearly not be claimed to be Magisterial, even by his most sycophantic cronies. Popes do not share their Magisterium with Islamic Scholars. The CDF has not been corrupted by being associated with such a disgraceful statement.

[Don't speak too soon, Father! We will not know until it hits us like a guillotine blade how the CDF will be dragooned into this mess. Though the obvious thing would have been for the CDF to have reacted to Abu Dhabi byre-presenting DOMINUS IESUS to Catholics an to the world - a seminal document I personally believe Jorge Bergoglio rejects, not just because all of his statements and actions as pope contradict what it re-affirmed to the world when Christianity entered its third millennium in 2000, but because he has never referred to it at all - I think not even while he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires and already making a big deal of playing footsie with the leaders of non-Christian faiths to whom, on the contrary, he all but kowtowed to in public every chance he got.]

What I find interesting is: Why? Did some of PF's collaborators object to an association of such an objectionable statement with the Church's doctrinal mechanisms? Or did the CDF, perhaps, itself courageously explain the problems involved?

Incidentally, I invite readers to revisit the superb CDF document of 2000, Dominus Iesus. [There we are!] It provides a succinct, complete, and convincing answer to PF's most recent public error.

The distinction between God's Will and and his permissive will is irrelevant. God's permissive will includes, for example, the Shoah. And the destruction of the Twin Towers. We are unlikely to find PF, with whatever daft verbal jiggery pokery, inviting justified world-wide opprobrium by suggesting that these events were God's will. Indeed, were he to do so, it would be and be perceived to be a major scandal and not least by the gullible meejah who, until recently, have given him such a soft ride.

What this remarkably unCatholic man meant to say, and did say, is perfectly clear. [i.e., that all religions are equal, which implies that the Incarnation was totally unnecessary and futile - Jesus did not have to come down to earth at all. BTW, Fr H uses the term 'un-Catholic' for this pope, whereas I prefer 'anti-Catholic' and even 'anti-Christian'.]

I don't know if it counts formally and canonically as heresy ... some of the deepest things in the Faith are so fundamental and are so inscribed on every part of Catholicism that they may never have been explicitly defined ex cathedra or by a Council.

The fact that there is only one name given under heaven for Salvation, JESUS, might be one of these undefined basics.

If it is true that Islam and other religions enjoy the status of having been willed by God, then there never need have been one single Christian Martyr.

Omnes Sancti Martyres Dei, orate pro nobis.

Washington, D.C. gets a liberal archbishop
who is to the left of even Cardinal Wuerl

March 28, 2019

The good news is the next archbishop of Washington, D.C., is not Cardinal Cupich, Cardinal Tobin or Bishop McElroy. The bad news is, according to Catholic News Agency, the new archbishop will be Wilton Gregory [till now, Archbishop of Atlanta].

A disciple of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, Gregory is not just liberal on some things; rather, he is liberal on everything.

On abortion.

On natural law and the traditional family.

On dissident priests.

On the translations of the Novus Ordo.

Even on dressing for the beach at Mass.

If true, this is a disaster for the United States. Pope Francis has managed to select an archbishop for the political capital of the world who is to the left of even Donald Cardinal Wuerl.

Here's the CNA report - which says nothing about Gregory's ultra-liberal record, nor even hint it...

Archbishop Wilton Gregory asked
to lead Washington archdiocese
By Ed Condon and JD Flynn


Washington D.C., Mar 28, 2019(CNA).- Pope Francis is expected to appoint Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Atlanta to serve as the next Archbishop of Washington, multiple sources have independently reported to CNA. Gregory would become the seventh Archbishop of Washington, succeeding Cardinal Donald Wuerl.

A formal announcement could come as early as next week, sources say, though it has not yet been confirmed that the archbishop has accepted the appointment. Sources in Rome and the United States told CNA that Gregory was informed of the appointment earlier this week.

Technically, there has been no Archbishop of Washington since Cardinal Wuerl’s resignation was accepted in October 2018, but Wuerl himself has served as interim leader of the archdiocese since that time.

The identity of Wuerl’s successor has been the subject of intense speculation over the last five months, and several prominent members of the American hierarchy were reportedly considered for the role.

One source told CNA that because Washington has been an epicenter of the Church’s sexual abuse crisis, the background of potential candidates has been subject to more exacting scrutiny than is typical for episcopal appointments.

For that reason, the source emphasized, the likely appointment of Gregory could still be subject to change, even close to the announcement, if the Holy See or Gregory himself had reason to be concerned about his ability to address the problems relating to sexual abuse and misconduct that have plagued the Washington archdiocese.

“They absolutely want to get this one right,” the source told CNA.

While Gregory, 71, is generally well-regarded among U.S. bishops as an administrator, one bishop told CNA that some expected his age might discourage him from accepting the appointment.

In Washington, Gregory would likely be expected to provide a period of steady leadership in Washington for the near term, while leaving open the possibility he could carry on past the normal retirement age for bishops of 75.

The Archbishop of Washington is generally viewed as one of the most influential Churchmen in the United States; the five most recent archbishops were all created cardinals - including the now-laicized Theodore McCarrick. The Archbishop of Washington is generally expected to walk a narrow line: articulating the Church’s teaching in the middle of the national political conversation, without appearing to be partisan.

Gregory’s appointment to the archdiocese would follow months of scandal in the Church in the United States, and his selection would likely have been made, at least in part, in recognition of his experience in dealing with the fallout of the last major abuse crisis in the Church.

Serving a term as president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops from 2001 to 2004, Gregory was responsible for helping to lead the American hierarchy through the fallout of the Church’s 2002 sexual abuse scandals. He oversaw the formation and implementation of the “Dallas Charter” and USCCB’s “Essential Norms” in 2002. [Not that Gregory alone was responsible for it - since the entire USCCB approved it with not a small amount of self-congratulatory smugness - but after the McCarrick expose and that of a few other US bishops as well, hasn't just about everyone faulted the Dallas Charter since then forgoiut out of its way to spare bishops the scrutiny and strictness it required of priests???]

As a past USCCB president, Gregory is part of a working group - together with Cardinal Timothy Dolan and Archbishop Joseph Kurtz - charged by the U.S. bishops with examining and developing proposed reforms for enhancing episcopal accountability.

As the first African-American Archbishop of Washington, Gregory’s appointment would also be viewed as a historic milestone for the Church in the United States, especially since the archbishop is likely to be created the first African-American cardinal.

Within the Archdiocese of Washington itself, Gregory’s appointment would likely bring a welcome end to months of speculation.

While Washington’s near 700,000 Catholics are a considerably smaller flock than the 1.2 million Gregory has led in Atlanta, the capital archdiocese is home to a broad diversity of communities, which include the deeply enculturated African-American parishes in the southeast of the city, the affluent parishes of northern parts of the city, large communities of Latin American immigrants, thousands of university students, and the rural communities of southern Maryland.

A Chicago native, Gregory converted to Catholicism as a student in a Chicago Catholic grade school. In 1971, he was ordained a priest in Chicago by Cardinal John Cody. Consecrated bishop at age 36, Gregory served as an auxiliary bishop in his home diocese under Cardinal Joseph Bernardin from 1983 until 1994.

The archbishop is known to have preserved close ties with his home city, and with archdiocesan leadership in Chicago.

In 1994 Gregory became the Bishop of Belleville, Illinois, where he remained for ten years before moving to Atlanta in 2004. Since his arrival in Atlanta, Gregory has ordained 64 men to the priesthood and overseen the welcoming of more than 16,000 people as converts into the Catholic Church.

Calls requesting comment from the Archdiocese of Washington went unreturned. The Archdiocese of Atlanta did not respond to questions as of press time.

I think it is safe to assume that the Gregory appointment will come through - especially in the absence from the CNA story of any other names in the running. Which just goes to show that the reigning pope continues to resolutely favor American bishops in the McCarrick mold. Wuerl is not really out because he still holds his positions in the Vatican curias to which he was named, particularly the all-important Congregation for Bishops.

So what we're getting is an prominent addition to the Wuerl-Cupich-Tobin-Farrell-McElroy line descending from McCarrick, even if Gregory was not, from all accounts, a McCarrick protege as the other four wer. These bishops represent, to borrow from Gilbert and Sullivan, 'the very model of a modern major-general' (in this case, of a modern aggiornamento bishop) by Bergoglio standards.

And in keeping with my practice to try and pool together articles and commentaries that are critical of the reigning pope, let me comment here on what I thought was a premature post by Father Z about 'putting Ring-gate to rest'. Like others who have come to the defense of the pope about this matter - including the BBC correspondent very early on - Fr Z points to the fact that the entire video shows the pope allowing his ring to be kissed for ten minutes before he starts his withdraw-and-shove act, and that after some minutes of this, he then resumes allowing it. I have neither the time nor the desire to watch the entire video so I'll take the word of those who have done so.

What made Fr Z's Ring-gate RIP appear premature was that shortly thereafter, the Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti told reporters, ""The Holy Father told me that the motivation was very simple: hygiene. He wants to avoid the risk of contagion for the people, not for him."

OK, very commendable, that!... But why did he allow it for all the nuns and priests who came before the hapless group of lay people he rebuffed, and for all those he apparently allowed to afterwards? Besides, in six years as pope, I don't think this has happened before. Or at least, not caught on camera. But, all of a sudden, for that length of time he was shown to have refused to allow his ring to be kissed, he thought of hygiene? Whatever, it was as lame an excuse as one could find to explain behavior one can only call boorish, to say the least.

Aldo Maria Valli, in the sarcastic piece he wrote (which I translated a few posts above this) soon after the video was made public, has a follow-up piece today entitled "From sanctification to sanification" to ridicule the reason Gisotti gave. I will post it as soon as translated - it's even more sarcastic than the first one.

The only comment I might add is that maybe our beloved pope thinks that all those killer plagues in medieval Europe were started not by the proliferation of mice and other vermin but by people who had kissed the pope's ring. And maybe, going by his hygienic concerns, he should discourage churchgoers from dipping their hands into the holy water font to bless themselves (or will he have churches do away with these fonts altogether)?

Anyway, why does the Vatican not publish guidelines for 'how to behave when you find yourself face to face with the pope'? Such as:
1. However much you might want to hug him, do not try to touch him at all.
2. If you want to kiss his ring, wait until he holds out his ring hand which means he allows you to do so - but do not hold the hand at all. Just genuflect or kneel and bend respectfully to kiss the ring.
3. If he does not hold out his hand to you, do not attempt to take his hand at all. Just kneel to show obeisance. And if you wish, bend down to kiss his foot or at least the hem of his cassock.
3. If he does hold out his hand to you, you should not really kiss the ring but merely bring it close to your lips.
4. If you mean to make such an obeisance to the pope, bring a Sani-wipe with you, so that if any part of your body or clothing touches the ring in any way, you can quickly sanitize the ring to make it safe for whoever comes after you.

My recommendations are, of course, quite minor - although first-line when it comes to the pope - compared to Valli's imaginings of where this 'sanification not sanctification' mania can lead to. So much for 'ring-gate RIP'.

And BTW, what about that other video showing the pope during the Consecration at his Mass in Loreto? I should think there ought to be more outrage over his failure to even attempt to genuflect before consecrating the Bread and Wine than at his boorish ring act. Even if we all know that for some reason he does not (and probably never has) do that at all for the Consecration, though he gladly kneels for those objects of his mercy with whom he allows ihmself to be photographed every Maundy Thursday). If you get a chance, watch the very brief clip, and see if you think it would make an edifyingly awesome model of the priestly act of Consecration, assuming, of course, that he genuflects properly.

Is Archbishop Wilton Gregory
the right man for Washington?
by Michael Warren Davis

March 29, 2019

It’s (almost) official: Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Atlanta will be appointed the next Archbishop of Washington, according to Ed Condon of the Catholic News Agency.

The office has technically been vacant since the last archbishop, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, resigned in October. Wuerl had been damaged by claims that he covered up sex abuse in his previous diocese of Pittsburgh. He had also maintained – in the face of claims to the contrary – that he knew nothing about the predatory sexual activities of his notorious predecessor, Theodore McCarrick.

Washington is perhaps the most sought-after diocese for ambitious American bishops – but a particular kind of bishop. While the Archbishop of New York finds himself rubbing shoulders with media and cultural luminaries, Washington’s archbishop has priceless access to lawmakers and political lobbyists. McCarrick’s talents as a fundraiser and Wuerl’s masterful diplomacy served them well in the post.

But because Washington is at the very heart of the current sex-abuse crisis, the Vatican couldn’t afford simply to hand the see to the next bureaucrat in line.

The Vatican had to decide whether it wanted a reformer who would expose McCarrick’s network of enablers and fellow-predators – or, shall we say, someone more discreet, who would protect the Church’s public image. Which role will Archbishop Gregory play, if he has indeed been chosen?

Gregory, who would be the first African-American Archbishop of Washington, served as president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) from 2001 until 2004, leading the American bishops through the first chapters of the Spotlight revelations.

It was under his leadership that the USCCB drafted its protocols for handling allegations of predatory priests, known as the “Dallas Charter” – though McCarrick was its principal author. In any event, Gregory certainly has more experience in dealing with the fallout from clerical sex abuse than most of his brother bishops.

He is not, however, the sort of reformer that conservative Catholics were hoping for. Two years ago he addressed the Association of US Catholic Priests, which promotes married priests and female deacons. Other speakers that year included two hardline supporters of Pope Francis: Fr Thomas Rosica and Professor Massimo Faggioli.

Archbishop Gregory has defended the controversial Fr James Martin, an editor at the Jesuit magazine America and consultant for the Vatican’s Secretariat for Communications. Ed Condon also reports that Gregory has “close ties” with Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, whom many consider the leader of the USCCB’s pro-Francis faction.

In other words, Wilton Gregory is firmly aligned with the well-connected liberals known as “Team Francis”. This might prove useful should Rome wish to exercise more direct control over Washington’s handling of further scandals in the archdiocese.

Conservative Catholics have long distrusted Archbishop Gregory, who was a friend of McCarrick’s and supported the ex-cardinal in appearing to oppose the then Cardinal Ratzinger’s attempts to deny Holy Communion to pro-abortion Catholic politicians.

It should be noted, however, that the Archbishop of Atlanta has spoken with evident distress of his “shame” at allowing himself to be hoodwinked by McCarrick. Indeed, he said recently that Catholics were “perplexed and sickened” that the Holy See may have ignored “multiple warning signs” relating to McCarrick and others.

On the other hand, Cardinal Wuerl – a prelate who certainly did ignore those warning signs – may have had a hand in this reported appointment. He and Cardinal Cupich are the only American members of the Congregation for Bishops, which forwards recommendations to the Holy Father.

From the Vatican’s perspective, Archbishop Gregory is certainly a safe pair of hands. Whether he is the man to clear the skeletons out of Washington’s closet remains to be seen.

These past two days, there has been very little new 'news' and a paucity of commentary I thought worth recording. So amid that doldrum, I missed the inimitable Maureen Mullarkey's review of the Martel book purporting wholesale homosexuality among the prelates and priests in the Vatican. She also quotes more about Martel's slander of Benedict XVI than other reviewers have done so far - some of it so far out that despite not intending to comment on any of it, I have to.

An anti-Catholic 'expose' traffics in
hearsay, rumor and catty accusations
Frédéric Martel's book, 'In the Closet of the Vatican' proves to be an appalling exercise
in smearing the Catholic Church in order to grind a personal and theological axes
by Maureen Mullarkey

March 29, 2019

Beset by a continuous drip of disclosures about clerical sex abuse, and angered by a pope intent on mischaracterizing the nature of the scandal, Catholics are a ready market for an exposé of a masked but powerful gay culture in Vatican circles. Released simultaneously in twenty countries and scheduled to coincide with the Vatican’s February abuse summit, Frédéric Martel’s In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy is a publishing gambit expecting to be an international sensation. [Has it lived up to that expectation though? I have not seen any news reports hailing the sales of the book so far - if sales have been in any way spectacular, or even enough to merit best-seller status on the usual bestseller lists, it would surely have come to our attention by now. I just did a quick check of the New York Times and Amazon nonfiction best-seller lists, and the first 50 titles of amazon-italia's current list of non-fiction 'piu venduto' (most sold) - Martel's book is in none of those. Maybe it was included the first few weeks after it went on sale, who knows?]

Prurience sells. Accordingly, Closet is a lurid through-the-looking-glass potboiler steaming with gleeful digs, salacious innuendo, unsupported inferences, and self-admiring ballyhoo. Like Alice, readers are expected “to believe at least six impossible things before breakfast” (e.g., intimates of Pope Benedict at posh parties with butlers in livery and cakes decorated with marzipan penises; male street prostitution in Rome bankrolled by Vatican clerics). Dozens more follow on into the night with randy seminarians, Muslim rent boys, “sacristy queens,” and sexually arid celibates.

An openly gay propagandist, Martel is hostile to the moral framework of Catholicism’s sexual ethics, and disdains “a continence that is against nature.” He crusades for an unreservedly gay priesthood: “A priest or a cardinal should not be ashamed of being homosexual; I even think it should be one possible social status among others... These cardinals, bishops and priests have the right to have lovers, and to explore their inclinations, whether acquired or innate.”

The book’s logic flows from its premise: most “homophobic” supporters of an objective moral order are themselves gay. It follows that the clerical culture of secrecy can only be eliminated by acknowledging gay priests as gays and, it follows, endorsing homosexuality.

To Martel, it is celibacy that is deviant. By trumpeting the obligatory collapse of priestly discipline, he works to undermine remaining institutional restrictions on sexual freedom. Homosexual priests must be free “to satisfy their inclinations.” To that end, Martel plays the intrepid truth-teller, a latter-day Diogenes carrying a lamp into dark corners in search of an honest cleric. Unsurprising in light of his aim, he finds few.

Those happy few are “gay-friendly,” left-leaning lieutenants of “mischievous” Pope Francis, Martel’s hero. They support gay entitlements, gay marriage, sexual freedom, and assorted social justice distractions from outmoded preoccupations with sin, grace, and natural law. All others are either leading double lives, are “thwarted homophiles,” or just asexual. Francis and his band “know that sexual desire, and homosexual desire first and foremost, is one of the main engines and wellsprings of Vatican life.”

Martel is evasive about his sources, derivative and profligate in his methods. Woven into 555 pages of unsubstantiated hearsay is material heavily indebted to a broad mélange of previously published sources. Despite breathless claims that he is disclosing a bombshell “beyond comprehension,” there is little new to be told. His claim — “It would have been difficult to publish a book like this twenty or even only ten years ago” — is false.

To illustrate, Martel’s chapter on the double life of Marcial Maciel, founder of the cult-like Legion of Christ, reprises what Gordon Urquhart chronicled in The Pope’s Armada (1999). Michael Rose’s Goodbye, Good Men (2002) documented the root of the abuse scandal reaching down to the seminaries after the cultural explosion of the 1960s and ’70s. Closet is a sequel set in Rome. What Rose described in dismay has been repackaged by Martel with tabloid relish and self-promotional chutzpah.

Sociologist Andrew Greely, S.J., is only one of a legion of serious writers who have covered the same ground (celibacy, sexual abuse, clerical homosexuality) with a clear eye and greater discernment for the last two decades and then some. Richard Sipe’s Sex, Priests, and Power: Anatomy of a Crisis appeared in 1995.

The Catholic press has not skimped on coverage of the seismic shifts within the church that began with sympathy and tolerance for homosexual persons before drifting into acceptance of gay cliques and a separatist culture in seminaries and clerical ranks.

Closet’s trademark novelty consists of catty wink-wink revelations that read like a warm-up routine for a night of Bitchy Bingo. The tenor of his self-styled analysis of Joseph Ratzinger is a pitch-perfect synecdoche of his reasoning about every conservative name mentioned in the tell-all:

---

Some monsignori I have interviewed [typically unnamed] called Ratzinger a ‘liturgy queen’ or an ‘opera queen.’... Benedict XVI is a veritable gender theory all by himself. Sua quique persona (to each his mask) [Not a mask at all: it's priestly celibacy and chastity in imitation of Christ,but of course, people like Martel would understand none of that]... [He is] a fashionable figure, seen wearing all the fashion houses of Milan, as once Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis or Elizabeth II had done."

---

[Martel does not even bother to be plausible. How could a pope be called 'fashionable'- when all his outerwear, whether a particular pope chooses to wear them or not - is the stuff of centuries-long tradition? It was known from the start of Benedict's Pontificate that he chose to continue getting all his clothes - papal wear as well as shirts and pants - from Euroclero, the same Roman tailor he used all the time he was a cardinal. Since when have the fashion houses of Milan catered to the clergy? The whole myth began with some British newspapers maliciously reporting in 2005 that the red papal shoes worn by Benedict XVI came from Prada - none of them did, as they were made by the same northern Italian 'no-name' shoemaker who made John Paul II's shoes.]

Martel thrills to tell that Oscar Wilde prefigured Benedict in the “homosexualized dandy” Dorian Gray. [Has Martel even read that novel, or even a synopsis of it? It's about a beautiful young man who, in effect, makes a pact with the devil so that he can retain his youth and beauty despite indulging in every conceivable vice and hedonistic pleasure - in exchange for which it would be a full-length portrait of him that would age, fade and reflect his life. So he goes on living his amoral life, which leads him to kill a number of persons who thwart him, and after his last murder, finds his portrait so revolting that he stabs it... His servants find a dead and withered old man stabbed in the heart while the portrait has been restored to its earlier beauty. How does Dorian Gray 'prefigure' Joseph Ratzinger in any way???]

Other Martel tidbits: Benedict “had a marked liking for accessories,” and chose Serengeti-Bushnell sunglasses after being criticized for Ray-Bans. Did you know that instead of downscale Geoxes, he chose “a sublime pair of sparkling Prada moccasins in brilliant lipstick red?” That his tailors and boot-makers were “well known for their ‘intrinsically disordered’ morals”? That as Cardinal Ratzinger, “our queenie” had “dizzying relationships” with young assistants who “were remarkable for their angelic beauty.” “It has to be said that Benedict liked to flirt.” [Gee, how could any of that have escaped the ultra-diligent investigators of AP, the New York Times and Der Spiegel when they pooled their resources in 2009-2010 to uncover any stories they could find to link Joseph Ratzinger directly or indirectly to acts of sexual abuse or covering up clerical sex abuse an came out with zip? Maybe they didn't think 'dizzying relationships with young assistants' constituted sexual abuse at all? Or at least sexual harrassment by a superior? Mullarkey mercifully does not bring up the presumed improper relationship with Georg Gaenswein that, according to other reviewers, Martel pursues.]

Extend this level of bent scrutiny to every subject and every conscientious conservative in the Vatican and you grasp Martel’s rancor toward Catholicism. Closet lingers with unveiled malice over non-progressivist clerics, devoting 11 pages to diminishing the reputation of Guinea’s Cardinal Robert Sarah. An outspoken, prominent standard-bearer for Catholic orthodoxy in the one place — Africa — where the church is growing, he must be discredited.

A second-generation Christian, Sarah is slyly depicted as a residual animist with “ a liking for witchcraft and witch doctors.” Esteemed among Catholics as an heir to Benedict, he is dismissed as a rigid “homophobe” with “an extravagant ego” and an eye on money. An unnamed priest confides that Sarah “prays constantly, as if he’s under some sort of spell. He’s frightening. He’s literally frightening.” Yet another anonymous source badmouths him as “a bottom-of-the-range theologian” whose theology is “puerile.”

On it goes. Defamation is the wrecking ball swung in animus. Depiction of a Vatican degraded to the point of illegitimacy resembles both a sedevacantist J’accuse and dog-eared anti-Catholic tropes. Martel conjures up the counter-Church of the Last Days. The great harlot of the Apocalypse reigns in Vatican City, where prelates travel with escorts and “go regularly to Cuba as sex tourists.” A “ring of lust” encircles the Vatican, a sexual casino for high rollers in cope and chasuble. How many Vatican scandals can be explained by break-ups between an eminence and his secretary-lover?

The title’s intended hypocrites are those conscientious clergy who publicly espouse traditional church teaching on sexual morality: “Heterosexual prelates were rare among those close to John Paul II; chastity was rarer still. . . . Most cardinals around John Paul II led a double life.”

Pope Benedict’s “internalized homophilia” — Martel’s own diagnosis —was among likely causes of his abdication. [That makes no sense at all. Homophilia, in Martel's usage, means a liking for gays to the point of tolerating whatever they do. No homophilic would have commissioned the inquiry Benedict asked three retired cardinals to do about homosexuality in the Vatican.] The Vatican “has one of the biggest gay communities in the world, and I doubt whether, even in San Francisco’s Castro, the emblematic gay quarter, though more mixed today, there are quite as many gays!”

This snake-pit of unverifiable rumor and conjecture is catnip to disaffected Catholics and anti-Catholics alike. Alert readers, however, are apt to see the author himself as the leading imposter —a diva who exaggerates and falsifies in the costume of a journalist.

Closet belongs to the genre of camp scholarship: gossip-as-knowledge-production in drag as sociology. It observes the giddy postmodern strategy to subvert what queer theorists call heterosexual hegemony. If “the hallmark of camp is its spirit of extravagance,” as Susan Sontag famously wrote, Closet is an exercise in high camp.

The act opens in the prologue with Martel crowing about his sex appeal to priests who “influential or otherwise, came on to me decorously, and some, with very little reluctance, more intensely. It’s an occupational hazard!” (And, oh, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi is “cute as a button.”)

An odor of hucksterism hangs over the project. Offered as investigative journalism, it comes with no index, no citations, no footnotes, no bibliography. In place of these is a link to a catalog of general sources (www.sodoma.fr), a preposterous compilation of general references available to anyone on Google but with no specified connection to any line in the book.

Perhaps that explains Martel’s caveat: “This book is accompanied and defended by a consortium of about fifteen lawyers.” A preemptive move, it calls to mind the lawsuits (plagiarism and copyright infringement) brought against Dan Brown for The Da Vinci Code.

Reminders of Brown’s creative methods are apparent to anyone familiar with the 2003 novel. It was his insistence on facticity that turned Brown’s thriller into an international blockbuster. Following suit, Martel prefaces his text with testimony that he is, indeed, presenting facts. (Because certain interviewees are given names of characters invented by Andre Gide, do not — not! — think any interviews contain elements of fiction.)

Echoing Brown’s title, Martel provides a chapter on “The Maritain Code,” offered as “a real key to understanding The Closet.” Jacques Maritain stands as one of the 20th century’s most influential public philosophers, a convert who integrated Catholicism into the literary and intellectual life of his era. That mission was lived, necessarily, within close relation to leading literary figures — André Gide, François Mauriac, Jean Cocteau, others — who were homosexual. Nudge, nudge. Say no more. Just decode.

Without intending to, this ugly book lends credence to stereotypes of homosexuals as sex-obsessed captives of their impulses. It is a slur on conscientious men with homosexual leanings who struggle to keep their vows, honor their commitments, and embrace the pledged obligations of their undertakings.

Finally, after several days - despite the pope's trip to Morocco and his enthusiastic reiteration of his AbuDhabi abracadabra and much of his abominable platitudes on Islam and immigration, and the release of his blather-inflated post-synodal exhortation about the 'youth synod' held last October, I have found something online that is truly interesting to an orthodox Catholic like me online - and it is not news, even if much of it may be new to you as it was to me. For me, particularly, to learn that Paul VI's personal preferences on liturgy were precisely what Bugnini and company codified into his Novus Ordo - and that I have been wrong to blame Bugnini and his committee reformists for the appalling wholesale changes they made to the Mass.

No wonder Jorge Bergoglio worships at Papa Montini's altar. In many ways, he's trying all he can to out do him - to impose changes in 'the Church' as radical as that Paul VI imposed with the Novus Ordo. If Montini changed the liturgical practice codified in the previous 500 years with the snap of a papal finger, Bergoglio has been determined to change not just practices but doctrines going all the way back to apostolic times, to which end he often edits Jesus;s evangelical statements to suit his agenda.



Nine months before Vatican-II even ended, Paul VI, in celebrating Mass in the vernacular for the first time, actually already introduced many elements of what would become his 'Novus Ordo' - the only difference being that he had to use the Vetus Ordo prayers because his Missal would not get published till 1969, when the NO officially became the Roman rite Mass.

By the way, I was forewarned by the Forum's internal system, as soon as I pasted the text, that at 65,829 characters, it exceeds the 65,535 allowed per post, so I will have to post it in two sections.

“A Half-Century of Novelty:
Revisiting Paul VI’s Apologia for the New Mass”
by Peter Kwasniewski

April 3, 2019

Text of a lecture given in various places in Australia during a visit sponsored by the Latin Mass Society of Australia.

April 3 of this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the promulgation of the Novus Ordo Missae by Pope Paul VI’s 1969 Apostolic Constitution Missale Romanum, the provisions of which were to go into effect on November 30, the first Sunday of Advent.

When we look back a half-century later at this monstrous masterpiece of liturgical reform —and, truth be told, it is no longer only self-proclaimed traditionalists who lament a job badly done — we often feel moved to ask the simple question: Why? Why was it deemed necessary to make so many and such radical changes in the Mass?

For an explanation, we must look to the pope who, more than any other figure, was responsible for pushing forward the liturgical reform, handing down not only a new rite of Mass, but also, in like manner, new rites for all of the sacraments and indeed new versions of almost everything to be said or done in church — a figurative “sack of Rome” that throws the work of Alaric and Charles V into the shade.

Where can we look to find the pope’s explanation? There are, as one would expect, a plethora of addresses, letters, and other documents that allow us not just a glimpse into the mind of Montini, but a leisurely review; he was frank and outspoken about the liturgical reform, which was and had been his passion prior to and during his pontificate.

Above all, however, we ought to look carefully at three general audiences in the 1960s: the first from March of 1965, concerning the epochal shift from Christian Latin to modern vernaculars; and two from November of 1969, on the even greater shift from the classic Roman Rite to the product of the Consilium.

Before descending into the details of these general audiences, I will make a theological argument about how we, as believers, should understand the historical development of liturgy in the Catholic Church, as this, I am convinced, is the only way to see the magnitude of what Paul VI desired to do, attempted to do, and, in the judgment of most people, succeeded in doing.

Laws of Organic Liturgical Development
In his 1947 encyclical on the liturgy, Mediator Dei, Pope Pius XII pointed out a theological error in the tendency of some members of the Liturgical Movement to reach back to suppositious liturgical rites of ancient times while excluding or denigrating later periods of Church history such as the Middle Ages or the Baroque. Speaking of “some persons who are bent on the restoration of all the ancient rites and ceremonies indiscriminately,” he says:

---

The liturgy of the early ages is most certainly worthy of all veneration. But ancient usage must not be esteemed more suitable and proper, either in its own right or in its significance for later times and new situations, on the simple ground that it carries the savor and aroma of antiquity. The more recent liturgical rites likewise deserve reverence and respect. They, too, owe their inspiration to the Holy Spirit, who assists the Church in every age even to the consummation of the world (cf. Matt 28:20). They are equally the resources used by the majestic Spouse of Jesus Christ to promote and procure the sanctity of man.[1]

---

Pius XII is writing in 1947 about avant-garde liturgists who want to leapfrog over the Baroque and medieval periods —in other words, over the Roman rite as codified after Trent — to arrive at a pristine apostolic liturgy. In 1947 the Roman Rite was still very much intact, as vintage photos of Pius XII’s magnificent papal liturgies evince; the liturgy committee that was to give Bugnini his first post at the Vatican and eventually produce a new Holy Week was yet to come. [Radical changes in the Holy Week liturgy made by Pius XII which Fr Hunwicke has taken pains to explain how an why they were 'not right', to say the least, and which many sanctimoniously 'traditionalist' bloggers conveniently and consistently fail to acknowledge when referring to Pius XII as the 'last' pope who upheld traditional liturgy.]

So when Pius XII talks about “more recent liturgical rites,” he is talking about medieval and Baroque developments, culminating in the Tridentine codification, of which the 1570 Missale Romanum is the flagship. The key points to take away from this paragraph are, first, that something’s being more ancient does not ipso facto make it better; second, that the historical development of the liturgy is not an accident that God permits, but a plan that He positively wills, inspired by the Holy Spirit and used by the Head of the Church, Our Lord Jesus Christ, to sanctify the members of His Mystical Body.

Indeed, this passage reads rather like a commentary on the famous Canon 13 of the Seventh Session of the Council of Trent:

---

If anyone says that the received and approved rites of the Catholic Church that are customarily used in the solemn administration of the sacraments can be looked down on, or that ministers can without sin omit them according to their own whim, or that any pastor of churches whatever can change them into other new ones, let him be anathema.[2]

---

The seventh canon of the twenty-second Session of Trent is also highly pertinent. This canon states:

---

If anyone says that the ceremonies, vestments, and outward signs which the Catholic Church uses in the celebration of Masses are incentives to impiety rather than offices of piety; let him be anathema.[3]

---

When the Council pointedly says “which the Catholic Church uses,” we are given to understand that all of the liturgical ceremonies, vestments, and external signs received from tradition are offices of piety and not incentives to impiety. Thus, the view, later popular with 20th century reformers, that aspects of the classical Roman Rite are to be considered corruptions of authentic liturgy and detrimental to the spiritual life of the faithful is anathematized ahead of time.

In the same spirit, the Roman Catechism published in 1566, three years after the Council of Trent was concluded, says this about the Mass in particular:

---

The Sacrifice is celebrated with many solemn rites and ceremonies, none of which should be deemed useless or superfluous. On the contrary, all of them tend to display the majesty of this august Sacrifice, and to excite the faithful when beholding these saving mysteries, to contemplate the divine things which lie concealed in the Eucharistic Sacrifice.

---

Christ promised that “when He, the Spirit of Truth, is come, he will teach you all truth”[4]: cum autem venerit ille Spiritus veritatis, docebit vos omnem veritatem (Jn 16:13). This includes the fullness of liturgy.[5]

One would expect, if the Church is truly governed by the Spirit of God, that her liturgy would, in its large lines and accepted forms, mature and become more perfect over time. Would it not then follow that the rate of change will slow down and the Spirit’s work will gradually shift from inspiring new prayers to preserving the prayers already inspired? A liturgical rite will grow in perfection until it reaches a certain maturity, and then will cease to develop in any but incidental or minor ways.

One could diagram this process as a chart with two lines: the descending line[6] represents the creation of liturgical forms, while the ascending line[7] represents the preservation of existing liturgical forms. As the former action tapers, the latter action dominates, until that verse from Ezekiel is fulfilled in the Church’s sacred liturgy: “Your renown went forth among the nations because of your beauty, for it was perfect through the splendor that I had bestowed on you, declares the Lord God” (Ezek 16:14).[8]

Much more can and should be said on the subject of what we might call “the laws of organic liturgical development,” and I am currently researching and writing on the subject. In the interests of time, however, I will turn to the three general audiences of Paul VI on the topic of the liturgical reform.[9]

General Audience of March 17, 1965
The first text we will look at was delivered on March 17, 1965, ten days after Pope Paul VI celebrated the first-ever Italian-spite Mass at the Church of All Saints (Ognissanti) in Rome. Inspite of official rhetoric, there is little evidence that the people rejoiced; a plaque memorializing the event in Ognissanti was vandalized so many times that a new plaque finally had to be placed high on the wall, out of reach of disgruntled parishioners.[10]

It is hard to know what to be more astonished about: the sheer contempt for the common man with which the audience drips, or the sheer fantasyland into which the pope enters when describing the anticipated benefits of the “new liturgy” that was unveiled at Ognissanti — remember, this was not the Novus Ordo, which was four years away, but a heavily simplified Tridentine Mass conducted in Italian (except for the Roman Canon), with the celebrant facing the people, standing at a temporary altar placed outside of the sanctuary.[11]

The pope says there have been negative reactions and positive reactions. The negative reaction is one of “a certain confusion and annoyance”:

---

Previously, they say, there was peace, each person could pray as he wished, the whole sequence of the rite was well known; now everything is new, startling, and changed; even the ringing of the bells at the Sanctus is done away with; and then those prayers which one doesn’t know where to find; Holy Communion received standing; Mass ending suddenly with the blessing; everybody answering, many people moving around, rites and readings which are recited aloud … In short, there is no longer any peace and we now know less than we did before; and so on.

---

This does not seem an altogether unreasonable reaction. As far as the pope is concerned, however, Catholics who react this way have a paltry understanding of what they are doing:

---

We shall not criticize these views because then we would have to show how they reveal a poor understanding of the meaning of religious ceremonial and allow us to glimpse not a true devotion and a true appreciation of the meaning and worth of the Mass, but rather a certain spiritual laziness which is not prepared to make some personal effort of understanding and participation directed to a better understanding and fulfillment of this, the most sacred of religious acts, in which we are invited, or rather obliged, to participate.

---

One wonders when a pope has ever said something more self-righteous, presumptuous, insensitive, and unjust? I suppose everyone, before the glorious revolution, was spiritually lazy, unprepared to make even “some” effort to understand, and altogether bereft of participation in the mysteries.

The popularity of Liturgical Movement authors like Dom Prosper Guéranger, Pius Parsch, and Ildefonso Schuster, whose commentaries on the Mass instructed and inspired precisely those laymen who were startled and disturbed by the changes of the 1960s is passed over in utter silence.[12]

Montini continues by explaining that reform always causes people to feel upset because deeply rooted religious practices are being tampered with, but that’s okay — soon everyone will love it. And we’ll make sure that no one can settle back again into silent devotion or laziness. “The congregation will be alive and active!,” he says: everyone must participate. Now one must “listen and pray” (apparently they were doing neither before).

Activity is the order of the day, the name of the game! We will finally have a liturgy that is not mummery (“performed merely according to its external form”) but “an immense wing flying towards the heights of divine mystery and joy.” An immense wing… Excuse me while I reach for the airsickness bag.

The positive reaction, on the other hand, is, according to Paul VI, that of a majority of Catholics, young and old, uneducated and scholarly, the earnestly devout and the urbanely cultured, insiders and outsiders, who greet the changes with “enthusiasm and praise.” At last, they say, “one can understand and follow the complicated and mysterious ceremonial” (the pope declines to explain how simplification and easy accessibility fit with “complicated and mysterious,” unless his meaning is that a ceremonial that was once complicated and mysterious will henceforth cease to be either). At last, “the priest speaks to the people” (but wait: I thought the liturgy was addressed primarily to God?).

One old gentleman, the pope says, fighting back a tear, gushed to a priest that “at last” in this new way of celebrating Mass he fully participated in the sacrifice — indeed, possibly for the first time in his life. Some say this excitement will quiet down and turn into habit. But Pope Paul expresses the hope that the “new form of worship” will continue to stir up “religious enthusiasm,” so that “the gospel of love” will be realized in “the souls of our time.” (He does not seem aware of Msgr. Ronald Knox’s classic critique of religious enthusiasm; it is just this hankering for feelings of enthusiasm or excitement that has led to ever-repeated efforts to stir up or stimulate congregations ever since the sixties, with ever-diminishing returns.)

This papal address is notable for the number of times it uses the word “new”: “new, startling, changed”; “new order”; “new scheme of things”; “new liturgical books”; “new form” (twice); “new liturgy” (twice); “new habit”; “liturgical innovation.” If we add them up, eleven times. Some Catholics today are critical of traditionalists who speak of the Novus Ordo, but here we have a pope identifying the interim missal of 1965 as a novel thing, when it was vastly less of a novelty than the missal of 1969. I think we owe it to Pope Paul to use his terms when we talk about his reforms. He did not try to hide the fact that there had been a sea change.

Many notable Catholics of this period have left us records of their reaction to the “new Mass” of 1965 (which in retrospect turned out to be a half-way house). Evelyn Waugh and William F. Buckley left us choice words about it, but I shall quote what Dietrich von Hildebrand wrote in 1966:

---

The basic error of most of the innovators is to imagine that the new liturgy brings the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass nearer to the faithful, that shorn of its old rituals the Mass now enters into the substance of our lives. For the question is whether we better meet Christ in the Mass by soaring up to Him, or by dragging Him down into our own pedestrian, workaday world. The innovators would replace holy intimacy with Christ by an unbecoming familiarity. The new liturgy actually threatens to frustrate the confrontation with Christ, for it discourages reverence in the face of mystery, precludes awe, and all but extinguishes a sense of sacredness.[13]

---

General Audience of November 19, 1969
Now we turn to a pair of general audiences given 4½ years later, in the month of November 1969. As mentioned at the start, the Novus Ordo Missae was officially to go into effect on the first Sunday of Advent, which fell on November 30th that year.

The Pope was really feeling the heat at this moment. He had promulgated the text of the Novus Ordo Missae seven months earlier, on April 3. The Short Critical Study of the New Order of Mass, more commonly known as The Ottaviani Intervention, was completed by June 5, but not published until a few months later; somehow it did not come to Paul VI’s knowledge until September 29, according to historian Yves Chiron.

The popular press picked up the story and made a great deal of it. Paul VI sent the Short Study to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, whose prefect, Cardinal Šeper, reported to him on November 12 that, in his opinion, the Study was essentially worthless. This was only one week prior to the general audience of November 19. We must bear in mind, then, that this and the following week’s address are Paul VI’s attempt to defend the entire project of the Novus Ordo in the face of its critics and for posterity. It is his apologia pro Missa sua.[14]

What is perhaps most striking about these addresses is the pope’s penchant for gratuitous assertion and his stark authoritarian tone. He wants us to believe that nothing really central has changed, while at the same time listing, and doubling down on, one enormous change after another. For those who take seriously that a developed liturgical rite is a kind of body-soul composite in which one cannot readily separate what it is from how it is done, how it looks, sounds, smells, and feels, the case he makes for essential identity is far from convincing.

On November 19, again the pope does not shy away from the language of novelty: he speaks of “a new rite of Mass” (four times) “a new spirit,” “new directions,” “new rules,” “new and more expansive liturgical language,” “innovation” (twice). He closes with the guarded sentiment: “Do not let us talk about ‘the new Mass.’ Let us rather speak of the ‘new epoch’ in the Church’s life.” In a colossal understatement, the pope says “the Mass will be celebrated in a rather different manner from that in which we have been accustomed to celebrate it in the last four centuries, from the reign of St. Pius V, after the Council of Trent, down to the present.”

He shows admirable candor in getting right to the point:

---

This change has something astonishing about it, something extraordinary. This is because the Mass is regarded as the traditional and untouchable expression of our religious worship and the authenticity of our faith. We ask ourselves, how could such a change be made? What effect will it have on those who attend Holy Mass?

---

His answer is feeble. Just pay attention to the explanations you will get from the pulpit and in religious publications, and trust that “a clearer and deeper idea of the stupendous and mysterious notion of the Mass” is just around the corner, thanks to the new missal. Again, he shows candor in admitting that the faithful will have “spontaneous difficulties.”

Paul VI claims that the new missal “is due to the will expressed by the Ecumenical Council held not long ago.” This claim is questionable, to say the least — particularly in view of what the pope will say one week later, when he openly contradicts Sacrosanctum Concilium on any number of points. But here, the new missal is said to be four things, each of which is surprising:

---

It is an act of obedience. It is an act of coherence of the Church with herself. It is a step forward for her authentic tradition. It is a demonstration of fidelity and vitality, to which we all must give prompt assent.

---

- It is quite unclear how “coherence of the Church with herself” is to be achieved by breaking with much of what the Church had been doing in her most important actions for centuries.
- It is quite unclear how exactly a radically revised missal counts as a “step forward” (whatever that means) for the Church’s “authentic tradition” (whatever that means).

I do not think it would be unfair to call this doublespeak. According to Edward Herman, “What is really important in the world of doublespeak is the ability to lie, whether knowingly or unconsciously, and to get away with it; and the ability to use lies and choose and shape facts selectively, blocking out those that don’t fit an agenda or program.”[15]

Again, one is left speechless at the claim that the Novus Ordo Missae is “a demonstration of fidelity and vitality, to which we all must give prompt assent.” Fidelity — how so, precisely? Vitality — just because papal muscle can be flexed to push through the biggest raft of changes in the history of the Church’s worship?

The speech continues in a tone almost feverish and certainly imperious, as if the pope were feeling the total inadequacy of his account:

---

It is not an arbitrary act. It is not a transitory or optional experiment. It is not some dilettante’s improvisation. It is a law. It has been thought out by authoritative experts of sacred liturgy; it has been discussed and meditated upon for a long time [that is, for a few years of extremely hasty and busy committee work]. We shall do well to accept it with joyful interest and put it into practice punctually, unanimously, and carefully.

---

These are not the words of a man who is especially at peace about what he has done, or confident in the power of the product to win over the customers. One suspects a psychiatrist could have a field day analyzing this language.

Pope Paul VI then says that the reform he has imposed “puts an end to uncertainties, discussions, arbitrary abuses. It calls us back to that uniformity of rites and feeling proper to the Catholic Church…” Can irony have no limits?
- It was in large part the Vatican’s practically yearly changes to the liturgy from the 1950s through the 1960s that stirred up this febrile atmosphere of uncertainty, discussion, and abuse;
- it was the insistence on liturgical reform that shattered the uniformity of rites and feeling that the Church had enjoyed in relative peace from the end of the Council of Trent to the 20th century.
- b=Moreover, one of the most characteristic features of the Novus Ordo is its lack of uniformity from one celebration to another, and its multiplication of Catholic “identities.”

The second part of the address goes into “what exactly the changes are.”
- Whether from ignorance or from duplicity, the pope states that the changes “consist of many new directions for celebrating the rites,” not adverting to the fact that the principal change is in the substance of the texts themselves: for example, only 17% of the orations of the old Roman Missal survived intact in the new missal.
- He then has the temerity to say: “Keep this clearly in mind: Nothing has been changed of the substance of the traditional Mass.” I wonder how many people in 1969 believed this; I wonder how many still believe it today.

A passage in St. Irenaeus of Lyons, directed against the arbitrary interpretations of the Gnostics, seems to me to capture perfectly what was done in our times with the Roman Rite, as well as the subterfuge of saying: “This is the Roman Rite” or worse, “This is now tradition.” St. Irenaeus writes:

---

Their manner of acting is just as if, when a beautiful image of a king has been constructed by some skillful artist out of precious jewels, one should then take this likeness of the man all to pieces, should rearrange the gems, and so fit them together as to make them into the form of a dog or of a fox, and even that but poorly executed; and should then maintain and declare that this was the beautiful image of the king which the skillful artist constructed, pointing to the jewels which had been admirably fitted together by the first artist to form the image of the king, but have been with bad effect transferred by the latter one to the shape of a dog, and by thus exhibiting the jewels, should deceive the ignorant who had no conception of what a king’s form was like, and persuade them that that miserable likeness of the fox was, in fact, the beautiful image of the king.[16]

---

Returning to the general audience, we find Paul VI — as if detecting the misgivings his words to this point might generate in a listener — going on the defensive:

---

Perhaps some may allow themselves to be carried away by the impression made by some particular ceremony or additional rubric [this is what he says, but in fact the transition from old to new is mostly a matter of lost rubrics, not additional ones], and thus think that they conceal some alteration or diminution of truths which were acquired by the Catholic faith for ever, and are sanctioned by it. They might come to believe that the equation between the law of prayer, lex orandi, and the law of faith, lex credendi, is compromised as a result.

It is not so. Absolutely not. Above all, because the rite and the relative rubric are not in themselves a dogmatic definition. Their theological qualification may vary in different degrees according to the liturgical context to which they refer. They are gestures and terms relating to a religious action — experienced and living —of an indescribable mystery of divine presence, not always expressed in a universal way. Only theological criticism can analyze this action and express it in logically satisfying doctrinal formulas.

---

In a spectacular instance of neoscholastic reductionism, we are told that only dogmatic definitions pertain to the essence of the Catholic Faith, since rites and rubrics have to do with experiences and actions that vary according to place and time; the only expression of truth is a “logically satisfying doctrinal formula.” In these words Paul VI has obliterated the lex orandi as a reality unto itself and has denied liturgy as theologia prima, a mode of revelation.

He continues: “The Mass of the new rite is and remains the same Mass we have always had. If anything, its sameness has been brought out more clearly in some respects.” As Shakespeare says, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” To belabor the point that the Mass is the same establishes that it isn’t; the obvious need not be said. In order to agree with the sameness hypothesis, one would first have to adopt the perspective that the Roman Rite is nothing other than a generic outline — an introduction, some readings, an anaphora with valid words of consecration, communion, conclusion.[17]

As if to offer proof of his claim, the pope rather pathetically turns to the oneness of the Lord’s Supper, the Sacrifice on the Cross, and the representation of both in the Mass, which he says all remains true for the Novus Ordo. Apart from the somewhat odd claim that the Mass is a representation of both the Cross and the Last Supper — which is not what the 22nd Session of the Council of Trent teaches — this, it must be said, is placing the bar of liturgical continuity pretty low.

Far from supporting the claim that the Novus Ordo is still the same Roman rite, it demonstrates only that the Novus Ordo is a valid liturgical rite, like any other liturgy, Eastern or Western, offered by a validly ordained priest using the correct matter and form. By this logic, one could argue that the Novus Ordo is the same as the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.

Still clutching at straws, Paul VI says that the new rite brings out more clearly the relationship between the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist,[18] but fails to explain how this is so; and, as can be shown both theoretically and practically, the opposite proves to be true.

He makes one last plug for the joy of active participation, then, as if running out of steam, declares: “You will also see other marvelous features of our Mass.” Why exactly does this plural suddenly appear?
- Is it the papal “we”: 'our' 9MY0 modern papal rite?
- Is it an oblique reference to the Consilium: our committee Mass that we now present to a Catholic world panting in expectation?
- Or is this the “we” of the collectivity that would subsequently find in the Novus Ordo Missae the incentive, and indeed the invitation, to celebrate itself?

Then, another desperate attempt to ram home the sameness thesis: “But do not think that these things are aimed at altering its genuine and traditional essence.” We are left once more with the stubborn question that will not go away: What is “the genuine and traditional essence” of a liturgy? Is it whatever the pope decides it is, however minimal that may be, or can we trust the broad lines of its historical development and its universal reception in the Church, as the Council of Trent so obviously did? In short, it is hard to imagine two more opposed visions of liturgy than Trent’s and Montini’s.

At the end he invokes a favorite word, “pastoral,” as justification, and expresses his desire that “the faithful will participate in the liturgical mystery with more understanding, in a more practical, a more enjoyable, and a more sanctifying way.” I’ll admit this is a subjective call on my part, but to my ear the language here smacks of urban planning and social engineering.

How curious, then, that he refers to “the Word of God which lives and echoes down the centuries” — that very Word whose ongoing incarnation in the organic development of the liturgy is being repudiated — and then opines that the faithful will better “share in the mystical reality of Christ’s sacramental and propitiatory sacrifice,” even though the Novus Ordo has purged the liturgy of its palpable mysticism and its unmistakable accentuation of the propitiatory sacrifice of Calvary.

This address is classic Montini: cold logic, stiff manner, overbearing tone, occasional Maritainian poetic flourishes, and, above all, a baffling obliviousness to the sheer magnitude of what he is doing, as if the dropping of liturgical nuclear bombs were like playing a game of theological chess.

(Continued in next post)

Finally, after several days - despite the pope's trip to Morocco and his enthusiastic reiteration of his AbuDhabi abracadabra and much of his abominable platitudes on Islam
and immigration, and the release of his blather-inflated post-synodal exhortation about the 'youth synod' held last October, I have found something online that is truly
interesting to an orthodox Catholic like me - and it is not news, even if much of it may be new to you as it was to me. For me, particularly: to learn that Paul VI's
personal preferences on liturgy were precisely what Bugnini and company codified into his Novus Ordo - and consequently, that I have been wrong to blame
Bugnini and his committee reformists for their appalling wholesale changes to the Mass, although of course, Paul VI alone bears the responsibility for imposing his
Mass on the entire Church - literally overnight (an act that, to me, far outweighs and cancels out the virtue in the courage he showed for promulgating Humanae Vitae).

No wonder Jorge Bergoglio worships at Papa Montini's altar. In many ways, he's trying all he can to outdo him - to force changes in 'the Church' as radical as, if not more,
than that Paul VI imposed with the Novus Ordo. If Montini changed the liturgical practice codified in the previous 500 years with the snap of a papal finger, Bergoglio is
determined to change not just practices but doctrines going all the way back to apostolic times, to which end he often edits Jesus's evangelical statements to suit his agenda.



Nine months before Vatican-II even ended, Paul VI, in celebrating Mass in the vernacular for the first time, actually already introduced many major elements of what would become his 'Novus Ordo' -
the only difference being that he had to use the Vetus Ordo prayers because his Missal would not get published till 1969, when the NO officially became the Roman rite Mass.

By the way, I was forewarned by the Forum's internal system, as soon as I pasted the text, that at 65,829 characters, it exceeds the 65,535 allowed per post, so I will have to post it in two sections.

“A Half-Century of Novelty:
Revisiting Paul VI’s Apologia for the New Mass”
by Peter Kwasniewski

April 3, 2019

Text of a lecture given in various places in Australia during a visit sponsored by the Latin Mass Society of Australia.

April 3 of this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the promulgation of the Novus Ordo Missae by Pope Paul VI’s 1969 Apostolic Constitution Missale Romanum, the provisions of which were to go into effect on November 30, the first Sunday of Advent.

When we look back a half-century later at this monstrous masterpiece of liturgical reform — and, truth be told, it is no longer only self-proclaimed traditionalists who lament a job badly done — we often feel moved to ask the simple question: Why? Why was it deemed necessary to make so many and such radical changes in the Mass?

For an explanation, we must look to the pope who, more than any other figure, was responsible for pushing forward the liturgical reform, handing down not only a new rite of Mass, but also, in like manner, new rites for all of the sacraments and indeed new versions of almost everything to be said or done in church — a figurative “sack of Rome” that throws the work of Alaric and Charles V into the shade.

Where can we look to find the pope’s explanation? There are, as one would expect, a plethora of addresses, letters, and other documents that allow us not just a glimpse into the mind of Montini, but a leisurely review; he was frank and outspoken about the liturgical reform, which was and had been his passion prior to and during his pontificate.

Above all, however, we ought to look carefully at three general audiences in the 1960s: the first from March of 1965, concerning the epochal shift from Christian Latin to modern vernaculars; and two from November of 1969, on the even greater shift from the classic Roman Rite to the product of the Consilium.

Before descending into the details of these general audiences, I will make a theological argument about how we, as believers, should understand the historical development of liturgy in the Catholic Church, as this, I am convinced, is the only way to see the magnitude of what Paul VI desired to do, attempted to do, and, in the judgment of most people, succeeded in doing.

Laws of Organic Liturgical Development
In his 1947 encyclical on the liturgy, Mediator Dei, Pope Pius XII pointed out a theological error in the tendency of some members of the Liturgical Movement to reach back to suppositious liturgical rites of ancient times while excluding or denigrating later periods of Church history such as the Middle Ages or the Baroque. Speaking of “some persons who are bent on the restoration of all the ancient rites and ceremonies indiscriminately,” he says:

---

The liturgy of the early ages is most certainly worthy of all veneration. But ancient usage must not be esteemed more suitable and proper, either in its own right or in its significance for later times and new situations, on the simple ground that it carries the savor and aroma of antiquity. The more recent liturgical rites likewise deserve reverence and respect. They, too, owe their inspiration to the Holy Spirit, who assists the Church in every age even to the consummation of the world (cf. Matt 28:20). They are equally the resources used by the majestic Spouse of Jesus Christ to promote and procure the sanctity of man.[1]

---

Pius XII is writing in 1947 about avant-garde liturgists who want to leapfrog over the Baroque and medieval periods —in other words, over the Roman rite as codified after Trent — to arrive at a pristine apostolic liturgy. In 1947 the Roman Rite was still very much intact, as vintage photos of Pius XII’s magnificent papal liturgies evince; the liturgy committee that was to give Bugnini his first post at the Vatican and eventually produce a new Holy Week was yet to come. [Radical changes in the Holy Week liturgy made by Pius XII which Fr Hunwicke has taken pains to explain how and why they were 'not right', to say the least, and which many sanctimoniously 'traditionalist' bloggers conveniently and consistently fail to acknowledge when referring to Pius XII as the 'last' pope who upheld traditional liturgy.]

So when Pius XII talks about “more recent liturgical rites", he is talking about medieval and Baroque developments, culminating in the Tridentine codification, of which the 1570 Missale Romanum is the flagship. The key points to take away from this paragraph are, first, that something’s being more ancient does not ipso facto make it better; second, that the historical development of the liturgy is not an accident that God permits, but a plan that He positively wills, inspired by the Holy Spirit and used by the Head of the Church, Our Lord Jesus Christ, to sanctify the members of His Mystical Body.

Indeed, this passage reads rather like a commentary on the famous Canon 13 of the Seventh Session of the Council of Trent:

---

If anyone says that the received and approved rites of the Catholic Church that are customarily used in the solemn administration of the sacraments can be looked down on, or that ministers can without sin omit them according to their own whim, or that any pastor of churches whatever can change them into other new ones, let him be anathema.[2]

---

The seventh canon of the twenty-second Session of Trent is also highly pertinent. This canon states:

---

If anyone says that the ceremonies, vestments, and outward signs which the Catholic Church uses in the celebration of Masses are incentives to impiety rather than offices of piety, let him be anathema.[3]

---

When the Council pointedly says “which the Catholic Church uses,” we are given to understand that all of the liturgical ceremonies, vestments, and external signs received from tradition are offices of piety and not incentives to impiety. Thus, the view, later popular with 20th century reformers, that aspects of the classical Roman Rite are to be considered corruptions of authentic liturgy and detrimental to the spiritual life of the faithful is anathematized ahead of time.

In the same spirit, the Roman Catechism published in 1566, three years after the Council of Trent was concluded, says this about the Mass in particular:

---

The Sacrifice is celebrated with many solemn rites and ceremonies, none of which should be deemed useless or superfluous. On the contrary, all of them tend to display the majesty of this august Sacrifice, and to excite the faithful when beholding these saving mysteries, to contemplate the divine things which lie concealed in the Eucharistic Sacrifice.

---

Christ promised that “when He, the Spirit of Truth, is come, he will teach you all truth”[4]: cum autem venerit ille Spiritus veritatis, docebit vos omnem veritatem (Jn 16:13). This includes the fullness of liturgy.[5]

One would expect, if the Church is truly governed by the Spirit of God, that her liturgy would, in its large lines and accepted forms, mature and become more perfect over time. Would it not then follow that the rate of change will slow down and the Spirit’s work will gradually shift from inspiring new prayers to preserving the prayers already inspired? A liturgical rite will grow in perfection until it reaches a certain maturity, and then will cease to develop in any but incidental or minor ways.

One could diagram this process as a chart with two lines: the descending line[6] represents the creation of liturgical forms, while the ascending line[7] represents the preservation of existing liturgical forms. As the former action tapers, the latter action dominates, until that verse from Ezekiel is fulfilled in the Church’s sacred liturgy: “Your renown went forth among the nations because of your beauty, for it was perfect through the splendor that I had bestowed on you, declares the Lord God” (Ezek 16:14).[8]

Much more can and should be said on the subject of what we might call “the laws of organic liturgical development,” and I am currently researching and writing on the subject. In the interests of time, however, I will turn to the three general audiences of Paul VI on the topic of the liturgical reform.[9]

General Audience of March 17, 1965
The first text we will look at was delivered on March 17, 1965, ten days after Pope Paul VI celebrated the first-ever Italian-spite Mass at the Church of All Saints (Ognissanti) in Rome. Inspite of official rhetoric, there is little evidence that the people rejoiced; a plaque memorializing the event in Ognissanti was vandalized so many times that a new plaque finally had to be placed high on the wall, out of reach of disgruntled parishioners.[10]

It is hard to know what to be more astonished about: the sheer contempt for the common man with which the audience drips, or the sheer fantasyland into which the pope enters when describing the anticipated benefits of the “new liturgy” that was unveiled at Ognissanti — remember, this was not the Novus Ordo, which was four years away, but a heavily simplified Tridentine Mass conducted in Italian (except for the Roman Canon), with the celebrant facing the people, standing at a temporary altar placed outside of the sanctuary.[11]

The pope says there have been negative reactions and positive reactions. The negative reaction is one of “a certain confusion and annoyance”:

---

Previously, they say, there was peace, each person could pray as he wished, the whole sequence of the rite was well known; now everything is new, startling, and changed; even the ringing of the bells at the Sanctus is done away with; and then those prayers which one doesn’t know where to find; Holy Communion received standing; Mass ending suddenly with the blessing; everybody answering, many people moving around, rites and readings which are recited aloud … In short, there is no longer any peace and we now know less than we did before; and so on.

---

This does not seem an altogether unreasonable reaction. As far as the pope is concerned, however, Catholics who react this way have a paltry understanding of what they are doing:

---

We shall not criticize these views because then we would have to show how they reveal a poor understanding of the meaning of religious ceremonial and allow us to glimpse not a true devotion and a true appreciation of the meaning and worth of the Mass, but rather a certain spiritual laziness which is not prepared to make some personal effort of understanding and participation directed to a better understanding and fulfillment of this, the most sacred of religious acts, in which we are invited, or rather obliged, to participate.

---

One wonders when a pope has ever said something more self-righteous, presumptuous, insensitive, and unjust? I suppose everyone, before the glorious revolution, was spiritually lazy, unprepared to make even “some” effort to understand, and altogether bereft of participation in the mysteries.

The popularity of Liturgical Movement authors like Dom Prosper Guéranger, Pius Parsch, and Ildefonso Schuster, whose commentaries on the Mass instructed and inspired precisely those laymen who were startled and disturbed by the changes of the 1960s is passed over in utter silence.[12]

Montini continues by explaining that reform always causes people to feel upset because deeply rooted religious practices are being tampered with, but that’s okay — soon everyone will love it. And we’ll make sure that no one can settle back again into silent devotion or laziness. “The congregation will be alive and active!,” he says: everyone must participate. Now one must “listen and pray” (apparently they were doing neither before).

Activity is the order of the day, the name of the game! We will finally have a liturgy that is not mummery (“performed merely according to its external form”) but “an immense wing flying towards the heights of divine mystery and joy.” An immense wing… Excuse me while I reach for the airsickness bag.

The positive reaction, on the other hand, is, according to Paul VI, that of a majority of Catholics, young and old, uneducated and scholarly, the earnestly devout and the urbanely cultured, insiders and outsiders, who greet the changes with “enthusiasm and praise.” At last, they say, “one can understand and follow the complicated and mysterious ceremonial”(the pope declines to explain how simplification and easy accessibility fit with “complicated and mysterious,” unless his meaning is that a ceremonial that was once complicated and mysterious will henceforth cease to be either). At last, “the priest speaks to the people” (but wait: I thought the liturgy was addressed primarily to God?).

One old gentleman, the pope says, fighting back a tear, gushed to a priest that “at last” in this new way of celebrating Mass he fully participated in the sacrifice — indeed, possibly for the first time in his life. Some say this excitement will quiet down and turn into habit. But Pope Paul expresses the hope that the “new form of worship” will continue to stir up “religious enthusiasm,” so that “the gospel of love” will be realized in “the souls of our time.” (He does not seem aware of Msgr. Ronald Knox’s classic critique of religious enthusiasm; it is just this hankering for feelings of enthusiasm or excitement that has led to ever-repeated efforts to stir up or stimulate congregations ever since the sixties, with ever-diminishing returns.)

This papal address is notable for the number of times it uses the word “new”: “new, startling, changed”; “new order”; “new scheme of things”; “new liturgical books”; “new form” (twice); “new liturgy” (twice); “new habit”; “liturgical innovation.” If we add them up, eleven times. Some Catholics today are critical of traditionalists who speak of the Novus Ordo, but here we have a pope identifying the interim missal of 1965 as a novel thing, when it was vastly less of a novelty than the missal of 1969. I think we owe it to Pope Paul to use his terms when we talk about his reforms. He did not try to hide the fact that there had been a sea change.

Many notable Catholics of this period have left us records of their reaction to the “new Mass” of 1965 (which in retrospect turned out to be a half-way house). Evelyn Waugh and William F. Buckley left us choice words about it, but I shall quote what Dietrich von Hildebrand wrote in 1966:

---

The basic error of most of the innovators is to imagine that the new liturgy brings the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass nearer to the faithful, that shorn of its old rituals the Mass now enters into the substance of our lives. For the question is whether we better meet Christ in the Mass by soaring up to Him, or by dragging Him down into our own pedestrian, workaday world. The innovators would replace holy intimacy with Christ by an unbecoming familiarity. The new liturgy actually threatens to frustrate the confrontation with Christ, for it discourages reverence in the face of mystery, precludes awe, and all but extinguishes a sense of sacredness.[13]

---

General Audience of November 19, 1969
Now we turn to a pair of general audiences given 4½ years later, in the month of November 1969. As mentioned at the start, the Novus Ordo Missae was officially to go into effect on the first Sunday of Advent, which fell on November 30th that year.

The Pope was really feeling the heat at this moment. He had promulgated the text of the Novus Ordo Missae seven months earlier, on April 3. The Short Critical Study of the New Order of Mass, more commonly known as The Ottaviani Intervention, was completed by June 5, but not published until a few months later; somehow it did not come to Paul VI’s knowledge until September 29, according to historian Yves Chiron.

The popular press picked up the story and made a great deal of it. Paul VI sent the Short Study to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, whose prefect, Cardinal Šeper, reported to him on November 12 that, in his opinion, the Study was essentially worthless. This was only one week prior to the general audience of November 19. We must bear in mind, then, that this and the following week’s address are Paul VI’s attempt to defend the entire project of the Novus Ordo in the face of its critics and for posterity. It is his apologia pro Missa sua.[14]

What is perhaps most striking about these addresses is the pope’s penchant for gratuitous assertion and his stark authoritarian tone. He wants us to believe that nothing really central has changed, while at the same time listing, and doubling down on, one enormous change after another. For those who take seriously that a developed liturgical rite is a kind of body-soul composite in which one cannot readily separate what it is from how it is done, how it looks, sounds, smells, and feels, the case he makes for essential identity is far from convincing.

On November 19, again the pope does not shy away from the language of novelty: he speaks of “a new rite of Mass” (four times) “a new spirit,” “new directions,” “new rules,” “new and more expansive liturgical language,” “innovation” (twice). He closes with the guarded sentiment: “Do not let us talk about ‘the new Mass.’ Let us rather speak of the ‘new epoch’ in the Church’s life.” In a colossal understatement, the pope says “the Mass will be celebrated in a rather different manner from that in which we have been accustomed to celebrate it in the last four centuries, from the reign of St. Pius V, after the Council of Trent, down to the present.”

He shows admirable candor in getting right to the point:

---

This change has something astonishing about it, something extraordinary. This is because the Mass is regarded as the traditional and untouchable expression of our religious worship and the authenticity of our faith. We ask ourselves, how could such a change be made? What effect will it have on those who attend Holy Mass?

---

His answer is feeble: Just pay attention to the explanations you will get from the pulpit and in religious publications, and trust that “a clearer and deeper idea of the stupendous and mysterious notion of the Mass” is just around the corner, thanks to the new missal. Again, he shows candor in admitting that the faithful will have “spontaneous difficulties.”

Paul VI claims that the new missal “is due to the will expressed by the Ecumenical Council held not long ago.” This claim is questionable, to say the least — particularly in view of what the pope will say one week later, when he openly contradicts Sacrosanctum Concilium on any number of points. But here, the new missal is said to be four things, each of which is surprising:

---

It is an act of obedience. It is an act of coherence of the Church with herself. It is a step forward for her authentic tradition. It is a demonstration of fidelity and vitality, to which we all must give prompt assent.

---

- It is quite unclear how “coherence of the Church with herself” is to be achieved by breaking with much of what the Church had been doing in her most important actions for centuries.
- It is quite unclear how exactly a radically revised missal counts as a “step forward” (whatever that means) for the Church’s “authentic tradition” (whatever that means).

I do not think it would be unfair to call this doublespeak. According to Edward Herman, “What is really important in the world of doublespeak is the ability to lie, whether knowingly or unconsciously, and to get away with it; and the ability to use lies and choose and shape facts selectively, blocking out those that don’t fit an agenda or program.”[15]

Again, one is left speechless at the claim that the Novus Ordo Missae is “a demonstration of fidelity and vitality, to which we all must give prompt assent.” Fidelity — how so, precisely? Vitality — just because papal muscle can be flexed to push through the biggest raft of changes in the history of the Church’s worship?

The speech continues in a tone almost feverish and certainly imperious, as if the pope were feeling the total inadequacy of his account:

---

It is not an arbitrary act. It is not a transitory or optional experiment. It is not some dilettante’s improvisation. It is a law. It has been thought out by authoritative experts of sacred liturgy; it has been discussed and meditated upon for a long time [that is, for a few years of extremely hasty and busy committee work]. We shall do well to accept it with joyful interest and put it into practice punctually, unanimously, and carefully.

---

These are not the words of a man who is especially at peace about what he has done, or confident in the power of the product to win over the customers. One suspects a psychiatrist could have a field day analyzing this language.

Pope Paul VI then says that the reform he has imposed “puts an end to uncertainties, discussions, arbitrary abuses. It calls us back to that uniformity of rites and feeling proper to the Catholic Church…” Can irony have no limits?
- It was in large part the Vatican’s practically yearly changes to the liturgy from the 1950s through the 1960s that stirred up this febrile atmosphere of uncertainty, discussion, and abuse;
- it was the insistence on liturgical reform that shattered the uniformity of rites and feeling that the Church had enjoyed in relative peace from the end of the Council of Trent to the 20th century.
- Moreover, one of the most characteristic features of the Novus Ordo is its lack of uniformity from one celebration to another, and its multiplication of Catholic “identities.”

The second part of the address goes into “what exactly the changes are.”
- Whether from ignorance or from duplicity, the pope states that the changes “consist of many new directions for celebrating the rites,” not adverting to the fact that the principal change is in the substance of the texts themselves: for example,only 17% of the prayers of the old Roman Missal survived intact in the new missal.
- He then has the temerity to say: “Keep this clearly in mind: Nothing has been changed of the substance of the traditional Mass.” I wonder how many people in 1969 believed this; I wonder how many still believe it today.

A passage in St. Irenaeus of Lyons, directed against the arbitrary interpretations of the Gnostics, seems to me to capture perfectly what was done in our times with the Roman Rite, as well as the subterfuge of saying: “This is the Roman Rite” or worse, “This is now tradition.” St. Irenaeus writes:

---

Their manner of acting is just as if, when a beautiful image of a king has been constructed by some skillful artist out of precious jewels, one should then take this likeness of the man all to pieces, should rearrange the gems, and so fit them together as to make them into the form of a dog or of a fox, and even that but poorly executed; and should then maintain and declare that this was the beautiful image of the king which the skillful artist constructed, pointing to the jewels which had been admirably fitted together by the first artist to form the image of the king, but have been with bad effect transferred by the latter one to the shape of a dog, and by thus exhibiting the jewels, should deceive the ignorant who had no conception of what a king’s form was like, and persuade them that that miserable likeness of the fox was, in fact, the beautiful image of the king.[16]

---

Returning to the general audience, we find Paul VI — as if detecting the misgivings his words to this point might generate in a listener — going on the defensive:

---

Perhaps some may allow themselves to be carried away by the impression made by some particular ceremony or additional rubric [this is what he says, but in fact the transition from old to new is mostly a matter of lost rubrics, not additional ones], and thus think that they conceal some alteration or diminution of truths which were acquired by the Catholic faith for ever, and are sanctioned by it. They might come to believe that the equation between the law of prayer, lex orandi, and the law of faith, lex credendi, is compromised as a result.

It is not so. Absolutely not. Above all, because the rite and the relative rubric are not in themselves a dogmatic definition. Their theological qualification may vary in different degrees according to the liturgical context to which they refer. They are gestures and terms relating to a religious action — experienced and living —of an indescribable mystery of divine presence, not always expressed in a universal way. Only theological criticism can analyze this action and express it in logically satisfying doctrinal formulas.

---

In a spectacular instance of neoscholastic reductionism, we are told that only dogmatic definitions pertain to the essence of the Catholic Faith, since rites and rubrics have to do with experiences and actions that vary according to place and time; the only expression of truth is a “logically satisfying doctrinal formula.” In these words Paul VI has obliterated the lex orandi as a reality unto itself and has denied liturgy as theologia prima, a mode of revelation.

He continues: “The Mass of the new rite is and remains the same Mass we have always had. If anything, its sameness has been brought out more clearly in some respects.” As Shakespeare says, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” To belabor the point that the Mass is the same establishes that it isn’t; the obvious need not be said. In order to agree with the sameness hypothesis, one would first have to adopt the perspective that the Roman Rite is nothing other than a generic outline — an introduction, some readings, an anaphora with valid words of consecration, communion, conclusion.[17]

As if to offer proof of his claim, the pope rather pathetically turns to the oneness of the Lord’s Supper, the Sacrifice on the Cross, and the representation of both in the Mass, which he says all remains true for the Novus Ordo. Apart from the somewhat odd claim that the Mass is a representation of both the Cross and the Last Supper — which is not what the 22nd Session of the Council of Trent teaches — this, it must be said, is placing the bar of liturgical continuity pretty low. [As someone put it well on a Traditional Mass-promoting website, The Council of Trent and St. Thomas Aquinas tell us: THE MASS IS BOTH SACRIFICE AND SACRAMENT. IT IS THE SACRIFICE OF CALVARY, RE-ENACTED BY JESUS CHRIST IN AN UNBLOODY MANNER, THROUGH THE MINISTRY OF ONE EMPOWERED BY HIM. AND AS A SACRAMENT, JESUS GIVES HIMSELF TO THE RECIPIENT, IN HOLY COMMUNION, AS FOOD FOR THE SOUL. In the words of the Council:

---

“That He might leave to His own beloved spouse, the Church , a visible sacrifice, such as the nature of man requires, whereby that bloody sacrifice, accomplished once on the cross, might be re-presented and the memory thereof remain even unto the end of the world, and by which its saving power might be applied to the remission of those sins which we daily commit … And forasmuch in this divine sacrifice which is celebrated in the Mass, the same Christ who once offered Himself in a bloody manner on the altar of the cross, is contained and immolated in an unbloody manner, the Holy Synod teaches that this sacrifice (of the Mass) is truly propitiatory, and that by means thereof this is effected that we might obtain mercy and find grace in seasonable aid if we draw near to God contrite and penitent, with a sincere heart and an upright faith, with fear and reverence. For the Lord, appeased by the oblation thereof (of the Mass), granting grace and the gift of penitence, forgives even heinous crimes and sins. For the Victim is one and the same, and the One who now offers by the ministry of the priests is the very same One who then offered Himself on the cross, the manner alone of the offering being different. The fruits of that oblation - namely, that bloody one - are received most plentifully by this unbloody one.”

---

Far from supporting the claim that the Novus Ordo is still the same Roman rite, it demonstrates only that the Novus Ordo is a valid liturgical rite, like any other liturgy, Eastern or Western, offered by a validly ordained priest using the correct matter and form. By this logic, one could argue that the Novus Ordo is the same as the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.

Still clutching at straws, Paul VI says that the new rite brings out more clearly the relationship between the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist,[18] but fails to explain how this is so; and, as can be shown both theoretically and practically, the opposite proves to be true.

He makes one last plug for the joy of active participation, then, as if running out of steam, declares: “You will also see other marvelous features of our Mass.” Why exactly does this plural suddenly appear?
- Is it the papal “we”: 'our' ('my') modern papal rite?
- Is it an oblique reference to the Consilium: our committee Mass that we now present to a Catholic world panting in expectation?
- Or is this the “we” of the collectivity that would subsequently find in the Novus Ordo Missae the incentive, and indeed the invitation, to celebrate itself?

Then, another desperate attempt to ram home the sameness thesis: “But do not think that these things are aimed at altering its genuine and traditional essence.” We are left once more with the stubborn question that will not go away: What is “the genuine and traditional essence” of a liturgy? Is it whatever the pope decides it is, however minimal that may be, or can we trust the broad lines of its historical development and its universal reception in the Church, as the Council of Trent so obviously did? In short, it is hard to imagine two more opposed visions of liturgy than Trent’s and Montini’s.

At the end he invokes a favorite word, “pastoral,” as justification, and expresses his desire that “the faithful will participate in the liturgical mystery with more understanding, in a more practical, a more enjoyable, and a more sanctifying way.” I’ll admit this is a subjective call on my part, but to my ear the language here smacks of urban planning and social engineering.

How curious, then, that he refers to “the Word of God which lives and echoes down the centuries” — that very Word whose ongoing incarnation in the organic development of the liturgy is being repudiated — and then opines that the faithful will better “share in the mystical reality of Christ’s sacramental and propitiatory sacrifice,” even though the Novus Ordo has purged the liturgy of its palpable mysticism and its unmistakable accentuation of the propitiatory sacrifice of Calvary.

This address is classic Montini: cold logic, stiff manner, overbearing tone, occasional Maritainian poetic flourishes, and, above all, a baffling obliviousness to the sheer magnitude of what he is doing, as if the dropping of liturgical nuclear bombs were like playing a game of theological chess.

(Continued in next post)

Nine months before Vatican-II even ended, Paul VI, in celebrating Mass in the vernacular for the first time, actually already introduced many major elements of what would become his 'Novus Ordo' -
the only difference being that he had to use the Vetus Ordo prayers because his Missal would not get published till 1969, when the NO officially became the Roman rite Mass.

“A Half-Century of Novelty:
Revisiting Paul VI’s Apologia for the New Mass” - Part 2
by Peter Kwasniewski

April 3, 2019

(Continued from above)

General Audience of November 26, 1969
One week later, the pope continues his apologia. Once again, notice how relentlessly Paul VI underlines the newness of what he is imposing on the Church. In the opening sentence he speaks of “the liturgical innovation of the new rite of the Mass.” The phrase “new rite” is mentioned seven times; the words “new,” “newness,” or “renewal,” seven more times; “innovation” twice; “novelty” twice. That makes a total of 18 times.

In classic Montini fashion, his second paragraph lingers regretfully over what is to be lost:

---

A new rite of the Mass: a change in a venerable tradition that has gone on for centuries. This is something that affects our hereditary religious patrimony, which seemed to enjoy the privilege of being untouchable and settled. It seemed to bring the prayer of our forefathers and our saints to our lips and to give us the comfort of feeling faithful to our spiritual past, which we kept alive to pass it on to the generations ahead. It is at such a moment as this that we get a better understanding of the value of historical tradition and the communion of the saints.

---

As incredible as it may seem, the pope appears to be saying that when we give up our hereditary religious patrimony, we feel most keenly the value of that tradition and of the communion of saints with whom we once prayed in common! This seems to me a sadistic maneuver, like telling a child: “You will appreciate your mother more if we take her away from you and you never see her again.” He continues, resuming themes from his March 1965 address:

---

This change will affect the ceremonies of the Mass. We shall become aware, perhaps with some feeling of annoyance, that the ceremonies at the altar are no longer being carried out with the same words and gestures to which we were accustomed — perhaps so much accustomed that we no longer took any notice of them. This change also touches the faithful. It is intended to interest each one of those present, to draw them out of their customary personal devotions or their usual torpor.

---

If I am not mistaken, Paul VI is arguing that ritual stability causes people to stop paying attention to what is going on and to fold in on themselves in subjectivism or laziness. If this were true, it would explain the obsession of modern liturgists with constantly changing things up: as I once remarked, paraphrasing Heraclitus, In the experience of many, on the contrary, stability in ritual makes possible a deep intimacy with the Church’s prayer, and thereby heads off unhealthy private or collective subjectivism.

In any case, the pope seems to be under no illusions about the shake-up when he writes in paragraphs 4 and 5:

---

We must prepare for this many-sided inconvenience. It is the kind of upset caused by every novelty that breaks in on our habits. We shall notice that pious persons are disturbed most, because they have their own respectable way of hearing Mass, and they will feel shaken out of their usual thoughts and obliged to follow those of others. Even priests may feel some annoyance in this respect. … This novelty is no small thing. We should not let ourselves be surprised by the nature, or even the nuisance, of its exterior forms.

---

This hardly requires comment, except to say that Paul VI would never have succeeded as a salesman.

It is no wonder so many Catholics stopped going to Mass and a further wave of priests and religious suffered the crisis of spiritual disorientation, when their supreme Shepherd thought it was a good idea to cause especially pious persons and priests a “many-sided inconvenience,” “upset,” “disturbance,” “annoyance,” “nuisance,” as they struggled to figure out what in Hades was going on with the “exterior forms” — not to say internal spirit —of the Church’s liturgy!

In the face of this upcoming challenge, what does Paul VI recommend? Like an eggheaded intellectual out of touch with ordinary Christians, he suggests that we need to prepare ourselves for “this special and historical occasion” by, don’t you know, doubling down on our study of books and articles that explain the motives for “this grave change.”

Recognizing again the inherent weakness of his position, he invokes “obedience to the Council” — he knows the lesson of totalitarian propaganda that the only thing needed to establish a falsehood as truth is to repeat the same lies calmly, boldly, and frequently — and adds to it, for good measure, “obedience to your bishops.” He is confident that all the bishops will be lining up in good ultramontanist (or should we say ultra-Montinist)[19] fashion. In a moment of almost Montanist afflatus, he concludes paragraph 6:

---

It is Christ’s will, it is the breath of the Holy Spirit which calls the Church to make this change. A prophetic moment is occurring in the Mystical Body of Christ, which is the Church. This moment is shaking the Church, arousing it, obliging it to renew the mysterious art of its prayer.

---

In paragraphs 7 through 14 — the largest thematic section of the discourse — Paul VI offers a defense of the practical abolition of Latin. He still seems to be smarting under the lash of Tito Casini’s 1965 book The Torn Tunic, in which that popular Italian author attacked the introduction of the vernacular into the Mass.

The pope’s point of departure in this section is the claim that because “the faithful are also invested with the ‘royal priesthood’ … they are qualified to have supernatural conversation with God” (§6). From this truth — which no one had ever denied, in theory or in practice — Paul VI deduces the necessity of replacing Latin with the common spoken language; for otherwise, the people are not able to have a supernatural conversation with God (?). The pope starts up his familiar hand-wringing routine, in which he will first tell us how great a loss will be incurred by the new rite:

---

The introduction of the vernacular will certainly be a great sacrifice for those who know the beauty, the power, and the expressive sacrality of Latin.

We are parting with the speech of the Christian centuries; we are becoming like profane intruders in the literary preserve of sacred utterance. We will lose a great part of that stupendous and incomparable artistic and spiritual thing, the Gregorian chant. We have reason indeed for regret, reason almost for bewilderment.

What can we put in the place of that language of the angels? We are giving up something of priceless worth. But why? What is more precious than these loftiest of our Church’s values? (§§8–9)

---

It is at this point that Paul VI shows his cards, advocating a kind of epistemological nudism or “free and simple” philosophy:

---

The answer will seem banal, prosaic. Yet it is a good answer, because it is human, because it is apostolic. Understanding of prayer is worth more than the silken garments in which it is royally dressed. Participation by the people is worth more — particularly participation by modern people, so fond of plain language which is easily understood and converted into everyday speech.(§§10–11)

---

As our earlier quotation from Dietrich von Hildebrand pointed out, we see here a humanistic, horizontal, and anthropocentric understanding of liturgy that is opposed, paradoxically, to liturgy’s very effectiveness as a means of spiritual transformation, drawing the soul up to the infinite God and into communion with the Mystical Body of Christ, past, present, and eternal.

The Latin language is effective precisely because of its “beauty, power, and expressive sacrality,” its “sacred utterance,” its “priceless worth,” the loftiness of its associations, and the “stupendous and incomparable artistic and spiritual thing” that clothes it in music, Gregorian chant.

Participation in the sense of the immediate comprehension of “plain language, easily understood, in everyday speech,” is the least and lowest sense in which the faithful participate in the awesome mysteries of Christ. Sociologists have pointed out that dense, impenetrable, to some extent off-limits, religious rituals are a powerful motivator for belief and devotion. Fr. Aidan Nichols observes: “The notion that the more intelligible the sign, the more effectively it will enter the lives of the faithful is implausible to the sociological imagination. … A certain opacity is essential to symbolic action.”[20]

Psychologists note that archetypal symbolism conveyed in gestures, clothing, and other physical phenomena, not to say the super-rational language of music, are at least as communicative as words, if not more so. The power of the liturgy to affect the soul depends to a very great extent on such non-verbal elements and the subtle factor that may be called, for lack of a better term, atmosphere or ambiance.

Yes, the faithful should have some grasp of the content of the Mass (and, of course, of more than just the Mass); about this, Dom Guéranger and the pars sanior of the Liturgical Movement were right.[21] But what draws men to liturgical worship is the prospect of an encounter with the mysterious and the ineffable, the strangely beautiful that opens our minds to the transcendent and offers a glimpse of heaven.

In this way it was exactly anti-apostolic to invert the Church’s priorities by placing a superficial notion of popular engagement above the more profound immersion in prayer that the ancient liturgy, properly celebrated, had always offered to the faithful, and still does.

In one of the most hauntingly ironic statements in papal history, Paul VI noted with some melancholy in his 1975 Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi: “Modern man is sated by talk; he is obviously tired of listening, and what is worse, impervious to words.”[22] This observation was made only five years after he had imposed on the Church a liturgy outstanding for its non-stop verbosity, huge doses of Scripture, lack of silence, and paucity of non-verbal ritual.

Back in the 1969 address, Pope Paul, however, proceeds to dig himself into a hole:

---

If the divine Latin language kept us apart from the children, from youth, from the world of labor and of affairs, if it were a dark screen, not a clear window, would it be right for us fishers of souls to maintain it as the exclusive language of prayer and religious intercourse?

---

The most dramatic decline in Mass attendance in the decade after the Council (that is, from the first introduction of the vernacular and versus populum to the imposition of the Novus Ordo) was found precisely among the laborers, as English sociologist Anthony Archer demonstrated.[23]

Furthermore, it is by no means clear that “men of affairs” ever favored the liturgical reform. I have already mentioned Casini, von Hildebrand, Waugh, and Buckley, but the most embarrassing sign of the lack of support among educated people came in 1971, with a petition urging the preservation of the traditional Latin Mass, signed by 56 of the most eminent cultural figures of Great Britain—“many of the foremost writers, critics, academics, and musicians of the day, as well as politicians from Britain’s then three main parties, and two Anglican bishops”[24] — which John Cardinal Heenan presented to Pope Paul VI, an intervention that led to the “English Indult” (sometimes called the “Agatha Christie Indult”) for the continued use of the old Mass, which was, in retrospect, the first step in a long process of backtracking on the overblown claims that had been made for the “new epoch” to be ushered in by the liturgical reform.[25]

Lastly, Paul VI’s mention of “children and youth” may remind us of what is perhaps the sharpest irony of all: while the average number of children born to mainstream Catholics and the average retention rate of young adults continues to be alarmingly low, the numbers of large families and the overall youthfulness of the traditional Mass movement today tell a very different story about what attracts people to Christ and what pushes them away.

In paragraphs 13 and 14, the pope throws a sop to Latin-lovers by reminding them that the new rite of Mass allows for the people to sing together in Latin the Ordinary of the Mass — an allowance that was almost never to be actualized in practice — and that Latin will still remain the official language of Vatican documents, cold comfort if ever there was any. Without any indication of sarcasm, he says: “Latin will remain … as the key to the patrimony of our religious, historical, and human culture. If possible, it will reflourish in splendor.” Yet if Latin is really the key to our Catholic patrimony, why are we making the one move most calculated to destroy its living presence in the Church? How will this help Latin “reflourish in splendor”?

In paragraph 15, Paul VI takes up his theme from the previous week that the Mass hasn’t really changed, because “the fundamental outline of the Mass is still the traditional one, not only theologically but also spiritually.” If by “fundamental outline” one means that some kind of penitential thing comes first, some kind of Eucharistic prayer comes around the middle, and some kind of gesture indicating the end of the service comes last, one can warmly agree with the pope’s assessment.

Here we would not have the time to go through a lengthy list of examples of ways in which the structure, theology, and spirituality of the new missal clearly differ or depart from those of the old missal.[26] But it takes little more than attendance at the usus antiquior to begin to see for oneself that the application of the word “traditional” to the reformed liturgical rites of Paul VI is precisely the sort of “abuse of language, abuse of power” about which the philosopher Josef Pieper, who lived under the National Socialist regime in Germany, wrote so eloquently.

Then Paul VI has either the naivete or the shamelessness to assert:

---

Indeed, if the rite is carried out as it ought to be, the spiritual aspect will be found to have greater richness. The greater simplicity of the ceremonies, the variety and abundance of scriptural texts, the joint acts of the ministers, the silences which will mark various deeper moments in the rite, will all help to bring this out.

---

As long as everyone “participates profoundly,” he says, the Mass will become “more than ever a school of spiritual depth and a peaceful but demanding school of Christian sociology. The soul’s relationship with Christ and with the brethren thus attains new and vital intensity.” In lines like this, we see Paul VI abandoning himself to full-scale fantasyland.

The last three paragraphs, 17 through 19, form a bizarre coda that conveys to us, even today at a distance, something of the feeling of slapdash haste and scarcely-controlled chaos that surrounded the entire project of liturgical reform:

But there is still a practical difficulty, which the excellence of the sacred renders not a little important. [What an expression!] How can we celebrate this new rite when we have not yet got a complete missal, and there are still so many uncertainties about what to do?

Good question, Holy Father. It was a question that had rarely left the lips of clergy and laity for a good 15 years by this point, as rubrics, texts, music, language, nearly everything continued to evolve on an almost annual basis. What we see in this madness for sacramental reform, starting regrettably under Pius XII, is the very negation of the correct Catholic attitude towards tradition, which is that of a gardener, not that of an industrialist or a real estate developer who knocks down the old mansion to make way for modern flats. If I might adapt some recent words of Fr. John Hunwicke: the pope needs

---

to remember the aperçu of Blessed John Henry Newman, that the ministry of the Roman Church within the oikoumene is to be a barrier, a remora, against the intrusion of erroneous novelty. It is: to hand on the Great Tradition unadulterated.

In an age when the adjective ‘negative’ has unpopular vibes, we need a re-appropriation at the very highest level within the Church of the central, fundamental importance of a negative and preservative papacy. Tradidi quod et accepi implies Quod non accepi non tradam.

---

Having posed the question, Paul VI answers it with rather more technical detail than one would expect in a general audience. The takeaway is that
- Latin liturgy is definitely on its way out — and that, by the pope’s express will.
- By November 28, 1971, there are to be no more Latin liturgies from the old missal or even from the new one.
And if a priest expects to find himself in various places, offering Mass alone and with a congregation, he had better invest in a stout wagon for carrying all the liturgical books he will need. The old days when an altar missal sufficed are hereby excluded in the name of “greater simplicity of rites.”[27]

The address closes with a final subtle irony—a quotation from one of Paul VI’s favorite authors, the Swiss priest and theologian Maurice Zundel (1897–1975), from the preface to the second edition of Le Poème de la Sainte Liturgie of 1934, which was published in English in 1939 under the title The Splendor of the Liturgy:

---

The Mass is a Mystery to be lived in a death of Love. Its divine reality surpasses all words. . . It is the Action par excellence, the very act of our Redemption, in the Memorial which makes it present.[28]

---

I do not know what Zundel, who died in 1975, thought of the Novus Ordo Missae, but I can say without a doubt: Anyone who reads this book, a profound work of mystical theology, which, from start to finish, is steeped in the prayers and ceremonies of the classic Roman Rite, enters into a world of luminous wonder and fiery devotion — the epitome of a Church securely and gratefully rooted in her tradition. This world was doomed by Paul VI’s interim missal of 1965 and banished by the perfidious Missale Romanum of 1969.

To a poor layman or priest standing in the audience on November 19 or November 26 of that fateful year, the glorious and intimate world described in Zundel[29] seemed on the verge of being lost for ever.

Conclusion
Revisiting these audiences five decades later is important for many reasons. Today I should like to mention just two of them.

The main reason is that, considering the magnitude of the reform, Paul VI’s defense of it is exceedingly flimsy. Some people saw that already back in 1965 and 1969, but today it is overwhelmingly clear, with the benefit of a hindsight that shows how narrow and dated are his assumptions, and how his every prediction has failed.

Montini’s defense of the Novus Ordo relies on equivocation, deceitfulness about the extent of the changes, and a brute exercise of top-down authority. It is based on a poor theology of liturgy, sacraments, and prayer; a poor sociology of ritual; a poor psychology of habit; and a poor philosophical analysis of modernity.

A second reason has to do with more recent attempts to clean up the Montinian mess. Proponents of the “Reform of the Reform,” no doubt in good faith, cling to a narrative in which the Novus Ordo Missae came hot off the Vatican press clothed in Latin as with a garment, ready to be celebrated in splendor and solemnity to the noble strains of Gregorian chant, in perfect fulfillment of the conciliar constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium — and then the Mass got “hijacked” by European and American progressives, who flatly contradicted the good intentions of Paul VI. [It is what I have tended to believe all these years! In 1969-1970, there was no Internet, and even if I had any interest at all in following Church news, there was no way to do that from just reading the newspapers in the Philippines. All I know is that the day I first attended a Novus Ordo Mass, I stopped going to Mass - I wasn't even interested in looking for any explanations of such a radical change for the worse - and thereby led a life of mortal sin for the next two decades because of that.]

A basic problem with this narrative is that it’s false. The three general audiences indicate that
- Paul VI never thought that the Novus Ordo would be celebrated widely in Latin;
- he never expected Gregorian chant to survive in the parishes;
- he never wanted “our Mass” to look or sound like the inherited Roman liturgy.
- He calmly noted that Latin and Gregorian chant would disappear; the old way of celebrating Mass would perish from the face of the Earth.
To this extent, then, he sought rupture, not the continuity for which his successor Benedict XVI has become famous.[30] Certainly Paul VI could have heartily endorsed the words of influential liturgist and Consilium member Joseph Gelineau, S.J.:

---

]Let those who like myself have known and sung a Latin-Gregorian High Mass remember it if they can. Let them compare it with the Mass that we now have. Not only the words, the melodies, and some of the gestures are different. To tell the truth, it is a different liturgy of the Mass. This needs to be said without ambiguity: the Roman Rite as we knew it no longer exists. It has been destroyed.[31]

---

It is evident that Paul VI’s operative principle was accommodationism: the liturgy must be accommodated to the mentality and purported needs of Modern Man.[32] To this hungry Moloch of modernization, every other consideration had to yield; indeed, the first sacrificial offering to be placed in its mouth was the Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.

It requires no towering intelligence to see that some of its clearest and most important provisions were not only ignored but negated. Paul VI acted against the provisions signed by 2,147 bishops and major superiors in an exercise of hyperpapalism that has no other historical equivalent and probably never will. In this way he exhibited an extreme megalomania that could be summed up in the phrase: L’église, c’est moi. [It's what I have been saying of Bergoglio's concept of his papal office.]

These three audiences illustrate a more general trend.
We can see an exact parallel to them in the manner in which the Vatican after the Council discouraged culturally Catholic nations from preserving any special constitutional recognition of or agreement with the Church, and
- in the disastrous policy towards the Communist countries known as Ostpolitik, which has resurfaced in Pope Francis’s sell-out to the Chinese government.
- We see it in the encouragement of ugly modern art, with the Paul VI audience hall, opened in 1971, as its preeminent monument.
- We see it in the discouragement of clerical attire and large families.

In other words, we are looking at a comprehensive program of secularization, of conformity to the liberal Western world forged in the anticlerical Enlightenment and repackaged after World War II as optimistic humanism. This was the defining ethos of the Vatican II period as interpreted and advanced by and under Pope Paul VI. [And now by his spiritual heir, Jorge Bergoglio]

And this is and was contrary to the fundamental demand of Christianity according to St. Paul in the Epistle to the Romans: “Do not be conformed to this world” — that is, the world as fallen angels and sinful men have made it, in their rebellion against God — “but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom 12:2).

The great American Catholic writer of the 19th century, Orestes Brownson, wrote in July 1846:

---

The Church is not here to follow the spirit of the age, but to control and direct it, often to struggle against it.

They do her the greatest disservice who seek to disown her glorious past, and to modify her as far as possible, so as to adapt her to prevailing methods of thought and feeling.

It is her zealous but mistaken friends, who, guided by a short-sighted policy, and taking counsel of the world around them, seek, as they express it, to liberalize her, to bring her more into harmony with the spirit of the age, from whom we, as good Catholics, should always pray, Libera nos, Domine![33]

---

Martin Mosebach speaks of “the defective liturgical development that was encouraged by a mentality antagonistic to spiritual realities.”[34] This, in fact, is what we see in Paul VI: a mentality so preoccupied with modernity, with evangelization, and with accessibility that it ends up becoming antagonistic to spiritual realities
— the set-apartness of the sacred;
- the primacy of God and the things of God;
- the otherworldly itinerary of Christ in His Passion, death, resurrection, and ascension; and
- the conquest of this world for Christ the King, seizing it from Satan’s empire and sanctifying it with her “mystic benedictions . . . derived from apostolic discipline and tradition.”[35]

Permit me to conclude with a quotation from Johann Adam Möhler:

---

If one cannot trust tradition, then Christians would rightly despair of ever learning what Christianity really is; they would rightly despair that there is a Holy Spirit which fills the Church, that there exists a common spirit and sure knowledge of Christianity. … This is the state in which those who reject tradition find themselves, and for them there can be no such thing as an objective Christianity.[36]

---

NOTES
[1] Mediator Dei, n. 61.
[2] DZ 856: “Canon 13. Si quis dixerit, receptos et approbatos Ecclesiae catholicae ritus in solemni sacramentorum administratione adhiberi consuetos aut contemni, aut sine peccato a ministris pro libito omitti, aut in novos alios per quemcumque ecclesiarum pastorem mutari posse, A.S.” Another translation of this dense text renders it thus: “If anyone says that the received and approved rites of the Catholic Church, accustomed to be used in the administration of the sacraments, may be despised or omitted by the ministers without sin and at their pleasure, or may be changed by any pastor of the churches to other new ones, let him be anathema.”
[3] “Si quis dixerit, ceremonias, vestes et externa signa, quibus in missarum celebratione Ecclesia Catholica utitur, irritabula impietatis esse magis quam officia pietatis: anathema sit.” On the surface, this canon would seem to require saying that the Novus Ordo, in its integrity, must be an “office of piety” and not an “incentive to impiety.” But it does not follow that the Novus Ordo fosters piety as much as the traditional rite, or that it avoids occasions of impiety as well as the traditional rite does. This canon also cannot be taken in isolation from other conditions that must be fulfilled before we can identify a given rite as actually Catholic, as opposed to being a tolerated intruder.
[4] St. Thomas Aquinas (ST II-II, q. 1, a. 9, sed contra) cites this verse as evidence for the indefectibility of the Church: “The universal Church cannot err, since she is governed by the Holy Ghost, Who is the Spirit of truth: for such was Our Lord’s promise to His disciples (Jn 16:13): ‘When He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will teach you all truth.’”
[5] Susanne Spencer writes: “The beauty of tradition is that it does not cast out the years between the early Church and now, but trusts that the Holy Spirit has guided the Church as we have grown in understanding of doctrine and developed our liturgical rites. Soon-to-be-canonized Blessed John Henry Newman describes the development of tradition in this way: ‘A true development, then, may be described as one which is conservative of the course of antecedent developments being really those antecedents and something besides them: it is an addition which illustrates, not obscures, corroborates, not corrects, the body of thought from which it proceeds.’” “The Beauty of the Extraordinary Form Comes from Tradition,” citing Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Pt. II, Ch. V.6.
[6] Like the descent of the dove, or the tongues of fire on Pentecost, announcing that a new dispensation is at hand. However, there will never be another dispensation: that of Christ is definitive. Hence, one can never expect a time, after the age of the Apostles, in which new Christian rites or sacraments will come into existence.
[7] This could remind us of the Ascension and the Assumption, exemplars of our final destiny in the unchanging bliss of heaven. As liturgy unfolds over time, it becomes more evidently the image of the eschatological banquet.
[8] This entire chapter of Ezekiel, especially verses 8 to 26, can be taken as a description of a three-stage historical drama: first, the calling of Israel and the old covenant; second, the coming of Christ and the new covenant, which inaugurated a period of maturation and royal splendor; third, the apostasy of the 20th century when churchmen went whoring after secular values, created “colorful shrines” to the gods of the world, and made a religion out of humanism, burning incense to “images of men.” To these values, gods, and images, churchmen sacrificed the Church’s sons and daughters, in the outward exodus of the baptized who left the Church and the internal exodus of the faithful who have ceased to believe or even to know the Catholic Faith.
[9] I would like to point out that all canonists and theologians are in agreement that General Audiences, like papal homilies or sermons, occupy a lowly place among the instruments by which a pope can choose to exercise his magisterium. They are often a mixture of statements that say something about matters of faith or morals and other statements that mere express the pope’s personal opinion. While they deserve our respectful attention, they usually do not demand much from us in the way of assent.
[10] See Gregory DiPippo, “The Liturgist Manifesto.” For more on the Ognissant event, see Dom Alcuin Reid, “March 7th, 1965—‘An extraordinary way of celebrating the Holy Mass’”; Peter Kwasniewski, “‘Backwards vs. Forwards’—What Does It Mean?” and “Just Say No to ’65!”; and the article mentioned in the next note.
[11] See the description at Rorate Caeli in “The 50th Anniversary of Paul VI’s First Italian Mass: Some Hard Truths About the ‘1965 Missal’ and the Liturgical Reform.”
[12] Pope Benedict XVI, whose intelligence, fairness, courtesy, and realism greatly exceeded those of Paul VI, noted precisely this fact in his Letter to Bishops Con Grande Fiducia, which accompanied the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum: “Afterwards, however [i.e., in the period after the introduction of the new missal], it soon became apparent that a good number of people remained strongly attached to this [older] usage of the Roman Rite, which had been familiar to them from childhood. This was especially the case in countries where the Liturgical Movement had provided many people with a notable liturgical formation and a deep, personal familiarity with the earlier form of the liturgical celebration.”
[13] Triumph magazine, October 1966; cited in Michael Davies, Liturgical Time Bombs in Vatican II (Rockford, IL: TAN Books and Publishers, 2003), 40–41.
[14] It is also worth noting that in response to the Short Study and other critiques, the pope pushed through a number of significant modifications to the Institutio Generalis that prefaced the missal.
[15] Quoted here. A similar Montinian phrase shows up in an Address to a Consistory, May 24, 1976: “For our part, in the name of tradition [!], we beseech all our children and all Catholic communities to celebrate the rites of the restored liturgy with dignity and fervent devotion.”
[16] Against Heresies, Book I, ch. 8.
[17] Such a remote or abstract sameness would not, in all probability, satisfy the simple and childlike or the sophisticated and cultured that the Mass was the same—the two demographics most heavily alienated from the Church during this period.
[18] Incidentally admitting that the age-old nomenclature of “the Mass of Catechumens” and “the Mass of the Faithful,” matching up to ancient practice and followed by hundreds of commentators over the centuries, has therewith been jettisoned.
[19] This was prior to the heroic stance taken up by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, which was to bring out the worst of the tyrant in Paul VI. But that is a story for another time.
[20] Aidan Nichols, Looking at the Liturgy: A Critical View of Its Contemporary Form (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 61.
[21] It is distressing to see some of today’s would-be advocates of tradition exalting a “devotionalism of ignorance” and a strict bifurcation between lay spirituality and the rites of the sanctuary. On this topic, see my articles “Is Passivity Mistaken for Piety? On the Perils and Pitfalls of Participation”; “Two Different Treasure Chests”; “Carrying Forward the Noble Work of the Liturgical Movement”; “Living the Vita Liturgica: Conditions, Obstacles, Prospects.”
[22] Evangelii Nuntiandi, n. 42.
[23] In his book The Two Catholic Churches: A Study in Oppression (SCM Press, 1986); see this article by Joseph Shaw.
[24] See this position paper, which is included in the forthcoming book from Angelico Press, The Case for Liturgical Restoration.
[25] The crucial milestones in this process are well known: the English Indult of 1971, Quattuor Abhinc Annos of 1984 (cleverly named to sound like a response to and replacement of Tres Abhinc Annos of 1967), Ecclesia Dei Adflicta of 1988, Summorum Pontificum of 2007, and Universae Ecclesiae of 2011.
[26] It is clear to those who compare them, although one is permitted to wonder how well acquainted Paul VI was with every liturgical book published at his behest. According to Archbishop Bugnini, on the one hand Paul VI read each draft of the Ordo Missae with painstaking care, underlining in multiple colors and annotating the margins in small print, while on the other hand he returned the text of the new lectionary with a note saying he had not been able to study it in detail but assumed that the experts had done their work properly.
[27] To use the language of the Synod of Pistoia—and of Paul VI.
[28] The wording of the opening phrases as quoted by the pope is somewhat different from that which is found in the English edition published by Sheed & Ward: “The Mass is a mystery, which must be made our living experience. And that experience is no less than a death for love.”
[29] Or, for that matter, in Prosper Guéranger, Nicholas Gihr, Pius Parsch, Fernand Cabrol, Ildefonso Schuster, or any of the large number of liturgical commentators in the 19th and 20th centuries who labored tirelessly to advance understanding and reanimate participation in the liturgy of the Church in its traditional (i.e., handed down) form, not as it might be reinvented by engineers in laboratories.
[30] The only exception was in Paul VI's attitude towards monks and nuns, who, in his Apostolic Letter Sacrificium Laudis, he encouraged to retain their chanted Latin Divine Office. However, he never enforced this, in keeping with his typically weak and ambivalent mode of governance, and watched from the balcony as all of the great religious orders collapsed, taking their choral office and sung Mass into the tomb with them.
[31] From Demain la liturgie (Paris, 1976), 9–10.
[32] On the motives of the reform and its revolutionary nature, the comprehensive work by Michael Davies remains indispensable, even if it must be supplemented by more recent publications: Pope Paul’s New Mass (Kansas City, MO: Angelus Press, 2009). See Yves Chiron, Annibale Bugnini, Reformer of the Liturgy, trans. John Pepino (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2018).
[33] “Newman’s Development of Christian Doctrine,” accessed here on March 20, 2019.
[34] Martin Mosebach, Subversive Catholicism: Papacy, Liturgy, Church (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, forthcoming), 95.
[35] Council of Trent, Session 22, ch. 5.
[36] Quoted in Antoine Arjakovsky, What is Orthodoxy? A Genealogy of Christian Understanding (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2018), 267–68.

Outgoing DC bishop, Cardinal Wuerl, left, looks on as his successor addresses his first news conference. Right and below, canon212.com's characteristic effusions on the Wilton appointment. Just try to ignore the adjectives and hyperbole.


"Oh when will they ever learn?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind..."
And it sounds like NEVER! Just keep everything
within the same sordid hierarchical line...

More of the same:
Archbishop Wilton Gregory named
to head DC Archdiocese
by Steve Skojec

April 4, 2019

As had been widely-speculated, Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Atlanta was appointed Thursday to succeed Cardinal Donald Wuerl as the Archbishop of Washington.

The diocese has fallen under heavy scrutiny after its two most recent bishops have become emblematic of the clerical sex abuse crisis — Theodore McCarrick for his alleged abuse of priests, seminarians, and altar boys; and his successor, Wuerl, for his failure to properly handle abuse cases during his tenure as the bishop of Pittsburgh. Wuerl had also denied having knowledge of of McCarrick’s illicit activities, and was embarrassed when it was later proven that he’d known of allegations about McCarrick since at least 2004.

Archbishop Gregory — no doubt soon to be cardinal — was the president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops from 2001 to 2004. In that role, he was responsible for the implementation of the Dallas Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, an effort the bishops love to tout, but which has faced heavy criticism for its failure to address one of the primary underlying problems with clerical abuse: accountability for the bishops themselves.

Catholic commentator Phil Lawler, who covered the creation of the Dallas Charter as a journalist in 2002, wrote in a 2016 column that

---

“In Dallas the bishops talked about how to discipline wayward priests; they said very little about how to restore trust in their own leadership.” Within weeks after that June 2002 meeting in Dallas, Bishop (now Archbishop) Wilton Gregory of Atlanta, then the president of the US bishops’ conference, placidly announced that the scandal was past history, and unquestioning Catholic journalists have been echoing that claim for years.”

---

We all know how that turned out.

The late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, who consecrated Gregory to the episcopate in 1983 and has been described as his “mentor,” is one of the most troubling figures in the history of the American epicopacy. Dark and sordid allegations continue to surround him over two decades after his death from pancreatic cancer in 1996.
- Bernardin has been accused of covering up for a number of clerical sex abusers, but also of recruiting homosexuals from Latin America to seminaries in Chicago, where he served as Archbishop from 1982 to 1996.
- Bernardin has also been alleged to have had a “sexual penchant for young men,” according to Catholic journalist Matt. C. Abbot.
- In one of the most disturbing allegations, he was identified by some as being the perpetrator of a ritual Satanic rape of an 11 year old girl in 1957, as fictionalized in the novel Windswept House, by the late Malachi Martin. The young girl, known only as “Agnes,” was reported to have come forward and passed a polygraph examination about this event in 1992.

And in much of the reportage of his appointment to DC, Gregory is being described as Bernardin’s “protege.” We’re left on our own to figure out what that might mean.

Catholic journalist and author George Neumayr has an idea. He reported last November — when rumors of Gregory being in the running for DC first surfaced — that
- in Atlanta, Gregory "maintained Bernardin’s program of gay promotion and propaganda in the Church.”
- Gregory has “defended the writings and speeches” of the notoriously pro-LGBT Jesuit, Fr. James Martin” — whom Gregory also invited to speak in his diocese last October — and
- appointed a priest caught in a homosexual love triangle to be the pastor of a parish in Conyers. (The parish, ironically, is named St. Pius X.)

And do you remember the letter then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the CDF, sent to the American bishops in 2004, saying that Catholic politicians who “reject the doctrine of the Church” should not receive the Eucharist? The one Theodore McCarrick “bowdlerized,” as Phil Lawler put it, when it was shared with the other U.S. bishops, “to suggest that the Vatican had not recommended withholding Communion from abortion advocates”?

Well the letter wasn’t only addressed to McCarrick. It was also sent to Wilton Gregory.

Everywhere you look, Gregory is there, sidled up close to the wrong kind of ecclesiastical figures, the wrong sorts of issues, his name in close proximity with those promoting or perpetrating evil in the Church, or those who refuse to understand the problems that ail us.

In other words, as long as you don’t want anything of substance to change, he appears to be a perfect fit to succeed the last two men who headed up the D.C. archdiocese.

If they want us to believe they don’t take any of this seriously, they’ve succeeded.

But here's the National Fishwrap with its earnest 'good faith' reporting on Mons. Wilson's debut in DC:

Gregory's promise:
'I will always tell you the truth'
[As his predecessors didn't?]
by Tom Roberts
Editor

April 4, 2019

WASHINGTON — In what he termed "a moment fraught with challenges," the new leader of the Archdiocese of Washington, in his first public appearance here April 4, repeatedly pledged to be honest with his flock.

"I believe that the only way I can serve the local archdiocese is by telling you the truth," said Archbishop Wilton Gregory, who will become the seventh archbishop of Washington. He repeated the claim several times during a 45-minute news conference in which he also answered questions about the effects of clericalism, the need for transparency in the church, the need to address mistakes of his predecessors, and how he intends to relate to the city's political scene.

Gregory, 71, currently the archbishop of Atlanta, will be installed in Washington, D.C., on May 21.

"This is obviously a moment fraught with challenges throughout our entire Catholic Church, but nowhere more so than in this local faith community," he said in prepared remarks, making a reference to the turmoil that has roiled the archdiocese during the past year.

His immediate predecessor, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who introduced Gregory, resigned in October after a Pennsylvania grand jury report raised questions about his handling of abusive priests in the 1990s while bishop of Pittsburgh. Wuerl's predecessor in Washington, Theodore McCarrick, was removed from the priesthood after revelations he sexually abused a youngster and sexually harassed seminarians.

"I would be naive not to acknowledge the unique task that awaits us," Gregory said in his remarks. He spoke of his confidence in the grace of God and the goodness of the people of the church as aids in facing his new responsibilities. "I want to come to know you, to hear your stories, to listen to the emotions and experiences and expectations that have shaped your precious Catholic faith, for better or for worse. I want to offer you hope."

He characterized his new archdiocese, its ethnic and social diversity. In a compact line that spoke of both the material and spiritual richness and poverty of its people, he said: "The Archdiocese of Washington is home to the poor and the powerful, neither of which realizes they are both."

In addition to offering hope, he promised: "I will rebuild your trust. I cannot undo the past, but I sincerely believe that together, we will not merely address the moments where we have fallen short or failed outright, but we will model for all the life and teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ, and we will reclaim the future." The archdiocese, he said, will move forward, "neither forgetting the past nor being constrained by it."

Asked about the role of what has been described as clerical or hierarchical culture in the sex abuse crisis, he recounted a scene from early in his priesthood in Chicago. He had been appointed to study in Rome and had just purchased a trunk in a store on Wabash Avenue when he met an older priest, whom he had long admired, who warned him of three temptations he would face in Rome: "He said, 'You will face the temptation for self-aggrandizement, the temptation for pleasure, and the temptation to power. And the most damaging and seductive temptation is that for power.'

"And I think so much of what we're facing now was a misuse of power, an abuse of power, clerical power, power that was intended in too many cases to dominate and destroy lives."

Perhaps the most candid moment of the exchange with the media came when asked whether he would address the misdeeds of his predecessors.

"It's difficult to come into a situation where there is unrest. I've known Donald Wuerl for over 40 years," Gregory said. "I know he is a gentleman. He works very hard for the church. He's acknowledged that he's made mistakes. That's a sign of the integrity of the man.

"If I can shed light on what I think we need to do in response to some of the mistakes he's acknowledged and asked forgiveness for, I'll do that. Part of clericalism is circling the wagons so that the episcopacy won't call one another to task. I think this moment has shown the folly of that approach to episcopal governance and episcopal collegiality."

Asked about transparency in the church, he repeated, "I will always tell you the truth."

Illustrating his promise, he recounted a scene during the 2001-2004 period when he was president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and leading the bishops to confront the growing sex abuse scandal. He said he met with Pope John Paul II and spoke candidly with him.

"I can remember on one occasion telling him what I had discovered" about the sexual abuse of young people, he said. "And he said, 'Are you sure?' And I said, 'Holy Father, I am sure, and there is more.' So I walked away from my time as president knowing this one thing: that I told them the truth as I knew it. And that's what I will do for the Archdiocese of Washington."

Asked how he intended to relate to the political power structure in Washington, he replied: "I see this appointment as an appointment to be the pastor of the Archdiocese of Washington. I was not elected to Congress," he said. "The pastor must speak of those things that are rooted in the Gospel, but I'm not going to be at any negotiating tables. That's not my place. My place is in the pews with the people."

He said, when asked what message he had for people who had left the church, "Well, we've certainly given our faithful lots of reasons to leave the church. I want to provide a few reasons to stay. I want to assure the people that I will be honest with them."

In his final response, he described himself as "an ordinary human being" who will not always handle matters perfectly.

"But I always have to tell you the truth," he said, repeating, "I have to tell you the truth. And I will."

So it seems Mons. Gregory came out well at the news conference today, said all the right things. Words are cheap, of course. Would he really investigate what Donald Wuerl knew about McCarrick and when, how he dealt with Benedict XVI's sanctions on McCarrick, stuff like that, and will he release archdiocesan documents relevant to Mons. Vigano's accusations? Naaah, I don't think he will do anything that will embarrass the pope, because candor and truth-telling will get him nowhere fast. Still, he is among the bishops - all the Catholic bishops and priests in the world, including the pope, whom we pray for at the Te igitur in every Mass. So God bless, and miserere nobis.

OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE:It was irresistible - to put together a recent cartoon of Bergoglio the Demolition Man, with the actual newsphoto from today of a bulldozer razing a parish building serving the poor in Shaanxi province.
What has Bergoglio to show so far for his secret deal with Beijing? Nothing but more persecution of underground Catholics to force them into the 'official church' Bergoglio has now recognized de facto if not de jure (maybe it is
de jure in the secret deal).



Shaanxi government razes
Qianyang parish to ground
by Fr Bernardo Cervellera
Editor


Rome, April 4, 2019 (AsiaNews) - This morning, the Qianyang (Shaanxi) government razed the only parish in the city to the ground. A bulldozer reduced the two-story building to rubble under the supervision of a group of policemen. In the video sent to AsiaNews we hear the sobs of some women, while several faithful look astonished at the destruction.

The Qianyang parish was located in a very poor area of ​​Shaanxi and serves around 2,000 Catholics, all peasants. It was built with offerings from other communities in the diocese.

On the upper floor the building housed the liturgy room; on the ground floor there were offices and the nuns residence. The sisters offered medical aid, medical visits and medicines to the indigent population.

The reasons for the destruction are still not known clearly.

The Diocese of Fengxiang, led until 2017 by Msgr. Luke Li Jingfeng has a special character in the Chinese church scene: it is the only diocese where neither the faithful nor the bishop are members of the Patriotic Association, although the government's Officfor Religious Affairs has a presence there. From 2017, the bishop has been 54 years old Msgr. Peter Li Huiyuan.

Some observers think that violence against the parish is a way to force the diocese to apply the new religious regulations and to have bishops and priests enrolled in the Patriotic Association.

Others point out that the communist cell that presides over the Qianyang government is made up of radical Maoists, for whom "religion is a fantasy that must be eradicated".

The church of Qianyang is famous in the area: in the past, according to the faithful, some miracles have been attributed to the holy water in the parish. Since then, many have flocked to receive holy water that is used as a physical and spiritual remedy for humans and animals.

For some believers, the destruction is due to the Maoists "fear of holy water".

If I were a Vaticanista in this Bergoglio era, I would have long ago asked to be reassigned or quit my job. Because, for a living, who wants to have to go through the reigning
pope's endless blather - starting with his daily homilette at Casa Santa Marta - and try to write it up into a story that people might genuinely want to read? Every Vaticanista
today ought to demand beyond-and-above-call-of-duty combat pay if the story of the day is all about a new papal document which in this pontificate tends to beat every record
for length and verbosity.

I never read anything by Bergoglio in full after Evangelii Gaudium - which I needed to read to get a concrete idea of how far the then-new pope would go in
institutionalizing the 'spirit of Vatican II' that he embodied so well. It soon became very clear that he was going to overwhelm and replace that ‘spirit’ which had already
led too many priests and bishops in the Church down the wrong paths, and institutionalize in its place ‘the fiat of Jorge Bergoglio’, who has constituted himself into the one-man
alpha-and-omega of Church authority that Fr.Rosica would several years later immortalize in his infamous definition –

incidentally, a statement the Bergoglio Vatican has never questioned nor repudiated – and what does that tell you?

Of Amoris Laetitia, I only read the parts in which its controversial statements were embedded, especially Chapter 8, after having left others more diligent and qualified to
discover and expose them. I didn’t think I needed to go through all the stuff that constituted the bulk of the cake in which the pope and his ghostwriters had embedded the
arsenic in Chapter 8, because I did not need to be catechized by them through their tiresomely platitudinous recycling of what the Church has always taught about marriage.

So I decided not to even look at the most recent papal exhortation on the so-called ’youth synod’ before others had unpacked it for me, and now that they have, I don’t even
have the desire to do so. Apparently,it is worse even than Amoris Laetitia because it puts down doctrine in general, not just a specific doctrine as Jesus’s teaching
on adultery (and what that means about divorce and remarriage and reception of the Eucharist)…. First, here’s Aldo Maria Valli’s initial take on it:

‘Christus vivit’ and
its smarmy antipathy towards doctrine
Translated from

April 4, 2015

One aspect emerges from the post-synodal exhortation Christus vivit, dedicated to ‘young people and all the People of God': an antipathy to doctrinal and social content on the part of those who drew up the document. [Reflecting, how could it not, the reigning pope’s own attitude. After all, he signed the document and only his name appears as its author.]

Just consider this passage:

---

As for growth, I would make one important point. In some places, it happens that young people are helped to have a powerful experience of God, an encounter with Jesus that touched their hearts. But the only follow-up to this is a series of “formation” meetings featuring talks about doctrinal and moral issues, the evils of today’s world, the Church, her social doctrine, chastity, marriage, birth control and so on.

As a result, many young people get bored, they lose the fire of their encounter with Christ and the joy of following him; many give up and others become downcast or negative. Rather than being too concerned with communicating a great deal of doctrine, let us first try to awaken and consolidate the great experiences that sustain the Christian life. [212]

---

This passage is significant because it shows that the document was written not so much with an eye to the needs and questions of young people today, but on the basis of [clearly un-evangelical] idiosyncrasies held by some ex-young people, now aged, that “doctrinal and moral questions” do not matter because they only provoke boredom.

Whoever has had to work with young people knows that in our time, the problem is no to provide them with ‘intense experiences’ and occasions of strong emotional encounters. They can find those anywhere because the world offers them in profusion. What young people ask for, perhaps in a confused way but not less evident because of that, is the exact opposite.

Because they live in a ‘liquid’ society, full of experience possibilities that have no moral reference points nor even rational meaning, they thirst for doctrine, for structured thought, for content, for rules – and when they find someone who is able to slake their thirst, they are far from bored but are very grateful because new horizons have been opened for them which no one had even spoken of to them. And they also discover the value of authority.

A Catholic educator wrote me: “In many decades working with highschool students first then with university students and young workers later, I really experienced the opposite of what Christus vivit claims. I have experienced young people asking help to decide on questions that are not even raised in school or university. What kind of young people have been listening to the bishops and to the pope for them to come to such a conclusion?” [Oh, Jorge Bergoglio must have thrown in his input here. From the not inconsiderable but still quite limited obligatory reading I’ve done since he became pope, he’s a great one for inventing far-fetched hypothetical situations which he presents as his pastoral experience, in which the very way he narrates them betrays they are fictional. But he makes them up anyway all the time to push any point he wants to make.]

My friend Andrea Mondineli has compared that passage from Christus vivit to the magisterium exporessed by St. Pius X in Acerbo nimis, in which he affirms the essentiality of doctrine because “the intellect, if it lacks true light in recognizing what is divine, would be like a blind man holding to another blind man until both of them fall into a ditch”.

And that is so. Only an ideological vision of reality could sustain that the problem today is to “dampen the urge to transmit a great quantity of doctrinal content”.

Such expressions are used by the 1968ers when they indulge in notionism and oppose every type of authority. But today, they sound anachronistic.

Suspicion of, if not hostility to, doctrine and moral norms emerges in other points of the exhortation. As when it warns of the risk of suffocating young people "with an ensemble of rules that give them a reductive and moralistic image of Christianity”. (No. 233] Suffocating them? When it is precisely the lack of moral directives – as educators know quite well – that leads a person to interior disequlibrium and unhappiness?

Dismissive of doctrine and morality, Christus vivit at a certain point expresses the need for a ‘synodal’ and ‘popular’ ministry to young people. These are adjectives very much in vogue in this pontificate, but do not say much. Indeed, they say nothing.

How different from the tone and content of John Paul II’s Fides et ratio, where he explains that in order to promote the dignity of the human being as well as the announcement of the Gospel, it is urgent “to lead people to discover both their capacity to know the truth and their yearning for the ultimate and definitive meaning of life.”[No. 102]

to know the true, the good and the beautiful, to give meaning to life. This is the great thirst young people have. And to deal with their demand, one needs philosophical thought that is oriented in an authentically Christian sense. We need to establish a new alliance between human reason and divine will, as Benedict XVI never ceased to urge.

One doubts that a ‘synodal ministry’ – whatever this vague clerico-bureaucratic term means – could help to bring young people closer to God.

In search of young people
by Robert Royal

April 4, 2019

Some years ago, my pastor talked me into teaching “Catholic Morals” to high-school sophomores. I can’t say that I look back to those three years with, uh, pleasure. Or satisfaction. Some of my students are still Catholic; others lapsed. The whole experience left me with profound appreciation for anyone who knows how to work with and really reach young people with the Good News in a dying culture like our post-truth West.

I’m, therefore, somewhat indulgent towards anyone who even tries to evangelize young people, especially since the dreaded Millennials have made their appearance. It’s easy to criticize failures; hard to know what to do – or sometimes even where to start. If you think you have an answer, try it out somewhere – see what happens. I’ve written here about a few outfits who may yet save us. The harvest could be great, but there aren’t nearly enough laborers (or good ideas) in the vineyard.

I also wrote almost daily about the Synod on Youth last October, with a mixture of hope about the goals and doubts about the approach. And I read Pope Francis’s Post Synodal Exhortation for that synod, Christus vivit! (“Christ Lives!”), which was released Tuesday, with similar expectations.

There are some quite moving pages in this lengthy document, encouraging young people to aspire to great things, to become themselves actors in their own stories, to speak to the Church, even when they have doubts, and be open to answers they may receive from older relatives and trusted authority figures in the Church. And above all to be open to the reality of Jesus Christ.

The Exhortation argues that the young should help teach those in the Church wedded to dead older models of outreach, how to talk to young people today. Instead of lectures on faith and morals, the young themselves should encourage the building up of communities through various groups and activities: attending to the poor and marginalized, working for social justice, developing new music ministries, liturgical celebrations, and social activities. [Of course, that's the now stultifyingly familiar 'activist' church dear to spirit-of-Vatican-II progressivists and to Jorge Bergoglio. And what, pray, are those older models of outreach that did manage to speak to generations of young people through the centuries? What was wrong with absorbing the faith from their elders, being catechized properly (in our time, just ask any Catholic who was given the Baltimore Catechism, say, to literally indoctrinate Catholicism into us during our formative years in school), and being exposed to bishops, priests and laymen who demonstrated Christian living directly?]

There’s also encouragement about seeing work – all work – as a vocation in addition to the more traditional forms of religious vocations. This is all to the good – especially, I believe, encouraging young people who are enthusiastic about the Faith to reach out to other young people. And to marry and form families – a need that, as I suggested to several bishops during the Synod, was being neglected.

In my view, though, there’s still not enough emphasis on not only falling in love and marrying for life, but also having children. There’s much vaguer talk about deep love generating life. But especially in the developed world, where populations are collapsing, saying explicitly that for most people their vocation will be a job, marriage, and having children would have made this document far more pointed.

One of the ironies about the exhortation is that it pretty much describes what Catholic schools and youth ministries have been doing for decades – at least in the United States – as if it’s something novel. And as potentially effective, when it’s been, in large part, ineffective. The Church here continues to hemorrhage young people. [Typical of anything that is theorized by committee from preconceived notions that have no input from reality!]
- Indeed, is there any country in the modern world where the doctrinal has been excessively and rigidly emphasized over the pastoral?
- Where the adults drive people away with stale repetition of morals and doctrines, and don’t put greater effort into socializing and “welcoming” than in teaching and forming?
The pope often suggests this. But my guess is: probably only rarely since Vatican II.

In fact, to judge by the evidence we have of what programs seem to attract the most students and actually lead to their living authentic Christian lives, it’s the ones that combine pastoral outreach with a substantial dose of Catholic truth.

Bishop Robert Barron has been pointing out for years that the single factor most young people cite for turning away from the Faith is that they think science has made belief unbelievable.

It may very well be, as Pope Francis claims, that starting out with arguments to the contrary may put many people off. That’s only to say that we first meet people where they are. But I see the popularity among young people of figures like Jordan Peterson – and Bishop Barron himself. And it leads me to believe that many are looking for something meatier than the millionth repetition of (otherwise true) assertions that God loves us.

Christ is mentioned a lot in the Exhortation – Fr. Antonio Spadaro S.J., who probably had a hand in the drafting, has written a glowing article pointing out that not only does Christ “live” in the title, but “’Life,’ ‘living,’ ‘alive’ are terms repeated throughout the text some 280 times, just as many times as the word ‘young,’ which is the key to the exhortation.”

Quite true, but maybe that near obsession – a half dozen times per page by my count – also reflects a certain limitation. Because it’s also true that you can read through this lengthy text and never see the words “heaven” (except in one quotation), “death,” “afterlife,” “eternity” (except as God willing us from all eternity, not as a future state), etc.

This surprised me so much that I actually did word searches, thinking maybe I’d overlooked something in a quick first reading. But no. The whole question of what happens when we die is absent – as well as whether “outreach” to young people is merely a way to give them a richer human experience – a sociological and psychological goal – or whether it matters eternally in some transcendent sense.

And that means that other than a ramped-up sense of forgiveness and Christ’s accompaniment of all his children, there’s a lot here that the best of the secular world could already offer young people. And does, along with indulgences for fornication, homosexuality, and abortion.

You can argue over the many and various ways the Exhortation tries to remove obstacles to reaching the large swaths of young people now distant and profoundly uninterested in religion, especially Catholicism. But the reluctance to touch on some of the most consequential matters of the Faith may be one of the very things that has failed to attract young people desperately searching for deeper answers.

Well, first let us be thankful this exhortation did not, as speculated, turn out to be a papal justification of homosexual and other deviant lifestyles. But it is certainly true to Bergoglian form in its dismissiveness of doctrine in the life of the Christian.

Jorge Bergoglio basically reduces the catechism to “God loves you, he loves you as you are, you do not have to change anything, you do not even have to be Catholic or Christian, he will always forgive you - provided you remember that your purpose in life is to help others, especially the poor and the migrants, and to save the earth by recycling, doing without air conditioning, driving small vehicles and avoiding air travel”.

One of the first lessons in the Baltimore Catechism is “Why did God make man?” And I learned, at kindergarten in the nuns’ school I attended, “God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in heaven.”

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 06/04/2019 05:17]

So SODOMA author Frederic Martel got it wrong - half-wrong,anyway. He predicted a major address on homosexuality by the pope at a meeting in the Vatican to which many leading LGBTQY activists had been invited. The meeting did take place, only not with the pope but with his Secretary of State, and of course, there was no papal address...

Cardinal Parolin receives LGBT activists
working to decriminalize homosexual acts
[In other words, those who oppose anti-sodomy laws
that exist today in at least 71 countries]
by Diane Montagna


ROME, April 5, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin today met with a group of 51 LGBT activists, politicians, and judges working to decriminalize homosexual acts, the Holy See has confirmed.

In a statement released this afternoon, Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti, responding to repeated inquiries from journalists about the alleged meeting, said:

---

Today in the Vatican, Cardinal Pietro Parolin received a group of approximately 50 persons working in various ways against the criminalization of homosexuality.

During the meeting, research on the criminalization of homosexual relationships in the Caribbean was presented to the Vatican Secretary of State.

Cardinal Parolin extended a brief greeting to those present, repeating the Catholic Church’s position in defence of the dignity of every human person and against every form of violence.

After having listened to the presentations of some of the participants at the meeting, Cardinal Parolin then assured that he would inform the Holy Father of the contents of the research.

---

News of today’s meeting first emerged in late March, when French sociologist and author Dr. Frédéric Martel, who is an open homosexual, reported on the event, referencing a letter of invitation addressed to an LGBT activist.

As LifeSite reported on Mar. 29, the letter, dated March 4 and signed by Professor Raúl Zaffaroni and Dr. Leonardo Raznovich – was sent on behalf of a coordinating committee for a research project regarding “criminalization of sexual relations between persons of same sex in the Caribbean.”

Organizers invited addressees (in this case, a pro-LGBT activist at the U.N.) to join a “private audience with His Holiness Pope Francis to be held on 5 April 2019 at the Vatican City at 12.00 noon.”

The letter stated that during the audience, “the Chair of the Coordinating Committee, Professor Raúl Zaffaroni, Justice of the Inter American Court of Human Rights, will present to His Holiness the Pope the preliminary results of the research.”

It added that “Professor Zaffaroni’s words will be followed by a historical speech by His Holiness relevant to the subject matter.”

With speculation of the Pope’s impending speech swirling on social media, on April 4 Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti “categorically” denied that the Holy Father would “deliver a ‘historical speech’ on the topic of homosexuality,” but he did not deny that the meeting would occur.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church — based on natural law, scripture and tradition — teaches that homosexual acts are “acts of grave depravity” (n. 2357), and that homosexuality is “objectively disordered” (n. 2358).

The Catechism also states that “persons who experience these tendencies must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity,” and that “every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.” However, it makes clear that “under no circumstances can [homosexual acts] be approved” (n. 2357, n. 2358).

At a press conference following today’s meeting at the Vatican, one of the participants — Baroness Helena Ann Kennedy, a British barrister, broadcaster, and Labour member of the House of Lords — told reporters that the LGBT group was respectfully welcomed. [Hey, if they were invited to the Vatican, how could they not be welcomed, and respectfully? That's just elementary good manners.]

“We have begun a dialogue, and Cardinal Parolin said that this dialogue will continue,” she said.

According to Italian media reports, the study on the criminalization of homosexual relationships in the Caribbean presented to Cardinal Parolin at today’s meeting highlights “the link between laws that still criminalize homosexuality in ten Caribbean counties and discriminatory attitudes that spread throughout society to the point of violence.”

Organizers argue that the Catholic Church bears some responsibility in the matter and are petitioning the Holy See to issue a statement opposing the criminalization of homosexual acts.

Leonardo Raznovich told journalists at today’s press gathering that when the research began, the Supreme Court in Belize declared the criminalization of homosexuality unconstitutional but the Catholic Church challenged the decision. Raznovich claimed that Pope Francis “intervened” — leading the local Church to withdraw their appeal.

“Thanks to the intervention of Pope Francis,” he said Belize is no longer numbered among the countries that criminalize homosexual acts.

Raznovich, who is an open homosexual, said the group then decided to petition the Holy See for a meeting, in order to determine the Vatican’s “position” on the matter.

While one LGBT site blamed the Pope’s absence on pressure following Martel’s announcement of the Pope’s “historic speech,” participants at today’s press conference sought to downplay the controversy.

“We had hoped to see the Pope himself, but in the end, he wasn’t available,” Kennedy said. “We can only imagine that he had state issues that required his presence.”

“Until a few days ago we thought we’d see him, then we learned he wasn’t available. We were sad that we couldn't see him, but maybe we’ll see him next time,” she added.

According to reports, at today’s press conference Raznovich publicly thanked Pope Francis, who he said “to some extent is responsible for this meeting. After intervening on the Church in Belize he wanted to know more about this research, and that is why we are here today.”

The Associated Press reported that the group had issued a statement urging the Catholic Church to declare its opposition to “conversion” therapies, which are aimed at bringing healing to persons who suffer with same-sex tendencies.

Deutsche Bank, which operates in 60 countries worldwide, also issued a statement on their participation in the private meeting at the with Cardinal Parolin, which they said was aimed at discussing “LGBTIQ discrimination.”

According to the statement, Management Board Member Karl von Rohr represented Deutsche Bank “as part of a delegation from Open for Business, a coalition of global companies that presents and promotes the business and economic case for LGBTQI rights"

After the press conference, Karl von Rohr, President and Member of the Management Board said: “We have a responsibility to both business and society to work with influential platforms that advocate a more inclusive and just world. Deutsche Bank is committed to advancing LGBTIQ rights around the world. We are grateful for the Vatican hosting us to discuss this topic and look forward to continue partnering with other companies, civil society organizations and governments to advance this important human rights issue.

The German bank praised Cardinal Pietro Parolin for signaling his willingness “to collectively move forward with the conversation.”

“This represents an important new level of dialogue with the Vatican across a broad base of stakeholders, which consisted of parliamentarians, judges, human right advocates and business leaders,” the bank said.

Along with Deutsche Bank, Open for Business members Accenture, Brunswick Group, EY, IBM, Microsoft, Linklaters and Virgin Atlantic all took part in the private audience with Cardinal Parolin.

The statement also highlighted that the initiative is supported by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and “includes a global call for companies to implement the UN standards of Conduct to tackle LGBTIQ discrimination in the workplace by 2020.”

In comments to LifeSite, a senior Vatican official said that today’s meeting threatens to “paralyze the Church in her moral proclamation.”

“Criminality is conduct from the perspective of civil justice,” the senior official explained. “In the Church, it is about God’s Commandments whose violation is a mortal sin. The public, however, will not make that precise distinction. This is exactly the intended effect."

Observers also wonder what repercussions the Vatican’s dialogue with LGBT activist, politicians and judges will have on the more than 30 African nations where homosexual activity between adults is still outlawed, and which live under growing threat of ideological colonization from the LGBT lobby in the West.

The consequences of believing in Jesus Christ
by Raymond Kowalski

April 5, 2019

On March 28, 2019, the Catholic News Agency reported on a lecture given the previous day by Archbishop Charles Chaput to seminarians at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio.

During his address, Archbishop Chaput said, “Do we really believe in Jesus Christ or not? That’s the central question in our lives. Everything turns on the answer. Because if our Christian faith really grounds and organizes our lives, then we have no reason to fear, and we have every reason to hope.”

What a stunning question to ask seminarians at the Josephinum, which, according to the news report, is a college-level and major seminary directly accountable to the Holy See and overseen by the apostolic nuncio to the United States.

An affirmative answer comes so easily for most of us. Of course we believe in Jesus Christ. We say so every Sunday during the Creed. But Archbishop Chaput adds the important qualifier: do we really believe in Jesus Christ? He asks us to go beyond mere words recited by rote. There are consequences to believing in Jesus Christ.

Two days prior to the archbishop’s lecture, the Church observed the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This feast could just as validly be called the Feast of the Incarnation. As we ponder what it means to really believe in Jesus Christ, this is a good place to begin. It is the first mystery of the Holy Rosary for a reason.
- Do we really believe that God became man?
- Do we really believe that Jesus Christ is that man?
- When we kneel during the Creed at the words, “was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man,” do we know and believe why we mark these words?
- When we kneel during the Last Gospel at the words Et Verbum caro factum est, do we assent to the reality of this event?

As Archbishop Chaput put it, everything turns on our answer. The Incarnation is the bedrock of Catholicism. Everything else is built on this doctrine.
- If we do not believe that God became man in the person of Jesus Christ, Catholicism is a waste of time.
- If we do believe it, we are led to the awesome reality of salvation, which is to say, to our ultimate return to the Father, by means of the Church that Christ founded and the precepts that He established.
- If we really believe in Jesus Christ, true God and true man, then we must believe in the one church that He established; we must offer the perpetual sacrifice that He instituted; and we must live our lives according to all that He taught.

These days, some important voices are suggesting that mere “acknowledgment” of the “Creator” is sufficient for salvation. (See, for example, the “Document on Human Fraternity,” signed by the pope in Abu Dhabi in February 2019, which went so far as to proclaim that it is the Creator “who on the last day will judge mankind.”) It is natural, therefore, that the faithful today would have doubts about the person of Jesus Christ, or why a Redeemer is even necessary. (Perhaps this is why Archbishop Chaput challenged this group of seminarians to look deep into their hearts.)

To doubt is human. The most famous doubter in history was Christ’s own apostle, Thomas. We all know the story about Thomas’s doubting the reports of the Resurrection. But the colloquy between Jesus and Thomas after the Last Supper and before the Crucifixion, as recounted in John, Chapter 14, is more instructive for these times.

Jesus begins, “Let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me.”

Jesus explains that He is going ahead of the apostles to prepare a place for them in His Father’s house. He assures the apostles, “I will come again, and will take you to myself; that where I am, you also may be.”

Thomas protests that they do not know the way to where Jesus is going. Jesus answers,

---

“I am the way, and the truth and the life. No man cometh to the Father but by me... If you had known me, you would without doubt have known my Father also; and from henceforth you shall know him, and you have seen him.”

---

Lest there still be doubt about His divinity and incarnation, Jesus says, “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again I leave the world, and I go to the Father.”

We are here confronted with the direct, personal testimony of Christ Himself regarding His identity and the eternal joy that will belong to those who believe in Him. It was meant to reassure the apostles in the near term and the faithful down through the ages against the turmoil and persecution that awaited those who believe. “These things I have spoken to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you shall have distress: but have confidence, I have overcome the world.”

Do we take Him at His word or not? This is Archbishop Chaput’s challenge to the seminarians and to all of us. Do we really believe in Jesus Christ and embrace the consequences of our answer?

Within hours of His speaking these words, Christ’s apostles were confronted with the challenge of belief. Their teacher, commander of the waves and wind, healer of the sick, master of demons, had been brutally and publicly tortured and killed — an example to all who might consider themselves a follower of this radical.

After learning of Christ’s Resurrection, the eleven disciples went to the appointed mountain in Galilee. “And seeing him they adored: but some doubted” (Matthew 28:17).

After reaffirming that “all power is given to me in heaven and in earth,” Christ sent them out into the world:

---

Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world. (Matthew 28:18–20.)

---

They had been sifted, put to the test. Now confirmed in their belief in Christ, they went out with zeal to carry out their commission, knowing full well that, as a consequence, they would drink from the same chalice.

In our time, martyrdom is a less likely consequence of belief in Christ, although it is making a comeback in many parts of the world. For now, our news media report on priests being stabbed at Mass in Montreal and statues of the Virgin Mary being beheaded in the Los Angeles area. For now.

In our time, the most likely consequence of belief in Jesus Christ, and observance of all things whatsoever He has commanded, is conflict: conflict between parents and children; conflict between friends; conflict between parishioners; and, perhaps most tragically, conflict between believers and their clergy.

This is the lesson to take away. If you really believe in Jesus Christ, be prepared for conflict.

A few days ago, I made the following remark about our reigning pope:

---

I never read anything by Bergoglio in full after Evangelii Gaudium - which I needed to read to get a concrete idea of how far the then-new pope would go in
institutionalizing the 'spirit of Vatican II' that he embodied so well. It soon became very clear that he was going to overwhelm and replace that ‘spirit’ which had already led too many priests and bishops in the Church down the wrong paths, and institutionalize in its place ‘the fiat of Jorge Bergoglio’, who has constituted himself into the one-man alpha-and-omega of Church authority that Fr.Rosica would several years later immortalize in his infamous definition –

incidentally, a statement the Bergoglio Vatican has never questioned nor repudiated – and what does that tell you?

---

The following day, there was this article in CRISIS magazine, which is an analysis of whether Vatican-II is still relevant in the age of Bergoglio. The writer says yes, it is to Bergoglio. My bias is far more extreme than his: that Bergoglio has simply made any previous teaching and practice of the Church irrelevant to him, because he alone decides what ought to be taught and done, and how it is to be taught and done. As if 2012-plus years of Church history have in effect been wiped out since Bergoglio became pope, and everything with him must be de novo.

Is Vatican II irrelevant now?
by DAVID G. BONAGURA JR.

April 5, 2019

Is Vatican II irrelevant now in the seventh year of Francis’s pontificate? In one respect, yes; in another, no. Neither explanation is what one might expect at first glance.

Popes Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI devoted the heart of their respective pontificates to trying to implement — or salvage, depending on one’s perspective — the teachings of the Council. All three were present for its duration and major players in its workings as pope, cardinal-archbishop, and theological adviser, respectively. All three deeply believed in the Council’s purpose, message, and general teachings, and sought to make them vibrant within their own Magisteria.

Even Joseph Ratzinger, who, when writing within the guild as an academic theologian, openly criticized certain aspects of various conciliar documents, most notably the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes), sought to preserve the integrity of the Council when he became pope.

In his first Christmas address to the Roman Curia in 2005, forty years after the Council’s conclusion, Benedict XVI made his most famous attempt at rescuing the Council from what he called the “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture,” a method of interpretation that disregarded what the Council actually said in favor of an agenda inimical to the Council and to the Church’s teachings, hidden under the nebulous banner of the “Spirit of Vatican II.”

Benedict, though well aware of the dramatic upheavals the Council generated, expressed his steadfast commitment to its correct implementation: “Today we can look with gratitude at the Second Vatican Council: if we interpret and implement it guided by a right hermeneutic, it can be and can become increasingly powerful for the ever necessary renewal of the Church.”

It is well known that in the ensuing decades after the Council, the “Spirit of Vatican II” ruptured the Church’s theological, liturgical, and pastoral life.
- Everything that belonged to the Church’s centuries-long Tradition was suddenly forbidden by those who controlled the parishes, chanceries, seminaries, and universities.
- Instead, new fads, prompted not by the faith but by the left-leaning wanderings of the rapidly secularizing West, were introduced into every facet of Church life.

A tiny number of bishops, priests, and lay people labored to stop these alarming practices by appealing to the actual texts of the Council: nowhere did a single document even mention turning the altar to face the people, or that all religions were equal, or that theologians formed their own authoritative Magisterium, or that Catholic universities need not be controlled by the Church, or that clerical celibacy and women’s ordination ought to be reconsidered.

As long as there was at least nominal support from the pope for realigning post-conciliar practices with what the Council actually said — and there was from all three popes, even if weakly in the case of the floundering Paul VI — then it seemed that the Council could be rescued from its inauthentic interpreters.

Flash-forward to the present — fifty-four years after the Council’s close and fourteen years after Benedict’s speech — and the nature of the conversation has shifted.
- Pope Francis is the first pope ordained a priest after the Council’s close.
- From the start of his pontificate through to the present, Francis has been championed by liberal Catholics for his “prophetic interpretation of the Council,” which is to say, for using his office to advance the Spirit of Vatican II.

And this he has done: from opening a commission to study the possibility of females in the diaconate to his rigged synods and his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, which have softened the Church’s teachings on marriage and family life, Francis has turned the Spirit of Vatican II into the substance of his papacy.

His recent [not just recent - they go all the way back, though not formally as in its outrageous formulation in the Abu Dhabi document] affirmations and speeches that make Catholicism appear as just another religion raised legitimate concerns until Bishop Schneider, during an ad limina visit to the Vatican by the Kazakhstani episcopacy, was able to secure from Francis a clarification that God permits religious pluralism rather than wills it. Thus if it were not for vigilant and faithful bishops like Schneider, Francis would be content to give the spirit of the Council free rein. [Whoa! Bonagura is making too much out of that small 'concession' - which sounded more like a polite "All right already, just shut the hell up!" Even if the pope did make use of it last week to 'justify' the Abu Dhabi formulation.]

Since Francis is receptive to its distorted spirit, he has invoked the Council without engaging its texts in the manner his predecessors did. [But that is exactly what 'the spirit of Vatican II' was and is - its exponents do not care about the letter of the law at all, only about its 'spirit' as they interpret it, and none but some of their scholars, who have to do it as a professional duty, have ever bothered to really look at what those documents actually say. You think Jorge Bergoglio did or does???]

Take, for example, his vigorous declaration that the liturgical reforms that followed the Council are “irreversible” and any “reform of the reform” — a reconfiguring of aspects of the Mass that were wrongfully or harmfully changed — is wrongheaded. Off the table for Francis is any discussion of the vast distortions between what the Council said about the Mass versus the new Mass that a subsequent committee engineered.

We saw this illustrated when Cardinal Sarah’s advocacy of ad orientem worship was sharply rebuked by the Vatican in the summer of 2016. Three months later, Sarah’s wings were clipped as Prefect for the Congregation for Divine Worship when the dicastery’s episcopal members were replaced by Francis supporters.

Rather than return to the Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy for analysis, Francis urged the faithful to reform their mentality and accept the new Mass as it is. And if these papal assertions were not enough, Francis publicly invoked his “magisterial authority” to strengthen his speech, a move that not only had prior popes never attempted, but one that, as canonist Ed Peters pointed out, showcases a bumbling of the papal playbook. [Not just a bumbling, but a complete rewrite of the papal playbook, as he has done incessantly since his infamous first words as pope - 'Buona sera', like some TV host.]

We could cite other examples such as when Francis encouraged a group of Italian theologians to adhere to the Council without encouraging a corresponding exploration of its texts, and when, speaking at a canon law conference, he stated that “the Second Vatican Council marked the passage from an ecclesiology modeled on canon law to a canon law conforming to ecclesiology,” a statement that, again according to Ed Peters, gives the wrong impression on both subjects.

For Francis, Vatican II is still relevant in regards to its nebulous spirit, for it provides cover for more distortions of Catholic faith and practice, as well as a model for how to make these distortions happen in the present. A case in point is how Francis dispatched his closest collaborators to advance a reading of Amoris Laetitia that is a serious — and dangerous — rupture of Catholic teaching on marriage and the Eucharist.

However, Vatican II has become irrelevant in another sense: there is not much motivation to appeal to its documents anymore.
Conservative prelates and laity trying to counter Francis’s disruptive innovations have been appealing for support not to Vatican II but to Scripture and the broader Tradition because Francis and his supporters have steered the universal Church beyond the texts of the Council. Defending and redeeming these texts is no longer as important as it seemed only a decade ago because the issues at stake today were not contemplated by the Council fathers.
[This is the best point made by Bonagura - a pre-eminently excellent one.]

For example, no bishop at the Council imagined that divorced and civilly remarried Catholics could receive the Eucharist while living in an adulterous relationship.

Does this mean that the actual teachings of Vatican II will fade into oblivion? This is unlikely to happen in the short term since the Council’s documents and approach have been incorporated into the extensive and widely consulted Catechism of the Catholic Church, which was created to rein in the wayward Spirit of Vatican II.

As a collective body, the texts of Vatican II will continue to have less and less import. Ironically, it is the Spirit of the Council untethered from reality that is both winning the moment and inspiring a genuine reform by driving its opponents to the real source of renewal — Scripture and Tradition. [Though, of course, recourse to either Scripture or Tradition is of no avail where it concerns this pope, who habitually misquotes and edits Scripture to suit his purposes, and who is clearly contemptuous, tout court, of 'Tradition'. Remember Rosica:]

Martha Alegria Reichmann,"SACRED BETRAYALS -The horrific account of betrayals against a widow involving a bishop, a cardinal and even a pope"- The true story".

Widow of onetime dean of Vatican diplomatic corps
accuses Cardinal Maradiaga of betrayal and coverup
by Edward Pentin

April 6, 2019

The widow of a former dean of the Vatican diplomatic corps has written an exposé accusing one of Pope Francis’s closest associates of betraying her family and covering up for grave clerical misconduct.

Martha Alegria Reichmann, whose late husband, Alejandro Valladares, was the Honduran ambassador to the Holy See for 22 years, explains in the book, Sacred Betrayals, how they were once close friends of Cardinal Óscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, the longtime archbishop of Tegucigalpa.

Her book, so far only in Spanish, chronicles how the cardinal, who is coordinator of the Council of Cardinals advising the Holy Father on Church reform, advised her to make a bad financial investment that caused her to lose her life savings.

She also provides details of the cardinal’s support for Bishop Juan Josè Pineda, who has been accused of sexual abuse of seminarians, living in active homosexual relationships and financial impropriety. Pope Francis accepted Bishop Pineda’s resignation last July, but no details of any disciplinary measures have been revealed.

The Register spoke to Alegria March 26.

Mrs. Alegria, what are your reasons for writing this book?
First of all, because, following the fraud, I suffered; and in the consequent betrayal by Cardinal Maradiaga of my family,I discovered a dark side in him, and I could not live in peace and serenity for the rest of my life without having made this public denunciation; because my Christian, ethical and moral principles did not allow me to keep quiet about such terrible things — that would have made me responsible for a cover-up; because to declare what I know and what they have done to me is not only a right that I have, but a duty; because I am a victim of the corrupt system that reigns in the current papacy.

I do not limit myself to telling my painful experience. I go much further because there are things that many people don’t know for lack of information; also, because the wicked triumph when the righteous are silent; and because God himself is being mocked.

Why did you choose the title 'Sacred Betrayal'?
Because I have been betrayed by people who carry a sacred investiture: former Bishop Juan Josè Pineda, Cardinal Oscar Andrès Rodrìguez Maradiaga and Pope Francis — three people I trusted blindly. In my book, everything is very well explained and demonstrated. There’s no doubt that’s how it was.

Cardinal Maradiaga is the coordinator of the “council of cardinals”; and despite being beyond retirement age, he is still archbishop of Tegucigalpa. Considering the allegations against him — all of which he denies — why do you think he remains in these positions?
In my book, I explain how the Vatican maneuvered so that Maradiaga would not be officially implicated as Pineda’s concealer; that way he could be kept in the “council of cardinals.” That was a grotesque action and a mockery of honesty because they gave him impunity.

The Pope has acted against cover-ups on very few occasions, only when the external pressure is very strong, as happened in Chile. In contrast, in Honduras, the cardinal has the media in his favor, and they do not report any of the denunciations against him. As for the few media that denounce, the cardinal calls them slanderers, and the fanatics and naive believe him in spite of so much evidence, although, little by little, they are becoming convinced of the truth.

I am just a widow to whom neither Maradiaga nor Francis have given importance because they do not practice the Gospel as it should be. It seems that the teachings of Christ have gone out of fashion and the devil reigns. The reasons for this terrible situation are revealed in my book, and it’s something frightening.

Why do you think Cardinal Maradiaga has been so protective of Bishop Pineda?
The causes of this extreme protection and concealment that has lasted almost 20 years are incomprehensible and unjustified from every point of view. Therefore, each person interprets it in his own way, and they make conjectures and accusations that harm the cardinal tremendously and, consequently, the Church.

There can be nothing good in that extreme protection. This is one of the reasons why Maradiaga has lost respect and credibility in a good part of the Honduran population.

Why do you think Pope Francis has dealt differently with Cardinal Maradiaga compared to other cardinals implicated in scandal?
Cardinal [Francisco Javier] Erràzuriz had only one accusation against him, for which he was removed from the Council of cardinals, but he is Chilean. Maradiaga has several serious, very serious accusations, but in Honduras there has not been the pressure that there was in Chile, and those pressures have been limited to eliminating Pineda.

The Pope keeps him by his side because perhaps he needs his bad advice, because he has punished those who have given him good advice, such as Father Thomas Weinandy, one of the most prestigious theologians in the world who was removed from his post in the United States Episcopal Conference [USCCB].

What do you believe are the underlying causes of the financial and spiritual corruption you refer to in the book?
Maradiaga is very powerful because he has the absolute support of someone much more powerful, who is Pope Francis. This is the reason why it is very easy for him to manage a dictatorship in the diocese as he pleases; he solves many problems by just saying: “These are slanders” or “They are attacking me so as to attack the Pope.”

Maradiaga has a dark side that he has been able to hide very well all his life and that he has a double morality that nobody could imagine, except his victims. Whoever reads my book will be surprised and convinced of this because what I tell there, I demonstrate, and Maradiaga will no longer be able to continue saying his hackneyed phrases: “They are calumnies”; “They attack me so as to attack the Pope.”

What are your hopes for the future? What needs to be done to ensure that the Honduran Church will recover from the corruption that you write about?
The hope, not only mine, but of many Catholics and many priests in Honduras, is that Maradiaga will be replaced by a pastor who has a fear of God, who makes a general cleaning for a fresh start, taking into account moral principles, honesty and transparency, both in finances and spiritually — a shepherd who is humble of heart, energetic, transparent, kind and just.

Whoever replaces Maradiaga will have a very difficult task because everything that is crooked will have to be straightened out. I am sure that these are the hopes also of many of the teachers and students of the Catholic University [of Honduras], especially the students of the faculty of medicine, who are going through terrible difficulties and have told Maradiaga that if it weren’t for the large amounts of money that he has drained from the university, they wouldn’t be going through so many calamities.

At the Catholic University, there is a lot to clean up, too. When? Maybe not till we have another pope, or maybe if Pope Francis put into practice all those beautiful phrases that he knows how to say and that are blown away like clouds that disappear into nothingness. As for my personal situation, I hope and trust only in God. I have abandoned myself to him with the absolute certainty that he will answer me. God is merciful. God is just. God works miracles. ... “God alone is enough.”

This may be hard to answer, but some might ask themselves whether you've written the book and perhaps exaggerated some of its content in order to make it a best-seller and thereby regain some of the money you lost. What would you say to such an accusation?
Do not worry; maybe it is difficult to ask the question, but, for me, it is very easy to answer it. What is more, the harder they are, the more I like them, because I always act based on the truth.

In my book I explain that I started writing it in 2016 just to have a psychological relief from everything I was living through; but as I discovered more and more things, all terrible and surprising, I added them in. I had a time of doubt, whether to publish it or not, and put it in the hands of God. Finally, I made the decision to do so because of the attitude of total injustice and cowardice that Cardinal Maradiaga showed, which angered me very much. This is told and demonstrated with evidence, and my lawyer has the audio of what he said. It was a terrible slander against one of his victims, and that was not me.

Everything that is written is not exaggerated. I just narrated the facts exactly as they are, and those that needed to be proved are proved. I can assure this with great force and a lot of certainty, and whoever thinks otherwise, I challenge him to prove it to me, but with proofs, just as I have done. Last week I read an article, in the Confidential newspaper, by a person who read the book and says that I fell short with the title I gave it.

There I do not say anything for the sake of saying it. I do not leave anything in the air. If I say that the cardinal was never our friend, I show it. If I say that my husband was the one who had the idea and carried it out, to get him to become a cardinal, I prove it. If I say that in Rome they are demanding the removal of Maradiaga while in Honduras there is a cover-up for him, I show it.

In the book there are very strong accusations and terrible revelations, but after everything, I give the evidence. So nothing is either invented or exaggerated. What is more, there are cases that are terrible and I did not include them because I do not have the evidence.

In Honduras a book came out shortly before mine, more or less the same size and number of pages with a cost of 600 [Honduran lempira, about $25] a copy. My book has a cost of L. 350 [about $14]. Almost half. Copies are selling well enough, but whether it becomes a success or not does not depend on me. That depends only on God. I did it with my conscience; I did it with the truth in my hand; I did it for dignity, for conviction and for love of God. I started with a sentence by Edmund Burke that says: “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.” Yes, I would like it to have a wide sale and that no one takes advantage of it. That I do make clear.

The fact that I did not accept a large amount of money in the past, that Maradiaga offered me, was because I believe that the money of the Church is for the poor. It was an act of sincerity and honesty that I am sure God will take into account, but I honestly do not think that applies to the book. God has his ways and knows how to act in his own time.

I somehow think that Mrs. Alegria's accusations will fall on the same deaf ears that have studiously ignored the DUBIA on AL and Mons Vigano's accusations, On the principle, I suppose, that giving an answer amounts to accepting the accusers' premise that something wrong, or at least questionable, was done, so why even bother to answer a 'non-existent' premise? Mrs. Alegria says she shows proof for every charge that she makes in the book, but will it be good enough for the pope to do what needs to be done if Maradiaga, so far one of most securely positioned among the Bergoglian untouchables, is shown to be culpable of at least Mrs. Alegria's main charges?

Part of the secret deal that the Bergoglio Vatican signed with Beijing must provide that "The Holy See must not comment at all on any events affecting Catholics in
China, especially if it has to do with mandatory enrollment in the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, which, as stated in the preamble, is the sine qua non
to this agreement."Otherwise, how explain the total silence of the Vatican about all the outrageous things that have been happening to underground Catholics and their bishops and priests since the deal was signed in September?

Bitter Easter in China:
In its game with Rome, Beijing romps away unopposed
[Actually, the game was over in September 2018: The Chinese won it by forfeit
because the Vatican abjectly agreed to any terms just to get an agreement]

April 8, 2019

One of the ways Communist China is applying its agreement with the Holy See is shown by the photo of a bulldozer under police escort demolishing a parish headquarters in Qianyang, which housed both its spaces for liturgy and for social work (a free clinic for the poor run by nuns).

The fault of the pastor and of the 2,000 faithful of this “clandestine” parish is the same as that of the diocese of which it is part, that of Fengxiang, in Shaanxi - the only diocese in all of China in which none of the baptized, from the bishop to the last of the faithful, has yet agreed to enroll in the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, the main instrument with which the regime subjects the Church to itself in the name of its “independence” from Rome. Benedict XVI had defined this as “irreconcilable” with Catholic doctrine, in the 2007 letter to Chinese Catholics, which his successor declares to be still valid [but which he has apparently, if not obviously, abrogated, judging by what we know so far of the agreement the Vatican signed with China. Starting with the simple fact that Bergoglio has recognized seven CPCA bishops who were illegitimately ordained and asked legitimate Vatican-appointed clandestine bishops to step aside in their favor. Does the Bergoglio Vatican really think it is hoodwinking anyone here?]

But it’s not only the material destruction of this as of many other buildings of the Catholic Church. What is more serious is the systematic suffocation of that big portion of the Church which does not have official recognition from the Chinese government, but also does not want to submit to the blackmail of being admitted to 'legality' only if it agrees to enroll in the Patriotic Association. [In no historical instance through two centuries have Catholics ever had to be declared 'legal' by the State in order to freely practice their faith.]

The case of the diocese of Mindong, in Fujan, is perhaps the most instructive, if one wants to understand how the Beijing authorities are putting into practice the secret agreement signed last September 22 with the Holy See.

Yet it was precisely the diocese of Mindong that a year ago had been indicated as the “stress test” for the good success of the agreement between the Holy See and China, in an article by Gianni Valente, the expert on Vatican affairs most read and cited by Pope Francis. [The husband in the Vaticanista power couple - the wife is Stefania Falasca of Avvenire - who became intimate friends of Bergoglio in Rome years before he became pope.]

But to judge by what is happening there today, this diocese is instead the “test” not of the agreement’s success, but of its failure.

Easter is drawing near, but the bishop who currently plays the role of auxiliary in the diocese of Mindong, Vincent Guo Xijin, is at serious risk of being blocked from celebrating both the Chrism Mass, on the morning of Holy Thursday, and the liturgies of the subsequent Triduum, as he was blocked from doing so last year. And in 2017, when just before Holy Week he was arrested by the police, to reappear twenty days later.

The punishment is over his refusal to celebrate the rites of Easter together with the excommunicated government-appointed bishop Vincent Zhan Silu, installed by the communist regime in his same diocese.

But then on September 22 2018 came the agreement between the Holy See and China on the appointment of bishops, and Rome not only revoked Zhan’s excommunication, but it convinced Guo to give up the leadership of the diocese to him, accepting for himself the role of a simple auxiliary, in spite of the fact that in Mindong there is a big disproportion between the “clandestine” Church which Guo leads - 80,000 faithful strong, 57 priests, 200 nuns, 300 consecrated laity, hundreds of catechists, versus the “official” Church of the formerly excommunicated Zhan, with a few thousand faithful and a dozen priests.

In order to set up the diocese of Mindong to the benefit of the 'official church', the Vatican twice sent one of its most experienced diplomats in the China negotiations, Cardinal Claudio Maria Celli in December 2017 [nine months before the agreement was signed, showing premeditation] and then again in December 2018.

The first time Guo resisted, but the second time he said yes. To obtain his obedience, Celli told him that it was Pope Francis himself who was asking him for this “sacrifice for the unity of the Chinese Church.”

The fact is, however, that in the face of the stepback by Rome, the Beijing authorities did not move a millimeter. The revocation of Zhan’s excommunication was not at all reciprocated with an official recognition of Guo on the part of the Chinese government. He continues not to be recognized as a bishop and to live, as a result, in illegality, at the mercy of the regime, which at any moment can arrest him, confine him, block him from celebrating Mass.

AsiaNews, the authoritative news agency of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions that also publishes in Chinese, has revealed that in the past few months the Chinese authorities have repeatedly set as a condition for Guo’s recognition his enrollment in the Patriotic Association, but he has always refused.

And the same thing has happened with dozens of “clandestine” priests of his diocese. None of them so far has agreed to sign a document in which it is demanded that they switch to the service of the new bishop Zhan, obey the laws of the state, enroll in the official organizations, and support the principle of the Church’s “independence.”

In addition to being vice-president of the Patriotic Association and of the pseudo episcopal conference that assembles only the bishops recognized by the government, Zhan is also a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, which held its last plenary session in Beijing in early March.

Responding in those days to a journalist of Xintao Daily who asked him what he thought about the obligation laid on Catholics to enroll in the Patriotic Association [So it has been made an obligation by the Chinese, and as such, it must be explicitly mentioned in the Vatican's secret agreement with China - no wonder the Vatican chooses to keep it secret] in order to do away with the 'clandestine' Church once and for all, Zhan said that this is the only way to make it so that “the Church is united.”

And this is the process of 'reconciliation' Pope Francis has chosen to force 'unity' between the official and underground churches in China. From Wenzhou, from Henan, from Hubei and from numerous other places there is news of continual pressure in this direction on “clandestine” bishops and priests, in some cases with offers of money.

How futile the timid reserve expressed in an interview with L’Osservatore Romano on February 3 by Cardinal Fernando Filoni, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples [which has administrative jurisdiction over all churches in missionlands, which includes China]:

---

“I hope I never have to hear or read again about local situations in which the agreement is exploited for the sake of forcing persons to do that which the Chinese law itself does not require, like enrolling in the Patriotic Association.”

---

[Which sounds outright hypocritical because surely Filoni knows - or ought to know - the contents of the secret agreement. Even more interesting is his remark that Chinese law itself does not require membership in the CPCA - which, of course, does not stop a totalitarian regime from imposing any measure it wants, law or not.]

The case of Mindong is not at all an isolated case. And not even the most serious. At the end of March, in the diocese of Xuanhua, in the province of Hebei, the police arrested and took to an undisclosed location its bishop, Augustine Cui Tai. It was the umpteenth in a series of arrests that for years have punished this “unofficial” bishop, this time betrayed by one of his priests, named Zhang Li, who reported him to the authorities and accused him of not obeying the new norms of the Vatican, which according to him require all the “clandestine” to join the “official” Church and to submit to its conditions.

But at the Vatican there is no sign at all of reaction to this terrible news on the post-agreement. [What an understatement! The Vatican has, in fact, maintained total silence in the face of all the news reported serially since September of reprisals against non-cooperating clandestine bishops, priests and communities.]

In mid-March, just before the official visit to Italy of Chinese president Xi Jinping, the Jesuit Antonio Spadaro, director of La Civiltà Cattolica and the lead adviser and ghostwriter of Pope Francis, published to great fanfare [and little reaction from anyone!] a book entitled The Church in China. A future yet to be written,” with an enthusiastic preface by Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin.

The Vatican authorities also made it known in various ways, during those days, that the doors of the Apostolic Palace were open, wide open, to a visit from the Chinese president to the pope.

But the visit didn’t happen. It appears Xi Jinping did not even consider it for a moment. [How unrealistic of the Bergoglio Vatican to have expected anything in this regard! There are no formal diplomatic relations between China and the Vatican. Xi was not going to breach diplomatic protocol to make headlines for Bergoglio, whom he must consider a complete vassal, if not a pathetic toady, for having agreed to what is apparently a very one-sided agreement in favor of Beijing. An agreement Beijing, one must note, did not seek or need - all the initiative for this was from the Vatican hoping to thereby wangle an invitation for the pope to visit Beijing, with the pretext of wanting a unified church in China. Sure, Beijing too wants a 'unified church', but one that is totally under its control. Meanwhile, China is only too willing to present a facade of friendliness to the Vatican in the interests of its own international image, but it remains a facade. Who knows what, if any, development will make it do something more concrete to show its friendliness - such as inviting Bergoglio to Beijing!]

Another slap for the Church of Rome, this one also taken in silence. [Well, how could the Vatican express disappointment, much less outrage, that the Chinese President would not follow their propaganda script for Bergoglio? There was not the slightest reason for them to expect that Xi would 'cooperate' in any way, and it was imprudent of them, if not demeaning, to have openly positioned themselves eagerly awaiting a Yes from Xi, like a panting dog, jaws wide open and drooling in expectation!]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 09/04/2019 05:25]

The French title of Cardinal Sarah's third book-length interview with journalist Nicholas Diat comes from Luke's account of the risen Christ's encounter with two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus, on the night of the first Easter Sunday, when the two men ask their unrecognized traveling companion to “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening and the day is almost over.” The title for the English edition uses the last clause which it translates as 'The day is now far spent".

‘As a bishop, it is my duty to warn the West’:
An interview with Cardinal Sarah
The Vatican cardinal discusses his hard-hitting new book
in an exclusive interview with La Nef
Translated by Zachary Thomas for

April 5, 2019

Cardinal Robert Sarah is publishing the third of his book-length interviews with Nicolas Diat: The Day is Far Spent. An unflinching diagnosis, but one full of hope in the midst of the spiritual and moral crisis of the West.

In the first part of your book, you describe “a spiritual and religious collapse.” How does this collapse manifest itself? Does it only affect the West or are other regions of the world, such as Africa, also affected by it?
The spiritual crisis involves the entire world. But its source is in Europe. People in the West are guilty of rejecting God. They have not only rejected God. Friedrich Nietzsche, who may be considered the spokesman of the West, has claimed: “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him…” We have murdered God. In view of God’s death among men, Nietzsche would replace him with a prophetic “Superman.”

The spiritual collapse thus has a very Western character. In particular, I would like to emphasize the rejection of fatherhood. Our contemporaries are convinced that, in order to be free, one must not depend on anybody. There is a tragic error in this.

Western people are convinced that receiving is contrary to the dignity of human persons. But civilized man is fundamentally an heir, he receives a history, a culture, a language, a name, a family. This is what distinguishes him from the barbarian. To refuse to be inscribed within a network of dependence, heritage, and filiation condemns us to go back naked into the jungle of a competitive economy left to its own devices.

Because he refuses to acknowledge himself as an heir, man is condemned to the hell of liberal globalization in which individual interests confront one another without any law to govern them besides profit at any price.

In this book, however, I want to suggest to Western people that the real cause of this refusal to claim their inheritance and this refusal of fatherhood is the rejection of God. From Him we receive our nature as man and woman. This is intolerable to modern minds.

Gender ideology is a Luciferian refusal to receive a sexual nature from God. Thus some rebel against God and pointlessly mutilate themselves in order to change their sex. But in reality they do not fundamentally change anything of their structure as man or woman. The West refuses to receive, and will accept only what it constructs for itself. Transhumanism is the ultimate avatar of this movement. Because it is a gift from God, human nature itself becomes unbearable for western man.

This revolt is spiritual at root. It is the revolt of Satan against the gift of grace. Fundamentally, I believe that Western man refuses to be saved by God’s mercy. He refuses to receive salvation, wanting to build it for himself.

The “fundamental values” promoted by the UN are based on a rejection of God that I compare with the rich young man in the Gospel. God has looked upon the West and has loved it because it has done wonderful things. He invited it to go further, but the West turned back. It has preferred the kind of riches that it owes only to itself.

Africa and Asia are not yet entirely contaminated by gender ideology, transhumanism, or the hatred of fatherhood. But the Western powers’ neo-colonialist spirit and will to dominate pressures countries to adopt these deadly ideologies.

You write that “Christ never promised his faithful that they would be in the majority” (pg. 34), and you go on: “Despite the missionaries’ greatest efforts, the Church has never dominated the world. The Church’s mission is a mission of love, and love does not dominate” (pg. 35). Earlier, you wrote that “it is the ‘small remnant’ that has saved the faith.” If you will pardon a bold question: What is the problem exactly, seeing that this “small remnant” does in fact exist currently and manages to survive even in a world hostile to the faith?
Christians must be missionaries. They cannot keep the treasure of the Faith for themselves. Mission and evangelization remain an urgent spiritual task. And as St. Paul says, every Christian should be able to say “If I proclaim the gospel, this gives me no ground for boasting, for an obligation is laid on me, and woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel!” (1 Cor 9:16).

Further, “God desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4). How can we do nothing when so many souls do not know the only truth that sets us free: Jesus Christ? The prevailing relativism considers religious pluralism to be a good in itself. No! The plenitude of revealed truth that the Catholic Church has received must be transmitted, proclaimed, and preached.

The goal of evangelization is not world domination, but the service of God. Don’t forget that Christ’s victory over the world is…the Cross! It is not our intention to take over the power of the world. Evangelization is done through the Cross.

The martyrs are the first missionaries. Before the eyes of men, their life is a failure. The goal of evangelization is not to “keep count” like social media networks that want to “make a buzz.” Our goal is not to be popular in the media. We want that each and every soul be saved by Christ. Evangelization is not a question of success. It is a profoundly interior and supernatural reality.

I’d like to go back to one of your points in the previous question. Do you mean to say that European Christendom, where Christianity was able to establish itself throughout the whole of society, was only a sort of interlude in history; that it should not be taken as a model in the sense that in Europe Christianity “dominated” and imposed itself through a kind of social coercion?
A society permeated by the Faith, the Gospel, and natural law is something desirable. It is the job of the lay faithful to construct it. That is in fact their proper vocation. They work for the good of all when they build a city in conformity with human nature and open to Revelation.

But the more profound goal of the Church is not to construct a particular model society. The Church has received the mandate to proclaim salvation, which is a supernatural reality. A just society disposes souls to receive the gift of God, but it cannot give salvation. On the other hand, can there be a society that is just and in conformity with the natural law without the gift of grace working in souls?

There is great need to proclaim the heart of our Faith: only Jesus saves us from sin. A society inspired by the Gospel protects the weak against the consequences of sin. Conversely, a society cut off from God quickly turns into a dictatorship and becomes a structure of sin, encouraging people toward evil. That is why we can say that there can be no just society without a place for God in the public sphere.
- A state that officially espouses atheism is an unjust state.
- A state that relegates God to the private sphere cuts itself off from the true source of rights and justice.
- A state that pretends to found rights on good will alone, and does not seek to found the law on an objective order received from the Creator, risks falling into totalitarianism.

Over the course of European history, we have moved from a society in which the group outweighed the person (the holism of the Middle Ages) – a type of society that still exists in Africa and continues to characterize Islam – to a society in which the person is emancipated from the group (individualism). We might also say, broadly speaking, that we have passed from a society dominated by the quest for truth to a society dominated by the quest for freedom. The Church herself has developed her doctrine in the face of this evolution, proclaiming the right to religious liberty at Vatican II. How do you see the position of the Church toward this evolution? Is there a balance to be struck between the two poles of “truth” and “freedom,” whereas so far we have merely gone from one excess to the other?
It is not correct to speak of a “balance” between two poles: truth and freedom. In fact, this manner of speaking presupposes that these realities are external to and in opposition to one another. Freedom is essentially a tending toward what is good and true. The truth is meant to be known and freely embraced. A freedom that is not itself oriented and guided by truth is nonsensical. Error has no rights.

Vatican II recalled the fact that truth can only be established by the force of truth itself, and not by coercion. It also recalled that respect for persons and their freedom should not in any way make us indifferent in relation to the true and the good.

Revelation is the breaking in of divine truth into our lives. It does not constrain us. In giving and revealing Himself, God respects the freedom that He Himself created. I believe that the opposition between truth and freedom is the fruit of a false conception of human dignity.

Modern man hypostatizes his freedom, making it an absolute to the point of believing that it is threatened when he accepts the truth. However, to accept the truth is the most beautiful act of freedom that man can perform.

I believe that your question reveals how deeply the crisis of the Western conscience is really in the end a crisis of faith. Western man is afraid of losing his freedom by accepting the gift of true faith. He prefers to close himself up inside a freedom that is devoid of content. The act of faith is an encounter between freedom and truth. That is why in the first chapter of my book I have insisted on the crisis of faith. Our freedom comes to fulfillment when it says “yes” to revealed truth. If freedom says “no” to God, it denies itself. It asphyxiates.

You dwell at length on the crisis of the priesthood and argue for priestly celibacy. What do you see as the primary cause in the cases of sexual abuse of minors by priests, and what do you think of the summit that just took place in Rome on this question?
I think that the crisis of the priesthood is one of the main factors in the crisis of the Church. We have taken away priests’ identity. We have made priests believe that they need to be efficient men. But a priest is fundamentally the continuation of Christ’s presence among us. He should not be defined by what he does, but by what he is: ipse Christus, Christ Himself.

The discovery of many cases of sexual abuse against minors reveals a profound spiritual crisis, a grave, deep, and tragic rupture between the priest and Christ.

Of course, there are social factors: the crisis of the ‘60s and the sexualization of society, which rebound on the Church. But we must have the courage to go further. The roots of this crisis are spiritual. A priest who does not pray or makes a theatre out of the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, a priest who only confesses rarely and who does not live concretely like another Christ, is cut off from the source of his own being. The result is death. I have dedicated this book to the priests of the whole world because I know that they are suffering. Many of them feel abandoned.

We, the bishops, bear a large share of responsibility for the crisis of the priesthood. Have we been fathers to them? Have we listened to them, understood and guided them? Have we given them an example? Too often dioceses are transformed into administrative structures. There are so many meetings. The bishop should be the model for the priesthood. But we ourselves are far from being the ones most ready to pray in silence, or to chant the Office in our cathedrals. I fear that we lose ourselves in secondary, profane responsibilities.

The place of a priest is on the Cross. When he celebrates Mass, he is at the source of his whole life, namely the Cross. Celibacy is a concrete means that permits us to live this mystery of the Cross in our lives. Celibacy inscribes the Cross in our very flesh. That is why celibacy is intolerable for the modern world. Celibacy is a scandal for modern people, because the Cross is a scandal.

In this book, I want to encourage priests. I want to tell them: love your priesthood! Be proud to be crucified with Christ! Do not fear the world’s hate! I want to express my affection as a father and brother for the priests of the whole world.

In a book that has caused quite a stir [In the Closet of the Vatican, by Frédéric Martel], the author explains that there are many homosexual prelates in the Vatican. He lends credibility to Mgr Viganò’s denunciation of the influence of a powerful gay network in the heart of the Curia. What do you think of this? Is there a homosexual problem in the heart of the Church and if so, why is it a taboo?
Today the Church is living with Christ through the outrages of the Passion. The sins of her members come back to her like strikes on the face. Some have tried to instrumentalize these sins in order to put pressure on the bishops. Some want them to adopt the judgments and language of the world. Some bishops have caved in to the pressure. We see them calling for the abandonment of priestly celibacy or making unsound statements about homosexual acts. Should we be surprised? The Apostles themselves turned tail in the Garden of Olives. They abandoned Christ in His most difficult hour.

We must be realistic and concrete. Yes, there are sinners. Yes, there are unfaithful priests, bishops, and even cardinals who fail to observe chastity. But also, and this is also very grave, they fail to hold fast to doctrinal truth! They disorient the Christian faithful by their confusing and ambiguous language. They adulterate and falsify the Word of God, willing to twist and bend it to gain the world’s approval. They are the Judas Iscariots of our time.

Sin should not surprise us. On the other hand, we must have the courage to call it by name. We must not be afraid to rediscover the methods of spiritual combat: prayer, penance, and fasting. We must have the clear-sightedness to punish unfaithfulness. We must find the concrete means to prevent it. I believe that without a common prayer life, without a minimum of common fraternal life between priests, fidelity is an illusion. We must look to the model of the Acts of the Apostles.

With regard to homosexual behaviors, let us not fall into the trap of the manipulators. There is no “homosexual problem” in the Church. There is a problem of sins and infidelity [to priestly vows]. Let us not perpetrate the vocabulary of LGBT ideology. Homosexuality does not define the identity of persons. It describes certain deviant, sinful, and perverse acts. For these acts, as for other sins, the remedies are known. We must return to Christ, and allow him to convert us.

When the fault is public, the penalties provided for by Church law must be applied. Punishment is merciful, an act of charity and fraternal love. Punishment restores the damage done to the common good and permits the guilty party to redeem himself. Punishment is part of the paternal role of bishops.

Finally, we must have the courage to clearly apply the norms regarding the acceptance of seminarians. Men whose psychology is deeply and permanently anchored in homosexuality, or who practice duplicity and lying, cannot be accepted as candidates for the priesthood.

One chapter is dedicated to the “crisis of the Church.” When precisely do you place the beginning of this crisis and what does it consist in? In particular, how do you relate the “crisis of faith” to the crisis of “moral theology.” Does one precede the other?
The crisis of the Church is above all a crisis of the faith. Some want the Church to be a human and horizontal society; they want it to speak the language of the media. They want to make it popular. They urge it not to speak about God, but to throw itself body and soul into social problems: migration, ecology, dialogue, the culture of encounter, the struggle against poverty, for justice and peace.

These are of course important and vital questions before which the Church cannot shut her eyes. But a Church such as this is of interest to no one [other than those who want such a church, an who have their priorities all wrong, like the reigning pope].
- The Church is only of interest because she allows us to encounter Jesus.
- She is only legitimate because she passes on Revelation to us.
- When the Church becomes overburdened with human structures, it obstructs the light of God shining out in her and through her.
- We are tempted to think that our action and our ideas will save the Church. It would be better to begin by letting her save herself.

I think we are at a turning point in the history of the Church. The Church needs a profound, radical reform that must begin by a reform of the life of her priests.
- Priests must be possessed by the desire for holiness, for perfection in God and fidelity to the doctrine of Him who has chosen and sent them.
- Their whole being and all their activities must be put to the service of sanctity.
- The Church is holy in herself. Our sins and our worldly concerns prevent her holiness from diffusing itself.
It is time to put aside all these burdens and allow the Church finally appear as God made Her.

Some believe that the history of the Church is marked by structural reforms. I am sure that it is the saints who change history. The structures follow afterwards, and do nothing other than perpetuate the what the saints brought about. [An idea that was often expressed by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI.]
- We need saints who dare to see all things through the eyes of faith, who dare to be enlightened by the light of God.
- The crisis of moral theology is the consequence of a voluntary blindness. We have refused to look at life through the light of the Faith.

In the conclusion of my book, I speak about a poison from which are all suffering: a virulent atheism. It permeates everything, even our ecclesiastical discourse. It consists in allowing radically pagan and worldly modes of thinking or living to coexist side by side with faith. And we are quite content with this unnatural cohabitation! This shows that our faith has become diluted and inconsistent! The first reform we need is in our hearts. We must no longer compromise with lies. The Faith is both the treasure we have to defend and the power that will permit us to defend it.

The second and third parts of your book are about the crisis in western societies. The subject is so vast, and you touch on so many important points–from the expansion of the “culture of death” to the problems of consumerism tied to global liberalism, passing through questions of identity, transmission, Islamism, etc.–that it is impossible to address them all. Among these problems, which seem to you to be the most important and what are the principal causes for the decline of the West?
First I would like to explain why I, a son of Africa, allow myself to address the West. The Church is the guardian of civilization. I am convinced that western civilization is passing at present through a mortal crisis. It has reached the extreme of self-destructive hate. As during the fall of Rome, elites are only concerned to increase the luxury of their daily life and peoples are being anesthetized by ever more vulgar entertainment.

As a bishop, it is my duty to warn the West! The barbarians are already inside the city. The barbarians are all those who hate human nature, all those who trample upon the sense of the sacred, all those who do not value life, all those who rebel against God the Creator of man and nature.
- The West is blinded by science, technology, and the thirst for riches.
- The lure of riches, which liberalism spreads in hearts, has sedated the peoples.
- At the same time, the silent tragedy of abortion and euthanasia continue and pornography and gender ideology destroy children and adolescents.
- We have become accustomed to barbarism. It doesn’t even surprise us anymore!

I want to raise a cry of alarm, which is also a cry of love. I do so with a heart full of filial gratitude for the Western missionaries who died in my land of Africa and who communicated to me the precious gift of faith in Jesus Christ. I want to follow their lead and receive their inheritance!

How could I not emphasize the threat posed by Islamism?
- Muslims despise the atheistic West.
- They take refuge in Islamism as a rejection of the consumer society that is offered to them as a religion.
- Can the West present them the Faith in a clear way? For that it will have to rediscover its Christian roots and identity.

To the countries of the Third World, the West is held out as a paradise because it is ruled by commercial liberalism. This encourages the flow of migrants, so tragic for the identity of peoples. A West that denies its faith, its history, its roots, and its identity is destined for contempt, for death, and disappearance.

But I would like to point out that everything is prepared for a renewal. I see families, monasteries, and parishes that are like oases in the middle of a desert. It is from these oases of faith, liturgy, beauty, and silence that the West will be reborn.

You end this beautiful book with a section entitled “Rediscovering Hope: The Practice of the Christian Virtues.” What do you mean by this? In what way can practicing these virtues be a remedy for the multifarious crisis we have spoken about in this interview?
We should not imagine a special program that could provide a remedy for the current multi-faceted crisis.
- We have simply to live our Faith, completely and radically.
- The Christian virtues represent the Faith blossoming in all the human faculties. They mark the way for a happy life in harmony with God. We must create places where they can flourish.
- I call upon Christians to open oases of freedom in the midst the desert created by rampant profiteering.
- We must create places where the air is breathable, or simply where the Christian life is possible.
- Our communities must put God in the center.
- Amidst the avalanche of lies, we must be able to find places where truth is not only explained but experienced.

In a word, we must live the Gospel: not merely thinking about it as a utopia, but living it in a concrete way.
- The Faith is like a fire, but it has to be burning in order to be transmitted to others.
- Watch over this sacred fire! Let it be your warmth in the heart of this winter of the West. “If God is for us, who is against us?” (Rom 8:31).
- In the disaster, confusion, and darkness of our world, we find “the light that shines in the darkness” (cf. Jn 1:5): He who said “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (Jn 14:6).

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 09/04/2019 07:42]