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And now, Hellgate?
But wait, since according to the best-pope-that-ever-was-or-could-ever-be, Hell does not exist - or by his logic, if it did exist, it would forever be empty (but did not
God consign Lucifer and all his fellow rebel angels to Hell?) - then Hellgate would seem to be a forced analogy.
I do not doubt at all that Bergoglio said substantially what Scalfari has reported in their most recent conversation, if only because this is not the first
time he has expressed the same thing to Scalfari, but without any remonstration whatsoever from the Vatican earlier. And if there had been no appreciable
reaction on the previous occasions, I can only think it is the timing of the 'conversation' (hitting the world with such a statement on Maundy Thursday -
couldn't he have waited till after Holy Week?) that has called the attention of almost everyone this time to Bergoglio's un-Christian theology that denies
not just the existence of Hell but also the immortality of the soul, the latter perhaps being more concerning. I wonder if one of the pope's 11 theological
commentators (in their now notorious, 'little book' series on Bergoglio's theology, probably destined never to be read and not to be taken seriously) touches on the
matter at all.
Lord, deliver your Church and all her faithful from all evil, and grant that your present Vicar on Earth may find his way to truly representing you and
not Satan who is the spirit of the godless world! ]
Breaking a Holy Week resolution
Good Friday, March 30, 2018
I made a resolution to steer clear of 'Church Politics', that is to say, controversial matters, during Holy Week. It is not easy under this pontificate, because there are such daily provocations. My resolution slipped yesterday afternoon. I think that was a misjudgement.
Now, I wake up on Good Friday morning to the secular media breaking a 'story' that PF has said that Hell does not exist.
I am not interested in explanations and denials and all about Scalfari. The fact is that the Media are spreading this. This is what people will remember. That is the incontrovertible fact.
Today is Good Friday. Is there no more worthy 'story' that PF, with his status, his charisma, his media advisers, his conviction that he is the voice of the Holy Spirit, could have thrust into the public domain ... on Good Friday morning?
The Evil One immediately put into my mind the phrase "This is a maniac out of control". I know it was the Evil One because I cannot see into PF's heart. And, if I could, it would not be for me to judge him. Get thee behind me, Satan. I mean this with all my heart.
But there is an objective term referring, not to silly fevered over-reactions on my part or yours, but to reality in a real world.
Skandalon. [A Greek word meaning 'stumbling block' which, in the Bible, refers to behavior or attitude that leads others to sin. Which is also the strict sense of the English word 'scandal' derived from it.]
I shall not enable any comments. I suggest that you and I go away and pray and, during the Liturgy, make a special intention for PF; that he may be the pope whom the Sacred Heart of Jesus means him [every pope] to be.
Fr Kirk's reaction below is right on, except he seems to think, like most commentators and 'reactors' so far, that Bergoglio was saying this about Hell for the first time. Cascioli and Socci and Skojec are among the few to remind us of earlier occasions when he said much the same thing - also to Scalfari - and those times, the Vatican did not even bother with their now-formulaic reproach for Scalfari, i.e., the Vatican communications people do not question the content of what he claims, only the form in which he reports it, as being 'not a faithful transcription' of what the pope said.
Why could someone not have come up with the very obvious retort - "The pope obviously believes in Hell, if only because Jesus, in conferring the keys of the Kingdom on Peter, said 'You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it'". Which is, of course, not the only time Jesus spoke about Hell. But obviously, no one in the Bergoglio Vatican can say that, because even those responsible for keeping the Bergoglio's best-pope-ever image intact probably believe Bergoglio does not believe in Hell!
News from nowhere
March 30, 2018
Sufficit quod honesti nihil agant, ut malum vincat. [It is enough that good men do nothing for evil to triumph).
My Dear Wormwood,
You have excelled yourself! How did you do it? I know Francis is a clumsy thinker at the best of times: but to get him to deny the existence of Hell and Eternal Punishment goes beyond what we could have hoped for in our wildest dreams. And at Easter!
'Sin with impunity' is the sweet gospel of Our Father who is Below (and quite the opposite of the ‘love’ and ‘mercy’ promised by the Enemy). To have made the successor of Peter its apostle is an unparalleled achievement. It is the crown of your career. You can expect rich rewards. All the kingdoms of the earth are yours for the asking!
Your delirious Uncle,
Screwtape
With Lettergate still fresh and rankling,
Vatican plays another shell game with the truth
by Steve Skojec
March 29, 2018
“An error which is not resisted is approved; a truth which is not defended is suppressed…. He who does not oppose an evident crime is open to the suspicion of secret complicity.”
– Pope Felix III
“The Vatican is filled with heretics and liars” is a story I’ve grown incredibly weary of telling. This particular ditty isn’t just familiar, it’s stuck on repeat, with the volume turned all the way up.
The latest episode comes from what is, by my unofficial guestimate, somewhere in the range of the seventh, eighth, or ninth published conversation with the pope by the 94-year-old atheist editor of Italy’s La Repubblica — a man famous for his interviewing style, which does not include voice recorders or the taking of notes, but conversations which he later reconstructs from memory. I’d go back and find each one and count them, but that’s an hour of my life I’d never get back, and after five or six, it all becomes a meaningless blur anyway. As one of America’s most notorious political minds famously asked: “At this point, what difference does it make?!”
As they have multiple times before, Scalfari says that he and the pope talked about Hell — specifically, how it doesn’t really exist:
Your Holiness, in our last meeting you told me that at a certain point our species will disappear, and God, always using His creative seed, will create other species. You never spoke to me about souls who die in sin and go to hell to suffer there for eternity. Instead you spoke to me of good souls who are admitted to the contemplation of God. But what of evil souls? Where do they go in punishment?
They do not go anywhere in punishment. Those who repent obtain the forgiveness of God and go among the ranks of those who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and therefore cannot be forgiven vanish. Hell does not exist, only the disappearance of sinful souls.
I’ll pause for a moment to let those of you who still possess the capacity to be surprised to collect your jaw from the floor.
Scalfari isn’t exactly being honest (or is suffering from a strange memory lapse) when he says that the pope has never spoken to him about this before. In fact, this statement is indicative of the unique problem Scalfari poses for those trying to discern what to believe about his representations of the pope’s thoughts.
Scalfari has, however, given us other examples on this topic in the past. For example, in October of 2017, Scalfari told us that the pope, along with his hand-picked pervert at the head of both the Pontifical Academy for Life and the John Paul II institute, Archbishop Vincenzo Pagalia, believes that that “the souls dominated by evil and not repentant cease to exist while those who are redeemed from evil will be assumed into beatitude, contemplating God.”
Earlier that same year, Scalfari told us that the pope had said, “In a millennium or so our human species will be extinguished and souls will merge with God.”
And in 2015, the dynamic duo were said to have discussed Francis’s bizarre eschatology with similar results:
“What happens to that lost soul? Will it be punished? And how? The response of Francis is distinct and clear: there is no punishment, but the annihilation of that soul. All the others will participate in the beatitude of living in the presence of the Father. The souls that are annihilated will not take part in that banquet; with the death of the body their journey is finished.”
There are those who have taken pains to explain every Scalfari interview away — each one, it seems, contains a bombshell or two — by pointing out the inaccuracy of an interview method that relies on the memory of a 93-year-old man to reconstruct the contents of an undocumented conversation.
But it is clear by now that the pope is relying on this very excuse. When he wants to let his freak flag fly — to put his most controversial ideas out into the public eye with no fear of accountability — he just calls up his old pal Eugenio and hoists his wildest theories up the flagpole. As they disseminate to the masses, the Vatican PR team goes into frantic spin mode while the pope is nowhere to be found, leaving everyone with the inescapable impression that yes, of course he said it, but you can’t really quote him on it now, can you?
As before, with today’s alleged denial of the dogma of Hell, the Vatican has released a statement that constitutes neither an affirmation nor a denial of what the pope said. As always, we are given a convenient — and entirely unconvincing — excuse:
The Holy [???] Father Francis recently received the founder of the newspaper La Repubblica in a private meeting on the occasion of Easter, without however giving him any interviews. [Excuse me! interview, conversation, chat, Q&A, dialog - whatever you call it, the two did talk, which means that, some questions were asked, rhetorically and/or interrogatorily, and some answers were given. One does not begin a spin by making such a stupid quibble!]
What is reported by the author in today’s article is the result of his reconstruction, in which the textual words pronounced by the Pope are not quoted. No quotation of the aforementioned article must therefore be considered as a faithful transcription of the words of the Holy Father.
Again, a familiar tune — so familiar it has all the same notes in roughly the same order. As I documented in my November 2015 examination of the Scalfari phenomenon, these not-actual-denials are a dime a dozen. One of my favorites was this:
Fr. Thomas Rosica, English-language assistant to the Holy See Press Office, told LifeSiteNews, “All official, final texts of the Holy Father are found on the Vatican website,” and since they were never published by the Holy See Press Office they “should not be considered official texts.” They were, said Fr. Rosica, “private discussions that took place and were never recorded by the journalist.”
See? If it’s not on the Vatican website, it didn’t happen. Who cares that the pope participated in it and the global media reported it and everyone who reads it believes it? More to the point, who cares that neither the pope nor the Vatican has made even the slightest effort to correct any of the whoppers contained in any of the more than half-dozen interviews?
Of course, at least one of the interviews — the first one that got the ball rolling — did appear on the Vatican website. Before it was taken down in late 2013. Then briefly re-appeared in 2014. Then disappeared again.
This same interview also appeared — along with other Scalfari interviews — in an Italian-only book called Interviews and Conversations With Journalists ( Interviste e Conversazioni con i Giornalisti), published by the Vatican’s official publishing arm, the Libreria Editrice Vaticana. As Italian journalist and author Antonio Socci wrote in 2015, “the interviews of Pope Bergoglio in Scalfari…have never been denied.” He continues, “Indeed they have been republished in full on the L’Osservatore Romano, and they have even just been completely republished by the same Argentine pope in a book signed by him from the Libreria Editrice Vaticana. So they are, in effect, official…”
There is indeed an art to a denial-flavored non-denial. But at the heart of the matter, we must remember that the pope has always had the power to correct the representation of his words. As the former papal spokesman, Fr. Frederico Lombardi, told us in October of 2013:
Pressed by reporters on the reliability of the direct quotations, Lombardi said during an Oct. 2 briefing that the text accurately captured the “sense” of what the pope had said, and that if Francis felt his thought had been “gravely misrepresented,” he would have said so.
He would have said so. But he didn’t say anything. He never does. [Because he is most honest in this respect - he never says anything he does not really mean! And that is why he goes out of his way to establish plausible deniability when he has to! Let anyone try to quote any of his 'plausibly deniable' statements as evidence of material heresy - and he will promptly deny he ever said any such things or meant it as heretical, or anti-Catholic, or apostate!]
That means that no matter how much the Vatican communications team wants to cast doubt on Scalfari’s credibility, Francis is perfectly happy with the way his thoughts have been represented. And as my friend, Senior National Review Writer Michael Brendan Dougherty tweeted today, “There’s something really dishonorable about a Vatican that won’t make any specific clarification of the Pope’s words, but depends on Catholic media to impugn as an atheist and exaggerator, the very reporter the pope himself chose.”
And of course, if we really doubt that this is what the pope believes about Hell, there’s the little matter of Amoris Laetitia 297, which reads, “No one can be condemned for ever, because that is not the logic of the Gospel!” [Unfortunately, AL has so many whoppers that most people tend to have overlooked this one!] This little gem, “If understood as meaning that no human being can or will be condemned to eternal punishment in Hell,” was given the theological censure of “Heretical, contrary to sacred Scripture” by a group of 45 international theologians and Catholic scholars in 2016. And as Vatican journalist Edward Pentin has brought to light, Francis is also on record
preaching last year that “everything will be saved — everything” and that at the end of history there will be an “immense tent, where God will welcome all mankind so as to dwell with them definitively.” He also said judgment was not to be feared because “at the end of our history there is the merciful Jesus.”
[Yet this is the kind of nonsense, anti-Christian 'theology' Mons. Vigano wanted the Emeritus Pope to endorse! I rather think Vigano has forgotten all about Christ and Catholicism in his professional and personal passion for Bergoglio and Bergoglianism!]
For every day Catholics, the situation presents a different, more pragmatic problem.
Catholic commentator and journalist Damian Thompson tweeted today, “It’s not the liberalism of this pontificate that bothers me. It’s the dishonesty.” [There, I have said so all along - that DISHONESTY is the worm at the core of this pontificate. Has any other pope before Bergoglio been documentably proven to be habitually dishonest, habitually lying, habitually deceiving, habitually hypocritical, habitually two-faced?]
Frustration over yet another scandalous statement from the pope coming just as the Easter Triduum begins is a sentiment being echoed by Catholics all over social media. Their exasperation is at a peak.
One woman, a convert and mother of a large family I spoke with this morning, asked me how she’s supposed to teach her kids about the faith when she also has to teach them the pope can’t be trusted. She admitted to me the frustration she felt over what is going on in the Church. “It’s bad enough we have to teach our kids to fight society,” she said. “now we have to fight the Church, too?”
With Lettergate I and II still fresh in their minds, the faithful now have every reason to believe that the Vatican will manipulate, omit, or fabricate the truth entirely according to their own whims as long as it advances their chosen narrative. In other words, having played fast and loose with the truth for so long, we have absolutely no reason to believe them when they tell us it’s the other guy we shouldn’t trust.
So until Francis issues a corrective statement, our only reasonable choice is to take what Scalfari said as gospel. [Not as gospel, obviously. But as a reasonably plausible version of the squalid truth about Bergoglio. Maybe the good Lord had a reason to have all these things erupting at this time.
It seems Pope Felix knew what he was talking about.
I disagree with Phil Lawler though that 'confusion is the hallmark of this pontificate' for the same reason that I object to the loose and almost thoughtless way in which the word is bandied about during this pontificate. This 'confusion', or what people see as confusion, is better described as a mess because that is what a wreckage always is - and is the natural outcome when the leader is someone who exhorts his people to 'make a mess' - hagan lio! Bergolio's mess is a quicksand of his own making - he just sinks deeper into it daily. Damian Thompson was more on the money - DISHONESTY is the hallmark of this pontificate, and as the Bard said, "Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we set out to deceive".
Confusion — now about hell — is
the hallmark of this pontificate
By Phil Lawler
March 29, 2018
Okay, Pope Francis probably did not say: “There is no hell.” [Just as probably, he could have said so!] But that’s the headline story for today — for Holy Thursday. And while maybe the interviewer is responsible for an inaccurate quotation, the Pope himself is responsible for the ensuing confusion.
The Vatican, naturally, has rushed out another “clarification.” Notice, however, that the Vatican statement does not actually deny that Pope Francis uttered those words. Because the truth is that nobody actually knows exactly what he said.
Here is the statement attributed to the Pontiff, in an article that appeared in La Repubblica, regarding the fate of unrepentant sinners:
They are not punished. Those who repent obtain God’s forgiveness and join the ranks of those souls who contemplate Him. But those who do not repent, and so cannot be forgiven, disappear. There is no hell; there is the disappearance of sinful souls.
That quotation appeared in a piece by Eugenio Scalfari, who interviewed the Holy Father earlier this week. Following his usual practice, Scalfari did not record the session, nor did he even take notes. The veteran journalist — who, by the way, is nearing his 94th birthday — relied on his memory to reconstruct the conversation. So the words that were in quotation marks in his article may or may not be the words of Pope Francis.
So today’s Vatican statement is certainly true: “No quotation in the aforementioned article can therefore be considered a faithful transcription of the words of the Holy Father.” But that non-denial leaves two questions unanswered:
- Did the Pope say those words — or did he say something close enough so that Scalfari’s quotation is not totally inaccurate?
- Why did the Pope submit to an interview with a journalist who would not quote him accurately?
Bear in mind that this is not the first time that Scalfari has interviewed the Pontiff, nor is it the first time that his articles have produced sensational headlines, based on shocking “quotations” from the Pontiff. In fact this is Scalfari’s fifth such interview. Again and again and again the Vatican public-relations machinery has cranked out a clarification, reminding bewildered Catholics that the quotations may not have been accurate.
Then again, maybe the quotations were accurate. In 2015, Scalfari made a similar report that the Pope had denied the reality of hell. If that report was inaccurate, why didn’t Pope Francis correct him in subsequent conversations, so that he would not make the same error again? For that matter, why doesn’t the Pontiff issue a statement of his own, right now, affirming that he does believe in hell? At this point, it is difficult to deny that either Scalfari is deliberately twisting the Pope’s statements — in which case he should certainly not be granted interviews — or the Pope is making statements that justify the headline coverage.
Pope Francis evidently thinks of Scalfari as a friend, and he certainly has the right to speak freely with his friends. But why would he speak on the record, if he knows that the record will be distorted? I can only conclude that Pope Francis — the Pope who encouraged young Catholics to “make a mess” — is deliberately creating confusion.
In Lost Shepherd I wrote: “The confusion in Amoris Laetitia is not a bug; it is a feature.” Pope Francis realized that he cannot directly contradict the perennial teaching of the Church, put forth so clearly by St. John Paul II. But he could and did create confusion about that teaching, and thereby provided new maneuvering room for those who are unhappy with the Church’s stand.
By the same logic, Pope Francis cannot deny the existence of hell without directly contradicting the teaching of the Church. But he can create confusion, and he has done so once again. Did he deny, or at least question, the existence of hell? We don’t know.
Countless thousands of puzzled people have now heard that the Pope believes there is no hell. Maybe he was misquoted; maybe he had intended a different message. But we do know what message he did not send. As the Christian world enters into the Triduum, commemorating the Passion of Christ, the headlines did not read: “Pope says Jesus died to save us from our sins.”
What possible purpose could this interview with Scalfari have served, if not to cause confusion about the Catholic faith? [And if that's not being anti-Catholic, what is? The answer to that age-old but no-longer rhetorical question, "Is the pope Catholic?", when referring to Bergoglio is: "NO, this pope is, in fact, deliberately and determinedly ANTI-CATHOLIC".]
Confusion is the hallmark of this pontificate: not a bug but a feature.
Here's a commentary from the increasingly ubiquitous Chris Altieri, whose recent past as a decades-long Vatican Radio stalwart surfaces in his bending over backwards to give Bergoglio the benefit of the doubt on any issue which, IMHO, weakens any arguments he makes otherwise...
Why on earth does Pope Francis
still trust Eugenio Scalfari?
Does 'trying to save one unregenerate atheist's soul' justify
the attendant aggravations on all Catholics of Scalfari's
candid if unrecorded accounts of Bergoglio's pinions?
by Christopher Altieri
March 30,2018
To call this latest one a head-scratcher is to put oneself in the running for understatement of the year. The facts are that Eugenio Scalfari, the 93-year-old atheist founder of Italy’s centre-left daily, La Repubblica, had a conversation with Pope Francis at the Domus Sanctae Marthae on Tuesday, on the basis of which he wrote a story that ran two days later in the pages of the paper Scalfari founded. Titled, “Pope: ‘It is an honour to be called a revolutionary’,” the piece contains direct reports of speech in which the Holy Father is quoted as saying many things that, did he say them, would be newsworthy to say the least.
Beyond that, it is nigh on impossible to be morally certain about anything regarding this affair. [In matters of common sense 'discernment', does one have to be 'morally certain', or simply 'reasonably certain', which we can be in this case?]
According to Scalfari’s report, the “colloquy” Pope Francis entertained with him ran the gamut: from the things like cosmogenesis — the origin and fate of the created order — to the social, political, and cultural complex and worldview we catch under the rubric of “Modernity”, to the present and future of Europe.
Right in the middle of the conversation — it reads like once that could be carried on by any pair of intelligent and cultured old men at a pensioners’ club over wine and cards — there is discussion of the eternal fate of those who die in sin.
About that last thing, Scalfari quotes Francis as saying, “[The souls of] those, who do not repent and [therefore] cannot be forgiven, disappear. A ‘hell’ does not exist: what exists is the disappearance of sinful souls.” If the Pope said that, or anything that fairly amounts to that, he would be a heretic.
There were other highly problematic expressions, which Scalfari put in the mouth of the Pope, as well: talk of “divine nature” and inert creation brought to life by a sort of divine or semi-divine “energy”, that sounds exciting and speculatively daring in the ears of hippies and devotees of the New Age, but that really come to hackneyed and sixth-rate rehashings of primitive cosmological speculation. [Oh yeah, same-old-same-old efforts, promoted by Scalfari among others, to make Bergoglio sound erudite. Because, of course, 'philosopher' and secular pope Scalfari would not be caught dead wasting his time in chats with anyone beneath his intellectual level, would he?]
Knowing what they come to, however, tells us nothing about where they’ve come from: Scalfari’s head? Pope Francis’s mouth? [Both obviously - the mouth planting the words, or the sense of the words, in the other's brain, which then regurgitates them a la Scalfari in Repubblica.]
The Press Office of the Holy See issued a statement on Thursday
afternoon, denying that Scalfari’s report is a faithful representation of Pope Francis’s ipsissima verba — his exact words — but avoiding a repudiation of the Pope’s ipsissima vox — that is to say, the general sense, meaning or purport of his remarks:
The Holy Father recently received the founder of the daily La Repubblica in a private meeting on the occasion of Easter, without, however, releasing any interview. Everything reported by the author in [Thursday’s] article is the fruit of his own reconstruction, in which the verbatim words pronounced by the Pope are not quoted. No direct report of speech, therefore, may be considered a faithful transcription of the words of the Holy Father
.
One has the impression they took great care to avoid such repudiation. That may or may not be the case. It is also neither here nor there. The statement is not satisfactory. To be perfectly frank, nothing in this situation is satisfactory, or even close to it. The headlines generated around the world declaring hell abolished and the Catholic Church changed forever are false. The story they headline, however, is not.
The universal pastor and governor of the Church is reported to have given expression to ideas that, should he be found to have expressed them, are contrary to the faith. Pope Francis must disown not only the precise verbiage Scalfari reported in his piece, but the ideas foisted upon him therein — at least the ones that are manifestly heretical. The longer he does not, the stronger the case becomes for believing he cannot.
For the record, Pope Francis has spoken of hell as though he believes it is real. [Ah, but here, one has to distinguish between words that he says pro forma - he must say them if only because he is the pope, after all - or those he really means from the core of his being (what he says in these informal interviews and off the cuff.] The Pope has threatened Mafiosi with it, should they fail to repent, and explained to a Girl Scout at the Tor Bella Monaca parish he was visiting in 2015 that anyone can go there who clings to the delusion of self-sufficiency and refuses to beg God’s mercy (which God will not refuse anyone who asks Him it), and described it during the course of a November 2016 fervorino in the chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae as a place in which one exists deprived of God’s charity.
Why Pope Francis would continue to trust that man, Scalfari, is beyond reckoning. Nearly half a dozen times since Francis’s election, have we been treated to a round of Scalfarism, the circuit of which is predictable enough, but each time more pernicious in its effect.
Even if Pope Francis believes that Scalfari’s soul depends on continuing their conversations and allowing Scalfari to take egregious license with his reportage of them, he must know that the inevitable results of his commerce with the man are confusion and scandal, hence that his persistence in it constitutes a failure in his mission to confirm the brethren. [But he obviously does not see it as his mission 'to confirm his brethren in the faith'. No, he thinks it is he who will henceforth give his brethren their daily bread, literally, if he can just succeed in the agenda he has with the United Nations to 'eliminate poverty and hunger by 2030'. Does he ever ask himself why even Jesus, Son of God, never tried to do that? We all have to live with the wages of Original Sin, from which no one, other than Mary, can be exempt.The wages of Original Sin being all the human afflictions God saw fit to impart as corrective punishment for his human creatures, whom he also gave a second chance to recover Paradise by accepting redemption from his Son, a redemption we must earn nonetheless by following God's law and God's will.]
It is easy to believe the Holy Father motivated in his continued commerce with Scalfari by genuine charity, by a desire that Scalfari’s soul be not lost. If the Pope’s intentions in all this are blameless, his judgment is nevertheless — indeed all the more — appalling. If the Pope’s solicitude for Scalfari’s soul is indeed so great, and Scalfari’s protestation of friendship sincere, then let Francis resign the office and go talk with his friend all day long over vino burino and briscola.
****************************************************************************************************************************************
Maundy Thursday was never an auspicious day for Catholics in the Bergoglian liturgy, since from his days as Archbishop of Bueno Aires, Jorge Bergoglio always used it to hype his personal humility by washing the feet of assorted persons, men and women - not necessarily and usually not Catholics - of whom the only requirement was that they be perceived to be downtrodden, materially poor and/or in unfortunate conditions (jail, an AIDS hospice, a leprosarium, and the like), to the point of making the foot-washing the focus of the day.
Of course, it was often done in places that have no chapel, and where, therefore, if he said Mass (not really a requirement for the footwashing) - though I have not researched into whether he did so - he would have had to invoke the 'necessity clause' in the provision of Canon Law that says
Can. 932 §1. The eucharistic celebration is to be carried out in a sacred place unless in a particular case necessity requires otherwise; in such a case the celebration must be done in a decent place.
in which anything but a pigsty or a garbage dump would be a decent place. But assuming he did not feel called upon to say Mass wherever and whenever he washed feet, wasn't he thereby violating his obligation as a priest to say the Mass of the Lord's Supper?
But let's not quibble about the place - Mass can be celebrated anywhere if one has to (better any place than not to say Mass at all) - except that the Masses on Maundy Thursday (there are two) have a special requirement for bishops. Because Maundy Thursday commemorates both the institution of the priesthood and the institution of the Eucharist by Jesus himself, bishops are enjoined to celebrate Maundy Thursday with the priests of their diocese in their cathedral churches - the church in which they have their cathedra (for the Bishop of Rome, it is the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano). For some reason, contemporary popes have said the Chrism Mass at St. Peter's Basilica, and before Bergoglio, only the evening Mass of the Last Supper at the Lateran.
The Chrism Mass in the morning specifically celebrates the institution of the priesthood - which is why all the clergy present renew their vows during this Mass. During the Mass, the bishop blesses the Oil of Chrism that will be used for Baptism, Confirmation, and Anointing of the sick or dying, in the coming year.
The Mass of the Lord's Supper inaugurates the Easter Triduum, and commemorates the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples, more explicitly than other celebrations of the Mass. The Mass stresses the institution of the Eucharist and the institution of the ministerial priesthood. A resource called Catholic Liturgical Library includes a 'third aspect' supposedly stressed in the Mass of the Lord's Supper, namely "the commandment of brotherly love that Jesus gave after washing the feet of his disciples". But Jesus had always preached brotherly love before then, and current rubrics say "the rite is not an obligatory part of the Mass", so saying it is a 'third aspect' of the Mass of the Last Supper when it is not in fact an obligatory part of the Mass is false.
Wikipedia tells us, with appropriate sourcing, that the washing of feet was in use at an early stage without relation to this particular day, and was first prescribed for use on Holy Thursday by a 694 Council of Toledo. By the twelfth century it was found in the Roman liturgy as a separate service. Pope Pius V included this rite in his Roman Missal, placing it after the text of the Mass of the Lord's Supper. He did not make it part of the Mass, but indicated that it was to take place "at a suitable hour" after the stripping of the altars. The 1955 revision by Pope Pius XII inserted it into the Mass. Current rubrics indicate that the rite is not an obligatory part of that Mass, but rather is something to be carried out "where a pastoral reason suggests it". [I fear, however, that for Bergoglio, personal reason outweighs his pastoral reason for this headline-and-camera-grabbing gesture. I think his ultimate demographic criteria for his ideal foot-washing subjects would be "terminally ill, AIDS-afflicted, Muslim, homosexual, newly-immigrant, men and women". Oooohhh, how much more merciful and compassionate can a pope be!]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 31/03/2018 20:09] |