THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

The Simoniac Pope by William Blake, ca. 1825 [Tate Gallery, London]. The pope depicted is Nicholas III.

Of Dante and our current crisis
By Anthony Esolen

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2018

In these bad days I have called to mind Dante’s Inferno. I think of the structure of the City of Dis, the Hell within Hell. Outside of its miserable walls are punished those sinners who gave in to immoderate desires for things that are naturally good, such as the intercourse of the sexes, male and female, food and drink, and wealth; and who misused faculties that are natural to the human person, such as anger and the longing for rest.

But your ticket for entry into Dis is an active malice, the tang of loving things that are simply evil.

The first of these sinners are the heretics, whose prime representatives are men of powerful intellect who denied the immortality of the soul, and therefore cut themselves off intellectually from the roots of life itself. It is an offense against the image of God in man. They dwell in tombs just within the walls of Dis, and are, as it were the front end of a pair of brackets, enclosing all of Dis’s depr,aved citizens.

At the other end, in Hell’s dead center and bottom, we will find the traitors, the worst of whom, Judas Iscariot, is chewed and mangled forever by the worst of the fallen angels, Satan.

Between heresy and treachery lie violence and fraud, the lion and the fox. Fraud is more wicked than violence, Dante says, because it perverts man’s highest power, that of the mind; therefore it is punished in a lower ring, that of the Malebolge, the ten Pouches of Evil.

In one of those pouches we find the Simoniacs, those who traded in ecclesiastical offices; they are planted upside down in holes in the ground that parody the baptismal font, with their feet slicked with oil and set aflame.

The violent are divided into three groups, according to the victim of the violence: worst are the violent against God Himself. These suffer the punishment of a rain of fire-flakes that spark the burning sands beneath them. They must take that fire lying down (blasphemers), sitting at the brink of the gulf of the fraudulent (the usurers), or racing about continually (the sodomites).

If Nature is the daughter of God, Dante reasons, then those who violate Nature in their sexual deeds, meant for the bringing of new life into the world, show their contempt of the Creator Himself. If human industry is the daughter of Nature, then those who do nothing for their wealth but rub coins together to make them breed are blasphemers too, as are the sodomites.

It is not pleasant to ask where in this scheme the wicked prelates of our time belong. Perhaps the question is too narrow. In our age of easy travel, after all, people can get around. Bishop Black might touch down in Sodom, in scorn of God, but only after he has supinely accepted the heresies that make Sodom conceivable to him; and then he takes the Eucharist in hands that smell of that foul city in an act of blasphemy.

But he cannot rest there. His fundamental “creative” sin must remain always in act; there is in fact no end to it, nor can there be. So he weaves about himself a web of sinners of like mind, and this is preeminently the sin of simony, which in this instance is to replace the bride of Christ with a male in drag, and set him about to pander and procure.

It would be cleaner just to sell the mitre and crozier for good old ill-gotten money. But all of this is to commit treason against Christ, who gave His life for the Church, to have her as his bride, pure and without spot.

It appears that if we pull at one string of the rats’ nest, we will catch the rest too. I am not saying that all of the bad bishops have been formal heretics, or that they have all been sodomites or men who condoned that sin in others, or that they have all made a habit of putting priests and other bishops in their hip pockets, or that they have all built their lives upon betraying Christ and His Church at every pass.

There is no need to make that claim. Nor do I say that we should always expect to find, among the prelates of Sodom, plenty of the other two ways that Dante identifies of being violent against God – in our time, the blasphemy of gross liturgical abuses, and the laundering of millions of dollars pressed from the hearts of the faithful.

Not always, not always. I do not make any universal claim. One sinner is not the same as another. The great general claim will do.

Nor do I say that the people in the pews have been paragons of orthodoxy, charity, truth, and fidelity. We have not. But now we know why some of our superiors have treated the most faithful of the laity with irritated indifference at best, and thinly veiled hatred at worst.

It is hard to take divorce seriously, I suppose, or cohabitation, or the smutty stuff peddled to children in many a Catholic school, when you have your hands down a seminarian’s pants, or when you seat your homosexual lover in the front pew, or when you cannot bring yourself to call God “He,” because the pronoun is too personal for comfort.

Perhaps the scandal will have this immediate effect: The next time you find a prelate who treats the Mass with blithe innovation, or who pushes a rainbow of sexual wickedness in the schools, or who seems allergic to the masculine character of Christ Himself, or who hedges himself with yes-priests and yes-nuns who promote these things, you will wonder perhaps where he is and what he does on a Friday evening.

That may not be fair. But what in this scandal has been fair?


Where else will we go?
by Randall Smith

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2018

Some say that people are leaving the Catholic Church over the current scandals. This confuses me. In whom did you have faith? The priest? The bishop? Or God? If your faith was in a priest, a bishop, or even the pope, then what you professed was idolatry, not Christian faith.

Am I downplaying the seriousness of the scandal or the damage it has done? No, but let’s put things into perspective. If you ask, “How can I continue to have faith in the Catholic Church considering all these horrible acts?” you might put yourself in the place of the Jewish community after the Holocaust. They had to ask themselves: “How can I continue to have faith in God considering all these horrible acts?”

How can we continue to dedicate ourselves to a community so unfaithful to God?
- Moses asked the same question when he saw the infidelity of his fellow Jews in the desert.
- The prophets asked the same question when they saw the injustices of the people in the Promised Land.
- The early apostles must have asked themselves the same question when they saw that it was one of their own company who handed Jesus over to His enemies.
- And Peter himself, the “rock” on which the Church was to be built, denied he even knew the Lord in His most desperate hour of need. What could anyone do to compete with that?

Life in the Church has rarely been simple.
- How hard would it have been to stay in the Church when one’s friends, neighbors, and family members were being martyred, torn to shred by animals or burned alive, for refusing to deny their faith?
- How hard would it have been to stay in the Church when so many of one’s other friends, neighbors, and family members had given in and denied Christ in the face of the threats of the Roman authorities.
- What would you have done when the Arian crisis split the Church in two, with the supposedly “Christian” emperor Constantine and most of the empire siding with the Arians?
- How about when three men all claimed to be pope in the fourteenth century?
- Or when the Protestant Revolt split Christendom and much of the Church hierarchy was corrupt and moribund?
The Council of Trent was a great gift of the Spirit, but it didn’t commence until 1545 (Martin Luther authored the 95 theses in 1517), and it didn’t wrap up until 1563, nearly twenty years later.

Imagine being a Catholic in the midst of these scandals.
- What would you have done?
- Would you have been one of those who stayed and fought the good fight in faith?
- Or would you have been one of the many who said, “That’s it. I’m out”?

But then where would you have gone? That’s the question Peter asks Christ. “Lord, where else shall we go?” Who else has the words of everlasting life?

I’m sorry, but did I miss something?
- Did Christ found some other Church – the Church with the good people [only]?
- The Church with the perfect liturgies?
- The Church in which all the clergy and laity are doctrinally correct and without sin?
Because I’ve never seen it. I’ve never read about it in the Scriptures, nor did the Fathers and Doctors of the Church mention it.

Quite the contrary; they repeatedly talk about the human element of the Church being sinful and in need of Christ’s redemption.

Are these scandals keeping people away from the Church? Please. People are staying away from the Church because the Church makes uncomfortable moral claims and because Catholics aren’t a living witness in society to the truth of that teaching.
- Surveys have repeatedly shown Catholics to be little different from the general public in their opinions on fundamental moral issues.
- Catholics in San Francisco threatened to sue their own bishop when he tried to enforce basic moral principles on the Catholic schools. - Archbishop Chaput is held at arms’ length by many Catholic universities, while Cardinal Mahoney, supposedly under penance the way ex-Cardinal McCarrick was, travels freely.

Ask priests and editors of “conservative” Catholic websites what kind of blowback they get when they try to tell the laity they should pay a living wage, be fair and honest in their business practices, or exercise a preferential option for the poor.

What kind of priests and bishops would you expect to get when large portions of the laity revolt if they hear anything from the pulpit about abortion, contraception, fornication, and same-sex sexual activity?

Large proportions of American Catholics wanted bishops who would look the other way as they openly violated fundamental Catholic teaching.
- Why are they surprised now to discover that some of these men “bent the rules” in their personal lives as well?
- Was fidelity what people were looking for? Or a winning personality and the ability to raise money?
- Wasn’t the latter the reason why so many institutions now so self-righteously condemning McCarrick earlier lavished him with honors and praise?

C.S. Lewis once complained about a culture that produces “men without chests” and then expects of them virtue.“We laugh at honor,” wrote Lewis, “and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” An American Catholic Church that laughed at Catholic social teaching and Catholic sexual morality should not be shocked to find doctrinal and moral traitors in its midst.

What do we do now? Demand the truth? Certainly. But as the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel insisted, you demand truth by living in the truth.

We should say of authentic Church teaching what St. Augustine said about the Gospel: “If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don’t like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself.” [Ahem! Does that not describe the hubris and narcissism of Jorge Bergoglio to a T?"]

Are you a Catholic? Then stop worrying – and act like one.