| | | OFFLINE | | Post: 32.331
Post: 14.417 | Registrato il: 28/08/2005
Registrato il: 20/01/2009 | Administratore | Utente Gold | |
|
He needs a massive transfusion of truth serum supplemented with a self-awareness vaccine.
The pope praises Mons. Vigano’s testimony
without naming him! – I'm joking, of course, but…
Translated from
November 9, 2018
I am saying so from the start, in order not to generate confusion and muttering (God forbid!) – this is a ‘lighthearted’ post. [Tosatti uses the word scherzoso, meaning primarily ‘jokingly’, but also facetious, light-hearted, teasingly. In this sense, it really is a masterpiece of irony – underscoring the absurdity of the pope’s homily, because as so often, Bergoglio does not seem to realize that he is really talking about himself, with respect to criticism in general and to Vigano’s testimonies, specifically. Which is why later in the post, Tosatti calls these words a ‘confession’. (The homily would be self-irony on the part of Bergoglio if he were aware he was talking of himself.)
But the post is really bitingly sarcastic because Tosatti's irony - and Bergoglio's, unwittingly - is directed at the pope himself and one of his besetting faults – about which he seems to have no self-awareness at all – and one I have remarked upon every so often: he sees the mote in everyone else’s eye but not the huge beam that lies athwart his moral vision!]
Yesterday, reading the VaticanNews reportage on the Pontiff’s words at his daily homilette from Casa Santa Marta, I said to myself: Well, look, he’s actually paying a eulogy to Archbsihop Carlo Maria Vigano – without mentioning his name of course, but that’s habitual for this pope.
To use the words of the brilliant Fosco Maraini [1912-2004, Italian polymath and polyglot),
ma oggi è un giorno a zìmpani e zirlecchi
un giorno tutto gnacchi e timparlini,
è un giorno per le vànvere, un festicchio
un giorno carmidioso e prodigiero,
è un giorno a cantilegi, ad urlapicchio…
[The verse uses colloquialisms to express various kinds of noisy celebrations saying in effect that “today is a day for all that”] – if the homilette meant that the pope finally acknowledging the value of the gestures (three so far) by the ex-Nuncio to the USA.
As Debora Donnini reported:
Testimony, murmuring, questioning. These were the three words that Pope Francis dwelt on this morning in his ‘homily' at Casa Santa Marta. He noted that “history shows us testimony was never a convenient or comfortable thing, not for the witness(es) – who many times have paid for it with martyrdom- nor for the powerful”.
“To give testimony [or to bear witness to something one believes and/or knows to be true] is to break a habit, a way of being. And that is to break for the better, to change one’s habit. That is why the Church advances through the witness of the faithful. Witness, not words, attract. Words help, yes, but witness is what attracts others to the Church and makes her grow”. And he repeated: Testimony “always breaks habit’ and also “places you at risk”.
'
On the other hand, he says, the opposite of open testimony, of laying oneself open, of facing situations and persons face to face, is 'the way of murmuring’, [he uses an Italian construct, mormorazione – though the correct word is mormorio – that means muttering in the sense of grumbling privately, and in a larger sense, to make innuendos] much more convenient and so usual in clerical circles, by way of “negative comments to destroy witness”.
“This sin of grumbling is committed daily, in small ways and big,” he said, noting that in our own life, we find ourselves grumbling “because we do not like something or other”, and instead of dialoguing or “seeking to resolve a conflictual situation, we grunble privately, always in a low voice, because we do not have the courage to speak clearly”. And that happens, he says, when “there is a testimony I don’t like or a person I don’t like, which starts me grumbling”.
Who knows if by that grumbling he also includes ad hominem against the person bearing witness, and all the rest of that often-used sport today that is called character assassination in English, but this time done through articles and even whole books. [See IL GIORNO DEL GIUDIZIO, by Tornielli and Valente, purporting to demolish the Vigano testimonies.]
I went on reading, and thinking that perhaps it is to such ‘dirty’ operations that the Pontiff is referring. Because he also said
“When a government is dishonest, it seeks to soil its adversaries by mucking them up through ‘mormorazione’ [i.e., innuendo]. “Which is defamation – and almost always, calumny. You who have known dictatorial governments well because you have lived under them, what does a dictatorial government do? First, it takes control of the communications media by law, and goes on to make innuendos and discredit all whom it considers a danger. Discrediting by innuendo is our daily bread, whether at the personal, familial, parochial, diocesan or societal level.”
In the end, the Pontiff summed up the key words of his reflection: testimony, which is provocative but makes the Church grow; versus grumbling and innuendo, “which is like my internal shield so that testimony does not harm me”.
So there we are, I tell myself. I’d like to see whether after this confession, the pope will decide to respond to the simple questions raised by Vigano on McCarrick and will finally order an apostolic investigation on the sexually abusive ex-cardinal, his career, those who supported him and were complicit with his double life, and perhaps even on the funds which he generously dispensed (and may have generously received) to promote his own agenda. Maybe not now, but perhaps tomorrow or the day after.
But Catholics are generally patient and know how to wait. Though perhaps we can’t say that of US Catholics who have been seething with rage and impatience since the summer. Not to mention the American judicial system…
A note on the other kind of schism
November 7, 2018
Most Catholics correctly, but incompletely, understand schism as “the refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff” (1983 CIC 751).
Overlooked here — perhaps because it is much rarer than is typical ‘anti-papal schism’ and is harder to spot when it does occur —i s the second kind of schism, namely, “the refusal … of communion with the members of the Church subject to him” (1983 CIC 751).
In other words schism comes in two varieties, ‘vertical schism’ whereby one refuses submission to the Roman Pontiff, and ‘horizontal schism’ whereby one refuses to extend that Christian unity owed to others who are, in fact, in union with the pope.
If the poster boy for vertical schism was, say, Martin Luther, the horizontal schismatic is, I suggest, one whose devotion to the pope is so extreme that he regards as disloyal those who don’t share his opinions on all things papal and, for that reason, shuns them.
Of course Catholics’ opinions on popes and prelates may vary widely, and, to be sure, the canonical requirements for proving schism, vertical or horizontal,in actual cases are high.
[Which is why it is very misleading to leave the definition of vertical schism at 'refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff' - because if that were so, then many Catholics, under any given pontiff, are really in schism! I think many Catholics like me understand schism first of all as formally breaking off with the Church for whatever reason, and that is why there are so few true schisms. I can't think of any current real schism, when even the Church has been saying in the past few decades that the FSSPX may be 'schismatic' but they are not in schism. Technically speaking, they are not, for they profess to recognize the pope as the terrestrial Head of the Church, though they may disagree with some of what he teaches.]
Catholics critical of Pope Francis and/or his governance of the Church — Catholics, mind, in full communion with the Church per Canon 205 — notwithstanding their demonstrable communion with the pope, are frequently disparaged these days, sometimes by ranking bishops, as being adversaries, accusers, and gossip-mongers.
To some extent, of course, such verbal insults should be written off as Life in This Valley of Tears and those subjected to them simply reminded that others have endured far harsher treatment for the Faith. But lately I wonder whether this demonizing of papal critics risks taking a canonical turn.
Long-time Vaticanista Marco Tosatti recently claimed that word has been passed down by papal representatives to bishops not to invite Raymond Cdl. Burke to their dioceses and that, should Burke appear at an event in their churches, they should not even appear with him. If this report is true, then understand: bishops working in close collaboration with the pope are instructing other bishops to avoid and, if necessary, to refuse manifestations of Christian unity due to a bishop who is, beyond any question, in full communion with him and them.
That report, if true, would suggest something well beyond mere verbal disparagement of a fellow bishop.
Again, journalistic claims of such counter-catholic (in the sense of ‘unity’ and ‘oneness’) directives are a long way from constituting proof of horizontal schism, but that such measures could even be plausibly alleged is a sign of the times and deeply troubling.
Like Catholics admonished to avoid sin and even near occasions of sin, so prelates should avoid schism and even actions suggestive of schismatic attitudes.
- If such disgraceful directives were quietly issued, may they be quietly and quickly withdrawn;
- if they were even contemplated may be they be rejected lest they open the door to even deeper divisions than we already suffer.
IMHO, our discourse would be much clearer if we stopped talking and thinking in terms of 'schism' - canonically and technically as futile to prove as 'heresy' and therefore unactionable, one way or the other - and simply speak of 'division', which allows for only one meaning and can be vertical or horizontal, without getting into the trap of branding anyone with some term that is near-impossible to 'prove'.
If this post falls under the general rubric of dissatisfaction with and/or gripes against the Church, then the following item certainly belongs:
The roots of Catholic anger
by George Weigel
November 7, 2018
After a month out of the country, working in Rome at Synod-2018 and helping mark the 40th anniversary of John Paul II’s election at events in Brussels and Warsaw, I came home to find Catholic anger over the latest phase of the abuse crisis unabated and intensified in some quarters.
That this crisis is not acknowledged for what it is by the highest authorities in Rome is a subject for another reflection at another time. The question today is: What are the roots of today’s Catholic anger and disgust?
Part of the answer to that, surely, is exhaustion. Why must we go through this again? Wasn’t the Long Lent of 2002 enough? Weren’t things fixed then?
Those whose anger is stoked by these understandable questions might have a look at a recent and thoughtful article by Kenneth Woodward in Commonweal. Woodward understands that ripping the cover off the serial sexual predations of the former archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, triggered a gag-reflex among the Catholic laity that seems to have been bred out of at least some Catholic clergy, both here in the United States and in Rome.
But the longtime religion editor of Newsweek also identifies another factor in today’s Catholic rage that ought to cause all of us to pause and think for a moment. Writing about the Pennsylvania grand jury report that sent Catholic anger through the roof this summer, my friend Woodward made a crucial point:
…the way Pennsylvania attorney general Josh Shapiro presented the report — and the way it was often described in the press — made it easy to assume that the grand jury had unearthed three hundred new clerical abusers, when in fact most of the abuse covered in the report occurred in the last century and roughly eight out of ten of the alleged abusers are dead. It was easy to overlock the good news in an otherwise disheartening report — namely, that since the U.S. bishops established stringent new procedures for handling allegations of sexual abuse in 2003, only two priests from the seven dioceses studied have been accused.
[But eB]every report on clerical sex abuses - since the ones in Boston back in 2002 to all the reports in Ireland, Germany, Belgium and Italy, perhaps even Chile - clearly described and provided statistical data on crimes overwhelmingly committed in the past. But secular media with their abiding anti-Catholic animus, have always pounced on these reports to make it seem that actual commission of such crimes is ongoing on the scale that the reports have it - and so, that is the conclusion drawn by media consumers including many Catholics who do not read beyond the headlines and look at the actual contents of the report. I do not think however that the current outrage is only due to this wrong perception - the greater outrage is that such crimes ever happened at all, whenever they did happen, and on a scale that is really obscene when the perpetrators are supposedly men of the Church.]
The “narrative” of an ongoing, widespread, and unaddressed rape culture in the Catholic Church in the United States is false. [False as to a 'rape culture' - that peaked in the 1970s-1990s - but the greater concern among Catholics who follow Church news is the continuing culture of silence and cover-up and yes, denial, in the Church hierarchy, up to the very summit. Which is best exemplified by the Vatican's choice of not using the word 'homosexuality' and its derivatives at all to describe the root evil behind both the rape culture and the cover-up culture, and worse, the attempt to 'prettify' the crime by calling it 'clericalism'.]
- There are still abusive Catholic clergy in America; they must be rooted out and dismissed from the ministry.
-
There are still bishops who don’t get it and they, too, must go. But as one state attorney general after another finds political hay to be made by investigating the Catholic past, it is essential that Catholics understand that a lot of the awfulness that is going to keep coming out — both in terms of abusive clergy and malfeasant bishops — was in the past. Effective anger today will focus on the present. And it will not be limited to local situations but will include the obtuseness (and worse) of officials in Rome.
Digging deeper, one hits another question: Why were so many Catholics, who don’t believe much else they read in the papers or see on TV, so ready to believe the misrepresentations of the Pennsylvania grand jury report? Part of the answer, I suspect, has to do with pent-up Catholic anger with clerical narcissism.
- A priest or bishop who messes with the Missal and re-writes it to his taste as he celebrates Mass is a narcissist.
- The priest or bishop who rambles on aimlessly during a daily Mass homily, abusing the time of his people, is a narcissist.
- A bishop who behaves as if he were hereditary nobility, but absent the gentlemanly noblesse oblige that characterizes the truly noble man, is a narcissist.
[Hmm, The current Bishop of Rome qualifies as a narcissist on all 3 counts if I - and many others - had not already identified him as a pathological narcissist long ago and almost soon after March 13, 2013.]
And Catholics are fed up with clerical narcissism. The angers of the present have been stoked by that narcissism for decades; the deadly combination of McCarrick and Josh Shapiro blew the boiler’s lid off. Anyone who doesn’t recognize this is not going to be much help in fixing what’s broken.
At the same time, it must be remembered that most priests and bishops in the United States are not narcissists: rather, they’re men with a deep sense of vocation who know they’re earthen vessels through whom flows unmerited but superabundant divine grace. Those men deserve our support, affection, and gratitude as they, like the rest of us, deal with the fallout of this season of humiliation and purification.
As for the narcissists, they need help — and disciplining. [And our prayers. And who more than the narcissist-in-chief?]
FEAR, THREATS, and INTIMIDATION?
November 9, 2018
The disquiet about broad hints of Internet Censorship of Catholic writers which emerged from the 'Synod' is only just dying down, and now the admirable Fr Zuhlsdorf and other usually reliable sources have reported that there are two congruous stories circulating about the kindly and paternal interest which Bergoglian Rome is taking in two particular bishops.
(1) Cardinal Burke. The rumour apparently is that the Nuncio has told American Bishops not to invite Cardinal Burke to their dioceses and, if he turns up, not to attend events which he addresses.
Cardinals are entitled to go anywhere without the permission of local Ordinaries; in fact, Cardinal Burke, with his punctilious courtesy, always informs Ordinaries when he plans to visit their dioceses.
So no one can actually keep him out. But you know how the world works. Timorous bishops who don't want a black mark against their name will put pressure on clergy and organisations within their jurisdictions not to invite him. And because the Inferior Clergy too can be timorous and might not want to ... er ... get a black mark against their names, they will think twice ... thrice? ... multiplicius? before getting involved. You might call it Drip Down Malevolence.
Perhaps PF should, before sacking cardinals, give some thought as to how a jobless Eminence is likely to spend his time.
(2) Bishop Schneider has been made aware that 'Rome' takes an interest in how many days he spends outside his diocese. Rumours about this have in fact been circulating for some weeks. But, so they say, this has been done orally so as to leave no paper trail ... see (a) below.
I find it difficult to keep my temper and to moderate my language as I write about all this. So I suppose the first point to be made is that much of it is rumour. It would be uncharitable to assume, without solid evidence, the certain truth of stories which, if true, would redound so very profoundly to the discredit of those involved. That being said ...
(a) This business supplies a remarkably exact example of what I wrote only last Monday about how the Bergoglian Church works (vide my piece about the sacking of Bishop Holley).
(b) FEAR. The Bergoglian regime has no scruples about making FEAR its main instrument of control, not only in Urbe but throughout the Catholic world. This corresponds closely with what workers in the Curia have been reporting for some years now. What an amazingly nasty ...
(c) THREATS. Bishops are supposed to be Successors of the Apostles, addressed by popes since time immemorial as Venerable Brethren. It is unbecoming that they should be informed, like naughty little schoolboys, which of their fellow bishops they should discourage from speaking in their dioceses, and whom they should themselves not go and hear. ("Well, Bloggs minor, you would be wise to give some thought as to what your School File might record about the sort of company you kept while you were here ...")
(d) INTIMIDATION. The apparent use of Nuncios as hostile spies and as agents of intimidation is deplorable. Or do I mean Stalinist? Should we address them as Comrade Commissar?
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/11/2018 02:03] |