It's a runaway train-
and the devil is driving
by Steve Skojec
November 23, 2018
“You hear that Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.”
-Agent Smith, The Matrix
Allow me, if you will, to think out loud a bit. I had a theory pop into my head this morning after reading two pieces of Church news that were so unfathomably stupid that they jarred something loose.
First, the stories, in the order I saw them.
It was announced today that the Jesuit superior general, Fr. Arturo Sosa, was elected head of the International Union of Superiors General (USG), a group that “represents religious orders and congregations of brothers and priests around the world in almost all countries” and “brings together General Superiors of the male religious orders and congregations.”
Fr. Sosa is one of the most heterodox religious leaders in the Church today.
- He has expressed Marxist sympathies and praised Fidel Castro.
- During the debate on Amoris Laetitia, he told an interviewer, regarding Jesus’s teaching on divorce,
“There would have to be a lot of reflection on what Jesus really said. At that time, no one had a recorder to take down his words.”
- He went on to say that
“the word is relative, the Gospel is written by human beings, it is accepted by the Church which is made up of human persons[.] … So it is true that no one can change the word of Jesus, but one must know what it was!” When this statement stirred up controversy – Cardinal Burke said Sosa should be “corrected” – he defiantly stood his ground.
- He has also said that he believes the Devil is a “symbolic figure” created by man to “express evil.” (Even a quasi-denial from his spokesman couldn’t put out that dumpster fire.)
- And for added flair, he was described by a Jesuit website as the first Jesuit superior to officially “baptize himself Buddhist” after he participated in a ceremony of some kind during a conference in Cambodia “between Buddhists and Christians who work for peace.”
I’m sure there’s more. This is just what comes to mind from the past year or two. And yet this is the man who was just elected to head a global organization representing religious orders of men from around the world.
They have decided they want this.
The second piece of news today was the appointment of Cardinal Blase Cupich to the organizing committee for the upcoming meeting of the heads of the various bishops conferences in Rome in February to tackle the issue of abuse.
- Cupich, who was the one prelate observers said looked unsurprised when the gathered American bishops were blindsided by an announcement that Rome was putting a stop to their action plan to deal with abuse during their annual fall meeting in Baltimore earlier this month.
- Cupich, who, during what appeared to be a prepared interruption of USCCB head Cardinal DiNardo making the announcement about the Holy See’s intervention, expressed his support for the pope and said, “It is clear the Holy See is taking the abuse crisis seriously” when it was clear that the case was anything but.
- Cupich, who was reported by the Catholic News Agency to have worked ahead of time with the disgraced-but-not-dismissed Cardinal Wuerl on an alternative action plan to deal with bishops accused of abuse – and who has flatly denied it.
The same Cupich who
- locked parishioners out of their TLM parish during the Easter Triduum,
- pressured his own priests not to participate in pro-life activities,
- works with pro-abortion politicians,
- has said he would give communion to remarried and gay couples and promoters of abortion,
- dismissed the founder of St. John Cantius parish in Chicago for unproven allegations, and
- drove a priest who was himself a childhood victim of clerical sex abuse into hiding over the burning of a rainbow flag that had been used in promotion of the homosexual agenda in his parish.
Cupich, who has brown-nosed his way from obscurity in small American dioceses to ascending the third largest episcopal see in America, with a red hat to boot.
This entire debacle is on rails, and it is accelerating. Constantly.
No matter how bad it looks, no matter what it costs, they just keep doing the same things.
The Vatican intervention in the U.S. bishops’ meeting was so controversial, one lay organization has decided to withhold $1 million in tithe money from the Vatican over it. But the single supportive voice of that move? He gets appointed by the pope to keep doing what he’s doing.
So here comes the theory.
It is known that while demons have free will
[that implies they can choose for good or for evil - but have demons ever chosen for good????], their wills are locked. They make a choice, and that’s it.
Fr. Chad Ripperger, who has become arguably the most noteworthy exorcist of our age, talks about this in one of his conferences (I can’t recall which one, or I’d quote him directly). He says exorcists have actually asked demons if, given the opportunity to make their choice again – serve God or not – they would make a different one. They always say no. No matter the torments and sufferings they endure, for the angels, free will is predicated upon a perfect knowledge that we men cannot understand. They make a decision, and they never go back on it. It’s a hard thing to wrap your mind around.
We are all tempted. We all sin. To the extent that we allow ourselves to be participants in evil, we give the devil and his minions some level of control over our lives.
But when I watch the leaders of our Church make the same idiotic choices again and again, when I watch the pope and his cabal making one self-defeating move after another, provoking public backlash and turning even those most sympathetic to the “reform” agenda against them – I cannot help but wonder if we are seeing the results of a much more direct form of demonic influence.
The only way any of what they are doing makes sense is to look at their agenda as though there is only one goal: destruction of the Church. The leading of souls into perdition. Scandalizing the faithful and causing them to doubt the promises Christ made about the Church’s ability to withstand the gates of Hell.
They are not even acting in their own apparent self-interest. The only thing that seems to matter is the cause.
To a lesser extent, I also see this when observing those who are not active proponents of the crisis, but who have been deceived by its architects. People who, seemingly once of sound faith and good will, are intoxicated, for lack of a better word, into a clearly false view of the events that are unfolding. They become so incapable of recognizing what is happening that they will fiercely attack anyone who tries to simply point out the obvious. They give terrifying meaning to the axiom, “
There are none so blind as those who will not see.”
Even within the resistance to what is being perpetrated against our beloved Holy Mother Church, there is an increasing factionalization.
- Conspiracy theories deepen and distract and divide us as we become fixated on ways to make sense of what is going on and how to fix it. - Bitterness and divisions set in, even over petty things.
- There is a seeming intractability,
a hardening of positions that leads to endless, circular arguments about things we ultimately cannot change.
With all of this in mind, it would be well, I think, for us to reflect upon and pray against what may in fact be a far deeper preternatural battle than most of us realize.
It looks more and more like a runaway train, and the devil is doing the driving. [What exactly is 'it'? I'll identify it if Skojec did not: this pontificate!]
Bergoglianism is an infinite-sided polyhedron, if such a concept is possible, because it has as many manifestations as its originator and his followers can think of. Fr H picks up some money quotes from what appears to be the latest interview given by CDF Prefect Emeritus Cardinal Mueller, for whom Fr H appears to nurture total and unqualified approval that I do not share, as I have had and have too many significant reservations about the cardinal for things he has said and worse, for things he has failed to say when he ought to have said them ...
Gerhard Cardinal Mueller on
Hyper-ueber-ultra-papalist Bergoglianism
November 25, 2018
Two quotations from the latest Mueller interview. The whole interview, which is superb, should be read, over at Lifesitenews.
Bergoglianism ... Hyperueberultrapapalism ... one might think of it as Catholic Teaching 'taken a bit further', perhaps 'a bit too far'. Not so.
The current error ravaging the Christian Tradition is not more Catholicism; it is less. It is a radical apostasy from the Catholic Faith. In his Eminence's words, "It is not at all Catholic". [Worse, it is often anti-Catholic and even anti-Christian, as I cannot tire of underscoring again and again about this anti-Catholic, even anti-Christian, pope.]
"[The pope's] authority is extended over the revealed Faith of the Catholic Church and not over the individual theological opinions of himself or those of his advisers ... it is irritating that theologically uneducated people are being promoted to the rank of bishops who, in turn, think that they have to thank the pope for it by means of a childish submission ... "
"The Magisterium of the bishops and of the pope stands under the Word of God in Holy Scripture and Tradition and serves Him. It is not at all Catholic to say that the pope as an individual person receives directly from the Holy Spirit the Revelation and that he may now interpret it according to his own whims, while all the rest are to follow him blindly and mutely ... rRvealed truth cannot be toppled by any power in the world, and no Catholic may ever believe the opposite or be forced to accept the opposite."
Rod Dreher appropriately refers to the Feb. 2019 Vatican powwow on the sex abuse crisis in the Church - and I deliberately call it a powwow (with lots of feasting amid the talking) because I don't believe the pope is serious about this at all...
After setting a date several months into the future - and doing so a full two months after the crisis escalated with the McCarrick exposure (total delay between July 2018 and February 2019 - seven months, long enough to have a premature baby if the pope were pregnant!) - the names of those the pope has appointed to organize the powwow are yet another index of how un-serious he is about all this:
- Cardinal Cupich of Chicago (perhaps the name that has drawn the most outrage and dismay);
- Archbishop Charles Scicluna (since returned to the CDF as an Adjunct Secretary while he remains Archbishop of Malta, and very much a Bergoglian);
- Cardinal Oswald Gracias of Mumbai who is on the Pope's 9-man advisory council of cardinals; and
- Fr. Hans Zollner, SJ, president of the Center for the Protection of Minors at the Pontifical Gregorian University and a member of the Vatican Commission for the Protection of Minors, an agency whose current status is unknown since its original term lapsed earlier this year.
Heading this agency is, of course, Cardinal Sean O'Malley, another C9 member and supposed to be the Vatican's point man for all questions having to do with clerical/episcopal sex abuse, who had claimed in a recent letter that the idea of the February 2019 summit came from him. But why was he not named to the organizing committee? Did he blot his card irretrievably with Bergoglio by criticizing the latter's adamant dismissal of the charges against Chilean Bishop Barros and his accusers last February? Would he not have been the obvious man to represent the US bishops on the organizing committee rather than the heavily-compromised Cupich???
The Cupich summit
By ROD DREHER
November 24, 2018
Pope Francis has named Cardinal Blase Cupich, the liberal Chicago archbishop, to the planning committee for the February 2019 summit to figure out what the Catholic Church is going to do worldwide about sex abuse.
Not Cardinal Sean O’Malley, who has been on the Vatican’s council of advisers regarding sex abuse. Not Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, head of the American bishops’ conference. Cardinal Blase Cupich, close ally of Francis.
[Dreher proceeds to quote Steve Skojec's riff on Cupich in the 1P5 post above.]
Cupich, whose appointment to the Chicago see was reportedly engineered by Cardinal McCarrick, and who, when asked about the Viganò allegations that the Vatican knew about McCarrick’s sexual misconduct and failed to act, told an NBC reporter that Francis has more important things to worry about, like immigration and the environment.
Yeah, that’s the guy. There are only three others on the committee.
I wonder what Father Paul Kalchik
[the priest who went into hiding after angering Cupich with a 'gay flag'-burning in his Chicago parish] thinks of this news.
Some kind of fix is in. From Lifesite:
Speaking to LifeSite in October, Capuchin Fr. Thomas Weinandy, a former executive director of the USCCB’s Secretariat for Doctrine who penned an open letter to Pope Francis last year, said he isn’t sure what to think about the February meeting.
But Fr. Weinandy added: “What I do know is that if the bishops focus on clericalism, you then know it’s not going to amount to much. If they actually take up the major problem in the Church, that of active homosexuality among the clergy and bishops, then you know they’re serious. But if they hide behind clericalism, you know they’re not serious. If they’re actually willing to take up the topic of homosexually active priests and bishops, you know they’re serious.”
[What will you bet the word 'homosexual' and any of its derivatives and variants won't even get on the 'instrumentum laboris' that Cupich et al will draw up for the February summit???]
Remember, this February meeting is designed by Pope Francis to set policy for the global church on dealing with sexual abuse. It’s impossible to overstate its importance.
[Dreher goes on to quote the first part of Skojec's post about the Jesuit superior-general who had himself baptized as a Buddhist, among his many jawdropping faults majeure.]
I've fallen about three posts behind in translating Aldo Maria Valli's blog, but I will start with his latest, since it relates to the above posts.
In the church of Bergoglio:
All the right men in the right positions
Translated from
November 26, 2018
Good day to you, dear friends, and welcome to our new feature called “The right man in the right position”.
Let us start with the organizing committee for the Vatican meeting to be held in February 2019 on
“The protection of minors in the Church”.
[Ah, so! The title given is yet another indication of how un-serious this meeting will be. ‘Protection of minors’, of course, sounds very noble and highminded, except that it’s a phrase that has been much abused since the 2002 US bishops meeting which supposedly drew up a ‘charter’ for the protection of minors in the Church. Which was remarkable in that it made no provisions for protecting the minors against bishops who deliberately covered up for sex-offending priests or who, as in the case of Theodore McCarrick, was the sex offender himself. Because the phrase ‘protection of minors’ implies total protection as far as is possible, its use has become shorthand for expressing the best of intentions while not really doing very much about it by way of cleaning up the root causes of clerical and episcopal sex abuse/cover-ups.
One had presumed, given how the February summit came to be initiated almost by force majeure by a chain of faith-shaking disclosures in July and August this year, that this cleaning up of the Church’s Augean stables would be the main theme and focus of that meeting. But no, we are still on ‘protection of minors’, as if good and noble intentions alone will resolve and wipe away what 16 years of ecclesiastical negligence have continued to ‘protect’ – an admission that rampant homosexuality involving not just the clergy but many of our bishops is really at the root of the proliferation of clerical sex abuses that peaked in the 1970s-1990s and their continuing cover-up to this day.]
As you know by now, whereas Cardinal Sean O’Malley, Archbishop of Boston and president of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, is
not on the summit’s organizing committee, it is Cardinal Blasé Cupich of Chicago who represents the US Church – most hard hit by the summer disasters – on the committee.
Since it is well-known that his appointment to Chicago was sponsored by both Cardinal Maradiaga [Bergoglio’s ‘Vice pope’] and by then-Cardinal McCarrick, serial molester of seminarians and choirboy abuser, then Cupich is truly the right man in the right position!
Moreover, Catholic News Agency has reported that Cupich, along with the ex-Archbishop of Washington, DC, Cardinal Wuerl, McCarrick’s protégé and successor, had worked on an alternative ‘anti-abuse’ plan to that which had been elaborated by the other US bishops and which was, in fact, blocked by the Vatican before the US bishops’ annual fall asssembly could even open to discuss it. Yet another circumstance that makes Cupich the right man in the right position!
Also, if you will recall, shortly after the McCarrick case exploded in the media, Cupich said the pope had more important things to be concerned about - like climate change and immigration - than sex abuses in the Church.
On the other hand, O’Malley, who distanced himself from Bergoglio on his ‘non-management’ of the Chilean sex abuse issues, has obviously become the wrong man in the wrong post.
[Notwithstanding that he is still theoretically the pope’s point man for dealing with clerical sex abuses.]
Now we come to the second right man in the right position. This is the Superior-General of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), Fr Augusto sosa, who was recently elected president of the Union of Superiors-General (USG) of all the world’s Catholic religious orders, at the USG’s 91st annual assembly, held in Ariccia near Rome, on the theme “Young people, faith and discernment”
[the theme of the recent Bergoglian ‘youth synod’].
Remember that when Fr Sosa was asked about allowing Communion to unqualified remarried divorcees, he said authoritatively:
“First of all, we must begin with reflecting very well on what Jesus really said [about adultery and divorce]. At that time, there were no tape recorders.”
When he was reminded of Matthew 19,3-6 [‘What God has put together, let no man put asunder”], he answered:
“I identify myself with what Pope Francis has said. We are not placing the Gospel words in doubt, but rather treating them with discernment”. That must be why his colleagues at the USG thought he was the right man in the right position to be their president.
But Fr Sosa has a right to the distinction for three other circumstances –
- having been photographed in pryaer among Buddhist monks
[worse, he was supposed to have been ‘baptized’ a Buddhist on the occasion];
- having said that the devil really does not exist but is only a pious fiction; and
- having written about the importance of Marxist mediation in the Christian faith.
Now, the third right man in the right position. In this case, we do not know his name but we can describe the occasion thanks to the account of a friend.
We are in a church in Naples, where at the end of the Mass, the priest – before giving the final blessing – called to the altar a young man who had asked to be able to eulogize a dead friend. He does so, and at the end expresses his thanks for having been given the chance to remember ‘my husband’.
So, the third right man in the right position! To which I would like to add the priest, but I do not know if he was aware at the time he invited the young man to come up and speak who it was who would be eulogized.
Generally, there ought to be no more than three persons mentioned in this feature, but this time, I will make an exception. The fourth one would be His Excellency, Mons. José Rodríguez Carballo, secretary (#2 man) of the Congregation for the Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life
[in short, for the religious orders, male and female, in the Church].
At a recent meeting with some cloistered nuns, he addressed them with these noble words:
“Be adult women! Live like adults not as adulterers!” All of which was meant to convince the cloistered nuns
to ‘open up’ to the world, not to be afraid of recent changes imposed by the Vatican on female religious orders, and not to resist the papal instruction that monasteries and convents no longer have independence and autonomy.
I think the reasons why Mons. Carballo deserves to the fourth man on today’s list are quite evident: for the refinement of his words, for the sensitivity he demonstrated in speaking thus to cloistered nuns, and for the consistency and profundity of his arguments.
Friends, I will stop here today. Until the next installment of this feature. And please do not forget to tell us whom you would name as ‘the right man in the right position’.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 27/11/2018 05:02]