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Post: 14.459 | Registrato il: 28/08/2005
Registrato il: 20/01/2009 | Administratore | Utente Gold | |
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Sorry for the enforced AWOL - I have had an extreme outbreak of shingles with all the complications attendant to it, and I look on it
as my Advent penance. However, the day I woke up to find out I had it (I didn't recognize warning signs in the past few days that had
me alarmed instead about an imminent heart attack), the first news that popped on my android after I turned on Google Chrome
was an account of the following prayer said by the pope on his visit this year to pay homage to the Immacolata- except
that the reporting agency started with the paragraph I have purpled below. In fairness to the pope, I am posting the entire
prayer for the record:
SOLEMNITY OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY
Act of Veneration to the Immaculate in Piazza di Spagna
Prayer of the Holy Father Francis
Saturday, December 8th 2018
Immaculate Mother,
on the day of your feast, so dear to the Christian people,
I come to pay you homage in the heart of Rome.
In my heart I bring the faithful of this Church
and all those who live in this city, especially the sick
and how many for different situations are more difficult to move forward.
First of all we want to thank you
for the maternal care with which we accompany our journey:
how many times we hear with tears in our eyes
from those who have experienced your intercession,
the graces that you ask for us for your Son Jesus!
I also think of an ordinary grace you give to the people who live in Rome:
that of facing the inconveniences of daily life with patience.
But for this we ask you the strength not to resign, indeed,
to do each day their own part to improve things,
because the care of everyone makes Rome more beautiful and livable for everyone;
because the duty well done by everyone assures everyone's rights.
And thinking of the common good of this city,
we pray for those who hold roles of greater responsibility:
get for them wisdom, foresight, spirit of service and collaboration.
Holy Virgin,
I would like to entrust you especially to the priests of this Diocese:
the parish priests, the vice-priests, the elderly priests who with the heart of shepherds
continue to work for the people of God,
the many priests students from all over the world who collaborate in the parishes.
For all of them I ask you the sweet joy of evangelizing
and the gift of being fathers, close to the people, merciful.
To you, a woman consecrated to God, I entrust consecrated women in religious life and in secular life,
that thanks to God in Rome there are many, more than in any other city in the world,
and they form a beautiful mosaic of nationalities and cultures.
I ask you for the joy of being, like you, spouses and mothers,
fruitful in prayer, in charity, in compassion.
O Mother of Jesus,
one last thing I ask you, in this Advent time,
thinking of the days when you and Joseph were anxious
for the imminent birth of your child,
worried because there was a census and you also had to leave your country, Nazareth, and go to Bethlehem ...
You know, Mother, what it means to bring life into the womb
and feeling around indifference, rejection, sometimes contempt.
This is why I ask you to stay close to families today
in Rome, in Italy, there are similar situations in the whole world,
because they are not abandoned to themselves, but protected in their rights,
human rights that come before any legitimate need.
O Mary Immaculate,
dawn of hope on the horizon of humanity,
watch over this city,
on homes, schools, offices, shops,
on factories, hospitals, prisons;
nowhere is it lacking what Rome has most precious,
and which preserves the testament of Jesus for the whole world:
"Love one another as I have loved you" (cf. Jn 13:34).
Amen.
For days now, I have been awaiting any reaction at all to that purpled passage which has so many outrageous statements in it - not that he is making them for the first time,
but never before as a public prayer! - but nada, niente, zip, zero. Have we reached a point where we can afford to ignore the now-habitual liberties this pope takes with truth, especially Gospel Truth - and therefore with the Word of God, and just let it go by without comment?
Let me fisk that passage:
"thinking of the days when you and Joseph were anxious
for the imminent birth of your child,
worried because there was a census and you also had to leave your country, Nazareth, and go to Bethlehem..."
[1) Why would the census worry them? They were dutiful subjects of Rome, following an imperial edict like all their fellow citizens of Roman Palestine to register themselves in the city of their ancestry.
2) Nazareth was not a country, just a rural village in Galilee, like Bethlehem was a village in Judea, not far from Jerusalem. Galiee and Judea were both regions of Roman Palestine which was not much bigger then as Israel is now.
3) As observant Jews, both Mary and Joseph would have had many occasions to have gone up to Jerusalem for the obligatory annual festive visits to the Temple, at least at Passover. So the trip would not have been a particular challenge, except that Mary was approaching her term - but she wouldn't have been the first or only pregnant woman who had to make such a trip at the time.
4) Besides, both she and Joseph, who had both been the object of angelic visits and messages about the child she bore, must have had some internal assurance that God would provide for its safe and healthy delivery in order to fulfill the mission he had. And in the unlikely event they did not have that internal assurance, then surely they knew how to pray that everything might go well.]
""You know, Mother, what it means to bring life into the womb
and feeling around indifference, rejection, sometimes contempt."
[1) Nowhere in the Gospel texts do I recall any line that says the Holy Family felt 'indifference, rejection and sometimes contempt' from their own people at any time. (Jesus during his public ministry, yes, many times. But before his final Passion, he drew so many followers that those in authority were threatened by the political potential his following meant.) To all except the shepherds on Christmas Day and to the Magi, and eight days later, to Simeon and Anna in the temple [and in a negative way, to Herod and his child killers], the Holy Family were just ordinary Galileans-next-door to everybody else.
2) Jesus would never have been able to spend the first thirty years of his life relatively unnoticed otherwise.
3) If the pope refers to the line in Luke that says 'There was no room at the inn', it meant neither indifference nor rejection, much less contempt. Everyone who has researched what conditions were like in Bethlehem at that census time (from all accounts, no bigger than it is today, and probably much smaller) says it simply meant the inns were all 'fully booked' and there were no lodgings to be had appropriate for a woman about to deliver a child.
One story tells us that it was an innkeeper who told Joseph that he could use the cave which his sheep and oxen used as a stable, an advice he took. It is not difficult to imagine that Mary and Joseph, both rural folk, came prepared for the delivery in terms of clothing and 'swaddling clothes' and that Joseph would have known how to make the best of the cave with the hay and manger.
4) Finally, was it not literally providential - it was meant to be - that there should be 'no room at the inn' in order that Jesus would be born as he was - in a manger inside a stable-cave - to underscore God's message that nothing was too humble a human beginning for the baby who would be the Savior and Redeemer of the world, of which he had been King, consubstantial with the Father, from all eternity?]
"This is why I ask you to stay close to families today
in Rome, in Italy, there are similar situations in the whole world,
because they are not abandoned to themselves, but protected in their rights,
human rights that come before any legitimate need.
How outrageous of this pope to insert his political agenda into the prayer - for what he said above is exactly the gist of the recent United Nations “Global Compact for safe, orderly and regular migration” (GCM), which the Vatican has been touting and promoting. In a recent article, L'Osservatore Romano reported that 160 nations have signed up on the GCM, whereas the U.S., Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Italy, Austria, Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Australia, and Israel, have not.
https://www.breitbart.com/immigration/2018/12/11/vatican-continues-full-court-press-for-u-n-immigration-program/
'The human rights of migrants come before any legitimate need'??? What human rights? Their right to migrate wherever they want to regardless of the laws of the host countries? Are these laws - immigration laws have always been considered a legitimate right of every sovereign country for its own protection and for the good of its citizens - the 'legitimate need' that the pope considers should be relegated in favor of the unconditional 'right' to migrate anywhere???
The United Nations - its handful of ultraliberal big powers/sponsors and its majority of herd-mentality countries - is acting like the World Parliament it was never supposed to be. It was never intended to override the sovereignty of individual nations other than for purposes of peacekeeping in times of open war. It cannot unilaterally tell sovereign nations they cannot enforce reasonable immigration laws and minimize unwanted mass migration when their national resources can barely meet the basic needs of their neediest citizens.
The Vatican serving as UN handmaiden and PR tout for this outrageous trampling over national sovereignth is not surprising, of course, because this pope more than a year ago simply interfered with the internal affairs of a sovereign international institution, the Knights of Malta, and essentially trampled shamelessly over its sovereignty so that it now is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bergoglio Vatican, Inc.
P.S. I must note that on December 10, Antonio Socci's blog post for Libero was entitled "The 'Migrant Christ' theorized by the church of Bergoglio has nothing to do with the Jesus of the Gospels: Here is the true story" - which he apparently wrote without knowing about the December 8 prayer.
But the point he makes is all the same: that this pope and his followers will not hesitate to twist Scriptures and the Gospel to promote their self-serving egotistical and political ends.
1. No man of good will would oppose any action that promotes the social good in terms of the greatest good for the greatest number - not in terms of preferential treatment for a select aggrupation of individuals who are not all or even largely driven by the material and security needs that disadvantaged persons experience everywhere. That is why reasonable immigration laws exist in order to help those who are truly most in need.
2. Jorge Bergoglio's twisted priorities militate against any sympathy for his largely pro-Muslim initiatives. Has he shown any similar initiative at all to come to the aid of persecuted Christians in many parts of the world? And yet he is supposed to be the number-one Christian leader in the world. Why be so pro-Muslim and so neutral to Christians? It's like asking why he has been, in his own way, persecuting Catholics who think and act as well-catechised and well-raised Catholics do.
Do we need more than this to define how anti-Catholic this pope really is? Surely that is the most tragic paradox for the Church of Christ at this start of the third millennium.
I will post a translation of Socci's article as soon as I can.
PPS - BTW, that part of the prayer where JMB refers to consecrated women is just too hypocritical after his two papal decrees that have virtually gutted the monasticism out of female religious orders! I still owe a translation of Aldo Maria Valli's account of the Bergogliac tirade that his two top men at the congregation in charge of religious orders gave to hapless cloistered nuns during a 'forced' excursion into the world at the Vatican recently.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/12/2018 05:13] |