Claustrofobia: Contemplative life and its destruction.[The Italian title plays on the word 'instructions' (istruzioni) referring to the pope's new decrees radically changing the nature of the cloistered orders, whereby the insertion
of the letter 'd' before istruzioni, changes the word to distruzioni (destruction).
Cloistered convents:
A silent extermination underway
thanks to 2 new papal decrees
January 25, 2019
Dear friends, my new book has just been published. Entitled
Claustrofobia. La vita contemplativa e le sue (d)istruzioni, (Claustrophobia: Contemplative life and its destruction), it is published by Chorabooks and dedicated to the dangers which cloistered orders are facing because of new Vatican dispositions.
[Valli goes on to quote from the publisher’s blurb, which he obviously wrote for them. Here is the translation of the blurb that I posted a couple of days ago, posted on the preceding page of this thread:]
A life of prayer, contemplating the divine mysteries and in reparation for the sins of the world, is a great treasure which has been conserved in convents and monasteries that have lasted centuries. But today it is in great danger. Not from an exterenal attack but by the initiative of the Catholic hierarchy at its summit.
The attack comes from Pope Frnacis's Apostolic Constitution Vultum Dei quaerere and the instructions for its application, Cor orans, a normative mechanism that threatens the autonomy of monasteries, weakens their independence, and with the pretext of aggiornamento (updating) and 'correct formation', questions the very idea of isolation and the cloistered life.
- Why this sudden 'claustrophobia' on the part of the Vatican?
- Why must it dilute the choice of those who decide to consecrate their lives to prayer behind cloisters?
One finds behind this decision an idea of spirituality which is totally horizontal - everything played out in a way that is incapable of seeing the beauty and grandeur of a relationship that is exclusively with God. It is a most serious situation which is clearly denounced in the book.
Following is the Introduction to the book, written by a cloistered nun who prefers to remain anonymous.
The last battle
by ‘A cloistered nun’
I got to meet Aldo Maria Valli in Rome, thanks to a common friend, and the meeting confirmed the positive impression I got from reading his latest books and the articles published on his blog - in which he succeeds to give voice to the sentiments and disorientation that we nuns, as also many other Catholics, are seeking to focalize internally.
In Valli’s blog, we find a real love for the Church and for the truth, that ‘precious pearl’ spoken of in the Gospel, for which one is ready to sell everything. It is along this line and perspective that the author’s interest has turned to us, cloistered nuns, and the latest papal documents that mean to impose a new ‘discipline’ on contemplative life which has a millenary tradition in the Catholic Church.
The very specific way of life that is ours as cloistered nuns is not immediately understandable to contemporary sensibility: in a way, it brings us the spirituality of the desert, where God leads his beloved spouse to speak to her, heart to heart, far from every creature that could distract her from him. Up till now, the cloister has been the sign of an exclusive encounter with God, in isolation from the world, in order to affirm the indispensable importance of seeking God, of the primacy of God.
In this sense, Valli’s new book inspires reflection. Indeed, it is permeated by one question: WHY?
- Why tamper with such a precious treasure, and one that has worked for a thousand years?
- What is at stake in the game that I being played here?
- What are the true reasons for this pope’s moves against traditional contemplative life?
This topic is different from those usually treated by the author, but no one who reads him can miss the red thread that unites all the topics he writes about: love for the Church and love for the truth. On our part, suffering from the assaults that have been launched against the faith and the Church – which we all know about – becomes even more intense when facing the apparent intention to destroy the monasteries and convents as they have existed so far in the Church. It is the last fortress which the Enemy targets, the last bulwark in which prayer still constitutes an act of resistance, in which lives are consecrated (‘wasted’ in the view of some) for no other reason than to praise God.
With what dismay we cloistered nuns find ourselves in this battle, carried out against us with arrogance, threats and psychological coercion! The worse for being carried out in the silence and hiddenness of convents. It is a silent extermination of monasticism, not just spiritually and culturally, but even materially (through controlling the assets of all convents). This is the willful extermination of a millenary structure that has survived virtually intact to our day.
And that is the true purpose of these two documents concerning our complex and delicate reality: Under a slogan that obsessively calls on us to ‘avoid isolation’ [which is ridiculous when isolation is the necessary condition for the cloistered life], one sees the intention to create a new ‘monasticism’ in which all nuns are to be placed under identical forms of aggiornamento (updating) and indoctrination, up to and including changing the rules that until now have been specific to each order. [The papal decrees violate the basic right of each order to make its own rules based on its specific charism.]
It is a silent extermination, because even within the church herself – considering that the monastic vocations are always carried out hidden from the world – this epochal change in the structure of convents is taking place and is being imposed without public awareness and to the general disattention of public opinion.
We must proceed to carry out this epochal change, we are told from ‘on high’, in order to “update the millenary contemplative life” – and it must be done quickly, by May 2019!
- WHY? Why such haste? Why this obsession?
- How could it be possible to structurally ‘update’ monastic life with its millennial history in just a few months? [And in dozens of orders around the world!]
- And why impose such radical changes through an ‘instruction’, which is the lowest grade among all the document categories of the Roman curia?
Perhaps jurists will be able to cite exceptions on the basis of law, though the instructions forbid any form of recourse, which is an impediment characteristic of dictatorial regimes in which forced mass re-education is unconditionally imposed.
In this context, and Aldo Maria Valli knows it well, whoever seeks to say something out of tune with the choir is exposed to public ridicule and accused of working for blind conservatism against ‘rightful renewal’. This is the reaction met by those convents which, seeking to ask dispensation from the instruction, are now the targets of church institutions [leading the charge being the very Congregation in charge of religious life] and their indispensable progressivisits.
And yet we must do battle. It is far from the monastic temperament to be a protagonist, to be out in the open even if it is in a good cause. But nothing keeps us from supporting whoever gets down to the arena in defense of Truth.
So we welcome this small but precious new book by Valli, who is an expert connoisseur of the Catholic world and a tried and tested Vaticanista, who gives voice in this book to us who have no public voice by the nature of our vocation, and who is seeking to have our voice heard by a larger public, a public which must be sensitized to the fact that everyone who is baptized is challenged by this attempt to destroy not just Church history and traditions but the Church itself.
The world more than ever needs monasticism, as the Church received it from its holy founders and as so many cloistered nuns and monks have lived it till now, for the benefit of the entire Church. We need cloistered nuns and their convents. They are hidden but they are authentic bulwarks of faith and prayer. We need to keep breathing the air of freshness that is found in the ‘desert’ of these places close to God.
Valli’s book includes three articles previously published on his blog that raised ample discussion. But it also includes the dismaying account of a meeting called by the Congregation for religious orders with cloistered nuns from all over the world – an assembly that raised many disquieting questions which even the reader without any particular knowledge of cloistered life will stop to reflect upon.
The new documents affecting cloistered life attempt to treat all monasteries at the same level – those that have always proved vital, and those with problematic situations. And in order to enforce this, impositive tones are used, with expressions such as "demanding" and "deferring to the Holy See", used meticulously in a multiplication of provisions. Everything about this Vatican initiative had the atmosphere of control, not of respect.
It is clear that the final battle has opened up, a particularly insidious and decisive battle, because it is aimed at the conquest and destruction of a last fortress. It will require commitment and courage from us, but also increasingly strong and resolute prayer. With the aim of allowing those who have consecrated their lives in claustral isolation to God to continue doing what we have always done, the unum necessarium – to occupy ourselves only with God, the Supreme Beloved.
On to another kind of attempted extermination....
Silencing Catholic speech
by David Carlin
FRIDAY, JANUARY 25, 2019
January 25, 2019
Ideological defenders of homosexuality argue that all disapproval of homosexual conduct arises from “homophobia” and that all speech against homosexuality is, therefore, “hate speech.” In the United States, in recent decades, this campaign against homophobic hate speech has been very effective. Almost never nowadays does anybody dare to utter a public word of disapproval against homosexuality.
What about the Catholic Church? Has the homosexualist campaign against “hate speech” had the effect of silencing the Church, of preventing it from communicating its ancient teaching that homosexual sodomy is sinful?
If my anecdotal information is reliable, it is a rare priest who gets into the pulpit at a weekend Mass and reminds his parishioners that homosexual conduct is seriously sinful. In some cases, probably not many, this silence on the part of priests is the result of their disagreement with Church teaching on the subject.
But in most cases, their silence is likely just a matter of discretion (the kind of “discretion” that is, as Falstaff says, the better part of valor). Why upset parishioners, many of whom disagree with the Church teaching on homosexuality, and not a few of whom have friends or family members who are gay or lesbian? Let sleeping dogs lie.
“Besides,” the priest can say to himself every time he decides not to preach on this touchy topic, “everybody knows what the Church teaching is. No need for me to remind them.” [Exactly what Jorge Bergoglio said, as pope, regarding what the Catechism teaches about homosexuality and its practie!]
This is true to a certain extent. The Catholic Church is famous for its super-strict sexual ethic, according to which the only morally legitimate sex is that which takes place between husband and wife without contraception and within the context of monogamous marriage.
If you know that, then you know that the Church condemns homosexual conduct. Leaving aside the fact that some people don’t actually know this (it’s amazing what perfectly obvious things some people don’t know), there is a distinction between believing something in the abstract and actually believing it.
Take, for example, another element of the Catholic sexual ethic: the teaching that marital contraception is a serious sin. “Everybody knows” in an abstract way that this is what the Church teaches, but not many American Catholics think this is what the Church actually believes. Why not?
Because for a half-century, ever since Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the traditional Church teaching on this topic in his encyclical Humanae Vitae, parish priests have pretty much left the topic of contraception alone.
The priest knows that the younger married couples in his parish (if he’s lucky enough, in many places, to have any younger couples) are almost certainly practicing contraception, or are getting ready to practice it as soon as they achieve their desired quota of children; and he knows that many of his older parishioner couples used to practice it when the wife was still young enough to get pregnant.
So it is not a sin that is rare and almost unheard-of among his parishioners, like murder or bank robbery. To sermonize against murder or bank robbery would indeed be a waste of time.
But to sermonize against contraception would be to call the attention of parishioners to a sin commonly committed in the parish. Yet for the priest to sermonize against contraception would be to antagonize parishioners and make himself unpopular. Better, then, to remain silent on the topic.
But this silence, when it persists year after year, decade after decade, pastor after pastor,
gradually persuades the average person in the pews that the Church isn’t truly serious when it says that marital contraception is a serious sin. The Church must think that marital contraception is a minor sin or perhaps not a sin at all.
William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), often called “the father of American Unitarianism,” once wrote that Calvinism went into decline in and around Boston, not because Congre
gational ministers sermonized against Calvinist doctrines, but because they no longer preached in support of these doctrines.
The anti-Calvinists didn’t preach against the doctrines of predestination, total depravity, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, etc. They just remained silent about these matters. And then one day the best people in Boston woke up and realized that they were no longer orthodox Christians and had become Unitarians.
Something not very different from this is happening in American Catholicism with regard to homosexual behavior (not to mention other elements of Catholic sexual ethics).
Perhaps no priest is preaching against the traditional Catholic teaching. But not many are preaching in support of it either. As a consequence, the moral disapproval of homosexual conduct that should be found and used to be found in the hearts and minds of Catholics is withering away.
And so the answer to the question I asked above – “Has the homosexualist effort to silence all criticism of homosexual behavior been effective among American Catholic priests?” – is a definite: YES.
The success of this “let’s silence the Catholic Church” campaign imposes, it seems to me, a fourfold obligation upon Catholic bishops and priests to preach vigorously against homosexual conduct. This must be done:
(1) in order that the Catholic moral doctrine regarding homosexuality not fade away;
(2) in order to say in no uncertain terms to pro-gay ideologues and their anti-Christianity allies, “You will not silence us on this or any other Christian topic”;
(3) in order to give encouragement to faithful Catholics, many of whom sometimes fear that the Church is about to discard or water-down this element and other elements of the Catholic faith. And
(4) and to give encouragement to non-Catholic Christians who, whatever their disagreements with Rome, look to the Catholic Church as Christianity’s Rock of Gibraltar.
Catholics and everybody else, both friend and foe, must be assured that the Catholic Church is not about to walk down the path that has been trod by liberal Protestant churches; that is, it is not about to discard one element after another of Christianity, thereby drawing closer and closer to atheism.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 28/01/2019 05:52]