Cardinals Burke and Brandmüller:
‘End the Conspiracy of Silence’
February 19, 2019
Cardinal Raymond Burke and Cardinal Walter Brandmüller have written an open letter to the presidents of bishops’ conferences attending this week’s Vatican summit on clerical sex abuse, calling on them to end their silence and return to upholding the divine and natural law.
In the letter released Feb. 19, they argue that the abuse crisis is only part of a wider and much deeper problem that owes itself to a society that openly calls into question an absolute moral law, and Church leaders who have “gone away from the truth of the Gospel.”
“A decisive act now is urgent and necessary,” the cardinals say, and call for an end to the “plague of the homosexual agenda” in the Church, organized networks of protection, and a “climate of complicity and a conspiracy of silence.”
In comments to the media on the open letter, Cardinal Burke said: “Given the incontrovertible state of confusion and error in the Church regarding the most fundamental moral questions, pastors of souls must raise their voices to defend the teaching of Christ and His Church. “Silence is cooperation with the ever-spreading confusion and division which is bringing serious harm to many souls,” he added.
[The rest of the blog quotes from the Open Letter so I am omitting it as we have the full text.]
Two Cardinals raise their ‘dubia’
on the coming abuse summit
Translated from
As late as a month ago, the double objective of the summit which the pope has called on February 21-24 with the heads of the Catholic hierarchy worldwide was
‘the protection of minors and vulnerable adults’, as the pope himself wrote in his ‘Letter to the People of God’
[I cringe at that tile given by the pope to a perfunctory document of unutterably pompous emptiness!] dated August 20, 2018.
A Page One editorial in
L’Ossevratore Romano on January 11, 2019 by Andrea Tornielli, editorial director of all Vatican media and spokesman of the pope, also said so in it very title:
“An encounter among pastors aimed at concreteness: Towards the meeting on the subject of the protection of minors and vulnerable adults”.
But since then, ‘vulnerable adults’ have disappeared from the official agenda of the summit. And with them, the question
of homosexual abuses on non-minors, even if statistically these make up the majority of clerical sex abuses.
In the well-attended news conference on February 18 to present toe summit,
Cardinal Blasé Cupich, who heads its organizing committee, explicitly denied that homosexuality if a cause of clerical sex abuses, even after he boasted that the reduction of these abuses in the USA in recent years was also the result of better screening of candidates applying for seminaries, by excluding all those who appeared to be ‘risks’.
[At least Cupich was forced to say the H word, which is supposed to be taboo at the Vatican and certainly at this summit.]
It is a fact that not only the question of homosexuality in the clergy but the very word homosexuality itself is ‘banned’ from use, even in the abundant mass of information that the Vatican has made available to the world media.
The reduction of the summit’s objective to simply ‘the protection of minors’ is evident in the home page (left), of the late-appearing website for the summit, strangely labelled
pbc2019.com, for which I have not been able to figure out what pbc stands for, not even by googling; as well as the official program (right). One might add to the evidence that the
Vatican meant this summit to be nothing but a sanctimonious exercise proclaiming the Bergoglio pontificate's concern over protecting minors - and letting evil priests
and bishops be - is the following headline in the Jesuit journal La Civilta Cattolica in December 2018 for an article by Fr. feerico Lombardi, SJ: "Towards the bishops' meeting
on the protection of minors"
[By the way, Lombardi, who is not even a bishop, was inexplicably named by Bergoglio to be the moderator of the bishops'
summit; he has not even been particularly involved in the fight against clerical sex abuse. Maybe the fact that he is
president of the Fondazione Vaticana Joseph Ratzinger/Benedetto XVI? In order to somehow associate this summit with
the Emeritus Pope? Who knows?]
Taking out the question of homosexuality from the summit agenda was clearly the decision of Pope Francis, who has never hidden the fact that he is more than convinced that
the entire clerical sex abuse problem is not about sex abuse but about the abuse of power, and that it does not have to do with individuals but with caste, the priestly caste. [And there we have the pope's own declaration of the state of denial that he and his followers blithely live in, and if you are looking for shameless hypocrisy, there it is - articulated by the supposed Vicar of Christ, no less.]
Everything, he says, boils down to ‘clericalism’ – which few Catholics buy.
Yet it is not the first time that this pope gives rise to ‘dubia’ over the doctrine, morality and pastoral praxis that he teaches. Who can forget the DUBIA raised by Four Cardinals after the publication of Amoris Laetitia, to which the pope never responded?
[He never responds to questions which, if he answered honestly, would amount to self-incrimination. And obviously, he does not wish to lie more than he already is doing.]
Now, the two surviving cardinals of the original four, Walter Brandmueller of Germany and Raymond Leo Burke of the USA, have decided to send an open letter to all the bishops who will be taking part in the pope’s summit.
It is a heartfelt call asking their fellow bishops not to remain silent on 'the plague of the homosexual agenda' that pervades the Church, which they consider an abandonment of the truth of the Gospel and therefore also at the root of the present crisis of faith.
We shall see if their appeal will be heard at all in the summit.
As Father Z and other Catholic commentators noted when the pope announced the dates for his sex abuse (er, protection of minors) summit last October, it will end on the reast of St. Peter Damian. Were Bergoglio and his advisers even aware of that? Is it not providential???
During the Rome 'summit', we shall celebrate
the Feast of St Peter Damian, Doctor of the Church
[and scourge of clergy committing sex offenses]
February 19, 2019
Speaking of homosexuality, during the Rome “summit”, on 23 February, we will celebrate the feast of St Peter Damian (d 1072), Doctor of the Church.
St. Peter was a spectacular theologian and reformer. One of his hardest hitting works is the
Liber Gomorrhianus (The Book of Gomorrah), which blasts, among other sins, pederasty and homosexuality in the clergy.
Let’s just say that St Peter addresses the problem through language that is atypical these days. He conveys his, and God’s, thoughts on the matter without the cowering equivocations in which we are lately so mired.
That is the real topic that the “summit” in Rome ought to be tackling head on. And everyone knows it.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/02/2019 17:50]