Both Marco Tosatti and Aldo Maria Valli have posted on their respective blogs the following contribution from Prof. Gian Pietro Caliari, a professor at the Accademia Dante Alighieri, who has multiple doctoral degrees from Italian and British universities in economics and international law, and is apparently a Catholic thinker, having co-authored a 1996 book entitled Il futuro dell’Europa: Le sue radice cristiane (The future of Europe: Its Christian roots) and having written about liturgy for Italy’s Rivista Liturgica. Tosatti calls the essay a spiritual call to arms, and I use here Valli’s headline for the article, for which the author himself uses the first part of the citation from St. Luke he uses to begin the essay, in its Latin form: “Venient dies quando desideratis videre unum diem…”
How we have become pagans –
and how we can become Christians again
by Gian Pietro Caliari
June 4, 2020
“The days will come when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, but you will not see it. There will be those who will say to you, ‘Look, there he is,’ [or] ‘Look, here he is.’ Do not go off, do not run in pursuit.”
(Lk 17, 22-23)
The evangelist reports this admonition from the Savior at the end of a brief conversation between Jesus and the Pharisees about the time of the coming of the Kingdom of God. after Jesus had already told them just before those lines, “Behold the Kingdom of God is within you”
(Lk 17,21).
We know that the expression “Kingdom of God” appears 122 times in the text of the New Testament and that the Fathers of the Church interpreted this expression in three dimensions.
The first – strictly Christologic – indicates precisely the
auto-basileia [one's own kingdom] of Christ himself, that is to say, the full and complete revelation of God and his Kingdom in Christ himself.
A second more mystical interpretation indicates the presence of the Truth of Christ within the innermost being of the believer himself.
And the third is ecclesiological, which indicates that the Kingdom of God is actualized in history in the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church.
Without overshadowing or ignoring the first two interpretations – but reaffirming them, on the contrary – the Second Vatican Council chose to affirm the third dimension in a dogmatic sense, as a doctrine that must be believed by whoever is truly Catholic.
The mystery of the holy Church is manifest in its very foundation. The Lord Jesus set it on its course by preaching the Good News, that is, the coming of the Kingdom of God, which, for centuries, had been promised in the Scriptures: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand”(Mk 1, 15; cf. Mt 4, 17).
In the word, in the works, and in the presence of Christ, this kingdom was clearly open to the view of men. The Word of the Lord is compared to a seed which is sown in a field (Mk 4, 14); those who hear the Word with faith and become part of the little flock of Christ (Lk 12, 32) have received the Kingdom itself. Then, by its own power the seed sprouts and grows until harvest time (Mk. 4, 26-29).
The Miracles of Jesus also confirm that the Kingdom has already arrived on earth: “If I cast out devils by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you “ (Lk 11, 20; cf. Mt 12, 28). Before all things, however, the Kingdom is clearly visible in the very Person of Christ, the Son of God and the Son of Man, who came “to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many” (Mk 10, 45). When Jesus, who had suffered the death of the cross for mankind, had risen, He appeared as the one constituted as Lord, Christ and eternal Priest (cf. Acts 2, 36; Heb 5, 6; 7, 17-21) and He poured out on His disciples the Spirit promised by the Father (cf. Acts 2, 33).
From this source the Church, equipped with the gifts of its Founder and faithfully guarding His precepts of charity, humility and self-sacrifice, receives the mission to proclaim and to spread among all peoples the Kingdom of Christ and of God and to be, on earth, the initial budding forth of that kingdom. While it slowly grows, the Church strains toward the completed Kingdom and, with all its strength, hopes and desires to be united in glory with its King. (Lumen gentium, 5)
This very choice was prophetic because it seems as though someone had foreseen that the time of “Christ, yes, the Church, no” would soon be followed by something even more tragic, when the slogan would be “Not even Christ and his Kingdom, No”.
In short, the time of a return to paganism or of neo-paganism within the Church herself, as the central nucleus of contemporary preaching!
In the winter of 1958 – that’s right, 1958 – a young priest and theologian wrote:
The image of the modern Church is characterized essentially by the fact that it has become and is becoming ever more a Church of pagans in a completely new way: no longer, as originally, a Church of pagans who had turned Christians, but rather a Church of pagans who still call themselves Christian but who have really become pagans for some time. Paganism today resides in the Church herself, and this is really the characteristic of the Church in our day as it is of the new paganism. It is paganism in the Church, and a Church inhabited in its core by paganism. [Joseph Ratzinger, “Die neuen Heiden und die Kirche” (The new pagans and the Church), Hochland, LV, 51, 1958-1959, p.1)]
What did that young theologian already see in the second half of the last century? To understand him, we must be clear about what we mean by modern paganism or neo-paganism.
According to Doniger and Eliade, it comprises “diverse spiritual movements which, although distinguishing themselves from the magic rituals of the ancient pagans, revive authentic pantheons and rituals from ancient cultures, especially through an approach that is deliberately eclectic and reconstructionist, and through a particularly contemplative and celebratory attitude”
(Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of World Religions, Merriam-Webster, 2000, pp. 794-795).
More descriptive and precise is the definition given by the Italian philosopher Salvatore Natoli,for whom although the new paganism is a movement with distinct theological, cosmological and anthropological visions, but a common and precise approach that is naturalistic, humanistic and relativistic
(cfr. La salvezza senza fede (Salvation without faith), Torino, 2007).
Many Catholics, rightly so, were scandalized and enraged when they had to attend (or witness on TV) a disgusting satanic ritual of priests and nuns happily prostrating themselves in an act of apostatic adoration of the Pachamama and a phallic idol in the Vatican Gardens and in the presence of the Successor of Peter and Vicar of Christ.
[Well, as of Jan 1, 2020, those titles have been relegated to mere historical footnotes that should not detract from what supreme narcissist Jorge Mario Bergoglio appears to think is all the identification he needs – his name, plain and simple, unencumbered by references to Christ and Peter or the Catholic Church for that matter.]
Or to the lugubrious procession of bishops who, ignoring that as bishops , they are successors to the apostles, carried these same idolatrous effigies on their shoulders from the Altar of the Confession at St. Peter’s Basilica to the Synod Hall.
But this was not just about Amazonian folklore!
Too many Catholics, wrongly, have not been indignant at all about the constantly hammered, spreading and ever more dishonest preaching that has all but expunged, if not altogether excluded, the announcement of Christ and his Kingdom, in order to impose a neo-pagan dogma whose content is shamelessly naturalistic, humanistic and relativistic.
Yet this, it appears, is the central nucleus of the ‘outgoing Church’ and of ‘going beyond the Church’ by avoiding’ any self-referentiality’ in the name of ‘integral ecologism’, of ‘neo-humanism’, of the ‘concrete situation’, and of ‘universal brotherhood’, all of which must be integral [to each other]. Simply replace ‘integral’ with dogmatic, and the game is over.
What then must the Catholic do who does not wish to fall into the trap of those who neo-paganistically point to ”Look at this!’ And “Look at that!”? Certainly, “do not go there, do not follow them”
(Lk 17, 23). But exactly how, concretely?
Three elements appear to be essential.
Before everything else, the recovery of liturgical sacredness in the face of the banalization of the Sacrum of God himself, the Most Holy Trinity. Because it is this banalization, precisely, that has shown the total failure of the post-Vatican II liturgical reform.
“In fact, the foundation of man’s union with God is the full distinction between man and God. That is why Christian Revelation spells out the fullness of this union, which places the union between God and man starting with the distinction between God and man. The redemptive act is a unique action, by Chtist alone: yet an inter-trinitary action in which the Son offers his humanity and that of the world in sacrifice to the Father in an act of absolute adoration. It is here alone that the trinitarian Mystery is manifested in all its truth”
(G. Baget Bozzo, The Anti-Christ: The prince of the world works out of small fissures in history, Milan, 2001, p. 46).
Indeed, it is in the liturgy that the gravest and most lethal blow has been inflicted on the faith and the Catholic people, in the sense of liturgy’s original and most essential dimension as
Mysterion,
Sacrum.
Then, there is non-conformism as an essential dimension of the Catholic faith:
“Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect” (Romans 12,2).
This admonition by the Apostle to the Gentiles was commented on by the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger:
“We must rediscover the courage of non-conformism in the face of the tendencies of the opulent world. Instead of following the spirit of the times, it must be we ourselves to brand that spirit with evangelical austerity. We have lost the sense that Christians cannot live as any others live. The stupid opinion according to which a specific Christian morality does not exist is an expression particularly driven by the loss of a basic concept: the difference between a Christian and the models of the world.” (V. Messori, The Ratzinger Report, 1985. P. 64)
This means the necessary rediscovery of Catholic identity, nourished by the simple but radical joy of having encountered He who alone is ‘the way, the truth and the life’
(Jn 14,6), but also by the humble pride of the Catholic Church continuing to be “the homeland of the soul” for those who are “exhausted and oppressed” by the increasingly pervasive and deadly oppression of the dominant neo-paganism.
To rediscover, therefore, the martyrologic-missionary characteristic of our faith, without unfounded and suspicious proselytism, which is itself integral and therefore, dogmatic.
Ratzinger continued in the interview book with Messori:
“The atheist culture of the modern West continues to live thanks to freedom from fear of the devil inherent in Christianity. But if Christ’s redemptive light should be extinguished, then despite all its knowledge and all its technology, the world will fall back into terror and desperation. There are already signs of the return of these obscure forces, while Satanic cults continue to grow in the secularized world (V Messori, op.cit. p. 79).
In short, it is not enough to be a good neighbor to others in the name of an integral and charitable neo-humanitarianism, stuffed with
gaudium and
laetitia. Paul VI wrote,
“These will always be insufficient, because even the most beautiful testimony will show itself impotent in time, if it is not enlightened, justified – what Peter called ‘give reason for your hope’ – expressed by a clear and unequivocal announcement of the Lord Jesus… There is no true evangelization if the name, the teaching, the life, the promises, the Kingdom, the mystery, of Jesus of Nazareth, Son of God, are not proclaimed” (Evangelii Nuntiandi, 22).
[Something, however, that Bergoglio, who professes to be a follower of Paul VI, has chosen to completely ignore in his constant proselytizing for a single world religion that bears the characteristics of both Freemasonry and the appalling United Nations, and in which he shamelessly quashes Christianity along with all other world religions and faiths.]
In the end, it comes down to three apparently banal points for reflection. Yet, it would appear that we are not certain ourselves that they would suffice to avoid "the abomination of desolation, of which the Prophet Daniel spoke”
(Mt 24,15).
Of one thing, we are nonetheless certain – and these are not themes for hossanizing, festive masses, but sought after by others – that is, a way to a
parvulus grex, that little flock that is strong, joyful and proud of its Lord who continues to encourage it to resist the world and invites it not to despair: “Do not be afraid any longer, little flock, for your Father is pleased to give you the kingdom” (Lk 12,32).
[i.e., Cardinal Ratzinger's 'creative minorities' who would seem to be the immediate future of the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church.]
Similar neopagan hypotheses have obviously relaxed missionary tension. Some have started to ask themselves: “Why ‘disturb’ non-Christians inducing them to baptism and faith in Christ, seeing that their religion is their way of salvation in their culture, in their part of the world?” Forgetting in this way the link that the New Testament establishes between salvation and truth - knowledge of which, as Jesus explicitly affirms, will make us free, and therefore saved.
Or, as St. Paul says,
“God our savior wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2, 4-7).
That is how much we must continue to announce Jesus - humbly but forcefully – to the world today, following the committed example of the generations which have preceded us in the faith.
One of my regrets about the past months I was absent from the Forum is having had to forgo translating and therefore transmitting to Forum readers the always remarkable and tireless reportage-commentary by Aldo Maria Valli on the state of the Church today under Bergoglio. There is no doubt he has become the foremost lay voice in the Church today who has been documenting and commenting on practically every new anti-Church initiative by the reigning pope. I do not think there has been any writer more proactive in this kind of genuinely Catholic documentation of the state of the Church. He now writes up to four different posts on his daily blog. In addition to which, he has been turning out books to reinforce his witness. Here are four of his latest books:
From left:
1)
Non avrai altro Dio (Thou shalt have no other God)
Reflections on the Abu Dhabi Declaration
2)
Gli strani casi (Strange cases)
Surprising and unexpected stories of lived faith
3)
Le due chiese (The two churches)
The synod on the Amazon and Catholics in conflict
4)
'Non abbandonarci alla tentazione' (Do not abandon us to
temptation) - in which he collects reflections
on the new Bergoglio-approved translation of the 'Our Father'
for Italian missals
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 09/06/2020 19:09]