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BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Ultimo Aggiornamento: 23/08/2021 11:16
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ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI







Tuesday, June 18, Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

Venerable MATT TALBOT (Ireland, 1856-1923), Ex-Alcoholic, Lay Franciscan
Born in Dublin to a working-class family, with a father and brothers who were heavy drinkers, Matt himself
became an alcoholic when he started work at 15 as a messenger for a liquor merchant. He remained an active
alcoholic until he was about 30. One day, he decided to take 'the pledge' to renounce drinking for three months,
while doing penance and going to daily Mass. He renewed the pledge every three months, and eventually for life.
He joined the Franciscan lay order in 1890, read widely under the guidance of a spiritual adviser from a Dublin
college, worked hard as an unskilled construction laborer, and shared his wages with needier persons. He died
of a heart attack on his way to Mass one day. Under his clothes, they found a chain around his waist and cords
around his arms and legs, which he apparently wore as an act of mortification. His story became widely known
and was used by the Church and civic groups to promote temperance among the Irish. The young Karol Wojtyla
wrote a paper about him. Six years after Matt's death, the Dublin Archdiocese started investigating his life
to promote his cause for sainthood. Paul VI recognized his heroic virtues and proclaimed him Venerable in 1973.
Although he is not a saint yet, he is considered in the Anglo-Saxon Catholic world as the patron of alcoholics.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/061812.cfm



AT THE VATICAN TODAY

Pope Francis met with Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, Archbishop of Manila (Philippines)




One year ago...
Benedict XVI met with H.E. Eduardo Gutiérrez Sáenz de Buruaga, Ambassador from Spain to the Holy See, who presented his credentials; with Cardinal Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino, Archbishop of Havana (Cuba); and ten bishops from Colombia (Group 3) on ad-limina visit,

As Benedict XVI made no statements for publication on this day last year, it is apropos to consider two commentaries on two of his recent discourses at the time - the first, his message at the closing Mass of the 50th International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin on June 17, 2012, and his impromptu lectio divina on baptism to the diocesan convention of Rome on June 11 (Pope Francis addressed the 2013 convention last night at the Aula Paolo VI).



Jose Luis Restan does well to tie in the Holy Father's closing message to the 50th IEC with his earlier lectio divina on baptism at the opening of the annual diocesan convention of Rome last week... It's a pity that both papal discourses - each exceptional in a different way, as the bulk of Benedict XVI's texts have been exceptional - have so far found little or no resonance at all in the Anglophone Catholic media-net world. Actually, one could count on the fingers of one hand the number of Catholic bloggers or commentators who regularly pay attention to what Benedict XVI says and do not take his texts for granted.

Indeed, one cannot and should not do that. In the past seven years, I have found out, with abiding wonder and gratitude, from the abundant examples provided to us by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI in decades of active thinking and expression of that thought, that the test of a great mind is how it can manage to present its messages in an infinite variety of really engaging ways while remaining constant, cogent and consistent. I can't think of any other figure who meets that criterion in today's world! Every new text from our Holy Father representa a surprise I look forward to receiving...


When faith becomes
nothing more than habit

Translated from

June 19, 2012

Much is being said [among those who pay attention to these things] of Benedict XVI's videomessage that closed the 50th International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin.

The courage and the clarity of the Pope in recognizing the terrible damage done by the sins of some members of the Church are always surprising. But on this occasion, there is a fundamental underlying judgment that must be underlined.

The Pope acknowledges that the homegrown evil on the terrain of the Church is remains a mystery, but he adds this perspective: "Evidently, their Christianity [of the priest sinners] was not nourished by an encounter with Christ but had been transformed to mere habit".

Benedict XVI sets the basis of the problem in the dramatic reduction of faith to mere formalism, to a mindless habit that no longer has an impact on our life. And once more, we heard him articulate the epicenter of all his efforts as Pope" to clarify the meaning of faith, to present it in all its breadth and depth, to show that it is the heart of life and not just some appendage to it.

A few days earlier, during the extemporaneous lectio divina with which he opened the annual diocesan convention of Rome, the Pope had presented this problem in order to explain the Sacrament of Baptism.

He started with one of his provocative paradoxes saying that in one way, becoming Christian is a passive act. It is not I who decides, "Now I will be Christian'. Of course, it requires my free adherence, my response, but first, there is the act of God who comes to me, draws me to his altitude.

And our 'activity' consists, first, in accepting that initiative of God. In the second place, being taken up by God means being set into the 'we' of the Church, it links us to others in a mysterious solidarity which is the very substance of the Body of Christ in history.

Then he explains that the positive formulations of Baptism - the baptismal vows - are not just a formula but a true dialog that concerns the very life of he who desires to receive a new life in Christ.

Basically, it starts us on a journey that will last our whole life and which demands our reason, affection and freedom. None of these vows is made once and for all, but they must be renewed every day of our lives, as the lives of the saints teach us.

Our baptismal profession of faith, says the Pope, is not just to be understood and memorized (though we would do well to do this too) but something that has to do with how we live.

"The truth of Christ can only be understood if we have understood his way... Truth which is not lived does not open up to us. Only truth which lived, truth that is accepted as our way of life, opens up as the truth in all its richness and depth".

This echoes the statement in the introduction to his encyclical Deus caritas est: "Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction".

What does this have to do with sexual crimes by priests? To the degree that faith is emptied of its substance and is reduced to nothing but an intellectual scheme or a moral discourse or to mere doctrinal formulation or piety, then it stops to 'touch our life', it becomes largely irrelevant.

Fatigue of faith, as he spoke about in his December 2011 address to the Roman Curia, has to do with this reduction, or better said, to the profound alteration of the substance of our faith. And this is reflected in how difficult it is to speak to the heart of contemporary man, in how easy it is for the latter to accept the dictates of whatever ideologies are in fashion.

In his message to a rather rickety part of the Church such as that on the green island of St. Patrick, Benedict XVI said that "The work of the Council was really meant to overcome this form of Christianity and to rediscover the faith as a deep personal friendship with the goodness of Jesus Christ".

The Council was not about adapting the Gospel to the times, but to make it shine in all its splendor in our time, with all its possibilities and risks. That continues to be the great task of the Church, which is not understood by those who remain castled within a fossilized transcendalism as well as those who have given themselves over to cultural dissolution in the dominant mentality of our day.

One and the other, they are all enemies of Benedict XVI's great mission.



Earlier, Sandro Magister had an article reflecting on the various homilies on Baptism that Benedict XVI has given during his years as Pope so far, and the major piece in this mosaic that his lectio divina to the diocesan convention represents.


Benedict XVI's homilies on Baptism:
Add to that sterling collection
his June 11 'lectio divina' at the Lateran



ROME, June 18 - It took place almost unnoticed by the general public. [Probably not at all. When both CNA and CNS (which have Rome bureaus staffed with more than one person) and even Vatican Radio's English service, all inexplicably consider the Bishop of Rome's address to his annual diocesan convention of no interest to their readership and audience - and therefore do not report the event at all - how can we expect secular media to pay any attention to it? Or even be aware of the event?]

But the lectio divina given by Benedict XVI on Monday night at the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, the cathedral of Rome, was one of the most elevated moments of the Pope's homilies on the sacrament of Baptism that together constitute a masterpiece.

That Benedict XVI is destined to pass into history for his liturgical preaching as Pope Leo the Great before him is a hypothesis that has by now been more than consolidated.

But in the great corpus of his homilies, those dedicated to Baptism have a place of unique relevance.

The mandate from Christ to baptize "in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit" were Jesus's last words on earth. The Church has taken these words very seriously, and it is how she has always generated her children. AS Christians and children of God.

Consequently, Baptism is the act of rebirth of each Christian as well as his identification document.

That is why it is very central in the preaching of Benedict XVI. At a time of widespread 'religious illiteracy', as he has called it, of vacillating faith and declining baptisms in nations that have a long tradition of Christianity, Papa Ratzinger wishes to start from the foundations of Christian life and call back attention to them in all their splendor.

His homilies on baptism are a striking example. Along with the lectio divina that he gave on June 11 to the faithful of Rome who packed the Lateran Cathedral.

Benedict XVI spoke extemporaneously, as the Fathers of the Church did in antiquity. Above him, his audience could admire, in the center of the mosaic in the apse, a jeweled Cross from which streams of living water flow.

It was precisely the link between Baptism and the Cross that was one of the salient points of the Pope's lectio divina, which took off from the 'mandate' given by Christ to the apostles before he ascended to heaven: "Go forth, make disciples of all peoples and baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit".

Another passage of the lectio which struck the audience forcefully is that in which the Pope gave new meaning and freshness to an ancient formula of the baptismal rite: the renunciation of "Satan and all his pomp", a formulation which has since been diluted by using the words "the temptations of evil" instead.

Since he was elected Pope seven years ago, Benedict XVI has administered Baptism 14 times, and preached a homily on each occasion - seven times at the Easter Vigil in St. Peter's Basilica, when he baptizes adult converts from various nations; and seven times on Epiphany Sunday, which commemorates the Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, when he baptizes the babies of Vatican employees in the Sistine Chapel.

[Magister then posts the full text of the lectio divina - a translation of which I posted on Page 320 of this thread; as well as links to the Pope's baptismal homilies of Epiphany and Easter from 2006 to 2012.]



[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 19/06/2013 04:28]
19/06/2013 02:16
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For some reason, the daily Vatican bulletin did not contain advance notice of what was probably Pope Francis's most important event yesterday, June 17 - addressing the annual diocesan convenion of Rome - simply because it took place at night. The oversight is especially glaring when one considers that Pope Francis considers himself Bishop of Rome above and beyond any other title that the Successors of Peter have carried traditionally. (Nor, for that matter, did news.va see fit to fashion a banner highlighting the convention as a significant event for the Bishop of Rome!] Here is Vatican Radio's account of the event, about which it has not provided its usual complete translation of the Pope's discourse, but relies on VIS for an English synopsis:

Pope Francis opens
diocesan annual convention



June 18, 2013

Pope Francis received the participants in the pastoral convention of the Diocese of Rome on Monday evening, at the opening of the event.

Under Benedict XVI, the annual meeting between the bishop of Rome and the leaders of pastoral, catechetical and outreach initiatives in the city has taken place in the cathedral Basilica of St John Lateran.

On Monday evening, however, the venue was changed to the Paul VI audience hall in Vatican City.

At several points, Holy Father extemporized from his prepared text and was interrupted several times by sustained applause.

“I'm not ashamed of the Gospel” was the theme of Pope Francis's catechesis given last night in the Aula Paolo VI for the inauguration of the Ecclesial Congress (17-19 June) that concludes the Diocese of Rome's pastoral year. The theme of the pastoral year [opened on June 11 last year by Benedict XVI[ was: “Christ, We Need You! The Responsibility of the Baptized in Proclaiming Jesus Christ.”

The meeting began with Cardinal Agostino Vallini, vicar general of the Diocese, greeting the Bishop of Rome. His address followed the Reading of the First Letter of St. Paul to the Romans, which contains the phrases that inspired the Pope's catechesis: “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel. … We who were baptized … are not under the law but under grace.”

Following are ample excerpts from Pope Francis's prepared address with some of the impromptu comments he added:

“]A revolution, in order to transform history, must profoundly change human hearts. Revolutions that have taken place throughout the centuries have changed political and economic systems, but non of them have truly changed the human heart.

Only Jesus Christ accomplished the true revolution, the one that radically transforms life, with his Resurrection that, as Benedict XVI loves to recall, was 'the greatest “mutation” in the history of humanity' and it gave birth to a new world.”

This is the experience that the Apostle Paul lives. After having met Jesus on the way to Damascus, he radically changes his perspective on life and receives Baptism. God transforms his heart. Before he was a violent persecutor of Christians, now he becomes an Apostle, a courageous witness of Jesus Christ. …

With Baptism, the paschal sacrament, we to are made to participate in that same change and, like Paul, 'we too might live in newness of life'. … We are led to believe that it is primarily in changing structures that we can build a new world. Faith tells us that only a new heart, one regenerated by God, can create a new world: a heart 'of flesh' that loves, suffers, and rejoices with others; a heart full of tenderness for those who, bearing the wounds of their lives, feel themselves to be on the outskirts of society.

Love is the greatest force for transforming reality because it breaks down the walls of selfishness and fills the chasms that keep us apart from one another...

Even in Rome there are people who live without hope and who are immersed in deep sadness that they try to get out of, believing to have found happiness in alcohol, in drugs, in gambling, in the power of money, in sex without rules. But they find themselves still more dejected and sometimes vent their anger towards life with violent acts that are unworthy of the human person. …

We who have discovered the joy of having God for our Father and his love for us, can we stand idly by in front of our brothers and sisters and not proclaim the Gospel to them? We who have found in Jesus Christ, who died and rose again, the meaning of life, can we be indifferent towards this city that asks us, perhaps even unconsciously, for hope? …

We are Christians; we are disciples of Jesus not to be wrapped up in ourselves but to open ourselves to others in order to help them, in order to bring them to Christ and to protect every creature...

St. Paul is aware that Jesus—as his name signifies—is the Saviour of all humanity, not just of persons of a certain age or geographical area. The Gospel is for all because God loves everyone and wants to save everyone...

The proclamation of the Gospel is destined primarily to the poor, to those who often lack the essentials for a decent life. The good news is first announced to them, that God loves them before all others and comes to visit them through the acts of charity that the disciples of Christ carry out in his name.

Others think that Jesus's message is destined to those who don't have cultural training and who therefore find in faith the answer to the many 'whys' that are present in their hearts.

Instead, the Apostle strongly affirms that the Gospel is for everyone, even experts. The wisdom that comes from Revelation is not opposed to human wisdom, but rather purifies and elevates it. The Church has always been present in the places where culture develops...

The Pope improvised the following:
The Gospel is for all! Going out toward the poor doesn't mean that we must become paupers or some sort of 'spiritual bums'! No, that's not what it means! It means that we must go towards the flesh of the suffering Jesus but Jesus's flesh also suffers in those who don't know it, with their studies, their intelligence, their culture. We must go there!

That's why I like to use the expression 'go to the outskirts', the existential peripheries. Everyone, all of them, [who suffer] from physical and real poverty to intellectual poverty, which is also real. All the outskirts, all the intersections of paths: go there. And ,sow the seed of the Gospel by word and by witness.


[Finally, the Pope makes it clear that he does not merely mean those who are materially destitute when he speaks of 'going to the outskirts' (actually, 'peripheries' is a much better translationthan 'outskirts' for the cognate word he uses, whether in Italian or Spanish). As I did at the very beginning when Pope Francis hammered this idea of the 'peripheries' in his early discourses, I shall cite Benedict XVI's use of the word 'desert' instead, for all those deprived of material, physical and spiritual essentials:]

What the Pallium indicates first and foremost is that we are all carried by Christ. But at the same time it invites us to carry one another... The pastor must be inspired by Christ’s holy zeal: for him it is not a matter of indifference that so many people are living in the desert. And there are so many kinds of desert.

There is the desert of poverty, the desert of hunger and thirst, the desert of abandonment, of loneliness, of destroyed love.

There is the desert of God’s darkness, the emptiness of souls no longer aware of their dignity or the goal of human life.

The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast. ..

The Church as a whole and all her Pastors, like Christ, must set out to lead people out of the desert, towards the place of life, towards friendship with the Son of God, towards the One who gives us life, and life in abundance. The symbol of the lamb also has a deeper meaning.

-Benedict XVI

Homily
to inaugurate his Petrine Ministry
April 24, 2005


Continuing with Pope Francis's text:
This means that we must have courage. … I want to tell you something. In the Gospel, there's that beautiful passage that tells us of the shepherd who, on returning to the sheepfold and realizing that a sheep is missing, leaves the 99 and goes to look for it, to look for the one.

But, brothers and sisters, we have one. It's the 99 who we're missing! We have to go out, we must go to them! In this culture—let's face it—we only have one. We are the minority. And do we feel the fervour, the apostolic zeal to go out and find the other 99? This is a big responsibility and we must ask the Lord for the grace of generosity and the courage and the patience to go out, to go out and proclaim the Gospel.

Sustained by this certainty that comes from Revelation, we have the courage, the confidence, to go out of ourselves, to go out of our communities, to go where men and women live, work, and suffer, and to proclaim the Father's mercy to them, which was made known to humanity in Jesus of Nazareth. …

Let us always remember, however, that the Adversary wants to keep us separated from God and therefore instils disappointment in our hearts when we do not see our apostolic commitment immediately rewarded. Every day the devil sows the seeds of pessimism and bitterness in our hearts. … Let us open ourselves to the breath of the Holy Spirit, who never ceases to sow seeds of hope and confidence.

Don't forget that God is the strongest and that if we allow him into our lives nothing and no one can oppose his action. So let's not be overcome by the discouragement that we encounter in facing difficulties when we talk of Jesus and the Gospel. Let's not think that faith doesn't have a future in our city!...

St. Paul then adds: 'I am not ashamed of the Gospel'. For him, the Gospel is the proclamation of Jesus's death on the cross. … The cross forcefully reminds us that we are sinners, but above, all that we are loved, that we are so dear to God's heart that, to save us, He didn't hesitate to sacrifice his Son Jesus.

The Christian's only boast is knowing that he is loved by God. … Every person needs to feel loved the way they are because this is the only thing that makes life beautiful and worthy of being lived.

In our time, when [what is freely given] seems to fade in our interpersonal relationships, we Christians proclaim a God who, to be our friend, asks nothing but to be accepted.

Think of how many live in desperation because they have never met someone who has shown them attention, comforted them, made them feel precious and important.

We, the disciples of Christ, can we refuse to go to those places that no one wants to go out of fear of compromising ourselves or the judgement of others, and thus deny our brothers and sisters the announcement of God's mercy?...

Again extemporizing:
Freely given! We have received this gratuity, this grace, freely. We must give it freely. And this is what, in the end, I want to tell you … Don't be afraid of love, of the love of God our Father. … Don't be afraid to receive the grace of Jesus Christ. Don't be afraid of our freedom that is given by the grace of Jesus Christ, or, as Paul said: 'You are not under the law but under grace'.

Don't be afraid of grace. Don't be afraid to go out of yourselves … to go and find the 99 who aren't home. Go out to dialogue with them and tell them what we think. Go show them our love, which is God's love.





Although I re-posted the following last June 11, I shall re-poSt it here again with Benedict XVI's completely extemporaneous 'lectio divina' at last year's diocesan convention (commented on by both Sandro Magister and Jose Luis Restan in an earlier re-post on this page), in parallel to Pope Francis's quasi-formal catechesis above:



POPE OPENS ANNUAL
DIOCESAN CONVENTION

June 11, 2012

"Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them
in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit"
(Mt 28, 19-20)



In Baptism, Christians reject Satan and
a culture in which truth does not matter

June 12, 2012







Eminence,
Dear brothers in the Priesthood and the Episcopate,
Dear brothers and sisters:

For me it is a great joy to be here, in the Cathedral of Rome, with the representatives of my diocese, and I thank the Cardinal Vicar for his kind words.

We heard that the last words of the Lord on this earth to his disciples were: "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit"
(Mt 28,19).

'Make disciples and baptize'. Why is it not enough for disciples to know the teachings of Jesus, to learn Christian values? Why is it necessary to be baptized? This is the subject for our reflection - in order to understand the reality, the profundity, of the Sacrament of Baptism.

A first door opens if we carefully read the words of the Lord. The choice of saying "in the name of the Father" in the Greek text is very important: The Lord says 'eis', not 'en', therefore, not "in behalf' of the Trinity - as we would say that a vice-prefect speaks in behalf of his prefect, an ambassador speaks in behalf of his government.

No. He says 'eis to onoma', which is an immersion within the name of the Trinity, an insertion into the Trinity, an interpenetration of God's being into ours, so we become a being immersed in the Trinitarian God - Father, Son and Holy Spirit, just as in matrimony, for example, two persons become one flesh, they become a new and singular reality, with a new and singular name.

The Lord helped us to understand this reality even better in his conversation with the Sadducees about resurrection. The Sadducees were familiar, from the canon of the Old Testament, only with the five books of Moses, in which resurrection is not mentioned, and so they rejected the idea.

But the Lord, precisely from these five books, demonstrates the reality of resurrection, saying: "And concerning the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living”
(cfr Mt 22,31-32).

Therefore, God takes these three beings, and within his name, they become the name of God. In order to understand who this God is, one must see these persons who have become the name of God, a name of God, who are immersed in God.

Thus we can see that whoever is within the name of the Lord, whoever is immersed in God, is alive, because God, said the Lord, is a God not of the dead but of the living. The living live because they are within the memory of God, within the life of God.

This is what happens in our being baptized: we become inserted into the name of God, so that we belong to his name, and his name becomes our name, and we too - like the three patriarchs of the Old Testament - can be witnesses to God, a sign of who this God is, the name of this God.

To be baptized means to be united with God: in a singular new existence we belong to God, we are immersed in God himself. If we think of this, we can immediately see some consequences.

The first is that God is no longer very remote from us, he is not a reality to be disputed - is he or isn't he? - but we are in God, and God is in us. The priority, the centrality of God in our life, is the first consequence of Baptism.

To the question "Is there a God?", the answer is, "Yes, and he is with us. This closeness of God matters in our life, this being in God himself, who is not a remote star, but the environment of my life". This would be the first consequence, and so we must ourselves keep in mind this presence of God in us, and truly live in his presence.

The second consequence of Baptism and its significance is that we become Christians. This does not follow because of a decision I make, "Now I will become a Christian". Of course, my decision is also necessary, but above all, it is an act of God on me: It is not I who make myself Christian - I am taken on by God, he takes my hand, and thus, saying Yes to this act of God, I become a Christian.

Becoming Christian, in a certain sense, is passive: I don't make myself Christian - it is God who makes me his man, God who takes my hand and realizes my life in another dimension. By myself, I cannot make myself live, but life is given to me. I am born not because I made myself man, but because being man was given to me.

And so even being Christian is given to me. It is passive on my part, but it becomes active in my life. This fact of passivity, of not making myself Christian but to have been made Christian by God, already implies something of the mystery of the Cross. Only by dying to my own selfishness, by getting out of myself, can I be Christian.

A third element that immediately opens up in this perspective is that, being immersed in God, naturally, I am united to my brothers and sisters, because they are all in God, and drawn out of my isolation, immersed in God, I am immersed in communion with others.

To be baptized is never a solitary action of and on myself - it is always necessarily being united with everybody else, being in unity and solidarity with the entire Body of Christ, with the whole community of brothers and sisters. The fact that Baptism places me in a community breaks my isolation. We must keep this in mind when we think of being Christian.

Finally, let us go back to the Word of Christ to the Sadducees: God is "the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’
(cfr Mt 22,32), and that is why, they are not dead. If they are of God and in God, they are living.

It means that with Baptism, with our immersion into the name of God, we are also immersed in immortal life - we are alive for always. In other words, Baptism is a first stage in the resurrection. Being immersed in God, we are already immersed in indestructible life, and resurrection begins.

Just as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are alive, being 'names of God', we too, inserted into the name of God, are alive in immortal life. Baptism is the first step towards resurrection, towards entering into God's indestructible life.

Thus, in a first approach, with St. Matthew's baptismal formula, with Christ's last words before ascending to heaven, we have already seen something of the essence of Baptism. Now, let us look at the sacramental rite, in order to understand even more precisely what Baptism is.

Christianity is not a purely spiritual thing, something that is only subjective, having to do with sentiment, with the will, with ideas, It is a cosmic reality. God is the creator of all matter, and matter enters into Christianity - we are Christians only in this great context of matter and spirit together.

It is therefore very important that matter is part of our faith, the body is part of our faith. Faith is not purely spiritual: God has inserted us into the entire reality of the cosmos, transforming the cosmos as he draws us towards him.

With a material element - water - comes not just a fundamental element of the cosmos, a fundamental creation of God, but also all the symbolism in religions, because in all religions, water has symbolic meaning.

The journey of religions, this search for God in various ways - still a search for God, even when mistaken - is assumed in the Sacrament of Baptism. The other religions, with their respective journeys towards God, are present b- they are assumed into the sacrament, which thus becomes a synthesis of the world: All the seeking for God as expressed in the symbols of various religions, become present, but above all, in the symbolisms of the Old Testament, with all its experiences of the goodness and salvation of God. We shall get back to this point.

The other element of Baptism is words, which are present in three ways: as renunciations, as promises and as invocations. It is important that these words are not just words, but a path of life.

These words carry out a decision. These words contain our entire baptismal pathway - pre-baptism as well as post-baptism. With these words, as with the symbols, Baptism extends through our entire life.

The reality of the promises, renunciations and invocations we make in Baptism is one that lasts for our entire life, because we are always walking along this baptismal path, through these words and the realization of these words.

The Sacrament of Baptism is not an act lasting an hour - it is a reality for our whole life, it is the pathway for our whole life. In fact, behind the sacrament is also the doctrine of two lives which was fundamental in early Christianity: a life to which we say No, and a life to which we say Yes.

Let us start with the first part - the renunciations. There are three, and I will start with the second: "Do you renounce the seductions of evil in order not to allow yourself to be dominated by sin?"

What are these seductions of evil? In the early Church and for centuries afterwards, the expression was "Do you renounce the pomp of the Devil?" Today, we know all too well what the expression 'pomp of the Devil' means.

The pomp of the devil consisted first of all of great and bloody spectacles, in which cruelty became entertainment, in which killing men became a spectacle, something spectacular. The life and death of a man as a spectacle. These bloody spectacles, this entertainment by evil, is the 'pomp of the devil', and what was seen to be beautiful was actually shown in all its cruelty.

But beyond this immediate significance of the term 'pomp of the devil', it also refers to a kind of culture, a 'way of life'
[The Pope uses the English term], [in which truth does not matter, only appearances. Truth is not sought, but effect, sensation; and under the pretext of truth, men are in fact destroyed. [For those who do this,] the object is to destroy others and to build upo themselves as the winners.

And so, this renunciation is all too real: renouncing a kind of culture that is really anti-culture, anti-Christ, and anti-God. It was a renunciation of a culture which in the Gospel of St. John is called kosmos houtos - this world. By 'this world', of course, John and Jesus were not speaking about God's Creation, about man as a creature of God, but of a creature who seeks to dominate and who imposes himself as though this was the world that matters, as if this was the way of life that must be imposed.

So let me leave each of you to reflect on this 'pomp of the devil', on the culture to which we say NO. To be baptized substantially means emancipating oneself, liberating oneself of this culture.

We also know today a kind of culture where truth does not count. Even if it is made to look as if all the truth is intended to be told, what really matters [to this culture] is the sensation it can produce, the spirit of calumny and destruction.

It is a culture that does not seek what is good, whose apparent moralism is actually a mask to deceive, to create confusion and destruction. To such a culture, in which lies are presented in the guise of truth and information, a culture that only seeks material wellbeing and rejects God, we say No.

We are familiar with so many psalms about the contradictions of a culture in which man holds himself untouchable by all the evils of the world, above everything and everyone, above God - in fact, a culture of evil, the dominance of evil.

Thus, the decision made at Baptism, the catechumenal way which lasts our whole life, is precisely this NO, which we say and carry out anew every day, with the sacrifices required to oppose what is in many places dominant. Even if this culture imposes itself as if it were the world, this world, it is not. Because there are so many who want the truth.

Let us go back to the first renunciation: "Do you renounce sin in order to live in freedom as children of God?". Today freedom and the Christian Life, that is, observing the commandments of God, are headed in opposite directions. Being Christian is seen as a state of slavery, while freedom is to be emancipated from the Christian faith, which means ultimately, liberating oneself from God.

The word sin seems to many almost ridiculous because, they say: "What, we cannot offend God? But he is so great that he could not possibly be interested if I make a small mistake? How is it that we cannot offend God when his interests are too great for him to be offended by us?"

It may seem true but it is not. God made himself vulnerable, In Christ crucified, we saw that God made himself very vulnerable, to the point of dying. God is interested in us because he loves us, and God's love is a vulnerability, God's love is his interest in man. God's love means that our first concern must be not to hurt him, not to destroy his love, not to do anything against his love because to do so, we would be living against ourselves and against our own freedom.

In fact, the apparent freedom of emancipation from God soon becomes a slavery to so many other dictatorships of the times which one is supposed to follow because that means keeping abreast of the times.

Finally, "Do you renounce Satan?" This tells us that a Yes to God is a NO to the power of the Devil who coordinates all this evil activity and wishes to be god of this world, as St. John also says.

But he is not God, only the adversary, and we shall not submit to his power. We say NO to him because we say YES, a fundamental Yes, the Yes of love and of truth.

The three renunciations, in the early rites of Baptism, corresponded to three immersions: Immersion in water as a symbol of dying, a NO which is really the death of one kind of life and the resurrection of a new one. We shall return to this.

Then the confession of faith in three questions: "Do you believe in God the almighty Father, Creator, and in Christ, and finally, in the Holy Spirit, and the Church?"

This three-part formulation developed out of the Lord's words when he said to "baptize in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit". These words have been concretized and deepened. What does Father mean, what does Son mean - all our faith in Christ, the whole reality of God made man - and what does it mean to be baptized in the Holy Spirit, namely all of God's action in history, in the Church, in the communion of saints?

That is why the positive formula of Baptism is also a dialog - it is not simply a formula. Above all, one's confession of faith is not just to be understood, not just an intellectual matter, something to memorize. Of course, it also involves the intellect, but it touches how we live, above all.

I find this very important. It is not an intellectual thing, just a formula. It is God's dialog with us, an action of God on us and in us, it is our response to him, it is a pathway.

The truth of Christ can be understood only if his way is understood. Only if we accept Christ as the way can we at last begin to be in him and able to understand him. Truth which is not lived cannot open up. Only truth that is lived, accepted as a way of life, as the way, opens up in all its richness and profundity.

So the baptismal formula is a way, the expression of our conversion, of an act of God. And we must keep this in mind all our life: that we are in communion with God, with Christ. And therefore with the truth. Living the truth, it becomes life, and living a life of truth, we find truth.

Now let us look at the material element of the Baptismal rite: water. It is very important to look at two significances of water here. On the one hand, it makes us think of the sea, especially the Red Sea, of the deaths that took place in the Red Sea.

The sea represents the power of death, as well as the necessity to die in order to come to a new life. I find this very important. Baptism is not just a ceremony, a ritual that was introduced some time ago. Nor is it just a washing off, a cleansing, a cosmetic operation.

It is more than just cleansing: it is death and life - the death of a certain existence, and the rebirth or resurrection of a new life. And this is the profundity of being Christian. It is not just a quality that is added - it is a new birth.

After having crossed the Red Sea, we are new beings. Thus the sea, in all the experiences of the Old Testament, has become for Christians a symbol of the Cross. Because it is only through death, a radical renunciation in which one dies to one kind of life, can one experience rebirth and can truly be in a new life.

This is one part of the symbolism of water: It symbolizes - especially in the immersion that was part of the baptismal rite in ancient times - the Red Sea, death, the Cross. Only from the Cross can we come to new life, and this must take place every day. Without this death from which we are always reborn, we cannot renew the vitality of a new life in Christ.

But the other symbol is the spring. Life is the origin of all life. So beyond the symbolism of death, it is also the symbol of new life. Every life comes from a spring, the water that comes from Christ as the new life that accompanies us through eternity.

Finally, let me say a brief word about the Baptism of children. Is it right to do it, or would it not be better to first have them undergo a catechumenal preparation in order to arrive at a Baptism that is fully 'achieved'?

The other question that is always asked is this: "Can we really impose a religion on a child who may not want to live it? Should we not allow the child to choose?"

Such questions show that we no longer see the Christian faith as a new life, the true life, but we only see it as a choice among many, even a weight that should not be imposed without the consent of the subject. Reality is different.

Life itself is given to us without having a choice as to whether we want it or not. No one can be asked, "Do you want to be born or not?" Life itself is given to us necessarily without previous consent - it is given to us, and we cannot say beforehand Yes or No, I want to exist, I don't want to exist.

The real question is: "Is it right to bring life into the world without that previous consent? Can life be 'given' even if the subject does not have the possibility to decide?" I would say - it is possible and right only if we can also give the guarantee that this life will be good, that it is protected by God, that it is a true gift. Only the anticipation of its meaning justifies the anticipation of life.

That is why Baptism as the guarantee that God is good, as anticipation of meaning, of God's Yes that protects life, justifies the anticipation of life. Therefore, baptizing children is not against freedom.

Indeed, it is necessary to give Baptism in order to justify the gift of life, which would otherwise be subject to dispute. Life which is in the hands of God, in the hands of Christ, immersed in the Trinitarian God, is certainly a gift that can be given without reservation. And so we are grateful to God who gave us this gift, and who gave us himself.

Our challenge is to live this gift, to truly live it in our post-baptismal pathway, both in the renunciations we made and in the Yes to always live in God's great Yes.
Thank you.





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I have belatedly discovered that Italian Vatifcanista Andrea Gagliarducci, who began covering the Vatican in 2007, writing for Il Tempo, and now for korazym.org, who also runs a blog on the site of National Catholic Register, has an independent blog curiously called ;Monday Vatican'. I posted a recent NCReg blog of his in which he went against his mainstream colleagues not to ignore Pope Francis's remarks to the CLAR leaders about, in effect, leaving the reform of the Curia for his cardinal advisers to attend to, since management is not his strong suit. I haven't had a chance to review the 'Monday Vatican' file, but here's another recent blog post which is clearly countercurrent - in not crediting Pope Francis for breaking new ground with every statement he makes -and is therefore quite welcome!

Challenging men of the Church
to get rid of worldliness:
Benedict XVI did it before Francis


June 9, 2013

«In the concrete history of the Church, however, a contrary tendency is also manifested, namely that the Church becomes self-satisfied, settles down in this world, becomes self-sufficient and adapts herself to the standards of the world.»

Moreover: «Not infrequently, she gives greater weight to organization and institutionalization than to her vocation to openness towards God, her vocation to opening up the world towards the other.»

And finally: «Once liberated from material and political burdens and privileges, the Church can reach out more effectively and in a truly Christian way to the whole world, she can be truly open to the world.»

Who said this?

A first – instinctive – answer [instinctive' only to those who allow the media to shape their thinking!] to this question would be: Pope Francis. He made «a Church of poverty and for the poor» his slogan from his very first meeting with journalists. He, who has increasingly often repeated that «institutions are useful, but up to a point».

The statements at the beginning of this article are actually not Francis’s. They are Benedict XVI’s. The now Pope-emeritus made those remarks in Freiburg, on September 25, 2011, to German Catholics engaged in pastoral work.

Benedict XVI’s words are relevant beyond the German context, even if it is true that the German Church experiences this pitfall in a very specific way. The German Church is wealthy thanks to the kirchensteuer, the State tax – of a considerable amount – on religion. It has been able to multiply social structures and charities, becoming almost self complacent.

Thus, [it would seem] the German Church has lost sight of God, while social structures have become the center of its work. The most painful thing is that an ever smaller number of Christians is employed in the Catholic-inspired social institutions that have been set up. In the name of social services, the Catholic identity is lost. And, lacking identity, the orientation of the mission of the Church is also lost.

As we noted earlier, this is not only a problem in Germany. Recently, Archbishop Mariano Crociata, Secretary General of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, standing before 200 workers from Catholic-inspired health facilities, underlined the need for all – workers and institutions – to preserve their identity and to have workers properly formed about Catholic principles.

More generally – in the wider context comprising all services and institutions that claim to be Catholic inspired – much has been debated, for example, about the identity of Catholic universities. A debate that has been fierce in the United States.

The Cardinal Newman Society is one of the associations that is carrying on the quest for identity: its website is full of denunciations of government intromission in the hiring of teachers in Catholic schools and universities. At the same time the Cardinal Newman Society does not hesitate to call attention on universities that are ever more detached from their own Catholic heritage.

A recently released book in Germany addresses these issues. Written by the journalist Manfred Luetz and Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes, President Emeritus of Cor Unum (the Vatican “dicastery” supporting Catholic charities), “Benedict’s legacy and Francis’s mission” (Benedikts Vermächtnis und Franziskus Auftrag: Entweltlichung, Eine Streitschrift, Verlag Herder) delineates a certain continuity between Benedict’s speech in Freiburg and Pope Francis’ words.

Cordes and Luetz presented a copy of the book to Benedict XVI, whom they met at the Mater Ecclesiae monastery where ne now lives within the Vatican. It is still uncertain how Pope Francis will transform his message, expressed in well-meaning slogans, into concrete endeavors.

During his pontificate, Benedict XVI not only maintained how important it was for the Church to become «less worldly ». He used the word «demondanization» ]getting rid of worldliness]. Ultimately, it is a matter of faith. How can faith be nurtured if there is no genuinee adherence to the Gospel when teaching, caring, or carrying on works of charity in the name of the Church?

Benedict XVI decreed a reform of the Caritas Internationalis constitution, based on the motto Caritas in Veritate, Charity in Truth (not accidentally the title of Benedict XVI’s social encyclical) and issued the motu proprio Intima Ecclesiae to regulate diocesan charities and reinforce the bishops’ oversight over them.

That is the starting point Pope Francis has inherited [in terms of 'Catholicizing' the Church's social activities], He looks forward to a reform of Pastor Bonus, the apostolic constitution that regulates the work of Curial offices. Will this reform achieve a change of hearts or will it merely be an organizational restructuring?

Ultimately, as Benedict XVI said in Freiburg, «it is not a question here of finding a new strategy to re-launch the Church. Rather, it is a question of setting aside mere strategy and seeking total transparency, not bracketing or ignoring anything from the truth of our present situation, but living the faith fully here and now in the utterly sober light of day, appropriating it completely, and stripping away from it anything that only seems to belong to faith, but in truth is mere convention or habit».

Benedict XVI said it in Freiburg. But it seems hardly anyone took note of it at the time. [No. As strong as that speech was, it got completely overshadowed (except perhaps in Germany) by Antonio Socci's ill-timed speculative story that Benedict XVI would resign in April 2012 on his 85th birthday! And when Cardinal bergoglio became Pope and started denouncing 'spiritual worldliness', everyone in the media greeted it as if it were a brand-new concept.

I don't remember anyone referring back to Freiburg 2011 at all, other than dedicated Benaddicts like Lella on her blog, Beatrice on her website, and this Forum. Peter Seewald has since pointed out that Joseph Ratzinger denounced all worldliness in men of the Church as early as the late 1960s in a major article where he first called for Entweltlichung, casting off this worldliness, material as well as spiritual.
]


The Freiburg address comes up, too, in Jose Luis Restan's commentary on the 'four-hands encyclical, about which I must interpose this demurral:

Whoever it comes from, I find myself gagging in apoplexy when I read anyone - even Restan whom I admire a lot - touting the 'continuity' between Benedict XVI and Pope Francis. Of course, there is continuity - a Pope is dutybound to uphold, defend and protect the deposit of faith handed to him. To expect any doctrinal discontinuity between this Pope and his predecessor is to assume that Francis will somehow step out of the doctrinal line of the Church - and that is simply not just absurd, but also out of the question! He may have a completely different personal style and idiosyncratic (i.e., very personal) points of emphasis about the Gospel, but he can only preach the same Gospel that the Apostles did, that all his predecessor Popes did.


Benedict'x legacy
and Francis's mission

Translated from

June 18, 2013

The news, communicated directly and unscripted by the Pope himself, that a new encyclical dedicated to faith will soon see the light - the result of work begun by Benedict XVI that Francis will bring to completion - is very significant.

"It is a powerful document," the Pope commented, referring to the text that was personally handed over to him by Benedict XVI, adding with more than just a wink, "It will be an encyclical by four hands".

We know it is normal that any Pope seeks help and contributions in weaving together the text of an encyclical which bears only one signature, but now, we have something new.

Pope Francis has explicitly taken up the work of his predecessor - and in this, continuity does not have be theorized. It simply becomes a quite eloquent fact.

It is no trivial matter, considering that everyday we are witnessing 'smoke and mirrors' games that insist on creating two images that are diametrically opposed, with the pernicious conclusion (false, but effective for the popular imagination) of a sort of rupture, of a new season for the Church that is discarding the legacy of thirty years of papal leadership [the combined Pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI].

It is interesting to note here a comment attributed to Benedict XVI by his friend, the psychiatrist-theologian Manfred Lutz, who visited him at Meter Ecclesiae, that "From the theological point of view, we[Francis and he] are perfectly in tune". No one must think the comment was simply made out of courtesy.

Lutz has just written a book with Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes (another longtime friend of Benedict XVI) entitled "Benedict's legacy and Francis's mission" on the concept of 'demondanizing' the Church.

This idea, which has been so explicitly reiterated by Francis in the first three months of his Pontificate, was already very much present in the Magisterium of Pope Benedict.

Cordes and Lutz focus on the September 2011 address given in Freiburg by Benedict XVI to German Catholics engaged in pastoral work. In decidedly severe tones, which nonetheless earned him little resonance in the media, Papa Ratzinger denounced "a Church (that) becomes self-satisfied, settles down in this world, becomes self-sufficient and adapts herself to the standards of the world... (and) gives greater weight to organization and institutionalization than to her vocation to openness towards God, her vocation to opening up the world towards the other."

Moreover, Benedict XVI added a historical judgment which, if it had been heard at all, would have left the media open-mouthed in amazement: "Secularizing trends – whether by expropriation of Church goods, or elimination of privileges or the like – have always meant a profound liberation of the Church from forms of worldliness, for in the process she, as it were, sets aside her worldly wealth and once again completely embraces her worldly poverty... Once liberated from material and political burdens and privileges, the Church can reach out more effectively and in a truly Christian way to the whole world, she can be truly open to the world. She can live more freely her vocation to the ministry of divine worship and service of neighbor".

[I understand Pope Francis needed to assert himself as completely his own man from the moment he stepped on to that loggia on March 13, 2013 - and in ways distinctively unlike all his predecessors - but could he have not cited Benedict XVI in his initial sallies about 'worldliness' in the Church? (Unless he never read the Freiburg speech or about it, at all! There was an article claiming that Bergoglio derived all his ideas and words about 'spiritual worldliness' - an awkward term I find restrictive - from a 19th-century British Jesuit who worked in Argentina.) Benedict XVI used every occasion he could to cite John Paul II in the early months of his Pontificate!]

It would be difficult to find greater accord than that which is obvious here, with respect to Francis's call for a poor Church, free of worldly certainties and oriented towards the peripheries of the world. [But in stronger, more precise and more elegant words!]

But the basic continuity is not concentrated only on this point. Recently, Francis expressed anew his concern for a kind of Pelagian revival in the Church. Pelagius, who was harshly criticized by St. Augustine and condemned by the Council of Ephesus, rejected that grace was necessary to do good and obtain salvation. That basically, man is self-sufficient and only needs the example of Jesus - Christianity reduced to speeches and good examples.

On both the right and the left, the Pelagian temptation is very actual, whether it is reducing Christianity to a program of political-social transformation or to efforts at individual moral perfection.

Even in this, the accord between the two Popes [Pope and ex-Pope!] is complete: Benedict XVI, as a good Augustinian, was hypersensitive to this temptation that Francis has pointed to from the beginning as one of his great concerns..

Allow me to add another nucleus of great accord, namely the need to open new paths, not to be content with what we already have, to learn a new form of presence that communicates Christ in a world that is ever changing. Evangelical poverty and freedom, the priority of grace, the wonder of a new mission, are three strong threads to further weave the profound continuity which many seem determined to dissolve.

Perhaps the coming and imminent encyclical on faith will help us to document this in a truly attention-getting way.


[I didn't see it earlier, but guess what Sandro Magister's piece was on www.chiesa on June 17:
chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1350539?eng=y
"Benedict wanted a 'poor' Church, too"

I was going to remark - "Why all of a sudden are three Vaticanistas pointing out something they ought to have done three months ago when this 'poor Church' thing first came up (though without any elaboration on the part of Pope Francis, and was, for three months, considered only in its literal meaning)? Surely, all three did not just suddenly remember about Freiburg this week! But it turns out Magister got his idea from Gagliarducci's blog (the one I posted above)_ - though Magister refers to the Freiburg speech as one of the 'major' ones in Benedict XVI's Pontificate!

Well, you see why I have felt very let down and put upon intolerably by these Vaticanistas, even the best of them. Why did it take these three intelligent, super-informed persons three months to wake up from the universal stupor-torpor that seems to have overcome their brains about Francis and Benedict????? Have they really waken up now, and will they point out all the other obvious oversights by their colleagues on the entire matter of Benedict XVI's record and person? Will other commentators wake up, too, from their self-imposed Rip-van-Winkling?


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Now, literally, soon a saint:
John Paul II - 'Santo subito'

Theologians approve a second miracle, and
canonization may take place in October

Translated from

June 18, 2013

VATICAN CITY - The commission of theologians consulted by the Congregation for the Causes of Sainthood has approved a miracle attributed to the intercession of Blessed John Paul II after his beatification. The miracle was certified as 'scientifically unexplainable' last April by the Congregation's medical consultants.

So, after just over eight years since his death, the Polish Pope could be canonized by October 20, the Sunday that falls between Oct. 18, anniversary of his election as Pope, and Oct. 22, anniversary of the formal start of his Petrine ministry, and also his liturgical feast day.

The remaining steps before the expected canonization include approval by all the cardinals and bishops of the full Congregation for the Causes of Sainthood, who will then elevate it to Pope Francis for final approval and a determination of the date for canonization.

The miracle was supposed to have taken place the very evening of May 1, 2011, after John Paul II was beatified by Benedict XVI in St. Peter's Square.

No other details about the miracle have been given out, but last April, a source at the Vatican said that "when the type of healing is known, many will be surprised".

[In July 2012, EWTN News reported the case involves the former mayor of a town in Colombia, who, like the Freench nun whose healing led to John Paul II's beatification, also suffered from Parkinson's disease, the ailment that eventually caused the Pope's death.
http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/miracle-could-lead-to-john-paul-iis-canonization]

The rest of the Repubblica story is maliciously tendentious, claiming that Benedict XVI had 'blocked' progress of his predecessor's canonization in a confrontation before his resignation with Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, who was reported at the time to have sought to pressure Benedict XVI to approve the canonization. But that was at least two months before the medical experts had decided on the presumed miracle presented by the postulator for John Paul II's cause. After having expedited the start of the whole process, the timing of the various stages in the process was no longer in the hands of Benedict XVI!

The Repubblica report goes on to make the absurd statement that the approval by the doctors and by the theologians means "Pope Francis approves of the canonization, otherwise the process would not have progressed". The second half of the article then goes into how Pope Francis is said to have 'unblocked' the process for beatification of eArchbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador after it was 'stalled' under Benedict XVI.

The report cites the gushing account of Romero's postulator, Mons. Vincenzo Paglia, who has lost no opportunity to demonstrate his dislpyalty to Benedict XVI (who named him cursed be the day - president of the Pontifical Council for the Family)... Well, it's Repubblica, which. far longer than Paglia, has been stabbing Benedict in the back every chance it gets *he ought to be mincemeat by now) and is still at it!

As for Mons. Romero's cause, what will Pope Francis do? Tell the Congregation for the Causes of Sainthood to consider his assassination martyrdom for having been killed 'in hatred of the faith' and not just as an act of political vendetta? If Romero's death is considered martyrdom, he will be beatified without requiring a miracle.]


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Wednesday, June 19, 2013 Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

Second and third from right: St. Romualdo's Vision, by Guercino, 1641; and Guido Reni's Coronation of Mary, 1595, with St. Romualdo (extreme right) and St. Catherine of Alexandria flanking Saints John the Evangelist and John the Baptist; second from right, St. Romuald by Fra Angelico, in a 1441 fresco in the Convent of St. Mark, Florence.
ST. ROMUALDO (Italy, ca 950-1027), Benedictine monk, Hermit, Abbot, Founder of the Camaldolesi Benedictines
St. Piero Damiani would write the biography of this saint a mere 15 years after his death. One of the many saints who spent their early privileged life of wealth in profligacy, Romuald had a change of heart at age 20 when he saw his father kill someone in a duel. He fled to a Benedictine monastery near Ravenna where he decided to become a monk. He left the abbey after three years because he did not think it was strict enough and became a hermit on an island. He gained a reputation for holiness that persuaded the Duke of Venice to leave office and join Romuald in a hermitage near the Benedictine abbey of San Miguel de Cuxa in Catalonia (Spain). Romuald returned to Italy after seven years when he learned that his father had become a monk but was tormented with doubts, which his son managed to resolve. Romuald also gained the friendship of Emperor Otto III who asked him to revive an old monastery as abbot. However, Romuald's reforms were resisted and he went back to being a hermit. For the rest of his life, however, he travelled all over France and Italy, establishing about a hundred monasteries and hermitages to propagate his mission to restore the Benedictine order to the primitive Rule of St. Benedict. In 1012, he founded the Congregation of Monk Hermits of Camaldoli, after he was given a property near Arezzo in Tuscany on which he could built an abbey (the Sacro Eremo). The Camaldolese have given the Church two popes (Pius VII and Gregory XVI,) many saints and blesseds. His body was found to be incorrupt at the time he was canonized in 1582. The millenary of the foundation of the Sacro Eremo in Camaldoli is being celebrated this year.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/061913.cfm



AT THE VATICAN, June 19, 2013

General Audience Continuing his catecheses on the Church, Pope Francis reflected on the Church as the Body of Christ,
of which we are members. He said this image makes us realize the importance of strengthening our union with Christ
through daily prayer, the study of God’s word and participation in the sacraments. And that "the communion of the Church,
and in union with the Pope and Bishops, each of us has a part to play, a gift to share, a service to offer, for building
up the Body of Christ".

After the GA, he met with participants of the meeting between the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialog and
the Saudi Arabia-sponsored International Islamic Forum for Dialogue.


St. Joseph's name added
to Eucharistic Prayers
in the Canon of the Roman Mass


The Congregation for Divine Worship published a decree that decreed that adds the name of Saint Joseph, Patron of
the universal Church, to the Eucharistic Prayers in the Roman Canon [standard prayers at every Mass in the Roman
rite]. The decree was approved by Benedict XVIin response to petitions received from around the world, and
this ha s been confirmed by Pope Francis. The decree is dated May 1, liturgical feast of St. Joseph as Patron of
Laborers.

Obviously, Benedict XVI's approval was given before he stepped down as Pope. What could have taken the CDW so long to prepare it for publication? It would have been most fitting for the decree to have been issued in the Pontificate of a Pope who was baptized Joseph. But I have not seen a single report about this liturgical milestone refer in any way to what the decree itself says that it had been approved by Benedict XVI and subsequently confirmed by Pope Francis. The lead for the report in the English service of Vatican Radio says:
"In the first decree of a liturgical nature of this pontificate, Pope Francis has decided that name of St. Joseph should be added to the Eucharistic Prayers II, II and IV, as they appear in the third typical edition of the Roman Missal, after the name of the Blessed Virgin Mary". Of course, the decree was issued in this Pontificate, but the initiative was taken by Benedict XVI, as the decree itself makes clear, and the Vatican media themselves should have taken the lead in pointing this out, not in ignoring it:


DECREE TO INCLUDE THE NAME OF ST. JOSEPH
IN THE EUCHARISTIC PRAYERS 11,III, AND IV OF THE ROMAN MISSAL


Exercising his paternal care over Jesus, Saint Joseph of Nazareth, set over the Lord’s family, marvelously fulfilled the office he received by grace.

Adhering firmly to the mystery of God’s design of salvation in its very beginnings, he stands as an exemplary model of the kindness and humility that the Christian faith raises to a great destiny, and demonstrates the ordinary and simple virtues necessary for men to be good and genuine followers of Christ.

Through these virtues, this Just man, caring most lovingly for the Mother of God and happily dedicating himself to the upbringing of Jesus Christ, was placed as guardian over God the Father’s most precious treasures. Therefore he has been the subject of assiduous devotion on the part of the People of God throughout the centuries, as the support of that mystical body, which is the Church.

The faithful in the Catholic Church have shown continuous devotion to Saint Joseph and have solemnly and constantly honored his memory as the most chaste spouse of the Mother of God and as the heavenly Patron of the universal Church.

this reason Blessed Pope John XXIII, in the days of the Most Holy Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, decreed that Saint Joseph’s name be added to the ancient Roman Canon.

In response to petitions received from places throughout the world, the Supreme Pontiff Benedict XVI deemed them worthy of implementation and graciously approved them. The Supreme Pontiff Francis likewise has recently confirmed them. In this the Pontiffs had before their eyes the full communion of the Saints who, once pilgrims in this world, now lead us to Christ and unite us with him.

Accordingly, mature consideration having been given to all the matters mentioned here above, this Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, by virtue of the faculties granted by the Supreme Pontiff Francis, is pleased to decree that the name of Saint Joseph, Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary is henceforth to be added to Eucharistic Prayers II, III, and IV, as they appear in the third typical edition of the Roman Missal, after the name of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as follows: in Eucharistic Prayer II: "ut cum beáta Dei Genetríce Vírgine María, beáto Ioseph, eius Sponso, beátis Apóstolis"; in Eucharistic Prayer III: "cum beatíssima Vírgine, Dei Genetríce, María, cum beáto Ioseph, eius Sponso, cum beátis Apóstolis"; and in Eucharistic Prayer IV: "cum beáta Vírgine, Dei Genetríce, María, cum beáto Ioseph, eius Sponso, cum Apóstolis ".

As regards the Latin text, these formulas are hereby declared typical. The Congregation itself will soon provide vernacular translations in the more widespread western languages; as for other languages, translations are to be prepared by the Bishops’ Conferences, according to the norm of law, to be confirmed by the Holy See through this Dicastery.

All things to the contrary notwithstanding.

From the offices of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments,
1 May 2013, on the
Memorial of Saint Joseph the Worker.

Antonio Cardinal Cañizares Llovera
Prefect
Arthur Roche
Archbishop Secretary







EIGHT YEARS AND TWO MONTHS AGO,

Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope.

OUR LOVE AND PRAYERS, YOUR HOLINESS!







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Thursday, June 20, 2013, Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

ST. ADALBERT von MAGDEBURG (d 961)
Benedictine monk, Missionary, Bishop, 'Apostle of the Slavs'
A German monk of the Benedictine Monastery of St. Maximin in Tréves, he was
consecrated a bishop and sent to Russia in 961. Princess Olga of that land
had asked Emperor Otto I the Great to provide her with a missionary. The son
of Princess Olga took her crown from her soon after Adalbert arrived in Russia,
and his mission companions were slain. He barely escaped with his own life
and made his way to Mainz, where he spent four years. He was then named
abbot of Weissenburg in Alsace and bishop of Magdeburg in Saxony. This was
a diocese created to provide missionary programs for the Slavs. There, Adalbert
was made metropolitan of the Slavs and established the dioceses of Naumberg,
Neissen, Merseberg, Brandenburg, Havelberg, and Posen. He also received
two papal legates to assist him in his vast labor. One of his pupils was
the future St. Adalbert of Prague whose fame would outdo his mentor's.
Readings for today's Mass: www.usccb.org/bible/readings/062012.cfm



AT THE VATICAN TODAY

Pope Francis met with

- Participants in the 38th annual conference of the UN's Rome-based Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). Address in Spanish.
The official English text may be found here:
http://attualita.vatican.va/sala-stampa/bollettino/2013/06/20/news/31228.html#TESTO%20IN%20LINGUA%20INGLESE

- Participants in the annual assembly of the Riunione delle Opere nell''Aiuto alle Chiese Orientali, popularly known as ROACO,
which, under the Congregation for Oriental Churches, coordinates assistance to Catholic churches of the Eastern Rite. Address
in Italian.
Vatican Radio's English translation may be found here:
http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2013/06/20/pope_to_middle_eastern_christians:_never_lose_hope/en1-703269



One year ago...
Continuing his reflections on prayer in the Letters of St. Paul, Benedict XVI focused at the General Audience on the apostle's great hymn of praise to God that opens his Letter to the Ephesians, saying our prayer should not be limited to seeking God's help but also to thanking and praising him. After the catechesis, the Pope issued a special appeal expressing his continuing concern and prayers over the increasing frequency and intensity of anti-Christian atacks in Nigeria, where in the preceding weekend, at least 21 Christians were killed in terrorist attacks on churches. After the audience, held at Aula Paolo VI, he met with Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis of the Republic of Latvia.


GENERAL AUDIENCE
June 20, 2012





Here is a translation of the full catechesis:

Our prayer is very often a request for help in our need. It is normal for man, because we need help, we need others, we need God. And so it is normal for us to ask God for something, to seek his help; and we must keep in mind that the prayer the Lord taught us, the 'Our Father', is a prayer of request. With this prayer, the Lord teaches us the priorities when we pray, he cleanses and purifies our desires and thus cleanses and purifies our heart.

Therefore, if it is normal that we would request something when we pray, it must not be exclusively so. We also have reasons to give thanks, and if we are a bit more attentive, we can see that we receive so many good things from God. And he is so good with us that it is proper and necessary to give thanks.

Our prayer should also be one of praise: If our heart is open, we shall see, despite all our problems, the beauty of his creation, the goodness that he shows us in Creation.

Therefore, we should not just ask when we pray. We must also praise and thank God - only in that way is our prayer complete.

In his letters, St. Paul does not just speak of prayer. He reports prayers of request, certainly, but also prayers of praise and benediction for what God has wrought and continues to realize in the history of mankind.

Today, I wish to dwell on the first chapter of his Letter to the Ephesians which begins, in fact, with a prayer which is a hymn of benediction, an expression of thanksgiving, of joy. St. Paul blesses God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, because in him, "he has made known to us the mystery of his will"
(Eph 1,9).

Truly, there is reason to to be thankful that God lets us know what has been hidden: his will about us, for us - 'the mystery of his will'. «Mysterion», «Mistero»: a term that recurs often in Sacred Scripture and liturgy. I won't get into its philology now, but in common language, it means something we cannot know, a reality that we cannot grasp with our own intelligence.

The hymn that opens the Letter to the Ephesians leads us by the hand towards the more profound significance of this term and of the reality that it indicates to us.

For believers, 'mystery' is not so much the unknown, but rather the merciful will of God, his plan of love which was fully revealed in Jesus Christ and offers us the possibility "to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge"
(Eph 3,18-19).

The 'unknown mystery' of God is revealed, and it is that God loves us and has loved us from the start, from eternity.

Let us therefore linger a bit on this solemn and profound prayer. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ..."
(Eph 1,3). St. Paul uses the verb euloghein, which generally translates the Hebrew word barak: it means to praise, to glorify, to thank God the Father as the spring of everything good in salvation, "He who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens".

The Apostle gives thanks and praise, but also reflects the reasons that urge man to give such praise, this thanksgiving, presenting the fundamental elements of the divine plan and its stages.

First of all, we must bless God the Father because, St. Paul writes, "he chose us in him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and without blemish before him in love"
(v 4).

That which makes us holy and immaculate is love. God has called us to existence, to holiness. This choice preceded even the creation of the world. We have always been in his plan, his thought. With the prophet Jeremiah, we too can say that before he formed us in the womb of our mother, he already knew us (cfr Jer 1,6); and knowing us, he loved us.

The call to holiness, namely, communion with God, belongs to the eternal plan of this God, a design that extends to history and comprehends all men and women because it is a universal call. God does not exclude anyone, his plan is only one of love.

St. John Chrysostom says, "God himself has made us holy, but we are called upon to stay holy. He who lives in faith is holy"
(Homily on the Letter to the Ephesians 1,1,4).

St. Paul continues: God has predestines us, he has elected us to be his 'adopted children, through Jesus Christ', to be incorporated in his only Son. The Apostle underscores the gratuitousness of this wonderful plan of God for mankind.

God chooses us not because we are good but because he is good. The ancient world had a statement about goodness: bonum est diffusivum sui - good nexx communicates itself, it is part of the essence of goodness that it communicates itself, it extends itself. God creates because he wishes to communicate his goodness to us and to make us good and holy.

In the center of this prayer of benediction, the Apostle illustrates the way in which the Father's plan of salvation is realized in Christ: "In him we have redemption by his blood, the forgiveness of transgressions, in accord with the riches of his grace"
(Eph 1,7).

Christ's sacrifice on the Cross is the unique and unrepeatable event with which the Father has shown us luminously his love for us, not merely in words, but in a concrete way. God is so concrete and his love is so concrete that he entered history, he became man in order to feel what and how it is to live in the world he created, and he accepted the way of suffering in his Passion even to death.

So concrete is God's love that he takes part not just in our being, but in our suffering and death. The sacrifice of the Cross certainly makes us become 'the property of God' because the blood of Christ has ransomed us from sin, it washes us of evil, it redeems us from the slavery of sin and death.

St. Paul asks us to consider how profound God's love is, which transformed history, which transformed his own life from being a persecutor of Christians to a tireless Apostle of the Gospel.

Once more the reassuring words of the Letter to the Romans resound: "What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us all, how will he not also give us everything else along with him?... For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord"
(Rom 8,31-32,38-39).

This certainty - God is for us, and no creature can separate us from him, because his love is stronger - is something that we must incorporate into our very being, into our conscience as Christians.

Finally, the divine benediction closes with a reference to the Holy Spirit that has been poured into our hearts: the Paraclete whom we have received as the promised seal. St. Paul says "he is the first installment of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s possession, to the praise of his glory"
(Eph 1,14).

Redemption has not been concluded, we hear, but it will have its full achievement when those whom God has acquired will be totally saved. We are still on the road to redemption, whose essential reality is the death and resurrection of Jesus. We are on the way to definitive redemption, towards the full liberation of the children of God.

And the Holy Spirit is the certainy that God will carry to completion his plan of salvation when he shall "sum up all things in Christ, in heaven and on earth"
(Eph 1,10).

St. John Chrysostom comments on this point: "God has elected us to the faith and has impressed on us the seal to inherit future glory" (Homily on the Letter to the Ephesians 2,11-14).

We must accept that the journey of redemption is also ours, because God wants free creatures who freely say Yes. But it is above all and primarily his way. We are in his hands, but free to walk along the way opened by him. Let us proceed along this road of redemption, together with Christ, and we shall feel that redemption is being achieved.

The vision that St. Paul presents to us in this great prayer of benediction leads us to contemplate the action of the three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity: the Father who chose us before the creation of the world, who thought of us and created us; the Son who redeemed us through his blood; and the Holy Spirit, the first installment of our redemption and future glory.

In constant prayer, in a daily relationship with God, we too will learn, like St. Paul, to discern ever more clearly the signs of this plan and this action: in the beauty of the Creator that emerges from his creatures
(cfr Eph 3,9), as St. Francis sings: "Praised be my Lord with all his creatures" (FF 263).

It is important to be attentive, especially now, during vacation time, to the beauty of Creation and to see the face of God in all this beauty.

In their lives, the saints show in a luminous way what the power of God can do with man's weakness. He can do it even with us. In the entire history of salvation, God has made himself near to us and waits patiently for our pace, understanding our infidelities, encouraging our commitment, guiding us.

In prayer we learn to see the signs of this merciful plan for the Church's own journey. And thus we grow in God's love, opening the door so that the Most Holy Trinity may come to dwell in us, to enlighten, warn and guide our existence.

“Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him"
(Jn 14,23), Jesus said in promising his disciples the gift of the Holy Spirit who will teach us everything.

St. Irenaeus once said that in the Incarnation, the Holy Spirit became accustomed to dwelling in man. In prayer, we should accustom ourselves to be with God. This is very important - that we learn to be with God, so we can see how beautiful it is to be with him, which is redemption.

Dear friends, when prayer nourishes our spiritual life, we become able to conserve that which St. Paul calls 'the mystery of faith' in a pure conscience
(cfr 1Tm 3,8), Prayer as a way of 'sccustoming ourselves' to be with God, generates men and women animated not by selfishness, by the desire to possess, by thirst of power, but by giving freely, the desire to love, the thirst for service, in short, animated by God. Only thus can we bring light to the darkness in the world.

I wish to conclude this catechesis with the epilog of the Letter to the Romans. With St. Paul, we too render glory to God because he has given us all of himself in Jesus Christ and he has given us the Comforter, the Spirit of truth.

St. Paul writes at the end of the Letter to the Romans: "Now to him who can strengthen you, according to my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, l according to the revelation of the mystery kept secret for long ages, but now manifested through the prophetic writings and, according to the command of the eternal God, made known to all nations to bring about the obedience of faith, to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ be glory forever and ever. Amen"
(16,25-27). Thank you.








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My main objection to this article (and I have quite a few) is that Mr. Oddie - who has reported and commented on Church affairs for decades = has bought totally and uncritically into the media meme of a 'corrupt Roman Curia'. even in the absence of any facts to substantiate this. By constant repetition which no one dares correct, such memes become established as 'media fact', i.e., conjecture and perception raised to the level of 'dogmatic truth', or what passes for it in the world of relativism - where they claim there is no absolute truth, that everything is relative, and yet, they lay down their judgments on the line all the time dogmatically, ex cathedra, as though they represent absolute truth that everyone must adhere to! Go figure...

But this patently fallacious 'dogmatic truth' from relativists has by now become so hardwired into public perception that even a veteran Catholic commentator like Oddie can swallow all that, hook, line and sinker, no questions asked, whatsoever. Of course, he is by no means the only one who regurgitates this poison dutifully for others to feed on, instead of retching it out and abjuring it. Or, at least, ask questions! Like "Name the most scandalous case of corruption and evil in Benedict XVI's Curia - and who exactly were involved in it!" Like I keep saying, if we haven't heard of any specific case, it's most likely because it ain't there at all.


Pope Francis says he is too ‘disorganised’
reform the Roman Curia
[by himself]

But the corruption has to be driven out.
What he needs is a Godly hitman as SecState - and
Cardinal Scola seems an obvious candidate

By William Oddie

June 20, 2013

After a meeting earlier this month of the presiding board of the the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Religious Men and Women (CLAR), a transcript of the Pope’s words was made by those present; a translation can be found here. [Actually, it was not a transcript - CLAR called it a 'synthesis' of what the Pope said, based on an immediate reconstruction by the six persons to whom he spoke.]

From his remarks, I found myself (as have others) homing in on the following words:

… it is difficult. In the Curia, there are also holy people, really, there are holy people. But there also is a stream of corruption, there is that as well, it is true… The ‘gay lobby’ is mentioned, and it is true, it is there… We need to see what we can do…

The reform of the Roman Curia is something that almost all Cardinals asked for in the Congregations preceding the Conclave. I also asked for it. I cannot promote the reform myself, these matters of administration… I am very disorganised, I have never been good at this. But the cardinals of the Commission will move it forward. There is Rodríguez Maradiaga, who is Latin American, who is in front of it, there is Errázuriz, they are very organised. The one from Munich is also very organised. They will move it forward.”

The Munich connection is worth a second look. According to Sandro Magister, as well as Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Archbishop of Munich, who is a member of the commission, there is also a certain Thomas von Mitschke-Collande, who was the manager of the Munich branch of what Magister calls “the most famous and mysterious company of managerial consulting in the world” (McKinsey & Company, an American global management consulting firm that “focuses on solving issues of concern to senior management.”)

In matters of the Church, Magister says, this Mitschke-Collande “knows his stuff. Last year he published a book with a title that was hardly reassuring: ‘Does the Church want to destroy itself? Facts and analyses presented by a business consultant.’ The diocese of Berlin turned to him to get its accounts back in order, and the German episcopal conference asked him to draw up a plan to save on costs and personnel. The proposal, which [Pope Francis] welcomed enthusiastically, was made to him by Fr Hans Langerdörfer, the powerful Jesuit secretary of the German episcopal conference, a Jesuit.” So it appears that Mitschke-Collande has in fact been appointed to sort out the Roman Curia’s notorious functional inefficiencies: a good and indispensable thing to do.

But can the Roman Curia actually be reformed (rather than simply reorganised) by a management consultant expert? The problem seems to be more than one of managerial disorganisation, though no doubt it would be helpful to get things moving a little more smoothly. But how will he diagnose and solve the deeper, more spiritual problems of corruption and intrigue that have caused such scandal in recent years? [What scandal, exactly, other than the direst of innuendoes repeated ad nauseam? It's the very hammering on generic 'corruption' to imply SCANDAL in bold capitals, even without stating anything specific that is the scandal otself.] What about that “gay lobby”, which Pope Francis says definitely exists?

And what exactly is the function of the commission of eight cardinals the Pope has appointed to “advise him in the government of the universal Church and to study a plan for revising the apostolic constitution on the Roman Curia, Pastor Bonus”?

They are Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, who will coordinate the whole operation; Cardinal Guiseppe Bertello, governor of the Vatican City State; Cardinal Francisco Javier Errazuriz Ossa, the retired Archbishop of Santiago de Chile, Cardinal Oswald Gracias of Bombay, Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich, Cardinal Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya of Kinshasa, Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley of Boston; and Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney. They, says Pope Francis, will also “move it forward”, the reform of the Curia, that is.

But how can they? They don’t meet until October, and they are chosen to represent the whole world, they live at the four corners of the globe: the problem is in Rome. No doubt they will be crucial in revising the apostolic constitution on the Roman Curia. But isn’t there a more urgent problem?

What will revising Pastor Bonus do to cure the wicked corruption which undoubtedly helped to overwhelm poor Pope Benedict, bringing his pontificate to a tragically premature end?

[This I object to most of all. and most vehemently. Benedict XVI was not 'overwhelmed' by any 'corruption' - if there had been genuine corruption, does any one who admires him doubt he would have booted out the wrongdoers? For the mere appearance of wrongdoing in the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples during the previous Pontificate, he lost no time in reassigning - it was outright demotion in many ways - the then all-powerful Prefect, Cardinal Crescencio Sepe, to be Archbishop of Naples, instead. Propaganda Fide controls some $9-billion dollars in assets that it uses to finance missions and poor dioceses and parishes around the world, and it was suspected of entering into real estate sweetheart deals with Italian business leaders. It was B16's first major move in the Curia back in 2005, and no one seems to remember it at all. In the same way, he sent off the then president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialog to be Nuncio to Cairo and the Holy See observer in the Arab League, not because of corruption, but because Mons. Michael Fitzgerald had appeared to be leaning over backwards to accommodate Muslims in the activities of the Council. Or, in a less dramatic manner, he reassigned Mons. Domenico Sorrentino, who had been secretary of the Cogregation for Divine Worship, to be Bishop of Assisi. Otherwise, Benedict XVI's instinctive sense of delicadeza made him retain the Curial heads named by John Paul II until they reached retirement age,

To postulate moreover that an unmanageable or even corrupt Curia 'overwhelmed' B16 in any way is to ignore all the considerable accomplishments of his Pontificate despite such a Curia, as bad as it has been made out to be. No one in the Curia was able to foil his initiatives to continue to strengthen the Vatican's efforts to correct everything that was wrong about the handling of the priest abuse issue, nor to open Vatican finances to international scrutiny, despite what I can only call token, if fierce, resistance, by elements who were against it.

No less significant, he did foil major maneuvers by Cardinal Bertone to consolidate a power base of his own, starting by trying to lord it over the Italian bishops' conference, or seeking to have the Vatican take over two major health enterprises in Italy, or his various nominations for posts such as the CEI presidency and the Archbishop of Milan and Patriarch of Venice. B16 proved to be defenseless against only one traitor - the man who was his valet for almost seven years and had performed the most intimate personal assistance tasks for him, in a total act of betrayal of the Pope's trust and of his privileged assignment.

But the worst offenders against B16 are to be found among the cardinals (who were also electors in the 2013 Conclave), diocesan bishops and assorted local prelates who, for eight years, openly defied his Magisterium in their respective jurisdictions. most notably in matters of liturgy. and in advocating liberal positions they have falsely attributed to Vatican II.

No, Benedict's decision to renounce the Pontificate was for the pragmatic reason he stated, and truly 'for the good of the Church' in every way. Experiencing the onset of motor disabilities and a possible total loss of eyesight, he was not going to stay on and give the enemies of the Church fresh ammunition to ridicule the Church. I can already imagine the media describing "a superannuated, tottering and blind Pope as the appropriate image of the superannuated, tottering and blind Church he leads", which might be one of the least offensive statements they could make. Realist that he is, he knew they would not spare him from such ridicule the way they spared John Paul II any criticism in his final years. For the good of the Church, he could not possibly let his own personal condition be turned into a matter of indignity for the Church.

The greater perspective, of course, is the magnitude and extent of the urgent tasks facing the Church - such as the new evangelization and all its wide-ranging implications, including the need for vocational recruitment and proper formation of priests; growing persecution of Christians around the world; the threat posed by Islam and global secularization to the faith; the Church's efforts to do what it can to alleviate conditions for the poorest and neediest of the world... Clearly, someone without his physical disadvantages would be in a much better position to carry on these tasks.]


Don’t heads need to roll now? We need these people out, quickly, we need a purge of the guilty men. [If this best of all possible Pontificates has not yet named any names and has not guillotined anyone as an earnest of that much-vaunted Curial reform, should we not presume there really are no heads to roll? That no one in the Curia has behaved so scandalously and criminally as the whole world assumes that Pope Francis could say justly, "Off with his head!" here and now, and then temper his verdict with whatever mercy is within him to grant?

We need, surely, someone who knows the curia but is not of it, preferably an Italian, someone committed to reform who can actually sweep the place clean. [Funny. no one has ever said before that a SecState's primary function is to clean up the Curia. even if there has always been something to clean up to some degree! When Cardinal Bertone was appointed, the expectation was for him to run the Curia in behalf of Benedict XVI - apparently in autumn of 2006, few in the media had yet come upon the meme of a 'corrupt and evil Curia'. Unfortunately for B16, his chosen right-hand man failed to deliver, with all the terrible consequences we now know. As an administrator, he was probably no worse than any of his predecessors, but where he failed his Pope was in playing the power game on his own behalf, an end that somehow spoiled everything else he did, or failed to do.]

We need a Godly hit man. That “gay lobby” for instance: someone must know who these people are: why can’t they simply be fired? The trouble seems to be that there is nobody on the spot with both the authority and the will actually to do the deed. [No, Mr. Oddie, the trouble is even more basic: No one has come out so far with names and specific charges. The Vatican can't go on a lynching spree just because it is expected to do so, on grounds that have not been established factually, much less legally!]

The obvious person to do all this on the Pope’s behalf ought surely to be his secretary of State, his “prime minister”: but if Sandro Magister is right (and he usually is, it seems) the present incumbent, Tarcisio Bertone, is a part of the problem: a year or two after the election of Pope Benedict he wrote an article describing Bertone sardonically as “the man who was supposed to help the Pope”.

It is generally supposed that he is on his way out; it has not gone unnoticed that he was not appointed to Pope Francis’s new commission. [Did anyone really expect Pope Francis to name as one of his advisers the central though unwitting agent provocateur of Vatileaks and the entire mudbath in which media submerged the Vatican? Mr. Oddie fails to note, however, that the one Curial cardinal in the Group of 8 is Cardinal Bertello, who at the time of his appointment as President of the Vatican Governatorate, was widely put down by the Italian media for being 'Bertone's protege'. as if that fact would have made B16 appoint him if Bertello himself wasn't deserving! After all, he was B16's Nuncio to Italy for a few years.]

So, who will replace him? It will be a key decision in all this, perhaps the key decision. The name that keeps on occurring to me is that of Cardinal Angelo Scola, who is supposed to be the papabile the curial Cardinals least wanted to be elected Pope, precisely because of his apparently rather fierce views on curial reform. He sounds ideal: but what do I know?

[IMHO, the cardinal electors went into the 2013 Conclave determined above all to choose a Pope who was not European (knocking out Scola and Ouellet from the running, right away!) - and who better than the Latin American who was the also-ran of the 2005 Conclave, even if he was 76, who had a reputation for holiness and the common touch, and as a Jesuit, would presumably have the requisite discipline more habitual, theoretically at least, in members of religious orders than in diocesan priests?]

The Holy Father is obviously not rushing into the reform of the Roman Curia [If he is in no rush, the situation cannot be as dire as everyone and his grandmother painted it in the days leading to the Conclave! It looks more and more like those oh-so-outraged cardinal electors - including many he made cardinals, such as the younger US cardinals - were simply looking for a pretext to bash Benedict XVI, inexplicably, for general incompetence while feigning concern for the Curia! I have not read of a single cardinal elector even whispering to the media about Curial reform since March 13, 2005. If it was all so bad, why aren't they at St. Peter's Square with placards reading 'RIFORMA SUBITO!' since nothing has been done about it for 3 months and the matter has been assigned to a Group of 8 that will meet for the first time in October.] - and I have no doubt that he is wiser than I am in all this. He is, it seems, getting to know his Curia personally, not least importantly in the Casa Santa Marta.

Perhaps I am being unduly impatient; perhaps, too, there is a touch of culpable vengefulness in my strong desire to see those who betrayed Pope Benedict struck down and sent far away from Rome to desolate parishes in swamps and industrial wastelands where they will have to do some real pastoral work rather than spending their every waking hour plotting against each other before enjoying a leisurely lunch in the Borgo Pio.

The trouble is, of course, that though this might turn some of them into holy priests and save their souls, it would not in the case of others be fair on their people. In those cases, their bishop would need to keep a close eye on the situation. [????]

Either way, the thing has to be done; and it can surely only be done on the spot by a single strong man loyal to the Pope and with his authority to act (rather than by a commission of distant cardinals at the ends of the earth).

I hope and pray it will be done soon, so that the Holy Father does not have this problem on his shoulders as well as all the other cares of his office. He urgently needs it: and he deserves nothing less. [How naïve to think that structural and personnel changes alone will relieve the Pope - or any other Pope, for that matter - of the burdens inherent to being Successor of Peter. There is no rest or respite for 'the servant of the servants of God', unless like Benedict XVI, he decides he can serve better by withdrawing to a life of prayer and meditation.]

This item was posted inadvertently a few hours ago when I had just lifted the article from the Herald, but I took it off so I could rebut some of its assumptions.

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Is this the Per Ipsum?

Fr. Blake who heads a parish in Brighton, England, is one of two British blogging priests. along with Fr. Tim Finigan, I have followed during Benedict XVI's Pontificate. In all that time, I believe this is the first post of this kind I have seen from him. Sarcasm is not usually his thing...

Pope Francis's 'emancipated' liturgy

June 19, 2013

Before I go any further, I am a great fan of so much of what our Holy Father has to say, especially about the poor, economics and the environment, at least in its reconstituted Vaticanese form, I am a bit uncomfortable with that cameraman that now has a permanent place on the back of the Popemobile. but it has become pretty obvious that the Supreme Legislator does not consider the rubrics of the liturgy are that important, in fact it seems as if they can be ignored, or changed at will.

Benedict taught the liturgy was "a given", we read the black and did the red. Francis seems to be less precise about these things, his liturgy is "emancipated", as he describes it.

Who cares if priests are vested properly? It is obviously "emancipated" to expect concelebrants to wear chasubles, or to expect street clothes the be covered by an amice if necessary, it is emancipated to put flowers on one corner of an altar and some candles, or are they oil lamps, on the other, with an insignificant crucifix in the middle. [I take it that since the Santa Marta Masses are supposed to the Pope's daily morning Mass (that he would offer, as his predecessors did, or as any priest should do, regardless of whether there are others present or not), Mons. Guido Marini has - and can have - nothing to do with them, since these are the Pope's private Masses, not official papal liturgies. I wonder who disposes of the arrangements for these Masses, and why it would be a problem at all to just follow the Benedettian altar configuration. Whoever is, he/she/they is or are obviously no fans of Benedict XVI and his respect for liturgy.]

It is emancipated to bow rather than genuflect to the tabernacle and after the elevations. It is unemancipated to prepare a homily carefully. It is unemancipated to expect servers to vest, it is emancipated to have the dressed in work uniforms and it is emancipated to have a Bishop take the role of a Deacon.

I want to be emancipated too. I think I might introduce a few prayers at the beginning of the Ordinary Form Mass whilst the choir are singing the Introit. I've a few different but ancient Offertory prayers I would like to introduce and I feel inclined to genuflect before and after each elevation. Now would that be "emancipated" or just plain Pelagian. or what is the other word, "Restorationist"? [In fairness, it has been explained that a medical problem - arthritis or sciatica - makes it difficult for Pope Francis to genuflect.]

Obviously my emmancipated choice to celebrate Mass ad apsidum (towards the apse) is rubrical according to the Missal and a valid option for any priest according to later CDW instructions, so that is not an issue/ Even if the Pope, unlike his two immediate predecessors who chose that option for their daily Mass, chooses not to avail himself of it, but what about "ending", celebrating Mass at he North or South end of the altar, is that emancipated or just plain Protestant?

It is pretty obvious from the Pope's personal liturgical style that any Priest or Bishop can do anything they like in the Ordinary Form, or are there limits?

The photo apparently shows a morning Mass concelebrated daily by the Pope with some senior prelates at Casa Santa Marta, and is taken at the prayer of the 'Per ipsum" ("Through him and in him, etc") that ends the canon of the Consecration - in which instead of the principal celebrant, the Pope, holding the chalice and the host, his concelebrants do. Fr. Blake also notes the 'stripped down' altar table - no candles, small Crucifix, and what he does not point out, a prominent microphone (relative to the Crucifix). A lay blogger has commented on the photo, and goes on to other reflections on the role of Popes in upholding what has been handed down to them:

Speaking of liturgical abuse……
by Lawrence Jones

June 19, 2013

Fr. Ray Blake seems a bit nonplussed over the liturgical behavior of Pope Francis, behavior which is very, very much different from his predecessor... Fr. Blake did have this photo -shown above], which captured one of the more strange “Per Ipsums” I’ve ever seen.

Now, the Mass is a Sacrifice offered by the priest to God. And the Per Ipsum is sort of the conclusion of the critical portion of that Sacrifice, the part where the priest really “finalizes” all that has come before in the Consecration and makes plain for Whom, by Whom, and to Whom the Sacrifice is offered.

But I don’t know that in my 15 years of being a Catholic, and several years of going to Mass before that, if I’ve ever seen the Per Ipsum offered in this manner. Does it undermine the idea of Sacrifice offered by the priest to have the priest who offered It not hold the Precious and Sacred Body and Blood of our Lord at this climactic act?

Fr. Blake noticed some other oddities [he quotes from Fr. Blake's blog entry]...

Now, many have said “Look, he’s a Jesuit, Jesuits don’t know or care about the finer points of the Liturgy.” I would respond by saying, perhaps that’s why it’s taken 500 years for a Jesuit to become Pope!

But seriously, many Jesuits have offered the Mass fully in line with the rubrics and have shown the proper respect for this, the Source and Summit of our Faith... A more accurate statement might be that liturgical abuse is especially widespread in Latin America, where all manner of abuses and bad ideas have been in wide circulation for decades.

I know many people are not comfortable with even raising questions regarding the actions of the Pope. I’ve been meaning to do a post on ultramontanism, its history, and the destruction it has permitted if not directly caused. But we’ve got to come to an understanding, as Catholics, and it’s something that I’ve only gradually become aware of in the past couple of years, that there are elements of the Faith that not even the Pope should change radically.

That’s not to say he hasn’t the power to do so, it’s that he hasn’t the right. As Fr. Blake says, one of those things is the Liturgy. Popes, historically, have felt bound by what they received in the Liturgy. They felt what they received was something beyond human, and that it was their duty to protect and defend that which they had received, and not make wholesale changes to it. Such changes as were made, historically, were limited to either permitting gradual, organic growth, or codification/rationalization of various Rites, in the case of Trent (which liturgical reform was not entirely “organic,” either).

That all began to change in the early 20th century, during a period of incredible ultramontanism that raged in the wake of Vatican I, where the dominant opinion really was that the Pope could do absolutely anything he willed, and that anything would be by definition good

That thinking led directly to the mid-20th century liturgical revolution, where a Pope decided it was appropriate not only to scrap close to 2000 years of liturgical tradition, and create a new “ecumenical” liturgy out of whole cloth, but also to, in an unclear manner, declare the traditional Liturgy abrogated [Paul VI did not, actually, but his promulgation of the Novus Ordo was considered universally to have meant an abrogation of the traditional Mass, until Benedict XVI made the necessary correction in 2007]something even the uber-progressive Hegelian Jesuit Karl Rahner defined as constituting a “mortal sin.” Pope Benedict later clarified that it was not right to abrogate a timeless Rite. And thank God for that.

But this ultramontanism goes beyond the Liturgy. The other sacred duty of popes, in addition to guarding, upholding, and cherishing the Liturgy as they received it, is to guard, defend, uphold, and transmit the received Tradition! That is, the complex set of beliefs and practices that have come down to us from the earliest Church.

Such was seen as the most basic function of a Pope for a very, very long time, but sometime in the 20th century that belief, too, became very muddied, very unclear, and we have now had a succession of Popes whose guardianship of Tradition has been at times troubled, at best.

And we have many faithful Catholics today who believe, or who have been led to believe, that Tradition is nothing more than whatever the present reigning Pope defines it to be. I have read such on several high profile Catholic blogs of late. I don’t think it takes much thought to find numerous problems with such a belief.

It’s a very sticky situation. Without belaboring the point too much, let me condense what I’m trying to say down to this: we need to be, as Catholics, careful not to reduce our definition of “orthodoxy” or “faithfulness” down to “I do or say whatever the Pope does or says.” I don’t think idea meshes well with either the history or Tradition of the Church.


BTW, The site news.va marked the first 100 days of this Pontificate by inaugurating this new feature:




I know I have been remiss so far in posting any of the articles that have been written about Pope Francis's first 100 days as Pope, but this is not a Pope Francis site, after all, and anyone who is interested would already have read them without my prompting.

Just to make sure that everything is clear about where I stand: From Day 1 of Pope Francis's Pontificate, it was never my intention to chronicle this Pontificate as I tried to do that of Benedict XVI. After all, this Forum is dedicated to Benedict XVI and continues to be, even if he is no longer Pope.

In the case of Pope Francis, I have limited myself to posting the Vatican bulletins about his daily activities and providing links to his major statements and addresses. He is our Pope, and his daily activities and statements provide the current context for the life of the Church.

However, the articles and commentaries on Pope Francis that I choose to post and comment on in this Forum are those that bear on or reflect on Benedict XVI's Pontificate and person - in the continuing desire to have a documented rebuttal to statements that are unfair, untrue, malicious and/or harmful to Benedict XVI. Pope Francis is already universally apotheosized more than amply and vociferously, and even if he were not, he does not need this Forum in any way (any more than Benedict XVI did!). Those of us who followed and continue to follow Benedict XVI with total dedication and love do so out of a personal connection to him - a directed commitment and dedication, not a general commitment to any other Pope.

Pope Francis has my allegiance to him as my Pope and the love that every Catholic has for the Pope, the same love I felt for the Popes in my lifetime, from Pius XII to Paul VI. Such love spontaneously acquired a personal connection with the two John Pauls, and on a different order of magnitude and more so, with Benedict XVI, that's all. I do not feel that with Pope Francis, any more than I felt it with Pius XII, John XXIII, and Paul VI, so the feeling has nothing to with Pope Francis and who he is, with all his great virtues and excellences. It simply has to do with my personal response to him.

But even if I had felt the same spontaneous connection, I would never have felt compelled to commit myself to following this Pontificate the way I did Benedict's, for the simple reason that I do not have the time to do more than I am already doing (increasingly difficult as it is to find not just the time ,but to be as prompt and as regular about it as I would like to be).

The experience of the past three months has shown that practically every news story or commentary published about Pope Francis is tailored to reflect negatively on Benedict XVI and/or his Pontificate, so in this category, obviously, I have had to choose for purposes of rebuttal, only those that are either 'typical' of such reporting and commentary - namely, they reflect the herd mentality in MSM and Catholic media, and the boilerplate line they all tend to take with respect to any particular papal event or statement; and those that appear in major media outlets that take the anti-Benedict line to an offensive extreme.




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Friday, June 21, 2013, Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time
MEMORIAL OF ST. ALOYSIUS GONZAGA


Third and fourth from left: St. Aloysius in Glory, by Tiepolo; and St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. Aloysius adoring the Immaculate Heart of Mary, by a 17th-century Spanish painter.
ST. ALOYSIUS (LUIGI) GONZAGA (Italy, 1568-1591), Jesuit, Patron of Christian Youth
When a young priest was presented to Benedict XVI During his visit to Padre Pio's shrine in San Giovanni Rotondo on this day in 2009, the Pope remarked to the priest named Luigi for today's saint that they were both celebrating their name day because his own second name is Alois, so HAPPY NAME DAY, HEILIGE VATER!*... Born in the family castle near Mantua of the House of Gonzaga, one of Italy's most storied noble families, young Aloysius grew up in the full splendor of Renaissance courts and the best education possible. As a teenager, he served as a page in the court of Spain's Philip II when his family lived in Spain for two years. He was always very pious from childhood; by age 7, his prayers included the Daily Office of priests; and at 9, he vowed himself to chastity, and received first Communion from the future St. Carlo Borromeo, then a cardinal. After a four-year battle of wills with his father who wanted him to be a soldier, he renounced his inheritance and joined the Jesuit order in Rome, where his confessor was the future saint and Doctor of the Church Robert Bellarmine. One condition for his acceptance was that he should reduce his level of self-mortification in order not to alienate his fellow seminarians. He was ordained in 1589. In 1590, he had a vision of the Archangel Gabriel who told him he would die within a year. In 1591, plague broke out in Rome. Aloysius helped in a hospital and caught the disease himself. He was always sickly, suffering from kidney disease. Although he recovered from the plague, he was weaker than ever. He told Bellarmine that he would die in the Octave of Corpus Christi which fell on June 21 that year. He seemed well that day, but he was given Extreme Unction. He died just before midnight. He was beatified just 14 years after his death, and was canonized in 1626 along with Stanislaus Kostka, another young Jesuit. Benedict XIII proclaimed him the patron of students in 1729, and in 1926, Pius XI named him patron of Christian youth. He was buried in the Church of St. Ignatius in Rome, but his head is now enshrined in the Basilica named after him in Castiglione, his hometown.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/062113.cfm


NB: The Pope's second baptismal name 'Alois' is the German form of Aloysius, which means 'famous warrior'. Fascinating combination of patron saints: Joseph the gentle carpenter and foster father, and Alois, the boy saint who did not become a soldier ('famous warrior') as his father was and wanted him to be! I remarked in 2009, that of all people, the ultra-secular then Prime Minister of Spain, Jose Luis Zapatero, bears the Spanish form of our Pope's baptismal names! Jose Luis is a favorite combination of male names in the Hispanic world.


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

Pope Francis met with-
Participants in the Day for Papal Representatives (Apostolic Nuncios) marked in the context of the Year of Faith. Address in Italian.
Vatican Radio's English translation may be found here:
http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2013/06/21/pope_to_nuncios:_be_pastors_who_carry_christ_to_the_world/en1-703615

and in the afternoon with
- Mons. Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (weekly meeting).


L'Osservatore Romano marked the 50th anniversary today of the election of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini who reigned as Pope Paul VI, with a special issue. OR editor Giovanni Maria Vian is a Church historian who has specialized in the life and Pontificate of Paul VI.


A news conference was held at the Vatican Press Office by officials of the Rome-based Fondazione Vaticana JosephRatzinger-Benedtto XVI to report on the Foundation's activities in 2013, particularly a symposium to be held October 24-26 at the Pontifical Lateran University on "The Gospels: History and Christology in the Writings of Joseph Ratzinger".

The Foundtion also announced the winners of the third annual Premio
Ratzinger in theology: Richard Burridge, Anglican minister, Biblical exegete, and Dean of King's College, London - the first non-Catholic to be awarded this prize; and Christian Schaller, lay professor of dogmatic theology and vice-director of the Regensburg-based Institut Papst Benedikt XVI, publisher of the 16-volume Collected Writings of Joseph Ratzinger.


One year ago...
Benedict XVI met with H.E. Filip Vujanović, President of Montenegro, with his wife and delegation; Mons. Nikola Eterović, Secretary-General of the Bishops' Synod. who presented the working document for the General Assembly of the Bishops' Synod on the New Evangelization scheduled in October 2012; and participants of the annual meeting of the ROACO (Riunione delle Opere per l’Aiuto alle Chiese Orientali)[Assembly of Works to Aid the Oriental Churches].

A news conference was held, presided by Mons. Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization, to present the program of the major events for the Year of Faith (Oct. 11, 2012 - Nov. 24, 2013), along with the Year of Faith website and its logo.




Addressing group aiding Oriental Churches,
Pope issues new appeal on Syria
and looks forward to Lebanon trip

June 21, 2012

Pope Benedict XVI today addressed participants in the annual meeting of ROACO (Riunione delle Opere in Aiuto delle Chiese Orientali), an umbrella group operating under the Congrgeation for Oriental Churches for various aid efforts in behalf of the Oriental Churches.

Here is the Vatican translation of an address that was delivered in Italian, French, English and German:

Dear Cardinals, Your Beatitudes,
Venerable Brother Bishops and Priests,
Dear Members and friends of ROACO,

I am very happy to welcome and greet you at this regular gathering. I extend greetings to the Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for Eastern Churches and President of ROACO and I thank him for the kind words that he addressed to me.

I also thank the Archbishop Secretary, the Under-Secretary, the other officials and all those present. I renew my gratitude to the institutions represented here, to the Churches from Europe and America that support them and to the many benefactors. I assure you of my prayers to the Lord, in the consoling certainty that he "loves a cheerful giver"
(2 Cor 9:7).

Above all it is my hope that you will persevere in "that movement of charity which, by Papal mandate, the Congregation oversees, so that the Holy Land and other Eastern regions may receive material and spiritual support in an ordered and just way so as to meet the demands of their ordinary ecclesial life and other special needs" (Address to the Congregation for Eastern Churches, 9 June 2007).

In these words I expressed myself five years ago while visiting the Dicastery for Eastern Churches and I now wish to reiterate firmly that same exhortation so as to underline the urgent needs of the present moment.

The present economic and social situation, all the more sensitive on account of its global dimensions, continues to create problems in economically developed areas of the world, and, more seriously, spills over into less affluent regions, seriously compromising their present and their future.

The East, the motherland of ancient Christian traditions, is especially affected by this process, which engenders uncertainty and instability that also has an impact on the Church and in the ecumenical and inter-religious fields.

These factors tend to reopen the endemic wounds of history and they have a damaging effect on dialogue and peaceful cohabitation among peoples. They also weaken authentic respect for human rights, especially the right to personal and community religious freedom. This right should be guaranteed in its public profession, not only in terms of worship, but also in relation to the pastoral, educational, charitable and social activities that are indispensable for its effective exercise.

The representatives of the Holy Land, including the Apostolic Delegate Archbishop Antonio Franco, the Vicar of the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and Father Custodian, all regular participants in ROACO, are joined this year by the two Major Archbishops, His Beatitude Cardinal George Alencherry of the SyroMalabar Church of India and His Beatitude Sviatoslav Shevchuk of the Greek Catholic Church of Ukraine.

Also present are the Apostolic Nuncio to Syria, Archbishop Mario Zenari, and the Bishop President of Caritas Syria. This gives me the opportunity to open up the gaze of the Church of Rome to the universal dimension that is so deeply rooted and constitutes one of the essential marks of the mystery of the Church.

It also gives me the opportunity to reaffirm my closeness to the sufferings of our brothers and sisters in Syria, especially innocent children and the defenceless.

May our prayer, our commitment and our active brotherhood in Christ, as an oil of consolation, help them not to lose sight of the light of hope in this moment of darkness, and obtain from God wisdom of heart for all in positions of responsibility so that bloodshed and violence, that only bring pain and death, may cease and give way to reconciliation, harmony and peace.

Every effort should be made, including by the international community, to bring Syria out of the present situation of violence and crisis, which has already lasted a long time and risks becoming a wider conflict that would have highly negative consequences for the country and the whole region.

I also issue an urgent and heartfelt appeal, in view of the extreme need of the population, that the necessary humanitarian assistance be guaranteed, and extended to the many persons who have been forced to leave their homes, some of them becoming refugees in neighbouring countries. The precious gift of human life must always be defended.

Dear friends of ROACO, the Year of Faith, which I have instituted to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the inauguration of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, will offer fruitful suggestions to Aid to the Eastern Churches, that are a providential witness to what we read in the Word of God: that faith without works withers and dies
(cf. Jas 2:17).

May you always be eloquent signs of the charity that flows from the heart of Christ and presents the Church to the world in her true mission and identity by placing her at the service of God who is Love.

Today in the Latin Rite we celebrate Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, whom I ask to sustain our thanksgiving to the Holy Spirit and to pray with us so that the Lord may also raise up in our days exemplary agents of charity towards others.

May the intercession of the Most Holy Mother of God always accompany the Eastern Churches in their homeland and in the diaspora, bringing them encouragement and hope for a renewed service to the Gospel.

May she also watch over the coming journey which – God willing – I will make to Lebanon for the solemn closing of the Special Assembly for the Middle East of the Synod of Bishops. I look forward to offering the Lebanese Church and Nation my paternal and fraternal embrace.

In the meantime I am pleased to impart to your Organizations, to all present, to your dear ones, and to the communities entrusted to your care, my affectionate Apostolic Blessing.


The following is information about ROACO from a CNS backgrounder in 2005:
Created by the Congregation for Eastern Churches, ROACO coordinates nearly 20 U.S. and European agencies and organizations that provide assistance to Eastern Catholic communities in Asia, Northern Africa, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Coordinating the vast amounts of aid and the projects to be funded is essential in order to avoid overlapping efforts on the part of both the Church and its donors.

ROACO acts like a clearinghouse, taking in requests for aid and support from the Eastern churches all over the world. Eastern Catholic churches are often a minority in overwhelmingly Muslim or Orthodox Christian nations and are located sometimes in very poor countries.

At the same time, ROACO serves as a bridge linking the Holy See and Christians of the Latin tradition to those of the Eastern Catholic churches. The Eastern churches have their own distinctive liturgical and legal systems, but enjoy the same dignity, rights, and obligations as members of the Latin rite.

Though ROACO addresses the needs of the Eastern churches across three continents, it also comes to the aid of the Latin-rite communities in the Middle East, particularly the Holy Land.





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In the continuing absence of a good wrap-up article about the IOR that is not biased one way or the other, I am re-posting these articles from this time last year, to call attention to significant background facts about IOR as well as the questions about its operations that have remained murky to this day... It is also 'instructive' because of Rodari's reference to St. Francis and his attitude towards the Church and money. Less than a year after he wrote this article, Rodari has not brought up this argument at all in his reporting about the new Pontificate!...



June 21, 2012
When I first started to read this article, I was hoping it might provide a helpful primer of sorts to the world of IOR. It is no such thing, primarily because Rodari tends to mix up his categories, but he reveals a couple of facts (I assume they are, because Rodari presents them as facts) that are not generally known about, of all people, Mother Teresa and John Paul II, and their attitude about contributions received by the Church. But I do take issue with Rodari's strange assumption that financial transparency is not compatible with the way the Church operates its good works....


The Vatican and IOR:
Where does the money come from
and how is it being used?

by Paolo Rodari
Translated from

June 18, 2012

What do they know, at the IOR, about where the money comes from that is deposited at the 'Vatican bank'? Little, or nothing at all. Did not Jesus say, "When you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing, so that your almsgiving may be secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you" (Mt 6,3)? [Surely, the Gospel citation does not apply to Rodari's first statement! One worries when a secular journalist starts citing Scripture, because his theology may well be deficient or suspect!]

IOR was said to have been ready to spend a lot of money - 200 million euros in cash - to make good the credit of the San Raffaele medical center in Milan and thereby acquire control of it. [A project of Cardinal Bertone, originally favored by Ettore Gotti Tedeschi who thereafter backed off, and which Benedict XVI himself eventually vetoed].

Euros from the anonymous faithful, for the most part, are meant to 'grow' as a matter of duty. Donations which do not just come from big depositors but from small contributions to the Church which make up quite a sum when put together.

All this money in currency that is not to be ashamed of because this, too, is the Church: offerings which are made often without knowing who they come from. Often but not always, because the so-called Peter's Pence - that part of the offerings collected by the local churches around the world which is sent to the Holy Father for the various social and charitable undertakings of the Church - also comes from other known donors [corporations or organizations].

For instance, on December 21, 2011, the well-known Italian TV anchor Bruno Vespa [hardly a fan of Benedict XVI] sent the Pope, in the name of his family, a contribution of 10,000 euro (with the P.S. "When could my family and I have a chance to meet the Holy Father and greet him?" in the cover letter sent to the Pope's private secretary, and published in Gianluigi Nuzzi's book Sua Santita). The common folk just give their offering without thought of identifying themselves. Most give a few euros, and there are also a few who decide to leave their entire patrimony of a lifetime to the Church.

[Somehow, Rodari shifts suddenly to the big-money depositors of IOR, as follows:]
IOR wants transparency in order to be able to join the 'white list' of financially virtuous nations. Fine. But how? How can they tell which of the bags of euros brought in by big depositors, perhaps simply to help clean up their conscience of their own sins, is an offering to the Church and not money that is being laundered? [Rodari seems to mix up his categories here. Depositors in IOR are bank depositors like they would be anywhere else. Their money is not a direct offering to the Church as the Peter's Pence collections are (though thelatter is necessarily deposited in IOR), but the choice to deposit in IOR means that big-money depositors make funds available to IOR for reinvestment or any other activity meant to make that money grow, and to spend some of the profits in the Church's social and charitable activities around the world.]

Where is the discrimination? How can they explain that transparency in the ecclesial sector clashes frontally with that secrecy, or discretion, which is an integral part of the life of faith? Of the mysteries of faith, in fact. [Rodari is being near-blasphemous in his sarcasm here. A financial transaction, even if it takes place in a bank that belongs to the Holy See - the Holy See may be 'holy' but the bank is not, even if its ulterior raison d'etre is religious, and therefore, presumably, holy - is a secular activity that has nothing to do with the faith. The transparency required by Moneyval is sheer secular transparency that could not possibly clash in any way with the faith, least of all with the 'mysteries of the faith'. No one in his right mind could possibly interpret the possible failure of IOR to vet its big depositors to find out where their deposited funds came from as having to do with the faith at all! It's plain incompetence, or worse, a 'couldn't-care-less' attitude, the very opposite of any manifestation of the faith!]

The news annals are full of such episodes. The protagonists of the two most outstanding examples are two 'sacred icons' of late 20th century Catholicism - John Paul II and Mother Teresa.

It would be difficult to find a saint that was ever as 'wealthy' as Mother Teresa was. Come again? Didn't she live by begging around the streets of Calcutta like the very poor whom she served? And don't her disciples everywhere do the same? Of course. But few are aware that Mother Teresa had an account in IOR of infinite dimensions.

So many donations, offered by rich and poor alike, captivated by her simplicity and faith. How many persons, many out of a sense of guilt because of their wealth, others out of genuine faith, gave over to her part of their own patrimony? Countless. Money which was brought to the IOR in many ways, and about whose sources no one asked questions, not even she. Because she said, literally: "It doesn't matter where the money comes from, but how it is used".

With it, she built hospitals, leprosaria, and carried out all her works of charity. But her biggest contributors kept their money at the IOR, stored in a subterranean bunker where, it is said, much of the money has been converted into gold ingots. (In 2007, it is said that the Vatican, on good advice and before the current crisis struck, converted many of its assets into gold, other than what was needed to cover current obligations and keep enough cash on hand. And that the IOR treasury is protected by four-meter-thick bomb-proof walls.)

Back to Mother Teresa's account. Karol Wojtyla knew all about it and she had his blessing. Because he, too, had the same policy with his own Peter's Pence. What money, in fact, did the Polish labor union Solidarnosc use to help bring down Communism in Poland? Who bankrolled it? Who sustained it financially?

Recently Lech Walesa himself, who led Solidarnosc at the time, stated that the union received money mostly from the Vatican and its charitable organizations. Asked to identify which, he said he could not remember. In short, he too, received financial aid without asking too many questions, and without moralisms, simply thanking Pope John Paul II and that enterprising American bishop, the late Mons. Paul Casimir Marcinkus, who headed IOR for some time.

Walesa said: "All the financial activity was carried out through the Church which was not controlled by the regime. We at Solidarnosc had to be very careful, we were spied on, the secret services carried on provocations of all kinds, and we tried to keep ourselves away from any suspicious activity", but, he adds, "this did not mean that we were not getting the money. On the contrary".

On October 2008, in Gdansk - the northern Baltic city where Solidarnosc was born - Walesa was questioned by the public prosecutor of Rome, Luca Tescaroli, who was investigating the death of Banco Ambrosiano president Roberto Calvi who was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London in June 1982.

Tescaroli pointed out that in letters from Calvi that surfaced after his death, he wrote that he had financed Solidarnosc in the amount of over one thousand-million dollars [a billion in American terms]. Walesa answered: "The Church gave us money but we never asked where it came from. The Church was helping us - to us, it simply meant it was expressing solidarity".

Solidarity or money-laundering? It all depends on your approach or point of view. It's like it is about sin: For the Church, the secrecy of the confessional is sacred, always, even when it concerns the most horrendous crimes, including pedophilia. But according to the law of most democratic states, it is sacrilege not to disclose such criminal secrets.

What about, for example, the $158 million that was spent by the Knights of Columbus in 2011 alone for charitable work, according to its Supreme Knight, Carl Anderson, who is a member of IOR's lay Advisory Board? Where did all that come from? Was it all just contributions from the faithful? Or were there other sources? [I think Rodari is singling out the Knights of Columbus for no apparent reason. I hold no brief for Carl Anderson, whose action of releasing the IOR board's internal minutes of the session at which they dismissed Gotti Tedeschi with a no-confidence vote, I found completely gratuitous and un-Christian, But for Rodari to single out the KofC as an example of potentially questionable financing, without citing a single fact to support it, is simply wrong and unethical.]

Going back to John Paul II, it is always useful to understand what the Catholic Church is. In 1996, on the 50th anniversary of his ordination as a priest, the College of Cardinals offered him a significant sum of money to use for whatever intention he chose. [Hmm, did the cardinals offer anything similar to Benedict XVI when he marked the 60th anniversary of his ordination last year?]

What did Papa Wojtyla do? Did he give it to the poor? No. "I want to use it for the reconstruction and decoration of the Redemptoris Mater chapel in the Apostolic Palace".

So this chapel, one of three major chapels in the Apostolic Palace, along with the Sistine and the Pauline, was renovated and adorned with money which could have been used for philanthropic or charitable purposes.

But the Pope had a definite plan for the chapel. In the background, he wanted a representation of parousia, the second coming of Christ, The Erchomenos - he who comes - appears in an axis of divinity which seems inaccessible, with an inscrutable depth, but which is made exceptionally near.

Christ, as a priest, descends, showing the wounds of his Passion. Before him, ready for the celestial feast, are Adam and Eve, dressed in red; Philip with a chalice, and Mark with the Gospel. Then there is Moses who blocks the Red Sea from the Egyptians for the Israelites' Passover crossing, and on the other side, Noah and his ark and animals. Then, Jonah and the whale, and on the other side, Joseph of Egypt with his sacks of grain. Earth and sea at the end of times give back the dead to Christ, and the latter emerge dressed in white, the humans who have been saved. And the archangel Michael has his hands on the scales of justice and tips the scale to cast the devil into hell.

Hell, of course, is also present, because otherwise, God would not be Father and Love but a dictator. [????] But whether any of these dead beings ends up in hell remains an inscrutable mystery of God. That is why Hell is covered by a red veil. And this is what Papa Wojtyla ordered, according to an idea by the late Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthazar, who was a friend of the present Pope. Hell is represented but it leaves the question open whether it remains empty.

It is for this reason that the Vatican, with John Paul II in the lead, has always accepted contributions without asking where the money comes from. [Once again, I find it troubling that Rodari seems to lump everything together - contributions intended as donations to the Church, along with personal or corporate funds that are deposited in IOR as savings or investments. There is a clear distinction. Peter's Pence generally comes to IOR in the form of checks from the various local Churches made out to the Pope or whatever Vatican agency they are told to remit to, but certainly not deposited in their own accounts.]

There are those who give anonymously as a form of expiation, the cost of saving themselves from eternal damnation, and an expiation accepted without facile moralism [Again, a misrepresentation by Rodari. The Church does not accept any such contributions as 'acts of expiation', for the simple reason that they are not necessarily all carried out in compliance of a penance prescribed in formal confession. It may be that some, if not all offerings to the Church, are made as a token of the contributor's personal hope that such an act may 'insure' him against Hell, but no single act can insure the Christian of that, only a continuing effort to avoid sin, to confess sins which we humans tend to repeat anyway, and to gain absolution every time we do that - the absolution is not forever, it's only good until the next time we commit sin!]

"I'll pay because perhaps it may help me," some say. "If your money serves to do some good, then perhaps God will have mercy on you," some priests usually say, only too happy to receive any contributions. As if to say, there's no harm in trying!

Otherwise, one won't understand why even today, it is possible to request Masses said for the dead. It is thought that paying 10 or 15 euro for a Mass will lighten the pains that the dear departed have to serve in purgatory. An inscription from 1500 says so on an image of Mary in Rome's Piazza del Gesu: By a decree of Pope Pius V [the Pope of the Council of Trent], who was canonized in 1712 by Clement XI, anyone who recites the Marian litany with faith before the image will receive for himself and for the souls in purgatory the equivalent of 100 days of indulgence, which can be increased if one crosses the street to the glorious Church of Gesu, Roman center for the Jesuits, and places an offering in its coffers. [Rodari would do well to read Spe salvi for what Benedict XVI says about indulgences, to get a genuine and unskeptical view of what they mean for the faithful.]

Money in exchange for salvation, of course. [NO, that's really misrepresenting the Church! We contribute to the Church primarily because we want to and we can, and only secondarily, because we should. To think that we can buy our way out of any punishment we deserve is a sin in itself. That's the logic of humans, not the logic of God and of his Church.] But with the necessary precautions.

The experts of Moneyval are not all wrong in this. Nor is itg wrong for anyone to buzz IOR insistently on this issue, because in everything, moderation is necessary. [In effect, IOR should be able to vet its big-money depositors to determine from their financial history if their money is clean, or if it is dirty money which they are trying to launder.]

On the other hand, reform in the Church always starts from within, often with a 'return to poverty'. Money should not frighten men of the Church, who generally do not moralize about the contributions they get, but poverty is an evangelical precept that cannot be ignored. Spiritual poverty certainly, but also material poverty. [The term Rodari uses, 'poverta di spirito', is incorrect. He obviously means 'spiritual humility', for which one needs a richness of spirit!]

St. Francis would not have been who he is if he had not abandoned everything, becoming a beggar when he could have been a rich textile merchant. Many ask today what St. Francis would say if he entered the Leonine walls into the world of the Vatican. Would he strip himself naked before the bankers of IOR as he did when he decided to give up his patrimony? Probably so.

[And I would ask Rodari to read up on St. Francis who did visit the Pope at the Vatican at least twice - once when he asked Innocent III to approve his new order, and six years later, when he attended the Fourth Lateran Council - and who never denounced the Vatican or the Pope for anything, but was always loyal to the Pope, whoever he was. Besides, Francis did not ask everyone to live in poverty - only the members of his various orders. He may have been mystical, but he was also practical, as it seemed he was, eminently, about the Vatican and what it needed in order to be able to deal with the universal Church! Moreover, Francis, like Mother Teresa, would probably have deposited any funds collected by his order in IOR if there had been an IOR at the time] ]

Because one thing is sure: The Church would not be what it is without the poor, who give 'joyfully' of the little that they have, as St. Paul asked them to. [But the Church always had figures like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea as well. The virtuous poor are certainly ideal, but they do not have a monopoly of virtue.]

Jesus said it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needled then for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Which is to say: Wealth in itself is not evil, but poverty facilitates a relationship with God, communion with mystery, and therefore eternal salvation.

The poor and the mendicant friars for centuries did their begging in the countryside - the poorest among the poor. Canon law today still recognizes the right of mendicant religious orders to beg alms. Those orders like the Capuchins who do not possess real estate or fixed income from rents are licensed to beg to support themselves.

But there are conditions: The alms-seekers must always do so in pairs; they should always lodge overnight in parish houses or their own religious house;, they must observe their order's religious practices regularly; they must not be gone for more than a month from their convent in their home diocese, or not more than two months outside of their diocese. [Interesting, but did we really need to know such details?]

Shortly before his last tragic week in Jerusalem, Jesus was in the temple. Mark and Luke narrate that Jesus and his disciples observed how the faithful gave the offerings which the priests would later use to perform ritual sacrifices and to help the poor. These were voluntary contributions, not taxes, that the priests also used to maintain the temple and their own needs.

Jesus and his disciples observed how the rich would toss off their coins ostentatiously. Then came a poor widow, who offered 'two small coins' which Mark said were worth 'a few cents'. For Jesus, it was this widow, not the rich, who was generous, not because she thought of making an offering - when she could have chosen not to do so - or because she gave her two coins to Yahweh and those who may be poorer than she, but because she gave everything she had to give.

The teaching is clear: It is people like her whom we must look to. These are the people who make up the Church. People who give everything, not just what is extra, and who give everything anonymously. Often in poverty.

Finally, this shows that St. Paul's teaching in Corinthians 7 remains valid: "I tell you, brothers, the time is running out. From now on, let those having wives act as not having them, those weeping as not weeping, those rejoicing as not rejoicing, those buying as not owning, those using the world as not using it fully. For the world in its present form is passing away".

In other words, we should not fear money. Money can be used, but as Mother Teresa did, almost forgetting that you have it.

This is a concept that was followed by Gotti Tedeschi's predecessor as IOR president, Angelo Caloia. In a lecture to ambassadors from the Middle East and North Africa at the Pontifical Gregorian University in May 2007, Caloia said that the money for Peter's Pence "is directed above all for the material needs of poor dioceses, to religious institutions and communities that are in serious difficulty: the poor, children, older people. the marginalized, victims of war and natural disasters,refugeees".

But, he added, there exists another source of income for the 'Pope's charities', namely, the profits of IOR. So these too are a blessing. Once the profits are made, they can be used in all the right ways, without any need to be scandalized. [I don't think the Vatican or IOR has ever had to apologize for any legitimate profits they have made out of IOR operations. The issue has always been whether IOR, wittingly or unwittingly, has been accepting deposits from persons or corporations who may be using it to launder dirty money. It's one thing not to know because you don't want to know, but in the new world of financial transparency, IOR has a duty to know, and I suppose that is the whole point of the internal regulations required by Moneyval to insure transparency.]

Every year, the IOR places at the Pope's total disposition the difference between its revenues and its income in the past year. The actual amount of this sum is supposed to be kept secret. But it is thought that it is considerable, at least twice what Peter's Pence brings. [In fact, it turns out to be much more.]

Some figures have leaked in recent years. In 1992, 62 billion Italian lire ($45 million); in 1993, 72.5 billion ($47.4 million); in 1994, 75 billion ($49.1 million); in 1995, 78.3 billion ($51,2 million). [The 2011 Vatican financial report said that IOR had contributed $55 million in 2010 to the Church's social and charitable activities.]

One cannot compare these figures at all to what the anonymous faithful contribute as represented by Peter's Pence. [????In fact, in 2011, this was estimated to be about $68 million, down from a peak of about $86 million in 2006. At the same time, however, Rodari omits mentioning the contributions made by the dioceses around the world according to their abilities, which in 2010 amounted to about $32 million. We shall have a clearer picture when the Vatican releases its financial statements for 2011, which will probably be at the beginning of July.]

But what is important is not how much there is, but how this money is used. So the Church teaches.


So I tried to look up any article that might give us a better overview of the IOR and its manifold travails in the past. Strangely, I found it right within this Forum - in a 2009 post in the now-defunct CHURCH&VATICAN thread. Which bears re-posting as is:

Cardinal Bertone launches
a 'transparency' operation
for the Vatican bank IOR

Translated from

Sept. 11, 2009

Operation Transparency will soon be under way at the IOR (Istituto per Le Opere di Religione), otherwise known as the Vatican bank.

It is expected that by Friday next week, there will be a meeting of the IOR oversight commission and its executive council to decide how to execute the instructions of the cardinals' commission which in late spring had called for making the operations of the IOR more transparent.

The global financial crisis had its negative consequences on the finances of the Holy See which had significant investments in the worst hit American financial giants. The IOR today needs better coordination, but most of all, a unified management.

In recent months, IOR has been the target of renewed criticisms and scrutiny following the July publication of the book Vaticano s.p.a. by Gianluigi Nuzzi, a staff writer for the Panorama weekly magazine.

Nuzzi's book is based mainly on the personal archive of IOR documents collated by the late Mons. Dardozzi, which show questionable financial operations and dubious payments to individuals which went on during the 1980s and into the mid-1990s, even after the departure of the late Archbishop Paul Marcinkus.

Under Marcinkus's management, the IOR became involved in a major financial scandal that involved the bankruptcy of Milan's Banco Ambrosiano, in which the IOR had been a major investor. Marcinkus escaped prosecution in Italy for the bankruptcy because of his immunity as a ranking Vatican official.

The current president of IOR, layman Angelo Caloia, an Opus Dei member, had tried to make the bank operations more transparent but came up against the old guard made up of those who had worked with Marcinkus.

Now, following the request of many cardinals and under the new leadership of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone as chairman of the IOR's oversight commission, Operation Transparency will be launched to avoid further repetition of the questionable practices cited in Nuzzi's book.

The other members of the cardinal's commission are Cardinals Attilio Nicora, president of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA, from its Italian acronym); Jean-Louis Tauran, French; Telesphore Toppo, Indian; and Odilo Scherer, Brazilian.

Caloia's present appointment ends in 2011. The choice of his successor will be decisive in the execution of Operation Transparency.

P.S. 2013 We now know, of course, that the cardinals named Ettore Gotti Tedeschi to replace Caloia in 2009; that Gotti Tedeschi was not juts one of the technical advisers to Benedict XVI for the social encyclical Caritas in veritate, but also one of the principals who drafter for him the financial transparency law promulgated in December 2010 creating the Agency for Financial Information to oversee the financial operations of all Vatican offices; and that Gotti Tedeschi was thrown out of IOR unceremoniously in May 2012 after he had opposed amendments to the transparency law engineered by Cardinal Bertone to dilute the oversight authority of the AIF by sharing it with the Secretariat of State and the Vatican Governatorate.

Whistleblower exposes
Vatican Bank shenanigans

by Philip Willan

[The article originally appeared in London's Guardian newspaper.]

Philip Willan is the author of The Last Supper: The Mafia, the Masons and the killing of Roberto Calvi. Willan's article on the IOR may be biased, since Calvi was the chairman of Banco Ambrosiano at the time it went bankrupt in 1982, for which the Vatican, as majority shareholder, later paid bank customers $224 million in restitution. His gruesome death in London, first thought to be a suicide, was ruled murder through 25 years of investigations, but the accused murderers, all tied to the Mafia, were acquitted for insufficient evidence. The Wikipedia entry on Calvi, brief as it is, is the stuff of stay-awake page-turners.

Rome, July 2, 2009 — When John Paul II became Pope in 1978 he inherited a number of relationships that would later prove embarrassing for the Vatican. Entanglement with dubious financiers such as Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi, would bring lasting discredit on the Catholic Church.

The choice of such disreputable business partners – both had links to the Mafia and were involved in ruinous bankruptcies – may have seemed justified at the time by the requirements of a clandestine global struggle against atheist communism. Both men were staunch anti-communists and members of Licio Gelli’s right-wing masonic lodge, P2.

Some 30 years on, the memory of the financial scandals associated with the name of Paul Marcinkus, the Lithuanian-American archbishop who ran the Institute for the Works of Religion, the Vatican bank also known by its Italian acronym IOR, is beginning to fade.

[Marcinkus was a trusted aide of John Paul II. He first came in as his primary English translator, then became his chief bodyguard for which he earned the nickname 'The Gorilla' and is credited with saving the Pope's life in the knife attack on him in Fatima. Then he was named pro-president of the Vatican Governatorate as well as president of the IOR. It is said he facilitated providing funds to the Solidarity movement in Poland during its fight against the Communist regime.]

We were led to believe that a new broom, wielded by the lay banker Angelo Caloia, had since swept clean the premises of the IOR, housed in the medieval Bastion of Nicholas V. The Vatican, it was thought, had learned the painful lessons of the Marcinkus era.

That assumption has been called into question by a new book, Vaticano S.p.a. (Vatican Ltd), written by the Panorama reporter Gianluigi Nuzzi.


Archbishop Marcinkus, Giulio Andreotti, and Guzzi.

[NB: It must be remembered that the documents Nuzzi uses only go as far as the 1990s. So all the 'generalizations' in this article have nothing to do with what the IOR may have been and is since Benedict XVI became Pope.

However, Cardinal Sodano, who for almost 15 years headed the cardinal's oversight commission for the IOR, is known to have made a midnight appointment, before his term ended as secretary of state, of a trusted man to a high IOR managerial position in order to keep a foothold in.]


A cavalier attitude to financial ethics continued well into the 1990s, with huge political bribes being laundered through the IOR and funds donated for charitable purposes being casually misappropriated by the bank’s administrators, according to Mr Nuzzi’s reconstruction.

Mr Nuzzi’s allegations are based on internal IOR documents, more than 4,000 in all, that were smuggled out of the Vatican by a disgruntled employee. This unique violation of IOR confidentiality was made possible by an unlikely whistleblower: Monsignor Renato Dardozzi.

An electronic engineer who held a top job at the state telecommunications company, Mgr Dardozzi was ordained priest at the age of 52. He worked in the IOR under Marcinkus [who was IOR president from 1971-1989; he resigned in the wake of the Ambrosiano scandals, and retired back to the US, where he died in Feb, 2006 at the age of 84], participated in the joint Vatican/Italian commission that examined the IOR’s role in the collapse of Mr Calvi’s Banco Ambrosiano, and witnessed Mr Caloia’s uphill struggle against the personnel and practices of the Marcinkus era.

The chief exponent of the old guard appears to have been Monsignor Donato De Bonis, who served as secretary general under Marcinkus and perpetuated the latter’s administrative legerdemain under the new regime.

In 1987, according to Mr Nuzzi, Mgr De Bonis set up the Cardinal Francis Spellman Foundation, with its own account at the IOR. Signatories on the account were De Bonis himself and Giulio Andreotti, the veteran Christian Democrat politician.

[Andreotti, who turned 90 in January, is perhaps emblematic of Italian politicians. He was Prime Minister of Italy three times (in 1989-1992, he was the last Christian Democrat PM before the party dissolved in the wake of the Tangentopoli scandal regarding widespread business bribes to leading CD politicians), twice Defense Minister, twice Minister of the Interior, and Foreign Minister in 1983-1989. All this, while openly in league with the Mafia (though late in his career, he decided to cut off his ties with them) and at the same time, presenting himself as a leading Catholic layman. He has been senator for life since 1991. He also founded and edits the monthly Zatholic magazine 30 GIORNI.]

During its first six years of operation the account received some 50 billion lire (€26 million) and paid out 43 billion.

Though Dardozzi’s documents show that Andreotti and De Bonis were beneficiaries of the Spellman account, the internal IOR correspondence is coy of admitting as much.

The Christian Democrat politician is often referred to cryptically as Omissis, while De Bonis goes under the codename Roma. Ownership of the account was clearly a sensitive matter.

The choice of the virulently anti-communist Spellman as “patron” of the fund is interesting. The well-connected cardinal of New York earned the sobriquet “money-bags” for his fund-raising skills and he earmarked significant sums for Italy’s Christian Democrat Party during the cold war years.

The Spellman fund seems to have been administered by De Bonis with promiscuous generosity. A variety of convents and clerics were to benefit, with payments ranging from the modest 1 million lire paid to five mother superiors, to the $50,000 sent to the auxiliary bishop of Skopje-Prizen, for the Albanian-speaking faithful, and the $1 million delivered to Cardinal Lucas Moreira Neves, the archbishop of Sao Salvador de Bahia in Brazil.

There were also payments of a more personal nature: 100 million lire for one of Andreotti’s lawyers, $134,000 for a New York conference on Cicero sponsored by the former prime minister, and even a 60 million lire payment to Severino Citaristi, a former treasurer of the Christian Democrat Party convicted of corruption.

In 1991 the account paid some 54 million lire in six instalments to Gioconda Crivelli, a jewelry and fashion designer who appears to have been a personal friend of Mr Andreotti. And a 5 million lire payment went at the same time to Monsignor Giuseppe Generali, described in an interview by Andreotti’s political colleague Walter Montini as Andreotti’s “spiritual guide”.

“He was so close to Andreotti as to become the protector of his sons during the dark years of terrorism,” Montini said. How a churchman could perform such a function was not explained.

Part of the massive Enimont bribe, paid to politicians to secure their approval for a reorganisation of the chemicals sector, was also bounced through the Spellman fund, according to Mr Nuzzi.

But Mr Caloia and Mgr Dardozzi chose discretion over transparency when questioned about it by prosecutors from Milan. “Despite the full collaboration promised and publicised in the press, they limited themselves to referring only what can no longer be concealed,” Mr Nuzzi writes.

Mgr Dardozzi’s documents reveal how the IOR leadership debated how much it was safe to reveal to the prosecutors. In a note to the cardinals’ oversight committee, Mr Caloia warned of the sensitivity of the issue.

“Any leak would constitute a source of grave harm for the Holy See,” he wrote. “And that is because the document outlines procedures and figures that – not being essential for the Milan prosecutor’s office – have not been transmitted.”

The reserve was motivated, Dardozzi observed wryly in a note to the IOR’s chief lawyer, of the need to avoid “leading (the investigators) into temptation”.

It is interesting to note that Mgr Dardozzi’s motive for turning whistleblower was not unalloyed disapproval of the IOR’s unethical conduct. His decision to smuggle his secret archive out of the Vatican sprang from anger at the institute’s refusal to pay him a commission on the sale of a valuable villa near Florence.

The unusual monsignor wanted to leave the money to his adoptive daughter, whose health condition required expensive hospital treatment.

Whatever the reason, Dardozzi’s archive offers an unprecedented glimpse of the inner workings of one of the world’s most secretive and unaccountable financial institutions.

The idea that a noble end – winning the cold war or funding one’s favourite charity – justifies almost any means, still seems to endure at the Pope’s bank in the Nicholas V Tower.

The topic of the Vatican bank’s financial shenanigans continues to fascinate the Italian public. Despite negligible publicity in the press and on television, Vaticano S.p.a. jumped to third place in the non-fiction rankings within 10 days of publication.

The full IOR story obviously remains to be told. I do not know what Nuzzi's book says about the origins of IOR's incredible and unconscionable 'getting into bed' with the Mafia and the Masons - which seems to be acknowledged fact. But it must have begun under Paul VI - how much did he know about it? He already had a great shock about the P2 Masonic lodge that apparently recruited a number of ranking Curia members, including Paul VI's chosen orchestrator of all post Vatican-II liturgical reforms, Mons. Anibale Bugnini (Piero Marini's beloved mentor). .


Just as a matter of interest, the IOR [circled in red, right side of photo)] is housed in the semi-circular Torre San Nicola right next to the Apostolic Palace.



I'd like to believe there must be a perfectly reasonable explanation (or explanations) for the apparent 'shenanigans' at IOR for so many years. Raising money to finance anti-Communist Cold War activities and the Church's charities does not justify partnering in business with the Mafia and the Masons. It's hard to imagine a more hypocritical set-up than that, nor stranger bedfellows for the Catholic Church. And then, all the petty graft of funnelling money to favorites for causes that cannot possibly qualify as 'works of religion' is simply appalling. [Thankfully, I have not read of any such shenanigans under Benedict XVI.]

In many ways, Dino Boffo's 'sins of omission' and/or possible commission, and even Silvio Berlusconi's philandering, are trivial offenses compared to the apparently massive and shady financial dealings that compromised the Church (and lost it a lot of money, too) back in the 1980s.


A lengthier account of the IOR back story as recounted by Nuzzi came out in the VATICAN INSIDER last August and can be consulted here in an English translation, such as it is:
http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/homepage/the-vatican/detail/articolo/beatificazione-di-giovanni-paolo-ii-karol-wojtyla-giovanni-paolo-ii-marcinkus-finanza-86/
It's too long for me to re-translate but you get the drift...
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After reading this article the first time, I checked the Vatican and Wikipedia entries on Blessed Anna Katharina Emmerick, where it is emphasized that her beatification was not at all based on her 'visions and prophecies' but only on her personal piety and holiness. The reason is that the 'visions and prophecies' were published in two volumes of reconstruction by the German poet Clement Brentano who visited Emmerick and stayed for five years to record her accounts of her visions. The Vatican decreed that none of it could be attributed directly to her, and the accounts are therefore, not reliable. But the official biography on the Vatican website for her beatification credits her spiritual life as recounted by Brentano to have provided inspiration to many in the 19th century.
http://www.vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/saints/ns_lit_doc_20041003_emmerick_en.html

It is only for its curiosity valuethat I am posting a translation of this article by a traditionalist writer who earlier had written an unflattering article (that I did not use) accusing Pope Francis of practicing demagoguery by his 'discontinuous' choices of personal style compared to his predecessors. He is being dishonest in not making it clear in this article that the Church has officially not accepted any of Emmerick's reported visions and prophecies. Like all visions and prophecies, the language is ambiguous enough to be interpreted more than one way, and even more questionable without seeing the account as it is given in full by author Brentano.


The 'prophecies' of Blessed Katharina Emmerick
on the 'time of two Popes', etc

by Mattia Rossi
Translated from

June 20, 2013

In 2004, would John Paul II have ever imagined that one day not too far off in the future, the German nun whom he beatified would prove to be highly relevant?

Just nine years have passed since October 1, 2004, when the Polish Pope, history's most prolific 'canonizer' of saints, elevated Anna KLatharina Emmerich, an Augustinian nun who lived from 1774-1824, to the honors of the altar.

Emmerick, born to a peasant family, is venerated by the Church for her mystical and visionary gifts. Thanks to one of her visions, archeologists were able to unearth the home that Mary and the Apostle John occupied in Ephesus after the death of Jesus. Her diary based on her visions and entitled "The sorrowful Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ" revealed some previously unrecorded information relative to the death of Jesus.

Her visions also included some apocalyptic foresights about the destiny of the Church. Above all, I believe she was the first to have ever prophesied some aspects of the liturgical reform that the Church underwent after Vatican II. "The Mass was short. And the Gospel of St. John was not read at the end". [A reading of the Prologue to the Gospel ends the traditional Mass.]

But what jumps out from her prophetic visions is what she saw about the future coexistence of two Popes: "I saw the relationship between the two... I saw how harmful the consequences would be of a false Church [that would emerge]. I saw it grow in size - heretics of every type came to Rome. The local clergy had become lukewarm and I saw a great obscurity", she wrote of her vision on May 13, 1830).

The more traditionalist Catholic world which is critical towards what it perceives to be changes in the teaching of Pope Francis [Such as what?] might well think this applies today. In the Emmerick prophecv, the emerging Church would be a 'false' one, with a doctrine has has been 'corrupted' (farther on, she uses the term 'Protestantized') and infested with a lukewarm clergy. [Didn't all that take place among many Catholics after Vatican II? When there was only one Pope at a time? Even now, there is only one - Benedict XVI is emeritus. As for Pope Francis, even if he has yet to declare his position on homosexual unions and marriages, Pope Francis has so far only preached orthodox doctrine, though he may have 'liberal' interpretations of certain practices, such as washing the feet of women on Maundy Thursday, or his 'emancipated' notions on liturgy.]

Still, the Church in Emmerick's vision would 'increase in dimension' (and those who want to may say this could refer to the 'Bergoglio effect' and a seeming wave of consensus across the Church_/

But Emmerick also foresaw a change of residence and living 'in cloisters' for one of the Popes: "I see the Holy Father in great anguish. He lives in a home that is different from his earlier quarters and he sees only a few visitors who are close to him. I fear that the Holy Father will suffer many more trials before he dies. I see the false Church of darkness making progress, and I see the tremendous influence that it has on the faithful" (vision of August 10, 1820). It seems as if the mystic was concerned about the 'popularity' and 'influence' of the new Church. [But there is no 'new Church' for now! It's hard to imagine how Francis's deliberately evangelical preaching could possibly lead to a 'new Church' that one could call 'false'!]

And here is what Emmerick prophesies about the Protestantization of the Catholic Church: "I saw that everything that had to do with Protestantism was gradually taking the lead and that the Catholic religion was precipitating into complete decadence. Most of her priests were attracted to the seductive but false doctrines of young teachers, and all together, they contributed to the work of destruction. The Faith will faw to very low levels and will be preserved only in certain places, in some homes, and in those families whom God has protected from disasters and wars" (1820).

Farther, about the 'Church of great dimension": "I saw many pastors involved in ideas that were dangerous for the Church. They were constructing a large church that was strange and over the top".

But she also pre-announced the doctrine which guided much of the Church's pastoral work in the post-Vatican II years, namely, ecumenism and religious freedom: "Into that 'large Church', everyone had to be admitted to be united with equal rights - evangelicals, Catholics, and sects of every denomination.... But God had other plans" (vision of April 22, 1823).

"God had other plans" - of which we all are, of course, in the dark. Indeed, no one can say if, when and ho much of Blessed Catherine's prophecies are relevant or are taking place. But certainly, the consonance of some of it with many rather obscure aspects of what is happening in the Church today is quite striking.
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On the anniversary of Paul VI's election as Pope, it is appropriate to recall the special bond between Benedict XVI and the Pope who named him Archbishop of Munich-Freising in 1977 and three months later, made him a cardinal. For this purpose, I am re-posting some items from the 'coverage' on this Forum of Benedict XVI's special and most memorable pastoral visit to Brescia and Concesio in northern Italy on November 8, 2009, to honor the Brescian Pope.





Benedict XVI fulfills
the dream of Paul VI

by Mons. Luciano Monari
Bishop of Brescia
Translated from
the 11/8/09 issue of


November 8, 2009

Brescia welcomes the Pope today. For me, as bishop of this place, and for our Church, the arrival of Benedict XVI represents an encounter of grace which is full of multiple significances. To say so, I wish to cite two texts from the New Testament which help to understand them.

The first is that which recounts the visit Peter makes to the centurion Cornelius and his family (cfr Acts 10,24-33). The centurion welcomes him, inviting him to tell them what the Lord had asked him to.

This is the first significance of the Pope's visit. What we expect of the Pope is that he does in Brescia what his mission is, namely, to announce the Gospel.

The fact of hearing this from the voice of Peter has a power and particular meaning for us. The Gospel remains the most important thing, and the Pope is coming to Brescia in its service.

But there is a second passage which illuminates the sense of this November 8 visit, and it is found in Paul's Letter to the Galatians, where Paul recounts his visit to Peter in Jerusalem.

The Apostle writes: "I presented to them the gospel that I preach to the Gentiles - but privately to those of repute - so that I might not be running, or have run, in vain" (Gal 2,2).

The meeting with Peter was a guarantee for Paul that his announcement of the Gospel corresponded to the faith and mission of the whole Church.

In this perspective, the visit of the Pope to Brescia must be seen as a confirmation that what our Church has done and continues to do is right, lived in communion and with and recognized to be authentic by the Bishop of Rome.

But what is this Church that is about to welcome the Pope? The Church of Brescia is rich for its past as well as for its present - for its human resources, with their creative capacity, and their great willingness to work. But it is also rich in the Christian sense, for the presence of many saints, for institutions born for Christian purposes, for a widespread lay commitment that is both organizational and cultural.

Ours is also a Church that knows suffering, which has experienced and continues to experience moments of hard work, and which faces a future with great problems, with important challenges starting with the lack of vocations and how to bring the Gospel within a lifestyle that has become pagan in many aspects.

But we have deep roots to reach into under such circumstances - and among this is the gift that Brescia has given to the Universal Church in Paul VI. Benedict XVI will be here in memory of Papa Montini, and the Church of Brescia is proud to count Paul VI among her sons.

Such pride is also fed by loyalty which is expressed in a series of institutions, and of well-thought-out initiatives to preserve his memory and to have his life and work known.

A worthy undertaking because, as far as I know, Paul VI is perhaps one of the lesser-known Popes, not known enough for his life and for the values that motivated his actions.

The Church of Brescia seeks to safeguard this memory and to make it live on. It is a commitment that at times needs a bit of effort because attention to Paul VI is not a widespread popular movement. And while it is a great movement, it is not yet a general one.

One of the objectives we have is precisely to make this movement popular, because there are extraordinary elements in the life and spirituality of Paul VI that can inspire personal and communitarian growth.

The visit of Papa Ratzinger reminds us of this further, in the name of a profound bond between these two Popes, a bond that goes far back. Paul VI always sought, in the years of his Pontificate, the nearness of theologians who could express the reality of Vatican II and therefore, the announcement of the Gospel, to the contemporary world, a world that had changed culturally and become indifferent to the Church.

I believe that by nominating Joseph Ratzinger to be Archbishop of Munich, Paul VI was pursuing this objective. Not all the reference points that he thought he had identified had received satisfactory responses in terms of safeguarding that full fidelity to tradition which Paul VI had always sought to live. And from this point of view, Archbishop Ratzinger corresponded to the expectations of the Pope from Brescia.

In a way, the election of Cardinal Ratzinger to the Papacy brings to fulfillment the dream of Paul VI for an announcement of the Gospel to a society in continual transformation, an announcement faithful to tradition but also capable of meeting the issues and cultural challenges of the day. It is an attitude that Joseph Ratzinger always had and that he carries forward today as the Successor of Peter.


Finally, one might perhaps add that the welcome for the Pope today will be an occasion for Brescia to see him as a person, with his teaching, his vision of man and of life.

Serious dialog with an intelligent man is always fruitful, whether one shares his certainties or not. This Pope has always been in dialog with the contemporary world - a dialog that is sometimes severe, as it must be for those who have strong convictions and seek to live them consistently.

But it is certainly a human dialog that hinges on reason, not on selfish interests, on the confrontation of reasons, not on imposition by force. This in itself is gain enough.

We therefore expect to present the Pope this Sunday with a peaceful day among us. Perhaps we will not be able to show him a perfect image of our Church. But we can show him a lively Church which believes sincerely in the Gospel, which loves the Lord, which seeks to grow by overcoming its fears and its inconsistencies.

And the Pope will help us simply by announcing to us the Gospel of Jesus. To hear this Gospel preached to us by the Successor of Peter will be an experience of comfort and joy, both for what the Pope will tell us, and because we shall see in him, in his presence, the fulfillment of a promise from the Risen Lord: "Behold, I am with you to the end of the world". We can ask for nothing more from this encounter with Pope Benedict.


The affinity between two 'teachers'
in words and gestures

by MARCO RONCALLI
Translated from

Nov. 7, 2009

We already noted in a Page 1 story in this newspaper on August 6, 2005 (anniversary of Paul VI's death) the special bond that binds Giovanni Battista Montini and Joseph Ratzinger, two intellectuals who came to the Chair of Peter.

Ir explains one of the reasons for the Pope's visit to Brescia and Concesio. Benedict XVI's presence will be rich with significance, that of Beneict XVI, who is firmly linked to the memory of the Pope who guided the Second Vatican Council and the initial face-off between the Church and the contemporary world.

A memory that 31 years after the Brescian Pope's death, continues to show itself in many ways: sympathy and communion, recognition and affection, convergence of ideas in the exercise of the Petrine ministry, an affinity in framing the dialog with secular culture and in urging greater vitality in Christian witness.

Of course, they have differences, and their styles are different, but the similarities become more evident and more convincing with time - even in their magisterial texts. Just recall in this context Papa Ratzinger's theological rationalism in reinterpreting Montini's teaching, in his revival of Populorum progressio in the recent Caritas in veritate.

If it is true, as the Bishop of Brescia has pointed out, that Benedict's visit confirms the path of a local Church that will not turn its back from the transcendental mystery of God, nor close its ears to listing to the Gospel announced with the voice of Peter; and if it is true that Benedict's arrival in Brescia will highlight the patrimony of Christian faith and civic life that the diocese must not only safeguard in memory, but deepen and value even more for their own spiritual growth, then a few facts leap to the eye when comparing the itineraries of Paul VI and Benedict XVI.

How can we forget that it was Papa Montini himself in March 1977 who named Joseph Ratzinger Archbishop of Munich-Freising after the death of Julius Dopfner, and three months after, to make him a cardinal in his last consistory?

How can we forget the appreciation of Paul VI for the work of the young German theologian, first as a consultant at Vatican II, and then as an acute observer of the troubled post-Conciliar years, such that in 1975, he invited him to preach the Lenten spiritual exercises at the Vatican (though the German declined because he felt neither his Italian nor his French were adequate to the task)?

And the telling details that Joseph Ratzinger remembers of his few meetings with the Brescian Pope. Like the ad limina visit of the Bavarian bishops in October 1977, when Papa Montini reminisced about his presence in Munich as a young priest, disoriented at first but soon made to feel at home by so many kind persons. Or the Mass at St. Peter's on Paul VI's 80th birthday, in which the Bavarian cardinal was struck by the Pope's citation of a verse from Canto XXIII of Purgatory in the Divine Comedy where Dante writes of "that Rome where Christ is Roman" - words that struck Ratzinger because of their symbolic relevance.

Yet another symbol is the series of Patristic texts Sources Chretiennes which will receive the VI International Paul VI Prize from the Istituto Paolo VI in Concesio tomorrow.

In a ceremony at the new headquarters of the Institute, Benedict XVI will hand over the prestigious award to the publishers of the historic series of books emblematic of the mid-20th century rediscovery of early Christian writings.

It is a gesture that also brings back another affinity that goes back a long way. In 1980, then Cardinal Ratzinger, along with Cardinal Paul Poupard, presided over the first of the international colloquia promoted by the Institute - it took place in Rome on October 24-26, on Paul Vi's encyclical Ecclesiam suam.


From that day in Brescia, here is Benedict XVI's homily in whichhe paid tribute to Paul VI:










Dear brothers and sisters!

My joy is great to be able to break with you the bread of the Word of God and of the Eucharist, here in the heart of the Diocese of Brescia, where the Servant of God Giovanni Battista Montini was born and underwent his formation as a youth.

I greet you all with affection and thank you for your warm welcome! I particularly thank your Bishop, Mons. Luciano Monari, for the kind words he addressed to me before the Mass, and with him, I greet the cardinals, bishops, priests and deacons, religious men and women, and all pastoral workers.

I thank the Mayor for his words and for his gift, and the other civilian and military authorities. And I address a special thought to all the sick people who are inside the Cathedral.

At the center of the liturgy on this 32nd Sunday in ordinary time, we find the figure of the poor widow, or more precisely, we find the gesture that she makes in casting the last coins she has into the treasure of the Temple.

A gesture which, thanks to the attentive gaze of Jesus, has become proverbial: 'widow's pence' has in fact, become synonymous to the generosity of one who gives without reservation the little that he or she possesses.

First, however, I wish to underscore the importance of the setting in which this Gospel episode takes place, namely, the Temple of Jerusalem, religious center of the people of Israel and the heart of all their life.

The Temple is the place for public and solemn worship, but also of pilgrimage, of traditional rites, and of rabbinical disputes, such as that reported in the Gospel between Jesus and the rabbis of his time - in which, however, Jesus teaches with singular authority, that of the Son of God.

He pronounces severe judgments - as we heard - on the scribes because of their hypocrisy. They, in fact, while showing off great religiosity, were exploiting the poor, imposing obligations which they themselves did not observe.

Jesus, in short, showed that he loved the Temple as a house of prayer, and because of this, he wished to purify it of improper uses, indeed, to disclose its deeper significance, linked to the fulfillment of his own mystery - the mystery of his death and resurrection - in which he himself would become the new and definitive Temple, the place where God and man meet, the Creator with his creature.

The episode of the widow's pence takes place in such context, and it leads us, through Jesus's own point of view, to fix our attention on a fleeting but decisive detail: the gesture of a very poor widow who tosses two coins into the treasure of the Temple.

As he did that day to his disciples, Jesus tells us: Pay attention. Look very well at what the widow did, because her action contains a great teaching - it expresses the fundamental characteristic of those who are the 'living stones' of this new Temple, namely, the gift of oneself to the Lord and to one's neighbor.

The widow of the Gospel, like the widow in the Old Testament, gives everything, gives herself, and places herself in the hands of God, for the sake of others. This is the perennial significance of the poor widow's offering, whom Jesus exalted because she gave more than the rich - who only give part of what they have in excess, whereas she gave everything that she had to live upon (cfr Mk 12,44), and therefore gave herself.

Dear friends, with the aid of this evangelical icon, I wish to meditate briefly on the mystery of the Church, the living Temple of God, and thus pay homage to the memory of the great Pope Paul VI, who consecrated his entire life to the Church.

The Church is a spiritual organism that prolongs in space and time the oblation (offering) made by the Son of God, a sacrifice apparently insignificant compared to the dimensions of the world and history, but decisive in the eyes of God.

As it says in the Letter to the Hebrews - in the text that we heard earlier - for God, the sacrifice of Jesus, offered 'once for all', sufficed to save the whole world (cfr Heb 9,26-28), because in that single oblation was condensed all the love of the Son of God made man, just as in the gesture of the poor widow was concentrated all her love for God and for her brothers. Nothing is lacking, and nothing more can be added.

The Church which is incessantly reborn with the Eucharist, from Jesus's self-giving, is the continuation of that gift, of a superabundance that can be expressed even in poverty, of the 'all' that is expressed in a fragment.

it is the Body of Christ who gives himself entirely, a Body that is broken and shared, in constant adherence to the will of its Head. I am happy that you are deepening your knowledge of the Eucharistic nature of the Church, with the guidance of your Bishop's pastoral letter.

This is the Church that the Servant of God Paul IV loved with passion and sought with all his strength to make understood and loved. Let us reread his thoughts on death, where at the conclusion, he speaks of the Church:

"I could say," he writes, "that I have always loved her... and it is for her, not for anything else, that I have lived. But I wish that the Church would know this".

They are the tones of a palpitant heart which goes on to say: "I would like finally to comprehend all about her, her history, her divine design, her final destiny, her complex, in all her total and unitary composition, her human and imperfect consistency, her disasters and her sufferings, the weaknesses and miseries of so many of her children, in her less sympathetic aspects, and in her perennial effort at fidelity, love, perfection and charity. Mystical Body of Christ! I wish to embrace her, greet her, love her, in every being of which she is composed, in every bishop and priest who assists and guides her, in every soul who lives her and illustrates her; I wish to bless her".

His last words are for her, as the Spouse of his life: "It is to the Church that I owe everything, and all I had. What will I say? May the blessings of God be upon you; be conscious of your nature and your mission; be sensitive to the true and profound needs of mankind; and walk in poverty, that is, freely, strongly and lovingly towards Christ".

What can we possibly add to words so elevated and intense? I would only wish to underscore this last vision of a Church that is 'poor and free' which recalls the Gospel figure of the widow.

That is what the ecclesial community should be in order to be able to speak to contemporary man. The Church's encounter and dialog with mankind in our time were particularly close to Giovanni Battista Montini's heart in all the seasons of his life, from his early years as a priest to his Pontificate.

He dedicated all his energies to the service of a Church that conformed as much as possible to the Lord Jesus Christ, in order that in encountering her, contemporary man would be able to encounter Christ, of whom he has absolute need.

This was the fundamental yearning of the Second Vatican Council, which corresponds to Pope Paul Vi's own reflection about the Church. He wanted to programmatically propose some of its salient points in his first encyclical, Ecclesiam suam, dated August 6, 2004, pre-dating the Conciliar Constitutions Lumen gentium and Gaudium et spes.

With that first encyclical, the Pontiff proposed to explain to everyone the importance of the Church for the salvation of mankind, and at the same time, the need to establish a relationship of mutual knowledge and love between the ecclesial community and society (cfr Enchiridion Vaticanum, 2, p. 199, No. 164).

'Conscience', 'renewal', 'dialog': these three words were chosen by Paul VI to express his dominant 'thoughts', as he called them, at the start of his Petrine ministry - and all three have to do with the Church.

Above all, the exigency that she deepens her awareness of herself: her origin, nature, mission, final destiny. And second, her need to renew and purify herself, looking at Christ as the model; and finally, the problem of her relations with the modern world (cfr ibid., pp. 203-205, nn. 166-168).

Dear friends - and I address myself specially to my brothers in the Episcopate and Priesthood - how can we not see that the question of the Church, of her necessity in the design of salvation, and of her relationship with the world, continue to be absolutely central even today?

That, in fact, the development of secularization and globalization have made this need even more radical, in the face of the rejection of God, on the one hand, and of non-Christian religions, on the other?

The reflection of Papa Montini on the Church is more than ever relevant. And even more precious is the example of his love for the Church, which is inseparable from his love for Christ.

"The mystery of the Church", we read in Ecclesiam suam, "is not simply the object of theological knowledge - it should be lived fact, in which even before having a clear notion of it, the faithful soul can have an almost connatural experience" (ibid., p 229, n. 178).

This presumes a robust interior life which is, the Pope continues, "the great spring of spirituality in the Church, her own way of being irradiated by the Spirit of Christ, a radical and irreplaceable expression of her religious and social activity, inviolable defense and renewable energy in her difficult contact with the profane world" (ibid., p. 231, n. 179).

And it is the Christian who is open, the Church that is open to the world, who have need of such a robust interior life.

Dearest ones, what an invaluable gift for the Church is the lesson of the Servant of God Paul VI! And how exciting it is every time to count oneself in his school! It is a lesson that concerns us all and commits us all, according to the different gifts and ministries of which the People of God are rich, through the action of the Holy Spirit.

In this Year for Priests, I am happy to underscore how much this lesson must interest and particularly involve priests, for whom Papa Montini always had special affection and concern.

In the encyclical on priestly celibacy, he wrote: "'Taken possession of by Jesus Christ' (Phil 3,12), to the point of abandoning all of oneself to him, the priest configures himself more perfectly to Christ even in the love with which the Eternal Priest loved his Body, the Church, offering all of himself for her... The consecrated chastity of his sacred ministers manifests, in fact, the virginal love of Christ for the Church, and the virginal and supernatural fecundity of this marriage" (Sacerdotalis caelibatus, 26).

I dedicate these words of the great Pope to the many priests of the Diocese of Brescia, well represented here, and to the young men who are being formed in the seminaries.

I also wish to recall what Paul VI said to the students of the Seminario Lombardo on December 7, 1968, when the difficulties of the post-Conciliar years were augmented by the ferment in the student world:

"So many," he said, "expect attention-getting gestures, energetic and decisive actions, from the Pope. The Pope is not duty-bound to follow any line other than confidence in Jesus Christ, which is more urgent for his Church than anything else. It will be He who will still the tempest.

"This is not about a sterile or inert expectation, but of vigilant waiting in prayer. This is the condition Jesus has chosen for us so that he can operate in fullness. Even the Pope needs to be helped with prayer" (Insegnamenti VI, [1968], 1189).

Dear friends, may the priestly example of the Servant of God Giovanni Battista Montini, guide you always, and may St. Arcangelo Tadini, whom I venerated earlier in a brief stop at Botticino, intercede for you.

As I greet and encourage the priests, I cannot forget - especially here in Brescia - the lay faithful who in this land have demonstrated extraordinary vitality in faith and good works, in the various fields of apostolate associations and social commitment.

In the Teachings of Paul VI, dear Brescian friends, you can find indications that are always valuable for facing the challenges of the present, especially the economic crisis, migration, and education of the youth.

At the same time, Papa Montini never lost an occasion to underscore the primacy of the contemplative dimension, and therefore, the primacy of God in human experience. That is why he never tired of promoting the consecrated life, in the variety of its forms. He intensely loved the multiform beauty of the Church, recognizing in it the reflection of the beauty of God which shines out from the face of Christ.

Let us pray that the brilliance of divine beauty may shine in each of our communities and that the Church may be a luminous sign of hope for mankind in the third millennium.

May this grace be obtained for us by Mary whom Paul VI proclaimed, at the end of the Second Vatican Council, Mother of the Church. Amen.










THE ANGELUS

The Holy Father also led the Angelus prayers before the end of the Mass. Because of the rains, the whole schedule was set back by an hour, and the Angelus was recited at 1 p.m. instead of noontime.

Here is a translation of the Pope's message before the Marian prayer:

At the end of this solemn celebration, I thank all those who were responsible for the liturgical animation, and all those who in various ways helpted in the preparation and realization of my pastoral visit to Brescia. Thank you all.

I also greet those who are following us on radio and television, and those who are in St. Peter's Square, particularly the many volunteers of the Unione Nazionale Pro Loco d’Italia.

At this Angelus prayer, I wish to recall the profound devotion that the Servant of God Giovanni Battista Montini always had for the Virgin Mary. He celebrated his first Mass in the Shrine of Santa Maria delle Grazie, the Marian heart of your city, not far from this Piazza. In that way, he placed his priesthood under the maternal protection of the Mother of God, and this attachment accompanied him all his life.

As his ecclesial responsibilities grew, he was also maturing an ever more ample and organic concept of the relationship of the Blessed Virgin Mary with the mystery of the Church.

In this perspective, his closing speech of the third session of Vatican-2 on November 21, 1964, was memorable. That session had promulgated the ecclesial constitution Lumen gentium which, in the words of Paul VI, "has as its summit and crown an entire chapter dedicated to Our Lady".

The Pope noted that it was the broadest synthesis of Marian doctrine ever elaborated by an Ecumenical Council, with the end in view of "manifesting the face of the Holy Church, to which Mary is intimately bound" (Enchiridion Vaticanum, Bologna 1979, p. [185], nn. 300-302).

In that context, he proclaimed the Most Blessed Mary as 'Mother of the Church'(cfr ibid., n. 306), underlining with ecumenical sensitivity, that "the devotion to Mary... is a means intended to orient souls towards Christ and thus reach the Father, in the love of the Holy Spirit" (ibid., n. 315).

Echoing the words of Paul VI, let us today pray likewise: O Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church, we commend to you the Church of Brescia and the entire population of this region. Remember all your children; confirm their prayers to God; keep their faith firm; increase their charity - O clement, o pious, o most sweet Virgin Mary (cfr ibid., nn. 317.320.325).




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An even earlier tribute by Cardinal Ratzinger was published in the OR's special issue of June 21, 2013, to mark the 50th anniversary of Paul VI's election.

A Pope whose measure
was not success and approval
but his conscience and his loyalty
to truth and faith

Homily by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
Archbishop of Munich-Freising
August 10, 1978
Translated from the 6/21/13 issue of


Editor's Note: Four days after the death of Paul VI, the Archbishop of Munich-Freising, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, celebrated a Mass for the late Pope in the city's cathedral. His homily on that occasion has to date been published only in the archdiocesan bulletin, Ordinariats-Korrespondenz. We publish it in its entirety to close the special issue which our newspaper has dedicated to Papa Montini on the 50th anniversary of his election on June 21 1963.




The Transfiguration
For 15 years, in the Eucharistic prayer during Holy Mass, we have said the words, "We celebrate in communion with your servant Pope Paul". Since August 7, this phrase has been missing. At this time, the symbol of the Church's unity has no name. He is now with those who have preceded him in the sign of faith and who rest in peace.

Pope Paul was called back to the house of the Father on the evening of the Feast of the Transfiguration, shortly after he heard Holy Mass and received the Sacraments.

"It is good for us to remain here," Peter had said to Jesus on the mount of the Transfiguration. He wanted to stay. What was then denied has been bestowed to Paul VI on this Feast of the Transfiguration in 1978 - he no longer has to descend to the routine quotidianity of history.Th

He can stay, where the lord sits at table for eternity with Moses, Elijah and so many others who have come from east and west, from north and south. His earthly pilgrimage is over.

In the Oriental Churches, which Paul VI loved so dearly, the Feast of the Transfiguration has a very special place. It is not considered just another Church event among many, a dogma among dogmas, but a synthesis of everything: Cross and Resurrection, the present and the future of all Creation.

The feast of the Transfiguration is a guarantee that the Lord will never abandon his creatures. He did not put on human flesh as if it were just a vestment, nor has he left history as if he had merely come to play a theatrical role. In the shadow of the Cross, we know that this is the way that creation moves towards transfiguration.

What we call Transfiguration is called in the Greek of the New Testament 'metamorphosis' - transformation - and this brings forth an important fact. Transfiguration is not a remote possibility that could happen in time.

The transfigured Christ reveals much more about what faith is: the transformation that takes place throughout a man's life. Biologically, life is a metamorphosis, a perennial transformation that ends in death. To live means to die - a metamorphosis towards death.

The account of the Lord's Transfiguration adds something new: to die means to rise again. Faith is a metamorphosis in which man matures definitively, and matures in order to be definitive. That is why the evangelist John defines the Cross as glorification, uniting transfiguration and the Cross. In the ultimate liberation from self, the metamorphosis of life achieves its goal.

The transfiguration promised by faith as a metamorphosis of man is above all a path of purification, a path of suffering. Paul VI accepted his papal service increasingly as a metamorphosis of faith into suffering.

The last words of the risen Christ to Peter, after having named him shepherd of his flock, were: "When you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go” (Jn 21,19).

It was a reference to the Cross which awaited Peter at the end of his journey. It was, in general, a reference to the nature of the Petrine service. Paul VI always let himself be led where humanly, by himself, he would not have gone.

Increasingly for him, the Pontificate meant having to take on the garment of someone else and be nailed to the Cross. We know that before his 75th birthday, and again before his 80th, he struggled intensely with the idea of resigning.

We can imagine how difficult it was for him no longer to belong to himself. Never to have a truly private moment. To be chained to the very end, in an ever physically yielding body, to a task that demands, day after day, the full and vital commitment of every human force one has.

"None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. For if we live, we live for the Lord"(Rom 14,7-8). These words from today's Reading literally marked his life. He gave new meaning to authority as service, carrying it as a suffering. He felt no pleasure in power, in position, in a career that had 'succeeded', precisely because authority was a responsibility that he bore. "It will lead you where you do not want to go" - that, to him, became hugely credible.

Paul VI carried out his service for the faith. From this derived both his firmness as well as readiness to compromise. For this, he had to accept criticisms, and even some comments after his death have not been lacking in bad taste.

But a Pope who does not undergo criticisms today fails in his task towards our time. Paul VI resisted telecracy and demoscopy, the two dictatorial tendencies of our time. He could do so because success and approval were not his parameters, rather his conscience, measured by the truth, by his faith.

That is why on many occasions, he sought compromise: faith leaves much that is open to an ample range of decisions, and only imposes love as the criterion, which is a duty to everyone and thus implies and imposes much respect.

Also because of this, he could be inflexible and decisive when the essential tradition of the Church was in play. In him, firmness did not derive from the insensibility of someone whose path is dictated by pleasure in power and despising others, but from the depth of his faith which made him able to bear all oppositions.

Paul VI was a spiritual Pope, a man of faith. Not mistakenly, a newspaper described him as the diplomat who left diplomacy behind. In the course of his career in the Roman Curia, he learned to master in a virtuoso manner the instruments of diplomacy. But these came to be relegated more and more to the backgreound in the metamorphosis of faith that he underwent.

In his intimate self, he increasingly followed the call of faith and its path - in prayer, in continuing encounter with Christ. In the process, he showed himself increasingly as a man of profound goodness, pure and mature.

Those who met him in his last years were able to experience directly his extraordinary metamorphosis through faith, its transfiguring power. One could see that this man, who was an intellectual by nature, consigned himself to Christ, day after day, allowing himself to be transformed and purified by him, and how this made him increasingly more free, more profound, more good, perspicacious and simple.

Faith is a metamorphosis to enter into authentic life, towards transfiguration. In Pope Paul, we saw all this. Faith gave him courage. Faith gave him goodness. And in him it was also clear that faith with conviction does not close us off, but opens us.

In the end, our memory keeps the image of a Pope who held out his hand. He was the first Pope who was able to visit all the continents, in an itinerary of the spirit that began in Jerusalem, fulcrum of the encounter and separation of the three great monotheistic religions. He went to the United Nations, in New York and in Geneva; he had an encounter with the largest non-monotheistic culture of mankind in India; he travelled among the suffering peoples of Latin America Africa and Asia. Faith holds out open hands. Its sign is not the fist, but the open hand.

In the Letter to the Romans from St. Ignatius of Antioch, we find the beautiful statement, "It is beautiful to sink in the world [like the setting sun[ for the Lord and rise again in him," (11,2). The bishop-martyr wrote this during his voyage from the East towards the land where the sun sets, the West, where, in the sunset of martyrdom, he hoped to achieve his rising again into eternity.

The path of Paul VI, became year after year, a journey that was increasingly aware of the burden of witness that he bore, a journey to the sunset of death which finally called him on the day of the Transfiguration of the Lord.

Let us entrust his soul confidently to God's eternal mercy and the dawn of eternal life. Let us allow his example to be a call that bears fruit in our souls. And let us pray that the Lord sends us a Pope who will carry on anew the original mandate of the Lord to Peter: "Confirm your brothers in the faith" (Lk 22,32).


Of course, at the time Cardinal Ratzinger delivered this eulogy for Paul VI, it would never have occurred to him - just slightly over one year a bishop and cardinal then, after 25 years of being a university professor - that 27 years later, he would be Pope himself and face the burdens of a position he describes here as somewhere in which "humanly, he would not gave gone by himself", much less face the struggle of deciding eventually to resign as Pope.



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Saturday, June 22, 11th Week in Ordinary Time

ST. THOMAS MORE (England, 1478-1535), Widower, Lawyer, Writer, Chancellor of England, Martyr
Known in his lifetime as omnium horarum homo (a man for all seasons) because of his wide scholarship and knowledge). Educated in London and Oxford, he was a page for the Archbishop of Canterbury and became a Lawyer. Twice a widower, he was the father of one son and three daughters, and a devoted family man. Writer, most famously of the novel which coined the word Utopia. Known during his own day for his scholarship and great knowledge. Friend of King Henry VIII. Lord Chancellor of England from 1529 to 1532, a position of political power second only to the King. Fought any form of heresy, especially the incursion of Protestantism into England. Opposed the king on the matter of royal divorce, and refused to swear the Oath of Supremacy which declared the King head of the Church in England. Resigned the Chancellorship, and was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Beheaded for his refusal to bend his religious beliefs to the King’s political needs. Beatified in 1886 and canonized in 1935, he is considered the patron saint of lawyers and of politicians.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/062212.cfm



AT THE VATICAN TODAY

Pope Francis met with
- His Highness Fra' Matthew Festing, Prince and Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, and his delegation.

- Madame Rosandić Šarić, former Ambassador of Croatia to Argentina

- Rev. Fr. François-Xavier Dumortier, S.J., Rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University.

- Pilgrims from the Diocese of Brescia.


One year ago...

Benedict XVI meet with Cardinal Lluís Martínez Sistach, Archbishop of Barcelona; Colombian bishops on ad-limina visit Groups 1 &2), whom he addressed in Spanish; participants in the National Assembly of the Coldiretti National Confederation (address in Italian); and Cardinal Fernando Filoni, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples (weekly meeting).

Pope to Italian agribusiness and fish farmers:
To overcome current crisis,
ethics must have primacy over other demands

Adapted and translated from the Italian service of

June 22, 2012


Coldiretti's educational publications promote the social doctrine of the Church.

The economic crisis presents agricultural and fish farmers with [unprecedented challenges that are certainly difficult' but they must be faced with 'a renewed and profound sense of responsibility manifested in solidarity and sharing", Pope Benedict XVI said today to participants in the national assembly of Coldiretti, the Italian confederation of farm entrepreneurs, representing a million and a half members operating on the national and European levels.

The Pope noted how the crisis has affected farming, in which the land itself has been devalued, and farmers have seen a drastic reduction in income. Losses have ranged from 8% for fruits to 32% for plant oil producers (mostly olive and sunflower oil).

"Considering that there is a moral crisis underlying the current economic difficulties", the Pope said, "do all you can so that ethical considerations maintain their primacy over all other demands".

He said there is a need to go to the roots of the crisis, "favoring the rediscovery of those spiritual values from which ideas, plans and works will flow", and therefore, ethics is the turnkey that will guarantee a better future for the next generations.

He said that the family, schools, unions and other political, cultural and civic institutions work together to stimulate and promote ethical standards, especially for young people. They are so full of ideas and hopes, they want to be able to build their own future but they expect valid examples and serious propositions from adults. We cannot disappoint their expectations".

In terms of the entrepreneur's social role, he said they should "carry out valid social policies in favor of the individual, and considering the crucial role of the family for all of society", deriving, he said, from the 'Christian roots that inspire Coldiretti'.

"You are called upon", he told them, "to instill a new consciousness and greater responsibility in the agricultural world", pursuing the common good, the dignity of the individual, along with honesty and transparency in providing services.

Coldiretti is the principal organization of farming entrepreneurs and 'direct farmers' [Coldiretti is short for 'coltivatori diretti'] In Italy and Europe. Now under president Sergio Marini, it represents all the agricultural enterprises found in Italy, with 19 regional federations, 97 provincial federations, 724 district offices and 5,668 peripheral branches.




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June 22, 2012
This is a rather belated entry because I only came across it during a Google search for something else, but it reminds me that last year, at around this time, Cardinal Canizares also wrote a beautiful tribute to Benedict XVI (on the occasion of the Diamond Jubilee of his priestly ordination) for the same newspaper (which carries the Spanish weekly edition of L'Osservatore Romano as a Sunday supplement), a translation of which I posted on Page 225 of this thread.
http://benedettoxviforum.freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=8527207&p=225
Obviously, he has written this new tribute in the wake of Vatileaks-etc...

A Pope for our day
At a time when mankind is at a great crossroads,
we have received the great gift of a man elected and sent by God

by Cardinal Antonio Canizares
Prefect, Congregation for Divine Worship
Translated from

June 13, 2012

We are living a crucial stage in history, in the world, in old Europe, in Spain, but most especially, in the Church which lately has been taking some hard knocks.

We are men of an age that is as fascinating as it is contradictory. Mankind today possesses instruments of unprecedented power. It can make this world a garden or reduce it to rubble. It has achieved an extraordinary capacity to intervene in the very founts of life: It can use this for good within the bounds of moral law, or yield to the myopic arrogance of a science that does not accept its limitations to the point of trampling on the respect that is due to every human being.

Today, as never before, mankind is at a crossroads. And at this crossroads, it has received the great gift of a man, elected and sent by God, Pope Benedict XVI, who, as few can, is concerned for man, his great questions, his very being and sense of well-being; for the value and dignity of the human person, for his freedom and his capacity to create a future and open new paths of hope, for his inalienable rights and the fundamentals that are derived not from the consensus of established powers, public or hidden, but from the very truth of the human being that is inseparable from the reality and foundation that sustains and orients him - God.

Pope Benedict, whose program from the first moment of his Pontificate, was nothing but, at every moment, to do what God wants, never tires of concerning himself about man, whom he loves and serves with all his powers, as if hearing that voice that Adam, the first man, heard in Paradise: "Adam, man, where are you?", similar to that other voice, from Genesis, in the dawn of mankind, "Where is your brother?"

Hearing that voice, God himself, before that Presence which sustains us all, the Pope responds with the only answer that man can give: the response of faith. And that is why he has called on the whole Church, in every place and situation, to "open the doors of faith".

A man of faith, who confirms us in the faith, is the great light whom mankind needs at this crossroads of history. A man of faith who is not daunted by the great difficulties that beset him artificially, devoid of sense and contrary to light - someone that mankind needs and asks for, and who blazes the path inexorably. Without allowing himself to be carried away by the ephemeral circumstances of the moment, seeking to listen to the voice of God, seeking his will, and through his thought, translated to words and teaching or to action and witness of man and his truth, which is testimony to Christ, affirms precisely again and again, opportunely or not, the only response that men need and hope for: Jesus Christ, Logos, Eternal Word, Wisdom of God, Love incarnate, man among men, the only one who knows what is in the heart of man, in whom the mystery of man is clarified, a Pope who discloses for us the sublimeness of our vocation, and who opens to us the great future for the mankind that we are.

Pope Benedict does not retreat nor change course in the face of so many things that have been dumped on him and those around him, but simply - with the simplicity of 'a worker in the vineyard of the Lord" - trusts in God, listens to God, confirms us in our faith, and encourages our hope.

Pope Benedict, like the faithful and prudent servant of the Gospel, has a passion for God and for man, he is a searcher and tireless witness-servant of the truth, of Truth with a capital T that penetrates and fills man's restless heart.

Passionate for the truth, he is a free man, a man of faith, the faith that gives freedom, and makes us free. And so, he is trying to restore to man his genuine self: as the image and likeness of God, Supreme Truth and Sovereign Freedom, the spring at which we drink the freedom that we yearn for, for us and our children.

This the great lesson of Pope Benedict, the Pope who is providential for this time in our history.

That is why he has convoked a Year of Faith. That is why he has called another universal assembly of the Bishops' Synod to discuss the most urgent and burning question of a new evangelization of the contemporary world.

The people, who have a profound sense of the truth which sustains them and which is nested in their heart, perceive in the Pope the Good Shepherd who loves them and leads them, not a bureaucrat nor seeker of power who would dominate the flock, and they are with the Pope: We saw it in Milan, in the procession of Corpus Christi after that in Rome - because people recognize in him the Good Shepherd who gives his life for his sheep.

Along with our thanksgiving to God for this great gift, and our thanks to the Pope for his efforts, courage, generosity, the way he lives only for others, as the Lord did, we must gather around him more closely each day, listen to him, follow the way he indicates that will lead us to the living waters that will quench the thirst of mankind in our day, without ever forgetting to pray for him, which is to pray for the whole Church and for the world.

How much we need to pray! What a great service we would do to the Church, to all mankind, and even to our own Spain, if we prayed more, if we undertook a great campaign for prayer as we find ourselves at this crossroads.

Apropos, I was struck by a post-script I had to that 2011 entry, which seems relevant to what appears to be the 'Vatlileaks case' against Cardinal Bertone:

Those of you who follow Catholic blogs in English may have come across an item first reported in English by Robert Moynihan, about statements reportedly made by Cardinal Canizares to an Italian blogger who ran an article in three lengthy parts that is more or less an informal biography of the Spanish cardinal. It makes for very interesting reading about his background (he has always considered himself 'progressive' and not at all traditionalist!)[ his 'rivalry' with the powerful 'moderate' Cardinal Archbishop of Madrid when he, Canizares, as Archbishop of Toledo, was Primate of Spain [one reason why Benedict XVI promoted him to Rome]; and, what Moynihan particularly purveys, the cardinal's account of how the Secretariat of State has sought to keep tight 'control' over all the dicasteries of the Roman Curia to the point of requiring Curial heads to submit any speeches or articles for vetting; his personal experience of how he - and the Pope - found out that his communications to the Pope (also required to be passed through the Secretariat of State) had been deliberately shelved and not passed on, and that since then, on the Pope's instructions, he has found another way to send his communications directly to the Pope through a trusted emissary. Perhaps the most shocking, however - which, I felt, may have overstepped discretion - was his explicit complaint of how he had tried to be friends with Cardinal Bertone but had been rebuffed at every step so he has stopped trying...


Lessons from Joseph Ratzinger:
Why despite everything
the Church survives and holds up

by Michelangelo Nasca
Translated from

June 22, 2012

Napoleon is reported to have said famously that he would destroy the Catholic Church. To which a cardinal replied calmly: "He will never succeed. Not even we have managed to do that!"

Citing this anecdote, the then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith replied to a question about the Church from Peter Seewald in his second book-length interview with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, God and the world.

"I think that this paradox," said the future Pope, "brings to light something very important. The Church has never lacked for human wrongdoings. But if she continues to hold up, despite a thousand and one creaks and cracks, if she continues to exist, if she continues to produce great saints, martyrs and believers, people who give their lives to serve as missionaries, nurses, teachers, this only shows that there is something else that holds her up".

In these smoldering summer days, the polemics and insinuations against the Church will likely not lessen, and unfortunately, she does not lack for creaks and cracks these days. In fact, one cannot deny that some prelate somewhere is bound to be caught out doing something improper (like the Argentine bishop Fernando Maria Bargallò, who has been the subject of worldwide ridicule after photos and video of him were released showing him 'cavorting' in the sea with a woman he claims to be a childhood friend, which certainly did not look like he was administering baptism to her).

Things like this certainly cause the friends of the Vatican vipers to gloat, while the enemies of the Church use the occasion to ask Catholics to embark on an exodus away from the Church!

But let us listen further to Cardinal Ratzinger in that interview from 12 years ago, who speaks passionately about the Church - not different in any way from the man who is Pope today:

I cannot truly imagine myself leaving the Church. It is my most intimate homeland. I have been fused to her from birth to such a point that, in order to separate myself from her, I would have to cut my own flesh and destroy myself.

Of course, there are always things that provoke anger, on the large scale as well as in smaller things... But one does not leave the family just because one is angered. Above all, we shall not be torn apart if the love that binds one to the other is stronger than whatever reasons for irritation or anger, if our life is held up by that original power".

[I translated the Italian citation given, as I do not have access now to the English version of God and the world.]

So, let us move forward with the certainty inherent in the faith that despite everything, there is always the Other who keeps our Church upright.





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I hope Giacomo Galeazzi wrongly reported the statement attributed here to Pope Francis, supposedly by one of his aides, and that it is just as maliciously apocryphal as the statement "The Carnival is over" that the newly elected Pope reportedly told Mons. Guido Marini in refusing to wear the ceremonial mozzetta and stole that all Popes before him in modern times have worn for their first presentation to the world as Pope. The new statement today would further reflect badly on Benedict XVI, as if he were acting like a Renaissance prince because he gladly attended concerts organized and offered in his honor, which didn't mean he slacked off from work since these concerts generally start after working hours! (or because he wore the far-from-extravagant ceremonial regalia that all Popes, including those who went on to be saints, have worn without question). As for going to concerts, what about the thousands of us regular folk who love music and queue up patiently for hours at opera houses and concert halls to get a chance to buy the cheapest tickets made available for SRO-only space at sell-out performances? We certainly do not behave like Renaissance princes, much less live even remotely like them!

Pope Francis does not attend
a concert in his honor

'I am not a Renaissance prince who
listens to music instead of working'

by Giacomo Galeazzi
Translated from the Italian service of

June 22, 2013

So the Pope decided at the last minute not to attend a concert that was part of the Year of Faith program. Instead of going to Aula Paolo VI for the concert in his honor, Pope Francis stayed in the whole afternoon working at the Santa Marta residence.

"He had urgent matters to attend to," said one of his aides. "It's not a question of health. You can see that his secretaries and personal physician [Dr. Patrizio Polisca, the same one who was Benedict XVI's personal physician] are attending the concert".

At the last minute and after the Vatican official media had announced the Pope would be in attendance, Francis decided not to participate because of "commitments that cannot be postponed".

The urgency appeared to refer to conversations that he has been having with some of the Apostolic Nuncios who came to Rome en masse for their participation in the Year of Faith. Conversations which may presage a shuffling of Vatican diplomatic assignments preliminary to reforming the Secretariat of State and the other Vatican ministries. [There they go again! It's a long way to October and that first meeting of the Group of 8 whom the Pope counts on to carry the reform. Besides, what's there to shuffle among the Nuncios? Is it now being alleged that there is 'evil and corruption' among them as well?]

The whole afternoon, Francis stayed in his room at Santa Marta and simply told his aides: "I am not a Renaissance prince who listens to music instead of working". [Since he kept to his room, one gathers his conversations with the nuncios - the urgent work Galeazzi supposes he was doing - were all conducted by telephone.]

And he proceeded to carry out the tasks of a day that was particularly 'heavy'. [The official schedule only included three private audiences, in the nature of courtesy calls by three VIPs, and an audience to pilgrims from the Diocese of Brescia who came for the 50th anniversary of Paul VI's election as Pope; and his weekly meeting with the CDF Prefect.]

Once more, therefore, maximum attention to the content of his work, and little or none to worldliness and formality. Excuse me, Galeazzi! This is one case when your dotting the i's and crossing the t's is absolutely superfluous, and worse, offensive! For many people of faith, listening to the right music can be a spiritual experience as edifying as a period of meditation, and is hardly worldliness! As for formality, there is a place for it, as in liturgy, as in ceremonial protocol, as in diplomacy. Not everything can and should be considered informal, casual and random.

Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization, gave assurances that "all the remaining events programmed for the Year of Faith will proceed as planned".

The absence of Francis from the concert is explained by the fact that the new Pope does not want to attend certain occasions or appointments, like concerts, which are not congenial to him. {Then he should have asked one of his aides to make this clear to the organizers of the concert, not decide at the last minute not to go!]

The concert featured music by Beethoven including his Symphony No. 9, performed by the National Symphony Orchestra of RAI (Italian state radio-TV) and the Choir of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia.

Yesterday, the Pope addressed 108 Apostolic Nuncios currently serving around the world and 40 ex-Nuncios in a Year of Faith event that had been pre-programmed last year. But he availed of the occasion to stamp it with his own imprint: He gave each of the Nuncios a silver pectoral cross, and one presumes that from now on, the Nuncios will stop using their gold pectoral crosses in order to align themselves with the 'modest' style of the new Pope. [Have we seen any of the cardinal electors or the various diocesan bishops doing that since March 13? What is wrong with gold anyway? One can almost bet that every prelate who wears a gold pectoral cross and chain received them as a loving gift at ordination from his family, or some rich friend, or even from his parishioners. And weren't we told that Cardinal Bergoglio wore a stainless steel cross and chain which he has chosen to continue to wear as Pope? Is Galeazzi sure those gift crosses were silver? They ought to have been stainless steel, as well. IMHO, if the intention is truly KISS (keep it simple, sinner!), all bishops, including the Pope should wear an olivewood pectoral cross with a chain made of olivewood beads. Why even bother with heavy metal? On the other hand, it might be salutary for the bishops to start their day by polishing their silver cross and chain because even sterling silver tarnishes... And BTW, the Nuncios should have taken off all their gold and dropped it into a collection box on their way out of the Vatican ,so that the precious metal and any jewels they had could be converted to Peter's Pence or meals-on-wheels or something similar.]

Galeazzi continues with more about the meeting with the nuncios yesterday, but his story about the concert was incomplete. The English service of Vatican Radio has not seen fit to devote a story to the concert without its guest of honor, but the Italian service did, and it says that Mons. Fisichella read a letter from the Pope thanking the performers and all who helped organize the concert. The last sentence of the RV Italian report says the Pope also expressed "his appreciation for this monumental work [Beethoven's #9] which is able to make us experience not just a moment of respite and spiritual upliftment, but also to inspire in all of us sentiments that urge us all to profound reflection". Curiously, the RV report does not quote or refer to any apology for the Pope's absence. Surely, the letter must have started with one!]

I refrained from commenting much on the first half of the story but I do wish to point out a few obvious points:
1) Did Mons. Fisichella not double-check with the Pope about his disposition towards the concert, or could he not have been told earlier by one of the Pope's aides that the Pope would prefer to take a pass on this one since he does not like attending concerts?
[But one of the earliest anecdotes I read about Cardinal Bergoglio is that he is an opera lover - not surprising, after all, for the son of an Italian family who grew up in Buenos Aires that has one of the world's greatest opera houses in its stupendous Teatro Colon, an architectural and acoustical marvel!]

2) Despite the letter of thanks, it was not very considerate at all to deprive the performers of their guest of honor. All their preparation, all the excitement of playing for the Pope, of having their family and friends present with them in the hall and psyched up to spend an hour in the presence of the Pope - all of it fizzling out at the last minute!

3) The program for concerts offered for Benedict XVI was always timed not to last longer than an hour. Surely, telephone conversations with a couple of Nuncios could have been postponed to the next day, so the Pope could take off for an hour and 20 minutes, max, allowing for pre- and post-concert pleasantries.

4) How is it worldly to listen to music but not worldly to follow the games of the hometown football team he roots for? Call me stupid, but I understand worldliness to be an attachment to 'things of the world' to the complete neglect - or at least to the detriment - of one's personal witness to the evangelical values Christ taught. Or perhaps I fail to get the theological sense at all of the fact that Jesus praised Mary of Bethany for pouring costly perfume on his feet to show her devotion and love. Surely, simplicity and modesty should not be debased to the level of fetish that has fanatical and demagogical elements?

On a completely different subject, for purposes of consistency, why aren't all the young people planning to go to Rio for WYD not told to stay home and donate their WYD budget to feed the poor in their respective countries instead? That was the rationale conveyed by the Nuncio in Argentina on behalf of the Pope to all those Argentines/ s who planned to to to Rome for the Pope's inaugural Mass.


P.S. And here's Corriere della Sera's indulgent, apotheosizing account of the story:

That seat left empty by a Pope
who prefers to work instead
of attending a concert in his honor

by Gian Guido Vecchi
Translated from

June 23, 2013


Mons. Fisichella standing, right of center, informs the audience that Pope Francis is unable to come to the concert because of 'work that cannot be delayed'.

It is destined to become a symbol the Pontificate - that empty chair in the center of Aula Paolo VI as yesterday evening, invited guests and Church officials listened a bit taken aback to the 'Concert of Classical Music for the Year of Faith' in the absence of the Pope.

It happens that just the other day, addressing the Vatican's apostolic nuncios, Pope Francis had once more denounced that 'spiritual worldliness' which is a 'leprosy' on the Church, yielding to the 'spirit of the world' which "exposes us pastors to ridicule", that "kind of bourgeoisie of spirit and of lifestyle that induces accommodation in order to have a comfortable and tranquil life". [So Vecchi considers a well-meaning concert all of that??? A leprosy on the Church, a source of ridicule for pastors, an accomodati0on towards a comfortable life? I do not think that is what Pope Francis had in mind.]

The fact is that no one before has had to announce as Mons. Rino Fisichella had to, at 5:30 p.m., when everyone was awaiting the Pope's arrival at the concert hall, that "The Holy Father cannot be present because of urgent work that cannot be postponed". [In 2011, Benedict XVI came late = very untypically - to the opening of an art exhibit by 60 artists honoring his 60 years as priest, but the reason was because he had to deal with a new problematic nomination of a Chinese bishop by the Communist 'patriotic Church'. That was a problem that could not be resolved instantly even if he had stayed away from the exhibit - and one gathers he was late for the appointment just for the time needed to be briefed about the situation and for him to discuss the Vatican's initial reaction, not to work out a solution then and there!]

General disconcertment and momentary 'mystery': Why? Fr. Federico Lombardi immediately ruled out it had to do with health reasons at all. and Mons. Fisichella assured everyone that the Pope's schedule the following day would remain unchanged.

Besides, present at the concert was Dr. Patrizio Polisca, the Pope's physician, and even Mons. Georg Gaenswein. prefect of the Pontifical Household and secretary to emeritus Pope Benedict XVI. It would be unthinkable for him to be there if either Benedict or Francis were ailing. So why?

Simply that Pope Francis had decided not to leave Santa Marta and continue to work as he does every day. To attend a concert is not in the DNA of a Pope who has decided not to go anywhere for the summer - he will stay in the Vatican [other than the time he goes to Brazil for WYD next month] and has offered the Apostolic Palace in Castel Gandolfo for the summer use of Benedict XVI.

Except that yesterday's concert had been programmed since August 2012 and organized well before the Conclave last March. So the new Pope could not cancel it, but simply decided not to attend. [It would have been considerate to inform Mons. Fisichella at least of this decision earlier!] -

It was learned from the Casa Santa Marta that Pope Francis did not leave the hotel the whole afternoon. Moreover, he reportedly told his aides simply: "I am not going to the concert. I am not a Renaissance prince..." Many think this is the sense of his decision, which is in line with so many other 'discontinuities' in personal style from his predecessors that have been evident in his first 100 days as Pope.

Starting with his decision not to live in the Apostolic Palace in order not to be 'isolated'. This was his first great 'reform', dispelling with one gesture the atmosphere of a Renaissance or royal court in which the measure of 'power' at the Vatican was perceived closeness to the Pope and/or easy access to the papal apartment. [And whose measure is that but the media's? It's as artificial as any of the factoids they love to rewarm again and again and serve up habitually to those who follow them mindlessly. During the eight years of B16's Pontificate, no one ever referred to his immediate circle, which was always a small one, as a 'Renaissance or royal court' - to do so now is wrong and unfair, especially since during his 23 years in the Curia, when he was considered by everyone the #2 man at the Vatican, even if he was not Secretary of State, he scrupulously kept apart from any groupings or factions within it.

Vecchi's allusions to a 'court' apply more to John Paul II's Pontificate, during which quite a number of Poles with important Curial positions were part of the so-called 'Polish mafia' that was a feature of the privileged papal entourage, led by Mons. Stanislaw Dsiwisz, Blessed Wojtyla's trusted private secretary. The Polish Mafia's influence in Church affairs - including the all-important nominations for bishops and cardinals - was widely reputed to be very strong indeed, especially in the final years of the Pope's life.

In contrast, Benedict XVI's immediate circle was confined to his 'papal family' - two secretaries, four housekeeper-factotums, and a valet who turned out to be Judas. Business required that every weekday evening, as long as he was in the Vatican, he also met with the Secretary of State and/or his two deputies. But as much as he stayed 'loyal' to Bertone through the latter's missteps and knack for fading into the woodwork everytime a media crisis assailed Benedict XVI, no one has suggested that Bertone enjoyed the same level of personal trust that Benedict XVI came to place in Georg Gaenswein. Outside of the papal family, which by extension included non-members of the household, but members of Joseph Ratzinger's earlier 'curial family' (Brigit Wansing, his transcribing secretary; Mons, Josef Clemens, his private secretary for 20 years; and Ingrid Stampa, his housekeeper for 14 years) who also had easy access to the papal apartment, no one in the Vatican can be described to be an 'intimate' of Benedict XVI.

As for the notion of the Pope being 'isolated' just because he lives in the Apostolic Palace, that is pure crap, and the media should not indulge in it as 'the' principal motivation for Francis's decision not to live there. In his 26 years as Pope, did anyone in the media ever call John Paul II 'isolated' because he lived in the Apostolic Palace? His natural gregariousness and preference to have congenial persons around him during the times of the day when he was not meditating and praying by himself, antedated Francis's more backslapping kind of bonhomie.

But no one who could analyze the major cultural issues of the day and of our time as Joseph Ratzinger did could be said to be isolated - and even his detractors have not critiqued his analyses as being nothing more than ivory-tower musings detached from reality. Even if he talked to no one - and he did talk to a lot of people in the course of a normal working day (he did not spend those private audiences simply trading small talk with his guests, from heads of state to delegations representing private businesses, institutions and the common folk - each encounter had to be a learning experience for anyone with the inquiring mind and open disposition that he has!]


The Pope who wants 'a poor Church for the poor" did not go to concerts when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Rather he spent his evenings visiting families in the poorest neighborhoods of the city incognito. [For one who had such a great reputation among BA's poor, how incognito could he have been? Also, were those visits really nightly, or occasionally? Or is this just one of those urban legends no one cares to research but simply assumes to be gospel-true. I must look up the appropriate references in the growing online literature on Francis to get a better idea.]

All this contributed yesterday to increasing nervousness in the Curia with its spasmodic expectation of new nominations to the Curia and to IOR. Was this the work that kept Francis busy yesterday afternoon? There are those who expect the first wave of Curial announcements to be made by June 29, feast of Saints Peter and Paul.[Apparently, Vecchi does not read the news, because everyone else knows by now that the Pope has said he will leave it to his cardinal advisers to work out said reform, though of course, everyone understands he alone will make the final decisions. But since the Group of Eight is not meeting for the first time till October, the Curia jitterists should cool their jitters for now.]

It is taken for granted that there will be a mass turnover of Curial heads, starting with Secretary of State Bertone. All the Curial heads and their #2 men are holding office now until otherwise provided by the Pope. But why should there be a mass turnover? To assume that is to assume that all of Benedict's Curial heads were either rotten or grossly incompetent. Unless a Curial head or secretary is one or the other, there is no reason to replace him for what is left of his five-year appointment term.

For weeks, the talk has been that Pope Francis will replace Bertone with Cardinal Giuseppe Bertello, president of the Vatican Governatorate, [whom the Italian media widely scorned as being 'Bertone's protege' when Benedict XVI named him to his current position and especially when he was made cardinal, as if he had no qualifications but being Bertone's protege. Now, all of a sudden, he is good enough for them to speculate that he might be Francis's choice for his right-hand man! In fact, it's like saying, "Oh look! Pope Francis found at least 'one good man' in that rotten, no-goodnik Curia of Benedict XVI - good enough to be one of his chosen advisers, and even to be SecState!" Seriously now!

The 'Bergoglio revolution' has roused great expectations. Last night at St. Peter's Square, there was a torch parade - with the demonstrators chanting "Francesco, Francesco" - to mark the 30th anniversary of the disappearance of the teenaged Emanuela Orlandi, daughter of a Vatican employe. She was abducted from a street in Rome, and her fate has been the subject of the wildest speculations this side of Dan Brown. The parade was organized by her brother Pietro who claims the Vatican has 'hidden knowledge' of his sister's fate. [Apparently last night's event was far tamer than a demonstration he organized two or three years back which disrupted an Angelus assembly led by Benedict XVI.]

Fr. Federico Lombardi was forced to go on a RAI evening newscast to say: "There are no secrets held back that could in any way resolve this cold case. To continue to say that is calumnious. Officials within the Vatican always cooperated fully with the investigations." [Since the crime was committed in Rome, the Italian police have jurisdiction over the case, not the Vatican. Of course, the Pope will easily win hearts by the thousands and reinforce his street creds as a folk hero, our Wonder-Pope, if he decides to ask Pietro Orlandi to come to Santa Marta for a tete-a-tete, and have it out once and for all. He could perhaps arrange for Orlandi to confront Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who, as Sostituto at SecState 30 years ago, dealt with the entire official investigation of the abduction and the internal Vatican inquiry into it.]
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Universal enthusiasm for the best of all possible Popes in the best of all possible situations for the Church in modern times has now created a new genre of journalism - an exegetic, justificatory kind of secular apologetics for what Pope Francis really means, or means to say but hasn't said, about the subjects that he chooses not to address head-on, the way he preaches daily - and rightly - against the routine sins and failings that all human beings, but most especially Catholics who ought to know better, are prey to.

Luigi Accattoli, veteran Vaticanista who has otherwise been fairly sober and objective as a commentator, adds his voice to the chorus of Francis exegetes-apologists. The article is typical of the new Francescophiliac journalism, in which perceived failings or shortcomings for which Benedict XVI would have been mercilessly pilloried are instead explained away in the best possible light for Pope Francis. and thus end up being virtues that must be praised rather than deficiencies to criticize. He walks on water! - how could he possibly be less than perfect? We've been through this before with Obamamania.


Pro-life politics - and why
Pope Francis is staying out of it

by Luigi Accattoli
Translated from

June 17, 2013

Francis does not cry out against laws that violate 'non-negotiable principles': this is one of the novelties in his way of being Pope. [Ooops! Did you mean 'being Bishop of Rome'?, since he apparently finds the title 'Pope' pompous and inappropriate! After all, no one ever called St. Peter 'Pope'!]

He shares the need to protest these laws but leaves the task to the bishops of each nation who know best the specifics of the law(s)_ to be protested. This was evident again yesterday (June 16) by what he said at the Mass to celebrate the Gospel of Life in St. Peter's Square.

"Let us say Yes to love and No to selfishness, Yes to life and No to death, Yes to freedom and No to slavery to so many idols in our time", he told a piazza that was as usual packed.

His message was so clear that the news agencies and Internet postings immediately used headlines like "The Pope says No to abortion and euthanasia". It is true he meant to say that, but he did not mention either abortion or euthanasia. [Fine, but where was the reproof from a media that always vituperated against the most general statements made by Benedict XVI as if he had delivered unpardonable screeds against the most cherished of liberal causes! Why do they find it right, and even laudable, this time, and not then?][/DIM

"Often man does not choose life," he continued. "He does not accept the Gospel of Life, but allows himself to be led by ideologies and logics that place obstacles to life, that do not respect life, because they are dictated by selfishness, by special interests, by profit, by power, by pleasure, and not by love."

Thus he has overturned the entire argumentation used in Catholic pedagogy on this subject without ever venturing into the area of laws [against life, presumably].
[How exactly did he 'overturn' Catholic teaching in this respect??? What did he say in that citation that Popes before him have not said and almost in identical words? And in the case of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, going farther as to be specific about the laws they consider a violation not just of Catholic teaching but of natural law?]

He did the same on May 12, also in St. Peter's Square, when he greeted participants in the annual Italian March for Life which had taken place that day through the streets of Rome. There was disappointment among some of those marchers who had expected a more direct statement about specific laws as both Papa Wojtyla and Papa Ratzinger generally did. [In this case, the laws being protested are those in some European countries in which human embryos are used for research, the whole point of the march being the slogan 'Uno di noi' - one of us - referring to each of those research embryos which are necessarily killed in the process]

In more militant Catholic circles, there is an even greater
disappointment [Is that really the right term for their sentiment? If it had been Benedict XVI, the term used would have been 'outrage'!] at the silence of the Pope over the continuing fight of French Catholics against homosexual 'marriages' which have been recognized under a recently passed law [called the Taubira law after the person who sponsored the bill].

Francis has never spoken about the issue, nor did he even refer to it when he met on June 15 with a group of French parliamentarians who belong to the France-Holy See Friendship Group.
[An egregiously deafening silence that affected even MSM, which hardly even reported on the meeting!] He did remind them that among their duties as lawmakers was to abrogate laws, but he did not say that Catholic legislators in France should do all they can to abrogate the Taubira law.

This attitude of the new Pope is being disputed among Catholics who are engaged in politics. Most insist that 'one day, he will speak clearly' and cite what he said about homosexual marriage on a couple of occasions when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Others doubt that he will ever say anything directly about any specific national law.

In support of the latter view, one might cite what he has done so far with respecf to the Church in Italy [of which the Bishop of Rome is Primate]. When he first met with Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco in a private audience on April 27, the president of the Italian bishops' conference told newsmen that the Pope had told him that "our episcopate should continue with the protection and promotion of non=negotiable values" and that the Pope shared the themes of the opening remarks he was preparing for the CEI general assembly that followed thereafter.

In his opening remarks, Bagnasco described the legitimization of homosexual unions as "a progressive vulnus (wound) to the specific identity of the family". But when the Pope met the bishops in assembly on May 23, he said not a word about this topic.

His silence must be interpreted in the light of the extemporaneous remarks he made at the start of his address to them that "dialog with cultural, social and political institutions 'in Italy' is your business to undertake".

Everyone interpreted this to mean
an override of the so-called 'lodo Bertone' [Bertone boast], namely the letter that Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone sent Cardinal Bagnasco when he was first named CEI president in 2007 by Benedict XVI, in which he said that the Secretariat of State, not the CEI, would exercise competence over political questions affecting the Church in Italy. [/This is a gross misrepresentation of fact. At the time, Cardinal Bagnasco simply ignored the letter and has continued to run the CEI as it had been during 16 years by Cardinal Camillo Ruini, considered by many to have been an activist by mobilizing the Catholics of Italy, under both John Paul II and Benedict XVI, to oppose laws against Catholic teaching at the polls. Accattoli is well aware that Bertone was completely out of line in even claiming any competence at all over the Church in Italy, which is defined by the Lateran pacts as the dialog partner for the state of Italy on all matters pertaining to Church and State relations in Italy. Not the Vatican, which represents the universal Church.

The Pope has competence in the Church of Italy because he is its ex- officio Primate, but this particular function of the Pope is exercised through the CEI, not through the Vatican at all. That Benedict XVI allowed Cardinal Bagnasco full rein to do as Ruini did - the Church in Italy mounted a massive protest against the Prodi government's plan to legislate gay 'marriage' in Italy - shows he stood by the CEI about its specific competence in Italy, not by his impetuous Secretary of State. If anyone overrode Bertone at all on this, it was Benedict XVI six years ago, and Cardinal Bagnasco himself.]


The interpretation is correct but partial. He may have sideiined the 'Bertone boast' [which was never more than that, so there was nothing to sideline in fact!] but Francis did more than that. He said, in effect, that not just the Secretary of State, but not even the Pope, can from now on have anything to say about our public life in Italy, but that such interventions are for the bishops to do.

WHOA! The Bishop of Rome, by virtue of being Bishop of Rome, is Primate of Italy. As Italy's first bishop, what happens to the Church of Italy is just as much his concern as that of the CEI. John Paul II and Benedict XVI were 'activist' Primates of Italy, i.e., they led their 'troops', because they spoke out when and as often as they needed to, against political developments in Italy which threatened or continue to threaten what Benedict XVI always called 'non=negotiable principles', in no uncertain terms.

And as for that business that a Pope must not speak out against any specific national law, it does not apply to Italy, where he is the Primate of the national Church, and it is his duty to speak out.

More importantly, however, Popes cannot always leave it up to the local bishops to speak out and do something about even the most pernicious problem such as the sex abuses committed by priests. We saw what happened when bishops were left to their own devices before 2001 - when many deliberately ignored specific canon law already existing at the time to deal with 'serious offenses' by priests. John Paul II had to confer the CDF with the jurisdiction to act on cases not acted upon by the local bishops.

Isn't it paradoxical that a Pope who has been praised to high heavens - and rightly - for being so direct and colloquially frank in his language when calling a spade a spade, is equally praised for choosing to keep silent so far about non-negotiable principles? With Benedict XVI, the attitude of the media - and the public perception they shaped - was and is 'damned if he does, damned if he doesn't". With Pope Francis, it is "all praise and glory to him whatever he says and does or does not say or do".

Our only consolation is that it is God's judgment on Benedict XVI that matters, not that of the media and their gullible following.

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June 23, Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time

ST. JOHN FISHER (England, 1469-1635), Bishop, Cardinal, Martyr
Fisher is the ecclesial 'twin' of Thomas More, his secular contemporary. They were imprisoned together and then beheaded two weeks apart, essentially for their refusal to uphold the validity of Henry VIII's adulterous marriage to Anne Boleyn, much less his split from the Roman Catholic Church to set up the Church of England. Fisher was a great Renaissance humanist in the category of Erasmus and More himself. He was named a bishop at 35 and gained fame as a preacher and writer. With the Reformation, he wrote eight books against the Lutheran heresy, earning him a leadership role among European theologians. Then he was asked to make a ruling on Henry VIII's marriage and he upheld Catherine of Aragon as his lawful wife. Henry found a pretext to imprison Fisher and More in the Tower of London when they refused to take an oath to the Act of Succession that meant recognizing the validity of the king's marriage and his leadership of the Church of England. Meanwhile, the Pope had made Fisher a cardinal, further angering the King. When he told a priest that he did not consider the King as head of the Church, he was brought to trial and sentenced to death. Along with Thomas More, he was beatified in 1886 and canonized in 1935.
Readings for today's Mass:
www.usccb.org/bible/readings/062313.cfm



AT THE VATICAN TODAY

Unusually, Pope Francis had a Sunday audience before today's Angelus with th3 Associazione dei Santi Pietro e Paolo
st the Aula di Benedizione of the Apostolic Place. The Association has traditionally trained and provided ushers
who welcome the faithful during liturgical celerbations in St. Peter's Basilica. It is also engaged in various
charitable and cultural activities in Rome. Address in Italian.

Sunday Angelus - The Pope reflected on Jesus's words in today's Hospel, "Whoever would save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it", saying the martyrs offer the best example of this message.
He reminded the faithful of the Feast of St. John the Baptist on Monday, June 24.

After the Angelus, he proceeded to the Vatican train station to welcome hundreds of children from various countries
who had taken part in a train ride from Milan, stopping in Bologna and Florence, and ending in Rome, on 'A trip through
beauty' sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Culture. The purpose was to expose the children to artistic creations
inspired by the faith in the four cities they visited. The Pope spent about 20 minutes talking to them and asking them
about the trip.



One year ago...
Benedict XVI presided at a meeting of all the heads of dicasteries in the Roman Curia. In the evening, he met with Cardinals Marc Ouellet, George Pell, Camillo Ruini, Jean-Louis Tauran, and Josef Tomko. Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi said that "with the situation created by the publication of private documents from the Vatican, the Holy Father wishes to pursue his reflections in continual dialog with the persons who share responsibility with him for the governance of the Church". He said the five cardinals were those considered by the Pope who :could usefully present their considerations and suggestions to him on how to re-establish a climate The Pope also named Cardinals Polycarp Pengo, Archbishop of Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania); Telesphore Placidus Toppo, Archbishop of Ranchi (India); and John Tong Hon, Bishop of HongKong, to the Council of Cardinals for the study of the organizational and economic problems of the Holy See.

Announced later in the day by Fr. Federico Lombardi: Greg Burke, longtime Rome-based European correspondent of Fox News and a member of Opus Dei, has been named 'communications adviser' to the Secretariat of State. Fr. Lombardi said Burke will "contribute to the improvement of communications strategies within the Holy See". He said that specifically, Burke would help "integrate attention to communications questions in the work of the Secretariat of State and to take charge of relationships with the Vatican Press Office and other communications organisms of the Holy See".

Pope meets Curial heads then
meets with five trusted cardinals
to discuss leak scandal



VATICAN CITY, June 23, 2012 (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI convened a special meeting of cardinals Saturday to get their advice about how to deal with the scandal over leaked Vatican documents, another sign of the damage the leaks have done to trust in the Holy See's governance. [Why should the meeting be seen as 'a sign of the damage...' rather than a sign of the Pope's normal concern about a managerial and morale problem, not to mention as[S} a sign of collegiality even in dealing with problems that are not ecclesial but administrative?]

Benedict was already scheduled to attend a regular meeting of the heads of Vatican offices Saturday morning. The Vatican press office said he had added a second meeting later in the day with other cardinals in a bid to try to "restore a climate of calm and confidence" in the Curia.

And the Vatican said he would meet over the coming days with still more cardinals who will be gathering in Rome for a Church feast day on Friday to "continue the dialogue with the people who share the responsibility of the Church's governance with him."

The Vatican has been scrambling to cope with the leaks of hundreds of Vatican documents exposing corruption [Only two - Mons. Vigano's letters - out of dozens of documents, alleged any corruption at all, and even he only cited one specific case of what he considered contract over-pricing! And yet, from the start, MSM has codified that one case into 'CORRUPTION IN THE VATICAN' as though it were a widespread practice], and I am compelled to point this out everytime they repeat this unfounded general charge!], political infighting and power struggles at the highest level of the Catholic Church.

The Pope's butler has been arrested in the case, accused of aggravated theft after [copies of] the Pope's own documents were found in his Vatican City apartment.

The Vatican is conducting two main investigations into the leaks: a criminal one headed by the Vatican gendarmes that led to the arrest of the butler, Paolo Gabriele, and another internal probe led by a commission of three cardinals tasked with getting to the bottom of the scandal.

Last weekend Benedict met with the cardinal's commission to learn details of [their questioning of] some of the two dozen people they have questioned.

The meetings Saturday were another indication of the seriousness with which he has taken the scandal and the damage it has done to the trust that is supposed to form the basis of the Vatican's governance.

In its statement, the Vatican said the regularly scheduled meeting with department heads, aimed at coordinating the Vatican's work, was "today particularly important and urgent to show efficient witness to the union of spirit that animates the Curia."

The second meeting Saturday includes Vatican cardinals and the archbishops of Sydney and retired vicar of Rome — two longtime papal advisers. [I don't see why the AP chose not to list the 5: Marc Ouellet, Prefect of Bishops; George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney; Camillo Ruini, former Vicar-General of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI in Rome; Jean-Louis Tauran, president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialog, member of the five-man Cardinal's Commission that oversees IOR, and former #3 man at the Secretariat of State in the latter part of John Paul-II's Pontificate; and Josef Tomko, former Prefect of Propaganda Fide, confidante of his fellow Pole John Paul II, and one of the three cardinals investigating Vatileaks-etc for the Pope.]

[The obvious thing about the afternoon meeting is that it does not include Cardinal Bertone. It is reminiscent of a meeting called by the Pope in Castel Gandolfo in the summer of 2009, the year Bertone was to turn 75, the statutory retirement age, at which the cardinals present were Scola, Schoenborn, Ruini and Bagnasco - all considered 'Ratzingerians'. The cast of characters today may have been determined primarily by which of those the Pope wishes to consult privately happened to be in Rome today (other than Ruini who lives in Rome, the three other cardinals who were called to Castel Gandolfo are currently in Milan, Vienna and Genoa, respectively, and it is likely they will be consulted when they come to Rome later this week for the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul). The presence of Cardinals Tauran and Tomko ensures high-level representation of the 'Old Guard' in these consultations.

About the 2009 meeting, Andrea Tornielli reported that Cardinal Schoenborn said the Pope 'closed off the discussion' about allowing Bertone to retire, before it could even begin. Now, those who think Bertone should retire when he reaches 78 in December - such as the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois,and Vittorio Messori - are saying to 'lay off Bertone for now - he'll be gone by the end of the year, anyway". No one but Benedict XVI knows, however.

And in the past, still according to Tornielli, the Pope has apparently ignored the opinion of his good friend Cardinal Meisner of Cologne that he would be better off allowing Bertone to retire. One wonders whether there has been any change since then of the Pope's personal cost-versus-benefit assessment of keeping on Bertone. God forbid that history will record, perhaps not entirely without basis, his insistence on retaining Bertone as one of the major 'mistakes' of his Pontificate. ]





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More looking back, to a couple of stories from one year ago. The first one is even more far-fetched now than it was then, but it is informative about the current state of the sainthood causes for two of our recent Popes:



Could Benedict XVI highlight
the Year of Faith by proclaiming
Paul VI and John Paul I 'Blessed'?

by Antonino d'Anna
Translated from

June 23, 2012

D'Anna is a journalist who writes about religious topics. He co-authored a book in 2010 about the extent of pedophilia and sexual perversions involving children throughout the world.

The 'news' coming from our source in the Vatican is very juicy. Indeed, for some time now, people in the Vatican have been talking about some important 'signal' that Benedict XVI will manifest to the world just before or during the Year of Faith, which marks the 50th anniversary of the opening the Second Vatican Council.

What might it be? Apparently, the beatification of Paul VI and John Paul I - the Pope who closed Vatican II and made the enxt three Popes cardinals (Albino Luciani, Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger), and the Pope of smiles, though he only reigned 33 days in the late summer of 1978.

Both are figures that Benedict XVI could indicate as models to a Church that appears to be agitated by contingencies like Vatileaks. in order to call attention to a way of serving the Church to celebrate the start of the Council which brought about the Church's aggiornamento or updating (which is still in dispute) according to the inspired initiative of Blessed John XXIII (whom John Paul II beatified during the Jubilee Year of 2000 along with Pius IX) within a few months of becoming Pope.

If Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was the man who opened Vatican II (he died on June 9, 1963, after its first session+, it devolved on Giovanni Battista Montini (elected June 21, 1963) to lead the Council through three more sessions to its conclusion in December 1965.

The period between summer 1963 to December 1965 when the Council ended was full of intense renewal and debates within the Conciliar hall, with decisions that were not easy for Papa Montini, who did decide that he was not going to let the Council rule on priestly celibacy or sexual morality or contraception. {Thank God for that!]

A reserved man who was not given to any mediatic gestures that came naturally to John Paul II, Paul VI is generally 'forgotten' by Catholics today. And wrongly so. The penultimate Italian Pope in our time, son of a bourgeois family of Brescia, a great intellectual who was the object of strong criticisms durihg his pontificate (similar in this way to Benedict XVI today), he revealed himself in his full humanity during the bitter days that followed the abduction and eventual murder by Communist terrorists of his longtime good friend Aldo Moro, who was Prime Minister of Italy at the time.

He did not hesitate to write an open letter to the "men of the Red Brigade", begging them, 'on my knees' to "just release him, without conditions". But he was unable to save the Christian Democrat statesman.

On the other hand, there is Albino Luciani, son of the Veneto region, from Canal d'Agordo, born in 1912. He was a 'popular' Pope. In 1972, Paul VI bestowed on him his papal stole on a visit to Venice, of which Luciani was Patriarch. A simple man, a man of the essentials, he wrote letters to famous people or literary characters in the book Illustrississimi, letters which first appeared in the monthly magazine Messaggero di Sant'Antonio/ He had known both Papa Roncalli and Papa Montini before they became Pope.

He was Pope for 33 days, and his sudden death (apparently the result fo a heart condition) left a number of questions that have given rise to conspiracy theories ranging from the incredible to the grotesque. What could he have done if he had lived longer? The hypotheses are equally numerous, and he has always been portrayed as something of a progressivist.

In fact, he Pope of smiles would probably not have been an innovator, as one might glean from the description of him in his home diocese of Belluno-Feltre: "In the theological field, he could be considered conservative, having energetically defended the encyclical Humanae vitae, and he was equally conservative about 'freedom' of conscience. In the disciplinary area, he was a reformer: he found ecclesiastical pomp 'vain', he encouraged his parish priests to sell their precious liturgical vessels and other assets to spend on the poor. In 1971, he even proposed that the richer churches of the West donate one percent of their annual revenues to the churches of the Third World".

The late Giuseppe De Carli (1952-2009) of RAI who contributed to a film on John Paul I, said: "He had projects that one might call revolutionary. And he did not like being in the Apostolic Palace that he called 'a labyrinth of Croesus'. He wanted an itinerant Church, as John Paul II would later carry out... If he had lived longer, he would have given us great surprises".

But at what point are the causes for beatification of these two Popes? In 2009, before Benedict XVBI visited Brescia in November, the postulator for Paul VI's cause, don Antontio Marrazzo, said: "I can say with a good deal of certainty that by 2010, our statement or Positio on the heroic virtues of the Pope will be completed. It will then be submitted to the Congregation for the Causes of Sainthood to be included in the list of causes to be analyzed by theologians and the cardinals and bishops who make up the Congregation. The joint recommendation of these two panels would then be presented to the Pope so he can proclaim the candidate's 'heroic virtues' [This has not yet happened]. Then we must proceed to presenting a miracle that can be attributed to his intercession. And there is a miracle that we have been examining to determine whether the healing produced was, in fact, not explicable by science. This will go through a similar procedure as the Positio, with the addition of a scientific panel, and if the miracle is certified, then the Pope can approve a decree for beatification and set a date for it."

Actually, quite a few miracles are being investigated for Papa Montini, including the healing of cancer patients, babies with severe illness, or work accidents, that have been reported to the church of the Virgin of Graces in Brescia.

As for Papa Luciani, his cause was forwarded to Rome after the conclusion of its diocesan phase in 2006. And the beatification miracle has even been narrowed down to a bank employee from Altamura who was inexplicably healed of stomach cancer when he prayed for the late Pope's intercession.

Brescia already has quite a devotion to its favorite son. As for Papa Luciani, on this centenary year of his birth, Canal d'Agorodo has become the object of many pilgrimages by people who believe his sanctity. Now it is up to the Church to formally recognize what the faithful believe.

It's a most appealing hypothesis - but unless the Congregation for Saints has already been working overtime on the steps towards the beatification of the two Popes, the probability seems remote. Pius XII is at a more advanced stage in the process because he has already been proclaimed Venerable. And a significant probable beatification miracle has been disclosed for him. His beatification - or perhaps, the beatification of all three Popes - would be a great manifestation of the multiple charisms that the Lord sees fit to endow his Vicars on earth with.



From potential saints to profligates and downright disgraces to the Church: I must make up for failing to call attention earlier to a major post-script to the entire Marcial Maciel case written by American journalist Jason Berry, who almost singlehandedly kept the case alive for the Anglophone world in the past decade. Most of you will have read it by now from National Catholic Reporter online
ncronline.org/news/vatican/legion-christ-and-vatican-meltdown which published it on June 21.

To those who have not seen it yet, it's very long, and rather meandering, so I won't re-post it here because, after all, NCRep is good about keeping its online archives intact. If you have not already been disgusted by what you have read till now about Maciel and his criminally servile 'acolytes' - who are still being kept on, almost unpardonably, by papal legate Cardinal De Paolis in their leadership positions at the Legionaries of Christ - you will have more than enough cause to be, learning about their systematic deception to keep Maciel's myth intact even after the CDF had penalized him in 2006.


The unspeakable Fr. Maciel:
Post-mortem post-scripts

Abstracted from an article
by JASON BERRY

June 21, 2012

- Berry's new revelations start out from what Gianluigi Nuzzi publishes in his book regarding notations made by Mons. Georg Gaenswein about a meeting he had with a priest, Fr. Moreno, who had been Maciel's private secretary for 18 years and served also as his valet. Gaenswein's notes say "In 2003, [Moreno] insisted on informing GP II -- but the latter would not stand to listen to him and did not believe him", and that Moreno then "wanted to inform Cardinal [Angelo] Sodano [then Vatican secretary of state] but he did not grant him an audience". Berry notes that "John Paul rebuffed a priest haunted by Maciel's secrets a full year before Ratzinger broke from the Pope to order an investigation".

- Berry describes Maciel's influence in John Paul II's Church almost to the very end: "From 1998, when a group of ex-Legionaries filed a canonical process with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's tribunal, seeking Maciel's ouster for abusing them in seminary, until 2006, when Ratzinger-as-Benedict dismissed him from ministry, Maciel was a gilded force, raising millions of dollars, thanks to the support of John Paul and the video images of the Pope and Maciel that the Legion gave to donors. By 2004 the Legion had a $650 million budget, and fewer than 650 priests".

- There's a side excursion into the case of Fr. Thomas Williams, for a long time the Legion's chief spokesman in the Anglophone world, who admitted recently that he had fathered a child many years ago.

- And how did the Legion leadership react (specifically Corcuera and Garza, the superior-general and chief financial officer, respectively), after Maciel was disciplined by Benedict XVI?

When the 2006 Vatican order banished Maciel to a life of prayer and penitence, the Legion sprang to his defense, announcing that Maciel had never been tried and, like Jesus, chose not to defend himself...

When Maciel died in 2008, the Legion revved up the publicity campaign, announcing that he had gone to heaven. A year later, after Corcuera revealed the news of Maciel's children, Garza spoke to Regnum Christi followers in Monterrey, telling them: 'We had the responsibility to assure that Our Father [Maciel] was in a house in a Legionary community because...the Vatican wanted Maciel handled in a certain way. This took us a good part of October, November, December of 2006; it wasn't until January or February of 2007 that we were in a position of power to start to think about what we were going to do.'...

The Legion never acknowledged in his lifetime that Maciel abused anyone. So strong was his psychological grip on the order that from 2006 through mid-2009, a year and a half after his death, Legion seminarians in Rome were being told that Maciel was falsely accused, a future saint, while in several countries, priests were leaving the order in protest.


- There's a convoluted account of Berry's conjecture on why Benedict XVI did not break up the Legionaries and start afresh, instead of trying to rebuild the order with the same people at the top. He believes that the Vatican has been trying to get hold of the Legion's finances, tightly held by Garza, and that is why Garza has been kept on. I find the conjecture offensive, naturally. But De Paolis really does not have a plausible explanation for keeping on Maciel's two top lieutenants, which is even more offensive.

- Berry ends with an astounding bit of information:

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, a powerful canon lawyer in the CDFG when the 1998 case was active, ended up helping the defendant, Maciel. Bertone left the doctrinal congregation to become archbishop of Genoa, Italy, and while there, in 2003, he wrote a glowing preface to the Italian edition of Christ Is My Life, Maciel's spin-control memoir, a last-ditch effort to keep himself from being punished. "The key to [his] success," Bertone wrote, "is, without doubt, the attractive force of the love of Christ."

Why on earth Bertone would have done that at all is unbelievable - given what he knew of the complaints that had been formally filed with the CDF in 1998! He obviously could not have been in touch with Cardinal Ratzinger who was already preparing to send Mons. Scicluna on his fact-finding and witness-interview mission to the USA and Mexico in 2004. Bertone was, of course, an ardent follower of John Paul II, who made him a bishop and eventually, cardinal and Archbishop of Genoa, so he probably thought that if John Paul II saw no evil in Maciel at all, then he would go with the Pope's judgment. Despite what he knew from the CDF files. 2013 P.S. I'd forgotten all about this tidbit - yet another fact to add to Bertone's already hefty 'bad judgment' dossier.


[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 24/06/2013 10:37]
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