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]