| | | OFFLINE | | Post: 31.470
Post: 13.558 | Registrato il: 28/08/2005
Registrato il: 20/01/2009 | Administratore | Utente Gold | |
|
This makes a great companion piece to Christopher Ferrara's listing of the Bergoglian 'teacher's pets' who have been advancing this pontificate's LGBTism,
except that in Ferrara's list, only Kasper, Schoenborn and perhaps Marx would qualify as 'advisers'/theoreticians for Bergoglio. The rest of his cast of
characters are quintessential follow-the-leader-right-or-wrong minions, who can and often are more Bergoglian than Bergoglio in their
zeal to preach his 'gospel' and put it into immediate practice. They generally do not have any ideas different from their lord and
master - to use Bergoglio's own term, they have been happily and willingly 'colonized ideologically' by Bergoglio.
On the other hand, Spadaro, Fernandez and Figueroa might well be Bergoglio's Three Musketeers [Mouseketeers, perhaps?], though I am not too sure
how much 'intellectual' influence Figueroa has on this pope. Except that Magister seems to have overlooked the man most Vaticanistas claim to be
the true administrative 'grey eminence' to this pope –
Cardinal Beniamino Stella, prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, who has really managed to avoid projecting himself in any way, and is perhaps,
thereby more effective, as he avoids the stones that are usually thrown at the tallest, most visible 'trees' in the forest. He's obviously much older
than any of the Three Musketeers, but being named 'Beniamino', would he be their D'Artagnan? (To illustrate how low-profile he has kept himself, the two
pictures in the panel above, obviously taken on the same occasion, are the only two photos I can find online showing him with the pope, other than when
he was conferred the red hat.)
The 'Three Musketeers' of the Bergoglian court
By Sandro Magister
SETTIMO CIELO
July 30, 2017
The classic communist parties had their “organic intellectuals.” But Pope Francis has them, too. Their names are Antonio Spadaro, Marcelo Figueroa, Víctor Manuel Fernández. [Not having met the term 'organic intellectual' before, I had to look it up, and I see now how and why Magister uses it.
"The concept of "organic intellectual" comes from Antonio Gramsci, the founder of PCI (Partita Communista Italiana). His idea was that the intellectual was at the service of the Party and, once the strategy and actions to be taken were established, the "organic intellectual" was the one in charge of looking for the best arguments to defend those strategies and actions, that is, something very similar to the behavior of politicians or the behavior required from a lawyer by a client. 'Traditional intellectuals' are not supposed to have this kind of commitment.
[As I recall, the Soviet Union referred to its 'house intellectuals' as the intelligentsiya – a Russian neologism from the 19th century that has become universally adopted to describe the social stratum of 'educated people engaged in the complex mental labours that critique, guide, and lead in shaping the culture and politics of their society'.]
The first is an Italian and a Jesuit, editor of La Civiltà Cattolica The others are Argentine, and the latter is not even Catholic but a Presbyterian pastor, but nonetheless, the pope made him editor of the first–ever Argentine edition of L'Osservatore Romano. [Ah yes, the ecumenism of favoritism! Apparently, this pope does not think there is any Argentine Catholic qualified for the job.]
Spadaro has turned Civilta… into the organ of Casa Santa Marta, meaning of the pope. And together with Figueroa, he wrote an article in the latest issue of the magazine that has slammed into the United States like a hurricane [the metaphor I would use would be 'like a North Korean ICBM' because it is just as malicious and misguided, and certainly far from a force of nature!] - it accused both Catholic and Protestant conservatives in the USA of acting “with a logic not different from that which inspires Islamic fundamentalism,” i.e., no better than Osama bin Laden and the ISIS.
All because these Catholics and Protestants have come together to fight as “neo-Crusaders” on “issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, religious education in the schools,” in other words, on “a particular form of defense of religious freedom.” With the result, say Spadaro and Figueroa, of fomenting an “ecumenism of hatred,” out of nostalgia for “a state with theocratic features.” [What nostalgia might there be for something that never was in the experience of Americans???] - ergo, the exact opposite of the ecumenism of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a pope “of inclusion, peace, encounter.”
The trouble is that the defense of life, of the family, of religious freedom have been at the forefront of the American Catholic Church’s agenda for more than a decade – and US Catholics were rightly outraged that “believers are attacked by their co-religionists merely for fighting for what their Churches have always held to be true.”
The highest-level protest came from the archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles Chaput, who rejected the article by Spadaro and Figueroa as “an exercise in dumbing down and inadequate.” But other comments have been much harsher and have had an easy time pointing out a series of colossal historical and logical blunders in the article.
Any other magazine would have tossed out such an article, the Canadian Raymond J. de Souza for example wrote on CRUX, the most important and balanced website of Catholic information in the United States. [Does Magister really believe that? What about National Catholic Register, which is decades older than Crux, and has a stable of veteran Catholic writers that dwarfs the few same-old, same-old contributors Crux depends on to augment what is produced by John Allen and Ines San Martin, who make up Crux's entire writing staff? Moreover, I doubt Crux would host Magister's generally Bergoglio-critical pieces at all. In fact, when was the last time there was a Bergoglio-critical article on Crux???]
But, of course, at Santa Marta, on Francis’s desk, the article was not tossed out at all. On the contrary, it was approved with full marks and made an even bigger splash because it was correctly interpreted by everyone as expressive not only of the pope’s thoughts but also of his management style.
In this case, it seemed to be an attack of unprecedented forcefulness, launched through his musketeers, on the “Ratzingerian” leadership of the Catholic Church in the United States.
[It is not, of course, accurate to describe the leadership of the US Catholic bishops in the USA as 'Ratzingerian'.
- USCCB president Cardinal Di Nardo was made a cardinal by Benedict XVI, true, but I will never forget that single news conference the US cardinals held before the 2013 Conclave when, one after the other, they described what they thought the next pope ought to be, and their statements sounded like a serial indictment of Benedict XVI for all that they thought he was not! (These cardinals included three created by Benedict XVI – Di Nardo, Dolan and O'Malley.)
- The USSCB Vice President is Mons. Jose Gomez of Los Angeles, who, although appointed by Benedict XVI to succeed the infamous Cardinal Mahoney in that Archdiocese, has been unabashedly a more Bergoglian-than-Bergoglio advocate of accepting all immigrants unconditionally.
- The USSCB secretary is Mons. Dennis Schnurr of Cincinnati, about whom the only pertinent fact I can gather from his skimpy entry in Wikipedia is that he organized the World Youth Day celebrations held in Denver in 1998, and was therefore a John Paul II bishop.
- The USCCB treasurer is Mons. Gregory Aymond of New Orleans who comes closest perhaps to being Ratzingerian in that "he is known as a strong proponent of the Catholic Church's position of opposing abortion, artificial birth control, and euthanasia. Aymond also believes that homosexuals should remain celibate." [Sounds like a true rarity these days!]
In fact, after the death of Cardinal George of Chicago, I am hard put to think of any US bishop I could think of as Ratzingerian. Before Bergoglio, I thought Mons. Chaput was, but since March 3, 2013, he hasn't been as dependably 'conservative' as he once was.]
In the doctrinal camp Fr. Spadaro is fairly nonchalant, theorizing that “in theology 2 + 2 can make 5,” and is infallible in prognosticating Bergoglio’s revolutions big and small. But among the counselors and confidants one is even closer to the pope than he is - the Argentine Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández, a theologian whose first and revealing work was, in 1995, a book entitled: “Heal me with your mouth:The art of kissing.”
It comes as no surprise that after this debut and after his other no less questionable literary productions, the Vatican of Benedict XVI first vetoed Fernández’s appointment as rector of the Universidad Católica Argentina, only to have to give in, in 2009, to the then-archbishop of Buenos Aires, who fought tooth and nail to get the nulla osta for the promotion of his protégé
In 2013, just after he was elected pope, Bergoglio quickly made Fernández an archbishop. And since then, this figure has almost spent more time in Rome than in Argentina, kept more than busy by being theological brain and ghostwriter for his friend the pope. Whole paragraphs of chapter eight of “Amoris Laetitia” [the document from Hell!] have been shown to have been lifted verbatim from articles by Fernández of a decade ago.
[Too bad Magister has nothing to add to the little we know about Pastor Figueroa – who had hosted a TV program (series?] in Buenos Aires featuring 'ecumenical' discussions with Cardinal Bergoglio and his friend, Rabbi Abraham Sikorska.][Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/08/2017 01:13] |