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BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

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03/08/2017 03:47
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The title for this piece was 'Metaphysical mischief: the Bergoglio gloss', which does not really describe what the article says, so I took
the liberty of putting a more appropriate title lifted from the text itself.


The thought of Pope Francis:
Blind emotion replaces reason, and
vide Hegel, 'whatever is, is right'

The intellectual backwash of the Enlightenment is
the philosophical basis of his teaching and his moral theology

by JAMES PATRICK

August 2, 2017

Every theology necessarily incorporates a philosophy, for there will always be a natural way of thinking that under-girds the exposition of revelation. Like everyman, popes have philosophies, and although it is not the business of a pope to advocate any philosophy, the philosophy every pope presupposes will influence his representation of the Catholic faith and his government of the Church.

John Paul II is often cited as an exponent of Thomism as interpreted through the lens of the phenomenology of Husserl. Benedict XVI is steeped in the Augustinian tradition, which carries with it certain themes borrowed from Plato, but which in the end was not too different from the Thomism of John Paul II, both teaching that human intellect could grasp transcendent ideas. Like his mentor Saint Augustine, Benedict has spent much effort explaining the relation between faith and reason. Famously, Benedict cited the rejection of reason as the great defect of Islamic thought.

Philosophy is common sense raised to the level of reflection, and nothing in the thought of John Paul II or Benedict challenges reason, rather the opposite, for reason itself is elevated in their teaching of the faith.

But then comes Pope Francis who offers what seems to be yet another gloss on the Catholic faith. The pope does not deny the divinity of Christ or the necessity of the sacraments; his reiteration of Divine Mercy [according to the way he understands it, that is] and exhortation to solidarity in matters political and economic have won broad approval. ['Broad approval'? Really?]

But something that seems alien is at work in his teaching, and that is because he accepts, perhaps deliberately, perhaps unwittingly, the intellectual backwash of the Enlightenment as the philosophical basis of his teaching and particularly of his moral theology. He is at heart a 'romantic' [read 'unrealistic'], and sympathy will always trump thought. [DIM=8pt][Not sympathy - blind emotion, or more specifically, the appeal to blind emotion, WHICH not just trumps thought but replaces it altogether!]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was an eighteenth-century French critic and philosopher whose thought has permeated the West. It was a theme of his philosophy that man although naturally innocent had been corrupted by the intrusion of law and tradition, which, rather than informing and elevating, always restricted and deformed. [If that is the sum of what Rousseau thought, then it was really a secular take-off - and a very poor one at that - of Adam and Eve in Eden, and their corruption by Satan (A Biblical 'myth' which, of course, the 'Enlightenment minds' dismissed as religious drivel.)]

Pope Francis has not been known to advance a doctrine of original innocence, but his persistent theme that the mission of the Church is misrepresented by defenders of the tradition, whom he unfailingly associates with Christ-denying Pharisees, who are soul-damaging rigorists, is an idea that, while it may have other immediate sources, can certainly be traced, by however circuitous a route, to Rousseau.

It is probably unlikely that Francis has read the turgid philosophy of the famous Prussian G. W. F. Hegel who lived a generation after Rousseau, but he is arguably a disciple. Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History were among the most popular philosophical sources of the nineteenth century, and if few had read the book there were many who knew the Hegelian slogan: “Whatever is, is right.” [Probably the derivation for the absurd Bergoglian notion that "Reality is greater than ideas". Maybe he never read Plato.]

For Hegel, history was a process through which reason exhausts itself in events and world-historical persons. The truth of things is not known by the light of intellect or by the application of reason in its transcendent character but by what happens in history. In Evangelii Gaudium, Francis notes that there is always a tension between reality and ideas. But then he writes:

“Reality is greater than ideas. [There we are!] This calls for rejecting the various means of masking reality: angelic forms of purity, dictatorships of relativism, empty rhetoric, objectives more ideal than real, brands of ahistorical fundamentalism, ethical systems bereft of kindness, intellectual discourse bereft of wisdom”(231).


At first sight this list seems unexceptionable, but at the same time one may see in it the shadow of the Hegelian triumph of 'whatever is' over thought. One of its terms is a nod to Benedict’s condemnation of the tyranny of relativism. The reference to angelic purity is puzzling. Does it refer to a dedicated pursuit of holiness or to a destructive scrupulosity? There are commonplaces: the unexceptionable rejection of empty rhetoric and unwise intellectual discourse. [Mmmm, this is typical of the faux erudition that often lards the Bergoglio-Fernandez texts, intended to mask the emptiness, unsoundness, or triviality of the underlying thoughts.]

But then what is “ahistorical fundamentalism”? In this context fundamentalism is a highly charged word. Ahistorical fundamentalism must be a system of rigorist moral precept that does not take into account what actually happens. However, it is the work of moral precepts not to take into account what may be done at any one time or place but instead to lift up, guide, and form.

In his introduction to his translation of Plato’s Dialogues Benjamin Jowett, the fabled president of Balliol College, Oxford, wrote:

“The universal is prior to the particular; the law conditions the event, the ideal regulates the actual. Knowledge consists in the discernment of a general pattern which the particular thing embodies, virtue consists of regulation of impulse according to eternal standards.”

Jowett was writing of Plato, but, broadly. Every Christian philosopher, including the modern popes, would subscribe to Jowett’s summary as the presupposition of thought and morality.

When Saint Thomas asks where truth resides, he answers that it resides in the mind and only secondarily in things. A historical or scientific account may derive truth from what happens in the world by explaining events under a generalization, but reality remains unintelligible without ideas, and in that sense ideas are always more important than reality. [One would have thought this was self-evident. Even the cosmos that God created surely started as an 'idea' in the divine consciousness!]

And also with theological truth and moral precepts. And so also with the exercise of authority.
- The attempt to rule without reference to tradition or any other transcendent rational ground, or even the regulative claims of the past, however benign the results may or may not accidentally be, will result in a government that rests upon unmoderated will, difficult in principle to distinguish from a vernacular Marxism.
- The attempt to derive moral guidance from reality, from how mankind behaves, from the sorry story of our aspirations and failures, will make every teaching of the Church uncertain, as has Amoris Laetitia in the opinion of many.

An editorial writer in the Guardian has said that Francis has changed the Church forever from a rule-bound institution to an instinctive Church. Good luck with your instincts.

The world is full of divorced and civilly remarried Catholics who think it would be good to receive the body and blood of Christ. If their instincts say they are at peace with God, why not? The vast majority of Catholics don’t follow Humanae Vitae anyhow so, as Francis has written, Humanae Vitae must be revisited. The teaching of the Church should be accommodated to what is actually happening. Rigorists, says Francis, do not go with the flow of life. Ah, Hegel.

Sed contra (on the contrary). Historically, it has been the role of the teaching Church, in the name of Christ,
- Never to accommodate itself to the ways of the world, but to ask of mankind the impossible, proposing the heroic and offering unstinting forgiveness for failure.
- It has been unsympathetic to claims that human nature must be treated gently. “In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted unto blood” (Heb. 12:4).
- It has viewed with horror the deliberate defection of one will from obedience to God.

Cardinal Newman wrote:

The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one willful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse."

[Oooohhh, Jorge Bergoglio certainly disavows all that first part of the statement, because his primary concern really is to relieve if not eliminate temporal afflictions, believing man can create utopia (the putative Kingdom of Heaven on earth in the mind of Bergoglians) which Jesus, for all that he was God, did not even hint at, much less try for, while he was on earth! Hence, his abiding faith in the UN's 'Sustainable Development Goals' which aim to end poverty and hunger on earth by 2030! Are these people in their right mind?]]

To this has been appended the fact of the sacrifice of Christ, the aid of the sacraments and the offer of forgiveness. The requirement that we love God most is ideal, and it will be realized in his elect. Without this high calling, mercy is the answer to a question that has not been asked.

A more down-to-earth take on this pope's thought process and thinking in general comes from Mundabor with his now-familiar irreverence - or worse - for the man he calls the Evil Clown....


The inverted papacy

August 1, 2017

No, I do not mean to say that the Pope is a homo himself – though he may well be, and none of my readers would be surprised . Rather, by inverted Papacy I mean a papacy which inverts the logical order of things, and of thinking"

The Church is meant to use earthly events (happy or sad) and the natural phases of this life to remind you of eternal life. From war to pestilence and from birth to death, but also to the sacraments that mark the rhythm of our earthly journey (again: birth, marriage, holy days, adulthood etc.), the Church indefatigably leads us from the earthly to the heavenly, helping us to live and understand every phase of our path in the broader perspective of our eternal destiny.

Not so in this Inverted Papacy, where we continuously note a complete inversion of priorities, and the instrumentalisation of everything that is sacred, with a view to pursuing earthly goals.
- Jesus is constantly depicted as a pacifist, an environmentalist or a social justice warrior ante litteram.
- The heavenly dimension is constantly reduced to the earthly one, and the latter is made a paradigm for the former.
- Not being an environ-mentalist is to betray Jesus, building walls is unchristian, the Blessed Virgin is a poor unemancipated woman, and such like rubbish.

Francis has brought the supernatural down to earth and has dragged it in the mud of his political ideology. He seems to enjoy the exercise very much. This does not surprise us at all when we reflect that the man has no supernatural interests at all, and his enviro-commie-ideology based on social envy and social hatred is his true interest.

If you made an atheist bouncer with a propension for Communism,the Pope, what you would have is a man pretty much thinking like Francis. If the man were also stupid, you would have one talking like him, too.

[Except, of course, that Jorge Bergoglio is not stupid at all. In fact, for his purposes, he is very clever and cunning, and as a narcissist, he has to be. Narcissists by definition care only about themselves: they always think they are 'great', better than anybody else (as Bergoglio thinks he can do better than Jesus himself about what a church ought to be, or even about the things Jesus said which Bergoglio finds inconvenient as 'Go and sin no more').

So fundamentally, narcissists really do not care about others – except insofar as they can use them.
- And so he canonizes John Paul II – and then reverses him on Familiaris consortio and ignores Veritatis splendor altogether, as he has been ignoring DOMINUS IESUS.
- He beatifies Paul VI and pays lip service to Humanae Vitae, all the while plotting to subvert it somehow.
- He seems to make nice with Benedict XVI, who has become, in effect, his prisoner in the Vatican, but only to make it appear that the latter is fully and solidly in agreement with him on everything, while he merrily disregards de facto, if not yet de jure, anything Benedict said or did as pope.


And as Mundabor points out in a post last week, he even instrumentalizes Padre Pio – do not forget he had the saint's coffin brought to St. Peter's Square to mark the start of his Year of Mercy, hoping thereby to attract crowds that would not have come simply to walk through his Holy Door!



Abusing Saint Padre Pio

July 29, 2017

God knows the Evil Clown grates me in a number of ways. But when he grates me most is when he tries to abuse of great Saints of the past, and tries to enlist them as soldiers in his army.

Today it was, sad as it is to say it, Padre Pio's turn. Even sadder, it was not the first time.

Let me go on record and say that if Jorge Bergoglio had been a civilian in the time of Padre Pio, the great Saint would have slapped him in the face without any hesitation for countless of the impious, heretical, or outright blasphemous statements this man keeps spouting around as if he were a new oracle instead of a South-American wannabe Caudillo with more power than sense and more arrogance than both.

This pope is now eighty. After slapping him very hard in the face if he were alive today, Padre Pio would have reminded Jorge Bergoglio that he hasn't much time left to see the error of his ways.

Sadly, some people can ditch the priestly habit for the papal one. But in the end they still remain bouncers.

I understand why Mundabor uses the epithet Evil Clown for JMB, but somehow, I find it not quite right - I suppose because what it evokes for me is some creepy figure from a Stephen King novel. At least it is better than that stupid term 'the Francis', which both Anglophone Catholic news aggregators use, without thinking at all that it hardly sounds pejorative if that is what they mean by it. On the contrary, it sounds like they are singling him out as 'the quintessential Francis', sui generis, [the way 'The Donald' became after Ivana Trump's inadvertent coinage of it because, being Czech and learning English, she used to put 'the' in front of proper names, once going around looking for 'The Dick', one of her then-husband's vice presidents]. Well yes, certainly not to be confused or conflated with the two great Francises in Church history (Francis of Assisi and Francis Xavier), rather than someone who really does dishonor to the name.

For good measure, let me add another recent Mundabor post that was very much on the mark, I thought:

Let us not forget the healthy fear of God
that underlies the genuine 'joy of Gospel'


July 27, 2017

I don't know about you, but I am tired of hearing the garden variety V-II priest talk of the “joy of the Gospel”, and invite his parishioners to “spread” said “joy”. It seems to me that the message is fundamentally off, and that it gives an extremely distorted view of Catholicism.

Yes, the concept has been around for 2,000 years now. But that joy was solidly grounded in the fear of the Lord and the ever present danger of damnation.

What happens now is that salvation is more or less taken for granted - no one of the pewsitters wanting to be so unkind as to think that his sign-of-peace-giving pew neighbour, or even his pot-smoking deviant nephew, could actually go to hell. How can anyone so rude and uncharitable to even entertain that possibility?

When hell is out of the equation, the “joy” is completely derailed, deformed, even betrayed. It becomes a sort of announcement that it is party time, without any mention of the conditions for admission and, in fact, without any real party in sight. This is also why it does not work.

- An agnostic being told to rejoice because of the Good News will simply answer to you that his daily routine is just as boring today as it was yesterday.
- A youth thinking of his pleasure and advantage will ask you whether this good news comes with, at the very least, music and beer.
- A single mother living in sin with lover number seventeen will think that the good news means she does not need to change anything in her life.
- A heathen believing in strange gods will think of you as his insurance just in case his own religion should fail him when he – as he still plans to do – dies in it. Etc…
- All of them will have no interest in something that is at the same time useless and already given to them for free.

This is not how our forefathers saw the entire matter. Their belief was grounded in a very solid fear of a very concrete danger of damnation. And the possibility and reasonable hope to, by fighting the battle to the end, reach one day an eternal state of unimaginable happiness was, and is cause of much joy. But it is joy grounded in a solid knowledge of the basis for it.

The V-II “joy” talk has nothing of it. It is, in the end, inane talking, because it refuses to be rooted in truth.

When I speak to heathens or atheists about Christianity I do not even mention the “joy of the Gospel”. I actually start with the very actual, very real threat of hell that the Gospel represents for him. You do it in the right way – playful, but serious; we aren't Protestants bashing bibles, but we aren't V-II wussies, either – and you will see how it sits.

Get that sting in the brain. It will not go away so soon, as the message has far more serious consequences for the recipient than a “joy” pretty much free for the asking, or without even the asking. It might bear great fruit one day.

You will, of course, be more or less friendly mocked, or worse. But this is a small price to pay for a chance of conversion, perhaps – and with God's grace – many years down the line.

The 'joy of the gospel' [which is limited to lip service] is soon forgotten. The Threat of the Gospel works a lot better.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 04/08/2017 15:50]
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