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TERESA BENEDETTA
00venerdì 6 gennaio 2017 20:11



Baldisseri's doubletalk
[Or, the latest untruthful apologia-pro-AL
from a leading Bergoglian henchman/courtisan]
by Christopher A. Ferrara

January 5, 2017


Icon of the phony Synods.

Remember him? Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, General Secretary of the Phony Synod, who, in the process of stage-managing that fraud upon the Church, was exposed for literally stealing copies of the Five Cardinals Book in which Cardinal Burke and four other cardinals defended the Church's traditional teaching on the impossibility of admitting public adulterers in "second marriages" to Holy Communion.

It was Baldisseri who ordered the book removed from the mailboxes of Synod fathers at the same time he and the rest of his cabal were manipulating the Synod to undermine the very teaching the Five Cardinals were defending.

The cabal having accomplished the aim of its conspiracy with the publication of Amoris Laetitia, for which the Phony Synod was mere window dressing, Baldisseri now openly declares victory for the subversives under the rubric of that utter novelty known as "discernment," introduced in Chapter 8 of Amoris.

"Discernment," so we are now told, means that negative exceptionless precepts of the natural law regarding sexual morality (including "thou shall not commit adultery") can admit of pastoral "exceptions" to be "discerned" in "certain cases.", to wit:
"Amoris Laetitia… uses the word discernment above all in Chapter 8, connecting it to two other words in the title: accompany and integrate… In fact, when love no longer corresponds to the form of sacramental marriage, the Church takes care of these wounded people, that they might rediscover the way of the Gospel…"

Notice how those involved in objectively immoral unions are depicted as "wounded people," as if to suggest that they are the innocent victims of some sort of horrible accident rather than their own deliberate choices, and that we must provide a kind of First Aid to these "wounded people" by "discerning" their situations, meaning — as if anyone didn't know it by now — allowing them to receive sacrilegious Holy Communion without an amendment of life.

The account of Baldisseri's remarks continues with the deception that animated the entire "synodal journey": i.e., that no change of moral doctrine and related practice is involved in this subversive enterprise. According to the Italian blog Sinodo 2015:

"This does not mean, the cardinal specified, that 'the regulations and doctrine of the Church' undergo variations that do not take account of 'traditional moral reflections'… [but] taking account of the 'general norm' [!], 'particular situations must be considered in their specificity'… In certain cases it is foreseen that this also includes access to the sacraments for so-called wounded couples, in particular in the case of the divorced and remarried."

This is classic Modernist doubletalk: the teaching has not changed but now we apply it differently to different people — a radical change!

The very idea that the Church's moral doctrine and related discipline are mere "general norms" that can vary in application according to "particular situations" destroys in practice both the doctrine and the discipline, as both are rooted in divine precepts of the natural law to which there are no exceptions.

It can never, under any circumstances, be permissible to engage in the intrinsically evil act of sexual relations outside of marriage. Therefore, it can never under any circumstances be permissible to receive Holy Communion while habitually engaging in such relations, as in the case of divorced and "remarried" persons.

Accordingly, as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared unequivocally during the reign of John Paul II:
"If the prior marriage of two divorced and remarried members of the faithful was valid, under no circumstances can their new union be considered lawful and therefore reception of the sacraments is intrinsically impossible. The conscience of the individual is bound to this norm without exception."

Baldisseri has to know that he is engaged in deliberate deception, for he is certainly aware that the Church has never taught — indeed cannot teach — that the precept "thou shalt not commit adultery" is variable according to circumstances.

He has to know that he is attempting to defraud the faithful by suggesting that the Church can accept situation ethics, which would reduce her entire moral edifice to rubble in practice and terminate her very mission, if that were possible, by reducing her to yet another religious organization that has died the death of the sexual Zeitgeist.

Baldisseri is, quite simply, an ecclesiastical conman who is a major player in a long-running sting operation whose aim is to strip the Church of the Truth that is her wealth and her irreplaceable patrimony.

My tone here is harsh, even brutal, but this is no time for undue deference to prelates of the sort that Our Lord Himself warned us would attack His Church: "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves." (Matt 7:15)

Or perhaps Our Lord's prophecy does not apply precisely to the likes of Baldisseri. For there is nothing inward about his malign intentions; they are written all over his face.
TERESA BENEDETTA
00venerdì 6 gennaio 2017 20:46
On 1Peter5, Maike Hickson interprets the Tablet story on Cardinal Parolin's shockingly shameless [for a reputed 'top international diplomat'] demands on the Knights of Malta in the name of his lord and master, to mean that Pope Francis is thereby defending the dismissed KM Grand Chancellor for his distribution of condoms in Myanmar when he was the Grand Hospitallier of the Knights of Malta. And then cites Michael Dougherty's account of the sex-abuser priest laicized under Benedict XVI and 'restored' to the priesthood two years later by Pope Francis through the intercession of some friends with 'pull' at the Bergoglian court.

Which, BTW, reveals another common thread running through the two cases. The KM ex-official defended by Parolin (and through him, the pope) also was able to mobilize the pope's support because he is said to be close to Parolin and others in the Bergoglian magic enneagram circle, not to mention that a brother is on the IOR board of directors. More and more, the papal court at Casa Santa Marta is looking like a Latin American caudillo's smoke-filled backroom where questionable deals for the privileged are the coin of the realm.

Pope defends dismissed Grand Chancellor -
and other court tales from Casa Santa Marta
by Maike Hickson

January 6, 2017

After Hickson quotes amply from the two sources cited above, she continues:

...So here we have a confirmation, and in two cases – one a promoter of contraception (and more), the other a child abuser – where Pope Francis rejects a sterner chastening and punishment of the gravely responsible persons.

However, in the recent case of the Congregation for Doctrine, Pope Francis has shown his unexplained (and likely irreversible) austerity: he has ordered the prompt removal of three well-trained and well-respected priests from their dicastery offices.

Moreover, the German Catholic newspaper, Die Tagespost, has confirmed, on 4 January, the earlier story reported by Marco Tosatti about the three priests who were dismissed from the CDF [on orders of the pope, who reportedly told Cardinal Mueller who asked why his priests were being dismissed: "I am the pope - I do not have to give my reasons"]. This confirmation came from their own sources in Rome:
As we learned from [our sources in] the Vatican, the report of the Italian Vaticanista, Marco Tossati, at the end of December [2016], according to which Pope Francis enforced the dismissal of three employees of the CDF, corresponds with the facts.

Furthermore, in the context of the pope’s own recent conduct, Die Tagespost referred the pope's “rather authoritarian style of leadership” and then hints that other signs also show that “the nervousness in the inner circle of Francis and in himself is growing.”

Nevertheless, does it not astonish us that the German Bishops’ Conference’s website immediately rebuked Die Tagespost for its alleged attempt “to silence” the “reformer pope”? That indignantly huffy article, published on the official website of the German Bishops, katholisch.de, even closes with these rather meaningful, if not celebratory, words:
The pope is having more and more difficulties. Inasmuch as only a few stand as clearly at his side – in his earnest grappling for an open and merciful Church – as Cardinal Reinhard Marx himself, the President of the German Bishops’ Conference.

TERESA BENEDETTA
00venerdì 6 gennaio 2017 22:57


I was surprised to see this article highlighted in one of the Catholic news aggregators today even if there is no immediate newspeg for it. The Acton site informs us that "This article first appeared at Catholic World Report. It was selected as one of the most popular articles to appear on the website in 2016"...

The newspeg, of course, is that it is a new year, and it has been 10 years and three months since it was delivered, yet the Regensburg address and its multiple layers of thought continue to be relevant in our daily life, and its realism on Islam an enduring fact that the powers-that-be in the West - and the current pope - continue to deny, even as jihadism continues to claim more victims through a seemingly infinite variety of ways to inflict death and terror in order to assert Islamist supremacy.

Regensburg revisited:
A West still in denial
by Samuel Gregg

January 4, 2017

A decade ago, a 79 year-old soft-spoken, white-haired German theologian returned to visit a university at which he had spent much of his academic career. On such occasions, it’s not unusual for a distinguished professor-emeritus to offer some formal remarks. Such reflections rarely receive much attention, and are often seen as exercises in reminiscing by scholars whose most substantial achievements are behind them.

In this instance, however, the speech delivered at the University of Regensburg on 12 September 2006 by the theologian Joseph Ratzinger, better known as Pope Benedict XVI, had immediate global impact. For weeks, even months afterwards, newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, and even entire books attacked, defended, and analyzed the almost 4,000 words which came to be known as the Regensburg Address.

Copies of the text and effigies of its author, however, were also ripped up, trampled on, and publicly burnt throughout the Islamic world. Television screens were dominated by images of enraged Muslim mobs and passionate denunciations by Muslim leaders, most of whom had clearly not read the text.

Also noticeable, however, was the frosty reception accorded to Pope Benedict’s remarks in much of the West. Descriptions such as “provocative,” “ill-timed,” “insensitive,” “un-feeling,” and “undiplomatic” appeared in religious and secular media outlets.

Certainly the Pope had plenty of vocal defenders in North America and Europe. Among other things, they suggested that some Muslims’ frenzied reaction to the Regensburg Address proved that Benedict’s gentle query about the place of reason in Islamic belief and practice was dead on-target.

Yet there’s no doubt that Benedict’s words at Regensburg touched a nerve — perhaps even several nerves — in the Western world. For while the Regensburg Address received so much attention because of nine paragraphs in which Benedict analyzed a fourteenth-century exchange between a Byzantine Emperor and his Persian Muslim interlocutor, the text’s primary focus concerned deep problems of faith and reason that characterize the West and Christianity today. And many of these pathologies quickly surface whenever and wherever Islamist terrorism rears its head.

They continue to enfeeble the West’s response to people whose acts in locations ranging from Brussels to Paris, Beirut to Jakarta, Jerusalem to San Bernardino, Abuja to London, and Lahore to New York reflect many things, including a particular understanding of the nature of the Divine.

One of the basic theses presented by Benedict at Regensburg was that how we understand God’s nature has implications for whether we can judge particular human choices and actions to be unreasonable. Thus, if reason is simply not part of Islam’s conception of the Divinity’s nature, then Allah can command his followers to make unreasonable choices, and all his followers can do is submit to a Divine Will that operates beyond the categories of reason.

Most commentators on the Regensburg Address did not, however, observe that the Pope declined to proceed to engage in a detailed analysis of why and how such a conception of God may have affected Islamic theology and Islamic practice. Nor did he explore the mindset of those Muslims who invoke Allah to justify jihadist violence.

Instead, Benedict immediately pivoted to discussing the place of reason in Christianity and Western culture more generally. In fact, in the speech’s very last paragraph, Benedict called upon his audience “to rediscover” the “great logos”: “this breadth of reason” which, he maintained, orthodox Christianity has always regarded as a prominent feature of God’s nature.

The pope’s use of the word “rediscover” indicated that something had been lost and that much of the West and the Christian world had themselves fallen into the grip of other forms of un-reason. Irrationality can, after all, manifest itself in expressions other than mindless violence.

That irrationality is loose and ravaging much of the West — especially in those institutions which are supposed to be temples of reason, i.e., universities — is hard to deny.

Take, for instance, those presently trying to turn Western educational institutions into one gigantic “safe space.” In this cocoon, those who maintain, for instance, that gender theory fails basic tests of logic, or that the welfare state has negative cultural effects, or that not all forms of inequality are in fact unjust (to name just some propositions which many today consider offensive), are regularly designated as “haters” or some word to which the suffix “phobe” is attached.

One especially relevant example of this refusal to reason was underscored by Darío Fernández-Morera in his recent book The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise (ISI, 2016). This text squarely challenges, if not demolishes, the common claim that Islamic Spain was an oasis of tolerance and pluralism in an otherwise bigoted world.

Drawing on primary sources as well as recent archaeological discoveries, Fernández-Morera shows that religious, political and cultural repression of Jews and Christians by Muslim authorities was the norm for Islamic Spain’s entire history: “the plain fact,” he states, “is that Islamic law imposed humiliating conditions on Christian dhimmis to ensure that absolute power remained in the proper hands.”

In a way, however, this is not the principal point of Fernández-Morera’s book. His broader argument is that dispassionate study of the truth about Muslim-ruled Spain has been obscured for decades by its subordination to ideological agendas associated with causes such as multiculturalism as well as a determination to cast medieval Christianity in a negative light.

Occasionally some scholars challenge the politically-correct narrative on this and similar subjects on the basis of logic and evidence. But those who do, such as the French medievalist Sylvain Gouguenheim (whose 2008 book Aristote au mont Saint-Michel: Les racines grecques de l'Europe chrétienne (Aristotle at Mont St Michel: The Greek roots of Christian Europe) demonstrated that Islam was not the source for the West’s “rediscovery” of Greek minds such as Aristotle).

The problem is that maintenance of myths about such subjects by intellectuals and their perpetuation by political leaders serve the interests of no one — least of all Muslims. Societies built on misrepresentations or denial of truth are storing up long-term trouble for themselves. [How much more cutting that truism is for the Church founded by Christ who said he was 'the way, the truth and the life'! And yet we are now four years into a habitual 'misrepresentation or denial of truth' by the Supreme Pontiff himself, supposed Vicar of Christ on earth.]
Western Europeans are presently discovering this as they wonder why some adherents of what they have been told over and over again is a religion of peace continue to engage in deeply un-peaceful acts in the name of that religion, while substantial percentages of believers in the same faith hate Jews and hold that sharia law should trump the laws of the European societies in which they have dwelt for decades.

But above all, clinging to falsehoods does not serve the cause of truth: that which should be at the core of the mission of any university worthy of the name.

This was one reason why Benedict’s Regensburg remarks underscored the centrality of Logos for the university and the public square more generally. Logos, for the Greeks, was not only a word for Divine Reason. It also meant to reason and explain one’s thoughts. The dismissal of Logos thus implies a choice to (1) decline to think critically, (2) refuse to debate and (3) shut off the capacity to give an account of what one believes in intelligible terms. [All those criteria appear to be met by the prevailing attitude in the church of Bergoglio. NB: Neither he nor any of his myrmidons is really 'debating' the issues because they adamantly refuse to answer the fundamental DUBIA posed directly to the pope over what he presumably teaches in AL Chapter 8, but simply resort to ad-hominem attacks on anyone who would question this most infamous document in the contemporary history of the Church, or else, re-formulate the tortuous casuistries of that chapter in even more tortuous ways.]

Once such a choice has been made, three options remain.
- One is that which has been chosen by Islamic jihadists — violence replaces reason, and reason is subordinated to a Divine Will that itself has no interest in reasonableness.
- The second is mass sentimentalism and appeals to emotivism to terminate perfectly legitimate debates. [The Bergoglian approach par excellence.]
- The third is to reduce reason to its empirical dimension.

Empirical and scientific reason have their place, Benedict affirmed at Regensburg. They have been the source of much genuine progress and technological developments for which, he said, “we are all grateful.”

The downside is that empirical reason is ill-equipped to address, for instance, issues of good and evil or discern the proper ends of human choice and action. To the extent that they try to do so, such modes of reasoning cannot help but lurch in the direction of utilitarianism: that which tries to determine good and evil by seeking to measure that which cannot be quantitatively measured.

These are just some examples of how, as Benedict stated at Regensburg, “The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality and can only suffer great harm thereby.”

The only way out of this cul-de-sac is to acknowledge that reason has greater breadth and depth which includes but also goes beyond the natural and social sciences. This, however, raises the question from where such reason comes. At that point, many Western minds turn away and decline to consider this matter.

Why? Because it points straight to the question of God — an entity that much of the West has for some time been trying to do without, or reduce to the status of a soft-toy, which amounts to much the same thing.

That God question was at the forefront of the Regensburg Address. Benedict’s focus, however, was less on Islam’s view of God’s nature than with the ways in which Christianity’s treatments of the place of reason has developed — and occasionally deteriorated — at different points of history. For the West this matters, because Christianity is at the heart of Western culture: the same culture that, from the time of the Greeks, has claimed to take reason seriously.

Critics of Judaism and Christianity are apt to argue that the God of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures seems almost as arbitrary as what many believe the God of the Koran to be. But if this was the case, why would a fourteenth-century Christian emperor of Byzantium hold, as cited by Benedict at Regensburg, that “not acting according to reason is contrary to God’s nature”?

According to Benedict, part of the answer is that the God of the Bible is also Divine Reason. To act in defiance of the Truth who is the revealed God is thus to act against reason. That is why the first verse of the Gospel of Saint John matters so much.

When its author penned the words “In the beginning was the Logos,” part of the point was to ground Logos in the God who manifests himself in the Book of Genesis, who identifies himself to Moses as “I AM” (and thus as a real being rather than a myth or an idol created by human hands), and who Christianity teaches is definitively revealed in Christ. For, Benedict noted, “Logos means both reason and word — a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason.”

Clearly there is something Greek about all this. But to Benedict’s mind, “The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance.” Christian faith needed philosophy. It needed the tools of rational inquiry inscribed into man’s very reason: the same reason which itself is derived from the same God revealed in the Scriptures.

Yet for all Christianity’s attention to reason, Christians have not always managed the relationship between faith and reason, Revelation and philosophy, very well. The Protestant Reformation was partly a reaction against the hyper-scholasticism that — as no less than Catholic saints like Thomas More lamented at the time — characterized much Catholic thinking in the late-fifteenth century and which seemed to marginalize Scripture.

This very real problem led, Benedict commented, many Reformers to believe that “they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy.”

At Regensburg, however, Benedict sought to draw our attention to the flip-side of this problem: the waves of what he called “dehellenization” which have surged through Christianity and the West at different points. By dehellenization, Benedict meant any fading of the commitment to coherent philosophical reasoning which Christianity partly absorbed from the Greek world and used to further apprehend the truth which permeates the Scriptures.

Whenever such distancing from reason has occurred, some Christians have embraced a type of submission to God that avoids or even discourages exploration of the “whys” of such obedience.

On the other end of the spectrum, Benedict argued, many theologians from the nineteenth century onwards increasingly fell (like much of the academy) into the trap of equating reason with empirical methods of inquiry. They thus gradually ceased to think about Christ and Revelation from any standpoint other than that which could be verified by scientific research methods.

Hence, in the words of James V. Schall SJ, “In eliminating philosophy from Scripture, we ended up by eliminating the divinity of Christ.” And that, for all intents and purposes, nullifies the essence of Christianity.

In this light, we see that the marginalization of Logos leads straight to
- the disappearance of natural theology,
- attempts to replace natural law with consequentialist ethics,
- a habit of excessive deference to disciplines such as sociology or psychology, and
- the insistence that people’s experiences trumps the conclusions of sound moral reasoning when we assess the goodness or otherwise of our choices. [All of which are hallmarks of the Bergoglian mindset that produced the anti-Catholic relativistic disaster called AL. Forget all the orthodox pablum served in dollops outside Chapter 8 in an attempt to mask its poison - for that is just what all that lip service was: safety ballast and camouflage that fooled no one, except those who, thinking to be objective, argued that the bulk of the longest papal document extant simply restated traditional Catholic teaching. In which nonetheless Bergoglio and his ghosts slip up by recommending that sex education of the young should be left to schools and other institutions, completely omitting to mention parents at all. I'm sure combing through that turgid and tedious document will uncover other such snuck-in heterodoxies).]

These developments have left much of Christianity spectacularly ill-equipped to even begin grappling with Islamic jihadism, let alone making meaningful contributions to combatting this phenomena.

One does not need to look hard within the Christian world — including the Catholic Church — to find those who endlessly repeat the “religion of peace” mantra, or who equate reasoned, carefully-worded, and historically-informed critique of various Muslim tenets and customs with “Islamophobia”.

To this degree, they echo the same banalities of those Western political leaders who, immediately after an attack by Islamic terrorists, immediately assert that it has nothing to do with Islam. Unfortunately for them — and the rest of us — those Muslims who immolate themselves while carrying out suicide-bombings clearly believe their actions do owe much to their religious faith.

Dehellenization’s effects, however, go beyond Christianity. Reason’s reduction to the empirical helps explain why, for example, much contemporary economics has degenerated into a sub-branch of applied mathematics that often obscures the powerful insights of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.

Empiricism also helps account for sociologists trying to measure happiness without being willing or able to define what happiness actually is. Again, it’s not the technique that is at fault. The mistake is viewing empirical reason as the only valid form of reasoning: a position that, ironically enough, cannot be proved empirically.

Then there is the fact that empirical reason has nothing to say about the theological dimension of something like Islamist jihadism, since it is incapable of entering into a serious discussion about God’s nature — something that is, by definition, beyond quantification or measurement.

It was against this backdrop that Benedict’s Regensburg Address reiterated the Catholic Church’s continuing commitment to reason in all its fullness and the need for Christians and the West more generally to re-engage reason in all its dimensions.

Of course Christianity is not a philosophy. It is ultimately about God and who He is: a subject about which reason can by itself comprehend a great deal but which is only fully made known through Revelation. Yet without reason, the truth about that reality can easily become obscure.

In that regard, the danger for Christianity at present is surely less one of fundamentalism but rather of sentimentalism: that which characterizes far too many contributions to public discourse in the West today — including those made by more than a few Christians — and which lies helpless and befuddled in the face of Islamist terrorism.

This is the stupor from which a gentle man, who has always tempered intellectual rigor and moral courage with genuine humility, tried to awaken Christians and the West at Regensburg. Ten years later, it seems, many remain fast asleep.


Well, what do you know? Apropos the discussion above on reason and irrationality, Fr. Spadaro, Bergoglio's in-house alter ego [his alter ego #1 is currently domiciled in Argentina], has just tweeted what one might call an 'objective correlative' to the Bergoglio nonsense we are being asked to take in, as revolting as it may be...

Spadaro’s irrational faith
By Phil Lawler

Jan 06, 2017

Father Antonio Spadaro, the Italian Jesuit who has been identified as “the Pope’s mouthpiece,” frequently uses his Twitter account(s) to belittle all those who have questions about Amoris Laetitia. But this gem from yesterday might have a boomerang effect:
Theology is no #Mathematics. 2 + 2 in #Theology can make 5. Because it has to do with #God and real #life of #people…
This is wrong, and wrong in revealing ways.

Is Spadaro suggesting that when we speak about “real life,” the rules of scientific logic don’t apply? Imagine how you would feel if someone said: “You can talk all you want about the law of gravity, but in real life, …” You wouldn’t know exactly what was coming next, but you would already know it was nonsense. The law of gravity is a law of real life, which applies to real people.

So too with mathematical logic. 2 + 2 = 4. Always. If you reach another result, you have made an error. Maybe you have defined the terms oddly, so that “2” doesn’t mean what it ordinarily means. Or maybe you don’t understand addition. In any case, unless you’re being deliberately misleading, you’re wrong.

So how is it possible that “2 + 2 in #Theology can make 5”? Spadaro tells us that theology “has to do with God.” Does he mean, then, that God can and will violate the laws of logic? If so, he has plunged headlong into the error that Pope Benedict XVI critiqued in his famous Regensburg address: the notion that faith cannot be subject to rational analysis.

Pope Benedict saw this error as a weakness of Islamic thought; he probably never anticipated that the problem would crop up in the editorial offices of La Civilta Cattolica [now a virtual annex of the papal wing in Casa Santa Marta].

Father Spadaro has an interest in promoting this sort of irrationalism. If you can suspend the ordinary rule of logic by making vague references to “real life” and “people,” then you can sew up the debate on Amoris Laetita very neatly. Every case is different — so the argument goes — and therefore the laws don’t apply. By that logic, since every stone you toss up in the air is a different case, you can never be sure whether or not the stone will come down. But trust me; it will.

If Spadaro is not promoting an irrational faith, there’s another way to interpret his curious Tweet, and it’s no more reassuring. He may be suggesting that you and I and millions of other ordinary Catholics cannot be expected to follow the intricate logic of theologians — in the same way that we are flummoxed by the abstruse calculations of quantum mechanics — so we should leave this important business to the professionals.

In other words, our role is to accept what we’re told. We’re not expected to understand; we’re only expected to fall in line. His approach to faith is not based on reason. It may, however, be based on power.
TERESA BENEDETTA
00sabato 7 gennaio 2017 00:07


Sandro Magister ended 2016 by announcing the shutdown of his site www.chiesa which had principally reprinted his weekly columns on the Church for L'Espresso. So he is now doing what he has to do on his blog Settimo Cielo, which for now, has started posting translations in English and Spanish, as well, but he may have a space or word-number limitation because the posts he has had so far under the new arrangement have been 'blog-length'.

He has a later post about this pope's China diplomacy, but I choose to start with this one which is a development that Riccardo Cascioli in La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana has also commented on. The development indicates a growing trend in this already undisciplined pontificate with its agents running wild - as Fr. Spadaro is - and with this Syria report, the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, is going increasingly far out... Did we say irrationality?


Pope's newspaper says climate change
triggered the Syrian civil war!

January 4, 2017

You have to read it to believe it. Here is the opening of today’s editorial on the front page of L'Osservatore Romano:
“We know that Aleppo cannot be freed with bombs. Aleppo and Syria still need to be set free from misery, from the climate change that a few years ago drove men and women to migrate from the rural areas, that destabilized the demographic equilibrium and triggered the first Syrian revolts and then the war.”

The author of this mind-boggling analysis of the Syrian crisis is Carlo Triarico. But the readers of the pope’s newspaper are not told that he is president of the Association for Biodynamic Agriculture, which promotes the farming method invented a century ago by the Austrian esotericist Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), based on a ritual of homeopathic fertilization, using cow horns and deer bladders and the like, in order to channel spiritual, cosmic, and astral forces into the planet, reinvigorating it.

A method that last November, in an open letter to the Italian minister of agriculture, almost all the scientific organizations working in the agricultural field dismissed as “magic,” after a conference in Naples organized by none other than the association that Triarico heads.

But on the occasion of that conference, OR had given space not to the criticisms of the scientists, but to Triarico’s commendation of himself, in a November 28 article, in which he proudly claimed that he had also organized, that previous February, a conference on "Laudato Si’,” the environmentalist encyclical of Pope Francis.

Also in that article, Triarico wrote exultantly that the conference in Naples had been attended by hundreds of militants from those “popular movements” that the pope had received on November 5 at the Vatican and which are his pride and joy, in confirmation of which “there is growing in the world a great movement of innovation for the common home”, Triarico claims.

But that wasn’t enough. Also on the occasion of the merger between [multinational chemical and drug empires] Bayer and Monsanto last year, it was to Triarico that the OR turned for an apocalyptic reprimand, in an article for the Sunday edition of September 18.

Turning back to today’s edition, the follow-up to that incredible opening paragraph is a whole hymn to the miraculous virtues of biodynamic agriculture in “ending hunger, creating the conditions for rural resiliency against climate change” and therefore, in a ripple effect, against migrations and wars, not only in Syria but also in other countries that have already been reached - the editorial says - by this method of cultivation: “Jordan, Iran, Egypt, Algeria, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Yemen.”

In a few days, on January 9, Pope Francis will give the new year’s address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, in which he will illustrate his geopolitical vision and the ways for seeking peace.

From now until then, it is to be hoped that no ambassador may get the notion that the Church’s recipe for peace in the world is today’s editorial in the pope’s newspaper.

Even Riccardo Cascioli, on La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, was not going to let the OR's climate-change indulgence pass unnoticed.


Vatican newspaper blames climate change
for triggering the war in Syria
by Riccardo Cascioli
Translated from

January 5, 2017

The idiocy of claiming that the war in Syria was provoked by climate change is not new, but to see it affirmed nonchalantly - as though it was a universally accepted fact - by L'Osservatore Romano leaves one in sheer consternation.

The ecologist drift of the Holy See's official newspaper has been evident for some time, but till now, one had thought that it would not drift to idiocy. Not anymore. Because this is not just about idiocy. But let's take things in order...

Page 1 of its January 4 edition features the article "Seeds for Aleppo", subtitled "Choosing an agriculture of peace", written by Carlo Triarico, which has this fulminant start:
“We know that Aleppo cannot be freed with bombs. Aleppo and Syria still need to be set free from misery, from the climate change that a few years ago drove men and women to migrate from the rural areas, that destabilized the demographic equilibrium and triggered the first Syrian revolts and then the war.”
At first glance, one might think it was just an unfortunate 'episode', an article by an occasional contributor which was not properly vetted by the editors. But the facts say otherwise, not just because this was a Page 1 article above the fold, and ought to have been reviewed carefully, but because the byline leaves no room for doubt.

Triarico is president of the Association for Biodynamic Agriculture, a method of cultivation combining some biological principles with 'magic' practices, and which had arisen from the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner. [This thought postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world that is accessible by direct experience through inner development. Clearly, this spiritual world ism more properly, a 'spirit world' that has nothing to do with God but with all those figments of the imagination reachable only through mediums and initiates.]

Although this belief system was condemned by the Church in 1918, and 'biodynamic agriculture' itself condemned by the scientific world, Triarico in recent years has become the OR's point of reference for all things agricultural (as Sandro Magister has noted).

As to the merits of Triarico's claims about how the Syrian war began, it is interesting to trace the origin of this idiocy. It was the American Secretary of State John Kerry who first proposed it to public opinion a year and a half ago on a visit to Alaska, which was then taken up by England's Prince Charles. [Kerry and Charles are, of course, prominent representatives, of the lunatic faction that has tended to blame very single major problem on earth to climate change.]

They claim that a drought of 3-4 years in Syria had forced a million and a half Syrian peasants to migrate to the cities, leading to revolts that eventually turned into a civil war. But whoever remembers how the war in Syria began knows very well how false that hypothesis is.

The real root of this hypothesis was in a research paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the USA, signed by Colin Kelley and others, entitled "Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent and the implications of the recent Syrian Drought", which concluded that drought in 2007-2010 contributed to the conflict in Syria, and that the drought was a result of manmade climate change.

But this conclusion is not even supported by the content of the study. Four years of drought could well be the result of local and regional meteorological factors without implying any global 'climate change'. Four years is too short a time period because broad climate change can be appreciated only in a time frame of at least 30-40 years.

Moreover, the drought in question had barely affected Syria. The research, in fact, refers to the Fertile Crescent, a vast territory that includes Iraq, half of Iran, and part of Turkey. In those years, drought also was experienced in parts of Lebanon, Jordan and Israel, but the most affected regions were a part of Iran and the region on the frontier between Turkey and Iraq - quite far from Syria. [Cascioli, who has made specialized studies on climate change, refers here to a book he wrote, Il clima che non t'aspetti (The climate you did not expect)].

Therefore one has to have a vivid imagination to support affirmations like those of Triarchi, which must be read with a good dose of cynicism. But the OR has for some time stopped being subtle about its advocacy of ecologist and 'no-global' idiocies.

In its issue of December 24, we find in an editorial by Lucetta Scaraffia entitled "The world in front of the manger", this equally unbelievable statement:
"Globalization, which seems to have been achieved by the markets, the world of finance and the Internet, has been transformed into a category similar to natural catastrophes on a world scale, the result of indiscriminate exploitation of the earth's resources and the cause of an increase in migrants who, all over the world, are fleeing lands that have become inclement to humans".

So, if we understand this complex destructive chain: Evil men (who are rich) exploit the earth's resources (cfr use of fossil fuels), thus provoking climate changes which in turn cause natural catastrophes which are the cause for mass migrations - and this whole process is called globalization.

Certainly, someone could provide appropriate music for this nonsense akin to a Mother Goose rhyme, but the fact remains that these are senseless affirmations to which the 'shadow' editress of OR does not even feel the duty to furnish data in support of such serious claims.

Indeed, as much as the ecologists carry on with apocalyptic scenarios, which the OR reports a-critically, there has been no evidence in the last several decades of an increase in extreme atmospheric events, let alone the hoax of so-called 'environmental refugees' (a topic that deserves a separate analysis).

But all the organs and agencies of the Holy See seize on anything as grist for the mill to demonstrate that the world is experiencing an emergency due to climate change, and do not take into account (or pretend not to) some of this mindset's collateral effects, such as that which emerges from another OR article on January 4, actually a preview of an article that will be published in the magazine Vita e Pensiero, written by ex-financier Gael Giraud who is now a Jesuit priest, on the subject of finances and climate change, entitled "Against the myth of an increase in the GNP".

Within a disquisition for persons knowledgeable on finances but all aimed at underscoring the need for policies against 'manmade climate change', there emerges a parallel discussion on the need of reining in population growth in sub-Saharan African, and without dwelling too much on the implications of this, Giraud explains that
"It seems possible to reduce the demographic tendency in the framework of an integrated support which includes activities to improve access to family planning services,to contribute to a better understanding of what is at stake in the reality of demographic facts, promote education for women and improve systems of social protection..."
This, of course, is bureaucratese for population control. And this really is what all the talk about climate change is leading to.

Sorry to point it out, but even if these currents of thought come from outside the Catholic world, they have been legitimized at the highest levels of the Church by the encyclical Laudato si, as recent statements by Leonardo Boff attest to.

Since it was published, thanks also to the tireless efforts of the Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Mons. Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, the Vatican has become conquered territory for radical ecologists, anti-natalists, shamans and buffoons of all sorts. [One must note how this pope has been debasing the leading pontifical academies, including the Pontifical Academy for Life, by packing them with dubiously-qualified, even non-Catholic ideologues whose main qualification is being on the same thought-wave as the pope, and dismissing reputable long-standing members who do not think like him at all.]
TERESA BENEDETTA
00sabato 7 gennaio 2017 22:57
January 6, 2017 headlines

PewSitter


Canon212.com

The latest whopper in a truth-challenged Pontificate

If you still harbored any doubt that Bergoglio and his acolytes are seriously 'off', to say the least, if not totally unhinged, on matters that have to do with truth, give it up. Carl Olson had a prompt rejoinder to the latest lunatic thought from Fr. Spadaro, the pope's current in-house oneman braintrust (Should be enough to make you shiver down to your marrow, but then, his lord and master has made far many more hair-raising statements, so... Snapshot of the MEGA-CRISIS in the Church today!)


Close papal confidant says
"2 + 2 in #Theology can make 5"
Fr. Spadaro's tweet, as short and simple as it is, has a decidedly nominalist (or voluntarist) bent to it,
for it rests on the apparent belief that God can indeed act contrary to what and who is he is
Analysis
by Carl Olson
Editor

January 06, 2017

Jesuit papal confidant and the editor of La Civiltà Cattolica, Fr. Antonio Spadaro S.J., who is considered to be "one of the Jesuits closest to Pope Francis," has a lively Twitter account. Lively, but not necessarily theologically sound. Granted, there are more substantial news items out there, but this little tempest in a tea pot is not only rather fun, it is rather revealing.

The tweet in question, from earlier today:



Fr. Spadaro was apparently trying to make a point about certain theologians who are supposedly too rigid, dogmatic, or scholastic in their approaches to complex or difficult moral situations. A number of folks responded to his tweet, pointing out, in essence, that it was wrong, vapid, and otherwise embarrassing.

This is Theology 101, the sort of thing junior high students should understand: truth can never contradict truth, even if some truth (theology) is supra-rational. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, quoting from both Vatican I's Dei Filius and Vatican II's Gaudium et Spes:
Faith and science: "Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth."

"Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are." (CCC, 159)

Dr. Francis Beckwith, meanwhile, proffers this from St. Thomas:
@antoniospadaro True, math's not #theology, But incoherence is a vice of #reason, including #theology, not just math. See Aquinas SCG.I.84.1 pic.twitter.com/2xn5iAjlxK
— Francis J. Beckwith (@fbeckwith) January 6, 2017

Perhaps sensing that his tweet was not going to successfully buck commonsense, basic theology, and the entire Tradition, Fr. Spadaro tried to find an ally in Benedict XVI:
"GOD was made flesh and shows us that he is NOT only a MATHEMATICAL reason but that this original Reason is also LOVE" #BenedictXVI (2006)
— Antonio Spadaro (@antoniospadaro) January 6, 2017

The quote, in the English translation on the Vatican site, is from an address given by Benedict at Auschwitz in May 2006: "The God in whom we believe is a God of reason - a reason, to be sure, which is not a kind of cold mathematics of the universe, but is one with love and with goodness."

That quote, however, does not help Fr. Spadaro at all since Benedict — to repeat what I've already noted above — is simply noting that God is a God of reason and that God also transcends the limits of reason and human knowledge.

In fact, Fr. Spadaro's simplistic, glaring error — which he seems to think is some sort of great theological insight — was roundly rebuffed in one of Benedict's most famous addresses, given at the University of Regensburg in 2006:
In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata.

Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazm and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness.

God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions.

The faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which - as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated - unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language.

God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf.

Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul - "λογικη λατρεία" [literally, 'logical service'] - worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).

Fr. Spadaro's tweet, as short and simple as it is, has a decidedly nominalist (or voluntarist) bent to it, for it rests on the apparent belief that God can indeed act contrary to what and who is he is.

As John Lawrence Hill explains in his exceptional book After the Natural Law (Ignatius, 2016), in nominalism, "Only things exist, not the relationships between and among them." Put simply, this means that the numbers "2" and "4" only mean what we want them to mean at any particular place and time, and that in some other instance, "2" might equal "3" and "2+2" might equal "5". "Thus," Hill states, "mathematical entities do not really exist" in nominalism; that is, they are entirely fluid and subjective.

Perhaps this is much ado over nothing. But I think four things can be suggested in light of the tweet, especially within the larger context, which is clearly the ongoing debates and disputes over Amoris Laetitia:

1). If Fr. Spadaro really does believe that, in theology, "2+2" can equal "5", and if Fr. Spadaro really does have as close a relationship to Pope Francis as most observers believe he does, well, say a few prayers, because it is just further evidence this pontificate is challenged when it comes to thinking and acting consistently and in concert with fundamental principles and truths.

2). If Fr. Spadaro really does believe this is somehow a good argument, at least at the level of a Twitter "zinger", then he not only has a shaky grasp of some foundational truths, he also would appear to have complete disdain for the actual concerns and arguments of those critical of (of even just concerned about) certain passages in Amoris Laetitia.

3). If, in fact, "2+2" can equal "5" in the realm of theology, what else can be suggested? Shall we rethink the Trinity and consider the possibility of 4 or 9 or 39.5 divine Persons? Perhaps the hypostatic union involves 3 or 12 or 99 natures?

Yes, I'm being a bit flippant, but there is a serious point here: if theological truth does not have to accord with reason, then where does that leave us? As Saint John Paul II stated at the outset of Fides et Ratio, "Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth..." (par 1).

If reason is set to the side, then faith ultimately becomes, as Benedict argued, a matter of fideism, something John Paul II (referencing Dei Filius 4) denounced: "Against the temptations of fideism, however, it was necessary to stress the unity of truth and thus the positive contribution which rational knowledge can and must make to faith's knowledge..."

4). Thus, when it comes to moral theology and complicated situations — say, involving marriages, divorces, new "unions", and such — there cannot and should not be any contradiction between reason, moral truth, and Church doctrine. This point is made very well in a recent post at OnePeterFive.com titled "Hard Cases Make Bad Law: A Response to Austen Ivereigh on Amoris Laetitia", in which the author states:
When the Church has traditionally made the demand for two such people to forgo their sexual relationship due to the irregularity of their bond it has struck many as draconian, blind to the reality of couples who have long since left behind “spouses” with whom they never really had anything close to what they have now.

Can’t these theologians and hierarchs see that this is not adultery? Can’t they see that this is authentic love?

While compelling, all of this misses the central point to the whole debate: the consistent teaching of the Church that two people can form an indissoluble bond of marriage which prevails until one of them dies — merely by speaking words to one another in the span of approximately 45 seconds. Here I refer, of course, to the marriage vows.

At its core, this is not an issue about canon law.

Time and again those on Ivereigh’s side of the argument have couched the whole thing in terms of those who are open to applying the law compassionately on a case by case basis and those who are legally “rigid”. I understand that the authors of the DUBIA leave themselves open to such a perspective due to their use of the phrase “more uxorio”. It looks as though the interest is precisely in “upholding the law” at all costs, concrete personal situations be damned.

This misses the point.

Certainly the canonical argument is vital in its own right to the life of the Church. However, canon law exists to protect deeper, more fundamental theological realities. In this debate, all of the canons in question concern the integrity of marriage as a sacrament and indissoluble bond, the sanctity of the Eucharist, and the necessity of upholding the commandments of God Himself to obtain eternal salvation.

Finally, the truly strange thing here is that while Fr. Spadaro and Company often seem to take umbrage with the supposedly rigid, fideistic arguments of canon lawyers, theologians, and "conservative" writers, they appear quite oblivious to the fact that they are proposing an irrational, fideistic approach that would require a fragmenting of authority in keeping with its inherent fragmenting of logic and theology.

If "2+2" can equal "5" in the realm of theology, then it can also equal "9" and "catfish" and "π" and just about anything you want it to. More than a considered belief that there are exceptions to "the rules", this is an irrational belief that "the rules" are essentially arbitrary and without objective, transcendent basis. And that is #arecipefordisaster. [i.e, PURE RELATIVISM, whose dictatorship Benedict XVI always warned about, never imagining it even within the realm of possibility that his successor would be a barefaced unapologetic POPE OF RELATIVISM.]

Corbinian's Bear opens his 2017 blogging with some heavy hitting - and not just at the Spadaros and other Bergoglio surrogates but at the man himself, the Church's first anti-Catholic pope.


Pope Francis and his problem with truth
by Ty Capps

Thursday, January 5, 2017

...The Bear has begun 2017 with a return to blogging with a vengeance. While finishing his dubious novel, he had to ignore a lot that was going on. Well, sorry, heretics, but the Bear is back.

The days of wondering whether Pope Francis is a good pope or something else are long since over with. The days of wondering why he always seems to say the wrong thing while in the domain of the Prince of the Power of the Air, or fails to correct bishops who are heterodox, are now tiny in the rear-view mirror.

It's 2017. We know who he is, what he believes, what his tactics are, and we have an idea about his dodgy theology. And it should scare the Hell out of you. ...

Here's the big deal. It isn't that Pope Francis has encouraged bishops to depart from orthodoxy in sexual morality and a few other areas. It is no particular issue, or even collection of issues. It's the fact that the philosophical suicide of Western thought has officially been adopted by the Pope of Rome.

The Marquis de Sade: "Morality is geography misconstrued."
Pope Francis: "Truth is the calendar misconstrued."

The Bear has argued that, for Francis, the truth is whatever he says it is, because he says it. It is like the most twisted Jack Chick caricature of infallibility.

Francis does not sit confidently on the bridge of the Barque of Peter, sounding the truths of the Faith with a brazen trumpet. He is the captain of a U-Boat, sending torpedoes against the Truth, whose wakes can be discerned by those with eyes to see. He slyly introduces ideas and practices that depart from the Faith as clearly taught in the past, and relies on heterodox bishops to run with them.

He's sneaky. Underhanded. Evasive. Vindictive. Honest men do not operate in this manner. We know this. That alone should cause even the most nose-deaf humans to smell that something is wrong.

So, what has changed? Why can divorced and remarried Catholics take communion now, when they couldn't before? Why can homosexuals be a "family?" Why can Lutherans take communion? And these all do implicate tenets of the Faith, of course. Communion for divorced and remarried implicates both the Catholic theology - the truth - of marriage, and the Catholic understanding of Holy Communion. What has changed?

We finally got a Pope philosophically dead from the cultural disease of the West [RELATIVISM, anyway you look at it]. Things change simply because Francis has decided. The Fuhrerprinzip again. Things change because times change. Truth is the calendar misconstrued.

He doesn't need to officially change dogmas, of course. That was the past, when supposed "truth" was locked up in musty old books. Now we know truth is mutable. Every human being has his or her own truth, eh?

It is infinitely easier to change "pastoral practices," to urge "discernment," to elevate "ecumenism" to the highest good, to make Global Warming a subject of incessant preaching, then watch the parasites on the Body of Christ go to work. The Truth is to be found in the lives of the people: is found, does not form, the lives of the people. See what a revolution this is? "What is truth?"

Sometimes the Bear fears nobody gets this but him. The fear is that he's totally lost his mind, because he's not really all that smart, and should not be the only one to notice something this big.

Francis is formally divorcing the Catholic Church from the very concept of truth. He acts as if the truth does not matter, or is subject to change, or more modern theological theories, or "mercy." A Catholic Church where truth no longer matters, cannot be the Catholic Church. A Pope who acts as if truth no longer matters, cannot be a pope.
[Well, Mr Bear, I have been hammering home this very obvious but generally unacknowledged bitter truth about a pope who consistently compromises truth when it is expedient for his agenda - and it almost always is. But many respectable commentators think it is beyond the pale to say bluntly that Jorge Mario Bergoglio is lying through his teeth most of the time about the truths of our faith. Even if they point out repeatedly how he is clearly violating the immutable principles of truth reaffirmed by John Paul II in Veritatis splendor. Well, I am probably not respectable at all, because consider the banners I have been constrained to use as needed in the past few weeks:




[

The Bear thinks this is the biggest story in a very long time. [It is - a lying pope who is also the first anti-Catholic pope, and definitely the king of all the contemporary dictators of relativism. It can't get worse than that for the one true Church of Christ! The already substantial documentary evidence of all that just keeps piling up. Just consider the first week of the year so far!]

Francis doesn't care what the letter of the law is, and need not bother changing it. He only cares about what clergy and faithful actually say and do. And, ultimately, that is all about conforming the Church to the failing culture of a dying West. In other words, at long last, the Church is failing in the exact same way, and at the exact same time, as every other worldly Western institution is failing. The implications are staggering and heartbreaking.

And very much apropos to all this...

How Pope Francis's defenders harm the Church

January 5, 2017

LifeSiteNews yesterday released a piece by one of its founders, John Henry Westen, who states that it is no longer possible to pretend that all is well with this papacy and that the pope is "simply misunderstood". He cites examples of very troubling - and incriminating - episodes that have occurred. A few years ago one of my blogging colleagues penned a piece called "The Pope Francis Little Book Of Insults". Of course this blog has been highlighting quite a few of those insults.

Some Catholics still refuse to admit the truth. One recently quipped that we "like to dig up some doozies". Well, they are doozies, but we don't have to "dig them up". They spew forth from the Vatican with great frequency and aplomb. They cannot be missed except by those who refuse to see and acknowledge the truth.

Ironically, such willful blindness prevents them from intelligently praying for the Church. We must be aware of the dire situation and not be afraid to admit it as such.

While we pray for the Church and the pope, we must also work to mitigate the harmful effects of the poison that emanates from the Vatican with the apparent approval from the pope (if not at his initiative).

Those who deny the potential and actual harm cannot and indeed will not protect those in their charges from spiritual dangers. In addition to praying for the pope and speaking out, let us also pray for those who insist on wearing rose-colored glasses for they may be their own worst enemies.

January 8, 2017
Just realized I failed to post this last night:

January 7, 2017 headlines

Canon212.com

In which C212 repeats its banner headline from the previous night....

PewSitter

While PewSitter notices that the Vatican document for the coming Week of Christian Unity calls Martin Luther 'a witness for the Gospel', which C212 fails to 'report'....
TERESA BENEDETTA
00domenica 8 gennaio 2017 17:00



Rejoinders to two recent ramblings on AL by Bergoglian acolytes swinging their mega-thurifers from the pages of CRUX... The first is a tedious
long-winded anecdote about a hypothetical couple whom the priest-writer obviously discerns to be worthy of communion in every way
(it reminds me of the many hypothetical anecdotes JMB recounts as genuine events from his pastoral ministry), and the second was
against a similar hypothetical case presented by Austin Ivereigh to justify the flagrant doctrinal defiance in AL Chapter 8.

Is Fr. Paul Keller’s essay really the way AL should be read?
It illustrates how pastors are going to stumble into accepting the central flaw in AL:
Assuming that a Catholic’s 'discernment' of his objective situation by his own conscience
is the sole criterion a priest needs to give the Eucharist even to those living in chronic sin
by Edward N. Peters

January 7, 2017

Apologies for the length of this post. It always takes more time to correct errors than it takes to make them. In Fr. Paul Keller’s CRUX essay published on January 6,
https://cruxnow.com/commentary/2017/01/06/case-study-communion-divorcedremarried/
we confront many errors.

Keller’s essay illustrates almost perfectly how pastors — reading Pope Francis’ Amoris laetitia in its overall, plain sense (and not, lawyer-like, parsing certain problematic phrases narrowly enough to support a more traditional interpretation) — are going to stumble into accepting (what I view as) the central flaw in Amoris (although others might rank other aspects of Francis’ document even more problematic in the long run), namely, implicitly assuming that, in the final analysis, a Catholic’s assessment of his or her own conscience is the sole criterion that governs a minister’s decision to give holy Communion to a member of the faithful.

That assumption, whence ever it arose and no matter how many adopt it, is simply wrong. Grasp that and one has the essence of the thing.

Keller indulges in a bit of the polite sneering that some moderns like to accord ecclesiastical tradition (e.g., by reminding us not “to treat the Church’s moral commands as if they were stones [to] hurl” at others) [an imagery he picked up verbatim from the reigning pope himself], but for the most part his errors are phrased plausibly. That’s what makes replying to his essay necessary. People might be taken in by it as they often are by “hard case” stories.

I begin by agreeing with Keller in a preliminary point: Nothing in his description of “Irma” suggests that her marriage to Francisco in El Salvador was invalid. Tribunals are better at spotting potential grounds of nullity than are typical parish priests but Keller is right not to get Irma’s hopes up for an annulment.

Now, on to just some of the serious mistakes in Keller’s essay.

First mistake: “As I respond [to Irma’s request for Communion], I must follow the guidelines that Pope Francis described in Amoris Laetitia, issued after the discussions and discernment of two Synods of Bishops on family life.”

Wrong. In administering holy Communion to a member of the faithful, Roman Catholic ministers are bound not by “guidelines” supposedly fashioned from a single, ambiguous, and highly controverted papal document, but instead by the plain and dispositive text of another papal document, called the Code of Canon Law (especially Canon 915 thereof), and by the common and constant interpretation accorded such norms over the centuries.

Second mistake: “[Irma] told me that Tony thought the idea [of living as brother and sister with her spouse according to the civil law] was crazy. As they were only 26 years old, Irma was afraid of what might happen to their relationship if they were no longer able to grow in their love through physical intimacy.”
Keller accepted, apparently without demur, Irma’s description of her objectively adulterous sexual relations as a way “to grow in love”. He has thus radically failed to speak the truth in love to a child of God who is consulting him as a priest of the Church and minister of Christ’s sacrament.

Any priest, let alone one approached in Confession (see Canon 978 § 2), would have to account for such a failure at Final Judgment. If as a confessor Keller approved Irma’s choice to engage in sexual relations with Tony, he has committed the crime of solicitation in confession. See my discussion of Canon 1387.

Third mistake: “[Irma] didn’t think Tony could handle the prospect of committing to complete celibacy for the next 70 years. Plus, both she and Tony wanted to have at least two or three more children.”

Setting aside the 26-year-old Irma’s callow estimate of her life-span and the sexually active phase therein, more importantly, Tony is not bound to observe “celibacy”. Nothing in Keller’s essay suggests that Tony is not free to marry. Granted, he is not free to marry Irma, for she is already presumptively married, but, Keller treating Tony as being not free to marry is simply wrong. As a single man Tony is, of course, bound to continence and Keller might help clarify this point for those who routinely confuse the terms (although Keller seems not know what it means either); but in any case, Tony is not bound to either celibacy or continence based on Irma’s situation.

Fourth mistake: “Although I have not said so to Irma, I have wondered if it would be better for her to attend a non-Catholic church.”

Thank God a priest of the Catholic Church has not made such a reprehensible suggestion to a lay Catholic coming to him with urgent moral questions. Still, Keller himself, who mentions this idea twice, needs immediately to eliminate from his mind any notion of advising a penitent to commit some other objectively grave sins (e.g., ceasing to attend Mass on Sundays or even joining another faith) so as to try to ‘sooth’ the effects of feeling guilty over an earlier grave sin. Good grief.

Fifth and central mistake: “If she were to just come up for communion, I couldn’t deny her. First of all, everything I know about her relationship has come from within the sacrament of Confession. Outside of the sacrament, I can’t ‘use’ that information in any way, certainly not by publicly denying her communion.”

Keller is largely correct about the rules on the seal of confession, but his knowledge of Irma’s marriage status is not sacramental: Irma’s status as canonically/civilly married to Francisco in El Salvador and as civilly married to Tony in the USA is a matter of public record — even if the public records are difficult to access in this highly unusual case. Keller notes, by the way, that Irma’s family is in America, too, and they all know she was married, per Keller.

Here we see, in any case, the fundamental problem of approaching the question of holy Communion for divorced-and-remarried Catholics as does Amoris, without any reference to Canon 915 (or to Canon 916, but the failure to deal directly with Canon 915 in situations like Keller’s is worse), which canon, as has been stated many times, requires ministers of holy Communion to withhold the sacrament from those who “obstinately persist in manifest grave sin”.

There is no question whatsoever that Irma’s case fits the classic situation of “public and permanent adultery” (CCC 2384) and that Keller should withhold the sacrament from her upon pain of dereliction of his duties under Canon 915 as a priest of Jesus Christ and minister of the Catholic Church.

But, dear reader, do you see how Keller, relying only on the import of Amoris, could walk right into that grave error?

Amoris assumes, without ever quite stating it, that individual consciences (which, yes, can be very complex, and often deal with hard cases, and are never fully knowable to another, and might be only partly informed, and so on, and so on), are the final arbiter of whether a would-be communicant must be given the sacrament, as if only Canon 916 (which most people would recognize as being the canon that looks at conscience) were on the books, and by which canon one could, in some hypothetical case, see an objectively grave sinner approaching for holy Communion without that act itself being sinful, while Canon 915, meanwhile, which requires ministers to make a distribution decision in accord with objective criteria, simply does not exist.

The pervasive and steadfast refusal of nearly all “Amoris supporters” (I dislike the term but it saves time) to face squarely the ancient tradition behind the unambiguous rule of Canon 915 is what dooms virtually all defenses of Amoris so far to irrelevance at best and to pastoral and even doctrinal disasters at worse.

Sixth mistake: Keller rephrases his claim that he is ‘constructively ignorant’ (my term) about Irma’s situation (in that he supposedly knows her situation only from Confession, so canonically he doesn’t “know” about it) so as to claim that it would be wrong for him to withhold holy Communion from Irma — who like other Catholics has indeed a right to receive holy Communion.

But may I suggest that quite the opposite is true: Keller has ‘constructive knowledge’ of Irma’s objectively irregular status in virtue of the fact that she has entered two public ceremonies each purporting to be weddings. He is thus bound to act in accord with the law governing such situations. (A quick aside: if Keller really thinks foreign country, earlier marriage situations never eventually come to light, and that his actions during the time he knew about it will never later be questioned, he’s terribly naive. But back to his essay.)

Seventh mistake: “Based on everything I know as a priest concerning sin, conscience, hope, Jesus, the teaching of the Church, and particularly the instruction the Church has received from Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia, I tell Irma, ‘If you sincerely believe in your conscience that this is how Christ can aid your growth in holiness, then, yes. You may go to communion.’”

That advice is wrong. Granted, perhaps based on some things that Keller clearly does not know about “sin, conscience, hope, Jesus, the teaching of the Church, and particularly the instruction the Church has received from Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia,” he might have innocently reached that conclusion and offered that bad advice, but his conclusions and the advice he offered are still wrong.

A man in his position, moreover, having been alerted to the possibility of so many errors in his thinking, and such serious errors at that, is, I suggest, now required to study these matters more deeply and to bring his advice into line with Church teaching.

Final thoughts:
For readers who hoped that Keller’s essay might finally prove how right and good it would be if we all read Amoris the way Keller et al think it should be read, four reactions to my post seem possible:

1. Peters has substantially misstated the law in regard to the reception of holy Communion by divorced-and-remarried Catholics and so he may be disregarded. To such persons I extend the invitation to show me where I have misrepresented the law controlling these situations.

2. Peters is a heartless pharisee who does not care about the pastoral problems of real people and so he may be disregarded. To such persons I say, that’s a rather tiresome ad hominem arising from the current antinomianism in the Church, but it leaves open the possibility that I (and, I need hardly say, scads of people way smarter than I) might be correct.

3. Peters has stated the law correctly, but the law needs to change significantly. To such persons I say, you are invited to show us how the law can be changed without doing doctrino-disciplinary damage to several aspects of Matrimony, Confession, and the Eucharist.

4. Peters has stated the law correctly and the law’s general connection to pastoral integrity is evident. To such persons I say, we need to bring parochial sacramental administration better into line with Catholic doctrine and discipline.

A final, final thought: As Keller gets to make up plausible hypotheticals to illustrate the advantages of his giving holy Communion to Irma, may I too offer a plausible hypothetical to illustrate its dangers?

One day, civilly remarried and communicating Irma’s doorbell rings. Francisco is standing there, his life having bottomed out in prison, but by the grace of God and pondering the hard truths he heard from faithful Catholic ministers in jail, he begs forgiveness from Irma and their child and is committed to resuming his duties as husband and father, chastened, humbled, and grateful for a second chance. At which point he learns that Keller has smoothed the path for Irma to live in a false union with the apparent blessing of the Church.

How does one compare Francesco’s failures (per Keller, arising out of pervasive poverty and drug-enhanced gang pressures) with Keller’s failure to speak rightly in safe America and faced only with questions from a confused Catholic woman?

PS: Happy Feast of St. Raymond Of Peny\Afort, a saint with a lot to say to canon lawyers. And to confessors.

* About that seal issue, a few more words are in order. Strictly speaking, Keller is belatedly introducing a game-changing fact, asserting that all of his information about Irma is Confessional. Well that, of course, would destroy any application of his example to most real life Amoris cases (and to any other morals case) because seal information cannot be used for anything to the detriment of the penitent.

Even if a penitent accurately confessed a grave sin, but for which he or she was not sorry, and later presented for holy Communion, the priest could not withhold Communion, as I (along with many others) would agree. But Keller’s phrasing might lead some to think that the canonically public status of marriage, even of civil marriage, is insufficient to act on in the external forum unless such status is also actually known by some decent portion of the community. That is incorrect and by Keller’s own narration, a number of other people know about Irma’s first wedding.

A key excerpt from this reply to hyper-uber-super-Bergoglian Austin Ivereigh's dogged defense of AL was cited by Carl Olson in his prompt response to Fr. Spadaro's "2+2=5" madness. Keller and Ivereigh both illustrate the impossibility of Bergoglian apologists to answer the Four Cardinals' DUBIA on the merits of the questions, simple as they are. Lacking any arguments to questions that lay bare the violation of Truth that is the fundamental sin in AL Chapter 8, they have now resorted pathetically to citing hypothetical cases of the highest 'complexity' to justify why Bergoglian 'mercy' ought to trump Christ's own teaching..

Hard cases make bad law:
A response to Austin Ivereigh on AL

January 6, 2017

Editor's Note:The following guest editorial was submitted by a reader who works in the office of Marriage and Family Life of a US diocese. With retributive action already having been taken against several of the signatories of the theological censures against Amoris Laetitia, we have agreed to publish this essay anonymously.

I would like to begin by thanking Austen Ivereigh, who in his December 30, 2016 column at Crux ("Critics of ‘Amoris’ need to look at concrete cases") got – though perhaps unintentionally — to the core of this debate.

The concrete examples he put forward are indeed those extremely difficult, exceptionally rare cases that trouble the consciences of everyone taking part in this discussion. Many people know someone who has been abandoned unjustly by a spouse through no real fault of their own, exposing them to great economic, social, and psychological distress. Some keen observers and participants in this debate are indeed those exact people.

Everyone desires to see vindication and lasting fulfillment for them. They certainly suffer and Jesus does not fail to draw close to them in their suffering.

The thought of an abandoned spouse picking up the pieces of their life and moving on to find a new companion naturally brings relief to those looking in from the outside, particularly if children are under the care of the abandoned spouse. Hopefully this new companion demonstrates all the fidelity, affection, and self-giving care for the abandoned spouse that her unfaithful husband failed to provide. Images of a brand new, healed and happy family bring solace. The desire arises for this new family to participate fully in the life of the Church and have the new union recognized as a valid marriage.

Occasionally though, the abandoned spouse is faced with the tragic scenario of being unable to obtain an annulment due to a lack of witnesses or a paper trail gone cold. Even more rarely, perhaps they had all their ducks in a row and the ecclesiastical tribunal didn’t find the case convincing enough to declare the previous marriage null. This is a bitter reality for some people.

Leaving aside the juridical factors, when one asks the ultimate question, “would Jesus smile upon a new union such as this?” the gut reaction would seem to be “of course!” In what bizarre world would the God of mercy, healing, closeness, the marginalized, the abandoned, the wronged, not approve of such a union? What could Jesus possibly have against such a classic example of human beings moving past the crushing consequences of sin and betrayal?

These are the sentiments which I would venture to say guide Ivereigh’s thought process on this issue. They are perfectly reasonable, compassionate sentiments. I do not believe they stem from a visceral hatred of “conservative” theologians or some maniacal desire to dramatically alter the course of the Church’s journey through history.

These sentiments lead Ivereigh to claim that the word “adultery” just doesn’t correspond with the sexual relations between the aforementioned abandoned spouse and her new companion. This is understandable. To most, adultery signifies relations rooted in irresponsibility, lust, selfishness, infidelity, and pleasure-seeking. It would be uncharitable and illogical to believe that these were the motivating factors within the sexual union of the two people in question. Their relations seem to be like those of other married couples rooted in stability, self-giving, and the desire to affirm their love.

This does not sound like adultery. I get it.

When the Church has traditionally made the demand for two such people to forgo their sexual relationship due to the irregularity of their bond, it has struck many as draconian, blind to the reality of couples who have long since left behind “spouses” with whom they never really had anything close to what they have now.

Can’t these theologians and hierarchs see that this is not adultery? Can’t they see that this is authentic love?

While compelling, all of this misses the central point to the whole debate: the consistent teaching of the Church that two people can form an indissoluble bond of marriage which prevails until one of them dies — merely by speaking words to one another in the span of approximately 45 seconds. Here I refer, of course, to the marriage vows.

At its core, this is not an issue about canon law.

Time and again those on Ivereigh’s side of the argument have couched the whole thing in terms of those who are open to applying the law compassionately on a case by case basis and those who are legally “rigid”. I understand that the authors of the dubia leave themselves open to such a perspective due to their use of the phrase “more uxorio”. It looks as though the interest is precisely in “upholding the law” at all costs, concrete personal situations be damned.

This misses the point.

Certainly the canonical argument is vital in its own right to the life of the Church. However, canon law exists to protect deeper, more fundamental theological realities. In this debate, all of the canons in question concern the integrity of marriage as a sacrament and indissoluble bond, the sanctity of the Eucharist, and the necessity of upholding the commandments of God Himself to obtain eternal salvation.

As much as Francis speaks about the victory of mercy, tenderness, and compassion over a legalistic, rigid mindset, this is not what drives him to the conclusion that some people living “more uxorio” can have recourse to the sacraments.

He knows as well as anyone in the Church that a person who has sexual relations with a person who is not his or her actual spouse is objectively committing adultery. There is no way around that fact. What constitutes adultery, no matter what the interior motivations, is blindingly obvious: sexual relations outside the context of a valid, sacramental marriage.

It’s the reason why the language of “objective” states of mortal sin can’t be dropped from the debate despite all the mitigating addendums tacked on about a lack of subjective culpability.

How then does Francis make peace with the possibility of those with no declared annulment in a ‘remarriage’, objective adulterers, receiving the sacraments? It’s simple: Francis believes that the overwhelming majority of what we call marriages in the Church are actually null. Fraudulent. Deficient. Not real. Unfounded. His original (unedited by the Vatican Press Office) comments on June 17 in Rome are the Rosetta Stone to this whole ordeal:
“We are living in a provisional culture… and because of this the great majority of our sacramental marriages are null. Because they say ‘yes, for the rest of my life!’ but they don’t know what they are saying. Because they have a different culture. They say it, they have good will, but they don’t know… They don’t know that it’s indissoluble, they don’t know that it’s for your entire life. It’s hard…

They prefer to cohabitate, and this is a challenge, a task. Not to ask ‘why don’t you marry?’ No, to accompany, to wait, and to help them to mature, help fidelity to mature. I’ve seen a lot of fidelity in these cohabitations, and I am sure that this is a real marriage, they have the grace of a real marriage because of their fidelity but there are local superstitions, etc…”

Francis is at peace with those “more uxorio” receiving absolution and communion because he is convinced that there is a very good chance the original marriage wasn’t a real marriage at all. Even if the external forum can’t declare it null for one reason or another, Francis trusts the internal forum to pick up the slack and get to the bottom of things.

An individual’s conscience rises to the rank of ecclesiastical judge and the accompanying priest ascends to the position of the local ordinary. The abandoned spouse, her new companion, and a priest can discern over time that the original marriage never existed and that even though a real sacramental marriage isn’t possible due to the missing annulment, their union, although a civil marriage, is a real marriage and their sexual relations are essentially the same as those between spouses in a valid marriage recognized by the Church.

The second portion of Francis’ June 17 remarks obviously put into play the possibility of cohabitation with proven fidelity (the hypothetical hard case in question) as being an actual marriage which is a source of God’s grace.

All of this belies a fundamental mistrust in the capability of a man and woman in today’s culture to stand at the altar and enter into a marriage through the spoken exchange of vows. Francis is not alone in his opinion. Christopher West, well-known promoter of John Paul II's Theology of the Body, has expressed his essential agreement with the pope based on his experiences as an archdiocesan director of marriage preparation.

There are definitely many within the Church who would say that the canonical presumption of a marriage being valid as an annulment process begins should be reversed to one of invalidity. It’s a great big mess out there and there is no reason to punish someone by withholding communion from them when the vast majority of “marriages” are not in fact marriages at all. Even though the annulment process went off the rails somewhere, statistics indicate she or he is still probably right in their conviction that their marriage wasn’t real in the first place.

What of it then? Hopefully it can be seen by now we are far beyond the realms of “applying the law” or “upholding the law”. We are touching on the fundamental question of whether the Church can ever know if two people are really married.
- If we want there to be such a thing as indissoluble sacramental marriage and we want it to be accessible to all types of Catholics, then we must rely on the premise that two people can create this sacrament by speaking vows in public in one specific instance.
- If we want to maintain the integrity of the sacrament, we must have marriage tribunals that carefully examine broken unions and distinguish the sham weddings where no one really gave their lives in freedom to one another, and the real weddings where people actually did what they intended and gave their lives away to one another and the Lord in love.

What is impossible, though, is to delegate such determinations to the realm of the internal forum.
- It is barely within the competence of a third party ecclesiastical tribunal to make such a weighty declaration as “that was never a real marriage”.
- It is nowhere near the competence of the conscience of an individual spouse (or confessor) to make such a determination, no matter how well-intentioned they might be.

To be as intellectually honest as possible, I will grant that perhaps our hypothetical abandoned woman is indeed correct. In reality there was never a real marriage in the first place. I imagine there are actual situations where this is true and for some reason it will just never be declared as such by a tribunal. Is her sexual relationship with the new companion still adultery in the moral sense and not simply in the legal one?

The answer is yes. For the obvious and simple reason that as a Catholic, the only way this woman can enter into a real sacramental marriage is through a Catholic wedding ceremony with the exchange of consent in public. Without an annulment, this is, of course, impossible. Without the valid sacrament she and her new companion would be forever cohabitating in a civil marriage and not as real spouses. Sexual relations with someone who is not one’s real spouse are always adulterous. Full stop.

Her circumstances are indeed tragic if all these factors are true. But the logic of the Gospel dictates that she would accept this situation and courageously renounce sexual relations with her new companion as an act of taking up one’s cross in the mystery of suffering. [This is the way Benedict XVI always described this particular suffering, which should be accepted as Christians should accept every suffering that comes their way as their participation in the sacrifice of Christ.]

In the Eschaton, we will figure this all out. We will discern clearly between the real and the unreal, the true and the false, the valid and the invalid. Here and now, though, we must take Jesus’s admonition in Matthew 18:6 very seriously, and understand that the role of the priest, tribunal, and even the pope himself is to defend the indissolubility of marriage and accompany the faithful in their journey to put away sin and put on Christ.

Such a task is a thankless one in the eyes of the world, but of infinite value in our desire to conform ourselves more perfectly to the One who sacrificed all for the sake of love.

If Ivereigh (and those who agree with his position) wants this hypothetical woman’s sexual relationship not to be “morally” adulterous, there is only one pathway forward: indissoluble, sacramental marriage with her new companion.

If one cannot provide that as a possibility and yet still proposes their sexual relations as something which can coexist with the Holy Eucharist, one stands nakedly, objectively, legally, and morally outside the teaching of Jesus Christ in the Gospel.

TERESA BENEDETTA
00domenica 8 gennaio 2017 20:37



On December 29, Marco Tosatti's blogpost (see preceding page for my translation) reported a new survey of the Church in Brazil showing that
nine million Catholics left the Church in 2014-2016. It would be easy to point to it as just one more negative evidence of the much-vaunted
'Bergoglio effect', except that the erosion of the Church in Brazil has been underway since the Marxist version of Liberation Theology took root
in the country with the largest Catholic population in the world.

Exacerbated since 2013, of course, by the election of a pope from Latin America whose record in his own native Argentina at stemming the
decline of the Catholic faith was not exemplary at all, and whose ultra-liberal interpretations of Vatican-II led him to uphold pastoral leniency
over doctrinal fidelity, as he has continued to do on a universal scale now that he is pope.

As our priest-commentator below observes, "Brazil is Liberation Theology embodied and at first hand. It is the 'new church' that has 'replaced'
the Church that took shape definitively after Constantine, and of course, the Church brought by Hispanic-Portuguese evangelization during
the European conquest of what is now Latin America]." In short, the 'new church' in Brazil is a paradigm of the present church of Bergoglio, which it antedated and pre-figured by a few decades...

The debacle of the Catholic Church in Brazil
Translated from

January 4, 2017

A wise man said that once upon a time... Well, that's how it is for the Catholics of Spain. You see how things have been going. The other day, my post on the growing atheism in Spain] brought a great many visits online and an abundant traffic in comments. But the facts are what they are.

[That post on January 2, 2017 was entitled "Spain now fifth among the countries with most atheists", led off with this paragraph:
"Fifth and bound to move up. Spain has seen a sad progression in which 25% of the population now say they are atheists, from 8.5% in the 1980s. The countries more atheist than us for now are China (61%), HongKong (34%), Japan (31%), and the Czech Republic (30%). Ah yes, that's 'progress' for you, Everything else is just nonsense...'
The post is in a long queue I set aside for translation this first week of 2017, and have not had the time to attend to.]

But calm down - there are Catholics who have it worse than we do. Brazil, for example. And I must repeat once more that data are obstinate: In two years, the Catholic Church in Brazil lost nine million members, representing a 10 percent loss in Church membership in a period of 2 years, from 60% of the population to now 50%.

Now what? Some of the comments to my post about the losses of the Church in Spain were not bothered at all, choosing to blame it on the late dictator President] Franco, who has been lying in his tomb at the Valle de los Caidos for some 40 years now. And there are those who blame the Roman Emperor Constantine from the fourth century. Surely we have had more than enough time to settle accounts with both.

And in Brazil? Who shall we blame? Getulio Vargas or Juscelino Kubitschek [two former presidents]? The 'retrograde stagnant Church" unable to understand and live the new times post Vatican II?

Yet everything that most of the Vatican II reformers wanted has been reality in Brazil for decades. But for all that, 10% less Catholics in two years.

Brazil has been the seat of bishops who were considered among the most progressivist, from Helder Camara to Casaldaliga, passing through Arns. Brazil, land of LT's 'base communities', of the Boffs and the Bettos [Frei Betto is a Dominican priest who was among the most active of LT advocates and activists and who served as spiritual mentor to Brazilian President Lula in the first decade of this century], of frontal opposition to so many Vatican directives [pre-Bergoglio, that is].

Brazil is the 'church of the people' ['el pueblo' so apotheosized by LT as well as by Bergoglio's variant of LT, 'teologia del pueblo'], the liberating church, the church of endless campaigns of fraternity.

Brazil was to be the paradigm of a renewed church, of liberated Catholics, inflamed with the Word, and fraternally solid. The land where ex-priest Leonardo Boff continues to say Mass and administer sacraments whenever he is asked, and where Cardinal Arns, according to Boff, asks him to concelebrate with him and other defrocked priests. A church, it seems, that is more evangelical, solidary and caring, open and committed [to what???] as no other church is.

Brazil is Liberation Theology embodied and at first hand. It is the 'new church' that has 'replaced' the Church that took shape definitively after Constantine, and, of course, the Church brought by Hispanic-Portuguese evangelization [during the European conquest of what is now Latin America]."

A church like that ought to be an example and a mirror to which the universal Church must look. Yes indeed, where to look to if one wants to put an end quickly to the Catholic Church, as soon as possible.

The people, the 'People of God', the people one must heed, to whom one must be committed, which constitutes the highest voice because its sense of faith must dictate what is to be done by the Church. The people who, according to the leading Liberation theologians, mus be the protagonists of their own history, whose voice must be heard above all to know their desires, yearnings, necessities and experiences: Yet look at where they are, what's happening to them - and I don't say this speaking but crying out! - many [too many] continue to abandon a church that has failed to convince them at all.

And let's not blame the Vatican for this, because according to Boff in his most recent interview, "this pope is one of us".

Well, let me catch that on the fly. "The pope who is one of us" - i.e., of liberation theology, of the base communities, we who are the good ones, we of the people, those who say that they really can discern the will of God - yet nine million more deserted the Barque of Peter in the past two years, and a few decades before that! Nine million jumped ship in two years. In Brazil. Where everyone is supposed to be quite happy in the 'new church'.

It would be interesting to know which dioceses had the most desertions, and the least. Perhaps a reader can inform us. But the data already made public [by one of Brazil's leading pollsters, Datafolha] indicate that even the progressivists of Brazil will not be dancing the samba any time soon.
TERESA BENEDETTA
00domenica 8 gennaio 2017 22:03


It seems that once again, it has fallen to Edward Pentin to do the necessary journalistic work to account for the controversy involving the Holy See and the Knights of Malta. No other Vaticanista seems to have even tried. Pentin thus completes and clarifies what we have so far gathered from a few disparate sources with incomplete information, especially as to dates. As the earlier reports indicated, it does not paint a pretty picture of the Bergoglio Vatican and its latest machinations. And it is only Part 1 of two parts...

Some had suggested this broihaha was really an oblique way for the pope to get at Cardinal Burke, co-author of the Five Dubia, with the end of ultimately dismissing him even from his papal demotion-appointment as Patron of the Knights of Malta, a sinecure compared to the post from which Bergoglio dismissed him, President of the Apostolic Segnatura, or the Church's highest canonical judge. If it was, the facts recounted here indicate the maneuver will fail.

Vatican foments disorder in the Order of Malta
Last month’s dismissal of the Order’s Grand Chancellor by its Grand Master,
who was involved in condom distribution in the Third World,
has precipitated a serious rift with the Holy See.
by Edward Pentin

January 7, 2017

VATICAN CITY — The dismissal of a senior figure in the Sovereign Order of Malta over the distribution of contraceptives in parts of the developing world has provoked a serious rift between the Knights of Malta and the Holy See, but one both parties hope will be swiftly resolved.

The dispute, which has led to a controversial intervention by the Holy See, has exposed a divergent approach to dealing with practices that the Church has always taught to be gravely immoral. It has also revealed allegations of ambitions of the Knights’ German association to extend its influence within the ancient chivalric Order, a papal wish to rid the Order of Freemasonry, and a mysterious 120 million Swiss Franc ($118 million) donation to the Knights.

The Sovereign Military Order of Malta is a lay religious order headquartered in Rome dating back to the First Crusade. It has long defended the faith against persecution and been dedicated to helping care for the poor, the sick and the vulnerable, employing about 25,000 medical personnel and 80,000 volunteers worldwide. It is considered a sovereign subject under international law, and has diplomatic relations with 106 countries.

American Cardinal Raymond Burke is the Order’s cardinal patron, whose task is to promote relations between the Holy See and the Knights, and to keep the Holy Father informed about spiritual and religious aspects of the Order.

The ongoing wrangle, which Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin has described as an “unprecedented crisis,” first became public after the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, Fra’ Matthew Festing, dismissed Albrecht Freiherr von Boeselager as Grand Chancellor, the Order’s third-ranking official, on Dec. 6, accusing him of being ultimately responsible for the distribution of contraceptives through the Order’s humanitarian agency, Malteser International.

Despite having taken a promise of obedience to the Grand Master as a Knight of the “Second Class”, the long-serving German-born Knight refused to step down at the Dec. 6 meeting, an act of insubordination which the Order called “disgraceful” and which prompted a “disciplinary procedure” that suspended Boeselager from all offices of the Knights of Malta, according to a Dec. 13 statement.

The Order of Malta’s constitution states that obedience in the Order involves the obligation to execute any instruction as lawfully given by the Superior, dependent on the motivation of that instruction.

The reasons for Boeselager’s dismissal primarily date back to when he was Grand Hospitaller from 1989 to 2014 and in charge of Malteser International, the Knights’ large humanitarian aid agency located in 24 countries. During his tenure, the organization is documented to have distributed thousands of condoms and oral contraceptives, mainly but not exclusively to help prevent prostitutes in the Far East and Africa contracting HIV/AIDS.

“They were giving the condoms not only to patients but also to aid workers in general,” an informed source told the Register on condition of anonymity. “The ostensible motivation was to prevent the spread of AIDS, and then, in general, as a program for family planning too — birth spacing and that kind of thing which you can hardly say had to do with AIDS.”

At the end of 2014, the Grand Master became aware of the issue and in May of 2015, Fra’ Festing appointed a three-person commission to find out what had happened. The commission produced its findings in January 2016; the issue of contraceptive distribution has been further catalogued more recently by the Lepanto Institute showing that tens of thousands of contraceptives were issued from 2005 to 2012.

Boeselager had been aware of the issue for some time, and was first informed of this situation “at least since 2013, when he held the position of Grand Hospitaller, or from when Malteser International had ordered a comprehensive evaluation of all projects regarding their conformity with the teaching of the Catholic Church,” said Eugenio Ajroldi di Robbiate, communications director for the Knights of Malta.

“Since the end of 2014, and up until December 2016, there have been numerous occasions when the Grand Master and Albrecht Boeselager had discussed the affair.”

The spokesman underscored that the commission “recognized the professionalism of Malteser International and the importance of its projects in 24 countries around the world, stressing that those where a moral issue was raised were limited to Myanmar, Kenya and South Sudan.”

In a Dec. 23 statement, Boeselager protested that there were no valid grounds to resign and that an “established procedure” for his removal wasn’t followed. He also criticized an instruction from the Grand Master, saying his directive that members not in agreement with his decision should resign was “reminiscent of an authoritarian regime.”

On the contraceptive issue, the former Grand Chancellor said the distribution of condoms in Myanmar to prevent the spread of AIDS was “initiated at a local level” and “without the knowledge” of Malteser International HQ. As soon as the Order learned of the condom distribution, two of the projects were immediately halted. A third continued, he said, because an abrupt end to the project would have deprived a poor region of Myanmar of all basic medical services. That project eventually ended after the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith intervened.

Boeselager said that he has always stressed “most clearly” that he feels “bound by the teachings of the Church,” and that to “contrive an accusation” that he did not acknowledge the Church’s teaching on sexuality and the family, based on the events in Myanmar, was “absurd.”

However, an Austrian component of Malteser International continues to advocate condom use to prevent HIV infection on its website, even though the Church teaches the use of contraceptives is “gravely immoral” in any circumstances.

Hopes that the contraceptive scandal would be addressed came on Nov. 10, when Cardinal Burke was received in private audience by Pope Francis. During that meeting, the Register has learned, the Pope was “deeply disturbed” by what the cardinal told him about the contraceptive distribution. The Pope also made it clear to Cardinal Burke that he wanted Freemasonry “cleaned out” from the Order, and he demanded appropriate action.

The concern was followed up by a Dec. 1 letter to Cardinal Burke, in which the Register has learned that the Holy Father underlined the cardinal’s constitutional duty to promote the spiritual interests of the Order and remove any affiliation with groups or practices that run contrary to the moral law.

The Holy Father did not explicitly ask in the letter that Boeselager be dismissed, and contrary to reports, Cardinal Burke has insisted that he would never have told Boeselager that the Pope had specifically asked for his dismissal.

Rather, inside sources are at pains to point out that the Knights’ leadership could not see how the matter could be otherwise rectified, when great scandal was involved and no one was taking responsibility for it. The leadership believed it was clear that Boeselager was principally responsible for what had happened, especially when, during the Dec. 6 meeting, he gave no reply when asked why he did not formally protest the accuracy of the commission report.

A reliable source also recalls Boeselager saying at a reception in Rome in 2014: “We have to give contraceptives to the poor or they will die.” Boeselager also reportedly did not reply when confronted with this remark at the Dec. 6 meeting.

The Knights’ leadership, as well as Cardinal Burke, were convinced that a grave violation of the moral law had been verified, and especially as it had been going on for a period of time, the persons responsible had to be disciplined otherwise the institution would lose its credibility.

Boeselager did not respond to a request from the Register to comment on matters related to his removal.

After his dismissal, inside sources say that Boeselager went to Cardinal Parolin, erroneously telling him that he had been told by Cardinal Burke that the Pope had instructed him to resign.

Because he viewed the situation as an emergency, according to sources, Cardinal Parolin did not verify what was communicated to Boeselager by Cardinal Burke before writing a Dec. 12 letter to Fra’ Festing on behalf of the Holy Father. In it, he stressed that the Pope’s “only instructions” were those given to Cardinal Burke in his missive of Dec. 1.

“In particular, regarding the use and dissemination of methods and means contrary to the moral law, His Holiness asked that dialogue [his emphasis] be the approach used to address and resolve potential problems,” Cardinal Parolin wrote in the letter. “He never mentioned, conversely, expelling anyone.” The cardinal added that he hoped that dialogue would be used to “find a prudent way forward that is advantageous for all.”

In response, Fra’ Festing stressed that the decision he had taken was “fully in accordance with the instructions” relayed by Cardinal Burke, and asked for an urgent meeting with Cardinal Parolin to find a way forward. At that meeting, Cardinal Parolin said he wanted to institute a commission to look into the issues surrounding the dismissal. The Grand Master and the leadership of the Knights refused such a commission, mainly due to the Knights’ sovereign status that prohibits such interference in its internal governance according to international law. The Knights’ leadership was under the impression that Cardinal Parolin had backed down from the idea.

However, on Dec. 22 the Grand Master and Cardinal Burke received a letter from the Vatican communicating that a commission, or group, had been established; that the Pope’s instructions in his letter of Dec. 1 were to be halted; and that nothing more was to be done until the newly formed group had completed its work. The Vatican also informed the media the same day, although not in the daily Vatican news bolletino but instead in an email, saying the five-member body was aimed at quickly obtaining information about the dispute.

Asked if he wanted to share his views on the matter, Cardinal Burke told the Register: “I can’t make any comment on these decisions because I was never consulted. I was present at the dismissal.” But he added that what concerns him “very much” in the entire “unfortunate reaction to the Grand Master’s just action is the loss of the heart of what is at stake, namely, a grave violation of the Church’s moral teaching and, indeed, of the natural moral law by a high profile and historic Catholic institution.”

The five members of the commission of enquiry are Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Holy See’s former observer to the United Nations in Geneva, Jesuit Father Gianfranco Ghirlanda, a former rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University, Jacques de Liedekerke, a lawyer, Marc Odendall, an investment banker, and Marwan Sehnaoui, president of the Order of Malta in Lebanon.

Apart from Father Ghirlanda, all those appointed to the group are members of the Order and are known allies of Boeselager. Odendall is known to be particularly supportive of Boeselager, and Archbishop Tomasi is a good friend of Odendall, according to sources inside the Order.

Furthermore, the Register has learned that Odendall, Sehnaoui, and Archbishop Tomasi have been involved with Boeselager regarding a very large bequest to the Order, made several years ago by a benefactor resident in France, worth at least 120 million Swiss Francs ($118 million). Cardinal Parolin is understood to have been aware of the bequest since at least March of 2014.

The Secretary of State is also known to be friends with Boeselager, and on Dec. 15 he appointed his brother, Georg Freiherr von Boeselager, as one of three new members of the board of the IOR (Vatican Bank).

The cardinal declined to answer a series of questions about Boeselager’s dismissal and the papal commission, telling the Register Jan. 2 it was “not opportune” to do so.

In a Jan. 3 letter to the Knights, the Order’s new Grand Chancellor Fra’ John Critien insisted that the Order “cannot collaborate” with the papal commission, not only because of its “juridical irrelevance” with respect to the Order’s legal system, but “above all” in order to “protect its sovereign prerogatives against initiatives in form objectively aimed at questioning or limiting its sovereign character.” The Order had already publicly stated such “interference” is “unacceptable.”

He therefore stressed that lack of collaboration with the commission is purely for “juridical motivations” and is “not and can in no way be considered lack of respect towards the Commission itself nor towards the Secretariat of State of the Holy See.”

Supporters of the commission have said one of the main reasons it was set up is because the Order of Malta’s national associations support Boeselager. This does not appear to be accurate, as the Register has seen letters of support for the Grand Master from various associations, including Italy, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Chile, and Malta.

On Jan. 4, Archbishop Tomasi replied to Fra’ Critien’s Jan. 3 letter, which he said “makes some statements whose inaccuracy creates misunderstandings” and “directly contradicts the wishes of the Holy Father.” According to the archbishop, the issue with respect to Boeselager’s dismissal “is not the sovereignty of the Order, but the reasonable claim of questionable procedures and lack of proven valid cause for the action taken. Also, he said, “there has never been the request for the resignation or dismissal of anyone, on the part of the Holy See and especially of the Holy Father.”

“Regarding what Your Excellency calls the juridical irrelevance of the Commission, the arguments used to replace the Grand Chancellor prompted its establishment by the Holy Father since the perceived irregularity of the procedure has deeply divided the Order,” Archbishop Tomasi stated.

Both the Order and the Holy See are keen for the matter to be speedily resolved, and despite the protests from the Order’s highest levels, the Vatican continues to view the papal commission, which had its first meeting Jan. 5, as the best way to achieve this.

In comments to the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero Dec. 31, Cardinal Parolin said the commission would “gather information and then we will see.”
TERESA BENEDETTA
00domenica 8 gennaio 2017 23:27

'The horror! The horror!'

The pope likens traditional Catholics to Herod
by Donald R. McClarey

January 7, 2017

We can always depend upon our Pope to disappoint. He uses the Feast of Epiphany to lash out at traditional Catholics:
“Longing for God draws us out of our iron-clad isolation, which makes us think that nothing can change. Longing for God shatters our dreary routines and impels us to make the changes we want and need. Longing for God has its roots in the past yet does not remain there: it reaches out to the future.

Believers who feel this longing are led by faith to seek God, as the Magi did, in the most distant corners of history, for they know that there the Lord awaits them.[But believers have already found God, otherwise they would not be believers. They do not have to travel far afield to find him, since he is everywhere, and for the believer, God is always in his heart.] They go to the peripheries, to the frontiers, to places not yet evangelized, to encounter their Lord. Nor do they do this out of a sense of superiority, but rather as beggars who cannot ignore the eyes of those who for whom the Good News is still uncharted territory.

[Here, he seems to be speaking about missionaries - not ordinary stay-at-home Catholics whose primary mission is within their family, the domestic Church. But has he not said repeatedly that everyone, whatever their religion or lack thereof, is just 'in the eyes of God, good as you are, and you do not have to change'? By which he also means, you don't have to worry about Jesus's 'Go and sin no more', because God will forgive you again and again]. And in his repeated affirmations that he does not want to convert anyone to Catholicism, does he not abolish the very concept of mission in the Church in accordance with Christ's Great Mandate to his apostles? All this formulaic talk of 'going to the peripheries' to seek God is sanctimonious blather for 'reach out to those in need and help them if you can'. Which, I am sure, every conscientious Christian does not lose sight of, because it is one concrete exercise of the commandment to 'Love your neighbor'.]

“An entirely different attitude reigned in the palace of Herod, a short distance from Bethlehem, where no one realized what was taking place. As the Magi made their way, Jerusalem slept. It slept in collusion with a Herod who, rather than seeking, also slept. He slept, anesthetized by a cauterized conscience. He was bewildered, afraid. [Herod was not bewildered at all. He was completely clear he did not want any human being around who could possibly challenge his temporal power, and acted quickly to make sure no child born in Bethlehem within a certain time frame would live to challenge him in any way.]

It is the bewilderment which, when faced with the newness that revolutionizes history, closes in on itself and its own achievements, its knowledge, its successes.... A bewilderment born of fear and foreboding before anything that challenges us, that calls into question our certainties and our truths, our ways of clinging to the world and this life.

Go here to read the rest.
http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Pope:-Magi-reflect-the-attitudes-of-the-believer,-Herod-the-bewilderment-of-those-who-turn-inward-39593.html

Christ told us what His followers could expect in this world. Being insulted by a bad pope [who makes far-fetched analogies to push his tiresome continuing screeds against Catholics who do not think like him] is small potatoes all things considered.


Because of a family emergency that kept me up all night and all this morning, I missed my TLM at Holy Innocents and had to go to the church of St. Gregory the Great next block from where I live for the 11:30 Mass. But even if the church is named for St. Gregory, and counts many Hispanics and French-speaking Caribbeans among its parishioners (in a heavily Jewish Upper West Side neighborhood), it does not offer the traditional Mass at all.

The last time I was there, when Benedict XVI was Pope, they at least had the Benedettian altar arrangement, with six candles and the Crucifix. Today there was nothing at all, not even flowers, on the versus-populum altar - and it bothered me that the celebrant, his deacon and the lay minister who led almost all the prayers and of course, read the 'readings', would genuflect in front of this empty altar everytime they had to pass it, whereas the Tabernacle with the Blessed Sacrament and the Crucifix are on the altar-proper behind them.

Who are they genuflecting to? The congregation? An altar that does not even carry any image of the Lord (nor, for that matter, the holy relic each church altar is supposed to have when it is consecrated)?

Anyway, this being the Feast of the Epiphany in the Novus Ordo, the Mass was not the usual low Mass - it began with a processional with a cross-bearer and two acolytes followed by the celebrant and his deacon, but as the Cross went by the pews, no one knelt as everyone does at a traditional liturgy.

And I had forgotten that in the Novus Ordo, or at least in this particular Mass, the celebrant himself remains seated during the entire Liturgy of the Word, until it comes time for him to give the sermon. Since the pews were only furnished with a hymnal and a card with some parts of the Mass, I did my best to follow the Mass with the Traditional Missal (and making sure to pray even the parts left out in the Novus Ordo).
- The lay minister did not intone the Kyrie, the choir alone did;
- there was no Gloria but a hymn to which verses the congregation responded with the 'Glooooooooooooooooria...in excelsis Deo' familiar from the Christmas carol;
- at the recitation of the Credo (mercifully the entire Nicene Creed), no one but me knelt at the words corresponding to "ET INCARNATUS EST DE SPIRITU SANCTO EX MARIA VIRGINE, ET HOMO FACTUS EST';
- the canon was, of course, abbreviated, and before I knew it, it was the Consecration (no bells to mark it);
- after the lay minister read a series of prayers for which the Mass was being offered, he called on the congregation to say aloud any special prayer they wished to share. When about ten or more persons had done so, I decided I wanted offer my prayer, too, so I spoke out: "That the One Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church may always uphold the deposit of faith, and that Pope Francis may be enlightened". A pregnant five-second pause followed before the congregation said the ritual "For this we pray", or whatever the right formulation is. And no one else added a prayer.

Anyway, at communion time, everyone in the church took Communion. I did, too, in the line where the celebrant was giving it (not from the 'eucharistic minister'), and was thankful to receive the Eucharist on the tongue and on my knees, my head properly covered with a veil. And that, despite all my misgivings about the NO and my personal shortcomings, I did 'pray the Holy Mass' as Pope St. Pius X exhorts us, the Mass as 'the highest prayer that exists'.

Oh yes, about the homily! The priest spoke properly of the gifts of the Magi, and said that everytime we do something good to anyone, we are, in our own small way, offering gifts to the Lord. He cited Matthew 25, 35-35, one of the Gospel passages most often cited by Pope Francis (in which Jesus says "Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me"). But when I feared that he was going to continue with the usual Bergoglian bleeding-heart rhetoric, he surprised me by saying instead, "It does not have to be anything big or material to show you love your neighbor. A smile or a good word will do". Thank you, Father, although it might have been even better if he had added "or a prayer, if it is all you can afford to give".

Too bad there is no afternoon Latin Mass at Holy Innocents on Sundays, and I don't say that to mean that the Novus Ordo is 'less valid' as a Mass. Only that, given a choice, I would always choose to go to a TLM than to an NO Mass.
TERESA BENEDETTA
00domenica 8 gennaio 2017 23:59
WHERE WILL MADNESS END???

I am still not sure if this is a serious report or a satire...But Briggs is a legitimate scientist, professor of statistics at Cornell University, and a serious scholar of the weather and related matters, though he is firmly on the side of those who oppose the pseudo-science of the climate catastrophists...

When marriage can be anything,
marriage can be anything
People are 'marrying' roller coasters and themselves,
mothers their sons, and fathers their daughters!
By WILLIAM M BRIGGS

Published on January 8, 2017

It is only irrational animus, bigotry, and hatred that causes some to deny that human beings and fairground rides cannot marry. Love is love, and sometimes love extends to the soaring tracks, twisting hairpin curves, and thrilling loop-de-loops of roller coasters.

Yes. Two women have married, not each other, which would not be unusual these days, but each has married a roller coaster. Not the same roller coaster, of course; that would be absurd; different roller coasters.

One lady, a Miss Wolfe, 33, church organist, fell in love with the roller coaster in Knoebels Amusement Park, Pennsylvania. According to one report, “Although she faces discrimination from employers, most of her family and friends have been supportive. ‘I’m not hurting anyone and I can’t help it,’ she said. ‘It’s a part of who I am.'”

Don’t scoff. No one chooses to be an objectum-sexual; it is something which is forced upon one. What’s that? What’s an objectum-sexual? As defined by the second wedded lady, Linda, 56, who tied her knot to the backside of a roller coaster, an objectum-sexual is a person who “has romantic feelings for inanimate objects.”

Psychology Today reports many are objectum-sexuals, folks who view their objects of love as “equal” partners. Who isn’t for Equality? Reports are coming in from the across the globe of objectum-sexuals marrying smart phones, steam engines, video game characters, rocks, trees, dolls, electronic devices, radios, pillows, cars, and, yes, the Eiffel Tower. [Briggs forgest dogs and other animals, which was all the mode before this new thing for inanimate objects.]

Animus, bigotry, and hatred not only motivates people to deny the rights of objectum-sexuals, but also to disparage the needs and desires of self-sexuals. Self-sexuals are people who love best themselves, making it natural that the objects of their matrimonial instincts are, well, themselves.

No less conservative an organ than Good Housekeeping reports that “self-marriage is a small but growing movement, with consultants and self-wedding planners popping up across the world.”

One such person is Brooklynite Erika Anderson who recently married herself. “It wasn’t an easy decision,” she said. “I had cold feet for 35 years. But then I decided it was time to settle down. To get myself a whole damn apartment. To celebrate birthday #36 by wearing an engagement ring and saying: YES TO ME. I even made a registry, because this is America.”

There is even, because this is America, a website, I Married Me, which advises readers to “Choose love.” Love is, after all, love. The site provides the unofficial motto for the self-marriage movement, “To honor myself is to understand and acknowledge that I am worthy”. Anybody can marry themselves, even folks who are already married to others, or to objects.

“It’s not a legal process — you won’t get any tax breaks for marrying yourself. It’s more a ‘rebuke’ of tradition, says Rebecca Traister, author of All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation.

Tradition insists that marriage is between one man, one woman; the two become “one flesh.” The pairs came together to procreate and care for not just each other, but for their created families. Marriages were the result of the natural state of mankind, driven by necessities of biology, the environment, and even religion. No government dared risk interfering with this fundamental and organic process. To have meddled would have invited charges of monumental hubris.

But things change. Governments recognized Equality trumped Nature, and so mandated that history and tradition be overthrown. But first they were borrowed from. History and tradition insisted that marriage was the state between two people, so government meddling dictated any two people could marry.

But it will quickly be realized (and is being realized) that history and tradition can be no guide whatsoever, because history and tradition, while they do say marriage was for pairs, also insist, in the strongest possible terms, that marriage is only for man-woman pairs.

So history and tradition must be rebuked.

Those who want to keep with capital-T Tradition are no longer allowed to do so. Traditionalists are still allowed to marry one another in the traditional way, but they are now forced to agree that government-defined “marriages” are equivalent to actual marriages. Governments have not, as yet, moved to “bless” object- and self-marriages, but there is no good reason for them not to.

And if people can marry roller coasters and themselves, why cannot sons marry their mothers? Cosmopolitan reports, “A Mom Fell in Love With Her Son and Plans to Have Children With Him,” which they call “genetic sexual attraction”. There is already a forum for interested people. Why not marriage?

After all, when marriage can be anything, marriage can be anything.
TERESA BENEDETTA
00lunedì 9 gennaio 2017 01:23




ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI



Wasn't expecting the page change. Please see preceding page for many earlier posts today, 1/8/17.



January 8, 2017 headlines

Canon212.com


PewSitter



BOMBSHELL EWTN INTERVIEW (Arroyo, Royal, Murray):
The pope's recent governing actions are
like a caricature of corporate America
by Oakes Spalding

JANUARY 7, 2017

Today's interview, from Raymond Arroyo's World Over Live, is a great indication of where the center of gravity is now moving within the ranks of the knowledgable Catholic faithful.

The interview was with author and apologetist Robert Royal and canon lawyer and priest Gerald Murray. I think it's fair to say that all (including Arroyo) were highly critical of Francis and the recent direction of his pontificate in the wake of Amoris Laetitia.

Among other things they addressed the report - now confirmed by many sources - that the Pope ordered the firings of three faithful [to the faith, but I suppose considered unfaithful to the pope] priests from important positions at the CDF and then belligerently exclaimed that, as Pope, he didn't have to explain himself to anyone.

Hence the jab about corporate America.

The three were somewhat restrained and "respectful" - they didn't claim Francis was a heretic or the forerunner to the Anti-Christ, etc. - but the overall negative sentiments were obvious. And I suspect all three may be less restrained in private.

Schism is coming. [NO, IT IS NOT! Certainly, Bergoglio and his church will not 'break away' from the One Holy Catholic Church since they appear confident they have set the stage for 'irreversibly' remaking the Church of Christ into Bergoglio's ideological image and likeness. Nor will faithful Catholics leave the Church all because of a potentially if not actually heretical pope - after all, he won't live forever, and we can sit out the Bergoglian crisis as the early Church did the Arian crisis, relying on the faith and its bimillennial deposit to live CAtholic lives the best we can, while ignoring Bergoglio's anti-Catholic moves.]

More and more fence sitters are taking sides in their own way. [Which is true! If Bergoglio has lost EWTN, as it would seem he has - with its most prominent personalities Arroyo and Pentin leading the charge against his anti-Catholicism - then he has lost the world's largest Catholic media network (the Galantini gang of Bergoglians at Avvenire and TV2000 in Italy are paltry by comparison) , and Mother Angelica must be happily beaming from heaven that her spiritual heirs are taking the ascendant at the EWTN empire.]

And no, I don't want schism. No true Catholic would. Francis recently privately admitted that he may be the cause of it. But everyone will have to answer to God for the part that he played.

Everyone.

C.S. Lewis once had a character say in That Hideous Strength:
If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family—anything you like — at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren’t quite so sharp; and that there’s going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous.

Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder.

Obviously Lewis didn't have the early 21st century crisis (stemming from the late 20th century crisis) of the Catholic Church in mind, exactly. But the point is still apt.

There is no refuge. More and more, to exhibit even "apparent neutrality" is to take a side. Which side are you on? [An early combox reply said "Christ's!" It is worth noting that while all those opposing Bergoglio's anti-Catholic statements and actions keep referring to what Christ taught - and Christ as 'the way, the truth and the life' - the pope's myrmidons only defend him, and his right and rightness in changing things around from what Christ himself defined. St. Benedict's rule, "Never place anything ahead of Christ!", appears totally lost on them.]

Meanwhile, a small sign of hope from Poland...But it is indicative that one feels compelled to 'celebrate' a 40% Mass attendance in a country that is 92 percent Catholic. At first, I thought the headline read "Sunday Mass attendance rises in Poland by 40 percent" which struck me as quite miraculous if true. But of course, I came thudding down from my wishful thinking perch as soon as I read it right...
Another Europe: Sunday Mass Attendance Rises in Poland to 40 Percent

The other Europe:
Polish Mass attendance climbs
[39.1% to 39.8% is a small step up but hardly a climb]
by Gerda Weiser
Translated by EPONYMOUS FLOWER from

January 5, 2017

WARSAW - There is "another Europe". The latest figures from Poland make it clear. The number of Sunday Massgoers rose to 40 percent in 2016.

According to the statistical institute of the Catholic Church in Poland, Sunday Massgoers in the survey population increased from 39.1 percent in 2015 to 39.8 percent in 2016. The number of Communion recipients rose from 16.3 percent to 17 percent, as Pawel Rytel-Andrianik reports in Zenit.

Poland has one of the densest parish nets in the Catholic world. About seven percent of all parishes are run by religious orders. 92 percent of Poles profess the Catholic faith. The number of priests working in parishes is almost 21,000. More than 7,000 religious are also active in the parishes.

In 2015 369,000 baptisms and 270,000 First Communions were offered and 134,000 marriages were consecrated. The figures point to a healthy, positive demographic development.

In more than 60,000 parishes around 2.5 million Catholics are active. A further 1.8 million Catholics are voluntarily active in the social sector, in child care, disability facilities, schools and hospices.

Polish catholicity is characterized by a rich Marian tradition and diverse forms of popular piety. The rosary and liturgical functions, which are based on the Marian works of Fatima, play a particularly strong role.

[For a meaningful comparison, I wish the report stated current statistics for a European country with the same total Catholic population as Poland, and statistics for Poland itself at the peak of John Paul II's Pontificate.]
TERESA BENEDETTA
00lunedì 9 gennaio 2017 03:14


I am sure I'm not the only one who did a double take on the above headline from EWTN's Great Britain correspondent, Deacon Nick Donnelly, who is usally a reliable reporter and alert commentator. His report begins this way:

In a recent interview, Bishop Schneider explained the importance of not losing a characteristic of the Catholic Church, which is being subject to the Pope. Bishop Schneider, who recently defended the Four Cardinals who submitted the dubia, made his comments in response to a question about the SSPX's discussions with the Holy See.
“If you remain canonically autonomous for too long, you run the risk of losing a characteristic of the Catholic Church, that is, to be subject to the pope. We cannot make our subjection to the Vicar of Christ dependent upon the person of the pope; this would not be faith. You cannot say that “I don’t believe in this pope, I don’t submit, I am going to wait until one comes along that I like.” [Surely he culd not have meant that being 'subject to the pope' means being subject unconditionally, without the critical exercise that even laymen are called on by Canon 212, if they have good reason to believe that the pope is teaching something not in accordance with the deposit of faith. Otherwise, forget the DUBIA!] This is not Catholic, it is not supernatural; it is human. It is a lack of supernaturality and trust in Divine Providence, that God is the one who guides the Church. This is a danger for the SSPX.”

I know that a Spanish website recently had a lengthy interview with Mons. Schneider - which is part of my year-start posting backlog - but I searched it twice to find out where he said the above and cannot find it in the site's own published transcript of the interview - in which, in fact, Mons. Schneider notes that when he was asked by the Holy See to visit two FSSPX seminaries, he very gladly noted that the picture of Pope Francis was on display at the sites.

So, I don't think the FSSPX has ever not recognized the pope as head of the Church - they certainly are not sede-vacantists. Mons. Fellay's official photographs always show the reigning pope's photograph in the background. Nor has the FSSPX ever made a statement about 'not believing this pope' (whoever he is or was) and 'waiting until one comes along that we like'.

The quotation does appear in the site's compilation of 'headlines' - or headline-making quotations from the Schneider interview. It must have come from the full interview, of which apparently, the website did not furnish the complete transcript. I am posting that compilation here to get an overview of the Schneider interview.

Interview with Mons. Schneider:
Headlines

January 4, 2017

“There are many places where priests act more like Protestant ministers than Catholic priests”.

“There are families that must travel more than 100 km (60 mi) so that they can go to a dignified Mass and hear sound doctrine”.

“The faithful must ask the priests for kneelers so that they can kneel”.

“We have a eucharistic-heart disease, and as long as we fail to heal it, the whole body will remain ill and will not produce fruit”.

“In today’s climate, it’s a true miracle that we have vocations”.

“Gender ideology is a depravity, a final form of Marxism”.

“If they can, parents should withdraw their children from schools where they are taught gender ideology”.

“There is a mentality of radical relativism within the Church”.

“We should speak up so that the Magisterium might speak clearly”.

“With moral relativism, especially concerning the reception of Communion by the divorced and remarried, we want God to do our will, and not for us to do His”.

“A sacramental female diaconate contradicts the nature of the Church”.

“We have to love the pope supernaturally, praying for him, but not practicing a form of papolatry”.

On the FSSPX and Mons. Lefebvre
“I am convinced that in the present circumstances, Msgr. Lefebvre would accept the canonical proposal of a personal prelature without hesitation”.

“Msgr. Lefebvre was a man with a deep sensus ecclesiae”.

“The episcopal ordinations were done in 1988 because in good conscience he thought that he had to do it, as an extreme act, and at the same time, he said that the situation should not last a long time”.

“If you remain canonically autonomous for too long, you run the risk of losing a characteristic of the Catholic Church, that is, to be subject to the pope.”

“We cannot make our subjection to the Vicar of Christ dependent upon the person of the pope; this would not be faith. You cannot say that “I don’t believe in this pope, I don’t submit, I am going to wait until one comes along that I like.” This is not Catholic, it is not supernatural; it is human. It is a lack of supernaturality and trust in Divine Providence, that God is the one who guides the Church. This is a danger for the SSPX”.

“I have asked Msgr. Fellay not to delay his acceptance any longer, and I trust in Providence, though it is not possible to have 100% certainty”.

“It is my great wish that the SSPX might be recognized and established within the regular structure of the Church as soon as possible, and this will be for the benefit of all, for them and for us. Actually it will be a new force in this great battle for the purity of the Faith”.

“I have told Msgr. Fellay: “Monsignor, we need your presence to join together with all of the good forces in the Church to achieve this union.”

On the Traditional Mass
“The movement to restore the traditional Mass is the work of the Holy Spirit, and is unstoppable”,

“If the Fathers of Vatican II witnessed a Mass like the one we know today and a traditional Mass, the majority would say that the traditional Mass is what they want, and not the other”,

The traditional liturgy is the liturgy of Vatican II, perhaps with small changes. [????]

Before I post the 'Adelante la Fe' interview, Deacon Nick had a more interesting post on Mons. Schneider earlier, speaking about a truly critical subject that hardly anyone in the Church talks about openly. In fact, I don't even remember Benedict XVI talking about Freemasonry, other than the CDF's reiteration of the Church's condemnation of the patently anti-Catholic movement:

Freemasonry is an 'instrument of Satan'
seeking to destroy the Church, says Bishop Schneider
by Deacon Nick Donnelly

January 5, 2017

Bishop Athanasius Schneider, a collaborator with Cardinal Burke and auxiliary bishop of Astana, Kazakhstan, recently gave a lecture on "Mary, conqueror of all heresies", in which he warned that Freemasonry is an "instrument of Satan".

Bishop Schneider made this observation in the context of 2017 being the 300th anniversary of the foundation of Freemasonry with the establishment of the first Grand Lodge in London.

Bishop Schneider described the past 300 years of Freemasonry as turbulent and hidden, in pursuit of a revolutionary and subversive ambition. He described Freemasonry as a "tool of Satan" that has largely shied away from daylight since its foundation.

Bishop Schneider went on to recall St Maximilian Kolbe's recollections of the Freemasons' aggressive celebrations of their 200th anniversary in Rome during 1917, in the middle of the First World War. He referred to how St Maximilian said Freemasonry had openly declared war on the Catholic Church.

The Freemason littered Rome with posters showing the Archangel Michael defeated on the ground trampled beneath a triumphant Lucifer. In their protests against the Catholic Church, the Freemasons also displayed the black flag of the heretic Giordano Bruno, a Dominican friar who promoted materialistic pantheism, a central belief of Freemasonry. (Bruno also denied fundamental doctrines of the Faith).

As a consequence of witnessing the Freemasons' hostility towards the Church in 1917, St Maximilian Kolbe decided to found the Militia Immaculatae [The Knights of the Immaculate] to counteract the actions of Lucifer.

In his lecture, Bishop Schneider went on to declare that the goal of Freemasonry is to eliminate the entire doctrine of God, especially Catholic doctrine. To achieve this goal the Freemasons have used many associations and societies. According to Bishop Schneider, Freemasonry seeks the dissolution of morality because they are convinced that unless they corrupt morality they cannot defeat the Catholic Church since they cannot defeat it with logical arguments.

Bishop Schneider concluded his reflections on Freemasonry by observing that the masonic action to defeat the Catholic Church was currently very topical again. In response to this, he reflected that undoubtedly the Blessed Virgin Mary will in the end crush the greatest Christian threat of all time: the heresy of the Antichrist.

Earlier in 2016 Bishop Schneider gave an interview to Daniel Blackman for One Peter Five during which he discussed the subversive influence of Freemasonry: quote]Bishop Schneider: Freemasonry is in itself intrinsically not compatible with Christian or Catholic faith, it is intrinsically not compatible, because the nature of freemasonry is anti-Christian. They deny Christ, and they deny the objective truths, they promote relativism, which is contrary to the truth, to the Gospel. So they promote the doctrinal errors of the Masonic philosophy. This is incompatible with Christian and Catholic faith.

Freemasonry has also an esoteric aspect, which is not Christian. They have rituals and ceremonies which are esoteric, which they openly admit, and such ceremonials are contrary to the faith. Their symbols and rituals demonstrate that they are against the divine truths in the Gospel – these things show that Freemasonry is another religion. I repeat, Freemasonry is another religion, an anti-Christ religion.

Even when they do good works, philanthropy and so forth, these dangerous things remain. Their philanthropy is not a justification for us to accept Freemasonry, just because of their good philanthropic work. I will never recognise their doctrines and rituals which are against the Divine truths of the Gospel. The Church can never accept this.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 1983 declaration on freemasonry is still valid. According to this Declaration it is a mortal sin to become a Freemason – even pope Francis has not changed this law. This teaching is official and still valid.

In 2013 on his return flight from Rio de Janeiro, Pope Francis made reference to a Masonic lobby. Recently, Cardinal Ravasi, in the Italian paper Il Sole 24 Ore, called for new dialogue and shared values with Freemasonry. Has Masonry won in the Church?
Of course we know that Freemasonry is one of the most powerful influences at all levels of human society. This is manifest and clear. Theoretically, when one is a leader in a very influential anti-Christian organisation, there is the tendency to infiltrate the organisation which is your enemy, it is very logical. So it is logical, over many centuries, that they would have tried and probably succeeded to infiltrate themselves into various levels of the Church – this is clear to me.

It is difficult to demonstrate concretely, to identify, who is a member. It is very difficult and dangerous, because someone may be accused of being a member, then it is proved the person is not a formally a member. It’s because of the secrecy and esotericism of Freemasonry that makes it very difficult.

One can assume that a cleric, a priest, bishop, or cardinal, has some connections with the masons by his speech. We hear clerics speaking like Freemasons, clearly, when they open their mouths, they use terms and concepts that are typically masonic. He could be a member, but you have to prove it, but at least when he speaks he has the spirit of the Freemason - they may not be formal members, but some bishops and cardinals speak clearly with a Masonic spirit. I stress this does not mean they are formally members of the Freemasons.

Dr Rudolf Graber, Bishop of Regensburg (1903-1992), wrote about Freemasonry's plans to destroy the Church in his book, "Athanasius and the Church of our time". He quotes from a letter written by a Freemason in 1839:
"We must not individualize vice; in order for it to grow to the proportions of patriotism and hatred of the Church, we must generalize it.

Catholicism is no more afraid of a sharp dagger than the monarchy is, but these two foundations of the social order are likely to collapse through corruption; we at all events never allow ourselves to be corrupted.

Do not, then, let us make martyrs but let us popularize vice among the masses. Whatever their five senses strive after shall be satisfied...Create hearts full of vice and you will no longer have any Catholics. That is the corruption, on a large scale, which we have undertaken, the corruption of the people by the clergy and that of the clergy by us, the corruption which leads the way to our digging the Church's grave". (Athanasius and the Church of our time, p.40).


TERESA BENEDETTA
00martedì 10 gennaio 2017 08:51



Wasn't Pope Francis upposed to be carrying on
the progressivist vision of Vatican II to completion?
St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI tried to give a shape and finality to the reforms of Vatican-II.
With Pope Francis, the debates seem back where they were in the early years following the Council.

January 9, 2017

A recent article published in the online magazine The Week and then mentioned in various American media shed light on a particular modus operandi of Pope Francis in tackling the issue of abuse of minors by clergy.

According to the article, Pope Francis is dismantling the set of reforms put into effect by St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI in order to restore the primary responsibility for countering clerical sex abuse to local churches.

[Have I misunderstood the set-up since 2001 all these years? I thought local dioceses still have and ought to have primary responsibility for this, but if they fail to act or act incorrectly, then the complaint can be sent on by anyone to the CDF for investigation and action. Or the local bishops themselves can raise the problem to the CDF if they feel they cannot handle it. But the two cases Gagliarducci cites have nothing to do with decentralizing the activity at all. Nor centralizing in the CDF.

In both, the pope appears to simply have decided he would take charge of everything, no need for the CDF - in the Barros case (Karadima's protege whom he named a Bishop in Chile , without even a semblance of an investigation, despite massive opposition from the faithful), and in the Inzoli case (restoring the priestly faculties two years after the man was defrocked by Benedict XVI, supposedly at the intercession of people close to Bergoglio. BTW, since Dougherty's The Week article came out, where we Anglophones first became aware of the Inzoli case - a truly shameless and shameful one - I had been expecting an immediate protest from the Vatican and an explanation/clarification of the facts about the case, but, if we are to learn anything from the non-handling of the DUBIA, we just aren't going to get any explanations for inconvenient facts.]

To cut a long story short, Pope Francis’s reforms in general seem to be dual-faceted. These two faces are in the end very different. On the one hand, there is a strong push toward the autonomy of local churches, toward a decentralization of functions, especially in doctrinal terms, as is hinted at in the Apostolic Exhortation “Evangelii gaudium,” the real program of the pontificate. [How much more decentralized can it get than the free hand given in AL not just to bishops but to priest-confessors to use their 'discernment' to decide whether remarried divorcees banned from communion should be allowed it after all because they may actually be in a 'state of grace'!!

On the other hand, one notes a progressive centralization, concentrating all the decision-making powers in the Pope himself or in his restricted circle, thus somehow taking power away from the Curial dicasteries that in fact represent a sign of the Pope’s collegial governing. [I think the Curia is far less a show of collegiality than a necessary administrative structure through which a pope must govern the Church, a structure that dates back centuries, long before 'collegiality' became a contemporary buzzword.]

It is then important to understand the rationale of Pope Francis’s reforms. This rationale does not seem fixed, but always evolving. [Which is why it is a misnomer to call it a 'rationale' - which is defined as "the fundamental reason or reasons serving to account for something" or "a reasoned exposition of principles". Because anything fundamental must be fixed, any principle must be fixed - if it is not, if it evolves with circumstances, then it is neither fundamental nor a principle!]

It [this supposed 'rationale'] has among its “pros” that it is supported by Big Media, because it represents positions that the secular media really wants to see the Pope take. On the other hand, his framework is never clear, that decisions seem always to evolve and never to be part of a clear, broad, long-term project. [DIM=pt][Which further shows it is no rationale at all, but rather a case-by-case arbitrary reaction, which can therefore not have a framework at all because it is nothing but relativistic play-dough!]

This 'rationale' was well explained by Bishop Marcello Semeraro, Secretary of the Council of Cardinals, in an article on Curia reform published some weeks ago by Il Regno magazine. Pope Francis outlined it completely in his Christmas Address to the Roman Curia, in which he made a sort of summary of all the reforms he had made, with a comprehensive list of all the “motu proprio” edicts of his pontificate.

What in the end is the core of Pope Francis’s [inherently changeable, being relativistic and situational] rationale?. The issue of sex abuse by clergy offers a good example. It allows us to understand how everything can be traced back to interpretations of the Second Vatican Council.

During their pontificates, St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI tried to give a shape and a finality to the Council’s reforms. With Pope Francis, it seems that the debates have returned to those early years immediately after the Council.

All the issues of this particular debate are as present as they were at the beginning, starting from the push toward local churches as an alternative power to the Pope’s.

Delicta graviora – those “most grave crimes” that include cases of sexual abuse of minors – have a story. They are crimes reserved to the ccompetence of the former Holy Office (now the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) under the Code of Canon Law issued by Pope Benedict XV in 1917. These crimes led to the promulgation of “Crimen Sollicitationis”, a document that provided detailed instructions to diocesan tribunals about how to deal with priests who exploited the Sacrament of Penance in order to make sexual advances on the penitent. The document also included a short section about the so-called crimen pessimum [worst crime], homosexual behavior by a member of the clergy, the norms for which were then extended to the crime of sexual abuse of minors.

After the Second Vatican Council, a wide debate re-opened every previously established principle for renewed discussion, for example, the general idea of decentralizing power by giving more responsibility to bishops, and – even more – by valuing the capacity of the local bishops for discernment of matters in their own dioceses. Some experts also raised the question about the “anachronism” of a judicial trial for clergy under the procedures provided for by canon law, preferring instead a “pastoral approach.”

Obviously, this issue should be interpreted through the lens of those particular years. The approach was not aimed at covering-up cases of sexual abuse. But with time it became evident that the management of cases at a local level could lead to some “gaps” in the reporting system.

Pope Benedict XVI explained the particular climate of those years in the pastoral letter he sent to Catholics of Ireland in 2010, a milestone document for understanding his approach to the clerical sexual abuse scandal and to the way the Church has moved ever since.

Benedict wrote:
“The programme of renewal proposed by the Second Vatican Council was sometimes misinterpreted and indeed, in the light of the profound social changes that were taking place, it was far from easy to know how best to implement it. In particular, there was a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations. [Note, Mr. Galiarducci: that is Bergoglio's rationale - and the word is used rightly this time, for AL Chapter 8!]

It is in this overall context that we must try to understand the disturbing problem of child sexual abuse, which has contributed in no small measure to the weakening of faith and the loss of respect for the Church and her teachings”.
Benedict’s analysis explains – but obviously does not justify – what happened prior to and during the years of scandals.

From 1962 to 2001, Crimen Sollicitationis was applied only in cases of abuse involving the Sacrament of Penance. At that time, the Holy Office did not have juridical competence over cases of sexual abuse, but only those that dealt with the abuses occurring in conjunction with sacramental confession. For this reason, during this period only a few cases of abuse were reported to the Holy Office. [Yet, when Joseph Ratzinger became pope, secular media like the BBC peddled outright lies that Crimen Sollicitationis - a 1962 document they attributed to Ratzinger who in 1962 was a university professor in Bonn - was meant to cover up sex abuse crimes by the clergy!]

In 1983, a new Code of Canon Law was issued, but it was not of any help. Canon 1395 states that trial for abuse must take place in the diocese, and the procedures g0et more complicated. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, asked Cardinal José Rosalio Castillo Lara for clarifications – the Cardinal was then president of the Pontifical Council for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts. Cardinal Ratzinger asked how the norms in Canon Law could be correctly interpreted in order to laicize priests who committed sexual abuse.

This happened in 1988. In the same year, Pastor Bonus, the Apostolic Constitution that regulates functions and competences of the Curia offices, was issued. Pastor Bonus extends the range of crimes under the jurisdiction of the CDF even though the Constitution does not provide any list of such crimes.

Because of this omission, local diocesan bishops retained the responsibility for trying priests who committed abuse. In practice, therefore, competence for overseeing such matters in the Roman Curia remained with the Congregation for the Clergy.

2001 was the turning point. After the pedophilia scandal exploded in the Archdiocese of Boston, St. John Paul II issued the motu proprio Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela, through which the authority for investigating cases of abuse was transferred from the Congregation for the Clergy to the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. In 2002, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued the instruction De Delictis Gravioribus, which outlined a detailed procedure to tackle abuse cases.

Centralization was needed, as in the most cases abuse could keep on taking place because dioceses failed to report cases of clergy sexual abuse of minors to Rome, and in many cases they simply moved abuser priests from parish to parish, rather than punishing them.

Joseph Ratzinger was the main inspiration for this change, and he carried on with this path when he was elected Pope. In July 2010, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith introduced some modifications to Canon Law that made clearer how the dicastery would examine and punish cases of clerical sexual abuse of minors. In the very same year, the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith asked Bishops Conferences from all over the world to issue and adopt guidelines in countering abuses starting from May 2012. This letter highlighted three key points: education of future priests or religious brothers, assistance for convicted priests, collaboration with the civil authorities.

Certainly the local churches did not stay silent or inactive. Just two examples: the Commission that the Belgian Church set up after the shock of the Dutroux case in the mid-90s, and the guidelines issued by the Bishops of Ireland during the 90s that help to shed light on scandals in 2010.

But the new, centralized approach, bore much fruit, as proven by the numbers provided by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in January, 2014, on the occasion of a hearing of the Holy See before a UN committee.

These are the data: from 2011 and 2012, Pope Benedict XVI laicized some 400 priests, and the trend signals an increase of defrockings since 2009. In 2009, 171 priests were defrocked; in 2010, there were no priests laicized out of 527 reports to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; in 2011, there were 260 priests defrocked out of 404 reported cases; in 2012, there were 418 reported cases and 124 priests laicized.

It is noteworthy that, despite these data, Pope Benedict XVI’s approach was heavily criticized. [It wasn't his approach the critics bore down on. It was on Benedict XVI himself, whom his critics would not give any credit at all for the fact that from the time the CDF was given competence over clerical abuse cases, he singlehandedly promoted and executed the Church's firm and clear response to the clerical abuse 'scandal'. They had nothing say about the 'approach', because they even refused to acknowledge that the Church was doing what it could by way of correcting the culture that tolerated the abuses and that led bishops to cover up for their erring priests, getting justice for the victims of the abusers, and pointing the way for abusers to make amends and reparation for their crimes.]

It is also noteworthy that, considering these numbers, Pope Francis’s reforms – once again, based on a major centralization through the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, and at the same time major responsibility allocated to the peripheries – were considered effective. [They were? What reforms? With what effects? When?]

It is finally noteworthy that the press is struck by Pope Francis’s lack of forgiveness toward those responsible for the scandals – as he demonstrated again last week on December 28, in a letter addressed to all Bishops on the occasion of the Feast of the Holy Innocents, in which he reiterated the line of zero tolerance toward perpetrators – but at the same time the press forgets that Pope Benedict XVI met with victims, and that St. John Paul II addressed the issue clearly and strongly.
[1) In what way is it noteworthy at all, when it has been SOP - pathetic, preposterous and patently false- from Day 1 of this pontificate for the media to consider everything Bergoglio does to be the first ever by any pope!
2) 'Zero tolerance' is not 'lack of forgiveness'. Zero tolerance has to do with considering sex abuses by priests, especially against minors, a complete NO-NO! that must be punished promptly and accordingly. But Gagliarducci;s awkward formulation brings up one of Fr. Hunwicke's favorite conundrums - in that it would seem Bergoglian mercy can apply to everyone except priests who commit these crimes, as if none of them were capable of true repentance and therefore worthy of absolution not only so that they can 'go and sin no more' but also that they can go ahead with making whatever amends and reparation they came.]

What is more shocking is that the secular world, so judgmental when it comes to sex abuse by clergy, so ready to attack the Church when the crimes and sins of its members come to light, is now backing the return of the management of these cases to the individual diocese, in line with the decentralization that the Pope always hoped for. [Again, it is quite naive to be 'shocked' at this, because the media are really not interested that the Church is doing anything about clerical sex abuses - they want to keep that issue alive as a club to wield against the Church when and as they please!]

Even in these cases, Pope Francis’s decisions are dual-faceted, [??? He did not even bother to resort to the two mechanisms cited below by Gaglairducci, but simply decided on his own. That's not dual-faceted! That's sheer authoritarianism.]

For an “Inzoli case” described in the article in “The Week”, there is a special tribunal for “Delicta Graviora” mandated to assist the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith in the appeals process – though the way this tribunal is going to work has not been specified. For a “Karadima case” and the promotion of a bishop who was linked to Karadima (a well-known abuser – the case was highly publicized because of the protests raised by one of the former members of the Pontifical Commission) there is a special tribunal to judge negligent bishops, a charge which was then redefined as sort of “crime of negligence” as yet without specifics, as it is a crime based on the subjective judgment of judges.

In the end, the problem is not simply in the way things are tackled, nor the people in charge of these matters. The real problem is in the apparent lack of a well-defined philosophy, a “modus operandi,” on the basis of which all the reforms are shaped. There you go - there is no rationale if neither philosophy nor modus operandi are defined - everything is arbitrary and blowin' in the relativistic wind!]

One may agree or disagree with the “modus operandi”, but things could be clearer [Tell us what has ever been clear in this pontificate other than his authoritarianism, his obvious enjoyment of the powers and perks of the papacy, and his utter contempt for any Catholic who does not think like him!], and in the end history will tell.

In the end, there are seemingly no boundaries to assess what this “modus operandi” is. [The arbitrariness of authoritarianism!] The debate is then frozen, as it was in the years that followed immediately the Second Vatican Council. And frozen, too, are the extraordinary newness of the Second Vatican Council, as well as the huge strides forward that the Church has made since the Council.
TERESA BENEDETTA
00martedì 10 gennaio 2017 14:07

When the man who is supposed to uphold the deposit of faith and promote the unity of the Church has become the primary cause of so much error and confusion.

Catholics and the present confusion
The faithful are told that they are too “rigid”.
The divorced and the homosexuals are, rightly or wrongly,
convinced that the Church has changed its doctrine
at least implicitly, if not explicitly.
by James V. Schall, S.J.

January 9, 2012

All through the modern era, the primary accusation against Catholicism was its clarity, its being too sure of what reason and revelation meant. It was arrogant. Imagine her claiming that she had a handle on essential truths!

What angered people was not the fact that the Church did not know what she was talking about, but the fact that she did and claimed that she did. People were comfortable with doubt. Doubt makes you free, not truth! Doubt leaves a lot of leeway. People claimed to be scandalized by certitude. To bring the Church into the modern world meant enticing, cajoling, or forcing her or her members to accept the supposed dubiousness of her own positions.

All religions, including Catholicism, are considered to be pretty much mythic. This origin of religion in fable is the majority opinion, especially among the elite. Religion is helpful only insofar as it does not interfere with more important things or claim that its truth was intended for everyone, that it had something to do with the way we should live. Religion was useful to keep the masses occupied. Catholicism is merely the extreme delusion of the religious mind. It brashly affirms that some connection with the divine can be established. Some divine intervention is thought actually to have happened in this world at a given time and place.

Let us add to this mix the multiculturalism and historicism that have governed academia and governments in recent decades. These positions affirm that “truth” varies from time to time and place to place. It changes according to current needs.

The best religion, as it turns out, is a strange variant of negative theology, the idea that we know what God is not, not what He is. Only now we are reasonably assured that God is not. Taken together, all ideas of God reveal a mass of confusion and self-interest. They confuse people. They prevent the “progress” of humanity to a better world. We have found no god in outer space. The Big Bang just happened in an orderly way by accident.

Except for certain strands of recent evangelical Christianity, most Protestant sects accepted the terms of the modern world. The essentials of the sexual revolution have their religious approval. Civil law is supreme over any natural or divine law that might limit the individual or state.

Ecology, itself mostly a blind faith masking itself as science, has reduced man to the terms of what are, erroneously, held to be “sustainable” limits of growth. Eschatology has become this-worldly. Transcendence has morphed into a futurology in which what man is becomes an object of his own science, not something given by nature and God, something discovered and understood by the use of his own reason.

Vatican II presented itself as a massive effort to retain tradition but also to reconcile the Church with the modern world in such a way that they harmonized with each other. It was not noticed at the time, as Tracey Rowland pointed out in her Culture and the Thomist Tradition, that the word “culture” was not neutral.

Modern “culture” already contained some good things, but it also had with in it principles and techniques that could eliminate both faith and even the structure of man as we had known him. In many ways, “to conform oneself to the culture” was a form of religious and intellectual suicide.

In this mix, the thought of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI stood as a corrective. They carefully sorted out the subtle principles and tendencies motivating the modern mind. They identified where these ideas and customs were leading. Under their guidance, it was clear that the mind of Catholicism knew what it was about.

Neither of these two popes had many intellectual peers. Those who were their peers usually recognized their genius. Catholicism understood where it came from in history and tradition. It clarified what it meant in relation to basic modern ideas, ideas that the two popes often defined more clearly than their advocates.

This papal teaching was profound and incisive. Not a few, however, came to think it was over the heads of most people, even most bishops. There is a kind of clericalism, as Fr. Mark Pilon has pointed out, that assumes that the laity cannot think. The request for clarification, which is their due, is often taken for disobedience. We needed a return to the original Gospels, it is said, to the simple life of faith.

Catholicism did not have to present itself before the world as understanding it. It is better to leave things more open, undefined.

In this light, however, with Pope Francis’s more recent emphasis on mercy and the poor, his many off-handed remarks, his hesitancy about explaining doctrine, the Church now, to many, seems confused, unsure of itself. It no longer seems to be a “rock” on which we can build.

The faithful are told that they are too “rigid”. The divorced and the homosexuals are, rightly or wrongly, convinced that the Church has changed its doctrine at least implicitly, if not explicitly. Divine positive law does not seem to hold against what people “do” do. Everything must be discerned. Every act seems an exception, which in a way it is. But there can be no “law” of only exceptions.

Many recent converts begin to wonder whether the Church is not reverting to positions that they thought, in the name of truth, that they had left. It is difficult to see why anyone should convert or even be preached to. To many, the Church seems to present itself as a kind of modern humanism in culture and socialism in political preference.

In the meantime, some three thousand mosques, with much Saudi money, have been built in the United States, probably more in Europe. They are mostly closed enclaves. The decline of population of European citizens has been often noted. Traditional European national populations are being replaced by a more fertile group of Muslims who, for the most part, do not assimilate or convert, either culturally or religiously. Some predict that Sweden will be Europe’s first Muslim country; others think it will be England. And if there is a first, there will be a second.

Islamic thinkers themselves shrewdly seem to opt both for terrorist and for democratic means to expand into Europe and America. The martyrdom and expulsion of so many Christians from the Mideast have gone largely unaccounted for. They appear more as an embarrassment than as objects of justice. Their specific witness seems almost lost.

It is a rare commentator or politician who notes the connection between Humanae Vitae, the decline of population, and the rise of Islam in Europe and America. “Refugees” fleeing into Europe can probably more accurately be described as “invaders” than immigrants, however sad their tale.

We are now experiencing something new, an incipient reaction. With Pierre Manent and Joshua Mitchell, we see that the nation-state and the family are the heart of true civilization. Globalism and world-state notions constantly reveal totalitarian tendencies. Emphasis on the poor has neglected the old Aristotelian notion of the middle-class, by far the majority in any decent society.

What are we to conclude from these considerations? The title of these opinions, and opinions they are, concerned “confused Catholics”. The conclusion is that the confusion of Catholics about the unity and consistency of their faith has dimmed or even taken out of the public order a firm voice that has connected in our civilization the present and the past, time and eternity.

Few seem certain about where the Church stands on many core issues that once were thought to be settled.

Practice does not really replace thought. It merely produces another kind of practice that seeks justification in a different line of thought.

Practice, overtly or covertly, depends on thought. The origin of all deviant practice is deviant thought. The knowing why it is deviant is a function of mind based on a standard of reason. It is the steady “knowing why” that, before anything else, we are missing.

TERESA BENEDETTA
00martedì 10 gennaio 2017 17:47

Canon212.com headlines, January 10, 2017



I am glad Mr Pentin has commented on this report which troubled me greatly when Father Z first ran it on his blog. While I understand that
Cardinal Mueller is trying a near-impossible tightrope act to keep his job (he may have valid reasons for doing so, such as 'Better me here than
someone who will simply rubberstamp everything this pope says' - even if he has, in effect, rubberstamped AL definitively with this interview),
has he not considered that this pope will now use these, and previous, less strong statements of his, as proof to wave before
everyone that "Benedict XVI's own appointee as CDF Prefect says AL is A-OK!"? (thus indirectly implicating Benedict XVI himself
in the heterodoxies of AL).

Cardinal Müller’s TV interview causes bewilderment
Vatican’s doctrinal chief criticizes making ‘dubia’ public and yet
it emerges that none of the CDF’s corrections to AL was accepted

January 9, 2017

Cardinal Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said in a live television interview on Sunday that a “fraternal correction” of Pope Francis regarding his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love) is “not possible at this time” because the document poses “no danger to the faith.”

But the cardinal’s comments, made yesterday to Vatican correspondent Fabio Marchese Ragona on the Italian channel Tgcom24, contrast with revelations, affirmed by at least two senior Vatican officials to the Register last week, that the CDF lodged a large number of corrections of Amoris Laetitia before its publication last April, and “not one of the corrections was accepted.”

His remarks also follow widely divergent interpretations of the document, with some bishops’ conferences such as Germany’s saying it allows Holy Communion for some remarried divorcees living in what the Church has always taught is an objective state of adultery, and others such as Poland’s emphatically saying it doesn’t. Individual bishops around the world have similarly been at odds over the issue.

Cardinal Müller did not refer to concerns over these differing interpretations in his Jan. 8 interview, but said instead that “at the moment, a correction of the Pope isn’t possible because there isn’t a danger to the faith.” He was referring to the dubia of four cardinals who asked the Pope Sept. 19 to clarify the teaching contained in Amoris Laetitia given these widely varying interpretations on crucial moral and sacramental matters.

[When the CDF Prefect says that a document as patently 'confusing' - and meant to be so - as AL does not present 'a danger to the faith', he is 1) being willfully blind to the anti-Catholic interpretations of AL Chapter 8 around the world - epitomized by the overwhelming majority of his own fellow German bishops - by supposedly intelligent persons who say, rightly, that they are only following what this pope himself has expressed in writing to some Argentine bishops that their interpretation of AL Chapter 8 is 'the only right interpretation'; and 2) seriously compromising truth itself, since the Supreme Pontiff is supposed to confirm his brethren in the faith, not to confuse and confound them.

Can he even cite a single major dubium presented to the CDF in the past 50 years since it was constituted as such (in place of the Holy Office that it used to be)? No, because the CDF always had the reigning pope's full approval and consent - as it should in anything that involves clarifying essential truths of Catholic doctrine that cannot be relativized in any way!

But this pope instructs the CDF prefect not to reply at all the FIVE DUBIA because he, the pope himself, cannot risk answering the YES and NO questions simply, without ifs and buts: No, because answering the questions the only way that they can truthfully be answered would be an admission that AL Chapter 8 was flawed by its violations of truth, and to answer them honestly (i.e., what he really intended the document to say but with much equivocation and technically-skirting-heresy rhetoric) would be to tie the noose and millstone of heresy around his own neck.]

The four cardinals — Carlo Caffarra, Walter Brandmüller, Raymond Burke and Joachim Meisner — sent the dubia (questions asking simply if 5 passages in the document are consistent with Church teaching) to the Pope “out of deep pastoral concern” in order to clear up “grave disorientation and great confusion” due to these different readings of the document’s teaching. The cardinals stressed they chose to highlight those points in “charity and justice,” for the sake of Church unity.

So far the Holy Father has not formally responded to the questions and has made it known to Cardinal Müller that he is not to respond to them on his behalf. Francis has not publicly given reasons for not doing so, but has implied that the four cardinals and others “persist in seeing only white or black, when rather one ought to discern in the flow of life”.

The cardinals decided to make the dubia public as they took the Pope’s decision not to respond as “an invitation to continue the reflection and the discussion, calmly and with respect.” In Nov. 15 comments to the Register, Cardinal Burke said if the Pope continues not to respond then “it would be a question of taking a formal act of correction of a serious error.” Cardinal Brandmüller later told La Stampa the correction would first take place in camera caritatis (in private).


PewSitter headlines, January 10, 2017
TERESA BENEDETTA
00martedì 10 gennaio 2017 21:44

Thanks to La Vigna del Signore whose banner I have adapted with a slight change (adding the year 2017).

FIRST PHOTOS IN 2017:
A visit from Augsburg's Cathedral Choir
January 6, 2016
Story and photos from the diocesan site via





Some members of the choir of Augsburg Cathedral with its director, Reinhard Kammler, visited Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI at his Mater Ecclesiae residence in the Vatican on Thursday, January 6, Solemnity of the Epiphany.

After celebrating Mass at the chapel of the residence, Benedict XVI had a long chat with his visitors, and congratulated Kammler on the 40th anniversary of his 'great team' as he called the choir.



At the end of the meeting, he imparted his blessing on the visitors.

WITH CARDINAL SARAH

And thanks to Beatrice, these two photos from Cardinal Sarah's Facebook page:











TERESA BENEDETTA
00mercoledì 11 gennaio 2017 16:58



Cardinal Burke’s interview in ‘La Verità”:
More cardinals are completely with the Four
by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

January 11, 2017

Lots of lefties are hopping up and down in little circles because the Four Cardinals (Burke, Caffara, Meisner, Brandmueller) offered Five Dubia (questions, narrowly framed, asking for yes or no clarificatory responses) arising from the objective lack of clarity in Chapter 8 of Amoris laetitia. As these catholic libs, chimp-like, fling their stuff around, Cardinal Burke continues to give interviews in an attempt to bring sobriety to the debate.

Today I saw an interview dated 11 January in the Italian publication La Verità. Cardinal Burke is asked some tough questions and he gives straight on answers.

Asked whether they are “inventing” a way to correct formally the Pope, Burke answered “Of course not.” But he points out that, in the past, Popes have been corrected. He sustains that it is an “error” to say that, in certain cases, the divorced and remarried living in more uxorio, can receive Communion. He doesn’t think that that is a heresy, but an error:
“No, it seems to me that it can qualify as an error, but we are dealing with a complex situation.

Heresy is the obstinate denial or obstinate doubt, on the part of the baptized, of a truth that one must believe by divine and Catholic faith.

One heresy could be that of one who sustains that there do not exist intrinsically evil acts; to affirm this would be to say something contrary to the doctrine of the Church and would clearly be a heresy.

The affirmation about access to the sacraments of which we were speaking a while ago, on the other hand, refers to a practice (prassi) that contradicts two doctrines: that of indissolubility of matrimony and that of the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. At first glance we can say that certainly it’s an error.”
Cardinal Burke confirms that the Four Cardinals are united and that he knows many cardinals who are with them.

The accusations – open from some and veiled from … another – flung at them pretty much roll off his back.

In regard to the accusation that the Four are “doctors of the law” (an insult leveled by Pope Francis at those who resist antinomianism)[a term invented by Luther to say that Christians are not bound by any moral law because faith alone is necessary for salvation]:
“It seems to me that the moral law isn’t something that imprisons a person; it is quite the opposite: the moral law frees a person and orients him to fulfill the good. In fact, when there is no respect for moral law there come about chaotic situations and morally there results a kind of imprisonment.

For people of faith, we have to say that the divine law frees, and it is not a negative thing. And then to teach moral law is a great act of charity towards one’s neighbor, because it points to the path of authentic freedom and happiness. It is impossible to affirm that a person can find some form of happiness in sinning.”

He was asked:
Why so much noise for a problem that many have a hard time understanding?
We are dealing here with a question that concerns the Church in a profound way: matrimony and family, which is its fruit, and they constitute the foundation of the very life of the Church. Our task is not to lose ourselves in difficult or vague questions; we are simply giving our contribution to the growth of the Church in the most elementary cell of life.


At this point, let me put up an article I ought to have posted earlier about something that a commentator has labelled 'the sixth dubium'. Particularly interesting because it comes from South African Cardinal Wilfrid Napier, who during the two 'family synods' appeared to have been among the more outspoken 'conservative' bishops, but then after the release of AL, came out fully in support of the document.

An African cardinal asks a good question:
What about Communion for polygamists?
Virtually every priest who has worked in Africa
knows that this is a serious pastoral issue
by Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith

January 6, 2017

Every now and then someone says something interesting on Twitter. Just yesterday Cardinal Napier, the Archbishop of Durban, reminded us all of something we ought not to forget.
Cardinal Napier @CardinalNapier
3/3 If Westerners in irregular situations can receive Communion, are we to tell our polygamists & other "misfits" that they too are allowed?
6:28 AM - 5 Jan 2017

Cardinal Napier describes a real and pressing question: polygamy is widespread in Africa, and Catholics in the West cannot ignore this.

Catholic teaching and practice must be such that they are able to be inculturated in a wide variety of settings. An initiative might go down well in Berlin or Vienna, but how will it play in Peoria, or Nairobi, or Durban, or Delhi or Manila?

No one particular local Church has a monopoly on truth, and no one particular local culture can claim to have absolute insights that other cultures have to take on board. Cultural imperialism cannot be Catholic. When the missionaries came to Africa, they aimed – at their best – to introduce the Gospel of Christ, not Western culture.

But just as Western cultural insight cannot claim a monopoly on Christianity, African culture too must adapt to Christ and not the other way around, for Christ is the absolute value, and while the cultures of Africa are of value too, they are such only relatively speaking.

Hence, on coming to Africa, the missionaries challenged certain deep-rooted cultural practices and did their very best to stamp them out. Missionaries in Kenya, for example, have fought against female genital mutilation for a century. And they have also condemned throughout Africa the practice of polygamy.

Progress against both practices has been patchy to say the least. We all know of famous polygamists such as the King of Swaziland who currently has 13 wives, and President Zuma of South Africa, who has six. The Church condemns this practice. Not only is it a form of institutionalized adultery, it is also deeply detrimental to the dignity of women.

Polygamists may not receive Holy Communion, and polygamists who wish to be baptised have to abandon the practice first.

President Zuma’s six wives are all concurrent wives, not to mention various other liaisons, but here in the West we have serial polygamy, where people have one spouse at a time, getting a divorce between each new union. What Cardinal Napier’s question raises is this: is there a difference between the two?

For the African Church, this is a pressing issue. For example, in 2004 it was reported that nearly half of marriages in Senegal are polygamous. I know from my own former ministry in Kenya that polygamy is not at all unknown among Catholics. People in that sort of situation might well think that the admission of those in irregular second unions throws them some sort of lifeline.

Four Cardinals, as we know, have submitted five dubia to the Pope on the matter of the correct interpretation of Amoris Laetitia. Virtually every priest who has ever worked in Africa could submit a dubium on this matter too, namely, to quote Cardinal Napier: “If Westerners in irregular [marital] situations can receive Communion, are we to tell our polygamists and other ‘misfits’ that they too are allowed?”

If polygamists were ever admitted to Holy Communion for whatever reason, it would undo a century of work by the missionaries who have consistently taught that marriage is an exclusive and lifelong union between one man and one woman, and can only be dissolved by death. It would also severely damage the credibility of the Church, and undermine the authority of Scripture.

Dubium means doubt, but on this matter there can be no doubt. We cannot admit polygamists to Holy Communion, whether serial ones of concurrent ones, whether Westerners or from other continents.

TERESA BENEDETTA
00mercoledì 11 gennaio 2017 17:31


Statement of the Grand Magistry
Rome, January 10, 2017
The Grand Magistry of the Sovereign Order of Malta, in response to the activities being carried out by a Group appointed by the Secretary of State of the Vatican, considers it appropriate to reiterate that the replacement of the former Grand Chancellor was an internal act of the government of the Order.

Thus, considering the legal irrelevance of this Group and of its findings relating to the legal structure of the Order of Malta, the Order has decided that it should not cooperate with it. This is to protect its sovereignty against initiatives which claim to be directed at objectively (and, therefore – quite apart from its intentions – reveals it to be legally irrelevant) questioning or even limiting said Sovereignty.

Article 4 paragraph 6 of the Constitutional Charter is clear when it states that “the religious nature of the Order does not prejudice the exercise of sovereign prerogatives pertaining to the Order in so far as it is recognised by States as a subject of international law” and Article 4 paragraph 5 reiterates that “the Order has diplomatic representation to the Holy See, according to the norms of international law.”

The confirmation of such status under international law is also attested to in the Annuario Pontificio of the Holy See, where the Order is mentioned only once and not amongst the religious orders, but rather amongst the States with Embassies accredited the Holy See.

The different ranks of the members of the Order belonging to different classes should be noted, and therefore also the hierarchical relationships that exist between those members and their superiors.

The Second Class, to which the former Grand Chancellor belonged, is for members of the Order ‘in Obedience’ who make the Promise according to Article 9 paragraph 2 of the Constitutional Charter (see also Article 8 paragraph 1 b) of the Constitutional Charter).

This Promise has nothing to do with the Vow of Obedience taken by the Knights of Justice, who belong to the First Class. Therefore the Knights of Justice “are religious in all respects” (Article 9 paragraph 1 of the Constitutional Charter), whilst they are not ‘Knights in Obedience’.

In addition, according to Article 4 paragraph 2, the Constitutional Charter states that members of the Second Class who have taken the Promise of Obedience are only subordinate to their particular Religious Superiors within the Order.

In the light of these fundamental legal regulations, it is clear that, in strictly legal terms, a refusal to a command ‘in Obedience’ does not justify in any way the involvement of ‘religious superiors’, all the more so as they do not all belong to the Order.

Such involvement, in addition to being legally impossible, is also superfluous in terms of protecting members of the Order: from the time that the members of the Second and Third Class who wish to appeal against disciplinary measures they consider too harsh, can dispute these before the Magistral Courts, as provided for by Article 129 of the Constitutional Code.

Failure to cooperate with the aforementioned Group has therefore strictly legal grounds, thus it is not and cannot in any way be considered as a lack of respect towards the Group, nor towards His Eminence Secretary of State.

The position of the Grand Magistry is that the depositions that individual members consider that they could make to the Group cannot, in their terms and judgments, be in contradiction, directly or indirectly, with the decision of the Grand Master and the Sovereign Council concerning the replacement of the Grand Chancellor.


If you wish to read a truly biased account of the above and its background story, read the AP's Nicole Winfield on this:
http://www.wbng.com/story/34229446/knights-of-malta-refuse-to-assist-irrelevant-papal-probe
TERESA BENEDETTA
00mercoledì 11 gennaio 2017 18:05
January 11, 2017 headlines

PewSitter

This morning, PewSitter lags once again, at least on its big bold headline...

Canon212.com


The Catholic Herald has summarized Edward Pentin's recent blogpost on Cardinal Mueller's 'bewildering' interview in this way...

30 other cardinals and a 'significant number' of bishops’
conferences said to have expressed misgivings on AL -
but received no reply from the Vatican

January 11, 2017

The Pope’s apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia has caused widespread concern among cardinals and bishops, according to new reports.

Edward Pentin, veteran Vatican reporter for the National Catholic Register, reports: “Before the document was published, 30 cardinals, having seen an advance draft of the apostolic exhortation, wrote to the Pope expressing their reservations, especially on the issue of Communion for remarried divorcees, warning that the document would weaken the three essential sacraments of the Church: the Eucharist, marriage and confession.”

Pentin also said that a “significant number” of bishops’ conferences have expressed concerns about the document. Furthermore, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), having seen a draft, submitted several pages of revisions. These were not accepted, according to Pentin. The Pope has also not replied to either the 30 cardinals or the bishops’ conferences.

The most significant public response to Amoris Laetitia so far has been the five dubia issued by four cardinals, asking for clarification. One of the four, Cardinal Raymond Burke, has recently said they might issue a formal correction of the Pope if he does not reply. Another, Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, said that any such correction would first be issued privately.

As a not-irrelevant aside, let me post this for a welcome chuckle - a post typical of the writings of Ordinariate Fr. Geoffrey Kirk, an Anglican-turned-Catholic who has very much the same background as a lifelong classicist as Fr. Hunwicke, who has been plugging Fr. Kirk's blog for months. Fr. Kirk is a great satirist a la C.S. Lewis in Screwtape Letters.

And indeed, many of his recent posts have been take-offs on those letters, with the devil Screwtape commending his junior-devil nephew Wormwood for his success with his principal patient one Jorge Bergoglio. Another one of his more diverting genre of posts is a periodic exchange of letters between Justin (Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury) and Franck (Bishop of Rome).

Here is his latest satire, a la Eye of the Tiber....


Infallibility
by Fr. Geoffrey Kirk

JANUARY 9, 2017

To the surprise of many seasoned Vatican watchers, Cardinal Giuseppe Corleone has been named Prefect of the recently formed Sacred Congregation for Subservient Compliance.

Corleone, 78, a native of Caltanissetta, and known in his home diocese as ‘L’enforcer’, had not previously gained a high profile in the media. He now occupies a commanding position in the Curia, with a brief to investigate all other dicasteries and root out all those who are not identifiably ‘on message’.

Asked whether he thought that his role was anomalous at a time when the Church had just concluded a Jubilee of Mercy, Corleone replied: ‘Mercy was last year; this is the Year of Retribution. We need to cleanse the Vatican of all these rigid little coprophiliacs. This is Europe’s last surviving absolute monarchy; and we intend to keep it that way.’

His department has already been nick-named the ‘Get Burke Brigade’ by junior Vatican officials and journalists alike.

Here is some background on Fr. Kirk:
On Sunday 1 July 2012 Monsignor John Broadhurst received The Reverend Geoffrey Kirk into the full communion of the Catholic Church through the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham at the Church of the Most Precious Blood, London.

Fr Kirk was an Anglican Priest for 40 years and Vicar of St Stephen’s, Lewisham for 30 years. As Secretary of Forward in Faith, Fr Kirk worked closely with its Chairman, Fr Broadhurst, over the past 20 years in developing Forward in Faith’s vision for unity and truth together with its statement on communion.

He also wrote extensively for “New Directions”, the monthly journal of Forward in Faith. Fr Kirk’s sponsors were Deacon Robbie Low and his wife Sara who were also both closely involved in work of FiF, Robbie was editor of "New Directions", before becoming Catholics several years ago.

The reception took place during the regular 11am Mass at the Church where the London (South) Ordinariate Group worships. Fr Christopher Pearson, the Pastor of the group, prepared Fr Kirk for his reception and said:

Many people have been inspired by Fr Geoffrey’s teaching, preaching and pastoral care over the years. His intellect, writing and wit encouraged a generation in the Catholic movement within the Church of England. I hope that they will now be similarly inspired to follow Fr Kirk's actions in seeking visible unity.


Canon212.com - New 'headlines' screenshot, 1/11/17
TERESA BENEDETTA
00giovedì 12 gennaio 2017 01:30
A firing, a demolition:
Behold the new Curia
From the English service of

January 11,2017

The reform of the Vatican curia that Pope Francis is carrying out is being done partly in sunshine and partly in shadow.

Among the provisions recently adopted in shadow, there are two that are emblematic.

The veil was lifted on the first by the Vaticanista Marco Tosatti, when on December 26 he broke the news of an order the pope had given to a dicastery head to summarily fire three of his officials, an order given without explanations and without accepting objections.

It is now known that the dicastery in question is not second-tier - it is the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. And the three officials fired enjoyed the full approval of their prefect, Cardinal Gerhard L. Müller, in his turn already the target of repeated acts of humiliation, in public, by the pope himself. [But who nonetheless recently criticized the Four Cardinals for making their DUBIA public and said explicitly that there was no occasion to even correct the pope on AL because 'it presents no danger to the faith'. For the CDF Prefect to say that AL - an infinite wellspring of ambiguity which has already sown so much controversy diving the Church's episcopacy, clergy and lay faithful - presents no danger to the faith is quite appalling!

But which of the three rejects is the official whom Francis personally - as Tosatti has reported - reprimanded harshly by telephone for having expressed criticisms against him, which had come to the pope’s ear through an informant?

It is the Dutch priest Christophe J. Kruijen, 46, in service at the CDF since 2009, a theologian of acknowledged expertise, awarded with the prestigious Prix Henri De Lubac in 2010 by the French embassy to the Holy See, unanimously bestowed upon him by a jury made up of the cardinals Georges Cottier, Albert Vanhoye, and Paul Poupard, for his theological thesis entitled: “Universal salvation or dual outcome of the judgment: to hope for all? A contribution to the critical study of a contemporary theological opinion concerning the realization of damnation,” defended at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas under the direction at the time of the Dominican theologian Charles Morerod, afterward rector of the same university and now the bishop of Lausanne, Geneva and Fribourg.

The “last things,” or death, judgment, heaven, hell, are Kruijen’s favored subject for his studies. But he is also appreciated for his excellent essay on the Jewish philosopher and then Carmelite nun Edith Stein, killed in Auschwitz in 1942 and proclaimed a saint in 1998: "Bénie par la Croix. L'expiation dans l'oeuvre et la vie d'Edith Stein" (Blessed by the Cross: Expiation in the work and life of Edith Stein).

In the public writings and remarks of Fr. Kruijen there is not a single word of criticism against Francis. But all it took was a tattle lifted from one of his private conversations to bring him into disgrace with the pope, who brought the whip down.

This too is part of the reform of the curia, by the orders and in the style of Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

The second measure taken in shadow concerns the Congregation for Divine Worship, the prefect of which is Cardinal Robert Sarah, he too the object of repeated public humiliations on the part of the pope, and now condemned to preside over offices and men who are pulling against him.

Directed by the secretary of the congregation, the English archbishop Arthur Roche, a commission has been set up within the dicastery at the behest of Francis, the objective of which is not the correction of the degenerations of the postconciliar liturgical reform - meaning that “reform of the reform” which is Cardinal Sarah’s dream - but the exact opposite: the demolition of one of the walls of resistance against the excesses of the postconciliar liturgists, the instruction “Liturgiam Authenticam” issued in 2001, which sets the criteria for the translation of liturgical texts from Latin into the modern languages.

With Benedict XVI these criteria had been further reinforced, in particular through the pope’s intention to hold firm the “pro multis” of the Gospel and the Latin missal in the words of consecration of the blood of Christ, against the “for all” of many current translations.

But Francis immediately made it understood that this matter left him indifferent. And now, with the institution of this commission, he is meeting the expectations for a modernization of liturgical language championed, for example, by the liturgist Andrea Grillo, a professor at the Pontifical Atheneum of St. Anselm and in great esteem at Casa Santa Marta:
> La traduzione/tradizione impossibile: i punti ciechi di “Liturgiam authenticam”

There are those who fear that after the demolition of “Liturgiam Authenticam,” the next objective, of this or another commission, will be the correction of “Summorum Pontificum,” the document with which Benedict XVI liberalized the celebration of the Mass in the ancient rite.
TERESA BENEDETTA
00giovedì 12 gennaio 2017 03:18


Here's a most interesting and not irrelevant reaction to Cardinal Mueller's recent defense of AL as not constituting 'a danger to the faith':

Stockholm Syndrome at the CDF:
Has Cardinal Müller been compromised?
by Steve Skojec

January 11, 2017

On August 23rd, 1973, four bank workers in Stockholm, Sweden, were taken hostage at gunpoint by Jan-Erik Olsson, a career criminal who was later joined by a friend of his from prison. After six days — during which the captives were treated harshly, terrified, strapped with dynamite, and kept in a vault — the standoff ended and the hostages were released.

But then, something strange happened. Dr. Joseph Carver, a clinical psychologist, describes what came next:
After their rescue, the hostages exhibited a shocking attitude considering they were threatened, abused, and feared for their lives for over five days. In their media interviews, it was clear that they supported their captors and actually feared law enforcement personnel who came to their rescue. The hostages had begun to feel the captors were actually protecting them from the police. One woman later became engaged to one of the criminals and another developed a legal defense fund to aid in their criminal defense fees. Clearly, the hostages had “bonded” emotionally with their captors.

While the psychological condition in hostage situations became known as “Stockholm Syndrome” due to the publicity, the emotional “bonding” with captors was a familiar story in psychology...

In the final analysis, emotionally bonding with an abuser is actually a strategy for survival for victims of abuse and intimidation. The “Stockholm Syndrome” reaction in hostage and/or abuse situations is so well recognized at this time that police hostage negotiators no longer view it as unusual.
Dr. Carver describes four situations in which a foundation for Stockholm Syndrome is present. “These four situations,” he says, “can be found in hostage, severe abuse, and abusive relationships”:
- The presence of a perceived threat to one’s physical or psychological survival and the belief that the abuser would carry out the threat.
- The presence of a perceived small kindness from the abuser to the victim
- Isolation from perspectives other than those of the abuser
- The perceived inability to escape the situation

When Cardinal Gerhard Müller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, appeared live on Italian television last Sunday and criticized the DUBIA, saying that there would be “no correction” because Amoris Laetitia presents “no danger to the faith,” many Catholics found themselves examining his face to see if he was blinking out a distress signal in Morse Code.

The bewilderment that has followed his interview continues to generate news, but the reasons why he would say something so obviously contrary to the truth — when Müller’s marginalization casts serious doubt on it being an exercise in fomenting power through the willful, positivistic subversion of reality — remains a mystery.

Nevertheless, I think the psychological descriptions above may shed some light on what we are witnessing. I’m certainly not trained in the subject, but I could not help but map the above-mentioned conditions for Stockholm Syndrome onto Cardinal Müller’s relationship with Pope Francis:

The presence of a perceived threat to one’s physical or psychological survival and the belief that the abuser would carry out the threat.
We have heard for some time about the “climate of fear” at the Vatican. This isn’t new — in an anonymous letter from a former member of the Curia penned in 2015, this exact term was used. More recently, we have seen this fear publicly discussed by not just journalists at LifeSiteNews and the National Catholic Register who have spent time in Rome, but Bishop Athanasius Schneider, who lived under Soviet communism and has compared the situation in Rome to his experiences.

I have described what I call “The Dictatorship of Mercy” — the unrelenting Vatican agenda-by-diktat, couched in the terms of “mercy” and “accompaniment” but as authoritarian as any program implemented by an autocratic regime.

We have been given several recent examples — from the exile of Cardinal Burke to the purges at the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Pontifical Academy for Life to the assault on the John Paul II Institutes for Marriage and Family to the unexplained, papally-ordered firings at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — that opposition will be crushed.

Müller himself is often disrespected and passed over by Francis and his closest advisors. In an interview in January, 2014, Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, a member of Francis’s inner circle, proffered naked scorn at Müller’s rejection of Holy Communion to the divorced and remarried, saying that the prefect “only thinks in black-and-white terms” and that “the world isn’t like that”.

Archbishop Victor Fernández, another close friend of Francis who is believed to be the chief ghostwriter of Amoris Laetitia, gave an interview in May of 2015 that was perceived as a direct attack on statements made by the Prefect of the CDF.

In May of this year, Maike Hickson reported that “Carlos Osoro, the archbishop of Madrid, Spain, forbade Cardinal Gerhard Müller from presenting his new book on hope at the Catholic University San Dámaso, because this book is — Osoro alleges — ‘against the pope‘.”

In December, Kathpress.at, an official publication of the Austrian Bishops’ conference under the leadership of papal ally Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, edited an interview with Müller in such a way as to leave some of his most important remarks about Amoris Laetitia on the cutting room floor.

And on multiple occasions, Francis has signaled his preference — or even deference — to Cardinal Walter Kasper on matters of theology, such that the openly heterdox prelate is known as “the pope’s theologian”. [Skojec forgets the more recent Bergoglian deference to his new theological pet, Cardinal Schoenborn of Vienna.]

Meanwhile, it should be remembered that Müller contributed an essay to the book, Remaining in the Truth of Christ — seen as such a threat to the synod proceedings that it was stolen from the Vatican mailboxes of the synod fathers — and signed on to the so-called “13 Cardinals Letter” that was alleged to have outraged the pope.

Taking all of this into account, Müller has plenty of reason to believe that he is under threat. What form it would take remains an open question, but if he had a fear of reprisal in some form, it would not be without merit. [As the only possible reprisal at this point - he has already received every possible humiliation from the pope - is his dismissal from the CDF, I proffer my hypothesis, repeating myself, that possibly Mueller has been trying his best to hold on to his Curial position because "Better me than someone else who will be this pope's rubberstamp", but this ignores the Realpolitik that Bergoglio is holding him at CDF for now because he can use him as his trump card for all his critics. "See? Even the CDF Prefect appointed by Benedict XVI has my back!"]

The presence of a perceived small kindness from the abuser to the victim
This condition seems, at least superficially, slightly less applicable. That said, despite his (rather tepid) opposition to heterodox interpretations of Amoris Laetitia, Müller still has his job as Prefect — a job which he seems to take seriously, even when others do not. This alone could be perceived as a kindness, even an openness from Francis. [I anticipated this argument in the previous remark, though I disagree that Mueller, based on his Sunday defense of AL, is really taking his job seriously, as he is condoning equivocal ambiguous teaching by the pope as not being 'a danger to the faith', when the CDF is dutybound to demand clarity in the Church's teaching.]

Isolation from perspectives other than those of the abuser
I have often described Müller to others as “essentially under house arrest.” The fear of monitored communications on the part of CDF officials has been noted in these pages before. The forced firings of competent staff members of the CDF at the pope’s command — without any justification — is a clear power play. One source of mine described the situation at the Vatican, as I have previously written, as “like an occupied state.”

Even when travelling in Spain, Müller faced the insubordinant behavior of an archbishop — his hierarchical inferior — who would, it is reasonable to conclude, only have made such a gesture of disrespect if he were protected by Rome. (Osoro has since been rewarded with a red hat. Coincidence?) So while Müller has, in theory, freedom of movement and access to outside perspectives, the dominant power base in Rome — and the very man to whom Müller reports — falls under the category of the “abuser”.

The perceived inability to escape the situation
Sources close to Müller have told me that the prefect and his close advisers believe they can do more good for the faith, and for the orthodox members of the CDF, by staying put — even though the situation is less than ideal. I have heard rumors that the Cardinal even considered retiring, but was persuaded to stay by those who have expressed fears over who might take his place. [There we are! This is really the most charitable scenario one can postulate.]

So while Müller technically possesses the autonomy to leave, one senses that he feels trapped by a moral duty to mitigate the damage being done by Rome. However, it appears increasingly clear that in so doing, he is being co-opted into the very agenda he is ostensibly standing his ground to resist.

So is some version of the psychological effect known as Stockholm Syndrome beginning to affect Müller’s judgment and sabotage his own self-interest? More importantly, is this happening in such a way that Müller himself is now undermining the Catholic Faith he is duty-bound to guard and protect? This seems an increasingly likely possibility.

In Edward Pentin’s January 9 report at the National Catholic Register on Müller’s surprising televised remarks last Sunday, some striking facts were brought to light. Most notable was the contradiction between the Cardinal’s words in the interview and his previous actions. Pentin writes:
His remarks also come after it has emerged the CDF had clear misgivings about the document before it was published — concerns which were never heeded. One informed official recently told the Register that a CDF committee that reviewed a draft of Amoris Laetitia raised “similar” dubia to those of the four cardinals. Those dubia formed part of the CDF’s 20 pages of corrections, first reported by Jean-Marie Genois in Le Figaro on April 7, the eve of the publication of the document.

Another senior official went further, revealing to the Register last week that Cardinal Müller had told him personally that the CDF “had submitted many, many corrections, and not one of the corrections was accepted”. He added that what the cardinal states in the interview “is exactly the contradictory of everything which he has said to me on the matter until now” and he had the “impression of someone who was not speaking for himself but repeating what someone else had told him to say.”

Remember, too, this largely-overlooked piece of information in our story of May 2nd, 2016:
In addition, it has now been reported that that Cardinal Müller was not given the copy of the final version of Amoris Laetitia – but only, instead, a much less problematic text – for his own final doctrinal review. It is once more due to the important work of Guiseppe Nardi that this important fact – which has subsequently been confirmed by other sources – was reported first in Italy, and has now been made known far and wide. While it seems clear that the orthodox forces – with Cardinal Müller at the top – are being increasingly ignored, pushed aside and even bypassed, the progressive forces are in fact being further promoted and now also encouraged in other ways.
So it is more than a little odd to see Müller defending the orthodoxy of the text. Further, Pentin also reported that in his most recent remarks:
[Müller] said he felt it was “a loss to the Church to discuss these things publicly”, adding that Amoris Laetitia is “very clear in its doctrine and we can interpret the whole doctrine of Jesus on marriage, the whole doctrine of the Church in 2000 years of history.”
But certainly, Cardinal Müller’s own public statements stand in rebuke of these comments. In this image made by 1P5’s Matthew Karmel, we see the clear distinction made by Müller in December of 2014:

It is clear that with divergent practices being implemented by various bishops around the world, the pope himself confirming that Holy Communion can be given to the divorced and remarried in certain circumstances, and the official interpreters of the exhortation trying to pass it off as “binding”, we are faced with nothing less than a “separation of the theory and practice of the faith.” If that is, indeed, a “christological heresy” — as Müller himself has claimed — it would therefore constitute a “danger to the faith” by any reasonable standard.

With the stakes thus clarified, certain conclusions are inescapable. If Cardinal Müller thinks he can stand athwart the darkness by staying where he is, trying to tamp down the fires of discontent stirred up by the DUBIA from within the Vatican apparatus by means of a more subtle, diplomatic approach, he is seriously mistaken.

And if he is being told what to say, and willing to do so (recall similar reports that Msgr. Pinto from the Roman Rota was given a papal order to attack the Four Cardinals) then it is impossible for him to be trusted — and it suggests that he has come to identify, somehow, with those who have essentially held him captive in his increasingly ineffectual position.

Recall this synopsis of a recent article at Crux, which struck me at the time as being a description of precisely what has been done to Müller, particularly as regards the accolades and responsibilities given by Francis to Kasper and Schönborn:
In a nutshell, Pope Francis’s approach to difficult personnel choices is to keep people in place, while entrusting the real responsibility to somebody else and thus rendering the original official, if not quite irrelevant, certainly less consequential.

Though our readers have often pointed out Müller’s own theological discrepancies, he has consistently been one of the better prelates in Rome during this pontificate. It was sad enough to see him treated this way by the reigning cabal; it is far more disheartening to see him now speaking on their behalf.

It is worth noting that Pentin also reports that
some 30 additional cardinals, having seen an advance draft of the apostolic exhortation, wrote to the Pope expressing their reservations, especially on the issue of communion for remarried divorcees, warning that the document would weaken the three essential sacraments of the Church: the Eucharist, marriage, and confession. The Pope never responded to that letter either, a Vatican source told the Register.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s well past time for these princes of the Church to man up. They have a moral duty to defend the Faith. Quiet murmuring does not a crown of martyrdom make. Will they or will they not defend their flock? Will they or will they not defend their mother?

Salvation history is quite literally at a turning point, and all that is required to help set things right is a bit of courage. How is it that there is so little to be found?

Reactions from Germany to
Cardinal Müller’s defense of AL
by Maike Hickson

January 11, 2017

In the wake of the recent 8 January defense of the papal document Amoris Laetitia by Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), there have been an increasing number of faithful Catholics now coming forth with reluctant criticisms, while others quote the cardinal in order to claim that the case of the DUBIA has now been closed for good.

In the following, I shall concentrate on three major voices: the German pro-life activist and book author, Mathias von Gersdorff; the German theologian, Dr. Markus Büning; and Guido Horst, the editor-in-chief of the major national German Catholic newspaper, Die Tagespost.

As we recall, Cardinal Müller has claimed that the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia is in accordance with the traditional teaching on marriage and that there is no danger to the Faith coming from this document. He has also now issued a critique of the four cardinals who published their DUBIA with reference to this papal document.

First, let us consider those German Catholics who now criticize Cardinal Müller’s position and recent statement. Mathias von Gersdorff shows himself disappointed with Cardinal Müller’s rebuke of, as well as his distancing from, the Four Cardinals’ own Dubia, and he says that the words of this cardinal thereby now “increase the confusion concerning Amoris Laetitia.” Von Gersdorff, consequently, now raises an important issue and question when he says:
It is indeed remarkable that Cardinal Müller chooses an interview on television in order to criticize his brothers of the College of Cardinals [the Four Cardinals]. As Prefect of the Congregation of the Faith, he has at his disposal means that are more apt than an eleven-minute-short interview in which merely three minutes are dedicated to the Apostolic Exhortation.

Does such a statement in a television interview have any relevant authority at all? One would have expected from a Prefect that he make such a grave statement – which has caused nearly an earthquake – either in L’Osservatore Romano or in an academic journal of theology.[dim]
In von Gersdorff’s eyes, Müller did not even have “the time to give sufficient reasons for his critique... Such a short format does not allow a larger explanation which would correspond to the weight of the statement...[A more careful explanation] would have been truly fitting.

It is impossible that Cardinal Müller missed the fact that many bishops and bishops’ conferences already interpret the document [Amoris Laetitia] very differently from Tradition and that they want to allow Communion for the remarried divorcees. That is also the clear tendency in Germany, the homeland of Cardinal Müller...

If he [Müller] thinks it is right to criticize the authors of the DUBIA, then it would be fitting also to criticize those who push ahead and interpret Amoris Laetitia (AL) in opposition to Tradition, with Cardinal [Reinhard] Marx being at the head of all of them.”

(In this context, it might be worth noting that Cardinal Müller just recently declined to comment on Cardinal Marx’s decision to remove his pectoral cross when visiting Jerusalem. Müller explicitly then said that he does not like to criticize his fellow prelates and cardinals in public: “I don’t think it is right to criticize my fellow prelates and cardinals in public, and I myself don’t do it.”)

Mathias von Gersdorff rightly asks why Cardinal Müller criticizes those who try to uphold the traditional Catholic teaching on marriage while being altogether silent about the heterodox interpretations of Amoris Laetitia. Von Gersdorff thus fittingly comments that
“with his own selective criticism, Cardinal Müller has now unfortunately increased the confusion concerning Amoris Laetitia” inasmuch as “the simple faithful see [and hear] a cacophony as they have never before seen it, concerning a moral theological question which had been clarified already by many popes, and for many centuries... [It is not about increasing the confusion - it is something worse: when the CDF Prefect rubberstamps AL with all its equivocations and ambiguities, he is upholding error and compromising Christian truth which he defended along with four other cardinals in the 2014 FIVE CARDINALS' book.

Therefore, he is 'confirming' to those who were still in doubt about the intentions of AL Chapter 8, that YES, the Church is now saying communion is OK for remarried divorcees, practically without condition; that such persons may not really be committing sin at all though they are living in adultery according to Christ's own definition; that may even be in a 'state of grace' despite all that; and that individual conscience unformed by Catholic teaching is the ultimate judge of whether an act is sinful or not. In short, Mueller has virtually answered the FIVE DUBIA the wrong way all the way - that is, the way Bergoglio would answer them honestly.

Many ask themselves: Why do the pope and the second man in the Vatican – that is to say, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Faith – not confirm and strengthen the teaching of the Church in this important question where there are so many people who now openly deny this teaching?

As a second German voice, Dr. Markus Büning – who has repeatedly raised in the recent past his passionate and principled voice of indignation concerning Amoris Laetitia and the silence of the prelates of the Church – discusses in a new article written for the German website Katholisches.info the question of a well-formed conscience with regard to the matter of the “remarried” divorcees.

Dr. Büning criticizes Amoris Laetitia for the fact that it is not based on the traditional Catholic teaching that a Catholic’s conscience has to be formed according to the Church’s Magisterium – and also with the reliable help of that Magisterium whose duty it is to teach the faithful trustworthily. As Büning says: “Only the well-formed conscience judges rightly and truthfully!”

After repeating the Church’s clear teaching with regard to the “remarried” divorcees and their being disallowed still to receive the Sacraments, as was laid out in paragraph 84 of the Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris Consortio, Büning concludes:
This text [FM 84] is not lacking any clarity. Here, nobody who knows the text can justly find an excuse, and nobody can thus come to the conclusion – with the help of a [purportedly] well-formed conscience – to seriously offer other solutions for the so-called remarried divorcees.
The German theologian continues by showing how the pope himself has taken now Amoris Laetitia on another path: “Pope Francis has now distanced himself with the publication of Amoris Laetitia from the clear teaching of his predecessor [John Paul II] and from his strict proscription as to the reception of Sacramental Communion, as was laid out in Familiaris Consortio 84...

In this context, the repeatedly soothing comments by the Prefect of the Congregation for the Faith are not helpful, either, according to which the Church’s teaching has not been changed [in AL]. For the sake of clarity and truth, I cannot follow here the line of Cardinal Müller. One thing is indeed obvious: AL has not confirmed, but softened Familiaris Consortio n. 84.


In the following, Dr. Büning shows how Pope Francis, with the help of footnote 351, does consider it possible for the “remarried” divorcees to have, in certain cases, access to the Sacraments. However, for this German theologian, the more crucial part of that section in AL is the fact that the document “no longer presents Divine Law as unalterable precept.” On the contrary,
“now the misguided, autonomous individual conscience is being celebrated by a pope! This teaching stands in clear opposition to the previous teaching of the Church concerning a well-formed conscience as it has been expressed in the Church’s Catechism which is still valid.”

In the face of such moral clarity and principled indignation and courage, one can only wonder at a recent article written by the prominent Guido Horst in the conservative newspaper Die Tagespost.

For him, Cardinal Müller’s January 8 statement concerning Amoris Laetitia and the dubia has now closed the case, as it were. He sees that the debate within the Church has – with the recent words of the cardinal – reached “an intermittent end,” and thus adds: “After all, the words of the Prefect for the Faith stem from a qualified and competent source.”

After quoting Müller’s words, according to which there will be no public correction of the pope, Horst concludes with the following words:
Thus it is clear that, in the foreseeable future, there will be no further attempt coming out from the College of Cardinals or the world’s episcopacy to correct the pope formally, as Cardinal Raymond Burke once proposed it...

Also the debate concerning the dubia – in public, as it has been so far – is closed. It may continue among the experts, but it will no longer a cause for irritation.
At the end of his article, the German journalist even proposes that Amoris Laetitia has, indeed, now set “stricter standards” than before when it comes to the question of the “remarried” divorcees and as to how to discern their situation and accompany them.

Prior to Amoris Laetitia, where some German dioceses proposed communion for everyone, the new papal document has now purportedly set the challenge of looking more carefully into each case individually. Thus, Horst says: “With Amoris Laetitia, the conditions for it [the pastoral care in individual cases] have become, rather, even stricter now.” [Horst is obviously in a Bergoglio-altered state of consciousness. While 'case-by-case' may certainly sound stricter than 'everyone', no one has any illusions that case-by-case is not just meant to be but already is the first step down that slippery slope to 'communion for everyone' and the virtual abolition of sin, as Eugenio Scalfari quite bluntly concluded, seeing through the casuistries of Bergoglian rhetoric three years ago.]

Another item I am posting belatedly though it is something we must all keep in mind - earth-based reality vs all the airy-fairy hypotheticals of AL Chapter 8...

Fantasy and reality
in the ‘Kasper proposal’
[Really the 'Bergoglio proposition']
By Phil Lawler

Jan 06, 2017

The debate on Amoris Laetitia has been simmering steadily since my last entry on the subject. Father Raymond de Souza has helped put that debate in perspective, with a clear and compelling summary [an analysis I posted on this thread last Dec. 30] — easily the best that I have seen — of where the argument now stands.

At this point the theoretical arguments for and against the “Kasper proposal” have been explored thoroughly. In this short comment I propose to take a step back, and assess how well (if at all) those arguments match the everyday realities of life in the Catholic Church. Proponents of change tell us that we should learn from the “lived experience” of the faithful. Let’s apply that standard to the matter at hand.

In theory, the “Kasper proposal” — as set forth in Chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia [i.e., it really is the Bergoglio proposition!] — suggests that Catholics who are divorced and remarried should meet with their pastors, and begin a lengthy, in-depth, soul-searching exploration of their situations. In theory, this process will enable them better to recognize their own failings, their need for God’s mercy, and the steps they should take to bring their lives fully into harmony with the demands of Christian morality. In theory it sounds edifying. But is it likely to happen? Is it a realistic expectation?

That long, demanding journey of discernment would be possible only if a couple made a firm commitment to the process, and found a priest equally willing to guide them along the path. How many couples would be willing to put in the necessary hours, to take each of the inevitably painful steps? How many priests?
- Isn’t it far more likely that ordinary couples, if they wanted to return to Communion, would seek out a priest who would give them quick approval to do so, without putting them through the rigorous spiritual exercises envisioned in Amoris Laetitia?
- Isn’t it more likely that many priests would be all too willing to provide that sort of rubber-stamp approval, to avoid a long and frustrating process?
The process sketched out in Chapter 8 of AL requires a level of commitment that, frankly, we aren’t likely to encounter often.

In the American parishes with which I’m familiar, priests are available to hear confessions just 30 to 45 minutes a week. Yet that short stretch of time is usually adequate to accommodate the few penitents who show up. Now we are being asked to believe that in these same parishes, priests will voluntarily set aside hour after hour to meet with couples in irregular situations — and that those couples will suddenly demand those sessions.

Certainly I know good priests who already do spend hours in the confessional or in counseling sessions, wrestling with the problems of troubled couples. And I know lay people who, having rediscovered their faith, sought out intensive spiritual direction. Without exception — do you suppose this is a coincidence? — they oppose the Kasper proposal [the Bergoglio proposition].

TERESA BENEDETTA
00giovedì 12 gennaio 2017 12:41



A delayed book review here, which I had intended to introduce a chapter from the book that the author himself posted on his blog, but as I have
yet to translate that chapter, here is the review. I shall add the chapter translation itself as soon as I can...Please remember that until AL, Valli
had been among the most ardent Bergoglists among the Vaticanistas.

Aldo Maria Valli:
Questions about this pope
from a son of the Church
by Lorenzo Bertocchi
Translated from

02-01-2017
January 2, 2017

The documented summary-review of Pope Francis's nearly four-year Pontificate so far by Italian State TV's Vaticanista Aldo Maria Valli leaves the reader with many questions, as in an unanswered quiz.

In almost 200 pages, Valli offers a long and detailed series of episodes and citations from the 266th Successor of Peter, raising courteous questions but without leaving any doubt as to the 'perplexities' that this pope has engendered.

In the beginning was Cardinal Kasper. As everyone recalls, at his very first Angelus remarks, the Pope made a praiseful citation of the German cardinal-theologian, who at the time, was rather on the fringes of the Catholic intelligentsia.

Called by the new pope "a theologian on the ball, a good theologian", and praised for his book about mercy, Kasper can be considered the academic reference for what would become - perhaps not all that strangely - the heart of this pontificate: mercy. [Of which, one must note, there's mercy and mercy!]

And we must go back to Kasper again in order to understand the two 'family synods' which this pope synthesized in the apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia. The synodal marathon over almost a two-year period got underway with Kasper's infamous 'gospel of the family' preached to a secret consistory in February 2014 [on express assignment by Bergoglio], which has now led to allowing communion 'in certain cases' for remarried divorces living together adulterously and continuing to do so.

Of all the dissertations on the possible controversial interpretations of divine mercy according to Kasper, there remains the paradigmatic passage that seems to guide the pontificate of someone who is a man of action, and certainly not a theologian or a philosopher [not that theologians and philosophers cannot be men of aciton, as well]: "from the logic of doctors of the law to that of the Good Samaritan". [Typically false Bergoglian dichotomy!]

It is unfortunate, writes Valli, that this line "entails numerous problems". The most serious - especially in the light of 'case by case' erected as a system in AL - would be the apparent "triumph of the contingent over the absolute, of the transitory over the stable, of the possible over the necessary".

Struck by propositions like 'discernment' and 'accompaniment', we ask ourselves whether reality does not end up resolving itself as simply the experience of the individual as the sole judge of himself, of what he believes is good or evil. Many have described this as ignoring moral absolutes and the triumph of situation ethics, which John Paul II condemned in the encyclical Veritatis splendor.

Valli's book hammers away at these questions - questions effectively condensed in the famous FIVE DUBIA presented by the Four Cardinals to the pope regarding AL Chapter 8.

The 'who am I to judge' pope - who made this Generation-Me mantra into a cult phrase, drawn from one of his answers in his first inflight news conference - is the pope of repeated confidential encounters with the king of Italian secularists, Eugenio Scalfari, during which the pope has used other catch phrases like the much-cited "There is no Catholic God".

He has called Martin Luther 'medicine' for a Church that was sick, and took part in opening the fifth centenary year of the Reformation, expressing possible ways towards interfaith communion which he had first treated equivocally [many saw it as an endorsement in yet another relativistic formulation, "Do what your heart tells you!] during a visit to Rome's Lutheran Church in 2015.

On his visit to Lund, Sweden for that joint celebration of Luther's Schism, he took it for granted that the problems separating Catholics and Lutherans on the doctrine of justification would be overcome (despite the 1999 Joint Catholic-Lutheran Declaration on Justification, towards which Cardinal Kasper had been among the most diligent of its drafters) [and to which the CDF, under Cardinal Ratzinger, felt it was necessary to issue a document listing the problems that remain open on that question].

On Islam and terrorism, Valli says the problem is that this pope says nothing "about the problem of violence in Islam". "Just as reductive [as well as irrational and willfully blind] is his reading of terrorism only in sociological and economic terms".

Still on terrorism, this pope let loose another unfortunate buzz phrase in essentially equating Catholic 'fundamentalism' to the Islamic kind. Returning from his WYD trip to Poland, the pope told newsmen on the plane that "I don't speak of Islamic violence because everyday when I read the newspapers, I see the violence taking place in Italy - someone shoots his fiancee dead, another kills his mother-in-law, yet these are baptized Catholics! They are violent Catholics! If I would speak about Islamic violence, then I must also speak of Catholic violence". [Surely one of the most idiotic (and fundamentally anti-Catholic) statements ever made by a pope, by a leader, even by an average person!]

Socio-economic issues are among the repeated topics of 'analyses' presented by this pope - they are cited especially in his advocacy of climate activism as expressed in his encyclical Laudato si, but especially in his sponsorship of 'popular movements' which generally have a clearly Marist matrix. And so, he repeatedly makes generic attacks against 'the system' ["This economy kills!] and the 'idolatry of money', which he even blames as a cause for why young people are more and more rejecting marriage. [When Francis's follies and fallacies are enumerated like this, you have to wonder whether he is not somewhat mentally 'not there'!]

All this, and much more, is found in Valli's 200-page book which details the perplexities that wrack him as a result of his papal chronicle.

At one point, he cites an unnamed journalist who offers a synthesis of the Bergoglio who is pope. It has been pointed out that the Argentine pope is rather repetitive [tiresomely so, ad nauseam] and so, the journalist summarizes using the pope's own recurrent themes and terms:
God? He is merciful ("He is greater than all our sins!") [Another IDIOTIC statement! So idiotic one cringes in embarrassment for Bergoglio! How can one compare God to sin???? It's like comparing him to Satan himself!]. The Church? let it be poor and for the poor, going outwards to the peripheries, let it heal wounds as in a field hospital.] [I suspect he does not really know what a field hospital is, otherwise he would realize that it is a most faulty metaphor for the Church] Pastoral care? Don't impose duties. just facilitate an encounter with the Lord.

Then there are the corollaries, similarly repeated over and over:'Pastors should take on the odor of the sheep, they should stop gossiping, they should not be careerists. Society? Fight the throwaway culture and money as god ("Corruption is an evil worse than sin") [Another can-you-believe-how-idiotic line!] Grandparents must be respected. Housing, land and jobs must be guaranteed for everyone. [Another one of those mindless Bergoglian Marxist formulations. 'Land' for everyone? In a society that is rapidly and universally urbanizing??? What planet is he living on?]

I will leave it to the reader who gets a copy of Valli's book to discover the conclusions he draws from the many questions that constellate the pages of this freely open book written with respect by a true son of the Church. [Remember JMB's copout when asked about his attitude towards homosexual practices? "I am a son of the Church - Read what the Catechism says!' Some 'son of the Church' this anti-Catholic pope is!]

1/14/17
THE DUBIA OF ALDO MARIA VALLI

It took me a couple more days before I could get back to finishing my translation of this chapter that the author himself excerpted from his book to post on his blog. It is a formidable analysis that comes from someone who has been a lifelong progressivist Catholic and who, until several months ago, was quite Bergoglian. But AL came along and changed his view of this pontificate to the point that he felt compelled to write a book documenting his critical inquiry into this pope, his statements and his actions.

This chapter, in effect, synthesizes virtually all the major dubia raised in the minds of average reasonable Catholics about this pope and this pontificate - and he formulates his questions as dubia answerable by Yes or No.

Because of its length, I had to do the translation on WORD, which means I must now enter all the format enhancements appropriate to the post - which will probably take me more than an hour to do...

Truth, justice, mercy:
Analyzing the 'Francis method'
by Aldo Maria Valli
Excerpt from his book "266...'
Published on his blog


“I believe in God. Not in a Catholic God. A Catholic God does not exist. God exists”. Words of Pope Francis.

The concept is not new, because it was already expressed, more completely, by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini [whose definitive biography so far was written by Valli] in his interview-book with fellow Jesuit Fr. George Sporschill.

But now an analogous question is being asked, but with a different subject. Not “Does God exist?” but “Is Pope Francis Catholic?”

September 2015, eve of the pope’s trip to the United States: On a pitchblack background, the face of the pope appears in half shadow. It is the cover of Newsweek, and the device is familiar: Whenever the Roman Pontiff is the subject of discussion, he is always depicted in obscurity, or else, facing away, back to the people. But it is the title that is immediately striking: “Is the Pope Catholic?”

The newsmagazine, an expression of a cultural, religious and political world that is certainly not approving of the Catholic Church, dramatizes the provocative question, which arises in part from Francis’s famous words “Who am I to judge a gay person?”, and more generally, because of Papa Bergoglio’s pastoral line, characterized not by condemnation [But which contemporary Pope’s pontificate has been characterized by condemnation???],, not by conflict with modernity but by dialog.

The weekly’s intention was transparent. By asking the question, it hits two birds with one shot: It accuses the Church pre-Bergoglio of having been always retrograde, while at the same time, touching the open wound of the divisions that the Argentine pope has been provoking in the Catholic Church by his decisions and by his [anti-Catholic] line in general.

In fact, the magazine hastens to note that the pope’s popularity in recent surveys of American Catholics, has been in free fall, because many conservative Catholics see him as the Fifth Column of he left and of radical ecologism, while acknowledging that the pope is a ‘superb communicator’ [How can someone who so habitually confused and confusing,If not outright incoherent when he is not insulting, be a ‘superb communicator’?], and “a cunning reflection of the Catholic image’ insofar as he "makes it superfluous to remind Catholics what they believe in”, relying instead on eloquent gestures such as renouncing princely vestments [What contemporary pope has dressed in princely vestments, unless one considers the traditional liturgical vestments preserved from previous popes in St. Peter’s sacristy and occasionally worn by the popes before Francis ‘princely vestments’?], using a utility vehicle for moving around, and choosing to live in a small room in Casa Santa Marta. [Such is the substance of myth that by constant repetition, gets to be established as a convenient factoid. But his room at CSM is hardly small – it is the hotel’s equivalent of a royal suite, and has an adjoining sitting room and study. In fact, a whole wing on one floor of the hotel is occupied by him and his personal and security staff, and if someone would report on the actual square-footage in this papal wing, it could well be beyond the square-footage of the papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace, which did not have to provide lodging for security personnel because by its very location, it is internally as secure as anything could be in the Vatican.]

But the title of Newsweek’s cover story is a reason to reflect: If this question arises in anyone, does it mean that Francis himself is legitimizing it? Is there something in the words, in the teachings and in the gestures of this pope that clashes with the Catholic faith, or at least, does not fully mirror it?

December 8, 2015. An appeal from the American biweekly newspaper The Remnant, which expresses the sentiments of traditional Catholic groups, calls on the pope to step down because
“a growing number of Catholics, including cardinals and bishops, are starting to acknowledge that your pontificate… is the cause of serious harm to the Catholic Church. It has become impossible to deny the fact, they wrote, that you, Holiness, do not possess the capacity nor the intention to fulfill that which is the duty of every pope according to the words of your immediate predecessor: “He must constantly link himself to the Church in obedience to the Word of God, in the face of all attempt to adapt or dilute it, as in the face of every opportunism’.
According to the Remnant, instead of focusing on the teaching of the Church on the Word of God, Francis is instead bent on proclaiming his own ideas, doing it in
“…multiple homilies, news conferences, off-the-cuff statements, interviews with newsmen, discourses of all kinds and idiosyncratic interpretations of the Gospel. These ideas, which range from simply disquieting to plainly heterodox, are perfectly represented by a document that is more or less his personal manifesto, Evangelii gaudium, containing a series of incredible pronouncements which never befoe had any Roman Pontiff dared to say.

“Among this, we must list a statement like “the dream… of transforming everything in the Church because the customs, the styles, the scheduled, the language and every ecclesial structure may become an adequate channel for the evangelization of the present world, rather than for self-preservation”. It is inconceivable that a Roman Pontiff could even hypothesize an inexistent opposition between the self-preservation of the Holy Roman Catholic Church and her mission in the world. [See? That was one of the idiocies I missed noting in my perfunctory scans of a document I find unsupportable in style as well as in content. Idiotic because how can the Church carry out her mission if she does not also take care to preserve who she is and the faith she embodies??? ]

The signatories do not excuse the pope for writing in EG of the temptation to which Catholics could yield, namely, in the Catholic enclosing himself in ‘structures’ that offer ‘false protection’, in ‘norms’ that transform believers into ‘implacable judges’ and in ‘habits’ whose only purpose is to keep things tranquil.

What the pope calls structures, norms and habits are, in fact, the appeal’s signatories write, the very framework of doctrine that prevents the Church from disintegrating.

The pope’s rebukes, they add, are generic and produce disconcert, whereas his epithets, sometimes insults, which the pope reserves for those who do not think like him, are quite specific against those whom he variously calls ‘fundamentalists’ , ‘Pharisees’, ‘Pelagians’, ‘triumphalists’, ‘gnostics’, ‘nostalgics’, ‘superficial Christians’, ‘gang of the privileged’, ‘peacocks’, ‘pedantic moralists’, ‘uniformists’, ‘arrogantly self-sufficient’, ‘aristocratic intellectuals’, ‘Christian bats who prefer the shadows instead of the light in the presence of the Lord’, and the like.

There are many accusations against the pope in the letter-appeal. In the foreground, his banalization of the concept of mercy, that he has been propagating in the name of a generic ‘tenderness’ which overshadows binding moral rules, whereas the only true ‘revolution of tenderness’ takes place through Baptism.

Now, another magazine cover. This time, in November 2015, the British weekly The Spectator, which has a conservative outlook. It is a cartoon: Francis merrily rides a giant wrecking ball that crashes into a church and reduces it to a pile of rubble, with the title “Pope vs Church: The anatomy of a Catholic civil war”. The thesis of Damian Thompson, who wrote the cover story, can be summarized thus: The ‘disordered’ reforms of Bergoglio and his ‘wild’ declarations are generating apprehensions among average Catholics who think that the pope has gone out of control.

So then: Is Francis not Catholic? Or hardly Catholic? On September 22, 2015, while this pope was in flight from Cuba to the USA, correspondent Gian Guido Vecchi of Corriere della Sera asked the question directly: “First, it was said that the pope is communist, and now some are asking whether the pope is Catholic, more or less? What do you say?”

Here was the pope’s response:
A cardinal friend of mine told me that one day, a lady came to him very concerned – she was very Catholic, a big rigid, this lady, but a good Catholic, who asked him if it was true that the Bible spoke of an anti-Christ. And he explained to her – that this is said in the Apocalypse, right? Then, she asked if it was also true that it speaks about an anti-pope. ‘But why do you ask this?” the cardinal asked. “because I am sure that Pope Francis is the anti-pope”. “Why would you think that?” he asked. “Because he does not use red shoes”. [See, how consistent he is even in this hypothetical, perhaps imaginary anecdotes! He ridicules this hypothetical ‘very Catholic, good Catholic but 'rather rigid' lady for being idiotic in her ‘rigid Catholicity’! Obviously, this was another notable milestone I missed in the documentation of Bergoglio’s inability to simply say Yes or No to a question.

One would have thought that a pope would have begun by answering, “Of course, I am Catholic. I was elected to lead the Catholic Church. I would not have been elected if I were not Catholic”. Not relate an anecdote that reduces opponents to objects of ridicule.]

So that's the way it is... there are historical reasons for thinking that one is Communist or not… I am sure that I have not said anything that is not within the social doctrine of the Church. .. [Evasion, evasion, your name is Bergoglio! So he shifts to the other accusation without ansswering the first at all, not that he has answered the second either!]

On another trip, when I was preparing to address the meeting of the ‘popular movements’ [in Bolivia], a colleague said to me: “You have held out your hand to these popular movements … but will the Church follow you?” And I said, “It is me who follows the Church”, and in this, I think I am not wrong, I believe I have not said anything that is not in the social doctrine of the Church.

Everything can be explained. Maybe the explanation will give the impression that I am being a bit ‘leftist’, but it would be an error of interpretation. No, my doctrine, in all this, in Laudato si, on economic imperialism and all that, is that of the social doctrine of the Church. And if it is necessary that I recite the Creed, I am ready to do so. [Excuse me! Where did that come from? As if by reciting the Creed if called to do so, he would thereby prove he is Catholic and not a communist???]

Bergoglio’s response, even if it was off the cuff and in imprecise Italian, allows us to understand the pope’s attitude in the face of some criticisms.

First of all, regardinjg the concern of the ‘good Catholic lady’ who sees in him an anti-pope, he has recourse to the rhetorical device of ridiculing her. “What, I am an anti-pope because I don’t wear read shoes?” As if to say: These ‘good Catholics’, so attached to tradition, are nothing but formalists. Then comes his substantial self-defense: “Actually, I have never said anything that is not contained in the social doctrine of the Church”. [Yes, but that addresses the accusation of being Communist, not of whether he is Catholic!]

But this pope is too intelligent not to know that even the way one says things have a certain importance. In fact, he acknowledges that some of his explanations could appear ‘leftist’.

A bit ingenuous and a bit sly, as he has described himself, and as he always appears when he is with journalists, he says that in order to avoid any doubts, he is even ready to recite the Creed, with which he makes known that he is quite aware of the disconcertment he is provoking in some sectors of the ecclesial community.

But he moves ahead the way he wants to, because he is convinced that today, it is more important to intervene on social injustices, on old and new poverty, on ecological problems and the ‘throwaway culture’ rather than speaking on doctrinal matters and moral questions (those famous ‘non-negotiable values’ in Benedict XVI’s Pontificate – abortion, euthanasia, homosexual practices, artificial procreation) - messages which, in the recent past, were hammered home.

That explains his strategy, although in truth, it has not kept him from reiterating the line of his predecessors on abortion, euthanasia and artificial procreation. [Hardly reiterating, but rather studiously avoiding having to say anything on such topics, because as he told the Italian bishops shortly after he became pope, it is not necessary to have to say the same things again and again. Of course, he does not follow his own counsel because on the secular issues which he has made his priority, he does tirelessly repeat himself again and again!]

Nonetheless, the covers of Newsweek and Spectator, like the petition from The Remnant, tell us that there is a certain discomfort, perhaps even distress about this pope, yet these are only three cases among the many that can be cited. A distress that has only worsened after the publication of Amoris laetitia, his post-synodal apostolic exhortation on ‘family love’.

Although I have become used to discussions and polemics regarding the work of popes (I have been doing this for more than 20 years), I must admit that I have never witnessed a confrontation as strident as this. In Italy, it is perhaps still a bit imperceptible, but it is underway especially on the Internet. And at the center of all the polemics is he, Pope Francis. Praised by some, criticized and opposed by others.

Something similar happened with John XXIII, especially after his decision to convoke the Second Vatican Council. Even Papa Roncalli, who was so loved as to pass into history as ‘the good pope’, was in fact accused of modernism and progressivism. And like Francis, he too was considered by some to be ‘Communist’, or too ecumenical and with little respect for Tradition. [A strange accusation against someone who happily followed every papal tradition, including wearing the red shoes, hats and capes that popes are entitled to wear ‘casually’, and who loved Castel Gandolfo as much as his predecessors and successors, except the present one.] In some circles, his call for aggiornamento [keeping up to date] was seen by some as a betrayal of tradition, and the debate on his actions became heated, but never as harsh and strident as for Francis today, if only because at that time, mass media were not omnipresent 24/7 as today, and there were no social networks which are catalysts of extremisms.

In any case, Bergoglio is between two fires: If the greater part of the criticisms continue to arrive from the ‘right’, even the more progressivist circles are in a state of fibrillation, and after having invested so much hope in him, are now starting to accuse him of inconclusiveness.

So there is a ‘Francis case’. Which one must look into with some inconvenient but inevitable questions: Wny, alongside the hosannahs from many, the increasingly hard stands against him continue to grow? What has gone wrong? What no longer convinces? And what do his opponents fear?

Many claim that those who are ranged againsgt this pope are fearful of the future and of losing their privileges. [??? Ordinary Catholics like me who only wantw to continue living the faith in which I grew up – because it represents a firm foundation for what one must do to be worthy of God’s grace – have no privileges to lose! Daily life is a continuing struggle, but we make do with God’s help which does not have to be material but which does bring joy and comfort in the midst of difficulties.] This hypothesis is widely held, and probably there is some truth to it. But if it's happening, there is more to it.

Juan Carlos Scannone, the Argentine theologian who is a friend of Bergoglio and a Jesuit like him (the theoretician, with Lucio Gera, of that ‘theology of the people’ that has influenced this pope considerably) [a variant of Liberation Theology which advocates its Marxist goals but rejects armed militancy] explains that with Francis, the Church has finally become the paradigm of Vatican II. That from the preceding paradigm, considered a-historical because it started off from ‘what must be’ without considering the reality of the time, we came to the historical paradigm desired by John XXIII, who wanted to take the personal and the subjective more in consideration. [Not true, of course. One only has to read his opening address to the Council in DEcember 1965!]

This was a change, Scannone explains, that is evident in Gaudium et Spes – the root and inspiration for Evangelii gaudium, which seeks to put into practice the method of ‘see, justify, act’, the central pastoral strategy of the Conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellin, Colombia, in 1968, and at every subsequent continent-wide conference until the 2007 Conference in Aparecida, whose final document, drafted under Bergoglio’s chairmanship , is the other source of inspiration for this pope.

[What Valli does not point out is that despite all these Latin-American bishops’ conferences and their hefty final documents – the first of which (Medellin 1968) spelled out the goals, strategy and tactics of frankly Marxist liberation theology with the establishment of the so-called ‘base communities’, going on to more radical documents in Puebla and Santo Domingo in the next twenty five years.

Meanwhile, the churches of Latin America simply continued to hemorrhage their members who joined assorted independent evangelical churches so that by the time Bergoglio became Pope, a continent that had once been 90% Catholic (forever, it seemed) was down to 69% - and in more than half of the countries of Latin America, Catholics now make up less than 50% of the population.

Aparecida in 2005 obviously did nothing to staunch the bleeding. Yet what did a 2014 Pew survey show, conducted during the first year of Bergoglio's Pontificate?
- Protestant Latin Americans attend Church more frequently, read the Scriptures and pray more often than Catholics.
- Catholics, the survey said, are less morally opposed to abortion, homosexuality, premarital sex, divorce and contraception.
- About 60 percent of Protestants surveyed in Latin America said they were looking for a church that “places greater importance on living a moral life.”

What was Bergoglio doing in Argentina all that time? Playing kumbaya with the evangelicals – even then, he had no interest in converting anyone to Catholicism, nor obviously, in stopping Catholics from leaving the Church. The pollsters had a catch phrase: While the Catholic Church was proclaiming an empty ‘preferential option for the poor’, the poor were manifesting a preferential option for the Protestants.

And that is why, Scannone says, this pope is committed to accompanying the poor, why he denounces the throwaway culture, and why he asks pastors to pay attention and solicitude to every single person: Reality is more important than ideas, Bergoglio already liked to say this in 1974, when he was head of the Jesuits in Argentina. [Another Bergoglio idiocy – as if reality could be appreciated independent of the mind!]

To inquire into the roots of this pope's thinking makes us understand how much he is bound to a certain climate – cultural, social and theological – that continues to influence him. But we can ask legitimately: has not that season passed by - at least in some of its important aspects - however heady it may have been for him? [What exactly did he do that kept the church in Buenos Aires together, if he tried at all, and with his decision to give priority to pastoral leniency, if not downright license, was he not bucking the obvious trend that the Catholics leaving the Church for Protestantism were not finding what they wanted in the Catholic Church? As the Pew survey found, the median percentage of converts from Catholicism to Protestantism left the Church for the following main reasons:
Are seeking a personal connection with God: 81%
Enjoy the style of worship at a new church: 69%
Wanted a greater emphasis on morality: 60%]

Today, in the face of the spread of subjectivism and relativism, immersed as we are in ‘liquid’ culture of post-modernity, exposed to the risk of seeing all the instruments that could assure us of moral stanards vanish before our eyes, can the ‘historical paradigm’ introduced by the progressivist reading of Vatican II still be our principal interpretative tool? Is it not perhaps necessary to update and integrate what has gone before into new reflections? Is not the problem today perhaps the opposite of what it was half a century ago?

Today, as a Church, don’t we risk now – which we did not before – of becoming too immersed in history so that we are incapable of having stable points of reference that can enable us to help orient a humanity that is morally out of control?

Theologian Inos Biffi [one of two winners of the 2016 Ratzinger Prize], in an article which never mentions Pope Francis but seems to be addressed to him indirectly, warns against any deviations of contemporary culture that the Church could well assume.

When subjectivism prevails above all, Biffi explains, the subject is "prey to impressions” and “human action ends up missing enlightened solid reason” which is what makes it possible to make good choices.

It is the great problem of our time. We no longer have principles and fundamental ideas to explain who we are and what we do. Or, better said, we have principles and notions which fatally lead us back “to instinctivity or incontestable opinions”, which is to say, allergic to any measure whatsoever.

Which leads us to "the absolutization of the subject, which has become the undisputable principle of good and evil, of valid and invalid”. A question, says Biffi, that would seem at first to be merely anthropological and logical inevitably becomes theological.

To reject this ‘liquidity’ of reality is to reclaim for man his faculty of “discerning intelligibility, order and the light of things as being a reflection of the Word, and therefore of the Father".

This is the dramatic challenge that faces all of us, especially the believer, in this age of a liquid society. But Pope Francis does not seem interested to assume this challenge.

On some occasions he has used harsh words against that which he calls ‘pensiero unico’ [In current discourse, usually used in its original form pensée unique" (French for "single thought") - a pejorative expression for mainstream ideological conformism of any kind, almost always opposed to that of the speaker], except that he uses the term in its original economic and social meaning [that neoliberalism is the only correct way to structure society, implying that mainstream discussion is limited by ideological assumptions of what is possible], not in its philosophical meaning and its possible theological implications.

Therefore, Bergoglio’s theology appears to reduce itself to a theology of rights that excludes duties, or relegates them to the background. [Is this properly called theology, or is it not, rather, ethical philosophy?]

“Spiritual intrusion into personal life is not possible,” he says in that first interview with La Civilta Cattolica in July 2013.

This is one of the most problematic of his dicta. In which Bergoglio takes upon himself, voluntarily or not, a commonplace typical of post-modernity – that individual judgment, or what is commonly called conscience, is always good, or at least, is always valid, something that no one can judge externally, with any universal standard.

But if individual choice, by the very fact of being taken ‘in conscience’, is in itself good and incontestable, are we not in full relativism? [That is quite obvious but very few, even among serious orthodox commentators, ever remarked on Bergoglio’s blatant relativism, evident almost from Day 1 of his pontificate. And we must be thankful Valli calls it by its name. Otherwise, it has been a continuing omission after four years that I find inexplicable considering that his predecessor had been the first world leader and intellectual who ever took such a strong – and widely quoted – public stand against the dictatorship of relativism the day before he was elected pope!]

And is it not perhaps true that along this road of relativism, it would be so easy to arrive at the idea – already widespread in the pastoral activity of the Church’s ministers – according to which ‘sincerity’ and spontaneity cancel out the nature of sin? [One of the heresies proposed with technically evasive casuistry in AL Chapter 8.]

And is it realy merciful to respect the choice of life of every individual who has made his choice freely and sincerely? [Sincerity is in itself a relative term – one can been completely sincere and be totally wrong at the same time.]

Is it not the duty of the Church to expose lifestyles characterized by sin? And is doing this not perhaps the highest form of mercy?

If the Church does not expose sin, if she is not able to make a sinner see clear within himself following Christ’s law, does she not condemn herself to irrelevance? [Which the 9aforementioned experience of the Church in Latin America abundantly demonstrates – in which 60% of those who left the Church for Protestantism claimed their principal reason was that they want ‘greater emphasis on morality’. That seems to me to be the most damning verdict on the church of Bergoglio – the pope’s personal extension to the universal Church of his ultra-permissive, ultra-lenient governance of the Church in Buenos Aires.]

Primacy of conscience [not in the sense of the Catholic formed conscience, but conscience as ‘what I think is right and good for me’] does not mean the impossibility or incapacity to judge. [But a relativistic conscience, what one might call purely self-referential, to use a Bergoglian pet term, is incapable of making any judgment that is not what it wants, what it thinks is right and good for itself.]

At stake here is not just the eternal destiny of the souls who think this way but the authoritativeness of the pope himself.

[So why have not more intelligent Catholics with access to media exposure ever spoken out against this most un-Christian Bergoglian idea of conscience, taken verbatim from the ‘me-myself-I’ self-centeredness of the generations formed by the 1968 cultural revolution – Bergoglio among them.

And with all due respect to Valli himself, who has finally taken off his progressivist blinders to the horrible reality of who Bergoglio really is and what he represents, he was among those who just let Bergoglio’s un-Christian, anti-Catholic ramblings and rantings pass unremarked!]

When Francis says that “everyone has his own idea of good and evil, and must choose to follow the good and combat evil as he conceives them” [one of the most outrageous statements in the first Scalfari ‘interview’ that the Vatican never refuted – even if Scalfari admitted that what he reported were his own paraphrasing of what he deduced from his conversation with the pope – and indeed, for months, reproduced Scalfari’s report on the Vatican webpage dedicated to Pope Francis’s Documents after finally taking it off but including it in the first anthology of the pope’s interviews collected and puiblished by the Vatican publishing house, and what better imprimatur/nihil obstat can there be?], what are we to think?

This is a subjectivist relativist conception of moral conscience which certainly is not what the Church has always taught. Does true good not exist objectively for the Catholic/ [or for anyone using his reason sanely and not selfishly]?

Besides the media manipulations and omissions (that one must always take into account), one must return to the greater problem which comprehends all other problems: In a cultural and spiritual context like ours – which is profoundly characterized by subjectivism (reality must be solved within the particular life experience of the subject, who is the sole judge of himself) and by emotionalism (the criterion for moral action does not come from well-formed reason but in the emotion evoked by living through a particular experience), does not the Bergoglio paradigm make a formidable contribution - not to say, a surrender – to the spirit of the times [Zeitgeist, to use the German term that has been absorbed into English usage], which is already characterized by the trioumph of the contingent over the absolute, of the transitory over the stable, of the possible over the necessary?

In short, is Pope Francis a product of relativism? [HE IS ITS VERY EXPRESSION!] A question which carries another within itself: On the basis of AL, is the “Francis method’ that it proposes intended to bring sinners to salvation, or simply for the ‘wellbeing’ [a subjective feeling] of the individuals concerned?

From a spirituality based on the rights of God and the duties of man, have we now come to a spirituality focused on the duties of God and the rights of man?

“If by fundamentalist one means someone who insist on fundamental things, I am a fundamentalist. As a priest, I do not teach my own thoughts and I do not act for myself. I belong to Christ”. So spoke Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, canonist. A way of saying that he does not agree with the Bergoglio line.

But even the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, is very explicit:
“We have the doctrine of the Church which is expressed in the Catechism, in the Council of Trent, in the two Vatican Councils, in declarations from our congregation. Pastoral care cannot have a concept different from that doctrine – doctrine and pastoral ministry are the same thing. Jesus Christ as Pastor and Jesus Christ as Teacher of the Word are not different persons. And the mercy of God does not contradict the justice of God”. [Brave words said before his recent January 8 capitulation asserting that AL presents no danger to the faith.]

And what about Cardinal Robert Sarah, who in his best-seller God or nothing, maintains that the Church is headed for self-dissolution if it fails to indicate a cure doctrinal and moral way?

“‘I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life’, Jesus said. That is what remain stable. And it is what I seek to bear witness to”, Sarah said in an April 2016 interview.

Despite Benedict XVI’s warnings against relativism, Sarah said, we now find ourselves in a world [and a Church] where everything is possible:
“We no longer have roots. Nothing stable. But we do have a stable doctrine – we have Revelation. And for us bishops, it is a duty to make our faithful go back to the roots of our faith, to Revelation.

We cannot leave our faithful without a sure and secure way to follow. Without a rock on which to rest and lean on. In the parish, that rock is the parish priest; in the diocese, the bishop; and in the universal Church, the Pope.

We must help the Holy Father assure the faithful that there is stability in the Church. That there is a way, one way forward. And that is Jesus Christ”.
When he was asked if, like Cardinal Burke, he considers himself a ‘fundamentalist’, he smiled and said, “Yes, of course!”

A pastor like Sarah is too faithful to the pope to engage him in direct polemics, but when he says, for example, that the greatest injustice is to give the need only ‘bread’, forgetting they need God, first of all, then his opposition to the Bergoglio line is not hidden at all.

Moreover, according to critics like Sarah, there is an error underlying Bergoglio’s propositions. That when he and his followers speak of the ‘poverty of the Church’, he really means desacralizing it. That when they say the Church should accompany the needy [in the material and emotional sense], they seem to deny a perception of the grandeur and majesty of God, in whose place, they would substitute human action.

Christ said the truth would make us free, but today, the question of Truth is hardly ever taken into consideration. We have become preoccupied only with freedom, thus our thinking is crippled and incomplete, because there is no authentic freedom without truth.

If the Church will not remind the faithful, on the basis of correct doctrine, of the line between authentic freedom and slavery, then who will show them the way. Sarah says:
“True freedom is that which commits us to seek the true, the good and the beautiful, to seek true justice. We can only be free in Jesus Christ. Only he can liberate us. And his freedom has nothing to do with what I personally want for myself. The Church should stay along this path”.

It is not surprising that, especially since AL was published, many observers, including pastors, announced the birth of a new church – ‘the church of Pope Francis’, a Church that is no longer judgmental but ‘in dialog’ in the sense that the dominant culture understands dialog, namely, a neutral and neuter Church, devoid of the ability and will to distinguish, to evaluate, to express a judgment.

Which makes it inevitable to ask: If the Church does not judge, does not distinguish, does not evaluate, then what is her function?

This pope, with his pastoral paradigm of ‘mercy’, seems to say that the purpose of the Church is to console and to accompany, but can one give comfort without any evaluation of the situation? Can there be any accompaniment without first making some judgment [about what accompaniment is necessary]?

Has the pope not decreed, in effect, that the subjective way of living any experience is the only measure to evaluate the moral quality of the experience?

If a grieving Paul VI, in a now-remote 1972, came to the conclusion that “through some fissure, the smoke of Satan has entered the Church”, can we not now ask: Through which fissure has relativism also entered? [The fissure has a name: Jorge Mario Bergoglio, pope and dictator of relativism par excellence!]

At this point in our inquiry, we can maintain that basically, there is not just one kind of relativism, that there are at least two – one bad and one good.
- Bad relativism leads directly to nihilism, and eventually to desperation, to the impossibility of harboring any kind of hope in anything that is stable and absolute.
- Whereas good relativism would be that which, while acknowledging the extreme variablity of human situations, continues to believe in an Absolute.

[‘Absolute’ here does not mean only a Supreme Being who is absolute, but also all the truths that have come to us from this Supreme Being, none of which can be relativized in evaluating any human experience. So, in this sense, all relativism – a rejection that anything can be stable and unchanging despite continually changing circumstances - is just BAD without ifs or buts. This is the relativism so strongly denounced by Benedict XVI and which his successor champions primarily as situational ethics, roundly denounced by John Paul II in Veritatis splendor.]

Some observers claim that with his paradigm of the Good Samaritan, Pope Francis is exercising ‘good’ relativism: he announces Christian hope but takes into account that everything in life is contingent.

Now the great question is: How is he announcing Christian hope: In his catecheses on mercy, he reiterates: “We are all called upon to follow the example of the Good Samaritan who is a figure of Christ. God has bent down towards us, has made himself our servant, and thus he saved us because we too can love eash other as he loved us”.

But what does it mean, exactly that “God has bent down towards us”?

It can be answered: It means sustaining us, encouraging, showing his compassion, help us concretely” [No, he does not always help us ‘concretely’, for which he has reasons we do not understand, but we don’t have to understand in order to bow to his will. If he, the Creator, bends down to us, can we do less than bow to his will?]

Yes, but only that? If we speak about giving Christian hope, does that not mean first of all to ‘transmit’ Jesus? And does this transmission of Jesus [which is a good definition for Christian mission!] consist only in helping others materially and emotionally, or does it not also mean the transmission of essential and inseparable moral standards, without which ‘transmitting Jesus’ would only consist in proof of human solidarity without witnessing to the Truth?
TERESA BENEDETTA
00giovedì 12 gennaio 2017 17:17

Bergoglio the wrecking-ball.

Why more and more priests can’t stand Pope Francis
He has been pigeonholed as 'a fearless reformer',
but questions are arising about his judgment
by Damian Thompson

Issue of 14 January 2017

On 2 January, the Vatican published a letter from Pope Francis to the world’s bishops in which he reminded them that they must show ‘zero tolerance’ towards child abuse. The next day, the American The Week magazine published an article that told the story of ‘Don Mercedes’ — Fr Mauro Inzoli, an Italian priest with a passion for expensive cars and underage boys.

In 2012, Pope Benedict stripped Inzoli of his priestly faculties, effectively defrocking him. In 2014, however, they were restored to him — by Pope Francis, who warned him to stay away from minors.

Then, finally, the Italian civil authorities caught up with this serial groper of teenagers in the confessional. Last summer Inzoli was sentenced to four years and nine months in jail for paedophile offences. The Vatican, under ‘zero-tolerance’ Francis, refused to supply evidence that prosecutors wanted.

If Pope Benedict XVI had displayed such a hypocritical attitude towards a clerical child abuser, the roof would have fallen in on him: he’d have been driven out of office instead of resigning.

But most of the world’s media have pigeon-holed Francis as a fearless reformer, doing battle against Vatican mafiosi, kiddie-fiddlers and ‘fundamentalists’. This perception made it easy for the Pope’s allies to keep the name of Mauro Inzoli out of English–speaking news outlets until last week.

That perception may change in 2017. For more than two years, leading Catholics have been at each other’s throats over a plan — surreptitiously supported by the Pope — to allow divorced-and-remarried Mass-goers to receive Holy Communion. The secular media have treated this, understandably, as an inside-the-beltway story. It’s difficult to make headlines out of a controversy that even theologians find hard to grasp.

At the end of last year, however, the communion row began to overlap with other controversies, all of which raised questions not only about the Pope’s judgment but also about his state of mind. [Hmmm, after reviewing/recalling a string of documented idiocies from the mouth and pen of this pope, when they are strung together in the above post, one has to ask, "Is he really in his right mind? Is he all there?" I think the intervention of the Holy Spirit may need to be far more fundamental than merely enlightening him to the truth, but in bringing him sanity!]

A man who, when he took office, seemed endearingly informal — paying his own bill at his hotel, refusing to live in the Apostolic Palace, making surprise phone calls to members of the public — now cuts a less sympathetic figure.

He has broken with a far more significant papal tradition than living in the papal apartments or travelling in limousines. He has defied the convention that a pope, once elected, ceases to play nasty curial politics.

Pope Benedict respected this convention. Liberals who were worried that the ‘Rottweiler’ would harbour ancient grudges watched in amazement — and relief — as he turned into a virtual hermit. [He did not turn into a virtual hermit until after his retirement!] This created the factional chaos that led to his resignation [What factional chaos, pray tell! Thompson always has a lamentable tendency to see a summer when there is one swallow. The easily identifiable 'factions' in the Benedict XVI Pontificate were the usual three factions that exist in any administration: those who were genuinely and loyally pro-Benedict, those who were pathologically anti-Benedict [always a minority but a scurrilous and subversive one], and those who just did their work without having to take sides, although such unsung heroes generally have no reason to be hostile to whoever is the reigning pope] — but right up until the end, Benedict was always ‘the Holy Father’.

That title has almost dropped out of use inside the Vatican under Francis, at least in everyday conversation. And, when you hear it, there is an edge of sarcasm. For example: ‘As the Holy Father so wisely says, we all have a natural tendency to eat shit.’

The priest in question is no fan of Francis. But the fact is that the Pope did say it — in public. Last month, he told the media to stop spreading fake stories because ‘people have a tendency towards the sickness of coprophagia’. Which means eating excrement.

Why did he say it? The traditionalist blog Rorate Caeli suggested that ‘ageing or an underlying medical issue’ was responsible for his ‘persistent anger, rancour, vituperation, use of uncouth words (which is known to be increasingly frequent in private)’.

Again, this is an opponent speaking. There is no evidence that the Pope is mentally ill. However, plenty of Vatican employees will testify to his outbursts of temper, rudeness towards subordinates and vulgar language.

He can also be genial, funny and compassionate. But this side of his personality is increasingly reserved for his inner circle and his allies.

All popes have inner circles, it goes without saying. What distinguishes Francis from his recent predecessors is the nature of the alliances he forms. He is far more brutal in the exercise of his power than, say, Pope John Paul II, who certainly had an authoritarian streak in him.

‘Bergoglio divides the church into those who are with him and those who are against him — and if he thinks you’re in the latter camp then he’ll come after you,’ says a priest who works in the curia. [Oh yes, that has been so obvious, almost since Day 1.]

'Bergoglio’, note! - he doesn’t even call him ‘Francis’. Tellingly, this priest used to be a fervent supporter of some of the Pope’s administrative reforms and he doesn’t look back nostalgically at the reign of Benedict, whom he blames for neglecting his papal duties. [Now, that's a new one! 'Neglecting" instead of the usual 'abandoning' levelled at B16 for deciding to give up his papacy!]

But, like so many Vatican employees, he’s sick of Francis’s habit of telling the entire Roman curia that they are modern-day Pharisees — an analogy that casts the Argentinian pontiff in the role of Jesus.

Clearly Francis believes that relaxing the rules on communion for Catholics in irregular marriages is an act of Christlike compassion. This is also the view of the venerable liberal cardinals who campaigned to elect him. It is often said that he is enacting their agenda — and it’s true that Francis is well disposed to liberal demands for women deacons and married priests.

He is not, however, their instrument. In the words of a Vatican observer who held an important position in Rome for many years, ‘He hasn’t taken on the old progressive mantle so much as created his own personality cult.’ Theological niceties bore him. Personal loyalty obsesses him — ‘and if the cardinal electors had done due diligence they would have discovered that he was an extraordinarily divisive figure among the Argentinian Jesuits’.

It’s not hard to detect a Latin American flavour to the deal-making and settling of scores that has become blatant over the past year. Most Catholic bishops had thought Francis was a plain-spoken and perhaps touchingly naive reformer. Instead, they are confronted by a pope who is simultaneously combative, charming, bad-tempered, idealistic and vengeful.

Does that remind you of anyone? The Trump-Francis analogy has been doing the rounds in Rome for months, and not just among the Pope’s opponents.

‘It’s not meant entirely seriously,’ says a well-placed source. ‘No one is suggesting that Jorge Bergoglio is tempted by the same sins of the flesh as Donald Trump. [But outright wordliness, which this pope manifests so much, if not from every pore) because he has to keep up a semblance - he is, after all, still pope), is not limited to sins of the flesh, which Trump appears to have left behind at least since his third marriage more than 10 years ago. Besides, Trump has a set of principles that he has stood by so far, which is clearly not in accord with the prevailing worldly conventional wisdom.]

‘And there’s another difference. The Americans can kick out their old rogue after four years. Francis doesn’t have to stand for re-election by the conclave. Which, believe me, is lucky for him, because after the misery and nonsense of the past couple of years he’d be eliminated in the first ballot.’
TERESA BENEDETTA
00giovedì 12 gennaio 2017 21:03


With thanks to Beatrice for leading me to this...

Vatican Gendarmerie calendar features
Benedict XVI for April 2017
Translated from

January 11, 2017

On April 16, which will be Easter Sunday, Benedict XVI will turn 90.

To celebrate this extra-special occasion, the Vatican Gendarmerie has used a photo of the Emeritus Pope taken with some of them recently at the Vatican Gardens to illustrate the month of April on the calendar.



Photographed with him are Mons. Georg Gaenswein, a gendarme and two firemen of the Gendarmerie corps.



TERESA BENEDETTA
00venerdì 13 gennaio 2017 00:34

Left: Murillo, Holy Family with John the Baptist, 1670?; right: Raphael, Holy Family, 1507.


You know how much the principles of Catholic doctrine enunciated in the Four Cardinals' DUBIA extends through the entire fabric of our life when practically every issue you could think of that is most problematic in the Church - pastoral as well as doctrinal - can be tied in to the dubious Bergoglian propositions in AL Chapter 8.

I thank Fr. Cipolla at Rorate caeli for indirectly suggesting that St. Joseph, spouse of the Virgin Mary and foster father of Our Lord Jesus, ought
to be the model and patron saint for all these remarried RCDs selfishly wanting to have their 'wedding cake', i.e., all the joys of adultery,
while also 'eating' the Eucharist. Fr. Cipolla underscores the contrast to St. Joseph's selflessness in following the unique plan God had
for him and his life...


The Holy Family in the shadow of AL
Sermon for the Feast of the Holy Family
by Fr. Richard G. Cipolla

January 11, 2017

This is the first year that the feast of the Holy Family is being celebrated in the context and shadow of Pope Franciss’ Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, the Joy of Love.

The Feast of the Holy Family was added to the Church’s calendar in the first decade of the twentieth century. To contemplate the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph is indeed a good thing to do within the celebration of the Christmas season. The bond of love that existed within this totally unique family is an example for every family to emulate.

But, as I have preached about many times, to hold up the Holy Family as a model for the what we can call normal family, is not an easy thing to do. And when we try to apply our own situation to that of the Holy Family without acknowledging that uniqueness, we are always disappointed.

And so we come here today to celebrate this feast, which is a contemplation of this unique family, this Holy Family, under the cloud of Amoris Laetitia. I say under the cloud in an objective sense, in that there seems to be some confusion about what certain sections of that document really mean, especially Chapter 8.

It is no secret that four cardinals of the Church submitted a private correspondence to the Pope in which they asked for a clarification of certain sections of the Exhortation that could be construed as contrary to Church teaching about the moral life with respect to the Sacrament of Marriage, the role of conscience, and the authority of the Church.

The request for clarification has been met by a refusal to answer the dubia, as they are called, and instead resorting to public press conferences to insist that the Exhortation is based on the outcome of a valid Synod of bishops and therefore there can be no doubt, no dubium, about the results of that Synod nor in the spelling out of its teaching in Amoris Laetitia.

Such monarchial, to say the least, behavior on the part of the Holy See is not only not consonant with the image of the Bishop of Rome as the servant of the Church but also brings forth once again what is the fundamental dogmatic problem in the Church today, a problem that has been growing for at least a century, the problem that is the ever expanding imagined power and authority of the Bishop of Rome.

One aspect of the question brought up by Amoris Laetitia is the objectivity of moral norms. This has been a topic of discussion in the Church for her whole life. The question of whether particular circumstances affecting a particular situation can in fact allow for the breaking of a fundamental moral norm. The Church’s answer to this question has always been that particular circumstances can never justify an act that is intrinsically evil.

St. Pope John Paul II affirmed this constant teaching of the Church in several of his encyclicals. The 1960s saw a resurgence of an attempt to soften this teaching of the Church by an appeal to the relationship between difficult circumstances and the moral law. The protest against Humanae Vitae was a clear example of an attempt to evade the difficulty of living a Catholic life based on the teaching of the Church. This specifically applied to marriage.

What we have seen in the past few years is an attempt to finish what was begun in the sixties but what was held back by St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI. It is a case of back to the future. But now the same flawed understanding of the demands of the moral life, of the role of conscience, and of the power of the Church, are proclaimed in the name of the mercy of God.

The role of conscience, my friends, is not to decide what to do. It is to recognize what is good and what is bad. The role of the confessor is not to decide what is right and wrong in the light of the penitent’s situation in life. The role of the Confessor is to absolve the penitent in the name of the mercy of God and to tell him: God and sin no more.

I want to briefly contemplate the situation of one of the members of the Holy Family, namely, Joseph. We know so little about St. Joseph. The most important is his faith, that he believed what the angel told him about the singular situation of Mary’s pregnancy, and that he acted out his faith by taking on the role of the father protector of this unique family, and he did so in love.

I always wonder why St. Joseph’s Day on March 19 is celebrated with such fervor among some ethnic groups, since objectively we know so little about him. My answer to my own wonderment is that most of us know instinctively that he relates to us, especially those of us who are married, in a mysterious and yet very real way. He took on a task, a role, the role of a father although he did not father the child for whom he was an earthly father, and every married man knows that even when one has fathered children that to be a faithful and loving father is not an easy task, and that a part of the at difficulty is to give oneself even when one wants to keep part of oneself for oneself.

St. Joseph’s situation would give some theologians pause. His acceptance to be the earthly father of Jesus and the husband of Mary with all the moral imperatives that apply without the physical intimacy of a husband and wife and without the deep wonder and joy of looking at his Son as part of himself. This is indeed a unique and difficult situation.

And, surely in this situation, we could declare that the moral norms of marriage do not apply to him and that his failure to abide by those norms could be excused by an appeal to the mercy of God, that the severity and ambiguity of his calling surely can be softened by a God of mercy and surely his Confessor would understand and tell him to not worry too much about following his own conscience as a man in his peculiar situation.

Does that shock you? It should.
- Is this consonant with the Church’s teaching on marriage, on sexuality, on conscience, on living a moral life, on the constitution of the Church ?
- But is this consonant with the deliberate ambiguities found in the teaching of Amoris Laetitia?
- And if it is not, then for the sake of truth, let the Bishop of Rome speak with clarity and cast away the doubts that cause so many good people to suffer because of the doubts that this lack of clarity brings into their own marriages.

It is to the Holy Family that we must pray, pray that each of us in our own families and husband or wife or child may have the grace to live a life of sacrificial love for each other, and that whatever our particular circumstances we know that we have the prayers of Joseph and the Blessed Virgin Mary to really assist us, and above all that we have the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ who is present at this Mass to offer himself for your and me.



Still on the subject of how we Christians ought to look at suffering which is inevitable in any life in many ways and in various degrees... And more: A little-cited reflection of Cardinal Ratzinger on how Communion-unqualified RCDs can deal with this particular suffering...


A serious Catholic way
to “accompany” the sinner
by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Posted on 12 January 2017

Fr Z shares an email from one of his followers:

"I’ve been reading through Ratzinger’s book “Behold the Pierced One“. In it, he addresses the issue of the prohibition of communion to the divorced and remarried (pp.94-98).


A couple of quotes:
We can understand how, paradoxically, the impossibility of sacramental communion, experienced in a sense of remoteness from God, in the pain of yearning which fosters the growth of love, can lead to spiritual progress…

When Augustine sensed his death approaching, he ‘excommunicated’ himself and undertook public penance. In his last days he manifested his solidarity with the public sinners who seek for pardon and grace through the renunciation of communion … this is a profoundly arresting gesture.

The ancient Church had a highly expressive practice of this kind. Since apostolic times, no doubt, the fast from the Eucharist on Good Friday was a part of the Church’s spirituality of communion.…

A fasting of this kind … could also be an act of solidarity with all those who yearn for the sacrament but cannot receive it. It seems to me that the problem of the divorced and remarried, as well as that of intercommunion (e.g. in mixed marriages), would be far less acute against the background of voluntary spiritual fasting, which would visibly express the fact that we all need that ‘healing of love’ which the Lord performed in the ultimate loneliness of the Cross.

Does this strike you as a more serious way to “accompany” sinners who are in “complicated situations” than simply telling them that they can receive Communion? This doesn’t give the impression that their sins are being overlooked or, worse, condoned. Also, it engages the powerful means of intercession which the Lord Himself praised.

Today vast swathes of the “Catholic” people probably have a vague notion of what the Eucharist and Communion are. For many people today Communion is, I fear, the moment when the lady puts the white thing in your hand just before you sing the song. Getting the white thing means that you’re okay just as you are; you are affirmed in your you-yourself-ness.

Hence, any suggestion to vast swathes, and to the priests who are not really guiding them, that it is perhaps better not to receive is met with disbelief and shock. What a challenge! “How dare you suggest that I’m not okay or that you don’t accept me just the way I am!” Getting the white thing before singing the song has taken on a dimension of belonging to a mutual self-affirmation club.

The controversy over Communion for the divorced and remarried has far reaching implications.

If those living in patently adulterous unions (or any other sinful state) can in fact receive Communion, then was Christ’s teaching about indissolubility … wrong? If it was wrong, if Christ could get that wrong, then is Christ really God?

If Christ isn’t God, then the Eucharist isn’t Christ. If the Eucharist isn’t Christ, then what is Communion? Are we idolators?

If the Eucharist isn’t what the Church has always said it is, then what is the Church? Who are we and what are we doing?...


On the subject of the Eucharist: From Fr Z to Fr H today...

AGNUS DEI

January 13, 2017

...What about the view of liberal protestants that the Eucharist was in origin a simple fellowship meal later perverted, by St Paul or by 'Early Catholicism', into a complex sacrificial mystery?

Happily, this widespread but evidence-free myth has been exploded by a distinguished American Jewish rabbinical scholar, Jacob Neusner [Cardinal Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's special Jewish friend].

When Jesus 'cleansed' the Temple by expelling the tradesmen who facilitated its worship, He was symbolising the replacement of that sacrificial system by His own new Eucharistic sacrifice, to be instituted a few days later. And the principal Jewish sacrifice to be replaced was the daily sacrifice of the Tamid Lamb, paid for by the Temple tax of Jewish males and offered for the whole of God's people.

"The atonement for sin achieved by the daily whole offering is null, and ... atonement for sin is achieved by the Eucharist; one table overturned, another set up in place, and both for the same purpose of atonement and expiation of sin".

The Lamb of God, the Incarnate Word under the visible tokens He has ordained, is the perfect oblation held in his hands and offered by the Christian priest as he stands at his altar every morning. Jesus is the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world.

But according to Common Worship (modern language Gloria, Agnus, and Invitation to Communion) He takes away the sin of the World. The Latin and Greek originals usually speak of sins, while CW has been influenced by John 1:29, which reads sin.

This Johannine singular sees sin as a single corporate turning away from God by fallen humankind. But in liturgy it may not be best to reflect comfortably on the corporate nature of sin, but instead to acknowledge its specific nature. The daily Christian needs to be aware of his own daily and plural sins as he attends the daily pleading of the One Great Sacrifice.
TERESA BENEDETTA
00venerdì 13 gennaio 2017 17:20


Peter Seewald:
Benedict XVI 'among history's most significant popes' yet
'one of the most misunderstood personalities of our time'
Interview by Paul Senz

January 12, 2017

It is well-known that Pope Francis regularly grants interviews to various media outlets, and has done so since the earliest days of his papacy. As a result, it seems as if each successive interview is received with less fanfare, and the words of the Holy Father are watched with breath a little less bated.

His predecessor, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, was never one to give interviews so frequently. However, over the last 25 years, he has granted four book-length interviews to German journalist Peter Seewald — Salt of the Earth, God and the World, Light of the World, and now Last Testament: In His Own Words (Bloomsbury, 2016). This most recent (and perhaps final) installment in the series of interviews contains many insights into the life and personality of Joseph Ratzinger.

The interviewer, Peter Seewald, brings his own intriguing personal story to these interviews. Raised Catholic, he left the practice of the Faith in his youth and became an ardent communist. It was the time he spent interviewing then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger that famously brought Seewald back home to the Church. Their professional relationship developed into a close friendship, and this can be seen in the pages of this latest book.

The interview sessions comprising Last Testament began before Benedict’s announcement of his resignation, and continued shortly thereafter. As a result, these interviews — which initially were conceived as research for Seewald’s biography of Benedict — became a venue for Benedict to give an unfiltered account of his papacy, of how he views its successes and failings, as well as one more exploration into his analysis of the blessings and problems of today’s world, and a reflection on his life up to this point.

Mr. Seewald spoke with CWR by email in December 2016. His responses were translated by the translator of Last Testament, Jacob Phillips.
You were born in Germany to a Catholic family. Can you tell us a little bit about your faith journey up to this point?
During the student rebellions of 1968 I began to engage with politics. Christianity seemed something of a relic from the past then. I felt that its mixture of power and madness had to be overcome in order finally to build a genuinely progressive society. So one day I withdrew myself from the Church. I felt liberated, and I fought for the ideas of Marx and Lenin.

Now, with the passage of time, I’ve left communism behind me. We did not know then what atrocities and millions of victims Maoism left behind in China (or rather, we did not want to know), but it was clear to me that these ideological systems cannot be reconciled with human dignity.

As a journalist who followed developments in society closely, I could now see that with the decline of Christianity in the West, the basic level of our culture, indeed of civilization, completely sank away with it. It was obvious that there was a link between forsaking the conviction that the world is created and belongs to a created order — an eclipse of God — and the danger of a new barbarism.

When I had the opportunity of conducting a long interview with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 1992, I was fascinated by the fact that from the faith, knowledge, and tradition of the Catholic Church there are answers that correspond to the problems of our time. Yes, the message the faith brings with it is an offer that one cannot fundamentally dismiss out of hand.

This is the fourth book-length interview you have done with Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict. Whose idea was it to do one more? Did Benedict go into this with the intention of giving his “final word” on his life and papacy, as far as you know?
Originally, these recordings were not meant for a separate publication, but as an aid to my work on a biography of Ratzinger. However, I then came to see they would constitute an incomparable historical document, and I realized that this text should not be withheld from the world. Pope Benedict was not in favor at first. But I was able to convince him that the book was a good idea. The prerequisite for him was that Pope Francis gave his consent.

So our conversation is not some text published for self-justification, nor did Pope Benedict want to give his “last word.” It just turned out that we had an unexpected chance to get authentic information from [someone who had been] the chief shepherd of the world Church, without any distortion from the media. This book clarifies in particular the circumstances and reasons for the historic resignation, and ends the speculations and conspiracy theories which surround it.

In essence this book is about keeping the doors to Benedict’s life’s work and message open, for this message is something I am convinced is indispensable for the future of the Church, of faith, and of society.

Having done so many interviews with him, and knowing him for so long, was there anything new that you learned in this most recent set of interviews?
Yes, there was a lot. I didn’t know, for example, that he was completely blind in one eye even before his election as pope, that he had heart problems, that he didn’t expect to live long. Expecting a short period of office, one doesn’t make long-term plans but only deals with the most urgent matters.

What hit him hardest was his being reproached for anti-Semitism in connection with the Williamson affair. He is one of the pioneers of Catholic-Jewish dialogue. Had he been properly informed about Williamson’s attitude, the reprieve of the excommunication of the Society of St. Pius X bishops would not have happened. [??? This was never ever hinted at before. One had the impression that if Williamson's denial of the Holocaust had been known to the pope, the excommunications would still have been lifted - which was the right thing to do - because 1) Williamson's personal opinions have nothing to do with the three other bishops; and 2) Williamson's historical revisionism had nothing to do with why he was excommunicated to begin with - historical ignorance is not a ground for excommunication. However, if Benedict XVI had known about Williamson's repeated denials of the Holocaust, then, along with announcing the lifting of the excommunication, the Vatican would make it known that this was done despite Williamson's unfortunate personal opinions because they had no bearing on why he was excommunicated. I hope somewhere, somehow, Seewald makes this correction.]

His humanity is moving. He says that when he needs to think deeply and clearly, he always has to recline on a sofa. And the fact he is not a merely functional character is shown by the story of an unhappy love during his time as a student. He was a fresh-faced, youthful man, who wrote poems and read Hermann Hesse. He had an effect on women, and they had an effect on him. He did not make the decision to be become a celibate priest easily.

The book describes his life in service, [a life] whose whole existence was placed in the service of proclaiming Christ, and which subordinated even his own happiness to the most burdensome and thankless tasks. He suffered enormously for it, without becoming embittered.

The interviews for this book took place both before and after Pope Benedict’s resignation announcement in February 2013. How shocked were you at the announcement?
My reaction was, “Oh no, please don’t, not yet!” A radio reporter called me on my iPhone and asked me whether the news was true or was just a scam.

I always knew that for Pope Benedict resignation was a real option. In our interviews published as Light of the World I asked him if he’d ever thought about resignation, and he answered, “If one’s psychological as well as physical power is no longer sufficient, the pope has the right and even the duty to step down.” But I had not expected it actually to take place at that point of time.

When was your next meeting after the resignation? Did the announcement change your plans?
Our first meeting after the resignation took place in July 2013. This event had of course changed my list of questions. As I mentioned, the background for this project was that it was intended to gather information for a biography. Now propaganda from Ratzinger’s opponents had misleading versions of events dominating the media. They said, “Ratzinger was the wrong choice for pope, the best thing he did was resign.” That was nonsense!

Last Testament shows that his papacy was anything but a failure, notwithstanding problems like Vatileaks, the Williamson affair, and the scant support from certain quarters of the Catholic establishment.

I believe that Benedict XVI was the collegial and prudent pope which the Second Vatican Council had wished for. With him, everyone knew where they stood. And that which he decreed, although perhaps uncomfortable, faithfully corresponded to the teachings of the Gospel. Moreover, he exercised his office with a unique dignity.

The most recent book, as with each of the others, touches on everything from obscure biographical information to the most profound questions about life, faith, and the last things.
Joseph Ratzinger is not a jovial, slap-on-the-back person. There are no cheap gimmicks with him. But at the same time he makes it easy to ask difficult questions unflinchingly, and he impresses you with his answers. And the beauty of his words only serves to deepen the clarity of his thinking even further. Anyone reading even just four or five pages of the book would be impressed with the humility with which the Pope Emeritus answers the questions. You can feel and sense his person almost as if he were there: his character, his thinking, his humility, his humor.

I have been an avid reader of the writings of Joseph Ratzinger for years, including his memoirs and your interviews with him. I still learned a great deal about him from this book. Were there any specific new insights that you gained?
He speaks with a remarkable openness, and neither glosses nor reworks his answers, as politicians like to do in order to present things differently or refine things. It remains a mystery to me, how he could deal with the demands of his stupendous responsibilities as pope in his old age, with his health problems, promulgating three encyclicals and writing his three-volume book on Jesus Christ.

In my opinion, Joseph Ratzinger is one of the most misunderstood personalities of our time. With his contributions to the Council, the rediscovery of the ancient Church Fathers, the revivifying of doctrine, and the purification and consolidation of the Church, he was not only a force of renewal, but as a theologian on the Petrine chair, one of the most significant popes in history.

As a theologian of the people, he has never forgotten that he comes from very simple circumstances, and has always defended the views of the simple faithful against the cold impositions of many university professors.

He is the sort of character that simply won’t exist in the future [if only because the circumstances that 'produced' him - in which his generation was among the last to have had a well-rounded classical education, despite living under Nazi Germany and later, with the far longer dominance of Communism in Europe - were truly unique] — and can be considered overall, therefore, as the Doctor of the Church for the modern era.

How many hours did you spend interviewing Pope Benedict for this book?
Maybe 10 or 12. Because he is a very musical person, a poet, an artist, an encounter with him is always cheering. We laughed a lot together. One of his friends once said: “Ratzinger never complains. He is like Mozart — his problems never affect his work.”

The great drama of his life was perhaps centered on his ability to keep going when otherwise everything would have been lost. Above all, that requires resources of spiritual strength which, he believes, depend on the cultural and intellectual quality of a person. When human beings no longer revere God as holy, then nothing else can be sacred to them. And when people lose their spiritual potency, their intellectual potency soon follows.

How long did you spend researching and preparing for the interview sessions?
It’s hard to say, maybe two months. Because I‘ve been accompanying him as a journalist for more than 20 years, I could gather together a lot of information and then scrutinize what is right and wrong about the image we have of Joseph Ratzinger.

We have here a biography spanning Germany of the 20th century, with all the peaks but also the troughs of a historical personality. According to the Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, Ratzinger is one of the most significant intellectuals of the contemporary world, whose bold reflections provide answers for the moral, intellectual, and cultural problems of our time.

But above all he is an inspired Father of the Church, who leaves behind a body of writings which is almost inexhaustible. There is also an untold amount of material to deal with, which must be situated in relation to history in order for the actions and statements to be understood at all.

The experiences of the aftermath of Nazi-dictatorship, after the atheistic tyrant and apocalyptic Second World War, are a case in point. No one would have dared to say, in 1945, that Christianity is a relic from the past, that we don’t need any longer. On the contrary, it was to be salvation for the future of humanity.

Do you expect to do any other work with the Pope Emeritus in the future? Or other books about him?
I mentioned that I’m working on a biography of Benedict XVI. One gets a closer understanding of someone through personal proximity to them. You can then “read” someone better, so to speak. On the other hand, however, if you are writing on someone who is indeed a “co-worker in truth,” you must above all make sure you’re writing a truthful account, and this necessitates a degree of critical distance.

But with Ratzinger, his life seems to be guided by some force of providence. “Why does everything to do with Ratzinger go wrong?” many people ask. [Anyone who asks that unlikely and most unfounded question has to be more pathologically afflicted even than the most manic anti-Trump bigot in Hollywood!]

But the real question should be, “Why is so much he does so right and good?” Ratzinger always goes for the whole perspective. He is preoccupied with the question of God, what God means for the human being, meaning how he enables the human being to find out who he is. To enter into the fulfillment of life, by turning to the Creator as a creature, to become an incarnation, such as is offered by the Gospel of Christ.

Other popes are characterized primarily by their pontificates. With Ratzinger there is a body of written work which is already great and significant even without his becoming pope. He is not far off being the most widely-read theological teacher worldwide, with editions of his books published in the millions.

Above all, he has shown us that religions and science, faith and reason, are not opposites. And that reason is a guarantor for ensuring that religion that does not slip into false fantasies and violent fanaticism. Last but not least, he put in place initiatives which Pope Francis can now extend, with gratitude.

How would you describe the influence Ratzinger/Benedict has had on you over the years?
From the very beginning, I was impressed by his realism, his courage, and the strength of his spirit.

Joseph Ratzinger sees his Church as a resistance movement against the seductive aberrations of the world, against the God-forsakenness of fundamentalist atheism and neo-paganism.

Ratzinger is a pragmatist — without losing sight of what is big and great, the complete whole, even for a second. That is where his modern edge lies: the critical perspective, the desire to perceive the real nature of things.

How is that possible? By not letting oneself be blinded or manipulated by certain fashions, but at the same time not be narrow-minded or stiff, but open to what must necessarily be changed. Then having the courage to do the things which need to be done.

Neither as a theologian nor as pope did Ratzinger ever put forward his own system of doctrine. He is a teacher for the whole Church, because he always goes to the center, to Jesus Christ. He has shown us Jesus once again, the whole Jesus.

The image of Jesus has become tattered by certain theologies and media representations. No one other than Ratzinger had the authority and gifts to show that we can trust the Gospel, both spiritually and historically. I believe that Pope Benedict has made a decisive contribution against the dilution of the Gospel, and laid the foundations for the faith in the 21st century.

What always impressed me was the continuity of the life of Pope Benedict. The continuity in his teaching, but also in his attitude, being both critical while being formed by love for God and humanity. Perhaps the very fact that he is always slandered makes his testimony all the truer.

At the end of his life, at any rate, he is at peace with himself and in the Lord — quite simply because he always performed his tasks with all the gifts that had been laid in his hands.

I consider Pope Benedict XVI to mark a turning-point, a link between two worlds, one who has built a bridge between the old world and the coming of the new — whatever it might bring. His most important sentiment is: “A society from which God is absent, destroys itself.”



TERESA BENEDETTA
00venerdì 13 gennaio 2017 23:46



This does not look at all like a promising start to another Bergoglian synod. I do not as yet 'discern' what his ulterior motive is for this assembly -
as we always knew what it was for the 'family synods' - but knowing the Bergoglio Vatican's capacity for deception, I actually dread to find out
what it might be. Already, the very secular approach taken in this preparatory document simply reinforces one's misgivings about this pope's
none-too-Catholic if not openly anti-Catholic inclinations...

The coming synod's preparatory document:
Not a word about holiness - perhaps
it is of little interest to this Holy Father
Translated from

January 12, 2017

Today the Vatican published the preparatory document for the next XVth general assembly of the Bishops' Synod on the theme, "Youth, faith and vocational discernment'.

It's a slim 70-page booklet which includes a questionnaire classified by continents and intended for the various bishops' conferences. [Will the bishops answer the questionnaires based on their own assumptions and experience, or on actual genuine - not superficial or token - surveys of young people in their dioceses? What bishops will be named to discuss the problems of young people and look out for them at the actual synodal assembly???]

I have read it, and I found some features striking:
First, in all 70 pages there is no reference to holiness as a model to propose, a goal to aim for, something that is worth one's devotion enough to struggle for.

The only time the word is used is a derivative on Page 50, where it says, "The Church herself is called on to learn from young people: she has the luminous witness of so many young saints who continue to be source of inspiration for everyone". [But they were saints because first, they were taught the faith properly by the Church, and they applied that faith in their daily life! Typically, the pope's acolytes have the cart before the horse.]

Therefore, even when the document mentions exemplary figures, they are described as "close to others, credible, consistent and honest" [i.e., holy or saintly are not among the adjectives used to characterize them - they may be all that, but that's unimportant compared to the qualities mentioned], or as "authoritative believers, with a clear human identity [they could not possibly have animal identities! - the adjective that ought to have been used here is 'Catholic', a clear Catholic identity. But given all the evidence of the past four years, that is not at all something this pope particularly wants to insist upon] , a visible spiritual quality, vigorous educative passion, and a profound capacity of discernment". [Ah, there we are, one of JMB's favorite words. If only he qualifies it as 'discernment of God's will' - even if this is always not given to us humans to discern, despite which we must learn to accept it nevertheless. Perhaps that is why in the Bergoglio lexicon, discernment means consulting your individual conscience to see what you are telling yourself! ]

In short, holiness does not seem to be of interest either as a goal nor as a trait necessary to inspire young people.

Second: Young people are admonished to be vigilant because "you must verify if your choices are dictated by a search for your own narcissistic self-realization [I call this a Freudian slip in which someone's subconscious, JMB's perhaps?, popped up!], or rather by your willingness to live your life by generously giving of yourself". Which leads to: And that is why, "contact with poverty, vulnerability and need is of great importance to understand whether you have chosen a good vocation or not." [That assumes that priesthood or the consecrated life is the chosen vocation, but marriage and family are equally valid choices, and would, realistically, be the more likely choice for most young people.]

And of course, there are recurrent references to 'the poor' throughout the document. Whereas prayer and worship get ten lines towards the end of the document.

The impression is that the document is very horizontally oriented towards social work, 'good works'. Let us see how attractive this approach will be.

My third and final remark: The document does not contain any citations - or call attention to documents - which are not that of the reigning pope - including admonitions against 'rigidity'. Of previous Pontiffs, including he who 'invented' World Youth Day and who in 27 years, inspired countless religious vocations, not a mention at all.

Apparently, for those who prepared this document, the Church was only born on March 13, 2013.
TERESA BENEDETTA
00sabato 14 gennaio 2017 05:36
January 13, 2017 headlines

Canon212.com


PewSitter


This was without a doubt the most outrageous news of the day - and what makes it worse is that the document giving episcopal approval of Eucharistic sacrilege, to begin with, is co-signed by Mons. Charles Scicluna, the canonist who made a name for himself, and was rightly praised, as Cardinal Ratzinger's chief 'prosecutor' of clerical sex abuse cases reported to the CDF...

Malta’s bishops tell the remarried:
take Communion if you feel at peace with God
The bishops say that avoiding sex may be 'humanly impossible'
by Dan Hitchens

Friday, 13 Jan 2017

Malta’s bishops have said that remarried people should receive Communion if they think they are at peace with God.

In a new document, "Criteria for the Application of Chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia", the bishops say that if “a separated or divorced person who is living in a new relationship manages, with an informed and enlightened conscience, to acknowledge and believe that he or she are [sic] at peace with God, he or she cannot be precluded from participating in the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist”.

The Maltese document is signed by Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, a former doctoral student of Cardinal Burke, and Bishop Mario Grech of Gozo. It was published in L'Osservatore Romano. [Why on earth did the OR go out of its way to publish this MONUMENTAL OUTRAGE TO THE FAITH?]

St John Paul II and Benedict XVI reaffirmed the Church’s perennial teaching that divorced and remarried Catholics cannot receive Communion, except possibly when they endeavour to live “as brother and sister”.

However, the Maltese bishops say that avoiding sex with a new partner may be “impossible”.

The new document underlines divisions among the world’s bishops over the Church’s traditional teaching, in the wake of Amoris Laetitia. The bishops of Poland and Costa Rica, several North American bishops, and others, have reiterated the traditional teaching, while others have diverged from it.

In November, the diocese of San Diego said that remarried Catholics may “conclude that God is calling them to return to full participation in the life of the Church and the Eucharist.”

Earlier this week Cardinal Raymond Burke said that, if the San Diego interpretation were to become universal, “then the Church’s teaching on marriage is finished.”

The Maltese bishops claim that Amoris Laetitia encourages a new practice because of footnote 351. This, in reference to the integration of people in “irregular situations”, states: “In certain cases, this can include the help of the sacraments.” Although Pope Francis has said he cannot remember this footnote, it has provoked much debate.

Some have argued that it merely reaffirms John Paul’s teaching in Familiaris Consortio: “Reconciliation in the sacrament of Penance which would open the way to the Eucharist, can only be granted to those who, repenting of having broken the sign of the Covenant and of fidelity to Christ, are sincerely ready to undertake a way of life that is no longer in contradiction to the indissolubility of marriage.

“This means, in practice, that when, for serious reasons, such as for example the children’s upbringing, a man and a woman cannot satisfy the obligation to separate, they ‘take on themselves the duty to live in complete continence, that is, by abstinence from the acts proper to married couples.’”

However, the Maltese bishops say that couples should instead “examine the possibility of conjugal continence”. The bishops refer to “complex situations where the choice of living ‘as brothers and sisters’ becomes humanly impossible”.

The Council of Trent states that it is always possible to keep the moral law: It teaches: “God does not command impossibilities, but by commanding admonishes thee to do what thou canst and to pray for what thou canst not, and aids thee that thou mayest be able.” It also states: “If anyone says that the commandments of God are, even for one that is justified and constituted in grace, impossible to observe, let him be anathema.”

Four cardinals, including Cardinal Burke, have asked Pope Francis to clarify that Amoris Laetitia does not encourage divergence from the Church’s traditional teaching. One, Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, has said: “Whoever thinks that persistent adultery and the reception of Holy Communion are compatible is a heretic and promotes schism.”


Canonist Ed Peters had this immediate reaction...

The Maltese disaster

January 13, 2017

The bishops of Malta, in a document that can only be called disastrous, repeatedly invoking Pope Francis’ Amoris laetitia, have directly approved divorced and remarried Catholics taking holy Communion provided they feel “at peace with God”.

Unlike, say, the Argentine document on Amoris which, one could argue, left just enough room for an orthodox reading, however widely it also left the doors open for abuse by others, the Maltese bishops in their document come straight out and say it: holy Communion is for any Catholic who feels “at peace with God” and the Church’s ministers may not say No to such requests.

In my view the Maltese bishops have effectively invited the Catholics entrusted to them (lay faithful and clergy alike!) to commit a number of objectively gravely evil acts.

That their document was, moreover, published in L’Osservatore Romano, exacerbates matters, for it deprives Vatican representatives of the ‘plausible deniability’ that they could have claimed (and might soon enough wish they could claim), as it becomes known that the Maltese bishops went beyond what even Amoris, if interpreted narrowly, seemed to permit.

For now, I make just a few points.
1. The Maltese bishops have fallen completely for the canonically and ecclesiologically false view that an individual’s assessment of his or her own readiness to receive holy Communion (see c. 916) controls a minister’s decision to administer the sacrament (see c. 915). In Malta now, anyone who approaches for the sacraments should be recognized as being “at peace with God”. Objective evidence to the contrary is simply no longer relevant. Canon 916 is thus eviscerated, Canon 915 is effectively repudiated.


2. The Maltese bishops do not seem to know what the word “conjugal” means. They think that non-married people can practice “conjugal” virtues and that they can decide about whether to engage in “conjugal” acts. Nonsense and, coming from bishops, inexcusable nonsense at that.

Non-married people can have sex, of course, but Catholic pastoral integrity does not hold such sexual acts on par with the physically identical, but truly conjugal, acts as performed by married persons.
3. The Maltese bishops, by extending their document to the sacrament of Reconciliation, have basically instructed their priests not to withhold absolution from divorced-and-remarried Catholics who refuse to repent of their “public and permanent adultery” (CCC 2384) even to the point of abstaining from sexual (nb: sexual not “conjugal”) relations.

Incredibly, such a directive raises the specter of green-lighting sacrilegious confessions and the commission of solicitation in confession. No priest should want either on his conscience, let alone both.

4. The Maltese bishops even managed to take swipes at Baptism and Confirmation by opening the door to divorced-and-remarried Catholics serving as godparents contrary to the expectations of Canon 874 § 1, 3º. See CLSA New Comm (2001) 1062-1063.

There are other serious problems with the Maltese document but the above should suffice to show why it is, quite simply, a disaster.

Father Z, citing the above post by Peters, adds the ff comments:
If you read that rubbish document, note the juxtaposition of “situations” and “ideals”.

This is going to turn into a war if not worse. Different countries different practices.

What will become of the unity of the Church if in one country any unrepentant sinner with the official blessing of the bishop and, when you cross the border into another country, you still need a firm purpose of amendment to be absolved and public scandal must be avoided.

Does that sound like two different Churches? [Yes, it does!. The 'Church' of Malta has effectively apostasized from the one Church of Christ by proclaiming a founding anti-Catholic principle of the church of Bergoglio.]


Maltagate: At peace with Satan

JAN 14, 2017

A document of openly Satanic inspiration has now been published by the Bishops of Malta. It goes, if possible, even further than Francis, in that the sacrilege that Francis introduced by way of footnotes and stupid rhetoric is now made explicit, and officially sanctioned, and called being “at peace with God”.

As if there existed a Catholic universe in which it is the sinner whO decides whether he is worthy of being admitted to Communion, or altogether in mortal sin (NB: if fornication is unavoidable, then the relevant sin of adultery is clearly not imputable).

Do not, even for a moment, delude yourself that this was not what Francis had in mind from the very start. However, the plan would have been thwarted very soon, if the bishops and cardinals had spoken like, well, Catholics when the time had come.

I needed a number of hours to calm down after reading this – let me say this again – utterly satanical garbage. However, one thing was clear from the very first moment: Cardinal Mueller'S astonishing affirmation that Amoris Laetitia affirms the traditional Church teaching becomes more absurd every day, as we have entire bishops’ conferences openly embracing heresy and sacrilege.

What will cardinal Mueller now do? Will he swiftly act and rebuke, silence and threaten the Maltese bishops? Surely, nothing else can be expected from him now? I would suggest that you do not hold your breath.

I would also suggest that you look at reality in the face here, and recognise that cardinal Mueller isn’t really better than the Maltese bishops...

fr. Z also commented on another outrage from the Vatican today... After Ban Ki Moon and Jeffrey Sachs - both of whom have been virtually consecrated by Pope Francis as his Secular-Acolytes-in-Chief with the rank of Cardinal High Priests - he is about to consecrate a new one.

Is the case not more than compelling enough as it is that Bergoglio's lip service against abortion is nothing more than that/ he has given his blessings to all these 'population control' advocates, and more tellingly, to the UN Development Goals for 2030 which is unabashed in its advocacy of various 'reproductive rights' and population control methods (code of course for unconditional abortion)?

Ehrlich was invited to address a new Vatican-sponsored conference to advance the pope's unfounded but omnisciently obstinate climate catastrophism.

Guess who's the Vatican's
next conference headliner!

January 13, 2017

LifeSite reports that Paul Ehrlich has been invited to speak at an event sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

Paul Ehrlich, perhaps the most famous advocate and promoter of abortion for the sake of population control, has been invited to speak. Compulsory abortions… sex-selection abortions… infanticide.

PAUL EHRLICH? Author of the Population Bomb? THAT PAUL EHRLICH?

Asking Paul Ehrlich to speak at a Vatican event is like asking…
… Sweeny Todd to cater your luncheon.
… Jenna Jameson to preface your book on sacramental marriage.
… Nero to head up the fire department.
… Anthony Wiener to manage your social media.
… Godfried Danneels to head your commission on abuse.

Here's the original LifeSite report:

He supports forced abortion, sterilization-
Next month, he’s speaking at the Vatican.
by Pete Baklinski


VATICAN CITY, January 12, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — The Vatican has invited the undisputed father of the modern, pro-abortion population control movement to present a paper at an upcoming Vatican-run conference.

Dr. Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb is scheduled to speak in Vatican City during the February 27-March 1 conference that will discuss “how to save the natural world.” The Stanford biologist champions sex-selective abortion as well as mass forced sterilization as legitimate methods to curb population growth.

In his 1968 book, Ehrlich went so far as to defend forced abortion, writing: “Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

Titled Biological Extinction, the February conference will address what Vatican organizers call an unsustainable “imbalance” between the world’s population and what the earth is capable of producing. The event is jointly sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

Organizers of the Vatican-run conference predict that if effective steps are not taken to reverse so-called man-made “global climate change,” then up to 40 percent of “all biodiversity on Earth” will be destroyed “by the end of this century,” including a “majority” of species of plants.

“There is no possibility of improving our situation without the widespread adoption of social justice, both as a matter of morality and as a matter of survival,” the event brochure put out by the Vatican states.

With the invitation of Ehrlich to address the conference, how the Pontifical Academies understand “social justice” takes on a sinister aspect.

In The Population Bomb, Ehrlich forecasted “an utter breakdown in the capacity of the planet to support humanity” that would result in starvation for hundreds of millions, predictions that have proved to be false while his theories have been debunked. The biologist predicted in 1968 that half of Americans would die by 1990. India and China would simply die out. By the year 2000, England would also cease to exist. [And here we all are still - including Ehrlich himself, unfortunately.]

Ehrlich mentioned in his book sex-selection abortion as a potentially effective tool for conserving the world’s resources by reducing population, a position he continues to defend.

In a 2011 interview with Mara Hvistendahl, Ehrlich defended sex-selection abortion, stating that “it would be a good idea to let people have their choice so that they could have fewer children and could have what they wanted,” adding that a sex-selection abortion and possibly even infanticide might be a better fate for females than what awaited them in an overpopulated world.

“You can be aborted as a conceptus, you can be killed at birth, or you can be sold into slavery and die in a slum someplace,” he said. “It would be interesting to know how many females you’re keeping out of hideous situations [when they are not] killed or infanticided.”

In the same interview, Ehrlich also defended the principle behind mass forced sterilization, a concept mentioned in a 1977 book he co-authored titled Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, suggesting that mass sterilization working in tandem with sex-selection technology would be particularly effective for population control interests.

Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, criticized the Vatican’s choice of Ehrlich as a suitable speaker.

“Ehrlich’s opinions on biological extinction rates are just as exaggerated as his failed predictions of a human population explosion. Why the Vatican should be giving a platform to this secular prophet of doom is beyond me,” he told LifeSiteNews.

“There are plenty of credible Catholic scientists around whose fact-based opinions should be highlighted by their Church. What's next? Inviting Raúl Castro to speak on human rights?” he added.

The Catholic Church not only condemns abortion but coercive population control methods as well.

Instead of seeing people as “mouths to feed,” “pollution producers,” or “carbon footprint makers,” the Church sees each person as a unique and unrepeatable gift from God.

In his watershed 1968 Encyclical Humanae Vitae that taught about the moral evil of using contraception to space birth, Pope Paul VI warned rulers of countries against using illicit methods of birth control to solve the “demographic problem.”

“Do not allow the morality of your peoples to be degraded; do not permit that by legal means practices contrary to the natural and divine law be introduced into the fundamental cell, the family,” he urged at that time.

Paul VI warned the people of the world then that if contraception became a societal norm it would provide governments with a “dangerous weapon” to manipulate population sizes.

“Who will stop rulers from favoring, from even imposing upon their peoples, if they were to consider it necessary, the method of contraception which they judge to be most efficacious? In such a way men, wishing to avoid individual, family, or social difficulties encountered in the observance of the divine law, would reach the point of placing at the mercy of the intervention of public authorities the most personal and most reserved sector of conjugal intimacy,” he wrote.

Pope Francis has also explicitly rejected population control as a method to combat climate change, writing in his encyclical Laudato Si’ that to “blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some [for lack of resources] is one way of refusing to face the issues.” [And yet he endorsed the UNDG unconditionally - in front of the United Nations General Assembly, in person, in September 2015. At this point, would you ever buy a used Fiat from this man? He is essentially UNPRINCIPLED because he goes with whatever he thinks is expedient for his own personal agenda.]

Given the Church’s outright condemnation of abortion, contraception, and the use of coercive population control measures to curb demographics, it remains to be seen why the Pontifical Academies viewed the famed proponent of population control as a suitable speaker for their conference.

This is not the first time an advocate for positions contrary to the Catholic faith has been invited to attend Vatican conferences. The leaders of both Pontifical Academies have, under Franciss pontificate, surprisingly given prominent platforms to some of the world’s foremost proponents of abortion and population control, including Ban Ki-moon and Jeffrey Sachs.

In 2015, Professor Margaret Archer, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, slammed the Centre for Family and Human Rights Institute (C-Fam), an American pro-life research institute that monitors the United Nations, after it raised concerns about abortion and population control proponents being given a platform at a Vatican conference on climate change. “I am appointed by the Pope and responsible directly to him. I’m afraid that leaves you and your cohort out in the cold,” she told the organization at that time.

Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, also has a history of inviting abortion and population control proponents to Vatican events. He has been criticized by pro-life advocates for unreservedly endorsing the United Nations’ controversial Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which pro-lifers warn include a not-so-hidden abortion and population control agenda. Last year, Sorondo defended inviting then-Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, an abortion advocate, to address a “social order” conference.

Also attending the Vatican conference is African Cardinal Peter Turkson, who in a BBC interview in 2015 said “birth control” could “offer a solution” to the impacts of climate change. Turkson, who has since become the prefect of the Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development, later revised his statement, saying that when he used the term “birth control,” what he actually meant was spacing of births or “responsible parenthood.”

Face it, Bergoglians! Your idol has completely caved in to THE WORLD, and all his pronouncements about God, Jesus and the Catholic Church are as phony as his humility.

TERESA BENEDETTA
00sabato 14 gennaio 2017 18:02

Canon212.com headlines, Jan 13-14, 2017

Not surprisingly, Canon212.com has streamlined its January 13 headline summary to the above. One of the topics named in both versions is the following item from the website of Walid Shoebat, a half Palestinian American born and raised Muslim in the USA, who says he was recruited for jihad by an imam at a young age, joined the PLO as a terrorist, was jailed three years in Jerusalem for a failed bombing attack in Bethlehem, and converted to Christianity in 1994. One could say Shoebat is sui generis in his current occupation...

'Everybody will be Muslim because of our stupidity':
Retired Pompeii archbishop blasts 'weak decadent Church'
by Andrew Bieszad
shoebat.com
January 13, 2017

In a scathing and long overdue realtalk criticism of the situation of the Church in Europe and with Islam, Archbishop Carlo Liberati [Bishop Emeritus of Pompeii] said that because of the moral decadence of the European people they have become modern day pagans who have rejected Christianity and hurt the most vulnerable among them and that people are refusing to address the problem.

As a result, he says that Europe who will be conquered by the Muslims once Islam is recognized as a “mainstream” religion within a decade or less:

Monsignor Carlo Liberati, an Italian Archbishop, gave the warning after observing the growing number of detention centres opening up in Europe, suggesting it was a sure fire way to have the Islamic faith become mainstream. He saida;
In 10 years we will all be Muslims because of our stupidity.

Italy and Europe live in a pagan and atheist way, they make laws that go against God and they have traditions that are proper of paganism. All of this moral and religious decadence favours Islam...

We have a weak Christian faith. The Church nowadays does not work well and seminaries are empty.

Parishes are the only thing still standing. We need a true Christian life. All this paves the way to Islam. In addition to this, they have children and we do not. We are in full decline.

Italy, along with the rest of Europe, has become a hotspot for immigration in the past decade. Figures show that there were 5,014,437 foreign nationals resident in Italy as of January 1, 2015, an increase of 92,352 from the previous year.

Italy has also seen a sharp rise in the number of illegal immigrants who dock on its shores after making the dangerous boat ride from North Africa across the Mediterranean sea.

And there has been a growing number of Eastern Europeans and Romanians migrating to the country since the expansion of the European Union.

Liberati claims Italy’s desire to help other nationalities is leaving its own country’s poor people destitute.
We help without delay those coming from outside and we forget many poor and old Italians who are eating from the trash. We need policies that take care of Italians first: our young people and the unemployed.

I am a protester. If I were not a priest, I’d be out there demonstrating in the squares. What is the point of so many migrants that instead of thanking for the food we give them, they just throw it, spend hours with their cell phones and even organise riots?”
Liberati even accused the Catholic church of donating too much money to the recent migrants.
Giving money to migrants wandering around town is not only wrong, but morally harmful because we encourage their behaviour and they get used to that, not mentioning the fact that we already feed them.

I think sometimes this creates a beggars’ network. I remember that my father went to work very hard as a migrant in Australia so I could go to the seminary. So he has experienced in his own skin the discomfort of poverty and the noble virtue of gratitude.

These words are prophetic and they echo what we have been saying for a long, long time here at Shoebat.com- the West is being conquered by Islam because as it has rejected Christianity. Since Islam is the culmination of all Christian heresy, then it is only natural that Europe, which has rejected Christianity and continues to do so unrepentantly, is becoming Muslim, because through Islamization they are perfecting their apostasy.

There is no logical explanation for why Europe or any nation would not only allow such people as these Muslims are who, as the Archbishop and we have pointed out, have absolutely no respect for our society and openly mock any generosity shown to them [while taking full advantage of it to advance their goal to conquer Europe and thereby, Christianity].

This is not just a question of being “super liberal”. This is a sign of manifest spiritual darkness that, through their apostasy, has blinded many Europeans [especially their government leaders] to head down the path of their own destruction. and without any way to help themselves because they have rejected God, Jesus, the only weapon they could have.

Europe could still be saved. But salvation will only come in Jesus and a return to His Faith. It will not come from any human source, and certainly not from ethno-nationalist paganism. But as Europe was once pagan and converted to the Faith, it has now returned to paganism and is completing its apostasy through Islam. This is not just happening in Europe, but also across the world, and echoes Jesus’s words:
And He said to the disciples, “The days will come when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it.

“They will say to you, ‘Look there! Look here!’ Do not go away, and do not run after them. “For just like the lightning, when it flashes out of one part of the sky, shines to the other part of the sky, so will the Son of Man be in His day.

“But first He must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation. And just as it happened in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man: they were eating, they were drinking, they were marrying, they were being given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.

“It was the same as happened in the days of Lot: they were eating, they were drinking, they were buying, they were selling, they were planting, they were building; but on the day that Lot went out from Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all.

“It will be just the same on the day that the Son of Man is revealed." (Luke 17:22-30)

And the Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge said; now, will not God bring about justice for His elect who cry to Him day and night, and will He delay long over them? “I tell you that He will bring about justice for them quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth? (Luk 18:6-8)

This comes at what many Catholics are saying is a great crisis in the Church- a crisis so serious, that it may be equal to and even surpass the Arian crisis of the 4th century. This crisis also bears a disturbing semblance to a prediction made as part of the revelations of Our Lady of Fatima.

In the words of the American Raymond Cardinal Burke, “the Faith itself is in danger” over fundamental, unalterable questions of morality:
“The confusion in the Church over the interpretation of certain passages of Amoris laetitia is evident. That is why I do not see how anyone could be able to say that there is no danger to the faith. Moreover, we have communicated in a very respectful way fiv DUBIA to the Pope, and when they were not given a response, we decided, for the good of souls, to make public that there are dubia and that all the faithful are called to pay attention.”
Burke, a signer with Walter Brandmuller, Carlo Caffara and Joachim Meisner, then raised the issue of a possible “formal correction” of the Pope. And according to reports from several Italian media outlets drawing from an interview published it the United States [with LifeSiteNews], Burke gave an ultimatum for this “formal correction” that expired after the feast of Christmas, about which Burke said:
”Many media outlets have misunderstood. In that interview in the United States they had asked me what would be the next steps with respect to the dubia presented to the Holy Father, and I simply said that nothing could happen at that moment seeing that we were about to enter into the liturgical season of Christmas and of Epiphany. Only afterwards could one possibly think of how to proceed, but it certainly was not an ultimatum for a confrontation with the Pope.”
The dubia revolve around access to Eucharist for the divorced and remarried who live more uxorio [as husband and wife], access that, in certain cases, Amoris laetitia permits. And which instead, the previous magisterium had ruled out on several occasions, except in the case of a commitment to live as brother and sister for those divorced and remarried persons who cannot be separated for valid reasons. Brandmuller has said that the possible “formal correction” of the pope would be able to take place “in camera caritatis” [in private].”

“In fact,” Burke specifies , “I have never said that a public confrontation ought to occur. I agree with Cardinal Brandmüller, the first step would be to ask for a private meeting with the Holy Father to point out to him the unacceptable statements in Amoris laetitia, showing how, in one way or another, they are not adequate to express what the Church He has always taught." [The article goes on to quote more from the interview with Burke in La Verita.]

What the good Cardinal is referring to is a formal list of questions that he and four other cardinals have handed over to Pope Francis asking him for specific doctrinal clarification. This list, called a dubia, is a very serious matter, since it is asking for a formal explanation about certain unclear statements about Catholic morality that have come from Pope Francis and his close associates that have been presented as “pastoral” teachings of the Church.

The issue here is not about the ability to change doctrine- doctrine cannot be changed. The issue here is that if certain teachings about marriage and the family are taught as though they have changed (when in reality they cannot), then it would amount to a massive apostasy within the leadership of the Church. In the words of Pope Pius XII:

I am worried by the Blessed Virgin’s messages to Lucy of Fatima. This persistence of Mary about the dangers which menace the Church is a divine warning against the suicide of altering the Faith, in Her liturgy, Her theology and Her soul … A day will come when the civilized world will deny its God, when the Church will doubt as Peter doubted. She will be tempted to believe that man has become God.


How is the situation of Islam an the state of the Church related? Because the two depend on each other.Pope John Paul II famously said that “As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.”

In the case of Europe, these are among the ancient lands of Christendom alongside those of the Middle East. What happens there will not just affect Europe, but the entire world. We know for a fact and we have reported that Muslims are chomping at the proverbial bit to conquer Europe and specifically, Rome because they see the fall of Rome, Italy and specifically, the Vatican as the destruction of Christianity and an eschatological sign of the global triumph of Islam.

They are waiting…

Yet Islam cannot conquer without the apostasy of the Europeans. For centuries, it was the Catholic Faith that enabled Europe to defend itself from the Muslims. Yet today, that same apostasy has rendered Europe unable to help and even willing to participate in its own suicide at the hands of the Muslims.

Right now Europe is on the edge of a major and terrible war. That same war is being mirrored in the Church herself. As the Church goes, so goes the world, and right now the world is running headfast towards paganism and, if the situation does not improve, there is the possibility for an equally great war in the Church through a level of apostasy that has not been seen in centuries.

Jesus came into the world to rescue us from the darkness of paganism, and He will likely return again once the world has rejected Him and is plunged back into the darkness it once came from like a dog returning to its own vomit.

As I have said before and I will say again, keep your lamps full and an extra flask or two of oil on hand. We will all need it in the days to come…


A commentary on the above from Deacon Nick Donnelly at


Archbishop Carlo Liberati has joined a growing number of bishops warning about the threat posed by Islam to Europe due to the collapse of Christianity. On the 2016 anniversary of the defeat of the Muslim army besieging Vienna in 1683 Cardinal Schönborn warned that Islamists were seeking to take advantage of Europeans' religious and moral weakness to conquer Europe: [DUH!!!!]
Looking at our situation in Europe... we have squandered the legacy we received from our Christian heritage. We've squandered it. And now we wonder what Europe will look like in the future. Not only economically ... but above all human, religious, faith. What will become of Europe? Islamism could indeed be the beneficiary. Will there now be a third Islamic attempt to conquer Europe? Many Muslims think that and want that, and they say this is the end of Europe.
[Nothing, Your Eminence, is hypothetical about the current situation. Even if the recent string of Islamist terrorism actions in Europe have been undertaken under allegedly 'individual initiative', such initiatives are motivated by the Islamic dream of world conquest and domination. Asking rhetorical questions about he jihadists is like Nero fiddling while Rome burnt, Your Eminence.]

Cardinal Burke has also warned of Islam's political ambitions in Europe. He is the patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, that defeated the attempted Muslim invasion of Malta in 1565. In his book, Hope for the World, Cardinal Burke wrote,
"If you really understand Islam, you understand that the Church really should be afraid of it: Nothing has changed in the Islamic agenda from prior times in which our ancestors had to defend Christendom from Muslim attacks. They saw that Islam was attacking sacred truth."

TERESA BENEDETTA
00domenica 15 gennaio 2017 03:21
Please note a few posts above that I have posted my translation of a chapter from Aldo Maria Valli's book 266..., which I consider a book-length presentation of all the DUBIA about Jorge Bergoglio harbored by sensible and rational Catholics who value the deposit of faith and the inviolability of the one true Church of Christ.
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